BOOK 1.

I.

My name is Hugh Paret. I was a corporation lawyer, but by no means a

typical one, the choice of my profession being merely incidental, and

due, as will be seen, to the accident of environment. The book I am

about to write might aptly be called The Autobiography of a Romanticist.

In that sense, if in no other, I have been a typical American, regarding

my country as the happy hunting-ground of enlightened self-interest, as

a function of my desires. Whether or not I have completely got rid of

this romantic virus I must leave to those the aim of whose existence

is to eradicate it from our literature and our life. A somewhat Augean

task!

I have been impelled therefore to make an attempt at setting forth, with

what frankness and sincerity I may, with those powers of selection of

which I am capable, the life I have lived in this modern America; the

passions I have known, the evils I have done. I endeavour to write a

biography of the inner life; but in order to do this I shall have to

relate those causal experiences of the outer existence that take place

in the world of space and time, in the four walls of the home, in the

school and university, in the noisy streets, in the realm of business

and politics. I shall try to set down, impartially, the motives that

have impelled my actions, to reveal in some degree the amazing mixture

of good and evil which has made me what I am to-day: to avoid the tricks

of memory and resist the inherent desire to present myself other and

better than I am. Your American romanticist is a sentimental spoiled

child who believes in miracles, whose needs are mostly baubles, whose

desires are dreams. Expediency is his motto. Innocent of a knowledge

of the principles of the universe, he lives in a state of ceaseless

activity, admitting no limitations, impatient of all restrictions.

What he wants, he wants very badly indeed. This wanting things was the

corner-stone of my character, and I believe that the science of the

future will bear me out when I say that it might have been differently

built upon. Certain it is that the system of education in vogue in the

70's and 80's never contemplated the search for natural corner-stones.

At all events, when I look back upon the boy I was, I see the beginnings

of a real person who fades little by little as manhood arrives and

advances, until suddenly I am aware that a stranger has taken his

place....

I lived in a city which is now some twelve hours distant from the

Atlantic seaboard. A very different city, too, it was in youth, in my

grandfather's day and my father's, even in my own boyhood, from what it

has since become in this most material of ages.

There is a book of my photographs, preserved by my mother, which I

have been looking over lately. First is presented a plump child of two,

gazing in smiling trustfulness upon a world of sunshine; later on a

lean boy in plaided kilts, whose wavy, chestnut-brown hair has been

most carefully parted on the side by Norah, his nurse. The face is

still childish. Then appears a youth of fourteen or thereabout in long

trousers and the queerest of short jackets, standing beside a marble

table against a classic background; he is smiling still in undiminished

hope and trust, despite increasing vexations and crossings, meaningless

lessons which had to be learned, disciplines to rack an aspiring soul,

and long, uncomfortable hours in the stiff pew of the First Presbyterian

Church. Associated with this torture is a peculiar Sunday smell and the

faint rustling of silk dresses. I can see the stern black figure of Dr.

Pound, who made interminable statements to the Lord.

“Oh, Lord,” I can hear him say, “thou knowest...”

These pictures, though yellowed and faded, suggest vividly the being

I once was, the feelings that possessed and animated me, love for my

playmates, vague impulses struggling for expression in a world forever

thwarting them. I recall, too, innocent dreams of a future unidentified,

dreams from which I emerged vibrating with an energy that was lost for

lack of a definite objective: yet it was constantly being renewed. I

often wonder what I might have become if it could have been harnessed,

directed! Speculations are vain. Calvinism, though it had begun to make

compromises, was still a force in those days, inimical to spontaneity

and human instincts. And when I think of Calvinism I see, not Dr. Pound,

who preached it, but my father, who practised and embodied it. I loved

him, but he made of righteousness a stern and terrible thing implying

not joy, but punishment, the suppression rather than the expansion of

aspirations. His religion seemed woven all of austerity, contained

no shining threads to catch my eye. Dreams, to him, were matters for

suspicion and distrust.

I sometimes ask myself, as I gaze upon his portrait now, the duplicate

of the one painted for the Bar Association, whether he ever could have

felt the secret, hot thrills I knew and did not identify with religion.

His religion was real to him, though he failed utterly to make it

comprehensible to me. The apparent calmness, evenness of his life awed

me. A successful lawyer, a respected and trusted citizen, was he lacking

somewhat in virility, vitality? I cannot judge him, even to-day. I

never knew him. There were times in my youth when the curtain of his

unfamiliar spirit was withdrawn a little: and once, after I had passed

the crisis of some childhood disease, I awoke to find him bending over

my bed with a tender expression that surprised and puzzled me.

He was well educated, and from his portrait a shrewd observer might

divine in him a genteel taste for literature. The fine features bear

witness to the influence of an American environment, yet suggest

the intellectual Englishman of Matthew Arnold's time. The face is

distinguished, ascetic, the chestnut hair lighter and thinner than my

own; the side whiskers are not too obtrusive, the eyes blue-grey. There

is a large black cravat crossed and held by a cameo pin, and the coat

has odd, narrow lapels. His habits of mind were English, although he

harmonized well enough with the manners and traditions of a city whose

inheritance was Scotch-Irish; and he invariably drank tea for breakfast.

One of my earliest recollections is of the silver breakfast service and

egg-cups which my great-grandfather brought with him from Sheffield to

Philadelphia shortly after the Revolution. His son, Dr. Hugh Moreton

Paret, after whom I was named, was the best known physician of the city

in the decorous, Second Bank days.

My mother was Sarah Breck. Hers was my Scotch-Irish side. Old Benjamin

Breck, her grandfather, undaunted by sea or wilderness, had come

straight from Belfast to the little log settlement by the great river

that mirrored then the mantle of primeval forest on the hills. So much

for chance. He kept a store with a side porch and square-paned windows,

where hams and sides of bacon and sugar loaves in blue glazed paper hung

beside ploughs and calico prints, barrels of flour, of molasses and rum,

all of which had been somehow marvellously transported over the passes

of those forbidding mountains,--passes we blithely thread to-day in

dining cars and compartment sleepers. Behind the store were moored the

barges that floated down on the swift current to the Ohio, carrying

goods to even remoter settlements in the western wilderness.

Benjamin, in addition to his emigrant's leather box, brought with him

some of that pigment that was to dye the locality for generations a

deep blue. I refer, of course, to his Presbyterianism. And in order the

better to ensure to his progeny the fastness of this dye, he married

the granddaughter of a famous divine, celebrated in the annals of New

England,--no doubt with some injustice,--as a staunch advocate on the

doctrine of infant damnation. My cousin Robert Breck had old Benjamin's

portrait, which has since gone to the Kinley's. Heaven knows who painted

it, though no great art were needed to suggest on canvas the tough

fabric of that sitter, who was more Irish than Scotch. The heavy

stick he holds might, with a slight stretch of the imagination, be a

blackthorn; his head looks capable of withstanding many blows; his hand

of giving many. And, as I gazed the other day at this picture hanging in

the shabby suburban parlour, I could only contrast him with his anaemic

descendants who possessed the likeness. Between the children of poor

Mary Kinley,--Cousin Robert's daughter, and the hardy stock of the old

country there is a gap indeed!

Benjamin Breck made the foundation of a fortune. It was his son who

built on the Second Bank the wide, corniced mansion in which to house

comfortably his eight children. There, two tiers above the river, lived

my paternal grandfather, Dr. Paret, the Breck's physician and friend;

the Durretts and the Hambletons, iron-masters; the Hollisters, Sherwins,

the McAlerys and Ewanses,--Breck connections,--the Willetts and Ogilvys;

in short, everyone of importance in the days between the 'thirties and

the Civil War. Theirs were generous houses surrounded by shade trees,

with glorious back yards--I have been told--where apricots and pears and

peaches and even nectarines grew.

The business of Breck and Company, wholesale grocers, descended to my

mother's first cousin, Robert Breck, who lived at Claremore. The very

sound of that word once sufficed to give me a shiver of delight; but

the Claremore I knew has disappeared as completely as Atlantis, and

the place is now a suburb (hateful word!) cut up into building lots

and connected with Boyne Street and the business section of the city

by trolley lines. Then it was “the country,” and fairly saturated with

romance. Cousin Robert, when he came into town to spend his days at the

store, brought with him some of this romance, I had almost said of this

aroma. He was no suburbanite, but rural to the backbone, professing a

most proper contempt for dwellers in towns.

Every summer day that dawned held Claremore as a possibility. And such

was my capacity for joy that my appetite would depart completely when I

heard my mother say, questioningly and with proper wifely respect--

“If you're really going off on a business trip for a day or two, Mr.

Paret” (she generally addressed my father thus formally), “I think I'll

go to Robert's and take Hugh.”

“Shall I tell Norah to pack, mother,” I would exclaim, starting up.

“We'll see what your father thinks, my dear.”

“Remain at the table until you are excused, Hugh,” he would say.

Released at length, I would rush to Norah, who always rejoiced with

me, and then to the wire fence which marked the boundary of the Peters

domain next door, eager, with the refreshing lack of consideration

characteristic of youth, to announce to the Peterses--who were to remain

at home the news of my good fortune. There would be Tom and Alfred and

Russell and Julia and little Myra with her grass-stained knees, faring

forth to seek the adventures of a new day in the shady western yard.

Myra was too young not to look wistful at my news, but the others

pretended indifference, seeking to lessen my triumph. And it was Julia

who invariably retorted “We can go out to Uncle Jake's farm whenever we

want to. Can't we, Tom?”...

No journey ever taken since has equalled in ecstasy that leisurely trip

of thirteen miles in the narrow-gauge railroad that wound through hot

fields of nodding corn tassels and between delicious, acrid-smelling

woods to Claremore. No silent palace “sleeping in the sun,” no edifice

decreed by Kubla Khan could have worn more glamour than the house of

Cousin Robert Breck.

It stood half a mile from the drowsy village, deep in its own grounds

amidst lawns splashed with shadows, with gravel paths edged--in

barbarous fashion, if you please with shells. There were flower beds of

equally barbarous design; and two iron deer, which, like the figures

on Keats's Grecian urn, were ever ready poised to flee,--and yet never

fled. For Cousin Robert was rich, as riches went in those days: not only

rich, but comfortable. Stretching behind the house were sweet meadows of

hay and red clover basking in the heat, orchards where the cows cropped

beneath the trees, arbours where purple clusters of Concords hung

beneath warm leaves: there were woods beyond, into which, under the

guidance of Willie Breck, I made adventurous excursions, and in the

autumn gathered hickories and walnuts. The house was a rambling, wooden

mansion painted grey, with red scroll-work on its porches and horsehair

furniture inside. Oh, the smell of its darkened interior on a midsummer

day! Like the flavour of that choicest of tropical fruits, the

mangosteen, it baffles analysis, and the nearest I can come to it is a

mixture of matting and corn-bread, with another element too subtle to

define.

