The particular weakness he indulged on this occasion was his need of

excitement and stimulus from without. He felt that for the first time in

four years he could express and interpret himself anew. The girl

promised rest; the hours in her company each evening alleviated the

morbid and inevitably futile poundings of his imagination. He had become

a coward in earnest--completely the slave of a hundred disordered and

prowling thoughts which were released by the collapse of the authentic

devotion to Gloria that had been the chief jailer of his insufficiency.

On that first night, as they stood by the gate, he kissed Dorothy and

made an engagement to meet her the following Saturday. Then he went out

to camp, and with the light burning lawlessly in his tent, he wrote a

long letter to Gloria, a glowing letter, full of the sentimental dark,

full of the remembered breath of flowers, full of a true and exceeding

tenderness--these things he had learned again for a moment in a kiss

given and taken under a rich warm moonlight just an hour before.

When Saturday night came he found Dot waiting at the entrance of the

Bijou Moving Picture Theatre. She was dressed as on the preceding

Wednesday in her lilac gown of frailest organdy, but it had evidently

been washed and starched since then, for it was fresh and unrumpled.

Daylight confirmed the impression he had received that in a sketchy,

faulty way she was lovely. She was clean, her features were small,

irregular, but eloquent and appropriate to each other. She was a dark,

unenduring little flower--yet he thought he detected in her some quality

of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of

all things. In this he was mistaken.

Dorothy Raycroft was nineteen. Her father had kept a small, unprosperous

corner store, and she had graduated from high school in the lowest

fourth of her class two days before he died. At high school she had

enjoyed a rather unsavory reputation. As a matter of fact her behavior

at the class picnic, where the rumors started, had been merely

indiscreet--she had retained her technical purity until over a year

later. The boy had been a clerk in a store on Jackson Street, and on the

day after the incident he departed unexpectedly to New York. He had been

intending to leave for some time, but had tarried for the consummation

of his amorous enterprise.

After a while she confided the adventure to a girl friend, and later, as

she watched her friend disappear down the sleepy street of dusty

sunshine she knew in a flash of intuition that her story was going out

into the world. Yet after telling it she felt much better, and a little

bitter, and made as near an approach to character as she was capable of

by walking in another direction and meeting another man with the honest

intention of gratifying herself again. As a rule things happened to Dot.

She was not weak, because there was nothing in her to tell her she was

being weak. She was not strong, because she never knew that some of the

things she did were brave. She neither defied nor conformed nor

compromised.

She had no sense of humor, but, to take its place, a happy disposition

that made her laugh at the proper times when she was with men. She had

no definite intentions--sometimes she regretted vaguely that her

reputation precluded what chance she had ever had for security. There

had been no open discovery: her mother was interested only in starting

her off on time each morning for the jewelry store where she earned

fourteen dollars a week. But some of the boys she had known in high

school now looked the other way when they were walking with "nice

girls," and these incidents hurt her feelings. When they occurred she

went home and cried.

Besides the Jackson Street clerk there had been two other men, of whom

the first was a naval officer, who passed through town during the early

days of the war. He had stayed over a night to make a connection, and

was leaning idly against one of the pillars of the Stonewall Hotel when

she passed by. He remained in town four days. She thought she loved

him--lavished on him that first hysteria of passion that would have gone

to the pusillanimous clerk. The naval officer's uniform--there were few

of them in those days--had made the magic. He left with vague promises

on his lips, and, once on the train, rejoiced that he had not told her

his real name.

Her resultant depression had thrown her into the arms of Cyrus Fielding,

the son of a local clothier, who had hailed her from his roadster one

day as she passed along the sidewalk. She had always known him by name.

Had she been born to a higher stratum he would have known her before.

She had descended a little lower--so he met her after all. After a month

he had gone away to training-camp, a little afraid of the intimacy, a

little relieved in perceiving that she had not cared deeply for him, and

that she was not the sort who would ever make trouble. Dot romanticized

this affair and conceded to her vanity that the war had taken these men

away from her. She told herself that she could have married the naval

officer. Nevertheless, it worried her that within eight months there had

been three men in her life. She thought with more fear than wonder in

her heart that she would soon be like those "bad girls" on Jackson

Street at whom she and her gum-chewing, giggling friends had stared with

fascinated glances three years before.

For a while she attempted to be more careful. She let men "pick her up";

she let them kiss her, and even allowed certain other liberties to be

forced upon her, but she did not add to her trio. After several months

the strength of her resolution--or rather the poignant expediency of her

fears--was worn away. She grew restless drowsing there out of life and

time while the summer months faded. The soldiers she met were either

obviously below her or, less obviously, above her--in which case they

desired only to use her; they were Yankees, harsh and ungracious; they

swarmed in large crowds.... And then she met Anthony.

On that first evening he had been little more than a pleasantly unhappy

face, a voice, the means with which to pass an hour, but when she kept

her engagement with him on Saturday she regarded him with consideration.

She liked him. Unknowingly she saw her own tragedies mirrored in

his face.

Again they went to the movies, again they wandered along the shadowy,

scented streets, hand in hand this time, speaking a little in hushed

voices. They passed through the gate--up toward the little porch--

"I can stay a while, can't I?"

"Sh!" she whispered, "we've got to be very quiet. Mother sits up reading

Snappy Stories." In confirmation he heard the faint crackling inside as

a page was turned. The open-shutter slits emitted horizontal rods of

light that fell in thin parallels across Dorothy's skirt. The street was

silent save for a group on the steps of a house across the way, who,

from time to time, raised their voices in a soft, bantering song.

"--_When you wa-ake

You shall ha-ave

All the pretty little hawsiz_--"

Then, as though it had been waiting on a near-by roof for their arrival,

the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's

face to the color of white roses.

Anthony had a start of memory, so vivid that before his closed eyes

there formed a picture, distinct as a flashback on a screen--a spring

night of thaw set out of time in a half-forgotten winter five years

before--another face, radiant, flower-like, upturned to lights as

transforming as the stars--

Ah, _la belle dame sans merci_ who lived in his heart, made known to him

in transitory fading splendor by dark eyes in the Ritz-Carlton, by a

shadowy glance from a passing carriage in the Bois de Boulogne! But

those nights were only part of a song, a remembered glory--here again

were the faint winds, the illusions, the eternal present with its

promise of romance.

"Oh," she whispered, "do you love me? Do you love me?"

The spell was broken--the drifted fragments of the stars became only

light, the singing down the street diminished to a monotone, to the

whimper of locusts in the grass. With almost a sigh he kissed her

fervent mouth, while her arms crept up about his shoulders.

THE MAN-AT-ARMS

As the weeks dried up and blew away, the range of Anthony's travels

extended until he grew to comprehend the camp and its environment. For

the first time in his life he was in constant personal contact with the

waiters to whom he had given tips, the chauffeurs who had touched their

hats to him, the carpenters, plumbers, barbers, and farmers who had

previously been remarkable only in the subservience of their

professional genuflections. During his first two months in camp he did

not hold ten minutes' consecutive conversation with a single man.

On the service record his occupation stood as "student"; on the original

questionnaire he had prematurely written "author"; but when men in his

company asked his business he commonly gave it as bank clerk--had he

told the truth, that he did no work, they would have been suspicious of

him as a member of the leisure class.

His platoon sergeant, Pop Donnelly, was a scraggly "old soldier," worn

thin with drink. In the past he had spent unnumbered weeks in the

guard-house, but recently, thanks to the drill-master famine, he had

been elevated to his present pinnacle. His complexion was full of

shell-holes--it bore an unmistakable resemblance to those aerial

photographs of "the battle-field at Blank." Once a week he got drunk

down-town on white liquor, returned quietly to camp and collapsed upon

his bunk, joining the company at reveille looking more than ever like a

white mask of death.

He nursed the astounding delusion that he was astutely "slipping it

over" on the government--he had spent eighteen years in its service at a

minute wage, and he was soon to retire (here he usually winked) on the

impressive income of fifty-five dollars a month. He looked upon it as a

gorgeous joke that he had played upon the dozens who had bullied and

scorned him since he was a Georgia country boy of nineteen.

At present there were but two lieutenants--Hopkins and the popular

Kretching. The latter was considered a good fellow and a fine leader,

until a year later, when he disappeared with a mess fund of eleven

hundred dollars and, like so many leaders, proved exceedingly difficult

to follow.

Eventually there was Captain Dunning, god of this brief but

self-sufficing microcosm. He was a reserve officer, nervous, energetic,

and enthusiastic. This latter quality, indeed, often took material form

and was visible as fine froth in the corners of his mouth. Like most

executives he saw his charges strictly from the front, and to his

hopeful eyes his command seemed just such an excellent unit as such an

excellent war deserved. For all his anxiety and absorption he was having

the time of his life.

Baptiste, the little Sicilian of the train, fell foul of him the second

week of drill. The captain had several times ordered the men to be

clean-shaven when they fell in each morning. One day there was disclosed

an alarming breech of this rule, surely a case of Teutonic

connivance--during the night four men had grown hair upon their faces.

The fact that three of the four understood a minimum of English made a

practical object-lesson only the more necessary, so Captain Dunning

resolutely sent a volunteer barber back to the company street for a

razor. Whereupon for the safety of democracy a half-ounce of hair was

scraped dry from the cheeks of three Italians and one Pole.

Outside the world of the company there appeared, from time to time, the

colonel, a heavy man with snarling teeth, who circumnavigated the

battalion drill-field upon a handsome black horse. He was a West

Pointer, and, mimetically, a gentleman. He had a dowdy wife and a dowdy

mind, and spent much of his time in town taking advantage of the army's

lately exalted social position. Last of all was the general, who

traversed the roads of the camp preceded by his flag--a figure so

austere, so removed, so magnificent, as to be scarcely comprehensible.

December. Cool winds at night now, and damp, chilly mornings on the

drill-grounds. As the heat faded, Anthony found himself increasingly

glad to be alive. Renewed strangely through his body, he worried little

and existed in the present with a sort of animal content. It was not

that Gloria or the life that Gloria represented was less often in his

thoughts--it was simply that she became, day by day, less real, less

vivid. For a week they had corresponded passionately, almost

hysterically--then by an unwritten agreement they had ceased to write

more than twice, and then once, a week. She was bored, she said; if his

brigade was to be there a long time she was coming down to join him. Mr.

Haight was going to be able to submit a stronger brief than he had

expected, but doubted that the appealed case would come up until late

spring. Muriel was in the city doing Red Cross work, and they went out

together rather often. What would Anthony think if _she_ went into the

Red Cross? Trouble was she had heard that she might have to bathe

negroes in alcohol, and after that she hadn't felt so patriotic. The

city was full of soldiers and she'd seen a lot of boys she hadn't laid

eyes on for years....

