“Hugh!” she exclaimed, and I was silent. “You don't understand,”

she went on, a little breathlessly, “what I mean by punishment is

deterioration. Do you remember once, long ago, when you came to me

before I was married, I said we'd both run after false gods, and that

we couldn't do without them? Well, and now this has come; it seems so

wonderful to me, coming again like that after we had passed it by, after

we thought it had gone forever; it's opened up visions for me that I

never hoped to see again. It ought to restore us, dear--that's what I'm

trying to say--to redeem us, to make us capable of being what we were

meant to be. If it doesn't do that, if it isn't doing so, it's the most

horrible of travesties, of mockeries. If we gain life only to have it

turn into death--slow death; if we go to pieces again, utterly. For now

there's hope. The more I think, the more clearly I see that we can't

take any step without responsibilities. If we take this, you'll have me,

and I'll have you. And if we don't save each other--”

“But we will,” I said.

“Ah,” she exclaimed, “if we could start new, without any past. I married

Ham with my eyes open.”

“You couldn't know that he would become--well, as flagrant as he is. You

didn't really know what he was then.”

“There's no reason why I shouldn't have anticipated it. I can't claim

that I was deceived, that I thought my marriage was made in heaven. I

entered into a contract, and Ham has kept his part of it fairly well.

He hasn't interfered with my freedom. That isn't putting it on a high

plane, but there is an obligation involved. You yourself, in your law

practice, are always insisting upon the sacredness of contract as the

very basis of our civilization.”

Here indeed would have been a home thrust, had I been vulnerable at

the time. So intent was I on overcoming her objections, that I resorted

unwittingly to the modern argument I had more than once declared in

court to be anathema-the argument of the new reform in reference to the

common law and the constitution.

“A contract, no matter how seriously entered into at the time it was

made, that later is seen to violate the principles of humanity should be

void. And not only this, but you didn't consent that he should disgrace

you.”

Nancy winced.

“I never told you that he paid my father's debts, I never told anyone,”

she said, in a low voice.

“Even then,” I answered after a moment, “you ought to see that it's

too terrible a price to pay for your happiness. And Ham hasn't ever

pretended to consider you in any way. It's certain you didn't agree that

he should do--what he is doing.”

“Suppose I admitted it,” she said, “there remain Maude and your

children. Their happiness, their future becomes my responsibility as

well as yours.”

“But I don't love Maude, and Maude doesn't love me. I grant it's my

fault, that I did her a wrong in marrying her, but she is right in

leaving me. I should be doing her a double wrong. And the children will

be happy with her, they will be well brought up. I, too, have thought

this out, Nancy,” I insisted, “and the fact is that in our respective

marriages we have been, each of us, victims of our time, of our

education. We were born in a period of transition, we inherited views

of life that do not fit conditions to-day. It takes courage to achieve

happiness, initiative to emancipate one's self from a morality that

begins to hamper and bind. To stay as we are, to refuse to take what is

offered us, is to remain between wind and water. I don't mean that we

should do anything--hastily. We can afford to take a reasonable time, to

be dignified about it. But I have come to the conclusion that the only

thing that matters in the world is a love like ours, and its fulfilment.

Achievement, success, are empty and meaningless without it. And you do

love me--you've admitted it.”

“Oh, I don't want to talk about it,” she exclaimed, desperately.

“But we have to talk about it,” I persisted. “We have to thrash it out,

to see it straight, as you yourself have said.”

“You speak of convictions, Hugh,--new convictions, in place of the old

we have discarded. But what are they? And is there no such thing

as conscience--even though it be only an intuition of happiness or

unhappiness? I do care for you, I do love you--”

“Then why not let that suffice?” I exclaimed, leaning towards her.

She drew back.

“But I want to respect you, too,” she said.

I was shocked, too shocked to answer.

“I want to respect you,” she repeated, more gently. “I don't want to

think that--that what we feel for each other is--unconsecrated.”

“It consecrates itself,” I declared.

She shook her head.

“Surely it has its roots in everything that is fine in both of us.”

“We both went wrong,” said Nancy. “We both sought to wrest power and

happiness from the world, to make our own laws. How can we assert

that--this is not merely a continuation of it?”

“But can't we work out our beliefs together?” I demanded. “Won't you

trust me, trust our love for one another?”

Her breath came and went quickly.

“Oh, you know that I want you, Hugh, as much as you want me, and more.

The time may come when I can't resist you.”

“Why do you resist me?” I cried, seizing her hands convulsively, and

swept by a gust of passion at her confession.

“Try to understand that I am fighting for both of us!” she pleaded--an

appeal that wrung me in spite of the pitch to which my feelings had been

raised. “Hugh, dear, we must think it out. Don't now.”

I let her hands drop....

Beyond the range of hills rising from the far side of the Ashuela was

the wide valley in which was situated the Cloverdale Country Club, with

its polo field, golf course and tennis courts; and in this same

valley some of our wealthy citizens, such as Howard Ogilvy and Leonard

Dickinson, had bought “farms,” week-end playthings for spring and

autumn. Hambleton Durrett had started the fashion. Capriciously, as he

did everything else, he had become the owner of several hundred acres

of pasture, woodland and orchard, acquired some seventy-five head of

blooded stock, and proceeded to house them in model barns and milk by

machinery; for several months he had bored everyone in the Boyne Club

whom he could entice into conversation on the subject of the records of

pedigreed cows, and spent many bibulous nights on the farm in company

with those parasites who surrounded him when he was in town. Then

another interest had intervened; a feminine one, of course, and his

energies were transferred (so we understood) to the reconstruction and

furnishing of a little residence in New York, not far from Fifth Avenue.

The farm continued under the expert direction of a superintendent

who was a graduate of the State Agricultural College, and a select

clientele, which could afford to pay the prices, consumed the milk and

cream and butter. Quite consistent with their marital relations was

the fact that Nancy should have taken a fancy to the place after Ham's

interest had waned. Not that she cared for the Guernseys, or Jerseys,

or whatever they may have been; she evinced a sudden passion for

simplicity,--occasional simplicity, at least,--for a contrast to and

escape from a complicated life of luxury. She built another house for

the superintendent banished him from the little farmhouse (where Ham had

kept two rooms); banished along with the superintendent the stiff plush

furniture, the yellow-red carpets, the easels and the melodeon, and

decked it out in bright chintzes, with wall-papers to match, dainty

muslin curtains, and rag-carpet rugs on the hardwood floors. The

pseudo-classic porch over the doorway, which had suggested a cemetery,

was removed, and a wide piazza added, furnished with wicker lounging

chairs and tables, and shaded with gay awnings.

Here, to the farm, accompanied by a maid, she had been in the habit

of retiring from time to time, and here she came in early July. Here,

dressed in the simplest linen gowns of pink or blue or white, I found a

Nancy magically restored to girlhood,--anew Nancy, betraying only traces

of the old, a new Nancy in a new Eden. We had all the setting, all the

illusion of that perfect ideal of domesticity, love in a cottage. Nancy

and I, who all our lives had spurned simplicity, laughed over the joy

we found in it: she made a high art of it, of course; we had our simple

dinners, which Mrs. Olsen cooked and served in the open air; sometimes

on the porch, sometimes under the great butternut tree spreading its

shade over what in a more elaborate country-place, would have been

called a lawn,--an uneven plot of grass of ridges and hollows that ran

down to the orchard. Nancy's eyes would meet mine across the little

table, and often our gaze would wander over the pastures below, lucent

green in the level evening light, to the darkening woods beyond,

gilt-tipped in the setting sun. There were fields of ripening yellow

grain, of lusty young corn that grew almost as we watched it: the

warm winds of evening were heavy with the acrid odours of fecundity.

Fecundity! In that lay the elusive yet insistent charm of that country;

and Nancy's, of course, was the transforming touch that made it

paradise. It was thus, in the country, I suggested that we should spend

the rest of our existence. What was the use of amassing money, when

happiness was to be had so simply?

“How long do you think you could stand it?” she asked, as she handed me

a plate of blackberries.

“Forever, with the right woman,” I announced.

“How long could the woman stand it?”.... She humoured, smilingly, my

crystal-gazing into our future, as though she had not the heart to

deprive me of the pleasure.

“I simply can't believe in it, Hugh,” she said when I pressed her for an

answer.

“Why not?”

“I suppose it's because I believe in continuity, I haven't the romantic

temperament,--I always see the angel with the flaming sword. It isn't

that I want to see him.”

“But we shall redeem ourselves,” I said. “It won't be curiosity and

idleness. We are not just taking this thing, and expecting to give

nothing for it in return.”

“What can we give that is worth it?” she exclaimed, with one of her

revealing flashes.

“We won't take it lightly, but seriously,” I told her. “We shall find

something to give, and that something will spring naturally out of our

love. We'll read together, and think and plan together.”

“Oh, Hugh, you are incorrigible,” was all she said.

The male tendency in me was forever strained to solve her, to deduce

from her conversation and conduct a body of consistent law. The effort

was useless. Here was a realm, that of Nancy's soul, in which there was

apparently no such thing as relevancy. In the twilight, after dinner,

we often walked through the orchard to a grassy bank beside the little

stream, where we would sit and watch the dying glow in the sky. After a

rain its swollen waters were turbid, opaque yellow-red with the clay

of the hills; at other times it ran smoothly, temperately, almost clear

between the pasture grasses and wild flowers. Nancy declared that it

reminded her of me. We sat there, into the lush, warm nights, and the

moon shone down on us, or again through long silences we searched the

bewildering, starry chart of the heavens, with the undertones of the

night-chorus of the fields in our ears. Sometimes she let my head rest

upon her knee; but when, throbbing at her touch, with the life-force

pulsing around us, I tried to take her in my arms, to bring her lips to

mine, she resisted me with an energy of will and body that I could not

overcome, I dared not overcome. She acknowledged her love for me, she

permitted me to come to her, she had the air of yielding but never

yielded. Why, then, did she allow the words of love to pass? and how

draw the line between caresses? I was maddened and disheartened by that

elusive resistance in her--apparently so frail a thing!--that neither

argument nor importunity could break down. Was there something lacking

in me? or was it that I feared to mar or destroy the love she had. This,

surely, had not been the fashion of other loves, called unlawful, the

classic instances celebrated by the poets of all ages rose to mock me.

