Temperamental People
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Title: Temperamental People

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Release date: July 22, 2026 [eBook #79161]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: George H. Doran Company, 1914

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79161

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TEMPERAMENTAL PEOPLE ***

By MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

THE OUT TRAIL

THE BREAKING POINT

A POOR WISE MAN

DANGEROUS DAYS

THE AMAZING INTERLUDE

“K”

BAB: A SUB-DEB

TISH

MORE TISH

SIGHT UNSEEN AND THE CONFESSION

AFFINITIES AND OTHER STORIES

LOVE STORIES

KINGS, QUEENS AND PAWNS

TWENTY-THREE AND A HALF HOURS’ LEAVE

“ISN’T THAT JUST LIKE A MAN?”

ETC., ETC.

New York: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

TEMPERAMENTAL

PEOPLE

BY

MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

NEW            YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Copyright, 1924,

By George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1914, by The Metropolitan Magazine Company

TEMPERAMENTAL PEOPLE

—B—

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

I | PAGE
HER MAJESTY, The Queen | 9
II |
THE ALTAR ON THE HILL: The Secretary | 60
III |
CYNARA: The Sculptor | 103
IV |
THE GREAT SUCCESS: The Singer | 123
V |
THE SECRET HOUSE: The Wife | 154
VI |
A MIDSUMMER KNIGHT’S DREAM: The Cowboy | 182
VII |
LILY: The Philanderer | 231
VIII |
“ÇA NE FAIT RIEN”: The Dough Boy | 262

TEMPERAMENTAL PEOPLE

I
HER MAJESTY, The Queen

I

Of course it was all over when I knew them, and naturally I did not get all the story at once. There they would sit in that little upper room in Switzerland, the Queen sewing, or sometimes just sitting near the window looking at the mountain wall, always beautiful, always in the soft white wool habit, and Clotilde, the lady-in-waiting who had been her maid of honour, feeding the briquets into the tiled stove and feeling the big pitcher on top of it to see if the chill had left the water.

And Rudi, big and still handsome, perhaps trying to read, but really watching the Queen. He hated reading and he loved the Queen. She had been his religion and his creed for so long, poor Rudi. And perhaps he was not clever; only loyal and adoring, and rather tragic.

When he was not watching her he would be looking at his watch, if it were evening. And the Queen would say:

“What time is it now?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Are you certain he is coming?”

“He said so.”

“Then he will come,” the Queen would say. And she would smooth more carefully the folds of the white gown, and Clotilde would get out the old ivory chess set with its inlays of gold and place it on the table.

The whole room would take on an air of waiting and of listening. Nobody spoke much. It was as if the ears and the minds of all three of them were turned toward the street and the passage below, waiting. And then, more often than not, we would hear Toto’s ringing step on the pavement and he would be coming up the stone staircase, brisk and young.

The Queen, Rudi, Clotilde, would watch the door until it opened and he came in.

All that great story behind them, and this its climax, that Toto should come in now and then in the evenings! That he should sit there, laughing his gay young laugh, and never know that to the other three his presence was the culmination of their lives.

Rudi and Toto at the table, with the lamplight on them, and the Queen in the shadows watching them both. And perhaps Rudi leaning back complacently and saying:

“You perceive, sir, that your king is in danger?”

“Danger! Egad, sir, he is lost!”

And the Queen watching them both, hungrily.

On those evenings Clotilde would slip away and come to my room. It was the least she could do, she felt—to give them that little time alone together. Not that she said this at first. It was only little by little that she told the story, knitting all the time at Rudi’s woollen stockings and unburdening herself at the cost, I always felt, of a certain feeling of disloyalty.

But it was rather a wonderful picture she drew: the roaring of great stags at night in the forest; the feudal life of the old castle on its mountain, where priceless old brocades and tapestries blew to rags in the wind from unmended windows; where a chamberlain lighted the family to bed at night, leading the way along dark and freezing stone passages. And where the Queen, a young girl then, shut off in a shabby nursery with an English “Mees” as a governess, made her own little muslin frocks by hand and was taught four languages.

In the evenings she was brought down to the cold salon and made to play the piano for an hour while the old Duke dozed in a chair with a deerskin over his knees, and her mother listened and criticised.

“She always played very badly at those times,” said Clotilde. “Her hands were so cold and she was always frightened.”

Then, it seems, there was a half-hour’s formal conversation in one of the four languages, the grim Archduchess sitting and the little Princess standing, and after that came the chamberlain, and so to bed.

The gloom lifted a little when Clotilde came to be her maid of honour. And it lifted still further when Rudi was placed on the castle guard, the officers of which were recruited from the lesser nobility. But outside of his sixteen quarterings, whatever that may be, Rudi had exactly his good looks, six uniforms—the dress ones of white breeches, blue tunic laced with gold and high patent leather boots—one horse, a boarhound and his pay. That is, he was supposed to have his pay. The old Archduke held out on him more often than not.

So far, you see, it is quite the usual story. But even here it has its points. There was the night, for instance, after the Archduke had held a boar hunt, when the Archduchess retired in fury to her chamber and the hunting party got vastly tight. When the old Duke was safely asleep a young sprig of royalty who was with the party offered to show them a sleeping beauty upstairs and about a dozen of them started up to the Princess’s door.

“We were awake,” said Clotilde. “And we heard them coming. But the lock on the door would not work. And then we heard Rudi outside the door.”

Rudi, it seems, had nothing but a poker from the fire in the great hall, but he took up his position with it.

“Over my dead body, gentlemen!” he said rather cheerfully. He seems always to have loved a fight.

If he had on the white breeches and the blue tunic he must have been rather a fine sight, poker or no poker. And so they sneaked away again and were found the next morning asleep in all sorts of places.

“One was under the piano,” said Clotilde.

The Duke gave Rudi the back pay that was coming to him as a reward and wrote to the King about it.

“If he had never written that letter— You see, it brought her to the King’s attention. There are times, my dear, when it is best not to be brought to a king’s attention.”

And undeniably this was one of the times. Rudi and the Princess were desperately in love. Desperately and fairly hopelessly. One can imagine the state of affairs had Rudi gone to the Duke and said to him: “Sir, I desire to confer on your daughter my sixteen quarterings, six uniforms, one horse and a boar hound.”

The Princess was not sleeping at night, nor Clotilde either, and Rudi would prowl around under the windows, trying probably to pretend he was a deer, and watching for the last gleam of candlelight. And at first the Princess had thought it was Clotilde he cared for and had been quite despairing.

“But it was not me he cared for,” said Clotilde, and bent a little lower over Rudi’s woollen stocking. “It was always—the Queen.”

Sometimes I have wondered about that little middle-aged lady-in-waiting. Just what went on in her heart so long ago? What has carved the little tragic lines of repression in her cameo-like face? Just what thoughts and memories and thwartings go into those interminable stockings?

There is a photograph of Rudi in his zenith on her little chest of drawers, and once on his name day I found her burning a candle before it.

II

Up to that time nothing had been said between the lovers. In Rudi’s position it was not for him to make the first move, and the Princess was shy and uncertain. Then the King’s letter bore its first fruits, in the shape of a stout little gentleman “with pigs’ eyes.”

The Princess had been hastily put into a muslin dress with a pink sash and taken in to see him, and he had talked to her for a few minutes, appraising her all the time. She had got so nervous that she had dropped her tea-cup. The Archduchess had scolded her frightfully about it later.

“But she did not know what it was all about,” said Clotilde. “Rudi was in attendance and he suspected something, but we did not.”

I think Clotilde herself suspected Rudi of what followed. For going back to the railroad, down the mountain, the big berlin carrying the King’s envoy upset and threw the little gentleman out. There was a great to-do about it at the castle, but the beans were spilled, so to speak, and there was nothing to be done.

And within a day or two Rudi, who had had a bad fright, declared himself. The English “Mees” had a bad cold and the old people were away for the day. Rudi, it seems, simply marched up to the old schoolroom, threw open the door and stalked in. He looked first at the Princess and then at Clotilde.

“Will you allow me a moment alone with the Princess?” he said.

Clotilde got up, curtsied and went out. As she closed the door she heard Rudi, still stalking apparently, cross the room and say in a loud and desperate voice:

“If you tell me to go I shall go—by the window!”

As the window, although over a cliff, was really a sort of narrow feudal slit for archers, and as Rudi was extremely big, there seems to have been little danger. Anyhow, it was apparently not necessary for him to make the attempt. When Clotilde went back, hearing no voices, she found them in each other’s arms.

“And then?”

“I did not see much of them for a week or so. I was taken ill. But they were very happy. Like children, not looking ahead. Just—happy.”

And she had been ill! Lying in her shabby stone-floored room, with its tapestry over the door to keep out the draft, and picturing them together. Having the Princess come in now and then, glorified, to talk of Rudi. And even Rudi tiptoeing in clandestinely to press her hand and thank her. Ill, indeed.

Nothing more had been heard of the little man with the pigs’ eyes except a profound apology for the accident from the Duke and a rather irritable acceptance of it. It began to look as if the King’s eyes had been turned elsewhere for a wife, and the Duchess was most unamiable.

Then one day a photographer came to the castle and took a great many photographs of the Princess, sitting and standing, sideways and full face.

“She had a new frock for it,” said Clotilde. “The Archduchess’s maid made it. It was white tulle looped with rosebuds, and they gave her the little string of pearls she wears now. It was her first décolleté, and she was very self-conscious. But so beautiful, my dear!”

Then things began to move rather fast. Came an Ambassadress to spend a week-end.

“A terrible woman,” said Clotilde. “Tall and thin, in a red velvet draped over a green plaid. Worth had just introduced the bustle and the enormous back drapery over it, and she could only sit on the edge of a chair.”

Well, there had been a gala dinner at four in the afternoon and a ball that night, and the Ambassadress, always from the edge of her chair, watched the Princess through her pince-nez.

“She dances sweetly,” she said. “Also she has manner. Very much manner, for one so young.”

The Archduchess was extremely gratified and content, even though her own back drapery had sunk into insignificance beside the visitor’s.

The hunt was fairly in the open now, and Rudi was almost frenzied. That night after the ball, when Clotilde went back to her room, she found him there, his sabre and helmet flung on her bed, and Rudi pacing the floor.

“I was greatly alarmed,” she said. “So much gossip went on in the castle always. And then it was old and the floor boards creaked. I could hear him long before I got to my door.”

It is a curious picture; the Ambassadress and the Archduchess being disrobed somewhere, their partures being taken off—the Archduchess had had one reset for the occasion—the tight Worth dresses, so heavy that their maids could hardly lift them, being hung away, and their wearers silently plotting, dreaming; the Princess herself, too trained to submission to resist them all, perhaps standing at her window with the tulle and rosebud frock flung anywhere; and Rudi in Clotilde’s room, not caring if he roused the castle, and loudly demanding of the girl who loved him that she help him to the girl he loved.

Of course there was no answer. Clotilde, it seems, was as ignorant of the world and its ways as the Princess.

“We had been so sheltered,” she said in her quiet voice. “I had never been out on a street alone in my life. And young women were not supposed to think. A serious-minded girl had no hope of marriage in those days. Although we had heard that”—she smiled a little—“Après la sainte cérémonie tout est permis.”

She had, it seems, been rather frightened at Rudi, so hot at first, so dogged toward the end. And he said the most frightful things about the King at the top of his voice. “Things one does not speak about,” she explained, “although they were probably true.”

Much of that, I gather, went over Clotilde’s head at the time, for she and the Princess were entirely innocent. But Rudi of course was not, and the idea of selling this pearl of his into any sort of impurity had quite maddened him.

It was almost dawn when he went away. And——

“He had forgotten his sword,” she said. “When he had gone I found it lying on my bed. I hid it in my closet and a maid found it there the next day and somehow it got about. I had a really dreadful time.”

But it did one bit of good. It convinced the Archduchess that Rudi was only interested in Clotilde. She had been rather suspicious. “So long as you are here,” she said contemptuously to Clotilde, “you will not receive young men in your bedroom. After the Princess’s marriage you can go where you will and do what you like. Sell yourself or give yourself away. It is nothing to me. But until then——”

She made a rather dreadful gesture, not improved by her appearance, and Clotilde went away.

“It was bedtime,” Clotilde said, “and the Ambassadress had told her the Viennese ladies were sleeping in masks of fresh veal to improve their complexions; she was trying it.”

She was hoping, you see, after all the lean years, to go back to court again. But one can see the old Archduke, who loved a pretty woman, coming to the door of his wife’s bedroom that night and there confronting that horrible mask!

When the ambassadress went away, still in the brown Swedish gloves without which she had never been seen during the visit, it was certain that she would return a favourable report to the King. But she said a few pertinent words to the Archduchess before she left.

“She is sweetly pretty and—virginal,” she said. “But for Heaven’s sake, madame, get her some clothes. Get Worth up here, or have him send somebody.”

The Archduchess was mean about money; and she demurred.

“It is her very simplicity——”

“Fiddlesticks!” said the Ambassadress, or its equivalent. “Keep her simple, of course, but dress her. And”—she glanced at Clotilde, who was present, and lowered her voice—“get rid of that handsome what’s his name.”

“I am not worried about Rudi,” said the Archduchess, and curled her lip. She knew what she knew.

So the Ambassadress went away, carrying on her lap a new bonnet she had never had a chance to wear in that forsaken spot, and sitting well forward in the berlin to save her drapery. And somehow or other the Princess seems to have thought the affair had blown over. But not Clotilde.

“I knew,” she said. “Who would not, with King’s messengers coming and going and with Worth sending people to measure her for clothes! Such clothes, my dear! And how lovely she looked in them!”

Young unmarried women in those days, it appears, were forbidden the satins and velvets of their elders, but Worth made her lovely things as dainty and airy as herself. She had a frock of pink tulle, looped with festoons of white camellias and a white ball gown embroidered in seed pearls. And since she rode beautifully, there was a riding costume of dark blue, so tight that she had to be sewed into it every time she put it on. The tailor from the village came up to do it.

“And Rudi knew,” Clotilde said. “He was like a madman with me; with her, of course, he was all gentleness. But his eyes seemed sunk in his head and I think he slept very little.”

They managed to meet, of course. The Princess would take a book of poems and wander out into the woods—with Clotilde—and Rudi would be there. And then Clotilde would wander off by herself and leave them alone together.

“It was rather dull for you.”

“I always took some embroidery, my dear.”

But I wonder how much she sewed? I wonder if she did not, now and then, lie face down on the fallen leaves and fight back her own sorrow.

Gradually, too, the little Princess began to get frightened. They were doing over the royal suite, for one thing, and Clotilde particularly described the bedroom.

I think the dear soul still regarded it as exquisite. It appeared that the walls were sea-green, the furniture freshly gilded, a new Brussels carpet was laid down, and all the pictures had bows of yellow ribbon surmounting them.

The Princess began to be shadowed under the eyes, and when they were fitting on the new frocks she was rather frozen. And one day Clotilde, coming back to them in the woods, found Rudi’s head buried in her lap, and the Princess, with a new and older look in her eyes, smoothing his bright hair.

“They were so helpless,” she said. “We all were. They could not even run away. No priest would have married them. And what made it worse was not knowing what was going on. Nobody told her anything. All they could do was to wait.”

Then came word that the King would visit the Duke, coming more or less incognito. But as he brought four of his gentlemen, each with a servant, and four valets, the accommodations of the shabby old palace were pretty well taxed.

III

The King, after he had got his face washed, turned out to be not unprepossessing, although he was a little man and not young. At first, when he stepped out onto the usual red carpet laid at the station he had looked rather like an undersized chimney-sweep, and he had seemed rather bored.

“But he brightened up when he saw her,” said Clotilde. “I don’t mean that he ever loved her—he had somebody else, I believe—but since he had to marry, he must have felt that he was fortunate.”

Just what he thought of his suite nobody knows. He stood it for three days anyhow, hunting part of the time, with the Princess taking fences that endangered the royal neck, all sewed into her habit as she was, and Rudi undoubtedly setting a pace and praying for a casualty. But the King was game, although he sat down with great care in the evenings.

And on the evening of the third day he got down to business, in the old Archduke’s study. Things were not going as well as they should. The revolutionary party was at his heels, and he needed a good healthy rallying point for public sentiment.

“Such as—”

“Such as an heir,” said the King.

The Archduke, I believe, stated that both he and the Archduchess came of fertile stock.

“Yet you have had but the one child,” said the King.

“One may be childless without being sterile, sire,” said the Archduke dryly, and flicked a glance at his wife’s portrait over the fireplace.

They came to some sort of agreement finally and sent for the girl. And while they were waiting one of the King’s gentlemen brought in a leather case and put it on the desk. It lay there, unopened, when the Princess came in.

The Archduchess herself had overseen her dressing that night. They had put a net studded with pearls over her fair hair, and she wore the white dress trimmed with seed pearls. She had begged for a scarf to cover her arms and shoulders, for there was very little of the bodice, but the Archduchess had grimly refused. She had become a shop-woman showing the wares she had for sale.

Maybe something tugged at the Archduke’s heart-strings when he saw her, for he was rather gentle for once, and he took her by the arm.

“His Majesty has done us—done you—the great honour of asking for your hand in marriage,” he said.

“I have no wish to marry,” she said, frozen cold.

“Tut, tut!” said the Archduke. “The timidity of a young girl, sire.” And he closed his hand on her arm until she almost fainted. The King’s eyes narrowed.

“We will not hurry you,” he said with a little smile. “To-morrow, perhaps—”

The leather case still lay there unopened when they sent her out of the room. Later came the ball, and as if things were not bad enough already, when the ballroom doors were thrown open it was found that the candles in the great crystal chandeliers had melted from too much heat, and there were piles of wax stalagmites on the floor.

Sometime between night and the next morning the Princess agreed.

“What else could she do?” Clotilde said. “They gave her her choice of that or of going into a convent. And she was so young, only seventeen.”

The next day the leather case was opened and the King put over her head the great black pearl necklace in which Di Bicci later painted his famous portrait of her, swathed in rose tulle with the pearls a smoky grey rope that fell almost to her knees.

“She was like a dead creature,” Clotilde said. “But even then she believed Rudi would find some way out. But even Rudi failed her just then. Oh, only for a few hours, but it was almost more than she could bear.”

Rudi was only out trying to get himself killed. He was a good Catholic and he did not believe in suicide, but he had seen the pearls on her neck and he clearly perceived that she had, so to speak, sold him out. When he came back safe—damnably safe—Clotilde went to him with a message and he told her to go where he had been trying to go all day.

It was, one realises, not an original situation to that point; the usual arranged marriage of the courts, with a hot-eyed lover somewhere in the offing and a Princess who cries herself to sleep at night. Most of the Queens of Europe went from tears to tiaras and seemed to manage very comfortably thereafter. And after all, as has been said before, “Après la sainte cérémonie tout est permis.”

But from this point the tale varies.

The King hunted and made a little love, mostly apparently to Clotilde, whom he waylaid in upper corridors and kissed every so often, and Rudi went to confession to shrive his soul for his thought against the King and brought away a trifle of information.

“My son,” said the old priest, “between a crown and a convent, what girl of seventeen would choose the church?”

Rudi apparently digested that and then went home to study the situation. And I am quite sure, although Clotilde doubts it, that it was Rudi who planned the night visit to the Gipsy encampment. It does not sound entirely spontaneous. However that may be, it is certain that on the third and last evening of the King’s visit the entire party made an excursion to the camp not far away in an oak wood.

The Gipsies seem to have been a sad lot, living in caves, with the children naked and all of them screaming and holding out their hands for money. But the King was not squeamish and insisted on going underground. The Archduke tore his beard, no doubt, but he had to follow, and he came out later on holding his nose.

But that is not important. What does matter is that in the darkness Rudi and the Princess slipped away and were married by the Gipsy chief. A Gipsy marriage, of course, but to each of them it was a real one. Rudi never accepted any other version on it.

“It was not a real marriage in the eyes of the church, of course. But they had taken certain vows in the presence of witnesses, and of course, to them—”

They had been married “over the tongs” and the only real ceremony apparently they had conducted themselves; just taking each other for better or for worse. The Gipsies seem to have constituted witnesses mainly, and local colour. There was a man with the Princess’s handkerchief on a pole as a symbol of purity, and another sawing away violently on a fiddle, and all around were the dark-skinned women who resembled the lilies of the field only insomuch as they neither toiled, spun nor washed.

“The Gipsies thought it was a great joke, but—” Her voice trailed off. It was a moment before she resumed her sewing.

“I don’t know how you feel about it,” she said. “But when two people love like that and go through a ceremony of marriage before God, it is marriage, I think. And if you had seen their faces you would have felt as I did, that it was consecrated.”

Before the King left he had formally proposed for the Princess and the Duke had accepted. He went away, red carpet again, special train and everything, including his four gentlemen, his gentlemen’s valets and his own four. The bows were thriftily taken off the pictures, the new Brussels carpet had a dust cloth laid over it and a new era set in the old palace.

Instead of coming down now in the evenings to play the piano and be interrogated, the Princess was carefully instructed in the etiquette of the court.

“Again and again,” said Clotilde, “her mother would make her enter the room. She taught her to sit, to rise—no play was ever so rehearsed.”

She went through with it, poor lamb, waiting all the time for Rudi to perfect his plans for flight; stood while her gowns were fitted to her, so tight that she could scarcely breathe and so heavy that she wilted under them. Messengers arrived bringing the King’s gifts to her. A complete toilet service of gold and ivory was one of them, but she would never use it.

And then, on the day the date of the wedding was set and the Archduke sent for her to tell her, Rudi was thrown from his horse and broke his leg.

Everything was gone in a minute.

She had only just got the word when she was sent for. Clotilde was with her and she said:

“This is the end.”

She went down the great marble staircase, hung with its Gombaut and Macée tapestries, now in the French museum at Sainte Lô, and went into the library. There she stood, very white and trembling, while she was told.

“The date,” said the Duke, “is such and such.”

“I am sorry, father,” she said, very composed now, “I should have told you before, but—”

“But what?” said the Duke, suddenly rigid.

“I am already married.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I have told you. I have married Rudi.”

Even to Clotilde I believe the Princess never told exactly what followed. There seems to have been no noise, for there were people about, in anterooms and corridors. And for the Archduke’s excuse there is the fact that he had been about to ally himself with one of the strong kingdoms and that he needed such alliance.

But the fact remains that the Princess was carried to her room sometime later with a dislocated wrist, and that it still has the faintest possible distortion. When she was allowed to get about again, under rigid supervision, Rudi had been carried off somewhere, and later on he was sent to Africa to join a regiment there.

There never really had been a hope for them.

IV

So she married the King, being taken to him of course in a special train, and having to wear evening dress in it, although it was mid-afternoon, and bowing from the window at the cheering crowds with a forced little smile, and her swollen wrist covered with a band of tulle.

Her frock, Clotilde said, was of rose brocade shot with gold, but what with the open window and the train dust it was quite ruined by the time they arrived. The open window gave her a moment’s hope, at first. But there never was a chance to leap through it and so bring everything to a quick termination.

The Archduchess never took her eyes off her.

But even then, remember, she had no idea of the real extent of the catastrophe.

She only knew that Rudi was gone and that the church did not recognise that she had contracted any marriage with him.

“She had not even a photograph of him,” said Clotilde. “He had given her that one”—she glanced at the one on the chest of drawers—“but they took it from her. Later on I managed to get it, and I have had it ever since.”

So she was married. She had, according to Clotilde, a marvellous trousseau; a hundred fine chemises, for instance, made by hand by the peasants, and all her dresses came from Worth. There was one of rose-coloured velvet with trimmings of silver fringe that required two maids to hold while she got into it.

But there was nobody to hold the burden she carried in her heart.

So she was married again. She dragged her heavy brocade of silver and white up the aisle of the royal chapel amid that glittering crowd of jewelled and stiffly rustling women and men, and swore to do her duty by God and her King. She meant to do that. She could not love the King, but she could be loyal and faithful. And, although it was rather like murder, she could kill the thought of Rudi. Or she thought she could. But she fainted after the ceremony.

“What about Rudi?” I asked. “Didn’t he know what was going on?”

“Not until it was too late.”

He got there the next day and tried to get an audience with the King. But they kept him out, and it is doubtful if the King, from first to last, ever identified Rudi at all.

I think Rudi would have killed him that day had he seen him.

But what would have been the use? She was the Queen then; she had already faced the dreadful ritual of a royal wedding night, been undressed by her strange ladies-in-waiting, and after the King had joined her been locked in by a high official and the keys taken away.

Rudi stayed for a week, but he never even saw her, and then went on to his lonely station in Africa. He was twenty-four, and he took back the streak of snow-white hair the width of two fingers which still gives him such an odd distinction. The Queen’s father and mother left too, the old Archduke to exercise the droit de seignor over any pretty peasant girl who took his fancy and the Archduchess to write those exultant letters to various royal relatives throughout Europe, copies of which have recently appeared in various memoirs.

“She made a quite lovely bride,” she wrote in one of them to the Queen of Sweden. “So composed and still.” Still indeed! Frozen to the very marrow of her! “She went a little faint after the ceremony, but was soon her bright and happy self again.”

And in another:

“She is taking her new responsibilities very seriously, as is proper. Her confessor tells me that she spends some time each day in the chapel, at prayer. A habit, he suggests, which might be emulated to advantage by the court.”

It was dawning on her, you see; the trap was closing and she had nobody to confide in except God. They had sent Clotilde away. She had not enough quarterings, for one thing, and for another, they had always suspected her of collusion with Rudi.

This may provide a key for that other cryptic letter, written some time later by the Archduchess to the English governess, who had more or less been in the secret, and recently published in her autobiography:

“We have at last got rid of C——. Thank God! She has, I hear, gone to Africa for the benefit of her health! As R—— W—— is there, one understands, I think. I can wish neither of them a greater misery than to marry the other, but it might be a desirable solution, and at least final.”

Clotilde has never mentioned that letter to me.

It was all over, apparently. The Queen was settled in her apartment at the palace. Her drawing room was white, a cold room, but not colder or whiter than the young Queen herself. Her dining room was next, a lofty circular room of red marble and black columns, and there the King dined with her occasionally, but less and less often as the weeks went by.

“He liked gaiety, you see,” said Clotilde, “and she could not be gay, although she tried. She puzzled him, I think. After a while he grew morose and when the meal was over he used to lean back and watch her. Not talking, you know. Just watching. Then, if she trembled, it irritated him.”

And around these two the stealthy life of the court, watching and whispering; maids of honour, courtiers, ushers, lackeys. All the ancient panoply, plush and gewgaws and curtsies and hand-kissing; the King with a private exit by which he slipped out to lead his secret man’s life, and the Queen under increasing espionage, and by that time carrying her dreadful secret.

She turned to the church for comfort and at last she confessed to her private chaplain.

“He was aghast,” said Clotilde. “He seems not to have known what to do. He prayed all of one night before the altar—an old man, too—and in the end he told her not to tell the King.”

One can see that old priest, too, I think, stretched on the cold stones and later going perhaps to his bishop. Heads together, weighing as well as praying; the very survival of the state perhaps at stake, and two old men divided between their God and their country.

And the King, disappointed and suspicious of he knew not what. A little man, vain and arrogant, accustomed to reach out and take what he wanted, and now finding that the spirit of this simple girl was as elusive as before he married her. Even jealous of the fact that her slim height made him seem shorter. Made him, if one can understand, a little less the King.

“He always walked a step or so ahead of her and it made her feel very awkward and very alone,” said Clotilde.

On gala evenings, then, the brilliant assembly: women in satins and brocades—the tiny waists, sharply defined busts and heavy draperies of the period—hung with jewels, watching and waiting; men in uniforms and orders; the famous throne-room with its great paintings and its dozen of glittering crystal chandeliers; and then the Groom of the Chambers throwing wide the doors and the entrance of the royal party, the King, small, cold and suspicious, just a little ahead of the Queen!

And somewhere in Africa Rudi staring at the northern stars.

It was after such a night that the Queen fainted again, falling with a crash against her enormous dressing-table, laden with glittering glass and gold, and receiving the little triangular scar on her forehead which she still tries to cover with her soft hair.

And soon after that it was announced to the King by the court physicians that the Queen would bear him a child.

It is impossible to convey the delicacy with which Clotilde told me that this expected heir to the throne, so loudly heralded, so politically vital, was not the King’s child, but Rudi’s. . . .

“If she had only let me know!” Clotilde said. “You see, I went to Africa that winter and I—saw Rudi. I could have told him and we might have thought of something. I believe she asked for me, but the King did not approve of my coming to her.”

Perhaps it is not fair to read between the lines. Perhaps Clotilde did go to Africa because of “trouble in her chest.” But I think she went out of a great hunger, to see Rudi again. Why not? After all, the Queen was lost to him, and he was young. They were all so pitifully young.

But Rudi was changed.

“He was very thin,” she said, “and so bitter! I cannot tell you how bitter. And he seemed somehow to have turned against me too. I only saw him once.” She hesitated. “No, I saw him twice, my dear. Why should I not tell you that? It is all so long ago, and I think he was a little mad at that time.”

It seems, then, that she saw Rudi at the hotel one morning, where he had come from his post out in the desert. He seemed to have been brooding, and he would not hear the Queen’s name at all.

“He had been too much alone, with the natives,” Clotilde explained. “He wasn’t even very tidy and—he had been drinking, I think.”

But there was no doubt that he had been drinking later on. Toward evening she received a scrawl from him telling her to come to a certain little square in the native quarter that night and receive a message for the Queen. She went, accompanied by her maid, and they found the square filled with howling, singing and dancing men and women, and in a cleared space, between two beating drums, Rudi sitting cross-legged on a mat.

His eyes were bloodshot and he had a lamp and a candle burning in front of him.

Clotilde edged her way near him and said clearly: “You are to come back with me, Rudi. Back to the hotel. This is no place for you.”

“It’s a good place. A damn fine place,” he said thickly.

“But you have a message for her, haven’t you?” she coaxed.

“I had a message, but I forget it,” he muttered. “Ah, yes!” He waved a hand at the frenzied crowd. “This is the message. Go back and tell her of my marriage feast. It may lack the resplendence of hers, but it has its points. It has its points.”

And at that moment a huge black woman decked out in silver bangles and beads came out of a house, followed by a crowd of yelling women, and came toward him.

The drums blared and the people shrieked with laughter. Clotilde turned away sick at heart, and made her way back to the hotel. But before she got there Rudi had followed her and caught her by the arm. He was not drunk any longer.

“If you tell her that I’ll kill you,” he said.

“Where’s your woman?”

“I don’t know,” he said wearily. “I never saw her before.”

He made no further explanation. At the hotel he got his horse, and the last she saw of him he was riding hell for leather down the narrow street and toward the desert.

V

It is curious to see how the old Archduke played his part in the story and went on, ignorant that he had contributed to it. But he had left his mark on the child and that had its consequences.

“You remember that he had hurt her severely in his anger,” said Clotilde. “Men think their evil deeds die with them, my dear, but they do not. When the baby came it had the red imprint of his fingers on its wrist—oh, very distinct. If you were to look now—”

But otherwise this heir to the throne, prematurely born seven months after the royal marriage, was quite beautiful.

“A true love-child,” Clotilde said gently. “Have you noticed that? One can always tell the babies born in love, I think.”

And its birth changed two people.

The King, who was one of them, became quite a different person. He scarcely left the Queen’s bed-chamber for the first three days. He would come in, send away the nuns and the ladies who happened to be in attendance, and sit by her great bed for an hour at a time. Not talking. Just watching her and the child, and sometimes going to the window and gazing out complacently at the bunting and flags which draped the public square before the palace in honour of the event.

He seemed at least a foot taller at that time, too.

But it had also changed the Queen. Up to that time she had been rather like a dazed child, trapped by forces she did not even understand. But the birth had turned her into a woman.

“It does that, you see,” Clotilde explained. “Have you noticed it, my dear? Even the expression of the face is often changed.”

The more gentle he was with her the more she felt the wickedness, priest or no priest, of going on with it. But she prayed fairly steadily to die so she need not tell him.

“I think,” the King would say, judicially, surveying the infant, “that he will favour my side of the family,” or words to that effect. And all the time she could see Rudi in him; Rudi’s bent little finger, Rudi’s bright hair, Rudi’s square jaw and even the promise of Rudi’s height. He was a “long” baby.

Apparently it never entered her head not to tell him. Out of this new maturity of hers had come the conclusion that none of them could go on living a lie. She would take the child and go away somewhere, anywhere, so long as she had the boy. Perhaps they could find Rudi, and after the King had divorced her—

Strange to think how little, after all that time, she knew the King. How she failed to consider the monstrous vanity of the man. For she waited three days trying to get strength for the ordeal, and then it was too late.

It was on the third day that the great public rejoicing took place. The town and the kingdom was in carnival, and in the afternoon there was a military procession with the booming of cannon from the fortress. Then the troops were drawn up in front of the palace, and the King, in uniform and wearing all his orders, carried the baby out onto a balcony while the bands played the national hymn.

It was when the King came back in, flushed with triumph, and placed the child beside her, that she found the courage to tell him.

“He stood by the bed and listened,” Clotilde said. “The crowds outside were still cheering and the bands playing. She thought he was going to kill her, and she kept the child close to her for fear he might hurt it. But he never even spoke. When she had finished he turned and went out without a word.”

No hand will ever penetrate the veil of the next few hours. The King, Clotilde has somehow learned, shut himself into his library alone at first, and one can fancy him there, pacing the floor and stopping now and then to glance over the place, still filled with carnival figures, pierrots and pierrettes dancing, grotesque papier-mâché animals on floats, banners, confetti. Even little dogs in ballet frills.

All the rejoicing going on, and he, the King, a cuckold.

Later he got in the court physicians and the Prime Minister, and sometime that night the old Archduke was located at his hunting lodge, and brought to the palace in his hunting clothes and a state of wild alarm.

“Two days later,” Clotilde said in her quiet voice, “the court physicians announced that the Queen’s condition was not satisfactory, and it was whispered about the court that her mind was affected. Within a month they took her to the summer palace in the mountains, and later she was sent, carefully guarded, to Italy. By that time all of Europe believed that she was permanently—not sane.”

But the King kept the child.

One can see his problem, I think. The cheers of his subjects still ringing in his ears; the sight of him with his heir, proud and exultant on his balcony, still fresh in their minds. And as he frantically paced his library, the issue growing clearer. He could kill the child or put him away, and that must have been his first thought, or with the assistance of Rome he could annul the marriage and marry again. But that meant a declaration of his own infamous situation, and his pride rebelled.

He compromised in the end, as better men had done before him. His throne was not too secure at the best; already were symptoms of the revolt which later overwhelmed him. The possession of an heir gave him strategic advantage.

And he may have believed her not sane. Her very confession, so suicidal, so inexplicable from any point of view but her own, must have seemed almost irrational. Indeed, Clotilde says she believes he would have discredited the story entirely, laid it to one of those temporary manias which occasionally follow childbirth, had not the chief court physician, after dutifully insisting that the child was premature, gone off and blown out his brains.

But whatever he may have believed or known, he did the one thing the girl queen had never anticipated, sent her away and kept her child. But always he hated him.

Clotilde has a confidential letter, written to her by an English governess when Toto, as he was familiarly called, was six.

“He is very bright and active,” she wrote. “But so lonely. Once a day he sees the King, but only for a few minutes. And I think his Majesty is rather severe; the discipline is military, and he has more to learn than is good for so young a child. However—”

VI

Clotilde had gone back to her father’s shabby old castle, and her first knowledge of the tragedy was through a visit from the Archduchess. She stalked in, long, lank and grey of face. Dirty, too, for she had travelled six hours by post-chaise, urging the coachman until the horses almost dropped. She put Clotilde’s mother out of the room with a gesture and confronted the frightened girl.

“You!” she said. “You wanton! Wantons both of you, living your dirty little lives under my roof!”

“No, madame,” Clotilde stammered. “I assure you—”

Great ladies sometimes allow themselves very coarse speech, and the Archduchess launched into quite imprintable language. In the end, however, she stalked to a mirror, straightened her bonnet with a jerk, and without waiting for a bell to be rung, went to the door.

“From now on,” she said, “I have no daughter. She can die and rot. I shall never recognise her again.”

And she did not.

She died two years later, leaving the Archduke surprisingly disconsolate. Clotilde, hearing she was dying, tried to see her beforehand to have her rescind that bitter ultimatum.

“But when I got there it was over,” she said. “She was lying in the chapel, very majestic, with a pall of purple velvet and ermine laid over her and six of her ladies keeping vigil, all in long black veils and holding candles. I relieved one of them who was faint and I had to stand perfectly still for six hours.”

One can see Clotilde standing there, I think, the light from the candles flickering on the dead woman’s white face, and Clotilde’s mind hopelessly circling; Rudi, the queen, the child, the dead woman. A cold air numbing her, her veil stirring, the candles flickering and—Rudi, the queen, the child, the dead woman. Over and over.

There may have been just a bit of hope still in her heart at that time. The lovers were so hopelessly separated, and Rudi was still young and vital. She would fight it back, of course. She may only have prayed as she stood there for surcease of suffering. So many women pray, not for happiness but for an end of misery. But to stand there and think that this was the end all must reach, and not even hope to live before dying.

Later on she wrote to Rudi.

“But he had heard of the Queen’s malady and he was very ill in a hospital. Somehow or other the letter never reached him.”

She does not say, but I rather think Rudi was under pretty careful espionage at the time. The wonder is that they let him live. However that may be, the failure of Rudi to reply gave the last blow to Clotilde’s always faint hope.

She made the only decision she felt was possible and chose the gentlewoman’s retreat from the sorrows of the world. She entered a convent.

“I do not know that I had any vocation,” she said thoughtfully. “But I had lived through a great deal and I wanted peace. Perhaps it was not a worthy motive.” Her voice lapsed for a moment. “But you see, I took my troubles in with me and there was too much time to think.”

Toward the end of her novitiate, however, she seems to have attained a sort of peace. Certainly by the time she emerged she had almost achieved that selflessness which has carried her on ever since. For she did emerge.

That in itself is a story. One can see how this narrative becomes a series of small scenes like a play, each leading on with a certain inevitability to the next, and all of them to that quiet curtain of the chess game in the sitting room, and to what, that night, was to follow.

There was a nun in the convent, a Sister Maria. Clotilde often found her watching her, and now and then they talked. Then one night Sister Maria came to her cell.

“I cannot sleep,” said the Sister. “I hardly ever sleep now, and the reason I cannot sleep is that I have a sin on me.”

“A sin?” said Clotilde. “But surely not!”

“A sin,” said Sister Maria. “One who acquiesces in a wickedness is likewise wicked. And I have acquiesced.”

Then she told Clotilde that she had been with the Queen during her accouchement, and that the Queen was sane.

Clotilde followed the earlier example of the palace chaplain and spent the rest of that night face down on the cold floor of the chapel before the altar. When she arose in the morning her last battle was fought. Not that she said this.

“I prayed for help and guidance,” was what she said. “And I received it.”

She left the convent soon after, drew her small patrimony from the bank, wrote to Rudi and then betook herself to Italy, where she rented a little house not so far from the Queen’s villa and settled herself to her vigil.

It lasted exactly three years.

VII

The Queen was just past eighteen when they sent her to that dreary villa in Italy, a damp cold place, with its tattered gold and rose papers fairly hanging from the walls, and its sparse furnishing and stone floors.

So far as any one could tell, life was over for her. She was surrounded by obsequious jailers who never let her pass the high wall of the garden, and although she wrote letters, none were ever sent out.

One day she found the little wooden box which now lies on her bedside table, and it became her treasure-house.

“She cut out and kept every scrap she could find in the newspapers about her baby,” said Clotilde. “They are there now, in that box. Some of them are quite worn with much handling.”

She never found any mention of Rudi.

After a time, to save herself from madness, she began to keep a journal, and it was found and published anonymously later by the Countess of B——, who had been in attendance on her. In one place she says:

“What must really matter is to remember rather than to be remembered; to love rather than to be loved. Anything else is selfish. As for the loneliness, are we not always alone? That seems to be the great struggle each human heart makes, to bridge to another heart, no matter how close, the unbridgeable gulf that lies between them.”

And she was nineteen!

But again the journal is more intimate.

“Orange trees and climbing jessamine, and the garden flooded with sunlight to-day. Even I, who am dead, feel the life that is around me outside these walls.”

“I do not weep any more. I must not send waves of wretchedness out into the world, lest they somehow touch and depress them. Another press cutting this morning, which has cheered the day.”

And then an unintelligible line or two, to the uninitiated: “She would make him happy, because she loves him. I think I knew that before she did. But have I courage enough to bear it?”

Clotilde has never mentioned that journal.

So one can see them all at that time; the old Archduke sitting alone in his dingy library, fingering his beard and staring at the picture of his dead wife on the wall, faithful to her now that it was too late; the King, fighting revolution and pinning his faith on an heir who daily signalled to him his own infamy; Rudi in a sun-baked African garrison, fighting like a devil when there was fighting on, and drinking himself into forgetfulness in the intervals; Clotilde trying to hold to that peace of God she had found, throwing useless little notes cut into apples over the villa wall; and the Queen searching the papers and journals for some news of her lover and her child, and when she found them hoarding them in the little wooden box.

There is a very definite picture of the Queen at that time. Cut off from the world, she had assumed the attitude and more or less the habit of a nun.

“She wore always the same thing, a trailing habit of soft white wool, high in the neck and with long loose sleeves. And over her hair—you know how lovely it is—she often wore a long white veil, peasant fashion. She seemed to think she ought to hide it. I don’t know why.”

Sometime during her imprisonment came the word that the little Crown Prince was dying. She got that too out of the newspapers, for it is to be remembered always that the King still preserved, possibly even to himself, that fiction of her insanity. Probably she was more nearly insane during that illness of her baby’s than ever before or since.

There is just one entry in her journal in the month that covered it, and it is dateless.

“If he dies, I shall kill myself.”

But sometime during that month occurred that strange incident of which the journal makes no record.

She ran away and went to the capital.

Vigilance had relaxed at the villa, and somehow at night she got out. She took a train at the station, a veiled and slender figure, and was on her way before the alarm was raised.

“She had to pass my house to do it,” Clotilde said. “So many things happen like that in life. Friends are close at hand, and we keep looking past them and far away.”

Once at the capital she drove to the palace. Not to the main entrance, but to that small private one which the King used for his own purposes.

“The sentry was very much frightened when she raised her veil,” Clotilde explained. “But after all she was the Queen. He let her in, crossing himself because the peasants are afraid of the insane, and she went directly up the stairs.”

It was early. Save for a few servants who gathered into whispering groups, nobody saw her, and she went unmolested to the Crown Prince’s suite. Outside the anteroom were doctors and nurses, the cardinal and the Prime Minister. She never looked at them, but passed straight through, and a sort of stricken silence followed her.

The King, you see, was in the anteroom alone. He had been with the child all night, not so much watching a little life ebb away as his own power, his very throne.

He would not let her pass. She prayed and wept, for she was frantic, but he listened unmoved, and as soon as he could get help he had her taken away. The newspapers never printed that story, and the sole result was a redoubled watch on her at the villa after that.

It was on the very day that the Crown Prince was pronounced out of danger that Rudi appeared again.

It was a warm night, and Clotilde had thrown a lace shawl about her and gone into the garden. The air was heavy with magnolia, and—

“I had just been thinking about him, my dear. It was so long since I had heard”—when she saw a man in the roadway, staring up at the Queen’s villa. He was perfectly motionless when she first saw him, but then he made some sort of vague despairing gesture and there was something familiar about it.

“Rudi!” she said, and had to steady herself by the magnolia tree. He came closer and recognised her.

She must have been a lovely young thing that night in her garden, with the lace scarf over her head and the magnolia lighted like stars above her. And Rudi came closer and said in an incredulous voice:

“Clotilde! But surely—”

“It is Clotilde,” she said in a shaken voice.

He took both her hands.

“It seems to me I’ve been looking all over the world for you,” he said.

She must have thrilled to that for a moment, must have had an instant of hope. But it was gone the next second, for he said:

“I might have known you would never desert her.”

But—mark this—he did not know the Queen was sane. Nor that the little Prince was his own child, and Clotilde did not tell him either until the next morning.

“He was so haggard,” is what she said. “He went back to the inn in the village after a time, and I had to think of how to break the news to him.”

It was much more than that, poor Clotilde. Just by keeping silent what might not have happened? Soft Italian skies and early spring gardens, and Rudi lonely and desperate, reaching out to any friendly hand.

“I did not go to bed at all,” was all she said.

By dawn she must have decided, for very early she sent him a note and they had breakfast together. That little touch of intimate life must have pretty well broken down her resolve. One can figure her giving him his morning coffee, and maybe just managing to touch his fingers as she did so, and Rudi perhaps saying:

“Quite like husband and wife, eh what?” or his equivalent of it.

But mostly Rudi staring at the villa above with a hurt and puzzled look.

Later on she told him the young Queen was sane, and a prisoner. He was the old fighting Rudi then, as mad as the man who had staged that mock wedding in the desert town. He knocked over a chair and was for killing the King outright. She could not get in a word.

“But I’ll take his throne away first,” he roared. “I’ll put him in the mud and trample on him. I’ll—”

“I wonder if you will,” she said quietly. Her tone made him turn and look at her.

“Why not?” he said, more quietly.

“Why do you think he has put her away?”

“He never had any right to her. She was my wife.”

“Rudi,” she said, leaning forward, “why has the little Crown Prince the mark of the Archduke’s fingers on his wrist?”

Then he knew.

VIII

The knowledge of his fatherhood did to Rudi what motherhood had done to the Queen. It matured and sobered him.

“He came a boy and went away a man,” Clotilde put it. “You see, he was trapped like the rest of us. There was of course no hope of ever getting the boy, and to try to overthrow the King was only to risk the child’s life.”

But he began almost fiercely to plot the Queen’s release.

He was no fool, was Rudi. He could stand—and did—at Clotilde’s window for hours, staring at the villa and yearning passionately for the girl imprisoned there. But another part of his brain was acutely active and he began to pin his faith on the Archduke.

“After all, he was her father,” Clotilde explained. “And he had been a violent man, but not so bitter as her mother.”

Rudi, however, found the old man quite gently demented; inclined, she intimated, to horrid reminiscence and quite shocking tales, and always listening for fear the dead Archduchess would hear him. He did not remember Rudi at all.

“He sat there pulling hair out of his head—he had it quite bare in places—and every now and then he would look up at the Archduchess’s picture and then he would whisper.”

That door was closed in Rudi’s face.

So it came finally to a simple question of abducting the Queen. It is rather a long story. Clotilde, too, complicated it by telling what clothing she got ready for her, peasant garments, “but new, of course,” she explained. And it seems Clotilde herself made the underwear, by hand.

Rudi came and settled himself at Clotilde’s cottage, taking her and her moral support very much for granted and seeming to have been as conscious of her as of a comfortable old shoe. He seems not even to have confided his plans to her entirely. He came and went, smoking an old pipe, littering the place generally in masculine fashion and walking his floor long hours at night so that she could not sleep.

But he was hers for that little time. I think she was supremely happy.

“Having him there made a great difference,” was what she said. “I had not cared what I wore for a long time, but I sent to Rome for some clothes and tried to dress cheerfully. He needed brightening.”

And one of the dresses he must have noticed and admired, for Clotilde had kept a piece of it. A white damask with soft pink roses woven through it.

“I had such a pretty hat to go with it,” she said reflectively. “I suppose it would look very queer now. Hats change so.”

Eventually they got her away, and when the search reached their villa there was nobody there but a surprised lady and gentleman, one sewing and the other reading, and a dark-skinned peasant woman in the kitchen cutting up vegetables for soup.

The peasant woman was the Queen.

“The reunion must have been very touching.”

Clotilde sat still and stared out.

“There was no reunion in the sense you mean.” She bent a little lower over her work. “There never—has been, my dear.”

Ah! now, I think, one sees the poignancy of that group in the other room. One realises why the Queen never sets foot in the tidy, barrack-like little room which is Rudi’s, and why Rudi’s face from nose to lip is carved with deep lines of repression. Perhaps even why the Queen still wears her nun-like habit of white wool.

All those years together and only once, after that first night of her rescue, had Rudi even so much as put his arms about her. And then she was not conscious of them.

The priests, you see, had convinced her of sin.

She must have been very pitiful that night of the rescue, with Rudi holding out his hungry arms and she drawing back from them.

“I cannot, Rudi.”

“But you are my wife.”

“I was never your wife.”

“Before God, yes. My wife, and the mother of my child.”

“Which was born in sin, Rudi.”

Perhaps he could have won her even then, but Rudi himself was in a strange state. Those months with the King, so unimportant to her, began to rise between them like a wall once he had got her again. He was insanely jealous of them.

He even at one time laid her attitude to him to love for the King.

“She would go back to him to-morrow,” he told Clotilde.

“Never, Rudi.”

After their first flight, to Vienna—for of course there was the secret hunt for the Queen and a thousand fears and false alarms—when they were settled in a cheap little flat, he added to that jealousy a comparison of what he could give her to what she had from the King. He would not let Clotilde spend a sou on the establishment.

“Why don’t you go back to him?” he demanded brutally one night, when she was sitting like a crushed lily in those dingy surroundings. “He’s tired of the Olga, I hear.” The Olga had been the outside interest for some time. “He could make you comfortable anyhow. I can’t.”

“You would be happier without me, Rudi, wouldn’t you?” she asked wistfully.

“Oh, God, no!” he said, and flung out of the room.

The children who had resorted to the desperate expedient of the Gipsy marriage were gone, you see, and instead here were a man and a woman, passionately loving, held together and yet infinitely separated.

It was that night, later on, that the Queen brought in the wooden box and placed it on the table before him. He lifted the lid and looked inside. Then he put his head down on the table and cried like a child.

Things were better after that.

They could not be husband and wife and they would not be lovers. But when the strain on Rudi became too severe, when his bitterness at what life had done to him made him morose even to the two devoted women, the Queen had her remedy.

She would go and get the wooden box and they would sit for hours over the newspaper cuttings about the little Crown Prince. An oil lamp burning, and Clotilde gone to bed, and those two bent together over the scraps which were all they had of their child.

IX

So far they had been able to hide themselves completely. Rudi read the papers in a small coffee-house on the Kochgasse and had found a position doing clerical work in a factory making glassware.

But the longing for his old kind was strong. One evening he sought a larger coffee-house, frequented by the smart Austrian officers, on the Kaerntnerstrasse, and put down his newspaper to see sitting at his table watching him the little envoy with the pigs’ eyes.

“So!” said the little man. “We meet again, sir.”

“I have not had the pleasure, I think,” Rudi said stiffly.

“Let me refresh your memory, then,” said the little man, watching him intently. And was quite explicit.

“Who then,” he went on, “would have foreseen the great tragedy to follow! So young and lively a girl, and apparently so—sane.”

“Yes,” said Rudi, with stiff lips.

The little man leaned over and lowered his voice, still watching warily.

“There are rumours of an escape,” he said. “From Italy. But doubtless you, as one of her oldest friends, have already heard it.”

“I am but recently returned from Africa,” Rudi observed, and calling the Kellner paid his bill.

“Very soon, however,” said Clotilde, “he realised that he was followed. He did not dare to go home. But he had not fought in Africa for nothing, and finally he threw them off.”

They fled to England, and from that time on life was a series of alarms and escapes. In London, for instance, the Queen met the Ambassadress of the velvet tunic over plaid face to face on the street. The enormous drapery at the back had given way to the pinched-in waist and padded hips of that period, and the mass of wadding, topped with a tiny bonnet, stood like a quivering wall before her.

“You need not deny your identity, madame,” said the Ambassadress. “I have had too much misery through you to forget your face.”

“I deny nothing,” said the Queen haughtily, “except your right to detain me on the street.”

She went on, leaving the creature staring after her, but quite sick herself with terror and shock. And as soon as possible they slipped out of England to the Continent again . . .

The old Archduke died. He sat in his bed propped up with pillows and saw the Archduchess come in the door to fetch him.

“I’m quite ready, my dear,” he said. “Why should a man live on when his bowels have turned to jelly?” He chuckled, and held out a skinny hand. “I’ve missed you, my dear,” he said. “But don’t look so damned beatific. It isn’t natural.”

Then he died and all his money went to distant relatives. The Queen, of course, could not touch it. They were very poor.

But aside from all this was their own inner problem; each trying to fight down the love for the other. There was a day when Rudi, desperate, came and stood before the Queen and said he was going away.

“I can’t go on,” he said doggedly. “I have loved no other woman in my life and there will be no other. But either you are my wife or you are not.”

“What was marriage to us was not marriage to the church,” she said, very pale.

“If you believe that, you believe that our boy is—”

“Oh, no!” she cried, and could only avoid that issue by pleading with him to stay.

Rudi, poor devil, stayed on, and at the end of three years one bit of comfort came to at least two of them. It was announced that the Queen had died at her villa in Italy and the court entered into a period of mourning.

Clotilde entered her room one morning in Brussels to find her staring at the announcement of her own death.

“I am twenty-four, Clotilde,” she said, “and I am dead.” Then she broke into terrible weeping. “My baby thinks I am dead,” she said. “My baby thinks I am dead . . .”

She had not seen the boy since the day the King had brought him in from the balcony, and for six years she had fed on the husks she could gather from the press. All that time a craving just to see him had been growing in her.

“She asked very little,” Clotilde said softly. “She could never hold him or even touch him, and she knew that. But just to see him—I cannot tell you how she yearned to see him.”

And finally Rudi agreed that they should make the attempt.

They chose the day of the boy’s seventh birthday, when he was to ride through the capital in an open carriage with the King. They left Brussels one rainy morning by train, the Queen heavily veiled and Rudi with a soft hat to pull down over his face. For once Clotilde was not with them. They were making their pitiful pilgrimage alone.

“Perhaps you did not know Europe before the war,” said Clotilde. “But such events were gala occasions. The buildings were decorated and the streets were always crowded. There was great public rejoicing.”

They found, it seems, a good position near a lamp-post and waited.

Finally there came into sight the King’s own regiment of hussars, and following that the lancers of the Crown Prince. Then the palace guards, and after that the carriage containing the King and Crown Prince.