Anthony did not want her to come South. He told himself that this was

for many reasons--he needed a rest from her and she from him. She would

be bored beyond measure in town, and she would be able to see Anthony

for only a few hours each day. But in his heart he feared that it was

because he was attracted to Dorothy. As a matter of fact he lived in

terror that Gloria should learn by some chance or intention of the

relation he had formed. By the end of a fortnight the entanglement began

to give him moments of misery at his own faithlessness. Nevertheless, as

each day ended he was unable to withstand the lure that would draw him

irresistibly out of his tent and over to the telephone at the Y.M.C.A.

"Dot."

"Yes?"

"I may be able to get in to-night."

"I'm so glad."

"Do you want to listen to my splendid eloquence for a few starry hours?"

"Oh, you funny--" For an instant he had a memory of five years

before--of Geraldine. Then--

"I'll arrive about eight."

At seven he would be in a jitney bound for the city, where hundreds of

little Southern girls were waiting on moonlit porches for their lovers.

He would be excited already for her warm retarded kisses, for the amazed

quietude of the glances she gave him--glances nearer to worship than any

he had ever inspired. Gloria and he had been equals, giving without

thought of thanks or obligation. To this girl his very caresses were an

inestimable boon. Crying quietly she had confessed to him that he was

not the first man in her life; there had been one other--he gathered

that the affair had no sooner commenced than it had been over.

Indeed, so far as she was concerned, she spoke the truth. She had

forgotten the clerk, the naval officer, the clothier's son, forgotten

her vividness of emotion, which is true forgetting. She knew that in

some opaque and shadowy existence some one had taken her--it was as

though it had occurred in sleep.

Almost every night Anthony came to town. It was too cool now for the

porch, so her mother surrendered to them the tiny sitting room, with its

dozens of cheaply framed chromos, its yard upon yard of decorative

fringe, and its thick atmosphere of several decades in the proximity of

the kitchen. They would build a fire--then, happily, inexhaustibly, she

would go about the business of love. Each evening at ten she would walk

with him to the door, her black hair in disarray, her face pale without

cosmetics, paler still under the whiteness of the moon. As a rule it

would be bright and silver outside; now and then there was a slow warm

rain, too indolent, almost, to reach the ground.

"Say you love me," she would whisper.

"Why, of course, you sweet baby."

"Am I a baby?" This almost wistfully.

"Just a little baby."

She knew vaguely of Gloria. It gave her pain to think of it, so she

imagined her to be haughty and proud and cold. She had decided that

Gloria must be older than Anthony, and that there was no love between

husband and wife. Sometimes she let herself dream that after the war

Anthony would get a divorce and they would be married--but she never

mentioned this to Anthony, she scarcely knew why. She shared his

company's idea that he was a sort of bank clerk--she thought that he was

respectable and poor. She would say:

"If I had some money, darlin', I'd give ev'y bit of it to you.... I'd

like to have about fifty thousand dollars."

"I suppose that'd be plenty," agreed Anthony.

--In her letter that day Gloria had written: "I suppose if we _could_

settle for a million it would be better to tell Mr. Haight to go ahead

and settle. But it'd seem a pity...."

... "We could have an automobile," exclaimed Dot, in a final burst of

triumph.

AN IMPRESSIVE OCCASION

Captain Dunning prided himself on being a great reader of character.

Half an hour after meeting a man he was accustomed to place him in one

of a number of astonishing categories--fine man, good man, smart fellow,

theorizer, poet, and "worthless." One day early in February he caused

Anthony to be summoned to his presence in the orderly tent.

"Patch," he said sententiously, "I've had my eye on you for several

weeks."

Anthony stood erect and motionless.

"And I think you've got the makings of a good soldier."

He waited for the warm glow, which this would naturally arouse, to

cool--and then continued:

"This is no child's play," he said, narrowing his brows.

Anthony agreed with a melancholy "No, sir."

"It's a man's game--and we need leaders." Then the climax, swift, sure,

and electric: "Patch, I'm going to make you a corporal."

At this point Anthony should have staggered slightly backward,

overwhelmed. He was to be one of the quarter million selected for that

consummate trust. He was going to be able to shout the technical phrase,

"Follow me!" to seven other frightened men.

"You seem to be a man of some education," said Captain Dunning.

"Yes, Sir."

"That's good, that's good. Education's a great thing, but don't let it

go to your head. Keep on the way you're doing and you'll be a

good soldier."

With these parting words lingering in his ears, Corporal Patch saluted,

executed a right about face, and left the tent.

Though the conversation amused Anthony, it did generate the idea that

life would be more amusing as a sergeant or, should he find a less

exacting medical examiner, as an officer. He was little interested in

the work, which seemed to belie the army's boasted gallantry. At the

inspections one did not dress up to look well, one dressed up to keep

from looking badly.

But as winter wore away--the short, snowless winter marked by damp

nights and cool, rainy days--he marvelled at how quickly the system had

grasped him. He was a soldier--all who were not soldiers were civilians.

The world was divided primarily into those two classifications.

It occurred to him that all strongly accentuated classes, such as the

military, divided men into two kinds: their own kind--and those without.

To the clergyman there were clergy and laity, to the Catholic there were

Catholics and non-Catholics, to the negro there were blacks and whites,

to the prisoner there were the imprisoned and the free, and to the sick

man there were the sick and the well.... So, without thinking of it once

in his lifetime, he had been a civilian, a layman, a non-Catholic, a

Gentile, white, free, and well....

As the American troops were poured into the French and British trenches

he began to find the names of many Harvard men among the casualties

recorded in the Army and Navy Journal. But for all the sweat and blood

the situation appeared unchanged, and he saw no prospect of the war's

ending in the perceptible future. In the old chronicles the right wing

of one army always defeated the left wing of the other, the left wing

being, meanwhile, vanquished by the enemy's right. After that the

mercenaries fled. It had been so simple, in those days, almost as if

prearranged....

Gloria wrote that she was reading a great deal. What a mess they had

made of their affairs, she said. She had so little to do now that she

spent her time imagining how differently things might have turned out.

Her whole environment appeared insecure--and a few years back she had

seemed to hold all the strings in her own little hand....

In June her letters grew hurried and less frequent. She suddenly ceased

to write about coming South.

DEFEAT

March in the country around was rare with jasmine and jonquils and

patches of violets in the warming grass. Afterward he remembered

especially one afternoon of such a fresh and magic glamour that as he

stood in the rifle-pit marking targets he recited "Atalanta in Calydon"

to an uncomprehending Pole, his voice mingling with the rip, sing, and

splatter of the bullets overhead.

"When the hounds of spring ..."

_Spang!_

"Are on winter's traces ..."

_Whirr-r-r-r!_ ...

"The mother of months ..."

_"Hey!_ Come to! Mark three-e-e! ..."

In town the streets were in a sleepy dream again, and together Anthony

and Dot idled in their own tracks of the previous autumn until he began

to feel a drowsy attachment for this South--a South, it seemed, more of

Algiers than of Italy, with faded aspirations pointing back over

innumerable generations to some warm, primitive Nirvana, without hope or

care. Here there was an inflection of cordiality, of comprehension, in

every voice. "Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of

us," they seemed to say in their plaintive pleasant cadence, in the

rising inflection terminating on an unresolved minor.

He liked his barber shop where he was "Hi, corporal!" to a pale,

emaciated young man, who shaved him and pushed a cool vibrating machine

endlessly over his insatiable head. He liked "Johnston's Gardens" where

they danced, where a tragic negro made yearning, aching music on a

saxophone until the garish hall became an enchanted jungle of barbaric

rhythms and smoky laughter, where to forget the uneventful passage of

time upon Dorothy's soft sighs and tender whisperings was the

consummation of all aspiration, of all content.

There was an undertone of sadness in her character, a conscious evasion

of all except the pleasurable minutiae of life. Her violet eyes would

remain for hours apparently insensate as, thoughtless and reckless, she

basked like a cat in the sun. He wondered what the tired, spiritless

mother thought of them, and whether in her moments of uttermost cynicism

she ever guessed at their relationship.

On Sunday afternoons they walked along the countryside, resting at

intervals on the dry moss in the outskirts of a wood. Here the birds had

gathered and the clusters of violets and white dogwood; here the hoar

trees shone crystalline and cool, oblivious to the intoxicating heat

that waited outside; here he would talk, intermittently, in a sleepy

monologue, in a conversation of no significance, of no replies.

July came scorching down. Captain Dunning was ordered to detail one of

his men to learn blacksmithing. The regiment was filling up to war

strength, and he needed most of his veterans for drill-masters, so he

selected the little Italian, Baptiste, whom he could most easily spare.

Little Baptiste had never had anything to do with horses. His fear made

matters worse. He reappeared in the orderly room one day and told

Captain Dunning that he wanted to die if he couldn't be relieved. The

horses kicked at him, he said; he was no good at the work. Finally he

fell on his knees and besought Captain Dunning, in a mixture of broken

English and scriptural Italian, to get him out of it. He had not slept

for three days; monstrous stallions reared and cavorted through

his dreams.

Captain Dunning reproved the company clerk (who had burst out laughing),

and told Baptiste he would do what he could. But when he thought it over

he decided that he couldn't spare a better man. Little Baptiste went

from bad to worse. The horses seemed to divine his fear and take every

advantage of it. Two weeks later a great black mare crushed his skull in

with her hoofs while he was trying to lead her from her stall.

In mid-July came rumors, and then orders, that concerned a change of

camp. The brigade was to move to an empty cantonment, a hundred miles

farther south, there to be expanded into a division. At first the men

thought they were departing for the trenches, and all evening little

groups jabbered in the company street, shouting to each other in

swaggering exclamations: "Su-u-ure we are!" When the truth leaked out,

it was rejected indignantly as a blind to conceal their real

destination. They revelled in their own importance. That night they told

their girls in town that they were "going to get the Germans." Anthony

circulated for a while among the groups--then, stopping a jitney, rode

down to tell Dot that he was going away.

She was waiting on the dark veranda in a cheap white dress that

accentuated the youth and softness of her face.

"Oh," she whispered, "I've wanted you so, honey. All this day."

"I have something to tell you."

She drew him down beside her on the swinging seat, not noticing his

ominous tone.

"Tell me."

"We're leaving next week."

Her arms seeking his shoulders remained poised upon the dark air, her

chin tipped up. When she spoke the softness was gone from her voice.

"Leaving for France?"

"No. Less luck than that. Leaving for some darn camp in Mississippi."

She shut her eyes and he could see that the lids were trembling.

"Dear little Dot, life is so damned hard."

She was crying upon his shoulder.

"So damned hard, so damned hard," he repeated aimlessly; "it just hurts

people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't

be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does."

Frantic, wild with anguish, she strained him to her breast.

"Oh, God!" she whispered brokenly, "you can't go way from me. I'd die."

He was finding it impossible to pass off his departure as a common,

impersonal blow. He was too near to her to do more than repeat "Poor

little Dot. Poor little Dot."

"And then what?" she demanded wearily.

"What do you mean?"

"You're my whole life, that's all. I'd die for you right now if you said

so. I'd get a knife and kill myself. You can't leave me here."

Her tone frightened him.

"These things happen," he said evenly.

"Then I'm going with you." Tears were streaming down her checks. Her

mouth was trembling in an ecstasy of grief and fear.

