“There is no use trying to blink the fact, sir, that there are certain

aspects of Mr. Dryfoos's character in which he is not a gentleman. We

have alluded to this fact before, and I need not dwell upon it now:

I may say, however, that my misgivings were not wholly removed last

night.”

“No,” Fulkerson assented; though in his heart he thought the old man had

behaved very well.

“What I wish to say now is that I cannot consent to act for you, in this

matter, merely as an intermediary whose failure would leave the affair

in state quo.”

“I see,” said Fulkerson.

“And I should like some intimation, some assurance, as to which party

your own feelings are with in the difference.”

The colonel bent his eyes sharply on Fulkerson; Miss Woodburn let hers

fall; Fulkerson felt that he was being tested, and he said, to gain

time, “As between Lindau and Dryfoos?” though he knew this was not the

point.

“As between Mr. Dryfoos and Mr. March,” said the colonel.

Fulkerson drew a long breath and took his courage in both hands. “There

can't be any choice for me in such a case. I'm for March, every time.”

The colonel seized his hand, and Miss Woodburn said, “If there had been

any choice fo' you in such a case, I should never have let papa stir a

step with you.”

“Why, in regard to that,” said the colonel, with a literal application

of the idea, “was it your intention that we should both go?”

“Well, I don't know; I suppose it was.”

“I think it will be better for me to go alone,” said the colonel; and,

with a color from his experience in affairs of honor, he added: “In

these matters a principal cannot appear without compromising his

dignity. I believe I have all the points clearly in mind, and I think I

should act more freely in meeting Mr. Dryfoos alone.”

Fulkerson tried to hide the eagerness with which he met these agreeable

views. He felt himself exalted in some sort to the level of the

colonel's sentiments, though it would not be easy to say whether this

was through the desperation bred of having committed himself to March's

side, or through the buoyant hope he had that the colonel would succeed

in his mission.

“I'm not afraid to talk with Dryfoos about it,” he said.

“There is no question of courage,” said the colonel. “It is a question

of dignity--of personal dignity.”

“Well, don't let that delay you, papa,” said his daughter, following him

to the door, where she found him his hat, and Fulkerson helped him on

with his overcoat. “Ah shall be jost wald to know ho' it's toned oat.”

“Won't you let me go up to the house with you?” Fulkerson began. “I

needn't go in--”

“I prefer to go alone,” said the colonel. “I wish to turn the points

over in my mind, and I am afraid you would find me rather dull company.”

He went out, and Fulkerson returned with Miss Woodburn to the

drawing-room, where she said the Leightons were. They, were not there,

but she did not seem disappointed.

“Well, Mr. Fulkerson,” she said, “you have got an ahdeal of friendship,

sure enough.”

“Me?” said Fulkerson. “Oh, my Lord! Don't you see I couldn't do anything

else? And I'm scared half to death, anyway. If the colonel don't bring

the old man round, I reckon it's all up with me. But he'll fetch him.

And I'm just prostrated with gratitude to you, Miss Woodburn.”

She waved his thanks aside with her fan. “What do you mean by its being

all up with you?”

“Why, if the old man sticks to his position, and I stick to March, we've

both got to go overboard together. Dryfoos owns the magazine; he can

stop it, or he can stop us, which amounts to the same thing, as far as

we're concerned.”

“And then what?” the girl pursued.

“And then, nothing--till we pick ourselves up.”

“Do you mean that Mr. Dryfoos will put you both oat of your places?”

“He may.”

“And Mr. Mawch takes the risk of that jost fo' a principle?”

“I reckon.”

“And you do it jost fo' an ahdeal?”

“It won't do to own it. I must have my little axe to grind, somewhere.”

“Well, men awe splendid,” sighed the girl. “Ah will say it.”

“Oh, they're not so much better than women,” said Fulkerson, with a

nervous jocosity. “I guess March would have backed down if it hadn't

been for his wife. She was as hot as pepper about it, and you could see

that she would have sacrificed all her husband's relations sooner than

let him back down an inch from the stand he had taken. It's pretty easy

for a man to stick to a principle if he has a woman to stand by him. But

when you come to play it alone--”

“Mr. Fulkerson,” said the girl, solemnly, “Ah will stand bah you in

this, if all the woald tones against you.” The tears came into her eyes,

and she put out her hand to him.

“You will?” he shouted, in a rapture. “In every way--and always--as long

as you live? Do you mean it?” He had caught her hand to his breast and

was grappling it tight there and drawing her to him.

The changing emotions chased one another through her heart and over her

face: dismay, shame, pride, tenderness. “You don't believe,” she said,

hoarsely, “that Ah meant that?”

“No, but I hope you do mean it; for if you don't, nothing else means

anything.”

There was no space, there was only a point of wavering. “Ah do mean it.”

When they lifted their eyes from each other again it was half-past ten.

“No' you most go,” she said.

“But the colonel--our fate?”

“The co'nel is often oat late, and Ah'm not afraid of ouah fate, no'

that we've taken it into ouah own hands.” She looked at him with dewy

eyes of trust, of inspiration.

“Oh, it's going to come out all right,” he said. “It can't come out

wrong now, no matter what happens. But who'd have thought it, when I

came into this house, in such a state of sin and misery, half an hour

ago--”

“Three houahs and a half ago!” she said. “No! you most jost go. Ah'm

tahed to death. Good-night. You can come in the mawning to see--papa.”

She opened the door and pushed him out with enrapturing violence, and he

ran laughing down the steps into her father's arms.

“Why, colonel! I was just going up to meet you.” He had really thought

he would walk off his exultation in that direction.

“I am very sorry to say, Mr. Fulkerson,” the colonel began, gravely,

“that Mr. Dryfoos adheres to his position.”

“Oh, all right,” said Fulkerson, with unabated joy. “It's what I

expected. Well, my course is clear; I shall stand by March, and I

guess the world won't come to an end if he bounces us both. But I'm

everlastingly obliged to you, Colonel Woodburn, and I don't know what to

say to you. I--I won't detain you now; it's so late. I'll see you in the

morning. Good-ni--”

Fulkerson did not realize that it takes two to part. The colonel laid

hold of his arm and turned away with him. “I will walk toward your

place with you. I can understand why you should be anxious to know the

particulars of my interview with Mr. Dryfoos”; and in the statement

which followed he did not spare him the smallest. It outlasted their

walk and detained them long on the steps of the 'Every Other Week'

building. But at the end Fulkerson let himself in with his key as light

of heart as if he had been listening to the gayest promises that fortune

could make.

By the time he met March at the office next morning, a little, but only

a very little, misgiving saddened his golden heaven. He took March's

hand with high courage, and said, “Well, the old man sticks to his

point, March.” He added, with the sense of saying it before Miss

Woodburn: “And I stick by you. I've thought it all over, and I'd rather

be right with you than wrong with him.”

“Well, I appreciate your motive, Fulkerson,” said March. “But

perhaps--perhaps we can save over our heroics for another occasion.

Lindau seems to have got in with his, for the present.”

He told him of Lindau's last visit, and they stood a moment looking

at each other rather queerly. Fulkerson was the first to recover his

spirits. “Well,” he said, cheerily, “that let's us out.”

“Does it? I'm not sure it lets me out,” said March; but he said this in

tribute to his crippled self-respect rather than as a forecast of any

action in the matter.

“Why, what are you going to do?” Fulkerson asked. “If Lindau won't work

for Dryfoos, you can't make him.”

March sighed. “What are you going to do with this money?” He glanced at

the heap of bills he had flung on the table between them.

Fulkerson scratched his head. “Ah, dogged if I know: Can't we give it to

the deserving poor, somehow, if we can find 'em?”

“I suppose we've no right to use it in any way. You must give it to

Dryfoos.”

“To the deserving rich? Well, you can always find them. I reckon you

don't want to appear in the transaction! I don't, either; but I guess

I must.” Fulkerson gathered up the money and carried it to Conrad. He

directed him to account for it in his books as conscience-money, and he

enjoyed the joke more than Conrad seemed to do when he was told where it

came from.

Fulkerson was able to wear off the disagreeable impression the affair

left during the course of the fore-noon, and he met Miss Woodburn with

all a lover's buoyancy when he went to lunch. She was as happy as he

when he told her how fortunately the whole thing had ended, and he took

her view that it was a reward of his courage in having dared the worst.

They both felt, as the newly plighted always do, that they were in the

best relations with the beneficent powers, and that their felicity had

been especially looked to in the disposition of events. They were in a

glow of rapturous content with themselves and radiant worship of each

other; she was sure that he merited the bright future opening to them

both, as much as if he owed it directly to some noble action of his own;

he felt that he was indebted for the favor of Heaven entirely to the

still incredible accident of her preference of him over other men.

Colonel Woodburn, who was not yet in the secret of their love, perhaps

failed for this reason to share their satisfaction with a result so

unexpectedly brought about. The blessing on their hopes seemed to his

ignorance to involve certain sacrifices of personal feeling at which

he hinted in suggesting that Dryfoos should now be asked to make some

abstract concessions and acknowledgments; his daughter hastened to deny

that these were at all necessary; and Fulkerson easily explained why.

The thing was over; what was the use of opening it up again?

“Perhaps none,” the colonel admitted. But he added, “I should like the

opportunity of taking Mr. Lindau's hand in the presence of Mr. Dryfoos

and assuring him that I considered him a man of principle and a man of

honor--a gentleman, sir, whom I was proud and happy to have known.”

“Well, Ah've no doabt,” said his daughter, demurely, “that you'll have

the chance some day; and we would all lahke to join you. But at the same

tahme, Ah think Mr. Fulkerson is well oat of it fo' the present.”

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Anticipative reprisal

Buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience

Courtship

Got their laugh out of too many things in life

Had learned not to censure the irretrievable

Had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance

Ignorant of her ignorance

It don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time

Justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs

Life has taught him to truckle and trick

Man's willingness to abide in the present

No longer the gross appetite for novelty

No right to burden our friends with our decisions

Travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues

Typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find

PART FIFTH

I.

Superficially, the affairs of 'Every Other Week' settled into their

wonted form again, and for Fulkerson they seemed thoroughly reinstated.

But March had a feeling of impermanency from what had happened, mixed

with a fantastic sense of shame toward Lindau. He did not sympathize

with Lindau's opinions; he thought his remedy for existing evils as

wildly impracticable as Colonel Woodburn's. But while he thought this,

and while he could justly blame Fulkerson for Lindau's presence at

Dryfoos's dinner, which his zeal had brought about in spite of March's

protests, still he could not rid himself of the reproach of uncandor

with Lindau. He ought to have told him frankly about the ownership of

the magazine, and what manner of man the man was whose money he was

taking. But he said that he never could have imagined that he was

serious in his preposterous attitude in regard to a class of men who

embody half the prosperity of the country; and he had moments of

revolt against his own humiliation before Lindau, in which he found it

monstrous that he should return Dryfoos's money as if it had been the

spoil of a robber. His wife agreed with him in these moments, and said

it was a great relief not to have that tiresome old German coming about.

They had to account for his absence evasively to the children, whom

they could not very well tell that their father was living on money that

Lindau disdained to take, even though Lindau was wrong and their father

was right. This heightened Mrs. March's resentment toward both Lindau

and Dryfoos, who between them had placed her husband in a false

position. If anything, she resented Dryfoos's conduct more than

Lindau's. He had never spoken to March about the affair since Lindau had

renounced his work, or added to the apologetic messages he had sent by

Fulkerson. So far as March knew, Dryfoos had been left to suppose that

Lindau had simply stopped for some reason that did not personally affect

him. They never spoke of him, and March was too proud to ask either

Fulkerson or Conrad whether the old man knew that Lindau had returned

his money. He avoided talking to Conrad, from a feeling that if he did

he should involuntarily lead him on to speak of his differences with his

father. Between himself and Fulkerson, even, he was uneasily aware of

a want of their old perfect friendliness. Fulkerson had finally behaved

with honor and courage; but his provisional reluctance had given March

the measure of Fulkerson's character in one direction, and he could not

ignore the fact that it was smaller than he could have wished.

