POSSESSION

1

In the fading October twilight Grandpa Tolliver sat eating an apple and

reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The ponderous book

(volume III) lay spread open upon his bony knees, for it was too heavy

to be supported in any other way, and he read by leaning far over and

peering at the pages through steel rimmed spectacles which were not

quite clear, as they never were. The dimness of lens, however, did not

appear to annoy him; undisturbed he read on as if the spectacles

sharpened his vision instead of dimming it. Things were, after all, what

you believed them to be; therefore the spectacles served their purpose.

He was not one to be bothered by such small things....

The room in which he sat was square and not too large. On two sides

there were windows and in one corner an enormous and funereal bed of

black walnut (the nuptial bed of three generations in the Tolliver

family) which bore at the moment the imprint of the perverse and angular

old body. He had lain there to think. Sometimes he lay thus for hours at

a time in a sort of coma, ruminating the extraordinary and imbecile

diversity of life. But it was the number of books which contributed the

dominating characteristic of the room. There was row upon row of them

rising from floor to ceiling, rows added year by year out of Grandpa’s

infinitesimal income until at last they had walled him in. There were

books bound in fine leather and books in cheap leather, worn and frayed

at the corners, books in cheap boards and an immense number of books

bound in yellow paper. Pressed close against the books on the north

wall of the room there stood an enormous desk of the same funereal black

walnut--a desk filled with innumerable pigeonholes into which had been

stuffed without order or sequence bits of paper scribbled over with a

handwriting that was fine and erratic like the tracks of a tiny bird

strayed into an inkpot. The papers ranged through every variety of shade

from the yellowish bisque of ancient documents to the gray white of

comparatively new ones. Of all the room it was the desk alone that had

an appearance of untidiness; it lay under a pall of dust save for two

small spots rubbed clean by the sharp elbows of Grandpa Tolliver.

What did he write? What was contained in this immense collection of

documents? No one knew that; not even the curiosity of his

daughter-in-law Hattie, who entered the room each morning to throw open

the windows (an action he detested) and force the old man out into the

chill air of the streets, had been able to penetrate the mysteries of

the extraordinary bird tracks. A word with luck, here or there....

Nothing more. And she had examined them often enough in a fierce effort

to penetrate the secret of his strength. From years of breathless,

headlong writing the words had lost all resemblance to combinations of

letters. The letters themselves were obscured; they flowed into one

another until each one, in the fashion of the Chinese, had become a

symbol, a mystery to which the old man alone held the key. It was the

writing of a man whose pen had never been able to keep pace with the

lightning speed of his thoughts. It may have been that the old man

himself could not have deciphered the writing on those sheets which long

since had turned to a yellow bisque. So far as any one could discover,

he never took them from the pigeonholes and read them a second time.

They were simply thrust away to turn yellow and gather dust, for Grandpa

Tolliver had suffered for years from a sense of the immense futility of

everything.

As he sat in the fading light in his decrepit rocking chair the

appearance of the old man struck faintly a note of the sinister.

Something in the shape of his great, bony head, in the appearance of his

unkempt gray beard, in the remarkable angularity of his lean body gave

him the appearance of one in alliance with the powers of darkness. The

peculiar gray green of his glittering eyes had a way of piercing through

pretense, through barriers of reserve and secrecy. They were the eyes of

one who knew far too much. They were the eyes that got somehow at the

core of things, so that a person--even his bitterest enemy, the vigorous

and unsubtle Hattie--winced before the shattering light that gathered in

their depths. They looked out from under shaggy brows with a knowledge

bred of solitude that was something more than human. And he had a

terrible way of using them, of watching people, of silently and

powerfully prying open their shells. For Grandpa Tolliver there were no

longer any illusions; he was therefore a horrid and intolerable old man.

* * * * *

At length when the light grew too dim even for the unearthly eyes of the

old man, he closed The Decline and Fall and devoted himself to finishing

his apple, absorbed for the time being in reflecting triumphantly upon

passages in the ponderous work which proved without any doubt that the

human race lay beyond the possibility of improvement.

When his strong pointed teeth had finished with the apple, he cast it

aside for Hattie to sweep out in the morning and, lifting The Decline

and Fall as high as possible, he dropped it to the floor with a

resounding crash. As the echo died there rose from belowstairs the sound

of clattering pans shaken by the crash from the startled hands of

Hattie, and then an inarticulate rumble of exasperation at this latest

bit of minute deviltry.

The old man leaned back in his chair and chuckled, wickedly. It was one

more skirmish in the state of war which had existed between him and his

daughter-in-law over a period of years.

Through the closed window the homely sounds of a dozen backyards

filtered into the room ... the sharp slam of a refrigerator door, the

sudden mad barking of a dog playing with a child, the faint whicker of

a horse in one of the stables and then the sound of Hattie’s vigorous

voice, still carrying a persistent, unmistakable note of irritation,

summoning her small sons from the far reaches of the neighborhood.

The sound of the voice rose and hung in the autumn night, rich,

full-blooded, vigorous, redolent of energy, beautiful in its primitive

strength. At the faint note of irritation Grandpa Tolliver, rubbing his

teeth with a skinny finger, chuckled again.

The voice wavered, penetrating the remote distances of the back yards,

and presently there came an answering cry in the shrill, high treble of

a boy of twelve arrested suddenly in the midst of his play.

“Yay-_us_! Yay-_us_! We’re coming!”

Primitive it was, like a ewe calling to her lambs, or more perhaps

(thought the old man) like a lioness summoning her cubs. It was Robert

who answered, the younger of the two. It was difficult for Fergus to

yell in the same lusty fashion; his voice had reached the stage where it

trembled perilously between a treble and a bass. The sounds he made

shamed him. Fergus, like his father, disliked making a spectacle of

himself. (Too sensitive, thought Grandpa Tolliver. Like his father he

would be a failure in life, because he had no indifference.)

The room grew darker and after a time the sweet, acrid odor of

smoldering leaves, stirred into flame by the children who played beneath

the window, drifted through the cracks in the glass. As if the scent,

the soft twilight, the sound of Hattie’s voice, had set fire to a train

of memories, Grandpa Tolliver began to rock gently. The chair made a

faint squeaking sound which filled the room as if it had been invaded by

a flock of bats which, circling wildly above the old man’s head, uttered

a chorus of faint shrill cries.... The old man chuckled again. It was a

bitter, unearthly sound....

The room in which Grandpa Tolliver sat had been added to the Tolliver

house during one of those rare intervals, years ago, when his son had

prospered for a time. The house itself stood back from the street in the

older part of a town which within a generation had changed from a

frontier settlement into a bustling city whose prosperity centered about

the black mills and the flaming furnaces of a marshy district known as

The Flats, a district black and unsightly and inhabited by hordes of

Italians, Poles, Slovaks and Russians who never emerged from its sooty

environs into the clear air of the Hill where the old citizens had their

homes. Among these houses the Tollivers’ was marked by the need of

paint, though this shameful fault was concealed somewhat by masses of

vines--roses, honeysuckle, ivy--which overran all the dwelling and in

summer threw a cloud of beauty over the horrid, imaginative trimmings

conceived by some side-whiskered small town architect of the eighties.

There was in the appearance of the house nothing of opulence. It was

gray, commonplace and ornamented with extravagant jig-saw decorations.

Also it suffered from a slate roof of a depressing shade of blue gray.

But it was roomy and comfortable.

Houses occupied for a long period by the same family have a way of

taking on imperceptibly but surely the characteristics of their owners.

The Tollivers, Hattie and Charles, had come into the house as bride and

bridegroom, in the days when Charles Tolliver had before him a bright

future, years before he gave up, at the urging of his powerful wife, a

commonplace adequate salary for a more reckless and extravagant career

in the politics of the growing county. By now, twenty years after, the

house, the lawn and the garden expressed the essence of the Tolliver

family. The grass sometimes went in grave need of cutting. The paint had

peeled here and there where it lay exposed to the middle-western winter.

At the eaves there were streaks of black made by soot which drifted from

the roaring Mills in the distant Flats. The shrubs were unpruned and the

climbing roses would have been improved by a little cutting; yet these

things, taken all in all, produced an effect of charm far greater than

any to be found in the other neat, painted, monotonous houses that stood

in unspectacular rows on either side of Sycamore Street. In the careless

growth of the shrubs and vines there was a certain wildness and

inspiring vigor, something full-blooded and lush which elsewhere in the

block was absent. There was nothing ordered, pruned or clipped into a

state of patterned mediocrity. Here, within the hedge that enclosed the

Tolliver property there reigned a marked abandon, a sense of life lived

recklessly with a shameless disregard for smug security. The Tollivers

clearly had no time for those things which lay outside the main current.

Yet there was no rubbish in evidence. The whole was spotlessly clean

from the linden trees which stood by the curb to the magenta-colored

stable at the end of the garden. You might have walked the length of the

block without consciousness of the other houses; but in front of the

Tollivers’ you would have halted, thinking, “Here is a difference

indeed. Some careless householder without proper pride in his grounds!”

Yet you would have stopped to notice it. At least it would have

interested you by the wild, vigorous, disheveled character of its

difference.

In the beginning the room which Gramp occupied had been built for a

servant and through its doors, in the spasmodic periods of Tolliver

prosperity, had passed a procession of weird and striking “hired girls”

... country maidens come to town in search of excitement, Bohemian and

Russian girls, the offspring of the Flat-dwellers; one or two who had

been, to Hattie’s shocked amazement, simply daughters of joy. With the

passing of Myrtle, the last of these, who was retired in order to bear a

child of uncertain paternity, the Tollivers’ ship of fortune had slipped

into one of the periodical doldrums and the stormy, unsatisfactory era

of the hired girl came to an end forever. Almost as if he had divined

the event, Grandpa Tolliver appeared on the same day seated beside the

driver on a wagon laden with books, to announce that he had come to take

up his abode with the family of his son. There was nothing to be done.

The books were moved into the room above the kitchen and there the old

man settled himself. He had been there now for ten years, a gadfly to

torment the virtuous, bustling existence of his daughter-in-law. He

seldom stirred from his room. He had, indeed, done nothing in all his

life which might be scored under the name of accomplishment. As a young

man he had been trained for the church, but when his education had been

completed, he discovered that he had learned too much and so believed

nothing. He bothered no one. His crime was inertia. He possessed an

indifference of colossal proportions.

* * * * *

As the room fell into a thick blackness, the rocking chair, under the

urge of flooding memories, acquired a greater animation. It may have

been that there was something in the homely sounds of the backyard vista

and the pleasant smell of burning leaves that pierced by way of his

senses the wall of the old man’s impregnable solitude. Presently he

chuckled again in a triumphant fashion, as if the memory of Hattie

Tolliver’s irritation still rang in his ears.

Ah, how she hated him! How they all scorned him! Even on his rare and

solitary ramblings along the sidewalks of the Town, prosperous citizens

regarded him with hostile looks. “Old Man Tolliver ... The Failure!”

They pointed him out to their children as the awful example of a man

without ambition, a man who drifted into a lonely and desolate old age,

abhorred and unwanted, a burden to his own children and grandchildren.

That’s what came of not having energy and push!

Old Man Tolliver ... The Failure! At the thought, the wicked old man

chortled more loudly than ever. Failure! Failure! What did they know of

whether he was a failure or not. Failure! That was where he had the joke

on the lot of them. He alone had fixed his ambition, captured his

ideal; he had done always exactly what he wanted to do.

In sudden satisfaction over his secret triumph the old man was very

nearly overcome by his own chuckling.

Old? Yes, he felt very old to-night. Perhaps he hadn’t many years before

him. Maybe it was only a matter of months. Then he would die. What was

it like to die? Just a passing out probably, into something vast and

dark. Oblivion! That was it. Why wasn’t that the ideal end? Oblivion,

where you were nothing and had no mind and no memory and no books, where

you simply did not exist. Just nothingness and eternal peace. Aratu,

that kingdom where reigned mere oblivion. He wasn’t looking forward to

Heaven and harps. (Imagine Hattie strumming a harp!) He was filled with

a sense of great completeness, of having done everything there was to

do, of having known all of life that it was possible for one man to

know. Sin? What was sin? He didn’t regret anything he had done. He had

no remorse, no regrets. On the contrary he was glad of all the things he

had done which people called sin. It gave him a satisfactory feeling of

completeness. Now when he was so old, he needn’t wish he had done this

or done that. He had. To be sure, he hadn’t murdered any one! He hadn’t

been guilty of theft. It was very satisfactory ... that feeling of

completeness.

