Well! at least I have known these moments and the rapture of

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Virginia Paque, Anuradha Valsa,

and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders

THE CORDS OF VANITY

A Comedy of Shirking

Revised and Expanded Edition

by JAMES BRANCH CABELL

with INTRODUCTION by WILSON FOLLETT

To

GABRIELLE BROOKE MONCURE

_Plus sapit vulgus, quia tantum, quantum opus est, sapit._

AN INTRODUCTION

by Wilson Follett

Mr. Cabell, in making ready this second or intended edition of THE

CORDS OF VANITY, performs an act of reclamation which is at the same

time an act of fresh creation.

For the purely reclamatory aspect of what he has done, his reward (so

far as that can consist in anything save the doing) must come from

insignificantly few directions; so few indeed that he, with a wrily

humorous exaggeration, affects to believe them singular. The author of

this novel has been pleased to describe the author of this

introduction as "the only known purchaser of the book" and, further,

as "the other person to own a CORDS OF VANITY". I could readily enough

acquit myself, with good sound legal proofs, of any such singularity

as stands charged in this soft impeachment--and that without appeal to

_The Cleveland Plain Dealer_ of eleven years ago ("slushy and

disgusting"), or to _The New York Post_ ("sterile and malodorous ...

worse than immoral--dull"), or to _Ainslee's Magazine_ ("inconsequent

and rambling ... rather nauseating at times"). These devotees of the

adjective that hunts in pairs are hardly to be discussed, I suppose,

in connection with any rewards except such as accrue to the possessors

of a certain obtuseness, who always and infallibly reap at least the

reward of not being hurt by what they do not know--or, for that

matter, by what they do know. He who writes such a book as THE CORDS

OF VANITY is committing himself to the supremely irrational faith that

this dullness is somehow not the ultimate arbiter; and for him the

pronouncements of this dullness simply do not figure among either his

rewards or his penalties. So, it is not exactly to these tributes of

the press that one reverts in noting that THE CORDS OF VANITY, on its

publication eleven years ago, promptly became a book which there

were--almost--none to praise and very few to love. After all, its

author's computation of that former audience of his--his actual

individual voluntary readers of a decade ago--appears to be but

slightly and pardonably exaggerated on the more modest side of the

fact. If there were a Cabell Club of membership determined solely by

the number of those who, already possessing THE CORDS OF VANITY in its

first edition, recognize it as the work of a serious artist of high

achievement and higher capacity, I suspect that the smallness of that

club would be in inordinate disproportion to everything but its

selectness and its members' pride in "belonging".

Be that as it may, the economist-author, on the eve of his book's

emergence from the limbo of "out of print", prefers that it come into

its redemption carrying a foreword by someone who knew it without

dislike in its former incarnation. No contingent liability, it seems,

can dissuade Mr. Cabell from this preference. An author who once

elected to precede a group of his best tales with an introduction

eloquently setting forth reasons why the collection ought not to be

published at all, is hardly to be deterred now by the mere

inexpediency of hitching his star to a farm-wagon. His own graciously

unreasonable insistence must be the excuse, such as it is, for the

present introduction, such as it is. If there may be said to exist a

sort of charter membership in Mr. Cabell's audience, this document is

to be construed as representing its very enthusiastic welcome to the

later and vastly larger elective membership.

And if, weighed as such a welcome, it proves hopelessly inadequate, at

least it provides a number of possible compensations by the way. For

instance, that _New York World_ critic who damned the book but praised

its frontispiece of 1909, has now a uniquely pat opportunity to

balance his ledger by praising the book and damning this foreword,

which, more or less, replaces the frontispiece. Similarly, the more

renowned critic and anthologist who so well knows the "originals" of

the verses in _From the Hidden Way_, can now render poetically perfect

justice to all who will care by perceiving that both the earlier

edition of this book and the author of this foreword are but figments

of Mr. Cabell's slightly puckish invention.

But these pages must not be, like those which follow, a comedy of

shirking. They will have flouted a plain duty unless they speak of the

sense and the degree in which this novel, during the process of

reclaiming it, has been actually recreated. Perhaps the matter can be

packed most succinctly into the statement that Mr. Cabell's hero has

been subjected to such a process of growth as has made him

commensurate in stature with the other two modern writers of Mr.

Cabell's invention. As _The Cream of the Jest_ is essentially the book

of Felix Kennaston and _Beyond Life_ that of John Charteris, so THE

CORDS OF VANITY is essentially the book of Robert Etheridge Townsend.

Now, this Townsend has accomplished a deal of growing since 1909. By

this I do not mean that he is taken at a later period of his own

imagined life, or that he fails to act consonantly with the extreme

youth imputed to him: I mean that he is the creation of a more mature

mind, a deeper philosophy, a more probing insight into the

implications of things. A given youth of twenty-five will be very

differently interpreted by an observer of thirty and by the same

observer at forty, very much as a given era of the past will be

understood differently by a single historian before and after certain

cycles of his own social and political experience. The past never

remains to us the same past; it grows up along with us; the physical

facts may remain admittedly the same, but our understanding accents

them differently, finds more in them at some points and less at

others. So Robert Etheridge Townsend remains an example of that

special temperament which, being unable to endure the contact of

unhappiness, consistently shirks every responsibility that entails or

threatens discomfort; and the truth about him, taking him as an

example of just that temperament, is still inexorably told. But his

weakness as a man becomes much more tolerable in this second version,

because it is much more intimately and poignantly correlated with his

strength as an artist. One is made to feel that he, like Charteris,

may the better consummate in his art the auctorial virtues of

distinction and clarity, beauty and symmetry, tenderness and truth and

urbanity, precisely because his personal life is bereft of those

virtues. Less than before, the accent is on the wastrel in Townsend;

more than before, it is on the potential creator of beauty in him. The

earlier readers will hardly count it as a fault that Mr. Cabell has

contrived to make his novel, without detriment to any truth

whatsoever, a far less unpleasant book. Sardonic it still is, by a

necessary implication, but not wantonly, and with a mellowness. The

irony, which at its harshest was capable of rasping the nerves, has

become capable of wringing the heart.