He could not make out whether Fulkerson shared his discomfort or not.

It certainly wore away, even with March, as time passed, and with

Fulkerson, in the bliss of his fortunate love, it was probably far

more transient, if it existed at all. He advanced into the winter as

radiantly as if to meet the spring, and he said that if there were any

pleasanter month of the year than November, it was December, especially

when the weather was good and wet and muddy most of the time, so that

you had to keep indoors a long while after you called anywhere.

Colonel Woodburn had the anxiety, in view of his daughter's engagement,

when she asked his consent to it, that such a dreamer must have in

regard to any reality that threatens to affect the course of his

reveries. He had not perhaps taken her marriage into account, except

as a remote contingency; and certainly Fulkerson was not the kind of

son-in-law that he had imagined in dealing with that abstraction. But

because he had nothing of the sort definitely in mind, he could not

oppose the selection of Fulkerson with success; he really knew nothing

against him, and he knew, many things in his favor; Fulkerson inspired

him with the liking that every one felt for him in a measure; he amused

him, he cheered him; and the colonel had been so much used to leaving

action of all kinds to his daughter that when he came to close quarters

with the question of a son-in-law he felt helpless to decide it, and

he let her decide it, as if it were still to be decided when it was

submitted to him. She was competent to treat it in all its phases:

not merely those of personal interest, but those of duty to the broken

Southern past, sentimentally dear to him, and practically absurd to her.

No such South as he remembered had ever existed to her knowledge, and

no such civilization as he imagined would ever exist, to her belief,

anywhere. She took the world as she found it, and made the best of it.

She trusted in Fulkerson; she had proved his magnanimity in a serious

emergency; and in small things she was willing fearlessly to chance it

with him. She was not a sentimentalist, and there was nothing fantastic

in her expectations; she was a girl of good sense and right mind, and

she liked the immediate practicality as well as the final honor of

Fulkerson. She did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she

realized him; she did him justice, and she would not have believed

that she did him more than justice if she had sometimes known him to do

himself less.

Their engagement was a fact to which the Leighton household adjusted

itself almost as simply as the lovers themselves; Miss Woodburn told the

ladies at once, and it was not a thing that Fulkerson could keep from

March very long. He sent word of it to Mrs. March by her husband;

and his engagement perhaps did more than anything else to confirm the

confidence in him which had been shaken by his early behavior in the

Lindau episode, and not wholly restored by his tardy fidelity to March.

But now she felt that a man who wished to get married so obviously and

entirely for love was full of all kinds of the best instincts, and only

needed the guidance of a wife, to become very noble. She interested

herself intensely in balancing the respective merits of the engaged

couple, and after her call upon Miss Woodburn in her new character she

prided herself upon recognizing the worth of some strictly Southern

qualities in her, while maintaining the general average of New England

superiority. She could not reconcile herself to the Virginian custom

illustrated in her having been christened with the surname of Madison;

and she said that its pet form of Mad, which Fulkerson promptly

invented, only made it more ridiculous.

Fulkerson was slower in telling Beaton. He was afraid, somehow, of

Beaton's taking the matter in the cynical way; Miss Woodburn said she

would break off the engagement if Beaton was left to guess it or find

it out by accident, and then Fulkerson plucked up his courage. Beaton

received the news with gravity, and with a sort of melancholy meekness

that strongly moved Fulkerson's sympathy, and made him wish that Beaton

was engaged, too.

It made Beaton feel very old; it somehow left him behind and

forgotten; in a manner, it made him feel trifled with. Something of the

unfriendliness of fate seemed to overcast his resentment, and he allowed

the sadness of his conviction that he had not the means to marry on

to tinge his recognition of the fact that Alma Leighton would not have

wanted him to marry her if he had. He was now often in that martyr mood

in which he wished to help his father; not only to deny himself Chianti,

but to forego a fur-lined overcoat which he intended to get for the

winter, He postponed the moment of actual sacrifice as regarded the

Chianti, and he bought the overcoat in an anguish of self-reproach.

He wore it the first evening after he got it in going to call upon

the Leightons, and it seemed to him a piece of ghastly irony when Alma

complimented his picturesqueness in it and asked him to let her sketch

him.

“Oh, you can sketch me,” he said, with so much gloom that it made her

laugh.

“If you think it's so serious, I'd rather not.”

“No, no! Go ahead! How do you want me?”

“Oh, fling yourself down on a chair in one of your attitudes of studied

negligence; and twist one corner of your mustache with affected absence

of mind.”

“And you think I'm always studied, always affected?”

“I didn't say so.”

“I didn't ask you what you said.”

“And I won't tell you what I think.”

“Ah, I know what you think.”

“What made you ask, then?” The girl laughed again with the satisfaction

of her sex in cornering a man.

Beaton made a show of not deigning to reply, and put himself in the pose

she suggested, frowning.

“Ah, that's it. But a little more animation--

“'As when a great thought strikes along the brain,

And flushes all the cheek.'”

She put her forehead down on the back of her hand and laughed again.

“You ought to be photographed. You look as if you were sitting for it.”

Beaton said: “That's because I know I am being photographed, in one way.

I don't think you ought to call me affected. I never am so with you; I

know it wouldn't be of any use.”

“Oh, Mr. Beaton, you flatter.”

“No, I never flatter you.”

“I meant you flattered yourself.”

“How?”

“Oh, I don't know. Imagine.”

“I know what you mean. You think I can't be sincere with anybody.”

“Oh no, I don't.”

“What do you think?”

“That you can't--try.” Alma gave another victorious laugh.

Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson would once have both feigned a great

interest in Alma's sketching Beaton, and made it the subject of talk, in

which they approached as nearly as possible the real interest of their

lives. Now they frankly remained away in the dining-room, which was very

cozy after the dinner had disappeared; the colonel sat with his lamp and

paper in the gallery beyond; Mrs. Leighton was about her housekeeping

affairs, in the content she always felt when Alma was with Beaton.

“They seem to be having a pretty good time in there,” said Fulkerson,

detaching himself from his own absolute good time as well as he could.

“At least Alma does,” said Miss Woodburn.

“Do you think she cares for him?”

“Quahte as moch as he desoves.”

“What makes you all down on Beaton around here? He's not such a bad

fellow.”

“We awe not all doan on him. Mrs. Leighton isn't doan on him.”

“Oh, I guess if it was the old lady, there wouldn't be much question

about it.”

They both laughed, and Alma said, “They seem to be greatly amused with

something in there.”

“Me, probably,” said Beaton. “I seem to amuse everybody to-night.”

“Don't you always?”

“I always amuse you, I'm afraid, Alma.”

She looked at him as if she were going to snub him openly for using

her name; but apparently she decided to do it covertly. “You didn't at

first. I really used to believe you could be serious, once.”

“Couldn't you believe it again? Now?”

“Not when you put on that wind-harp stop.”

“Wetmore has been talking to you about me. He would sacrifice his best

friend to a phrase. He spends his time making them.”

“He's made some very pretty ones about you.”

“Like the one you just quoted?”

“No, not exactly. He admires you ever so much. He says” She stopped,

teasingly.

“What?”

“He says you could be almost anything you wished, if you didn't wish to

be everything.”

“That sounds more like the school of Wetmore. That's what you say, Alma.

Well, if there were something you wished me to be, I could be it.”

“We might adapt Kingsley: 'Be good, sweet man, and let who will be

clever.'” He could not help laughing. She went on: “I always thought

that was the most patronizing and exasperating thing ever addressed to

a human girl; and we've had to stand a good deal in our time. I should

like to have it applied to the other 'sect' a while. As if any girl

that was a girl would be good if she had the remotest chance of being

clever.”

“Then you wouldn't wish me to be good?” Beaton asked.

“Not if you were a girl.”

“You want to shock me. Well, I suppose I deserve it. But if I were

one-tenth part as good as you are, Alma, I should have a lighter heart

than I have now. I know that I'm fickle, but I'm not false, as you think

I am.”

“Who said I thought you were false?”

“No one,” said Beaton. “It isn't necessary, when you look it--live it.”

“Oh, dear! I didn't know I devoted my whole time to the subject.”

“I know I'm despicable. I could tell you something--the history of

this day, even--that would make you despise me.” Beaton had in mind his

purchase of the overcoat, which Alma was getting in so effectively, with

the money he ought to have sent his father. “But,” he went on, darkly,

with a sense that what he was that moment suffering for his selfishness

must somehow be a kind of atonement, which would finally leave him

to the guiltless enjoyment of the overcoat, “you wouldn't believe the

depths of baseness I could descend to.”

“I would try,” said Alma, rapidly shading the collar, “if you'd give me

some hint.”

Beaton had a sudden wish to pour out his remorse to her, but he was

afraid of her laughing at him. He said to himself that this was a very

wholesome fear, and that if he could always have her at hand he should

not make a fool of himself so often. A man conceives of such an office

as the very noblest for a woman; he worships her for it if he is

magnanimous. But Beaton was silent, and Alma put back her head for

the right distance on her sketch. “Mr. Fulkerson thinks you are the

sublimest of human beings for advising him to get Colonel Woodburn to

interview Mr. Dryfoos about Lindau. What have you ever done with your

Judas?”

“I haven't done anything with it. Nadel thought he would take hold of

it at one time, but he dropped it again. After all, I don't suppose

it could be popularized. Fulkerson wanted to offer it as a premium to

subscribers for 'Every Other Week,' but I sat down on that.”

Alma could not feel the absurdity of this, and she merely said, “'Every

Other Week' seems to be going on just the same as ever.”

“Yes, the trouble has all blown over, I believe. Fulkerson,” said

Beaton, with a return to what they were saying, “has managed the whole

business very well. But he exaggerates the value of my advice.”

“Very likely,” Alma suggested, vaguely. “Or, no! Excuse me! He couldn't,

he couldn't!” She laughed delightedly at Beaton's foolish look of

embarrassment.

He tried to recover his dignity in saying, “He's 'a very good fellow,

and he deserves his happiness.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Alma, perversely. “Does any one deserve happiness?”

“I know I don't,” sighed Beaton.

“You mean you don't get it.”

“I certainly don't get it.”

“Ah, but that isn't the reason.”

“What is?”

“That's the secret of the universe,” She bit in her lower lip, and

looked at him with eyes, of gleaming fun.

“Are you never serious?” he asked.

“With serious people always.”

“I am serious; and you have the secret of my happiness--” He threw

himself impulsively forward in his chair.

“Oh, pose, pose!” she cried.

“I won't pose,” he answered, “and you have got to listen to me. You know

I'm in love with you; and I know that once you cared for me. Can't that

time--won't it--come back again? Try to think so, Alma!”

“No,” she said, briefly and seriously enough.

“But that seems impossible. What is it I've done what have you against

me?”

“Nothing. But that time is past. I couldn't recall it if I wished. Why

did you bring it up? You've broken your word. You know I wouldn't have

let you keep coming here if you hadn't promised never to refer to it.”

“How could I help it? With that happiness near us--Fulkerson--”

“Oh, it's that? I might have known it!”

“No, it isn't that--it's something far deeper. But if it's nothing you

have against me, what is it, Alma, that keeps you from caring for me now

as you did then? I haven't changed.”