“Incurably romantic,” she had called me, in calmer moments, when I was

able to discuss our affair objectively. And once she declared that I had

no sense of tragedy. We read “Macbeth” together, I remember, one rainy

Sunday. The modern world, which was our generation, would seem to be

cut off from all that preceded it as with a descending knife. It was

precisely from “the sense of tragedy” that we had been emancipated: from

the “agonized conscience,” I should undoubtedly have said, had I been

acquainted then with Mr. Santayana's later phrase. Conscience--the old

kind of conscience,--and nothing inherent in the deeds themselves, made

the tragedy; conscience was superstition, the fear of the wrath of the

gods: conscience was the wrath of the gods. Eliminate it, and behold!

there were no consequences. The gods themselves, that kind of gods,

became as extinct as the deities of the Druids, the Greek fates, the

terrible figures of German mythology. Yes, and as the God of Christian

orthodoxy.

Had any dire calamities overtaken the modern Macbeths, of whose personal

lives we happened to know something? Had not these great ones broken

with impunity all the laws of traditional morality? They ground the

faces of the poor, played golf and went to church with serene minds,

untroubled by criticism; they appropriated, quite freely, other men's

money, and some of them other men's wives, and yet they were not haggard

with remorse. The gods remained silent. Christian ministers regarded

these modern transgressors of ancient laws benignly and accepted their

contributions. Here, indeed, were the supermen of the mad German prophet

and philosopher come to life, refuting all classic tragedy. It is true

that some of these supermen were occasionally swept away by disease,

which in ancient days would have been regarded as a retributive scourge,

but was in fact nothing but the logical working of the laws of hygiene,

the result of overwork. Such, though stated more crudely, were my

contentions when desire did not cloud my brain and make me incoherent.

And I did not fail to remind Nancy, constantly, that this was the path

on which her feet had been set; that to waver now was to perish. She

smiled, yet she showed concern.

“But suppose you don't get what you want?” she objected. “What then?

Suppose one doesn't become a superman? or a superwoman? What's to happen

to one? Is there no god but the superman's god, which is himself? Are

there no gods for those who can't be supermen? or for those who may

refuse to be supermen?”

To refuse, I maintained, were a weakness of the will.

“But there are other wills,” she persisted, “wills over which the

superman may conceivably have no control. Suppose, for example, that

you don't get me, that my will intervenes, granting it to be conceivable

that your future happiness and welfare, as you insist, depend upon your

getting me--which I doubt.”

“You've no reason to doubt it.”

“Well, granting it, then. Suppose the orthodoxies and superstitions

succeed in inhibiting me. I may not be a superwoman, but my will, or my

conscience, if you choose, may be stronger than yours. If you don't get

what you want, you aren't happy. In other words, you fail. Where are

your gods then? The trouble with you, my dear Hugh, is that you have

never failed,” she went on, “you've never had a good, hard fall, you've

always been on the winning side, and you've never had the world against

you. No wonder you don't understand the meaning and value of tragedy.”

“And you?” I asked.

“No,” she agreed, “nor I. Yet I have come to feel, instinctively, that

somehow concealed in tragedy is the central fact of life, the true

reality, that nothing is to be got by dodging it, as we have dodged it.

Your superman, at least the kind of superman you portray, is petrified.

Something vital in him, that should be plastic and sensitive, has turned

to stone.”

“Since when did you begin to feel this?” I inquired uneasily.

“Since--well, since we have been together again, in the last month or

two. Something seems to warn me that if we take--what we want, we shan't

get it. That's an Irish saying, I know, but it expresses my meaning. I

may be little, I may be superstitious, unlike the great women of history

who have dared. But it's more than mere playing safe--my instinct, I

mean. You see, you are involved. I believe I shouldn't hesitate if

only myself were concerned, but you are the uncertain quantity--more

uncertain than you have any idea; you think you know yourself, you think

you have analyzed yourself, but the truth is, Hugh, you don't know the

meaning of struggle against real resistance.”

I was about to protest.

“I know that you have conquered in the world of men and affairs,” she

hurried on, “against resistance, but it isn't the kind of resistance

I mean. It doesn't differ essentially from the struggle in the animal

kingdom.”

I bowed. “Thank you,” I said.

She laughed a little.

“Oh, I have worshipped success, too. Perhaps I still do--that isn't the

point. An animal conquers his prey, he is in competition, in constant

combat with others of his own kind, and perhaps he brings to bear a

certain amount of intelligence in the process. Intelligence isn't the

point, either. I know what I'm saying is trite, it's banal, it sounds

like moralizing, and perhaps it is, but there is so much confusion

to-day that I think we are in danger of losing sight of the simpler

verities, and that we must suffer for it. Your super-animal, your

supreme-stag subdues the other stags, but he never conquers himself, he

never feels the need of it, and therefore he never comprehends what we

call tragedy.”

“I gather your inference,” I said, smiling.

“Well,” she admitted, “I haven't stated the case with the shade of

delicacy it deserves, but I wanted to make my meaning clear. We

have raised up a class in America, but we have lost sight,

a little--considerably, I think--of the distinguishing human

characteristics. The men you were eulogizing are lords of the forest,

more or less, and we women, who are of their own kind, what they have

made us, surrender ourselves in submission and adoration to the

lordly stag in the face of all the sacraments that have been painfully

inaugurated by the race for the very purpose of distinguishing us from

animals. It is equivalent to saying that there is no moral law; or, if

there is, nobody can define it. We deny, inferentially, a human realm as

distinguished from the animal, and in the denial it seems to me we are

cutting ourselves off from what is essential human development. We are

reverting to the animal. I have lost and you have lost--not entirely,

perhaps, but still to a considerable extent--the bloom of that fervour,

of that idealism, we may call it, that both of us possessed when we were

in our teens. We had occasional visions. We didn't know what they meant,

or how to set about their accomplishment, but they were not, at least,

mere selfish aspirations; they implied, unconsciously no doubt, an

element of service, and certainly our ideal of marriage had something

fine in it.”

“Isn't it for a higher ideal of marriage that we are searching?” I

asked.

“If that is so,” Nancy objected, “then all the other elements of our

lives are sadly out of tune with it. Even the most felicitous union of

the sexes demands sacrifice, an adjustment of wills, and these are the

very things we balk at; and the trouble with our entire class in this

country is that we won't acknowledge any responsibility, there's no

sacrifice in our eminence, we have no sense of the whole.”

“Where did you get all these ideas?” I demanded.

She laughed.

“Well,” she admitted, “I've been thrashing around a little; and I've

read some of the moderns, you know. Do you remember my telling you

I didn't agree with them? and now this thing has come on me

like a judgment. I've caught their mania for liberty, for

self-realization--whatever they call it--but their remedies are vague,

they fail to convince me that individuals achieve any quality by just

taking what they want, regardless of others.”....

I was unable to meet this argument, and the result was that when I was

away from her I too began to “thrash around” among the books in a vain

search for a radical with a convincing and satisfying philosophy.

Thus we fly to literature in crises of the heart! There was no lack

of writers who sought to deal--and deal triumphantly with the very

situation in which I was immersed. I marked many passages, to read them

over to Nancy, who was interested, but who accused me of being willing

to embrace any philosophy, ancient or modern, that ran with the stream

of my desires. It is worth recording that the truth of this struck home.

On my way back to the city I reflected that, in spite of my protests

against Maude's going--protests wholly sentimental and impelled by the

desire to avoid giving pain on the spot--I had approved of her departure

because I didn't want her. On the other hand I had to acknowledge if I

hadn't wanted Nancy, or rather, if I had become tired of her, I should

have been willing to endorse her scruples.... It was not a comforting

thought.

One morning when I was absently opening the mail I found at my office I

picked up a letter from Theodore Watling, written from a seaside resort

in Maine, the contents of which surprised and touched me, troubled me,

and compelled me to face a situation with which I was wholly unprepared

to cope. He announced that this was to be his last term in the Senate.

He did not name the trouble his physician had discovered, but he had

been warned that he must retire from active life. “The specialist whom

I saw in New York,” he went on, “wished me to resign at once, but when I

pointed out to him how unfair this would be to my friends in the state,

to my party as a whole--especially in these serious and unsettled

times--he agreed that I might with proper care serve out the remainder

of my term. I have felt it my duty to write to Barbour and Dickinson and

one or two others in order that they might be prepared and that no time

may be lost in choosing my successor. It is true that the revolt within

the party has never gained much headway in our state, but in these days

it is difficult to tell when and where a conflagration may break out,

or how far it will go. I have ventured to recommend to them the man who

seems to me the best equipped to carry on the work I have been trying to

do here--in short, my dear Hugh, yourself. The Senate, as you know, is

not a bed of roses just now for those who think as we do; but I have the

less hesitancy in making the recommendation because I believe you are

not one to shun a fight for the convictions we hold in common, and

because you would regard, with me, the election of a senator with the

new views as a very real calamity. If sound business men and lawyers

should be eliminated from the Senate, I could not contemplate with any

peace of mind what might happen to the country. In thus urging you, I

know you will believe me when I say that my affection and judgment are

equally involved, for it would be a matter of greater pride than I can

express to have you follow me here as you have followed me at home. And

I beg of you seriously to consider it.... I understand that Maude and

the children are abroad. Remember me to them affectionately when you

write. If you can find it convenient to come here, to Maine, to discuss

the matter, you may be sure of a welcome. In any case, I expect to be

in Washington in September for a meeting of our special committee.

Sincerely and affectionately yours, Theodore Watling.”

It was characteristic of him that the tone of the letter should be

uniformly cheerful, that he should say nothing whatever of the blow

this must be to his ambitions and hopes; and my agitation at the new and

disturbing prospect thus opened up for me was momentarily swept away by

feelings of affection and sorrow. A sharp realization came to me of how

much I admired and loved this man, and this was followed by a pang

at the thought of the disappointment my refusal would give him.

Complications I did not wish to examine were then in the back of my

mind; and while I still sat holding the letter in my hand the telephone

rang, and a message came from Leonard Dickinson begging me to call at

the bank at once.

