The Project Gutenberg eBook of McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI June, 1908 No. 2, by Various.

The first time that there was any talk of my going to America was, I think, in 1874, when I was playing in "The Wandering Heir." Dion Boucicault wanted me to go, and dazzled me with figures, but I expect the cautious Charles Reade influenced me against accepting the engagement.

When I did go, in 1883, I was thirty-five and had an assured position in my profession. It was the first of eight tours, seven of which I went with Henry Irving. The last was in 1907, after his death. I also went to America one summer on a pleasure trip. The tours lasted three months at least, seven months at most. After a rough calculation, I find that I have spent not quite five years of my life in America. Five out of sixty is not a large proportion, yet I often feel that I am half American. This says a good deal for the hospitality of a people who can make a stranger feel so completely at home in their midst. Perhaps it also says something for my adaptableness!

"When we do not speak of things with a partiality full of love, what we say is not worth being repeated." That was the answer of a courteous Frenchman, who was asked for his impressions of a country. In any case it is almost imprudent to give one's impressions of America. The country is so vast and complex that even those who have amassed mountains of impressions soon find that there still are mountains more. I have lived in New York, Boston, and Chicago for a month at a time, and have felt that to know any of these great towns even superficially would take a year. I have become acquainted with this and that class of Americans, but I realize that there are thousands of other classes that remain unknown.[Pg 122]

The Unknown Dangers of America

I set out in 1883 from Liverpool on board the "Britannic" with the fixed conviction that I should never, never return. For six weeks before we started the word America had only to be breathed to me, and I burst into floods of tears! I was leaving my children, my bullfinch, my parrot, my "aunt" Boo, whom I never expected to see again alive, just because she said I never would, and I was going to face the unknown dangers of the Atlantic and of a strange, barbarous land. Our farewell performances in London had cheered me up a little—though I wept copiously at every one—by showing us that we should be missed. Henry Irving's position seemed to be confirmed and ratified by all that took place before his departure. The dinners he had to eat, the speeches he had to make and to listen to, were really terrific! One speech at the Rabelais Club had, it was said, the longest peroration on record. It was this kind of thing: "Where is our friend Irving going? He is not going like Nares to face the perils of the far North. He is not going like A—— to face something else. He is not going to China," etc.—and so on. After about the hundredth "he is not going," Lord Houghton, who was one of the guests, grew very impatient and interrupted the orator with: "Of course he isn't! He's going to New York by the Cunard Line. It'll take him about a week!"

New York Before the "Sky-scrapers"

My first voyage was a voyage of enchantment to me. The ship was laden with pig-iron, but she rolled and rolled and rolled. She could never roll too much for me. I have always been a splendid sailor, and I feel jolly at sea. The sudden leap from home into the wilderness of waves does not give me any sensation of melancholy.

What I thought I was going to see when I arrived in America, I hardly remember. I had a vague idea that all American women wore red flannel shirts and bowie knives and that I might be sandbagged in the street! From somewhere or other I had derived an impression that New York was an ugly, noisy place.

Ugly! When I first saw that marvellous harbour I nearly cried—it was so beautiful. Whenever I come now to the unequalled approach to New York I wonder what Americans must think of the approach from the sea to London. How different are the mean, flat, marshy banks of the Thames, and the wooden toy light-house at Dungeness, to the vast, spreading harbour, with its busy multitude of steam boats and ferry boats, its wharf upon wharf, and its tall statue of Liberty dominating all the racket and bustle of the sea traffic of the world![Pg 123]

That was one of the few times in America when I did not miss the poetry of the past. The poetry of the present, gigantic, colossal, and enormous, made me forget it. The "sky-scrapers," so splendid in the landscape now, did not exist in 1883; but I find it difficult to divide my early impressions from my later ones. There was Brooklyn Bridge, though, hung up high in the air like a vast spider's web. Between 1883 and 1893 I noticed a great change in New York and other cities. In ten years they seemed to have grown with the energy of tropical plants. But between 1893 and 1907 I saw no evidence of such feverish increase. It is possible that the Americans are arriving at a stage when they can no longer beat the record! There is a vast difference between one of the old New York brownstone houses and one of the fourteen-storied buildings near the river, but between this and the Times Square Building or the still more amazing Flatiron Building, which is said to oscillate at the top—it is so far from the ground—there is very little difference. I hear that they are now beginning to build downwards into the earth, but this will not change the appearance of New York for a long time.

I had not to endure the wooden shed in which[Pg 124] most people landing in America have to struggle with the custom-house officials—a struggle as brutal as a "round in the ring" as Paul Bourget describes it. We were taken off the "Britannic" in a tug, and Mr. Abbey, Lawrence Barrett, and many other friends met us—including the much-dreaded reporters.

When we landed, I drove to the Hotel Dam, Henry to the Brevoort House. There was no Diana on the top of the Madison Square Building then—the building did not exist, to cheer the heart of a new arrival as the first evidence of beauty in the city. There were horse trams instead of cable cars; but a quarter of a century has not altered the peculiarly dilapidated carriages in which one drives from the dock, the muddy sidewalks, and the cavernous holes in the cobble-paved streets. Had the elevated railway, the first sign of power that one notices after leaving the boat, begun to thunder through the streets? I cannot remember New York without it.

I missed then, as I miss now, the numberless hansoms of London plying in the streets for hire. People in New York get about in the cars, unless they have their own carriages. The hired carriage has no reason for existing, and when it does, it celebrates its unique position by charging two dollars for a journey which in London would not cost fifty cents!

