PART III

Mrs. George J. Atkinson dropped upon a Chinese Chippendale chair in the

drawing room of the big house in Church Street, buried her face in her

hands, and burst into tears. Before her, lying open on the Duncan Phyfe

table, was a sheet of heavy cream-coloured notepaper. In the centre of

the page a single paragraph had been inscribed in a small, delicate,

but positive hand. It was the sixth “regret” for a luncheon party for

eight to be given during the succeeding week. The High Gods--or, at

least, Goddesses--of the social Olympus had decided that, if she was

not impossible, she was at least highly improbable.

Of course it was George’s fault. He never had held up her hands in the

fight that she had been waging for years for their social recognition.

There was nothing worth having that was not worth working for. And, by

inverting cause and effect, there was nothing that could not eventually

be won if you worked hard enough for it. A simple and pragmatical

philosophy, and a proven one, for it had brought her well along toward

middle life with an unbroken record of successes. Unfortunately for

her, the methods took small account of the personal equation, and

she was not attuned to the subtleties or skilled in the tactics of

alternate advance and retreat by which conservative and observant

strongholds are taken. She had made the fatal mistake in the beginning

of assuming that wealth was, as a matter of course, an effective

weapon, not realising that, with a number of the old families in

straitened circumstances, simple living had become the criterion for

good taste, and the ostentation had become, by contrast, mere vulgarity.

For several years now she had been entertaining with an industry that,

taken merely as an example of unflagging effort, was little less than

superb. Of course, she had had her snubs, but she had blanked her

mind to them and concentrated on her more responsive acquaintances.

Her parties had for the most part been well attended, and she had had

many invitations to teas and large functions, but, as time passed

and few acquaintanceships mellowed into friendship, she began to

have misgivings. She consoled herself, however, with the knowledge

that the old city was socially the most conservative in America and

consequently, while the most difficult, the most desirable to claim

as one’s own. She had at last concluded that the time had arrived for

the major movement. She knew well that there was no halfway ground in

the society of the old town. Membership in the St. Cecilia Society and

attendance at its balls was the one criterion. For a hundred and fifty

years the managing board of the organisation had gathered annually,

sipped their port, champagne, or Scotch, with the changing fashion,

and decided whether any of the “new people” in town were eligible for

recognition by their hereditary aristocracy. Within that charmed circle

one belonged, one was a member of the family. Outside of the fatal

line, one was always more or less a stranger stopping temporarily in

the city. The fact that such a sojourn might be protracted for several

generations was powerless to change the transitoriness of the visit or

the chill and punctilious politeness with which an aspiring ineligible

was received. He was relegated to the class the existence of which is

admitted, but not encouraged. Yes, the time had arrived, she felt, when

her husband might safely put his letter in for the St. Cecilia Society,

and, in preparation for the event, she would put down a barrage that

could be counted upon to blast out final obstructions.

Accordingly the misguided tactician had released a scourge of social

activity upon the inner circle. It had been bridged, dined, tea’d--at

first formally--and later with a certain creaking and ponderous

informality that whispered over the teacups, “just among ourselves--you

understand--” At first the attack, by reason of its surprise, seemed

destined for success. But it had been launched too far in advance.

There came a lull, and, as soon as the bewildered dowagers had time to

draw sufficient breath, they laughed. Laughter--the most deliberately

cruel sound that the human animal can make. Poor Mrs. Atkinson! Thumbs

down.

In the meantime Atkinson had fought his way blindly through the

turmoil. That fall he christened his evening clothes “the overalls,”

and he climbed into them obediently every night and went on duty. He

had not the vaguest idea what it was all about. At times he would

become aware of his wife’s eyes fixed stonily upon him; then he would

pull himself together and turn wearily to his dinner partner and the

weather. But he had a robust constitution, and the daylight was still

kind to him. He manufactured his cotton-seed oil, did a stiff trick

or two for the chamber of commerce, dropped into the Yacht Club for a

cocktail and a word about nothing in particular with the men, and did

not have a single social aspiration upon him.

Now he opened the door and stood gazing at his wife. He rubbed his

eyes, blinked, and gazed again, incredulous of the evidence of his

senses.

“The children!”

“No. They’re all right. Read that.”

Atkinson picked up the note, glanced at it, and patted his wife’s

shoulder consolingly.

“There, there!” he said. “I didn’t know you were so fond of her.

Grippe, eh? We’ll send over some flowers.”

She was always suspicious of George when he was as stupid as that. A

man who was that great a fool could never have made such a success of

his life. She had concluded once that because he never laughed aloud

and had a way of smiling at things that any one could see were not in

the least amusing, he had no sense of humour. Had it not been for this

she might have suspected him of the supreme audacity of making fun of

her. Now this suspicion fluttered in her mind, and she regarded him

with a long, penetrating look. His mouth, which had been twitching at

the corners, stiffened under the bristly moustache, and his eyes met

hers with candour. While she gazed, they actually mirrored sympathetic

distress.

Yes, George was devoid of perception, and she was an unfortunate

woman, but she would not go into that now. She could tell him about

his stupidity later. Now she could only say in a bleak voice, “She had

grippe last month. She has been at three affairs this week.”

“But she says, my dear, that she must save her strength.”

She looked at him almost curiously. “Are you really as simple as that?”

Then her voice went on in a wail of despair, “Oh, I ought to have known

that it was no use trying with you around. You’ve never backed me

up--you’ve never even understood what I was trying to do for your own

children.”

He kicked a gilt Louis Quinze chair out of the way, jerked up a

substantial product of modern America, sat squarely upon it, and said:

“Right. I haven’t understood. If there is a forest, I’m glad to hear

it. I haven’t been able to see it yet for the trees. Now try to tell me

in words of not over two syllables exactly what it is you want.”

“Very well,” she answered. “I will. The point is that you simply have

to get into the St. Cecilia Society this year because I have been

counting on it; in fact, I was so sure that when I was in New York last

summer I invited Valerie down to make her début with us. Now, if we

don’t get in, we’ll be in the pleasant position of having to tell your

sister that she can keep Valerie at home because we are not good enough

to be acceptable socially. Now, do you understand?”

He was callous enough to smile. “Good God!” he said, “is it all really

as simple as that? My dear, you have surprised me--and we have been

married fifteen years. Tell me, please, who are some of the managers of

the St. Cecilia Society.”

She mentioned several names of the sort that the tourist might be seen

any spring day deciphering from the oldest tombs in St. Michael’s

churchyard.

“It is sort of hopeless,” she concluded, “because I never seem to see

them at the teas and things that I go to.”

His smile broadened into a laugh. “Those chaps--teas! I fancy not. Why,

my dear, you have been tearing me away from them at the Club every

evening to doll up and go to your accursed parties.”

That night the House of Atkinson recalled invitations for two dinners,

a tea, and a luncheon, and the following afternoon George settled his

wife comfortably aboard the New York express. His parting words were:

“Better get several ball gowns--quiet ones. Outfit Valerie too. Bob’s

usually too strapped to give her nice things, you know.”

During the succeeding weeks Atkinson had more time to spend with his

friends. Two cocktails of an evening at the Club now, with plenty

of time to talk markets and the economic aspect of the new city

paving programme. Nice chaps, these, urbane, fastidious about rather

unexpected things; not smart dressers; insular, yes--not too greatly

concerned with the opinions and behaviour of the insignificant residue

of the globe lying to the north of Magnolia Cemetery and the south of

the Battery. Younger ones, who addressed him as “sir,” secure in a

breeding that kept the courtesy from appearing servile--older men, who

knew a horse, a mint julep, and a gentleman when they met one--men

who, like himself, were quite content to leave teas, the Sunday

concerts, the Poetry Society, and the Episcopal ritual to their wives.

Pleasant evenings those, with one’s own kind and no fuss about it.

And then, in the third week of his wife’s absence, that flying trip

to Washington to appear before the Interstate Commerce Commission on

a rate hearing of vital importance to the old city. The Committee had

asked Atkinson to act as spokesman. The clean, hard drive of his brain

against a problem always brought concrete results. He could talk to

the Yankees in their own language. Pleasant chats in the smoker. Nice

chaps surely. No putrid smoking-room humour. And the homeward trip with

the concessions in their pockets, a fight behind them, and a genial

comradeship in the air.

It was during the last hour of that railroad journey, while the four

of them were enjoying final cigars, that Atkinson spoke his first

words bearing on the matter of the coveted membership. One of the

men had been saying something to him--the fellow whose name always

reminded him of an heroic phrase from early American history--“Damn the

torpedoes--go ahead!”--not that--that was Farragut--oh, yes--“Millions

for defence, and not one cent for tribute”--that was the chap!...

When the man had finished his question, Atkinson smiled and said,

“Say, that’s awfully hospitable of you fellows. Hadn’t given the balls

much thought before. Suppose there’ll be a quiet corner of refuge for

middle-aged knee joints?--Not much of a dancer, you know-- Yes? Well,

I’ll send the letter over by messenger to-morrow.”

Mrs. Atkinson returned from the North at an opportune moment. Mamba

was receiving a thick, cream-coloured envelope from an elderly negro

who had the bearing of an ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. She

lifted the missive from the tray and, with shaking fingers, removed it

from its two envelopes--

“The Managers of the St. Cecilia Society request the pleasure....”

* * * * *

And while the social gods had been playing upon the hopes and fears

of the Atkinsons, Saint Wentworth, having attained his majority, was

journeying to Charleston in accordance with the family tradition to

attend his first St. Cecilia ball and represent his generation of the

line among his social peers.

But the years had wrought a change in the temporal, if not the

spiritual, aspect of the pilgrimage. Two generations ago the Wentworth

carriage, followed by a wagon for luggage and servants, would have

driven down from the plantation and drawn up impressively before the

hospitable Planters’ Hotel. The tailor and an army of mantua makers

would have been awaiting its arrival to put the finishing touches on

the new broadcloths and brocades for the all-important début. To-day,

Saint, with a week’s vacation ahead of him, served his last negro,

turned the store over to the malaria-bitten poor-white who was to

take his place, washed up, and caught a lift on a wagon as far as the

bridge. Over the ancient wooden planking he footed it to the city,

caught a trolley, and finally arrived at the little brick house in

Church Street.

The premises were deserted. Doubtless Mrs. Wentworth had gone out with

Polly to purchase some consummating touch for the girl’s costume. But

the magnitude of the impending event had charged the inanimate walls

of the building, and, as he let himself in, he caught the contagion

of excitement in the air. He took the steps two at a time to his

room--what a brick Mother was!--how absolutely invincible! His father’s

dress suit had been lifted from its long oblivion and made ready. He

could see that the old broadcloth lapels had been faced with silk in

the prevailing mode. The trousers lay beside the coat, beautifully

pressed and folded. A new white vest, a shirt, a tie, and gloves were

ranged beside the suit, and, under the edge of the bed, beside his

old slippers, stood a pair of new patent-leather pumps with the light

flowing and settling over them like some gleaming liquid.