The boy was standing in the carriage, bowing and smiling, looking about with Rudi’s eyes, smiling Rudi’s smile. And on his left arm he wore a band of mourning!

Rudi put his arm around the Queen to steady her. And the carriage went on.

X

All this time the Queen had been known as Rudi’s wife. It simplified things in their roving lives. And it was as Madame W—— that I first met her in London. She gave me French lessons, coming daily to my apartment at Claridge’s. She was extraordinarily beautiful, even in the plain black she wore for the street, and she had a curious habit of fingering and occasionally staring at the only ornament she ever wore, an amethyst cross on a fine gold chain.

That was during the period when Rudi and Clotilde were hunting her all over Europe.

I suppose there comes a time when every woman questions the love that surrounds her, when tenderness and self-sacrifice seem merely kindness and tolerance, when motives appear twisted and even a caress can be felt a betrayal.

And the Queen was a woman now. She knew that Rudi was leading an unnatural life and she seems to have brooded over it. While Rudi had taken Clotilde for granted, the Queen could so take neither of them any longer. The thought that Rudi was giving her everything and she giving nothing in exchange grew increasingly bitter to her.

When I met her she had run away.

“She had begun to feel she was a burden,” was Clotilde’s explanation. “She could not see that she was our universe. And then”—she glanced at me—“you know how women are. She thought if she went away Rudi could claim his father’s estate and marry me.”

And there had been a precipitating cause at the end. Clotilde had been “silly enough” to have a crying spell over something or other, and Rudi had become sufficiently conscious of her for the moment to try to comfort her.

“He put his arm around me, as a brother would,” she explained. “But she happened to come to the door just then and—she went away that night.”

So the Queen taught me French, and Rudi agonised again. It was during this interval, I believe, that he entered into the conspiracy to overthrow the King, but seems never to have gone very far with it; it was more an outpouring of his hate of the King than any political conviction.

But her flight brought about a curious meeting, and I was an unconscious witness to it.

She left it to me to choose the subject for the day and I idly selected the royal wedding at Windsor.

“One wonders,” I said, in my laborious French, “whether these marriages are ever truly happy. They can know so little of each other.”

Her face set somewhat.

“Some adapt themselves. Others perhaps—cannot.”

“The King of —— is at Windsor,” I struggled on, “but his entourage is here. Also the little Crown Prince.”

“Here!” she said, and slowly got to her feet. “Here!”

“Across the hall.”

She went to the window and stood looking out on that vista of dingy slate roofs and old chimneys which the upper floors of Claridge’s offer to its guests, and when she turned around I could see that she was oddly pale.

“A long time ago,” she said, “I—knew the Crown Prince as a baby. If I could only see him now—”

“He is in and out quite often.”

“Would you mind if I leave the door a little open? I could sit here quietly and—if it would not disturb you, mademoiselle.”

There was no more French lesson. I think she had quite forgotten why she came. I was—Heaven forgive me—a trifle amused and maybe a bit bored. All week I had seen the London crowds trampling and crushing to catch a glimpse of visiting royalties. I had seen Madame Tussaud’s almost mobbed while a group of maids of honour inside had visited the waxworks. And now my lesson was ended.

She sat, her hands clenched in her lap, and bent a bit forward. During a half hour or so she did not move at all. And at last at dusk we heard the elevator and a boyish voice and clatter coming along the hall. She got up then and the boy came in sight.

“Toto!” she said softly.

The boy stopped and peered into the darkness of the room.

“Somebody called me,” he said to the tutor who accompanied him.

“Nobody called you.”

“It said ‘Toto,’ ” the child insisted.

She stood, her whole body tense, but she did not speak again, and then the tutor opened the door across and took the boy inside. When I turned from lighting the lamps she had closed the door and stood fingering and staring at the little cross.

“Shall we have the lesson to-morrow at the usual time, madame?” I asked.

“The lesson?” she said vaguely. “Ah, yes, of course. If the hour is convenient to you.”

But there never was another lesson. Later on, years later, I was to learn from Clotilde that she was run down that night in the crowd at Oxford Circus and very badly hurt. Maybe it was an accident—suicide was a mortal sin to her—but it may not have been. The closing of that door across the hall had been too significant; just a good substantial door, like everything in Claridge’s, but its quiet closing had somehow spelled finality.

But when she thought she was dying she sent for Rudi.

“And he saved her,” Clotilde said. “You see, he promised her the boy.”

XI

Rudi, I have explained, was not subtle. He was a soldier, a lover and a gentleman, but that was all. His plan was simplicity itself; with the revolution under way, he and his group would abduct the Crown Prince into Switzerland, hide him there, and later Rudi would take him to America.

And the plan served its immediate purpose for under its stimulus the Queen began to recover. That, and the full knowledge of Rudi’s love and loyalty.

“He hardly ever left the nursing home,” Clotilde said. “And he brought her the most amusing things he could find. One was a set of lead soldiers. He fought all sorts of battles on the counterpane. He was always such a boy.”

Ah, and such a soldier, too! One wonders a little about Rudi in those years, when he had neither Clotilde’s refuge of tears nor the Queen’s of flight. His profession gone and Rudi quietly accepting it, but keeping his shoulders back and his mind untarnished nevertheless, and playing lead soldiers to ease the double pain in his heart.

Things were a little easier after the Queen went back. Rudi had his revolutionary plans at night after his day’s work was over, and the Queen had her hope.

But when occasionally she forgot and put her hand on his arm over some map or plan, he would make an excuse and move away. There was a wall between them neither of them dared to break ever so little. It was like a dam in which the smallest leak might precipitate a catastrophe.

Just what would have happened had the revolution not hung fire nobody can say. But it was held off for one reason or another for a long time, and when it finally came—

“It was too late,” Clotilde said.

“Toto was a man.”

“Partly that.” She had finished the stocking and she laid it on her knee and smoothed it with her delicate hand. “It is like this: When a young man, raised to a throne, is turned out into the world, he meets with many temptations. Against them he has only one thing.”

“And that?”

“The pride of birth,” she said slowly. “The traditions that lie behind a long line of kings. It is a sort of noblesse oblige.” She smiled faintly. “When he came here, into exile, how could they tell him?”

They had never thought of that.

All those years of planning and waiting, with hope growing a little fainter as time went on and the boy grew up. But still the thought that some day he would come, and understand, and perhaps be eager for the love they offered him, since he had had no love at all before. And now this!

Ironical too that the thing which kept them from him was his only vital heritage from the King!

He never knew of Rudi’s part in the revolution, but it is doubtful if he would have held it against him. He had entered the university and he seemed to have no regrets at all for his lost throne.

Clotilde mentioned the first time Rudi brought him to them.

The Queen had been very white, very composed, making her little bow to him. And he had stood tall and straight and so like Rudi, filling the room with his vital youth and smiling at these three people who had sacrificed their lives to him.

“It is good of you to allow me to come, madame,” he said to the Queen. “I have known little enough of homes, but this is surely one.”

He and Rudi were immensely chummy from the start. They took long walks together, Rudi not a step behind for all his years. But there were times when Rudi disappeared, and Clotilde, and left the Queen to have her boy for an hour or so alone.

He began to bring her his little troubles, boy-fashion.

“My father was never fond of me,” he said to her once. “And I never knew my mother. You don’t mind if I make one of you, do you?”

How young they all were together! For remember, she was still in her thirties, and Rudi a scant forty. And how she bloomed under happiness, discarded the white wool garments for the things of this world, indeed, Toto declared could have passed as his sweetheart; was his sweetheart; and dared Rudi to contest his claim!

All this time the King was playing in Paris, driving in the Bois every afternoon with a gardenia in his buttonhole and smirking at pretty women. The Russian Olga had followed him there and was sharing such of his leisure and the crown jewels as she could get hold of, neither of which was a great deal.

And then suddenly came the blow to them of a movement to replace Toto on the throne. Things were going badly with the new republic. That very night while we talked the matter was in all their minds.

“What has he decided?” I asked Clotilde.

“Nothing yet. But I think he will go back.”

She sighed. The interlude would soon be over. Once again they would live their drab lives; no Toto to come leaping up the stairs, to kiss the Queen’s hand and impudently chaff Rudi; no loud laughter; no little preparations for supper, being sure to have plenty for a hungry boy.

Clotilde’s mind must have followed mine, for she put down her knitting and rose.

“It must be time to put on the kettle,” she said, and disappeared into the shining little tiled kitchen beyond, where copper pans hung on the wall and a platter of cold sliced meats stood ready.

An unfinished story, you see, up to that moment, with Clotilde bustling in the kitchen and Rudi and Toto bent over the chess game. And with Rudi saying:

“You perceive, sire, that your King is in danger.”

And Toto: “Danger! Egad, sir, he is lost.”

And even then the portier downstairs, in his night-shirt and moustache bandage, admitting the conclusion to it and calling Toto out into the passage.

The Queen’s eyes followed him to the door and remained there; Rudi’s eyes were on her.

When Toto came back there was an odd change in his face. He closed the door and stood inside, holding to the knob.

“My father,” he said in a low voice. “He is—” He straightened himself. “The King is dead.”

No one spoke, and again the Queen watched Toto and Rudi watched the Queen. She rose slowly.

“You are going back?”

“Yes.”

He picked up his cap and turned toward the door. Then, remembering their kindness to him, he turned again.

“You have been very good to me,” he said, stumblingly. “I shall never forget it . . . I—I love you both.”

She knew it was the end, but her voice was quite steady.

“May God be with you, Majesty, now and forever,” she said.

Rudi and he went out together, and as I closed the door I saw that the young King had his arm around Rudi’s shoulders.

She went into her bedroom and after a time Clotilde called me in.

“I am frightened,” she whispered. “She has not spoken. She does not even seem to know I am in the room.”

The Queen lay on her high narrow bed, well raised with pillows. She had undressed, and the little distortion where the Archduke had twisted her wrist showed very plainly. She had her eyes closed and held the amethyst cross in her fingers.

Clotilde bent over her.

“Are you asleep?” she asked.

“I am praying,” said the Queen.

It was late when Rudi came back, and she had not moved or opened her eyes. She heard his step, however, and called to him.

“Rudi!”

“I am here,” he said, from the corridor.

“Will you come in?” And when he had done so, awkwardly self-conscious inside that forbidden threshold: “Has he gone?”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes and was silent. When she looked up at him again it was to say pitifully:

“All I had! And he is gone.”

“You have me,” said Rudi sturdily. And without more ado he took her quite simply into his arms and held her there.

We left them alone together, Clotilde and I, and it was I who made Clotilde the tea that night and took it to her as she sat collapsed in the front room. Neither Rudi nor the Queen had thought of her at all.

She said very little.

“I loved him so very much,” she said once, and it was a moment before I knew she was referring to Toto. And again: “I shall go away now. They will be happier alone. Together,” she corrected herself, and her face seemed somehow older.

But it was characteristic of her that before I left she was planning what the Queen should wear for her marriage. Her mind had gone back to the old Worth days.

“But Worth is not so popular now, I fancy,” she said. And sighed. “And dresses are so simple. There are no important gowns any more.”

There was the sound of low talking from the Queen’s bedroom when I left that night, and Clotilde was deep in old boxes. The velvets and brocades of yesterday.

They were together, but she was alone.

I have never seen Rudi and the Queen since that night, but only last year I was in the Musée of Saint Lô, looking for the Gombaut and Macée tapestries, which had been sold on the old Archduke’s death. After I had found them I noticed a little elderly gentlewoman standing near and I spoke to her.

“They are quaint, are they not?”

Then I recognised her. It was Clotilde, but aged beyond belief, a dried up little spinster now. She put out a trembling hand.

“Ah, my dear!” she said, and glanced from me to the tapestries. “I see you remember.”

“How are they?”

“Very well, and very happy, I think. I seldom see them now.”

“And Toto?”

“But that you know. He has made a good King. He has lived up to the traditions of—his line.” And she smiled ever so faintly.

We went back to the pension where she was living and she gave me a cup of tea. There was the same picture of Rudi on her table, and one of the Queen, but—perhaps it was by accident—the little dish of pansies was in front of Rudi.

She never opened up to me as completely as she had before. She had developed little reserves and small silences, when she sat with her hands folded in her lap. You see, she had no stockings to knit for Rudi any more. But she told me about the wedding, which had been very simple.

“She would only wear a travelling suit,” she said. And sighed. “But perhaps that was better. You see, they were going directly to Toto’s coronation.”

“They went to that?” I asked, astounded.

“Not precisely to it,” she corrected herself. “But they were in the square when he came out onto the balcony later. The same balcony—” she checked herself.

“You did not go?”

“No,” she said. And then drawing herself more erect, with two spots of colour in her cheeks: “Ah, my dear, why should I lie to you? I did go, but they never knew it.”

And a moment later:

“He looked very wonderful, and very happy. What is, is best.”

II
THE ALTAR ON THE HILL: The Secretary

I

Thomas Patrick Finnerty entered his house and closed the door behind him. He liked this closing of the house door every evening, the shutting out of the world from Mary and himself. He had, too, a sense of increased importance. On the street he was only one of a mass of similar men, perhaps a trifle more humble, even a size or so smaller than most of them. But once inside his house he was by way of being a god.

But a very young and gentle god. Even an apologetic god.

“I’m afraid I’m late, honey,” he said, at the kitchen door.

“I only hope the chops aren’t spoiled.”

“I’m not very hungry, anyhow.” He drew himself up a little. “The Chief took me to lunch to-day.”

It had been a great event, this going out with the Chief to luncheon. He could still see the eyes of the office on them, could almost hear the buzz that followed their departure. But Mary was unimpressed.

“I should think he might!” she said. “The way you slave for him.”

“Well, he’s a great man. Any way you look at it, he’s a great man,” said Pat, loyally. He looked at her. She was not beautiful; her chin receded, and her throat was long and full, a nervous, sensitive throat. But her eyes were soft and limpid, and whenever she looked at Thomas Patrick they were full of pride and love. However, she was not looking at him now, and he caught a quiver of that tell-tale throat.

“What have you got against him anyhow?” he inquired. It was the only subject on which they differed, and to-night with the memory of that luncheon and its conversation in his mind it troubled him. He hated differing with anybody.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“He paid my doctor bill last summer.”

“I know it. You’ve told me often enough.”

“Then what is it? You don’t deny he’s a big man?”

“Not with you around, I don’t!”

She dished up the supper, and he trotted after her into the little dining room. His faithful eyes were anxious. If he could only make Mary see the Chief as he saw him, all would be well; a big man, doing big things. Not that he didn’t—well, a man who worked like that had to play sometimes. The bigger the man sometimes, the more violent the reactions. He didn’t quite understand the Chief, that way, but then he wasn’t there to understand. He was only his secretary.

He studied Mary as she ate.

“There’s something in your mind about him,” he persisted.

“Well, look at his wife.”

“What about her?”

“She doesn’t look happy, does she?”

“She’s sick,” said Thomas Patrick. “She’s been on the edge of nervous prostration for years.”

“And what gives her that?” Mary demanded.

Thomas Patrick put down his napkin.

“If you’re blaming him for that,” he said earnestly, “let me tell you something. If ever a man was good to his wife, he is. Only the other day she wanted some silver fox, and she had it in twenty-four hours. And he’s got a standing order at the florists’ for her. I’ve got her birthday and their wedding anniversary on the calendar, and all I’ve got to do—”

“You do it, don’t you?”

“He’s always sending her presents. I don’t do that, do I? He selects them and he pays for them. And what’s more, she hasn’t the sense to stick by him. She’s away half the time. If a woman wants to keep her husband she’s got to stick around.”

“Oh, really!” said Mary.

But it was impossible that he and Mary should quarrel. They loved each other too much. He had no more doubt of Mary’s love for him than of his for her. They were different sorts of love, of course. For instance, he was never jealous of Mary, but she was frequently jealous of him.

“What about that new stenographer you’ve got down there? Is she pretty?” she would say.

“Why, I don’t know,” he would answer, and deliberate as though the matter had not occurred to him before. “No, hardly; not my sort, anyhow.”

“What is your sort?”

“You,” he would say, and smile his boyish smile.

Or:

“Don’t you have a lot of women coming and going there?”

“Some. Not so many.”

“What sort?”

“Old ladies about estates, middle-aged ones fighting the income tax. Why?”

“I just wondered.”

He was not fooled at all. Oh, he was very shrewd, this little Thomas Patrick Finnerty, with his loyal Irish eyes and his warm Irish heart.

“Look here, honey,” he would say sometimes, “don’t you get any foolishness into your head. I never look at any woman but you. I never have and I never will.”

But it pleased him, rather. It invented for him the pleasant little fiction that there was a devil in every man, including himself, and that he, Thomas Patrick Finnerty, had successfully subdued that devil.

On those evenings when, on his return, he found Mary unusually “dolled up,” as he called it, and knew that again some hidden fear in her was making her reach out to hold him, he almost filled the little house with sheer pride of sex.

Even her dislike of the Chief was the purest jealousy. She wanted no mixed devotion. She could not see, somehow, that the one could never detract from the other; added to it, rather.

He dried the dishes for her that night, rather humbly coaxing her into good humour again. And he had finally succeeded when Mrs. Tufts, whose husband was doorkeeper at the Lyric Theatre, came from next door to borrow some eggs. She opened the door on them in each other’s arms, and Thomas Patrick, of all things, was kissing that sensitive, tremulous throat.

“Well now, I never saw the like of you two!” she said. “I’d like to bring Jim Tufts right here and show him something.”

She got the eggs and went away, not knowing how many times in the months to come she was to remember that little scene, and try to reconcile it with what had followed.

II

It was after the Tufts woman had gone that Mary recognised some subtle change in Thomas Patrick, a sort of mysterious excitement. He could not sit still, but walked around, jingling the small change in his pocket. He seemed, too, to be eyeing the furniture with a sort of appraisal.

“Made no mistake over this dining room set,” he said once.

He even wandered into the parlour, and stood awhile in front of the leather self-rocker, which they were still paying for.

“Darned good chair,” he said.

“Kind of like yourself this evening, don’t you?”

“Just thinking how lucky I am,” he said, rather shyly.

But when she suggested seeing Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood, he did not show his usual enthusiasm.

“I’ll go if you want to, honey,” he said. “But I’m sort of tired, myself.”

Mary eyed him. She knew that better than anything he loved a Fairbanks picture. He would sit, small and self-effacing in the darkness, and in his soul it was he who was fighting and riding on the screen. His were the reckless smile, the bravado and bluster, that moved before him. She had felt him stiffen for the leap when the hero dropped from a balcony onto his horse.

Almost he himself galloped away!

“I don’t care much about it,” she said, and watched him again.

He went upstairs rather early, and laid out his best shirt for the morning, putting in the buttons neatly and examining his shoes. And when bedtime came she was electrified to find that he had brought out his new white madras pajamas, kept for sickness, and was putting them on.

The shirt had aroused her ever-ready suspicions. The pajamas lulled them. And when, after his nightly custom, he came around to “tuck her into bed” she put up her arms and drew him down to her.

“You’re the best man in the world, Pat,” she said.

“I’m not good enough for you, honey.” She was to remember that later.

It was when they were both tucked away that he broached his great news, in the darkness and fumbling about for her hand.

“How’d you like to live in Washington?”

She sat upright.

“Washington? You’re crazy.”

“The Chief’s going to run for Senator.”

Mary was silent, considering the news.

“He’ll never get it.”

“You bet he will.”

“Him a Senator!” said Mary, with a sniff.

“Now look here, honey—”

“Well, I’m not moving the furniture yet!” she said, and settled back on her pillow.

He lay still, staring into the darkness. If only Mary could see the Chief as he saw him in the office; receiving great men with a nod; making his quick, sure decisions; the office a dead thing until he came and then vitalised into action, into importance—if only Mary could see the greatness in the man!

And after a time he felt Mary’s hand groping for his.

“I’m sorry, Pat,” she said, “I guess I’m just jealous of him. That’s all. But I’d love to go to Washington.”

He was suddenly very happy. They would go to Washington, and up on Capitol Hill the Chief would do his great work for the nation. Then, on days when the Chief was to speak, Mary could sit in the gallery of the Senate and listen to him.

She would see then how he stood out from the ruck of common men. Why, he looked a Senator; big and handsome and powerful. Perhaps he would even be President some day. He considered that. “Mr. Thomas P. Finnerty, secretary to the President, to-day gave out the following statement—”

Mary would like that.

III

With the announcement of the Chief’s candidacy things began to change in the office. The day’s routine was put through quickly, and after that came a series of conferences. Sometimes it was one man, closeted with the Chief for a prolonged period; again it would be a delegation, and the office would be thick with the smoke of the Chief’s cigars when it had gone.

There were always newspaper men, too. Thomas Patrick knew them all soon, even the ones belonging to the opposition press. He would pass out his neatly typed statements to them with a small pucker of worry on his face.

“We’re being square with you fellows,” he would say, anxiously. “So you be square with us.”

“Square!” the opposition would snort on his departure, stuffing the pages into its pockets.

“Well, the kid’s square.”

The Chief was making a fine campaign, and what was more, he had ceased “playing.”

“Boss is certainly walking the chalk line,” the chief clerk observed to Thomas Patrick. “Not so many telephone calls on his private wire, eh what?”

“How do you know they weren’t on business?”

“Then that sort of business is darned poor just now,” said the chief clerk, and grinned.

“If talk of that kind gets to the press—”

“Oh, I’m not a damned fool,” said the chief clerk, and sauntered off.

The book containing that secret page was apparently closed, and Thomas Patrick was relieved and happy. But as time went on he began to understand why it had ever been written. In spite of the crowds and the adulation, the Chief was a lonely man. He began to see, dimly, that loneliness may drive a man to seek company along a crooked path.

And his wife was away again.

“Gone to some fool sanitarium,” he said to Mary, with disgust.

“Maybe she’s sick.”

“She could be sick at home, couldn’t she?”

But Mary understood loneliness, if she couldn’t disloyalty, and she no longer objected when now and then, the Chief took Thomas Patrick home to dinner.

“We’ll eat something,” the Chief would say, “and then we’ll do a little work.”

And Thomas Patrick would sit, very small and self-conscious, at the table, and be served by a butler and a footman in white gloves. The awful silence and dignity oppressed him. And across from him the Chief would make conversation, in his kindly way, and finally send the servants out. Then they would talk, man to man.

And sometimes Thomas Patrick felt, as he shut the house door behind him and went away, that the Chief rather dreaded his going, that he hated being left alone.

Thomas Patrick seemed to grow in height at that time. He began to feel that the Chief was leaning on him, and he assumed a sort of protective attitude. It was he now who looked to see if the Chief’s great coat was in the car, and when they began to make trips to outlying districts, it was he who brought a revolver and kept it in the car thereafter, for fear of thugs.

And, to complete his happiness, one day the Chief gave him the key of a safe deposit box, and told him to bring its contents back with him. He brought back a sealed manila envelope, exhaling a faint odor of scent, and laid it on the Chief’s desk. The Chief looked at it, and then at Thomas Patrick.

“When you’re as old as I am, Pat,” he said, soberly, “you’ll learn that you don’t find happiness by chasing up an alley after it.”

He took a box of matches and going into his private washroom, put the contents of the envelope into a bowl and set fire to them. He stood by until they slowly burned up, and Thomas Patrick felt that he was observing a ceremony.

But the Chief’s wife did not come back. She was taking a new cure of some sort, and it promised to be lengthy. And as time went on, and the Chief showed fatigue and nervous strain, Thomas Patrick began to be anxious again.

He was always gentle to Thomas Patrick, but when they were having dinner at the big house he was sometimes sharp with the servants. And after dinner, in the library, there began to be times when he would stop dictating and, lying back in his chair, would stare abstractedly at the painting of a fleshy, almost nude woman, over the mantelpiece.

It was a Sir Thomas Lely, although of course Thomas Patrick did not know it, and the Chief’s wife had bought it and put it there, with a light over the top. It was considered a very handsome picture.

“You and Mary getting along all right?” he asked once, after such an interval.

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s right. Hold onto her!” said the Chief. “She’s a good girl, Pat.”

“She is, indeed. She’s—she’s wonderful.”

Mary was most awfully pleased when he told her that conversation.

But, as a matter of fact, it was after just such an evening that the trouble began. There had been no letter from the Chief’s wife that day, for one thing, and he seemed to have expected one. Then when they got to the house there it was, and Thomas Patrick saw the Chief’s face set somewhat as he read it.

“Well, I guess we’ll bach it for awhile longer, Pat,” he said. And laughed, a little recklessly.

He was restless and abstracted after dinner, and something before nine he got out of his chair.

“I’ve gone stale, Pat,” he said. “Better give it up for to-night.” He looked at his watch. “Might freshen me up to see a show or something. Do you good, too. How about it?”

Thomas Patrick flushed with pleasure.

“All right with me, sir,” he said.

There are certain moments which stand out in a lifetime, glorious soul-swelling moments when the full flavour of joyous existence is being tasted. Thomas Patrick, behind the Chief, being passed into the Lyric Theatre with a bow from the business manager and a wave of the hand; Thomas Patrick stepping into a box behind the Chief and seeing the house turn en masse to stare; Thomas Patrick, very erect while a small burst of applause interrupted the program and the Chief bowed—great moments these, unforgettable.

If only Mary had been in the audience!

Now and then during the evening he eyed the Chief, who was very calm, and apparently quite oblivious of the faces turned toward him; oblivious, too, of the attention he was receiving from the stage. There was a girl in blue who sang an entire song to him, but the Chief appeared to be only slightly amused and a trifle bored. Indeed, toward the end of the second act he seemed to lose interest in the stage and fell to writing something in his notebook. Evidently the staleness had passed, and that great mind of his was functioning again.

He took another look at his program and then tore out the page from his notebook and wrote something on it. Then he passed it to Thomas Patrick.

“The stage door’s behind this box, Pat,” he said. “Slip out before the curtain falls and give this message to that girl in the blue dress. Her name’s Elliot. Lily Elliot. Give it to her, you understand?”

Thomas Patrick felt a little sick. The hand that took the note even shook a little.

“Don’t you think, sir—” he ventured.

The Chief gave him an odd look.

“Don’t you worry, Pat,” he said. “I’ll do the thinking! I’m only asking her out to supper.”

Thomas Patrick stopped outside the box and considered, his heart beating furiously. Damn the girl! Damn the Chief’s fool of a wife! Damn all women—except Mary. But the Chief had turned and was watching him. He opened the door and went behind.

He was some time in finding the Elliot girl’s dressing room. Stage hands jostled him; he tripped over a wire cable and a dozen men yelled at him. He wandered about, a queer timid figure in a ridiculous necktie, and all the time something in him was whispering: “I wish he wouldn’t. Oh, I wish he wouldn’t.”

The Elliot girl, her make-up absurdly accentuated away from the footlights, a kimono very negligently thrown around her, took the note and read it.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“His secretary.”

“Hm!” she said, and looked him over. “That’s him in the stage box, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Tell him all right.”

As he went out of the dressing room he suddenly saw Mr. Tufts, sitting in a chair at the stage entrance. Mr. Tufts, however, was reading a newspaper.

“Worked pretty late, didn’t you?” said Mary, that night, when he had locked the house and tiptoed up the stairs.

Thomas Patrick hesitated. Then:

“Yes,” he said.

IV

From the beginning Thomas Patrick had realised that there is more in a political campaign than meets the eye. Therefore he was neither surprised nor suspicious when one morning the Chief told him to hire a deposit box at the Republic Trust in his own name.

“And give me the keys,” he said. “Certain amount of confidential stuff oughtn’t to be floating around.”

So Thomas Patrick rented a box, and rather proudly signed his name on the card. Some of these days he and Mary would have such a box. He often felt now that the deed for their house should be in a safer place than under the paper in the bureau drawer. And later on, when he occasionally took a sealed manila envelope to the Trust Company he enjoyed going into the basement of the bank, where uniformed attendants swung open the enormous door to the vaults, and he was able to gain an access impossible to the shrewdest cracksmen in the business.

Next to being great oneself was being attached to greatness.

Greatly to his relief the Elliot matter seemed to have gone no further. The campaign was in full swing now, and successfully so. Now and then he went with the Chief here and there, and from the back of a hall listened with swelling pride to the speeches he himself had helped to prepare. He would treasure the pleasant things he heard and tell the Chief on the way back.

“Surely had them going to-night, sir,” he would say.

“Think so?”

“It was sticking out all over them. One fellow near me, he said: ‘Talks like a Senator, and by God, he looks like one!’ ”

“Humph!” the Chief would say, and perhaps straighten his tie.

There were no more evenings at the house now, and Thomas Patrick missed them. But the Chief seemed happier, in the thick of things as he was now, and to miss his wife less. He was fairly confident, too.

“Mary like the idea of Washington?” he asked once.

“She’s crazy about it.”

“You’ll have to have more money there,” he said, in his large way. “It costs a lot to live there.”

It seemed impossible for a human being to be happier than Thomas Patrick Finnerty was, in those days. Nor less suspicious.

If he had felt no distrust at the renting of the safe deposit box, he felt even less when he learned one day that the Chief felt the need of private quarters of his own. Thomas Patrick was becoming an old campaigner, and he began to see that it was sometimes necessary to give the people what was good for them rather than what they wanted, and even to conceal the fact that they were being done good. Also the opposition was growing bitter, and there was talk of a leak in the office.

“I have to see a lot of fellows,” the Chief explained, “that I don’t want to take to the house. And with reporters hanging about all the time, I can’t see them here.”

“Yes, sir,” said Thomas Patrick, enormously flattered at this confidence.

“What I think you’d better do,” said the Chief, considering, “is to rent me an apartment somewhere. In your own name. You might try the Burleigh. I understand they have some.”

“They’re pretty expensive.”

“Well, we’ll charge it to campaign expenses!” said the Chief.

Thomas Patrick was very busy the next few days. He took the apartment, and equipped it with various things evidently necessary to a political campaign, cigars in quantity, a poker table and chips, and the Chief’s particular brand of cigarettes, but without his monogram, of course. And he paid the first month’s rent in advance out of a checking account of his own, established for the purpose.

Thomas Patrick had a curious feeling of being a secret and powerful figure in national affairs. The only drawback was that Mary could not share this inner knowledge with him.

“All set, sir!” he announced to the Chief one afternoon, as he handed over the keys.

“Fine,” said the Chief.

He drew his check book toward him and made out a check. Then he tore it out and passed it over; it was to Thomas Patrick Finnerty, for five hundred dollars. Thomas Patrick coloured to the roots of his nondescript hair.

“I didn’t do it for money,” he stammered.

“Campaign expenses, Pat!” said the Chief. And then he did an unusual thing. He got up and put his hand on Thomas Patrick’s shoulder. “You’ve stuck by me, Pat,” he said, “and I don’t forget those things.”

Never, save when Mary agreed to marry him, had Thomas Patrick been so happy. And the Chief’s touch on his shoulder meant more than the money in his hand.

“I guess I won’t thank you,” he said huskily. “I guess you know I’ll go on sticking, sir. I guess I’m that kind.”

The Chief was touched. He knew devotion when he saw it, and he knew too that there wasn’t too much of it floating about. Also, his own generosity exalted him; he was, so to speak, carried on the wave of it a bit further than perhaps he had meant to go.

“How about taking that ‘campaign’ check,” he suggested, “and buying fifty shares of B. T. & P. on a ten dollar margin? I understand there’s something doing there.”

“But suppose it goes down?”

“Oh, I could carry you all right. But I don’t think it will.”

The total result of which was that three days later on Thomas Patrick Finnerty cashed in a seven hundred dollar profit, making twelve hundred in all, and bought himself immediately a pair of new shoes, not before they were badly needed.

He had not told Mary. She feared and hated speculation, for one thing. Not, of course, that he was going to speculate any more. He was through. And the second reason was that their wedding anniversary was due on the fourth of the next month. He was going to give it all to her then, as a present.

At first he meant to give it to her in a check. Then—oh, he was cunning—he thought of a better way. He would cash it, and first of all he would hand her a ten-dollar bill.

“Thought you might prefer buying your own present,” he would say.

“Oh, Pat! You’re a darling. I’ll get—” Well, maybe she would say silk stockings. She was crazy about silk stockings.

“Then you might want to spend this, too,” he would say, airily. And lay another bill in her lap.

And so on, through the whole amount. She would grow silent after awhile, and just sit staring. And then perhaps her throat would work a little and she would cry. Laughing, too, of course. She had a funny way of doing both together sometimes.

“Kinda set us up in Washington, eh what?” he would say. And she would hold onto him as if she would never let go.

He was sublimely happy. He held his head higher now as he walked home from the office, and often he came in whistling.

“You’d think you were going to be a Senator yourself,” Mary said sometimes.

“Maybe I will.”

“Two new neckties, too!” she said. “Some night I’m going to call up the Chief’s house and see if you’re really there. Maybe you have a girl somewhere.”

“Maybe I have!” said Thomas Patrick, strutting about with his secret.

But, as it happened, he did not carry out his plan entirely. Nobody can say exactly why some small patch of apparently extraneous material sometimes creeps into the fabric of a life, and entirely alters the whole thing. But it happened now.

One night he saw Mary reading a newspaper advertisement of fur coats, poring over it in her absorbed fashion, and he had his brilliant idea.

“Look pretty good, don’t they?” he said, over her shoulder.

“They’re half price.” But she added, for fear of hurting him, “I don’t want one, you know. My suit’s as good as ever.”

“Well, we’re not in the fur coat class. Not yet,” he said craftily. “Some of these days—”

“—when you’re President!” said Mary.

On the evening of their anniversary he staggered up the street with a huge box, and set it carefully inside the hall door. Then he wandered back. Mary was dressed with unusual care, and he could see flowers on the dining room table.

“Going to have company?” he inquired nonchalantly.

“Company?”

“All dressed up, aren’t you?”

“Why, Pat!” she said, with a little quiver of her full throat. “You don’t mean to say—!”

“Great Scott!” he said. “Who’d ever believe I’d go and forget it?”

He tried to take her in his arms, but she evaded him.

“You forgot it!” she said. “You’re tired of me. I’ve been seeing it for some time. I’m not pretty—oh, no, I’m not—and you’re going up in the world and I’m standing still.”

“Why, Mary!”

“Oh, it’s true. Everybody sees the difference. Mrs. Tufts was here to-day, giving me a talk about holding a husband. ‘They’re a slippery lot,’ she said. ‘The minute you sit back and let go your hold, they’re off.’ That’s what she said.”

“I was only fooling, honey.”

“Oh, you say that now.”

“If you don’t believe me, come out in the hall.”

Just a fur coat, and not a very grand one at that, but how it changed the whole atmosphere of the little house that night! With Mary crying and laughing—wouldn’t one know she would do that?—and Thomas Patrick standing her up in it and turning her around. Showing her the hidden pockets, and the depth of the fur, and even the quality of the lining, and then fastening the storm collar up over her throat and fetching down a hat, any old hat, to get the complete effect.

And later on Mary—she was clever, he thought—covering an old coat hanger with cotton and muslin, so no wear should come to it from the hanging away. Even the final depositing of it in a special closet, and locking it up, and finding a place to hide the key—all of it more or less sacramental.

She had accepted his explanation of it without question. The Chief had given him a check for the extra work, and who should he spend it on if not on her?

“You needed a new overcoat,” she said.

“Oh, I’ll get that, all right,” he said in that strange new lordly manner of his. “We’re on the up curve, old lady. I’m telling you.”

But after they had gone to bed, he lay for some time staring at the darkness. What had Mrs. Tufts meant, that afternoon? Had Tufts by any chance seen him at the theatre?

V

It was about a week after that that events began to move with fatal rapidity.

Thomas Patrick had been out of the office all the afternoon, and when he got home that evening it was to find Mary with a curious set look about her mouth, and dinner not ready.

“His wife’s been here,” she said.

“The Chief’s? When did she get back?”

“To-day. She’d had a bill for a fur coat sent to her by mistake. I guess that brought her.”

“A fur coat!” said Thomas Patrick, with the pulses beating in his neck.

“That’s what I said. And when she went to the office and asked him about it he said he’d told you to get one for me and charge it to him.”

He was trembling now with fear and anger.

“She had her nerve, coming to you!”

“It’s her husband.”

“What did you tell her?”

“What could I say? Tell her he was buying fur coats for another woman?”

“How do you know that? How do you know that wasn’t your fur coat on his bill?”

“Was it?”

He hesitated. Only once before had he lied to Mary.

“Yes,” he said shortly, and went upstairs.

Dinner was very silent. Mary’s eyes seldom met his and she ate very little, but it was not until she was carrying out the plates that she came out with what was in her mind.

“I’m just wondering,” she said, “how often you’ve lied to me before.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I saw the bill for that coat. It wasn’t bought where mine came from.” She deposited her plates in the kitchen and came back. “What sort of a hold has he got on you, anyhow?” she demanded. “You’d lie for him. I believe you’d steal or kill for him.”

“You lied to save her, didn’t you?”

“That’s different,” said Mary shortly. “She hadn’t done anything. But he’s as crooked about women as a dog’s hind leg, and you’d lie to protect him.”

She went into the kitchen and closed the door.

Had he been less inarticulate he might have explained to her; that a great man may have his weaknesses, and yet be great; that he must be protected from those weaknesses in order to remain great; and his own feeling that the Chief’s wife might be virtuous, and yet be as guilty as the Chief.

But he could not talk. He never had any words for great moments.

He got out his papers and spread them on the dining room table, but he did not work much. His mind kept running back to that phrase of Mary’s: “What sort of a hold has he got on you anyhow?” And beyond the closed door, where Mary was working in sombre silence, he knew she was thinking of that, too. Suspecting him, of God knows what. Perhaps even putting her fur coat in what she had once scornfully termed a “conscience fund.”

He heard Mary finish her work, and braced himself for her entrance. But she did not come in. Instead, he heard the back door open and shut, and knew she had gone to the Tufts’.

He felt strangely oppressed and anxious, and very alone. He had always been alone until the Chief and Mary had come into his life, and on them he had lavished all he had. Now Mary seemed miles away. And the Chief—if only the election was over and the Chief was busy with great affairs! Out of temptation, so to speak. A Senator could not travel in shady by-paths. He must stand in the sunlight.

He got his hat and went out. Somehow he dreaded seeing Mary again after she had been at the Tufts’. He would let her sleep on the situation, and in the morning things would look different.

He walked endless miles. He had no particular physique, and when he grew very tired he found a bench in a public square and sat down. Once he lit a match and looked at his watch. It was only eleven o’clock. Then—he was very tired—he dozed off, and it was one when he roused himself and hurried home.

There was a light in the dining room and it frightened him. Mary was sitting there, waiting for him. Waiting with what she had heard from Mr. Tufts, to confront him with it. She would never believe that he had only carried a message to the Elliot girl. She would be sitting there, her poor throat working, imagining all sorts of terrible things.

He opened the door and slipped into the house, quite white with anxiety and excitement.

Mary was at the table, leaning her elbows on it. She had been crying, and as he moved along the little hall he heard her say:

“Here he is now.”

Then she was not alone. Mr. Tufts, perhaps, waiting to——

There was a police officer standing on the other side of the table.

The room began to whirl, and Thomas Patrick caught the door frame to steady himself.

“Well?” he said. His voice did not sound like his own.

Mary was standing now, he could see through a sort of black mist, standing and searching his face with reddened, terrified eyes. Then he was in the room, and the policeman had closed the door and was putting him into a chair.

“Better sit down a minute,” he was saying. “No hurry.” And to Mary: “You haven’t a bit of liquor in the house, have you? He needs it.”

“No.”

His head cleared a little, and he looked again at Mary, this strange, frozen Mary who never came near him, but stood staring with those dreadful eyes.

“I went out for a walk,” he said. “Then I got tired and sat down, and—”

“All right, son,” the officer broke in. “We’ll have all that, later—no need of worrying the wife, y’understand.”

Suddenly Mary spoke.

“Pat!” she said tensely, “for God’s sake speak up. Tell him you didn’t even know this Lily Elliot; tell him to go home and let us go to bed. Get him out of here. What’s he doing here, worrying us to death? We’re not criminals.”

It was about the Elliot girl. Then the Chief— The mist was going, and wariness crept into his blue Irish eyes. It was a political frame-up, a stall. The opposition was behind this. Well, let them get something from him if they could.

“I’m not talking, one way or the other,” he said cannily.

“Pat!”

“I’m not talking, I tell you,” he addressed the policeman stubbornly. “I’m not playing dirty politics for anybody, and you can chase that up an alley and kill it!”

But it seemed the policeman was not trying to make him talk. It appeared, too, that all that was wanted of him was to go somewhere, and that Mary was to go to bed and not to worry. Long after, all that came back to him, wiped out though it had been by the events that followed. He remembered kissing Mary, and the frightened desperate way in which she had clung to him, and a police car waiting around the corner, and that silent drive to the City Hall.

It was only when he got to the City Hall that he knew he was under arrest.

“What for?” he demanded, feverishly. “I’ve got a right to know, haven’t I?”

“You’ll be able to do your talking in a minute,” some one said.

Then he was in the detective board room, with Stuart, the Chief of detectives across a table from him, and half a dozen newspaper men standing round. Some of them he knew, and there was curiosity in their eyes, and pity.

Pity? For what?

VI

The sight of the reporters put him on his guard. Stuart was part of the opposition. They were trying one of their political tricks on him, that was all. Well, they could all go to hell; they’d get nothing out of him.

Stuart was talking, an eye on the reporters.

“Some time ago,” Stuart said, “you rented an apartment at the Burleigh, in your own name, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Was that apartment for your own use?”

He hesitated. Better keep the Chief’s name out as long as possible.

“Yes,” he said slowly.

“And in it you installed a girl from the Lyric Theatre, Lily Elliot.”

Patrick Thomas’s face turned an ashy grey.

“That’s a lie,” he shouted. “I never—”

He checked himself. Stuart was grinning at the reporters.

“What about it?” he demanded, furiously. “Don’t beat about the bush. And quit grinning, damn you!”

“You admit you knew the Elliot girl?”

“I’d met her.”

“You bet you had,” Stuart said grimly. “Now the question’s this, Finnerty. Did you rent that apartment for yourself or for somebody else? Don’t stall, and don’t try to protect anybody. I want the truth.”

“What’s it all about, anyhow?” he asked fretfully. “If you’re trying to plant anything on—anybody, you’ll get nothing out of me.”

“Was it for yourself, or for some one else?”

“I’ve told you that.”

“And you kept it up, out of your salary, I suppose!”

Some of the newspaper men laughed, but Stuart made a motion for silence.

“I’d—been speculating,” said Thomas Patrick. “In B. T. & P.”

“Ah, look here, Stuart,” a reporter said, “let the kid alone. You know darned well—”

“Keep out or get out,” Stuart replied grimly. He leaned back in his chair and surveyed Thomas Patrick.

“Where were you to-night between ten and eleven o’clock?”

“Taking a walk.”

“Oh, you were, eh!”

He reached forward, opened a drawer of his desk and laid a revolver on it.

“You never saw that before, either, I suppose?”

Thomas Patrick gazed at the revolver. Then he leaned forward and picking it up, examined it. Suddenly it clattered to the floor, and Thomas Patrick leaped to his feet.

“Something’s happened to the Chief!” he shouted. “Let me out of here. You damned fools, keeping me here, when he’s in trouble! I—!”

“Sit down, Finnerty,” Stuart said mildly. “He’s all right. But I see you recognise his revolver.”

Thomas Patrick sat down, trembling. But the last trace of haze had gone, exploded with that outburst.

“Who said it was his revolver?”

“Isn’t it?”

“I bought it. It’s mine, if you want to know. It’s registered in my name.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Stuart said sharply. “Between ten and eleven o’clock to-night the Elliot woman was shot and killed in that apartment of yours at the Burleigh. With that revolver. Now go on and hang yourself if you want to.”

The revolver lay on the floor, and Thomas Patrick sat staring at it—now it seemed black and shiny, and again it was blood-red. It made these shifts of colour with extreme rapidity, so that he was obliged to blink.

“Well?” said Stuart.

“It changes,” said Thomas Finnerty, in an absent voice. “Makes me dizzy looking at it. Kinda sick, too. I—”

He seemed to be stooping to pick up the revolver, but instead he fell forward on his face and lay there in a very peaceful faint. It was the first peace he had had for a good many hours.

When he came around he was very quiet. One of the reporters opened the drawer of a desk and got out a bottle of whisky, pouring some in a glass and mixing it with water at the cooler. But he waved it away.

They asked him innumerable questions, but to most of them he simply said: “I don’t know,” or “I’m not talking any.” On one or two things, however, he was very firm. He had rented the apartment for himself, and the revolver was his. He “didn’t remember” where he had gone on that walk of his. Mostly his replies were rather absent, as if he had to rouse himself to answer them. He would forget them—the men there—altogether between questions, or while Stuart drew circles and squares on the blotter in front of him, and be back at home with Mary, trying to explain to her.

“But don’t you see?” he would say. “You take a big man like that, and once you let his name get mixed up in a thing like this, he’s gone. Gone.”

“But suppose he did it?”

“Don’t you believe it. How d’you know she didn’t do it herself? Or maybe that crowd of drunks that hung around him, maybe one of them got funny. Or there was a fight, or something.”

What with talking with Mary, and having every now and then to listen to Stuart, he got very tired. His head would droop, and then Stuart would spring at him some question designed to trap him.

“When did your Chief meet Lily Elliot?” he would say, for instance. And Thomas Patrick’s tired eyes would unclose and he would say:

“I don’t know he ever met her.”

Finally Stuart gave it up and sent him off to be locked up. But he talked a little first.

“You’re doing your best,” he said, “according to your lights. But he’s not worth it, Finnerty. No man is. Murphy says you’ve got a wife at home. You’ve got her to consider. Get some sleep and think it over.”

“I’m not worried about my wife,” said Thomas Patrick. “She understands me and I understand her.”

He looked about the room, and his eyes fell on the reporters.

“I’d be kinda glad,” he said, “if one of you fellows’d go around there in the morning and see her. Just tell her it’s all right, y’understand? Everything’s all right.”

Down in the dingy press room, with its typewriters, its telephone booths, and its scribbled walls, the group of reporters held small and informal conclave that night. There was the whale of a story, or there wasn’t any story at all.

He was a pretty square kid, they finally decided. And he had lied like a gentleman. Also, he had put a pretty definite crimp in Stuart. “Never got a thing out of him,” they said with unholy joy.

In the end they decided there would be no story.

They brought out the bottle from the Detective Board room, and had a drink all round.

“Here’s to loyalty,” said Herrald, of the Gazette, “which the highly intelligent believe in, and only fools practise.”

VII

Thomas Patrick dropped asleep very quickly after they had put him in a cell. He slept heavily, his mouth a trifle open, his figure sprawled. But toward morning he put an arm out to hold Mary, and she was not there. That roused him.

He sat up and thought things over. The Chief, of course, would be around in the morning and explain everything. Of course he hadn’t shot her. He probably didn’t even know about it. She had shot herself. Those women were always doing that sort of thing, taking poison or something. They seemed to go as far as they could, and then at last they reached the end of the road, and—

She had been a pretty girl. He’d thought that night, seeing her on the stage, that she had a look of Mary about her. Of course in the wings, with that make-up on her—and now she was dead.

Well, by and large, she’d left a lot of trouble behind her. The Chief’s wife, now. It was going to be hard on her; she’d been suspicious anyhow. And she’d never understood the Chief as, for instance, Mary understood him. Just as like as not she’d raise a fuss, just when a fuss might be fatal. And she’d never see that if she’d just stuck by, if she’d given him, Thomas Patrick Finnerty, a bit of a hold to help the Chief over a slippery place, it would never have happened.

Toward dawn he grew restless and took to pacing the floor in his stockings. He had taken off his shoes. The fear he had fought down all night began to rise in him, and with it claustrophobia, a terror of being shut in. The walls seemed contracting on him; he could hardly breathe.

Odds and ends of thoughts came to the surface of his mind and then sunk again: men who had paced floors like this, waiting for morning and the chair; Mary alone in bed, crying; the Chief, perhaps, getting his first knowledge in the morning paper, and trying to smile across the breakfast table at his wife; his old father saying to him, “We Irish may be a bit weak in the head, but we’re strong in the heart.” Mary’s fur coat. Mr. Tufts. The safe deposit box and its seven hundred dollars. The rent money.

He dismissed this last at once. The Chief would look after that. He would look after everything. And when all this was over they would go to Washington, and maybe Mary in the gallery seeing the Chief at work on the nation’s business would understand him at last.

As always, the thought of the Chief steadied him, and when he refused his breakfast it was with a grin.

“I’ll be eating mine at home!” he said. “Anyhow, I don’t hear your cooking here highly recommended.”

“Ordered your taxi yet?”

“Taxi nothing. Limousine!” he said, and grinned again.

The morning seemed a day in length, but it was only ten o’clock when his cell was unlocked and he was taken to a small room to see a visitor. He had been so sure it would be Mary that he had trembled with excitement all the way. If only they left him alone with her, so he could explain! She would believe him. She must.

But it was only Mr. Marks, the Chief’s friend and attorney. In his disappointment he did not even see the visitor’s hand.

“I’m sorry, my boy, terribly sorry,” said Mr. Marks. And sat down. He was plainly nervous. “The—the Chief has asked me to look after you, and so—”

“He knows about it, does he?”

Mr. Marks looked slightly surprised and a trifle wary.

“Yes, of course. He—”

“Then why didn’t he come himself? I sat up pretty nearly all night lying for him.”

Mr. Marks looked about him anxiously, but the guard had moved away.

“He can’t very well come,” he said, “not under the circumstances. But he appreciates what you’ve done greatly. You’ve saved him, and you’ve saved the party.”

“I did it for him,” said Thomas Finnerty doggedly. “The party hadn’t a God-damned thing to do with it.”

“No. Of course not,” Mr. Marks agreed with alacrity. “But it becomes a party matter, nevertheless. A scandal like this, breaking at this time, would be fatal.”

“The scandal’s on me, isn’t it?”

“Not entirely,” said Mr. Marks, and bent forward. “Just how far are you prepared to go in this thing, Pat? I needn’t tell you it won’t be forgotten.”

“Meaning—money?” asked Thomas Patrick, slowly. His face had turned scarlet.

“You’ll have stood a certain amount of anxiety,” Mr. Marks said delicately. “You’re entitled to compensation.”

“Did he send me that message?”

Mr. Marks saw the error in his strategy, and like a wise general retreated in time.

“No,” he said. “It was an idea of my own. That’s all. And of course it was based on the hope that you would go through with it.”

“How far have I got to go?”

Mr. Marks relaxed a trifle and leaned back again.

“Not as far as you think. It wasn’t—murder.”

“She did it herself?”

“No,” said Mr. Marks. “There’d been a poker party, and considerable drinking. The Chief had left his revolver lying about, and one of the men picked it up. He was playing with it when it went off. There’s no case, you see. It was purely accidental.”

“Then where do I come in?”

But he came in, he found, very definitely. There would be a verdict of accidental death; that had already been arranged with the coroner. But the opposition was hard at work, trying to connect the Chief with it, and so to raise a scandal.

“It’s a dirty business, any way you look at it,” Mr. Marks said. “If you’ll stick, we’ll swing the thing right, Pat. But if you don’t, we’re gone. And—” he looked at Thomas Patrick, “he’s gone. Not only publicly, but at home. You know what I mean.”

“How about me at home?” Thomas Patrick raised a pair of haggard blue eyes. “I’m willing to go the limit for him. You can tell him that. But he’s got to go and square things with Mary. He owes me that much.”

“I’ll see he does.”

“And what’s more,” said Thomas Patrick, raising his voice a little, “he’d better come here and see me himself. This isn’t any lawyer’s job, Mr. Marks. It’s between me and him, man to man.”

“So it is, Pat.”

Mr. Marks rose and held out his hand again, but before Thomas Patrick took it he said: “She’s got to know the whole thing. Mary, I mean. You can trust her, and the poor kid’s about crazy by this time.”

“You can trust me,” said Mr. Marks. And then Thomas Patrick shook hands.

He ate something at noon that day, being upheld by that promise, and also by a faint sense of exaltation. If the Chief could trust Mary, and he could trust Marks, then by heaven they could all trust him. Let Stuart do his damnedest. He, Thomas Patrick Finnerty, was on the job.

His faith never wavered until he saw Mary that afternoon, in Stuart’s office. Stuart was at his desk, and Mary was by the window. He saw at once that, although it was a cold day, she was not wearing the fur coat, and she made no move toward him.

Stuart’s presence alarmed him and made him self-conscious, too.

“Hello, honey,” he said.

She looked very white, he saw, and she made no effort to answer him. But her great eyes were fixed on him, staring, as if she were seeing a stranger and endeavouring to fix him in her mind. “Mary, honey!” he said, and took a step toward her, but she neither moved nor spoke.

He looked at Stuart.

“I’d like to see my wife alone,” he said.

“You saw your attorney alone,” Stuart said. “Anybody else is against orders.”

“Has—has anybody been to see you yet, honey?”

“Nobody, except Mrs. Tufts.” There was no life in Mary’s voice. Almost, it seemed, no interest.

Stuart leaned back in his chair and smiled, and suddenly Thomas Patrick saw red. They hadn’t told Mary. They weren’t going to tell Mary. They would let her suffer, while they ran around pulling their dirty little political strings to keep the thing under cover. By God, then he would tell her. Let Stuart hear it if he wanted. He would tell Mary the way they had used him and what they had promised. And he would tell her, convince her, that there was no other woman. There never had been. There couldn’t be.

“Nobody came?” he asked thickly.

“The Chief called up. He said not to worry. He was looking after things.”

The red mist faded. It was Marks who had failed him, not the Chief. The Chief could be trusted.

“I want you to go and see him, honey,” he said, still from that strange distance between them. “He—he wants to see you. Marks said so.”

“I never want to see him again,” Mary replied, monotonously.

“Not if I ask you to, honey?”

Mary’s chin suddenly began to work.

“I loved you so!” she said. “I worked and slaved for you. And all the time you had that girl.”

Thomas Patrick looked at Stuart, and Stuart looked back at him.

“I told you,” he said. “You see how it’s working out, old man.”