Nothing remained. Death.... Deadness.... Why he was dead already. Death

must be like this room, blank, dark, negative, neither one thing nor the

other. He had been dead for weeks, for months, for years; and here he

was walled up in a tomb of books. “La Pucelle” (a rare edition). What

would become of it? Like as not Hattie would burn it, never knowing its

value. Think how she would suffer if ever she discovered she had burned

up a great pile of banknotes! Candide, The Critique of Pure Reason,

Spinoza, Montaigne, Darwin, Huxley. (What a row they’d caused! How well

he remembered the chatter.) Plato. And there was Verlaine and George

Sand and all of Thackeray. Colonel Newcome and Rebecca Sharp with her

pointed nose and green eyes. What an amusing creature she was! Amelia

Sedley, that tiresome, uninteresting, virtuous bore! And Charles

Honeyman. (Ah! He knew things they didn’t dream of in this town!) And

there in the corner by the old desk, Emma Bovary tearing voluptuously at

her bodice.

But they were not all ghosts of books. There were ghosts too of reality,

ghosts born of memories, which came dimly out of the past, out of a

youth that, dried now at its source, had been hot-blooded and romantic

and restless; such ghosts as one called Celeste (in a poke bonnet with a

camelia pinned just above the brim) who seemed forever peeping round the

corner of a staircase as she had once peeped, in a glowing reality round

the corner of a staircase in the Rue de Clichy. Nina who was more alive

now than she had ever been.... And they thought him a failure!

Yes, they were amusing ghosts. He had lived with them so many years.

Lonely? How was it possible to be lonely among such fascinating

companions? He had lived with them too long. He knew them too well,

inside and out. They kept him company in this tomb of books. He seldom

left it. Once a week, perhaps, to walk around the block; and then the

children ran from him as if they saw the Devil himself.

Grandpa Tolliver began to rock more gently now. Yes, he’d been wicked

enough. He’d known everything there was to know and didn’t regret it.

They shut him up in this room and didn’t address him for days at a time,

but he had Emma Bovary and Becky Sharp to amuse him; and Celeste who

belonged to him alone. Grandpa Barr didn’t even have them. His children

had left him--all but his daughter Hattie--to go to Iowa, to Oregon, to

Wyoming, always toward the open country. Your friends might die and your

children might go away, but your memories couldn’t desert you, nor such

friends as Emma and Becky.

Outside it began presently to rain, at first slowly with isolate,

hesitating drops, and then more and more steadily until at last the

whole parched earth drank up the autumn downpour.

2

In the sound of rain falling through soft darkness there is a healing

quality of peace. Its persistence--the very effortless unswerving rhythm

of the downpour--have the power of engulfing the spirit in a kind of

sensuous oblivion. Even upon one of so violent and unreflective a nature

as Ellen Tolliver, one so young, so impatient and so moody, the sound of

the autumn rain falling on the roof and in the parched garden had its

effect. It created a music of its own, delicate yet primitive, abundant

of the richness of earth and air, so that presently in a room a dozen

feet from her grandfather, Ellen stopped sobbing and buried her face in

the pillow of her great oak bed, soothed, peaceful; and presently in the

darkness of her room she lay at last silent and still, her dark hair

tossed and disheveled against the white of the pillowcase. She lay thus

in a solitude of her own, separated only by the thinness of a single

wall from the solitude in which her grandfather sat enveloped. If the

sound of her sobbing had been audible, there was another wall that would

have stopped it ... the wall of warm autumn rain that beat upon the

earth and shut her away from all the world.

She knew no reason for this outburst of weeping. If there had been a

reason she would not have locked herself in her room to weep until she

had no more tears. She could not say, “I weep because some one has been

unkind to me,” or “I weep because I have suffered a sudden

disappointment.” She wept because she could not help herself; because

she had been overcome by a mood that was at once melancholy and heroic,

sad yet luxuriously sensuous. After a fashion, her weeping gave her

pleasure. Now that the sound of the rain had quieted her, she lay

bathing her soul in the darkness. Somehow it protected her. Here in a

locked room where no splinter of light penetrated, she was for a little

time completely herself. That was the great thing.... She was

_herself_.... There was no one about her.... Sometimes this same

triumphant aloofness came to her from music.... It too was able to set

her apart where she was forced to share nothing of herself with any one.

In the darkness people couldn’t pry their way into your soul. All this

she understood but vaguely, with the understanding of a sensitive girl

who has not learned to search her own soul. And this understanding she

kept to herself. None knew of it. The face she showed to the world

betrayed nothing of loneliness, of wild and turbulent moods, of fierce

exasperation. To the world she was a girl very like other girls, rather

more hasty and bad-tempered perhaps, but not vastly different--a girl

driven alone by a wild vague impulse hidden far back in the harassed

regions of her impatient soul. It is one of the tragedies of youth that

it feels and suffers without understanding.

For an hour she lay quite still listening to the rain; and at the end of

that time, hearing sounds from below stairs which forecast the arrival

of supper, she rose and lighted the gas bracket above her dressing

table.

At the first pin point of flame, the world of darkness and rain vanished

and in its place, as if by some abracadabra, there sprang into existence

the hard, definite walls of a room, square and commonplace, touched with

quaint efforts to create an illusion of beauty. The walls were covered

with wall paper bearing a florid design of lattices heavily laden with

red roses on anemic stalks. Two Gibson pictures, faithfully copied by an

admirer, hung on either side of the oak dresser. They were “The Eternal

Question” and “The Queen of Hearts.” The bed, vast and ugly, and still

bearing in the white counterpane the imprint of Ellen’s slim young body,

fitted the room as neatly as a canal barge fits a lock. The chairs

varied in type from an old arm chair of curly maple, brought across the

mountains into the middle-west by Ellen’s great-grandfather and now

relegated to the bedroom, to a damaged patent rocker upholstered in red

plush with yellow tassels. On the top of the dressing table lay a cover

made elaborately of imitation Valenciennes and fine cambric, profusely

ornamented by bow knots of pink baby ribbon.

By the flickering light, the girl arranged her hair before the mirror.

It was dark, heavy, lustrous hair with deep blue lights. Hastily tossing

it into a pompadour over a wire rat, she washed her eyes with cold water

to destroy the redness. She was preparing the face she showed the world.

It was not a beautiful face though it had its points. It was too long

perhaps and the nose was a trifle prominent; otherwise it was a pleasant

face, with large dark eyes, fine straight lips and a really beautiful

chin. It held the beginnings of a beauty that was fine and proud. The

way the chin and throat leapt from her shoulders was a thing at which to

marvel. The line was clear, triumphant, determined. Even Ellen was

forced to admire it. What she lacked in beauty was amply compensated by

the interest which her face inspired. The pompadour, to be sure, was

ridiculous. It was but a week or two old, the sign of her emancipation

from the estate of a little girl.

For a long time she studied the reflection in the mirror. This way and

that she turned her proud head, admiring all the while the line of the

throat and tilted chin. It delighted her as music sometimes delighted

her, with a strange leaping sensation of triumph over people about her.

She thought, “Am I to be great one day? Am I to be famous? Is it written

in my face? I will be or die ... I must be!”

* * * * *

Early in the afternoon, before the long rain settled in for the night,

she had walked out of Miss Ogilvie’s little house down the brick path

under the elms with a heart singing in triumph. Before she arrived home,

the sense of triumph had faded a little, and by the time she reached her

room it was gone altogether, submerged by a wave of despair. It seemed

that her triumph only made life more difficult; instead of being an end

it was only a beginning. It created the most insuperable difficulties,

the most perilous and agitating problems.

Miss Ogilvie lived in a weathered old house that withdrew from the

street behind a verdant bulwark of lilacs, syringas, and old apple trees

abounding in birds,--wrens, blackbirds, finches and robins. In the warm

season, as if the wild birds were not enough, a canary or two and a pair

of love-birds hung suspended from the roof of the narrow piazza high

above the scroll-work of the jig-saw rail. There were those who believed

that Miss Ogilvie, in some earlier incarnation, was herself a bird ... a

wren perhaps, or a song sparrow flitting in and out of hedges and tufts

of grass, shaking its immaculate tail briskly in defiance of a changing

world.

When she sat in her big rocker listening to the horrible exercises of

her pupils, she resembled a linnet on a swaying bough. She rocked gently

as if she found the motion soothing to some wildness inside her correct

and spinsterish little body. Always she rocked, perhaps because it

helped her to endure the horrible renderings of Schumann and Mendelssohn

by the simpering daughters and the sullen sons of the baker, the

butcher, the candle-stick maker. For Miss Ogilvie understood music and

she was sensitive enough. In her youth, before her father failed in the

deluge that followed the Civil War, she had been abroad. She had heard

music, real music, in her day. In all the Town she and Grandpa Tolliver

alone knew what real music could be. She had even studied for a time in

Munich where she lived in her birdlike way in a well chaperoned

_pension_. The other girls fluttered too, for in her day women were all

a little birdlike; it was a part of their training.

In the early afternoon when Ellen Tolliver came for her weekly lesson,

Miss Ogilvie, dressed in a tight-fitting basque of purple poplin

ornamented with pins of coral and cameo, received her formally into the

little drawing-room where she lived in a nest of pampas grass, conch

shells, raffia baskets, and spotless bits of bric-a-brac. There was in

the reception nothing unusual; Miss Ogilvie permitted herself no

relaxation, even in the privacy of her own bed-chamber. She remained a

lady, elegantly so, who supported herself in a genteel fashion by giving

music lessons. But with Ellen a certain warmth and kindliness, seldom

to be found in her contact with other pupils, occasionally tempered the

formality. To-day her manner carried even a hint of respect.

Ellen sat at the upright piano and played. She played with a wild

emotionalism unhampered by problems of technique. She poured her young,

rebellious soul into the music until the ebony piano rocked and the

ball-fringe of the brocade piano-cover swayed. Miss Ogilvie sat in her

big rocking chair in a spot of sunlight and listened. It was significant

that she did not rock. She sat quite still, her tiny feet barely

touching the floor, her thin blue-veined hands lying quietly like little

birds at rest in her purple poplin lap. The canaries too became still

and listened. A hush fell upon the garden.

“And now,” said Miss Ogilvie, when Ellen paused for a moment, “some

Bach,” and the girl set off into the tortuous, architectural beauties of

a fugue. She played without notes, her eyes closed a little, her body

swaying with a passionate rhythm which arose from something far more

profound than the genteel precepts of Miss Ogilvie. It was savage. It

must have terrified the gentle little old woman, for she knew that to

play Bach savagely was sacrilege. And yet ... somehow it didn’t matter,

when Ellen did it. There was in the music a smoldering, disturbing

magnificence.

Then she played some Chopin, delicately, poetically; and at last she

finished and turned about on the piano stool to await the criticism of

her teacher.

Miss Ogilvie said nothing. Her blue eyes winked a bit in embarrassment

and down one withered cheek ran a tear which had escaped her dignity and

self-possession. The sunlight flickered across her thin hands, and

presently she stirred.

“My child,” she said, “there is nothing for me to say.”

And Ellen’s heart leapt so suddenly that she grew faint with joy.

“I no longer count for anything,” said Miss Ogilvie gently. “You are

beyond me....” She smiled suddenly and dabbed her eyes politely. “Who

am I to instruct you? My child, you are an artist. You frighten me!” She

leaned forward a little, confidingly, and whispered. “It happens like

that ... in the most unexpected places, in villages, in ugly towns ...

why, even in a dirty mill town like this.”

Between the two there was a bond, a thing which neither ever mentioned

but which, in the silence that followed Miss Ogilvie’s undignified

outburst, took possession of both and drew them together. Both scorned

the Town, a treason which none had discovered; and now when Miss Ogilvie

spoke again she dragged the secret bond into the glaring light of day.

“Artists occur,” she said, “without respect for places.” And then after

a little pause.... “But you must never let any one here suspect you’re

an artist. It would make you unhappy.” Recovering herself a little she

began again to rock gently. “For a long time I’ve known you were

escaping me.... It was no use hiding it from myself.... I know it

now....”

She smiled triumphantly a withered, rosy smile, a bit like the smile one

might see on the bright face of a lady apple, and began pulling at the

lace on her handkerchief. “It’s wonderful,” she said, “to think I have

discovered it.... Poor me! But you must work, Ellen, there are hard days

ahead ... harder than you guess.

“D’you know?” she continued, in her excitement leaning forward once

more, “when I was a girl, I played well ... I was like you ... not so

independent, not so strong, because I was always a little woman ... even

then,” she added as if she were conscious that age had shriveled her.

“Sometimes I thought I would like to be a great pianist ... a great

artist.... But women didn’t do such things in my day. My father would

never have listened to it for a moment. It wasn’t a ladylike thing to

do. It was like being a circus rider. He let me take lessons so that I

could play in the drawing-room and accompany my young men when they

sang. My father even let me study in Munich, but when he found out I was

more interested in music than in young men ... he brought me home. I

never got very interested in young men ... I always liked music better.”

Ellen listened respectfully, moved as much by her feeling for Miss

Ogilvie in the rôle of a friend as by her respect for older people in

general. She was carefully brought up and had good manners. But,

secretly, the tale bored her a little. There was nothing interesting in

it, nothing to seize one’s imagination, nothing to soothe her

impatience, nothing which fed that wild ambition. All that Miss Ogilvie

told her had happened so long ago.