Saint was caught by one of his rare waves of emotion. It choked him

up, left him shaken. It meant so much to her--all this. His solitary

life had given him leisure for thought, and he had developed a habit of

passionate search into causes, a feeling that surfaces didn’t matter;

that behind every physical expression of a personality there lay the

deep secret impulse. Now he lost sight of the makeshift wardrobe before

him and stood abashed before the unswerving purpose of which it was

an expression--the determination to hold a place for her children in

the class to which they had been born. Out in the country he had not

thought much about being a gentleman. It had seemed rather absurd in

the only life in which he seemed capable of succeeding--of course,

gentility was a state of being: you were born a Wentworth and you

refrained from doing certain things because instinctively they put your

teeth on edge. There you were--and that was all there was to it. But

being a gentleman as a career--that was different. To be done properly

it would involve so many things that were utterly beyond him: setting,

education, attainments--what was the use! There were still things

within reach--books, pictures, out of doors, and--yes--even the negroes

there at the mines with their humour, tragedy, and the flattering

respect and frank liking that they gave him. He was finding happiness

there. What did clothes matter?--dances, girls, surfaces--what was

the use of it all? And, God! what a lot of herself his mother had put

into it--saving for years, sewing, taking boarders, catering--and his

savings too, for he knew that a part of the money he sent home every

week had gone into the bank for the “coming out.” She could have taken

things easier all of these years but for her determination to be ready

when the time came to give Polly and himself these things--these--and,

to her, the intangible, but incalculably valued significance that lay

behind them.

He had things that he had wanted terribly to do with this week. The

fossils that the negroes were always turning up in the mines had

started him off on geology, and the director at the Museum had offered

to show him books and specimens. Then there was the Art Gallery. A

friend there had promised that he should meet some of the painters so

that he could see how pictures were made. Now the precious week had to

go in a round of entertainments--an ancient fetish. Of course he hadn’t

hesitated when his mother made the plans. In fact, he knew that he had

been predestined from birth for this moment. But he felt that it was

something to be done and--God willing--forgotten.

But the clothes, lying mutely before him, pulled against his mood and

brought him back to his mother and the vague intangible thing that she

was so determined to save from the wreckage of the past. He picked

up the coat and carried it to the window. In the light he could see

that the broadcloth was distinctly green in shade and shiny on the

shoulder blades. Oh, well, it didn’t matter. He had heard it said that

many of the boys of his set went in their fathers’ old suits, and the

waiters--most of whom were family retainers--in their grandfathers’;

that, in these lean years since the war, a dress suit was not worth

the name that hadn’t the vitality to see three generations of St.

Cecilias. He slipped off his coat and tried the garment on. With the

amazing adaptability of its kind the swallowtail fell snugly but easily

over his shoulders. He surveyed himself in the glass and was surprised

to see how broad it made his shoulders appear, how slender his waist.

He had outgrown his adolescent stoop and ranginess of arms and legs,

and the boyish grace and co-ordination of body, that had made him

a star pupil in dancing school, had come back and waited unnoticed

under the cheap, poorly fitting clothing that he usually wore. Now, as

he surveyed himself, he became conscious of the change. Odd--when he

went to the country he had always been tortured by the thought of his

appearance--of how he looked to strangers; and yet, in retrospect, he

realised that, for those four years, he had forgotten to think about

himself one way or another. Now he was again acutely conscious of

the impression that he would make, and yet no longer afraid. Perhaps

it was the coat that had put a charm upon him. Poor old Dad! He had

had a terrible struggle of it, but what a gentleman he must have

been!--gentleman, no doubt of that....

He heard the front door open and the animated voices of his mother and

Polly, like two girls going to their first party--a great night in the

house of Wentworth. Well, he’d play up--give them everything he had for

this week. It was little enough, that.

They supped early; then, while they were waiting for the carriage,

Mamba slipped over from the house next door to see them dressed for the

ball. She had retained calling acquaintance at the little brick house.

In fact, among these white folks who knew her past, she rejoiced in

a partial reversion to type, perpetrating outrageous audacities and

assuming an intimacy that brought dignified rebukes from Maum Netta

down upon her unregenerate head.

She had brought Lissa with her to see the dresses, and the girl entered

the sitting room quietly and stood near the door, her hands locked

loosely against the front of her dress, her eyes taking everything in

with a roving, eager glance. Saint had never seen the child before, but

his interest in Mamba and Baxter caused him to notice her closely as

she stood there. She must be about ten or eleven, he thought, and her

lack of embarrassment in the alien setting struck him at once. Also she

was beautiful. He knew that it was in bad taste to think of beauty in

a negro, but there was no other word that would serve. She was no more

a pretty child than an ugly one. Beauty was the one word. Those eyes

that were both Mamba’s and Baxter’s were like lamps in the small oval

of her face. A moment of wild conjecture came to the boy--where would

this child end?--what destiny did America hold for her?

Mamba stood surveying the three Wentworths--the mother in a black silk

that fitted perfectly over her mature but beautifully modelled figure;

Saint, wearing his swallowtail with an air; and Polly, radiant in the

cloudy whiteness of her first ball gown.

“Yeah,” the old woman ejaculated with emphasis, “dese is _my_ buckras!

Maum Netta now is jus’ bawn wid um an’ can’t help sheself, but me--Ah

is pick um fuh choice.” She turned to Polly. “Goin’ let Mamba carry dat

slipper bag, ain’t it?”

“Why, Mamba, I thought you’d be carrying Mrs. Atkinson’s. I hear they

are going to-night.” Then she patted the old woman coaxingly on the arm

and begged, “Do tell us how they got in. We’re just dying to know.”

Mrs. Wentworth spoke sharply: “Polly, I _am_ surprised! Do you call

_that_ being a lady?”

But Mamba bent over in one of her silent spasms of laughter, and when

she straightened up her eyes were snapping with mischief.

“Ah gots tuh tell,” she said. “Ah jes gots tuh! Ah been fair bus’ wid

de inside laugh, an’ Ah gots tuh let um out. De boss is fine,” she said

by way of preface. “But--well, Ah jes gots tuh say it straight--de

missis, she’s good tuh me, but she ain’t one ob us, Miss Polly.”

Mamba had memorised the words overheard in Atkinson’s report to his

wife upon her return to the city, and she gave them in a perfect

reproduction of his crisp, incisive speech, bringing her narrative to

a close just as a loud rap fell on the door and Maum Netta announced

the carriage.

The driver, a grizzled veteran of many seasons, held the carriage door

open, bowed them in, then banged it shut with that sound, at once loud,

restrained, and almost ritualistic, which, heard up and down the silent

downtown streets during the brief “season,” denoted a St. Cecilia night.

“Oh, Mother,” Polly gasped in ecstasy, “a slam-door carriage!--and me

in it! Don’t let anybody wake me up!”

Balls should always be given in buildings with high porticoes supported

by Corinthian columns, and with wide pavements before them traversed

by canvas canopies. There is something awe-inspiring, something out of

Greek mythology about such a temple of Terpsichore, with the up-flung

light accentuating height, and up above the soaring capitals the dark,

pregnant with mystery. And the canopy that crawls like a striped canvas

caterpillar down the steps and across the pavement to present its mouth

to the carriage doors adds just the frivolous touch that bridges the

gap between an ancient ecstasy and a modern one. It was before just

such a building that a carriage presently drew up with a flourish and

disgorged the family of Wentworth.

Up the wide stairway, with the covering of gleaming white, Kate

Wentworth, on the arm of her son, led the way--then on through the soft

glow of the ballroom and the warm cross-play of greetings and smiles,

to the spot before the second fireplace where Wentworth mothers had

chaperoned their broods for the greater part of a hundred and fifty

years. Her cousins, the De Chatigny Ravenels, would be next to them,

she remembered, and the Cooper River Heywards directly across the

floor. Yes, there was Aunt Sarah Huger with her turkey-tail fan. She

must be seventy now, but to see her to-night no one would believe it

were it not for the fan, which dated her definitely with the débutantes

of the late ’sixties.

There was constant visiting between the groups. Older cousins and

family friends came to welcome Kate Wentworth back to her accustomed

place and to cast an appraising eye over Polly and Saint. For the

first time in the boy’s life he was conscious of being regarded

with popular approval. In the background of his mind there loomed a

strange conviction that he had been there before. His usual diffidence

was gone, and in its place he experienced an exhilarating sense of

congruity, of measuring up to expectations.

Polly was immediately surrounded, her card taken from her fingers

and scrutinised by eager eyes--“What, nothing saved for me, Miss

Polly!”--“The sixteenth--no? Well, please--one for the next ball!”--“We

can’t let the season pass without one, now can we?”

Saint stood looking about him. Even the magnitude of the moment was

forgotten in the beauty that surrounded him. The hall was large, with

a high ceiling and tall, slender windows on both sides. An atmosphere

of home, and traditional hospitality, was given by four open fires

under Adam mantelpieces, two on each side of the apartment. About the

fires groups were gathered, laughing and talking with hands spread to

the glowing coals. But it was the colour that fascinated Wentworth. It

trembled softly from shaded lights, glowed in only a slightly lower key

from the women’s costumes, and lay banked in a profusion of flowers

on the mantelpieces and the musicians’ dais. Last night he had been

serving his negro labourers. A contrast. The sudden and unexpected

beauty and colour of the room created a mood of unreality; yet an

unreality in which he was intensely alive and in which he felt a glow

of possessive pride.

He saw a broad, squarely planted back near him that looked familiar

under the swallowtail coat--Mr. Atkinson. An awe that he had always

felt for his successful neighbour was immediately forgotten in a sense

of his individual responsibility as host. He stepped forward and held

out his hand.

“It’s a great pleasure to see you, Mr. Atkinson,” he said. “But perhaps

you don’t remember me. I’m Wentworth.”

The older man gave him a firm grip. “Why, thank you, Wentworth,” he

answered. “It is all rather new for us.”

A kick on the ankle from Mrs. Atkinson’s evening slipper brought

the sentence to an abrupt end, and Saint replied quickly: “That’s

interesting. This is my début too. I hope that you will enjoy it as

much as I intend to.”

Atkinson smiled his thanks and turned toward his wife. “My dear, this

is Mr. Wentworth. Surely you remember him.”

“Indeed I do. But you hardly ever give us a glimpse of you now. You

spend all your time at your--er--country place, don’t you?”

“And this,” interposed Mr. Atkinson, while Saint groped for an answer,

“is my niece, Valerie Land. Valerie, let me present Mr. Wentworth.”

The boy’s first impression was one of eyes, dark brown and very intent,

fixed upon his face with an earnest scrutiny. “Serious,” he thought,

“and at a dance, too. She won’t be a go here.” Then she smiled, and

he knew that he had been wrong. Daring and mischief were there now.

