Transcriber’s Notes

This e-text is based on ‘The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine,’ from September, 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. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the corresponding article.

© H. H. Half-tone plate, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

BRONZE GROUP OF THE UNDEFEATED AMERICAN POLO TEAM

HERBERT HAZELTINE’S SCULPTURE OF THE AMERICAN TEAM WHICH WON THE WORLD’S CHAMPIONSHIP IN ENGLAND, IN 1909, AND DEFENDED IT SUCCESSFULLY AGAINST ALL ENGLAND IN 1911 AND 1913

(The leading figure: Mr. Milburn. Second figure: Mr. Whitney, captain. Figure in background: Mr. Lawrence Waterbury. Figure on the right: Mr. J. M. Waterbury.)

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THE CENTURY MAGAZINE

VOL. LXXXVI

SEPTEMBER, 1913

NO. 5

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

CONTENTS

VERSE

LOVE BY LIGHTNING

BY MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS

Author of “The Melting of Molly,” “Andrew the Glad,” “Miss Selina Lue,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY F. R. GRUGER

LOVE is the début of a woman’s soul from the darkness under Adam’s left ribs into the sunshine of the Garden of Eden and his presence. It is heavenly, but very much like a major operation attended by convulsions, and I am going to write you the whole truth about it, my dear Evelyn, and not present to you an unadorned feminine version. It is going to be hard, for I’ve only been practising concise veracity for a little over a month, and if I am crude in places, you must forgive me.

What did it?

Aunt Grace, my unfilial virago of a disposition, and the will of God.

Please don’t let it make you uncomfortable to have me speak of Him in this friendly fashion, for He is in the story, and I can’t help it. Besides, that is part of what I want to tell you about.

The first of May, mother came home from a visit to Aunt Grace in Louisville with the most peculiar little man led by a halter for me. He has a title, genuine brand. Elizabeth Gentry is going to marry him now, and she’ll write you all about it. Aunt Grace had selected him in Rome at Easter, and told him the round numbers of the fortune Grandmother Wickliffe left me. She had instructed mother minutely as to my joyous and appreciative course of action toward him, and you know how my maternal parent is about Aunt Grace. I want to record it of father that he received the duke with a recoil, and went to New Orleans the next morning for an indefinite stay.

Of course the little man is a human being, but I consider the United States as fortunate that it is not now in complications with Italy over the murder of one of her scions by an enraged Tennessee woman. Two days after his arrival, and only several hours after the first time he tried to possess his funny little paws of my very garden-burned hand, I packed a few of my belongings in three trunks and a steamer-bag and departed to find Dudley. He is such a perfectly satisfactory brother that, since my earliest youth, I have always felt it best to flee to him when I feel a tantrum coming on. They don’t disturb the even tenor of his life in the least.

“Oh, Nell!” was all mother had the courage to say, when so far away from Aunt Grace, at the announcement of my intention.

“My brother is ill up in the Harpeth Hills, and I must go to him,” was all I said to the duke.

That was the feminine version of a line in Dudley’s last letter, saying he had caught a heavy cold sleeping out without his blanket while with one of his gangs marking lumber on Old Harpeth. But I did take his grace to call on Elizabeth before I departed. I will say that much for myself.

With it all I had left home in such a whirl of hurry and rage that I hadn’t had time really to realize myself until I sat in my seat and watched the train begin to wind around and around the foot-hills that lead up from the valley. And I must say that realization of myself was not much in the way of amusement. Why should I have left mother in a huff just because she is Aunt Grace’s obedient sister? Isn’t she also my browbeaten parent? And why rudely abandon the little nobleman, who was my guest, for trying to kiss my hand, which has been used for any old purpose, from digging worms for Dudley to fish with to supplying a surface to be pressed by Bobby Gentry’s adolescent bristles, even unto the mustache he at present flourishes? And others, too! No, I couldn’t honestly approve of myself, as hard as I tried.

And, to make it worse, the very day itself was a balmy, pliant, feminine thing, with not a bluster in its disposition to harmonize with mine. There was a soft bridal veil of spring mist all over the Harpeth Valley, behind which the orchards were blushing pink and white, while by noon, as we began to go up the hills, I caught a whiff of that indescribable, lilting honeysuckle note that comes in the June rhapsody in the Alleghanies. You remember it, don’t you, deary, even if you do live in an enchanted Breton garden with a husband who sings? I’m going to remember it in heaven.

No, I wasn’t very well pleased with myself, and I got more and more serious on the subject the higher the train crawled up toward the crown of Old Harpeth. If a naturally conscientious person has such a bad disposition that she finds it impossible to accept any form of criticism from other people, then she is ethically obliged to chastise her own self, which is the refinement of psychical cruelty.

By three o’clock the only way I could drag myself out of the depths was by remembering how Aunt Grace’s nostrils distend while she insinuates to mother in my presence what an unsatisfactory daughter I am. I can always get up a rage with that mental picture. That is, I could; now it is different, because—but that is what I am going to tell you about.

Of course I knew that Dudley’s letters all went to Crow Point, and the ticket-man had told me that we got there at five-fifty. That hour was not dark—quite, I knew, and I decided that I would have plenty of time to drive across the ridge to his camp at Pigeon Creek.

Isn’t it a good thing for women that they can’t take peeps into what is going to happen to them next? Men could digest their disclosed futures complacently, but on account of pure excitement, women never in the world could even sufficiently masticate theirs to swallow them.

“Is it far from Crow Point to Pigeon Creek?” I asked the conductor, by way of amusing myself.

“About one horse-pull,” he answered lucidly, as he went to help a woman and eleven children off at Hitch It.

I’m glad now he was no more explicit.

Crow Point was just a little farther along the road than Hitch It, and we got there before I had time to ask him any more questions. Purple dusk was just hovering over the mountain-top, as if uncertain about settling down upon it for the night, when the train stopped. He called Crow Point, and I jumped off—the universe.

I stood for a few minutes, with my mind tottering.

“Looking for anybody, little gal?” came a drawl from out the twilight just in time to keep me from running after the train to try and tell them that I didn’t want to be left alone in the mountains at dark. A man sat all hunched up on the tree-trunk that supported one end of the huge log which represented the station platform of Crow Point, whittling a small stick.

“Is this Crow Point?” I gasped from the depths of both consternation and amazement as I looked from him to the three trunks stacked on the ground by the rustic platform.

“Sure am,” was the answer, as the small red slivers of wood flew.

“Is this—this all of it?” I asked, this time less from consternation than astonishment.

“Well, they is a few more of us,” he answered. “Was you a-looking for any of us in particular?”

“Mr. Dudley Gaines,” I answered in a manner that bordered on the lofty, as if I felt that the status of my family must be much the same commanding one at Crow Point that it was down in Hillsboro.

“I reckon you’ll have to holler that loud enough to reach about twenty-five miles acrost to Pigeon Creek, gal, if you want to git him,” was the unimpressed answer.

“Twenty-five miles!” I spoke less haughtily this time. “Can’t I get there to-night?”

“You could ef you had started this time last night,” was the practical reply.

Suddenly the fact that I was planted down in the wilderness of gigantic mountains, alone except for one aborigine of the masculine gender, overpowered me so that I sank down on the log and became much meeker in manner and spirit.

“What’ll I do?” I asked, and this time my words were nothing more than a subdued and respectful peep.

“Wall, I reckon Stivers and missus will have to take you in for the night,” answered the native, with a condescending drawl. “They might not, but you mentioned young Gaines’s name. We ’most shot him for a revenue when he first came, but he’s brought a sight of good work amongst us, and lives like he was fellow-man with all. Be you his sister or his woman?”

“Sister,” I answered, taking a grain of courage at thus hearing Dudley’s name mentioned as that of a prominent citizen of the fastnesses.

“Yes, Stivers had a cross on his gun for Dud, and he mighty nigh got a bloodstain to smear on it ’fore he found out that he were just a logger. But Stivers’ll take you in, I reckon, now he knows you belong to his tribe, though his cabin is so small you couldn’t cuss a cat without getting hair in your teeth.”

“Where do Mr. and Mrs. Stivers live?” I ventured, with a shudder at the taste of cat-hair in my mouth.

“Round behind that crag and woodland there,” he answered as he turned the stick and looked at it critically in the fading light. “You can go on by yourself, or, if you want to wait until I whittle this little end slimmer, I can take you along with me. They is going to be a ruckus kind of a meetin’ of the gang there to-night, but they won’t nothing but dark draw the boys outen the bushes.”

“I’ll wait,” I answered trustfully, preferring to appear at the hostelry under the care of a strange man than risk the woods alone. Necessity is the stepmother of many conventions.

And there I sat on a companionable log beside a perfectly strange outlaw who had been talking about notches on guns and blood-splotches, waiting for him to whittle down the end of a stick exactly to satisfy his artistic tastes before accompanying me through a dark strip of woodland to the hospitable roof of a moonshiner, in hopes I would be taken in to spend the night thereunder.

And I must proudly and truthfully record it of myself that I bore the situation in dignified and complacent terror, sitting humbly still while the moonshiner slowly peeled tiny pink shavings off the end of the stick for what seemed like centuries to me. My interior was a small Vesuvius of disposition, frozen over temporarily, and I even had the strength to marvel at my own control of it.

Finally he held his work of art close to his eyes to see the point in the dusk, which had deepened by the moment, tested it on his finger carefully several times, peered at it again, and then nonchalantly threw it away in the grass.

“Come on and follow,” he said in commanding and indifferent mien as I rose to accompany him.

And follow him I did, in true squaw fashion, about ten paces behind. I was surprised he didn’t ask me to carry his gun, a long, heavy ante-bellum weapon that rested carelessly in the hollow of his arm. I’d have done it with the greatest graciousness if he had handed it to me. A frightened woman easily lapses into savagery, and is willing to accept impedimenta in the rear of man in times of danger.

And, as we walked, the shadows got blacker and blacker, and the tree-tops lowered lower and lower in their thick gloom. Every few minutes something furry, like the hallucination of a gigantic mouse, would scurry across our path, or a great creaky croak would be hurled at our heads from the groaning branches above. And, with every fresh horror, I got closer to the heels of the human animal in front of me, until I was in danger of having my nose skinned by the barrel of the gun, or stepping on the protruding heels of his heavy boots, into which his faded overalls were stuffed. My knees may have trembled, but I assure you I kept pace with grim determination through what seemed endless miles of that haunted woodland.

And as we tramped along in silence, my mood of self-depreciation, which had seized me on the train, again asserted itself, and my alarmed mentality was saying sternly that it had warned my proud spirit that such catastrophes would be the result of my headlong course of wilfulness, when we came out of the darkness into a clearing where a cabin stood, from which a dim light shone.

“Stivers’,” remarked my guide, fluently. “So long,” he added tersely, and disappeared again into the woods by another path. At the time I wondered if he could be troubled by the conventions. I did him an injustice; I know now it was a horse hitched on the other side of the clearing.

For more than a few long minutes I stood and pondered with panicky indecision over just what to do, the wood with its nightmares on the one hand, and the unknown on the other. I chose the unknown, and plunged in as I faltered up to the open door of the small two-room hut.

Suddenly two doors were shut hurriedly in the darkness, and I heard the scuffling of heavy feet as a man appeared in the flare of the dim candle in the front room and peered at me cautiously.

“What do you want?” was the hospitable greeting that issued from the cavern of his huge chest.

“Mr. Dudley Gaines,” I answered, using instinctively the name of introduction that I had seen succeed a few minutes earlier.

“He ain’t here; but if you are his woman, come in,” was the answer, and as Dudley’s property I entered the Stivers’s abode.

Even in my tragic situation for an instant my temper rose. Why should man’s possession justify the existence of a woman in the eyes of the primitive? However, masculine justification of life is a delicious feeling to a woman in a dark and fearful wood and—But I’ll tell you about that later.

With becoming gravity and timidity I entered the living-room of the moonshiner’s hut, and weakly seated myself in a chair he pointed out to me in a corner by an open window.

“Brat’s got fits, and the woman is out there tending it,” was my host’s ample excuse for the non-appearance of my hostess.

At his words my heart jumped and then stood still. I had never been in the house with a fit before, and the feeling was gruesome, coming so close on the heels of the woolly, furry things in the woods.

Then as I poised myself on the edge of the chair, holding on tight to keep myself from running out into the night, an eery wail came from the back of the house, and I collapsed on the seat, with a queer, suffocating pain in the place of that jump. I had never noticed a child’s cry before, and something moved in the region of my solar plexus.

“Can’t—can’t something be done?” I ventured in desperation.

“Naw,” came the answer in a drawl. “I reckon it is bound fer kingdom come this trip sure. Leader will take a look at it when he comes in fer a round-up of the gang. They’ll all be late to-night, on ’count of some dirty business over at Hitch It. If you want to go to bed, that’s the best bed in the lean-to out there we keep for over-nights. Better git settled and outen the way ’fore the gang gits here. They’re ’most too rough fer calico like you to stay around, and there’ll be a big fight on ’fore it’s over. Leader is snorting rough over that knifing at Hitch It, and somebody’ll be cut down with power by him ’fore he’s done with it. The woman is too upsot with the kid to see to you; but bedding is all you need, now dark has come. Better git to cover right away.”

Drawn by F. R. Gruger. Color-Tone, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

“THEN, AS I FALTERED AND FELT THAT I MUST STOP AND SINK ON THE FLOOR, A WHILE A SHOULDER BRACED ITSELF AGAINST STRONG, WARM, BARE ARM CAME AROUND ME, AND UNDER MY ARM AROUND THE BABY, MINE, AS GABRIEL SWUNG INTO STEP WITH ME”

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As he was speaking, he took the candle and led the way into a little shed-room, while I followed with trembling knees, and the jelly of fear quivering all over my body. Every moonshine murder about which I had ever read in the papers trod in martial array before my mental eyes, and my breath was just a flutter between my chattering teeth. It really is a triumph of the survival of the life force in the human body that I am alive to tell the tale to you to-day.

“They’s light enough from the window for you to roll in,” the man said as he pointed to a low bed, built of logs and boughs along the wall next to the front room. “Better git to cover and stay there, a calico like you, with the boys as rough as they be; you mightn’t like ’em. I reckon they better not know you’re here, on ’count of the row that’s coming over that knifing; so lay close.”

And even before he had time to depart with his candle, I made a dive beneath the patched quilt, only grasping my hat in my hand instead of keeping it on my head. Then, as still as my trembling limbs would let me, I lay close to the rough, thin, pine planks that separated me from what seemed the only other human being in the world. And for hours it seemed I lay there and panted and groveled in spirit with terror and helplessness, waiting, waiting, for something dreadful to happen, and almost wishing it would come and be over.

Across the mountain-tops there began to be distant mutterings of thunder, and in the flashes of lightning I could see restless, dark birds wing by the small window. And save for the thunderings, there was a stillness that must have been on the waters before the first dawn reigned. I could hear my heart beat like a muffled motor, and only the uncanny wail broke the silence now and again, while once I thought I heard a woman’s stifled moan that sent a shudder to the very core of my body.

And as I lay and cowered in that darkness, the mood of self-realization came back upon me, and alone in that terror of blackness I turned at bay and faced myself. Was that coward thing I that lay helpless while a woman alone moaned away the life of her tortured child, and a plan for murder was plotted with my full knowledge? Why didn’t I run out into that dreadful night and warn the victim, stop him from stepping into the dreadful trap laid for him? And right then I impeached myself. I had been guarded and fended and had all humanity nurtured out of me, so that, rather than risk my own pitiful little life, I was willing to “lie close” and let my brother human be murdered in cold blood.

“But women are weak,” I argued in my own defense, “and terrible, wolfish things like these they cannot control or prevent. They must let them take their course.”

“Weak women have steeled themselves to the saving of their brothers and sisters centuries long,” came the still, small voice that seemed to be hovering over my breast.

“I can’t risk my own life for that of a rough moonshiner who probably spends his time whittling a stick to throw away,” I sobbed in answer to myself.

“What more important thing than whittling a stick do you do with your life?” came the question, relentlessly.

“Nothing,” I sobbed under my breath, as a vision of all the nothings I had done in my life came before me with a flash of the lightning that seemed to illumine the inside of the very inner me.

“And that other woman suffering in there, why don’t I go to her?” I demanded of myself, and failed to find an answer.

“Afraid of the roughness of some mountain man who would scarcely dare harm your brother’s ‘woman’?” I asked contemptuously from above my own breast. “You a ‘woman,’ if you let another woman watch her child die alone!”

Desperate at this goad, I sat up, and was pushing back the quilt, when the muffled sound of heavy boots came from across the clearing, and in another flash I saw a file of men, each one of whom looked ten feet tall, each with a gun on his arm, come out of the black woods and turn to the front of the house. I melted back to cover, and lay drawing breath like a drowning man.

Quietly they came into the room next to that in which I was hiding, and their drawly voices had a subdued and terrible sound as they exchanged a few remarks in guarded tones.

“Leader come?” one man asked from so near the pine board against which I trembled that he couldn’t have been a foot away from me.

“Naw; and Bill is waiting in the woods to ketch him ’fore he gits here, if he kin,” came the mumble of my host’s big voice.

“It’ll be nip and tuck ’twixt ’em, and lay out the worst man feet due west,” another voice took up the gruesome chorus.

“That’s Bill now, coming outen the woods,” exclaimed Stivers, ominously. “I reckon he thinks he missed Leader. Don’t nobody say nothing when he comes in, but let him set and wait for his knock-out. Nobody’s business but Leader’s.”

Listening frantically, I heard the doomed man’s hesitating feet shuffle into the room and the chair groan as he took his seat amid the glum silence.

And there I lay, and with Bill I waited I didn’t know for what, some nameless horror that would kill the life in me and make me a dishonored thing all my life—a human too cowardly to cry out the word of warning to another of God’s creatures. And through it all the little child wailed and the woman moaned.

Then in the midst of another thick muttering from the head of Old Harpeth, which was followed by a vivid flash, I heard another pair of feet step on the threshold of the cabin. I cowered under the quilt, held my breath, and took the bullet into my own heart—or thought I did.

Then high and clear through the flash of the lightning, over the mutterings of the thunder and the scuffle of the men’s feet, accompanied by a glad cry from the moaning woman, there came a voice of an archangel singing in tones of command that thrilled that whole mountain until it seemed to shake with its reverberations:

“Stand up! stand up for Jesus!

Ye soldiers of the cross;

Lift high His royal banner,

It must not suffer loss.”

I lay still, and something poured into my heart that was a peace made from the glory of the storm, the moan of the woman, and the song of a dawn-bird. Out of the darkness my soul came like—I think I partly expressed it in the first sentence of this confession, if you will turn back and see, Evelyn dear.

After the men had sung the wonderful old hymn through to its very last lines,

“To him that overcometh

A crown of life shall be;

He with the King of Glory

Shall reign eternally,”

Bill and I kept very still and took our “knock-out.”

Bill had stuck a knife into a gallant over at Hitch It for offering to exchange snuff-sticks with Malinda Budd, and I could easily detect a decided vein of sympathy in the voice of Leader while he administered a rousing reproof to the knife, but extolled the use of fists in such cases, much to the approval of the rest of the gang.

In fact, that was the greatest sermon ever spoken in the English language on the theme of justice, courage, feminine protection, manly dignity, and brotherly love, and it was done in about five minutes, I should say. Every word of it hit Bill fair and square, and me also, to say nothing of all the rest of the world. During the last minute and a half of the discourse the men were indulging in muttered “Ahmens” and “Glory be’s,” and I could hardly restrain myself from throwing off the quilt and—well, you know, Evelyn, that Grandmother Wickliffe was a pillar in the Methodist Church of Hillsboro, and at times of great emotion, during the visit of the presiding elder, she did—shout. Aunt Grace never likes to hear it mentioned.

Now, let me see, this is just about the beginning of the real story, and I am so anxious to tell it all, though I really feel a hesitancy. However, when I am through with the letter, I can leave out any part of it that doesn’t sound seemly for me to tell about him—and me, can’t I?

To begin with, I hardly know how to make you understand about that baby’s stomach, and how near a tragedy it was. Don’t laugh! I tremble when I think about it, and I don’t ever believe I’ll learn to do it to them. I hope I won’t have to practise on one of my own first; but, then, it would be awful to kill another woman’s baby experimenting on it, wouldn’t it? I’d better not think about that now, or I can’t tell the rest of the story.

Well, after the doxology had been sung by the strange Gabriel in the next room, accompanied by some really lovely rough men’s voices, and he had sent them away so he could see to the sick baby in the other room, I lay still and had a racking, glorious experience. For the first time in my life I really prayed to Something that answered in the dark. I didn’t have much to say for myself, but a great Gentleness reached down and laid hold of me for always, and I can never be lost from Him any more, and I knew it. Now, I have been taught that it is called the witness of the spirit, and it’s what Grandmother Wickliffe had. But I didn’t inherit it; I had to find it myself, and I got it through tribulation, by the way of Gabriel’s song in the terror of the night, followed by the sermon to Bill.

And while I was lying there under the quilt, just shouting in my soul with ancestral ardor, I was called to come forth and attest my new convictions. And I did. If I hadn’t got that faith in God just a few minutes before on the wings of a great emotion, I never could have steeled myself to taking that awful purple, twitching baby and helping Gabriel do the dreadful things to it he did. I would have taken to the woods at the first look at it. But I know now that I had got the real religion that darts right through the emotions, and prods you up to do things. And I did them.

“It’ll die, and I can’t hold it,” whimpered the poor exhausted mother when Gabriel told her to hold the baby’s mouth open while he poured in the hot water. At that time I was still safe and rejoicing over myself under the quilt.

“You must hold him while I wash him out, or he will die. Come, brace up and help me!” I heard Gabriel plead to the poor creature, with positive agony in his voice, while the baby moaned.

“No use, Leader; I’ve done give’ up,” and I heard her fling herself on the floor and begin to moan in chorus with the baby.

It took me just half a minute to get to my feet, into that other room, and that baby in my arms, as awful to look at as it was. Of course it seemed as if God was honoring me by crowding works on my new faith pretty closely, and how I got through with such credit I don’t see; but I did.

“You’ll have to show me just what to do; I never touched a baby before, but I will try to help,” I said to Gabriel, who was looking at me in an absolute astonishment and devout thankfulness that encouraged my new-found capableness.

“A woman, thank God!” I heard him mutter before he spoke.

“Tip him on your arm, hold his head close against your breast, with your finger down his throat, while I pour in this hot water; then turn him over on your knee quick when it is about to come up. He is full of fried potatoes, and that is what is making the spasms. I’ll hold his legs with my left hand, so he can’t kick away from you. We must get down enough of this water to bring up all of the potatoes.”

Gabriel’s voice was quick and respectful, as if he were speaking to somebody that had as much intellect and manual training as himself. I suppose that is what helped me through with those dreadful hours of time that it took to work up that awful potato—that and the positive way I said:

“Now, God, help me, please, and quick!”

At last it all came forth, and I don’t suppose it really was hours; but the baby was apparently done for.

“No use, Leader; his time have come. She’s buried five out thar in the clearing at jest about his age. Let the little critter go in peace,” said Stivers, who had come in through the back door. His rough voice had a note of suffering in it, though he lit his pipe by a coal from the fire calmly enough.

But at the mention of the five little graves out in that awful night, the poor woman on the floor groveled up on to her knees and caught at my skirts.

“God help you!” said Gabriel, gently, to her. “He’s rid of the poison, but so collapsed that there seems nothing more to do.”

“Yes, and I’m going to help God help her,” I said suddenly, and I rose from the chair to walk the floor with the limp, white thing that had been the purple horror in my arms. “I didn’t know how to unpoison him, but if it’s strength and heat he needs, I can give him that,” and I held the tiny mountaineer close against my bare breast, from which his poor little convulsed fingers had torn all the foolish lace and embroidered linen.

“If a physician were here, he would try transfusion; the child is anemic, anyway,” said Gabriel, thoughtfully.

“We don’t need any physician but God to get my heat and strength into him. I only wish I had on a real flannel petticoat, as a decent woman ought to have for cases of emergency like this, to wrap him in. This old piece of blanket isn’t real wool.”

“Poor folks can’t buy much but shoddy these days,” said Stivers, with glum resentfulness.

“Here, my shirt’s the thing,” said Leader, and as quick as one of the flashes that came in the window with the thunder mutterings, he had peeled off his own gray flannel blouse, and was wrapping it around the baby, and tucking it close over my breast.

“Now fight, and I’m with you,” he said as he looked straight into my eyes in the dim light.

“He isn’t going to die; he’s got a right to live, and he’s going to do it, God helping,” I answered, as I got a firm grasp of the mite on my left arm, and put my warm right hand over the poor little collapsed stomach.

And then for what seemed hours of eternity I walked and rubbed and hugged that limp baby, while I prayed inside my own vitals to the tune of “Stand up.” Stivers stood smoking sullenly by the fire, the mother lay on the floor, moaning, and Gabriel stood over by the window, with his bare shoulders gleaming comfortingly with every flash of lightning. And the knowledge that all three of those strong, useful real people were depending upon ignorant, foolish me to lead the fight for that poor little life made the new wings of my spirit raise themselves and soar out into some wonderful space I had never been in before, but through which I knew the way and could take the baby with me.

How long I plodded across and across that rickety floor of the cabin I don’t know, but once I staggered as I came near Gabriel at the window, and my right shoulder sagged under its burden. Then, as I faltered and felt that I must stop and sink on the floor, a strong, warm, bare arm came around me, and under my arm around the baby, while a shoulder braced itself against mine, as Gabriel swung into step with me.