Irving Brings Shakespeare to America

There were very few theatres in New York when we first went there. All that part of the city which is now "up town" did not exist, and what was then "up" is now more than "down" town. The American stage has changed almost as much. Even then there was a liking for local plays which showed the peculiarities of the different States, but they were more violent and crude than now. The original American genius and the true dramatic pleasure of the people is, I believe, in such plays, where very complete observation of certain phases of American life and very real pictures of manners are combined with comedy almost childlike in its[Pg 126] naïveté. The sovereignty of the young girl which is such a marked feature in social life is reflected in American plays. This is by the way. What I want to make clear is that in 1883 there was no living American drama as there is now, that such productions of romantic plays and Shakespeare as Henry Irving brought over from England, were unknown, and that the extraordinary success of our first tours would be impossible now. We were the first, and we were pioneers and we were new. To be new is everything in America. Such palaces as the Hudson Theatre, New York, were not dreamed of when we were at the Star, which was, however, quite equal to any theatre in London, in front of the footlights. The[Pg 127] stage itself, the lighting appliances, and the dressing-rooms were inferior.

Our First Appearance Before an American Audience

Henry made his first appearance in America in "The Bells." He was not at his best on the first night, but he could be pretty good even when he was not at his best. I watched him from a box. Nervousness made the company very slow. The audience was a splendid one—discriminating and appreciative. We felt that the Americans wanted to like us. We felt in a few days so extraordinarily at home. The first sensation of entering a foreign city was quickly wiped out.

On the second night in New York it was my turn. "Command yourself—this is the time to show you can act!" I said to myself as I went on the stage of the Star Theatre, dressed as Henrietta Maria. But I could not command myself. I played badly and cried too much in the last act. But the people liked me, and they liked the play, perhaps because it was historical, and of history the Americans are passionately fond. The audience took many points which had been ignored in London. I had always thought Henry as Charles I. most moving when he made that involuntary effort to kneel to his subject, Moray, but the Lyceum audiences never seemed to notice it. In New York the audience burst out into the most sympathetic, spontaneous applause that I have ever heard in a theatre.

American Clothes

My impression of the way the American women dressed in 1883 was not favourable.[Pg 130] Some of them wore Indian shawls and diamond ear-rings. They dressed too grandly in the street and too dowdily in the theatre. All this has changed. The stores in New York are now the most beautiful in the world, and the women are dressed to perfection. They are as clever at the demi-toilette as the Parisian, and the extreme neatness and smartness of their walking gowns is very refreshing after the floppy, blowsy, trailing dresses, accompanied by the inevitable feather boa, of which English girls, who used to be so tidy and "tailor-made," now seem so fond. The universal white "waist" is so pretty and trim on the American girl. It is one of the distinguishing marks of a land of the free, a land where "class" hardly exists. The girl in the store wears the white waist; so does the rich girl on Fifth Avenue. It costs anything from seventy-five cents to fifty dollars!

London, when I come back from America, always seems at first like an ill-lighted village, strangely tame, peaceful, and backward. Above all, I miss the sunlight of America, and the clear blue skies of an evening.

"Oh, yes, if you mean by that a wonderful land—a land of sunshine and light, of happiness, of faith in the future!" I answered. I saw no misery or poverty there. Everyone looked happy. What hurts me on coming back to England is the hopeless look on so many faces; the dejection and apathy of the people standing about in the streets. Of course there is poverty in New York, but not among the Americans. The Italians, the Russians, the Poles—all the host of immigrants washed in daily across the harbour—these are poor, but you don't see them unless you go Bowery ways and even then you can't help feeling that in their sufferings there is always hope. Vulgarity? I saw little of it. I thought that the people who had amassed large fortunes used their wealth beautifully. When a man is rich enough to build himself a big, new house, he remembers some old house which he once admired, and he has it imitated with all the technical skill and care that can be had in America. This accounts for the odd jumble of styles in Fifth Avenue, along the lake-side in Chicago, in the new avenues in St. Louis and elsewhere. One millionaire's house is modelled on a French château, another on an old Colonial house in Virginia, another on a monastery in Mexico, another is like an Italian palazzo. And their imitations are never weak or pretentious. The architects in America seem to me to be far more able than ours, or else they have a freer hand and more money.

The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens

It is sad to remember that Mr. Stanford White was one of the best of these splendid architects. It was Stanford White with Saint-Gaudens, that great sculptor, whose work dignifies nearly all the great cities in America, who had most to do with the Exhibition buildings of the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. It was odd to see that fair dream city rising out of the lake, so far more beautiful in its fleeting loveliness than the Chicago of the stock-yards and the pit which had provided the money for its beauty. The millionaires did not interfere with the artists at all. They gave their thousands—and stood aside. The result was one of the loveliest things conceivable. Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their work as well as though the buildings were to endure for centuries instead of being burned in a year to save the trouble of pulling down! The World's Fair recalled to me the story of how Michelangelo carved a figure in snow which, says the chronicler Vasari who saw it, "was superb."

Saint-Gaudens gave me a cast of his medallion of Bastien-Lepage, and wrote to a friend of mine: "Bastien had 'le coeur au métier.' So has Miss Terry, and I will place that saying in the frame that is to replace the present unsatisfactory one." He was very fastidious about this frame and took such a lot of trouble to get it right.

It must have been very irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim to that extraordinary official Puritanism which sometimes exercises a petty censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a beautiful little nude figure of a boy—holding an olive branch—emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace wreath and some lettering were substituted.

Saint-Gaudens did the fine bas-relief of Robert Louis Stevenson which was chosen for the monument in St. Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. He gave my daughter a medallion cast from this, because he knew that she was a great lover of Stevenson. The bas-relief was dedicated to his friend, Joe Evans. I knew Saint-Gaudens first through Joe Evans, an artist who, while he lived, was to me and to my daughter the dearest of all in America. His character was so fine and noble—his nature so perfect. Many were the birthday cards he did for me, original in design, beautiful in execution.[Pg 131] Whatever he did, he put the best of himself into it. I wrote this in my diary the year he died:

"I heard on Saturday that our dear Joe Evans is dangerously ill. Yesterday came the worst news. Joe was not happy, but he was just heroic, and this world wasn't half good enough for him. I wonder if he has gone to a better. I keep on getting letters about him. He seems to have been so glad to die. It was like a child's funeral, I am told, and all his American friends seem to have been there—Saint-Gaudens, Taber, etc. A poem about the dear fellow by Mr. Gilder has one very good line in which he says the grave 'might snatch a brightness from his presence there.' I thought that was very happy, the love of light and gladness being the most remarkable thing about him, the dear sad Joe."

