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Transcriber’s Notes
This e-text is based on ‘The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine,’
from July, 1913. The table of contents, based on the index from the May
issue, has been added by the transcriber.
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation have been retained, but
punctuation and typographical errors have been corrected. Passages
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FICTION NUMBER
~The Century Magazine~
~Vol. LXXXVI~ JULY, 1913 No. 3
CONTENTS
PAGE
~Beelzebub Came to the Convent, How~ _Ethel Watts Mumford_ 323
Picture by N. C. Wyeth.
~Millet’s Return to his Old Home.~ _Truman H. Bartlett_ 332
Pictures from pastels
by Millet.
~Man who did not Go to Heaven on _Ellis Parker Butler_ 340
Tuesday, The~
~Borrowed Lover, The~ _L. Frank Tooker_ 348
~Remington, Frederic, Recollections
of~ _Augustus Thomas_ 354
Pictures by Frederic Remington,
and portrait.
~Spinster, American, The~ _Agnes Repplier_ 363
~Coming Sneeze, The~ _Harry Stillwell Edwards_ 368
Picture by F. R. Gruger.
~Balkan Peninsula, Skirting the~ _Robert Hichens_
V. In Constantinople. 374
Pictures by Jules Guérin and
from photographs.
~Noteworthy Stories of the Last
Generation.~
The New Minister’s Great _C. H. White_ 390
Opportunity.
With portrait of the author,
and new picture by Harry
Townsend.
~Camilla’s First Affair.~ _Gertrude Hall_ 400
Pictures by Emil
Pollak-Ottendorff.
~T. Tembarom.~ _Frances Hodgson Burnett_ 413
Drawings by Charles S. Chapman.
~Mannering’s Men.~ _Marjorie L. C. Pickthall_ 427
~Verita’s Stratagem.~ _Anne Warner_ 430
~St. Elizabeth of Hungary.~ By _Timothy Cole_ 437
Francisco Zubarán. Engraved
on wood by
~Hard Money, The Return to~ _Charles A. Conant_ 439
Portraits, and cartoons by
Thomas Nast.
~Morgan’s, Mr., Personality~ _Joseph B. Gilder_ 459
Picture from photograph.
~Socialism in the Colleges.~ _Editorial_ 468
~Money behind the Gun, The~ _Editorial_ 470
~One Way to make Things Better.~ _Editorial_ 471
~“Schedule K,” Comments on~ _Editorial_ 472
~Christmas, On Allowing the Editor _Leonard Hatch_ 473
to Shop Early for~
~Business in the Orient.~ _Harry A. Franck_ 475
~Cartoons.~
Foreign Labor. _Oliver Herford_ 477
Ninety Degrees in the Shade. _J. R. Shaver_ 477
VERSE
~My Conscience.~ _James Whitcomb Riley_ 331
Decoration by Oliver Herford.
~House-without-Roof.~ _Edith M. Thomas_ 339
~Sierra Madre.~ _Henry Van Dyke_ 347
~Prayers for the Living.~ _Mary W. Plummer_ 367
~Little People, The~ _Amelia Josephine Burr_ 387
~Belle Dame Sans Merci, La~ _John Keats_ 388
Republished with pictures by
Stanley M. Arthurs.
~Eden, Beauty in.~ _Alfred Noyes_ 399
~Gettysburg, High Tide at, The.~ _Will H. Thompson_ 410
~Blank Page, For a~ _Austin Dobson_ 458
~Maeterlinck, Maurice~ _Stephen Phillips_ 467
~Brother Mingo Millenyum’s Ordination.~ _Ruth McEnery Stuart_ 475
~Ballade of Protest, A~ _Carolyn Wells_ 476
~Same Old Lure, The~ _Berton Braley_ 478
~Limericks.~:
Text and pictures by Oliver Herford.
XXX. The Gnat and the Gnu. 479
XXXI. The Sole-Hungering Camel. 480
HOW BEELZEBUB CAME TO THE CONVENT
BY ETHEL WATTS MUMFORD
Author of “The Eyes of the Heart,” “Whitewash,” etc.
WITH A PICTURE BY N. C. WYETH
Copyright 1913, by ~The Century Co.~ All rights reserved.
Sister Eulalia rose from the bench by the door in answer to Sister
Teresa’s call. The broken pavement in the outer patio of the Convent of
La Merced echoed the tapping of her stick as she slowly made her way
to the arch leading to the interior of the building. Sister Eulalia
was blind, but as nearly the whole seventy years of her life had been
passed within these same gray walls familiarity supplied the defect
of vision. Her daily tasks never had been interrupted since, a full
half-century before, a wind-driven cactus-thorn had robbed her of
sight. She wore with simple dignity the white woolen garb of the order,
with its band of blue ribbon from which depended a silver cross, the
snowy coif framing her saintly face with smooth bands that contrasted
with the wrinkled surface of her skin. To the eye of an artist, her
frail figure in its quaint surroundings of Spanish architecture, dating
from the early years of the seventeenth century, would have made an
irresistible appeal. But no artist ever sought that remote, almost
forgotten city, and for the few Indians and half-breeds who have
inherited the fallen glories of Antigua de Guatemala, the moribund
convent held no interest. Occasionally one of the older “Indigenes”
whose conscience troubled him would leave an offering of food at the
twisted iron gate and mumble a request for prayers of intercession; or
the dark-eyed half-Spanish children would stare with something of both
fascination and fear at the five white-clad ancient women who, morning
and evening, crossed the patio to the chapel: Sister Eulalia on the arm
of Sister Teresa, Sister Rose de Lima and Sister Catalina, one on each
side of the Mother Superior. To these two younger sisters--their years
were but sixty-six and sixty-nine--had fallen, by common consent, the
care of the Mother Superior, whose age no one knew, so great it was,
and whose infirmities the nuns loyally concealed. By them her wandering
sentences were received as divine revelations, and indeed her strange,
thin voice, as it repeated Latin texts with level insistence, conveyed
a weird, Delphic impression.
The Mother Superior had been a woman of learning, of beauty, and of
high birth, but all that had been long ago. Now she was but a pale
shade repeating vaguely the words learned in a former life. Her
features remained fine and fair, as if preserved in some crystalline
substance. Her skin was unlined, for care and sorrow could reach her no
more.
Unless she were being conducted to and from the chapel by her devoted
handmaidens, or lay at rest in the state bed of the visitors’ room,
she sat in the high carved seat at the end of the refectory table, her
thin hands folded, her eyes fixed on the symbolic cross on her breast,
unconscious of those who came and went about her, or of the echoing
aisles and lofty pillared porticos that surrounded her abstracted
existence.
As the blind nun crossed the court and entered the refectory, she
became conscious of an unusual stir. She divined the presence of
each of the sisters, divined them strangely intent and not a little
agitated. The voice of Sister Rose de Lima reached her in a whisper of
portent.
“The reverend Mother has spoken--in Spanish!”
A pause followed the announcement. There was a slight sound from the
white prophetess. Sister Teresa and Sister Catalina, who stood beside
her, drew insensibly closer. Their hands were joined, finger-tip to
finger-tip, in the prayerful pose of medieval funereal statues; their
withered faces were drawn with expectation. At the opposite end of
the table stood Sister Rose, leaning forward breathlessly. Sister
Eulalia remained at the entrance, rigid, as if turned into stone. The
moments lengthened. The sunlight danced in golden motes through the
long windows, innocent now of their olden glories of painted glass,
and showed the worn carving of memorial stones emblazoned with coats
of arms, half erased by the passing of many sandaled feet. The stone
walls betrayed by protruding nails the absence of their wood-carvings
and panels. The badly repaired rifts in the earthquake-torn walls
showed garishly. The white figures, as in a tableau, remained still
and unmoving, and the seated form of the Mother Superior appeared as
lifeless as the waxen figure of Jesus under its shade of glass on the
little altar.
She opened her eyes, if such a slow unclosing of the lids could be so
called, revealing two wells of opaque blackness. A quick sigh escaped
the lips of the three nuns. Sister Eulalia heard, and slowly knelt,
ready to receive the word should such be sent.
The reverend Mother’s colorless lips moved. At first no sound issued
from them. Then, with strange forceful vibration, her voice broke the
waiting stillness.
“Woe!” she cried. “Woe! ‘The Fiend, as a roaring lion, walketh about,
seeking whom he may devour!’”
Four withered hands hastily made the sign of the cross.
Heavily as they had lifted, the waxen lids closed over the opaque black
eyes. The rigid body relaxed slightly, and the Mother Superior relapsed
into her wonted insensibility.
“We are surely to be tempted!” said Sister Eulalia. “Sisters, we must
be strong to resist the Fiend.” Sister Teresa nodded. “We are warned,”
she added.
Sister Rose crossed herself again.
Very gently Sister Catalina assured herself of the comfort of the
reverend Mother, and the four aged nuns turned to their tasks again,
but with beating hearts. The Fiend would beset them soon, and in
some dreadful guise. Sister Rose breathed a prayer for strength, as
she filled the tiny red lamp burning ever before the waxen image.
Sister Teresa hurriedly began “Aves,” as she peeled an onion; Sister
Catalina’s “paternosters” preceded her into the garden; and Sister
Eulalia’s beads slipped hastily through her knotted fingers as she
returned to the mechanical perfection of her work at the loom.
“As a roaring lion!”--Sister Eulalia’s blind eyes could conjure more
dreadful sights than the faded vision of her less afflicted companions
would ever see. Now she brought them before her in endless array of
horror. She would know him only by his roar, she thought, and he might
creep up close noiselessly. Her ear was alert to the lightest sound.
But the day wore on and no roaring beast came with hellish clamor to
affright the gentle recluse.
[Illustration: Drawn by N. C. Wyeth. Half-tone plate engraved by H.
Davidson
“THE FIVE WHITE-CLAD ANCIENT WOMEN WHO, MORNING AND EVENING, CROSSED
THE PATIO TO THE CHAPEL”]
Sister Catalina entered the patio from the garden-close, a yellow
hill-rose in her hand to pleasure her afflicted companion with its
subtle peppery scent; an act not sanctioned by the drastic rules of the
convent. But years upon years had rolled by, bringing a gentle sagging
of discipline. Occasionally one of the few priests who still clung to
the wrecked cathedrals came to hear confessions of puerile and trifling
misdemeanors, and a severer penance than a dozen “Aves” was unknown and
unmerited. Sister Eulalia inhaled the rose’s fragrance gratefully. Her
blunt, weaving-calloused fingers sought and found the soft petals of
the flower with loving touch.
It was thus that the Rev. Dr. Joel McBean saw them. He paused,
delighted. What a characteristic picture! How well composed; how
symbolical of a decaying faith! His kodak was instantly leveled, and
with a snap the sisters were immortalized. For Dr. McBean was known far
and wide on the west coast for his lectures on the benighted people of
other lands. His present visit to Central America combined his vacation
with a search for new material for his winter tour.
The click of the camera caused Eulalia, the sightless, to turn sharply.
Catalina, who was slightly deaf, seeing her companion’s movement,
looked about and stood still in open-mouthed amazement. Then she made
the gesture common to all women in all lands, and emitted the sound
that accompanies it when the invading hen must be incited to flight.
“Shoo!” she cried. “Shiss--shiss!” and waved her garden apron at the
intruder.
Sister Eulalia grasped the hem of Catalina’s flowing sleeve.
“What is it? Oh, what is it?” she gasped.
“A man! A strange man!” came the answer in a frightened whisper.
The gentleman in question realized that he was distinctly de trop, but
he strongly desired to gather more lecture material from this promising
source. Setting down the camera, he took out his well-thumbed volume
of “Handy Spanish” and sought for a suitable phrase of explanation and
introduction. There were headings about “The Hotel,” “The Laundry,”
“The Eating and Procuring of Meals,” “At the Railway Station,” “The
Diligence,” “The Physician”; but among the thousand useful phrases,
not one seemed to offer itself aptly. At last he found the heading he
sought: “Cameras--Films--Developing, etc.” “Have you any cyanide?” did
not fit. “Have you a darkroom in this hotel?” seemed ambiguous. “Direct
me to the photographer” would not do. Ah! Eureka! “May I take your
picture?” He bowed politely, approached the now thoroughly frightened
nuns, and with carefully spaced utterance made his request. “May I take
your picture?” he repeated, with a graceful sweep of his white hand.
“Fotografia--cuadro--”
Sister Rose appeared in the doorway, followed by Teresa. His gesture
included them also, and the ancient gateway, the columned portico, and
the quaint façade of the little chapel.
“Beautiful!” he cried. “Multo bueno! Hermosa, hermosa--muy hermosa!”
He wanted to take their picture! The nuns were completely at sea. Why
should this stranger, this man with queer apparel and strange speech,
want their picture? They possessed only one--the portrait of Our
Lady of Mercy above the little altar of the chapel--and why should
any one want a thing that so obviously it was impossible for them to
give? Bewildered, they looked from one to another. Sister Rose, being
the youngest and most mentally alert, became aware of the sacerdotal
character of their visitor: the gold cross at the end of his chain, the
wide-bordered felt hat which he waved so gracefully, the neat black
clothes, the breviary that bulged from his pocket; but, more than all,
the expression of his smiling face and gentle, near-sighted eyes.
“He is a priest--see you not?” she said excitedly. “His dress, his
manner, bespeak it. He comes from some foreign land. Alas! that the
reverend Mother cannot speak with him in Latin!”
“It is true,” said Catalina. “Pardon, reverend Father,” she quavered,
“I did not know! Our picture--you shall see it.”
She turned toward the chapel, but the visitor waved her back. The group
before him was irresistible, just as they were. Catalina instinctively
obeyed his gesture, marveling.
“Are--are there any more of you?” he inquired in his halting Spanish.
Now at last they understood. The reverend Father was making the rounds
of the clerical houses in order to make his report to the bishop. That
had happened once before. Sister Rose launched into explanations.
“No. We are all that are left, except the Mother Superior,” she told
him. “We are allowed here on sufferance only, for as, of course, the
reverend Father knows, the churches have all been taken by the state,
and but for the reverend Mother, who was kinswoman to some one great
in the land, we should have been sent forth. Alas! our numbers have
dwindled--grave upon grave we have made, each nun for herself, and now
all are filled save five. We have not, it is quite true, turned the
holy sod of our last sleeping-places as often as is the rule; but we
have grown old, and the work is hard--”
It was the lecturer’s turn to be utterly confused and routed; the
sudden change of manner, the deference shown to him all at once;
above all the avalanche of Spanish was too much for him, but he still
retained his amateur photographer’s zeal. With a hand raised to draw
their attention, but which the nuns mistook for pastoral blessing, he
steadied the camera against his narrow chest, and snapped a second
picture. With a polite “Thank you” and a sigh of satisfaction, he wound
the reel, heartily regretting the while that the limits of the camera’s
focus must necessarily leave out the perfection of the setting--the
towering, smoking peak of the Volcan de Fuego on the right, stained
red and yellow by its sulphurous outpourings, and the menacing green
inactivity of Agua’s deadly summit; all the gloom and glow of those
earthquake-seamed walls, and tottering, carved gateways.
“Mil gracias!” He thanked them awkwardly. “I--well--goodness! how
_does_ one say it?” He seized upon the “Handy Spanish Phrases”
again, and ran his finger down the line of camera sentences. “Please
make me six prints.” “This is over-exposed.” “You have fogged the
plate.”--“Tut, tut!” he exclaimed impatiently, “how in the world do you
say ‘I’ll give you a blue-print’?--blue-print--blue-print--Ah! this
will do. ‘An excellent portrait’--presented--for you,” he explained,
and supplemented the statement with an elaborate pantomime. The nuns
watched his gesticulations with breathless interest. He pointed to each
in turn, made a circle around his own face, smiling blandly and nodding
appreciation.
The sisters conferred.
“It clears!” said Sister Rose. “He asks us have we broken the rules
and looked at ourselves in a looking-glass.” She advanced toward Dr.
McBean and spoke for the sisterhood with deep earnestness. “Oh, no,
reverend Father, we have not seen our own reflections for fifty years,
and more--oh, never! There never has been a mirror on the walls of La
Merced. Vanity is not our sin. Thanks be to Our Lady, not even in the
convent well have we looked to see our faces reflected. Oh, no!”
Dr. McBean caught a word here and there, and felt that he was being
vehemently reassured about something, probably that the nuns would
be grateful for his kindness; that the elderly virgins knew nothing
whatever of such a thing as a camera, and had no idea of the use to
which he put his black box, would have seemed so ridiculous that the
possibility of it never occurred to him. With more bows, and renewed
and halting thanks, he took his departure.
“To-morrow,” he called. “_Mañana_--I will bring the
blue-prints--_mañana_. Adios! Gracias!”
The nuns watched his departure in silence, but as the sound of his
tripping footsteps died away, they turned to one another excitedly.
“Tell me, you who have eyes--what was he like?” begged Eulalia.
The others turned to her pityingly.
“Thou shalt hear. We had forgotten thine affliction, poor sister. He is
thin of the leg and round above. He wears glasses on a small nose. His
eyes are blue, and his hands are beautiful and white, like the hands
of Father Ignatius--the saints rest his soul! He wore black, with a
cassock very short indeed; and a round white collar, and a gold cross
hung at his waist. He bore a small black box, that doubtless contained
a holy relic, for ofttimes he clasped it to his bosom and cared for it
most lovingly.”
“How strange,” mused Eulalia, “that the reverend Fathers should send
one to question us thus unannounced, and one who also speaks so
strangely! His words were confusing, and I caught not often the sense,
though I listened with all my ears. Had it not been for Sister Rose, I
never should have guessed his mission.”
“Had’st thou seen him, thou would’st have known,” said Sister Teresa.
“His calling was not to be mistaken; moreover, with the reliquary he
blessed us.”
They had great food for speculation. Such excitement had not come into
their lives in unnumbered years. The dreadful prophecy of the Mother
Superior was forgotten. For the first time in a decade Eulalia was
heard to lament her loss of sight. Try as she would, she could not
make a satisfactory mental picture from her companions’ descriptions
of their visitor. These were vivid and detailed enough, but somehow
she could not bring them to take definite shape. Over and over again
they discussed the form and face, the manners and raiment of Dr. Joel
McBean. Not a gesture they did not speculate upon and imitate, not a
sentence of his incoherent Spanish that was not dissected, analyzed,
and wondered about. In particular, why did he want their picture, and
then leave without it?
But “to-morrow” he had said, to-morrow he would come; then perhaps they
would understand.
The sunlight turned copper-red, warning them of the lateness of the
hour and putting a sudden end to their excited converse. Suddenly
sobered and recalled to its own world, the flustered dove-cote
subsided. With stately tread they sought the reverend Mother. She
suffered herself to be lifted from her chair, and with eyes downcast
took her slow way to the chapel, with the help and guidance of her two
faithful attendants.
* * * * *
The perspiration stood in great beads upon the brow of Joel McBean as
he emerged from a black, unventilated closet in the Posada del Rey, a
tray of chemicals in his hand. He held the developed films up to the
light and nodded with satisfaction. The pictures were excellent, clear
and sharp, well composed, excellently suited to the enlargement of
the stereopticon. He examined each with minute care, but found none
requiring the intensifier. There at last they were fixed forever,
the replicas of this strange land of contradictions--pictures that
should make his audiences realize how fortunate they were to be able
to stay at home in comfort while an intrepid and intelligent explorer
braved the trials of arduous travel in order to bring the simulacrum of
these other lands to their very doors, together with enlightening and
well-turned elucidations of the manners and customs of these benighted
dwellers in lands forgotten. Already he felt glowing sentences
stirring in his brain, sonorous and uplifting words, at once pitying
and broad-minded. “Tolerance”--that was the motto of his discourses;
tolerance always, but coupled with the well-directed searchlight
of comparison. What a point he would make of these aged, recluse
women--their ignorance, their useless lives, their abasement before the
Juggernaut of outworn rules! He flattered himself that his presence,
momentary as it was, had brought new impetus, and a realization of
other and more intelligent peoples, to these remnants of obsolete
conditions. “Obsolete conditions”--ah, a good expression!
He slipped the sensitized paper under the films in their wooden cases,
and set them for a moment on the rim of his balcony overlooking the
cobbled pavement of the unfrequented King’s Highway, upon which the
tropic sun beat with white fury. A moment only sufficed, and he
withdrew the prints. They proved marvelously good; as portraits they
could not have been excelled. He smiled with satisfaction. How pleased
these benighted little sisters would be, he thought, for he was a
kindly man. He slipped the photographs between the leaves of his “Handy
Spanish Phrases,” and, walking along the red-tiled gallery, made his
way across the blue-and-white-walled patio, and while parrots shrieked
at him and capuchin monkeys chattered, he passed from their cages
toward the great, sweating water-jars, and emerged into the glare of
the street.
Everywhere the remains of huge triumphal arches met his eye; enormous
buildings of state and vast churches, seamed and cracked by the
volcano’s upheavals, now flowered with creepers and plumed with growing
trees. The silence indicated complete desertion, except where one
caught, from time to time, in some shattered palace, a glimpse of an
Indian family at their squalid tasks, or the bray of a burro echoing
from some stately ruin.
At last the twisted wrought-iron gate and the flanking spiral columns
of the gateway of the convent came in sight. Dr. McBean quickened his
steps.
He had been eagerly awaited within those solemn walls. After matins
the excited sisters had gossiped and chatted over the events of the
previous day, and then proceeded--each quietly, in her own cell, and
unknown to her fellows--to make an elaborate toilet. The least faded
blue ribbons were put on, a fresh coif was found, spots and stains
were removed from worn white garments, while the little silver crosses
received an unaccustomed furbishing.
Somewhat shamefaced they met, and laughed like children as each
realized the worldliness of the others, till again Sister Eulalia’s
complaint turned them to consolatory condolences. A frown of petulance
had settled between Sister Eulalia’s brows. To be sure, it was lost
in a maze of wrinkles, but it was there. In her old heart was revolt
against the sorrow accepted so bravely fifty years before. She did not
realize her sin, absorbed as she was in the Great Interest.
When Dr. McBean entered the patio he was met by the four nuns, who
advanced smiling, with murmured hopes of a happy sleep of the night
before and perfect health to-day.
“I kept my promise, you see,” he beamed, handing the prints to Sister
Teresa, and speaking in his native tongue. “The pictures are really
very good, and I hope you will enjoy having them. Thank you so
much--and good-by. I start on my journey again to-day; so I must be
off. Good-by, again. Adios--buanos dais!”
The nuns curtsied and bowed. He paused a moment in order to jot in
his note-book: “Ignorant peoples invariably gratefully receive and
appreciate--all evidences superior civilization”--bowed again and
departed.
It was not till any further glimpse of him was denied by the corner
wall that they turned to the photographs. They looked in astonishment,
which increased to puzzled wonder; then a look of fear crossed Sister
Teresa’s face. Sister Eulalia, with tears in her eyeless lids, had
disconsolately sought her seat on the weaving-bench. These marvels
were not for her. For a moment she hated her companions--they were no
longer companions. She was alone in her misery.
From the depths of self-pity she was rushed to sudden astounded
attention by sounds of wrath, of venomous speech, of resentment and
anger. Sister Eulalia could not believe her ears, and the angry
conversation gave her no hint of its cause. It seemed the babblings of
sheer madness.
Sister Teresa had been the first to exclaim.
“See!” she cried, “I cannot understand! This is thy portrait to the
life, Sister Catalina, and thine, Sister Rose, also this likeness of
Sister Eulalia. But where am I? Who is this strange nun?”
Sister Catalina gazed at the picture in deep perturbation. “But I see
thee well,” she affirmed. “It is thy very self upon the paper, but it
is I who am not there, and this is the strange nun!” She pointed to her
own portrait.
Sister Rose intervened. “Foolish! It is thy very self, and Sister
Eulalia, and Sister Teresa, yes; but I am not there, and in my place is
a stranger!” She pointed to her own semblance. “Who is this?”
Both Sister Teresa and Sister Catalina looked at her scornfully. “It is
thyself,” they said in one breath.
Sister Rose colored till she symbolized her name, but it was the red of
anger that mantled her cheeks.
“Indeed, it is not!” she answered hotly. “I have not a withered face, a
jaw like a knife, and such eyes!”
“I tell thee, _that_”--Sister Catalina pointed, that there be no
further mistake--“_that_ is _thou_! _This_ is the stranger.”
“Stranger?” laughed Rose; “then we know thee not!”
It was Sister Catalina’s turn to flame with anger. “It is not true!”
she cried, stamping her foot with a grotesque parody of infantile rage.
“_I_ look like _that_! I know better! I remember as if it were to-day
how I looked in the great mirror in my father’s house!”
“_I_ tell thee naught but the truth,” exclaimed Sister Teresa, now
quite beside herself. “Give _me_ the picture!” She snatched at the
print. A tussle ensued, punctuated by the sharp sound of a slap as they
fought for the apple of discord.
Sister Catalina being the youngest, and, owing to her daily labors in
the garden, the most active of the trio, obtained possession of the
photograph, but not till, with a desperate push, she had thrust Sister
Teresa so sharply forward that she fell panting against the iron gate.
The force of the impact made the rusty iron clang, and Sister Teresa
sank to the ground with a faint cry.
Not till then could Sister Eulalia master her fright and nervousness
sufficiently to enter the arena. With outstretched hands, forgetful of
her crutch, she advanced to the center of the patio. Her first words
were sufficiently arresting to bring a sudden cessation of hostilities.
“Oh, my sisters!” she cried, “oh, my sisters--the Fiend! The Fiend!”
Involuntarily three pairs of terror-stricken eyes looked about. The
sun-flooded courtyard held no unfamiliar shape; the sky was undarkened
by any dreadful wing. No fateful roar broke the morning hush. But
Sister Eulalia had sunk to her knees, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“We were warned,” she shrilled, “but we were not proof against him.
How should we know him in the guise of a holy man?” The listeners
gasped. “Look, oh, my sisters, what has happened. I--even I, whom God
had blessed with blindness that I might not see--_I_ complained aloud.
Envy and hatred were in my heart that ye saw marvels while I lay in
darkness. I am ashamed--I am ashamed!”
She rocked backward and forward, a prey to remorse.
With a cry of sudden terror, Sister Catalina flung the crumpled
photograph from her. It fluttered like a blown leaf, was caught by a
vagrant breeze and wafted toward Sister Teresa, crouching by the gate.
As if the white-hot fires of the dreaded volcano had suddenly poured
toward her in searing streams, she screamed aloud, dragged herself to
her feet with surprising alacrity, and rushed for protection to her
former assailant, throwing her arms about Sister Catalina in a paroxysm
of fear.
“Ay, cry aloud your terror, sisters,” continued Sister Eulalia. “What
was this thing of mystery the Fiend brought among ye? In the winking of
an eye it brought strife and anger. How wise were they who forbade us
looking-glasses. For ye forgot your own images till ye knew them no
more. Behold, this thing that showed ye yourselves, as in a glass that
was not glass, let in the very spirit of the devil. All the years of
our happiness together in God were as nothing before the magic of the
Evil One, whom we welcomed. Though we were warned, though we knew him
the ‘Prince of Disguise’! Pray for pardon--pray quickly, that our souls
be not lost forever!”
They knelt in prayer, signing themselves with the cross, surprised,
indeed, that their hands did not refuse their mission in punishment for
their sin. The noonday sun beat mercilessly upon the veiled heads as
they bent in petition. At last Sister Catalina interrupted the droning
cadence.
“Sister whom God hath blessed with blindness, I will lead thee to this
evil thing. Thine eyes are closed against its wiles. Take it, thou, to
the chapel, and there, with a taper lit at the altar, we will burn it,
that it may return to the Father of Lies, who sent it.”
Sister Eulalia winced with fear, but realizing her peculiar mission she
suffered herself to be led by the trembling nun till her fingers closed
on the cursed paper. Painfully, on their knees, as one mounts the holy
stairs in penance, they crawled to the chapel and prostrated themselves
at the rail. With tears of remorse, the sisters embraced. A taper, one
of the precious few in the tin box under the altar-lace, was lighted
at the flame of the tiny red lamp. The print as it flared up seemed to
show the pictured faces in twisted grimace; then it blackened, withered
to ash, and dispersed in gray filaments.
For a moment the penitents remained in silent contemplation, then with
one accord they crossed the patio to the refectory. Though the reverend
Mother hear them not, yet they must make confession.
As they entered they stopped short, spellbound. The opaque black eyes
were open wide, staring at them from the crystalline whiteness of the
Mother Superior’s face. To the culprits that gaze was as accusing as
any clarion voice of Judgment. They bowed their heads.
The reverend Mother’s lips moved.
“Vanitas vanitatum!” she cried, and again--“Vanitas vanitatum!”
The echoes took up the sound as a bell that will not be
silenced--Vanitatum.
[Illustration]
MY CONSCIENCE
BY JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY
Sometimes my Conscience says, says he,
“Don’t you know me?”
And I, says I, skeered through and through,
“Of course I do.
You air a nice chap ever’ way,
I’m here to say!
You make me cry--you make me pray,
And all them good things thataway--
That is, at _night_. Where do you stay
Durin’ the day?”
And then my Conscience says, onc’t more,
“You know me--shore?”
“Oh, yes,” says I, a-trimblin’ faint,
“You’re jes’ a saint!
Your ways is all so holy-right,
I love you better ever’ night
You come around,--’tel plum daylight,
When you air out o’ sight!”
And then my Conscience sort o’ grits
His teeth, and spits
On his two hands and grabs, of course,
Some old remorse,
And beats me with the big butt-end
O’ _that_ thing--‘tel my clostest friend
’Ud hardly know me. “Now,” says he,
“Be keerful as you’d orto be
And _allus_ think o’ me!”
[Illustration]
MILLET’S RETURN TO HIS OLD HOME
WITH LETTERS FROM HIMSELF AND HIS SON
BY TRUMAN H. BARTLETT
REPRODUCTIONS MADE FOR THE CENTURY OF PAINTINGS AND PASTELS BY MILLET
IN THE COLLECTION OF THE LATE QUINCY A. SHAW
When Jean François Millet, with his wife and nine children, went
to Cherbourg in August, 1870, soon after the breaking out of the
Franco-German War, he carried with him some of his own pictures and
several belonging to Théodore Rousseau that had been left in his care,
which were owned by a Mr. Hartmann, a friend of both artists. Once in
that city, there was no certainty that Millet could sell a picture or
get means to live upon from any one. To be sure, Barye and his family
were already there, but he had a large family to look after, and was
helping Armand Sylvestre, the writer, who lived there.
Detrimont, the picture-dealer, had advanced eight hundred francs on
a painting he had previously ordered of Millet; but when this money
should be gone Millet was sure to be in very embarrassing straits.
Sensier’s business relations with Millet had long since ceased, and he
had gone with the government to Tours. What was the poor painter to do,
and what did he think? Behind him were twenty-one years of incessant
labor and harsh experiences, a procession of great works of art sent
into the world, out of which he had got a bare living. He was tired
and health-broken, and had a large family to care for; he was worried
over the dark days of his country, while possessing hardly a dollar and
living in a city always indifferent to his genius.
But fortune had not quite forsaken poor Millet. Durand Ruel had managed
to get out of Paris and reach London with some pictures. He, too, was
in no prosperous condition, and in his anxiety he determined to give
an exhibition in that city and take his chances as to the result.
Trusting in the merits of the “Norman Peasant,” which he believed would
be recognized in London, even in war-time, he wrote to Millet asking
for some pictures and promising to send him some money--a small sum at
once, if he were in need. Ruel added as a further encouragement that
if he had any luck he would continue to order pictures and forward
money for them as fast as he could.
The London scheme worked so well that Millet was enabled to stay in
Cherbourg and its vicinity for sixteen months; and yet there was
trouble in it. Nothing ever seemed to come to him in bright colors that
was not shaded or involved in some train of unpleasant circumstance;
and what made it still more fateful was the fact that he could not
extricate himself by his own efforts. Never was a leaf more powerless
before the wind than was Millet in the worldly entanglements that
pursued him to his latest breath.
“I will begin a picture for you at once with the greatest ardor,”
he wrote to Ruel. When he had finished it, it was taken by his son
François to the wharf, where the little steamer lay that was to carry
it to Southampton, while the father went to the custom-house to get a
permit. The collector of customs, although knowing perfectly well who
the artist was, refused to accept his declaration of authorship--all
that ever was required--unless the artist would swear to it on the
Bible. This extra demand, and the arrogant manner of the collector, was
interpreted by Millet as an insult, and he left the official’s presence
in anger and despair. He could not forward this or any other picture
without the oath, and how was he to live if he did not? To his surprise
and joy, he found on going to the wharf where the picture was to leave
for Southampton that it had been taken on board the steamer. A seaman
who had charge of embarking freight had seen the name of Millet on the
box, and had asked young François about it, and whether that was the
Millet who came from Greville. Learning that it was, he said, “Oh, all
right! Never mind the permit; bring it aboard, and I will see that no
one disturbs it.”
[Illustration: From the collection of the late Quincy A. Shaw.
Half-tone plate engraved by R. C. Collins
THE SPADERS
FROM THE PASTEL BY JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET]
There seemed to be an undying enmity against Millet on the part of the
representative authorities of Cherbourg, beginning when they gave him a
niggardly allowance to pursue his first studies in Paris, accentuated
when they refused to continue it, and brutally intensified when he
returned for refuge in 1870. Nor did it cease; for not long after his
death some resident artists were discovered counterfeiting Millet’s
works and selling them to those who were supposed to have been familiar
with what he had done for more than thirty years. The punishment meted
out to these rascally imitators was only two months in prison, and even
then there were those who regarded the penalty as too severe for the
offense.
There were still more troubles to come, for Millet tried to do some
sketching out of doors, but the authorities prevented him. Writing to
Sensier in September, 1870, he says: “It is utterly impossible for me
to make a single mark of the pencil outside of the house. I should be
immediately cut down or shot. I have been arrested twice and brought
before the military authorities, and was released only after they
had inquired about me at the mayor’s office, though they advised me
strongly not even to show an indication of holding a pencil.”