The hospitality of that house! One would have thought we had arrived,

my mother and I, from the ends of the earth, such was the welcome we got

from Cousin Jenny, Cousin Robert's wife, from Mary and Helen with the

flaxen pig-tails, from Willie, whom I recall as permanently without

shoes or stockings. Met and embraced by Cousin Jenny at the station and

driven to the house in the squeaky surrey, the moment we arrived she and

my mother would put on the dressing-sacks I associated with hot weather,

and sit sewing all day long in rocking-chairs at the coolest end of the

piazza. The women of that day scorned lying down, except at night, and

as evening came on they donned starched dresses; I recall in particular

one my mother wore, with little vertical stripes of black and white, and

a full skirt. And how they talked, from the beginning of the visit until

the end! I have often since wondered where the topics came from.

It was not until nearly seven o'clock that the train arrived which

brought home my Cousin Robert. He was a big man; his features and even

his ample moustache gave a disconcerting impression of rugged integrity,

and I remember him chiefly in an alpaca or seersucker coat. Though much

less formal, more democratic--in a word--than my father, I stood in

awe of him for a different reason, and this I know now was because

he possessed the penetration to discern the flaws in my youthful

character,--flaws that persisted in manhood. None so quick as Cousin

Robert to detect deceptions which were hidden from my mother.

His hobby was carpentering, and he had a little shop beside the

stable filled with shining tools which Willie and I, in spite of their

attractions, were forbidden to touch. Willie, by dire experience, had

learned to keep the law; but on one occasion I stole in alone, and

promptly cut my finger with a chisel. My mother and Cousin Jenny

accepted the fiction that the injury had been done with a flint

arrowhead that Willie had given me, but when Cousin Robert came home and

saw my bound hand and heard the story, he gave me a certain look which

sticks in my mind.

“Wonderful people, those Indians were!” he observed. “They could make

arrowheads as sharp as chisels.”

I was most uncomfortable....

He had a strong voice, and spoke with a rising inflection and a marked

accent that still remains peculiar to our locality, although it was much

modified in my mother and not at all noticeable in my father; with an

odd nasal alteration of the burr our Scotch-Irish ancestors had brought

with them across the seas. For instance, he always called my father

Mr. Par-r-ret. He had an admiration and respect for him that seemed

to forbid the informality of “Matthew.” It was shared by others of my

father's friends and relations.

“Sarah,” Cousin Robert would say to my mother, “you're coddling that

boy, you ought to lam him oftener. Hand him over to me for a couple of

months--I'll put him through his paces.... So you're going to send him

to college, are you? He's too good for old Benjamin's grocery business.”

He was very fond of my mother, though he lectured her soundly for her

weakness in indulging me. I can see him as he sat at the head of the

supper table, carving liberal helpings which Mary and Helen and Willie

devoured with country appetites, watching our plates.

“What's the matter, Hugh? You haven't eaten all your lamb.”

“He doesn't like fat, Robert,” my mother explained.

“I'd teach him to like it if he were my boy.”

“Well, Robert, he isn't your boy,” Cousin Jenny would remind him....

His bark was worse than his bite. Like many kind people he made use of

brusqueness to hide an inner tenderness, and on the train he was hail

fellow well met with every Tom, Dick and Harry that commuted,--although

the word was not invented in those days,--and the conductor and brakeman

too. But he had his standards, and held to them....

Mine was not a questioning childhood, and I was willing to accept the

scheme of things as presented to me entire. In my tenderer years, when

I had broken one of the commandments on my father's tablet (there were

more than ten), and had, on his home-coming, been sent to bed, my mother

would come softly upstairs after supper with a book in her hand; a book

of selected Bible stories on which Dr. Pound had set the seal of his

approval, with a glazed picture cover, representing Daniel in the lions'

den and an angel standing beside him. On the somewhat specious plea that

Holy Writ might have a chastening effect, she was permitted to minister

to me in my shame. The amazing adventure of Shadrach, Meshach and

Abednego particularly appealed to an imagination needing little

stimulation. It never occurred to me to doubt that these gentlemen had

triumphed over caloric laws. But out of my window, at the back of the

second storey, I often saw a sudden, crimson glow in the sky to the

southward, as though that part of the city had caught fire. There were

the big steel-works, my mother told me, belonging to Mr. Durrett and

Mr. Hambleton, the father of Ralph Hambleton and the grandfather of

Hambleton Durrett, my schoolmates at Miss Caroline's. I invariably

connected the glow, not with Hambleton and Ralph, but with Shadrach,

Meshach and Abednego! Later on, when my father took me to the

steel-works, and I beheld with awe a huge pot filled with molten metal

that ran out of it like water, I asked him--if I leaped into that

stream, could God save me? He was shocked. Miracles, he told me, didn't

happen any more.

“When did they stop?” I demanded.

“About two thousand years ago, my son,” he replied gravely.

“Then,” said I, “no matter how much I believed in God, he wouldn't save

me if I jumped into the big kettle for his sake?”

For this I was properly rebuked and silenced.

My boyhood was filled with obsessing desires. If God, for example, had

cast down, out of his abundant store, manna and quail in the desert,

why couldn't he fling me a little pocket money? A paltry quarter of

a dollar, let us say, which to me represented wealth. To avoid the

reproach of the Pharisees, I went into the closet of my bed-chamber to

pray, requesting that the quarter should be dropped on the north side of

Lyme Street, between Stamford and Tryon; in short, as conveniently near

home as possible. Then I issued forth, not feeling overconfident, but

hoping. Tom Peters, leaning over the ornamental cast-iron fence which

separated his front yard from the street, presently spied me scanning

the sidewalk.

“What are you looking for, Hugh?” he demanded with interest.

“Oh, something I dropped,” I answered uneasily.

“What?”

Naturally, I refused to tell. It was a broiling, midsummer day; Julia

and Russell, who had been warned to stay in the shade, but who were

engaged in the experiment of throwing the yellow cat from the top of

the lattice fence to see if she would alight on her feet, were presently

attracted, and joined in the search. The mystery which I threw around it

added to its interest, and I was not inconsiderably annoyed. Suppose one

of them were to find the quarter which God had intended for me? Would

that be justice?

“It's nothing,” I said, and pretended to abandon the quest--to be

renewed later. But this ruse failed; they continued obstinately to

search; and after a few minutes Tom, with a shout, picked out of a hot

crevice between the bricks--a nickel!

“It's mine!” I cried fiercely.

“Did you lose it?” demanded Julia, the canny one, as Tom was about to

give it up.

My lying was generally reserved for my elders.

“N-no,” I said hesitatingly, “but it's mine all the same. It was--sent

to me.”

“Sent to you!” they exclaimed, in a chorus of protest and derision. And

how, indeed, was I to make good my claim? The Peterses, when assembled,

were a clan, led by Julia and in matters of controversy, moved as one.

How was I to tell them that in answer to my prayers for twenty-five

cents, God had deemed five all that was good for me?

“Some--somebody dropped it there for me.”

“Who?” demanded the chorus. “Say, that's a good one!”

Tears suddenly blinded me. Overcome by chagrin, I turned and flew into

the house and upstairs into my room, locking the door behind me. An

interval ensued, during which I nursed my sense of wrong, and it pleased

me to think that the money would bring a curse on the Peters family. At

length there came a knock on the door, and a voice calling my name.

“Hugh! Hugh!”

It was Tom.

“Hughie, won't you let me in? I want to give you the nickel.”

“Keep it!” I shouted back. “You found it.”

Another interval, and then more knocking.

“Open up,” he said coaxingly. “I--I want to talk to you.”

I relented, and let him in. He pressed the coin into my hand. I refused;

he pleaded.

“You found it,” I said, “it's yours.”

“But--but you were looking for it.”

“That makes no difference,” I declared magnanimously.

Curiosity overcame him.

“Say, Hughie, if you didn't drop it, who on earth did?”

“Nobody on earth,” I replied cryptically....

Naturally, I declined to reveal the secret. Nor was this by any means

the only secret I held over the Peters family, who never quite knew what

to make of me. They were not troubled with imaginations. Julia was a

little older than Tom and had a sharp tongue, but over him I exercised

a distinct fascination, and I knew it. Literal himself, good-natured and

warm-hearted, the gift I had of tingeing life with romance (to put the

thing optimistically), of creating kingdoms out of back yards--at which

Julia and Russell sniffed--held his allegiance firm.

II.

I must have been about twelve years of age when I realized that I was

possessed of the bard's inheritance. A momentous journey I made with

my parents to Boston about this time not only stimulated this gift, but

gave me the advantage of which other travellers before me have likewise

availed themselves--of being able to take certain poetic liberties with

a distant land that my friends at home had never seen. Often during the

heat of summer noons when we were assembled under the big maple beside

the lattice fence in the Peters' yard, the spirit would move me to

relate the most amazing of adventures. Our train, for instance, had been

held up in the night by a band of robbers in black masks, and rescued by

a traveller who bore a striking resemblance to my Cousin Robert Breck.

He had shot two of the robbers. These fabrications, once started, flowed

from me with ridiculous ease. I experienced an unwonted exhilaration,

exaltation; I began to believe that they had actually occurred. In vain

the astute Julia asserted that there were no train robbers in the east.

What had my father done? Well, he had been very brave, but he had had no

pistol. Had I been frightened? No, not at all; I, too, had wished for

a pistol. Why hadn't I spoken of this before? Well, so many things

had happened to me I couldn't tell them all at once. It was plain that

Julia, though often fascinated against her will, deemed this sort of

thing distinctly immoral.