"Sweet," he muttered sentimentally, "sweet little girl. Don't you see

we'd just be putting off what's bound to happen? I'll be going to France

in a few months--"

She leaned away from him and clinching her fists lifted her face toward

the sky.

"I want to die," she said, as if moulding each word carefully in her

heart.

"Dot," he whispered uncomfortably, "you'll forget. Things are sweeter

when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it.

It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot. And when I got it it

turned to dust in my hands."

"All right."

Absorbed in himself, he continued:

"I've often thought that if I hadn't got what I wanted things might have

been different with me. I might have found something in my mind and

enjoyed putting it in circulation. I might have been content with the

work of it, and had some sweet vanity out of the success. I suppose that

at one time I could have had anything I wanted, within reason, but that

was the only thing I ever wanted with any fervor. God! And that taught

me you can't have _any_thing, you can't have anything at _all_. Because

desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there

about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we

poor fools try to grasp it--but when we do the sunbeam moves on to

something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter

that made you want it is gone--" He broke off uneasily. She had risen

and was standing, dry-eyed, picking little leaves from a dark vine.

"Dot--"

"Go way," she said coldly. "What? Why?"

"I don't want just words. If that's all you have for me you'd better

go."

"Why, Dot--"

"What's death to me is just a lot of words to you. You put 'em together

so pretty."

"I'm sorry. I was talking about you, Dot."

"Go way from here."

He approached her with arms outstretched, but she held him away.

"You don't want me to go with you," she said evenly; "maybe you're going

to meet that--that girl--" She could not bring herself to say wife. "How

do I know? Well, then, I reckon you're not my fellow any more. So

go way."

For a moment, while conflicting warnings and desires prompted Anthony,

it seemed one of those rare times when he would take a step prompted

from within. He hesitated. Then a wave of weariness broke against him.

It was too late--everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed

the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.

The little girl in the white dress dominated him, as she approached

beauty in the hard symmetry of her desire. The fire blazing in her dark

and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame. With some

profound and uncharted pride she had made herself remote and so achieved

her purpose.

"I didn't--mean to seem so callous, Dot."

"It don't matter."

The fire rolled over Anthony. Something wrenched at his bowels, and he

stood there helpless and beaten.

"Come with me, Dot--little loving Dot. Oh, come with me. I couldn't

leave you now--"

With a sob she wound her arms around him and let him support her weight

while the moon, at its perennial labor of covering the bad complexion of

the world, showered its illicit honey over the drowsy street.

THE CATASTROPHE

Early September in Camp Boone, Mississippi. The darkness, alive with

insects, beat in upon the mosquito-netting, beneath the shelter of which

Anthony was trying to write a letter. An intermittent chatter over a

poker game was going on in the next tent, and outside a man was

strolling up the company street singing a current bit of doggerel about

"K-K-K-Katy."

With an effort Anthony hoisted himself to his elbow and, pencil in hand,

looked down at his blank sheet of paper. Then, omitting any heading,

he began:

_I can't imagine what the matter is, Gloria. I haven't had a line from

you for two weeks and it's only natural to be worried--_

He threw this away with a disturbed grunt and began again:

_I don't know what to think, Gloria. Your last letter, short, cold,

without a word of affection or even a decent account of what you've been

doing, came two weeks ago. It's only natural that I should wonder. If

your love for me isn't absolutely dead it seems that you'd at least keep

me from worry--_

Again he crumpled the page and tossed it angrily through a tear in the

tent wall, realizing simultaneously that he would have to pick it up in

the morning. He felt disinclined to try again. He could get no warmth

into the lines--only a persistent jealousy and suspicion. Since

midsummer these discrepancies in Gloria's correspondence had grown more

and more noticeable. At first he had scarcely perceived them. He was so

inured to the perfunctory "dearest" and "darlings" scattered through her

letters that he was oblivious to their presence or absence. But in this

last fortnight he had become increasingly aware that there was

something amiss.

He had sent her a night-letter saying that he had passed his

examinations for an officers' training-camp, and expected to leave for

Georgia shortly. She had not answered. He had wired again--when he

received no word he imagined that she might be out of town. But it

occurred and recurred to him that she was not out of town, and a series

of distraught imaginings began to plague him. Supposing Gloria, bored

and restless, had found some one, even as he had. The thought terrified

him with its possibility--it was chiefly because he had been so sure of

her personal integrity that he had considered her so sparingly during

the year. And now, as a doubt was born, the old angers, the rages of

possession, swarmed back a thousandfold. What more natural than that she

should be in love again?

He remembered the Gloria who promised that should she ever want

anything, she would take it, insisting that since she would act entirely

for her own satisfaction she could go through such an affair

unsmirched--it was only the effect on a person's mind that counted,

anyhow, she said, and her reaction would be the masculine one, of

satiation and faint dislike.

But that had been when they were first married. Later, with the

discovery that she could be jealous of Anthony, she had, outwardly at

least, changed her mind. There were no other men in the world for her.

This he had known only too surely. Perceiving that a certain

fastidiousness would restrain her, he had grown lax in preserving the

completeness of her love--which, after all, was the keystone of the

entire structure.

Meanwhile all through the summer he had been maintaining Dot in a

boarding-house down-town. To do this it had been necessary to write to

his broker for money. Dot had covered her journey south by leaving her

house a day before the brigade broke camp, informing her mother in a

note that she had gone to New York. On the evening following Anthony had

called as though to see her. Mrs. Raycroft was in a state of collapse

and there was a policeman in the parlor. A questionnaire had ensued,

from which Anthony had extricated himself with some difficulty.

In September, with his suspicions of Gloria, the company of Dot had

become tedious, then almost intolerable. He was nervous and irritable

from lack of sleep; his heart was sick and afraid. Three days ago he had

gone to Captain Dunning and asked for a furlough, only to be met with

benignant procrastination. The division was starting overseas, while

Anthony was going to an officers' training-camp; what furloughs could be

given must go to the men who were leaving the country.

Upon this refusal Anthony had started to the telegraph office intending

to wire Gloria to come South--he reached the door and receded

despairingly, seeing the utter impracticability of such a move. Then he

had spent the evening quarrelling irritably with Dot, and returned to

camp morose and angry with the world. There had been a disagreeable

scene, in the midst of which he had precipitately departed. What was to

be done with her did not seem to concern him vitally at present--he was

completely absorbed in the disheartening silence of his wife....

The flap of the tent made a sudden triangle back upon itself, and a dark

head appeared against the night.

"Sergeant Patch?" The accent was Italian, and Anthony saw by the belt

that the man was a headquarters orderly.

"Want me?"

"Lady call up headquarters ten minutes ago. Say she have speak with you.

Ver' important."

Anthony swept aside the mosquito-netting and stood up. It might be a

wire from Gloria telephoned over.

"She say to get you. She call again ten o'clock."

"All right, thanks." He picked up his hat and in a moment was striding

beside the orderly through the hot, almost suffocating, darkness. Over

in the headquarters shack he saluted a dozing night-service officer.

"Sit down and wait," suggested the lieutenant nonchalantly. "Girl seemed

awful anxious to speak to you."

Anthony's hopes fell away.

"Thank you very much, sir." And as the phone squeaked on the side-wall

he knew who was calling.

"This is Dot," came an unsteady voice, "I've got to see you."

"Dot, I told you I couldn't get down for several days."

"I've got to see you to-night. It's important."

"It's too late," he said coldly; "it's ten o'clock, and I have to be in

camp at eleven."

"All right." There was so much wretchedness compressed into the two

words that Anthony felt a measure of compunction.

"What's the matter?"

"I want to tell you good-by.

"Oh, don't be a little idiot!" he exclaimed. But his spirits rose. What

luck if she should leave town this very night! What a burden from his

soul. But he said: "You can't possibly leave before to-morrow."

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the night-service officer regarding

him quizzically. Then, startlingly, came Dot's next words:

"I don't mean 'leave' that way."

Anthony's hand clutched the receiver fiercely. He felt his nerves

turning cold as if the heat was leaving his body.

"What?"

Then quickly in a wild broken voice he heard:

"Good-by--oh, good-by!"

Cul-_lup!_ She had hung up the receiver. With a sound that was half a

gasp, half a cry, Anthony hurried from the headquarters building.

Outside, under the stars that dripped like silver tassels through the

trees of the little grove, he stood motionless, hesitating. Had she

meant to kill herself?--oh, the little fool! He was filled with bitter

hate toward her. In this dénouement he found it impossible to realize

that he had ever begun such an entanglement, such a mess, a sordid

mélange of worry and pain.

He found himself walking slowly away, repeating over and over that it

was futile to worry. He had best go back to his tent and sleep. He

needed sleep. God! Would he ever sleep again? His mind was in a vast

clamor and confusion; as he reached the road he turned around in a panic

and began running, not toward his company but away from it. Men were

returning now--he could find a taxicab. After a minute two yellow eyes

appeared around a bend. Desperately he ran toward them.

"Jitney! Jitney!" ... It was an empty Ford.... "I want to go to town."

"Cost you a dollar."

"All right. If you'll just hurry--"

After an interminable time he ran up the steps of a dark ramshackle

little house, and through the door, almost knocking over an immense

negress who was walking, candle in hand, along the hall.

"Where's my wife?" he cried wildly.

"She gone to bed."

Up the stairs three at a time, down the creaking passage. The room was

dark and silent, and with trembling fingers he struck a match. Two wide

eyes looked up at him from a wretched ball of clothes on the bed.

"Ah, I knew you'd come," she murmured brokenly.

Anthony grew cold with anger.

"So it was just a plan to get me down here, get me in trouble!" he said.

"God damn it, you've shouted 'wolf' once too often!"

She regarded him pitifully.

"I had to see you. I couldn't have lived. Oh, I had to see you--"

He sat down on the side of the bed and slowly shook his head.

"You're no good," he said decisively, talking unconsciously as Gloria

might have talked to him. "This sort of thing isn't fair to me,

you know."

"Come closer." Whatever he might say Dot was happy now. He cared for

her. She had brought him to her side.

"Oh, God," said Anthony hopelessly. As weariness rolled along its

inevitable wave his anger subsided, receded, vanished. He collapsed

suddenly, fell sobbing beside her on the bed.

"Oh, my darling," she begged him, "don't cry! Oh, don't cry!"

She took his head upon her breast and soothed him, mingled her happy

tears with the bitterness of his. Her hand played gently with his

dark hair.

"I'm such a little fool," she murmured brokenly, "but I love you, and

when you're cold to me it seems as if it isn't worth while to go

on livin'."

After all, this was peace--the quiet room with the mingled scent of

women's powder and perfume, Dot's hand soft as a warm wind upon his

hair, the rise and fall of her bosom as she took breath--for a moment it

was as though it were Gloria there, as though he were at rest in some

sweeter and safer home than he had ever known.

An hour passed. A clock began to chime in the hall. He jumped to his

feet and looked at the phosphorescent hands of his wrist watch. It was

twelve o'clock.