Other reasons there are, too, for holding that THE CORDS OF VANITY is

certain to make its second appeal to a many times multiplied audience.

Since divers momentous transactions of the years just gone, the whole

world stands in a moral position extraordinarily well adapted to the

comprehension of just such a comedy of shirking; and especially the

world of thought has received a powerful impulsion toward the area

long occupied by Mr. Cabell's romantic pessimism. There is perhaps

somewhat more demand for satire, or at least a growing toleration of

it. Moreover, by sheer patience and reiteration Mr. Cabell has

procured no little currency for some of his most characteristic ideas.

Chivalry and gallantry, as he analyzes them, are concepts which play

their part in the inevitable present re-editing of social and literary

history. _The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck_, _The Cream of the Jest_,

and _The Certain Hour_ have somewhat to say to the discriminating,

even on other than purely aesthetic grounds; _Beyond Life_ is on the

threshold of its day as the _Sartor Resartus_ of one side, the

aesthetic side, of modernism;

"_Of_ Jurgen _eke they maken mencion";_

and THE CORDS OF VANITY is but the first of the earlier books to be

reissued in the format of the uniform and accessible Intended Edition.

While THE CORDS OF VANITY was out of print, a fresh copy is known to

have been acquired for twenty-five cents. Copies of a more recent work

by the same hand--a tale which has been rendered equally unavailable

to the public, though by slightly different considerations--have

fetched as much as one hundred times that sum. This arithmetic may be,

in part, the gauge of an unsought and distasteful notoriety; but that

very notoriety, by the most natural of transitions, will lead the

curious on from what cannot be obtained to what can, and some who have

begun by seeking one particular work of a great artist will end by

discovering the artist. In short, it is rational to expect that the

fortunes hereafter of this rewritten novel will very excellently

illustrate the uses of adversity.

Not, I repeat, that any great part of the reward for such writing can

come from without. According to Robert Etheridge Townsend, "a man

writes admirable prose not at all for the sake of having it read, but

for the more sensible reason that he enjoys playing solitaire"--a not

un-Cabellian saying. And, even of the reward from without, it may be

questioned whether the really indispensable part ever comes from the

multitude. A lady with whose more candid opinions the writer of this

is more frequently favored nowadays than of old has said: "Every time

I hear of somebody who has wanted one of these books without being

able to get it, or who, having got it, has conceded it nothing better

than the disdain of an ignoramus, I feel as if I must forthwith get

out the copy and read it through again and again, until I have read it

once for every person who has rejected it or been denied it." One may

feel reasonably sure that it is this kind of solicitude, rather than

any possible sanction from the crowd, which would be thought of by the

author of this book as "the exact high prize through desire of which

we write".

WILSON FOLLETT.

CHESHIRE, CONNECTICUT

_May, 1920_

CONTENTS:

THE PROLOGUE

I HE SITS OUT A DANCE

II HE LOVES EXTENSIVELY

III HE EARNS A STICK-PIN

IV HE TALKS WITH CHARTERIS

V HE REVISITS FAIRHAVEN AND THE PLAY

VI HE CHATS OVER A HEDGE

VII HE GOES MAD IN A GARDEN

VIII HE DUELS WITH A STUPID WOMAN

IX HE PUTS HIS TONGUE IN HIS CHEEK

X HE SAMPLES NEW EMOTIONS

XI HE POSTURES AMONG CHIMNEY-POTS

XII HE FACES HIMSELF AND REMEMBERS

XIII HE BAITS UPON THE JOURNEY

XIV HE PARTICIPATES IN A BRAVE JEST

XV HE DECIDES TO AMUSE HIMSELF

XVI HE SEEKS FOR COPY

XVII HE PROVIDES COPY

XVIII HE SPENDS AN AFTERNOON IN ARDEN

XIX HE PLAYS THE IMPROVIDENT FOOL

XX HE DINES OUT, IMPEDED BY SUPERSTITIONS

XXI HE IS URGED TO DESERT HIS GALLEY

XXII HE CLEANS THE SLATE

XXIII HE REVILES DESTINY AND CLIMBS A WALL

XXIV HE RECONCILES SENTIMENT AND REASON

XXV HE ADVANCES IN THE ATTACK ON SELWOODE

XXVI HE ASSISTS IN THE DIVERSION OF BIRDS

XXVII HE CALLS, COUNSELS, AND CONSIDERS

XXVIII HE PARTICIPATES IN SUNDRY CONFIDENCES

XXIX HE ALLOWS THE MERITS OF IMPERFECTION

XXX HE GILDS THE WEATHER-VANE

THE EPILOGUE: WHICH SUGGESTS THAT SECOND THOUGHTS--

THE PROLOGUE

_"In the house and garden of his dream he saw a child moving, and

could divide the main streams at least of the winds that had played on

him, and study so the first stage in that mental journey."_

_The Prologue: Which Deals with the Essentials_

_1--Writing_

It appeared to me that my circumstances clamored for betterment,

because never in my life have I been able to endure the contact of

unhappiness. And my mother was always crying now, over (though I did

not know it) the luckiest chance which had ever befallen her; and that

made me cry too, without understanding exactly why.

