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Title: An Alley of Flashing Spears and other stories
Author: Byrne, Donn (1889-1928)
Date of first publication: 1933
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., undated
Date first posted: 1 May 2011
Date last updated: 1 May 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #779

This ebook was produced by Al Haines






AN ALLEY OF

FLASHING SPEARS


AND OTHER STORIES



BY

DONN BYRNE




LONDON

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & CO., LTD.




MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

PURNELL AND SONS, PAULTON (SOMERSET) AND LONDON






CONTENTS


    I. AN ALLEY OF FLASHING SPEARS
   II. TREACHERY
  III. THE MASTER OF RAYMOND LULLY
   IV. EXECUTIVE SESSION
    V. TOWERS OF SILENCE
   VI. THE HAPPY TOWNLAND
  VII. HAIL AND FAREWELL
 VIII. GREEN ISLE
   IX. A SISTER OF SHINING SWORDS




AN ALLEY OF FLASHING SPEARS

AND OTHER STORIES



I

AN ALLEY OF FLASHING SPEARS

You will read about it all in The Book of the Old Man, which is Tu
Fu's; of Ming Huang, greatest of the T'ang emperors--wise, strong, a
marvellous polo player, the idol of his people; and you will read there
of Tai Chen of the Thousand Songs.  You will read how, under him, the
land grew and prospered; how heavy kine and fatted oxen and stout
ponies trampled the grassy plains; how the fruit trees flourished and
the hibiscus dotted the gardens with stars; how the rivers were heavy
with fish.  The suns rose golden and the moons were silver, and the
people sang beneath the city walls.

And then Ming Huang, the Son of Heaven, met Tai Chen, the lute girl--"a
rose aflame," a T'ang poet calls her, "tall as and swaying like a reed;
her hair a dim cloud and her face a flower"--and loved her.  In
Chang-an, the triple-walled, they dwelt together, oblivious of time and
season, of imperial polity, of sedition without the gates.  Drums and
bells rolled musically from the marble towers.  In the house boats on
the river tragedies were played and great epics recited.  In the royal
park jasmine flowers scented the air.  Poppies flamed scarlet against
the blue of the water.  And beside them Li Po, the Wine Drinker, great
among T'ang poets, sang of their love and beauty in oblique immortal
rhymes.

And all this time An Lu-shan, the swart, ambitious Tartar general,
plotted fast and successfully.  To Chang-an came suddenly the news that
ten thousand battle chariots were whipping over the plain toward them,
led by the Tartar traitor, intent on Ming Huang's death.  They gathered
about them the royal guard and fled southward in panic, the Tartar
horde gaining with every mile.

The guard grew sullen and looked at Tai Chen with hostile, bloodshot
eyes.  They stopped in their flight and gathered about the emperor's
tent.  Stormily the leaders entered and stormily they reproached Ming
Huang.  The empire lay wasted and war covered the land like a cloud.  A
usurper claimed the throne while the Son of Heaven passed the time in
revelry and love-making.  Not one step farther would they flee; not one
weapon would they draw for the Dynasty of T'ang until the Lute Girl had
been sent out to die.  It was for Ming Huang to choose between his
millions of groaning people and Her of the Thousand Songs.

"Go outside, Tai Chen!" said Ming Huang.


"_The young willows and the rushes renew with the year_," writes Li Po
in his old age; "_the peach blooms open on the eastern wall and green
parrots chatter in the branches.  No longer lowering soldiery strike
through the black clouds of war.  The convent on the hill draws the
western merchants.  Wealth and happiness bud again; knowing Peace is
here!_

"_The young willows and the rushes renew with the year; the peach
blooms open on the eastern wall--ah! but the Little Beautiful One who
crept moaning down an alley of flashing spears!_"


Li Po, the Drinker of Wine, has been dead these dozen centuries, and
nothing remains of him but the memory of his drinking bouts and his
immortal songs.  And Ming Huang, the great polo player and the Son of
Heaven!  Death has called his last game and his crown is as dust.  The
jade lute of Tai Chen of the Thousand Songs is silent in the dim bowers
of death.  But ever and again through the centuries their tragedy
reappears, blossoms for an hour of happiness, and agony.

Men are born again, people say, and walk the earth with the same
habiliments and features, doing the same deeds with their weak or
purposeful characters.  Empires are reborn.  Another Rome has risen,
and another Carthage, which must be deleted; and out of the sea has
sprung a new Atlantis, lush and golden.  And great events have their
ghosts, too, like dead empires and dead men, though we see them not.
Beside us a Cleopatra of the tenements may re-enact the ancient
intrigue of the Nile.  And the pale apothecary next door may work for
science with the flame that sped through Roger Bacon's veins.  Even so.


I

The speaker's voice ceased for an instant; and as he stood motionless
on the edge of the platform, under the great incandescent street lamp,
he suggested a dim crayon drawing--a tall, vibrant young man, with hair
as blond as a woman's, and a face that seemed ruggedly hewn out of
rock, and black eyes that blazed with the intense inner fire of opals.
He was poised lightly on his feet, as though he were about to spring
into the clear air.

"To every man the earth was given," he continued--"the earth and the
fullness of it.  It belongs to every man--to the poor man as well as to
the rich man--to the rich man as well as to the poor!"

The stillness after his voice ceased showed how intently the crowd was
listening to him.  They stood north and south along West Street, in
close, serried ranks.  They flowed into the piers and side streets.
The darkness of their bodies in the shadows suggested a strong tide
rising, and their pale white faces above their massed bulk were like
bubbles on a river.

"To every man," the speaker went on, "as much money as he can make, in
honesty, by the use of his body and brains.

"But, apart from this, the sustenance of the earth is for every
man--cripple and athlete, rich and poor.  That is an inalienable right."

Very calm, but very vibrant, like a note on a violoncello, his voice
rang down the street.  It crept round corners into the alleyways and
the docks.  It swung across the reach of river on the left of him.  It
smote the bridges of the ships moored alongside.

"This year," the voice went on, "there has been the biggest wheat crop
in a decade.  This year has been a year of prosperity.  And this year
the price of bread has gone steadily up!"

He swung round and faced the men on the platform behind him--a gaunt
old clergyman, with his hands folded and his eyes lowered to the
ground; a great official of a labour federation, of stocky workman
type, but with the shrewdness of a big statesman in his face; a couple
of minor labour leaders, with sincerity stamped in their thinking eyes;
a group of public men and women, well dressed, a trifle uncomfortable
before the grimed, muscular crowd.

"They have given reasons to account for this--the men at the bottom of
the deal.  Shallow, inadequate reasons.  False, lying reasons.  And
when they were caught in the wrong they have shrugged their shoulders,
saying a cent or two doesn't matter." His tones took on a savage
emphasis, like the roll of a drum.  "It matters to you, the men with
the tired backs and the sweat in your eyes.  It matters to the
thousands with no one to provide for them.  It matters to me."

He looked at the vanguard of the crowd at his feet--longshoremen,
stevedores, garment workers, draymen.  They looked back at him with
expectant eyes, with silent, gaping mouths.

"I have given away"--his tones were more even--"on bigger things than
this--on things where ten times as much was at stake.  But on this I
shall not give away.  Not if it were a quarter of a cent!  Not if it
were the smallest shaving of the smallest copper coin!"

His voice became suddenly more serious than passionate.  A look of
tenderness came into his eyes.

"My people," he said, "for three years I have worked for you, and for
three years I have served you well.  And I have served well and
honestly this city.  When you wanted to strike I have got for you
reasonable terms and agreements.  There are no more bomb outrages.  No
more marching with red flags through the city streets.  No more
irresponsible attacks on men or property.  When you were right I have
fought for you.  When you were wrong I have chidden you.  All this has
been done in peace and amity."

He stood before them for a few moments bowed a little.  A little ripple
of comment came from the crowd in a low rumble, like the roar of a
muffled furnace or the distant rolling of thunder.  It died away in
long, shuddering sound waves.  The speaker suddenly galvanized into
passion.  His right arm shot out like a piston.  His face blazed:

"Sharpen your pencils, you reporters, and take down what I shall say to
my people.  And you, policemen, open your ears that you may hear it!
Before I shall allow the bread for these men's mouths to be juggled
against them; before I shall allow the fruits of God's earth to be
peculated for revelry, for the debts of a profligate son, for a woman's
gewgaw--I shall lead my people, five hundred thousand strong, to the
homes of these men in this city.  And I shall tear them from their
pleasant firesides and from the arms of their wives.  And I shall
crucify them to their own doors!"

A shudder passed along the crowd about the platform, wavered down the
streets and ebbed into the alleys.  And then immediately following it
came a dull, ominous roar, like the roar of a caged animal.  The
speaker raised his hand.

He was shaking and livid now.  His voice sank to nearly a whisper; but
it cut into every corner of the crowd, sharp and clean, like a knife:

"And in three days I will do this thing--even though I die!"


II

I should have been proud to know Nils Riordan's father, if any portion
of what I hear of him is true.  I hear it along the piers of New York,
where stevedores load and unload great liners under green, crackling
lights.  I hear it on pilot boats, lurching and pitching in Ambrose
Channel.  I hear it in queer tobacconists' shops with faded Indians,
and in forgotten groceries along the quays.  A great poet they tell me
he was, and a man with a brain as keen as a razor.  I discount this,
for these people are no judges of metre and rhyme and no great critics
of mentality.  But of this I am sure--he was a good man and a true one.

I can see him plainly before me--a tall, lean, black and curly-headed
man, with slight, irregular features and shining black eyes; a twisted
mouth, with a smile on it always, and a song.  "A wonderful singer he
was," the blind piper of Eighty-third Street told me, "with a voice so
sweet that it would coax the birds from the tree!  And he would give
the last penny in his pocket to you--the heart of corn!" A great Irish
gentleman I judge him to have been, for all his grimy overalls.  It is
about men like this that legends grow, as they have grown about that
laughing Jewish writer of the East Side--on whom be peace!

And his mother, too, they remember there--even after five-and-twenty
years!--the beautiful young Danish girl who loved Connor Riordan and
married him.  And they will tell you with wistful smiles how, when
Connor Riordan was killed by a falling derrick on Pier Thirteen, his
wife Gloria crept into Calvary to die on his grave.

Nils Riordan is a great man now.  His name is spoken in Cabinet circles
with great admiration and a little fear; it is revered wherever in New
York men work with their naked hands.  Professors of political economy
mention him with respect to their students when commenting on the
solution of problems of labour.  But on the piers and along the shore
of New York he is Connor Riordan's son; and that explains everything.

"No wonder he should be clever!" they say emphatically.  "His father
could have downed the greatest professor of any college.  And good
looks!  You should have seen his mother!"

And here enters another factor in the equation that made Nils Riordan
royalty by birth and by deed among the workers of New York--the
Reverend Malachi Bowen, of the Church of All Saints, on Hudson Street,
a gnarled old clergyman of no denomination in particular, who abhorred
dogma as he abhorred the devil, and who preached a lesson of kindliness
from the Sermon on the Mount to Jew and Catholic, Protestant and
Chinaman.  He still preaches, and he still walks the streets, visiting,
with his kindly smile and with the pockets of his coat filled with
pennies for the children and lumps of sugar for the horses.  Williams
College remembers him as a great Greek scholar.  But he is a thorn in
the flesh of the younger clergymen of the city, superb dialecticians,
well-groomed men, who see religion as a walled city.  Sometimes they
protest to the bishop about Father Malachi and his sermons.

"Gentlemen," the bishop invariably replies, "if I had the courage of my
convictions I should preach, think and do exactly as he does."

It was Father Malachi who stepped in when Connor Riordan and his wife
died, and took charge of two-year-old Nils.  No one protested his right
to take the boy, though every woman for three miles of blocks would
willingly have added the orphan to her own numerous brood.  Quaintly
the old clergyman took care of the child in his ramshackle bachelor
quarters, feeding and nursing and clothing him; teaching him
righteousness, mixed with the luxury of Greek.  But the people of the
neighbourhood were not to be robbed of their share in the
responsibility.  The light collection bag of the Church of All Saints
grew heavy and remained so.  The lad grew up fair and
straight-featured, like his mother, but with his father's black,
flashing eyes.  He had the cold, judicial brain of the Northern people,
and through it ran his father's Gaelic blood, setting all afire.

Father Malachi sent the boy to Harvard.  Nils protested, saying he
wanted to go to work; but the old clergyman would not have it so.

"We can afford it," he said.  "The people have been good to me.  And
what do I want with money, who am simple and old?"

At Harvard, Nils was not a spectacular figure or even a well-known one,
for his work lay in the stodgy, serious realm of economics.  He did not
appear on the athletic fields, though strong as any man there.  In
students' societies and activities he took no part, for already there
hung over him the shadow of great and weighty things to come--so big,
so powerful, that their mere looming in the distance blotted out these
minor things, as an ocean makes infinitesimal a purling stream.

He returned to Hudson Street, with his degree crackling and important
in his valise.  That night Father Malachi took him up into the belfry
of the little church.  An early summer moon hung heavily in the sky,
full and bloated and saffron.  The first heat wave had struck the city,
and the tang of it was in the atmosphere, heavy and ominous.  Outside
the tenements men and women sat gasping for air, like fishes out of
water.  Children played listlessly in the streets.  Across the North
River the ferries plied to the Jersey shore, blazing with light and
hurtful to the eye with their suggestion of fire.  Through the streets
tram cars crawled clanging, mean shacks pulled by jaded horses.  Along
the quays the incandescent arc lamps shone in violet hazes.  On the
piers cranes rumbled and creaked, and men shouted in hoarse, guttural
voices.  A sense of terror struck Nils as he looked downward.  So much
work and so much life, and so little comfort!

"There is a man's body--and a man's soul," the old clergyman said
suddenly in the darkness.  His voice was slow and halting.  He paused
for a minute.  "And a man's soul!  I have lived for sixty-two years and
I don't know whether that soul is immortal."

He stopped again, thinking hard and choosing words in which to phrase
his thoughts.  Nils stopped breathing, nearly, so intent he was on
listening.  In twenty years he had often heard the old clergyman speak
solemnly, reproving wrong and urging right; but to-night he felt he
would speak most solemnly of all, bringing out the fruit of all his
living for his threescore-and-two.

"A man can work for his body," Father Malachi went on.  "He can
accumulate wealth and comfort.  He can build fine houses and live in
them.  He can have ease in old age."  He paused again, and by some
queer accident the noises in the street became hushed; the sound of the
chattering cranes faltered and died, as though even the mute metal and
stone were listening.  "I don't like to speak of souls, Nils, for I
don't know what a soul is.  But a man can live in this world and gather
nothing.  And a man can leave this world, having nothing, and that
thing which we call his soul may be strong and healthy and satisfied."

He raised his head in the darkness and looked at Nils.  And Nils,
though he couldn't see them, knew that there was in his eyes the light
of stars.

"I can die to-morrow, Nils, and if there is a Great Living Power behind
everything I can meet It unafraid, knowing I have done Its work; and if
there is none I can lay myself to rest easily, knowing that I have done
mine."  The halting accents ceased and his voice took on a firm,
decided tone.  "And this is the work that I have done, Nils: I have
worked for the good of others, for the good of everybody all my life.
I have forgotten myself and worried nothing about myself; and now, at
the end of my days, I am satisfied.  And when the time comes I am ready
to quit."

A bank of cloud crept over the face of the moon and obscured it
quickly.  Beneath the belfry of the church the streets became darkened
suddenly and the electric lamps seemed inadequate after the mellow
light.  And high and shrill came the voices of children, unable to
sleep for the heat and still querulous at play.

"We are all little children, son, groping in the dark and hoping that
the night will lift, and that at some hour we shall see the face of the
sun.  And it is the duty of the strong to care for the weak, and of the
whole child to protect the crippled one.  That is how I feel it after
my two-and-sixty years."

The bank of cloud in the sky took on the form of a rough triangle and
suddenly from the apex of it the moon shone forth as before, and the
light of it, after the obscurity, seemed to flood the streets like a
mist.  Beneath them they could see clearly the life of the streets
limned in faint whites and inky shadows--the men and women on the
tenement steps, immobile, terribly patient; the listless children, with
their pretence of play; the sweating gangs on the docks, standing out
in harsh chiaroscuro under the blazing light of arc lamps; the jaded
horses with the street cars and the tired men at the reins.  The old
preacher moved forward and caught the edge of the belfry in his gnarled
hands.

"These are the little children of the world, Nils," he said--"unwise,
improvident, obstinate, ill.  There they are.  Your people, Nils.
These are the people who love you and who loved your father.  These are
the people whose generosity to the church here made it possible for me
to keep you and to educate you."

Father Malachi turned to Nils and looked at him closely and nervously
as he stood there in the moonlight, strangely pallid, very strong, like
a die cut in metal.  His voice became shaky.

"But though it was their money, son, freely and without thought of
return it was given, and that is no bond on you.  To every man there is
his choice in this world, whether he shall work for himself or whether
he shall, forgetting himself, work for others.  Choose either way,
Nils.  Whatever you choose, we shall always love you--these people and
I."

He waited, with his hands on the belfry, for what he felt was a great
space of time, but what he knew was only a few seconds.  Every moment
seemed to be clicked off for him with infinite slowness by the clock of
eternity, and all sounds were dulled to him.  He seemed to feel through
his body the flow of blood in each particular vein, and to hear the
minute mechanism of his body pulse and quiver with the slowing movement
of his life.  Suddenly the answer came to him, high and full and clear:

"I have chosen, Father Malachi."

The old clergyman turned and looked at him closely.  Little by little
the tenseness of his expectancy relaxed.  His hands unclasped from the
belfry and there was again in his eyes the light of stars.

"You have chosen well, Nils," was all he said; but he said it very
softly, and silently together they went down the stairs.


III

The drawing-room had been nearly emptied of all furniture, and there
remained very little in it except the huge piano at one end and the
pictures on the walls, Czannes and Hiroshiges; but there hung about it
still the atmosphere of great wealth and comfort.  It was in every
cubic millimetre of the air.  It was even in the hard, bare floor.  It
hung about everything, like the odour of sanctity, so that the ten rows
of chairs, of ten chairs each, and the lectern and desk in front of
them, which converted the place into a lecture room, seemed as much of
a desecration as would a Punchinello show in a cathedral.

And as Nils Riordan swung toward the desk it all smelt hostile to him,
as the air of a foreign country might seem hostile to an invading
enemy.  He passed through the hundred people, who were scrutinizing him
closely, without any evidence of his feeling of hostility and
discomfort.  He reached the desk and looked over the assembly with a
calm and cold eye.  Only two or three of his hearers he knew by sight.
The rest were known to him, or nearly all of them, through the society
columns and the supplements of Sunday papers.

"As most of my hearers are women," he began gently--but there was a
hint of savagery in his voice as there might be a hint of claws beneath
the soft paws of a leopard--"I am going to speak of something that will
interest them.  I am going to talk about some children."

He had come at the request of a shallow matron, whose hobby was
affecting an interest in art and social problems, to address an
audience of society men and women on some question of labour.  This
afternoon function was a fad of hers, taking the place of tea and
modelled on a French experiment she had seen described in a book of
Marcel Prevost's.  Nils had been preceded the foregoing week by a
Russian male dancer, and for the week afterward a cubist sculptor was
booked to perform.  The labour leader would probably be rewarded by a
cheque for a hundred dollars for a workers' charity.  He grinned to
himself up his sleeve with grim humour.  Ordinarily he would have
refused curtly, resenting her dilettante meddling in matters that were
so close to his heart.  It seemed raw and cruel to him, this assembly
to hear him speak.  He loathed slumming parties with a wholesome
resentment; but he was going to make them pay for this--and pay very
dearly.

"Families of fifteen children are not uncommon down in that district,"
he was going on in the course of his talk.  "I have one in particular
in mind.  The entire earning capacity of this family is twenty-eight
dollars a week.  Four dollars a day for seventeen human beings.  Less,
if it will bring it home to you any closer, than a quarter a day for
each living and human being!"

They were looking at him a little disappointed, a little baffled; and
he smiled sardonically to himself as he guessed what they were thinking
about.  They had all heard of him as Nils Riordan, president of several
labour organizations and director of a weekly paper called _The
Worker_.  They all knew of spectacular things he had done--of how he
had broken up a dynamiting gang by walking into their resort and
cuffing the leader about the ears; of how he had saved a great coal
magnate's home from destruction and turned viciously on him when the
man had expressed his gratitude; of how he had broken up an agrarian
conspiracy by threatening to crucify the leaders.  They knew him as the
man who had refused a seat in Congress because he wanted to be near his
people.  They had heard that to utter the least criticism of him among
the workers of New York would be tantamount to suicide.

They had expected somehow--God knows why!--that he would appear before
them like a wild man from a circus show; an apparition in a flannel
shirt and a red tie, unkempt, probably unshaved, and ranting like a
demagogue; with the truculent jowl and battered ears of a prize fighter
and the look in his eyes of one of Morgan's buccaneers.  And, instead
of that, here was a young man, lean, wiry, with a fair, regular, strong
Northern face, and eyes cold, like some black stone; and, instead of
overalls, wearing a well-cut serge suit, a spotless collar and mellowly
browned shoes; and, instead of mouthing blood and thunder, speaking in
the calm, measured tones of a professor addressing a class.

As a show it was a flivver, they each voted silently, and inexpressibly
below the standard of Madeleine's others.  Nils again felt sardonically
amused.  They had come for thrills and were disappointed.  Before they
were out of the room he would give them a thrill they would remember
for many bitter days!

"Remember always," he went on emphatically, "that these conditions I am
telling you of are not accounts of starving Belgium or stricken Poland.
They obtain right in this city.  They are within four miles of this
house.  You can enter one of these tenements and see things for
yourselves in twelve minutes in your automobiles."

As he went on speaking his eye swept the audience calmly and firmly,
resting here and there on people of special interest to him.  There was
Mrs. Howard Van Zile in the front row, a haughty, patrician woman, who
was examining him intently to see what was in him.  And Richard
Hammerling's wife, plump, a little dowdy, with cross-grained skin and
bored eyes.  He wanted suddenly to turn on her and tell her that her
great-grandfather had been no richer than any of these he was speaking
about.  A little farther back Lady Alice Fitz-Patrick leaned back
fuming.  She had come to America to collect for a British charity and
the thought of any possible opposition made her furious.  A thin,
acidulous old maid she seemed to him, for all her Geraldine blood.  And
back of it all was Mrs. Mifflin Bentley Swan, eager, watching her
hostess' face--a swarthy, greasy-looking dowager who had earned her
right to sit in this august assembly by subsidizing a dozen pet
hospitals.  And beside her was the Countess Flannigan, whose
grandfather had started an immense fortune with the money taken from
quay workers in his saloon.

A few men were here--nearly all of them of stern metal.  Senator Booth,
a shrewd, tense man, an implacable enemy of the labour leaders, but,
for all that, Nils admitted, a statesman and a follower of high ideals
from his own point of view.  And, no less inimical, beside him sat
Justice Thomas, a shrivelled, caustic old figure, with a grey face
hewed into innumerable lines, with colourless eyes and great pouches
under them; a stern judge, Nils knew, and no friend of the people, but
an open, two-handed fighter, who asked for no quarter and gave none.
They, too, and a few others, had come here to see what metal was in him
and what power.  And the sight of them was a relief to Nils after a
glance at John Zabriskie Reid, tame cat and hired guest, and Richard
Payne Schieren, who touted for tailors and wine merchants on the sly.

"The land that does not take care of its children"--he paused, and
enunciated each word with the solemnity of a prophecy--"that land will
surely die!"

A figure caught his eye as it flashed about the room--the figure of a
woman, a demure, motionless woman, whose eyes seemed frightened.  She
seemed to sink into the mass of people about her, to be blotted out, to
merge into her surroundings, as a chameleon fades against a wall.

And suddenly, as he looked at her, he was struck with a sense of shock
to find how beautiful she was.  Her pose, as she sat there with her
hands on her lap, was that of a country girl modestly seated in a
church; but when she raised her eyes to look at him, as she did
infrequently, he saw in them the suffering look of a dumb animal.  Her
face was perfectly oval, like a face on a valentine, and her mouth was
perfect, and her teeth and her nose and brow.

But the striking thing about her was the seeming transparency of her.
Her skin was clear and had the false opacity of porcelain.  Her eyes
were amber-coloured; they were nothing more than a liquid tint against
the skin.  The hair of her eyebrows and lashes seemed laid on in
delicate brown by a faint-pointed brush.  Her hair was a mass of russet
shimmer.  There was something frightfully unreal about her.  She was,
it appeared to him, nothing but an iridescent liquid.  She might have
been a painter's conception of a supernatural creature homing in mist,
had it not been for her belted, flaring gown, with the white fox
collar, like a priest's stole, about her neck, and her mannish tall
silk hat.  These things--and the agonized look in her eyes, like the
look in the eyes of a spaniel that has been kicked and kicked and
kicked until its spirit screams dumbly.

His glance stole toward her many times during the course of the
lecture, until he was under the hypnosis of her face as a patient might
be charmed by a flashing metal disk.  His voice went on, strong and
resonant, painting his subject in wide swathes of black and white,
holding his audience, impressing some, irritating others; and as he
spoke he suddenly identified the girl before him, and his heart jumped
with pity.  So this was the wife of De Courcy Delavan, the grass widow
of that satanic rake who was the devil incarnate, if ever he walked up
and down the world and to and fro in it!

And, with a hot surge of resentment, Nils remembered the explosive
story of that strange marriage.  He remembered how the
multi-millionaire, as savage as a criminal boy, crazed with money and
seething with hatred of everything and everybody, had married the
daughter of a Long Island squatter; had brought her to New York to
insult the Fifth Avenue debutantes, flaunting her beauty in their
faces.  And when he had done that he left her as dramatically as he had
married her, striking her viciously in the face in a box at the opera,
and fleeing away in his yacht to Cairo and Port Said.  He left her in
possession of the great house on Madison Avenue and a sufficient bank
account, because it amused him to see a squatter's daughter mistress of
a mansion where his mother, a descendant of a Norman prince, had
reigned, and which his father, a fine old gentleman and great
philanthropist, had planned to be the home of his best friend's
daughter.

The women of New York had taken her up as much, uncharitably be it
said, for a rebuke to Delavan as out of pity for herself.  Here was
that strange flotsam of a woman, beautiful as few women have been
beautiful, patronized by everybody, jeered at by servants, alone in the
world, living in a great mansion, and dying a slow, horrible, golden
death--as horrible as the fate of Midas the King!  Here was Myrtle De
Courcy Delavan, who had been Myrtle Squires!

"I want to give you a few cases in point," he proceeded, "with facts,
dates and amounts.  I will tell you the case of the family of Gian
Battista Repetti."

And as he went on, with merciless detail, into epic fights of human
children against poverty and disease, he noticed the eyes of Myrtle
Delavan grow moist and swimming with tears.  And suddenly his heart
went out to her in a quick, generous flow.

He ended his lecture quickly and cuffed his notes together on the desk.
He gazed about the room with a firm, calm eye.  His glance caught the
glances of Judge Thomas and Senator Booth as one steel blade might ring
on others.  It caught the rising hostess and dropped her back into her
seat as a blow might.  He leaned forward on the desk and his voice
purred.

"You, this afternoon," he said, "are all here, I take it, because of a
sincere desire to hear of conditions in these destitute districts.  And
you all, having heard of them, and sincere as you are, are naturally
actuated by an eager desire to better things for these children."

His tones took on suddenly a keen, acrid fighting edge--an edge that
braced the room like the shock of cold water:

"Sympathy is a queer thing.  From the poor to the poor it is the
dearest commodity on earth, for it means forgetting their own worries
to shoulder vicariously the troubles of others.  But from the rich to
the poor it is an empty thing, as empty as air, and good only for their
own souls."

He took up a sheaf of lists from the table and his eyes grew hard and
cold:

"I have here in my hand a list of the people in this room--one hundred
and two of them.  Nearly all come of millionaire families.  And the few
who do not reach that height of wealth are wealthy enough to accede to
my request.  I spoke to you of the big seaside resort we are trying to
buy for the children, to send them to in summer.  From each person in
this room I want one thousand dollars."

He paused for an instant and a sort of concerted gasp went through the
audience.  The eyes of the senator looked at him with puzzled wonder.
About the judge's impassive mask a wry smile dawned.

"There are many among you," Nils went on, "who will do this thing
without a second thought.  And those who won't"--he swung back and drew
himself up to his full height, and his voice cut the air like a
whip--"I shall make their names a byword in this land."

He looked at them for a moment, his face tense, his eyes blazing.  His
voice rang through the drawing-room like the concerted volley of a
thousand voices, reverberating from the mellow walls, buffeting from
ceiling to floor, swirling about the chairs like the threatening swirl
of waves:

"The people will remember those who heard their cry and never answered.
For to-day I have cried to you for them.  And the memory of the people
is bitter and long.  And hate will be about you always as you roll past
them in your cars or walk by them in the streets.  And hate is a bitter
and a terrible thing.  It makes the day fearful and robs the night of
sleep.  And hate will be yours.  That I promise you."

The hostess stood up, with a scared protest forming on her lips.  The
look in Nils' eyes made her falter and wince.

"I beg your pardon, madam," he flashed at her coldly, and the words
seemed to drive her back in her chair like a shot from a gun.

His eye crossed the glance of the shrewd old judge.  There was a cold,
reminiscent smile on the jurist's face, a wise, cynical smile, as of a
man who sees inexperienced game fall into a trap.  And suddenly Nils
knew that he was thinking of the twenty-year sentence that had been
passed on a daring hold-up man that morning.  He threw his head back
and faced him calmly.

"Yes; I know what you're thinking of, Judge Thomas," he said, "and it
doesn't cause me one tremor.  No, not one!"

The jurist grinned--an unbelievable, boyish thing for so hard and
wizened a face; he pulled a cheque book and fountain pen from his
pockets.  The senator did the same with a bellow of laughter.  And then
all at once Nils was flooded with a torrent of cheques and promises,
and the incident was over in a minute of laughter and smiles.

He turned to make his way out of the room and met, face to face, the
amber-eyed wife of Delavan.  He stopped unconsciously, for he felt
somehow that there was something she wanted to say to him, and there
was something for him to say to her.  For a moment they looked at each
other--she with an unspoken, understood question in her scared eyes.

"Is it all so?" she asked timidly.

"Is it all so?" Nils repeated indignantly.  "Will you come and see it
with your own eyes?  For years I have been wanting somebody to come
down sincerely and have it brought home to him or her at first hand.
Will anyone do it?  Will you?"

Her eyes dropped and she said nothing, and bitterly Nils turned to go
away.  Once more he had made a plea in vain; but faith had never lost
its savour for him, and he was as disappointed now as the first time he
had pleaded for an emissary to accompany him.

"I will," she said timidly, stung by the bitterness in his face; but
there was in her eyes the look of a startled hare.


IV

Because she had been all her life at the beck of somebody--and the
habit of obedience was as natural to her as the flow and reflux of her
blood--and because she had all her life been contemned by somebody, she
sat in that big house on Madison Avenue, obeying a husband to whom she
owed no allegiance and eyed with pitying contempt by all with whom she
came in contact.  Idly and dully she sat and watched the days go by,
with no thought of anything good that day, with no expectancy for the
morrow.

Behind her chair at table the butler stood, a reverend, pompous man,
who was always imagining to himself the father of his mistress, the
ragged-shirted, straggling-bearded beach squatter.  In the
silver-and-blue dressing room her maid pictured the hovel out of which
this millionaire's wife had sprung.  Indignant surreptitiously, the
footmen stood by the door or mounted the driving seat of her car.  The
women of her new world told her what to do, what to attend, what to
read.  Patiently she submitted to the titled sempstress who clothed her
in marvellous gowns, and on those slim, fairy's feet of hers were put
shoes that were like gloves.

No man dared speak to her of love or affection, for a man's life to De
Courcy Delavan was as negligible as the life of a fly on the wall, and
he would be glad of an excuse to kill a man.  A terrible and ghastly
prisoner she was, without the spirit to throw everything aside and walk
away fearlessly, and without the strength of will to kill herself, had
either of those things occurred to her.

As a drowning person might grasp at a floating windrow she had taken up
Nils Riordan's invitation in the dull hope that here was something
which might help her pass the terrible, lagging days; that might take
her out of herself, as the phrase is.  With the first flush of
excitement she had known for four years--for the four incredibly long
years that she had been married to Delavan--she started out now with
the labour leader to investigate the submerged quarters.  Aflame with a
cold, white heat of accusation, Nils had sat with her in her limousine.
Coldly he had taken her through sweatshops along lower Broadway, and
shown her the girls pushing the flicking treadles and holding the stuff
beneath the needles with scarred, nervous fingers.

"These are the live exercises in the problem of the living wage," he
told her.  "Oh--that fuss at the end of the room?  That's nothing!" he
commented bitterly.  "Just one of them who has fainted from overwork."

"Oh!" she gasped scaredly, the air hissing inwardly through her teeth.

He took her into labourers' tenements at meal-time, and insisted on her
taking in every poor and tragic detail.  He spared her nothing.  The
women of the homes regarded her with angry suspicion.  Nils quieted
their resentment soothingly.

"I'm not trying to make an exhibition of you, Annie," he told one of
them.  "I'm as jealous of your feelings as you yourself are.  But this
is for the good of everybody.  I think it will help us all."

"God bless you!" he was answered.  "If you think so----"

He took her to the East Side, to where the children swarmed like ants
about the peddlers' pushcarts, babbling in liquid Italian and in
slurred Slav and in singsong Yiddish.  He ticked off the names of the
streets on his finger tips.

"In summer, in this neighbourhood," he told her, "you will never see
one of those small white hearses off the streets.  And every third
tenement you pass has a white crepe knot on the door."  He was sorry
suddenly he had told her that when he saw her eyes brimming with tears.

He showed her the grey-headed, broken women who creep through the doors
of office-buildings when the day's work is past to scrub the floors.
He showed her little shopkeepers who clung to their miniature stores,
fighting hopelessly while life and commerce swept past them, leaving
them high and dry, as on a sand bar, with no hope of a range of tide to
take them off again.  And men he showed her, too, the white-jacketed
scavengers crouched over gutters; the sweating, cursing stevedores at
the piers; the pale, anmic clerks bolting their food at the lunch
hour, compelled to steal nickels' worths in honour restaurants.

"It's ghastly!" she said.  "It frightens me!"  She pressed closer to
his side, as though afraid these people might set upon and rend her.

He thought about her all the time now; and the more he thought about
her, the less of her he understood.  It was a puzzle to him how she,
who had been born in squalor and had lived in poverty until four short
years before, could be so moved and frightened by the conditions she
saw.  How she was changed now--the squatter's daughter!  How she had
merged in luxury, who had once known only rags and tatters!  Wealth was
not unknown to him--at Harvard and in New York he had many wealthy
friends.  And comfort he was accustomed to himself.  But it was a shock
to him how luxurious a woman could be, how well cared for, how sleek.

She would have been beautiful anywhere in fluttering rags; but now,
groomed as she was, she was super-beautiful.  Her hands had been tended
until they were as soft as a snowflake, and as white.  Her face had
been massaged until it resembled nothing less in texture and colour
than an opening rose.  Her teeth were like pearls leaving the chamois
of a lapidary, and her hair had been treated until it was like gossamer
ruddying in a rosy dawn.  These things were the results of her maid's
care--a matter of which he never thought, as he never thought that the
four years had been as slow in passing as four decades, and that it
seemed to her she had been living in this ease and luxury all her life.

This thought passed, and for days he thought only of the pain she had
been and was in.  Those tragic amber eyes haunted him.  Pain was a
thing he understood, for he had seen much of it about him, and the
agony in her face called to him every moment.  At times he would find
himself starting up, with hot, angry curses on his tongue, when he
reviewed the story, and at times he would sit brooding over it long and
silently.  And then subconsciously, filling the background of the
tragic eyes, would come the details of the delicately cut,
infinitesimally moving nostrils; the ruddy mouth with its curving under
lip and beautifully bowed upper one; the sweet contour of her face.  He
remembered vividly the white, slender hands.

There had been too many interests in his life before now to admit of
his thinking of and knowing women; and, now that for the first time he
had been thrown in contact with one, he was appalled by the mystery and
beauty of her.  But the other things, the agony and the fear--his heart
cried to do something to ease them.  If he had seen these things in the
eyes of a child he would have taken it up and petted and soothed it
confidently.  If he had seen it in the eyes of a man he would have
known what to say and do.  But before her, who had said nothing, who
suffered mutely, he was powerless.

"It's damnable!" was all he could say.  And he thought of the absentee
husband; and his hands caught and moved sinisterly, with the imaginary
action of encircling a neck and thrusting thumbs into a larynx.

To her, who had known only one man--and he an emanation from hell, like
the spirit that possessed itself of the Gadarene swine--Nils Riordan
was a revelation.  If her husband had been as Lucifer fallen from
heaven, the labour leader was as Michael with the Flaming Sword.  The
man's personality enveloped her; it swept her along like a whirlwind.
She understood little of what he was saying.  She understood nothing at
all of what was in him.  She was thrilled by him.  Everything he said
or did she accepted as right.

She had once seen in a paper, in a magazine--in a book, perhaps--an
allegory of Labour: a young man rising among clouds, mysterious as to
face, heavily muscled as to body, with glory shining in a halo about
his head, and thunderbolts flying from his arms and shoulders and
chest.  She remembered it now, and to her it typified Nils Riordan.
The idea of seeing him, of being with him, became fixed in her, as an
alienist might put it.  Silently she sat and waited for to-morrow, or
the day after to-morrow, when she would be in his company for an hour.

So these two came together now and again--she clinging to him in
spirit, with a maddened desperation, though in action motionless and
dumb; and he yearning toward her, aching to do something for her, and
as mute and inactive as she.  They rode and visited tenements and
workshops, settlement houses and prisons, charity bureaux and homes.

He had relented toward her of late, so manifest was her distress at the
things she was seeing.  He felt he should off-set his campaign with
something that would please.  He wanted to show her, he told her, that,
in spite of poverty and distress and the uncertainty of work, there
were happy homes and happy people in these districts.  He brought her
to places where young married lovers were setting out to brave life
cheerfully together; to flats where grandfathers, veterans of war
often, spent their last days in dangling grandsons on their knees and
chuckling in unashamed delight; to mean streets where swarms of
children hung about hard-worked mothers like garlands of glory.

They were returning from the tour, walking across a little park at
Tenth Street and Avenue A.  She had left her car on Broadway at his
request, for he wished the visits to be made with as little ostentation
as possible, lest the feelings of the visited should be wounded.  The
dry crackle of frost was in the air and, though it was only late in the
afternoon, the violet arc lights were lighting wanly.  A gaunt
band-stand rose beside them and their feet struck the cemented way in
little clicks.  Across the avenue from them hove a line of delicatessen
stores, kept by great blond men with purring Slovak tongues.  There was
little traffic, and the few pedestrians on the sidewalks pattered along
swiftly through the cold.  Suddenly, as he walked alongside her, he
knew she was crying.

"What is it?" he asked affrightedly.  "What is the matter?"

As he looked at her she brought out her handkerchief and covered her
eyes, still walking.  Her knees seemed to bend under her.  She held the
handkerchief with a grotesque gesture of arm and elbow that hurt him
like a blow.

"You must tell me!" he nearly shouted in panic.  "What is wrong?"

He stood before her and stopped her in her walk.  She began sobbing in
little gusts of breath that came through her teeth in pants,
hard-driven.  Suddenly she burst out wildly:

"I can't help it," she cried.  "They are all so happy.  They have no
money.  They have nothing to live on.  But they have all got somebody.
And somebody loves them.  And I have got everything in the world.  And
I have got nobody--nobody--nobody!"  The words came out as if something
within her were being torn apart.

He was shaking as badly as she was.  He caught her by the shoulders,
with his hands trembling.

"Listen!  Listen!" he cried to her.

"I've got nobody!" she cried on.  "Nobody to be with me!  Nobody to
love me!  Nobody!  Nobody!  Nobody!  Oh, God!  Oh, God!  Oh, God!"

His grasp tightened on her shoulders.  He shook her as he might shake a
man in anger.

"You are wrong!" he shouted in sudden revelation.  "I love you!  I do!
I do!  Do you hear me?  I love you!  I do!"

She stiffened suddenly under his hands and the handkerchief fell from
her eyes.  Her throat was heaving terribly.  Her grasp tightened on his
arm and she looked up at him with a terrible question in her eyes, as
if she had heard miraculously the one thing she had least hoped for and
most wanted in the world, and as if she were not sure she had heard
aright.

He could not bear to see that look, and, regardless of time and place,
he swept her to him with a clasp so fierce that it might have been a
wrestling hold; and as he did that he discovered suddenly that he was
sobbing too.


V

Every emotion, every thought Nils Riordan had had until now--exultation
in the pride of leadership; his great, wide love for his own people;
his affection closely wound about the old pastor who had reared him;
his deep, mystical reverence for the father and the mother who were
dead; the clear, supernal voice that called to him at times and pointed
out the road he was to follow, and the great bound of heart that came
to him on hearing it--all these seemed minor, edgeless, lifeless,
compared to the flame that burned in him now that he knew he loved
Myrtle Delavan.

At moments great tenderness suffused him when he thought what she had
suffered, and iron fingers constricted his heart and sweat broke out on
him as he went vicariously through her agony.  And then passion would
shake him until his throat was as dry as dust, and his face was livid
with rage as he thought of the smiling, cynic villain who had been the
cause of it.  These would pass and the great resolution would simmer
within him.

"If ever," he would stop and say to himself, wherever it was, at
whatever time it might be--"if ever she suffers one pang more, one
unhappy moment more, may God desert me, both living and dead!"

But, apart from these moments, life passed for him in a single golden
minute.  A queer madness swept about him, so that he might have been
walking on air, so buoyantly did his feet go; and the atmosphere he
breathed might have been the very winds of Paradise.  His heart seemed
to inflate to the breaking point, to tug at his body as a balloon might
tug at the ground.  He wished to stop everybody in the street and give
them everything he had.  And, when he thought of her at times, the
brilliancy of it seemed to knock him aghast, as the light of the vision
felled Saul of Tarsus; and it would appear cruelly impossible to him
that he was pledged to marry the most beautiful woman in the world.

"You will marry me?" he had asked her the evening after that sobbing
discovery in the mean park.

"How can I?" she had wailed to him.  "I am married already."

"You will get your freedom," he told her.  "You will begin action
immediately.  There is not a jury of men in the world--not a judge--who
would withhold it for an instant."

"I am afraid," she quavered.  "Afraid for you and for me.  Afraid of
him!"

"There is no need for you to be afraid of him," he said, so savagely
that his voice dropped to a hoarse, throaty whisper, "so long as I am
here.  And as for me, I am afraid of no man while I am doing what is
right and have these two hands."

He wanted her, in the first flush of decision, to walk out of the house
on Madison Avenue that night and take refuge with some of the people on
the East Side until the decree was granted.  But this was too much for
her.

She had promised enough already, and she was shaken through and
thoroughly frightened.  It would be best to leave her as she was.

"The moment that decree is given," he directed her, "you will put on
the clothes I shall buy for you.  You will walk over the threshold of
that house, with nothing from it--not the value of a straw.  You will
come direct to my arms and you will marry me."

"I will!" she answered.

"And you will be my girl, and my wife?  And you will follow me always
and love me always?"

"Always!" she answered him, sobbing.  "Always!  Always!  Always!"

He would not go near her house ever, or sit down with her in that
luxurious limousine.  But every day he saw her, walked with her, had
lunch or dinner; and so passed these days.  She would walk out of the
house trippingly, trying to come with calm and dignity, and ignorant
and careless of the prying, gossiping eyes that spied on her.  They
would meet at the corner and go for their long walks and explorations.
November had come in, all white frost and cold sunshine, and New York
had entered on its two wonderful months.  Rapturously they walked up
Fifth Avenue, with its eternal carnival of people and cars, stopping
every moment to look in at a shop window, admiring a tropical display
in a florist's store; or a Bokhara rug stretched to entice the
purchaser, a wonderful symphony in tone colours, like a hashish eater's
dream; or a vase of translucent pottery rescued from the China of Han
and Ming.

She did not understand these things and did not care for them, though
she tried to--poor girl!  But she was content to stand and watch him
admire them, and to hear him enthuse, treasuring up every word and
every occasion, collecting them with the avidity of a beggar collecting
coins, to gloat over them afterward in the hours of his absence.
Together they walked in Central Park, the frost-stiffened grass
crunching beneath their feet harmoniously; or they wandered along the
quays, remarking the battered oversea boats standing contentedly in
their docks, like horses in stalls.  So passed these days!

Occasionally he talked to her about his mission in life; about the men
who toiled with their hands and who bunched their muscles to receive
the naked burdens of the world.  He told her what he wanted to make of
them--a strong, cohesive unit, pulling together, each for the good of
all; not a truculent force, proud in its strength and demanding
excesses under the guise of rights, but a great movement that,
gathering force and rapidity, would sweep every atom in it forward to
the prosperity and comfort fitted to their station.  She didn't grasp a
tithe of it all, and sadly he saw that she was not destined to be a
strong help-mate in his work; but he passed it over lightly.

"It is too much to ask," he told himself.  "Here is the most beautiful
woman in the world, and the best-hearted, and the most loving.  I can
do the work myself.  She will sympathize with it, even if she doesn't
understand.  And the people will love her, because of her kindliness
and beauty, as they loved my mother."

Four years before, De Courcy Delavan, who knew the beauty of women with
the same thorough knowledge he had of the richness of wine and the
hazard of cards, picked her from her Long Island swamp, considering her
looks to surpass those of any woman in New York.  She had then an
intense, vivid beauty, like the beauty of a wild flower opening to the
sun.  And after those four years, until she met Nils Riordan, she had a
cultivated, calm human beauty, a thing that conformed to standard and
tint, like a valuable bloom in a greenhouse.  But after she met Nils
Riordan she became transformed.  Light glimmered from her eyes and
shone from her face and was haloed in her hair, as it might be about
the features of a soul beatified.

It was startling how she, that pale chrysalis, became suddenly a
butterfly of happiness.  She went singing about the house; and though
she knew Nils hated to think of her in the clothes that Delavan's money
bought she could not help arraying herself in the best and most
beautiful she had or could buy, weighing in her intimate, woman's
brain, the pleasure he had in seeing her in all her glory, arrayed
royally as she ought to be, against the pain of knowing that the rake's
wealth provided it.  And besides, she guessed shrewdly it was seldom he
thought of that--other things engrossed him.

Carefully she prepared for each day, using every artifice at her
command, spending hours before dressing table and mirror, counting no
detail too laborious, because she loved him so.  And each day she was
rewarded by the gasp of incredulous wonder that came from his lips when
he saw her, like the choking wonder an ancient Greek might have had on
seeing a vision of supernatural beauty.  That she lived for and that
she gloried in, because it told her she meant something to the
wonderful man she loved.

He had little time for work now; the wooing of her kept him busy all
the day and at night he liked to be alone, in an ecstasy of thought
about her.  At times a fit of panic seized him, there was so much to be
done--articles to be written; investigations to be taken up; speeches
to be made in favour of candidates for Congress standing on the Labour
ticket; commissions the sittings of which should be attended.  But he
would pass them over guiltily, promising that one week or one month
from now he would attack everything with renewed vigour.

"Merkle can attend to that," he would say cheerfully to subordinates
when they brought work to him; and Jim Merkle would be pleased and
willing to undertake the task.

I think it was in Birmingham that Merkle had been born, right in the
heart of manufacturing England, and his people had known hard days.  He
would tell unbelievably terrible stories of conditions in the
cotton-spinning mills and in the cutlery factories.  And as he told
them his eyes would glimmer balefully; and he would denounce all
capitalists with terrible oaths and threaten vaguely that a day would
come with the people's revenge, as a red day had come in France about
one hundred and twenty years ago.  An uncouth, ungainly figure of a man
he was, tall and lanky, with colourless grey eyes and a mouth creased
from bitterness and shouting.  He looked like a rough plaster cast in a
sculptor's studio, but the moment he began speaking he became nothing
but will and flame.

"The Irreconcilable," the members of Parliament had called him in
England, speaking in a tone of light contempt.  But no man in England
had ever swayed the workers as he had done.  There was no act of
sabotage, no wave of popular fury in Great Britain, that could not be
traced back to Jim Merkle.  A horrible, defamatory attack on a great
personage had sent him flying from England, with the law seeking to
clutch him for criminal libel.  In America his plea of a political
offence had saved him from deportation and extradition.

In New York he had run up against Nils Riordan in his campaign of
savagery; and, finding that he could accomplish nothing in a city so
completely under the sway of the popular young leader, he had enrolled
himself as a lieutenant under Nils, working faithfully for every ideal
the organization had in mind, and resorting only to the accepted
methods of agitation.  He seemed to like Nils.

"If we only had you in England, boy!" he would say with admiration in
his eyes; but the eyes would cloud quickly.  "But things are different
there!  We don't get anything with your logic and diplomacy; we've got
to bloody well use a club."

Riordan thought the man had taken suddenly the sane and logical view of
labour problems and was delighted with the conversion.  Merkle had
proved valuable in breaking new ground and bringing new forces into the
fold.  The Englishman had a wonderful gift of wild oratory, and crowds
came magically under his sway, while they progressed less quickly under
the calm, logical tones of the college man.  He had sent Merkle to
Syracuse to help in an election, and Merkle had succeeded wonderfully.
He had sent Merkle to talk over the leaders of the Waiters' Union to
the terms he had made for them.  Forcefully and succinctly Merkle had
laid the case before them.

"... And them's as fair as you would get an you were to stay out till
the Judgment Day.  Fair, square and aboveboard!"

A dissatisfied murmur rose from his hearers, an angry whisper and the
shaking of heads.  Merkle had sprung to his feet, his great hands
knotted and his eyes glittering.

"And if any man doesn't think them fair," he roared, "let him step out
on this floor with me!"

That had been effective.  Riordan would have been firm and decisive,
but he would not have accomplished the compromise as quickly as this.

Ordinarily Nils would have kept a tight rein on Merkle, overseeing
minutely everything the lieutenant did, and entrusting him not at all
with the larger issues at hand; but now, with his new-found happiness,
he saw everybody in a different and glorious light.  He regarded Merkle
as a sincere and able leader, whose faults were negligible and whose
loyalty was beyond question; a little rough, but with a heart of gold.

"Turn it over to Merkle" was becoming a formula with him.  Other men in
the organization protested.  Johnson, the tired, disillusioned man who
edited _The Worker_, voiced his dislike of the Englishman boldly.

"You're incurable, Johnson," Nils had replied laughingly.  "You can see
no good in anything or anybody.  You're as suspicious as a Central
Office man.  Don't be an ass!  Merkle's as straight as they're made."

"Very well.  We'll see!" Johnson had replied grimly.

But morose suspicions and unfounded warnings had no effect on Nils.  He
passed them over lightly, as a sailor might shake his head after a dash
of spray.  Eagerly he awaited and met Myrtle Delavan, and planned with
her their future life after she had gained her freedom.  A little house
on one of the quiet squares in the forgotten portions of the city they
would have--a place with green shutters and whitewashed walls; with
flowers trailing from window boxes; with a door that would be open to
everybody on the first tap of the great brass knocker they would attach
to it.

Inside everything would be shining, and in winter they would have a
great fire in the main room, with licking green flames over the logs.
A sort of sublimated workman's house it would be, simple, clean, with
here and there beautiful touches that would give it effects not
equalled in any mansion in the country.  And he thought to himself of
her going to and fro in it, in a plain gown of beautiful colours, a
sublimated workman's wife.  And there would be a cradle, he promised
himself secretly, which he would hew out with his own hands....

She listened to his plans, with her mouth and eyes eager, like a child
breathless over a fairy tale.  She said nothing, except to implore him
to continue.  And then suddenly they would become silent, each in their
own thoughts; his deliciously tender, and hers unutterably poignant,
because of the contrast of what he planned with what she had known
before.  At times like these she would turn to him quickly and grip his
wrist with her hands, and her slim, soft fingers would become withes of
encircling steel.

"You love me?" she would ask breathlessly; and in her eyes the old
agony would come, as though conjured up by a malignant charm.

"I do, my darling," he would reply.  "I love you with all my heart and
soul."

"Will you always love me?"

"Every moment in this life, dear girl," he would answer her solemnly,
seeing the terror she was in; "and afterward--if that is possible."

"You will!  Won't you, Nils?  Promise me.  Promise me, Nils!  For if
you ever desert me, or if you ever stop loving me, I shall die, Nils.
I shall surely die!"

But this was seldom, for he had convinced her somehow that she was all
there was in the world for him.  And as for him, he would smile
tenderly at the absurdity of her question, for that they should always
be together and that everything should be as they had planned seemed as
certain to him as the rising of the morning sun.  And as he thought of
that a great wonder seized him that they two in a whirlwind of Fate
should be swung together, and exist alongside so long as the least part
of spirit should adhere, in this planet and in a future one.  He saw in
awed, mute wonder that a great mystery had been shown him, greater than
the rite at Eleusis, surpassing the inmost secret of black ancient
magic.  In one moment he had heard the purring shuttle of Life.

Before, the world had seemed to him a grim, stern place; and he had
wondered how there could be so much happiness in it, seeing it as
baldly as he did.  But now he, too, was living in Arcady....  So passed
these days!


VI

Whoever has been in Father Malachi's study in the Hudson Street
parsonage will never forget it--that weird rectangle, with its musty
and threadbare green chairs and couch; with its jumble of dog-eared
books; Homer the poet and Apuleius the fiction writer joggling against
the report of the Forrest Commission on labour problems, and Baker on
Housing Conditions; Henry George proudly holding his own beside
Sophocles; and Bastable, that sly liar, daring to repose alongside of
honest Herodotus.  A huge Biblical Concordance was there, too, and a
tattered religious encyclopedia, exhumed from a secondhand store.

The ornaments of the room were incongruous--the presents of his
parishioners: A gaudy sunset by some artist of the slums, done, most
likely, from an Eighth Avenue fire escape; a full-rigged ship carved
into an immense green bottle; a plaster cast of Diana unloosing her
bow, the gift of an Italian plasterer.  An old desk stood in a corner,
piled high with letters and notes, and memoranda made out on stray
scraps of paper.  And over everything was an air of comfort, of being
lived in.

Those who have been there will remember, as the mainspring of the room,
the fine white head of Father Malachi, cuddled into the hollow made by
the back of a green chaise longue.  It seemed a corner of a quiet
back-water compared to the rushing river of life outside.  And the
quietest thing in it was Father Malachi, leaning back in his chair,
with his hands folded and his spare knees crossed.

But to-day he was not quiet.  He fumbled about his desk, with his head
averted, while Nils Riordan talked enthusiastically in the corner by
the window.

"I could never get her to come down and see you until now, Father
Malachi," he went on.  "She was always afraid.  She was afraid of
meeting anybody.  But now she wants to meet you and I'm going to bring
her down."  He paused and his voice became unutterably soft.  "It means
a lot to me to see together the two people I love most in all the
world."

He stopped and leaned forward, his hands clasped together and a little
dreaming smile upon his lips.  The old clergyman still bent over his
desk, with nothing of him visible to Nils except the long arc of his
back, and his hands, which were trembling.

"You will love her, Father Malachi, for herself just as much as for me;
and the people will love her when they know her."

For the first time he noticed the old pastor's preoccupation at his
desk, his averted face, his trembling hands.

"Can I help you?" he asked.  "Are you looking for anything?"

"No," was the slow reply.  "I am not looking for anything."

"Is there something wrong?" Nils asked with a note of alarm.  He
started to his feet and looked toward the desk anxiously.  There was no
answer.  He pressed forward.  "Father!" he called quickly.  "Father!
Tell me!  Am I doing anything wrong?  Tell me!"

"You are doing nothing wrong, Nils."  The words came slowly and
haltingly.  "I can see nothing wrong.  But----"

"But what?"

The pastor turned round in his creaking swivel chair.  His body was
limper and more bowed than Nils had ever seen it.  His face was haggard
and his eyes were full of trouble.

"Laddie Nils," he said gently, "I would do anything to spare you pain.
There is nothing on earth so dear to me as you and your happiness.  But
the people don't like it.  They are talking.  They are losing faith."

A sort of gasp hissed through Riordan's teeth and the light went out of
his face like a quenched candle.  His eyes became focused widely on
nothing and all his body became tense, like a setter pointing.

"What are they saying," he asked suddenly and colourlessly.

"They are saying," the pastor answered firmly--Nils could feel that he
had steeled himself to say it and that every syllable he spoke was
hurting him like an intense pain--"that another man with a great career
before him has been drawn away from it to follow a woman.  They say
that Labour was all right for you until you got in touch with Fifth
Avenue; that you have forgotten them all for a whiff of talcum powder
and the rustle of a silk gown.  They say this--and more."

"But--my God!--father, this is all wrong.  This----"

"They say," Father Malachi went on inexorably, "that your father and
mother would turn in their graves to see their son trailing after the
cast-off wife of a profligate millionaire."

"This is damnable!" Riordan all but shouted.  "The girl is the squarest
and sweetest and most horribly treated woman in all the world.  And she
is one of themselves, born and bred poor, and willing to come back and
live among them."

"They say that you are lazing away your time with her; forgetting your
trusts; neglecting your work."

"But I oversaw everything.  I put it all into Merkle's hands----"

"Merkle!"  The old man's tone was like ice and acid; a terrible light
came into his eyes; his frame trembled with rage.

"Merkle?" Nils said, aghast.  "Why, Merkle's the squarest man alive!
He has sacrificed everything for the cause.  He has done wonders----"

The clergyman controlled his rage by a great effort of will.  He stood
up slowly and looked at Riordan between the eyes.  His voice was as
solemn as on the night in the belfry, but his tones were firm now, sure
of the facts before him, not shaking as when he had been unknotting the
gossamer threads of uncertainty.

"Nils, in seven weeks Merkle has done nearly as much harm as you have
done good in three years.  It is he who has been spreading reports
about you.  He has been making the unions dissatisfied, urging to them
that they would gain twice as much by rebellion and force as by hard
work and arbitration.  He has been hinting that you were the tool of
capitalism, philandering with a woman of the moneyed class.  And
Nils"--his voice became horror-stricken--"there is dynamite in the air."

Very still Riordan stood, very still and stricken.  For a moment, he
doubted whether he was hearing right; whether all this was not the
figment of some distorted dream.  Gradually the familiar surroundings
came back to him.  The truth was written too patent and bold in the old
man's face to be mistaken.

"So that's what's wrong!" he said in a whisper.  "That's what's wrong
with the mill hands.  And that's why that dying crowd of anarchists
have burst out again, and why Dolmetsch has begun making speeches.  I
see it.  I see!"

His hands clasped firmly and the startled look went from his eyes; and
they lit up again with firmness and determination.  He moved a little,
turned, and began pacing up and down the room with nervous, rapid
strides.  A flashing light kindled in his eye and the colour mounted to
his temples.  Suddenly he turned to the pastor.

"Listen to me, father," he said in vicious, snapping accents, "and mark
it!  I am neither going to rest nor give in until I have driven Merkle
from this country as he has been driven from England; until I have
branded him for what he is--a liar and a Judas, a self-seeking
demagogue and the enemy of all decent men.  I will go down among my
people and see whether they trust me or trust him.  I will leave him so
that no roof will cover him except the filthiest anarchist dive.  And
if necessary I shall kill him as I would kill a wolf that has strayed
among sheep.  Mark what I say!"

He took another few turns about the room, savage, untamable, like some
wild animal confined by bars.

"And mark this, too!" he shouted.  "I shall make the people eat every
word they have uttered about the woman I am going to marry; for I shall
marry her.  And I shall bring her down here to them, and they shall go
down on their knees to her as to a crowned queen.  And they shall live
to repent shamefacedly of the days when they spoke of her lightly.  By
God!  They shall!"  And he plunged wildly from the room.

They met at Thirty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue that afternoon and
walked southward through a thin layer of snow that was freezing on the
sidewalks.  A typical December afternoon it was, cold and stinging,
with the white snow beneath and everything standing out in strong,
vivid colours.  Right and left the houses rose like towers of ivory,
glistening with hoar-frost and a coating of snow.  Above them the sun
shone in a great golden blaze, while from the west clouds blew toward
it--heavy masses of ochre and saffron, with a background of inky black.

He could not find it in his heart to be gay that afternoon, but he was
careful to say nothing to her of what he had heard; and inside him
somewhere burned a great smouldering rage against those who had dared
to criticize her.  She saw he was morose and gloomy, but she attributed
it to some worry about the cause he was always speaking of, and she was
afraid to ask him to tell her of it, fearing she would not grasp what
was wrong, and could not offer proper advice and consolation.  So she
contented herself with being gay and talking vivaciously, hoping to
take his mind away from the difficulties.  She filled her lungs with
the keen, frosty air and glanced upward to the sun.

"Do you see the sun, Nils?" she prattled.  "Do you see the sun?  It is
so bright to-day it makes me happy."

He listened to her perfunctorily; for, gay as she was, the blow he had
received was too severe to be deflected even by her pleasure.  But she
persisted in speaking to him and making him notice.

"I sometimes think," she went on, "that everything in the world owes
its happiness to the sun.  I feel alive only when the sun is shining,
and when it sets the day is over for me.  And I wait patiently until it
rises again.  Look at it, Nils."  She laid her hand gently on his arm.
"Look at it, Nils," she said softly.  "You are my sun, dear!"

He raised his eyes skyward, half closing them for shade; and as he let
the golden shimmer strike the lashes he noticed that the cloud bank
from the west was sweeping rapidly toward it in great black fragments,
like jinn racing forward on Titanic wings.  The foremost cloud
broadened in a huge black disk, began to scallop at the edges, and took
on suddenly the grotesque outlines of a man's face--hard, forceful,
with a great jaw and nose and rugged forehead.  Nils watched it in
astonishment, and to his mind there leaped the thought that it was the
face of Jim Merkle.  It blotted out the sun as a hood blots out a
candle, and the streets became dark and cold.  The woman beside him
uttered a little cry of terror.

"The sun is going out, Nils!" she gasped.  "Nils, the sun is going out!"

He caught viciously at her arm and held her to him, as he might do in a
sudden emergency of danger; but he could say nothing to her, for a
moment of terror was paralyzing the cords of his throat and stopping
the rhythm of his heart's beating.


VII

Through the closed windows of the office the sound of the crowd outside
came in a faint _susurrus_ of sound, now rising to a humming as of
innumerable insects and sinking again until it came to a whisper as
light as that of a breeze among leaves.  From the windows themselves,
past the platform of scaffolding that had been erected for the meeting,
the great mass of people in the square seemed like a mass of larvas,
closely packed and seething, seen through a microscope.  Their faces
were grim and white, and the lines of policemen keeping them in order
were nervous and clung together as tightly as possible.  The striking
longshoremen they were handling to-day were not to be impressed by
night-sticks and whistles.  They were a fierce, lawless crowd, who, if
they were angered, would massacre the police force in the square with
as great ease and as little compunction as they would pitch bags into
the hold of a vessel.  High overhead sodden rain clouds hung like a
gigantic pall, dull and hopelessly grey.  A raw air was out, so moist
that it glistened, and in it the faces of the strikers were grey with a
tinge suggesting want and despair.

Inside the office, with the long deal table and the shabby chairs,
tension rose to pain.  At one end of the table Bentley sat, secretary
of the Labour Federation, a thickset, red-faced man, with big grey eyes
and a close-cropped white moustache.  His hands were clasped and his
elbows on the table, and his mouth was set grimly.  On one side of him
was Flannagan, of the Longshore Union, a massive red-haired bulk, with
anger showing in every line of his face.  Beside him was Johnson,
editor of _The Worker_, loose-lipped and bald, chewing an unlighted
cigar nervously.  Father Malachi had risen from the table and was
looking out of the window, with his back turned to them and his head
bowed.  Opposite Bentley, at the other end, Nils Riordan sat, limp and
grey-faced.

"Well, Mr. Riordan?" Bentley asked.

"Why can't you let me go ahead?" Nils asked bitterly.  "Why don't you
let me fight the thing out?  Give me time."

"We have given you time, Mr. Riordan," Bentley replied doggedly.  "We
have waited and stood by you, and every day we have been losing our
hold on the workers, and Merkle has been gaining all the time.  In a
few weeks more the work of all our lives will be undone.  There will be
dynamiting right in this city, and there will be as bloody fights as
those in Colorado.  We can wait no longer."

Again the silence and the tenseness took possession of the room, and
the murmur of the crowd outside crept into it in a threatening minor
tone.

Bentley looked steadily toward Riordan.

Flannagan shrugged his immense shoulders and scowled furiously.
Johnson spat out rags of his cigar and put it back in his mouth.

"Come, Mr. Riordan," Bentley urged.  "Give up Mrs. Delavan."

"In God's name," Nils began furiously--"in God's name, leave Mrs.
Delavan out of it!  That's my private affair."

"A public man has no private affairs," Bentley went on firmly.  "And
Mrs. Delavan is the whole matter at issue.  If you marry her you lose
your people.  They will not stand for you marrying the divorced wife of
a millionaire.  They resent everything about her--her servants; her
house; her picture in the papers; her summers at Newport; her cars.
Everything!  It may be all right--I've no doubt it is; but the people
believe she is nothing except a be-costumed Fifth Avenue woman who
looks on them as dirt.  The idea has been seeping into their minds for
months and Merkle has made the most of it.  Nothing will change that
idea.  Not a thing!"

"But we'll show them," Nils pleaded.  "They must be reasonable."

"They are never reasonable," Johnson uttered bitterly.  "They never
think.  If they did there'd never be any trouble."

"Here's how the matter stands, Mr. Riordan"--Bentley laid his hands
flat on the table: "No matter how much influence you had with the
people until now, no matter how much you have done for them, at the
present moment they distrust you; and they will distrust you so long as
you have anything to do with Mrs. Delavan.  There are always people who
will not believe in her good motives or yours, and those persons will
infect the trusting ones.  We of the Labour Federations are up against
the biggest crisis in many years, and we can't afford to be associated
with or support anyone who is in disfavour and unpopular.  We shall
have to cut loose from you; and the moment we do any power you have is
at an end.  Come now!  Be reasonable.  Give up Mrs. Delavan."

"I can't do it," Nils said firmly.  He shook his head.

Flannagan jumped to his feet in a sudden passion.  His eyes blazed and
there was foam at the corners of his mouth.  He hammered the table with
his huge hands.

"You!  You!" he shouted incoherently at Nils.  "Damn you and your calf
love!  Look at the people outside that window.  Forty thousand of them.
Going to hell, and driven there by Merkle!  No use for their leaders.
And the Union funds gone.  Starving--do you understand?  And you are
the only man who can stop it.  You never think of them.  You think only
of a powdered hussy who sold herself to a rich man, like a woman of
the----"

Nils was on his feet too.  His hand swung the heavy chair from the
floor.

"Say that," he shouted back--"say that, and I'll crack your skull like
an eggshell!"

"Sit down, Flannagan!" Bentley commanded.  "Do you hear me?  Sit down!"

Again there was silence in the room, and through the brick walls there
filtered in the sense of the crowd outside--a faint shuffle of many
feet, like the pit-a-pat of dancers, and a hoarse soughing, as of bleak
wind through bare branches.  Riordan got up again.  His eyes were
bloodshot.

"Listen, Bentley," he said; "and you, Flannagan, and Johnson!  And
listen to me, Father Malachi!  This girl we are speaking about has had
the hardest time of anybody in the world that I know of.  She didn't
want to be anything, but Fate made her the wife of a scoundrel.  He
left her and for four years she has been buried alive.  It makes no
difference that the grave is gold and marble--none at all.  And then we
met, and for the first time in her life she approximated happiness.  I
say nothing about myself, gentlemen.  Leave me out--except that the
fault of it is mine.

"We fell in love with each other--that's the long and short of it.  And
I urged her to get a divorce and marry me.  There is nothing wrong in
that.  You have a wife, Bentley; and you, Flannagan.  You married the
women you wanted to and they married you because they chose you.  And
both of you are happy and contented.  That's all we ask, and there is
nothing wrong in that.

"Gentlemen, I have worked all my life for this cause.  I have worked
alongside of you for the past three years and a half since I came out
of college; and before that I dreamed of nothing else and planned for
nobody else but the people.  You needn't reproach me, Flannagan.  The
plight of the men outside is hurting me as much as it is hurting you.
And nobody knows better than I the damage that will be done if Merkle
isn't beaten.

"But listen to this, gentlemen: If anything happens now the girl will
die.  She has taken action against her husband, and by a boat that
enters New York Harbour this afternoon her husband returns from France.
Nobody except myself can stand between him and her.  If I desert her
now and let her return to that brute it will kill her, as surely as by
a knife.  She will die herself before she meets him.  Think!  Think of
it!  If I desert her this woman of mine will die!"

They sat very silent for a moment.  The crowd without had become
curiously still, and in the street at the rear of them a barrel organ
struck up a gaudy, jingling melody that forced its way into the room
like an intruder; a ghastly, sordid, heartless incident.  It
intensified the silence of the hearers with its metallic roll and set
off the gravity of the conference as a pygmy might set off a giant.
Bentley shook his head.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Riordan," he said decisively.

For an instant it seemed as if Nils would spring at Bentley.  He was
poised at the edge of the table like a crouching panther.  The veins on
his forehead stood out and his neck swelled under his collar.

"To hell with you and your cause!" he blazed.  "I'm through with it.  I
will walk out of this room and shake the dust of it off my feet for
ever.  I am not dependent on you for anything.  I can make my living
and hers without you.  You have left it to me to choose; and--by
God!--I will!"

The old clergyman at the window straightened up as if he had seen
something he was expecting.  He peered out for a moment and turned
round slowly.

"You are right, Nils," he said.  "You have the right to choose."

He came forward slowly and his face seemed very grey against the white
of his hair.  He moistened his lips as he walked and his eyes were
strangely sunken.  Outside, the noise of the crowd buzzed angrily, like
a swarm of hornets, and in contrast with it the street organ jingled
merrily away, like a butterfly fluttering about while a hurricane
clouds darkly, ready to break.

"You have always the right to choose, Nils," he went on solemnly.
Bentley shot an angry glance at him and Johnson seemed surprised.  "I
told you before that you had.  Do you remember when, laddie?  It was
the night you returned from college.  Do you remember that?"

"I do," Nils answered; his voice was a hoarse whisper.

"I took you up into the belfry and I showed you the city beneath us.
It was a hot night and the children could not sleep, and they could
hardly play.  I told you you could choose to work for yourself or to
work for the people from whom you were sprung, who had brought you up,
who loved you.  Do you remember how you chose that night, Nils?"

"I do," Riordan answered him again; his voice was hardly audible.

"You began your work, and every day you saw more how they needed a wise
and strong leader.  They rallied to you, Nils, as they had never done
to anybody before.  You worked wonders for them.  It is a small thing,
perhaps, Nils, but you don't know how many people knelt at their
bedsides every night and prayed for you for all you had done.  They
looked forward to life with hope because you were working for them.
You know that, Nils, don't you?"

He could answer nothing.  He stood at the end of the table, his face
white, his feet teetering beneath him.

"What you have been to these people in New York you might be to twenty
million of them in America.  You could be the one to lead them to
wisdom and strength and comfort.  You know that yourself, Nils.  We all
know that."

Father Malachi stopped to collect his words and his voice grew
distressful, so much so that three of his hearers were terrified that
they should see the most terrible of all sights, an old man who cried.
But he caught himself up and went ahead:

"I know about this, and it is a hard thing, Nils.  And I believe
you--that if you leave her this woman will die.  And I know that you
and she are bound to each other in a big, pure love.  But the people
are inexorable.  They clamour now as they clamoured to Pilate.  Many
people die for others, Nils; but it is always a hard and pitiful thing."

He listened intently, as if he heard something the others did not.  He
straightened up again and looked at Nils squarely.

"You are a free man, Nils, and you have as much right to your happiness
and life as these twenty million have to theirs.  You can choose.  You
can choose between the happiness of these people who need you, and to
whom you pledged yourself, and your own.  They are in danger, now that
Merkle is at large, like a lion in the streets.  But your life is your
own, Nils, to do with what you like.  You can turn your back on them.
You can walk out of this room with this girl----"

"Out of this room?" Nils asked quickly and affrightedly.  Something in
the pastor's voice told him it was not a figure of speech.

"Yes; out of this room," the pastor nodded.  "I have sent for her and
she is here.  So choose now."

They heard for the first time the movement of feet in the adjoining
corridor and they were all suddenly hushed.  Through the windows the
clamour in the square struck them--a speaker of some kind was
addressing the men from the middle of the crowd, and his high-pitched
hysterical voice was followed by a dull insensate roar, like the raging
in animals annoyed by the trainer's iron.  And from the next street the
barrel organ still rippled faintly a sentimental song of frustrated
love, with long-drawn notes swinging into a trill of appoggiaturas--a
cheap, shallow thing.

Mrs. Delavan stood in the doorway, a slim, frightened creature.
Against the dark furs about her neck and shoulders her beautiful
features shone translucently--the melting amber eyes, the wonderfully
curved and darkly red mouth, the graceful sweep of chin, the hair like
warm, reddish light.  Against the bareness of the office she seemed
like an orchid springing up suddenly in a back yard, a miracle of
beauty.

Unconsciously the men rose to their feet.  They looked at her with a
startled expression on their faces.  She was transfixed with terror.

Nils alone did not turn toward her.  His gaze was levelled hypnotically
through the window at the seething square.  The old clergyman went
forward and took her hands.  He drew her toward him silently.  For long
minutes he looked at her.

"My poor little lady!" he said at last.  "My poor, bonny little thing!"

She went white at the words and started as if to run to Riordan's side.
But he held her gently.

"They want to take Nils away from you--his people.  There are twenty
million of them and you are only one girl.  They want him very badly."
He let her hands go and turned away.  "My heart is broken for you both!"

She took two steps toward Nils quickly and then all at once stopped.
Her hands dropped to her sides limply.  Her head went back and her eyes
closed.

"I knew it!"  She broke into a wail.  "I knew it--the day the sun went
out!"

She clawed toward him with hands outstretched.  She might have gone
blind suddenly, so feebly did she grope.  Riordan made no sign of
having heard her.

"Oh, Nils!  I shall die!" she cried with great sobs.  "I shall surely
die."

Johnson turned a sickening white where he stood, and Bentley's mouth
went into a crease of chiselled lines.  Flannagan shuffled uneasily.
They dared not look at Riordan, but their eyes followed her, unable to
move from her face.  They saw a wonderful expression of tenderness
sweep over it.

"Ah, Nils!" she said slowly; her voice was like some melancholy chord
on a flute.  "Poor Nils!  Poor boy!"

She moved slowly toward him and touched his arm with her finger tips.
They could see the cloth of his sleeve quiver.

"I can't stand this," Flannagan said suddenly, and moved forward.
Bentley stopped him with a quickly upraised palm.  Johnson shook his
head hopelessly.

"Aren't you going to say good-bye to me, Nils?" she was pleading; he
might have been stone, so motionless did he remain.

She caught at his hand quickly and kissed it and, turning, fled out of
the room.  She was sobbing terribly; dry, cutting spasms of sound that
were horrible to hear; and she struck against the door lintel, so
blindly did she rush out.

They heard her go crying down the corridor; and once they heard her
fall, pick herself up again, and run on.  Without, the crowd began to
shout with a rumble that was like thunder.

The men in the room paid no attention to them.

They stood still and shaken.  Occasionally they looked at each other
and turned away guiltily.  Bentley after a time put his hand in his
pocket and glanced at his watch mechanically.  It was twenty-five
minutes to four, and the meeting was to have started at half past
three.  He made no move to go out.

The barrel organ began again--this time a quick, staccato measure, two
short bars and a lilt into a smashing crescendo; a cynical,
pseudo-solemn thing, full of mockery.  The pastor noticed it
unconsciously and, seizing on the trifle, began wondering what it was.
He listened again to the laughing blasphemy of it.

"The Funeral March of a Marionette!" he discovered with a creeping
horror.

The roar in the streets became more insistent.  It thundered like
gunnery.  Riordan turned round quickly and decisively, and the leaders
looked at him with nervous apprehension.  His face was whiter than snow
and down it sweat was pouring.

"I am ready," he said quietly, "and the people are waiting."

Bentley looked at him shakenly.  He tried to protest.

"Mr. Riordan!  Nils!" he said.  "Don't speak to-day.  Don't----"

Riordan shot one savage glance of hatred at him and cut short the words
on his lips.

They went out one by one, the music becoming louder as they entered the
corridor.  The pastor noticed that the men were unconsciously keeping
time with the barrel-organ music as they walked.

"The Funeral March of a Marionette!" he repeated to himself, aghast.

They mounted the steps of the platform and took their seats.  Beneath
them in the square the mob of people was like a seething pot, the
blackness of their clothes was like water and their white faces seemed
bubbles on its surface.  They clawed about the edges of the platform
like bees swarming on a tree's branches.  Nils stepped out and a great
roar greeted him.  It swept up Fifth Avenue and weltered toward the
rivers, on each side.

"My people!" he began firmly.

The old clergyman looked towards one corner of the square where a
limousine was waiting.  He saw a grey figure, with dark furs, tottering
toward it with uncertain steps.  It put out its hands before it and
pushed the crowd feebly aside.  Even in the distance it seemed to shake
with terrible sobs.

"What I am going to advise you to-day," the speaker was saying in cold,
firm accents, "I say from my deepest sense of duty toward you.  And
that duty I have always kept----"

The figure reached the limousine and fell into it rather than stepped.
The old clergyman watched it roll away.  He turned and looked at the
crowd with hostile, accusing eyes.

"God forgive you!" he muttered fiercely.

There came into his head again the echo of the rippling, cynical music
he had heard when she had broken from the room, and with which the men
had kept time while walking out; and, bending his head, he began to
recite, feelingly, brokenly, the prayers he would utter at a hopeless
bedside.




II

TREACHERY

So it was her husband who had killed Miles Hanlow, him they called "the
gombeen man."  So it was he who did it!  Curiously enough Marge
Campbell felt no shock or terror or great shame now.  Could she have
known it subconsciously all these weeks?  Of course not.  And yet where
was the shock, the pain, the horror?  There was none.  Only something
inside turned to chilled steel.

From the drawing-room of the terraced house she could see from the edge
of the Irish coast the dun hills of Scotland across the channel, purple
somehow, and naught but one steamer on the broad waters, half way out,
slipping northward, from Belfast to America most likely.  In the garden
outside a maid in white was going here and there among the rose bushes,
gathering flowers for a table decoration, her Ulster voice humming a
folk song:

  "I know where I'm going," she sang,
    "I know who's going with me.
  I know who I love,
    But the de'il knows who I'll marry."


Yes, she had known something was wrong for a few weeks now.  There had
been a shadow on her husband's very handsome, somewhat common face, and
a strange nervousness about him.  She had not connected it with the
murder of the local money-lender--how could she?  She knew he was in
debt over card games, horse races and the like, but so he always was,
and he never spoke to her of them.  Yes, he had been nervous, strange,
haunted, as it were, but that he had killed Miles Hanlow, the gombeen
man, that she never suspected until the little Catholic priest had come
visiting her that morning.

"You are certain of this, Father Gray?"

"As certain as that I'm alive, Miss Marge," he said, calling her by the
name the Glens of Antrim knew her by.  "Your husband met Hanlow coming
late at night from Ballycastle.  Where your husband was I don't know.
They met on the bridge over Owendarragh.  Your husband had his loaded
riding crop.  Hanlow was found a mile down the river, on the rocks."

"How I knew it I don't choose to say.  I am breaking no seal of
secrecy," he added.

"I know that, Father Gray," Marge Campbell said quickly.  Though her
Ulster tradition was inimical to the priest's belief, yet she knew him
for a gentleman.  Some peasant had witnessed it and told him, fearful
of what was to be done under the circumstances.  Or perhaps the
clergyman had seen the thing himself, returning from some late
sick-call.

"But why do you tell me?" she had asked him.  "Why don't you tell my
husband?  Why don't you speak to my brother, Sir Colin Fraser?"

"To tell it to Rory Campbell would do no good.  To tell it to Sir Colin
would mean that Sir Colin would arrest your husband.  There would be
nothing else for him to do.  I tell it to you because your family
should know of it.  And for another reason: after this speech, there
will never be heard one other word from me.  I promise you that."

"You will not communicate with the authorities?"

"I am not an officer of the peace, Mrs. Campbell, I am only a servant
of God, needing the inspiration of His infinite wisdom."

So it was her husband who had killed the gombeen man.  She should be
shocked, numb with terror, white with fear.  Her head had become
suddenly alert and quick as a whippet, cold and stubborn as the Ulster
steel.

      *      *      *      *      *

She had to think now, rapidly, clearly, fully.  There was a big issue
to be faced, and so little time.  Everything about her blotted out for
an instant, the solid drawing-room, the great French windows, the
garden and the singing girl in it, and she was in a world of cold grey
facts.

Did she love her husband?  She hardly knew.  She was fond of him.  That
was as far as she could say.  But she was intensely sorry for him, the
poor fellow, the poor, poor fellow.

She remembered him as she had known him four years ago, before they
were married, a great hulk of a man with black curly hair and blue eyes
and a rollicking laugh--a figure to make any woman glad.  Perhaps he
followed horse racing too much, drank too much, gambled more than was
good for him, but he had nothing to do beyond draw his income from the
Belfast Linen Mill his people had left him, and ride to the hounds, and
shoot in the autumn.

"He's a roaring lad, is Campbell of Cairngorm," the countryside spoke
of him, "but he'll quiet down when he gets married.  They all do."

But, contrary to the rule, Campbell of Cairngorm did anything but calm
down on his marriage to her.  A good thing for him that marriage had
been--Margery Fraser, the belle of the Nine Glens, the star of Antrim,
the countryside poets called her; a sister of Sir Colin,
Deputy-Lieutenant of the County to His Majesty the King, the National
Grand Master of the Orange Badges; and a fortune of her own, which was
not little.

"You ought to bless this day," someone had told Rory on his marriage
morning, "It's you are lucky."

"Sure the devil's childer have the devil's luck," he laughed back.

That's how he had treated that marriage, as the sheerest piece of luck,
and he had wasted his young wife and his heritage, and the friendship
of Colin Fraser, as a man is not careful of the money he wins betting
on horses, as against money solidly earned.  He had never been rude to
Marge, never brutal, never even cold.  She had just become casual to
him.  There was no other woman.

"He had changed, too," she thought.

He had always been a regular bull of Bashan of a man, but now he was
heavier than ever, a thickness showing about the ankles and wrists.
His hands were steady on a rein no more.  In the black curls there were
grey streaks, that had made them outrageously common, like the coarse
hair in a mattress.  And his face was bloated a little, the eyes a
trifle bloodshot, the mouth relaxed.  He was never drunk but he was
never sober.  And his voice had grown louder and more boisterous.

"Be damned to this!" he would shout.  "And be damned to that!"  Of
course everyone knew that that was only his manner, but nevertheless,
none ever provoked him very far.  One did not quite know what was
behind it now.  What was behind it, Marge knew now--it was what had
occurred late at night on the bridge over Owendarragh, the dark and
bubbling river.

Something of the kind was bound to come.  He was drinking too hard.
Gambling too much also, for what stakes she was left in ignorance, but
she knew he had been playing with Belfast merchants and Englishmen,
with officers of the garrison and sporting men of outlying localities.
He wasn't careful in his friends any more.  He would drink with a
pig-jobber just as quickly as with Sir Colin, her brother.  And jockeys
and minor satellites of the racing world had grown familiar towards
him.  Poor Rory, the luck was not as good as it had been.  Fate was
calling in her loans...

"But he wouldn't let me!" she cried out.  She had wanted to influence
him, to make him see the natural sanity of life--that the bracing sea
was better than stray waters, and that there was as much interest in
his home as there was at race-courses.  Herself, now, without any
vanity, there were few women as good-looking as she.  Tall and
graceful, built for mistress of a house, rich-bosomed, gracious; her
glistening auburn hair, like rare Chinese silk; her eyes of a deep blue
bordering on the green of the sea; her skin so white and life-ful,
there was no defect in her, except perhaps that the nose was a trifle
large for a woman, and the chin a little determined, but those made up
her wonderful profile.  Her little puckered mouth, there was no flaw in
that.

"He wanted to be as he was?"  She understood now that it was with no
idea of settling down he had married her.  He had taken her as a
god-send, and gone his way.

She had never grown angry or rancorous, as other women might have done,
at his manner of living.  When she married, she had been aglow with
life and love.  All the months were June to her, with the cinnamon bees
singing in the clover.  Full moons, and the little wavelets chanting
epithalamia against the moonlit shore.  She had given herself freely
and magnificently, and to her husband's lips had arisen the facile
Celtic love song.

"My Star of Antrim!  My Star of Ulster!  My Star of all the World!
Your hair is red as gold, and your eyes are wonderful and deep as the
sea.  And your puckered mouth is like some dewy rosebud opening to the
dawn."  He kissed her slim, soft hands.

"Don't waste them, Rory.  Don't waste them," she had laughed, drawing
his lips from her fingers.

All that had passed, as a day passes, or a month or a season.  It had
been, and then, after fading gently, no longer was.  A phenomenon that
had passed, and that she was glad had occurred.  It was unthinkable to
her to moan for it, to grow angry, to think that her life was blighted
because it was no more.  That it had been short was no more wonder than
that a certain summer had been short.  There was just one thing had
bothered her--she had wished to have a child, and thought Providence
unkind to her.  Now she was glad, and thankful.  She blessed God!  She
blessed His infinite wisdom over and over....

Back of the house, by the stables, one of the boys was raising his
voice bitterly over something about "the little mare."  A gaunt
deerhound went snuffling down one of the garden paths, and the maid
gathering roses still sang:

  "I have stockings of silk"; her voice rang blithely,
    "Shoes of bright green leather;
  Combs to buckle my hair;
    And a ring for every finger."


No, she analysed, there was no more of it left.  Love between Rory and
herself had just come and gone; rushed in, abided a while and gone away
gently, and all there was left of his visit to her husband and herself
was a something--a fondness, one said.

      *      *      *      *      *

But this got her nowhere, she thought impatiently, this thinking about
love as a woman will.  However--there it was in black and white.  Her
husband had killed a man.  None knew of it but she, counting out the
little Catholic priest, who, she felt, would be dumb as a stone.  She
knew the man he had killed, a grotesque, fat creature, shambling,
shallow-eyed--a furtive person, hated by all the neighbourhood.  He had
made his money in America, God knows how.  Yet for his life, the life
of her husband Rory was forfeit to the law.

"Wives, be subject unto your husbands," she remembered the instructions
of Paul, "as unto the Lord, for Christ is the head of the Church, so
the husband is head of the household."  Or some such formula.  So it
was up to Rory to judge for himself what was to be done, and she had no
part in it, but to acquiesce.  To do otherwise would be to commit
treason, as Peter did when he denied his Lord, and Peter wept at every
cock crow until his death, and was crucified head downwards, though he
was bishop of Rome.  So terrible a thing was treason.  Paul would have
her silent, though silence was criminal.  "Back, woman!" the savage
Jewish convert would have snarled at her, so hateful to him was her
sex.  A woman was nothing without her husband.  Even Solomon, whom they
called the Wise, had defined her position.  "The heart of her husband
doth safely trust in her"--he spoke the praise and properties of a good
wife--"she will do him good and not evil...."  Ruth the Moabitess,
exemplar of married women, clung to the mother of her dead husband,
saying: "Entreat me not to leave thee... thy people shall be my
people."  A woman was to her husband as a satellite to a planet,
revolving around it, having no independent being.

"Love, honour, and obey," she smiled a little wistfully, remembering
her solemn promise.

She had loved a man, and been taken by him in marriage, and unto him
now she was bound for better or worse.  His fortunes were her fortunes,
and his life hers.  So went the law and immemorial custom, and so all
good stories ran.  Were she to ask a hundred women, their answer would
be the same.  "Say nothing about it.  Hush, for God's sake!  Are you
mad?"  They would account it a virtue to defraud the law.  "He's your
husband, isn't he?"  Paul and Ruth and Solomon were of old, but the
world over, she felt, the rule was the same to-day.  Were she to
conceal this evil, though it was as grievous as to merit the hangman's
noose, and were it to be revealed later, there was not one but would
praise her, not a man, woman or child, not a single one.  No, she
repeated, not one....

A commotion rose at the back-door of the house.  A blind beggar--a dark
man of the Glens went the phrase--was begging of Shiela Dhu, the
housekeeper, and was asking for the mistress.

"Musha then, 't is to herself I'd like to be speaking, just the wee
word."

"Herself you'll no be speaking to.  You've got the bite and sup.  Off
with ye now."

"And where is himself?  Himself, the master of this house."

"And where is himself?"  Shiela Dhu cackled in savage sneering.
"Yerra, where would himself be but where they do be racing horses, and
passing the punch bowl, and card playing and dicing until the dawn of
day?"

She must stop that, Marge said to herself.  Old Shiela had no right to
talk of her master in such a manner.  But Marge did not rise.  She sat
listening dully to the blind beggar going down the drive.

"A hard life it is surely," he was complaining, "to be going travelling
the Nine Glens of Antrim from the crack of dawn until the dying of the
day, and not to be knowing whether it's the sun that's in it, or the
moon itself, save by the way the heat does be playing on the ground.  A
lonely life it is for the three of us--for me and the dog and the stick
in my hand."

The maid in the rose garden sang suddenly:

  "Feather beds are soft,
    And painted rooms are bonny,
  But I'd leave them all
    To go with my love, Johnny."


"Ah, but that's different!" said Marge Campbell.

But Colin!

      *      *      *      *      *

She saw her brother, older than she, grizzled as a badger, with the
hawk-like governing face, the powerful jaw and nose, the searching eye,
the head that righteousness and honour held high.  "A hard man," his
opponents said.  "A big man," was the report of the country.  "A great
one," the Orange brethren claimed.  He might be all those things to all
the world, but to Marge he was only her brother Colin.

The "black Frasers" the countryside and inimical Ireland call Marge's
family.  Dour and hard, unbeatable in battle, Ireland has little use
for the harsh Scotsmen who came westward to conquer under the English
flag.  It knows little of that family, and wants to know less.  That a
Fraser came over with Bruce, and that there were always Frasers after
him, is Irish history.  There were Frasers at Benburb and the Yellow
Ford.  At the Fraser house in the Glens of Antrim, black-bearded
Highland men prepared for battle, and with pistol and dirk, claymore
and oxhide targe, went marching over the Ulster Hills to drive the
Irishry to "hell or Connacht."  She could see them swinging into line,
with the battle shout of the Antrim Frasers--"Cogadh no sith," "Give us
war or peace, it's all one to us."  The pibrochs splitting the sky with
the rallying song of the clan:

"Wi' a hundred pipers, and a', and a'."

Great days!  A great name!  A great tradition! and of it all there was
only left Colin and she!

He might have been a great man, her brother Colin, Grand Master of the
terrible Orange Brethren, baronet by a patent of King James, Justice of
the Peace for the County of Antrim, and Deputy Lieutenant to His
Majesty the King.  To her he was only Colin, her brother, bound to her
by a thousand ties, child of the same grey, gentle mother who was dead;
companion of her earliest days.  Ever since she could remember she had
known and loved Colin.

"Isn't that strange?" she told herself in awe.  Then she laughed.  Of
course, it wasn't strange.  He was her brother Colin.

She remembered with a queer little tug at her heart when Colin swam
from Ireland to Scotland on a summer's day--she was only a little
"girsha" then, but she remembered the stir.  Aye, and she remembered,
too, the night they waited for the election returns to see if Colin had
got in.  The blood tingling at the finger tips, and every minute an
hour.

She remembered standing by Colin when his wife died, and he was going
about a crazed man, she treating him gently as a child.  "There was
love," she had thought awesomely.  Who could be closer than those two?
For though Colin's wife was beauty and passion to him, she was his
sister and as natural and as necessary as the day.

How close they had been together.  He was twelve years older than she,
but that had been no barrier.  It had seemed only a reserve strength
and experience on which she could draw.  She had told Colin of the men
who proposed to her, of doubts in her heart; of debts she had
accumulated, which had seemed terrible to her, but Colin had helped her
with a laugh.  All her life she had known Colin and loved Colin, and
had been loved and protected by him, and she had never thought of it
before.

"Rory, my husband, is a stranger," she said, with a sense of shocked
discovery.

"Colin!"  She grew very white.  There was a strange contraction about
her heart.  She knew Colin better than any one did--better, she said to
herself with a queer note of jealousy, that his dead wife had known
him.  The thing the world called hard in his character, was that
upright, meticulous sense of honour that was as definite and as
terrible as a drawn sword.  His word was never lightly given, but it
was his bond, as fixed as his oath on the Eucharist.  Even that office
of his, justice of the peace, was as sacred to him as his calling is to
a priest.  He had been entrusted with it by the government of the
realm, and it was honour to administer and uphold the peace.  Not a
beggar but would receive full justice from him, not the lost ragged
beggar in the street.  Not a gentleman but would suffer by the law
should he transgress it--not a gentleman in the Nine Glens.  It was
Colin's pride that he administered justice and kept the peace of the
district.  And this matter of the gombeen man had worried him more than
he cared to show.

"He was a ruffian, a good-for-nothing, a scab on the community, Marge,"
Colin had said.  "But I have a trust to that dead man that his murderer
shall pay."

"But, Colin dear," she had said, "don't take it to heart.  If the
police can't find who did it, it's not your fault."

"The police are subordinate officers of mine.  The trust is mine.  It's
bigger than that even.  It's--well, it's big to me."

Yes, assuredly she understood him better than anyone else.  It was
Colin's honour.

"I am betraying Colin," she thought.  Were she not to move over to that
telephone in the sitting-room, the strange, crooked, black thing in the
sitting-room, mouthpiece and receiver in one, very like a doctor's
device--and call him and tell him straight away, she would leave a mark
on the honour that was more to him than his life--the thing the Frasers
had kept unspotted for years and decades and centuries.

"But Rory!  My husband!  I should be betraying him!"

And if she were to do that thing, the eyes and hands of womankind would
be turned from her.  What did it matter that Colin was the brother she
had known all her life, and whom she loved so?  Beside him Rory was a
tepid stranger.

"Your brother's honour!"  Women would shake their heads.  "He's your
man!"

All would be against her, women and little children in the street and
they would say vile things, suggesting a hidden lover somewhere, and
holding her name to be spat at until her dying day.  All the
preachments would be against her; the preachment of the fanatical,
ragged-bearded Paul; the sublime words of Ruth, and Solomon, there was
no going past the wisdom of Solomon.

"He is your man," she could hear hypothetical voices say.  "The other
is only your brother.  It is your husband's life.  As for your
brother--it's only his honour."

It was very simple, after all.  She sat with her head in her hands
reviewing it, and life swung by her as insignificant as a clock's
pendulum.  A hornet buzzed angrily on the terrace, and from the highway
came the spank-spank of a horse in a dog cart.  A stable-boy outside
raised his voice discussing the points of the mare between the shafts.

"She may have the heighth and she may have the build, but she can na
jump.  D'ye mind the right foreleg, I ask you?  Do you mind that?"

And the maid in the garden continued her song, in quaint plaintive
minor:

  "Some say he's black,
    But I say he's bonny,
  O he's the flower of the flock
    My own true love, Johnny!"


"And were all the world to know, none would blame me for hiding it.
Not Colin even!  Not even he!"  A sudden sob came from her.  "Least of
all Colin.  Least of all, he!"

      *      *      *      *      *

She arose suddenly.  She went to the telephone.  She picked it up.  She
called for her number in a firm voice.

"Is that Garryday Abbey?  Is Sir Colin Fraser in.  This is his sister."

"He's not in now, Miss Margery."

"Is that you, Rorke?  Please tell my brother, when he comes in, to ring
me immediately."

"Yes, Miss Margery."

"Tell him it's very important.  Tell him--tell him--just tell him--tell
him that----"

"Yes, Miss Margery."

"That I know who killed Miles Hanlow, the gombeen man."

It seemed to her as she put the receiver down that the whole world must
be changed somehow, rocking to its foundations and the planets crashing
together in space, so ill and faint did she feel.  But nothing had
changed.  She was herself.  The hornet still buzzed on the terrace, and
the deerhound snuffled along the garden walk, and the maid was
finishing her song, coming in now with a bunch of roses.

  "I know where I'm going,
    I know who's going with me,
  I know who I love,
    But the de'il knows who I'll marry."




III

THE MASTER OF RAYMOND LULLY

You might have taken him, had you seen him from behind, what with the
shining slant of his tall hat, the delicate line of morning-coat and
his creamy spats,--you might have taken him for an actor.  But his walk
was not exaggerated, not self-conscious enough for that.  If you were
looking at him face to face, at his clean-cut, knife-like quality of
feature; at the half-closed lids that helped his glasses conceal a pair
of grey and not very striking eyes; at his prim mouth and the downward
turn at the corners; at the high, ecclesiastical brow that was
swallowed up by a bay or an inlet of baldness, as it were, you might
have imagined him a clergyman, a younger son of a fine family who had
taken up the cure of souls.  But his step was not timid enough for a
clergyman's.  On one occasion a passer-by on Fifth Avenue had mistaken
him for the young Duke of Salm-Salm.

"Not that I blame you in the least," he had answered his accoster, in
that even, frigid, perfectly courteous and rather high voice of his.
"No, I cannot blame you for your mistake, for if there is any person on
earth who looks as a duke should look, it is I.  I am Jean Master."

Which was enough to compensate this casual acquaintance for any
disappointment he may have felt at not meeting Salm-Salm.  For to know
Jean Master in New York, or to know him in London or Paris even, was to
reach a station higher than that of princes.  There are many princes in
this world, but there is only one Jean Master.

If you ask about Jean Master on Madison Avenue they will tell you what
a great pity it is he has to work for his living and how his relations
in Maryland were hurt at the idea of Jean becoming a newspaper man.
They will tell you that he might have scraped along somehow.  And if
you mention his name on Park Row, where the newspaper offices huddle
together for protection from the righteous wrath of the city, the eyes
of the men will light up with the fire that shows only at the mention
of a great man.  They will tell you, probably--for it is a favourite
story--of how he had a European coronation set ahead two hours, because
he wanted to write his article and catch his train at a certain time.
They will tell you that Peter the Montenegrin has two rooms set apart
in his palace for Master, to be used at any time he cares.  They will
relate for you with glee how he loaned Edward the Seventh fifteen
dollars, and had to dun him to get it back.  They will also tell you
many amusing stories of him and the Shah of Persia, three-fourths of
which I warn you not to believe.  They will dilate on the world's
mysteries he has solved--the disappearance of John Orth, for example;
the tragic puzzle of poor Prince Rudolph's end; the mystery of the
ghostly tiara of Pius the Ninth; the riddle of the Wasp's Nest and the
Three Precious Stones which the young Burmese king set before him; all
these and more.  And then they will curse very violently and inhumanely
because, now that General Sir Eric Master, head of the family, is dead
in the Great War and his sons with him, and his fortune in the hands of
Jean of that name, they naturally expect him to use his razor-like
brain no more, to let his gifts run to seed, to live the life of an
idler.

"All he'll ever think about now," Dixon, city editor of _The Star_,
reflected bitterly, "is tennis scores and whether the queen's been out
in auction.  Oh, money! money!"

And, indeed, if you had seen him swing around from Fifth Avenue into
Central Park South one bright May morning--attired for this once in a
business suit--you might have been pardoned for agreeing with Dixon.
There was a sort of blank look in his eye that would suggest a brain's
inactivity.  He yawned twice.  With elaborate politeness he bowed to a
robust lady who waved a cheery, plump hand to him from the blue
recesses of a limousine.

It was a warm, golden day with a deep shadow along the side walk.  To
the right of Master as he strolled, Central Park swirled like a green
agitated sea.  Motors whipped by like ferrets.  A very little breeze
was stirring about uncertainly, as if it were not sure whether to blow
decently or to go home.  The sun peeped northward, with an unmistakable
quality of spring in its effervescence--an effervescence that suggested
young girls and gambolling lambs.  A truckman out of pure joy of heart
fed lumps of sugar to his team of three, while a Neapolitan milled out
a ripple of chiming melody from a barrel-organ.  A six-foot negro
passed grinning.  Master beamed.

At Sixth Avenue he was joined by a little black-haired man, a man whose
mouth was slack and whose dull black eyes looked aimlessly through very
round spectacles.  He came out of nowhere, so to speak, bobbing up and
accompanying Master like a feat of legerdemain.  It was surprising how
blank and silly the man looked, nearly too much to be so.

"Good morning, Moreau," Master hailed him.

"Good morning, Mr. Master," the little black man answered.

They walked in silence for twenty yards.  As they went along all eyes
were focused on Master--none on his companion, for this Moreau, seeming
to realize how insignificant he must be, had dressed in clothes that
sapped the last ounce of personality from him, boots such as everybody
wears, a drab suit like which there must be three million others, and a
soft hat.  His bow tie was black.

They stopped at the great bulk of a studio building with two electric
torches on each side.  Master turned to enter.  "Let me see if I've got
it right," he said as his foot touched the step.  "I'm to be very
careful to see that the door's left unbolted, and I'm to raise my voice
when I want you to enter, if I do."

"That's right, Mr. Master," Moreau answered.  Even his voice was
insignificant.

"Very well," Master said.  "Very well.  The responsibility's yours if
anything happens to me."

A subdued Jamaican in a white livery took him up in the elevator.  At
the seventeenth floor they stopped.

"Mr. Deering's apartment--Mr. Ossian Deering's?" Master asked.

"Right in front of you, sir."

"How stupid of me," Master smiled.  "Of course this is his apartment."

There was no name on the white door, no bell, nothing but a small gold
pentacle painted in the middle of the panel with three black Hebrew
letters in relief on it.

"Very _chic_; very _chic_ indeed," Master nodded.  He knocked three
times.  A small Japanese opened it.

"I am Mr. Master," said he.  "I telephoned earlier."

The studio was very large, but there was little light to it.  The great
window which a painter would have used was covered with purple cloth,
and only a small one on the side of the room was uncurtained.  For a
moment Master blinked and stopped short as if he were suddenly thrust
into a dungeon, but as he became more used to the room he began to
distinguish objects in it.  Toward one end he could see the black lines
of an electric furnace and along two sides of the wall ran a bench like
a laboratory bench,--a stout, acid-stained thing with queer-shaped
phials and tubes scattered about it.  At one end of it a small brazier
flamed--a high, tripod-like torch such as might have been in some Greek
temple.  Here and there were retorts on stands, like pipes turned
upside down; a line of distorted test-tubes; strange apparatus, and
queer misshapen bottles with metals and metal ore in them.  Master
could distinguish the white, bright glint of mercury; the tawny flecks
of pyrites; black, fetid-looking silver ore.  Here was a full beaker of
golden nitric acid, and in a corner he could see a flask with the
strange green tint of hydrochloric.  He turned his head away, and in a
corner caught a glimpse of a crystal on its velvet pile.  On other
tables he saw a white skull; a crucifix with a serpent instead of a
Christ.  About the heavy black draping of the room grotesque markings
in green and gold held his attention--the two-bodied, superhuman symbol
of the Zohar; the intricate, triangular pentacle of Solomon the King;
horrible signs from the manuals of medieval wizards; the peacock with
the human face; the seven-pointed star of Rabbi Zechiel; the Golden
Calf.  Master shivered a little.

"The thing's uncanny," he whispered to himself.

He looked about again, at the laboratory table with the vessels of the
wrong shape, at the hideous crucifix, and the brazier that flamed
vividly red.  It was like the nightmare of some scientist gone mad.  A
door in the rear of the studio opened suddenly and a figure came
forward.

"Mr. Master?" it said, and extended its hand.

He was very tall, Master could see, with a marked stoop and massive
shoulders.  His face in the dim, half light was a pale, strongly marked
face with blotches of black for eyes, hooked nose and thin mouth;
black, wiry hair falling dankly over his forehead.  He had on a
painter's loose smock of green that accentuated his dead pallor.  As he
greeted Master, the visitor noticed that his hand was a live, firm
bunch of pliant muscles and hard bone, but its skin was soft, highly
manicured, like silk.

"A queer hand," Master thought.

Deering drew a chair forward, a deep, stately seat like a pontifical
throne.  "You wanted to see me about getting in touch with your friends
over the border, Mr. Master?  That is a thing I cannot do for you.  I
call no spirit but the spirit of the great chemist, Raymond Lully."

"If it is a matter of money----" Master broke in.

"It is not a matter of money.  I never do anything for money."

His voice was sharp, snapping, decisive.  As he spoke, Master, who was
listening keenly and observing him dreamily but also keenly, noticed
two things: His voice was the tone of a healthy man, mentally and
physically; and again, while he didn't care for money, his eyes were
the eyes of a mean man.  They closed into angular slits at the corners,
with shallow, disappearing wrinkles, and there was a lift to the
corners of the mouth and nostrils that Master recognized as the
sign-manual of avarice.

"I thought if you could summon Raymond Lully for yourself, you could
call a friend for me."

"I'm sorry;" the alchemist shook his head.  "I presume to summon no
one, least of all for a private end.  If the great chemist comes to me,
it is to collaborate on the work which he left unfinished when he
crossed the border."

Master nodded solemnly, but in his eyes there was the least hint of
pleasure.  He had, by good luck, the game where he wanted it, the
pieces arranged to play.  Ever since, a year ago, Ossian Deering had
come to New York from Paris, and announced himself as an alchemist and
a searcher after the Philosopher's Stone, Master had had the feeling
that there was something behind him; something more than pose, than
belief even.  In London, Deering had narrowly escaped jail for a
palpable fraud on a credulous woman; in Paris he had been mixed up in
an unsavoury gambling scheme--but he still kept his followers.  His
cleverness had convinced them that the rumours were merely attacks of
his enemies.  Master had read of his career and, the moment he had
entered America, had prophesied his incarceration.

"There is a young man," he said when the ship-news reporter had told
him of the spiritualist, "who will be an addition if not an ornament to
Sing Sing."

Newspapers and a few minor magazines had printed his poetry, which was
bad, obscure, and pointless.  They had printed accounts of his new-old
religion of diabolism.  To the public he was either a malevolent figure
or a simple madman who was amusing at times.  Master had examined his
photograph with care.  He marked the wide-set eyes and the firm balance
of the head.

"He's too clever a man to believe in that," he had concluded.

He examined the photograph again and saw the wrinkles of meanness and
avarice on the features like a fine lace design.

"There's a man who wants your money," he had laughed.  "Now for the
rush to give it to him."

But the rush of fools had never taken place.  He had refused all reward
from the clients and followers who had flocked about him.  There were
no complaints.  But with a doggedness that was extraordinary the
alchemist continued to get his name, his doctrines, his actions into
the periodicals.

"Corking work," Master had applauded.  "But what does he get out of it?"

And now, as he stood in front of the alchemist for the first time,
Master believed less than ever that the man was sincere.  The night
before, at a dinner to which the Police Commissioner had been invited,
the subject of Ossian Deering had cropped up.  Master had hazarded that
there was something wrong in that direction.  The police head had
laughed.

"If you can find anything wrong there I'll buy you a new hat."

"I need a hat," Master had observed plaintively.  "I'll take that on."

The alchemist moved toward the door.  He wanted to finish the
interview.  "If you take my advice, Mr. Master, you'll have nothing to
do with Black Magic.  It's a bad thing for laymen."

Master raised his eyebrows.  "I'm not exactly a layman," he said.  He
waited a moment.  "I have opened the Book with the Seven Seals and
knocked on the panels of the House of the Dog."

"Did you make the Circle and raise the Rod?"

"I did."

The alchemist walked over to the laboratory bench and leaned against
it.  He watched Master with sharp, slit eyes.  "Did they come?"

"They did not."

"Did you call them by the Name of Names?"

"I was afraid."

The alchemist smiled gravely.  Beneath his whole solemn manner Master
had the idea that he was laughing; that while the terms of old,
ceremonial magic rang sonorously from his tongue, he was using them as
a man talks nonsense to a child.  He was using this as a vast, gorgeous
farce; the hideous setting of the room; the crooked phials of the
alchemist; the blasphemies of the devil-worshipper.  What was behind it
all?  He gave no sign of anything.  Master was trembling with
irritation.  He caught sight of the alchemist's hand.  In spite of its
careful polish and smooth manicured surface, there was the pattern of
grime on it.

"You have to be patient, Mr. Master," he was saying, "if you want to
attain to the Secret.  Hermes, the thrice-greatest Intelligencer, was
four score and ten before he understood the Great Secret.  Cornelius
Agrippa, the magic master, died without solving the pentacle of
Solomon.  Nicholas Flamel and his wife Pernella were white-haired
before they could transmute gold...."

But he must get money from somewhere, Master began thinking again.
Could he be fleecing anybody?  Hardly possible.  Some word of it would
come out.  Could he be sincere?  Could the miracle happen?  Was it
possible that he was discovering the Philosopher's Stone, aided by a
man who had been dead nearly seven hundred years?  Master looked about
him, at the flaming brazier with its licking, horrible tongue; at the
devilish symbols on the tapestries; at the ghastly enigmas in green and
gold.  He felt his hair quiver at the thought.

".... Here, night after night," the alchemist recounted simply, "I made
the circle and spoke the name 'Adonay,' until at last he came.  So now
we labour together, he and I.  I make the mixture and tend the furnace.
He stands outside the circle in a monk's black robe, with the cowl
drawn high.  He nods when I question...."

But the whole thing, Master felt, the careful setting, the eternal
loquaciousness, the artistic quality of it, all seemed out of tune.  It
was like an elaborate scheme to conceal something, a red herring drawn
across the trail of a fox.  And there were the too-highly polished
hands.

"He got them polished because they were rough," Master said to himself.
He glanced about the room vacantly.  The voice of the alchemist came to
him solemnly, like a ritual being read.  His eye caught a banner in a
corner, draped from ceiling to floor like a Japanese print.  In the
uncertain light of the studio he could see on it the outline of a great
malevolent head--eyes dilated by venomous horror, teeth like dogs'
fangs.  He walked toward it, repressing a shiver as he went.  "It is
the Unknown God?" he queried.

"It is He," the alchemist replied.

And Master felt, as everyone else felt who saw it, a sense of terror.
As one watched the massive slant of jaw, the great bristling hair, the
horror of the eyes, one could hardly be convinced that it was merely a
thing of coarse cloth and fine paint.  The pentacles about the head,
the mystic diagrams, the grotesque Hebrew lettering invested it with a
sense of power.  It was put there with the object of repelling, Master
judged.  A shiver of repugnance ran through him.  His hat fell from his
hand.

"How rottenly careless of me," he murmured.

He groped at the bottom of the tapestry for it and picked it up.  As he
felt for it, he ran his finger over the coarse canvas.  They touched
something like a pipe.  He pressed it.  There was the resilience of
rubber and the feeling of bunched wires beneath.  He picked up his hat
and rose.  "I got it," he said and laughed to himself at the double
meaning.

"I feel I can't breathe," he gasped suddenly and walked toward the
small window.  He opened it as far as it would go and looked out.
Below him, one hundred and eighty feet, the thin gully of an air-shaft
fell.  It dropped away sheer to the concrete surface of the court.

"The air's good," he laughed.  He swung himself sitting on the sill
with his face toward the room.

"Take care,--don't fall out," the alchemist warned.

"Oh no, I won't," Master smiled.  He teetered on the edge like a
mischievous child.  A touch would have sent him over.  "If I did I'd
kill myself.  Tell me more about Raymond Lully."

"There is little more to tell," the alchemist began.  "Perhaps this
year--perhaps next--perhaps not for twenty--we shall make the Stone,
but one day it will come...."

His voice went on in an even monotone, like the voice of an hypnotic
subject.  Master's eyes wandered about the room.  It was an electric
conduit, no doubt, that he had felt, and he looked toward the small
furnace--much too large for that.  It slipped through an opening in the
wall into another room, he was sure.

"Beautiful!" he laughed to himself, "beautiful!"  He still watched the
alchemist with mouth open, with interest and eyes like a child's.  He
still teetered on the edge of the air-shaft.

".... We once nearly attained it in the ascendant of the star
_Alhaire_, the star of benevolence," Deering went on.

Master glanced at the door.  The jambs were slightly apart, as Moreau
had instructed him to leave them.  He thought he had heard, a few
minutes ago, the whisper of his feet on the stairs.  He would be there
now anyway.

"There is also the star _Athanna_, the little star of great light.  It
ascends----"

"I say!" Master suddenly shouted.  The loudness of his voice struck the
quiet of the room like a blasphemy.  "I say, tell me, how the devil do
you get the twenty-dollar pieces down to the street?"

The alchemist's pleasant, cynical smile dropped off like a falling
mask.  His muscles set under the green smock.  "Ugh!" he grunted, like
a startled animal.

"The false money you make in the next room," Master urged gently.  His
tone was suave.  He showed his teeth in a pleasant smile.  He balanced
himself easily on the sill.  "How do you manage to cart away all the
heavy stuff without arousing suspicion?  Do tell me.  I'd love to hear
it."

The alchemist seemed to crouch easily against the laboratory bench.
His massive shoulders dropped and his legs tensed.  He watched Master's
form set in the panel of the window like a body in a photograph.  He
was calculating time and distance.  One half-second's rush would send
Master hurtling through to the court-yard.  He drew himself back to
spring.  A sudden sense of panic seized Master.  Twice he had shouted
his signal and Moreau had not appeared.  What was wrong? he asked.  And
then quickly, as he saw the alchemist rise on his toes, Master sprang
to the floor in a flash of action, and Deering's rush stopped before it
began.

"Well?" Master queried, and he was surprised to hear no shaking throb
in his voice.

The alchemist said nothing, but he searched Master with his eyes, held
him in the spot where he was as if those eyes were long metal spikes by
which Master was transfixed.  They were green, it appeared to Master,
and fairly luminous, and as he stood there with them boring into him he
remembered how once he had looked at an emerald in Tiffany's, held by a
malign hypnosis, until he felt he was sinking into a vast infinity of
green.  The alchemist moved along the laboratory bench, with his easy,
noiseless, invisible cat's tread, keeping his green eyes on Master all
the time.

"Well?" asked Master again.  It was all he could say.  But in his own
head there ran the question, pounding, reverberating, rolling like a
train over sleepers--"Where was Moreau?  Where, in heaven's name, was
Moreau?"

The alchemist had stolen half-way along the room by now, with his
menacing eyes still drilling into Master's, as an African whip-snake's
pierce into a flamingo bird's, terrible as a sword, threatening like a
thunderstorm.  Master felt himself being lulled into a sort of
dreaminess.  He moved his feet, and as he moved he heard a slight
metallic shiver.  Some intuition broke the spell of Deering's eyes over
him, and he looked downward.  He was standing on a parallelogram of
zinc, some two and a half feet square, placed precisely where an
intruder stealing through the window and jumping on the floor would
land as he sprang.  Master stepped off it as he saw the alchemist's
hand flash toward an ebony and copper switch on the wall.  He cleared
it by a couple of feet when there was a crash like a gunshot, and the
sting of oxidized metal in the air.  Behind him the zinc plate billowed
upward to the strain.  He had escaped electrocution by fifteen inches.
The alchemist snapped off the switch with an oath.

"That's a dirty trick," Master said flippantly, but this time his voice
sounded hollow.  His body was shaking, and the palms of his hands and
his forehead were moist and cold, while his tongue seemed a swollen,
dry thing that filled up the intolerably arid tube of his throat and
mouth.  The voice inside him was shrieking hysterically now: "Where was
Moreau?  Where, in heaven's name, was Moreau?"

The alchemist turned away his eyes from Master's and walked back easily
toward the end of the laboratory bench.  There was an air of careless
purpose about him that terrified Master more than the sinister
steadiness of his eyes.  For a moment Master thought of making at him,
downing him, fighting tooth and nail for life, but it would be useless,
he felt.  The man was too well prepared, too diabolically clever, to be
taken at a disadvantage.  The only thing to do was to wait, as a city
submits passively to a siege, to wait until Moreau turned up, but where
in heaven's name was Moreau?

The alchemist had reached the end of the bench and was taking a hood
off something, slowly, imperturbably.  Master could see the heavy lines
of a smelter's blast-pipe as Deering twirled it about on its pivot like
a machine-gun.  A sort of hallucination came over Master--it seemed to
him, all of a sudden, that he had been delivered over to the
unspeakable Power of which the room seemed a shrine.  Evil magic, whose
symbols were about him, had him in its grip.  Through a vague mist he
could see the painting of the Unknown God, with its impossibly cruel
features and its dog's fangs.  Great, forbidden names surged in his
mind--Adonay, the Adversary; Astarte, who was Lilith's sister; Baal and
Baal-phegor; the serpent that was made of brass.  These were all
assisting the man who was torturing him--the man who worshipped devils,
which is the most accursed sin.  In a moment now the blast-pipe would
shoot out a blade of green flame that would cut through him like the
blade of a knife.  He could imagine the thing striking him like a
thunderbolt.  It might sweep around like a scythe and cut him in two.

"Great heavens!" he gulped.

The alchemist adjusted his gas-cocks.  He stooped to strike a match.
Over his shoulder he grinned.

"If you move," said a pleasant, apologetic voice at the door, "I shall
shoot your head off!"

Deering swung around.  The little black man with the dull, spectacled
eyes and the drooping mouth was holding a large black revolver in his
direction.  There was something grotesque in the idea of his using a
pistol, but the way he held it was remarkably efficient.

"Confound you, Inspector Moreau," Master blazed.  "You said you'd be
here in fifteen minutes!"

"I'm here in twelve," the blank-looking man answered.

"Oh," Master laughed.  There was a high note and a catch in it.  "I
thought you were a half hour."  He glanced at his watch.  "You're
right," he laughed again.

The alchemist looked at them with blazing eyes and set jaw.  "What's
this?" he shouted.

Master waved a slim, deprecating hand.  His face was still white but
his manner was suave.

"You do yourself injustice, my dear sir," he argued blandly.  "Every
yegg and second-story man blusters.  You're an artist, not a mechanic
in crime.  Act like one.  You haven't made a blunder yet."

The little Inspector looked at Master with his obtruding rabbit's eyes.
"What's up, Mr. Master?" he asked.

"If you go into the next room, Moreau, you'll find an electric press
and furnace where he makes the most cunning little coins you ever
saw--probably twenty-dollar pieces,--he's not a small man.  I haven't
seen them, but they're there."

"Are they there?" the Inspector asked.  "I'll go and see."

"Oh, no, you won't," Master laughed.  "This gentleman has tried to kill
me already.  I'm not going to be left alone with him any longer."

The alchemist looked at Master with rage.  The Inspector's huge pistol
still pointed toward his body in an unwavering line.  "How did you find
it out, Mr. Master?" the Inspector asked.

"Must you know?"  Master lit a cigarette and collected his hat and
gloves.  "Well, in the first place, devil-worshippers don't parade
their faith,--at least, only the fools do.  Mr. Deering is not a fool.
He is a very clever man.  Therefore he has an object in it.  Do you
follow me?"

"I do--I do," the Inspector chimed in.

"You've got an extraordinary brain, Moreau.  He might have the object
of fleecing followers--in founding a sect, a perfectly well-known way
of making a prosperous living.  You discovered already that he wasn't
accepting money.  But Mr. Deering likes money.  You can see it in his
face.  You see that, don't you, Moreau?"

"I see it.  I see it," the Inspector agreed.

"Very well.  Now listen closely: Therefore the thing was used for
something else.  The only thing it could be used for is a disguise.  It
is repulsive.  There's where its value comes in.  Now listen again:
Where the disguise is most repulsive--there's the place most important
to conceal.  The most repulsive thing in the apartment is the horrible
tapestry of the Unknown God.  Under that I found the electric conduit."

"Yes," the Inspector broke in.  His eyes were shining.  Master took a
long puff of his cigarette.

"The conduit is ostensibly connected with the little furnace in the
laboratory.  But there is too much power for that--you ought to get the
Electric Company to send you any queer-looking bills, Moreau.  They do
these things better in Paris--therefore it is used for something else.
Look at his hands, Moreau.  They're too-well manicured."

"I don't follow you there," Moreau apologized.

"Cerebrate, man, cerebrate," Master fumed.  "They're too-highly
manicured, because they're too hardly used.  He's doing the work of a
coal-heaver in some way.  The calluses have been cut off his hands with
a razor.  Really, Mr. Deering," he turned to the alchemist, "you ought
to have worn gloves.  The best criminals wear gloves."

"Don't be a fool," the alchemist snapped.  "You can't wear gloves.
This isn't burglary.  Coining's an exact science."

"How rottenly foolish of me," Master murmured.  "I beg your pardon."

"And then----" Moreau said.

"You'd better tell your policeman friend to put away his gun," the
alchemist complained peevishly.  "It's silly."

"It is silly," Master agreed.  "Put it away, Moreau.  It spoils the
look of the apartment."

"And then----" Moreau asked a second time.

He pocketed the revolver, but he still kept his eyes on the alchemist.

"And then," Master grinned, "I went and sat on the window where a
finger could push me off, and accused him.  Naturally he tried to kill
me.  Then you entered, dear Inspector Moreau."

"But I don't see that even that was enough.  It was guesswork about the
coining, wasn't it?" the police officer queried.

"It wasn't enough," Master smiled, "oh no--I'm coming to that.  You
don't know anything about the art of lying, Moreau.  No.  I suppose
not.  There are some books you should read.  There is an axiom in lying
that to lie well you must lie like the truth, and disguise is only
lying."

"I don't see it," Moreau was stubborn.

"Of course you don't.  It isn't there.  Mr. Deering was cleverer still.
He told the truth and it looked like a lie.  He said he was making gold
and nobody believed him.  The alchemy part and Raymond Lully are
details.  The principle is intact.  I must go now.  Good-bye, Mr.
Deering.  So sorry it had to be.  I'm often up around Sing Sing.  I'll
come in and see you."

The alchemist was game.  "Yes.  Do come," he smiled.

Master set his hat upon his head.  Moreau laid his hand on Deering's
arm.  "Let's go and see that coining outfit," he said.

"I'm sorry," Master said.  "I've got a luncheon engagement.  Good-bye."

And as he passed down the street, bowing gravely to the plump lady now
returning in her blue limousine, the savage, triumphant note of a
police whistle, blowing for aid, told him that the Inspector had
discovered the outfit.




IV

EXECUTIVE SESSION

He sat and skimmed quickly through the figured pages before him on his
desk, a short, thick-set man with the jowl and build of a prizefighter
and--if his keen, grey eyes were any evidence--the mind of a great
leader.  He whipped leaf after leaf aside with the fingers of his
stubby, hairy hands.  His voice rasped like that of a field marshal.

"I don't see anything wrong here," he shot at the old head clerk.

"Read a little further, Mr. Curran," the head clerk said nervously.
The employee was listening intently, his drab, grey head on one side.
There was a look of panic in his weakish blue eyes, and the corners of
his long, grey moustaches shook a little as though the mouth were
quivering beneath them.

"I don't see why you didn't keep it until the morning, Perkins," Curran
grumbled.  He bored ahead through the papers.

Five o'clock had struck and the big office on Church Street was empty.
An August sun still beat unmercifully on the streets, a full, mellow
blaze, not like the vicious crackle of midday, and home-going clerks
and stenographers were milling through the streets like a swarm of
ants.  An elevated train screamed shrilly as it negotiated a corner on
grinding wheels, and from below came the impatient clanging of street
cars.  The great office building had suddenly ceased its rattle and
hum, and become curiously still, like a man dozing.  The head clerk
stopped listening and looked intently at the great contractor.  He
pulled something out of his pocket with shaking stealth.  Curran
suddenly threw the papers aside.

"Why, there's nothing wrong here!" he snarled.  "What the devil's wrong
with you?"  He stood up impatiently.  The frown on his face gave way to
an expression of startled wonder, then to a cloud of storming rage.
The head clerk was facing him unsteadily across the desk, a heavy
automatic pistol in his shaking right hand.

"What the blazes!" Curran exploded.  "What's wrong with you?"

"I want to talk to you, Mr. Curran," the clerk said gulpingly.  He
backed up against the wall, the pistol shaking.

"Are you mad?" Curran roared at him.  There was something booming and
full in his voice, like the bellow of an infuriated animal.  "Put that
thing down!"

"I want you to listen to me, Mr. Curran," the clerk began again.

"Put that pistol down.  Do you hear me?  Put it down!"  The contractor
moved around the desk quickly.  The clerk raised it until the muzzle
covered the employer fully.

"As sure as Heaven's above me, Mr. Curran," he warned, "if you come a
step nearer, if you call for help, if you touch that telephone, I'll
kill you."

The contractor stopped short in his rush.  He looked at Perkins
closely.  Something in the man's strained eyes and tense figure sounded
a danger signal to him.  The clerk was afraid--horribly, hysterically
afraid, so afraid that he would fire on the slightest pretext.  He
stood against the wall in a hunched, distorted attitude; his
panic-stricken face and goggling eyes; his neat hair and full
moustaches; his highly-polished and long-worn shoes, and his
well-pressed and long-worn suit; his spare angularity and weak, white
hands, all screaming in grotesque contrast to the powerful, deadly,
blue-black weapon he held so ridiculously pointed at the contractor's
abdomen.  Curran decided quickly.  He turned back and plumped down in
his chair.

"What is it?" he snapped.  "Hurry up.  I want to get home."

The fury had left his face for the moment and a sort of dozing calm had
come over it; eyes half closed, mouth relaxed, brow smooth.  But he
gave the impression of movement all the same, like a wave that travels
in-shore with a slow, lifting, relentless swell, and that will break
when it reaches the beach in a passion of boiling surf.  The clerk
pulled forward a chair and sat down, holding the pistol levelled
carefully.

"I've been with you twenty-five years now, Mr. Curran," he said in
well-measured tones, as though he had rehearsed it.  "I'm drawing
forty-five dollars a week and I'm fifty-two years old."

Curran said nothing.  His eyes were still half closed.  His face was
inscrutable.

"You think I'm getting too old," Perkins went on.  For an instant a
note of pathos came into his voice and it seemed as if it might break
into a quaver.  "There's others in the office want to be head
clerk--young men!"

He looked at Curran with an expression that was compounded of fright
and bitterness and pleading.  The contractor seemingly dozed on.

"They've played office politics against me; they've shown up my
mistakes; they've made me look old and doddering.  They've won out, and
now you're going to chuck me away."

"Yes.  I'm going to let you go, Perkins," Curran said listlessly, as
though the thing didn't interest him at all.

"You're not," the clerk flared out in weak, spasmodic fury.  "You're
not going to let me go--not until you do the right thing by me!"

"What's that?" Curran asked succinctly.  He felt in his pocket for a
cigar, for a cigar-cutter, for a match.  He lit the cigar carefully.
There was nothing of bravado in his action.  It wasn't a piece of
careless indulgence.  He did it because it was natural to him.  He was
listening intently.  And never once did he take his eye from the gun.

"You're going to give me"--Perkins said excitedly, he banged his left
fist hysterically on the table--"my salary for the next five years,
down.  Eleven thousand and seven hundred dollars.  That's what you're
going to do."

"What's this," Curran asked lazily, "a hold-up?"

"It's not a hold-up," the clerk shook his head quickly.  "I want to
tell you something----"

"You can save your breath," Curran laughed.  "You won't get it."

"If I don't get it," Perkins' voice went suddenly shrill, then quavered
into a whisper.  His face blanched more than ever.  "If I don't get it,
I shall kill you here this afternoon."

The contractor never moved.  His face was as granite and expressionless
as before.  Smoke issued from his lips in even, well-timed puffs.
Still he watched the clerk's eyes, and the gun.

"Twenty-five years ago, when I came to you first, Mr. Curran," the
clerk's tones were even, as though this were one of the parts well
rehearsed, "I got fifteen dollars a week.  You were younger than I was
then, and you were just starting out.  You're worth five millions
to-day, and I'm where I began--nearly.  I get forty-five dollars a
week."

He paused for an instant as though he were expecting some observation
from the contractor.  There was nothing but silence.  There was a note
of frightened disappointment in his voice when he continued.

"I got married then, and that year was a year of saving.  Scraping and
saving nickels!  Eating cheap lunches all the time!  Sweating, going
home, boxed up in an elevated train like a negro in a Jim Crow car!"
The hysterical note crept into his voice again.  "Cold in winter time
and the heat in summer!  And seven children coming one on the top of
another.  Four of them dead, and three daughters left!  Scrape and save
with the devil at my heels all of the time!  And still I go up to
Harlem in an elevated train and eat a quick lunch and look forward to
nothing to-morrow except the same thing.  And you've got a great
apartment in town for winter, and a place in the country for the
summer; four motor cars and a yacht."  He raised his left forefinger
and shook it at Curran.  His face was distorted frightfully.  "What's
the difference between me and you?" he nearly shouted.  "Tell me.
What's the difference?"

A fine blue ash was forming on Curran's cigar, and the smoke rose
fragrantly in whirling circles, like the powder rings of a miniature
gun.  His eyes were still focused on the blue-black weapon, and at the
question a significant, infinitesimal smile came into his eyes.

"And I had a good education," the clerk said bitterly, "as good as
anyone who hasn't been to college.  You got nothing but what you picked
up in night school.  And I came of decent people, and you were born in
an Irish slum!"

The contractor took his watch from his pocket.  Nineteen minutes past
five.  A greater throng than ever swarmed through the street, eddying
toward the subway and the Jersey tubes.  Below him Curran could see
from the window, on the elevated train, a huddle of pallid faces jammed
together in a grotesque, unsightly mass, like pale, withering flowers.
At a dock at the end of Fulton Street his yacht was waiting for him, a
faint tendril of smoke weaving upward from the stacks, and white-ducked
sailors standing patiently on the deck.  It would take him an hour and
a half ploughing downward through the Sound to get home.  He snapped
the case of the timepiece impatiently.

"Well?" he shot at the clerk.  Perkins wilted at the tone.  His arm was
getting cramped from holding the heavy weapon, and he rested his wrist
on the desk.

"Mr. Curran," he said pleadingly.  He had become again the employee,
fearful of the boss.  "I've worked for you now for twenty-five years.
I've been in the same stuffy home, fighting for life all the time.
There has never been a let-up.  It's been too hard for one man.  I've
never had a cent to call my own.  It's been fear all the time that I'd
lose my job and never get another one.  There's been the girls to
raise.  You don't know how hard it is.  It's not fair."

"What's not fair?" Curran blazed suddenly.  He sat up in his chair with
a clatter, like a soldier coming to quick attention.  His eyes flashed
like sparks at the terminals of an electric battery.  "You've done a
clerk's work; you've got a clerk's salary--no more, no less.  You
worked and you got paid for it.  That's fair."

"But to throw me away!" the clerk nearly whimpered.

"There's not any case of throwing away or casting off.  You're no
longer worth the salary, and there are better men for the place.  Why
shouldn't I let you go?"

"I've been twenty-five years here," Perkins pleaded.

"I'm sorry," Curran said decisively.  "You're hired as a business
proposition, not as a charitable trust.  You're no longer useful to me.
I won't have you in the office.  You've been paid scrupulously for all
the labour you've done.  You have no claim on me."

"I don't care," Perkins said wildly.  "I want that money.  I want that
money for the five years.  If I don't get it, I'll shoot.  Do you hear
me?  I'll shoot."

"Attend to me," Curran said coldly.  "Do you know what you're doing?
You're committing a crime for which you will get twenty years in
prison.  And if you shoot, you'll get the electric chair."

"I don't care," Perkins repeated doggedly.  "If I don't get it, I'll
shoot.  I want to tell you something else first.  Listen to me, Mr.
Curran."

The contractor's temper was going.  His hands began clenching with a
slow, remorseless pressure, like the tightening of a vice.  A purplish
colour suffused his face, and his nostrils twitched.  He shook himself
quickly as if to throw it off, and settled himself back in the chair
again, but through his half-closed eyes came a light that was like a
flame.  The cigar, bitten through, fell to the floor.  He lit another
with curt, staccato movements.

"Go ahead," he ripped through his teeth.

"I've got three daughters, Mr. Curran," the clerk said nervously.
"There's Amelia, who's twenty--she's taking her examination to be a
school teacher.  There's Jane.  She's nineteen, and she's keeping
company with a young broker, and we think it will come to something.
There's Laura, the baby, only fifteen, and she's at school yet.  If I
lose my job now, Amelia will have to go to work at once in an office,
and Jane's young man may drop out--they don't like coming to places
where there's want in the house, and Jane can't go to work--she's
delicate.  And the baby, I don't know what will happen to the baby.
One man!  With three daughters!  That's hard, Mr. Curran."

The contractor swiveled the grey eyes, that were like searchlights,
around on the clerk.  He saw the expression on the man's face, like the
expression of a much kicked dog that is pleading for something.
Easily, with that repulsive trick of his that accorded so little with
the sensitive, clean-cut mouth, he rolled his cigar from one corner to
the other.  He watched the street below for an instant before speaking.
The street, from the eighth storey of the building, seemed like a
rectangular trough filled with minute human beings.  Everywhere,
against the sombre background of the grey and dark business suits of
the men, he could see bedraggled, tired things in white blouses,
weakened by the smashing violence of the heat, limping like stricken
soldiers retiring from line of battle.  He swung back in his chair and
looked at Perkins.

"Why didn't you tell me about it?" he asked easily.  "Why didn't you
come to me instead of staging this hold up farce?"

"You're a hard man, Mr. Curran," the clerk said weakly.

"I see," Curran said slowly and softly.  He bent forward and laid his
elbows on the desk.  "Now put away that fool gun of yours and I'll talk
to you."

The clerk blanched again in sudden terror.  He moved backward so
quickly that the chair nearly toppled beneath him.  His hand clenched
the stock of the automatic so firmly that the muzzle shook beneath the
tension.  He looked like a boy with his arm thrown in front of his face
to deflect a blow, calling all the time for mercy.  A revolting,
horrible sight, Curran thought--yet at the first move the man would
shoot.

"I won't put it down until you promise, Mr. Curran," Perkins cried at
him.  "I won't put it down."

"You ask me for help," the contractor said with a hint of disgust in
his voice, "and still you insist on pointing that gun at me, and you
expect to get it."

"I don't want anything except my rights," Perkins said doggedly.  "I
want your promise that you'll do the right thing by me."

The contractor threw himself back in his chair with savage impatience.
The great vein in the centre of his forehead showed up ugly and blue
and pulsing.  His jaws set in jambs of iron muscle.

"You'll get no promise from me," he answered viciously.  "You'll get
nothing from me except jail."

"Then I'll shoot," Perkins repeated.  His voice choked like thick
liquid attempting to escape from a narrow orifice.  His lips became a
pallid, hideous grey, like the ash of a cigarette.  He thrust out his
tongue to moisten them, a shapeless, arid, blue thing.  His hand was
moist where it held the revolver, and about it, where it lay on the
desk, perspiration formed in minute, whitish particles, like inert
smoke.

"I got no chance," he began in sudden passion.  "I was better raised
than you were and better taught.  But I got stuck in your office
keeping your books, and attending to accounts, and answering and
writing letters, until I was no better than a galley slave.  I might as
well have been in prison, for all the pleasure and profit I got out of
it, while the work of me and the like of me made you rich.  I might
have been out on the road, selling things, making a good salary and ten
dollars a day expenses.  Or I might have been in a bank, learning how
to make money and invest it.  But you got me young, and kept me here,
and here I am now--old, and you're throwing me out, and me with three
daughters!  I never got a chance," he went on bitterly, "I never got a
chance."

The drone and reiteration of his complaint made Curran take one
flashing review of his life and work.  He remembered the days--it
seemed hardly a year ago, and yet it must have been close on two
score--when he was digging mains in New York, and after work, though
his whole body was screaming for rest, going off to night school, and
working as hard with pen and ink as with pick and shovel.  And the days
when he had one horse and wagon, that grew magically to three, and then
to a dozen, and lastly to an organization of monster engines and giant
derricks, and chisels that slit open great rocks with the force of
dynamite--forces that could wreck the greatest buildings in New York or
raise a second Thebes.  And the great game of it all, that he had
played with a lone hand, conceiving strategies as cunning as those of
Moltke, and effecting triumphs no smaller in their way than the
triumphs of Bismarck.  Chance!  There was no such thing as chance!

Perkins had dropped back to his even, colourless tone.  Occasionally he
gulped and swallowed a word, as though he were sobbing in a quiet way.
The clamour of the street had ceased and there was no longer the
electric sense that it was full of people.  A leather-bound clock on
the desk ticked on evenly, with a gentle, soothing sound, as of some
harmless insect.  The dial registered twenty-four minutes after five.
Everything took on the monotony of a summer evening.  The weapon in
Perkins' hand seemed meaningless and homely, like a garden tool.  The
tragic phrases of the head clerk felt banal.

"And surely I deserve something after working so long," he was
pleading.  "Not to be thrown away, like a worn-out nib.  And I wouldn't
care so much if I had a little money, but I have none.  You couldn't
save anything with a life as hard as mine has been.  Three daughters!
And Amelia has set her heart so on teaching school.  And Jane's young
man will drop out.  I know it.  And she's fond of him.  It would mean
so much to her.  A good home, and a maid to do the work.  My life
insurance too, that will lapse.  There was only five years to go, and
Amelia would have a splendid job, and Jane would be married to her
broker.  If anything happened to me in the meanwhile, there would be
the insurance.  Think of it, Mr. Curran, such a hard life, and three
daughters!"

Curran straightened up suddenly.  He was like a great animal that had
been stung once too often by a gnat, and for the instant lost its
temper.  With the sound of his voice the monotony left the room and it
became tense and pregnant, as though the elements about had been
quickened by the passage of a vital spark.

"Can I help that?" he demanded harshly.  "Am I God?"

"You're a hard man, Mr. Curran," was the clerk's weak response, "a hard
man!"

There was a minute's silence in the office, an even inexplicable
minute, like a lull in a tempest, and Curran found himself placidly
interested in the situation, as he might be interested in a situation
at a play.  Here was this sorry pattern of a man opposite him, a
windrow of life, without the crashing violence that makes for success
or the placid calm that ignores it, sitting and holding the balance of
power in his weak hand against one who handled men and metal and earth
and air and water with the nonchalance of a demi-god.  A weak thing,
weak as a rabbit, and yet holding a power in his frail hands that would
snuff out the lives of ten powerful men, as a line of candles might be
snuffed out.  The drama was well set, even though the prologue had
slithered aimless and weak through twenty-five years.  On the desk the
clock ticked slow and inexorably like some allegorical presentation of
destiny.  The streets were silent, as an audience might be who waited
breathlessly for the fall of the curtain.  And as Curran, sitting in a
theatre, thrilled for the moment, could calculate shrewdly what the
outcome would be, so he knew, sitting in front of this man who was
ready to deal him death for refusing to utter a monosyllable, what
would be the finish of the drama.  He, Curran, would win.  With death
before him, and without uttering the word that would obviate it, he
would win.  That was an assured thing.

He watched Perkins dreamily for a time, wondering what he would do
next, what he would say, and he noticed how the strain of the last half
hour had told on the man.  His face had fallen in at the cheek bones,
and deep worn lines had appeared in it, like scars left by the point of
a knife.  His eyes had sunk back in their sockets and they were clouded
by blood, and a sweat had moistened all his face, making it clammily
blue, like the countenance of one who is dying in agony.  The neat
collar had wilted, and the neat moustaches drooped pitiably.  The
contractor's eyes wandered over the man's clothes, and he saw how often
the tie had been pressed, and here and there in the coat were deft
darnings, so well done that none but a hawk's eye like Curran's could
see them.  And on the vest was a stain that had been erased
laboriously.  A woman's work, Curran said to himself.  He thought of
the wife Perkins had, and he conjured up to himself the sort of woman
she must be--a tired, pallid woman, who had achieved resignation under
the burden of unfortunate years, accepting poverty and spreading her
scant measure to the largest surface.  The thing affected him, for it
made him think of his own wife, who was dead, never knowing the
affluence that had come to him with the tide's turning, and who had
gone through meagre days loyally and proudly.  For Perkins himself he
had no pity, for the man had received what he had earned, no more--but
no less.  Even the agony of terror in which he was now, was of his own
making.  The case of the three daughters he didn't understand, and it
didn't move him.  He had four stalwart sons of his own, and he had in
his heart a contempt for a man who has only daughters.  But the woman
who had to darn rents in a coat, and to hang over an ironing board
pressing her husband's tie, he could understand that!  And Curran
hadn't even mentioned her!

He leaned forward on the desk again, and when he spoke his voice had
dropped its savage, saw-like quality, and become unaccountably gentle
and smooth.

"Perkins," he said, "I want you to put away that gun.  I've never given
away to anybody yet on a threat, and I won't now.  Put it away.
There's a good fellow.  I'll forget about it."

"Not until you've made your promise, Mr. Curran," the clerk returned
doggedly, "not until you promise me."

"If you put that thing away," Curran went on, "and you want just to
tell me some facts, and not to make threats, then I'll do something for
you."

The clerk shook his head fiercely.  His face worked into an attitude of
fixed purpose.

"I don't want you to do anything for me," he said in a little outburst
of passion.  His eyes shone at Curran balefully.  "I want my rights,
and I'm going to get them.  I want my five years' salary right in my
hand before I put it down.  If I don't get it I'll shoot."

"God damn you!" Curran exploded violently.  The words crashed from his
mouth as though they had been propelled by gunpowder.  He threw himself
back in his chair with a thud that nearly smashed it.  Everything went
out of his mind before a flying tempest of rage--the picture of the
woman slaving in a Harlem flat; the whining complaint of the head
clerk; the thought of the waiting yacht and the familiar setting of the
office.  All he knew was that before him sat a man who was threatening
to shoot him if he didn't accede to a ridiculous request.  Rage tingled
in his finger tips and clouded the sight of his eyes.  He, John Curran,
trapped in a corner and held there impotently at the point of a gun,
and by the weakest man he knew.  It was maddening.

The head clerk saw the gust of passion in his eyes.  He began pleading,
but he still held the pistol firmly clenched in his hand.

"Mr. Curran----" he attempted.

"You go to the devil!" Curran roared at him.  "By Heaven!  I'll make
you pay for this.  Before to-night's out I'll have you under lock and
key, and you'll stay there until they carry you out in a pine box."

The pleading look ebbed from the clerk's eyes, and a dull apathy came
into them.  He looked at Curran accusingly, as though the contractor
were wilfully committing a terrible mistake that he could easily avoid.
It was like the look of a man who sees a friend persist in a ruinous
resolution against common sense and against advice.  Suddenly the clock
on the desk struck a single stroke for the half hour, a musical,
silvery sound that set off dramatically the contractor's brazen roar.

"In five minutes," Perkins uttered in a hoarse whisper, "in five
minutes we shall both be dead."

The contractor caught himself short and quick.  He curbed his rage, as
a man might throw a brake on a flying vehicle.  Something must be done
at once.  He must get that gun.  How?  Rush him?  No!  At the first
move the man would shoot, and he could not fail to hit.  One ball from
that heavy forty-five at such close range would split a man like a
wedge.  If it had been anything except a forty-five automatic, he might
have taken a chance.  Throw over the heavy desk, and grapple with
Perkins as it caught his legs?  No!  The man would see too plainly what
he intended and he would fire before the thing was tilted an inch.
Lean forward and subdue him with those terrible grey eyes, as men a
hundred times stronger than he had been subdued by them?  No!  That
would fluster the clerk, and his finger would jerk the trigger in pure
nervousness.  What, then?  Think!  He must think!

"In three minutes," Perkins said huskily, "in three minutes I shall
fire."  And once more he looked at Curran appealingly, and tried to
moisten his grey lips with his horrible blue tongue.

Three minutes yet, Curran calculated.  His brain worked like a flying
shuttle.  Plans entered his mind, were examined, and thrown away with
the rapidity of chain-links flashing over a flying gear.  And while
device after device hummed sibilantly through his head, in the
background of it, a great disgust with contempt for the man in front of
him rose like a banked cloud.  The assured thing would happen.  Even in
the meagre cycle of those three minutes he would manage to get that
gun.  And then!  The clerk would grovel in an epilepsis of terror.  He
would shriek for mercy, whining like the cowardly thing he was.  He
would grope on the floor like a beast of the field.  The tear ducts
would open, and his face, horrible now with sweat, would become a
terrible thing that no man should look upon and ever forget.  Faugh!

"Only two minutes," the clerk counted, "only two minutes.  And then God
help us, Mr. Curran!  You and me!"

Sound narrowed until there was nothing except the laboured breathing of
the two.  The rolling of the planets through the universe condensed to
the petty ticking of the clock.  The problem of life and death hovered
in the room for the instant, naked and monstrous.  Even Curran's iron
nerve began to shake.  The cold and narrow circle of the weapon trained
at him caught him in a hypnotic net, and he felt himself poised on the
edge of a precipice below which was all space, and into which he would
eddy in a moment, minuter than a speck of dust.  The clerk's lean
forefinger crooked around trigger and that faint action broke the
spell.  Instantly Curran's brain and nerve and body began functioning
in rapid harmony.  Suddenly, before the clerk's eyes, he seemed to
stiffen into stone.  He leaned sidewise a little, and his eyes pivoted
sidewise, and half closed.  Every muscle in his body, every throbbing
vein and artery went suddenly still, like a being whom an Eastern
necromancer had petrified by a flourish of his wand.

The clerk's finger relaxed on the trigger.  A blank look came into his
eyes.  Curran was paying no attention to him.  And yet he was paying
attention to something.  To something outside.  There was something he
heard or felt.  The contractor's fingers began to drum the desk,
nervously, quickly, unrhythmically.  His mouth opened in an expression
of fearsome doubt.  His brows contracted, and his eyes grew wild.  On
the last minute the second hand of the clock whipped around the dial in
quick, staccato jerks.  The clerk's finger hovered nervously about the
trigger.

"This way!"  Curran's voice rose nearly to a scream.  "Quick!  For
God's sake!  Break down the door!"

The clerk swung around toward the door indecisively.  With the
quickness of a panther, and with a panther's sure flick of paw,
Curran's hand shot across the desk.  It caught the clerk's wrist like a
vice.  There was a smothered groan from the clerk as his arm was nearly
wrenched from the socket.  The pistol clattered harmlessly on the desk.
Curran picked it up and tossed it into the waste-paper basket.  Perkins
still looked at the door with fascinated eyes.

"You needn't look at that," Curran said in contemptuous tones.
"There's nobody there."

He plucked the receiver from the hook of the telephone savagely.  He
jaggled the instrument impatiently.  "Spring, 3100," he barked into it.
"Police Headquarters."  His heel stamped the ground in rage.  "It's the
limit for you, my fellow," he mumbled between his closed teeth, "I'll
push this case if it takes every minute I've got.  The damned nerve of
you!  Your rights!  And your moving picture melodrama!  Threaten me,
would you?  Hold me up?  By Heaven!  I'll show you."

He paused for an instant, his heel still tapping the ground, his eyes
closed to savage slits.

"Well?" he roared at the clerk.  "What have you got to say about it?"

He looked up at Perkins, in a sort of surprise at hearing nothing.  The
clerk was sitting erect in his chair, white-faced, but his mouth was
set in firm, rigid lines.  The terror had passed out of his eyes and a
sort of calm was in them.  The clamminess had gone from his brows, and
the agitated muscles of his face had become calm.  There was a tragic
dignity about the man.  His left forearm rested across his knees.  His
right, which Curran had twisted so savagely, hung limp and powerless by
his side.

"What have you got to say for yourself?" Curran shot at him again.

"I've got nothing," the head clerk answered firmly.  "I got my chance
and I lost it.  That's all."

"You're going to get jail for this," Curran went on.  "Do you
understand that?"

"I understand it," the clerk answered.  There was a proud independence
in the apathy of his tone.  "If I failed, it was that, or the electric
chair, or shooting myself.  I knew it.  I'm ready."

He watched Curran's puzzled face with a sort of dogged contempt.  "Oh,
yes.  I wanted it badly," he commented with a weary smile, to the
contractor's unuttered thought.

Curran hung the receiver of the telephone up abruptly.  He jumped to
his feet.

"Get out of this," he shouted.  "Get home out of this."  He looked at
the man's right arm.  "Have that arm seen to," he directed, "and stay
away until it's all right."  The telephone began jangling.

The clerk stood up with a look of bewilderment on his face,

"You're not sending me away," he stumbled, "and you want me to stay----"

"I don't want you to stay," Curran rasped, "but I suppose I can find
you something for the next five years."  He picked up the receiver of
the ringing instrument.  "Police Head----  Oh, go to blazes!" he said
impatiently.  He turned to Perkins.  "Now get out of this," he
directed.  "No, don't say anything.  I don't want to talk to you.  Get
out."

He stood for a moment listening to the clerk making his way through the
outer office.  Who would have imagined it all, he began thinking?  And
then suddenly his eye caught the clock.  Twenty-three minutes to six!
He crammed his hat on his head and started toward the door.  He would
miss his tennis, he thought, but he would get home in time for dinner
at seven.  Twenty-six miles in an hour and a quarter?  The yacht ought
to make that.  The captain ought to get that out of her.  If the
captain couldn't, he would very soon find one who could....




V

TOWERS OF SILENCE

I

Without, in the grounds of the famous Florida resort, modernity hummed
in strident, imperative accents.  Eight-cylindered cars raced along a
bevelled speedway.  High overhead an airplane buzzed like an angry
wasp.  Below, from a jazz band in a poinsettia-decorated tearoom, came
the epileptic measure of a "shimmy" dance.  But in the suite the
Chatterjees occupied was Persia.

The sitting room where Sir Rustumji Kama Chatterjee, the great Parsee
merchant whom the British Government had honoured with a title, sat
with Brereton Ford was hung here and there with intricate, heavy-lined
rugs, while on this table and on that great brass jars stood, chased
with all the skill of the Benares worker.  Blue-and-white tiles, very
like Chinese, were scattered hither and thither; and the blinds were
drawn to dull the tropic day.  That was not much to suggest the Orient,
but there was a spirit of the Orient all about it, of the calm, ancient
Persia of fire-worshipping days, and it was more probably the figure of
the Parsee prince, old Sir Rustumji, very strange, very venerable, and
of his daughter, Putlibai, who had just left the room, that gave it
that dimness of a perfumed Persian dusk, rather than the turquoise and
silver tiles, or rugs of Guzerat.

Brereton Ford was leaning toward the merchant prince, his bronzed
hawk's face, with its New England blood, standing forth dramatically
against the semi-languor of the Parsee's olive skin and dreamy eyes.

"Shorn of ritual, the religion of Zoroaster comes right down to an
active practice of benevolence," Ford was saying.  "Its religious
observances are a rigidity of personal cleanliness.  How simple!"

"And its worship a worship of a Supreme Being, under the manifestation
of Fire, which is Light and Great Cleanliness, my son."  Very
benevolent and meticulously clean did old Sir Rustumji appear, as he
leaned back watching the young architect.  His loose and flowing white
garments, with the rimless maroon turban, sloping backward at an angle
from the top of his forehead; his venerable white beard; his kindly
black eyes, all gave the air of a priest instructing a neophyte.

Ford leaned toward him more tensely.

"It may seem absurd to you, sir, to hear one say so, but for years I
have been searching for--oh, well, let us say truth--a belief, and, as
it were, a manner of life, that earnest accord with a belief that is a
manifestation of Supremity on earth, and that I should be following Its
wishes.  It's the sort of thing one seldom mentions aloud--but--

"In the Zend-Avesta," the Parsee baronet began, and for an hour or a
little more perhaps, in his perfect English he informed Brereton Ford
of the tenets of Zoroastrianism.  He told him of the faith which
Zoroaster gave, which are _homut_, purity of thought, and _bookt_,
purity of speech, and _virust_, purity of action.  He explained to him
the worship of the Manifestation called the Sun.  He informed him that
all Parsees must be born on the ground floor of a house, as life must
be commenced in humility.  He mentioned to him how when dead, a dog,
man's faithful companion, is brought in to say farewell.  He told him
then of the disposition of the body.

"It is brought to and laid in the Tower of Silence," said Sir Rustumji,
"and the vultures, the scavengers of God, take the corruptible covering
from the frame.  The Sun receives the vital essence."


Brereton Ford shivered: It was better to lie in the cool earth, where
flowers grow.

"From the sun thou camest!  To the sun thou goest!  Child of the Sun!"
quoted the Parsee....

Putlibai, Sir Rustumji's eighteen-year-old daughter was singing in the
little morning room on the lake.  Her slight, liquid accents, clear as
a bird's, changed the guttural Gujurati to a flexibility like Italian.
She was carolling a love song of Narsingh Meta's:

  "_O you with large eyes, bright and open as cups,_
  "_You have two young citrons nestled on your breast._
  "_Your teeth are mother of pearl; your lips are honey._
  "_Your hair is like a fragrant bush and spread upon your shoulders,_
  "_The down on your face is like violets under a bed of roses._
  "_Whoever comes to gather the flowers, tell him they are thine._
  "_Thou art my nightingale and my shrub of roses..._"


"Putlibai," the Parsee called.

Her feet made no sound, so softly did she enter the room.  For an
instant she paused at the door, an apparition of tropic beauty such as
Labid, prince of poets, would have sung, or Firdausi, the Accomplished
One, or Omar, who built the tenets of verse.  Very small and very
slight she stood there, and the clear olive of her beautiful skin
seemed only a precious cloth on which her two ruby lips were laid, and
the opalescent jewellery of her eyes.  Her small and delicate hands,
very like flowers, peeped from the folds of her blue _sari_, and under
her head-cloth of thin white stuff her hair, black and lustrous, showed
like oiled silk.

"There is a translation into English of the Zend-Avesta, Putlibai," her
father said, "that I brought with me from Bombay.  Bring it here for
Mr. Ford."


She smiled as she went out to get it, a frank eager smile, such as an
Occidental woman might give, and Brereton Ford, as he watched her go,
became more and more convinced that with her his destiny was bound.
Life had suddenly become for him a quest in a perfumed Persian forest
for a treasure of three hundred lakhs of rupees, which is nigh unto ten
million dollars gold, all of it the property of Sir Rustumji
Chatterjee, a Parsee merchant.  And Putlibai, whom the poets of Bombay
had called inaccessible as the dark stars, was to be the necessary but
delectable guide.  And the treasure was guarded by fortresses, high,
implacable, lonely, terrible, called the Towers of Silence, where
vultures hovered.  And though willingly he would have embraced an alien
life for that treasure, the high towers appalled him.  He was a great
architect, was Brereton Ford--America honours him still--but he was a
very great blackguard also, and a coward to boot....


In all the colonies of the Parsees in India and Persia; in Bombay, in
Guzerat, in Surat, in Broach, the name of Sir Rustumji Chatterjee is
revered, not only as a business man and a great philanthropist, but as
an ornament to his religion.  The great rest-house in Surat for
Parsees, the foundation of the chair of Pehlevi at Oxford--those things
are not treasured up as much as the fact that he wrote the "Zarthoshti
Sitisbak," which caused many unbelievers to see the light; and that he
is meticulous in ritual.

But if Sir Rustumji Chatterjee is religious, it is because of the
vision and epic of his worship and that there is great colour to it,
great adventure, and that is more to him than mechanical ritual and set
prayers.  Back to the dimness of ancient days--before Abraham was, much
less Moses--Zoroaster was giving his laws to the Medes and Persians.
Pliny and Marcellus, and Apuleius, and Strabo, the blind geographer,
spoke of them with reverence, and when in Bethlehem of the Jews a Babe
was born, Persian magi went to it with reverence.  They saw Brahma rise
and Isis and Osiris die.  The epileptic Mahomet came out of the desert
like a whirlwind and their faith-mates drooped under the Moslem steel.
And they arose in the night-time, and Persia knew them no more.

"But the Sun cannot be quenched," old Sir Rustumji used to tell
himself.  "Its glory abides for ever."  His sixty years of life had
passed like a long, benevolent day.  India was the better for him.  Its
banks prospered.  Its cottonfields were more fruitful by reason of him
and his associates.  He bothered no man and all revered him.  Musing
over his religion, coeval with the sun, a bachelor until forty-five, he
passed his life going from trading station to trading station.

At forty-five he married--Adnai, daughter of Kaikabod Jhijhiboy, great
in Bombay annals, and from her he had Putlibai, daughter of his heart.
Adnai his wife, died, and the child was all that was left to him....


Perhaps it was because it was so late that he married, and that he gave
at that time all of love his intense, proud nature could summon that
the loss of his wife Adnai struck him so harshly.  However, it did.
But day by day the little Putlibai became more and more like her, until
at sixteen and seventeen she was a living image of Jhijhiboy's
daughter.  He could not seem to part with her.  When he went to Fookon
or travelled by caravan to the Persia he loved, he brought the child
with him.  When, toward the end of seeing American machinery, with the
view of developing the Indian ore supply, he proposed visiting America,
he wished her to come with him.

"Will you come with me across the water, Putlibai?" he asked her.
"Farther than Persia, farther than England, to America--the new world?"

"My father, I will," she answered joyously.

And so, to America they came, two strange figures such as might have
wandered out of some Oriental classic, _The Book of Wisdom and Lies_
for instance, or _The Thousand and One Nights_.  Reporters interviewed
them in New York, in Pittsburgh, in the Middle West, speaking
alternately of the wealth of old Sir Rustumji--a millionaire,
incredible to believe, who was not an American; of the winsomeness of
Putlibai, whom they with unpardonable ignorance insulted as a Eurasian
beauty; of Parsees whom they mixed up recklessly with the Pharisees of
Bible days.  They were lonely, in a way, these twain.  And when winter
came they went southward to Florida, where they met Brereton Ford, the
architect.

"He is America's foremost artist," Reynolds, the Omaha banker, who knew
more of Renaissance architecture than any living man, introduced him to
Sir Rustumji.

And Sir Rustumji was glad to know Ford, for he wanted to discuss with
him the points of Indian architecture, the Taj Mahal, for example, and
notably, the monument he had recently raised to his wife Adnai, a lone,
massive Tower of Silence which brooded over the hills of Guzerat.


There are none who ever speak of Brereton Ford but as of a great man.

"But not a good man," many will tell you.  "If you remember, he had no
friends."

No!  He had no friends; that is true.  There was no such thing as
friendship to him in the world.  Everyone to him had a definite value,
and that depended on what he could get from them.  Not only money, but
knowledge, ideas.  Born in the gutter, he had fought his way upward by
sheer power of will.

"Ford, somehow, makes me afraid," a professor at Princeton once said.
"There is something in the man that glitters, that will out, by fair
means or force."  That was his genius.

He persuaded a Massachusetts family to give him his chance in Paris.
He succeeded in getting a _Prix de Rome_.  The family he dropped
callously when he needed them no more.  It was so with his first
partnership.  Young Briggs he used until he had become acquainted with
everyone of value whom Briggs knew.  Then Briggs went by the board.

"Well," says Briggs pathetically--bless his heart!  There is no rancour
in him!  "A dub like myself has no license to travel with a genius like
Brereton Ford."

Genius he was!  He took the dry bones of conventional architectural
detail and chucked them to the four winds.  "I'll get down to mere
building," he said, and of mere building he made simple grandeur.
Witness the country house he built for Epstein the sugar king, in
Westchester County.  "A pig in a king's castle!" Ford characterized his
client.  Abruptly he dropped that style, and, falling back on old
Romanesque and Byzantine types, he evolved a style so distinctively his
own that the veriest layman could recognize it.  Those little churches
throughout New England, those gem-like little libraries, all are living
memories to his head and pencil!

"I'm sick of building houses for tripe-merchants, and churches for
hypocrites," he broke out bitterly at his club.

"What do you want to do, then?"

"I want money enough to do anything I like.  If I choose to raise a
monument to Galileo in Wichita, Kansas, or an obelisk to Booker T.
Washington in Atlanta, Georgia, I want to be in a position to devote
the time to making such a work of art as will overcome ignorance and
all prejudice.  I want to justify my genius."

Randall O'Connor, that shrewd trial lawyer who possesses an uncanny
knowledge of human nature, has an interesting theory about Brereton
Ford.  "The old Masons," he will tell you, "were the closest guild in
the world--an occult guild, very cruel.  They used to sacrifice human
lives for the safety of their bridges.  To my mind Brereton Ford is a
reincarnation of one of the old master-masons, who builded the pyramid
of Cheops, perhaps, or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, revisiting the
earth.  A cruel, unnatural being, brimming with genius."  Well, why not?


Now, when a certain city in Florida, which shall be nameless, decided
that it would build a magnificent city hall, it did a good thing: it
engaged Brereton Ford.  The Florida city had made a pretty penny from
its trade in citrus fruits; from some very spendthrift government
shipyards; and from gold-scattering Northern tourists.  The Sons of Noe
must have felt extremely like that city council when they decided to
build a tower on Shinar plain, in the place which was afterward called
Babel.

"We want something worthy of this premier city--of this gateway to
America's tropic empire." Colonel Milo Rosenthal acted as spokesman for
the city fathers.  "Something as high as anything New York has, and at
the same time substantial and commodious.  Something that can be seen
as the ships come up the harbour.  Something like the Colosseum at
Rhodes; yes, ahem!  Rhodes!  Make it," he concluded grandiloquently,
"make it the eighth wonder of the world!"

At this most architects would have shrugged their shoulders and gone
northward, or have gone ahead with the work in a spirit of tolerant
humour, giving the Boosted City a replica of a Philadelphia skyscraper.
Not so Brereton Ford.  He merely blinked.

"How much money have you got?" he asked succinctly.

On the answer to this Ford's comment was brief, brusque and snorting.
"Hell!"  But he went ahead and achieved a miracle.  Little by little at
his direction the edifice rose, white, slender, very like a spear.  It
reared above the drab commercial hive like a standard of battle.  There
was music to it, and line, and poetry.

"When this thing of mine is finished," Ford told Colonel Milo
Rosenthal, emphasizing every word with a vicious jab of his forefinger
into the Southern aristocrat's ribs, "you can drop your citrus fruits,
your shipyards, your hotels.  The people will come to your city to see
that thing alone."

"By golly, I believe you," the colonel agreed.  He was right to agree
about it.  For people do.


While the city hall was in process of building Brereton Ford was almost
all of the winter at various resorts nearby: St. Augustine; Ormond;
Miami.  He was no garret genius.  He needed the decencies of food and
music and evening clothes for his art.  He liked acclamation, which he
received in good taste.  He liked to have people presented to him, and
to mix among bankers from Texas; automobile millionaires; wheat and
coal magnates, as their equal, and to look down on them as their
better.  And in due course he met them and impressed them, even the
most ignorant of them, such as Gates, the Saint Paul department-store
man; even the most reticent of them, as were Sir Rustumji Chatterjee
and his daughter Putlibai, the Parsees, who came westward from the
strange Asian colony which worshipped fire and practised benevolence
and left their dead for the Sun and the Birds in their lonely and bleak
and terrifying Towers of Silence, ...


"And so, sir," Ford told Sir Rustumji, "I have become convinced of the
Truth as laid down by Zoroaster, the prophet; and my wish and utmost
intention is to embrace the faith of the Parsee."

"Many Europeans," Sir Rustumji said, "become convinced of the truth of
Buddhism, and not a few turn to Islam.  But to our faith there have
been few converts.  Nevertheless ... In Bombay you will undergo the
ceremony of _nirang_, which is a purification.  And about your waist
will be laid the cincture of seventy-two threads, which denote the
seventy-two chapters of Zend-Avesta...."

He was outwardly calm, was the old Parsee prince, but within a great
pride had arisen in him, and a great joy with it.  He had come to
America to bring back dry facts about machinery, and with it he was
returning in company of a convert to the faith he held to with all the
power of his fine soul.  A man great among his countrymen, an artist, a
thinker.  He praised God in his manifestation of the Sun....

"And another thing, sir," Ford continued.  "I should like to be joined
to you by a nearer tie.  But--I am poor----"


That weighed little to one who followed the precepts of ancient Persian
days.  Ford was a great artist, a poet in stone.  And were not poets
heaven-sent and heaven-directed?  Had not a prince loaded the camels of
Firdaussi with gold for a single distich; and Labid, was he not called
the "Companion of Kings?"  Who better for Putlibai than this young
architect, without a peer, who was dear to the old man's heart, dearer
than a son could be?  His convert!

"Putlibai," he told her, "I have found you a husband."

And Putlibai's slender frame trembled and her throat swelled, and her
eyes flickered like stars.  For Brereton Ford was a prince to her, a
prince from an Arabian tale.  Great-armed, blazing-eyed, he would stand
among the men of her nation like a warrior among helots, two heads
higher than they.  A poet, or as good as a poet!  And about him hung
the mystery of the Occident--for if the West finds the East mysterious,
the East finds the West equally so.  From her lips, as from a flute,
there rose the marriage-song of Guzerat:

  "_All hail this day!
  I gave thee an order, goldsmith;
  I told thee to make an armlet for my Sorabji's arm,
  And a wine-stringed necklace for me, his beloved.
  I gave thee an order, mercer;
  I told thee to bring a plaid for my Sorabji,
  And a pair of_ palris _for me, his adorer.
  I gave thee an order, jeweller;
  I told thee bring rings for my Sorabji,
  And a pair of bracelets for me, his bride._"


And as Putlibai sang, old Sir Rustumji stroked his beard, and thought.
_Ee-yah_!  He was happy.  Now he had a son for his family, and a
husband for his daughter.  Time would flow by in soft and reverential
days, and when the end of his life came he would be tended.  And more
time would slip along, and by his side, happily, would repose his
daughter and his new son in the great Tower of Silence he had builded
above the hills of Guzerat....


Tregarthen, the young Cornish poet, who had been across to America to
represent art and letters on the British High Commission, was much
taken with Brereton Ford.  But then Tregarthen was taken with anything
sinister.  In early days he had sung the poetry of absinthe.  Later he
had become a Satanist.  Now he had developed, in a month of Florida, an
admiration for Brereton Ford.

They had wandered from their hotel up toward the shore, where the sea
was continually complaining, and back down the soft Florida night to
the resort grounds, a developed arid garden of no perfume, where
palm-trees in ordered, repulsive rows, and barren poinsettia plants
rose shamefully from the sandy soil.  They sat down, lighting
cigarettes.  In a little while the moon would rise, but as yet it was
very dark.  They had been talking of recent art topics--a book by
Ibanez; a new Spanish colourist; the Victory Arch in New York.

"By the way," Tregarthen drawled, "the notice of your engagement is in
all the New York papers.  You know I never did anything but
congratulate you, but, if you'll pardon me, I don't understand----"

"Well, I'll tell you," Ford said brutally.  "I need the money.  I can't
work unless my surroundings are harmonious.  To lack anything that
money can buy irks me.  This Parsee, my young poet, would make a
Detroit millionaire seem like a piker.  Frankly, I need the money."

"I thought maybe you were in love with the girl?"

"With the girl!" Ford laughed.  "My lad, I've told you time and time
again what my ideal of a woman is: a _chic_ French marquise, or one of
our well-groomed white beauties.  The girl!  Blast it!  I think as
little of her as of any good-looking coloured girl working in the
hotel.  In a little while this fat father-in-law of mine will be
reposing in one of his disgusting Towers of Silence--my soul! what a
savage, vile conception!" and Ford shivered--"and I'll be back in
civilization hunting a divorce----"

"And you're not overwhelmed at the truth of Parseeism?"

"Parseeism!  Bah!"  Ford fairly spat.  "It's the same to me as the Holy
Rollers, or any voodoo lodge.  Damn their coloured religions!  Listen,
Tregarthen, doesn't it make you laugh?  Sun-worship!  And Towers of
Silence!  Blazes!  Why not cannibalism?  Why not----"

"What was that?"  Tregarthen had heard a noise in the garden.

"A mullet jumping in the river perhaps, or some tripe-merchant walking
off his heavy dinner."  Ford was paying no attention.  "I suppose most
people would call me a damned scoundrel, but you know, as a poet, that
art is unmoral, therefore, the artist, it follows, must necessarily----"

Ford whistled as he dressed by electric lights.  It was decent of old
Chatterjee, he decided, to ask to see his city hall before leaving for
the North.  The party had arrived in the town only late the evening
before and at seven this morning they would be going north to New York.
But the Parsee wanted to see his future son-in-law's masterpiece.
Wherefore, Ford arose at five in the morning to bring him to it.

"I will show him what he's getting into the family," the architect
boasted.

Below, in the lobby of the hotel, he found old Sir Rustumji alone,
dressed in tweeds, a soft deerstalker on his reverend white hair.

"Did you have coffee?" the old man asked.

"No," answered Ford.  "I ran across no one, and I didn't say I was
coming out."

"Too bad to get you up, my son, so early."  Sir Rustumji beamed
benevolence.

"It's but a block away," Ford answered.  "And I'm only too glad."

They went out through the deserted streets.  The morning was heavy,
foggy.  As yet there was no sign of the sun.  All of the town was
sleeping, evidently, for they met no man.

"There it is!"  Ford stopped on a side street.  "I'm going to take you
up on the roof just as you asked.  Lucky I've got the keys.  And the
service elevator is running."

Ford made his way across stubble and planks to the elevator cage.  He
motioned the old man in before him.

"They're going to have an immense job to get this finished by the first
of May, when they've announced the opening.  My work on it's done,
anyway.  The carpenters, joiners, plumbers, have their month before
them.  They can do it, I guess, without me."

"I hope so, my son."

They left the elevator and climbed a short winding stair.  With a
mighty heave of his shoulder Ford opened the trap-door to the roof.  It
creaked as it rose.  He slipped on to the solid ground alone.  Sir
Rustumji followed him, with surprising agility.

"There it is," Ford exalted.  He looked down into the streets.  The
Parsee followed his eyes.

Towering like a spear from the ground up, the great white building rose
like a spirit of flame.  Very slender it was, with a slenderness of a
young birch tree, and very white, like silver.  It rose above the other
buildings as a tall tree rises above shrubs, and the whole city seemed
only a pedestal on which Brereton Ford's conception was a monument.
And there was great silence--the silence of the sleeping city, and in
all the city it was the most silent building of all.

The Parsee was thoughtful for an instant.  He turned to the east, where
mottled morning clouds were piled massively with here and there a ray
of sunlight bursting through.

"It is a great work," Sir Rustumji acknowledged.

Suddenly, with the melodrama of southern climes, the sun seemed to
shoot above the horizon--a huge scarlet splash in the east.  The old
Parsee bent his head.

"God is good," he said.  "He gives us this magnificent orb to know Him
by."

He turned to Ford calmly.

"I was in the garden of the hotel the night you spoke to your poet
friend," he told Ford.

Ford had not been paying much attention to him, but these words seemed
to drip into his brain like acid, etching into his intelligence like
aqua fortis, and as he turned and looked at the Parsee, he felt his
knees shaking suddenly, and a cold wind blowing through his hair.  Sir
Rustumji had lost his benevolence.

"I did not care about the money so much.  If you had needed money you
could have had it from me without marrying my daughter.  And even what
you said about Putlibai that night might have been forgiven and you
allowed to go.  But you did something else."

Ford could not take his eyes from the Parsee's face.  Something he had
never seen before stood out in it, mystic, very terrible, the Orient of
ancient days, before Moses lived, or Abraham.

"You used God and His symbol and His prophet Zoroaster to get money for
your uses.  And then, laughing, you blasphemed Them.  And for that you
are going to die."

Without a hurried movement, Sir Rustumji took a revolver from his
pocket.

"Here on your own tower, silently, you will lie with your face to the
sun, as you would have lain dead eventually had you come with me to
Guzerat, and married my daughter, and embraced our faith."  And the old
Parsee began shooting him.  High in the air above the city, the sound
of the explosion seemed negligible, and at the fifth shot Brereton Ford
died.

The Parsee descended to the stairway, clanging the iron door behind
him.  From the street below, some minutes later, he looked up at
Brereton Ford's tower rising with slender, silent majesty into the air.
On the white top of it the sun seemed to beat in a kind of fury, white,
infinitesimal; and in the blue sky overhead two buzzards were perched.




VI

THE HAPPY TOWNLAND

I

He smiled in his white moustaches as Kennedy, the over-dressed,
sophisticated clerk who played the market on margin came into the
office.  He was not in the habit of being familiar with Kennedy, for he
disliked the man, but this morning there was too much joy bursting in
his heart to keep up the habitual aloofness.  As yet none knew his
secret not even Marian, his wife, nor his daughter, Aileen, and he
needed to say something of it to someone, as a kettle must boil over.

"A fine morning; a fine June morning, Kennedy!" he rubbed his hands, "a
great morning in the country!"

"Yes," agreed the clerk.  His cold, suspicious eye took in his employer
appraisingly.  "What was the old guy up to now?" he thought.

"Yes," Simpson went on, as if carelessly.  "I shall be glad to get away
from all this and live in the country.  Yes, very glad! yes!"

"You're thinking of going to live in the country, to commute?"

"No, to live in it for good," Simpson bent over his mail as if there
were an end to the pronouncement.  The clerk grimaced as he went out of
the door; the old man might go and live in Gehenna for all he cared.

He lifted his head as the door closed and gazing through the window he
seemed to go into a sort of a trance.  Below him was the harsh jangle
and bustle of Church Street and Dey--the creaking of the lorries: the
rhythmic drumming of the elevated train; the barking of motor horns;
the subdued cacophonous hum of hurried life.  Before his eyes, in the
physical sense, was the muddy puddle of the East River; the unbeauty of
squalid ferryboats; the ugly, insect-like types that threaded their way
hither and thither, the vertebrated line of railroad barges.  Beyond
that, the dingy wilderness of the Jersey shore front, with its huddle
of docks, its hideous advertisements, its smoke-fuddled factories.  And
over it all, a harsh, unhealthy sunlight rained brazenly.  But he saw
and heard nothing of these.

"The Happy Townland," he was saying to himself, "Yes, that's it!  The
Happy Townland."

Past this dun and ugly prospect he was seeing, as by some miracle of
second sight, a green and odorous country--long, winding roads bordered
by high trees; cool meadows where cows grazed; a mare browsing daintily
with a long-legged foal capering by her; a brook somewhere indefinitely
placed, fringed by golden rod and bull reeds; the mellow sleepiness of
a big house; dogwood rioting in blossom and the delicate mauve of
laurel.  From everywhere there came to his nostrils the scent of
trampled grass and the biting perfume of pine trees.  And by a white
magic the harsh bustle of the city streets was metamorphosed into the
lazy drone of bees and the sound of wind among the reeds; the note of
unknown birds and the clamour of indefinite brooks.  He drew an agent's
brown sheet from the drawer of his desk and perused it for the
thousandth time.

"About ten acres of land," he read, "artistically laid out in flower
beds and vegetable gardens; one acre of orchard, beautiful shade and
fruit trees; lawns tastefully laid, the whole arranged as a delightful
private park," and above: "the farmhouse has been remodelled in a
thoroughly modern manner, without deteriorating from its old-world
charm."

As far back as he could remember, and that was at the age of six, and
fifty years ago, the ambition of his life had been to own a house in
the country, with ground sufficient to provide for its needs.  A sort
of haven, it had always seemed to him, into which he could retire in
his late days and the prospect of, and hope for which, had supported
him through all his life.  As far back as he could remember, and even
before he could, the shadow of uncertainty and want had hung over his
life like a cloud.  Very dimly, but with startling streaks of stark
realism, he could conjure up pictures of his father's cobbling and
shoemaking store in Fall River--a dim, leather-smelling house, with a
great wooden Hessian boot swinging over the door as a sign of his
Guild.  He could dimly remember his father, a wizened, snarling sort of
man with spectacles, whose knife cut through the leather with a rasp;
his mother, a gaunt, pinched-mouthed shrew, whose sap of humanity
poverty had turned into gall.

These personalities were very vague to him now, but the bitter edge of
one thing he remembered only too well, and that was the tragic poverty
of the house--the rush to finish a piece of work on Saturday night so
that the customer might pay in time for Sunday's sustenance; the sorry
makeshifts, the utter shame of things.  He could remember, in spite of
his father's trade, the condition of his own parody of shoes, the holes
in the soles, in the toe-caps, the bent and broken hooks on the vamp.

Only one incident of tenderness had relieved that grim childhood.  That
was when he had left home.  An old acquaintance of his father's, a
journeyman cobbler, had risen sufficiently in the world to have a small
store in New York.  By some means the family got in touch with him and
young William Simpson was engaged as a sort of errand boy and salesman.
On the occasion of his leaving for New York, his father seemed less
harsh than was customary and his mother had cried.

Enough of this!  "A sorry tale is ever unwelcome," says a Gaelic
proverb.  Sharp and biting tragedy is stimulating, but a dingy record
affects one like some malodorous miasma.  The sequence of Simpson's
rise to moderate prominence in his business can be imagined.  From
office boy to salesman; his marriage to Marian, daughter of his
employer; a small store; a larger store; a factory; a fair competence.
And lastly the chance to shoe a portion of a great army--a war contract
that had placed him in comparative luxury.  There was no genius in the
man, even no marked ability.  He followed a painstaking recipe for
success and obtained it, moving along timidly, nearly invisible in the
current of business, too small to be reckoned with.

"Honesty and hard work," he told himself, "win in the end."  He had not
brains enough for the dishonesty that makes millions or that obviates
hard work by brilliant and daring short cuts.

He could understand his rise in business, but what he could not
understand--for his wife never explained it to him--was his progress in
dwelling and environment.  From a dingy and small apartment on West
Twentieth Street to a two-family house in Flatbush; to a small house of
his own; to a modest flat on Riverside Drive; to a large and garish one
with two baths, neither of them harshly overworked.  And again, from
the slatternly Polish girl of his early days to the cook, maid and
chauffeur of the present ones.

"Marian certainly is a wonder!" he would think in awe.  But his wife's
method was fairly blatant.  She merely took what she wanted and
depended on him to furnish the funds.  The only credit I can give
Marian Simpson is for her discovery that he was dependable.

She had done wonders, had Marian, according to him.  But for him the
last wonder.  He was to perform a prodigy of magic comparable to the
palace Aladdin raised, by the aid of the Djinn of the lamp, for the
King of China's daughter.  He would transplant Marian and his daughter
Aileen to the coveted farmhouse in the country, with its acre of
orchard, "the whole arranged as a delightful private park."  After the
din and rush of New York, the fictitious life of it, the pinchbeck
splendour, the perilous pinnacle of semi-success, they would rest happy
and contented, they would be people not prisoners, inhaling air and
sunlight, not the fetid odours and grime of the metropolis.

Because he had been born in the city and had lived all his life in it,
going its ways as regularly as a felon on a treadmill, his whole life's
desire had been to leave it and live close to the land.  In the city,
he was timid, negligible, unassertive.  The detail of his origin placed
him ill at ease amongst the men of well-nurtured youth, of sterling
education and happy home ties.  That, and a routine of salesmanship,
with its necessary deference, made him apologetic towards even his
servants.  Cook and housemaid paid no attention to him.  The chauffeur
bullied him.  In business he was referred to contemptuously, if at all.
But he had the belief that away from the city's wiles and
sophistications, amongst the simple rural people, he would be happy,
independent of spirit, obligated to no man.  A great portion of his
thinking life was passed in the dream of his state and appearance when
the happy day would come for him to go there.  He imagined himself as a
sort of bluff English squire--he a thin, tall, dejected man, with
drooping moustaches, and a head going bald, who would have been a
humorous figure, if it had not been for the pathos in his eyes!  He
could see himself in rough tweeds and gaiters, with a dog following
him.  Occasionally he would stop in front of an athletic outfitter's
and look with a sort of shamed awe at the golf clubs in the window,
queer-shaped shining sticks with haunting names--mashies and niblicks,
jiggers and sammies, brassies and cleeks--and he would look forward
with happy embarrassment to the day when he would have courage enough
to go on a links and try them.  At times, forgetting his years, he
could see himself cantering along a lonely by-path on a sturdy black
cob.

Some verses of an Irish poet, which he had seen printed at the bottom
of the editorial page of his newspaper--to fill up space most
likely--had haunted him.  His spirit entered chimingly into the man's
vision of the "Happy Townland."

  "_Boughs have their fruit and blossom
  At all times of the year!_"


He could understand the ecstasy of that vision, the exaggerated
fragmentary flashes that were like the tissue of a hashish-eater's
dream:

  "_An old man plays the bagpipes
  In a golden and silver wood,
  Queens, their eyes blue like ice,
  Are dancing in a wood...._"


The irresponsible swinging refrain began running in his head, as a
military march or a sentimental ballad might run in the head of another
man.  It typified his whole life's desire.  It hammered in his veins
like a slogan.


  "_The little fox he murmured
  O what of the world's bane
  The sun was laughing sweetly,
  The moon pulled at my rein,
  The little fox, he murmured,
  O do not pluck at his rein,
  He is riding to the townland
  That is the world's bane._"


At last he had his Happy Townland.  He had arrived at the great
ambition of his grey days.  For the first time in his life he had done
something without his wife's knowledge, he had purchased the
gentleman's dwelling with its orchard, its flowerbeds and vegetable
gardens; its shade and fruit trees, "the whole arranged as a delightful
private park."


II

It is the habit of romantic young men and of cynical young women to say
and believe that the great loves and love stories of old days have no
counterpart in modern life.  There is no longer a Canon Peter Abelard
nor a fair Heloise; nor an Anne of Austria on whose account a
Buckingham would plunge into war.  The topless towers of Troy are dust,
and Helen with them.  And the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's, is
mute in the land.

But they are wrong in this matter.  There is no age as ripe in love as
this, and this gaunt stone metropolis is its smiling garden.  States
and ranks of men change and fashions of loving, but the eternal miracle
is there.  Men die of love and women with them.  The humble huckster of
the street may harbour the ambition of a serf for a queen, and the
magnate of the stock exchange may extend to the poorest girl in his
employ the honourable passion of King Cophetua for the beggar maid.

I cannot think of William Simpson without the complement of Marian, his
wife.  Little as I care for that woman, and God knows that is little
indeed, I believe that without her he would have pined away and died.
Without her there would be no reason for his existence.  Every penny he
made, every hour of toil he spent, was for her sake and not for his
own.  He translated everything into terms of her pleasure, and even
this, the master ambition of his life, he thought of as a surprise and
joy to her.

She is forty-five years old now, a thick-set, obese woman, whose
shallow ambitions are shown in her shrewd black eyes.  Of every new
fashion in dress and manner that is created, she is the extreme
devotee, whether it be the lacing of shoes up the back, the shortening
or lengthening of frocks, the wearing of furs in summer, or the hobby
of the moment, skating, riding, bridge.  She is addicted to singing
snatches of the latest popular songs.  She lives to see and be seen.
Shallow compliments please her, such as a polite incredulity that
Aileen, who is twenty-three, can be her daughter.  Surely her younger
sister, people say, and she is grateful for that courtesy.

Transparent as she is, painted, over-manicured, over-dressed, selfish,
narrow, utterly worthless, in William Simpson's eyes she is beautiful
and good.  Her degree above him, who was the daughter of an employer,
when he was only a ragamuffin of the streets; her cheap coyness; her
affectation of fashion, all these attracted him as a young man, and
held him, now he was old.  He accepted her wishes as decrees and
thought her taste the glass of form.

For years now coming back from his office worn with the exertion his
small abilities required, he permitted himself to be led to theatres,
to supper afterwards, to the society of people for whom he cared
nothing and who cared nothing for him, because as she suggested it, it
seemed to him there was nothing else to do.  "Come on," she would tell
him, "hurry up.  What a time I've had to dress.  I do wish we hadn't to
go."

"But if you'd rather stay at home," he would offer, thinking it a pity
she should have to go against her inclination.

"Do you think it's any pleasure for me to sit in all night, after being
here all day alone," would be her short response, and he would agree in
his mind to the justice of it.  "God knows, it's so little pleasure I
get out of life, I'm glad to get this."  And all evening, at the
theatre, at the party, at the dance, he would admire, in his
simplicity, her consummate tact which concealed her indifference and
dislike of the event.  Some day, he would say to himself, he would give
her a life worth living!  And he would sympathise mutely at the pain
she underwent to fit herself into the garish boots she wore, or to
confine her ample figure in the clothes a tyrant fashion thrust upon
her.  How happy she would be, he told himself, in the quiet country
estate he planned for her, no worthless friendships to compel her, nor
trivial pursuits to claim her time.  No torture of clothes there, he
said, but a fine, free and gracious apparel, such as a lady of the
Manor should wear.  There she would blossom forth in her natural
surroundings as buxom and as hearty as a full blown rose.

His daughter Aileen, a slim young pattern of her mother, morose and
discontented, had a diffident, lazy manner.

"Come, dearie," her mother would say, "you've got to go to the rink for
your skating lesson.  It's eight o'clock now."

"Oh, Ma," she would reply with a pout, rising all the same, "it's such
a bother!"

"Hurry up, dearie," her mother would urge sharply.  "We've got to be
there at eight-thirty.  They'll charge us just the same.  Your father
will call for us in the car, and we'll have a bite to eat afterwards."

When they had gone out, on the rare occasions they permitted him to
stay behind, Simpson would be thankful in his heart that his daughter
disliked the life as much as her mother did, and sitting there, dozing
over a journal which he did not understand, but which uttered the
mystic desirable formulae of fertilizers, and the rotation of crops; of
glanders and farcy; of short-horned Devons and belted Dutch; he could
imagine her in a print gown caring for a rose garden, or taking an
interest in the dairy, or helping him with the swarming bees.  And he
would think of some sentimental picture he had once seen--a
reproduction on a calendar perhaps--of a young girl sitting on a rustic
style, dreaming, the strings of a quaker bonnet in her fingers, and he
would nod his head approvingly.

At times they would migrate for a week or more to out-of-town
resorts--to Palm Beach, though that was infrequent; to Lake Wood; to
Bar Harbour, and during their stay there, mother and daughter, and
himself too, would sit listlessly in hotel lounges, except at the times
it was proper for them to be out--drinking orangeade, or walking in the
pine woods, or on the beach.  None knew them, save occasional tragic
casuals like themselves.  And mother and daughter kept up a continual
criticism of the guests in the hotel.

"Here's that woman again!" the mother would say.  "She's going out
riding now.  Look at her habit with the tan boots."

"That young riding master is waiting for her again--the same one she
was out with yesterday."  The daughter would watch through the window.

"And the husband just gone up to town!" the mother would join in.

Or they would pick out an innocuous old gentleman in tweeds and spats.

"He's a general in the army!" the mother would vouchsafe, "Mrs. Mearson
told me."

"Look at the young wife he's got," Aileen would notice.  And through
all this Simpson would sit mute, with the terrible immobility of an
Oriental priest, firm in his belief that these things would pass and
that at the end of the road green pastures lay.

An advertisement of a new resort outside New York had attracted wife
and daughter, and they had dragged him along for a week end.  The crisp
cold of after Christmas was in the air.  The roads glinted with
particles of frost that resembled microscopic jewels.  Snow hung in the
trees, fluffy, like tender wool.  And overhead, in the night time, a
vast abyss of stars.

The mother and Aileen were in the throes of that two day ecstasy which
accompanied every change.  They spoke enthusiastically of the country.

"Wouldn't you like to live here all the time?" Simpson hazarded.  It
was one of the occasions when he came perilously near to unburdening
himself of the secret of his heart.

"What, dearie?" his wife asked.

"I was thinking we might come out and live sometime in the country
altogether."

"Sure, dearie," she agreed in that lazy manner of hers that avoided
discussion.  "I and Aileen saw some swell houses in Bronxville this
afternoon when we were coming home from the motion pictures."

He smiled to himself contentedly.  She was ready and eager he thought;
but she dreamed only possibilities where he dreamed miracles.  It was
to no stucco atrocity in a super suburb he would lead her, along no
whirring electric railroad past broad avenues of advertising
boards--but he would strike boldly at the rock and lead her to the
Happy Townland, the enchanted country--a land as foreign as Bokhara or
Cathay, where swallows would twitter in the eaves, and bees build their
cells droningly, and a gentle lowing would come over the hills from the
kine, and the tender grass show itself, and the herbs of the mountain
be gathered.


III

So there!  It was done.  He slapped his cheque book to, and gathered up
the papers the agent handed him.

"A fine bargain you've got, Mr. Simpson," the fat, bespectacled agent
told him, "spacious and commodious, with all modern improvements.  Have
you decided on a name for it yet?"

"I am going to call it the Happy Townland," Simpson answered, blushing
a little, as though he had decided on calling an eldest son Algernon.

"A queer name," the agent admitted.  "I should have thought of 'Sans
Soucis,' or 'Sunny Farm,' or 'Cosy Nook'..."

It was his at last, that low-lying, thatched farmhouse, with its broad
windows and deep doors, lying there like a windrow above the rolling
waves of meadow land, and behind it in May the orchard would blossom in
white and delicate pink.  Everything he had dreamed of he possessed
there.  Even the brook in the distance, with reeds and golden rod.  He
had said nothing of it to his wife, waiting to surprise her until the
sale was consummated, and he had done nothing towards furnishing or
stocking it.  To furnish it would be her labour of love, as to stock it
would be his.  He was glad of all those modern improvements for her
sake, though he could have done without them himself.  He was glad
there was a garage there, too.  She would not like to be without a
car--and then he could use it also, for a country club was only thirty
miles away, and again he thought with a sense of joyful fear, of the
outfitter's window and the shining golf clubs with haunting names,
drivers and cleeks, jiggers and sammies, mashies and niblicks.  From
thinking of these his mind turned to the stock he would have, the two
Guernsey cows--for some reason unknown to himself he preferred
Guernseys--he would churn their rich, warm milk into delicate, pale
butter.  A horse, too, a docile but sturdy horse, and he would have
dogs, two or three of them, one of those shaggy Sealyhams, a collie and
perhaps a terrier, and a spaniel would come in handy for shooting in
the autumn.  The farm part of it would be a bit of a facer at first but
he could hire a couple of men for that, and one of those fellows from
an agricultural college to supervise it.  Those agricultural men were
very efficient, they ran things like a science.  Of course he didn't
want it too efficient.  He didn't want money out of it--he had enough
of that.  He wanted leisure and repose and a free life, like that Roman
he had read of somewhere and sometime--what was his name?  Cincinnatus,
or something like that--who gave up his consulship, or some office or
another, to plough his farm by the Tiber's banks....


IV

They had passed through the shrill streets an hour ago; passed the mean
by-ways on the border land; passed the loathsome shacks that are the
barnacles of a city.  They had skimmed along the trim suburban villas
and through the region of the roadhouses.  And still they went on.

"I do wish you'd tell us where you are bringing us," his wife
complained peevishly.

"It ain't anything wonderful," the daughter commented.  "Just some idea
of Pa's to go and have lunch in a roadhouse or something: wake me up
when we get to Trenton."

But Simpson gave no word of satisfaction.  He sat back silent with the
smile on his lips that one has when keeping a secret for a child.  He
had bundled them into the car that Saturday morning with great ado, and
a great show of secrecy.  Jansen, the square-headed chauffeur, had
looked sullen when he mentioned Farmingdale.  Jansen could see no
reason why the old man shouldn't have taken a train, and left him free
to patronise his favourite pool room, or to organize a joy ride for his
friends and their girls to some place worth while, like Coney Island.

"Why in hell can't he take a train when he goes off on these rube
hikes? the old stiff," the chauffeur grumbled to himself.

It was a late June, and the sun had had as yet no time to dull the
greenness of the grass and hedges.  A shower had fallen early that
morning and a great clean air was out with a faint smell of clover.
Dogwood showed in white starry splashes, and here and there was the
delicate colouring of laurel, and all over the meadows were the bubbles
of dandelion.  They whipped by a piece of wooded country, where a
rivulet trickled by the road covered with watercress.  A rabbit sat
still until they were nearly upon him, and then flashed off like a
bullet.  A tortoise hissed viciously at them as they flew by.

"This country stuff does make you sleepy," his wife remarked.  As she
lay back on the cushioned seat, her eyes closed and her mouth opened,
her face expanded into a splotch of vacuous obesity.  Her motoring
bonnet, a horrible thing with a blue veil, fell awry on one side of her
head.  But Simpson regarded her with an expression of beatitude.  His
daughter looked about her at the rustic prospect with the bored hauteur
of the city bred.  To Simpson's lips rose the cryptic marching song of
his ambition.

  "The sun was laughing sweetly;
  The moon pulled at my rein,
  But the little fox he murmured,
  'Oh do not pull at his rein:
  He is riding to the townland'..."


"What's that, dearie?" his wife murmured sleepily.

"The next turn to the right," Simpson directed.  The chauffeur swore a
succession of silent damnations as vicious as any of a Finnish
necromancer's.

They swung down a side road that grew narrower as they went along.  A
broad belt of woods extended on either side, and as they passed by
there was the sound in the undergrowth of startled wild inhabitation.

They skirted a pool into which turtles dived with a series of pluds, as
of falling stones.  A stop before a gate, which Simpson opened with a
great key, and they swept up the drive to the house.

"Why don't you tell us where we are," his wife said querulously; "what
next?"

The car slowed down before the broad black door.  Another great key and
Simpson swung it open.  He stood on the threshold with a faintly
theatrical gesture.

"Come in," he said.  "Welcome!"

"Of all the things!" his wife grumbled.  His daughter followed
peevishly.

He disappeared for an instant, and a moment later he was opening
shutters, wrestling here and there with refractory latches, fussed,
hot, triumphant.  He passed from the great parlour to the dining-room,
running like a boy.  A quick flood of sunlight burst into the rooms.
It mounted and bathed the high ceilings; it swept into the great
fireplaces; it mellowed into a golden haze in the crevices and corners.

"That's the electric light," Simpson pointed to the chandeliers, as
though to an eighth wonder of the world.  He moved quickly into the
broad hall, and tapped inoffensive wainscotings on both sides.

"Gun lockers!" he whispered.  "They open with a secret spring."

His wife and daughter were gazing at each other with a curious surmise.
His wife looked troubled, as though at the first symptoms of dementia.
His daughter choked back a laugh.

"The kitchens are behind--we'll see them later," he hustled on.  "Come
upstairs.  I want to show you something."

He ran up the stairs before them, and they followed him conversing
slowly, the daughter breaking into a little titter.  On the landing
light broke in successive progression as more shutters were opened.

"Come ahead!" he called triumphantly.

They entered a wide many-windowed room.  He was standing looking over
the approach to the house.

"Just look at that," he told them, "just look at that."

In front of them was an immensity of gently rolling green, that
resolved itself, as they looked, into a stretch of lawn; into a faint
belt of woods; into a billowing of meadow land.  Far away the high road
wound in a broad white riband, with a solitary horse and cart dotting
it a quarter mile away.  A village dozed peacefully, shaded by great
trees, somewhat to their left.  Near by, a clear metallic trickle of a
brook.  In the distance, like a mirage, a train scuttled along, the
size of a child's toy.

Over everything hung a faint blue heat haze.  Four dappled cows lay
easily in a distant field, and sheep and lambs nibbled daintily in the
hills westward.  Somewhere overhead a rook cawed noisily.  From the
fields of clover came the insistent humming of bees and the sharper
drone of wasps from the invisible orchard.  To their ears, in even,
sonorous waves from the village came the smashing clang of a sledge on
a smithy anvil.  Marian Simpson's mouth closed tightly.  Her dark eyes
took on a vindictive light.

"Do you mean to tell me, William Simpson," she snapped, as a harsh
judge might address a prisoner, "that you brought us all this way to
look at an old empty house?"

"I did," he answered her smilingly.  He stuck his thumbs in the
armholes of his vest, and stood with his feet apart.  He had the air of
a conjurer about to spring a trick upon a hostile and incredulous
audience.

"You did," his wife's tones became dangerously cool, "and what did you
do that for?"

"Because we are going to live here."

She looked at him for an instant blankly, as if she had not understood
what he said; then a little anxiously as if afraid his reason had given
away, but by some means she disabused herself of this idea, and a
contemptuous anger showed on her face.

"Because we are going to live here?" she repeated after him.  She
turned to her daughter.  "What do you think of that?"

The confident expression on his face wavered to an expression of
extreme silliness.  The facial muscles retained their pose but the eyes
grew blank.  There was a feeling within him as if something had gripped
him with a giant, implacable force.

"We're going to live here," his wife laughed, "Oh, no! we ain't."

"I thought," he murmured feebly; "I thought you'd like it."

"Like it here," she responded with a vicious parry.  "In this rube
place; with nothing but rubes around!"

"Oh, Pa," his daughter observed in pained tones, "there's no smart
people here."

He didn't answer because he couldn't.  With a sort of mechanical
blindness he began fastening the shutters again.

"Come on now," his wife was saying.  "Us for the nearest town and
something to eat."

He followed them down the stairs and listened to their conversation
blankly.

"Sure he wouldn't like it," the mother was remarking.  "He only thinks
he would.  Look at Mr. Schumm, for instance.  Said good-bye to all of
us and bought a bungalow in Arverne.  Three months later he was back.
What did he say?  'Broadway's good enough for me,' he said.  'Never
again.'"

He stood out in the sunlight with them.  His wife looked
sympathetically at his drawn face.

"Sure, dearie," she said.  "I know how it is.  Every spring I feel the
same.  I want to go out and fly like a bird.  That Wanderlust, I guess.
But I tell you what we'll do.  We'll go up.  We'll go up to the
Adirondacks for a month.  I know of a swell hotel there.  Mrs. Millish
told me about--sun parlours and dances twice a week.  We'll give you
the country."

As they walked to the car, a sudden thought flashed on her mind.  She
turned on him thunder-stricken.

"William Simpson!" she demanded agonisedly, "you haven't gone and
bought this place, have you?"

"No," he lied bravely.  He even managed a wan smile.  "No!  No!  Oh no!"

"I knew you couldn't be such a fool as all that," she uttered in relief.

He stepped into the car, and sitting down, waiting for it to start, he
kept his head turned rigidly forward, for he was afraid, somehow, that,
were he to look back he would leap out and running towards the doors he
would cling to them, cry over them, refuse to be dragged from them, as
some evicted emigrant might clutch passionately at the lintels of his
ruined home.


V

Kennedy, saturnine, suspicious, cynical, walked from the inner office.
He paused as the door closed behind him.  "So he's going to the
Adirondacks for a month is he?" he muttered.  "Thought he said he was
going to live in the country"--a pause--"That's what they all say."  He
sauntered over to the window, and he smiled grimly as he thought of the
old man's worn and haggard look.  He had aged inexplicably over the
week-end.  "Sure he's going to the country," the clerk told himself.
"We'll give him a fine party there.  And he'll be the only one not
coming back."




VII

HAIL AND FAREWELL

Imagine a pleasant, rotund man of thirty.  Imagine him landing at the
Battery with fifty other Italian immigrants.  Imagine him dressed in a
black velvet coat, a hat that rose like a sugar cone, and baggy
corduroy breeches.  Imagine a red handkerchief about his neck, a
spreading smile upon his face, a fiddle under his arm, and there you
have Gian Battista Repetti, a poet of Genoa.

"If," said Gian Battista to his friends in the Gaffe di Nero,
"Cristofero Colombo discovered this America, then I, a Genoese destined
to be no less immortal than he, may sing of it.  Are we, men of Genoa,
to allow this nation discovered by our antique fellow-citizen, to be
fought for, sung of, and populated by Neapolitan cut-throats, Sicilian
brigands, and Calabrian mule-drivers?  Are we, I ask you?"

"No, by no means," said his friends, and they thumped the tables of the
Caffe until fifty glasses tinkled in harmony.

"Then I, Gian Battista the troubadour, I will go.  Ecco.  I go next
Tuesday."

They drank several chopines of Chianti to the venture.

The next Tuesday, having sold everything he had and borrowed all he
could, behold Gian Battista on the deck of a liner, pulling out into
the bay.  A score of the patrons of the Caffe di Nero stood on the pier
in a semi-circle, exactly as in the distance the towering blue
mountains were ranged.  As the steamer swirled away from the pier Gian
Battista broke into the strains of "Ah, mi Genova," a little thing he
had composed for the occasion.

The ten days following, Gian Battista believes, are described in some
lost fragment of the Inferno.

It was from Anton Todisco that Gian Battista got his idea of coming to
America--Anton, who had worked for years at a few soldi a day in a
macaroni factory, and then emigrated.  Anton had come back in burly
American clothes, an inconceivably small Derby hat, and buttoned shoes
with truculent toes.

Anton had worn a watch and chain that looked like chunks of bullion
recovered from a sunken galleon.  Anton had mysterious papers, his
citizenship papers he explained, that made him the equal of any peer of
the Old World and the superior of most, and that formed a bar to
molestation at the hands of the powers.

"Let them try to touch me," he would say, "just let them try, you
betcha."

At which the patrons of the Caffe di Nero were duly impressed.

The only bar to complete felicity in the new world, Anton admitted, was
the presence of Irlandeses,--Irishmen, huge brutal fellows, the evil
genii of America, who, Anton hinted, lured Italian boys into their
houses and ate them on their national festivals, such as St. Patrick's
Day.  But then, Anton said with a fine touch of philosophy, perfect
happiness does not obtain here below.  Life is not all beer and
skittles, all Chianti and polenta.

At which the company, a little cast down by the description of these
ogres, would nod sagely, clear their throats and drink a little from
their glasses.

But all this did not deter Gian Battista.  If a part of a poet's work
is to cheer the hearts of men, another and no less important function
is to fight the world's wars.  Wherefore Gian Battista landed at the
Battery not in the least afraid of but merely circumspect in the
presence of the huge Corkonian who twirled his night-stick
belligerently as he lolled in the front of the ferry.

There was no one to meet him.  His passport to the country was the
fifty dollars a frugal government requires of liberty-lovers as a token
of good faith.

He felt a little lost, something like a rabbit that had been set down
in a strange field.

In front of him, a hundred yards away, buildings rose like mountains;
people swarmed like ants.  There was a melody of strange sounds.
Automobiles sped onward, their horns grunting raucously.  Street cars
warned pedestrians of imminent death with imperative brazen clangs.
Somewhere there was the loud metallic chatter of a giant drill.

"In the name of God," said Gian Battista, "forward, company!"  For he
had been in the Carabineers and had fought the Turks in Tripoli.

He stopped when he had gone a hundred yards.  A blue plate on a post
attracted him.  He spelled out the white letters.

"Ah, il Broadway!" he exclaimed delightedly.

Now he was on familiar ground, for Anton had told him of Broadway and
Fifth Avenue and the Bronx.  Fifty-nine streets north of this, Anton
had said, there was a statue of Christopher Columbus and a great plaza
named for him.  He would go there first of all and pay his respects as
Napoleon might have paid his respects to a monument of Caesar.  As a
Genoese, it was his duty.

The walk along the street was somewhat chilling.  There was no caffe
outside of which to sit and discuss the ministry, a pleasant occupation
with a flask of Chianti.  No one even looked at him.  Men tore past
with their jaws set.  Women scurried along with their eyes fixed on
points far ahead.  There was no cheery "Come sta'."  There was no
sidelong or backward glance of black velvety eyes to set the heart
fluttering and the mind weaving canzoni.  Occasionally a man stopped to
remove his straw hat and mop his forehead.  Then he dashed on again.
Gian Battista felt oppressed.

Opposite City Hall a main was being dug.  Shovelfuls of brown clay
impelled by invisible hands flashed over the edge of the hole.  Gian
Battista went over to investigate.  In the depths he caught glimpses of
swarthy Italian faces.

"_Buon giorno, signori_," he chanted.  "_Ohe, buon giorno!_"

Nobody looked up.

"_Buon giorno_," he repeated more slowly.

A tousled head thrust itself up at the end.

"Nuttin' doin'," it said.  "Nuttin' doin'."

Gian Battista looked at it dully.

"Nuttin' doin'," it said again, "beat it."

Gian Battista moved off.  He didn't understand what was said, but he
resented the tone.

At Bleeker street he was hailed loudly.

"Shine?" a voice inquired.

Then it exploded into a laugh.

Gian Battista looked around.  A tubby Sicilian bootblack was writhing
with amusement.  He pointed to the red handkerchief around Gian
Battista's neck, then at his fiddle, then at his hat.  After that he
slapped his fat knees, and doubled up, and shot off chuckles like a
machine gun.  A sardonic Neapolitan leaned against the bootblack's
chair and regarded the poet with a superior and insulting smile.

At last it dawned on Gian Battista that they were laughing at him.  He
drew himself up to his five feet four, put his hand on his hip and
scowled at them.

"Bah!" he spat, and moved on.

Behind him he could hear the loud merriment of the Sicilian.  The
Neapolitan shouted "figlio di can," after him.

Gian Battista was becoming angry.  The reverent state of mind he had
cultivated for the first sight of the Genoese mariner's monument was
passing.  But after all, he thought, these are baser folk unable to
appreciate a poet, people who never heard anything but a hurdy-gurdy in
their sordid lives.  Was he, Repetti, to be annoyed by them?

As he passed along an occasional Irish policeman eyed him with morose
suspicion.

At Twenty-third Street he paused.  He stood still at the bow of the
Flatiron.  The mid-day rush was on.  Stenographers dodged under the
bonnets of Fifth Avenue 'buses.  Green trolley cars wormed past each
other through a maze of rails.

A sudden thought struck him.  It was here he would begin his adventure.
He put his hat on the ground and made an inviting little well for
contributions.  He put his fiddle to his shoulder and drew the bow
across the strings.

An officer stalked slowly toward him.  Gian Battista looked.  One of
the Irishers? ... Oh, joy, the face was Italian, although unfortunately
Neapolitan.

"Eh, oh, Garibaldine!" hailed Gian Battista.

"Don't you know there's no panhandling around here, don't you?"

Gian Battista looked up in amazement.

"Do you want to get pinched, you cock-eyed Dago?"  Gian Battista got a
jab in the ribs.  "Get a move on.  Your feet are showing."

But Gian Battista had gone.  All that remained of him was a greenish
felt hat on the pavement, wrong end up.

An hour later he arrived at the steamship office, and demanded a ticket
to Genoa.  As the clerk was getting it, he began an inarticulate tirade
against Christopher Columbus, which a telegraph messenger silently
enjoyed.

"I have spent a great deal of money," thought Gian Battista standing at
the bow of a steamer as it pulled away from the pier that afternoon.
"But," he added, "it would have taken nearly as much to bury me, and,
thank God!  I am still alive."

A little ring of returning immigrants stared at him in frank wonder.

He pushed his left foot forward and threw back his shoulders.

"Ai nostri monti," he warbled.

The grey-haired pilot on the bridge looked down.  "Mr. Bates," he said
to the third officer, a shining exhibit in brass and blue.  "Do me a
favour?"

"Surely, Mr. Pilot."

"Take a marlinspike and go down and kill that wop."

The third officer laughed.

"His first visit home in fifteen years, I suppose.  Seems glad to get
back, poor devil."




VIII

GREEN ISLE

The squat, grey-bearded chief mate leaned across the table of the hotel
sitting-room.  There was in his eyes the look of a pleading dog.

"Every stitch of sail in her is as good as the day it came from the
loft, and all she wants is a few weeks in dry dock.  Get aboard her,
sir, and warp her out.  Once off Ambrose Light and your troubles will
drop from you like a snake's old skin.  Look, sir," he pulled out a
frayed memorandum-book and thumbed the pages.  "I got in touch with
most of the old crew, Ryan the boatswain, and John Fay the carpenter,
and a lot of others.  Reisenberg, the second, is in port, too, and
would be only too glad to come.  Once off Sandy Hook, sir----"

The young-old, hatchet-faced, scientist-mariner shook his head.

"It's very decent of you, Matthison, but----"

"It's a year since you've been to sea, sir; things are happening every
minute.  The Prince of Monaco's been making soundings off Cape Verde,
following up your work on tidal waves, that's bringing in light on
volcanic eruptions every month.  Young Jobb has his divers off Yucatan,
and swears he has found the lost Atlantis.  You could beat them all at
their own game."  The mate's face ventured a sort of grin.  "And
there's 'Green Isle' you've never yet found."

Renous rose and went across to the hotel window.  Beneath him, fourteen
storeys below, he could see Broadway and Forty-second Street, a narrow
caon, swarming, now the Saturday matinee was over, with human beings
that looked like ants, and yet, to his disordered imagination, were
less than the least vermin that were ever parasites on a body.  Things
with courage smaller than a jackal's, with souls meaner than the souls
of rooting swine.  There, from the blind man at the Subway kiosk, they
were buying the papers that told every revolting detail of his wife's
death in the Long Island roadhouse, gloating over the history of brandy
and cocaine and reckless lechery with actors of the meaner sort, while
he, poor fool, was giving his addresses on pelagology before learned
institutions!  Even now they were reciting his name and honours,
Gilbert Renous, Doctor of Science, Fellow of the Royal Geographical
Society, Knight Commander of the Bath, Holder of the Elephant of
Denmark, of the Alfonso and Isabella of Spain, of France's Legion of
Honour.  His wife shamefully dead!  Even now sob-sisters, as the
cynical public called them, were pointing a moral to adorn the tale....

"I heard a Portuguese sailor talk about it, not a week ago, sir, _Ilha
Verde_ he called it.  And he believed in it as firmly as he believed in
heaven."

Renous turned from the window to the mate.  He wished he could thank
the man.  The old mariner knew his former commander was in trouble and
had come to try and wean him from it.  He had said nothing of the death
of Renous' wife.  He had mentioned only the _Marco Polo_, lying now at
Tebo's dockyard, and urged, and urged, and urged.

He ached, as he stood there, for the power to be away from this welter
of sordid emotion and detail, but since the dreadful news had reached
him through the city room of a newspaper, he had not felt the power to
move, to act in any way.  He wanted the sea he loved, the mighty green
cleanliness of it----

"You remember the evenings on the poop, sir?" the mate followed up what
he thought was an advantage.  "The trade winds blowing steady and you
speaking of 'Green Isle'----"

It seemed to him that all through his life those two words had power to
conjure him.  He remembered, when at school, reading, in an
encyclopedia, of Atlantis, the lost continent sunk by the gods.  And in
his studies, at the Naval Academy, he had seen an old chart of the
thirteenth century, the islands of _Hy Brasil_--in the map Andreas
Blanco made.  And there was Auroras, of which the whalers told.  Long
before he had bought and fitted out the _Marco Polo_ for deep-sea
exploration there was always at the back of his mind the dream of
_L'le Verte_, as the French sailors called it--a spacious island of
golden sands and sparkling waters, with trees green and thick as grass
over it, and a multitude of birds in the branches, melodious,
vari-coloured.  "There life is easiest unto men," he would quote old
Proelus.  And in due course the myth which had charmed St. Brendan and
Marco Polo became in his existence a sort of haven of thought to which
he would retire in time of stress.

He never knew whether he quite disbelieved it, and took it in its
rightful sense of the ideal state and country which all hearts covet,
for the sea breeds a gentle mania in those whose occasions are on its
ripe bosom.  They are hard-headed, those sailing men, and will admit
nothing, after the manner of a good lawyer, but down in their hearts
there is a not faint belief in the existence of the Kraken; in the
deadly tenacity of Sargasso Sea.  At eventime, on watch, they can
imagine the golden-waved horses of Neptune against the sunset, and the
dolphins of Amphitrite drawing her silver shell, for the ocean is of
great depth and many moods and an infinity of monsters are in it; so
who may tell?

"Longitude 63.00 and latitude 50.20, sir, you used to say----"

"A manuscript in Trinity College gives it that," Renous laughed.  And
at the thought of that exactness there came into his mind the memory of
the days--oh, it must be ten years now, and she a girl of
sixteen!--when he talked about Green Isle with Inga Laurviak, his young
manhood's sweetheart.  He could remember her ice-blue Norse eyes light
with excitement as he spoke of the Welsh myth of the green meadows in
the Irish Sea, whither Merlin and his twelve companions sailed to find
the secrets of dead Druids, and returned having found it not.

"But one day," he laughed, "I am going to look for the Green Isle.
Perhaps, over the horizon----"

"You mustn't find it without me," he could remember her eager features,
splendid as a Scandinavian queen is.  "Promise me, Gilbert, that you
will not find it without me!"

A pang of conscience smote him, for in his own trouble he had not
thought of hers.  Only Monday he had seen in the papers the news of the
death of her husband, Colin Martin, the mural painter, whom he had
never known.  The country mourned him, so the obituaries went, and she,
poor girl! must be mourning him, too.  A great painter and a great man.
He must forget his own filthy affair, and write her a letter, condoling
with her in the dignity of her grief.

"What shall it be, sir?" Matthison broke in.  "Shall we up topsails and
down the bay?  I've got my eye on a diver or two."

There was important work he could do--he knew that.  Work of value to
the world--the matter of the re-charting and re-exploration of Sargasso
Sea.  But that was not what was in his mind, but the queer myth of
Green Isle.  A craving for ideals brought on, no doubt, by this
tragedy.  Perhaps, across the horizon, in the wake of the sun----

From the street below, high, tremulous, as in the nave of a cathedral,
came the shrill hunting cry of a newsboy:

"Extra!  Extra!  Hold Two in Renous' Affair!  Extra!  Extra!"

He shivered and winced.  The splendid tropic vision with its golden
sands and sparkling waters, with its magnificent forestry, to which
singing birds clung like swarming bees, was wiped from his mind as a
slate is wiped clean by a wet sponge.

"What's the use?" his heart was crying in dumb agony.  Outwardly he
smiled.  "No, Matthison, old comrade!" he shook his head.  "Those days
are gone!"


In the newspaper accounts of that ghastly thing known as the Renous'
affair, you will read of Renous' birth in Vermont; of his years in the
Naval Academy and his resignation of his commission to take up
exploring of the deep sea.  There is much in them inaccurate, but they
are in the main true, as facts go.  They lack colour.  They describe
the _Marco Polo_ as a sailing ship, failing to give the queer
personality of the barquentine he bought from the Prince of
Lichtenstein; a dream of a vessel, with her full-rigged foremast and
her two trig schooner sails; hull of steel, and remainder of wood made
sacred and mellow by time; decks white and hollowed from holy-stoning.
A thing Aylward might have painted; she stood against the
sky--wire-rigging and white cloud of sail; the edge of her copper
sheathing glistening against the blue water-line; sweeping black line
above that, and then grey with shining brass ports, all topped by a
scarlet rail.  She was a bonnie ship, the _Marco Polo_, so bonnie even
that the two great drums for sea-sounding on either side, with their
miles of piano wire, could not spoil her.  The bonniest thing afloat,
Renous used to say, and surely he ought to know, whose home had been
the sea for ten long years.

Because the sea was in his blood--his grandfather had built clipper
ships in Salem days, and his father had died in a tidal wave at Samoa
when the three American cruisers were caught on the treacherous
shore--because the sea was in his blood, young Renous had gone to it as
a man to his inheritance.  It was as natural for him to go to Annapolis
as another man to go to Harvard, or Princeton, or Yale.

It was on his holidays in Vermont that he first met Inga Laurviak,
summering there with Gustav Laurviak, Ambassador of Sweden--a very fine
old man, with whiskers and spectacles, very like the portraits of
Henrik Ibsen.  To her he told his ambitions of the sea, stammering, as
a boy will.  Her Norse eyes shone; and her body, firm and
full-breasted, strong-haunched, with great braids of hair to her knees,
quivered, like a race horse, at a fine ambition.

"But why the Navy?" she asked.  "Why patrol up and down the seas;
sailing, waiting, eternally awaiting war, and breaking your heart if it
doesn't come to justify your profession?  You have money enough.  Why
don't you go out yourself; fit out your own ship, as the Prince of
Monaco did, and tell us about the surface of the ocean, and the things
that are in it, and the earth that is beneath it?"

And then he told her of Green Isle----

All this was very long ago--ten years' time--and many men were dead
since then and many born, and countries had waged battles against each
other, and new stars came into the sky and old ones unaccountably
disappeared.  But since then, up and down the world, Renous had gone on
his mission, filled with scientific ardour he thought--and yet at
nights in the waist of the ship going southward, when the stars of
first magnitude appeared, with the white cloud of sail between him and
the stars, he could never cease dreaming of Inga Laurviak--those days,
when they had been together and talked of the sea, and of going up and
down it as through a dim unknown forest, and of Green Isle.  She would
come back to his thoughts constantly and he would ponder over the
queerness of things, how an enthusiasm of hers had set him on the
career that made his name.  Where was she now? he would ponder, as he
watched the Southern Crosses, the False Cross and the True, rise dimly
southward.  Married, most likely!  Ah, well--women will!

He turned up in capitals time after time, achieving great fame, as, for
instance, when he proved there was no difference in level between the
Pacific and the Atlantic on either side of the Panama Canal.  For that
the International Council for the Study of the Sea honoured him, and he
was asked to lecture to the common people about the wonders of the
ocean.

"Of course," the university faculties apologized, "there isn't much to
be said.  Only literature can fully tell of the beauties----"

"Isn't there?" grinned Renous.  And he impishly began to paint the
ocean for the multitude until it was plain as a landscape, and gave
them facts which made them gape; telling them, for instance, that the
Baltic Sea was as shallow as thirty fathoms and the Persian Gulf as
fourteen, while the mean depth of the Pacific was 2,240; he told them
smilingly that the sea holds in solution 6,700 times as much silver as
was taken from all the world's mines from the time Columbus came to
America seeking China until 1902.

"And the way to get it out?" the Rosenheim people approached.  "Listen,
Commander.  We got a proposition to make you----"

"You go to the devil!" Renous roared.  "I've got respect for the sea!"

The public crowded to him, listening eagerly, as it would have to
_Marco Polo_, coming back myth-laden from Cathay.  He told it of the
whirlpool of Charybdis, which is now Galoforo.  He told it of mysteries
he had seen on the waters, as when the sea turned milk-white for days
as he sailed between Yokohama and Hongkong.  "And that I cannot
explain," he added simply.

A newspaper man once indulged in a facetious remark.

"Do you believe in the sea-serpent?"

"I do," Renous told him, "because I've seen it."

"But there isn't such a thing!"

"Oh, Lord!  _Eppur si muove_!  But the damned earth does move, as
Galileo said.  Now, look here."

He told them of seeing in shallow water, on a bright day, in the Gulf
of Mexico, a reptile on the sea-floor, one hundred and sixty feet long,
with the head of a serpent, and a body scaled like a crocodile,
ring-striped, with four flappers such as turtles have.  With his
affidavit went the affidavits of the crew, of Sir John Reading, the
geologist, who was with him, and of Priam Beckett, of the Peabody
Institute.  The world was electrified.

"What you have seen is very interesting," the officials of a certain
Technological Institute informed him.  "The animal is evidently the
Enaliosaurus, extinct for over a million years----"

"What I have seen is the sea-serpent," Renous snapped with one of his
rare exhibitions of temper.  "And hundreds of others have seen it, only
they fear being laughed at if they mention it.  There is a skipper in
Brazil who saw the thing, or one of them, twine itself about a schooner
and suck it down...."  His hearers were grey with terror.

It was about this time, I think, that he met and wedded Estelle Rogers,
that little beauty who made such a sensation the year she came out.  He
met her at a dinner at Clarke the sugar man's.  She seemed such an
exotic thing, so small, so dark, so perfect, that he could not keep his
eyes from her.  As for her, she looked tragically, despairingly at the
lank, powerful explorer for whom the mysterious and fearful sea had no
terrors.  It was as though she were a child in the dark, appealing to a
grown-up for aid.

"Who is that little dark beauty?" Renous asked his host.

"A daughter of Judge Rogers," Clarke, the smooth, blond man of the
world smiled a little uneasily.  "Leave her alone," he laughed.

It must have been to her beauty Clarke alluded, Renous thought, fearful
of his guest's heart.  But leave her alone he did not.  He met her
father, the sinister, electrocuting judge.  Her mother he did not meet.
She was in a sanatorium, Renous was told, hopelessly insane.  A great
pity arose in him for the lonely child, for though she was twenty-one
there was much of the child in her.

"It must have been very lonely for you."  His great, gentle way gave
him the right somehow to probe to the heart.

"It was," she admitted.

"I know what loneliness is," he said.  "On the sea..."

Had he been a man of the world--instead of a simple dweller on the
deep, uncomplex-minded and strong and fearless as Triton, he might have
understood hints and shrugs and carefully careless remarks dropped to
him at Piping Rock and Ormond Beach in the year he wooed her.  He might
have understood when Grant, the neurologist, explained to him that
unscrupulous nurses occasionally gave children opium preparations to
quiet them and that the habit sometimes clung through life.  That was
one explanation, Grant averred.  It might also be explained through
prenatal influence; but the fact remained that there were many young
society women hopeless drug addicts.  "Do you see?" added Grant lamely.

"New York, from all you say of it, is a damned rotten place," was all
Renous mentioned in his simplicity.  A shrewd man would have said,
"What exactly do you mean?  Why do you tell me that?"  But Renous was
not shrewd.

Her father looked at him queerly when he asked for her hand; shuffled;
hawed; granted the request with a strange heartiness.

"Estelle is a strange girl in many ways," the old unmentionable, who
had driven his wife mad, clasped his hands unctuously, "but she is
sound at the core, sir; sound at the core!"

"I can't see any strangeness in her," thought Renous.  All he could see
was that piquant, pleading face; with the mouth a trifle too red, too
full; the colour somehow pallid; the eyes like dark grapes; the purple
hair.  Strange that he, with all the mysticism that the sea gives,
could not sense that queer intangible doom that seemed to hang about
her....  A woman with disaster in her eyes.

They were married, and a strange dramatic pair they made--he, bronzed
from the salt air, nearly white haired, broad and spare in the
shoulders, waisted like a woman; she, small, perfectly made, with a
face that Zuloaga should have painted.  There was a year's lecturing
before him, and the _Marco Polo_ was at Tebo's yacht-yard; the crew
dispersed.  For that year she accompanied him, hither and thither, from
city to city.  He was the great lion of science--she the social magnet,
driven to dancing, to excitement, to frenzy nearly, as by some strange
fury.  At times she would seem near death from exhaustion and again her
eyes would sparkle and by some miracle her frame would fill with
electric energy.

"You're killing yourself, Estelle," he would tell her gently.  "You're
all nerves.  This dancing will break you."  He would think for a while.
"When this lecture business is over, I'll get out the _Marco Polo_, and
take you on a long trip."

"Listen," she would creep into his arms and lean against him with a
fierce intensiveness.  "Listen, Gilbert," she would whisper.  "Never
let me go.  Promise me, you will never let me go!"

"Heart, I shall never let you go!" he would tell her, aghast at the
sudden tears in her eyes.

He wanted to take her on a couple of voyages with him and then buy a
great house in the country, on Staten Island, perhaps, where the ships
come home.  And the _Marco Polo_ would go to sea, hunting down some new
mystery of the ocean, to return with a cargo of facts for men of
science to assort and examine.  The years would slip by peacefully
until they were old; he happy in his work; she in her house, with
something of the strength of a castle in it, standing in its own wide
grounds.  And about her would be seven sons, some fair as he was, and
some exotically dark like herself.  And time and time again they would
slip off in the fairy barquentine....

"Listen, Estelle," he would try to tell her, "there's a country which
mariners have hoped to discover since men first put to sea in ships.  A
country which some say is off Africa, and some off Brazil, and some say
it appears and disappears every thousand years...."

But try as he would he could not put words to it.  For something had
gone awry with his dreams.  There was something between his soul and
the landfall of Green Isle, a strange opacity; a vague and terrible
veil; threatening, ruddy weather, which somehow portended doom....

She would not go with him on his first voyage after they were married.
"I would be in the way," she objected; and never met his eye.  "It
would be so lonely," she pleaded afterward, "and all my life, Gilbert,
I've been spoiled.  Let me stay."  He granted that, for he looked on
women, as a simple man will, as creatures too fragile for anything but
luxury.  So he put her in a suite in a hotel on Fifth Avenue.  And the
_Marco Polo_ sailed away.

"Oh, I wish I were going with you," she said fiercely, as the tugboat
waited to take her ashore.

"Come then," he said.  "Come as you are."

"I can't.  I can't."  There was a terror in her voice.  And she went
into the tugboat lightly, and away from his eyes.

He was savage with himself as he ploughed southward, for into his head
there would persist in coming the thought of Inga Laurviak, the blond
sea-queen with the eyes that were blue as ice.  It was unfaithfulness,
he told himself viciously; and yet it would come.  As he stood abaft
the mizzen shrouds with the water lapping, slapping at the bows, and
the deep gurgle at the wake behind, he would sense as though she were
beside him, with her strong silence and warm, pulsing spirit, a figure
from a Norse mythology, watching the ever-changing colour and mood of
the sea, listening to the harsh music of the cordage, and dreaming with
him that some day, perhaps, there would arise southward the dim verdure
of Green Isle....  He would imagine that of Inga.  He could see her,
too, in his home by the sea, rearing sons all of whom would one day be
seamen.  And that he could never dream of Estelle, the little exotic
with the purple eyes.  Her could he only vision coming from her
dressmaker's, or under her maid's hands; having tea at the Ritz or
dancing at the Colony Club.  She always seemed an expensive photograph
in a society periodical, not a man's mate and the mother of men!

"Damn it!" he swore.  "What am I thinking about at all?  Poor kid!"

There was a change in his wife when he returned.  He could not but
notice it.  She no longer went to her old haunts for amusement.  She
seemed to have dropped Fifth Avenue and chosen, in its place, Broadway.
She was uncomfortable at the activities of her social set.

"They're all such hypocrites and bores!" she told her husband with a
note of viciousness.

She seemed also to have acquired a new circle of friends--another whose
speciality was the upper under-world; a professional dancer of ballroom
steps whose reputation was international; a person reputed to be a
black magician, a fat, sinister man; a half-dozen members of dubious
foreign nobility, Russian, Roumanian, and the like--a very strange
assortment!

"Queer bunch you seem to have collected, Estelle," Renous laughed.

"Don't be so narrow-minded, Gilbert."  She was petulant.  "They're
interesting--not like the bores at the Union League!"

They did not seem comfortable in his presence, that macabre
agglomeration.  No more did she.  There was also, about the hotel, an
air of furtiveness, on the part of desk officials, bell-boys and the
like, as though some secret were kept from him and shared with her--a
leering thing.

He went on a lecture tour from coast to coast, a popular series,
intended to make the public love what he loved--the sea.  She
accompanied him, but was restless every instant.  She seemed to want to
get away.  He was puzzled, hurt....

"The worst thing about this drug habit," Grant, the great neurologist,
told him on his return, "is the company it leads its slaves into.
There is a tendency among addicts to hold orgies in parties, as it
were.  And at those parties there are scenes, you understand, under the
influence of the drug, of which I spare even men of the world
details----"

"Poor Grant!" Renous thought.  "He has been treating these unfortunates
until he has gone mad on the subject, and can speak of nothing else."
A hilarious idea occurred to him.  "I wonder if he thinks I can be
taking drugs?"

"You exaggerate, man," he told his friend.  "Heigho!  Getting late.  I
must be off!"

"You poor fool!" said Grant's eyes.

"Listen, dear girl," Renous told his wife seriously, "I'm going off to
Europe to give an account of that monsoon discovery at six
universities, and I want you to come with me.  You're peaked.  You're
white.  You need a trip.  And when we come back I'll put everything
aside for years and we'll buy a big house on a green hill----"

She patted his big brown hands.

"Now, peaches, you go off without me, and tell them how deep the sea
is, and how wet it is, and come right back.  And we'll settle down in
the big house on the green hill, away..."  She grew hysterical for a
moment--"away, away from New York, far away!"

Three months he spent in Europe alone, and then returned on the
_Rochambeau_, cancelling without warning his reservation on a smaller,
slower boat.  He wanted to take her by surprise, to know, by her
actions on seeing him, whether she really cared any more--a thing he
doubted.  He walked into the lobby of his hotel.

"Mrs. Renous is not in," the clerk on duty told him with a white,
scared face.  "A newspaper has been inquiring about something, too," he
told Renous.  "I think it's important."

He called up Park Row.  "What the devil is it?" he asked savagely.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Renous," the answer came, "but your wife's had an
accident ... yes, a bad one.  Fatal, I'm sorry to say ... under unusual
circumstances ... Evidently been victimized ... Is there anything you
would care to say?"

What had happened in those two days he could hardly tell.  He
remembered his friend Grant hurrying helter-skelter to the hotel; his
removal to another place; disillusion, agony, shame, the fear of
madness; then Matthison...

He drew a sheet of paper toward him:


"Dear Inga Martin," he wrote.  "I want you to know how utterly sorry I
am for you in the loss of your husband, and how I wish I could say
something that would be of help to you in the grief you are feeling--"
not a word through all of it of himself or his own tragedy.  "I am
leaving on a long exploration trip immediately," he added in a manner
of explaining why he would never call on her to offer condolence in
person.  He hesitated how to sign the set phrase.  "Yours truly?"
"Yours sincerely?"  Those words seem so pointless.  "I am dreadfully
sorry, Inga!" he ended it, "G. Renous."


He wished he hadn't come to see her, he told himself as he walked up
the brownstone steps in Fifty-seventh Street--but what could he have
done?  Inga's note was such a clear call.  "I must see you.  I cannot
very well go to your hotel to talk.  Gilbert, please come."

They stood facing each other across the room, and looking at each other
while, seemingly, minutes passed.  Everything seemed to drop from them,
clothes, bodies, room and all, and they stood looking at each other,
soul-naked, as though they were dead.

"You never found Green Isle, Gilbert?" her voice came richly to him.

"No!"

She came toward him and took his hands.  As she looked at him great
tears coursed down her cheeks, like pearls.

"Poor Gilbert!"  There was infinite compassion in her tones.

"I didn't come here, Inga, to talk about my affairs, but to sympathize
with you in your loss----"

"Poor Gilbert!" she repeated, but there was a new tone in her voice,
and there was a smile of agonized irony on her lips.  He thought she
was about to be hysterical.

"What is it, Inga?"

"Sit down."  She motioned him to a couch and took a chair herself, a
little in the shade, so that her face was dim to him.  "I know you are
going away somewhere heartbroken, with your life wrecked.  And you are
very simple, Gilbert, always on the sea.  You don't know that everyone
has tragedy somewhere, gentle and simple, either hidden or known.  I
want to tell you something.  I want it to make you remember that these
things are incidents.  Everyone you meet, Gilbert, has something."  Her
tones were very restrained, very even.

"When you were down in the Malay Peninsula I married Colin Martin.
I'll not say why.  I just married.  Just as you did.  That's all."  For
an instant her voice grew staccato, hurried.  "He was a very handsome,
devilish man, dark as Apollyon--you have seen pictures in his
obituaries--and a great genius.  He was in love with me for a while, a
month perhaps.  Contrast, you see.  And he wanted my money.  He was
poor."

She raised her head suddenly and looked at him.  He could see her face
dimly, her eyes shining at him, impressing him with her history.

"Gilbert," her voice had uncontrolled tears in it, "think of six years,
six years of a woman's life, without harmony, without love, without
children, life grown hideous strangely, through no fault of hers.
Think of living with a person in the same house, who, you know, has
done you the most terrible injury in the world, and you can say nothing
to him because of your pride.  But alone, alone all the time, you think
of death, praying for it to come, by accident; by illness; somehow.
And your continual temptation is to end it yourself, by an overdose of
sleeping draught, by carelessness with a gas-jet,--and you shiver
suddenly at the cowardice you were about to commit, and you set your
shoulders, and you smile ghastly, and you struggle on."

"God, why didn't I know?"  Renous was frantic.

"Gilbert, yours hasn't been the only tragedy in the world.  Yours has
been short and quick.  Mine was six years' Gethsemane.  Gilbert, when a
peasant girl is betrayed, she can leave the scene of her tragedy, and
time will make her forget the man, and will heal her.  But what will
time do for a woman like me, who cannot leave the scene, and before
whose eyes the man always is, loathsome, terrible.  A peasant girl,
Gilbert, is betrayed for love, but I, Gilbert, Colin Martin betrayed me
for money."

"Why didn't you leave him?" Renous' voice was harsh, cracked.

"You see, I couldn't, Gilbert.  My father died nearly a year ago, and
he was Ambassador of Sweden.  For the sake of my nation I could not
afford scandal.  I had to stay in the road I had hewn for myself--and
all the time, Gilbert, God forgive me!--I was thinking of you hunting
for Green Isle--" a queer husky note came into her rich voice, as of
unshed tears.  "You were married, and I could picture you and your wife
going up and down the world in the _Marco Polo_, the dolphins playing
at the bows, and a strange dream in your eyes.  And I had told you, the
first, to fit out your boat and go search it."  Her words came rapidly
now, as though she were about to cry, "and I was jealous, Gilbert,
jealous----"

"And after your father died, what then?"

"Then it was bad, Gilbert," there could no longer be kept from her
voice the muted sobbing.  "I was broken.  I could do nothing.  I
couldn't go away.  I couldn't even kill myself.  And there was
something queer in Colin's eyes, something that terrified me.  He was
as polite, as cold, as distant, as ever.  But there was something in
his eyes.  I found out when he was dead, Gilbert, what it was--" her
head dropped in shame--"he was planning to divorce me.  He had hired
detectives and an actress who would impersonate me."  Her tones were
hardly above a whisper now, "She was going with a man, somewhere, and
they were going to swear it was I----"

"Why didn't somebody kill him?"  Renous was white with rage.  "Why, in
God's name, didn't somebody kill him?"

"You know how he died, Gilbert," Inga's voice grew hushed with awe.
"You know how he died?  He was out in his car toward Westchester one
day when a storm came up, a storm hardly bigger than a handkerchief.  A
single bolt of lightning hit him, and took him from the face of the
earth.  I think that even God's mercy was through with Colin Martin,
and He just struck!"

She rose unsteadily to her feet, and gave a laugh that was half a cry.

"So you see there is a great deal of trouble in the world, not only for
you, Gilbert, but for all of us...."


He had come on deck unnoticed, and as he stood abaft the mainshrouds,
leaning over the handrail, he could see the rim of the sun showing in
the east.  A few minutes, he knew, and it would shoot up like a
pyrotechnic display.  A fine breeze was blowing northward, bellying the
close hauled sails.  He glanced about his boat, noting everything, from
the drowsy man at the wheel to the white combing of surf at the bows,
where the flying fishes skimmed the waves in sudden terror.  Above his
head he could hear the mewing of gulls and the gurgle of the wake
behind.

"Luff her a bit," he could hear the second mate direct the helmsman.
"She'll stand it."

His wife had come on deck unknown to him, and leaning against the
mizzen-mast she watched him looking eastward.  The six days since they
had left New York had put colour into her cheeks, and taken the shadows
from about her eyes.  There was a smile on her lips as she stood there
with the dawn breeze about her, in her white skirt and sweater, with
her ruddy hair braided thickly about her head like a helmet of gold.  A
wave slapped the _Marco Polo_ on the bows and shot spray over staysails
and jibs.

"Ease her when she pitches!" the navigator growled to the man at the
wheel.

She moved toward him from the mizzen-mast to the starboard rail, while
he stood looking into the east.  There was in her lips and her eyes a
great radiance...

"What are you looking for, Gilbert?" she asked.  One would have said
she was about to tease him.  "Green Isle?"

"No!" he answered her.  His arm drew her close to the rail as the sun
shot high above the water-line.  "Not any more!" he told her.  "No!"




IX

A SISTER OF SHINING SWORDS

She was looking at a piece of plate, fragile as silk, where the symbols
of the one-winged birds and the tree with interwoven boughs, the
Chinese symbols of love, were painted with the lightness of a butterfly
touching a flower.  All about her, in the shop that was Li Sin's, the
light chatter of Fifth Avenue chirped through the sombre, majestic
store like the sleepy chorus of birds at dawn.  Down in the front of
the curio treasure house a trio of actresses were prattling of the
latest play.  A rotund judge of the Supreme Court was examining a
carpet with a more fixed glance than he ever used at the minutes of a
case.  A Roman Catholic priest was dreaming over a cross of gold and
rubies, treasure from Macao, where the sons of Portugal hold their
outposts against the Golden Hordes.  A sedate curator of a museum, a
thin, white-faced man with a threadbare overcoat and a straggling black
beard, was struggling against the temptation to steal a tiny vase.
Again Jeannette Baird looked at the plate with its mystic romantic
symbols.  A queer flush ran over her face and a smile--the smile of
brides--hovered in her eyes and lips for an instant.

Li Sin, square-faced, high-cheeked, modest in brown tweeds, was smiling
also.  She flushed again as she caught his eye.  She put the plate
down, and looked him squarely in the face.

"I am going to be married," she said.

Li Sin nodded.  There was as much happiness in his face as though he
had unearthed an unknown lyric of Po-Chin's.

"To Captain Patrick Burgoyne," he suggested.

"Yes, to Patrick Burgoyne," she answered.  The Manchu was smiling
broader than ever.  She caught her breath and regarded him fixedly.
She had the air of a mother who had discovered a child in the act of an
innocuous prank.

"It was you who introduced Patrick Burgoyne to me."

"It was," Li Sin confessed.

"Li Sin," she said, blushing furiously, half laughing, a soft look in
her eyes as though in an instant a veil of tears might come--"Li Sin, I
believe you are nothing but a scheming old matchmaker!"


Now, when Peter de Cuyler Baird, through a sense of righteousness and
no sense of politics, had supported by his wealth the programmes of
three successive party administrations, the party heads, in grateful
remembrance, decided that some honour must be shown him.

A tall, spare man, with fair hair and fair moustache, very much on the
received conception of an English cavalry officer--nothing missing but
the monocle; a minor poet of distinct imagination but of inability of
execution, a dreamer, it was difficult to find exactly what to do for
him.  A place in the Cabinet was impossible.  He seemed to fit into no
distinct committee of public works.

"I've got it," the shrewd Secretary of State rapped the table.  "We'll
make him an ambassador."  Again commenced the process of elimination.
Men of affairs, shrewd, hard-headed men, politicians of the first rank
of men raised in the service, were required for the European courts.

"Constantinople?" the President suggested.

"I don't think so."  The Secretary of State frowned.  "Something might
happen."

"Greece," the Secretary suggested to Baird.  "Where Byron died, and
wrote poems, and--ahem, histories, and--ahem, essays, and things."

"I thank you, but I don't think I should care for Greece," Baird
replied to the offer.  "I really want no place at all.  I was only too
glad to help."

"I've got it," the Secretary exploded.  "We need a good, capable man in
Peking.  You've got to go.  It's your duty."

"I think I should like China," Baird answered.

So off to China went Peter de Cuyler Baird, taking with him a library
of works on the Celestial millions, a desire to see the Porcelain Tower
at Nanking, an ambition to write a history of China in verse which he
would entitle: "Cathay: An Epic," and lastly his daughter, Jeannette,
an orphan of five years old.

His friends pleaded with him to leave her behind.  They said it was
practically infanticide to drag a child into a country where cholera
and yellow fever and leprosy abound.

Old Peter looked about in his vague way.  "She is a very healthy
child," he said.  And then: "I should be very lonely without her."  And
at the last sentence his friends gave way.  He was such a gentle soul.

And healthy Jeannette Baird proved to be.  In Peking, surrounded by a
host of Mongol servants, she grew up strong and beautiful as she would
have in her own healthy New York.  She grew up speaking the Pekingese
dialect of China much more fluently than English, as British children
in India speak Bengali.  A queer little figure in embroidered blouse
and skirt--though with fair hair and blue eyes like her father's--she
might have been one of the girls of Su, the darlings of the King.
Everyone loved her.  Placid mandarins in horn spectacles smiled with
indescribable benevolence toward her.  "Chai-Net," as her name was
transposed, was adored by her attendants.  The only flaw they found in
her was that her feet were slim and healthily developed, instead of
being bound in the lily form.  But that, they agreed, was a custom of
the barbarous Americans, something akin to the habit that other savages
were said to have of wearing rings in the nose.

And little by little the graceful, poetic tentacles of the Yellow Land
fastened themselves on Peter de Cuyler Baird, as they have done on
other men--on Homer Lea, if instances are wanted; on Sir Robert Hart,
that shrewd Scots-Irisher from canny Belfast, and on a great English
general whose name must never be said.  He lost himself in the study of
Chinese literature and customs.  He acquired much wisdom from owl-like
Chinese mandarins, learning the futility of swimming furiously in the
abysmal sea of time.  For those terms the party left him in his
peaceful ease, and in those twelve years his daughter grew up like a
straight lily, knowing more about the Analects of Confucius than about
the Epistles of Paul; more of Tu Fu, who is called the God of Verse,
than about her rightful heritage of Longfellow; walking about in a
dream about the great wall that Tawak builded, instead of hustling
briskly up the Fifth Avenue of which Li Sin spoke.

For Peter de Cuyler Baird made the acquaintance and gained the
friendship, which was no small thing, of Li Sin, the greatest merchant
of Oriental _objets de vertu_ that America has ever known.  His place
on Fifth Avenue has more treasures than have the silent Greek monks on
Mount Athos.  It is not a shop.  It has more the feeling of a
cathedral.  From the Oriental tapestries on the walls, from the
startling jewels in their cases, from the graven Buddhas, and the
fragile vases, from the lutes of gold and lutes of jade, exhales a
perfume of valour and romance, of brave deeds done, of fine chivalry,
of ineffable wisdom--a dim, holy place which connoisseurs approach with
awe, and of which pretty women make a fashion.

And to Peter de Cuyler Baird it was told, because he was a discreet
man, that Li Sin was not Li Sin, but Hsieu Po, a great name, a Manchu
noble of Tientsin.  To Peter de Cuyler Baird it was also told that Li
Sin was a great physician, ranking with Li Jo-Hu, and with On Yang
Hsieu of Jo-eh, and that his services were at the disposal of anyone,
but he would take no fee for them, deeming them Heaven-sent.  And Peter
de Cuyler Baird, having been long in China now, understood how a Manchu
noble could have a store, for it was deemed in wisdom that a fortune
garnered honestly in the marts of commerce was equally noble with
honours gained with chivalry on the field of battle by Western men.
And it came to pass that Peter de Cuyler Baird died suddenly one quiet
night with a smile on his lips, leaving his fortune to his daughter,
and behind him a translation of the T'ang Poets into metrical English
verse--a crime more atrocious than the thing called mayhem, but
pardonable to such a gentle, vague soul.  And Li Sin, who was in Macao
at the time, rushed northward, and brought home to Gramercy Park and
the care of two gentle Old World aunts the young woman of seventeen,
Jeannette Baird.


Captain Patrick Burgoyne, black- and curly-headed, blue-eyed, square of
face, bulky of body and spare of flesh, groomed like a thoroughbred
race horse from the shiny tip of his silk hat to his pearl-grey spats,
strolled down Fifth Avenue from the Plaza.  There was a subtle pleasure
in the wearing of correct clothes after three years of furs in
Greenland, a pleasure to the sting of a shower bath after a hard day's
work in the city.  Before Li Sin's store he paused and grinned--the
losing grin of a good sportsman.  He walked in.  He looked over the
squat Celestial as the spire of a church might overshadow the modest
house alongside.

"Well?" asked Li Sin.  He had not seen the Irish explorer for three
years, but his greeting was as offhand as though they had parted
yesterday.

"No luck!" Burgoyne laughed.  "I don't believe there was ever a mammoth
in Greenland."

"Too bad."  Li Sin nodded his head.  He had felt all along that
Burgoyne's search for mammoth ivory would be in vain, but he was not
the sort to rub it in with a tactless remark.  "Three years gone!"

"Not quite altogether," Burgoyne laughed.  "I did some exploring work
up there, and I think I've got some new data on the upper inlets."

"Of course you have," said Li Sin, with a glint of admiration in his
slant eyes.

If you look up Captain Patrick Burgoyne in that red Mecca called Who's
Who, you will find his age, which is thirty-two.  You will find details
of his birth-place, Omagh, in the County Tyrone, Ireland--an abominable
spot, with the worst golf course in the country.  You will learn that
he acquired a commission in the Leinster Fusiliers; that he transferred
to the Rhodesian Rifles three years later with the rank of captain;
that he left them to explore Africa; that he is a Fellow of the Royal
Geographical Society.

Now, if you want to know of his standing as an explorer, you will
consult the proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society--a series of
the most uninteresting pamphlets ever written by the hand of man.  You
will find articles there signed: "P. Burgoyne," giving the depths and
shallows of uninteresting rivers, the barometric pressure on the tops
of mountains with weird, unpronounceable names.  They are read
occasionally by the sort of people who make encyclopedias.

And if you want to know anything about the real Patrick Burgoyne, you
will have to ask Sven Hedin, or the Duca degli Abruzzi, or old Bill
Snyder, keeper at the New York Zoo for so many years.  They will tell
tales of him in Africa, when he tracked down the pygmy people of the
Congo, or when he set out alone, except for native bearers, into the
vast alluvial swamp south of Leopoldville, where, the rumour goes the
pterosaur spreads its wings at night, and the unspeakable creatures
that began with the creation of the world exist in that hot and damp
inferno.  Six months later he returned shaken and white--and afraid!

"What did you find out?" they clamoured at him on his return.

"Nothing!" he answered grimly.  But for months his life was fought for
in a great hospital.  And at his ravings the doctors shuddered and
nurses grew pale as death.

Abruzzi will tell you that of all men he saw but one whom all natives
of all lands helped because of his glorious, breaking smile.  Li Sin,
whom he had met in Damascus, in Bokhara, in Teheran, in Wadi-Halfa, in
Lhasa in Tibet, will tell you of the occasion when Burgoyne rescued a
leper from stoning by Turkomans.  His arm about the unfortunate devil,
his great revolver out, his jaw set, he drove the threatening Turkomans
before him until he got the unclean one into safe hands.

"A Chinaman might have done it," Li Sin says, "a Bengali even, or any
Oriental, but a Western man, who fears the silver plague more than
death--that is Burgoyne!"

Over the cages of many zoological gardens, where queer arctic or
tropical beasts are found, you will find the inscription: "The Gift of
Captain Patrick Burgoyne," and if you are interested and can gain the
confidence of that queer, close-mouthed fraternity who tend zoological
exhibits, they will tell you with pride that Burgoyne's specimens were
as happy and contented on arriving in alien lands as they were in their
own icy homes, or in the bush of their native forest.  There was
something strangely tender in the way he handled animals.  And there
was something strange in the trust they gave him.

"The dam'dest thing I ever knew," used to begin poor Bonavita, who is
dead; and he would tell of the small cougar which Burgoyne had found
somewhere in Columbia.  A blind kitten, it had wandered away into the
Columbian forest.  Burgoyne, knowing it would die if left unaided,
picked it up and fed it on milk.  At Cartagena, three months afterward,
he tried to give it away.  None would have it.

"Well, damn you!  I suppose I've got to take you along!" he addressed
the queer pet affectionately.  He took it to New York, caged and
protected.  He handed it over to the Bronx Gardens officials.  In three
days they telephoned him it was dying of a broken heart.  He had to
take it with him to Dublin, to London, to Paris.  In each city he had
to exercise it on a length of chain, blushing all the time.

"I feel like a musical-comedy star looking for notoriety!" he swore.
But he had the same affection for it that another man might have for a
dog.


In Glasgow, on a lecture tour, he left the cougar in charge of the
Royal Botanic Gardens, but through the belief in its tameness, as they
saw it with Burgoyne, the keepers were lax in turning it into a cage.
Somebody opened the door to feed it titbits.  Like a flash, the cougar
had leaped over their heads and had picked up Burgoyne's scent like a
bird dog.  It slipped through the thoroughfares, snarling, barking, now
and then bewildered at the crowds.  It arched its back as if to spring.
A policeman pumped his revolver into it.  It turned over on its back,
clawing.  It died.

"I'm sorry, Captain Burgoyne"--the lord mayor made a special visit to
his hotel to see him--"from the bottom of my heart I'm sorry."

"It was the only thing to do," Burgoyne answered.

But never again did Patrick Burgoyne return to Glasgow.


"And where are you going now?" Li Sin asked.

"War," replied Burgoyne.  "Do you know I didn't hear about the darned
thing until I came to the Danish settlement at Dvorhag?"

"I thought so," the Manchu nodded.  "You had better stay in New York
for a month or so first.  You need something human between times.  You
can't go straight from Greenland to what France is now."

"Yes, I think I had better," Burgoyne nodded.

He was standing in the shadow of a great stone Buddha as he was
speaking.  There was the rustle of a dress, the patter of feet, and a
tall, straight young woman came up to Li Sin.  Suddenly she noticed
Burgoyne.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she told Li Sin, and turned to go.

"Jeannette," the Manchu smiled.  "I want to present an old friend of
mine, an old friend in spite of his youth, Captain Patrick Burgoyne.
Burgoyne, you have heard me speak of Peter Baird's daughter.  This is
she!"

"So you are Patrick Burgoyne," she said simply.  "I have heard so much
of you from Li Sin, and you are exactly what I thought you would be
like."

Burgoyne stammered for an instant.  Three years' residence with no
women to look on except the flat-faced, thick-lipped, exceedingly
greasy, incredibly fat, and amazingly filthy Eskimos had not kept him
in training for the fair women of his own world.

"I have to go up to my laboratory," Li Sin told him cruelly.  "I want
you to take him out to tea, Jeannette, and tell him all that has
happened in the world since he left it."

"I should love to," she said, with that smile of hers, the quick
parting of lips that suggested a rose-bud glistening with the dew of
dawn.

The Manchu did not go up immediately to his laboratory.  He watched
Burgoyne pilot her to a hansom, and hand her in, as though she were a
fragile piece of ling ware--something more tender than silk, more
costly than rubies.  Hong Kop, the lean, the silent Cantonese who was
Li Sin's body servant, came silently into the store.  He smiled as he
saw the twain.

"Why do you smile, Hong Kop?"  Li Sin came up behind him.

The Cantonese bowed.  "The brook of Wang-hei-ho is wide," he quoted,
and slipped through the shop like a shadow.

"But two outstretched arms can span it," Li Sin finished the proverb,
and he too was smiling.

In a city where Patrick Burgoyne knew no women, beyond the staid wives
of his explorer friends and the bespectacled, exceedingly proper but
indubitably ugly women who came to his occasional lectures, it was, by
all manner of logic, inevitable that he should seek the society of
Jeannette Baird, which she accorded him without stint.  And, as for
her, Patrick Burgoyne was a revelation.  For her circle was bound by
the love of two aunts (who dressed in black and lived in Gramercy Park
and preserved the samplers of the Baird womenfolk, dating back to the
days of good Queen Anne), by the affection of Li Sin, by the
acquaintance of a young circle with whom she was not intimate--for she
never could learn to smoke, abhorred cocktails, and dancing after one
o'clock in the morning tired her, healthy girl as she was.  When
Burgoyne tucked his sport shirt up for golf, there was a tremendous
scar from elbow to wrist.  A leopard had made an unexpected jump at
him, and he had broken its flight with his forearm, as a boxer would
block an opponent's lead.

"You might have been killed!"  She shuddered as he told her the story
in laughing, staccato sentences.

"Nasty little beggar he was," Burgoyne laughed, and he began to mangle
up a bunker with his niblick.

And swimming--and it was a sight to see Pat swim, with that easy,
flashing stroke of his learned from the Kroos of the Gold Coast--she
saw the red depression about his left knee.  A cobra had bitten him
there in India, and the bite had to be hacked with a knife, filled with
gunpowder, and a match set to it.  Jeannette Baird grew white and sick
at the story.

"It hurt," she said foolishly.  "It hurt."

"It hurt?"  He turned to her with his whimsical smile.  "To be sure, it
hurt.  It's been my only operation, and I've been talking about it ever
since."

I think they were indubitably in love with each other from the first
instant they met.  That woman with the slight athletic build, with the
face of a spirit such as Benda might draw; pale, regular, like some
fine lily; with the dim background of mysticism in her that had been
the gift of the Golden Empire to one who loved it, it was impossible
that Burgoyne should not be smitten by her as by a fever.  There had
been no thought of women in Burgoyne's life, beyond an infatuation for
a New York debutante, which faded quickly, and the affair with the
Russian countess who wanted to elope with him--an insane, quixotic,
romantic thing that ended in pathos, and which I would invite murder by
telling.  These two things faded into a dim horizon, scattered,
vanished, when the glorious sunlight of Jeannette Baird came across his
path.


As for her, many-hued, delicate, the thing called love came like
dawning.  It burst into a red sweep of cloud and sun.  And then
gradually the clear brightness of it ran through her veins like a rare
wine.  Night after night, when she left Burgoyne she would look out of
her window over the moonlit Bishop's Garden and finger the lute that Li
Sin had given her--the lute that had been an Empress's.  _Yu_, _Kung_,
and _Chih_ went the soft notes of the scale, now a murmur of drowsy
birds and now thrumming boldly like the music of the Dragon-Boat
Festival, and she would dream of the great epics of love, of the great
T'ang poem which was Ming Huang's and Tai Chen's of the Thousand Songs,
of Yang-ti the Strong and of Fai-Yen the Beauteous One, vague
honey-coloured visions.

They might never have spoken to each other of the thing born in them,
she because of her innate modesty and Burgoyne because he could never
believe that such a vision of beauty could be his.  A very modest man
is Patrick Burgoyne.  Monarchs have pinned orders on his breast, and he
has hastened from their presence to hide them in the bottom of trunks.
"Wear them?" he would stutter if the thing were suggested.  "Is it a
fool you want to make of me, or a sandwich man for a jeweller's shop?"
But he was happy to be near her, happy to be noticed by her.  And this
he testified to by singing in a cracked, falsetto voice, off-tune, an
Irish ballad in which he stated he was an orphan (which he was not--Sir
Kevin and Lady Burgoyne being the halest people I know) and an exile
(he had the freedom of the city of Dublin somewhere in his pockets),
and that he was about to lay his aged bones in a pauper's grave.  This
was a sign he was enjoying himself supremely.

They had gone down one spring morning to Cold Spring Harbour for a day
with some friends.  They were returning in the evening.  They were
standing on the edge of the platform waiting for their train.  A
special came crashing down the track from Wading River.  A porter
trundled a truck along the platform.  Unconsciously Burgoyne stepped
out of the way.  Fifty yards distant the express thundered.

"Look out!" some one called.

He lost his footing, stumbled, and fell on the track.  Like a
conjurer's trick, he whirled around on his face, his legs and arms
outstretched taut, every atom of air expulsed from his huge chest.
Some one caught Jeannette Baird as she leaped forward.  Like a crash of
ordnance the train went past.  Her scream cut through the air like a
jagged bolt of lightning.  As the last car passed Burgoyne jumped up.
He began dusting the collar of his coat.

"I've got a red-hot cinder on the back of my neck," he half shouted.
"Where is that porter until I murder him!"

He looked around for Jeannette Baird.  She had slipped fainting to the
platform.  In one prodigious sweep he had gathered her into his arms.

"Oh, _machree, machree_," he crooned to her.  "Oh, _machree, machree_!"


There is no need to describe those first months of the marriage of
Burgoyne and Jeannette Baird.  To every man and woman in this world at
some allotted time comes that sweeping golden flood that carries them
whirling onward past the solid banks of material things.  There is that
time when one awakens suddenly to the glory of the universe--to the
wonder of the depth of blue in the heavens and the marvels of flowers,
and the brown body of the homing bee.  The ragged fleeces of the clouds
seem the work of some Titan silversmith, and clearly, for an ineffable
instant, one hears the mighty harmony of the fixed and wandering stars.
There is no man or woman who at some time does not experience it.  No,
not one!

So, for two months, Patrick Burgoyne and his wife Jeannette lived in a
world as much apart from the hustle and rage of New York as the world
of the little folk of the hills is from the solid world of men.  If
such a thing as adoration can be given to a human being, Burgoyne gave
it to that beautiful, mystical wife of his.  If such a thing as worship
is proper for men, it was lavished on Patrick Burgoyne.

"I'm so happy I will die," Jeannette used to tell him with tears in her
eyes.  "Can it last, Patrick, can it last?"

"When the war's over," he would tell her, "I'll come back to you.  And
together we'll roam the wide world, machree.  And we'll never see the
time passing until we're white-haired and drowsy with sleep.  And we'll
die together, and it will begin again among the stars."

It might have been her early love of Chinese wisdom and Chinese poetry
that made war a vague, intangible thing to Jeannette Burgoyne.  It
might have been the strain of her dreaming father in her.  Though she
said nothing, she could never believe Burgoyne would leave her side.

There came a day when Burgoyne frowned viciously, began pacing the
room, began tapping his fingers on the table.  She felt a queer terror
grip her heart.  "Is there anything wrong?" she asked.

"Oh, no!  Nothing.  Nothing at all," he told her.  She looked at him
with dumb, stricken eyes.

A month before Burgoyne had offered his services to his country through
the medium of his embassy.  He was glad in the heart of him, though a
trifle ashamed at that feeling, at the delay in the answer.  It meant
so much longer with Jeannette.

Came the day when he lunched with an attach at Sherry's.  The diplomat
hailed him with forced humour.  "Got a job for you!"

"Is it with the Leinsters?" Burgoyne asked eagerly.

The attach shook his head.  He looked away.

"Is it the Rhodesian Rifles, then?" asked Burgoyne.

"The fact of the matter is," the diplomat stated uneasily, "the
Government would be glad if you'd investigate the African situation up
in Mashonaland.  There's something queer going on there."

Burgoyne laid down his knife and fork.

"Any intelligence officer can do that," he said.

"I'm sorry, old man," Barrett, the attach, said.  "You won't take it,
then."

"I'm damned if I will!"

"I don't blame you," the diplomat told him.  He had been at school at
Portora with Burgoyne.  "I'll try again."

So, impatient and restless, now frowning in anger, now in violent
demonstrations to Jeannette, Burgoyne raged about like a panther in a
cage.  And Jeannette, looking at him fearfully, felt a tugging at her
heartstrings.

"His love is drooping and dying," she thought to herself, "like a
plucked rose."

When he was out, no longer did the tapestry of melody wreathe itself
about the cherished lute.  She held herself upright and tears rolled
down her face.


"_The birds have quit the hushed hillside_," she sang the mournful
melody of Li Hua.  "_The east wind wails like troubled ghosts who go
hither and thither in ominous gloom.  Athwart the trampled grass the
sunlight pales.  The warm blood in my veins is like chilled water in
the frozen brooks._"


There was somewhere in the Baird family a grandfather--or was it a
great-grandfather?--who belied the family standard of quietude and
gentleness, and who had quadrupled the fortune by canny work in the
shipping business.  There was talk of his blackbirding to the French
and English Indies.  There were tales of his whaling ships leaving New
Bedford armed to the teeth, and of their coming back laden with oil,
while the barques of competitors came back not at all.  These things
may not be true, for lies attach themselves about strong men, as
barnacles foul a ship.

But, true or not, a flare of the old man's blood and spirit glints
forth occasionally in a Baird.  It may lie dormant, and then a word, an
occasion, may set it aflame.  It dies out after, but that is a
dangerous minute.

And now, while Patrick Burgoyne paced the floor, looked this way and
that, drew paper toward him and threw it away again, the spirit of old
Hell-Fire Baird began to light softly like the first glow of tinder in
the breast of Jeannette.  She began to brood with her eyelids half
closed.


Impatiently Burgoyne went out of the house one day, and uptown to his
club.  He wanted to keep all worry from his wife until the last moment
possible.  He told her nothing of his plans.  "Good God!" he thought,
"poor child!  That will come soon enough!"

From his club he got the embassy on the long-distance, Barrett talking.

"I just got word this minute, Patrick," the attach told him.  "You're
appointed, if you'll take it, to the staff of a diplomatic mission
coming across here.  Go out and buy a hat with a red band.
Congratulations, my boy!"

"My compliments to the diplomatic mission to the United States,"
Burgoyne's words dropped into the receiver like icicles, "and they can
go to the devil.  I'm a fighting man, and not a pink-tea liar."

He rushed back to the house and began slinging his things together.  He
called for Jeannette.

"Mavourneen, I've got to run up to Canada in an hour," he told her.
There was a tremor in his voice.

"Well, why not?" she said coldly.

He looked at her strangely in a sort of daze.  He couldn't understand
her.  He had expected her to cry, to throw her arms about him, to plead
to be allowed to come.  He remembered the words of some man at the
club, a man who had had much experience with women, which Burgoyne had
not.  The saying was to the effect that women acted strangely at times,
and when they acted strangely the best thing to do was to let them
alone.

"Well, I'll be going," he said weakly.

"Go, by all means," she told him politely.

The door had hardly closed when her rage began.  So this was love, she
told herself bitterly.  So this was what she had dreamed.  The whole
fabric of her dreams and visions had been ripped ruthlessly from bottom
to top.  She had given herself all to this man, body and heart and the
faint, aromatic, precious thing which was her soul.  He had pawed it,
mauled it, played with it, amused himself with it, and then suddenly
tired of it, as a man will of a flower worn all day in his buttonhole,
of a certain tie, of a pair of spats.  A sort of fierce modesty flamed
within her.  She, Jeannette Baird, to have been treated thus!  She
thrust her hands to her burning face.

"Let him go back to his bears and wolves," she said scornfully.  "Let
him go back to his savage lands.  It is what he is fit for!"

All that night she lay awake, at times cold with scorn, and at times
her face wet with tears.  She held her pillow to her mouth to choke her
sobs.  Dawn came and the day drew on with leaden, lagging feet.
Another hideous night, and Burgoyne came with the morning.

He ran--he could not wait to walk--into the little morning room where
she sat before her untasted breakfast.

"Look at me!" he shouted joyfully.

His shoulders were bulging beneath a khaki tunic.  Riding breeches
glared out from his knees.  Puttees wound upward from his heavy boots.

"I'm a Tommy," he gurgled.  "I'm a plain private in a Canadian
artillery regiment."  He dived forward to catch her in his arms.  "I've
got two days' leave, and I've come all the way down to spend a few
hours with you."

She stopped his spontaneous rush with a cold glance.  "Well?" she asked
frigidly.

"It was the only thing to do," Burgoyne explained.  "When I get over to
the other side--"

"I'm not interested, I'm afraid."

Burgoyne looked at her blankly.  "Are you cracked, Jeannette?" he
exploded.

"I'm not crazy, if that's what you mean.  I know what I'm saying.
We've been married three months now, and for a month and a half you've
been trying to get away.  Now, you've got away.  You ought to be
satisfied."

"Look here, Jeannette, for God's sake!  You--"

"Patrick Burgoyne," she faced him, "if you had really cared for me,
you'd have stayed here, where we were so happy for those two months.
But you never cared for me.  You were eager to get away."

"But you don't understand, girl"; he threw his hands apart.  "I had to
go.  Would you have me stay here while my old comrades and my old
friends are being killed--"

"I don't care," she said cruelly.  He came toward her.

"And as for not caring for you, Jeannette," he told her; "if I could
take my heart out of my body and lay it at your feet, I'd do it, by
God! girl! if anything--"

"Well, here's something for you, Patrick Burgoyne," she said fiercely.
"I care as little for you as for the fly on that windowpane.  If
there's one person on earth I detest, it's you.  And I want you to know
it!"

"Jeannette!" he implored.

"Please go!"

"For Heaven's sake, Jeannette, think of what you're saying.  You're not
meaning it, surely!"

"Will you please go?"  There was a tired frown on her forehead, and she
turned her head away.  She made an impatient gesture with her hand.

He straightened himself suddenly and, swinging around with a click,
went out through the door.  She heard the big front door close and his
firm, swinging tread going down the street.  Every stride away from her
seemed to tug at her heart as though a rough cable were tearing at the
delicate organism of it, but she would not call him back.  She would
not.  Never!  Never!  No!


For a month, now, the reports that the silent Cantonese, Hong Kop, had
been bringing to Li Sin were steadily growing more and more serious.
The Jeannette Baird of the days before Burgoyne appeared seemed to have
vanished into thin air, and a feverish, hardened woman to have taken
her place.  The younger set, who had found her to be such a prude, as
they termed it, now welcomed her with open arms.  The abhorred cocktail
had no longer any repulsion for her.  The dances that lasted until
morning found her going rhythmically at dawn.  And men congregated
about her as buzzards might over a dying man.  There was John Van
Rensselaer Adams, half decent.  There was Major Lefferts, rotten to the
core.  And there was Rodney Keston, a slimy, cunning thing.

And, strange to say, it was to Rodney Keston, of all men, that
Jeannette Burgoyne seemed to incline.  A pale, soft, slight man, with a
neat black beard and an ironic manner, and with something utterly
effeminate about him, he was of the type which honest men feel should
be stamped under heel as they crush the loathsome thing.  One would
fear hitting him, lest, instead of the swinging fist striking honest
flesh and bone, it should plunge into some ulcerous mass, revolting,
unthinkable.

"The only thing to do with a man like that," someone said, "is to bury
him alive in lime!  And yet, somehow, women like him.  It's
unbelievable!"

He did something for a living, did Rodney Keston--painted miniatures,
or was an interior decorator, or something obnoxious of the kind.  His
talk was continually of art and letters, and he spoke off-handedly of
strange, exotic works, of poets who used words for painting instead of
writing, of novelists who created their heroes out of devil
worshippers.  Perhaps it was her reaction from Burgoyne--Burgoyne with
the clean eye and the set jaw, Burgoyne with the two swinging arms,
Burgoyne the smiling, that drove her to companionship with the flaccid,
pale and melancholy charlatan with his eternal twaddle of super-art.
And of the new set with whom she had come in contact, who knew vaguely
that her husband had gone for a soldier, there were some who sneered
openly and some who were disgusted and some who laughed.

"He's not such a fool as he looks," they told one another.  "He's after
her money.  He'll get her to divorce this soldier gink--and then, oh,
boy!"


There is something incredible in how the Chinese come to know matters
which seem out of their ken.  Hong Kop, the mysterious, had no entry to
the places affected by Jeannette Burgoyne and her protg, or admirer,
or whatever the beast might be called.  By some intuition he appeared
to know of every occurrence, and every word between them.  To Li Sin he
reported faithfully and in detail.

"Am I to kill this man Keston?" he suggested gently to his master.  He
felt longingly at the knife in his sleeve.

"Umm," Li Sin pondered for an instant.  A twinge of scorn ran across
his face.  "No."  The Cantonese bowed.

"You will go down to Chai-Net, Hong Kop," Li Sin ordered.  "And you
will tell her that I want her to take an automobile ride with me in the
morning.  I want to show her something.  At six o'clock, Hong Kop."


The big grey touring car slipped westward from Gramercy Park.  Faintly
the noise of traffic had begun, a dull, rumbling sound like a drowsy
sleeper walking.  It swished through the grimy West Side.  Hong Kop,
the inscrutable, drove her with the easy motion of a gondola.  In the
rear Jeannette Burgoyne, erect and watchful, was studying the grave
features of Li Sin.

"I knew you Chai-Net, when you were hardly the size of the child in the
street there," he pointed to a pig-tailed girl of eight, bringing in
milk from a doorstep.  He was silent for a moment.

"I knew you when you were a young girl, Chai-Net, when I used to bring
you presents from the New York you never knew, and I brought you back
here, Chai-Net.  And I introduced you to your husband, Chai-Net."

She made a quick, abrupt gesture.

"No, you will listen to me, Chai-Net, to Li Sin, who am old, to Li Sin
who knew you all your life.  And who picked you a husband, Chai-Net."

They had run through the slips to a ferryboat and were crossing now.
The fresh, caressing wind of the East River came to them with a shock
as of sprayed water.

"You do not know Patrick Burgoyne, Chai-Net.  Look!  There is the dawn
still in the sky.  I have often seen Burgoyne look at it; get up and
laugh.  'Here's a bid for fortune,' he used to say, and that day he was
off to find the lost Oasis of Sahara, or to chart the Azof Sea.  A
great poet and a great wanderer, and a great man, Chai-Net."

"That's all he wants--that!  Not me!" she said chokingly.

"He will share all that with you, Chai-Net."

They had emerged on the Jersey shore.  Hong Kop swung the car southward
along the water front.  "But you have got one rival, Chai-Net.  And
that takes him from you now."

She sat erect as if struck in the face.  She flushed red.  "A rival!"

"A rival, Chai-Net."

She sat back limply.  A flood of colour came into her face.  "Oh,
shamed me!" she cried softly, reverting to the soft-toned Pekingese of
her youth "Never again can I raise my head, Li Sin.  Never again.  Oh,
shamed me, Li Sin!  Oh, shamed me!"

"Look up, Chai-Net," Li Sin told her.  "There is something I want you
to see."

The rapid, shuffling steps of troops shuddered down the street.  An
officer came into sight, his revolver dangling at his thigh.

"You have never seen troops before, Chai-Net, troops going into war.  I
want you to see them, Chai-Net."


The regiment swung down the street, their jaws set, their faces drawn.
There was no sound of bugles, no flurry of drums.  "Look at them,
Chai-Net," Li Sin went on.  "They are not laughing.  They are not
enjoying themselves.  No bands are playing.  They are going into war!"

She was looking at them curiously.  Somehow she had imagined a display
of blue and gold lace, of people cheering, of bands playing, of
hand-clapping, and waving handkerchiefs.  Somehow the grim silence
thrilled her, the set faces, the determination, the glint of the sun on
rifles, the air of deadly business to hand.

"Look at the boy there, with the chubby cheeks.  He should be laughing
or dancing with girls.  Look at the seriousness of the sergeant, the
lean fellow with the scar.  I know the white-haired major there; he
leaves his wife and three children behind."

He saw a dawn of wonderment on her face; a sort of awe, such as one
might feel in front of elemental forces.

"They may never get over, Chai-Net.  They may be drowned as dogs are
drowned.  There are those who will never return.  They have to go.
Every fighting man has to go.  Patrick Burgoyne has to go."

He laid his hand on hers for an instant.  "There is your rival,
Chai-Net."

A short rasping order and the troops stopped.  The sun had risen over
the tops of a ridge of clouds.  He flashed on the burnished pieces and
they turned suddenly into a forest of silver swords.

"Do you remember, Chai-Net, the song of Yang Kwei-fei:

  _In hearts and gems I entertained my Lord.
  I danced to the Rainbow Skirt and Feather Jacket air.
  In the clouds, he said, he saw my light robes trail,
  And roses were as nothing to my cheeks.
  The tireless shuttles of the eternal stars
  Should never see him leave me, so he said._

  _The dragon flag is floating in the sun:
  The drum is throbbing and the trumpets blow:
  My Lord is leaving me; my king; my own.
  I mount the Gibbons' Tower and I watch
  The tall spears glitter by the Lake of Shang.
  My Lord is gone!_

  _There was naught else could bring him from my side
  But the roll of battle chariots and the Tatar knives.
  No weeping from me, now I know myself
  The sister of shining swords.  Chieh!  Chieh!_


He paused for a minute.  He held her hands.  "Will you telegraph to
Canada, Chai-Net?" he asked.  A grey-haired colonel came toward the
car.  He shook hands with the Manchu.  "This is no Boxer picnic," he
told Li Sin--"nor sailing into Santiago with the bands playing.  This
is the most serious thing we've seen since the Revolution!"

They talked for a few minutes.  The grizzled officer waved good-bye.
Li Sin turned around to Jeannette.  She was not there.  "Where is
Chai-Net, Hong Kop?" he asked.

"She went up the street a little way," Hong Kop replied in his
Cantonese singsong.  "She was crying, but her head was high.  And her
eyes were like a young queen's."






[End of An Alley of Flashing Spears and other stories,
by Donn Byrne]