He had trouble in finding a taxi that would take him out at that hour.

As he urged the driver faster along the road he speculated on the best

method of entering camp. He had been late several times recently, and he

knew that were he caught again his name would probably be stricken from

the list of officer candidates. He wondered if he had not better dismiss

the taxi and take a chance on passing the sentry in the dark. Still,

officers often rode past the sentries after midnight....

"Halt!" The monosyllable came from the yellow glare that the headlights

dropped upon the changing road. The taxi-driver threw out his clutch and

a sentry walked up, carrying his rifle at the port. With him, by an ill

chance, was the officer of the guard.

"Out late, sergeant."

"Yes, sir. Got delayed."

"Too bad. Have to take your name."

As the officer waited, note-book and pencil in hand, something not fully

intended crowded to Anthony's lips, something born of panic, of muddle,

of despair.

"Sergeant R.A. Foley," he answered breathlessly.

"And the outfit?"

"Company Q, Eighty-third Infantry."

"All right. You'll have to walk from here, sergeant."

Anthony saluted, quickly paid his taxi-driver, and set off for a run

toward the regiment he had named. When he was out of sight he changed

his course, and with his heart beating wildly, hurried to his company,

feeling that he had made a fatal error of judgment.

Two days later the officer who had been in command of the guard

recognized him in a barber shop down-town. In charge of a military

policeman he was taken back to the camp, where he was reduced to the

ranks without trial, and confined for a month to the limits of his

company street.

With this blow a spell of utter depression overtook him, and within a

week he was again caught down-town, wandering around in a drunken daze,

with a pint of bootleg whiskey in his hip pocket. It was because of a

sort of craziness in his behavior at the trial that his sentence to the

guard-house was for only three weeks.

NIGHTMARE

Early in his confinement the conviction took root in him that he was

going mad. It was as though there were a quantity of dark yet vivid

personalities in his mind, some of them familiar, some of them strange

and terrible, held in check by a little monitor, who sat aloft somewhere

and looked on. The thing that worried him was that the monitor was sick,

and holding out with difficulty. Should he give up, should he falter for

a moment, out would rush these intolerable things--only Anthony could

know what a state of blackness there would be if the worst of him could

roam his consciousness unchecked.

The heat of the day had changed, somehow, until it was a burnished

darkness crushing down upon a devastated land. Over his head the blue

circles of ominous uncharted suns, of unnumbered centres of fire,

revolved interminably before his eyes as though he were lying constantly

exposed to the hot light and in a state of feverish coma. At seven in

the morning something phantasmal, something almost absurdly unreal that

he knew was his mortal body, went out with seven other prisoners and two

guards to work on the camp roads. One day they loaded and unloaded

quantities of gravel, spread it, raked it--the next day they worked with

huge barrels of red-hot tar, flooding the gravel with black, shining

pools of molten heat. At night, locked up in the guard-house, he would

lie without thought, without courage to compass thought, staring at the

irregular beams of the ceiling overhead until about three o'clock, when

he would slip into a broken, troubled sleep.

During the work hours he labored with uneasy haste, attempting, as the

day bore toward the sultry Mississippi sunset, to tire himself

physically so that in the evening he might sleep deeply from utter

exhaustion.... Then one afternoon in the second week he had a feeling

that two eyes were watching him from a place a few feet beyond one of

the guards. This aroused him to a sort of terror. He turned his back on

the eyes and shovelled feverishly, until it became necessary for him to

face about and go for more gravel. Then they entered his vision again,

and his already taut nerves tightened up to the breaking-point. The eyes

were leering at him. Out of a hot silence he heard his name called in a

tragic voice, and the earth tipped absurdly back and forth to a babel of

shouting and confusion.

When next he became conscious he was back in the guard-house, and the

other prisoners were throwing him curious glances. The eyes returned no

more. It was many days before he realized that the voice must have been

Dot's, that she had called out to him and made some sort of disturbance.

He decided this just previous to the expiration of his sentence, when

the cloud that oppressed him had lifted, leaving him in a deep,

dispirited lethargy. As the conscious mediator, the monitor who kept

that fearsome ménage of horror, grew stronger, Anthony became physically

weaker. He was scarcely able to get through the two days of toil, and

when he was released, one rainy afternoon, and returned to his company,

he reached his tent only to fall into a heavy doze, from which he awoke

before dawn, aching and unrefreshed. Beside his cot were two letters

that had been awaiting him in the orderly tent for some time. The first

was from Gloria; it was short and cool:

* * * * *

_The case is coming to trial late in November. Can you possibly get

leave?_

_I've tried to write you again and again but it just seems to make

things worse. I want to see you about several matters, but you know that

you have once prevented me from coming and I am disinclined to try

again. In view of a number of things it seems necessary that we have a

conference. I'm very glad about your appointment._

GLORIA.

* * * * *

He was too tired to try to understand--or to care. Her phrases, her

intentions, were all very far away in an incomprehensible past. At the

second letter he scarcely glanced; it was from Dot--an incoherent,

tear-swollen scrawl, a flood of protest, endearment, and grief. After a

page he let it slip from his inert hand and drowsed back into a nebulous

hinterland of his own. At drill-call he awoke with a high fever and

fainted when he tried to leave his tent--at noon he was sent to the base

hospital with influenza.

He was aware that this sickness was providential. It saved him from a

hysterical relapse--and he recovered in time to entrain on a damp

November day for New York, and for the interminable massacre beyond.

When the regiment reached Camp Mills, Long Island, Anthony's single idea

was to get into the city and see Gloria as soon as possible. It was now

evident that an armistice would be signed within the week, but rumor had

it that in any case troops would continue to be shipped to France until

the last moment. Anthony was appalled at the notion of the long voyage,

of a tedious debarkation at a French port, and of being kept abroad for

a year, possibly, to replace the troops who had seen actual fighting.

His intention had been to obtain a two-day furlough, but Camp Mills

proved to be under a strict influenza quarantine--it was impossible for

even an officer to leave except on official business. For a private it

was out of the question.

The camp itself was a dreary muddle, cold, wind-swept, and filthy, with

the accumulated dirt incident to the passage through of many divisions.

Their train came in at seven one night, and they waited in line until

one while a military tangle was straightened out somewhere ahead.

Officers ran up and down ceaselessly, calling orders and making a great

uproar. It turned out that the trouble was due to the colonel, who was

in a righteous temper because he was a West Pointer, and the war was

going to stop before he could get overseas. Had the militant governments

realized the number of broken hearts among the older West Pointers

during that week, they would indubitably have prolonged the slaughter

another month. The thing was pitiable!

Gazing out at the bleak expanse of tents extending for miles over a

trodden welter of slush and snow, Anthony saw the impracticability of

trudging to a telephone that night. He would call her at the first

opportunity in the morning.

Aroused in the chill and bitter dawn he stood at reveille and listened

to a passionate harangue from Captain Dunning:

"You men may think the war is over. Well, let me tell you, it isn't!

Those fellows aren't going to sign the armistice. It's another trick,

and we'd be crazy to let anything slacken up here in the company,

because, let me tell you, we're going to sail from here within a week,

and when we do we're going to see some real fighting." He paused that

they might get the full effect of his pronouncement. And then: "If you

think the war's over, just talk to any one who's been in it and see if

_they_ think the Germans are all in. They don't. Nobody does. I've

talked to the people that _know_, and they say there'll be, anyways, a

year longer of war. _They_ don't think it's over. So you men better not

get any foolish ideas that it is."

Doubly stressing this final admonition, he ordered the company

dismissed.

At noon Anthony set off at a run for the nearest canteen telephone. As

he approached what corresponded to the down-town of the camp, he noticed

that many other soldiers were running also, that a man near him had

suddenly leaped into the air and clicked his heels together. The

tendency to run became general, and from little excited groups here and

there came the sounds of cheering. He stopped and listened--over the

cold country whistles were blowing and the chimes of the Garden City

churches broke suddenly into reverberatory sound.

Anthony began to run again. The cries were clear and distinct now as

they rose with clouds of frosted breath into the chilly air:

_"Germany's surrendered! Germany's surrendered!"_

THE FALSE ARMISTICE

That evening in the opaque gloom of six o'clock Anthony slipped between

two freight-cars, and once over the railroad, followed the track along

to Garden City, where he caught an electric train for New York. He stood

some chance of apprehension--he knew that the military police were often

sent through the cars to ask for passes, but he imagined that to-night

the vigilance would be relaxed. But, in any event, he would have tried

to slip through, for he had been unable to locate Gloria by telephone,

and another day of suspense would have been intolerable.

After inexplicable stops and waits that reminded him of the night he had

left New York, over a year before, they drew into the Pennsylvania

Station, and he followed the familiar way to the taxi-stand, finding it

grotesque and oddly stimulating to give his own address.

Broadway was a riot of light, thronged as he had never seen it with a

carnival crowd which swept its glittering way through scraps of paper,

piled ankle-deep on the sidewalks. Here and there, elevated upon benches

and boxes, soldiers addressed the heedless mass, each face in which was

clear cut and distinct under the white glare overhead. Anthony picked

out half a dozen figures--a drunken sailor, tipped backward and

supported by two other gobs, was waving his hat and emitting a wild

series of roars; a wounded soldier, crutch in hand, was borne along in

an eddy on the shoulders of some shrieking civilians; a dark-haired girl

sat cross-legged and meditative on top of a parked taxicab. Here surely

the victory had come in time, the climax had been scheduled with the

uttermost celestial foresight. The great rich nation had made triumphant

war, suffered enough for poignancy but not enough for bitterness--hence

the carnival, the feasting, the triumph. Under these bright lights

glittered the faces of peoples whose glory had long since passed away,

whose very civilizations were dead-men whose ancestors had heard the

news of victory in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Bagdad, in Tyre, a hundred

generations before; men whose ancestors had seen a flower-decked,

slave-adorned cortege drift with its wake of captives down the avenues

of Imperial Rome....

Past the Rialto, the glittering front of the Astor, the jewelled

magnificence of Times Square ... a gorgeous alley of incandescence

ahead.... Then--was it years later?--he was paying the taxi-driver in

front of a white building on Fifty-seventh Street. He was in the

hall--ah, there was the negro boy from Martinique, lazy, indolent,

unchanged.

"Is Mrs. Patch in?"

"I have just came on, sah," the man announced with his incongruous

British accent.

"Take me up--"

Then the slow drone of the elevator, the three steps to the door, which

swung open at the impetus of his knock.

"Gloria!" His voice was trembling. No answer. A faint string of smoke

was rising from a cigarette-tray--a number of Vanity Fair sat astraddle

on the table.

"Gloria!"

He ran into the bedroom, the bath. She was not there. A negligée of

robin's-egg blue laid out upon the bed diffused a faint perfume,

illusive and familiar. On a chair were a pair of stockings and a street

dress; an open powder box yawned upon the bureau. She must just

have gone out.

The telephone rang abruptly and he started--answered it with all the

sensations of an impostor.

"Hello. Is Mrs. Patch there?"