Miller Gorse was there, and Tallant, waving a palm-leaf while sitting

under the electric fan. They were all very grave, and they began to talk

about the suddenness of Mr. Watling's illness and to speculate upon its

nature. Leonard Dickinson was the most moved of the three; but they were

all distressed, and showed it--even Tallant, whom I had never credited

with any feelings; they spoke about the loss to the state. At length

Gorse took a cigar from his pocket and lighted it; the smoke, impelled

by the fan, drifted over the panelled partition into the bank.

“I suppose Mr. Watling mentioned to you what he wrote to us,” he said.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Well,” he asked, “what do you think of it?”

“I attribute it to Mr. Watling's friendship,” I replied.

“No,” said Gorse, in his businesslike manner, “Watling's right, there's

no one else.” Considering the number of inhabitants of our state, this

remark had its humorous aspect.

“That's true,” Dickinson put in, “there's no one else available who

understands the situation as you do, Hugh, no one else we can trust as

we trust you. I had a wire from Mr. Barbour this morning--he agrees.

We'll miss you here, but now that Watling will be gone we'll need you

there. And he's right--it's something we've got to decide on right away,

and get started on soon, we can't afford to wobble and run any chances

of a revolt.”

“It isn't everybody the senatorship comes to on a platter--especially at

your age,” said Tallant.

“To tell you the truth,” I answered, addressing Dickinson, “I'm not

prepared to talk about it now. I appreciate the honour, but I'm not at

all sure I'm the right man. And I've been considerably upset by this

news of Mr. Watling.”

“Naturally you would be,” said the banker, sympathetically, “and we

share your feelings. I don't know of any man for whom I have a greater

affection than I have for Theodore Wading. We shouldn't have mentioned

it now, Hugh, if Watling hadn't started the thing himself, if it weren't

important to know where we stand right away. We can't afford to lose the

seat. Take your time, but remember you're the man we depend upon.”

Gorse nodded. I was aware, all the time Dickinson was speaking, of

being surrounded by the strange, disquieting gaze of the counsel for the

Railroad....

I went back to my office to spend an uneasy morning. My sorrow for

Mr. Watling was genuine, but nevertheless I found myself compelled to

consider an honour no man lightly refuses. Had it presented itself at

any other time, had it been due to a happier situation than that brought

about by the illness of a man whom I loved and admired, I should have

thought the prospect dazzling indeed, part and parcel of my amazing

luck. But now--now I was in an emotional state that distorted the

factors of life, all those things I hitherto had valued; even such a

prize as this I weighed in terms of one supreme desire: how would the

acceptance of the senatorship affect the accomplishment of this desire?

That was the question. I began making rapid calculations: the actual

election would take place in the legislature a year from the following

January; provided I were able to overcome Nancy's resistance--which I

was determined to do--nothing in the way of divorce proceedings could be

thought of for more than a year; and I feared delay. On the other hand,

if we waited until after I had been duly elected to get my divorce and

marry Nancy my chances of reelection would be small. What did I care for

the senatorship anyway--if I had her? and I wanted her now, as soon as I

could get her. She--a life with her represented new values, new values

I did not define, that made all I had striven for in the past of little

worth. This was a bauble compared with the companionship of the woman

I loved, the woman intended for me, who would give me peace of mind and

soul and develop those truer aspirations that had long been thwarted and

starved for lack of her. Gradually, as she regained the ascendency over

my mind she ordinarily held--and from which she had been temporarily

displaced by the arrival of Mr. Watling's letter and the talk in the

bank--I became impatient and irritated by the intrusion. But what answer

should I give to Dickinson and Gorse? what excuse for declining such an

offer? I decided, as may be imagined, to wait, to temporize.

The irony of circumstances--of what might have been--prevented now my

laying this trophy at Nancy's feet, for I knew I had only to mention the

matter to be certain of losing her.

XXIII.

I had bought a small automobile, which I ran myself, and it was my

custom to arrive at the farm every evening about five o'clock. But as I

look back upon those days they seem to have lost succession, to be fused

together, as it were, into one indeterminable period by the intense

pressure of emotion; unsatisfied emotion,--and the state of physical and

mental disorganization set up by it is in the retrospect not a little

terrifying. The world grew more and more distorted, its affairs were

neglected, things upon which I had set high values became as nothing.

And even if I could summon back something of the sequence of our

intercourse, it would be a mere repetition--growing on my part more

irrational and insistent--of what I have already related. There were

long, troubled, and futile silences when we sat together on the porch

or in the woods and fields; when I wondered whether it were weakness

or strength that caused Nancy to hold out against my importunities:

the fears she professed of retribution, the benumbing effects of the

conventional years, or the deep-rooted remnants of a Calvinism which--as

she proclaimed--had lost definite expression to persist as an intuition.

I recall something she said when she turned to me after one of these

silences.

“Do you know how I feel sometimes? as though you and I had wandered

together into a strange country, and lost our way. We have lost our way,

Hugh--it's all so clandestine, so feverish, so unnatural, so unrelated

to life, this existence we're leading. I believe it would be better if

it were a mere case of physical passion. I can't help it,” she went on,

when I had exclaimed against this, “we are too--too complicated, you are

too complicated. It's because we want the morning stars, don't you see?”

She wound her fingers tightly around mine. “We not only want this, but

all of life besides--you wouldn't be satisfied with anything less. Oh,

I know it. That's your temperament, you were made that way, and I

shouldn't be satisfied if you weren't. The time would come when you

would blame me I don't mean vulgarly--and I couldn't stand that. If you

weren't that way, if that weren't your nature, I mean, I should have

given way long ago.”

I made some sort of desperate protest.

“No, if I didn't know you so well I believe I should have given in long

ago. I'm not thinking of you alone, but of myself, too. I'm afraid I

shouldn't be happy, that I should begin to think--and then I couldn't

stop. The plain truth, as I've told you over and over again, is that I'm

not big enough.” She continued smiling at me, a smile on which I could

not bear to look. “I was wrong not to have gone away,” I heard her say.

“I will go away.”

I was, at the time, too profoundly discouraged to answer....

One evening after an exhausting talk we sat, inert, on the grass hummock

beside the stream. Heavy clouds had gathered in the sky, the light had

deepened to amethyst, the valley was still, swooning with expectancy,

louder and louder the thunder rolled from behind the distant hills, and

presently a veil descended to hide them from our view. Great drops began

to fall, unheeded.

“We must go in,” said Nancy, at length.

I followed her across the field and through the orchard. From the porch

we stood gazing out at the whitening rain that blotted all save the

nearer landscape, and the smell of wet, midsummer grasses will always be

associated with the poignancy of that moment.... At dinner, between the

intervals of silence, our talk was of trivial things. We made a mere

pretence of eating, and I remember having my attention arrested by the

sight of a strange, pitying expression on the face of Mrs. Olsen, who

waited on us. Before that the woman had been to me a mere ministering

automaton. But she must have had ideas and opinions, this transported

Swedish peasant.... Presently, having cleared the table, she retired....

The twilight deepened to dusk, to darkness. The storm, having spent the

intensity of its passion in those first moments of heavy downpour and

wind, had relaxed to a gentle rain that pattered on the roof, and from

the stream came recurringly the dirge of the frogs. All I could see

of Nancy was the dim outline of her head and shoulders: she seemed

fantastically to be escaping me, to be fading, to be going; in sudden

desperation I dropped on my knees beside her, and I felt her hands

straying with a light yet agonized touch, over my head.

“Do you think I haven't suffered, too? that I don't suffer?” I heard her

ask.

Some betraying note for which I had hitherto waited in vain must have

pierced to my consciousness, yet the quiver of joy and the swift,

convulsive movement that followed it seemed one. Her strong, lithe body

was straining in my arms, her lips returning my kisses.... Clinging to

her hands, I strove to summon my faculties of realization; and I began

to speak in broken, endearing sentences.

“It's stronger than we are--stronger than anything else in the world,”

she said.

“But you're not sorry?” I asked.

“I don't want to think--I don't care,” she replied. “I only know that I

love you. I wonder if you will ever know how much!”

The moments lengthened into hours, and she gently reminded me that it

was late. The lights in the little farmhouses near by had long been

extinguished. I pleaded to linger; I wanted her, more of her, all of her

with a fierce desire that drowned rational thought, and I feared that

something might still come between us, and cheat me of her.

“No, no,” she cried, with fear in her voice. “We shall have to think

it out very carefully--what we must do. We can't afford to make any

mistakes.”

“We'll talk it all over to-morrow,” I said.

With a last, reluctant embrace I finally left her, walked blindly to

where the motor car was standing, and started the engine. I looked back.

Outlined in the light of the doorway I saw her figure in what seemed an

attitude of supplication....

I drove cityward through the rain, mechanically taking the familiar

turns in the road, barely missing a man in a buggy at a four-corners.

He shouted after me, but the world to which he belonged didn't exist. I

lived again those moments that had followed Nancy's surrender, seeking

to recall and fix in my mind every word that had escaped from her

lips--the trivial things that to lovers are so fraught with meaning.

I lived it all over again, as I say, but the reflection of it, though

intensely emotional, differed from the reality in that now I was

somewhat able to regard the thing, to regard myself, objectively; to

define certain feelings that had flitted in filmy fashion through my

consciousness, delicate shadows I recognized at the time as related to

sadness. When she had so amazingly yielded, the thought for which my

mind had been vaguely groping was that the woman who lay there in my

arms, obscured by the darkness, was not Nancy at all! It was as if this

one precious woman I had so desperately pursued had, in the capture,

lost her identity, had mysteriously become just woman, in all her

significance, yes, and helplessness. The particular had merged

(inevitably, I might have known) into the general: the temporary had

become the lasting, with a chain of consequences vaguely implied that

even in my joy gave me pause. For the first time in my life I had a

glimpse of what marriage might mean,--marriage in a greater sense than

I had ever conceived it, a sort of cosmic sense, implying obligations

transcending promises and contracts, calling for greatness of soul of a

kind I had not hitherto imagined. Was there in me a grain of doubt of my

ability to respond to such a high call? I began to perceive that such a

union as we contemplated involved more obligations than one not opposed

to traditional views of morality. I fortified myself, however,--if

indeed I really needed fortification in a mood prevailingly triumphant

and exalted,--with the thought that this love was different, the real

thing, the love of maturity steeped in the ideals of youth. Here was a

love for which I must be prepared to renounce other things on which I

set a high value; prepared, in case the world, for some reason, should

not look upon us with kindliness. It was curious that such reflections

as these should have been delayed until after the achievement of my

absorbing desire, more curious that they should have followed so closely

on the heels of it. The affair had shifted suddenly from a basis

of adventure, of uncertainty; to one of fact, of commitment; I am

exaggerating my concern in order to define it; I was able to persuade

myself without much difficulty that these little, cloudy currents in

the stream of my joy were due to a natural reaction from the tremendous

strain of the past weeks, mere morbid fancies.