Robert Taber

Robert Taber, dear, and rather sad too, was a great friend of Joe's. They both came to me first in the shape of a little book in which was inscribed: "Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it." "Upon this hint I spake," the book began. It was all the work of a few boys and girls who from the gallery of the Star Theatre, New York, had watched Irving's productions and learned to love him and me. Joe Evans had done a lovely picture by way of frontispiece of a group of eager heads hanging over the gallery's edge, his own and Taber's among them. Eventually Taber came to England and acted with Henry Irving in "Peter the Great" and other plays.

Like his friend Joe, he too was heroic. His health was bad and his life none too happy—but he struggled on. His career was cut short by consumption and he died in the Adirondacks in 1904.

I cannot speak of all my friends in America, or anywhere, for the matter of that, individually. My personal friends are so many, and they are all wonderful—wonderfully staunch to me! I have "tried" them so, and they have never given me up as a bad job.

Dramatic Criticism in America

William Winter, poet, critic, and exquisite man, was one of the first to write of Henry with whole-hearted appreciation. But all the criticism in America, favourable and unfavourable, surprised us by the scholarly knowledge it displayed. In Chicago the notices were worthy of the Temps or the Journal des Débats. There was no attempt to force the personality of the writer into the foreground nor to write a style that would attract attention to the critic and leave the thing criticised to take care of itself. William Winter and, of late years, Alan Dale have had their personalities associated with their criticisms, but they are exceptions. Curiously enough, the art of acting appears to bore most dramatic critics, the very people who might be expected to be interested in it. The American critics, however, at the time of our early visits, were keenly interested, and showed it by their observation of many points which our English critics had passed over. For instance, writing of "Much Ado about Nothing," one of the Americans said of Henry in the Church Scene that "something of him as a subtle interpreter of doubtful situations was exquisitely shown in the early part of this fine scene by his suspicion of Don John—felt by him alone, and expressed only by a quick covert look, but a look so full of intelligence as to proclaim him a sharer in the secret with his audience."

"Wherein does the superiority lie?" wrote another critic in comparing our productions with those which had been seen in America up to 1884. "Not in the amount of money expended, but in the amount of brains; in the artistic intelligence and careful and earnest pains with which every detail is studied and worked out. Nor is there any reason why Mr. Irving or any other foreigner should have a monopoly of either intelligence or pains. They are common property and one man's money can buy them as well as another's. The defect in the American manager's policy heretofore has been that he has squandered his money upon high salaries for a few of his actors; and in costly, because unintelligent, expenditure for mere dazzle and show."

William Winter and His Children

William Winter soon became a great personal friend of ours, and visited us in England. He was one of the few sad people I met in America. He could have sat upon the ground and "told sad stories of the deaths of kings" with the best. In England he loved going to see graveyards, and knew where every poet was buried. He was very familiar with the poetry of the immediate past—Cowper, Coleridge, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and the rest. He liked us, so everything we did was right to him. He could not help being guided entirely by his feelings. If he disliked a thing, he had no use for it. Some men can say, "I hate this play, but of its kind it is admirable." Willie Winter could never take that unemotional point of view.

His children came to stay with me in London. When we were all coming home from the theatre[Pg 132] one night after Faust (the year must have been 1886), I said to little Willie:

"Takes the cake," said his little sister scornfully. "It takes the ice-cream!"

"No, I won't, with all that blue stuff on your face." (He was made up for Mephistopheles.) Then, after a pause, "But why—why don't you take it!" She was only five years old at the time!

Discovering the Southern Darkey

For quite a while during the first tour I stayed in Washington with my friend, Miss Olive Seward, and all the servants of that delightful household were coloured. This was my first introduction to the negroes, whose presence in the country makes America seem more foreign than anything to European eyes. They are more sharply divided into high and low types than white people, and are not in the least alike in their types. It is safe to call any coloured man "George." They all love it, perhaps because of George Washington; and most of them are really named George. I never met with such perfect service as they can give. Some of them are delightful. The beautiful, full voice of the "darkey" is so attractive—so soothing, and they are so deft and gentle. Some of the women are beautiful, and all the young appeared to me to be well-formed. As for the babies! I washed two or three little piccaninnies when I was in the South, and the way they rolled their gorgeous eyes at me was "too cute," which means, in British-English, "fascinating."

At the Washington house, the servants danced a cake-walk for me—the coloured cook, a magnificent type, who "took the cake," saying, "That was because I chose a good handsome boy to dance with, Missie." They sang, too. Their voices were beautiful—with such illimitable power, yet as sweet as treacle.

The little page boy had a pet of a woolly head—Henry once gave him a tip, a "fee," in American-English, and said: "There, that's for a new wig when this one is worn out," gently pulling the astrakhan-like hair. The tip would have bought him many wigs, I think!

"Why, Uncle Tom, how your face shines to-night!" said my hostess to one of the very old servants.

He had taken some from her dressing-table to shine up his face in honour of me! A shiny complexion is considered to be a great beauty among the blacks. The dear old man! He was very bent and very old; and looked like one of the logs that he used to bring in for the fire—a log from some hoary, lichened tree whose life was long since past. He would produce pins from his head when you wanted one; he had them stuck in his pad of white woolly hair. "Always handy then, Missie," he would say.

He was acting as a sort of master of the ceremonies at the entertainment the servants were giving me.

American Women

Washington was the first city I had seen in America where the people did not hurry, and where the social life did not seem entirely the work of women. The men asserted themselves here as something more than machines in the background, untiringly turning out the dollars while their wives and daughters give luncheons and teas at which only women are present.