"No, I'm looking for her myself. Who is this?"

"This is Mr. Crawford."

"This is Mr. Patch speaking. I've just arrived unexpectedly, and I don't

know where to find her."

"Oh." Mr. Crawford sounded a bit taken aback. "Why, I imagine she's at

the Armistice Ball. I know she intended going, but I didn't think she'd

leave so early."

"Where's the Armistice Ball?"

"At the Astor."

"Thanks."

Anthony hung up sharply and rose. Who was Mr. Crawford? And who was it

that was taking her to the ball? How long had this been going on? All

these questions asked and answered themselves a dozen times, a dozen

ways. His very proximity to her drove him half frantic.

In a frenzy of suspicion he rushed here and there about the apartment,

hunting for some sign of masculine occupation, opening the bathroom

cupboard, searching feverishly through the bureau drawers. Then he found

something that made him stop suddenly and sit down on one of the twin

beds, the corners of his mouth drooping as though he were about to weep.

There in a corner of her drawer, tied with a frail blue ribbon, were all

the letters and telegrams he had written her during the year past. He

was suffused with happy and sentimental shame.

"I'm not fit to touch her," he cried aloud to the four walls. "I'm not

fit to touch her little hand."

Nevertheless, he went out to look for her.

In the Astor lobby he was engulfed immediately in a crowd so thick as to

make progress almost impossible. He asked the direction of the ballroom

from half a dozen people before he could get a sober and intelligible

answer. Eventually, after a last long wait, he checked his military

overcoat in the hall.

It was only nine but the dance was in full blast. The panorama was

incredible. Women, women everywhere--girls gay with wine singing shrilly

above the clamor of the dazzling confetti-covered throng; girls set off

by the uniforms of a dozen nations; fat females collapsing without

dignity upon the floor and retaining self-respect by shouting "Hurraw

for the Allies!"; three women with white hair dancing hand in hand

around a sailor, who revolved in a dizzying spin upon the floor,

clasping to his heart an empty bottle of champagne.

Breathlessly Anthony scanned the dancers, scanned the muddled lines

trailing in single file in and out among the tables, scanned the

horn-blowing, kissing, coughing, laughing, drinking parties under the

great full-bosomed flags which leaned in glowing color over the

pageantry and the sound.

Then he saw Gloria. She was sitting at a table for two directly across

the room. Her dress was black, and above it her animated face, tinted

with the most glamourous rose, made, he thought, a spot of poignant

beauty on the room. His heart leaped as though to a new music. He

jostled his way toward her and called her name just as the gray eyes

looked up and found him. For that instant as their bodies met and

melted, the world, the revel, the tumbling whimper of the music faded to

an ecstatic monotone hushed as a song of bees.

"Oh, my Gloria!" he cried.

Her kiss was a cool rill flowing from her heart.

CHAPTER II

A MATTER OF AESTHETICS

On the night when Anthony had left for Camp Hooker one year before, all

that was left of the beautiful Gloria Gilbert--her shell, her young and

lovely body--moved up the broad marble steps of the Grand Central

Station with the rhythm of the engine beating in her ears like a dream,

and out onto Vanderbilt Avenue, where the huge bulk of the Biltmore

overhung, the street and, down at its low, gleaming entrance, sucked in

the many-colored opera-cloaks of gorgeously dressed girls. For a moment

she paused by the taxi-stand and watched them--wondering that but a few

years before she had been of their number, ever setting out for a

radiant Somewhere, always just about to have that ultimate passionate

adventure for which the girls' cloaks were delicate and beautifully

furred, for which their cheeks were painted and their hearts higher than

the transitory dome of pleasure that would engulf them, coiffure,

cloak, and all.

It was growing colder and the men passing had flipped up the collars of

their overcoats. This change was kind to her. It would have been kinder

still had everything changed, weather, streets, and people, and had she

been whisked away, to wake in some high, fresh-scented room, alone, and

statuesque within and without, as in her virginal and colorful past.

Inside the taxicab she wept impotent tears. That she had not been happy

with Anthony for over a year mattered little. Recently his presence had

been no more than what it would awake in her of that memorable June. The

Anthony of late, irritable, weak, and poor, could do no less than make

her irritable in turn--and bored with everything except the fact that in

a highly imaginative and eloquent youth they had come together in an

ecstatic revel of emotion. Because of this mutually vivid memory she

would have done more for Anthony than for any other human--so when she

got into the taxicab she wept passionately, and wanted to call his

name aloud.

Miserable, lonesome as a forgotten child, she sat in the quiet apartment

and wrote him a letter full of confused sentiment:

* * * * *

... _I can almost look down the tracks and see you going but without

you, dearest, dearest, I can't see or hear or feel or think. Being

apart--whatever has happened or will happen to us--is like begging for

mercy from a storm, Anthony; it's like growing old. I want to kiss you

so--in the back of your neck where your old black hair starts. Because I

love you and whatever we do or say to each other, or have done, or have

said, you've got to feel how much I do, how inanimate I am when you're

gone. I can't even hate the damnable presence of PEOPLE, those people in

the station who haven't any right to live--I can't resent them even

though they're dirtying up our world, because I'm engrossed in

wanting you so._

_If you hated me, if you were covered with sores like a leper, if you

ran away with another woman or starved me or beat me--how absurd this

sounds--I'd still want you, I'd still love you. I_ KNOW, _my darling._

_It's late--I have all the windows open and the air outside, is just as

soft as spring, yet, somehow, much more young and frail than spring. Why

do they make spring a young girl, why does that illusion dance and yodel

its way for three months through the world's preposterous barrenness.

Spring is a lean old plough horse with its ribs showing--it's a pile of

refuse in a field, parched by the sun and the rain to an ominous

cleanliness._

_In a few hours you'll wake up, my darling--and you'll be miserable, and

disgusted with life. You'll be in Delaware or Carolina or somewhere and

so unimportant. I don't believe there's any one alive who can

contemplate themselves as an impermanent institution, as a luxury or an

unnecessary evil. Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of

life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in

proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from

the ruin--but they don't, even you and I...._

_ ... Still I can see you. There's blue haze about the trees where

you'll be passing, too beautiful to be predominant. No, the fallow

squares of earth will be most frequent--they'll be along beside the

track like dirty coarse brown sheets drying in the sun, alive,

mechanical, abominable. Nature, slovenly old hag, has been sleeping in

them with every old farmer or negro or immigrant who happened to

covet her...._

_So you see that now you're gone I've written a letter all full of

contempt and despair. And that just means that I love you, Anthony, with

all there is to love with in your_

GLORIA.

* * * * *

When she had addressed the letter she went to her twin bed and lay down

upon it, clasping Anthony's pillow in her arms as though by sheer force

of emotion she could metamorphize it into his warm and living body. Two

o'clock saw her dry-eyed, staring with steady persistent grief into the

darkness, remembering, remembering unmercifully, blaming herself for a

hundred fancied unkindnesses, making a likeness of Anthony akin to some

martyred and transfigured Christ. For a time she thought of him as he,

in his more sentimental moments, probably thought of himself.

At five she was still awake. A mysterious grinding noise that went on

every morning across the areaway told her the hour. She heard an alarm

clock ring, and saw a light make a yellow square on an illusory blank

wall opposite. With the half-formed resolution of following him South

immediately, her sorrow grew remote and unreal, and moved off from her

as the dark moved westward. She fell asleep.

When she awoke the sight of the empty bed beside her brought a renewal

of misery, dispelled shortly, however, by the inevitable callousness of

the bright morning. Though she was not conscious of it, there was relief

in eating breakfast without Anthony's tired and worried face opposite

her. Now that she was alone she lost all desire to complain about the

food. She would change her breakfasts, she thought--have a lemonade and

a tomato sandwich instead of the sempiternal bacon and eggs and toast.

Nevertheless, at noon when she had called up several of her

acquaintances, including the martial Muriel, and found each one engaged

for lunch, she gave way to a quiet pity for herself and her loneliness.

Curled on the bed with pencil and paper she wrote Anthony

another letter.

Late in the afternoon arrived a special delivery, mailed from some small

New Jersey town, and the familiarity of the phrasing, the almost audible

undertone of worry and discontent, were so familiar that they comforted

her. Who knew? Perhaps army discipline would harden Anthony and accustom

him to the idea of work. She had immutable faith that the war would be

over before he was called upon to fight, and meanwhile the suit would be

won, and they could begin again, this time on a different basis. The

first thing different would be that she would have a child. It was

unbearable that she should be so utterly alone.

It was a week before she could stay in the apartment with the

probability of remaining dry-eyed. There seemed little in the city that

was amusing. Muriel had been shifted to a hospital in New Jersey, from

which she took a metropolitan holiday only every other week, and with

this defection Gloria grew to realize how few were the friends she had

made in all these years of New York. The men she knew were in the army.

"Men she knew"?--she had conceded vaguely to herself that all the men

who had ever been in love with her were her friends. Each one of them

had at a certain considerable time professed to value her favor above

anything in life. But now--where were they? At least two were dead, half

a dozen or more were married, the rest scattered from France to the

Philippines. She wondered whether any of them thought of her, and how

often, and in what respect. Most of them must still picture the little

girl of seventeen or so, the adolescent siren of nine years before.

The girls, too, were gone far afield. She had never been popular in

school. She had been too beautiful, too lazy, not sufficiently conscious

of being a Farmover girl and a "Future Wife and Mother" in perpetual

capital letters. And girls who had never been kissed hinted, with

shocked expressions on their plain but not particularly wholesome faces,

that Gloria had. Then these girls had gone east or west or south,

married and become "people," prophesying, if they prophesied about

Gloria, that she would come to a bad end--not knowing that no endings

were bad, and that they, like her, were by no means the mistresses of

their destinies.

Gloria told over to herself the people who had visited them in the gray

house at Marietta. It had seemed at the time that they were always

having company--she had indulged in an unspoken conviction that each

guest was ever afterward slightly indebted to her. They owed her a sort

of moral ten dollars apiece, and should she ever be in need she might,

so to speak, borrow from them this visionary currency. But they were

gone, scattered like chaff, mysteriously and subtly vanished in essence

or in fact.

By Christmas, Gloria's conviction that she should join Anthony had

returned, no longer as a sudden emotion, but as a recurrent need. She

decided to write him word of her coming, but postponed the announcement

upon the advice of Mr. Haight, who expected almost weekly that the case

was coming up for trial.

One day, early in January, as she was walking on Fifth Avenue, bright

now with uniforms and hung with the flags of the virtuous nations, she

met Rachael Barnes, whom she had not seen for nearly a year. Even

Rachael, whom she had grown to dislike, was a relief from ennui, and

together they went to the Ritz for tea.

After a second cocktail they became enthusiastic. They liked each other.

They talked about their husbands, Rachael in that tone of public

vainglory, with private reservations, in which wives are wont to speak.

"Rodman's abroad in the Quartermaster Corps. He's a captain. He was

bound he would go, and he didn't think he could get into anything else."