The following extracts from other letters to Sensier will illustrate
the precious patriotism of these military authorities when their own
comfort was in question, as well as let a little light upon their
ardent efforts to sustain their struggling country in its darkest days
of 1870-71. He says:
“What a chance those miserable Prussians have for devastating the
country! I fear that, though touching Paris lightly at present, they
will still hold it so that they may continue their work in other
places. I fear that they will make believe to attack Paris, and under
the shadow of that pretense devastate the country of everything it has
that they need. During this time Paris will exhaust its provisions,
and, famine once there, they will do with it as they please. In
supporting the Prussians the country will eventually exhaust itself;
then will come universal famine. What do they think of all this at
Tours? There is one thing I wish to tell you: for a long time they have
sent from here to England sheep, pigs, potatoes, and every kind of
provisions, but since the war these exports have increased. A good deal
of complaint has been made, and for my part I ask myself how they can
send these things to strangers abroad--and probably by indirect ways to
the enemy--when we have so great a need for them. How can they rob a
country now given to misery, as ours is?--for a large part of France is
not only devastated but is prevented from planting crops for the coming
year.
“Naturally, you know of Gambetta’s circular for preventing the
exporting of provisions. That circular did not give details of
everything that should not be exported. The authorities here have
slyly dodged that and have permitted things to be sent away that were
not mentioned in the circular. This has almost made a revolution.
The people tried to prevent the embarking of these articles, but the
national guard surrounded the dock and the shipment was made. I think
these authorities are horrible. They let eggs, butter, and fowls be
sent away. The mayor and the prefect should be whipped. If you can only
tell Gambetta this! It appears that a great quantity of cannon is in
the arsenal here, of which no use is made. They say that the chassepôts
that came from England were left out of doors in the rain and mud. The
maritime authorities do nothing, and the people cry out against them.
It is said that there are eight thousand sailors here who wish to go
into action, but not one is permitted to leave.
“Neither will the authorities send the cannon to Lille--those that were
ordered to be sent long ago--and Lille begs for them. Eleven hundred
cannon here, and not one used or sent away to the places where they are
needed! There are also several gunboats which the officers say could
be employed on the rivers, but they, too, are idle, although certain
officers are doing their best to have something done with them. Why not
tell Gambetta all this, so that he could give rigid orders? Durand
Ruel has sent me a thousand francs. It was time! Oh, it was time! It
will be quickly spent; and so I must work to get more when I need it.”
Before Millet returned to Barbizon he went with his family to look for
the last time upon the scenes of his youth, to walk over the fields
that his forefathers had tilled for generations, to visit the church
where his dead had worshiped, and to sit beside their graves. It was a
pilgrimage that deeply touched every chord of his nature as it never
had been touched before.
He was conscious that he had lived an unusual life, that he had
contributed his share to his country’s glory, and that, too, when
rarely released from the awful chain of untoward circumstances. Yet
no word of bitter complaint ever escaped his lips, nor did he fully
confide his thoughts to any one. He knew that some tidings of him
had reached his native hamlet and had given pleasure to its humble
dwellers. “He longed,” says his son François, “to see whether he
could again feel his youth. I think he did, for he never seemed to be
present, not even when he told us children of the wondrous legends of
the priory of Greville.”
The following is a part of François’ story of their journey to Gruchy.
“When we all went to Gruchy we stopped on the way at Vauville, and
as we came to the little inn we were met by a large and fine-looking
old woman who approached us as if we were princes, and after saluting
us she said very humbly: ‘Gentlemen, we haven’t much for the table.’
‘Haven’t you soup?’ asked Father. ‘Oh, yes!’ she replied, ‘but do you
care for that?’ ‘Certainly, we like soup,’ was the answer. ‘Very well,
then, you shall have some soup.’ ‘Have you any butter?’ ‘Yes, we have
butter.’ ‘Very well, we like butter.’ ‘Then, gentlemen, you shall have
butter, and you can eat as we do.’ ‘But I am very hungry,’ said one of
my brothers. ‘Then,’ said the woman, ‘we will kill a rabbit for the
boy.’
“While we were waiting for our food we sat around a fireplace in which
was burned a kind of dry brush, thrown into it with a pitchfork. It
made a tremendous blaze, giving Father much pleasure, and he said that
that was the way they had fire when he was a boy in the old home.
[Illustration: From the collection of the late Quincy A. Shaw.
Half-tone plate engraved by C. W. Chadwick
THE SHEPHERD
FROM THE PASTEL BY JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET]
“After we had eaten we went out to make some sketches of the church and
priory. Soon after our arrival, a peasant, eighty-seven years old, who
had known my grandfather, came to the hotel to find us and to renew his
acquaintance with Father. He invited us to come to the priory and take
breakfast with his son, who lived there and had charge of the property.
We accepted the invitation, and just before it was time to go the old
man came with two carts, a large one with rude board sides for Father,
Mother, and the older children, and a small one for the younger ones
and the servant. In this way we were trundled off to the priory, where
we were very warmly welcomed by the old man’s son.
“The dining-room was very large, with an enormous fireplace, and great
iron locks were on the doors. Our breakfast consisted of little beans
and butter. While we were eating, a half-crazy uncle of our host sat
in the fireplace, watching, as he said, for a headless prior who
continually visited the convent, entering it through the chimney. ‘I
must not let him come down,’ he said, ‘so I watch him; but he must not
know that I see him.’
“The priory is very rich in legends concerning every phase of the life
that has been lived in it for many generations. This man had cared
for it since it had been used as one of the buildings of a farm; and,
in cultivating the ground, had lived so secluded a life, and dwelt so
constantly upon the history of the priory, that he had become insane,
his head turned in faithfulness to duty.
“The priory is on a hill, while the village of Vauville is below, near
the sea, and hidden from the building.
“On entering the church at Vauville we encountered the curé, who
appeared very curious and desirous to talk with strangers, as they very
seldom come there. While Father was looking at the picture over the
altar, he said, ‘It is not bad; it has good color’; whereupon the curé,
who had come up hurriedly, remarked, ‘You are looking at the picture,
I see. It seems to interest you.’ ‘Yes,’ said Father. ‘Ah, well, I can
tell you who painted it--one Mouchel, a child of Cherbourg. I don’t
know how much he is known away from us, but he had a pupil who was
helped by the city of Cherbourg and has now become known as a man of
great talent.’
“The curé was very polite, and he conducted us to the door without
dreaming that he had seen the pupil of Mouchel, though Father was that
person.
“One day when we were in the café of the inn, a little old man with
large blue eyes came to the door and looked at Father, and said in
the patois of the locality, which consists more of movements of
the head, peculiar accents of words, and of pauses, than of a full
language, ‘Ah! do you know? Yes.’ Then Father’s chin moved upward in
deep emotion. ‘Ah! I knew _you_ when you were a little toad. We are
old now. Ah, changes have come! You know it.’ ‘Come in,’ said Father,
still more affected, pointing to a chair and table. Then turning to
me, with his head close to my ear, he whispered, ‘It is Peter, our old
servant. He took care of my father when he died, as well as all the
rest of the family.’ After Father had become somewhat composed, he said
to the innkeeper, ‘Give Peter all he wants.’ ‘Oh, I want nothing now,
but to see you. To go back into the years. Ah, we are old now!’ This
was too much for Father, and, rising to go out, he said quietly to the
innkeeper, ‘He is now a drunkard, but give him everything.’
“One night at the little inn, the wind blew a real tempest; it was
fearfully dark and the roar of the sea was something terrific, so the
proprietor said to his servant, who was putting thorns on the fire to
make a great blaze, as if to calm the elements outside, ‘How would you
like to go on such a night as this to the priory?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’
he replied, ‘there are things you cannot reason about, and happenings
you had better keep away from. Perhaps it would be better to stay at
home on a night like this. The old boy up there is not a good sleeper.
He is out and around nights like this, watching his stacks of grain,
for he, as you know, though very learned, is in league with the devil
in some way. At any rate, the devil has something to do with him. He
always looks at me suspiciously, as if I had stolen his wheat, though
he knows well enough that it was the devil that did it. For, even in
the daytime, when he counts his sheaves, there are always some lacking,
and in the night still more are missing. He can’t even drink his own
cider without the devil hiding his pitcher and playing all sorts of
tricks with him. No, it’s better to stay indoors when things outside
are so uncertain.’
[Illustration: From the collection of the late Quincy A. Shaw.
Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson
THE LESSON IN KNITTING
FROM THE PAINTING BY JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET]
“The proprietor of the inn had been a cook in Paris, but had returned
to his native hamlet to live the rest of his days. He soon began to
talk, perhaps to please us, as we said nothing. ‘They are strange men,
those of this country,’ he began; ‘I myself have been in Paris, and I
have seen many things; but I could not stay away from here, and so I
came back. You see, sir, we people of these parts cannot live away.
I don’t know why, but there is no place like our own land. So I came
back from Paris to spend the time still left to me. But there was one
who did not come back. Nor is this country without its interest. Many
years ago a young fellow named Millet lived near here, and he had the
strange fancy to be a painter, making pictures on cloth, sir, and,
almost incredible as it may seem, he went to Paris. Going to Paris
nowadays is nothing, but then it was a very serious matter. They do say
that though he had much trouble he had courage also, and has succeeded,
so that he is on the road to celebrity and has become a great honor
to his country. A man of much talent, of whom we are all very proud.’
Father said nothing, but I saw he was smiling broadly. When we left
the inn for good, the proprietor looked at Father very carefully, as
if he suspected that he had not entertained an ordinary traveler; and
finally, his suspicions evidently growing, he said, ‘I remember the
physiognomy of the Millets, who were well known along this coast as
fine-looking men.’ We could see that he was ready to ask whether Father
was not the young fellow who went to Paris. His curiosity was gratified
later.
[Illustration: From the collection of the late Quincy A. Shaw.
Half-tone plate engraved by G. M. Lewis
PEASANT WOMAN AND CHURN
FROM THE DRAWING BY JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET]
“When we visited the graveyard at Greville, where our ancestors were
buried, and found their graves, which had no headstones and the wooden
crosses of which had long ago gone to dust, we saw that they were
covered thickly with weeds nearly as high as our heads. I said nothing,
but pointed to them as if asking which member of the family each grave
contained; and Father, also pointing, simply said, ‘Father, Mother,
Grandmother,’ and so on through the family category. Waiting awhile,
much affected, he repeated, as only he could, the words, ‘Oh, the high
weeds where sleep the dead!’
“In a few days we went there again and found a man cutting the weeds.
Father asked him why he was doing so. ‘To sell them,’ he replied.
‘Sell!’ exclaimed Father. ‘Do you say that you are selling the weeds
from the graves?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Does the curé know of it?’ ‘Know of it? Of
course he does. He consents to it and thinks it a good thing to do.’
Then, as if speaking to himself, Father said, ‘Ah! the heart has left
this place. You are men no more. And the curé--!’
“It was in November, 1870, that Father made the sketch of the superb
marine, which he painted in the spring of the next year and sent to
Ruel.[1] He made also a great number of sketches and drawings of places
near Greville and Vauville, as well as of the priory. Father loved
every inch of the earth of his native hamlet. It is a wonderful land.
“We lived in M. Feuardent’s house in Cherbourg, Father doing his work
in an ordinary room with no special light facilities. He desired very
much to make some pictures of the country and sea around Cherbourg,
but the authorities told him that he must not even carry a pencil or
a note-book. It was in Cherbourg that he made the drawings of ‘The
Milk-maid,’ from sketches taken in Greville.”
[1] Owned by the estate of the late Quincy A. Shaw, of Boston,
Massachusetts.
[Illustration]
HOUSE-WITHOUT-ROOF
BY EDITH M. THOMAS
House-without-roof my house I called,
Whether in palaces I dwelt
Or lowly cot, clay-paved and walled;
And, if at wayside cross I knelt,
Or if at shrine, for me the place
Dissolved into hypæthral space.
Beside the fire on mine own hearth,
While household hours slipped softly by,
With those most dearly loved on earth,
Still would the ceiling fade on high;
And, as the sparks my fire up-sent,
My soul escaped above, unpent.
The lightnings oftentimes she drew,
And crossed the wingèd migrants’ flight;
She sought her roof in midday blue,
Where tender cloud-weft fails from sight--
In evening-red’s ethereal bars--
Or vault of night with brede of stars.
She sought--but higher yet must rise
The courses of her mansionry;
Beyond these skies to Other Skies,
Its walls cut through so sheer, so free;
Beyond the brede of stars, aloof,
I look--but nowhere find a Roof!
THE MAN WHO DID NOT GO TO HEAVEN ON TUESDAY
BY ELLIS PARKER BUTLER
Author of “Pigs is Pigs,” “Long Sam ‘Takes Out,’” etc.
Uncle Noah Prutt, sitting in the front row of seats, leaned forward and
put his hand behind his ear, vainly seeking to hear what his wife was
saying to Judge Murphy. From time to time he stood up, trying to hear
the better, but each time the lanky policeman pushed him back into his
seat.
“Judge, yer Honor,” said the policeman, after the fifth time, “this man
here has nawthin’ t’ do with th’ case, an’ he’s disthurbin’ th’ coort.
Shall I thrun him out?”
“Let him be, Flaherty, let him be!” said the justice, carelessly, and
at the words Uncle Noah arose and came forward to the black walnut bar
that separated the raised platform of the justice from the rest of the
room.
“Ah pleads not guilty, Judge!” said Uncle Noah, laying one trembling
hand on the rail and pushing forward his ear with the other. He was
a coal black Negro, with close-kinked white hair that looked like a
white wig. His nose was large and flattened against his face, and his
eyeballs were streaked with brown veins that gave him a dissipated
look. He was the type of Negro that, at fifty, claims eighty years of
age, and, so judged, Uncle Noah Prutt might have been anywhere between
sixty and one hundred and ten. As he stood at the bar his black face
bore a look of the most deeply pained resentment, and his thick lower
lip protruded loosely as a sign of woe.
“Sit down!” shouted both the justice of the peace and the policeman,
and, with his lip hanging still lower, Uncle Noah backed into his seat.
He sat as far forward as he could, and leaned his head still farther
forward.
“Who is that man?” asked the justice of no one in particular.
“Him? He’s mah husban’,” said the young colored woman, with a slight
up-tilt of her nose. “Yo’ don’ need to pay no ’tention to him at all,
Jedge. Ah ain’ ask him to come yere. He ain’ yere in no capacity but
audjeence, he ain’.”
“He has no connection with this case?” asked the justice.
“No, sah!” said the young woman, decidedly.
“If he makes any more trouble, Flaherty,” said the justice, “put him
out of the court. Now, what is this trouble, Sally?”
The young woman standing against the bar was fit to be classed as
a beauty. Well-formed, with a rich yellow skin through which the
blood glowed in her cheeks, with masses of black hair and her head
carried high, she was superb, even in her cheap print wrapper. Even
the fact that her feet were hideous in a pair of broken and run-down
shoes of the sort worn by men did not impair her general appearance
of an injured brown Venus seeking justice, and when she glanced at
the prisoner her bosom heaved with anger and her brown eyes glowed
dangerously.
The prisoner sat humped down in a chair in an attitude of the most
profound dejection. He was of a darker brown than the woman, and so
loose of joint that when he moved he flopped. His feet were so large
as to be almost grotesque, and he was so thin that the bones of his
shoulders were outlined by his light coat. But as he sat in the
prisoner’s seat his face was the most noticeable feature. It was thin
and long for a Negro, but with such high and prominent cheek-bones that
his eyes seemed hidden in deep caves, and the eyes were like those of a
dog that knows he is to be beaten. His wide mouth hung far down at the
corners. He was a picture of the utterly crushed, the utterly helpless,
the utterly hopeless. He was the shiftless Negro, with the last ray of
hope extinguished. He had but one thing to look forward to, and that
was the worst. As the justice asked Sally the question the prisoner’s
mouth sagged a bit farther at the ends, and his eyes took a still
sadder dullness.
“Yo’ ain’ miss it none when yo’ asks whut am dis trouble, Jedge,” said
Sally, angrily. “Dis yere ain’ nuttin’ but trouble, an’ I gwine ask yo’
to send dis yere Silas to jail forebber an’ ebber. Yassah! An’ den he
ain’ gwine be in jail long enough to suit me. An’ Ah gwine ask yo’ to
declare damages ag’inst him, fo’ huhtin’ mah feelin’s, an’ fo’ tryin’
to drown me, an’ fo’ abductin’ me away from dat poor ol’ no-’count
Noah whut am mah husban’, an’ fo’ alieamatin’ mah affections, on’y he
couldn’t. When Ah whack him awn de head wid dat bed-slat--”
“Now, one minute,” said the justice, raising his hand. “Flaherty, what
do you know about this case?”
“Well, yer Honor,” said the policeman, in the confidential tone an
officer of the law assumes when he feels that he, and he only, can
explain matters, “th’ way ut was was this way: I was walkin’ me beat up
there awn Twilf’ Strate this mawrnin’, like I always does, whin I heard
a yellin’ an’ a shoutin’. So I run into th’ lot--”
“What lot?” asked Justice Murphy.
“’Twas betwane Olive an’ Beech Strates, yer Honor. This here deff man,
Noah Prutt, lives in a shack-like there, facin’ awn th’ strate. Th’
vacant lot is full iv thim hazel-brushes an’ what all I dunno.”
“You said there was a shanty on the lot. How could it be a vacant lot
if there was a shanty on it?” asked the justice.
“Now, yer Honor,” said Flaherty, with an ingratiating smile, “there’s
moore than wan lot in th’ wurrld, ain’t there? Th’ lot this Noah Prutt
lives awn is wan iv thim. And th’ nixt wan is another iv thim. An’ th’
nixt wan t’ that is th’ third iv thim, an’ th’ ould Darky owns all iv
thim, and iv th’ three iv thim but wan is vacant, and that’s th’ middle
wan. There’s a shanty awn th’ furrst wan, and there’s a shanty awn
th’ thurrd wan, an’ as I was sayin’, there’s nawthin’ awn th’ vacant
wan excipt brush-like, an’ mebby a few trees, an’ some tin cans, an’
whatnot.”
“Very good!” said his honor. “Go ahead.”
“Well, sor,” said Flaherty, “this Prutt an’ this wife iv his lives
in th’ furrst shanty, but th’ other wan is vacant excipt whin ’t is
occupied. Th’ ould man rints ut now an’ again, an’ a dang lonely
habitation ut is, set ’way back fr’m th’ strate, like ut is. So here I
was, comin’ along, whin I hear th’ racket in th’ vacant lot, an’ whin I
got there amidst th’ hazel-brush here was this Sally a-hammerin’ this
Silas over th’ head wid a bed-slat, an’ him yellin’ bloody-murdther. So
I tuck thim up, th’ bot’ iv thim, yer Honor.”
“And that’s all you know of the case?” asked the judge.
“Excipt what she tould me,” said Flaherty.
“And what was that?” asked Judge Murphy.
“Ut was what previnted me from arristin’ her for assault an’ batthery,”
said Flaherty, “for if iver a man was assaulted an’ batthered, this
same Silas was. She can wield a bed-slat like a warryor.”
“Ah’d ’a’ killed him! Ah’d ’a’ killed him shore!” said Sally.
“She w’u’d!” said Flaherty, briefly. “Thim Naygurs have th’ harrd
heads, but wan more whack an’ he’d iv had a crack in th’ cranyum. So
I wrested th’ bed-slat from her. Th’ place looked like there’d been a
war, yer Honor. Plinty iv thim hazel-brushes she’d mowed down wid th’
bed-slat thryin’ t’ murdther him. An’ whin I heard th’ sthory, I did
not blame her.”
“I have been waiting patiently to hear it myself,” said the justice.
“Accordin’ t’ th’ lady,” said Flaherty, “she’s a respictable married
woman, yer Honor, bound in th’ clamps iv wedlock to this Noah Prutt,
an’ niver stheppin’ t’ wan side iv th’ path iv wifely duty or to th’
other. ’Tis nawthin’ t’ us why a foine-lookin’ gurrl like her sh’u’d
marry an’ ould felly like him. Maybe him havin’ two houses atthracted
her. I dunno. But, annyway, she’s had t’ wash th’ wolf from th’ doore.”
“Had to do what?” asked the justice.
“Go out doin’ week’s wash t’ kape food in th’ house,” explained
Flaherty. “For th’ ould man will not wurrk much. He’s got that used t’
livin’ awn th’ rint iv th’ exthra shanty, ye see. An’ there’s been no
rint comin’ in this long whiles, for th’ prisoner at th’ bar has been
th’ tinint iv th’ shanty, an’ he ped no rint at all.”
“Why not?” asked the justice.
“Well, sor,” said Flaherty, rubbing the hair at the back of his neck
and grinning, “th’ lady here says he’s been that busy coortin’ her
he’s had no time t’ wurrk. ’Twas nawthin’ fr’m wan ind iv th’ week till
th’ other but, ‘Will ye elope wid me, darlint?’ an’, ‘Come now, l’ave
th’ ould man an’ be me own turtle-dove!’”
“Ah tol’ him Ah gwine murder him ef he gwine keep up dat-a-way of
proceedin’!” cried Sally, shrilly. “Ah tol’ him! Ah say, ‘Go on away,
you wuthless deadbeat Nigger! Wha’ don’ you pay yo’ rent like a man,
befo’ yo’ come talkin’ ’bout supportin’ a lady?’ Dass whut Ah tol’
him, Jedge. An’ whut he say? He say, ‘Sally gal! Ah gwine nab yo’ an’
hab yo’. Ah gwine steal yo’ an’ lock yo’ up, an’ nail yo’ up, an’ keep
yo’!’ Dass whut he say. An’ he done hit!”
“Stole you, and locked you up?” asked the judge.
“Yassah!” cried Sally, glaring at the trembling Silas. “He lock me up,
an’ he nail me up, an’ he try to drown me, ef Ah ain’ say whut he want
me to say. Dat low-down, hypocritical Nigger! Yassah! Ah tole him,
‘Silas, ef yo’ don’ go way an’ leave me alone Ah gwine tek mah hands
an’ Ah gwine yank all de wool right offen yo’ haid!’ Dass whut Ah say,
Jedge. An’ Ah say, ‘Ef yo’ don’ shet up Ah gwine tear yo’ eyes out!’
An’ Ah means it. Talkin’ up to me like dat! An’ den whut he do?”
She held out her hand toward the dejected Silas and shook her finger at
him.
“Den whut he do? He see Ah ain’ to be coax’ dat-a-way, ’cause he a
no-’count Nigger, an’ he let on he purtind he get religion an’ wuk on
mah feelin’s. Yassah! ’Cause he know Ah’s religious mahsilf an’ he
cogitate how he come lak a snake in de grass an’ cotch me whin Ah ain’
thinkin’ no meanness of him. So long come dish yere prophet-man, whut
call hisself Obediah, whut get all de Niggers wuk up an’ a-shoutin’
over yonder on de ol’ camp groun’s. Ah am’ tek no stock in dat Obediah
prophet-man, Jedge, ’cause Ah a good Baptis’, lak mah husban’ yonder;
but plinty of de black folks dey run to him, an’ dey hear him perorate
an’ carry on, an’ dey get sot in dere minds dat dey gwine to hebben
las’ Tuesday night whin de sun set. Yassah, dass whut dey think, ’cause
de prophet-man he pretch dat-a-way. An’ dis yere Silas he let on he
gwine to hebben along wid de rest of de folks.”
She let her lip curl scornfully.
“Him a-gwine to hebben!” she scoffed. “But Ah ain’ but half believe he
got religion lak he say. Ah say, ‘Luk out, Sally! Ef he gwine to hebben
nex’ Tuesday let him go; an’ if he ain’ gwine, let him alone.’ But yo’
look at him, Jedge! Jes look at him! He ain’ look so dangeroos, is he?
An’ whin he come to me an’ say, ‘Sally, Ah done got quit of de ol’ Nick
whut was in me, an’ Ah gwine be lak dat no mo’,’ Ah jes got to believe
him. Yassah! He dat pernicious meek an’ lowly an’ sorrumful-like dat Ah
ain’ suspict no divilment at all. ‘Ah feel troubled in mah conscience,’
he say, ‘’cause Ah been tryin’ to lead yo’ on de wrong paff, an’ Ah
can’t go to hebben nex’ Tuesday les’ yo’ forgib me,’ he say, an’ he
look so downheart’ an’ seem lak he so set on gwine to hebben wid de
rest ob de folks, dat Ah say, ‘All right, Silas, Ah don’ hold no hard
feelin’s. Ef yo’ don’ bodder me no more, Ah forgib yo’ whut is pas’ an’
done for, but ef yo’ gwine to hebben yo’ better clean up yo’ house an’
put hit in order, lak de Book say, before yo’ start, ’cause ef yo’ don’
yo’ gwine get sint back, shore!’ So he let on lak dat how he think,
too. He purtind to thank me kinely fo’ dat recommindation, an’ he ask’
c’u’d Ah lind him a scrub pail an’ a mop an’ a broom, twell he clean up
he house. An’ I so done.
“Dass all right! He scrub, an’ he wash, an’ he clean, an’ he move all
he furniture out in de lot, an’ he clean, an’ he wash, an’ he scrub!
He ain’ wuk lak dat fo’ months, Jedge. So den Ah think shore he got
religion, lak he let on. So, come Monday, Ah got a job down to Mis’
Gilbert’s scrubbin’ her house, an’ Ah jes got to hab dat pail an’ dat
mop an’ dat broom. So Ah tell Noah whut job Ah got, an’ Ah say, ‘Noah,
Ah gwine down to Mis’ Gilbert’s house, fo’ to help clean house, an’ ef
she want me, Ah gwine stay right dah twell de house all clean’ up.’
Cause dat a long perambulation down to Mis’ Gilbert’s house, Jedge, an’
ef she ask me to stay a couple o’ days, Ah gwine save mah breakfas’
an’ mah suppah whilst Ah stay down yonder. So Ah go outen de house an’
Ah walk down de street twell Ah come to de gate whut lead up to Silas’
house, an’ Ah walk up de paff, an’ Ah knock on de do’. Nobody say
nuffin’! Ah knock ag’in. Nobody say nuffin’! Ah open de do’ gintly, an’
Ah peek in. Ain’ nobody in de shack at all. So Ah steps in, fo’ to get
mah pail an’ mah mop an’ mah broom.
“Dab dey set, right by de do’, an’ excipt fo’ dem, dey ain’ nuffin’
in de shack at all but de straw outen Silas he’s bed, an’ dat all
scatter aroun’ lak to dry an’ air out. Excipt dey one bed-slat whut
Ah calculate Silas he keep handy fo’ to whack at de rats, which am
mighty pestiferous about dat shack. So whin Ah seen he done clean
up yeverything as neat as a pin, my heart soften unto him. Ah jes
gwine feel sorry fo’ him, de leas’ little bit. So Ah gwine look in de
cupboard to see ef he got plenty to eat--an’ he ain’ got nuffin’ in
de cupboard but a box of matches, an’ dat all! So Ah feel right smart
sorry I been scold him lak I do, an’ Ah gwine pick up mah pail an’ mah
mop an’ mah broom whin--bang!--de do’ go shut an’ Ah all in de dark.”
“Some one shut the door?” asked the justice.
“_He_ shet de do’!” shouted Sally, shrilly, pointing her finger at the
trembling Silas. “He shet de do’, an’ he lock de do’, an’ he start to
nail de do’, lak he say he would! Yassah! Ah bang mahsilf ag’inst de
do’ an’ Ah yell an’ shout, an’ de do’ don’t budge, ’cause hit locked.
An’ all de while--bam! bam! bam!--he nailin’ de do’ from de outside. Ah
poun’ wif mah fists an’ Ah peck up mah pail an’ slam at de do’ twell de
pail all bus’ to pieces, an’ Ah bang mah mop to pieces, but--bam! bam!
bam!--he go on nailin’.”
She paused for breath, and Silas opened his mouth, as if to speak, but
closed it again.
“Yassah!” she shrilled, glaring at Silas, “he nail up de do’ so Ah
can’t budge hit, an’ whin Ah try de windows, dey nailed up too.”
“There’s two iv thim doors,” explained Flaherty, “an’ both iv thim open
outward. He’d nailed sthrips acrost thim. Th’ two windys has wooden
shutters, and he’d nailed thim fast.”
“What!” exclaimed Justice Murphy. “He nailed the woman in?”
“He did, sor!”
“But--but this is outrageous!” exclaimed the justice.
All three glared at the dejected Silas, and did not see Noah Prutt as
he arose from his chair.
“Make him pay, Jedge! Make him pay!” cried Noah, eagerly.
“Sit ye down!” cried Flaherty, in a voice of thunder, and Noah
subsided. On the edge of his chair he nodded like a toy mandarin. He
understood that things were going badly for Silas, and that was enough
to please him. Sally turned to him and shouted in his ear.
“Shet up an’ stay shet!” she cried. “This is none of yo’ business,
Noah. Ah gwine manage this mahsilf!”
The old man smiled and nodded his willingness. As she turned away he
touched her on the arm.
“Thutty dollahs,” he said, and nodded and smiled again.
“Thutty nuffin’s!” she muttered. “Ah guess yo’ Honor will know whut Ah
ought to get from dat Silas, an’ whut he ought to get from yo’. ’Cause
Ah suffer a heap o’ distress of min’ an’ body whilst Ah been shet up in
dat shanty dem three days.”
“Three days!” exclaimed the justice.
“Yassah! Ah been nail up in dat shanty three days an’ three nights,”
said Sally, “an’ all dat time Ah been pestered an’ annoyed. Ah been
sploshed on mah feet an’ Ah been hungry an’ col’, an’ Ah been insulted.
Dat Silas he jus’ hong roun’ dat shanty to make me mizzable, but Ah
ain’ give in one bit. No, sah! Ah’d a-died fus’. Fus’ off Ah bang on de
do’ an’ Ah bang on de windows, an’ Ah keep wahm, an’ whin Ah get col’
Ah pile some straw in de fireplace an’ Ah get dem matches an’ Ah mek me
a straw fire. An’ prisintly Ah hear Silas scramble-scramble on de roof.
‘Whut he up to now?’ Ah say; ‘He gwine try climb down de chimbly? Ef
he do Ah whack him wid de bed-slat twell he mighty sorry he try dat.’
But he ain’ try hit. No, sah! Splosh! come a pail of wahtah down de
chimbly, an’ out go mah fire, an’ mah feet suttinly get sopped. An’
Silas he say, down de chimbly, lak he voice all clog up wif laughin’,
‘Ain’ gone to hebben yit! Ain’ gone to hebben yit!’ an’ splosh! yere
come anudder pail of wahtah.”
“Why, this is no case for me,” said the justice. “This man should be
bound over to the Grand Jury!”
“Ah don’ care whut yo’ bind him to, so as yo’ bind him good an’
strong,” said Sally, vindictively. “Yevery time Ah try to get wahm by
makin’ a fire, down come dat pail of wahtah an’ splosh mah feet, twell
Ah think he try to drown me. ‘Ain’ gone to hebben yit!’ he shout’.
Hit right col’ in dat shanty, Jedge. Hit pernicious col’. Dat wahtah
freeze on de flo’, an’ hit freeze on mah shoes, an’ Ah get hungrier an’
hungrier, an’ Ah shout an’ Ah rage, an’ all he say is, ‘Ain’ gone to
hebben yit! Ain’ gone to hebben yit!’ Ah bet he ain’! Whin de time come
he gwine somewheres ilse!”
“How did you get out, finally?” asked the justice.
“Ah keep maulin’ at de do’ wif dat bed-slat all de whiles,” said Sally.
“Dat a mahty fine piece of bed-slat, dat is. An’ prisintly, whin Ah
about to drap wid hunger an’ col’ an’ die where Ah drap, Ah beat a
hol’ in de do’. ‘Ain’ gone to hebben yit!’ he ’low, an’ whack at de
bed-slat wif a club, but Ah right smart mad, an’ Ah pry an’ Ah wuk, an’
prisintly Ah pry off one board. An’ when he see Ah gwine win out he
scoot. Yassah! He scoot. Ah ’low he run away ’cause he afraid, but dass
not hit. No, suh! He gwine fotch an ax, fo’ to nail up dat do’ ag’in.
So prisintly Ah wuk dat do’ open an’ Ah step out, an’ whut Ah see? Ah
see dat Silas a-standin’ yere in de paff, wid he ax in he hand an’ he
mouf wide open, lak Ah been a ghos’. ‘Ain’ gone to hebben yit, her?’ Ah
say; ‘Well, if yo’ ain’ gone yit, yo’ gwine mighty soon!’ an’ I wint
fo’ him wif de bed-slat, an’ he yell lak blazes whilst Ah gwine murder
him. An’ dat how-come de pleeceman heah him an’ save he life.”
The justice folded his hands, his fingers working nervously, as if they
longed to take hold of the throat of the dispirited prisoner.
“In all my experience,” he said, “this is the most outrageous case I
have ever met! I am only sorry I am not the proper official to try
this case. I hope this man gets the full penalty of the law. I can’t
express--”
He shook his head.
“Whatever possessed you?” he asked the shrinking Silas.
“His Honor is speakin’ t’ ye!” cried Flaherty, poking Silas with his
baton. “Spake up whin he addrisses ye! Why did ye do ut?”
“Ah--” began Silas, in a thin, scared voice.
“Sthand up whin ye addriss th’ coort!” said Flaherty, and Silas stood.
As he stood there was nothing about him that suggested the fiery lover.
His drooping shoulders and general air of long-permanent shiftlessness
almost gave the lie to the idea that he could have taken the trouble to
carry a pail of water to a roof. He looked as if to walk at a shambling
gait was about the extreme of any exertion of which he was possible.
“Ah didn’ do hit,” he said weakly, and sat down again.
“Now! now!” said Justice Murphy, sharply. “None of that!”
“Sthand up whin his Honor addrisses ye!” said Flaherty.
“Ah don’ know nuffin’ about hit, Jedge,” said Silas, in a squeaky voice
as he half lifted himself out of the chair. “Ah’ll tell yo’ all whut
Ah know. Ah wint away from mah shanty Monday, ’cause Ah got to yearn
a dollar fo’ to buy a white robe fo’ to go to hebben in Tuesday, an’
Ah chop a cord ob wood an’ yearn mah dollar an’ buy mah white robe.