Thomas Patrick made a small despairing gesture. “I guess I’d better go back,” he said. He looked at Mary, but she did not look at him. “I never loved anybody but you, honey,” he said. “I guess you’ll never know how much I loved you.”

Then they took him away.

When Mr. Marks, three days later, brought him the news that one Thomas Patrick Finnerty was free to walk the sunny streets again, he found him in the jail infirmary, with a fever.

“It’s all over, Pat,” he said. “You’ve stuck by us, and—”

“You bet I have,” said Thomas Patrick. “And what have I got for it? Three days in hell. You laid down on me, Mr. Marks.”

“If you mean your wife, I saw her yesterday.”

“What did you say?”

“I told her you’d had nothing to do with the shooting.”

“Did you tell her that girl wasn’t mine?”

“That’s what I went to tell her, Pat. But—”

“You didn’t tell her?”

“Look here, Pat,” said Mr. Marks, “you know Mary better than I do. She—well, she’s pretty excitable, and she hates the Chief. If I’d told her that, you know what she’d have done. She’d have beaten it hot-foot down to Stuart, and—I guess you know the rest.”

“My God!” said Thomas Patrick.

He lay back and stared at the ceiling. One wasn’t crucified, then, all at once, one went on, and on, and there wasn’t any end to it. For Marks was right, and Thomas Patrick suddenly knew it. Mary would fight to the death for him, against the Chief, against the world. But maybe he himself—

“I’ve got to get out of here,” he said feverishly. “I can fix her all right. You needn’t worry, Mr. Marks.”

“Sure you can,” said Mr. Marks, heartily. “You’ll be all right in a day or so. And the Chief says anything he can do, just let him know.”

He stayed a little longer, but Thomas Patrick seemed to have nothing to say. He shook hands finally and departed, and as he looked back Thomas Patrick was lying very still, staring at the ceiling.

In a conference with the Chief that night, in the library with the painting, Mr. Marks indicated the situation in a few pointed words.

“I’m warning you,” he said. “He’s all right, but the wife’s a pure hysterical type. She’ll talk, as sure as fate. And he’s hell bent on telling her.”

The Chief was sitting in his chair, his head bent.

“He’s got a right to tell her,” he said heavily.

“I’ve warned you. That’s all I can do.”

“What is it you want, anyhow?” the Chief demanded irritably. “I like the boy. I’m not going to sacrifice him any further than I can help.”

“I’m only talking of the next few weeks.” Mr. Marks’ voice was smooth. “Get her away, keep her away from him until after election. That’s all.” He saw the Chief’s face and smiled. “I’m not talking about abduction, man! Send her for a trip.”

The Chief groaned.

“Or let me do it. You needn’t appear in it at all. She’ll go. She’s pretty sore, you know.”

VIII

Mary had been eating her heart out for a week in Florida, when they finally released Thomas Patrick. He was very weak; he seemed, moving in the crowd, more than ever just a part of it, and even a humbler and more inconspicuous part of it than before. He hurried, as well as he could. Not an extra minute now must be added to Mary’s torture. Because his mind was so eager and his feet so slow, he was slightly bent forward as he moved.

When he found the house locked, and the shutters closed, he was too exhausted for coherent thought. He sat down on the steps and wiped his clammy hands with his handkerchief.

“And I wanted a drink of water,” he muttered to himself. “I wanted a drink of water.”

After a time he got up and moved about the premises, and Mrs. Tufts, seeing him, raised her kitchen window.

“Your key’s here,” she said.

“Where’s Mary?”

“You’re a fine one to be asking that!” she said, and disappeared. When she returned she held out the key, and he took it.

“Has she gone away, Mrs. Tufts?”

“She has that. And right good sense she showed.” Then she slammed down the window.

He felt very weak again, and very thirsty. He unlocked the kitchen and got some water; then he sat down and looked about him. Mary had left him. Mary!

He got up after a while and wandered about the house. Before the self-rocker he stood for some time. “Darned good chair,” he muttered to himself, absently. It would have to be crated to go to Washington. But then they weren’t going to Washington. At last he went upstairs and crawled into bed.

He had a slight return of the fever that night, preceded by a chill, and when he went to a closet for an extra blanket, there was Mary’s fur coat, staring him in the face.

For the first time he broke down. He stood there, in his pajamas an absurd, tragic figure, and cried into it.

The next day he resigned his position. He had thought it all out, and this seemed the only thing to do. But he decided to say nothing about Mary having left him. The Chief might somehow hold it against Mary, and anyhow, he had troubles enough of his own.

“I haven’t any quarrel with anybody, you understand,” he explained painfully. “I guess it was the only way to fix it. But the way I see it, a good many folks know about it, and—” he smiled faintly—“I’d sort of be a liability. Just now, anyhow.”

“I’ll take that risk,” said the Chief grimly. “You did the biggest thing for me one man can do for another. I’m not forgetting that.”

But he made no impression on Thomas Patrick, who remained gently obdurate. He began to wonder if Thomas Patrick suspected the reason for Mary’s absence, and he decided, in that case, to make a clean breast of it. The boy’s face rather alarmed him.

“How’s Mary?” he asked.

Thomas Patrick paled a trifle but his eyes were steady.

“She’s all right,” he said.

“It—didn’t make any difference to her?”

“She understands me, and I understand her,” said Thomas Patrick. “I guess she knows I never cared for anybody else.”

He declined any help in getting another position and went away, leaving the Chief puzzled and baffled. He could not see that what Thomas Patrick had done for him was only honourable by being beyond price, even the price of a job. But he did begin to see, dimly, that one who climbs high may have to do so on the bent shoulders of the defeated.

The next day Thomas Patrick established his vigil. He brought in some groceries and began to keep house, being very careful to wash out the dish cloths and keep everything very tidy, against Mary’s possible return. Now and then he went out, but always he hurried back, for fear he would miss her.

The Tufts would have nothing to do with him, and he was very lonely, so after a while he took to pretending Mary was there. Alone at the table he would sometimes talk to her, and he liked to think that she was just beyond the door, in the kitchen. He would even call to her.

“Honest to God,” Mrs. Tufts said one night, after she had had the dog out, “I think the boy’s daft. He’s sitting in there talking to himself out loud.” And later that night she said to Mr. Tufts: “Maybe we’ve been a bit hard on the lad. I don’t want him on my everlasting soul.”

“Hard on him!” said Mr. Tufts. “If it wasn’t for that boss of his and his dirty political pull he’d be on the end of a rope by now, and you know it.”

As election day drew near however, he was stronger, and he had given up this childish pretence. The sense, too, of her presence in the little house was departing. But he was still waiting. At night, after the Tufts had gone to bed, he would sit out on the front steps and smoke and watch. And sometimes he fell asleep there, to waken stiff and a trifle chilly hours later.

The patrolman on the beat roused him more than once.

One night he wakened himself, and he had a curious feeling that the Chief was very near, looking at him. He started up and looked about. But of course the Chief was not there, and he went inside feeling rather sheepish.

He read the papers carefully, first the personal column, and then the political part, for news of the two people he loved best in all the world. Over one of the Chief’s speeches he pored breathlessly: “This great nation, founded upon an ideal, and that ideal the sanctity of the home—”

“That’s right,” he thought, thrilling a little. “That’s the stuff. The home. That’s—that’s America.”

He went into his deserted house that night, still exalted.

But, more and more, he began to feel that election day was to mark a period of some sort. At first it was vague. If Mary wasn’t back by election day he would do something. He still felt that to do anything before the Chief was elected would amount to desertion. But as time went on the “something” became increasingly definite. And, as election day approached, he began to lay his plans.

He rang the Tufts’ door-bell one night, and Mrs. Tufts opened the door. He looked so thin and worried that her heart was touched.

“Come in,” she said. “Tufts is at the theatre.”

“I guess I’d better not,” he said, uncomfortably. “I have a little package here, for Mary. If she happens to come back any time, and—I’m not around, I wish you’d give it to her.”

“I’ll do it, sure. You’re not going away, are you?”

“No,” he said. “That is, not right away.”

He turned to go, hesitated.

“You might hide it somewhere, if you don’t mind. It’s money.”

Long after he had gone, Mrs. Tufts stood with the package in her hands. It was fairly bulky. She took it upstairs and hid it under a corner of the spare room rug.

It contained, had she known it, the seven hundred dollars from the safe deposit vault.

One day, too, about that time he met Stuart on the street. Thomas Patrick tried to slip by, but Stuart stopped him.

“Understand you’re not working for the Chief any more?”

“I’ve been kind of weak, since that jail fever you fellows gave me!”

“How’s the wife?”

“She’s all right,” said Thomas Patrick, craftily.

Stuart eyed him.

“Most women would have lit out,” he said. “You’re pretty lucky.”

“Yes, I’m pretty lucky,” said Thomas Patrick, and went on.

He bought a revolver that day.

Election day passed very slowly. Once he slipped down town, and looked at the bulletin boards; certain districts he and the Chief had counted on seemed to be wavering, and his face puckered with anxiety. But others, doubtful before, seemed certainties now. When there was cheering he joined in it, and he carried home a newspaper and pored over it.

In the afternoon he cleaned up the yard, and burned the dead leaves. Now and then he stopped and inspected the street. A girl with a suit case sent him dizzy, until he saw it was not Mary. Now and then he looked at his watch.

He ate no supper, and in the evening he went down town again. The Chief was leading now, and the crowds were taking his election for granted. Thomas Patrick sat on a fire plug and watched; he felt lethargic, and very tired, like a runner who has won the goal and is too weary for triumph.

Home once more, he made the round of the house. It was all in order. He got out the revolver and loaded it. Then an odor of burning leaves coming through the window attracted his attention, and he went downstairs and filling a pail with water, carried it out and extinguished the smoulder.

He did not go in at once. He knew now that Mary was not coming back, but he had agreed to give her to election day, and the day was not over. After a time he dozed, to be wakened at midnight by the touch of the patrolman’s hand on his arm. He roused and smiled.

“All right, Sweeney,” he said. “Kinda cold to-night, isn’t it?”

Then he looked again. It was the Chief, and beside him was Mary.

Half an hour later the Chief went away. Thomas Patrick took him to the door, and helped him into his overcoat, as he had done so often before.

“It was awfully good of you to come, sir,” he said. “I—I appreciate it.”

The Chief looked down at him grimly.

“Is that all you’ve got to say, Pat?”

Thomas Patrick reflected. What had he forgotten?

“Oh, I’m sorry!” he said. “I guess I’ve been pretty much excited. My congratulations, Senator.”

The new Senator pulled his hat over his eyes, and opened the front door. “Thanks,” he said, and his voice was slightly hoarse. He went out on the doorstep, the odor of wet, smouldering wood was still thick in the air—and hesitated there.

“But you won’t come to Washington?”

Thomas Patrick lowered his voice.

“Well, you heard what she said. She doesn’t want to go,” he said apologetically. “She seems to think—well she’s been kind of worried. And she likes this house.”

The Chief drove away. He had left the old life behind him, with its weaknesses, and to-morrow was a new day. But he had also left behind him Thomas Patrick, and the new day seemed strangely empty.

As the car turned a corner he glanced back. Thomas Patrick was still on his step, staring after him. . . .

After a time Thomas Patrick went inside and closed the door. In the hall he coughed, to clear a tension in his throat, and then he went back to where Mary awaited him in the parlour, a loving, penitent Mary, but still with that look of fear in her eyes.

“Are you going with him?” she asked.

“No, honey. I told him.”

Mary came to him, and put her arms around him.

“You’ll not be sorry, Pat,” she whispered. “I’ll make it up to you. We’ll just be happy, and forget him.”

“Yes,” said Thomas Patrick sturdily. “We’ll just be happy.”

He took Mary around, and showed her the dish cloths, and the inside of the coffee pot! He even made her some coffee, and stood over her in the dining room while she drank it.

“How are the Tufts?” she inquired.

“They’re fine,” he said cheerfully.

And it was as if, in re-discovering Mary, he had rediscovered the little house, too.

“Didn’t make any mistake in this dining room furniture, did we?” he asked.

“I got sort of homesick to see it again, Pat.”

“Did you, honey?”

But long after Mary was apparently asleep that night he lay there in the darkness, staring at the ceiling. Well, a man couldn’t have everything. He had Mary. He put his arm over her, and she moved and spoke.

“Pat,” she said, “what was the revolver doing in the spare room?”

He hesitated. Then he told her his third and last lie.

“Oh, that!” he said. “It belongs to the Chief. I’ll take it down to him to-morrow.”

Some months later Thomas Patrick Finnerty got out of the train, and took his first view of the nation’s capital. He had sat up all night in the day coach of the excursion train—“See Washington. Round trip five dollars”—but in the washroom he had changed his collar, and he was now prepared to face the day.

The dome on Capitol Hill towered before him. He knew it at once, and directed his steps toward it. He was too excited to eat. He was going to see the Chief again; hear him, too. For to-day the Chief was to deliver his first speech in the Senate.

It was still early. He wandered about, closely inspecting the Grant monument so as to be able to describe it to Mary later, and so when the doors finally opened he was the first in the visitors’ gallery. He sat in the front row, inspecting each senator as he went to his desk, until the Chief came in. After that he saw nobody else.

Men came in and went out. The galleries slowly filled. Bored reporters wandered into the press gallery, glanced down, yawned, and went out again. The Chief sat shuffling papers on his desk. After awhile he rose to his feet. Thomas Patrick’s collar felt suddenly very tight; he ran his finger around inside it to loosen it.

It was not a great speech, as such things go, but to Thomas Patrick it was surpassing.

“He’s got Henry Clay and Daniel Webster beat a mile,” he muttered. “Those old birds, they couldn’t touch him.”

He did not understand why the Senate did not rise in acclaim when the Chief sat down. He resented the indifference of the Vice-President on his rostrum, and the lethargy of the galleries. He was so excited that he had to wipe his clammy hands with his handkerchief.

When the Senate recessed he went down the staircase into the rotunda and waited there. Now and then he glanced at its hideous statues, but only for a second. He did not want to miss the Chief. In the centre there had once lain the body of the unknown soldier, and all the nations of the world had brought wreaths and placed them against the bier. Some poor kid, sacrificed that government might live.

It never occurred to him that there was a certain analogy there. He blinked a little as he stared up into the dizzy height of the dome.

Then he heard the Chief’s voice. His heart raced; he stepped forward, a small nervous figure, just like any other of the tourists who wandered about, only perhaps a trifle more humble, a size smaller than most of them. So humble, so small and inconspicuous was he that the Chief never saw him. He passed between two other great men, and went on.

Late that night Thomas Patrick sat in the day coach again. He was making notes of what he had seen, to take them back to Mary: The Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Over this last entry his head drooped. He was very tired.

He leaned back against the back of the seat and thought things over, but mainly he thought of the Chief and of the speech he had made that day.

“The country’s safe with him,” he reflected. “He’s a great man. Any way you look at it, he’s a great man.”

III
CYNARA: The Sculptor

I

I was looking once again at Sidney Bush’s Cynara in the Metropolitan, when Courtney Valentine’s wife touched me on the arm.

“So you come, too!” she said. “Do you know there is nearly always some man or other here, staring at it?”

“I didn’t know it. But I can understand it.”

She eyed me. “I suppose every man has been true to somebody, after his fashion. Even you!”

“Where is he? I haven’t heard of him for a dozen years. Not since—”

“Nor I. Come and see me, Maurice, won’t you? I had no idea you were in town.”

She wandered off, and I stood gazing at the Cynara.

II

I suppose once in every creative life there comes the sublime moment, the consecrated hour when, not from within but from without, there comes the onrush of true greatness. Then, out of paint or clay or whatever sordid material may lie to hand, the artist creates; beauty out of ugliness, purity out of filth.

A Baudelaire imagines his mistress dead and rotting, and writes a great poem: “Alors, o ma beauté . . . .”

And out of the scum of a Paris brothel poor Sidney Bush had built his Cynara.

He was no poet, God knows. I don’t even know how he had happened on the poem. But I had wandered into his studio at Saint Cloud one day to find Julie Termonde cowering in a corner and muttering that he had tried to kill her, and Sidney himself paying no attention to her—or to me, for that matter—but standing at a window with a book in his hand.

I don’t believe he had Anne Worthington in his mind at all at that time. All that lay pretty far behind him then, but it may have pleased his vanity and excited his imagination to fancy that he had been faithful to Anne, in his fashion, through the years.

Anyhow, he started the Cynara that day, and if the body and the face were Julie Termonde, the expression, the soul of the thing, was Anne . . .

It almost made an honest woman of Julie, did the Cynara. Almost, but not quite. But it did change her. She took to wearing about the studio, instead of the sketchy garments of the pre-Cynara period, a stiff black silk dress, a long gold chain and a crucifix, and as nearly as she could copy it the expression of the Cynara itself. But she only achieved a sort of hypocritical wistfulness for the pathos of the sculptured figure.

The Cynara itself, of course, is steadfastness and loyalty, the woman who rises in a man’s mind after a debauch and makes him groan. And seeing that little French guttersnipe assuming the pose, while she was both living with Sidney and deceiving him, made me sick. What was even worse was seeing Anne behind the thing. Seeing her eyes and her spirit breathe purity into that harlot body, and the whole thing perpetualised in marble.

For it was done in marble, finally, from one of those greyish blocks held by the French government for such purposes at the Dépôt des Marbres in Paris. Sidney was like a madman during the plaster casting, and Julie Termonde left him for a time, I doubt if he knew she was gone. But it came out very well.

It made him famous, of course. And when Anne came to Paris the next year he took her to see it. The Metropolitan was dickering for it at the time. I don’t believe even then that Sidney was in love with Anne, but he must have known that she stood behind his success. She had given him the memory on which he had built. Simplicity and purity, and a sort of humble steadfastness—that was Anne in those days.

But Anne was still in love with him.

Poor Anne. . . .

III

I suppose nobody but the creative artist knows the agony that follows a great success. For once Sidney had touched the stars, and his hands were impatient to reach them again. In the months that followed he was like a caged demon, creating and destroying, brooding. He even drank absinthe, a thing he had always been afraid of, and finally in a fit of what was probably more anguish than anger, he threw Julie out of the house for good. She seemed, I imagine, to shorten his grasp. I know he formulated a theory at that time as to the connection between celibacy and inspiration, and he and Father Alexis, the curé, mustered between them an imposing list to prove their case.

But it did not come back, the thing that had created Cynara. Indeed, it was twelve years in coming, and that twelve years forgot Julie, wrecked Anne and did more things to me than I care to remember.

For he married Anne.

Possibly it was his method of attaining the ideal he had somehow lost. Anne, you see, was the Cynara to him. He must have felt that she would bring him again whatever it was that had come and gone. And of course she did not. He did not love her, for one thing. He had no lover’s illusion with which to cover her, once she had ceased to represent the lost woman of a man’s dreams.

“If only I hadn’t married him,” she said to me once, “I would have helped him more. I stood for something then, Maurice. Now—!”

The truth is, of course, that he was not capable of love. Not then, anyhow. His mind was entirely turned in on himself, not so much selfishly, as with the conviction that somewhere there, inside him, lay the thing he was waiting for.

The man who marries a woman only because of her aloofness and her essential virginity has little enough to go on, once the one is bridged and the other destroyed. And he had had little enough at the best. What Anne suffered was shown by what she did later.

IV

“What made her do it?” I asked Ellice Valentine, when I made my call a few days later. “She was the last woman in the world to make a break like that.”

“I suppose the answer is that she loved him.”

“Burke? I don’t believe it.”

“No. Sidney. She adored him. She was rather pathetic about it. And I have an idea that she never loved him as much as the day she ran away with the other man. Women are like that, sometimes, Maurice.”

“It sounds like insanity.”

“Maybe it is,” she said calmly. “Personally, I don’t think any woman in love is entirely sane. The things they do!” She stared for a moment at her wedding ring. “I saw her that last day, you know.”

Well, it was a pitiful enough picture as she drew it; Anne standing crying in a jumble of little slippers and bright negligées and garments, with a swollen-eyed maid packing, and a photograph of Sidney on one end of the dressing table and one of the Cynara on the other.

Anne, she said, picked up the Cynara and flung it, frame and all, into a waste-basket. She hated it, she said.

“She didn’t know of Julie?”

“No. But she felt it had hurt her, somehow. She didn’t know just how. She said that that was the way Sidney seemed to think of her—in marble or something of the sort. He’d been away for two days then; she didn’t know where he was.”

“She meant, probably, that he loved his dream of her, rather than herself.”

“Maybe,” said Ellice, rather vaguely. “He didn’t love her. Didn’t even pretend to. And she had learned to be loved, you see. He had been adorable at first.”

She gave me one of her quick searching glances.

“You see, women need to be loved,” she said. “They are not like some men, who just go on caring year after year, without any return whatever.”

“He must have cared; he shot himself.”

“Not for two years! Don’t lay that to Anne, Maurice. He shot himself because he couldn’t repeat Cynara, not because he couldn’t repeat—Anne.”

Yes. Sidney had reached the point of suicide, and had failed. I had been wandering about China when the word came, and I had had a very clear vision of that failure, and of Sidney recovering, lying there and stubbornly adding this to the list of his other failures.

Holy images about, and nuns, and probably Father Alexis, with his shameful old soutane and his faded, other world eyes, remonstrating against this crime against God-given life. And Sidney sneering and thinking perhaps of Julie and Anne, but mostly of how he had bared his soul to the world. That unbroken front of his broken; a confession made, not to his priest, but to the press!

He was a proud man, Sidney.

“I wrote him at once, when I heard,” said Ellice. “But he didn’t answer. I rather thought he wouldn’t.”

“What in the world did you say?”

“Oh, just a friendly letter. You know—about the children, and all that. He’d liked the children, in his—” she smiled, “—in his own fashion. But I did say something else. I told him not to worry about repeating Cynara; that things like that came as the result of an emotion, and that when the emotion came again so would everything else.”

Somebody came just then, and I left. But Ellice followed me out into the hall, and laid a detaining hand on my arm.

“You don’t know anything about Anne, do you, Maurice?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve tried, haven’t you?”

“She left Burke after a year. In Vienna. That’s all I know.”

“You don’t think he ill-treated her?”

“No. I think she simply still cared for Sidney. That’s all. In spite of what you said a half hour ago, there are women like that, too, Ellice.”

She patted my arm and let me go.

Curiously enough, she wrote me a letter that very night, and I received it the next morning. “Somehow your face haunted me to-day, Maurice,” she said. “And you know my old habit of impulsively writing letters. But you see, my dear, I was once so very badly in love with you, and so I feel tenderly toward you, as we do to all old loves. Don’t worry! It’s all over ages ago, but it is true. The hours we all spent together, with me caring for you, and you in love with Anne, and Anne only living for Sidney! Luckily the chain stopped there, for Sidney only cared for himself, but if the Director of all has a sense of humour, how funny we must have seemed!

“But this is what I want to say. Aren’t you cherishing a dream at the expense of reality? And aren’t you exactly as bad as Sidney if you do? Think it over.

“And don’t stay away because of this letter. Come in and see the children have their tea, and you will know what I mean.”

V

This is not my story. It is the story of Sidney and Anne Bush, and perhaps, in a way, of Julie Termonde, of Ellice Valentine and myself. But I have given Ellice’s letter to show the reason I did not see her for a time. A man may feel flattered by the knowledge that a woman has cared for him, but it is also an embarrassing matter. And when she cheerfully proclaims that she has long been “over” it, it also contains certain quite difficult elements of discomposure.

Thus a month went by and I did not see Ellice Valentine. I was preparing for another of those wanderings which have kept me fairly interested and fully occupied for the last few years, when a rather peremptory summons came from her by telephone. It had something to do with copying an antique marble mantel I had brought from Italy, and I gathered that she had found a firm to do it.

“In cement,” she explained. “They take casts of it in plaster, and then build it. It will only clean your mantel, Maurice. And I daresay it needs it!”

“Go ahead,” I said. “But what am I to do, outside of providing the mantel?”

“You’re to come and see the people with me. They haven’t the slightest respect for my ideas.”

I agree to do it. . . .

Does any one, I wonder, sit as often as I do, considering how the affairs of life would have worked out had they done this at a given time? Or not done that? All those milestones on the road, and all those little paths that lead to right and left—do all of them lead off Dover?

Are we free agents, or simply the slaves of some unknown inevitable law? Some happy through it, some wretched, and most of us, God knows, not one or the other. Puppets or kings?

I went. I remember stopping on the way out in the shrouded drawing room of my house to look at the mantel, and remembering that it was Sidney who had urged me to buy it and ship it back.

“It’s good,” he had said, running his long sculptor’s fingers over the relief. “It’s damned good, Maurice. The joke of it is, you’ll never know how good it is.”

And now it was to be copied—in cement. Shades of Sidney Bush, who loathed imitation, and had refused to eat his dinner one night because the hostess had garnished the wild duck with lilies cut out of turnips. And very well cut, it had seemed to me. Sidney, who had loved almost sensuously the feel of marble under the hand, and preferred the patina of old rubbed satinwood to the gloss of a woman’s hair.

Cement!

But I concealed all this from Ellice Valentine, and entered as well as I could into her enthusiasm. When my task was completed—I was, I found, to secure a reduction in the cost—we were asked if we cared to inspect the studio. It surprised me, rather. Cement had in my mind been a matter of noisy crushing machines on a city street, and yet here was an enormous and lofty room, where quiet workmen were doing deft things with their hands, and where, stretching almost across one end was a heroic and partially completed altar piece, the Crucifixion.

VI

The preliminary modelling had been done in plaster, and only at one end had the cement work been begun. The unearthly skill of the thing seized me. But it was horrible, too. There was hate in it, as well as beauty; there was a sneer on the face of the Roman centurion as he gazed up at the Cross, and such malignity and lust of suffering on the countenances of the Jews who stared as fairly shook me.

“Come away, Maurice! It’s terrible,” said Ellice Valentine, and caught me by the arm.

“It is incomplete, madame,” said the Italian who escorted us. “It is right that this portion should be terrible. But the figure of Our Lady will redeem it. The sculptor is working on that now, but he is not satisfied.”

And then it happened. Behind us, on the floor—of cement, of course!—I heard the sharp and regular tapping of a cane. Ellice turned around, and I felt her grip on my arm tighten.

“Maurice!” she said, and caught her breath.

It was Sidney Bush, and he was blind.

He walked without hesitation toward the composition at the end of the studio. He was on familiar ground here, evidently, and the tap-tapping of his stick ceased. He took off his coat and hat, laid the cane carefully away, felt for and picked up a smock and drew it over his head.

Ellice Valentine was crying.

“Take me away, Maurice,” she whispered. “It is too pitiful.”

But—let me be clear about this—there was tragedy, but nothing pitiful about Sidney. He had lost no trace of his old arrogance. Fallen, the sculptor of Cynara, to a worker in cement, there was something imperious in the very tilt of his head as he marched the length of the studio. And as we turned to go we heard him calling to his helper in his old insolent voice.

In the cement factory, with only his hands now for eyes, he still was king.

The Italian stood for an instant, staring at him as he swung himself to the high platform.

“He is a good workman. A real artist,” he said. “But he is a hard man to work with. He has made already a dozen beautiful figures of the Holy Mother, but he is not satisfied.”

Thinking it over later, I read the old struggle still going on in Sidney, as revealed in the altar piece. Ellice Valentine had been right. He could only do the thing he felt, and he was feeling now—had been for years—only hate and bitterness. Suffering he could do, too; the Christ was the epitome of the anguish of the world. The Jews summarised hatred, resentment and the spirit of revenge. But love and sacrifice were not in him.

I did not believe he would ever do the Mother.

VII

It was two weeks before I went to see him at his home. Two weeks of indecision. Ellice Valentine had gone, and had been refused admission, and there was no question but that he both hated and feared any intrusion from his old life.

Ellice reported the place as comfortable.

“A hideous little house in a row,” she said. “But as well as I could see, past the woman who opened the door, well enough furnished.”

“What sort of woman?”

“Elderly. I know what you are thinking. It wasn’t Julie.”

I had thought of Julie. She might still be trying to live up to the Cynara. And, in a way, I was sorry it was not. She had the Frenchwoman’s gift of making a man comfortable, at least, and Sidney must have needed that. It was, in a sense, all he had left.

“You sent in your name?”

“Yes. He just told her there was a mistake. And she added that he received no visitors.”

But not even that, after his violent gregariousness of early days, brought the changed conditions so vividly to me as did my first visit.

I rang the bell and was refused admission, as I had expected. But I stepped past the woman into the hall, and called to him sharply.

“Don’t be a fool, Sidney,” I said. “It’s Maurice, and I’m not going away.”

Something dropped in a room nearby, and I heard him swearing softly. I opened the door and walked in.

The room was perfectly dark.

Nothing could have brought home to me the catastrophe as did the black night of that room. For he had been working there. By the ray of light from the hall, I saw him standing, modelling tool in hand, before a small sketch model in clay. His head was uplifted irritably, and his body crouched almost ready to spring.

“Get the hell out of here,” he snarled.

“What’s the use?” I said. “Now I’m here. I needn’t come back, but I’m not going now.”

He said nothing for a minute. Then I suppose he saw the futility of further concealment, for he said:

“You’ll find an electric light switch behind the door. I don’t need it—as I suppose you know.”

“Yes,” I said, and turned on the light.

“Just what else do you know?” he asked rather sharply.

“I happened into the studio the other day. I had no idea—I suppose you know the altar piece is magnificent.”

“Cement!” he commented bitterly. “Imitation stuff, imitation art!” But he added: “It’s good, as far as it’s gone. And it’s to be stared at by a lot of European peasants! Has it struck you that the best art has always gone into the churches, to be lost there for generations?”

I repeated an old quotation of Father Alexis, that, if religion did not exist, the artists would have had to invent it. And he countered it with his old jibe: that behind real sculptor lies essential truth, and what did the churches know of truth?

But it seemed to me that he was talking against time. He was not easy; he seemed to be listening, almost waiting. Once, at a sound outside, he turned his face toward the door, and I felt that his body stiffened.

When nothing occurred, however, he grew gradually easier. But the talk was unsatisfactory; there were too many roads he refused to follow. He would not discuss the old days at Saint Cloud, nor his present circumstances, beyond saying that he was comfortable. He grumbled about the studio, and sneered about American art. And he asked me what I had been doing. He smiled a little when I said I had been wandering.

“You’re a faithful soul, Maurice!” he said. “They’re not worth it. Not a God-damned one of them.”

When I finally rose to go, he did a curious thing. He moved rather quickly to the door into the hall and opening it, stood there for a moment, apparently listening. He seemed satisfied then, and threw the door wide.

“Good-night, Sidney.”

“Good-bye, Maurice.” And then, after a pause and with difficulty, “I appreciate your coming.”

“But you don’t want me to come back?”

“What’s the use?” And after a pause, “Christ, man! Don’t try to bring the dead to life.”

“You’re doing magnificent work.”

“Then let me alone to do it,” he said, and closed the door in my face.

He had, I felt, every right to close the door of his life to me. If he chose to crawl under a porch like a sick dog, at least he was entitled to his isolation. But I wished I had summoned my courage to ask about Anne. Somehow I felt that he knew.

Then—curious how the Cynara figures in all this—I went once more to see it, before I started away again. It had, you remember, the look of Anne; not the Anne who had run away with Martin Burke, but of Anne the girl.

And standing looking at the Cynara was Anne herself. Not even a changed Anne, except that she was a little thinner. Just Anne.

How unimportant I was in her scheme of life was shown by her greeting of me. She neither flushed nor paled. She came straight to me and held out a hand in a rather shabby glove.

“You haven’t forgotten me, Maurice, have you?” she asked. She did not smile; Anne was never a smiling woman.

“No,” I said. And again, “No, Anne.”

“I wanted to see you the other night, but I thought I’d better not.”

“The other night? Anne, you haven’t gone back to him?”

“What else was there to do? He was so awfully helpless at first. And, of course, I was responsible for it, Maurice. I—had to see him through.”

I did not undeceive her. She had not been responsible, but if she thought so—

“And he took you back?”

She did smile a little, then, but it was the sad ghost of a smile.

“Not as his wife. I had made that impossible, of course. But he supports me, and I—look after him.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Eight years now,” she said. And turning away, stood staring at the Cynara. “I think he is coming back, Maurice. He’s doing some work now that is really good. At first it was—ghastly.”

Still thinking only of him, you see. He had both imprisoned and enslaved her for years, and she saw neither prison nor slavery, but only the man and his work.

“It is very good work, Anne. I’ve seen it. But what about you? Have you no friends? Have you let him shut off the entire horizon?”

“I haven’t minded it, Maurice.”

“Is he kind to you?”

“He never forgets what I did, of course. But now he’s working again, things are better.” She hesitated. “Sometimes I think lately he has to force himself to remember. You know what I mean.”

She would not let me see her home, and she asked me not to come again.

“He did not go to bed at all the night you were there,” she explained. “I could hear him walking the floor. And he has been very—uncertain ever since.”

I could guess what his being “uncertain” would mean. I remember the day Julie Termonde said he had tried to kill her, when I had found her cowering in a corner. And I had a clear vision of that blind man going berserk in the little house, throwing things about, yelling at the frightened servant, and hurling all the venom stored in his embittered heart at the very soul in the world who loved him. Enraged at her very silence and submission; torturing himself with old memories; jealous with that fiercest jealousy of all, the jealousy of pride and not of love.

For he was jealous and suspicious. I knew that, looking back. Jealous of me! He had not wanted me to see Anne. He had taunted me with being a loyal soul. He had forbidden me to come back. Jealous of me and suspicious of Anne.

That, I think, may be the heaviest cross a woman who has once gone wrong may have to bear. Suspicion. She was more his prisoner than his slave. He did not love her, but he watched her.

I did not sleep that night. It was I who walked the floor, enraging myself against him. He who had gone from a mistress into marriage, and from marriage to unfaithfulness, condemning Anne for her one error to a living death! Virtue in him, as in most men, was as hypocritical as had been Julie Termonde’s black silk dress and gold crucifix.

VIII

A certain amount of blundering is allowable to a man who cares for a woman and sees her wretched. I offer only this excuse for myself. I expected no happiness, but it seemed to me some one should have the right to look after her and protect her.

It was Ellice who told me later where the fallacy lay in my reasoning.

“When a woman is childless,” she said, “she makes her man her child. You might as well have asked Anne to give up a son. And of course this being a bad child made no difference.”

For that is what I did.

She was very gentle with me, but from the moment I began I saw it was hopeless. He needed her. She did a good many things for him that he thought were done by the servant. Everything in the house had its own place, so he could find it, and was never moved from that place. She read to him, too. Only the night before she had had a bad time; she was reading aloud.

“Last night, ah yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine

There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed

Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;

And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head.

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”

She had tried to stop when she found what it was, but he made her read on. Then she had heard him laugh, rather dreadfully. And the next moment he had taken the book from her and flung it into the fire.

She had been composed enough up to that, but there she broke. It seemed that she had heard him outside her door later that night, and she had thought perhaps he meant to kill her and then himself. He had stood there, very still, for some time, and then had gone away.

But I was not to worry. She had only been over-wrought. He had really been much gentler with her lately.

I had to go away with that. . . .

I suppose I would never have found the solution had it not been for Ellice Valentine and her absurd mantel. The final arrangements were to be made for the casts before my departure, and we went together to the studio to complete them.

“At noon,” her note said. “I don’t want to meet him, and I want to study the altar piece.”

There was nobody around, and we sauntered alone into the studio. The group was complete now. The Mother stood below the cross, looking up, and Ellice gazed at it for some time without speaking.

It was Anne.

I suppose nothing he will ever do, and he has done some big things since, will be as truly great as that figure, buried to-day in a small Lithuanian Church. Courage, anguish and love are epitomised in it; all the suffering of all the motherhood of the world.

And it was Anne.

Ellice did not speak until we were outside again. Then she said:

“How terribly he loves her!”

I do not think she had reasoned it out then. She simply felt it. But later on she explained it.

“He couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t loved her,” she said. “And he couldn’t have done it if—everything had been happy between them. Don’t you see?”

“You mean, he has to reach for a star?”

“Don’t you? Cynara was the dream of a lost love. This is the dream of a lost motherhood. Probably he doesn’t know it himself, but it is true.”

But he did know it. It was that fact which brought about the tragedy.

Anne, it seems, went to the studio that evening to bring him home, for the streets had turned icy. She saw the Madonna, and had a moment, I gather, of sheer happiness. But he only stood near her, saying nothing and brooding. And on the way home he had told her a man could build out of the mud, if he had his gaze on the stars. He had built the Cynara out of his mistress at the time, and now—this.

She went upstairs very quietly when they got home, and even laid out his night things and turned down his bed. I can see her seeing that there were matches and tobacco beside the bed. She had an idea, I suppose, that what she meant to do would only touch the surface of his life. Her being there or not being there had seemed to matter so little.

Then she got his revolver—he was still downstairs—and shot herself in the chest. . . .

He was standing outside the door when I got there. They were keeping him out. You see, he had never been in Anne’s room, and he knocked against things and got in the way. And besides, he kept yelling at them to do something, when they were doing all they could.

He refused to let me pass, although Anne had sent for me, and somehow or other he had got hold of the revolver, and would not give it up. It took me a good half hour to get him away from the door and downstairs, and even then he kept hold of the revolver. If Anne died I knew he would shoot himself, and I wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t shoot me.

It was a nightmare. He insisted on talking—anything that welled to the surface of his mind. He said the Italian at the studio was not an Italian but a Levantine Jew, and that he wouldn’t keep the place warm. From that he began to boast about the way he got about the streets, and what he said to the people who offered to help him. His terrible pride again. And all the time he was listening. Just listening.

He broke in once, however, on this monologue to ask me how I knew, and why I had come.

“Did she send for you?”

“Yes. We were old friends, Sidney.”

“Ah, I know what she wants.” He turned his distorted face toward me. “She wants you to promise to take care of me. I’ll see you in hell first.”

After a time he began groping around the room, and at last he found a small model of the Madonna for the altar piece. He stood holding it, running his fingers lightly over it.

“I tried to keep her out of it,” he said. “I tried. But I couldn’t.”

He put the figure back, and then he dropped on his knees before it and raised his face.

“Oh, holy mother of God,” he said. “Intervene for us. Forgive me and save her. For without her there is nothing.”

IX

So it seems that there are times when a man may raise up a graven image and worship it, and yet receive an answer to his prayer. For Anne did not die.

At dawn they took him up into that unfamiliar room of hers, and led him carefully to her bed so he would not strike against it, and after a time they left him there. He hardly left it for weeks.

He spent hours, they said, locating the little things in the room, so that whatever she wanted he could get it quickly for her. Before they let her up, he had practised the movement from the bed to the chair where she was to sit, so that when the time came he lifted her and deposited her with one movement.

I am not trying to prove that he had changed fundamentally. He has never done that. A good many people, by and large, detest him, and others only tolerate him for his genius. For genius it is, of course. He still blusters and bellows, he still boasts when he is happy and sulks when he is hurt.

I have heard him enter the house at Saint Cloud—they are back there now—and call Anne at the top of an angry and imperious voice. And I have seen her come, as quietly as ever, and as ready to serve him.

But I have seen something of Anne in everything worth while that he has done since. And whether he makes love to her or not, every new bit of work he does is a love song to her, imperishable in marble or in bronze.

He will always be faithful to her, in his fashion.

IV
THE GREAT SUCCESS: The Singer

Yesterday I happened to read an editorial on careers for women, and when I had finished I sat back and thought about the strange case of Peggy Wentworth. That of course is not the name she has made famous, but it happens to be her own.

Not that Peggy’s case was typical. I know of a good many women who have been able to reconcile a substantial family life with distinguished success in their own particular lines; who have reared creditable families, been artists, wives and mothers at the same time, and apparently were able to succeed in the one as well as in the other.

But for one I know who has been able to do this, ten have failed. The younger generation is making better going of it, apparently, for the younger generation of men has less of the old and now outgrown idea that a man is not fully a man unless his wife is entirely dependent on him for money. It is the older generation which has had to go through the re-adjustment period, and Jim Wentworth belonged to that generation.

Even the older generation, of course, was more easily reconciled when the woman earned while remaining in her home. The writing women, for instance, have been able to manage their houses and raise their children, and to get to their desks during school hours or after the family bedtime, and apparently the only difference it has made in the home life is that a good many of them have burned the candle at both ends. Which explains, perhaps, why there are no great women writers. They have had to give to their work the rag tag and bobtail of their time.

But the theatrical women and the successful singers are different. Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that writers are always more or less anonymous figures; it is not themselves, but their work that counts. The actress and the singer, when successful, achieve a personal popularity. They belong, in a curious way, to the public.

This story of Peggy Wentworth’s covers a considerable space of years. It is the story of a great success, with its rewards and penalties. But it is, I have always felt, primarily a love story.

I met Peggy first in a pension in Berlin—a bare place with cold porcelain stoves and old furniture rubbed to the last degree of polish; and she used to sing for us once in a while in the evenings, while the two fräuleins who ran the pension knitted, and Peggy’s older sister, Anne, sat with her hands folded in a sort of depressed silence.

Anne must have been almost forty at that time, a drab woman always badly dressed, and with a curiously unhealthy looking skin. Peggy once told me that Anne had been quite a pretty girl, but it was hard to believe.

“We were a big family,” Peggy said, “and when mother died Anne took hold and raised us. She had a chance to get married once, but she felt she shouldn’t leave.”

So it appeared that Anne had become the family martyr. Most families can boast of one.

It appeared, too, that Anne had determined that there should be only one martyr in the family, and that Peggy should have her chance. Just what fierce saving had achieved it no one can know, but when Peggy’s voice outgrew her local teachers Anne had somehow managed to take her abroad.

By the time I met them, however, Anne was beginning to doubt the wisdom of her course. Peggy’s voice was doing all and more than had been expected, and she was likely to get a chance to sing at the Munich Opera House, with a prospect of Berlin later. But Anne was getting along in life, and her ideas of what constituted happiness were changing.

In a word, out of her starved and impoverished years she had dreamed of success and wealth for Peggy. But as time went on she began to feel less sure that they would be enough.

I remember going into her room one night to find her sitting up in bed, almost barricaded behind one of the thick, red-covered feather mattresses which the pension served out in cold weather, and which covered either the legs or the body, but never both. She looked dreary and old.

We talked of Peggy’s undeniable future, and Anne showed no enthusiasm whatever.

“I brought her over,” she said, “but sometimes I’m sorry I did it.”

“Why?”

“Where is it going to take her?”

I said that if things went on as they were going, I believed that she would be the greatest all-American prima donna; that she would, in that case, earn vast sums of money, and that Anne herself would be extremely proud of her. But Anne only looked at me from under eyelids that already showed the fine wrinkles of her age.

“It depends on what you want out of life. Happiness, I should say.”

“Different people find happiness in different ways, Anne. With Peggy it may be that to give pleasure to thousands—”

“Nonsense,” she broke, in bitterly. “I’m not talking about giving. What’s she to get?” And before I could reply: “There are just three courses open to a woman. There used to be only two. I’m a product of the two period. I couldn’t go out and earn a living, so I stayed at home and dried up.” She swept me with unhappy eyes. “I didn’t want Peggy to do that, so I brought her over here. And I’m sorry I did.”

I remember that she said the three courses were marriage, a career, and what she savagely termed “drying up.” And for reasons which she gave in her monotonous voice, she had chosen the career course for Peggy.

“I represent the drying up,” she said. “And as to marriage—I’d seen my own mother drudged to death with a house and children. I can look back and see her, cooking and washing endless dishes. I’ve seen her beating a heavy Brussels carpet. I’ve seen her hanging curtains at night while my father read the newspaper, and putting the ladder into the cellar herself afterwards. She used to mend after he’d gone to bed. After she died, I did the same thing.”

“Then,” I objected, going back to careers, “you see only three courses open for women, and all of them are unhappy?”

I was writing myself at that time, small inoffensive stories for the cheaper magazines, and I felt called upon to defend both careers and marriage, and even a combination of the two. But she remained unmoved.

“You’re different,” she said. “You’ve got your family already. And you can work at home. A singer’s different, or an actress. If they get to the top they stay in New York most of the time and have too much money. Men don’t like that. And if they don’t succeed they have to travel most of the time, and make a home in a hotel room. When they’re away too much, their husbands are unfaithful.”

She had, you see, reduced it to a formula.

“There’s no trouble if a woman doesn’t want to marry,” she said. “It’s when she tries to be two things at once that the trouble comes.”

“Peggy may not want to marry.”

She smiled grimly.

“With my example before her? Never. She wants to marry, and to have a lot of children. But she wants to sing, too . . .”

Peggy made her American début at the Metropolitan in the early fall five years later, and I need say nothing of her success. Only the other night, while the family was away, I got out one of her records and played it quietly. And suddenly I was back in the old pension, with Peggy at the piano, and Anne sitting with her hands folded, watching her with inscrutable eyes.

I wrote and asked Anne to spend the following Christmas with us, and she accepted. Peggy’s five years in Europe since I had seen them had been earning years, and the Anne I met at the station was a smarter Anne, not with more assurance, for she had never lacked that, but with more poise. She looked no older than before, and it was rather surprising to find that she sometimes hesitated for a word, and then used its German equivalent.

But she was very tired. The début had been a strain, and since Peggy’s enormous success they had no privacy whatever.

“Of course, she belongs to the public now. She doesn’t particularly need me now.”

“She always needs you. You know that.”

She gave me an odd glance, and changed the subject.

Anne fell into our quiet ways quickly, and with what seemed like relief. She took what we felt was a rather pitiful pleasure in trimming the tree on Christmas eve, and afterwards we sat in her room and talked. She had brought an enormous photograph of Peggy in a silver frame, and it was on her toilet table.

“She has grown very beautiful, Anne,” I said.

“Yes. That doesn’t do her justice.”

“I suppose she is very happy.”

“She’s rather—triumphant,” Anne said slowly; and after a pause: “She’s going to be married.”

Her tone made me look up.

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “Do you like the man?”

“I do. That’s the trouble.” She smiled when she saw my face. “Not that way; don’t worry. But I’m anxious. He’s a strong man, a—a real person. And he’s madly in love with her. That will help for a while, but after that—”

Her voice trailed off. “She’s making a lot of money,” she said after a time, apropos of nothing.

“More than he does?”

“She will make more than he does. But it isn’t that; he has a good bit. It’s that she belongs to the public pretty much now. She always will, as long as she sings. He—you know what I mean. He’ll have to share her.”

“The money thing’s important, too, Anne.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “They like their women dependent.”

But she changed the subject soon. Peggy’s prosperity was a wonderful thing for them all. She had bought her father a house, “a little place, but it’s his, you know.” And a young brother still at home was to go to Columbia, living at Peggy’s apartment while he did so.

“In that way I’m glad,” was Anne’s comment. “She’s giving us all a leg up.”

It appeared that Peggy could afford to. She had already signed a contract with a company, making phonograph records, and it meant a considerable amount of money. Later, as she became even better established, it would bring in a fortune. But Anne was not greatly interested in the money end of Peggy’s success.

“The only value of money,” she said, “is independence. But of course to father and Harry, and to me, it means dependence. I don’t resent it, but it’s a fact.”

During the remainder of Anne’s visit I was able to gather a little, here and there, as to Peggy’s love affair. I learned, for instance, that Peggy had offered to abandon her career, but that Mr. Wentworth—Jim, as Anne called him—had been unwilling to ask that sacrifice. Others had made a go of it, he said, and they were going to put two above-the-average minds to it. He seemed to have no anxiety whatever. . . .

From its very nature, this record must be episodic. At intervals I saw Anne or Peggy. Then, for long periods at a time I had to rest content with newspaper knowledge. But with each period of contact the story took a step forward.

For instance, the next one was at Peggy’s wedding. I had finished a novel, and was in New York for a round of theatres and concerts, when the invitation was forwarded to me. And I promptly accepted.

Peggy had taken a summer place up the Hudson, and they were married there, outdoors. The full development of her beauty struck me when I first saw her in her wedding dress, and there were a certain steadiness and maturity about the eyes. Both their responses were clear and solemn, and I noticed that that sort of reverential attitude persisted in them both during the reception afterwards.

All of important musical America was there, and a scattering of substantial business men and their families. The two groups did not mix, however; after the ceremony the musical people, prosperous, a trifle foreign, either by birth or affectation, noisily and demonstratively enjoyed themselves, by themselves. Equally prosperous, militantly native and rather ostentatiously quiet, Wentworth’s relatives and friends likewise remained together. They were as far apart as the poles; two worlds between which the orchestra pit was a gulf as wide as stellar space.

Peggy and her husband moved hospitably between them, but I had an odd impression that when they met it was as two emissaries, each from his own camp, to which when the parley was over each would retire again.

Peggy sent for me when she went in to change into her travelling things, sending the message by Anne, and I followed her into the house. Anne had looked different to me throughout the afternoon; I could not tell just how. But in the sunny hall, before we went upstairs, I discovered what it was, and it rather shocked me. Anne had had her hair dyed.

She caught my eyes on it and gave her grim smile.

“Yes, my dear,” she said. “You’re right. How do you like it?”

“I don’t, very much, Anne dear.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Peggy nearly had a fit,” she told me. “I rather like it, myself. There are a good many dyed heads out there.” She nodded through the open door. “I’m just beginning to learn that age is an unnecessary liability.” But she added, as we went up the stairs: “It’s frightfully expensive to keep up.”

Looking back, I can see how symbolic that dyed hair of Anne’s actually was. Up to that time she had been too busy, too anxious, too serious, to think very much of herself. If she had regretted the passing of her youth she had buried her regret. But now she was in a world which worshipped youth and beauty, and which demanded of its women their nearest approach to one or the other.

In the sheer instinct for survival Anne was beginning to think of herself.

Probably nothing that day pointed the difference in Peggy’s worldly affairs so clearly as her bedroom suite upstairs, compared with her pension room on the Alserstrasse. In the pension there had been a bare high room, cold and bleak even in summer; a narrow wooden bed; a wardrobe; a washstand with bowl and pitcher, placed on a strip of brown oilcloth; a chair or two, and leading into Anne’s chamber, a door covered with wall paper to match the rest of the wall. Now—

In a large boudoir-dressing room, lined with built-in wardrobes with glass doors, Peggy stood. Her toilet table was a litter of gold and ivory. On a great chaise longue a toy dog lay on a satin pillow, and lounging beside him, cigarette in hand, was Mazzari, the tenor. Flowers and bright cushions, tables with lamps, photographs in silver frames, her wedding veil with its coronet of orange blossoms over the back of a chair, made a luxurious litter.

Peggy herself was on the hearth rug, wrapped in a loose robe of quilted rose satin. A maid in uniform was hovering over a dressing case, and Peggy, quite oblivious of Mazzari, was dictating notes of thanks for gifts to a secretary at a desk. She smiled at me and went on.

Anne sat down beside the tenor and borrowed a cigarette from him, eyeing me with a sort of amused defiance.

“I’m on the downward path,” she told me, nonchalantly.

I had an impression that Anne was deliberately emphasizing to me the least attractive side of her new environment; as if, recalling our talk in Berlin, she was saying: “You saw us then and you see us now. This is success. How do you like it?”

She was not jealous, at that period, of Peggy and the fulness of her life. She was cynical, however, and somehow disillusioned, if she had ever had any illusions.

“Mazzari has been married four times,” she said coolly. “That’s what a voice can do.”

Peggy stopped dictating and saw Anne’s cigarette.

“Anne, I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Why? It can’t hurt my voice.”

There was something in her tone, a faint acidity, a new note from her to Peggy, that worried me. Anne had changed a great deal in her attitude toward her sister. It was as though she said: “Don’t try any of the diva stuff on me. I know you. I remember Indiana, if you forget it, and I made you what you are. Remember that.”

I was sorry for Anne, and angry with her. What was it? Jealousy? I have said that it was not, but I am not so sure. Consider that the very clothing Anne wore Peggy had paid for; remember Peggy’s success and the fruits of that success; her beauty; the clamorous crowd that overran the house and the garden; the gifts, ranged in rows of gold and silver and what not on their long white-draped tables; the reporters and camera men waiting below; the maid and the secretary; and Mazzari, the great, the golden, sitting at his ease on the chaise longue, and figuratively at the Prima donna’s feet.

But eliminate all those, and remember only that in a room across the hall Peggy’s husband was changing into his travelling clothes, and that Peggy herself was about to enter that world Anne was denied, the mysterious realm of love.

I began to see that while Peggy’s success had not touched her, it had touched Anne, and on the raw.

Peggy finished her letters, and turned to Mazzari.

“Run away now, Luigi,” she said briskly. “I want to dress, and I want to talk to an old friend.”

He got up slowly, for he was a corpulent man, and waddled to her.

“I am a very sad man to-day, my Peggy,” he said. “You should have chosen me.” He took her hand and held it. “At least we speak the same language, think the same thoughts.”

Peggy laughed.

“Language, yes. Thoughts! Don’t dare to say we think the same thoughts.”

He looked slightly flattered, and with a magnificent sort of gesture he bent and kissed her hand.

“No,” he said, when he straightened. “Not the same thoughts. My best are less than your worst. That is why I love you.”

He stooped over her hand again with a sort of ludicrous solemnity, bowed and went with heavy dignity out of the room. Peggy looked at me and smiled.

“Don’t worry about him,” she said. “He doesn’t care for me, but he loves to dramatise himself. He will go down now and drink a great deal of champagne and eat enormously. Anne.” She looked at her sister. “Where is Harry?”

“Wherever the wine is,” Anne replied briefly.

“Can’t you get him away from it?”

“You would have it. It’s all over the place by now, anyhow. I can’t lock him up.”

Peggy made her strange helpless gesture again, and turned to me.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “Jim and I talked it over, but people do expect wine at a wedding, especially—” Whatever she was going to say, she checked herself. “A good many of my musical friends are Europeans, and of course a festivity to them means wine.”

When she was dressed she got Anne and the others out of the room and came over and sat down near me.

“You’ve made a success of your marriage,” she said. “That’s why I sent for you. I want so terribly to have this go right. How can it be done? How can it be done?”

