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Title: The Show Piece
Author: Tarkington, Booth [Newton Booth] (1869-1946)
Author (introduction): Tarkington, Susanah [Susanah
   Keifer Robinson] (1871-1966)
Date of first publication: 1947
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1947
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 30 January 2019
Date last updated: 30 January 2019
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1593

This ebook was produced by
Al Haines, Cindy Beyer, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.






THE SHOW PIECE

by Booth Tarkington; introduction by Susanah Tarkington





INTRODUCTION


When I tried to think whether or not my husband would wish this
unfinished novel of his to be published, I could reach no decision; for
only Divine Providence could possibly supply me with the answer. As I
read and re-read _The Show Piece_, however, I began to be certain that
the writing itself demanded publication. I saw, too, that in the most
important way the book really had been finished; that it is all here for
people who care about the essence of a book.

Mr. Tarkington had found occasion to dictate the synopsis of the ending
as he saw it would be, and he had left a few dictated notes. The
synopsis and the notes are included for the benefit of those who read in
order to know "what finally happened," which of course is important,
too, and something that only a morbidly literary affectation would seek
to ignore, since everything living must begin and develop, or fail to
develop, and end. Yet in _The Show Piece_, as in most of Mr.
Tarkington's writings ever since _The Flirt_, the truth and the mystery
of human nature, and how most clearly to tell about that truth and that
mystery, have been his chief concern.

It seems to me appropriate--and I hope I am not wrong--to reprint here
parts of an article that Mr. Tarkington wrote not much more than a year
ago when he was asked to tell how and why he had written a book of his
called _Image of Josephine_. In these few words Mr. Tarkington expressed
to the full, I think, what he had come to consider his particular sort
of business, so to speak, as a novelist. He wrote:

    Since everything we do depends much upon what our ancestors have
    done for us, and to us, it must be true that any novel begins to
    be written before the writer is born. So if an author tried to
    explain completely how and why he has written a certain book
    he'd have to produce biographies of all the twigs on his family
    tree, followed by his own memoirs--to include the influence of
    environment--and in all the world there wouldn't be patience
    enough to listen to him unless his mother were still alive.

    Of course this means only that the quality of any book depends
    upon the kind of person the author is. Well, that's something he
    doesn't himself know, because no man knows himself and even the
    shrewdest women have but a sketchy notion of themselves and
    usually don't like to expose it to too much light....

    If for some moments the reader will think hard of his circle of
    friends and acquaintances he'll perceive that his thoughts are
    really roving among strangers. Their aspects and manners are
    familiar enough to him, of course, and he knows what many of
    them would do under given circumstances. Every one of them has
    his own special reputation, so to speak, and a few adjectives
    tell the color of it. One man is thought "kind and
    broad-minded"; another "cold and yet self-sacrificing," and so
    on. Thus the reader may think of these people but might find
    that his wife differs from him in her opinion of some of
    them....

    In any book intended to investigate human beings and if possible
    to reveal something about them, the writer must take account of
    such matters. If the people in the book are to "come alive" to
    the eye and ear of an observant reader, those people must be not
    easier to know all about than actual people. They must be people
    about whom the reader could change his opinion, as he does,
    sometimes, of actual people; and his likes and dislikes may
    alter accordingly. The people of the book, to seem human, must
    be as inconsistent, for instance, as human beings are, and must
    inspire in one another as diverse opinions of themselves as all
    human beings do. That is, they mustn't fall into fiction
    patterns. What they feel, think, and do mustn't conform to the
    literary expectations of a reader more accommodatingly than do
    the actual creatures of flesh about him. The author, moreover,
    mustn't work the reader into liking or disliking any of the
    people of the book. Such processes are appropriate to the
    "vicarious adventure" and vicarious love-experience stories
    wherein the reader (probably the author, too) becomes in
    imagination one or more of the fictitious people and thus
    "escapes" from life and the cares of the day; but though almost
    any book, or almost any work of art, can possibly be used as
    "escape," the investigatory novel isn't meant that way....

_The Show Piece_, though it is an entirely different sort of book from
_Image of Josephine_, is certainly also an investigatory novel. While it
is an exploration of egoism, and--as Mr. Tarkington said while he was
writing it--might even have been called _The Egoist_ if George Meredith
hadn't used that title, it is much more than the revelation of "Irvie
Pease's" unconscious and seemingly immutable self-centeredness. It deals
also, in Mr. Tarkington's deceptively simple and uninvoluted prose, with
the strange attraction of egoism and the powerful and intricate effects
that egoism may have upon a variety of lives other than that of its own
peculiar victim, perhaps because we are egoists all, in one measure or
another.

To me, however, and I think I dare be this personal, the deepest
significance of the book, and what makes it a crown to his life as a man
and as a writer, is the tremendous fact that his own center was not in
self. Autobiographical as any creative human being's work necessarily in
time must be seen to be, yet only the great can achieve something beyond
"self-expression," can see from the outside as well as from the inside,
and so be wise. Mr. Tarkington was wise, and so was truly modest; but it
is not, I think, incumbent upon me to be modest for him.

Susanah Tarkington





THE SHOW PIECE




CHAPTER 1


That an able-minded man in his late forties could be made morally
bilious by a dear innocent child of four or five, and that for years
such a man, a family doctor, would return to that condition whenever he
thought of that child, overtaxes credulity; but the thing has happened.

The older we grow the queerer we are--though it may be only that the
older we grow the better we see how queer everybody is--but, even in the
days of Irvie Pease's infancy, Dr. Joseph Erb recognized the strangeness
of his thoughts about the child. Later, old Erb began to perceive the
even greater oddity of his going on, year after year, feeling the same
way about Irvie--whom almost everybody else loved. Erb and I had gone
into our fifties, though, before the doctor openly admitted to me the
absurdity of his prejudice.

That afternoon, having prescribed a tonic and peevishly referred to my
dislike of exercise, Erb sat down by one of the open windows of my
workroom, lighted a bent cigarette and looked poisoned as a noisy young
voice was heard from the front yard of the house next door. "At twenty
or even thirty," Erb said, "I wouldn't have believed that at my present
age I could be so irked by merely the voice of that fifteen-year-old
child out there. How do you stand it, yourself?"

"Without fury," I replied, not permitting myself to laugh. "It brings me
no acute discomfort even though I come near living with it."

"So you do," he assented. "Why don't you move away?"

At that, I did laugh. "Do you think Irvie Pease is the reason I'm such
an old wreck that my sister calls you in to prescribe bitter syrups for
me and threaten me with death if I don't walk five miles a day?"

"I didn't say anything about five miles," he said. "You can push
yourself around a few blocks at the end of an afternoon's work, can't
you? You'd better--if you expect to finish this book you're on!" His
annoyance with me increased as the voice outdoors became noisier. "Stop
making a fuss over a twenty minutes' walk a day. Confound it, listen to
that boy out there!"

"Why should we, Doctor?"

"Because we can't help it! Not with that window open."

"Look at me, Lucy!" the boy was shouting. "Watch me, Edgar! Look, all
you kids! Everybody listen to me, the Old Maestro!"

Dr. Erb knew as well as I did that many people found this gay young
voice anything but an unpleasant one; nevertheless he gave me a malign
glance, and then, urged by the human perversity that draws the eye to
what will afflict it, he stared down from the window into the broad
front yard next door. So did I.

There was a stone sun-dial in the midst of the green lawn and upon it a
youth in grey flannels had clambered to stand erect, inviting the
attention of five or six contemporaries previously engaged in the chase
of a pair of frolicsome cocker spaniels. The boy on the sun-dial was
brown-haired, brown-eyed, tall for his age but comely and not
cumbersome. Indeed he was so elaborately graceful that the strong
suspicion of his being consciously so was readable in Dr. Erb's crinkled
expression.

"Hey!" the boy shouted. "Everybody shut up! Forget those tykes, stand
still, look at me and listen! Me, the good Old Maestro's giving you a
recitativo. Anybody that laughs is fined five dollars!" Then, as the
group of his young friends subdued themselves to watch and listen, he
assumed a mock heroic attitude, one arm extended and the other upon his
heart. "I'm a statue on a pedestal, see. Statue of an Orator in the
Forum Romanorum."

One of the boys made an objection. "You can't be, Irving. Statues can't
talk."

"This one can," the youth on the sun-dial said, and improvised loudly.
"Friends, Romans and Countrymen, lend me your great big stick-out ears!
I come not to bury Caesar or anything but to praise him if I can think
why. Black as the pitch from pole to pole, I am the captain of my fate,
I am the master of my soul! Kindly cheer, everybody; cheers, please!
Louder, please; anybody that doesn't cheer loud as they can I'll fine
ten dollars."

A smaller boy seated on the turf before him spoke up seriously. It was
he who had objected to a statue's talking. "You can't, Irvie. Nobody
here's ever had ten dollars all at once in their whole lifetime."

"Shut up, Edgar." Irvie Pease stood on his left foot, waved his right
leg and both arms. "Look! The Russian Ballet! Watch the Old Maestro
perform a Russian Ballet on but a few square inches of sun-dial. I'm the
Afternoon of a Faun, see. More cheers, please! Anybody that doesn't
cheer loud enough I'll fine twenty dollars. Yay! Hurray for the Old
Maestro doing the Russian Ballet!"

Then, singing "Too-da-loodle-doo" as his accompaniment, he did the
Russian Ballet a little too much, fell from the sun-dial, came to ground
on his hands and knees, laughing, and jumped up lightly. "What do I do
next? I'll tell you. The Old Maestro will now play an exhibition game of
tennis. Hop around to the tennis court, everybody. The Old Maestro's
going to play an exhibition set of singles. Emma, I'll let you be my
ingloriously defeated opponent. The rest of you can be frenzied
spectators. Follow the Old Maestro! Yay!"

Musically protracting his "Yay", he ran round the house to the tennis
court in the shrubberied wide back yard. He ran leapingly, the spirit of
the ballet still upon him; and with a submissive kind of eagerness the
half-dozen others followed him--all except one, the boy Edgar, who
remained seated upon the ground near the sun-dial and appeared to be
lost in thought. Young Emma, my niece, royally appointed to be Irvie
Pease's tennis opponent, ran almost as dancingly as he did.

"Tickled to death, isn't she?" old Joe Erb said, as the sound of the
young voices came to us more faintly. "They all think it's a privilege
to have Irvie Pease take a little notice of 'em. Of the whole
kit-and-boodle of 'em, that young niece of yours is the most so. Ever
think about that?"

"Yes, I've seemed to notice it."

"I'll bet you have! She and the rest of the kids aren't much foolisher
over him than the grown people around here are, though. Actual adults
brighten all up if he condescends to jolly 'em a little. They're always
saying, 'Hasn't he the loveliest manners with older people?' Manners?
Just pure, bald patronizing!"

"Or just pure, bald youngness," I suggested. "Amiable of him, too,
because most of 'em at his age don't waste their time noticing us at
all."

"Me," Erb said, "I like that better than the patronizing. As for that
young niece of yours, she'd consider it a big treat to be allowed to
polish his shoes. I've seen her a dozen times helping everybody else
spoil him, hanging on his every golden word. If you're so fond of her,
as they tell me you are, why'n't you get her to laugh at him, instead?"

I laughed, myself, as I resumed my chair at my work-table; I'd risen to
look out of the window. "'Get her to laugh at him'? She does that all
the time. It's the chief item of Irvie's spell. She's always telling me
what a 'marvelous comedian' he is."

"I see," Erb said. "It wouldn't be any use to try to get her to laugh at
him intelligently. At their age they laugh at what makes old people's
ears and stomachs ache. People our age have no effect upon the young, no
matter what we say or do."

"Odd view for a doctor," I suggested. "Have the young not eyes? Do they
not weep when you bolus 'em? Do they not bleed when you----"

Still looking down from the window, he paid no attention to me. "I like
that one," he said. "That serious, round-faced young Edgar Semple. He
hasn't followed the 'Old Maestro' and the others. He's still sitting
there. Engaged in one of his meditations. Odd boy; but I think he's got
something. I'd give a nickel to know what he's thinking about. I'd give
more, though, not to know what Irvie Pease is thinking about; but I
always do. So does anybody that takes one good look at him." Erb began
to replace his stethoscope and blood-pressure apparatus in his satchel.
"Irvie Pease's mere shining face is always a plain proof that he never
for an instant thinks about anything but himself and never will."

"Thinks?" I said.

"Oh, of course you're right." Erb looked moody as he closed the satchel.
"Absorption in self isn't thought. Children naturally have the most, and
even at our age there are some odious remnants; but these people who all
their lives seem just made of it--pure egoism, spontaneous self-pushery,
instinct for leadership and self-dramatization--why, damn it, they
succeed; they get on! They put it over big on all the boobs, and I never
knew a more stick-out precocious sample of it than Irvie Pease. Yes, and
he's going to be that way all his life. Why, damn it, he makes me sick!"

I laughed again, Erb spoke with so sharp a vehemence. "Could you admit,"
I asked, "that you're a pretty biased old gentleman?"

"Absolutely!" He was loudly emphatic. "Here I go, still breaking out
every now and then, spending actual time blithering over a bright-faced
young school-boy! Who'd believe it? It's absurd and I think I'm crazy. I
don't care. Look here, I brought almost all of that squad of youngsters
down there into this world and I swear that the first squeaks ever
uttered by Master Irving Pease sounded like 'Me! Me! Me!'"

"Don't they all?" I asked.

"No, sir! Not to that extreme. Remember by when he was three how he'd
bounce into a roomful o' grown people and beller and charge about and
stamp and squawk to make 'em all look at him and put on a fuss over him,
how cute and smart and active he was? I never could bear sound or sight
of him then, nor from then on!"

"Go it!" I said. "Old family doctor walking into dozens of familiar
households for decades, I should think you'd have got used to----"

"Not a bit of it," he interrupted. "I've cured hundreds of 'em in
thirty-three years of practice and most of 'em were good as gold when
sick and some of 'em were mighty mean little specimens; but oh my, Irvie
Pease! Whenever he was sick he just grabbed the chance to be more
prominent and keep everybody on the run. On your word now, have you ever
got used to him, yourself?"

"'Used to him', Doctor? Are you trying to goad me into feeling guiltily
critical of one of my own family connections?"

"Thank God he's not one of mine!" the doctor said and moved toward the
door. "Feel guilty or not as you like. There's one person who ought to
feel that way, though, and that's Irvie Pease's father. Sit still; don't
come downstairs with me. I ought to know my way by this time, oughtn't
I?" Then, as we heard a burst of youthful cheering from the tennis court
behind the house next door, old Erb uttered a grunted exclamation and
his stamping footsteps on the stairway seemed to repeat the vocal
protest.

I didn't try to get back into my work; the interruption of the doctor's
visit had dislodged me, and a few moments after he'd gone I found myself
idly looking down from the window again. Young Edgar Semple alone was in
view, still sitting on the grass staring at the sun-dial. Not a
noticeable boy, he was short, sturdy, round-faced and serious, as Erb
had said; remarkably quiet, too.

He was so quiet that I was often curious about him, wondering what his
thoughts might be, though apparently they were always as undisturbing as
were his voice and manner and his placid clear blue eyes. He was Irvie
Pease's cousin--his semi-adopted brother, in fact, a background figure
brought up in the same house. As I stood watching him and wondering why
the sun-dial seemed to fascinate him, he rose and, with his head bent in
thought, walked slowly away toward the noisy tennis court behind the
house. He hadn't been thinking about the sun-dial at all, I concluded;
but he'd most typically been thinking.

As my spectacled eyes followed the stocky figure of fourteen-year-old
Edgar Semple on his slow and pondering way toward the tennis court, I
comprehended that the boy's long, long thoughts were occupied with a
puzzle, and I guessed that his mystery might be Irvie Pease. This kind
of speculative guessing being the business and habit of any writing
man--always reaching for what people feel and think--I went on to wonder
if Edgar mightn't be trying to understand just what in Irvie's character
and behavior made him a leader and in particular so captivating to my
niece, young Emma Millerwood.

Edgar passed from my sight, and an undeniable sense of guilt, no doubt
the result of old Erb's querulous talk, came upon me. It was
preposterous; but that guiltiness increased a few moments later when I
again heard a triumphant young voice. "Viva! Viva the Old Maestro!" I
could distinguish the words. "Give the Old Maestro a big hand for that
shot, you kids! Everybody cheer! Viva the Old Maestro! Viva!"

My interior qualm was distinct, and old Joe Erb would have had a worse
one if he'd stayed. So susceptible we are to suggestion that it can be
contagion: a few strongly spoken words first lodge in our ears, then
convince us that we've long held opinions or feelings now at last coming
to light. I wondered if what Erb, and now I, too, found irritating in
Irvie Pease was our own long-past youth--or our loss of it! Herodotus
said that in Egypt the old tom-cats always slew all the young ones.




CHAPTER 2


The doctor was right about Irvie Pease's father. Pretty Evelyn Pease,
the mother, was doting creature enough; but, from the day of his son's
birth, Will Pease seemed mastered by a kind of ancestor worship in
reverse, a blinded pride and joy in this offspring, their only child.
William Levering Pease was otherwise better than a merely sensible man.
He was a lawyer, possessed of a conscientious but agile mind that more
than once, and before he was fifty, held honorable attention in the
country's highest court. His genial manner was genuine, coming from the
heart; he had "literary leanings", loved scholarship, and, though a rock
for his principles, he was actually, I think, the very best liked and
respected citizen of our populous community.

For my part, I didn't like anybody better than I liked Will Pease. The
earlier Peases and my own family had been intimate even before our
country town began to swell and smoke itself up into cityhood seventy
years ago, and there'd been more than one intermarriage to group us the
more closely. Will Pease was my third cousin; and his wife's first
cousin, Irving Millerwood, had married my sister, Harriet. Thus the
young Irvie--Master Irving Millerwood Pease, named for my
brother-in-law--was my sister's second-cousin-by-marriage and a third
cousin to my niece, Emma Millerwood, Harriet's daughter.

These relationships, often confusing to the people actually involved,
are of course but fog and cobweb on the brain of a maddened listener for
whom there's an ill-advised attempt to make them clear. I'm not so rash;
I'm only explaining that after old Joe Erb had unfortunately put me in
the way of feeling a little fed-up with Irvie Pease sometimes, my
feeling of guilt for the sensation was the more pointed because
undeniably I was Irvie's relative, however distantly and intricately.

The association of the two families was further knitted because after
the death of my brother-in-law, Irving Millerwood, my widowed sister,
Harriet, and her little daughter had come to live with me, next door to
the Peases. Will and Evelyn Pease were Harriet's contemporaries, not
mine. She was fourteen years my junior; they were of like age, and
throughout her girlhood and short married life she'd been the
inseparable companion of Evelyn. Though upon need I could retreat to my
workroom, a remodeled attic, the households in their intimacy were
almost as one.

As nature seems to have provided that the most heartfelt business of any
generation is the next one, the three children in the two houses,
especially Irvie, largely absorbed the attention of the adults. My
niece, Emma, only four when she and her mother came to live with me, was
brought up, as we say, with Irvie Pease and that other boy of the
Peases', Edgar Semple, whom even old Joe Erb had confessed he liked.
Here was another cousinship. Edgar was an orphaned nephew of Evelyn
Pease's, and Will and Evelyn had taken him in, which was like their kind
hearts.

They didn't legally adopt him; but the treatment he had from them was in
all respects what he'd have received if he'd been their own son--a
slightly younger brother of Irvie's, warmly cherished though less on the
way to become a personage. Both Edgar and Irvie seemed to take this same
view. At least it was evident in Edgar's manner, and Irvie could never
have been allowed to doubt his own superior prominence and promise.

Dr. Joseph Erb placed upon the father most of the blame for Irvie's
youthful showiness; but here a change in American custom was concerned.
Will Pease, like many another of only the fourth generation after the
pioneers, had been brought up so strictly and with such consequent
numberless small mortifications that on the very day after the birth of
his son he told me happily that he'd never say an arbitrary no to him,
the boy should live in freedom; and Will kept his word. He kept it so
well that whatever else Irvie was, he was himself, his own child and on
the way to be his own man. I sometimes thought, though, that he'd
inherited himself--not from his lovable parents but from some
everybody's darling far back in his ancestry.

Enhancing such heritage, poor Irvie had begun even in infancy to hear
talk of his talents. Both parents quoted him in his presence. They dwelt
upon his babyhood's precocities of wit, described with delight his young
unconventionalities, and nobody need think he didn't understand. When he
was no more than two, his facial expression, especially when his bodily
beauty was being extolled, often made me laugh within my ribs; I was too
fond of Will and Evelyn to be open with such mirth.

Will Pease, teaming, would stop a friend on a downtown street and tell
him something little Irvie had said or done, and then, perhaps that
evening, would let Irvie hear him repeating to callers what the
astonished and delighted friend had exclaimed in comment. Thus early do
some of us learn our prominence.

When Irvie was eight Will told his partners and stenographers, and
everybody else on their floor of the Millerwood Building, that Irvie of
his own choice had begun to read _Don Quixote_ and had written "a rather
remarkable little poem" about the book. Will typed copies of the poem,
sent them to relatives and friends and even handed me one in the Peases'
living-room after a fairly large but congenial dinner-party. He coughed,
laughed placatively, and asked me if I'd mind reading it aloud to the
company. I contrived to do it with gravity.

    _"Don Quixote thought he was a knight_
    _Perhaps he was right._
    _It was a long time of yore_
    _People do not wear armors any more._
    _Though of knights now there are none_
    _My own heart whispers some day I will become one."_

During the reading, Will Pease sat on the edge of his chair, and,
leaning forward, listened as if to angels' choiring; but when I finished
he did his best to be a modest father. Coughing apologetically, he
explained that though of course the verses were faulty in form he really
couldn't help feeling that a certain quality in the thought made them
rather worth hearing, if we hadn't minded. He had to confess that he was
really pretty foolish over the boy, he went on, with an engaging laugh
at himself; and probably he oughtn't to have asked grown people to
listen to an eight-year-old child's poetizing. On the other hand, he and
Evelyn both had a feeling that maybe it did show just a glimmer of
something perhaps rather unusual--the use of the word "whispers" in the
last line of the poem, for instance--and, well, he couldn't help feeling
that the verses showed something that some day might--might develop
into--well, something unusual and--and----

"You don't need to be making excuses, Will." The interruption came from
Janet Millerwood, Will's aunt, a woman of my own age but all her life an
undiscourageable, almost professional enthusiast. "Everybody knows how
unusual Irvie already is," she said. "No other living child of eight
could possibly have written anything to compare with those lines of his.
I liked particularly that touch of Irvie's about his heart's
_whispering_ to him that he'd be a knight some day. The word 'whispers'
makes it a touch that has actual subtlety. He felt the thing
emotionally, you see. He didn't just think it; he felt it. There's
analysis there, instinctive discrimination, and it's always the true
essence of poetry to deal in these shades of meaning. I'm grateful to
Irvie for a real pleasure, and I think it's all simply too wonderful for
words!" She turned to her sleepy old husband. "Don't you feel so, too,
Frank?"

"I liked it first rate," he said obediently. "It's remarkable."

My sister Harriet, glowing, clapped her hands. "More than just
remarkable," she declared. "There's only one Irvie!"

I glanced at Irvie's mother. She sat deprecatorily blushing but proud as
Punch. I saw something more; behind her chair a door stood ajar and
beyond it, in the hall, was the poet, himself. He'd tiptoed there to
listen, being obviously certain that his poem was going to be at least
mentioned. I restrained my hilarious upsurge, looked dreamy and let him
go on thinking himself unseen.

The hall was dim; but Irvie's pleasure was too bright to be obscured.
Never, for sheer complacency, have I seen his eavesdropper's smile
equalled, even upon the face of an applauded adult. He waited until
everybody had finished the obligatory exclamations about him; then he
stole away--most likely to write another subtle poem, I suspected.

By less than this have I known full-grown persons to be ruined, so far
as any comfort in their society was concerned. By less did I once see a
sober-minded woman of thirty so changed that until her recovery people
ran at sight of her. They didn't run at sight of Irvie Pease, though,
except toward him. Old Joe Erb was Irvie's only detractor, a pitiable
minority, and when I more or less--mainly less and with inward
mirth--became somewhat of the Doctor's opinion, I naturally didn't tell
anybody. Irvie of course, though he saw us, was almost unaware of such
dim old creatures as Erb and me, plainly looked upon us as inconsequent
objects in his adjacent scenery. When his attention was unavoidably
drawn to myself, he showed the slightly amused tolerance for the
obsolete that is really in the heart of all youth when it acknowledges
the existence of a bygone era's relics.

He accepted applause, though, from any quarter, old or young, expected
it and was graciously used to it. By the time he was fifteen he'd had a
lifetime of it from the Peases and Millerwoods, aunts, uncles and
cousins, and from the general circles in which he moved. My sister
regarded him as a part of her reverent and tender mourning for her
worshipped husband because Irvie had been named for him. She could never
bear the slightest hint of criticism of Irvie Pease, and as for the
young Emma, my niece, she was Irvie's serf.

Where's a man so rare that even in mature age he's acquired the art of
self-protection when he speaks to ladies of their idols? On the evening
after a tennis tournament arranged by Irvie Pease to celebrate his
sixteenth birthday, I stirred up an actual scene at my own dinner-table
where sat only my sister, my niece and myself. Emma and Harriet were
exclamatory over the humorous little speech addressed by Irvie to the
tennis spectators (of whom I'd been one) when he'd accepted the silver
cup donated by his great-aunt Janet and awarded to him as the winner of
the "tournament".

A fond flush decorated Emma's brow and cheeks; she was beginning to turn
prettier after a plain childhood and the warm color made her almost
lovely. "Wasn't he darlingly funny, though!" she cried. "He's always
making fun of himself in the cutest way, especially when he has an honor
or something bestowed on him. You know--like calling himself the 'Old
Maestro' or 'Irvie, the Idiot Earl'--all those funny things he makes up
to call himself. He's really so terribly modest, the way he makes fun of
himself; it just makes everybody think all the more of him."

I had an unfortunate impulse to be educational. "Yes, indeed," I said
airily. "Many biographies show it to be a successful method, Emma.
Self-aggrandizement dressed up as mirthful self-belittlement is an
excellent old device to win the innocent."

Harriet gave me a stare that should have stopped me. "You didn't think
that was a charming little speech of his?" she asked.

"Yes, charming. I think Irvie had a regret, though."

"What regret?"

"I had a low idea," I said. "I thought Irvie was sorry he couldn't make
both speeches--the presentation one by poor old Janet Millerwood and his
own, too."

"But that would have been impossible!" Young Emma's eyes were enlarged
by seeing a person of my age lost to common sense. "How could anybody
make a speech presenting a cup to himself and then another accepting it?
Those are two utterly different things, don't you see? They're just the
opposite. So how _could_ Irvie have done both?"

"He couldn't, Emma. I only had an impression he was rather restive
during his great-aunt's address to him and that he was thinking of a few
rather nice things about himself he could have wished her to add. That's
not so rare, dear, in recipients of awards--even when they have bald or
grey heads."

"Why, how awful of you!" Emma's bright hazel eyes attained their
largest. "I never heard such absurd blind nonsense!"

"Don't wither me, Emma!" Like many another rash old tease of an uncle
making trouble for himself, I went on with my prattle. Emma was the most
athletic girl in our large neighborhood, and on a tennis court a flying
marvel. "When Irvie got up the tournament to honor his birthday," I said
musingly, "you don't suppose he was pretty sure of one probability, do
you?"