So the child, that then was I, procured a pencil and a bit of

wrapping-paper, and began to write laboriously:

"DEAR LORD

"You know that Papa died and please comfort Mama

and give Father a crown of Glory Ammen

"Your lamb and very sincerely yours

"ROBERT ETHERIDGE TOWNSEND."

This appeared to the point as I re-read it, and of course God would

understand that children were not expected to write quite as straight

across the paper as grown people. The one problem was how to deliver

this, my first letter, most expeditiously, because when your mother

cried you always cried too, and couldn't stop, not even when you

wanted to, not even when she promised you five cents, and it all made

you horribly uncomfortable.

I knew that the big Bible on the parlor table was God's book. Probably

God read it very often, since anybody would be proud of having written

a book as big as that and would want to look at it every day. So I

tiptoed into the darkened parlor. I use the word advisedly, for there

was not at this period any drawing-room in Lichfield, and besides, a

drawing-room is an entirely different matter.

Everywhere the room was cool, and, since the shades were down, the

outlines of the room's contents were uncomfortably dubious; for just

where the table stood had been, five days ago, a big and oddly-shaped

black box with beautiful silver handles; and Uncle George had lifted

me so that I could see through the pane of glass, which was a part of

this funny box, while an infinity of decorous people rustled and

whispered....

I remember knowing they were "company" and thinking they coughed and

sniffed because they were sorry that my father was dead. In the light

of knowledge latterly acquired, I attribute these actions to the then

prevalent weather, for even now I recall how stiflingly the room smelt

of flowers--particularly of magnolia blossoms--and of rubber and of

wet umbrellas. For my own part, I was not at all sorry, though of

course I pretended to be, since I had always known that as a rule my

father whipped me because he had just quarreled with my mother, and

that he then enjoyed whipping me.

I desired, in fine, that he should stay dead and possess his crown of

glory in Heaven, which was reassuringly remote, and that my mother

should stop crying. So I slipped my note into the Apocrypha....

I felt that somewhere in the room was God and that God was watching

me, but I was not afraid. Yet I entertained, in common with most

children, a nebulous distrust of this mysterious Person, a distrust of

which I was particularly conscious on winter nights when the gas had

been turned down to a blue fleck, and the shadow of the mantelpiece

flickered and plunged on the ceiling, and the clock ticked louder and

louder, in prediction (I suspected) of some terrible event very close

at hand.

Then you remembered such unpleasant matters as Elisha and his bears,

and those poor Egyptian children who had never even spoken to Moses,

and that uncomfortably abstemious lady, in the fat blue-covered

_Arabian Nights_, who ate nothing but rice, grain by grain--in the

daytime.... And you called Mammy, and said you were very thirsty and

wanted a glass of water, please.

To-day, though, while acutely conscious of that awful inspection, and

painstakingly careful not to look behind me, I was not, after all,

precisely afraid. If God were a bit like other people I knew He would

say, "What an odd child!" and I liked to have people say that. Still,

there was sunlight in the hall, and lots of sunlight, not just long

and dusty shreds of sunlight, and I felt more comfortable when I was

back in the hall.

2--_Reading_

I lay flat upon my stomach, having found that posture most conformable

to the practice of reading, and I considered the cover of this slim,

green book; the name of John Charteris, stamped thereon in fat-bellied

letters of gold, meant less to me than it was destined to signify

thereafter.

A deal of puzzling matter I found in this book, but in my memory,

always, one fantastic passage clung as a burr to sheep's wool. That

fable, too, meant less to me than it was destined to signify

thereafter, when the author of it was used to declare that he had,

unwittingly, written it about me. Then I read again this

_Fable of the Foolish Prince_

"As to all earlier happenings I choose in this place to be silent.

Anterior adventures he had known of the right princely sort. But

concerning his traffic with Schamir, the chief talisman, and how

through its aid he won to the Sun's Sister for a little while; and

concerning his dealings with the handsome Troll-wife (in which affair

the cat he bribed with butter and the elm-tree he had decked with

ribbons helped him); and with that beautiful and dire Thuringian woman

whose soul was a red mouse: we have in this place naught to do.

Besides, the Foolish Prince had put aside such commerce when the Fairy

came to guide him; so he, at least, could not in equity have grudged

the same privilege to his historian.

"Thus, the Fairy leading, the Foolish Prince went skipping along his

father's highway. But the road was bordered by so many wonders--as

here a bright pebble and there an anemone, say, and, just beyond, a

brook which babbled an entreaty to be tasted,--that many folk had

presently overtaken and had passed the loitering Foolish Prince. First

came a grandee, supine in his gilded coach, with half-shut eyes,

uneagerly meditant upon yesterday's statecraft or to-morrow's

gallantry; and now three yokels, with ruddy cheeks and much dust upon

their shoulders; now a haggard man in black, who constantly glanced

backward; and now a corporal with an empty sleeve, who whistled as he

went.