Beautifully as the women dress, they talk very little about clothes. I was much struck by their culture—by the evidence that they had read far more and developed a more fastidious taste than most young Englishwomen. Yet it is all mixed up with extraordinary naïveté. Their vivacity, the appearance, at least, of reality, the animation, the energy of American women, delighted me. They are very sympathetic, too, in spite of a certain callousness which comes of regarding everything in life, even love, as "lots of fun." I did not think that they, or the men either, had much natural sense of beauty. They admire beauty in a curious way through their intellect. Nearly every American girl has a cast of the winged Victory of the Louvre in her room. She makes it a point of her education to admire it.

There! I am beginning to generalize—the very thing I was resolute to avoid. How silly to generalize about a country which embraces such extremes of climate as the sharp winters of Boston and New York, and the warm winds of Florida which blow through palms and orange groves![Pg 133]

THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE

BY MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR G. DOVE

James Tapster was eating his solitary, well-cooked dinner in his comfortable and handsome house, a house situated in one of the half-moon terraces which line and frame the more aristocratic side of Regent's Park, and which may, indeed, be said to have private grounds of their own, for each resident enjoys the use of a key to a portion of the Park entitled locally the "Inclosure."

Very early in his life Mr. Tapster had made up his mind that he would like to live in Cumberland Crescent, and now he was living there; very early in his life he had decided that no one could order a plain yet palatable meal as well as he could himself, and now for some months past Mr. Tapster had given his own orders, each morning, to the cook.

To-night Mr. Tapster had already eaten his fried sole, and was about to cut himself off a generous portion of the grilled undercut before him, when he heard the postman's steps hurrying around the Crescent. He rose with a certain quick deliberateness, and, going out into the hall, opened the front door just in time to avoid the rat-tat-tat. Then, the one letter he had expected duly in his hand, he waited till he had sat down again in front of his still empty plate before he broke the seal and glanced over the type-written sheet of note-paper:

In the same handwriting as the signature were added two holograph lines: "Glad you have the children home again. Maud will be round to see them soon."

Mr. Tapster read over once again the body of the letter, and there came upon him an instinctive feeling of intense relief; then, with a not less instinctive feeling of impatience, his eyes traveled down again to the postscript: "Maud will be round to see them soon." Well, he would see about that! But he did not exclaim, even mentally, as most men feeling as he then felt would have done, "I'll be damned if she will!" knowing the while that Maud certainly would.

His brother's letter, though most satisfactory as regarded its main point, put Mr. Tapster out of conceit with the rest of his dinner; so he rang twice and had the table cleared, frowning at the parlor-maid as she hurried through her duties, and yet not daring to rebuke her for having neglected to answer the bell the first time he rang. After a pause, he rose and turned toward the door—but no, he could not face the large, cheerless drawing-room up-stairs; instead, he sat down by the fire, and set himself to consider his future and, in a more hazy sense, that of his now motherless children.

But very soon, as generally happens to those who devote any time to that least profitable of occupations, Mr. Tapster found that his thoughts drifted aimlessly, not to the future where he would have them be, but to the past—that past which he desired to forget, to obliterate from his memory.

Till rather more than a year ago few men of his age—he had then been sixty, he was now sixty-one—enjoyed a pleasanter and, from his own point of view, a better filled life than James Tapster. How he had scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer—in a word, all those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had always been self-respecting and conscientious—not a prig, mind you, but inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; and, so inclining, he had found contentment and great material prosperity.

Not even in those days to which he was now looking back so regretfully had Mr. Tapster always been perfectly content; but now the[Pg 134] poor man, sitting alone by his dining-room fire, remembered only what had been good and pleasant in his former state. He was aware that his brother William and William's wife, Maud, both thought that even now he had much to be thankful for. His line of business was brisk, scarcely touched by foreign competition, his income increasing at a steady rate of progression, and his children were exceptionally healthy. But, alas! now that, in place of there being a pretty little Mrs. Tapster on whom to spend easily earned money, his substance was being squandered by a crowd of unmanageable and yet indispensable thieves,—for so Mr. Tapster voicelessly described the five servants whose loud talk and laughter were even now floating up from the basement below,—he did not feel his financial stability so comfortable a thing as he had once done. His very children, who should now be, as he told himself complainingly, his greatest comfort, had degenerated from two sturdy, well-behaved little boys and a charming baby girl into three unruly, fretful imps, setting him at defiance, and terrorizing their two attendants, who, though carefully chosen by their Aunt Maud, did not seem to manage them as well as the old nurse who had been an ally of the ex-Mrs. Tapster.

Looking back at the whole horrible affair—for so, in his own mind, Mr. Tapster justly designated the divorce case in which he had figured as the successful petitioner—he wondered uneasily if he had done quite wisely—wisely, that is, for his own repute and comfort.

He knew very well that had it not been for William, or rather, for Maud, he would never have found out the dreadful truth. Nay, more, he was dimly aware that but for them, and for their insistence on it as the only proper course open to him, he would never have taken action. All would have been forgiven and forgotten, had not William, and more especially Maud, said he must divorce Flossy, if not for his own sake,—ah, what irony!—then for that of his children.

Of course, he felt grateful to his brother William and to his brother's wife for all they had done for him since that sad time. Still, in the depths of his heart, Mr. Tapster felt entitled to blame and sometimes almost to hate his kind brother and sister. To them both, or rather, to Maud, he really owed the break-up of his life; for, when all was said and done, it had to be admitted (though Maud did not like him to remind her of it), that Flossy had met the villain while staying with the William Tapsters at Boulogne. Respectable London people should have known better than to take a furnished house at a disreputable French watering-place, a place full of low English!