"What probability?"

"That you'd let him win, Emma."

"Let him!" she cried. "Let him! What on earth do you mean?"

"I'm afraid I thought you slacked off rather plainly in the set you lost
to him, Emma."

"What!" She seemed to see me as a horrifying spectacle. "Of all the
accusations! There never was a fairer contest. Irvie beat Edgar and he
beat Mary Reame and Harry Enders, and so did I. We couldn't play more
than one set each with each or we'd have been there all night, and if
every one of us didn't play our best every time it wouldn't have been a
real tournament. Doesn't that satisfy you?"

"It's not to the point, dear," I said. "I had the unworthy thought that
Irvie knew you'd let him win because you always do."

"Oh!" Emma uttered the one exclamation. It was a hurt outcry, and,
although her lips moved as if she tried to add something to it, she
couldn't. In fact, she burst into tears, rose from the table and
brokenly left the room.

"Thoughtful of you!" my sister said. "Do you think it considerate to
tease her by casting slurs on----"

"Slurs?" I tried to laugh myself out of a false position. "Are you
taking it seriously, too? Can't I be allowed to try to be a comic old
bystander once in a while? Slurs? Good heavens! They're only children.
Slurs!"

"What else could they seem to Emma?" my sister said. "What are you
trying to do to her? Spoil her friendship with a dear boy who's the
splendid only son of our own kinsfolk, our next neighbors and best
friends? I declare I think you'd better dose your old dried-up sense of
humor with a narcotic!"

Snubbed speechless, I nevertheless strongly agreed with her as she, too,
abandoned me to my coffee and the four candles that lighted our small
table. Irvie wasn't to be joked about. Henceforth when my thoughts of
him tempted me to be a funny dog I'd better become a miracle of silence.




CHAPTER 3


On a rainy afternoon during the Christmas holidays I'd come downstairs
to the family library and found Emma and Edgar Semple there playing
backgammon. They were busier with argument, though, than with the game.

I took the book I wanted and would have departed; but Emma stopped me.
She tossed her dicebox crossly upon the gaudy gaming board, said "Wait,
Uncle, please"; then spoke emotionally to Edgar.

"Edgar, you've got to. You've got to tell him and let him decide. If you
won't tell him I will."

Edgar shook his head. "I wouldn't."

"Tell me what?" I asked.

As usual Edgar's expression calmly revealed nothing. "It's of no
consequence, sir."

"Oh, isn't it?" Emma cried. "All right, then, I'll just prove it is and
pretty serious consequence at that, because it's--it's about Irvie's
ruining his health!"

"His what?" I said. "To me he appears robust."

"Ah, but you don't know!" My niece's eyes were suddenly moist; she
jumped up and openly suffered at me. "He's--he's killing himself!"

I tried not to laugh. "How?"

"He's smoking himself to death." Emma so unhappily believed what she
said that she had ado not to sob aloud. "His father and mother don't
even know that he smokes at all because old Aunt Janet promised if he
wouldn't until he's eighteen she'd give him a car. But he _is_; he's
been smoking for a whole year and he coughs and coughs and won't listen
to anybody! Whenever I try to tell him the risk he's running, he just
laughs and says we've all got to--got to"--Emma's voice broke, but she
finished the dreadful quotation--"got to die some time so--so why not
young!"

"Boys before Irvie have talked like that to girls," I said. "Most of 'em
cough, too, when they begin to try to smoke."

"'Begin'?" she cried. "'Begin to try'? Oh, you've never known anybody
that smokes and inhales every breath as Irvie does! Even _I_ didn't,
until last night! Nobody can _live_ and smoke the way he does--sixty
cigarettes an hour!"

"No," I said, "you're right. As a regular practice that'd be poor
hygiene; but nobody could do it. Even Irvie couldn't, Emma."

Several tears were already out upon her cheeks; now she added others.
"He does! Sixty an hour! It's how he smokes all the time except when
he's with his father and mother or Aunt Janet. I've been begging and
begging Edgar to tell Uncle Will and Aunt Evelyn and he won't do it--he
just won't!"

"Well----" Edgar said. "I rather think I'd better not."

"Do you want him to die?" Emma's vehemence reached this climax. "Uncle
Will or Aunt Evelyn wouldn't punish him; they never did in their lives.
They'd just try to save him. They'd get Dr. Erb to examine his lungs and
try to cure him. What else is there to do?"

"Is that what you want me to decide?" I asked.

"You've got to do more!" She caught my sleeve imploringly. "Edgar won't
tell them and if I do, Irvie'll hate me. _You_ won't go on letting him
smoke sixty cigarettes an hour, will you? _You_'ll tell them, won't
you?"

I patted her hand. "I'm like Edgar. I believe I'd better keep out of it,
Emma."

She snatched her hand away, made a fist of it with which to gouge her
eyes. "Nobody!" she wept. "Nobody, nobody'll lift a finger to help!"
Concluding with a gulp delivered at our consciences, she left us and
went elsewhere--to continue her weeping, so I surmised, not without
compassion.

"Too bad," I said to young Edgar. "What's made her so excited about it?"

He rose thoughtfully from the backgammon table. "She'll calm down out of
it, sir. It doesn't amount to anything. Irvie doesn't smoke much, not
more than the rest of the boys do. He just happens to be the one the
girls worry about."

"But if he tells her he smokes sixty cigarettes an hour----"

"No, sir." Edgar's calm remained complete. "Irvie didn't tell her that."

"But she just declared----"

"I know," he said. "I'll explain it if you don't mind keeping it
confidential." He permitted the faintest of smiles to appear momentarily
upon his round face and in his blue eyes. "You know how Irvie is. He
doesn't mean any harm and it doesn't do any. He just likes to keep a
good deal going on about him, if you've ever happened to notice."

"Yes, I've happened to."

"I thought so," Edgar said with the cool detachment that often gave me
an odd feeling about him: I seemed to be talking with an imperturbable
person of my own age--or even older! "I'm afraid you might get a wrong
idea of him, sir. Older people usually see only one or two sides of
younger people."

I laughed. "We belong to different tribes, do we?"

"I think so, sir. It's why I've a notion that maybe in your own mind
you're sometimes a little hard on Irvie."

"I'll add to your mind-reading, Edgar," I said. "If I'm hard on Irvie,
as you say, maybe it's because he reminds me mortifyingly that at his
age I, too, was something of a prima donna--at least to my own view."

"Yes, sir; but isn't everybody to some extent more or less just a bit
that way?" Edgar seemed satisfied that we'd established this platform.
"Well, then, I'll go ahead. As you implied, yourself, it's only human
for a boy to like having the girls think they're worrying about him.
That's why Irvie's got 'em all believing this sixty-an-hour tragedy. He
didn't tell 'em he smoked that hard; he let 'em find it out for
themselves. That was just last night and made a big sensation,
especially, of course, with Emma, and so----"

"But, Edgar, if he didn't tell them he----"

"No, sir. Emma got excited and counted 'em."

"But it can't be done, Edgar."

"No, of course not." Edgar's smile appeared again. "She did count 'em,
though--exactly sixty. Then she started the big fuss; but it was funny
to see Irvie keep looking sideways at Sylvia to see what she----"

"Sylvia?" At the moment I didn't place any Sylvia among Irvie's young
subsidiaries.

"Sylvia Stelling," Edgar explained. "You've probably seen her on the
beach with the rest of us at Stonehaven in summer. She's visiting Mary
Reame over the holidays. Irvie's kind of impressed with her for the
simple reason she's a New Yorker, and he can't ever help trying his best
to impress the people that impress him. 'Most everybody seems to be like
that, though, I've noticed--especially playing up strong to anyone from
a bigger town. Well, Irvie did the sixty-an-hour stunt mostly on
Sylvia's account; but of course the rest were expected to----"

"Edgar, you said Emma counted----"

"Yes, sir, if you don't mind remembering it's confidential. The crowd
met over at our house after dinner to go skating at the Riverside Rink
and come back later for hot chocolate and things. Uncle Will and Aunt
Evelyn had gone to Ladies' Night at the Nineteenth Century Literary Club
that Uncle Will's president of, and the house was all ours. Well, Irvie
said he'd decided not to skate; he was going to stay home and smoke and
read Chaucer and Montaigne----"

"Read what, Edgar?"

"Chaucer and Montaigne, sir. I mean that's what he said. Emma told him
he was smoking himself to death; but anyhow she and the rest of us went
and skated a while. The rink was too crowded, though, and we didn't stay
long. We were back in just an hour and Irvie was sitting by the fire
with the Canterbury book on his lap and a whale of a pile of cigarette
stubs in Uncle Will's big glass ash-tray on the table beside him. Emma
counted 'em and screamed out he'd finished sixty in that one hour--three
packs. They were there, too, all right--sixty stubs--and the girls
certainly made enough noise about 'em! Sylvia did some of it; so it went
off pretty well, you see."

"No, I don't see!" I said. "While the rest of you were gone had someone
else come in--maybe more than one--and helped Irvie to smoke all
those----"

"No, sir. Nobody but Irvie'd been there. It's simpler than it looks. I
wondered how he'd done it, and when I get to wondering I always seem to
have to poke around in my mind till I think out the answer. Well, I
thought I had the answer to the sixty-an-hour problem; but I had to poke
around in other places besides my mind to prove I was right."

"That all?" I asked with interest. "You wanted to prove it to yourself
only?"

"Yes, of course." Edgar looked surprised. "Maybe it's a bad habit; but I
seem to be like that. I always seem to have to know. Anyhow it's why,
when the crowd went out to the kitchen to make the chocolate, I looked
in the table drawer and found the scissors Uncle Will keeps in there to
clip things out of the newspapers that he wants to save. There were some
little shreds of tobacco on the scissors and some more on the floor. You
see, don't you, sir?"

"I begin to, Edgar.

"Yes," he said. "Irvie'd cut his cigarettes in two; then he just smoked
a little bit of each half and put it in the ash-tray. They made such an
outrageous big hill on the tray he was pretty sure somebody'd count
'em--most likely Emma because she was already fussed up about his
smoking--and of course she did; so it turned out to be a pretty good
go."

"Good go?" I echoed. "Is that what you call it?"

"Why, certainly, sir; that's all it was. I wouldn't be giving it away to
you, of course, except maybe Emma--just now while she thinks she's all
wrought up over it--well, she might get to working on you some more and
there'd be just a chance you'd think you ought to tell Uncle Will and
Aunt Evelyn. If you should, they'd be worried over what doesn't amount
to anything at all."

"Aren't you forgetting my niece's worrying?" I asked.

"No, I'm not very likely to forget anything about Emma." Here there was
something like ruefulness, a slight undertone in the voice of this
uncommonly self-possessed boy. "I suppose you mean you feel she ought to
be cheered up by being told about the scissors, sir?"

"Yes, that is what I feel."

He shook his head. "No, sir. Giving it away to Emma'd put me in a pretty
unsporting hole, as if I'd tried to make him look goofy to you--and so
to her, too. That wouldn't be right at all."

"Not even if he's been behaving goofily, Edgar?"

"He hasn't. Not really, sir. It was just a kid kind of thing to do.
Don't you make any allowances," this remarkable Edgar asked me, "for
Irvie's just being his age?"

"His age? It's about the same as yours, isn't it?"

A trace of pain appeared upon Edgar's brow and seemed as near a token of
desperation as that unemotional surface could produce. "Look here," he
said. "I simply can't be the means of getting Irvie into any sort of
mess with Emma or our crowd or with you or anybody. Technically I'm an
outsider in our family, sir; but you'd never in the world know it from
Irvie any more than you would from Aunt Evelyn or Uncle Will. There
isn't a stingy bone in his body; he's as generous as any real brother
could be. I owe everything to his father and mother, and, instead of
grudging it, Irvie's always wanted me to have as much from them as he
has, himself--sometimes actually more. There isn't anything in the world
I wouldn't do for him and jump at the chance! If through what I've told
you it'd get exaggerated around that he'd been pulling a fast one to
keep the girls worked up over his health----"

I interrupted. "Wasn't that actually what he did?"

"No, sir. He just put on an act--really kind of enjoyable if you look at
it right--to get the crowd going and impress Sylvia. Not that he cares
anything about her personally; it was only because she's a visiting girl
and from New York. That little cigarette show oughtn't to be taken up by
older people. Where on earth was the least harm in it, sir?"

"But you heard Emma----"

"Yes; don't worry," Edgar said. "She really kind of enjoys making this
moan over Irvie, because in the back of her head she knows perfectly
well he's in robust health, as you said. Girls like making that kind of
fuss and then forgetting it and then doing it again. Irvie's funny some
ways; he likes having 'em do it, and I'd certainly hate to be the one to
mess it all up. He's a grand old Irvie, sir, and please, I do hope my
telling you about this bit of kidding isn't going to make you
conscientiously feel that you ought to--ought to----"

I put a cordial end to the boy's uneasiness. "No; I'll remember you told
me in confidence, Edgar. I think perhaps you're right; girls probably do
enjoy this kind of worrying. How'd you get that idea?"

"I?" Again he looked a little surprised by a question to which he'd
supposed I naturally knew the answer. "Why, just from watching Emma."




CHAPTER 4


Irvie was only eight when he wrote the poem on _Don Quixote_ that gave
him so much tender celebration within the family and its fringes. He had
more of the same from more people when he wrote, produced, directed and
principally acted a full-fledged play. This was at the close of his
Sophomore year at Princeton. June was in flower, not long before we all
went away for the summer; Irvie and Edgar Semple, now successfully
entitled to call themselves Juniors, had returned from their second
bright college year, and Irvie brought with him a manuscript composed in
hours spared from the curriculum. He began his casting almost within the
moment of his arrival.

Emma, at dinner that evening, was too joyously excited to touch her
soup; she was as full of the play as she was of the change in Irvie
wrought by the past nine months in New Jersey.

"I'm really not exaggerating," she told Harriet and me. "He's really not
the same person he was as a Freshman. It's really as if he'd utterly
become a sophisticated man but all without the slightest putting-on or a
trace of affectation. He's so aristocratically matured, so really
distinguished-looking and cosmopolitan, and's spent I don't know _how_
many of his week-ends in New York! He wears his clothes just beautifully
but really without the slightest consciousness of them. Mary Reame's to
have the principal woman's part in the play, of course----"

"Why do you say 'of course'?" Harriet asked. "Mary's a dear girl and
certainly good-looking; but I don't see how that entitles her to----"

"She's perfect!" Emma was authoritative. "Irvie says he wrote the part
for her and everybody knows she's always been the best actress of all
the girls in our charades. Irvie's having me play her mother----"

"You? Mary's mother?" Harriet said. "At seventeen--and Mary must be
twenty, isn't she? I don't see----"

"Those things don't make the slightest difference on the stage." Emma
made this announcement eagerly. "He says it's almost as good as Mary's
because they're all splendid acting parts and this mother has almost the
strongest scene with him in the whole play, he says. He expects to
finish writing the last act by lunchtime to-morrow so we're going to
begin rehearsing right afterward at the Peases'. First, though, we all
have to be there at eight this evening to hear him read it to us up to
where it stops. He's already read it up to there to his father and
mother and they say they just can't understand how in the world he ever
did it because it sounds so professional."

"How about Edgar Semple?" I asked. "As they've been rooming together at
college, hasn't Irvie read it to Edgar, too? What does he think of it?"

"Edgar?" Emma looked vague. "I don't know. I suppose Edgar's heard some
of it and of course he'd like it. Anyhow, Irvie's going to have him play
one of the parts--nothing that calls for much action or emotion of
course. Nobody'd ever think of Edgar as especially much of an actor, I
don't think. Irvie knows almost all of his own part by heart already and
it's more than twice as long as any other in the whole play."

"You bet!" I said; but Emma was too exuberant to notice this chuckle,
and Harriet gave me only the mere whiff of a side glance as she said,
"Tell us some more about your part in it, dear."

"Mine, Mother? Well, you see the whole play turns on the character he's
going to do, himself--a man called 'Abercrombie Brown'. He says
'Abercrombie Brown' is supposed to symbolize the elements that are in
all masculine characters in the world, so it means the man of the
future, kind of above and advanced beyond people as they are to-day. He
says it's going to be terribly hard for him to put across the
footlights; but don't you think his conception of 'Abercrombie Brown' is
a perfectly marvelous idea, Mother?"

"Of course she does," I said. "Is that the name of the play,
Emma--'Abercrombie Brown'?"

"No. He thought of that; but he says the most outstanding New York
playwrights don't use that kind of title much any more. The title's
going to be 'As If He Didn't Know', and don't you think it's perfectly
splendid, Mother?"

Harriet warmly said she did. "The 'He' who knows is Irvie, is it?" she
asked approvingly.

"Yes, 'Abercrombie Brown', of course, Mother. You see he goes about
among the other characters probing into them and then just laughing
satirically at them, and then of course the heroine--that's Mary
Reame--falls terribly in love with him; but he just laughs at her, too;
so the mother of Mary--that's me--well, she sort of takes him to task,
as I understand it, and he probes her character too and shows her where
she's all wrong in her old-fashioned motherliness and her capitalistic
ideas. 'Abercrombie Brown' is a widely known young socialistic
psychologist and all that, and----"

I interrupted. "Irvie's a socialist now, Emma?"

"Yes, of course," she said. "He says the capitalistic system's
practically a washout and so----"

"And Edgar?" I interrupted again. "Does he feel that way, too?"

"I guess so, I don't know; he never says much, you see. His part's
almost the shortest in the play--I believe he's supposed to be
middle-class and's got a bank or something, the mother's husband--and in
the climax of the last act Irvie knocks him down, because Edgar's isn't
a sympathetic part and----"

"Is that the end of the play, Emma?"

"No, the end's the part that isn't written yet; but he'll have it
to-morrow and he told us a good deal about what he thinks it's going to
be. It sounds marvelous--simply too marvelous, Mother!"

Harriet patted Emma's back. "Tell us about it, dear."

"Well, he thinks he'll have the stage get dark and all the other
characters go off, and 'Abercrombie Brown'--I told you that's Irvie,
didn't I?--sits on a rock--it's in the woods somewhere--and the stage
gets dark and he has a soliloquy about the dark mysterious woods being
like this life of ours that nobody can find their way around
in--sometimes not even he because he's discovered he never really cared
anything at all about the heroine, she's too conventional and stodgy.
Cousin Evelyn says she thinks that's one of the most original ideas in
the whole play. Then, while he's sitting there wondering if he ought to
commit suicide--why, then, just at the end, he's going to have a light
from a reflector in the wings, a kind of bright pink, and--and----"

Emma's voice had become emotional; I helped her out. "And the light
falls on the rock and 'Abercrombie Brown', doesn't it, Emma?"

"Yes--and he steps up on top of the rock and stands in the light--he
stands there with his arms outstretched and--and laughing." Emma
swallowed, blinked, then recovered herself and was eager again. "The
idea's pretty subtle; but it means he's just laughing at the whole
world--laughing and laughing at it! I think it's the most marvelous idea
I ever heard of! Did either of you ever hear of a play that had an end
like that?"

"You mean did your mother or I ever hear of a play ending with the star
in the center of the stage and a light focussed on him or her, Emma?"

"Oh, I mean the whole thing!" she cried. "I mean the light and the woods
and the rock and laughing at the world--all of it! Did you ever know
anything like it?"

"No, not exactly like all of it," I admitted, conscious of another side
glance from Harriet. "Not like quite all of it."

Emma ate no more than a bite or two of her dinner and was off to the
Peases' again to hear Irvie's reading. When she'd scurried out of the
dining-room Harriet gave me the look of a woman who expects to have her
feelings hurt, and said, "I don't hope to interfere with what you
probably think is your sense of humor on the subject of Irvie Pease; but
to me this play sounds very like the work of youthful genius--original
and daring to be unusual. You couldn't possibly keep an open mind and
not try to be funny about it--at least until you see it performed, could
you?"

I said I hoped so, and, for the meekness of my tone, was ill-rewarded by
my sister. She spoke not but gave me a glance in which there was nothing
except suspiciousness.

****

A day or two after this she disorganized my afternoon's work for me.
With misgiving I heard her hurrying up the stairs from the second floor;
she began to defend herself challengingly as she opened the door. "You
know perfectly well I never interrupt you, myself," she said, "and that
I never let anybody else do so. Even when someone telephones on a matter
of business I never----"

"What is it, Harriet?"

"It's different," she said. "Irvie Pease wants to consult you about his
play. He's downstairs and I think you ought."

"Why 'ought'?"

"Because at his age you wouldn't have liked advice to be refused by an
older and more experienced man, would you?"

"Good heavens!" I said. "Irvie doesn't think I'm more experienced than
he is, does he?"

"Of course he does!"

Irvie didn't. When she'd gone down and sent him up, it almost
immediately became plain that he didn't. I had to confess to myself,
though, that his easy smile was winsome and that, as Emma'd said, this
academic year of his had given him a new manner. It seemed to consist of
an offhand cheerful kind of carelessness--as if nothing mattered much
but everything would probably be all right. If it weren't, he'd not be
disturbed; he'd know how to deal with it comfortably.

His former boyish gracefulness was markedly still with him. Apparently
he had no consciousness of it now, although a portrait painter, seeking
Irvie's best pose, would probably have said, "Hold that!" to almost any
of the new Junior's attitudes. Even when he slid one leg over the arm of
the easy-chair he'd taken after greeting me with an amused "Hello,
hello, hello!" his long thin figure had picturesque quality in every
easy line and contour. His face, long too, and symmetrically so, had
shaped into the comely modelings that were to be permanent in his full
manhood; the most critical old eye must have found them agreeable and
the whole of him disarming.

More, Emma hadn't claimed altogether overmuch for him when she said he
was "distinguished-looking"; nor with that look did he wear upon his
harmonious surface anything that a youthful person, his contemporary,
would have called an air of conceit. To the eyes of age almost all the
young look innocently self-centered, so profoundly so that we elders are
flattered when they notice us; but Irvie Pease's preoccupation with
himself was of an engaging kind--his youngly restless large brown eyes
had a twinkle. He'd have been observed in any crowd, and a stranger
would have wished to know him. Within a month after this call upon me I
overheard a plainly formidable dowager in the North Station, in Boston,
exclaim as she stared at him, "Who _is_ that fascinating-looking youth!"

Having lounged himself into the easy-chair and brought forth from a
pocket of his excellent brown jacket a briar pipe, which he caressed
rather than smoked, he added his own apology to Harriet's.

"Aunt Harriet says you're dogging away at a book or something." (Harriet
was his cousin, not his aunt; but he and Edgar had always aunted and
uncled both of us.) "Sorry to interrupt; but a rather technical problem
or two's turned up in this play of mine and I thought maybe a chat with
you'd shed a light. Father told me you used to do a bit along this line,
yourself."

"Yes; but I stopped it before you were born, Irving."

"Did you really? You wrote a play and then quit?" He was interested
somewhat languidly. "So you wrote one, too, did you?"

"Yes, sixteen," I said, yielding to the ignoble impulse. Age does not
remove these weaknesses of character; we elders, incurably human, still
are urged from inside to bark when we're barked at; we turn boastful
when others brag to us, and we go proud when the pride of others is
shown to us. Vanity evokes vanity from even the lean and slippered
pantaloon.

"Sixteen? Sixteen plays?" Irvie looked more incredulous than surprised.
"I don't suppose you mean sixteen plays that were actually produced
professionally, with professional actors and New York openings and all
that--do you?"

"I seem to remember that they got at least that far, Irving."

"You don't say!" This wasn't an animated exclamation of his; it was only
a soothing one. He plainly thought that either my doddering memories
were deceiving me, or if indeed my vaunted sixteen plays had actually
seen "Broadway" they now belonged to a remote, unremembered past--an
extinct era when nobody knew anything of consequence and nothing really
counted. However, in thinking my poor old plays unremembered, as I was
sure he did, he was all too right, and I didn't hold it against him.
"Sixteen--well, well!" he said indulgently, then spoke with the
briskness of one who turns to a living topic. "This play of mine, now;
I'd like to get your honest opinion of it. I'd like you to be frank
about it."

"Yes, of course, Irving."

"This play of mine," he said, "is right now in its incipient amorphous
phase. It's plastic, like a work of sculpture I keep molding between my
hands, if you see what I mean."

"Yes, I think I do, Irving."

His brow showed a slight corrugation, not of thought but as a sign that
we were now arriving at something serious. "You see, this performance
I'm doing here is only a try-out. From the way some of the older people
seem to be taking it--my father, for instance, and I don't know a better
literary or dramatic mind than he's got--well, perhaps it sounds a bit
giddy in an undergraduate; but I'd rather like to see the thing on
Broadway, myself. That's why I want to make a thorough test of it with
these amateurs. Well, that means I've got a problem before me."

"What's the problem, Irving?"

"I've got to decide," he said, "which way I'll do the end. Emma tells me
she's given you an idea of the plot, its symbolic meanings, the
characters and----"

"She has indeed, Irving--at every meal. What's your trouble about the
end?"

"I'd hardly call it a trouble." He made a negligent gesture with his
pipe. "It's just an argument with Edgar. You see, he's made suggestions
now and then while I was writing the piece; but sometimes he runs
completely off the track. For instance, he wanted me to change quite a
little of the phrasing, because people might get the idea I'm being too
much like Bernard Shaw. Well, of course, even when I was a boy, I took
quite an interest in moderns like Shaw and Wells and Ibsen; but what I'm
really doing in this piece is shooting out in advance of that group's
psychology. I'd like to take a long progressive step forward, if you see
what I mean."

"What about the end?" I asked. "Was your argument with Edgar mainly
about that?"

"In a way," he said. "I'm sitting on the rock, you see, all alone in the
dark and that's where I have this soliloquy. You mightn't have heard;
but soliloquies are back now, you know. Until we hit me on the rock with
the light, the audience gets just the voice coming out of the darkness."

"Just the voice, Irving? Yours, you mean?"

"Yes. I make it just a slender voice, rather little and eerie, up to the
cue for the reflector, and this slender, eerie little voice sums up the
whole meaning--how I didn't really care for 'Nora' at all and how to me
all the older generations are just bunglers that have made life and the
world nothing but a big sloppy mess."

"I see," I said. "What's 'Abercrombie Brown' do about it, Irving?"

"I laugh," he replied. "That's where I stop using the eerie little
slender voice, and the reflector comes on with me up on top of the rock,
standing there laughing and laughing at everything. Well, Edgar keeps
pecking at me to change all that and I think the whole play'll be
definitely lost if I do."

"How's Edgar want you to change it, Irving?"

"He thinks it'd be better if I'd be laughing at myself instead of at
life and the world. He thinks I ought to change the soliloquy to show
I'm finding out at last I'd been mistaken--all wrong about 'Nora' and
the other characters and that everybody else was right and I'd been a
fat-head about everything from the start; so 'Abercrombie Brown' would
end the play by laughing at himself instead of at life and the world. I
don't like it. It'd change the psychology of the whole play. It'd be
dangerous."

"You're sure?" I asked.

"Definitely," Irvie said. "Some people might like it; but on the other
hand this isn't a play for the groundlings. The idea of having me
mistaken about everything and laughing at myself for a fool looks to me
like giving up all the subtlety I want to bring out. The very point I'm
definitely meticulous about is hitting a terrifically modern note. I'd
lose it if I'd laugh at myself instead of at life and the world."

"Then Edgar's idea is all wrong, is it?"