And while I tried to co-ordinate my own ideas, she went on:

“You saw the crowd downstairs. They didn’t mix. They never will mix. But Jim and I have got to live in a common world. He can’t have his friends and I mine.”

“It’s a sort of compromise,” I said. “Of course, things are different with us. We don’t live in New York. I don’t see many literary people.”

“Then it is you who have given up your own people, the ones who talk your language, as Mazzari said?”

“No. The difference is that I can carry on my work alone. I need them, of course, but only once in a while. You have to have them all the time.”

She sat without speaking for a time, smoothing her gloves in her hands. “Jim doesn’t like them, much,” she said at last. “He doesn’t understand them. They are fine and wonderful, but of course they are different.

“He’s very conventional,” she added, after another pause. “He wouldn’t have come in, for instance, while I was changing my things. Mazzari—”

She did not follow that line. She went to the window and looked out, and then called me to her side. The grounds, beautiful with the midsummer colours of the borders and the light green of new cut lawns, lay below, and the two camps were clearly outlined. Near the tennis court lounged and laughed Peggy’s musical friends and associates from the opera, while Jim Wentworth’s family and his guests were decorously talking close to the sunken garden. The tennis court group was far the more lively and colourful. And just then Mazzari, standing with a wine glass in his hand, commenced to roll out in Italian what I took to be a love song. His voice rose to us, clear and mellow, and Peggy drew a long breath.

“That’s what I mean,” she said. “Apart. Doing different things. Thinking different thoughts. . . .”

Anne spent the following Christmas with us again. She was very smart by that time, and Peggy’s Christmas gift to her had been a wonderful set of sables. She was living with Peggy and Jim, and so was Harry, she said. But Harry had left the university and was looking around for something to do. The father was in Florida.

“Isn’t he working?” I asked.

“Peggy allowances him. He didn’t make much, you know. Tax collector in a poor county. And he can’t stand the northern winters.”

“Peggy stands them,” I said, rather sharply.

“She doesn’t know it’s winter,” Anne said, with a return of the acidity I had noticed before. “From steam-heated dressing room in a closed theatre to a warm house. Flowers everywhere—usually sent, but if not she buys them. Who couldn’t stand her sort of winters?”

I began to get a picture of Peggy, gradually. Not at once. The first picture was of Anne. She asked for breakfast in her room, and looked at me in amazement when I asked her not to smoke before the children.

“How provincial you are!” she said.

But she managed somehow, and a certain hardness in her seemed to melt away gradually during the week that followed. So it was from her that I finally got my picture of Peggy. She trailed into my room one night in a negligée, and sat down by my fire.

“I’d give a good bit to know just what you think of Peggy and the rest of us,” she said, out of a clear sky.

“I’m very fond of you all.”

“Not that. The way we hang onto her. She’s done so much for us that now if she tried to do less we’d have a grievance. But I’m not concerned with her just now. She gets a lot of pleasure out of giving. That’s not it. It’s what it is doing to the rest of us.”

And after a silence, when she sat lost in thought and staring at the fire.

“I used to be a self-respecting human being. I wasn’t happy, but I was myself. Now I’m happy, if a cat on a warm hearth is happy—and I’m nothing. Take Harry, too. I’d like to wager that he won’t take a job unless it’s exactly to his taste. He doesn’t have to. Do you suppose father has lived seventy years in Indiana without learning to bear up under its winters? Nonsense.”

“What about Jim?”

“Oh, that doesn’t touch him. He has plenty of money. But he’s not happy. Take an average day. He’s gone before she’s awake, if she’s sung the night before, and he says good-morning over the telephone to her from the office. If she’s studying a part she works a part of the day, but he’s downtown, so that does not matter. But if she’s singing that night, and you’ve seen how many nights she has been singing, what happens? She has a light supper at five o’clock. Jim gets home about six. She’s off at seven and whom does he dine with? Harry and me. I tell you there are weeks when he hardly sees her, except from the box in the opera house.”

She was more talkative than I had ever seen her, and she gave a very faithful picture of the conditions. The house was never empty, and somehow the attempt to mix Jim’s world with Peggy’s had not worked. They always divided off, “like a children’s party,” Anne explained. And whereas Peggy’s friends stood ready to take Jim Wentworth whole-heartedly to them, his friends stood aloof from Peggy. For all the crowd, Peggy was often very lonely.

Anne got up at last.

“I suppose most successes mean some failures,” she said. “Well, don’t worry. It may work out all right. We’re none of us absolutely yellow, and Peggy may come to her senses and throw us out.” She moved to the doorway and stopped there. “But it’s not a good arrangement when a wife has to leave another woman to be her husband’s hearth-mate.” She saw my face and laughed. “Oh, good heavens,” she exclaimed, “it’s not what you’re thinking. He never sees me.”

I studied Anne during the remainder of her visit, and an impression gained just before she left the room that night was strengthened as time went on.

I do not know certainly that Anne knew she cared for Jim Wentworth. I do know that neither Jim himself or Peggy ever suspected it. Possibly Anne knew, for I could see at times in her a bitterness, not against the world or her people, although she always railed more or less, but against herself. The explanation, if she did care for him, was simple enough to me. Anne was greatly maternal, and for years she had lavished her aborted maternity on Peggy; she had never cared much for her brother. The time had come, however, when Peggy no longer needed her and Jim somehow did. She had to love somebody.

In all of this I am aware that Jim himself has been rather a shadowy figure. I did not know him well, and my chief recollection was of a square and solid figure, over middle height and faultlessly dressed for his marriage, submitting after the wedding with amused reluctance to being photographed with his famous wife.

“You fellows don’t want me,” he said, cheerfully enough. “Come on, Peggy. Stand out.”

He had a sort of steadiness and dependability, and he stood with his feet planted pretty squarely on the ground. There has never been any doubt in my mind but that he went into marriage soberly and after much thought, and that he cared intensely for Peggy. He was a serious sort of person, but he had humour and a most engaging smile. His main characteristic, however, was a sort of quiet strength.

It was a year or so before I went to New York again. I don’t know exactly what I had expected, but certainly I had not anticipated the change I found in Peggy. She was thin and fine-drawn, and her girlish look had gone. In her make-up on the stage, with borders and lights, the change escaped detection. She even looked, because of her slimness, younger, and her voice had certainly gained something. I am no musician, so I don’t know what, unless it was depth and maturity.

I sat with Jim in their box that night, and since from the moment she entered he never took his eyes from her, I had a good chance to study him. I have heard of hungry eyes, have even written of them, but I had never really seen them until then. It gave me a queer feeling, rather as though life was separating them and that he felt that she was only his when, as now, she sang to him.

Sing to him she certainly did. Perhaps she felt the same thing he did, that in their home they were somehow drifting apart, but that here, in that great auditorium, for a little space they were together. All the crowd, but really only the two of them.

When she finished, he was very pale, and he got out a handkerchief and mopped his face.

I stayed with them for several days, and saw that they were almost never alone together. On off nights Mazzari and others of the company would lounge in, bringing with them visitors to meet her. There was a welter of music, tobacco and food, and then more music. Peggy was always surrounded; and since they kept late hours and Jim had to rise fairly early, at midnight or thereabouts he would slip quietly away. It is a tragic fact that no one ever inquired for him or seemed to miss him.

Not once while I was there did any of Jim’s people or friends appear.

It was after one of those crowded evenings that I had a short talk with him. The guests had gone, but Anne, Harry and the father, who was there for a day or two, were still in the drawing room. I got an impression that some question was at stake; Harry, perhaps, or that the old man wanted something—he usually did—and I left them together.

On the way to my room I passed Jim’s study to see him sitting alone in front of the fire. I believe he thought I was Peggy, for he turned eagerly when he heard me; then his face settled again into a sort of apathy. He got up.

“May I come in?”

“Certainly.”

He drew a chair to the fire for me, and settled himself.

“Family love feast still going on?” he inquired.

“Yes. You don’t have her much to yourself, do you?”

“Much?” His voice was savage. “Never.”

“Couldn’t that be arranged, Jim? I think she misses it, too.”

He said nothing to that for a moment, but sat staring at the fire. Then:

“Once, perhaps. Not now. Her life is too crowded. The plain truth is that she doesn’t need me. She’s got her people, and her following, and her success. She doesn’t even need me to support her.”

I had an answer to that last, and gave it to him promptly. I said that a good many marriages had survived in the past because women were financially dependent on their men. But that when a woman who was economically free elected to marry and stick by her husband, it was because she wanted to. In other words, because she loved him. He seemed to think that over.

“You leave out an important element,” he said finally. “Habit. She has formed the habit of being married to him.”

He was rather determinedly withdrawing himself from her. The idea that she did not need him had grown, in his sensitive state, to a belief that she did not want him; and the result was a sort of proud coldness on his part that left her hurt and bewildered.

She was having trouble enough without that, too. For Harry was drinking pretty steadily, and was out of a position again.

“He’ll never amount to a row of pins,” Anne said to her once rather brutally. “There was a time when fifteen dollars a week and a chance to go to night school was the best thing he could think of. But he’s like the rest of us. Our ideas of money have changed. He’s worth about twenty-five dollars a week right now, but he goes downtown with Jim in an expensive car. He lives here, to the tune of— I don’t know what you spend, but it’s a fortune. And the salary he’s worth looks like a joke to him.”

“I can’t throw him out.”

“No,” Anne said slowly. “No, you can’t. But you’d save his immortal soul if you did.”

Peggy herself gave me no confidence whatever. Once or twice I thought she was going back to our talk the day of her wedding, but she never did. The nearest she came was when, apropos of my own children, she said suddenly:

“Sometimes I think if we had children it would help. They would be one thing in common.”

But Anne was there, and she said nothing further. By that time I saw that the old intimacy between the sisters was almost gone; that Anne resented her own dependence, and let Peggy see it. But she made no move to go away, and as far as that goes, she had no place to go. She hated her father.

Peggy, on the other hand, undoubtedly saw that, with every other element to drag them apart, her own family also stood between Jim and herself. They were never alone together. Harry went about, living his own probably not very creditable masculine life, but Anne was always there.

And Anne always would be there, ghastly relic of an outworn system which made its own martyrs; the helpless dependent, the unfortunate parasite.

In view of the situation that developed later on, undoubtedly Peggy had already begun to distrust her voice. If she had not buried that distrust things might have been different, but she would not talk even to me. She saw, helplessly, that Anne was somehow lost to her, and bitterly unhappy into the bargain, and that Jim, whom she wildly loved, was drifting away. And that her voice was somehow responsible.

With Anne her method was precisely the wrong one. She tried to win her back by acts and gifts of external generosity, but these only served to increase Anne’s sense of dependence. As for Jim, she cared too much, was too much hurt, to make any overtures. Probably she knew, subconsciously at least, that the only thing to do there was to surrender her work, and she was not prepared to do that. It was a part of her. Not only the applause, but the work itself, the hard study, the hours with her accompanist, when the servants walked about with stealthy feet, and her maid waited to spray her throat—all that was a part of her, and a vital part.

Peggy had employed a housekeeper by that time, and Anne’s last small pretence at usefulness had gone when she ceased to run the city and country houses. She had nothing whatever to do. . . .

For two years I heard little or nothing of them except through the newspapers. Then, one day, to my surprise, I received a letter from Anne.

I hardly know why I am doing this, she wrote, except that I must talk to some one. Things really are about as usual, and yet somehow we seem to be moving on toward a catastrophe of some sort. I don’t know what.

Peggy is pretty tired, for one thing. Tired of the everlasting crowds and of work, and tired of Harry and me. Harry has been doing very badly. As for me—well, I am always around, and I haven’t the strength of character any more or any training to start out for myself. I have made the effort, asked Peggy to give me a small allowance and begged Harry to go with me to a boarding-house somewhere. But he won’t do it.

I know Jim would be happier without us. He could have her to himself once in a while, and a lot of things would clear up, I think. But perhaps I am morbid about this. The real truth is not only that Peggy’s family has been ruined by her success, but that it has come between her and her husband. I told you once that men like their women dependent, but it is deeper than that. A good many of them resent any outside interest, except what occupies the time they are in their offices, and they want the main interest to be themselves.

When I tell you that Jim is often at his club now on Peggy’s evenings at home, you will see what I mean. The whole question is whether she sacrifices one or the other, Jim or her work.

As for myself, I don’t see much ahead. If I was brought into the world to produce a great artist, I have done my work. And that has failed, too, for what is her success without happiness? Quite frankly, I would deliberately let go of life if I felt sure there was something to come after.

I wrote to Anne and to Peggy too. Both letters were frank, and Peggy’s was almost brutally so.

Every successful woman, I wrote, sooner or later finds herself at the forks of the road. Perhaps this will not always be, for men will learn to make for the wife’s affairs the same understanding allowance women have always made for the business interests of their men. But the fault is also with the women. They cannot apparently reconcile the two, the home and the career, but, they must somehow learn to do it.

You asked me once how we managed, and I replied that it was by mutual compromise. I might have added, and I do now, that it was only possible by detaching my work from my family life, and by putting the family life first. I might have gone higher, the other way about, but it would not have been worth the cost.

I advised her strongly, too, to find something for Anne to do, and to face the fact that generosity may be a vice and a self-indulgence. That it could wreck lives and character.

Her reply was prompt and very humble.

I know it is true, but what can I do? I have watched it coming until I am almost desperate. But the plain truth is that when I make overtures to Jim he thinks I am sorry for him, and draws into a shell of pride. As for Anne, all my life I have looked forward to making things easy and happy for her, and you must see that I cannot turn her out. My home must be her home, so long as we both live. She deserves that, at the very least.

Within the next year or two things moved rather rapidly. The old father suddenly re-married and I got a bitterly cynical letter from Anne. Then Harry got into some sort of trouble and had to leave the country. Peggy and Mazzari went on a concert tour just after that, and she stayed with me when they came to our city. Her obsessing idea was that she had wrecked every one she loved, without seeing how.

“Even Anne,” she finished. “And I depended so on Anne to see me through.”

Mazzari came out to an early dinner that night, and he had not been in the house five minutes before I saw that he was a new and possibly important element in the situation. On her wedding day I had laughed at him, but I could not do that now. He had a sort of new dignity about him, an almost—it sounds queer, but it was true—an almost majestic pride in the sheer hopelessness of his devotion.

He drew me aside after dinner, while Peggy was upstairs, and opened up his heart with an engaging abandon.

“She is a wonder-woman,” he said. “And I love her. You know that. But she loves only that—that business man of hers.” I cannot hope to reproduce the scorn in his voice for Jim. “Me, I speak her language, I am of her people, we have the same God. He? He does not even love her.”

I protested, but he held up a dramatic hand.

“It takes a big man to love a big woman,” he announced. “I am a big man. He is not.”

Curiously enough, Peggy did not return to the confidential tone of her letter, and during that brief visit we had only one talk. She was always surrounded, even in the house; her accompanist, a secretary, a maid, one or the other was always with her.

I began to see that, no matter what she intended, there was not much time for a husband in her life. But, although she was never alone, I thought her very lonely, a sort of loneliness of the heart. Queens must have it sometimes.

But she did open up once.

“You mustn’t take Mazzari too hard,” she said. She was having her hair brushed at the time, and I had a distinct feeling of shock over such a subject before her maid. But I found that she did not think of the woman at all; I daresay she was always about, and Peggy had grown to think of her as a sort of toilet article.

“I certainly won’t, unless you do.”

She laughed a little.

“I’m used to him,” she said. “He’s like a comfortable fire; he burns, but he doesn’t blaze too much.” She took her hand mirror, and examined her face absently. “I have to have some affection,” she said. “Even a dog has to be loved.”

“You have Jim.”

“Jim doesn’t care any more.”

“I don’t believe it. And you have Anne.”

“Anne hates me,” she said bitterly. “I can understand Jim. Or I try to. But I can’t understand Anne.” And a moment later: “I’ve got everything, and nothing.”

There was a sort of blessed hush after they had all gone. . . .

In looking about for an explanation of the desperate act by which Anne finally solved her problem, I find myself wondering if her love for Jim did not enter into it very largely. That he never knew of it I am certain, but I am also certain that it existed.

In that case, I daresay the sort of pseudo-domesticity of their life together while Peggy was away was finally too much for her. But even eliminating that, Peggy’s absence was surely a contributory cause, and Peggy must have known it. Always when she was there she was justifying Anne to herself. “You did this for me, Anne,” or “Anne is my second mother.” “Do come to-night, Anne; I want your opinion—” on anything, from an aria to a costume.

But Peggy’s constantly upholding hand had been withdrawn, and Anne slipped down and down. She killed herself.

I have sat back and looked at the words, and they seem horrible to me even now. It was so unnecessary and so—so final. Do women really kill themselves because they have nothing worth while to do? And if so, was having something worth while to do the answer? Because Peggy had had that, and she had not found happiness. Was the only safe way then a sort of comfortable mediocrity? A little love, a little work, a little play?

Was it that men were satisfied with less, that they could so easily live their lives of double interest, home and work, and that women demanded more, all of love and all of success?

Are the great of the world among women always a little lonely? Is there the element of tragedy in all genius? Or was Anne, and later Peggy herself, a victim of a changing order of things, to which women have reacted more quickly than men?

Just what crisis finally precipitated Anne’s suicide I do not know. Probably, indeed, there was no crisis. She had, I think, simply reached the end of the hopeful trail.

I had a heartbroken note from Peggy. The idea that she was somehow wrecking everything she valued was noticeable through it, and she quoted Wilde about men always killing the thing that they loved. She had forgotten Anne’s later bitterness, and had gone back to the days when Anne had been the only mother she knew.

She did not mention Jim. She said she had fixed up Harry’s affairs, and he was back with them. . . .

From a psychological point of view, Anne’s suicide was a distinct milestone in Peggy’s condition. She could not face what she felt as to her own part in it. For months after she would not even speak Anne’s name.

It rested for Harry, however, to deliver the final psychological blow, and again her voice was the agent. It appears that he heard Peggy, in the early dramatic days of the war, singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic from the steps of the public library. He went home that night and told her that she had profoundly moved him, and that he had gone off at once and enlisted.

Later I heard from Jim that she had remained quite steady and said that she was very proud. But she had gone to her bedroom and fainted.

Harry was killed at Château-Thierry.

I imagine that, along with that blow, there came the frightful conviction that she had sent, not only Harry, but other boys; that she saw her dead laid out in rows; that she began to see herself as a thing of wrath, an agent of destruction. She began to have a steady insomnia.

I saw Jim in Washington not long after that, and the change in his appearance was very marked. His hair was quite grey, and he was less carefully dressed than usual. We lunched together at the Shoreham, and it developed that since he was too old for the army he had been trying to get some sort of war work. But he had failed.

“Where is Peggy?”

“She’s not very well. Of course Harry’s death— She’s singing at the camps.”

And a moment later, with a ghastly sort of smile: “You see how it is. She’s got a job to do for the war. Morale, you know. I can’t even do that.”

A day or so later I saw him lunching with a young woman. She looked eminently respectable, and I surmised that he was actuated by sheer loneliness. Still, it worried me. I wondered if Mazzari was also singing at the camps.

There was a long time when I heard nothing of Peggy or Jim after that. My husband and two sons were in the army, and I myself had a government mission abroad. While I was in Paris, shortly before the Armistice, I learned that Peggy was singing along the front, and later on that she had been giving a concert in a hospital when it was struck by a shell and almost demolished, but that she had not been hurt.

I did not know what had happened to her until I met her.

It was on Armistice Day, and I was on the balcony of the Crillon. Underneath a procession of war cripples was going by; in the square the crowd was separating to make way for an informal parade—first the mounted hussars, in helmet and full regalia once more, then “Papa” Joffre, generals and the cabinet, a vast formless jubilation.

There was a woman in front of me, heavily veiled and dressed in black. Now and then she lifted her veil to put a handkerchief to her eyes, and so at last I knew her. It was Peggy. But a changed and older Peggy. She was thinner than ever and quite colourless and she was, something which must have been rare with her, quite alone. I touched her on the shoulder, and she gave a little cry and threw herself at me.

“My dear, my dear!” she said. “I have wanted you so.”

But she did not say it. She whispered.

Her voice was entirely gone. She told me, in the taxi going back to her hotel, that she had not been able to speak since the time of the bombardment at the front. Of course she had had time to get accustomed to the idea, but I was profoundly shocked and moved.

“It’s a form of paralysis,” she whispered. “They tell me I’ll get over it, only not to try too much. I don’t know.” She sat looking ahead of her, her hands smoothing the gloves she had taken off, an old and familiar trick of hers, and I tried to think what this would mean to her. I couldn’t. She had always, to me, been a vehicle of her wonderful voice, and now without it she seemed a sort of empty vessel, a—

“I keep wondering,” she whispered, “how Jim will feel. He cared for my voice before he cared for me. Of course,” she added, after a pause, “it won’t last, but—suppose it does?”

Later on I asked about Mazzari, but she did not know where he was, or care, I gathered. She even smiled a little. “He only cared for the singer, anyhow,” she said. “I always knew that.”

Her main, her only concern, was Jim. She went back to him again and again, watching me wistfully as I reassured her.

“I don’t think you know how far we have drifted apart,” she said.

It was, it always had been, probably, as inevitable as fate. Now that we know more of the mind, I can pick out one by one the milestones she had passed, each one leading on to catastrophe, even while or because she had buried them. Buried they had been, deep in the unconscious, which forgets nothing, and kept down there by a violent effort of her conscious will. But then had come the bombardment, the shock, the temporary paralysis of her powers of resistance. . . .

The unconscious took hold. It said to her, in effect: “You have wrecked and ruined, lost and suffered, through your voice. It is better dead. Better dead.”

I see that now, but at the time I did not understand.

I had been astonished to find her in a modest hotel, with no trace of her customary entourage, and no doubt she saw that, for she explained that she had spent money almost as fast as she had earned it, and that she felt obliged to be careful.

“But Jim—” I protested.

“I have never gone to Jim for money,” she said proudly. But her face twitched a little. “I can’t ask him to keep me now.”

She had something, of course, but I was aghast at the distance that had evidently come between them. That she still cared I was positive, but how far had Jim drifted? I remembered the girl in the restaurant.

I cabled Jim that night without telling her, and for four days no reply came. I was angry and frightened, but on the fifth day he cabled.

Have moved heaven and earth for passport. Can’t get one. Will you bring her home?

She was like a ghost on the steamer. She was afraid of being recognised, and only after night was I able to get her out on deck for a breath of air. At first I thought that she was grieving over her condition, for the fall from supreme greatness is harder than for those who have not reached the top. But I began to see after a time that she had waved that aside as of no importance whatever, and that her whole mind was on Jim.

Out of all that life had held out to her, only Jim was left.

Would Jim see that too? I could not get to him first to warn him, and yet, in her psychological condition, I did not know what would happen if he failed her.

She was dressed, veiled and on deck long before we were ready to dock. She had even, a rare thing for her, put some rouge on her cheeks. I found her, however, scrubbing it off.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “He must see me just as I am.”

She had lost a great deal of her beauty, and she looked almost old. I confess that I was worried, but I need not have been. I saw Jim on the pier before she did, and he had the same hungry look in his eyes that I had seen in the box at the opera.

He just took her into his arms and held her there. . . .

The answer? There is no answer, except perhaps that success passes, one way or another, and that the only thing that matters is a strong, warm, human hand to hold to in the dark.

But there is a brief sequel to this story, and I do not know what it teaches. Perhaps that it does not require failure to teach a woman perspective. To some, of course, success is enough in itself, but there are others who, not through calamity but because they will not pay the cost, prefer love to success when, as sometimes happens, they cannot have both.

We came through the war safely, and last summer I went out to Montana, where Jim had bought a summer ranch. Three years had passed and more, and all the world knew that the great diva would never sing again. It was true that she no longer whispered, but her singing voice was gone.

I found them brown and happy, and inseparable. The old look had gone from both of them, and Peggy was doing most of the work, with a Chinaman in the kitchen. There was not even a piano, nor one of the photographs which used to litter up whatever Peggy was calling home at the moment.

I asked Jim once if she ever tried to sing, but he said she did not.

“It’s gone,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the loss it must be to her, I’d say frankly that I’m glad. You never knew it, but it had come between us, somehow. Not the singing, but all that it brought with it.”

I was not much of a rider, and Jim was busy about the ranch during most of the day. Peggy rode off alone rather often, and would come in toward evening tired but very happy. After those rides I always thought there was something rather wonderful in her attitude toward Jim, something solicitous and tender and almost mysterious.

I had ventured out alone into the mountains one day, going further than I knew, and finally losing my way. After considerable wandering my horse found the trail again, and we headed toward home. It was mid-afternoon, and the peaks overhead were brilliant with sunshine. And on a rock, above, suddenly I saw Peggy.

She was standing there, immobile, looking down toward the ranch. She had not seen me, and as I looked she threw her hands out and began to sing. I had never heard her sing like that. It was all back, and more.

I sat on my horse and cried; cried for the sheer pathos of it. Just how long it was since her voice had come back I did not know. I do not know now, for she still carries out the program she set for herself. Jim has never guessed. But what is important is that somehow, somewhere she had reached the forks of the road, and had turned to Jim.

No, it isn’t an answer. It is plain surrender. I suppose whether it pays or not depends on the Jims of the world. And it depends, too, on what a woman really wants. I daresay it will always be love, unless we develop a new type of women. Which God forbid.

V
THE SECRET HOUSE: The Wife

I

Her father was dead. In the fulness of years he had passed away. There was no great grief; only a hush in the house and that sense of emptiness that comes to even a crowded household after a death. The children had been taken to school. In the nursery a canary sang in a sunny window.

She sat alone in the room that had been the dead man’s study for many years. It was a small room in the back of the house on the second floor. Out of it opened his bedroom. The bed, strangely square and white and empty, stood where she could see it from the desk. All the morning she had been busy with his papers, his letters to her mother during the war, old receipts, newspaper cuttings, many photographs—the impedimenta of a long and busy life. Over the desk hung his sword, and under it were photographs on the wall, a picture of her as she looked at her first communion, a younger picture of a very little girl in a plaid dress, with velvet-topped shoes and straight hair cut into a bang, and just before her, level-browed, one taken when she was seventeen, about the time— She closed her eyes.

Receipts and cancelled checks went into the waste-basket; letters were laid aside for more careful scrutiny. The war records went into a box with half a dozen medals. They were to go to the Grand Army headquarters. He had been a very great soldier, this old man who died.

Most of the cancelled checks she recognised. He had brought her back into the big family home when her children began to come. Since then she had helped him with his affairs—not that he knew much of business himself. He had kept his books in a sort of crooked, comfortable fashion that had been her husband’s despair. She ran over the cancelled checks hastily before tearing them in half and consigning them to the waste-basket. There were a few that were not familiar; one of quite recent date puzzled her. Pay to the order of Joan Bailey, it said. The date was only a month or two ago. That was rather curious; a month or two ago he had been quite ill, and there had been a nurse. But the nurse’s name was not Bailey.

She went over the checks now with some care. The accumulated extravagances and necessities of thirty years were there. She found the piano that was her wedding gift; little Emily’s silver mug. And every now and then she came across a Joan Bailey check. When she had finished, she sat staring at twenty of them, each for a substantial sum, each endorsed across the back in the same neat feminine hand. Two a year for ten years! She sat with the checks in her hands, looking out through the window to the vista and garden and white road beyond.

The canary sang joyously. Beside the white bed in the next room was the great upholstered chair in which her father had sat during the past year. More than once he had sat there while she worked at his desk, watching her with loving, faded old eyes.

“Pay to Joan Bailey!” That was what he had been thinking when he looked at her through the doorway.

Her baby had lived then after all. They had told her it died. For ten years, he who had been frankness and truth itself, had lived a lie, had fought desperately for her happiness and—secured it.

Out of all the tumult of that terrible time, the name of Joan Bailey came back, loomed large. For years she had not thought of her. She had put her resolutely out of her intelligence, just as she had put away that one year. The child was dead, and what had been, had been.

Ah! but the child was not dead! Round in a circle again to the child.

How she had hated it—this visible little squalling symbol, this tangible sin! She had held it once—she remembered that. Sometimes still in the night she wakened to a consciousness of that pitiful little bundle which had been hers for only an hour. Such thoughts never came to her in the day, so rigorously had she schooled her mind to forgetfulness. But at night, with the barriers of caution and secrecy weakened by sleep, sometimes she was back again in the little house on Long Island, with Joan Bailey’s motherly face bending over her, and a tiny thing beside her that stirred against her heart.

One builds up a house of secrecy day by day; each new day adds thickness to its walls. And so she had built her house. Only to find now, after ten years, these twenty doorways.

The gardener was bending over some early crocuses down on the lawn. Lying out on the grass to the sun was a child’s frock put to bleach. The frock was Emily’s, who was seven—the other child would be ten—taller than Emily!

Her own composure surprised her. The thing was so new that as yet she was able to view it almost with detachment. It was as if another woman’s problem confronted her for solution, as though another woman with a husband and children had confessed a living illegitimate child and had asked her what to do.

The children were coming home from school. She could see the carriage on the white road, filled with a squirming mass that overflowed onto the steps, clung to the back, and stood between the old driver’s friendly knees.

The horse ambled along. Here and there a youngster dropped off as casually as a ripe apple from a tree, and scurried across a lawn to home and luncheon. Childish laughter came to her through the open window. But as the carriage neared the house, glee was succeeded by decorum. Grandfather had just gone away.

Something of their new dignity seemed to invest the two little girls in white as they drove in, short legs dangling, prim hair ribbons erect. They saw her through the window and waved to her. She waved back absently. These children belonged to the woman with the problem.

Of all life’s great questions, only death is met with a hush, and death after all is not a question but its answer. The man who is to be hanged must have his breakfast first. The tortures of the spirit are inextricably confused with food, with money, with covering our bodies, with putting them to rest at night—so shackled are our souls by the flesh.

The gardener must have permission to put crocuses in a pot for the table, the children must have luncheon. Perhaps it was just as well—it gave her a little time. Very slowly she was comprehending this thing that had come to her. After she had grasped it, she could begin to think of what she must do.

Once in the house the children forgot their new-found dignity and called to her jubilantly. The reaction from the hush of the last three days was immensely cheerful. The house was full of sunlight, of open doors, of spring flowers, of little darting breezes full of promise.

The little girls danced through the hall and up the staircase. Only, at the door of the study, they moderated their shrill young voices. For here they were again on the threshold of the great Unknown. Each child as she kissed her mother threw a wide-eyed glance to the empty room beyond, with the square white bed and the great chair.

“The teacher,” said Emily, in her older sister voice, “was very considerate to Jane. Jane, tell mother what you did.”

“Throwed ink on the teacher,” said Jane gaily, “shook my pen and the ink went on her. She was all spotty.”

“How very naughty!” said the mother. “How very, very naughty!”

She drew a long breath. These were hers, hers by law, by every right of legitimacy. However she had failed before, here at least, she had done her best—and her best had been very good.

“The teacher,” said Emily, “the teacher says that she thinks she can get it out and you are not to worry, mother, but that to-morrow Jane is not to be allowed to eat her orange at eleven o’clock.”

“I should think not,” she heard her own voice saying. “I shall have to apologise for my naughty little daughter.”

She ate no luncheon, but she sat and spread bread and butter “and plenty of jam, please, mother” for the little girls.

Her orderly house soothed her; it was as if the very decorum and respectability of her surroundings had put this other thing far back, almost out of her life. The quiet step of the maid serving the table, the shaven green of the spring lawn, the dignified manœuvres of the goldfish in an aquarium in a sunny window—all these helped to keep her mental balance; she stored up, as it were, a reserve of saneness against the time that she knew was coming.

There was something of desperation in the way she clung to the small affairs of her household, something of fierce maternity in the way she held the children to her. It was as if she said to the other woman:

“These are my children—only these.”

But the evil hour could not be indefinitely postponed. At two o’clock came a message from a kindly neighbour:

“Please let me have the kiddies for a little while. I know how terribly tired you must be. I will take splendid care of them, and do lie down and take a nap.”

Even then, she prolonged the parting. In her black dress with white bands at the neck and wrists, she led the children down the drive to the gate and watched them scurry across the road and out of sight. When at last, she turned, she and the other woman, herself of ten years ago, were together alone for the first time: this other self, which she loathed, which had shamed her so.

“Your child,” said the other self.

She stood under the apple trees, which were still black but moist and swelling with promise, and put her hand to her throat.

“Not mine,” she said, “oh, my God! not mine, living and without a mother. I won’t face it; I can’t face it.” But after all, she was the daughter of a soldier and she had something of her father’s soul. Perhaps that afternoon she had some little conception of the burden the old man had carried through the years—a burden not of his own making, a weight of secrecy that must have almost crushed his upright spirit.

She went back to the study. The sun was in the west now and the room was cool and shadowy. She closed the door and resolutely faced her situation.

She was happily married to a man she both loved and respected. She had two children born of that marriage. About her lay secure ramifications of respectability, of domestic happiness and love. One of two things she must do and she must make her choice and abide by it.

She had a little money from her father’s estate. She could see Joan Bailey and continue her father’s secret arrangement, thus ignoring everything but her financial responsibility for the child. Or she could tell her husband.

She faced her dilemma squarely, for as yet it was only a dilemma. Only later on was she to find that between a mother and her child is a bond that no instinctive secrecy, no fear of shame, can entirely sever.

She went very far back. She went back to that early spring—years before—and her first love affair. Here was no tale of seduction of a young girl by an older man; merely the story of a boy and a girl, both in their teens, caught in the throes of a first love. A tale of long spring evenings when the motherless girl wandered unwatched among the trees, when the boy with his ardent young soul on his lips met her night after night. And even then it had not been wrong; they had always intended to marry.

April it was by that time, April, fast flowering into May.

They ran away finally, because the elders had said that years must elapse and at seventeen years are centuries—

But no one would marry them. They were so young—almost flagrantly young. They were discovered after a day or so of fruitless interviews with clergymen and brought back.

And for a time that had seemed to be all. They were to wait and in a few years they might marry.

But it had not been all. There had been—the small red bundle that had stirred against her heart.

Little by little the boy had slipped out of her life. She saw him now and then, even yet. A chance meeting had long since ceased to have any shock about it—and she had felt so secure.

The boy had never known about Joan Bailey or the other.

The old father had not blamed the boy much. The hardest part for her had been that he blamed himself. She had heard him walking the floor of this very room hour after hour, those first days. Hard days they were, brooding hard days. He had looked very peaceful yesterday when they—

Her husband came home that night, swinging up the walk with an air of almost boyish freedom. The restraint of the last few days had told on him also. He had loved the old soldier—but when one is full of years and yearns for rest, death is not a captivity, but a release.

The dogs barked around him. He kept a weather eye on the window, suspecting ambuscade.

It was a twilight game with the children to ambush father from a window and pelt him with rag dolls—so being young and having in his pocket certain ammunition with which to return their fire, the ammunition being bonbons, he walked warily and with extreme caution, keeping a weather eye open for danger signals in the shape of hair ribbons over window sills.

But after all, his caution went for nothing, because instead of rag babies, it was crocuses, and they came from behind the hall door when he entered.

He was a tall young man and he carried the children upstairs, one on each shoulder, into his wife’s dressing room. The shades were drawn. She had a fear of the daylight, late as it was. She felt that since he knew her so well, he must see at once the veil that lay over her eyes.

He dropped the children in a laughing heap on the couch and came over to her.

“You are looking tired, sweetheart,” he said, “and you promised to rest to-day.”

“I have rested. There were some little things—”

“Look here, why not go away for a few days, just two or three. Mam’selle can keep the girlies well enough. We will take the car and just go quietly. We won’t even lay out a route. We’ll just wander about. What do you think of it?”

She patted his arm, still avoiding his eyes.

“Give me a little time,” she begged. “There are so many things just now, and I—somehow I don’t feel—” She broke down, her voice trembling.

“That’s natural, of course. In a day or so, I suppose the roads will be better anyhow. But you must get away. This whole thing has been too much for you.”

Still with his arm around her, they went downstairs to dinner. Between the lights on the table she could look across to him. How strong he looked—and how good! She knew his creed, an almost Puritanical insistence on integrity in women; she knew his belief in her.

Above, Mam’selle was putting the children to bed. There were short excursions in white nighties to the head of the stairs, last good-night messages, soft little kisses blown down. Across the table her husband smiled at her.

“After all,” he said softly, “he was very old, dear. You still have the children, and—and me.”

She smiled back at him with veiled eyes.

“Pay to Joan Bailey!”

II

She went to church the next morning with her husband. It was one of the conventions after a bereavement. She sat with her heavy veil down. There was a gleam of comfort for her in the sermon after all. The Rector saw her and delicately avoided any subject that might recall her recent grief. A personal man, that day he sought to be strictly impersonal. He must not preach of death or sorrow. He preached instead of sin, as a safe abstraction.

What could this small quivering young woman in black know of sin? He spoke about it to his wife on his way over.

“There is nothing gained in probing a raw wound,” he said. “There is comfort in the service itself. I am fond of her and I don’t want to sadden her. If you think I am treading on dangerous ground, let me know.” She often let him know such things. They had a signal system with a handkerchief.

So he preached from the text, “The wages of sin is death.”

He was a tall man with the eyes of a dreamer and some beliefs that he did not voice in the pulpit.

“Sin!” he said. “Men and women, there is no absolute standard for sin. The virtue of the untempted is nothing. He who sins and repents among you is greater than he who has never sinned, having never had desire.”

His wife was watching the congregation. Before long she got out her handkerchief.

His arm slipped through hers, her husband talked to her on the way home. She needed air; they must take a roundabout way. He showed her crocuses in fence corners, shrubbery bursting into dull red and green again, beds of early tulips lifting their spiked heads through the soil. The village streets were full of sedate couples walking home in the spring sunshine. How friendly they were, how kind! What would they be if they knew? Did she dare? Did she dare not to?

Their walk prolonged itself. Behind her veil she was gathering up courage to ask him a question.

“The sermon!” she said at last. “Do you—do you really believe what he said?”

He had to think a moment. Church to him was a matter of weekly habit, a quiet hour in which his soul fed on things spiritual and took in, as one may say, a week’s supply ahead. With the final “Amen” of the benediction, he closed and locked that part of his mind and laid it away.

“The text, oh, yes, ‘The wages of sin.’ Well, I don’t know about that. I never get past the fact that it’s a plural subject and a singular verb. I was trying to parse it all the time he was preaching.”

“He said,” she reminded him, “that the virtue of the untempted wasn’t—didn’t amount to much; it was only those who had been—been tempted that knew anything about it.”

He looked down at her, smiling.

“What is it! Has one of the maids been taking things?”

“No, not that. I was just—just thinking.”

“Oh, as to that,—well, if you really want my opinion about it—sin is sin wherever you find it. You cannot get away with it, either in this world or the next. He’s handling dangerous doctrine. Even to comfort the sinner, one need not compromise with crime.”

“But if one is tempted—”

“We are all tempted,” he said. “The only difference between the good ones and the bad ones is that the bad ones yield and the good ones do not.”

She had known it all along. He was like her father—only younger, more uncompromising. The older man had mellowed with the years. For her husband the world was divided into the sheep and the goats, the good and the bad.

Afterwards she could recall very little of that terrible Sabbath.

In the afternoon the children frolicked with their father. With his usual kindly thought, he kept them from her. Late in the afternoon she had rather a shock. He came into the room where she was lying on a couch and held a key before her.

“To father’s study,” he said.

It was still father’s study.

“I have been in there. You are not going to touch that mess of papers again. That’s a man’s job. I am going to start it to-night.”

Her heart seemed to stop.

“But—there are so many,” she gasped, “and I have always—”

“That’s exactly it. You have always looked after them, and I never realised until now what a lot there was to do. I’ll sort them out roughly, and to-morrow I will send one of the girls from the office to help put them in order.”

“But the key—”

“I’ll take care of the key,” he said, smiling, and thrust it into his pocket.

That night when he was safely asleep she got the key and slipped into the little study. Everything was as she had left it. The box of medals and papers, the stack of cancelled checks, and over on the desk, under a weight where she had placed them, the Joan Bailey checks.

Perhaps he had seen them and wondered. What if he asked her about them? What could she say?

Still building, you see, the secret house, still propping its falling walls.

Fortune favoured her next day. Her husband telephoned at ten o’clock that he would not be able to get home to dinner until late.

“Take things easy to-day, Bess,” he said. He dropped his voice. He was calling from the office. “I couldn’t stand it to have you ill.” His voice was a caress. “If you want me to go to pieces, just get sick.”

He meant it. She knew that he meant it. That morning it only added to her agony of mind. But it gave her a full day. She must know that this thing was real. Lying awake the night before, she had come to doubt it.

It was just possible that Joan Bailey had been exacting from her father a sort of hush money all these years. That had been done, she knew. “Blackmail,” they called it, and yet—

What she remembered of the Joan of years ago, was of a kindly, broad-faced woman who had closed her baby’s fingers around one of hers and watched in vain for the mother gleam in her eyes.

Anyhow she must know.

The children were at school. Mam’selle was darning stockings on a sunny corner of the terrace. She had no railroad schedules and must trust to luck. She dressed quickly in the still unfamiliar black and walked to the station.

Here and there a kindly neighbour spoke to her in the chastened dropped voice that one adopts toward the recently bereaved.

“So good,” they said; “so fine a man and so brave a soldier—and all your life wrapped up in you!”

She could have screamed. That was it exactly. If only he had not been so tender, if only he had made her face the thing at the time, if only when Will had gone to him and said he loved her, he had insisted that she tell the truth! But he had saved her then, as always, and now—

She had a very definite plan. Of one thing she was quite confident. Her father had not intended that she should find out this thing. She believed that through his lawyer he had made provision for the other child, and it was to the lawyer that she went first.

He saw her at once. She approached the subject bravely. It had come to the point with her when all the world might know, if only she could keep it from one man.

“I want you to be quite frank with me,” she said. “I am going to say something that is not particularly pleasant for me or for you, but I have to say it, and I want you to promise, first, to be quite honest.”

The lawyer was elderly, suave, rather judicial.

“My dear child,” he said, “lawyers have to be honest, or dishonest people would not come to them.”

She bent forward.

“Exactly what do you know of Joan Bailey?”

She had hit it right away. She had known her father very well, and men are tolerably certain quantities. Given a situation and a man, one can tell what the man will do. With a woman it is different; the woman herself does not know what she will do.

The lawyer put his finger-tips together.

“Ah!” he said, “Joan Bailey! Do you mind telling me why you ask?”

“My father left her money, I think—an annuity.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“No, but I have reason to believe that he did.”

“And your reason?”

She held out two small, black-gloved hands to him.

“Please!” she cried. “I cannot fence. I only know that I must find out. I do not care about the money. It is not that at all. It is something else that I must know.”

The lawyer hesitated, then:

“The woman, Joan Bailey, was left a small annuity. It amounts, I believe, to three hundred dollars a year.”

“Do you know why it was left to her?”

For just a moment his eyes dropped. Then he glanced up at her with something of pity, much of comprehension.

“Yes,” he admitted, “I know.”

Even then she must be sure. There must not be another mistake. She forced her dry lips to speak.

“The child is living?”

“The child is living—a fine boy. I never approved—”

She rose. In another moment she felt that she would scream.

“Thank you,” she said. “If you will give me the address—”

He was not so sure about that. In his kindly way he urged against it.

“Let the dead past bury its dead,” he said with a hand on her shoulder. “The child is well enough.”

“I am living a lie. I have been living a lie for ten years, but then I thought that it affected no one but myself. Now that I know that—now that I know that—there is some one else, it is different—I—”

The old man shook his head after her as she went out. He thought she was making a mistake. He did not understand, of course. Once a mother, always a mother, no doubt would have been his explanation. He did not believe in native honesty in women; in fact, he did not believe there was such a thing as honesty. Elderly lawyers lose their faith and substitute for it tolerance.

She got the address from him finally. It was not the Long Island village that she remembered. It was in New Jersey, an hour’s ride, perhaps.

A sort of exaltation of sacrifice was on her now. She was quite clear, no longer dazed and uncertain—to see the child, to comprehend him, that he was hers, that whether she would or not she could no longer plan her life without him—this she kept before her all the way. She could only look forward. She dared not look back to the white house with the crocuses, to Emily and little Jane, to the thousand homely trifles that up to now had made up her day, almost her life. She did not think. She was like a runner striving for the tape, eyes only for the goal ahead, all effort, all tenseness. An instant of softening would be fatal.

And so after a long time she reached the house. It was a very small house of clapboards with a porch. A poor little house, but not untidy—quite thrifty, indeed, with its white curtains in the window and its geranium box, rather spindling from the long winter.

She walked past it before she summoned courage to come back. There was no door-bell. She rapped. Perhaps she had a moment of relief when there was no reply from within. There was no one there. Surely she had done her part. She had tried—

A second rap brought a response, a small voice from well beyond the door. She knew immediately that it was the child’s voice. She had no thrill, certainly; only a sickness, a sort of dizziness that made her steady herself by the door-post.

“Come in,” said the small voice; “just open the door. It’s not locked.”

Somehow or other she pushed the door open and stepped inside. The early spring sunshine had been very warm, but the little house was cool. That was the first thing she noticed—coolness and order and a sort of prim austerity.

Then she saw the boy. He was propped up on a sofa-bed in the back of the room.

“Miss Joan isn’t here,” he said politely; “she’ll be here at five o’clock.”

She could make out around him the various impedimenta of a child’s convalescence. Pictures cut out and pinned to the wall over the sofa-bed, papers covered with childish drawings, and on a chair, neatly covered with cold water, four pared potatoes with the knife beside them. Evidently the small hands had been labouring as well as playing.

She stood in the centre of the room looking down. Nothing quite appropriate came to her to say. But the boy was at ease.

“You will have to excuse me,” he said. “I have a broken leg. It’s almost better. In about a week I am going to get a pair of crutches.”

Still she could think of nothing to say. The child was almost exactly like his father. It was a further complication. The same brown eyes, heavily lashed, the same droop to the corners of his mouth, the same rather wistful smile.

“Crutches,” said the small voice, “with rubber tips on ’em. Miss Joan is afraid I’ll slip and fall again.”

She sat down. She was never theatrical, and the whole episode had an air of unreality. When she did speak at last, her voice was very well controlled; she even managed to smile.

“I will not wait for Miss Joan,” she said, “but I will sit down and talk to you, if I may.”

The boy was delighted. Naïvely he showed her his drawings, marvellous ships with flags as large as themselves in bow and stern, accompanied by sharks, also as large as the vessels, the whole sailing a sea ferociously disturbed. He showed her the potatoes and how thin the peelings were.

He was pathetically glad of a visitor.

With an experienced eye, she noted that although he was a little pale from confinement, his eyes were clear and healthy. He looked well cared for and well nourished, abundantly cheerful.

The little house itself was comforting. This was no hovel, but a home in which love and order abided. So far, so good. But, after all, that was not her problem.

Perhaps a half hour passed during this one-sided conversation. She was not thinking at all—she was remembering. Back, as she sat there, came every forgotten detail of the other spring. Back came the boy with his dark eyes and wistful mouth. Back out of the limbo of things wilfully forgotten came that twenty-four hours of flight and terror and delight.

“Surely it had not been so wrong,” she said to herself, when the result had been so beautiful.

“Sin is sin wherever you find it. You cannot get away with it, either in this world or in the next.”

“I wonder,” said the boy, “if you would look at the clock in the kitchen. At half-past three school is out, and somebody generally comes and sits with me.”

She got up a little blindly and went to the kitchen door. She felt that the boy’s eyes followed her. That probably he knew the significance of her dark clothing and veil, that he would even—had he dared—have offered his mite of comfort.

“Almost three-thirty,” she said; “if you are sure some one will come to sit with you, I think I must go.”

He smiled.

“Some one!” he said. “Why, yesterday there were eleven, and when Miss Joan came home, she had to scrub the floor.”

She did not kiss the boy good-bye. It would have been an audacity, almost an impertinence. She stood beside him, looking down.

“Miss Joan will be sorry she missed you.”

“Do you always call her Miss Joan?”

“Why, yes; that’s her name.”

“You don’t call her Aunt Joan or—or mother?”

“But she’s not my aunt or my mother either. I just live with her. But we are great friends. Miss Joan says I am all she has, and she’s mostly all I have got.”

Dangerous ground this!

She had a frantic impulse to drop on her knees beside the sofa-bed and to catch the small cheerful figure to her. The diversion came at the right moment—a clatter of feet outside, a slamming open of the door, an influx of small boys, not too tidy, and bearing curious small boy offerings.

She moved back and let the mob surround him. She had the pain of seeing herself forgotten as she herself had forgot. She worked her way very quietly to the door and out to the street.

And now at last she found that she could think. There was something concrete about which to reason, a fact to be faced, not a fear as before. Some of her father’s gallant blood made her throw back her shoulders and sit straight. She had risen to meet her hour, as women always do rise to meet the great crises of life.

The responsibility was not hers alone. This one thing—the child—she shared in common with the boy of years ago. The responsibility was his, too. She had not thought of reproach, of course. It was simply that they two must face this thing together, must talk it over, think it out, decide what was best.

Had it not been that the secret involved him also, probably in her exalted mood, she would have taken the whole thing to her husband that night. But in all the years that she had been building the secret house she had forgotten that she had a partner in this ownership. It was not hers alone. Now she remembered.

In the city between trains she had time to telephone to him. She found him without the slightest difficulty. For years their paths, never crossing, had closely paralleled. A hand out in this, her darkness, and she could touch him.

She called his apartment at first and was given his club.

There was a slight constraint in his manner when she gave him her name. The constraint was not immediate; it seemed to take him a moment to place her. For, of course, what had been a tragedy for her had been but an episode for him.

“Oh, of course!” he said, after a moment. “How stupid of me! How are you, Bess?”

“Very well,” she said quickly. “I wish I might see you and talk to you.”

“Yes?”

“Something has happened,” she said hastily, “something I think you ought to know. I’m—I’m rather upset about it.”

There was instant sympathy in his tone.

“Oh, yes, I know. Your father has just died, hasn’t he? I am very sorry.”

“It isn’t that; it’s something entirely different. Could you—could you come to see me?”

He hesitated just the fraction of a second. Then:

“I could come out to-night, if it is very important.”

She caught the slightest possible change in his inflection. It was as if he emphasized the fact that to-night he knew her husband would be there.

In the darkness of the telephone booth she flushed.

“It is something that concerns only you and me. I am sorry, but I would like to have you come when Will is not at home.”

There was a real silence, very short, very illuminating.

“Where are you living?”

“In the old house.”

“I see.” Then another pause. “I am very busy just now. Probably you know that I am to be married—but if to-morrow afternoon will do, I can arrange to come.”

“Shall I send the carriage for you?”

“No; I’ll take the short cut across the fields.”

How familiar that was, how many times he had telephoned to her and said that he would take the short cut across the fields!

Once again the children, once again the quiet dinner with her husband smiling at her through the candles, once again evening with the two of them pacing the terrace under the stars while he smoked. Once again the thousand and one soft sounds of early spring: the distant roaring of a little creek swelled with rain, the belated twitter of a bird working late to build its home, the raising of windows in the night nursery after Mam’selle put out the lights.

From a hand on her elbow as they moved her husband slipped his arm around her. Once, at the far end of terrace, where the shadows were deepest, he stopped—and drew her close.

“You look very young to-night,” he told her, “quite saintly in your black dress. I am almost afraid of you.”

“Afraid of me! Because I wear a black gown!”

“No. Because your virtues shine in your face. I am very common clay, I am afraid, only—you keep it hidden from me!”

“Oh, no.”

“I love you with all my heart, dearest.” He bent over her. “I am afraid I don’t say it often enough, but I always think it. You are my saint—my star! And you are more than that—you are the mother of my two little girls.”

It was a rare outburst for him. Two days ago, so absolutely had she dismissed the past, two days ago she would have deprecated and adored the little speech. Now it left her terrified and ashamed. To tell him! To see the light die out of his eyes, never to come back! To have no more hours together like this one, with his arm about her and perfect trust between them.

A light wind had sprung up, with a threat of rain. Upstairs Mam’selle, always watchful, was bowing the shutters in the night nursery. A vision of the room came to her. Two white beds, two small white chairs, one beside each bed, covered with an orderly array of fresh garments for the morning; small shoes, neatly rolled white stockings, fluffy little petticoats.

And then—a sofa-bed in the back of a tidy little room in a clapboard house, childish drawings pinned to the walls, four potatoes pared thin!

III

The other man came in the afternoon. She watched him make his way up through the fields, which were fields no longer, being laid out with neat cement streets and rows of young trees. The day was warm for so early in the year. He carried his hat. It was an old trick. How often she had watched him come through those very fields carrying his hat, the wind blowing his heavy hair back from his face. Even the gesture with which he attempted to restore its order was familiar.

How many things were coming back to her!

Their meeting was very quiet, just a minute eye to eye, hand to hand, and then she was sitting and he was standing looking down at her.

He approved of her. He had always liked her, even when the madness of young love had died. Many friendships are refined out of the crucible of passion.

“How little you have changed!” he said. “You are, if anything, even lovelier.”

“I am older, and just now I am very sad.”

“I know. I only heard about it yesterday. He was splendid.” There was a little pause. Both were thinking. “How decent he was to me, when—when I deserved almost any brutality.”

She nodded. He was making it easier for her. He was leading back.

“He was very understanding,” she said. “He knew life and people, and he knew youth. He was very young himself, always, although after—that, he aged, rather.”

She had thought she could tell him immediately, but it was harder than she had expected.

“Jove!” he said, looking around the room. “How changed it is and yet—how much the same! To think of you being married and having—is it one child or two?”

“Two.”

“And you are happy, of course.”

“I have been until recently.”

He was impatient at himself for forgetting her father’s death. They seemed to talk around in circles. If they touched that madness of ten years before it was to rebound quickly to something else.

And now, looking at him, she wondered why it had all been. She had never really cared—she knew that now. He touched nothing in her that was vital or real. He was not her man. This terrible thing had been spring madness—that was all.

He had been there for a half hour and they had touched many conversational surfaces. Was he afraid, or did he not know that she must have had some real need when she sent for him?

She moved uneasily about the room and, turning suddenly, caught him off guard.