When at length I reached my room at the Club I sat looking out at the

rain falling on the shining pavements under the arc-lights. Though waves

of heat caused by some sudden recollection or impatient longing

still ran through my body, a saner joy of anticipation was succeeding

emotional tumult, and I reflected that Nancy had been right in insisting

that we walk circumspectly in spite of passion. After all, I had

outwitted circumstance, I had gained the prize, I could afford to wait a

little. We should talk it over to-morrow,--no, to-day. The luminous face

of the city hall clock reminded me that midnight was long past....

I awoke with the consciousness of a new joy, suddenly to identify it

with Nancy. She was mine! I kept repeating it as I dressed; summoning

her, not as she had lain in my arms in the darkness--though the

intoxicating sweetness of that pervaded me--but as she had been

before the completeness of her surrender, dainty, surrounded by things

expressing an elusive, uniquely feminine personality. I could afford

to smile at the weather, at the obsidian sky, at the rain still

falling persistently; and yet, as I ate my breakfast, I felt a certain

impatience to verify what I knew was a certainty, and hurried to

the telephone booth. I resented the instrument, its possibilities

of betrayal, her voice sounded so matter-of-fact as she bade me good

morning and deplored the rain.

“I'll be out as soon as I can get away,” I said. “I have a meeting at

three, but it should be over at four.” And then I added irresistibly:

“Nancy, you're not sorry? You--you still--?”

“Yes, don't be foolish,” I heard her reply, and this time the telephone

did not completely disguise the note for which I strained. I said

something more, but the circuit was closed....

I shall not attempt to recount the details of our intercourse during

the week that followed. There were moments of stress and strain when it

seemed to me that we could not wait, moments that strengthened Nancy's

resolution to leave immediately for the East: there were other, calmer

periods when the wisdom of her going appealed to me, since our

ultimate union would be hastened thereby. We overcame by degrees the

distastefulness of the discussion of ways and means.... We spent an

unforgettable Sunday among the distant high hills, beside a little lake

of our own discovery, its glinting waters sapphire and chrysoprase.

A grassy wood road, at the inviting entrance to which we left the

automobile, led down through an undergrowth of laurel to a pebbly

shore, and there we lunched; there we lingered through the long summer

afternoon, Nancy with her back against a tree, I with my head in her

lap gazing up at filmy clouds drifting imperceptibly across the sky,

listening to the droning notes of the bees, notes that sometimes rose

in a sharp crescendo, and again were suddenly hushed. The smell of the

wood-mould mingled with the fainter scents of wild flowers. She had

brought along a volume by a modern poet: the verses, as Nancy read

them, moved me,--they were filled with a new faith to which my being

responded, the faith of the forth-farer; not the faith of the anchor,

but of the sail. I repeated some of the lines as indications of a creed

to which I had long been trying to convert her, though lacking the

expression. She had let the book fall on the grass. I remember how she

smiled down at me with the wisdom of the ages in her eyes, seeking my

hand with a gesture that was almost maternal.

“You and the poets,” she said, “you never grow up. I suppose that's the

reason why we love you--and these wonderful visions of freedom you have.

Anyway, it's nice to dream, to recreate the world as one would like to

have it.”

“But that's what you and I are doing,” I insisted.

“We think we're doing it--or rather you think so,” she replied. “And

sometimes, I admit that you almost persuade me to think so. Never quite.

What disturbs me,” she continued, “is to find you and the poets founding

your new freedom on new justifications, discarding the old law only

to make a new one,--as though we could ever get away from necessities,

escape from disagreeable things, except in dreams. And then, this

delusion of believing that we are masters of our own destiny--” She

paused and pressed my fingers.

“There you go-back to predestination!” I exclaimed.

“I don't go back to anything, or forward to anything,” she exclaimed.

“Women are elemental, but I don't expect you to understand it. Laws and

codes are foreign to us, philosophies and dreams may dazzle us for the

moment, but what we feel underneath and what we yield to are the primal

forces, the great necessities; when we refuse joys it's because we know

these forces by a sort of instinct, when we're overcome it's with a full

knowledge that there's a price. You've talked a great deal, Hugh, about

carving out our future. I listened to you, but I resisted you. It wasn't

the morality that was taught me as a child that made me resist, it was

something deeper than that, more fundamental, something I feel but

can't yet perceive, and yet shall perceive some day. It isn't that I'm

clinging to the hard and fast rules because I fail to see any others, it

isn't that I believe that all people should stick together whether

they are happily married or not, but--I must say it even now--I have a

feeling I can't define that divorce isn't for us. I'm not talking about

right and wrong in the ordinary sense--it's just what I feel. I've

ceased to think.”

“Nancy!” I reproached her.

“I can't help it--I don't want to be morbid. Do you remember my asking

you about God?--the first day this began? and whether you had a god?

Well, that's the trouble with us all to-day, we haven't any God, we're

wanderers, drifters. And now it's just life that's got hold of us, my

dear, and swept us away together. That's our justification--if we needed

one--it's been too strong for us.” She leaned back against the tree and

closed her eyes. “We're like chips in the torrent of it, Hugh.”....

It was not until the shadow of the forest had crept far across the lake

and the darkening waters were still that we rose reluctantly to put the

dishes in the tea basket and start on our homeward journey. The tawny

fires of the sunset were dying down behind us, the mist stealing,

ghostlike, into the valleys below; in the sky a little moon curled like

a freshly cut silver shaving, that presently turned to gold, the white

star above it to fire.

Where the valleys widened we came to silent, decorous little towns and

villages where yellow-lit windows gleaming through the trees suggested

refuge and peace, while we were wanderers in the night. It was Nancy's

mood; and now, in the evening's chill, it recurred to me poignantly.

In one of these villages we passed a church, its doors flung open; the

congregation was singing a familiar hymn. I slowed down the car; I felt

her shoulder pressing against my own, and reached out my hand and found

hers.

“Are you warm enough?” I asked....

We spoke but little on that drive, we had learned the futility of words

to express the greater joys and sorrows, the love that is compounded of

these.

It was late when we turned in between the white dates and made our way

up the little driveway to the farmhouse. I bade her good night on the

steps of the porch.

“You do love me, don't you?” she whispered, clinging to me with a

sudden, straining passion. “You will love me, always no matter what

happens?”

“Why, of course, Nancy,” I answered.

“I want to hear you say it, 'I love you, I shall love you always.'”

I repeated it fervently....

“No matter what happens?”

“No matter what happens. As if I could help it, Nancy! Why are you so

sad to-night?”

“Ah, Hugh, it makes me sad--I can't tell why. It is so great, it is so

terrible, and yet it's so sweet and beautiful.”

She took my face in her hands and pressed a kiss against my forehead....

The next day was dark. At two o'clock in the afternoon the electric

light was still burning over my desk when the telephone rang and I heard

Nancy's voice.

“Is that you, Hugh?”

“Yes.”

“I have to go East this afternoon.”

“Why?” I asked. Her agitation had communicated itself to me. “I thought

you weren't going until Thursday. What's the matter?”

“I've just had a telegram,” she said. “Ham's been hurt--I don't know how

badly--he was thrown from a polo pony this morning at Narragansett, in

practice, and they're taking him to Boston to a private hospital. The

telegram's from Johnny Shephard. I'll be at the house in town at four.”

Filled with forebodings I tried in vain to suppress I dropped the work

I was doing and got up and paced the room, pausing now and again to gaze

out of the window at the wet roofs and the grey skies. I was aghast at

the idea of her going to Ham now even though he were hurt badly hurt;

and yet I tried to think it was natural, that it was fine of her to

respond to such a call. And she couldn't very well refuse his summons.

But it was not the news of her husband's accident that inspired the

greater fear, which was quelled and soothed only to rise again when

I recalled the note I had heard in her voice, a note eloquent of

tragedy--of tragedy she had foreseen. At length, unable to remain where

I was any longer, I descended to the street and walked uptown in the

rain. The Durrett house was closed, the blinds of its many windows

drawn, but Nancy was watching for me and opened the door. So used had

I grown to seeing her in the simple linen dresses she had worn in the

country, a costume associated with exclusive possession, that the sight

of her travelling suit and hat renewed in me an agony of apprehension.

The unforeseen event seemed to have transformed her once more. Her veil

was drawn up, her face was pale, in her eyes were traces of tears.

“You're going?” I asked, as I took her hands.

“Hugh, I have to go.”

She led me through the dark, shrouded drawing room into the little salon

where the windows were open on the silent city-garden. I took her in my

arms; she did not resist, as I half expected, but clung to me with what

seemed desperation.

“I have to go, dear--you won't make it too hard for me! It's

only--ordinary decency, and there's no one else to go to him.”

She drew me to the sofa, her eyes beseeching me.

“Listen, dear, I want you to see it as I see it. I know that you will,

that you do. I should never be able to forgive myself if I stayed away

now, I--neither of us could ever be happy about it. You do see, don't

you?” she implored.

“Yes,” I admitted agitatedly.

Her grasp on my hand tightened.

“I knew you would. But it makes me happier to hear you say it.”

We sat for a moment in helpless silence, gazing at one another. Slowly

her eyes had filled.

“Have you heard anything more?” I managed to ask.

She drew a telegram from her bag, as though the movement were a relief.

“This is from the doctor in Boston--his name is Magruder. They have got

Ham there, it seems. A horse kicked him in the head, after he fell,--he

had just recovered consciousness.”

I took the telegram. The wordy seemed meaningless, all save those of

the last sentence. “The situation is serious, but by no means hopeless.”

Nancy had not spoken of that. The ignorant cruelty of its convention!