An’ dat night all de prophet’s folks spind de night on de hilltop,
a-waitin’ fo’ de dawn ob de great day, an’ a-prayin’ an’ a-singin’ an’
a-fastin’. An’ Tuesday Ah spint awn de hilltop like dat, a-prayin’ an’
a-singin’ an’ a-fastin’ twell de sun sh’u’d set. An’ whin de sun set
nuffin’ happen. No, sah. Nobody go nowheres, an’ dey ain’ no prophet
no mo’, fo’ he wint away wid whut he done collicted up endurin’ de
revival. So whin dat come about Ah quite pertickler hungry, an’ Ah go
fo’th t’ yearn some money fo’ to get mah food an’ to pay whut Ah owe
Noah, ’cause he been pesterin’ me about he rint. So Ah get some wood
to chop, an’ I chop hit. An’ bime-by, whin Ah chop all dat wood, Ah
guess Ah’ll go home, an’ Ah go home. An’ whin Ah retch mah shanty, Ah
see de do’ bruk, an’ somebody a-yammerin’ on hit, an’ whilst Ah look,
out sprong dis Sally Prutt an’ whack me on de haid wid a bed-slat, an’
holler, ‘Ain’ gone to hebben yit! Ain’ gone to hebben yit!’ lak she
done gwine crazy, an’ ebbery time she whack she holler, an’ ebbery time
she holler she whack. So I gwine get away from dere quick, an’ whin Ah
run, she run, an’ she shore gwine murder me, ef dish yere pleeceman am’
come an’ stop her.”
“Just so!” said Justice Murphy, sarcastically. “And you were not near
the shanty at all? And you did not nail this woman in it? And you did
not pour water down the chimney?”
“No, sah,” said Silas, in a frightened voice.
“Oh, you brack liah!” said Sally, angrily.
“And I suppose you never said, ‘Ain’t gone to heaven yet!’ did you?”
said the judge. “You never heard those words, did you?”
Silas looked from side to side, and his lower lip trembled. His
back took a more disconsolate droop. There are no words in the
English language to describe how utterly downcast and hopeless and
woe-saturated he looked. Milton came near it when he said something
about “Below the lowest depths still lower depths--” In woe Silas was
in depths a couple of stories lower than that.
“Well?” said the justice, sharply.
“Answer his Honor whin he addrisses ye!” shouted Flaherty, and Silas
moistened his lips and gulped.
“No, sah! Ah--Ah ain’ hear them wuds perzackly, nevah befo’. Ah ain’
heah, ‘Ain’ _gone_ to hebben.’ Ah jes heah ‘Ain’ _gwine_ to hebben.’”
“Oh, you did hear that, did you?” said the justice. “Who said that?”
Silas stared at his boot. He blinked a couple of times, and then spoke.
“Ol’ Noah, he say thim wuds,” he said. The judge turned to the old
Negro on the chair in the front row, and pointed at him.
“That Noah?” he asked. “Is that the man?”
“Yassah,” said Silas, sadly. “Dass de man. He say hit.”
Old Noah, seeing that the conversation was veering his way, arose and
came forward, his hand behind his ear and expectation in his face.
“Thutty dollahs, Jedge!” he said eagerly. “Dass de right amount. Thutty
dollahs.”
“You go set down!” yelled his wife in his ear, but the old man shook
his head.
“Ain’ he gwine pay hit?” he asked resentfully. “Ain’ de jedge gwine
_mek_ him pay hit? Whaffo’ Ah nail up de shack ef he ain’ gwine pay
hit?”
“Whut yo’ palaver about? Nail up de shack! _You_ ain’ nail up no shack.
Dat no-’count Silas _he_ nail up de shack,” shouted Sally.
The old man nodded his head and grinned.
“Yas, dasso! Dasso! Ah nail up de shack, Jedge,” he chuckled. “Ah nail
him in. Yassah, Ah done jes so.”
“_Him?_” shouted the justice, “you mean _her_?”
“Yassah, Ah nail _him_ in,” said Noah.
“_You_ did?” shouted the justice.
“Ah--Ah beg pawdon, Jedge,” said the old man. “Ah cawn’t heah as--as
well as Ah used to heah. Ah cawn’t hear whisperin’ tones no moah.
Ah--Ah got to beg yo’ to speak jes a leetle mite louder.”
“WHY DID YOU NAIL HIM IN THE SHACK?” shouted Justice Murphy at the top
of his voice.
“Why, ’cause he won’ pay me de rint,” said Noah, as if it was a thing
every one should have known. “Ain’ Sally been jes tol’ yo’? Ah surmise
she done confabulate about that all de whiles she talkin’. Yo’ mus’
scuse her, Jedge. Whin de womens staht talkin’, nobuddy know _whut_ dey
talk about. Dey jes talk fo’ de exumcise. Mah secon’ wife, which am de
las’ but one befo’ Ah tuck Sally--”
“Look here!” shouted Justice Murphy. “Why did you nail him in the
shack?”
“Zack?” said the old man, doubtfully. “No, sah, he name Silas. Dass
him yondah. I arsk him fo’ de rint, an’ I _beg_ him fo’ de rint, an’ I
argyfy about dat rint twell Ah jes wohn out, an’ Ah don’ git no rint
at all. So bime-by erlong come dish yere prophet whut you heah about,
maybe. Ah ain’ tek no stock in dat prophet-man at all! No, sah! Ah ’s
a good Baptis’ an’ Ah don’ truckle to none o’ dem come-easy, go-easy,
folks like dat. Ah stay ’way from him, an’ Ah tell Sally she stay way
likewise. But dis yere Silas he get de prophet-man’s religion bad.
Yassah. He ’low he gwine to hebben las’ Tuesday whin all de res’ ob de
gang go. Ah reckon he ain’ gwine go, ’cause Ah feel dey ain’ none ob
dem gwine go, but Ah can’t be shore. Mos’ anything li’ble to happen
whin times so bad like dey is. So Ah projeck up to Silas an’ Ah say to
him, ‘Ef yo’ gwine to hebben nex’ Tuesday, yo’ bettah pay me de rint
befo’ yo’ go.’ Dass whut Ah say, Jedge. An’--an’--an’ dass reason-able.
’Cause ef he gwine to hebben Tuesday, Ah ain’ gwine hab no chance _to_
collict dat rint come Winsday. No, sah.”
“Then what?” shouted the justice.
“Nuffin’!” said Noah. “Nuffin’ _at_ all. He say, ‘Scuse me, Noah, but
Ah so full ob preparations fo’ de great evint Ah ain’ got time to yearn
no money to pay de rint.’ An’ Ah say, ‘Silas, Ah want mah rint!’ So,
bime-by, whin Monday mawrnin’ come erlong, Sally she gwine away to do
a job o’ work, an’ Ah meyander ober to Silas’ shack, an’ Ah got mah
hatchit an’ mah nails, whut Ah gwine mind de fince. An’ whin Ah come to
de shack All hear de squawk ob a board in de flo’ an’ Ah know Silas he
in de shack, an’ Ah slam de do’ an’ Ah nail up de do’ an’ he carrye on
scandalous, but he can’t git yout. An’ Ah don’ care whut he say, ’cause
Ah can’t heah ef he cuss or ef he palaver.
“’Cause Ah ain’ gwine hab no tinint go to hebben like dat whin he owe
me rint _twell_ he pay de rint. So Ah reckon Ah leave him dere twell
de gwine is all gone, an’ Ah ain’ worried erbout Silas gwine alone by
hisse’f. He ain’ got de get-up to do nuffin’ alone by hisse’f. So Ah
leab him dah twell he natchully bus’ out.”
“You tried to starve him,” shouted the justice. “You threw water down
the chimney.”
“Dass jes a _pre_-caution, Jedge, dass jes a _pre_-caution,” said the
old Negro. “Ah got mah doubts erbout dat ol’ Obediah prophet-man whut
come from nowhares. Whin Ah see de smoke a-risin’ from de chimbly, Ah
speculate ef et hebben whar de prophet-man gwine tek they-all, or ef he
gwine tek dem ilsewhars, an’ Ah cogitate how maybe Silas gwine _es_cape
in de flame ob de fiah. Dey yain’t nuffin’ like good ol’ Baptis’ water
fo’ to fight debbil’s fiah, so Ah fotch a couple o’ pail’ ob wahtah,
an’ Ah po’ hit down de chimbly, an’ Ah say, ‘Yo’ ain’ gwine to hebben
yit! Yo’ ain’ gwine to hebben yit!’ Yassah. An’ he ain’!”
He chuckled with glee, but at the same moment he caught a glimpse of
Sally’s face, and his grin gave way to a look of blank surprise. Slowly
and carefully Sally was rolling up her sleeves, and her eyes glittered
menacingly. Flaherty tapped her on the shoulder.
“None iv that here!” he said sternly.
The justice looked from one to the other of the parties before him,
closed an impressive-looking law book with a bang, and stood up,
feeling for his tobacco-pipe in his hip pocket.
“Flaherty,” he said slowly, “this is not a case for this court. It
seems in the nature of a domestic misunderstanding. Under ordinary
circumstances,” he added, pressing tobacco into the pipe with his
thumb, “I should undertake to explain to all parties just what happened
and how it happened and why it happened but--” he looked at old Noah
and shook his head--“there is nothing in the statutes of the State of
Iowa compelling a justice of the peace of the County of Riverbank, City
of Riverbank and Township of Riverbank, to shout that loud and that
long. Case dismissed!”
Flaherty herded the three parties out of the room and the justice
lighted his pipe.
“Whaffo’ Ah ain’ git mah thutty dollahs?” he heard Uncle Noah ask in
the hall. “Wha’ we gwine?”
“Ah tell yo’ wha’ yo’ ain’ gwine!” he heard Sally shout. “You ain’
gwine to hebben yit! But yo’ gwine to wish yo’ was gwine ’fo’ Ah git
froo wif yo’!”
“Flaherty,” said his Honor, tilting back comfortably and blowing a
cloud of blue smoke toward the ceiling, “go out and warn that woman to
keep the peace.”
“I will,” said Flaherty, “but can ye ixpict ut iv her, Murphy?”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
SIERRA MADRE
BY HENRY VAN DYKE
O mother mountains! billowing far to the snow-lands,
Robed in aërial amethyst, silver, and blue,
Why do ye look so proudly down on the lowlands?
What have their gardens and groves to do with you?
Theirs is the languorous charm of the orange and myrtle,
Theirs are the fruitage and fragrance of Eden of old,--
Broad-boughed oaks in the meadows fair and fertile,
Dark-leaved orchards gleaming with globes of gold.
You, in your solitude standing, lofty and lonely,
Bear neither garden nor grove on your barren breasts;
Rough is the rock-loving growth of your cañons, and only
Storm-battered pines and fir-trees cling to your crests.
Why are ye throned so high and arrayed in splendor
Richer than all the fields at your feet can claim?
What is your right, ye rugged peaks, to the tender
Queenly promise and pride of the mother-name?
Answered the mountains, dim in the distance dreaming:
“Ours are the forests that treasure the riches of rain;
Ours are the secret springs and the rivulets streaming
Softly down through the manifold bloom of the plain.
“Vain were the toiling of men in the dust of the dry land,
Vain were the plowing and planting in waterless fields,
Save for the life-giving currents we send from the sky-land,
Save for the fruit our embrace with the storm-cloud yields.”
O mother mountains, Madre Sierra, I love you!
Rightly you reign o’er the vale that your bounty fills,--
Kissed by the sun, or with big, bright stars above you,--
I murmur your holy name and lift up mine eyes to the hills.
THE BORROWED LOVER
BY L. FRANK TOOKER
Author of “Kerrigan’s Christmas Sermon,” “Under Rocking Skies,” etc.
“’Tis this way with women,” declared Kerrigan: “some of thim will
desave ye, and some will not, but ye will niver know which till ut ’s
done; for they’re all alike in the use of their eyes and tongues, and
the proof of the puddin’ ’s in the ’atun’. Mind thot, laad.”
It was Sunday morning, and Kerrigan was leaning over the rail, looking
dreamily off across the waste of piled lumber to the spires and roofs
of the city. The sun shone brightly; the yellow flood of the river
lipped softly the barnacled piles of the wharf; the hush of the Sabbath
lay over all. Nicolao had just gone over the side of the vessel for an
all-day outing; but he turned at Kerrigan’s warning. He waved his hand
airily.
“Tha’ ’s alla right,” he replied. “Eet ees the gamble, yas--what yo’
expec’. So-long! Adios!”
“Staay where ye arre,” commanded Kerrigan, sternly. “I’m goun’ wid ye.
’Tis a guardeen ye waant, ye light-mind child of misfortune. Wait till
I change me clothes.”
Twenty minutes later they crossed the wharf and passed cityward,
something of Kerrigan’s grandfatherly air of protection dropping away
at every step.
“’Tis good to be young,” he said; “I mind I was young wance mesilf.
Where are ye goun’, laad?”
“I hava the friend,” Nicolao replied; “his name is
Porfirio--Portuguese, weeth the nice shop, nice fam’ly, nice daughter,
yo’ know.”
“I do,” said Kerrigan, significantly; “ye’d niver go ilse. I’ll attind
ye for yer own safety. ’Tis on me mind.”
At the crossing they boarded a trolley, for the sun was hot and Nicolao
in haste; and going well forward, they seated themselves in the car. As
Kerrigan glanced down to return the change of his fare to his pocket,
he saw two hands meekly folded in the lap of the woman who sat at his
left. The hands held a breviary and a handkerchief. He glanced up at
the face of the holder--the fresh Irish face of a young woman.
He sighed and looked away; he knew not why, but for an instant it gave
him a desolate feeling of homesickness. Then Nicolao began to talk, and
Kerrigan forgot the girl.
But presently she left the car, and as she rose to her feet, he saw
a handkerchief flutter to the floor. He leaned forward quickly, and,
picking it up, hurried after his neighbor; but others had risen between
them, and she had reached the street and was stepping up to the curb
when he touched her arm.
“Ye dropped it, _acushla_,” he said, and turning quickly, she glanced
at his outstretched hand.
“Then ’twas a miracle,” she said, “and belongs to the church, not to
me.” She held up her own hand, in which safely reposed the breviary and
the handkerchief. Kerrigan stared.
“Wid me two eyes I saw it drop as ye got up,” he declared.
“I had but one,” replied the girl. “Are your two eyes strong enough to
see that I’ve got it still? And you’ve lost your car.”
“I’ve lost more--me good name,” Kerrigan said. “I’ve stolen the
handkerchief.”
“Then you’d better pray for repentance,” she advised. “I’ll give you a
hint: the church is before you. Good-by, and thank you--for nothing.”
Laughing, she hurried away up the steps of the church.
Kerrigan hesitatingly watched her go, then walked to a side porch and
sat down.
“I’ll tak’ the hint to this extint,” he muttered, and patiently waited
through the hour of service; but as the audience streamed forth at the
close he returned to the main door and stood watching.
But suddenly he felt a touch on his arm and heard a voice say:
“I’ll be going home now.”
Startled, he looked down into the face of the girl. It was very demure,
though flushed.
“Ah, ’tis ye thot’s repinted--of yer haard heart,” he said. “Ye’ve come
back to tell me so.”
“I’ve repented of naught but my sins,” she replied, “and a hard heart
is not one of them. But I’d borrow you for a little, if you have
nothing better to do.”
“I’ll have nothing better to do all through purgatory, which will be
hiven to me if ye’re wid me,” he replied. “And there’s another miracle.”
She laughed.
“I’d not care to keep you so long.”
“Thin I’ll get me hell first, which is wrong,” he answered sadly. “I
tho’t ye were orthodox.”
“I’m--” She pressed his arm in warning as a man passed them rapidly,
turning to look back into their faces. He was weazen, middle-aged, with
a wry face.
“That’s the reason for borrowing you,” she explained in a low voice.
“Thot’s not a reason; ut’s an apology,” Kerrigan said tartly. “Ut’s a
monkey, not a mon.”
“He’s always hanging about,” she replied. “My father and mother favor
him; he’s got money.”
“Ut’s a curse,” Kerrigan declared solemnly.
“So the rich tell me,” said the girl with a laugh.
“I’m rich mesilf while I have ye,” he said.
“You’re only borrowed,” she warned him. “Are you a masterful man?”
“I’m meek as Moses,” he assured her. “A child could lade me.”
“Oh, then you won’t do at all!” she cried. “I thought you were
masterful by your looks. My father and mother are meek, but set in
their ways, and I’m tired of it. Now, a man who’d knock me about and
_them_--”
“Ye waant me to knock thim about--yer father and mither?”
“I want them to think you would,” she corrected him. “’T would be good
for them. But of course you’d not do it; you’d only be soft-spoken and
blarneying.”
“I’m as gintle as a cow by nature,” he assured her; “but I’d sell me
birthright to plaze ye. Now tak’ me home wid ye and prove ut.”
“’T is worth trying,” she replied. “You’ll stay to dinner? I’ve taken
to you, you know.”
“I accipt both the dinner and the compliment,” he answered, “and thank
ye kindly for both.”
In the porch of their small house near the wall of the cemetery of the
city her father and mother sat waiting as they entered the gate.
“My friend, Mr.----” The girl hesitated.
“Kerrigan--Thomas Kerrigan,” that gentleman said promptly.
“My father and mother,” continued the girl. “Reilly’s their name. The
gentleman was very kind. He lost his car to return my handkerchief.”
Her father, a weather-beaten little man, looked Kerrigan over coolly as
he nodded.
“Faith!” he said at last, “I’m thinkin’ he’s likely to lose his supper
before he returns it; he’s got it in his hand yet.”
The girl laughed.
“It was not mine, you know,” she explained.
“I don’t see the joke,” her father said irritably. “What’s all the
stir, Kate?”
“Ye’ll see ut in time,” Kerrigan replied with composure. “’T is like
this: she liked me betther nor the bit of white rag, so she took me
instid.”
“She was always greedy,” replied Reilly; “she’d take the biggest lump
iv’ry time, not countin’ the quality.” He turned to his wife. “Do ye
mind thot, Mary?”
“I don’t understand a’ the nonsince,” replied his wife, a meek little
wisp of a woman. She rose and went into the house, followed by Kate.
Kerrigan was looking complacently about him, and now said:
“Ye have the cimetery handy, Reilly.”
“I need to,” the old man replied. “I worrk in it.”
“’T is the fine job,” declared Kerrigan. “Ye can feel all the time how
much betther off ye are than yer neighbors. I doubt not ut makes ye
consated.”
“There’s thim that are livin’ that make me feel the same,” Reilly said
significantly. He glared at Kerrigan, who nodded.
“’T is a habit and grows on ye, like drinkun’,” Kerrigan declared.
“What do ye do to cure ut?”
“I choose me own fri’nds mostly,” Reilly said tartly. “Belikes ye will
take the hint.”
“I do,” replied Kerrigan. “’T is the raison ye worrk in the cimetery,
I tak’ ut; the talk’s wan-sided. Ye’d like thot.”
Kate came out and, seeing her father glowering, sat down by Kerrigan,
carelessly placing her hand on the back of his chair.
“My father has taken to you,” she said with a coquettish glance. “He’ll
monopolize you. I’ll not see you at all. I’m fair green with the
jealousy.”
“Good Lord!” sputtered the old man, and glared at her, but she seemed
not to hear or see.
“We’ll go for a walk after dinner,” she went on--“in the cemetery. It’s
the only place I can get you away from him; for he works there in the
week, and he’d not like to spoil his holiday by seeing the place.”
“’T will be a sore thing to part from him,” answered Kerrigan, “for
we’re like brithers alriddy, barrun’ the size of us and the looks; but
I’d not like to remind him of worrk, so we’ll go, as ye say.”
“’T is the nice, quiet place for young people,” Kate said and laughed.
“You’ll find them all about, walking arm and arm, and sitting on the
benches in the shade, hand in hand. They’ll not notice us at all.”
“Thin we’ll not notice thim,” answered Kerrigan, with good-natured
generosity; but Reilly rose up and stormed into the house, slamming the
door.
He ate his dinner rapidly and in silence, and left the table long
before the others, and when, ready for their walk, Kate and Kerrigan
appeared in the porch, he sat there grim and silent, wearing his coat
and hat.
Kate showed her surprise.
“Why, Father, have you the chill?” she asked anxiously. “Are you cold?”
“Wan worrd more, me girl, and I’ll fetch ye a clip on the side of the
head, old as ye are,” Reilly said savagely.
“You’d never do the like of such a queer thing,” she exclaimed--“never.
And you know me Tom would not stand for that at all. Would you?” She
looked trustingly up into Kerrigan’s face.
“’T would hurt me more nor him to tak’ a little, small mon across me
knee,” Kerrigan replied, “but ’t would be both me duty and right. But
he’s only jokun’, me dear. He’s laughun’ in his sleeve this minut’.”
Reilly eyed him with a look of ferocity.
“Tin years younger, ye lump,” he said, “and small as I am, I’d fetch ye
the mate of it over the jaw, big as ye are.”
“Hiven be thanked for the tin years, thin!” exclaimed Kerrigan, piously.
“Yes, Heaven be thanked!” echoed Kate. “’T would be a sore thing for a
loving girl to see her old father in the hands of a strong man. You’ll
always be tender to him, won’t you?”
“Always,” promised Kerrigan--“tender, but firm.”
“Thank you,” she said softly. “I knew you would. But good-by, Father.”
“Ye can’t go,” snapped Reilly. “Into the house wid yez!”
“What!” she cried. “And me of age, and earning me living these five
years!” She threw back her head and walked toward the gate, with her
father following after.
“Thin I’ll go wid yez, ye ungrateful girl,” Reilly declared.
“Thin take me ither arm,” said Kerrigan, with a solicitous air; but
Reilly stepped back, waving him off.
“Go on, ye lump!” he commanded.
“Aye, ye know best,” Kerrigan agreed. “’T is more like a marriage
procission yer way.”
Kate laughed.
“For shame,” she cried, “to talk of marriage so soon! I’ve known you
but four hours.”
“What’s time to the lovun’ hearrt thot knows uts own mate?” asked
Kerrigan.
“True,” she replied; “it’s nothing at all.”
“If ye’ve no respict for yer owld father, ye hussy,” Reilly hissed
close at her ear, “think shame to yersilf for the bowldniss of yez.”
“To think you’d put the black name of boldness on your own daughter!”
Kate cried, turning angrily. “I’ll not listen to you.” She flounced up
the road.
Reilly followed. He passed into the cemetery behind them and stubbornly
kept near; but as they turned into an avenue of live-oaks, he caught
sight of a slender young man who stood in a path and watched Kate
and Kerrigan go by. Reilly beckoned to him, and the young man came
hesitatingly forward.
“And how are ye the day?” Reilly said genially, and extended his hand.
In manifest surprise the young man shook hands and said:
“Well, Mr. Reilly, as the world goes. And how are you?”
“Fine, Michael,” Reilly replied, “though troubled a small bit.” He
glanced ahead at the pair, who had not looked back. The young man’s
eyes also followed them.
“Aye, it’s the world’s way,” he agreed with a somber air. “It’s up and
down with us all.”
“It is, Michael Cassidy,” replied Reilly. “But I’ve not seen ye for the
long time.”
As Michael had been forbidden to come to the house, he deemed it
politic to make no reply. His silence left Reilly at a loss, and
presently he said with a melancholy shake of the head:
“It’s God’s truth, as they say, that a mon niver knows what’s good for
him.”
Michael looked at him inquiringly.
“Are you speaking of yourself, Mr. Reilly?” he asked.
“I am,” Reilly confessed. “Here was I keepin’ a fine lad like yersilf
from me house, and who should me daughter bring into it but thot big
lump yon! Bedad! he fills the whole place!”
“Lord keep us all!” exclaimed Michael.
“’T is well said, Michael Cassidy,” replied Reilly. “’T is the bitter,
true worrd.”
“But not past mending, Mr. Reilly,” Michael said with a sly glance. “’T
is only to let me come back and send the lump flying.”
“Flyin’ is it?” exclaimed Reilly, wrathfully. “Faith! he flies like a
tree.”
“’T is your own house,” Michael replied. “You have only to say the word
go. I know how it sounds myself.”
“Have I? ’T is all ye know. I give him a couple or three hints of the
same, and he was for takin’ me over his knee--me, the father of me own
daughter. And what did she do but egg him on!”
“Aye, that’s bad.”
“It is so.”
“If you could manage to let him do it,” Michael said thoughtfully, “and
then call the police for assault, you’d have him fine. ’T would shame
Kate. ’T would be bad for him.”
“Would it?” Reilly said with scorn. “And how would it be for me in me
owld age to be taken across a mon’s knee? Tell me thot.”
Michael snickered, but quickly changed his snicker to a cough under
Reilly’s wrathful look.
“You’re right, Mr. Reilly,” he said soberly; “’t would make angels
weep.”
“I’d not distress the howly wans to thot extint,” Reilly declared. He
was silent a moment, then said with a brightening face: “If you’d pass
a scrappy worrd wid him yersilf, Michael, and take a clip or two of his
fist, belikes Kate would take pity on ye and--”
“The pity of a woman is a poor tale,” Michael replied hastily. “Has
Kate taken a liking to him?”
“A liking to him, is it!” exclaimed Reilly. “She makes me fair blush
for her bowldniss.”
“Then she’s given me up, and it’s no use at all,” Michael said with a
groan.
“Well, if she’s given ye up, ye’ve nothing to lose by me plan,” argued
Reilly. “She might take ye back.”
“And be where I was before,” objected Michael, “and that was nowhere at
all, with you against me. That’s the plain word between friends, Mr.
Reilly, and no harm meant.”
“But all that’s done and gone, as I told ye,” Reilly irritably replied.
“I’m for ye now, Michael. ’T is her pity that’s the only way to win her
now.”
“Faith! I think I’d get it,” answered Michael, dolefully; “the man’s as
broad as a house.”
“Well, if it comes to the blows bechune ye,” Reilly said, “just grapple
wid him, and I’ll give him a little small clip on the back of the head
wid me stick.” He gripped his cane hard as he added grimly: “Bedad!
I’ll put me heart in it, and that’s no lie. Now come on and try me
plan.”
But Michael still held back.
“What’s changed you all at once?” he asked. “You never liked me.”
“That lump,” said Reilly. “He’ll marry her out of hand before their
walk’s over if ye do not stop him.”
“And if I do stop him, will I have her myself?” Michael asked.
“Ye will,” Reilly promised. “I’ve passed me worrd.”
“Then God be with us all, and here goes!” said Michael.
They quickened their pace and caught up with the pair, and Kate,
looking back, stopped.
“I thought you’d forgotten us, Father,” she said with a laugh. “And
is it Mr. Cassidy with you, the great stranger!” She introduced him
to Kerrigan as a “friend of the family,” and they walked on together,
Reilly straggling on ahead, leading the way toward his tool-house, in a
lonely part of the cemetery.
“It’s the long time since you’ve been to see us, Mr. Cassidy,” Kate
said at last.
“It is,” Michael replied. “The place is fairly overrun. It’s the queer
lot you have hanging about.”
“Overrun, do you say!” exclaimed Kate. “There’s not been a soul there
in weeks.”
Michael laughed disagreeably.
“It’s not an hour since I saw this wind-bag come out of the door,” he
replied in a loud voice. Then he put his hand to his mouth, saying
softly: “When you strike, strike quick and hard, Mr. Kerrigan. I’d
like to have it over. And look out for the old man’s stick.” Kerrigan
grinned.
Kate, on Kerrigan’s left, had not heard the aside, and she grew pale.
She leaned forward now to say sweetly:
“And how are your father and mother--Michael? Are they well?”
“They are,” Michael answered; “but a bit low in spirit. I’d take it
kindly if you’d parade the big monkey you’ve got with you before their
gate. Belikes it would hearten them up; they’re fond of a show.”
They heard Reilly chuckle.
“Aye, Michael’s the b’y,” he muttered, and gripped his stick hard.
Kerrigan stopped short.
“We’ll go now,” he said stiffly.
“With all my heart,” retorted Michael, and turned back. But Kate caught
Kerrigan’s arm, pulling him forward.
“Would you leave a girl in the middle of a walk to go following after a
joker like Michael?” she cried. “Sure, he was always up to his tricks.
It’s some little, small joke on his father, the poor old man. I’ll have
naught to do with it.”
The two men stood glaring at each other, the grimness of Kerrigan’s
face being lighted, however, as he stood with his back to Kate, by a
sly wink.
“Is ut a joke?” he demanded.
“Would you call the lady a liar?” Michael asked hotly. “She says it’s
a joke; and if she says it’s one, it is, even if it isn’t. Are your
manners as awry as your face?”
“I niver quarrel before ladies, but we’ll take a walk soon and try to
match faces,” Kerrigan said significantly.
“You couldn’t please me more if you asked me to your wake,” Michael
airily replied.
“Oh, Father, there’s your little workhouse,” nervously called Kate. “I
left something in it when I brought you your dinner-pail Thursday. I’ll
get it now, if you have your key, though I’m thinking you’ve forgotten
it, as usual.”
“I niver forget it,” retorted Reilly; and to prove his contention, led
the way to the tool-house.
It was a stout little stone house with a strong door, and as Reilly
opened it, he stepped in, looking back at the others with a sour smile.
“Forget it, did I?” he snapped. “Now, where did ye l’ave what ye left?”
“I hid it on top of that shelf--a little, small box,” Kate said. “Will
you reach it down, Mr. Kerrigan? You’re as tall as the house yourself,
and ’t will not trouble you, like these small men.”
Kerrigan stepped into the room, and in a flash she closed the door and
locked it.
“Now, Michael, run, if you love me!” she exclaimed. “Do you think I
want to see you murdered before my eyes? Your courage is two sizes too
big for your body.”
But Michael did not move.
“Better be murdered than see you making love to that brute,” he said
doggedly. “I’ll see it out now.”
She caught him by the shoulders and tried to push him away.
“But it’s not making love, Michael dear,” she replied. “It was just to
stir father.” She explained in a word, with Michael’s face gradually
relaxing in a grin.
“Well, you’ve stirred him all right,” he said; “he wants you to marry
me now. We’ll do it at once before he changes his mind.”
“In a hurry like this!” she cried. “Oh, I couldn’t.”
“All right,” he replied, and seated himself on the door-step. “Then
I’ll stay and be murdered.”
For a moment Kate stood irresolute, wringing her hands.
“Oh, what shall I do!” she murmured.
“I told you--marry me now,” he replied. He went to her, and, taking her
hands, said quickly: “I’ve the license; I’ve had it for weeks. It would
be the fine thing, wouldn’t it, to have it found like that on my dead
body?”
“I think I should die of shame,” she confessed. “It would hardly seem
decent.”
“It’s the true word you say, Katie dear. You see, there’s nothing left
but to use it.”
“Sure, it would make me feel like a widow, and me not yet a wife,” she
said. “I’ll go, Michael. It’s all that’s left for us now. Hurry.”
* * * * *
Inside the barred window Kerrigan and her father saw them hasten away.
Her father chuckled.
“She fooled ye,” he said, for Kerrigan had not found the box.
“She did,” Kerrigan agreed. He seated himself on a stool and looked
about him complacently. “Ye’ve the nice little shop for wet weather,”
he went on.
“For anny weather,” Reilly replied. He had suddenly become genial, and
he began to talk of his work. “Thirty years I’ve worked here,” he said
at the close, “and I’ve put by a little against me owld age. And now
Kate will marry, and there’s wan trouble liss off me mind. Michael’s a
good b’y.”
“He is,” Kerrigan agreed with great heartiness. “Did ye hear him
blackguarrdun’ me to me face as bowld as ye plaze? Me hearrt warrmed to
the laad.”
“Aye, and he fooled ye well; they both did,” said Reilly, and chuckled.
“They did,” answered Kerrigan. “And now I’m like a hin in a coop; but
I’m not alone.”
For a moment Reilly looked at him, and then a shadow crossed his face.
“Ye take it aisy,” he said suspiciously.
“Ut’s me way,” replied Kerrigan. “I’m a sedenthary mon by nature,
though I’m slightly out of practice, though ut all comes back. I’ll
shmoke now.” He took his pipe from his pocket and leisurely began to
fill it.
“But ye lost the girl,” Reilly told him.
“Can I lose what I niver had or waanted?” Kerrigan asked. “I don’t
know.”
“It was not an hour since ye were all but marryin’ her before me eyes,”
snapped Reilly. “What of that?”
“I was borrowed only,” exclaimed Kerrigan.
“And what do ye mane?” demanded Reilly.
“’T was what Katie said,” answered Kerrigan. “We were standun’ before
the church whin up edged a red-headed little old mon, and says she to
me, ‘May I borrow ye for a bit?’ ‘Sure,’ says I. And she borrowed me to
get rid of the mon, and now she’s borrowed anither to get rid of you
and me. Sure, she’s the bright wan.”
Reilly was staring straight ahead, piecing the broken patches of truth
together. Suddenly he looked up.
“And nayther of ye meant nothing at all by all the love-talk?”
“Nothing at all,” answered Kerrigan.
“Thin she’s a desateful hussy,” cried Reilly, angrily. “She’s made me
ate me own worrds through fear of ye. I said young Cassidy should niver
have her, and now she’s made me fair’ throw him at her, as if he was
the last mon on God’s earth! Ye can’t trust a woman at all.”
“Sometimes ye can and sometimes ye cannot,” amended Kerrigan, “but ye
niver know which ut is till ut’s too late.”
“It’s the true worrd,” agreed Reilly. He sighed, then added not without
a touch of pardonable pride: “Well, she’s no fool, and she’s me own
daughter. There’s something in that.”
[Illustration]
RECOLLECTIONS OF FREDERIC REMINGTON
BY AUGUSTUS THOMAS
Author of “Arizona,” “The Witching Hour,” etc.
