felt quite unequal to dragging himself about, wilted and irritated,
any longer. Really, he considered, settling back into the motor, he
was getting pretty fed up with this insatiable lust of Laura's. He
wondered whether, when they were married and she was away from her
mother, he would be able to instil in her a more normal enjoyment of
her pleasures. He thought, vaguely, of not going after all--of
awaiting them at the house. But a vision rose before him of Laura
all evening wrapped in her delicate fury of aloofness, something too
inhumanly polite to be called sulking, but of shattering import to
nerves on edge--and he decided grimly that he was too hot, too
tired. In the last analysis it was less trouble to go to the garden
party.
By this time they were humming smoothly up to the Vinguts' gates.
The breeze had cooled the heat of his brow, but his thoughts were
growing only more feverish with the passing moments. He halted the
chauffeur suddenly: "Let me out here, Lane. I'll walk up to the
house--I need exercise."
It was pleasant to stroll along the driveway, to stretch his cramped
limbs, and absorb at leisure the careful beauties of the land about
him. The lonely graciousness of tall poplar trees, the low-flowering
crimson of rhododendrons ministered gratefully to his troubled soul.
New satisfaction filled him as he discovered no people in sight.
They must be the other side of the house, on the terraces, he
thought, restfully. And then, suddenly, he stopped short, staring.
Just ahead in a clearing was an old Italian fountain, gray stone,
carved and mellowed by the centuries, water splashing musically into
its basin. Sitting on the edge was a tall young girl, the adolescent
grace of her body showing clear and white through the classic
scantness of her shell-pink draperies. Diana herself she might have
been, nymph-robed and formed, her chestnut hair bound about by a
silver fillet, her long, white legs, uncovered, dangling in the
water. He felt a wild certainty that if he spoke she would melt away
into the spray of the fountain. And then she turned her head and saw
him.
"You are late," she said, in a very clear, low voice that merged
into the plashing water.
"Yes--I am late," he stammered. "I wonder ... who you are?"
She stared into his eyes with the deep, unconscious gravity of a
child.
"I am Athena," she answered simply.
"Athena!" he gasped. "Good heavens! Then you _are_ a goddess--or a
nymph----"
She laughed--and her laughter sounded in his ear more like the
fountain than the fountain itself.
"Oh, no," she reassured him. "We all have Greek names because they
are more beautiful."
"'We all'!... Good lord, child, who _are_ you?"
"Why--I am Athena--one of the Morris Dancers. We came to do our
Spring Dance for the party."
How absurdly simple, he thought. And yet how insufficiently it
explained the wonder of her.
"Why are you here--alone?" he went on. He could do nothing but
question her. He had to get to the bottom of her, somehow.
"We're through dancing--and the people tired me."
He sat down on the edge of the fountain, and she moved up beside
him, touching him, a divine friendliness in her deep blue eyes.
"How did they tire you--child?" he asked her gently.
"They are all so artificial--and so conscious. We are taught how
terrible this consciousness of self and sex is. Hellena Morris
teaches us that woman is only really beautiful, really strong, when
she is quite unconscious and unstudied."
He eyed the grave little lecturer amusedly.
"Do you understand all that--Athena?" he ventured.
"Why, yes," she said. "We are all very intelligent. It's the
wholesome life we lead and the perfection of our bodies."
He threw back his head and laughed.
"I like you when you laugh," she told him suddenly. "I like you to
throw your head back, and the kind little crinkles round your eyes.
When you are not laughing you look so tired."
"I am tired," he admitted; "tired and disillusioned most of the
time. Perhaps it's my unwholesome life and imperfect body----"
He watched her, glowing with unreasoning pleasure at her laugh.
"Humour, too!" he cried. "Child, you are wonderful! Tell me about
yourself ... everything. I must know the magic that evolved such
perfection."
"Give me your hand," she said. "There!... Now you can understand me
better.
"There isn't much to tell. I am seventeen, and have lived with
Hellena since I was eight. There are twenty of us. She teaches us
... wonderful things. Not hideous 'accomplishments,' but _real_
things that will help us--Greek and Latin, and the care of our
bodies, and the worship of beauty. We all dance, and sing, and play
... and we paint, and write verse, and translate the classics, and
read to each other. And we are very strong and hardy, because of our
simple lives.... We can beat men at their own games, although we
are so slight. We wear few clothes--nothing to restrain or
disfigure us. And when we dance we don't learn special steps; we
express in ourselves whatever we are dancing--Sorrow, or Love, or
Spring. See, I will do you part of our Spring Dance."