I was a boy divided in two. One part of me dwelt in a fanciful realm

of his own weaving, and the other part was a commonplace and protesting

inhabitant of a world of lessons, disappointments and discipline. My

instincts were not vicious. Ideas bubbled up within me continually

from an apparently inexhaustible spring, and the very strength of the

longings they set in motion puzzled and troubled my parents: what I

seem to see most distinctly now is a young mind engaged in a ceaseless

struggle for self-expression, for self-development, against the inertia

of a tradition of which my father was the embodiment. He was an enigma

to me then. He sincerely loved me, he cherished ambitions concerning me,

yet thwarted every natural, budding growth, until I grew unconsciously

to regard him as my enemy, although I had an affection for him and a

pride in him that flared up at times. Instead of confiding to him my

aspirations, vague though they were, I became more and more secretive as

I grew older. I knew instinctively that he regarded these aspirations

as evidences in my character of serious moral flaws. And I would sooner

have suffered many afternoons of his favourite punishment--solitary

confinement in my room--than reveal to him those occasional fits of

creative fancy which caused me to neglect my lessons in order to put

them on paper. Loving literature, in his way, he was characteristically

incapable of recognizing the literary instinct, and the symptoms of its

early stages he mistook for inherent frivolity, for lack of respect

for the truth; in brief, for original sin. At the age of fourteen I had

begun secretly (alas, how many things I did secretly!) to write stories

of a sort, stories that never were finished.

He regarded reading as duty, not pleasure. He laid out books for me,

which I neglected. He was part and parcel of that American environment

in which literary ambition was regarded as sheer madness. And no one

who has not experienced that environment can have any conception of the

pressure it exerted to stifle originality, to thrust the new generation

into its religious and commercial moulds. Shall we ever, I wonder,

develop the enlightened education that will know how to take advantage

of such initiative as was mine? that will be on the watch for it,

sympathize with it and guide it to fruition?

I was conscious of still another creative need, that of dramatizing

my ideas, of converting them into action. And this need was to lead me

farther than ever afield from the path of righteousness. The concrete

realization of ideas, as many geniuses will testify, is an expensive

undertaking, requiring a little pocket money; and I have already touched

upon that subject. My father did not believe in pocket money. A sea

story that my Cousin Donald Ewan gave me at Christmas inspired me to

compose one of a somewhat different nature; incidentally, I deemed it

a vast improvement on Cousin Donald's book. Now, if I only had a boat,

with the assistance of Ham Durrett and Tom Peters, Gene Hollister and

Perry Blackwood and other friends, this story of mine might be

staged. There were, however, as usual, certain seemingly insuperable

difficulties: in the first place, it was winter time; in the second, no

facilities existed in the city for operations of a nautical character;

and, lastly, my Christmas money amounted only to five dollars. It was my

father who pointed out these and other objections. For, after a careful

perusal of the price lists I had sent for, I had been forced to appeal

to him to supply additional funds with which to purchase a row-boat.

Incidentally, he read me a lecture on extravagance, referred to my last

month's report at the Academy, and finished by declaring that he would

not permit me to have a boat even in the highly improbable case of

somebody's presenting me with one. Let it not be imagined that my ardour

or my determination were extinguished. Shortly after I had retired from

his presence it occurred to me that he had said nothing to forbid my

making a boat, and the first thing I did after school that day was to

procure, for twenty-five cents, a second-hand book on boat construction.

The woodshed was chosen as a shipbuilding establishment. It was

convenient--and my father never went into the back yard in cold weather.

Inquiries of lumber-yards developing the disconcerting fact that four

dollars and seventy-five cents was inadequate to buy the material

itself, to say nothing of the cost of steaming and bending the ribs, I

reluctantly abandoned the ideal of the graceful craft I had sketched,

and compromised on a flat bottom. Observe how the ways of deception lead

to transgression: I recalled the cast-off lumber pile of Jarvis,

the carpenter, a good-natured Englishman, coarse and fat: in our

neighbourhood his reputation for obscenity was so well known to mothers

that I had been forbidden to go near him or his shop. Grits Jarvis, his

son, who had inherited the talent, was also contraband. I can see

now the huge bulk of the elder Jarvis as he stood in the melting,

soot-powdered snow in front of his shop, and hear his comments on my

pertinacity.

“If you ever wants another man's missus when you grows up, my lad, Gawd

'elp 'im!”

“Why should I want another man's wife when I don't want one of my own?”

I demanded, indignant.

He laughed with his customary lack of moderation.

“You mind what old Jarvis says,” he cried. “What you wants, you gets.”

I did get his boards, by sheer insistence. No doubt they were not very

valuable, and without question he more than made up for them in my

mother's bill. I also got something else of equal value to me at the

moment,--the assistance of Grits, the contraband; daily, after school,

I smuggled him into the shed through the alley, acquiring likewise the

services of Tom Peters, which was more of a triumph than it would seem.

Tom always had to be “worked up” to participation in my ideas, but in

the end he almost invariably succumbed. The notion of building a boat in

the dead of winter, and so far from her native element, naturally struck

him at first as ridiculous. Where in Jehoshaphat was I going to sail it

if I ever got it made? He much preferred to throw snowballs at innocent

wagon drivers.

All that Tom saw, at first, was a dirty, coal-spattered shed with dim

recesses, for it was lighted on one side only, and its temperature was

somewhere below freezing. Surely he could not be blamed for a tempered

enthusiasm! But for me, all the dirt and cold and discomfort were

blotted out, and I beheld a gallant craft manned by sturdy seamen

forging her way across blue water in the South Seas. Treasure Island,

alas, was as yet unwritten; but among my father's books were two old

volumes in which I had hitherto taken no interest, with crude engravings

of palms and coral reefs, of naked savages and tropical mountains

covered with jungle, the adventures, in brief, of one Captain Cook. I

also discovered a book by a later traveller. Spurred on by a mysterious

motive power, and to the great neglect of the pons asinorum and the

staple products of the Southern States, I gathered an amazing amount of

information concerning a remote portion of the globe, of head-hunters

and poisoned stakes, of typhoons, of queer war-craft that crept up on

you while you were dismantling galleons, when desperate hand-to-hand

encounters ensued. Little by little as I wove all this into personal

adventures soon to be realized, Tom forgot the snowballs and the

maddened grocery-men who chased him around the block; while Grits would

occasionally stop sawing and cry out:--“Ah, s'y!” frequently adding that

he would be G--d--d.

The cold woodshed became a chantry on the New England coast, the alley

the wintry sea soon to embrace our ship, the saw-horses--which stood

between a coal-bin on one side and unused stalls filled with rubbish

and kindling on the other--the ways; the yard behind the lattice fence

became a backwater, the flapping clothes the sails of ships that took

refuge there--on Mondays and Tuesdays. Even my father was symbolized

with unparalleled audacity as a watchful government which had, up to the

present, no inkling of our semi-piratical intentions! The cook and the

housemaid, though remonstrating against the presence of Grits, were

friendly confederates; likewise old Cephas, the darkey who, from my

earliest memory, carried coal and wood and blacked the shoes, washed the

windows and scrubbed the steps.

One afternoon Tom went to work....

The history of the building of the good ship Petrel is similar to that

of all created things, a story of trial and error and waste. At last,

one March day she stood ready for launching. She had even been caulked;

for Grits, from an unknown and unquestionably dubious source, had

procured a bucket of tar, which we heated over afire in the alley and

smeared into every crack. It was natural that the news of such a feat

as we were accomplishing should have leaked out, that the “yard” should

have been visited from time to time by interested friends, some of whom

came to admire, some to scoff, and all to speculate. Among the scoffers,

of course, was Ralph Hambleton, who stood with his hands in his pockets

and cheerfully predicted all sorts of dire calamities. Ralph was always

a superior boy, tall and a trifle saturnine and cynical, with an

amazing self-confidence not wholly due to the wealth of his father, the

iron-master. He was older than I.

“She won't float five minutes, if you ever get her to the water,” was

his comment, and in this he was supported on general principles by Julia

and Russell Peters. Ralph would have none of the Petrel, or of the South

Seas either; but he wanted,--so he said,--“to be in at the death.” The

Hambletons were one of the few families who at that time went to the sea

for the summer, and from a practical knowledge of craft in general Ralph

was not slow to point out the defects of ours. Tom and I defended her

passionately.

Ralph was not a romanticist. He was a born leader, excelling at

organized games, exercising over boys the sort of fascination that comes

from doing everything better and more easily than others. It was only

during the progress of such enterprises as this affair of the Petrel

that I succeeded in winning their allegiance; bit by bit, as Tom's had

been won, fanning their enthusiasm by impersonating at once Achilles

and Homer, recruiting while relating the Odyssey of the expedition in

glowing colours. Ralph always scoffed, and when I had no scheme on foot

they went back to him. Having surveyed the boat and predicted calamity,

he departed, leaving a circle of quaint and youthful figures around the

Petrel in the shed: Gene Hollister, romantically inclined, yet somewhat

hampered by a strict parental supervision; Ralph's cousin Ham Durrett,

who was even then a rather fat boy, good-natured but selfish; Don and

Harry Ewan, my second cousins; Mac and Nancy Willett and Sam and Sophy

McAlery. Nancy was a tomboy, not to be denied, and Sophy her shadow. We

held a council, the all-important question of which was how to get the

Petrel to the water, and what water to get her to. The river was not to

be thought of, and Blackstone Lake some six miles from town. Finally,

Logan's mill-pond was decided on,--a muddy sheet on the outskirts of

the city. But how to get her to Logan's mill-pond? Cephas was at length

consulted. It turned out that he had a coloured friend who went by the

impressive name of Thomas Jefferson Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver),

who was in the express business; and who, after surveying the boat

with some misgivings,--for she was ten feet long,--finally consented to

transport her to “tide-water” for the sum of two dollars. But it proved

that our combined resources only amounted to a dollar and seventy-five

cents. Ham Durrett never contributed to anything. On this sum Thomas

Jefferson compromised.

Saturday dawned clear, with a stiff March wind catching up the dust into

eddies and whirling it down the street. No sooner was my father safely

on his way to his office than Thomas Jefferson was reported to be in

the alley, where we assembled, surveying with some misgivings Thomas

Jefferson's steed, whose ability to haul the Petrel two miles seemed

somewhat doubtful. Other difficulties developed; the door in the back of

the shed proved to be too narrow for our ship's beam. But men embarked

on a desperate enterprise are not to be stopped by such trifles, and

the problem was solved by sawing out two adjoining boards. These were

afterwards replaced with skill by the ship's carpenter, Able Seaman

Grits Jarvis. Then the Petrel by heroic efforts was got into the wagon,

the seat of which had been removed, old Thomas Jefferson perched himself

precariously in the bow and protestingly gathered up his rope-patched

reins.