"Anthony's in the Infantry." The words in their relation to the cocktail

gave Gloria a sort of glow. With each sip she approached a warm and

comforting patriotism.

"By the way," said Rachael half an hour later, as they were leaving,

"can't you come up to dinner to-morrow night? I'm having two awfully

sweet officers who are just going overseas. I think we ought to do all

we can to make it attractive for them."

Gloria accepted gladly. She took down the address--recognizing by its

number a fashionable apartment building on Park Avenue.

"It's been awfully good to have seen you, Rachael."

"It's been wonderful. I've wanted to."

With these three sentences a certain night in Marietta two summers

before, when Anthony and Rachael had been unnecessarily attentive to

each other, was forgiven--Gloria forgave Rachael, Rachael forgave

Gloria. Also it was forgiven that Rachael had been witness to the

greatest disaster in the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Patch--

Compromising with events time moves along.

THE WILES OF CAPTAIN COLLINS

The two officers were captains of the popular craft, machine gunnery. At

dinner they referred to themselves with conscious boredom as members of

the "Suicide Club"--in those days every recondite branch of the service

referred to itself as the Suicide Club. One of the captains--Rachael's

captain, Gloria observed--was a tall horsy man of thirty with a pleasant

mustache and ugly teeth. The other, Captain Collins, was chubby,

pink-faced, and inclined to laugh with abandon every time he caught

Gloria's eye. He took an immediate fancy to her, and throughout dinner

showered her with inane compliments. With her second glass of champagne

Gloria decided that for the first time in months she was thoroughly

enjoying herself.

After dinner it was suggested that they all go somewhere and dance. The

two officers supplied themselves with bottles of liquor from Rachael's

sideboard--a law forbade service to the military--and so equipped they

went through innumerable fox trots in several glittering caravanseries

along Broadway, faithfully alternating partners--while Gloria became

more and more uproarious and more and more amusing to the pink-faced

captain, who seldom bothered to remove his genial smile at all.

At eleven o'clock to her great surprise she was in the minority for

staying out. The others wanted to return to Rachael's apartment--to get

some more liquor, they said. Gloria argued persistently that Captain

Collins's flask was half full--she had just seen it--then catching

Rachael's eye she received an unmistakable wink. She deduced,

confusedly, that her hostess wanted to get rid of the officers and

assented to being bundled into a taxicab outside.

Captain Wolf sat on the left with Rachael on his knees. Captain Collins

sat in the middle, and as he settled himself he slipped his arm about

Gloria's shoulder. It rested there lifelessly for a moment and then

tightened like a vise. He leaned over her.

"You're awfully pretty," he whispered.

"Thank you kindly, sir." She was neither pleased nor annoyed. Before

Anthony came so many arms had done likewise that it had become little

more than a gesture, sentimental but without significance.

Up in Rachael's long front room a low fire and two lamps shaded with

orange silk gave all the light, so that the corners were full of deep and

somnolent shadows. The hostess, moving about in a dark-figured gown of

loose chiffon, seemed to accentuate the already sensuous atmosphere. For

a while they were all four together, tasting the sandwiches that waited

on the tea table--then Gloria found herself alone with Captain Collins

on the fireside lounge; Rachael and Captain Wolf had withdrawn to the

other side of the room, where they were conversing in subdued voices.

"I wish you weren't married," said Collins, his face a ludicrous

travesty of "in all seriousness."

"Why?" She held out her glass to be filled with a high-ball.

"Don't drink any more," he urged her, frowning.

"Why not?"

"You'd be nicer--if you didn't."

Gloria caught suddenly the intended suggestion of the remark, the

atmosphere he was attempting to create. She wanted to laugh--yet she

realized that there was nothing to laugh at. She had been enjoying the

evening, and she had no desire to go home--at the same time it hurt her

pride to be flirted with on just that level.

"Pour me another drink," she insisted.

"Please--"

"Oh, don't be ridiculous!" she cried in exasperation.

"Very well." He yielded with ill grace.

Then his arm was about her again, and again she made no protest. But

when his pink cheek came close she leaned away.

"You're awfully sweet," he said with an aimless air.

She began to sing softly, wishing now that he would take down his arm.

Suddenly her eye fell on an intimate scene across the room--Rachael and

Captain Wolf were engrossed in a long kiss. Gloria shivered

slightly--she knew not why.... Pink face approached again.

"You shouldn't look at them," he whispered. Almost immediately his other

arm was around her ... his breath was on her cheek. Again absurdity

triumphed over disgust, and her laugh was a weapon that needed no

edge of words.

"Oh, I thought you were a sport," he was saying.

"What's a sport?"

"Why, a person that likes to--to enjoy life."

"Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?"

They were interrupted as Rachael and Captain Wolf appeared suddenly

before them.

"It's late, Gloria," said Rachael--she was flushed and her hair was

dishevelled. "You'd better stay here all night."

For an instant Gloria thought the officers were being dismissed. Then

she understood, and, understanding, got to her feet as casually as

she was able.

Uncomprehendingly Rachael continued:

"You can have the room just off this one. I can lend you everything you

need."

Collins's eyes implored her like a dog's; Captain Wolf's arm had settled

familiarly around Rachael's waist; they were waiting.

But the lure of promiscuity, colorful, various, labyrinthine, and ever a

little odorous and stale, had no call or promise for Gloria. Had she so

desired she would have remained, without hesitation, without regret; as

it was she could face coolly the six hostile and offended eyes that

followed her out into the hall with forced politeness and hollow words.

"_He_ wasn't even sport, enough to try to take me home," she thought in

the taxi, and then with a quick surge of resentment: "How

_utterly_ common!"

GALLANTRY

In February she had an experience of quite a different sort. Tudor

Baird, an ancient flame, a young man whom at one time she had fully

intended to marry, came to New York by way of the Aviation Corps, and

called upon her. They went several times to the theatre, and within a

week, to her great enjoyment, he was as much in love with her as ever.

Quite deliberately she brought it about, realizing too late that she had

done a mischief. He reached the point of sitting with her in miserable

silence whenever they went out together.

A Scroll and Keys man at Yale, he possessed the correct reticences of a

"good egg," the correct notions of chivalry and _noblesse oblige_--and,

of course but unfortunately, the correct biases and the correct lack of

ideas--all those traits which Anthony had taught her to despise, but

which, nevertheless, she rather admired. Unlike the majority of his

type, she found that he was not a bore. He was handsome, witty in a

light way, and when she was with him she felt that because of some

quality he possessed--call it stupidity, loyalty, sentimentality, or

something not quite as definite as any of the three--he would have done

anything in his power to please her.

He told her this among other things, very correctly and with a ponderous

manliness that masked a real suffering. Loving him not at all she grew

sorry for him and kissed him sentimentally one night because he was so

charming, a relic of a vanishing generation which lived a priggish and

graceful illusion and was being replaced by less gallant fools.

Afterward she was glad she had kissed him, for next day when his plane

fell fifteen hundred feet at Mineola a piece of a gasolene engine

smashed through his heart.

GLORIA ALONE

When Mr. Haight told her that the trial would not take place until

autumn she decided that without telling Anthony she would go into the

movies. When he saw her successful, both histrionically and financially,

when he saw that she could have her will of Joseph Bloeckman, yielding

nothing in return, he would lose his silly prejudices. She lay awake

half one night planning her career and enjoying her successes in

anticipation, and the next morning she called up "Films Par Excellence."

Mr. Bloeckman was in Europe.

But the idea had gripped her so strongly this time that she decided to

go the rounds of the moving picture employment agencies. As so often had

been the case, her sense of smell worked against her good intentions.

The employment agency smelt as though it had been dead a very long time.

She waited five minutes inspecting her unprepossessing competitors--then

she walked briskly out into the farthest recesses of Central Park and

remained so long that she caught a cold. She was trying to air the

employment agency out of her walking suit.

In the spring she began to gather from Anthony's letters--not from any

one in particular but from their culminative effect--that he did not

want her to come South. Curiously repeated excuses that seemed to haunt

him by their very insufficiency occurred with Freudian regularity. He

set them down in each letter as though he feared he had forgotten them

the last time, as though it were desperately necessary to impress her

with them. And the dilutions of his letters with affectionate

diminutives began to be mechanical and unspontaneous--almost as though,

having completed the letter, he had looked it over and literally stuck

them in, like epigrams in an Oscar Wilde play. She jumped to the

solution, rejected it, was angry and depressed by turns--finally she

shut her mind to it proudly, and allowed an increasing coolness to creep

into her end of the correspondence.

Of late she had found a good deal to occupy her attention. Several

aviators whom she had met through Tudor Baird came into New York to see

her and two other ancient beaux turned up, stationed at Camp Dix. As

these men were ordered overseas they, so to speak, handed her down to

their friends. But after another rather disagreeable experience with a

potential Captain Collins she made it plain that when any one was

introduced to her he should be under no misapprehensions as to her

status and personal intentions.

When summer came she learned, like Anthony, to watch the officers'

casualty list, taking a sort of melancholy pleasure in hearing of the

death of some one with whom she had once danced a german and in

identifying by name the younger brothers of former suitors--thinking, as

the drive toward Paris progressed, that here at length went the world to

inevitable and well-merited destruction.

She was twenty-seven. Her birthday fled by scarcely noticed. Years

before it had frightened her when she became twenty, to some extent when

she reached twenty-six--but now she looked in the glass with calm

self-approval seeing the British freshness of her complexion and her

figure boyish and slim as of old.

She tried not to think of Anthony. It was as though she were writing to

a stranger. She told her friends that he had been made a corporal and

was annoyed when they were politely unimpressed. One night she wept

because she was sorry for him--had he been even slightly responsive she

would have gone to him without hesitation on the first train--whatever he

was doing he needed to be taken care of spiritually, and she felt that

now she would be able to do even that. Recently, without his continual

drain upon her moral strength she found herself wonderfully revived.

Before he left she had been inclined through sheer association to brood

on her wasted opportunities--now she returned to her normal state of

mind, strong, disdainful, existing each day for each day's worth. She

bought a doll and dressed it; one week she wept over "Ethan Frome"; the

next she revelled in some novels of Galsworthy's, whom she liked for his

power of recreating, by spring in darkness, that illusion of young

romantic love to which women look forever forward and forever back.

In October Anthony's letters multiplied, became almost frantic--then

suddenly ceased. For a worried month it needed all her powers of control

to refrain from leaving immediately for Mississippi. Then a telegram

told her that he had been in the hospital and that she could expect him

in New York within ten days. Like a figure in a dream he came back into

her life across the ballroom on that November evening--and all through

long hours that held familiar gladness she took him close to her breast,

nursing an illusion of happiness and security she had not thought that

she would know again.

DISCOMFITURE OF THE GENERALS

After a week Anthony's regiment went back to the Mississippi camp to be

discharged. The officers shut themselves up in the compartments on the

Pullman cars and drank the whiskey they had bought in New York, and in

the coaches the soldiers got as drunk as possible also--and pretended

whenever the train stopped at a village that they were just returned

from France, where they had practically put an end to the German army.