Ah; he was afraid! She saw it in his eye.

That gave her courage. She turned and crossed the room to him, her slim black gown dropping about her.

“I sent for you,” she said, “not to talk about how the neighbourhood has changed or what we had done to the house. You know it. Why don’t you ask me what it is?”

“I have been trying to guess.”

During the long hours of the night before she had framed a dozen ways to tell him, roundabout ways leading him on so that he himself at last might frame it, but when the time came, so desperate was her situation that she blurted out the truth from mere madness of getting it over with.

“Do you know—have you never thought that there might have been a very tragic result to that—that excursion of ours?”

His eye sharpened, grew keen and watchful.

“I am not sure that I understand exactly—”

“I think you understand. It is quite true.”

For a moment they stood facing each other. In her face only shame and distress, in his a curious mixture of amazement and a growing exultation.

“There was a child—a boy. He let me think it had died. I have always thought so. But a few days ago, in going over his papers—”

Quite without warning she turned white and caught at a chair. He made a quick step forward but she would not let him touch her.

“Poor little girl!” he said. He seemed to understand. He made no further attempt to approach her.

“I did not bring you here to talk about—what is past,” she said, speaking very fast. “That’s over and done with. I am not blaming you. I never have blamed you. But my problem is so terrible—I don’t know what to do—I can’t even think. Don’t you understand? Here I am with a husband and two little girls, and yet, off in a wretched little town in New Jersey, in a poor little house, I have another child. Don’t you see?”

He did not see exactly. That was the tragedy of it. The need of secrecy he could comprehend, the necessity of concealment, the physical problem. But this spiritual question of hers was beyond him—this new and crying responsibility. Still there was a question at issue. He could see that. He fell to pacing up and down the room.

“It is awkward, isn’t it?” he said, at last. “A boy, you say. How—how old is he?”

“Almost ten. He looks like you.”

Again there was the gleam of exultation, very momentary, very undeniable.

It took her a long time to make him see what she felt, her responsibility to this child, her duty to be honest now for her own sake, and something that she had only begun to suspect herself—her longing for the boy. But they seemed to get nowhere at all.

“But what am I to do?” he said finally. “It’s—it’s damned awkward in every way. Of course you are not going to be foolish enough to take the child or—tell your husband about it?”

“Why not?”

“Because the time to have told him was before you married him. It’s too late now.”

“I know that. I was young and afraid. I am not afraid now. I am only afraid—not to. You are going to be married. Shall you tell her?”

“That’s different. Of course I shall not tell her. My dear girl, I have no intention of shirking my responsibility. The child is mine. I believe you absolutely. I will do my share, of course. He will have to be brought up, educated.”

She flung out her hands helplessly.

“That isn’t it. Am I to go on all the rest of my life living a lie? Am I to let my husband call me a good woman when I am not a good woman?”

“Well, as to that—if you insist on an argument, are you any worse woman because the child is living? Now, look here, don’t be silly and hysterical. The thing is true and we will have to face it, but don’t forget this: Don’t be selfish. You spiritual women with eyes of saints are very selfish with your souls. What is your conscience to the happiness of three other people? To sleep at night with the feeling that you have made a clean breast of it, that having done a wrong thing you have helped it by telling about it, and at the same time to destroy permanently the happiness of a good man—that’s got to be figured on. I am not afraid. It won’t be pleasant, but if you tell I will face it. But don’t forget one thing. To secure your spiritual ease and the further happiness of a boy who is already quite contented as he is, you are going to destroy your husband’s faith and happiness, you may break up your home. And there are the two little girls.”

He was right—she knew it all at once. She could never tell. Telling would be easy. The hard thing would be to live on year after year shoring up with ceaseless vigilance the walls of her secret house, fighting endlessly for the three she loved, against this child who was also hers and for whom every instinct of her was now crying out. No compromise with her conscience this, a pure sacrifice. And not the least of her burdens would be that even her husband would never understand. A moment of carelessness, a crumbling wall and she would stand before him as a woman who had deceived him and continued to deceive him, not to save him—but to save herself.

When she held out her hand he bent over it very low.

“I am afraid you think I am hard,” he said. “But it is life. Only don’t think I am not sorry—I am terribly sorry. I had never dreamed of it, and if at any time there is anything I can do—”

She was ghastly, but she tried to smile.

“Then I wish now and then you would go to see him. He is very lonely. He has—he has broken his leg.”

“Go? Of course I’ll go,” he replied heartily. “I am feeling like a yellow dog, but that sort of thing I can and will do. I—I like boys, you know.”

She wrote the address on the back of one of her cards and gave it to him.

“If you could go soon,” she said, “while he is still unable to get around, it would—it would be very kind.”

The children were coming in. As they stood there a door slammed and a shrill young voice called “Mother.”

He put his hand over hers.

“Remember,” he said. “It is three against one.”

There was a young moon that night. Wrapped in a steamer rug she lay in a deep chair at the end of the terrace.

Mam’selle opened the window above. From the nursery came a chorus of sleepy “Good-nights.”

Her husband sat on the balustrade. She could see only the deeper shadow. That was he, and the glowing end of his cigar.

“Trouble,” he was saying in his young voice, “trouble is a great thing, darling. I believe we are closer together to-night than we have ever been before. A little while ago I was thinking—”

“What were you thinking?”

“Well, I was hoping—rather hoping that sometime when you are quite strong again, that we might have a son. I—I am very fond of boys, you know.”

“A son!”

A son, a brown-eyed wistful small boy on a sofa-bed in a little clapboard house. If she could only have said: “I have a son, a little lonely boy! I have a son and my arms are aching for him!”

But she did not dare. How could she kill the happiness in her husband’s voice, the hope, the trust. He had asked her for a son. Could she offer him the child of another man? How much was honesty to count against his suffering? Her decision was made, but the question would always be hers, seeking answer.

Suddenly her hands went cold. She had given the boy’s father his address on one of her visiting cards! How careless, how madly careless! She must get it back, know that it was destroyed. And could her visit to the child have betrayed her? Had she been seen? How could she explain?

Her husband sat on the balustrade and smoked. The peace of the night was on his soul. And she, to whom he had confided his happiness, lay back in her deep chair and plotted and schemed, as she must plot and scheme all the rest of her life, to keep intact her secret house.

VI
A MIDSUMMER KNIGHT’S DREAM: The Cowboy

I

Into the monotonous beat of a heavy rain on the tin roof and the rhythmic snoring of a dozen men the alarm clock on the window sill of the bunk house burst with a wild, metallic scream, announcing four o’clock of a wet morning. Low groans here and there, the stretching of tired bodies and a break in the snoring of the cook—temporarily housed there—followed.

Dice Barnett, the corral boss, sat up in bed and yawned. Then, “Roll out, boys!” he roared, and yawned again.

The cook sat up and stared venomously across the row of inert figures.

“You bellow like a bull!” he growled.

The corral boss said nothing. At these rising hours he was always hopeless and dispirited. The cook thumped his pillow, lay back and was instantly asleep again. Only the wranglers rose at four. The Kid, in the next bed to Dice, opened a pair of drowsy eyes in a sunburned face, and shut them again. But Dice, with the gesture of an expert, leaned over and dragged the coverings away, making a clean sweep of them. The Kid made a frantic clutch, but they were gone. The cold early-morning air of the mountains penetrated to the Kid’s very marrow. Grumbling, he got out of bed.

In the faint light other equally hopeless figures were emerging. No one spoke. Life wasn’t worth the effort. They pulled on their trousers, shirts and socks, and began the daily struggle to get into boots still damp and stiff from the day before, and always, even at their driest and best, a trifle small. The bunk house resounded with dreary thuds as their heels came down, thud, thud, on the floor.

“Get out and lemme sleep,” muttered the cook, with his eyes shut.

Outside on the rough veranda the men morosely got their chaps and gloves, and the Kid lighted a lantern and led the way toward the stables, where the night horses waited for the morning wrangling. The silent line, dogged, unhappy, still half asleep, plodded through the mud and rain without speech, except for a muttered comment from some one to the effect that this was the life.

The Kid was as silent as the rest, but, for a reason of his own, less hopeless. And once outside the barn, boots softening a little under mud and rain, blood moving a little faster, the stalls warm with the heat of a dozen animals, signs of life began to assert themselves among the others. Gathered around the lantern they tossed for who should wrangle the cañon and who should take the big pasture. They saddled under shelter, and leading their horses out mounted them carefully, for the horses in the small hours of the morning were rather like themselves, irritable and quarrelsome. The Kid, with an eye toward the cottages, still shrouded in darkness, moved with extreme deliberation.

Dice slid into his saddle after the manner of one experienced in the early-morning tempers of horses, and rolled a cigarette.

“One thing this rain’s good for,” he observed. “No dude woman will want to wrangle in it.”

From one or two quarters came a half-hearted assent in this. Now and then some Eastern girl among the ranch boarders who had proved herself to the corral, with its rather exacting standards, was given the privilege of rising at four a. m., lighting herself to the corral with an electric flash, getting out her own saddle and bridle, and then of accompanying the men on their wild ride through the dawn, risking her neck for the thrill of being a part of the romantic world of story and dream. Always, to outward seeming, the attitude of the men was one of amused tolerance. Actually they accepted it as tribute, took extremely good care of their devotees and concealed behind their taciturnity certain predilections which they would have died rather than avow.

“You tell ’em,” said Al, the saddle boss.

The Kid said nothing. He cast another glance toward the sleeping cottages, and led his horse back and forth several times before mounting.

Dice watched these manœuvres coldly.

“Don’t let me hurry you any,” he said politely. “Maybe you’d like your breakfast first.”

Reluctantly the Kid mounted, but before he touched spur to his horse he looked back. Yes, quite certainly; unmistakably. There was a spot of white light moving through the semidarkness toward the corral. The Kid suddenly dismounted, and throwing up a stirrup began to fumble with a strap. But the corral boss interfered cruelly.

“Come right along,” he said. “Whoever she is, she’s out of luck.”

The Kid was forced to mount, and they started, going at a walk in order to get the stiffness out of their horses, climbing slowly up the steep and muddy trail which they could not see, but which the horses followed unerringly.

At the top Dice slowed up and the Kid fell in beside him.

“Who was the wild woman?” he asked.

“It was the Carter girl,” said the Kid, with an assumption of indifference. “Rosamond Carter.”

“I thought so. She works while the other girls sleep.”

“What do you mean by that?” the Kid demanded truculently.

“Just what I said, son.” The corral boss’s voice was bland but firm. “She makes a life work of what ought to be a little diversion, and she’s that afraid of getting out of practice that she keeps her hand in on you—and me,” he added as a cautious afterthought. On and up they rode. From far away in the big pasture rose to them already the shrill cries and whistles of Al, Slim and Jack Moncrielle as they hazed the horses into bunches and threw them together, a hundred or so, ready to run them back along the trail to the corral and the day’s work. The stream in the cañon below roared with its burden of the night’s rain, which streamed down the steep walls in a thousand temporary torrents and drowned all conversation. The Kid rode on, turning over in his mind the corral boss’s comment. Now and then he thought of replies he might have made, but hadn’t.

Once, indeed, he did clear his throat and commenced, “You don’t understand her. She—”

But the rushing water drowned the sound of his voice.

The horses, seeking shelter, had wandered far up the cañon and off the trail. With the first light the men began to bunch them, their own animals climbing like goats, finding foothold here, there and anywhere. Once the Kid’s horse slipped and went down, and there was a bad moment when eternity lay over a rock and a foot away. But there came a good moment, too, when the last straggler had been brought in, when the rain had ceased and the tops of the cliffs were pink with the rising sun, and when through the cañon and out on the plain below, the Kid could see the ranch, and smoke rising from the cook-house chimney.

The Kid felt his first glow of the day, and it was compounded of the facts that the morning wrangling was over, that breakfast was waiting, and that somewhere in that huddle of pin-point houses Rosamond Carter was living, moving and having her being. He drew a long breath.

“I want to talk to you, Dice,” he said, as they rode companionably behind their morning’s salvage. “This is the life, all right. But where do you go from here?”

“Meaning?”

“There’s no future in this sort of thing, Dice.”

“No? I thought you were going to take up a homestead.”

“There’s nothing in ranching,” said the Kid gloomily. “Look at the Old Man. Had to come to dude ranching after all. And if he couldn’t make it go, who could?”

Dice said nothing. Somebody had been getting at the boy, he knew, and he knew who it was. It was the Kid himself who gave him his chance a moment later.

“I think you’ve got a wrong idea about Rosamond Carter, Dice,” he offered.

“Maybe—maybe not.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“I told you. She works while the other girls sleep, that’s all. Do you think she piled out of bed to go wrangling in the rain because she loved Nature? Rats!”

“Even at that,” the Kid said hotly, “I don’t like the way you speak of her.”

“No? I didn’t suppose you would. Well, you’ve asked my opinion and I’ll give it to you. She’s the sort that has to have some fellow trailing after her or she isn’t happy, and if she can pry him away from another girl it doesn’t take anything from her pleasure.”

“There was nothing between me and Janet, Dice.”

“All right. I’ll take your word for it. But did Janet know it?”

The Kid was very angry—unreasonably angry. He had merely tried to set Dice right as to Rosamond Carter, and Dice had had to drag in Janet, and a lot of extraneous matters which the Kid himself was trying very hard to put out of his mind. “You’ll feel better when you’ve had your breakfast,” he said witheringly.

In the cook-house ham and eggs, flapjacks, fried potatoes, coffee, corn bread. The Kid ate enormously but sulkily, and then, lounging out, took a quick survey of the ranch. Already in the corral Jack Moncrielle’s rope was whirling and the horses were milling madly. As he brought out each animal, meek enough now that the rope was around its neck, the saddlers took it in hand and fastened on it the badges of servitude. A growing row of saddled animals stood waiting.

In that brief glance the Kid could see all that constituted his little world, with its hopes and problems. The Old Man, an affectionate but rather misleading term, the Old Man being fifty; on the porch in front of the linen house Janet in a blue gingham, fresh and tidy and steady-eyed, but with a despondent droop to her mouth; and coming toward him, gay and smart in riding clothes and showing no resentment for the morning’s fiasco, Rosamond Carter.

“I’m awfully sorry, Kid,” she said. “I got there just a minute too late.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said awkwardly.

“I just went back and cried, Kid.”

He was practically stricken dumb at this confession of emotion, and the hand which held his after-breakfast cigarette trembled. Nothing adequate to say occurred to him, but his wildly rolling eyes saw that Janet had risen and was going into the linen house.

“ ’Stoo bad,” he muttered.

Rosamond had caught his glance toward the linen house.

“Well, I’ll try again to-morrow,” she said brightly, and moved a foot or two away. Then she turned. “You certainly are a handsome thing, standing there in the sun!” She smiled at him. “I wish I had a picture of you.”

She went on, and the Kid drew himself up to his full height and put a hand carelessly to his neckerchief. Then he took off his hat, recreasing it, rolling up the rim at the sides with tender hands, and replaced it, slightly tilted, over the right eye. After that he swaggered up to the corral.

II

Now Janet was in the ranch, but hardly of it. Her mother was the ranch housekeeper; but years ago, in the days of the open range and hostile Indians, when the Old Man was young and believed that the proper place for dudes was east of the Mississippi River, she had been the great lady of the cow country. Her husband had been a younger son of the British aristocracy, a fact which he had proceeded to forget as quickly as possible, except that he had gone through his money like an English gentleman, both living and giving generously.

Not that that mattered now, save for a certain breeding, an English sort of reticence and the excellent horsemanship which were all he had bequeathed to Janet. His widow was the ranch housekeeper, and during the long summer she went around from cottage to tent, tent to cottage, conversing with maids in some such manner as “Get some mouse traps for 22, Maggie. The field mice have eaten Mrs. Brown’s orange sweater.” Or “Tell Mr. Jenkins in 18 that he’ll have to stop smoking in bed. He burns holes in his sheets every time.”

Janet taught school in the winter, riding back and forth on Midge, the little buckskin which she had trained to an uncanny degree of intelligence. Not that Janet had any idea of the importance Midge was to assume in her life, but because, until the Kid came into it, she had a good bit of leisure time. After that, of course—

The Kid had come over from the Powder River country some eight months before, a big brown boy with a scar on his neck from the Argonne Forest, a good saddle, a dauntless spirit and ten dollars in coin of the realm, which he stood ready to bet at any odds or none on anything at all. He lost the ten dollars and his heart almost simultaneously and for the rest went through his initiation into the outfit creditably.

He was given bad horses and stuck to them as long as his knees held out; fought with his two fists when he had to; jibed and was jibed at; mortgaged his pay in advance on blackjack and poker; drank a variety of moonshine under different names, with equally disastrous results; and in sentimental moments was wont to tilt back his chair, draw his hat over his eyes and, having thus secured the delusion of isolation from his kind, to produce a mouth organ and pour out his soul in a succession of dismal sounds.

He had eight words of army French, a cowpuncher’s sense of humour, a very masculine vanity, an extreme humility about women, and a modesty so shrinking that he did without bed sheets for a week because he wouldn’t ask Janet for them.

“What do you get out of all those books, Miss Janet?” he had asked her once.

“I like to know about things. Don’t you?”

He set about a course of reading then. It irked him horribly, but it was his idea of decreasing the distance between them. He would sit off, grimly aloof from the card table, going at full blast, and feel that with every line, so to speak, he climbed a step. By late spring, although nothing had been said, Janet and the Kid were keeping steady company, and the Old Man had his eye on a homestead for them up Indian Creek. But the summer influx had changed everything. Beginning with the first of June the ranch took on a strange and exotic blooming, became colourful and sparkling. The lawn by the big house began to be dotted with bright hats and sweaters. The corral lost its air of businesslike austerity and on its high fence perched strange and brilliant birds, with clear young voices which shouted, “Ride ’er, cowboy!”

The wranglers themselves took on some of this new colouring. They began to appear in new hats, in pink shirts, in vivid-coloured neck handkerchiefs. The corral in business hours, which were all day now, was as full of local colour as a Buffalo Bill show, and slightly reminiscent of it, for the Old Man knew his business.

And to the Kid a new and bewildering world of women opened up, and with this difference: He had always looked up to Janet as a sort of superior being, and now came dozens of girls, clean and sweet and wholesome as the mountain air, who stood near him, in groups or singly, and gazed at him as at some supreme and magnificent creature.

They tendered him the homage of all the romance they had built up about the West, gazing at him with their clear soft eyes, seeing in him the Virginian or some other hero; but mostly Faversham.

It went to the Kid’s head. He paid thirty dollars for a new pair of inlaid spurs, and was quite apt, when not otherwise occupied, to play idly with a hemp rope, with which he could do a variety of things. When, standing like a star in the centre of a circle of satellites, he let it settle gently over the head of some pretty creature, she would flush at the distinction. Generally, that is. For once he saw a new girl, Rosamond Carter, and roped her neatly. But Rosamond did not flush. She looked quite squarely into the Kid’s eyes and said, “Now you’ve got me, what do you intend to do with me?”

It was the Kid who flushed that time.

The cruel thing about it all was that Rosamond very deliberately set to work to steal the Kid, to sacrifice him to make a summer holiday. Before she fixed on him she had coolly appraised the masculine situation, the men of the outfit, the visiting Easterners, even the Old Man himself. She even knew about Janet, which must be Janet’s excuse, for she will need one—and Janet knew that she knew.

Perhaps Rosamond maliciously hoped for a struggle, girl against girl; but Janet never put up a fight. She let the Kid go his blundering, masculine way, cried herself to sleep at night, rode Midge and trained him in a sort of desperation, and presented to the Kid and to the world a sort of frozen friendliness that wrung the Old Man’s heart. The Kid was gone. He rode with Rosamond in the evenings, and swallowed whole her bait of his horsemanship and his red-bloodedness and the general lack of both in Eastern men.

“There’s nothing to the society game,” she would say, sitting on her horse and looking over the far places through lashes lightly touched with black paste. “I’m a better woman when I’m here with you.”

The Kid felt rather noble at such times, and very, very strong. Now and then, however, his conscience hurt him, and he would go and sit on Janet’s small veranda. But he could not find anything much to say, and Janet would not help him. She never once told him that he was a magnificent specimen of manhood, although she felt that the mould had been broken when the Kid was made. She did tell him that he needed a haircut, and Rosamond rather gasped when he appeared later with a dark roof on the ridgepole of his head, so to speak, and from there to the eaves and below almost entirely unthatched.

On cottage verandas the great burglary was much under discussion, and sympathy was entirely with Janet. Even the Kid came in for his share.

“The poor fish!” was one gentleman’s comment. “She’s got him out of water and gasping, and when he’s good and dead she’ll throw him back.”

Certainly the Kid was gasping. He was not sleeping well, and in the long night watches he lay and thought to the accompaniment of a chorus of snores in which the cook sang the bass. Even the Kid knew that Rosamond would be expensive, and that red-blooded manhood was hardly a sufficient asset in supporting a wife; and somehow he could not see Rosamond on a one-hundred-and-sixty-acre homestead, in a log house, washing dishes. He was divided between going East to make a fortune and prospecting the mountains for a gold mine. On the whole he leaned toward the gold mine. It was quicker, and certainly there were traces of gold in the creek.

He took a camping trip up into the mountains, and on his return the boss had a bad time with one of the campers.

“The next time I go out, for God’s sake send me with a guide. That boy we had was hunting gold instead of firewood half the time.”

“Gold!” said the Old Man thoughtfully.

Now the Old Man was no fool, and he was fond of his boys. Especially he was fond of the Kid. So that evening, cigarette in hand, he wandered up to the corral. Generally during the dude season he stayed away from the corral, for out of every hundred intelligent and considerate riders there was sure to be one congenital idiot who thought it highly Western to take a horse stiff with hours of standing and spur him into a wild gallop at the start.

The Old Man, at such times, according to the corral, was likely to go off by himself and tell God all about it, and later to tell the horse killer himself.

So he wandered up, cigarette between his teeth and battered hat on his head, and stood off by himself, watching; and, since he was no fool, he got the Carter situation in a minute. He saw her standing watching the Kid, and the Kid saddling with the highest sort of efficiency, but conscious of her every second. And when she had got her horse at last he saw her go down the road and stop there waiting while the Kid roped out his own animal and threw the saddle on his back. The Old Man smiled and called to the Kid.

“Going somewhere?” he inquired.

“I’m through, sir. I’ve been teaching Miss Carter to ride, and I thought—”

“Ride!” snorted the Old Man. “That girl rode in a horse show before you were out of short pants, son. What’s she been putting over on you?”

The Kid gulped and said nothing.

“Now see here!” said the Old Man. “You’re new to this dude stuff, and it’s gone to your head. All the boys get it at first, but it’s like being vaccinated. They’re safe after that, and the scar hardly shows.” He surveyed the Kid, who looked like the picture on a coloured jacket of a Western novel, and grinned. “It’s the trimmings, boy, the trimmings!” Then his smile died and his face hardened. “But I’ll tell you this: If this local colour is going to turn one of my best men into a damn fool, then by the Almighty I’ll put the outfit in overalls. I don’t see any women going crazy over the blacksmith or the irrigator.”

He started off, but turned and spoke over his shoulder.

“Put your horse up,” he said. “One of the principles of this ranch is to teach its guests self-confidence. Maybe she can manage alone—if she has to. And another thing: There isn’t any gold in these mountains. I’ve prospected them for forty years.”

It was that night that the Kid proposed to Rosamond Carter. There was a dance going on, with the band from the town forty miles away. The band arrogated to itself certain prerogatives, in addition to a fair amount in money. Thus, once each evening, after looking over the ground, the gentleman at the bass drum would pick out the best dancer, signal to her with a lifted finger and thus indicate, no matter what her previous engagement, that the next dance was his. And once also each evening the cornetist would, instrument to mouth and blowing lustily, cut in and send some discomfited youth to the wall.

The bass drummer chose Rosamond that night, and she shot a glance of visible triumph around the room. It was when it was over that the Kid took her outside and asked her to marry him. He was so husky that she had to ask him to repeat it.

“I don’t mean now, Rosamond. All I want is to know that you care. After that—” He made a large gesture, implying no doubt that if she cared the rest was easy.

“Of course I care, Kid dear. I’m crazy about you.”

He nearly broke her hand, so convulsively did he grab it.

“But—marriage!” Rosamond said gently, loosening her hand and surreptitiously rubbing her fingers. “That’s different, isn’t it?”

“Why different? If you love me and I love you—”

“ ‘Marry’ is such a long, long word,” she said. “Let’s not worry about that part of it. There’s no hurry about it. Let’s just be happy together.”

That suited him well enough. He was too content to force things, and he knew extremely well that there could be no hurry about it, anyhow. Of course he kissed her, and he was trembling all over when he released her. Quite certainly he considered that the kiss had sealed her to him, that she was his and he was hers. He didn’t go back to the dance at all. He wandered out and half dazedly climbed a butte, where he sat in the starlight, not thinking so much as feeling, while tired horses grazed around him and the lights of the ranch below were a constellation of planets, reflected in an ink-black lake.

But—and here was a queer thing—Janet suddenly came into his mind, and his first thought was that now he had lost her! He had never heard that a man may have a passion for one woman while he loves another, and certainly it did not occur to him then.

One of the stars below was Janet’s, and he sat and gazed at it for some time. Then—such a strange creature is man—he went down from the butte and stood watching the dance from outside a window, just to catch a glimpse of Rosamond.

III

In August came the ranch rodeo. The bad string was brought in a day or two before for the bucking contests, and a long-horned Mexican steer waited in a paddock to be bulldogged. Half a dozen burros for roping and tying were there, too, and in the bunk house at night there was a strong odor of saddle soap and metal polish.

Two days before the rodeo came a mysterious gentleman with long grey hair parted in the middle and brushed out in tufts over his ears, and wearing a grey-checked suit of exceeding loudness, bound with black braid.

The corral, viewing this apparition from a distance, pretended to be immediately stricken with blindness, and reeled and staggered about. And, accustomed to the ways of dudes, they waited breathlessly to see the new arrival in riding clothes.

But he did not ride. He sat on a bench most of the time, rolling cigarettes with a facility that put even the corral to shame. Once he wandered up, took a look at the horses and wandered away without a word or a change of expression.

“I wouldn’t sit in a game of cards with that guy, not for a million dollars,” said Jack Moncrielle. “I bet he doesn’t open his mouth to eat, any more than he has to.”

The Kid saw the newcomer, as he saw everything at that time, through a sort of haze. Even the talk that drifted to him in the bunk house, that Poker Face was a cruiser looking for talent for a tent show on the water front in Chicago, passed over his head. He had washed a pan of sand from the creek and found a fleck or two of gold in it, and already at night, when he pulled his mouth organ out from under his pillow and poured out his soul, he was riding in his own automobile, with Rosamond beside him. He never dreamed that the man in the checked suit was to cost him one good year of misery.

The rodeo came, and with it half the countryside. It parked its cars in great lines and brought the children and luncheon boxes, and when the riders rode into the field, to the blare of the band, it crowded to the fences and cheered. It cheered them all, but mostly it cheered Janet. Janet and the Old Man led the procession. Janet was going to ride!

When the Kid learned it, before the procession started, he had a queer sick feeling. Just for a moment he forgot Rosamond, and he made a furious protest to Janet herself.

“I think you’ve lost your mind,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s all right for us. We’re paid to risk our necks to amuse the dudes. But you! You’re not!”

“Don’t worry about me,” said Janet coldly. “And if you want to know it, I’m not riding to amuse the guests.”

His rage increased when he saw Janet drawing for her horse like the others, but when she drew Corkscrew a dull despair settled on him. Even the Old Man was anxious then, but he need not have worried. Corkscrew lived up to his name, leaped and twisted, whirled and lunged, but Janet’s knees hugged him like two slim steel vises, and Corkscrew came to rest at last, beaten.

When Janet looked around the roaring, cheering field all she saw was Rosamond, delicately clad, cool and very feminine, watching her with hard, triumphant eyes.

The rodeo went the way of all rodeos. Al was thrown and knocked out. He lay quite still, a suddenly pinched and colourless profile turned up to the sky, in the midst of breathless silence. Then he moved and the crowd relaxed. He got up and limped off.

The Kid rode and bulldogged with the others, neither better nor worse than the average, which was good. And he swaggered a bit, with the thirty-dollar spurs clanking and the nail heads on his chaps gleaming like silver. When he caught Rosamond’s eye she smiled, and the warm sense of a secret intimacy between his own perspiring self and her cool exquisiteness swelled his heart almost to bursting.

But Janet, after all, provided the hit of the day. For she brought out Midge after the riding was over, when the bull had been retired to rest his weary neck muscles, and all the little burros, after the thrill of their lives, had trotted docilely back to tell their families of their escapes. And Midge performed.

It is not necessary to tell what Midge did. His fame is a part of the vaudeville history by now, and Janet’s, too, for that matter. Actually Midge was only an agency for the working out of those certain destinies with which this story deals. At the time he provided Janet with the means of release from an intolerable situation, for by nightfall the ranch knew that the cruiser, which is only a bunk-houseism for a highly honourable profession, had made Janet an offer for vaudeville and that she had accepted it.

The bunk house was divided in its opinion that night, but the Kid did not hear about it until later. He spent the evening sitting on the creek bank with Rosamond, telling her about the gold.

August wore on, with the Old Man teaching Janet fancy rope work behind the barn, with divers sluggish Eastern livers renewing their youth, with the horses a trifle leaner and their riders browner, and with the Kid out on the bank and gasping, and Rosamond not yet ready to throw him back.

With the end of August came the general exodus from the ranch. Apparently new people, who were really the old ones changed by their city garb, began to appear on the lawn. The truck carried daily mountains of trunks to the railroad. The line of horses at the rail at saddling time diminished day by day. The grass in the pastures and on the high meadows turned in patches to red and brown. The prairie dogs in Dog Town could emerge without the whistle of a bullet past their heads. A deer was seen in the cañon, and a guide brought in a small and highly disagreeable black bear cub. In a word, the early fall of the mountains was at the door.

And Rosamond was going. The Kid would waken in the morning before the alarm clock and lie there wondering how he could bear it. He thought of her exquisiteness, her fastidious daintiness. He saw her going back to surroundings like herself—although he had not the faintest possible idea of what such surroundings might be—and the bunk house suddenly seemed horrible to him; the boots on the floor, the snorings of the men, the cook’s false teeth in a cup on the chair beside the bed, Dice, in his underdrawers, his fine body bare and uncovered to the waist.

He had a wonderful parting from Rosamond. They rode up the cañon and watched the moon rise, and she made him promise a dozen ways to be faithful. She made no promises herself, however, and he was to remember that later. When late that night he went to the bunk house he found Dice waiting for him, sitting on the step.

“Well,” was Dice’s greeting, “thank God, that’s over!”

“What’s over?”

“Rosamond. You thick-headed idiot, d’you think you’ll ever see her again?”

“That’s my affair,” said the Kid loftily.

“Not by a damned sight!” was Dice’s comment. “This outfit has been short one man for eight weeks, and you’re the man. Now you take some advice. Can the Lady Rosamond and crawl on your face to Janet—and I hope to God she puts her foot on you.”

Janet did almost literally that.

By the middle of September the ranch was almost down to what Jack Moncrielle designated as a prewar basis. A dozen horses saddled in the morning, six or eight in the evening; in the bunk house long sessions of poker or blackjack, in the peculiar silence of the gambling puncher; Janet training her horse; the Old Man shooting ducks out on the flat, and in close conclave with Janet in the evening; the alarm clock in the bunk house set at six instead of four; in the pastures cinch sores and saddle galls slowly healing, and spurs a cruel memory, and in the Kid’s mind already a faint haze over Rosamond’s memory and an unexpected pang at the knowledge that Janet was going away.

Then two things happened in quick succession which showed the Kid what he had done. The first was that Janet was caught in the wire.

Now to be caught in the wire is one of the desperate emergencies and often one of the tragedies of Western life. Horses caught in the wire come home with flesh torn to ribbons, deep cuts to the bone, muscles and tendons severed.

Fortunately it was not Midge, but another horse. Janet knew better than to lay a fence flat and try to leap over it, but she was possessed those days by a sort of restless desperation, and it followed the first talk she had had with the Kid for weeks. He had gone to her, humble enough in all conscience, unable to bear the thought that she should leave with the coldness between them. Janet was in the little paddock the Old Man had given her, with Midge’s curious stage properties scattered about, for she had just finished a lesson, and she heard him through without a quiver.

“In all you’re saying,” she said at last, “you are taking for granted that you have offended me or hurt me. Just why?”

He fingered the hat in his hand nervously.

“Well, we used to be good friends, Janet.”

“Aren’t we still?”

“You didn’t tell me you were going to do this thing.”

“I didn’t tell Dice, either, or any of the boys.”

“That’s different.”

“How is it different?”

“I don’t know. I used to think it was.”

He gave it up then and went away. He didn’t understand it himself, so how could he explain? All he knew was that it mattered less and less each day that no letter came from Rosamond, and more and more that Janet would soon be gone. He went away and sat by himself, staring in the general direction of the railroad, which seemed somehow to be interfering with his life. And Janet saddled the Old Man’s bay mare and got caught in the wire.

When the mare’s foot caught and she leaped forward she pulled the wire Janet was standing on and threw her on it. Instantly she was caught on a hundred red-hot, tearing and jerking points of agony. The mare leaped over her, leaped back again, reared and fell. The wire by that time was over and under Janet, and the horse was up again. Janet was dragged out into the field as post after post gave way, and then the mare got free.

The Old Man found Janet there a half hour later, her clothes torn to ribbons and stained with blood, and he got her out and onto his horse. She was too dazed to be questioned, but the Old Man knew, and he muttered most of the way home.

Her going was delayed almost a month by the accident, and in that month the Kid suffered horribly. Rosamond was like a bad dream by that time, but if he wanted to forget her the bunk house gave him no chance. He grew to hate her very name, although not as much as he hated himself.

He was consumed with jealousy too. It was Dice who sat with Mrs. Allenby and Janet during the convalescence, and Slim who took over the care and training of Midge. Even the cook, wandering over in the evening with a bit of specially broiled chicken or trout, had the entrée to the Allenby cottage. Only the Kid was left out.

The truth, of course, was that under the ice that had frozen over Janet’s love the current of it still ran fast and furious. But the ice was there. Even the Old Man finally put in a word for him, but Janet shook her head.

“If he would do it once he would do it again,” she said. “I used to mind, but I don’t now.”

The abominable fact that all the ranch had pitied her was, next to the Kid’s defection, what rankled. And when, the night before she left, the Kid came again, humbly, and stood before her she went quite pale with outraged pride.

“I’ve been a fool, Janet, and I know it.”

“About what?”

“You know what I mean, don’t you?”

She was not very strong, yet, and she began to tremble, but her voice was steady. She even laughed a little.

“I suppose I do. But aren’t we all foolish at times? I was myself, last spring, but I’ve got over it.”

As old as the hills, this story. The wandering male, the hurt pride of the woman, four feet of distance and yet a mile or so between them. The Kid, who had never heard of the vicious pendulum of love, from passion to hate and back to love again, the Kid turned on his high heels and went away from this new and different Janet, who was as hard and stiff and shiny as new leather.

It was entirely clear now that she had never cared a plugged nickel for him. He had thought once— They called this life, did they, this thing of working all day and suffering all night? Life!

He went down and sat by the creek. Life! A man poured out his whole heart at a woman’s feet, and she went on the stage and painted her face, and a lot of dudes stared at her and sent her notes and took her out to supper. Life!

Oh, well, let it ride!

IV

Janet started East the next week, with Midge in a box car and the Old Man himself going as far as Chicago. And—blow after blow—Slim was going along, to sleep with Midge and tend him on the train, and later on in chaps and spurs and full regalia to assist Janet during the performance. Slim!

Janet’s farewell to the ranch was rather emotional, but the Kid watched in vain for any indication that he was more than merely included in the general tout ensemble. The boys rode to the station and cheered her wildly as the train pulled out, the Old Man waved his hat, and something seemed to fall through the Kid’s diaphragm and settle like a cold flatiron below his breast bone, to remain there for a long, long time.

Years and years passed, and after a week’s time in Chicago the Old Man came home. There was nothing on the surface of things to indicate any radical changes at the ranch. The dogs greeted him uproariously. The lawn looked pleasantly empty and dudeless. The men were hearty and cheerful and ambidextrous at the table as usual. Nothing, in short, to indicate that only the outside of the Kid was among those present, and that, save of course for the cold flatiron, the rest of the Kid was unaccountably missing and might have been located in Chicago.

“How’d it go?” asked Dice Barnett, when the Old Man ambled over to the corral after supper.

“Pretty good,” said the Old Man. “Pretty good. That gold-toothed smile of Slim’s is going to be worth money to him now.”

He glanced at the Kid, but the Kid was sharpening his knife on the edge of a boot and seemed completely absorbed.

“As for Janet, she’s a hit,” said the Old Man, who hadn’t been talking to managers without picking up a phrase or two. “The act’s a knock-out. They’ve had the same sort of thing, of course; but with Janet’s youth and beauty—well, I wish you boys had been there. She sent her love to you all.”

The Kid tested the blade on a finger nail.

“She’s a right good-looking girl, Janet.” Thus, Joe, not without malice. “Somebody will try to pick her off the branch all right. I knew a girl once went on the stage, and she got a bushel of mash notes every week.”

The Kid put away his knife, rose and yawned ostentatiously.

“Reckon I’ll turn in,” he said, and disappeared from a circle which waited to grin until he had gone.

He slept very poorly that night, and spent most of his time reflecting bitterly on the trust in human nature which had turned Janet loose on the world without somebody near her to punch the face of any guy who tried to get fresh with her. A bushel of mash notes every week, eh? He lay there and saw Janet on a brilliantly lighted stage, while the theatre was entirely filled with gilded youths who—the Kid’s experience of theatres was small—almost buried her in flowers. He groaned and turned over on his face. Oh, well, what was it to him, anyhow? Let it ride, that’s all.

The winter came. Part of the outfit went down to the Old Man’s herd of steers in New Mexico, and Al and Joe were following cows in Arizona. The bunk house beds were empty, except for Dice and the Kid, and instead of blackjack and poker Dice read by the bunk-house lamp in the evenings, and the Kid played solitaire morosely. At mealtimes, for they were all together now, the Old Man read Janet’s letters aloud, and her clippings. Her advance man had got hold of her family history by that time, and played pretty heavily on it. The result was that she was being invited to good houses.

For instance:

“ ‘Everything on the table was gold,’ ” the Old Man read aloud one day. “ ‘Can you imagine it? But do you know something? I wouldn’t trade the whole service for the tin cup by the Big Spring.’ ”

“Rats!” said the savage fear inside the Kid. “Piffle! Tut! And as for that hundred and sixty acres and a log house, tut again. She’s gone. She’s lost. She’ll never come back.”

In November Dice Barnett and the Kid drove the horses along the old cattle trail by the creek to the winter range, and camped for a few days there. The Old Man had been hunting elk, and he blew into camp one day to find the Kid alone, sitting on his heel while he disconsolately fried potatoes in bacon fat, and whistling an extremely dolorous hymn. The Old Man sat back on a log and eyed him.

“Well,” he inquired, “got your sense of values yet?”

“What d’you mean?”

The Old Man looked around.

“It’s like this,” he said. “Take this creek, now. There’s gold in it—real gold. I don’t know from where, but it’s there. Fellows have frozen and starved to death looking for it. But there’s fool’s gold too. Every now and then somebody brings in some iron pyrites and thinks he’s made his everlasting fortune.”

“I get you,” said the Kid. “Well, I know the difference all right now, sir.”

That was all the Old Man said then. But later on, cleaning his rifle with a corner torn off the Kid’s dish towel, he said: “I got a Chicago paper a day or two ago. The Carter girl’s engaged to be married.”

The Kid said nothing for a moment. He was scraping the frying pan. Then he looked up and caught the Old Man’s eye.

“She was a right nice girl,” he said, and grinned.

Winter came on, and the ranch was isolated from the world. Once a week or so the postman in his flivver would work his way up through the roads, thaw out his radiator with boiling water and himself with hot coffee, and leave the mail. Bears came down from the mountains and left tracks around the storehouse and the kitchen. Deer came fearlessly to the feeding racks by the corral, and a mountain sheep was reported on Bishop’s Rock. On the day before Christmas came a great wooden box from Janet, with a fur coat for her mother and a set of Kipling for the Old Man, and on Christmas Day came a telegram:

Dearest Love and a Merry Christmas to all of you.

Janet.

No message to the Kid at all.

The Old Man was rather worried. The Kid had come to his senses, but there was still something wrong with Janet. And the Kid was on his mind. The boy was not eating and—the Old Man strongly suspected—not sleeping either.

“Maybe I’d better write her how things are,” he said one day to Dice Barnett.

“It’s no place for a third party, in my opinion,” Dice objected. “They’ll make the grade or they won’t, but they can’t be pushed.”

So in the long idle days of heavy snow the Old Man pasted Janet’s clippings in a scrapbook, and Mrs. Allenby mended and stacked linen, and the Kid slowly ate his heart out, having abundance of time for this sort of gastronomical misery.

The snow had come early and lay late, and in the open range along the foothills a dozen or so horses dead from cold and starvation had been eaten by coyotes, so that only their bones marked their tragedy. Out in the far meadows the cattle had exhausted the hay, and herculean efforts on the part of the men failed to open a road by which to send the hay carts through. In March they got out at last, and the Old Man breathed again. But the cold continued, and the feed grass was almost exhausted. On a dismal day in March the Kid rode out to the pasture with his revolver strapped on his hip, and cut out some twenty lean and sickly cows to die that the rest of the herd might live.

They looked at him with soft, appealing eyes; and the Kid’s hand shook as he drew the gun. When it was all over he went back and sat for a long time in the steaming barn, where the work horses munched their hay and no one was likely to find him. He would have sold himself for a ten-cent piece that day, and considered the price high.

But with the opening of the spring he found a bit of hope rising, like the sap in the cottonwood trees. Janet would come back that summer, and he would make up for all he had done. He worked solely to that end. He put a new roof on the saddle shed—for her. He dredged stone and repaired roads—for her. With the aid of six cow horns which he rubbed to a high polish and a piece of wood which he varnished, he made a hatrack, slightly odorous but very sightly in his eyes—for her. And in the evenings when his work was done he sat by the stove in the bunk house and played melancholy airs on his mouth organ, to the unprintable expostulations of the now augmented outfit.

The ranch was preparing for the summer influx. Painters and carpenters swarmed over the place; the boys came back from New Mexico and Arizona, jerked off their store clothes, pulled on their chaps, stamped into their boots and were off to report to the Old Man. An early dude or two came, and bunches of wild flowers began to appear in the dining room, while the cook began his summer-long complaint of having to clean the trout the men brought in.

And then at the end of June came Janet.

V

Afterwards, reviewing the situation, the Old Man blamed himself. He should never have let Rosamond come back to the ranch. Certainly he would never have let that fool Crosby Nugent get past his wire if he could have foreseen what was going to happen.

But who could have foretold that the Kid, for instance, was going to back out of the field without even giving battle? Or that Janet would take his withdrawal for indifference? The Old Man, who had forgotten the inverted psychology of lovers, wanted to shake them both, and nearly smoked himself to death over them.

Janet arrived first. From the inside of the car she had made certain that the Kid was with the others on the platform, and was thus able to adopt a wide smile which included everybody and singled out none. All winter she had hated herself for refusing the Kid’s overtures, and all winter she had waited for him to renew them. But he had not. Janet’s attitude, then, was a sort of feverish, watchful waiting; which was, unfortunately, also the Kid’s.

So she smiled at everybody, and the men cheered, and Slim stood in the door of his box car and hi-oo-ed loudly and repeatedly. And the Kid saw only a beautiful and expensively dressed young woman who might pretend to be the same old Janet, but who couldn’t put anything over on him.

No, the Kid saw it all quite clearly. He had gone back to Janet, but she had not come back to him. What was kissing the Old Man and shaking hands all around was a prosperous, successful and worldly Janet, a—he used the only word he had to cover the situation—dude Janet.

She couldn’t put anything over on him. Not even when she suddenly stopped talking and stood still, staring at the mountains with a queer soft look in her eyes. The Kid remained a little aloof, whistling to himself to show his complete comprehension, and his indifference to it. After a while he went over and talked to Slim.

There was no card game in the bunk house that night. In the centre of an enthralled circle sat Slim, and his talk was of Janet and the act. Strange theatrical terms fell from his lips, and stranger statements. Such, for instance, as an offer of ten thousand dollars for Midge, who had cost the Old Man forty, and that Janet’s buckskin stage outfit had set her back five hundred iron men; that the act drew down four hundred a week; that there was a line of Johnnies waiting for Janet every night that reached to the curb and out into the street.

“What about Janet? Did she fall for them?” inquired Dice, with a side glance at the Kid.

“Janet! She told me to push in the face of any one who spoke to her, and you bet I did it.”

The vision of Slim, fighting a path out of the theatre every night for Janet, held the bunk house silent for a moment.

“She’s a great kid,” said Slim reflectively. “A great kid.” While the men slept that night the Kid got up, and drawing on his breeches and boots with extreme caution removed from the wall the almost complete cow-horn masterpiece. With equal caution he reached the open air and headed for the creek.

July came, and with it came dudes and yet more dudes. The ranch overflowed with dudes. Pleasant, genial dudes, who did not expect metropolitan-hotel service and rode their horses carefully; disagreeable dudes, who were afraid to bully the Old Man, but tried it out on the corral with unpleasant results; fool dudes, who sat up all night to make night hideous and rode their horses to death or near it; men dudes, who immediately bought neckerchiefs and wide hats, and rubbed themselves into blisters trying to sit the trot; fat-women dudes in breeches riding off weight; pretty-girl dudes, who looked up at the ranchmen with soft romantic eyes, asking but for notice and a little condescension from the young gods in chaps and spurs.

Once again the alarm clock on the bunk-house window sill exploded at four a. m., and once again an occasional favoured girl was invited to crawl out of her warm bed before dawn, to risk her neck in the romantic West. But there was this difference, that the Kid now rose hopelessly to what may be called a womanless day. The Kid was definitely and permanently off women.

Rosamond blew in breezily the first of August, with a chaperon and Crosby Nugent, and inside of four hours the bunk house had classified Nugent as yellow. He swaggered up to the corral as soon as he had changed into riding clothes, and looked over the stock sourly.

“D’you call them horses?” he demanded of the Kid.

“If you’ve got any better name you’re welcome to use it.”

Mr. Nugent approached the bars of the fence and peered through.

“Suppose I can pick my own horse, eh?”

The Kid looked around. There was no one near.

“Well,” he said softly, “we usually make our own selections, but we aim to please. Which will you have?”

Some ten minutes later Mr. Nugent threw a leg over the back of the blue roan of his selection, and in so doing lightly touched the blue roan on the back with his spur. Immediately following this Mr. Nugent struck the barn wall with a thud, and then dropped to the ground, where he lay for a moment before the Kid helped him up.

“Must have scratched him somewhere,” said the Kid gently.

“Scratched him! I’m scratched all right. Why the hell don’t you break your horses?”

“Break them!” The Kid’s tone was pained. “Why, the children ride that horse. He’s a pet, he is.” He looked off at the blue roan, standing quietly by the rail. “Al,” he called, “look around for something quiet. See if Lizzie’s out.”

After that the men of the outfit were as definitely off Nugent as the Kid was off women. He rode a succession of horses, bringing them in scratched and sweating, and finding fault with them all. But the bunk house knew more than that. It perceived quite early that Rosamond was fatuously in love with him. She trailed him as assiduously as she had once trailed the Kid, but what had thrilled the Kid to his very soul was quite clearly beginning to bore Nugent. He took to riding early now and then to get off by himself, and it was on one of those early trips that he fell in with Janet.

It is hard to defend Janet. It is necessary to remember that she considered the Kid entirely lost to her, and to keep in mind Rosamond’s part in that loss, and of course, too, there was that rankling open humiliation of the year before. But the real issue was the Kid.

She had made one real effort to bridge the gap between them, but it had failed. She had asked him to ride with her some evening when his work was done.

“You don’t want to ride with me,” he said gruffly.

“I’ve asked you.”

“What’s the matter with the dude men who are always hanging round you?”

She flushed.

“I got enough of that last winter, Kid.”

Suddenly all the furious jealousy of that desperately lonely winter flamed in him.

“So I’ve heard,” he said coldly. She waited rather wistfully, but for a moment or two he busied himself with a saddle. Then, “Now look here, Janet!” he burst out angrily, “I don’t want you to be kind to me. I know you mean well, but—I don’t want it.”

She had had to turn and go away.

It was after that that Nugent met Janet on the trail one morning, and recognised her as the girl he had seen in a theatre the winter before. Maybe he considered the women of the stage fair game. Maybe he was bored with Rosamond. Maybe behind it all there was some genuine sentiment. Whatever it may have been, it is certain that from that day he spent an undue amount of time with her.

The Kid, glancing toward Janet’s cottage, could see him curled up on the step, animated and laughing, and Janet laughing too. When there came into view the crowd of young people, which followed Janet those days like the tail of a comet, Nugent would wander away, scowling, to look up Rosamond and make his peace with her. The Kid, who had begun by merely disliking him, began to hate him with a terrible hatred.

Just how Rosamond felt no one could know. She went about with a sort of frozen smile on her face, and made at least one effort to rouse Nugent’s jealousy by getting the Kid back. But the Kid knew nothing of such subterfuges, and he had no intention of going back.

She asked him one night if she might wrangle with him the next morning, and he uncomfortably agreed. Maybe she misunderstood the reason for the moody silence in which he worked in the dawn, his taciturnity on the homeward ride. But she was as desperate as he was, and less resigned. She swayed toward him in the saddle.

“Kid,” she said softly, “I’ve treated you very badly, haven’t I?”

“How?”

“Don’t you want to talk about it?”

He faced her squarely and honestly.

“I don’t see much use in it. Do you?”

“I want you to forgive me, Kid.”

“Forgive you for me having a brain storm? Well, I guess not!” Then he smiled boyishly. “I’m not holding any hard feelings,” he said. “I guess I liked being crazy while it lasted.”

That effectually closed any further negotiations so far as Rosamond was concerned.

The Kid was becoming an extremely difficult person to live with. He no longer joined in the card game in the bunk house at night, and if he wore his hat with the rim curled at the sides and the front tilted toward his right eye it was from pure habit. The swagger had gone from his walk and the lilt from his voice. When sent after strays he went alone, by choice, riding as though all the devils of hell were after him.

And Janet? Janet was suffering from a complex, which is a bad thing at any time, but which when constituted of love and hurt pride makes an insoluble compound with some of the attributes of revenge. She could not sit on her heel behind the saddle shed and whistle melancholy dirges. She could not yell at any crowd playing poker around the lamps to “For God’s sake put the light out and let a fellow sleep.” All she could do was to give hurt for hurt, and this she did with a Janetlike thoroughness.

After two weeks or so, when Crosby Nugent haunted Janet’s every step, and Rosamond’s eyes had a feverish glitter and her laugh was shrill and forced, one night Dice Barnett took his hat in his hand and presented himself at the Old Man’s office door.

“Come in,” said the Old Man from the lamplight by his desk. “I’ve been expecting you for a day or two.”

“Yes, sir,” said Dice. “I guess you were right last winter. They’re not making the grade after all. I don’t know but somebody’d better do some shoving.”

The Old Man nodded.

“Things are pretty bad, are they?”

“If he gets any worse to live with he’ll have to be roped and tied.”

The Old Man rolled a cigarette thoughtfully.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It strikes me, Dice, that this thing is between the two women now, and it is no place for us. I don’t know that I blame Janet, but I’ll tell you this: If she was half her age I’d give her a good spanking.”

He sighed and got up.

“It’s a good bit like a boil, Dice,” he went on. “It’s got to come to a head before it can be cut.”

Dice moved to the door. It was all right for the Old Man to be philosophical; he didn’t have to live with the Kid.

“He’s likely to do Nugent some harm some of these days,” he offered. “Looks to me like he’s just waiting his chance.”

The Old Man smiled grimly.

“The one rule of this ranch,” he said, “is first-class care of our guests. I insist on that.” Dice nodded and stepped out on the doorstep. “Of course,” the Old Man added, “what I don’t know won’t hurt me.”

Dice was smiling faintly as he went back to the bunk house.

The ranch meanwhile was watching the play with avid interest. It saw the foppish Nugent spending hours in Janet’s paddock in the heat and dust, hauling out and putting away props, holding horses, saddling and unsaddling, his face smeared with sweat and his clothing dirty and disarranged. Janet was training a new pony, and once it kicked him. He walked with a limp for days.

Just what he thought, what furtive and secret hope he had, cannot be known. Certainly he had no intimation of any situation save the Rosamond one, which must have been pretty acute sometimes. To him the Kid was merely a good-looking cowpuncher with a grouch, and certainly a small flare-up which occurred between them at that time must have puzzled him considerably. It came about, oddly enough, through the gold in the creek sand.

Certainly the Kid had never given a thought to any gold in the mountains after the Old Man’s statement relative to it. And so far as gold is concerned, if there ever was any there it is still there, for it has never been found. But although the Kid did not believe there was gold, if there was any—if this can be made clear—he meant to find it. And the breaking point came one day when Nugent came up to the bunk-house porch with a pan in his hand, with a few pin-point specks in it which he said were gold.

The Kid had watched him coming with malevolent eyes.

“Gold!” he said nastily. “Fool’s gold!”

“Real gold,” said Nugent.

“Fool’s gold!” said the Kid belligerently.

Nugent gave him a contemptuous glance.

“You may know how to ride,” he said coldly, “although I’d like to see you on an English saddle before I can say. But there may be one or two other little things you don’t know.”

The Kid got up slowly, with a dangerous smile, but Dice Barnett pushed him back and stepped in front of him.

“Better take it away, Mr. Nugent,” he said firmly. “There isn’t enough there to have any difference of opinion about.”

Over Dice’s shoulder Nugent got a look at the Kid’s face, and it must have startled him. There seemed to be no particular reason for the dull hatred that blazed in the Kid’s eyes. He was a trifle startled.