She drew her white, dripping legs from the fountain and danced
before him--a thing so light and delicate, so breeze-blown and
whimsical, so altogether lovely, that his distrust of her humanity
returned to him unbearably.
She stopped--a sudden flush of rose and gleam of white--and
dropped by his side again.
"And every night," she went on, as though there had been no
interruption, "we say our creed: 'I believe in beauty--all the
beauty that ever has been and ever will be in the world. And I will
worship and serve it with the highest there is in me--always.'"
He could not speak at first. Then finally, unevenly: "I can't
presume to praise your theory of life, Athena--any more than I
could your dancing. Thank you for them both."
She put her hand on his knee, looking at him, whitely, a little
wildly.
"What is your name?" she asked.
"Dick," he answered, as simply as she had told him hers.
"I should like to marry you--Dick."
He stared at her.
"So you include marriage--in your scheme of life?" he said dully.
"Yes. Hellena says our marriage laws are terrible, but, while there
is no substitute, if we love terribly it is right to marry. I want
to marry you, Dick--to be with you always, and take the tired look
away from your eyes."
"Child!" he cried. "You don't know me!"
"It doesn't matter," she told him quaintly. "Love often comes this
way."
He took her hand against his cheek.
"Dear," he said, "I am thirty-five--a pretty world-stained and
world-weary creature. Your radiant youth was given you for a better
man than I."
"I love _you_, Dick, I have never loved before."
"Athena, I am ... going to marry ... some one else."
She trembled against him.
"Some one you _love_?" she cried. "Dick, some one you love as you
could love me? Is she as young and beautiful? Could she amuse you,
and care for you, and adore you always--_always_, as I would?"
"Athena," he said slowly, "there is no one like you ... in the
world. I love this ... other girl in my own way. Not as you should
be loved, but I'm not fit for such love as that. I can't marry you.
Athena--dear--don't make it too hard."
She sat, silent.
Then: "Dick--would you--kiss me?"
He took her gently in his arms.
In the distance people were moving. There was a rustle and a
chatter. He let her go suddenly.
"Good-bye--dear," he said.
"Good-bye--Dick," she answered dully.
Once he turned back and saw her--drooping, rose-white, against the
old gray fountain.
* * * * *
From the gay group ahead Laura detached herself, ruffled and
fluttering.
"You're late enough," she greeted him.
"Yes," he said. Then, with an effort: "Have you seen the--Morris
Dancers?"
"Oh, yes; we all did. I think they're rather disgusting--so few
clothes and so much throwing themselves about; don't you?"
"You forget," he answered slowly, "that I have just arrived."
--------------------------------------------------------------------
A CLEVER CATCH
By Lloyd F. Loux
She was a thief, and he knew it. He had followed her in her travels,
where she posed as a saleswoman. At various times he had thought to
capture her, but she evaded him. He feared he had too little
evidence, and she was so wily and so clever.
When he saw her sun-kissed hair and inviting lips, he felt abashed
to think of associating crime with her, and so he waited for more
conclusive evidence. He wished to be sure. How embarrassing it would
be to accuse her and then find her innocent!
And yet--he knew she was dangerous. Then one day he realized
something odd. He had been robbed! _He_, the cleverest detective on
the force, had been robbed! Yes, it was hard to realize. And by the
very woman he was seeking to capture. Yes, he knew _she_ must have
done it.
Now he would bring her to justice! But how? He had no actual
evidence more than his own conviction. Ah, yes! He would put on a
bold front and bluff her. Yes, bluff her! How happy he felt. Why,
after he had made this capture he would be the proudest man on the
force. And he could have the satisfaction of saying he had wrung the
confession from her. So he togged up and put on a bold front and a
wise air and started out. But suppose she suspected his bluff? Oh,
horrors! Imagine his chagrin. The wisest man on the force, and made
a plaything of by a baby of a woman! But he was started, and only
cowards turn back. Suffice it for us to know that he succeeded and
escorted her to the nearest magistrate's office, and she confessed!
Yes, and he had the satisfaction of hearing her take oath to the
confession. Then the magistrate appointed him to be her keeper for
life.
The case was closed with the best wishes of the magistrate.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
STRICTLY BUSINESS
By Lincoln Steffens
"There's an extra, a Christmas girl downstairs, that I think you'll
want to keep; she's a worker, but----"
The big store manager looked up at the tall, prim New England woman
who was the head of his employment bureau, and he understood. But
he's a brute.