“Keep fighting,” he said deep in his throat.

And again I soared away with the baby up to where God was there to help us.

Then suddenly we both were brought back to earth by my feeling him stir, and huddle closer to my breast, while the limp little knees found strength to press themselves in against the ribs over my heart.

“Oh!” I sobbed with a quick breath.

The mother moaned, and Gabriel steadied us both closer. He thought the baby was dead, I knew.

“Want to give him to me?” he asked gently.

“No, I don’t,” I answered jerkily enough to sound like a snap; “but wipe the perspiration out of my eyes. He’s getting hot now, and I’m melting, but I don’t dare stop hugging and patting. Make his mother understand he’s getting all right.”

But nobody has to make a mother understand when her baby is saved. The poor creature just gave one pitiful gasp, and went to nice, comfortable crying instead of moaning. It was lovely to hear hearty boohoos, though she never said a word except to ask Stivers for her snuff-stick, which he attentively swabbed in the can before he handed it to her.

“You can’t go on walking and joggling forever; sit down and rock and rest with him,” suggested Gabriel, timidly and respectfully, after he had passed a nice, cool, linen handkerchief all over my hot face for me, even with intelligence enough to wipe in the hollow under my chin.

“Not now; he’s squirming deliciously, and I don’t dare. Suppose he should go limp again,” I answered fearfully.

“He’s due to drop off to sleep now,” announced Leader in such a positive, though kind, voice that almost immediately young Stivers obediently turned himself a bit, settled in a nice, soggy way, and I could feel the little lungs so near mine begin to draw breath in a regular, good sound sleep.

I waited a minute to be sure, then sank with him into a chair beside the fire.

“Yes, he’s all right now,” Leader said in a lovely, quiet voice, with just a husky note of happiness in it as he gently raised into his own strong hand one tiny paddie that had stolen up on my breast from out the warm, gray shirt. For a wonderful second we were all soul-becalmed together, and then he went over into the corner and slipped on his khaki hunting-coat, which he had hung on a peg in the wall, and decorously tied his silk handkerchief around his neck, in true mountaineer fashion. He never did get that shirt again, for I originated some remarkable bandages for young Stivers out of it next day.

Color-Tone, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

“‘ARE YOU REAL?’ HE WHISPERED, WITH MY CHEEK PRESSED HARD AGAINST HIS, AND HIS ARMS TERRIFIC WITH TENDERNESS”

DRAWN BY F. R. GRUGER

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Then he came back to the fire, and while I hovered the kiddie, the mother came close on her knees and settled beside us, so that together we took a worse ministerial drubbing than even Bill got for the knifing episode, delivered in a voice of such heavenly sympathy that Grandmother Wickliffe’s spirit again rose in me, and if it hadn’t been for the baby, I believe she would have broken out this time in one good shout. She hasn’t up to date, but I feel sure she will some day, and I don’t always intend to restrain her manifestations.

The sermon this time had for its text the sacredness of the use of the maternal fount for the young instead of promiscuous food, but it embraced all the advanced feminist questions of the day, and was an awful glorification and arraignment of human females all in one breath. Why don’t women begin to know what dreadful and wonderful creatures they really are earlier in life? The knowledge comes with an awful shock when it does come, and ought to be experienced while young. I had taken Bill’s sermon to heart, but that one to Mrs. Stivers I got right in the center of my soul. It is still there.

And when it was over, the poor mother was kneeling by the fire, with the baby at her breast, sobbing and crooning softly as she rocked it to and fro in its deep sleep.

“It’s suffocating in here, now that it is all over. Don’t you want to come out and watch the storm?” Gabriel asked me in a low voice as he stood beside me looking down on the comfortable pair on the hearth. “Don’t be afraid. It is a great one, mostly electrical, and will likely go on all night this way. It makes the atmosphere almost unendurably heavy. Do you want to watch it from the bluff there at the end of the clearing? You can look down and see it at play in the valley.”

“Please,” I answered, catching the word in the middle with a breath that was a sob in retreat.

Then before I knew it, or how, we were seated together on a big rock that jutted out from the edge of the world. The cabin, with its one or two dim lights, loomed with shadowy outlines behind us, and tall trees hugged us close on both sides; but before us and beneath us was a wild, black, turbulent night.

“Now look down into the valley when the next flash comes,” Gabriel said with a note of excitement sounding in his deep voice that matched the wind through the trees.

Then just as he finished speaking, a slow, steady sheet of light came and lit up the world below us. The fields in their spring garments, embroidered by the threads of silver creeks, lay lush and green, dotted by farm-houses in which dim lights twinkled, bouqueted by glowing pink orchards, and outlined by blooming hedges. Tall trees were massed along the edges of the meadows and the river-banks, and among them the white lines of the old sycamores gleamed in masses of high lights. And in the wild, soft wind that rushed up the mountain-sides and flung itself upon us there was mingled the tang of the honeysuckle and rhododendron with the sweetness of the orchards and pungence of newly plowed earth.

Then as suddenly as the picture had risen before our eyes it sank back into the purple blackness, and I caught my breath with the glory of it.

“And God made it!” I exclaimed softly, with the last sob that had been left in my heart caught from my mouth by the wind.

“‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein,’” he answered, and the wind took his words as if it had been waiting for them to carry across the mountains.

After that for several long minutes, I don’t know how many, I sat silent in the windy blackness, with the tree-branches sighing and crashing over our heads, and wild things rustling in the leaves and bushes beside us, and wondered what was happening to me.

Of course I have been deadly afraid of a minister all my life, and the times we have had the bishops and presiding elders and pastors to dinner with us in honor of the memory of Grandmother Wickliffe have been times of torture to me. I always thought, of course, they were not real men, though the way they looked and their hearty appetites for both viands and jokes kept them from seeming conventional angels; but this Gabriel materialization that sat close to me on that rock, which was the end of the universe, was a strong, heart-beating man, who alone stood between me and the real wilderness of the woods and the awful wilderness of my ignorant and convicted spirit. It was terrific, but heavenly sweet.

“I know He made me,—I found that out to-night,—but I don’t see what for, and I wish I knew why,” I said in the smallest voice I had ever heard myself use; and this time there was just the echo of that last sob left to sigh out on the wind.

“He saw I needed you pretty badly a few hours ago,” Gabriel said in that delicious warm voice he had used to me to encourage me through the worst baby chokings.

“I’ve always been a dreadful woman, and wanted to be more and more so until I heard you sing ‘Stand up for Jesus!’ when I was dead and gone from fear of your gun, and talk to Bill about loving the girl with the snuff-stick in the right way, and the man, too, just because we are all God’s children. I was lost, but Something found me in the dark just before you and the baby did. I never belonged to anything or anybody before, and even now how do I know that God wants me after the awful way I have lived?” My words trailed in positive anguish.

“He does want you, woman dear. Take my word for that, or would you like me to quote you about five hundred passages from His Book to prove it to you?” He laughed as he said it in a wooing, comforting way that was both manly and ministerial.

“You don’t know me. I’m a perfect stranger to you,” I answered with agonizing honesty, because the regard of that man, whom I had never seen a few hard, long hours before, was becoming very valuable to me, and I felt afraid that if I didn’t warn him about myself before he took me for a friend, I might not ever do it, but dishonestly make him like me, as I have done to so many other men.

“We couldn’t be perfect strangers after the battle with those potatoes—and after seeing what that flash revealed of the valley together, could we?” he asked, with the amusement sounding still more plainly in his voice. “And you know you heard me preach twice. Isn’t that a kind of left-handed introduction?”

“People that are introduced to me don’t ever know me,” I answered forlornly; for I felt that the time had come for me to confess my sins before men, and this was the hardest man to do it to I had ever met, and also the easiest.

“Then tell me about yourself. I’ve been wondering a bit since I have had time. You answered a hurry-call I had to send above pretty quickly,” he said in a beguiling and encouraging tone of voice that sounded just as other agreeable men’s voices have sounded to me before, only more so.

Just then a furry thing rustled in the bushes, and I moved an inch nearer him. I felt him stir, but he sat comfortingly still. I didn’t want him to move to me.

“The worst thing about me is that I am utterly and entirely worthless,” I began, dropping the words out slowly in the dark. “If God made me, He can’t help but be dreadfully disappointed in me, and wishing He hadn’t. I’m just a wicked white kitten, with a blue ribbon around my neck, kept in a basket, and fed the warm milk of other people’s work and attentions.”

“That is not always the kitten’s fault,” said Gabriel, gently.

“It’s this kitten’s. My family would have liked for me to be strong-minded and go to college and do things in the world. They’ve tried to persuade me. Dudley, my brother, says I have got so much brains held in solution that he is afraid some day something will happen to precipitate them before the world is ready for them; but I ignore them strenuously. My mother is the president of the Home Mission Society that Grandmother Wickliffe founded, and Aunt Grace is state president of the Colonial Daughters, and makes remarkable speeches. I am just a large, white-skinned, well-fed, red-headed bunch of nothing, and I don’t know how to get over it.”

“At least you are of the blessed company of the meek,” answered Gabriel, this time with a real human chuckle that he might have used if he had found three of a kind in a poker-hand.

“Oh, no, I’m not meek,” I hastened to assure him. “I’m the most conceited woman on the earth, the vain kind of conceit that looks in the glass and admires its black lashes and white teeth, and long curves in good frocks, not the intellectual-attainment kind, that has some excuse for existence. I know I’m beautiful, and I hugely enjoy it.”

“You sound beautiful by description, and a few flashes of lightning, added to candle-light, bear you witness. Still, why shouldn’t you appreciate the gifts God has made you? Beauty can have the most wonderful influence in the world in the way of enjoyment for us people at large. Use yours that way when no misguided potatoes call you.” His voice was enthusiastic and delightful, and what he said about the flashes of lightning made me blush so there in the dark that I was sorry one didn’t come that minute and let him see it—the blush. That thought, coming into my mind, cast me into the depths of humiliation that I had had it about him.

“That’s the trouble,” I faltered in unhappy mortification at my instability of character. “I use it to make other people miserable, and know when I do it—men people and things like that.”

“Sometimes that isn’t fair, is it?” he asked after a minute’s pause. “And yet women will do it. What makes them?”

“I don’t know,” I almost sobbed, but controlled it. “I never knew how wrong it was until you talked to Bill about that snuff-stick girl, and how he ought to feel about her, and influence her not to do other men that way. I’m like her, only I do worse than snuff-sticks; and I enjoy it. No, I know God doesn’t want a woman like that.”

“But perhaps you won’t be like that any more. I don’t believe you could, after tasting to-night’s adventure. You lapped up that situation pretty enthusiastically,” he said gently. But somehow there was a hint of amusement in his voice that set my dreadful temper off for a second, and made me wild to convince him of the depths of my sinfulness. I felt that the occasion demanded his serious attention and not levity.

All my life my temper has been a whirlwind that rose and carried me to the limit of things, and then beyond, without any warning. I thought I was making a confession in a state of religious zeal, but I am afraid it was just the same old rage. Religious zeal often takes these peculiar forms of exaggerated temper, and often never finds itself out. From this you’ll see I’m trying very hard to differentiate myself; but it is difficult.

Then for minutes and minutes, and perhaps hours, I sat there in the dark beside that strange man, and told him things that I had never told anybody living, and some I had never admitted to myself. It came out in a wailing, sobbing volume, and I trembled so that he had to take my cold hand in his, I suppose to keep me from sliding off the rock down into the valley.

I wonder if any woman before ever talked out her whole wild self into a man’s ears? And I wonder if it shook him as it did this one out under the lowering clouds and dark trees? When women habitually reveal themselves to men, it is going to bring social revolution, and they must go slow.

And I did go slow. I tried to be truly considerate of him. I began on a few ridiculous misdemeanors that I am surprised I remembered of myself, such as inconsiderate extraction of money from father by means of unwarranted tantrums, impositions on my dear mother’s loving credulity about some of my hunting forays with Bobby, when I left home riding Lady Gray, side-style, only to fling a leg over Dudley’s Grit two squares down the street, where Bobby was waiting with him for me.

It surprised me that he only chuckled delightedly, and wanted to know just exactly who and what Bobby was or is.

But I couldn’t be diverted, and was determined to tell the whole tale. I felt as if I must get one or two things off my conscience and on to his. I went the whole length, and succeeded.

When I told him of that mad escapade at Louisville, while I was visiting Aunt Grace, with Stanley Hughes and the supper party he gave to that French dancing-girl in “The Bird-Flight,” when I got out of the taxi and walked home in my satin slippers in the snow for ten blocks rather than stay and have Stanley take me another block in the state he was in, though I had done nothing to stop his drinking and laughed at him, I heard him catch his breath and shudder.

I never told anybody before that it was a paper-knife in my hands that ripped open Henry Hedrick’s cheek for an inch, down in his library while Mamie was up-stairs putting their six-months’ old baby to bed, and I was a guest in their house. In this case I had suspected how he felt about me before I came, but had contemptuously ignored it because I liked to be with Mamie. I told the last few minutes of that tale with dry sobs breaking my words, and while I shook, he folded my cold hand in both his warm ones, and I heard him mutter between his teeth:

“God love her and keep her!”

Then, after a long stillness, I crept closer to him, so that my head bowed against his arm, and opened the very depths to him.

“I don’t think any woman ought to say this to any man,” I began from very far down in my throat, “but you are a preacher, and that makes a difference, and you won’t mind. I am disrespectful and ungrateful to Aunt Grace about it when she is trying her level best to do it to me, but—but I ought to get married. There are lots of wonderful women all over the world who are doing gloriously without husbands, and living happily forever after; but I’m not one. Some women have such frivolous spirits that nothing but a good, firm husband and an enormous family of children can ever chasten them. I’m one. I’ve always thought that he’d find me some day long before I was ready for him—or them; but now I’m afraid he’ll never come. I know he won’t.” I clung to his strong fingers desperately.

“I think he will,” he answered as he kindly, but firmly, possessed himself of his own hand and coat-sleeve, but in such a way as not to hurt my feelings. “I seem to feel that he is well on the road, though fighting hard,” he added in what sounded like mild exasperation or desperation, I couldn’t tell which.

“No,” I answered, with pitiful sadness and real conviction—“no; I am not worthy of him, and he won’t come. It is too late. God and you have just taught me this dreadful night what a good woman really is, and now I will have to be so busy trying all the rest of my life to be one that I won’t have time to look for—that is, he won’t find me. I don’t want anything but a good one, and if I’m being so good as all that, how’ll I let him know I want him?”

“Maybe he’ll get a revelation,” answered Gabriel in a low and controlled voice that seemed to come from the very fastnesses of something within him.

And as he spoke I felt something warm and sweet and terrible stealing over me; but I plunged forward in my confession, past the episode of the duke, my traitorous flight from home, and up to the arrival at Stivers’s, and the cowardly taking of refuge under the patchwork quilt.

“I misunderstood, and thought from the way the men talked that you were going to kill Bill, and I was too much of a coward to run out and find him in the dark and warn him. You see, I lay still and let Bill be killed, whether you did it or not; and so I murdered him, even if he is alive,” I deduced miserably.

“Dudley was wise to fear the precipitation of the logical part of the solution,” Gabriel remarked so quietly that it seemed as if he preferred that I shouldn’t hear him.

“Yes; and, you see, I am a common murderer as well as all the other dreadful things. And I let that baby die, too, rather than go and help the woman wash it outside and in, as you made me do. That is two murders; and I’m another one for not knowing how to fill it up with hot water and poke my finger down its throat and press the potatoes and water up at the same time. I’m a woman, or I ought to be. It’s my life business to know and perform ably such terrible and simple operations on babies. That makes me three murderers. And how did I know that Bill wouldn’t kill you at the same time you killed him, and Mr. Stivers and—”

“Stop!” Gabriel exclaimed suddenly, and he was shaking so hard with unseemly mirth that he shook me, too; for without being able to help myself, I had been crowding closer and closer to him, until I was burrowing right under his arm in the agonies of confession. “The damages will be endless if you go on at this rate. How many of these murders did you realize you were doing at the time you did ’em?”

“Only Bill,” I answered, after a few minutes of intense mental suffering. “I knew I ought to go and sympathize with the mother of the baby, but I didn’t know about that squeezing a baby’s stomach in the right place; but, as I say, I ought to have known, and—I did throw the quilt back to start to Mrs. Stivers when you came in. Please don’t laugh!”

“Then you stand acquitted of all responsibility of faulty impulse except about the murder of Bill, which didn’t come off,” Gabriel answered in a gentle, serious, and respectful voice that soothed me into a cheerful frame of mind over my crimes even before he had more than half uttered the words. I felt hope for myself rise in my heart.

“And then—then you came to the door and began to sing ‘Stand up for Jesus!’ so that eyes in my soul opened suddenly, and I saw Him standing and looking pitifully down into my awful black heart, and I felt Him reach out His hand to me in the darkness. I’ve always avoided and been afraid of God before, but now do you think He feels about me as He did the man on the other cross who had done awful things, I forget just what, and as long as Bill and the baby are both alive, and I worked so hard, He will forgive me and love me? And give me more awful work to do? Tell me, and what you say I will believe.” I crouched at his knee as I asked the question breathlessly.

“Oh, you wonderful, foolish woman, you! Don’t you know that the good God knows and claims His own?” Gabriel answered, as he bent forward and put his hand on the head that had bowed on his knee. For a heart-still instant we trembled together, then he said quietly and humbly: “I give up. All my life I have prayed that my ‘woman’ would be one who had seen her Master face to face. Stumbling in the darkness, groping, both of us, we found each other and—clung. Are you mine? God, dare I claim a miracle such as You sent to Your servants of old? Have we together met You in the bush, and is it burning? Can we believe that You mean to”—

Then suddenly, in the very midst of his prayer, came a great, white, steady glare, which rent the black clouds above us and revealed us to each other, like the sun at high noon. The very mountains seemed to reel in it, and the forest behind us was stilled from the rack of the winds.

And clasping his knees, I looked and looked into his eyes, down, down until I found a light more blinding than that without, while I could feel his searching mine sternly, solemnly, and with a hope so great that I was tempted to cower, but was prevented by a fierce hunger that rose in me and demanded. I don’t know how long the light lasted, but when it went out, and had left us in the night, the ordeal was over, and I was welded into his arms, and his lips were pouring out love to me in broken words of blessing and demand.

“Are you real?” he whispered, with my cheek pressed hard against his, and his arms terrific with tenderness. “Can I believe it is true? Can I claim a miracle? Can I?”

“Yes,” I answered with triumphant certainty in my mind and voice—“yes. It’s that revelation you said you—that is, the—the man that was coming for me would have. I know it’s a miracle, because I am as afraid of a preacher as of—of that thing rustling out there in the bushes; but if God let me get into your arms this awful way He means for me to stay. And it’s my miracle, not yours. I needed one, and you didn’t. You are it! You don’t think He will take you away from me in the daylight, do you?”

“Never,” he laughed against my lips, with the coax and woo both in his throat, under my hand pressed against it. And that was the taming of the wild me.

A long time after, when I had settled myself comfortably against his shoulder, and gone permanently to housekeeping in the parsonage of his arms, softly the clouds above us drifted apart, and a glorious full moon shone down on us in the warmest congratulatory approval.

“Let me look good at you, love-woman, so I’ll not confuse you with the other flowers when morning comes,” Gabriel fluted from above my head as he attempted to turn me on his arm a fraction of an inch away from him.

“You can use the moon, if you need it for identification purposes, but that lightning was enough for me,” I answered, retiring from his eyes for a hot-cheeked second under the silk handkerchief around his neck. “It may take time and moonlight to teach you me, but I knew you in a flash. I know it’s awful, but most women learn love by lightning, and it’s agony to have to wait while men slowly arrive at it by the light of the sun, moon, and stars. Will nothing ever teach them to hurry?”

“I should say,” answered Gabriel, with a delicious laugh, which I got double benefit of, for I both heard it and felt it, “that I had met you at least half-way.”

“And I’m a perfect stranger to you,” I was reiterating honestly, when an amazed answer arrived from the other side of the rock.

“Well, you don’t look it—perfect strangers!” came in Dudley’s astonished voice, as he rose from beneath the crag and stood beside us. “You old psalm-singer, you, where did you get that girl?” he demanded with a great, but, for the circumstances, very calm, interest.

“Just picked her up in the woods, where she has always been waiting for me, you old log-killer, you. Yes, I guessed the fact that she is your sister, but I dare you to try to take her away from me,” answered Gabriel, as he held me closer, when, with sisterly dignity, I tried to get into a position to squelch Dudley.

“I’ll never try,” answered Dudley, with devout thankfulness sounding in his voice up from his diaphragm. “Maybe you can hold her down, Gates; you seem to have got a good grip for a starter. The family never could.”

Yes, my dear Evelyn, Gabriel turned out to be that wonderful Gates Attwood to whom Chicago has given five million dollars to build his great Temple of Labor down on the South Side. He has been up here visiting Dudley at his camp at Pigeon Creek, hiding for a little rest for three months, and circuit-riding the mountaineers. If I had met him under the shelter of my own roof-tree, I in evening dress, with the lights on, I would have taken one insolent look at him, and then talked to Bobby the rest of the evening, while Aunt Grace raged in pantomime at mother about me. I realized this the instant Dudley called his name, and I turned and hid my eyes against his lips as I trembled at such an escape from losing him.

“I never belonged to anybody but you and—God. That’s what made me bad to the others before I was found and claimed,” I whispered across his cheek, while he nestled me still deeper into his breast, ignoring Dudley, as he deserved.

“God’s good woman, and mine,” was the low answer I felt and heard.

“Well, I’d better go scare Mr. and Mrs. Possum and the Coon Sisters off your trunks over at Crow Point,” remarked Dudley, with more than brotherly consideration. “Something familiar about that collection of baggage yanked me off the down train. I’ll fix you up at Stivers’s when you want to come in, Nell. Here’s to her permanent change of heart, Parson!” And he lighted his pipe as he strolled away through the woods.

And as he left, an awful shyness came pressing in between me and the great man who sat on an Old Harpeth crag and held me so mercifully in his arms.

“Isn’t there a mistake somewhere?” I asked in fear and trembling. “Or did I really get born again, with you to help me?”

“Yes, love,” he answered softly. “This is the right way of things. I needed you; you, me. We were ready, and He let us touch hands in the storm, to be new created. Don’t you feel—kind of weak and young?”

“No,” I whispered just as softly. “Dreadfully strong. I know now how Eve felt when she put her hand to Adam’s side, where there wasn’t even a scar, and didn’t have to ask where she really came from.”

THE LETTER THAT REALLY WAS SENT

Hillsboro, Tennessee, May 30.

My dear Evelyn:

Yes, I know it sounds dreadful for him, that I’m going to marry Gates Attwood next month; but I am going to be better than you can believe I will. I tried to write you all about it, but I couldn’t. No, that isn’t exactly true. I did, but Gates is wearing the letter in his left breast pocket, and won’t give it up. Everybody will just have to trust him with me because he does; and he must know what’s best, because God trusts him. Please come home in time for the wedding. I need you, but I haven’t made any plans. I can’t think or plan. I’m feeling. Were you ever born again? If you have been, you will know what I’m talking about when I tell you; and if you haven’t, you will think I am crazy.

Lovingly,
HELEN.

Color-Tone, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

LES DEUX AVOCATS (THE TWO LAWYERS)

FROM THE HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED PAINTING BY HONORÉ DAUMIER

NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF ALEXANDER W. DRAKE

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LIFE AFTER DEATH[1]

BY MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Author of “The Life of the Bee,” “Pelléas and Mélisande,” etc.

THIS calm, judicious review of the results of organized psychical research cannot fail to be immensely valuable in clearing up the mists accumulated in twenty-eight years of earnest investigation into “the debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical, and spiritualistic.” The accumulations of evidence, and of argument based upon evidence, have been so enormous that few men busy with life have found time more than to dip into the wonderful subject and turn dismayed and reluctant away. Nothing has been so much needed by the Public Concerned with the Greater Things as a careful digestion of this subject to date, and we are fortunate in having so broad, so scientific, so many-sided a mind as Maeterlinck’s perform this service for us.

This paper is the first of many in which THE CENTURY will take account of civilization’s accomplishments in many fields for the benefit of busy men and women.—THE EDITOR.

THE THEOSOPHICAL HYPOTHESIS

I HAVE recently been studying two interesting solutions of the problem of personal survival—solutions which, although not new, have at least been lately renewed. I refer to the neotheosophical and neospiritualistic theories, which are, I think, the only ones that can be seriously discussed. The first is almost as old as man himself; but a popular movement of some magnitude in certain countries has rejuvenated the doctrine of reincarnation, or the transmigration of souls, and brought it once more into prominence.

The great argument of its adherents—the chief and, when all is said, the only argument—is only a sentimental one. Their doctrine that the soul in its successive existences is purified and exalted with more or less rapidity according to its efforts and deserts is, they maintain, the only one that satisfies the irresistible instinct of justice which we bear within us. They are right, and, from this point of view, their posthumous justice is immeasurably superior to that of the barbaric heaven and the monstrous hell of the Christians, where rewards and punishments are forever meted out to virtues and vices which are for the most part puerile, unavoidable, or accidental. But this, I repeat, is only a sentimental argument, which has only an infinitesimal value in the scale of evidence.