Sometimes it was only by a great exercise of self-control that he, James Tapster, could refrain from telling Maud what he thought of her conduct in this matter, the more so that she never seemed to understand how greatly she—and William—had been to blame. On one occasion Maud had even said how surprised she had been that James had cared to go away to America, leaving his pretty young wife alone for as long as three months. Why hadn't she said so at the time, then? Of course, he had thought that he could leave Flossy to be looked after and kept out of mischief by Maud and William. But he had been, in more than one sense, alas! bitterly deceived.

Still, it's never any use crying over spilt milk, so Mr. Tapster got up from his chair and walked around the room, looking absently, as he did so, at the large Landseer engravings, of which he was naturally proud. If only he could forget, put out of his mind forever, the whole affair! Well, perhaps with the Decree being made Absolute would come oblivion.

He sat down again before the fire. Staring at the hot embers, he reminded himself that Flossy, wicked, ungrateful Flossy, had disappeared out of his life. This being so, why think of her? The very children had at last left off asking inconvenient questions about their mama.

By the way, would Flossy still be their mama after the Decree had been made Absolute? So Mr. Tapster now suddenly asked himself. He hesitated, perplexed. But, yes, the Decree being made Absolute would not undo, or even efface, that fact. The more so—though surely here James Tapster showed himself less logical than usual—the more so that Flossy, in spite of what Maud had always said about her, had been a loving and, in her own light-hearted way, a careful mother. But, though Flossy would remain the mother of his children,—odd that the Law hadn't provided for that contingency—she would soon be absolutely nothing, and less than nothing, to him, the father of those children. Mr. Tapster was a great believer in the infallibility of the Law, and he subscribed whole-heartedly to the new reading, "What Law has put asunder, let no man join together."

To-night Mr. Tapster could not help looking back with a certain complacency to his one legal adventure. Nothing could have been better done or more admirably conducted than the way the whole matter had been carried through. His brother William, and William's solicitor,[Pg 135] Mr. Greenfield, had managed it all so very nicely. True, there had been a few uncomfortable moments in the witness-box, but every one, including the judge, had been most kind. As for his counsel, the leading man who makes a specialty of these sad affairs, not even James Tapster himself could have put his own case in a more delicate and moving fashion. "A gentleman possessed of considerable fortune—" so had he justly been described; and counsel, without undue insistence on irrelevant detail, had drawn a touching and a true picture of Mr. Tapster's one romance, his marriage eight years before to the twenty-year-old daughter of an undischarged bankrupt. Even the Petitioner had scarcely seen Flossy's dreadful ingratitude in its true colors till he had heard his counsel's moderate comments on the case.

This evening Mr. Tapster saw Flossy's dreadful ingratitude terribly clearly, and he wondered, not for the first time, how his wife could have had the heart to break up his happy home. Why, but for him and his offer of marriage, Flossy Ball—that had been his wife's maiden name—would have had to earn her own living! And as she had been very pretty, very "fetching," she would probably have married some good-for-nothing young fellow of her own age, lacking the means to support a wife in decent comfort,—such a fellow, for instance, as the wretched "co" in the case; while with Mr. Tapster—why, she had had everything the heart of woman could wish for—a good home, beautiful clothes, and the being waited on hand and foot. A strange choking feeling came into his throat as he thought of how good he had been to Flossy, and how very bad had been her return for that kindness.

But this—this was dreadful! He was actually thinking of her again, and not, as he had meant to do, of himself and his poor motherless children! Time enough to think of Flossy when he had news of her again. If her lover did not marry her—and, from what Mr. Greenfield had discovered about him, it was most improbable that he would ever be in a position to do so—she would certainly reappear on the Tapster horizon: Mr. Greenfield said "they" always did. In that case, it was arranged that William should pay her a weekly allowance. Mr. Tapster, always, as he now reminded himself sadly, ready to do the generous thing, had fixed that allowance at three pounds a week, a sum which had astonished, in fact quite staggered, Mr. Greenfield's head clerk, a very decent fellow, by the way.[Pg 136]

"Of course, it shall be as you wish, Mr. Tapster, but you should think of the future and of your children. A hundred and fifty pounds a year is a large sum; you may feel it a tax, sir, as years go on——"

"That is enough," Mr. Tapster had answered, kindly but firmly; "you have done your duty in laying that side of the case before me. I have, however, decided on the amount named; should I see reason to alter my mind, our arrangement leaves it open to me at any time to lower the allowance."

But, though this conversation had taken place some months ago, and though Mr. Tapster still held true to his generous resolve, as yet Flossy had not reappeared. Mr. Tapster sometimes told himself that if he only knew where she was, what she was doing,—whether she was still with that young fellow, for instance,—he would think much less about her than he did now. Only last night, going for a moment into the night nursery,—poor Mr. Tapster now enjoyed his children's company only when he was quite sure that they were asleep,—he had had an extraordinary, almost a physical impression of Flossy's presence; he certainly had felt a faint whiff of her favorite perfume. Flossy had been fond of scent, and, though Maud always said that the use of scent was most unladylike, he, James, did not dislike it.

With sudden soreness, Mr. Tapster now recalled the one letter Flossy had written to him just before the actual hearing of the divorce suit. It had been a wild, oddly worded appeal to him to take her back, not—as Maud had at once perceived on reading the letter—because she was sorry for the terrible thing she had done, but simply because she was beginning to hanker after her children. Maud had described the letter as shameless and unwomanly in the extreme, and even William, who had never judged his pretty young sister-in-law as severely as his wife had always done, had observed sadly that Flossy seemed quite unaware of the magnitude of her offense against God and man.

Mr. Tapster, who prided himself on his sharp ears, suddenly heard a curious little sound. He knew it for that of the front door being first opened, and then shut again, extremely quietly. He half rose from his chair by the fire, then sat down again heavily.

By Maud's advice, he always locked the area gate himself when he came home each evening. But how foolish of Maud—such a sensible woman, too—to think that servants and their evil ways could be circumvented so easily. Of course, the maids went in and out by the front door in the evening, and the policeman—a most respectable officer standing at point duty a few yards lower down the road—must be well aware of these disgraceful "goings on".