"A butterfly guided every man of them along the highway. 'For the Lord

of the Fields is a whimsical person,' said the Fairy,' and such is his

very old enactment concerning the passage even of his cowpath; but

princes each in his day and in his way may trample this domain as

prompt their will and skill.'

"'That now is excellent hearing,' said the Foolish Prince; and he

strutted.

"'Look you,' said the Fairy, 'a man does not often stumble and break

his shins in the highway, but rather in the byway.'....

"Thus, the Fairy leading, the Foolish Prince went skipping on his

allotted journey, though he paused once in a while to shake his bauble

at the staring sun.

"'The stars,' he considered, 'are more sympathetic....

"And thus, the Fairy leading, they came at last to a tall hedge

wherein were a hundred wickets, all being closed; and those who had

passed the Foolish Prince disputed before the hedge and measured the

hundred wickets with thirty-nine articles and with a variety of

instruments, and each man entered at his chosen wicket, and a

butterfly went before him; but no man returned into the open country.

"'Now beyond each wicket,' said the Fairy, 'lies a great crucible, and

by ninety and nine of these crucibles is a man consumed, or else

transmuted into this animal or that animal. For such is the law in

these parts and in human hearts.'

"The Prince demanded how if one found by chance the hundredth wicket?

But she shook her head and said that none of the Tylwydd Teg was

permitted to enter the Disenchanted Garden. Rumor had it that within

the Garden, beyond the crucibles, was a Tree, but whether the fruit of

this Tree were sweet or bitter no person in the Fields could tell, nor

did the Fairy pretend to know what happened in the Garden.

"'Then why, in heaven's name, need a man test any of these wickets?'

cried the Foolish Prince; 'with so much to lose and, it may be,

nothing to gain? For one, I shall enter none of them.'

"But once more she shook her glittering head. 'In your House and in

your Sign it was decreed. Time will be, my Prince; to-day the kid

gambols and the ox chews his cud. Presently the butcher cries, _Time

is!_ Comes the hour and the power, and the cook bestirs herself and

says, _Time was!_ The master has his dinner, either way, all say, and

every day.'

"And the Fairy vanished as she talked with him, her radiances thinning

into the neutral colors of smoke, and thence dwindling a little by a

little into the vaulting spiral of a windless and a burnt-out fire,

until nothing remained of her save her voice; and that was like the

moving of dead leaves before they fall.

"'Truly,' said the Foolish Prince, 'I am compelled to consider this a

vexatious business. For, look you, the butterfly I just now admire

flits over this wicket, and then her twin flutters over that wicket,

and between them there is absolutely no disparity in attraction. Hoo!

here is a more sensible insect.'

"And he leaped and cracked his heels together and ran after a golden

butterfly that drifted to the rearward Fields. There was such a host

of butterflies about that presently he had lost track of his first

choice, and was in boisterous pursuit of a second, and then of a

third, and then of yet others; but none of them did he ever capture,

the while that one by one he followed divers butterflies of varying

colors, and never a golden butterfly did he find any more.

"When it was evening, the sky drew up the twilight from the east as a

blotter draws up ink, and stars were kindling everywhere like tiny

signal-fires, and a light wind came out of the murky east and rustled

very plaintively in places where the more ambiguous shadows were; and

the Foolish Prince shivered, for the air was growing chill, and the

tips of his fingers were aware of it.

"'A crucible,' he reflected, 'possesses the minor virtue of continuous

warmth.'

"And before the hedge he found a Rational Person, led hither by a

Clothes' Moth, working out the problem of the hundred wickets in

consonance with the most approved methods. 'I have very nearly solved

it,' the Rational Person said, in genteel triumph, 'but this evening

grows too dark for any further ciphering, and again I must wait until

to-morrow. I regret, sir, that you have elected to waste the day, in

pursuit of various meretricious Lepidoptera.'

"'A happy day, my brother, is never wasted."

"'That appears to me to be nonsense,' said the Rational Person; and he

put up his portfolio, preparatory to spending another night under his

umbrella in the Fields.

"'Indeed, my brother?' laughed the Foolish Prince. 'Then, farewell,

for I am assured that yonder, as here, our father makes the laws, and

that to dispute his appreciation of the enticing qualities of

butterflies were an impertinence.'

"Thereafter, pushing open the wicket nearest to his hand, the Foolish

Prince tucked his bauble under his left arm and skipped into the

Disenchanted Garden; and as he went he sang, not noting that, from

somewhere in the thickening shadows, had arisen a golden butterfly

which went before him through the wicket.

"Sang the Foolish Prince:

"'Farewell to Fields and Butterflies

And levities of Yester-year!

For we espy, and hold more dear,

The Wicket of our Destinies.

"'Whereby we enter, once for all,

A Garden which such fruit doth yield

As, tasted once, no more Afield

We fare where Youth holds carnival.

"'Farewell, fair Fields, none found amiss

When laughter was a frequent noise

And golden-hearted girls and boys

Appraised the mouth they meant to kiss.

"'Farewell, farewell! but for a space

We, being young, Afield might stray,

That in our Garden nod and say,

_Afield is no unpleasant place.'"_

3--_Arithmetic_

In such disconnected fashion, as hereafter, I record the moments of my

life which I most vividly remember. For it is possible only in the

last paragraphs of a book, and for a book's people only, to look back

upon an ordered and proportionate progression to what one has become;

in life the thing arrives with scantier dignity; and one appears, in

retrospection, less to have marched toward any goal than always to

have jumped and scrambled from one stepping-stone to another because,

however momentarily, "just this or that poor impulse seemed the sole

work of a lifetime."