We may admit that certain of their theories are rather ingenious; and what they say of the part played by the “shells,” for instance, or the “elementals,” in the spiritualistic phenomena, is worth about as much as our clumsy explanations of fluidic and supersensible bodies. Perhaps, or even no doubt, they are right when they insist that everything around us is full of living, sentient forms, of diverse and innumerous types, “as different from one another as a blade of grass and a tiger, or a tiger and a man,” which are incessantly brushing against us and through which we pass unawares. If all the religions have overpopulated the world with invisible beings, we have perhaps depopulated it too completely; and it is extremely possible that we shall find one day that the mistake was not on the side which one imagined. As Sir William Crookes well puts it in a remarkable passage:

It is not improbable that other sentient beings have organs of sense which do not respond to some or any of the rays to which our eyes are sensitive, but are able to appreciate other vibrations to which we are blind. Such beings would practically be living in a different world to our own. Imagine, for instance, what idea we should form of surrounding objects were we endowed with eyes not sensitive to the ordinary rays of light but sensitive to the vibrations concerned in electric and magnetic phenomena. Glass and crystal would be among the most opaque of bodies. Metals would be more or less transparent, and a telegraph wire through the air would look like a long narrow hole drilled through an impervious solid body. A dynamo in active work would resemble a conflagration, whilst a permanent magnet would realise the dream of mediæval mystics and become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of energy or consumption of fuel.

All this, with so many other things which they assert, would be, if not admissible, at least worthy of attention, if those suppositions were offered for what they are, very ancient hypotheses that go back to the early ages of human theology and metaphysics; but when they are transformed into categorical and dogmatic assertions, they at once become untenable. Their exponents promise us, on the other hand, that by exercising our minds, by refining our senses, by etherealizing our bodies, we shall be able to live with those whom we call dead and with the higher beings that surround us. It all seems to lead to nothing very much and rests on very frail bases, on very vague proofs derived from hypnotic sleep, presentiments, mediumism, phantasms, and so forth. We want something more than arbitrary theories about the “immortal triad,” the “three worlds,” the “astral body,” the “permanent atom,” or the “Karma-Loka.” As their sensibility is keener, their perception subtler, their spiritual intuition more penetrating, than ours, why do they not choose as a field for investigation the phenomena of prenatal memory, for instance, to take one subject at random from a multitude of others—phenomena which, although sporadic and open to question, are still admissible?

THE NEOSPIRITUALISTIC HYPOTHESIS

OUTSIDE theosophy, investigations of a purely scientific nature have been made in the baffling regions of survival and reincarnation. Neospiritualism, or psychicism, or experimental spiritualism, had its origin in America in 1870. In the following year the first strictly scientific experiments were organized by Sir William Crookes, the man of genius who opened up most of the roads at the end of which men were astounded to discover unknown properties and conditions of matter; and as early as 1873 or 1874 he obtained, with the aid of the medium Florence Cook, phenomena of materialization that have hardly been surpassed. But the real beginning of the new science dates from the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research, familiarly known as the S. P. R. This society was formed in London twenty-eight years ago, under the auspices of the most distinguished men of science in England, and, as we all know, has made a methodical and strict study of every case of supernormal psychology and sensibility. This study or investigation, originally conducted by Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, and continued by their successors, is a masterpiece of scientific patience and conscientiousness. Not an incident is admitted that is not supported by unimpeachable testimony, by definite written records and convincing corroboration. Among the many supernormal manifestations, telepathy, previsions, and so forth, we will take cognizance only of those which relate to life beyond the grave. They can be divided into two categories: first, real, objective, and spontaneous apparitions, or direct manifestations; second, manifestations obtained by the agency of mediums, whether induced apparitions, which we will put aside for the moment because of their frequently questionable character, or communications with the dead by word of mouth or automatic writing. Those extraordinary communications have been studied at length by such men as F. W. H. Myers, Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and the philosopher William James, the father of the new pragmatism. They profoundly impressed and almost convinced these men, and they therefore deserve to arrest our attention.

It appears, therefore, to be as well established as a fact can be that a spiritual or nervous shape, an image, a belated reflection of life, is capable of subsisting for some time, of releasing itself from the body, or surviving it, of traversing enormous distances in the twinkling of an eye, of manifesting itself to the living and, sometimes, of communicating with them.

For the rest, we have to recognize that these apparitions are very brief. They take place only at the precise moment of death, or follow very shortly after. They do not seem to have the least consciousness of a new or superterrestrial life, differing from that of the body whence they issue. On the contrary, their spiritual energy, at a time when it ought to be absolutely pure, because it is rid of matter, seems greatly inferior to what it was when matter surrounded it. These more or less uneasy phantasms, often tormented with trivial cares, although they come from another world, have never brought us one single revelation of topical interest concerning that world whose prodigious threshold they have crossed. Soon they fade away and disappear forever. Are they the first glimmers of a new existence or the final glimmers of the old? Do the dead thus use, for want of a better, the last link that binds them and makes them perceptible to our senses? Do they afterward go on living around us, without again succeeding, despite their endeavors, to make themselves known or to give us an idea of their presence, because we have not the organ that is necessary to perceive them, even as all our endeavors would not succeed in giving a man who was blind from birth the least notion of light and color? We do not know at all; nor can we tell whether it is permissible to draw any conclusion from all these incontestable phenomena. Meanwhile, it is interesting to observe that there really are ghosts, specters, and phantoms. Once again, science steps in to confirm a general belief of mankind, and to teach us that a belief of this sort, however absurd it may at first seem, still deserves careful examination.

THE DILEMMA OF THE TRUTH-SEEKER

NOW, what are we to think of it all? Must we, with Myers, Newbold, Hyslop, Hodgson, and many others who have studied this problem at length, conclude in favor of the incontestable agency of forces and intelligences returning from the farther bank of the great river which it was deemed that none might cross? Must we acknowledge with them that there are cases ever more numerous which make it impossible for us to hesitate any longer between the telepathic hypothesis and the spiritualistic hypothesis? I do not think so. I have no prejudices,—what were the use of having any in these mysteries?—no reluctance to admit the survival and the intervention of the dead; but, before leaving the terrestrial plane, it is wise and necessary to exhaust all the suppositions, all the explanations, there to be discovered. We have to make our choice between two manifestations of the unknown, two miracles, if you prefer, whereof one is situated in the world which we inhabit and the other in a region which, rightly or wrongly, we believe to be separated from us by nameless spaces which no human being, alive or dead, has crossed to this day. It is natural, therefore, that we should stay in our own world as long as it gives us a foothold, as long as we are not pitilessly expelled from it by a series of irresistible and irrefutable facts issuing from the adjoining abyss. The survival of a spirit is no more improbable than the prodigious faculties which we are obliged to attribute to the mediums if we deny them to the dead: but the existence of the medium, contrary to that of the spirit, is unquestionable; and therefore it is for the spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that it exists.

Do the extraordinary phenomena of which we have spoken—transmission of thought from one subconscious mind to another, perception of events at a distance, subliminal clairvoyance—occur when the dead are not in evidence, when the experiments are being made exclusively between living persons? This cannot be honestly contested. Certainly no one has ever obtained among living people series of communications or revelations similar to those of the great spiritualistic mediums Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Thompson, and Stainton Moses, nor anything that can be compared with these so far as continuity or lucidity is concerned. But though the quality of the phenomena will not bear comparison, it cannot be denied that their inner nature is identical. It is logical to infer from this that the real cause lies not in the source of inspiration, but in the personal value, the sensitiveness, the power of the medium. These mediums are pleased, in all good faith and probably unconsciously, to give to their subliminal faculties, to their secondary personalities, or to accept, on their behalf, names which were borne by beings who have crossed to the further side of the mystery: this is a matter of vocabulary or nomenclature which neither lessens nor increases the intrinsic significance of the facts.

THE BORDER-LAND OF LIFE AND DEATH

WELL, in examining these facts, however strange and really unparalleled some of them may be, I never find one which proceeds frankly from this world or which comes indisputably from the other. They are, if you wish, phenomenal border incidents; but it cannot be said that the border has been violated. It is simply a matter of distant perception, subliminal clairvoyance, and telepathy raised to the highest power; and these three manifestations of the unexplored depths of man are to-day recognized and classified by science, which is not saying that they are explained. That is another question. When, in connection with electricity, we use such terms as positive, negative, induction, potential, and resistance, we are also applying conventional words to facts and phenomena of the inward essence of which we are utterly ignorant; and we must needs be content with these, pending better. Between these extraordinary manifestations and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in the name of the dead, there is, I insist, only a difference of the greater and the lesser, a difference of extent or degree, and in no wise a difference in kind.

For the proof to be more decisive, it would be necessary that neither the medium nor the witnesses should ever have known of the existence of him whose past is revealed by the dead man; in other words, that every living link should be eliminated. I do not believe that this has ever actually occurred, nor even that it is possible; in any case, it would be a very difficult experiment to control. Be this as it may, Dr. Hodgson, who devoted part of his life to the quest of specific phenomena wherein the boundaries of mediumistic power should be plainly overstepped, believes that he found them in certain cases, of which, as the others were of very much the same nature, I will merely mention one of the most striking. In a course of excellent sittings with Mrs. Piper, the medium, he communicated with various dead friends who reminded him of a large number of common memories. The medium, the spirits, and he himself seemed in a wonderfully accommodating mood; and the revelations were plentiful, exact, and easy. In this extremely favorable atmosphere, he was placed in communication with the soul of one of his best friends, who had died a year before, and whom he simply called “A.” This A, whom he had known more intimately than most of the spirits with whom he had communicated previously, behaved quite differently and, while establishing his identity beyond dispute, vouchsafed only incoherent replies. Now, A “had been troubled much, for years before his death, by headaches and occasionally mental exhaustion, though not amounting to positive mental disturbance.”

The same phenomenon appears to recur whenever similar troubles have come before death, as in cases of suicide.

“If the telepathic explanation is held to be the only one,” says Dr. Hodgson (I give the gist of his observations), “if it is claimed that all the communications of these discarnate minds are only suggestions from my subconscious self, it is unintelligible that, after having obtained satisfactory results from others whom I had known far less intimately than A and with whom I had consequently far fewer recollections in common, I should get from him, in the same sittings, nothing but incoherencies. I am thus driven to believe that my subliminal self is not the only thing in evidence, that it is in the presence of a real, living personality, whose mental state is the same as it was at the hour of death, a personality which remains independent of my subliminal consciousness and absolutely unaffected by it, which is deaf to its suggestions, and draws from its own resources the revelations which it makes.”

The argument is not without value, but its full force would be obtained only if it were certain that none of those present knew of A’s madness; otherwise it can be contended that, the notion of madness having penetrated the subconscious intelligence of one of them, it worked upon it and gave to the replies induced a form in keeping with the state of mind presupposed in the dead man.

IS THE FUTURE LIFE DIM AND SHADOWY?

OF a truth, by extending the possibilities of the medium to these extremes, we furnish ourselves with explanations which forestall nearly everything, bar every road, and all but deny to the spirits any power of manifesting themselves in the manner which they appear to have chosen. But why do they choose that manner? Why do they thus restrict themselves? Why do they jealously hug the narrow strip of territory which memory occupies on the confines of both worlds and from which none but indecisive or questionable evidence can reach us? Are there, then, no other outlets, no other horizons? Why do they tarry about us, stagnant in their little pasts, when, in their freedom from the flesh, they ought to be able to wander at ease over the virgin stretches of space and time? Do they not yet know that the sign which will prove to us that they survive is to be found not with us, but with them, on the other side of the grave? Why do they come back with empty hands and empty words? Is that what one finds when one is steeped in infinity? Beyond our last hour is it all bare and shapeless and dim? If it be so, let them tell us; and the evidence of the darkness will at least possess a grandeur that is all too absent from these cross-examining methods. Of what use is it to die, if all life’s trivialities continue? Is it really worth while to have passed through the terrifying gorges which open on the eternal fields in order to remember that we had a great-uncle called Peter and that our Cousin Paul was afflicted with varicose veins and a gastric complaint? At that rate, I should choose for those whom I love the august and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing. Though it be difficult for them, as they complain, to make themselves understood through a strange and sleep-bound organism, they tell us enough categorical details about the past to show that they could disclose similar details, if not about the future, which they perhaps do not yet know, at least about the lesser mysteries which surround us on every side and which our body alone prevents us from approaching. There are a thousand things, large or small, alike unknown to us, which we must perceive when feeble eyes no longer arrest our vision. It is in those regions from which a shadow separates us, and not in foolish tittle-tattle of the past, that they would at last find the clear and genuine proof which they seem to seek with such enthusiasm. Without demanding a great miracle, one would nevertheless think that we had the right to expect from a mind which nothing now enthralls some other discourse than that which it avoided when it was still subject to matter.

This is where things stood when, of late years, the mediums, the spiritualists, or, rather, it appears, the spirits themselves, for one cannot tell exactly with whom we have to do, perhaps dissatisfied at not being more definitely recognized and understood, invented, for a more effectual proof of their existence, what has been called “cross-correspondence.” Here the position is reversed: it is no longer a question of various and more or less numerous spirits revealing themselves through the agency of one and the same medium, but of a single spirit manifesting itself almost simultaneously through several mediums often at great distances from one another and without any preliminary understanding among themselves. Each of these messages, taken alone, is usually unintelligible, and yields a meaning only when laboriously combined with all the others.

As Sir Oliver Lodge says:

The object of this ingenious and complicated effort clearly is to prove that there is some definite intelligence underlying the phenomena, distinct from that of any of the automatists, by sending fragments of a message or literary reference which shall be unintelligible to each separately—so that no effective telepathy is possible between them,—thus eliminating or trying to eliminate what had long been recognized by all members of the Society for Psychical Research as the most troublesome and indestructible of the semi-normal hypotheses. And the further object is evidently to prove as far as possible, by the substance and quality of the message, that it is characteristic of the one particular personality who is ostensibly communicating, and of no other.[2]

The experiments are still in their early stages, and the most recent volumes of the “Proceedings” are devoted to them. Although the accumulated mass of evidence is already considerable, no conclusion can yet be drawn from it. In any case, whatever the spiritualists may say, the suspicion of telepathy seems to me to be in no way removed. The experiments form a rather fantastic literary exercise, one intellectually much superior to the ordinary manifestations of the mediums; but up to the present there is no reason for placing their mystery in the other world rather than in this. Men have tried to see in them a proof that somewhere in time or space, or else beyond both, there is a sort of immense cosmic reserve of knowledge upon which the spirits go and draw freely. But if the reserve exist, which is very possible, nothing tells us that it is not the living rather than the dead who repair to it. It is very strange that the dead, if they really have access to the immeasurable treasure, should bring back nothing from it but a kind of ingenious child’s puzzle, although it ought to contain myriads of lost or forgotten notions and acquirements, heaped up during thousands and thousands of years in abysses which our mind, weighed down by the body, can no longer penetrate, but which nothing seems to close against the investigations of freer and more subtle activities. They are evidently surrounded by innumerable mysteries, by unsuspected and formidable truths that loom large on every side. The smallest astronomical or biological revelation, the least secret of olden time, such as that of the temper of copper, an archæological detail, a poem, a statue, a recovered remedy, a shred of one of those unknown sciences which flourished in Egypt or Atlantis—any of these would form a much more decisive argument than hundreds of more or less literary reminiscences. Why do they speak to us so seldom of the future? And for what reason, when they do venture upon it, are they mistaken with such disheartening regularity? One would think that, in the sight of a being delivered from the trammels of the body and of time, the years, whether past or future, ought all to lie outspread on one and the same plane.[3] We may therefore say that the ingenuity of the proof turns against it. All things considered, as in other attempts, and notably in those of the famous medium Stainton Moses, there is the same characteristic inability to bring us the veriest particle of truth or knowledge of which no vestige can be found in a living brain or in a book written on this earth. And yet it is inconceivable that there should not somewhere exist a knowledge that is not as ours and truths other than those which we possess here below.

A LACK OF VITAL COMMUNICATIONS

THE case of Stainton Moses, whose name we have just mentioned, is a very striking one in this respect. This Stainton Moses was a dogmatic, hard-working clergyman, whose learning, Myers tells us, in the normal state did not exceed that of an ordinary schoolmaster. But he was no sooner “entranced” before certain spirits of antiquity or of the Middle Ages who are hardly known save to profound scholars—among others, St. Hippolytus; Plotinus; Athenodorus, the tutor of Augustus; and more particularly Grocyn, the friend of Erasmus—took possession of his person and manifested themselves through his agency. Now, Grocyn, for instance, furnished certain information about Erasmus which was at first thought to have been gathered in the other world, but which was subsequently discovered in forgotten, but nevertheless accessible, books. On the other hand, Stainton Moses’s integrity was never questioned for an instant by those who knew him, and we may therefore take his word for it when he declares that he had not read the books in question. Here again the mystery, inexplicable though it be, seems really to lie hidden in the midst of ourselves. It is unconscious reminiscence, if you will, suggestion at a distance, subliminal reading; but no more than in cross-correspondence is it indispensable to have recourse to the dead and to drag them by main force into the riddle, which, seen from our side of the grave, is dark and impassioned enough as it is. Furthermore, we must not insist unduly on this cross-correspondence. We must remember that the whole thing is in its earliest stages, and that the dead appear to have no small difficulty in grasping the requirements of the living.

In regard to this subject, as to the others, the spiritualists are fond of saying:

“If you refuse to admit the agency of spirits, the majority of these phenomena are absolutely inexplicable.”

Agreed; nor do we pretend to explain them, for hardly anything is to be explained upon this earth. We are content simply to ascribe them to the incomprehensible power of the mediums, which is no more improbable than the survival of the dead, and has the advantage of not going outside the sphere which we occupy and of bearing relation to a large number of similar facts that occur among living people. Those singular faculties are baffling only because they are still sporadic, and because only a very short time has elapsed since they received scientific recognition. Properly speaking, they are no more marvelous than those which we use daily without marveling at them; as our memory, for instance, our understanding, our imagination, and so forth. They form part of the great miracle that we are; and, having once admitted the miracle, we should be surprised not so much at its extent as at its limits.

Nevertheless, I am not at all of opinion that we must definitely reject the spiritualistic theory; that would be both unjust and premature. Hitherto everything remains in suspense. We may say that things are still very little removed from the point marked by Sir William Crookes, in 1874, in an article which he contributed to the “Quarterly Journal of Science.” He there wrote:

The difference between the advocates of Psychic Force and the Spiritualists consists in this—that we contend that there is as yet insufficient proof of any other directing agent than the Intelligence of the Medium, and no proof whatever of the agency of Spirits of the Dead; while the Spiritualists hold it as a faith, not demanding further proof, that Spirits of the Dead are the sole agents in the production of all the phenomena. Thus the controversy resolves itself into a pure question of fact, only to be determined by a laborious and long-continued series of experiments and an extensive collection of psychological facts, which should be the first duty of the Psychological Society, the formation of which is now in progress.

HAS THE SPIRIT ONLY AN INCOHERENT MEMORY OF LIFE?

MEANWHILE, it is saying a good deal that rigorous scientific investigations have not utterly shattered a theory which radically confounds the idea which we were wont to form of death. We shall see presently why, in considering our destinies beyond the grave, we need have no reason to linger too long over these apparitions or these revelations, even though they should really be incontestable and to the point. They would seem, all told, to be only the incoherent and precarious manifestations of a transitory state. They would at best prove, if we were bound to admit them, that a reflection of ourselves, an after-vibration of the nerves, a bundle of emotions, a spiritual silhouette, a grotesque and forlorn image, or, more correctly, a sort of truncated and uprooted memory, can, after our death, linger and float in a space where nothing remains to feed it, where it gradually becomes wan and lifeless, but where a special fluid, emanating from an exceptional medium, succeeds at moments in galvanizing it. Perhaps it exists objectively, perhaps it subsists and revives only in the recollection of certain sympathies. After all, it would be not unlikely that the memory which represents us during our life should continue to do so for a few weeks or even a few years after our decease. This would explain the evasive and deceptive character of those spirits which, possessing only a mnemonic existence, are naturally able to interest themselves only in matters within their reach. Hence their irritating and maniacal energy in clinging to the slightest facts, their sleepy dullness, their incomprehensible indifference and ignorance, and all the wretched absurdities which we have noticed more than once.

But, I repeat, it is much simpler to attribute these absurdities to the special character and the as yet imperfectly recognized difficulties of telepathic communication. The unconscious suggestions of the most intelligent among those who take part in the experiment are impaired, disjointed, and stripped of their main virtues in passing through the obscure intermediary of the medium. It may be that they go astray and make their way into certain forgotten corners which the intelligence no longer visits, and thence bring back more or less surprising discoveries; but the intellectual quality of the aggregate will always be inferior to that which a conscious mind would yield. Besides, once more, it is not yet time to draw conclusions. We must not lose sight of the fact that we have to do with a science which was born but yesterday, and which is groping for its implements, its paths, its methods, and its aim in a darkness denser than the earth’s. The boldest bridge that men have yet undertaken to throw across the river of death is not to be built in thirty years. Most sciences have centuries of thankless efforts and barren uncertainties behind them; and there are, I imagine, few among the younger of them that can show from the earliest hour, as this one does, promises of a harvest which may not be the harvest of their conscious sowing, but which already bids fair to yield such unknown and wondrous fruit.[4]

TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS

SO much for survival proper. But certain spiritualists go further, and attempt the scientific proof of palingenesis and the transmigration of souls. I pass over their merely moral or scientific arguments, as well as those which they discover in the prenatal reminiscences of illustrious men and others. These reminiscences, though often disturbing, are still too rare, too sporadic, so to speak; and the supervision has not always been sufficiently close for us to be able to rely upon them with safety. Nor do I purpose to pay attention to the proofs based upon the inborn aptitudes of genius or of certain infant prodigies—aptitudes which are difficult to explain, but which, nevertheless, may be attributed to unknown laws of heredity. I shall be content to recall briefly the results of some of Colonel de Rochas’s experiments, which leave one at a loss for an explanation.

First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth, and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into an hypnotic sleep, and by means of downward passes makes them trace back the whole course of their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence, and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each of these hypnotic stages the subject reassumes the consciousness, the character, and the state of mind which he possessed at the corresponding stage in his life. He goes over the same events, with their joys and sorrows. If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence, and his recovery. If, for instance, the subject is a woman who has been a mother, she again becomes pregnant and again suffers the pains of childbirth. Carried back to an age when she was learning to write, she writes like a child, and her writings can be placed side by side with the copy-books which she filled at school.

This in itself is very extraordinary, but, as Colonel de Rochas says:

Up to the present, we have walked on firm ground; we have been observing a physiological phenomenon which is difficult of explanation, but which numerous experiments and verifications allow us to look upon as certain.

We now enter a region where still more surprising enigmas await us. Let us, to come to details, take one of the simplest cases. The subject is a girl of eighteen, called Joséphine. She lives at Voiron, in the department of the Isère. By means of downward passes, she is brought back to the condition of a baby at her mother’s breast. The passes continue, and the wonder-tale runs its course. Joséphine can no longer speak; and we have the great silence of infancy, which seems to be followed by a silence more mysterious still. Joséphine no longer answers except by signs; she is not yet born, “she is floating in darkness.” They persist; the sleep becomes heavier; and suddenly, from the depths of that sleep, rises the voice of another being—a voice unexpected and unknown, the voice of a churlish, distrustful, and discontented old man. They question him. At first he refuses to answer, saying that “of course he’s there, as he’s speaking”; that “he sees nothing”; and that “he’s in the dark.” They increase the number of passes, and gradually gain his confidence. His name is Jean-Claude Bourdon; he is an old man; he has long been ailing and bedridden. He tells the story of his life. He was born at Champvent, in the parish of Polliat, in 1812. He went to school until he was eighteen, and served his time in the army with the Seventh Artillery at Besançon; and he describes his gay time there, while the sleeping girl makes the gesture of twirling an imaginary mustache. When he goes back to his native place, he does not marry, but he has a mistress. He leads a solitary life (I omit all but the essential facts), and dies at the age of seventy, after a long illness.

We now hear the dead man speak, and his posthumous revelations are not sensational, which, however, is not an adequate reason for doubting their genuineness. He “feels himself growing out of his body,” but he remains attached to it for a fairly long time. His fluidic body, which is at first diffused, takes a more concentrated form. He lives in darkness, which he finds disagreeable; but he does not suffer. At last the night in which he is plunged is streaked with a few flashes of light. The idea comes to him to reincarnate himself, and he draws near to her who is to be his mother (that is to say, the mother of Joséphine). He encircles her until the child is born, whereupon he gradually enters the child’s body. Until about the seventh year this body was surrounded by a sort of floating mist in which he used to see many things which he has not seen since.

The next thing to be done is to go back beyond Jean-Claude. A mesmerization lasting nearly three quarters of an hour, without lingering at any intermediate stage, brings the old man back to babyhood, to a fresh silence, a new limbo; and then suddenly another voice and an unexpected person. This time it is an old woman who has been very wicked; and so she is in great torment. She is dead at the actual instant; for, in this inverted world, lives go backward and of course begin at the end. She is in deep darkness, surrounded by evil spirits. She speaks in a faint voice, but always gives definite replies to the questions put to her, instead of caviling at every moment, as Jean-Claude did. Her name is Philomène Carteron.