For the first two or three months of his widowerhood (how else could he term his present peculiar wifeless condition?) there had been a constant coming and going of servants, first chosen, and then dismissed, by Maud. At last she suggested that her brother-in-law should engage a lady housekeeper, and the luckless James Tapster had even interviewed several applicants for the post after they had been chosen—sifted out, as it were—by Maud. Unfortunately, they had all been more or less of his own age, and plain, very plain; while he, naturally enough, would have preferred to see something young and pretty about him again.

It was over this housekeeper question that he had at last escaped from Maud's domestic thraldom; for his sister-in-law, offended by his rejection of each of her candidates, had declared that she would take no more trouble about his household affairs! Nay, more, she had reminded him with a smile that she had honestly tried to make pleasant, that there is, after all, no fool like an old fool—about women. This insinuation had made Mr. Tapster very angry, and straightway he had engaged a respectable cook-housekeeper, and, although he had soon become aware that the woman was feathering her own nest,—James Tapster, as you will have divined ere now, was fond of good workaday phrases,—yet she had a pleasant, respectful manner, and kept rough order among the younger servants.

Mr. Tapster's sister-in-law now interfered only where his children were concerned. Never having been herself a mother, she had, of course, been able to form a clear and unprejudiced judgment as to how children, and especially as to how little boys, should be physically and mentally trained. As yet, however, Maud had not been very successful with her two nephews and infant niece, but this was doubtless owing to the fact that there had been something gravely amiss with each of the five nurses who had been successively engaged by her during the last year.

The elder of Mr. Tapster's sons was six, and the second four; the youngest child, a little girl named, unfortunately, Flora, after her mother, was three years old. There had been a fourth, Flossy's second baby, also a girl, who had only lived one day. All this being so, was it not strange that a young matron who had led, for some four years out of the eight years her married life had lasted, so wholly womanly and[Pg 137] domestic an existence as had fallen to the lot of Flossy, should have been led astray by the meretricious allurements of unlawful love?—Maud's striking thought and phrase, this.

And yet, Flossy, in spite of her frivolity, had somehow managed the children far better than Maud was now able to do. At the present time, so Mr. Tapster admitted to himself with something very like an inward groan, his two sons possessed every vice of which masculine infancy is capable. They had become, so he was told by their indignant nurses, the terror of the well-behaved children who shared with them the pleasures of the Park Inclosure, where they took their daily exercise; and Baby, once so sweet and good, was now very fretful and peevish.

Again the train of Mr. Tapster's mournful thoughts was disturbed by a curious little sound—that of some one creeping softly down the staircase leading from the upper floors. Once more he half rose from his chair, only to fall heavily back again, with a look of impotent annoyance on his round, whiskered face. Where was the use of his going out into the hall and catching Nurse on her way to the kitchen? Maud had declared, very early in the day, that there should be as little communication as possible between the kitchen and the nursery, but Mr. Tapster sometimes found himself in secret sympathy with the two women whose disagreeable duty it was to be always with his three turbulent children.

Mr. Tapster frowned and stared gloomily into the fire; then he suddenly pulled himself together rather sharply, for the door behind him had slowly swung open. This was intolerable! The parlor-maid had again and again been told that, whatever might have been the case in her former places, no door in Mr. Tapster's house was to be opened without the preliminary of a respectful knock.

Fortified by the memory of what had been a positive order, he turned round, nerving himself to deliver the necessary rebuke. But instead of the shifty-eyed, impudent-looking woman he had thought to see, there stood close to him, so close that he could almost have touched her, Flossy, his wife, or rather the woman who, though no longer his wife, had still, as he had been informed to his discomfiture, the right to bear his name.

A very strange feeling, and one so complicated that it sat uneasily upon him, took instant possession of Mr. Tapster: anger, surprise, and relief warred with one another in his heart.

Then he began to think that his eyes must be playing him some curious trick, for the figure at which he was staring remained strangely still and motionless. Was it possible that his mind, dwelling constantly on Flossy, had evoked her wraith? But, no, looking up in startled silence at the still figure standing before him, he realized that not so would memory have conjured up the pretty, bright little woman of whom he had once been proud. Flossy still looked pretty, but she was thin and pale, and there were dark rings round her eyes; also, her dress was worn, her hat curiously shabby.

As Mr. Tapster stared up at her, noting these things, one of her hands began playing nervously with the fringe of the dining-table cover, and the other sought the back of what had once been one of her dining-room chairs. As he watched her making these slight movements, nature so far reasserted itself that a feeling of poignant regret, of pity for her, as well as, of course, a much larger share of pity for himself, came over James Tapster.

Had Flossy spoken then,—had she possessed the intuitive knowledge of men which is the gift of so many otherwise unintelligent women,—the whole of Mr. Tapster's future, to say nothing of her own, might have been different and, it may be suggested, happier.

But the moment of softening and mansuetude slipped quickly by, and was succeeded by a burst of anger; for Mr. Tapster suddenly became aware that Flossy's left hand, the little thin hand resting on the back of the chair, was holding two keys which he recognized at once as his property. The one was a replica of the latch-key which always hung on his watch-chain, while the other and larger key, to which was attached a brass tag bearing the name of Tapster and the address of the house, gave access to the Inclosure Garden opposite Cumberland Crescent!

Avoiding her eager, pitiful look, Mr. Tapster set himself to realize, with a shrewdness for which William and Maud would never have given him credit, what Flossy's possession of those two keys had meant during the last few months.

This woman, who both was and was not Mrs. Tapster, had retained the power to come freely in and out of his house! She had been able to make her way, with or without the connivance of the servants, into his children's nursery at any hour of the day or night convenient to herself! With the aid of that Inclosure key, she had no doubt often seen the children during their daily walk! In a word, Flossy had been able to enjoy all the privileges of motherhood while having forfeited all those of happy wifehood!