Well! at least I have known these moments and the rapture of their

dominance; and I am not lightly to be stripped of recollection of

them, nor of the attendant thrill either, by any cheerless hour

wherein, as sometimes happens, my personal achievements confront me

like a pile of flimsy jack-straws.

What does it all amount to?--I do not know. There may be some sort of

supernal bookkeeping, somewhere, but very certainly it is not

conformable to any human mathematics.

_THE CORDS OF VANITY

"His has been the summer air, and the sunshine, and the flowers; and

gentle ears have listened to him, and gentle eyes have been upon him.

Let others eat his honey that please, so that he has had his morsel

and his song."_

1.

_He Sits Out a Dance_

When I first knew Stella she was within a month of being fifteen,

which is for womankind an unattractive age. There were a startling

number of corners to her then, and she had but vague notions as to the

management of her hands and feet. In consequence they were perpetually

turning up in unexpected places and surprising her by their size and

number. Yes, she was very hopelessly fifteen; and she was used to

laugh, unnecessarily, in a nervous fashion, approximating to a whinny,

and when engaged in conversation she patted down her skirts six times

to the minute.

It seems oddly unbelievable when I reflect that Rosalind--"daughter to

the banished Duke"--and Stella and Helen of Troy, and all the other

famous fair ones of history, were each like that at one period or

another.

As for myself, I was nine days younger than Stella, and so I was at

this time very old--much older than it is ever permitted anyone to be

afterward. I cherished the most optimistic ideas as to my impendent

moustache, and was wont in privacy to encourage it with the

manicure-scissors. I still entertained the belief that girls were

upon the whole superfluous nuisances, but was beginning to perceive

the expediency of concealing this opinion, even in private converse

with my dearest chum, where, in our joyous interchange of various

heresies, we touched upon this especial sub-division of fauna very

lightly, and, I now suspect, with some self-consciousness.

2

All this was at a summer resort, which was called the Green

Chalybeate. Stella and I and others of our age attended the hotel hops

in the evening with religious punctuality, for well-meaning elders

insisted these dances amused us, and it was easier to go than to argue

the point. At least, that was the feeling of the boys.

Stella has since sworn the girls liked it. I suspect in this statement

a certain parsimony as to the truth. They giggled too much and were

never entirely free from that haunting anxiety concerning their

skirts.

We danced together, Stella and I, to the strains of the last Sousa

two-step (it was the _Washington Post_), and we conversed, meanwhile,

with careful disregard of the amenities of life, since each feared

lest the other might suspect in some common courtesy an attempt

at--there is really no other word--spooning. And spooning was absurd.

Well, as I once read in the pages of a rare and little known author,

one lives and learns.

I asked Stella to sit out a dance. I did this because I had heard Mr.

Lethbury--a handsome man with waxed mustachios and an absolutely

piratical amount of whiskers,--make the same request of Miss Van

Orden, my just relinquished partner, and it was evident that such

whiskers could do no wrong.

Stella was not uninfluenced, it may be, by Miss Van Orden's example,

for even in girlhood the latter was a person of extraordinary beauty,

whereas, as has been said, Stella's corners were then multitudinous;

and it is probable that those two queer little knobs at the base of

Stella's throat would be apt to render their owner uncomfortable and a

bit abject before--let us say--more ample charms. In any event, Stella

giggled and said she thought it would be just fine, and I presently

conducted her to the third piazza of the hotel.

There we found a world that was new.

3

It was a world of sweet odors and strange lights, flooded with a

kindly silence which was, somehow, composed of many lispings and

trepidations and thin echoes. The night was warm, the sky all

transparency. If the comparison was not manifestly absurd, I would

liken that remembered sky's pale color to the look of blue plush

rubbed the wrong way. And in its radiance the stars bathed, large and

bright and intimate, yet blurred somewhat, like shop-lights seen

through frosted panes; and the moon floated on it, crisp and clear as

a new-minted coin. This was the full midsummer moon, grave and

glorious, that compelled the eye; and its shield was obscurely marked,

as though a Titan had breathed on its chill surface. Its light

suffused the heavens and lay upon the earth beneath us in broad

splashes; and the foliage about us was dappled with its splendor, save

in the open east, where the undulant, low hills wore radiancy as a

mantle.

For the trees, mostly maples of slight stature, clustered thickly

about the hotel, and their branches mingled in a restless pattern of

blacks and silvers and dim greens that mimicked the laughter of the

sea under an April wind. Looking down from the piazza, over the

expanse of tree-tops, all this was strangely like the sea; and it gave

one, somehow, much the same sense of remote, unbounded spaces and of a

beauty that was a little sinister. At times whippoorwills called to

one another, eerie and shrill; and the distant dance-music was a

vibration in the air, which was heavy with the scent of bruised

growing things and was filled with the cool, healing magic of the

moonlight.

Taking it all in all, we had blundered upon a very beautiful place.

And there we sat for a while and talked in an aimless fashion. We did

not know quite how one ought to "sit out" a dance, you conceive....

4

Then, moved by some queer impulse, I stared over the railing for a

little at this great, wonderful, ambiguous world, and said solemnly:

"It is good."