“But I have. I shall never care for you again, Mr. Beaton; you might as

well understand it once for all. Don't think it's anything in yourself,

or that I think you unworthy of me. I'm not so self-satisfied as that; I

know very well that I'm not a perfect character, and that I've no claim

on perfection in anybody else. I think women who want that are fools;

they won't get it, and they don't deserve it. But I've learned a good.

deal more about myself than I knew in St. Barnaby, and a life of work,

of art, and of art alone that's what I've made up my mind to.”

“A woman that's made up her mind to that has no heart to hinder her!”

“Would a man have that had done so?”

“But I don't believe you, Alma. You're merely laughing at me. And,

besides, with me you needn't give up art. We could work together. You

know how much I admire your talent. I believe I could help it--serve it;

I would be its willing slave, and yours, Heaven knows!”

“I don't want any slave--nor any slavery. I want to be free always. Now

do you see? I don't care for you, and I never could in the old way; but

I should have to care for some one more than I believe I ever shall to

give up my work. Shall we go on?” She looked at her sketch.

“No, we shall not go on,” he said, gloomily, as he rose.

“I suppose you blame me,” she said, rising too.

“Oh no! I blame no one--or only myself. I threw my chance away.”

“I'm glad you see that; and I'm glad you did it. You don't believe me,

of course. Why do men think life can be only the one thing to women? And

if you come to the selfish view, who are the happy women? I'm sure that

if work doesn't fail me, health won't, and happiness won't.”

“But you could work on with me--”

“Second fiddle. Do you suppose I shouldn't be woman enough to wish my

work always less and lower than yours? At least I've heart enough for

that!”

“You've heart enough for anything, Alma. I was a fool to say you

hadn't.”

“I think the women who keep their hearts have an even chance, at least,

of having heart--”

“Ah, there's where you're wrong!”

“But mine isn't mine to give you, anyhow. And now I don't want you ever

to speak to me about this again.”

“Oh, there's no danger!” he cried, bitterly. “I shall never willingly

see you again.”

“That's as you like, Mr. Beaton. We've had to be very frank, but I don't

see why we shouldn't be friends. Still, we needn't, if you don't like.”

“And I may come--I may come here--as--as usual?”

“Why, if you can consistently,” she said, with a smile, and she held out

her hand to him.

He went home dazed, and feeling as if it were a bad joke that had been

put upon him. At least the affair went so deep that it estranged the

aspect of his familiar studio. Some of the things in it were not very

familiar; he had spent lately a great deal on rugs, on stuffs, on

Japanese bric-a-brac. When he saw these things in the shops he had felt

that he must have them; that they were necessary to him; and he was

partly in debt for them, still without having sent any of his earnings

to pay his father. As he looked at them now he liked to fancy something

weird and conscious in them as the silent witnesses of a broken life. He

felt about among some of the smaller objects on the mantel for his pipe.

Before he slept he was aware, in the luxury of his despair, of a remote

relief, an escape; and, after all, the understanding he had come to with

Alma was only the explicit formulation of terms long tacit between them.

Beaton would have been puzzled more than he knew if she had taken him

seriously. It was inevitable that he should declare himself in love with

her; but he was not disappointed at her rejection of his love; perhaps

not so much as he would have been at its acceptance, though he tried to

think otherwise, and to give himself airs of tragedy. He did not really

feel that the result was worse than what had gone before, and it left

him free.

But he did not go to the Leightons again for so long a time that Mrs.

Leighton asked Alma what had happened. Alma told her.

“And he won't come any more?” her mother sighed, with reserved censure.

“Oh, I think he will. He couldn't very well come the next night. But he

has the habit of coming, and with Mr. Beaton habit is everything--even

the habit of thinking he's in love with some one.”

“Alma,” said her mother, “I don't think it's very nice for a girl to let

a young man keep coming to see her after she's refused him.”

“Why not, if it amuses him and doesn't hurt the girl?”

“But it does hurt her, Alma. It--it's indelicate. It isn't fair to him;

it gives him hopes.”

“Well, mamma, it hasn't happened in the given case yet. If Mr. Beaton

comes again, I won't see him, and you can forbid him the house.”

“If I could only feel sure, Alma,” said her mother, taking up another

branch of the inquiry, “that you really knew your own mind, I should be

easier about it.”

“Then you can rest perfectly quiet, mamma. I do know my own mind; and,

what's worse, I know Mr. Beaton's mind.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that he spoke to me the other night simply because Mr.

Fulkerson's engagement had broken him all up.”

“What expressions!” Mrs. Leighton lamented.

“He let it out himself,” Alma went on. “And you wouldn't have thought

it was very flattering yourself. When I'm made love to, after this,

I prefer to be made love to in an off-year, when there isn't another

engaged couple anywhere about.”

“Did you tell him that, Alma?”

“Tell him that! What do you mean, mamma? I may be indelicate, but I'm

not quite so indelicate as that.”

“I didn't mean you were indelicate, really, Alma, but I wanted to warn

you. I think Mr. Beaton was very much in earnest.”

“Oh, so did he!”

“And you didn't?”

“Oh yes, for the time being. I suppose he's very much in earnest with

Miss Vance at times, and with Miss Dryfoos at others. Sometimes he's a

painter, and sometimes he's an architect, and sometimes he's a sculptor.

He has too many gifts--too many tastes.”

“And if Miss Vance and Miss Dryfoos--”

“Oh, do say Sculpture and Architecture, mamma! It's getting so

dreadfully personal!”

“Alma, you know that I only wish to get at your real feeling in the

matter.”

“And you know that I don't want to let you--especially when I haven't

got any real feeling in the matter. But I should think--speaking in the

abstract entirely--that if either of those arts was ever going to be in

earnest about him, it would want his exclusive devotion for a week at

least.”

“I didn't know,” said Mrs. Leighton, “that he was doing anything now at

the others. I thought he was entirely taken up with his work on 'Every

Other Week.'”

“Oh, he is! he is!”

“And you certainly can't say, my dear, that he hasn't been very

kind--very useful to you, in that matter.”

“And so I ought to have said yes out of gratitude? Thank you, mamma! I

didn't know you held me so cheap.”

“You know whether I hold you cheap or not, Alma. I don't want you to

cheapen yourself. I don't want you to trifle with any one. I want you to

be honest with yourself.”

“Well, come now, mamma! Suppose you begin. I've been perfectly honest

with myself, and I've been honest with Mr. Beaton. I don't care for

him, and I've told him I didn't; so he may be supposed to know it. If he

comes here after this, he'll come as a plain, unostentatious friend

of the family, and it's for you to say whether he shall come in that

capacity or not. I hope you won't trifle with him, and let him get the

notion that he's coming on any other basis.”

Mrs. Leighton felt the comfort of the critical attitude far too keenly

to abandon it for anything constructive. She only said, “You know very

well, Alma, that's a matter I can have nothing to do with.”

“Then you leave him entirely to me?”

“I hope you will regard his right to candid and open treatment.”

“He's had nothing but the most open and candid treatment from me, mamma.

It's you that wants to play fast and loose with him. And, to tell you

the truth, I believe he would like that a good deal better; I believe

that, if there's anything he hates, it's openness and candor.” Alma

laughed, and put her arms round her mother, who could not help laughing

a little, too.

II.

The winter did not renew for Christine and Mela the social opportunity

which the spring had offered. After the musicale at Mrs. Horn's, they

both made their party-call, as Mela said, in due season; but they did

not find Mrs. Horn at home, and neither she nor Miss Vance came to see

them after people returned to town in the fall. They tried to believe

for a time that Mrs. Horn had not got their cards; this pretence failed

them, and they fell back upon their pride, or rather Christine's pride.

Mela had little but her good-nature to avail her in any exigency, and

if Mrs. Horn or Miss Vance had come to call after a year of neglect,

she would have received them as amiably as if they had not lost a day in

coming. But Christine had drawn a line beyond which they would not have

been forgiven; and she had planned the words and the behavior with which

she would have punished them if they had appeared then. Neither

sister imagined herself in anywise inferior to them; but Christine was

suspicious, at least, and it was Mela who invented the hypothesis of the

lost cards. As nothing happened to prove or to disprove the fact, she

said, “I move we put Coonrod up to gittun' it out of Miss Vance, at some

of their meetun's.”

“If you do,” said Christine, “I'll kill you.”

Christine, however, had the visits of Beaton to console her, and, if

these seemed to have no definite aim, she was willing to rest in the

pleasure they gave her vanity; but Mela had nothing. Sometimes she even

wished they were all back on the farm.

“It would be the best thing for both of you,” said Mrs. Dryfoos, in

answer to such a burst of desperation. “I don't think New York is any

place for girls.”

“Well, what I hate, mother,” said Mela, “is, it don't seem to be any

place for young men, either.” She found this so good when she had said

it that she laughed over it till Christine was angry.

“A body would think there had never been any joke before.”

“I don't see as it's a joke,” said Mrs. Dryfoos. “It's the plain truth.”

“Oh, don't mind her, mother,” said Mela. “She's put out because her old

Mr. Beaton ha'r't been round for a couple o' weeks. If you don't watch

out, that fellow 'll give you the slip yit, Christine, after all your

pains.”

“Well, there ain't anybody to give you the slip, Mela,” Christine clawed

back.

“No; I ha'n't ever set my traps for anybody.” This was what Mela said

for want of a better retort; but it was not quite true. When Kendricks

came with Beaton to call after her father's dinner, she used all her

cunning to ensnare him, and she had him to herself as long as Beaton

stayed; Dryfoos sent down word that he was not very well and had gone to

bed. The novelty of Mela had worn off for Kendricks, and she found him,

as she frankly told him, not half as entertaining as he was at Mrs.

Horn's; but she did her best with him as the only flirtable material

which had yet come to her hand. It would have been her ideal to have the

young men stay till past midnight, and her father come down-stairs in

his stocking-feet and tell them it was time to go. But they made a

visit of decorous brevity, and Kendricks did not come again. She met him

afterward, once, as she was crossing the pavement in Union Square to get

into her coupe, and made the most of him; but it was necessarily very

little, and so he passed out of her life without having left any trace

in her heart, though Mela had a heart that she would have put at the

disposition of almost any young man that wanted it. Kendricks himself,

Manhattan cockney as he was, with scarcely more out look into the

average American nature than if he had been kept a prisoner in New York

society all his days, perceived a property in her which forbade him as

a man of conscience to trifle with her; something earthly good and kind,

if it was simple and vulgar. In revising his impressions of her, it

seemed to him that she would come even to better literary effect if

this were recognized in her; and it made her sacred, in spite of her

willingness to fool and to be fooled, in her merely human quality. After

all, he saw that she wished honestly to love and to be loved, and the

lures she threw out to that end seemed to him pathetic rather than

ridiculous; he could not join Beaton in laughing at her; and he did

not like Beaton's laughing at the other girl, either. It seemed to

Kendricks, with the code of honor which he mostly kept to himself

because he was a little ashamed to find there were so few others like

it, that if Beaton cared nothing for the other girl--and Christine

appeared simply detestable to Kendricks--he had better keep away from

her, and not give her the impression he was in love with her. He rather

fancied that this was the part of a gentleman, and he could not have

penetrated to that aesthetic and moral complexity which formed the

consciousness of a nature like Beaton's and was chiefly a torment to

itself; he could not have conceived of the wayward impulses indulged at

every moment in little things till the straight highway was traversed

and well-nigh lost under their tangle. To do whatever one likes is

finally to do nothing that one likes, even though one continues to do

what one will; but Kendricks, though a sage of twenty-seven, was still

too young to understand this.