I will now quote Colonel de Rochas:

By intensifying the sleep, I induce the manifestations of a living Philomène. She no longer suffers, seems very calm, and always answers very coldly and distinctly. She knows that she is unpopular in the neighborhood, but no one is a penny the worse, and she will be even with them yet. She was born in 1702; her maiden name was Philomène Charpigny; her grandfather on the mother’s side was called Pierre Machon and lived at Ozan. In 1732 she married, at Chevroux, a man named Carteron, by whom she had two children, both of whom she lost.

Before her incarnation, Philomène had been a little girl who died in infancy. Previous to that, she was a man who had committed murder, and it was to expiate this crime that she endured much suffering in the darkness, even after her life as a little girl, when she had had no time to do wrong. I did not think it necessary to carry the hypnosis further, because the subject appeared exhausted and her paroxysms were painful to watch.

But, on the other hand, I noticed one thing which would tend to show that the revelations of these mediums rest on an objective reality. At Voiron, one of the regular attendants at my demonstrations is a young girl, Louise——. She possesses a very sedate and thoughtful cast of mind, not at all open to hypnotic suggestion; and she has in a very high degree the capacity, which is comparatively common in a lesser degree, of perceiving the magnetic effluvia of human beings and, consequently, the fluidic body. When Joséphine revives the memory of her past, a luminous aura is observed around her, and is perceived by Louise. Now, to the eyes of Louise, this aura becomes dark when Joséphine is in the phase separating two existences. In every instance there is a strong reaction in Joséphine when I touch points where Louise tells me that she perceives the aura, whether it be dark or light.

I thought it well to give the report of one of these experiments almost in extenso, because those who maintain the palingenesic theory find in these the only appreciable argument which they possess. Colonel de Rochas renewed them more than once with different subjects. Among these, I will mention only one, a girl called Marie Mayo, whose history is more complicated than Joséphine’s, and whose successive reincarnations take us back to the seventeenth century and carry us suddenly to Versailles, among the historical personages moving about Louis XIV.

Let us add that Colonel de Rochas is not the only mesmerizer who has obtained revelations of this kind, which may henceforth be classed among the incontestable facts of hypnotism. I have mentioned his alone because they offer the most substantial guaranties from every point of view.

WHAT HAS BEEN PROVED?

WHAT do they prove? We must begin, as in all questions of this kind, by entertaining a certain distrust of the medium. It goes without saying that all mediums, by the very nature of their faculties, are inclined to imposture, to trickery. I know that Colonel de Rochas, like Dr. Richet and like Professor Lombroso, was occasionally hoaxed. That is the inherent defect of the machinery which we must perforce employ; and experiments of this sort will never possess the scientific value of those made in a physical or chemical laboratory. But this is not an a priori reason for denying them any sort of interest. As a question of fact, are imposture and trickery possible here? Obviously, even though the experiments be conducted under the strictest supervision. However complicated it may be, the subject can have learned his lesson, and can cleverly avoid the traps laid for him. The best guaranty, when all is said, lies in his good faith and his moral sense, which the experimenters alone are in a position to test and to know; and for that we must trust to them. Besides, they neglect no precaution necessary to make imposture extremely difficult. After taking the subject, by means of transverse passes, up the stream of his life, they make him come down the same stream; and the same events pass in the reverse order. Repeated tests and countertests always yield identical results; and the medium never hesitates or goes astray in the labyrinth of names, dates, and incidents.[5]

Moreover, it would be requisite for these mediums, who are generally people of merely average intelligence, suddenly to become great poets in order thus to create, down to every detail, a series of characters differing entirely one from the other, in which everything—gestures, voice, temper, mind, thoughts, feeling—is in keeping, and ever ready to reply, in harmony with their inmost nature, to the most unexpected questions. It has been said that every man is a Shakspere in his dreams; but have we not here to do with dreams which, in their uniformity, bear a singular resemblance to fact?

I think, therefore, that, until we receive evidence to the contrary, we may be allowed to leave fraud out of the question. Another objection that might be raised, as was done with respect to the Myers phantom, is the insignificance of their revelations from beyond the grave. I would rather look on this as an argument in behalf of their good faith. Those whose imagination is rich enough to create the wonderful persons whom we see living in their sleep would doubtless find no great difficulty in inventing a few fantastic but plausible details on the subject of the next world. Not one of them thinks of it. They are Christians, and therefore carry deep down in themselves the traditional terror of hell, the fear of purgatory, and the vision of a paradise full of angels and palms. They never refer to any of it. Although they are most often ignorant of all the theories of reincarnation, they conform strictly to the theosophical or neospiritualistic hypothesis, and are unconsciously faithful to it in their very indefiniteness: they speak vaguely of “the dark” in which they find themselves. They tell nothing because they know nothing. It is apparently impossible for them to give any account of a state that is still illumined. In fact, it is very likely, if we admit the hypothesis of reincarnation and of evolution after death, that nature, here as elsewhere, does not proceed by bounds. There is no special reason why she should take a prodigious and inconceivable leap between life and death.

We do not find the dramatic change which at first thought we are rather inclined to expect. The spirit is first of all confused at losing its body and every one of its familiar ways; it recovers itself only by degrees. It resumes consciousness slowly. This consciousness is subsequently purified, exalted, and extended, gradually and indefinitely, until, reaching other spheres, the principle of life that animates it ceases to reincarnate itself, and loses all contact with us. This would explain why we never have any but minor and elementary revelations.

All that concerns this first phase of the survival is fairly probable, even to those who do not admit the theory of reincarnation. For the rest, we shall see presently that the solutions which man’s imagination finds there merely change the question and are inadequate and provisional.

THE DANGER OF UNCONSCIOUS SUGGESTION IN MESMERIC TESTS

WE now come to the most serious objection, that of suggestion. Colonel de Rochas declares that he and all the other experimenters who have given themselves up to this study “have not only avoided everything that could put the subject on a definite tack, but have often tried in vain to lead him astray by different suggestions.” I am convinced of it: there can be no question of voluntary suggestion.

But do we not know that in these regions unconscious and involuntary suggestion is often more powerful and effective than the other? In the hackneyed and rather childish experiment of table-turning, for instance, which, after all, is only a crude and elementary form of telepathy, the replies are nearly always dictated by the unconscious suggestion of a participant or a mere onlooker.[6] We should therefore first of all have to make sure that neither the hypnotizer nor an onlooker, nor yet the subject himself, has ever heard of the reincarnated persons. It will be enough, I shall be told, to employ for the countertests another operator and different onlookers who are ignorant of the previous revelations. Yes, but the subject is not ignorant of them; and it is possible that the first suggestion has been so profound that it will remain forever stamped upon the unconsciousness, and that it will reproduce the same incarnations indefinitely in the same order.

All this does not mean that the phenomena of suggestion are not themselves laden with mysteries; but that is another question. For the moment, as we see, the problem is almost insoluble, and control is impracticable. Meanwhile, since we have to choose between reincarnation and suggestion, it is right that we should confine ourselves in the first instance to the latter, in accordance with the principles which we have observed in the case of automatic speech and writing. Between two unknowns, common sense and prudence decree that we should turn first to the one on whose frontiers lie certain facts more frequently recorded, the one which shows a few familiar glimmers. Let us exhaust the mystery of our life before forsaking it for the mystery of our death. Throughout this vast expanse of treacherous ground, it is important that, until fresh evidence arrives, we should keep to one inflexible rule, namely, that thought transference exists as long as it is not absolutely and physically impossible for the subject or some person in the room to have cognizance of the incident in question, whether the cognizance be conscious or not, forgotten or actual. Even this guaranty is not sufficient, for it is still possible for some one taking no part in the sitting, and even very far away from it, to be placed in communication with the medium by some unknown means, and to influence the medium at a distance and unwittingly. Lastly, to provide for every contingency before letting death come upon the boards, it would be necessary to make certain that atavistic memory does not play an unforeseen part. Cannot a man, for instance, carry hidden in the depths of his being the recollection of events connected with the childhood of an ancestor whom he has never seen, and communicate it to the medium by unconscious suggestion? It is not impossible. We carry in ourselves all the past, all the experience, of our ancestors. If by some magic we could illumine the prodigious treasures of the subconscious memory, why should we not there discover the events and facts that form the sources of that experience? Before turning toward yonder unknown, we must utterly exhaust the possibilities of this terrestrial unknown. It is moreover remarkable, but undeniable, that, despite the strictness of a law which seems to shut out every other explanation, despite the almost unlimited and probably excessive scope allotted to the domain of suggestion, there nevertheless remain some facts which perhaps call for another interpretation.

THE LACK OF COMPELLING PROOF IN THE THEORY

BUT let us return to reincarnation, and recognize, in passing, that it is very regrettable that the arguments of the theosophists and neospiritualists are not compelling; for there never was a more beautiful, a juster, a purer, a more moral, fruitful, and consoling, or, to a certain point, a more probable creed than theirs. But the quality of a creed is no evidence of its truth. Even though it is the religion of six hundred millions of mankind, the nearest to the mysterious origins, the only one that is not odious, and the least absurd of all, it will have to do what the others have not done—bring unimpeachable testimony; and what it has given us hitherto is only the first shadow of a proof begun.

Indeed, even that would not put an end to the riddle. In principle, reincarnation sooner or later is inevitable, since nothing can be lost or remain stationary. What has not been demonstrated in any way, and will perhaps remain indemonstrable, is the reincarnation of the whole, identical person, notwithstanding the abolition of memory. But what matters that reincarnation to him, if he be unaware that he is still himself? All the problems of the conscious survival of man start up anew, and we have to begin all over again. Even if scientifically established, the doctrine of reincarnation, just like that of a survival, would not set a term to our questions. It replies to neither the first nor the last, those of the beginning and the end, the only ones that are essential. It simply shifts them, pushes them a few hundreds, a few thousands, of years back, in the hope, perhaps, of losing or forgetting them in silence and space. But they have come from the depths of the most prodigious infinities, and are not content with a tardy solution. I am most certainly interested in learning what is in store for me, what will happen to me immediately after my death. You tell me:

“Man, in his successive incarnations, will make atonement by suffering, will be purified, in order that he may ascend from sphere to sphere until he returns to the divine essence whence he sprang.”

I am willing to believe it, notwithstanding that all this still bears the somewhat questionable stamp of our little earth and its old religions; I am willing to believe it; but even then? What matters to me is not what will be for some time, but for always; and your divine principle appears to me not at all infinite nor definite. It even seems to me greatly inferior to that which I conceive without your help. Now, even if it were based on thousands of facts, a religion that belittles the God conceived by my loftiest thought could never dominate my conscience. Your infinity or our God, without being even more unintelligible than mine, is nevertheless smaller. If I be again immerged in Him, it means that I emerged from Him; if it be possible for me to have emerged from Him, then He is not infinite; and, if He be not infinite, what is He? We must accept one thing or the other: either He purifies me because I am outside Him and He is not infinite; or, being infinite, if He purify me, then there was something impure in Him, because it is a part of Himself which He is purifying in me. Moreover, how can we admit that this God who has existed for all time, who has the same infinity of millenaries behind Him as in front of Him, should not yet have found time to purify Himself and put a period to His trials? What He was not able to do in the eternity previous to the moment of my existence He will not be able to do in the subsequent eternity, for the two are equal. And the same question presents itself where I am concerned. My principle of life, like His, exists from all eternity, for my emergence out of nothing would be more difficult of explanation than my existence without a beginning. I have necessarily had innumerable opportunities of incarnating myself; and I have probably done so, seeing that it is hardly likely that the idea came to me only yesterday. All the chances of reaching my goal have therefore been offered to me in the past; and all those which I shall find in the future will add nothing to the number, which was already infinite. There is not much to say in answer to these interrogations, which spring up everywhence the moment our thought glances upon them. Meanwhile, I had rather know that I know nothing than feed myself on illusory and irreconcilable assertions. I had rather keep to an infinity the incomprehensibility of which has no bounds than restrict myself to a God whose incomprehensibility is limited on every side. Nothing compels you to speak of your God; but, if you take upon yourself to do so, it is necessary that your explanations should be superior to the silence which they break.

It is true that the scientific spiritualists do not venture as far as this God; but, then, tight-pressed between the two riddles of the beginning and the end, they have almost nothing to tell us. They follow the tracks of our dead for a few seconds in a world where seconds no longer count, and then they abandon them in the darkness. I do not reproach them, because we have here to do with things which, in all probability, we shall not know in the day when we shall think that we know everything. I do not ask that they shall reveal to me the secret of the universe, for I do not believe, like a child, that this secret can be expressed in three words or that it can enter my brain without bursting it. I am even persuaded that beings who might be millions of times more intelligent than the most intelligent among us would not yet possess it, for this secret must be as infinite, as unfathomable, as inexhaustible as the universe itself. Nevertheless, the fact remains that this inability to go even a few years beyond the life after death detracts greatly from the interest of their experiments and revelations. At best, it is only a short space gained, and it is not by this juggling on the threshold that our fate is decided. I am ready to go through what may befall me in the short interval filled by those revelations, as I am even now going through what befalls me in my life here. My destiny does not lie there, nor my home. I do not doubt that the facts reported are genuine and proved; but what is even much more certain is that the dead, if they survive, have not a great deal to teach us, whether because at the moment when they can speak to us they have nothing to tell us, or because at the moment when they might have something to reveal to us they are no longer able to do so, but withdraw forever, and lose sight of us in the immensity which they are exploring.

[1] Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos and copyright U. S. A., 1913, by Eugène Fasquelle.

[2] “The Survival of Man,” Chap. XXV, p. 325.

[3] In this connection, however, we find two or three rather perturbing facts, a remarkable one being that at a spiritualistic meeting held by the late W. T. Stead the prediction of the murder of King Alexander and Queen Draga was described with the most circumstantial details. A verbatim report was drawn up of this prediction and signed by thirty witnesses; and Stead went next day to beg the Servian minister in London to warn the king of the danger that threatened him. The event took place, as announced, a few months later. But “precognition” does not necessarily require the intervention of the dead; moreover, every case of this kind, before being definitely accepted, would call for prolonged study in every particular.

[4] In order to exhaust this question of survival and of communications with the dead, I ought to speak of Dr. Hyslop’s recent investigations, made with the assistance of the mediums Smead and Chenoweth (communications with William James). I ought also to mention Julia’s famous “bureau” and, above all, the extraordinary séances of Mrs. Wriedt, the trumpet medium, who not only obtains communications in which the dead speak languages of which she herself is completely ignorant, but raises apparitions said to be extremely disturbing. I ought lastly, to examine the facts set forth by Professor Porro, Dr. Venzano, and M. Rozanne, and many other things besides, for spiritualistic investigation and literature are already piling volume upon volume. But it was not my intention or my pretension to make a complete study of scientific spiritualism. I wished merely to omit no essential point and to give a general but accurate idea of this posthumous atmosphere which no really new and decisive fact has come to unsettle since the manifestations of which we have spoken.

[5] In order to hide nothing and to bring all the documents into court, we may point out that Colonel de Rochas ascertained upon inquiry that the subjects’ revelations concerning their former existences were inaccurate in several particulars.

“Their narratives were also full of anachronisms, which disclosed the presence of normal recollections among the suggestions that came from an unknown source. Nevertheless, one perfectly indubitable fact remains, which is that of the existence of certain visions recurring with the same characteristics in the case of a considerable number of persons unknown to one another.”

[6] In this connection, may I be permitted to quote a personal experience? One evening at the Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille, where I am wont to spend my summers, some newly arrived guests were amusing themselves by making a small table spin on its foot. I was quietly smoking in a corner of the drawing-room, at some distance from the little table, taking no interest in what was happening around it and thinking of something quite different. After due entreaty, the table replied that it held the spirit of a seventeenth-century monk who was buried in the east gallery of the cloisters under a flagstone dated 1693. After the departure of the monk, who suddenly, for no apparent reason, refused to continue the interview, we thought that we would go with a lamp and look for the grave. We ended by discovering in the far cloister, on the eastern side, a tombstone in very bad condition, broken, worn down, trodden into the ground, and crumbling, on which, by examining it very closely, we were able with great difficulty to decipher the inscription, “A.D. 1693.” Now, at the moment of the monk’s reply there was no one in the drawing-room except my guests and myself. None of them knew the abbey; they had arrived that very evening a few minutes before dinner, after which, as it was quite dark, they had put off their visit to the cloisters and the ruins until the following day. Therefore, short of a belief in the “shells” or the “elementals” of the theosophists, the revelation could have come only from me. Nevertheless, I believed myself to be absolutely ignorant of the existence of that particular tombstone, one of the least legible among a score of others, all belonging to the seventeenth century, which pave this part of the cloisters.

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Country Roads of New England

Four Drawings by Walter King Stone

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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 TWO

WITH PICTURES BY HERMAN PFEIFER

SYNOPSIS OF PRECEDING INSTALMENT

ON the day of her graduation from the training-school, the White Linen Nurse was overcome by hysteria. For weeks she had been working too hard, and two or three cases with which she had been connected having gone wrong, she had racked herself with an absurd sense of responsibility. Now, in her distracted state, the visible sign of her self-contempt was the perfectly controlled expression of her trained-nurse face.

From a scene in her room with her two room-mates, in which confidences are exchanged, she rushed to the office of the Superintendent of Nurses, and hysterically demanded her own face. The Senior Surgeon was sent for, and after tartly telling the girl she was a fool, finally took her with him and his little crippled daughter for a thirty-mile trip into the country, where he had been summoned on a difficult case.

On their return, the Senior Surgeon lost control of the machine on a steep hill, and the three were thrown out.

WHEN the White Linen Nurse found anything again, she found herself lying perfectly flat on her back in a reasonably comfortable nest of grass and leaves. Staring inquisitively up into the sky she thought she noticed a slight black-and-blue discoloration toward the west, but more than that, much to her relief, the firmament did not seem to be seriously injured. The earth, she feared, had not escaped so easily. Even away off somewhere near the tip of her fingers the ground was as sore, as sore as could be, under her touch. Impulsively to her dizzy eyes the hot tears started, to think that now, tired as she was, she would have to jump right up in another minute or two and attend to the poor earth. Fortunately for any really strenuous emergency that might arise, there seemed to be nothing about her own body that hurt at all except a queer, persistent little pain in her cheek.

Not until the Little Crippled Girl’s dirt-smouched face intervened between her own staring eyes and the sky did she realize that the pain in her cheek was a pinch.

“Wake up! wake up!” scolded the Little Crippled Girl, shrilly. “Naughty—pink-and-white Nursie! I wanted to hear the bump! You screamed so loud I couldn’t hear the bump.”

With excessive caution the White Linen Nurse struggled up at last to a sitting posture, and gazed perplexedly about her.

It seemed to be a perfectly pleasant field—acres and acres of mild old grass tottering palsiedly down to watch some skittish young violets and bluets frolic in and out of a giggling brook. Up the field? Up the field? Hazily the White Linen Nurse ground her knuckles into her incredulous eyes. Up the field, just beyond them, the great empty automobile stood amiably at rest. From the general appearance of the stone wall at the top of the little grassy slope it was palpably evident that the car had attempted certain vain acrobatic feats before its failing momentum had forced it into the humiliating ranks of the backsliders.

Still grinding her knuckles into her eyes, the White Linen Nurse turned back to the Little Girl. Under the torn, twisted sable cap one little eye was hidden completely, but the other eye loomed up as rakish and bruised as a prize-fighter’s. One sable sleeve was wrenched disastrously from its armhole, and along the edge of the vivid, purple little skirt the ill-favored white ruffles seemed to have raveled out into hopeless yards and yards and yards of Hamburg embroidery.

The Little Girl began to gather herself together a trifle self-consciously.

“We—we seem to have fallen out of something,” she confided with the air of one who halves a most precious secret.

“Yes, I know,” said the White Linen Nurse; “but what has become of—your father?”

Worriedly for an instant, the Little Girl sat scanning the remotest corners of the field, then abruptly, with a gasp of real relief, she began to explore with cautious fingers the geographical outline of her black eye.

“Oh, never mind about Father,” she asserted cheerfully. “I guess—I guess he got mad and went home.”

“Yes, I know,” mused the White Linen Nurse; “but it doesn’t seem—probable.”

“Probable?” mocked the Little Girl, most disagreeably; then suddenly her little hand went shooting out toward the stranded automobile.

“Why, there he is,” she screamed—“under the car! Oh, look—look—looky!”

Laboriously the White Linen Nurse scrambled to her knees. Desperately she tried to ram her fingers like a clog into the whirling dizziness round her temples.

“Oh, my God! oh, my God! what’s the dose for anybody under a car?” she babbled idiotically.

Then with a really Herculean effort, both mental and physical, she staggered to her feet, and started for the automobile.

But her knees gave out, and wilting down to the grass, she tried to crawl along on all fours till straining wrists sent her back to her feet again.

Whenever she tried to walk, the Little Girl walked; whenever she tried to crawl, the Little Girl crawled.

“Isn’t it fun!” the shrill childish voice piped persistently. “Isn’t it just like playing shipwreck!”

When they reached the car, both woman and child were too utterly exhausted with breathlessness to do anything except just sit down on the ground and stare.

Sure enough, under that monstrous, immovable-looking machine the Senior Surgeon’s body lay rammed, face down, deep, deep into the grass.

It was the Little Girl who recovered her breath first.

“I think he’s dead,” she volunteered sagely. “His legs look—awfully dead to me.” Only excitement was in the statement. It took a second or two for her little mind to make any particularly personal application of such excitement. “I hadn’t—exactly—planned—on having him dead,” she began with imperious resentment. A threat of complete emotional collapse zigzagged suddenly across her face. “I won’t have him dead! I won’t! I won’t!” she screamed out stormily.

In the amazing silence that ensued the White Linen Nurse gathered her trembling knees up into the circle of her arms and sat there staring at the Senior Surgeon’s prostrate body, and rocking herself feebly to and fro in a futile effort to collect her scattered senses.

“Oh, if some one would only tell me what to do, I know I could do it! Oh, I know I could do it! If some one would only tell me what to do!” she kept repeating helplessly.

Cautiously the Little Girl crept forward on her hands and knees to the edge of the car, and peered speculatively through the great yellow wheel-spokes. “Father!” she faltered in almost inaudible gentleness. “Father!” she pleaded in perfectly impotent whisper.

Impetuously the White Linen Nurse scrambled to her own hands and knees and jostled the Little Girl aside.

“Fat Father!” screamed the White Linen Nurse. “Fat Father! Fat Father! Fat Father!” she gibed and taunted with the one call she knew that had never yet failed to rouse him.

Perceptibly across the Senior Surgeon’s horridly quiet shoulders a little twitch wrinkled and was gone again.

“Oh, his heart!” gasped the White Linen Nurse. “I must find his heart!”

Throwing herself prone upon the cool, meadowy ground and frantically reaching under the running-board of the car to her full arm’s-length, she began to rummage awkwardly hither and yon beneath the heavy weight of the man in the desperate hope of feeling a heart-beat.

“Ouch! you tickle me!” spluttered the Senior Surgeon, weakly.

Rolling back quickly with fright and relief, the White Linen Nurse burst forth into one maddening cackle of hysterical laughter. “Ha! ha! ha!” she giggled. “Hi! hi!”

Perplexedly at first, but with increasing abandon, the Little Girl’s voice took up the same idiotic refrain. “Ha! ha! ha!” she choked. “Hi! hi! hi!”

With an agonizing jerk of his neck, the Senior Surgeon rooted his mud-gagged mouth half an inch farther toward free and spontaneous speech. Very laboriously, very painstakingly, he spat out one by one two stones and a wisp of ground-pine and a brackish, prickly tickle of stale goldenrod.

“Blankety-blank-blank-blank!” he announced in due time—“blankety-blank-blank-blank-blank! Maybe when you two blankety-blank imbeciles have got through your blankety-blank cackling, you’ll have the blankety-blank decency to save my—my blankety-blank-blank-blank-blank-blank life!”

“Ha! ha! ha!” persisted the poor White Linen Nurse, with the tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Hi! hi! hi!” snickered the poor Little Girl through her hiccoughs.

Feeling hopelessly imprisoned under the monstrous car, the Senior Surgeon closed his eyes for death. No man of his weight, he felt sure, could reasonably expect to survive many minutes longer the apoplectic, blood-red rage that pounded in his ear-drums. Through his tight-closed eyelids very, very slowly a red glow seemed to permeate. He thought it was the fires of hell. Opening his eyes to meet his fate like a man, he found himself staring impudently close, instead, into the White Linen Nurse’s furiously flushed face, which lay cuddled on one plump cheek, staring impudently close at him.

“Why—why—get out!” gasped the Senior Surgeon.

Very modestly the White Linen Nurse’s face retreated a little further into its blushes.

“Yes, I know,” she protested; “but I’m all through giggling now. I’m sorry—I’m—”

In sheer apprehensiveness the Senior Surgeon’s features crinkled wincingly from brow to chin as though struggling vainly to retreat from the appalling proximity of the girl’s face.

“Your—eyelashes—are too long,” he complained querulously.

“Eh?” jerked the White Linen Nurse’s face. “Is it your brain that’s hurt? Oh, sir, do you think it’s your brain that’s hurt?”

“It’s my stomach,” snapped the Senior Surgeon. “I tell you I’m not hurt; I’m just—squashed. I’m paralyzed. If I can’t get this car off me—”

“Yes, that’s just it,” beamed the White Linen Nurse’s face—“that’s just what I crawled in here to find out—how to get the car off you. That’s just what I want to find out. I could run for help, of course; only I couldn’t run, ’cause my knees are so wobbly. It would take hours, and the car might start or burn up or something while I was gone. But you don’t seem to be caught anywhere on the machinery,” she added more brightly; “it only seems to be sitting on you. So if I could only get the car off you! But it’s so heavy. I had no idea it would be so heavy. Could I take it apart, do you think? Is there any one place where I could begin at the beginning and take it all apart?”