"Yes," Stella agreed, in a curious, quiet and tiny voice, "it--it's

very large, isn't it?" She looked out for a moment over the tree-tops.

"It makes me feel like a little old nothing," she said, at last. "The

stars are so big, and--so uninterested." Stella paused for an

interval, and then spoke again, with an uncertain laugh. "I think I am

rather afraid."

"Afraid?" I echoed.

"Yes," she said, vaguely; "of--of everything."

I understood. Even then I knew something of the occasional

insufficiency of words.

"It is a big world," I assented, "and lots of people are having a

right hard time in it right now. I reckon there is somebody dying this

very minute not far off."

"It's all--waiting for us!" Stella had forgotten my existence. "It's

bringing us so many things--and we don't know what any of them are.

But we've got to take them, whether we want to or not. It isn't fair.

We've got to--well, got to grow up, and--marry, and--die, whether we

want to or not. We've no choice. And it may not matter, after all.

Everything will keep right on like it did before; and the stars won't

care; and what we've done and had done to us won't really matter!"

"Well, but, Stella, you can have a right good time first, anyway, if

you keep away from ugly things and fussy people. And I reckon you

really go to Heaven afterwards if you haven't been really bad,--don't

you?"

"Rob,--are you ever afraid of dying?" Stella asked, "very much

afraid--Oh, you know what I mean."

I did. I was about ten once more. It was dark, and I was passing a

drug-store, with huge red and green and purple bottles glistening in

the gas-lit windows; and it had just occurred to me that I, too, must

die, and be locked up in a box, and let down with trunk-straps into a

hole, like Father was.... So I said, "Yes."

"And yet we've got to! Oh, I don't see how people can go on living

like everything was all right when that's always getting nearer,--when

they know they've got to die before very long. Because they dance and

go on picnics and buy hats as if they were going to live forever.

I--oh, I can't understand."

"They get used to the idea, I reckon. We're sort of like the rats in

the trap at home, in our stable," I suggested, poetically. "We can bite

the wires and go crazy, like lots of them do, if we want to, or we can

eat the cheese and kind of try not to think about it. Either way, there's

no getting out till they come to kill us in the morning."

"Yes," sighed Stella; "I suppose we must make the best of it."

"It's the only sensible thing to do, far as I can see."

"But it is all so big--and so careless about us!" she said, after a

little. "And we don't know--we can't know!--what is going to happen to

you and me. And we can't stop its happening!"

"We'll just have to make the best of that, too," I protested,

dolefully.

Stella sighed again, "I hope so," she assented; "still, I'm scared of

it."

"I think I am, too--sort of," I conceded, after reflection. "Anyhow, I

am going to have as good a time as I can."

There was now an even longer pause. Pitiable, ridiculous infants were

pondering, somewhat vaguely but very solemnly, over certain mysteries

of existence, which most of us have learned to accept with stolidity.

We were young, and to us the miraculous insecurity and inconsequence

of human life was still a little impressive, and we had not yet come

to regard the universe as a more or less comfortable place,

well-meaningly constructed anyhow--by Somebody--for us to reside in.

Therefore we moved a trifle closer together, Stella and I, and were

commonly miserable over the _Weltschmerz_. After a little a distant

whippoorwill woke me from a chaos of reverie, and I turned to Stella,

with a vague sense that we two were the only people left in the whole

world, and that I was very, very fond of her.

Stella's head was leaned backward. Her lips were parted, and the

moonlight glinted in her eyes. Her eyes were blue.

"Don't!" said Stella, faintly.

I did....

It was a matter out of my volition, out of my planning. And, oh, the

wonder, and sweetness, and sacredness of it! I thought, even in the

instant; and, oh, the pity that, after all, it is slightly

disappointing....

Stella was not angry, as I had half expected. "That was dear of you,"

she said, impulsively, "but don't try to do it again." There was the

wisdom of centuries in this mandate of Stella's as she rose from the

bench. The spell was broken, utterly. "I think," said Stella, in the

voice of a girl of fifteen, "I think we'd better go and dance some

more."

5

In the crude morning I approached Stella, with a fatuous smile. She

apparently both perceived and resented my bearing, although she never

once looked at me. There was something of great interest to her in the

distance, apparently down by the springhouse; she was flushed and

indignant; and her eyes wouldn't, couldn't, and didn't turn for an

instant in my direction.

I fidgeted.

"If," said she, impersonally, "if you believe it was because of _you_,

you are very much mistaken. It would have been the same with anybody.

You don't understand, and I don't either. Anyhow, I think you are a

mess, and I hate you. Go away from me!"

And she stamped her foot in a fine rage.

For the moment I entertained an un-Christian desire that Stella had

been born a boy. In that case, I felt, I would, just then, have really

enjoyed sitting upon the back of her head, and grinding her nose into

the lawn, and otherwise persuading her to cry "'Nough." These virile

pleasures being denied me, I sought for comfort in discourteous

speech.

"Umph-huh!" said I, "and you think you're mighty smart, don't you?

Well, I don't want you pawing around me any more, either. I won't have

it, do you understand! That was what I was going to tell you anyhow,

you kissing-bug, even if you hadn't acted so smart. And you can just

stick that right in your pipe and smoke it, you old Miss Smart Alec."

Thereupon I--wisely--departed without delay. A rock struck me rather

forcibly between the shoulder blades, but I did not deign to notice

this phenomenon.

"You can't fight girls with fists," I reflected. "You've just got to

talk to them in the right way."