WITH PICTURES BY FREDERIC REMINGTON AND A PORTRAIT
Frederic Remington had a large mind in a big body. The mind had great
natural capacity in many directions, and in one of those directions
was remarkably self-taught. The body had been splendidly cultivated
and came to be unwisely overtaxed. His young manhood was spent in the
far West, at work with the cow-boys and near the soldiers and Indians
whose picture historian he was destined to become. The life of those
men was rude and exciting. Much that would be considered dissipation in
civilized surroundings was logical reaction to their environment--man’s
answer to nature’s challenge. Remington adopted the cow-boy habit
and point of view, and finally assimilated the cow-boy standard
and philosophy. It is necessary to consider that fact if one would
accurately estimate his character, his work, his achievement, and his
untimely end. His very intimacy with the men and the material he drew
was purchased at what others may call that cost. Future generations
who profit by the facts he recorded must not quarrel with the method
of their unconscious acquisition; and the wisest of those who loved
him would be less wise if they wished any of his steps retraced.
That education reinforced the independence of his nature, made him
indifferent to the “cards and custards” of society, and, to speak after
his own fashion, kept him “with the bark on.” He worked unhampered by
rule, example, or opinion, a veritable child of nature, and he died
untamed. Nature and second nature kept him at high pressure. He lived,
thought, spoke, and worked by a series of explosions insulated under
deep sympathy and great good humor.
Remington was primitive and partizan. Sensitive as an Indian, he liked
instinctively and enduringly, he hated intuitively and long. He adored
the memory of his father, who had been a soldier, and he remembered
him in his uniform. Besides, in the West, in Frederic’s day, the local
advent of the troopers meant sudden and inflexible order. The military
acted promptly and without debate.
Remington loved the soldiers; he loathed all politicians because they
talked.
One of Remington’s distinctions between orators and officers is worth
recording. He had been recently visiting General Chaffee and more
recently listening to Mr. Bourke Cockran and Mr. William J. Bryan.
Indian fashion, he was half acting the manner of all three and feeling
inwardly for his answer. “This is it,” he said; “Chaffee tells you to
do a thing like this; he looks out from under his eyebrows with his
head down; the orator throws his head up and looks out from under his
eyelids. The soldier menaces--the orator hypnotizes.”
Remington kept near the ground in all his thinking. The superstructure
of things, the embellishment of ideas, the amplification of systems,
had small attraction for him. He had a passion for the roots, for the
explanations, for the causes. His speech was laconic. If his friends
had known the sign language he would generally have used it. His own
vocabulary was small, vital, and picturesque, singularly free from
slang, but strongly colored with military terms and phrases. He was a
good listener and a good laugher. Like the disappearing Carson River,
an adequate joke flowing through his system would rise again with
recurrent and unexpected irruptions of reflected sunshine. He had also
the quality of being humorous himself, and the flavor of his humor was
Western, fresh, and wholesome.
One evening he strolled, astonished and abashed, into our half-lighted
dining-room, where, unknown to him, a dinner party was in progress.
After his own dinner he had come “across lots” for a cigar and our
usual argumentative salvation of mankind. The introductions being
over, a lady purring at the great man in knickerbockers and herculean
stockings asked:
“Did you ride your bicycle, Mr. Remington?”
“Ride it? Ha-ha! Why the blankety-blanked thing wouldn’t let me walk
with it.”
[Illustration: From a photograph by Sarony, owned by E. W. Kemble
FREDERIC REMINGTON]
Mrs. Remington had a liking and a capacity for philosophic study. Some
of the modern phases had her attention, and one of them which she felt
would be useful she pressed upon Remington’s notice. His hospitality to
the idea was more tolerant than acquisitive, and at times he may have
really doubted its potency; but if he had any criticism it was never
spoken, and perhaps never implied. One morning during that period,
however, his man Tim brought me a brief note, which read as follows:
Dear Tommy:
I was in town last night at The Players and I got so out of tune
with the Infinite that you could notice it for two blocks.
[Illustration: Copyright by Mrs. Frederic Remington
“THE SCALP”
MODELED BY FREDERIC REMINGTON]
The value of mere anecdotes of any man is that each reader draws
from them that side of the personality which he would have seen and
drawn from the man himself, not merely the element open to the proper
vision of the reporter; and that must be the excuse for anecdotes.
E. W. Kemble, or, as his friends know him, Ed Kemble, introduced the
writer to Remington in 1890. The two illustrators were friends, but
the most beautiful side of their friendship needed a third friend for
its precipitation. Kemble is universally amusing when he cares to
be. Few men are his equal in putting the spirit of caricature into
ordinary verbal report or comment; even his famous drawings do not
show such sure fun. Remington responded promptly to Kemble’s comedy,
however expressed. Most men who know it do the same, but Remington went
further. When Kemble had left him after any interview, all of Kemble’s
woes of which Remington had been the repository were suddenly dwarfed
in the larger horizon of Remington’s experiences and transmuted into
side-splitting jokes. In his mind, Kemble was never “grown up”; and
Kemble reciprocated. Remington’s throes, viewed through Kemble’s prism,
were just as amusing. They took even each other’s art as playfellows
take each other’s games. There were years when much of their leisure
was passed in company; in the winter, skating and long walks over the
hills of Westchester; in the summer, swimming baths in the Sound,
bicycling, and tennis. Their understanding was mutual and immediate.
One night after the theater, on the train home from New York, sitting
together, Remington was by the car window, Kemble next to the aisle.
An obstreperous commuter was disturbing the passengers, men and women.
The busy conductor’s admonition had been ineffective, the brakeman’s
repeated expostulations useless. The men passengers seemed cowed; the
rowdy was gaining confidence. On his third blatant parade through
the car, and as he passed Kemble’s side, Remington’s two hundred and
fifty pounds of bone and muscle reached out into the aisle, and, with
the precision of a snapping-turtle, lifted him from his feet like a
naughty boy and laid him face downward over Kemble’s interposing lap.
With the spirit of perfect team-work, as Remington held the ruffian,
Kemble spanked him, while the legs in the aisle wriggled frantically
for a foothold. The correction, prolonged and ample, was accompanied by
roars of laughter from fifty other passengers. Being done, Remington
stood the offender on his feet. The man began a threatening tirade.
Before half a sentence was uttered Remington had him again exposed to
Kemble’s rhythmic tattoo. This was enough; and when again released the
fellow rapidly left the car for the relative seclusion of the smoker.
Mrs. Remington used to tell of her husband’s return to her one night
when they had transiently taken rooms at a New York hotel. Remington,
after escorting her back from the theater, had her consent to a little
romp at the club. It had come to be two o’clock in the morning; Mrs.
Remington had gone to bed, but was as yet only in the border-land of
sleep when she was aroused by the repeated slamming of hallway doors.
At the proper moment in the crescendo her own door was opened, and in
the frame of light stood her husband, quickly joined by a protesting
attendant.
“It’s all right,” said Remington; “this one’s my wife--good-night!”
One early morning in February, 1898, James Waterbury, the agent of the
Western Union Company at New Rochelle, telephoned me that the _Maine_
had been blown up and had sunk in the harbor of Havana. Knowing the
interest the report would have for Remington, I immediately called
him on the telephone and repeated the information. His only thanks or
comment was to shout “Ring off!” In the process of doing so I could
hear him calling the private telephone number of his publishers in New
York. In his mind, his own campaign was already actively under way.
One incident of that campaign illustrates the primitive man in
Remington. He and Richard Harding Davis were engaged to go into Cuba
by the back way and send material to an evening newspaper. The two men
were to cross in the night from Key West to Cuba on a mackerel-shaped
speed boat of sheet-iron and shallow draft. Three times the boat put
out from Key West and three times turned back, unable to stand the
weather. The last time even the crew lost hope of regaining port. Davis
and Remington were lying in the scuppers and clinging to the shallow
rail to keep from being washed overboard. The Chinaman cook between
lurches was lashing together a door and some boxes to serve as a raft.
Davis suggested to Remington the advisability of trying something of
the kind for themselves.
“Lie still,” Remington commanded; “you and I don’t know how to do that.
Let him make his raft. If we capsize, I’ll throttle him and take it
from him.”
Some months later, on learning of the incident, I tried to discuss the
moral phase of it with him; but he brushed my hypocrisy aside with the
remark: “Why, Davis alone was worth a dozen sea-cooks. I don’t have to
talk of myself.”
His experiences in Cuba were scarcely more supportable than this
unpropitious start. The heat was terrible, the transportation bad, and
his physical condition poor. He suffered. Growling over it all, long
afterward he said to me:
“From now on I mean to paint fruits and flowers. Then if I’m ordered to
the scene of action I can go fearlessly.”
Until his increasing weight made it hard to find a mount, he liked
to ride. He had no fear of any horse, and among men he had a man’s
courage; but he had an unreasonable fear of dogs. Once, on the occasion
of a men’s dinner in the early days of the bicycle’s popularity, Kemble
had made a souvenir caricature for each guest. The card at Remington’s
plate represented Frederic in the costume of a bronco buster, with
chaps, sombrero, and guns, riding a bicycle--a look of terror on his
face. The bicycle was bucking half-way over the road, frightened at a
little cotton dog on four wooden wheels. Nobody laughed more heartily
over the card than Remington, and for years it had a place of honor in
his studio.
The waning of his great strength was a more sensitive subject with him
than his increasing weight, which produced the condition. Gradually in
our Sunday walks, the hills grew steeper for him. His favorite ruse for
disguising the strain on him was to stop occasionally and survey the
landscape:
“Look there, Tommy, how that land lies. I could put a company of men
back of that stone wall and hold it against a thousand until they
flanked me.”
As with the Southern gentleman who used to look out of the window
after passing the decanter to his guest, it was the part of friendship
on these occasions to multiply details of the supposititious
fortifications until the commander regained his wind.
One Sunday morning in those later days I went with him to the office
of an osteopathic physician who was treating him. The osteopath was
a slight man and not tall. Remington, lying face downward on the
operating-table, presented a skyline so much higher than that of the
average patient that the doctor standing on the floor lacked the angle
of pressure necessary to his treatment. The doctor therefore mounted a
chair, from which he stepped to the table, and finally sat astride of
Remington, applying his full weight to the manipulation which he was
giving to the spinal column.
[Illustration: Copyright by Mrs. Frederic Remington. From a photograph
by Davis and Sanford.
“THE BRONCO BUSTER”
FROM THE SCULPTURE BY FREDERIC REMINGTON]
“I hope I’m not hurting you, Mr. Remington?” said the doctor. Remington
answered:
“It’s all right, Doctor--so long as--you don’t--use your spurs.”
Early in his occupancy of the New Rochelle home--perhaps in 1895--he
added to his house a studio. This room was twenty by forty feet on the
floor, and twenty feet to the roof-tree. A big skylight was in one
pitch of the roof; windows with the sills breast-high were on one end,
and one side wall. The second end had a double door big enough to
admit a horse, or to be opened wide as he painted the horse in the open
air outside. All four walls of the studio were covered, above doors
and windows and in their dead spaces, with military and Indian and
Mexican trappings of all descriptions from spurs to war-bonnets; there
were guns of every kind ever carried by an American soldier; all kinds
of swords and bridles, saddles, belts, canteens, and cartridge-boxes,
powder-horns, bayonets, and knives; there were war clubs, tomahawks,
bows, arrows, spears, tom-toms, pipes, scalps, and the wands of
medicine-men; moccasins, blankets, beaded deerskins, and the skulls of
buffalo, mountain goats, and American carnivora; sombreros, quirts,
horsehair lassos, chaps, serapes, ollas, mats, pots, and baskets; in
short, not prints or catalogues, but, for all that he might need for
any Western picture, the veritable thing itself. He knew the troop
and tribe and time and latitude of each. Accuracy in their use was
his religion. In his chosen field he abhorred anachronisms. There was
considerable éclat over the exhibition of a painting by a new-comer.
The subject showed in an Indian fight the rescue of one trooper by
another. Remington took one look at it and turned away in disgust.
Bits of arms, uniforms, and harness that had never met outside of a
museum were assembled in the picture. To the ordinary observer their
association was harmonious; but to his expert eye it was falsehood and
fake.
In the four arts which he essayed--letters, illustration, painting, and
sculpture--Remington was self-taught. His writing was soon abandoned
because it was not easy to him, and was not so remunerative as was
drawing done in the same time. He had something to say, however, when
he did write, and he had an attractive and a graphic style. Great
good nature and wholesomeness showed through his lines, and he wrote
always from the inside of his subject. It is not the province of this
rambling anecdotal recollection of him to attempt an appreciation or a
criticism of his art, but one may with propriety note the rapidity with
which he overcame the initial difficulties of his tasks and outgrew the
unavoidable mistakes of the beginner. Thumbing the older numbers of
the magazines in which his earliest illustrations appear,[2] notably
those of the Roosevelt articles, one sees that the salient marks of the
novice, the small hands and feet of his figures, soon disappear, and in
their stead the vigorous members of a master are employed.
[Illustration: Drawn by Frederic Remington
“I TOOK YE FOR AN INJIN”]
Remington’s first work was in black-and-white India-ink washes. He
was skilled with the pen, but to achieve values by multiplied strokes
was foreign to both temperament and training. As those technically
informed are aware, but as not all readers know, his illustrations,
like all printed pictures, since the direct drawing upon boxwood and
lithographic stone was superseded, were made on a large scale and
reduced by photographic processes to the size needed for the printed
page. He usually worked on a cardboard twenty-four by thirty inches,
or thereabout, in size. From black-and-white washes he advanced to
black-and-white in oils, and again from these to canvases of such
color in flat fields as lent themselves to the earlier reproductions
for magazine covers and double pages. During all of this time he
was acquiring a technic that grew through the various stages of his
contemporaries’ estimate from rebuke to admiration.
[Illustration: Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merrill
THE PACK-HORSE MEN REPELLING AN ATTACK BY INDIANS
FROM THE PAINTING BY FREDERIC REMINGTON]
It was an exhibition of Charles Rolla Peters’s moonlights, about 1894,
that gave Remington his most serious wish to paint. The mystery of
these efforts and their largeness were keyed to the mute though not
inglorious poet in him. He came to see and to master the nuances of
the moon’s witchery in all her moods. It was interesting to follow his
awakened and developing sense of color. Nature on that side made more
and more appeal to him, until in our Sunday-morning and weekday-evening
tramps the tints of sky and field and road almost totally dislodged the
phantom soldiery from the hillsides.
About 1896 Ruckstuhl, the sculptor, set up a tent on a vacant lot
back of our place at New Rochelle, New York, and began in clay the
construction of the half-size model for the heroic equestrian statue of
General Hartranft that now stands in bronze in front of the State-house
at Harrisburg. It was Remington’s first intimate view of sculpture in
the making. The horse especially interested him. During the two months
that the sculptor labored, Remington made daily visits to the Ruckstuhl
tent. The following winter I was sitting one day in his studio watching
him at an illustration for some story of Owen Wister’s. He was working
“chic,” that is to say, without models, and was making his first marks
in charcoal. His outline began to show a cow-boy in the foreground of a
bar-room shooting toward the back of the picture, into the perspective
of which ran the bar and its stampeding clientele. As it occurred to
him that the bulking figure of the local egotist obscured too much
of other interesting detail, he quickly dusted off the drawing and
reversed his characters, thereby making the aggressor stand in the
background and putting the victims to the front. With equal ease he
could have put his cow-boy to either side of the room. I said to him:
“Frederic, you’re not an illustrator so much as you’re a sculptor. You
don’t mentally see your figures on one side of them. Your mind goes all
around them.”
Not long after that he bought a set of tools. Ruckstuhl sent him a
supply of modeler’s wax, and he began his “Bronco Buster.” It was
characteristic of the man that his first attempt should be a subject
difficult enough as a technical problem to have daunted a sculptor of
experience and a master of technic. His love of the work when he got
at it, his marvelous aptitude for an art in which he had never had a
single lesson, are some evidence that it was possibly his _métier_.
His few bronze groups and figures that rapidly followed “The Bronco
Buster,” and his heroic equestrian monument of “The Pioneer” in
Fairmont Park, are the work of one who surely would have excelled in
sculpture if he had lived to follow it.
Remington thought he believed in “art for art’s sake,” but I know
of nothing that he ever did in any of its departments that did not
primarily attempt a story. His wish to tell something that had touched
him, and tell it at first hand, was as primitive as the instinct of a
caveman.
The boy in the nursery wants something that will go. There is a kinship
in Remington’s frequently expressed choice of an epitaph:
“He Knew the Horse.”
His death occurred December 26, 1909. On January 1, 1912, the present
Democratic administration of New Rochelle was formally installed. It
transacted no business that day except to pass a resolution requesting
the New Haven Railroad, which was constructing a new station near
Remington’s old home, to call that stop “Remington Place.” The railroad
graciously complied. Remington’s fellow sculptor, Robert Aitken, has
under way a portrait bust of him and four pedestal bas-reliefs. This
monument is to be set up fronting the station, and perhaps it, too,
will carry that commemorating phrase.
[2] See ~The Century~ for January, April, July, and August, 1889, June,
1896, and February, 1902.
[Illustration: Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson
“PEGGY”
FROM THE MARBLE BUST BY EVELYN BEATRICE LONGMAN]
THE AMERICAN SPINSTER
BY AGNES REPPLIER
Author of “The Fireside Sphinx,” etc.
That this is the Golden Age of spinsters no one will deny, and that
America furnishes the soil in which these hardy plants put forth their
finest bloom is equally indisputable. How many years have passed since
the “antient maydes” of Boston--which term included all unmarried
women older than twenty-five--were pronounced by John Dunton to be a
“dismal spectacle”?[3] How many years since a few “acute and ingenious
gentlewomen” in colonial Virginia had the temerity to remain single and
cultivate their own tobacco plantations, for which unnatural behavior
they were subjected to repeated “admonishments”? _Now_ the “antient
mayde” flaunts her freedom in the faces of those who are patiently
doing their duty to the world. _Now_ if a woman runs a successful
apple-orchard or dairy-farm, her exploits are heralded far and wide,
and other women write exultant papers about her, intimating that the
day of the male agriculturist is virtually over. I am not sure that the
attitude of our great-great-grandfathers, who jealously and somewhat
fearfully guarded their prerogatives, was not more flattering to my sex
than this enthusiasm evoked by achievements which in a man would not be
found worthy of notice.
As for age--well, who in these years of grace is frankly and
confessedly old? We no longer say, “On a l’âge de son cœur,” but
“On a l’âge de sa volonté.” Jane Austen settled down to caps and
spinsterhood before she was thirty. Dr. Johnson alluded to Miss Lucy
Porter’s “hoary virginity” when that lady was fifty-two. The Ettrick
Shepherd stubbornly protested that “to ca’ a woman saxty, and then
mainteen that ye didna ca’ her auld, is naething short o’ a sophism.”
But now no one gets beyond middle age, or “the prime of life.” I have
heard a Boston spinster of eighty-two (a remarkable woman, I admit)
casually spoken of as middle-aged; and when, in a desperate resolve to
push matters to an issue, I said: “Miss D--is not middle-aged; she is
old. If you are not old when you are eighty-two, when _are_ you old?”
the remark was taken in ill part. “I should not dream of calling Miss
D--old,” said one gallant Bostonian, and all his hearers agreed with
him.
The French spinster is a negligible factor. The English spinster has
conquered her territory and become a force to be reckoned with. But the
American spinster is the standard-bearer of the tribe. Her incessant
activities and her radiant self-satisfaction have made her appear
more dominant than she is, and have caused her critics much needless
apprehension. When Mrs. Van Vorst wrote, in 1903, “Our factories are
full of old maids, our colleges are full of old maids, our ball-rooms
in the worldly centers are full of old maids,” Americans read these
words with placid unconcern. They had given too many wedding presents
in their day to have any doubts anent the permanent popularity of
marriage. But English readers, who are ever prone to be literal,
appear to have accepted Mrs. Van Vorst’s statements _au pied de la
lettre_. Mr. Marriott Watson, chilled to the heart--as well he might
be--by the vision of a ballroom destitute alike of girls and matrons,
wrote for the “Nineteenth Century” a severe and agitated protest.
He asserted that a woman’s “functions” “alone excuse or explain her
existence,”--which is one way of looking at the matter; and he pointed
out that American women are the most remote the world can show from the
primitive and savage type which represents the dynamic force of a race.
The mere fact that the American spinster is so often and so sharply
censured marks the strength of her position. No one dreams of censuring
the French _vieille fille_ or the German _jungfrau_. These victims of
fate meet with scorn or sympathy, according to the taste and breeding
of commentators. In either case, their lives are registered as
failures. Nothing can rob the German woman of those vital sensibilities
which center in the home and family. “Every great movement of the
Teutonic soul,” says Mr. Havelock Ellis, “has been rooted in emotion.”
If the women of Germany are demanding “rights,” and demanding them
with no uncertain voice, it is because they seek to meet their
responsibilities with authority. The sphere of home and child-rearing
is their sphere, and they purpose to rule in it.
It is not possible for the Frenchwoman, who understands the structure
of society, to welcome spinsterhood. “All her instincts of expansion,”
says that acute observer Mr. William Crary Brownell, “are hostile to
it. There is no more provision in the French social constitution than
in the order of nature itself for the old maid.” Therefore, as the twin
passions of the French heart are to be in rational accord with nature
and in rational accord with social life, the unmarried woman has no
alternative but to feel herself doubly incomplete. She is unstirred
by the American woman’s vaulting ambition to be man’s rival, or by
an uneasy envy of man’s estate. Perhaps it is because a French girl
never regrets her sex that France has produced more eminent women than
any other nation in the world. Certainly the only man who ever had
the courage to say he would like to be a woman (a beautiful woman, he
stipulated) was that distinguished Frenchman M. Jules Lemaître.
No one since De Quincey has spoken so generously of the English
spinster as has Mr. John B. Atkins in the pages of ~The Century~. He
does not, like so many of his contemporaries, accuse her of gross
selfishness. He does not deny her the right to control her own life. He
goes so far as to say that she may use it to good purpose, and extract
from it some measure of content. He points out the philanthropic paths
which it should be her duty and her pleasure to tread. He draws a
pleasing picture of the maiden aunt giving to nieces and nephews--to
nephews especially--her sympathy and comradeship. Sir Leslie Stephen
says that “Woman to a boy is simply an incumbrance upon reasonable
modes of life,” and it is to be feared that many women--aunts
and others--have the same doubtful regard for boys. But British
sentimentality demands of the old maid, if she be a good old maid, that
yearning attitude toward other people’s children which marks her as
“womanly” and earns for her the tolerance of the world.
The American spinster is seldom sentimental, which is in her favor, and
she is seldom emotional, which is both gain and loss. Her attenuation
of feeling lessens her charm and influence, but serves to keep her
in accord with the orderly conventions of society. She is keenly
competitive, and eager for new fields of activity; but she can read
Ellen Key’s “Love and Marriage” with intelligent detachment. She
cries occasionally for the moon, but she is in no immediate danger of
scorching her fingers by trying to play with the sun.
The flexibility of American social life gives to the unmarried woman an
assured position which has no counterpart in the older civilizations.
She may be an anomaly in nature, but she is in perfect accord with her
more or less agreeable surroundings. She has no background to give
repute and distinction to her rôle; but she infuses into it her own
persuasive personality. She stands free from the common obligations
of her sex, but she does work which is well worth doing, and she not
infrequently adds to the gaiety of life. “Of how many homes,” says Mr.
Brownell, “is she not the decorously decorative ornament! She may have
courted or have drifted into her position of dignified singleness; it
is in either case equally sure that she has not considered her estate
incomplete in itself, or disengaged from the structure of society.”
As a matter of fact, she is wont to feel herself--birth and fortune
permitting--a pillar of society. It is no question with her of
wasted force or blighted vitality. It is a question of directing her
superabundant energy into those channels where she can accomplish
measurable results. She seeks and finds a constructive human existence
remote from marriage and maternity. The French or German woman remains
unmarried because the unkindly fates have so decreed. The English
woman occasionally assists fate from sheer love of independence. “The
most ordinarie cause of a single life,” says Bacon, “is liberty,
especially in certain self-pleasing and humorous minds.” But it is
surely reserved for the American woman to remain unmarried because she
feels herself too good for matrimony, too valuable to be intrusted to
a husband’s keeping. Her attitude bears some resemblance to that of
Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who wrote with praiseworthy conviction: “I
may say without vanity that just Heaven would not bestow such a woman
as myself upon a man who was unworthy of her.”
This is not idle jesting. Would it be possible in any country save our
own for a lady to write to a periodical, explaining, “Why I am an Old
Maid,” and be paid coin of the realm for the explanation? Would it be
possible in any other country to hear such a question as “Should the
Gifted Woman Marry?” seriously asked, and seriously answered? Would it
be possible for any sane and thoughtful woman who was not an American
to consider even the remote possibility of our spinsters becoming a
detached class, who shall form “the intellectual and economic élite
of the sex, and leave marriage and maternity for the less developed
woman”? What has become of the belief, as old as humanity, that
marriage and maternity are highly developing processes, forcing into
flower a woman’s latent potentialities; and that the less developed
woman is inevitably the woman who has escaped this keen and powerful
stimulus. “Never,” says Edmond de Goncourt, “has a virgin, young or
old, produced a work of art.” One makes allowance for the Latin point
of view. And it is probable that M. de Goncourt never read “Emma.”
Signor Ferrero, contemplating the unmarried women of England, those
amazing creatures who “devote themselves to sterility, not from
religious motives, but from sheer calculation” (which is also a Latin
point of view), has recorded his conviction that they will make
themselves felt as a force, and has expressed his genuine dismay as to
the possible results of their activity. He has even confessed to some
whimsical misgivings lest Italian and Sicilian women should acquire
this Saxon taste for spinsterhood. Yet England is emphatically a man’s
country--which France has never been--and its attitude toward marriage
is a robustly masculine attitude, as unacceptable to the French as to
the American woman. There is no attempt anywhere to gloss over this
rude fact. The Englishman believes with Mr. Kipling:
“He travels the fastest who travels alone.”
He echoes the verdict of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Marriage narrows
and damps the spirits of generous men.” “The position of a single
man,” says a stout-hearted writer in the “Contemporary Review,” “is in
itself envied and applauded; that of a single woman certainly is not.
To every woman marriage is still accounted a promotion. There may be
counterbalancing circumstances, but to be married is, in itself, an
object of desire and a subject for congratulation.”
In the good old days when English spinsters softened the reproach of
spinsterhood by borrowing the prefix “Mrs.,” as did those excellent
ladies, Mrs. Hannah More and Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, the position of a
single man was neither envied nor applauded. He was held to be (if of
decent life,--much allowance was made for rakes) only a little less
contemptible than a single woman. “The pain and the opprobrium o’
defunckin an auld bachelor,” writes the Ettrick Shepherd, expressing
after his hardy fashion the sentiment of his time. Dr. Johnson firmly
maintained that marriage was more necessary for a man than for a woman,
because a woman could make herself comfortable and a man could not.
The responsibility for the more modern and more supercilious masculine
attitude must be placed where it belongs,--on the shoulders of the
Englishwoman, who has accepted the creed that for her marriage is a
promotion, and that “counterbalancing circumstances” should not be held
to weigh too heavily in the scale. As Dean Hole’s friend said to him,
when congratulated on her daughter’s engagement: “To be sure, Jenny
hates the man, but then there’s always something.”
Miss Austen was the most veracious of chroniclers, one who with careful
self-control refused to wander beyond the area of her own observation;
but there is nothing in American fiction, and very little, I fancy,
in the fiction of any land, which is comparable to the marriage of
_Charlotte Lucas_ and _Mr. Collins_. Many novelists have made easy copy
of husband-hunting. It is a favorite theme with Trollope, who treats
it with ruthless cynicism, and it is a not uncommon element in modern
story-telling. But _Charlotte Lucas_ staggers us. Miss Austen calls her
“sensible and intelligent.” She is also well-bred, clear-headed, and
kind. She is _Elizabeth Bennet’s_ chosen friend. And she marries _Mr.
Collins_! Marries him with alacrity, and with permanent satisfaction.
If there be any one episode in life and letters which is calculated
to reconcile us to the rapid increase of spinsterhood in England and
America, it is the amazing fact that Jane Austen not only married
_Charlotte Lucas_ to _Mr. Collins_, but plainly considered it a not
unnatural thing for her to do.
Ten years ago, when a rage for compiling useless statistics swept over
Europe and the United States, it occurred to some active minds that
children should be made to bear their part in the guidance of the
human race. Accordingly a series of questions--some sensible and some
foolish--were put to English, German, and American school children,
and their enlightening answers were given to the world. One of these
questions read: “Would you rather be a man or a woman, and why?”
Naturally this query was of concern only to little girls. No sane
educator would ask it of a boy. Even Jules Lemaître at twelve must have
shared the convictions of his fellows. German pedagogues, be it noted,
struck the question off the list. They said that to ask a child, “Would
you rather be something you must be, or something you cannot possibly
be?” was both foolish and useless. Interrogations concerning choice
were of value only when the will was a determining factor.
In this country no such logical inference chilled the examiner’s zeal.
The question was asked and was answered, and we discovered as a result
that a great many little American girls (a minority, to be sure, but a
respectable minority,) were well content with their sex; not because it
had its duties and dignities, its pleasures and exemptions; but because
they plainly considered that they were superior to little American
boys, and were destined, when grown up, to be superior to American men.
One small New England maiden wrote that she would rather be a woman
because “Women are always better than men in morals.” Another, because
“Women are more use in the world.” A third, because “Women learn things
quicker than men, and have more intelligence.” And so on through
varying degrees of self-sufficiency. “Lord, gie us a gude conceit o’
ourselves!” prayed the Scotchman, who knew the value of assurance.
Now certainly these little girls were old maids in the making. They had
stamped upon them in their tender infancy the hall-mark of the American
spinster. In a few more years they will be writing papers on “The Place
of Unmarried Women in the World’s Work,” and reading addresses on “The
Woman of Intellect: her Duty to Herself and to the State.” There is
a formidable lack of humor in this easy confidence, in the somewhat
contemptuous attitude of women whose capacities have not yet been
tested, toward men who stand responsible for the failures of the world.
It denotes, at home or abroad, a density not far removed from dullness.
In that dreary little Irish drama, “Mixed Marriages,” which the Dublin
actors played in New York two years ago, an old woman, presumed to
be witty and wise, said to her son’s betrothed: “Sure, I believe the
Lord made Eve when He saw that Adam could not take care of himself”;
and the remark, while received with applause, reflected painfully upon
the absence of that humorous sense which we used to think was the
birthright of Irishmen. The too obvious retort which nobody uttered,
but which everybody must have thought, was that if Eve had been
designed as a care-taker, she had made a shining failure of her job.
It is conceded, theoretically at least, that woman’s sphere is an
elastic term, comprising any work she is able to do well. Therefore,
it may be that American spinsters, keen, college-bred, ambitious, and,
above all, free, are destined to compete vigorously and permanently
with men. They are, we are told, the only women who can give themselves
unreservedly to work, and from them alone enduring results are to
be expected. Yet it is at least worthy of notice that most of the
successful business women of France,--Mme. Clicquot-Ponsardin, Mme.
Pommery, Mme. Dumas, Mme. Bernet, Mme. Boucicault,--have been either
married women who were their husbands’ partners, or widows who took
upon their capable shoulders the burden of their dead husbands’ cares.
They were also mothers who, with the definite aims and practical
instincts of their race, projected themselves into the future, and wove
out of their own pursuits the fabric of their children’s lives.
At present the American spinster is in a transition stage, a stage
so replete with advantages that we may be permitted to hope it will
last long. She has escaped from the chimney-corner, and is not yet
shut up in banks and offices. She does a reasonable amount of work,
and embraces every reasonable opportunity of enjoyment. She gratifies
her own tastes, and cherishes her natural affinities. She sometimes
cultivates her mind, and she never breaks her heart. She is the best
of friends, and she has leisure for companionship. She is equally
free from _l’esprit gaulois_ and from “_les mœurs de vestales
pétrifiées_,” which are the Scylla and Charybdis of the French _vieille
fille_. She is content with a contentment which the German _jungfrau_
neither understands nor envies. She is assured with an assurance
unknown to the experienced English old maid. She is, as I have said,
the standard-bearer of her tribe, and the pibroch to which she marches
blithely through life has the ring of the old Covenanting song:
“That a’ the world may see
There’s nane in the right but we.”
All this is far removed, as Mr. Marriott Watson warns us, from the
savage and primitive woman, who represents the dynamic force of a
race. But who shall ring the bells backward? And who shall reconcile
the primitive woman to the exigencies and formalities of civilization?
Some years ago in South Carolina I came to know and love an old Negro
“mammy,” a wise, fat, kind, mysterious old mammy, whose heart was soft,
whose touch was healing, whose voice was like a lullaby, and whose
experiences would have colored half a dozen ordinary lives. Her sister,
the laundress, was one day under discussion, and I asked, with more
than my customary ineptitude: “Aunt Cordelia, is Caroline an old maid?”
Aunt Cordelia turned upon me a look in which contempt for my ignorance
blended with a deep acceptance and understanding of life as she had
known it, unfiltered, unsheltered, unevasive. “Laws, honey,” she said,
“we’s no ole maids. Some’s married, and some isn’t; but we’s no ole
maids.”
[Illustration]
[3] “Life and Errors of John Dunton,” 1705.
PRAYERS FOR THE LIVING
BY MARY W. PLUMMER
O soul of all souls whitest, what need’st thou
Of solemn masses who with angel choirs
Dost chant enraptured thy most pure desires,
And to the heavenly will, as erst on earth, dost bow?
What can I ask for thee, in halting prayer,
Heavy with grief, that could increase thy bliss?
What in thy perfectness can be amiss
Who grewest to angelhood all unaware?
Rather, pray thou for me. And when ye stand,
Making petition, folding wing on wing,
Drooping your eyes before the glory-light,
Think, if thou may’st, on him who, wandering
Along the lower way, hath lost thy hand,
Yet seeketh for thy footprints day and night!
THE COMING SNEEZE
BY HARRY STILLWELL EDWARDS
Author of “Sons and Fathers,” “Two Runaways,” etc.