“Take it apart—hell!” groaned the Senior Surgeon.

A little twitch of defiance flickered across the White Linen Nurse’s face.

“All the same,” she asserted stubbornly, “if some one would only tell me what to do, I know I could do it.”

Horridly from some unlocatable quarter of the engine an alarming little tremor quickened suddenly, and was hushed again.

“Get out of here—quick!” stormed the Senior Surgeon.

“I won’t,” said the White Linen Nurse, “until you tell me what to do.”

Brutally for an instant the ingenuous blue eyes and the cynical gray eyes battled each other.

“Can you do what you’re told?” faltered the Senior Surgeon.

“Oh, yes,” said the White Linen Nurse.

“I mean, can you do exactly what you’re told?” gasped the Senior Surgeon. “Can you follow directions, I mean? Can you follow them explicitly? Or are you one of those people who listens only to her own judgment?”

“Oh, but I haven’t got any judgment,” protested the White Linen Nurse.

Palpably in the Senior Surgeon’s bloodshot eyes the leisurely seeming diagnosis leaped to precipitous conclusions.

“Then get out of here quick, for God’s sake, and get to work!” he ordered.

Cautiously the White Linen Nurse jerked herself back into freedom and crawled around and stared at the Senior Surgeon through the wheel-spokes again. Like one worrying out some intricate mathematical problem, his mental strain was pulsing visibly through his closed eyelids.

“Yes, sir?” prodded the White Linen Nurse.

“Keep still!” snapped the Senior Surgeon. “I’ve got to think,” he said. “I’ve got to work it out. All in a moment you’ve got to learn to run the car. All in a moment! It’s awful!”

“Oh, I don’t mind, sir,” affirmed the White Linen Nurse, serenely.

Frenziedly the Senior Surgeon rooted one cheek into the mud again.

“You don’t mind?” he groaned. “You don’t mind? Why, you’ve got to learn—everything—everything from the very beginning!”

“Oh, that’s all right, sir,” crooned the White Linen Nurse.

Ominously from somewhere a horrid sound creaked again. The Senior Surgeon did not stop to argue any further.

“Now come here,” he ordered. “I’m going to—I’m going to—” Startlingly his voice weakened, trailed off into nothingness, and rallied suddenly with exaggerated bruskness. “Look here, now, for Heaven’s sake, use your brains! I’m going to dictate to you very slowly, one thing at a time, just what to do.”

Quite astonishingly the White Linen Nurse sank down on her knees and began to grin at him.

“Oh, no, sir,” she said; “I couldn’t do it that way—not one thing at a time. Oh, no, indeed, sir—No.” Absolute finality was in her voice, the inviolable stubbornness of the perfectly good-natured person.

“You’ll do it the way I tell you to,” roared the Senior Surgeon, struggling vainly to ease one shoulder or stretch one knee-joint.

“Oh, no, sir,” beamed the White Linen Nurse; “not one thing at a time. Oh, no; I couldn’t do it that way. Oh, no, sir; I won’t do it that way—one thing at a time,” she persisted hurriedly. “Why, you might faint away or something might happen right in the middle of it—right between one direction and another, and I wouldn’t know at all what to turn on or off next; and it might take off one of your legs, you know, or an arm. Oh, no; not one thing at a time.”

“Good-by, then,” croaked the Senior Surgeon. “I’m as good as dead now.” A single shudder went through him, a last futile effort to stretch himself.

“Good-by,” said the White Linen Nurse. “Good-by. I’d heaps rather have you die perfectly whole, like that, of your own accord, than have me run the risk of starting the car full-tilt and chopping you up so, or dragging you off so, that you didn’t find it convenient to tell me how to stop the car.”

“You’re a—a—a—” spluttered the Senior Surgeon, incoherently.

“Crinkle-crackle!” went that mysterious, horrid sound from somewhere in the machinery.

“Oh, my God!” surrendered the Senior Surgeon, “do it your own—damned way! Only—only—” His voice cracked raspingly.

“Steady! Steady there!” said the White Linen Nurse. Except for a sudden odd pucker at the end of her nose her expression was still perfectly serene. “Now begin at the beginning,” she begged. “Quick! Tell me everything just the way I must do it! Quick! quick! quick!”

Twice the Senior Surgeon’s lips opened and shut with a vain effort to comply with her request.

“But you can’t do it,” he began all over again; “it isn’t possible. You haven’t got the mind.”

“Maybe I haven’t,” said the White Linen Nurse; “but I’ve got the memory. Hurry!”

“Creak!” said the funny little something in the machinery.

“Oh, get in there quick!” surrendered the Senior Surgeon. “Sit down behind the wheel!” he shouted after her flying footsteps. “Are you there? For God’s sake, are you there? Do you see those two little levers where your right hand comes? For God’s sake, don’t you know what a lever is? Quick now! Do just what I tell you!”

A little jerkily then, but very clearly, very concisely, the Senior Surgeon called out to the White Linen Nurse just how every lever, every pedal, should be manipulated to start the car.

Absolutely accurately, absolutely indelibly, the White Linen Nurse visualized each separate detail in her abnormally retentive mind.

“But you can’t possibly remember it,” groaned the Senior Surgeon. “You can’t possibly. And probably the damned car’s bust and won’t start, anyway, and—” Abruptly the speech ended in a guttural snarl of despair.

“Don’t be a—blight!” screamed the White Linen Nurse. “I’ve never forgotten anything yet, sir!”

Very tensely she straightened up suddenly in her seat. Her expression was no longer even remotely pleasant. Along her sensitive, fluctuant nostrils the casual crinkle of distaste and suspicion had deepened suddenly into sheer dilating terror.

“Left foot—press down—hard—left pedal,” she began to singsong to herself.

“No, right foot—right foot!” corrected the Little Girl, blunderingly from somewhere close in the grass.

“Inside lever—pull—’way—back!” persisted the White Linen Nurse, resolutely, as she switched on the current.

“No, outside lever! Outside! Outside!” contradicted the Little Girl.

“Shut your damned mouth!” screeched the White Linen Nurse, her hand on the throttle as she tried the self-starter.

Bruised as he was, wretched, desperately endangered there under the car, the Senior Surgeon could almost have grinned at the girl’s terse, unconscious mimicry of his own most venomous tones.

Then with all the forty-eight lusty, ebullient years of his life snatched from his lips like an untasted cup, and one single noxious, death-flavored second urged, forced, crammed down his choking throat, he felt the great car quicken and start.

“God!” said the Senior Surgeon, just “God!” The God of mud, he meant; the God of brackish grass; the God of a man lying still hopeful under more than two and a half ton’s weight of unaccountable mechanism, with a novice in full command.

Up in her crimson leather cushions, free-lunged, free-limbed, the White Linen Nurse heard the smothered cry. Clear above the whir of wheels, the whizz of clogs, the one word sizzled like a red-hot poker across her chattering consciousness. Tingling through the grasp of her fingers on the vibrating wheel, stinging through the sole of her foot that hovered over the throbbing clutch, she sensed the agonized appeal. “Short lever, spark; long lever, gas,” she persisted resolutely. “It must be right; it must!”

Jerkily then, and blatantly unskilfully, with riotous puffs, and spinning of wheels, the great car started, faltered, balked a bit, then dragged crushingly across the Senior Surgeon’s flattened body, and with a great wanton burst of speed tore down the sloping meadow into the brook rods away. Clamping down the brakes with a wrench and a racket like the smash of a machine-shop, the White Linen Nurse jumped out into the brook, and with one wild, terrified glance behind her, staggered back up the long, grassy slope to the Senior Surgeon.

Mechanically through her wooden-feeling lips she forced the greeting that sounded most cheerful to her.

“It’s not much fun, sir, running an auto,” she gasped. “I don’t believe I’d like it.”

Half propped up on one elbow, still dizzy with mental chaos, still paralyzed with physical inertia, the Senior Surgeon lay staring blankly about him. Indifferently for an instant his stare included the White Linen Nurse. Then glowering suddenly at something beyond her, his face went perfectly livid.

“Good God! the—the car’s on fire!” he mumbled.

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. “Why, didn’t you know it, sir?”

Headlong the Senior Surgeon pitched over on the grass, his last vestige of self-control stripped from him, horror unspeakable racking him sobbingly from head to toe.

Whimperingly the Little Girl came crawling to him, and, settling down close at his feet, began with her tiny lace handkerchief to make futile dabs at the mud-stains on his gray silk stockings.

“Never mind, Father,” she coaxed; “we’ll get you clean sometime.”

Nervously the White Linen Nurse bethought her of the brook. “Oh, wait a minute, sir, and I’ll get you a drink of water,” she pleaded.

Bruskly the Senior Surgeon’s hand jerked out and grabbed at her skirt.

“Don’t leave me!” he begged. “For God’s sake, don’t leave me!”

Weakly he struggled up again and sat staring piteously at the blazing car. His unrelinquished clutch on the White Linen Nurse’s skirt brought her sinking softly down beside him like a collapsed balloon. Together they sat and watched the gaseous yellow flames shoot up into the sky.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” piped the Little Girl.

“Eh?” groaned the Senior Surgeon.

“Father,” persisted the shrill little voice—“Father, do people ever burn up?”

“Eh?” gasped the Senior Surgeon. Brutally the harsh, shuddering sobs began to rack and tear again through his great chest.

“There! there!” crooned the White Linen Nurse, struggling desperately to her knees. “Let me get—everybody a drink of water.”

Again the Senior Surgeon’s unrelinquished clutch on her skirt jerked her back to the place beside him.

“I said not to leave me!” he snapped out as roughly as he jerked.

Before the affrighted look in the White Linen Nurse’s face a sheepish, mirthless grin flickered across one corner of his mouth.

“Lord! but I’m shaken!” he apologized. “Me, of all people!” Painfully the red blood mounted to his cheeks. “Me, of all people!” Bluntly he forced the White Linen Nurse’s reluctant gaze to meet his own. “Only yesterday,” he persisted, “I did a laparotomy on a man who had only one chance in a hundred of pulling through, and I—I laughed at him for fighting off his ether cone—laughed at him, I tell you!”

“Yes, I know,” soothed the White Linen Nurse; “but—”

“But nothing!” growled the Senior Surgeon. “The fear of death? Bah! All my life I’ve scoffed at it. Die? Yes, of course, when you have to, but with no kick coming. Why, I’ve been wrecked in a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, and I didn’t care; and I’ve lain for nine days more dead than alive in an Asiatic cholera camp, and I didn’t care; and I’ve been locked into my office three hours with a raving maniac and a dynamite bomb, and I didn’t care; and twice in a Pennsylvania mine disaster I’ve been the first man down the shaft, and I didn’t care; and I’ve been shot, I tell you, and I’ve been horse-trampled, and I’ve been wolf-bitten, and I’ve never cared. But to-day—to-day—” Piteously all the pride and vigor wilted from his great shoulders, leaving him all huddled up, like a woman, with his head on his knees—“but to-day I’ve got mine,” he acknowledged brokenly.

Once again the White Linen Nurse tried to rise.

“Oh, please, sir, let me get you a—drink of water,” she suggested helplessly.

“I said not to leave me!” jerked the Senior Surgeon.

Perplexedly, with big staring eyes, the Little Crippled Girl glanced up at this strange fatherish person who sounded so suddenly small and scared like herself. Jealous instantly of her own prerogatives, she dropped her futile labors on the mud-stained silk stockings and scrambled precipitously for the White Linen Nurse’s lap, where she nestled down finally after many gyrations, and sat glowering forth at all possible interlopers.

“Don’t leave any of us!” she ordered with a peremptoriness not unmixed with supplication.

“Surely some one will see the fire and come and get us,” conceded the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes, surely,” mused the White Linen Nurse. Just at that moment she was mostly concerned with adjusting the curve of her shoulder to the curve of the Little Girl’s head. “I could sit more comfortably,” she suggested to the Senior Surgeon, “if you’d let go my skirt.”

“Let go of your skirt? Who’s touching your skirt?” gasped the Senior Surgeon, incredulously. Once again the blood mounted darkly to his face. “I think I’ll get up—and walk around a bit,” he confided coldly.

“Do, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

With a tweak of pain through his sprained back, the Senior Surgeon suddenly sat down again. “I sha’n’t get up till I’m good and ready,” he declared.

“I wouldn’t, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. Very slowly, very complacently, all the while she kept right on renovating the Little Girl’s personal appearance, smoothing a wrinkled stocking, tucking up obstreperous white ruffles, tugging down parsimonious purple hems, loosening a pinchy hook, tightening a wobbly button. Very slowly, very complacently, the Little Girl drowsed off to sleep, with her weazen, iron-cased little legs stretched stiffly out before her. “Poor little legs! Poor little legs! Poor little legs!” crooned the White Linen Nurse.

“I don’t know that you need to make a song about it,” winced the Senior Surgeon. “It’s just about the cruellest case of complete muscular atrophy that I’ve ever seen.”

Blandly the White Linen Nurse lifted her big blue eyes to his.

“It wasn’t her ‘complete muscular atrophy’ that I was thinking about,” she said. “It’s her panties that are so unbecoming.”

“Eh?” exclaimed the Senior Surgeon.

“Poor little legs! Poor little legs! Poor little legs!” resumed the White Linen Nurse, droningly.

Very slowly, very complacently, all around them April kept right on being April. Very slowly, very complacently, all around them the grass kept right on growing, and the trees kept right on budding. Very slowly, very complacently, all around them the blue sky kept right on fading into its early evening dove-colors.

Nothing brisk, nothing breathless, nothing even remotely hurried, was there in all the landscape except just the brook, and the flash of a bird, and the blaze of the crackling automobile.

The White Linen Nurse’s nostrils were smooth and calm with the lovely sappy scent of rabbit-nibbled maple-bark and mud-wet arbutus buds. The White Linen Nurse’s mind was full of sumptuous, succulent marsh-marigolds and fluffy-white shad-bush blossoms.

The Senior Surgeon’s nostrils were all puckered up with the stench of burning varnish. The Senior Surgeon’s mind was full of the horrid thought that he’d forgotten to renew his automobile fire-insurance, and that he had a sprained back, and that his rival colleague had told him he didn’t know how to run an auto, anyway, and that the cook had given notice that morning, and that he had a sprained back, and that the moths had gnawed the knees out of his new dress-suit, and that the Superintendent of Nurses had had the audacity to send him a bunch of pink roses for his birthday, and that the boiler in the kitchen leaked, and that he had to go to Philadelphia the next day to read a paper on “Surgical Methods at the Battle of Waterloo” and he hadn’t even begun the paper yet, and that he had a sprained back, and that the wall-paper on his library hung in shreds and tatters, waiting for him to decide between a French fresco effect and an early English paneling, and that his little daughter was growing up in wanton ugliness under the care of coarse, indifferent hirelings, and that the laundry robbed him weekly of at least five socks, and that it would cost him fully seven thousand dollars to replace this car, and that he had a sprained back.

“It’s restful, isn’t it?” cooed the White Linen Nurse.

“Isn’t what restful?” glowered the Senior Surgeon.

“Sitting down,” said the White Linen Nurse.

Contemptuously the Senior Surgeon’s mind ignored the interruption and reverted precipitously to its own immediate problem concerning the gloomy, black-walnut-shadowed entrance-hall of his great house, and how many yards of imported linoleum at $3.45 a yard it would take to recarpet the “confounded hole”; and how it would have seemed, anyway, if—if he hadn’t gone home as usual to the horrid black-walnut shadows that night, but been carried home instead, feet first and quite dead—dead, mind you, with a red necktie on, and even the cook was out! And they wouldn’t even know where to lay him, but might put him by mistake in that—in that—in his dead wife’s dead bed!

Altogether unconsciously a little fluttering sigh of ineffable contentment escaped the White Linen Nurse.

“I don’t care how long we have to sit here and wait for help,” she announced cheerfully, “because to-morrow, of course, I’ll have to get up and begin all over again—and go to Nova Scotia.”

“Go where?” lurched the Senior Surgeon.

“I’d thank you kindly, sir, not to jerk my skirt quite so hard,” said the White Linen Nurse, just a trifle stiffly.

Incredulously once more the Senior Surgeon withdrew his detaining hand.

“I’m not even touching your skirt,” he denied desperately. Nothing but denial and reiterated denial seemed to ease his self-esteem for an instant. “Why, for Heaven’s sake, should I want to hold on to your skirt?” he demanded peremptorily. “What the deuce,” he began blusteringly—“why in—”

Then abruptly he stopped and shot an odd, puzzled glance at the White Linen Nurse, and right there before her startled eyes she saw every vestige of human expression fade out of his face as it faded out sometimes in the operating-room when, in the midst of some ghastly, unforeseen emergency that left all his assistants blinking helplessly about them, his whole wonderful, scientific mind seemed to break up like some chemical compound into all its meek component parts, only to reorganize itself suddenly with some amazing explosive action that fairly knocked the breath out of all on-lookers, but was pretty apt to knock the breath into the body of the person most concerned.

When the Senior Surgeon’s scientific mind had reorganized itself to meet this emergency, he found himself vastly more surprised at the particular type of explosion that had taken place than any other person could possibly have been.

“Miss Malgregor,” he gasped, “speaking of preferring ‘domestic service,’ as you call it—speaking of preferring domestic service to—nursing, how would you like to consider—to consider a position of—of—well, call it a—a position of general—heartwork—for a family of two? Myself and the Little Girl here being the two, as you understand,” he added briskly.

“Why, I think it would be grand!” beamed the White Linen Nurse.

A trifle mockingly the Senior Surgeon bowed his appreciation.

“Your frank and immediate—enthusiasm,” he murmured, “is more, perhaps, than I had dared to expect.”

“But it would be grand,” said the White Linen Nurse. Before the odd little smile in the Senior Surgeon’s eyes her white forehead puckered all up with perplexity. Then with her mind still thoroughly unawakened, her heart began suddenly to pitch and lurch like a frightened horse whose rider has not even remotely sensed as yet the approach of an unwonted footfall. “What did you say?” she repeated worriedly. “Just exactly what was it that you said? I guess, maybe, I didn’t understand just exactly what it was that you said.”

The smile in the Senior Surgeon’s eyes deepened a little.

“I asked you,” he said, “how you would like to consider a position of ‘general heartwork’ in a family of two, myself and the Little Girl here being the two. ‘Heartwork’ was what I said. Yes, ‘heartwork,’ not housework.”

“Heartwork?” faltered the White Linen Nurse. “Heartwork? I don’t know what you mean, sir.” Like two falling rose-petals her eyelids fluttered down across her affrighted eyes. “Oh, when I shut my eyes, sir, and just hear your voice, I know of course, sir, that it’s some sort of a joke; but when I look right at you, I—I—don’t know—what it is.”

“Open your eyes and keep them open, then, till you do find out,” suggested the Senior Surgeon, bluntly.

Defiantly once again the blue eyes and the gray eyes challenged each other.

“‘Heartwork’ was what I said,” persisted the Senior Surgeon. Palpably his narrowing eyes shut out all meaning but one definite one.

The White Linen Nurse’s face became almost as blanched as her dress.

“You’re—you’re not asking me to—marry you, sir?” she stammered.

“I suppose I am,” acknowledged the Senior Surgeon.

“Not marry you!” cried the White Linen Nurse. Distress was in her voice, distaste, unmitigable shock, as though the high gods themselves had fallen at her feet and splintered off into mere candy fragments. “Oh, not marry you, sir?” she kept right on protesting. “Not be—engaged, you mean? Oh, not be engaged—and everything?”

“Well, why not?” snapped the Senior Surgeon.

Like a smitten flower the girl’s whole body seemed to wilt down into incalculable weariness.

“Oh, no, no! I couldn’t!” she protested. “Oh, no, really!” Appealingly she lifted her great blue eyes to his, and the blueness was all blurred with tears. “I’ve—I’ve been engaged once, you know,” she explained falteringly. “Why—I was engaged, sir—almost as soon as I was born, and I stayed engaged till two years ago. That’s almost twenty years. That’s a long time, sir. You don’t get over it—easy.” Very, very gravely she began to shake her head. “Oh, no, sir! No! Thank you—very much, but I—I just simply couldn’t begin at the beginning and go all through it again. I haven’t got the heart for it. I haven’t got the spirit. Carving your initials on trees and—and gadding round to all the Sunday-school picnics—”

Brutally, like a boy, the Senior Surgeon threw back his head in one wild hoot of joy. Much more cautiously, as the agonizing pang in his shoulder lulled down again, he proceeded to argue the matter, but the grin in his face was even yet faintly traceable.

“Frankly, Miss Malgregor,” he affirmed, “I’m much more addicted to carving people than to carving trees; and as to Sunday-school picnics—well, really now, I hardly believe that you’d find my demands in that direction excessive.”

Perplexedly the White Linen Nurse tried to stare her way through his bantering smile to his real meaning. Furiously, as she stared, the red blood came flushing back into her face.

“You don’t mean for a second that you—that you love me?” she asked incredulously.

“No, I don’t suppose I do,” acknowledged the Senior Surgeon with equal bluntness; “but my little kiddie here loves you,” he hastened somewhat nervously to affirm. “Oh, I’m almost sure that my little kiddie here—loves you. She needs you, anyway. Let it go at that. Call it that we both—need you.”

“What you mean is,” corrected the White Linen Nurse, “that needing somebody very badly, you’ve just suddenly decided that that somebody might as well be me?”

“Well, if you choose to put it like that,” said the Senior Surgeon, a bit sulkily.

“And if there hadn’t been an auto accident,” argued the White Linen Nurse just out of sheer inquisitiveness, “if there hadn’t been just this particular kind of an auto accident at this particular hour of this particular day of this particular month, with marigolds and—everything, you probably never would have realized that you did need anybody?”

“Maybe not,” admitted the Senior Surgeon.

“U-m-m,” said the White Linen Nurse. “And if you’d happened to take one of the other girls to-day instead of me, why, then I suppose you’d have felt that she was the one you really needed? And if you’d taken the Superintendent of Nurses instead of any of us girls, you might even have felt that she was the one you most needed?”

“Oh, hell!” said the Senior Surgeon.

With surprising agility for a man with a sprained back he wrenched himself around until he faced her quite squarely.

“Now see here, Miss Malgregor,” he growled, “for Heaven’s sake, listen to sense, even if you can’t talk it! Here am I, a plain professional man, making you a plain professional offer. Why in thunder should you try and fuss me all up because my offer isn’t couched in all the foolish, romantic, lace-paper sort of flub-dubbery that you think such an offer ought to be couched in, eh?”

“Fuss you all up, sir?” protested the White Linen Nurse, with real anxiety.

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

“‘THE CAR’S ON FIRE!’ HE MUMBLED. ‘YES, SIR,’ SAID THE WHITE LINEN NURSE. ‘WHY, DIDN’T YOU KNOW IT, SIR?’”

DRAWN BY HERMAN PFEIFER

[❏
LARGER IMAGE]

“Yes, fuss me all up,” snarled the Senior Surgeon, with increasing venom. “I’m no story-writer; I’m not trying to make up what might have happened a year from next February in a Chinese junk off the coast of—Nova Zembla to a Methodist preacher and a—and a militant suffragette. What I’m trying to size up is just what’s happened to you and me to-day. For the fact remains that it is to-day. And it is you and I. And there has been an accident, and out of that accident—and everything that’s gone with it—I have come out thinking of something that I never thought of before. And there were marigolds,” he added with unexpected whimsicality. “You see, I don’t deny even the marigolds.”

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

“Yes, what?” jerked the Senior Surgeon.

Softly the White Linen Nurse’s chin burrowed down a little closer against the sleeping child’s tangled hair.

“Why—yes, thank you very much; but I never shall love again,” she said definitely.

“Love?” gasped the Senior Surgeon. “Why, I’m not asking you to love me!” His face was suddenly crimson. “Why, I’d hate it, if you—loved me! Why, I’d—”

“O-h-h,” mumbled the White Linen Nurse in new embarrassment. Then suddenly and surprisingly her chin came tilting bravely up again. “What do you want?” she asked.

Helplessly the Senior Surgeon threw out his hands.

“My God!” he said, “what do you suppose I want? I want some one to take care of us.”

Gently the White Linen Nurse shifted her shoulder to accommodate the shifting little sleepy-head on her breast.

“You can hire some one for that,” she suggested with real relief.

“I was trying to hire—you!” said the Senior Surgeon, tersely.

“Hire me?” gasped the White Linen Nurse. “Why! Why!”

Adroitly she slipped both hands under the sleeping child and delivered the little frail-fleshed, heavily ironed body into the Senior Surgeon’s astonished arms.

“I—I don’t want to hold her,” he protested.

“She—isn’t mine,” argued the White Linen Nurse.

“But I can’t talk while I’m holding her,” insisted the Senior Surgeon.

“I can’t listen while I’m holding her,” persisted the White Linen Nurse.

Freely now, though cross-legged like a Turk, she jerked herself forward on the grass and sat probing up into the Senior Surgeon’s face like an excited puppy trying to solve whether the gift in your upraised hand is a lump of sugar or a live coal.

“You’re trying to hire me?” she prompted him nudgingly with her voice. “Hire me for money?”