VI

So there were Rosamond and Janet and the Kid, all tragically unhappy, each in his own way; and Nugent, playing his game according to his own rules, one of which was that a revoke was not a revoke unless it was called, and walking through the collective disapproval of the ranch without recognising that it existed. The boil, in the Old Man’s language, was slowly coming to a head and causing considerable loss of sleep and general misery meanwhile.

Craps in daytime, cards at night occupied the outfit’s leisure.

Slim would stand, bones in his left hand, two fingers of his right extending upward, and beseech, “Allah be Allah, dice be dice!”

Al, squatted on the floor, would pronounce cryptically, “Read’m’n’weep,” which is translated into, “Read them and weep.”

Mrs. Allenby fought her eternal fight with field mice and pack rats. Early rising dudes in wrappers and slippers, clutching soap and towels, hurried to the bath houses to get what one cynical woman termed the first rim on the tub, and here and there some dashing gentleman wore a snake rattle in his hatband.

In a word, the season was well along. And then the boil came to a head. Janet was pretty sick of her own game by that time, and was not sleeping any better than the Kid; but she had, in effect, got a bear by the tail and couldn’t let go. Up to that time, too, Nugent had been skilful enough to keep their companionship on a purely friendly basis. It had not taken him long to find that the girl’s theatrical and worldly contacts had not touched her.

She had, however, definitely resolved to break the thing up. She was surfeited with revenge, and it was dust in her mouth, after all. She hated herself and she was close to hating Nugent. She started out that day, indeed, with the definite intention of making a complete confession and facing an unpleasant hour to save her own soul.

And it may be said for Crosby Nugent that he, too, realised that things could not go on as they were; that he stood ready, in that height of his infatuation, to break with Rosamond and to ask Janet to marry him. Like the Kid the year before, he was carried away by a new type of girl. His imagination was excited. And Janet was a blood-stirring little figure, with her apparently reckless horsemanship and that sort of cool defiance with which she now faced the world.

Any pretext answered with him for a ride with her, and this day he was going gold hunting. He had all the Easterner’s conviction that the mountains of the West were full of hidden wealth, which it required the higher intelligence of the East to discover, and they started for that final ride armed with pan and hammer, saddlebags and luncheon.

Just what happened cannot be known precisely. Apparently they lunched together in amity, and he took up his gold hunting again. They were about ten miles back in the mountains, and had sat down on the edge of a cliff to look over their specimens. The surmise must be that her closeness and their isolation went to his head, and that he commenced to make passionate love to her. All that is absolutely certain is that she undoubtedly pushed him over the edge!

He fell only about twenty feet, and landed on a ledge, but the shock made him furious, and he lost what remained of his temper when he found he could neither get up nor down. He must have said some bitter things then, for it appears that Janet must have sat for a couple of hours or so at the top of the cliff, refusing either to help him or to go and bring help.

Sometime in that two hours they both came to their senses. They were absurd, and they knew it. For him the romance of the West had died with the same thud with which he landed, and the nonsense had gone out of Janet when he disappeared over the cliff face.

The last hour of the two Janet spent in wondering how she was to get help to him without the Kid getting the story, and it is certain that Nugent’s chief thought was to keep Rosamond from knowing about his predicament. Janet had made him ridiculous before her, and his infatuation for her had smashed to pieces along with his pride.

It appears then that when the evening shadows began to fill the cañon below with purple, and the Bishop’s Rock high above was a massively rosy jewel set in gold, Janet went to the cliff edge and called down to him coldly that she was going for a rope; and that Nugent merely nodded, and went on grimly picking splinters out of his hands with the point of his scarfpin.

Janet was frantically determined by that time to effect the rescue herself, and to keep the story from spreading over the ranch. She rode slowly, to arrive as late as possible, and her plan was to reach unperceived the barn where Midge’s stage props were kept, to get her ropes and effect the rescue herself.

She would have succeeded, probably, but for one thing. The Kid was corral dog that night. Checking up at nine o’clock, he had found their two horses missing, and set himself doggedly to wait for them. Riders came in, unsaddled and turned their horses loose, to run on an easy lope to the pasture and the herd. The racks in the saddle house filled up, with the exception of two spaces, and filled with rage, despair and solid fear, the Kid stood with folded arms, staring at the mountains.

From the bunk-house windows came the sound of Slim’s voice, crying, “Hit me! Harder!” followed, not by the sound of blows, but of chips on a wooden table. Their hard day over, the wranglers were playing blackjack. Far away, in the Old Man’s office, shone the green shade of his office lamp as he pored over his accounts. The stable cat rubbed against the Kid’s ankles, caught against his spurs and spat angrily.

At ten o’clock he saw the wavering light of an electric flash coming toward the corral. It was Rosamond. She went first to the saddle house, and then came back to him, turning the light on him as she did so.

“They aren’t back, are they?” she asked.

“No.”

She collapsed on a bench and sat there, twisting her hands together.

“I don’t think they’re coming, Kid.”

“They’ll come, all right.”

“He’s wild about her. He doesn’t take any trouble to hide it.”

The Kid drew a long breath.

“Well, it takes two to make that kind of a bargain,” he said, and relapsed into sullen silence. After a time, however, he roused and said, “I’m going to leave here. Guess I’ll hit the trail for New Mexico—and herd sheep,” he added bitterly. He was, as a cow and horse man, committing himself to the lowest of degradations, but Rosamond had not even heard him.

“You know why it started, don’t you?”

“No, and I don’t care.”

“She’s paying me back for last summer, Kid. Oh, I know the ranch blames him, but any man’s a fool in the hands of any girl if she wants him to be. It was you.”

The Kid was dull with misery, and it was a moment or two before he grasped what she had said. But it brought him no cheer, even then. “I don’t care why she did it. You and I are just out of luck—that’s all.”

“Aren’t you going to put up a fight?”

“No, ma’am,” said the Kid. “If she wants him she can have him. And I wish her luck,” he added bitterly.

“Don’t be silly!” Rosamond snapped. “You and I have made a mess of things, and we’ve got to straighten them out—if we get the chance.” Suddenly she began to cry against the Kid’s shoulder.

“I’m awfully fond of him, Kid,” she wailed. “I’ve got my clothes and everything. And he’s fond of me too. It’s—it’s the altitude or something. When you’re not used to it it makes you different.”

“You tell ’em,” gloomily assented the Kid, and patted her shoulder. After a time he drew himself away and gave her a final brotherly pat.

“Now look here,” he said. “You go back to your cabin and crawl into bed, and I’ll get a horse and wander up the way they went. Chances are their horses got away and they’re walking in.”

Then suddenly he caught her arm.

“Listen!” he said.

A horse was coming in from the cañon trail. Under the cottonwoods a hundred yards away it stopped, and a moment later the Kid had caught Rosamond and pushed her into the shadow of the barn. Some one was coming from the cottonwoods on foot, a shadowy figure which proceeded to do a number of curious things.

First it went to one of the bunk-house windows and looked in. After that it struck a bee line for the barn, and the Kid put an arm across Rosamond’s chest and held her back against the wall. The figure entered the barn, groped there for a time very stealthily, and then emerged and started back toward the cottonwoods.

“Janet!” said the Kid sternly.

The figure started and dropped what it carried. The Kid picked it up and planted himself in front of the figure.

“Now,” he said, “perhaps you’ll explain what you want with a rope this hour of the night.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort!”

“I’ve got the rope.”

“There are other ropes. I dare say that will occur to you in time.”

“Is anybody hurt?”

“No.”

“Where’s Nugent?”

“That’s my affair.”

“Not by a darned sight!” said the Kid furiously. “It’s my business too. I’ve sat back and let you two carry on your fool game about as long as I intend to, and I’m through. I’m going to go and kill him. Where is he?”

“I pushed him over a cliff, and he can’t get back.”

“Why did you push him over a cliff?” demanded the Kid, standing very tall and with his fists clenched.

“He tried to kiss me.”

Certainly Rosamond tasted the ashes of life at that moment. But certainly, too, the tight band which had been around something in the Kid’s left chest for some months gave with a snap, allowing his heart to race madly.

“Janet!” he said softly. “Janet, I—”

“Will you give me my rope, please?”

“What for? Let him stay where he is. He can die and rot there for all I care.”

But here Rosamond gave a little wail, and Janet saw her. She stiffened at once, and threw up her head.

“He’s in the Blue Cañon,” she said. “You and Miss Carter can go and find him.”

But when she started toward her cottage the Kid caught her by the arm.

“Not a bit of it!” he said more cheerfully than he had spoken for months. “You did this, and you’re going to see it through. If you don’t I’ll get the boys, and there’ll be a mouthful of talk going on around this place to-morrow. Think it over! There’s been a good little bit of talk already.”

“Oh, of course, if that’s a threat—”

“Sure it’s a threat, and I’m a bully! I’ve been so damned sick of sitting down and taking my medicine like a gentleman that I’m through being a gentleman, that’s all. How about it?”

Five minutes later a curious party of three rode out of the ranch toward the cañon and headed into the mountains. Of the three, one was softly whistling, one was angrily erect and silent, and one was dabbing at her eyes with a moist handkerchief. They followed the trail in darkness, knowing only of its climbs and steep descents by the inclination of their saddles, until at last they emerged into the upper meadows and starlight.

And there the Kid halted his horse and waited for Janet, to say, out of a clear sky and very virtuously: “There’s no excuse for a girl leading a man on, and then pushing him over a cliff because he tries to kiss her.”

“No,” she retorted. “I didn’t hear of any one going over a cliff last year.”

The Kid could think of no appropriate reply. He rode on, no longer whistling. But in spite of this rebuff his spirits were rising. It seemed quite clear to him that if a girl really loved a man she wouldn’t push him over a cliff. Therefore she didn’t love Nugent. Therefore it was distinctly possible that she might love somebody else. This feeling grew on him, and some time later he made a further overture:

“I made you a present last winter, but when you came back I threw it in the creek.”

“I can’t imagine why,” was Janet’s cold comment.

Thus repulsed, the Kid lapsed into an unhappy silence; but a little farther on he turned his head and spoke back over his shoulder: “It was only something I made out of cow horns. It wouldn’t appeal to you these days, anyhow.”

Janet made no comment, and thus thrown back on himself the Kid’s resentment against Nugent had time to take form and to develop into cold anger. By the time they had reached the place of that gentleman’s temporary incarceration all the bitterness of the summer, against Janet, Rosamond and himself, had crystallised into hatred of Crosby Nugent. That Janet remained cruel and aloof; that Rosamond clung to their heels; that even if she could have cared for him he had nothing to offer Janet but sixty dollars a month, a saddle and himself; that men had looked for the gold in the mountains for forty years and never found it; that he hadn’t eaten any supper—Nugent, when they reached him, was to bear the brunt not only of the thing he knew but of a dozen he had never heard of.

At the edge of the cliff, having tied their horses, the Kid borrowed Rosamond’s flashlight and bent over the edge. Some twenty feet below, sitting sulkily on a rock, below which again the cliff fell a sheer fifty feet, was Nugent. He looked up as the light appeared.

“Who’s there?” he called.

“Are you hurt?”

“Scratched. I can’t get up this infernal wall.”

“Well, there’s no hurry, anyhow,” said the Kid. “There are some of us here who don’t care if you never come back.”

“Go away and let me talk to somebody with sense,” Nugent shouted. “I don’t feel funny, if you do.”

“Sorry, old man,” said the Kid. “Only Miss Carter and Miss Allenby are here, and neither of them wants to talk to you. But you’re mistaken. I wasn’t being funny.”

For the first time it struck Nugent that the atmosphere above was, to put it mildly, hostile. He lost his head and his temper.

“All right. Be as serious as you damned please,” he called angrily, “but get me out. If you haven’t got a rope I’d advise getting one pretty fast.”

The Kid was beginning to enjoy himself.

“What’s the hurry?” he inquired.

Nugent’s position was distinctly inferior but he did the best he could. When he realised that no immediate rescue was being staged, braced against the boulder and facing up, he made an address to the jury above that for length, breadth and strength of language made the Kid hold his ears. When Nugent finally relapsed into breathless silence the Kid sat on the edge of the cliff and swung his legs over.

“Evidently the shock has set him to raving,” he observed. “The question is, is he worth saving, or shall I drop a rock on him?”

Nugent’s reply to that was a request to the Kid to go to perdition, an undiplomatic but excusable speech, which resulted in the Kid’s dropping his contemptuous attitude and reminding him sternly that there were ladies present.

“Now I’ll tell you how the situation lies,” he said in a conversational tone, his long legs dangling over the lip of the cañon. “You’ve been a nuisance on the ranch all summer. You’ve about ridden your horses to death, and that’s a ranch crime. And you’ve swanked about until we’ve had to grab a close hold on ourselves to keep you out of the horse trough. And you’re where you are because you don’t know any more about ladies than you do about horses, and that’s plenty.” The Kid paused, but Nugent remained sulkily silent.

“As the prisoner,” said the Kid, “you’ve got a right to plead.”

The prisoner immediately again consigned the Kid to perdition, and that gentleman smiled.

“I’ll reverse that sentence,” he said. Then he dropped his bantering manner and bent over the edge.

“It’s like this, Nugent. The ranch isn’t going to hold you and me after to-night. And I warn you that after the way you’ve talked I aim to put you in the horse trough before I go to bed. But you’re not getting out of there unless you agree to leave the ranch to-morrow, and that’s flat.”

“Rosamond!” bellowed Mr. Nugent.

“What is it?”

“Let that maniac talk his fool head off if he wants to, or roll rocks down here, as he threatens. You ride down to the ranch and send an outfit up here. I’m not going to stay here all night.”

The Kid was not only beginning to enjoy himself enormously but to grow a trifle drunk with power.

“Rosamond,” he said, “for the sake of our old love, stay where you are.”

There was a shocked silence from below, and then the Kid’s voice again as he bent over.

“Now, Mr. Nugent,” he said, “let’s be calm about this. I’m ready to make terms if you are. I’ve got a rope here, and I’ll snake you out of that place with no more trouble if you think you can make the noon train to-morrow.”

It was now himself that Mr. Nugent would see consigned to perdition before he made any such concession.

“Janet!” he called.

“Miss Janet,” corrected the Kid softly. “Anyhow, I wouldn’t bring her into this. She’s a trifle hasty at times. Put down that rock, Janet!” he called, and Janet, aloof and disapproving, drew herself angrily erect. The action sobered the Kid at once. He bent toward her and lowered his voice.

“Don’t be angry with me, honey,” he said. “I’ve suffered so darned much.”

In the darkness Janet moved closer to the Kid, and for the first time in months her voice to him was the voice of the old Janet, sweet and grave and very, very kind.

“So have I, Kid,” she said.

He caught her hand and kissed it.

Below, Mr. Nugent sat on his rock and considered the situation. He was cold and tired, he was angry, he was afraid to face Rosamond; but most of all he was puzzled.

“I don’t get it,” he said at last in a milder tone. “Where do you come in on this, anyhow?”

“Janet,” said the Kid, swiftly and in a whisper, “where do I come in on this, anyhow?”

“Tell him you’re engaged to me,” said Janet.

The Old Man had not been able to sleep that night, and so he got up and, rather sketchily clad, wandered about the place. The cottages were dark, the lawn deserted, but from the bunk-house windows came the glow of lamplight, and Slim’s plaintive cry, “Hit me again! Harder!”

The Old Man, smiling and clutching his dressing gown about him, stole past and went toward the corral. He went into the barn and moved among the night horses, speaking to them softly.

Suddenly, outside, he heard the sound of horses moving quietly, the rub of saddle leather, the faint clank of metal on metal. The Old Man listened, and then stepped back deeper into the shadows.

There were, he could see, several horses, and the business of unsaddling went on in a silence that was highly mysterious. One after another the freed horses made off for the pasture; one after the other their silent ex-riders carried away saddle, bridle and saddle blanket to the shed. Then, still without speech, the party seemed to divide, and two figures moved off into the darkness and two remained. The two which had gone were feminine, so far as the Old Man could determine in that place of breeched females. The two which remained were undeniably male.

“Now that the women are gone,” said one voice, “we’ll have this out, my friend.”

“Suits me,” said the Kid’s soft drawl. “And I’ve warned you, Mr. Nugent, what I aim to do. I’m going to wash some of your sins away in that horse trough.”

“Try it!”

“I intend to. It may cost me my job, for the Old Man’s orders are pretty strict. He says, ‘Keep your hands off the dudes. You might hurt ’em.’ ”

“Don’t worry about hurting me,” said Nugent. “I’ve stood a lot of insolence from you to-night, and before I leave here there’s going to be one sick cowboy.”

Very, very stealthily the Old Man moved toward the barn door, and there peered out. Nugent was taking off his coat and the Kid was kicking out of his chaps. When he was free of them he threw them aside and faced Nugent with a smile.

“Better take off your pants too,” he suggested. “The water might spoil ’em.”

Nugent’s answer was a furious rush.

The ranch slept. Out in the pastures which spread over the foothills, wire to wire a mile or two, the horses rested or grazed. A coyote barked from a high red butte. In a cottage down the road Rosamond lay, face down on her bed, and in her own little room Janet was standing before a warped and bleached bit of flotsam from the creek, a strange affair of dingy cow horns on a cracked wooden base, on which she smiled tenderly. And in the barn doorway stood the Old Man, snorting like a war horse with what might or might not have been anger, while before him went on a silent and mighty battle.

Inch by inch Nugent gave way. Inch by inch the Kid fought him back. The dust rose and circled about them. The stable cat brought a mouse and laid it at the Old Man’s feet, but he did not see it. The cat, waiting for approval, heard nothing but a low rumble in the Old Man’s throat, which sounded like but may not have been “Good Kid! Good boy!” And every inch of Nugent’s retirement led straight to the horse trough.

Some two minutes later the Kid, holding furiously to a writhing, splashing figure in the horse trough, felt a hand on his shoulder and looked around. One of his eyes was almost closed, but out of the other he saw trouble, and let go his hold to stand stiffly erect.

“You don’t need to drown a sheep, boy, to kill the vermin on him,” said the Old Man. Then, drawing his dressing gown around him, the Old Man went back to bed.

Some time later the Kid swaggered into the bunk house with the fillet of one of the cook’s best tenderloin steaks over an eye. In answer to tender inquiry he stated that he had bumped into a tree, after which he proceeded to undress and to crawl into bed.

The game went on. The Kid lay still, every inch a man and a good many inches aching. He was very happy, too happy to sleep. The noise went on about him, but he was alone in a great silence, with Janet.

After a time he reached under his pillow and got his mouth organ, and, lying there, softly and plaintively he made music to the song that was in his soul.

VII
LILY: The Philanderer

I

The party had divided in London, three to Wales, Courtney Wallace and Vance to Cornwall and Devon. Vance had been rather insistent on the southern tour. The other man had yielded without enthusiasm.

“I’ve done it before,” he said resignedly. “Lyme Regis, Torquay, Tintagel, Clovelly! And you’ve done it before, Vance. Is it possible, by any accident, that the lady from the Theatre Royal is—going south?”

Vance flushed, although he laughed.

“She is motoring with a party of friends. I believe that is their general direction. There is hardly a chance of our running into them.”

Wallace smoked reflectively. Beneath their hotel window all London passed. Schoolboys with top hats and canes scrambled to the tops of buses, flower women disputed on the pavements, coster carts dodged the traffic; the street was a thousand miracles.

Suddenly Wallace bent forward.

“Ah!” he said. “That’s too bad! That’s—that’s horrible!”

A coster’s donkey, hardly larger than a dog, had gone down and a bus had passed over its foot. It lay on its side, a little island of tragedy in the river of traffic that promptly divided around it. The coster, with his face working, was on his knees beside it, fumbling with the harness buckles.

Vance rose and glanced over the other man’s shoulder.

“It’s infamous!” he cried. “What chance had the little beast, anyhow? Look at that! No room for it to live and hardly room for it to die!”

He flung away from the window. Wallace himself, less highly organised perhaps, did not care to look again. Instead, he turned meditative eyes on his companion. It was his work to study people, and Vance was good holiday material, psychologically, not too complex for hot weather. It was interesting to watch Vance decide that he wanted a thing and to follow the steps by which he got it; further still, to see him justify himself, standing his soul at attention and telling it what it needed, what was good for it, generally bullying it into line. He liked an audience for the process. More than once he had chosen Wallace. The argument differed little from time to time.

“Every now and then,” he would say, “I have got to cut clean loose from work, from everything. You know how hard I work—constant strain, and all that. Most men leave their business when they close the office door behind them, and don’t take it up until the next morning. But I’m always at it. Creative work’s the devil and the strain is cumulative. At the end of ten months, I’ve done a year’s work, and I feel it.”

“Yes,” Wallace would agree. He knew that he was only the remote audience, that Vance was really talking to his soul, and enjoying it.

“If I were a drinking man I’d go on a terrific bust—nervous explosion, you know. Or, if I could afford it, I’d hike to Monte Carlo. I don’t do either. But one thing I can do, and it isn’t selfish. It’s sheer self-preservation. I can get away from my family, and I do.”

And so on, ending of course in a eulogy of Edith, his wife, and of the children.

“Only woman in the world who could live with me,” he would say. “She has poise; she understands! She knows as well as I do when I’ve reached my limit. Came down to see me off—but you saw her at the dock, of course. How do you think she looked?”

Vance had the egotist’s habit of repeating himself, and twice now Wallace had faced this question. Both times he had evaded it.

“There’s a certain amount of strain about such partings,” he had said. “I thought she was depressed, naturally. I don’t see her very often, of course.”

On one such occasion Vance had roused from his self-engrossment, at something in Wallace’s voice.

“You used to be bully friends,” he said. “I’m sorry you don’t come out oftener.”

“There’s a perfectly good reason why I don’t go,” Wallace returned easily. “There is nothing quite so painful to a bachelor as the married happiness of his friends.”

Vance had been quite satisfied.

To Wallace, sitting back in the hotel window, came the memory of Edith’s face that day on the pier. In repose her face had been enigmatic—a sort of tolerant resignation, with a flash now and then of humour. It was almost, Wallace thought uneasily, as if she had reached a point where she must laugh at herself, or weep.

There came to the older man’s mind, as Vance moved to a writing table, odds and ends of Vance’s philosophy of life.

“I’m not a saint, of course, but my good times have never hurt anybody.”

“I am a better husband and a better father for getting away now and then. It’s perfectly true that all of us need to invite our own souls once in a while.”

“All my capital is in my head, and about once a year I have to look after the investment.”

And that very ingenuous statement on the steamer, apropos of a triangle which was holding the interest of the smoking room—

“After all, if a man has any breadth of intelligence, any larger view of life, it is almost impossible to find one woman who understands all sides of him, isn’t it?”

Wallace had had a quizzical vision of Vance’s soul, rather nice and young and naïve, saluting and accepting this second-hand wisdom as Truth.

Vance was examining the proposed itinerary of the excursion and copying it into his letter. He was writing eagerly, boyishly, and when he rose it was with a mischievous appearance of having, by sending the word home to Edith, clinched the arrangement. But he held two letters in his hand, not one.

“When do you want to start?” Wallace asked.

“The car will be ready to-morrow. Why not go while the weather’s good?” Under his carefully casual tone was an eagerness that could not be entirely suppressed.

Vance made a good travelling companion. His enthusiasm, which even infected Wallace, surmounted the minor mishaps of the journey—a broken brake rod, tire trouble, three days of rain which tied them up in Bournemouth, and beat the sea to a sodden plain. It was at Bournemouth that they got to the subject of dreams. Vance had had a dream. He was still shaken at breakfast, and he reverted to it when, in weather-proof tweeds, they ventured through the rain to the pier.

“I daresay it’s overwork, isn’t it?”

Wallace eyed him. He looked almost ill, strained, his mouth set hard.

“Dreams are curious things,” Wallace said reflectively. “You know there’s a theory that our dreams are our real selves.”

“I thought they were the reasonable soul run mad.”

“Not at all. During sleep seems to be the only time that the unconscious self gets to the surface. All barriers are down. The highly cultured part of one, which is only superstructure, of course, is off guard. Suppressed desires come up, wishes that would horrify us in waking moments, fears that are founded on such wishes; it’s rather abstruse.”

“ ‘The flattering truth of sleep,’ ” said Vance cynically, but he changed colour. “It’s ridiculous! I refuse to be such stuff as dreams are made of. I have never had a dream that was not incongruous, absurd. Even this about Edith—”

“The brain, of course, when the will is suspended during sleep, is like an engine without a governor. I’ll acknowledge that.”

Vance wheeled on him.

“And this dream of seeing Edith and the children sinking in a quicksand—are you going to classify that as a fear that is founded on a wish?”

It was a direct challenge. Wallace, who, dealing in the things of the soul, dealt in intangibilities that were the realest things in the world to him, could forswear neither his belief nor his friend, and compromised.

“Not exactly that. Your unconscious self may realise that there are times when a man, to do his best work, should not have his interests divided. I should hardly call that disloyalty.”

Vance recovered himself slowly. It was as if he had peered over the edge of an abyss. Wallace realised to his surprise that he was profoundly shaken; that he must be more careful. It was a dangerous thing to turn a man’s thoughts in. Vance, thoroughly objective, must not become subjective. He was too mental, too imaginative. Perhaps Vance himself was right, had, in his graceless young way, solved his own psychology, and the girl from the Theatre Royal was a safety valve.

They had not yet encountered the other party, and after the morning on the sands at Bournemouth, Vance seemed determined to ignore its possible proximity. He ceased peering ahead at each motor they overtook; the inns where they lunched were selected at random, and not, as earlier, as if in accordance with some preconceived itinerary. He seemed to have placed his affairs on the cold knees of the gods and was waiting.

But he still dreamed. Wallace, sharing a room with him in a small inn on the edge of Dartmoor, found him sitting up by the window one night.

“It’s those damned dreams,” he said fretfully. “Of course I know she’s all right, and the children too. But do you realise that I can’t send a cable from this God-forsaken hole?”

But the mere outburst helped him. He went back to bed and almost immediately to sleep. It was Wallace who lay awake.

Until he met the girl, Wallace could not understand the depths to which he felt Vance had been stirred. It was not their first holiday together; Vance, always attractive to woman, was attracted by them. More than once, Wallace had known these holidays of the younger man complicated by a pretty woman, had witnessed his penitential or aggressively virtuous return, as the case might be. But this time there was a difference. Vance was harder hit, or perhaps he had been more brain-weary than before, and the reaction was stronger. He was not sleeping well. And when they were near the sea he took to long walks over the cliffs.

It was at Lynton that they came up with the other party, a Mr. and Mrs. Byron, and the girl herself. Her name was Lily Ruskin; she was a slender girl, much younger than Wallace had anticipated, simply dressed and without make-up. He drew a deep breath. She was so much better than he had expected; even the way her brown hair was twisted low on her neck was without affectation, without even that studied simplicity that is most artificial of all. The girl was absolutely natural, rather lovely in a slim, graceful way.

The Byrons were impossible, frankly. Mrs. Byron was a vivid person, noisily dressed and not flawless in speech. Wallace gathered at dinner that her main interest in life was her bull terrier, travelling with her, and named George Broadhurst after the American playwright.

“It was in one of Broadhurst’s plays that I made my first success,” she confided to Wallace. “I’ve got a New York offer upstairs now. If it wasn’t for Byron, I’d go in a minute.”

“You’re not going without me. You can lay to that,” Byron put in, his tone surly. “In this game it’s either double harness or single harness, and no half way about it, as far as I’m concerned.”

She shrugged her heavy shoulders and turned her attention to her dinner, eating with slow and deliberate appreciation. But later in the meal, when Byron’s attention was distracted, she reverted for a moment to the American tour.

“I’m going, nevertheless,” she said frankly. “If Lily goes I go. I know a lot of Americans. We’ll have rather a cheery time.”

Lily Ruskin left the table before the others had finished, making an excuse of the heat of the room, and Vance rose with her. Mrs. Byron looked after him, with much the same air of deliberate appreciation she had shown to her food.

“Rather a nut, your friend. Lily is quite mad about him,” observed Mrs. Byron, and took some raisins.

“He’s a brilliant chap, in his line,” Wallace observed. He had lost nothing of Vance’s protective droop toward Lily, of her almost shivering consciousness of his nearness. And because the girl was straight—he knew that now; he had not expected it—the situation had taken on a new quality of tenseness. Lily was mad about Vance, mad with the unspoiled passion of the woman who has saved herself, through God knows what filth, clean for the one man, and who having found him is ready to give her all. And there was worse to come.

“Fancy!” drawled Mrs. Byron. “Brilliant, handsome and young! And yet your clever American ladies have let him escape!”

“Escape?”

“Unmarried,” she explained. “It is one of the most charming things about America. So many of your men remain unmarried!”

Wallace caught a swift glance from under her heavy lids and met it squarely.

“American standards of luxury are rather high,” he said gravely. “Comparatively speaking, we have few hereditary fortunes. A man must work for years to establish himself, before he can marry.”

Although he had preserved his impassivity, underneath Wallace was seething with fury. Vance had gone too far. He was passing with these people as a single man; it was puerile, childish, damnable. It was a great deal more—it was dangerous. Wallace found himself an involuntary accomplice, and his gorge rose.

They had their coffee in the garden that clung to the edge of the cliff. For months after, Wallace was to remember that twilight hour, with the terraced paths winding beneath them, the heavy fragrance of flowers opening to the first dew of the night, the lights of a battleship far out from land, the distant sound of the sea far below, the excited whimpering of George Broadhurst, who had flushed a rabbit in the shrubbery.

Vance and Lily sat a little apart. They were very silent. The girl’s face looked set and white; she refused coffee, took a cigarette, forgot to light it. The air seemed charged with feeling. Rather suddenly Wallace knew that Vance had told her. Mixed with his relief came sympathy for her. Mrs. Byron had been right. She was quite mad about Vance. And she did not care who knew it, apparently. She sat, bent a little forward, gazing out to sea, and one of her hands lay on Vance’s knee. He was uncomfortable about it for a minute—then he covered it with one of his own.

The conversation languished. They had no common ground on which to meet. Vance made no effort. Wallace tried the Ulster uprising, and was countered by Mrs. Byron with the flat statement that she detested the Irish and Lady Gregory’s plays. Was Wallace a playwright? But of course not; he was Doctor Wallace—she’d forgotten.

“M. D.,” Vance made an effort. “Doctor of Minds. Be very careful, Mrs. Byron. He knows all sorts of spooky things. He’s a psychologist.”

It was clear that Mrs. Byron confused Wallace at once with the Society of Psychic Research. She roused to the first interest of the evening.

“Ghosts!” she said. “Do tell me a ghost story!”

Wallace smiled.

“I deal with ghosts, of course,” he admitted, “but they are ghosts of the mind’s own raising.”

“Any sort of ghost,” she persisted. “Once in Warwickshire, we stopped in a haunted house. Do you remember, Lily? And how you sat up and nothing happened?”

The girl did not reply. She spoke past Mrs. Byron, to Wallace.

“What do you mean by ghosts of the mind’s own raising?”

Having caught her attention, Wallace was determined to hold it. He had already formulated a plan of a sort. If he could get Vance through the evening, he thought he could talk him into reason. It was the next two hours he dreaded. For there was mischief afoot. Vance stirred, lighted a cigar. In the flare of the match his eyes were reckless, the eyes of a man who has ceased to think.

When he chose, Wallace could be vastly entertaining. He made the effort then. He held the conversational lines taut, driving hard to one point, to hold Vance and the girl to the group. So he spoke mostly to her, held her attention close, ignored the pitiful appeal of her white face. For twenty minutes or more he held them all. At the end of that time Mrs. Byron dropped asleep, her head falling forward. Byron, who had suffered complete metaphysical submergence early in the game, emerged enough a few moments later to take himself to the end of the terrace, the terrier at his heels. And still Wallace talked on.

“Dreams!” he said. “Now there’s a field for fancy, Miss Ruskin!” He was conscious that he had caught Vance’s attention. “You know, dreams show us that we never forget things. We don’t, you know. They’re all there, big and little. Along comes the scent of a flower, or some combination of scents, or a strain of music, and presto, the little memory cell closes up, completes the circuit, and we are off.”

Vance, leaning forward, lifted the girl’s hand to his cheek.

“The smell of the sea over the land of Lorna Doone,” he said unsteadily, “and all of us, here to-night.”

“In dreams,” Wallace persisted grimly, “we’re particularly liable to go back. Far back. I know of an interesting case of the sort. You know, no soul is safe from us.” The girl shivered. “In the case I speak of a young and charming woman finds she has made a mistake in her marriage. Somewhere, deep in her soul, she holds the image of a man she wishes she had married. Very deep in her soul—it took me two months to get to it, for she would not acknowledge it, even to herself.”

“I know,” said Lily. “Women have to bury—so much.”

“This chap, whoever he is, evidently represents a refuge in time of trouble, to her. It’s all unconscious. She does not know it herself. Anyhow, when things get pretty hard for her—the husband wanders, although he loves her—she goes back in her dreams to her early childhood, to a fright she had, a dog that turned on her. The dream is always the same; she sees the dog coming, and it is the other man—the chap she did not marry, that she calls to for help. It’s incongruous, like all dreams, but vastly interesting.”

He had the girl’s attention, at least.

“I see,” she said, slowly. “And to you this symbolizes something?”

“Perhaps not the dream alone. There were other circumstances, of course. What she is burying is probably a feeling that in a crisis of any sort, the—the other man would be more dependable than the husband. It is possible, of course, that she has always cared for the other chap. If there is a crisis, and the husband fail her—”

Lily rose, shaking off Vance’s detaining hand. She stood near Wallace, looking down.

“And when the crisis comes, what will the husband matter, after all?” she demanded. “Your philosophy of life is wrong—all philosophy of life is wrong, when it is founded on law, and not on love.”

“Colonies have been founded on that principle—and failed.”

She hardly heard him. Her hands hung before her, clasped so close that her slim fingers were blue-white.

“Law that is best for the many may be criminally wrong for the few,” she said, and leaving them, joined Byron and the terrier at the end of the terrace. Vance did not look up after her, but Wallace knew that no movement of her white figure was lost to him. He waited for Vance to speak, but he made no effort. When she did not come back, but with Byron penetrated deeper into the garden shadows, Vance rose and flung away his cigar.

“I’m going up to bed,” he said irritably. “This whole damned party has hung together this evening as if every member of it was afraid of his own society.”

Perturbed as he was, Wallace smiled. It was so like Vance to be childish at a big moment. Of course, he knew Vance was not going to bed. He would break up the party and then come down for his cheated hour with Lily. Wallace stifled a groan of very weariness, and shut his jaw grimly. He would see the thing out, if he had to sit up all night. And it came very nearly to that.

Wallace sat alone on the terrace. A launch put off from the shore and headed for the battleship. The lantern in the bow moved across the black water like the reflection of some swift star. Wallace’s thoughts, too, crossed the sea. He thought of Edith Vance, of the day of her wedding, of the calm confidence in her eyes until the service had begun, of the shade of panic in them when, at the signal, she had held out her hand for the ring. Wallace had noticed her hands that day at the dock. It was warm and she had slipped off her gloves. The ring had hung a little loose.

Lily came back along the terrace, and sat down beside him. He had thought she would come. The battle, after all, was between them! Vance, sulking in his room, had already surrendered.

“I’ve been watching that boat,” he said. “There’s something inevitable about the way it’s making for the ship. It hasn’t varied a foot. That’s life, in its best sense, isn’t it—knowing what one wants, and going directly for it?”

The speech was unlucky.

“That is life,” she replied. Her voice, that had seemed light, was deeper now; the bell tone of passion was in it. “To know what one wants, and to go directly—over no matter what depths.” She turned suddenly and faced him. “You are not going to let me see him alone again. Why?”

“Because I’m in deadly fear of you.” Wallace tried to smile, saw her eyes, and looked away instead.

“You think he—cares?”

“I think he thinks he cares. It’s just as disastrous, under the circumstances.”

“He is—like that?”

The loyalty of male to male made Wallace hesitate.

“Well, not as bad as I’m letting you think. He’s fond of women—he is temperamental; you can’t measure his sort with the usual yard-stick. He’s decent enough.”

“Do you know his wife?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me about her?”

Wallace eyed her steadily.

“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”

“She is mad about him, of course. I wonder—will you let me tell you a bit about myself?”

“Do you think—”

“I should like you to know. And afterwards—I shall ask you something. I am not so young as I look. I am twenty-three. And I have been—straight. I wanted you to know that.”

She paused. Wallace’s profile was impassive. But she knew he was keenly alert to what she was saying.

“I have no great talent. My appearance helped—I made up well—and my voice is good. I’ve had a lot of temptation, of course. That’s in the game. If I stayed straight it wasn’t because of any traditions behind me, or of any special quality in me. You know what I mean—when everywhere around one there is a sort of elastic creed, one—”

“I understand, of course.”

“I want you to know the truth, before I come to the other. I was good because in the end it paid. I couldn’t amount to much on the stage, but if I was straight, I could make a good marriage. That had to be my future. I had no other. It sounds revolting—but isn’t that after all the truth about a great many women? Only—you never heard it before.”

“Possibly,” said Wallace. “But I absolutely refuse to believe it.”

She shrugged her slender shoulders.

“It is the absolute truth with me, anyhow.”

Perhaps Wallace’s attitude disconcerted her. She did not go on at once. Byron passed them, the dog at his heels, and with a curt good-night went into the hotel. Some one above flung up a window. The launch, its star swaying in the ocean swell, clung to the side of the battleship. Lily sat bent forward, her restless fingers interlaced.

“Of course you know—he did not tell me he was married until to-night. All the time I said to myself that I was glad I had been straight, because now he could marry me, and there would be nothing to forget. But he cannot marry me.”

The little car of the cliff railway came up, after its final trip. The night had grown so still that they could hear the guard closing and locking the doors, could follow his footsteps as he moved, whistling softly, along the curving street.

“I knew a girl once,” Lily went on in her sweet, deepened voice. “She cared a lot about a man. They were not married, but everybody liked them both. They were amazingly popular. They used to have Sunday teas at their house, and—well, he died after a while. She was young and good-looking, and she’d had a good offer for the next season—with Fred Terry, I think. But she went out to the country where he was buried, and shot herself. It’s like that, sometimes.”

The thrill in her voice took him rather by the throat. All his life he had been denying this right of love to the throne of reason, had been fighting the cause of the mind against the heart—except once, and that was long ago, as love flies. It came to him all at once that the machine is always more powerful than the engineer that controls it, that this slim girl, in her primal appeal, was stronger than all law. For just that moment he wondered, were Vance and she right, and he wrong? Why sacrifice the few on the altar of the multitude? He found himself mumbling a response.

“Yes. It is like that, sometimes. But there are few great passions. Once in a thousand years two people meet, and there is a sort of psychic explosion. After that, I suppose in all the world there is only for the man the one woman—”

“—And for the woman the one man,” she finished, softly. “It happens oftener than you think. Only—they are afraid.”

The whole thing began to seem unreal to Wallace. The women he had known did not do battle for love. He had no precedent to guide him in such a situation. And, like most men, in spite of his profession, he feared subtleties. He moved out into the open.

“What do you want me to do?” he demanded. “Vance is married. I know his wife, and I like her. I can’t stand back and see him disloyal to her. I’m not going to leave him here—or anywhere.”

“Does she care as much as I do?”

“That’s not the question.”

“Isn’t that the question?”

“There are children. Has he told you that?”

She winced, but her determination did not waver.

“Perhaps you do not understand. I am not asking him to give them up. I understand better than you think. He cares a great deal now, but not as I care. There is always one who kisses, and one who turns the cheek. I think he will never forget me. Years from now, if he hears my name, he will thrill to it. But it will be to a memory. And where he will thrill to a memory, I shall go white. That’s the difference. You see, I know. But he cares.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go away. Let us have the next few weeks, if that is all we are to have out of life.” She mistook Wallace’s incredulous silence for hesitancy. “Just think,” she went on, “I who should have all my life before me, am offering it for a month with him. Oh, I shan’t kill myself,” as he started. “I shall go on. You know. Stars live for big moments. I am asking you for my big moment.”

She looked up at him, faintly smiling. Then, without warning, she buried her face in her hands and cried, silently, stonily, while Wallace sat helplessly by. The break did one thing; it gave him time. When she lifted her head at last, he was ready.

“Perhaps you are right, from your viewpoint. You are free; your life is yours. You can do what you like with it. I’m not preaching morality now. It’s hardly a question of that. I mean, of course, that you are determined to evade that issue. But we cannot live to ourselves alone. If Vance wanted to go to the devil and it involved himself only, I’d probably let him alone. But he has a wife.” He met her eyes squarely. “I’m going to prevent this thing if I can.”

A coarser woman would have defied him, confident in her power over the other man. But Lily only eyed him rather wistfully.

“I see,” she said slowly. “How solicitous you are for her! I wonder—” She hesitated, more careful of him than he had been of her. “I hope you are not in love with her. If you are, and if you are suffering what I have suffered to-night—”

Wallace drew his breath in sharply. But she had risen, and stood looking up at the darkened façade of the hotel. Somewhere, behind its windows, Mrs. Byron slept placidly. Byron had exchanged his half-sullen apathy of the day for noisy slumber. Tourists gorged with sight-seeing rested tired muscles and weary eyes. On all save these two in a garden, and Vance keeping vigil above, the night had descended with healing wings.

Lily had noticed Wallace’s sharply taken breath after all. For she turned and held out her hand.

“How we take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were God’s spies!” she said wistfully. “I with my perplexities, your dream-woman with hers, and now—you. Good-night.”

She turned and went into the house.

II

Wallace did not sleep that night. He was up at early dawn, and roused the chauffeur. Then he went to Vance’s room.

Vance was awake, lying back on his pillows, his arms under his head.

“Well?” he demanded, sulkily.

“It’s going to be a great day. If we start now, we can make Bath early, and—”

“I’m not going to Bath.”

Wallace stood at the foot of the bed and looked down at him. Against Vance’s childish peevishness he stood the genuine passion of Lily Ruskin, and he marvelled. What was there about Vance that enlisted such devotion? That kept Edith faithful, brought Lily to her knees, had cost him a night’s sleep and the entire pleasure of the journey? Certainly the element of boyishness that kept him, Wallace, always on the look-out to save him from danger, was not his attraction for Lily. There was nothing maternal in Lily’s love. He was her man.

“I’m not going to Bath,” Vance repeated.

Wallace suddenly lost his temper.

“You’re going to the devil,” he snapped. “That’s what you’re doing. And I’m pretty sick of holding you back. I’m tired of mothering you.”

With one of his quick changes of mood, Vance laughed. Then, with a great leap, he sprang out of bed and went to the window.

“God, what a day!” he said. “I’m not going to spend it riding between these confounded hedgerows. It’s the sea for me.”

He turned and put an arm around Wallace’s shoulders.

“I’m sane this morning. Don’t look so—nervous. We’ll get a sailboat, all of us, including George Broadhurst, and put our thumbs to our noses as we pass old Johnny Bull’s cruiser out there. Look at the colour of that water!”

He had thrown off the coat of his pajamas, and his splendid torso was bare. He went to the window again, and threw out one magnificent arm toward the sea.

“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean—roll,” he declaimed; “Ten thousand fleets sail over thee in vain!”

Some outraged Britisher in the next room rapped sharply on the wall, and his oratorical flight died in a chuckle.

“Go on out,” he said to Vance. “Order the car back to the garage, and ask some one to call Lily, like a good chap. She oughtn’t to miss that sea.”

Wallace was helpless against the flood tide of his morning good humour. He tried to argue, to voice with Lily’s face before him the resolutions of the night before. Vance splashed in his tub, and sang between warnings.

More than once that morning Wallace was tempted to give up the fight and go away. It was so evident that Vance’s infatuation was a temporary madness, a wound that would quickly heal. After all, if anything happened, it was up to the girl. Mrs. Byron, sitting under a sunshade in the bow of the boat, found the situation amusing, a little leaven to the unutterable boredom of the sail. Byron slept, face down in the sun, on the little deck of the fishing boat. The fisherman sat with the tiller ropes in his hand, and spat over the gunwale.

In the shadow of the sail Vance and Lily talked of immaterial things, or sat, flushed and star-eyed, not talking at all. As the night before Vance’s hand lay over hers, and once, when Wallace turned against the wind to light his cigarette, Mrs. Byron laughed a quickly hushed outburst. Wallace hated his situation and voiced his disgust.

“I’m not the watchdog,” he said. “If you two young idiots want to kiss each other, you needn’t wait until I am barking around a corner.”

From the tragedy of the night before, the thing seemed to have descended to broad farce. Wallace’s æsthetic sense was outraged. If the thing was to be a summer flirtation, with its accompaniment of kisses stolen behind the chaperon’s back, it was time he got out. His position was neither dignified nor necessary.

But with the exuberance of Vance’s morning mood, passed the gaiety of the excursion. Lily’s eyes were sombre as the boat came about and tacked along her angular course back toward the pier. Something was said about Avignon. Lily, it seemed, had the offer of a cottage there for the summer. Her eyes met Vance’s, steadily.

Mrs. Byron babbled on, under her sunshade.

“Men always look so well in flannels,” she said. “You should always wear flannels, Mr. Vance. You look like a Greek god in them.”

“Greek gods,” said Vance easily, “were mighty thrifty about flannels, or any sort of clothes.”

The accident happened on their way back to the hotel. Long afterwards, Wallace looked back on that morning, and wondered over many things. What would have happened had the car of the cliff railway not made that sudden jump? Would Lily and Vance have gone to Avignon? Why did the car jerk? Was there, after all, a personal God to direct his puppets?

The party had gone soberly enough along the promenade, Lily, Mrs. Byron and Vance ahead, Wallace and Byron behind, smoking. The terrier formed a connecting link of palpitating life between the two divisions of the party. The hot midsummer sun had made them all languid. Vance strode along, easily conversational, but with eyes only for Lily. The girl walked by his side, head bent, but every atom of her vibrant under his gaze.

The little car started without the dog, and Vance volunteered to go back for him. They had gone a few feet up the cliff face, and he was bent forward, ready to jump. Then the cable jerked, and he went out on his head.

The car climbed steadily. There was no way to stop and return. All of that dreadful time Wallace stood on the platform holding tight to Lily, who did not move, and staring down at the white bundle that was Vance.

He had been picked up when they got down to him, quite unconscious and his head lolling back on the arms of his bearers. Wallace took charge then, and they got him back to the hotel. It was concussion, possibly fracture. His general condition was fair, under the circumstances.

Lily waited outside the door during the consultation, her face set like stone. Then she went in and took charge. Wallace had sent for a nurse and the two women worked together. Vance took a sinking spell in the night, almost went under. During all that time the girl never whimpered, but worked steadily, doing what she was told, with set lips and burning eyes. And somehow, perhaps by the very will of her, he pulled through.

Wallace had notified Edith as soon as he knew definitely. The responsibility was too great to bear alone. And that next morning, early, he showed Lily a cablegram.

“Sailing to-day. Arrive Tuesday. Edith.”

She drew a long breath.

“Will you let me stay until then?”

“Do you think it wise?”

“What harm can it do? I am some one you know. I have helped a little. What of it? I have helped. And I can help more. He knows when I put my hands on him. He is quieter. There is a sort of sixth sense that we have when we love, that tells us if the one we love is near.” She shivered. “I think, if I were dying, and he touched me, I should come back.”

After that, Wallace left things as they were. Vance went into delirium, and opiates did little for him. But Lily, in her white frock, telling him over and over about the cottage at Avignon, could quiet him for hours. And into those whispered words she put all the dream month that was to have been theirs and now never would be.

“This morning we breakfasted on the terrace,” she would croon in her lovely voice. “Purple grapes from the hillside and butter from the whitewashed farmhouse across the valley. And after breakfast we wandered along the path, hand in hand. When we were weary we came back, and you read to me. It was warm, and your voice—was very soothing. I—fell—asleep.” Then, over and over: “I—fell—asleep”—until his wide eyes closed, and he, too, slept.

And the fifth day he was clearly better. The mental confusion persisted, but his general condition had improved. And that day he put his hand over hers, as it lay on the bed. Lily went white and closed her eyes. The nurse was walking on the terrace, and only Wallace was in the room. Lily bent over the sick man, until her cheek was close to his.

“Last night,” she whispered, “last night we sat in the moonlight, under the trees before the cottage. Do you remember? And at last I slid to your feet, with my head against your knee, my dear, my dear. And I told you all the things you are never to forget, never, so long as you live. That I shall always love you, always. That I shall never love any one else. Whenever you think of me you can know that I am thinking of you. For I shall always be thinking of you. And I kissed you on your dear eyes, like this. You will never forget that, either.”

Wallace looked at her and marvelled. She had taken on during the week a spiritual quality which amazed him. The shadow of death lay in her eyes. Sometimes he thought that Vance’s death would have been easier for her than what was coming.

When Vance had dropped asleep, she took up the nurse’s prayer book. She had fallen into that habit. Wallace remembered the couple who had been so amazingly popular in Lily’s queer individualistic world, and the woman who had shot herself on the man’s grave. “It is like that sometimes,” she had said. Looking across the bed at her, he knew that it was like that with her.

Edith came the next morning. Wallace met her, clothed in that garment of old friendship which for so long had covered his heart.

“I got your wire in London,” she said briefly. “It was good news.” And in the cab she turned to him, a little flushed. “All the way over, I said to myself that you were with him, and if he could be saved, you would do it.”

Where Lily had English reserve, Edith had poise. She told Wallace of the children, had herself well in hand. Wallace, who had had some fore-knowledge of Edith’s intuitions, had feared her questions. She asked none.

The Byrons had left that morning. He was grateful for so much. But Lily was still at the hotel. “I can’t do anything with her,” Mrs. Byron had said, hysterically. “She says she will go to-night, but she scares me. Did you ever know any one so strange? If you could know the men who have been mad about her! And to see her hanging over that poor wreck!”

He had a poor opinion of Lily’s power to dissemble. If she were only not in sight!

She was not in the room. She had promised that. The nurse was there, in a state of mental confusion and some dismay. Wallace felt that he could trust her discretion. Nevertheless he was anxious. But everything went off well. Vance knew Edith and smiled at her. Edith was singularly controlled. She told him about the little girls, and he listened with his eyes on her face. Then she had brought news—a splendid cast for the new play, the revival under favourable conditions of an early comedy. Whereas Lily had soothed him with the cottage at Avignon, Edith roused him with the thought of work.

In the midst of Wallace’s anxieties one of Vance’s own quips came to him—“Every woman,” he had said, “should have two husbands, one to love and cherish, the other to honour and obey.” What one woman could ever satisfy Vance’s dual nature? What one woman ever could take the place of all other women to him?

Edith dressed for dinner that night. The relief from strain had revived her colour. Wallace thought she had never been so lovely. Lily had moved to another table and dined alone. Wallace saw that she was not eating; her eyes hardly left Edith’s face, a puzzled look, as if she were trying to fit this wife into Vance’s life, trying to readjust all she knew of him from this new angle. Wallace was uneasy.

It was when the fish had gone that Edith turned to him.

“The girl in black, to my right, Courtney—is she the woman?”

“What woman?”

Edith did not reply at once. She glanced at Lily, and for a moment their eyes met.

“I see she is. She is very lovely.”

“Why should you think there is a woman?”

“There is generally a woman. You know that. I knew, of course, when he changed his plans so suddenly. Am I a shock, or—did she know of me?”

“She knew of you,” said Wallace gravely.

“Just one thing more, Court, I’ll not ask any more questions. It was an accident?”

“Absolutely.”

“He’s emotional, you know. Fearfully intense in each new affair. I—wondered.”

The mutton had come on, and she sat calmly while they were served.

“I’ve often thought,” she said, “how curious things are. He loves us all. He wouldn’t break up the family. He likes to feel that, somewhere behind him, we are there to come back to. He feels that I am solid, dependable. In a way he could hardly do without me. But—”

There seemed to be nothing to say. Wallace pretended to eat. Lily had given up the pretence, and sat, her chin cupped in her palm.

“She’s badly hurt, poor thing,” said Edith, after a time. “Life’s an awful mess, Court. Shall we have coffee on the terrace?”

Wallace had schooled himself so long that he had no longer any fear. There had been times, earlier, when he had not often dared to see Edith Vance. Now he had achieved, on a foundation of old friendship, a sort of superstructure of philosophy. He took what the gods gave, and built contentment from the fragments. So they sat together on the terrace, where a week before Lily had poured out her plea to him.

Edith refused coffee.

“To be quite frank,” she said, “I’m giving the—the girl a chance to say good-bye. She’d manage it somehow, judging by her eyes. So why not be gracious and give it?”

“You are very wonderful.”

“Not at all. Only rather resigned and very experienced.”

“I suppose there’s nothing to do. If I talk to him—”

“You’d make him unhappy, and give him a grievance. It wouldn’t change anything. Sometimes I think, if I made him fiercely jealous, it would help. But it would be too humiliating, under the circumstances. I try to think that, with him, it’s the desire to be loved. We all have that, I suppose.”

“You?”

“I daresay. I’m very human, Court.”

Just for a moment the guards were down between them. No flame leaped into Wallace’s eyes, but the yearning tenderness of a man who has loved a woman long and hopelessly. She bent forward and touched his arm lightly.

“It is a great comfort to me, always, to know that you are behind me.”

The flame was there, then, but she did not see it. He bent over and kissed her hand.

Lily was gone. What her good-bye had been lay between her and Vance and the bewildered nurse who waited in the passage. One thing was certain—there was no resignation in her farewell. She went because she must, creeping like a broken thing out of the room, and along the corridor. Just inside the door of her bedroom was a small straight chair. She dropped into it, and sat there, her hands in her lap. Inconsequential things came into her mind—that she had packed her fresh gloves and sent them in her box, that the early Victorian furniture of the room was hideous, that she must remember to write and give up the cottage at Avignon.

She shivered, and getting up, went to the window. The launch was once again moving across the bay far below, but it was early twilight and there was no star in the bow. She felt rather ill. By stepping out onto the narrow stone balcony, she could see the window of Vance’s room. The nurse had turned on the light. The wife was there now, probably, and Vance’s friend, who had hated her and been kind to her. Three of them, with years of old association to hold them together. And she, alone, on the balcony in the night.