His mind hastened heavily on. What a fool[Pg 139] he must have looked before his servants! How they must have laughed to think that he was being so deceived and taken in! Why, even the policeman who stood at point duty outside must have known all about it!

Small wonder that Mr. Tapster felt extremely incensed; small wonder that his heart, hardening, solidifying, expelled any feeling of pity provoked by Flossy's sad and downcast appearance.

"I must request you," he said, in a voice which even to himself sounded harsh and needlessly loud, "to give me up those keys which you hold in your hand. You have no right to their possession, and I grieve to think that you took advantage of my great distress of mind not to return them with the things of which I sent you a list by my brother William. I cannot believe"—and now Mr. Tapster lied as only the very truthful can lie on occasion—"I cannot believe, I say, that you have taken advantage of my having overlooked them, and that you have ever before to-night forced yourself into this house! Still less can I believe that you have taught our—my—children to deceive their father!"

Even when uttering his first sentence, he had noticed that there had come over Flossy's face—which was thinner, if quite as pretty and youthful-looking, as when he had last seen it—an expression of obstinacy which he had once well known and always dreaded. It had been Flossy's one poor weapon against her husband's superior sense and power of getting his own way, and sometimes it had vanquished him in that fair fight which is always being waged between the average husband and wife.

"You are right," she cried passionately. "I have not taught the children to deceive you! I have never come into this house until I felt sure that they were asleep and alone, though I've often wondered that they never woke up and knew that their own mother was there! But more than once, James, I've felt like going after that society which looks after badly treated children—for the last nurse you had for them was so cruel! If she hadn't left you soon I should have had to do something! I used to feel desperate when I saw her shake Baby in her pram; why, one day, in the Inclosure, a lady spoke to her about it, and threatened to tell her—her mistress——"

Flossy's voice sank to a shamed whisper. The tears were rolling down her cheeks; she was speaking in angry gasps, and what she said actually made James Tapster feel, what he knew full well he had no reason to feel, ashamed of himself. "That is why," she went on, "that is why I have, as you say, forced myself into your house, and why, too, I have now come here to ask you to forgive me—to take me back—just for the sake of the children."

Mr. Tapster's mind was one that traveled surely, if slowly. He saw his chance, and seized it. "And why," he said impressively, "had that woman—the nurse, I mean—no mistress? Tell me that, Flossy. You should have thought of all that before you behaved as you did!"

Mr. Tapster finished the sentence for her: "You didn't think," he observed impressively, "that I should ever find you out."

Then there came over him a morbid wish to discover—to learn from her own lips—why Flossy had done such a shameful and extraordinary thing as to be unfaithful to her marriage vow.

"Whatever made you behave so?" he asked in a low voice. "I wasn't unkind to you, was I? You had a nice, comfortable home, hadn't you?"

"I was mad," she answered, with a touch of sharp weariness. "I don't suppose I could ever make you understand; and yet,"—she looked at him deprecatingly,—"I suppose, James, that you too were young once, and—and—mad?"

Mr. Tapster stared at Flossy. What extraordinary things she said! Of course he had been young once; for the matter of that, he didn't feel old—not to say old—even now. But he had always been perfectly sane—she knew that well enough! As for her calling herself mad, that was a mere figure of speech. Of course, in a sense, she had been mad to do what she had done, and he was glad that she now understood this; but her saying so simply begged the whole question, and left him no wiser than he was before.

There was a long, tense silence between them. Then Mr. Tapster slowly rose from his arm-chair and faced his wife.

"I see," he said, "that William was right. I mean, I suppose I may take it that that young fellow has gone and left you?"

"Yes," she said, with a curious indifference, "he has gone and left me. His father made him take a job out in Brazil just after the case was through."

"And what have you been doing since then?" asked Mr. Tapster suspiciously. "How have you been living?"

"His father gives me a pound a week." Flossy still spoke with that curious indifference. "I tried to get something to do"—she hesitated, then offered the lame explanation—"just to have something to do, for I've been[Pg 140] awfully lonely and miserable, James; but I don't seem to be able to get anything."

"If you had written to Mr. Greenfield or to William, they would have told you that I had arranged for you to have an allowance," he said, and then again he fell into silence....

Mr. Tapster was seeing a vision of himself, magnanimous, forgiving—taking the peccant Flossy back to his heart and becoming once more, in a material sense, comfortable! If he acceded to her wish, if he made up his mind to forgive her, he would have to begin life all over again, move away from Cumberland Crescent to some distant place where the story was not known—perhaps to Clapham, where he had spent his boyhood.

But how about Maud? How about William? How about the very considerable expense to which he had been put in connection with the divorce proceedings? Was all that money to be wasted? Mr. Tapster suddenly saw the whole of his little world rising up in judgment, smiling pityingly at his folly and weakness. During the whole of a long and of what had been, till this last year, a very prosperous life, Mr. Tapster had always steered his safe course by what may be called the compass of public opinion, and now, when navigating an unknown sea, he could not afford to throw that compass overboard, so——

"No," he said; "no, Flossy. It would not be right for me to take you back. It wouldn't do."

"Wouldn't it?" she asked piteously. "Oh, James, don't say no like that, all at once! People do forgive each other—sometimes. I don't ask you to be as kind to me as you were before—only to let me come home and see after the children!"

But Mr. Tapster shook his head. The children! Always the children! He noticed, even now, that she didn't say a word of wanting to come back to him; and yet, he had been such a kind, nay, if Maud were to be believed, such a foolishly indulgent husband.

And then, Flossy looked so different. Mr. Tapster felt as if a stranger were standing there before him. Her appearance of poverty shocked him. Had she looked well and prosperous, he would have felt injured, and yet her pinched face and shabby clothes certainly repelled him. So again he shook his head, and there came into his face a look which Flossy had always known in old days to spell finality, and when he again spoke she saw that her knowledge had not misled her.