And beauty. And the swift fluctuations of a colour that could come and

go. There was a distinct air of worldliness about her that was new to

Saint in the women that he met. Even in that first casual moment of

meeting, he knew that she was definitely motivated. That she would know

quite well what she wanted. He responded to that with an instinctive

masculine withdrawal. Then he met the mischief in her smile again and

forgot to be afraid.

“May I see your card?” he asked. “I should like tremendously to have

the pleasure.”

He found a number of blanks. She had not met any one. Suddenly behind

the smiles of the little group he saw actual distress. They did not

know that rescue was sure to come, that guests on that ballroom floor

were never left to their own resources. They were standing there

smiling quite steadily without the least idea of what to do next.

A glance over his shoulder assured him that Polly was labouring amid

an embarrassment of riches. He could catch glimpses of her bright

young head through the milling circle of evening suits. Rapidly he

scribbled his name twice on the card that he held, then asked if he

might present some of his friends. His task was not a difficult one.

Valerie Land was a light that, under no circumstances, could long have

remained obscured. Soon she was having to smile her regrets and exhibit

her completed card to new arrivals. The men who had secured dances

thanked Saint. The Atkinsons beamed upon him. He had several dances for

himself. Being a gentleman was becoming interesting after all. At least

there was something to be said for it.

Behind its banked palms the band crashed into a Sousa march. Saint

hastened to his mother and led her into the line that was forming for

the cotillion. Everywhere about him couples were meeting, young men

with white-haired women on their arms, gay old gentlemen playing the

gallant to the débutantes--all of an age to-night, with the first-year

boys and girls eyeing their seasoned partners for fear that they might

miss some fine point in the old-world courtesy that still prevailed

upon a St. Cecilia floor. There were things that ladies and gentlemen

still refrained from doing and saying here that would be both done and

said at to-morrow night’s informal hop.

The dances--a sadly inhibited fox trot, a flapper dance tucked primly

back into petticoats for the night. But the waltz! You could give

your body to three-quarter time, it would seem, without violating the

niceties. Saint took Valerie into the curve of his arm and launched

her without a word upon the broad limpid tide of the “Blue Danube.”

The floor was just crowded enough to require perfect guiding in the

man and instinctive divination of his mood and tempo in his partner.

The surge and lift of the peerless old waltz, and the girl in his

arms, submissive to his slightest suggestion, yet so separate, so

passionately individual, worked on Wentworth like a drug. The small

brown head lay against his shoulder, and the girl never raised her face

to his. Before his eyes colours swam and wove as they drifted between

the couples. Colour always moved him deeply, and now the many-tinted

dresses whirling and streaming across his vision blurred into one

another, creating an effect like a rainbow with a frieze of faces

sliding along its upper edge. When the music stopped it was as though

the rainbow had fallen about them in a thousand gleaming fragments.

They drew apart slowly. The girl pressed Saint’s hand, then she raised

her face and gave him a long and preternaturally solemn gaze. They did

not join the promenade of couples, but turned away and found a corner

under the palms by the band.

An old bent negro appeared in the doorway with a tray in his hand.

Upon the tray gleamed a row of diminutive wedges of yellow fire. They

looked rather like the illustration in Saint’s old Bible story book of

the coming of the Holy Ghost. He looked up and saw them there. Then he

broke a tenet of the society by going and bringing one to a débutante

on the ballroom floor. He felt that he must do something spectacular;

substitute some memorable symbol for the inadequacy of speech. She took

the glass by its slender stem and touched his own gravely with it, then

they drained them without a word and put them down.

The touch of glass on wood seemed to break the spell. They laughed into

each other’s faces, the girl daringly, the boy a little shamefaced.

“Silly, aren’t we?” he said.

“Divinely.”

“Well, if it is sentimental and all that, I don’t care,” he defended.

“One does not have to apologise for being sentimental at a St. Cecilia

ball. It is a part of the show, like the old silver, and the sixteenth

dance. By the way, whom did you give the sixteenth to?”

She extended her programme, and her escort frowned heavily over it.

“This will never do,” he assured her. “Mr. Jervais is one of the

managers, and every one will think that you were stranded and he had to

come to your rescue. You must give it to me and let me tell him that

there was a mistake.”

“No,” she told him firmly, “I understand that the sixteenth is saved

for wives and sweethearts. I am not going to let you be gallant to a

stranger and break some Charleston girl’s heart.”

Feeling very masterful, Saint wrote his name boldly down for the dance

and handed the card back with a bow just as the band crashed into a

march.

The couples were forming for the march, and Saint, who was unengaged,

picked his way between them and returned to the great doorway, the old

negro, and the little lambent flames. “To carry your liquor like a

gentleman.” The phrase was a commonplace worn thin by long usage. It

did not really matter how much one got away with. It was knowing your

limit and stopping just on the safe side of it. It meant becoming more

and more and more of a gentleman with each drink until one emerged

the supreme and effulgent personification of all gentility. But until

to-night the question had been entirely a hypothetical one to the

boy. In youth drinking is a habit of the gregarious, and Saint had

always been a solitary soul. It had never occurred to him to go to

the sideboard in the little Church Street house and help himself from

the decanter that was always kept there. Now, as he downed his third

sherry he experienced that expansion toward his own kind that comes

from sharing a convivial glass. The bent old negro was an archangel

of reverential persuasiveness. Other men were in the group around

him. Barriers of reserve and restraint were crumbling. Now the low,

habitual hum of life leaped to a higher, clearer note; lights went up;

colours brightened, formed into beautiful accidental patterns, broke

and fluttered out again among the dancers, hovered shimmering, in the

corners. Roses heaped on the mantelpieces released perfume of an almost

unbearable poignancy. Music was no longer an external delight. It had

entered into his being and raced out in the pound of his arteries to

sting exquisitely in his feet, so that waiting for his next dance to

start was actual pain.

The hours rushed together and telescoped. The supper march formed,

coiled about the hall like an iridescent serpent, and headed for the

door. Saint, with his mother on his arm, stood near the end of the

column, and as its head turned and moved toward him, he got a swift

impression of the leading couple. Major Barker, the president of the

society, was carrying his seventy years like a familiar jest to which

he already knew the answer, but which was unfailingly amusing. He wore

the red rosette of office on his lapel, and his face with its ruddy

cheeks and white beard was bent smilingly toward his partner. She

seemed scarcely more than a child, and her roving, mischievous glance

passed from one girl to another with conscious triumph.

“Hello!” exclaimed Saint. “What is Betty LaGrange doing there?”

“Hadn’t you heard?” his mother whispered. “It’s the talk of the town.

June Mayrant was married last week and expected to be the bride of

the ball. But Betty has always hated her, so she ran off day before

yesterday and married Herbert Deas. She returned this morning and,

of course, as the newest bride, was asked by the Major. June was so

furious that she stayed at home.”

With incredible swiftness the supper march was followed by the ritual

of the midnight repast--oysters, then boiled rice, duck, boned turkey.

Champagne, and the rise and fall of talk that seemed gradually to

become rhythmic, advancing and receding like surf. Champagne again,

stinging the tongue deliciously, sending streams of tiny bubbles from

the bottom of slender-stemmed glasses to burst soundlessly under your

nose as you drank. Questions; and answers that you made from somewhere

outside of yourself, while you sat apart and were amazed at their

brilliance.

Dessert--and the moment when, according to the old custom, the men left

their own partners to circle among the tables, drinking healths to

old sweethearts, débutantes, visiting girls. Across the narrow table

Saint could see his mother’s face smiling at him through a faint, pink

haze. Behind the smile he saw something that pulled him up. His glass

was halfway to his mouth, but he replaced it carefully on the table.

“Sure,” he said as though she had spoken, “depend on me.” Some one had

stopped beside them. Saint looked up and saw his employer’s big frame.

Raymond held out his glass. “Twenty-three years ago to-night, Kate. Our

last St. Cecilia together.”

“Twenty-three years is a long time, Charles, but I still remember.”

Saint saw the pink haze deepen over his mother’s face. He experienced

a shock of surprise, then a swift, clairvoyant moment of revelation.

He remembered her reluctance to send him to Raymond for work, doubly

strange he had thought at the time because of that gentleman’s

eagerness to do what he could for him, his almost paternal kindness

during the interview. Now he saw his own father with a sudden intensity

of visualisation. Usually he had remained in the memory only as a

succession of impressions: a bafflement as keen as pain in the evenings

when he would come from work--rare days when the child would be

awakened in the dawn by the barking of dogs, smell of gun grease, old

hunting togs, and those nights when his father would return bringing a

sense of space and a shining joy with him from the woods. The house had

seemed bigger on those evenings, there would be laughter and sometimes

music with his mother at the old square piano. Then in a black wave

he would sometimes be overwhelmed by the impressions clustered around

that brief, sudden illness--whispers--darkened rooms--lilies--and the

dramatic finality of death in its first impact against the child mind.

But now, with his gaze resting on his mother’s face, he was aware

of his father standing there with them sharply etched against the

retina. The picture faded, and in its stead he saw Raymond, his eyes

upon Mrs. Wentworth’s. In his highly attuned state Saint then became

the possessor of certain knowledge--a fact that was there before him

renascent in the thoughts of the other two. His mother could have

married Raymond if she had wanted him. There would have been the big

house on Meeting Street--ease. But she had taken his father, Dad, who

had been born for the plantation and had been no better a fit in town

than his son had proved to be.

In a flash it had come and gone. He saw that his mother’s lifted

glass was just meeting Raymond’s and touching for the toast. The

supper toast! The moment for old romances to be remembered. He rose

and muttered his excuses, but the two who remained at the table were

smiling into each other’s eyes over their glasses, the woman with a

flash of girlish coquetry that made her suddenly a stranger--the man

with a flicker of an old pain about his mouth--romance. He turned

slowly and surveyed the room. Where was the Atkinson table? he

wondered--the Atkinsons--and Valerie Land.

While he searched, the dining room commenced to tilt slowly, like the

saloon of a liner in a sea way. Finally, at the far upper edge of it

he caught a glimpse of the face that he sought. The space between

the tables was crowded with men going and coming, pausing to drink a

health, then moving on. Heavy bodies jostled him from his balance,

and the angle of the floor became more and more acute. Suddenly, when

he had almost reached his goal that side of the room descended with a

swoop, and carried him to the girl in a headlong rush. She looked up

and regarded him gravely, speculatively, waiting for him to speak. But

now he encountered a new difficulty. Something strange had happened to

his lips. They were alien to his face, like a circle of rubber, and

when he bit them cautiously he could not feel his teeth. He could still

move them, but they had lost their identity and could not be trusted

with the things that were clamouring to be said. Suddenly he saw a way

out. He placed his hand over his heart, as he had been taught to do in

dancing school, bowed from the waist, and touched the rim of Valerie’s

glass with his own as he had done earlier in the evening--just that--a

silent toast--something too beautiful and significant for words. She

smiled and sipped her glass. He gave her a long look heavily freighted

with meaning, and executed a dignified retreat. Only, when he was

safely back at his mother’s table, his exultation over his achievement

commenced to give place to a vague doubt. Why, at the last, had Valerie

caught her lower lip under her small white teeth, and why, as soon

as his back was turned, had there been that suddenly hushed burst of

laughter at her table?