Beaton scarcely understood it himself, perhaps because he was not yet

twenty-seven. He only knew that his will was somehow sick; that it spent

itself in caprices, and brought him no happiness from the fulfilment of

the most vehement wish. But he was aware that his wishes grew less and

less vehement; he began to have a fear that some time he might have none

at all. It seemed to him that if he could once do something that was

thoroughly distasteful to himself, he might make a beginning in the

right direction; but when he tried this on a small scale, it failed, and

it seemed stupid. Some sort of expiation was the thing he needed, he was

sure; but he could not think of anything in particular to expiate; a man

could not expiate his temperament, and his temperament was what Beaton

decided to be at fault. He perceived that it went deeper than even fate

would have gone; he could have fulfilled an evil destiny and had done

with it, however terrible. His trouble was that he could not escape from

himself; and, for the most part, he justified himself in refusing

to try. After he had come to that distinct understanding with Alma

Leighton, and experienced the relief it really gave him, he thought

for a while that if it had fallen out otherwise, and she had put him in

charge of her destiny, he might have been better able to manage his own.

But as it was, he could only drift, and let all other things take their

course. It was necessary that he should go to see her afterward, to show

her that he was equal to the event; but he did not go so often, and he

went rather oftener to the Dryfooses; it was not easy to see Margaret

Vance, except on the society terms. With much sneering and scorning,

he fulfilled the duties to Mrs. Horn without which he knew he should be

dropped from her list; but one might go to many of her Thursdays without

getting many words with her niece. Beaton hardly knew whether he wanted

many; the girl kept the charm of her innocent stylishness; but latterly

she wanted to talk more about social questions than about the psychical

problems that young people usually debate so personally. Son of the

working-people as he was, Beaton had never cared anything about such

matters; he did not know about them or wish to know; he was perhaps too

near them. Besides, there was an embarrassment, at least on her part,

concerning the Dryfooses. She was too high-minded to blame him for

having tempted her to her failure with them by his talk about them; but

she was conscious of avoiding them in her talk. She had decided not to

renew the effort she had made in the spring; because she could not do

them good as fellow-creatures needing food and warmth and work, and she

would not try to befriend them socially; she had a horror of any such

futile sentimentality. She would have liked to account to Beaton in this

way for a course which she suspected he must have heard their comments

upon, but she did not quite know how to do it; she could not be sure how

much or how little he cared for them. Some tentative approaches which

she made toward explanation were met with such eager disclaim of

personal interest that she knew less than before what to think; and

she turned the talk from the sisters to the brother, whom it seemed she

still continued to meet in their common work among the poor.

“He seems very different,” she ventured.

“Oh, quite,” said Beaton. “He's the kind of person that you might

suppose gave the Catholics a hint for the cloistral life; he's a

cloistered nature--the nature that atones and suffers for. But he's

awfully dull company, don't you think? I never can get anything out of

him.”

“He's very much in earnest.”

“Remorselessly. We've got a profane and mundane creature there at the

office who runs us all, and it's shocking merely to see the contact of

the tyro natures. When Fulkerson gets to joking Dryfoos--he likes to put

his joke in the form of a pretence that Dryfoos is actuated by a selfish

motive, that he has an eye to office, and is working up a political

interest for himself on the East Side--it's something inexpressible.”

“I should think so,” said Miss Vance, with such lofty disapproval that

Beaton felt himself included in it for having merely told what caused

it. He could not help saying, in natural rebellion, “Well, the man of

one idea is always a little ridiculous.”

“When his idea is right?” she demanded. “A right idea can't be

ridiculous.”

“Oh, I only said the man that held it was. He's flat; he has no relief,

no projection.”

She seemed unable to answer, and he perceived that he had silenced her

to his own, disadvantage. It appeared to Beaton that she was becoming a

little too exacting for comfort in her idealism. He put down the cup of

tea he had been tasting, and said, in his solemn staccato: “I must go.

Good-bye!” and got instantly away from her, with an effect he had of

having suddenly thought of something imperative.

He went up to Mrs. Horn for a moment's hail and farewell, and felt

himself subtly detained by her through fugitive passages of conversation

with half a dozen other people. He fancied that at crises of this

strange interview Mrs. Horn was about to become confidential with him,

and confidential, of all things, about her niece. She ended by not

having palpably been so. In fact, the concern in her mind would have

been difficult to impart to a young man, and after several experiments

Mrs. Horn found it impossible to say that she wished Margaret could

somehow be interested in lower things than those which occupied her. She

had watched with growing anxiety the girl's tendency to various kinds

of self-devotion. She had dark hours in which she even feared her entire

withdrawal from the world in a life of good works. Before now, girls

had entered the Protestant sisterhoods, which appeal so potently to the

young and generous imagination, and Margaret was of just the temperament

to be influenced by them. During the past summer she had been unhappy

at her separation from the cares that had engrossed her more and more as

their stay in the city drew to an end in the spring, and she had hurried

her aunt back to town earlier in the fall than she would have chosen to

come. Margaret had her correspondents among the working-women whom she

befriended. Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaret was

actually promoting a strike of the button-hole workers. This, of course,

had its ludicrous side, in connection with a young lady in good society,

and a person of even so little humor as Mrs. Horn could not help seeing

it. At the same time, she could not help foreboding the worst from it;

she was afraid that Margaret's health would give way under the strain,

and that if she did not go into a sisterhood she would at least go into

a decline. She began the winter with all such counteractive measures as

she could employ. At an age when such things weary, she threw herself

into the pleasures of society with the hope of dragging Margaret after

her; and a sympathetic witness must have followed with compassion

her course from ball to ball, from reception to reception, from

parlor-reading to parlor-reading, from musicale to musicale, from play

to play, from opera to opera. She tasted, after she had practically

renounced them, the bitter and the insipid flavors of fashionable

amusement, in the hope that Margaret might find them sweet, and now at

the end she had to own to herself that she had failed. It was coming

Lent again, and the girl had only grown thinner and more serious

with the diversions that did not divert her from the baleful works of

beneficence on which Mrs. Horn felt that she was throwing her youth

away. Margaret could have borne either alone, but together they were

wearing her out. She felt it a duty to undergo the pleasures her aunt

appointed for her, but she could not forego the other duties in which

she found her only pleasure.

She kept up her music still because she could employ it at the

meetings for the entertainment, and, as she hoped, the elevation of her

working-women; but she neglected the other aesthetic interests which

once occupied her; and, at sight of Beaton talking with her, Mrs.

Horn caught at the hope that he might somehow be turned to account in

reviving Margaret's former interest in art. She asked him if Mr. Wetmore

had his classes that winter as usual; and she said she wished Margaret

could be induced to go again: Mr. Wetmore always said that she did not

draw very well, but that she had a great deal of feeling for it, and her

work was interesting. She asked, were the Leightons in town again; and

she murmured a regret that she had not been able to see anything of

them, without explaining why; she said she had a fancy that if Margaret

knew Miss Leighton, and what she was doing, it might stimulate her,

perhaps. She supposed Miss Leighton was still going on with her art?

Beaton said, Oh yes, he believed so.

But his manner did not encourage Mrs. Horn to pursue her aims in that

direction, and she said, with a sigh, she wished he still had a class;

she always fancied that Margaret got more good from his instruction than

from any one else's.

He said that she was very good; but there was really nobody who knew

half as much as Wetmore, or could make any one understand half as much.

Mrs. Horn was afraid, she said, that Mr. Wetmore's terrible sincerity

discouraged Margaret; he would not let her have any illusions about the

outcome of what she was doing; and did not Mr. Beaton think that some

illusion was necessary with young people? Of course, it was very nice of

Mr. Wetmore to be so honest, but it did not always seem to be the wisest

thing. She begged Mr. Beaton to try to think of some one who would be a

little less severe. Her tone assumed a deeper interest in the people

who were coming up and going away, and Beaton perceived that he was

dismissed.

He went away with vanity flattered by the sense of having been appealed

to concerning Margaret, and then he began to chafe at what she had said

of Wetmore's honesty, apropos of her wish that he still had a class

himself. Did she mean, confound her? that he was insincere, and would

let Miss Vance suppose she had more talent than she really had? The more

Beaton thought of this, the more furious he became, and the more he

was convinced that something like it had been unconsciously if not

consciously in her mind. He framed some keen retorts, to the general

effect that with the atmosphere of illusion preserved so completely

at home, Miss Vance hardly needed it in her art studies. Having just

determined never to go near Mrs. Horn's Thursdays again, he decided to

go once more, in order to plant this sting in her capacious but somewhat

callous bosom; and he planned how he would lead the talk up to the point

from which he should launch it.

In the mean time he felt the need of some present solace, such as only

unqualified worship could give him; a cruel wish to feel his power

in some direction where, even if it were resisted, it could not be

overcome, drove him on. That a woman who was to Beaton the embodiment of

artificiality should intimate, however innocently--the innocence made it

all the worse--that he was less honest than Wetmore, whom he knew to

be so much more honest, was something that must be retaliated somewhere

before his self-respect could be restored. It was only five o'clock, and

he went on up-town to the Dryfooses', though he had been there only the

night before last. He asked for the ladies, and Mrs. Mandel received

him.

“The young ladies are down-town shopping,” she said, “but I am very glad

of the opportunity of seeing you alone, Mr. Beaton. You know I lived

several years in Europe.”

“Yes,” said Beaton, wondering what that could have to do with her

pleasure in seeing him alone. “I believe so?” He involuntarily gave his

words the questioning inflection.

“You have lived abroad, too, and so you won't find what I am going to

ask so strange. Mr. Beaton, why do you come so much to this house?” Mrs.

Mandel bent forward with an aspect of ladylike interest and smiled.

Beaton frowned. “Why do I come so much?”

“Yes.”

“Why do I--Excuse me, Mrs. Mandel, but will you allow me to ask why you

ask?”

“Oh, certainly. There's no reason why I shouldn't say, for I wish you to

be very frank with me. I ask because there are two young ladies in this

house; and, in a certain way, I have to take the place of a mother

to them. I needn't explain why; you know all the people here, and

you understand. I have nothing to say about them, but I should not be

speaking to you now if they were not all rather helpless people. They do

not know the world they have come to live in here, and they cannot help

themselves or one another. But you do know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure

you know just how much or how little you mean by coming here. You are

either interested in one of these young girls or you are not. If you

are, I have nothing more to say. If you are not--” Mrs. Mandel continued

to smile, but the smile had grown more perfunctory, and it had an icy

gleam.

Beaton looked at her with surprise that he gravely kept to himself. He

had always regarded her as a social nullity, with a kind of pity, to be

sure, as a civilized person living among such people as the Dryfooses,

but not without a humorous contempt; he had thought of her as Mandel,

and sometimes as Old Mandel, though she was not half a score of years

his senior, and was still well on the sunny side of forty. He reddened,

and then turned an angry pallor. “Excuse me again, Mrs. Mandel. Do you

ask this from the young ladies?”

“Certainly not,” she said, with the best temper, and with something in

her tone that convicted Beaton of vulgarity, in putting his question of

her authority in the form of a sneer. “As I have suggested, they would

hardly know how to help themselves at all in such a matter. I have no

objection to saying that I ask it from the father of the young ladies.

Of course, in and for myself I should have no right to know anything

about your affairs. I assure you the duty of knowing isn't very

pleasant.” The little tremor in her clear voice struck Beaton as

something rather nice.

“I can very well believe that, Mrs. Mandel,” he said, with a dreamy

sadness in his own. He lifted his eyes and looked into hers. “If I told

you that I cared nothing about them in the way you intimate?”

“Then I should prefer to let you characterize your own conduct in

continuing to come here for the year past, as you have done, and tacitly

leading them on to infer differently.” They both mechanically kept up

the fiction of plurality in speaking of Christine, but there was no

doubt in the mind of either which of the young ladies the other meant.