“I suppose I ought to have got married,” continued Miss Ogilvie. “But I

waited too long.... I had chances!” she added proudly, “good ones....

Maybe I would have been happier to-day.... I don’t know, though,” she

added doubtfully, puckering her withered lips as if she could come to no

decision in the matter. “There’s so much to be said on both sides. But

what I mean to say is, that you must go ahead.... You mustn’t let

anything stop you.... It’s easier now than it was in my day. At least

there’s no one to oppose you.... It’s a gift that doesn’t come to every

one.... You see I didn’t marry and I didn’t become an artist.” And a

note of wistfulness entered her voice. “So now I’m just an old spinster

who gives music lessons. Maybe,” she said, “you can manage both. I don’t

know ... and you don’t.... But don’t let anything stop you.... Don’t die

without having done what you wanted to do. There’s no more for me to

tell you.... I can teach you nothing, but I hope you’ll come sometimes

and play for me.... I’d like it.”

By the time she finished Miss Ogilvie’s eyes were again bright with

tears, as much from pity of herself as in a benevolent envy of the

impetuous Ellen’s youth and independence.

“It won’t be easy....” the girl said presently. “There’s my mother....

She thinks I ought to get married.... She had me take music lessons

because she thought it would make me more marriageable if I could play

the piano.... Of course she’s proud that I play so well. She’s proud of

anything I can do.”

“Perhaps she’ll come round,” suggested Miss Ogilvie. “But it’ll be a

struggle.... I know your mother, Ellen.... She’s made you ambitious....

That’s where she made a mistake.” She coughed suddenly with

embarrassment. “But I don’t want to interfere. She’s your own mother....

It’s for her to decide.” And Miss Ogilvie abased herself and her high

hopes for Ellen before the altar of her generation’s respect for the

position of a mother.

“And there’s no money ...” said Ellen sullenly. “There never is.”

“Perhaps we could work that out.... I could let you take some of the

pupils ... I have too many now ... I’d be willing to help ... to

sacrifice if necessary.” It was clear that Miss Ogilvie meant to say

nothing directly; she had no desire to be responsible for the actions of

the impetuous girl. Yet she continued to hint, to imply that she would

do her part if a crisis arose.

“I want to,” said Ellen, “I want to more than anything in the world....

I want to be great and famous.... I’ve got to be.” She became so savage,

so intense that in her great rocking chair Miss Ogilvie trembled.

* * * * *

At last Ellen put on her hat, which perched well up on the absurd

pompadour, bade Miss Ogilvie good-by, and went out to the piazza, where

her bicycle rested against the fancy railing under the cages of the

canaries and love-birds. As she turned down the brick path, the voice of

Miss Ogilvie followed her.

“If the chance comes,” she said, “look to me. I’ll do what I can to help

you.” The words came out in little gasps as if she were unable to keep

them--bold though they were--imprisoned any longer. Ellen smiled back at

her over her shoulder and the old lady retired into the weathered house.

As Ellen pedaled over the brick streets between rows of maple trees, her

delight faded slowly before the assaults of her common sense. In these

skirmishes, wild hope and inspiration went down in defeat. There were

too many obstacles ... poverty, prejudice, even her own sense of

provinciality. Yet underneath a little voice kept saying, “You’ll do it

... you’ll do it.... Nothing can stop you. You’ll be able to get what

you want if you want it hard enough.”

And by the time she turned into the block where the Tolliver family

lived, clinging like grim death to a respectability which demanded a

brave face turned toward the world, her mind began once more to work in

its secret way, planning how it would be possible.

Miss Ogilvie’s timid, frightened offer of help she had quite forgotten.

Miss Ogilvie was so old, so gentle, so ineffectual ... like her own

caged canaries. Ellen’s mind had begun already to turn toward her cousin

Lily. The glamorous Lily must know some way out.

3

It was Lily who still dominated her thoughts when she descended at last

to find her mother setting the table for the family supper. This was an

operation into which Mrs. Tolliver threw all the great energy and force

of her character. It was impossible for her to do things easily; the

placing of each fork involved as much precision, as much thoroughness

and intensity as the building of a bridge or a skyscraper. It was the

gesture of an ardent housekeeper burning incense before the Gods of

Domesticity, the abandoned devotion of an artist striving for

perfection.

For an instant Ellen stood in the doorway watching her mother as if

somewhere in the recesses of her clever brain she considered this parent

as she might consider a stranger, marking the woman’s strong face, her

vigorous black hair, the rosiness of her healthy cheeks. Ellen, her

mother said, had a disconcerting way of studying people, of prying into

their lives, even of imagining things about them that could not possibly

have been true. This was exactly what Ellen did as she waited in the

doorway. She regarded silently the figure that stood before her, swathed

in durable serge and ornamented with a gold chain and a tiny Swiss watch

out of all proportion with the size and vigor of her body.

Then suddenly Mrs. Tolliver became aware of her daughter’s presence. She

straightened her back and stood with the knives and forks poised in her

hand beneath the glare of the ornate chandelier.

“Well,” she said. “You might speak when you come into a room.” Then

after a slight pause, “You can finish the table. I’ve got to watch the

pies.”

Listlessly the daughter took the silverware and absently she began

laying it at the places to be occupied by her father, by Fergus, by

Robert. There was no place for Gramp Tolliver. He ate in the solitude of

his own room meals which were placed on the bottom step of the “back

way” to be carried up by him in response to a loud knock on the door of

his hermitage. For eight years he had eaten thus in exile.

“Ma,” began Ellen, “when does Lily arrive?”

The mother continued to pour water into the shining glasses. “In a week

or two ... I don’t know exactly,” she said, and then raised her blue

eyes to regard her daughter with a long and penetrating look. Between

the two there was a sort of constant and secret warfare which went on

perpetually as if, failing to understand each other, there could be no

grounds between them for trust. Now Mrs. Tolliver saw nothing but the

top of Ellen’s dark head, secretive, silent, as she bent over the table.

“Why do you want to know?” she asked with an air of suspicion. “You’ve

been talking a great deal about Lily lately....”

“I don’t know,” came the evasive answer. “I like her.... I’d like to be

like Lily some day.”

Mrs. Tolliver resumed her task in silence but with an air of

thoughtfulness. Again it was Ellen who broke the silence.

“I suppose there’s no money ... now that everything is settled.” She put

this forward tentatively, as if the matter was of no great interest to

her.

“There’s nothing over ...” replied her mother. “You knew there wouldn’t

be.... If Papa is elected, things will be all right again ... for a time

at least.” This last she added with a profound sigh--a signal that at

any moment consideration of the trials brought upon her by an easy-going

husband might loose all the torrent of an emotional, primitive nature.

“Why do you ask?”

“I just wondered,” said Ellen. “I’d hoped things might be a little

better.”

“They won’t be ... for a time....”

The significance of this conversation lay not so much in what was said

as in what was not said. Neither the mother nor the daughter approached

the real subject of the conversation openly. They hovered about it,

descending for a time on the edge of it, flitting away again coyly, with

backward glances. The fault may have been Ellen’s. Certainly the ways of

the honest, emotional Mrs. Tolliver were neither dark nor devious.

Presently the mother made an effort to strike at the heart of the

situation.

“I wish,” she said, “that you would settle down and be content,

Ellen.... I thought you were better for a time.... What is it you want?

Is it to go away just when you’re old enough to be a comfort to me? Is

that the reward a mother has for her care and sacrifices? That she loses

her only daughter as soon as she is old enough to think she is grown

up?”

She was slipping into one of the most unbearable of her emotional moods,

a mood of self-pity, when she threw herself as the Pope before the

Visigoths upon the mercy of her husband and children. All the signs of

its approach were at hand--the pathos, the slightly theatrical tone. The

mood was aggravating because fundamentally it was reasonable. You could

not argue the rightness of her position. She had sacrificed everything

for her husband and her children. Day by day she continued to sacrifice

everything. She would go on sacrificing herself until she died. She

would have given her life for them without a regret. To wait upon her

amiable unsuccessful husband and her three superlatively wonderful

children was her idea of love, of perfect service. They were her world,

her life, the beginning, the very core, the end of her passionate

existence. The only reward she asked was possession; they must belong to

her always.

And then it struck Ellen suddenly that the position of the mother was

pitiable. It was pitiable because she knew so little of what was in her

daughter’s heart ... so precious little of all the things stirring there

so wildly, so savagely. She could never know, at least until after it

was done--whatever it was that was to be done. Even then she could not

understand that there were stronger things than love, things which were

more profound and more important.

“And why are you so interested in Lily?” began her mother. “Why do you

say you want to be like her?”

“I don’t know,” replied Ellen in a low voice. “I don’t know except that

I don’t want to be like the others.”

Her mother considered her for a moment and then shook her head, as if

silently she had reached a decision.

“I can’t understand your restlessness,” she said. “I don’t know where

you get it.”

Ellen stood now leaning against the mantelpiece above the gas log.

Outside the rain still fell heavily.

“Well,” she said, “it’s not my fault that one grandfather ran away from

home as a boy and went to California to dig gold.... And it’s not my

fault that the other left his wife and ran away to live in Europe for

thirteen years.”

Mrs. Tolliver turned sharply. “Who told you that? I mean about your

grandfather Tolliver....”

Ellen smiled in her silent, proud way. “I’m not deaf, Mama, nor

blind.... I’ve been about the house now for nearly nineteen years. I

know about Gramp Tolliver.”

Again Ellen was smitten by amazement at her mother’s ignorance of how

much she knew, at how little the older woman understood of the shrewd

knowledge she had hoarded away.

“I’m sorry you know it,” said Mrs. Tolliver. “It would have been just as

well if you hadn’t known.” Again she nodded her head with that same air

of reaching a secret decision. “But now that you know it, you might as

well know some other things.... You’re old enough now, I guess.” She sat

down on one of the stiff-backed chairs and beckoned to her daughter.

“Come here,” she said, “and sit on my lap.... I’ll tell you other

things.”

Ellen came to her and sat upon her lap, rather awkwardly, for to her it

seemed a silly thing. She had not the faintest understanding of all that

this small gesture meant to her mother. And secretly she hardened

herself against a treacherous attack upon her affections. It was the

habit of her mother to attack her through love. Always it had been a

sure method of reducing Ellen’s fortress of secrecy and hardness.

“It’s about Lily,” began Mrs. Tolliver. “I know Lily is beautiful. She’s

very kind and pleasant ... but there are things about her that aren’t

nice. In some ways Lily is a loose woman.... She’s laid herself open to

talk.... People smirch her good name.... Perhaps she isn’t really

bad.... Nobody really knows anything against her, but she is free with

men.... There’s been talk, Ellen, and when there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

Here Ellen interrupted her. “I don’t believe it.... I don’t believe any

of it,” she exclaimed stubbornly. “It’s the way people talk. I know how

they do.... I’ve heard.... It’s one reason why I hate the Town.”

And then Ellen saw her mother assume a great calmness, deliberately and

with a certain ostentation, in order to impress Ellen with her sense of

justice. It was like taking a cloak from a closet and putting it

gravely about her. “I’ve never mentioned it to any one,” she said (never

once guessing the thoughts in her daughter’s mind), “not to a soul....

Nothing could induce me to.... After all, Lily is my first cousin, the

daughter of Aunt Julia, my own mother’s sister.... I wouldn’t permit any

one to befoul her name in my presence.... But here we are alone,

together, you and I.... It’s in the family. That makes a difference....

Sometimes, in the family, one has to face the facts. And the facts are

that Lily hasn’t behaved well.... She’s lived in Paris for years, alone

in the wickedest city in the world.... There’s even talk about her

having had a baby ... and she’s never been married.... Nobody knows ...

and Aunt Julia wouldn’t tell me.... You can’t get a word out of her....

You wouldn’t want to be like that, now would you?”

Ellen fell to pleating the folds of her cheap dress. Her dark brows drew

closer together. She was sullen, awkward.

“I don’t see that it makes any difference ... not to Lily. She’s

free.... She’s happy.”

“But she’s rich,” said her mother. “That’s why she’s free ... and only

God knows whether she’s happy.... A woman like that can’t be happy.... I

don’t want my daughter, my pure, lovely little daughter to be

contaminated.”

The tide of Mrs. Tolliver’s emotions displayed all the signs of bursting

the dam of her restraint. Ellen knew these signs. Her mother was

beginning to drag in God. She was beginning to use words like “pure,”

and “lovely.” And for the first time in her life, Ellen found herself

instead of softening, growing harder and harder. Strangely enough, it

was the words of the gentle, birdlike Miss Ogilvie which gave her a new

power. This time, she was not to be defeated.

“Well, it doesn’t make any difference,” she said, rising from her

mother’s lap. “I like Lily better than any one in this town ... I always

will ... and nothing can change me.” The fine line of her young chin

grew stubborn and there rose between mother and daughter the old

impregnable wall.