“Folks'll 'low I'se plum crazy, drivin' dis yere boat,” he declared,

observing with concern that some four feet of the stern projected over

the tail-board. “Ef she topples, I'll git to heaven quicker'n a bullet.”

When one is shanghaied, however,--in the hands of buccaneers,--it is

too late to withdraw. Six shoulders upheld the rear end of the Petrel,

others shoved, and Thomas Jefferson's rickety horse began to move

forward in spite of himself. An expression of sheer terror might have

been observed on the old negro's crinkled face, but his voice was

drowned, and we swept out of the alley. Scarcely had we travelled a

block before we began to be joined by all the boys along the line of

march; marbles, tops, and even incipient baseball games were abandoned

that Saturday morning; people ran out of their houses, teamsters halted

their carts. The breathless excitement, the exaltation I had felt on

leaving the alley were now tinged with other feelings, unanticipated,

but not wholly lacking in delectable quality,--concern and awe at these

unforeseen forces I had raised, at this ever growing and enthusiastic

body of volunteers springing up like dragon's teeth in our path. After

all, was not I the hero of this triumphal procession? The thought was

consoling, exhilarating. And here was Nancy marching at my side, a

little subdued, perhaps, but unquestionably admiring and realizing that

it was I who had created all this. Nancy, who was the aptest of pupils,

the most loyal of followers, though I did not yet value her devotion at

its real worth, because she was a girl. Her imagination kindled at my

touch. And on this eventful occasion she carried in her arms a parcel,

the contents of which were unknown to all but ourselves. At length we

reached the muddy shores of Logan's pond, where two score eager hands

volunteered to assist the Petrel into her native element.

Alas! that the reality never attains to the vision. I had beheld, in my

dreams, the Petrel about to take the water, and Nancy Willett standing

very straight making a little speech and crashing a bottle of wine

across the bows. This was the content of the mysterious parcel; she

had stolen it from her father's cellar. But the number of uninvited

spectators, which had not been foreseen, considerably modified the

programme,--as the newspapers would have said. They pushed and crowded

around the ship, and made frank and even brutal remarks as to her

seaworthiness; even Nancy, inured though she was to the masculine sex,

had fled to the heights, and it looked at this supreme moment as though

we should have to fight for the Petrel. An attempt to muster her doughty

buccaneers failed; the gunner too had fled,--Gene Hollister; Ham Durrett

and the Ewanses were nowhere to be seen, and a muster revealed only Tom,

the fidus Achates, and Grits Jarvis.

“Ah, s'y!” he exclaimed in the teeth of the menacing hordes. “Stand

back, carn't yer? I'll bash yer face in, Johnny. Whose boat is this?”

Shall it be whispered that I regretted his belligerency? Here, in truth,

was the drama staged,--my drama, had I only been able to realize it. The

good ship beached, the headhunters hemming us in on all sides, the scene

prepared for one of those struggles against frightful odds which I had

so graphically related as an essential part of our adventures.

“Let's roll the cuss in the fancy collar,” proposed one of the

head-hunters,--meaning me.

“I'll stove yer slats if yer touch him,” said Grits, and then resorted

to appeal. “I s'y, carn't yer stand back and let a chap 'ave a charnst?”

The head-hunters only jeered. And what shall be said of the Captain

in this moment of peril? Shall it be told that his heart was beating

wildly?--bumping were a better word. He was trying to remember that

he was the Captain. Otherwise, he must admit with shame that he, too,

should have fled. So much for romance when the test comes. Will he

remain to fall fighting for his ship? Like Horatius, he glanced up at

the hill, where, instead of the porch of the home where he would fain

have been, he beheld a wisp of a girl standing alone, her hat on the

back of her head, her hair flying in the wind, gazing intently down at

him in his danger. The renegade crew was nowhere to be seen. There are

those who demand the presence of a woman in order to be heroes....

“Give us a chance, can't you?” he cried, repeating Grits's appeal in

not quite such a stentorian tone as he would have liked, while his hand

trembled on the gunwale. Tom Peters, it must be acknowledged, was much

more of a buccaneer when it was a question of deeds, for he planted

himself in the way of the belligerent chief of the head-hunters (who

spoke with a decided brogue).

“Get out of the way!” said Tom, with a little squeak in his voice. Yet

there he was, and he deserves a tribute.

An unlooked-for diversion saved us from annihilation, in the shape of

one who had a talent for creating them. We were bewilderingly aware of a

girlish figure amongst us.

“You cowards!” she cried. “You cowards!”

Lithe, and fairly quivering with passion, it was Nancy who showed us

how to face the head-hunters. They gave back. They would have been brave

indeed if they had not retreated before such an intense little nucleus

of energy and indignation!...

“Ah, give 'em a chanst,” said their chief, after a moment.... He even

helped to push the boat towards the water. But he did not volunteer to

be one of those to man the Petrel on her maiden voyage. Nor did

Logan's pond, that wild March day, greatly resemble the South Seas.

Nevertheless, my eye on Nancy, I stepped proudly aboard and seized

an “oar.” Grits and Tom followed,--when suddenly the Petrel sank

considerably below the water-line as her builders had estimated it. Ere

we fully realized this, the now friendly head-hunters had given us

a shove, and we were off! The Captain, who should have been waving

good-bye to his lady love from the poop, sat down abruptly,--the crew

likewise; not, however, before she had heeled to the scuppers, and

a half-bucket of iced water had run it. Head-hunters were mere daily

episodes in Grits's existence, but water... He muttered something in

cockney that sounded like a prayer.... The wind was rapidly driving

us toward the middle of the pond, and something cold and ticklish was

seeping through the seats of our trousers. We sat like statues....

The bright scene etched itself in my memory--the bare brown slopes with

which the pond was bordered, the Irish shanties, the clothes-lines with

red flannel shirts snapping in the biting wind; Nancy motionless on the

bank; the group behind her, silent now, impressed in spite of itself at

the sight of our intrepidity.

The Petrel was sailing stern first.... Would any of us, indeed, ever see

home again? I thought of my father's wrath turned to sorrow because he

had refused to gratify a son's natural wish and present him with a real

rowboat.... Out of the corners of our eyes we watched the water creeping

around the gunwale, and the very muddiness of it seemed to enhance its

coldness, to make the horrors of its depths more mysterious and hideous.

The voice of Grits startled us.

“O Gawd,” he was saying, “we're a-going to sink, and I carn't swim! The

blarsted tar's give way back here.”

“Is she leaking?” I cried.

“She's a-filling up like a bath tub,” he lamented.

Slowly but perceptibly, in truth, the bow was rising, and above the

whistling of the wind I could hear his chattering as she settled....

Then several things happened simultaneously: an agonized cry behind me,

distant shouts from the shore, a sudden upward lunge of the bow, and

the torture of being submerged, inch by inch, in the icy, yellow water.

Despite the splashing behind me, I sat as though paralyzed until I was

waist deep and the boards turned under me, and then, with a spasmodic

contraction of my whole being I struck out--only to find my feet on the

muddy bottom. Such was the inglorious end of the good ship Petrel! For

she went down, with all hands, in little more than half a fathom of

water.... It was not until then I realized that we had been blown clear

across the pond!

Figures were running along the shore. And as Tom and I emerged dragging

Grits between us,--for he might have been drowned there abjectly in the

shallows,--we were met by a stout and bare-armed Irishwoman whose scanty

hair, I remember, was drawn into a tight knot behind her head; and who

seized us, all three, as though we were a bunch of carrots.

“Come along wid ye!” she cried.

Shivering, we followed her up the hill, the spectators of the tragedy,

who by this time had come around the pond, trailing after. Nancy was not

among them. Inside the shanty into which we were thrust were two small

children crawling about the floor, and the place was filled with steam

from a wash-tub against the wall and a boiler on the stove. With a

vigorous injunction to make themselves scarce, the Irishwoman slammed

the door in the faces of the curious and ordered us to remove our

clothes. Grits was put to bed in a corner, while Tom and I, provided

with various garments, huddled over the stove. There fell to my lot the

red flannel shirt which I had seen on the clothes-line. She gave us

hot coffee, and was back at her wash-tub in no time at all, her entire

comment on a proceeding that seemed to Tom and me to have certain

elements of gravity being, “By's will be by's!” The final ironical touch

was given the anti-climax when our rescuer turned out to be the mother

of the chief of the head-hunters himself! He had lingered perforce with

his brothers and sister outside the cabin until dinner time, and when he

came in he was meek as Moses.

Thus the ready hospitality of the poor, which passed over the heads

of Tom and me as we ate bread and onions and potatoes with a ravenous

hunger. It must have been about two o'clock in the afternoon when we

bade good-bye to our preserver and departed for home....

At first we went at a dog-trot, but presently slowed down to discuss the

future looming portentously ahead of us. Since entire concealment was

now impossible, the question was,--how complete a confession would be

necessary? Our cases, indeed, were dissimilar, and Tom's incentive to

hold back the facts was not nearly so great as mine. It sometimes seemed

to me in those days unjust that the Peterses were able on the whole

to keep out of criminal difficulties, in which I was more or less

continuously involved: for it did not strike me that their sins were not

those of the imagination. The method of Tom's father was the slipper. He

and Tom understood each other, while between my father and myself was a

great gulf fixed. Not that Tom yearned for the slipper; but he regarded

its occasional applications as being as inevitable as changes in the

weather; lying did not come easily to him, and left to himself he much

preferred to confess and have the matter over with. I have already

suggested that I had cultivated lying, that weapon of the weaker party,

in some degree, at least, in self-defence.

Tom was loyal. Moreover, my conviction would probably deprive him

for six whole afternoons of my company, on which he was more or less

dependent. But the defence of this case presented unusual difficulties,

and we stopped several times to thrash them out. We had been absent from

dinner, and doubtless by this time Julia had informed Tom's mother of

the expedition, and anyone could see that our clothing had been wet. So

I lingered in no little anxiety behind the Peters stable while he made

the investigation. Our spirits rose considerably when he returned to

report that Julia had unexpectedly been a trump, having quieted his

mother by the surmise that he was spending the day with his Aunt Fanny.

So far, so good. The problem now was to decide upon what to admit. For

we must both tell the same story.

It was agreed that we had fallen into Logan's Pond from a raft: my

suggestion. Well, said Tom, the Petrel hadn't proved much better than a

raft, after all. I was in no mood to defend her.

This designation of the Petrel as a “raft” was my first legal quibble.