A good many thoughts went through Beaton's mind, and none of them were

flattering. He had not been unconscious that the part he had played

toward this girl was ignoble, and that it had grown meaner as the fancy

which her beauty had at first kindled in him had grown cooler. He was

aware that of late he had been amusing himself with her passion in a

way that was not less than cruel, not because he wished to do so, but

because he was listless and wished nothing. He rose in saying: “I

might be a little more lenient than you think, Mrs. Mandel; but I won't

trouble you with any palliating theory. I will not come any more.”

He bowed, and Mrs. Mandel said, “Of course, it's only your action that I

am concerned with.”

She seemed to him merely triumphant, and he could not conceive what it

had cost her to nerve herself up to her too easy victory. He left Mrs.

Mandel to a far harder lot than had fallen to him, and he went away

hating her as an enemy who had humiliated him at a moment when he

particularly needed exalting. It was really very simple for him to stop

going to see Christine Dryfoos, but it was not at all simple for Mrs.

Mandel to deal with the consequences of his not coming. He only thought

how lightly she had stopped him, and the poor woman whom he had left

trembling for what she had been obliged to do embodied for him the

conscience that accused him of unpleasant things.

“By heavens! this is piling it up,” he said to himself through his set

teeth, realizing how it had happened right on top of that stupid insult

from Mrs. Horn. Now he should have to give up his place on 'Every Other

Week; he could not keep that, under the circumstances, even if some

pretence were not made to get rid of him; he must hurry and anticipate

any such pretence; he must see Fulkerson at once; he wondered where he

should find him at that hour. He thought, with bitterness so real that

it gave him a kind of tragical satisfaction, how certainly he could find

him a little later at Mrs. Leighton's; and Fulkerson's happiness became

an added injury.

The thing had, of course, come about just at the wrong time. There never

had been a time when Beaton needed money more, when he had spent what

he had and what he expected to have so recklessly. He was in debt to

Fulkerson personally and officially for advance payments of salary.

The thought of sending money home made him break into a scoffing laugh,

which he turned into a cough in order to deceive the passers. What sort

of face should he go with to Fulkerson and tell him that he renounced

his employment on 'Every Other Week;' and what should he do when he had

renounced it? Take pupils, perhaps; open a class? A lurid conception

of a class conducted on those principles of shameless flattery at

which Mrs. Horn had hinted--he believed now she had meant to insult

him--presented itself. Why should not he act upon the suggestion? He

thought with loathing for the whole race of women--dabblers in art. How

easy the thing would be: as easy as to turn back now and tell that old

fool's girl that he loved her, and rake in half his millions. Why

should not he do that? No one else cared for him; and at a year's

end, probably, one woman would be like another as far as the love was

concerned, and probably he should not be more tired if the woman were

Christine Dryfoos than if she were Margaret Vance. He kept Alma Leighton

out of the question, because at the bottom of his heart he believed that

she must be forever unlike every other woman to him.

The tide of his confused and aimless reverie had carried him far

down-town, he thought; but when he looked up from it to see where he

was he found himself on Sixth Avenue, only a little below Thirty-ninth

Street, very hot and blown; that idiotic fur overcoat was stifling. He

could not possibly walk down to Eleventh; he did not want to walk even

to the Elevated station at Thirty-fourth; he stopped at the corner to

wait for a surface-car, and fell again into his bitter fancies. After

a while he roused himself and looked up the track, but there was no car

coming. He found himself beside a policeman, who was lazily swinging his

club by its thong from his wrist.

“When do you suppose a car will be along?” he asked, rather in a general

sarcasm of the absence of the cars than in any special belief that the

policeman could tell him.

The policeman waited to discharge his tobacco-juice into the gutter. “In

about a week,” he said, nonchalantly.

“What's the matter?” asked Beaton, wondering what the joke could be.

“Strike,” said the policeman. His interest in Beaton's ignorance seemed

to overcome his contempt of it. “Knocked off everywhere this morning

except Third Avenue and one or two cross-town lines.” He spat again and

kept his bulk at its incline over the gutter to glance at a group of men

on the corner below: They were neatly dressed, and looked like something

better than workingmen, and they had a holiday air of being in their

best clothes.

“Some of the strikers?” asked Beaton.

The policeman nodded.

“Any trouble yet?”

“There won't be any trouble till we begin to move the cars,” said the

policeman.

Beaton felt a sudden turn of his rage toward the men whose action would

now force him to walk five blocks and mount the stairs of the Elevated

station. “If you'd take out eight or ten of those fellows,” he said,

ferociously, “and set them up against a wall and shoot them, you'd save

a great deal of bother.”

“I guess we sha'n't have to shoot much,” said the policeman, still

swinging his locust. “Anyway, we shant begin it. If it comes to a fight,

though,” he said, with a look at the men under the scooping rim of his

helmet, “we can drive the whole six thousand of 'em into the East River

without pullin' a trigger.”

“Are there six thousand in it?”

“About.”

“What do the infernal fools expect to live on?”

“The interest of their money, I suppose,” said the officer, with a grin

of satisfaction in his irony. “It's got to run its course. Then they'll

come back with their heads tied up and their tails between their legs,

and plead to be taken on again.”

“If I was a manager of the roads,” said Beaton, thinking of how much he

was already inconvenienced by the strike, and obscurely connecting it as

one of the series with the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of Mrs.

Horn and Mrs. Mandel, “I would see them starve before I'd take them

back--every one of them.”

“Well,” said the policeman, impartially, as a man might whom the

companies allowed to ride free, but who had made friends with a good

many drivers and conductors in the course of his free riding, “I guess

that's what the roads would like to do if they could; but the men

are too many for them, and there ain't enough other men to take their

places.”

“No matter,” said Beaton, severely. “They can bring in men from other

places.”

“Oh, they'll do that fast enough,” said the policeman.

A man came out of the saloon on the corner where the strikers were

standing, noisy drunk, and they began, as they would have said, to have

some fun with him. The policeman left Beaton, and sauntered slowly down

toward the group as if in the natural course of an afternoon ramble. On

the other side of the street Beaton could see another officer sauntering

up from the block below. Looking up and down the avenue, so silent of

its horse-car bells, he saw a policeman at every corner. It was rather

impressive.

III.

The strike made a good deal of talk in the office of 'Every Other

Week' that is, it made Fulkerson talk a good deal. He congratulated

himself that he was not personally incommoded by it, like some of the

fellows who lived uptown, and had not everything under one roof, as

it were. He enjoyed the excitement of it, and he kept the office boy

running out to buy the extras which the newsmen came crying through the

street almost every hour with a lamentable, unintelligible noise. He

read not only the latest intelligence of the strike, but the editorial

comments on it, which praised the firm attitude of both parties, and

the admirable measures taken by the police to preserve order. Fulkerson

enjoyed the interviews with the police captains and the leaders of the

strike; he equally enjoyed the attempts of the reporters to interview

the road managers, which were so graphically detailed, and with such

a fine feeling for the right use of scare-heads as to have almost the

value of direct expression from them, though it seemed that they had

resolutely refused to speak. He said, at second-hand from the papers,

that if the men behaved themselves and respected the rights of property,

they would have public sympathy with them every time; but just as soon

as they began to interfere with the roads' right to manage their own

affairs in their own way, they must be put down with an iron hand; the

phrase “iron hand” did Fulkerson almost as much good as if it had never

been used before. News began to come of fighting between the police and

the strikers when the roads tried to move their cars with men imported

from Philadelphia, and then Fulkerson rejoiced at the splendid courage

of the police. At the same time, he believed what the strikers said,

and that the trouble was not made by them, but by gangs of roughs acting

without their approval. In this juncture he was relieved by the arrival

of the State Board of Arbitration, which took up its quarters, with a

great many scare-heads, at one of the principal hotels, and invited the

roads and the strikers to lay the matter in dispute before them; he

said that now we should see the working of the greatest piece of social

machinery in modern times. But it appeared to work only in the alacrity

of the strikers to submit their grievance. The roads were as one road in

declaring that there was nothing to arbitrate, and that they were merely

asserting their right to manage their own affairs in their own way. One

of the presidents was reported to have told a member of the Board, who

personally summoned him, to get out and to go about his business. Then,

to Fulkerson's extreme disappointment, the august tribunal, acting on

behalf of the sovereign people in the interest of peace, declared

itself powerless, and got out, and would, no doubt, have gone about its

business if it had had any. Fulkerson did not know what to say, perhaps

because the extras did not; but March laughed at this result.

“It's a good deal like the military manoeuvre of the King of France and

his forty thousand men. I suppose somebody told him at the top of the

hill that there was nothing to arbitrate, and to get out and go about

his business, and that was the reason he marched down after he had

marched up with all that ceremony. What amuses me is to find that in an

affair of this kind the roads have rights and the strikers have rights,

but the public has no rights at all. The roads and the strikers are

allowed to fight out a private war in our midst as thoroughly and

precisely a private war as any we despise the Middle Ages for having

tolerated--as any street war in Florence or Verona--and to fight it out

at our pains and expense, and we stand by like sheep and wait till they

get tired. It's a funny attitude for a city of fifteen hundred thousand

inhabitants.”

“What would you do?” asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted by this view

of the case.

“Do? Nothing. Hasn't the State Board of Arbitration declared itself

powerless? We have no hold upon the strikers; and we're so used to being

snubbed and disobliged by common carriers that we have forgotten our

hold on the roads and always allow them to manage their own affairs in

their own way, quite as if we had nothing to do with them and they owed

us no services in return for their privileges.”

“That's a good deal so,” said Fulkerson, disordering his hair. “Well,

it's nuts for the colonel nowadays. He says if he was boss of this

town he would seize the roads on behalf of the people, and man 'em with

policemen, and run 'em till the managers had come to terms with the

strikers; and he'd do that every time there was a strike.”

“Doesn't that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned in Lindau?”

asked March.

“I don't know. It savors of horse sense.”

“You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson. I thought you were the most engaged

man I ever saw; but I guess you're more father-in-lawed. And before

you're married, too.”

“Well, the colonel's a glorious old fellow, March. I wish he had the

power to do that thing, just for the fun of looking on while he waltzed

in. He's on the keen jump from morning till night, and he's up late and

early to see the row. I'm afraid he'll get shot at some of the fights;

he sees them all; I can't get any show at them: haven't seen a brickbat

shied or a club swung yet. Have you?”

“No, I find I can philosophize the situation about as well from the

papers, and that's what I really want to do, I suppose. Besides, I'm

solemnly pledged by Mrs. March not to go near any sort of crowd, under

penalty of having her bring the children and go with me. Her theory is

that we must all die together; the children haven't been at school since

the strike began. There's no precaution that Mrs. March hasn't used. She

watches me whenever I go out, and sees that I start straight for this

office.”

Fulkerson laughed and said: “Well, it's probably the only thing that's

saved your life. Have you seen anything of Beaton lately?”

“No. You don't mean to say he's killed!”

“Not if he knows it. But I don't know--What do you say, March? What's

the reason you couldn't get us up a paper on the strike?”

“I knew it would fetch round to 'Every Other Week,' somehow.”

“No, but seriously. There'll be plenty of news paper accounts. But you

could treat it in the historical spirit--like something that happened

several centuries ago; De Foe's Plague of London style. Heigh? What made

me think of it was Beaton. If I could get hold of him, you two could go

round together and take down its aesthetic aspects. It's a big thing,

March, this strike is. I tell you it's imposing to have a private war,

as you say, fought out this way, in the heart of New York, and New

York not minding it a bit. See? Might take that view of it. With your

descriptions and Beaton's sketches--well, it would just be the greatest

card! Come! What do you say?”

“Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. March if I'm killed and

she and the children are not killed with me?”

“Well, it would be difficult. I wonder how it would do to get Kendricks

to do the literary part?”

“I've no doubt he'd jump at the chance. I've yet to see the form of

literature that Kendricks wouldn't lay down his life for.”