2.

_He Loves Extensively_

I saw no more of Stella for a lengthy while, since within two days of

the events recorded it pleased my mother to seek out another summer

resort.

"For in September," she said, "I really must have perfect quiet and

unimpeachable butter, and falling leaves, and only a very few

congenial people to be melancholy with,--and that sort of thing, you

know. I find it freshens one up so against the winter."

It was a signal feature of my mother's conversation that you never

understood, precisely, what she was talking about.

Thus in her train the silly, pretty woman drew otherwhither her

hobbledehoy son, as indeed Claire Bulmer Townsend had aforetime drawn

an armament of more mature and stolid members of my sex. I was always

proud of my handsome mother, but without any aspirations, however

theoretical, toward intimacy; and her periods of conscientious if

vague affection, when she recollected its propriety, I endured with

consolatory foreknowledge of an impendent, more agreeable era of

neglect.

I fancy that at bottom I was without suspecting it lonely. I was an

only child; my father had died, as has been hinted, when I was in

kilts.... No, I must have graduated from kilts into "knee-pants" when

the Democracy of Lichfield celebrated Grover Cleveland's first

election as President, for I was seven years old then, and was allowed

to stay up ever so late after supper to watch the torchlight parade. I

recollect being rather pleasantly scared by the yells of all those

marching people and by the glistening of their faces as the irregular

flaring torches heaved by; and I recollect how delightfully the cold

night air was flavored with kerosene. In any event, it was on this

generally festive November night that my father again took too much to

drink, and, coming home toward morning, lay down and went to sleep in

the vestibule between our front-door and the storm-doors; and five

days later died of pneumonia...In that era I was accounted an odd boy;

given to reading and secretive ways, and, they record, to long

silences throughout which my lips would move noiselessly. "Just

talking to one of my friends," they tell me I was used to explain;

though it was not until my career at King's College that I may be said

to have pretended to intimacy with anybody.

2

For in old Fairhaven I spent, of course, a period of ostensible study,

as four generations of my fathers had done aforetime. But in that

leisured, slatternly and ancient city I garnered a far larger harvest

of (comparatively) innocuous cakes and ale than of authentic learning,

and at my graduation carried little of moment from the place save many

memories of Bettie Hamlyn.... Her father taught me Latin at King's

College, while Bettie taught me human intimacy--almost. Looking back,

I have not ever been intimate with anybody....

Not but that I had my friends. In particular I remember those four of

us who always called ourselves--in flat defiance, just as Dumas did,

of mere arithmetic--"The Three Musketeers." I think that we loved one

another very greatly during the four years we spent together in our

youth. I like to believe we did, and to remember the boys who were

once unreasonably happy, even now. It does not seem to count, somehow,

that Aramis has taken to drink and every other inexpedient course, I

hear, and that I would not recognize him today, were we two to

encounter casually--or Athos, either, I suppose, now that he has been

so long in the Philippines.

And as for D'Artagnan--or Billy Woods, if you prefer the appellation

which his sponsors gave him,--why we are still good friends and always

will be, I suppose. But we are not particularly intimate; and very

certainly we will never again read _Chastelard_ together and declaim

the more impassioned parts of it,--and in fine, I cannot help seeing,

nowadays, that, especially since his marriage, Billy has developed

into a rather obvious and stupid person, and that he considers me to

be a bit of a bad egg. And in a phrase, when we are together, just we

two, we smoke a great deal and do not talk any more than is necessary.

And once I would have quite sincerely enjoyed any death, however

excruciating, which promoted the well-being of Billy Woods; and he

viewed me not dissimilarly, I believe.... However, after all, this was

a long, long while ago, and in a period almost antediluvian.

And during this period they of Fairhaven assumed I was in love with

Bettie Hamlyn; and for a very little while, at the beginning, had I

assumed as much. More lately was my error flagrantly apparent when I

fell in love with someone else, and sincerely in love, and found to my

amazement that, upon the whole, I preferred Bettie's companionship to

that of the woman I adored. By and by, though, I learned to accept

this odd, continuing phenomenon much as I had learned to accept the

sunrise.

3

Once Bettie demanded of me, "I often wonder what you really think of

me? Honest injun, I mean."

I meditated, and presently began, with leisure:

"Miss Hamlyn is a young woman of considerable personal attractions,

and with one exception is unhandicapped by accomplishments. She plays

the piano, it is true, but she does it divinely and she neither

crochets nor embroiders presents for people, nor sketches, nor

recites, nor sings, or in fine annoys the public in any way

whatsoever. Her enemies deny that she is good-looking, but even her

friends concede her curious picturesqueness and her knowledge of it.

Her penetration, indeed, is not to be despised; she has even grasped

the fact that all men are not necessarily fools in spite of the

fashion in which they talk to women. It must be admitted, however,

that her emotions are prone to take precedence of her reasoning

powers: thus she is not easily misled from getting what she desires,

save by those whom she loves, because in argument, while always

illogical, she is invariably convincing--"

Miss Hamlyn sniffed. "This is, perhaps, the inevitable effect of

twenty cigarettes a day," was her cryptic comment. "Nevertheless, it

does affect me with ennui."