The question to be decided by the court was, What is a raft? just as

the supreme tribunal of the land has been required, in later years, to

decide, What is whiskey? The thing to be concealed if possible was the

building of the “raft,” although this information was already in the

possession of a number of persons, whose fathers might at any moment

see fit to congratulate my own on being the parent of a genius. It was a

risk, however, that had to be run. And, secondly, since Grits Jarvis was

contraband, nothing was to be said about him.

I have not said much about my mother, who might have been likened on

such occasions to a grand jury compelled to indict, yet torn between

loyalty to an oath and sympathy with the defendant. I went through the

Peters yard, climbed the wire fence, my object being to discover first

from Ella, the housemaid, or Hannah, the cook, how much was known in

high quarters. It was Hannah who, as I opened the kitchen door, turned

at the sound, and set down the saucepan she was scouring.

“Is it home ye are? Mercy to goodness!” (this on beholding my shrunken

costume) “Glory be to God you're not drownded! and your mother worritin'

her heart out! So it's into the wather ye were?”

I admitted it.

“Hannah?” I said softly.

“What then?”

“Does mother know--about the boat?”

“Now don't ye be wheedlin'.”

I managed to discover, however, that my mother did not know, and

surmised that the best reason why she had not been told had to do with

Hannah's criminal acquiescence concerning the operations in the shed. I

ran into the front hall and up the stairs, and my mother heard me coming

and met me on the landing.

“Hugh, where have you been?”

As I emerged from the semi-darkness of the stairway she caught sight of

my dwindled garments, of the trousers well above my ankles. Suddenly she

had me in her arms and was kissing me passionately. As she stood before

me in her grey, belted skirt, the familiar red-and-white cameo at her

throat, her heavy hair parted in the middle, in her eyes was an odd,

appealing look which I know now was a sign of mother love struggling

with a Presbyterian conscience. Though she inherited that conscience,

I have often thought she might have succeeded in casting it off--or at

least some of it--had it not been for the fact that in spite of herself

she worshipped its incarnation in the shape of my father. Her voice

trembled a little as she drew me to the sofa beside the window.

“Tell me about what happened, my son,” she said.

It was a terrible moment for me. For my affections were still

quiveringly alive in those days, and I loved her. I had for an instant

an instinctive impulse to tell her the whole story,--South Sea Islands

and all! And I could have done it had I not beheld looming behind her

another figure which represented a stern and unsympathetic Authority,

and somehow made her, suddenly, of small account. Not that she would

have understood the romance, but she would have comprehended me. I knew

that she was powerless to save me from the wrath to come. I wept. It was

because I hated to lie to her,--yet I did so. Fear gripped me, and--like

some respectable criminals I have since known--I understood that any

confession I made would inexorably be used against me.... I wonder

whether she knew I was lying? At any rate, the case appeared to be a

grave one, and I was presently remanded to my room to be held over for

trial....

Vividly, as I write, I recall the misery of the hours I have spent,

while awaiting sentence, in the little chamber with the honeysuckle

wall-paper and steel engravings of happy but dumpy children romping in

the fields and groves. On this particular March afternoon the weather

had become morne, as the French say; and I looked down sadly into the

grey back yard which the wind of the morning had strewn with chips from

the Petrel. At last, when shadows were gathering in the corners of the

room, I heard footsteps. Ella appeared, prim and virtuous, yet a little

commiserating. My father wished to see me, downstairs. It was not the

first time she had brought that summons, and always her manner was the

same!

The scene of my trials was always the sitting room, lined with grim

books in their walnut cases. And my father sat, like a judge, behind the

big desk where he did his work when at home. Oh, the distance between us

at such an hour! I entered as delicately as Agag, and the expression in

his eye seemed to convict me before I could open my mouth.

“Hugh,” he said, “your mother tells me that you have confessed to going,

without permission, to Logan's Pond, where you embarked on a raft and

fell into the water.”

The slight emphasis he contrived to put on the word raft sent a colder

shiver down my spine than the iced water had done. What did he know? or

was this mere suspicion? Too late, now, at any rate, to plead guilty.

“It was a sort of a raft, sir,” I stammered.

“A sort of a raft,” repeated my father. “Where, may I ask, did you find

it?”

“I--I didn't exactly find it, sir.”

“Ah!” said my father. (It was the moment to glance meaningly at the

jury.) The prisoner gulped. “You didn't exactly find it, then. Will you

kindly explain how you came by it?”

“Well, sir, we--I--put it together.”

“Have you any objection to stating, Hugh, in plain English, that you

made it?”

“No, sir, I suppose you might say that I made it.”

“Or that it was intended for a row-boat?”

Here was the time to appeal, to force a decision as to what constituted

a row-boat.

“Perhaps it might be called a row-boat, sir,” I said abjectly.

“Or that, in direct opposition to my wishes and commands in forbidding

you to have a boat, to spend your money foolishly and wickedly on a

whim, you constructed one secretly in the woodshed, took out a part of

the back partition, thus destroying property that did, not belong

to you, and had the boat carted this morning to Logan's Pond?” I was

silent, utterly undone. Evidently he had specific information.... There

are certain expressions that are, at times, more than mere figures of

speech, and now my father's wrath seemed literally towering. It added

visibly to his stature.

“Hugh,” he said, in a voice that penetrated to the very corners of my

soul, “I utterly fail to understand you. I cannot imagine how a son

of mine, a son of your mother who is the very soul of truthfulness and

honour--can be a liar.” (Oh, the terrible emphasis he put on that word!)

“Nor is it as if this were a new tendency--I have punished you for it

before. Your mother and I have tried to do our duty by you, to instil

into you Christian teaching. But it seems wholly useless. I confess that

I am at a less how to proceed. You seem to have no conscience whatever,

no conception of what you owe to your parents and your God. You not only

persistently disregard my wishes and commands, but you have, for many

months, been leading a double life, facing me every day, while you were

secretly and continually disobeying me. I shudder to think where this

determination of yours to have what you desire at any price will lead

you in the future. It is just such a desire that distinguishes wicked

men from good.”

I will not linger upon a scene the very remembrance of which is painful

to this day.... I went from my father's presence in disgrace, in an

agony of spirit that was overwhelming, to lock the door of my room and

drop face downward on the bed, to sob until my muscles twitched. For he

had, indeed, put into me an awful fear. The greatest horror of my

boyish imagination was a wicked man. Was I, as he had declared, utterly

depraved and doomed in spite of myself to be one?

There came a knock at my door--Ella with my supper. I refused to open,

and sent her away, to fall on my knees in the darkness and pray wildly

to a God whose attributes and character were sufficiently confused in my

mind. On the one hand was the stern, despotic Monarch of the Westminster

Catechism, whom I addressed out of habit, the Father who condemned a

portion of his children from the cradle. Was I one of those who he had

decreed before I was born must suffer the tortures of the flames of

hell? Putting two and two together, what I had learned in Sunday school

and gathered from parts of Dr. Pound's sermons, and the intimation of

my father that wickedness was within me, like an incurable disease,--was

not mine the logical conclusion? What, then, was the use of praying?...

My supplications ceased abruptly. And my ever ready imagination, stirred

to its depths, beheld that awful scene of the last day: the darkness,

such as sometimes creeps over the city in winter, when the jaundiced

smoke falls down and we read at noonday by gas-light. I beheld the

tortured faces of the wicked gathered on the one side, and my mother

on the other amongst the blessed, gazing across the gulf at me with

yearning and compassion. Strange that it did not strike me that the

sight of the condemned whom they had loved in life would have marred if

not destroyed the happiness of the chosen, about to receive their crowns

and harps! What a theology--that made the Creator and Preserver of all

mankind thus illogical!

III.

Although I was imaginative, I was not morbidly introspective, and by the

end of the first day of my incarceration my interest in that solution

had waned. At times, however, I actually yearned for someone in whom I

could confide, who could suggest a solution. I repeat, I would not for

worlds have asked my father or my mother or Dr. Pound, of whom I had a

wholesome fear, or perhaps an unwholesome one. Except at morning Bible

reading and at church my parents never mentioned the name of the Deity,

save to instruct me formally. Intended or no, the effect of my religious

training was to make me ashamed of discussing spiritual matters,

and naturally I failed to perceive that this was because it laid

its emphasis on personal salvation.... I did not, however, become an

unbeliever, for I was not of a nature to contemplate with equanimity a

godless universe....

My sufferings during these series of afternoon confinements did not come

from remorse, but were the result of a vague sense of injury; and their

effect was to generate within me a strange motive power, a desire to do

something that would astound my father and eventually wring from him the

confession that he had misjudged me. To be sure, I should have to wait

until early manhood, at least, for the accomplishment of such a coup.

Might it not be that I was an embryonic literary genius? Many were the

books I began in this ecstasy of self-vindication, only to abandon them

when my confinement came to an end.

It was about this time, I think, that I experienced one of those shocks

which have a permanent effect upon character. It was then the custom

for ladies to spend the day with one another, bringing their sewing; and

sometimes, when I unexpectedly entered the sitting-room, the voices of

my mother's visitors would drop to a whisper. One afternoon I returned

from school to pause at the head of the stairs. Cousin Bertha Ewan and

Mrs. McAlery were discussing with my mother an affair that I judged from

the awed tone in which they spoke might prove interesting.

“Poor Grace,” Mrs. McAlery was saying, “I imagine she's paid a heavy

penalty. No man alive will be faithful under those circumstances.”

I stopped at the head of the stairs, with a delicious, guilty feeling.

“Have they ever heard of her?” Cousin Bertha asked.

“It is thought they went to Spain,” replied Mrs. McAlery, solemnly, yet

not without a certain zest. “Mr. Jules Hollister will not have her name

mentioned in his presence, you know. And Whitcomb chased them as far as

New York with a horse-pistol in his pocket. The report is that he got

to the dock just as the ship sailed. And then, you know, he went to live

somewhere out West,--in Iowa, I believe.”

“Did he ever get a divorce?” Cousin Bertha inquired.

“He was too good a church member, my dear,” my mother reminded her.

“Well, I'd have got one quick enough, church member or no church

member,” declared Cousin Bertha, who had in her elements of daring.

“Not that I mean for a moment to excuse her,” Mrs. McAlery put in, “but

Edward Whitcomb did have a frightful temper, and he was awfully strict

with her, and he was old enough, anyhow, to be her father. Grace

Hollister was the last woman in the world I should have suspected of

doing so hideous a thing. She was so sweet and simple.”