“Say!” March perceived that Fulkerson was about to vent another

inspiration, and smiled patiently. “Look here! What's the reason we

couldn't get one of the strikers to write it up for us?”

“Might have a symposium of strikers and presidents,” March suggested.

“No; I'm in earnest. They say some of those fellows--especially the

foreigners--are educated men. I know one fellow--a Bohemian--that used

to edit a Bohemian newspaper here. He could write it out in his kind of

Dutch, and we could get Lindau to translate it.”

“I guess not,” said March, dryly.

“Why not? He'd do it for the cause, wouldn't he? Suppose you put it up

on him the next time you see him.”

“I don't see Lindau any more,” said March. He added, “I guess he's

renounced me along with Mr. Dryfoos's money.”

“Pshaw! You don't mean he hasn't been round since?”

“He came for a while, but he's left off coming now. I don't feel

particularly gay about it,” March said, with some resentment of

Fulkerson's grin. “He's left me in debt to him for lessons to the

children.”

Fulkerson laughed out. “Well, he is the greatest old fool! Who'd 'a'

thought he'd 'a' been in earnest with those 'brincibles' of his? But I

suppose there have to be just such cranks; it takes all kinds to make a

world.”

“There has to be one such crank, it seems,” March partially assented.

“One's enough for me.”

“I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too,” said Fulkerson. “Why, it

must act like a schooner of beer on him all the while, to see 'gabidal'

embarrassed like it is by this strike. It must make old Lindau feel like

he was back behind those barricades at Berlin. Well, he's a splendid old

fellow; pity he drinks, as I remarked once before.”

When March left the office he did not go home so directly as he came,

perhaps because Mrs. March's eye was not on him. He was very curious

about some aspects of the strike, whose importance, as a great social

convulsion, he felt people did not recognize; and, with his temperance

in everything, he found its negative expressions as significant as its

more violent phases. He had promised his wife solemnly that he would

keep away from these, and he had a natural inclination to keep his

promise; he had no wish to be that peaceful spectator who always gets

shot when there is any firing on a mob. He interested himself in the

apparent indifference of the mighty city, which kept on about its

business as tranquilly as if the private war being fought out in its

midst were a vague rumor of Indian troubles on the frontier; and he

realized how there might once have been a street feud of forty years in

Florence without interfering materially with the industry and prosperity

of the city. On Broadway there was a silence where a jangle and clatter

of horse-car bells and hoofs had been, but it was not very noticeable;

and on the avenues, roofed by the elevated roads, this silence of the

surface tracks was not noticeable at all in the roar of the trains

overhead. Some of the cross-town cars were beginning to run again, with

a policeman on the rear of each; on the Third Avenge line, operated by

non-union men, who had not struck, there were two policemen beside the

driver of every car, and two beside the conductor, to protect them from

the strikers. But there were no strikers in sight, and on Second Avenue

they stood quietly about in groups on the corners. While March watched

them at a safe distance, a car laden with policemen came down the track,

but none of the strikers offered to molest it. In their simple Sunday

best, March thought them very quiet, decent-looking people, and he could

well believe that they had nothing to do with the riotous outbreaks in

other parts of the city. He could hardly believe that there were any

such outbreaks; he began more and more to think them mere newspaper

exaggerations in the absence of any disturbance, or the disposition to

it, that he could see. He walked on to the East River.

Avenues A, B, and C presented the same quiet aspect as Second Avenue;

groups of men stood on the corners, and now and then a police-laden car

was brought unmolested down the tracks before them; they looked at it

and talked together, and some laughed, but there was no trouble.

March got a cross-town car, and came back to the West Side. A policeman,

looking very sleepy and tired, lounged on the platform.

“I suppose you'll be glad when this cruel war is over,” March suggested,

as he got in.

The officer gave him a surly glance and made him no answer.

His behavior, from a man born to the joking give and take of our life,

impressed March. It gave him a fine sense of the ferocity which he had

read of the French troops putting on toward the populace just before the

coup d'etat; he began to feel like the populace; but he struggled with

himself and regained his character of philosophical observer. In this

character he remained in the car and let it carry him by the corner

where he ought to have got out and gone home, and let it keep on with

him to one of the farthermost tracks westward, where so much of the

fighting was reported to have taken place. But everything on the way was

as quiet as on the East Side.

Suddenly the car stopped with so quick a turn of the brake that he

was half thrown from his seat, and the policeman jumped down from the

platform and ran forward.

IV

Dryfoos sat at breakfast that morning with Mrs. Mandel as usual to pour

out his coffee. Conrad had gone down-town; the two girls lay abed much

later than their father breakfasted, and their mother had gradually

grown too feeble to come down till lunch. Suddenly Christine appeared at

the door. Her face was white to the edges of her lips, and her eyes were

blazing.

“Look here, father! Have you been saying anything to Mr. Beaton?”

The old man looked up at her across his coffee-cup through his frowning

brows. “No.”

Mrs. Mandel dropped her eyes, and the spoon shook in her hand.

“Then what's the reason he don't come here any more?” demanded the girl;

and her glance darted from her father to Mrs. Mandel. “Oh, it's you, is

it? I'd like to know who told you to meddle in other people's business?”

“I did,” said Dryfoos, savagely. “I told her to ask him what he wanted

here, and he said he didn't want anything, and he stopped coming. That's

all. I did it myself.”

“Oh, you did, did you?” said the girl, scarcely less insolently than she

had spoken to Mrs. Mandel. “I should like to know what you did it for?

I'd like to know what made you think I wasn't able to take care of

myself. I just knew somebody had been meddling, but I didn't suppose it

was you. I can manage my own affairs in my own way, if you please, and

I'll thank you after this to leave me to myself in what don't concern

you.”

“Don't concern me? You impudent jade!” her father began.

Christine advanced from the doorway toward the table; she had her hands

closed upon what seemed trinkets, some of which glittered and dangled

from them. She said, “Will you go to him and tell him that this

meddlesome minx, here, had no business to say anything about me to him,

and you take it all back?”

“No!” shouted the old man. “And if--”

“That's all I want of you!” the girl shouted in her turn. “Here are

your presents.” With both hands she flung the jewels-pins and rings and

earrings and bracelets--among the breakfast-dishes, from which some of

them sprang to the floor. She stood a moment to pull the intaglio ring

from the finger where Beaton put it a year ago, and dashed that at her

father's plate. Then she whirled out of the room, and they heard her

running up-stairs.

The old man made a start toward her, but he fell back in his chair

before she was gone, and, with a fierce, grinding movement of his jaws,

controlled himself. “Take--take those things up,” he gasped to Mrs.

Mandel. He seemed unable to rise again from his chair; but when she

asked him if he were unwell, he said no, with an air of offence, and got

quickly to his feet. He mechanically picked up the intaglio ring from

the table while he stood there, and put it on his little finger; his

hand was not much bigger than Christine's. “How do you suppose she found

it out?” he asked, after a moment.

“She seems to have merely suspected it,” said Mrs. Mandel, in a tremor,

and with the fright in her eyes which Christine's violence had brought

there.

“Well, it don't make any difference. She had to know, somehow, and now

she knows.” He started toward the door of the library, as if to go into

the hall, where his hat and coat hung.

“Mr. Dryfoos,” palpitated Mrs. Mandel, “I can't remain here, after the

language your daughter has used to me--I can't let you leave me--I--I'm

afraid of her--”

“Lock yourself up, then,” said the old man, rudely. He added, from the

hall before he went out, “I reckon she'll quiet down now.”

He took the Elevated road. The strike seemed a vary far-off thing,

though the paper he bought to look up the stockmarket was full of noisy

typography about yesterday's troubles on the surface lines. Among the

millions in Wall Street there was some joking and some swearing, but not

much thinking, about the six thousand men who had taken such chances in

their attempt to better their condition. Dryfoos heard nothing of the

strike in the lobby of the Stock Exchange, where he spent two or three

hours watching a favorite stock of his go up and go down under the

betting. By the time the Exchange closed it had risen eight points, and

on this and some other investments he was five thousand dollars richer

than he had been in the morning. But he had expected to be richer

still, and he was by no means satisfied with his luck. All through the

excitement of his winning and losing had played the dull, murderous rage

he felt toward the child who had defied him, and when the game was over

and he started home his rage mounted into a sort of frenzy; he would

teach her, he would break her. He walked a long way without thinking,

and then waited for a car. None came, and he hailed a passing coupe.

“What has got all the cars?” he demanded of the driver, who jumped down

from his box to open the door for him and get his direction.

“Been away?” asked the driver. “Hasn't been any car along for a week.

Strike.”

“Oh yes,” said Dryfoos. He felt suddenly giddy, and he remained staring

at the driver after he had taken his seat.

The man asked, “Where to?”

Dryfoos could not think of his street or number, and he said, with

uncontrollable fury: “I told you once! Go up to West Eleventh, and drive

along slow on the south side; I'll show you the place.”

He could not remember the number of 'Every Other Week' office, where

he suddenly decided to stop before he went home. He wished to see

Fulkerson, and ask him something about Beaton: whether he had been

about lately, and whether he had dropped any hint of what had happened

concerning Christine; Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the

fellow's confidence.

There was nobody but Conrad in the counting-room, whither Dryfoos

returned after glancing into Fulkerson's empty office. “Where's

Fulkerson?” he asked, sitting down with his hat on.

“He went out a few moments ago,” said Conrad, glancing at the clock.

“I'm afraid he isn't coming back again today, if you wanted to see him.”

Dryfoos twisted his head sidewise and upward to indicate March's room.

“That other fellow out, too?”

“He went just before Mr. Fulkerson,” answered Conrad.

“Do you generally knock off here in the middle of the afternoon?” asked

the old man.

“No,” said Conrad, as patiently as if his father had not been there a

score of times and found the whole staff of “Every Other Week” at work

between four and five. “Mr. March, you know, always takes a good deal

of his work home with him, and I suppose Mr. Fulkerson went out so early

because there isn't much doing to-day. Perhaps it's the strike that

makes it dull.”

“The strike-yes! It's a pretty piece of business to have everything

thrown out because a parcel of lazy hounds want a chance to lay off and

get drunk.” Dryfoos seemed to think Conrad would make some answer

to this, but the young man's mild face merely saddened, and he said

nothing. “I've got a coupe out there now that I had to take because I

couldn't get a car. If I had my way I'd have a lot of those vagabonds

hung. They're waiting to get the city into a snarl, and then rob the

houses--pack of dirty, worthless whelps. They ought to call out the

militia, and fire into 'em. Clubbing is too good for them.” Conrad was

still silent, and his father sneered, “But I reckon you don't think so.”

“I think the strike is useless,” said Conrad.

“Oh, you do, do you? Comin' to your senses a little. Gettin' tired

walkin' so much. I should like to know what your gentlemen over there on

the East Side think about the strike, anyway.”

The young fellow dropped his eyes. “I am not authorized to speak for

them.”

“Oh, indeed! And perhaps you're not authorized to speak for yourself?”

“Father, you know we don't agree about these things. I'd rather not

talk--”

“But I'm goin' to make you talk this time!” cried Dryfoos, striking

the arm of the chair he sat in with the side of his fist. A maddening

thought of Christine came over him. “As long as you eat my bread, you

have got to do as I say. I won't have my children telling me what I

shall do and sha'n't do, or take on airs of being holier than me. Now,

you just speak up! Do you think those loafers are right, or don't you?

Come!”

Conrad apparently judged it best to speak. “I think they were very

foolish to strike--at this time, when the Elevated roads can do the

work.”

“Oh, at this time, heigh! And I suppose they think over there on the

East Side that it 'd been wise to strike before we got the Elevated.”

Conrad again refused to answer, and his father roared, “What do you

think?”