The man must have known what Hambleton Durrett was! Nancy read my

thoughts, and took the paper from my hand.

“Hugh, dear, if it's hard for you, try to understand that it's terrible

for me to think that he has any claim at all. I realize now, as I never

did before, how wicked it was in me to marry him. I hate him, I can't

bear the thought of going near him.”

She fell into wild weeping. I tried to comfort her, who could

not comfort myself; I don't remember my inadequate words. We were

overwhelmed, obliterated by the sense of calamity.... It was she who

checked herself at last by an effort that was almost hysterical.

“I mustn't yield to it!” she said. “It's time to leave and the train

goes at six. No, you mustn't come to the station, Hugh--I don't think

I could stand it. I'll send you a telegram.” She rose. “You must go

now--you must.”

“You'll come back to me?” I demanded thickly, as I held her.

“Hugh, I am yours, now and always. How can you doubt it?”

At last I released her, when she had begged me again. And I found

myself a little later walking past the familiar, empty houses of those

streets....

The front pages of the evening newspapers announced the accident to

Hambleton Durrett, and added that Mrs. Durrett, who had been lingering

in the city, had gone to her husband's bedside. The morning papers

contained more of biography and ancestry, but had little to add to the

bulletin; and there was no lack of speculation at the Club and elsewhere

as to Ham's ability to rally from such a shock. I could not bear to

listen to these comments: they were violently distasteful to me. The

unforeseen accident and Nancy's sudden departure had thrown my life

completely out of gear: I could not attend to business, I dared not

go away lest the news from Nancy be delayed. I spent the hours in an

exhausting mental state that alternated between hope and fear, a

state of unmitigated, intense desire, of balked realization, sometimes

heightening into that sheer terror I had felt when I had detected over

the telephone that note in her voice that seemed of despair. Had she had

a presentiment, all along, that something would occur to separate us?

As I went back over the hours we had passed together since she had

acknowledged her love, in spite of myself the conviction grew on me that

she had never believed in the reality of our future. Indeed, she had

expressed her disbelief in words. Had she been looking all along for a

sign--a sign of wrath? And would she accept this accident of Ham's as

such?

Retrospection left me trembling and almost sick.

It was not until the second morning after her departure that I received

a telegram giving the name of her Boston hotel, and saying that there

was to be a consultation that day, and as soon as it had taken place she

would write. Such consolation as I could gather from it was derived from

four words at the end,--she missed me dreadfully. Some tremor of pity

for her entered into my consciousness, without mitigating greatly the

wildness of my resentment, of my forebodings.

I could bear no longer the city, the Club, the office, the daily contact

with my associates and clients. Six hours distant, near Rossiter, was a

small resort in the mountains of which I had heard. I telegraphed Nancy

to address me there, notified the office, packed my bag, and waited

impatiently for midday, when I boarded the train. At seven I reached a

little station where a stage was waiting to take me to Callender's Mill.

It was not until morning that I beheld my retreat, when little wisps of

vapour were straying over the surface of the lake, and the steep green

slopes that rose out of the water on the western side were still in

shadow. The hotel, a much overgrown and altered farm-house, stood,

surrounded by great trees, in an ancient clearing that sloped gently

to the water's edge, where an old-fashioned, octagonal summerhouse

overlooked a landing for rowboats. The resort, indeed, was a survival of

simpler times....

In spite of the thirty-odd guests, people of very moderate incomes who

knew the place and had come here year after year, I was as much alone as

if I had been the only sojourner. The place was so remote, so peaceful

in contrast to the city I had left, which had become intolerable. And at

night, during hours of wakefulness, the music of the waters falling over

the dam was soothing. I used to walk down there and sit on the stones of

the ruined mill; or climb to the crests on the far side of the pond to

gaze for hours westward where the green billows of the Alleghenies lost

themselves in the haze. I had discovered a new country; here, when our

trials should be over, I would bring Nancy, and I found distraction

in choosing sites for a bungalow. In my soul hope flowered with little

watering. Uncertain news was good news. After two days of an impatience

all but intolerable, her first letter arrived, I learned that the

specialists had not been able to make a diagnosis, and I began to take

heart again. At times, she said, Ham was delirious and difficult to

manage; at other times he sank into a condition of coma; and again he

seemed to know her and Ralph, who had come up from Southampton, where he

had been spending the summer. One doctor thought that Ham's remarkable

vitality would pull him through, in spite of what his life had been.

The shock--as might have been surmised--had affected the brain.... The

letters that followed contained no additional news; she did not dwell

on the depressing reactions inevitable from the situation in which she

found herself--one so much worse than mine; she expressed a continual

longing for me; and yet I had trouble to convince myself that they

did not lack the note of reassurance for which I strained as I eagerly

scanned them--of reassurance that she had no intention of permitting her

husband's condition to interfere with that ultimate happiness on which

it seemed my existence depended. I tried to account for the absence

of this note by reflecting that the letters were of necessity brief,

hurriedly scratched off at odd moments; and a natural delicacy would

prevent her from referring to our future at such a time. They recorded

no change in Ham's condition save that the periods of coma had ceased.

The doctors were silent, awaiting the arrival in this country of a

certain New York specialist who was abroad. She spent most of her days

at the hospital, returning to the hotel at night exhausted: the people

she knew in the various resorts around Boston had been most kind,

sending her flowers, and calling when in town to inquire. At length came

the news that the New York doctor was home again; and coming to Boston.

In that letter was a sentence which rang like a cry in my ears: “Oh,

Hugh, I think these doctors know now what the trouble is, I think I

know. They are only waiting for Dr. Jameson to confirm it.”

It was always an effort for me to control my impatience after the first

rattling was heard in the morning of the stage that brought the mail,

and I avoided the waiting group in front of the honeycombed partition of

boxes beside the “office.” On the particular morning of which I am now

writing the proprietor himself handed me a letter of ominous thickness

which I took with me down to the borders of the lake before tearing open

the flap. In spite of the calmness and restraint of the first lines,

because of them, I felt creeping over me an unnerving sensation I knew

for dread....

“Hugh, the New York doctor has been here. It is as I have feared for

some weeks, but I couldn't tell you until I was sure. Ham is not exactly

insane, but he is childish. Sometimes I think that is even worse. I have

had a talk with Dr. Jameson, who has simply confirmed the opinion which

the other physicians have gradually been forming. The accident has

precipitated a kind of mental degeneration, but his health, otherwise,

will not be greatly affected.

“Jameson was kind, but very frank, for which I was grateful. He did not

hesitate to say that it would have been better if the accident had been

fatal. Ham won't be helpless, physically. Of course he won't be able to

play polo, or take much active exercise. If he were to be helpless, I

could feel that I might be of some use, at least of more use. He knows

his friends. Some of them have been here to see him, and he talks quite

rationally with them, with Ralph, with me, only once in a while he says

something silly. It seems odd to write that he is not responsible, since

he never has been,--his condition is so queer that I am at a loss to

describe it. The other morning, before I arrived from the hotel and when

the nurse was downstairs, he left the hospital, and we found him several

blocks along Commonwealth Avenue, seated on a bench, without a hat--he

was annoyed that he had forgotten it, and quite sensible otherwise. We

began by taking him out every morning in an automobile. To-day he had a

walk with Ralph, and insisted on going into a club here, to which they

both belong. Two or three men were there whom they knew, and he talked

to them about his fall from the pony and told them just how it happened.

“At such times only a close observer can tell from his manner that

everything is not right.

“Ralph, who always could manage him, prevented his taking anything to

drink. He depends upon Ralph, and it will be harder for me when he is

not with us. His attitude towards me is just about what it has always

been. I try to amuse him by reading the newspapers and with games;

we have a chess-board. At times he seems grateful, and then he will

suddenly grow tired and hard to control. Once or twice I have had to

call in Dr. Magruder, who owns the hospital.

“It has been terribly hard for me to write all this, but I had to do it,

in order that you might understand the situation completely. Hugh dear,

I simply can't leave him. This has been becoming clearer and clearer to

me all these weeks, but it breaks my heart to have to write it. I

have struggled against it, I have lain awake nights trying to find

justification for going to you, but it is stronger than I. I am afraid

of it--I suppose that's the truth. Even in those unforgettable days at

the farm I was afraid of it, although I did not know what it was to be.

Call it what you like, say that I am weak. I am willing to acknowledge

that it is weakness. I wish no credit for it, it gives me no glow, the

thought of it makes my heart sick. I'm not big enough I suppose that's

the real truth. I once might have been; but I'm not now,--the years of

the life I chose have made a coward of me. It's not a question of

morals or duty it's simply that I can't take the thing for which my soul

craves. It's too late. If I believed in prayer I'd pray that you might

pity and forgive me. I really can't expect you to understand what I

can't myself explain. Oh, I need pity--and I pity you, my dear. I can

only hope that you will not suffer as I shall, that you will find relief

away to work out your life. But I will not change my decision, I cannot

change it. Don't come on, don't attempt to see me now. I can't stand any

more than I am standing, I should lose my mind.”

Here the letter was blotted, and some words scratched out. I was unable

to reconstruct them.

“Ralph and I,” she proceeded irrelevantly, “have got Ham to agree to go

to Buzzard's Bay, and we have taken a house near Wareham. Write and tell

me that you forgive and pity me. I love you even more, if such a thing

is possible, than I have ever loved you. This is my only comfort and

compensation, that I have had and have been able to feel such a love,

and I know I shall always feel it.--Nancy.” The first effect of this

letter was a paralyzing one. I was unable to realize or believe the

thing that had happened to me, and I sat stupidly holding the sheet

in my hand until I heard voices along the path, and then I fled

instinctively, like an animal, to hide my injury from any persons I

might meet. I wandered down the shore of the lake, striking at length

into the woods, seeking some inviolable shelter; nor was I conscious of

physical effort until I found myself panting near the crest of the ridge

where there was a pasture, which some ancient glacier had strewn with

great boulders. Beside one of these I sank. Heralded by the deep tones

of bells, two steers appeared above the shoulder of a hill and stood

staring at me with bovine curiosity, and fell to grazing again. A fleet

of white clouds, like ships pressed with sail, hurried across the sky as

though racing for some determined port; and the shadows they cast along

the hillsides accentuated the high brightness of the day, emphasized

the vivid and hateful beauty of the landscape. My numbness began to be

penetrated by shooting pains, and I grasped little by little the fulness

of my calamity, until I was in the state of wild rebellion of one whom

life for the first time has foiled in a supreme desire. There was no

fate about this thing, it was just an absurd accident. The operation of

the laws of nature had sent a man to the ground: another combination of

circumstances would have killed him, still another, and he would have

arisen unhurt. But because of this particular combination my happiness

was ruined, and Nancy's! She had not expected me to understand. Well,

I didn't understand, I had no pity, in that hour I felt a resentment

almost amounting to hate; I could see only unreasoning superstition in

the woman I wanted above everything in the world. Women of other days

had indeed renounced great loves: the thing was not unheard of. But that

this should happen in these times--and to me! It was unthinkable

that Nancy of all women shouldn't be emancipated from the thralls of

religious inhibition! And if it wasn't “conscience,” what was it?