After supper--dances--one that impinged upon his consciousness--the

sixteenth. Out over the polished floor flowed the strains of “Auf

Wiedersehn,” weaving their old, sentimental spell about the feet of the

callous new generation, deluging them with their flood of associations.

Mothers, grandmothers who had danced their sixteenths to that air, and

had in turn endowed it with their own romances, watched with a happy

mist in their eyes. Something strange and new seemed to enter into the

boy, clearing his brain, sharpening his perceptions, infusing him with

an illusion of grandeur. He knew that he would speak clearly, that his

thoughts would be brilliant, his logic irrefutable. He went confidently

in search of his partner.

As she went into his arms, Valerie exclaimed: “What a perfectly

gorgeous orgy! Isn’t it marvellous to throw shame to the winds and

revel in it once more with the old darlings? I never want to be young

again. I want to die a rank sentimentalist.”

They plunged into the tide of music and movement. After the first

measure the boy was no longer conscious of the floor’s solidity beneath

his feet. He circled through a rarefied ether, guided and sustained

by the music. Around him again flowed the rainbow with its frieze of

drifting faces. Now and then, out of the blur, eyes, wide and eloquent,

close to his own--poignantly intimate for a moment--gone--the sixteenth!

* * * * *

Later, when Saint kissed his mother good-night in the hall of the

little brick house, he asked: “Well, dear, did I carry it off like a

gentleman?”

She answered with a shadowy smile: “By a very narrow margin, dear boy;

a shade too narrow, I would say. For a moment at supper you frightened

me a little, but that was silly of me.”

He turned toward the stairs. Polly had said her good-nights and had

preceded them. Now for a moment mother and son were alone together.

He hesitated, turned, and saw her standing under the hall lamp. The

girlish look was still upon her face, she was smiling faintly, and

although her gaze rested upon him he realised that it was unaware

of his presence because of its projection into some far place where

her spirit had gone alone. He felt that shock of strangeness which

comes with a sudden glimpse of the familiar from a new angle. In the

down-flung light of the rose-hued lamp he saw his mother as a stranger

might have, dissociated from all preconceptions; a woman still young,

beautiful, and a thoroughbred in every line of her figure, a woman who

had fought a lone cause with such dauntlessness of spirit that even the

honourable scars of the combat were hidden from prying eyes.

Saint harked back to the earlier moment of revelation, and almost

unconscious of the fact that he was speaking aloud, said tentatively:

“Mr. Raymond--at supper?”

She came back to him slowly as though returning by gradual stages

from her far land. Finally she was there again under the rose lamp,

beautiful still, but familiar. She did not answer the implied question

that hung in the air between them, but beckoned the boy to her in

silence. When he reached her side she took both of his hands in hers.

Then she said: “Do you remember your father, Saint?”

“Sometimes, just barely--but to-night at supper----”

“Yes, I know. It was when Charles Raymond came to our table. I saw him

then too. You’re a strange boy. Sometimes I’m glad. Charles’s son would

never have gotten that.”

She stood for a moment considering, her glance lowered, then she looked

him full in the eyes and continued: “You’ll be wondering why we had

that flash. You’ll be thinking it strange, maybe, but it’s not strange

at all, really. You see at the first ball of the season twenty-three

years ago both Mr. Raymond and your father proposed to me. I loved your

father--everybody did. To-night everywhere I looked I seemed to see him

again. That’s all--that’s the story.”

Saint said huskily: “And these things that mean so much to you--things

that you could have had--you let them all go--for him?”

Kate Wentworth’s form stiffened. Saint felt her fingers tense in his

grasp. “Certainly I did not give them up. You could not have said that

if you had known him well. We were both willing to wait awhile, that

was all, until he had won them for me. We were gambling with all the

odds in our favour--there was only one thing that we did not count

on--it happened--and we lost--that was all.”

His hands gripped so that she flinched. “Listen,” he said, and his

voice came in an odd constricted whisper, “I don’t know whether you’ve

lost or not. I’ve been wasting an awful lot of time with my silly head

in the clouds, but I’m not old yet--I am going to try.”

She drew him to her and kissed him, holding him close for a moment, but

when she spoke it was with her usual serenity. “Now run along,” she

said. “You’ll only want coffee in the morning, and you may have it in

bed.”

* * * * *

The next afternoon Saint came face to face with Valerie in an alcove of

the Gibbs Art Gallery. Meeting any one there was a little surprising,

as there were several teas in progress, and at that period art found it

difficult to hold its own in competition with society in Charleston. He

stopped short, his surprise and pleasure plainly evident. “You here!”

he exclaimed.

“Of course,” she smiled at him. “This is where I belong. But you! I did

not gather from the men I met last night that they went in very much

for art.”

“They don’t, and I suppose that is why I have always been rather

lonely. After all, friends have to more or less like the same things,

don’t they?”

“They do nowadays, I am afraid. Life is so short, and being bored can

kill so much of it.”

They had drifted to a window and stood looking across the street

into an old churchyard where great live oaks were bronzed by the

late sun. “That’s the sort of thing I like,” he said--“funny old

tombstones--pictures--music--books.”

Valerie looked up quickly, and he closed his catalogue with “and brown

eyes.”

“And champagne,” she supplemented.

He was immediately embarrassed. “That’s unkind of you. Last night was

an event, a sort of initiation. It won’t happen again. And now that I

come to think of it, you were unkind last night too. You laughed when I

toasted you at supper.”

“God forbid,” she replied piously. “A nobody from New York laugh at a

Charleston gentleman!”

A suspicion caused Saint to bend and glance under her lowered lashes,

then they laughed together in the quiet echoing room. “Oh,” she gasped,

“you were _such_ a gentleman. I did not know that they made them like

that any more. I suppose it takes lots of grandfathers to get away with

a jag like that.”

She swung him around and slipped her arm through his. “Come,” she said.

“It will soon be getting dark, and we must see what your local artists

can do. I am out discovering Charleston to-day.”

“You know pictures. What luck!”

“I ought to. I have starved for them long enough. There, those etchings

are rather nice. Who is the artist?”

“Oh, she is a Charleston woman. Been plugging away mostly alone for

several years, but she has taken several awards lately. I love her

work, but I don’t know enough about etchings to say why.”

Valerie coolly removed the thumb tacks and carried the picture to the

light. “Feel that surface. Get that texture? Good strong work. You know

how they’re made, don’t you?”

Saint shook his head, and she gave him a brief account of the

process--scratching the design on the protected plate, then biting the

picture out with acid. “I wish I had you in Dad’s studio for a while.

I’d show you. And that group over there. That’s interesting.”

She hurried Saint across the gallery to a small collection of misty

low-country landscapes. At a distance they gave the impression of

pastel, but on close scrutiny they appeared to be treated by some

process of colour wash.

“Say, here’s something new,” Valerie exclaimed. “Strong Japanese

influence, and yet how individual, and how they have captured the mood

of your country. It is local work, of course.”

“Yes, and I know her quite well,” Saint boasted. “You must meet her.

And I don’t think the Japanese influence is conscious. She is much too

unspoiled for influences. Like most of us here, she has had to work out

her own salvation. I’ve seen her out doing the marshes near the mines,

sitting day after day like a tiny wren, painting away at a certain mood

until she got it.”

“We’ll all be hearing of her some day,” Valerie affirmed with

conviction. “She’s got something of her own.”

Saint insisted on her seeing the permanent exhibit in the main gallery.

They were portraits, for the most part, and the girl moved quickly

along the big room. “These are interesting,” she said after her

inspection, “but not as art. I like them because they help to explain

you. I suppose most of them were colonels, and I am sure they all

carried their liquor like gentlemen.”

For an hour they loitered through the pleasant rooms, and Saint got his

first glimpse behind the surface of paper and canvas into processes

and methods. He watched the girl avidly while she talked. Down the

street St. Michael’s flung out the quarter hours. He did not hear them

strike. She had the thing that he had always wanted. She lived it,

breathed it as naturally as air. He had waked that morning with a firm

resolve to let the old dreams go, to find some solid terrain where he

could plant his feet and renew his struggle, to give his mother and

Polly their chance. But his motive had not been altogether unselfish.

There had been something about his own experiences of the night before

that had shifted values. Somehow the affair had assumed a greater

significance than he could possibly have imagined. Now he stood as

the recognised head of the family. There was a new and pleasurable

sense of self-importance in the thought. His mother had accomplished,

by being quietly and serenely exactly what she was, what no amount of

argument could have brought to pass, and behind his mother that sharp

invocation of his father. Then there had been the approval of the older

people at the ball, an approval that tacitly assumed that he was being

what was expected of him, that made him understand that measuring up

to those expectations was after all a fulfilment. But now the cross

current of Valerie’s talk threw his mind into confusion. A longing that

had nothing to do with reason twisted him with a pain that was almost

physical. In a moment he had blurted out:

“I have always meant to go in for this some day. I am going to paint.”

She turned and studied his face seriously, her own very grave. “I

didn’t know you felt that keenly about it,” she said at length. “Tell

me more about yourself, please. I really want to know.”

He asked to escort her home, and they took their way through the crisp

January evening around the Battery, where a winter sunset burned low

across the Ashley and flooded the river with crimson lacquer. But

now Valerie had turned from the contemplation of beauty to the more

practical aspects of life. She asked bluntly: “What do you do for a

living?”

Saint flushed. Her forthrightness challenged his own, but habit

prevailed, and he gave the old, vague answer: “I am employed across the

river in Phosphates.”

“Phosphates,” she wondered, “suggests something to do with soda water

to my uninitiated mind, but I don’t suppose a gentleman has anything to

do with soda fountains.”

“No,” he said, too preoccupied with the threadbare deception to smile,

“I have the management of the Phosphate Mining Company’s commissary.”

She gave him her wide gaze. “That sounds important. I am duly

impressed.”

Under her look his own eyes began to waver. Suddenly he blurted out:

“No, that’s all rot. It isn’t important. In plain English I serve a

gang of phosphate negroes all the week, then on Sunday I wash up, come

to town, sit in the family pew, and play the gentleman. So there you

are.”

She patted his arm in the gathering gloom. “I am so very glad you told

me that,” she confided. “Now we’re going to be real friends.”

“Not until you have told me something about yourself,” he qualified.