“I think a strike is always bad business. It's war; but sometimes there

don't seem any other way for the workingmen to get justice. They say

that sometimes strikes do raise the wages, after a while.”

“Those lazy devils were paid enough already,” shrieked the old man.

“They got two dollars a day. How much do you think they ought to 'a'

got? Twenty?”

Conrad hesitated, with a beseeching look at his father. But he decided

to answer. “The men say that with partial work, and fines, and other

things, they get sometimes a dollar, and sometimes ninety cents a day.”

“They lie, and you know they lie,” said his father, rising and coming

toward him. “And what do you think the upshot of it all will be, after

they've ruined business for another week, and made people hire hacks,

and stolen the money of honest men? How is it going to end?”

“They will have to give in.”

“Oh, give in, heigh! And what will you say then, I should like to know?

How will you feel about it then? Speak!”

“I shall feel as I do now. I know you don't think that way, and I don't

blame you--or anybody. But if I have got to say how I shall feel, why,

I shall feel sorry they didn't succeed, for I believe they have a

righteous cause, though they go the wrong way to help themselves.”

His father came close to him, his eyes blazing, his teeth set. “Do you

dare so say that to me?”

“Yes. I can't help it. I pity them; my whole heart is with those poor

men.”

“You impudent puppy!” shouted the old man. He lifted his hand and struck

his son in the face. Conrad caught his hand with his own left, and,

while the blood began to trickle from a wound that Christine's intaglio

ring had made in his temple, he looked at him with a kind of grieving

wonder, and said, “Father!”

The old man wrenched his fist away and ran out of the house. He

remembered his address now, and he gave it as he plunged into the coupe.

He trembled with his evil passion, and glared out of the windows at the

passers as he drove home; he only saw Conrad's mild, grieving, wondering

eyes, and the blood slowly trickling from the wound in his temple.

Conrad went to the neat-set bowl in Fulkerson's comfortable room and

washed the blood away, and kept bathing the wound with the cold water

till it stopped bleeding. The cut was not deep, and he thought he

would not put anything on it. After a while he locked up the office and

started out, he hardly knew where. But he walked on, in the direction

he had taken, till he found himself in Union Square, on the pavement

in front of Brentano's. It seemed to him that he heard some one calling

gently to him, “Mr. Dryfoos!”

V.

Conrad looked confusedly around, and the same voice said again, “Mr.

Dryfoos!” and he saw that it was a lady speaking to him from a coupe

beside the curbing, and then he saw that it was Miss Vance.

She smiled when he gave signs of having discovered her, and came up to

the door of her carriage. “I am so glad to meet you. I have been longing

to talk to somebody; nobody seems to feel about it as I do. Oh, isn't it

horrible? Must they fail? I saw cars running on all the lines as I came

across; it made me sick at heart. Must those brave fellows give in?

And everybody seems to hate them so--I can't bear it.” Her face was

estranged with excitement, and there were traces of tears on it. “You

must think me almost crazy to stop you in the street this way; but when

I caught sight of you I had to speak. I knew you would sympathize--I

knew you would feel as I do. Oh, how can anybody help honoring those

poor men for standing by one another as they do? They are risking

all they have in the world for the sake of justice! Oh, they are true

heroes! They are staking the bread of their wives and children on the

dreadful chance they've taken! But no one seems to understand it. No one

seems to see that they are willing to suffer more now that other poor

men may suffer less hereafter. And those wretched creatures that are

coming in to take their places--those traitors--”

“We can't blame them for wanting to earn a living, Miss Vance,” said

Conrad.

“No, no! I don't blame them. Who am I, to do such a thing? It's

we--people like me, of my class--who make the poor betray one another.

But this dreadful fighting--this hideous paper is full of it!” She held

up an extra, crumpled with her nervous reading. “Can't something be done

to stop it? Don't you think that if some one went among them, and tried

to make them see how perfectly hopeless it was to resist the companies

and drive off the new men, he might do some good? I have wanted to go

and try; but I am a woman, and I mustn't! I shouldn't be afraid of the

strikers, but I'm afraid of what people would say!” Conrad kept pressing

his handkerchief to the cut in his temple, which he thought might be

bleeding, and now she noticed this. “Are you hurt, Mr. Dryfoos? You look

so pale.”

“No, it's nothing--a little scratch I've got.”

“Indeed, you look pale. Have you a carriage? How will you get home? Will

you get in here with me and let me drive you?”

“No, no,” said Conrad, smiling at her excitement. “I'm perfectly well--”

“And you don't think I'm foolish and wicked for stopping you here and

talking in this way? But I know you feel as I do!”

“Yes, I feel as you do. You are right--right in every way--I mustn't

keep you--Good-bye.” He stepped back to bow, but she put her beautiful

hand out of the window, and when he took it she wrung his hand hard.

“Thank you, thank you! You are good and you are just! But no one can do

anything. It's useless!”

The type of irreproachable coachman on the box whose respectability had

suffered through the strange behavior of his mistress in this interview

drove quickly off at her signal, and Conrad stood a moment looking after

the carriage. His heart was full of joy; it leaped; he thought it would

burst. As he turned to walk away it seemed to him as if he mounted upon

the air. The trust she had shown him, the praise she had given him, that

crush of the hand: he hoped nothing, he formed no idea from it, but it

all filled him with love that cast out the pain and shame he had been

suffering. He believed that he could never be unhappy any more; the

hardness that was in his mind toward his father went out of it; he saw

how sorely he had tried him; he grieved that he had done it, but the

means, the difference of his feeling about the cause of their quarrel,

he was solemnly glad of that since she shared it. He was only sorry for

his father. “Poor father!” he said under his breath as he went along.

He explained to her about his father in his reverie, and she pitied his

father, too.

He was walking over toward the West Side, aimlessly at first, and then

at times with the longing to do something to save those mistaken men

from themselves forming itself into a purpose. Was not that what she

meant when she bewailed her woman's helplessness? She must have wished

him to try if he, being a man, could not do something; or if she did

not, still he would try, and if she heard of it she would recall what

she had said and would be glad he had understood her so. Thinking of her

pleasure in what he was going to do, he forgot almost what it was; but

when he came to a street-car track he remembered it, and looked up and

down to see if there were any turbulent gathering of men whom he might

mingle with and help to keep from violence. He saw none anywhere; and

then suddenly, as if at the same moment, for in his exalted mood all

events had a dream-like simultaneity, he stood at the corner of an

avenue, and in the middle of it, a little way off, was a street-car, and

around the car a tumult of shouting, cursing, struggling men. The driver

was lashing his horses forward, and a policeman was at their heads, with

the conductor, pulling them; stones, clubs, brickbats hailed upon the

car, the horses, the men trying to move them. The mob closed upon them

in a body, and then a patrol-wagon whirled up from the other side, and

a squad of policemen leaped out and began to club the rioters. Conrad

could see how they struck them under the rims of their hats; the blows

on their skulls sounded as if they had fallen on stone; the rioters ran

in all directions.

One of the officers rushed up toward the corner where Conrad stood, and

then he saw at his side a tall, old man, with a long, white beard, who

was calling out at the policemen: “Ah, yes! Glup the strikerss--gif

it to them! Why don't you co and glup the bresidents that insoalt

your lawss, and gick your Boart of Arpidration out-of-toors? Glup the

strikerss--they cot no friendts! They cot no money to pribe you, to

dreat you!”

The officer lifted his club, and the old man threw his left arm up to

shield his head. Conrad recognized Lindau, and now he saw the empty

sleeve dangle in the air over the stump of his wrist. He heard a shot in

that turmoil beside the car, and something seemed to strike him in the

breast. He was going to say to the policeman: “Don't strike him! He's an

old soldier! You see he has no hand!” but he could not speak, he could

not move his tongue. The policeman stood there; he saw his face: it

was not bad, not cruel; it was like the face of a statue, fixed,

perdurable--a mere image of irresponsible and involuntary authority.

Then Conrad fell forward, pierced through the heart by that shot fired

from the car.

March heard the shot as he scrambled out of his car, and at the same

moment he saw Lindau drop under the club of the policeman, who left him

where he fell and joined the rest of the squad in pursuing the rioters.

The fighting round the car in the avenue ceased; the driver whipped his

horses into a gallop, and the place was left empty.

March would have liked to run; he thought how his wife had implored him

to keep away from the rioting; but he could not have left Lindau lying

there if he would. Something stronger than his will drew him to the

spot, and there he saw Conrad, dead beside the old man.

VI.

In the cares which Mrs. March shared with her husband that night she was

supported partly by principle, but mainly by the potent excitement which

bewildered Conrad's family and took all reality from what had happened.

It was nearly midnight when the Marches left them and walked away toward

the Elevated station with Fulkerson. Everything had been done, by

that time, that could be done; and Fulkerson was not without that

satisfaction in the business-like despatch of all the details which

attends each step in such an affair and helps to make death tolerable

even to the most sorely stricken. We are creatures of the moment; we

live from one little space to another; and only one interest at a time

fills these. Fulkerson was cheerful when they got into the street,

almost gay; and Mrs. March experienced a rebound from her depression

which she felt that she ought not to have experienced. But she condoned

the offence a little in herself, because her husband remained so

constant in his gravity; and, pending the final accounting he must make

her for having been where he could be of so much use from the first

instant of the calamity, she was tenderly, gratefully proud of all the

use he had been to Conrad's family, and especially his miserable old

father. To her mind, March was the principal actor in the whole affair,

and much more important in having seen it than those who had suffered in

it. In fact, he had suffered incomparably.

“Well, well,” said Fulkerson. “They'll get along now. We've done all we

could, and there's nothing left but for them to bear it. Of course

it's awful, but I guess it 'll come out all right. I mean,” he added,

“they'll pull through now.”

“I suppose,” said March, “that nothing is put on us that we can't bear.

But I should think,” he went on, musingly, “that when God sees what we

poor finite creatures can bear, hemmed round with this eternal darkness

of death, He must respect us.”

“Basil!” said his wife. But in her heart she drew nearer to him for the

words she thought she ought to rebuke him for.

“Oh, I know,” he said, “we school ourselves to despise human nature. But

God did not make us despicable, and I say, whatever end He meant us for,

He must have some such thrill of joy in our adequacy to fate as a father

feels when his son shows himself a man. When I think what we can be if

we must, I can't believe the least of us shall finally perish.”

“Oh, I reckon the Almighty won't scoop any of us,” said Fulkerson, with

a piety of his own.

“That poor boy's father!” sighed Mrs. March. “I can't get his face out

of my sight. He looked so much worse than death.”

“Oh, death doesn't look bad,” said March. “It's life that looks so in

its presence. Death is peace and pardon. I only wish poor old Lindau was

as well out of it as Conrad there.”

“Ah, Lindau! He has done harm enough,” said Mrs. March. “I hope he will

be careful after this.”

March did not try to defend Lindau against her theory of the case, which

inexorably held him responsible for Conrad's death.

“Lindau's going to come out all right, I guess,” said Fulkerson. “He

was first-rate when I saw him at the hospital to-night.” He whispered

in March's ear, at a chance he got in mounting the station stairs: “I

didn't like to tell you there at the house, but I guess you'd better

know. They had to take Lindau's arm off near the shoulder. Smashed all

to pieces by the clubbing.”

In the house, vainly rich and foolishly unfit for them, the bereaved

family whom the Marches had just left lingered together, and tried to

get strength to part for the night. They were all spent with the fatigue

that comes from heaven to such misery as theirs, and they sat in a

torpor in which each waited for the other to move, to speak.

Christine moved, and Mela spoke. Christine rose and went out of the room

without saying a word, and they heard her going up-stairs. Then Mela

said:

“I reckon the rest of us better be goun' too, father. Here, let's git

mother started.”