It is impossible to imagine what ruse Mrs. Tolliver would have used

next, impossible to calculate the depths of emotion into which she might

have plunged, had she not been halted by so small a thing as the ringing

of a doorbell. The sound jangled noisily through the house and Ellen,

finding in it the opportunity for escape, sped away to open the door.

Outside on the doorstep, drenched, tow-headed and grinning, stood Jimmy

Seton, the little brother of May Seton. In one grubby hand he held a

note.

“It’s from May,” he grinned. “I guess it’s an invitation to a party.”

And without another word, he vanished like an imp into the dark wall of

pouring rain.

4

The father of May Seton was rich according to standards. He was not so

wealthy as the Harrison family which owned the Mills, or as Julia Shane,

Mrs. Tolliver’s Aunt Julia, a great and proud lady who lived in Shane’s

Castle, a gloomy house, relic of a past day, which stood isolated now

upon a low hill in the midst of the clamorous and ascendant Mills. There

were some who said that Harvey Seton was richer than Julia Shane, but it

was impossible to know. The Seton wealth was public property. The wealth

of Julia Shane, except for the land which she owned, lay concealed in

the vaults of banks in Paris, in New York, in Pittsburgh, in Chicago. No

one could gage it; and from the old woman’s mode of living, it was

impossible to make any estimate. There had been a day when Shane’s

Castle was the great house of the Town, even of the state. Great people

stopped there, politicians, artists, musicians, even a President or two.

But for years now, ever since Lily went to live in Paris, the famous

drawing-room, glittering with crystal and silver and glowing with

tapestries and paintings, had been closed and muffled in cheese-cloth.

In the big house, beneath the unceasing fall of soot from the furnaces,

Julia Shane with her spinster daughter, Irene, lived in three rooms. It

was this state of affairs which led people in the Town to believe that

her fortune had decreased in some mysterious way. The old woman alone

knew that she could have bought up Harvey Seton, tossed his corset

factory into the midst of the Atlantic Ocean and never missed the money.

She lived upon the income of her income. The Town, so far as she was

concerned, no longer existed.

These things played an important part in the life of the Town. No one

ever tired of discussing them. It was by these standards that citizens

were judged; and there were no better standards in a town which had

emerged less than a century before from a complete wilderness. There was

nothing unusual in them, for it is the man of property after all whom

most people, in their heart of hearts, honor most profoundly.

The success of Harvey Seton was, in itself, not especially interesting.

It paralleled very closely the tale of any successful middle-western

manufacturer. The interest lay in what he manufactured and in his

character. He was born and brought up in what people call straitened

circumstances. At twenty-one he entered a pharmaceutical school and upon

being graduated, started life as a clerk in a pharmacy of the Town. For

eight years he lived rigorously and saved his money. He was a Methodist

and attended church regularly, despising card-playing and the theater as

implements of the devil. In this there is nothing unusual. It is here

that the bizarre makes its appearance.

There came a day when he learned that Samuel Barr, a brother of Julia

Shane and of Mrs. Tolliver’s father, had invented a combination of gutta

percha and steel which served as an admirable substitute for whalebone.

Now Samuel Barr was always inventing something. He invented a

cash-carrier, a patent rocker, and had even meddled with the idea of

perpetual motion. He had invented a machine which he set up in a field

on the farm of his brother-in-law, because he said the contrivance, once

it was started, would not stop until it flew into pieces of its own

velocity; therefore one must have an open space about it so that no one

might be injured by the flying fragments. With his brother-in-law,

Colonel John Shane, he waited behind a tree for the machine to fly to

bits. It revolved a few times and presently came to an abrupt halt. No

fragments flew through space. The machine was a failure.

It is standing there to-day, in the midst of a field now cultivated by

Bohemian immigrants. It is too bulky to be moved. It remains, like a

gigantic rock, in the midst of waving corn, the single monument to

Samuel Barr’s inventive genius. The other things,--the cash-carrier, the

patent rocker, the synthetic whalebone have survived. With a few

variations they whiz coins through gigantic department stores in a

hundred cities; they support the tired backs of a million exhausted

housewives; and they enclose the swelling forms of even more millions of

too plump women. But Samuel Barr made no money out of these things.

Others made the money and stole the credit. It was the perpetual motion

machine which was the apple of his eye, the great creative effort of his

soul. No one wanted that, so no one stole it from him. It remained, the

single possession of his trusting soul. The weather is eating it slowly

away. Sometimes people stop along the road and walk into the field to

regard the strange Gargantuan engine. “Sam Barr’s Perpetual Motion

Machine” exists, the only monument to his name.

Samuel Barr is important to this tale because it was he who founded

Harvey Seton’s fortune, and because it was his machine which stands as a

superb symbol for the taint which ran through all his family. It was the

taint of a family of great energy which had fantastic visions, which

gambled high, staking everything to win or lose. It was a curious taint,

rare and unhappy, but out of it there sometimes rose a sudden genius--an

artist, an adventurer, a philosopher, an inventor. The taint was in all

of them. His sister Julia risked her fortune a dozen times and, winning,

increased it a dozen times. His niece Hattie Tolliver never ceased to

plan great undertakings which would make her husband rich. She risked

her fortune a dozen times and, losing, saw it vanish into a mass of

debts. His great-niece Ellen Tolliver had it strongly, though few would

have suspected it. She was subtle like old Julia Shane. She told her

affairs to no one.

* * * * *

When Harvey Seton, twenty-nine, rather pallid and ambitious in a

cold-blooded fashion, heard of Samuel Barr’s invention, he set about to

gain possession of it. This he accomplished in time, by methods not

entirely honest, at the cost of one hundred and fifty dollars. Then he

secured a partner and the Eureka Reinforced Corset Factory came to raise

its walls in the factory district under the windows of Shane’s Castle.

In justice to Harvey Seton, it must be said that he struggled for a time

with his conscience. He was not a bad man. His fault lay in a too great

desire for wealth; that is to say, wealth in the abstract, for its own

sake alone, and not for what it could bring to him of this world’s

pleasures. He had some pangs over his treatment of Samuel Barr, but they

were as nothing to the pangs he endured from the nature of his

enterprise.... A Methodist corset manufacturer might seem a

contradiction in terms, a combination of two elements which are in no

way soluble, the one in the other; but somehow, Harvey Seton--perhaps

because he was really shrewd--managed to unite them. He continued to

sing in the church choir; and, on the left hand, he manufactured

corsets. He knew, no doubt, that some of the most devout of his

Methodist sisters wore stays beneath their clothes. Perhaps if they had

been forced to wear them on the outside, the corset business would have

suffered. The world being what it is, Harvey Seton prospered. His

corsets became known in remote lands for their durability and their

restrictive values. Eureka Reinforced Corsets came to be worn by the

great ladies of New York and London, by the housewives of the Middle

West, by the demi-mondaines of Paris and Brussels, by professors’ fat

wives in Germany. They were introduced at length even among the bisque

ladies of Polynesia and the black ladies of brothels in Mozambique. In

1897 Harvey Seton opened a branch factory at St. Denis on the outskirts

of Paris. It brought him nearer to his continental markets.

Meanwhile Harvey Seton’s life followed a narrow path to and from the

corset factory, and presently he married one of the plumpest of

Methodist sisters who presented him after a hesitation of three years

with a daughter, May. Then followed an hiatus of ten years and there

appeared a thin anemic little boy. These are the facts of Harvey Seton’s

life. There was nothing more and nothing less. It was the thin sickly

little boy, now grown precocious and somewhat spiteful, who brought the

note through the pouring autumn rain to Ellen’s doorstep and thus played

his tiny, anemic part in the drama of her life.

* * * * *

But May and Ellen were friends, or as near friends as it was possible

for any one to be with such a girl as Ellen. May frankly adored her. She

admired her straight, slim figure, so different from her own vague

softness, and her handsome dark hair. She envied her ability to play the

piano. What Ellen said or believed, to May was gospel. And in this there

was nothing extraordinary. It was the worship of a weak, good-natured

soul for a strong, self-willed one. May was pretty in a plump, blonde,

pale fashion. She giggled a great deal and liked the companionship of

the Town boys. Ellen did neither of these things. In fact she hated the

boys with a kind of savage resentment, as if it were presumptuous of

them even to fancy they might interest her. She permitted May to worship

her, since there seemed nothing to be done about it; yet the adoration

annoyed her at times so profoundly that she wanted to strike the blonde,

silly girl, to really hurt her, to destroy her as she might destroy some

pale, stupid worm. She hated her because May had those things which

would have made her own way easy. But her pride kept her silent. She

smiled at May in her cold, aloof fashion and permitted her to continue

worship.

5

When Ellen arrived at the Setons’ on the night following the visit of

Jimmy, she found that the family had not yet finished supper. They sat

about the table, Seton _père_ at the head, thin, bloodless, bearded,

looking like one of the more austere of the saints, rather than a corset

manufacturer. Seton _mère_, fat, fleshy, good-natured, occupied a seat

at the far end. Between them sat disposed little Jimmy, anemic and

insignificant, May plump and pale, and last of all, a stranger.

“This,” said May Seton, giggling and indicating the young man at her

left, “is Mr. Clarence Murdock. I’ve been wanting you to meet him,

Ellen. I’m sure you’ll like each other. He’s from New York ... here to

see Papa on business.”

The young man rose and bowed a little stiffly but with a flattering

deference.

“May has told me so much about you ... I’m delighted to know you.”

“Sit down until we finish,” said May. “We’re just eating the last of our

dessert.”

Now May’s introduction of Mr. Clarence Murdock was not altogether

straightforward. From the phrases she chose, it could be gathered that

it was the first time she had ever seen Mr. Murdock and that Ellen had

never heard of him before. In this there was no truth for he had seen

May many times. They even called each other by their Christian names.

And May had given Ellen elaborately detailed descriptions of the young

man, having gone even so far as to hint that there was more between them

than mere friendship. But May could not resist doing things of this

sort where a man was concerned. It was impossible for her to be honest.

The mere shadow of a man upon the horizon goaded her into a display of

dimples and coquetry. She bridled, grew arch and mysterious. She was

taught by an aspiring mother that these things were a part of a game.

Ellen might have replied, “Yes. I’ve heard a great deal concerning you,

Mr. Murdock,” but she did not. She said, “I’m so glad to know you,” gave

him a faint smile and a look which seemed not so much concerned with Mr.

Murdock as with the dead fish and boiled lobsters in the ornamental

print on the wall behind him. All the same she began quietly examining

the points of the stranger.

He was not bad looking and he had nice manners. To be sure he might have

been taller. He was not quite so tall as Ellen. He had nice brown hair

sleekly brushed back from a high forehead, and he wore a starched collar

of the high, ungainly sort which was the fashion in those days. His eyes

were brown and gentle and near-sighted, his face well-shaped and his

nose straight, though a trifle thin so that it gave his countenance a

look of insignificance which one might expect in a perpetual clerk. He

was not, Ellen decided, the sort of romantic figure which could sweep

her off her feet. Still, he came from New York. That was something. He

had lived in the world.

“My, what a rain we’ve been having,” observed Mrs. Seton. “I suppose

it’s what you’d call the equinoctial storms.”

Yes, her spouse replied, it was just that. And he launched into a

dissertation upon equinoctial storms, their origin, their effect, their

endurance, their manifestations in various quarters of the globe,--in

short all about them. Fifteen precious minutes passed beyond recall into

eternity while Harvey Seton discussed equinoctial storms. No one else

spoke, for it was the edict of this father that no one should interrupt

him until he had exhausted his subject. He was indeed a King among

Bores. And when he had finished, his wife, instead of going further with

this topic or one of similar profundity, struck out in the exasperating

fashion of women upon some new and trivial tangent.

“Herman Biggs is coming in, Ellen,” she observed brightly. “Right after

supper.” And she beamed on Ellen with the air of a great benefactress.

Her thoughts were not uttered, yet to one of Ellen’s shrewdness they

were clear. The smile said, “Of course a poor girl like you could not

aspire to a New Yorker like Mr. Murdock, but I am doing my best to see

that you get a good husband. Herman Biggs is respectable and honest.

He’ll make a good husband. We must look higher for May. She must have

something like Mr. Murdock.”

And even as she spoke the doorbell rang and the anemic Jimmy sped away

to open it as if on the doorstep outside stood not the freckled Herman

Biggs but some wild adventure in the form of a romantic stranger.

* * * * *

It _was_ Herman Biggs. He came in as he had come in a thousand times

before, and stood with his dripping hat in his hand, awkwardly, while he

was introduced to Mr. Clarence Murdock. But he did not sit down. The

lecture upon equinoctial storms had claimed the remainder of the time

allotted to dessert. The little group rose and distributed itself

through the house. Mr. Seton went into a room known as his den. Mrs.