As they all wore overseas caps and claimed that they had not had time to

have their gold service stripes sewed on, the yokelry of the seaboard

were much impressed and asked them how they liked the trenches--to which

they replied "Oh, _boy!_" with great smacking of tongues and shaking of

heads. Some one took a piece of chalk and scrawled on the side of the

train, "We won the war--now we're going home," and the officers laughed

and let it stay. They were all getting what swagger they could out of

this ignominious return.

As they rumbled on toward camp, Anthony was uneasy lest he should find

Dot awaiting him patiently at the station. To his relief he neither saw

nor heard anything of her and thinking that were she still in town she

would certainly attempt to communicate with him, he concluded that she

had gone--whither he neither knew nor cared. He wanted only to return to

Gloria--Gloria reborn and wonderfully alive. When eventually he was

discharged he left his company on the rear of a great truck with a crowd

who had given tolerant, almost sentimental, cheers for their officers,

especially for Captain Dunning. The captain, on his part, had addressed

them with tears in his eyes as to the pleasure, etc., and the work,

etc., and time not wasted, etc., and duty, etc. It was very dull and

human; having given ear to it Anthony, whose mind was freshened by his

week in New York, renewed his deep loathing for the military profession

and all it connoted. In their childish hearts two out of every three

professional officers considered that wars were made for armies and not

armies for wars. He rejoiced to see general and field-officers riding

desolately about the barren camp deprived of their commands. He rejoiced

to hear the men in his company laugh scornfully at the inducements

tendered them to remain in the army. They were to attend "schools." He

knew what these "schools" were.

Two days later he was with Gloria in New York.

ANOTHER WINTER

Late one February afternoon Anthony came into the apartment and groping

through the little hall, pitch-dark in the winter dusk, found Gloria

sitting by the window. She turned as he came in.

"What did Mr. Haight have to say?" she asked listlessly.

"Nothing," he answered, "usual thing. Next month, perhaps."

She looked at him closely; her ear attuned to his voice caught the

slightest thickness in the dissyllable.

"You've been drinking," she remarked dispassionately.

"Couple glasses."

"Oh."

He yawned in the armchair and there was a moment's silence between them.

Then she demanded suddenly:

"Did you go to Mr. Haight? Tell me the truth."

"No." He smiled weakly. "As a matter of fact I didn't have time."

"I thought you didn't go.... He sent for you."

"I don't give a damn. I'm sick of waiting around his office. You'd think

he was doing _me_ a favor." He glanced at Gloria as though expecting

moral support, but she had turned back to her contemplation of the

dubious and unprepossessing out-of-doors.

"I feel rather weary of life to-day," he offered tentatively. Still she

was silent. "I met a fellow and we talked in the Biltmore bar."

The dusk had suddenly deepened but neither of them made any move to turn

on the lights. Lost in heaven knew what contemplation, they sat there

until a flurry of snow drew a languid sigh from Gloria.

"What've you been doing?" he asked, finding the silence oppressive.

"Reading a magazine--all full of idiotic articles by prosperous authors

about how terrible it is for poor people to buy silk shirts. And while I

was reading it I could think of nothing except how I wanted a gray

squirrel coat--and how we can't afford one."

"Yes, we can."

"Oh, no."

"Oh, yes! If you want a fur coat you can have one."

Her voice coming through the dark held an implication of scorn.

"You mean we can sell another bond?"

"If necessary. I don't want to go without things. We have spent a lot,

though, since I've been back."

"Oh, shut up!" she said in irritation.

"Why?"

"Because I'm sick and tired of hearing you talk about what we've spent

or what we've done. You came back two months ago and we've been on some

sort of a party practically every night since. We've both wanted to go

out, and we've gone. Well, you haven't heard me complain, have you? But

all you do is whine, whine, whine. I don't care any more what we do or

what becomes of us and at least I'm consistent. But I will _not_

tolerate your complaining and calamity-howling----"

"You're not very pleasant yourself sometimes, you know."

"I'm under no obligations to be. You're not making any attempt to make

things different."

"But I am--"

"Huh! Seems to me I've heard that before. This morning you weren't going

to touch another thing to drink until you'd gotten a position. And you

didn't even have the spunk to go to Mr. Haight when he sent for you

about the suit."

Anthony got to his feet and switched on the lights.

"See here!" he cried, blinking, "I'm getting sick of that sharp tongue

of yours."

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

"Do you think _I'm_ particularly happy?" he continued, ignoring her

question. "Do you think I don't know we're not living as we ought to?"

In an instant Gloria stood trembling beside him.

"I won't _stand_ it!" she burst out. "I won't be lectured to. You and

your suffering! You're just a pitiful weakling and you always

have been!"

They faced one another idiotically, each of them unable to impress the

other, each of them tremendously, achingly, bored. Then she went into

the bedroom and shut the door behind her.

His return had brought into the foreground all their pre-bellum

exasperations. Prices had risen alarmingly and in perverse ratio their

income had shrunk to a little over half of its original size. There had

been the large retainer's fee to Mr. Haight; there were stocks bought at

one hundred, now down to thirty and forty and other investments that

were not paying at all. During the previous spring Gloria had been given

the alternative of leaving the apartment or of signing a year's lease at

two hundred and twenty-five a month. She had signed it. Inevitably as

the necessity for economy had increased they found themselves as a pair

quite unable to save. The old policy of prevarication was resorted to.

Weary of their incapabilities they chattered of what they would

do--oh--to-morrow, of how they would "stop going on parties" and of how

Anthony would go to work. But when dark came down Gloria, accustomed to

an engagement every night, would feel the ancient restlessness creeping

over her. She would stand in the doorway of the bedroom, chewing

furiously at her fingers and sometimes meeting Anthony's eyes as he

glanced up from his book. Then the telephone, and her nerves would

relax, she would answer it with ill-concealed eagerness. Some one was

coming up "for just a few minutes"--and oh, the weariness of pretense,

the appearance of the wine table, the revival of their jaded

spirits--and the awakening, like the mid-point of a sleepless night in

which they moved.

As the winter passed with the march of the returning troops along Fifth

Avenue they became more and more aware that since Anthony's return their

relations had entirely changed. After that reflowering of tenderness and

passion each of them had returned into some solitary dream unshared by

the other and what endearments passed between them passed, it seemed,

from empty heart to empty heart, echoing hollowly the departure of what

they knew at last was gone.

Anthony had again made the rounds of the metropolitan newspapers and had

again been refused encouragement by a motley of office boys, telephone

girls, and city editors. The word was: "We're keeping any vacancies open

for our own men who are still in France." Then, late in March, his eye

fell on an advertisement in the morning paper and in consequence he

found at last the semblance of an occupation.

* * * * *

YOU CAN SELL!!!

_Why not earn while you learn?_

_Our salesmen make $50-$200 weekly_.

* * * * *

There followed an address on Madison Avenue, and instructions to appear

at one o'clock that afternoon. Gloria, glancing over his shoulder after

one of their usual late breakfasts, saw him regarding it idly.

"Why don't you try it?" she suggested.

"Oh--it's one of these crazy schemes."

"It might not be. At least it'd be experience."

At her urging he went at one o'clock to the appointed address, where he

found himself one of a dense miscellany of men waiting in front of the

door. They ranged from a messenger-boy evidently misusing his company's

time to an immemorial individual with a gnarled body and a gnarled cane.

Some of the men were seedy, with sunken cheeks and puffy pink

eyes--others were young; possibly still in high school. After a jostled

fifteen minutes during which they all eyed one another with apathetic

suspicion there appeared a smart young shepherd clad in a "waist-line"

suit and wearing the manner of an assistant rector who herded them

up-stairs into a large room, which resembled a school-room and contained

innumerable desks. Here the prospective salesmen sat down--and again

waited. After an interval a platform at the end of the hall was clouded

with half a dozen sober but sprightly men who, with one exception, took

seats in a semicircle facing the audience.

The exception was the man who seemed the soberest, the most sprightly

and the youngest of the lot, and who advanced to the front of the

platform. The audience scrutinized him hopefully. He was rather small

and rather pretty, with the commercial rather than the thespian sort of

prettiness. He had straight blond bushy brows and eyes that were almost

preposterously honest, and as he reached the edge of his rostrum he

seemed to throw these eyes out into the audience, simultaneously

extending his arm with two fingers outstretched. Then while he rocked

himself to a state of balance an expectant silence settled over the

hall. With perfect assurance the young man had taken his listeners in

hand and his words when they came were steady and confident and of the

school of "straight from the shoulder."

"Men!"--he began, and paused. The word died with a prolonged echo at the

end of the hall, the faces regarding him, hopefully, cynically, wearily,

were alike arrested, engrossed. Six hundred eyes were turned slightly

upward. With an even graceless flow that reminded Anthony of the rolling

of bowling balls he launched himself into the sea of exposition.

"This bright and sunny morning you picked up your favorite newspaper and

you found an advertisement which made the plain, unadorned statement

that _you_ could sell. That was all it said--it didn't say 'what,' it

didn't say 'how,' it didn't say 'why.' It just made one single solitary

assertion that _you_ and _you_ and _you_"--business of pointing--"could

sell. Now my job isn't to make a success of you, because every man is

born a success, he makes himself a failure; it's not to teach you how to

talk, because each man is a natural orator and only makes himself a

clam; my business is to tell you one thing in a way that will make you

_know_ it--it's to tell you that _you_ and _you_ and _you_ have the

heritage of money and prosperity waiting for you to come and claim it."

At this point an Irishman of saturnine appearance rose from his desk

near the rear of the hall and went out.

"That man thinks he'll go look for it in the beer parlor around the

corner. (Laughter.) He won't find it there. Once upon a time I looked

for it there myself (laughter), but that was before I did what every one

of you men no matter how young or how old, how poor or how rich (a faint

ripple of satirical laughter), can do. It was before I found--_myself_!

"Now I wonder if any of you men know what a 'Heart Talk' is. A 'Heart

Talk' is a little book in which I started, about five years ago, to

write down what I had discovered were the principal reasons for a man's

failure and the principal reasons for a man's success--from John D.

Rockerfeller back to John D. Napoleon (laughter), and before that, back

in the days when Abel sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. There

are now one hundred of these 'Heart Talks.' Those of you who are

sincere, who are interested in our proposition, above all who are

dissatisfied with the way things are breaking for you at present will be

handed one to take home with you as you go out yonder door this

afternoon.

"Now in my own pocket I have four letters just received concerning

'Heart Talks.' These letters have names signed to them that are familiar

in every house-hold in the U.S.A. Listen to this one from Detroit:

* * * * *

"DEAR MR. CARLETON:

"I want to order three thousand more copies of 'Heart Talks' for

distribution among my salesmen. They have done more for getting work out

of the men than any bonus proposition ever considered. I read them

myself constantly, and I desire to heartily congratulate you on getting

at the roots of the biggest problem that faces our generation

to-day--the problem of salesmanship. The rock bottom on which the

country is founded is the problem of salesmanship. With many

felicitations I am

"Yours very cordially,

"HENRY W. TERRAL."