It was the end. She knew that. Had she had her chance, she might have held him forever, held him with the thin strong chain of passion. But they had jockeyed her out of her chance, all of them together. And now she was going.

Wallace had offered to see her off, but she had refused. So now she went down the staircase, very white, looking straight ahead, and crossed the dingy lower corridor. She never even saw the suave lady manager who bowed her out. The cab was waiting, and by it, in the dusk, Vance’s wife. She had thrown a wrap about her; her head was uncovered and a light summer breeze was blowing her fine hair about. She held out her hand.

“I heard you were going. I—please let me thank you for all you have done.”

The same amazing frankness that had characterised Lily’s love for Vance persisted to the end. She ignored Edith’s hand, but there was no defiance in her voice. It had all the hopelessness and directness of one who leaves a dying message.

“I nursed him because I loved him,” she said, and got into the cab.

Vance hugged his grief sullenly for two days; refused to talk, drove Edith frantic by lying for hours with his head pillowed on his arms, generally sulked. But he was improving steadily, and on the third day they got him out of bed.

Much to Wallace’s relief, Lily had not wired or written. Evidently she had played her game hard, and knew herself beaten. It was up to Vance, of course. He might have been harder hit than they thought, might elect to follow her. Wallace, watching Edith with eyes that worshipped, knew that she, too, was thinking of this. She voiced it at last.

“It is worse than I had thought, Court,” she said. “It’s not so much that he’s in love with her. But he keeps thinking how mad she is about him. It’s eating him like a fever.”

She was right. Vance’s one thought now was to see Lily again. He argued to himself that if they were to part, he owed her that much. After all, she had cared for him in his illness, and there had been nothing in their relations to be ashamed of. When he found that Edith’s plan was to go directly to Liverpool, he grew resentful. He would go to London, anyhow. He could slip away at night and leave word he would join them at the ship.

He reached his determination the day the nurse had gone. He would pack a small bag that night and get away early in the morning. And having made his plan, he was vastly cheerful all day, wrote some business letters, dressed and went down to dinner, strutted a bit, if the truth be told, over the interest his return to the life of the place aroused in the hotel.

They had their coffee, as usual, on the terrace, Vance, beside Edith, running his fingers caressingly up and down her arm; Wallace, a little aloof, looking out over the sea.

“I’ll be glad to get back to work and to the kids,” Vance said, suddenly. “What dreams I had about you all, Edith.”

“The children are quite well. Mademoiselle cabled to-day.”

He looked out at the sea, his cup in his hand.

“Court has a lot of theories about dreams—bally nonsense most of them. Do you remember the lady you told us of, who dreams about a dog? What was that, Courtney?”

“I was illustrating a point,” said Wallace, uncomfortably. “I don’t usually cite cases from my practice.”

“Well, this was interesting. Court drew a moral and adorned a tale with it. The lady is in trouble and deep in her soul is buried the fact that she doesn’t love her husband as much as she loves somebody else. Do you see? But every now and then, when she’s asleep, she dreams that a dog is attacking her—isn’t that it, Court?—and she calls for the other man.”

“It sounds very thrilling,” said Edith, quietly. “Does your information include the other man’s name, Court?”

Wallace put down his cup and rose.

“No,” he replied shortly.

Vance’s program was still one of early hours. By ten he was in his bedroom, and Edith, in one of the soft white silk negligées she affected, was reading on the couch in her room beyond. So impatient was Vance to begin his preparations for London that he risked discovery, and put a few things in his bag. He was exultant, almost triumphant. To-morrow he would see Lily. Then he would go back to work, and he would work as never before. Lily! Lily!

At something before midnight he went to the door of Edith’s room and spoke to her. She was asleep on the couch, the book open on the floor beside her. Had he not known Edith as a woman who seldom wept, he would have said that she had been crying.

It was his custom to waken her with a caress. Quite frequently he kissed her closed eyes until they wakened. But out of the delirium after his accident rose vividly Lily’s kisses on his eyelids. His good taste refused this particular caress now. He stood and looked down at her.

And then, quite suddenly, Edith spoke in her sleep, a low tone, quite distinct, full of terror.

“It’s the dog again. He’s coming toward me! Drive him away. Courtney, drive him away.”

She stirred, and her set muscles relaxed. Vance stood, staring at her. Then he went into the next room and sat down. He was still rather weak. His forehead was covered with cold sweat.

“Courtney!” he said. “So it’s been Courtney all these years. God!”

A madness of jealousy seized him. Weak as he was, he flung up and down the room. He recalled, year after year, their married life, the affection that he knew now had not been love, her sweetness, her beauty, Wallace’s eyes as he looked at her. Deep buried, this love of hers; that was like her. And Courtney Wallace did not know that he was the man. What a mess the whole thing was!

From balcony to door and back to balcony he paced. Once he stopped in front of the mirror and surveyed himself.

“She treated me like a child,” he panted. “She thinks I’m a weakling. She pets me as she would a dog. She’s kind to me. By God, I’ll show her I’m a better man than Courtney.”

Quite suddenly he saw his half packed bag on the bed. With an oath he flung its contents back into the drawers. Then, quieter, but determined, he went to his wife’s room and stood beside her.

“Edith!” he said. “You’d better waken and go to bed.” He stooped and kissed her on the eyelids. He had quite forgotten Lily.

VIII
“ÇA NE FAIT RIEN”: The Dough Boy

I

Now the rivalry between Captain Trowbridge, the general’s youngest aide-de-camp—called Tommy by the general when there were no inspectors or other nuisances hanging round—and Sergeant Gray began before they sailed for France. Not that Tommy would have conceded rivalry. The distance vertically between an aide-de-camp and a sergeant is something between the aviation record for altitude and the farthest fixed star.

As for significance and insignificance, there were times when Sergeant Gray felt that he hardly cast a shadow, and numerous instances when Tommy, though in the same room with him, could not see him at all. This fading away of Sergeant Gray had begun with his leaving Harvard and enlisting as a private in the Army, with a sort of Harvard idea of proving that, in spite of certain indications to the contrary, he was really no better than any one else. But his almost complete erasure—so far as Tommy was concerned—had begun with the affair of the general’s niece and the bran muffin.

By thus enlisting he had, of course, expected merely to demonstrate his true democracy; and then after a suitable time to take such training as was deemed necessary and immediately thereafter put on a Sam Browne belt and a silver bar—perhaps two. Probably two. And have a striker to polish his boots, and wear spurs and carry a crop and have people look after him in the street and say: “I’ll bet that fellow’s some scrapper, what?”

As a matter of honesty, one of the first investments he made after enlisting was in a Sam Browne belt. He kept it locked up in the brown tin trunk under his camp bed, of course, along with the signed photographs of several débutantes and a reserve store of cigarettes and some hand-knitted socks and three pairs of silk pajamas with his monogram on the pocket, which he hid with a sense of deadly shame. After a day or two with the troop he began to have nightmares about somebody discovering those pajamas.

But as a matter of fact things slipped up badly. First the Government, unable itself to swank round in anything but sack suits, issued a ban against the military belt, and made a lot of otherwise well set-up and slim young officers—and others—look as though they had dressed in a hurry and forgotten something. Stout generals who had depended for years on the belt rather than on their rectus and oblique muscles suddenly extended in the direction in which they were going and had to have a supplementary hook and eye put on below the lowest button. Thus the Army at one stroke lost all waistline whatever, and a man was likely to find his breeches reaching up to his armpits or clinging perilously to his hip lines, depending on his tailor’s taste in figures.

That was the first blow, and Sergeant Gray took it sulkily. During the first meeting of the staff after the aforesaid ruling he voiced his sentiments to the general’s horse, which he was in process of polishing to that varnished perfection which generals affect.

“Headquarters looks like a blooming maternity ward,” he muttered bitterly.

On top of that came the second blow. No one could enter an officers’ training school until he was twenty-one. And Sergeant Gray was exactly twenty years, eight months and three days old.

“Holy mackerel!” he reflected gloomily. “You’d think the Germans were going to ask for our birth certificates. If I’m strong enough to valet twenty horses I guess I could bear up under a Sam Browne belt.”

This second blow did something rather terrible for a time to Sergeant Gray. He still loved his country, but he hated the War Department. It had reflected on his manhood.

“Oh, very well,” he said to himself. “If I’m too young for responsibility, I’m too young—that’s all.”

He then proceeded to demonstrate his lack of responsibility for four lively months.

“What the devil has got into the Headquarters Troop, Tommy?” inquired the general pettishly.

“Lot of young porch climbers! If they persist in jumping the M. P.’s somebody’s going to get into trouble. The hospital’s full of ’em now.”

That, however, was before the situation developed between Gray and Tommy and so Tommy merely said: “Not enough to do, sir, probably. Some of them might help at the remount station. Lot of wild horses there now, sir.”

“Anybody know anything about horses?”

“I believe Gray does, sir. I understand his people have a ranch in the West, and he plays polo somewhere on Long Island.”

“Curious thing, this new Army,” observed the general. It was not the first time he had made the remark. The first time was when he had happened on his youngest brother-in-law scrubbing the floor at division headquarters. “But—c’est la guerre, Tommy. C’est la guerre. Send him in.”

So Sergeant Gray came in and the general viewed his tall figure with shrewd and kindly eyes—veiled, however, with the fiercest of eyebrows.

“I understand you know all about horses, sergeant,” he said.

“No, sir.”

“Humph!” said the general. “Know anything about them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, what do you know about the horse?”

Sergeant Gray considered.

“Sorry, sir,” he apologised. “Afraid I’ve forgotten most of it. It’s a quadruped, of course, sir, belonging to the genus—”

Here the general, who had a cigarette in one hand and a lighted match in the other, angrily put the match in his pocket and the cigarette on the floor and got up. He was a very large man in several dimensions.

“Don’t be funny with me,” he snarled. “Don’t be funny with me!”

Sergeant Gray looked plaintively misunderstood.

“If the general will only explain what he means, sir,” he said. Generals and so on are supposed to be addressed in the third person; see the Manual for Instruction in Military Courtesy.

The general was eyeing him with the searching glance that comes with the first star on a man’s shoulder and so increases with their number that by the time a man has four he can see entirely through the War Department.

“It was you, wasn’t it,” he inquired, “who sneezed into my horse’s ear the other day when I was mounting?”

“It came on me suddenly, sir. One minute I was all right, and the next—I’ve had a touch of coryza, sir. The dust—”

The upshot of it was that Gray went temporarily to the remount station and in the intervals taught the Headquarters Troop—which is cavalry—to ride.

He stood, tall and relentless, in the middle of a muddy ring at monkey drill; and round him circled the terrified rookies on unsaddled horses, clutching madly first at manes; then, as they slid inevitably back, gripping with frenzied legs at the hip bones of their mounts; and finally sliding with the slow relentlessness of fate off the rear, giving a last despairing clutch at the tail as they fell into the mud.

“That fellow’s got real horsemanship, Tommy,” observed the general one day. He had ridden up outside the paddock and, unseen by Gray, was watching the scene. “Good-looking young devil, too. Perfect seat. What’s he got those horses running for?”

It is unfortunate to have to record that at this moment the general suddenly left his saddle and flew over the paddock fence. One moment he was there, a fine soldierly figure on his English saddle with exactly an eighth of an inch of white collar at the neck of his blouse—and the next moment he was gone.

“Good Lord!” said Tommy.

On the other side of the paddock fence what appeared to be a largish heap of mud stirred and then raised itself to a semisitting posture and attempted to loosen a rope which was inexplicably about its chest. That failing, it cleared away the mud from one eye and mumbled: “What the hell happened to me?”

The one eye, rolling wildly, finally focused on a blue-white young face bent over it.

“I didn’t see you, sir,” explained Sergeant Gray wildly. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you—let me at the rope, sir.”

The general was now sitting up and spitting mud. He said nothing. He moved first one leg and then the other and then stared round him wildly. Through the slats of the paddock fence he could see Tommy, alighted and supporting himself by his horse’s neck and torn apparently by emotion. He was quivering from head to foot.

“Nothing hurt, Tommy,” said the general finally. “If you can find a hoe or something I should like to open my right eye.”

Tommy, thus adjured, took his handkerchief out of his mouth and gulped twice.

“Very well, sir,” he said.

The general, still sitting, then turned his gaze on Gray and commenced a sort of monologue which shall here be indicated as follows:

“!!!!?!?!?!!?——?——?——?”

Sergeant Gray’s colour came back slowly. After all, if the Old Man could talk like that he wasn’t dead or dying. Nobody facing eternity would so risk his soul.

“I was roping them, sir,” he said. “I didn’t see you. I used to be able to throw a rope fairly well and I— You were behind the horses, sir,” he finished feebly. “I hope you don’t think it was intentional. Why, I—I might have killed you!”

“You’ve damned half killed me as it is,” said the general, carefully standing up.

Then suddenly he began to shake. His vast figure quivered, his breath came in gasps. Sergeant Gray, watching him with dreadful anxiety, heard a deep stentorian rumble interspersed with breathless wheezes. The general was laughing!

“I’d give a million dollars to have seen Tommy’s face,” he said, and shook again.

There was after that a queer sort of understanding between the general and Sergeant Gray, based as it were on mutual admiration—not unmingled with apprehension. Sometimes there was a little twinkle in the general’s eye when Gray’s back was turned, though his severity never relaxed. He told the story on himself once or twice at dinners, too, and made a great hit with it though he always told that Tommy had fainted; and as it was Tommy’s duty to go to dinners with him and see that the general was on the hostess’ right, with the prettiest débutante in the room next to him, Tommy got rather fed up with it.

“Never knew what struck me,” the general would say with his deep-chested rumble. “One minute I was on Sachem and the next I was over the fence and completely buried. Had to be excavated—like a sewer. And there was Tommy, crumpled up in a faint, and this young devil of a Gray digging for me. Only found me by the end of the rope sticking up.”

So Sergeant Gray’s commission remained in the dim future, and round the barracks he took to humming rather mournfully a song that ran like this:

On his sleeve he wore a piece of ribbon;

He wore it in the summertime and on an August day.

And when they asked him why in hell he wore it—

It stood for his commission, which was far, far away.

The lieutenant inspected all the rifles;

And when he’d done inspecting them he said what he’d to say.

Then all the lit-tle soldier boys were worried—

They knew that their commissions were far, far away.

“Far, far away!” bellowed Sergeant Gray in a plaintive howl like a dog baying at the moon.

Then the division got ready to move and did move eventually. And owing to the wager about a bran muffin, Sergeant Gray met the general’s niece and went straight clean crazy about her. The pink hat she wore covered the universe. The world was awheel when she was in her little car. And the depth of his madness about her was exactly the profundity of his jealousy of Tommy. They were held up for a week at the port of debarkation after all; and every day for as many hours as possible Sergeant Gray was mentally on the ground letting her walk on him. And every evening Captain Tommy Trowbridge took her to the theatre or sat on the veranda and spoke plaintively about a fellow’s chances over there; and if he didn’t come back he wanted her to know that she had meant a lot to him, and that somehow or other he was a changed man the last few days.

“I’ll be darned glad,” said Peggy’s father—her name was Peggy—“when I can sit on my own front porch again and not be mentally assassinated by some young idiot in spurs who wants to rave about never coming back.”

But Peggy’s mother only smiled and sent the butler out with orangeade and cookies. She knew that they were all little boys really—for all their trappings. And she knew, too, that some of them would not come back.

On the night they were finally to go Sergeant Gray very deliberately went A. W. O. L. for three hours and lurked in the shrubbery round Peggy’s house. He had already said good-bye to her and if he hadn’t had a sense of humour he would probably have said a great deal more. But she had only known him seven days; and all he said to her was that if he didn’t come back he wanted her to know that she had meant a lot to him, and that somehow or other he was a changed man the last few days.

So he lurked round the shrubbery—and Tommy was there, of course. But so was the general and the elderly divisional chaplain, who was an old family friend; and Gray’s fear of a sentimental parting between Tommy and the girl died painlessly. Though even hearing her voice set his heart alternately sinking because of leaving her, and beating one hundred and twenty to the minute at the thought of coming back in a Sam Browne belt, and so forth, and laying his one bar—possibly two, certainly two—at her feet.

Ultimately he wandered back to the camp and was stopped by a sentry. Sergeant Gray was singing.

“The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,” he warbled, “are as a string of pearls to me.”

“Aw, stop that racket!” said the sentry coldly. “Where’s your pass?”

“Each hour a pearl, each pearl a tear,” carolled Sergeant Gray. “Why, look who’s here!”

“Your pass!” repeated the sentry firmly.

“Now look here,” argued Sergeant Gray. “You’re not going to be persistent, are you? Why, man alive, you are going to stay here, and I”—he lowered his voice to a wistful key—“I am going, who knows whither! In an hour, or perhaps two, I shall be gone, probably never to return.” He became sepulchral. “As for man, his days are as grass—” He forgot the rest of it.

After a time the harassed sentry let him by and stood staring after him. “Gee!” he muttered.

Sergeant Gray swung along the dusty road between the line of barracks and stopped outside headquarters. Late as it was, the building was brilliantly lighted and through one of the windows the chief of staff could be seen mixing himself a mild drink. Sergeant Gray stopped and stared in at him. He admired the chief of staff. After all, why only one bar—or two? If the war lasted long enough he might get to the very top and be dined to the limit by people with sons who wanted commissions. And then—

He gave an unconscious imitation of the stride of the chief of staff as he went toward the troop headquarters.

The troop was frightfully busy. It was assembling in full kit and was to march to the lighter carrying saddlebags, blanket roll, rifle, belt, bayonet and pistol. The saddlebags bulged like pop-overs, since they contained clothing, toilet articles and cigarettes. Also cigarettes. Also more cigarettes. And yet again—

Sergeant Gray, still humming, wandered into the barracks, where the stable sergeant said: “Where the hell’ve you been? Having a last drink with the general?”

Sergeant Gray surveyed him with a loving eye. He loved the stable sergeant. He loved the mess sergeant. He loved the whole mangy troop. He loved the world.

“Let’s make it up, dear,” he said sweetly. “Kiss me, won’t you?” The stable sergeant eyed him menacingly and then thought better of it. “I’ve been out under the stars,” cooed Sergeant Gray, “thinking about the exigencies of war and that you and I may perhaps be separated over there, never to meet again. I’m all broken up, old man. If it happens, promise me—”

The stable sergeant retired, muttering.

Gray then made a final inspection of his barracks bag, which contained cigarettes. Also and incidentally:

(a) Extra uniform.

(b) Socks.

(c) Winter and summer underwear.

(d) Extra blanket.

(e) Extra shoes.

(f) Writing paper.

(g) Books, ranging from a Testament to a detective yarn.

(h) Pencils.

(i) Chocolate.

(j) Spurs.

(k) Sewing materials.

(l) Letters to read on shipboard.

(m) Foreign service cap.

Nor was this all. Surreptitiously stowed away was a pair of leggings and a trench coat of great expense and admirable fulness of tail. These for that great day when he received his commission. He packed and rolled carefully, humming meanwhile:

I want a belt just like the belt

That all the shavetails wear.

It has a strap that goes up the back

And makes the ma’m’selles stare.

It’s made of leather with a hook or two,

And you can bet it makes the girls love you.

I want a belt just like the belt

That all the shavetails wear.

At last he was ready. On his head he placed his steel helmet and then proceeded to hang his accoutrements onto various parts of his person. He weighed about three hundred pounds by that time and walked rather like a diver ready to submerge.

“Holy mackerel!” he groaned to the mess sergeant. “How far is it to the blooming lighter, anyhow?”

“Only six miles,” said the mess sergeant cheerfully.

“I’m about as portable as a steel range.”

Nevertheless, he felt that now for the first time he presented a truly martial appearance. He wished the girl could see him. He set his mouth in grim and rather ferocious lines and took a glance at himself in the broken mirror on the wall. Now bring on the Hun!

However, some of his joy in his appearance was dimmed by the appearance on the scene at one a. m. of a camp orderly carrying a portable typewriter. The troop, lined up and totally unable to sit, cast agonised glances at the case.

“An extra machine for the general,” said the camp orderly in a bored voice. “The general intrusts it to Sergeant Gray, who will be held responsible for it.”

“Holy mackerel!” protested Sergeant Gray. “Look here, son! Look me over! Do you see any place to hang that damned thing? You go back and tell the general that if he wants me to carry it I’ll have to swallow it.”

However, in the end he had to take it; and something of his fine military frenzy died in him.

At four that morning the division, as it stumbled in more dead than alive, had coffee on the pier. Sergeant Gray, by getting into line ever and anon, managed to land four cups, which he supplemented with some doughnuts. He felt a trifle low in his mind, however. And for quite two minutes he stood gazing in the general—and quite erroneous—direction of the abode of the general’s niece. He then sighed and ate his eighth doughnut and in due time went aboard ship. It took some four hours to load five thousand troops; and during all that time Sergeant Gray stood as lithe and graceful as a steel safe and guarded the general’s typewriter.

All attempts to get rid of it were abortive. He appealed to the general’s secretary, a wan and distracted young man, without success.

“Where is he anyhow?” he asked.

“In the bridal suite.”

“Well, you take this thing, won’t you?”

“Me? Don’t you think I’ve got anything to do? The staff’s in bed and the aides—” Here words failed the secretary. “And keep away from the bridal suite. The Old Man’s trying to get his wife on the ship’s telephone and Central’s threatened twice to report him.”

By seven o’clock he got rid of the typewriter by placing it outside the general’s door, where the division adjutant fell over it five minutes later. Being a person of quick temper, when he had picked himself up he kicked it and permanently disabled it. This is, so far as is known, the only casualty suffered at any time by the division as a whole, because—but why worry about the armistice now?

By seven o’clock the effect of the doughnuts and coffee was entirely gone and there was no hint of breakfast.

“When do we eat?” inquired Sergeant Gray of the supply sergeant.

“Paris, probably,” returned the sergeant. “D’you know our heavy freight’s gone astray? All we’ve got, so far as I can make out, is the box with the chaplain’s communion service and the Old Man’s air mattress. Not a saddle. Two hundred of ’em somewhere—probably shipped to the Belgians.”

“Don’t find ’em,” implored Sergeant Gray. “If they’re found I’ll have to carry the whole blooming lot. Seem to think I’m a slow freight.”

At ten o’clock Sergeant Gray performed a melancholy duty. This was to sit at the peril of his life in an open gangway and write post cards announcing his safe arrival on the other side. “If we ever get over,” explained the noncom who distributed them, “they’ll cable and the cards will be mailed. If we don’t—”

Sergeant Gray sent one to his mother first. After that he wrote one for the girl. After that he sat and thought about Tommy for quite a length of time. As man and man, he’d have given Tommy the race of his life and won, he felt. As between Harvard and Yale, too, he’d back old Harvard every time. But as between officer and noncom! And girls were queer too. They fell for rank right along. Put an officer’s insignia on any sort of a stuffed shirt, he considered miserably, and they’d put his photograph in a silver frame and set fresh flowers in front of it.

“The thing to do,” he reflected, “is to work hard and keep out of trouble. Then when I get my commission—”

This is the story of how Sergeant Gray kept out of trouble.

Now it should be understood from the start that Sergeant Gray had nothing on Tommy as to jealousy. And it hurt his aide-de-camp-ly pride to be jealous of a sergeant. And though he was normally a kindly young man with good manners who always asked the dowagers to dance while hoping they wouldn’t, he considered that the best way to hide his jealousy was to assume an attitude that either ignored Gray altogether or kept him underfoot.

So he found the general’s typewriter, badly wounded and with the key with the interrogation mark entirely gone—and any general will know that this absolutely impaired its usefulness, because generals are always writing letters to Washington asking why certain things are not being attended to—and he followed the scent as a dog trails a rabbit. Which brought him to Gray. Not that this was surprising. It was Tommy who had sent the typewriter to Gray to carry.

“Gray, did you leave that typewriter outside the general’s door?” he demanded in his best imitation of the general’s manner when a recommendation of his had come back from the War Department marked “Disapproved.”

“I did, sir,” said Gray. The “sir” irked him fearfully just then.

“You didn’t by any chance kick it when you did so?” asked Tommy.

“I didn’t understand that I was to do so, sir,” said Gray.

Tommy gulped. It was he who found his rank a handicap just then.

“Go and get it,” he ordered, “and put it where it belongs. And don’t try to be funny with me.”

He had got that, too, from the general.

Gray did as he was told, smiling grimly the while. If Tommy felt that way about things, all right. But just then the honours were his and he knew it. It was the beginning of the feud between them.

His rage against Tommy was most unjustly increased at finding himself far below decks in a room with five others—to be exact, with the stable sergeant, the mess sergeant, the supply sergeant and two duty sergeants. They were dropping down the river by that time and the stable sergeant, having selected the best bunk, was lying in it closely covered. Every now and then he put the blankets over his head. Sergeant Gray eyed him with some contempt.

“If you’re sick now,” he observed, “you’ll never reach the other side.”

“Sick, hell!” said the sergeant. “D’you see that sign?”

The sign was a melancholy one. It forbade absolutely all smoking below decks and on the decks above after dark. To defeat which ruling the stable sergeant was blowing the smoke from his cigarette under the bed clothing.

“Put a dog under this blanket,” he said complacently, “and he’d come out deloused all right. Say, I’m going to suggest that to—”

But Sergeant Gray was not listening. He was making an interesting experiment, which was to see whether or not he could swallow the smoke from a cigarette. He failed.

By twelve o’clock he felt very empty and extremely forlorn. The city was not even on the sky line and already illimitable distance seemed to separate him from Peggy. He stood at the rail and gazed back, but he had extreme difficulty in imagining what she might be doing at that hour, their common life having covered something less than twelve hours out of the past week. But twelve hours was seven hundred and twenty minutes and life was measured by heartbeats; seven hundred and twenty minutes at, say, eighty heartbeats a minute—

After the noon mess of boiled cabbage, tripe and tea, orders began to issue from headquarters.

The general had had a large desk put in the sitting room of the bridal suite and sat behind it thinking up orders to issue. He did this because his stomach was none too good and occupation kept him from worrying about the sea.

“First of all,” said the general, “is the matter of neatness. Take this order, Lewis.” Lewis was the secretary and was trying to steady the tripod of the field typewriter between his knees—there was some motion on—and to conceal a certain indigestion he had felt since the first roller. “As military neatness is one of the first qualities of the soldier, special attention is to be paid by the officer personnel to cleanliness of the decks. It is therefore forbidden to throw burned matches about.”

He leaned back and closed his eyes. He was feeling a trifle dizzy.

“Tommy!” he called.

The aides were in the next room, playing chuck-a-luck in cautious silence. They had laid a folded bath towel on the top of the table and on it the dice fell softly.

“Coming, sir,” said Tommy, and appeared in the doorway, rigidly at attention, but with the edge of a two-dollar bill protruding from a pocket of his blouse.

“When my aides-de-camp have finished shooting craps,” observed the general suavely, “I would be greatly pleased if they will ask the staff to meet me here at four o’clock.”

“Craps, sir?” said Tommy, greatly hurt.

“And I’d like to know whether you young gentlemen have entirely finished with the candy my niece sent me.”

“Candy, sir?” Tommy’s tone was indignant.

“Don’t repeat everything I say!” warned the general as the ship gave a real wallow. “Anchor that damned typewriter to something, Lewis, and then go and bring me a cup of hot water. I’m heading for a bilious attack.”

Then he eyed Tommy. He was in that state of mind and body when he cherished no illusions about his friends, and the possibility of Tommy as his nephew-in-law was not particularly pleasant. Tommy was just a bit too military. His neatly shined boots were at too precise an angle.

The general, who had outlived that phase of militarism some twenty years before and liked to relax now and then, felt sometimes that Tommy was trying to set him a good example.

“About that candy, sir,” said Tommy, still aggrieved and every angle of him correct, “I would like to say—”

The ship gave another roll. No, Tommy would not do. He was too damned persistent.

“If my aides-de-camp have finished shooting craps, as I observed before when you interrupted me,” said the general most unjustly, “I should be highly gratified if they will say to the staff that, if they have quite finished their various poker and bridge games, the commanding general will see them here at four o’clock.”

Which, of course, was not precisely the message Tommy and the others delivered. That is what aides-de-camp are for.

Now the real story of the enmity between Tommy and Sergeant Gray dates from precisely thirty seconds after that speech of the general’s. For Tommy, going out slightly ruffled, met Sergeant Gray in the passage—or whatever they call it on a ship—and the sergeant, having just been thrown against a doorway, had struck his right crazy bone and was holding himself tight so he would not yell. Tommy, ignorant of the accident, paused before Gray and said in his most aide-de-camp-ly manner:

“Sergeant!”

At which the usage of war demands that the sergeant salute and reply, “Sir.”

But Gray was past even the usages of polite society. He still stood looking into vacancy and trying not to yell.

“Well?” said Tommy, waiting for the proper thing to happen.

Slowly Sergeant Gray came back to partial consciousness and turned a pair of eyes filled with fury on Tommy.

“Oh, go away and lemme alone!” he said. Which was neither Harvard nor regulations, and immediately made him liable to court-martial.

Tommy flushed.

“I’m in no hurry, Gray,” he said urbanely. “I’ll just wait here until you have a moment to think.”

“I’ve d—I’ve darned near broken my arm.”

“I’m waiting.”

A dogged resolution not to salute Tommy at any price was rapidly forming in Sergeant Gray’s mind. He dropped his right arm limp at his side and made an abortive effort to raise it.

“Can’t lift my hand, sir. Awfully sorry.”

“There’s no hurry,” said Tommy. “The voyage will last ten days and I’m prepared to stand here until you salute me, if—”

“If it takes all summer,” finished Sergeant Gray. “Very well, sir. But I shall be obliged to report to my captain that I am being subjected to persecution.”

It had ceased entirely to be a matter of rules and regulations and was now a matter of a girl. Both of them knew it. The anger between them was primitive jealousy complicated by a Sam Browne belt and two parallel bars. Tommy under ordinary circumstances was a nice chap who sent his mother flowers on her birthday and would pick up pedestrians in his car and give them a lift quite often, unless he was on his way to play golf. On those occasions he hadn’t time to stop. And Gray was one of those fellows, even at Harvard, who liked to chat with motormen on street cars and always sent the telephone girl a box of candy at Christmas and was likely to pick up a stray dog ’most anywhere and take it into whatever place was nearest and order it a square meal. Wrapped in paper of course.

But a very brief acquaintance with a girl—the same girl—had changed them both.

So they stood there rigidly and in silence until at two minutes after four the general put his head out of the door and said:

“Tommy!”

“Yes, sir.”

“What the hell has happened to the staff?”

“Sorry, sir.” Tommy was a bright pink. “Gray has refused to salute me and—I’ll notify them at once, sir.”

The general stood in the doorway and drew himself to his full and awful height. He was not, at that, much taller than Gray, but he had a chest like a hogshead and room enough for a whole constellation of stars on his shoulders.

“Come in, sergeant,” he said grimly, and stalked into his room grimly and creaked into his chair grimly.

Of course he would normally have done nothing of the sort. He would—the matter forcing itself on his attention as it had—have ordered Gray in irons at once. But there was the Peggy complication. He was very fond of Peggy.

“Of course,” he said, also grimly, “you know this is a court-martial offence?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Unless there are extenuating circumstances. In that case—”

He eyed Gray.

“I couldn’t move my arm, sir. I’d knocked my crazy bone.”

“Can you lift it now?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Very well,” said the general. “You will salute Captain Trowbridge fifty times. In the passage when he returns.”

There was, for just the fraction of a second, the exchange of a glance of understanding between the general and Sergeant Gray. It was, on the general’s part, by way of being a twinkle; and on Sergeant Gray’s, of triumph.

“May I ask a question, sir?”

“Well?”

“Is Captain Trowbridge to return the salutes?”

“According to regulations, he will.”

And again, for the fraction of a second, they exchanged glances. The general liked Tommy, and in a sort of watchful and reminiscent way—remembering West Point probably—he liked Gray. But whom a general loves he chastens.

It was a very sulky Tommy who returned to the chuck-a-luck games some time later, while the staff smoked cigarettes in the general’s room and discussed such matters as physical exercise for the troops; and mumps and submarines and the rotten food the Navy gave the Army; and what the deuce had happened to the heavy freight; and seasickness; and the fundamental motives of Pershing’s strategy. A certain number of them began several times to say: “When I was in the Philippines—” and were cut short hastily.

It was when they had all gone that the general sent for Gray and made him his sergeant-orderly. He made it very clear that Gray was still under the ban of his displeasure and that the real reason he was taking him in at all was to clean up after the staff. For the floor of headquarters looked rather like the floor of a pool room, being covered with burned matches and cigarette ashes and torn-up bits of paper on which various members of the staff had noted suggestions to be made to the general—and then thought better of it.

“I have come to the conclusion, Gray,” finished the general, “that the only way to keep you out of trouble is to keep you in it. You’ll have plenty of it right here.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray with a sort of sinking conviction that he would now have to polish the general’s boots, until he remembered that the general had a valet along. What the deuce did a sergeant-orderly do, anyhow?

“You will stay within call,” said the general, “and make yourself generally useful. Better clean up this floor now. And hereafter, sergeant, you will make note of the name of any officer throwing matches or ashes on my floor. Keep a pad and pencil in your pocket.”

Then he went to have tea with the captain on the bridge, accompanied by the chief of staff carrying his tea ball. The general drank only his own tea.

This is really the story of a feud and its culmination. Feuds are of two sorts: The sort that spring up spontaneously out of an initial injury, and the ones that grow slowly from small things to greater ones. This was both.

Some time later Tommy sauntered into the general’s room for one of the general’s cigarettes. His own tobacco tasted queer to him—not that he was seasick of course. And seeing Gray there he did not see him—which happens in the Army now and then—and lighted a cigarette and threw the match on the floor. Whereupon Sergeant Gray got a pad out of his pocket and wrote something on it.

Tommy was vaguely uneasy. He went into the aides’ room next door and pondered. And when he had lost three dollars and twenty cents more he went back for another cigarette and lighted it and waited developments. They came. Gray got out the pad again and wrote on it.

This time Tommy told the aides and they put their heads together, but it was no use. It wasn’t the taking of the cigarettes. The general expected that, for—having almost as much privacy as a canary bird—he had never found a place where they were sufficiently concealed. Though he had done fairly well for a few days once with a box marked: “Memoranda for book on the new warfare.”

During the time the general was having tea Sergeant Gray’s list grew. He got—to be exact:

The divisional judge advocate.

The divisional adjutant.

The chaplain.

The master-at-arms.

The ship’s executive officer.

A seasick brigadier general—who threw his whole cigar on the floor and groaned. Gray had hardly the heart to put him down.

A lieutenant colonel. This latter waited some time and threw three matches and two butts on the floor. But this was because he was impatient. He had been notified that he was promoted to a full colonel, but his papers had not come before sailing and he wanted permission to put on his eagles for dinner.

Some time later the general returned. He was quite cheery, having done all the talking and made an excellent case for the Army versus the Navy, and he smiled grimly over Sergeant Gray’s list.

“Tommy!” he called. And when Tommy came, neater than wax and slightly dignified owing to the matter of returning fifty salutes, the general very pleasantly read:

“Captain Trowbridge, two matches.

“I am determined,” said the general rather oratorically, “to enforce military neatness about me. Pick ’em up, Tommy.”

Which Tommy did, grinning sourly and avoiding Sergeant Gray’s eye.

“And the evening and the morning were the first day.”

The first thing that was noticeable was the Gallicisation of the ship. The doughboys had French phrase books and pored over them diligently. There was a sprinkling of British added to the conversation also, owing to the magnificent presence of an English sergeant major on board.

“Attention for the sergeant majah!” or “Gangway for the sergeant majah!” they would call when he appeared. “Cheer-o” and “Feeling rather ducky this morning, aren’t you?” vied with such French phrases as “Très bon,” pronounced tray bone, and “Combien,” pronounced according to taste and directed at the boy behind the grating who sold tobacco and candy. The routine of the ship went on, varied by reveille and mess calls, by shooting craps and by physical exercise which consisted mostly—owing to lack of space—of putting the men on their backs and having them raise their legs in the air, on the count dropping them with tremendous thuds to the deck.

“Not dignified,” reflected the general, watching them, “but better than nothing. It might be good for the waistline.”

He took to doing it himself in his stateroom and one morning Sergeant Gray, drowsily keeping watch on the deck outside the window of the general’s cabin, was electrified to see a pair of strong and muscular bare legs, topped by feet, rise into view and disappear some six times.

This keeping watch had been Gray’s idea. It had come as a result of the united efforts of William, the general’s colored valet, and Lewis and Sergeant Gray to get the general each morning into his rubber life-saving suit for practice in case of necessity; and into his life belt in time for fire drill. The general always blamed the suit for his troubles—or his valet.

“What the hell’s the matter with you this morning?” he would roar. “Arms paralyzed?”

And when it was all over and the general was near his boat and the troops were rushing up the companionways like battering rams, each man holding to the breeches belt of the man ahead, with the little fellows who lost their footing swinging like the cracker on the end of a whip, while the staff stood at different stations timing the drill with stop watches, Lewis and Gray and William would sink into chairs and perspire.

“Eleven minutes!” Lewis would groan. “If we’re struck he’ll go down like a stone. He’s too big to move fast.”

“Dollars to doughnuts he’d refuse to leave without full equipment,” said Gray rather bitterly. “There’s only one thing to do, Lewis. He oughtn’t to be alone at night.”

“He’s got a bunch of aides.”

“He has,” assented Gray grimly. “I call ’em, don’t I? D’you ever know ’em to waken until I’ve banged at their doors for ten minutes? Eleven o’clock this morning before one of them showed up! No, this is up to you and me, Lewis.”

“All right,” said Lewis without enthusiasm. He loved the general as a mother loves a child, but he generally felt that he was running the entire division. In speaking of the general to his intimates he always said “we.”

“We issued an order about throwing cigarettes overboard this a. m.,” he would say, for instance. “If a sub should pick up two in a line she could get our course.”

Or: “Sorry, old-timer. No cards for me. We’re seeing the staff at ten-thirty.”

So: “All right,” he said. “Well?”

“He’s all right in daylight,” said Gray. “Or he will be as soon as he gives up that rubber-suit business and sticks to a life belt. It’s night I’m thinking about.”

All of which leads merely to the next step in the feud. For Lewis and Gray and William—at his own request—divided the night into three watches and hovered like ministering angels on the deck outside the bridal suite. But things were uneventful enough, except that William, his first watch on, hearing strange and stertorous sounds from beyond the porthole, roused Gray with a shuddering fear that the general had had an attack of apoplexy. And except that the general, finding Gray yawning all over the place one morning, observed tartly that he’d better stop shooting craps all night.

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray.

It is unfortunate perhaps that the night Tommy could not sleep for thinking of the girl and the night Sergeant Gray saw the submarine should have coincided. It was not really a submarine, so there is no need for excitement.

Gray saw the periscope quite plainly. It may have been merely a nocturnal whale dreaming, like Tommy and Gray, of a lost love, it must be so frightfully easy for a whale to lose track of his love in the Atlantic—or it may have been the leg of a table or an empty crate. Considerable excitement was wasted on empty crates in the Atlantic during the late unpleasantness. Whatever it was, Gray was not in much doubt. But he waited to be quite sure, because a fellow hates to get five thousand men up on deck in the middle of the night for what may turn out to be the carcass of a horse.

So he stood bent over the rail. And at that moment a figure came along the empty deck, walking as men walk at night when they dream of a house in the country with a lot of vines and things and a girl waiting in a runabout for the five-twenty from town—and the figure held between wistful lips a lighted cigarette.

It took just one and a half seconds for Gray to knock the cigarette out of the aforesaid wistful mouth—and then he did it by jarring rather than direct action. For he miscalculated his distance and hit Captain Trowbridge, Yale, ’16, aide-de-camp and captain of artillery, a mighty slam on the ear.

Some moments later the general opened his porthole and put out his head. On the deck just outside was a darkish mass which seemed to be still and yet in violent movement.

“Stop that!” roared the general. “Get up out of that and get below decks. What the—” There has been considerable military language so far. We’ll call it mischief. “What the mischief d’you fellows mean, anyhow?”

The mass slowly became two masses and took on vertical instead of horizontal dimensions. But neither mass spoke. By common consent they separated, looking—as Elizabeth Browning says—two ways, and moving in the direction they were looking.

It was the chaplain who first noticed next morning the coincidence that one of the general’s aides-de-camp had a swollen left ear and that the sergeant-orderly had a cut lip.

The chaplain sauntered into the bridal suite and—having been most military for two seconds—took one of the general’s cigarettes, surveyed himself in the general’s mirror and observed: “Been having a family row, I see.”

“Pick up that match, chaplain,” said the general testily. “What sort of a row?”

“Been some sort of a mix-up between Tommy and Gray. Wish I’d seen it. Must have been considerable of a scrap.”

“Nonsense,” snapped the general. “What’d they fight about?”

“Search me!”

“Besides, an officer and a noncom—”

The chaplain, who was fond of boxing, had doubled up his fists and was making tentative passes at the general’s trench coat, which was swinging on a hook.

“They haven’t liked each other much for some days,” he said, and got in a beautiful hook on the general’s collar. “ ’F you ask me, it’s mutual jealousy.”

“I see,” said the general in a thoughtful tone. He greatly admired the chaplain, though he complained of him bitterly. “Can’t teach him discipline,” he would say at dinner parties. “Goes A. W. O. L. whenever he wants to and turns up blithely with some excuse or other and a box of cigars for me. I don’t know what to do with the fellow.”

“How dreadful!” the débutante on his right would breathe.

“Horrible,” the general would agree. “But I can’t put him in the guardhouse, though I’ve threatened it. The men love him. They call him the Bird of Paradise. Fact. I’m the Old Bird and he’s the Bird of Paradise.”

Upon which his great shoulders would heave and the débutante would try to think of the proper thing to say.

So the general saw how the chaplain’s mind was working.

“There wasn’t much time,” he observed.

“It wouldn’t take much time. Not with the young lady I have in mind. If I were not a married man—”

But the chief of staff came in just then, very military and precise, and the chaplain became just as military and precise and went out.

During the day the general issued more orders, to keep him from thinking about his stomach, and went on deck to read for a while, taking a book on military tactics and a detective story with him. So long as Tommy was near him he read tactics. But for quite a long time he sat and looked at the sea and thought about his niece back home, who was all the daughter he had, and these two young rascals pommelling each other under his window the night before. It took him back quite a number of years.

“The young fools,” he said reminiscently.

Well, there was no use worrying about it. They were going to war and no one could tell who would come back. He looked aft along the deck to where those fine boys of his were clustered against the rail, and he wondered.

II

They landed eventually and a code signal went back overseas at once, liberating several thousand post cards announcing their safe arrival. And a certain girl who lived near the port of debarkation and had been meeting the postman every morning for some time, got three of them. Two of them she put in her desk and the third one she put in the pocket of her sweater and carried with her. It is too soon to tell which one that was. But her mother found it and took it to her father—pretty well worn it was by that time—and he said: “The kiddie’s always off at some sort of a tangent. She’ll forget him in a week.”

“She isn’t eating.”

“Probably eating between meals,” he said callously. “Ice-cream sodas and that sort of stuff. Cut her allowance.”

But a morning or two later at breakfast he said over the morning paper: “Looks as though Charlie wouldn’t get any fighting after all. They’re breaking fast.”

Charlie was the general.

“Damned shame too,” he added.

“Father!” said a choked voice. “How can you? Wouldn’t you be glad if it was all over? And they’d all come home and—”

Here the girl lost her voice and left the table in a hurry.

“Humph!” said her father thoughtfully. “What was the name on that card?”

And on hearing it: “Better take her down to Aiken for a few weeks,” he said. “She’s got some sort of a bee in her bonnet.”

“She has,” said her mother grimly. “She can tell you herself. I won’t.”

But of course she did, almost immediately, and the cook in the kitchen heard a loud roaring from the dining room and slipped into the pantry to listen.

“Never!” said the roaring voice. “Never, with my consent. D’you think I’ve lost my mind? Send her here! I’ll tell her! I’ll settle this matter! This is one time when I shall assert myself in my own family.”

So they sent for the girl and she came and he asserted himself for fifteen minutes. At the end of which time he apologised. Then he argued for fifteen minutes, at the end of which he was perspiring and humble. At the end of an hour he was a cringing, pleading male, offering bribes of new cars and saddle horses; and was only met with something like this, delivered in a gentle patient tone:

“I only feel that it is my duty, father dear. Of course I cannot expect you to understand. It is the call of my country. I must accept. Some one person out of this family ought to do something.”

“Your brother is over there fighting.”

“Exactly,” she said in her patient way. “And millions of other people’s brothers to be looked after.”

“What d’you mean then—some ‘one’ person?” he persisted, sensing a gibe.

“From the three of us.”

“Look here,” he thundered, “aren’t we working? Haven’t I ruined my voice for the Liberty Loan?”

“Not noticeably,” she said coldly.

But everybody knows the rest of that conversation. It took place in about a million homes, and in a certain fixed percentage of instances it ended in a trip to Washington and certain tearful fittings of girlish uniforms. And in the end one blue-and-white or pink-and-white bedroom being closed off; and certain sheepish visits to its emptiness; and a renewed, terrified scanning of the daily papers for submarine sinkings. From which it will be seen that the girl did not go to Aiken. That is the story.

The curious thing about this story is that it is a war story without any war in it whatever. Of course the people at home did not know that. Sergeant Gray’s family, playing golf at Del Monte, always visualised him as a sort of storm centre for Hun strafing. They considered that German shells would seek him as orange juice seeks the eye. And Peggy’s people saw her wandering over battlefields at night, stooping ever and anon amid flying bullets to soothe the wounded, and perhaps being captured by the enemy.

But the real facts were rather different. Not that the girl wouldn’t have gone straight into the jaws of hell if she had had a chance, or that Sergeant Gray wouldn’t have done his fair share of the fighting and considerable more. They were both just out of luck, that’s all.

It was late summer when the division reached France and went into training in the general direction of the Front. It had been trained pretty fine already and was reported to G. H. Q. as being in first-class condition by a lot of inspectors-general—nicknamed the Pickwick Club by the general in confidence to the chief of staff.

The general had a compartment in the train going up, and he took the chief of staff in with him and put Sergeant Gray in an upper berth because it might be necessary to speak French during the night. He had been studying French himself, but the French didn’t seem to know their own language, and when he got excited he mixed considerable Filipino Spanish in it and it was rather like a salad.

Tommy had been missing when the arrangement was made, and sometime after midnight he turned up and in—on the floor of the compartment. He was sleeping there quite peacefully when a German shell struck him in the chest and a startled voice belonging to Sergeant Gray said: “Awfully sorry, sir. Just wanted to get a drink of water. Had no idea you were there.” He thought he had jumped on the general.

“Wuf!” coughed Tommy, holding his chest. “Wuf! Wuf! What the dickens do you mean—trying to murder me?”

Sergeant Gray listened. The general was wide awake by that time, but continued to snore.

“Why the devil don’t you sleep where you belong then?” whispered Sergeant Gray furiously. “I’ve sprained my ankle on you.”

The next snore the general gave sounded strangely like a snort.

Now I am perfectly aware that in our Army no commissioned officer swears at a noncom, and that if he ever did the noncom would of course not swear back. But it must constantly be remembered that the situation between Tommy and Sergeant Gray was extramilitary. It was man to man. It was Yale to Harvard and Harvard to Yale. And it was jealousy to jealousy.

Well, they got to their area finally and did the usual things, such as getting rid of the manure heaps in the street and learning to brush their teeth in the mornings while the astounded French populace looked on. Except the officers, they washed mostly in the street at the town pump and drill over, they bought chocolate sweetened with saccharin, and writing paper and vin ordinaire at the little shops. They grew quite accustomed to cows breaking through their ranks when they were drawn up for the solemn ceremony of retreat; and to having these same cows wander at night into the stables where some of them were billeted and lie down with them to pleasant dreams. And they gave their monkey meat and tin willie to the French children and their extra underwear—finding how badly they needed it—and bought green cheese at the cheese shop, and had to report to the regimental doctor afterward.

But always, always, they waited for the order to move up to the Front. And it did not come.

The Headquarters Troop got very low in its mind. There they were, on their toes to get to work, and life consisted of trucking every blasted thing they needed six kilometres from a railhead, fighting the military police for diversion and as usual attempting to evade the early-morning shave by liberal applications of talcum powder to jaws and upper lips. They had been there about five weeks when William, arriving in the kitchen for breakfast after helping the general into his clothes, announced that the general was sick.

“Or if he ain’t he’s goin’ to be,” he asserted. “He was readin’ the morning mail and talkin’ to himself something awful. Then I give him the last of that there grapefruit we brought over, and all at once he give a yell and I ain’t seen him since.”

“Where’s the grapefruit?” inquired Sergeant Gray anxiously. As sergeant-orderly he was now a part of the household and ate in the kitchen. He didn’t mind that at all, but it gave him an uncomfortable sense sometimes of being warmer and better fed than the other fellows. It was awfully good for him, too, being an excellent offset to being a spoiled only son. Every now and then he helped the cooks pare the potatoes. But he sometimes wondered about his mother playing golf in California. He was afraid she might think she hadn’t raised her boy to be a potato parer.

“If you ate that grapefruit!” he threatened William.

“It’s there—unless the aide-de-camps’ve got it,” said William. “They’re like these here vacuum cleaners, them aide-de-camps. They—”

Sergeant Gray, who was of the age that is always hungry, tiptoed into the hall of the little French house and gazed into the dining room across. The grapefruit was there, and sitting behind it was Tommy, booted and spurred, with a new riding crop on the table and a fresh morning shave and a very feminine-looking letter in his hand. A hot wave of jealousy flashed over Sergeant Gray.

Tommy glanced up.

“Sergeant!”

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray with suspicious eyes on the letter.

“Bring me some powdered sugar.”

“Sir?” said Sergeant Gray.

“Powdered sugar,” repeated Tommy in a cold voice.

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“You heard me!” bawled Tommy. “Sugar! Powdered sugar!”

Now a sergeant-orderly has many duties. They consist frequently in doing anything that the proper person for the job may flunk. He may be put to anything from raking the general’s lawn to leading a platoon over the top in battle. But there is nothing in the regulations about powdered sugar.

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray, and retired to the kitchen. It was empty.

“Sugar,” muttered Sergeant Gray furiously. “I’ll see him in blazes first. Sugar!” He sat down.

“Sergeant!” came a very military voice from across the hall.

“Sugar! I’ll sugar him!” mumbled Sergeant Gray, glancing round the kitchen.

Almost thirty seconds later he stalked into the dining room and placed a bowl before Tommy, and Tommy—feeling the magnanimity of victory—observed that it was a nice morning.

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Gray, and retired, taking Tommy’s glass of water with him, ostensibly to refill it. Having done that he proceeded systematically to empty the water pails in the kitchen.

It was only an instant after that that he heard wild and choking speech from the dining room, and ran in. Tommy was on his feet making hideous grimaces.

“Water!” he yelled. “Quick! Get me some water! I’m poisoned! I’m—”

“Just discovered there isn’t any water, sir,” said Sergeant Gray. “I’ll run to the town pump for some, sir.”

Tommy, however, shot past him to the kitchen and was making a frenzied round of the water pails. Finding none, however, he poured some scalding coffee instead and but substituted one agony for another.

“Awfully sorry, sir,” said Sergeant Gray in the tone one uses to a sick child. “If I can do anything—”

Tommy steadied himself with an effort and confronted him.

“Gray, what did you bring me for sugar?”

“For sugar? Wasn’t it sugar, sir?”

“You know darned well it wasn’t sugar.”

“It was in a box,” protested Sergeant Gray in an aggrieved voice. “I’m no cook, sir, but it looked like sugar. If you didn’t notice the difference yourself, sir—”

Tommy looked at him speechlessly and went out. And Sergeant Gray’s smile was a mirthless one, for there was the edge of a pink envelope sticking out of the breast pocket of Tommy’s blouse.

It is most unfortunate to have to record that that day the general developed mumps. It was given out in the division as bronchitis, of course, and the general lay in a high French bed and roared orders to the chief of staff outside the door and threw a puttee at William when he suggested a hot lemonade. But part of the time he lay in the bed and nursed two grievances: First, that the Germans were breaking fast and unless they moved up soon they might as well not move at all. And second, that his family had had an attack of insanity and had allowed Peggy to come to France. He considered that girls were of two kinds: The ones to be taken care of and babied and have their railroad tickets bought for them and the automobile rug tucked in round them and a kiss for every birthday and one to grow on. And the others. The general’s niece belonged to the first kind.

She was in Paris.

“I’m going to come to see you before I really settle down to work,” she had written. “Lots of people here say I can’t do it; but I saw the nicest general yesterday and two colonels to-day. They all seem to be going in your direction soon and they all think you are a perfectly wonderful soldier and that if anything happens to General Pershing, which of course we mustn’t hope for—”

“Little minx!” said the general. “She’ll have the whole general staff eating out of her hand in a week!”

“And I’ll be in a pretty pickle if she comes here.”

However, the word pickle brought a terrible pain immediately in front of his ears and changed the trend of his thoughts.

The general had considerable time to think during the next few days. Mostly he thought about war and what wires he could pull to get to the Front. But he also thought about Peggy and Tommy and Sergeant Gray. He was a very wise man and he considered it unlikely that pure family affection was bringing the girl to visit him. Which was it then? Gray or Tommy? The general decided that it was Gray by a very easy method. He simply tried to think which one he would choose if he were a pretty girl and twenty, and he decided that it would be Gray.

Yes, the girl was only twenty. She had fibbed about her age a bit to get over; but, then, a good many others did. Only it was unfortunate that she had antedated her birth a number of years before her parents were married.

It was some days later that the general told Tommy she was coming. Tommy stood in the doorway, very rigid and trying not to inhale germs, and acknowledged that he, too, had had a letter.

“She can’t stay here,” said the general. “Don’t know how the deuce she’s put it over, anyhow. Against every regulation. Likely to make trouble all round. You fellows will have to look after her, y’know. Only going to keep her one day.”