Seton went into the kitchen and the young people disappeared into the

cavernous parlor, followed by Jimmy, still filled with the same

expectancy of stupendous adventure, intent upon harassing the little

party for the rest of the evening by the sort of guerilla warfare in

which he excelled.

It was a gaunt house constructed in a bad period when houses broke out

into cupolas, unusual bay windows and variations of the mansard roof.

Outside it was painted a liverish brown; inside the effect was the same.

In the parlor there was an enormous bronze chandelier with burners

constructed in imitation of the lamps found during the excavation of

Pompeii, an event which considerably agitated the world of the

eighties. The walls were covered with deep red paper of a very

complicated design of arabesques upon which was superimposed a second

design in very elegant gold, even more complicated. Against this hung

engravings of Dignity and Impudence, The Monarch of the Forest, and The

Trial of Effie Deans. Pampas grass in vases ornamented with realistic

pink porcelain roses, waved its dusty plumes above a bronze clock

surmounted by a bronze chariot driver and horses which rushed headlong

toward a collision with a porcelain rosebud. By the side of the clock

stood a large conch shell bearing in gilt lettering the legend,

“Souvenir of Los Angeles, Cal.”

“Shall we play hearts?” asked May, with appropriate glances, “or shall

we just talk?... There’s no moon and the piazza is all wet.”

Ellen said nothing; she continued to regard Mr. Murdock with a curious,

speculative air.

“Let’s play hearts,” said the anemic Jimmy, fidgeting and climbing over

the sofa. “I kin play, Mr. Murdock,” he added proudly.

Upon the pride of the Seton family, Ellen turned a withering glance,

charged with homicidal meaning. It said, “What are you doing here?... If

you were my brother you’d be in bed where you belong.”

“Ellen wants to play hearts!... Ellen wants to play hearts!” sang out

Jimmy, pulling awry the shade of the imitation bronze lamp.

Herman Biggs blushed and stammered that it made no difference to him.

Mr. Murdock was gentle and polite. “Let’s talk,” he suggested mildly,

“we might as well get acquainted.” As the oldest by nearly ten years and

the most sophisticated by virtue of his residence in New York, he took

the lead.

“I think so too,” replied Ellen and a curious flash of understanding

passed between them, a glance which implied a mutual superiority founded

upon something deep in Ellen’s nature and upon Mr. Murdock’s superior

age and metropolitan bearing.

So they talked, rather stupid talk, punctuated by May’s giggles, the

guffaws of Herman Biggs, and the pinches of the anemic Jimmy, who was

never still. Now this pale pest swung himself from the curtains, now he

climbed the back of a chair, now he sought the top of the oak piano,

menacing lamps and vases and pictures. And after a while Ellen was

induced to sit at the piano and play for the party. It was ragtime they

wanted, so she played “I’m afraid to go home in the dark” and “Bon-bon

Buddy” and other favorites which Mr. Murdock sang in a pleasant baritone

voice. After that he gave imitations of various vaudeville artists

singing these same ballads.

At length May and Herman Biggs retired, accompanied by Jimmy, to bring

in the refreshments, and Ellen was left alone with the stranger.

“I suppose,” she began, “you find it dull here after New York.”

Mr. Murdock coughed. “No, it’s pleasant enough.... Mr. Seton has been

very kind to me.... I’ll be here another week or two installing the

electrical equipment.”

Ellen raised her head proudly. “I’m going to New York myself soon ...

probably this winter.... I’m going to study music.”

Mr. Murdock was very ready. “Well, we must meet again there.... It’s a

lonely place for a girl without family or friends.”

“But I don’t get homesick,” said Ellen, with the sophisticated air of an

experienced traveler. “I certainly wouldn’t be homesick in New York.”

From that moment Mr. Murdock began to regard her with a deeper interest.

Perhaps he saw that by her side May had no points to be compared with

Ellen’s air of quiet assurance, her youthful dignity, her curiously

apparent respect for herself as an individual. She sat in the plush

rocker within the glow from the bronze lamp. At the moment she was not

awkward at all; she was tall, graceful, dark, even a little imposing.

The essence of her individuality rose triumphant above the plush

rocker, the engravings that hung against the elaborate wall paper, above

even the cheap dress which concealed her young slenderness. She stirred

the imagination. Certainly her face was interesting.

“I didn’t know,” began Mr. Murdock, “that you were a professional

musician.... I don’t suppose you like playing ragtime.... Maybe you’d

play me something good ... something classical, really good, I mean like

Nevin or MacDowell.”

And Mr. Murdock, growing communicative, went on to say that his sister

played too. She lived in Ogdensburg, New York. He had come from

Ogdensburg to make his fortune in the city. That was the reason, he

said, that he understood how lonely a person could be.

“Of course, it’s different now,” he continued, “I have lots of

friends.... Homer Bunce and Herbert Wyck.... But you’ll meet them when

you come to New York.”

He was very pleasant, Mr. Murdock. And he was nice looking in a rather

spiritless way. His eyes were kind and his hands nice. To Ellen hands

were important features. Shrewd beyond her years, she saw people by

their hands and their mouths. Mr. Murdock’s mouth was a trifle small and

compressed, but otherwise all right. He might be a prig, but underneath

the priggishness there lay a character nice enough.

“And now won’t you play for me?” he persisted, “something of Nevin or

MacDowell?”

Ellen went to the piano and played a Venetian Sketch and To a Waterlily.

She and Miss Ogilvie considered such music pap. From choice she would

not have played it, but she understood at once that Mr. Murdock would

like this music. Indeed he had asked for it. She knew he would like what

the people in the Town liked. Mr. Murdock listened with his eyes closed

and when she had finished he said, “My, that’s fine.... I like soft,

sweet music.”

She was still playing when May and Herman returned bearing the hot

chocolate and plates of cakes, followed closely by the simian Jimmy, his

mouth stuffed to overflowing. Mr. Murdock still listened, lying back in

his chair with closed eyes.

* * * * *

It was Mr. Murdock who outmaneuvered the _gauche_ Herman Biggs and

escorted her home. They talked stiffly, walking very close to each other

through the pouring rain beneath the Tolliver family umbrella.

On the steps of the porch, Ellen bade him good-night.

“We must meet again before I go away.”

“Certainly,” said Ellen; but in her heart she had resolved against it,

for she considered Mr. Murdock slightly boring. It was possible, she

could see now, for people to live in a city and still never leave their

home towns.

It was like Mr. Seton, thought Ellen. Every two years he went to Europe

to visit the Junoform Reinforced Corset branch factory at St. Denis near

Paris, but he really never left the Town at all. He carried it with him.

If only she could go to Paris....

6

Mr. Murdock stayed a week longer than he had planned, and before he left

he managed to see Ellen not once, but many times. Always May was

present, giggling and admiring, though toward the end, under the

prodding of a shrewd mother who saw a concealed menace in the situation,

she betrayed a slight and refreshing coldness toward her friend. Before

he left, Ellen called him Mr. Murdock no longer, but Clarence.

In the weeks that followed she received from him two post cards, one a

colored picture of lower New York photographed from Brooklyn Bridge

against the sunset and the other a view of the Reservoir at Forty-Second

street which, he wrote, had been demolished a little while before. On

them he recalled her promise to let him know when she came to New York.

May, however, received a dozen post cards and a half-dozen letters, so

his correspondence with Ellen must have signified nothing at all.

Certainly it did not excite her deeply.

“Clarence writes me,” said May one day, “that you are going to New York.

Why didn’t you tell me?... I should think you’d tell your best friend a

thing like that.”

And Ellen slipped into a cloud of evasions. “I may have told him that,”

she replied airily. “I don’t know how he could have found out.... It was

a secret, I haven’t mentioned it to any-one.” And she made a number of

vague excuses, which seemed neither logical nor founded upon fact. It

was as if she considered May too stupid to understand such things or

thought her too unimportant to consider at all.

“It’s funny,” said May, “that you’d tell such a thing to a stranger like

Clarence....” For a moment the suspicions planted in her complacent mind

by an aspiring mother stirred with life and raised their heads. But she

succumbed again quickly to the domination of her companion and thrust an

arm about Ellen’s waist.

“It’s only because I’m interested,” she said. “I know that you’re going

to be great and famous some day.... We’re all going to be proud of you.”

At which Ellen sniffed, not without an air of scorn, as if she cared not

a fig whether the Town was proud of her or not.

At home, however, May received another warning from her mother. “Mr.

Murdock,” said the plump Mrs. Seton, “is not a young man to be passed up

lightly.... There aren’t many like him.... He suits your father to a T,

and he would fit in fine at the factory. Your father needs some one

like that to help him out, until Jimmy is big enough to take hold....

Don’t trust Ellen too far.... She’s too quiet to be trusted.”

At which May only laughed. “Why, Ellen wouldn’t think of marrying him,”

she said, “she won’t marry anybody in this town.... It isn’t likely

she’ll ever marry ... at least for a long time. Besides, she doesn’t

think he’s good enough.”

Mrs. Seton snorted angrily and put down the Ladies’ Home Journal. “Good

enough for her ...! Who is she to be so choosey?... Why, the Tollivers

can’t pay their bills.... They’re just out of bankruptcy.... Good enough

for her ...! If she ever gets as fine and upstanding a young man as Mr.

Murdock ... a man so industrious and hardworking and well-behaved, she

can thank her stars....” For a moment Mrs. Seton paused to recover her

breath, greatly dissipated by this indignant outburst. That Ellen should

scorn Mr. Clarence Murdock was not a thing to be borne lightly. Then she

continued, “And this talk about going to New York.... How’s she going to

get to New York? Who’s to put up the money, I’d like to know? Old Julia

Shane, I suppose.... It’s not likely the old woman would part with a

cent even if she could.”

It was, in the Seton family, a cherished fiction that Julia Shane was

stricken by an overwhelming poverty: it was a fiction that increased the

confidence of a fortune founded upon reinforced corsets.

“Julia Shane!” continued the ambitious mother, “Julia Shane! What’s she

got to be proud about?... With a daughter as fast and loose as Lily?...

I suppose she’s proud of living in that filthy old house in the midst of

the Flats.”

And so the ashes of the feud between the Setons and the

Barr-Shane-Tolliver clan, lighted accidentally by the chance appearance

of the guiltless and model Mr. Murdock, showed signs of flaming up again

after a peace of twenty years.

7

The Christmas holidays arrived; the Tollivers sold the last of their

horses, and went on showing brave and indifferent faces to the world.

Ellen, going her secret way, awaited the arrival of her cousin Lily,

still certain that Lily would have a solution. She no longer argued with

her mother. Instead she took refuge in silence and if she spoke at all

it was in a docile and pleasant fashion. She permitted herself to be

petted and admired, so that Mrs. Tolliver in the eternal optimism of her

nature believed that Ellen had forgotten or out-grown her restlessness,

and was content.

But the girl spent hours at her piano, playing wildly, as if the sound

of her music in some way eased the fierce restlessness of her spirit. At

times she attacked a polonaise with such violence and fire that the

spangled notes soared through the air and penetrated even the stillness

of Gramp Tolliver’s solitary chamber. At such moments the old man paused

in his reading, permitted his book to slip to the floor and sat in his

rocking chair motionless, listening with his lean old head cocked a

little on one side, a wild and dancing light in his eye. For hours at a

time he listened thus, muttering occasionally to himself.

(That granddaughter of his had something which none of them suspected,

something that was rare and precious in this world.) When the music at

last died away, losing itself in the maze of walls which shut him into

exile, it was his habit to sink back with a clucking sound and begin to

rock, gently at first and then more and more savagely, until at last he

became submerged by the stream of shrewd, malicious thoughts which swept

through his old brain.

“She’s got something none of them understand.... And I’m the only one

who knows it. But they’ll kill it in her. They’ll pull her down until

she’s on the level with the rest of them. I know.... I know.... Haven’t

I heard Liszt himself, in Paris in the heyday of his fame? And

Rubinstein? They’ll destroy her if they can with all their little tricks

and deceits.... Mean they are, meaner than dirt, trying to drag her down

to the rest of them.... The girl doesn’t know it herself.... How good

she is no one has ever told her.... She doesn’t know the power that’s in

her. They’ll never let her free. They’ll clip her wings. They’ve clipped

the wings of greater ones....”

And then with a cascade of wicked chuckles the old man settled back to

his reading. “They’ve never clipped my wings. They can’t because I don’t

live in their world. They can’t come close enough to catch me. They

can’t fly high enough....”

And slowly the rocking decreased in violence until at last the chair

became quite still and the skinny arm reached down to recover the heavy

book. Belowstairs the last echoes of the turbulent music died away until

the silence was broken only by the distant cries of children playing in

the streets and the faint muttering of the old man....

“It’s best that she doesn’t know.... It wouldn’t help her ... only make

her miserable ... only give them a chance to tear her to pieces, nerve

by nerve....”