“Jennings was very attractive,” said my Cousin Bertha. “I don't think I

ever saw a handsomer man. Now, if he had looked at me--”

The sentence was never finished, for at this crucial moment I dropped a

grammar....

I had heard enough, however, to excite my curiosity to the highest

pitch. And that evening, when I came in at five o'clock to study, I

asked my mother what had become of Gene Hollister's aunt.

“She went away, Hugh,” replied my mother, looking greatly troubled.

“Why?” I persisted.

“It is something you are too young to understand.”

Of course I started an investigation, and the next day at school I

asked the question of Gene Hollister himself, only to discover that he

believed his aunt to be dead! And that night he asked his mother if his

Aunt Grace were really alive, after all? Whereupon complications and

explanations ensued between our parents, of which we saw only the

surface signs.... My father accused me of eavesdropping (which I

denied), and sentenced me to an afternoon of solitary confinement for

repeating something which I had heard in private. I have reason to

believe that my mother was also reprimanded.

It must not be supposed that I permitted the matter to rest. In addition

to Grits Jarvis, there was another contraband among my acquaintances,

namely, Alec Pound, the scrape-grace son of the Reverend Doctor Pound.

Alec had an encyclopaedic mind, especially well stocked with the kind of

knowledge I now desired; first and last he taught me much, which I would

better have got in another way. To him I appealed and got the story, my

worst suspicions being confirmed. Mrs. Whitcomb's house had been across

the alley from that of Mr. Jennings, but no one knew that anything

was “going on,” though there had been signals from the windows--the

neighbours afterwards remembered....

I listened shudderingly.

“But,” I cried, “they were both married!”

“What difference does that make when you love a woman?” Alec replied

grandly. “I could tell you much worse things than that.”

This he proceeded to do. Fascinated, I listened with a sickening

sensation. It was a mild afternoon in spring, and we stood in the deep

limestone gutter in front of the parsonage, a little Gothic wooden house

set in a gloomy yard.

“I thought,” said I, “that people couldn't love any more after they were

married, except each other.”

Alec looked at me pityingly.

“You'll get over that notion,” he assured me.

Thus another ingredient entered my character. Denied its food at

home, good food, my soul eagerly consumed and made part of itself the

fermenting stuff that Alec Pound so willing distributed. And it was

fermenting stuff. Let us see what it did to me. Working slowly but

surely, it changed for me the dawning mystery of sex into an evil

instead of a holy one. The knowledge of the tragedy of Grace Hollister

started me to seeking restlessly, on bookshelves and elsewhere, for

a secret that forever eluded me, and forever led me on. The word

fermenting aptly describes the process begun, suggesting as it does

something closed up, away from air and sunlight, continually working in

secret, engendering forces that fascinated, yet inspired me with fear.

Undoubtedly this secretiveness of our elders was due to the pernicious

dualism of their orthodox Christianity, in which love was carnal and

therefore evil, and the flesh not the gracious soil of the spirit, but

something to be deplored and condemned, exorcised and transformed by

the miracle of grace. Now love had become a terrible power (gripping me)

whose enchantment drove men and women from home and friends and kindred

to the uttermost parts of the earth....

It was long before I got to sleep that night after my talk with Alec

Pound. I alternated between the horror and the romance of the story I

had heard, supplying for myself the details he had omitted: I beheld

the signals from the windows, the clandestine meetings, the sudden and

desperate flight. And to think that all this could have happened in our

city not five blocks from where I lay!

My consternation and horror were concentrated on the man,--and yet I

recall a curious bifurcation. Instead of experiencing that automatic

righteous indignation which my father and mother had felt, which had

animated old Mr. Jules Hollister when he had sternly forbidden his

daughter's name to be mentioned in his presence, which had made these

people outcasts, there welled up within me an intense sympathy and

pity. By an instinctive process somehow linked with other experiences,

I seemed to be able to enter into the feelings of these two outcasts,

to understand the fearful yet fascinating nature of the impulse that

had led them to elude the vigilance and probity of a world with which

I myself was at odds. I pictured them in a remote land, shunned by

mankind. Was there something within me that might eventually draw me

to do likewise? The desire in me to which my father had referred, which

would brook no opposition, which twisted and squirmed until it found its

way to its object? I recalled the words of Jarvis, the carpenter, that

if I ever set my heart on another man's wife, God help him. God help me!

A wicked man! I had never beheld the handsome and fascinating Mr.

Jennings, but I visualised him now; dark, like all villains, with a

black moustache and snapping black eyes. He carried a cane. I always

associated canes with villains. Whereupon I arose, groped for the

matches, lighted the gas, and gazing at myself in the mirror was a

little reassured to find nothing sinister in my countenance....

Next to my father's faith in a Moral Governor of the Universe was his

belief in the Tariff and the Republican Party. And this belief, among

others, he handed on to me. On the cinder playground of the Academy

we Republicans used to wage, during campaigns, pitched battles for the

Tariff. It did not take a great deal of courage to be a Republican

in our city, and I was brought up to believe that Democrats

were irrational, inferior, and--with certain exceptions like the

Hollisters--dirty beings. There was only one degree lower, and that was

to be a mugwump. It was no wonder that the Hollisters were Democrats,

for they had a queer streak in them; owing, no doubt, to the fact that

old Mr. Jules Hollister's mother had been a Frenchwoman. He looked like

a Frenchman, by the way, and always wore a skullcap.

I remember one autumn afternoon having a violent quarrel with

Gene Hollister that bade fair to end in blows, when he suddenly

demanded:--“I'll bet you anything you don't know why you're a

Republican.”

“It's because I'm for the Tariff,” I replied triumphantly.

But his next question floored me. What, for example, was the Tariff? I

tried to bluster it out, but with no success.

“Do you know?” I cried finally, with sudden inspiration.

It turned out that he did not.

“Aren't we darned idiots,” he asked, “to get fighting over something we

don't know anything about?”

That was Gene's French blood, of course. But his question rankled. And

how was I to know that he would have got as little satisfaction if he

had hurled it into the marching ranks of those imposing torch-light

processions which sometimes passed our house at night, with drums

beating and fifes screaming and torches waving,--thousands of citizens

who were for the Tariff for the same reason as I: to wit, because they

were Republicans.

Yet my father lived and died in the firm belief that the United States

of America was a democracy!

Resolved not to be caught a second time in such a humiliating position

by a Democrat, I asked my father that night what the Tariff was. But I

was too young to understand it, he said. I was to take his word for it

that the country would go to the dogs if the Democrats got in and the

Tariff were taken away. Here, in a nutshell, though neither he nor

I realized it, was the political instruction of the marching hordes.

Theirs not to reason why. I was too young, they too ignorant. Such is

the method of Authority!

The steel-mills of Mr. Durrett and Mr. Hambleton, he continued, would

be forced to shut down, and thousands of workmen would starve. This was

just a sample of what would happen. Prosperity would cease, he declared.

That word, Prosperity, made a deep impression on me, and I recall the

certain reverential emphasis he laid on it. And while my solicitude for

the workmen was not so great as his and Mr. Durrett's, I was concerned

as to what would happen to us if those twin gods, the Tariff and

Prosperity, should take their departure from the land. Knowing my love

for the good things of the table, my father intimated, with a rare

humour I failed to appreciate, that we should have to live henceforth

in spartan simplicity. After that, like the intelligent workman, I was

firmer than ever for the Tariff.

Such was the idealistic plane on which--and from a good man--I received

my first political instruction! And for a long time I connected the

dominance of the Republican Party with the continuation of manna and

quails, in other words, with nothing that had to do with the spiritual

welfare of any citizen, but with clothing and food and material

comforts. My education was progressing....

Though my father revered Plato and Aristotle, he did not, apparently,

take very seriously the contention that that government alone is good

“which seeks to attain the permanent interests of the governed by

evolving the character of its citizens.” To put the matter brutally,

politics, despite the lofty sentiments on the transparencies in

torchlight processions, had only to do with the belly, not the soul.

Politics and government, one perceives, had nothing to do with religion,

nor education with any of these. A secularized and disjointed world! Our

leading citizens, learned in the classics though some of them might be,

paid no heed to the dictum of the Greek idealist, who was more practical

than they would have supposed. “The man who does not carry his city

within his heart is a spiritual starveling.”

One evening, a year or two after that tariff campaign, I was pretending

to study my lessons under the student lamp in the sitting-room while my

mother sewed and my father wrote at his desk, when there was a ring

at the door-bell. I welcomed any interruption, even though the

visitor proved to be only the druggist's boy; and there was always

the possibility of a telegram announcing, for instance, the death of a

relative. Such had once been the case when my Uncle Avery Paret had died

in New York, and I was taken out of school for a blissful four days for

the funeral.

I went tiptoeing into the hall and peeped over the banisters while Ella

opened the door. I heard a voice which I recognized as that of Perry

Blackwood's father asking for Mr. Paret; and then to my astonishment, I

saw filing after him into the parlour some ten or twelve persons. With

the exception of Mr. Ogilvy, who belonged to one of our old families,

and Mr. Watling, a lawyer who had married the youngest of Gene

Hollister's aunts, the visitors entered stealthily, after the manner of

burglars; some of these were heavy-jowled, and all had an air of mystery

that raised my curiosity and excitement to the highest pitch. I caught

hold of Ella as she came up the stairs, but she tore herself free, and

announced to my father that Mr. Josiah Blackwood and other gentlemen had

asked to see him. My father seemed puzzled as he went downstairs.... A

long interval elapsed, during which I did not make even a pretence of

looking at my arithmetic. At times the low hum of voices rose to what

was almost an uproar, and on occasions I distinguished a marked Irish

brogue.

“I wonder what they want?” said my mother, nervously.

At last we heard the front door shut behind them, and my father came

upstairs, his usually serene face wearing a disturbed expression.

“Who in the world was it, Mr. Paret?” asked my mother.

My father sat down in the arm-chair. He was clearly making an effort for

self-control.

“Blackwood and Ogilvy and Watling and some city politicians,” he

exclaimed.

“Politicians!” she repeated. “What did they want? That is, if it's

anything you can tell me,” she added apologetically.

“They wished me to be the Republican candidate for the mayor of this

city.”

This tremendous news took me off my feet. My father mayor!

“Of course you didn't consider it, Mr. Paret,” my mother was saying.

“Consider it!” he echoed reprovingly. “I can't imagine what Ogilvy and

Watling and Josiah Blackwood were thinking of! They are out of their

heads. I as much as told them so.”