Was it, as she said, weakness, lack of courage to take life when it

was offered her?... I was suddenly filled with the fever of composing

arguments to change a decision that appeared to me to be the result of

a monstrous caprice and delusion; writing them out, as they occurred

to me, in snatches on the backs of envelopes--her envelopes. Then

I proceeded to make the draft of a letter, the effort required for

composition easing me until the draft was finished; when I started for

the hotel, climbing fences, leaping streams, making my way across

rock faces and through woods; halting now and then as some reenforcing

argument occurred to me to write it into my draft at the proper place

until the sheets were interlined and blurred and almost illegible. It

was already three o'clock when I reached my room, and the mail left at

four. I began to copy and revise my scrawl, glancing from time to time

at my watch, which I had laid on the table. Hurriedly washing my

face and brushing my hair, I arrived downstairs just as the stage was

leaving....

After the letter had gone still other arguments I might have added began

to occur to me, and I regretted that I had not softened some of the

things I wrote and made others more emphatic. In places argument

had degenerated into abject entreaty. Never had my desire been so

importunate as now, when I was in continual terror of losing her. Nor

could I see how I was to live without her, life lacking a motive being

incomprehensible: yet the fire of optimism in me, though died down to

ashes, would not be extinguished. At moments it flared up into what

almost amounted to a conviction that she could not resist my appeal. I

had threatened to go to her, and more than once I started packing....

Three days later I received a brief note in which she managed to convey

to me, though tenderly and compassionately, that her decision was

unalterable. If I came on, she would refuse to see me. I took the

afternoon stage and went back to the city, to plunge into affairs again;

but for weeks my torture was so acute that it gives me pain to recall

it, to dwell upon it to-day.... And yet, amazing as it may seem, there

came a time when hope began to dawn again out of my despair. Perhaps

my life had not been utterly shattered, after all: perhaps Ham Durrett

would get well: such things happened, and Nancy would no longer have an

excuse for continuing to refuse me. Little by little my anger at what

I had now become convinced was her weakness cooled, and--though

paradoxically I had continued to love her in spite of the torture for

which she was responsible, in spite of the resentment I felt, I melted

toward her. True to my habit of reliance on miracles, I tried to

reconcile myself to a period of waiting.

Nevertheless I was faintly aware--consequent upon if not as a result of

this tremendous experience--of some change within me. It was not only

that I felt at times a novel sense of uneasiness at being a prey to

accidents, subject to ravages of feeling; the unity of mind that had

hitherto enabled me to press forward continuously toward a concrete

goal showed signs of breaking up:--the goal had lost its desirability.

I seemed oddly to be relapsing into the states of questioning that had

characterized my earlier years. Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to

say that I actually began to speculate on the possible existence of a

realm where the soul might find a refuge from the buffetings of life,

from which the philosophy of prosperity was powerless to save it....

XXIV.

It was impossible, of course, that my friends should have failed to

perceive the state of disorganization I was in, and some of them at

least must have guessed its cause. Dickinson, on his return from Maine,

at once begged me to go away. I rather congratulated myself that Tom had

chosen these months for a long-delayed vacation in Canada. His passion

for fishing still persisted.

In spite of the fact I have noted, that I had lost a certain zest for

results, to keep busy seemed to be the only way to relieve my mind of

an otherwise intolerable pressure: and I worked sometimes far into the

evening. In the background of my thoughts lay the necessity of coming to

a decision on the question of the senatorship; several times Dickinson

and Gorse had spoken of it, and I was beginning to get letters from

influential men in other parts of the state. They seemed to take it for

granted that there was no question of my refusing. The time came when

I had grown able to consider the matter with a degree of calmness.

What struck me first, when I began to debate upon it, was that the

senatorship offered a new and possibly higher field for my energies,

while at the same time the office would be a logical continuation of a

signal legal career. I was now unable to deny that I no longer felt any

exhilaration at the prospect of future legal conquests similar to those

of the past; but once in the Senate, I might regain something of that

intense conviction of fighting for a just and sound cause with which

Theodore Wading had once animated me: fighting there, in the Capitol at

Washington, would be different; no stigma of personal gain attached to

it; it offered a nearer approach to the ideal I had once more begun to

seek, held out hopes of a renewal of my unity of mind. Mr. Watling had

declared that there was something to fight for; I had even glimpsed

that something, but I had to confess that for some years I had not been

consciously fighting for it. I needed something to fight for.

There was the necessity, however, of renewing my calculations. If

Hambleton Durrett should recover, even during the ensuing year, and

if Nancy relented it would not be possible for us to be divorced and

married for some time. I still clung tenaciously to the belief that

there were no relationships wholly unaffected by worldly triumphs, and

as Senator I should have strengthened my position. It did not

strike me--even after all my experience--that such a course as I now

contemplated had a parallel in the one that I had pursued in regard to

her when I was young.

It seemed fitting that Theodore Watling should be the first to know of

my decision. I went to Washington to meet him. It pained me to see him

looking more worn, but he was still as cheerful, as mentally vigorous as

ever, and I perceived that he did not wish to dwell upon his illness.

I did venture to expostulate with him on the risk he must be running in

serving out his term. We were sitting in the dining room of his house.

“We've only one life to live, Hugh,” he answered, smiling at me, “and we

might as well get all out of it we can. A few years more or less doesn't

make much difference--and I ought to be satisfied. I'd resign now, to

please my wife, to please my friends, but we can't trust this governor

to appoint a safe man. How little we suspected when we elected him that

he'd become infected. You never can tell, in these days, can you?”

It was the note of devotion to his cause that I had come to hear: I

felt it renewing me, as I had hoped. The threat of disease, the louder

clamourings of the leaders of the mob had not sufficed to dismay

him--though he admitted more concern over these. My sympathy and

affection were mingled with the admiration he never failed to inspire.

“But you, Hugh,” he said concernedly, “you're not looking very well, my

son. You must manage to take a good rest before coming here--before the

campaign you'll have to go through. We can't afford to have anything

happen to you--you're too young.”

I wondered whether he had heard anything.... He spoke to me again about

the work to be done, the work he looked to me to carry on.

“We'll have to watch for our opportunity,” he said, “and when it comes

we can handle this new movement not by crushing it, but by guiding it.

I've come to the conclusion that there is a true instinct in it, that

there are certain things we have done which have been mistakes, and

which we can't do any more. But as for this theory that all wisdom

resides in the people, it's buncombe. What we have to do is to work out

a practical programme.”

His confidence in me had not diminished. It helped to restore confidence

in myself.

The weather was cool and bracing for September, and as we drove in a

motor through the beautiful avenues of the city he pointed out a house

for me on one of the circles, one of those distinguished residences,

instances of a nascent good taste, that are helping to redeem the

polyglot aspect of our national capital. Mr. Watling spoke--rather

tactfully, I thought--of Maude and the children, and ventured the

surmise that they would be returning in a few months. I interpreted

this, indeed, as in rather the nature of a kindly hint that such a

procedure would be wise in view of the larger life now dawning for me,

but I made no comment.... He even sympathized with Nancy Durrett.

“She did the right thing, Hugh,” he said, with the admirable casual

manner he possessed of treating subjects which he knew to be delicate.

“Nancy's a fine woman. Poor devil!” This in reference to Ham....

Mr. Watling reassured me on the subject of his own trouble, maintaining

that he had many years left if he took care. He drove me to the station.

I travelled homeward somewhat lifted out of myself by this visit to him;

with some feeling of spaciousness derived from Washington itself, with

its dignified Presidential Mansion among the trees, its granite shaft

drawing the eye upward, with its winged Capitol serene upon the hill.

Should we deliver these heirlooms to the mob? Surely Democracy meant

more than that!

All this time I had been receiving, at intervals, letters from Maude and

the children. Maude's were the letters of a friend, and I found it easy

to convince myself that their tone was genuine, that the separation had

brought contentment to her; and those independent and self-sufficient

elements in her character I admired now rather than deplored. At

Etretat, which she found much to her taste, she was living quietly, but

making friends with some American and English, and one French family of

the same name, Buffon, as the great naturalist. The father was a retired

silk manufacturer; they now resided in Paris, and had been very kind

in helping her to get an apartment in that city for the winter. She

had chosen one on the Avenue Kleber, not far from the Arc. It is

interesting, after her arraignment of me, that she should have taken

such pains to record their daily life for my benefit in her clear,

conscientious handwriting. I beheld Biddy, her dresses tucked above slim

little knees, playing in the sand on the beach, her hair flying in the

wind and lighted by the sun which gave sparkle to the sea. I saw Maude

herself in her beach chair, a book lying in her lap, its pages whipped

by the breeze. And there was Moreton, who must be proving something of

a handful, since he had fought with the French boys on the beach and

thrown a “rock” through the windows of the Buffon family. I remember one

of his letters--made perfect after much correcting and scratching,--in

which he denounced both France and the French, and appealed to me

to come over at once to take him home. Maude had enclosed it without

comment. This letter had not been written under duress, as most of his

were.