“Oh, my Lord, no!” said the Senior Surgeon. “There are plenty of people I can hire for money; but they won’t stay,” he explained ruefully. “Hang it all!—they won’t stay!” Above his little girl’s white, pinched face his own ruddy countenance furrowed suddenly with unspeakable anxiety. “Why, just this last year,” he complained, “we’ve had nine different housekeepers and thirteen nursery governesses.” Skilfully as a surgeon, but awkwardly as a father, he bent to readjust the weight of the little iron leg-braces. “But, I tell you, no one will stay with us,” he finished hotly. “There’s something the matter with us. I don’t seem to have money enough in the world to make anybody stay with us.” Very wryly, very reluctantly, at one corner of his mouth his sense of humor ignited in a feeble grin. “So, you see, what I’m trying to do to you, Miss Malgregor, is to—hire you with something that will just naturally compel you to stay.” If the grin round his mouth strengthened a trifle, so also did the anxiety in his eyes. “For Heaven’s sake, Miss Malgregor,” he pleaded, “here’s a man and a house and a child all going to—hell! If you’re really and truly tired of nursing, and are looking for a new job, what’s the matter with tackling us?”

“It would be a job,” admitted the White Linen Nurse, demurely.

“Why, it would be a horrible job,” confided the Senior Surgeon, with no demureness whatsoever.

Very soberly, very thoughtfully, then, across the tangled, snuggling head of his own and another woman’s child, he urged the torments and the comforts of his home upon this second woman.

“What is there about my offer that you don’t like?” he demanded earnestly. “Is it the whole idea that offends you? Or just the way I put it? ‘General heartwork for a family of two’—what is the matter with that? Seems a bit cold to you, does it, for a real marriage proposal? Or is it that it’s just a bit too ardent, perhaps, for a mere plain business proposition?”

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

“Yes, what?” insisted the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes—sir,” flushed the White Linen Nurse.

Very meditatively the Senior Surgeon reconsidered his phrasing. “‘General heartwork for a family of two’? U-m-m.” Quite abruptly even the tenseness of his manner faded from him, leaving his face astonishingly quiet, astonishingly gentle. “But how else, Miss Malgregor,” he queried—“how else should a widower with a child proffer marriage to a—to a young girl like yourself? Even under conditions directly antipodal to ours, such a proposition can never be a purely romantic one. Yet even under conditions as cold and businesslike as ours, there’s got to be some vestige of affection in it, some vestige at least of the intelligence of affection, else what gain is there for my little girl and me over the purely mercenary domestic service that has racked us up to this time with its garish faithlessness?”

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

“But even if I had loved you, Miss Malgregor,” explained the Senior Surgeon, gravely, “my offer of marriage to you would not, I fear, have been a very great oratorical success. Materialist as I am, cynic, scientist, any harsh thing you choose to call me, marriage in some freak, boyish corner of my mind still defines itself as being the mutual sharing of a—mutually original experience. Certainly, whether a first marriage be instigated in love or worldliness, whether it eventually proves itself bliss, tragedy, or mere sickening ennui, to two people coming mutually virgin to the consummation of that marriage, the thrill of establishing publicly a man-and-woman home together is an emotion that cannot be reduplicated while life lasts.”

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

Bleakly across the Senior Surgeon’s face something gray that was not years shadowed suddenly, and was gone again.

“Even so, Miss Malgregor,” he argued—“even so, without any glittering romance whatsoever, no woman, I believe, is very grossly unhappy in any affectional place that she knows distinctly to be her own place. It’s pretty much up to a man, then, I think, though it tear him brain from heart, to explain to a second wife quite definitely just exactly what place it is that he is offering her in his love or his friendship or his mere desperate need. No woman can even hope to step successfully into a second-hand home who does not know from her man’s own lips the measure of her predecessor. The respect we owe the dead is a selfish thing compared with the mercy we owe the living. In my own case—”

Unconsciously the White Linen Nurse’s lax shoulders quickened, and the sudden upward tilt of her chin was as frankly interrogative as a French inflection. “Yes, sir,” she said.

“In my own case,” said the Senior Surgeon, bluntly—“in my own case, Miss Malgregor, it is no more than fair to tell you that I—did not love my wife. And my wife did not love me.” Only the muscular twitch in his throat betrayed the torture that the confession cost him. “The details of that marriage are unnecessary,” he continued with equal bluntness. “It is enough, perhaps, to say that she was the daughter of an eminent surgeon with whom I was exceedingly anxious at that time to be allied, and that our mating, urged along on both sides, as it was, by strong personal ambitions, was one of those so-called ‘marriages of convenience’ which almost invariably turn out to be marriages of such dire inconvenience to the two people most concerned. For one year we lived together in a chaos of experimental acquaintanceship; for two years we lived together in increasing uncongeniality and distaste; for three years we lived together in open and acknowledged enmity; at the last, I am thankful to remember, we had one year together again that was at least an—armed truce.”

Darkly the gray shadow and the red flush chased each other once more across the man’s haggard face.

“I had a theory,” he said, “that possibly a child might bridge the chasm between us. My wife refuted the theory, but submitted herself reluctantly to the fact. And when she died in giving birth to—my theory, the shock, the remorse, the regret, the merciless self-analysis that I underwent at that time almost convinced me that the whole miserable failure of our marriage lay entirely on my own shoulders.” Like the stress of mid-summer, the tears of sweat started suddenly on his forehead. “But I am a fair man, I hope, even to myself, and the cooler, less-tortured judgment of the subsequent years has virtually assured me that for types as diametrically opposed as ours such a thing as mutual happiness never could have existed.”

Mechanically he bent down and smoothed a tickly lock of hair away from the little girl’s eyelids.

“And the child is the living physical image of her,” he stammered—“the violent hair, the ghost-white skin, the facile mouth, the arrogant eyes, staring, staring, maddeningly reproachful, persistently accusing. My own stubborn will, my own hideous temper, all my own ill-favored mannerisms, mock back at me eternally in her mother’s unloved features.” As mirthless as the grin of a skull, the Senior Surgeon’s mouth twisted up a little at one corner. “Maybe I could have borne it better if she’d been a boy,” he acknowledged grimly; “but to see all your virile—masculine vices come back at you, so sissified, in skirts!”

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

With an unmistakable gasp of relief, the Senior Surgeon expanded his great chest.

“There, that’s done,” he said tersely. “So much for the past; now for the present! Look at us pretty keenly and judge for yourself. A man and a very little girl, not guaranteed, not even recommended, offered merely ‘as is,’ in the honest trade-phrase of the day, offered frankly in an open package, accepted frankly, if at all, ‘at your own risk.’ Not for an instant would I try to deceive you about us. Look at us closely, I ask, and decide for yourself. I am forty-eight years old; I am inexcusably bad-tempered, very quick to anger, and not, I fear, of great mercy. I am moody, I am selfish, I am most distinctly unsocial; but I am not, I believe, stingy, or ever intentionally unfair. My child is a cripple, and equally bad-tempered as myself. No one but a mercenary has ever coped with her, and she shows it. We have lived alone for six years. All of our clothes, and most of our ways, need mending. I am not one to mince matters, Miss Malgregor, nor has your training, I trust, made you one from whom truths must be veiled. I am a man, with all a man’s needs, mental, moral, physical. My child is a child with all a child’s needs, mental, moral, physical. Our house of life is full of cobwebs. The rooms of affection have long been closed. There will be a great deal of work to do, and it is not my intention, you see, that you should misunderstand in any conceivable way either the exact nature or the exact amount of work and worry involved. I should not want you to come to me afterward with a whine, as other workers do, and say: ‘Oh, but I didn’t know you would expect me to do this! Oh, but I hadn’t any idea you would want me to do that! And I certainly don’t see why you should expect me to give up my Thursday afternoon just because you yourself happened to fall down-stairs in the morning and break your back!’”

Across the Senior Surgeon’s face a real smile lightened suddenly.

“Really, Miss Malgregor,” he affirmed, “I’m afraid there isn’t much of anything that you won’t be expected to do. And as to your ‘Thursdays out’? Ha! if you have ever yet found a way to temper the wind of your obligations to the shorn lamb of your pleasures, you have discovered something that I myself have never yet succeeded in discovering. And as to ‘wages’? Yes, I want to talk everything quite frankly. In addition to my average yearly earnings, which are by no means small, I have a reasonably large private fortune. Within normal limits there is no luxury, I think, that you cannot hope to have. Also, exclusive of the independent income which I should like to settle upon you, I should be very glad to finance for you any reasonable dreams that you may cherish concerning your family in Nova Scotia. Also, though the offer looks small and unimportant to you now, it is liable to loom pretty large to you later; also, I will personally guarantee to you, at some time every year, an unfettered, perfectly independent two-months’ holiday. So the offer stands—my ‘name and fame,’ if those mean anything to you, financial independence, an assured ‘breathing spell’ for at least two months out of twelve, and at last, but not least, my eternal gratitude. ‘General heartwork for a family of two!’ There, have I made the task perfectly clear to you? Not everything to be done all at once, you know; but immediately where necessity urges it, gradually as confidence inspires it, ultimately if affection justifies it, every womanish thing that needs to be done in a man’s and a child’s neglected lives? Do you understand?”

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

“Oh, and there’s one thing more,” confided the Senior Surgeon. “It’s something, of course, that I ought to have told you the very first thing of all.” Nervously he glanced down at the sleeping child, and lowered his voice to a mumbling monotone. “As regards my actual morals, you have naturally a right to know that I’ve led a pretty decentish sort of life, though I probably don’t deserve any special credit for that. A man who knows enough to be a doctor isn’t particularly apt to lead any other kind. Frankly, as women rate vices, I believe I have only one. What—what—I’m trying to tell you now is about that one.” A little defiantly as to chin, a little appealingly as to eye, he emptied his heart of its last tragic secret. “Through all the male line of my family, Miss Malgregor, dipsomania runs rampant. Two of my brothers, my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather before him, have all gone down, as the temperance people would say, into ‘drunkards’ graves.’ In my own case, I have chosen to compromise with the evil. Such a choice, believe me, has not been made carelessly or impulsively, but out of the agony and humiliation of several less successful methods.” As hard as a rock, his face grooved into its granite-like furrows again. “Naturally, under these existing conditions,” he warned her almost threateningly, “I am not peculiarly susceptible to the mawkishly ignorant and sentimental protests of people whose strongest passions are an appetite for chocolate candy. For eleven months of the year,” he hurried on a bit huskily—“for eleven months of the year, eleven months, each day reeking from dawn to dark with the driving, nerve-wracking, heart-wringing work that falls to my profession, I lead an absolutely abstemious life, touching neither wine nor liquor nor even, indeed, tea or coffee. In the twelfth month—June always—I go ’way up into Canada,—’way, ’way off in the woods to a little log camp I own there,—with an Indian who has guided me thus for eighteen years, and live like a—wild man for four gorgeous, care-free, trail-tramping, salmon-fighting, whisky-guzzling weeks. It is what your temperance friends would call a ‘spree.’ To be quite frank, I suppose it is what anybody would call a ‘spree.’ Then the first of July,—three or four days past the first of July, perhaps,—I come out of the woods quite tame again, a little emotionally nervous, perhaps, a little temperishly irritable, a little unduly sensitive about being greeted as a returned jail-bird, but most miraculously purged of all morbid craving for liquor, and with every digital muscle as coolly steady as yours, and every conscious mental process clamoring cleanly for its own work again.”

Furtively under his glowering brows he stopped and searched the White Linen Nurse’s imperturbable face. “It’s an—established habit, you understand,” he re-warned her. “I’m not advocating it, you understand, I’m not defending it; I’m simply calling your attention to the fact that it is an established habit. If you decide to come to us, I—I couldn’t, you know, at forty-eight, begin all over again to—to have some one waiting for me on the top step the first of July to tell me what a low beast I am till I go down the steps again the following June.”

“No, of course not,” conceded the White Linen Nurse. Blandly she lifted her lovely eyes to his. “Father’s like that,” she confided amiably. “Once a year—just Easter Sunday only—he always buys him a brand-new suit of clothes and goes to church. And it does something to him, I don’t know exactly what, but Easter afternoon he always gets drunk,—oh, mad, fighting drunk is what I mean,—and goes out and tries to shoot up the whole county.” Worriedly, two black thoughts puckered between her eyebrows. “And always,” she said, “he makes mother and me go up to Halifax beforehand to pick out the suit for him. It’s pretty hard sometimes,” she said, “to find anything dressy enough for the morning that’s serviceable enough for the afternoon.”

“Eh?” jerked the Senior Surgeon. Then suddenly he began to smile again like a stormy sky from which the last cloud has just been cleared. “Well, it’s all right, then, is it? You’ll take us?” he asked brightly.

“Oh, no!” said the White Linen Nurse. “Oh, no, sir! Oh, no, indeed, sir!” Quite perceptibly she jerked her way backward a little on the grass. “Thank you very much,” she persisted courteously. “It’s been very interesting. I thank you very much for telling me, but—”

“But what?” snapped the Senior Surgeon.

“But it’s too quick,” said the White Linen Nurse. “No man could tell like that, just between one eye-wink and another, what he wanted about anything, let alone marrying a perfect stranger.”

Instantly the Senior Surgeon bridled.

“I assure you, my dear young lady,” he retorted, “that I am entirely and completely accustomed to deciding between ‘one wink and another’ just exactly what it is that I want. Indeed, I assure you that there are a good many people living to-day who wouldn’t be living if it had taken me even as long as a wink and three quarters to make up my mind.”

“Yes, I know, sir,” acknowledged the White Linen Nurse. “Yes, of course, sir,” she acquiesced, with most commendable humility; “but all the same, sir, I couldn’t do it,” she persisted with inflexible positiveness. “Why, I haven’t enough education,” she confessed quite shamelessly.

“You had enough, I notice, to get into the hospital with,” drawled the Senior Surgeon, a bit grumpily, “and that’s quite as much as most people have, I assure you. ‘A high-school education or its equivalent,’—that is the hospital requirement, I believe?” he questioned tartly.

“‘A high-school education or its—equivocation’ is what we girls call it,” confessed the White Linen Nurse, demurely. “But even so, sir,” she pleaded, “it isn’t just my lack of education. It’s my brains. I tell you, sir, I haven’t got enough brains to do what you suggest.”

“I don’t mean at all to belittle your brains,” grinned the Senior Surgeon despite himself,—“oh, not at all, Miss Malgregor,—but, you see, it isn’t especially brains that I’m looking for. Really, what I need most,” he acknowledged frankly, “is an extra pair of hands to go with the—brains I already possess.”

“Yes, I know, sir,” persisted the White Linen Nurse. “Yes, of course, sir,” she conceded. “Yes, of course, sir, my hands work awfully well—with your face. But all the same,” she kindled suddenly—“all the same, sir, I can’t. I won’t! I tell you, sir, I won’t! Why, I’m not in your world, sir. Why, I’m not in your class. Why, my folks aren’t like your folks. Oh, we’re just as good as you, of course, but we aren’t as nice. Oh, we’re not nice at all. Really and truly we’re not.” Desperately through her mind she rummaged up and down for some one conclusive fact that would close this torturing argument for all time. “Why, my father eats with his knife!” she asserted triumphantly.

“Would he be apt to eat with mine?” asked the Senior Surgeon, with extravagant gravity.

Precipitously the White Linen Nurse jumped to the defense of her father’s intrinsic honor.

“Oh, no,” she denied with some vehemence; “Father’s never cheeky like that! Father’s simple sometimes—plain, I mean. Or he might be a bit sharp. But, oh, I’m sure he’d never be—cheeky. Oh, no, sir. No.”

“Oh, very well, then,” grinned the Senior Surgeon. “We can consider everything all comfortably settled, then, I suppose?”

“No, we can’t,” screamed the White Linen Nurse. A little awkwardly, with cramped limbs, she struggled partly upward from the grass and knelt there, defying the Senior Surgeon from her temporarily superior height. “No, we can’t,” she reiterated wildly. “I tell you I can’t, sir. I won’t! I won’t! I’ve been engaged once, and it’s enough. I tell you, sir, I’m all engaged out!”

“What’s become of the man you were engaged to?” quizzed the Senior Surgeon, sharply.

“Why, he’s married,” said the White Linen Nurse. “And they’ve got a kid!” she added tempestuously.

“Good! I’m glad of it,” smiled the Senior Surgeon, quite amazingly. “Now he surely won’t bother us any more.”

“But I was engaged so long,” protested the White Linen Nurse—“almost ever since I was born, I said. It’s too long. You don’t get over it.”

“He got over it,” remarked the Senior Surgeon, laconically.

“Y-e-s,” admitted the White Linen Nurse; “but, I tell you, it doesn’t seem decent, not after being engaged—twenty years.” With a little helpless gesture of appeal she threw out her hands. “Oh, can’t I make you understand, sir?”

“Why, of course I understand,” said the Senior Surgeon, briskly. “You mean that you and John—”

“His name was Joe,” corrected the White Linen Nurse.

With astonishing amiability the Senior Surgeon acknowledged the correction.

“You mean,” he said—“you mean that you and—Joe have been cradled together so familiarly all your babyhood that on your wedding-night you could most naturally have said: ‘Let me see, Joe, it’s two pillows that you always have, isn’t it? And a double-fold of blanket at the foot?’ You mean that you and Joe have been washed and scrubbed together so familiarly all your young childhood that you could identify Joe’s headless body twenty years hence by the kerosene-lamp scar across his back? You mean that you and Joe have played house together so familiarly all your young tin-dish days that even your rag dolls called Joe father? You mean that since your earliest memory, until a year or so ago, life has never once been just you and life, but always you and life and Joe? You and spring and Joe, you and summer and Joe, you and autumn and Joe, you and winter and Joe, till every conscious nerve in your body has been so everlastingly Joed with Joe’s Joeness that you don’t believe there’s any experience left in life powerful enough to eradicate that original impression? Eh?”

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

“Good! I’m glad of it,” snapped the Senior Surgeon. “It doesn’t make you seem quite so alarmingly innocent and remote for a widower to offer marriage to. Good, I say! I’m glad of it.”

“Even so, I don’t want to,” said the White Linen Nurse. “Thank you very much, sir; but even so, I don’t want to.”

“Would you marry Joe now if he were suddenly free and wanted you?” asked the Senior Surgeon, bluntly.

“Oh, my Lord, no!” said the White Linen Nurse.

“Other men are pretty sure to want you,” admonished the Senior Surgeon. “Have you made up your mind definitely that you’ll never marry anybody?”

“N-o, not exactly,” confessed the White Linen Nurse.

An odd flicker twitched across the Senior Surgeon’s face like a sob in the brain.

“What’s your first name, Miss Malgregor?” he asked a bit huskily.

“Rae,” she told him, with some surprise.

The Senior Surgeon’s eyes narrowed suddenly again.

“Damn it all, Rae,” he said, “I—want you!”

Precipitously the White Linen Nurse scrambled to her feet.

“If you don’t mind, sir,” she cried, “I’ll run down to the brook and get myself a drink of water.”

Impishly like a child, muscularly like a man, the Senior Surgeon clutched out at the flapping corner of her coat.

“No, you don’t,” he laughed, “till you’ve given me my definite answer, yes or no.”

Breathlessly the White Linen Nurse spun round in her tracks. Her breast was heaving with ill-suppressed sobs, her eyes were blurred with tears.

“You’ve no business to hurry me so,” she protested passionately. “It isn’t fair; it isn’t kind.”

Sluggishly in the Senior Surgeon’s jolted arms the Little Girl woke from her feverish nap and peered up perplexedly through the gray dusk into her father’s face.

“Where’s my kitty?” she asked hazily.

“Eh?” jerked the Senior Surgeon.

Harshly the little iron leg-braces clanked together. In an instant the White Linen Nurse was on her knees in the grass.

“You don’t hold her right, sir,” she expostulated. Deftly, with soft, darting little touches, interrupted only by rubbing her knuckles into her own tears, she reached out and eased successively the bruise of a buckle or the dragging weight on a cramped little hip.

Still drowsily, still hazily, with little smacking gasps and gulping swallows, the child worried her way back again into consciousness.

“All the birds were there, Father,” she droned forth feebly from her sweltering mink-fur nest.

“All the birds were there

With yellow feathers instead of hair,

And bumblebees—and bumblebees—

And bumblebees—and bumblebees—”

Frenziedly she began to burrow the back of her head into her father’s shoulder. “And bumblebees—and bumblebees—”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake—‘buzzed in the trees!’” interpolated the Senior Surgeon.

Rigidly from head to foot the little body in his arms stiffened suddenly. As one who saw the supreme achievement of a life-time swept away by some one careless joggle of an infinitesimal part, the Little Girl stared up agonizingly into her father’s face.

“Oh, I don’t think ‘buzzed’ was the word!” she began convulsively. “Oh, I don’t think—”

Startlingly through the twilight the Senior Surgeon felt the White Linen Nurse’s rose-red lips come smack against his ear.

“Darn you! Can’t you say ‘crocheted in the trees’?” sobbed the White Linen Nurse.

Grotesquely for an instant the Senior Surgeon’s eyes and the White Linen Nurse’s eyes glared at each other in rank antagonism. Then suddenly the Senior Surgeon burst out laughing.

“Oh, very well,” he surrendered—“‘crocheted in the trees!’”

The White Linen Nurse sank back on her heels and began to clap her hands.

“Oh, now I will! Now I will!” she cried exultantly.

“Will what?” frowned the Senior Surgeon.

The White Linen Nurse stopped clapping her hands and began to wring them nervously in her lap instead.

“Why, will—will,” she confessed demurely.

“Oh!” exclaimed the Senior Surgeon. “Oh!” Then jerkily he began to pucker his eyebrows. “But, for Heaven’s sake, what’s the ‘crocheted in the trees’ got to do with it?” he asked perplexedly.

“Nothing much,” mused the White Linen Nurse, very softly. With sudden alertness she turned her curly blonde head toward the road. “There’s somebody coming,” she said. “I hear a team.”

Overcome by a bashfulness that tried to escape in jocosity, the Senior Surgeon gave an odd, choking little chuckle.

“Well, I never thought I should marry a—trained nurse!” he acknowledged with somewhat hectic blitheness.

Impulsively the White Linen Nurse reached for her watch and lifted it close to her twilight-blinded eyes. A sense of ineffable peace crept suddenly over her.

“You won’t, sir,” she said amiably. “It’s twenty minutes of nine now, and the graduation was at eight.”

FOR any real adventure except dying, June is certainly a most auspicious month.

Indeed, it was on the very first rain-green, rose-red morning of June that the White Linen Nurse sallied forth upon her extremely hazardous adventure of marrying the Senior Surgeon and his naughty little crippled daughter.

The wedding was at noon in some kind of gray-granite church. The Senior Surgeon was there, of course, and the necessary witnesses; but the Little Crippled Girl never turned up at all, owing, it proved later, to a more than usually violent wrangle with whomever dressed her, concerning the general advisability of sporting turquoise-colored stockings with her brightest little purple dress.

The Senior Surgeon’s stockings, if you really care to know, were gray, and the Senior Surgeon’s suit was gray, and he looked altogether very huge and distinguished, and no more strikingly unhappy than any bridegroom looks in a gray-granite church.

And the White Linen Nurse, no longer now truly a White Linen Nurse, but just an ordinary, every-day silk-and-cloth lady of any color she chose, wore something rather coaty and grand and bluish, and was distractingly pretty, of course, but most essentially unfamiliar, and just a tiny bit awkward and bony-wristed-looking, as even an admiral is apt to be on his first day out of uniform.

Then as soon as the wedding ceremony was over, the bride and groom went to a wonderful green-and-gold café, all built of marble and lined with music, and had a little lunch. What I really mean, of course, is that they had a very large lunch, but didn’t eat any of it.

Then in a taxi-cab, just exactly like any other taxi-cab, the White Linen Nurse drove home alone to the Senior Surgeon’s great, gloomy house, to find her brand-new stepdaughter still screaming over the turquoise-colored stockings. And the Senior Surgeon, in a Canadian-bound train, just exactly like any other Canadian-bound train, started off alone, as usual, on his annual June “spree.”

Please don’t think for a moment that it was the Senior Surgeon who was responsible for the general eccentricities of this amazing wedding-day. No, indeed. The Senior Surgeon didn’t want to be married the first day of June. He said he didn’t, he growled he didn’t, he snarled he didn’t, he swore he didn’t; and when he finished saying and growling and snarling and swearing, and looked up at the White Linen Nurse for a confirmation of his opinion, the White Linen Nurse smiled perfectly amiably and said, “Yes, sir.” Then the Senior Surgeon gave a great gasp of relief and announced resonantly: “Well, it’s all settled, then? We’ll be married some time in July, after I get home from Canada?” And when the White Linen Nurse kept right on smiling perfectly amiably and said, “Oh, no, sir, oh, no, thank you, sir; it wouldn’t seem exactly legal to me to be married any other month but June,” the Senior Surgeon went absolutely dumb with rage that this mere chit of a girl, and a trained nurse, too, should dare to thwart his personal and professional convenience. But the White Linen Nurse just drooped her pretty blonde head and blushed and blushed and blushed and said: “I was only marrying you, sir, to—accommodate you, sir, and if June doesn’t accommodate you, I’d rather go to Japan with that monoideic somnambulism case. It’s very interesting, and it sails June 2.” Then, “Oh, hell with the ‘monoideic somnambulism case’!” the Senior Surgeon would protest.

Really it took the Senior Surgeon quite a long while to work out the three special arguments that would best protect him, he thought, from the horridly embarrassing idea of being married in June.