What it really was that twisted Aunt Tildy’s features into the anxious
expression which inevitably waits on an approaching sneeze, no one, it
is likely, will ever discover, though several plausible explanations
have been offered; but twisted they were, early in life, and for all
time Aunt Tildy was condemned to face the world with wrinkles on her
forehead, lifted brows, a ruffled nose, half-closed eyes, and a drawn
mouth. The theory of an arrested sneeze was advanced many years ago by
Tim Broggins, who still sits around the cotton warehouse and, while
he whittles white pine splinters and chews tobacco, is wont to settle
all questions as they arise. Tim knows everything worth knowing and
probably some things that are not; and of course he knew what was the
trouble with Aunt Tildy’s face.
“Hit’s er comin’ sneeze, that’s what!” said he once, when Aunt Tildy,
passing in her little country buggy, drew comment after her. “Hit’s
er comin’ sneeze! Hit’s er sollum fac’, gentle_men_, that Aunt Tildy
ain’t been known ter sneeze in her whole life. She started oncet erlong
back in th’ sixties; got her face twisted jes right, looked at th’ sun
an’ was er-strainin’ of her corsits when somebody hollered ‘Cyclone!’
She’d been in one cyclone that like ter drug her hair out by th’ roots,
an’ when she heard th’ name ag’in, she jes natchully hunted cover an’
forgot to pull ’er face together. When th’ cyclone passed, hit were too
late. She ain’t never sneeze’ sence that day. Thought I’d try her some
time with snuff or red pepper an’ see if hit wouldn’t tech ’er off an’
straighten out things; but hit’s done growed that erway now. The thing
is sot an’ fixed!”
Aunt Tildy, however, did not let the tangled condition of her features
interfere with business. From the profits of her little farm and
country store she managed to sustain herself admirably; to educate and
marry off her niece and lay up a competency for old age. It mattered
not how hard the times, how poor the crops, and how bad were general
collections, there was seldom a day when she did not have money in
bank to loan at legal interest on exceptional collateral. With her
bonnet pushed back, her fat umbrella grasped by its middle, and her
little worn bag, she was a familiar figure in town on most Saturdays.
It was on a Saturday that Aunt Tildy and handsome Jack Cromby met for
the first time, and Jack heard from Tim Broggins the old legend of the
coming sneeze. Jack was the wide-awake and pushing representative of
an up-State snuff factory, and was flooding the county with little red
labeled tin boxes that contained samples of its product.
“Tell yer what, Jack,” said Tim, as he passed his knife-blade under
a delicate curl of pine to the end of his splinter, “ef you was ter
git th’ ole lady’s face on your boxes an’ call it ‘The Comin’ Sneeze’
brand, hit would ketch th’ town. Say, Jack! why ’n’t you try er little
of the stuff on her, anyhow? Seems ter me ef you could jes git her
up-town on the Court-House Square whar folks could see it all, an’ git
her to turn loose that sneeze that’s been er hangin’ fire forty years,
you’d sell er million! I ain’t er-sayin’ yo’ ole stuff could reach
it, but it mout. My private opinion is that when that sneeze do come,
hit’ll have ter be broke up with dynamite firs’ an’ then took out of
her system piece by piece. Still, as I said, yo’ pertickerlar brand of
tickler mout tech it off!”
Jack laughed heartily at the drollery of the wag; and then, the spirit
of commercial enterprise taking possession of him, he suddenly grew
serious.
“Not a bad idea, Tim--that about the picture. Think of the big ones
to hang in the window--three colors--‘The coming sneeze’! And what a
trade-mark! By George! I wonder whether I can get a photograph of her.”
“Dunno ’bout _that_. But I did hear John Belton who runs the gallery
up-town say as how las’ week he took some to sen’ to her niece out in
Texas. Maybe you mout git hold o’ one ef you go ’bout it right. But
looker here, Jack!--don’t you git me mixed up in this thing! Lord! She
run down that sneeze joke o’ mine ten years ago an’ sech er tongue
lashin’!--Keep me out o’ hit er I’ll call you er liar, sho’!”
“I’ll keep you out, Tim. Belton, did you say?”
“Yes--John Belton. He’ll let you have one of the pictur’s, mebbe,
ef you don’t tell what you want with hit. Ef you tell him _that_,
he wouldn’t sell you one fer no price--’cause Belton wants ter live
erwhile yet.”
Jack Cromby finessed. He had his own picture taken, being now
thoroughly carried away with the advertising scheme, and voluntarily
paid cash in advance. He then begged of the well-pleased artist one of
Aunt Tildy’s,--to “send away to some friends.” In after days--though
it is a shameful thing to print--he very generously assisted the
unfortunate Belton to erect a barricade of fiction between himself and
his outraged patron.
Jack’s one great error in discretion, after embarking on this perilous
enterprise, was committed when he confided his plans to a young belle
of the community. Handsome, dashing, well-dressed, and generous, Jack
was a favorite, and numbered his sweethearts by dozens up and down the
road. Among these was Miss Pinkie Appleby, selected by him in an evil
moment to become the joint custodian of his mature plans touching Aunt
Tildy’s likeness. Of course, Miss Pinkie laughed. What girl would not,
in the circumstances? How could the innocent joke, as Jack described
it, in any way injure Aunt Tildy? And what girl would not have promptly
confided the secret to several intimates whom Jack had not honored,
with strict injunctions as to secrecy?
The little group of idlers around the warehouse were holding their
usual morning conversation when Aunt Tildy’s vehicle turned the corner
at a pace that caused all four wheels to slide sidewise and give forth
a harsh warning. Tim Broggins suspended his whittling a moment, looked
at the broad scar left in the dust, and suffered his contemplative gaze
to follow the receding figure in the buggy.
“What ails Tildy?” The question came from Judge Oglesby, whose two
hundred and fifty pounds were waiting upright in a broad chair while
his justice court threatened to convene. “Sorter flustered, ’pears
to me.” He crossed his fat hands on his hickory cane and rested them
against his zone of greatest circumference, blinking, as the dust began
to float in.
“I wonder!--I wonder!” said Tim, reflectively, as he resumed his
interrupted occupation. “Now, gentle_men_, I’m goin’ ter give er guess;
an’ watch me hit the nail on the head! Jedge, you know how ol’ Squire
Jones laugh’ erbout that sneeze picture las’ night, an’ how drunk he
were?”
“Squire was putty drunk, Tim. Worse ’n usual.”
“Well, now, I bet squire stop’ an’ tole Aunt Tildy all erbout hit!
Right on his way home, her store is, an’ most gener’ly he begins
to ricollec’ things he was to bring back ’bout time he gits there!
Aunt Tildy gits er big trade o’ that sort. Hit’s a good soberin’-up
stan’ for fellows goin’ thet erway an’ totin’ too much of the brand
o’ O-be-joyful they buy eroun’ town. Yes, sir, squire tole ’er
cert’in--dad blast his ol’ skin, he had oughter be lynched! Where’d she
pull up, Jedge?”
“Lawyer Thomas’s office!”
“Thar now! She ain’t got no common business on ’er mind ter-day! This
ain’t no mortgage, gentlemen, ner no jumpin’ account case. This is
_fight_. She’s done cross the line an’ got on the criminal side o’ th’
docket, Jedge. Let’s go an’ stan’ eroun’ an’ see what’s up!”
But if the idlers sought excitement, they failed to get it. Aunt Tildy,
after half an hour spent in consultation with her lawyer, issued from
his office and, with one withering glance at the group, climbed into
her buggy. When she turned it about, it slid as before, only this time
the sound that came back seemed a defiance. Tim surveyed the little
drama with intense interest.
“See ’er cut the horse, Jedge--three times ’twixt crossings! Mad? Dad
blast my skin, she’s jes natchully er hornet now! Hit’s squire’s work.”
The pictures arrived a week or two later. They set the town wild with
laughter. Merchants, clerks, and customers came out on the sidewalks
up and down the single business street and exchanged criticisms after
an ancient fashion of town people. There was Aunt Tildy, sure enough,
in the act of holding a box of snuff; and there was the old, familiar,
coming, but long delayed, sneeze! The supply of pictures was exhausted
in thirty minutes. At ten o’clock they brought fifty cents each; at
eleven, a dollar; and at noon Tim Broggins sold his copy to the town
bank for one dollar and a half. The cashier was Aunt Tildy’s agent.
The laughter, which began down-town, spread over the dinner-hour
up-town and rippled over the county for a week. No more striking
advertisement had ever been put forth in that region. No other snuff
could touch the trade. “The Coming Sneeze” brand had won and held the
market.
Then one day Lawyer Thomas took the train for Macon and filed suit for
$10,000, as damages direct and punitive, against the snuff company for
infringement of copyright. For, on the day Aunt Tildy had come to town
so angry, she had bought the negative of Belton and applied through him
for a copyright on her own face as portrayed in that photograph. “The
Coming Sneeze” was her own personal property.
After this fact became known, the idlers took their hats off and
cheered Aunt Tildy whenever she passed. Her sole recognition of their
friendliness was an abortive smile that flickered for an instant
against the background of the coming sneeze.
Tim became oracular.
“Tell you what, boys!--Jedge--that’s er new p’int in law, on me! Don’t
er man or er woman own his own face? Fer an instance, has er man got
ter put his face on er record like er guano contrac’ or mule mortgidge
befo’ he can pertec’ hisself? Dad blast my skin, _nobody_ ain’t safe!
I’m er goin’ right up-town an’ git my pictur’ struck off an’ patented
now! Some o’ these smarties like Jack Cromby’ll be comin’ erlong here
bime-by an’ er gittin’ me onter er Christmas cyard, an’ you on er
valentine!” Tim laughed silently. “Po’ Jack!” he said. “Always did lack
jedg_ment_ an’ allus will, I reck’n!”
Jack Cromby’s experience with the managers of his snuff company is
not a matter of public record. He may have suffered criticism or he
may have convinced them that their product was getting, throughout
the rural districts for which it was manufactured, an advertisement
worth all it might cost. If the airing of Aunt Tildy’s complaint was
not confined to a city office and its spectacular values lost in the
multiplicity of graver legal causes, the snuff company would not suffer
much, if any. A local hearing would give him a chance to fill a column
of the town’s weekly paper with a carefully prepared report of the
trial, which report would be quoted in full in all the rural weeklies
of the State. The advertisement department of his company would see to
that.
The transference of Aunt Tildy’s case to her home county was easily
effected. Lawyer Thomas was after a verdict in her favor, and perhaps
was not unmindful of the advertising feature as concerned himself, and
greatly preferred the home atmosphere.
The reappearance of Jack on the scene, therefore, betrayed no evidence
of chagrin. On the contrary, his step was a little more elastic, his
head held a bit higher, his movements were quicker, and his salutes
and greetings full of cheer. Resiliency was written all over him; the
sunrise was on his face.
“Now ding blast his imperdunce!” said Broggins one day when Jack,
passing on the opposite side of the street, had waved a hand to them
joyously and shouted a greeting: “Hello, Tim! Hello, Judge! Major, how
are you? See you boys later!”--“ding blast his imperdunce! What’s he
got up his sleeve now? Jack! Oh, Jack!” he called lazily.
“What’s the matter, Tim?”
“Got you going some--ain’t they?”
“Not--on--your--life, Tim! Watch _me_!”
Aunt Tildy’s case, by consent, came up in her own town before a special
master appointed by the court.
Long before the hour set for the hearing arrived, people began to
appear on the scene. Every wagon-yard, every vacant lot was crowded
with vehicles; every horse-rack and hitching-post was in use. There
had been great days in town before; Robinson’s old one-ring circus
had occasionally depopulated the rural district in its favor, and at
another time the political contest between Democrats and Populists
and Tom Watson’s impassioned speeches had made it the storm-center
of excitement. But no such crowd ever had assembled within the
incorporated limits as that which gathered to see Aunt Tildy through
in her brave assault on the enemy. The special master had elected to
hear the issue in a private office, but indignant public opinion drove
him into the court-house and to the bench, where he was soon surrounded
by an eager crowd so dense that breathing became difficult despite the
fact that all the court-room windows were open.
[Illustration:
Drawn by F. R. Gruger Half-tone plate engraved by R. C. Collins
“‘WELL, NOW, I BET SQUIRE STOP’ AN’ TOLE AUNT TILDY ALL ERBOUT HIT!’”]
Not half the visitors secured entrance. The majority gathered around
the building in the public square, men, women, and children, and took,
second-hand, from those who struggled exhausted out of the doors, such
reports of the proceedings as were not borne to their ears direct on
the vibrant air. Buggies, wagons, carryalls, and the grass afforded
seats, and the good-natured crowd settled down to enjoy the day.
Within the building the master and the lawyers soon arranged
preliminaries and the case was opened, Aunt Tildy sitting serenely
scornful beside her lawyer and facing the curious spectators with
perfect indifference. It was a long trial, stubbornly contested at
every point. The defense protested against “imperfect service” and
“surprise.” Both sides amended and contested each other’s amendments.
Both sides “demurred” and fought each other’s demurrers. Both sides
offered documentary evidence, and both sides moved to “strike out.” And
there were arguments at every crisis. So the day wore along, and the
people outside proceeded to dine from their baskets. They were having
the best of it by far.
Finally a buzz of excitement came from within. Persons visible through
the windows were observed to straighten up and face one way. The crowd
on the outside were now having the worst of it.
About this time Tim Broggins, who had heretofore been in evidence
chiefly around the grocery down the street, where he had all day
elaborately explained between “treats” the features of Aunt Tildy’s
remarkable case, as well as the Federal law governing copyrights,
appeared on the scene bearing a long scaling-ladder. Tim’s approach to
the building with his burden was one of the features of the case not
soon forgotten. The unsteadiness of his gait, the weight and length
of the ladder, and his attempts to face every one who asked him
questions--there were dozens of them--produced a set of gymnastics on
his part that cleared the whole north side of the square. People fled
from him as from a plague, the women with babies leaving first.
Reaching the court-house, Tim made heroic efforts to place the ladder
upright against the wall--a performance that convulsed his audience,
then at a safe distance. The final result was, Tim went over on his
back with the ladder on top of him, escaping miraculously without
broken bones. Friendly hands stood up both Tim and the ladder, and
presently he climbed unsteadily to the second-story window, where,
after a brief survey of the court-room scene and swaying dangerously,
he began to laugh.
“Jedge,” he called eagerly to Oglesby below, “come up! Come up!” The
judge was about as happy as Tim, but more discreet. He shook his head
and shifted his quid.
“Tell us erbout it, Tim!”
“Ol’ lady on th’ stan’, Jedge, hammerin’ away with her umberella!--Go
it, Aunt Tildy!” he shouted. The master’s gavel was heard, and those
within the room near the window turned and shook their heads at Tim.
“What’s she sayin’, Tim?”
“She’s jes p’intedly er-skinnin’ of Jack Cromby! ‘Oudacionest’ is the
shortes’ word I’ve ketched. Go it, Aunt Tildy, I’m er bettin’ on yer!
Whoopee-ee--!”
“Silence in court!” The master’s angry voice could be heard by the
outsiders; and again the people at the window, gesticulating, turned on
Tim, whose expostulations descended.
“Thass all right, gentle_men_,--all right! I ain’t in the court ner
on th’ earth ner in th’ heavens, ner in the waters unner th’--earth!”
Tim made a dangerous lurch as he concluded, but swayed back into
the perpendicular, while the crowd below held their breath. Then he
straightened up and craned his neck over his neighbors’ heads, his
sides shaking while he hammered on the ladder with his fist. The people
below him were burning with curiosity and the judge grew impatient.
“How goes it, Tim?”
“Fine, Jedge! Come up!--Come up! Room at the top! Allus room at the
top!”
“More room down here! What’s she sayin’ now?”
“Oh, gee! Oh, gee!--” Tim laid his head against the wall and joined
loudly in the subdued laugh which rippled through the window. “This
here is er circus right, Jedge! She says anybody says she ever took
er pinch o’ snuff er wet er snuff-stick in her born days is er lower
down houn’ th’n Jack Cromby, an’ Jack is th’ lowes’ she met in thirty
years’ tradin’ with Niggers an’ po’ white trash! Jedge,--oh, Jedge!--”
Tim held on with both hands for safety and let his laughter come. He
finally ended it with a wild “Whoop-ee-ee!” which was followed by
furious strokes of the master’s gavel and the usual pantomime in the
window. These did not trouble Tim. “Jedge, you had oughter see Jack’s
face _now_! _Gem_iny _crim_iny! He better keep outer the way of the
‘befo’ takin’’ man or git er patent on it quick! Hello, Jack!” He had
thrust his head in the window. Somebody shook him and pushed it out.
“All right, _all-l-l_ right, gentlemen. Wouldn’t ’sturb nobody fer
nothin’!”
Then the vibrant voice of Lawyer Thomas rang out clear and loud, and
the attentive people in the square below needed no interpreter. His
arraignment of the foreign firm which had slandered and humiliated
one of the noble women of the county, his scathing denunciation of
Jack Cromby, were things to talk about for years. Despite the gavel,
applause followed his every rounded period, and to this applause Tim
contributed each time a wild whoop that fairly split the air. When
Lawyer Thomas closed with a flight of eloquence that caused the older
people to mention Toombs and Linton Stevens, the applause from within
was answered by cheers from without. At this climax Tim Broggins’s feet
slipped, the outer cheers subsided suddenly into something like a gasp
of horror, and Oglesby beat a hasty retreat. Fortunately, however, Tim
lodged among the upper rounds of the ladder from which he disengaged
himself only after five minutes of hard work. During his struggles to
get back on the upper side of his ladder he was good-naturedly assisted
by advice from the sympathetic crowd who knew a “Roman holiday”
sacrifice by sight if not in terms.
But all good things as well as bad must have an end. There came a few
moments of silence with evidence of close attention above.
“What’s up now, Tim?” The judge drew nearer the ladder to avoid
shouting.
“Hush! The boss is talkin’!” The silence was short; presently the
people in the court-room began to move excitedly and to clap hands,
and once more Tim, who had regained his lost ground, uttered his
“Whoopee-ee!”
“One thousan’, Jedge, one thousan’! That’s what she gits! Oh, gee!--oh,
gee!” he cried, cupping one hand toward Oglesby, who had ventured back
into the danger zone below.
Then a queer sound issued from within, a single sound, a shrill,
high-pitched, prolonged note, so totally divorced from the masculine
hubbub there that it attracted the attention of everybody. And this
time the people within the court-room cheered wildly, joyously, and
hilariously, shaking one another by the shoulders and slapping backs.
But almost instantly there began to mingle with the cheers certain
vocal explosions up and down the whole chromatic scale which, swelling
in volume, finally swallowed up all other sounds, and frantic hands
were seen through the windows clutching at elusive coat-tail pockets.
Tim was holding to the window-sill desperately and swaying violently as
he gasped for breath to answer the excited questions hurled up to him.
He found it at last.
“Aunt Tildy has snee--snee--_sneezed_! And scattered er box
over ev’ybody! The comin’ sneeze has done come! An’--an’--by
gosh!--hit’s--got me--too,--Currasha-h-h-o! Kitty!” The ladder went out
from under him, and he hung, sneezing, to the window-sill, while below
the women shrieked.
However, no tragedy marred the day. Judge Oglesby galloped out from
under the falling ladder, and responsive to the frantic appeals of
women, and greatly to the relief of all, the men at the window reeled
Tim in by his hair and coat-collar and trousers’ seat, despite his
struggles.
“Hurrah for Tim Broggins!” yelled the delighted Oglesby from a safe
distance, waving his hat. A ringing shout went up.
“Currasha-h-h-o!” faintly replied the invisible Tim.
SKIRTING THE BALKAN PENINSULA
FROM TRIEST TO CONSTANTINOPLE
FIFTH PAPER: IN CONSTANTINOPLE
BY ROBERT HICHENS
Author of “The Spell of Egypt,” “The Holy Land,” “The Garden of Allah,”
etc.
WITH PICTURES BY JULES GUÉRIN (SEE FRONTISPIECE) AND PHOTOGRAPHS
Constantinople is beautiful and hateful. It fascinates and it repels.
And it bewilders--how it bewilders! No other city that I have seen
has so confused and distressed me. For days I could not release
myself from the obsession of its angry tumult. Much of it seems
to be in a perpetual rage, pushing, struggling, fighting, full of
ugly determination to do--what? One does not know, one cannot even
surmise what it desires, what is its aim, if, indeed, it has any aim.
These masses of dark-eyed, suspicious, glittering people thronging
its streets, rushing down its alleys, darting out of its houses,
calling from its windows, muttering in its dark and noisome corners,
gathering in compact, astonishing crowds in its great squares before
its mosques, blackening even its waters, amid fierce noises of sirens
from its innumerable steamers and yells from its violent boatmen, what
is it that they want? Whither are they going in this brutal haste,
these Greeks, Corsicans, Corfiotes, Montenegrins, Armenians, Jews,
Albanians, Syrians, Egyptians, Arabs, Turks? They have no time or
desire to be courteous, to heed any one but themselves. They push you
from the pavement. They elbow you in the road. Upon the two bridges
they crush past you, careless if they tread upon you or force you
into the mud. If you are in a caique, traveling over the waters of
the Golden Horn, they run into you. Caique bangs into caique. The
boatmen howl at one another, and somehow pull their craft free. If
you are in a carriage, the horses slither round the sharp corners,
and you come abruptly face to face with another carriage, dashing on
as yours is dashing, carelessly, scornfully, reckless apparently of
traffic and of human lives. There seems to be no plan in the tumult, no
conception of anything wanted quietly, toward which any one is moving
with a definite, simple purpose. The noise is beyond all description.
London, even New York, seems to me almost peaceful in comparison with
Constantinople. There is no sound of dogs. They are all dead. But even
their sickly howling, of which one has heard much, must surely have
been overpowered by the uproar one hears to-day, except perhaps in the
dead of night.
Soldiers seem to be everywhere. To live in Constantinople is like
living in some vast camp. When I was there, Turkey was preparing
feverishly for war. The streets were blocked with trains of artillery.
The steamers in the harbor were vomiting forth regiments of infantry.
Patrols of horsemen paraded the city. On my first night in Pera,
when, weary with my efforts to obtain some general conception of what
the spectacular monster really was, what it wanted, what it meant,
what it was about to do, I had at length fallen asleep toward dawn,
I was wakened by a prolonged, clattering roar beneath my windows. I
got up, opened the shutters, and looked out. And below me, in the
semi-darkness, I saw interminable lines of soldiers passing: officers
on horseback, men tramping with knapsacks on their backs and rifles
over their shoulders; then artillery, gun-carriages, with soldiers
sitting loosely on them holding one another’s hands; guns, horses, more
horses, with officers riding them; then trains of loaded mules. On and
on they went, and always more were coming behind. I watched them till
I was tired, descending to the darkness of Galata, to the blackness of
old Stamboul.
Gradually, as the days passed by, I began to understand something of
the city, to realize never what it wanted or what it really meant,
but something of what it was. It seemed to me then like a person with
two natures uneasily housed in one perturbed body. These two natures
were startlingly different. One was to me hateful--Pera, with Galata
touching it. The other was not to be understood by me, but it held
me with an indifferent grasp, and from it there flowed a strange and
almost rustic melancholy that I cared for--Stamboul. And between these
two natures a gulf was fixed--the gulf of the Golden Horn.
[Illustration: From a photograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood
THE WATER-FRONT OF STAMBOUL, WITH PERA IN THE DISTANCE]
Pera is a mongrel city, set on a height and streaming blatantly to
Galata; a city of discolored houses not unlike the houses of Naples;
of embassies and churches; of glaring shops and cafés glittering with
plate-glass, through which crafty, impudent eyes are forever staring;
of noisy, unattractive hotels and wizen gardens, where bands play at
stated hours, and pretentious, painted women from second-rate European
music-halls posture and squall under the electric lamps. There is no
rest, no peace in Pera. There seems to be no discipline. Motor-cars
make noises there even in the dead of night, and when standing still,
such as I never before heard or imagined. They have a special breed
of cars in Pera. Bicyclists are allowed to use motor sirens to clear
the way before them. One Sunday when, owing to a merciful strike of the
coachmen, there was comparative calm, I saw a boy on horseback going at
full gallop over the pavement of the Grande Rue. He passed and repassed
me five times, lashing his horse till it was all in a lather. Nobody
stopped him. You may do anything, it seems, in Pera, if it is noisy,
brutal, objectionable. Pera has all that is odious of the Levant:
impudence, ostentation, slyness, indelicacy, uproar, a glittering
commonness. It is like a blazing ring of imitation diamonds squeezing a
fat and dirty finger. But it is wonderfully interesting simply because
of the variety of human types one sees there. The strange thing is
that this multitude of types from all over the East and from all the
nations of Europe is reduced, as it were, by Pera to a common, a very
common, denominator. The influence of place seems fatal there.
[Illustration: From a photograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood
A STREET OF HAREM HOMES IN CONSTANTINOPLE]
Stamboul is a city of wood and of marble, of dusty, frail houses that
look as if they had been run up in a night and might tumble to pieces
at any moment, and of magnificent mosques, centuries old, solid, huge,
superb, great monuments of the sultans. The fire-tower of Galata
looks toward the fire-tower of Stamboul across a forest of masts;
but no watchfulness, no swiftness of action, can prevent flames from
continually sweeping through Stamboul, leaving waste places behind
them, but dying at the feet of the mosques. As one looks at Stamboul
from the heights of Pera, it rises on its hills across the water,
beyond the sea of the Golden Horn, like a wonderful garden city, warm,
almost ruddy, full of autumnal beauty, with its red-brown roofs and its
trees. And out of its rich-toned rusticity the mosques heave themselves
up like leviathans that have nothing in common with it; the Mosque of
Santa Sophia, of the Sultan Achmet, with its six exquisite minarets,
of Mohammed the Conqueror, of Suleiman the Magnificent, and how many
others!
[Illustration: From a photograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood
GALATA BRIDGE, WHICH CONNECTS GALATA AND PERA]
There is no harmony between the mosques of Stamboul and the houses of
Stamboul. The former are enduring and grand; the latter, almost like
houses of cards. And yet Stamboul is harmonious, is very beautiful.
Romance seems brooding over it, trailing lights and shadows to clothe
it with flame and with darkness. It holds you, it entices you. It sheds
upon you a sense of mystery. What it has seen, Stamboul! What it has
known! What a core of red violence that heart has and always has
had! When the sunset dies away among the autumnal houses and between
the minarets that rise above the city like prayers; when the many
cypresses that echo the minarets in notes of dark green become black,
and the thousands of houses seem to be subtly run together into a huge
streak of umber above the lights at the waterside; when Seraglio Point
stretches like a shadowy spear toward the Bosporus and the Black Sea,
and the coasts of Asia fade away in the night, old Stamboul murmurs to
you with a voice that seems to hold all secrets, to call you away from
the world of Pera to the world of Aladdin’s lamp. Pera glitters in the
night and cries out to heaven. Old Stamboul wraps itself in a black
veil and withdraws where you may not follow.
[Illustration: THE COURTYARD OF THE “PIGEON’S MOSQUE”
FROM THE PAINTING MADE FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN]
When I think of Constantinople as a whole, as seen, say, from the top
of the Galata tower, set up by the Genoese, I think of it as the most
wonderful, the most beautiful, and the most superbly situated city I
ever have seen.
It is an Eastern city of the sea, pierced by water at its heart, giving
itself to the winds from Marmora, from the Golden Horn, from the
Bosporus, from the Black Sea. The snows of Asia look upon it across
the blue waters of Marmora, where the Iles des Princes sleep in a
flickering haze of gold. Stamboul climbs, like Rome, to the summits of
seven hills, and gazes over the great harbor, crowded with a forest
of masts, echoing with sounds of the sea, to Galata, and to Pera on
the height. And the Golden Horn narrows to the sweet waters of Europe,
but broadens toward Seraglio Point into the Bosporus, that glorious
highway of water between Europe and Asia, lined with the palaces and
the villas of sultans and pashas, of Eastern potentates and of the
European Powers: Yildiz, and Dolma bagtché, Beylerbey, and Cheragan,
the great palace of the Khedive of Egypt’s mother, with its quay upon
the water, facing the villa of her son, which stands on the Asian
shore, lifted high amid its woods, the palace of the “sweet waters
of Asia,” the gigantic red-roofed palace where Ismail died in exile.
Farther on toward Therapia, where stand the summer embassies of the
Powers, Robert College, dignified, looking from afar almost like a
great gray castle, rises on its height above its sloping gardens. Gaze
from any summit upon Constantinople, and you are amazed by the wonder
of it, by the wonder of its setting. There is a vastness, a glory of
men, of ships, of seas, of mountains, in this grand view which sets
it apart from all other views of the world. Two seas send it their
message. Two continents give of their beauty to make it beautiful. Two
religions have striven to sanctify it with glorious buildings. In the
midst of its hidden squalor and crime rises what many consider the most
beautiful church--now a mosque--in the world. Perhaps no harbor in
Europe can compare with its harbor. For human and historical interest
it can scarcely be equaled. In the shadow of its marvelous walls,
guarded by innumerable towers and girdled by forests of cypresses, it
lies like some great magician, glittering, mysterious, crafty, praying,
singing, intriguing, assassinating, looking to East and West, watchful,
and full of fanaticism.
I crossed the new bridge. The famous old timber bridge, which rocks
under your feet, has been moved up the Golden Horn, and now spans the
sea by the marine barracks. Evening was falling; a wind had brought
clouds from the Black Sea. The waters were colorless, and were licked
into fretful wavelets, on which the delicate-pointed caiques swayed
like leaves on a tide. Opposite to me, at the edge of Stamboul, the
huge Mosque of Yeni-Validé-Jamissi rose, with its crowd of cupolas
large and small and its prodigious minarets. Although built by two
women, it looked stern and male, seemed to be guarding the bridge, to
be proclaiming to all the mongrels from Galata and Pera, who hurried
from shore to shore, that Stamboul will make no compromise with the
infidel, that in the great space before this mosque the true East in
Europe begins.
Russia was in the wind, I thought. The breath of the steppes was
wandering afar to seek--what? The breath of the desert? The great
mosque confronted it, Islam erect, and now dark, forbidding under the
darkening sky. Even the minarets had lost their delicate purity, had
become fierce, prayers calling down destruction on unbelievers. And all
the cries of Stamboul seemed to gather themselves together in my ears,
keening over the sea above which I stood--voices of many nations; of
Turks, Arabs, Circassians, Persians, of men from the wilds of Asia and
the plains of India; voices of bashi-bazouks and of slaves; even, thin
high voices of eunuchs. From the quays to right and left of the bridge
crowds of people rose to my sight and hurried away; to them crowds
of people descended, sinking out of my sight. Soldiers and hamals
passed, upright and armed, bending beneath the weight of incredible
loads. Calls of Albanian boatmen came up from the sea. From the city of
closely packed fishermen’s vessels rose here and there little trails
of smoke. On their decks dim figures crouched about wavering fires. A
gnarled beggar pushed me, muttering, then whining uncouth words. Along
the curving shore, toward the cypress-crowned height of Eyub, lights
were strung out, marking the waterside. Behind me tall Pera began
to glitter meretriciously. The Greek barbers, I knew, were standing
impudently before the doors of their little saloons, watching the
evening pageant as it surged slowly through the Grande Rue and toward
the Taxim Garden. Diplomats were driving home from the Sublime Porte
in victorias. The “cinemas” were gathering in their mobs. Tokatlian’s
was thronged with Levantines whispering from mouth to mouth the current
lies of the day. Below, near the ships, the business men of Galata were
rushing out of their banks, past the large round-browed Montenegrins
who stand on the steps, out of their offices and shops, like a mighty
swarm of disturbed bees. The long shriek of a siren from a steamer
near Seraglio Point tore the gloom. I went on, despite menacing Validé
Sultan, I lost myself in the wonderful maze of Stamboul.
Stamboul near the waterside is full of contrasts so sharp, so strange
that they bewilder and charm, and sometimes render uneasy even one
who has wandered alone through many towns of the East. Sordid and
filthy, there is yet something grandiose in it, something hostile and
threatening in the watchful crowds that are forever passing by. Between
the houses the sea-wind blows up, and you catch glimpses of water, of
masts, of the funnels of steamers. Above the cries of the nations rise
the long-drawn wails and the hootings of sirens. The traffic of the
streets is made more confusing by your constant consciousness of the
traffic of the sea, embraced by it, almost mingling with it. Water and
wind, mud and dust, cries of coachmen and seamen, of motor-cars and
steamers, and soldiers, soldiers, soldiers passing, always passing.
Through a window-pane you catch a glitter of jewels and a glitter of
Armenian eyes gazing stealthily out. You pass by some marble tombs
sheltered by weary trees, under the giant shadow of a mosque, and a
few steps farther on you look through an arched doorway and see on the
marble floor of a dimly lighted hall half-naked men, with tufts of
black hair drooping from partly shaved heads and striped towels girt
round their loins, going softly to and fro, or bending about a fountain
from which water gushes with a silvery noise. This is a Turkish bath.
Throughout Stamboul there are bath-houses with little cupolas on their
roofs, and throughout Stamboul there are tombs; but the uneasy and
watchful crowds throng the quarters near the waterside and the great
bazaars and the spaces before the principal mosques. They are not
spread throughout the city. Many parts of Stamboul are as the waste
places of the earth, abandoned by men.
By night they are silent and black; by day they look like the ways of
a great wooden village from which the inhabitants have fled. In their
open spaces, patches of waste ground, perhaps a few goats are trying to
browse among rubbish and stones, a few little children are loitering,
two or three silent men may be sitting under a vine by a shed, which
is a Turkish café. There is no sound of steps or of voices. One has no
feeling of being in a great city, of being in a city at all. Little
there is of romance, little of that mysterious and exquisite melancholy
which imaginative writers have described. Dullness and shabbiness brood
over everything. Yet an enormous population lives in the apparently
empty houses. Women are watching from the windows behind the grilles.
Life is fermenting in the midst of the dust, the discomfort, the almost
ghastly silence.
The great bazaar of Stamboul is a city within a city. As you stand
before its entrance you think of a fortress full of immured treasures.