"But?" he insisted.
"Her references aren't good."
"Not good?" he said. "You mean they ain't good people?"
"Oh," she exclaimed, "they're good people; they're very good people,
but----"
"But?"
"They prefer not to speak, for or against."
"I see," he growled. "A case for bad people. Send her up to me."
And up came the case, another Puritan, slim, alive, afire.
"I know," she began, "I know what you're going to say; every word of
it. I'm fired, but, first, I must hear a lecture; the same old
lecture. So fire away, but cut it short."
"Won't you be seated?" he said politely.
"Thanks," she mocked.
He rose, and, with a chivalrous bow, begged her to "Please be
seated."
"No," she declared decidedly, "I'll take it standing, so I can get
out if I don't like----"
"Sit down," he bellowed.
She sat.
He stood glaring at her. "Think I'd let you stand there lecturing
and judging me?" he growled. And he lectured and judged her. Then
he, too, sat.
"How do you know what I was going to say?" he demanded.
"Because you all say the same thing," she flashed; "everywhere I
work. They tell me I'm bad, so I'm discharged, but they all give me
that lecture on how to be good--out of a job." She named places she
had worked: stores where the managers and the conditions were
notorious. "They gave it to me at Freeman's," she sneered, "and,"
she jeered, "at the One Price Stores! Everywhere I get it, and not
only from you bosses. I see the other girls catch on to my story,
and, with looks at me, pass it on. 'Poor Thing,' they whisper and,
then, of course, the Poor Thing is fired."
She didn't look like a Poor Thing. She looked like a very Brave
Thing to this manager of women, but he felt, with his man's
intuition, the despair that was washing her courage away. So he was
kind.
"How old is the child?" he asked brutally.
"Five."
"Who takes care of it while you're at work?"
"Mother."
"And you support all three?"
"Yes, and," she blazed, "you needn't worry about that. You fire
away. I'll make out, somehow. Only don't, don't tell me I'm bad
again. I know that, too. Don't I tell it to myself every hour, every
day, and, if I forget it for one little hour, doesn't some one
remind me?"
He was afraid she'd break, and he didn't want her to; not her. "Too
proud, too brave."
"You needn't worry about me, either," he said. "This is a business
house, strictly business. No sentiment, and no scruples. We're here
to make money, and we're on the lookout for women who'll work and
work hard for us. We don't mind a little thing like a little child.
Fact is, a little----"
She was lifting from her chair.
"Which is it," he asked roughly, "a boy, or----?"
"A girl," she said, and she dropped back.
"The fact is," he resumed, "a little girl at home makes the mother
work harder in the store. And that's the report on you. They say
you're a hard worker, so I'd like to keep you on, regular, for
life."
She lifted again.
"But----" he said.
"But," she collapsed.
"I don't see," he said, "how you can work hard, regular, if you go
on telling yourself that lie every hour, every day; that you're
bad."
He got up, huffily. "How bad are you, anyway? How good you been
since--during the last five years?"
"As good as I was before," she blazed, springing to her feet.
"Um-m," he calculated. "I'll bet you are, and I'll bet that's pretty
good. Good enough for us. We ain't so awfully good ourselves. Quick
sales, small profits, and satisfied customers--lots of 'em. That's
what we call good."
She was reaching for him again, with hands, with eyes.
"But," he struck, "you can't do much for us and the little girl if
you're afraid every hour, every day, that you'll be found out and
fired. We got to cut out fear."
"You mean?" she gasped.
"I mean," he thundered, "I mean that you got to cut out that
every-hour-every-day business. See? It's rot, anyhow. You're as good
as anybody, and if anybody here says you ain't, you come to me and
I'll tell 'em this is a women's business, run for profit; and women;
including mothers; women, children, and--money. Y'on?"
She stood there staring; comprehending, and he felt that she wanted
to break, but----
"Now, now, none o' that," the brute commanded. "Not here. This is
business, strictly business. You get back on your job. D'y' hear?"
Yes, she nodded; she heard, and she bolted for the door, but as she
opened it she turned and she broke:
"God, how I will work! How I will----"
--------------------------------------------------------------------
THE ADVENT OF THE MAJORITY
By Stella Wynne Herron
Colonel Scipio Breckenbridge stopped polishing the lighthouse lamp
and stared out across Lone Palm Key to where the blazing yellow sand
met the dark blue waters of the Gulf. Yes--there they were again,
hobnobbing on the beach--the alien Higgins, his face a beef red
from alcohol within and the tropic sun without, stretched prone, the
breeze flapping his loose sailor's pants around his skinny
ankles--the Captain erecting a tarpaulin tent against the day of
the great four-yearly event, the presidential election.