Matthew's letters--he wrote faithfully once a week--I kept in a little

pile by themselves and sometimes reread them. I wondered whether it

were because of the fact that I was his father--though a most inadequate

one--that I thought them somewhat unusual. He had learned French--Maude

wrote--with remarkable ease. I was particularly struck in these letters

with the boy's power of observation, with his facile use of language,

with the vivid simplicity of his descriptions of the life around him, of

his experiences at school. The letters were thoughtful--not dashed off

in a hurry; they gave evidence in every line of the delicacy of feeling

that was, I think, his most appealing quality, and I put them down with

the impression strong on me that he, too, longed to return home, but

would not say so. There was a certain pathos in this youthful restraint

that never failed to touch me, even in those times when I had been most

obsessed with love and passion.... The curious effect of these letters

was that of knowing more than they expressed. He missed me, he wished to

know when I was coming over. And I was sometimes at a loss whether to be

grateful to Maude or troubled because she had as yet given him no hint

of our separation. What effect would it have on him when it should be

revealed to him?... It was through Matthew I began to apprehend certain

elements in Maude I had both failed to note and appreciate; her little

mannerisms that jarred, her habits of thought that exasperated, were

forgotten, and I was forced to confess that there was something fine in

the achievement of this attitude of hers that was without ill will or

resentment, that tacitly acknowledged my continued rights and interest

in the children. It puzzled and troubled me.

The Citizens Union began its campaign early that autumn, long before

the Hons. Jonathan Parks and Timothy MacGuire--Republican and Democratic

candidates for Mayor--thought of going on the stump. For several weeks

the meetings were held in the small halls and club rooms of various

societies and orders in obscure portions of the city.

The forces of “privilege and corruption” were not much alarmed. Perry

Blackwood accused the newspapers of having agreed to a “conspiracy of

silence”; but, as Judah B. Tallant remarked, it was the business of the

press to give the public what it wanted, and the public as yet hadn't

shown much interest in the struggle being waged in its behalf. When the

meetings began to fill up it would be time to report them in the columns

of the Era. Meanwhile, however, the city had been quietly visited by

an enterprising representative of a New York periodical of the new

type that developed with the opening years of the century--one making a

specialty of passionate “muck-raking.” And since the people of America

love nothing better than being startled, Yardley's Weekly had acquired

a circulation truly fabulous. The emissary of the paper had attended

several of the Citizens meetings; interviewed, it seemed, many

persons: the result was a revelation to make the blood of politicians,

capitalists and corporation lawyers run cold. I remember very well the

day it appeared on our news stands, and the heated denunciations it

evoked at the Boyne Club. Ralph Hambleton was the only one who took it

calmly, who seemed to derive a certain enjoyment from the affair. Had

he been a less privileged person, they would have put him in chancery.

Leonard Dickinson asserted that Yardley's should be sued for libel.

“There's just one objection to that,” said Ralph.

“What?” asked the banker.

“It isn't libel.”

“I defy them to prove it,” Dickinson snapped. “It's a d--d outrage!

There isn't a city or village in the country that hasn't exactly the

same conditions. There isn't any other way to run a city--”

“That's what Mr. Krebs says,” Ralph replied, “that the people ought to

put Judd Jason officially in charge. He tells 'em that Jason is probably

a more efficient man than Democracy will be able to evolve in a coon's

age, that we ought to take him over, instead of letting the capitalists

have him.”

“Did Krebs say that?” Dickinson demanded.

“You can't have read the article very thoroughly, Leonard,” Ralph

commented. “I'm afraid you only picked out the part of it that

compliments you. This fellow seems to have been struck by Krebs, says

he's a coming man, that he's making original contributions to the

people's cause. Quite a tribute. You ought to read it.”

Dickinson, who had finished his lunch, got up and left the table after

lighting his cigar. Ralph's look followed him amusedly.

“I'm afraid it's time to cash in and be good,” he observed.

“We'll get that fellow Krebs yet,” said Grierson, wrathfully. Miller

Gorse alone made no remarks, but in spite of his silence he emanated an

animosity against reform and reformers that seemed to charge the very

atmosphere, and would have repressed any man but Ralph....

I sat in my room at the Club that night and reread the article, and if

its author could have looked into my soul and observed the emotions he

had set up, he would, no doubt, have experienced a grim satisfaction.

For I, too, had come in for a share of the comment. Portions of the

matter referring to me stuck in my brain like tar, such as the reference

to my father, to the honoured traditions of the Parets and the Brecks

which I had deliberately repudiated. I had less excuse than many others.

The part I had played in various reprehensible transactions such as the

Riverside Franchise and the dummy telephone company affair was dwelt

upon, and I was dismissed with the laconic comment that I was a graduate

of Harvard....

My associates and myself were referred to collectively as a “gang,” with

the name of our city prefixed; we were linked up with and compared to

the gangs of other cities--the terminology used to describe us being

that of the police reporter. We “operated,” like burglars; we “looted”:

only, it was intimated in one place, “second-story men” were angels

compared to us, who had never seen the inside of a penitentiary. Here

we were, all arraigned before the bar of public opinion, the relentless

Dickinson, the surfeited Scherer, the rapacious Grierson, the salacious

Tallant. I have forgotten what Miller Gorse was called; nothing so

classic as a Minotaur; Judd Jason was a hairy spider who spread his net

and lurked in darkness for his victims. Every adjective was called upon

to do its duty.... Even Theodore Watling did not escape, but it was

intimated that he would be dealt with in another connection in a future

number.

The article had a crude and terrifying power, and the pain it aroused,

following almost immediately upon the suffering caused by my separation

from Nancy, was cumulative in character and effect, seeming actively to

reenforce the unwelcome conviction I had been striving to suppress, that

the world, which had long seemed so acquiescent in conforming itself to

my desires, was turning against me.

Though my hunger for Nancy was still gnawing, I had begun to fear that I

should never get her now; and the fact that she would not even write to

me seemed to confirm this.

Then there was Matthew--I could not bear to think that he would ever

read that article.

In vain I tried that night to belittle to myself its contentions and

probable results, to summon up the heart to fight; in vain I sought to

reconstruct the point of view, to gain something of that renewed hope

and power, of devotion to a cause I had carried away from Washington

after my talk with Theodore Watling. He, though stricken, had not

wavered in his faith. Why should I?

Whether or not as the result of the article in Yardley's, which had been

read more or less widely in the city, the campaign of the Citizens Union

gained ground, and people began to fill the little halls to hear Krebs,

who was a candidate for district attorney. Evidently he was entertaining

and rousing them, for his reputation spread, and some of the larger

halls were hired. Dickinson and Gorse became alarmed, and one morning

the banker turned up at the Club while I was eating my breakfast.

“Look here, Hugh,” he said, “we may as well face the fact that we've got

a fight ahead of us,--we'll have to start some sort of a back-fire right

away.”

“You think Greenhalge has a chance of being elected?” I asked.

“I'm not afraid of Greenhalge, but of this fellow Krebs. We can't afford

to have him district attorney, to let a demagogue like him get a start.

The men the Republicans and Democrats have nominated are worse than

useless. Parks is no good, and neither is MacGuire. If only we could

have foreseen this thing we might have had better candidates put up--but

there's no use crying over spilt milk. You'll have to go on the stump,

Hugh--that's all there is to it. You can answer him, and the newspapers

will print your speeches in full. Besides it will help you when it comes

to the senatorship.”

The mood of extreme dejection that had followed the appearance of the

article in Yardley's did not last. I had acquired aggressiveness: an

aggressiveness, however, differing in quality from the feeling I once

would have had,--for this arose from resentment, not from belief. It

was impossible to live in the atmosphere created by the men with whom I

associated--especially at such a time--without imbibing something of

the emotions animating them,--even though I had been free from these

emotions myself. I, too, had begun to be filled with a desire for

revenge; and when this desire was upon me I did not have in my mind a

pack of reformers, or even the writer of the article in Yardley's. I

thought of Hermann Krebs. He was my persecutor; it seemed to me that he

always had been....

“Well, I'll make speeches if you like,” I said to Dickinson.

“I'm glad,” he replied. “We're all agreed, Gorse and the rest of us,

that you ought to. We've got to get some ginger into this fight, and a

good deal more money, I'm afraid. Jason sends word we'll need more. By

the way, Hugh, I wish you'd drop around and talk to Jason and get his

idea of how the land lies.”

I went, this time in the company of Judah B. Tallant. Naturally we

didn't expect to see Mr. Jason perturbed, nor was he. He seemed to be in

an odd, rather exultant mood--if he can be imagined as exultant. We were

not long in finding out what pleased him--nothing less than the fact

that Mr. Krebs had proposed him for mayor!

“D--d if I wouldn't make a good one, too,” he said. “D--d if I wouldn't

show 'em what a real mayor is!”

“I guess there's no danger of your ever being mayor, Judd,” Tallant

observed, with a somewhat uneasy jocularity.

“I guess there isn't, Judah,” replied the boss, quickly, but with a

peculiar violet flash in his eyes. “They won't ever make you mayor,

either, if I can help it. And I've a notion I can. I'd rather see Krebs

mayor.”

“You don't think he meant to propose you seriously,” Tallant exclaimed.

“I'm not a d--d fool,” said the boss. “But I'll say this, that he half

meant it. Krebs has a head-piece on him, and I tell you if any of this

reform dope is worth anything his is. There's some sense in what he's

talking, and if all the voters was like him you might get a man like me

for mayor. But they're not, and I guess they never will be.”

“Sure,” said Mr. Jason. “The people are dotty--there ain't one in ten

thousand understands what he's driving at when he gets off things like

that. They take it on the level.”

Tallant reflected.

“By gum, I believe you're right,” he said. “You think they will blow

up?” he added.

“Krebs is the whole show, I tell you. They wouldn't be anywhere without

him. The yaps that listen to him don't understand him, but somehow he

gets under their skins. Have you seen him lately?”

“Never saw him,” replied Tallant.

“Well, if you had, you'd know he was a sick man.”

“Sick!” I exclaimed. “How do you know?”

“It's my business to know things,” said Judd Jason, and added to

Tallant, “that your reporters don't find out.”

“What's the matter with him?” Tallant demanded. A slight exultation in

his tone did not escape me.

“You've got me there,” said Jason, “but I have it pretty straight. Any

one of your reporters will tell you that he looks sick.”....

The Era took Mr. Jason's advice and began to publish those portions of

Krebs's speeches that were seemingly detrimental to his own cause. Other

conservative newspapers followed suit....