And there are treasures of price under the heavy arches, in the long
roofed-over lanes. The bazaars of Tunis seem minute, of Damascus
ephemeral, of Cairo dressed up, of Jerusalem crushed together and
stifling, when compared with the vast bazaars of Stamboul, which have
a solidity, a massiveness, unshared by their rivals. I saw there many
cheap goods such as I have seen on certain booths in the East End of
London, but they were surrounded with a certain pomp and dignity, with
a curious atmosphere of age. Some parts of the bazaars are narrow.
Others are broad and huge, with great cupolas above them, and, far
up, wooden galleries running round them. Now and then you come upon
an old fountain of stained marble and dim faience about which men are
squatting on their haunches to wash their faces and hands and their
carefully bared arms. The lanes are paved and are often slippery.
Just under the lofty roof there are windows of white glass, and about
them, and on arches and walls, there are crude decorations in strong
blues and purples, yellows and greens. The serious merchants from many
lands do not beset you with importunities as you pass; but sometimes a
lustrous pair of eyes invites you to pause, or a dark and long-fingered
hand gently beckons you toward a jewel, a prayer-carpet, a weapon, or
something strange in silver or gold or ivory.
One day a man from Bagdad invited me to buy a picture as I drew near
to him. It was the portrait of a dervish’s cap worked in silk. The
cap, orange-colored and silver, was perched upon a small table (in
the picture) above which hung curtains in two shades of green. A heavy
gilt frame surrounded this “old master” of the East. We bargained. The
merchant’s languages were broken, but at length I understood him to say
that the cap was a perfect likeness. I retorted that all the dervishes’
caps I had seen upon living heads were the color of earth. The
merchant, I believe, pitied my ignorance. His eyes, hands, arms, and
even his shoulders were eloquent of compassion. He lowered the price of
the picture by about half a farthing in Turkish money, but I resisted
the blandishment and escaped into the jewel bazaar, half regretting a
lost opportunity.
[Illustration: From a photograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood
PUBLIC LETTER-WRITERS IN A CONSTANTINOPLE STREET]
Many Turkish women come to the bazaars only to meet their lovers.
They cover a secret desire by a pretense of making purchases. From the
upper floor of the yellow-blue-and-red kiosk, in which Turkish sweets
are sold, and you can eat the breasts of chickens cooked deliciously
in cream and served with milk and starch, I have watched these subtle
truants passing in their pretty disguises suggestive of a masked ball.
They look delicate and graceful in their thin and shining robes, like
dominoes, of black or sometimes of prune-color, with crape dropping
over their faces and letting you see not enough; for many Turkish women
are pretty.
One day I was in the upper room of a photographer’s shop when two
Turkish women came in and removed their veils, standing with their
backs to the English infidel. One was obviously much younger than the
other, and seemed to have a beautiful figure. I was gazing at it,
perhaps rather steadily, when, evidently aware of my glance, she turned
slowly and deliberately round. For two or three minutes she faced me,
looking to right and left of me, above me, even on the floor near my
feet, with her large and beautiful blue-gray eyes. She was lovely.
Young, perhaps eighteen, she was slightly painted, and her eyebrows
and long curling lashes were blackened. Her features were perfect, her
complexion was smooth and brilliant, and her expression was really
adorable. It seemed to say to me quietly:
“Yes, you are right. It is foolish ever to conceal such a face as this
with a veil when really there is not too much beauty in the world.
Mais que voulez-vous? Les Turcs!” And the little hanum surely moved
her thin shoulders contemptuously. But her elderly companion pulled at
her robe, and slowly she moved away. As the two women left the room,
the photographer, a Greek, looked after them, smiling. Then he turned
to me, spread out his thin hands, and said, with a shrug, “Encore des
désenchantées!”
I thought of the disenchanted one day as I sat among the letter-writers
in the large and roughly paved court of the “Pigeon’s Mosque,” or
Mosque of Bajazet II. For hours I had been wandering on foot through
the upper quarters of old Stamboul, and I could not release my mind
from the dull pressure of its influence. All those wooden houses,
silent, apparently abandoned, shuttered--streets and streets of them,
myriads of them! Now and then above the carved wood of a lattice I had
seen a striped curtain, cheap, dusty, hanging, I guessed, above a cheap
and dusty divan. The doors of the houses were large and solid, like
prison doors. Before one, as I slowly passed by, I had seen an old Turk
in a long quilted coat of green, with a huge key in his hand, about to
enter. He glanced to right and left, then thrust the key into the door.
I had felt inclined to stop and say to him:
“That house has been abandoned for years. Every one has migrated long
ago from this quarter of Stamboul. If you stay here, you will be quite
alone.” But the old Turk knew very well that all the houses were full
of people, of imprisoned women. What a fate to be one of the prisoners!
That was my thought as I looked at the sacred pigeons, circling
in happy freedom over the garden where Bajazet slumbers under his
catafalque, fluttering round the cupolas of their mosque, and
beneath the gray-pink-and-white arcade, with its dull-green and
plum-colored columns, or crowding together upon the thin branches of
their plane-tree. A pure wind blew through the court and about the
marble fountain. The music made by the iridescent wings of the birds
never ceased, and their perpetual cooing was like the sweet voice of
content. The sunshine streamed over the pavement and penetrated under
the arches, making the coral beads of a rosary glow and its gold
beads glitter, giving to the amber liquid carried on a tray by a boy
to a barber beneath his awning a vivacity almost of flame. Beside me
a lover was dictating a letter to a scribe, who squatted before his
table, on which were arranged a bright-blue inkstand and cup, a pile of
white paper, and a stand with red pens and blue pencils. Farther on,
men were being shaved, and were drinking coffee as they lounged upon
bright-yellow sofas. Near me a very old Turk, with fanatical, half-shut
eyes, was sitting on the ground and gazing at the pink feet of the
pigeons as they tripped over the pavement, upon which a pilgrim to the
mosque had just flung some grain. As he gazed, he mechanically fingered
his rosary, swiftly shifting the beads on and on, beads after beads,
always two at a time. Some incense smoldered in a three-legged brazier,
giving out its peculiar and drowsy smell. On the other side of the
court a fruit-seller slept by a pile of yellow melons. The grain thrown
by the pilgrim was all eaten now, and for a moment the sunshine was
dimmed by the cloud of rising and dispersing birds, gray and green,
with soft gleams like jewels entangled in their plumage. Some flew far
to the tall white-and-gray minaret of their mosque, others settled on
the cupola above the fountain. A few, venturous truants, disappeared in
the direction of the seraskierat wall, not far off. The greater number
returned to their plane-tree on the right of the lover and the scribe.
And as the lover suggested, and the scribe wrote from right to left,
the pigeons puffed out their breasts and cooed, calling other pilgrims
to remember that even the sacred have their carnal appetites, and to
honor the poor widow’s memory before going up to the mosque to pray.
[Illustration: MOSQUE OF THE YENI-VALIDÉ-JAMISSI, CONSTANTINOPLE
PAINTED FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN]
One day I went up the hill toward Yildiz to see the Selamlik. That
morning the sultan was going to pray in the mosque of wood which Abdul
Hamid built close to the mysterious, walled-in quarter of palaces,
harems, kiosks, gardens, barracks, and parks which he made his prison.
From the Bosporus you can see it extending from the hilltop almost
to the sea, a great property, outside the city, yet dominating it,
with dense groves of trees in which wild animals were kept, with open
spaces, with solitary buildings and lines of roofs, and the cupola of
the mosque of the soldiers. All about it are the high walls which a
coward raised up to protect him and his fear. The mosque is below the
great entrance-gates on a steep hillside beyond the walls. A large
modern house, white, with green shutters, in which Abdul Hamid used to
grant audiences and, I believe, to give banquets, looks down on it.
From the upper windows of this dwelling the Turks say the ex-sultan
often stared at his city through powerful glasses.
The mosque is not large. It is yellow and white, with a minaret of
plaster on the side next the sea, and a graveled courtyard surrounded
by green iron railings and planted with a few trees. On the side next
to Yildiz is a steep bank. A road runs up the hill to the left of
the mosque as you face Yildiz, and another hidden road descends from
the gates and gives access to the courtyard behind the mosque. The
sultan has therefore a choice of two routes, and nobody seems to know
beforehand which way he will come. There were very few tourists in
Constantinople when I was there. People were afraid of war, and before
I left the Orient express had ceased to run. But I found awaiting the
padishah many Indian pilgrims, a large troop of pilgrims from Trebizond
who were on their way to Mecca, several Persians wearing black toques,
and a good many Turks. These were in the courtyard close to the mosque,
where I was allowed to stand by the aristocratic young chief of police,
who wore a woolly, gray, fez-shaped cap. Outside the railings stood a
dense crowd of veiled women.
Soon after I arrived a squadron of the body-guard rode up from the
city, carrying red-and-green pennons on long staffs, and halted before
the gates of the palace. And almost at the same moment the palace
musicians, in dark-blue, red, and gold, wearing short swords, and
carrying shining brass instruments, marched into the inclosure. They
stood still, then dropped their instruments on the ground, moved away,
and sat down on the bank, lolling in easy attitudes. Time slipped
by, and important people strolled in, officers, court officials,
attendants. Eunuchs shambled loosely past in wonderfully fitting, long
frock-coats, wearing turquoise rings on their large weak hands, and
looking half-piteously impudent. Men hurried into the mosque carrying
brown Gladstone bags. Nazim Pasha, weary and grave, the weight of war
already on his shoulders, talked with the master of the ceremonies
beside steps before which lay a bright-yellow carpet.
This is the sultan’s entrance to the mosque. It is not imposing. The
two flights of steps curve on right and left to a trivial glass porch
which reminded me of that bulbous addition to certain pretentious
houses which is dignified by the name “winter garden.” Some smart, very
strong Turkish sailors lined up opposite me. Not far from the porch
stood a group of military doctors in somber uniforms. A second yellow
carpet was unrolled to cover the flight of steps on the left of the
porch, more eunuchs went by, more Gladstone bags were carried past me.
Then came soldiers in yellowish brown, and palace officials in white
and blue, with red collars. Two riding-horses were led by two grooms
toward the back of the mosque. The musicians rose languidly from the
bank, took up their instruments, turned round, and faced toward Yildiz.
Through the crowd, like a wind, went that curious stir which always
precedes an important event for which many people are waiting. Nazim
Pasha spoke to the chief of police, slowly moving his white-gloved
hands, and then from the hilltop came a rhythmical, booming noise of
men’s voices, very deep, very male: the soldiers before the gates were
acclaiming their sovereign. I saw a fluttering movement of pennons; the
sultan had emerged from the palace and was descending by the hidden
road to perform his devotions.
In perhaps five minutes an outrider appeared from behind the mosque,
advancing slowly parallel with the bank, followed by a magnificent
victoria, covered with gold and lined, I think, with satin, drawn by
two enormous brown horses the harness of which was plated with gold.
They were driven from the box by a gorgeous coachman, who was standing.
The musicians, turning once more, struck up the “Sultan’s Hymn,” the
soldiers presented arms; the brown horses wheeled slowly round, and
I saw within a few paces of me, sitting alone in the victoria in a
curious, spread-out attitude, a bulky and weary old man in a blue
uniform, wearing white kid gloves and the fez. He was staring straight
before him, and on his unusually large fair face there was no more
expression than there is on a white envelop. Women twittered. Men
saluted. The victoria stopped beside the bright-yellow carpet. After
a moment’s pause, as if emerging from a sort of trance, the Calif of
Islam got up and stepped slowly and heavily out, raising one hand to
his fez. Then, as if with an abrupt effort to show alertness, he walked
almost quickly up the steps to the glass porch, turned just before
entering it, stood for an instant looking absolutely blank, again
saluted, swung round awkwardly and disappeared. Almost immediately
afterward one of his sons, a rather short and fair young man with a
flushed face, attended by an officer, hurried past me and into the
mosque by another entrance.
A few persons went away while his Majesty was praying; but all the
pilgrims stayed, and I stayed with them. Several of the officials
walked about on the gravel, talked, smoked, and drank orangeade, which
a servant brought to them on a silver tray. Now and then from within
the mosque came to us the loud murmur of praying voices. The soldiers
of the body-guard descended the hill from the gates of Yildiz on
foot, leading their horses, and assembled outside the courtyard. They
were followed by a brilliant squadron of cavalry in dark-blue-and-red
uniforms, with green-and-red saddle-cloths; their blood-red flag was
borne before them, and their own music accompanied them. The soldiers
in yellowish brown had piled arms and were standing at ease, smoking
and talking. Twenty minutes perhaps went by, then a Gladstone bag was
carried out of the mosque. We all gazed at it with reverence. What was
in it? Or, if there was nothing, what had been recently taken out of
it? I never shall know. As the bag vanished, a loud sound of singing
came from within, and a troop of palace guards in vivid-red uniforms,
with white-and-red toques trimmed with black astrakhan, marched into
the court led by an officer. Some gendarmes followed them. Then the
chief of police tripped forward with nervous agility, and made us all
cross over and stand with our backs to the bank in a long line. An
outrider, dressed in green and gold, and holding a big whip, rode in on
a huge strawberry-roan horse. Behind him came a green-and-red brougham
with satin cushions, drawn by a pair of strawberry roans. A smart
coachman and footman sat on the box, and on each side rode two officers
on white horses.
Now the singing ceased in the mosque. People began to come out. The
sultan’s son, less flushed, passed by on foot, answering swiftly
the salutes of the people. The brougham was drawn up before the
bright-yellow carpet. Nazim Pasha once more stood there talking with
several officials. The soldiers had picked up their arms, the sailors
were standing at attention.
Then there was a very long wait.
“The sultan is taking coffee.”
Another five minutes passed.
“The sultan is sleeping.”
On this announcement being made to me, I thought seriously of departing
in peace; but a Greek friend, who had spoken to an official, murmured
in my ear:
“The sultan is awake and is changing his clothes.”
This sounded promising, and I decided to wait.
It seemed to me that his Majesty was a very long time at his toilet;
but at last we were rewarded. Abruptly from the glass porch he appeared
in European dress, with very baggy trousers much too long in the leg
and a voluminous black frock-coat. He stood for a moment holding the
frock-coat with both hands, as if wishing to wrap himself up in it.
Then, still grasping it, he walked quickly down the steps, his legs
seeming almost to ripple beneath the weight of his body, and stepped
heavily into the brougham, which swung upon its springs. The horses
moved, the carriage passed close to me, and again I gazed at this
mighty sovereign, while the Eastern pilgrims salaamed to the ground.
Mechanically he saluted. His large face was still unnaturally blank,
and yet somehow it looked kind. And I felt that this old man was weary
and sad, that his long years of imprisonment had robbed him of all
vitality, of all power to enjoy; that he was unable to appreciate the
pageant of life in which now, by the irony of fate, he was called to
play the central part. All alone he sat in the bright-colored brougham,
carrying a flaccid hand to his fez and gazing blankly before him. The
carriage passed out of the courtyard, but it did not go up the hill to
the palace.
“The sultan,” said a voice, “is going out into the country to rest and
to divert himself.”
To rest, perhaps; but to divert himself!
After that day I often saw before me a large white envelop, and the
most expressive people in the world were salaaming before it.
(To be continued)
[Illustration]
THE LITTLE PEOPLE
BY AMELIA JOSEPHINE BURR
Because I left the hearthstone to watch the stars at night,
Because I loved the forest and wandered there alone,
The little fairy people who mock at human might
They set a spell upon me and chose me for their own.
The Little People called me--and oh, their word was sweet!
Fair as the towers of sunset I saw their kingdom rise--
But I knew my mother listened for the coming of my feet.
In tears the vision darkened and vanished from mine eyes.
The Little People called me to cast with them my lot
Or nevermore to see them, for mine own kindred’s sake.
The heart cried out within me, and yet I faltered not.
My people were my people--what choice was mine to make?
My people are my people, and dear they are to me,
Yet sometimes comes a longing--till I hardly dare to pray--
For that far land of wonder that I shall never see,
And for the Little People from whom I turned away.
[Illustration]
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
BY JOHN KEATS
WITH A PICTURE BY PAUL MEYLAN
Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms
So haggard and so woebegone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the mead,
Full beautiful--a fairy’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
I set her on my pacing steed
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A fairy song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said,
“I love thee true.”
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore;
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed--ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hill’s side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all:
They cried, “La belle dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!”
I saw their starved lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: Drawn by Paul Meylan. Half-tone plate engraved by C. W.
Chadwick.
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
“_I set her on my pacing steed
And nothing else saw all day long._”--~Keats.~
]
[Illustration]
THE NEW MINISTER’S GREAT OPPORTUNITY[4]
BY C. H. WHITE
Author of “The Village Convict,” “Eli,” etc.
WITH A PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR AND A PICTURE BY HARRY TOWNSEND
(NOTEWORTHY STORIES OF THE LAST GENERATION)
“The minister’s got a job,” said Mr. Snell.
Mr. Snell had been driven in by a shower from the painting of a barn,
and was now sitting, with one bedaubed overall leg crossed over the
other, in Mr. Hamblin’s shop.
Half a dozen other men who had likewise found in the rain a call to
leisure looked up at him inquiringly.
“How do you mean?” said Mr. Noyes, who sat beside him, girt with a
nail-pocket. “‘The minister’s got a job?’ How do you mean?” And Mr.
Noyes assumed a listener’s air, and stroked his thin, yellow beard.
Mr. Snell smiled with half-shut, knowing eyes, but made no answer.
“How do you mean?” repeated Mr. Noyes. “‘The minister’s got a job?’ Of
course he has--got a stiddy job. We knew that before.”
“Very well,” said Mr. Snell, with a placid face; “seeing’s you know so
much about it, enough said. Let it rest there.”
“But,” said Mr. Noyes, nervously blowing his nose, “you lay down this
proposition: ‘The minister’s got a job.’ Now I ask, what is it?”
Mr. Snell uncrossed his legs, and stooped to pick up a last, which he
proceeded to scan with a shrewd, critical eye.
“Narrer foot,” he said to Mr. Hamblin.
“Private last--Doctor Hunter’s,” said Mr. Hamblin, laying down a
boot upon which he was stitching an outer sole, and rising to make a
ponderous, elephantine excursion across the quaking shop to the earthen
water-pitcher, from which he took a generous draft.
“Well, Brother Snell,” said Mr. Noyes,--they were members together of a
secret organization, of which Mr. Snell was P. G. W. T. F., “ain’t you
going to tell us? What is this job? That is to say, what--is it?”
Brother Snell set his thumbs firmly in the armholes of his waistcoat,
surveyed the smoke-stained pictures pasted on the wall, looked keen,
and softly whistled. At last he condescended to explain.
“Preaching Uncle Capen’s funeral sermon.”
There was a subdued general laugh. Even Mr. Hamblin’s leathern apron
shook.
Mr. Noyes, however, painfully looking down upon his beard to draw out a
white hair, maintained his serious expression.
“I don’t see much ‘job’ in that,” he said. “A minister’s supposed to
preach a hundred and four sermons in each and every year, and there’s
plenty more where they come from. What’s one sermon more or less when
stock costs nothing? It’s like wheeling gravel from the pit.”
[Illustration: HEMAN W. CHAPLIN (“C. H. WHITE”)
Author of “The New Minister’s Great Opportunity”]
“O. K.,” said Mr. Snell; “if ’tain’t no trouble, then ’tain’t.
But seeing’s you know, suppose you specify the materials for this
particular discourse.”
Mr. Noyes looked a little disconcerted.
“Well,” he said, “of course I can’t set here and compose a funereal
discourse offhand without no writing-desk; but there’s stock enough to
make a sermon of any time.”
“Oh, come,” said Mr. Snell, “don’t sneak out; particularize.”
“Why,” said Mr. Noyes, “you’ve only to open the leds of your Bible, and
choose a text, and then: When did this happen? Why did this happen? To
who did this happen? and so forth and so on; and there’s your sermon.
I’ve heard ’em so a hunderd times.”
“All right,” said Mr. Snell; “I don’t doubt, you know: but as for me,
I for one never happened to hear of anything that Uncle Capen did but
whitewash and saw wood. Now, what sort of an autobiographical sermon
could you make out of sawing wood?”
Whereat Leander Buffum proceeded, by that harsh, guttural noise well
known to country boys, to imitate the sound of sawing through a log.
His sally was warmly greeted.
“The minister might narrate,” said Mr. Blood, “what Uncle Capen said to
Issachar, when Issachar told him that he charged high for sawing wood.
‘See here,’ says Uncle Capen, ‘s’pos’n’ I do. My arms are shorter ’n
other folks’s, and it takes me just so much longer to do it.’”
“Well,” said Mr. Noyes, “I’m a fair man; always do exactly right is
the rule I go by; and I will frankly admit now and here that if it’s a
biographical discourse they want, they’ll have to cut corners.”
“Pre-cisely,” said Mr. Snell; “and that’s just what they do want.”
“Well, well,” said Mr. Hamblin, laboriously rising and putting his
spectacles into their silver case, for it was suppertime, “joking one
side, if Uncle Capen never did set the pond afire, we’d all rather take
his chances to-day, I guess, than those of some smarter men.”
At which Mr. Snell turned red; for he was a very smart man, and had
just failed, to everybody’s surprise,--for there was no reason in the
world why he should fail,--and had created more merriment for the
public than joy among his creditors by paying a cent and a half on the
dollar.
* * * * *
“Come in and sit down,” said Dr. Hunter as the young minister appeared
at his office door; and he tipped back in his chair, and put his feet
upon a table. “What’s the news?”
“Doctor,” said Mr. Holt, laughing, as he laid down his hat and took an
arm-chair, “you told me to come to you for any information. Now, I
want materials for a sermon on old Mr. Capen.”
The doctor looked at him with a half-amused expression, and then
sending out a curl of blue smoke, he watched it as it rose melting into
the general air.
“You don’t smoke, I believe?” he said to the minister.
Holt shook his head and smiled.
The doctor put his cigar back into his mouth, clasped one knee in his
hands, and fixed his eyes in meditation on a one-eared Hippocrates
looking down with a dirty face from the top of a bookcase. Perhaps the
doctor was thinking of the two or three hundred complimentary visits he
had been permitted to make upon Uncle Capen within ten years.
Presently a smile broke over his face.
“I must tell you before I forget it,” he said, “how Uncle Capen
nursed one of my patients. Years and years ago I had John Ellis, our
postmaster now, down with a fever. One night Uncle Capen watched; you
know he was spry and active till he was ninety. Every hour he was to
give Ellis a little ice-water, and when the first time came, he took a
table-spoonful--there was only a dim light in the room--and poured the
ice-water down Ellis’s neck. Well, Ellis jumped as much as so sick a
man could, and then lifted his finger to his lips. ‘Here’s my mouth,’
said he. ‘Why, why,’ said Uncle Capen, ‘is that your mouth? I took that
for a wrinkle in your forehead.’”
The minister laughed.
“I have heard a score of such stories to-day,” he said. “There seem to
be enough of them; but I can’t find anything adapted to a sermon, and
yet they seem to expect a detailed biography.”
“Ah, that’s just the trouble,” said the doctor. “But let us go into the
house. My wife remembers everything that ever happens, and she can post
you up on Uncle Capen, if anybody can.”
So they crossed the dooryard into the house.
Mrs. Hunter was sewing; a neighbor, come to tea, was crocheting
wristers for her grandson. They were both talking at once as the doctor
opened the sitting-room door.
“Since neither of you appears to be listening,” he said, as they
started up, “I won’t apologize for interrupting. Mr. Holt is
collecting facts about Uncle Capen for his funeral sermon, and I
thought that my good wife could help him out, if anybody could. So I
will leave him.”
And the doctor, nodding, went into the hall for his coat and
driving-gloves, and, going out, disappeared round the corner of the
house.
“You will really oblige me very much, Mrs. Hunter,” said the
minister--“or Mrs. French, if you can give me any particulars about
old Mr. Capen’s life. His family seem to be rather sensitive, and they
depend on a long, old-fashioned funeral sermon; and here I am utterly
bare of facts.”
“Why, yes,” said Mrs. Hunter. “Of course. Now--”
“Why, yes; everybody knows all about him,” said Mrs. French.
And then they laid their work down and relapsed into meditation.
“Oh!” said Mrs. Hunter in a moment. “No, though--”
“Why, you know,” said Mrs. French--“no, I guess, on the whole--”
“You remember,” said the doctor’s wife to Mrs. French, with a faint
smile, “the time he papered my east chamber, don’t you--how he made the
pattern come?”
And then they both laughed gently for a moment.
“Well, I have always known him,” said Mrs. French; “but really, being
asked so suddenly, it seems to drive everything out of my head.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Hunter, “and it’s odd that I can’t think of exactly
the thing just at this minute; but if I do, I will run over to the
parsonage this evening.”
“Yes, so will I,” said Mrs. French. “I know that I shall think of
oceans of things just as soon as you have gone.”
“Won’t you stay to tea?” said Mrs. Hunter as Holt rose to go. “The
doctor has gone; but we never count on him.”
“No, I thank you,” said Mr. Holt. “If I am to invent a biography, I may
as well be at it.”
Mrs. Hunter went with him to the door.
“I must just tell you,” she said, “one of Uncle Capen’s sayings. It was
long ago, when I was first married, and came here. I had a young men’s
Bible class in Sunday-school, and Uncle Capen came into it. He always
wore a cap, and sat at meetings with the boys. So one Sunday we had in
the lesson that verse,--you know,--that if all these things should be
written, even the world itself could not contain the books that should
be written; and there Uncle Capen stopped me, and said he, ‘I suppose
that means the world as known to the ancients.’”
* * * * *
Holt put on his hat, and with a smile turned and went on his way toward
the parsonage; but he remembered that he had promised to call at what
the local paper termed “the late residence of the deceased,” where, on
the one hundredth birthday of the centenarian, according to the poet’s
corner:
“Friends, neighbors, and visitors he did receive
From early in the morning till dewy eve.”
So he turned his steps in that direction.
He opened the clicking latch of the gate and rattled the knocker on the
front door of the little cottage, and a tall, motherly woman of the
neighborhood appeared and ushered him in.
Uncle Capen’s unmarried daughter, a woman of sixty, her two brothers
and their wives, and half a dozen neighbors were sitting in the tidy
kitchen, where a crackling wood-fire in the stove was suggesting a
hospitable cup of tea.
The minister’s appearance, breaking the formal gloom, was welcomed.
“Well,” said Miss Maria, “I suppose the sermon is all writ by this
time. I think likely you’ve come down to read it to us.”
“No,” said Holt, “I have left the actual writing of it till I get all
my facts. I thought perhaps you might have thought of something else.”
“No; I told you everything there was about Father yesterday,” she
said. “I’m sure you can’t lack of things to put in; why, Father lived
a hundred years--and longer, too, for he was a hundred years and six
days, you remember.”
“You know,” said Holt, “there are a great many things that are very
interesting to a man’s immediate friends that don’t interest the
public.”
And he looked to Mr. Small for confirmation.
“Yes, that’s so,” said Mr. Small, nodding wisely.
“But, you see, Father was a centenarian,” said Maria, “and so that
makes everything about him interesting. It’s a lesson to the young, you
know.”
“Oh, yes, that’s so,” said Mr. Small, “if a man lives to be a
centurion.”
“Well, you all knew our good friend,” said Mr. Holt. “If any of you
will suggest anything, I shall be very glad to put it in.”
Nobody spoke for a moment.
“There’s one interesting thing,” said one of the sons, a little old man
much like his father; “that is, that none of his children have ever
gone meandering off. We’ve all remained”--he might almost have said
remained seated--“all our lives right about him.”
“I will allude to that,” said Mr. Holt. “I hope you have something
else, for I am afraid of running short of material: you see, I am a
stranger here.”
“Why, I hope there won’t be any trouble about it,” said Maria, in
sudden consternation. “I was a little afraid to give it out to so young
a man as you, and I thought some of giving the preference to Father
Cobb; but I didn’t quite like to have it go out of the village, nor
to deprive you of the opportunity, and they all assured me that you
was smart. But if you’re feeling nervous, perhaps we’d better have him
still; he’s always ready.”
“Just as you like,” said Holt, modestly; “if he would be willing to
preach the sermon, we might leave it that way, and I will add a few
remarks.”
But Maria’s zeal for Father Cobb was a flash in the pan. He was a
sickly farmer, a licensed preacher, who, when he was called upon
occasionally to meet a sudden exigency, usually preached on the
beheading of John the Baptist.
“I guess you’ve got things enough to write,” said Maria, consolingly;
“you know how awfully a thing does drag out when you come to write it
down on paper. Remember to tell how we’ve all stayed right here.”
* * * * *
When Holt went out, he saw Mr. Small beckoning him to come to where his
green wagon stood under a tree.
“I must tell you,” he said, with an awkwardly repressed smile, “about a
trade of Uncle Capen’s. He had a little lot up our way that they wanted
for a schoolhouse, and he agreed to sell it for what it cost him,
and the selectmen, knowing what it cost him,--fifty dollars,--agreed
with him that way. But come to sign the deed, he called for a hundred
dollars.
“‘How’s that?’ says they. ‘You bought it of Captain Sam Bowen for fifty
dollars.’
“‘Yes, but see here,’ says Uncle Capen, ‘it’s cost me on an average
five dollars a year for the ten year’ I’ve had it for manure and
plowing and seed, and that’s fifty dollars more.’
“‘But you’ve sold the garden stuff off it, and had the money,’ says
they.
“‘Yes,’ says Uncle Capen, ‘but that money’s spent and eat up long ago.’”
The minister smiled, shook hands with Mr. Small, and went home.
* * * * *
The church was crowded. Horses filled the sheds, horses were tied to
the fences all up and down the street. Funerals are always popular in
the country, and this one had a double element of attractiveness. The
whole population of the town, having watched for years with a lively
interest Uncle Capen’s progress to his hundredth birthday, expected now
some electrical effect analogous to an apotheosis.
In the front pews were the chief mourners, filled with the sweet
intoxication of preëminence.
The opening exercises were finished, a hymn was sung:
“Life is a span,”
and Father Cobb arose to make his introductory remarks.
He began with some reminiscences of the first time he saw Uncle Capen,
some thirty years before, and spoke of viewing him even then as an
aged man, and of having remarked to him that he was walking down the
valley of life with one foot in the grave. He called attention to Uncle
Capen’s virtues, and pointed out their connection with his longevity.
He had not smoked for forty years; therefore, if the youth who were
present desired to attain his age, let them not smoke. He had been a
total abstainer, moreover, from his seventieth year; let them, if they
would rival his longevity, follow his example. The good man closed with
a feeling allusion to the relatives, in the front pew, mourning like
the disciples of John the Baptist after his “beheadment.” Another hymn
was sung:
“A vapor brief and swiftly gone.”
Then there was deep silence as the minister rose and gave out his text:
“I have been young, and now I am old.”
* * * * *
“At the time of the grand review in Washington,” he said, “that mighty
pageant that fittingly closed the drama of the war, I was a spectator,
crippled then by a gunshot wound, and unable to march. From an upper
window I saw that host file by, about to record its greatest triumph by
melting quietly into the general citizenship; a mighty, resistless army
about to fade and leave no trace, except here and there a one-armed
man, or a blue flannel jacket behind a plow. Often now, when I close
my eyes, that picture rises, that gallant host, those tattered flags;
and I hear the shouts that rose when my brigade, with their flaming
scarfs, went trooping by. Little as I may have done as a humble member
of that army, no earthly treasure could buy from me the thought of my
fellowship with it, or even the memory of that great review.
“But that display was mere tinsel show compared with the great pageant
that has moved before those few men who have lived through the whole
length of the last hundred years.
“Before me lies the form of a man who, though he has passed his days
with no distinction but that of an honest man, has lived through some
of the most remarkable events of all the ages. For a hundred years a
mighty pageant has been passing before him. I would rather have lived
that hundred years than any other. I am deeply touched to reflect
that he who lately inhabited this cold tenement of clay connects our
generation with that of Washington. And it is impossible to speak of
one whose great age draws together this assembly without recalling
events through which he lived.
“Our friend was born in this village. This town then included the
adjoining towns to the north and south. The region was then more
sparsely settled, although many houses standing then have disappeared.
While he was sleeping peacefully in the cradle, while he was opening
on the world childhood’s wide, wondering eyes, those great men whose
names are our perpetual benediction were planning for freedom from a
foreign yoke. While he was passing through the happy years of early
childhood, the fierce clash of arms resounded through the little strip
of territory which then made up the United States. I can hardly realize
that, as a child, he heard as a fresh, new, real story of the deeds of
Lexington from the lips of men then young who had been in the fight; or
listened, as one of an eager group gathered about the fireside, or in
the old, now deserted taverns on the turnpike, to the story of Bunker
Hill.
“And when, the yoke of tyranny thrown off in our country and in France,
Lafayette, the mere mention of whose name brings tears to the eyes of
every true American, came to see the America that he loved and that
loved him, he on whose cold, rigid face I now look down joined in one
of those enthusiastic throngs that made the visit like a Roman triumph.
“But turn to the world of nature, and think of the panoramic scenes
that have passed before those now impassive eyes. In our friend’s
boyhood, there was no practical mode of swift communication of news. In
great emergencies, to be sure, some Paul Revere might flash his beacon
light from a lofty tower; but news crept slowly over our hand-breadth
nation, and it was months after a Presidential election before the
result was generally known. He lived to see the telegraph flashing
swiftly about the globe, annihilating time and space, and bringing the
scattered nations into greater unity.
“And think, my hearers, for one moment of the wonders of electricity.
Here is a power which we name, but do not know, that flashes through
the sky, that shatters great trees, burns buildings, strikes men dead
in the fields; and we have learned to lead it, all unseen, from our
house-tops to the earth; we tame this mighty, secret, unknown power
down into serving us as a daily messenger; and no man sets the limits
now to the servitude that we shall yet bind it down to.
[Illustration: Drawn by Harry Townsend. Half-tone plate engraved by H.
C. Merrill.
“‘NOW, WHAT I WANT TO KNOW IS, WHAT ON EARTH THERE WAS IN IT ABOUT
UNCLE CAPEN?’”]
“Again, my hearers, when our friend was well advanced in life, there
was still no better mode of travel between distant points than the
slow, rumbling stage-coach; many who are here remember well its delays
and discomforts. He saw the first tentative efforts of that mighty
factor steam to transport more swiftly. He saw the first railroad built
in the country; he lived to see the land covered with the iron network.