This was more than I could bear, for I had already pictured myself

telling the news to envious schoolmates.

“Oh, father, why didn't you take it?” I cried.

By this time, when he turned to me, he had regained his usual

expression.

“You don't know what you're talking about, Hugh,” he said. “Accept a

political office! That sort of thing is left to politicians.”

The tone in which he spoke warned me that a continuation of the

conversation would be unwise, and my mother also understood that the

discussion was closed. He went back to his desk, and began writing again

as though nothing had happened.

As for me, I was left in a palpitating state of excitement which my

father's self-control or sang-froid only served to irritate and enhance,

and my head was fairly spinning as, covertly, I watched his pen steadily

covering the paper.

How could he--how could any man of flesh and blood sit down calmly after

having been offered the highest honour in the gift of his community! And

he had spurned it as if Mr. Blackwood and the others had gratuitously

insulted him! And how was it, if my father so revered the Republican

Party that he would not suffer it to be mentioned slightingly in his

presence, that he had refused contemptuously to be its mayor?...

The next day at school, however, I managed to let it be known that the

offer had been made and declined. After all, this seemed to make my

father a bigger man than if he had accepted it. Naturally I was asked

why he had declined it.

“He wouldn't take it,” I replied scornfully. “Office-holding should be

left to politicians.”

Ralph Hambleton, with his precocious and cynical knowledge of the

world, minimized my triumph by declaring that he would rather be his

grandfather, Nathaniel Durrett, than the mayor of the biggest city in

the country. Politicians, he said, were bloodsuckers and thieves, and

the only reason for holding office was that it enabled one to steal the

taxpayers' money....

As I have intimated, my vision of a future literary career waxed and

waned, but a belief that I was going to be Somebody rarely deserted

me. If not a literary lion, what was that Somebody to be? Such an

environment as mine was woefully lacking in heroic figures to satisfy

the romantic soul. In view of the experience I have just related, it is

not surprising that the notion of becoming a statesman did not appeal

to me; nor is it to be wondered at, despite the somewhat exaggerated

respect and awe in which Ralph's grandfather was held by my father and

other influential persons, that I failed to be stirred by the elements

of greatness in the grim personality of our first citizen, the

iron-master. For he possessed such elements. He lived alone in Ingrain

Street in an uncompromising mansion I always associated with the

Sabbath, not only because I used to be taken there on decorous Sunday

visits by my father, but because it was the very quintessence of

Presbyterianism. The moment I entered its “portals”--as Mr. Hawthorne

appropriately would have called them--my spirit was overwhelmed and

suffocated by its formality and orderliness. Within its stern walls

Nathaniel Durrett had made a model universe of his own, such as the

Deity of the Westminster Confession had no doubt meant his greater one

to be if man had not rebelled and foiled him.... It was a world from

which I was determined to escape at any cost.

My father and I were always ushered into the gloomy library, with its

high ceiling, with its long windows that reached almost to the rococo

cornice, with its cold marble mantelpiece that reminded me of a

tombstone, with its interminable book shelves filled with yellow

bindings. On the centre table, in addition to a ponderous Bible, was one

of those old-fashioned carafes of red glass tipped with blue surmounted

by a tumbler of blue tipped with red. Behind this table Mr. Durrett sat

reading a volume of sermons, a really handsome old man in his black tie

and pleated shirt; tall and spare, straight as a ramrod, with a finely

moulded head and straight nose and sinewy hands the colour of mulberry

stain. He called my father by his first name, an immense compliment,

considering how few dared to do so.

“Well, Matthew,” the old man would remark, after they had discussed Dr.

Pound's latest flight on the nature of the Trinity or the depravity of

man, or horticulture, or the Republican Party, “do you have any better

news of Hugh at school?”

“I regret to say, Mr. Durrett,” my father would reply, “that he does not

yet seem to be aroused to a sense of his opportunities.”

Whereupon Mr. Durrett would gimble me with a blue eye that lurked

beneath grizzled brows, quite as painful a proceeding as if he used an

iron tool. I almost pity myself when I think of what a forlorn stranger

I was in their company. They two, indeed, were of one kind, and I of

another sort who could never understand them,--nor they me. To what

depths of despair they reduced me they never knew, and yet they were

doing it all for my good! They only managed to convince me that my

love of folly was ineradicable, and that I was on my way head first

for perdition. I always looked, during these excruciating and personal

moments, at the coloured glass bottle.

“It grieves me to hear it, Hugh,” Mr. Durrett invariably declared.

“You'll never come to any good without study. Now when I was your

age...”

I knew his history by heart, a common one in this country, although

he made an honourable name instead of a dishonourable one. And when I

contrast him with those of his successors whom I was to know later...!

But I shall not anticipate. American genius had not then evolved the

false entry method of overcapitalization. A thrilling history, Mr.

Durrett's, could I but have entered into it. I did not reflect then that

this stern old man must have throbbed once; nay, fire and energy still

remained in his bowels, else he could not have continued to dominate a

city. Nor did it occur to me that the great steel-works that lighted the

southern sky were the result of a passion, of dreams similar to those

possessing me, but which I could not express. He had founded a family

whose position was virtually hereditary, gained riches which for those

days were great, compelled men to speak his name with a certain awe.

But of what use were such riches as his when his religion and morality

compelled him to banish from him all the joys in the power of riches to

bring?

No, I didn't want to be an iron-master. But it may have been about

this time that I began to be impressed with the power of wealth, the

adulation and reverence it commanded, the importance in which it clothed

all who shared in it....

The private school I attended in the company of other boys with whom I

was brought up was called Densmore Academy, a large, square building

of a then hideous modernity, built of smooth, orange-red bricks with

threads of black mortar between them. One reads of happy school days,

yet I fail to recall any really happy hours spent there, even in the

yard, which was covered with black cinders that cut you when you fell.

I think of it as a penitentiary, and the memory of the barred lower

windows gives substance to this impression.

I suppose I learned something during the seven years of my

incarceration. All of value, had its teachers known anything of youthful

psychology, of natural bent, could have been put into me in three. At

least four criminally wasted years, to say nothing of the benumbing

and desiccating effect of that old system of education! Chalk and

chalk-dust! The Mediterranean a tinted portion of the map, Italy a man's

boot which I drew painfully, with many yawns; history no glorious epic

revealing as it unrolls the Meaning of Things, no revelation of that

wondrous distillation of the Spirit of man, but an endless marching and

counter-marching up and down the map, weary columns of figures to

be learned by rote instantly to be forgotten again. “On June the 7th

General So-and-so proceeded with his whole army--” where? What does

it matter? One little chapter of Carlyle, illuminated by a teacher

of understanding, were worth a million such text-books. Alas, for the

hatred of Virgil! “Paret” (a shiver), “begin at the one hundred

and thirtieth line and translate!” I can hear myself droning out in

detestable English a meaningless portion of that endless journey of

the pious AEneas; can see Gene Hollister, with heart-rending glances of

despair, stumbling through Cornelius Nepos in an unventilated room with

chalk-rubbed blackboards and heavy odours of ink and stale lunch. And

I graduated from Densmore Academy, the best school in our city, in the

80's, without having been taught even the rudiments of citizenship.

Knowledge was presented to us as a corpse, which bit by bit we

painfully dissected. We never glimpsed the living, growing thing, never

experienced the Spirit, the same spirit that was able magically to

waft me from a wintry Lyme Street to the South Seas, the energizing,

electrifying Spirit of true achievement, of life, of God himself. Little

by little its flames were smothered until in manhood there seemed no

spark of it left alive. Many years were to pass ere it was to revive

again, as by a miracle. I travelled. Awakening at dawn, I saw, framed

in a port-hole, rose-red Seriphos set in a living blue that paled the

sapphire; the seas Ulysses had sailed, and the company of the Argonauts.

My soul was steeped in unimagined colour, and in the memory of one

rapturous instant is gathered what I was soon to see of Greece, is

focussed the meaning of history, poetry and art. I was to stand one

evening in spring on the mound where heroes sleep and gaze upon the

plain of Marathon between darkening mountains and the blue thread of the

strait peaceful now, flushed with pink and white blossoms of fruit

and almond trees; to sit on the cliff-throne whence a Persian King had

looked down upon a Salamis fought and lost.... In that port-hole glimpse

a Themistocles was revealed, a Socrates, a Homer and a Phidias, an

AEschylus, and a Pericles; yes, and a John brooding Revelations on his

sea-girt rock as twilight falls over the waters....

I saw the Roman Empire, that Scarlet Woman whose sands were dyed

crimson with blood to appease her harlotry, whose ships were laden with

treasures from the immutable East, grain from the valley of the Nile,

spices from Arabia, precious purple stuffs from Tyre, tribute and spoil,

slaves and jewels from conquered nations she absorbed; and yet whose

very emperors were the unconscious instruments of a Progress they wot

not of, preserved to the West by Marathon and Salamis. With Caesar's

legions its message went forth across Hispania to the cliffs of the

wild western ocean, through Hercynian forests to tribes that dwelt where

great rivers roll up their bars by misty, northern seas, and even to

Celtic fastnesses beyond the Wall....

IV.

In and out of my early memories like a dancing ray of sunlight flits

the spirit of Nancy. I was always fond of her, but in extreme youth I

accepted her incense with masculine complacency and took her allegiance

for granted, never seeking to fathom the nature of the spell I exercised

over her. Naturally other children teased me about her; but what was

worse, with that charming lack of self-consciousness and consideration

for what in after life are called the finer feelings, they teased her

about me before me, my presence deterring them not at all. I can see

them hopping around her in the Peters yard crying out:--“Nancy's in love

with Hugh! Nancy's in love with Hugh!”

A sufficiently thrilling pastime, this, for Nancy could take care of

herself. I was a bungler beside her when it came to retaliation, and

not the least of her attractions for me was her capacity for anger: fury

would be a better term. She would fly at them--even as she flew at the

head-hunters when the Petrel was menaced; and she could run like a

deer. Woe to the unfortunate victim she overtook! Masculine strength,

exercised apologetically, availed but little, and I have seen Russell

Peters and Gene Hollister retire from such encounters humiliated and

weeping. She never caught Ralph; his methods of torture were more

intelligent and subtle than Gene's and Russell's, but she was his equal

when it came to a question of tongues.