Yes, indeed. Make no mistake. Lone Palm Key _is_ a part of the
United States. This speck of an island that flips up out of the Gulf
like the tip end of a fish's tail is listed as the sixty-sixth
precinct of Florida. For twenty years now the Colonel had
religiously cast one vote for the Democratic candidate; the Captain,
one for the Republican candidate. For twenty years--the Captain and
the Colonel being the entire population--the sixty-sixth had split
fifty-fifty--and for twenty years both had cherished the secret
hope of one day carrying it.
Mr. Higgins had drifted into Lone Palm--literally--on a hatch top
of the ill-fated _Petrel_ two months before, and it was not long
before his lamentable failing made itself manifest. Mr. Higgins was
unhappy unless drunk. When his entertainment ceased, and it looked
as if, through sheer thirst, he would have to consent to be taken to
Key West with the Captain's next cargo of sponges--non-human--he
had discovered a cast-up keg of whiskey. Such an act of Providence
almost restored his waning faith in God. But, alas! for an acrid
week now the sacred fount had been dry. This time he would surely be
frozen out---- But, now, here was the Captain encouragingly
friendly, almost chummy, with him----
The Colonel strode across to the recumbent Higgins, and touched him
with his foot.
"Higgins," he asked, "do yo' reckon to vote on Lone Palm this
election?"
"I 'ave that intention," replied Mr. Higgins gently.
"Are yo'--Republican or--Democrat?" The Colonel's voice trembled
in spite of himself.
"I 'aven't decided--yet," and Mr. Higgins let his gaze drift again
skyward.
The Colonel met the Captain's perfidious eyes across the prostrate
form of the potential majority. In that silent glance there was a
declaration of bloody war.
From that moment began the Golden Age on Lone Palm for Mr. Higgins.
With flattering frequency he drank healths to the Grand Old Party,
then to the party "that gave birth to Andrew Jackson and Thomas
Jefferson, sah!"
But no maiden, pressed by two suitors, was ever more coy in avowing
a choice than he.
A week before election the Captain's and the Colonel's liquor ran
out. Mr. Higgins, to his horror, began to get sober. The day before
election the Captain and his sloop disappeared. The Colonel did not
wait to investigate. He also hoisted sail for Key West. That night
both the Captain and the Colonel unloaded mysterious cargoes. At
midnight, after wandering constantly between the Captain's bungalow
and the lighthouse, Mr. Higgins fell down in the sand, impartially
between the two abodes. The Captain and the Colonel, in silence,
removed the political enigma to his sail-cloth tent.
Mr. Higgins did not appear at the polls until nearly noon. It was
evident that the combination of Jamaica rum and Kentucky mountain
dew had made terrible ravages on a constitution even so immune to
spirituous shocks as his.
"Drink's the cause o' this here country's goin' to the dorgs," he
remarked, through pallid, parched lips, as he entered the booth.
His ballot cast, he disappeared, still enwrapped in mystery and
silence.
At exactly six o'clock the Colonel arose.
"The polls of the Sixty-sixth Precinct, Monroe County, State of
Florida, are now closed. We will proceed to count votes, Captain
Hartford!"
The Colonel thrust into the box a hand that shook in spite of him
and drew out a ballot.
"One Republican!"
The Captain's heart leaped.
"One Democratic!" announced the Colonel tremulously.
The Captain waited, staring at the floor. Finally he looked up. The
Colonel was gazing as if hypnotized, his bulging eyes fastened on
the ballot in his hand. At last the announcement came:
"The Prohibition Party--one vote!"
Two minutes later they found this pinned to Mr. Higgins' empty tent:
"i don what i don bekaws of conshunce i suddently cam to fel the
orful kurse of drink hav made free to borrow a sale bote will leve
same at kee west"
The Colonel drew himself up in his Prince Albert.
"The Sixty-sixth has again split even, sah!" he announced.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
THE NIGHT NURSE
By Will S. Gidley
It was long after the midnight hour in the dimly lighted wards of
the field hospital back of the English battle line at Ypres, and
pretty, white-capped Nydia, the nurse best beloved by the wounded
soldiers--Nydia, with the face of a Madonna and voice as soft and
soothing as that of a mother crooning a lullaby to a sleeping
babe--was flitting about among the cots, adjusting a bandage or
pillow here, and giving a swallow of water or medicine there, and
doing everything possible for the comfort of her charges.