Again the persistent rocking until at last the room grew dark, and the

old man rose in response to a loud knock on the door of the stairs,

stirred himself and lighted an oil lamp so that he might find his way to

the tray of food that Mrs. Tolliver thrust in at the door of his cell.

There was no gas in this room beneath the roof; Gramp Tolliver had been

an expense for too many years. It would have cost twenty dollars to fit

his room with gas lights. And in ten years he had produced nothing save

the scraps of paper covered with bird track handwriting that were stowed

away in the pigeonholes of the desk.

* * * * *

In those days there came to Grandpa Tolliver, more by some obscure

instinct than by any communication with those outside his cell, the

certainty that his granddaughter’s behavior was a source of irritation

to the people of the Town. True, he occasionally overheard from the

kitchen below snatches of reproachful conversation which drifted upward

by way of the ventilator ... strange remarks which appeared to come out

of the blue, yet when pieced together they provided a coherent story.

Reproaches of sulkiness, of silence, of secrecy, cast by a mother, who

desired nothing so much as confidences, against a daughter who was

incapable of anything but secrecy. They were an ill-matched pair. This

the old man understood, with a sort of wicked satisfaction, because the

things which in Ellen were incomprehensible to her mother were the

things which had come down to the girl from himself. It was another mark

in the long score between Grandpa Tolliver and his daughter-in-law;

another, in which nature herself took a hand, in the long battle between

two fiercely antagonistic temperaments.

He could not have known that the people in the Town likewise had

reproaches for Ellen. He could not have known that they said it was her

duty to begin giving music lessons in order to prop up the fortunes of a

proud and bankrupt family. Yet in his unearthly way, he did know; and in

some vague way he was pleased. Even in his isolation so impregnable, so

defiant, his heart was warmed by the thought of an ally. The enemy was

driving Ellen, a neutral, into his camp; and into his icy heart there

came drop by drop a warm trickle of unaccustomed sympathy. Not that

Gramp Tolliver planned active aid; that would have been too much to

expect, for Gramp Tolliver had discovered half a century earlier the

idiocy of mixing in the affairs of other people.

Instead he chuckled and read in triumph and vindication The Decline and

Fall.

8

On the morning of the third day before Christmas, Clarence Murdock,

bearing a neat handbag packed with those things which he would need

during a journey of three weeks through the middle-western country,

turned his back on the Babylon Arms and made his way toward the railway

station and the transcontinental express. Behind him he left the two

young men whom, in the fashion of bachelors who have migrated without

root or connection from the provinces into a great city, he had picked

up as companions somewhere amid the flotsam and jetsam of Manhattan

life. They had come to him separately, each drawn perhaps in his own way

by the smug neatness which marked the life and character of Clarence.

Yet the two men were in no way alike. Their difference was manifested in

the very reasons for their attachment to Clarence. The one, an

adventurous boisterous soul, had fastened upon Clarence because Clarence

had a talent for keeping things in order, a perfect genius indeed for

pigeonholing the very emotions of his own life. Out of the mighty chaos

which was the essence of the wholehearted Homer Bunce, there emerged a

pathetic need for order and comfort; and this Clarence supplied to

superb satisfaction. Even the books and pillows of their tiny apartment

were kept in scrupulous order. Disorder made Clarence nervous.

Mr. Wyck, on the other hand, had found strength in Clarence, a thing

which Bunce himself never even thought of finding in the orderly depths

of Clarence’s soul. For Mr. Wyck’s family was old and Mr. Wyck himself

lacked vitality. There was in the lower Manhattan in those days a street

named for the Wycks, a street renamed long since, in the hasty fashion

of a great city, for a Tammany politician. His family was so old (as age

went in New York) that there remained only himself and two spinster

aunts who lived at Yonkers. It was this antiquity of blood which the

pale Mr. Wyck counted upon as the very rod and staff of his existence.

At his first meeting with Clarence, at an annual outing on Staten Island

of the employees of the Superba Electrical Company, Inc., Mr. Wyck had

sensed in Clarence a certain un-American and shameful respect for an old

family name, the strange yearning in a man with no tradition for a name

which carried with it memories, even though they were very distant and

virtually obsolete, of coaches and country estates. They _were_ distant,

for seventy years had gone the way of eternity since there had been

money in the Wyck family, and the descendant of the patroons, the last

of the Wycks, now followed his fortune as a clerk in the accounting

department of the Superba Electrical Company, Inc.

On the rock of this respect for tradition, Wyck had fastened his hope.

At length, he discovered in Clarence a man who was impressed; and the

self-respect of Mr. Wyck, for all the insignificance of his world,

increased in direct proportion with the awe produced in Clarence Murdock

by the awful sound of the name Wyck.

* * * * *

Thus the three had come together, living in a fashion contented enough,

in a tiny apartment filled with beaded portières bought at a Seventh

Avenue emporium and leather cushions decorated with pyrographic Indian

heads by loving sisters and aunts. Yet a spirit of unrest hovered over

the place, an uneasiness which none save Mr. Wyck discerned with any

degree of clarity. He alone knew that the day would come when, one after

the other with fatal precision, his two companions would find their

present mode of life unendurable. In turn each was certain to choose,

from among the hordes of girls that swarmed the streets of New York, a

mate. Only the gods knew who these two women might be or where they were

at that moment. There was only one certainty, and that Mr. Wyck, with

the sensitiveness of an effeminate man of low vitality, admitted to

himself. Clarence and Bunce would marry, Bunce no doubt for love because

his animal spirits were high, Clarence perhaps because he would be

trapped by the glamour of a tradition.

Oh, Mr. Wyck understood this. It troubled him in the moments when he was

left in solitude. It disturbed his digestion of the greasy meals which

he ate alone each day in some hole-in-the-wall restaurant far downtown

near the offices of the Superba Electrical Company, Inc. It was

impossible that he should ever marry. Women had never interested him;

the very idea filled him with a faint disgust. He would not only be left

alone in the world; he would no longer possess even Clarence who

respected his name. He knew that any woman was stronger than himself.

* * * * *

The Babylon Arms raised its twelve stories in one of the Eighties just

east of Riverside Drive. Among the brownstone fronts of the early part

of this century its gaunt sides gave it an overpowering appearance of

height, loneliness, even grandeur. In those days great apartments were

rare in that part of New York, and the Babylon Arms stood as a solitary

outpost of the army of apartment houses which since have ranged their

extravagant bulks in a solid face along the North River and eastward to

the Park. The Babylon Arms is still there, rather shabby and _démodé_, a

belle of the early nineteen hundreds, out of fashion, overpainted, with

electric bulbs fitted into gas brackets and the once somber red walls of

its hallways painted over in grotesque imitation of the more

ostentatious marble of its newer sisters. But its pride is gone. It

stands jostled now and a little battered, like the bedizened women who

came in from the streets to flit through its gloomy corridors. It is

shabby genteel, like the two old ladies who live in the parlor bed-room

of the first floor. It is jolly and good-natured, like the clerk and his

family who climb the two flights of worn stairs above the point where

the antiquated elevator rocks uncertainly to its final stop. It is

comic, respectable, quaint, vulgar, tragic, common and happy ... all

these things; and so after a fashion, in the way of old houses, it is

like life itself.

But it was new and elegant in the early nineteen hundreds. The Babylon

Arms! It was a name known throughout the growing Upper West Side! It was

the first of the skyscraping apartment houses. And among the pioneer

cliff dwellers were Clarence Murdock and two companions who shared among

them the expenses of the apartment two floors above where the elevator

jolted uncertainly to a final stop. It was not so expensive--living two

floors above the elevator; and the name “Babylon Arms” looked

impressive, even a little flamboyant, on one’s card. To Bunce the name

signified opulence, a certain grandiose triumph of success; to Clarence

it meant that people would say, “Ah, the Babylon Arms! He must have a

good background to live there!” To Mr. Wyck, it meant simply that he was

keeping up one of the traditions of his name; yet there were times too

when he was a little ashamed of the Babylon Arms as an institution

touched by vulgarity.

As Clarence on the third day before Christmas closed the door behind him

on the bead portières and burnt leather cushions, he left Bunce singing

lustily as he rubbed his great healthy body in the chilly air of the

bathroom, and Mr. Wyck, still lying in bed, his thin, slightly yellow

nose peeping above the blankets against the hour when it would be

painfully necessary for him to rise. As the door closed, Bunce’s

rendition of “I’m afraid to go home in the dark” was interrupted for an

instant while he shouted after Clarence, “Look out now and don’t come

home married to that fat, pretty Seton girl!”

At the shout Clarence hastened away, shocked a little by the vulgarity

of Bunce. As for Mr. Wyck the words struck terror into his heart. He saw

the breaking up of his home. He saw himself, a timid, frightened little

man, lost once more among the obscenities of a cheap boarding house.

9

A number of things made necessary this trip of Clarence; there were the

usual customers to be visited; the new equipment of the Junoform Corset

Factory was in need of inspection, and finally there was an engagement

to spend Christmas and several days of the holiday season as the guest

of the Seton family; and this he looked upon with relief because life in

hotels had come to weary him inexpressibly. He longed for a home, with a

wife who would put by his slippers for him and sit by his fireside. The

prospect of one dreary hotel after another burdened his soul; so the

acceptance of Mr. Seton’s invitation had been even colored by a subdued

enthusiasm.

It was, after all, ambition which had betrayed him into city life and

the wretched, fly-by-night existence of a drummer. He was ambitious to

be wealthy, to be admired, to be honored in a community.

There were times, but these were rare and isolated moments, when his

ambitions rose for an instant beyond even these things, times when, in

an ecstasy of intoxication, they soared dizzily among the pinnacles of

hope far beyond the reach of one whose place in the structure of life

was clearly somewhere in the foundations. It was then that he caught for

an instant glimpses of a life in which he saw himself not only wealthy

and respectable but distinguished and glamorous, one whose character

captured the imagination, who gave himself and his life to the great

world.

All this was perhaps not clearly thought out in his mind; yet he sensed

its presence a little way beyond his reach as a small boy searches in

the darkness of a jam closet for something which he knows is there but

cannot see.

In these lurid, almost ecstatic moments, he saw his future wife not so

much in the rôle of a domestic paragon, as a brilliant and beautiful

creature, fit to walk through the avenues of the great world by the

side of a clever and worldly man. To be sure, such things were never

mentioned to fellow-drummers, yet they were there, shut up in his heart,

quiet save for rare moments. His companions in the smoking car may have

had their secrets too. It is impossible to say. If such secrets existed,

they were too well hidden beneath their suspicions of each other.

* * * * *

It was in one of his placid, normal moods that he boarded the train for

the west. He took off his brown overcoat with the half-belt at the back,

his brown fedora hat, adjusted his eyeglasses, and settled himself in

his chair. At the moment he permitted his thoughts to hover about the

picture of May Seton, pale, blonde, good-natured and pretty in her plump

way. There was nothing in the least carnal in these thoughts, for he was

a young man who might have served as a model for those institutions

which concern themselves with the morals of young men and preach the

doctrine that complete purity of mind is possible by sheer perseverance

alone. He was innocent of women. He had worked hard and had no time for

them. Indeed the very thought of them in that way gave him a faintly

squeamish feeling. He was one of those in whom desire follows in the

wake of timid experience, who cannot in the beginning conceive passion

otherwise than abstractly. So now he conceived May Seton more as an

idea, a sort of stepping stone to comfort and warmth, than as a woman to

be desired. That he might be a sensual man had never occurred to him.

As the train moved across the Jersey Flats he fell to considering his

prospects as a son-in-law of Harvey Seton and the certainty of an

interest in the Junoform Reinforced Corset Company, a thing already

hinted at by his suppositions mother-in-law. He thought of the Town. He

pictured, quite clearly and placidly, a small and pleasant house

surrounded by shrubs and trees, a comfortable front porch. He even

pictured Mrs. May Seton Murdock in a rocking chair, far more attractive

than she was in the flesh, darning his socks. In fact, he saw his

future bounded on four sides by Junoform Reinforced Corsets, by May

Seton, by the Town and by hard work. It was this placid and uneventful

path that his feet were to follow.

The car in which Clarence sat, like all cars bound from the East across

the mountains into the fertile and prosperous Midlands, was crowded. He

was not a man gifted with great curiosity and rarely indulged himself in

speculation concerning his fellow travelers. Indeed, from his manner one

soon understood that he observed very little about him. And now as the

wheels clicked along the smooth track he settled himself to reading. He

had brought with him against the monotonous agony of the trip a book by

Richard Harding Davis and a copy of the _Saturday Evening Post_, and

these absorbed his attention until the train had passed Philadelphia and

turned northward a bit in the direction of Altoona. Presently his

interest flagged and he fell to watching the scenery; but before long

this too wearied him and he fell asleep. Slumber was a state which he

welcomed, for there were long periods when his mind grew exhausted with

turning over the same frayed thoughts. There were times when it might

have been said that he existed in a state of suspended animation.