“It’s an awfully short story,” she said, “and a grey little one. You

see, Father is one of those artists who missed greatness. He even

missed distinction. He thought that because he loved painting he could

be a painter. Now he knows how little that has to do with it, and he

is too old to start over at anything else. Mother--Uncle George’s

sister, you know--oh, she’s such a brick. She works too, at lots of

things, and helps, and when I get home I will have to turn in too and

find something to do--not painting. Father says one artistic failure

in the family is enough. But in spite of everything we do, we don’t

get anywhere. Father can’t leave New York because he can get odd

jobs there--something from the scenic studios, interior decorations,

dribbling little things that keep us chained there yet won’t give us

enough to really live on. And New York is such a bitter place to be

poor in.”

Saint slipped his arm through hers, found her hand and pressed it. She

let her fingers remain in his, and, after a moment of silence, looked

up at him with her long scrutiny. “The two of us,” she whispered.

“Cinderellas at the ball. That was why I was so glad that you told me

about your work too.”

* * * * *

After his week in the rarefied air of the social world, Saint’s descent

to the earth of the mining camp had been a gradual one, during which

he was still enveloped in trailing clouds of glory. The events of the

brief sojourn had remained so vividly in his mind that they seemed for

those first few days more actual than the humdrum routine through which

he moved by habit rather than thought. He measured cloth and weighed

out provisions, but there was a shimmer over his tasks, as though an

iridescent gauze floated between his hands and the things that they

touched. It was not until the fifth day that he could actually be said

to have arrived. He was dining as usual at the mess maintained by the

white employés in a cottage near the washing shed. He was always silent

at his meals, and the other men usually took him as a matter of course

and discussed their poker and hunting across him as though he were a

part of the room’s furnishings. But to-day one of their number returned

from town, where he, like Saint, had gone for the ball and a taste

of the social season. He ragged the boy rather unmercifully, and the

others joined in, with the result that when he stepped again through

the commissary door the shimmering illusion was gone--salt pork,

cabbages, and herrings were again salt pork, cabbages, and herrings.

The swallowtail was definitely back in camphor, and his actual wage was

twelve dollars and fifty cents a week.

He seldom had customers in the afternoon, as the negroes were still

in the mining fields, and as the hours dragged by he came into a

realisation of what the week had meant to him. Now, with the glamour

gone, he could see quite plainly that its luminous centre had been

Valerie Land. Sitting in his little sanctum behind the store, with his

face buried in his hands, he looked for the first time into youth’s

keenest tragedy: a vast aspiration and the overwhelming conviction of

his own inability to attain it. He tried to consider it impersonally

and debated it as a purely academic question. Was it better to have

caught a glimpse of the unattainable or to have stayed in ignorance of

it all, sweating it out in the obscurity of the camp, finding escape

only in his reading, music, pictures--the sort of things that couldn’t

hit back? Now even the little that he was sending home was desperately

needed there. If Polly was given this year, and perhaps next, she would

probably marry, and marry well. In the meantime she and his mother must

have the best possible background.

Looking back on his parting from Valerie, he realised that some

protective divination had been at work within him, for he had made the

farewell deliberately casual, as though they were mere acquaintances

parting after a week of festivities. She had said that surely she would

see him on the following Sunday when he would come to town as usual.

He had replied evasively, telling her that there would be a lot of

work to be made up, and he did not know when he would be free again.

He remembered that she had looked surprised and hurt. Now he thought

bitterly that even that was best. There was no use to go ahead toward

an agonising smash. A clean break--and a memory--surely that was the

wisest. Now he must pull himself together--buck up--face it squarely.

Through the heavy stillness came the sound of an automobile engine

throbbing in the sand of the main road some little distance away. It

fretted the structure that the boy was commencing to build--challenged

its permanence. He dropped his face in his hands. “A bunch of tourists

on their way to see the Ashley River gardens,” he thought. They were

commencing to discover them now. Coming from way up North in their

great new machines that looked so out of place in the ancient solitudes

of marsh and forest. He wished they’d stay away. Their appearance

stressed differences so heavily, started absurd longings.

He heard a step in the store, got wearily to his feet, shook himself

together, and went out. The large room was gloomy, and by comparison

the doorway seemed almost dazzling in the afternoon sun. It framed a

foreground of white sand road, and a towering back drop of straight

pine boles. In the centre of the picture, showing only in silhouette,

stood Valerie.

She hesitated a moment, then advanced toward him. While he thought,

“This isn’t right. This will upset everything again,” his quick

perception of beauty caught the sinuous flow of the little body,

carried now with a childish bravado. He said, “Oh, good God,” and stood

motionless. On his face was the old look that had counted so heavily

against him when he was a child--the wide-eyed, almost vacuous gaze.

Finally he broke into movement, holding out his hand--“Valerie.”

“Yes,” she said, laughing a little shakily, “right you are, but don’t

be so frightened. I haven’t come to call. That wouldn’t be proper. I

have come on a mission. I have come to save you. Is there some place

where we can talk?”

She had spoken in a light manner but with a serious undertone in her

voice. Saint was mystified. He locked the store and opened the door

into his own room. She entered, and he followed her in silence. He was

bewildered by her sudden and unexpected appearance, and by the faint,

exciting vibrations that her presence released in the familiar room.

She did not look about her, saying at once: “Uncle George was taking

the children to see the gardens, so I got him to drop me off here.”

Then with her characteristic directness, she came immediately to the

point.

“You remember what I told you about Father and the bad time he has had?”

Saint nodded assent.

“Well, I have been thinking about him a lot since, and I couldn’t

help thinking about your saying that you were going in for

painting. It made me see you in a new light, and it made me see

your great danger. I thought maybe no one else would see it and

tell you. You see, it struck me suddenly that Father must have been

awfully like you when he was young--his passion for beauty--for

knowledge--reading--painting--confusing the love for a thing with the

ability to create it.” She was talking now in short, rushing sentences,

watching his face for any revelation that it might give her of his

response, but not giving him a chance to interrupt her. “And Dad isn’t

the only one that made the mistake. I have seen lots of others go

the same way. You see, they are two such different things. I knew a

real artist once--he almost hated his art--it was such a relentless

taskmaster--he was a terribly lonely soul--but his things are in the

Metropolitan now. At first, at the gallery that afternoon, you said

you loved pictures. Then, after I had talked to you about them, you

said suddenly that you were going in for it. That made me feel terribly

responsible. I could not rest until I could come to say _don’t_. Hold

on to the thing you have. Try to make it pay the way. Then you can have

beauty too. That’s all. Am I forgiven?”

She had been standing tensely before him while she spoke. Now her body

went slack. She sighed and let herself go into the depths of Saint’s

big chair.

The boy stood looking down at her with preternatural solemnity. “You

are right to have come,” he said, “but I don’t know yet. I can’t

think quickly, you know. There has always been a dream. It seemed so

far, so hard to get hold of. I kept doing all sorts of things like

those fossils there, hoping I would stumble on it and see it clearly.

Then came the ball. It changed values, made me see other things as

important, and on top of that, the day with you and the pictures. Now

here I am back on earth again. I see this job for what it is. I am

beginning to loathe it all--the ugliness--the cheap hypocrisy. And yet

I know now that I can’t let it go. I am even beginning to see some

justification for the hypocrisy. Polly’s got to have her chance. I’ve

got to play up for Mother. So there we are!”

“But there’s more than just that,” she told him earnestly. “You see, I

have been thinking terribly hard about it. It took a lot of courage to

come, and I would not have dared if I had not had an idea.”

She was so small and so desperately in earnest that Saint could not

help smiling down at her.

“Oh, don’t take this lightly,” she begged. “It hasn’t been easy for me,

and I can’t just waste it all. You must see it like this: Now you are

in a job that you can do. I bet you can do it better than other men

could, even not thinking about it. But you have lots of imagination

that you have just been playing in this room with, keeping that door

into the store closed all the time. Why can’t you spend some of it

on the job? Whatever it is, you can make it grow. Then when you have

succeeded you will have time and money for Beauty too, and she won’t

disillusion you then as she has Dad.”

Saint sat down opposite his guest and looked into the fire that

crackled on the hearth between them. After a while he said: “Dreams are

funny things. They had me mastered when I was a kid--shoulders right

to the mat--but out here I have learned to keep them in their place

a little. I only let them come into this room, and never across that

threshold into the store. It was hard keeping them shut up at first, I

can tell you. But now they behave. Then I started reading, playing a

little, thinking things out, studying. It seemed that if I could only

keep alive by what I got beyond that door, I could keep on finding my

happiness alone in here. Then there was always the vague hope that

sometime, somehow, a miracle would happen and I’d find myself writing,

or painting, and would never have to open the door into the store

again.”

“But don’t you see, you can’t keep on that way. That’s drifting. You

must carry your imagination over that threshold--into life--and make it

work for you. You are young, and no one can count on always meeting

life alone.” She blushed hotly, stole a sidelong glance at him that

brought reassurance, then hurried on: “I mean life is something to be

gone after--fought for--not just dreamed over.”

She broke off suddenly, then mocked herself, “Here I am getting as

intense as anything, positively preaching to you--and my pose in ruins.

My nice casual little self gone moralist. Well, don’t lie awake over

what I have said. We’ve all got to think things out for ourselves,

anyway.”

She stood up, saying that the car would be back any minute and she

had promised to be at the roadside to be picked up without delaying

the homeward journey. She had an overdone air of indifference about

her and held out her hand with impersonal coolness. Saint took it and

held it for a moment. Then he said with the solemnity of youth, “Thank

you, Valerie. I have to think this all out. But I’ll never forget your

coming.”

“Oh, that’s all right, quite all right,” she replied in a deliberately

passionless voice. “It is the sort of thing that my sort of meddling

person can’t help doing for a friend. You’ve taken it nicely. And now I

feel better for having done it.”

In the moment of departure she hesitated, turned slowly, and for the

first time examined the room, noting the etchings, the books, the

guitar; and on the table the rather absurd self-instruction book. She

completed her survey in silence; then she came and took both of his

hands impulsively. In the up-flung light of the fire her face was

luminous.

“Oh,” she said, “I am sorry for you and I’m proud of you. This little

room--can’t you feel it? It is not a playhouse, after all. It is your

battle ground, and you’re going to win.” She dropped his hands suddenly

and turned her back upon him, leaving him inarticulate and embarrassed.

Then she looked over her shoulder and laughed audaciously.

“There’s something else I came to say too, and I had almost forgotten.

It’s this: you need not be afraid to come and see me in town. I’ll

promise not to marry you unless you ask me.”

The boy goggled at her, his face a mask of comedy. Finally he achieved

a grin.

“Poor boy,” she laughed. “The Wentworths have never had to contend with

my sort before, but you’re young. You’ll learn.”