"--For, the mere facts of the case she plainly demonstrates, with the

abettance of her dimples, to be an affair of unimportance; the real

point is what she wishes done about it. Yet the proffering of any

particular piece of advice does not necessarily signify that she

either expects or wishes it to be followed, since had she been present

at the Creation she would have cheerfully pointed out to the Deity His

various mistakes, and have offered her co-operation toward bettering

matters, and have thought a deal less of Him had He accepted it; but

this is merely a habit--" "Yes?" said Bettie, yawning; and she added:

"Do you know, Robin, the saddest and most desolate thing in the world

is to practise an _etude_ of Schumann's in nine flats, and the next is

to realize that a man who has been in love with you has recovered for

keeps?"

"--It must not be imagined, however, that Miss Hamlyn is untruthful,

for when driven by impertinences into a corner she conceals her real

opinion by voicing it quite honestly as if she were joking. Thereupon

you credit her with the employment of irony and the possession of

every imaginable and super-angelical characteristic--"

"Unless we come to a better understanding," Miss Hamlyn crisply began,

"we had better stop right here before we come to a worse--"

"--Miss Hamlyn, in a word, is possessed of no insufferable virtues and

of many endearing faults; and in common with the rest of humanity, she

regards her disapproval of any proceeding as clear proof of its

impropriety." This was largely apropos of a fire-new debate concerning

the deleterious effects of cigarette-smoking; and when I had made an

end, and doggedly lighted another one of them, Bettie said nothing....

She minded chiefly that one of us should have thought of the other

without bias. She said it was not fair. And I know now that she was

right.

But of Bettie Hamlyn, for reasons you may learn hereafter if you so

elect, I honestly prefer to write not at all. Four years, in fine, we

spent to every purpose together, and they were very happy years. To

record them would be desecration.

4

Meantime, during these years, I had fallen in and out of love

assiduously. Since the Anabasis of lad's love traverses a monotonous

country, where one hill is largely like another, and one meadow a

duplicate of the next to the last daffodil, I may with profit dwell

upon the green-sickness lightly. It suffices that in the course of

these four years I challenged superstition by adoring thirteen girls,

and, worse than that, wrote verses of them.

I give you their names herewith--though not their workaday names, lest

the wives of divers people be offended (and in many cases, surprised),

but the appellatives which figured in my rhymes. They were Heart's

Desire, Florimel, Dolores, Yolande, Adelais, Sylvia, Heart o' My

Heart, Chloris, Felise, Ettarre, Phyllis, Phyllida, and Dorothy. Here

was a rosary of exquisite names, I even now concede; and the owner of

each _nom de plume_ I, for however brief a period, adored for this or

that peculiar excellence; and by ordinary without presuming to mention

the fact to any of these divinities save Heart o' My Heart, who was,

after all, only a Penate.

Outside the elevated orbits of rhyme she was called Elizabeth Hamlyn;

and it afterward became apparent to me that I, in reality, wrote all

the verses of this period solely for the pleasure of reading them

aloud to Bettie, for certainly I disclosed their existence to no one

else--except just one or two to Phyllida, who was "literary."

And the upshot of all this heart-burning is most succinctly given in

my own far from impeccable verse, as Bettie Hamlyn heard the summing-up

one evening in May. It was the year I graduated from King's

College, and the exact relation of the date to the Annos Domini is

trivial. But the battle of Manila had just been fought, and off

Santiago Captain Sampson and Commander Schley were still hunting for

Cervera's "phantom fleet." And in Fairhaven, as I remember it,

although there was a highly-colored picture of Commodore Dewey in the

barber-shop window, nobody was bothering in the least about the war

except when Colonel Snawley and Dr. Jeal foregathered at Clarriker's

Emporium to denounce the colossal errors of "imperialism"....

"Thus, then, I end my calendar

Of ancient loves more light than air;--

And now Lad's Love, that led afar

In April fields that were so fair,

Is fled, and I no longer share

Sedate unutterable days

With Heart's Desire, nor ever praise

Felise, or mirror forth the lures

Of Stella's eyes nor Sylvia's,

Yet love for each loved lass endures.

"Chloris is wedded, and Ettarre

Forgets; Yolande loves otherwhere,

And worms long since made bold to mar

The lips of Dorothy and fare

Mid Florimel's bright ruined hair;

And Time obscures that roseate haze

Which glorified hushed woodland ways

When Phyllis came, as Time obscures

That faith which once was Phyllida's,--

Yet love for each loved lass endures.

"That boy is dead as Schariar,

Tiglath-pileser, or Clotaire,

Who once of love got many a scar.

And his loved lasses past compare?--

None is alive now anywhere.

Each is transmuted nowadays

Into a stranger, and displays

No whit of love's investitures.

I let these women go their ways,

Yet love for each loved lass endures.

"Heart o' My Heart, thine be the praise

If aught of good in me betrays

Thy tutelage--whose love matures

Unmarred in these more wistful days,--

Yet love for each loved lass endures."

For this was the year that I graduated, and Chloris--I violate no

confidence in stating that her actual name was Aurelia Minns, and that

she had been, for a greater number of years than it would be courteous

to remember, the undisputed belle of Fairhaven,--had that very

afternoon married a promising young doctor; and I was draining the cup

of my misery to the last delicious drop, and was of course inspired

thereby to the perpetration of such melancholy bathos as only a

care-free youth of twenty is capable of evolving.

5

"Dear boy," said Bettie, when I had made an end of reading, "and are

you very miserable?"

Her fingers were interlocked behind her small black head; and the

sympathy with which she regarded me was tenderly flavored with

amusement.