So between slumber and a bored wakefulness, the hours passed in a

succession of dreary towns and monotonous winter-dead farms, punctuated

by signs advertising patent medicines and cheap hotels. As the train

swept through Johnstown, he was for a moment diverted by the sight of so

much smoke and desolation, by the gigantic slag heaps and the flaming

furnaces. The spectacle was not a new one. He must have seen it twenty

times, by day when it was sordid, and by night when it became wild and

fantastically magnificent. Yet it interested him as it always interested

him, tugging at some part of his soul which failed to fit the neat

pattern of his universal conformity.

“What a great country!” he reflected. “By George! It’s a privilege to

be a citizen of a country so energetic and prosperous!”

A curious light came suddenly into his nice brown eyes, and for a time

the corset factory and May Seton were forgotten in the face of a new

emotion, so much more profound and stirring. Even the rawness, the

barren crudity of the picture exalted him. For a moment his ambitions

threatened to gain the upper hand--those wild unruly ambitions which

sometimes bore him beyond the round of thoughts which wearied him.

“To own mills like these!” he thought. “To be a power in industry. To go

to Europe every year. To have a great house and one of these new

automobiles.”

And Johnstown disappeared behind the train, lost in a gigantic and

all-enveloping cloud of smoke and soot through which the flames of the

furnaces flashed dimly.

The monotonous mountains, seamed with black rivers flowing between crags

of blue ice, succeeded the smutty town, and Clarence settled back in his

chair. But he did not read. He sat staring out of the window, thinking,

thinking, thinking. Perhaps he tried to nurse his sense of importance,

to persuade himself that he possessed the stuff which went into the

accomplishments of great ambitions.

The roaring train sped on and on, and presently he went into the smoking

compartment where he fell into conversation with other traveling

salesmen. They exchanged stories of a broad nature, until Clarence, by

nature a nice young man, found the flavor growing too strong and

returned to his seat.

Then it was for the first time that he noticed his fellow passengers. He

did not notice all of them, or even two or three. He noticed only one, a

woman who sat in the chair beside him reading a novel with a yellow

paper back called “Chèri” by a person with the queer name of Colette.

He sat down and tried to read but, for some obscure reason, the figure

of the woman kept getting between him and the story of the great open

spaces. He found himself reading paragraphs which meant nothing to him.

He read an entire page without knowing what had happened in the tale.

Such a thing had never happened to him before.

The woman who kept thrusting herself between him and the story was

dressed all in black, though she did not appear to be in mourning.

Rather it seemed that she wore black because it became her. Across one

shoulder was thrown a stole of black fox and from the brim of her small

hat hung a froth of black lace which obscured her dark eyes and

permitted her to regard her companions without receiving in return the

force of their stares. From beneath the hat there escaped a bit of tawny

hair, so dark that in some lights it appeared almost red. She appeared

to take full advantage of the shield made by the lace, for from time to

time she put down her yellow-backed novel and fell to observing the

people about her ... a middle-aged woman with a little boy in a sailor

suit, a fat man who lay back in his seat and snored quietly, a pair of

college girls, one reading ponderously the essays of Emerson and the

other absorbed (self-consciously) in the pages of Boccacio; another

traveling salesman and a pair of old women returning from a funeral who

vied with each other in a talking race.

“And then I said to her....” “She said, ‘Mabel, he’ll never be well

again ... even if he didn’t die, he’ll never be well again’” ... and

“What do you think of such behavior?... Unpardonable, I thought....” “I

quite agree with you, unpardonable....” “Well, that’s what I told

Mabel.”

Snatches of the old women’s talk, projected in voices pitched high

enough to override the clamor of the train, were tossed about them like

jagged fragments of glass.

The woman with the veil put down her book and, smiling quietly, listened

to them. She turned away from Clarence a little so that he was able to

shift his position and thus obtain a clearer view of her.

She was beautiful, and even to Clarence, unskilled in such fine

distinctions, it was clear that she was a lady. This fact was conveyed

beyond all doubt by the way she sat, poised with a neat and easy grace,

in the way her slender hands clasping her book lay against the black of

her dress, the way she carried her head and wore her fine clothes, even

by the veil which somehow stood as a symbol of all that was gently bred

in her character. There seemed between her and the others in the car an

invisible veil which shielded her while she looked out upon them from a

different world.

At her feet stood a smart black handbag, covered with bright

labels. Clarence read them one after another in a kind of

intoxication--Sorrento, Cannes, Dieppe, Hotel Ruhl, Hotel Royal

Splendide, Hotel Ritz-Carlton. And, surely yet imperceptibly, just as an

hour or two earlier the sight of the Johnstown furnaces had captivated

his moderate imagination, the woman began to take possession of him.

Somehow these two impressions became blended, and out of them there came

to Clarence glimpses of a brilliant world which he never before

penetrated, even in the wildest flights of ambition.

* * * * *

Presently the stranger, wearied of listening to her companions, resumed

her reading and Clarence, still fascinated, continued to watch her

until, becoming conscious of his gaze, she turned suddenly and dismissed

him by the faintest movement of her shoulder. At the gesture, which from

her seemed a command, he turned quickly away and blushed as if she had

spoken to him in rebuke. Yet it seemed to him that as she glanced in his

direction, her lovely mouth was arched for an instant by the faintest of

smiles--a smile which said: “Staring does not disturb me. It is nothing

new to me.” It may even have been that she mocked him. It was impossible

to say. Only one thing remained certain: Clarence had been disturbed by

something entirely new in his experience.

In his own way he tried to discover what it was that suddenly shattered

all his peace. The woman was beautiful, yet he in no sense desired her.

Indeed, in the dull purity of his mind, it is probable that no such

unclean thought even occurred to him. Beyond all doubt she fascinated

him, yet it was not this which destroyed his ease. Rather it was

something in her manner, something in her very bearing and personality

which overwhelmed him ... that sudden glimpse of another world, in which

people lived lives as different from his as day is different from night,

a sudden terror at her self-possession, at the unseen, impregnable

barrier by which she protected herself from those others in the car.

There was in her manner too a certain veiled but terrifying

recklessness.

With an air of infinite absorption, she continued to read the

yellow-backed novel, as if she had forgotten that the man in the seat

beside her existed. Beyond her, the two old women continued, “And I said

to her when she rang me up the next morning....” “It’s shameful what

some women will do!” ... “Since that day he’s been an invalid, unable to

stir!” And they clucked and wagged their crêpe-clad heads like a pair of

crows on a fence.

The train roared on through the blue-white mountains, into the west

toward Pittsburgh. Upon the hills the early winter darkness had already

begun to descend.

Still Clarence did not read. The novel and the _Saturday Evening Post_

slipped to the floor and lay there unnoticed. The characters in his book

failed to hold their own against the woman in the adjoining seat. He

even had a faint sense of being on the edge of the romantic and

exciting.

And at the same moment, the thoughts of May Seton and a comfortable

house in the Town were swept away like so much rubbish into oblivion,

carrying with them the sense of peace and certainty which a little time

before made the future so pleasant and comfortable.

Presently he rose and went into the smoking compartment where he

remained for a time. When he emerged, it was quite dark, and high up on

the barren mountains an occasional warm yellow light indicated the

existence of a lonely house. Returning to his chair he found the

mysterious woman had vanished. Only the somber handbag covered with

bright labels remained. The names glittered ... Sorrento, Cannes,

Firenze, Beau Rivage, Royal Splendide, Claridge’s, Berkeley....

He glanced at his gold watch (the gift of Uncle Henry) and decided to

dine. Making his way toward the dining car, he found the passageway

blocked by other passengers, college girls and boys, drummers like

himself, old women, children, all swaying with the motion of the

speeding train. It was a bad time to travel, on the eve of a holiday;

yet the crowd was pleasant enough, good-natured, laughing, on the whole

gay with the holiday spirit.

Slowly the door of the dining car devoured the thin line, casting out

others who fought their way back in an opposing column, until at last

Clarence stood at the entrance of the bright car, surveying the groups

of heads bent over swaying soup and underdone chops.

* * * * *

Still harassed and unaccountably miserable, he stood first on one foot

and then the other, surveying the crowd until at length he discovered

far down the aisle his friend of the paper-backed novel. She sat at a

table for two opposite an elderly man in a black frock coat who, quite

properly, did not address her although he seemed not unconscious of her

presence, for he stole from time to time glances at her tawny hair and

fine throat until she dismissed him suddenly with a frank stare in which

there was a great deal more than a hint of amusement. After that a wall,

invisible as it was impenetrable, separated them, as was proper between

two victims of a system which threw harassed travelers arbitrarily into

each other’s company. As she ate the woman continued to look about her

as if she were profoundly amused by the friendly spectacle of the

rocking car. Still she appeared to use the film of lace as a perpetual

shield.

He had been watching her thus for a long time when, to his sudden

horror, he saw the elderly man wipe his thin mouth with his napkin, pay

his check and, followed by the steward, move fatally toward the end of

the car. At the sight Clarence was tempted suddenly to run. Yet it was

impossible to run. The best one could do was to turn back and squeeze

slowly and painfully past the fat encumbrances of the corridor. Besides,

how could one make a spectacle of one’s self? What would people think?

He stood frozen with horror, filled with the sensations of one about to

be dragged forward to torture. As in a nightmare he felt himself borne

forward by a steward who grinned maliciously and said, “Place for one?

Certainly! Right this way.”

Without effort he floated through space until suddenly, with a tormented

and unuttered groan, he sank into the seat opposite the woman with the

delicate black veil.

He felt the pulses beating in his throat. He bent over the menu card,

but even this did not protect him. Again the unreality of a nightmare

smote him. This time he was naked and horribly embarrassed at his

improper predicament. He sensed the woman examining him as she examined

the others, with a detached and curious smile of appraisal.

These were his sensations, various, confused, terrifying. As though

there were eyes in the top of his neatly brushed head, he saw all this

happening. What he did not see, what he could not have known were the

thoughts of the woman--that she watched him, that she saw the throbbing

vein in his throat stand out suddenly and knew well enough its meaning.

By the aid of that agitated vein she saw, with a sophistication beyond

his wildest imaginings, in this mild little drummer a man of a sensual,

passionate nature. The thing which amused her was a speculation, absurd

to be sure, but none the less clear. She wondered whether this little

man knew himself, whether he had ever been aroused.

“Chops,” Clarence found himself writing on the check. “Chops. Mashed

potatoes. Lima beans. Coffee.”

Then the sound of a voice reached him, warm, low, insinuating. “I advise

you against the chops. They are atrocious. I was forced to send them

back and order something else.”

The woman had spoken to him of her own accord and his suspicions arose

in sudden array, bristling and fully armed. Yet he knew that he must

answer. Heroically he looked up and asked,

“What do you advise?”

“The roast beef is very good....”

Though he detested it, he wrote down roast beef and then straightened in

his chair, pulling at his collar and cravat. For the life of him, he

could find nothing to say. It was impossible to overcome that fragile,

invisible barrier.

“Don’t think me impertinent,” she said, “for speaking ... but I’m almost

bored to death.... I hate traveling.... I’d like always to stay in one

spot.”

For an instant he suspected the faintest trace of a foreign accent in

her voice, though he could not be certain.

“I know,” he said politely, “I hate it too....”

She laughed softly.

“It’s the first time I’ve traveled any distance in years.... I couldn’t

talk to the old crow who sat there before you.... It would have

frightened him to death.”

It was impossible for Clarence to say that it also frightened him to

death, so he coughed and buttered a bit of roll.

“You don’t mind my speaking, do you?” she pursued.

For a moment Clarence fancied he had lost his mind. It was queer enough

that a strange woman should speak to him, but even queerer that she

should sweep past all the procedure of good manners and ask him directly

whether he minded it. And she was neither brazen nor embarrassed.

“No, of course not,” he managed to say, “I mean I’m awfully glad. I hate

traveling alone.”

Then it occurred to him that he had made an indelicate, perhaps a

suggestive remark, and the blushes once more swept his face.

After hours the waiter arrived with the roast beef and lima beans.

“I haven’t much farther to go,” continued the woman. “Thank God, I’m not

bound for Chicago.”

Clarence found it impossible to eat beneath her gaze.

“I get off at eleven something ...” he said, “I’ve forgotten

exactly....”

The woman laughed. “Why, so do I! We must be bound for the same place.”

For an instant he succumbed to a terrifying suspicion that, in truth,

she had marked him for her own. But this idea he dismissed quickly, as

utterly improbable. The woman was clearly a lady. She was terribly sure

of herself, of keeping things just where she wanted them. She might be a

spy, an adventuress. (Ghosts of a thousand cheap magazine stories danced

through his brain.) Yet a woman like that, if she were bad, wouldn’t be

bothering herself with insignificant game like himself. He began to

believe that she had been speaking the truth, that she had been driven

to address him only out of a vast boredom.