“But you can’t get ready so soon,” he suggested at last with real triumph. “You’ve no idea how long it takes a girl to get ready to be married. There are so many people she has to tell—and everything.”

“There’s never but two that she’s got to tell, or bust,” conceded the White Linen Nurse with perfect candor—“just the woman she loves the most and the woman she hates the worst. I’ll write my mother to-morrow, but I told the Superintendent of Nurses yesterday.”

“The deuce you did!” snapped the Senior Surgeon.

Almost caressingly the White Linen Nurse lifted her big blue eyes to his.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “And she looked as sick as a young undertaker. I can’t imagine what ailed her.”

“Eh?” choked the Senior Surgeon. “But the house, now,” he hastened to contend—“the house, now, needs a lot of fixing over; it’s all run down. It’s all—everything. We never in the world could get it into shape by the first of June. For Heaven’s sake, now that we’ve got money enough to make it right, let’s go slow and make it perfectly right.”

A little nervously the White Linen Nurse began to fumble through the pages of her memorandum-book.

“I’ve always had money enough to ‘go slow and make things perfectly right,’” she confided a bit wistfully. “Never in all my life have I had a pair of boots that weren’t guaranteed or a dress that wouldn’t wash or a hat that wasn’t worth at least three re-pressings. What I was hoping for now, sir, was that I was going to have enough money so that I could go fast and make things wrong if I wanted to—so that I could afford to take chances, I mean. Here’s this wall-paper, now,”—tragically she pointed to some figuring in her note-book,—“it’s got peacocks on it, life-size, in a queen’s garden, and I wanted it for the dining-room. Maybe it would fade, maybe we’d get tired of it, maybe it would poison us: slam it on one week, and slash it off the next. I wanted it just because I wanted it, sir. I thought maybe, while you were ’way off in Canada—”

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

“‘YOU’VE NO BUSINESS TO HURRY ME SO,’ SHE PROTESTED. ‘IT ISN’T FAIR; IT ISN’T KIND’”

DRAWN BY HERMAN PFEIFER

[❏
LARGER IMAGE]

Eagerly the Senior Surgeon jerked his chair a little nearer to his fiancée’s.

“Now, my dear girl,” he said, “that’s just what I want to explain—that’s just what I want to explain—just what I want to explain—to—er—explain,” he continued a bit falteringly.

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

Very deliberately the Senior Surgeon removed a fleck of dust from one of his cuffs.

“All this talk of yours about wanting to be married the same day I start off on my—Canadian trip,” he contended, “why, it’s all damned nonsense.”

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

Very conscientiously the Senior Surgeon began to search for a fleck of dust on his other cuff.

“Why, my—my dear girl,” he persisted, “it’s absurd, it’s outrageous! Why, people would—would hoot at us! Why, they’d think—”

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

“Why, my dear girl,” sweated the Senior Surgeon, “even though you and I understand perfectly well the purely formal, businesslike conditions of our marriage, we must at least, for sheer decency’s sake, keep up a certain semblance of marital conventionality before the world. Why, if we were married at noon the first day of June as you suggest, and I should go right off alone as usual on my Canadian trip, and you should come back alone to the house, why, people would think—would think that I didn’t care anything about you.”

“But you don’t,” said the White Linen Nurse, serenely.

“Why, they’d think,” choked the Senior Surgeon—“they’d think you were trying your—darndest to get rid of me.”

“I am,” said the White Linen Nurse, complacently.

With a muttered ejaculation the Senior Surgeon jumped to his feet and stood glaring down at her.

Quite ingenuously the White Linen Nurse met and parried the glare.

“A gentleman, and a red-haired kiddie, and a great walloping house all at once, it’s too much,” she confided genially. “Thank you just the same, but I’d rather take them gradually. First of all, sir, you see, I’ve got to teach the little kiddie to like me. And then there’s a green-tiled paper with floppity sea-gulls on it that I want to try for the bath-room. And—and—” Ecstatically she clapped her hands together. “Oh, sir, there are such loads and loads of experiments I want to try while you are off on your spree!”

“’S-h-h!” cried the Senior Surgeon. His face was suddenly blanched, his mouth twitching like the mouth of one stricken with almost insupportable pain. “For God’s sake, Miss Malgregor,” he pleaded, “can’t you call it my Canadian trip?”

Wider and wider the White Linen Nurse opened her big blue eyes at him.

“But it is a spree, sir!” she protested resolutely. “And my father says—” Still resolutely her young mouth curved to its original assertion, but from under her heavy-shadowing eyelashes a little smile crept softly out—“when my father’s got a lame trotting-horse, sir, that he’s trying to shuck off his hands,” she faltered, “he doesn’t ever go round mournful-like, with his head hanging, telling folks about his wonderful trotter that’s just ‘the littlest, teeniest, tiniest bit lame.’ Oh, no. What father does is to call up every one he knows within twenty miles and tell ’em: ‘Say, Tom, Bill, Harry, or whatever your name is, what in the deuce do you suppose I’ve got over here in my barn? A lame horse that wants to trot! Lamer than the deuce, you know, but can do a mile in two forty.’” Faintly the little smile quickened again in the White Linen Nurse’s eyes. “And the barn will be full of men in half an hour,” she said. “Somehow nobody wants a trotter that’s lame, but almost anybody seems willing to risk a lame horse that’s plucky enough to trot.”

“What’s the ‘lame trotting-horse’ got to do with me?” snarled the Senior Surgeon, incisively.

Darkly the White Linen Nurse’s lashes fringed down across her cheeks.

“Nothing much,” she said; “only—”

“Only what?” demanded the Senior Surgeon. A little more roughly than he realized he stooped down and took the White Linen Nurse by her shoulders, and jerked her sharply round to the light. “Only what?” he insisted peremptorily.

Almost plaintively she lifted her eyes to his.

“Only my father says,” she confided obediently—“my father says, ‘if you’ve got a worse foot, for Heaven’s sake, put it forward, and get it over with!’

“So I’ve got to call it a spree,” smiled the White Linen Nurse; “’cause when I think of marrying a surgeon that goes off and gets drunk every June, it—it scares me almost to death; but—” Abruptly the red smile faded from her lips, the blue smile from her eyes—“but when I think of marrying a—June drunk that’s got the grit to pull up absolutely straight as a die and be a surgeon all the other ’leven months in the year?” Dartingly she bent down and kissed the Senior Surgeon’s astonished wrist. “Oh, then I think you’re perfectly grand!” she sobbed.

Awkwardly the Senior Surgeon pulled away and began to pace the floor.

“You’re a good little girl, Rae Malgregor,” he mumbled huskily—“a good little girl. I truly believe you’re the kind that will see me through.” Poignantly in his eyes humiliation overwhelmed the mist. Perversely in its turn resentment overtook the humiliation. “But I won’t be married in June,” he reasserted bombastically. “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. I tell you I positively refuse to have a lot of damned fools speculating about my private affairs, wondering why I didn’t take you, wondering why I didn’t stay home with you. I tell you I won’t. I surely won’t.”

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

With a real gasp of relief the Senior Surgeon stopped his eternal pacing of the floor.

“Bully for you!” he said. “You mean then we’ll be married some time in July after I get back from my—trip?”

“Oh, no, sir,” whimpered the White Linen Nurse.

“But, great Heavens!” shouted the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes, sir,” the White Linen Nurse began all over again. Dreamily planning out her wedding-gown, her lips without the slightest conscious effort on her part were already curving into shape for her alternate “No, sir.”

“You’re an idiot!” snapped the Senior Surgeon.

A little reproachfully the White Linen Nurse came frowning out of her reverie.

“Would it do just as well for traveling, do you think?” she asked, with real concern.

“Eh? What?” said the Senior Surgeon.

“I mean, does Japan spot?” queried the White Linen Nurse. “Would it spot a serge, I mean?”

“Oh, hell with Japan!” jerked out the Senior Surgeon.

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

Now, perhaps you will understand just exactly how it happened that the Senior Surgeon and the White Linen Nurse were married on the first day of June, and just exactly how it happened that the Senior Surgeon went off alone as usual on his Canadian trip, and just exactly how it happened that the White Linen Nurse came home alone to the Senior Surgeon’s great, gloomy house, to find her brand-new stepdaughter still screaming over the turquoise-colored stockings. Everything now is perfectly comfortably explained except the turquoise-colored stockings. Nobody could explain the turquoise-colored stockings.

But even a little child could explain the ensuing June. Oh, June was perfectly wonderful that year! Bud, blossom, birdsong, breeze, rioting headlong through the land; warm days as sweet and lush as a greenhouse vapor; crisp nights faintly metallic, like the scent of stars; hurdy-gurdies romping tunefully on every street corner; even the ash-man flushing frankly pink across his dusty cheek-bones.

Like two fairies who had sublet a giant’s cave, the White Linen Nurse and the Little Crippled Girl turned themselves loose upon the Senior Surgeon’s gloomy old house.

It certainly was a gloomy old house, but handsome withal, square and brown and substantial, and most generously gardened within high brick walls. Except for dusting the lilac-bushes with the hose, and weeding a few rusty leaves out of the privet hedge, and tacking up three or four scraggly sprays of English ivy, and re-greening one or two bay-tree boxes, there was really nothing much to do to the garden. But the house? O ye gods! All day long from morning till night, but most particularly from the back door to the barn, sweating workmen scuttled back and forth till nary a guilty piece of black-walnut furniture had escaped. All day long from morning till night, but most particularly from ceilings to floors, sweltering workmen scurried up and down step-ladders, stripping dingy papers from dingier plasterings.

When the White Linen Nurse wasn’t busy renovating the big house or the little stepdaughter, she was writing to the Senior Surgeon. She wrote twice.

“Dear Dr. Faber,” the first letter said—

Dear Dr. Faber:

How do you do? Thank you very much for saying you didn’t care what in thunder I did to the house. It looks sweet. I’ve put white, fluttery muslin curtains ’most everywhere. And you’ve got a new solid-gold-looking bed in your room. And the Kiddie and I have fixed up the most scrumptious light blue suite for ourselves in the ell. Pink was wrong for the front hall, but it cost me only $29.00 to find out, and now that’s settled for all time.

I am very, very, very, very busy. Something strange and new happens every day. Yesterday it was three ladies and a plumber. One of the ladies was just selling soap, but I didn’t buy any. It was horrid soap. The other two were calling ladies, a silk one and a velvet one. The silk one tried to be nasty to me. Right to my face she told me I was more of a lady than she had dared to hope. And I told her I was sorry for that, as you’d had one “lady,” and it didn’t work. Was that all right? But the other lady was nice, and I took her out in the kitchen with me while I was painting the woodwork, and right there in her white kid gloves she laughed and showed me how to mix the paint pearl gray. She was nice. It was your sister-in-law.

I like being married, Dr. Faber. I like it lots better than I thought I would. It’s fun being the biggest person in the house.

Respectfully yours,
RAE MALGREGOR, AS WAS.

P.S. Oh, I hope it wasn’t wrong, but in your ulster pocket, when I went to put it away, I found a bottle of something that smelled as though it had been forgotten. I threw it out.

It was this letter that drew the only definite message from the itinerant bridegroom.

“Kindly refrain from rummaging in my ulster pockets,” wrote the Senior Surgeon, briefly. “The ‘thing’ you threw out happened to be the cerebellum and medulla of an extremely eminent English theologian.”

“Even so, it was sour,” telegraphed the White Linen Nurse in a perfect agony of remorse and humiliation.

The telegram took an Indian with a birch canoe two days to deliver, and cost the Senior Surgeon twelve dollars. Just impulsively the Senior Surgeon decided to make no further comments on domestic affairs at that particular range.

Very fortunately for this impulse, the White Linen Nurse’s second letter concerned itself almost entirely with matters quite extraneous to the home.

The second letter ran:

Dear Dr. Faber:

Somehow I don’t seem to care so much just now about being the biggest person in the house. Something awful has happened: Zillah Forsyth is dead. Really dead, I mean. And she died in great heroism. You remember Zillah Forsyth, don’t you? She was one of my room-mates, not the gooder one, you know, not the swell; that was Helene Churchill. But Zillah? Oh, you know, Zillah was the one you sent out on that fractured-elbow case. It was a Yale student, you remember? And there was some trouble about kissing, and she got sent home? And now everybody’s crying because Zillah can’t kiss anybody any more. Isn’t everything the limit? Well, it wasn’t a fractured Yale student she got sent out on this time. If it had been, she might have been living yet. What they sent her out on this time was a senile dementia, an old lady more than eighty years old. And they were in a sanatorium or something like that, and there was a fire in the night. And the old lady just up and positively refused to escape, and Zillah had to push her and shove her and yank her and carry her out of the window, along the gutters, round the chimneys. And the old lady bit Zillah right through the hand, but Zillah wouldn’t let go. And the old lady tried to drown Zillah under a bursted water tank, but Zillah wouldn’t let go. And everybody hollered to Zillah to cut loose and save herself, but Zillah wouldn’t let go. And a wall fell, and everything, and, oh, it was awful, but Zillah never let go. And the old lady that wasn’t any good to any one, not even herself, got saved, of course. But Zillah? Oh, Zillah got hurt bad, sir. We saw her at the hospital, Helene and I. She sent for us about something. Oh, it was awful! Not a thing about her that you’d know except just her great solemn eyes mooning out at you through a gob of white cotton, and her red mouth lipping sort of twitchy at the edge of a bandage. Oh, it was awful! But Zillah didn’t seem to care so much. There was a new interne there, a Japanese, and I guess she was sort of taken with him. “But, my God, Zillah,” I said, “your life was worth more than that old dame’s!”

“Shut your noise!” says Zillah. “It was my job, and there’s no kick coming.” Helene burst right out crying, she did. “Shut your noise, too!” says Zillah, just as cool as you please. “Bah! There’s other lives and other chances.”

“Oh, you believe that now?” cries Helene. “Oh, you do believe that now, what the Bible promises you?” That was when Zillah shrugged her shoulders so funny, the little way she had. Gee! but her eyes were big! “I don’t pretend to know what your old Bible says,” she choked. “It was the Yale feller who was tellin’ me.”

That’s all, Dr. Faber. It was her shrugging her shoulders so funny that brought on the hemorrhage, I guess.

Oh, we had an awful time, sir, going home in the carriage, Helene and I. We both cried, of course, because Zillah was dead, but after we got through crying for that, Helene kept right on crying because she couldn’t understand why a brave girl like Zillah had to be dead. Gee! but Helene takes things hard! Ladies do, I guess.

I hope you’re having a pleasant spree.

Oh, I forgot to tell you that one of the wall-paperers is living here at the house with us just now. We use him so much, it’s truly a good deal more convenient. And he’s a real nice young fellow, and he plays the piano finely, and he comes from up my way. And it seemed more neighborly, anyway. It’s so large in the house at night just now, and so creaky in the garden.

With kindest regards, good-by for now, from

RAE.

P.S. Don’t tell your guide or any one, but Helene sent Zillah’s mother a check for fifteen hundred dollars. I saw it with my own eyes. And all Zillah asked for that day was just a little blue serge suit. It seems she’d promised her kid sister a little blue serge suit for July, and it sort of worried her.

Helene sent the little blue serge suit, too, and a hat. The hat had bluebells on it. Do you think when you come home, if I haven’t spent too much money on wall-papers, that I could have a blue hat with bluebells on it? Excuse me for bothering you, but you forgot to leave me enough money.

It was some indefinite, pleasant time on Thursday, the twenty-fifth of June, that the Senior Surgeon received the second letter. It was Friday, the twenty-sixth of June, exactly at dawn, that the Senior Surgeon started homeward.

(To be concluded)

THE GENTLE READER

BY ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

WHY does the poet choose to sing?

No impulse ever stirred in me

The wish to make myself a thing

To which all mocking gibes might cling.”

Perhaps he sees more than you see.

“Why should this fool go crying out

The secrets of his soul? In steel

I case myself, nor care to shout

Those things one does not talk about.”

Perhaps he feels more than you feel.

“If I had wisdom to impart,

I’d say the thing, and let it go,

Not trifle with a foolish art

And make a motley of my heart.”

Perhaps he knows more than you know.

SUBMARINE MOUNTAINS

BY CALE YOUNG RICE

UNDER the sea, which is their sky, they rise

To watery altitudes as vast as those

Of far Himalayan peaks impent in snows,

And veils of cloud and sacred deep repose.

Under the sea, their flowing firmament,

More dark than any ray of sun can pierce,

The earthquake thrust them up with mighty tierce,

And left them to be seen but by the eyes

Of awed imagination inward bent.

Their vegetation is the viscid ooze,

Whose mysteries are past belief or thought.

Creation seems around them devil-wrought,

Or by some cosmic urgence gone distraught.

A-down their precipices, chill and dense

With the dank midnight, creep or crawl or climb

Such tentacled and eyeless things of slime,

Such monster shapes as tempt us to accuse

Life of a miscreative impotence.

About their peaks the shark, their eagle, floats

In the thick azure far beneath the air,

Or downward sweeps upon what prey may dare

Set forth from any silent, weedy lair.

But one desire on all their slopes is found,

Desire of food, the awful hunger strife;

Yet here, it may be, was begun our life,

Here all the dreams on which our vision dotes

In unevolved obscurity were bound.

Too strange it is, too terrible! And yet

It matters not how we were wrought, or whence

Life came to us with all its throb intense,

If in it is a Godly Immanence.

It matters not,—if haply we are more

Than creatures half conceived by a blind force

That sweeps the universe in a chance course:

For only in Unmeaning Might is met

The intolerable thought none can ignore.

A VISIT TO WHISTLER

BY MARIA TORRILHON BUEL

IN May, 1899, we were two women in Paris for hats, gowns, and the season’s show of pictures. I was under the wing of a handsome matron who had a latent desire to see herself transferred to canvas should she chance upon a painter with an appealing portrait of some other woman. Through friends, several great studios were opened to us, and we grew more and more enterprising, until one day my guide and mentor, suddenly turning to me, said, “Let us visit Whistler!”

It fairly took my breath away, for I recalled much caustic wit of alleged Whistler origin that I had seen in the public prints, and, feeling the promptings of caution, I exclaimed, “How dare you?”

“Because he has invited me,” she replied.

It was true, for, a few years before, my friend’s husband, shrewd in the law, and equally daring in his connoisseurship, had paid a large price for a Whistler “Nocturne” of a beauty so characteristic that even amateurs could look at it and wonder what it was all about. This nocturne began its existence in my friend’s home by perpetrating a joke. It had been brought to the house by one of Whistler’s pupils, just from Europe. We two women entered the drawing-room to find it alone in its glory, which did not seem to be dimmed by the fact that it was on the carpet with a Louis Quinze chair for an easel. We gazed in wonderment, from all possible angles, and finally exclaimed that it was “quite Japanese” in style and coloring. Then the reverent pupil entered, kneeled before it, wiped it softly with his silk handkerchief, smiled, and reversed it—for we had been studying the chef-d’œuvre upside down. He withdrew without taking notice of our chagrin. Evidently the joke was too good to keep, for the incident has become one of the stock Whistler anecdotes. Within a year a friend has regaled me with it, without a suspicion of carrying coals to Newcastle.

That purchase had given the artist much satisfaction, aside from the lofty price, and he used to write charming letters, asking my friend to visit him in Paris.

That same day we went to his studio in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.

Arriving at a forbidding area, with a winding staircase, we looked at each other with feminine indecision. Before we could arrange a retreat, the concierge, who was somewhere near the top, caught sight of us and called down to learn whom we wanted. I made a megaphone of my hand and screamed aloft, “Monsieur Whist-lai-ai-re!”

“Là bas, on the fifth,” she answered.

After a slow ascent, we stood at last on the top steps of the winding staircase. I can still hear the prolonged jingle of the primitive bell my vigorous pull had roused. Before it was stilled, the door opened suddenly, and there stood Whistler, the great Whistler—in his shirt-sleeves!

The first impression was of a little, big personage who completely filled the doorway. He appeared much smaller than any idea of personality conveyed by the portraits of him that we had seen. On his left arm he held a large palette, with a bunch of brushes in his hand. All were moist, as were also to some extent his sleeves and clothing, for he was without a painting-apron. But the famous monocle was there, and the whisk of white hair was in the right place. The signalement was complete.

There he stood, silent, obviously waiting for us to explain the intrusion. In the dim light I imagined that I could see his monocle bristling, and I felt much like a conscience-stricken child about to be eaten by an ogre. As my friend remained dumb, in a weak voice I murmured the name that was to be our talisman, meekly adding my own; but that was lost in his “Ah!” of recognition.

“You are the bold woman who bought my picture! I have a sitter now; but come to-morrow at four, and we will have tea.”

We accepted in unison, the door was closed in our faces, and with a sense of deep satisfaction at having escaped an unknown peril we tripped lightly down the staircase. While we were standing at his door, Whistler had so managed that we could not have moved half an inch farther toward the forbidden sanctuary. It was probably a well-planned, habitual, and defensive position on his part.

On the following day, punctually at four o’clock, we again stood in constrained positions on the narrow steps, but without a sense of awkwardness; again the bell jingled wildly.

Again the great Whistler opened the door, but now dressed in a suit of black, with the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his lapel. His welcome was graceful and cordial. With easy confidence we walked into the studio. A bright fire glowed at one end, in front of which was a round table covered with green rep, on which were tea-things, and dishes filled with dainty French cakes. A little maid, in neat cap and apron, was hovering about. All about us, turned to the wall and unframed, were seemingly hundreds of canvases. What has become of all those treasures since Whistler’s death?

As we entered, he said, with a wave of the hand toward the hidden canvases, “See how careful I am!”

As a whole, the studio, though spacious, was simple in its furnishings, except for the amazing decoration of masterpieces turned to the wall. He offered us chairs, and seated himself on the edge of a long table. Reaching out for a copy of “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies,” he began to read to us his most spicy letters.

He read on and on, until we began to wonder whether all the afternoon was to be spent in this novel and entertaining way. Meanwhile I glanced about and noticed a large phonograph, which seemed the only discordant note in an otherwise harmonious place. It soon became a discord, for suddenly tiring of his own wit, he turned lovingly to the instrument, and regaled us with a medley of “coon” songs, orchestral numbers, and other music. Had we dared, we should have glanced at each other in amazement.

At last Whistler reverted to art, and brought a canvas to the easel. He oiled it slightly, tenderly, and, lo! a handsome Italian boy shone forth, soul and all. It was magical. We had previously agreed to say but little, and never to gush over anything we might be shown. We did not speak, indeed hardly dared to, for he was watching us as a nurse watches a thermometer in an overheated room.

Again he made search, and brought before us another picture. This time the oiling and dusting disclosed the portrait of a beautiful American girl, wearing an evening cloak, the collar of which was very high. Such breeding and poise in the picture! It was more than a reproduction: something of the inner woman was there. Over this we allowed ourselves to exclaim in admiration, which moved the master to say:

“It took a long time to paint this portrait.”

There was a pause, of which my friend took advantage to say that she would much like to have him paint her portrait.

“How long shall you be in Paris?” he asked.

“Another week.”

“There you are! You Americans are all the same; here to-day, gone to-morrow; à Paris aujourd’hui, demain, à Hoboken. One might as well try to paint fish jumping out of the water,” he added with his captivating laugh.

With this laugh, all the ice that had been accumulating melted away. I found voice to say that I had recognized him immediately the day before from having seen and greatly admired his portrait by a fellow-artist. To my complete discomfiture, he shrugged his shoulders and said:

“He imagines that he has painted my portrait.”

At last we were having a glimpse of the real Whistler, or, rather, of the one we had heard of and read about.

He showed us two more canvases, one by a pupil. Then he drew up to the tea-table and began to discourse on the “Nocturne” which my friend had bought. This led to a recital of his hopes of the budding “Académie Whistler,” which had been formally opened in the autumn of 1898. However, the academy did not remain open long. Nothing in his training or natural gifts gave him the endurance and patience required of a teacher; besides, his health failed, and he went to a milder climate. We dared ask him how he liked being a teacher, to which he answered:

“You know what the French call une bête de somme—un cheval de fiacre—quoi!” Again he shrugged and sighed.

We had brought with us two copies of Nicholson’s caricature of Whistler, in which he is standing at full-length, monocled, against a nocturnal sky. We asked him to sign them, and he was exceedingly gracious about it.

“These caricatures were my idea,” he explained; “I told Nicholson how to do them. They are a great success.”

On each he sketched a butterfly in pencil, adding on one, “Tant pis” and on the other, “With all proper regrets.”

He told us that he often became very much attached to his work. Once he had an order from a man for a portrait; it was duly finished, and amply paid for. He still held it, although the man wrote periodically to have it sent to him. “I really feel that it is much too good for him,” he explained. “The worst of it is that the longer I keep it the more I like it, and”—after a pause he whispered—“the less likely he is to get it.”

As the afternoon had waned, we suggested driving him home. He assented, putting on his famous high hat and a pair of black gloves, and we clattered down the five flights together, the air seeming fairly saturated with his presence.

Entering the one-horse victoria which had brought us from the hotel, I had to sit on the strapontin, about which I festooned myself as best I could. To my astonishment, our appearance did not seem to create much commotion in the Quartier, though I knew how exotic we must look.

We drove through a round porte-cochère, which was the entrance to a sort of tunnel; at the end of it we emerged into a courtyard flanked by the little house Whistler occupied.