Both Tallant and I were surprised to hear these sentiments out of the

mouth of Mr. Jason.

“You don't think that crowd's going to win, do you?” asked the owner of

the Era, a trifle uneasily.

“Win!” exclaimed the boss contemptuously. “They'll blow up, and you'll

never hear of 'em. I'm not saying we won't need a little--powder,” he

added--which was one of the matters we had come to talk about. He

gave us likewise a very accurate idea of the state of the campaign,

mentioning certain things that ought to be done. “You ought to print

some of Krebs's speeches, Judah, like what he said about me. They're

talking it all around that you're afraid to.”

“Print things like his proposal to make you mayor!”

The information that I was to enter the lists against Krebs was received

with satisfaction and approval by those of our friends who were called

in to assist at a council of war in the directors' room of the Corn

National Bank. I was flattered by the confidence these men seemed to

have in my ability. All were in a state of anger against the reformers;

none of them seriously alarmed as to the actual outcome of the

campaign,--especially when I had given them the opinion of Mr. Jason.

What disturbed them was the possible effect upon the future of the

spread of heretical, socialistic doctrines, and it was decided to

organize a publicity bureau, independently of the two dominant political

parties, to be in charge of a certain New York journalist who made a

business of such affairs, who was to be paid a sum commensurate with the

emergency. He was to have carte blanche, even in the editorial columns

of our newspapers. He was also to flood the city with “literature.” We

had fought many wars before this, and we planned our campaign precisely

as though we were dealing with one of those rebellions in the realm of

finance of which I have given an instance. But now the war chest of our

opponents was negligible; and we were comforted by the thought that,

however disagreeable the affair might be while it lasted, in the long

run capital was invincible.

Before setting to work to prepare my speeches it was necessary to make

an attempt to familiarize myself with the seemingly unprecedented

line of argument Krebs had evolved--apparently as disconcerting to his

friends as to his opponents. It occurred to me, since I did not care

to attend Krebs's meetings, to ask my confidential stenographer,

Miss McCoy, to go to Turner's Hall and take down one of his speeches

verbatim. Miss McCoy had never intruded on me her own views, and I took

for granted that they coincided with my own.

“I'd like to get an accurate record of what he is saying,” I told her.

“Do you mind going?”

“No, I'll be glad to go, Mr. Paret,” she said quietly.

“He's doing more harm than we thought,” I remarked, after a moment.

“I've known him for a good many years. He's clever. He's sowing seeds

of discontent, starting trouble that will be very serious unless it is

headed off.”

Miss McCoy made no comment....

Before noon the next day she brought in the speech, neatly typewritten,

and laid it on my desk. Looking up and catching her eye just as she was

about to withdraw, I was suddenly impelled to ask:--“Well, what did you

think of it?”

She actually flushed, for the first time in my dealings with her

betraying a feeling which I am sure she deemed most unprofessional.

“I liked it, Mr. Paret,” she replied simply, and I knew that she had

understated. It was quite apparent that Krebs had captivated her. I

tried not to betray my annoyance.

“Was there a good audience?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“How many do you think?”

She hesitated.

“It isn't a very large hall, you know. I should say it would hold about

eight hundred people.”

“And--it was full?”--I persisted.

“Oh, yes, there were numbers of people standing.”

I thought I detected in her tone-although it was not apologetic--a

desire to spare my feelings. She hesitated a moment more, and then left

the room, closing the door softly behind her...

Presently I took up the pages and began to read. The language was simple

and direct, an appeal to common sense, yet the words strangely seemed

charged with an emotional power that I found myself resisting. When at

length I laid down the sheets I wondered whether it were imagination,

or the uncomfortable result of memories of conversations I had had with

him.

I was, however, confronted with the task of refuting his arguments: but

with exasperating ingenuity, he seemed to have taken the wind out of our

sails. It is difficult to answer a man who denies the cardinal principle

of American democracy,--that a good mayor or a governor may be made

out of a dog-catcher. He called this the Cincinnatus theory: that any

American, because he was an American, was fit for any job in the gift

of state or city or government, from sheriff to Ambassador to Great

Britain. Krebs substituted for this fallacy what may be called the

doctrine of potentiality. If we inaugurated and developed a system of

democratic education, based on scientific principles, and caught the

dog-catcher, young enough, he might become a statesman or thinker or

scientist and make his contribution to the welfare and progress of the

nation: again, he might not; but he would have had his chance, he would

not be in a position to complain.

Here was a doctrine, I immediately perceived, which it would be suicidal

to attempt to refute. It ought, indeed, to have been my line. With a

growing distaste I began to realize that all there was left for me was

to flatter a populace that Krebs, paradoxically, belaboured. Never in

the history of American “uplift” had an electorate been in this manner

wooed! upbraided for expediency, a proneness to demand immediate

results, an unwillingness to think, yes, and an inability to think

straight. Such an electorate deserved to be led around by the nose by

the Jasons and Dickinsons, the Gorses and the Griersons and the Parets.

Yes, he had mentioned me. That gave me a queer sensation. How is one

to handle an opponent who praises one with a delightful irony? We, the

Dickinsons, Griersons, Parets, Jasons, etc., had this virtue at least,

and it was by no means the least of the virtues,--that we did think.

We had a plan, a theory of government, and we carried it out. He was

inclined to believe that morality consisted largely, if not wholly, in

clear thinking, and not in the precepts of the Sunday-school. That was

the trouble with the so-called “reform” campaigns, they were conducted

on lines of Sunday-school morality; the people worked themselves up into

a sort of revivalist frenzy, an emotional state which, if the truth were

told, was thoroughly immoral, unreasonable and hypocritical: like all

frenzies, as a matter of course it died down after the campaign was

over. Moreover, the American people had shown that they were unwilling

to make any sacrifices for the permanent betterment of conditions, and

as soon as their incomes began to fall off they turned again to the

bosses and capitalists like an abject flock of sheep.

He went on to explain that he wasn't referring now to that part of the

electorate known as the labour element, the men who worked with

their hands in mills, factories, etc. They had their faults, yet they

possessed at least the virtue of solidarity, a willingness to undergo

sacrifices in order to advance the standard of conditions; they too

had a tenacity of purpose and a plan, such as it was, which the small

business men, the clerks lacked....

We must wake up to the fact that we shouldn't get Utopia by turning out

Mr. Jason and the highly efficient gentlemen who hired and financed him.

It wasn't so simple as that. Utopia was not an achievement after

all, but an undertaking, a state of mind, the continued overcoming of

resistance by a progressive education and effort. And all this talk of

political and financial “wickedness” was rubbish; the wickedness they

complained of did not reside merely in individuals it was a social

disorder, or rather an order that no longer suited social conditions.

If the so-called good citizens would take the trouble to educate

themselves, to think instead of allowing their thinking to be done for

them they would see that the “evils” which had been published broadcast

were merely the symptoms of that disease which had come upon the social

body through their collective neglect and indifference. They held

up their hands in horror at the spectacle of a commercial, licensed

prostitution, they shunned the prostitute and the criminal; but there

was none of us, if honest, who would not exclaim when he saw them,

“there, but for the Grace of God, go I!” What we still called “sin” was

largely the result of lack of opportunity, and the active principle

of society as at present organized tended more and more to restrict

opportunity. Lack of opportunity, lack of proper nutrition,--these made

sinners by the wholesale; made, too, nine-tenths of the inefficient of

whom we self-righteously complained. We had a national philosophy that

measured prosperity in dollars and cents, included in this measurement

the profits of liquor dealers who were responsible for most of our

idiots. So long as we set our hearts on that kind of prosperity, so long

as we failed to grasp the simple and practical fact that the greatest

assets of a nation are healthy and sane and educated, clear-thinking

human beings, just so long was prostitution logical, Riverside

Franchises, traction deals, Judd Jasons, and the respectable gentlemen

who continued to fill their coffers out of the public purse inevitable.

The speaker turned his attention to the “respectable gentlemen” with the

full coffers, amongst whom I was by implication included. We had simply

succeeded under the rules to which society tacitly agreed. That was our

sin. He ventured to say that there were few men in the hall who at the

bottom of their hearts did not envy and even honour our success. He, for

one, did not deem these “respectable gentlemen” utterly reprehensible;

he was sufficiently emancipated to be sorry for us. He suspected that we

were not wholly happy in being winners in such a game,--he even believed

that we could wish as much as any others to change the game and

the prizes. What we represented was valuable energy misdirected and

misplaced, and in a reorganized community he would not abolish us, but

transform us: transform, at least, the individuals of our type, who were

the builders gone wrong under the influence of an outworn philosophy.

We might be made to serve the city and the state with the same

effectiveness that we had served ourselves.

If the best among the scientists, among the university professors and

physicians were willing to labour--and they were--for the advancement

of humanity, for the very love of the work and service without

disproportionate emoluments, without the accumulation of a wealth

difficult to spend, why surely these big business men had been moulded

in infancy from no different clay! All were Americans. Instance after

instance might be cited of business men and lawyers of ability making

sacrifices, giving up their personal affairs in order to take places of

honour in the government in which the salary was comparatively small,

proving that even these were open to inducements other than merely

mercenary ones.

It was unfortunate, he went on, but true, that the vast majority of

people of voting age in the United States to-day who thought they had

been educated were under the obligation to reeducate themselves.

He suggested, whimsically, a vacation school for Congress and all

legislative bodies as a starter. Until the fact of the utter inadequacy

of the old education were faced, there was little or no hope of solving

the problems that harassed us. One thing was certain--that they couldn't

be solved by a rule-of-thumb morality. Coincident with the appearance

of these new and mighty problems, perhaps in response to them, a new and

saner view of life itself was being developed by the world's thinkers,

new sciences were being evolved, correlated sciences; a psychology

making a truer analysis of human motives, impulses, of human

possibilities; an economics and a theory of government that took account

of this psychology, and of the vast changes applied science had made in

production and distribution. We lived in a new world, which we sought

to ignore; and the new education, the new viewpoint was in truth nothing

but religion made practical. It had never been thought practical before.

The motive that compelled men to work for humanity in science, in

medicine, in art--yes, and in business, if we took the right view of

it, was the religious motive. The application of religion was to-day

extending from the individual to society. No religion that did not fill

the needs of both was a true religion.