“I know what's the matter with you, Ralph Hambleton,” she would

say. “You're jealous.” An accusation that invariably put him on the

defensive. “You think all the girls are in love with you, don't you?”

These scenes I found somewhat embarrassing. Not so Nancy. After

discomfiting her tormenters, or wounding and scattering them, she would

return to my side.... In spite of her frankly expressed preference

for me she had an elusiveness that made a continual appeal to my

imagination. She was never obvious or commonplace, and long before I

began to experience the discomforts and sufferings of youthful love

I was fascinated by a nature eloquent with contradictions and

inconsistencies. She was a tomboy, yet her own sex was enhanced rather

than overwhelmed by contact with the other: and no matter how many trees

she climbed she never seemed to lose her daintiness. It was innate.

She could, at times, be surprisingly demure. These impressions of her

daintiness and demureness are particularly vivid in a picture my memory

has retained of our walking together, unattended, to Susan Blackwood's

birthday party. She must have been about twelve years old. It was the

first time I had escorted her or any other girl to a party; Mrs. Willett

had smiled over the proceeding, but Nancy and I took it most seriously,

as symbolic of things to come. I can see Powell Street, where Nancy

lived, at four o'clock on a mild and cloudy December afternoon, the

decorous, retiring houses, Nancy on one side of the pavement by the iron

fences and I on the other by the tree boxes. I can't remember her dress,

only the exquisite sense of her slimness and daintiness comes back to

me, of her dark hair in a long braid tied with a red ribbon, of her

slender legs clad in black stockings of shining silk. We felt the

occasion to be somehow too significant, too eloquent for words....

In silence we climbed the flight of stone steps that led up to the

Blackwood mansion, when suddenly the door was opened, letting out sounds

of music and revelry. Mr. Blackwood's coloured butler, Ned, beamed at us

hospitably, inviting us to enter the brightness within. The shades were

drawn, the carpets were covered with festal canvas, the folding

doors between the square rooms were flung back, the prisms of the

big chandeliers flung their light over animated groups of matrons and

children. Mrs. Watling, the mother of the Watling twins--too young to be

present was directing with vivacity the game of “King William was King

James's son,” and Mrs. McAlery was playing the piano.

“Now choose you East, now choose you West,

Now choose the one you love the best!”

Tom Peters, in a velvet suit and consequently very miserable, refused

to embrace Ethel Hollister; while the scornful Julia lurked in a corner:

nothing would induce her to enter such a foolish game. I experienced

a novel discomfiture when Ralph kissed Nancy.... Afterwards came the

feast, from which Ham Durrett, in a pink paper cap with streamers, was

at length forcibly removed by his mother. Thus early did he betray his

love for the flesh pots....

It was not until I was sixteen that a player came and touched the keys

of my soul, and it awoke, bewildered, at these first tender notes. The

music quickened, tripping in ecstasy, to change by subtle phrases into

themes of exquisite suffering hitherto unexperienced. I knew that I

loved Nancy.

With the advent of longer dresses that reached to her shoe tops a change

had come over her. The tomboy, the willing camp-follower who loved me

and was unashamed, were gone forever, and a mysterious, transfigured

being, neither girl nor woman, had magically been evolved. Could it be

possible that she loved me still? My complacency had vanished; suddenly

I had become the aggressor, if only I had known how to “aggress”; but

in her presence I was seized by an accursed shyness that paralyzed my

tongue, and the things I had planned to say were left unuttered. It was

something--though I did not realize it--to be able to feel like that.

The time came when I could no longer keep this thing to myself. The need

of an outlet, of a confidant, became imperative, and I sought out Tom

Peters. It was in February; I remember because I had ventured--with

incredible daring--to send Nancy an elaborate, rosy Valentine; written

on the back of it in a handwriting all too thinly disguised was the

following verse, the triumphant result of much hard thinking in school

hours:--

Should you of this the sender guess

Without another sign,

Would you repent, and rest content

To be his Valentine

I grew hot and cold by turns when I thought of its possible effects on

my chances.

One of those useless, slushy afternoons, I took Tom for a walk that led

us, as dusk came on, past Nancy's house. Only by painful degrees did

I succeed in overcoming my bashfulness; but Tom, when at last I had

blurted out the secret, was most sympathetic, although the ailment from

which I suffered was as yet outside of the realm of his experience.

I have used the word “ailment” advisedly, since he evidently put my

trouble in the same category with diphtheria or scarlet fever, remarking

that it was “darned hard luck.” In vain I sought to explain that I did

not regard it as such in the least; there was suffering, I admitted, but

a degree of bliss none could comprehend who had not felt it. He refused

to be envious, or at least to betray envy; yet he was curious, asking

many questions, and I had reason to think before we parted that his

admiration for me was increased. Was it possible that he, too, didn't

love Nancy? No, it was funny, but he didn't. He failed to see much in

girls: his tone remained commiserating, yet he began to take an interest

in the progress of my suit.

For a time I had no progress to report. Out of consideration for those

members of our weekly dancing class whose parents were Episcopalians the

meetings were discontinued during Lent, and to call would have demanded

a courage not in me; I should have become an object of ridicule among

my friends and I would have died rather than face Nancy's mother and the

members of her household. I set about making ingenious plans with a view

to encounters that might appear casual. Nancy's school was dismissed at

two, so was mine. By walking fast I could reach Salisbury Street, near

St. Mary's Seminary for Young Ladies, in time to catch her, but even

then for many days I was doomed to disappointment. She was either in

company with other girls, or else she had taken another route; this

I surmised led past Sophy McAlery's house, and I enlisted Tom as a

confederate. He was to make straight for the McAlery's on Elm while I

followed Powell, two short blocks away, and if Nancy went to Sophy's and

left there alone he was to announce the fact by a preconcerted signal.

Through long and persistent practice he had acquired a whistle shrill

enough to wake the dead, accomplished by placing a finger of each hand

between his teeth;--a gift that was the envy of his acquaintances, and

the subject of much discussion as to whether his teeth were peculiar.

Tom insisted that they were; it was an added distinction.

On this occasion he came up behind Nancy as she was leaving Sophy's gate

and immediately sounded the alarm. She leaped in the air, dropped her

school-books and whirled on him.

“Tom Peters! How dare you frighten me so!” she cried.

Tom regarded her in sudden dismay.

“I--I didn't mean to,” he said. “I didn't think you were so near.”

“But you must have seen me.”

“I wasn't paying much attention,” he equivocated,--a remark not

calculated to appease her anger.

“Why were you doing it?”

“I was just practising,” said Tom.

“Practising!” exclaimed Nancy, scornfully. “I shouldn't think you needed

to practise that any more.”

“Oh, I've done it louder,” he declared, “Listen!”

She seized his hands, snatching them away from his lips. At this

critical moment I appeared around the corner considerably out of breath,

my heart beating like a watchman's rattle. I tried to feign nonchalance.

“Hello, Tom,” I said. “Hello, Nancy. What's the matter?”

“It's Tom--he frightened me out of my senses.” Dropping his wrists, she

gave me a most disconcerting look; there was in it the suspicion of a

smile. “What are you doing here, Hugh?”

“I heard Tom,” I explained.

“I should think you might have. Where were you?”

“Over in another street,” I answered, with deliberate vagueness. Nancy

had suddenly become demure. I did not dare look at her, but I had a most

uncomfortable notion that she suspected the plot. Meanwhile we had

begun to walk along, all three of us, Tom, obviously ill at ease and

discomfited, lagging a little behind. Just before we reached the corner

I managed to kick him. His departure was by no means graceful.

“I've got to go;” he announced abruptly, and turned down the side

street. We watched his sturdy figure as it receded.

“Well, of all queer boys!” said Nancy, and we walked on again.

“He's my best friend,” I replied warmly.

“He doesn't seem to care much for your company,” said Nancy.

“Oh, they have dinner at half past two,” I explained.

“Aren't you afraid of missing yours, Hugh?” she asked wickedly.

“I've got time. I'd--I'd rather be with you.” After making which

audacious remark I was seized by a spasm of apprehension. But nothing

happened. Nancy remained demure. She didn't remind me that I had

reflected upon Tom.

“That's nice of you, Hugh.”

“Oh, I'm not saying it because it's nice,” I faltered. “I'd rather be

with you than--with anybody.”

This was indeed the acme of daring. I couldn't believe I had actually

said it. But again I received no rebuke; instead came a remark that set

me palpitating, that I treasured for many weeks to come.

“I got a very nice valentine,” she informed me.

“What was it like?” I asked thickly.

“Oh, beautiful! All pink lace and--and Cupids, and the picture of a

young man and a young woman in a garden.”

“Was that all?”

“Oh, no, there was a verse, in the oddest handwriting. I wonder who sent

it?”

“Perhaps Ralph,” I hazarded ecstatically.

“Ralph couldn't write poetry,” she replied disdainfully. “Besides, it

was very good poetry.”

I suggested other possible authors and admirers. She rejected them all.

We reached her gate, and I lingered. As she looked down at me from

the stone steps her eyes shone with a soft light that filled me with

radiance, and into her voice had come a questioning, shy note that

thrilled the more because it revealed a new Nancy of whom I had not

dreamed.

“Perhaps I'll meet you again--coming from school,” I said.

“Perhaps,” she answered. “You'll be late to dinner, Hugh, if you don't

go....”

I was late, and unable to eat much dinner, somewhat to my mother's

alarm. Love had taken away my appetite.... After dinner, when I was

wandering aimlessly about the yard, Tom appeared on the other side of

the fence.

“Don't ever ask me to do that again,” he said gloomily.

I did meet Nancy again coming from school, not every day, but nearly

every day. At first we pretended that there was no arrangement in this,

and we both feigned surprise when we encountered one another. It

was Nancy who possessed the courage that I lacked. One afternoon she

said:--“I think I'd better walk with the girls to-morrow, Hugh.”

I protested, but she was firm. And after that it was an understood thing

that on certain days I should go directly home, feeling like an exile.

Sophy McAlery had begun to complain: and I gathered that Sophy was

Nancy's confidante. The other girls had begun to gossip. It was Nancy

who conceived the brilliant idea--the more delightful because she said

nothing about it to me--of making use of Sophy. She would leave school

with Sophy, and I waited on the corner near the McAlery house. Poor

Sophy! She was always of those who piped while others danced. In those

days she had two straw-coloured pigtails, and her plain, faithful face

is before me as I write. She never betrayed to me the excitement that

filled her at being the accomplice of our romance.