He walked with her to the road, and they saw the Atkinson car

approaching, a great, shining limousine, nosing its way along the

winding sand road. Atkinson was at the wheel, and the children had a

friend with them in the deep rear seat. Saint helped Valerie up beside

him while he responded to the cheery greetings, then stood and watched

the car diminish toward a far vanishing point. Instinctively he turned

back into the old avenue of escape--the splendid abstract dreams that

had pulled him through the bitter moments of his adolescence. He opened

his mind to them, and suddenly they were upon him, bright and amazing,

more actual than life. The great machine vanishing under the trees

turned the trick--its incongruity in that primitive setting. Under the

rubber tires, a scant six feet deep--carcases of dinosaurs, their great

teeth and bone fragments waiting for the shovels of the negroes to

show them the light again. They rose before him. In the dusk under the

live oaks he saw vast moving shapes oddly balanced on hind legs while

they reached to feed on treetops. They were so real, so marvellously

convincing, he regarded them with a sort of detached pride akin to the

thrill of creation. The last glimmer of a sanguine sunset, broken into

long bars by the tree trunks, penetrated the dusk and burned faintly on

the swaying forms. Then the swamp mists bellied in whitely and blurred

the huge outlines.

Saint became conscious of the roughness of the bark against which he

was leaning. “Yesterday and to-day,” he thought, “and what does it all

amount to, anyway?” He pulled himself up sharply. What would Valerie

say! She thought he had something in him, and she hadn’t put him down

as a quitter. He straightened up resolutely, and jammed his hands deep

into his trousers pockets. Then he strode quickly across the road and

entered the store.

* * * * *

One month had passed since Wentworth had been to the city for the St.

Cecilia ball, four years since he had gone on the payroll of the mining

company. Mr. Raymond had sent word that he would call at noon. There

was an important matter to be threshed out. The two men had scarcely

met since the morning when they had driven out together and Saint

had been installed. Mr. Raymond belonged to a world of statistics,

directors’ meetings, and conferences, with his orbit definitely

fixed in the big Broad Street offices and the surrounding financial

district. Wentworth had been directly answerable to the commissary

manager, an extremely low order of human being named Goodlow, to whom

a trade was as the breath of life, and who naturally regarded his

aristocratic subordinate with the traditional suspicion and dislike of

the poor-white. Twenty years of penny-pinching had raised him from the

keeper of one of the smallest branches to the position of purchasing

and managerial head of the chain. Saint knew that the man disliked him

intensely, but he also knew that, having come into the job over the

manager’s head, at the hands of the great Mr. Raymond, he enjoyed a

certain mysterious prestige in the Goodlow mind, and that was why he

was, at least, left largely to himself.

It was odd that Saint felt no nervous apprehension at the prospect of

the visit of his chief. He wondered about this for a while. What had

brought about the difference? Then he got the answer: the ball, not the

event itself, but the things for which it stood, the odd feeling of

importance that it left with him in spite of his disillusioning return

to the realities of the camp. He remembered his panic that day when he

had been given his job, and he smiled at his own expense.

When Mr. Raymond arrived he greeted his employé warmly, but there

was a subtle something in the air that seemed to temper the extreme

cordiality of his attitude toward him when they had driven out to the

store that other morning four years ago. He stood silent while the

outer door was locked, then, at a gesture of invitation, preceded

Wentworth into his little sanctum. Strangely enough, the room seemed

to impair the sense of superiority which an employer has every right

to experience in an interview that deals with policies of the company.

The room was less a part of the store building than it was of the man

before him. It confused the issue, making him feel like a guest in

his own house. Mr. Raymond stood looking about him in silence for a

moment. There were many books, and his roving glance failed to discover

a familiar title upon any of the neatly arranged bindings. There

were several etchings, and odd bits of statuary. In a corner stood a

glass case containing a small collection of fossils from the mines.

His glance came back to Wentworth and rested on him questioningly. He

had had him neatly catalogued. The boy had been hopelessly devoid of

ability, personality, everything that could make for success. He had

taken him on and buried him here because Kate Wentworth was one of

the finest women God ever made, and he wanted to do what he could for

her son. Now, reinforced by this inexplicable background, the boy was

emerging as a mystery, and he was suspicious of mysteries, especially

in business. His employé had changed physically too--filled out--and

there was an ease and resilience about his carriage that denoted

reserves of vigour.

Saint begged his guest to be seated and returned to the store for the

box of cigars. When he re-entered the room Mr. Raymond was standing

before the mantelpiece from which he was in the act of lifting a small

curious object, holding it gingerly in his heavy, blunt fingers.

“What’s this peculiar affair, Wentworth?” he inquired.

Saint took it and held it with a strange sort of deference. It was

about six inches in height, made of some heavy, dark wood. Oddly out of

proportion, it yet resembled a woman in a kneeling posture. The limbs

were massive and primitively modelled, the eyes half-closed, the nose

broad and flat.

The answer came with diffidence. “Oh, that! Why, that’s a piece of

primitive African sculpture. It was almost a duplicate of a piece in a

collection at the museum, and when it was offered the other day by the

British Museum for sale or exchange, the director arranged for me to

take it off their hands.”

He hesitated a moment, while he studied the bit of wood, then he added

impulsively: “Not often a fellow down here gets a chance like that, I

can tell you.”

“Ahem! no--I suppose not,” Raymond replied. Then, seizing the

opportunity offered by the topic, he sat down, relighted his cigar,

and said with some sententiousness: “Negro, eh! Well, that brings us

to the matter in hand. I thought, Wentworth, that we had rather given

you an idea of the policy toward Baggart and his men out here. It’s

not the sort of thing that we issue orders about, you understand, but

there is a general feeling among the men that it is for the good of all

concerned not to interfere with his administration of the law in this

district. Perhaps you haven’t quite realised this?” And he looked at

Saint with raised eyebrows.

“But I do understand, Mr. Raymond, and God knows I’ve minded my own

business. Why, I even let that yellow skunk Bluton hang around the

store, and keep my mouth shut while I wait on him.”

“Oh, it’s nothing about the store,” said Mr. Raymond hastily. “It’s

this matter of Davy something-or-other. I gather that Baggart

subpœnaed him for crap shooting Saturday night, and that you appeared

for him and swore to his alibi.”

“Oh, that!” exclaimed Saint, his face clearing. “Certainly. I see you

don’t understand. I had Davy here helping me take stock until midnight,

then I saw him go home. When he told me about his summons I thought

that there was some mistake, so I offered to go to the hearing and

clear it up for him. That was all.”

Raymond leaned forward with his elbows on the arms of the chair and

regarded Saint intently. The boy was struck again, as he had been that

first day, by the kindliness of his eyes, but when he spoke the bold,

flexible voice had a decisive edge to it.

“I see that I have to be very plain-spoken with you, Wentworth. It

is a hard matter to put into words, but I am going to try to get it

over to you. We--that is, the Company, the labour, the magistrate,

you--have all shaken down into a system that works. It may look unjust,

it certainly is faulty, but I am not sure that it is such a bad

arrangement after all. To begin with, the state put a magistrate here

and requires him to maintain an office, a constable, and live like a

white man on seventy-five dollars a month, and--here’s the joker--such

perquisites as the office may yield. The incumbent holds his office at

the pleasure of the voters--not the mining interests with their few

white votes, but the rank and file of the poor-white, small farmers,

workingmen, who fear the negro in the mass worse than they do the

devil. They give their man the job for what it is worth, requiring of

him two things: to keep the negro, as they say, in his place, and,

with almost no actual police at his command, to maintain order in

the district. From their point of view Baggart is a success. He has

absolute power to cause the arrest and fix the penalty of any man upon

the knowledge and belief of his constable or the invaluable Bluton. Now

you see what will happen to the mining company if it interferes. If we

stand with a negro openly against the magistrate we are going back

on our colour; according to his point of view, we are demoralising

the negroes and putting unsafe notions in their heads. In reprisal,

then, the magistrate has only to flood the village with warrants

under perfectly valid statutes, crap shooting, delinquent road taxes,

dog taxes, and God only knows what not, and in this way pauperise

our negroes, and deprive us of labour. No, we are expected to extend

co-operation, as it is called, and as long as we do we have a right to

expect him not to be too excessive in his demands. At any rate, be the

ethics what they may, we are powerless because Baggart is doing exactly

what his constituency put him here to do.”

“But,” interrupted Saint, “all the money that the fines bring in, what

becomes of that?”

Mr. Raymond inhaled a deep breath of tobacco smoke and blew it toward

the ceiling. “That,” he said with a cryptic smile, “is Proctor

Baggart’s little secret.” After a moment he added: “I may say in the

strictest secrecy that we are trying through an underground route to

have all magistrates required to give receipts for fines. That may be

some small restraint, but I doubt if we can get away with it.”

“But, Mr. Raymond,” Saint asked, “what would you have me do about Davy?

Why, he was working under my eyes at the time. I had to take care of

him.”

“Certainly, take care of him, but in the proper way. What you’ve done

is apt to lay him open for an ungodly disciplining now. It will be

Baggart’s indirect way of enlightening you. He has to come down hard

on insubordination. He has to be invincible. That’s what gives him his

hold over them. Remember that last case? Time Bluton was ripped by that

old fellow Ned? Baggart simply had to get that man. It cost him lots

of money, private detective, and all that, but he put him up for ten

years. Result: no more razor exercise since that night. But to get back

to this specific case--here’s how it stands: Everybody knows Davy’s

weakness for craps. He was due for a contribution, that’s all. You had

only to sit tight, and the next morning he’d have come to you for his

fine. If his credit was strong on your books, you could have advanced

him the ten dollars then and there; if not, you could have sent two

down on account. Baggart makes terms, you know--two down, two a week.

That way you would have been playing the game and everybody would have

been happy.”

Saint said, “I mind most getting Davy in wrong by it. What had I better

do about it now?”

The employer gave the matter thought. At length he said, “I’ll tell you

what. Just go over to Baggart. He’s not a bad sort to talk to. You’ll

have to handle it a little delicately. Compliment him on the way he

keeps order. Tell him that you are just beginning to understand how

he gets such fine results. That he can count on your co-operation in

future. Fine word that--co-operation. Then say offhand that you have a

special interest in Davy and that if he gets in trouble again to let

you know.”

“That’s a nasty dose to stomach,” Saint remarked, “but I can’t have

Davy persecuted. I suppose I’ll end by going.”

“That’s right,” Mr. Raymond approved. “Better take a bull by the horns

and haul him out of the road. Only way to get ahead.” He sat smoking

for a moment or two, then touched on the subject in the abstract.

“Strange tangle, this negro business. Had a talk with a neighbour of

yours about it yesterday. Atkinson--fine chap--open mind. He’s been

thinking a lot about it and had it sized up pretty well. He said that

the Yankee was all for the negro race, and hated him as an individual,

but that in the South, we love the individual negro, while we hate,

or at least fear, him as a race. I told him that if he had been South

during reconstruction and had seen them making laws for us in Columbia,

he’d know mighty well why, as a race, we have to hold him under

control.”