* * * * *

He brought the name out in three long booming triumphancies--pausing for

it to produce its magical effect. Then he read two more letters, one

from a manufacturer of vacuum cleaners and one from the president of the

Great Northern Doily Company.

"And now," he continued, "I'm going to tell you in a few words what the

proposition is that's going to _make_ those of you who go into it in the

right spirit. Simply put, it's this: 'Heart Talks' have been

incorporated as a company. We're going to put these little pamphlets

into the hands of every big business organization, every salesman, and

every man who _knows_--I don't say 'thinks,' I say _'knows'_--that he

can sell! We are offering some of the stock of the 'Heart Talks' concern

upon the market, and in order that the distribution may be as wide as

possible, and in order also that we can furnish a living, concrete,

flesh-and-blood example of what salesmanship is, or rather what it may

be, we're going to give those of you who are the real thing a chance to

sell that stock. Now, I don't care what you've tried to sell before or

how you've tried to sell it. It don't matter how old you are or how

young you are. I only want to know two things--first, do you _want_

success, and, second, will you work for it?

"My name is Sammy Carleton. Not 'Mr.' Carleton, but just plain Sammy.

I'm a regular no-nonsense man with no fancy frills about me. I want you

to call me Sammy.

"Now this is all I'm going to say to you to-day. To-morrow I want those

of you who have thought it over and have read the copy of 'Heart Talks'

which will be given to you at the door, to come back to this same room

at this same time, then we'll go into the proposition further and I'll

explain to you what I've found the principles of success to be. I'm

going to make you _feel_ that _you_ and _you_ and _you_ can sell!"

Mr. Carleton's voice echoed for a moment through the hall and then died

away. To the stamping of many feet Anthony was pushed and jostled with

the crowd out of the room.

FURTHER ADVENTURES WITH "HEART TALKS"

With an accompaniment of ironic laughter Anthony told Gloria the story

of his commercial adventure. But she listened without amusement.

"You're going to give up again?" she demanded coldly.

"Why--you don't expect me to--"

"I never expected anything of you."

He hesitated.

"Well--I can't see the slightest benefit in laughing myself sick over

this sort of affair. If there's anything older than the old story, it's

the new twist."

It required an astonishing amount of moral energy on Gloria's part to

intimidate him into returning, and when he reported next day, somewhat

depressed from his perusal of the senile bromides skittishly set forth

in "Heart Talks on Ambition," he found only fifty of the original three

hundred awaiting the appearance of the vital and compelling Sammy

Carleton. Mr. Carleton's powers of vitality and compulsion were this

time exercised in elucidating that magnificent piece of speculation--how

to sell. It seemed that the approved method was to state one's

proposition and then to say not "And now, will you buy?"--this was not

the way--oh, no!--the way was to state one's proposition and then,

having reduced one's adversary to a state of exhaustion, to deliver

oneself of the categorical imperative: "Now see here! You've taken up my

time explaining this matter to you. You've admitted my points--all I

want to ask is how many do you want?"

As Mr. Carleton piled assertion upon assertion Anthony began to feel a

sort of disgusted confidence in him. The man appeared to know what he

was talking about. Obviously prosperous, he had risen to the position of

instructing others. It did not occur to Anthony that the type of man who

attains commercial success seldom knows how or why, and, as in his

grandfather's case, when he ascribes reasons, the reasons are generally

inaccurate and absurd.

Anthony noted that of the numerous old men who had answered the original

advertisement, only two had returned, and that among the thirty odd who

assembled on the third day to get actual selling instructions from Mr.

Carleton, only one gray head was in evidence. These thirty were eager

converts; with their mouths they followed the working of Mr. Carleton's

mouth; they swayed in their seats with enthusiasm, and in the intervals

of his talk they spoke to each other in tense approving whispers. Yet of

the chosen few who, in the words of Mr. Carleton, "were determined to

get those deserts that rightly and truly belonged to them," less than

half a dozen combined even a modicum of personal appearance with that

great gift of being a "pusher." But they were told that they were all

natural pushers--it was merely necessary that they should believe with a

sort of savage passion in what they were selling. He even urged each one

to buy some stock himself, if possible, in order to increase his own

sincerity.

On the fifth day then, Anthony sallied into the street with all the

sensations of a man wanted by the police. Acting according to

instructions he selected a tall office building in order that he might

ride to the top story and work downward, stopping in every office that

had a name on the door. But at the last minute he hesitated. Perhaps it

would be more practicable to acclimate himself to the chilly atmosphere

which he felt was awaiting him by trying a few offices on, say, Madison

Avenue. He went into an arcade that seemed only semi-prosperous, and

seeing a sign which read Percy B. Weatherbee, Architect, he opened the

door heroically and entered. A starchy young woman looked up

questioningly.

"Can I see Mr. Weatherbee?" He wondered if his voice sounded tremulous.

She laid her hand tentatively on the telephone-receiver.

"What's the name, please?"

"He wouldn't--ah--know me. He wouldn't know my name."

"What's your business with him? You an insurance agent?"

"Oh, no, nothing like that!" denied Anthony hurriedly. "Oh, no. It's

a--it's a personal matter." He wondered if he should have said this. It

had all sounded so simple when Mr. Carleton had enjoined his flock:

"Don't allow yourself to be kept out! Show them you've made up your mind

to talk to them, and they'll listen."

The girl succumbed to Anthony's pleasant, melancholy face, and in a

moment the door to the inner room opened and admitted a tall,

splay-footed man with slicked hair. He approached Anthony with

ill-concealed impatience.

"You wanted to see me on a personal matter?"

Anthony quailed.

"I wanted to talk to you," he said defiantly.

"About what?"

"It'll take some time to explain."

"Well, what's it about?" Mr. Weatherbee's voice indicated rising

irritation.

Then Anthony, straining at each word, each syllable, began:

"I don't know whether or not you've ever heard of a series of pamphlets

called 'Heart Talks'--"

"Good grief!" cried Percy B. Weatherbee, Architect, "are you trying to

touch my heart?"

"No, it's business. 'Heart Talks' have been incorporated and we're

putting some shares on the market--"

His voice faded slowly off, harassed by a fixed and contemptuous stare

from his unwilling prey. For another minute he struggled on,

increasingly sensitive, entangled in his own words. His confidence oozed

from him in great retching emanations that seemed to be sections of his

own body. Almost mercifully Percy B. Weatherbee, Architect, terminated

the interview:

"Good grief!" he exploded in disgust, "and you call that a _personal_

matter!" He whipped about and strode into his private office, banging

the door behind him. Not daring to look at the stenographer, Anthony in

some shameful and mysterious way got himself from the room. Perspiring

profusely he stood in the hall wondering why they didn't come and arrest

him; in every hurried look he discerned infallibly a glance of scorn.

After an hour and with the help of two strong whiskies he brought

himself up to another attempt. He walked into a plumber's shop, but when

he mentioned his business the plumber began pulling on his coat in a

great hurry, gruffly announcing that he had to go to lunch. Anthony

remarked politely that it was futile to try to sell a man anything when

he was hungry, and the plumber heartily agreed.

This episode encouraged Anthony; he tried to think that had the plumber

not been bound for lunch he would at least have listened.

Passing by a few glittering and formidable bazaars he entered a grocery

store. A talkative proprietor told him that before buying any stocks he

was going to see how the armistice affected the market. To Anthony this

seemed almost unfair. In Mr. Carleton's salesman's Utopia the only

reason prospective buyers ever gave for not purchasing stock was that

they doubted it to be a promising investment. Obviously a man in that

state was almost ludicrously easy game, to be brought down merely by the

judicious application of the correct selling points. But these men--why,

actually they weren't considering buying anything at all.

Anthony took several more drinks before he approached his fourth man, a

real-estate agent; nevertheless, he was floored with a coup as decisive

as a syllogism. The real-estate agent said that he had three brothers in

the investment business. Viewing himself as a breaker-up of homes

Anthony apologized and went out.

After another drink he conceived the brilliant plan of selling the stock

to the bartenders along Lexington Avenue. This occupied several hours,

for it was necessary to take a few drinks in each place in order to get

the proprietor in the proper frame of mind to talk business. But the

bartenders one and all contended that if they had any money to buy bonds

they would not be bartenders. It was as though they had all convened and

decided upon that rejoinder. As he approached a dark and soggy five

o'clock he found that they were developing a still more annoying

tendency to turn him off with a jest.

At five, then, with a tremendous effort at concentration he decided that

he must put more variety into his canvassing. He selected a medium-sized

delicatessen store, and went in. He felt, illuminatingly, that the thing

to do was to cast a spell not only over the storekeeper but over all the

customers as well--and perhaps through the psychology of the herd

instinct they would buy as an astounded and immediately convinced whole.

"Af'ernoon," he began in a loud thick voice. "Ga l'il prop'sition."

If he had wanted silence he obtained it. A sort of awe descended upon

the half-dozen women marketing and upon the gray-haired ancient who in

cap and apron was slicing chicken.

Anthony pulled a batch of papers from his flapping briefcase and waved

them cheerfully.

"Buy a bon'," he suggested, "good as liberty bon'!" The phrase pleased

him and he elaborated upon it. "Better'n liberty bon'. Every one these

bon's worth _two_ liberty bon's." His mind made a hiatus and skipped to

his peroration, which he delivered with appropriate gestures, these

being somewhat marred by the necessity of clinging to the counter with

one or both hands.

"Now see here. You taken up my time. I don't want know _why_ you won't

buy. I just want you say _why_. Want you say _how many!_"

At this point they should have approached him with check-books and

fountain pens in hand. Realizing that they must have missed a cue

Anthony, with the instincts of an actor, went back and repeated

his finale.

"Now see here! You taken up my time. You followed prop'sition. You

agreed 'th reasonin'? Now, all I want from _you_ is, how many

lib'ty bon's?"

"See here!" broke in a new voice. A portly man whose face was adorned

with symmetrical scrolls of yellow hair had come out of a glass cage in

the rear of the store and was bearing down upon Anthony. "See

here, you!"

"How many?" repeated the salesman sternly. "You taken up my time--"

"Hey, you!" cried the proprietor, "I'll have you taken up by the

police."

"You mos' cert'nly won't!" returned Anthony with fine defiance. "All I

want know is how many."

From here and there in the store went up little clouds of comment and

expostulation.

"How terrible!"

"He's a raving maniac."

"He's disgracefully drunk."

The proprietor grasped Anthony's arm sharply.

"Get out, or I'll call a policeman."

Some relics of rationality moved Anthony to nod and replace his bonds

clumsily in the case.

"How many?" he reiterated doubtfully.

"The whole force if necessary!" thundered his adversary, his yellow

mustache trembling fiercely.

"Sell 'em all a bon'."

With this Anthony turned, bowed gravely to his late auditors, and

wabbled from the store. He found a taxicab at the corner and rode home

to the apartment. There he fell sound asleep on the sofa, and so Gloria

found him, his breath filling the air with an unpleasant pungency, his

hand still clutching his open brief case.