“And what a transition is this! Pause for a moment to consider it.
How much does this imply? With the late improvements in agricultural
machinery, with the cheapening of steel rails, the boundless prairie
farms of the West are now brought into competition with the fields
of Great Britain in supplying the Englishman’s table, and seem not
unlikely, within this generation, to break down the aristocratic
holding of land, and so perhaps to undermine aristocracy itself.”
So the preacher continued, speaking of different improvements, and
lastly of the invention of daguerreotypes and photographs. He called
the attention of his hearers to this almost miraculous art of indelibly
fixing the expression of a countenance, and drew a lesson as to the
permanent effect of our daily looks and expression on those among whom
we live. He considered at length the vast amount of happiness which
had been caused by bringing pictures of loved ones within the reach of
all, the increase of family affection and general good feeling which
must have resulted from the invention, and suggested a possible lifting
of the civilization of the older nations through the constant sending
home, by prosperous adopted citizens, of photographs of themselves and
of their homes, and referred to the effect which that must have had in
new immigration.
Finally, he adverted to the fact that the sons of the deceased, who sat
before him, had not yielded to the restless spirit of adventure, but
had found “no place like home.”
“But I fear,” he said at last, “that the interest of my subject has
made me transgress upon your patience; and with a word or two more I
will close.
“When we remember what hard, trying things often arise within a single
day, let us rightly estimate the patient well-doing of a man who has
lived a blameless life for a hundred years. When we remember what harm,
what sin, can be crowded into a single moment, let us rightly estimate
the principle that kept him so close to the golden rule not for a day,
not for a decade or a generation, but for a hundred years.
“And now, as we are about to lay his deserted body in the earth, let
not our perceptions be dulled by the constant repetition in this
world of death and burial. At this hour our friend is no longer aged;
wrinkles and furrows, trembling limbs and snowy locks, he has left
behind him, and he knows, we believe, to-day more than the wisest
philosopher on earth. We may study and argue all our lives to discover
the nature of life or the form it takes beyond the grave; but in one
moment of swift transition the righteous man may learn it all. We
differ widely one from another here in mental power. A slight hardening
of some tissue of the brain might have left a Shakspere an attorney’s
clerk. But in the brighter world no such impediments prevent, I
believe, clear vision and clear expression; and differences of mind
that seem world-wide here may vanish there. When the spirit breaks its
earthly prison and flies away, who can tell how bright and free the
humblest of us may come to be? There may be a more varied truth than we
commonly think in the words, ‘The last shall be first.’
“Let this day be remembered. Let us think of the vast display of
nature’s forces which was made within the long period of our old
neighbor’s life; but let us also reflect upon the bright pageant that
is now unrolling itself before him in a better world.”
* * * * *
That evening Miss Maria and her brothers, sitting in state in the
little old house, received many a caller, and the conversation was
chiefly upon one theme: not the funeral sermon, although that was
commended as a frank and simple biographical discourse, but the great
events which had accompanied Uncle Capen’s progress through this world,
almost like those which Horace records in his ode to Augustus.
“That’s trew, every word,” said Apollos Carver. “When Uncle Capen was a
boy there wasn’t one railroad in the hull breadth of the United States,
and, just think, why, now you can go in a Pullerman car clear acrost to
San Francisco. My daughter lives in Oakland, just across a ferry from
there.”
“Well, then, there’s photographing,” said Captain Abel. “It doos seem
amazing, as the minister said: you set down, and square yourself, and
slick your hair, and stare stiddy into a funnel, and a man ducks his
head under a covering, and, _pop!_ there you be as natural as life, if
not more so. And when Uncle Capen was a young man there wasn’t nothing
but portraits and mini’tures, and these black-paper-and-scissors
portraits--what do they call ’em? Yes, sir, all that come in under his
observation.”
“Yes,” said one of the sons, “it’s wonderful. My wife and me was took
setting on a settee in the Garden of Eden, lions and tigers and other
scriptural objects in the background.”
“And don’t forget the telegraph,” said Maria; “don’t forget that.”
“Trew,” said Apollos, “that’s another thing. I hed a message come oncet
from my son that lives to Taunton. We was all so sca’t and faint when
we see it that we didn’t none of us dast to open it, and finally the
feller that druv over with it hed to open it fer us.”
“What was there in it?” said Mr. Small. “Sickness, death?”
“No; he wanted his thick coat expressed up. But my wife didn’t get over
the shock for some time. Wonderful thing that telegraph. Here’s a man
standing a hundred miles off, like enough, and harpooning an idea chock
right into your mind.”
“Then that was a beautiful truth,” said Maria, “that Father and
Shakspere would probably be changed round in heaven. I always said
Father wasn’t appreciated here.”
“Well,” said Apollos, “’tis always so; we don’t begin to realize the
value of a thing tell we lose it. Now that we sort o’ stand and gaze at
Uncle Capen at a fair distance, as it were, he looms. If he only hedn’t
kep’ so quiet always about these ’ere wonders; a man really ought, in
justice to himself, to blow his own horn jest a little. But that was a
grand discourse, wasn’t it, now?”
“Oh, yes,” said Maria, “though I felt nervous for the young man; but
when you come to think what materials he had to make a sermon out of,
why, how could he help it? And yet I doubt not he takes all the credit
to himself.”
“I should really have liked to have heard Father Cobb treat the
subject,” said Mrs. Small, rising to go, and nodding to her husband.
“’Twas a grand theme. But it was a real chance for the new minister.
Such an opportunity doesn’t happen not once in a lifetime.”
* * * * *
The next morning, after breakfast, on his way home from the
post-office, the minister stopped in at Dr. Hunter’s office.
The doctor was reading a newspaper.
Holt took a chair in silence.
The doctor laid down the paper and eyed him quizzically, and then
slowly shook his head.
“I don’t know about you ministers,” he said. “I attended the funeral;
I heard the biographical discourse; I understand it gave great
satisfaction. I have reflected on it over night, and now, what I want
to know is, what on earth there was in it about Uncle Capen?”
The minister smiled.
“I think,” he replied, “that all that I said about Uncle Capen was
strictly true.”
[Illustration]
[4] Reprinted from ~The Century~ for August, 1883, and included in the
author’s volume of short stories “Five Hundred Dollars,” published by
Little, Brown & Company, Boston.
[Illustration]
BEAUTY IN EDEN
BY ALFRED NOYES
When Beauty, white
As lilies in Eden night,
Woke for the deepening heavens’ delight,
Her rosy looks
Taught laughter to the brooks,
And were the world’s first gospel-books.
And wild things came,
By loveliness made tame,
And fawned on her pure feet with eyes of flame.
Yet, though her splendor
Made the fierce earth surrender,
And drew those burning panthers to attend her;
Though in her bowers,
She ruled harmonious hours,
And rode her lions with a leash of flowers;
They did not lose
The suppleness of their thews,
Nor that fierce might, loved by the warrior Muse.
Music hath fire,
Passion and deep desire,
That now plumb hell, and now to heaven aspire.
Yet, to be strong,
Must that tumultuous throng
Never escape the reins that guide the song.
So, gloriously,
She ruled earth, sky, and sea,
Being herself the law of harmony.
Strong charioteer,
The steeds are thine to steer!
Rule our weak souls! Bring back the Golden Year.
[Illustration]
CAMILLA’S FIRST AFFAIR
BY GERTRUDE HALL
Author of “What Camilla did with Her Money,” etc.
WITH PICTURES BY EMIL POLLAK-OTTENDORFF
Never did there live a pretty woman so poor in faith as Camilla, where
the protestations of her adorers were concerned.[5] It was certainly
not when they professed to find her charming that she was incredulous,
nor yet when they declared themselves _épris_. It was when they
asserted for their sentiments, durability; for themselves, the same
conspicuous constancy as distinguishes the north star.
Particularly during the period when she was known as Princess Elaguine,
and lived in Paris, was comment made--in those circles where it
is thought no shame to talk over lovely ladies--upon the ultimate
inaccessibility of the princess, who was yet so ready to be courted.
She liked the society of men, delighted in the atmosphere of their
lively admiration, accepted their compliments as animals in the Zoo
will swallow buns. But she no more reposed confidence in them than she
would have reached with her hand through the bars of the wild-beast
cages.
A singular case. For she was Italian, and though her eyes were cool
and green, there lurked in her face somewhere--her lips, perhaps, or
her eyelids, or her cheeks or chin--what physiognomist could tell?--a
promise of warmth and richness that drew foolish fellows to press on
and on--till they came to a barrier, beyond which she looked at them
with ironical eyes which told them that, sorry for them though she was,
she did not believe in them one little bit. Not one of her critics had
the intelligence, probably, to guess what was at bottom of it. (Yet how
common it is, when you find a person afraid of dogs, to discover that
he was bitten when a child!) And far from Camilla would it have been to
set them on the right scent.
The truth was, in her mind there lived the memory--quite fresh still
when she chose to recall it, so deep a mark had it made--of a passage
in her youth to which was referable the line of a whole life with
regard to the tender passion. It was the memory, as you have guessed,
of her first affair.
* * * * *
It was in Florence, where she was born and brought up. They were
tarradiddles which she told later about her origin: that her mother
was a Roman marchesa and her father court physician to Victor Emmanuel
II, and that her name was Cordez. Her name, as a matter of truth, was
Bugiani. Her mother had at one time waited on customers in a village
_osteria_, at another had been a house-servant. The man who called her
daughter was something or other at the railway-station. Her aunt was
a cook. Her sister Bianca worked in a little shop on Porta Rossa at
making straw-braid into hats, with other gossiping little women who ate
their simple lunch out of a piece of newspaper. Her brother Olindo was
apprenticed to a gardener.
When the truth about Camilla comes out, anybody may know how it
happened that she received an education so immeasurably above that
enjoyed by the rest of her family--as fine an education for a woman as
Florence could afford. The elegant boarding-school where she lived ten
months of the year, the Institut Heller, had a reputation to maintain.
Her two-months’ vacation Camilla spent at home, perforce, with her
plebeian family, in the hot city.
The house stood in a wide, pleasant street, and had a handsome
entrance. The main door, open all day, let you under a high arched way.
The door to the ground floor gave on this, and the staircase climbed
from it to the upper stories, each occupied by a different family. This
passage ended in a court, with a plot of earth and an oleander or two;
on this opened the modest quarters of the Bugiani, who in consideration
of certain favors performed certain duties.
From all such Camilla was exempt. Antenore--Babbo, she called
him--never suggested that she should work in the summer like Bianca,
at straw-braiding or some such thing. It went against the grain, but
what would you? Being reserved for a different destiny, she must not be
creating for herself a past she might blush for, nor yet hardening her
hands with labor. So she never answered the night ring at the big front
door, never touched the huge pump-handle in the court, by which this
house, boasting every modern convenience, was supplied with water in
all its kitchens.
Every morning at nine she appeared in the _portone_ dressed for the
street, a picture of the well-born, well-bred young lady who never
steps out unescorted. But where was her maid, where her duenna? About
this matter there was simply nothing to be done. A bitter necessity
to Antenore that his young daughters should run about Florence
unattended--part of the hardship that drew from him so often the
remark that Poverty is a Pig.
Had he been able, however, to keep a constant eye upon Camilla, he
would have seen nothing to blame. She went quietly and swiftly, looking
neither to right nor left, her well-brought-up eyes slid away from
those of Man, appearing to prefer the paving-stones. She conducted
herself like the young ladies of good family among whom she had lived;
her clothes were such as theirs, their traditions had perfectly become
hers; whether escorted or not, she was not to be taken for any but one
of them.
Down the long street she walked to the Institut Heller, which occupied
the first floor of a characteristic brown Florentine palazzo, at
the corner of a wide sunny piazza with a marble-faced old church.
Camilla went there to practise. As she had no piano at home, it had
been arranged that she should continue during vacation to use the
Pleyel upright in the school music-room, and incidentally redirect
Mademoiselle Heller’s mail. The servant left as caretaker could neither
write nor read.
So at nine daily Camilla would set forth, in a pale yellow batiste and
a black hat with a plume, carrying gloves and a parasol. Her charming
eyebrows were obscured by the “fringe” which had come into fashion--for
this was 1879; a thick braid hung down her neck, where it was turned
back and fastened with a velvet bow.
She was not yet very pretty. The green sepals wrapped the folded
rose-leaves rather straightly, the future rose hardly yet knew itself
to be a rose. Antenore had no such great need to feel uneasiness at the
thought of bees and butterflies.
Her little head, of course, was full of the vague dreams of sixteen,
which does not mean the dreams of a New England maiden of sixteen.
Camilla’s grandmother had been married before that age, one of her
schoolmates, only fifteen, had left school to become affianced; the
Veronese Juliet, it will be remembered, was fourteen. Though Camilla
fulfilled the European ideal of a _jeune fille_, unstained by so much
as an unauthorized breath, and had the pretty, virginal air of such,
she may be described, rather than as a stick of green wood, as a little
bonfire in preparation--dry brush and resinous pine, all duly laid and
for the present cold, but ready to sparkle and flame when the Torch
should come.
Unconscious of this, she could still think of forty things besides
love. Her chief sentiment in reaching the freedom of the streets was
that it would be pleasant to be for several hours away from home,
to have a series of cool, empty, palatial rooms all to herself--to
practise, yes, but also to read and to look out of the window.
That was her chief sentiment on the fifth of July. By the
fifteenth--But it cannot be said that Camilla ever honestly regretted
the relative simplicity which she lost that summer.
With all her air of minding her own distinguished affairs, she yet saw
everything. She knew by sight the tenants of the house, of course, for
whom the Babbo and Olindo, or Aunt Battistina and Bianca, combining
forces, agitated the stiff pump-handle. She was familiar with the
faces she passed daily on her way. And she naturally remarked, the
second time he appeared there, a youth, an idle, slender _damerino_,
who seemed waiting for something, on the opposite side of the street.
The third time she saw him, she wondered whom he was there for. The
breath-catching possibility striking her that he waited to see her come
forth--for that style of thing was done in Florence in those days--she
gave him his share of an abstracted look, taking in the house fronts
and the lamp-post near which he stood. A handsome man, young, the
faintest smear of charcoal-dust on his upper lip--seventeen, perhaps. A
son of family, quite certainly.
No, he was not there for her sake; he remained watching the door, while
pretending not to, after she had passed. For somebody else, then,
living in the same house. She had seen him half a dozen times before
she could determine whom. One evening she recognized him in the shadowy
form hanging about the stairs, once even in the court--her court! She
knew all by that time, and scorned him. It was the French maid on the
second floor. This person took a child out for the air every morning;
she went to the Fortezza, where the little one could play.
And he, a gentleman, could degrade himself to pursue that creature!
Parisian, yes, but ugly, and not a day less than twenty-five.
The rather sweet, hungry, expectant, young-dog look of a boy belonging
to circles where the maidens are so guarded that if there is to be
romance it must be sought where there are greater facilities, mollified
her not at all. It disgusted her. It disgusted her to the point finally
that, running into him unexpectedly under the archway, she drew herself
up and gave him a look in which was expressed all that decent people,
_la gente per bene_, think of such bad taste, a prolonged, punishing,
proud look; then passed on, her heart thumping with the excitement of
the thing.
On the day following, glancing from the tail of her eye to see whether
he were at his usual post, she did not find him. Before she had reached
the end of the street he passed her, then lingered and allowed her
to pass. She did it in a hurry, with downcast eyes and rising color.
Reaching Miss Heller’s, she rang with all her might. Never, it seemed
to her, never had old Italia in her distant kitchen been so slow in
pulling the wire that released the catch and allowed the little door
cut in the large one to swing inward.
When at midday she was obliged to come out again, the gallant was
standing sentry across the way. She was aware of him following her at a
just respectful distance.
To be followed by a man is frightening, for Man is a Hunter. There is
a difference, though, in the degree of disagreeableness of the fright,
if the Hunter is so desirable-looking as to be himself an imaginable
object of hunt.
Next day it was the same thing. At a just respectful distance he
followed her to school and back. On the day after that, the same.
When this proceeding had been kept up for three days, it took rightly
the aspect of romance, filling the thoughts of sixteen with surmises,
tremors, a sense of initiation, and the excitement of a great secret.
On the fourth morning, as she was reaching the school, he passed ahead
of her, and pushed a letter under the door.
It was inscribed, “To the First who shall enter.” It ran thus:
Signorina,
I write to crave your pardon, and to explain my apparent
impertinence in following you on the street. But how could a man
of any sensibility endure the thought of so much _grazia_ and
_gentilezza_ walking unprotected in a city with whose iniquities
he is but too well acquainted? I cannot conceive of the false
security or the remissness that so exposes a dove to falcons. Fear
not that I shall myself presume to offer the offense which it is
my determination to prevent others from offering. Regard me solely
as a _cavaliere_ whose courage and strength are dedicated to your
service.
Suo devotissimo,
~Giulio Forti~.
How delicate! How knightly! Her climbing of the stairs was
sleep-walking. She adjusted the slats of the blind so that, unseen, she
could look at him where he loitered in the doorway across the street.
He must have very little to do, really, to afford all that time. But
of course it was vacation for him as for her. And he had the resource
of cigarettes. Now he was talking with the porter, of whom he had
just begged a light. He took off his straw hat to fan himself with
it, for even on the shady side of the freshly watered street it was
hot weather. He was a pretty boy--her words for him were “a handsome
man”--with a covering of close black astrakhan to his small round
head, a speaking eye, dainty features, and a warm-toned skin agreeably
sprinkled with freckles. He wore the carefully fitted clothes of a
good class, new, but not too new, and a light silk cravat chosen with
thought.
Camilla that day omitted scales and exercises. Her piano could be heard
in the street. She played her show pieces, “Les Cloches du Monastère,”
“Les Soupirs,” “La Caressante,” various Chopin waltzes.
When she came forth at noon, and her body-guard sprang from his door to
fall into the relation of a dog at her heels, he first begged wistfully
with his eyes to know by a look from her that he was understood and
forgiven. She gave him the look he wanted. A moment later he hustled
off the sidewalk a man who, he considered, had passed her too closely.
There was a high word or two, then the workman grumblingly fell away
from the irate young gentleman shaking his slender cane.
They were new heavens and new earth between which Camilla now moved
forth at morning, with an oleander at her breast, token that she was
a woman and adorned herself to be the more loved. For there was no
supposing that the vague fever in her veins, glowing by day and filling
the night with dreams, had not been caught, by a contagion as strange
as subtle, from the fever in his brown eyes.
At the end of a week his face, when upon reaching the school he hurried
forward without a word to pull the bell-handle for her, was pale with
anguish, and his eyes catching hers expressed urgent reproach. On the
morning following he unexpectedly pressed inside the door after her,
and pushed it to. They stood alone in the great stone hallway. He was
obviously agitated, and her heart had stopped.
“Signorina,” he burst forth, hoarse with the sincerity of his emotion,
“what have I done? I wish to know what you have against me. Never do
you give me a look, never a smile. You regard me with horror, it is
evident. And why? Why? I must find out before I live another day. If I
am repulsive to you I had best go and drown myself. Why, tell me, do
you act toward me as if I were either invisible or else a little dust
in the street? Am I a toad, a reptile, in your eyes?”
Camilla had clenched one hand and pressed it over her heart; she lifted
the other to her throat. Giulio was not surprised that a young girl
should be terrified in the circumstances to the point of fainting.
In this great moment the exhibition of her timidity must not make
him timid. Trembling at his own courage, he took her hands, in part
to reassure and if necessary support, in part to conquer further. He
pressed them with all his strength, and commanded, imploringly, “Look
at me in the face, and see whether I am such a monster! See whether you
find in my eyes anything but love and by loyalty! Look, I beg, look!
Look!” He waited, straining her hands.
Camilla, thus masterfully summoned, slowly lifted her face and looked.
Both of them looked volumes.
The next thing, he was gently grasping her head. She averted her lips
with unaffected shrinking. He very respectfully kissed her hair. He
hoped he knew how a well-brought-up man behaves with a well-brought-up
young girl.
A hard parrot voice, coming from above, out of sight, made them both
jump. “Who is there?” It was Italia, who, when she had pulled the wire
that governed the street-door, was wont to come down from her kitchen
and let the visitor in at the door of the first floor. Seeing no one,
she was making inquiry.
“It’s Camilla,” was called to her from below. “I am coming. I am
resting a minute. Leave the door open.”
The stone-floored echoing hallway where they stood was vast as a royal
ballroom. At the farther end, broad, low stairs vanishing upward; on
the right, the long wall, unbroken save by one door--the ground floor
was reserved by the owner, always absent; at the left, three open
arches letting into a court, the bottom of a wide shaft with windows,
over which a square of burning blue sky. The pavement of this court was
green with the damp of centuries; a stone coping, projecting from the
wall, hemmed in enough earth to support a spindling rose-tree.
“I am forced to go away to-morrow,” Giulio, still short-breathed with
emotion, whispered spasmodically; “and how can I go without learning
my fate from you? I am compelled to visit my married sister and be
absent for two eternal weeks. My family is obliged to stay in town
through the summer, you know, by my grandmother’s serious illness; but
my parents insist that I shall go for the change. I vow I will not! I
will disobey, and incur I know not what from their displeasure, unless
you promise to answer the letters I shall write you. Do you promise?
Viareggio. Poste Restante. I will not compromise you by remaining
longer. On the way home make me happy by a glance now and then, when it
will not be observed. Farewell, my soul! I am your slave!”
Among the letters to be redirected to Mademoiselle Heller she found
his first letter. She answered it there at the school, when she ought
to have been practising. In the two weeks of his absence she received
about twenty letters, for in the ardor of his passion he sometimes
wrote twice a day. The same did she.
As life was far from monotonous at the Mediterranean watering-place,
where in beautiful striped tights of white and blue he took glorious
swims twice a day, one might suppose that bits of news, information,
anecdote, a little fun, would have found their way into his letters.
Not at all. They were love-letters neat. He would write:
How, O my adored _fidanzata_, can I live through the days and
months and years that must pass before the blessing of the
sacerdote will have given me the right to call you mine, wholly,
wholly, and forever, mine! When I think that at the end of summer
I must, as my parents have decided, go to Zurich to complete my
studies, and be divided from you by mountains as well as months, I
feel that, in view of the anguish of that distance and waiting, it
had almost been better had I never met the beam of your beauteous
eye. But courage! Let us take courage, thinking of our future
happiness.
She would write:
In the night, in dreams, you are always with me. I cannot sleep
but you are there; and so I find myself, when I am not ardently
wishing for a letter, sighing for the night and dreams. _Caro mio
bene_, should you ever love me less, how could I endure it? If ever
your heart should change toward me, if ever another should have
the place with you which it is my joy and honor to hold, keep it a
secret from me, I conjure you! I might kill myself, or perhaps you!
A day earlier than she had expected, he stood at the Heller entrance,
in time to slip in with her. He folded her to his breast, both of them
breathless and throbbing. But again with a brusk instinctive movement
she got her lips out of the way, and he controlled his impulse. A man
who respects himself respects his own affianced. He pressed a long,
silent kiss upon her brow.
Raising a warning finger, she listened a second, then sang out to
Italia, “I am going to rest a minute before doing the stairs. Let the
door stand open for me.”
They seated themselves on the bottom steps for a good long scene in
whispers.
Never were there such facilities, for Italia would not again think of
the door, save to suppose that Camilla had come in by it and shut it
behind her. Any one descending could be heard long before seen. Giulio
had time to tiptoe out, Camilla would appear to be just arriving. When
the danger was past, she could let Giulio in again.
The facilities were, in fact, too great! These young things had leisure
to say everything a thousand times over.
Both of them knew a great deal about lovers, from general rumor and
private confidence, from drama, book, and song. Their wide-awake Latin
minds had early incorporated all that lore, and they acted now in as
grown-up a manner as they knew. Camilla developed an umbrageous mood
one day, during which she questioned him about his past. Oh, nothing of
the smallest consequence, he said, with regard to a certain _francese_.
He had had the opportunity to render her a service, once, when she
was caught in the rain with her little charge. He had chanced to be
carrying an umbrella, that was all. After that, he had continued the
acquaintance, just a little, from courtesy.
[Illustration: “THEY SEATED THEMSELVES ON THE BOTTOM STEPS FOR A GOOD
LONG SCENE IN WHISPERS”]
Novices, they played their parts according to romantic conventions
known to both, beneath which the unconventional heart did in the case
of each after its nature.
It appeared, as gradually as a flower fades on its stalk, that even
he, even in vacation, had duties occasionally, engagements, pressing
engagements sometimes, things that must be attended to for his father,
or mother, or grandmother. He would have to consult his watch.
Sometimes he could stay only a minute.
She asked him one day why he was in such a heavy humor, so silent.
He asked sadly in reply how he could be different, living in a house
where all were so deeply concerned over the condition of his poor
grandmother. Added to this, his aunt was arriving to see her mother,
and was bringing his cousins. They would take up his whole time for the
next few days.
Camilla looked at him attentively. Murmuring, “My idol!” he drew her
cheek down to his shoulder and imprisoned her hands in those pretty,
dry, brown hands of his, which had the gift of pleasing her so much.
“La Caressante,” as it rang forth from her window on certain of those
soft, summer mornings, might have been mistaken for a musical imitation
of artillery sputtering amid the varied sounds of battle, “Les Soupirs”
for the note-portrayal of a wreck tossed in a stormy swell.
One morning, with the affected briskness of a man who does his best
to put a good face on a tiresome business, he said, “Expect me not,
my Camilla, to-morrow. I am sent off to visit my married sister up at
Vicchio. A sudden decision. My family, saying that I have grown thin,
as I have, indeed, with the cruel anxiety of our secret, believe I need
the change. A dreadful bore, but what can I do?”
“Another married sister? How many more married sisters, _caro mio_,
have you in your pocket?”
“There is still another--three in all. I was born long after them, the
only man-child, which gives an excuse to old friends of the family for
saying that my parents spoil me. And I am sorry to tell you, Camilla,
that you must not write to me there, for there is no such thing as
_poste restante_. The letters are brought to the villa by a peasant and
my sister distributes them. Nor shall I find it possible to write you,
for I could not post a letter unknown.”
Bianca that night was roused from the deadness of sleep by
unaccustomed signs of life in her bedfellow, Camilla, who, she realized
with horror, was struggling in the effort to keep her sobbing inside
and unheard.
“What is it? Oh, what is the matter?” she asked, feeling in the dark
for her sister’s shoulder.
“_Non mi seccare!_” Camilla answered, with a furious dash of her heel.
“Bother me not!” but without concealment after that she relieved her
need to weep.
Giulio at Vicchio, far among the hills! Giulio thinking of her, while
from the high loggia he looked Florenceward. Giulio sending his wishes
as he gazed at Venus--_stella confidente!_--brightening in the fading
sunset!
The pain of absence, of this black and total silence, was such that on
the fourth day, after reading over all his letters, she broke the rule
and stole out to go for just a minute to his street and satisfy her
yearning to see the windows of his vacant room.
She did not go far, for on the way she saw him, or--for a moment she
thought herself the victim, possibly, of an hallucination. It was his
exact image, anyhow. He walked along lightly, his straw hat far back
on his head, his pretty nose and white teeth to the wind, talking with
a boy of his own age and type. He was laughing, as he drew something
on the air with his half-burned cigarette; she caught the glint in the
sunshine of the signet-ring on his little finger. She turned and ran.
That day she asked Bianca whether she would help her, and then she told
her everything.
At evening--Antenore was kept late at the station on certain nights of
the week--they slipped out together while Aunt Battistina’s back was
turned, and hurrying like guilty creatures went to the Cornelio gardens.
Almost invariably, when Camilla had asked how he had spent the evening,
Giulio had said, “At Cornelio’s, with my father.”
They posted themselves in an unlighted doorway whence they could
watch the entrance of the fashionable open-air café. Over the laurel
wall inside the iron railing floated golden haze. Between pieces of
band-music were intervals of clattering china and voices. Figures
passed in and out.
It was not so simple as they had thought, this waiting. Wishing to be
as unnoticed as mice, they felt more conspicuous than camels. Bianca’s
little yellow dog, Pallina, who had refused absolutely to stay behind,
had the vile habit of yapping at passers; cracks and cuffs would not
subdue her. The persons barked at naturally turned to look.
Half a dozen times footsteps were heard, or imagined, on the stairs
farther within. The girls each time hurried out of the way, and,
against their habit, afraid of everybody, walked along the house fronts
the length of the gardens, then back, to ensconce themselves again,
very uneasy as to what the guard of public safety had thought, half
expecting him to darken the doorway suddenly and question them. Oh, it
was an evening to remember like some painful nightmare! Camilla, in
spite of all, never lost sight of their reason for being there.
Now she seized Bianca’s arm. Giulio was coming out, with a party--the
boy of earlier in the day, and two young girls dressed exactly alike,
the cousins, very likely; behind them came a middle-aged gentleman and
lady.
“The grandmother must be getting well,” said Camilla through her teeth,
“seeing that they can laugh like that!”
“We will say,” she arranged with Bianca on the way home, “that while we
stood at the door taking the air, Maria Nutini and her mother passed,
and we joined them for a turn. They left us at the corner.”
Every time Bianca was wakened that night, she saw Camilla writing.
Once tears were falling upon the paper. Ordered to keep still, Bianca
sorrowfully relapsed into her healthy young sleep.
In the morning Camilla posted her letter. If it fell into his mother’s
hands, so much the worse for him.
To live on, days, months, years, with that burden of love turned back
upon the heart, like a dammed-in torrent, how could it be endured?
What, what did one do to destroy the spell by which another got this
dreadful power to fill one’s every thought, made himself master over
the motions of one’s blood? For Camilla, in her outraged pride, desired
not to love Giulio any more.
The hours of suspense were so intolerable that more than once she
wished she never had been born. She had calculated the earliest at
which she might expect an answer. She allowed not an hour more before
writing him again. And then she waited with confidence, knowing
positively that she should see him.
In this second waiting she had the first glimmering notion that she
might feel better by and by, that the burning sense of ignominy
attached to feeling oneself trampled and disdained might be turned to
victorious gladness by making the other, the dear enemy, feel himself
more trampled, more disdained.
She was not wishing that she never had been born, while, gathering
suggestion from Spanish ballad and Sicilian tale, she plotted a
development of the story in every point worthy of herself. Her scene
firmly imagined and finished off with the right artistic touches, she
could actually hum that afternoon. When Bianca, helping Battistina
to hunt for the vegetable-knife needed to prepare supper, asked her
whether she had seen anything of it, she could answer by a careless
snatch of song.
At ten precisely, without the necessity to ring, the little door cut in
the large one yielded to Giulio’s hand. He was fortified to meet his
lady just inside, but the great hallway was empty. Surprised, he took
a few doubtful steps, made up his mind, and fell to pacing the floor.
After a while, he stopped under the middle arch, sent an absent glance
from window to window up the white shaft to the square of blue, and
composed himself to wait where he stood, arms crossed, feet well apart.
He was a trifle pale, and with his troubled air appeared more grown-up
than when, six or seven weeks ago, with the desert ahead of the long
empty season in town, he had wondered what resources of distraction the
streets, his only hope, might afford.
Half an hour passed. The shutter inside the window above and opposite
moved; Camilla’s hand appeared, beckoning him to mount the stairs.
She met him at the door of the _primo piano_, but when he would have
taken her hand she hurried before him, into Mademoiselle Heller’s own
sacred sitting-room, where the chairs were in ghostly covers and the
chandelier was muffled in a gauze bag. The closed windows kept out the
heat and noise, kept in the faint musty smell. She turned, they looked
at each other, and she smiled, as it struck him, a singular smile.
“You wished to see me,” he said.
“I did. But I have seen you already. For twenty minutes I watched you
from behind the shutter when you did not know I was there; you were
standing under the arch. And--I believe it saved your life. See what I
had brought.” She showed him a little knife, bright and pointed, with
a handle of horn. (It must be said that her dagger looked rather like
a vegetable-knife.) He gave a just perceptible start. His heart had
naturally jumped. But he knew, deep down, that the dagger was part of
play-acting. With a gesture intended insolently to reassure, she threw
it on the table, and smiled the singular smile which twisted her lips
to an expression of such excessive irony. “Be not afraid. I had never
seen your face when you were trying to cover your fear and inventing
lies to tell me. After that spectacle, I decided you were not worthy of
my powder. No, you need fear nothing from that silly stiletto, either
for yourself or for me. I am not sure which I meant it for. Both,
perhaps.”
“Come, Camilla,” he began, in the low, soft, ultra-reasonable tone
which any man knows is the one to adopt with excited, unreasonable
women. “Come! This is hardly the speech to hold to me. You are too
agitated to know what you are saying. It seems to me that after such a
letter as you wrote, threatening me--_nientedimeno!_--with a blow on
the cheek wherever you met me, before everybody, it is I rather than
you who have the right to call myself offended. If I am here, it is
because I love you in spite of your bad treatment of me, and I wish to
explain.”
This gentle and well-intentioned speech was interrupted by a sort of
human feminine rendering of a leonine roar from Camilla. “Zurigo!
Zurigo! Ha!” she exclaimed, “those are your tactics, are they? What you
are thinking is that in a few days more you will depart for Zurigo.
You need only keep up this comedy for a few days and then you can drop
me without fear. All you will have to do is not to write.” Her eyes
flared up intense and green; she took a pantherine step nearer. “But
I--” she smacked the varnished table startlingly with the flat of her
palm--“I do not admit that I am a person who can be dropped. And you
are here in order that I may drop you first, and in such a manner as
you cannot mistake or forget. You shall know yourself quite certainly,
my fine sir, to have been discarded. But I wish you to remember for
another time.” Another pantherine step nearer. His manhood, of which
he was at the moment intensely conscious, forbade his receding by an
inch. “I wish you to remember, for another time, that one does not
so lightly take up and throw over persons like me. A man of nothing,
like yourself, takes a puny wax doll to make love to and then neglect,
knowing that it is safe.” She was under his very nose. “I wish you
to learn the danger there is in making love to--to tigresses! Will
you remember hereafter--” his head was suddenly clutched, he felt
claws through his hair--“to keep to your own kind and let alone such
creatures as could eat you at a bite? A man should be the stronger,
while you--I could dare, fight, love, ten to your one. I saw it while
you stood down there. Will you remember?”