"It's bright but it's cheaper," Irvie said. "I don't deny I've been
considering it; but it'd belittle my whole conception of 'Abercrombie
Brown'. No, it won't do. I shan't use it. I----"

"Just a moment," I interposed, and I ought to be ashamed to admit that
my tone was gravely insidious. "Am I right in surmising your conception
of 'Abercrombie Brown' to be somewhat in the nature of a self-portrait,
Irving?"

"Oh, no doubt," he said carelessly. "But of course myself seen
objectively." He slid his leg from the arm of the chair and rose. "I'd
like to spend more time with you talking over things informally this
way; but Father's given me our old stable to make over into a playhouse,
I've got 'em all working out there and I'd better toddle along to hold
'em down. They're liable to run haywire building the proscenium."

He returned his pipe to his jacket pocket, and, as he sauntered to the
door, I comprehended that for an otherwise idle quarter of an hour or so
of his all he'd desired me to be was an audience. "Glad to have you look
in any time and see what we're doing to the old place," he said in
farewell. "We may make the old Pease horse-barn the foundation of a
Civic Theatre. The town needs one. 'Bye-bye."

Evidently he informed his company of players that he'd been in
consultation with me. When I came downstairs I found Emma just entering
the house and plainly fresh from stage carpentry; she had sawdust on her
dress and a curl of wood-shaving in her hair. "I'm proud of you!" she
cried. "Irvie says you agreed with him on all the points he consulted
you about."

"He what, Emma?"

"Consulted you about," she said. "I think it's just darling, and so are
you!"

I didn't explain to her that he hadn't consulted me. In fact, she didn't
give me the opportunity. She was finding life and the world so
excitingly beautiful that she was embracing even an uncle.




CHAPTER 5


The Peases' no-styled brick house, like my own of the same groping
decade, was a product of the early Twentieth Century when the larger
migrations out of downtown crowding and smoke began in most of our
active cities. It was Will Pease's father who built their house; and
other families of that generation (my own) came one after another to
build and live in the neighborhood. So, in this more amply spaced
"residence section", old intimacies were continued and, later, repeated
among the children and grandchildren of the Nineteenth Century's
"prominent citizens". Of this expanded group of several hundred people,
the Pease family and its connections were the central cluster.

This wasn't the result of conspicuous wealth or fashionableness; other
families surpassed them in both and the Peases weren't ambitious that
way. They were important because Will Pease and his father, and his
grandfather, too--a genial greybeard in black broadcloth,
well-remembered from my boyhood--had always been known for their
goodwill, good judgment and unalterable principles. They were kind,
responsible men, respected for their abilities and loved for their
charity of mind and of purse. Of all the Peases the present head of the
family, Will, was the modest and worthy topmost; and if our big town
recognized any one person as its "principal citizen", that person was
he. Add that if any one house was the special dispenser of hospitality
and friendly discourse his was, and the stir made by his young son's
play becomes comprehensible as fanfare attending a distinguished event.

...Shaded by old forest trees behind the Peases' tennis court, there
stood a spacious brick stable. Will's father had pioneered into this
bosky region without an automobile and before the close of the
horse-and-buggy age; but Will had built a garage closer to the house and
more convenient of access. Now the long-vacant stable resounded to
hammer and saw, as the exertions of the cast of "As If He Didn't Know"
and a pair of hired carpenters re-shaped the whole ground floor,
"carriage-house", box-stalls and all, into a recognizably modernist
theatre--designed by Irving Millerwood Pease, so stated in the printed
program.

Luck in weather was with Irvie. There was never a balmier coolness under
a clear moon than on the night in the last week of that June when
Harriet and I crossed through the shrubberies of our own back yard and
followed a path to the Peases' driveway. There we joined a scattered
procession of our friends, relatives and acquaintances, moved with them
toward a roseate effulgence among the big trees. It defined itself
neatly as we passed beyond intervening foliage and saw the fiery
lettering: "NEW CIVIC THEATRE".

"Irvie's done just everything!" Harriet said, exhilarated but nervous.
"Think of his having even that neon sign over the old carriage-house
doors. Really now, you'll have to admit that's wonderful. I do hope she
won't forget any of her lines; she's so excited I don't know what she'll
do! She wouldn't eat a thing, just rushed over here at six o'clock to
begin being made up. Think of her trying to look like Mary Reame's
mother!"

"She won't, Harriet. If she wears that grey wig she'll look a lot older
than Mrs. Reame. When girls under twenty make themselves up to look
forty they----"

Harriet, of course, wasn't listening. She made a dart away from me and
caught at the arm of a friend. "Carrie Reame! Isn't it exciting? I know
your Mary'll be perfectly splendid. We're all so delighted she's playing
'Nora'. Emma says 'Nora's' a perfectly Ibsenesque part. Doesn't Mary
love it?"

"Wild over it!" Mrs. Reame laughed. "Of course it's rather short for a
leading part, especially in her scenes with the hero, and she's worried
over what to do with her hands during his longer speeches; but she
adores every word of the play. She thinks the audience is going to find
it marvelous."

"So does Emma--too marvelous for words!"

Harriet fluttered back to me as we turned pink with our near approach to
the neon light. Then we passed the portal of the "New Civic Theatre" and
were within the somewhat odorously new-painted auditorium, which was
already half-filled and murmurous with congenial chatter. "A hundred and
eighty invitations," Harriet said, as we found seats among cousins of
ours. "Irvie's worked so hard, I do hope they'll all come." They all
did, almost. By eight o'clock, the initial dramatic moment, all but
three or four of the hired chairs were occupied, and, looking about me,
I saw no face that wasn't amiably expectant. Two of those faces were,
indeed, touchingly so, I thought, as I caught a glimpse of them between
intervening heads. The shining eyes and flushed cheeks of Will and
Evelyn Pease betokened a tender pride already too effervescent to be
decorously concealed.

Three formal resounding knocks behind the scenes brought the proper hush
upon the spectators; chords from a piano were heard, accompanying a
young male voice, and, when the yellow denim curtains had yielded to
insistence and jerked apart, an interior "set" was disclosed wherein I
recognized several articles of furniture of my own. More conspicuous,
however, was Evelyn Pease's piano at which Irvie sat playing rather
sparsely and singing a song to Mary Reame. (Words and music by Irving
Millerwood Pease, the program imparted in an asterisked note.)

Mary, as "Nora", was a pretty picture in pink organdy; but probably only
the eyes of her immediate family lingered upon her. Irvie was all in
white with a red rose in his buttonhole; his voice, not large, was a
tenor with the unforgettable vibrancy that stirs the heart; and the
song, though completely of that beginning of the "crooning" epoch, was
as honeyed as its title: "My Apple Blossom, You".

Inconsistently, just after the song, Irvie, as "Abercrombie Brown",
began to deride "Nora" for being a creature of the sentimental era--"a
mere saccharine echo of the Gay Nineties" he called her, presumably
because he perceived that she'd fallen in love with him while he sang.

"Did you ever see anything so artistic?" the woman in front of me leaned
back to whisper to Harriet. "I mean the way Irvie checked the applause
after his song--just the slightest movement of his hand. If he weren't
really an artist he'd have wanted it. My Tommy's got only a bit-part and
he's scared to death; but Irvie's as cool as cool! I do hope these
people appreciate what he's giving them."

She needn't have worried about that; old Joe Erb hadn't come, and, in
the audience of this overwhelmingly one-boy play, I was, all by myself,
the whole of the cold-hearted minority. Like many another actor Irvie
seemed to feel that the presence of an audience demanded from him a
sonorous and yet elegant artificiality. Thus his voice became richly
musical and his pronunciation execrable. He'd blur one _r_, burr the
next, and what he did to short _a_'s and broad _a_'s made my head swim,
for I'm cursed with a sensitive ear. Once he said, "I awsked you not to
ahsk me to ask that of myself"; I'll swear that was the "line" and how
he spoke it. While he talked and talked and talked, his posture never
failed in picturesqueness--as when he stood framed in a rear doorway and
took the rose from his buttonhole to toss it scornfully to "Nora". Most
of the time he had his fellow-actors' backs or profiles to the audience
while he held the center of the stage, a process notoriously damaging to
any dramatic simulation of reality. Altogether I thought that seldom in
amateur theatricals, and even in the saddest professional experiences of
my own theatrical past, had I seen worse acting.

The play itself, as I'd already gathered, was of an old vintage
frequently rediscovered by the young; it was Bernard Shaw filtered down
to platitudinous lees. Nothing was plausible; nothing could be believed.
No group of human beings in the world would have stood about a room,
motionless and dumb, to be as incessantly scored upon, victoriously
insulted and mocked as were the subordinates in this play--all except
"Abercrombie Brown" himself being of course subordinates. The meekest of
stodgy souls would have ganged up on "Abercrombie Brown" and thrown him
out long before the end of the first act.

By that time I was myself too drearily an old stodgy soul to be
amused--and yet, round about me, were a hundred and eighty people, more
than half of them of mature age, all listening submissively. Submissive?
They sat entranced, many of them leaning forward, hanging upon every
word from the stage; and, when the pair of curtains twitched to a
juncture, closing the act, the "New Civic Theatre" resounded. Old Janet
Millerwood could be heard shouting "Brava! Brava!" through an uproar of
applause that was unmistakably spontaneous and genuine.




CHAPTER 6


The demonstration swelled until Irving Millerwood Pease had twice
stepped forth between the curtains and twice gravely bowed with the
reticence appropriate to an artist who receives impersonally a tribute
to his art.

The woman in front of me, Ella Pease Martin, a widowed relative of
Harriet's and mine, squirmed round, tilted her chair backward and seized
Harriet's hand rapturously. "Isn't it just beyond words!" she cried.
"Could anybody believe he's still only a boy in college? I thought my
Tommy did awfully well, too, didn't you? You wouldn't have known he was
scared, would you?"

"No, not the least bit." Harriet was ecstatically responsive. "Of course
some New York manager'll gobble this up. It's 'way beyond the
professional plays being put on nowadays; but I do hope Irvie won't
decide to be an actor. He must just write, write, write! Weren't you
astonished to see how almost middle-aged Emma really did make herself
look? Of course she had only the one line in this act; but I do
think----"

I got up and went outdoors to smoke. Other people were standing about
under the moonlit trees, similarly taking advantage of the intermission,
and I heard them murmuring to one another adjectives of delight.
Wondering what was the matter with me--grotesquely critical of a boy's
show in a barn--I kept away from them, and did again, half an hour
later, after Irvie'd been brought out four times at the conclusion of
the second act.

It was the final act that brought me my two surprises. The first was
Edgar Semple, who hadn't made his appearance in the play until then,
though "Abercrombie Brown" had several times satirically referred to the
tinsel soul of "Octavius Thompson", the banker, "Nora's" father. Edgar
now came upon the stage as "Octavius Thompson", and for the first time
that evening there seemed to be a convincingly actual, quiet-spoken,
unstuffed person in this play.

His "make-up" as a middle-aged stoutish businessman was so real that I'd
hardly have known him, and he made everything that he did and said seem
what we call "natural". I thought it fortunate for the almost operatic
Irvie that this excellent actor hadn't appeared earlier in the piece,
and, when the star negligently knocked him down in the top moment of the
climax, my perverted sympathies were all with the fallen banker.

I had my second surprise a few moments later when Irvie began his
soliloquy in the suddenly darkened modernistic woodland that was the
"set" for that act. Instead of using the end he'd originally written for
the play--"Abercrombie Brown's" summing up everything except himself as
a mess and "just laughing and laughing at life and the world"--the
author had switched to Edgar Semple's suggestion. The soliloquy,
avoiding its original self-celebration, dealt with "Abercrombie Brown's"
discovery that all through the play he'd been not a heroic intellect
mocking fools but a vainglorious ass.

In his talk with me Irvie'd dismissed this idea, and it must have been
hard for him to swallow; but, though the swallowing took time, he had
done it. He'd been able to perceive the placative value of Edgar's
substitute finale. It appeared to belittle the hero; but it didn't. It
really enhanced him by making him humanly likeable.

I thought that even this doting audience might have tired somewhat of
the inexhaustible rightness and too-conscious superiority of
"Abercrombie Brown"; but "Abercrombie Brown" now, at last, appeared as
capable of modesty. In Edgar's version "Abercrombie Brown" found himself
in the end to have been a consistent bungler, the one wrong-headed fool
among the estimable fellow-mortals he'd been deriding. When the pink
light from the reflector broke the darkness, its shaft fell not upon
Irvie standing elevated and with outstretched arms laughing as from the
mountain. On the contrary he was using the rock as a desk, and a pad of
scratch-paper, brought from his coat-pocket, for the writing of notes of
apology to all the other people in the play. Finally, as a personal
touch, and stepping humorously out of character, he wrote and read an
apology to the members of the audience, asking their pardon for all the
nonsense they'd been inveigled into hearing from a young man who didn't
know any better.

The hit was palpable. Irvie's whimsically engaging smile and deprecatory
little bow, as he rose and spoke these last words directly across the
footlights, captivated everybody. I, too, was a victim of that charm and
found myself applauding till the palms of my hands burned.

The curtains did not close. Irvie bowed and bowed; then stepped into the
woodland wings and brought forth lovely Mary Reame. They took two
"calls" together, and after that Irvie summoned his whole company, stood
at the center of the line of triumphant young people in the warm glow of
footlights, and laughingly shared his honors. It was a pretty sight, and
Emma's happy face--the happiest of all, I thought--made me wonder again,
and with a pang, what the devil I'd been doing inside myself all
evening, demanding a masterpiece! The end of the play, in fact, was of
its small kind almost that and I could have cheered Irvie for it--until
I remembered that it was Edgar Semple's.

****

There were "refreshments" outdoors; candle-lit white tables were set in
the moonlight under the trees and colored waiters in white brought pats
and salads and ices and coffee. Ella Martin and Harriet, returning from
an affectionate rush upon the dressing-rooms to congratulate the
playwright-actor and their own Emma and Tommy, placed me at a table and
talked across me with appropriate exuberance. What had most importantly
delighted both Emma and Tommy, I gathered, was that there hadn't been a
"single hitch". Harriet became impressive; she might have been
conducting a muted passage in a symphony. "Not a single one! Emma says
that's the most marvelous thing of all, because Irvie changed the whole
end of the play at the very last moment. They didn't any of 'em know he
was going to do it that way, so the end was as much a surprise to them
as it was to the audience."

"Irvie hadn't rehearsed it?" I asked.

"No, not with the rest of 'em. He didn't decide on it until after the
dress rehearsal last night, Emma says. He had them all go home and then
he worked it out and got Edgar to write it on a typewriter and learned
it by heart before he went to bed. Emma says the most wonderful thing of
all is how he acted it to-night--that utter change--without a single
hitch."

I thought interestedly about that typewriting of Edgar's. I didn't
believe he'd done it from Irvie's dictation; but evidently he wasn't
explaining this to anybody--nor, thus far, was Irvie. On the white table
before me moonshine mingled with candlelight, and behind me I heard the
unmistakable bass-viol voice of our city's foremost authority upon
Elizabethan Drama, old Judge Samuel Johnson Wilboyd. Though my back was
toward him, my mind's eye saw his zooming words blow forward the grey
fringes of that unique relic, a shield against dental-minded gossips,
his great lambrequin moustache.

"Curb that mock-modest laughter, Will, my dear fellow; it deceives not
me. Your son is not of the herd and you well know it. I say he is a
dramatist. In time his works will go over this country and people will
know that the light the theatre has so long awaited has come. Foster
that talent. See that his university courses feed it. When he shall have
graduated see to it that he have pens, ink, paper, a secluded room in
which to use them. You need do nothing more."

Will Pease spoke apologetically. "His mother'll be delighted when I tell
her what you've said, Judge, and of course it's gratifying that Irving
shows this dramatic talent. We're glad he's so versatile; but you see
I--that is, it's rather been planned that he's to go through law school
after he leaves college--he and our other boy, Edgar Semple, too--and
that then they'll both be coming into my office. You'd sanction his
making the law his profession, wouldn't you, Judge?"

"Ordinarily, yes. Beginning his professional life in your office, Will,
my dear fellow, would be an exceptional privilege for any ordinary young
man. Let young Semple have that, if you please, but not your son. The
masterstroke with which he ended this evening's drama says 'No' to any
other calling. Without that masterstroke we of the audience might have
been--well, slightly surfeited with the prevalence of the leading
character, 'Abercrombie'. We might, indeed, have gone away thinking him
rather egregious. But no, in the very last moments before the final
curtain, the author introduced a legitimate but wholly unexpected
dramatic surprise that won all hearts. It was, in the common phrase,
electric."

"Yes, I felt so, too," the pleased Will said. "Even to his mother and me
it was a surprise."

"Will, my dear fellow, it was more. That soliloquy, I say, was a
masterstroke. I yield to no man in my respect for the law as a great
profession; but I say to you that you must--I employ the word 'must'
advisedly--give your son his chance to become our leading dramatist."

I didn't hear Will's flattered response; Ella Martin was pushing a plate
at me. "Eat your chicken salad," she said. "Wake up, eat your salad and
say something! Where's your enthusiasm? Anybody'd think you haven't
enjoyed yourself this evening. Nothing at all to say?"

"I've been wondering," I explained. "In all this flood of praise I
haven't heard anybody mention the merits of young Edgar Semple."

"Of Edgar?" Harriet murmured, and both she and Ella Martin looked
vaguely surprised. "His merits? You mean his acting?"

"He was rather the villain of the piece, wasn't he?" Ella said. "Did you
think he stood out especially? Come to think of it, I can't remember
anything he did except get knocked down. Can you, Harriet?"

"No, except I thought he had a good make-up." Then both of them began to
talk again of Irvie and Emma and Ella's Tommy.

Even Edgar's acting, which to my singular mind resembled a good deed in
a naughty world, threw not a candle's beam upon these ladies or upon the
eminent Sam Johnson Wilboyd or any other than myself. In a naughty world
candles haven't much chance against limelight.




CHAPTER 7


In the "new civic theatre", during this supper interval, the chairs were
being piled upon the stage to clear the floor for dancing, and an
orchestra had arrived. When jazzy strains issued from the old stable,
making me anxious to go home, the young people fluttered pinkly under
the neon light, hurrying through the doorway to begin their coupled,
rhythmic meanderings, and Harriet restrained me.

"Don't be such an old dry-as-dust! Surely you want to watch her, don't
you--anyhow for a little while--when she's having such a happy time? Of
course Irvie'll dance first with Mary Reame, as she's his leading lady;
but---- Oh, come along, just for half an hour or so. It isn't going to
hurt you, is it?"

I said I didn't know and we went in, stood near the wall and watched the
dancing. That is to say, of course, that most of the time Harriet and I
watched our Emma, who was dancing with short Tommy Martin and looking
over his shoulder at the graceful sinuosities of Irvie Pease with Mary
Reame.

Almost eighteen and neither a belle nor a wallflower, Emma was more what
people call a "nice-looking girl" than a pretty one. She had a
pleasantly shaped face, an athletic tall figure, and as for her hair,
she herself used the old description, "just hair-colored hair". She
hadn't any coquetry at all, lacked all the luring devices for which the
new psychology and crooned slang have supplied unappetizing definitions,
and she wasn't often called "charming" by even her most affectionate
relatives. She had a studious, straightforward mind, not a brilliant
one; but I have no child of my own, and ever since she and her mother
had come to live with me when Emma was a solemn good little thing, she
was dear to me--dearer, indeed, than all else. It seemed to me that she
danced prettily even with Tommy Martin, a partner two inches shorter
than herself.

Irvie Pease and Mary Reame were spectacular. Mary was a golden-headed
girl, delicately lovely, more a slim lily than the apple blossom Irvie's
song called her, and in their dancing now, as in the play, the two still
were star and leading lady. To and fro and everywhere, they intricately
swung and glided, delighting the older people on the sidelines until
another boy "cut in", took Mary away and Irvie was released to his
radiant mother. She'd been awaiting this opportunity.

"It's really important," I heard Evelyn say as she seized his arm. "I
coaxed Judge Wilboyd to wait until I could get hold of you. He says it's
time he was in bed; but he's so anxious to----"

She brought Irvie into a group of parents and other spectators near me,
and a moment later, in spite of the yammering "music", I again heard
imposing and resonant accents from under the grey lambrequin of
moustache:

"You are a dramatist!"

Harriet thought I might be missing this, nudged me to listen. "Isn't
that splendid? Just think: it's Judge Wilboyd himself saying it to
Irvie!"

"My lad," the Wilboydian thunders proclaimed, "that masterstroke at the
end! Had it not been for that we might have thought you only a
promisingly talented youth; but the end proves you capable of
inspiration, and that is genius. That touch--the sudden deeply humorous
intimacy with yourself--and then, with what disarming charm, the final
intimacy with the audience, too! Perhaps only youth has these darings.
Perhaps, as a more finished playwright later, you'll not surpass this
one. My boy, tell me how that idea came to you."

"Oh, I don't know." Irvie laughed as if to prove he knew how much he was
being over-praised. "How does anybody get ideas? I didn't decide on this
one till the very last; I wasn't sure it'd go. I'd considered several
ends for the play and the one I used I finally sort of worked out
with--with--I mean I more or less worked it out with Edgar. Really I
expect a good deal of the credit for it ought to be given to him because
of the way he kept insisting on my using it. He----"

"Ah, yes; but it was yours!" This was the authoritative interruption,
and thus was Irvie's revelation of his debt corrupted. "The other young
man insisted; but only upon what you had created. Modesty's becoming but
mustn't bemuse us. Your father and mother will nourish this dramatic
gift. Your career lies before you and----"

Here outrageous drum, saxophone and marimba prevailed over oratorical
pontificacies, and a moment later a laughingly blushing Irvie emerged
from the group. Perhaps he couldn't have made his tribute to Edgar more
definite without yelling, and maybe it was too much to ask that in this
hour of triumph he should go about explaining everything fully to
everybody. Probably he felt that he'd done his best to give credit where
credit was due, and, if people insisted that all of it was due himself,
that wasn't his fault. Already loping and gliding to the music, he
danced his winding way among fluctuant couples to Mary Reame, and, in
turn "cutting in", swept her jubilantly away and away. Her look was that
of the Sleeping Princess just awakened and understanding how.

Emma was now dancing with Edgar, her second partner shorter than
herself. Edgar danced competently, I thought, and seemed to be talking,
too, with his usual placidity. I doubted that she listened; and her
frank face began to be wistful. No matter where they moved together she
seemed to be looking over Edgar's shoulder at Irvie and Mary.

Not enjoying this impression, I made such a fuss about the effect of the
orchestra on my head that Harriet crossly succumbed. We found Evelyn and
Will and as we said goodnight to them, and Harriet produced final
raptures over the play, I thought this must have been the proudest and
happiest evening in the lives, thus far, of those two good souls. Will
shook my hand tumultuously and Evelyn joyously kissed both Harriet and
me. Then my sister and I got ourselves out into the beautiful but
unquiet night. The whackings and thumpings of that expensive orchestra
became less obdurate upon us as we followed the path from the Peases'
driveway and trudged back through our own shrubberies.

"I think," Harriet said, breaking the silence between us, "I do think it
was all just heavenly and Emma's really having the time of her life. Of
course Irvie feels he ought to dance more with Mary than with the other
girls--I mean during the first part of the evening--because she had the
best girl's role and did it so well, so it's appropriate he should. It
was nice of him to tell old Wilboyd that Edgar'd helped him with the
end, don't you think?"

"Yes. At least he rather tried."

"Of course it couldn't have amounted to much, Edgar's help," Harriet
said. "Irvie always has so many more ideas than poor Edgar has--but it
was like Irvie to want to bring Edgar in, if there was any possible
excuse for it. Don't you admit now that the whole thing's been most
significant as the promise of a brilliant career?"

"A theatrical one, Harriet? Irvie's to abandon his father's plans for
him to come with Edgar into the law office?"

"Nonsense!" she said. "He'll be all the greater lawyer because to-night
he's proved what a splendid creative mind he has. I don't believe you
can deny it."

"I don't, Harriet. When I think how he keeps us all thinking about him I
can't deny that he must have one of the most interesting minds in the
world."

"At last!" she exclaimed. We'd now come into the house and she dropped
her light wrap on a hall table. "Thank heaven at last you've admitted
he's what everybody else has always known him to be--the brightest
dearest boy in the world!" She went into the library and turned on a
reading-lamp. "I'm going to sit up for Emma. You go to bed and repent
your old sins."

It wasn't late--I often worked far deeper into the night--and I went up
to the third floor and my workroom; but I didn't try to work. I didn't
even sit down; I walked the floor, compelled to ponder upon the
interesting mind--and character--of Irvie Pease. I've usually found that
if I can see behind the shapings of any grown man's face the shapings it
has worn when the man was a boy, then I know the man. So, too, if a
boy's face shows me what it will be in maturity, then I know the boy.
Irvie was now half-man, half-boy, and to-night I'd seen both faces, the
boy's and the man's.

There was nothing unkind in Irvie. He was light-hearted, gayly clever
and instinctively winsome, and he was a delight to the eye; but to
delight all eyes and ears was meat and drink to him. In youth that's to
be expected and only the repetitious shocks that produce maturity can
banish it; but to-night I didn't see Irvie's coming years bringing with
them that sort of maturity. I could only see him being always
unalterably his own hero.

****

...My windows were open, and high-flying beetles bumped the screens.
Other bumps were faintly on the air, the distant tom-tom thumpings from
the Peases' old stable where the young danced to barbaric rhythms. Once
I heard drums and saxophones pause for an interval and vaguely the
clapping of the dancers' hands claiming an encore, and I paused beside a
window to listen. The encore didn't come--evidently the musicians had
set their minds to a recess--so for a time the night was as still as the
overhead moon itself. Then I heard a sound that puzzled me because it
seemed a human one and to come from near the lilac bushes close to the
house, below my window. It wasn't repeated and I thought I could easily
have been mistaken; but it had seemed very like a brief utterance of
pain--a sob in the voice of a young girl.

I stood listening for perhaps as long as five or six minutes, and heard
nothing more. Then I went downstairs; but at the top of the lower
flight, in the "upstairs hall", I paused, hearing the front door open
and close. Harriet called from the library: "That you, Emma? Is the
party all over?"

"No, not for quite a while yet probably." Emma's voice was cheerful. "I
just thought I----"

"Then why did you----"

"Oh, I don't know, Mother." Emma seemed to be casual. "I just thought I
might as well come home." She went into the library and I continued on
my way to the lower floor; but half way down the stairway I stopped
again. Harriet must have seen something that dismayed her; I heard her
cry out:

"Emma! Why, what---- Dear child, you look as if----"

"No, I don't. Nothing of the kind! I'm only---- I'm----" Emma's tone,
sharp for a moment, went into tremolo. Though I could see neither of
them, the picture I had was of Emma drooping into a chair as Harriet
dropped a book and jumped up to face her.

"Emma! What's the matter?"

"Nothing, I tell you! I just got tired; I don't care to dance with Edgar
Semple forever, Mother!"

"But surely other boys----"

"Oh, yes, plenty enough; it wasn't that." Emma's voice, though doing its
best, had the quaver in it again. "I only---- I mean everything was all
just lovely. Mother, I've always thought Mary Reame's the most utterly
perfect girl in the world. Tell me something. I've never been in any
theatricals before; but doesn't it usually happen that the ones who are
lovers in the play sort of fall in love with each other outside in real
life, too? It's usually like that in theatricals, isn't it? It--it seems
pretty natural that they would, doesn't it?"

Harriet spoke quickly. "You don't mean Irvie hasn't danced with anybody
except Mary all evening?"

"Yes. He--he didn't. Tommy laughed and said Irvie'd told him Mary was
such a--such a honey-dazzle in his play he was going to dance with her
all night and not anybody else--at all."

"Well, but, dear, that doesn't mean he----"

"I think it does, Mother. I think it's just right, myself, especially
after the beautiful way she did her part and how wonderful she looks.
It's right he should show everybody his appreciation and--and how he
feels about her. I ought to be _glad_ it's like that, oughtn't I? I
can--I can--I _will_ be glad, Mother!"

Then there were only vocal murmurings and a faint rustle of garments
that made me think Harriet knelt before Emma and took her in her arms. I
turned about on the stair and went back to my workroom and more pacing
the floor. It had indeed been a sob I'd heard beneath my window.

When all but one of the people who surround any human being look upon
him with something close upon adoration, the single cold heart should
search itself. I searched mine and knew why my thoughts of Irvie Pease
were no longer tinged by the hidden mirth that often moved me during his
childhood and his earlier boyhood.

Youth and young love, both in blinders, dance or weep along the crest of
flower-edged cliffs, and the better a youth is loved--and the more who
love him--the more and deeper are the hurts that he can lightly do.




CHAPTER 8


With their families, the owners of two of our newspapers had been
pleased members of Irvie's audience; few professional dramatic
performances anywhere have received more enheartening attention from the
press. Sunday editions printed reproductions of photographs of the
assembled cast; there were others of Irvie as "Abercrombie Brown" and
one showed him seated at a desk supposedly writing his play. Another,
most effective of all, was of Irvie at the piano singing "My Apple
Blossom, You" to Mary Reame, who leaned toward him exquisitely
spellbound. There was also an elaborate interview with Irvie.

The young dramatist had received her "graciously", the interviewer said.
He had shown her over his New Civic Theatre; but when she asked him if
he hadn't already planned a Broadway production for his play, striking
while the iron was hot, he'd smilingly replied that really he hadn't
thought much about it, though possibly he'd decide to place "As If He
Didn't Know" with a New York agent who'd see about interesting a
manager--the interviewer thought there'd be no doubt of its being
immediately "snapped up". Other than this the young author had no plans
for the immediate future except to accompany his family as usual to
Stonehaven, the Atlantic resort where the Pease family had spent the hot
months "since time immemorial".

On the whole he treated his "new fame" lightly, the interviewer said;
he'd even expressed doubt that he'd ever care to write another play. "I
just wanted to prove to myself I could do it," he was quoted as saying.
She reminded him that not only his writing but his acting, too, had been
loudly praised by the audience; and here again his modesty shone forth.
He responded that if he hadn't been "quite indeed a ham" this was
because of the inspiration derived from "playing opposite a perfectly
gorgeous leading lady", and the interviewer said gayly that the "young
writer-actor-director's face lit up most significantly" as he paid this
tribute--she couldn't help thinking that so Prince Florizel must have
looked when he spoke of the lovely Perdita. The column ended by
mentioning that its author parted with reluctance from Irvie and "that
laughing light I fancy one would always see in his eyes."

****

...That phrase about the Pease family's spending the hot months at
Stonehaven "since time immemorial" I thought genuinely Irvie's, not the
reporter's. Time immemorial on the lips of the young is sometimes a
reference to times astonishingly recent. The Pease family had been
spending July and August at Stonehaven for a dozen years; but as that
took Irvie's memory back to when he was only eight, the epoch was
doubtless, for him, astronomical. I'd been a Stonehaven summer visitor,
myself, for about thirty years and was still, in the estimation of
previously established summer residents, not to mention the "natives",
something of an upstart.

Harriet and Emma thought summer on that north-eastern strip of rock,
pine, juniper, sand and salt surf the "next thing to heaven", and it was
Harriet who'd coaxed our home neighbors thither with us when Irvie and
Edgar were small boys. Will Pease's law office was always too busy to
let him have a full season away, and this year he wasn't to join us
until the second week in August. The evening before the rest of us left,
in early July, Harriet and I walked across the unseparated lawns to say
good-bye to him. We found Emma already there, and Irvie, perched atop a
wardrobe trunk in the hall, practicing palmistry upon her, predicting
grotesque events for her future.

In the living-room where we went to sit with Evelyn and Will, we could
hear my niece's outcries of protest and Irvie's mock-solemn assertion
that he was a scientific prophet. Emma, we heard him insist, was
destined to be expelled from Bryn Mawr promptly after her matriculation
there in September. "No, you can't escape it, my child. It'll be for
gambling and leaving a kangaroo in the president's office." Then he and
Emma whooped in young hilarity as he slid from the trunk and they
pattered down the hall on their way to outdoors. Emma's laughter sounded
true--even though I thought I heard a catch in its overtones. She'd got
at herself pretty thoroughly, I knew; and when she was living up to her
ideals--being a "good sport"--she didn't mean to let anybody suspect it.

Will Pease's good grey eyes shone with pleasure. "Everything's going to
be all right," he said. "The day after the play, what with all the
excitement and publicity, I'm afraid I wondered if he mightn't want to
follow that line the rest of his life; but no, he's sound. He'll tread
the path his grandfather and I planned for him the night he was born.
Naturally I want him to love literature and the drama; but only as
pleasures for the mind, not as a vocation."

Evelyn smiled a little wistfully. "He could hardly help feeling the
temptation, though, could he, Will? He found the name of some agent in a
theatrical magazine he bought, and he sent off the manuscript Tuesday;
so if a manager takes it he'd really be almost compelled to go to New
York and be a playwright, wouldn't he?"

"Not a bit of it," Will said easily. "He and the rest of us would just
go to the opening night, and naturally that'd be a gratification; but of
course he's got to finish college and go through law school. I've talked
to him about it, and thank goodness he knows what's solider and better
worth while than theatrical glory! When he's out of law school he'll
come back to his home town and live here, a good citizen and a good
lawyer. We couldn't well look forward to anything finer for him, could
we?"

With a depth of feeling that moistened his mild eyes, Will addressed the
question to me, and for a moment I was at a loss. Built unquestioningly
in his own father's image, Will Pease had the simple, constant hope to
see his son honorably follow the same pattern. Like many another good
soul certain that he and his forebears have found the best in life, Will
had a profound urge, probably biological, to see his offspring settled
into that perfectly believed-in groove. I had doubts; but with Will's
appealing eyes upon me I couldn't even jocosely hint them. To his
endearingly nave question, my response was only, "No, Will; of course
not."

"No, of course not!" Brightened as readily as is a child, he repeated my
flimsy confirmation. "American life doesn't offer anything better. There
isn't much money in it, maybe, and no wide fame--just the esteem and
goodwill of his fellow-townsmen--but I say that a good American citizen
living up to his highest principles in a good American community like
this finds what we call 'the good life'. Our son knows that as well as
we do, Evelyn, and I thank God for it!"

Evelyn spoke softly and reached out from her chair to touch his hand.
"Yes, Will; so do I."

Her gesture touched more than Will's hand; it touched my heart: those
two were so assured that their son would preserve the perfection they
saw in him. If he'd fail them, their sky would fall; but such chances
are the common lot of all mothers and fathers. I could hope that this
loving pair might always somehow keep themselves as proud of their Irvie
as they were to-night in their certainty that he'd live the "good life"
they lived, themselves.

...When we'd said our temporary good-bye to Will at the front door,
Harriet and Evelyn, though they'd be on the train together next day,
still pottered in talk, as women do; but I went on, and crossing the
Peases' lawn came upon Edgar Semple. He was standing hands in pockets
under the starlight, doing nothing detectable; so I asked him if he
indulged a farewell reverie.

"Guess so," he said. "You see, Irvie and I won't be coming back in the
autumn. We'll be stopping at Princeton on our way from Stonehaven and we
won't see this old place again until the Christmas holidays. I always
hate to leave here and I was just getting a picture of the house in the
dark--and the bright light of the windows--fixed in my mind. It's always
been such a happy place that when I'm away I like to think of exactly
how it looks in the night-time as well as by day and in all sorts of
weather--in sunshine or when it's rained on, and when the leaves are out
and when they aren't."

"I live but I don't learn," I informed him. "I've been gullible in
crediting the slogan that for the new generation everything sentimental
is both extinct and abhorrent." Then I added, "I haven't yet thanked you
for the pleasure you gave me the other night."

"The pleasure I----" He didn't know what I meant. "What night?"

"Good heavens, _the_ night! What you did for Irvie's play."

"What I did?" He was still a blank.

"Certainly. Not only your acting, which was the best present; but your
contribution to the play itself--the changed soliloquy at the end, the
altered version you made."

"I?" I could see that he was startled. "Look here, where'd you get an
idea I had anything to do with it?"

"Partly from the author himself, Edgar. He talked to me about it when he
was doubtful of it and planning to use his own version; but I also heard
him telling old Sam Johnson Wilboyd that you ought to have a good part
of the credit for the change."

"He did?" Edgar's tone wasn't one of pleasure; he was annoyed. "Irvie
oughtn't to've done that."

"I rather thought he ought--and more, too."

"No, sir!" The boy was emphatic. "When people feel they have to go
around giving credit to more than one person for anything that goes off
well, it gets all messed up and nobody knows what's what. It's a
nuisance."

"I don't think you need worry," I said. "I seem to be the only person
who really understands what you did for the play, and I haven't thought
it my affair to mention it."

"I'm certainly glad to hear so!"

"Why?" I asked. "Don't you like being praised?"

"I wouldn't be," he said, with some impatience because of having to
explain so simple a thing. "All it'd do'd be to dwindle the acclaim for
Irvie a little and spoil what I get out of it, myself."

"What do you get out of it, Edgar?"

Again he seemed bothered by having to clarify the obvious. "What do I
get out of it? Why, don't you see? Irvie and I can't both be popular
figures. I'm not built that way; but he is. He was born to shine; it's
always tickled me to death that he was--and just think what it means to
Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Will! So if sometimes I can stew up some way for
him to shine even brighter, why, that's what I like doing. I can't
shine, myself; it's a sort of special gift that he's got and I haven't.
He shines no matter what he does. Well, if I can add a little to that
sometimes--and for such a lovable guy, the best friend I've got--and he
gets the fun out of it he does and----"

With a palms outward gesture instead of more words, Edgar put the matter
up to me to understand, and I wonderingly thought I did understand it.
"So Irvie gets a whole lot of fun out of his shining, does he?"

There came a rare sound through the darkness--something most unusual
from Edgar Semple--a chuckle, a fond one. "Doesn't he, though! What he
gets out of being a celebrity! He's always been something of one in a
way--you know, among our crowd and around through the neighborhood and
family connection--but now, after those pictures in the paper and the
rest of it, he's a celebrity all over town. People he doesn't know have
begun staring at him on the street--sometimes even from across the
street."

"Have they indeed?"

"Oh, certainly! I've seen 'em do it and of course so's Irvie. When it
happens he does a little acting for 'em--nothing much, just speaking in
a deeper voice and dropping his hand on my shoulder maybe, or walking a
little differently. You could hardly tell it; but it's there and he
certainly does love it some. So do I, and where's the harm?"

"Nowhere that I can see." I laughed. "You're sure, are you, that you'll
never want any credit for whatever ideas of yours Irvie may take up?"

"Good heavens, no!" Then Edgar laughed, too. "The last thing on earth
I'd ever want to do'd be to horn in on Irvie's glory. If life's a game
it seems to me I'm the kind that plays it safe."

"Play it, Edgar? You admit you do play it?"

"No, I don't think so," he said. "It just _is_ that way. What I mean, if
I'd fall down on anything or'd make a fool of myself it wouldn't matter
a great deal because it wouldn't be a really bad disappointment for
anybody. I'd be no fallen idol and maybe I could pick myself up again
without people's even noticing I'd been down. Standing on a pinnacle,
though--that's a ticklish position."

"Irvie's pinnacle, you mean, Edgar? You think that's a dangerous----"

"No, no, not really, sir. He'll stay up there of course. He's safe,
because we all want him to be and would do anything on earth not to let
him fall off. Happily he has that effect on everybody. No one could bear
it if he ever did a Humpty Dumpty and----" Edgar stopped himself;
Harriet, crossing the lawn, was beside us.

"Why, Edgar Semple!" she exclaimed. "Aren't you going to Mary Reame's
good-bye party for Irvie and Emma and you? Emma and Irvie went quite a
while ago."

"Golly, did they?" He seemed surprised, as he turned away. "Then I'd
better hop along, I suppose. Goodnight."

"That was nice of him," Harriet said, when he was at a distance and we'd
begun to walk toward our own house. "He wasn't surprised; he only
pretended to be. He's very tactful about not pushing in when Emma has a
chance to go anywhere with Irvie. Edgar's often quite a really
thoughtful sort of boy, don't you think?"

Harriet was a kind woman; but, like Emma, and indeed like the rest of
the Millerwoods and Peases, she seldom showed much interest in what
Edgar was. She'd spared, now, only the one incidental thought to him,
for, pausing as we reached the stone steps of the portico before our
front door, she revealed what was on her mind these days.

"I can't tell you how glad I am that we're getting off to-morrow," she
said. "You're so absent-minded when you're working on anything I don't
believe you really see things. I don't suppose you've noticed how little
Emma's been eating ever since the night of the play?"

"I have, though, Harriet."

"Even you! Then indeed it's a good thing we're going. Emma's at a
sensitive age; she seems to worry over--over all sorts of things. She
needs a change of scene. Having a lot of different people about her'll
be a great help, too. So will the sea and the air from the pine woods.
She mustn't begin getting thinner."




CHAPTER 9


Stonehaven was indeed a "change of scene", and the "different people"
gave us a contrast equal to the landscape's. In that sea-breezy spot,
the Pease family and Harriet and Emma and I were not, as at home, looked
upon as established elements vital to the place. At the Stonehaven Inn
we'd spent summers numerous enough to be regarded as possibly worthy
tributaries; but families who'd been cottage-dwellers for two or three
generations couldn't always prevent themselves from displaying a shade
of condescension in their friendliness toward us and our
fellow-sojourners at the Inn.

One of us, however, received no condescension from anybody; the rather
he dispensed it. Cottagers, "natives" and Inn guests alike treated the
much-invited Irvie as the principal young gentleman of the
place--mainly, I thought, because he looked it. The rest of us bore our
various little exclusions well and enjoyed our compensations. The
Stonehaven Inn looked as inn-like as possible, set a knowingly savory
table, and from its verandah and terraces offered the most magnificent
view of sea and harbor and surf-beleaguered rocky islets within the gift
of this stretch of coast.

The beach, not one of the Norsemen's "long beaches" but a short deep
lunette of fine sand, bordered landward by wild grass stretching back to
bayberry, juniper and thicketed groves of pine, was no more than ten
minutes' walk from the Inn. I took that walk most mornings, although
nowadays I seldom went into the surf, those white surges being too
briskly iced from the north for the sedentary who've not kept themselves
robust after fifty. Harriet and Evelyn went with me; but usually
abandoned me there; they were still sprightly enough to love sporting in
cold seas. I'd walk a while, shell-hunting at the water's varying edges;
then I'd sit alone, or with non-bathing acquaintances near the
bath-houses, and watch the classic spectacle--figures like nudes in
sunlit action flying over the sand or at play in long green watery
hollows that engulfed them with bubbling crystal.

Most of the time, naturally, I watched our own young people and their
playfellows. Emma was a born intimate of the sea, an easy-going
water-witch in it or on it. She out-swam and out-dived all of the other
girls and most of the boys, too. In an impromptu half-mile swimming-race
she'd come in second to Irvie Pease--which reminded me of what she
always did at tennis. On the beach Irvie was of course a decorative
figure; but in this he sometimes had competition, especially from one of
his and Edgar's summer friends, a youth all too appropriately named
Prettiman. If John Bunyan had seen this sample of comeliness and had put
it in a book, surely he'd have named it "Mr. Prettyman".

When the squadron of young would come up out of the sea, frolicking or
passing "medicine balls", I sometimes suspected Irvie of knowing that he
looked beautiful and of perhaps attitudinizing undetectably; but his
friend George Prettiman could never be accused of any self-consciousness
at all. He was too simple, too unimaginative and too lazy; though I
think that in this time of his youth he was the handsomest person I ever
saw.

I spoke of him to Evelyn one morning when she'd "gone in" with Harriet
but had come out soon and lay beside me for a sun-bath on the sand.
"George Prettiman's a remarkable boy, Evelyn. Usually a young gentleman
so beauteous would get satirical treatment from his male contemporaries
and sometimes from the girls, too. They're likely to plaster him with
nicknames referring to his symmetry. Good thing for Antinos that he
didn't live to-day, he'd have been made miserable; but George seems to
get along with everybody. Both Irvie and Edgar appear to like him. They
genuinely do, don't they?"

"Yes, indeed," she said. "Everybody does. Maybe it's because he's so
much more than good-natured that he's really spinelessly gentle." She
laughed. "The boys say he'll do anything anybody tells him to. Yes, they
all like him, especially Janey Blue, I believe."

"Janey Blue? Which one is Janey Blue?"

Evelyn sat up straight and shaded her eyes with a hand. "She's a tall
sandy-haired girl, even taller than Emma--almost too tall. There she is,
just now passing that big rubber ball to Emma. She and George are
supposed to be engaged, Irvie says."

I watched Emma receive the ball from the tall sandy-haired girl and
instantly, with a competent, long-armed swing, send it on to Irvie. "Are
they old enough?" I asked. "Aren't all of that gamboling little troupe a
lot too young to be thinking of betrothals and marriage?"

"Murder, no!" Evelyn had sunk back upon the sand and didn't open her
closed eyes. "I'm afraid you've reached the time of life when you don't
see these differences; they all look the same age to you. George
Prettiman's two or three years older than our own boys. He flunked out
at Harvard year before last, and since then he hasn't done anything at
all except go to Pinehurst in the winter and come here in the summer."

"That makes him eligible for marriage, Evelyn?"

"Why not? He'll never do anything else especially, and Janey Blue's
never been able to look away from him since the first time she ever saw
him. She's old enough, too. Twenty, the same age as our dear Mary
Reame."

"Mary Reame?" I was surprised. "Mary's twenty?"

"Almost twenty-one." I saw that although Evelyn still didn't open her
eyes her face showed some amusement. "Mary Reame and Janey graduated in
June last year from that New York 'finishing school' Mary went to.
Mary's coming on here, by the way, to visit Janey later in the summer.
She's to spend a week with Janey and then another week with that
Stelling girl who went to the same school and's visited Mary once or
twice out home. You didn't know Mary's coming?"

"I believe I'd heard so." I looked toward the water where Emma and Irvie
together, forgetting the "medicine ball", were running again to dive
through the curve of a wave, and were followed hand-in-hand by the
superb George with his tall Janey. "I hadn't realized, though, that
Mary's so fully 'marriageable'."

Evelyn sat up again, opened her eyes and gave me a glance in which I saw
her amusement increase. "I've always heard," she said, "that it's the
most customary thing in the world for a boy to think he's a little in
love with a girl at least a shade older than himself. Mary Reame's a
darling creature and so far as I can judge she reciprocates--who
wouldn't?--but she'd hardly be able to wait through two more years of
college and then four of law school, would she? I don't think any of us
need to begin worrying about that, need we?"

"No," I said, "not about that."

Irvie, interrupting a gallop to the bath-house to dress, paused beside
his mother and me. Dripping and laughing, he looked down on us and it
was easy to see why he drew the gaze of beach spectators more than did
the sumptuous George Prettiman. Wet or dry, Irvie always had the
"something" that singled him out. "Water too cold for you to-day,
Mother?" he asked. "I saw you streaking out like a scared greyhound
after one dip." He spoke to me jocosely. "How's your darling old 'One
o'Clock' running this season? Had as many breakdowns as you did last
year? Had to be towed in lately? Run into any whales off shore? Aren't
you ever going to invite me again to go out with you?"

"Oh, come any day, any day, Irving."

He laughed loudly. "That means no day, doesn't it? I may fool you and
take you up before the season's over, though--go out with you and spoil
your fishing! Might bring a girl or so with me to make sure of it." Then
he danced away to the bath-house.

****

...The "One o'Clock" was a shabby old twenty-eight-foot fishing-boat;
but that wasn't her intended name. Orion Clafley, her elderly builder
and owner, though his appearance and conversation wouldn't have led
anyone to suspect a streak of fantasy, had named her "HOURI", not
anticipating what facetiousness would make of that word once he'd
painted it in large white capital letters on her black stern. Stonehaven
villagers, readily mistaking the final letter "I" of "HOURI" for the
figure "1", thought "Hour One" a perplexing name for any boat; then
received Orion's increasingly irritated explanations hilariously. The
name "HOURI" still appeared defiantly upon her stern; but for fifteen
years this incongruously rather tubby craft had been gayly known to
"natives" and summer residents alike as the "One o'Clock". I'd hired
her, season after season, and Orion with her.

I was a mild fisherman, not an ardent one. Many an afternoon the "One
o'Clock" merely dawdled at sea without a line over the side and Orion
sat by the chuggy two-cylinder engine in the stern, humoring it while I
did indolent steering forward, content with our eight miles an hour of
"cruising speed". Commonly we had no passengers. Harriet abhorred boats
and Emma preferred her own rather dangerous sailing-dory. I didn't like
that dory; but Emma was often miles from shore in it alone, especially
after Mary Reame's arrival at Stonehaven to visit Janey Blue. When from
the "One o'Clock" I'd see the dory's small grey patch of sail in the
distance I'd head for it and hover near; then, when we were on land
again, Emma'd reproach me pettishly for being an old hen; but next day,
to make up for her temper, she'd perhaps be gentle and go out with Orion
and me.

Lacking Orion Clafley, I couldn't get out in the old tub, myself, so
trifling a motor-boatman was I. Near middle age when gasoline locomotion
arrived, I had never any faith that I could master the intricacies of a
marine engine. Anybody can learn to steer a boat; but of all men on
earth I suppose I am the poorest mechanic; so when Orion Clafley lay
flat with stomach trouble for a week, the "One o'Clock" only swung about
her mooring in the harbor, idle, until Edgar Semple volunteered to be my
temporary engineer.

****

By that time August had come and Will Pease heartily with it. Nobody had
a more zestful delight in the place than his, and, though he devoted his
days to the golf course and the beach, he seemed never tired enough to
go to bed. He loved walking at night along the coast, following
ankle-twisting paths through scratching bushes and over stony hillocks,
or he would badger me into going by starlight to sit with him upon rocky
juts into the sea. There he'd quote whole passages or salt phrases out
of maritime poems all the way from Tudor ballads to Masefield; but I
think there was never a night when he didn't at least end by talking of
his son. His voice always had a little change of tone when he spoke of
Irvie, as if now he came to something happily confidential.

"I wonder if you noticed the boy at dinner this evening?" he thus said
one night, when the incoming tide's flying spume had driven us from the
rocks and we began to make our way back to the Inn. "Did you happen to
observe that he was just as jolly as usual, teasing his mother about her
fear of getting stung by a jellyfish at the beach, and all that? You
didn't see any difference in him, did you?"

"No, none at all."

"I thought not." We'd reached the boardwalk that runs beside the road
leading to the Inn, and in an access of intimate friendliness Will took
my arm. "You may be glad to know what a good sport the boy is. He's had
a bad little disappointment to-day. His mother and I are pretty tickled
over the way he not only kept it dark but didn't show his feelings. No,
sir--not by the blink of an eye! That agent turned him down; but
nobody'd guess it from Irvie."

"Agent?" I'd forgotten. "How did----"

"You know," Will said. "Irvie's play. That agent he sent it to kept it
all these weeks; but to-day Irvie had a letter from him. All it said was
that except the end of the play showed promise, the material seemed
time-worn and the agent didn't feel that he could encourage himself
enough to submit it to a manager, so he was returning it to the author.
Well, after all that praise and publicity for the play at home, it must
have been a pretty hard jolt to get such a letter, mustn't it?"

"I'm afraid so, Will. You say Irving 'kept it dark'?"

"Yes, from everybody, and of course we'll never speak of it to him. The
typewritten manuscript was in a big envelope; but the letter was
separate. The desk clerk at the Inn handed Evelyn this afternoon's mail
for the four of us and she opened the smaller envelope by mistake. The
flap wasn't even sealed. When she saw the letter was from the agent she
just couldn't help reading it; then she put it back in the envelope and
had the clerk put the manuscript and the letter back in Irvie's box, so
he'd get it when he came in. We didn't see him till dinnertime, and at
first we were both afraid to look at him; but he certainly took it like
a good sport, don't you think?"

"Yes, Will, certainly."

Will became even more confidential. "In the long run, though, this
literary set-back might be a good thing, wouldn't you think?"

That surprised me into a stupid question. "You don't mean, do you, Will,
that you and Evelyn feel Irvie's always been so much on the top of the
wave that he needs a few set-backs to----"

"No, no, no, never!" Will dismissed the idea instantly. "If anything,
he's too modest about himself already. What I mean is that while this
agent's letter sounded officious and opinionated, as Evelyn repeated it
to me, it might help Irvie to have no regrets about choosing the law for
his life work. Anyhow, though, that nasty letter must have been a blow."
Will's paternal sympathy put a tremble into his voice. "If--if he were
your boy wouldn't you feel rather proud of the way he's taking it?"




CHAPTER 10


I did think Irvie's gameness a credit to him and I said so the next
afternoon to Edgar Semple. We were out in the "One o'Clock", flopping
into a heavy southerly chop that kept me mopping the spray from my face;
the old boat was notoriously "wet". Emma was with us, to make up for an
uncommonly sharp scolding she'd given me the day before when I'd closely
followed her dory all the way back to the harbor mouth. Just now she was
in the stern, hauling in a useless trolling line, and Edgar had come
forward to the little cabin for a tarpaulin to shelter the engine and
keep the spark-plugs dry.

"Irvie's not letting anybody see the wolf gnaw his vitals," I said.
"Plucky of him. Is he going to send his script to another agent?"

"Sir?" Edgar, unfolding his tarpaulin as he emerged from the tiny
companionway, paused beside my steering-wheel. "Another agent? Why, he's
still waiting to hear from the one he did send it to."

"He hasn't told even you?" My surprise was genuine; I hadn't meant to
give Irvie away. "I supposed of course----"

Edgar was shrewd. "Oh, I see! Got the script back, has he? I hadn't any
doubt it would be that way; but I thought when it happened he'd keep it
to himself--just let it ride until people forgot about it, or if
somebody'd ask him he'd laugh and say something like, 'Oh, that old
thing? I decided to suppress it long ago, put it away among the follies
of my youth.' Something like that--just sliding over it. That'd be
Irvie's way and a pretty good one, too. I can't imagine his telling
anybody about it now--last of all Aunt Evelyn or Uncle Will. So how did
you happen to----"

I explained, and Edgar laughed sympathetically. "Poor old Irvie! Well,
he'll keep it dark and so'll we. If he thinks nobody knows, he won't
really mind much. He had his fun out of it at home and he's having too
good a time here." Edgar glanced at Emma's back; she was busy with her
wet trolling line, the chop was noisy and she couldn't have heard us.
"No need to mention it--to anybody--is there, sir?"

"No, Edgar."

He went aft with his tarpaulin and I thought of what he'd said of
"Irvie's way" and its being a pretty good one. Maybe it was--for Irvie.
To hide our defeats, sliding them down to the cellars of our
consciousness so that our public appearances shine forth to even
ourselves as wholly undented--more of us than is suspected follow this
solacing way. So long as the show window's kept triumphantly bright and
enticing, this kind of shopman can be content and feel that he prospers.
Edgar evidently thought it not only a good way but the best way, for
Irvie, and as usual would devote himself to keeping it smooth.

...The "One o'Clock" was making heavy weather of it, and, after
receiving several simultaneous quarts of salt water upon my already
dripping front, I put the boat about and headed for the harbor with a
following sea pushing us along in a sudden smallness of sound. The
engine no longer needed the protection of the tarpaulin; Edgar let it
drop and I could hear him debating a nautical question with Emma. We
were towing the "One o'clock's" tender, a flat-bottomed small rowboat
without which I never put to sea, and the argument concerned this
precaution.

"Suppose we'd spring a plank or your old gas tank got on fire," I heard
Emma say. "In a chop as heavy as this the three of us'd have a fine time
in that shallow-draft little ten-foot dinghy! We'd have to head straight
into the chop of course and that peanut shell'd do nothing but take in
water over the bow and fill up. So there you'd be, having to swim for
it!"

"Of course you would," Edgar returned. "You wouldn't have much chance if
you headed into such a chop as this; but you could be all right if you
put the dinghy's stern to it."

"Edgar Semple!" Emma shouted her derision. "Everybody knows that the
only possible way to ride out a blow is to keep heading into the sea."

"Not in a little rowboat like that dinghy," he said. "Rowing with your
back to the bow, you can't see what's coming or at what angle it'll hit
you. Put your stern to the waves, though, and you do see what's coming
at you and if you're a sharp enough oarsman you can keep squared to it.
A rowboat can go with the sea when it can't go against it. Maybe you'll
have to bail some; but that way you'll ride it out. Put your bow to it
and you'll swamp."

"You're absolutely wrong!" Emma cried. "Ask anybody."

"That's the poorest way to settle anything, Emma--asking anybody. It's
better to ask somebody that knows."

"What a quibble!" Emma laughed at him. "When you're beaten in argument
you always do that, Edgar."

"Always, Emma?"

"Never knew you not to!"

"Glad to hear it," Edgar said. "I must be on the right track--going to
be a lawyer."

"Yes, and how judge and juries'll hate you! You'd never give up the
least little point."

"No, not if it's the right one, Emma."

"Or the wrong one!" she said, and they laughed together merrily, much to
my pleasure.

When we'd left the "One o'Clock" at her harbor mooring and had rowed
ashore in the dinghy, the two skipped away from me and ran ahead. Irvie
was having a small "tea-party or something" at the Inn for Mary Reame,
and Emma and Edgar feared to be late. I followed, a long way behind, and
had a glimpse of Irvie's party as I crossed the lounge on my way to the
elevator. The double doors of a smaller room stood open and through the
aperture there came the full sound of a piano and a manly young tenor
voice singing "My Apple Blossom, You".

I saw Irvie at the piano and Mary Reame leaning upon it, as she had in
his play. Irvie's gay charm was out in full force; he knew dozens of
songs, adroitly alternated the frolicsome with the sentimentalized, and,
tinkling semblances of accompaniment out of a piano, he could--as his
mother laughingly said--woo the bird off the tree. Mary Reame, I
thought, seemed ready to leave her bough for Irvie.

Emma and Edgar weren't in sight from where I momentarily paused; but I
could see the spectacularly handsome George Prettiman upon a sofa,
seated beside his tall Janey Blue, who seemed to feel that Irvie's music
was all about George. Her hand stole to touch his and he received this
sketch of a caress with amiable complacency. To that somehow rather
touching picture of an "engaged young couple" the moody-looking girl at
the other end of their sofa offered a radical contrast.

I'd seen her at the beach sometimes and recalled that Evelyn Pease had
spoken of her as "that Stelling girl", also that Miss Stelling had
visited Mary Reame at home--and another recollection came faintly. Her
name was Sylvia Stelling, wasn't it?--and wasn't it she for whom Irvie
Pease, at sixteen or so, had cut his cigarettes in two with a pair of
scissors?... Small and dark, she was what's called
"insignificant-looking"; but though she sat with downcast eyes I had the
impression that she'd usually be discontented and yet feel, with an odd
kind of sulkiness, that she was important. She remained immobile as, in
the moment of my pausing, Irvie finished "My Apple Blossom, You" and
instantly swung into a carol of nonsense about the Sons of the Prophet
and Abdullah Bulbul Ameer. There was a burst of joy, and Irvie's voice
was joined in the song by a dozen others but not by that of the girl at
the end of the sofa. Her moody expression was unchanged; she didn't
move, didn't even look up.

For reasons not fathomed, the mental snapshot I had of her as she sat
detached, not succumbing to Irvie's voice or to anything else, came
intermittently before me as I changed my salted clothes. I was curious
enough to speak of her at our two-family table in the Inn's dining-room.

"All of you seemed to be having yourselves a time at Irvie's party," I
said to Emma, who sat beside me. "All of you, that is, except one. I
happened to glance through the doorway and it struck me that there was a
Banquo at the feast."

Emma understood but quickly looked reticent, an expression familiar to
me when she disapproved of a colleague and wouldn't admit it. Irvie,
across the table, was amused. "Means Sylvia Stelling," he explained to
the others. "She's like that most of the time lately. Just dead pan. My
guess is it's because she was beginning to have her eye on poor old
George but Janey jumped in first and collared him. Whoever was first
would get him of course; he wouldn't know what was happening. Old
George's really the 'girl who never could say no'."

Evelyn looked displeased. "That's nonsense, Irvie. None of those
Stellings could care for anything except themselves, especially not that
suppressed little Sylvia. She's always been queer as queer and I don't
see how a girl like Mary Reame can bear to be visiting there. I used to
think Mary fastidious in choosing her friends; but----"

"She is!" Emma spoke up quickly in loyal championage. "Mary's just as
fastidious as she ever was; she's perfect! They were at school together,
Aunt Evelyn, and visited each other several times when they were young."
This brought a laugh from the rest of the table, and Emma explained
herself. "I mean before they came out. Mary's finished the week she
promised Janey at the Blues' cottage and she couldn't decently turn
Sylvia's invitation down for the next week at the Stellings', could
she?"

"Perhaps not," Evelyn said. "I just don't see, though, how any civilized
person could live a week in that cottage--that atrocious mansion!"

I thought Evelyn right about the "atrocious mansion". The Stellings had
built it, not long since, upon an ostentatious hilltop two or three
miles away from both the sea and the village. I'd never been nearer it
than the stone-pillared entrance to its long asphalt driveway; but what
could be seen of an Italianate balustraded roof, above pointed pines,
had struck me as discomfiting in the northern New England landscape.
Moreover, there'd been a rumor that Mrs. Stelling had instructed her
architect to erect for her "a nice summer cottage that'll be a replica
of the Dowager Queen's palace in Rome". No doubt slanderous, this artful
bit had nevertheless a Stelling flavor.

Mrs. Stelling's husband, as he was usually mentioned rather than as "Mr.
Stelling", was an emaciated dreamy man with pale auburn hair, and he was
believed to have been selected by Mrs. Stelling because of a fancy she'd
taken to his ancestry, a ticket she might at times have occasion to use.
His interest in life appeared to rest upon his stamp collecting. I'd
never seen him except at the beach; but whenever we happened to come
near each other there he seemed convinced, in his misty way, that I was
a fellow-collector. Possibly he thought that at my age nobody would wish
to be anything else, and, as he didn't listen to my vague responses, his
harmless illusion continued from one season to another.

"You'll be interested to learn," he'd say in his suppressed voice, "that
I'm now negotiating for nine of the rarest items out of the Sykes-Smythe
estate in London."

Mr. Stelling's suppressedness was easily recognized as a condition
produced by his marriage to a bird of overwhelmingly different feather,
much too gorgeous plumage. With her loose pink face, over-dressed hair
and big aggressive head mounted neckless though pearled upon a
ballooning bosom, she reminded me of Marie de' Medici in surfeited
middle age. At the beach, where only I saw her, Mrs. Stelling's
infrequent appearances seemed to bedizen the very sand and her querulous
small eyes to challenge the right of the surf to make all that noise
when she was speaking. At her "atrocious mansion" she gave sumptuously
oppressive entertainments, and Evelyn and Will Pease, after attending
one of them, returned as quickly to the Inn as they respectably could.
Will had a kind of horror of the Stellings' style of living, and Evelyn
more than shared it.

..."Those people!" she said to-night at our dinner-table, after I'd
brought up the subject of the Stellings' daughter. "One or two more such
families, with their liveries and champagne and dozen cars, not to speak
of Roman palaces, would be the ruin of quiet old unfashionable
Stonehaven. I don't see what they ever wanted to come here for anyhow.
They----"

"Oh, see here now," Irvie interposed. "They had a right to, didn't they?
If you want to know the reason, though, Mother, it's because Mrs.
Stelling's hay fever is better here. You can't blame her for that, can
you? Besides, take her on the right side and she's quite a jolly old
thing. I don't see anything wrong in her living the way she likes to if
she can afford it, and she certainly can. Thirty millions! Boy!"

Will Pease spoke in troubled surprise. 'You're joking, aren't you,
Irvie?'

"Ain't I always?" the cheerful youth responded. "Thirty millions isn't
just a guess, though. Bill Tropp in my class has an old uncle in New
York who's one of the trustees or what-you-may-call-'ems of the estate
Mrs. Stelling's father left, and Bill told me. Bill says it's all honest
money, too; her father made three blades of grass grow where one grew
before. So what's wrong about it?"

"Nothing at all," Will said. "Your mother and I aren't envy-shouters,
Irvie. We're not accusing anybody of wickedness and corruption. It's
only the rubbing-in of riches that makes us join revolutionaries that
deplore vulgarity."

"Speech!" Edgar Semple looked up from his plate. "That was a good
beginning, Uncle Will. You said it! Speech!"

"You eat your lobster," Will said crossly, and an amiable buzz of family
laughter seemed to end our discussion of the Stellings; but I renewed
it.

"You used the word 'suppressed' about the daughter," I said to Evelyn.
"With such limitless resources at hand what suppresses Sylvia?"

"Her mother," Evelyn replied. "Her obnoxious mother. Look at the woman's
husband--all he dares is to walk in his sleep whispering about his old
stamp collection. She couldn't endure having a daughter grow up to take
part of the show away from her. She never allows Sylvia an hour's
freedom. She'd keep her still in the nursery if she could; she's even
stingy with her. Nobody ever hears Sylvia's voice when her mother's
around. I don't mean I like the girl. That brooding makes her most
unattractive; but anybody could see where it comes from. What a family!
I'm certainly not prejudiced but I----"

"Oh, no!" Irvie gave his mother a pat on the back. "Not a bit
prejudiced. Not an iota!" Evelyn was delighted to have him mock her, and
this time the family laughter did end our table-talk about the
Stellings.

Irvie paired with me in our little procession from the dining-room to
the lounge. "Want to be a hospitable old Sea Cap'n?" he said. "Mary
Reame's been here over a week and in the sea plenty but not once on it.
She'd like to get out in a boat but not in that tippy dory of
Emma's--she says she's sure Emma'll be drowned in it some day--and the
Stellings keep their yacht in Florida. If you're going out again in the
'One o'Clock' any time before Mary leaves----"

"Why, of course, Irving. To-morrow afternoon if you like. Edgar's going
with me again; he's still my engineer. We'll leave just after lunch."

"Good enough!" Irvie said. "Emma'll come, too, of course. Mother said
for me to ask Mary to dine with us here at the Inn to-morrow evening, so
both invitations'll have to include Sylvia. I'm lunching at the
Stellings' to-morrow and I'll have the pair of 'em at your little old
pier by two o'clock. Kindly arrange sweet weather."




CHAPTER 11


Emma and Edgar were already aboard the "One o'Clock", and, as I rowed
Irvie and his smiling, delicate Mary out in the dinghy, he explained why
Sylvia Stelling hadn't come.

"Her mamma wouldn't let her. Maybe she would have; but at lunch she
heard me prattling and asked what on earth was the 'One o'Clock'. When I
told her it was a fishing-boat you hired she screeched. Said anybody
that went out in such craft always smelled of fish for hours, especially
in hot weather. If Sylvia went she mightn't get back in time to be
de-fished and dressed for the five-o'clock party at the Blues' cottage;
it wouldn't do at all. Mrs. Stelling said she had no authority over a
'house-guest'--yes, that's what she called Mary, a 'house-guest'; it's
Mrs. Stelling's style--so Mary could go and smell herself up if she
wanted to."

Mary laughed. "Tell him the rest of it, Irving."

He complied. "Mrs. Stelling didn't worry over whether I'm sensitive or
not about being a mere worm of a hotel guest. She said Sylvia couldn't
come to dinner with us, either. She'd allowed her to join my tea-party
yesterday, me being such a nice persuasive feller, but no--not for
dining. Said she'd always though it 'rather cheapening' for a girl 'in
Sylvia's position' to be seen too often around summer hotels. Whoops,
what a tactful old gal, and whoof, where'd all this heat come from? I'm
sizzling in all my seams. Do hurry and get us out of the harbor and upon
the rolling blue."

This was indeed the hottest day in many Stonehaven seasons. Outside the
harbor we were not upon a "rolling blue" but upon a dulled glassy
surface lazily humped by the subsided chop of the previous afternoon and
without horizons. A yellowish haze, thinner than fog but almost as
palpable, removed all blues and greens from sky and sea, and before we'd
made a full sea-mile from the harbor we were out of sight of land. Our
only breeze, the slight one afforded by our eight-miles-an-hour, wasn't
cooling. Our faces and hands seemed the hotter for it, and I didn't ask
if anybody'd care to make the exertion of fishing.

Mary Reame, often called a "sweet girl", was really so. She said she was
enchanted to be on the sea and thought the effect of the haze, with the
sun so faint one could stare at it, beautifully Turneresque. "I'm not
used to the water, like the rest of you," she added. "I'm much more
entirely a mid-west inlander because I've never spent a whole season by
the ocean and the only time I ever really saw anything of it at all was
going to Europe and coming back, that summer the family took me over. I
don't mind it's being so hot; I feel exhilarated to be out here on this
boundlessness. Don't you see how like a Turner it is, Irving?"

"Oh, I do!" he responded in a lover's huskily softened voice; but I
heard him. "It's beautiful to see it as you do, Mary--ah, and for us to
feel it together!"

Emma, too, heard this, since she was standing beside me near the wheel;
but, if she flinched, the emotional jerk wasn't perceptible. Mary Reame
and Irvie didn't care who saw that they were in love and Emma had made
up her mind and her heart to show them and everybody else never anything
but brightest approval. At this very moment, when the romantic condition
of her two dearest friends became most apparent, she was probably
imagining herself as a bridesmaid parading a stout smile down the length
of a church aisle at the end of which, before a flowered altar, Irvie
awaited his lovely slender bride.

...I'd run the "One o'Clock" on a slanting south-easterly course out
from shore for about an hour and a half; then I called Emma to the
wheel--she'd gone aft to chat with Edgar by the engine--and, when she'd
relieved me of steering, I went down into the little box of a cabin and
brought forth some sandwiches and a couple of thermos bottles of iced
tea.

Mary Reame made the correct chirpings over this hospitality, asked what
could be more divine, a question Irvie no doubt rightly interpreted as
meaning what could be more divine than to sit beside him enjoying common
refreshment on the boundless deep. Then she pointed to the west. "It's
getting more and more Turneresque over in that direction. These
sulphurous tones that tint the air seem to be deeper in color yonder.
What's there, Irving?"

"Nothing except Porpoise Cove, Bristol Beach, Miller's Neck, a string of
summer hotels, summer shacks and a couple of lighthouses," he told her.
"That's the land, Mary, about seven miles off our starboard
quarter--only you can't see it. You could if this hot haze'd clear up;
but it isn't going to, so you'll have to be content with the Atlantic
Ocean and present company--which strikingly includes me. Can you stand
it?"

Mary gave him a look that openly proved to us all how happily she could
stand it.

Edgar accepted a glass of iced tea and showed me his watch. "Twenty
after three," he said. "About twelve miles out, aren't we? Emma and Mary
and Irvie and I are supposed to be at the Blues' cottage by
five--announcement party for Janey and George Prettiman. I'd rather stay
out in the boat, myself; but the others----"

"All right, Edgar. I'll head for home."

When I'd taken the wheel from Emma, I put about, watched the compass,
and for a little less than an hour held a straight course for
Stonehaven's harbor mouth. Then, from foot to head, I had a too-familiar
sensation--that of losing personal momentum. For some moments the "One
o'Clock" continued to move spinelessly and without propulsion; then lay
lazily aflop: once again that senile engine had broken down. Emma,
beside me, looked round at Edgar.

"Hi there, Engineer! Get out your monkey-wrench and see how long you're
going to hold us up."

Edgar didn't respond. He was down on his hands and knees, absorbedly
busy, and a suggestive smell of gasoline unpleasantly drifted forward to
us.

"Get going, Edgar," Irvie said. "We'll be due at the Blues' pretty soon.
It's after four. How could there be any announcement party without
Janey's school roommate? Mary's got to get there. Hurry it up!"

Edgar still didn't answer. He'd opened a hatch in the floor-boarding and
was working with his head and an arm beneath the aperture. Irvie didn't
ask if he needed help, possibly because he knew Edgar's competence, but
became more urgent. "Hi, get a move on, feller! I want to be at that
party, myself."

****

Edgar rose, wiping his monkey-wrench with a clump of cotton waste, which
he tossed overboard. "Take it easy," he said, and called to me. "Feed
pipe from the gas tank to the engine, sir. I was afraid the vibration'd
crack that old pipe some day."

"Crack it?" Irvie spoke imperiously. "Bandage it up with something,
then, and let's get going."

"It isn't cracked," Edgar said. "It's broken right in two. I've got the
gas turned off all right; but until we get a new feed pipe from
Clafley's shop the 'One o'Clock' is out of commission. We'll have to get
a tow."

Mary Reame murmured, "Oh, dear!" and Irvie exclaimed, "A tow, the
devil!" He jumped up from his chair beside Mary's. "Who's going to see
us in this haze?"

I brought a megaphone and a pair of binoculars from the cabin; all of us
searched the thin yellow-filtered sunshine for a chance Samaritan. The
binoculars didn't help us much, the air was too thick, and of course the
megaphone was only a hopeful gesture until a friendly boat should
appear. Mary Reame tried to hide her anxiety not to miss the
announcement party; Irvie fretted, and the misconduct of the "One
o'Clock" seemed to put upon the poor old boat, and me too, an air of
stubborn but conscious guilt.

We'd lain helpless for perhaps twenty minutes when an encouraging sound
became faintly audible--the throbbing of a marine engine. Irvie mounted
the cabin-roof and began to bellow through the megaphone, "Ahoy there,
you! Boat ahoy! Give us a tow, will you?" and presently a whitish streak
appeared on the water half a mile or more to the eastward--recognizably
a motorboat cruising along the coast.

Emma had the binoculars. "No use shouting, Irvie," she said. "They
couldn't possibly hear you. They ought to notice we're not making
headway; but they're not stopping yet. Keep waving, Edgar."

In token of distress Edgar was widely waving the small flag we carried
on the "One o'clock's" stern, and for a moment the white streak to the
east seemed to become clearer. Irvie jumped down from the cabin. "Joy,
oh, joy! They're turning toward us and'll give us our tow. Cheer up,
Mary, we're practically at Janey Blue's right now."

"No, we aren't," Edgar said. "They aren't heading for us. If they saw us
at all they probably thought we're just lying here fishing. They're
moving right along, cruising down east."

"Oh, no! They couldn't!" Mary cried; but Edgar was right, and with a
general groan we saw the white streak fade into complete invisibility.




CHAPTER 12


Mary Reame, as if she'd missed a train, turned anxiously to Edgar. "How
long," she asked, "do we have to wait for another?"

He only looked astonished, but Emma reminded me of an occasion when
Orion Clafley and I had broken down and weren't brought in until
midnight. "We just thought you were writing in your room, so we didn't
miss you until after dinner. On top of that the boat Uncle Will sent out
to look for you was hours and hours finding you in the dark. We'd better
decide not to mind missing the party, Mary."

"Get practical," Irvie said. "We're not going to miss it. We covered a
lot of distance running for home before we broke down; we can't be more
than three or four miles out. There's the dinghy. What's the matter with
rowing in?"

"A four to five sea-mile row in that dinghy?" Edgar shook his head.
"She'd be overloaded, and with one pair of oars it'd take forever."

"The dinghy's got rowlocks for two pairs," Irvie said. "Aren't there a
couple more oars stowed away somewhere?"

I apologized. "No. I'm sorry; but Orion needed 'em for another boat
and----"

Edgar renewed his objection. "What's the difference? Five people in that
boat----"

"I didn't say five people!" Irvie protested. "The dinghy's light as a
feather, the tide's running in, I'll row the girls ashore and we'll be
at that party before it's half over!"

"I wouldn't count on it." Edgar, always cautious, looked serious. "I
doubt if you could make it under an hour and a half at the best. I doubt
if----"

"Doubt, doubt, doubt! Doubt nothing!" Irvie laughed and unfastened the
dinghy's painter from the "One o'clock's" stern. "I'll telephone the
village from the Blues' and have a motorboat sent out for you two;
they'll easily tow you home in time for dinner. How's that for an
executive brain? Always trust the seafaring Old Maestro. Come on, ladies
mine!" As he spoke, he pulled the dinghy alongside, stepped lightly into
it and seated himself amidship at the oars. "Forward the Light Brigade!"
he cried. "Mary, sit in the stern; it's more comfortable and my weight
throws aft when I row. Emma in the bow seat'll trim the boat just right.
On with the dance!"

Mary smiled upon him but was timid. "Such a little boat. Is it safe?"

"As a church, my child!"

Irvie gave her his hand as she stepped over the "One o'Clock's" side and
let herself down upon the dinghy's stern seat. Emma, following Irvie
instantly, was already sitting in the bow between the unused oarlocks.
With a strong stroke he began to pull away from the "One o'Clock".

"'Pull for the shore, sailor!'" he blithely sang. "'Pull for the----'"

"Wait a second!" Edgar had groped in a locker and brought forth a tin
can in which he'd kept screws, nuts and bolts. He emptied these out and
tossed the can to Emma. "Catch! You might ship a little water before you
get in and need something to bail with."

Emma laughed as she caught the can, and Irvie mockingly called as he
bent to his oars, "Man the pumps, men! A leak, a leak, a leak! '"We are
lost," the Captain shouted as he staggered down the stair.'" Then he
began to sing again, "'Pull for the shore, sailor! Pull for the
shore----'"

Already a decisive space of satiny water showed between the "One
o'Clock" and the dinghy, and Emma, in the little boat's bow and facing
us, was waving her handkerchief in jaunty farewell. I realized that I'd
had not a word to say during the swift operation that was separating her
from me. Young people often make their decisions, and act upon them,
too, so quickly that an unconsulted older person scarce knows what is
happening; then stands baffled by the accomplished fact. Irvie'd swept
things along almost instantaneously and it was not until after he'd had
his way that I became reluctant to let him have it. I could foresee no
danger at all--a child's toy sloop would have been safe upon that
breezeless surface--yet, as the watery space between the "One o'Clock"
and those three figures in the dinghy became irrevocable, the rowboat
seemed pathetically and even ominously little in a vastness of vaporous
sea and tinted air.

...The burlesque singing of Irvie Pease grew fainter and fainter till
it came no more to our ears. The haze dimmed the boat; the three figures
merged until there was only a lonely pale dot visible--then it vanished,
too.

Edgar had been staring at it with me, silent; but now he coughed,
lighted a cigarette and settled himself into one of the small wicker
chairs we sported. "Of course they'll be all right, sir; but I think
Irvie'll feel pretty tired before he gets there. Emma can spell him at
the oars, though, and she probably will. She rows quite as well as he
does, maybe better, though Irvie wouldn't think so. I suppose we'd
better keep our ears open for a putt-putt if another boat happens along;
but that probably won't be until Irvie stirs one up to come out for us.
I don't see much for us to be doing except sit and wait, do you?"

I laughed, said I didn't; and sat down beside him. The water made not
even a gurgle against the "One o'Clock's" bow, stern or sides, though at
times the hull beneath us heaved a little or sank a little or seemed to
sidle gently, as if we rested upon some sluggish great being not wholly
pleased to have us there. My eyes were hot. I closed them, felt my head
nodding and before long was drowsing in my chair.

Edgar roused me by heaving the anchor overboard. "Thought I might just
as well," he explained, returning from the bow. "Irvie'll give our
location as well as he can to whatever boat comes out for us and we
seemed to be drifting some. It could be almost dark by that time and
there might be a shower by then, too. I think they're going to get one
ashore before so very long. Wouldn't you say so?"

I looked to the westward where lay the haze-hidden land and saw a
darkening of the sulphurous tint prevailing there all day. "Thunder
shower," I said. "It may hold off, though, and not come on till nine or
ten o'clock. I've seen it behave that way after one of these yellowish
days. About how long has the dinghy been gone, Edgar?"

"They ought to be fairly near Stonehaven Harbor by this time," he said.
"Of course they'll make it easily before that shower comes across the
bay."

"Oh, yes, of course," I said. "I'm not worrying about them at all."
Then, staring westward and seeing how swiftly the darkness there was
gathering and spreading, I spoke with a sharper gravity than I intended.
"Are you?"

"I?" Out of the side of his eye Edgar gave me a glance of startled
reproach, as if he thought I wished to alarm him. "Worrying about them?
Not in the least. They're a long way north of us by now and the shower's
coming up straight out of the west. It wouldn't reach them--at least not
until they're well ashore--but I begin to think we might get it out
here, sir. In fact, I'm sure we shall--before long, too. The whole look
of things is changing pretty fast."

"The whole look of things" was indeed changing, and with a rapidity
unexampled in my previous experiences on that coast. Filtered sunshine
was gone, and, though neither in that westward dark thickening nor
anywhere else could we see shape or outline of a cloud, all yellow was
brushed out of the air in a moment, and the "shower" advanced upon the
sea with lightnings and crashing thunder--thunder that all at once
sounded near at hand.

"I'm afraid there's a lot of wind in it, too," Edgar said. "It looks
like--it looks like quite a squall."

After that the eruption of nature confronting us encouraged neither of
us to speak. For a few more moments only, we lay on a sea turned to
black glass; then a great white confluence of water rolled at us out of
the west and we were struck by a wind that had already unroofed summer
shacks and twisted great branches out of stout old elms ashore. As if
under power and being steered, the "One o'Clock", disregarding her
anchor rope, instantly moved round into the trough of the sudden
white-topped waves and went into such extremities of violent action that
she seemed a creature independently alive and taking a death-struggle
into her own hands.

Thrown from my feet and grasping foolishly at overturned chairs, I had
one of those freaks of memory that crises sometimes bring, and in my
mind's eye saw old Cap'n Amos Wheeler standing in morning sunshine on
the Stonehaven village wharf discussing a bad blow of the preceding
night. "No, sir; that wasn't no squall," he'd said. "That was a _bolt_.
A bolt's ten times wuss'n a squall. What we got last night was a
_bolt_." That was years ago; Cap'n Amos Wheeler had lain long in his
family's cemetery now; but, sliding on the bucking floor-boards of the
"One o'Clock", I remembered him and knew what he meant by a bolt.

This was one. Gallons of frothy water, too salt in the mouth, flopped
upon me as the "One o'Clock" convulsed herself in the short deep trough;
then Edgar Semple, on his knees, pulled at my arm till my right hand
grasped the upright shaft of the steering-wheel. I got my back to the
wall of the cabin and so sat, rollingly, holding to that steel shaft and
finding my soul ill prepared for my body's drowning.

The "One o'Clock" seemed to be the leaping and dodging lonely target of
a colossal animosity. Tropical-like lightnings, intolerably bright and
discharging simultaneous blasts of thunder, searched for us closer and
closer; a water-spout walked in that turmoil, though we were spared
seeing it. We saw almost nothing except flying water and those
target-hunting flashes--then came crashing rain as tropical as the
lightning and we lived within a curtain of it.

Edgar, staggering and caroming, was on his feet; he clutched a cleat on
the cabin's roof. My wet and dizzy eyes saw his figure rise above me,
drop down and rise again with the contortions of our frightened boat.
Not a yard from me, he was shouting at me: "Thank the rain! If it holds
for ten minutes like this----" I saw him look upward, addressing the
uproarious deluge. "Rain harder! Let's have the best you've got! Pour it
down, Old Scout!"

This personification of the prodigious power above and about us, "Old
Scout", seemed to reach the mark and Edgar's request to be
granted--never had I known such impassioned rain. It did last ten
minutes, or more, and was our defender, beating down the vicious deep
chop, bringing the "One o'Clock" easement. The valiant old boat still
flopped but upon watery hummocks only; the great wind of the bolt passed
on, and then the rain, as if satisfied with having done this business
for us, thinned the size of its drops, became sparse, gave us a final
congratulatory wetting and ceased to be.

I got to my feet and Edgar released his cleat. "Good old 'One o'Clock'!"
he said. "What's the reason we didn't crawl into the cabin and keep
dry?"

I told him. "We didn't like the idea of being drowned in a box, Edgar."

He shook his head, not in denial but in rueful assent as we looked about
us. With unbelievable celerity the bolt had become nothing. In less than
half an hour it had come and gone, and now, except for lumpy water,
there was no vestige of it. To the eastward, the direction in which it
had passed, the cooled air was crystal and everywhere the world lay
clear under an after-sunset sky. West and northwest stretched the long
thin land, neatly dark blue beyond miles of pale sea; but this silent,
abrupt unveiling was strange. No peace came with it.

"Of course----" Edgar began, stopped; then said, "Of course----" again.

"Why, yes, of course!" I spoke out sharply. "They had plenty of time to
make it--plenty. They'd at least have been in the harbor before it
struck. No doubt in the world they made it safely. They----"

"Yes, they _had_ to." Edgar stopped staring landward, picked up the
fallen chairs and sat down. "One thing's certain," he said. "Irvie's
never cared to be out on the water much; but he's good enough at the
oars, he's strong as a horse and he's got plenty of nerve. He wouldn't
lose his head; he wouldn't be afraid, and of course Emma wouldn't,
either."

"No, never, Edgar."

"We know that much, anyhow," he said. "Of course, though, they made the
harbor before the blow. Well--nothing for us to do again except sit and
listen to the water running out of the scuppers. We dragged anchor a
lot. We must be a long way from where we were when they left us. Now
about six or seven miles out, wouldn't you say so, sir?"

"Just about, Edgar. We might have a longer wait than we expected."

He was looking landward again. "I don't care how long we wait to get
towed in," he said. "I--I wish somebody'd come and _tell_ us, though!"

That haggard wish for somebody to come and tell us--tell us that our
flimsy dinghy had reached the harbor before the "bolt" struck--was what
we both could have shouted and shouted, while all we did was to sit and
wait. Last echoes of sunset left the sky. Faraway tiny sparks were the
lights coming out on shore--we sat in darkness and still nobody came to
tell us.

Edgar broke the silence we'd held neither of us knew how long. "Of
course there isn't a dry cigarette on board." His voice was hushed and
uncertain. "Well, I don't--don't care." From a pocket he took a sodden
packet and tossed it into the water where it made a dismal little
splash. "There go the last of mine and I didn't want 'em anyhow." Then
he rose quickly. "Hello! Do you hear something?" From far away over the
water there came through the darkness unmistakably a faint chugging
sound, and Edgar's voice was abruptly loud. "By Golly!" he cried. "It's
a boat and I'll bet a thousand dollars it's looking for us! It's the
boat Irvie said he'd send for us. Everything's going to be all right. By
Golly, sir, everything _is_ all right. They got there! I'll give that
boat a light to show where we are."

In exuberant relief he dashed into the cabin, brought forth a tin
bucket, a big chart-book and a box of dry matches he'd found in a
locker. He set the bucket on the roof of the cabin, tore the chart-book
into sections and made a bonfire of its pages in the bucket. The flames
shone merrily, the chugging grew louder and within five minutes a voice
familiar but surprising to me hailed us crossly.

"Hi there! Can't you folks get along without draggin' a sick man out o'
bed?"

The voice was Orion Clafley's, and he complained talkatively as he drew
nearer. He'd known I'd never be able to take care of myself if anything
like a real breeze came up, he declared, and when his wife had told him
that "quite a shower" was on the way he'd got up, put on his clothes and
borrowed his brother's boat to come out and see why we hadn't had sense
enough to go home before we got our feet wet. In fact, all the boats in
Stonehaven had come out to look for us--people at the Inn "seemed a mite
anxious and runnin' all this way and that, offerin' rewards," Orion
said.

"Might a-give up, myself," he added, from a boat's length away, "if you
hadn't showed that light. Ain't goin' to tow you in. Take too long. I'll
git my nephew, 'Lonzo, to come out and bring the boat in to-morrow
morning. That anchor ain't goin' to drag no more to-night. Needn't tell
me the engine broke down; knowed you'd let it jest exackly at the wust
time in twenty years!" He was now alongside and grasping our gunwale to
keep the two boats from rubbing. "Git aboard. I'll run you home quick as
I can make it. Your folks's makin' plenty distubbance over you and so's
the hull village and everybody else." Then, as Edgar and I clambered
over the side and were in his boat, his husky voice changed tone.
"Everybody ashore told me there was five o' you. Godfrey Mighty, where's
the rest o' you?"

****

That hour of dark voyage to Stonehaven was the vilest I ever spent in a
boat or perhaps anywhere, and I think Edgar Semple would say that same
for himself. Orion Clafley tried to be tactful; but his first words
after we'd answered his question about the "rest of us" had been
impulsive.

"In that dinghy? You _let_ 'em?"

How easily Irvie's sunny confidence had made us let them! What had my
indecision and ignorance done to myself--and ah, to my sister and to my
best friends, Will and Evelyn, and to the father and mother of Mary
Reame!

All along the shore, near Stonehaven and half-encircling the harbor, we
saw, as we came closer, a multitude of twin brilliancies--the headlights
of so many automobiles that there was a glare upon the water and all
through the air above it. Orion Clafley, long silent at his
steering-wheel, explained this with a saturnine grunt.

"Gathered from nigh and fur. Motored from all round about, they have.
Think maybe they'll git a chance to see your bodies brought in." Then,
as we passed the bar at the harbor mouth, he shaded his eyes with a
hand. "Boat goin' in some way ahead of us. It's the 'Flora Smith', my
nephew 'Lonzo's. He come out when I did but turned off t' the eastud.
Headin' in fer that little pier o' yourn. Lot o' people on it and down
on your float, too. Likely headin' in to tell 'em he couldn't find
nothin'." Orion paused, staring ahead; then he said, "Hey, listen!
What's that noise? Sounds like cheerin'. You don't suppose----"

We ourselves were in strong light now; but 'Lonzo Clafley's boat, two
hundred yards ahead of us, was in stronger, and we saw him lay his craft
alongside the float at the water end of the short pier. Against the
glare we saw heart-liftingly more--three silhouetted figures that rose
up from the boat, stepped out upon the float and were enfolded by other
figures crowding upon them. There was no question about the cheering
now; it came hysterically from the float, from the pier and from the
adjacent shores.

"By Godfrey!" Orion Clafley said. "This coast ain't had such a bolt in
twenty years, and if that young Irvie Pease has brought that dinghy
through it alive he's done somethin' nobody could believe and there
ain't a seafarin' man in Stonehaven that'd claim he could done it,
himself. Yes, and by Godfrey there's the dinghy tied on behind 'Lonzo's
boat. By Godfrey Mighty that young Irvie Pease _has_ done it!"

We came to the float and with unintended irony we, too, were cheered;
but the glory was all Irvie's. George Prettiman and the other young
people from Janey Blue's party, shouting, were lifting him upon their
shoulders. Will Pease, choking and half-weeping, seized upon Edgar and
me, an arm about each of us.

"That boy of mine! He brought 'em through! They'd blown miles eastward;
but when Alonzo picked 'em up they'd come through the storm, it was all
over and Irvie was rowing for shore. Oh, I tell you--that boy of mine!
That boy of mine!"

Emma threw her arms about my neck and kissed me; but Mary Reame was
clinging to Harriet and seemed upon the point of collapse. At her
resilient age and a very climax of romance--imminent deadly peril and
saved by her lover--she should have been radiant; but hers was the only
stricken figure in that illumined tumult of rejoicing.

Emma ran back to her and with Harriet helped her up the gangway from the
float to the pier. Ahead of us we saw Irvie's laughing face on high, as
he protested against being carried the whole length of the pier on the
shoulders of his jubilant young friends--and I'd have liked to be one of
them. Will, pushing along beside me, clutching my arm, was still
murmuring, "That boy of mine!"

Irvie Pease was a hero again.




CHAPTER 13


At the Inn, Josiah Labrosse, our landlord, had a late hot dinner waiting
for us in the smaller room off the large dining-room, and, when we
shipwrecked five had changed our clothes, four of us sat down to it with
Harriet and Will and Evelyn. Irvie was delayed, even in the doorway, by
exclaiming people not till then able to reach him, beam upon him and
shake his hand.

"Good Lord!" he said, laughing as he took his place between his mother
and father. "You might think I was Columbus or the boy that stood on the
burning deck whence all but him had fled. All I did was what I simply
had to--or else! Ha! That lobster stew looks good. I'll to it, hearties;
I'll to it!"

I was glad to be more pleased with him than ever I'd been, especially
with his making light of what he'd done. "What I simply had to--or
else." His father, scarce able to eat for pride and joy, couldn't let it
pass.

"Don't try to minimize it, boy," Will said. "You've shown the stuff
you're made of and everybody knows it."

Evelyn, still shaky and ready to shed more tears of relief, couldn't
restrain herself. "Oh, when we saw that white wall of water coming
across the bay and the horrible blackness above it! We knew you were out
there in it--but didn't dream you were in that eggshell; we thought at
least you were in the bigger boat--and oh, you weren't! and yet you
fought it and came through and saved yourself and--and saved these two
dear girls----" She flung an arm about Irvie's neck and kissed him on
the cheek. "Oh, you darling bravest of the brave!"

"Stop it!" Irvie protested. "You're making me spill lobster stew all
over the tablecloth."

The rest of us, ready to laugh at nothing, did laugh at that--all except
one, Mary Reame. She'd put on a pretty evening dress, brought with her
to the Inn that afternoon when she'd arrived for the boating party.
Patterned in apple blossoms, that slim dress seemed now a touching
reference to the song Irvie Pease had so often sung to her. Emma,
sitting next to her, straight and strong, looked exalted. Her eyes were
bright and her chin was up; but Mary's wasn't and she didn't let anybody
see her eyes. The range of her gaze included only her plate and the
tablecloth near it, and when she spoke, which was almost not at all, it
wasn't in a "natural" voice. She made motions with a spoon or fork; she
didn't eat.

I heard Emma murmuring to her. "Stop it! Brace up and eat something. Why
isn't everything all right? Don't be this way!"

Mary's response was little better than a whisper. "Yes--yes, I know.
Don't bother about me."

Edgar spoke up briskly: "The old 'One o'Clock' didn't behave too badly,
after all. She did shoot us right spang into the trough, though. You
won't believe it, Emma, but even during a whale of a ducking I was
thinking of that argument of yours."

Emma didn't respond; it was Will Pease who asked, "What argument?"

Edgar looked placidly at my niece. "You don't mind my rubbing it in, do
you, Emma?" Then he answered Will's question. "Up to to-day she's been
insisting that if you were out in a boat like that dinghy and got caught
in a blow you'd head her straight into wind and sea. I told her no,
you'd put her stern to the waves and go with 'em or you'd swamp. She
wouldn't give in."

"Maybe because she was right," Will said. "I don't know anything about
boats, myself; but couldn't she----"

"No, sir; and she knows better now. I'm just doing a gloat over her,
Uncle Will, because she's had a pretty eye-opening object lesson. When
that sea struck him if Irvie hadn't known enough to put the dinghy's
stern to it and run with it--well, I don't care to dwell on horrors that
didn't happen; but if Irvie hadn't done exactly that we wouldn't be
having this jolly little dinner-party in celebration, and Emma knows
it."

Will and Evelyn didn't care whether Edgar won his argument or not; all
they saw in it was more laurel for Irvie. Evelyn kissed him again and
Will patted him on the back. "By George!" the glowing father exclaimed.
"The more we learn of what you did this day, my boy, the more we marvel
over you! The presence of mind and the knowing exactly what to do----"

"Oh, see here!" Irvie said. "How about dropping all this? As a matter of
fact, I didn't do it all. Mary did a tremendous job of bailing with that
tin can Edgar threw on board--I think we'd have sunk if she hadn't--and
I even let Emma spell me a while at the oars and----"

"Yes, yes; you hardly did a thing, yourself!" the delighted Will
exclaimed. "Just for once you might as well cut out the modesty; we all
know better. I wish you'd heard what those waterfront people were saying
about it. Even old fishermen who've been out in a thousand blows,
themselves!"

Harriet added her testimony. "Even that old curmudgeon, Orion Clafley
himself. I heard him shouting to somebody out in the harbor that Irvie
Pease ought to have a medal!"

"Forget it!" Irvie said. "We all did our best, and what's it matter who
gets the credit? Let's talk about something else."

"You're wrong," Emma said, speaking suddenly and loudly. "We none of us
want to stop talking about you, so why should we? When people feel that
somebody's done a grand thing he ought to accept it and just be glad
they do."

"Bravo, Emma!" Will Pease cried. "Why, Irvie, the Stonehaven children of
the next generation will hear their fathers tell the story of this storm
and how Irving Pease, only a summer visitor and an inland boy at that,
saved----"

"Oh, well----" Irvie interrupted, and, apparently in spite of himself,
seemed to find the prediction rather gratifying. "No matter what people
make of it or what they choose to say of me, the truth's simply that we
had luck. Luck was all there was to it."

At this, Mary Reame did look up. It was the slightest quickest flicker
of a glance; but for that half second she looked toward Irvie and then
looked down again. "At least drink your coffee!" I heard Emma urging
her, and Mary clinked her spoon against the cup but didn't drink.

She wasn't fully in Irvie's view: Emma, sitting forward, seemed to
shelter her, and Irvie, busy with eating and talking, was almost
surrounded, as it were, by his affectionate mother and father. Certainly
he hadn't observed Mary's exhaustion--for, when we left the table and
went toward the populous general living-room of the Inn, he skipped
gayly forward and took her by the arm.

"Hi, old lady dearest----" he began, and then as, not looking at him,
she drooped closely against Emma, "Why, Mary!" he exclaimed. "Good Lord,
don't you know it's all over and here we all are again, safe and sound,
the same as ever? What on earth's the matter?"

"Nothing. I'm all right."

"But you look----"

He wasn't permitted to finish telling her how she looked. As we came
through the lounge door he was seized upon, made the center of a group
of all ages crowding upon him with more congratulations, more enthusiasm
and a dozen half-shouted questions at once: How had he done what he did,
what had he felt while he was doing it, did he realize himself how
remarkable was his exploit, were the girls too frightened to help, and
was it true, as some shore-watchers claimed, that there'd been a
water-spout in the storm? Will, Evelyn and Harriet, as happy parents of
off-spring saved magically from the sea, were also surrounded and
detached from the rest of us. Mary, with Emma's arm about her, turned to
Edgar.

"Please," she said weakly, "will you telephone to Janey Blue for me?
She's got her own car and I'd like her to come as soon as she can and
get me."

"But, Mary!" Emma began hurried remonstrances. "Wouldn't I do almost as
well as Janey? Next to her you'd say I'm your best friend, wouldn't you?
If you'd just let me----"

"Emma, I've got to be out of this crowd."

"Then come up to my room," Emma said. "You can lie down there until it's
time for you to go back to the Stellings' cottage. You could----"

"No, I don't want to go back to the Stellings' till I have to; I don't
want to have to talk to Mrs. Stelling, or Sylvia either, to-night. I
don't----"

"But, Mary, up in my room----"

"I just can't stay here." Mary fought with her nerves. "I've got to get
away or I'll make an exhibition of myself. Please thank Mr. and Mrs.
Pease and tell them and your mother good-bye for me." She turned to me
and put forth a little ice-cold hand, which I took with some
astonishment. "Thank you for asking me out in your boat. I probably
won't see you again until you come home in the autumn, so good-bye."

"What do you mean, good-bye?" Emma spoke sharply. "We'll all be seeing
you to-morrow, of course. You've only half finished your week at the
Stellings'."

"No," Mary said. "I telephoned the station from your room while you were
taking our wet clothes down to dry. Please send mine home to me if you
don't mind. The station got me a reservation and I'm leaving on the
early train to-morrow morning. Edgar, if you'll please telephone Janey
pretty quickly----"

"I don't need to," he told her. "Josiah Labrosse lets me use a car of
his when I want it and it's parked on the Inn driveway just outside. If
you think you've got to get to Janey----"

"Yes, I do. She'll take me back to the Stellings' later. So please----"

"Come right along," Edgar said in a casual tone, though he was staring
at her hard. He turned immediately, went out to the long verandah, down
its steps and disappeared.

Mary followed, still with Emma's arm about her, and I stepped ahead of
them to open the screen doors. Nobody appeared to notice us, and, before
we knew that our movement had attracted any attention, the three of us
stood upon the lighted verandah, waiting for Edgar to bring the car to
the foot of its steps. Then Irvie came forth, but not unattended. A girl
in her early 'teens and three little boys pushed after him, all of them
pressing upon him with extended fountain-pens.

"Just a minute, just a minute!" he begged them, laughing. "I can't sign
'em all at once, can I?" He spoke to us cheerfully. "What's doing out
here? It's cold after that blow and if Mary's still feeling so languid
she'd better come sit with me by that nice log fire at the other end of
the lounge. Come along, Mary; I'll get rid of these autograph fiends
and----"

"No," Mary said, moving away from him, with Emma, to the edge of the
steps. "I'm going to Janey's for a while before I go back to the
Stellings'."

"You are?" He was surprised; then seemed to comprehend. "I see. You
still feel pretty shaken and it's too noisy here. All right; we'll go
over to Janey's and have a nice quiet time there, dear. Just wait till I
borrow a car and I'll----"

"No," Mary said again. "Edgar's got one; I'm going with him."

"But you----" Irvie began. "Why, what----"

It was then he realized that she hadn't looked at him, wouldn't look at
him. He was astounded, wholly perplexed; stood staring at her.

"Good-bye," Mary said in a whispered gasp and moved uncertainly down the
steps.

Emma and I went with her. Edgar had just stopped a shabby old sedan for
her on the driveway below and jumped out; he opened the rear door of the
car before I could extend my hand to it. Irvie came half way down the
steps, but halted abruptly, and the powerful light of the porte-cochre
lantern was full upon his face. Jolted by a lover's rebuff, unable to
understand the cause of it, and not yet quite sure that he was receiving
it, he spoke brusquely.

"See here! If you really mean you don't want me to come with you----"

"No," Mary said, her foot on the running-board, "I don't."

"Oh, very well!" Irvie looked haughty and in his voice was the
resentment natural to a lover now certain that he was being badly
treated for no reason. "Then I won't!"

Mary, her back to him, stepped half way into the car; but suddenly she
turned, stepped down and we saw tears copious in her eyes. She threw
both arms about Emma, who stood silent and all at once seemed to me
mysteriously dramatic. "You grand thing!" Mary cried huskily to her.
"Don't think I'll ever forget how magnificent you were--and are!"

Then Mary almost leaped into the car, not needing either Edgar's hand or
mine to help her. A moment later, as Edgar jumped in and drove away, she
seemed to be sitting almost doubled up on the back seat.

Emma'd gone before I turned back to the steps; but the 'teen-age girl
and the three little boys were again assailing Irvie, clamoring for his
autograph. I passed him without looking at him.




CHAPTER 14


Edgar found me in the writing-room when he came back to the Inn. No one
else was there and he sat down, waiting for me to finish my letter. I
put it aside. "You delivered her to Janey all right?"

"'All right'?" he repeated. "I couldn't say just that. Janey and George
Prettiman were wandering about the lawn; but when I got Mary out of the
car, pretty crumpled, they came running up and Janey took her right in
the house. George said he guessed Janey wouldn't be out again and wanted
to know what it was all about. Naturally I couldn't tell him."

"No, Edgar; naturally you couldn't."

"Because I didn't know," Edgar said, and shook his head ruefully. "I
drove back here by the Pine Woods Road and I saw Irvie but didn't let
him know I did and drove on. He's just rambling around in the dark
wondering what happened. Uncle Will and Aunt Evelyn think he's skipped
out to avoid more acclaim; but that isn't like him. Besides Mary
herself, who do you think knows what did happen, sir?"

"Emma does," I said. "Maybe she even knows what Mary meant by calling
her 'magnificent'. Of course girls in emotion do say these things to
each other."

"Golly, yes," he assented. "Who knows what they mean by 'em? But
whatever Emma knows, she won't tell. She'll never tell. There's Janey
Blue--she probably knows by this time, in confidence, because that's why
Mary wanted to get to her. She had to talk to somebody and it couldn't
be Emma."

I agreed. "No, it couldn't be Emma."

"No," he said. "It couldn't because what Mary wanted to talk about was
something that'd changed her toward Irvie, and she knew Emma'd fight
that."

"Yes, Edgar."

"The way I see it," he said, "Mary didn't want to talk to Sylvia about
it--she doesn't like her enough--so the only person she could go to was
Janey, her old school roommate, and she's telling Janey all about it
right now. All about what? Why, about whatever happened that's changed
her toward Irvie. Well, what did?"

"I wasn't present when it happened," I reminded him. "The strange thing,
though, is that one of the three persons who were present didn't foresee
this result. That's Irvie. He did something Mary found so painful that
she can't bear the sight of him to-night--leaving on the morning train
and may never wish to see him again--yet even when he came out on the
verandah as she was leaving he hadn't seen that she was changed toward
him. Queer, isn't it?"

"Well--no." Edgar gave me a look that was itself rather queer. Though he
didn't smile, the usual calm of his expression was altered by a humorous
desperation as if he had to speak out and say something he didn't wish
to say, an unwilling confession. "You know, sir, the honest God's truth
is"--the words seemed to burst from him--"Irvie's clever about a lot of
things; but he just isn't too darned awfully bright!"

I stared at Edgar. "You've always thought that, haven't you?"

"Oh, in a way," he admitted, with a sound like a groan. "I mean he--he
thinks about himself a good deal and that stops anybody from thinking
much about other people. When Irvie doesn't have the kind of effect on
them that he likes he--well, he wouldn't dwell on it much. He rather
thinks that everything he does and says is pretty much all right, you
see, and if they didn't think so he'd just be surprised and puzzled and
hurt, the way he is to-night, for instance. Whatever he did that upset
Mary, he'd minimize it, think it amounted to practically just nothing at
all, wonder why it made her treat him as she did and of course he'd bury
it. If I spoke of it to him, for instance, he'd say he didn't know what
I was talking about and pretty soon he actually wouldn't." Edgar
frowned; then laughed. "Anyhow, I know there's one thing that didn't
happen."

"What's that, Edgar?"

"I'm afraid it's the very thing you think most probably did," he said.
"That out in the little boat Irvie got scared and showed it and that his
behaving badly in that way is what changed Mary's feeling about him.
Isn't it what you suspect?"

"If I do, Edgar, it's because I can't think of anything else that could
possibly----"

"But it's _not_ possible!" His emphasis was earnest. "It's the simplest
explanation of course and the first that'd occur to anybody; but Irvie's
playing the coward is one thing that positively could not have happened.
I don't think anybody knows him better than I do, and the one thing I'm
certain of is that he wasn't scared. In his whole life I've never known
him to be physically afraid of anything. Have you, sir?"

"No, not that I remember."

"Nor that anybody else remembers," Edgar said with conviction. "I've
seen him when he ought to've been scared and when everybody else
was--but not Irvie. That time when Uncle Will took Irvie and me out west
we did some hill climbing and there wasn't anything Irvie wouldn't
tackle. He got himself and me into places, 'way up the side of a canyon,
where it didn't look as if we could ever either go up or down another
inch and I was scared to death; but all Irvie did was joke about it and
go on risking his neck till we wormed our way out. Really, he enjoys
being in danger."

"Because it's a chance for glory?" I asked. "Or maybe because he
couldn't imagine the worst's happening to himself, he's so sure he has a
destiny?"

"Maybe a shade of both, sir; but what I'm insisting upon is that
whatever happened out in that dinghy, it wasn't Irvie's showing the
white feather. You can dismiss that impossibility from your mind."

"Very well," I said, convinced that he was right. "Then we're left in
the dark."

"Yes, and may stay so," he assented. "Irvie'll let this be the end of
it. Almost anybody else would write to Mary and demand explanations; but
not he. He doesn't like 'em. He never cares to go much into things,
especially when they mayn't be pleasant about himself. If somebody
doesn't like him, or changes from liking him, he doesn't care to hear
why. He won't follow this up. By to-morrow he'll have settled it, so far
as he's concerned, and just be saying to himself, 'Oh, well, that's the
way some girls are, you never know what they'll do, so forget it.' He'll
want the whole business to slide off and be forgotten."

"But, Edgar, he's seemed to me pretty much in love and----"

"Yes, he was," Edgar said. "I mean was. That's the way he is."

****

He knew his Irvie, and if Irvie had received a blow it left no bruise
visible to the eye; whatever hurt he'd had he took no long time to
dispose of it in his own way, for at the beach next morning he was as
much his blithe untarnished self as ever I saw him. I was near him when
a group of his young friends, boys and girls, came running up to him,
calling to know why Mary Reame had left Stonehaven so unexpectedly: Was
somebody in her family ill at home, was she sick, herself, after that
awful storm, and of course he'd gone to the station to see her off,
hadn't he?

"No, nothing's the matter with her or anybody else," he answered
cheerfully. "She's perfectly all right--just thought it's getting near
the end of the season and she'd better be hopping home. No, I didn't see
her off at the station; I overslept. Where's that medicine ball?"

Will and Evelyn and Harriet, just out of the bath-houses, were
intercepted on their way to the surf; more people wanted to exclaim over
yesterday's adventure. Standing nearby, I was aware of a vague presence
at my elbow and a thin voice addressing me.

"It may interest you to know," Mr. Stelling said, "I've just received
information of an old warehouse in Philadelphia where some remarkable
discoveries have been made. Great stacks of letters dating from as much
as a hundred years ago and never before examined have yielded
astonishing finds. Three unique stamps not previously suspected of being
still in existence were----" He broke off the sentence to murmur, "Dear
me! What's my wife saying to those people?"

Wide, pink and aggressive, Mrs. Stelling had borne down on Will and
Evelyn, pushing their friends aside, and was speaking querulously in her
overfed, half-choked voice. "Mrs. Pease, will you kindly inform me what
sort of bringing-up girls get from their mothers in those prairie towns
out where you people live? When I let Sylvia go out there to visit this
girl some years ago I think I must have been crazy! Such manners as----"

"Oh, look here, Mother!" Sylvia had followed Mrs. Stelling and made an
annoyed attempt to interpose. "Since she was my visitor, not yours, and
I didn't care tuppence whether she stayed or went home, why the
hullabaloo?"

"'Hullabaloo'?" Mrs. Stelling turned upon her. "Nice word to use to your
mother! Not my visitor? Anybody who visits in my house is my visitor and
when I've invited any house-guest for a week they're supposed to stay
out that week and not go getting my servants up for an untimely
breakfast and ordering a car of mine out for a train, disturbing my
whole household. You go take a walk with your father somewhere and don't
interfere with me when I'm expressing my opinion of Miss Mary Reame to
the people responsible for her lack of manners."

At this, Evelyn Pease laughed outright. "Where'd you get that idea, Mrs.
Stelling?"

"Aren't you?" Mrs. Stelling was more offended than disconcerted. "Aren't
you her aunts or uncles or something? You're all from the same town,
aren't you? Besides, isn't she engaged to your son?"

Evelyn laughed again, merrily. "Not the least in the world, Mrs.
Stelling," she said, and seized Will's hand. "Come, let's get into the
surf!" Taking her willing husband with her--he was laughing, too--she
dashed by Mrs. Stelling and went splashing into the sea.

I heard Sylvia speaking sullenly to her mother. "Hadn't you better begin
listening to me sometimes if you don't want your blood pressure to----"
and Mrs. Stelling responding imperiously, "That's enough from you,
Sylvia!"

Sylvia said, "Oh, all right!" and looked cowed as she walked moodily
away.

Mr. Stelling was no longer near me, and the outlines of his figure, as
he faded himself into the distance, were expressive of nothing but
overwhelmed retreat. Harriet hadn't followed Will and Evelyn; she
hurried to me, took me by the arm and led me away from listeners.
"Wasn't it lovely to see Evelyn put that awful, awful woman in her
place!" she said, as a prelude. "Now I want to know what you think Emma
has on her mind."

"Have you asked her?"

"No, she won't let me even ask her and I've learned to know when it's of
no use to try. She puts a tensity about her, looks like a young
priestess, sacrificial and exalted. She wouldn't come to the beach, went
out in her dory again and I know I'll never, never get anything from her
about what she's thinking."

"No, you probably won't."

"She's odd sometimes, even to me," Harriet said. "Of course I agree with
Will and Evelyn about Mary Reame. She got so upset by her fright that
she had to get home to her mother, and they're rather pleased about it
because they believe it'll disrupt any little affair that may have got
started between her and Irvie. They like Mary, of course; but they've
never felt that either spiritually or intellectually she'd ever be
anywhere up to Irvie, and this proves it. Well----" Harriet mused for a
moment; then smiled as if upon a thought somewhat secret but one that
brought her a noteworthy satisfaction. "Well--in the end it might turn
out most decidedly for the best."

These mothers! From a daughter's birth they'll plan a bridegroom for
her, though for a son many of them will hope that there'll never be a
bride. For years Harriet's hope for her daughter and the darling cousin
named for the loved husband had been the persistently guiding motive.
The way to the cherished end wasn't clear, of course, and that
culmination was a long way ahead; but at least one obstacle, poor gentle
Mary, had removed itself. Harriet didn't see any mystery in the removal
and neither did Irvie's pleased parents; but the evening of that day
ironically deepened the mystification of two observers. Edgar Semple
must have felt both the irony and the mystification at least as keenly
as I did.

The dinner menu cards upon all the Inn's tables had a typewritten slip
attached to them:

    _Farewell Hop Tonite, last of the season, but before the music,
    all guests of the Stonehaven Inn are invited by the Selectmen of
    this Town to take seats in the Inn's ballroom to witness a brief
    ceremony. The Stonehaven Inn cordially seconds this invitation._

                                                        _Respectfully_
                                                        JOSIAH LABROSSE.

"What in the world's all this about the Selectmen?" Irvie asked the rest
of us at our table; but he looked self-conscious, and later it seemed
probable that he'd been forewarned and already knew the answer. However,
when we joined our fellow-guests in the ballroom, he made himself only a
member of the audience and went with Emma and Edgar to join George
Prettiman and Janey Blue and sit expectantly.

The big room was comfortably filled; young people had come from the
cottages for the "Hop", and to the general surprise there were "native"
faces here and there while behind a table at one end of the room stood
not only the three Selectmen of Stonehaven in Sunday black but a group
of fishermen trying to look unaware of being in their best clothes.
Orion and Alonzo Clafley and all the male members of the widespread
Clafley family connection were there, a solemn delegation behind the
Selectmen. Stalwart John Clafley Wade, the Head Selectman, had brought a
gavel with him and he used it upon the table, rapping for order.

"Mr. Irving Millerwood Pease," he said, "will kindly step forward."

"Why, what----" Irvie said loudly, apparently dumfounded; then he rose,
and, wearing an air of humorous puzzlement, walked forth into the open
space between the audience and the delegation of local authorities.

The Head Selectman addressed him with dignity. "Mr. Pease, the chosen
representatives of the people of this town have taken this opportunity
to meet with as many of our summer residents as may be here present in
order to acknowledge a debt. During all the years that Stonehaven has
entertained summer visitors there has never been a single accident or
casualty that has proved fatal to any of Stonehaven's summer guests, and
Stonehaven is proud of the record. Last evening, as you all know, an
unusual squall arose and except for your coolness and seamanship, Mr.
Pease, there would in our judgment have been a triple drowning. Thanks
to you, such did not occur and Stonehaven's record for its care of our
summer visitors wasn't smirched by a tragedy. The Selectmen of this town
have prepared a citation honoring you for this deed." Here Mr. Wade
extended the written citation to Irvie. "Please accept it accompanied by
the goodwill and admiration of all citizens of this our good town of
Stonehaven."

As Irvie took the paper, and hand-clapping grew loud, I saw Emma's face
illumined as by a maternal happiness. She was the first to jump to her
feet to emphasize an applause that became louder and louder. In a moment
the rest of us were standing, too, and that whole wing of the Inn
resounded with an approval that almost shook its walls. Herein was the
irony and the mystery: What had Irvie Pease done in the half hour that
brought him this glorifying ovation and cost him his sweetheart?




CHAPTER 15


A mystery is a mystery to only those who puzzle themselves with it, so
this was one to only Edgar and me. Probably we both guessed the right
answer often enough when our later speculations reverted to Mary Reame's
calling Emma "magnificent"; but we were to wait a long time for
certainty of solution, and when it came it didn't matter much.
Stonehaven already looked dustily autumnal; Will and Evelyn went down
with their two boys to Princeton; Harriet and I left Emma at Bryn Mawr
and returned to a house that was lifeless without her. For us, as for
our next neighbors, too, that whole area of the city felt blank, lacking
the three young people whose daily doings so absorbed us and seemed to
give us most of our reason for living. No wonder the old birds begin to
lose interest in the nest when the young ones are preparing themselves
to fly.

Except for the interlude of the Christmas holidays we had a dull winter,
though on a February afternoon Harriet came in from one of her woman's
club meetings bringing a bit of gossip to which for once I listened.
Mary Reame was engaged to Frederick Charles Carhart, that affluent
youngish widower-about-town, and Mary's mother, in strictest confidence,
had admitted it here and there.

"It'll be a large church wedding late in June," Harriet said
benevolently. "He's very well off and a friend of the Reame family and
everybody says Mary looks very, very happy. I don't see how she could,
seeing what she's losing. Emma'll be home in time to be a bridesmaid;
but I do hope they won't ask Irvie to be an usher."

"Why shouldn't he be, Harriet?"

She reproved me. "You don't see it would be asking too much of
him--after the way she treated him and how he must have suffered?"

"He did? He suffered?"

"What!" she exclaimed. "You didn't see how bravely he covered it up?"

That was the legend Harriet had by this time established with herself;
the ladies love these romantic vapors. Fled from hysterically by a
notional girl who hadn't known her own mind, Irvie had so gallantly
hidden his wound that only those who knew him best could have guessed
that he'd received it. Now he might have to endure playing a part in the
ceremony that united her forever to another and he would smile; but the
smile would be a spartan's. In spite of the happy fact that everything
would probably in time "work out satisfactorily", Irvie during this
interval was to be looked upon as martyred by a misplaced love.
Worshipful women will go to any length to let their imaginations make
for them such a picture.

The actual event of the wedding, however, didn't substantiate this one;
Irvie, though he reached home in time, wasn't asked to be an usher. Emma
was a bridesmaid; so was Janey Blue, and, to the astonishment of
old-fashioned people like the Peases and Harriet, so was Sylvia
Stelling. Harriet, loudly exclamative, brought in this news a week
before the wedding. "And her mother not ten days dead!" my sister cried.
"Mrs. Reame says Mary thought she simply had to ask Sylvia, so she wrote
almost a month ago and did; but she didn't get any answer at all from
her till the very day after Mrs. Stelling's funeral. Then Sylvia
telegraphed her acceptance. Did you ever hear anything like it?"

"Not that I recall, Harriet."

"Good heavens!" she exclaimed. "It was even in our papers out here, how
Mrs. Stelling collapsed at a dinner she was giving and lived only a few
minutes. It was a stroke, and the very next day after the funeral, here
was that telegram saying Sylvia'd be delighted--she actually used the
word 'delighted'--to accept Mary's invitation. What these young people
do nowadays! No respect for anything! They don't care how they shock
people. Think what it shows!"

"That Sylvia didn't care much for her mother?" I suggested.

"No, nor for anybody else, nor for what people think of her! Not that I
blame her," Harriet continued, "for having no feeling for that spoiled,
mannerless woman who lived only to display her self-indulgence and show.
There are common decencies, though, and now Sylvia's got her head she
begins by proving she has no regard for 'em. Coming out here to be a
bridesmaid the very next week after----"

She was interrupted by Evelyn, who with a rush arrived in our downstairs
library where Harriet had found me. "Have you heard that Sylvia
Stelling----" Evelyn began, and for a time the two produced one of those
exclamatory duets in which words become indistinguishable. Evelyn
emerged from it with something like a brief solo. "Will's simply aghast.
He says if those are modern New York manners he----"

"I can't believe it!" Harriet cried. "It's just that girl! She's freed
from her suppressive mother and got her head at last so she----"

"Got her head?" Evelyn interrupted. "I should say she has. You remember
Irvie's telling us about the classmate of his whose father was in the
Trust Company or something that looked after the Stelling Estate? Irvie
had some more about it when he was home at Christmas, did I tell you?
Mrs. Stelling had only the income during her lifetime--of course it was
huge--the grandfather died just after Sylvia was born and he'd left it
all in trust for her, and that was before the inheritance taxes were
made so crushing, so Sylvia'll have practically the whole thing. No
wonder, with her awful bringing-up--that outrageous mother and that
shadow of a father--no wonder she thinks she can do what she pleases and
can laugh at anybody who disapproves of her!"

At Mary's wedding Sylvia didn't look like a person who laughs much at
anything. She'd arrived in the costliest of foreign cars, one much
noticed in even our crowded streets, and she'd brought Janey Blue, the
Maid-of-Honor, with her--and also George Prettiman, who complaisantly
accompanied his fiance. Of course during the processions to and from
the altar, through stained-glass filterings of afternoon sunshine, my
eyes were upon Emma who looked smilingly solemn and now could easily be
thought a handsome girl, I was sure; but at both the church and the
mulling reception afterward I more than once took account of the
sensational heiress. She was already that; publicity had followed her
from the moment of her mother's death, and, though the wedding-guests
were too well-bred to stare baldly, their curiosity about her maintained
a running whisper on the air.

She must have known it; but she didn't show that she did. Though her
expression now seemed rather determined than downcast, it struck me as
still having in it a kind of sulkiness. She didn't look at people when
she spoke to them, nor did she smile nor in any way become affably
responsive; but these reticences were those of long habit and by no
means attributable to her bereavement. Without exertion she made the
bride a subsidiary figure, and on all sides of me I heard the
murmurings.

"Have you seen her? No, not there; she's that rather small darkish one
standing talking to Irvie Pease and the out-of-town man that looks
absurdly like the Apollo Belvedere."... "You don't see the
attraction? Not in seventy millions?"... "Yes, the very next week
after her mother's funeral; but I hear that's the way they do
nowadays."... "No, not pretty exactly but think of all that power in
those small hands."... "They say she brought two maids with her in
another car."... "Yes, I met her but she only said 'How dj do', not
another word."... "Yes, probably marry somebody as rich as she is--or
an Archduke or one of these Georgian Princes."... "What's it matter
not being a beauty? Haven't you seen those pearls!"

On my way out of the Reames' beflowered living-room, and on my way out
of the house, too, if I could make it, I was brought to a halt by
Harriet, Evelyn and Ella Martin, who also were speaking of the pearls.
"What do you think of it?" Ella asked me. "I mean of her wearing them to
a wedding, making all this show with them the very week after she
inherited them from her mother."

"Not at all," Evelyn said, though her disapproving amazement wasn't less
than Ella's. "Everybody at Stonehaven knew Mrs. Stelling's pearls very
well. These aren't the same; they're even finer and larger. They're new
ones, I tell you--absolutely. New ones! She's begun to outdo her
mother."

****

The Stelling caravan, only a stirring episode, departed eastward almost
as soon as the out-shone bride had thrown her bouquet from the Reames'
stairway landing; but it was Sylvia's shocking journey that brought the
end of our sea mystery to Edgar and me. At dinner Emma, still gayly in
her bridesmaid's dress, had agreed with Harriet wistfully that Irvie had
been able to bear the wedding more debonairly than if he'd had to hide
the anguish of being an usher. "Of course since he's a Princeton Senior
now," our Bryn Mawr Sophomore said, "he has all the self-command he
needs. When he congratulated Mary and Mr. Carhart you'd never have
dreamed what it cost him or that he wasn't the gayest of the gay.
Mother, it was heart-breaking; he seemed almost careless about it!"

Irvie himself proved how right she was about his carelessness. In the
twilight Emma and I sat in wicker chairs upon our lawn and he sauntered
over from his father's house but declined an invitation to sit with us.
"Thanks, no; just on my way to say hello to aunts and uncles I didn't
get around to at the reception. Did you both see that car Sylvia and
Janey and George piled off in? It wasn't one of the Stonehaven garage
outfit of the Stellings'. New. Golly, isn't she going to go it, though!"
He uttered a most carefree laugh. "Good old Janey better look out!"

Emma didn't follow this. "Why, Irvie?"

"You haven't got it yet? Didn't I tell you all last summer Sylvia had
her eye on George--if she ever got her chance?"

"But George wouldn't----"

"George wouldn't?" Irvie's tone was one of cheerful mockery. "George
would! That poor guy's so simple he'll always do what anybody tells him
to; it only depends on who's the last person to tell him."

"Irvie! He's not that supine!"

"Then just call it sweetly tractable, Emma. I don't say old Georgie's
got imagination enough to think up much of what he could do with all
that dough; but he has just barely enough of his own to live on in the
way he likes. The Blues aren't too well off. If Georgie marries Janey
he'll have to go to work; but ouch, how could he? Janey's mother's
practical and she persuaded them to put off their wedding until autumn
so that George could get himself established in some business first, and
he never will; he's too helpless. That gives Sylvia plenty of time. Just
wait. Well, I'll be shoving along. I thought Mary made quite a cute
little bride, didn't you?"

With that, he did shove along, swinging gracefully down the sylvan
street, and Emma, after devoting a sigh to his bravery, gave a languid
greeting to Edgar Semple who'd been hovering on the lawn at a little
distance.

He sat down with us but waited for some moments before he spoke. "The
remarkable thing about it, Emma," he said deliberately, "is that you saw
what was coming in time to put the dinghy about."

"What?" she said, staring. "What on earth do you mean? I don't know what
you're talking about."

"Don't you?" He laughed and turned to me. "Of course you must have
thought it all out, sir, by this time; but anyhow here it is: Mary told
Janey, and Janey couldn't help telling George of course, and at that
reception this afternoon George let it out to me in the most casual way.
He forgot all about it's having been confidential until after he'd told
me. We just got to talking about Stonehaven last summer and naturally
our big squall came up and Mary's rushing home by the first train she
could get and----"

"Edgar!" Emma's tone was peremptory. "I don't care to hear----"

"Yes, I know," he said apologetically. "Mind, I'm not trying to rub it
in that I was right about putting a rowboat's stern to the sea and
running with it; but when you saw that Irvie was heading into the squall
and would certainly swamp the boat, and you grabbed the oars out of his
hands, slammed them into your oarlocks and put the dinghy about, you
must have----"

"That's my own affair!" Emma's face was dim to us in the thickened
twilight; but the tensity of her voice and the rigidity of her figure
were perceptible as she rose and stalked toward the house. She paused at
the steps, called back shakily, "George Prettiman--what a fine authority
for such a story! There's absolutely nothing at all in what he says--or
in what you're saying, either, Edgar Semple!" She let us hear her
footsteps sound sharply as she crossed the portico and went into the
house.

"Anyhow," Edgar said reflectively, "that's what she did and it's what
saved them. Must have been at the last possible instant or she'd never
have grabbed the oars from Irvie. Makes the whole thing pretty clear
now, doesn't it?"

"Clear indeed!" We two sat on that midland lawn a thousand miles away
and looked upon the same picture of sudden Atlantic fury. We saw the
three figures, two girls and a boy, beset by engulfing waters, and we
knew that one of the girls had abruptly given up theory for practice.
Confronted by the reality of rushing seas, Emma had grasped the truth.
We could hear her outcry above the wind and the plunge of waves, "Put
the boat about, Irvie! For God's sake put her about!" and, when he
wouldn't, Emma had done it herself, seizing the oars from him at the
last possible instant, as Edgar had said. She'd got the half-filled
dinghy about, and, while Mary had frenziedly bailed, Irvie'd sat
nonplussed. When the rain came, and the sea fell, Emma'd put the oars
back into Irvie's hands.

"That was it, you see," Edgar said. "I knew it wasn't Irvie's being
scared that changed Mary. He wasn't. It wasn't his being wrong about
heading into the sea, either; though it would have drowned them. She
could have forgiven him for that. George was rather vague. He just said
Mary was upset because she thought Irvie ought to've given Emma the
credit for taking the oars when she did; but of course you see how it
finished poor old Irvie for Mary."

"Yes, of course, Edgar." In Alonzo Clafley's rescuing boat Irvie, jolly
with the rescuer, hadn't mentioned that it was a girl who saved the
dinghy; but it was when Alonzo brought the three to the cheering crowd
on the float and pier, and Irvie let himself be hoisted upon high, that
Mary's incredulity became a stricken one. Irvie protested, but jovially
and without the instant proclamation of Emma as their savior. Later, at
the Inn, when he'd disclaimed credit and said "All I did was what I
simply had to--or else!" Mary saw that he'd never be able to deny
himself even an unearned laurel. Probably his reference to letting Emma
"spell" him at the oars was his most injurious self-revelation. His
being able to smudge it all over even to himself like that, and to
believe that he'd as easily smudged it over for Mary, too, was what sped
her flight from him.

****

Not Mary, the timid bride of that afternoon, was in our thoughts as we
sat in shared silence on the lawn while more and more stars became
visible. Not Mary but Emma! There are women who love to the utmost. They
do not care what the son or the brother or the husband is or does. For
them he has only perfection and yet what they ask is that they may help
to cover his imperfection--with glory if they can--and that at any cost
they shall help to make him happy. Edgar didn't need to say he knew this
of Emma. What he did say as he rose to leave me after that half-hour of
reverie was only, "Well--more power to her!"




CHAPTER 16


At Stonehaven that summer the Blues' cottage was not opened; it bore a
"To Let" sign on a shaggier and shaggier lawn throughout the season. Nor
was the atrocious mansion of the late Mrs. Stelling inhabited, except by
a caretaker. Mr. Stelling had been encouraged to stroll among British
philatelists while Sylvia motored in the Canadian Rockies with Janey
Blue and George Prettiman. Mr. and Mrs. Blue, it was understood, had
hoped to add the rental fee of their cottage to the necessary expenses
of a metropolitan wedding; but Stonehaven had an "off season" and they
were disappointed.

"They won't need it, though," Irvie said at lunch on the last day of our
sojourn at the Inn that year. "How long since you heard from Janey,
Emma?"

"Not since July, though I've written her twice since then."

"Coming to a head," he said, surer than ever that he was a prophet. "The
Blues'll never be put to that outlay."

"What outlay?" Will Pease asked his son; but, when Irvie explained, Will
only laughed. "I'm afraid you're at the age when it seems proper to be
cynical about 'girls'. I suppose it's a Senior's privilege. I can't
imagine even that peculiar Miss Stelling's doing such a thing to a nice
girl like Janey Blue, nor young Prettiman's letting it be done, Irvie."

"I can," Evelyn said with the slight frown that appeared upon her pretty
brow whenever Sylvia Stelling was mentioned. "The 'Stelling girl'
wouldn't have any compunction about taking anything on earth she wants,
no matter from whom she takes it. She's going to spend the rest of her
life making up to herself for her mother's treatment of her, and in that
sulky way of hers 'the world is mine' is written all over her. As for
George Prettiman, heaven help him, didn't you ever notice that weak
laugh of his? All he has for both mental and emotional equipment is a
kind of sleepy good nature. I shouldn't be at all surprised if Irvie's
right and the Stelling girl's decided that what she wants in a husband
is beauty--mere somewhat masculine beauty."

"Yay, Mother!" Irvie cried. "Isn't that a bit indelicate? Aren't you
turning a trifle too modern for our old-fashioned midland background?"

Evelyn gave him the flattered glance she always had for him when he
teased her. "What do you think of it, Emma?" she asked. "Is Irvie
right?"

"I don't know. It seems odd, though, Sylvia's taking them on this
elaborate trip--I mean Janey's consenting to it. I--I'm afraid I'm sorry
for Janey."

****

We were all sorry for Janey when we next heard of her--except Irvie
perhaps, who seemed to take the affair as more or less a joke on all
parties concerned; so his mother reported after a letter of his from
Princeton. Emma wrote Harriet from Bryn Mawr she'd heard at last from
Janey who'd left Sylvia's motoring party at Banff in October and was on
her way home. She'd written on the train. Emma quoted the four stiff
sentences of which Janey's letter to her consisted: "You are one of the
few friends I feel I should notify that my plans for the future are
completely altered. My engagement to George Prettiman is broken. I have
no blame for anyone but myself in accepting so much hospitality. I am
leaving for home at once."

Emma's written comment was as emotional as if she'd spoken it. "Oh,
Mother, Mother! That poor girl's heart is broken. She's never looked at
anybody except George and her feeling for him was a blind devotion--the
very blindest I ever knew because of course the rest of us all saw what
an absolute sap he is; but she never could--just blind, blind, blind! He
couldn't help being one, himself, of course, because such entire poverty
of intellectual endowment simply can't be improved; but Sylvia doesn't
care anything about that. She just wants another ornament like the new
pearls she wore at Mary's wedding. So she grabbed the handsomest man in
the world--if you like that style--and what did she care if it broke
poor Janey's blind heart? Poor, poor blind Janey, she'll never see
George as he really was--she'll only mourn his loss the rest of her
days. Irvie saw it all coming long before the rest of us could even
imagine it. How brilliant and shrewd he is, Mother! I think it was
almost supernatural."

Irvie's foresight amazed even his fond father. "You may not see how it
applies," Will said to me; "but such insight into the weaknesses of
human character, the knowing what results it will bring about when
nobody else does, is one of the requisites for becoming a great lawyer."

In fact, Irvie's shrewdness in this sad matter seemed established; but
there may have been a step in his reasoning that didn't appear on the
surface. He may have felt that almost anybody, even someone with a
character far stronger than George Prettiman's, mightn't be able to
resist Sylvia Stelling's prodigious affluence, were it offered to him.
Irvie may have thought that nobody could.

****

Sylvia led her captive down into California where they were married with
a costly splendor reported, with photographs, even in our local papers;
but our own neighborhood hopefully looked upon the incident as closed.
"She'll never come back to Stonehaven; it'll be too small a field for
her," Evelyn said. "The pine trees'll grow tall enough to hide that
absurd palace and we can forget it and her too. We have better things to
think about, thank heaven!"

Her particular allusion--the better things to think about--was to the
Princeton Commencement of that year. Irvie's graduation, accompanied by
Edgar's, was for all the Peases a milestone decorated in carnival colors
or at least in those that harmonized with orange and black, and even old
Janet Pease, Irvie's great-aunt, went to New Jersey for the celebration.
My own occasion to be there was the reunion of my depleted class; but
for Emma and Harriet there was a forlorn disappointment. My sister and I
drove out to Bryn Mawr to pick up Emma and found her in despair, having
been diagnosed in that very hour as afflicted by a severe attack of
measles. Harriet stayed with her and I went on to my reunion alone.

Will Pease didn't let me spend much time among my classmates. He
immediately seized upon me, carried me off to a "Tea" in Irvie's (and
Edgar's) handsome rooms, which were crowded with Peases and nice-looking
girls and dressed-up students. In a window-seat I had an agreeable talk
with a member of the graduating class whose name I didn't catch, a frank
young gentleman who seemed to be a special friend of Edgar Semple's.

"Perhaps you don't know old Edgar picked up a _cum laude_," he said,
laughing. "None of these people seem to notice it much, they're all
making such a fuss over Irvie Pease. Of course Irvie's done well enough,
too; but maybe he wouldn't have if he hadn't roomed with Edgar. He's a
popular guy, Irvie, though--got his P on the eleven this year; just
barely but he got it--and's been on almost all the dance committees. He
was our class president in Freshman year. Oh, yes, he's quite a lad. I
hear his graduation thesis has made something of a stir among the
Faculty. I have an idea who it was that did most of the groundwork for
him, though."

"Your friend Mr. Semple?" I asked.

"Oh, well," he said with a somewhat belated air of reticence. "Of course
Irvie'd never have had the patience."

I made an inquiry about this thesis that evening at my own class
headquarters. Dr. Philippus Connors was a relic my class had deposited
in the Faculty in the Department of English, and now, though about to
retire, he still showed sprightly signs of life and he was enthusiastic
about Irving Pease's thesis, an astonishing work of research and most
excellently written, old Philippus said: "The title didn't allure me,
'On Some of the More Obscure of the Elizabethan Writers'. We get a lot
of that, you know, and most of it's flashy stuff, shallow research, just
decorated; but when I got into this--Lord, what a difference."

"Surprised you, did it, Philippus?"

"Didn't it, though!" His worn-out eyes almost sparkled. "I hadn't been
expecting anything like it from Pease; I saw I'd under-rated him. That
youth had been excavating. He'd dug up passages of genuine poetry by
Elizabethans, some of 'em little more than names to many pretty good
scholars. He'd found things that ought to live. In fact, that thesis is
a revelation and we're going to place it in the University Library as a
reference work of lasting merit."

More light on that "work of lasting merit", and upon other matters, was
shed by the Class Day exercises. Will Pease insisted upon my membership
in the "family" for this cheerful ceremonial, and, as I sat in the
temporary amphitheatre centered upon the half-buried historic cannon, it
was easy to feel that among all those Seniors seated below us, the
Peases saw only one. For them of course everything was all about Irvie,
and, when one or another of the jocular class orators mentioned his
name, Will and Evelyn leaned forward breathless as if they'd never heard
it before.

Most of the allusions to members of the class were providentially
enigmatic to their families, and, when Will heard his son addressed from
the rostrum as "Irvie Pease, King of the New York Night Spots," and the
class cheered jocosely, Will laughed heartily, too. "What good fun," he
said, "to hear them making a joke of everything for the last time!
They'll all be out in the 'wide, wide world' to-morrow and it won't be
so easy. Did you see how Irvie laughed, too, when he was called the
'King of the New York Night Spots'? He told me he was expecting some
such reference because a head waiter once mistook him for somebody else
and gave him the best table at a floor show or something and some of his
classmates saw him there. He said it was the only time he'd ever been in
the place. It's all great fun!"

In the whole course of the afternoon Edgar Semple's name was spoken only
once; but it was received with a knowing acclaim from the class below
us. The Class Prophet was merely naming over a group of Seniors for whom
because of their studiousness he prophesied a gloomy fate in monastic
seclusions; but when he came to Edgar he paused a moment and said, "Also
in this category I see before me that Man Friday, good old Svengali
Semple." The speaker's pause to let his meaning sink in was rewarded by
the Seniors' mirthful manifestation that they understood him perfectly,
though nobody else did. Will Pease turned beaming to me.

"They certainly seem to appreciate having Edgar called Svengali. Some
funny episode in his past four years, I suppose. I must ask him about
it."

Will forgot to do so, however. On the way from the cannon exercises we
ran into Philippus Connors who with fervor congratulated him on Irvie's
thesis. Of course Will already knew something about it; but what he
heard from Philippus almost burst him. "'To be placed permanently in the
University Library'!" he repeated at intervals after our happy encounter
with Philippus. "Permanently! 'A work of exceptional merit.'
Permanently! and that's what the Faculty itself think of him. How could
these four years end better? All these Commencement parents are proud,
of course, and I mustn't brag; but oh, I tell you, that boy of mine!"

****

...Wandering alone upon the campus after sunset, as older alumni
sometimes wistfully do, I came beneath the windows of the rooms occupied
by Irvie Pease and Edgar Semple. The windows were lighted; I saw Edgar
passing and re-passing them, and, upon an impulse, went upstairs and
found him alone, packing for departure.

"What's the idea?" I asked him. "Isn't your class assembled over in
front of Old North to sing on the steps for the last time, or maybe the
next to the last time? Why aren't you with them?"

"Well, somebody's got to do this," he said. He alluded to the
packing-boxes in which he was neatly placing accumulated books.

"Then I won't interrupt you."

"Why, no. That's what I----" He paused; then asked me, "Didn't you get a
note I left for you at the Nassau Club this morning?"

"No, I haven't been there to-day, Edgar."

"It doesn't matter, sir, since you're here. It was just to ask you if
you could spare a few minutes for a--for a confidential talk with me at
any time before you'd be leaving. If you have the few minutes now it
would be as good a time as any."

"Yes." I sat down. "What is it, Edgar?"

"It's--it's a little difficult."

He stood before me, pondering, and I was almost humorously struck by the
thought that in his essentials he'd changed little since his earlier
boyhood. Naturally he was larger all over; but he would always be short
and sturdy. He had developed a handsome profile if one noticed it; but
he was still round-faced and still had what seemed to me the "bluest
eyes in the world". Except for them he'd have seemed stolid, yet they
never flashed; they had always, even when he was presumably merry, the
same look of comprehending things maturely. No, Edgar hadn't changed
much; he'd always been mature.

"Can I help you out with it?" I suggested. "There's something you'd like
me to do?"

"Yes, if you could; but it's a good deal," he said, and his
embarrassment continued. "I was wondering how good a financial risk
you'd think I am. I'm pretty sure I could pay you back before long if
you'd take my note for eighteen hundred dollars; but the matter's rather
involved. You see, Irvie and I--well, we've gotten into debt."

"You and Irvie have?" I asked. "The two of you owe eighteen hundred
dollars?"

"It amounts to that," he said. "The worst of it is Uncle Will's already
sent us enough to clean everything up and he thinks it's all paid. I
know he's been saving up to send us through Harvard Law School and I
think it would embarrass him a good deal to let us have that much extra
at this time. I wouldn't like to tell him that we need it, especially as
he thinks all our bills have been settled."

"No, I'd not like to tell him that, either, Edgar."

"If I could borrow the eighteen hundred from you," Edgar said, "I could
pay it back out of some money my father left me. I think it amounts to
about seven thousand dollars; but the trouble is Uncle Will's always
kept it invested for me. If I asked him for it right now when it's
needed, or for eighteen hundred dollars of it, I'm afraid he might guess
we hadn't settled our debts with the money he's already sent to do it
with; but if I tell him later that I insist on paying my own expenses
through the law school with the money my father left me, I think he'd be
willing to let me have it and then I could pay you the eighteen hundred.
Could you possibly let us have it, sir?"

"'Us'?" I said. "You mean 'us', do you, Edgar? You couldn't possibly be
referring to expenses incurred by Irvie Pease, 'the King of the New York
Night Spots'? You're not being exclusively a Man Friday just now, are
you?"

The pink tint that spread over his face was undeniable. "Well, you see
Irvie and I have always shared everything, sir."

"Which includes not only a Svengali thesis for the University Library
but also such misfortunes as debts," I said, and produced a cheque-book.




CHAPTER 17


Edgar repaid me at Stonehaven in August after Will's arrival there.
"He's a really admirable boy, that Edgar," Will said, not completely
aware how truly he spoke. "It wasn't really much more expensive to send
the two of them through college than it would have been for the one; but
now he's turned independent and's insisted that he can get through the
four years of the Harvard Law School on some money his father left him
and doesn't intend to be any further expense to me ever. Of course I
told him I had never regarded him as a burden and that I'd looked upon
it as a pleasure and a privilege to do what I could for him. He said
that knowing this had been the greatest happiness in his life; but he
knew that the times were slack and things growing more and more
expensive and he wouldn't feel right with himself unless I let him have
his way. Well, I had to, didn't I?"

"Yes, I suppose so, since he put it like that."

"He did," Will said, "and pretty strongly, too. I had to respect his
reasons. He's always been sound as a dollar and I'm proud of both of our
boys. Another thing, too," Will finished brightly. "This may come in
handy for Irvie. I'll probably be able to increase his allowance a
little."

****

I hadn't much doubt that Irvie could use an increase nor that now Edgar
had his own money he would become Irvie's banker as long as it lasted.
This devoted ant, while his stores sufficed, would never refuse the
grasshopper. The mainspring of Edgar's young life was his gratitude for
what Will and Evelyn had done for him and to repay it in some measure.
He would always work to grant them their dearest wish, which was for the
special kind of "success" they wanted for Irvie.

If Irvie didn't have it Edgar wanted him to appear to them to have it.
He'd "cover up" for him; he'd go to any pains required to bring Irvie
the distinctions that rejoiced them. More, his affection for Irvie
himself was of such indulgence that it was a little like Emma's own.
Their two devotions to the one object were complete.

What inspires the passionate friendships of youth is often a mystery to
older people. Parents, and even uncles, see the children apparently
wasting treasures of love and admiration in what's obviously, sometimes
even ludicrously, a wrong direction; even tactful opposition brings only
a fire of championage. There were these two boys, Irvie and Edgar, and
Emma Millerwood knew them. Anybody with a good mind would have said she
couldn't hesitate a moment between them, and she had a good mind; but
she'd unhesitatingly chosen Irvie as the inspiration of her young
life--and so had Edgar chosen Irvie as the basic motive for all his
actions. Irvie had the something that so inspired them, and between
them, and with all the Peases back of them, they'd have their chance to
make of him a happy and successful man.

I wasn't to see much more of their immediate progress toward that goal.
For a longer time than I could spare I had to interrupt my seasons at
Stonehaven and at home, too. The winter before Emma came out of Bryn
Mawr was a hard one on my burdened elderliness, and Dr. Erb hustled me
to Arizona. Harriet went with me, but only for my installation upon a
salubrious ranch, and there I stayed--not unhappily, for I could still
ride a little and I wrote enough to finish two more books. I had not
infrequent letters from "all the family" except Irvie, who was reported
by Harriet to have become "a great favorite in Boston". She was amused
by Edgar's seeming to fall into the habit of "just being a book-worm,
not caring how he looks and wearing the same old clothes the whole
time." He didn't come to Stonehaven at all during his vacations now; but
continued his studies in Will's office and did legal odd jobs of various
kinds for the firm.

From Stonehaven she reported voluminously and with bitterness: "After
trying for two seasons with no success to rent their cottage, the Blue
family are back in it again. Emma tells me that Janey tried her hand at
several jobs but didn't make a go at any of them and I must say you'd
hardly know her as the same girl she used to be. She's as amiable as
ever but somehow looks all dried up and perfectly certain to be an old
maid. The one shock seems to have made a sort of husk of her. I suppose
you may not see enough of lighter current periodicals to be aware of the
present career of the person who gave it to her; but one can't pick up
any of them in the Inn reading-room without being confronted by the face
of Mrs. George Prettiman. They say she has a press agent and I don't
doubt it--'Mrs. George Prettiman sips cocktails with Prince Rebedos';
'Mrs. George Prettiman's table at Giambini's'--oh, Mrs. George Prettiman
at Jockey Clubs, at restaurants, at night spots and on beaches, Mrs.
George Prettiman everywhere.

"There seems to be a sort of public for this new type, its Roman
entertainments and panoplies. We've always had the great spenders, but
the older breed of them had a kind of dignity, founded hospitals and
libraries, lived in as much quiet as they could find. Who are these new
ones? They aren't 'climbers'--they aren't even conscious of the old
prestiges that could be climbed to. I think what they want is simply
envy for their conspicuousness and power. It makes one wonder what kind
of world we're living in. Sometimes everything seems upside down with
every kind of vulgarity on top, and yet we know that there does still
exist our same old world wherein there's decency in taste and manners
and people still lead sensible lives in their own quiet ways. What's
more, I firmly believe such people are even in the majority, though they
seem submerged under all this gaudiness, hectic pretense, restlessness
and modernity. Among all the hundreds of people we know at home no one
is much like that and neither are any of our friends that we know in
other cities. Here at Stonehaven the new breed was unknown until the
Stellings came, and Mrs. George Prettiman, outdoing her mother a
hundredfold, will never set eyes on the place again. She took what she
wanted from it, and, not having inherited the hay fever, will have no
possible use for her mother's dusty old palace on the hilltop, thank
heaven.

"I've never seen Emma happier than she is this summer."

I knew what Harriet meant by that concluding sentence.

****

When old Erb crabbedly went over me upon my return home he acknowledged
the caution of my Arizona medical adviser, but said, "Oh, yes, you could
have come back months ago; but it's just as well to be safe. Guess
that's what you'll be now if some of these new bugs they're always
finding don't get at you. Well, I guess your sister'll have told you all
about the 'new blood' Will Pease has got in his law office. You can't
keep that Irvie down; he's been showing off again."

Irvie had, and most effectively. I knew all about it from Harriet's
recent letters and from Will Pease's and from Emma's. During this first
year after their graduation from the law school Will had put the
groundwork of one of his important cases in the hands of the "new
blood", Irvie and Edgar, and this groundwork had been done so thoroughly
that when the case came to be tried, Will himself and the older
attorneys had been astonished to find how little was left for them to
do. The two youngest members of the firm had the affair so well in hand,
in fact, that wisdom decreed its being left to them almost entirely.
Edgar's preparation of the case, and in particular an argument Will
assigned to Irvie, had brought subsequent expressions of approval not
far short of enthusiastic from both judge and jury. Will felt a new
solidity in his office, and Irvie had won actual reputation as an expert
"trial lawyer".

"What a team!" Will said. "By the time we went into court we found we
had to leave virtually the whole thing to those two because they'd made
themselves such masters of every detail that they knew a lot more about
it than we did, ourselves. Now we know who'll take our places when we
retire."

Old Fenelon Pease, a cousin Will had inherited as a rather idle member
of the firm, stopped me on the street and added something to this. "I
don't go to court much these days; but I didn't miss an hour of that
trial. It was a fascinating thing to see how that case had been prepared
and how it worked out, unfolding itself day after day. Really it almost
didn't need any of the speeches; that young Semple had the whole thing
on the table before him clear as day. It was interesting to see how my
young cousin Irvie came back to him for point after point and Semple
always had them for him. I don't mean that Irvie didn't make a good
speech. He did indeed; but who couldn't under such circumstances? Of
course I don't mean to take away any of the credit he won for it."

"No, of course not," I said, and the better understood Will Pease when
he informed me that Irvie'd have a longer vacation than would Edgar that
summer. "There really isn't much for Irvie to do around the office for
this while," Will said. "Nothing important's coming up during the summer
and he might just as well go on to Stonehaven when his mother and the
rest of you do. Edgar's needed, though. He's come to be kind of a
backbone for the detail work in the office that's always having to be
cleared away. I think I can bring him on with me in August. He hasn't
taken any vacation at all for some years. Says he hasn't needed any; but
he'll be the better for a little freshening up at old Stonehaven. He's
certainly a Trojan for work."

****

"A little freshening up at old Stonehaven," Will had said, and, when I
had my first glimpse of the sea on our drive from the station, I knew
that this was what I'd needed for myself. Orion Clafley had a new
four-cylinder engine in the "One o'Clock" and the boat was ready for me.
I was out with him in her the next day and so were Emma and Irvie Pease,
laughing together over the futility of their putting out trolling lines
that never caught anything.




CHAPTER 18


Irvie must have felt that anything like a clear-cut proposal of marriage
to Emma would be to deal in the superfluous, and probably so did she.
She'd been so long and so plainly "there" for him as whatever he needed
her to be--wife, servant, supporter, anything at all--he had only to
realize that he did need her and their affair seemed to be settled. It
had taken that shape during my absence, and Emma herself, and of course
Harriet, and Evelyn, too--though Evelyn may have doubted that anybody in
the world would ever be quite "up to" Irvie--were now well content.

As Harriet had written me, Emma was indeed happy. She'd never been a
possessive girl; but she now possessed what she'd always wanted, the
long prospect of ministering to the beloved. I don't think that she
understood his need of an Edgar Semple to minister to him, too.

Irvie was as optimistically versatile in his plans for the future as
he'd always been in the past. Without eavesdropping I'd often hear
fragments of these plans projected to my always receptive niece as the
two passed and re-passed my chair gayly arm-in-arm in their pacings of
the Inn's long verandah.

"It'll take a lot of money but I'll swing it," I'd hear him say; and, on
their return to where I sat, "A house in the country, not too big at
first but we can add to it. Lots of visitors and dogs and shooting----"
And then, as they came by again, "Interesting people. Not the
commonplace kind, but people we'd really like to entertain, people
who've been everywhere and done all sorts of things and----" Then as
they came again, "That part of the firm's fee they split between Edgar
and me didn't amount to so much, and things may come a little slow at
first; but there are lots of openings now in reorganizing business and
in politics and all that. I might take a whirl at a senatorship some
time, who knows?" Irvie was laughing as he said this, but was a little
more serious as they passed again. "Then we must have a station wagon
with Something Farms on it. Country life for our background but lots of
travel thrown in and----"

It was too easy to see that for Emma these were not merely words. They
were enchantments, not because of what they promised--she didn't care
about that--but because they were the music of the voice she loved; it
didn't matter what Irvie said; the voice was enough. What she saw when
she looked at him couldn't be seen by any other, even though the
reflection of her vision shone in her own face. Irvie saw it there and
delighted in it; but so could anybody else see it there and when I did,
too much, I felt myself to be an unwishful intruder and that I needed a
walk.

"Idyllic" was of course my sister's word for the state of things.
"Naturally Will knows it's happening and he couldn't be more delighted.
When he comes, in August, you'll see. He told me before we left home
that he'd always wished this might happen when Irvie came to settle
down--everything so suitable. A girl that Irvie'd grown up with and who
understood him and would help to make his future as bright as it ought
to be. I don't like extreme words; but oh, I don't see how anything
could be more rapturous!"

We'd come to Stonehaven a little earlier than usual, toward the end of
June. It was the day after Harriet had gone so far as "rapturous" that
Evelyn came indignantly to our lunch-table with what seemed a portent.
She'd been talking with a group of fellow-guests on the verandah. "Here
it is the twelfth of July," she said. "Wouldn't you think that if
anybody intended to occupy a cottage for this summer they'd already have
done it? Besides, who in the world would want to rent a 'show place'
like the Stellings'?"

"Who does?" Irvie asked. "Are there signs of life on the hilltop?"

"Yes, there are," Evelyn said. "Gardeners getting weeds out of the
driveway, and Mrs. Paxton was motoring by there yesterday and said she
saw one of those enormous trucks just going in. Said she thought she saw
another farther up the driveway. Of course the place would have to be
renovated if there's going to be a tenant; but----"

Irvie, teasing his mother, interrupted with a mischievous suggestion.
"Maybe it's Sylvia herself coming back to look the old place over once
more. Wouldn't it be a treat to see good old George Prettiman, the
beautiful millionaire, on our beach again?"

"What a horrible thought!" his mother exclaimed. "No, it's absolutely
impossible that anybody could be so lost to decency. Even she'd never do
such a thing--with the Blues in their cottage and Janey here to be faced
every day. No, I'm not fearing anything as bad as that; but I did hope
that no overpowering family would ever rent that place. No other kind of
family would want it or be able to pay for it; but it does look as if
it's happening."

Two days later, as the people of France were celebrating the anniversary
of the capture of the Bastille, there appeared on our beach at
Stonehaven a figure comparable in its effect on ourselves to what the
French might be supposed to feel did they behold, seemingly reclothed in
the flesh, an apparition of Louis XVI. Our own apparition, moreover,
might well have written "_Rien_" in his diary as Louis is said to have
done on the evening of the day that cost him everything; one was as
little aware as the other that anything extraordinary had happened or
was happening. George Prettiman, whom we beheld with incredulity before
us, plainly didn't know that he was startling or even that Janey Blue's
friends had gathered about her as if to shut out the sight of him.

Some people come to Stonehaven for but a season; others for two or
three. They live on the fringes of the place, as it were; know little
and care less about either its continuous life or the semi-continuous
life that gathers itself there every summer. On the beach these fringe
people were disporting themselves as usual, not conscious how the
habitus had clustered themselves into groups focussing their
unbelieving stares upon Mr. Prettiman.

When I arrived he was just coming up out of the surf to stand placidly
dripping upon its fluctuant edges and debate with himself, apparently,
the question whether or not he'd be the better for another dip. He'd
lost his beauty; fat can do this in less time than that elapsed since
we'd seen him. Any sculptor knows how readily a little over-pudginess of
a chin can bring pudginess to a nose, too, and how a slight protrusion
of the abdomen can dwindle the proportions of a leg. He'd lost not a
part of his beauty but all of it and was as little conscious of this as
that he'd ever had any. For some moments he stood in contented vague
contemplation; then returned into the surf.

The groups of bathers and non-bathers who'd been centered upon him
spellbound began to break up and circulate among themselves. They all
seemed to be saying, or, rather, gasping, "Can you believe it!"

Irving Pease and Emma had been swimming far out beyond the life raft,
unaware of the sensation ashore. They turned, and it happened that they
came out of the surf at the same time that George Prettiman came forth
from his second plunge therein. The three figures emerged together with
no one else near them. Emma stared, confounded; then gave George an
amazed nod of recognition and walked away. Irvie Pease remained,
however, the noon sun shining on his wet head and on George's. Greetings
were exchanged and the two shook hands; Irvie was seen to be holding
some converse with the pariah.

"Oh, I wish he hadn't done that!" Harriet exclaimed. "Surely he didn't
need to shake hands with him."

"But he couldn't very well help it," Evelyn said. "George put out his
hand, and after all he's an old friend of Irvie's. I wish I knew what
they're saying." She had not long to wait. George went to the
bath-houses and Irvie came laughing to join a hurriedly increasing group
about his mother. Everybody wanted to know what had been said.

"Just nothing at all," Irvie reported. "Except he's fat as the Dickens,
you wouldn't know he'd ever been away. He said Hello and didn't I think
the water colder than usual to-day, and I said, 'Well, not much colder',
and he said well, maybe it wasn't but just seemed so to him, and then he
said, 'Well, be seeing you,' and trotted off to his bath-house." Irvie
looked merrily at the semi-circle of serious faces now about him. "What
more did you expect? Old George never said anything yet, did he?"

Three voices asked the same question, "But does it mean _she's_ here?"

"Search me!" Irvie said, and he and Emma went back for another swim.

The talk at our lunch-table and most of the other tables at the Inn,
too, was concerned with the same question: Had _she_ had the effrontery
to come back to Stonehaven or was George Prettiman a mere errand boy
detached to see that the palace was made ready for a tenant? For our
table at least, Irvie disposed of the latter possibility. "Does anybody
think he's got sense enough?"

The question was settled the next day. I had not been to the beach but
returned, at the hour for lunch, from an excursion in the "One o'Clock",
and the commotion of talk I heard from the Inn verandah gave me the
answer as I went up the steps. It was jumbled but the fragments were
sufficient: "No wonder she brought a house-party with her!"...
"Looked as discontented as ever."... "Oh, she'd have front enough for
anything."... "Who on earth _are_ those people she's brought
here--self-confident theatrical-looking, the kind she _would_ bring
here?"... "Why on earth did Irvie Pease feel called upon to----"

Irvie, standing just inside the screened doors of the Inn, was
explaining that matter to his mother and Harriet. Both ladies, for
almost the first time in their lives, looked critical of him, Harriet so
much so that her displeasure was marked by her not looking at him at
all. Apparently she looked out through the screen doors. Evelyn was
almost sharp with him.

"Why on earth you had to let that woman go about presenting you to all
her party----"

"She didn't, Mother!" Irvie's tone was protestive. "I didn't meet half
of 'em. You see, there was a man I'd known at college----"

"Yes, you've explained that, Irving."

"Well, I had to speak to him, didn't I? I couldn't----"

Emma came in, interrupting. "The most amazing thing! I mean the effect
of Janey Blue's getting another glimpse of George Prettiman. She doesn't
know how it happened to her."

"How what happened to her?" Harriet asked.

"I mean the whole thing, Mother. He's pudgy, absolutely pudgy! She
doesn't know how it happened to her in the first place. She sees she
must have worshipped his beauty and it's all gone. I talked to her and
she wonders--she absolutely wonders!--how she wasted so much time on him
and so much tragedy. She's really cured; but isn't it strange?"

****

The following is a synopsis of the end as Mr. Tarkington wrote it, with
the addition of some notes of his:



The very things that Irvie's father and mother deplore--the publicity,
the riches and show-off that attend Sylvia--attract Irvie. Sylvia tires
of her beautiful, "harmless" George Prettiman and she decides upon
changing him for Irvie.

Irvie is tempted by the vision--yachts, palaces, shining as the host at
great parties, living in the delightful glare of the continuous
conspicuousness that he loves. Edgar is horrified, tries to fight off
the coming dreadful blow to Emma, the treachery to an old friend, George
Prettiman, and the crushing disappointment to Will and Evelyn Pease, who
abhor Sylvia Stelling and everything for which she stands.

Edgar's devoted a large part of his own life to building up Irvie as a
fine and triumphant figure in a worthy and useful life; he has
subordinated even his own lifelong devotion to Emma for that end. In
despair he sees that he has failed with Irvie, for whom Aladdin's Cave
has seemed to open.

All the egoism with which Irvie was born and which has been so long
fostered by those who have loved him draws him onward. He falls for his
vision of what Sylvia offers and takes her.

More than balancing this dnouement and "on the bright side", is the
increasing emphasis placed upon the developing character of Edgar
Semple. Irvie has been the "show window"; but Edgar is the stock of
goods, so to speak. Of course Irvie's father's plans for the two boys
fall to the ground--Irvie isn't going to be any good citizen, fine
home-town lawyer; that's all off. He looks toward being a great
gentleman, country life, Palm Beach, big house-parties, patron of the
arts, racing stable maybe. Will Pease's plans, however, though at first
seeming to fall to the ground, don't do so. Edgar Semple, who in reality
has always been the backbone of Irvie's "success", brilliantly upholds
those plans and will more than fulfill Will's hopes for the old law
office.

The narrator's partiality for Edgar is justified and his half-hidden
long hope in regard to Emma is satisfied. Her maturing mind, awakened by
shock, at last perceives that all along the best of Irvie, so to say,
has come from Edgar. Edgar was always the substance and Irvie the
surface glitter.

As for Irvie himself--to continue with another allusion to the Arabian
Nights--the result is not Aladdin's Cave but the ship upon which Sinbad
is drawn to destruction upon the Lodestone Rock. Sylvia's released
egoism hasn't let her picture herself as an over-shadowed or subservient
wife but the rather as a super-dominant figure--with husbands (if she
chooses another presently) who serve as equerries or attendants,
background figures who must do what she tells them and run errands as
she chooses. For all her follies and costly glitterings, she holds the
purse strings tight, as did her mother before her--though possibly she'd
let Irvie collect stamps and become another faded figure like her
father, the unnoticeable Mr. Stelling.

Irvie is left to his tragi-comedy; but, to the narrator's great
satisfaction, the reward for Emma and for Irvie's parents, too, rests
upon the competent shoulders and the rising star of Edgar Semple.




NOTES:

An instance of Irvie's talk--an automobile accident he saw. His whole
account consists of what _he_ was doing before, during and after the
accident; what he said and did. Nothing about the people who were hurt.

I'd see Irvie one day with a Great Dane. Irvie loves to pretend to fight
with the big dog. Irvie always thinks someone's looking at him. When he
walks he's always making a picture out of himself--his dog is an
appanage, like something to wear. After Sylvia is married to Irvie he
gets to be her Great Dane--only middle-sized and rather cowed. Nobody's
ever stood up to Sylvia and nobody's going to.

Will Pease dies, and Irvie at the funeral is a conspicuous and noble
sufferer--holding up his mother. Self-conscious grief, though of course
he does feel some. Edgar looked after things.

I see a party as probably the last view you'd have of Irvie. Sylvia is
fascinated and courting somebody else. Irvie's rather carelessly ordered
by her to run and get something for the benefit of the man she's showing
off at. I'd been afraid that Emma might again be glamored and made
unhappy by seeing Irvie at the party, where I think he will be as of
yore the great figure and will give Emma a return of her feeling for
him. Doesn't--because Irvie is a pricked balloon.

In the end, when Sylvia has thrown Irvie out, Emma and I both suppose
Edgar will take him back into the law firm, even though Edgar now has
another partner. Edgar says no and means no. Irvie would be thought to
have a right to come back into what had once been his father's old firm;
but Edgar is hard about it. No!

I see this is partly Edgar's anger over the way Irvie treated Emma, and
for the first time Emma--married to Edgar for some months--seems really
to look up to him.






[End of The Show Piece, by Booth Tarkington]