“I was wondering, sir,” said Tommy, “if I could get Paris leave for a day or two. I need some uniforms, sir. Not immediately, sir,” he added hastily, seeing something in the general’s eye. He had no mind to be sent back to Paris while she was in camp.

“I’ll see about it.”

“And—if you are well enough to talk, sir—”

“I’m not,” said the general fretfully. “What is it?”

“I have been thinking about Gray, sir. I understand he is anxious for a commission and that you are thinking of— The recommendations for the candidates’ school are ready to be filled out.”

There was a small twinkle in the general’s eye.

“Run away and play, Tommy,” he said. “There are moments when I realise my age and general unfitness for the service. But I’m still running this division, thank God! And you might intimate as much to the chief of staff sometime.”

Left alone, the general reflected.

“Now Gray,” he considered, “wouldn’t have done that. He’ll use his wits or his fists or both. But I miss my guess if he’d try to put Tommy out of the way.”

Here, however, he dozed off and was only awakened by the arrival of the storm centre, accompanied by two very important general officers and a fatuous captain, who had tucked her up most of the way in the motor and already had the light of insanity in his eyes.

“Mumps!” she said to Tommy. “Why, the poor old dear! Then I’m going to stay right here and nurse him.”

“He needs you,” said Tommy in a maudlin tone. “He needs you awfully. We can put you up, you know. We—”

But she was not listening to Tommy. As a matter of fact, for the last thirty miles she had not heard a thing the general officers said, such as: “It was the plan, in case the enemy reached this point—” or: “These buildings on the right contain engineers’ stores. Those are pontoons for bridges.” Or even the captain: “Are you quite sure your feet are warm?”

She was homing like a pigeon, though she did not know it.

She greeted them all: the judge advocate, who was not really so formidable as his title and should have been in his office at headquarters quarrelling with the mayor about taking over the town hall; and the chaplain, who had an open tenderness for her—only he would have called it tendresse now; and such of the staff as could pretend it had business there; and naturally all the aides. And then she saw Sergeant Gray.

Now it is hard to say just how she had thought of Sergeant Gray. She had always known that Tommy, for instance, and the others, would be living comfortably somewhere and mostly sending out orders to fight and that sort of thing. But Gray was different. She had always pictured him in his helmet, one of a long grim line crouched waiting to go over the top. She had had a number of such pictures of him stored away, but she had not exactly anticipated finding him in charge of a detail cleaning out the town well.

Yet when she looked down the narrow street that is precisely what he was doing. She looked away for fear he might feel uncomfortable and said at once:

“How military you all look! You’re so imposing. Some of you may have noticed,” she added, “that I am in uniform myself.” But she was really saying to herself fiercely that it took all sorts of things to make a war, and certainly clean drinking water was one of them.

So Sergeant Gray kept on with his work and found a number of things that the French population had missed for years, and had continued healthy in spite of, and the general’s official family surrounded one member of his personal family, and clanking with spurs and swollen with rank, took Peggy inside. The odds were certainly Tommy’s that afternoon.

III

Gray knew exactly what was happening inside the house when Tommy took the general’s niece in to see him. She would go upstairs and speak to the general from the door, and they would stand round bored and hardly talking until she came down. And then they would all become animated and tell anecdotes; and the chief of staff would sit at the piano and sing wistfully; and an aide-de-camp would bring him some canary seed; and the chaplain would give his imitation of Harry Lauder making a speech; and Tommy—

“Get the hell out of here!” he snarled at a cow ambling gently along the street.

The general entertained vicariously at dinner that night for his niece. There were her visiting escort and part of the staff and the general’s own household. And before dinner the chaplain, who had had the mumps, came and sat with him.

“Well?” said the general.

The chaplain lighted one of the general’s cigarettes.

“She has seen him,” he observed. “He was as you arranged, in charge of a detail cleaning out the town well. He was game all right. I thought he’d probably hide, but he didn’t. I’m bound to say, however, that he’s been in a fighting state of mind ever since.”

“But he didn’t hide. That’s the point. What’s she doing now?”

“They are having tea,” said the chaplain. “There are eight of them—and at least seven are planning to sit beside her at dinner.”

The general chuckled. Lying there in the high bed, his face gave rather the impression of a small barrel needing to be hooped.

“I’m going to have him wait at table to-night, Chaplain,” he rumbled. “If there’s any nonsense about either of ’em, that’ll cure it.”

“I don’t know,” observed the chaplain in a doubtful voice. “I like Gray and I don’t believe that you’ll do any good by humiliating him. He enlisted to fight. It isn’t his fault that he isn’t fighting now.”

The above space represents what the general said just there about the division not getting forward. But when he became calmer:

“Got to offset the idea she’s got about Gray,” he justified himself. “She knows that story about him roping me over a fence, and like a fool I spent a whole evening telling about the mischief he’s been up to at different times. She’s got to see him with his claws clipped.”

The chaplain differed and said so:

“Life,” he pronounced in his best pulpit manner, “life clips all our claws eventually. But why not leave to the young their illusions and their dreams?”

“Piffle!” said the general rudely.

Now Peggy took off her uniform that night, which was forbidden in the little book she carried round with her, and came down to dinner to meet the waiting household in something rather unwarlike and very pleasing to behold. Not real evening dress, you understand, for the war was still on though dying fast. And had her hand kissed by a French officer who had invented an errand so as to meet her. Then they all went in to dinner; and there were commissary chocolates on the table; and four candles standing in saucers; and on a side table a box of the general’s most cherished cigars, which he had thought were safely hidden away in one of his kit bags.

The chief of staff sat at the head of the table and Peggy sat on his right.

The rest drew lots of an army cap to see who should sit next to her—and Tommy won.

“How nice!” she said, when he sat down. She would have said the same thing to any one, but Tommy grew quite lyric.

“It is Fate,” he said. “Kismet. Even though the rest of them fall on me afterward and rend me, this hour is mine.”

“Think of it!” said Peggy in the exact words used by every girl who got to France and met some one she knew over there. “Meeting here like this so far from home!”

“If one wants a thing badly enough,” said Tommy, “it just naturally comes.”

“Soup, sir?” said a deep bass at his elbow.

Tommy glanced up hurriedly, but all he saw was Sergeant Gray’s rather fine profile as he placed the soup plate.

There was a very quiet little game played at dinner that night. Only Peggy and the players knew about it. It consisted mainly of most obsequious and zealous service on the part of Sergeant Gray, so that Tommy had not a moment for any real conversation. Between courses Gray stood firm and silent behind Tommy’s chair, and when he disappeared kitchenward Tommy would try hastily to make up for lost time.

“If you could only know what this glimpse of you means to me, Miss Peggy. You know, when you are thinking a lot about one particular person—”

“More chicken, sir?”

“No!”

Gray would move on and Tommy would begin again, the light of desperation in his eyes.

“It’s been hard to keep my mind on war, I can tell you. Ever since I heard you were coming—”

“More potatoes, sir?”

“Look here,” Tommy said finally in a low and furious voice, “when I want more food I’ll ask for it. D’you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” said Gray in the tone of a well-bred butler.

After that he offered Tommy nothing whatever and left him conspicuously without dessert. Peggy, who had been rather flushed and silent during the meal, smiled somewhat grimly at that. But she ate very little. The plain truth was that Miss Peggy was having to reassort quite a number of ideas, and among them was that mental picture of Sergeant Gray in a steel helmet leading a forlorn hope across No Man’s Land and later being decorated by her uncle, the general. Getting accustomed to having the greatest military figure in the Army in bed upstairs with the mumps and the devil of the Headquarters Troop carrying round the mashed potatoes was rather a strain.

Her escort left that night and Peggy slept at a Red Cross hut in the village, but before she left she had a few words with the general.

“I do think,” she began spiritedly, advancing into the sick room. “I do think—”

“Go on out!” roared the general. “Do you want to go round with a face like a balloon? Go on out!”

“Don’t waste that military tone on me,” said Peggy severely. “I don’t care whether I get it or not. I’m going to tell you exactly what I think about you.”

She then sat down on the general’s bed and stared at him coldly.

“Don’t you think,” she said, “that when you have gentlemen round you—”

“Get off the bed, Peggy,” begged the general in a different tone. “Don’t you know there is always some fool inspector or other looking for things to take back to G. H. Q.? Do you want to ruin me?”

“You ought to be ruined. Let me tell you, you haven’t fooled me for a minute. And if you think it is funny to take a friend of mine and just because you have the authority—”

Here—to the general’s horror—she curled up on the foot of his bed and began to cry. He was really awfully disturbed. He sat up in his blue-silk pajamas—he was president of the pajama club the aides had got up, because he had a monogram on his left cuff; but he did not know he was president—and patted her and in his anxiety revealed a great deal he had not meant to reveal—vocally, not physically.

“Good heavens,” he said at last, “what do you want me to do, anyhow? Kiss him?”

“He ought to be an officer and you know it,” she said in a smothered tone. Her face was buried in the eiderdown comfort. “He’d be a good officer, too, and you know that. He wants it more than anything.”

“I dare say,” said the general rather grimly. “Well, if you’ll get up and behave according to the regulations and not have me court-martialed, I’ll see what I can do.”

She sat up then and gave every evidence of being about to kiss his inflated face, but he held her off.

“May I tell him?” she asked.

“You may not,” said the general sternly. “I may have my weak moments and submit to being bullied when I’m sick. But the time hasn’t come yet when I allow the women of my family to make my promotions, thank heaven! Now run and have the chaplain take you home. And for heaven’s sake, remember that he’s a married man and susceptible.”

Peggy left at the crack of dawn the next day. If she had expected to be seen off with the éclat of her arrival she was disappointed. Not an aide showed up; but a tall young man with a sergeant’s chevrons and a pair of hungry eyes was standing outside the general’s doorway.

“I had to see you,” said Sergeant Gray rather huskily. “I hope you don’t mind?”

“Well, if you hadn’t—” said Peggy.

“I made a fool of myself last night, you know. I was nearly crazy. Not,” he added hastily, “that I cared a snap about what I was doing. That’s all in the day’s work. But to have to listen to that— Am I ever going to see you again?”

“I don’t see why not,” said Peggy briskly. But there was a shake in her voice. Because after all there was a rather considerable chance against it. Sooner or later they would move up, and then—

“Of course we’re going to meet again,” she said determinedly. And because that was an emotional sort of subject she added: “Isn’t it queer there is nobody up? I thought the Army rose at the crack of dawn.”

There was a scarcely perceptible twitch of Sergeant Gray’s upper lip and inside the house the general’s bell was ringing furiously.

“Great luck for me they’re not here,” he said. “I’ll carry any message you care to leave. I’m a sort of cross between a nursery maid and a messenger boy, anyhow.”

“I shan’t leave any messages,” said Peggy coldly.

“You’ll—do you mind letting me know your address when you’re located?”

Of course this was only surface talk, because the car had come up which was to take her back, and the chauffeur, who was from the troop, was staring straight ahead and listening hard. Also, the general was now beating a tattoo with his bell and the noise was horrible. What Sergeant Gray was really saying with his eyes was that he worshipped her.

“I’ll be very glad to let you know,” replied Peggy primly, and got into the car. It is entirely significant of the sort of girl Peggy was that Sergeant Gray ran true to form and tucked her in.

“Are you sure your feet will be warm?” he asked tenderly.

Even Peggy, who was feeling awfully slighted by Tommy and the others, smiled at that. It was so exactly the tone the maudlin captain had used coming down. Gray gave a final pat to the rug, a tender pat because it covered Peggy, and lowered his voice.

“I had a lot of things to say to you,” he said hurriedly. “But every time I think of something I remember that he said it to you last night. The only thing he didn’t say was—”

“Yes?” said Peggy expectantly.

But the chauffeur had planned that by starting early and going very fast he could get four hours in Paris, and so moved off. Long after the car had disappeared down the crooked little street, and while the general’s bell gave evidence of hysteria, Sergeant Gray stood looking after it.

At least he had seen her alone. There would be a price to pay for it, but it had been worth any price. As to punishment:

“Ça ne fait rien,” muttered Sergeant Gray. Which is army French for not giving a tinker’s damn.

Exactly one hour late that morning, a shaking William took the general his coffee.

“Clock an hour slow!” the general shouted in a frenzy. “Are you going to tell me that every clock in this whole house is crazy?”

“ ’Pears like they are, sir,” quavered William. “The cook’s clock and mine—they’re both off an hour. I just called the aides-de-camp, sir, and Captain Trowbridge’s like he’s out of his head.”

The general put four lumps of sugar in his coffee and stirred it reflectively.

“Who saw my niece off, William?”

“ ’Pears like nobody did, sir.”

“I see,” said the general thoughtfully. “William, find Sergeant Gray and send him here.”

When Gray arrived, somewhat breathless, the general let him stand at attention for some time. The feeling Gray had now and then that a touch of spot remover would take him out entirely returned very strongly.

“For some curious reason, sergeant,” said the general, “two clocks in this house lost an hour last night. Do you know anything about it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Humph!”

The general looked away. Drat the boy, anyhow! He wondered if he had ever had such desperate eyes when he fell in love for the first time. He had been in love in a perfectly nice way so many times since. But he rather hoped he had never looked like a cross between a sheep and a Bengal tiger.

“I’ll give you one minute to explain,” said the general coldly.

“I wanted a word alone with Miss Peggy, sir. I’m sorry if it caused any trouble.”

“Trouble!” bawled the general, and sank back among his pillows. “The plain truth is, Gray, that I’ve got to get rid of you. You’re making an old man of me. I’m going to turn you over to somebody else.”

“Yes, sir,” said Gray, growing even paler.

“You will have a week’s C. B. and K. P.,” said the general. Which sounds rather like the conferring of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, but is not. “And after that I’m going to send you to an officers’ training school. And,” added the general grimly, “if you don’t behave yourself may the Lord have mercy on your soul!”

So Sergeant Gray pared potatoes and did various menial duties for a week in the headquarters kitchen and sang as he worked, mostly about wanting a belt just like the belt that all the shavetails wore. He irritated the cook considerably. And now and then he encountered Tommy and saluted him according to the regulations and without any particular rancour. Because very soon now he, too, would be clattering about in a belt and spurs, and so on—and Tommy’s single advantage would be gone.

Now and then Tommy addressed him rather sharply, and at those times Sergeant Gray bore himself with admirable humility and muttered: “Ça ne fait rien.” He was unbelievably well behaved those days.

Then the time came to leave, and the general gave him a little talk on the responsibilities of being an officer and the spirit that lay behind service to his country and pretty nearly brought him to tears. After that he went away, and with him from the general’s household went something of gaiety and youth and irrepressible spirits. The division drilled and waited, and outside his military family the general was his rigid and soldierly self. He made rounds on horseback, accompanied generally by Tommy, and discovered a number of things he wasn’t meant to see; and then rode back to divisional headquarters and searched his dispatches for the orders to move forward. But none came and the Germans were breaking.

In his secret heart Tommy was a bit relieved. He was willing enough to fight, but after all the end of the war would have its advantages. On the long rides through the French lanes he took again to visualising the little house somewhere and Peggy in it and golf for two on Saturday afternoons. After all, if the Germans gave up it would be not only because of the army in the field but of those—like themselves—who waited behind the lines. He offered that to the general one day and the general was unappreciative.

“Don’t talk like a jackass, Tommy,” was what he said.

So through all the early fall the Germans slowly retreated; and the division waited, growing more and more down-spirited; and the girl in a seaport French town poured innumerable cups of coffee and cut innumerable sandwiches; and Candidate Gray worked for his commission. He worked doggedly night and day. He sat up at night studying and dragged his tired young body out of bed at reveille and shaved and made his bed and ate his breakfast hurriedly, and was all that a candidate should be.

Now and then he got a very brief letter from Peggy. It would detail her work carefully, but it would say very little about herself, and after a time he grew jealous of her work. She seemed to be obsessed with it, and the slow and painful fact dawned on him that she loved the whole Army.

“She doesn’t give a hang for me,” he said to himself more than once. “She was nice to me because of the uniform and what it meant. And she’s being just as nice to about six hundred a day right now.”

The sad part of it was that he was nearly right. The girl had just discovered service and was enamoured of it. She went back at night to her dreary room in a cold French house, and heated water and soaked her tired feet in it and then crawled into bed to keep warm. But at daylight she was up again, putting on all the extra clothing she had and drinking a cup of execrable coffee sweetened with saccharin before starting on her tramp through the incessant rain to the canteen.

She was too busy to think about Gray or Tommy in the daytime and too tired at night. She began to feel old and matronly and rather like a mother to all the world. And when the hospital trains arrived all the love in her went out to the cheerful boys who were so grateful to her for what she sometimes felt was so pitifully little.

So her letters grew detached and impersonal, and Candidate Gray, studying them carefully, found no hope in them and set his teeth doggedly. If only the Germans didn’t break entirely! If only he’d get his chance!

Then the Germans broke.

It was too cruel! Too incredible! The thing was over and he had had no part in it. The division had had no part in it. The day of the armistice, that brought so much joy with it, brought to about two million men a sickening sense of futility; of lost opportunity and wasted effort.

Candidate Gray sat in his barracks and gloomed. After all the commission had been only a means to an end. He wanted to fight. If he had had a boyish feeling that he wanted to lead instead of being led—well, he was very young. And he wanted terribly to prove that he was a man.

And after a time, however, he brightened up. The fellows in the trenches would have a rest, anyhow. Of course he felt that the armistice was a blunder. The Hun ought to have been licked to a finish. But at least the war was over. He dreamed a dream of a little house within motoring distance of town and Peggy in it and golf for two on Saturday afternoons.

Having thus begun to see the brighter side of things he wandered into town to look for the disbursing paymaster and buy him a drink or two, this being preliminary to an appeal to get permission to sign a cash receipt for his month’s pay, thus saving a certain amount of time in case the armistice meant twenty-four hours’ leave—which was important. It meant getting into the nearby city early and thus getting the best room in its only hotel. And it meant, too, sending off as soon as possible a letter to Peggy which was in his pocket.

“I’ve been recommended for my commission,” he had written, “and it ought to be along pretty soon. I shall get a few days’ leave then, and I thought if you didn’t mind I’d drop in and see you.” Dropping in to see her meant travelling a day and a night in a French train and probably sleeping on the floor or in a baggage rack. He had tried this last and it wasn’t bad. “I’m pretty well knocked out by the armistice naturally, but I suppose a lot of poor devils who have had it hard will be mighty thankful.” He had hesitated over the signature and finally ended it “yours.”

“And that’s God’s truth too,” he had muttered.

Then he went out and played the eternal game of the private soldier in a small French village full of officers—did his best to avoid saluting by trying to look as though he was invisible and, if that ruse failed, never looking above the second blouse button of any uniform he met.

“What you don’t see won’t hurt you,” he muttered.

In ten days or so Peggy’s letter came back.

“How splendid to think you are going to be an officer,” she wrote. “But I always knew you would be. And, of course, I shall be delighted to see you, though I’m afraid I shall be awfully busy. Yesterday we served—”

All the balance was about her work. It was not entirely a satisfactory letter, and there was a casual mention of a Red Cross major that set him frowning. Of course those Red Cross chaps would be hanging round her. There was always some one hanging round her. He added that day a new jealousy to the ever-present one of Tommy, and had to go out and buy his lieutenant’s insignia to cheer himself up.

Then one day a rumour spread through the camp; an incredible thing that took all the courage out of the hundreds of expectant young hearts and sent the weak sisters among them to the French wine shops to forget their wrongs in cognac. The rumour was that all promotions were cancelled.

Gray got it from the one-time mess sergeant of the Headquarters Troop from the old division. The M. S. had been recommended, too, and was looking blue round the lips.

“I don’t believe it,” said Gray stoutly, but with a sinking heart.

“All right. You’ll find out.”

“But—but why? We’ve worked like dogs. Sending us here was equivalent to a promise that if we made good—”

“Any old time they’ll keep a promise they don’t want to! Come on and have some cognac. I’m going to drink myself to death.”

Candidate Gray went back to his barracks and sat down on his bed. The bottom had dropped out of his world. All that study and effort, and now—nothing. Back where he had been. And not even a fight to look forward to. Something of the fine faith he had in his Government and its promises died that afternoon, never after to be wholly revived. For the incredible rumour proved to be true. All promotions were cancelled. All earned commissions were cancelled. From that time on effort in the Army was to be without reward.

The Army generally adopted an attitude of ça ne fait rien. And Sergeant Gray said it, too, but without any conviction. He was seared to the very soul.

There were thirty-eight desertions from the Candidates’ School in the first twenty-four hours. After that they lessened, for most of the weak sisters had gone. But the spirit was gone out of the men.

On the tenth day Gray wrote again to Peggy—a cheerful letter which almost made her cry.

“I had expected to put on a little side when I came to see you. But two things have interfered. First, I won’t be able to come. Second, there isn’t any side to put on. I have buried my officer’s equipment in an old beet field and perhaps some day it will be recovered and hung in a museum as a relic of the great war. Probably I wasn’t officer stuff, anyhow, so it’s just as well. Way down in my little inside I’m a bit disappointed, but ça ne fait rien.

“I’m not going to bother you with any more letters. I know you are busy and I haven’t any right to take up your time.”

He hesitated a long time after that and then just wrote “God bless you” in a shaky hand and sent it off before he lost his courage. Because his courage was not quite so good as it had been. He was beginning to lose faith in himself.

Of course his psychology was wrong. He felt this new and cruel army order as a personal stigma. He was somehow less of a man for it. He gave the girl up on the head of it and took to wandering round the camp at night, giving her up again every minute.

He was entirely inarticulate and there was no one to voice his misery to, so he did like most lovers and chose some other’s disconsolate words to fit his case. On a bright night he was prone to sit on the barracks steps, for instance, and plaintively bay at the moon:

The hours I spent with thee, dear heart

Are as a string of pearls to me.

He would be carried away by emotion after a time and forget the one hundred and eleven disgruntled candidates within.

My rosary. My rose-a-a-a—ree.

His heartbroken wail would penetrate the thin walls and loose window frames of the barracks, and a chorus of groans would echo from the inside, followed by the opening of a window.

“Aw, go to bed and forget it!” a voice would say.

And after a time, chilled to the bone and having finally renounced her, he would retire to his cot, take off his shoes and putties, his hat and blouse, and turn in.

Once warmed through, he slept extremely well.

He went back to the old division after a time, to find things going on much the same. The general was too good a soldier to tolerate any slacking. But there was a subtle difference. Only the chaplain remained the same, for only the chaplain had not hoped for promotion, and the general, who had been in the Army a long time, and had therefore developed a sort of armor-plate philosophy.

And on the third day of Gray’s return Tommy came back from seven days’ leave. Sergeant Gray saw him coming back, gay and debonair and clanking, and viewed him with lowering suspicion. A little later Lewis came to the door for a breath of air and Gray stalked up to him.

“Where has he been?” he asked. “Trowbridge?”

“He says he’s been to Paris,” said Lewis rather fretfully. The general’s uncertain temper had been very certain the last few days.

“Like hell he’s been to Paris!”

“I don’t know where he’s been,” said Lewis, “and what’s more I don’t care. I’ll tell you this, Gray: If the Old Man doesn’t stop working me day and night I’m going to—”

“I know where he has been,” said Gray darkly, and stalked away.

That night, the chauffeur being laid up, Sergeant Gray drove the aides to a Red Cross dance, and carefully and with extreme deliberation ditched the lot of them six miles from anywhere. The aides, after considerable conversation, walked back in the mud and Gray curled himself up inside the car and gloomed for quite a length of time. After which he went asleep and wakened in the cold dawn with a sort of ready-made conviction that he was going to ditch Tommy as easily as he had the car and much more permanently.

But that very day he had to acknowledge that the honours of the game Tommy and he were playing were Tommy’s—to that point.

After nightfall it was the chaplain’s benevolent custom to show moving pictures in the village square.

The chaplain considered it an excellent time to enlighten the French population as to America; but as most of the pictures were of the old Wild West, doubtless the French will continue to think it our native pastime to shoot up gambling hells and ride madly on horseback with drawn revolvers after people we do not happen to fancy.

In the square Gray met Lewis and paired off with him out of sheer loneliness.

“The Old Man thinks we’ll be going home soon,” said Lewis.

“Humph!” said Sergeant Gray, whose faith in the general was moribund along with other things.

“Well, don’t you want to go?”

“Ça ne fait rien,” observed Sergeant Gray out of a low mind.

The hero in the picture, having rescued the girl from eleven bandits and fired sixteen shots without reloading his revolver, now took the girl in his arms and turned Lewis’ mind into a new channel.

“Say,” he offered, “you were right about Trowbridge. He didn’t go to Paris.”

“No?” observed Sergeant Gray indifferently, but with an extra heartbeat.

“He went to see that niece of the general’s. They’re kidding him to death about it.”

This receiving no acknowledgment he turned toward Sergeant Gray, but that young gentleman was moving rapidly away in the crowd. So that was it. This then was what the Army did to a fellow. It took him over to France and stuck him in a mudhole and didn’t let him fight and offered him a commission and then took it away. And any stuffed shirt in a belt and leather putties could amble all over France and give the impression he’d won the war. Hell’s bells!

The winter passed slowly. Once he got a letter from Peggy and he walked a mile out of town to read it alone.

“I was so sorry about your commission,” she wrote. “I think it’s a perfect shame, and somebody ought to write to the War Department about it. I know you had counted on it.”

Good heavens—sympathy! He didn’t want sympathy. If he wasn’t a better man than a dozen aides-de-camp he’d cut his throat. He threw the letter away and then got it out of the mud again and stood for quite a time holding it in both hands. But he did not answer it. He had, you understand, given her up.

So the winter passed and the general sent for the chaplain one day and said: “There’s something wrong with Gray, chaplain, and I’m blessed if I know what it is.”

“What’s he been doing now?” said the chaplain, helping himself to a tin of commissary chocolates on the executive desk.

“Nothing! That’s what I’m wondering about. Don’t throw that paper on the floor! It’s about six weeks now since he’s been up to any mischief. That was when he ditched my aides.”

“Must be sick,” said the chaplain rather thickly through the chocolates.

“He ditched Tommy, you may recall, the night he returned from his leave.”

“I see. Probably meant to kill the lot to get Tommy.”

“Very likely,” said the general calmly. “I could have spared one or two of them too. However, I didn’t send for you about Gray—only I’m blamed if I know what’s got into girls nowadays. They can’t see any farther than their noses. What I want to know is, why the deuce when you get twenty-four hours’ Paris leave you stay a week.”

IV

Along about February the division received its orders for home. It drew new equipment technically, which means that a certain large percentage of it was old stuff done over—shoes that had been resoled, uniforms sterilised and somewhat shrunken, but clean at least. And it was most thoroughly and awfully deloused. There was a great run on the post-card shop, and the chaplain got up a final boxing tournament and fought for three rounds himself, while the division cheered itself black in the face.

He came out of it rather the worse for wear, but nothing whatever to Tommy, who had been his opponent.

“Fights like he works,” said the general, chuckling, to the chief of staff. “No rules and no control, but gets results. Did you hear what he said when Tommy got him that time on the ear?”

But the chief of staff had been discreetly deaf.

So the division prepared to move and the staff went ahead, taking a day or two in Paris to buy souvenirs and eat at the Ritz and visit the Folies Bergère. And with the general went Tommy and the other aides and the chaplain and the C. of S. and Lewis and William and Sergeant Gray.

Sergeant Gray went along because of a rumour that food was scarce in Paris, and in an extra kit bag he carried three loaves of real bread baked with white army flour, a box of sugar, a tin pail of butter and the general’s tea and tea ball. But there was plenty of food in Paris, it developed, and so he cached the bag under his bed in the hotel and reported at the general’s door.

The general was not there, but Tommy was—and at the telephone.

“Can’t you hear me?” he was howling. “Confound these French phones, anyhow. Hello! Hello!”

“Stick your head out the window and you won’t need a telephone,” muttered Gray in the hall.

“Hello! That’s better. Yes, sailing from your town. Just learned it. Isn’t that great?”

Sergeant Gray’s eyes narrowed.

“You fix things so you’ll have some free time. . . . But look here. You know you promised. . . . I—there are some things I want to talk to you about. All right. Good-bye.”

Something wild and reckless and very young surged in Sergeant Gray’s breast. She’d promised all her time to him, had she? Very well! He could have it. If she thought for a minute that he was going to hang round for a word—

He went out—to find Lewis standing disconsolately on the curb.

“This is Paris, old-timer,” he said recklessly. “Let’s go to my bankers and get some money and then see the town.”

Lewis eyed him.

“What d’you mean, see the town?” he inquired cautiously.

“Eat and drink. Mostly drink,” said Sergeant Gray with the devil of rage in full control now.

“Not for mine,” said Lewis. “But if you’re hell bent for trouble I’ll go along and keep an eye on you.”

But for all his wild talk Gray neither ate nor drank much. He was white and silent and the eye Lewis kept on him was rather an alarmed one.

“If you call this seeing Paris,” he said finally in an aggrieved tone when Gray had stood for some time leaning over a parapet looking at the Seine, “I’m darned if I do. The Hudson’s got that creek beat a mile.”

“More people have drowned themselves in this river per square inch than in all the rivers you ever saw,” said Sergeant Gray.

“Don’t be a damned fool,” said Lewis nervously.

But Gray only laughed. He intended his laugh to be hollow and it was—rather.

“Come on, old-timer,” he said. “We’ll see Paris, all right.”

So they ate again and drank a trifle and became extremely dull with too much food. And that night they did the most sensational thing they could think of and went to a Montmartre restaurant, all red velvet and gilt mirrors, with a band trying to play American ragtime and a considerable percentage of the women not what they ought to be but undoubtedly what they were.

And they were no sooner seated than Sergeant Gray said: “Why, look who’s here!”

It was Tommy, of course.

Lewis was no fool and he was awfully uncomfortable. But Gray was quite calm and slightly exhilarated. He bought a dozen vastly expensive roses from the flower girl almost at once and sent them to Tommy, who looked first puzzled and then extremely gratified. He pulled at the small moustache he had grown in France and interrogated the flower girl. But she professed entire ignorance.

“May start something,” said Gray, sitting rather low to escape observation. “Watch him!”

Tommy was alone and rather plaintive about it. He sat for some time staring at the flowers, and then he gathered them up and presented them to the girl sitting next to him.

Gray yawned.

“He bit all right,” he said. “Don’t catch his eye, Lewis.”

Tommy was now in earnest conversation with the French girl. Gray was silent but watchful. Soon he called the flower girl and bought from her double his previous purchase. He gathered them up in his arms and rose.

“Watch again, Lewis,” he said, “and keep watching.”

He wandered across the room and bowed before the girl.

“Every morn I bring thee violets,” he said in English. And then in French: “I, too, am laying a tribute at mademoiselle’s feet. But perceive that it is double the other.”

Then he sat down on her other side. For some time the scandalised Lewis watched a battle between the two—fought without speech between them. Tommy bought lilies of the valley; Gray doubled his purchase. Violets; Gray again.

“You darned idiot!” Tommy muttered. “If you think you can carry this on indefinitely I’ll show you.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?” said Gray respectfully.

The restaurant was on to the game now and applauding. Tommy was hot and perspiring and—what was more tragic—financially very low. At eleven o’clock he was a beaten and a broken man and Sergeant Gray held the field. Loud laughter greeted Tommy’s discomfited exit.

“And now,” said the French girl. “Why, monsieur?”

“It was a little game, mademoiselle.”

Some time later he prodded the exasperated and drowsing Lewis in the chest.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ll have to get a truck to get that girl’s flowers home if she’s got a home. Call a taxi, will you?”

“You blamed young fool,” said Lewis savagely. But Gray only smiled.

“I got him again, Lewis,” he said. “Once more. And I’ll get him yet for keeps.”

Lewis called the taxicab and helped to pile in the flowers and the girl, and followed himself under protest.

Then to his horror he heard the door shut, and the taxi drove off, leaving Gray on the pavement.

A half hour later Lewis got back to the hotel and banged furiously at Sergeant Gray’s door. But the unmistakable sounds of that young gentleman sweetly sleeping sent him raging off to bed.

Sergeant Gray spent the next day in the train in formulating a new plan of campaign. Their stay at the seaport might be anything from one day to three weeks. He went on the theory, therefore, that it was to be for one day and proceeded on that hypothesis.

During the intervals between meals he sat in a compartment with Lewis, who sulked and plotted. At the dinner signal he joined the procession which followed the general’s majestic figure to the dining car, and which carried:

The chief of staff—the tea ball.

Tommy—a loaf of bread.

First aide-de-camp—using the Shaksperean method—the pail of butter.

Second ditto—a tin of chocolates.

Gray—the box of sugar.

The chaplain—a bottle of Scotch procured by various underground methods from a British sergeant major.

As the day went on Sergeant Gray grew perceptibly more cheerful. He went back to the day coach and fraternised there with Tommy’s striker by shooting craps with him and losing, and by ignoring the fact that that worthy was obviously carrying a contraband bottle in a method well known to the army private—that is, buttoned under his blouse in exact centre front and held there by his belt.

That night they reached the seaport. Sergeant Gray after a private conversation with Tommy’s striker was in high good humour again and the general eyed him with suspicion.

“There’s some new devilment in the air,” he confided to the chaplain. “When that young rascal begins to sing he’s up to something.”

For Sergeant Gray, carrying kit bags to the various rooms, was carolling blithely:

Oh, promise me that some day you and I

Shall take our love together to some sky-y-y.

“I’ve got a hunch,” said the chaplain, whose speech had been strangely changed by army life, “that I’d better keep an eye on Tommy.”

“Nothing of the sort!” the general observed pettishly. “Let him look after himself. The next few days ought to settle it between them. Let ’em alone. I’m betting on Gray, myself.”

“Two to one on Tommy,” said the chaplain, who didn’t particularly care for Tommy but wanted to brighten the days of waiting for the transport.

“Fifty francs,” said the general.

“Done,” said the chaplain. “But I make a condition. Don’t use your influence, general.”

“My influence! You honour me. Don’t throw matches on my floor!”

It was rather late then and most of the party went to bed. Tommy gave his boots to his striker and shaved, to save time in the morning. He intended to get an early start. He also spent some time with a pair of nail scissors and his trench mirror, trimming his hair at the back of his neck, and set his alarm watch for seven o’clock.

Then he went to bed and dreamed that Sergeant Gray was sitting on the foot of his bed in a major-general’s uniform and majesty—except that he had his thumb to his nose.

But Gray did not go to bed early. He had a number of things to do. First, he saw Tommy’s striker again and a certain sum of money changed hands.

“Got ’em all?” he inquired first.

“He’s only got three pairs. Here they are. I’ll get a D. D. for this, most likely.”

“For going A. W. O. L.? You will not. Anyhow, I’ll see to that,” said Sergeant Gray largely. “You hide ’em and don’t tell me where they are. That’s all. And then disappear. Get arrested. I only want about six hours.”

Then with a clear conscience he went out into a drizzling rain and wandered through the streets. He was, of course, immediately challenged by an M. P., and addressed him solemnly.

“Approach, varlet,” he said in a deep, sonorous bass. “I would have speech with thee.”

“You’re out of bounds and out of hours,” said the M. P.

“Wouldst know my errand?” queried Sergeant Gray in a deep, tense whisper. “Then I will a tale unfold. Know, minion, that I seek a lost child—my own, my littlest one. A tiny thing with curls that reached—”

“I guess I can take you to her,” said the M. P. cheerfully. “Come along, old man. We’ve got a nice little place for lost kids.”

“Have a heart, old man,” said Sergeant Gray in his normal voice. “For particular reasons this town means a lot to me. There’s somebody here—well, I can’t sleep. That’s all.”

Even M. P.’s are human at times, and after a short further argument Sergeant Gray passed on.

The M. P. watched him out of sight and then sighed. There was nobody in the darned town he cared a whoop about. He sighed again, and from far off in the rain floated back a blithe young voice:

When we shall be alone and faith renew,

And find those hollows where the violets grew-ew-ew—

He turned a corner and faded away into the night.

Now, Peggy had not slept much that night either. She was cold, for one thing; and homesick, for another. Service was a wonderful thing, but there were hours and places in one’s heart that it didn’t entirely fill. And all this movement homeward, too, left her with a feeling sometimes of being eternally left behind. The men came in and got their sweaters or safety-razor blades or whatever they needed—she was in the supply department now—and went out again for that final leg of the journey home; and always she remained behind.

And now that the general was going home—she put it on the general—the feeling of loneliness was rather acute.

She slept finally and rather overdid it toward morning, so she was late and nearly cross and certainly cold to her very bones when she reached her headquarters the next morning. She always opened up. She put her key in the lock and then turned, somewhat startled, because a tall and familiar figure was beside her, saluting.

“Let me open that for you,” said the figure out of the early-morning mist.

“Good gracious!” she said. “I—why, Mr. Gray!”

“I’ve been here since five o’clock,” he offered. “Afraid I’d miss you. It’s hard to tell how much time we have here, and I had a number of things to settle.”

He did not mention that he had already settled one of them. It was a full hour later when Tommy missed his boots.

They were inside by that time and she turned on the electric light. He had a good look at her then, and he saw that she was thinner and considerably pinched with cold.

“D’you mean to say you’ve been doing this all winter?” he demanded fiercely.

“Doing what?”

“Coming to this barn, without a fire, and getting things going?”

“There’s a Frenchwoman. She’ll be along soon.”

“What have you had for breakfast?”

“Coffee. Coffee and a roll.”

“Exactly. You look it. Where d’you keep the coal?”

She had been on her own for such a long time that she was rather dazed. She watched him build a roaring fire. Then he lifted her chair—with her in it—up close to it and stood off and surveyed her grimly.

“Some things being a noncom has taught me,” he said. “I’ll be a darned good wife for somebody some day. Now for the ham and eggs.”

“There isn’t such a thing.”

“Oh, isn’t there? You wait and see.”

He caught up his service cap and started out, but paused in the doorway.

“If you’re not sitting right there when I come back,” he threatened, “I’ll court-martial you. And believe me, I’m some court-martialer.”

She was still rather stunned. The men of the organisation worked hard enough, but they blew in somewhere about nine o’clock, when the house was warm and things going. She had never resented it. After all, getting a house going was woman’s work. But she was most awfully contented before her fire, and rather like a kitten.

He came back in a surprisingly short time, having left consternation in his wake at the hotel. He brought a frying pan and six eggs and most of the general’s private stock of bread and butter and tea, including the treasured tea ball. She recognised this last and fixed him with a suspicious eye, but he was quite brazen.

“Yeah,” he said, grinning amiably. “It’s his. So are the butter and the bread and the tea. The eggs I salvaged elsewhere. Now, if you can get something to heat water in we’ll breakfast. A real breakfast.” His voice changed and softened. “You poor little kid!” he said. “When I saw you coming along in the cold, alone—”

That wouldn’t do. It was dangerous. He fell to breaking eggs violently.

“I’m some cook,” he boasted. “Watch me tie the pan to the end of the poker, and then watch some more.”

It was about that time that the chaplain heard a fine hullabaloo in the hotel corridor; and on inquiring the reason put on his bathrobe and paid a visit to the general. He found that gentleman sitting up in bed with the eiderdown comfort round his shoulders, drinking a cup of French coffee and cursing it as he drank.

“About that wager, sir,” he said. “Does it stand in case of trickery on either side?”

“Hog wash!” said the general angrily. “Slop! Swill!” He banged his cup down. “What sort of trickery?”

“Gray has made off with Tommy’s boots.”

“All of them?” inquired the general.

“All of them.”

“D’you know,” observed the general genially, “the more I see of that boy the more I think he’ll succeed in life. He has a way of getting what he goes after. Now, the time he yanked me over that fence—”

“I remember, sir,” said the chaplain hastily. “But we said nothing last night about conditions. If theft—”

“Fiddlesticks!” said the general rudely. “Let Tommy go out in his stocking feet. Gray would. Why didn’t Tommy steal Gray’s boots? Not that I won’t court-martial Gray. Do him good. Military discipline.”

But after the chaplain had gone the general lay back and lighted a cigarette and smiled at the ceiling.

Now sometime later in the day, Tommy got a pair of boots. They pinched his feet and affected his temper—which was bad enough, anyhow. And he went to Peggy like a needle to the pole. He found her, too, but he found Gray also—behind a counter and dealing out supplies with a lavish hand. That is, it had been lavish, but the supplies were almost gone.

“Serve you anything, sir?” said Sergeant Gray in a businesslike manner. “Soap? Talcum powder?”

Tommy ignored him and bent low over Peggy’s hand. He was in full regalia—crop, spurs, cap, and gloves in left hand.

“He was the very picture of a modern major-general,” hummed Gray to himself, but not too low to escape Tommy’s ears.

“I tried to get here earlier,” said Tommy in a tense voice, “but—”

“Sweater, sir?” said Sergeant Gray loudly. “Razor blades? We have the best quality. Toothbrush? Best bristles—standard make.”

“Gray,” said Tommy coldly, “when I wish anything I shall ask for it.”

“You wouldn’t,” implored Sergeant Gray in a wistful tone, “care for a pair of socks, sir? Or a—”

“Gray,” thundered Tommy, “report to the general and say that I shall be here for some time unless he wants me!”

“Sir, I do not clearly understand. Will the captain please repeat? Paragraph C, Lesson XV, Method of Instruction in Military Courtesy,” he added in an undertone to Peggy.

“You heard me!” said Tommy in frenzied repression. “Go and do it. And if I find out that you had any connection with the loss of my boots this morning I’ll see that something is done about it.”

Gray looked at Peggy. There was perhaps the slightest twitch at the corners of her mouth. That was all.

He took the message to the general, who was shaving with cold water and who eyed him grimly over the lather.

“Very well,” said the general. “I’m going there myself soon. You’d better go back there and wait for me. But—Gray.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Captain Trowbridge’s boots have been mislaid. Before I go I want to see them outside his door. Don’t leave until they are found.”

The general was looking in the mirror just then. Through that medium they exchanged a brief glance of understanding.

“Yes, sir,” said Gray.

But Tommy’s striker had gone most effectually A. W. O. L., and it being necessary to get the general to Peggy as soon as possible Gray solved that problem by taking two pairs of boots belonging to the chief of staff and one pair of the adjutant’s and ranging them in a neat row outside Tommy’s door. But Tommy’s boots had to be found. There had been an air of cold finality about the general.

The morning passed and at noon he saw the general and Tommy and Peggy lunching together in the hotel, and felt a cold chill of terror. The general had missed his tea ball, too, and even the story of the breakfast had not made up for his sense of personal indignity. Hang the boy, anyhow! Was nothing safe when he was round?

In the afternoon came the word that they would sail the next day, and Sergeant Gray’s heart fell lower and lower. But at four o’clock he located the striker and the boots and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

“Now for it,” he muttered.

Now, the end of this story might have been different but for two things: One was Gray’s popularity with the Headquarters Troop. And the other was that the feud between Tommy and Gray was better known than either of them guessed—cause and all. So it became in a small way a matter between the officer personnel and the troop.

Late that afternoon Sergeant Gray raced to Peggy’s headquarters, assuming when near the door an air of extreme if slightly breathless leisure. And he found Peggy alone, except for about forty enlisted men and three young women assistants.

“What’s happened to Trowbridge?” he asked. “Not dead, is he?”

“I don’t see why you don’t like Captain Trowbridge,” observed Peggy primly. “He’s been very kind. Our trucks are all out or broken down and we need all sorts of supplies. He’s gone to find a car and bring us some.”

“Oh, he has, has he?” said Sergeant Gray bitterly.

“I was going to ask you to see about it. But you’ve not been here all day.”

“Sorry. Couldn’t get back.”

“We always say here,” said Peggy sweetly, “that when we really want anything done it is the army officers who do it for us.”

“Really? Well, he hasn’t got the stuff yet. Where’s he going to get a car?” he asked disagreeably. “If he does get one he’ll ditch it somewhere. I’ve seen him drive.”

“I think you are in a bad humour about something,” said Peggy, still pleasantly, and left him.

He was frightfully ashamed of himself immediately, but Tommy was pretty badly on his nerves by that time. He followed her and apologised and had hard work not to tell her he worshipped her before the forty enlisted men and the others.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Only—you’re so queer.”

She was of course young in things of that sort or she would have known that men in love are mostly queer and frequently irritable—and always unreasonable. She was simply puzzled.

“I hate the idea of his getting that stuff for you, that’s all,” he said. “As far as that goes, I think I’ll get it, anyhow. What do you want?”

“Everything,” she replied promptly.

“You shall have it.”

He stalked out, very tall and as much like the general as he could carry himself, and on the pavement reflected that he stood committed to something he couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination carry through. Yet if ever he was to prove that he was a better man than Tommy, Sam Browne belt or none, this was the time.

“Either I put it through,” he reflected, “or I don’t.”

But he really meant much more than that.

Down on the wharf the members of the Headquarters Troop had become longshoremen. They played in their time many parts, it being the particular function of the Headquarters Troop to do everything in the army not otherwise definitely assigned, from surrounding major generals, and stopping shells intended for them, to building bridges when the engineers were engaged elsewhere. They froze their noses dispatch riding and broke horses, when there were any, and looked after headquarters and got the blame for everything that went wrong, being always handy and expecting to be jumped on. Incidentally, of course, they had an intimate personal knowledge of a number of extremely confidential military papers that they were not supposed to have.

So that late afternoon they were longshoremen, working on the wharf under gasoline flares and muttering things about getting to mess sometime that week.

Now in certain ways Gray’s mind and the general’s worked alike. The general, you remember, had picked Gray for Peggy by imagining himself Peggy for a moment. And Sergeant Gray in similar fashion figured out what he would do if he were Tommy. There was only one car in the outfit by that time, and that was the general’s. If Gray had been Tommy he would have commandeered the general’s car, and to do that he would have had to wait until the general was out of it.

His whole chance, then, rested on the general being in it somewhere. He went swiftly back to the hotel and the car was there and Tommy standing beside it.

Now, it is one of a sergeant-orderly’s privileges to ride with the chauffeur of a general’s car and open the doors when necessary and generally give that air of military dignity without which no army can really thrive. So Sergeant Gray saluted and opened the door for Tommy, who eyed him suspiciously, and then saluted again and closed the door and got in beside the chauffeur, who wanted food and was in a towering rage.

Gray didn’t lose a minute.

“Look here, old man,” he said cautiously. “I’m in the devil of a mess and you’ve got to help me out.”

“I have, have I?”

“All I want is to hang him up somewhere. I want an hour—that’s all. I’ll fix it all right with you. You can stall the engine somewhere and I’ll get out and examine it. Once I get under the hood—”

“Oh, is that all?” jeered the chauffeur, steering deliberately at an M. P. and turning out with a grin as the M. P. leaped and bellowed. “And me stuck all night fixing it up again! What d’you take me for, anyhow?”

“Fifty dollars if you’ll do it now,” said Gray desperately. “I’m up against it, old man. Just stall ’er and leave the rest to me.”

Still cautiously, with Tommy’s suspicious eyes boring into his back, Gray laid five American ten-dollar bills on the seat between them.

The engine stopped. The chauffeur, having shut off the magneto, made various futile efforts to start.

“What the dickens is wrong?” came Tommy’s exasperated voice from within. “If you fellows can’t drive this car I’ll do it myself.”

Sergeant Gray hopped out and raised the engine hood. In exactly thirty seconds it was quite certain that the car would not start for an indefinite period. Then he opened the door and saluted.

“Sorry, sir. Seems to be the wiring. Shall I get you a taxi?”

“Taxi!” shouted Tommy. “You know there isn’t a taxi in the whole —— town.”

“Anyhow I can try, sir,” said Gray, and saluted again. “But I won’t,” he added, and faded away in the general direction of the wharf.

An hour or so later Peggy was alone in her little office upstairs in her bleak headquarters building. She was very low in her mind, for there was a big troop movement on and her supplies were gone. The long line of men waiting for sweaters for the cold homeward voyage had had to be turned away sweaterless—and that with thousands of sweaters near at hand. The district manager was in Paris begging for trucks and the other men somehow didn’t act. And just now had come a frenzied note from Tommy Trowbridge that he had broken down somewhere or other and couldn’t get the supplies, but would she dine with him.

She wouldn’t dine with him. She didn’t want any dinner. Wasn’t there anywhere anybody to depend on? It was always dinner with men. What she wanted was razor blades and sweaters and toothbrushes and comfort bags. Not food.

She got up and went to the window. There was a brisk tramping of marching feet beneath in the street and a voice shouting orders. The company stopped. Heavens! There were hundreds of them, and her shelves were empty. She ran down and opened the door and there was Sergeant Gray’s back very fierce and soldierly; and Sergeant Gray’s voice, most triumphant, bellowing orders. Then he turned and looked down at her.

“If you’ll just stand aside,” he said, “I’ll give you a little demonstration of the value of man power in the Army.”

They filed in then, grinning cheerfully, and every man of the troop carried a crate or a box or a bundle. There were two hundred and fifty men, to be exact, and they had stripped the warehouse as locusts strip a tree.

“Say the word,” shouted Gray exultantly over the din, “and we’ll bring the warehouse too. We had to rope and tie your warehouse man.”

At ten-thirty that night the general left a dinner party given him by the officers of the port. He had had a very pleasant evening, having told the story of being roped over the fence with great success and having indicated the various weaknesses in the General Staff to the exact degree of propriety. At the last minute he had taken Tommy with him, but Tommy had added nothing to the general gaiety.

The general’s car had been mysteriously missing for several hours, but the general had dined well and was not in a captious mood. So he footed it round to Peggy’s lodging, to find she had not returned.

“They work these girls too hard, Tommy,” he observed. “They ought to take it easier. C’est l’armistice.” He liked the sound of that and he repeated it. It reminded him of the chaplain, who used a great deal of French, and that reminded him of the wager.

“I’ll see if my niece is at her headquarters,” he said. “You go back to the hotel and get some sleep.”

“I’m not at all tired, sir,” offered Tommy desperately.

“In that case,” observed the general, “you might take a look round for my car, and if I find out who took it from in front of the hotel this afternoon I’ll make things pleasant for him.”

Tommy turned and with a sinking heart limped off. The general was rather sorry for Tommy. But he had been his aide-de-camp for a good while and there had always been a girl in the offing somewhere. He didn’t take Tommy too hard.

He turned toward Peggy’s headquarters. At the foot of the street lay the sea and beyond that—home. The war was over and they had had no active part in it. Mingled with the general’s regret was a vast thankfulness. The war was over and his boys and millions of other splendid boys were turning their faces toward the setting sun—and home.

There was a prodigious sound of hammering from within Peggy’s building, punctuated by the rip of rending wood. The general stood in a doorway and observed a number of things. First of all Sergeant Gray, with a hatchet in his hand and a checked gingham apron tied round his neck, straightened up from a box and looked down at Peggy, who had an armful of sweaters and was therefore helpless.

“Attention!” said Sergeant Gray sternly. “Eyes front! Unsling equipment!”

“I will not!” said Peggy. “I’ve just got these sweaters—”

“Discipline,” observed Sergeant Gray, “is the instant and willing obedience to orders. Paragraph I, section I, Manual of Instruction in Military Courtesy. I’m going to kiss you.”

“Why didn’t you say that before?” Peggy demanded—and unslung equipment immediately.

“The first one is for me,” said Sergeant Gray, “and the second one is for me, and the third is for the general, bless him.”

“Sergeant!” said the general from the doorway. “There are certain duties I prefer to attend to myself.”

At midnight that night the chaplain was wakened by a knocking at his door and mumbled “Entrez” drowsily.

A uniformed shadow stepped inside, saluted and said in Sergeant Gray’s voice, but with an almost lyric quality to it: “Sir, the general wishes the chaplain to report to him in his room.”

“My compliments to the general, sergeant, and tell him to go to blazes.” However, he reconsidered that instantly and added: “What’s up, Gray? Have I got to get into uniform?”

“I believe not, sir. The general has had some recent information, I think, sir.”

“You don’t see my bedroom slippers anywhere, do you?” asked the chaplain peevishly. “Only death would make me do this at home. If I ever get out of the Army—”

“It’s not so bad, sir,” said Sergeant Gray, restraining an impulse to burst into song. “Here they are, sir. You’ve put them in the washbasin.”

“Gracious!” he said. “I meant to rub out a pair of socks and I must have—”

Sometime later the chaplain, in a pair of army socks and a dressing gown, knocked at the general’s door and entered. The general was in bed, smoking the last of his best cigars, with the eiderdown over his shoulders and a bottle of champagne and a glass and a toothbrush holder beside him on the stand.

“Come in, chaplain,” said the general cheerfully, “and lock the door. If any of my aides-de-camp knock, snore. They can smell champagne through a brick wall.”

“I don’t drink and you know it.”

“Neither do I,” observed the general. “But we’re going home and home is going to be a very dry place. Anyhow this is a toast.”

The chaplain was thrusting his feet into the general’s slippers but he looked up at that.

“Then she’s settled it?”

“She has,” said the general. “You owe me fifty francs. And if any one had told me three years ago that I’d be paying eight dollars to drink to a noncom nephew-in-law I’d have said he was crazy.”

He poured the wine. Outside on the stairs a soldier was making a leisurely and tuneful way to bed. Both men listened and smiled.

The hours I spent with thee, dear heart,

Are as a string of pearls to me,

warbled Sergeant Gray.

“To—them!” said the general, raising his toothbrush mug. “Sorry about the fifty francs, chaplain.”

The chaplain took a modest sip.

“To them!” he said. “As to the fifty francs—Ça ne fait rien.”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of Temperamental People, by Mary Roberts Rinehart.]

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Table of Contents

- TEMPERAMENTAL PEOPLE

- I HER MAJESTY, The Queen

- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII
- IX
- X
- XI

- II THE ALTAR ON THE HILL: The Secretary

- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII

- III CYNARA: The Sculptor

- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII
- IX

- IV THE GREAT SUCCESS: The Singer

- V THE SECRET HOUSE: The Wife

- I
- II
- III

- VI A MIDSUMMER KNIGHT’S DREAM: The Cowboy

- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI

- VII LILY: The Philanderer

- I

- II

- VIII “ÇA NE FAIT RIEN”: The Dough Boy

- I
- II
- III
- IV

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE