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CONTENTS


                PAGE

INTRODUCTION                vii

THE PRELIMINARIES              _Cornelia A. P. Comer_                1

BUTTERCUP-NIGHT                _John Galsworthy_                22

HEPATICAS                _Anne Douglas Sedgwick_                30

POSSESSING PRUDENCE            _Amy Wentworth Stone_                56

THE GLORY-BOX                _Elizabeth Ashe_                68

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD         _Dallas Lore Sharp_                89

IN THE PASHA'S GARDEN          _H. G. Dwight_                98

LITTLE SELVES                _Mary Lerner_                121

THE FAILURE                _Charles Caldwell Dobie_              136

BUSINESS IS BUSINESS           _Henry Seidel Canby_                152

NOTHING                _Zephine Humphrey_                167

A MOTH OF PEACE                _Katharine Fullerton Gerould_         180

IN NO STRANGE LAND             _Katharine Butler_                201

LITTLE BROTHER                _Madeleine Z. Doty_                208

WHAT ROAD GOETH HE?            _F. J. Louriet_                217

THE CLEARER SIGHT              _Ernest Starr_                227

THE GARDEN OF MEMORIES         _C. A. Mercer_                252

THE CLEAREST VOICE             _Margaret Sherwood_                259

THE MARBLE CHILD               _E. Nesbit_                270

THE ONE LEFT                _E. V. Lucas_                283

THE LEGACY OF RICHARD HUGHES   _Margaret Lynn_                290

OF WATER AND THE SPIRIT        _Margaret Prescott Montague_          310

MR. SQUEM                _Arthur Russell Taylor_               326

  BIOGRAPHICAL AND INTERPRETATIVE NOTES                337




INTRODUCTION

THE SHORT STORY


There is a story current among companionable golfers of a countryman who
reluctantly accepted an invitation from a group of friendly associates
to try his unpracticed hand at golf. When they all arrived at the links,
his friends carefully placed the little carbonadoed sphere upon the tee,
and told their aged neophyte that he must try to send this little
painted ball to the first hole--plainly marked by the distant waving red
flag toward which they pointed. The stalwart old man swung his club
valiantly, hit the golf-ball a square, ringing blow, and watched it
eagerly as it made its long, swift flight toward the far-off
putting-green. His three friends, all loudly congratulating him upon his
stroke, went with him in his silent search for the ball. Finally they
found it lying just three or four inches from the edge of the first
hole. A look of exultant astonishment was upon their faces; a look of
keen disappointment upon the face of the old man. "Gee, I missed it," he
muttered in disgust. His stroke had been the traditional stroke of the
ignorant lucky beginner; he had unwittingly accomplished a feat beyond
the dream of the trained expert.

Something similar to this triumphant accomplishment of the golf links
has occasionally happened in the realm of story-telling. An untrained
narrator, with a good tale to tell and with a natural instinct to select
the dramatic incidents and arrange them luckily in effective sequence,
has held his hearers in continuously rapt attention, and won from them,
at the close of his story, round upon round of spontaneous applause.
But as the literary world has grown older and more mature in its
;sthetic judgments, it has naturally grown more exacting. As narrator
after narrator has told his stories, the critical public and the
academic critics have come to impose certain definite technical
demands--demands not so definite or so exacting, however, that the
splendor of success in certain ways has not pardoned even rather glaring
neglects and defects along certain other concurrent ways.

Now it has been my pleasant task during the recent months to read or to
reread scores upon scores of short stories that have been published in
the _Atlantic Monthly_. My object has been to select from the Atlantic
files some of the best and most representative of these narratives for
publication in book form, and thus make these significant stories more
readily available for the college, school, and the reading public. Out
of this study, as it has combined and recombined with all my impressions
of past readings, have come certain convictions that have grown more
persistent as the reading and the selecting have progressed.

The net result of this thinking, I may at the beginning assert, has been
to expand and liberalize my convictions concerning the art and technique
of short-story writing. The choice of theme is multitudinous, the
methods of allowable treatment generously variable, the emphasis upon
character, plot, and setting easily shiftable, and the ultimate effects
as diversified as our human moods and interests. Contrary to a currently
repeated assertion, there is, I am convinced, no strict Atlantic type of
story--at least none so rigorously conceived as not to allow
unquestioned commendation of the narrative art of such varied
personalities as Bret Harte, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Sarah Orne Jewett,
John Galsworthy, Mrs. Comer, Mrs. Gerould, E. Nesbit, Jack London, or
indeed that whole luminous galaxy of skilled story writers--many of them
without fame--who for the past sixty years have been contributing the
best of their literary selves to the _Atlantic_. Yet a study of these
contributions of such varied types convinces one of certain large
demands which each successive editor has, with somewhat latitudinarian
rigor, pretty positively held in mind while he was determining the worth
of the given product. What, we may be interested in asking, are these
larger and more persistent demands?


_The unified impression_

Perhaps the most obvious requirement is that one upon which Edgar Allan
Poe, in his brilliant critical essays on the art of the short story,
laid the strongest stress--the demand that the narrator produce an
unquestioned unified effect or impression. An examination of the
narrative method of the old Metrical Romances and of many of the Arabian
Nights Tales will by contrast illustrate Poe's comment. In those
writings there was often no apparent plan. The hero started out and had
an adventure. This the story-teller narrated as Episode No. 1. The hero
continued and had another adventure, similar or dissimilar to the first.
This we recognize as Episode No. 2. And thus the story continued until
the narrator's powers of invention or endurance were exhausted. We close
the reading with no sense of satisfied unity--no oneness of impression.
At the beginning of the story, the writer of these Romances and Tales
apparently had no definitely preconceived plan, he allowed no
foreshadowing of catastrophe, he was careless alike of both beginning
and end, he made no conscious use of suspense, setting,
character-contrast, reverting narrative, climax, or any of the numerous
devices that make up the technique of modern short-story writing. More
particularly did he ignore the principle of unified impression.


_Unified impression secured by character domination_

While unity of impression is the sovereign demand in the modern short
story, the ways in which this impression may be secured possess
interesting variety. One of the most important of these ways is evident
in the pervading or directing influence of some strongly dominant
character. Events move in accordance with the will of some one
person--or, it may be some group of persons with closely related powers
and aims.

An interesting example of single character domination is seen in Miss
Sherwood's story, _The Clearest Voice_. Alice, the wife, has been dead
five years, yet it is her personality that still pervades and governs
the home. Her spirit of kindly interest, her instinct for the ;sthetic,
her household control--all these have persisted through the long months
that have intervened since her death. But it is when the husband is
faced by the temptation to accept an inheritance which legally, though
not justly, belongs to him--it is then that the influence of the wife's
assertive character silently and determinedly dictates the correct
decision. The husband's pressing financial difficulties, the urgings of
the relatives, the unquestioned legality of the bequest--these are all
finally swept aside by the subtle workings of a quietly persisting
ethical force.

Sometimes an author reveals the strength and wisdom of one of his
characters by allowing this character to yield to the wisdom and
domination of another. I am thinking of Mrs. Comer's story, _The Wealth
of Timmy Zimmerman_.[1] As we read the first part of this narrative, we
are interested only in Timmy Zimmerman and the personal character
problems which the huge profits of the tobacco trust suddenly thrust
upon this uncultured but good-souled parvenu. We watch him in his early
struggles so full of energy and bold emprise; we rejoice with him in his
significant financial triumphs, and later we watch him as he tries, by
an expensive building enterprise, by tours through Europe, by the rapid
and careless driving of his ten-thousand dollar red automobile, to win
back the nervous contentment that was the happy companion of those early
years of adventurous poverty. He dominates each separate situation, but
he does not solve his problem. It is only when he meets Molly Betterton
and sees himself as analyzed by her candid native acumen, that he learns
his own weakness and the true potentialities of his wealth. Her
character is strong enough to win dominion over him; it is not strong
enough to dominate the story and lure the reader away from the
controlling interest in the personality whose career the reader has so
intently watched. The unity of impression is firmly and continuously
centered in the portrayal of Timmy Zimmerman's character, and it is that
which tautly holds the reader's attention in leash.

A more recent story that secures its chief interest from character
portrayal is Mr. Arthur Russell Taylor's _Mr. Squem_. Mr. Squem is a
traveling man who sells Mercury rubber tires. He wears clothes that
arrest attention--broad striped affairs that seemed stripes before they
were clothes; his talk is profusely interlarded with vulgar but
picturesque slang; he is far removed from the academy. Brought into
direct contrast with the Reverend Allan Dare and Professor William Emory
Browne, his crudity is the more grossly apparent. It is later enhanced
by the glimpse we get of his room--'extremely dennish, smitingly red as
to walls, oppressive with plush upholstery. A huge deerhead, jutting
from over the mantel, divided honors with a highly-colored September
Morn, affrontingly framed. On a shelf stood a small bottle. It contained
a finger of Mr. Squem, amputated years before, in alcohol.'

But in the midst of a railroad wreck, we lose all thought of these
banalities and crudities; we take Mr. Squem for what he really is--a
genuine, large-hearted, efficient minister unto his fellow men. The
impression he creates dominates the entire situation.

Of the classic stories which admirably illustrate this method of
securing a unity of impression through concentrated character interest,
we like to revert to Bret Harte's _Tennessee's Partner_. It is of small
moment that we do not know this man's name--of small moment indeed that
he seems, throughout his mining career at Sandy Bar, to have been
content to have his personality dimmed by the somewhat more luminous
aura of Tennessee. But when Tennessee's repeated offences bring him to
trial before Judge Lynch, and finally to his doom on the ominous tree at
the top of Morley's Hill, Tennessee's partner comes suddenly upon the
scene and overpoweringly dominates the situation. We close our reading
of the story completely impressed by the devoted loyalty of Tennessee's
partner--the loyalty that creates the unified impression.

And this same unity of impression thus secured in _The Clearest Voice_,
_The Wealth of Timmy Zimmerman_, _Mr. Squem_, and _Tennessee's Partner_
by concentrated interest in character, is easily discernible, in scores
of other stories. The method is artistically employed by Hawthorne in
_The Great Stone Face_, in Maxim Gorky's _Tchelkache_, Turgenef's _A
Lear of the Steppes_, J. M. Barrie's _Cree Queery_ and _Myra Drolby_,
Thomas Nelson Page's _Marse Chan_, Henry James's _The Real Thing_,
Joseph Conrad's _The Informer_, and such well-known Atlantic stories as
Anna Fuller's _The Boy_, Esther Tiffany's _Anna Mareea_, Florence
Gilmore's _Little Brother_, Ellen Mackubin's _Rosita_, Charles Dobie's
_The Failure_, Clarkson Crane's _Snipe_, and Christina Krysto's
_Babanchik_. Indeed the list is well-nigh inexhaustible, and is
constantly being increased by the many gifted writers who, enriching our
current literature, see in personal character the germ of
story-interest.


_Unified impression secured by plot_

Just as in looking at a finished piece of artistic tapestry we get a
sense of harmonious design, so in contemplating the events of a
well-told story, our sense of artistic completeness is satisfied by the
skill displayed in the weaving and interweaving of incident--such
weaving and interweaving as bring the significant events into the
immediate foreground, and group the items of lesser moment in such an
unobtrusive manner as to merge them into harmony with the main design.

Preceding the beginning of any story, we assume the existence of a state
of repose. Either there is nothing happening, or, if events are
happening, they are simply happening in the atmosphere of dull and
inconsequential routine, and are accordingly without the pale of
narratable notice. Then, suddenly, or gradually, something happens to
disturb this repose; and to this initial exciting force are traceable
the succeeding events, with such varied culminations as prosperity, or
poverty, or dejection, tragedy or joy, or restored calm, or any one of
the multitudinous finalities that life brings with her in her equipage.

The whole principle of plot, as here briefly analyzed, is simply and
artistically revealed in Mr. Ernest Starr's _The Clearer Sight_--an
admirable example of a story whose unity is secured largely by the
effective handling of situation and incident. To Noakes, the young
scientist who is the central character in the story, the master chemist,
Henry Maxineff, has given certain general suggestions for a formula
which will give an explosive of great value and of high potential power.
The young man, following these general lines, discovers that, by slight
additions and alterations, he can successfully work out the formula and
immediately sell his secret to a foreign government. The sum he would
thus secure would amply justify him in proposing marriage to Becky
Hallam, the girl of his choice. We watch him in his brisk experiments
and in his conclusive yielding to the temptation. We see him betraying
his employer and at the same time failing to meet the standard of
confidence which is demanded by the girl he loves. Right in the midst of
these scientific successes and these ethical failures comes the terrible
explosion in the laboratory where Noakes was working in secret. He is
blinded by the accident--permanently, he thinks. Harassed by his
sufferings--more particularly by his spiritual sufferings--he makes his
confessions to Mr. Maxineff and Miss Hallam, and looks despairingly
toward the empty future. The story closes with the physician's hope that
the loss of his sight is after all but temporary. As we end our reading
and view the events in retrospect, we are conscious of having seen the
various threads of interest woven into a complete and unified design.

Again, the principles of plot structure are clearly seen quietly
creating their unified impression in _A Sea Change_, one of Alice
Brown's homely stories.[2] Cynthia Miller, a New England housewife, had
lived for years her life of dull routine in an isolated mountain farm
eight miles from the nearest village. Her husband, Timothy, 'was a son
of the soil, made out of the earth, and not many generations removed
from that maternity.' Cynthia gradually comes to despise her life and
her husband's crude carelessness--exemplified by his habitual animal
aura and his newly-greased boots by the open oven door. With little ado,
but with grim determination, she leaves him and goes to the sea-side
home of her sister Frances. Cynthia is taken ill, but is at length cured
by the kindly village doctor and the silent ministrations of the
neighboring sea. Timothy, changed by the sudden departure of his wife
and the opportunity for introspection that his lonely life now brings
him, shakes off a bit of his earthiness and goes, after several weeks,
to find his wife. We listen to the brief reconciliation and see Timothy
begin to breathe in new life of aroused love and appreciation. The
author's skillful manipulation of the action makes us live in the glow
of a clearly perceived oneness of impression.

There are, of course, thousands of stories which secure this singleness
of effect by a similar skill in the handling of situations and
incidents. Among these many we need mention only a few whose unity is
largely secured by plot-interest--Thomas Bailey Aldrich's _Marjorie
Daw_, Maupassant's _The Necklace_, Poe's _Murders in the Rue Morgue_,
Stockton's _A Tale of Negative Gravity_ and _The Lady or the Tiger_,
Kipling's _Without Benefit of Clergy_, Pushkin's _The Shot_, A. Conan
Doyle's _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_, and Jack London's _A Day's
Lodging_.


_Unified impression secured by setting_

Perhaps the most significant critical comment on setting--the third
important element in the story-weaving process that secures oneness of
impression--is that frequently quoted conversation of Stevenson with
Graham Balfour: 'You may,' said Stevenson, 'take a certain atmosphere
and get action and persons to express it. I'll give you an
example--_The Merry Men_. There I began with the feeling of one of those
islands on the west coast of Scotland, and I gradually developed the
story to express the sentiment with which the coast affected me.'

There is no sensitive reader who will not sympathize with this feeling
and immediately understand how the atmosphere of a particular place will
act upon inventive genius and become the exciting force for the
production of a story. The squalid surroundings in the city slums, the
gay glamour of a garishly-lighted casino, the unending stretch of desert
waste, the dim twilight or the shrouded darkness of the pine forest, the
bleakness of the beaches in midwinter, the sounding cataracts, haunting
one like a passion--how rich in storied suggestiveness may be each of
these to him who already has within him the instinct of story or
romance.

How the mood of place may effect its influence is well expressed in the
opening passages of John Galsworthy's _Buttercup-Night_, which
sensitively analyzes the feelings for an unnamed bit of land in the
'West country' as the author experienced them one Sunday night of a
by-gone early June.

     'Why is it that in some places there is such a feeling of life
     being all one; not merely a long picture-show for human eyes, but a
     single breathing, glowing, growing thing, of which we are no more
     important a part than the swallows and magpies, the foals and sheep
     in the meadows, the sycamores and ash trees and flowers in the
     fields, the rocks and little bright streams, or even the long
     fleecy clouds and their soft-shouting drivers, the winds?

     'True, we register these parts of being, and they--so far as we
     know--do not register us; yet it is impossible to feel, in such
     places as I speak of, the busy, dry, complacent sense of being all
     that matters, which in general we humans have so strongly.

     'In these rare spots, that are always in the remote country,
     untouched by the advantages of civilization, one is conscious of an
     enwrapping web or mist of spirit, the glamorous and wistful wraith
     of all the vanished shapes that once dwelt there in such close
     comradeship.'

We can readily see, as we read _Buttercup-Night_, that it is the
atmosphere of the place that subtly dictates the telling of the story,
and at the end leaves the reader breathing this delicious June air and
living within the charmed romance of this accumulated mass of magical
yellow. What happens is interesting, but it is interesting largely
because the incidents are fused and integrated with the hovering spirit
of place and time--here as dominating in their charm as is the weird,
mysterious Usher homestead in its gloom.

While such stories as Stevenson's _Merry Men_ and Galsworthy's
_Buttercup-Night_ and Poe's _The Fall of the House of Usher_ illustrate
in a particularly striking way the dominant influence of setting, we
recall scores upon scores of stories that have an added power because
their authors have shown skill in the creation of a permeating and
directing environment. Among the more famous of these stories are Sarah
Orne Jewett's _The Queen's Twin_,[3] Israel Zangwill's _They that Walk
in Darkness_, Prosper M;rim;e's _Mateo Falcone_, Hardy's _Wessex Tales_,
Lafcadio Hearn's _Youma_,[4] Jack London's _Children of the Frost_, John
Fox's _Christmas Eve on Lonesome_, Edith Wyatt's _In November_,[5] and
Mrs. Gerould's _The Moth of Peace_.[6]


_Unified impression secured by theme_

Another element of the story which we find interesting to discover and
analyze is the author's dominant theme--what in the older days we might
have unapologetically called the moral of the story. But along with the
development of the technique of the short story, there came a school of
critics and writers that shied terribly at this mention of the word
moral; and such writers as Stevenson often seemed over-conscious of its
lurking danger. In such consciousness, Stevenson wrote wonderful stories
of adventure and mystery, such as _Treasure Island_ and _The Sire de
Maletroit's Door_. Yet the native instinct toward emphasis upon theme
allowed him to write such powerful ethical stories as _Markheim_ and
_Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. But in these, as in most of the modern
thematic stories, the ethical truth pervades rather than intrudes. It is
so firmly woven into incident and character and surroundings and natural
dramaturgy that its identity is not exposed to naked bareness, but
combines with other elements to produce a perfect unity through harmony
of tone and effect.

Among the recent Atlantic story-writers this harmonious linking is seen
happily existent in the deft workmanship of Mrs. C. A. P. Comer and Anne
Douglas Sedgwick. In each number of three notable trilogies which these
gifted writers have contributed, there is an artistic treatment of three
notable themes. In Mrs. Comer's _Preliminaries_, _The Kinzer Portraits_,
and _The Long Inheritance_ we find the author's implied comments on
Engagement, Marriage, and Divorce. In Anne Douglas Sedgwick's
unconnected floral trilogy--_Hepaticas_, _Carnations_, and
_Pansies_--there is in turn reflected Miss Sedgwick's attitude toward
three themes which are less concrete and which demand a longer
phrasing. In the first there is the world-old story of a noble spirited
woman's love and sacrifice and ardent wishings for her self-victimized
son. In _Carnations_ we have the story of a husband, Rupert Wilson,
released from the bondage of an unfortunate infatuation and restored to
the sanity of love. In _Pansies_ we have a generous tribute to quiet
sentiment, developed by a study in character contrasts--the
simple-hearted woman, loving a simple garden, contrasted with the kindly
disposed but worldly-environed Mrs. Lennard, fond of display and Dorothy
Perkins effects, and laying a disproportioned stress upon the expensive
and the modern.

In none of these six stories is there the slightest suggestion that the
narrative has been conceived in the spirit of propaganda. It would be
impossible to say even that it was the underlying theme which gave the
initial conception to the narrative and directed its progress. Any one
of these six stories I can fancy beginning in plot, or in character, or
in setting. Plot, character, setting, and theme--all are here, but all
are so happily combined that I feel no disproportionate emphasis, and
hence no forcing of a technical element. I only know that, personally,
when I think over these stories, I find the theme of each leaving its
strong and lingering impression.

What is true regarding this effective combination of elements in these
stories of Mrs. Comer's and Miss Sedgwick's is of course true of many of
the Atlantic stories which I have been reading. Perhaps in the majority
of the best there is such a thorough merging of all the elements that
the final impression falls upon neither character nor plot nor setting
nor theme. The author has had something worth while to relate, and he
has related it in a simple and natural way,--all unconscious of, or
happily triumphant over, any studied technique in the art of narration.
It has indeed been a conviction in the minds of some of the Atlantic
editors that most persons, even though untrained in manipulating the
story-maker's gear, have at least one experience--real or imagined--that
is abundantly worth telling and worth writing. Unconsciously of course
this artless narrator might throw into bold relief theme, character,
setting, or plot. Or he might unconsciously merge these separate
interests.


_The woman writers_

Aside from the mere contemplation of story-element technique, there are
many other interesting observations which naturally come to one who
reads critically the currently published fiction. He who examines the
recent Atlantic files will be immediately impressed by the dominant
place held by women writers of the short story--Mrs. Wharton, Mrs.
Comer, Mrs. Gerould, Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Brown, Mary Antin, Zephine
Humphrey, Edith Ronald Merrielees, Margaret Prescott Montague, Kathleen
Norris, E. Nesbit, Laura Spencer Portor, Anna Fuller, Edith Wyatt,
Margaret Lynn, Elizabeth Ashe, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Elsie Singmaster,
Margaret Sherwood. Among the Atlantic contributors we should find it
difficult indeed to match this list with an equal number of men equally
gifted in story-telling power. But even if we should succeed in such a
fatuous pairing of talent, we should still be impressed with the high
place attained by the women writers--high in contrast with the place
which they have attained in painting, sculpture, architecture, drama,
and music.

And why this high attainment in the realm of the short story? Perhaps it
is partially due to a lighter-winged fancy native in the feminine
mind--a fancy that roves with more natural ease and grace among the
animals and flowers of earth, among the clouds and stars and spirits of
the sky, among the demon-haunted grottoes of the underworld. From all
these easily-directed journeys perhaps it turns more naturally to the
penetrable secrets of human motive--penetrable, however, only to those
hearts which yield quickly, spontaneously--even wantonly--to the springs
of love, hate, beauty, justice, jealousy, fear, vengeance, and the
silent routine of daily duty. Doing all this of its natural self, the
heart can more readily guide the mind in the deft record of vicarious
action. Leastwise, to make a simple record of a real or an imagined
experience is a task which can be more easily done by girls than by
boys.

As boys and girls grow into maturity and the desire for contact with
life increases, the masculine mind finds its natural outlet in business,
in wrestlings with the soil, in contests of law and--at the present
moment, alas!--in the chaos of relentless war. Woman's sphere, though
continually enlarging, is still relatively narrowed, and she seeks her
freedom in the realm of imagination, thus identifying herself oftentimes
in the work-a-day contests of men. This mental exercise within the wide
gamut of imagined emotions naturally helps her to enter sympathetically
into varied contests. And it is perhaps because of her broadened
understanding that she is fuller and truer in her written record.

The feminine mind, moreover, is more observant of detail and more ready
to perceive a lack of harmony in arrangement; and while mere fullness of
observation might in isolated cases lead to incontinent garrulousness,
the generous flow is usually held in sufficient check by that nicer
feminine perception of an ;sthetic effect that dictates shearing and
compression.

Perhaps the widening of the educational field, the world's fuller
acknowledgment of woman's varied ability, her easier mastery of delicate
technique, a more habitual access to a writing-pad--perhaps all these
combine with other facts and circumstances to encourage her in this
prolific output of marketable fiction. At any rate, the fact is easily
apparent.


_The stamp of authenticity_

A further interesting fact revealed in an examination of Atlantic
narratives is the encouragement of that type of story which carries with
it the stamp of an authentic atmosphere. More than a generation ago this
magazine was printing the stories of Bret Harte--stories that revealed
with great accuracy and skill and sympathy the spirit of the California
mining camp. Bret Harte had lived and breathed the grim and romantic
spirit of this environment. Fusing this experience with an imagination
that emotionalized a native instinct for story-telling, Bret Harte was
able to lend to his writing a verisimilitude that easily won the
reader's interest in the charm and novelty of that strenuous and
elemental western life.

While the work of Bret Harte perhaps most strikingly illustrates this
power of authentic portrayal of experience and place, there are scores
of Atlantic stories that employ the same general method. Sarah Orne
Jewett, in such stories as _The Queen's Twin_, _The Life of Nancy_, and
_A Dummet Shepherd_, has admirably re-created the simple life of rural
New England. Lafcadio Hearn has realistically brought to us the spirit
of Japan, Jacob Riis has portrayed for us many pictures of New York
tenement life, Joseph Husband has brought us into the atmosphere of
industrialism, H. G. Dwight and Charles Johnson have allowed us to
breathe the spirit of Orientalism. And scores of other writers, such as
Dallas Lore Sharp, E. Morlae, Margaret Prescott Montague, Abraham
Rihbany, Mary Antin, Mildred Aldrich, Simeon Strunsky, after they have
lived their separate experiences, have shared with us the intimate
memories which those personal experiences have bequeathed.


_Sordidness rejected_

The Atlantic traditions, for the most part, have rejected the harrowing
and the sordid and the meretricious. Contrasted with the tone of tragic
realism so often dominant in Gorky, Dostoevsky, Turgenef, Maupassant,
and Zola, we usually find in the pages of the _Atlantic_ an emphasis
upon themes which suggest a gentler and more humane spirit. The winds of
heaven do, of course, sometimes blow over places that are bleak, barren,
and desolate. They shriek and moan through winter wilds, and sometimes
the human mood that corresponds to this despair has found its reflection
in stories which the _Atlantic_ has printed. But the mission of the
magazine has in general been in the sunlit fields or near the
hearthfire's glow. If it sometimes has witnessed tragedy, it has never
found delight in the disclosure of grimness for grimness' sake. It has
been more watchful of scenes within the commonplaces of human action;
here the writers have found themes of quiet pathos, of homely humor, and
of rich romance. Small wonder, indeed, if since August, 1914, grimmer
scenes than usual should not sometimes shadow the pages! But even so;
the writers have not yet lost their sanity, their hopefulness, or their
quiet sense of humor.


_Possibilities within the future_

After these comments on the more dominant characteristics of the short
story it is natural to inquire into the possible future of the art. It
is apparent that writers are paying careful attention to technique, and
there is real danger to the art if technique is to be too narrowly
interpreted and too slavishly followed. A credulous acceptance of a
guide has always worked havoc in the field of creative literature.
Aristotle, and Horace, and Longinus--to revert to a literary period now
far distant--showed admirable critical acumen, but it may be sincerely
questioned whether they enhanced the worth of Grecian and Roman
literature. We may be quite sure that the critical writings of neither
Boileau nor Pope deepened or improved French or English poetry. Will our
short stories be any better here in America because Brander Matthews,
Bliss Perry, Clayton Hamilton, Henry S. Canby, W. B. Pitkin, Miss
Albright, Miss Ashmun, and a score of others have written so
entertainingly about them? As I have read these criticisms and as I have
seen new writers apparently influenced by these criticisms and by the
methods obvious in Poe, Bret Harte, Kipling, and O. Henry, I have been
reluctantly made to feel that we were perhaps on the verge of yielding
to the technique of the telling rather than to the substance of the
experience.

Where art becomes too self-conscious and too critical, it sacrifices
spontaneity and elemental power, and smothers itself in the wrappings of
its self-woven web. Reliance upon technique and long practice in its use
will help crudeness to rise to mediocrity, but the process will never
lift the mediocre writer to the plane of the supremely excellent or the
austerely great.

Perhaps the present danger lies partly in the attitude of the magazine
editor whose sceptre is his checkbook. Let us not deceive ourselves.
Literature is now a business--or if not wholly commercialized, it is
acutely sensitive to the laws of the trade. The purely commercial
editors, with their eyes riveted to the main chance, have come to
recognize the power of technique, and to it they have been paying
bountiful tribute. The public has in turn learned to expect the sudden
start, the swift pace, the placarded climax, the clever paradox, the
crisp repartee, the pinchbeck style, the bared realism, the concluding
click. It is all very perfect and very regular, and the editor in
accepting the manuscript that adheres to each conventional requirement
encloses his check for two hundred dollars in a letter that contains an
order for a half dozen more of the identical type. One of the deplorable
adjuncts of this procedure is that the editor often realizes the
emptiness of this technically correct story, and his own best literary
judgment spurns it. But trying to objectify what his clientele would
applaud, he pays the price and orders more.

Conversely, a story with genuine substance and sincere feeling comes to
his desk. He reads it and approves. Then he asks that fateful
question--What will my reading public say? He concludes that they will
note the utter lack of climax, of cleverness, of ingenuity, of realistic
contact with unadorned everydayness. He closes the incident by a return
of the manuscript with a printed rejection slip enclosed.

But this procedure is sometimes happily reversed: an editor has had the
fortitude to ignore the fancied judgment of his readers and has relied
upon his own impressions of what constitutes literary worth. He is
conscious that the story he has accepted is written in utter ignorance
or in total disregard of traditional propriety and the laws of modern
technique; yet it carries a message, it reveals character, it shows real
thinking powers. Accepted and published, as was Arthur Russell Taylor's
_Mr. Squem_, it has been enthusiastically received by its readers.

There is one final conviction that emerges from the varied and the
multitudinous impressions that come from the reading of all these
stories. Every individual has an experience worth narrating; and most
individuals have scores upon scores of experiences--real or
imagined--that are worth narrating. To succeed in the attempt one does
not necessarily need to be a conscious master of technique. He must, of
course, have a reasonably firm command of his vernacular--indeed, to
succeed in any large degree, he must attain unquestioned mastery and
fittingly fashion his style to the theme immediately at hand. He should
have a sense of organization that deftly orders the proper sequence of
events and skillfully adjusts both minor and major incidents to secure a
unified impression. There is, I am convinced, no single minor rule that
critics may formulate which will stand a rigid acid test. Genius
abrogates every law; talent may abrogate most laws. A great experience,
a great situation, a great theme, a great character, a great scene, a
great emotion--any one of these may direct even an ordinary writer to
successful narration. The skilled story-teller will win success from
even scanty material--but the scanty material will be enriched by a
sense of humor, an ingenious fancy, a felicitous style, a controlling
imagination, a deft craftsmanship, or a keen perception of the value and
regulation of detail.




ATLANTIC NARRATIVES




THE PRELIMINARIES

BY CORNELIA A. P. COMER


I


Young Oliver Pickersgill was in love with Peter Lannithorne's daughter.
Peter Lannithorne was serving a six-year term in the penitentiary for
embezzlement.

It seemed to Ollie that there was only one right-minded way of looking
at these basal facts of his situation. But this simple view of the
matter was destined to receive several shocks in the course of his
negotiations for Ruth Lannithorne's hand. I say negotiations advisedly.
Most young men in love have only to secure the consent of the girl and
find enough money to go to housekeeping. It is quite otherwise when you
wish to marry into a royal family, or to ally yourself with a criminal's
daughter. The preliminaries are more complicated.

Ollie thought a man ought to marry the girl he loves, and prejudices be
hanged! In the deeps of his soul, he probably knew this to be the
magnanimous, manly attitude, but certainly there was no condescension in
his outward bearing when he asked Ruth Lannithorne to be his wife. Yet
she turned on him fiercely, bristling with pride and tense with
over-wrought nerves.

'I will never marry any one,' she declared, 'who doesn't respect my
father as I do!'

If Oliver's jaw fell, it is hardly surprising. He had expected her to
say she would never many into a family where she was not welcome. He had
planned to get around the natural objections of his parents
somehow--the details of this were vague in his mind--and then he meant
to reassure her warmly, and tell her that personal merit was the only
thing that counted with him or his. He may have visualized himself as
wiping away her tears and gently raising her to share the safe social
pedestal whereon the Pickersgills were firmly planted. The young do have
these visions not infrequently. But to be asked to respect Peter
Lannithorne, about whom he knew practically nothing save his present
address!

'I don't remember that I ever saw your father, Ruth,' he faltered.

'He was the best man,' said the girl excitedly, 'the kindest, the most
indulgent.--That's another thing, Ollie. I will never marry an indulgent
man, nor one who will let his wife manage him. If it hadn't been for
mother--' She broke off abruptly.

Ollie tried to look sympathetic and not too intelligent. He had heard
that Mrs. Lannithorne was considered difficult.

'I oughtn't to say it, but can't explain father unless I do. Mother
nagged; she wanted more money than there was; she made him feel her
illnesses, and our failings, and the overdone beefsteak, and the
under-done bread,--everything that went wrong, always, was his fault.
His fault--because he didn't make more money. We were on the edge of
things, and she wanted to be in the middle, as she was used to being. Of
course, she really hasn't been well, but I think it's mostly nerves,'
said Ruth, with the terrible hardness of the young. 'Anyhow, she might
just as well have stuck knives into him as to say the things she did. It
hurt him--like knives, I could see him wince--and try harder--and get
discouraged--and then, at last--' The girl burst into a passion of
tears.

Oliver tried to soothe her. Secretly he was appalled at these squalid
revelations of discordant family life. The domestic affairs of the
Pickersgills ran smoothly, in affluence and peace. Oliver had never
listened to a nagging woman in his life. He had an idea that such
phenomena were confined to the lower classes.

'Don't you care for me at all, Ruth?'

The girl crumpled her wet handkerchief. 'Ollie, you're the most
beautiful thing that ever happened--except my father. He was beautiful,
too; indeed, indeed, he was. I'll never think differently. I can't. He
tried so hard.'

All the latent manliness in the boy came to the surface and showed
itself.

'Ruth, darling, I don't want you to think differently. It's right for
you to be loyal and feel as you do. You see, you know, and the world
doesn't. I'll take what you say and do as you wish. You mustn't think
I'm on the other side. I'm not. I'm on your side, wherever that is. When
the time comes I'll show you. You may trust me, Ruth.'

He was eager, pleading, earnest. He looked at the moment so good, so
loving and sincere, that the girl, out of her darker experience of life,
wondered wistfully if it were really true that Providence ever let
people just live their lives out like that--being good, and prosperous,
and generous, advancing from happiness to happiness, instead of stubbing
along painfully as she felt she had done, from one bitter experience to
another, learning to live by failures.

It must be beautiful to learn from successes instead, as it seemed to
her Oliver had done. How could any one refuse to share such a radiant
life when it was offered? As for loving Oliver, that was a foregone
conclusion. Still, she hesitated.

'You're awfully dear and good to me, Ollie,' she said. 'But I want you
to see father. I want you to go and talk to him about this, and know him
for yourself. I know I'm asking a hard thing of you, but, truly, I
believe it's best. If _he_ says it's all right for me to marry you, I
will--if your family want me, of course,' she added as an afterthought.

'Oughtn't I to speak to your mother?' hesitated Oliver.

'Oh,--mother? Yes, I suppose she'd like it,' said Ruth, absent-mindedly.
'Mother has views about getting married, Ollie. I dare say she'll want
to tell you what they are. You mustn't think they're my views, though.'

'I'd rather hear yours, Ruth.'

She flashed a look at him that opened for him the heavenly deeps that
lie before the young and the loving, and he had a sudden vision of their
life as a long sunlit road, winding uphill, winding down, but sunlit
always--because looks like that illumine any dusk.

'I'll tell you my views--some day,' Ruth said softly. 'But first--'

'First I must talk to my father, your mother, your father.' Oliver
checked them off on his fingers. 'Three of them. Seems to me that's a
lot of folks to consult about a thing that doesn't really concern
anybody but you and me!'


II

After the fashion of self-absorbed youth, Oliver had never noticed Mrs.
Lannithorne especially. She had been to him simply a sallow little
figure in the background of Ruth's vivid young life; someone to be
spoken to very politely, but otherwise of no particular moment.

If his marital negotiations did nothing else for him, they were at least
opening his eyes to the significance of the personalities of older
people.

The things Ruth said about her mother had prepared him to find that
lady querulous and difficult, but essentially negligible. Face to face
with Mrs. Lannithorne, he had a very different impression. She received
him in the upstairs sitting-room to which her semi-invalid habits
usually confined her. Wrapped in a white wool shawl and lying in a long
Canton lounging-chair by a sunshiny window, she put out a chilly hand in
greeting, and asked the young man to be seated.

Oliver, scanning her countenance, received an unexpected impression of
dignity. She was thin and nervous, with big dark eyes peering out of a
pale, narrow face; she might be a woman with a grievance, but he
apprehended something beyond mere fretfulness in the discontent of her
expression. There was suffering and thought in her face, and even when
the former is exaggerated and the latter erroneous, these are impressive
things.

'Mrs. Lannithorne, have you any objection to letting Ruth marry me?'

'Mr. Pickersgill, what are your qualifications for the care of a wife
and family?'

Oliver hesitated. 'Why, about what anybody's are, I think,' he said, and
was immediately conscious of the feebleness of this response. 'I mean,'
he added, flushing to the roots of his blond hair, 'that my prospects in
life are fair. I am in my father's office, you know. I am to have a
small share in the business next year. I needn't tell you that the firm
is a good one. If you want to know about my qualifications as a
lawyer--why, I can refer you to people who can tell you if they think I
am promising.'

'Do your family approve of this marriage?'

'I haven't talked to them about it yet.'

'Have you ever saved any money of your own earning, or have you any
property in your own name?'

Oliver thought guiltily of his bank account, which had a surprising way
of proving, when balanced, to be less than he expected.

'Well,--not exactly.'

'In other words, then, Mr. Pickersgill, you are a young and absolutely
untried man; you are in your father's employ and practically at his
mercy; you propose a great change in your life of which you do not know
that he approves; you have no resources of your own, and you are not
even sure of your earning capacity if your father's backing were
withdrawn. In these circumstances you plan to double your expenses and
assume the whole responsibility of another person's life, comfort, and
happiness. Do you think that you have shown me that your qualifications
are adequate?'

All this was more than a little disconcerting. Oliver was used to being
accepted as old Pickersgill's only son--which meant a cheerfully
accorded background of eminence, ability, and comfortable wealth. It had
not occurred to him to detach himself from that background and see how
he looked when separated from it. He felt a little angry, and also a
little ashamed of the fact that he did not bulk larger as a personage,
apart from his environment. Nevertheless, he answered her question
honestly.

'No, Mrs. Lannithorne, I don't think that I have.'

She did not appear to rejoice in his discomfiture. She even seemed a
little sorry for it, but she went on quietly:--

'Don't think I am trying to prove that you are the most ineligible young
man in the city. But it is absolutely necessary that a man should stand
on his own feet, and firmly, before he undertakes to look after other
lives than his own. Otherwise there is nothing but misery for the woman
and children who depend upon him. It is a serious business, getting
married.'

'I begin to think it is,' muttered Oliver blankly.

'I don't _want_ my daughters to marry,' said Mrs. Lannithorne. 'The life
is a thousand times harder than that of the self-supporting
woman--harder work, fewer rewards, less enjoyment, less security. That
is true even of an ordinarily happy marriage. And if they are not
happy--Oh, the bitterness of them!'

She was speaking rapidly now, with energy, almost with anguish. Oliver,
red in the face, subdued, but eager to refute her out of the depths and
heights of his inexperience, held himself rigidly still and listened.

'Did you ever hear that epigram of Disraeli--that all men should marry,
but no women? That is what I believe! At least, if women must marry, let
others do it, not my children, not my little girls!--It is curious, but
that is how we always think of them. When they are grown they are often
uncongenial. My daughter Ruth does not love me deeply, nor am I greatly
drawn to her now, as an individual, a personality,--but Ruth was such a
dear baby! I can't bear to have her suffer.'

Oliver started to protest, hesitated, bit his lip, and subsided. After
all, did he dare say that his wife would never suffer? The woman
opposite looked at him with hostile, accusing eyes, as if he incarnated
in his youthful person all the futile masculinity in the world.

'Do you think a woman who has suffered willingly gives her children over
to the same fate?' she demanded passionately. 'I wish I could make you
see it for five minutes as I see it, you, young, careless, foolish! Why,
you know nothing--nothing! Listen to me. The woman who marries gives up
everything, or at least jeopardizes everything: her youth, her health,
her life perhaps, certainly her individuality. She acquires the
permanent possibility of self-sacrifice. She does it gladly, but she
does not know what she is doing. In return, is it too much to ask that
she be assured a roof over her head, food to her mouth, clothes to her
body? How many men marry without being sure that they have even so much
to offer? You yourself, of what are you sure? Is your arm strong? Is
your heart loyal? Can you shelter her soul as well as her body? I know
your father has money. Perhaps you can care for her creature needs, but
that isn't all. For some women life is one long affront, one slow
humiliation. How do I know you are not like that?'

'Because I'm not, that's all!' said Oliver Pickersgill abruptly, getting
to his feet.

He felt badgered, baited, indignant, yet he could not tell this frail,
excited woman what he thought. There were things one didn't say,
although Mrs. Lannithorne seemed to ignore the fact. She went on
ignoring it.

'I know what you are thinking,' she said, 'that I would regard these
matters differently if I had married another man. That is not wholly
true. It is because Peter Lannithorne was a good man at heart, and tried
to play the man's part as well as he knew how, and because it was partly
my own fault that he failed so miserably, that I have thought of it all
so much. And the end of all my thinking is that I don't want my
daughters to marry.'

Oliver was white now, and a little unsteady. He was also confused. There
was the note of truth in what she said, but he felt that she said it
with too much excitement, with too great facility. He had the justified
masculine distrust of feminine fluency as hysterical. Nothing so
presented could carry full conviction. And he felt physically bruised
and battered, as if he had been beaten with actual rods instead of
stinging words; but he was not yet defeated.

'Mrs. Lannithorne, what do you wish me to understand from all this. Do
you forbid Ruth and me to marry--is that it?'

She looked at him dubiously. She felt so fiercely the things she had
been saying that she could not feel them continuously. She, too, was
exhausted.

Oliver Pickersgill had a fine head, candid eyes, a firm chin, strong
capable hands. He was young, and the young know nothing, but it might be
that there was the making of a man in him. If Ruth must marry, perhaps
him as well as another. But she did not trust her own judgment, even of
such hands, such eyes, and such a chin. Oh, if the girls would only
believe her, if they would only be content to trust the wisdom she had
distilled from the bitterness of life! But the young know nothing, and
believe only the lying voices in their own hearts!

'I wish you would see Ruth's father,' she said suddenly. 'I am
prejudiced. I ought not to have to deal with these questions. I tell
you, I pray Heaven none of them may marry--ever; but, just the same,
they will! Go ask Peter Lannithorne if he thinks his daughter Ruth has a
fighting chance for happiness as your wife. Let him settle it. I have
told you what I think. I am done.'

'I shall be very glad to talk with Ruth's father about the matter,' said
Oliver with a certain emphasis on _father_. 'Perhaps he and I shall be
able to understand each other better. Good-morning, Mrs. Lannithorne!'


III

Oliver Pickersgill Senior turned his swivel-chair about, bit hard on the
end of his cigar, and stared at his only son.

'What's that?' he said abruptly. 'Say that again.'

Oliver Junior winced, not so much at the words as at his father's face.

'I want to marry Ruth Lannithorne,' he repeated steadily.

There was a silence. The elder Pickersgill looked at his son long and
hard from under lowered brows. Oliver had never seen his father look at
him like that before: as if he were a rank outsider, some detached
person whose doings were to be scrutinized coldly and critically, and
judged on their merits. It is a hard hour for a beloved child when he
first sees that look in heretofore indulgent parental eyes. Young Oliver
felt a weight at his heart, but he sat the straighter, and did not
flinch before the appraising glance.

'So you want to marry Peter Lannithorne's daughter, do you? Well, now
what is there in the idea of marrying a jail-bird's child that you find
especially attractive?'

'Of course I might say that I've seen something of business men in this
town, Ross, say, and Worcester, and Jim Stone, and that if it came to a
choice between their methods and Lannithorne's, his were the squarer,
for he settled up, and is paying the price besides. But I don't know
that there's any use saying that. I don't want to marry any of their
daughters--and you wouldn't want me to. You know what Ruth Lannithorne
is as well as I do. If there's a girl in town that's finer-grained, or
smarter, or prettier, I'd like to have you point her out! And she has a
sense of honor like a man's. I don't know another girl like her in that.
She knows what's fair,' said the young man.

Mr. Pickersgill's face relaxed a little. Oliver was making a good
argument with no mushiness about it, and he had a long-settled habit of
appreciating Ollie's arguments.

'She knows what's fair, does she? Then what does she say about marrying
you?'

'She says she won't marry anybody who doesn't respect her father as she
does!'

At this the parent grinned a little, grimly it is true, but
appreciatively. He looked past Oliver's handsome, boyish head, out of
the window, and was silent for a time. When he spoke, it was gravely,
not angrily.

'Oliver, you're young. The things I'm as sure of as two and two, you
don't yet believe at all. Probably you won't believe 'em if I put them
to you, but it's up to me to do it. Understand, I'm not getting angry
and doing the heavy father over this. I'm just telling you how some
things are in this world,--facts, like gravitation and atmospheric
pressure. Ruth Lannithorne is a good girl, I don't doubt. This world is
chuck full of good girls. It makes _some_ difference which one of 'em
you marry, but not nearly so much difference as you think it does. What
matters, from forty on, for the rest of your life, is the kind of
inheritance you've given your children. You don't know it yet, but the
thing that's laid on men and women to do is to give their children as
good an inheritance as they can. Take it from me that this is Gospel
truth, can't you? Your mother and I have done the best we can for you
and your sisters. You come from good stock, and by that I mean honest
blood. You've got to pass it on untainted. Now--hold on!' he held up a
warning hand as Oliver was about to interrupt hotly. 'Wait till I'm
through--and then think it over. I'm not saying that Peter Lannithorne's
blood isn't as good as much that passes for untainted, or that Ruth
isn't a fine girl. I'm only telling you this: when first you look into
your son's face, every failing of your own will rise up to haunt you
because you will wish for nothing on God's earth so much as that that
boy shall have a fair show in life and be a better man than you. You
will thank Heaven for every good thing you know of in your blood and in
your wife's, and you will regret every meanness, every weakness, that he
may inherit, more than you knew it was in you to regret anything. Do you
suppose when that hour comes to you that you'll want to remember his
grandfather was a convict? How will you face that down?'

Young Oliver's face was pale. He had never thought of things like this.
He made no response for a while. At last he asked,--

'What kind of a man is Peter Lannithorne?'

'Eh? What kind of--? Oh, well, as men go, there have been worse ones.
You know how he came to get sent up. He speculated, and he borrowed some
of another man's money without asking, for twenty-four hours, to protect
his speculation. He didn't lose it, either! There's a point where his
case differs from most. He pulled the thing off and made enough to keep
his family going in decent comfort, and he paid the other money back;
but they concluded to make an example of him, so they sent him up. It
was just, yes, and he said so himself. At the same time there are a
great many more dishonest men out of prison than Peter Lannithorne,
though he is in it. I meet 'em every day, and I ought to know. But
that's not the point. As you said yourself, you don't want to marry
their daughters. Heaven forbid that you should! You want to marry his
daughter. And he was weak. He was tempted and fell--and got found out.
He is a convict, and the taint sticks. The Lord knows why the stain of
unsuccessful dishonesty should stick longer than the stain of successful
dishonesty. I don't. But we know it does. That is the way things are.
Why not marry where there is no taint?'

'Father--?'

'Yes, Ollie.'

'Father, see here. He was weak and gave way--_once_! Are there any men
in the world who haven't given way at least _once_ about something or
other?--are there, father?'

There was a note of anguish in the boy's voice. Perhaps he was being
pushed too far. Oliver Pickersgill Senior cleared his throat, paused,
and at last answered sombrely,--

'God knows, Ollie. I don't. I won't say there are.'

'Well, then--'

'See here!' his father interrupted sharply. 'Of course I see your
argument. I won't meet it. I shan't try. It doesn't change my mind even
if it is a good argument. We'll never get anywhere, arguing along those
lines. I'll propose something else. Suppose you go ask Peter Lannithorne
whether you shall marry his daughter or not. Yes, ask him. He knows
what's what as well as the next man. Ask Peter Lannithorne what a man
wants in the family of the woman he marries.'

There was a note of finality in the older man's voice. Ollie recognized
it drearily. All roads led to Lannithorne, it seemed. He rose, oppressed
with the sense that henceforward life was going to be full of unforeseen
problems; that things which, from afar, looked simple, and easy, and
happy, were going to prove quite otherwise. Mrs. Lannithorne had angered
rather than frightened him, and he had held his own with her; but this
was his very own father who was piling the load on his shoulders and
filling his heart with terror of the future. What was it, after all,
this adventure of the married life whereof these seasoned travelers
spoke so dubiously? Could it really be that it was not the divine thing
it seemed when he and Ruth looked into each other's eyes?

He crossed the floor dejectedly, with the step of an older man, but at
the door he shook himself and looked back.

'Say, dad!'

'Yes, Ollie.'

'Everybody is so terribly depressing about this thing, it almost scares
me. Aren't there really any happy times for married people, ever? You
and Mrs. Lannithorne make me feel there aren't; but somehow I have a
hunch that Ruth and I know best! Own up now! Are you and mother
miserable? You never looked it!'

His father surveyed him with an expression too wistful to be complacent.
Ah, those broad young shoulders that must be fitted to the yoke! Yet for
what other end was their strength given them? Each man must take his
turn.

'It's not a soft snap. I don't know anything worth while that is. But
there are compensations. You'll see what some of them are when your boys
begin to grow up.'


IV

Across Oliver's young joy fell the shadow of fear. If, as his heart told
him, there was nothing to be afraid of, why were his elders thus
cautious and terrified? He felt himself affected by their alarms all the
more potently because his understanding of them was vague. He groped his
way in fog. How much ought he to be influenced by Mrs. Lannithorne's
passionate protests and his father's stern warnings? He realized all at
once that the admonitory attitude of age to youth is rooted deep in
immortal necessity. Like most lads, he had never thought of it before
save as an unpleasant parental habit. But fear changes the point of
view, and Oliver had begun to be afraid.

Then again, before him loomed the prospect of his interview with Peter
Lannithorne. This was a very concrete unpleasantness. Hang it all! Ruth
was worth any amount of trouble, but still it was a tough thing to have
to go down to the state capital and seek one's future father-in-law in
his present boarding-place! One oughtn't to have to plough through that
particular kind of difficulty on such an errand. Dimly he felt that the
path to the Most Beautiful should be rose-lined and soft to the feet of
the approaching bridegroom. But, apparently, that wasn't the way such
paths were laid out. He resented this bitterly, but he set his jaws and
proceeded to make his arrangements.

It was not difficult to compass the necessary interview. He knew a man
who knew the warden intimately. It was quickly arranged that he was to
see Peter Lannithorne in the prison library, quite by himself.

Oliver dragged himself to that conference by the sheer strength of his
developing will. Every fibre of his being seemed to protest and hold
back. Consequently he was not in the happiest imaginable temper for
important conversation.

The prison library was a long, narrow room, with bookcases to the
ceiling on one side and windows to the ceiling on the other. There were
red geraniums on brackets up the sides of the windows, and a canary's
cage on a hook gave the place a false air of domesticity, contradicted
by the barred sash. Beneath, there was a window-seat, and here Oliver
Pickersgill awaited Lannithorne's coming.

Ollie did not know what he expected the man to be like, but his
irritated nerves were prepared to resent and dislike him, whatever he
might prove. He held himself rigidly as he waited, and he could feel the
muscles of his face setting themselves into hard lines.

When the door opened and some one approached him, he rose stiffly and
held out his hand like an automaton.

'How do you do, Mr. Lannithorne? I am Oliver Pickersgill, and I have
come--I have come--'

His voice trailed off into silence, for he had raised his eyes
perfunctorily to Peter Lannithorne's face, and the things printed there
made him forget himself and the speech he had prepared.

He saw a massive head topping an insignificant figure. A fair man was
Peter Lannithorne, with heavy reddish hair, a bulging forehead, and
deep-set gray eyes with a light behind them. His features were irregular
and unnoticeable, but the sum-total of them gave the impression of
force. It was a strong face, yet you could see that it had once been a
weak one. It was a tremendously human face, a face like a battle-ground,
scarred and seamed and lined with the stress of invisible conflicts.
There was so much of struggle and thought set forth in it that one
involuntarily averted one's gaze. It did not seem decent to inspect so
much of the soul of a man as was shown in Peter Lannithorne's
countenance. Not a triumphant face at all, and yet there was peace in
it. Somehow, the man had achieved something, arrived somewhere, and the
record of the journey was piteous and terrible. Yet it drew the eyes in
awe as much as in wonder, and in pity not at all!

These things were startlingly clear to Oliver. He saw them with a
vividness not to be overestimated. This was a prison. This might be a
convict, but he was a man. He was a man who knew things and would share
his knowledge. His wisdom was as patent as his suffering, and both
stirred young Oliver's heart to its depths. His pride, his irritation,
his rigidity vanished in a flash. His fears were in abeyance. Only his
wonder and his will to learn were left.

Lannithorne did not take the offered hand, yet did not seem to ignore
it. He came forward quietly and sat down on the window-seat, half
turning so that he and Oliver faced each other.

'Oliver Pickersgill?' he said. 'Then you are Oliver Pickersgill's son.'

'Yes, Mr. Lannithorne. My father sent me here--my father, and Mrs.
Lannithorne, and Ruth.'

At his daughter's name a light leaped into Peter Lannithorne's eyes
that made him look even more acutely and painfully alive than before.

'And what have you to do with Ruth, or her mother?' the man asked.

Here it was! The great moment was facing him. Oliver caught his breath,
then went straight to the point.

'I want to marry your daughter, Mr. Lannithorne. We love each other very
much. But--I haven't quite persuaded her, and I haven't persuaded Mrs.
Lannithorne and my father at all. They don't see it. They say
things--all sorts of dreadful things,' said the boy. 'You would think
they had never been young and--cared for anybody. They seem to have
forgotten what it means. They try to make us afraid--just plain afraid.
How am I to suppose that they know best about Ruth and me?'

Lannithorne looked across at the young man long and fixedly. Then a
great kindliness came into his beaten face, and a great comprehension.

Oliver, meeting his eyes, had a sudden sense of shelter, and felt his
haunting fears allayed. It was absurd and incredible, but this man made
him feel comfortable, yes, and eager to talk things over.

'They all said you would know. They sent me to you.'

Peter Lannithorne smiled faintly to himself. He had not left his sense
of humor behind him in the outside world.

'They sent you to me, did they, boy? And what did they tell you to ask
me? They had different motives, I take it.'

'Rather! Ruth said you were the best man she had ever known, and if you
said it was right for her to marry me, she would. Mrs. Lannithorne said
I should ask you if you thought Ruth had a fighting chance for happiness
with me. She doesn't want Ruth to marry anybody, you see. My father--my
father'--Oliver's voice shook with his consciousness of the cruelty of
what was to follow, but he forced himself to steadiness and got the
words out--'said I was to ask you what a man wants in the family of the
woman he marries. He said you knew what was what, and I should ask you
what to do.'

Lannithorne's face was very grave, and his troubled gaze sought the
floor. Oliver, convicted of brutality and conscience-smitten, hurried
on, 'And now that I've seen you, I want to ask you a few things for
myself, Mr. Lannithorne. I--I believe you know.'

The man looked up and held up an arresting hand. 'Let me clear the way
for you a little,' he said. 'It was a hard thing for you to come and
seek me out in this place. I like your coming. Most young men would have
refused, or come in a different spirit. I want you to understand that if
in Ruth's eyes, and my wife's, and your father's, my counsel has value,
it is because they think I see things as they are. And that means, first
of all, that I know myself for a man who committed a crime, and is
paying the penalty. I am satisfied to be paying it. As I see justice, it
is just. So, if I seem to wince at your necessary allusions to it, that
is part of the price. I don't want you to feel that you are blundering
or hurting me more than is necessary. You have got to lay the thing
before me as it is.'

Something in the words, in the dry, patient manner, in the endurance of
the man's face, touched Oliver to the quick and made him feel all manner
of new things: such as a sense of the moral poise of the universe,
acquiescence in its retributions, and a curious pride, akin to Ruth's
own, in a man who could meet him after this fashion, in this place.

'Thank you, Mr. Lannithorne,' he said. 'You see, it's this way, sir.
Mrs. Lannithorne says--

And he went on eagerly to set forth his new problems as they had been
stated to him.

'Well, there you have it,' he concluded at last. 'For myself, the things
they said opened chasms and abysses. Mrs. Lannithorne seemed to think I
would hurt Ruth. My father seemed to think Ruth would hurt me. _Is_
married life something to be afraid of? When I look at Ruth, I am sure
everything is all right. It may be miserable for other people, but how
could it be miserable for Ruth and me?'

Peter Lannithorne looked at the young man long and thoughtfully again
before he answered. Oliver felt himself measured and estimated, but not
found wanting. When the man spoke, it was slowly and with difficulty, as
if the habit of intimate, convincing speech had been so long disused
that the effort was painful. The sentences seemed wrung out of him, one
by one.

'They haven't the point of view,' he said. 'It is life that is the great
adventure. Not love, not marriage, not business. They are just chapters
in the book. The main thing is to take the road fearlessly,--to have
courage to live one's life.'

'Courage?'

Lannithorne nodded.

'That is the great word. Don't you see what ails your father's point of
view, and my wife's? One wants absolute security in one way for Ruth;
the other wants absolute security in another way for you. And
security--why, it's just the one thing a human being can't have, the
thing that's the damnation of him if he gets it! The reason it is so
hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven is that he has that
false sense of security. To demand it just disintegrates a man. I don't
know why. It does.'

Oliver shook his head uncertainly.

'I don't quite follow you, sir. Oughtn't one to try to be safe?'

'One ought to try, yes. That is common prudence. But the point is that,
whatever you do or get, you aren't after all secure. There is no such
condition, and the harder you demand it, the more risk you run. So it is
up to a man to take all reasonable precautions about his money, or his
happiness, or his life, and trust the rest. What every man in the world
is looking for is the sense of having the mastery over life. But I tell
you, boy, there is only one thing that really gives it!'

'And that is--?'

Lannithorne hesitated perceptibly. For the thing he was about to tell
this undisciplined lad was his most precious possession; it was the
piece of wisdom for which he had paid with the years of his life. No man
parts lightly with such knowledge.

'It comes,' he said, with an effort, 'with the knowledge of our power to
endure. That's it. _You are safe only when you can stand everything that
can happen to you._ Then and then only! Endurance is the measure of a
man.'

Oliver's heart swelled within him as he listened, and his face shone,
for these words found his young soul where it lived. The chasms and
abysses in his path suddenly vanished, and the road lay clear again,
winding uphill, winding down, but always lit for Ruth and him by the
light in each other's eyes. For surely neither Ruth nor he could ever
fail in courage!

'Sometimes I think it is harder to endure what we deserve, like me,'
said Lannithorne, 'than what we don't. I was afraid, you see, afraid for
my wife and all of them. Anyhow, take my word for it. Courage is
security. There is no other kind.'

'Then--Ruth and I--'

'Ruth is the core of my heart!' said Lannithorne thickly. 'I would
rather die than have her suffer more than she must. But she must take
her chances like the rest. It is the law of things. If you know yourself
fit for her, and feel reasonably sure you can take care of her, you have
a right to trust the future. Myself, I believe there is Some One to
trust it to. As for the next generation, God and the mothers look after
that! You may tell your father so from me. And you may tell my wife I
think there is the stuff of a man in you. And Ruth--tell Ruth--'

He could not finish. Oliver reached out and found his hand and wrung it
hard.

'I'll tell her, sir, that I feel about her father as she does! And that
he approves of our venture. And I'll tell myself, always, what you've
just told me. Why, it _must_ be true! You needn't be afraid I'll
forget--when the time comes for remembering.'

Finding his way out of the prison yard a few minutes later, Oliver
looked, unseeing, at the high walls that soared against the blue spring
sky. He could not realize them, there was such a sense of light, air,
space, in his spirit.

Apparently, he was just where he had been an hour before, with all his
battles still to fight, but really he knew they were already won, for
his weapon had been forged and put in his hand. He left his boyhood
behind him as he passed that stern threshold, for the last hour had made
a man of him, and a prisoner had given him the master-key that opens
every door.




BUTTERCUP-NIGHT

BY JOHN GALSWORTHY


Why is it that in some places there is such a feeling of life being all
one; not merely a long picture-show for human eyes, but a single
breathing, glowing, growing thing, of which we are no more important a
part than the swallows and magpies, the foals and sheep in the meadows,
the sycamores and ash trees and flowers in the fields, the rocks and
little bright streams, or even the long fleecy clouds and their
soft-shouting drivers, the winds?

True, we register these parts of being, and they--so far as we know--do
not register us; yet it is impossible to feel, in such places as I speak
of, the busy, dry, complacent sense of being all that matters, which in
general we humans have so strongly.

In these rare spots, that are always in the remote country, untouched by
the advantages of civilization, one is conscious of an enwrapping web or
mist of spirit, the glamorous and wistful wraith of all the vanished
shapes which once dwelt there in such close comradeship.

It was Sunday of an early June when I first came on one such, far down
in the West country. I had walked with my knapsack twenty miles; and,
there being no room at the tiny inn of the very little village, they
directed me to a wicket gate, through which by a path leading down a
field I would come to a farmhouse where I might find lodging. The moment
I got into that field I felt within me a peculiar contentment, and sat
down on a rock to let the feeling grow. In an old holly tree rooted to
the bank about fifty yards away, two magpies evidently had a nest, for
they were coming and going, avoiding my view as much as possible, yet
with a certain stealthy confidence which made one feel that they had
long prescriptive right to that dwelling-place.

Around, as far as one could see, there was hardly a yard of level
ground; all was hill and hollow, that long ago had been reclaimed from
the moor; and against the distant folds of the hills the farmhouse and
its thatched barns were just visible, embowered amongst beeches and some
dark trees, with a soft bright crown of sunlight over the whole. A
gentle wind brought a faint rustling up from those beeches, and from a
large lime tree that stood by itself; on this wind some little snowy
clouds, very high and fugitive in that blue heaven, were always moving
over. But what struck me most were the buttercups. Never was field so
lighted up by those tiny lamps, those little bright pieces of flower
china out of the Great Pottery. They covered the whole ground, as if the
sunlight had fallen bodily from the sky, in tens of millions of gold
patines; and the fields below as well, down to what was evidently a
stream, were just as thick with the extraordinary warmth and glory of
them.

Leaving the rock at last, I went toward the house. It was long and low
and rather sad, standing in a garden all mossy grass and buttercups,
with a few rhododendrons and flowery shrubs, below a row of fine old
Irish yews. On the stone verandah a gray sheep-dog and a very small
golden-haired child were sitting close together, absorbed in each other.
A pleasant woman came in answer to my knock, and told me, in a soft,
slurring voice, that I might stay the night; and dropping my knapsack, I
went out again.

Through an old gate under a stone arch I came on the farmyard, quite
deserted save for a couple of ducks moving slowly down a gutter in the
sunlight; and noticing the upper half of a stable-door open, I went
across, in search of something living. There, in a rough loose-box, on
thick straw, lay a long-tailed black mare with the skin and head of a
thoroughbred. She was swathed in blankets, and her face, all cut about
the cheeks and over the eyes, rested on an ordinary human's pillow, held
by a bearded man in shirt-sleeves; while, leaning against the
whitewashed walls, sat fully a dozen other men, perfectly silent, very
gravely and intently gazing. The mare's eyes were half closed, and what
could be seen of them dull and blueish, as though she had been through a
long time of pain. Save for her rapid breathing, she lay quite still,
but her neck and ears were streaked with sweat, and every now and then
her hind-legs quivered spasmodically. Seeing me at the door, she raised
her head, uttering a queer half-human noise, but the bearded man at once
put his hand on her forehead, and with a 'Woa, my dear--woa, my pretty!'
pressed it down again, while with the other hand he plumped up the
pillow for her cheek. And, as the mare obediently let fall her head, one
of the men said in a low voice, 'I never see anything so like a
Christian!' and the others echoed, in chorus, 'Like a Christian--like a
Christian!'

It went to one's heart to watch her, and I moved off down the farm lane
into an old orchard, where the apple trees were still in bloom, with
bees--very small ones--busy on the blossoms, whose petals were dropping
on the dock leaves and buttercups in the long grass. Climbing over the
bank at the far end, I found myself in a meadow the like of which--so
wild and yet so lush--I think I have never seen. Along one hedge of its
meandering length was a mass of pink mayflower; and between two little
running streams grew quantities of yellow water-iris--'daggers,' as they
call them; the 'print-frock' orchid, too, was everywhere in the grass,
and always the buttercups. Great stones coated with yellowish moss were
strewn among the ash trees and dark hollies; and through a grove of
beeches on the far side, such as Corot might have painted, a girl was
running, with a youth after her, who jumped down over the bank and
vanished. Thrushes, blackbirds, yaffles, cuckoos, and one other very
monotonous little bird were in full song; and this, with the sound of
the streams and the wind, and the shapes of the rocks and trees, the
colors of the flowers, and the warmth of the sun, gave one a feeling of
being lost in a very wilderness of nature. Some ponies came slowly from
the far end,--tangled, gypsy-headed little creatures,--stared, and went
off again at speed. It was just one of those places where any day the
Spirit of all Nature might start up in one of those white gaps that
separate the trees and rocks. But though I sat a long time
waiting--hoping--She did not come.

They were all gone from the stable when I went back up to the farm,
except the bearded nurse and one tall fellow, who might have been the
'Dying Gaul' as he crouched there in the straw; and the mare was
sleeping--her head between her nurse's knees.

That night I woke at two o'clock to find it almost as bright as day,
with moonlight coming in through the flimsy curtains. And, smitten with
the feeling that comes to us creatures of routine so rarely,--of what
beauty and strangeness we let slip by without ever stretching out hand
to grasp it,--I got up, dressed, stole downstairs, and out.

Never was such a night of frozen beauty, never such dream-tranquillity.
The wind had dropped, and the silence was such that one hardly liked to
tread even on the grass. From the lawn and fields there seemed to be a
mist rising--in truth, the moonlight caught on the dewy buttercups; and
across this ghostly radiance the shadows of the yew trees fell in dense
black bars.

Suddenly I bethought me of the mare. How was she faring, this marvelous
night? Very softly opening the door into the yard, I tiptoed across. A
light was burning in her box. And I could hear her making the same
half-human noise she had made in the afternoon, as if wondering at her
feelings; and instantly the voice of the bearded man talking to her as
one might talk to a child: 'Oover, my darlin'; yu've a-been long enough
o' that side. Wa-ay, my swate--yu let old Jack turn yu, then!' Then came
a scuffling in the straw, a thud, that half-human sigh, and his voice
again: 'Putt your 'ead to piller, that's my dandy gel. Old Jack wouldn'
'urt yu; no more'n if yu was the Queen!' Then only her quick breathing
could be heard, and his cough and mutter, as he settled down once more
to his long vigil.

I crept very softly up to the window, but she heard me at once; and at
the movement of her head the old fellow sat up, blinking his eyes out of
the bush of his grizzled hair and beard. Opening the door, I said,--

'May I come in?'

'Oo ay! Come in, zurr, if yu'm a mind tu.'

I sat down beside him on a sack. And for some time we did not speak,
taking each other in. One of his legs was lame, so that he had to keep
it stretched out all the time; and awfully tired he looked, gray-tired.

'You're a great nurse!' I said at last. 'It must be tiring work,
watching out here all night.'

His eyes twinkled; they were of that bright gray kind through which the
soul looks out.

'Aw, no!' he said. 'Ah, don't grudge it vur a dumb animal. Poor things
they can't 'elp theirzelves. Many's the naight ah've zat up with 'orses
and beasts tu. 'T es en me--can't bear to zee dumb creatures zuffer.'
And laying his hand on the mare's ears, 'They zay 'orses 'aven't no
souls. 'T es my belief they've souls zame as us. Many's the Christian
ah've seen ain't got the soul of an 'orse. Same with the beasts--an' the
ship; 't es only they'm can't spake their minds.'

'And where,' I said, 'do you think they go to when they die?'

He looked at me a little queerly, fancying perhaps that I was leading
him into some trap; making sure, too, that I was a real stranger,
without power over his body or soul--for humble folk must be careful in
the country; then, reassured, and nodding in his beard, he answered
knowingly,--

'Ah don't think they goes so very far!'

'Why? Do you ever see their spirits?'

'Naw, naw; I never zeen none; but, for all they zay, ah don't think none
of us goes such a brave way off. There's room for all, dead or alive.
An' there's Christians ah've zeen--well, ef they'm not dead for gude,
then neither aren't dumb animals, for sure.'

'And rabbits, squirrels, birds, even insects? How about them?'

He was silent, as if I had carried him a little beyond the confines of
his philosophy; then shook his head.

''T es all a bit dimsy. But you watch dumb animals, even the laste
littlest one, an' yu'll zee they knows a lot more'n what we du; an' they
du's things tu that putts shame on a man 's often as not. They've a got
that in them as passes show.' Not noticing my stare at that unconscious
plagiarism, he went on,' Ah'd zooner zet up of a naight with an 'orse
than with an 'uman--they've more zense, and patience.' And stroking the
mare's forehead, he added, 'Now, my dear, time for yu t' 'ave yure
bottle.'

I waited to see her take her draft, and lay her head down once more on
the pillow. Then, hoping he would get a sleep, I rose to go.

'Aw, 't es nothin' much,' he said, 'this time o' year; not like in
winter. 'T will come day before yu know, these buttercup-nights.'

And twinkling up at me out of his kindly bearded face, he settled
himself again into the straw.

I stole a look back at his rough figure propped against the sack, with
the mare's head down beside his knee, at her swathed black body, and the
gold of the straw, the white walls, and dusky nooks and shadows of that
old stable illumined by the dimsy light of the old lantern. And with the
sense of having seen something holy, I crept away up into the field
where I had lingered the day before, and sat down on the same halfway
rock.

Close on dawn it was, the moon still sailing wide over the moor, and the
flowers of this 'buttercup-night' fast closed, not taken in at all by
her cold glory! Most silent hour of all the twenty-four--when the soul
slips half out of sheath, and hovers in the cool; when the spirit is
most in tune with what, soon or late, happens to all spirits; hour when
a man cares least whether or no he be alive, as we understand the word.

'None of us goes such a brave way off--there's room for all, dead or
alive.' Though it was almost unbearably colorless, and quiet, there was
warmth in thinking of those words of his; in the thought, too, of the
millions of living things snugly asleep all round; warmth in realizing
that unanimity of sleep. Insects and flowers, birds, men, beasts, the
very leaves on the trees--away in slumberland.

Waiting for the first bird to chirrup, one had perhaps even a stronger
feeling than in daytime of the unity and communion of all life, of the
subtle brotherhood of living things that fall all together into
oblivion, and, all together, wake. When dawn comes, while moonlight is
still powdering the world's face, quite a long time passes before one
realizes how the quality of the light has changed; so it was day before
I knew it. Then the sun came up above the hills; dew began to sparkle,
and color to stain the sky. That first praise of the sun from every bird
and leaf and blade of grass, the tremulous flush and chime of dawn! One
has strayed so far from the heart of things, that it comes as something
strange and wonderful! Indeed, I noticed that the beasts and birds gazed
at me as if I simply could not be there, at this hour that so belonged
to them. And to me, too, they seemed strange and new--with that in them
'that passed show,' and as of a world where man did not exist, or
existed only as just another form of life, another sort of beast. It was
one of those revealing moments when we see our proper place in the
scheme; go past our truly irreligious thought: 'Man, hub of the
Universe!' which has founded most religions. One of those moments when
our supreme importance will not wash either in the bath of purest
spiritual ecstasy, or in the clear fluid of scientific knowledge; and
one sees clear, with the eyes of true religion, man playing his little,
not unworthy, part in the great game of Perfection.

But just then began the crowning glory of that dawn--the opening and
lighting of the buttercups. Not one did I actually see unclose, yet, all
of a sudden, they were awake, the fields once more a blaze of gold.




HEPATICAS

BY ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK


I

Other people's sons were coming home for the three or four days' leave.
The first gigantic struggle--furious onslaught and grim resistance--was
over. Paris, pale, and slightly shuddering still, stood safe. Calais was
not taken, and, dug into their trenches, it was evident that the
opposing armies would lie face to face, with no decisive encounter
possible until the spring.

There was, with all their beauty and terror, an element of the facetious
in these unexpected holidays, of the matter-of-factness, the freedom
from strain or sentiment that was the English oddity and the English
strength. Men who had known the horrors of the retreat from Mons or the
carnage of Ypres, who had not taken off their clothes for ten days at a
stretch or slept for four nights, came home from trenches knee-deep in
mud, from battlefields heaped with unburied dead, and appeared
immaculate and cheerful at breakfast; a little sober and preoccupied,
perhaps; touched, perhaps, with strangeness; but ready for the valorous
family jest, and alluding to the war as if, while something too solemn
for adequate comment, it were yet something that lent itself to
laughter. One did such funny things, and saw them; of the other things
one did not speak; and there was the huge standing joke of an enemy who
actually hated one. These grave and cheerful young men hated nobody; but
they were very eager to go back again; and they were all ready, not only
to die but to die good-humoredly. From the demeanor of mothers and
wives and sisters it was evident that nothing would be said or done to
make this readiness difficult; but Mrs. Bradley, who showed serenity to
the world and did not, even when alone, allow herself to cry, suspected
that the others, beneath their smiles, carried hearts as heavy with
dread as her own.

It had been heavy, with hope now as well as with dread, for the past
week. It was a week since she had last heard from Jack. Mrs. Crawley,
over the hill, had had her wire, and her husband was now with her; and
Lady Wrexham expected her boy to-morrow. There was no certainty at all
as regarded herself; yet at any moment she might have a wire; and
feeling to-day the stress of waiting too great to be borne in passivity,
she left her books and letters, and put on her gardening shoes and
gloves, and went out to her borders.

For weeks now the incessant rain had made the relief and solace of
gardening almost an impossibility; but to-day was mild and clear. There
was no radiance in the air; curtains of pearly mist shut out the sky;
yet here and there a soft opening in the white showed a pale, far blue,
gentle and remote as the gaze of a wandering goddess, and the hills
seemed to smile quietly up at the unseen sun. Mrs. Bradley, as she went
along the river-path, could look across at the hills; the river-path and
the hills were the great feature of Dorrington--the placid, comely red
brick house to which she and Jack had come fifteen years ago, after the
death of her husband in India. Enclosed by woods, and almost catching
sight of the road,--from its upper windows and over its old brick
wall,--the house could have seemed to her too commonplace and almost
suburban, in spite of the indubitably old oak-paneling of the
drawing-room, had it not been for the river and the hills. Stepping out
on to the lawn from the windows of the drawing-room, she and Jack, on
that April day, had found themselves confronting both--the limpid, rapid
little stream, spanned near the house by its mossy bridge, and the
hills, beyond the meadows, streaked with purple woodlands and rising,
above the woods, to slopes russet, fawn, and azure. Jack, holding her by
the hand, had pointed at once with an eager 'Isn't it pretty,
mummy!'--even at eight he had cared almost as much as she, and
extraordinarily in the same way, for the sights of the country; and if
the hills had not settled the question, it was settled, quite finally,
ten minutes later, by the white hepaticas.

They had come upon them suddenly, after their tour of the walled kitchen
garden and their survey of the lawn with its ugly shrubberies,--now long
forgotten,--penetrating a thicket of hazels and finding themselves in an
opening under trees where neighboring woods looked at them over an old
stone wall, and where, from an old stone bench, one could see the river.
The ground was soft with the fallen leaves of many an autumn; a narrow
path ran, half obliterated, down to the river; and among the faded
brown, everywhere, rose the thick clusters, the dark leaves, and the
snowy flowers--poignant, amazing in their beauty.

She and Jack had stopped short to gaze. She had never seen such white
hepaticas, or so many, or so placed. And Jack, presently, lifting his
dear nut-brown head and nut-brown eyes, had said, gazing up at her as he
had gazed at the flowers, 'They are just like you, mummy.'

She had felt at once that they were like her; more like than the little
boy's instinct could grasp. He had thought of the darkness and
whiteness; her widow's weeds and pale face had suggested that; but he
could not know the sorrow, the longing, the earthly sense of irreparable
loss, the heavenly sense of a possession unalterably hers, that the
dark, melancholy leaves and celestial whiteness of the flowers
expressed to her. Tears had risen to her eyes and she had stooped and
kissed her child,--how like her husband's that little face!--and had
said, after a moment, 'We must never leave them, Jack.'

They had never left them. Dorrington had been their home for fifteen
years, and the hepaticas the heart of it, it had always seemed to them
both; the loveliest ritual of the year that early spring one when, in
the hazel copse, they would find the white hepaticas again in flower.
And of all the autumnal labors none were sweeter than those which
cherished and divided and protected the beloved flowers.

Mrs. Bradley, to-day, worked in her long border, weeding, troweling,
placing belated labels. She was dressed in black, her straw hat bound
beneath her chin by a ribbon and her soft gardening gloves rolling back
from her firm, white wrists. Her gestures expressed a calm energy, an
accurate grace. She was tall, and when she raised herself to look over
the meadows at the hills, she showed small, decisive features, all
marked, in the pallor of her face, as if with the delicate, neutral
emphasis of an etching: the gray, scrutinizing eyes, the charming yet
ugly nose, the tranquil mouth which had, at the corners, a little drop,
half sweet, half bitter, as if with tears repressed or a summoned smile.
Squared at brow and chin, it would, but for the mildness of the gaze,
have been an imperious face; and her head, its whitened hair drawn back
and looped in wide braids behind, had an air at once majestic and
unworldly.

She had worked for over an hour and the last label was set beside a
precious clump of iris. The hazel copse lay near by; and gathering up
her tools, drawing off her wet gloves, she followed the path under the
leafless branches and among the hepaticas to the stone bench, where,
sinking down, she knew that she was very tired. She could see, below the
bank, the dark, quick stream; a pale, diffused light in the sky showed
where the sun was dropping toward the hills.

Where was Jack at this moment, this quiet moment of a monotonous English
winter day?--so like the days of all the other years that it was
impossible to think of what was happening a few hours' journey away
across the Channel. Impossible to think of it; yet the thick throb of
her heart spoke to the full of its significance. She had told herself
from the beginning,--passionate, rebellious creature as, at bottom, she
knew herself to be, always in need of discipline and only in these later
years schooled to a control and submission that, in her youth, she would
have believed impossible to her,--she had told herself, when he had gone
from her, that, as a soldier's widow, she must see her soldier son go to
death. She must give him to that; be ready for it; and if he came back
to her it would be as if he were born again--a gift, a grace, unexpected
and unclaimed. She must feel, for herself as well as for her country,
that these days of dread were also days of a splendor and beauty
unmatched by any in England's history, and that a soldier's widow must
ask for no more glorious fate for her son than death in such a cause.
She had told herself all this many times; yet, as she sat there, her
hands folded on her lap, her eyes on the stream below, she felt that she
was now merely motherhood, tense, huddled, throbbing and longing,
longing for its child.

Then, suddenly, she heard Jack's footsteps. They came, quick and light,
along the garden path; they entered the wood; they were near, but
softened by the fallen leaves. And, half rising, afraid of her own joy,
she hardly knew that she saw him before she was in his arms; and it was
better to meet thus, in the blindness and darkness of their embrace, her
cheek pressed against his hair, his head buried close between her neck
and shoulder.

'Jack!--Jack!' she heard herself say.

He said nothing, holding her tightly to him, with quick breaths; and
even after she had opened her eyes and could look down at him,--her own,
her dear, beautiful Jack,--could see the nut-brown head, the smooth
brown cheek, the firm brown hand which grasped her, he did not for a
long time raise his head and look at her. When, at last, he did look up,
she could not tell, through her tears, whether, like herself, he was
trying to smile.

They sat down together on the bench. She did not ask him why he had not
wired. That question pressed too sharply on her heart; to ask might seem
to reproach.

'Darling, you are so thin,--so much older,--but you look--strong and
well.'

'We're all of us extraordinarily fit, mummy. It's wholesome, living in
mud.'

'And wholesome living among bursting shells? I had your last letter
telling of that miraculous escape.'

'There have been a lot more since then. Every day seems a miracle--that
one's alive at the end of it.'

'But you get used to it?'

'All except the noise. That always seems to daze me still. Some of our
fellows are deaf from it.--You heard of Toppie, mother?' Jack asked.

Toppie was Alan Thorpe, Jack's nearest friend. He had been killed ten
days ago.

'I heard it, Jack. Were you with him?'

'Yes. It was in a bayonet charge. He didn't suffer. A bullet went right
through him. He just gave a little cry and fell.' Jack's voice had the
mildness of a sorrow which has passed beyond the capacity for emotion.
'We found him afterwards. He is buried out there.'

'You must tell Frances about it, Jack. I went to her at once.' Frances
was Toppie's sister. 'She is bearing it so bravely.'

'I must write to her. She would be sure to be plucky.'

He answered all her questions, sitting closely against her, his arm
around her; looking down, while he spoke, and twisting, as had always
been his boyish way, a button on her coat. He was at that enchanting
moment of young manhood when the child is still apparent in the man. His
glance was shy, yet candid; his small, firm lips had a child's gravity.
With his splendid shoulders, long legs, and noble little head, he was
yet as endearing as he was impressive. His mother's heart ached with
love and pride and fear as she gazed at him.

And a question came, near the sharp one, yet hoping to evade it:--

'Jack, dearest, how long will you be with me? How long is the leave?'

He raised his eyes then and looked at her; a curious look. Something in
it blurred her mind with a sense of some other sort of fear.

'Only till to-night,' he said.

It seemed confusion rather than pain that she felt. 'Only till to-night,
Jack? But Richard Crawley has been back for three days already. I
thought they gave you longer?'

'I know, mummy.' His eyes were dropped again and his hand at the
button--did it tremble?--twisted and untwisted. 'I've been back for
three days already.--I've been in London.'

'In London?' Her breath failed her. The sense of alien fear became a
fog, horrible, suffocating. 'But--Jack--why?'

'I didn't wire, mummy, because I knew I'd have to be there for most of
my time. I felt that I couldn't wire and tell you. I felt that I had to
see you when I told you. Mother--I'm married.--I came back to get
married.--I was married this morning.--O mother, can you ever forgive
me?'

His shaking hands held her and his eyes could not meet hers.

She felt the blood rush, as if her heart had been divided with a sword,
to her throat, to her eyes, choking her, burning her; and as if from far
away she heard her own voice saying, after a little time had passed,
'There's nothing I couldn't forgive you, Jack. Tell me. Don't be afraid
of hurting me.'

He held her tightly, still looking down as he said, 'She is a dancer,
mother, a little dancer. It was in London, last summer. A lot of us came
up from Aldershot together. She was in the chorus of one of those
musical comedies. Mother, you can never understand. But it wasn't just
low and vulgar. She was so lovely,--so very young,--with the most
wonderful golden hair and the sweetest eyes.--I don't know.--I simply
went off my head when I saw her. We all had supper together afterwards.
Toppie knew one of the other girls, and Dollie was there. That's her
name--Dollie Vaughan--her stage name. Her real name was Byles. Her
people, I think, were little tradespeople, and she'd lost her father and
mother, and an aunt had been very unkind. She told me all about it that
night. Mother, please believe just this: it wasn't only the obvious
thing.--I know I can't explain. But you remember, when we read _War and
Peace_,'--his broken voice groped for the analogy,--'you remember
Natacha, when she falls in love with Anatole, and nothing that was real
before seems real, and she is ready for anything. It was like that. It
was all fairyland, like that. No one thought it wrong. It didn't seem
wrong. Everything went together.'

She had gathered his hand closely in hers and she sat there, quiet,
looking at her hopes lying slain before her. Her Jack. The wife who was,
perhaps, to have been his. The children that she, perhaps, should have
seen. All dead. The future blotted out. Only this wraith-like present;
only this moment of decision; Jack and his desperate need the only real
things left.

And after a moment, for his laboring breath had failed, she said, 'Yes,
dear?' and smiled at him.

He covered his face with his hands. 'Mother, I've ruined your life.'

He had, of course, in ruining his own; yet even at that moment of
wreckage she was able to remember, if not to feel, that life could mend
from terrible wounds, could marvelously grow from compromises and
defeats. 'No, dearest, no,' she said. 'While I have you, nothing is
ruined. We shall see what can be done. Go on. Tell me the rest.'

He put out his hand to hers again and sat now a little turned away from
her, speaking on in his deadened, bitter voice.

'There wasn't any glamour after that first time. I only saw her once or
twice again. I was awfully sorry and ashamed over the whole thing. Her
company left London, on tour, and then the war came, and I simply forgot
all about her. And the other day, over there, I had a letter from her.
She was in terrible trouble. She was ill and had no money, and no work.
And she was going to have a child--my child; and she begged me to send
her a little money to help her through, or she didn't know what would
become of her.'

The fog, the horrible confusion, even the despair, had passed now. The
sense of ruin, of wreckage almost irreparable, was there; yet with it,
too, was the strangest sense of gladness. He was her own Jack,
completely hers, for she saw now why he had done it; she could be glad
that he had done it; she could be glad that he had done it. 'Go on,
dear,' she said. 'I understand; I understand perfectly.'

'O mother, bless you!' He put her hand to his lips, bowing his head upon
it for a moment. 'I was afraid you couldn't. I was afraid you couldn't
forgive me. But I had to do it. I thought it all over--out there.
Everything had become so different after what one had been through. One
saw everything differently. Some things didn't matter at all, and other
things mattered tremendously. This was one of them. I knew I couldn't
just send her money. I knew I couldn't bear to have the poor child born
without a name and with only that foolish little mother to take care of
it. And when I found I could get this leave, I knew I must marry her.
That was why I didn't wire. I thought I might not have time to come to
you at all.'

'Where is she, Jack?' Her voice, her eyes, her smile at him, showed him
that, indeed, she understood perfectly.

'In lodgings that I found for her; nice and quiet, with a kind landlady.
She was in such an awful place in Ealing. She is so changed, poor little
thing. I should hardly have known her. Mother, darling, I wonder, could
you just go and see her once or twice? She's frightfully lonely; and so
very young.--If you could--if you would just help things along a little
till the baby comes, I should be so grateful. And, then, if I don't come
back, will you, for my sake, see that they are safe?'

'But, Jack,' she said, smiling at him, 'she is coming here, of course. I
shall go and get her to-morrow.'

He stared at her and his color rose. 'Get her? Bring her here, to stay?'

'Of course, darling. And if you don't come back, I will take care of
them, always.'

'But, mother,' said Jack, and there were tears in his eyes, 'you don't
know, you don't realize. I mean--she's a dear little thing--but you
couldn't be happy with her. She'd get most frightfully on your nerves.
She's just--just a silly little dancer who has got into trouble.'

Jack was clear-sighted. Every vestige of fairyland had vanished. And she
was deeply thankful that they should see alike, while she answered,
'It's not exactly a time for considering one's nerves, is it, Jack? I
hope I won't get on hers. I must just try and make her as happy as I
can.'

She made it all seem natural and almost sweet. The tears were in his
eyes, yet he had to smile back at her when she said, 'You know that I am
good at managing people. I'll manage her. And perhaps when you come
back, my darling, she won't be a silly little dancer.'

They sat now for a little while in silence. While they had talked, a
golden sunset, slowly, had illuminated the western sky. The river below
them was golden, and the wintry woodlands bathed in light. Jack held her
hands and gazed at her. Love could say no more than his eyes, in their
trust and sorrow, said to her; she could never more completely possess
her son. Sitting there with him, hand in hand, while the light slowly
ebbed and twilight fell about them, she felt it to be, in its accepted
sorrow, the culminating and transfiguring moment of her maternity.

When they at last rose to go it was the hour for Jack's departure, and
it had become almost dark. Far away, through the trees, they could see
the lighted windows of the house which waited for them, but to which she
must return alone.

With his arms around her shoulders, Jack paused a moment, looking about
him. 'Do you remember that day--when we first came here, mummy?' he
asked.

She felt in him suddenly a sadness deeper than any he had yet shown
her. The burden of the past she had lifted from him; but he must bear
now the burden of what he had done to her, to their life, to all the
future. And, protesting against his pain, her mother's heart strove
still to shelter him while she answered, as if she did not feel his
sadness, 'Yes, dear, and do you remember the hepaticas on that day?'

'Like you,' said Jack in a gentle voice. 'I can hardly see the plants.
Are they all right?'

'They are doing beautifully.'

'I wish the flowers were out,' said Jack. 'I wish it were the time for
the flowers to be out, so that I could have seen you and them together,
like that first day.' And then, putting his head down on her shoulder,
he murmured, 'It will never be the same again. I've spoiled everything
for you.'

But he was not to go from her uncomforted. She found the firmest voice
in which to answer him, stroking his hair and pressing him to her with
the full reassurance of her resolution. 'Nothing is spoiled, Jack,
nothing. You have never been so near me--so how can anything be spoiled?
And when you come back, darling, you'll find your son, perhaps, and the
hepaticas may be in flower, waiting for you.'


II

Mrs. Bradley and her daughter-in-law sat together in the drawing-room.
They sat opposite each other on the two chintz chesterfields placed at
right angles to the pleasantly blazing fire, the chintz curtains drawn
against a rainy evening. It was a long, low room, with paneled walls;
and, like Mrs. Bradley's head, it had an air at once majestic,
decorated, and old-fashioned. It was a rather crowded room, with many
deep chairs and large couches, many tables with lamps and books and
photographs upon them, many porcelains, prints, and pots of growing
flowers. Mrs. Bradley, her tea-table before her, was in her evening
black silk; lace ruffles rose about her throat; she wore her accustomed
necklace of old enamel, blue, black, and white, set with small diamonds,
and the enamel locket which had within it Jack's face on one side and
his father's on the other; her white hands, moving gently among the
teacups, showed an ancient cluster of diamonds above the slender
wedding-ring.

From time to time she lifted her eyes and smiled quietly over at her
daughter-in-law. It was the first time that she had really seen Dollie,
that is, in any sense that meant contemplative observation. Dollie had
spent her first week at Dorrington in bed, sodden with fatigue rather
than ill. 'What you need' Mrs. Bradley had said, 'is to go to sleep for
a fortnight'; and Dollie had almost literally carried out the
prescription.

Stealing carefully into the darkened room, with its flowers and opened
windows and steadily glowing fire, Mrs. Bradley had stood and looked for
long moments at all that she could see of her daughter-in-law,--a
flushed, almost babyish face lying on the pillow between thick golden
braids, sleeping so deeply, so unconsciously,--her sleep making her
mother-in-law think of a little boat gliding slowly yet steadily on and
on, between new shores; so that, when she was to awake and look about
her, it would be as if, with no bewilderment or readjustment, she found
herself transformed, a denizen of an altered world. That was what Mrs.
Bradley wanted, that Dollie should become an inmate of Dorrington with
as little effort or consciousness for any of them as possible; and the
drowsy days and nights of infantine slumbers seemed indeed to have
brought her very near.

She and Pickering, the admirable woman who filled so skillfully the
combined positions of lady's maid and parlormaid in her little
establishment, had braided Dollie's thick tresses, one on either
side--Mrs. Bradley laughing a little and both older women touched,
almost happy in their sense of something so young and helpless to take
care of. Pickering understood, nearly as well as Jack's mother, that
Master Jack, as he had remained to her, had married very much beneath
him; but at this time of tragic issues and primitive values, she, nearly
as much as Jack's mother, felt only the claim, the pathos of youth and
helplessness. It was as if they had a singularly appealing case of a
refugee to take care of: social and even moral appraisals were
inapplicable to such a case, and Mrs. Bradley felt that she had never so
admired Pickering as when seeing that for her, too, they were in
abeyance. It was a comfort to feel so fond of Pickering at a time when
one was in need of any comfort one could get; and to feel that, creature
of codes and discriminations as she was, to a degree that had made her
mistress sometimes think of her as a sort of Samurai of service, a
function rather than a person, she was even more fundamentally a kind
and Christian woman. Between them, cook intelligently sustaining them
from below and the housemaids helpful in their degree, they fed and
tended and nursed Dollie, and by that eighth day she was more than ready
to get up and go down and investigate her new surroundings.

She sat there now, in the pretty tea-gown her mother-in-law had bought
for her, leaning back against her cushions, one arm lying along the back
of the couch and one foot in its patent-leather shoe, with its sparkling
buckle and alarming heel, thrusting forward a carefully arched instep.
The attitude made one realize, however completely tenderer
preoccupations held the foreground of one's consciousness, how often and
successfully she must have sat to theatrical photographers. Her way of
smiling, too, very softly, yet with the effect of a calculated and
dazzling display of pearly teeth, was impersonal, and directed, as it
were, to the public via the camera rather than to any individual
interlocutor. Mrs. Bradley even imagined, unversed as she was in the
methods of Dollie's world, that of allurement in its conscious and
determined sense, she was almost innocent. She placed herself, she
adjusted her arm and her foot, and she smiled gently; intention hardly
went further than that wish to look her best.

Pink and white and gold as she was, and draped there on the chesterfield
in a profusion of youth and a frivolity that was yet all passivity, she
made her mother-in-law think, and with a certain sinking of the heart,
of a Dorothy Perkins rose, a flower she had never cared for; and Dollie
carried on the analogy in the sense she gave that there were such
myriads more just like her. On almost every page of every illustrated
weekly paper, one saw the ingenuous, limpid eyes, the display of
eyelash, the lips, their outline emphasized by just that touch of rouge,
those copious waves of hair. Like the Dorothy Perkins roses on their
pergolas, so these pretty faces seemed--looped, draped, festooned--to
climb over all the available spaces of the modern press.

But this, Mrs. Bradley told herself, was to see Dollie with a dry, hard
eye, was to see her superficially, from the social rather than from the
human point of view. Under the photographic creature must lie the young,
young girl--so young, so harmless that it would be very possible to
mould her, with all discretion, all tenderness, into some suitability as
Jack's wife. Dollie, from the moment that she had found her, a sodden,
battered rose indeed, in the London lodging-house, had shown herself
grateful, even humble, and endlessly acquiescent. She had not shown
herself at all abashed or apologetic, and that had been a relief; had
counted for her, indeed, in her mother-in-law's eyes, as a sort of
innocence, a sort of dignity. But if Dollie were contented with her new
mother, and very grateful to her, she was also contented with herself;
Mrs. Bradley had been aware of this at once; and she knew now that, if
she were being carefully and commendingly watched while she poured out
the tea, this concentration did not imply unqualified approval. Dollie
was the type of young woman to whom she herself stood as the type of the
'perfect lady'; but with the appreciation went the proviso of the sharp
little London mind,--versed in the whole ritual of smartness as it
displayed itself at theatre or restaurant,--that she was a rather dowdy
one. She was a lady, perfect but not smart, while, at the same time, the
quality of her defect was, she imagined, a little bewildering and
therefore a little impressive. Actually to awe Dollie and to make her
shy, it would be necessary to be smart; but it was far more pleasant and
perhaps as efficacious merely to impress her, and it was as well that
Dollie should be impressed; for anything in the nature of an advantage
that she could recognize would make it easier to direct, protect, and
mould her.

She asked her a good many leisurely and unstressed questions on this
first evening, and drew Dollie to ask others in return; and she saw
herself stooping thoughtfully over a flourishing young plant which yet
needed transplanting, softly moving the soil about its roots, softly
finding out if there were any very deep tap-root that would have to be
dealt with. But Dollie, so far as tastes and ideas went, hardly seemed
to have any roots at all; so few that it was a question if any change of
soil could affect a creature so shallow. She smiled, she was at ease;
she showed her complete assurance that a young lady so lavishly endowed
with all the most significant gifts, need not occupy herself with
mental adornments.

'You're a great one for books, I see,' she commented, looking about the
room. 'I suppose you do a great deal of reading down here to keep from
feeling too dull'; and she added that she herself, if there was 'nothing
doing,' liked a good novel, especially if she had a box of sweets to eat
while she read it.

'You shall have a box of sweets to-morrow,' Mrs. Bradley told her, 'with
or without the novel, as you like.'

And Dollie thanked her, watching her cut the cake, and, as the rain
lashed against the windows, remarking on the bad weather and cheerfully
hoping that 'poor old Jack' wasn't in those horrid trenches. 'I think
war's a wicked thing, don't you, Mrs. Bradley?' she added.

When Dollie talked in this conventionally solicitous tone of Jack, her
mother-in-law could but wish her upstairs again, merely young, merely
the tired and battered refugee. She had not much tenderness for Jack,
that was evident, nor much imaginativeness in regard to the feelings of
Jack's mother. But she soon passed from the theme of Jack and his
danger. Her tea was finished and she got up and went to the piano,
remarking that there was one thing she could do. 'Poor mother used to
always say I was made of music. From the time I was a mere tot I could
pick out anything on the piano.' And placing herself, pressing down the
patent-leather shoe on the loud pedal, she surged into a waltz as
foolish and as conventionally alluring as her own eyes. Her inaccuracy
was equaled only by her facility. Smiling, swaying over the keys with
alternate speed and languor, she addressed her audience with altogether
the easy mastery of a music-hall artiste: 'It's a lovely thing--one of
my favorites. I'll often play, Mrs. Bradley, and cheer us up. There is
nothing like music for that, is there? it speaks so to the heart.' And,
whole-heartedly indeed, she accompanied the melody by a passionate
humming.

The piano was Jack's and it was poor Jack who was made of music. How was
he to bear it, his mother asked herself, as she sat listening. Dollie,
after that initiation, spent many hours at the piano every day--so many
and such noisy hours, that her mother-in-law, unnoticed, could shut
herself in the little morning-room that overlooked the brick wall at the
front of the house and had the morning sun.

It was difficult to devise other occupations for Dollie. She earnestly
disclaimed any wish to have proper music lessons; and when her
mother-in-law, patiently persistent, arranged for a skillful mistress to
come down twice a week from London, Dollie showed such apathy and
dullness that any hope of developing such musical ability as she
possessed had to be abandoned. She did not like walking, and the sober
pageant of the winter days was a blank book to her. Sewing, she said,
had always given her frightful fidgets; and it was with the strangest
sense of a privilege, a joy unhoped-for and now thrust upon her, that
Mrs. Bradley sat alone working at the little garments which meant all
her future and all Jack's. The baby seemed already more hers than
Dollie's.

Sometimes, on a warm afternoon, Dollie, wrapped in her fur cloak, would
emerge for a little while and watch her mother-in-law at work in her
borders. The sight amused and surprised, but hardly interested her, and
she soon went tottering back to the house on the preposterous heels
which Mrs. Bradley had, as yet, found no means of tactfully banishing.
And sometimes, when the piano again resounded, Mrs. Bradley would leave
her borders and retreat to the hazel copse, where, as she sat on the
stone bench, she could hear, through the soft sound of the running
water, hardly more than the distant beat and hum of Dollie's waltzes;
and where, with more and more the sense of escape and safety, she could
find a refuge from the sight and sound and scent of Dollie--the thick,
sweet, penetrating scent which was always to be indelibly associated in
her mother-in-law's mind with this winter of foreboding, of hope, and of
growing hopelessness.

In her letters to Jack, she found herself, involuntarily at first, and
then deliberately, altering, suppressing, even falsifying. While Dollie
had been in bed, when so much hope had been possible of a creature so
unrevealed, she had written very tenderly, and she continued, now, to
write tenderly, and it was not false to do that; she could feel no
hardness or antagonism against poor Dollie. But she continued to write
hopefully, as, every day, hope grew less.

Jack, himself, did not say much of Dollie, though there was always the
affectionate message and the affectionate inquiry. But what was
difficult to deal with were the hints of his anxiety and fear that stole
among the terse, cheerful descriptions of his precarious days. What was
she doing with herself? How were she and Dollie getting on? Did Dollie
care about any of the things she cared about?

She told him that they got on excellently well, that Dollie spent a good
deal of time at the piano, and that when they went out to tea people
were perfectly nice and understanding. She knew, indeed, that she could
depend on her friends to be that. They accepted Dollie on the terms she
asked for her. From friends so near as Mrs. Crawley and Lady Wrexham she
had not concealed the fact that Dollie was a misfortune; but if others
thought so, they were not to show it. She still hoped, by degrees, to
make Dollie a figure easier to deal with at such neighborly gatherings.
She had abandoned any hope that Dollie would grow: anything so feeble
and so foolish could not grow; there was no other girl under the little
dancer; she was simply no more and no less than she showed herself to
be; but, at this later stage of their relationship, Mrs. Bradley
essayed, now and then, a deliberate if kindly severity--as to heels, as
to scents, as to touches of rouge.

'Oh, but I'm as careful, just as careful, Mrs. Bradley!' Dollie
protested. 'I can't walk in lower heels. They hurt my instep. I've a
very high instep and it needs support.' She was genuinely amazed that
any one could dislike her scent and that any one could think the rouge
unbecoming. She seemed to acquiesce, but the acquiescence was followed
by moods of mournfulness and even by tears. There was no capacity in her
for temper or rebellion, and she was all unconscious of giving a warning
as she sobbed, 'It's nothing--really nothing, Mrs. Bradley. I'm sure you
mean to be kind. Only--it's rather quiet and lonely here. I've always
been used to so many people--to having everything so bright and jolly.'

She was not rapacious; she was not dissolute; she could be kept
respectable and even contented if she were not made too aware of the
contrast between her past existence and her present lot. With an air
only of pensive pride she would sometimes point out to Mrs. Bradley, in
the pages of those same illustrated weeklies with which her
mother-in-law associated her, the face of some former companion. One of
these young ladies had recently married the son of a peer. 'She _is_ in
luck, Floss,' said Dollie. 'We always thought it would come to that.
He's been gone on her for ages, but his people were horrid.'

Mrs. Bradley felt that, at all events, Dollie had no ground for thinking
her 'horrid'; yet she imagined that there lay drowsing at the back of
her mind a plaintive little sense of being caught and imprisoned. Floss
had stepped, triumphant, from the footlights to the registrar's office,
and apparently had succeeded in uniting the radiance of her past and
present status. No, Dollie could be kept respectable and contented only
if the pressure were of the lightest. She could not change, she could
only shift; and although Mrs. Bradley felt that for herself, her life
behind her, her story told, she could manage to put up with a merely
shifted Dollie, she could not see how Jack was to manage it. What was
Jack to do with her? was the thought that pressed with a growing weight
on her mother's heart. She could never be of Jack's life; yet here she
was, in it, planted there by his own generous yet inevitable act, and by
hers--in its very centre, and not to be evaded or forgotten.

And the contrast between what Jack's life might have been and what it
now must be was made more poignantly apparent to her when Frances Thorpe
came down to stay from a Saturday to Monday: Frances in her black, tired
and thin from Red-Cross work in London; bereaved in more, her old friend
knew, than dear Toppie's death; yet with her leisurely, unstressed
cheerfulness almost unaltered, the lightness that went with so much
tenderness, the drollery that went with so much depth. Dearest, most
charming of girls,--but for Jack's wretched stumble into 'fairyland'
last summer, destined obviously to be his wife,--could any presence have
shown more disastrously, in its contrast with poor Dollie, how Jack had
done for himself?

She watched the two together that evening--Frances with her thick,
crinkled hair and clearly curved brow and her merry, steady eyes,
leaning, elbow on knee, to talk and listen to Dollie; and Dollie, poor
Dollie, flushed, touched with an unbecoming sulkiness, aware, swiftly
and unerringly, of a rival type. Frances was of the type that young men
married when they did not 'do for themselves.' There was now no gulf of
age or habit to veil from Dollie her disadvantage. She answered shortly,
with now and then a dry, ironic little laugh; and, getting up at last,
she went to the piano and loudly played.

'He couldn't have done differently. It was the only thing he could do,'
Frances said that night before her bedroom fire. She did not hide her
recognition of Jack's plight, but she was staunch.

'I wouldn't have had him do differently. But it will ruin his life,'
said the mother. 'If he comes back, it will ruin his life.'

'No, no,' said Frances, looking at the flames. 'Why should it? A man
does n't depend on his marriage like that. He has his career.'

'Yes. He has his career. A career isn't a life.'

'Isn't it?' The girl gazed down. 'But it's what so many people have to
put up with. And so many haven't even a career.' Something came into
her voice and she turned from it quickly. 'He's crippled, in a sense, of
course. But you are here. He will have you to come back to always.'

'I shall soon be old, dear, and she will always be here. That's
inevitable. Some day I shall have to leave her to Jack to bear with
alone.'

'She may become more of a companion.'

'No; no, she won't.'

The bitterness of the mother's heart expressed itself in the dry, light
utterance. It was a comfort to express bitterness, for once, to
somebody.

'She is a harmless little thing,' Frances offered after a moment.

'Harmless?' Mrs. Bradley turned it over dryly and lightly.' I can't feel
her that. I feel her blameless if you like. And it will be easy to keep
her contented. That is really the best that one can say of poor Dollie.
And then, there will be the child. I am pinning all my hopes to the
child, Frances.'

Frances understood that.

Dollie, as the winter wore on, kept remarkably well. She had felt it the
proper thing to allude to Jack and his danger; and so, now, she more and
more frequently felt it the proper thing to allude, humorously, if with
a touch of melancholy, to 'baby.' Her main interest in baby, Mrs.
Bradley felt, was an alarmed one. She was a good deal frightened, poor
little soul, and in need of constant reassurances; and it was when one
need only pet and pity Dollie that she was easier to deal with. Mrs.
Bradley tried to interest her in plans for the baby; what it should be
named, and how its hair should be done if it were a little girl--for
only on this assumption could Dollie's interest be at all vividly
roused; and Mrs. Bradley hoped more than ever for a boy when she found
Dollie's idle yet stubborn thoughts fixed on the name of Gloria.

She was able to evade discussion of this point, and when the baby came,
fortunately and robustly, into the world on a fine March morning, she
could feel it as a minor but very real cause for thanksgiving that
Dollie need now never know what she thought of Gloria as a name. The
baby was a boy, and now that he was here, Dollie seemed as well pleased
that he should be a commonplace Jack, and that there should be no
question of tying his hair with cockades of ribbon over each ear.
Smiling and rosy and languid, she lay in her charming room, not at all
more maternal,--though she showed a bland satisfaction in her child and
noted that his eyes were just like Jack's,--yet subtly more wifely.
Baby, she no doubt felt, with the dim instinct that did duty for thought
with her, placed and rooted her and gave her final rights. She referred
now to Jack with the pensive but open affection of their shared
complacency, and made her mother-in-law think, as she lay there, of a
soft and sleepy and tenacious creeper, fixing tentacle after tentacle in
the walls of Jack's house of life.

If only one could feel that she had furnished it with a treasure.
Gravely, with a sad fondness, the grandmother studied the little face,
so unfamiliar, for signs of Jack. She was a helplessly clear-sighted
woman, and remembrance was poignantly vivid in her of Jack's face at a
week old. Already she loved the baby since its eyes, indubitably, were
his; but she could find no other trace of him. It was not a Bradley
baby; and in the dreamy, foreboding flickers of individuality that pass
uncannily across an infant's features, her melancholy and steady
discernment could see only the Byles ancestry.

She was to do all she could for the baby: to save him, so far as might
be, from his Byles ancestry, and to keep him, so far as might be, Jack's
and hers. That was to be her task. But with all the moulding that could,
mercifully, be applied from the very beginning, she could not bring
herself to believe that this was ever to be a very significant human
being.

She sent Jack his wire: 'A son. Dollie doing splendidly.' And she had
his answer: 'Best thanks. Love to Dollie.' It was curious, indeed, this
strange new fact they had now, always, to deal with; this light little
'Dollie' that must be passed between them. The baby might have made Jack
happy, but it had not solved the problem of his future.


III

A week later the telegram was brought to her telling her that he had
been killed in action.

It was a beautiful spring day, just such a day as that on which she and
Jack had first seen Dorrington, and she had been working in the garden.
When she had read, she turned and walked down the path that led to the
hazel copse. She hardly knew what had happened to her; there was only an
instinct for flight, concealment, secrecy; but, as she walked, there
rose in her, without sound, as if in a nightmare, the terrible cry of
her loneliness. The dark wet earth that covered him seemed heaped upon
her heart.

The hazel copse was tasseled thickly with golden green, and as she
entered it she saw that the hepaticas were in flower. They seemed to
shine with their own celestial whiteness, set in their melancholy green
among the fallen leaves. She had never seen them look so beautiful.

She followed the path, looking down at them, and she seemed to feel
Jack's little hand in hers and to see, at her side, his nut-brown head.
It had been on just such a morning. She came to the stone bench; but the
impulse that had led her here was altered. She did not sink down and
cover her face, but stood looking around her at the flowers, the
telegram still open in her hand; and slowly, with stealing calm, the
sense of sanctuary fell about her.

She had lost him, and with him went all her life. He was dead, his youth
and strength and beauty. Yet what was this strange up-welling of relief,
deep, deep relief, for Jack; this gladness, poignant and celestial, like
that of the hepaticas? He was dead and the dark earth covered him; yet
he was here, with her, safe in his youth and strength and beauty
forever. He had died the glorious death, and no future, tangled,
perplexed, fretful with its foolish burden, lay before him. There was no
loss for Jack--no fading, no waste. The burden was for her, and he was
free.

Later, when pain should have dissolved thought, her agony would come to
her unalleviated; but this hour was hers, and his. She heard the river
and the soft whisperings of spring. A bird dropped lightly, unafraid,
from branch to branch of a tree near by. From the woods came the rapid,
insistent tapping of a woodpecker; and, as in so many springs, she
seemed to hear Jack say, 'Hark, mummy,' and his little hand was always
held in hers. And, everywhere, telling of irreparable loss, of a
possession unalterable, the tragic, the celestial hepaticas.

She sat down on the stone bench now and closed her eyes for a little
while, so holding them more closely--Jack and the hepaticas--together.




POSSESSING PRUDENCE

BY AMY WENTWORTH STONE


I

'A lie's an abomination unto the Lord a hundred and twenty-four, a lie's
an abomination unto the Lord a hundred and twenty-five, a lie's an
abomination unto the Lord a hundred and twenty-six,' recited Prudence
Jane, and paused.

'Go on,' said Aunt Annie, looking up from her sewing and fixing her eyes
severely on the small blue back across the room.

Prudence Jane, with the heels of her little ankle-ties together and her
hands clasped tightly behind her, was standing in the corner, saying
what was known in the family as her punish-sentence. Whenever she had
been unusually naughty she had to say one four hundred times up in Aunt
Annie's room. It was, no doubt, a silly sort of punishment, but it was
one that Prudence Jane strongly objected to--and that, after all, is the
essence of a punishment. Prudence Jane had seven teasing, mimicking
brothers, and whenever one of them caught her saying a punish-sentence
it was days before she heard the last of it. Already in the garden below
there was audible a shrill voice singing, 'A _lie_ is an
a_bom_-i-_na_-tion _un_-to the _Lord_,' to the tune of 'Has anybody here
seen Kelly?' And out of the corner of her eye, which was supposed to be
fastened on the rosebuds of Aunt Annie's wall-paper, Prudence Jane could
see an impudent little person in corduroys, straddling the gravel walk
and squinting up at the window.

'Is "a lie's an abomination" in the Bible?' inquired Prudence Jane.

'Yes,' said Aunt Annie, 'go on.'

'Where?' demanded Prudence Jane.

'Where?' repeated Aunt Annie a little blankly. 'Why--why--in the middle
of the Bible. Don't you listen to the minister, Prudence Jane?'

'The middle of the minister's Bible?' pursued Prudence Jane.

'Yes, of course,' said Aunt Annie, 'Prudence Jane, if you don't go on at
once I shall have you say it five hundred times.

'A lie's an abomination unto the Lord a hundred and twenty-seven,'
resumed Prudence Jane hastily.

Prudence Jane's sentences varied from day to day, it being Aunt Annie's
idea to fit the sentence to the crime whenever possible. Thus, for being
late to school it was, naturally, 'Procrastination is the thief of
time.' While for telling Lena, the cook, that Uncle Arthur had said she
was more of a lady than Aunt Annie, the sentence had been nothing less
than, 'Truth crushed to earth will rise again.'

This particular fib had been very disastrous in its consequences. We
will not dwell upon them here. They make a story in themselves. Suffice
it to say that there was no possible excuse for Prudence Jane.

It was otherwise with the fib for which she was this morning serving a
sentence up in Aunt Annie's room. Those who also have been named after
their two grandmothers will at once forgive Prudence Jane for telling
the new minister, the very first time she met him, that her name was
Imogen Rose. It was, to be sure, a stupid little fib, and was therefore
quite unworthy of Prudence Jane. For Prudence Jane almost never told
stupid little fibs. The fibs of Prudence Jane were little masterpieces,
with a finish and distinction all their own. Her brother Will, who
adored her, and had a large mind, declared when he came home from
college that she was the greatest mistress of imaginative fiction since
George Eliot. Her Aunt Annie, who had not had the advantages of a
college course, and who roomed with Prudence Jane, said that she was a
'simple little liar.'

Now this was unfair of Aunt Annie, for whatever else Prudence Jane might
be, she was _not_ simple. Even her looks belied her. With her big
confiding eyes, as round and blue as two forget-me-nots, and her pale
yellow hair held demurely back from her forehead by a blue ribbon
fillet, she gave an impression of gentle innocence that was altogether
misleading.

'She is so like little Bertie,' dear old Grandma Piper would say; 'that
same frail, flower-like look that he had toward the last. I almost
tremble sometimes. Haven't you noticed a transparency about her lately,
Annie?'

But Aunt Annie never had.

It may be said in passing that there was only one person to whom
Prudence Jane was really transparent, and that was her youngest brother,
Peter. Peter was a square, solid little person, with a vacant
countenance; but nothing important that Prudence Jane did escaped him.

'Just to look into that sweet little face is enough for me,' Grandma
Goodwin would declare; 'I don't want anybody to tell _me_ that Prudence
Jane is untruthful. No child could look straight at you out of her
little soul as she always does, and tell a fib. The trouble is they
don't understand her at home. I've always said Annie Piper had a
suspicious nature.'

To do Aunt Annie justice, it should be said that rooming with Prudence
Jane did not tend to cultivate in one a nature that was trustful and
confiding. And yet at heart Prudence Jane was really not at all the
incorrigible little fibber that she seemed. She told fibs, not because
she wished to deceive, but because the dull facts of life were so much
less interesting than the lively little romances which she could make up
out of her own head. When one is a creative genius one naturally rebels
at being shackled to anything so tedious as a fact. Prudence Jane,
looking back over a day, could rarely separate the things which had
really happened from those she had invented.

Her brother Horace, who was studying law, said that he would give a
hundred dollars to see Prudence Jane on the witness stand. This was one
night at supper when she was being cross-examined by Aunt Annie. For
five minutes she had kept the family spellbound by a circumstantial
account of how that afternoon she had seen an automobile truck, loaded
with a thousand boxes of eggs, go over the embankment. With eggs at
sixty-five cents a dozen this was really a very shocking tale.

'Prudence Jane,' said Aunt Annie, who had private sources of
information, 'you know well enough that no truck went over the
embankment. Whatever do you mean by telling such an outrageous fib?'

Prudence Jane looked across the supper table at her aunt out of two
round candid eyes.

'That wasn't a fib; that was just a story' she explained.

'Well, it wasn't true; and stories that aren't true are very wicked,'
said Aunt Annie with decision.

'Are all the stories in books true?' inquired Prudence Jane, the picture
of innocence behind her bowl of bread and milk.

'No,' Aunt Annie was forced to admit, 'but stories written in books are
different. The writers don't mean for us to believe them.'

'Do they say so in the books?' went on Prudence Jane relentlessly.

'Of course not,' said Aunt Annie; 'we know their stories aren't true, so
they don't deceive us.'

'But you always know _my_ stories aren't true, too,' objected Prudence
Jane; 'so I don't deceive you, either.'

'Prudence Jane,' said Aunt Annie, 'I shan't argue with you. You are a
very naughty little girl. I sometimes think that you don't belong to us
at all; you're so different from your brothers.'

This was true. All the other little Pipers had been simple, virtuous
children, with imaginations under perfect control--'a remarkable family'
everybody had said, until the Pipers became quite complacent about
themselves. This was why Prudence Jane seemed like such a judgment upon
them. They had waited long and patiently, as Aunt Annie put it, for
Providence to see fit to send them a dear little girl to inherit her
grandmothers' names--and they received Prudence Jane. Had she appeared
at an earlier date, or had there been another girl in the family, she
might have escaped either the Prudence or the Jane. But for fifteen
years little masculine Pipers had arrived in the household with unbroken
regularity, and been named, one by one, after all the available
grandfathers and uncles. For the last one, indeed, there had not been
even a cousin left, and he had been christened by common consent Peter
Piper. And still the grandmothers waited.

From the moment, therefore, when bluff old Doctor Jones looked in upon a
parlor full of aunts, and announced that it was 'a girl at last, by
Jove,' there had been no choice left for Prudence Jane. The only point
discussed in the solemn family conclave was as to whether she should not
be Jane Prudence.

'Oh, for mercy's sake, call the poor little kid Jurisprudence, and be
done with it,' said a flippant uncle--and that had settled it. Prudence
Jane was duly entered at the end of the list in the middle of the Family
Bible, and her career began.

Through eight years she was just unmitigated Prudence Jane,--not a
syllable of it could ever be omitted lest one grandmother or the other
be slighted,--and then suddenly one day she decided that it was a
combination no longer to be borne. She hated her name with all her
little soul; therefore she would discard it and take another. This
sounded simple, but there were, in fact, several complications. The most
important was Aunt Annie. Never a really progressive spirit, in this
matter of names Aunt Annie showed herself to be an out-and-out
stand-patter.

'You wish that you had been called Gwendolin?' she echoed in horror, as
she combed out the pale yellow hair at bed-time. 'Why, Prudence Jane,
I'm ashamed of you. Gwendolin is a very silly name indeed, and you have
two such noble ones. I only hope that you will grow up to be like the
beautiful grandmammas who gave them to you'--which was a truly lovely
little bit of optimism on Aunt Annie's part.


II

Prudence Jane did not consult Aunt Annie further. That very night,
however, staring up into the darkness from her little white bed, she
decided upon a new combination. And when the Reverend Mr. Sanders came
up to her the next day after Sunday School, and inquired kindly what
little girl this was, Prudence Jane was quite prepared to tell him, with
the transparent look which so frightened dear old Grandma Piper, that it
was Imogen Rose.

She fully meant to inform her family of this interesting change as soon
as she got home from Sunday School, but when she tiptoed into the parlor
Aunt Annie, in all the majesty of her plum-colored satin, was sitting in
a straight-backed chair reading _The Christian Word and Work_, and
looked unreceptive to new ideas. So Prudence Jane tiptoed out again, to
await a more favorable moment.

Unfortunately, before that moment arrived she had a falling-out with her
brother Peter. This was a mistake, for it was the part of prudence
always to make an ally of Peter Piper. He had discovered Prudence Jane
flat on the floor in a corner of the library, scratching her name out of
the Family Bible with an ink-eraser.

'Did the minister tell you to write Imogen in?' he inquired blandly, as
he stood in the doorway with his hands in his corduroys.

'None of your business,' retorted Prudence Jane, closing the Bible with
a bang and sitting down upon it.

The result was that Peter Piper, from whom nothing was ever hidden, went
off and told Aunt Annie all about Imogen Rose and the minister.
Whereupon Aunt Annie, with her usual limited point of view, had
pronounced it a very monstrous fib indeed, and had sent Prudence Jane
instantly into the corner.

'A lie's an abomination unto the Lord three hundred and ninety-eight, a
lie's an abomination unto the Lord three hundred and ninety-nine, a
lie's an abomination unto the Lord four hundred,' finished Prudence Jane
at a canter, and whisked around from her corner.

Aunt Annie beckoned with solemn finger.

'To-morrow, Prudence Jane,' she said, looking across the sewing-table,
'I am going to take you to see the minister and you must tell him
yourself what your real name is, and what a dreadful story you have told
him. I shall ask him what he thinks should be done with a little girl
who cannot speak the truth. I'm sure I don't know what he will say. But
we can't deceive a minister. They always know when they hear a fib.'

'Do they?' asked Prudence Jane, openly interested, her round eyes
fastened upon her aunt.

'Always,' replied Aunt Annie rashly.

'Then why do I have to go and tell him?' asked Prudence Jane.

'Prudence Jane,' said Aunt Annie, 'you are a very saucy little girl, and
I'm sure I don't know what is going to become of you.'

Prudence Jane walked slowly out of the room. She was considering what
Aunt Annie had said about ministers, and she wondered if it were true.
As she went tripping down the stairs she decided to put the Reverend Mr.
Sanders to a test the very next time she met him. And that was why it
was so surprising, when she peeked through the hall window at the foot
of the stairs, to behold him diligently wiping his feet on the door-mat.

'How do you do?' said Prudence Jane politely, as she opened the door.

'Why, good afternoon, Imogen,' said the minister, shaking hands
cordially.

Prudence Jane made the little knix that she had learned at German
school. It was always the finishing touch to Prudence Jane. The Reverend
Mr. Sanders looked down upon it with a most friendly smile.

'Is your aunt at home?' he asked, placing his hat on the table and
following Prudence Jane into the parlor.

'Yes,' she said with simple candor. A fib of that sort was quite beneath
Prudence Jane.

Then she sat down on a velvet sofa, spread out her little blue skirt,
folded her hands in her lap and crossed her ankle-ties. She had never in
her life looked so much like little Bertie. The Reverend Mr. Sanders,
regarding her from an opposite chair, waited for her to open her lips
and say, 'Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.' Instead, this is what
she said:--

'Is Eliza Anna Bomination your grandmother?'

'I beg pardon,' said the Reverend Mr. Sanders.

'Is she dead and gone to heaven, and that's why you say "unto the
Lord"?' continued Prudence Jane.

'I wonder, Imogen,' he said, 'if you would mind beginning over again.'

'I say, is Eliza Anna Bomination your grandmother?' repeated Prudence
Jane. 'Aunt Annie says she's written down in the middle of your Bible
where all people's relations are, and she sounded like a grandmother;
they always have such horrid names.'

The minister looked across at the velvet sofa with eyes that entirely
contradicted the gravity of his face.

'No,' he said, 'I'm sorry, but she isn't. I wish she were. I never heard
of such a jolly grandmother.'

'Is she an aunt?' pursued his small interlocutor.

'I'm afraid that she's not even related by marriage,' he replied.

'Isn't she written down in the middle of your Bible at all?' said
Prudence Jane.

The minister shook his head.

'No,' he said, 'I'm afraid not.'

'Then Aunt Annie told a whopper,' announced Prudence Jane with
satisfaction.

'We should not malign the absent,' said the Reverend Mr. Sanders. 'And
that being the case, suppose you go up at this point, Imogen, and tell
your Aunt Annie that I am here.'

Prudence Jane wondered what 'maligning the absent' was. She distrusted
gentlemen who made cryptic remarks of this sort. It was a way her
brother Horace had. She saw that the moment had now arrived to test Aunt
Annie's theory about ministers and fibs!

'She can't come down,' she replied.

'Can't come down?' repeated the minister.

'No,' said Prudence Jane, looking at him out of the depths of her
forget-me-not eyes, 'she's washed her hair.'

'Oh,' said the Reverend Mr. Sanders, in the tone of one who finds the
conversation getting definitely beyond him.

At this moment an apparition with a round face and a pair of corduroy
shoulders suddenly darkened the open window.

'A _lie_ is an a-_bom_-i-_na_-tion _un_-to the _Lord_,' it sang; and,
catching sight of the clerical back, vanished hastily.

'Interesting chorus,' observed the Reverend Mr. Sanders.

Prudence Jane paid no heed to this interruption.

'It's hanging down her back now,' she pursued, launching upon the
details with her usual aplomb. 'It comes clear down to here.' And
standing up, she indicated a point halfway between her ankle-ties and
the bottom of her ridiculous skirt.

The minister gazed fascinated. Prudence Jane sat down again.

'She washed it with Packer's Tar Soap,' she said, her eyes fixed upon
her victim.

She was quite unable to make out whether Aunt Annie was right about
ministers or not. The Reverend Mr. Sanders looked like the Sphinx.

'She gave a piece to a gentleman once,' went on Prudence Jane, warming
to her work. 'He wasn't a very nice gentleman. He was a--a--' she
hesitated a moment over a fitting climax,--'a--a Piskerpalyan,' she
finished.

'Mercy!' said the Reverend Mr. Sanders, finding his voice at last. 'And
what, may I ask, are you?'

Prudence Jane looked faintly surprised.

'I,' she said, with pride and composure, 'am an Orthy Dox Congo
Gationist.'

'Yes,' said the Reverend Mr. Sanders, 'so I suspected from the first.'

And now _what_ did he mean by that, thought Prudence Jane to herself.
She could no longer see his face. He had turned abruptly in his chair
and was watching something through the aperture in the porti;res.

Prudence Jane heard the thump of a pair of shoes plodding up the stairs
and along the upper hall. She knew that it was Peter Piper going to find
Aunt Annie. There was a stir in the room overhead, then the muffled
sound of a rocking-chair suddenly abandoned, followed by the swish of
skirts coming along the passage and down the stairs.

Prudence Jane sat with parted lips on the edge of the sofa.

The Reverend Mr. Sanders looked decidedly nervous, but he rose and
presented a bold front to whatever might be coming to him through those
porti;res. In another moment they were pushed hastily aside, and Aunt
Annie, crowned with a quite faultless coiffure, hurried into the room.

'Why, Mr. Sanders,' she said, 'I did not know until this minute that you
were here.'

Then her eye fell upon her niece. Prudence Jane was now standing in
front of the sofa, tracing the pattern of the carpet with the toe of an
ankle-tie.

'Why didn't you tell me that Mr. Sanders was waiting?' demanded Aunt
Annie sternly.

Prudence Jane continued to gaze at the carpet.

'Mr. Sanders,' said Aunt Annie, who never postponed a disagreeable
duty, 'we have a little girl here who cannot speak the truth, and we are
going to ask you to tell us what becomes of people who tell wrong
stories.'

The Reverend Mr. Sanders looked ill at ease.

'Come here,' continued Aunt Annie, holding out her hand toward the
velvet sofa.

Prudence Jane moved reluctantly across the room.

'And now,' went on the voice of the accuser, 'she has even deceived her
minister, and she has come to make her little confession. Tell Mr.
Sanders,' directed Aunt Annie, 'the truth about that wicked fib.'

'Which one?' inquired Prudence Jane meekly.

'You know very well which,' answered her exasperated aunt; 'the last
one.'

Prudence Jane lifted her blue eyes from the carpet and looked straight
at the unfortunate Mr. Sanders.

'She didn't give any of it to the Piskerpalyan,' she said.

Then she turned and walked discreetly through the porti;res. She felt
that it was no moment to stay and learn what became of little girls who
told whoppers.

'Didn't give who what?' she could hear Aunt Annie saying vaguely on the
other side of the curtains.

But Prudence Jane decided to let her minister explain.




THE GLORY-BOX

BY ELIZABETH ASHE


I

In Southern Ohio a girl's wedding chest is her Glory-Box. If, like Mabel
Bennet, you are the daughter of a successful druggist, the box is of
cedarwood, delivered free of charge by the Dayton department stores; but
if, like Eunice Day, you are the daughter of an unsuccessful bookkeeper
who has left a life insurance inadequate even when supplemented by the
salary you earn teaching primary children, then the box is just a box,
covered with gay cretonne, and serving the purpose very nicely.

When Eunice Day's engagement became known, Mabel, remembering the
scalloped guest-towels which Eunice had given her some months before,
brought over one afternoon an offering wrapped in tissue paper.

'I hope you'll like this, Eunice,' she said. 'It's just a sack,--what
they call a matin;e. I've found them very useful.'

Mabel spoke with the slightly complacent air of the three months' bride.

'Why, it's ever so dear of you to go to so much trouble,' said Eunice,
taking the package into her hands. She was a tall, slender girl, with
dark eyes and a pretty dignity of bearing. 'I'll have to open it right
now, I guess. You aren't in a hurry, are you?'

'Oh, no, not especially. Harry doesn't get home until quarter past six,
and I've fixed the vegetables. Just you go ahead.'

Eunice untied the white ribbon. 'Why, Mabel, it's beautiful, and such a
delicate shade of pink!'

She held the sack at arm's length.

'I'm glad you like it. It's nothing wonderful, of course.'

'It couldn't be more pretty, and Stephen loves pink. I wrote him the
other day that I had made a pink kimono and I hoped he would like it. He
wrote back that pink was--was the color of dawn and apple-blossoms.'

Mabel laughed. 'Stephen has a funny way of saying things, hasn't he?'

'Why, I don't know,' said Eunice, flushing.

'Oh, well,' went on Mabel good-naturedly, 'I do think you look nice in
pink with your dark hair. Harry always tells me to stick to blue. It's
the color for blondes. Don't you want to show me your things? I won't
mind if the ribbons aren't all run in yet.'

'I'd like to show them to you, of course. Come upstairs. They'll look
nicer though when they are all pressed out,' said Eunice, laying the
sack carefully back in its paper wrappings. She carried it on
outstretched palms.

'Do you know when you're going to be married?' asked Mabel as she
reached the top of the narrow stairs.

'We haven't made plans yet. Probably Stephen won't want to for another
year. It depends on so many things.'

'I suppose so,' said Mabel, following Eunice into her bedroom. It was a
small room but pretty. Eunice had recently put four coats of white paint
on her oak set. 'Lawyers,' continued Mabel sympathetically, 'have to
wait so much longer. Now Harry knew to a cent what salary he was getting
when he proposed to me, and he knew what his raise would probably be for
the next two years. The Wire Company is a square concern. There's your
Glory-Box! It looks awfully nice. You made it, didn't you?'

'Stephen made it when he was on for his vacation last summer. We
happened to have the cretonne in the house. Mother wanted me to buy a
cedar chest but I thought this would do.'

'Oh, one doesn't really need a cedar chest,' said Mabel cheerfully, 'and
they're terribly expensive, you know.'

'Yes, I do know.' Eunice's face twinkled. 'I'll lay this sack on the bed
so it won't get mussed while I'm showing you the things.'

She raised the lid of the Glory-Box, then glanced shyly at the other
girl. 'You're the first person I've shown them to. I hope you'll think
they're dainty. There isn't much lace on them, but mother put in a lot
of handwork--feather-stitching.'

'Lace is a bother to do up,' Mabel said amiably. 'I've been almost
distracted doing up mine.'

'Your things were beautiful, though.' Eunice was laying piles of
carefully folded garments on the edge of the box.

'There, I've got it now,' she said, getting up from the floor. 'This is
my prettiest set. I've kept it wrapped in dark blue paper. Mother said
it would keep white longer.'

'Why, they are sweet, Eunice!' Mabel touched the soft white stuff with
appraising fingers. 'And all made by hand. My, what a lot of work! Your
mother must have spent hours on them.'

'She did. She said she wanted to do it, though. The other things are
plainer.' Eunice took them up one by one and showed them. 'I won't let
you see the table linen to-day. I've done a lot of initialing, but they
don't look really well until they have been washed.'

'No, they don't. Anyway I have to be going. You certainly have nice
things, Eunice. That kimono is awfully pretty.'

'I like it,' said Eunice simply.

'Well, I can't stay another minute. Don't you come down to the door now.
You have to put away everything. I'll just run along. Come and see me.
I've got the flat all settled.'

'I shall love to, Mabel. Just a moment! You must let me go to the door
with you. The Glory-Box can wait.'

Eunice found her mother standing by the bed when she came back. She was
a meagre-looking woman with a thin mouth. Her eyes had once been soft
and dark like Eunice's, but the glow had gone out of them, leaving them
a little hard.

'I've been looking at the sack Mabel brought you. It's a nice pattern.
That sort of lace looks almost like real val. What did she say to your
things?'

'She said they were sweet, mother.'

'Well, I suppose they are as nice as any one could have without spending
money. You didn't show her the tablecloth I gave you?'

'No, I thought I'd wait to show the linen until it was all done up.'

Her mother fingered the lace on the sack.

'I don't believe she has a much better tablecloth than that one, Eunice.
Do you suppose so?'

'No,' answered Eunice, 'probably not. It's very beautiful.' She laid
down the garment she was folding and looked up, troubled, into her
mother's face. 'Oh, it seems so selfish for me to have it all. You've
always wanted nice fine linen, mother.'

'I've given up wanting, I guess. I don't care as long as you have them.
You had better lay tissue paper in that sleeve, Eunice, the way I showed
you. I'll start supper so that you can put these things away. They won't
look like anything if you leave them about.'

When her mother was gone, Eunice took up the pink kimono and spread it
out on the bed. She could fold it more carefully that way. She touched
it with caressing fingers. 'Dawn and apple-blossoms,' she repeated
softly. Then she smiled, remembering Mabel's remark: 'Stephen has a
funny way of saying things.'

Stephen was different somehow from Harry, from any of the men whom her
friends had married. They were nice young men, of course, all of them.
One was superintendent of the Sunday School, besides getting a good
salary in the Cash Register Company; another had gone to college, had
been in Stephen's class at the Ohio State University in fact, and was
now doing well as part owner of the garage on Main Street; still another
was paying-teller in the bank next to the garage; he wore very
'good-looking' suits, usually with a tiny line of white at the edge of
the waistcoat. Still Stephen was different.

When he had got his B.A. degree at Ohio, he decided that he wanted to be
a lawyer, and that he would go to one of the best schools in the
country. He chose Columbia. He had worked his way through college, but
he considered that it would not pay to work his way through Law School.
He wanted the time to get something out of New York. His father was
unable to advance the money, so Stephen went to a friend of his
father's, a prosperous coal-dealer in the town, and asked that he lend
him enough to put him through economically, but not, he plainly said,
too economically. He would give the coal-dealer notes, payable with
interest four years after he was admitted to the bar.

The coal-dealer, taking into consideration the fact that the young man
had broken every record at the university in scholarship, and two other
facts, the young man's forehead and mouth, lent him the money. He said
that the interest need not begin until he was admitted.

Stephen thanked him and went to Columbia. One of the professors there
took a great fancy to him. He introduced him to his sister, a maiden
lady living in Washington Square, who, finding him very likable,
introduced him to other people living in the Square.

Stephen was very happy. He wrote to Eunice,--he had been engaged to her
since the end of his second year at the Law School,--'Washington Square
is rather terrifying from the outside, but once inside you feel
beautifully at home. I think it's the perfect breeding you find there.
I've met women more intellectual, greater perhaps, than Professor
Lansing's sister, but never one who gives such an impression of
completion. There are no loose ends. You will like her, Eunice.'

In another letter he said, 'We won't have much money to start with, of
course, but if we put a little dignity into our kitchenette apartment,
it will be a home that people will love to come to. It's partly the
dignity of their living that makes these Washington Square people so
worth while to be with.'

And last week he had written, 'You won't find New York lonely. They will
love you, dear. You belong. You have not only charm but the dignity that
belongs. I wonder if I'm foolish to care so much for that word dignity.
Perhaps it's because I associate it with you, or perhaps--I love you
because you have it.'

And Eunice too was happy and proud: happy that Stephen was coming into
his own, and proud that he should think her equal to the occasion. It
would not be an easy task, being equal to Stephen. Stephen was a great
man, or would be a great man. She knew it and Stephen knew it. 'We are
going to be great, you and I,' he had said more than once. And yet one
day when she had answered, 'You and I, Stephen?' his eyes, which had
been alight with the glorious vision of the future, softened, and he had
come and knelt beside her and had laid his head down. 'Oh, Eunice,' he
had whispered, 'I've got brains; I'm pretty sure to be successful; but
if I'm worth while, it will be because of you. You are a great woman,
dear.'

And Eunice had mothered him and had hoped--so fervently that the hope
was a prayer--that she would really be great enough to meet his needs.

Sometimes she doubted. She had dignity; Stephen had said so; but inside
she was deprecating and shy. People like Mabel Ashley made her shy, and
most of the people she knew were like Mabel. They thought Stephen's way
of saying and thinking things 'funny.' There was only one woman whom she
could talk with, a High-School teacher who had come to board next door.
She and the High-School teacher took long walks together.

The High-School teacher had been to Europe twice. She knew how people
lived outside of this little Ohio town--outside of the United States
even. She was full of shrewd comment. Eunice talked to her about the
books that she and Stephen were reading, and sometimes about Stephen
himself. Several times the High-School teacher had said, 'He is
splendid, Eunice.'

Eunice thought about her this afternoon as she put the last things away
in the Glory-Box. She hoped that, if the Washington Square people were
like this teacher, she would get along. And there came another
encouraging thought. The people in the Square were sure of themselves of
course, but perhaps they were sure because they had things and had
always had things. She would one day have the things in her Glory-Box,
and she would have Stephen. After she was quite used to having them and
to having a person like Stephen, she would be sure of herself too.

'Supper will be ready in five minutes, Eunice.'

'I'm coming in a moment.'

The room had grown quite dark. Eunice lighted two candles standing on
her bureau. They were in common glass candlesticks which she had bought
at the Ten Cent store: she had wanted to have brass; but then, Stephen
and she were going to have brass candlesticks in every room of their
house. They both loved candle-light.

Eunice smoothed her dark hair. Then she washed her hands very carefully.
Stephen had said once that they were not wonderfully pretty hands, but
that they had distinction. He had kissed them.

'I guess I'm all right now,' said Eunice, glancing into the mirror. She
picked up a photograph of Stephen from the bureau and laid her face
against it. Then she blew out the candles and went downstairs.


II

Stephen's letter that awaited her when she came home from school the
next afternoon was a one-page scrawl. 'My head is ringing so with the
quinine I've taken that I can't write to-night. By to-morrow I shall
probably be rid of this beastly cold. I want to tell you about a book
I've just read. It's great stuff.' He added a postscript: 'Don't ask me,
dear, if I wore my rubbers day before yesterday. You know I didn't.'

In Eunice's eyes was a smile of amused tenderness as she put the letter
back in its envelope. If the cold were 'beastly,' perhaps he might
remember next time. She was afraid though that only married men wore
rubbers.

No letter came the next day, or the next.

'If I don't hear to-morrow, I'll telegraph.'

'He's probably busy,' said her mother.

'I'm afraid he's sick.'

Eunice waited for the postman on Saturday morning, but he brought her
no letter. She put on her hat and coat.

'I'll be back in a half hour, mother.'

As she went down the steps a boy riding a bicycle stopped at the curb.
He handed her a telegram. It was from Stephen's landlady. Stephen had
died that morning at two o'clock--of pneumonia.

Eunice was conscious of being very collected and calm as she went back
into the house; quite wonderfully calm. Her mother was in the kitchen.
Eunice went to her and told her--very gently. She had the feeling that
it was her mother's sorrow. Her mother's dry, hard sobs and bowed figure
brought the tears to her eyes. She laid her hand on the thin convulsed
shoulders. 'Mother, don't--don't, dear, it's all right, you know.' She
stood by her chair until the sobs ceased.

'I'm going around to--to Stephen's, mother. I'll not be gone long.'

Mrs. Day followed her to the steps; her face was pitifully pinched,
almost old. At the gate Eunice turned and saw her.

'Poor mother!' She wanted to go back and kiss her but she dared not.

Stephen's home was on the other side of the town. It was a small frame
house painted light gray, with a gable back and front, and a narrow
porch running across it. This morning the shades in the parlor were
drawn down.

Eunice had to wait some moments before the door was opened by Stephen's
young sister--a slip of a thing but a capable housekeeper. Her eyes were
swollen with crying. 'She's so little,' thought Eunice, and took her in
her arms.

When the girl was able to speak, she told Eunice that her father had
gone to New York, and that he would bring Stephen home. Eunice stayed an
hour, comforting, talking, planning. Then she left her.

'I'm so quiet. I didn't know it could be like this.'

The March wind blew the dust into her face. The grit irritated her. She
wished there were snow on the ground and then wondered that she should
care. That was how it was the next two days: she went on thinking and
acting, with every now and then this strange awareness of being alive.

But on Monday afternoon when they came home from the cemetery, Eunice
went upstairs to her room.

'I'm going to lie down a while, mother.'

Her mother made no answer as she turned into the kitchen.

Eunice lay down on the bed. A pale yellow sunset gleamed through the
branches of the tree outside her window. She had seen the yellow streak
in the sky as they had left the cemetery. She closed her eyes to shut it
out. Her heart was no longer numb. It was waking to its misery. She lay
very still with clenched hands. She had learned to bear physical pain
that way. She thought perhaps she could bear this if she lay very still.

'I want to tell you about a book I've just read. It's great stuff.'

'O Stephen, Stephen, laddie!'

The tears came, and great sobs that shook and twisted her rigid body.
Once she thought her mother came up the stairs and stopped outside her
door. She buried her face in the pillow. Her mother must not hear. By
and by,--she had been quiet for an hour,--her mother came in with a
tray.

'I've made you some toast and tea, Eunice. You must keep up your
strength.'

Her tone was flat and emotionless. She set the tray down by her in the
darkness. Then she lighted the gas.

Eunice swallowed the tea obediently, she was so very tired. As she put
the cup down her eyes fell on the cretonne-covered box in the window.

'Mother, my Glory-Box! Don't let me see it! Oh, don't let me see my
Glory-Box!'

Mrs. Day came up to the bed. 'I'll take it out to-morrow while you are at
school. I meant to do that.' Her face worked as she left the room.

When the door closed, Eunice sat up and pushed her tumbled hair back
from her face. She wanted to look at the Glory-Box. To-morrow her mother
was going to take it away. She clasped her hands tightly about her
drawn-up knees and stared at the box with hot, miserable eyes. Of course
it would have to be taken away, but she wanted to look at it now because
it was her Glory-Box and because it was Stephen's. Stephen had made it.

'That's a decent job for just a lawyer,' he had said, when the last nail
was driven in and they were taking a critical survey of it.

Stephen had laughed when she regretted that the roses in the cretonne
were yellow, because the things to go into the box very likely would be
pink. He had laughed and kissed her and told her she had better get a
pair of pink specs, then the roses would be pink enough.

And Stephen had taken such an interest in what she had written about the
things she was embroidering for household use. When she had reported a
whole dozen napkins hemmed and initialed, he had thought it would be
jolly to have nice linen. They would probably be short on silver at
first, but good linen made you feel respectable. He remembered his
mother taking so much pride in what had been left of hers. For a moment
the words of that letter were so vividly recalled that she forgot that
Stephen was dead. For quite a moment she was happy. Then she
remembered, but the realization brought no tears, only a swelling wave
of misery.

'I can't bear it, oh, I can't!'

But even as she moaned she knew that she would bear it, that she would
go on living for years and years and years. Other girls she had known or
heard about--in her own town--had gone on living: little Sadie Smith
whose lover had been killed three days before her wedding, and even
Milly Petersen, who had been engaged for five years when the man asked
to be released because he wanted to marry the girl who had recently
moved to Milly's street. These girls had lived; they had grown pale and
faded, or hard. People felt very sorry for them: they were spoken of as
'poor Milly,' or 'Sadie Smith, poor child'; but they had lived. Eunice
saw herself moving among her little circle, brave and sad-eyed like
these girls.

Suddenly--she never remembered just how it came about--suddenly her
humor flashed a white light over the vision. This sad-eyed Self seemed
something not to pity but to scorn. It was grotesque standing in your
friend's parlor with clenched hands, as it were, and compressed lips,
saying, 'Don't mind me, please. I'm bearing it.' If one were going to
live one must live happily. Stephen was such a happy person. He was
happy when he was working or playing or just loving. Even hurdy-gurdys
made him happy.

'When I hear one grinding away in the morning,' he had written, 'I have
to kick a few Law Journals about just to keep in tune with the darn
thing.'

It had been a delightful surprise to her, his overflowing happiness, for
Stephen's face in repose was very grave. She herself only occasionally
had his joy in mere living, but she had always thought that Stephen's
joyfulness would prove infectious. Suppose, now, without Stephen she
should make the experiment of being happy. It would be a wonderful
experiment to see,--she spoke the words aloud, deliberately,--to see if
she could kill this terrible thing, Sorrow, and keep Stephen to love and
to remember.

Eunice was still staring at the Glory-Box, but it was more than her
Glory-Box. It was part of the problem that she was trying to think out
clearly. For perhaps sorrow was a problem that you could work out like
other problems, if only you could see it, not as one solid, opaque mass,
but as something made up of pieces that you could deal with one at a
time. The Glory-Box was a piece. She had wanted it taken away because it
was a thing so filled with pain that she could not bear to have it
about. If--Eunice got up in her excitement and walked up and down the
room--if the Glory-Box could become a box again, just a box covered with
cretonne, and the things in it become things, then a great piece of
misery would disappear. Love, a girl's love, was like--she groped a
moment for words--like a vine that puts forth little shoots and
tendrils; love even went into things. When Death trampled on the vine,
the shoots and tendrils were crushed with it. But if you cut them off,
these poor bruised pieces of the vine, the vine itself would perhaps
have a chance to become strong and beautiful.

Eunice played with the idea, her cheeks flushed, her eyes very bright.
She felt as she did sometimes when talking on paper with Stephen.

She went over to the Glory-Box and raised the cover. On top lay the
matin;e that Mabel had brought on that day not quite a week ago. She
unfolded it and touched it. 'This isn't--Stephen,' she said aloud, quite
firmly. 'It's cotton voile and val lace. It's cotton voile.'

She took out garment after garment. When she came to the pink kimono her
eyes blinded with tears. 'It's a lovely shade. Pink is pretty with dark
hair.' Her quivering lips could scarcely frame the words. 'It's not
Stephen. It's--it's just a kimono.'

She put the things back and closed the box. 'I'll look at the rest in a
day or two. I'll keep looking at them. Probably I shall never be able to
use them, but I'll keep looking until I get accustomed to seeing them.
Mother will get used to seeing the box here. If she put it in the
storeroom she would always dread going in.'

Mrs. Day was getting breakfast the next morning when Eunice came down.
She went on mechanically with her preparation, avoiding looking at her.
At the table she glanced up. Eunice's face was white and haggard, but
her eyes, strangely big, were shining. Eunice's mother watched her
furtively throughout the meal. As they left the table Eunice put her
arms about her.

'Don't take the box out, mother. It's better to get used to it. I'm
trying to get used to things. Don't you worry about me. You'll see.'

She kissed her and hurried to school. In her exalted mood the
sympathetic attentions of the other teachers seemed almost surprising.
They were dear and kind, but why should they be so kind? She was going
to be happy. At the end of the day, however, Eunice let herself softly
into the house, too wretched to want to meet her mother. She carried to
her room the letters of condolence that were on the dining-room table.
She read them impassively, even the kindly one from Miss Lansing,
wondering why they did not touch her. 'It's because I'm tired,' she
concluded, and knelt down by the Glory-Box, bowing her head on her
outstretched arms.

'Stephen, dear,' she prayed, 'I can't look at the things to-night. I'm
too tired.'

But the next day she took them all out. And on a Saturday afternoon
three weeks later she startled her mother by coming into her room
dressed in the suit and hat that were her 'best.' Her mother laid down
the skirt on which she was putting a new braid.

'Why, where are you going, Eunice?'

'I thought I'd call on Mabel. I've never been to see her since she
started housekeeping. I promised to, long ago.'

Mrs. Day looked at her keenly, her mouth tightening. 'You're foolish to
go and see all her wedding presents about the house. You won't be able
to stand it.'

'I shall, mother. That's why I'm going to stand it. I shan't mind
calling there after I've been this once. I've thought it out.'

'You're a queer girl, Eunice. I don't understand you. But I suppose you
know your--your own business best,' she ended, taking up her work again.