The pain of her iron finger-nails in his scalp was fairly unendurable,
but he stood it with boyish dignity, like a little Spartan; for one
thing, certain that if he tried to free himself he would come forth all
the more sorrily scratched; for another, not finding this maltreatment
by passionate feminine fingers altogether disagreeable. His eyes were
half closed, an enigmatic smile played over his lips. At the same
time, he was intensely on the alert, ready to prevent her making him
ridiculous beyond a certain limit.
“Will you remember,” she said, “what happens when one amuses oneself
with persons who have blood in their veins? Will you? There, go! I do
not believe you will forget.”
She released him with a push. With ceremonious deliberation he took out
his pocket-handkerchief, to wipe a goutlet of blood from the edge of
his hair.
“These are scarcely parliamentary methods!” he said, and managed a
laugh. “But a man--” an enormous increase in his sense of masculine
importance appeared in his bearing--“a man, you know, cannot resent
such fairy touches from the hand of a lady. He is bound to consider
such attentions a compliment. I have been flattered beyond my
deserts. But I cannot be mistaken in thinking that I have brought
love and caresses this morning to the wrong market, and so, with your
permission, I will withdraw. Until another day, Camilla, when you feel
more kindly disposed. No, my Camilla, I shall not forget you. I think I
can promise in all sincerity not to forget.”
He got to the door a little hurriedly, but with the hope that he had
not come off so very badly after all.
Once out of the house, the little future man of the world took a deep
lungful of the free air. The thumb he presently slipped through his
armhole, while with the other hand he swung his cane, expressed as far
as it could the enrichment he felt in the knowledge of women gained
that morning. Hero of a scene of jealousy! But who would have dreamed
that a well-brought-up girl...? He delicately touched his temple to
see whether it still bled.
[Illustration: Drawn by Emil Pollak-Ottendorff “EVERY TIME BIANCA WAS
WAKENED ... SHE SAW CAMILLA WRITING”]
Camilla had thrown herself into one of the shrouded arm-chairs.
The scene had not been what she intended. One thing after the
other--finally that ferocious need to get her fingers among his
hair--had interfered. But she regretted nothing, though not unaware of
having, to produce her grand effect, torn off a part of herself and
thrown it to the crows. She would bleed, and she would miss it; still,
for the moment she regretted nothing.
* * * * *
She never saw Giulio again, to speak to him. As she did not even pass
him on the street for a year or two (and pretend not to know him!)
she supposed him in Zurich. Often, in the night, for ever so long
after their parting, her heart would be caught as if in a screw by the
remembrance of the past. Shame would burn her for her lapses from a
becoming rigor. There had been a kiss or two, after all. Unpractical
longing for everything to have been different, or else for everything
by some wonderful twist of fortune still to turn out well, and she and
Giulio be together again, would wring tears from her. But in her saner
moments she understood that there was no hope of that, and simply cried
into her pillow because she could not get Giulio out of her blood.
But time passed. Many things happened. She grew up. When finally one
day she did run into Giulio on the street (and pretend not to know
him!) nothing stirred in her heart at sight of the old love. She smiled
with pity for her honest ardor of the old days, and its innocent avowal.
Her dream of the future had changed. In the present dream, which
naturally contained love along with riches and glory, it was always
love that she received, love lavished in Arabian Nights’ baskets of
jewels at her feet. All her part was condescension. This was the work
of Giulio--the inconstant. Never again should a man hold her in his
hand, to feel and suffer in dependence upon him. She would have all the
power herself.
* * * * *
It was the school-boy Giulio still at work when, as Princess Elaguine,
in Paris, she showed herself so willing to be amused by men, and so
resolved not to give any man the chance to make her miserable.
[5] The writer is speaking of that Camilla, once obscure companion and
secretary to Mrs. Northmere, the author, and later her heir, some of
whose adventures have been told in these pages. See “Mrs. Northmere’s
Treasure,” in ~The Century~ for August, 1910, and “What Camilla did
with Her Money,” in ~The Century~ for January, 1911.
[Illustration]
THE HIGH TIDE AT GETTYSBURG[6]
BY WILL H. THOMPSON
(Of the Fourth Georgia, Doles’s Brigade, Rodes’s Division, Ewell’s
Corps.)
A cloud possessed the hollow field,
The gathering battle’s smoky shield.
Athwart the gloom the lightning flashed,
And through the cloud some horsemen dashed,
And from the heights the thunder pealed.
Then at the brief command of Lee
Moved out that matchless infantry,
With Pickett leading grandly down,
To rush against the roaring crown
Of those dread heights of destiny.
Far heard above the angry guns
A cry across the tumult runs,--
The voice that rang through Shiloh’s woods
And Chickamauga’s solitudes,
The fierce South cheering on her sons!
Ah, how the withering tempest blew
Against the front of Pettigrew!
A khamsin wind that scorched and singed
Like that infernal flame that fringed
The British squares at Waterloo!
A thousand fell where Kemper led;
A thousand died where Garnett bled:
In blinding flame and strangling smoke
The remnant through the batteries broke
And crossed the works with Armistead.
“Once more in Glory’s van with me!”
Virginia cried to Tennessee:
“We two together, come what may,
Shall stand upon these works to-day!”
(The reddest day in history.)
[Illustration: Drawn by Stanley M. Arthurs. Half-tone plate engraved by
H. C. Merrill
“IN VAIN VIRGINIA CHARGED AND RAGED, A TIGRESS IN HER WRATH UNCAGED”]
Brave Tennessee! In reckless way
Virginia heard her comrade say:
“Close round this rent and riddled rag!”
What time she set her battle-flag
Amid the guns of Doubleday.
But who shall break the guards that wait
Before the awful face of Fate?
The tattered standards of the South
Were shriveled at the cannon’s mouth,
And all her hopes were desolate.
In vain the Tennesseean set
His breast against the bayonet!
In vain Virginia charged and raged,
A tigress in her wrath uncaged,
Till all the hill was red and wet!
Above the bayonets, mixed and crossed,
Men saw a gray, gigantic ghost
Receding through the battle-cloud,
And heard across the tempest loud
The death-cry of a nation lost!
The brave went down! Without disgrace
They leaped to Ruin’s red embrace.
They only heard Fame’s thunders wake,
And saw the dazzling sunburst break
In smiles on Glory’s bloody face!
They fell, who lifted up a hand
And bade the sun in heaven to stand!
They smote and fell, who set the bars
Against the progress of the stars,
And stayed the march of Motherland!
They stood, who saw the future come
On through the fight’s delirium!
They smote and stood, who held the hope
Of nations on that slippery slope
Amid the cheers of Christendom!
God lives! He forged the iron will
That clutched and held that trembling hill.
God lives and reigns! He built and lent
The heights for Freedom’s battlement
Where floats her flag in triumph still!
Fold up the banners! Smelt the guns!
Love rules. Her gentler purpose runs.
A mighty mother turns in tears
The pages of her battle years,
Lamenting all her fallen sons!
[Illustration]
[6] First printed in ~The Century~ for July, 1888.
[Illustration]
T. TEMBAROM
BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
Author of “That Lass o’ Lowrie’s,” “The Shuttle,” etc.
WITH DECORATIVE PICTURES BY CHARLES S. CHAPMAN
CHAPTER XIX
The county was discreetly conservative in its social attitude. The gulf
between it and the new owner of Temple Barholm was too wide and deep
to be crossed without effort combined with immense mental agility. It
was, on the whole, much easier not to begin a thing at all than to
begin it and find one must hastily search about for not too noticeable
methods of ending it. A few unimportant, tentative calls were made, and
several ladies who had remained unaware of Miss Alicia during her first
benefactor’s time drove over to see what she was like and perhaps by
chance hear something of interest. One or two of them who saw Tembarom
went away puzzled and amazed. He did not drop his h’s, which they had
of course expected, and he was well dressed and not bad-looking; but
it was frequently impossible to understand what he was talking about,
he used such odd phrases. He seemed good natured enough, and his way
with little old Miss Temple Barholm was really quite nice, queer as it
was. It was queer because he was attentive to her in a manner in which
young men were not usually attentive to totally insignificant, elderly
dependents.
Tembarom derived an extremely diluted pleasure from the visits. The few
persons he saw reminded him in varying degrees of Mr. Palford. They had
not before seen anything like his species, and they did not know what
to do with him. He also did not know what to do with them. A certain
inelasticity frustrated him at the outset. When, in obedience to Miss
Alicia’s instructions, he had returned the visits, he felt he had not
gone far.
Serious application enabled him to find his way through the church
service, and he accompanied Miss Alicia to church with great
regularity. He began to take down the books from the library shelves
and look them over gravely. The days gradually ceased to appear so
long, but he had a great deal of time on his hands, and he tried to
find ways of filling it. He wondered if Ann would be pleased if he
learned things out of books.
When he tentatively approached the subject of literature with Miss
Alicia, she glowed at the delightful prospect of his reading aloud to
her in the evenings--“reading improving things like history and the
poets.”
“Let’s take a hack at it some night,” he said pleasantly.
The more a fellow knew, the better it was for him, he supposed; but he
wondered, if anything happened and he went back to New York, how much
“improving things” and poetry would help a man in doing business.
The first evening they began with Gray’s “Elegy,” and Miss Alicia felt
that it did not exhilarate him; she was also obliged to admit that
he did not read it very well. But she felt sure he would improve.
Personally she was touchingly happy. The sweetly domestic picture
of the situation, she sitting by the fire with her knitting and he
reading aloud, moved and delighted her. The next evening she suggested
Tennyson’s “Maud.” He was not as much stirred by it as she had hoped.
He took a somewhat humorous view of it.
“He had it pretty bad, hadn’t he?” he said of the desperate lover.
“Oh, if only you could once have heard Sims Reeves sing ‘Come into the
Garden, Maud’!” she sighed. “A kind friend once took me to hear him,
and I have never, never forgotten it.”
But Mr. Temple Barholm notably did not belong to the atmosphere of
impassioned tenors.
On still another evening they tried Shakspere. Miss Alicia felt that a
foundation of Shakspere would be “improving” indeed. They began with
“Hamlet.”
He found play-reading difficult and Shaksperian language baffling, but
he made his way with determination until he reached a point where he
suddenly grew quite red and stopped.
“Say, have you read this?” he inquired after his hesitation.
“The plays of Shakspere are a part of every young lady’s education,”
she answered; “but I am afraid I am not at all a Shaksperian scholar.”
“A young lady’s education?” he repeated. “Gee whizz!” he added softly
after a pause.
He glanced over a page or so hastily, and then laid the book down.
“Say,” he suggested, with an evasive air, “let’s go over that ‘Maud’
one again. It’s--well, it’s easier to read aloud.”
The crude awkwardness of his manner suddenly made Miss Alicia herself
flush and drop a stitch in her knitting. How dreadful of her not to
have thought of that!
“The Elizabethan age was, I fear, a rather coarse one in some respects.
Even history acknowledges that. Queen Elizabeth herself used profane
language.” She faltered and coughed a little apologetic cough as she
picked up her stitch again.
“I bet Ann’s never seen inside Shakspere,” said Tembarom. Before
reading aloud in the future he gave some previous personal attention to
the poem or subject decided upon. It may be at once frankly admitted
that when he read aloud it was more for Miss Alicia’s delectation than
for his own. He saw how much she enjoyed the situation.
His effect of frankness and constant boyish talk was so inseparable
from her idea of him that she found it a puzzling thing to realize that
she gradually began to feel aware of a certain remote reserve in him,
or what might perhaps be better described as a habit of silence upon
certain subjects. She felt it marked in the case of Strangeways. She
surmised that he saw Strangeways often and spent a good deal of time
with him, but he spoke of him rarely, and she never knew exactly what
hours were given to him. Sometimes she imagined he found him a greater
responsibility than he had expected. Several times when she believed
that he had spent part of a morning or afternoon in his room, he was
more silent than usual and looked puzzled and thoughtful. She observed,
as Mr. Palford had, that the picture-gallery, with its portraits of
his ancestors, had an attraction. A certain rainy day he asked her, to
go with him and look them over. It was inevitable that she should soon
wander to the portrait of Miles Hugo and remain standing before it.
Tembarom followed, and stood by her side in silence until her sadness
broke its bounds with a pathetic sigh.
“Was he very like him?” he asked.
She made an unconscious, startled movement. For the moment she had
forgotten his presence, and she had not really expected him to
remember.
“I mean Jem,” he answered her surprised look. “How was he like him? Was
there--” he hesitated and looked really interested--“was he like him in
any particular thing?”
“Yes,” she said, turning to the portrait of Miles Hugo again. “They
both had those handsome, drooping eyes, with the lashes coming together
at the corners. There is something very fascinating about them, isn’t
there? I used to notice it so much in dear little Jem. You see how
marked they are in Miles Hugo.”
“Yes,” Tembarom answered. “A fellow who looked that way at a girl when
he made love to her would get a stranglehold. She wouldn’t forget him
soon.”
“It strikes you in that way, too?” said Miss Alicia, shyly. “I used to
wonder if it was--not quite nice of me to think of it. But it did seem
that if any one did look at one like that--” Maidenly shyness overcame
her. “Poor Lady Joan!” she sighed.
“There’s a sort of cleft in his chin, though it’s a good, square chin,”
he suggested. “And that smile of his--Were Jem’s--”
“Yes, they were. The likeness was quite odd sometimes--quite.”
“Those are things that wouldn’t be likely to change much when he grew
up,” Tembarom said, drawing a little closer to the picture. “Poor Jem!
He was up against it hard and plenty. He had it hardest. This chap only
died.”
There was no mistaking his sympathy. He asked so many questions that
they sat down and talked instead of going through the gallery. He was
interested in the detail of all that had occurred after the ghastly
moment when Jem had risen from the card-table and stood looking round,
like some baited dying animal, at the circle of cruel faces drawing in
about him. How soon had he left London? Where had he gone first? How
had he been killed? He had been buried with others beneath a fall of
earth and stones. Having heard this much, Tembarom saw he could not ask
more questions. Miss Alicia became pale, and her hands trembled. She
could not bear to discuss details so harrowing.
“Say, I oughtn’t to let you talk about that,” he broke out, and he
patted her hand and made her get up and finish their walk about the
gallery. He held her elbow in his own odd, nice way as he guided her,
and the things he said, and the things he pretended to think or not
to understand, were so amusing that in a short time he had made her
laugh. She knew him well enough by this time to be aware that he was
intentionally obliging her to forget what it only did her harm to
remember. That was his practical way of looking at it.
“Getting a grouch on or being sorry for what you can’t help cuts no
ice,” he sometimes said. “When it does, me for getting up at daybreak
and keeping at it! But it doesn’t; you bet your life on that.”
She could see that he had really wanted to hear about Jem, but he knew
it was bad for her to recall things, and he would not allow her to
dwell on them, just as she knew he would not allow himself to dwell on
little Miss Hutchinson, remotely placed among the joys of his beloved
New York.
Two other incidents besides the visit to Miles Hugo afterward
marked that day when Miss Alicia looked back on it. The first was
his unfolding to her his plans for the house-party, which was
characteristic of his habit of thinking things over and deciding them
before he talked about them.
“If I’m going to try the thing out, as Ann says I must,” he began when
they had gone back to the library after lunch, “I’ve got to get going.
I’m not seeing any of those Pictorial girls, and I guess I’ve got to
see some.”
“You will be invited to dine at places,” said Miss
Alicia,--“presently,” she added bravely, in fact, with an air of
greater conviction than she felt.
“If it’s not the law that they’ve got to invite me or go to jail,” said
Tembarom, “I don’t blame ’em for not doing it if they’re not stuck on
me. And they’re not; and it’s natural. But I’ve got to get in my fine
work, or my year’ll be over before I’ve ‘found out for myself,’ as Ann
called it. There’s where I’m at, Miss Alicia--and I’ve been thinking
of Lady Joan and her mother. You said you thought they’d come and stay
here if they were properly asked.”
“I think they would,” answered Miss Alicia with her usual delicacy. “I
thought I gathered from Lady Mallowe that, as she was to be in the
neighborhood, she would like to see you and Temple Barholm, which she
greatly admires.”
“If you’ll tell me what to do, I’ll get her here to stay awhile,” he
said, “and Lady Joan with her. You’d have to show me how to write to
ask them; but perhaps you’d write yourself.”
“They will be at Asshawe Holt next week,” said Miss Alicia, “and we
could go and call on them together. We might write to them in London
before they leave.”
“We’ll do it,” answered Tembarom. His manner was that of a practical
young man attacking matter-of-fact detail. “From what I hear, Lady Joan
would satisfy even Ann. They say she’s the best-looker on the slate.
If I see her every day I shall have seen the blue-ribbon winner. Then
if she’s here, perhaps others of her sort’ll come, too; and they’ll
have to see me whether they like it or not--and I shall see them. Good
Lord!” he added seriously, “I’d let ’em swarm all over me and bite me
all summer if it would fix Ann.”
He stood up, with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, and looked down
at the floor. “I wish she knew T. T. like T. T. knows himself,” he
said. It was all quite wistful.
It was so wistful and so boyish that Miss Alicia was thrilled as he
often thrilled her.
“She ought to be a very happy girl,” she exclaimed.
“She’s going to be,” he answered, “sure as you’re alive. But whatever
she does, is right, and this is as right as everything else. So it just
goes.”
They wrote their letters at once, and sent them off by the afternoon
post. The letter Miss Alicia composed, and which Tembarom copied, he
read and reread, with visions of Jim Bowles and Julius looking over his
shoulder. If they picked it up on Broadway, with his name signed to it,
and read it, they’d throw a fit over it, laughing. But he supposed she
knew what you ought to write.
It had not, indeed, the masculine touch. When Lady Mallowe read it, she
laughed several times. She knew quite well that he had not known what
to say, and, allowing Miss Alicia to instruct him, had followed her
instructions to the letter. But she did not show the letter to Joan,
who was difficult enough to manage without being given such material to
comment upon.
The letters had just been sent to the post when a visitor was
announced--Captain Palliser. Tembarom remembered the name, and recalled
also certain points connected with him. He was the one who was a
promoter of schemes--“One of the smooth, clever ones that get up
companies,” Little Ann had said.
That in a well-bred and not too pronounced way he looked smooth and
clever might be admitted. His effect was that of height, finished
slenderness of build, and extremely well-cut garments. He was no longer
young, and he had smooth, thin hair and a languidly observant gray eye.
“I have been staying at Detchworth Grange,” he explained when he had
shaken hands with the new Temple Barholm and Miss Alicia. “It gave me
an excellent opportunity to come and pay my respects.”
There was a hint of uncertainty in the observant gray eye. The fact
was that he realized in the space of five minutes that he knew his
ground even less than he had supposed he did. He had not spent his
week at Detchworth Grange without making many quiet investigations,
but he had found out nothing whatever. The new man was an ignoramus,
but no one had yet seemed to think him exactly a fool. He was not
excited by the new grandeurs of his position and he was not ashamed
of himself. Captain Palliser wondered if he was perhaps sharp--one of
those New Yorkers shrewd even to light-fingeredness in clever scheming.
Stories of a newly created method of business dealing involving an air
of candor and almost primitive good nature--an American method--had
attracted Captain Palliser’s attention for some time. A certain
Yankee rawness of manner played a part as a factor, a crudity which
would throw a man off guard if he did not recognize it. The person
who employed the method was of philosophical non-combativeness. The
New York phrase was that “He jollied a man along.” Immense schemes
had been carried through in that way. Men in London, in England, were
not sufficiently light of touch in their jocularity. He wondered
if perhaps this young fellow, with his ready laugh and rather
loose-jointed, casual way of carrying himself, was of this dangerous
new school.
What, however, could he scheme for, being the owner of Temple Barholm’s
money? It may be mentioned at once that Captain Palliser’s past had
been such as had fixed him in the belief that every one was scheming
for something. People with money wanted more or were privately
arranging schemes to prevent other schemers from getting any shade the
better of them. Débutantes with shy eyes and slim figures had their
little plans to engineer delicately. Sometimes they were larger plans
than the uninitiated would have suspected as existing in the brains of
creatures in their ’teens, sometimes they were mere fantastic little
ideas connected with dashing young men or innocent dances which must be
secured or lovely young rivals who must be evaded. Young men had also
deft things to do--people to see or not to see, reasons for themselves
being seen or avoiding observation. As years increased, reasons for
schemes became more numerous and amazingly more varied. Women with
daughters, with sons, with husbands, found in each relationship a
necessity for active, if quiet, manœuvering. Women like Lady
Mallowe--good heaven! by what schemes did not that woman live and have
her being--and her daughter’s--from day to day! Without money, without
a friend who was an atom more to be relied on than she would have been
herself if an acquaintance had needed her aid, her outwardly well-to-do
and fashionable existence was a hand-to-hand fight. No wonder she had
turned a still rather brilliant eye upon Sir Moses Monaldini, the great
Israelite financier. All of these types passed rapidly before his
mental vision as he talked to the American Temple Barholm. What could
he want, by chance? He must want something, and it would be discreet to
find out what it chanced to be.
If it was social success, he would be better off in London, where in
these days you could get a good run for your money and could swing
yourself up from one rung of the ladder to another if you paid some
one to show you how. He himself could show him how. A youngster who
had lived the beastly hard life he had lived would be likely to find
exhilaration in many things not difficult to purchase. It was an odd
thing, by the way, the fancy he had taken to the little early-Victorian
spinster. It was not quite natural. It perhaps denoted tendencies--or
lack of tendencies--it would also be well to consider. Palliser was
a sufficiently finished product himself to be struck greatly by the
artistic perfection of Miss Alicia, and to wonder how much the new man
understood it.
He did not talk to him about schemes. He talked to him of New York,
which he had never seen and hoped sometime shortly to visit. The
information he gained was not of the kind he most desired, but it
edified him. Tembarom’s knowledge of high finance was a street lad’s
knowledge of it, and he himself knew its limitations and probable
unreliability. Such of his facts as rested upon the foundation of
experience did not include multimillionaires and their resources.
Captain Palliser passed lightly to Temple Barholm and its neighborhood.
He knew places and names, and had been to Detchworth more than once.
He had never visited Temple Barholm, and his interest suggested that
he would like to walk through the gardens. Tembarom took him out, and
they strolled about for some time. Even an alert observer would not
have suspected the fact that as they strolled, Tembarom slouching a
trifle and with his hands in his pockets, Captain Palliser bearing
himself with languid distinction, each man was summing up the other and
considering seriously how far and in what manner he could be counted as
an asset.
“You haven’t been to Detchworth yet?” Palliser inquired.
“No, not yet,” answered Tembarom. The Granthams were of those who had
not yet called.
“It’s an agreeable house. The Granthams are agreeable people.”
“Are there any young people in the family?” Tembarom asked.
“Young people? Male or female?” Palliser smilingly put it. Suddenly it
occurred to him that this might give him a sort of lead.
“Girls,” said Tembarom, crudely--“just plain girls.”
Palliser laughed. Here it was, perhaps.
“They are not exactly ‘plain’ girls, though they are not beauties.
There are four Misses Grantham. Lucy is the prettiest. Amabel is quite
tremendous at tennis.”
“Are they ladies?” inquired Tembarom.
Captain Palliser turned and involuntarily stared at him. What was the
fellow getting at?
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” he said.
The new Temple Barholm looked quite serious. He did not, amazing to
relate, look like a fool even when he gave forth his extraordinary
question. It was his almost business-like seriousness which saved him.
“I mean, do you call them Lady Lucy and Lady Amabel?” he answered.
If he had been younger, less hardened, or less finished, Captain
Palliser would have laughed outright. But he answered without
self-revelation.
“Oh, I see. You were asking whether the family is a titled one. No;
it is a good old name, quite old, in fact, but no title goes with the
estate.”
“Who are the titled people about here?” Tembarom asked, quite unabashed.
“The Earl of Pevensy at Pevensy Park, the Duke of Stone at Stone Hover,
Lord Hambrough at Doone. Doone is in the next county, but just over the
border.”
“Have they all got daughters?”
Captain Palliser found it expedient to clear his throat before speaking.
“Lord Pevensy has daughters, so has the duke. Lord Hambrough has three
sons.”
“How many daughters are there--in a bunch?” Mr. Temple Barholm
suggested liberally.
There Captain Palliser felt it safe to allow himself to smile, as
though taking it with a sense of humor.
“‘In a bunch’ is an awfully good way of putting it,” he said. “It
happens to apply perhaps rather unfortunately well; both families are
much poorer than they should be, and daughters must be provided for.
Each has four. ‘In a bunch’ there are eight: Lady Alice, Lady Edith,
Lady Ethel, and Lady Celia at Stone Hover; Lady Beatrice, Lady Gwynedd,
Lady Honora, and Lady Gwendolen at Pevensy Park. And not a fortune
among them, poor girls!”
“It’s not the money that matters so much,” said the astounding
foreigner, “it’s the titles.”
Captain Palliser stopped short in the garden path for a moment. He
could scarcely believe his ears. The crude grotesqueness of it so far
got the better of him that if he had not coughed he would have betrayed
himself.
“I’ve had a confounded cold lately,” he said. “Excuse me; I must get it
over.”
He turned a little aside and coughed energetically.
After watching him a few seconds, Tembarom slipped two fingers into his
waistcoat pocket and produced a small tube of tablets.
“Take two of these,” he said as soon as the cough stopped. “I always
carry it about with me. It’s a New York thing called ‘G. Destroyer.’ G
stands for grippe.”
Palliser took it.
“Thanks. With water? No? Just dissolve in the mouth. Thanks awfully.”
And he took two, with tears still standing in his eyes.
“Don’t taste bad, do they?” Mr. Temple Barholm remarked encouragingly.
“Not at all. I think I shall be all right now. I just needed the
relief. I have been trying to restrain it.”
“That’s a mistake,” said Tembarom. They strolled on a pace or so,
and he began again, as though he did not mean to let the subject
drop. “It’s the titles,” he said, “and the kind. How many of them are
good-lookers?”
Palliser reflected a moment, as though making mental choice.
“Lady Alice and Lady Celia are rather plain,” he said, “and both of
them are invalidish. Lady Ethel is tall and has handsome eyes, but Lady
Edith is really the beauty of the family. She rides and dances well and
has a charming color.”
“And the other ones,” Tembarom suggested as he paused--“Lady Beatrice
and Lady Gwynedd and Lady Honora and Lady Gwendolen.”
“You remember their names well,” Palliser remarked with a half-laugh.
“Oh, I shall remember them all right,” Tembarom answered. “I earned
twenty-five per in New York by getting names down fine.”
“The Talchesters are really all rather taking. Talchester is Lord
Pevensy’s family name,” Palliser explained. “They are girls who have
pretty little noses and bright complexions and eyes. Lady Gwynedd and
Lady Honora both have quite fascinating dimples.”
“Dimples!” exclaimed his companion. “Good business.”
“Do you like dimples particularly?” Palliser inquired with an impartial
air.
“I’d always make a bee-line for a dimple,” replied Mr. Temple Barholm.
“Clear the way when I start.”
This was New York phrasing, and was plainly humorous; but there was
something more than humor in his eye and smile--something hinting
distantly at recollection.
“You’ll find them at Pevensy Park,” said Palliser.
“What about Lady Joan Fayre?” was the next inquiry.
Palliser’s side glance at him was observant indeed. He asked himself
how much the man could know. Taking the past into consideration, Lady
Joan might turn out to be a subject requiring delicate handling. It
was not the easiest thing in the world to talk at all freely to a
person with whom one desired to keep on good terms, about a young woman
supposed still to cherish a tragic passion for the dead man who ought
to stand at the present moment in the person’s, figuratively speaking,
extremely ill-fitting shoes.
“Lady Joan has been from her first season an undeniable beauty,” he
replied.
“She and the old lady are going to stay at a place called Asshawe Holt.
I think they’re going next week,” Tembarom said.
“The old lady?” repeated Captain Palliser.
“I mean her mother. The one that’s the Countess of Mallowe.”
“Have you met Lady Mallowe?” Palliser inquired with a not wholly
repressed smile. A vision of Lady Mallowe overhearing their
conversation arose before him.
“No, I haven’t. What’s she like?”
“She is not the early-or mid-Victorian old lady,” was Palliser’s reply.
“She wears Gainsborough hats, and looks a quite possible eight and
thirty. She is a handsome person herself.”
He was not aware that the term “old lady” was, among Americans of the
class of Mrs. Bowse’s boarders, a sort of generic term signifying
almost anything maternal which had passed thirty.
Tembarom proceeded.
“After they get through at the Asshawe Holt place, I’ve asked them to
come here.”
“Indeed,” said Palliser, with an inward start. The man evidently did
not know what other people did. After all, why should he? He had been
selling something or other in the streets of New York when the thing
happened, and he knew nothing of London.
“The countess called on Miss Alicia when we were in London,” he heard
next. “She said we were relations.”
“You are--as we are. The connection is rather distant, but it is near
enough to form a sort of link.”
“I’ve wanted to see Lady Joan,” explained Tembarom. “From what I’ve
heard, I should say she was one of the ‘Lady’s Pictorial’ kind.”
“I am afraid--” Palliser’s voice was slightly unsteady for the
moment--“I have not studied the type sufficiently to know. The
‘Pictorial’ is so exclusively a women’s periodical.”
His companion laughed.
“Well, I’ve only looked through it once myself just to find out. Some
way I always think of Lady Joan as if she was like one of those Beaut’s
from Beautsville, with trains as long as parlor-cars and feathers
in their heads--dressed to go to see the queen. I guess she’s been
presented at court,” he added even a trifle more unsteadily.
“Yes, she has been presented.”
“Do they let ’em go more than once?” he asked with casual curiosity.
“Confound this cough!” exclaimed Captain Palliser, and he broke forth
again.
“Take another G,” said Tembarom, producing his tube. “Say, just take
the bottle and keep it in your pocket.”
When the brief paroxysm was over and they moved on again. Palliser was
looking an odd thing or so in the face. “I always think of Lady Joan”
was one of them. “Always” seemed to go rather far. How often and why
had he “always thought”? The fellow was incredible. Did his sharp,
boyish face and his slouch conceal a colossal, vulgar, young ambition?
There was not much concealment about it, Heaven knew. And as he so
evidently was not aware of the facts, how would they affect him when
he discovered them? And though Lady Mallowe was a woman not in the
least distressed or hampered by shades of delicacy and scruple, she
surely was astute enough to realize that even this bounder’s dullness
might be awakened to realize that there was more than a touch of
obvious indecency in bringing the girl to the house of the man she had
tragically loved, and manœuvering to work her into it as the wife of
the man who, monstrously unfit as he was, had taken his place. Captain
Palliser knew well that the pressing of the relationship had meant only
one thing. And how, in the name of the Furies! had she dragged Lady
Joan into the scheme with her?
It was as unbelievable as was the new Temple Barholm himself. And how
unconcerned the fellow looked! Perhaps the man he had supplanted was no
more to him than a scarcely remembered name, if he was as much as that.
Then Tembarom, pacing slowly by his side, hands in pockets, eyes on the
walk, spoke:
“Did you ever see Jem Temple Barholm?” he asked.
It was like a thunderbolt. He said it as though he were merely carrying
his previous remarks on to their natural conclusion; but Palliser felt
himself so suddenly unadjusted, so to speak, that he palpably hesitated.
“Did you?” his companion repeated.
“I knew him well,” was the answer made as soon as readjustment was
possible.
“Remember just how he looked?”
“Perfectly. He was a striking fellow. Women always said he had
fascinating eyes.”
“Sort of slant downward on the outside corners--and black eyelashes
sort o’ sweeping together?”
Palliser turned with a movement of surprise.
“How did you know? It was just that odd sort of thing.”
“Miss Alicia told me. And there’s a picture in the gallery that’s like
him.”
Captain Palliser felt as embarrassed as Miss Alicia had felt, but it
was for a different reason. She had felt awkward because she had
feared she had touched on a delicate subject. Palliser was embarrassed
because he was entirely thrown out of all his calculations. He felt
for the moment that there was no calculating at all, no security in
preparing paths. You never know where they would lead. Here had he been
actually alarmed in secret! And the oaf stood before him undisturbedly
opening up the subject himself.
“For a fellow like that to lose a girl as he lost Lady Joan was pretty
tough,” the oaf said. “By gee! it was tough!”
He knew it all--the whole thing, scandal, tragically broken marriage,
everything. And knowing it, he was laying his Yankee plans for getting
the girl to Temple Barholm to look her over. It was of a grossness
one sometimes heard of in men of his kind, and yet it seemed in its
casualness to outleap any little scheme of the sort he had so far
looked on at.
“Lady Joan felt it immensely,” he said.
A footman was to be seen moving toward them, evidently bearing a
message. Tea was served in the drawing-room, and he had come to
announce the fact.
They went back to the house, and Miss Alicia filled cups for them and
presided over the splendid tray with a persuasive suggestion in the
matter of hot or cold things which made it easy to lead up to any
subject. She was the best of unobtrusive hostesses.
Palliser talked of his visit at Detchworth, which had been shortened
because he had gone to fit in and remain until a large but uncertain
party turned up. It had turned up earlier than had been anticipated,
and of course he could only delicately slip away.
“I am sorry it has happened, however,” he said, “not only because
one does not wish to leave Detchworth, but because I shall miss Lady
Mallowe and Lady Joan, who are to be at Asshawe Holt next week. I
particularly wanted to see them.”
Miss Alicia glanced at Tembarom to see what he would do. He spoke
before he could catch her glance.
“Say,” he suggested, “why don’t you bring your grip over here and stay?
I wish you would.”
“A grip means a Gladstone bag,” Miss Alicia murmured in a rapid
undertone.
Palliser replied with appreciative courtesy. Things were going
extremely well.
“That’s awfully kind of you,” he answered. “I should like it
tremendously. Nothing better. You are giving me a delightful
opportunity. Thank you, thank you. If I may turn up on Thursday I shall
be delighted.”
There was satisfaction in this at least in the observant gray eye when
he went away.