“But in the meantime,” Saint argued, “they’re not getting anywhere, are

they?”

Mr. Raymond’s voice was a little weary. “Oh, I don’t know, I’m sure.

Anyhow, there’s always got to be labour, and they are the best for us.

And you never saw one willing to work out here who had a dollar in

his pocket. It isn’t as though they were unhappy. Come, you have been

working here four years. You keep your eyes open. Are they a miserable

lot?”

“No, I can’t say honestly that they are. They have enough to eat, and,

to tell you the truth, when they actually cut loose for a good time

they seem to get a lot more out of it than I do.”

“Sure they do. The white man’s burden,” said Mr. Raymond, in dismissal

of the subject. “Enough to eat, friends, more time than we have, the

men have women, and the women have men. ‘Sufficient unto the day,’

as the Bible or somebody says. Now tell me how you’re getting along

yourself.”

Saint said, “I’m glad you asked me that. There are some things that I

want to talk over with you, and I want you to have a look at the books.

I have been thinking a lot about the work here, and I believe it has

possibilities. I have started some things already. Do you mind if I go

ahead with suggestions?”

Raymond regarded him with a surprise that was not entirely free from

amusement. He had never considered the commissary in the light of its

business possibilities. “Go right ahead,” he encouraged.

The boy began a little self-consciously, but soon lost all sense

of himself in the telling of his plans. “There’s quite a nice cash

business now among the outside negroes who farm. We could make a small

line of agricultural implements pay, I think. And I’d like to have

Davy as a regular hand. He’s quick at figures”--a wry smile tugged at

the corner of his mouth--“quicker than I am, as a matter of fact, and

he’s the most popular boy for miles around. I could get him for five

dollars a week, and, unless I’m mighty wrong, he’ll pay for himself

from the start.”

Saint, watching intently, could almost visualise the new ideas sink

slowly in, meet the dense wall of unquestioned preconceptions, and

slowly rebound.

“Hmmm, not so sure about that last item. Never use negroes in the

stores. Never thought of it. Can get a white boy just as cheap, and it

has always been white man’s work. Start now and it might put notions in

their heads.”

“Perhaps that’s why the cash business has been going to the little

negro shops over on the main road,” put in Saint quietly.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Then the big man laughed. “All right,” he said

at length. “Go ahead and try it out. Any more surprises for me?”

Half an hour later Mr. Raymond stood on the piazza of the store,

blinking in the glare that the white sand road flung upward. “Well,

good-bye, Wentworth,” he said. “Remember to do your best by us in

straightening out that damned awkward business with Baggart, and watch

your step in future. And about the store: go ahead with your plans, and

I’ll stand back of you with Goodlow and the town office. If anything

new occurs to you, you had better run over to town and take it up with

me personally.”

* * * * *

All that afternoon Saint was too filled with elation over the success

of his plans to give thought to any other matter. But the next morning,

plodding through the white sand on his way to Baggart’s office, the

unpleasant nature of the mission upon which he was engaged commenced to

eclipse the brightness of his mood. He had locked the store and started

off through the lemon-coloured winter sunshine whistling the air of

the last waltz that he had danced with Valerie, and while his surface

thought played lightly with that memory, plans for the store had been

taking form in a substratum of his mind. But as he tramped along a

shadow commenced to grow out of the Baggart business and cast a gloom

over his mood. Finally he stopped whistling, then, almost defiantly, he

faced the unpleasant issue.

No longer confronted by the powerful and persuasive personality of his

employer, Saint now saw the incident for exactly what it was. He was

on his way to apologise for having done a thing that, deep within his

instinctive feeling for right and wrong, he knew to have been right.

All of the arguments that he had listened to the day before could

not change that. He remembered now how his simple and unpremeditated

action had affected the magistrate’s court when he had gone in and

sworn to Davy’s alibi. The negroes had regarded him with amazement.

That had impressed him at the time and made him wonder. But Baggart

had immediately suspended the case upon which he was engaged, received

him with an exaggerated courtesy, at once removed the charge from the

books, and thanked him cordially for coming. “The dirty hound,” Saint

thought. “He must have gone straight to the Company’s office and whined

about it.” With that impulse to vent anger upon an inanimate object, he

struck viciously at a wayside bush with the stick that he was carrying.

Then his thoughts veered from the specific case to the ethics involved

in the affair. What an intricate mess it all was. You could not go

about righting a wrong in a perfectly direct and natural way because of

appearances, because of the effect that it would produce upon a number

of minds that had no concern with the actual incident. Everything

had to be done upon such an absurdly personal basis. Davy was his

employé, and so, for personal reasons, he would do what he could for

Davy. Baggart, who was a state official, nevertheless managed to make

everything that he did an obvious personal concession, and expected

private and personal concessions in return. As long as a man looked

after his own negroes in accordance with the customs prevailing in his

particular locality, no one thought anything of it. But if he made an

open move that carried the slightest suggestion of impersonal interest

in the race, that was another matter, and he was due to be cozened

gently back into line.

Well, now that he came to think of it, that was exactly where his

grandfather had stood in 1861. He had enjoyed the reputation of

taking better care of his slaves than any other man in the parish.

He had positively pampered them. Yet he had died at Gettysburg

in defence of certain principles, among which certainly must be

numbered the institution of slavery. But no, that was not quite a

fair comparison. In town, at any rate, there were now good schools.

There was even a state college for negroes. There were coloured

business and professional men who were earning tidy incomes and living

comfortably. Saint’s mind locked with this apparent inconsistency.

Suddenly he saw an explanation--not a solution--there probably wasn’t

any--but at least the motivating principle. Expediency. In town, both

numbers and power rested securely with the white, and so he could

afford to appear in court for a negro, could educate him, give him a

chance in business, indulge his own benign paternalism. Out in the

agricultural region, staying on upon the same soil that had enslaved

their grandfathers, they were held to the old code of behaviour by a

tradition of servitude, reinforced in many cases by an actual affection

to their landlords. There they were safe. Only here in the industrial

belt, thronged as it was by the rag-tag and bob-tail of the race, ten,

twenty, a hundred of them to a single white, the grip could not be

allowed to slacken. White supremacy must remain absolute.

A dazzling idea struck the boy, an idea as fantastic, as improbable

as the old grandiose and heroic dreams. Suppose he should openly

abandon expediency for principle. Suppose he should turn back now,

instead of going on and repudiating his attitude of three days ago.

What would happen? He stopped dead in his tracks, trying to estimate

the consequences. First, according to Mr. Raymond’s reasoning, Davy

would soon be apt to receive another summons. He would be fined,

perhaps even given a term on the chain gang. It would be easy

enough for Baggart to get him in a crap game if he just watched and

waited. Then most certainly his own position would be jeopardised.

He would no longer be one of a group bound together by a wordless,

but absolute, understanding. He’d be out in a no-man’s land of his

own making. He would lose the chance that he was just beginning to

realise in the store. Hunting for work again. Failure again. His

mother--Polly--Valerie.

Out of a job, what good would he be to himself or anybody else?

Supposing that he was really interested in the problems of the

negroes and wanted to help, was it not best to stay here, observe the

conventions, and give them a leg up one at a time? Yes, that seemed the

practical thing to do. But if that was so, why was it so difficult to

go on to Baggart’s? It ought to be plain sailing if he had satisfied

himself that he was right. He searched for a reason that would bring

conviction to himself. Of course, it was his own pride. No gentleman

would relish having to apologise to a man of Baggart’s type. Well,

then, he must make a personal sacrifice in the matter. For Valerie--his

mother--Polly--for the assistance that he might be able to render

to the negroes themselves, he must pocket his pride. He squared his

shoulders, feeling not a little heroic. Before him the broad belt of

white sand swung out to divide at a little distance into two roads, one

cutting straight back between the pines into the vast loneliness of the

black back country, the other swinging a sharp right angle toward the

river and Baggart’s office. Saint stood, his eyes before him, and tried

to force the familiar, objective details of sand, forest, and sky in

upon his mind. He must get out of himself and go ahead with the thing

he had to do. But the picture-making faculty that had so often been

his escape now turned upon him and endowed the way that he must choose,

with its wide-flung alternatives, with a huge and momentous symbolism.

His heroic pose collapsed. With a gesture of utter weariness he set his

face in the direction of Baggart’s office.

* * * * *

In Charleston the brief and intense social season had burned itself

out, and the chimes of St. Michael’s, that had carolled it brightly

through its short career, were now, in their Lenten tolling, sounding

its requiem. For Lent still made a sharp line of demarkation in the

behaviour of the old city, with its deeply imbedded Church of England

tradition. The imposing building, with its lofty façade and Grecian

portico, where the St. Cecilia had held sway, had now about it an air

of desertion and neglect. There seemed suddenly to be more old women in

mourning, fewer girls in bright colours, for the visiting débutantes

were packing for homeward journeys, and local belles were fluttering

away on visits to more gala and less godly metropolises.

Saint was in the city for Sunday, but he did not attend church with his

mother and sister. He had two engagements that morning. Mr. Raymond had

made an appointment to talk with him at his home at eleven o’clock,

and, after that, he had to tell Valerie good-bye before she caught a

northbound train at two. Two such different engagements, each with its

train of associations, had made the boy of two minds during a sleepless

night and a preoccupied early morning. He was like a spirit that is

trying to inhabit two separate planes of existence, and the way that

his thoughts soared when Valerie brushed across them made it terribly

hard to hold his feet down to the solid substance of the proposition

that he was going to make to his employer.

It was almost three months since Valerie’s call at the mines, when he

had listened to her solemn warning. That event, and the visit of Mr.

Raymond coming on top of it, had opened up a new phase of existence

for him. Books, music, fossils, even painting had been forgotten for

the time. He had plunged with the thrill of a fresh adventure into

the problem of making the commissary a paying proposition. Once his

interest had been aroused and he had looked over the records, he was

amazed to see what had come to pass even without conscious effort.

He had known that he enjoyed the confidence of the negroes, and that

gradually they had started to bring their friends to shop at his

commissary. But his mind had been absorbed with other matters, and he

had not realised that, from zero, he had built up a very considerable

cash business among non-employés of the mines.

Then had come the impulse that prompted him to ask for Davy as a

helper. Immediately sales had boomed. At his own suggestion the boy

had taken the slack hours in the afternoon to go out on advertising

excursions among his friends, and the result had been that both Saint

and himself were kept going at top speed during the hours when the

negroes came to do their purchasing.

Saint was amazed at the ease with which results were accomplished.