Eunice felt quite sure that she did, and yet there were days when the
experiment seemed a failure, or at least only just begun: days when she
would read in a paper of brilliant social events in New York, in
Stephen's New York. Stephen might have been there at that dinner, his
eyes, which looked so gravely from his picture, lighted with the
joyfulness of the occasion, his splendid head towering above the other
men as he joined in the toasts--Stephen had told her they always made
toasts at these dinners; she could hear his laugh, his hearty boyish
laugh. And those other days in early spring, when a hurdy-gurdy would
play 'Turkey in the Straw,' and she could see Stephen pitching his Law
Journals about, exulting in the glorious fact that he was alive. Oh, how
she longed for him, wanted him these days--with a passionate yearning
that for moments maddened her. But as the months went by the times of
overwhelming wanting came less and less frequently. 'I shall soon be
happy,' Eunice told herself. And on a morning of June loveliness, a
morning of very blue sky, white clouds, and butter-cups, Eunice knew
that she was happy.

'I'm glad to-day, Stephen, I'm glad, just because it's all so
beautiful.'

She wondered now and again why, since she herself was so surely leaving
the sorrow behind her, her mother should still droop under its weight.
They seldom talked about Stephen. They had agreed at the beginning not
to do that often, but there was bitterness in her mother's face and
bitterness on occasion in her words. 'I've got used to seeing your box
around, but don't ever ask me to look inside.' It occurred to Eunice
that perhaps it was because to her mother had come only the grief. She
was not having Stephen to love.


III

One afternoon late in February, Eunice was met in the hall by her
mother. 'A letter came for you this morning. It's from New York.' She
stood watching her as Eunice opened it with unsteady fingers.

Eunice looked up in a few moments, very white. 'It's from Professor
Lansing's sister,' she faltered. 'Miss Lansing is coming on to Chicago
this week. She says she would like to see me. She'll stop off in Dayton
over night, Saturday probably, and will come out for lunch if it's
convenient for us to have her. She can make connections by doing that.
Oh, mother, it's beautiful of her to want to come.'

'I don't know that it will do you much good to see her. You'll probably
get upset.'

'No, I won't be upset because I'll be so glad. Stephen said she was a
wonderful woman, and--we can talk about him. He was at her house only a
few days before he--caught cold.'

'Well, I don't know,' said her mother. 'You had better come into the
kitchen where it's warm. You look like a ghost, Eunice. I'll give you a
cup of soup to drink. It's on the stove now.' She laid nervous
compelling fingers on Eunice's arm. 'I suppose,' Mrs. Day was pouring
out the soup as she spoke, 'I suppose that Miss Lansing hasn't any idea
of the way we live. Even the front stoop looks a sight. It's needed a
coat of paint for years.'

'I know,' Eunice answered, her face clouding. 'I wish things were
different for Stephen's sake. But we can't help it.'

'No,' said her mother harshly, 'we can't help it. But I wish she wasn't
coming for a meal. The last decent tablecloth was cut up into napkins a
month ago. I was ashamed of the one we set Mabel Bennet down to the
other night.'

Eunice walked to the window. She looked out upon the backyard, upon the
snow that was reflecting the sunset, a sentence of one of Stephen's
letters in her mind. 'It's the dignity of their living that makes these
Washington Square people so worth while.' And then she recalled that
other letter. 'It will be jolly to have nice linen. Good linen makes you
feel respectable.'

It pained her that they must offer this friend of Stephen's what they
had been ashamed to offer Mabel Bennet. Stephen's pride would be hurt,
Stephen who had loved that word 'dignity'; and Stephen's pride was her
own pride just as much as if she were his wife, as if he were living.

Eunice stood a long time looking out upon the snow, until the rose of
the sunset had gone from it, leaving it blue and cold. She turned from
the window.

'Mother,'--she was glad that in the darkening kitchen she could not see
her mother's face distinctly,--'mother, don't you think we had better
use that very fine cloth you gave me, and the napkins, to make the table
look nice? Hadn't we better use them?'

'Use your things out of your Glory-Box, Eunice!'

'Yes, they are just pretty things, now, mother. All the pain is out of
them. I'm going to wear the best set you made me. I think if I have on
those nice clothes under my dress I won't be so shy with Miss Lansing. I
want--O, mother, I want Stephen to--to feel proud of me.'

Mrs. Day bent to rake the fire, then straightened up. 'If you can stand
wearing that set, I've nothing to say. You have a right to your own
notions. But I don't see how I can bear to look at the cloth.'

'After it's been done up and on the table once, you'll forget there was
anything sad connected with it. I know you will,' said Eunice, with her
brave, pleading eyes fixed on her mother's set face.

'I don't know; maybe I could forget. But I don't see how I could bring
myself to use something out of your own Glory-Box. It seems almost
indelicate. They're all your things.'

Eunice crossed the room and laid her face down on her mother's shoulder.
'You gave me the things, mother, and you've had so little of what you've
always wanted. Can't it be our Glory-Box, for us both to use on special
occasions--like this?' Her arms tightened about her mother's neck.
'Can't we use them this time for Stephen's sake?'

After a moment's silence Mrs. Day pushed her gently away.

'If they are to be washed you'll have to bring them down to-morrow. I'll
want to get them on the line while this good weather lasts. Saturday is
only four days off.'

Saturday evening Eunice lighted the candles on her bureau; lighting the
candles seemed like another ceremony of this perfect day. She had got up
early so as to put her room and the rest of the house in order. While
her mother was finishing in the kitchen she had set the table. It had
been a joy to do that, to spread the cloth so that the creases would
come in just the right place, and the large initial 'D' show without
being too conspicuous, and to fold the napkins prettily and arrange the
dishes. At the last moment she had decided that it would not be too
extravagant to buy a little plant of some sort for a centrepiece. So
there was just time for her to slip into the clothes that had been
spread out on the bed, and do over her hair, before Miss Lansing
arrived.

Stephen had said, 'You will like her, Eunice.' Like her!--she was the
most wonderful woman she had ever met. She was elderly, but strangely
enough you did not wonder whether she had been pretty or beautiful when
she was young. She was wonderful just as she was now. You could not
think of her as being different. She was tall, a little taller than
Eunice herself. Her face was finely cut, the sort of face you saw in
engravings of old portraits; there were not many lines in it. Her eyes
were dark and young too, though she had quite gray hair and evidently
didn't care to be in the fashion, for her black silk fell all around in
ample lengths. Eunice had watched her hands. They were not small, but
long and slender and very white; the two rings she wore seemed made for
them.

And Eunice had not felt shy. At first she had thought she was going to;
Miss Lansing had seemed at first so like a personage; but the thought of
Stephen, and of the featherstitched best set she was wearing made her
forget that Washington Square was, as Stephen had said, rather
terrifying on the outside. It was Stephen's friend whom they were
entertaining, and Stephen's friend was not a personage really, but a
wonderful woman who had loved Stephen too.

After lunch they talked together in the parlor while her mother was
clearing things away. Miss Lansing said that she had seen a great deal
of Stephen that last year. He had seemed to enjoy coming to the house.
He had come to dinner sometimes, but more often he had dropped in on
Saturday or Sunday afternoons for tea. One afternoon he had not been
quite himself. She had questioned him a little and he had confessed with
a laugh that he was homesick for Ohio.

'That was the time he talked for two hours about you, my dear,' Miss
Lansing said, smiling. 'Fortunately no one else came in, so he was
uninterrupted. I liked to listen to his talk; he had charm.' But Eunice
saw her eyes kindle. 'He was more than charming. He was great.'

'Yes,' Eunice answered very low. 'He would have been a great man, Miss
Lansing. I always knew he would.'

At that Miss Lansing put out both hands and covered Eunice's that were
clasped tightly in her lap. 'He would have been a great man,' she
repeated, 'and you, my dear, would have made him a great wife.'

Eunice felt that never, unless she should hear Stephen's voice again,
should she listen to such wonderful words as those. Ever since Miss
Lansing had gone they had sung themselves in her heart like a sacred
refrain. She was glad that it was night now so that she could fall
asleep repeating them.

'Getting ready for bed, Eunice?'

'I'm beginning to.' Eunice opened the door to her mother, who stood
outside winding the clock.

'Do you know,' said Mrs. Day as she set the alarm, 'I've been thinking
again what a good idea it was to open that can of peas. They did make
the chops look so tasty, and they were almost as tender as the French.
I helped Miss Lansing twice.'

Eunice kissed her as she turned away.

'It was a nice dinner throughout, mother, and the table looked lovely.'

'Well, I saw Miss Lansing look at the cloth. She was too much of a lady
to say anything, of course, but I could tell she noticed it.'

'Yes,' said Eunice, 'I think she did.'

Mrs. Day was closing her door.

'Put out the light in the hall before you go to bed, Eunice.'

'Yes, mother,' said Eunice, softly closing her own door.

She stood still a moment in the centre of the candle-lighted room. Then
she went over to the Glory-Box and took out the kimono and laid it over
the footboard so that the pink folds could catch the light. When she had
undressed, she put it on. 'It will be a beautiful ending to the day,'
she said, as she stood before the mirror braiding her hair.

Her eyes rested on Stephen's picture.

'I think you would have been proud to-day, dear, and I think you would
have liked this.'

She turned to the mirror, and looked at the girl reflected there, at the
dark eyes and hair and at the kimono draping her soft white gown.

'Dawn and apple-blossoms,' she whispered and then stretched out her
arms.

'Stephen, my dear! O Stephen.'




THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD[7]

BY DALLAS LORE SHARP


I

We were trailing the 'riders' of P Ranch across the plains to a hollow
in the hills called the 'Troughs,' where they were to round up a lot of
cattle for a branding. On the way we fell in behind a bunch of some
fifty cows and yearlings which one of the riders had picked up; and,
while he dashed off across the desert for a 'stray,' we tenderfeet drove
on the herd. It was hot, and the cattle lagged, so we urged them on. All
at once I noticed that the whole herd was moving with a swinging,
warping gait, with switching tails, and heads thrown round from side to
side as if every steer were watching us. We were not near enough to see
their eyes, but the rider, far across the desert, saw the movement and
came cutting through the sage, shouting and waving his arms to stop us.
We had pushed the driving too hard. Mutiny was spreading among the
cattle, already manifest in a sullen ugly temper that would have brought
the herd charging us in another minute, had not the cowboy galloped in
between us just as he did--so untamed, unafraid, and instinctively
savage is the spirit of the herd.

It is this herd-spirit that the cowboy, on his long, cross-desert drives
to the railroad, most fears. The herd is like a crowd, easily led,
easily excited, easily stampeded,--when it becomes a mob of frenzied
beasts, past all control,--the spirit of the city 'gang' at riot in the
plains.

If one would know how thin is the coat of domestication worn by the
tamest of animals, let him ride with the cattle across the rim-rock
country of southeastern Oregon. No better chance to study the spirit of
the herd could possibly be had. And in contrast to the cattle, how
intelligent, controlled, almost human, seems the plainsman's horse!

I share all the tenderfoot's admiration for the cowboy and his 'pony.'

Both of them are necessary in bringing four thousand cattle through from
P Ranch to Winnemucca; and of both is required a degree of daring and
endurance, as well as a knowledge of the wild-animal mind, which lifts
their hard work into the heroic, and makes of every drive a sage-brush
epic--so wonderful is the working together of man and horse, a kind of
centaur of the plains.

From P Ranch to Winnemucca is a seventeen-day drive through a desert of
rim-rock and greasewood and sage, which, under the most favorable
conditions, is beset with difficulty, but which, in the dry season, and
with anything like four thousand cattle, becomes an unbroken hazard.
More than all else on such a drive is feared the wild herd-spirit, the
quick, black temper which, by one sign or another, ever threatens to
break the spell of the riders' power and sweep the maddened or
terrorized herd to destruction. The handling of the herd to keep this
spirit sleeping is ofttimes a thrilling experience.


II

Some time before my visit to P Ranch, in the summer of 1912, the riders
had taken out a herd of four thousand steers on what proved to be one of
the most difficult drives ever made to Winnemucca. For the first two
days on the trail the cattle were strange to each other, having been
gathered from widely separated grazing grounds,--from Double-O and the
Home Ranch,--and were somewhat clannish and restive under the driving.
At the beginning of the third day signs of real trouble appeared. A
shortage of water and the hot weather together began to tell on the
temper of the herd.

The third day was long and exceedingly hot. The line started forward at
dawn, and all day kept moving, with the sun cooking the bitter smell of
the sage into the air, and with sixteen thousand hoofs kicking up a
still bitterer smother of alkali dust which inflamed eyes and nostrils
and coated the very lungs of the cattle. The fierce desert thirst was
upon the herd long before it reached the creek where it was to bed for
the night. The heat and the dust had made slow work of the driving, and
it was already late when they reached the creek, only to find it dry.

This was bad. The men were tired, but the cattle were thirsty, and Wade,
the 'boss of the buckaroos,' pushed the herd on toward the next
rim-rock, hoping to get down to the plain below before the end of the
slow desert twilight. Anything for the night but a dry camp.

They had hardly started on when a whole flank of the herd, suddenly
breaking away as if by prearrangement, tore off through the brush. The
horses were as tired as the men, and, before the chase was over, the
twilight was gray in the sage, making it necessary to halt at once and
camp where they were. They would have to go without water.

The runaways were brought up and the herd closed in till it formed a
circle nearly a mile around. This was as close as it could be drawn, for
the cattle would not bed--lie down. They wanted water more than they
wanted rest. Their eyes were red, their tongues raspy with thirst. The
situation was a difficult one.

But camp was made. Two of the riders were sent back along the trail to
bring up the 'drags' while Wade, with his other men, circled the uneasy
cattle, closing them in, quieting them, and doing everything possible to
make them bed.

They were thirsty; and instead of bedding, the herd began to 'growl'--a
distant mutter of throats, low, rumbling, ominous, as when faint thunder
rolls behind the hills. Every plainsman fears the growl, for it too
often is a prelude to the 'milling,' as it proved to be now, when the
whole vast herd began to stir--slowly, singly at first and without
direction, till at length it moved together, round and round a great
compact circle, the multitude of clicking hoofs, of clashing horns and
chafing sides, like the sound of rushing rain across a field of corn.

Nothing could be worse for the cattle. The cooler twilight was falling,
but, mingling with it, rose and thickened and spread a choking dust from
their feet which soon covered them, and shut from sight all but the wall
of the herd. Slowly, evenly, swung the wall, round and round, without a
break. Only one who has watched a milling herd can know its suppressed
excitement. To keep that excitement in check was the problem of Wade and
his men. And the night had not yet begun.

When the riders had brought in the drags, and the chuckwagon had
lumbered up with supper, Wade set the first watch.

Along with the wagon had come the fresh horses--among them Peroxide Jim,
a supple, powerful, clean-limbed buckskin, that had, I think, as fine
and intelligent an animal-face as any creature I ever saw. And why
should he not have been saved fresh for just such a need as this? Are
there not superior horses as well as superior men--a Peroxide Jim to
complement a Wade?

The horse plainly understood the situation, Wade told me; and though
there was nothing like sentiment for horse-flesh about the boss of the
P Ranch riders, his faith in Peroxide Jim was absolute.

The other night-horses were saddled and tied to the wheels of the wagon.
It was Wade's custom to take his turn with the second watch; but
shifting his saddle to Peroxide Jim, he rode out with the four of the
first watch, who, evenly spaced, were quietly circling the herd.

The night, for this part of the high desert, was unusually warm. It was
close, still, and without a sky. The near, thick darkness blotted out
the stars. There is usually a breeze at night over these highest
rim-rock plains which, no matter how hot the day may have been, crowds
the cattle together for warmth. To-night not a breath stirred the sage
as Wade wound in and out among the bushes, the hot dust stinging his
eyes and caking rough on his skin.

Round and round moved the weaving shifting forms, out of the dark and
into the dark, a gray spectral line like a procession of ghosts, or some
morris dance of the desert's sheeted dead. But it was not a line, it was
a sea of forms; not a procession, but the even surging of a maelstrom of
hoofs a mile around.

Wade galloped out on the plain for a breath of air and a look at the
sky. A quick cold rain would quiet them; but there was not a feel of
rain in the darkness, no smell of it on the air. Only the powdery taste
of the bitter sage.

The desert, where the herd was camped, was one of the highest of a
series of table-lands, or benches; it lay as level as a floor, rimmed by
a sheer wall of rock from which there was a drop to the bench of sage
below. The herd had been headed for a pass, and was now halted within a
mile of the rim-rock on the east, where there was a perpendicular fall
of about three hundred feet.

It was the last place an experienced plainsman would have chosen for a
camp; and every time Wade circled the herd, and came in between the
cattle and the rim, he felt the nearness of the precipice. The darkness
helped to bring it near. The height of his horse brought it near--he
seemed to look down from his saddle over it, into its dark depths. The
herd in its milling was surely warping slowly in the direction of the
rim. But this was all fancy, the trick of the dark and of nerves--if a
plainsman has nerves.

At twelve o'clock the first guard came in and woke the second watch.
Wade had been in the saddle since dawn, but this was his regular watch.
More than that, his trained ear had timed the milling hoofs. The
movement of the herd had quickened.

If now he could keep them going, and could prevent their taking any
sudden fright! They must not stop until they stopped from utter
weariness. Safety lay in their continued motion. So the fresh riders
flanked them closely, paced them, and urged them quietly on. They must
be kept milling and they must be kept from fright.

In the taut silence of the stirless desert night, with the tension of
the herd at the snapping-point, any quick, unwonted sight or sound would
stampede them; the sneezing of a horse, the flare of a match, would be
enough to send the whole four thousand headlong--blind, frenzied,
trampling--till spent and scattered over the plain.

And so, as he rode, Wade began to sing. The rider ahead of him took up
the air and passed it on until, above the stepping stir of the hoofs,
rose the faint voices of the men, and all the herd was bound about by
the slow plaintive measures of some old song. It was not to soothe their
savage breasts that the riders sang to the cattle, but to prevent the
shock of their hearing any loud and sudden noise.

So they sang and rode and the night wore on to one o'clock, when Wade,
coming up on the rim-rock side, felt a cool breeze fan his face, and
caught a breath of fresh, moist wind with the taste of water in it.

He checked his horse instantly, listening as the wind swept past him
over the cattle. But they must already have smelled it, for they had
ceased their milling. The whole herd stood motionless, the indistinct
forms close to him in the dark, showing their bald faces lifted to drink
the sweet wet breath that came over the rim. Then they started again,
but faster, and with a rumbling from their hoarse throats that tightened
Wade's grip on the reins.

The sound seemed to come out of the earth, a low, rumbling mumble, as
dark as the night and as wide as the plain, a thick inarticulate bellow
that stood every rider stiff in his stirrups.

The breeze caught the dust and carried it back from the gray-coated,
ghostly shapes, and Wade saw that the animals were still moving in a
circle. If he could keep them going! He touched his horse to ride on
with them, when across the black sky flashed a vivid streak of
lightning.

There was a snort from the steers, a quick clap of horns and hoofs from
far within the herd, a tremor of the plain, a roar, a surging mass--and
Wade was riding the flank of a wild stampede. Before him, behind him,
beside him, pressing hard upon his horse, galloped the frenzied steers,
and beyond them a multitude, borne on, and bearing him on, by the heave
of the galloping herd.

Wade was riding for his life. He knew it. His horse knew it. He was
riding to turn the herd, too, back from the rim, as the horse also knew.
The cattle were after water--water-mad--ready to go over the precipice
to get it, carrying horse and rider with them. Wade was the only rider
between the herd and the rim. It was black as death. He could see
nothing in the sage, could scarcely discern the pounding, panting
shadows at his side; but he knew by the swish of the brush and the
plunging of the horse that the ground was growing stonier, that they
were nearing the rocks.

To outrun the stampede was his only chance. If he could come up with the
leaders he might yet head them off upon the plain and save the herd.
There were cattle still ahead of him; how many, what part of the herd,
he could not tell. But the horse knew. The reins hung on his straight
neck, while Wade, yelling and firing into the air, gave him the race to
win, to lose.

Suddenly they veered and went high in the air, as a steer plunged
headlong into a draw almost beneath their feet. They cleared the narrow
ravine, landed on bare rock and reeled on.

They were riding the rim. Close to their left bore down the flank of the
herd, and on their right, under their very feet, was a precipice, so
close that they felt its blackness--its three hundred feet of fall!

A piercing, half-human bawl of terror told where a steer had been
crowded over. Would the next leap carry them after him? Then Wade found
himself racing neck and neck with a big white steer, which the horse,
with marvelous instinct, seemed to pick from a bunch, and to cling to,
forcing him gradually ahead till, cutting him free from the bunch
entirely, he bore him off into the sage.

The group coming on behind followed its leader, and in, after them,
swung others. The tide was turning. Within a short time the whole herd
had veered, and, bearing off from the cliffs, was pounding over the open
plains.

Whose race was it? Peroxide Jim's, according to Wade, for not by word or
by touch of hand or knee had he been directed in the run. From the flash
of the lightning the horse had taken the bit, and covered an
indescribably perilous path at top speed, had outrun the herd and
turned it from the edge of the rim-rock, without a false step or a
tremor.

Bred on the desert, broken at the round-up, trained to think steer as
his rider thinks it, the horse knew as swiftly, as clearly as his rider,
the work before him. But that he kept himself from fright, that none of
the wild herd-madness passed into him, is a thing for wonder. He was as
thirsty as any animal of the herd; he knew his own peril, I believe, as
none of the herd had ever known anything; and yet, such coolness,
courage, wisdom, and power!

Was it training? Was it more intimate association with the man on his
back, and so, a further remove from the wild thing which domestication
does not seem to touch? Or was it all suggestion, the superior
intelligence above riding--not the flesh, but the spirit?




IN THE PASHA'S GARDEN

A STAMBOUL NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT

BY H. G. DWIGHT