“Perhaps we are,” he said, and told her that he was bound for the Town.

“So am I,” she replied. “It’s the first time I’ve been back there in

years.... Maybe you come from the Town?” she continued.

The discovery of this bond helped matters a little. It furnished at

least some ground for the stumbling feet of Clarence.

“No, I’m going on business.... I’ve been there before.... It’s a nice

progressive Town, full of booming factories ... a place to be proud of.”

But he found abruptly that he had taken the wrong turning. The stranger

was not proud of the Town. “I suppose you might be proud of it, if you

like that sort of thing.... I find it abominable.” For a moment, the

bantering, charming, humorous look went out of the eyes behind the veil,

supplanted by a sudden sadness. “No,” she continued, “I don’t like it,

though I’ve no doubt it’s very prosperous.”

For a moment Clarence was baffled. He understood suddenly that this new

strange world was more remote, more unfamiliar than he had imagined. It

was not perhaps made out of factories and roaring furnaces. The

discovery increased his awkwardness and in some strange way distended

the glamour with which he surrounded her. He struggled for words.

“I’m going to spend Christmas with the Setons,” he said. “Probably you

know them. They’ve always lived in the Town.”

The woman frowned slightly. “Seton?” she repeated, “Seton?” Then it

appeared that the light dawned upon her. “To be sure.... I know.... They

own a corset factory.... But they’re new people. Yes, I know who they

are although I don’t know them.”

She made the statement simply and without a trace of condescension. She

made it as a simple observation. If she had said, “I know who the King

of England is ... but I don’t know him,” the intonation, the inflection

would have been identical. She had answered his question, but she had

answered it more profoundly than she knew, more profoundly, more

tragically than even Clarence knew until years afterward. “_I know who

they are although I don’t know them._”

Before the eyes of Clarence there rose suddenly the image of May Seton,

good-natured, trivial, blonde, commonplace. It was almost as if she had

entered the train by some obscure miracle and stood there beside the

mysterious stranger, awkward, silly, ungainly.

The woman was rising now. “I must go back to my seat,” she said. “It

isn’t fair to keep the others waiting.” She pulled the stole of black

fox about her handsome shoulders and lowered the veil. “Thank you,” she

said, “for saving a poor helpless traveler from boredom.”

And with that she closed the adventure.

When he returned to his seat, he found her sitting absorbed in her

yellow-backed novel. Greeting him with a faint smile, she returned to

her reading. After an hour she rested her head against the back of the

chair and appeared to fall asleep. It was not until the train roared

into the Town that she again addressed him.

Snow filled the air as they got down from the train at midnight. The big

flakes, tormented by a rising wind, fell heavily, obscuring the yellow

lights of the dirty brick station. They were the only passengers to

descend and Clarence offered to take charge of her luggage. There were

two large trunks and another handbag. The trunks she left at the

station. She would send for them. The two handbags she would take with

her.

The great train, spouting steam, got under way with a vast uproar. The

brightly lighted cars moved away into the snowstorm and the pair of them

were left alone beneath the yellow glare of the station lamps. A little

way off two horse drawn cabs stood by the curb, the heads of the beasts

hanging, their backs bent against the storm. From the warm station

emerged a pair of drivers, muffled to the ears. To one of them, the lady

called out.

“Oh, Jerry,” she said, “I’m glad you’re here.... There’s no one to meet

me.... I didn’t send word ahead.”

The plumper of the two old men took off his hat and peered at her for a

moment while the snow fell on his bald head. Slowly recognition came to

him. “Sure, Miss Lily.... It’s a pleasure.... Back again, after so many

years ... and not a day older, if you’ll let me say so.”

At this the stranger laughed softly. The cabby took the bags from

Clarence, who had bestirred himself briskly to do the proper thing.

“It’s late,” he said. “Perhaps I’d better go with you to see that

nothing happens.”

“Thank you,” replied his companion, “but I’ll be safe.... I haven’t far

to go ... and I’ve known Jerry all my life.... He has driven me ever

since I was a little girl.... You see I only live a little way off.” She

laughed again, “Right in the midst of the Mills.” She made a little

gesture with her big muff to indicate the direction of the Mills. There,

above the encircling flames of the furnaces, rose dimly the silhouette

of a great house crowning the top of a low hill. But for the flames of

the furnaces it would have remained invisible. Now it stood out against

the red, snow-dimmed glare, black, mysterious.

The woman stepped into the swaying, moth-eaten cab and the driver

climbed to the seat. Suddenly she leaned out of the window and addressed

Clarence. “Before we part,” she said, “I suppose we ought to know each

other’s names, _pour sauver les convenances_. I’m Miss Shane,” she

added, “Miss Lily Shane.”

Clarence took off his hat and bowed. “I’m Mr. Murdock.... Mr. Clarence

Murdock.”

“And you won’t think me wicked, I know,” she added, “for speaking to a

strange man.... I’m careful who I speak to.... I knew I would be safe

with you.”

And the cab drove off through the snowstorm in the direction of Shane’s

Castle, leaving Clarence on the platform mumbling a polite answer, his

face scarlet, his pulses beating faster than they had ever beaten

before.

* * * * *

After a moment he climbed into the other cab and bade the driver take

him to the residence of Mr. Harvey Seton. The contentment, the holiday

spirit had oozed out of him. He was no longer glad to be spending

Christmas with the Setons. Reflecting upon his recent encounter, it

occurred to him suddenly what it was that was familiar about the woman.

Lily Shane! To be sure, she was the cousin of Ellen Tolliver! The rich

cousin ...! There was something about her that reminded him of Ellen as

she sat talking to him in the Setons’ parlor, something withdrawn and

contained, rather distinguished and proud. In one of those moments of

insight, so rare to him, he saw all at once that there was in the girl

and her cousin something which set them aside from the others.

This thought he turned over and over in his mind as the musty cab,

smelling faintly of ammonia, bore him through the blowing storm further

and further into the smug future that lay spread out before him in a

suburban panorama of little white houses with “artistic” piazzas and

shutters ornamented by cut-out hearts and diamonds; and after a time he

became once more almost content. The wild disturbance caused by the

sudden encounter with the stranger appeared to have quieted, when

another thought, entering suddenly his tired brain, made him miserable

once more. He fell to considering the final speech of Miss Lily

Shane.... “_I’m careful who I speak to. I knew I should be safe with

you._”....

He could not make out whether or not the speech was meant as a tribute

to him. Something in the memory of the stranger’s manner implied that he

was a poor thing.

And then it occurred to him that at this very moment he must be passing

the Tollivers’ house, and poking his head out of the cab window, he saw

that there was still a light in the windows. For an instant he fancied

that the wind bore toward him the strains of wild music, surging and

passionate; but of this he could not be certain, for the wind howled

wildly and snow fell in a thick blanket. It may have been, after all,

only his imagination; it had been playing him queer tricks since the

very moment he raised his eyes and saw Miss Lily Shane sitting there

beside him.

10

The same evening was for Mrs. Tolliver one of rare peace and

happiness--an evening when, warmed by the glow from the open fire, she

sat surrounded by her family while the blizzard howled and tore at the

eaves, setting the limbs of the gnarled old apple tree to scratch

against the frozen panes. At such times there was in her appearance

something grand and majestic; she sat in her ample chair like a

triumphant Niobe, a sort of enthroned maternity the borders of whose

narrow kingdom ended with the walls of the Tolliver living room.

It was a large square room, infinitely clean, although shabby and worn,

for the dominant rules of the Tolliver household were cleanliness and

comfort. It was this room which was the core of the Tolliver existence,

the shrine of the sacred Lares and Penates, such a room as has existed

rarely in each generation of the world since the beginning of time. With

her family assembled about her, the cares and worries of the day slipped

from her shoulders softly, beautifully into oblivion. She rested herself

by darning the family stockings.

Near her Ellen sat at the piano playing, playing endlessly, in the wild

and passionate fashion which sometimes overwhelmed them all, causing the

mother to cease her darning for an instant, young Fergus to look up from

his book, and even Charles Tolliver to stir himself sleepily and forget

in the surge of her music the cares which he sought to drown each

evening in sleep. The great shabby sofa was his. There it was that he

lay for hours every night, until at length and after much effort, he was

shepherded off to bed by his energetic wife. Perhaps he slept because in

sleep he found a solace for the complacent failure of his life.

Robert, the younger brother, lay on his stomach beside the fire, his

short nose wrinkled in an effort to decipher the mysteries of a picture

puzzle. He had a passion for problems, and a persistence which had come

to him from his mother.

Ah! They were a family in which to take pride! What was money compared

to such a good husband and such fine children? So ran the thoughts of

Mrs. Tolliver; and presently her face became wreathed in smiles, but she

did not know she was smiling. If she had looked at that moment into a

mirror, she would have been astounded. Her happiness at such moments

ceased to be a conscious emotion.

Outside the windows the wind howled and the snow, falling in the first

real blizzard of the winter, whished against the rattling panes.

The fire crackled and presently beneath the great blanket her husband

stirred slowly and murmured, “Ellen, play the one I like so much.... I

don’t know the name but you know what I mean.”

And slowly Ellen turned into the melodies of one of Liebesträume--the

one which is written about the lovers lost on a lake during a black

storm.

In her strange way the girl loved her father best, perhaps because in

his gentle impersonal way he made upon her none of those savage demands

which her mother, in all the ferocity of her affection, constantly

exacted. With Mrs. Tolliver love implied endearments, constant

manifestations of affection. To her love between people separated by

hundreds of miles was inconceivable. It was a thing to be touched, to be

fondled and treasured. Those whom she loved must always be at hand,

under her eye, full of protesting affection. Perhaps in this she was

right; she was, after all, a primitive woman who trusted her instincts.

There was no reason in her. Perhaps love _is_ only fanned into life by

close and breathless contacts.

Mr. Tolliver was so different. There was in him something of his father,

a touch of the terrible philosophic aloofness of the gaunt old man who

lived above the kitchen in another part of the house. But he lacked

Gramp Tolliver’s strength, as well as that implacable resistance of the

old man to all the assaults of emotion. Where the old man was aloof,

powerful, and independent through the very quality of his indifference,

the son had failed by some weakness of character. There was in him too

much of humanity. People liked him. Farmers in their fields stopped

their horses and abandoned their plows to talk with Charlie Tolliver. At

the elections they had supported him to a man; but there were not enough

of them. The Town was too powerful.

In the world Charles Tolliver failed because of his very gentleness. He

had a way of regarding life with a fine sense of proportion, of seeing

things in their proper relation. It was as if he stood already at the

end of his own existence and looked back through it as through a long

tunnel, seeing that those things which others labeled as mountains were

after all but mole-hills, and those things which others would have

called trivial possessed the most uncanny importance. And this was a

weakness, for it led one into the paths of philosophic acceptance; and

it was a weakness which none recognized more shrewdly than his own

direct and vigorous wife.

Ah (she thought) if only he would see things in the proper light. If

only I could make him fight as I would fight in his place! He’s

innocent, like a little child; but it’s not his fault. That old man

abovestairs is to blame; that old devil who never cared for his own

children. And, goaded by these thoughts, a kind of baffled rage at Gramp

Tolliver swept the honest woman. She had no subtle way of combating his

deviltries, because to a woman of so violent a nature, indifference was

an unconquerable barrier. Gramp Tolliver lived, in his sinister fashion,

in a world which she not only failed to understand but even to imagine.

Suddenly Ellen ceased her music; it died away in a faint, diminishing

breath, disappearing slowly into silence beneath the strong beautiful

fingers. The girl leaned forward on the piano and buried her face

silently in her hands. She did not sob, and yet one could be sure that

she was miserable. In her silence there was something far more terrible

than weeping. It rose up and filled all the room, so that Mrs. Tolliver,

lost in her angry thoughts of the old man in the lonely room overhead,

sensed it suddenly and ceased her darning. This thing had come so often

of late to break in upon the happiness of their lives. It was a monster,

savage, insatiable. Something more powerful than all of them.

For a time she watched her daughter and slowly there spread over her

face a look of trouble and bewilderment. It was an expression which of

late had come to Mrs. Tolliver so often that it had begun already to

leave its mark in the fine lines about her eyes and at the corners of

her mouth. It was at times like this that her heart ceased all at once

to beat and a coldness swept through her body; for love with her was

really an intense and physical thing.

On the sofa her husband slept peacefully, quieted at last by the

Liebestraum; and again she resented his indifference, all his

willingness to accept life, his refusal to struggle against fate.

“Things come out right in the end,” he always said when she assailed

him. “There is no use in struggling.”

Ah, she thought bitterly, but there _is_ use in struggling. There is a

satisfaction to the spirit. But this, of course, her husband could never

have known.

* * * * *

“Ellen,” she murmured, “Ellen.” And the girl raised her head with a look

in her eyes so terrible that it appalled her mother. “Are you tired?”

“No.”

Again a little pause. “Why are you unhappy?”