There was something of a mystery about Nydia. Nobody knew her
history or antecedents. She had appeared at the hospital and
proffered her services at a time when they were badly needed, and
the medical staff had accepted the offer and set her at work without
further questioning or investigation.
From the first Nydia was very popular with the patients to whom she
ministered; far more so than she was with the grim-visaged
surgeon-general in charge of the field hospital. Said he one day to
his assistant:
"This angel-faced nurse we've taken on lately may mean well, but I
am afraid she is a bit careless. Altogether too many of her patients
are dropping off--er--unexpectedly. I'll have to look into the
matter."
Which he did--later on--but that, as Kipling says, is another
story.
Return we now to Nydia on her nightly rounds.
She pauses at the cot of a stalwart young English captain who is
suffering from a gunshot wound received a few days before, and bends
over him with a look of anxious solicitude on her face.
"How is the pain to-night, my captain?" she asks, in a low, sweet
voice like a caress.
"Bad, bad," he replies slowly. "But I can stand it, dear, so long as
I have you for a nurse. Just think! Only a week since you first came
to my cot side, and already I love----"
"Hush! my brave captain," she breaks in on his rhapsody. "You must
not think of such things when you are suffering so from your wound.
It will be time enough for that to-morrow. To-night you must sleep.
I must use the needle to quiet your pain."
"And when I wake to-morrow may I talk to you of love?"
"Yes--when you wake, my captain, you may talk to me of love--_when
you wake_!
"Listen, dear," she went on in a whisper so low that only he could
hear. "I am going to lull you to sleep with a story--a story of
myself." She paused long enough to use the needle and then resumed
whispering in his ear:
"Don't interrupt or try to ask questions, my captain; there isn't
time for that. In three minutes you will be asleep, and I must talk
fast. You, no doubt, believe me to be either French or English. I am
neither. I am from beyond the Rhine, a true daughter of the
Fatherland. When the war came I had an affianced lover in the German
army, a young lieutenant, who had been sent to England on a secret
mission. There he was arrested, tried, and executed, as a spy, in
the Tower of London.
"Yes, the English shot my lover for a spy! Since that my only
thoughts have been of revenge. That is why I am here acting as
nurse--and why my patients die!
"The English sent my lover out into the Great Unknown--alone. I
will send a thousand English to keep him company! To-day, my
captain, you said you would gladly die for me, so I am taking you at
your word!
"I have just given you a fatal dose of the hypodermic, and when you
wake it will be in another world, with my brave Wilhelm, who was
named for the great War Lord. When you meet him, tell him that _I
sent you_--and give him my love!
"Ha! ha! Do you hear, my captain? Give him my love; and tell him
that each night, Providence permitting, I will send him a new
messenger bearing my greetings! That is all. Good-bye, my captain.
The end is near. I am going to kiss you now so you may die happy!"
She bent lower over the cot of the dying officer. He had not spoken
before during her self-revelation; but now his eyes, filled with
horror and loathing, rolled upward to meet hers, and with a final
effort he hissed forth the one word--"_Fiend!_"
Nydia smiled--a grim, mirthless smile.
"No, not fiend, my captain--only a German!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------
WHY THE TRENCH WAS LOST
By Charles F. Pietsch
Not two miles away lay his home. Metre by metre, Joffre's "nibbling"
had forced the Boches back over the death-sown fields of the
Argonne. And now as he sat in his cunningly hidden nest aloft in a
treetop, observer for a battery of 75's, his telescope, wandering
from the German trenches, brought home so close that he seemed
almost to be standing in his own garden.
It was so close, he thought--just over there. And it was so good to
be able to watch little Marie playing at the door, and to peep
inside into the kitchen where Jeanne was working--or to follow her
from room to room as her slim figure flitted past the windows.
He had worried so when "Papa" Joffre's masterly retreat had left her
there alone. But this was the fourth day now that he had kept watch
over her, and soon, he said to himself with a smile--soon that
little home was sure to lie back of the French lines in safety.
The day was quiet. Only intermittently a cannon barked or a rifle
spat across the wire entanglements. And all the morning he had sat
watching Marie's flaxen tresses bobbing among the rose bushes--and
dreaming of when the war ended.
And suddenly the picture changed.
Marie has dropped her dolls and is racing into the kitchen. The door
slams. He almost hears the bolt shot to, he thinks. And a squad of
Uhlans rides into the yard.