On reaching his home, the master insisted on our coming in to see it. We found it rather gloomy, with a garden in the rear, which was shown with great pride. There were a few pictures on the walls. The cloth was spread on the dining-table, and many dishes and plates were stacked in the middle.

The good-bys were said, with an invitation extended to visit his studio again on our next trip. We had had a memorable visit with him, and were taking away with us impressions of the real Whistler—the Whistler whom the world at large knew not, the kind, genial, courteous, humanly sorrowful, and sorrowing man of genius.

LOWER MANHATTAN, FROM THE HUDSON, OR NORTH, RIVER

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BROAD STREET, LOOKING NORTH TO WALL STREET

The portico of the Stock Exchange is at the left, a part of the portico of the Sub-Treasury is seen at Wall and Nassau Streets, and the crowd in the street, at the right, is the outdoor exchange known as “The Curb.”

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CORTLANDT STREET, LOOKING EAST FROM THE FERRY

The Hudson Terminal is seen at the left, and the Investment Building and Singer Tower at the right.

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LOWER BROADWAY, FROM THE POST-OFFICE

The portico of St. Paul’s is in the foreground, and the Singer Tower in the distance.

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THE BOOK OF HIS HEART

BY ALLAN UPDEGRAFF

Author of “The Siren of the Air,” etc.

WITH A PICTURE BY HERMAN PFEIFER

ON Monday, April 11, Mr. Francis wrote in the book:

“She was in again to-day. Dressed quite different from the first time. Not expensive, but tasteful and excellent. Took samples of blue pongee and crêpe de chine. I said I thought that delicate new London mist would become her better. She thanked me, and let me give her a sample of that. She showed a knowledge of silks that was most pleasing, considering the general ignorance among women on such subjects. We talked about some things not important enough to mention here.

‘All are architects of Fate,

Working in these walls of time.’

Longfellow.”

His reason for adding this selection was not very clear; but somehow a little touch of poetry seemed suitable after an entry of that sort. There was a good deal of poetry in the book, selections copied from various magazines and volumes that had helped to brighten his prosaic existence as a silk salesman in McDavitt’s department store.

One would have had to be a good observer to guess that behind the plain, neat, black-and-white exterior of Mr. Francis there was the soul of a poet. Judged by the frost-touched blackness of his hair, he might have been thirty-eight years old. His face, tending to delicacy of feature in the forehead and nose, and rendered a little wistful by the worry-lines about his eyes, had the pallor that comes from years of living in artificial light. He invariably looked as though he had been smooth-shaven five minutes before, and he invariably was ready to give his most earnest attention to the desires of a customer. He fitted in the high-classed old establishment that employed him, and paid him well for a silk salesman. The consideration shown him he repaid by immaculateness in dress, scrupulousness in his reports, and the air of an English butler in dealing with customers.

His inner self was revealed in only two of his daily activities—in the handling of the silks that had been his familiars from boyhood, and in the keeping of a large red-morocco diary that he carried in the breast-pocket of his black frock-coat.

The silks—how he caressed their shimmering textures and colors, how he made them display all their subtle beauties and allurements! It was quite without guile on his part: the idea of urging or inveigling any one into buying would have filled him with horror. He displayed his wares to their best advantage because he loved them. Therefore he did it so wonderfully well that many a fine lady, after watching his firm, white, well-kept hands play among the folds, bought stuffs for which she had no possible use. This gained him some dislike and trouble, for McDavitt’s does not exchange dress-goods.

But Mr. Francis’s real self-revelation was reserved for the diary. Every night he made an entry. During the several hours every day when the choiceness, and therefore sparseness, of McDavitt’s clientele left him with nothing to do, he often took out the book, opened it among the shining silks on the mahogany counter, and made a note or two in it. It was a rather large book for a diary, and the India-paper leaves gave its thousand pages the bulk of a far smaller number in ordinary diaries. The words “Personal Journal” were printed in gold across the front cover, and there was a bunch of gold forget-me-nots, tied with a gold true-lover’s knot, in the upper left-hand corner. Beneath the forget-me-nots, in small, precise roman capitals, Mr. Francis had printed his name, ROLAND FARWELL FRANCIS.

To one prying into the secrets of Mr. Francis’s life through the medium of this diary, the number of entries like the one quoted above might have seemed somewhat appalling.

The pages were full of hints of romance, or, rather, of an almost indefinite number of romances. The vague beginnings were recorded in statements like “She was in again to-day.” Later there were conjectures about “her,” bits of personal description, faint suggestions of longing, of aspiration; then commiserations of his own unworthiness, bitter self-analysis leading up to relinquishment, final fits of despondency, during which he loaded pages with the most mortuary poetry he could find. But he was an invincible idealist; soon the process started all over again. From the time when he began work, aged seventeen years, as a stock clerk in McDavitt’s silk department, he must have approximated a round hundred of these catalectic romances.

His station in life, his work, his poetic temperament, made the result inevitable. His silks attracted beauty, he adored beauty, and beauty considered him in much the same class as the glass-and-ebony display-fixtures. Like a modern Tantalus, he watched the waters of life flow by so close that they fairly enveloped him, and yet he was powerless to lift one drop for the quenching of the thirst of his soul. A cheaper man might have solaced himself with cheaper beauty, a more practical man might have sought beauty as true in less inaccessible places, a luckier man might have stumbled upon it nearer home. Mr. Francis, lacking cheapness and practicality and luck, had remained a virtuous bachelor.

On Friday, April 15, Mr. Francis wrote in the book:

“She has not been in again. Several times I thought I saw her some aisles away. Her face is an unusual one. It is strange I seem always to be seeing it.

“I heard a few minutes ago a rumor that I was being considered for a great piece of good fortune if Mr. Baldwin’s illness continues to prevent him from resuming his duties. I do not know why I am not so very much thrilled by the prospect. I suppose I ought to be.

“She must have decided that McDavitt’s is too expensive. Her dress was tasteful, but not at all luxurious. She gave me a feeling of great respect.

‘Friend, let us cease to vex the Eternal Why:

’Tis very good to live; better, perhaps, to die.’

Reader Magazine.”

On Monday, April 18, he wrote:

“To-day, on account of the continued illness of Mr. Baldwin, I was promoted to be the assistant buyer and manager of this department. Three thousand a year, nearly sixty dollars a week! Once I looked forward to thirty per w’k like millions. Now sixty is not so much. I must be getting old. It will help me to lay up a competence for my declining years. Perhaps I should send one of my nephews to college. It has been the regret of my life that I entered on an active business career immediately after graduation from high school. Doubtless I should have made an effort to work my way through Columbia. Yes, I will write to my brother and offer to send one of the boys to college.

“She has not been in again. Doubtless she decided to purchase elsewhere. McDavitt’s is expensive. Perhaps I should strive to have the margin of profit reduced. She did not dress or act like one with much money. Doubtless she was attracted to Mc’s by their reputation for handling only the best. I remember she looked worried whenever I quoted prices. Still, she wished the best. But the state of her purse made her careful, and finally made her decide to purchase in a cheaper store. I think I can understand her. That London mist would have suited her, trimmed with a little old gold. However, of course it is foolish for me to allow myself to indulge in such reflections. I shall probably never see her again.

“Mrs. Benson congratulated me warmly on my advancement. She has been very thoughtful of my comforts for the last seven years, going on eight. She mentioned how she had always tried to, and I thanked her deeply. She said she hoped I wouldn’t feel impelled to move elsewhere, and I assured her I had no such intentions. I despise a man who is puffed up by a little success. Vanity of vanities, vanitas vanitatis. Or vanitatium? I wish I remembered more of my Latin; my memory is far from what I should like it to be. Mrs. B. also said she had two tickets to The Empire Vaudeville given her by the new couple in the back parlor. They are in the theatrical profession, and are getting a try-out there this week. I could not well refuse her invitation to accompany her, although I do not care for vaudeville. She says she goes at least once every week. It brightens up her dull life. Poor soul! I guess she needs it. Hers is not a very gay life.”

Drawn by Herman Pfeifer. Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merrill

“‘SHE WAS THREE AISLES AWAY, LOOKING OVER THAT NEW IMPORTATION OF CHINESE MANDARINS’”

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During the considerable period that Mr. Francis had rented Mrs. Benson’s most expensive room, the second-floor front, his intimacy with her had consisted of one heart-to-heart talk in the week following Mr. Benson’s decease. Mr. Benson, who had been indefinitely “in the clothing business,” had caught a cold which developed into pneumonia, with fatal results. When, a few days after the funeral, Mrs. Benson wept on Mr. Francis’s shoulder, she had said that she wished never to speak to another man, never even to see one, except in the necessary course of business. She ran a boarding-house, and she would accept men as well as women for boarders; other relations with them she could not consider.

Mr. Francis had always respected her wishes. Even when she presided at the Sunday evening dinner-table, a wide, tight vision of black silk, and conversation was supposed to be more unrestricted than on week-days, Mr. Francis had been careful not to trespass on the sacred confines of her bereavement. Her conversation with the other men at the table, in which she attempted to include him, he passed off as her necessary sacrifice to the business that supported her widowhood. He was even more literal-minded than the average idealist.

On Thursday, April 21, he wrote in the book:

“I am quite sure she was in again to-day. She was three aisles away, looking over that new importation of Chinese mandarins, but she departed before I approached. She was dressed altogether different from the first two times, but I am sure it was she. I would notice her face among a thousand. I noticed those two little lines at the top of her nose between her eyebrows. And yet she is not old; one would not call her young, either; and not middle-aged, either. Before I got over wondering whether I should go over and wait on her personally, she had gone. He who hesitates is lost. The clerk said she had taken samples of all the new silks. He thought she had taken too many, and said she did not act like a buyer. I requested him to follow McDavitt’s principle to give all the samples asked for and not comment on it.

“To be much of my time in the office, as my new position forces me to be, has some drawbacks. Doubtless, however, even were I back in my old place, I should never see her again. And what possible good can come if I do see her? I am little more than a servant, a lackey. But I forget that I am now an assistant buyer. Perhaps that raises me a little in the scale. But how little—not enough to make any difference to her.

“From the library to-day I got a book, ‘Selections from the English Poets of the Nineteenth Century.’ It is more complete than the ‘Golden Treasury,’ and I anticipate a great deal of pleasure and profit from it. It contains Shelley’s ‘Defense of Poetry,’ which I can well afford to read again.”

Under the entry of Friday, April 22, he copied entire Shelley’s “Indian Serenade,” beginning,

“I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night.”

“Sunday, April 24.

“This evening has been a most eventful one for me. I am engaged to Mrs. Benson. I am still so astonished that I do not know precisely how it occurred. I do not know how to describe my feelings. They are so mixed. Words fail me.

“I escorted her to a Sunday-evening concert at the Metropolitan. I owed her something, of course, in return for The Empire Vaudeville, and when she reminded me of that, I said maybe she would like to go to the Metropolitan. The music was beautiful. Homer and Bonci sang. I have always gone alone before. Mrs. Benson wept because it was so beautiful. Then she said she was partly weeping because the boarders had begun to cast insinuations about her and me.

“Words cannot express how overcome I was. She has, of course, nothing but her reputation. How bitterer than a serpent’s tooth is a slanderous tongue! I asked her who started it, but she would not tell me for fear I would attack him, which would make matters worse. I would have done so, too; at least I would have demanded a retraction. Before I knew it we were engaged.

“I am not sorry. How lonely my life has been! Perhaps I have at last found happiness where I least expected it. She is a good, honest, capable woman, and she says she’s going to begin exercising to reduce her weight. I fear I am unworthy. Would that I could adore her more! Everything is not just as I imagined love to be; but I am not sorry. I should be happy in my good fortune. It is not good for man to live alone.

‘Duty is an Archangel on the right-hand side of God.’

Anon.”

Nevertheless, it was a much chastened, even saddened, Mr. Francis who returned to work the following morning. He had lived in his dreams, his romances had been the deepest and sweetest part of his life, for so long that such a reality as his engagement to Mrs. Benson hurt him through and through.

Perhaps any reality in the matter of romance would have hurt him. He had become a confirmed dreamer, even as he had become a confirmed bachelor, and he was not fitted to cope with practical details. Even the preparations, the hundred and one rather sordid arrangements, he would have had to go through in order to marry his latest ideal would probably have saddened him a good deal. It was thrice in vain that he attempted to be practical in the matter of marriage with Mrs. Benson; he suffered by every necessary preparation that brushed the star-dust off the butterfly’s wings of his dream ideal of love—suffered agonies that gave him a feeling of weakness in the diaphragm and in the knees.

Until eleven o’clock he was busy with the morning instalment of traveling-salesmen who came to offer their wares. This duty disposed of, he strolled out into the department where he was supposed to oversee the stock and clerks. Wicked hopes that she, the lady of his dream romance, would return he suppressed so firmly that he had a continuous ache in his throat. Gone were his shimmering dreams, his vistas of poetic reverie. He threw himself desperately into the business of arranging displays, stationing clerks, verifying price-tags. He was thoroughly melancholy and businesslike and stern-faced and miserable.

His evenings at the boarding-house were even more uncomfortable than his days in the store. Mrs. Benson had lost no time in announcing her engagement, and Mr. Francis now occupied the place of honor at her right hand at meals; he had long refused this place through feelings of delicacy about trespassing on Mrs. Benson’s known reverence for her late husband, and the honor sat heavily upon him. The smiles and insinuations of the boarders, the sordid jocularity of it all, seared his soul. Idealist that he was, his sense of humor was not much developed; and remarks like, “Can’t you just see Mr. Francis walking the floor with a bundle of yell in his arms?” sent all the blood from his heart into his face, and back again, in two frantic leaps.

On one point he was trying to be firm: he would not let Mrs. Benson read in “The Book of his Heart.” She found it on the second evening of their prenuptial bliss in the front parlor, and triumphantly drew it forth. Desperately he reclaimed his property; frantically he argued that it was sacred to him, that there were some things they wouldn’t have to share in common. No theory could have been more repugnant to Mrs. Benson, and none could have so solidified her determination to read that “Personal Journal” from cover to cover. The issues were pitched, the armies drawn up, the bugles blown; and struggle as he would, Mr. Francis realized that he was foredoomed to the woe of the vanquished. She would read the book, she would despise it, and she would burn it because of its wicked references to women other than herself. Realizing this certain outcome, Mr. Francis vacillated between the wisdom of burning the book himself and the wickedness of hiding it and telling her that he had burned it. In the meantime he kept his coat buttoned and his door locked.

On Thursday, April 28, he wrote at one o’clock in the morning:

“God have mercy on me, a miserable sinner! She was in again to-day, and I adore her still.

“I could not greet Mrs. Benson as usual this evening. I could not. She insisted, but I said I had a sore throat and might infect her. She said I must have a doctor, but I was firm, I declared I would get along all right. She came up with a mustard-plaster while I was retiring. I could not let her in. It was terrible. Several of the boarders heard her; I could hear them laughing. The knowledge of my turpitude debases me like a crawling worm. I have always striven to live an upright life, so that I could look all men and women in the face. My duty is plain. Shall I be a hypocrite and deceiver? Shall I give up my self-respect, which has meant so much to me all these years? I am in a terrible dilemma.

“I will rise at five o’clock and leave the house before any one is stirring to-morrow morning. But what shall I do to-morrow evening? Heaven help and guide me!

“And yet my heart is not able to be sorry that she was in again to-day. I had given up expecting her, and the sight of her confounded me. The blueness of her eyes is like still waters. Her brown hair is as soft as brown silk in the skein. Her gentleness restoreth my soul. Yes, though I walked through the Valley of Death, I would love her. I am a vile man, loathsome to myself. And I am a liar. I told Mrs. Benson I was kept at the store while in truth I was walking in Central Park. Through the night under the stars. Full of the thought of her. Full of poetry no one ever yet wrote the like of. Full of wonder and hope and exceeding glory and brightness.

“She is a sampler. I ought to have suspected it ever since that clerk spoke about her taking samples of all those new mandarins and she never bought anything. She had an idea to do it on a large scale. Instead of being in the employ of only one rival store, she has eight she supplies samples to. She spends all her time supplying samples to the stores that employ her. But she’s afraid her idea won’t work. She dresses as different as she can, but the department managers get to recognize her, with unfortunate results.

“I went up to her as soon as I recognized her, and asked to be allowed to wait on her. I lost once by my hesitation. She seemed much disappointed because I recognized her. I said, ‘I suspect you are a sampler, but I will take the responsibility of supplying you with all the samples from McDavitt’s silk department that you desire.’ Of course I had no right to make such an offer, but I did not think of it at the time. She looked all broken up, and told me she was deeply obliged, but she thought she’d have to quit and go back in Seaton-Baum’s silk department. She said she wished she could get into McDavitt’s, if only we didn’t employ only men clerks. I said I thought McDavitt’s was behind the times in that as well as in many other things, and I had intended to take the matter up with the superintendent. This was true. I asked for her name and address, so that I might notify her if anything came of it. She gave them to me.

“She said she wondered how I recognized her when she dressed differently every time, and I said I should remember her face among a million. She said that didn’t prejudice her against me as it would if most men had said it. She shook hands with me when she said good-by.

“I will not put her name down here. There are some things I cannot put down even here. And yet why shouldn’t I? I have always tried to be sincere and frank here. Miss Anna Wright. Anna. But doubtless I shall never see her again. Ours is a purely business acquaintance. I fear I shall not be able to change the policy about men clerks. It is an unprogressive policy. How her face would brighten the department! And she knows silks better than most of our men clerks. She has a feeling about them that counts a great deal; she really understands them. My slight acquaintance with her has filled me with the deepest respect. There is a great deal of sincerity about her, but she looks as if her life had not been altogether happy. I do not feel bashful when I talk to her, as I do with most women. This is most strange, considering how I feel toward her. I have a sort of feeling that she trusts me. What would I not give if I were worthy! Thank Heaven, she does not know how I have treated poor Mrs. Benson!”

On Friday, April 29, Mr. Francis wrote in the book:

“I am inscribing these words in a furnished room that I rented shortly after the store closed this evening. I sent an expressman to Mrs. Benson’s to get my things. Try as I would, reason with my self, all was in vain. I am a coward; I could not go back to Mrs. Benson’s.

“I thought I would go back and say something against Mr. Benson, thus breaking off the engagement in a respectable manner. Mrs. Benson has often said that if I ever said anything against Mr. Benson, everything between us would be at an end. I thought this would be a good way to end matters. God knows I have nothing against Mr. Benson, and I know he would have forgiven me if he had heard of it in the place wherever the dead are. But I could not do it. When within a block of the house I could not force myself to go any farther. I could not, as God is my witness. I have tried to do right, but I am such a coward I would have succumbed in the street if I had gone on.

“Mrs. Benson refused to allow the expressman to get my things, although I had sent the money to pay a week’s rent in advance with him. She tried to make him give her my address, but I had warned him not to do that, and I gave him a dollar when he returned and told me how he had resisted her. I regret that she would not let him have my things. I can get a new outfit, of course, but I had become accustomed to some of the things I had. Some of them I have had since my seventeenth year. Still, I am content. I have deserved much worse than has been meted out to me.

“Later. Mrs. Benson has been here. The expressman deceived me; he gave her my address, after all. I will not write down what she said while irresponsible through her emotions, and I do not remember what I said. At any rate, she is gone. I can hardly write.

“Later. The landlady of this house has just been in to tell me I must move out in the morning. She doesn’t desire men like me in her house. She says she knows my kind, and I am worse than the white-slavers the papers tell about. Perhaps she is right. I have no words to express my misery at my conduct. I will rise at five o’clock in the morning and seek a new rooming-house where I am not known.”

“Saturday, April 30.

“I have another furnished room. It is not highly desirable. I rented it under an assumed name, and I will move when the present danger has had time to decrease. I tremble lest Mrs. Benson should come to seek me in the store. I spend as much of my time in the office as possible, and keep a sharp lookout when I am on the floor.

‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practise to deceive!’

I know now something of the feeling of the felon who has escaped and whom every man’s hand is raised against. But I have brought it on myself. I only hope it will not result in my final expulsion from the store. McDavitt’s is very careful about the character of their employees.

“I put the matter about lady clerks in the department up to the manager this afternoon. To my surprise, he took to it rather kindly, and will refer it up to the proper authorities.

“A chilly, rainy day. I am tired out, but very happy to be secluded in this room. It is pleasant to sit alone and hear the rain outside.

“But I am not altogether alone. I have a memory, and a name, and I have a hope. Anna. But why is my heart lifted up? I am not worthy even to think of her.

‘For be the day never so long,

At last the bell ringeth to evensong.’

Stephen Hawes.”

“Tuesday, May 3.

“The superintendent has refused to entertain my suggestion about women clerks in the silk department. It would be against McDavitt’s policy. I have written and expressed his decision. So everything ends. I shall never see her again. I am a broken reed. One thing I can be thankful for: Mrs. Benson has not come to ask for me at the store.”

“Wednesday, May 4.

“This evening after dinner I walked over to the address. It is an apartment-house, and it is just such a place as I should think she would choose to live in. Nothing showy, but very neat and quiet and respectable. I walked in front of the house several times before returning. Something expanded in me every time I walked before the house and thought it was the place where she lives. I wonder whom she lives with? Doubtless with her mother and father and perhaps a sister or brother. I picked out a window that looked like it might be hers on the third floor. There was a soft yellow light like the light of a lamp in it.

“But of course I was mistaken. Probably she was out. She must be much sought after, and doubtless goes out a great deal in the evenings. Still, I found my heart lifted up just to walk slowly by and imagine she was in the room with the yellow lamp. I came home with peace and happiness in my heart, and yet with a great yearning. I will not conceal that I had that also. How poorly that expresses my feeling! The power of verbal expression is not my forte.”

The entry of Thursday, May 5, ended:

“She has not replied to my note telling of the superintendent’s decision; but of course no reply was necessary. Walked before her house this evening. Had not expected to, but could not resist the temptation. Have no right even to think of her. Legally, of course, I am still engaged to Mrs. Benson.”

The entries of May 6, 7, and 8 related that he had walked past “her” house. He avoided mentioning her name, as an ancient Hebrew would have avoided mentioning the name of Jehovah, or a modern Japanese the name of his emperor.

On Monday, May 9, Mr. Francis wrote in the book:

“I have a note from her, thanking me for my efforts in her behalf and regretting that McDavitt’s is so unprogressive. She ends: ‘I shall apply to you again when your store has got out of the rut of ages. I like McDavitt’s for its air of gentility and old-fashioned niceness.’ How she can write! I shall treasure her note. She says she would have written, thanking me, before, but my note reached her just as they were moving to another apartment. She sends me the new address unconsciously on the heading of her letter. I am glad I know she has moved. Suppose I had continued to walk before her former residence, thinking she still lived there? And yet that might have served me just as well, as long as I thought she was there.

“Now I have to record a very unpleasant matter. Mr. A. I. Sugenheim, an attorney-at-law, was in the store to-day to see me, and he said Mrs. Benson had decided to start a suit for breach of promise against me for $10,000; but if I wished to avoid the disgrace of having my name and picture in all the papers, I could pay the money, and he would not start the suit. He gave me an unpleasant impression. I said I should have to consult a lawyer before I decided. I recognized Mrs. Benson had grounds for damages, but I didn’t have $10,000. He said I could pay in instalments.

“I said I would consider the matter. He then said he would compromise for $5000 cash. My dealings with traveling-salesmen stood me in good stead. I said I would not think of paying a cent more than $2000. I had $1200 in the savings-bank, and I would pay the rest $100 a month.

“He begged me to remember that I had committed a very grave offense. Both from a legal and moral point of view I was culpable, and I had no right to pinch pennies to put myself square with the world. I was obliged to admit all this. But I did not like the way he said it; his manner did not give me a feeling of frankness and sincerity. I answered that $2000 was a great deal of money. ‘Make it $2500, for your conscience’ sake, at least,’ he said. I saw he was weakening; his nature was exactly like that of many of the salesmen I have to deal with. I turned away, saying, ‘I will make it $2100 and I cannot in conscience make it a cent more.’ He caught me by the arm and told me to believe him I would regret it to my dying day if I did not make it $2400, anyway; but I was firm. Finally he agreed to accept $2100. Unpleasant as the details were, I have a great feeling of relief. To-morrow I shall withdraw all my savings from the savings-bank and meet him at his office at 6:30 P.M. After that I shall be free.

“Walked past her new home this evening. It is perhaps not so nice as the other place, but eminently respectable. I debated all the way whether I would act unwarrantedly if I wrote her another note in answer to her last. How she would despise me if she knew the unfortunate details of my private life! I bow my head in shame when I think of her and of them.”

“Tuesday, May 10.

“Mr. Sugenheim said last night Mrs. Benson had refused to accept $2100. She had been wounded too deeply, and disgraced forever in the eyes of the boarders. I was overcome with grief at this news. But she would accept $2400. I at once agreed. I can save nearly two hundred dollars a month out of my salary by living carefully, and I feel more absolved from my turpitude than if I had paid a smaller amount. But it is a base thing to try to feel that I can acquit myself by a money payment. This will be a lesson to me never to trifle with a woman’s feelings again unless I really love her. I think I can say on my honor that I never really loved Mrs. Benson. This makes me feel at once more blameworthy and more relieved than if I had loved her. It is hard to explain just how.

“Walked past her new home again this evening. I have chosen another window on the third floor, right-hand corner, as the one that belongs to her. This is foolish, but why should I not do it if it pleases me? I started to write several notes to her this evening, but tore them up. I have no excuse to inflict myself upon her.”