She put her arm round her mother, to lift her from her chair, but the

old man did not stir, and Mela called Mrs. Mandel from the next room.

Between them they raised her to her feet.

“Ain't there anybody agoin' to set up with it?” she asked, in her hoarse

pipe. “It appears like folks hain't got any feelin's in New York. Woon't

some o' the neighbors come and offer to set up, without waitin' to be

asked?”

“Oh, that's all right, mother. The men 'll attend to that. Don't you

bother any,” Mela coaxed, and she kept her arm round her mother, with

tender patience.

“Why, Mely, child! I can't feel right to have it left to hirelin's so.

But there ain't anybody any more to see things done as they ought. If

Coonrod was on'y here--”

“Well, mother, you are pretty mixed!” said Mela, with a strong tendency

to break into her large guffaw. But she checked herself and said: “I

know just how you feel, though. It keeps acomun' and agoun'; and it's

so and it ain't so, all at once; that's the plague of it. Well, father!

Ain't you goun' to come?”

“I'm goin' to stay, Mela,” said the old man, gently, without moving.

“Get your mother to bed, that's a good girl.”

“You goin' to set up with him, Jacob?” asked the old woman.

“Yes, 'Liz'beth, I'll set up. You go to bed.”

“Well, I will, Jacob. And I believe it 'll do you good to set up. I

wished I could set up with you; but I don't seem to have the stren'th I

did when the twins died. I must git my sleep, so's to--I don't like very

well to have you broke of your rest, Jacob, but there don't appear to be

anybody else. You wouldn't have to do it if Coonrod was here. There I go

ag'in! Mercy! mercy!”

“Well, do come along, then, mother,” said Mela; and she got her out of

the room, with Mrs. Mandel's help, and up the stairs.

From the top the old woman called down, “You tell Coonrod--” She

stopped, and he heard her groan out, “My Lord! my Lord!”

He sat, one silence in the dining-room, where they had all lingered

together, and in the library beyond the hireling watcher sat, another

silence. The time passed, but neither moved, and the last noise in the

house ceased, so that they heard each other breathe, and the vague,

remote rumor of the city invaded the inner stillness. It grew louder

toward morning, and then Dryfoos knew from the watcher's deeper

breathing that he had fallen into a doze.

He crept by him to the drawing-room, where his son was; the place was

full of the awful sweetness of the flowers that Fulkerson had brought,

and that lay above the pulseless breast. The old man turned up a burner

in the chandelier, and stood looking on the majestic serenity of the

dead face.

He could not move when he saw his wife coming down the stairway in the

hall. She was in her long, white flannel bed gown, and the candle she

carried shook with her nervous tremor. He thought she might be walking

in her sleep, but she said, quite simply, “I woke up, and I couldn't git

to sleep ag'in without comin' to have a look.” She stood beside their

dead son with him, “well, he's beautiful, Jacob. He was the prettiest

baby! And he was always good, Coonrod was; I'll say that for him. I

don't believe he ever give me a minute's care in his whole life. I

reckon I liked him about the best of all the children; but I don't know

as I ever done much to show it. But you was always good to him, Jacob;

you always done the best for him, ever since he was a little feller. I

used to be afraid you'd spoil him sometimes in them days; but I guess

you're glad now for every time you didn't cross him. I don't suppose

since the twins died you ever hit him a lick.” She stooped and peered

closer at the face. “Why, Jacob, what's that there by his pore eye?”

Dryfoos saw it, too, the wound that he had feared to look for, and that

now seemed to redden on his sight. He broke into a low, wavering cry,

like a child's in despair, like an animal's in terror, like a soul's in

the anguish of remorse.

VII.

The evening after the funeral, while the Marches sat together talking

it over, and making approaches, through its shadow, to the question of

their own future, which it involved, they were startled by the twitter

of the electric bell at their apartment door. It was really not so late

as the children's having gone to bed made it seem; but at nine o'clock

it was too late for any probable visitor except Fulkerson. It might

be he, and March was glad to postpone the impending question to his

curiosity concerning the immediate business Fulkerson might have with

him. He went himself to the door, and confronted there a lady deeply

veiled in black and attended by a very decorous serving-woman.

“Are you alone, Mr. March--you and Mrs. March?” asked the lady, behind

her veil; and, as he hesitated, she said: “You don't know me! Miss

Vance”; and she threw back her veil, showing her face wan and agitated

in the dark folds. “I am very anxious to see you--to speak with you

both. May I come in?”

“Why, certainly, Miss Vance,” he answered, still too much stupefied by

her presence to realize it.

She promptly entered, and saying, with a glance at the hall chair by the

door, “My maid can sit here?” followed him to the room where he had left

his wife.

Mrs. March showed herself more capable of coping with the fact. She

welcomed Miss Vance with the liking they both felt for the girl, and

with the sympathy which her troubled face inspired.

“I won't tire you with excuses for coming, Mrs. March,” she said,

“for it was the only thing left for me to do; and I come at my aunt's

suggestion.” She added this as if it would help to account for her more

on the conventional plane, and she had the instinctive good taste to

address herself throughout to Mrs. March as much as possible, though

what she had to say was mainly for March. “I don't know how to begin--I

don't know how to speak of this terrible affair. But you know what I

mean. I feel as if I had lived a whole lifetime since it happened. I

don't want you to pity me for it,” she said, forestalling a politeness

from Mrs. March. “I'm the last one to be thought of, and you mustn't

mind me if I try to make you. I came to find out all of the truth that

I can, and when I know just what that is I shall know what to do. I have

read the inquest; it's all burned into my brain. But I don't care for

that--for myself: you must let me say such things without minding me. I

know that your husband--that Mr. March was there; I read his testimony;

and I wished to ask him--to ask him--” She stopped and looked

distractedly about. “But what folly! He must have said everything he

knew--he had to.” Her eyes wandered to him from his wife, on whom she

had kept them with instinctive tact.

“I said everything--yes,” he replied. “But if you would like to know--”

“Perhaps I had better tell you something first. I had just parted

with him--it couldn't have been more than half an hour--in front of

Brentano's; he must have gone straight to his death. We were talking,

and I--I said, Why didn't some one go among the strikers and plead with

them to be peaceable, and keep them from attacking the new men. I knew

that he felt as I did about the strikers: that he was their friend. Did

you see--do you know anything that makes you think he had been trying to

do that?”

“I am sorry,” March began, “I didn't see him at all till--till I saw him

lying dead.”

“My husband was there purely by accident,” Mrs. March put in. “I had

begged and entreated him not to go near the striking anywhere. And he

had just got out of the car, and saw the policeman strike that wretched

Lindau--he's been such an anxiety to me ever since we have had anything

to do with him here; my husband knew him when he was a boy in the West.

Mr. March came home from it all perfectly prostrated; it made us all

sick! Nothing so horrible ever came into our lives before. I assure you

it was the most shocking experience.”

Miss Vance listened to her with that look of patience which those who

have seen much of the real suffering of the world--the daily portion of

the poor--have for the nervous woes of comfortable people. March hung

his head; he knew it would be useless to protest that his share of the

calamity was, by comparison, infinitesimally small.

After she had heard Mrs. March to the end even of her repetitions, Miss

Vance said, as if it were a mere matter of course that she should have

looked the affair up, “Yes, I have seen Mr. Lindau at the hospital--”

“My husband goes every day to see him,” Mrs. March interrupted, to give

a final touch to the conception of March's magnanimity throughout.

“The poor man seems to have been in the wrong at the time,” said Miss

Vance.

“I could almost say he had earned the right to be wrong. He's a man of

the most generous instincts, and a high ideal of justice, of equity--too

high to be considered by a policeman with a club in his hand,” said

March, with a bold defiance of his wife's different opinion of Lindau.

“It's the policeman's business, I suppose, to club the ideal when he

finds it inciting a riot.”

“Oh, I don't blame Mr. Lindau; I don't blame the policeman; he was as

much a mere instrument as his club was. I am only trying to find out

how much I am to blame myself. I had no thought of Mr. Dryfoos's going

there--of his attempting to talk with the strikers and keep them quiet;

I was only thinking, as women do, of what I should try to do if I were a

man.

“But perhaps he understood me to ask him to go--perhaps my words sent

him to his death.”

She had a sort of calm in her courage to know the worst truth as to

her responsibility that forbade any wish to flatter her out of it. “I'm

afraid,” said March, “that is what can never be known now.” After a

moment he added: “But why should you wish to know? If he went there as

a peacemaker, he died in a good cause, in such a way as he would wish to

die, I believe.”

“Yes,” said the girl; “I have thought of that. But death is awful; we

must not think patiently, forgivingly of sending any one to their

death in the best cause.”--“I fancy life was an awful thing to Conrad

Dryfoos,” March replied. “He was thwarted and disappointed, without even

pleasing the ambition that thwarted and disappointed him. That poor

old man, his father, warped him from his simple, lifelong wish to be a

minister, and was trying to make a business man of him. If it will be

any consolation to you to know it, Miss Vance, I can assure you that

he was very unhappy, and I don't see how he could ever have been happy

here.”

“It won't,” said the girl, steadily. “If people are born into this

world, it's because they were meant to live in it. It isn't a question

of being happy here; no one is happy, in that old, selfish way, or can

be; but he could have been of great use.”

“Perhaps he was of use in dying. Who knows? He may have been trying to

silence Lindau.”

“Oh, Lindau wasn't worth it!” cried Mrs. March.

Miss Vance looked at her as if she did not quite understand. Then she

turned to March. “He might have been unhappy, as we all are; but I know

that his life here would have had a higher happiness than we wish for or

aim for.” The tears began to run silently down her cheeks.

“He looked strangely happy that day when he left me. He had hurt

himself somehow, and his face was bleeding from a scratch; he kept his

handkerchief up; he was pale, but such a light came into his face when

he shook hands--ah, I know he went to try and do what I said!” They were

all silent, while she dried her eyes and then put her handkerchief back

into the pocket from which she had suddenly pulled it, with a series of

vivid, young-ladyish gestures, which struck March by their incongruity

with the occasion of their talk, and yet by their harmony with the

rest of her elegance. “I am sorry, Miss Vance,” he began, “that I can't

really tell you anything more--”

“You are very kind,” she said, controlling herself and rising quickly.

“I thank you--thank you both very much.” She turned to Mrs. March and

shook hands with her and then with him. “I might have known--I did know

that there wasn't anything more for you to tell. But at least I've found

out from you that there was nothing, and now I can begin to bear what I

must. How are those poor creatures--his mother and father, his sisters?

Some day, I hope, I shall be ashamed to have postponed them to the

thought of myself; but I can't pretend to be yet. I could not come to

the funeral; I wanted to.”

She addressed her question to Mrs. March, who answered: “I can

understand. But they were pleased with the flowers you sent; people are,

at such times, and they haven't many friends.”

“Would you go to see them?” asked the girl. “Would you tell them what

I've told you?”

Mrs. March looked at her husband.

“I don't see what good it would do. They wouldn't understand. But if it

would relieve you--”

“I'll wait till it isn't a question of self-relief,” said the girl.

“Good-bye!”

She left them to long debate of the event. At the end Mrs. March said,

“She is a strange being; such a mixture of the society girl and the

saint.”

Her husband answered: “She's the potentiality of several kinds of

fanatic. She's very unhappy, and I don't see how she's to be happier

about that poor fellow. I shouldn't be surprised if she did inspire him

to attempt something of that kind.”

“Well, you got out of it very well, Basil. I admired the way you

managed. I was afraid you'd say something awkward.”

“Oh, with a plain line of truth before me, as the only possible thing, I

can get on pretty well. When it comes to anything decorative, I'd rather

leave it to you, Isabel.”