Always before business success had seemed to him a thing separate from

life--a feat of legerdemain requiring a certain sort of person for its

accomplishment. Now he saw it for the first time as the outgrowth of

personality--a by-product of the man himself. He had discovered too

that it brought a thrilling satisfaction entirely aside from the money

that it yielded. It was a game to be played. His imagination was as

busy as ever, only instead of being what he now considered a vague and

demoralising agency, it was wedded to actuality and was building high

dreams over the shabby little commissary.

Some of these dreams he had talked over with Davy, who knew exactly

what the negroes wanted and what they could afford to pay for it.

Finally he had mapped out concrete plans and had asked Mr. Raymond for

this interview, immediately after which he would have to go and tell

Valerie good-bye.

Since the afternoon of Valerie’s visit to the mines he had seen her

as often as possible. At first they had spent their Sunday afternoons

at the museum or art gallery. The pictures were not on exhibition on

Sundays, but Saint had gained admission through the secretary, and he

and the girl had the big echoing room with all of its splendours to

themselves. They would look at the pictures for a while, then sit on a

settee and let their talk drift where it would. Valerie told him about

her father. “The sweetest, the gentlest man alive. Everything to make

an artist but the little essential spark.” Once she said passionately:

“Only geniuses should be allowed to create. It’s cruel to let others

try and fail. You see the pitiful thing is that Father knows good work.

He’s his own judge. And the things that he has to do to keep alive! He

will never go back to see them after they are done, and he won’t let us

go to see them. He has a creed, and he must break it to live.”

Sometimes, in brighter moods, Valerie would tell of the other side of

their life: the casual comings and goings of people who could sing,

paint, act--New York, and the terrible splendour of its nights. Then

Saint would momentarily revert to his old gods and exclaim: “I want

that life, Val, I want it terribly,” or, “That’s the real thing. Can’t

you just feel that, Val?” and she would reassure him with, “But, don’t

you see, you can have all of that and more when you have succeeded at

what you are doing. That’s what I want for you, freedom--then beauty.”

Then Mamba had taken a hand in their affairs. Employing her old

tactics, she had insinuated herself into the good graces of Valerie

and had attached herself to her as personal maid. Then one night, when

Saint was telling Valerie good-night, she stumbled into them at the

front door and asked them with the excessive innocence of manner that

always masked some deep design if they would like to accompany her to

a special midnight service at her church. Saint recognised the manner

immediately and turned a knowing grin upon her. “Old Machiavelli,” he

thought, “she has something up. I wonder whether she is really doing

it for love of us or starting to run up an account against the next

difficulty of one of her precious daughters.” He finally credited her

with the double motive. Valerie was thrilled at the prospect of the

adventure.

Mamba led the way through an alley so narrow that both walls could be

touched at the same moment with the extended hands, and on into the

labyrinth of back-yard passageways of lower East Bay, then suddenly

through a side door into a darkened corner of the large room that

served as a meeting house. This was no ordinary service subject to the

occasional invasion of a white visitor in search of local colour. It

was a section of Africa transplanted to new soil and, with the lapse

of a century, still black with jungle mystery, crimson with jungle

passion. Mamba, seizing a moment when the faculties of the swaying

crowd were locked fast in the grip of a chant, got them unobserved into

a dark corner near the door. Over them, like the crash of breakers,

swept the terrific, cumulative intensity of the worship, now throbbing

with an old terror of jungle gods, again lifting suddenly into rapt

adoration of the new Christ. This, and the pounding rhythms of the

spirituals, the amazing emotional release wrought by the music, so

fascinated and yet frightened the white girl that she sat huddled

against Saint, clinging to his hand with tense fingers, her head

pressed against his shoulder. While between them and the nearest group

of worshippers Mamba sat on guard with her rare and cryptic Mona

Lisa smile playing incongruously about her grim mouth and baring the

formidable teeth in a thin up-curving line.

It was in the art gallery on the following afternoon that the avowal

had come. A silence had grown between them. The high, windowless walls

muted the occasional street noises and surrounded them with a barrier

of beauty against the importunate realities that waited for them out

in the winter afternoon. The young lovers sat so quietly that a casual

observer would have thought the room unoccupied, and in that deep

silence there grew up between them so complete a communion that the

final word seemed almost superfluous. Saint raised his eyes at last

and found the girl’s fixed upon him with their intent, reading look.

He took her hands and said very softly, “I love you, Valerie.” In the

suddenly awakened silence, the words seemed to hover in the air about

the girl, then she answered on a note that was almost one of sadness,

“And I love you, Saint.” They leaned forward then, like two children,

and kissed, and presently took their way home through the darkening

street, carrying their miraculous secret so carefully past the street

windows of their friends that they scarcely spoke again until they said

good-bye.

But gradually, as the weeks passed, they began to substitute long walks

in the country for the hours spent in the art gallery. Saint began

to see his old enthusiasms for his guitar and his pictures as just a

little absurd. It was the store and its possibilities now, and Saint

did most of the talking. The old flair was still there, making him

forget himself in an idea, but the idea now concerned itself with a

bigger store, more stock, perhaps a second store some day. Sometimes,

for nearly an hour, Valerie would have scarcely a word to say, and she

did not always follow the soaring flights of his reapplied imagination.

* * * * *

And now, on this momentous morning, Saint stood upon the doorstep

of Mr. Raymond’s colonial dwelling on lower Meeting Street, and

listened to St. Michael’s measured announcement that the hour for his

first interview had arrived. A step sounded beyond the closed door.

He executed a tremendous effort of will, banished Valerie from his

thoughts, and commenced to run over in his mind the things that he

wanted from his employer: “more space--a line of fertilisers, and

seed--new large piazza where visiting negroes could congregate--break

all connection with Goodlow and do his own purchasing.” At that point

the door was opened by a maid.

“Yes, sir,” she said in answer to his inquiry, “Mr. Raymond is

expecting you in the library.”

He passed in and the door closed softly behind him.

Half an hour later he was again on the doorstep, with the big form of

his employer filling the opening behind him. Mr. Raymond placed a large

firm hand on his shoulder.

“Well, you have what you want, haven’t you?” he asked.

“I should say I have, sir.”

“Good luck to you, then. I must confess that I am surprised as well as

pleased with your results. But blood will tell. It will be fine working

directly with you in future. My congratulations, and warm regards to

your good mother, please.”

Had he got what he wanted! Saint had to smile. A new wing for

agricultural implements, fertilisers, and seed, a big piazza that

would attract the negroes to idle and feel at home, authorisation to

do his own buying and to be answerable to Mr. Raymond alone. Then,

right on top of it all--right smack out of the blue--a salary raise to

twenty-five dollars a week. The boy felt just a little intoxicated as

he turned away from the big Meeting Street mansion.

When he arrived at Atkinsons’ Mamba admitted him; then, as nobody was

looking, she gave him a proprietary pat on the back, accompanied by

a leer that was distinctly a throw-back to the East Bay epoch of her

life.

“Ain’t no use to hang back, Mr. Saint. Ah sho knows it when Ah sees it.

She’s in de parlour now waitin’ for you, an’ she’s done all broke out

wid it.”

“You’re a suspicious old devil,” he told her with a grin, “and if I

didn’t have such a deep respect for the law I’d tell you to your teeth

what I really think of you.”

Yes, Valerie was waiting for him. The street windows were closed, as

is the custom in the old city, and the light in the room was dim and

chill. An open fire strove valiantly but only half-successfully to

bring it to life.

The girl came toward him and gave him both of her hands, glancing up

into his face with a new shyness in her own. But Saint, usually so

quick to feel the mood of another, was bursting with his triumph. His

eyes were shining with excitement, and his colour was high under the

tan of his skin. He did not linger over her hands, but gave them a

short, vehement grip and released them.

“I have come for your congratulations, Valerie,” he exclaimed. “I have

just been talking to Mr. Raymond, and he has given me everything I

want. You can’t guess how exciting it all really is.”

“Oh,” she said on a short indrawn breath, “you’re happy to-day, aren’t

you? I am very glad. Sit down and tell me all about it.”

With a new decisiveness of manner Saint led her to the sofa and sat

beside her. He took her hand and held it between both of his, but his

manner was abstracted, and his eyes gave her the odd impression of

being focussed, not on her face, but on some remote point behind her.

He talked rapidly, his enthusiasm vaulting minor details, hurdling

obstacles, leaping at, and beyond, conclusions, so that she had very

little idea what it was all about. Something very like egotism began to

creep into his recital. The girl looked at him in dismayed wonder. She

felt as though the sequence of their meeting--understanding--love had

commenced to reel backward, and that presently she would find herself

talking to a stranger. She drew her hand away from between his relaxed

fingers and saw that he was oblivious of the fact.

When his first gush had spent itself it was as though he came slowly

back into the room from some far place, and his eyes became cognisant

of her face. He stopped speaking and looked at her in surprise.

“Why, what’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing, only I am wondering if I was wise when I went out to the

store that day and tried to reform you.”

Instantly he was his old self and very contrite. “I am an ass,” he

announced, “I have been babbling my head off. Please forgive me, dear.

It’s that silly single-track brain of mine.” He took her hand again,

and she let it lie cool and lax in his as he hurried on. “Why, how can

you say that it might have been unwise? I can never tell you all that

it has meant to me. See already what it has done. And I owe it all to

you. I can never thank you enough--never.”

“But you are happy to-day,” she said with apparent irrelevance.

He was conscious of a note of accusation in her voice, and it mystified

him. He said, “Why, yes, it’s a big day. The biggest in my business

career, I guess.”

Her eyes rested searchingly on his face. “Yes, that’s what counts with

men,” she said wearily. “We are different, after all. Well, I am glad

for your success, but you must let me go and finish packing now. My

train goes in an hour, you know.”

“Good God, Val, I forgot. Can you ever forgive me?”

“I don’t know,” she told him. “It hurts.”

“But I lay awake all last night thinking about you. And this business

to-day--I wanted that for you.”

She looked into his rueful face. Suddenly her own changed and softened.

She answered slowly, translating an idea into speech as it grew in

her own mind: “Yes, I can forgive you. I understand you now. I never

guessed that you could lose yourself in an idea like that. It makes you

different.”

She stood with her face very close to his. Her eyes seemed to widen

with the intensity of her gaze until at last Saint saw fright in them.

“What--what’s the matter?” he stammered.

“Oh,” she cried, “I was so sure that I was right until now. I was

so certain I was saving you from defeat. But now I am frightened.”

Suddenly her arms were about his neck, her face strained to his breast.

“Oh, my dear,” she pleaded, “if you did have it in you to paint and I

have blundered--please forgive me, please forgive me!”

Saint laughed softly, reassuringly. He was himself again, and vastly

relieved that her fright was not the result of his neglect, but merely

a fancied mistake on her own part.

“You funny, intense child,” he said, “of course you were right. I was

always meant for business, only I didn’t have the sense to see it until

this winter. And then you came and showed me how to go about it.”