"I don't want to be unkind," he said ponderously. "If you will only go to William, or write to him if you would rather not go to the office,"—Mr. Tapster did not like to think that any one once closely connected with him should "look like that" in his brother's office,—"he will tell you what you had better do. I'm quite ready to make you a handsome allowance—in fact, it is all arranged. You need not have anything more to do with that fellow's father—an army colonel, isn't he?—and his pound a week; but William thinks, and I must say I agree, that you ought to go back to your maiden name, Flossy, as being more fair to me."

"No; it wouldn't be right for me to let you do so." He hesitated, then added, "They don't miss you any more now"; with no unkindly intent he concluded, "soon they'll have forgotten you altogether."

And then, just as Mr. Tapster was hesitating, seeking for a suitable and not unkindly sentence of farewell, he saw a very strange, almost a desperate look come over Flossy's face, and, to his surprise, she suddenly turned and left the room, closing the door very carefully behind her.

He stared after her. How very odd of her to say nothing! And what a strange look had come over her face! He could not help feeling hurt that she had not thanked him for what he knew to be a very generous and unusual provision on the part of an injured husband.... Mr. Tapster took a silk handkerchief out of his pocket and passed it twice over his face, then once more he sought and sank into the arm-chair by the fire.

Even now he still felt keenly conscious of Flossy's nearness. What could she be doing? Then he straightened himself and listened; yes, it was as he feared; she had gone up-stairs—up-stairs to look at the children, for now he could hear her coming down again. How obstinate she was, how obstinate and ungrateful! Mr. Tapster wished he had the courage to go out into the hall and face her, in order to tell her how wrong her conduct was. Why, she had actually kept the keys—those keys that were his property!

Suddenly he heard her light footsteps hurrying down the hall; now she was opening the front door—it slammed, and again Mr. Tapster felt pained to think how strangely indifferent Flossie was to his interests. Why, what would the servants think, hearing the front door slam like that?

But still, now that it was over, he was glad the interview had taken place, for henceforth—or so, at least, Mr. Tapster believed—the Flossy of the past, the bright, pretty, prosperous[Pg 141] Flossy of whom he had been so proud, would cease to haunt him. He remembered, with a feeling of relief, that she was going to his brother William; of course, she would then, among greater renunciations, be compelled to return the two keys—for they, that is, his brother and himself, would have her in their power. They would not behave unkindly to her—far from it; in fact, they would arrange for her to live with some quiet, religious lady in a country town a few hours from London.

Then Mr. Tapster began going over each incident of the strange little interview, for he wanted to tell his brother William exactly what had taken place.

His conscience was quite clear, except with regard to one matter, and that, after all, needn't be mentioned to William. He felt rather ashamed of having asked the question which had provoked so strange and wild an answer—so unexpected a retort. Mad? What had Flossy meant by asking him if he had ever been mad? No one had ever used the word in connection with James Tapster before—save once. Oddly enough, that occasion also had been in a way connected with Flossy, for it had happened when he had gone to tell William and Maud of his engagement.

It was on a fine day nine years ago come this May, and he had found William and William's wife walking in their little garden on Havenstock Hill. His kind brother, as always, had been most sympathetic, and had even made a suitable joke—Mr. Tapster remembered it very sadly to-night—concerning the spring and a young man's fancy; but Maud had been really disagreeable. She had said, "It's no use talking to you, James, for you're mad, quite mad!"

Strange that he should remember all this to-night, for, after all, it had nothing to do with the present state of affairs.

Mr. Tapster felt rather shaken and nervous; he pulled out his repeater watch, but, alas! it was still very early—only ten minutes to nine. He couldn't go to bed yet. Perhaps he would do well to join a club. He had always thought rather poorly of men who belonged to clubs—most of them were idle, lazy fellows; but still, circumstances alter cases.

Suddenly he began to wish that Flossy had remained a little longer. He thought of all sorts of things—improving, kindly remarks—he would have liked to say to her. He blamed himself for not having offered her any refreshment; she would probably have refused to take anything, but still, it was wrong on his part not to have thought of it. A pound a week for everything! No wonder she looked starved. Why, his own household bills, exclusive of wine or beer, had worked out, since he had had this new expensive housekeeper, at something like fifteen shillings a head, a fact which he had managed to conceal from Maud, who "did" her William so well on exactly ten shillings and ninepence all round!

It struck nine from the neighboring church, where Mr. Tapster had sittings,—but where he seldom was able to go on Sunday mornings, for he was proud of being among those old-fashioned folk who still regard Sunday as essentially a day of rest,—and there came a sudden sound of hoarse shouting from the road outside. Though he was glad of anything that broke the oppressive silence with which he felt encompassed, Mr. Tapster found time to tell himself that it was disgraceful that vulgar street brawlers should invade so quiet a residential thoroughfare as Cumberland Crescent. But order would soon be restored, for the sound of a policeman's whistle cut sharply through the air.

The noise, however, continued; he could hear the tramp of feet hurrying past his house and then leaving the pavement for the other side of the road. What could be the matter? Something very exciting must be going on just opposite his front door, that is, close to the Inclosure railings.

Mr. Tapster got up from his chair, and walked in a leisurely way to the wide window. He drew aside the thick red rep curtains, and lifted a corner of the blind. Then, through the slightly foggy haze, he saw that which rather surprised him and made him feel actively indignant; for a string of people, men, women, and boys, were hurrying into the Inclosure Garden—that sacred place set apart for the exclusive use of the nobility and gentry who lived in Cumberland Crescent and the adjoining terraces.

What an abominable thing! Why, the grass would all be trampled down; and these dirty people, these slum folk, who seem to spring out of the earth when anything of a disagreeable or shameful nature is taking place,—a fire, for instance, or a brawl,—might easily bring infectious diseases on to those gravel paths where the little Tapsters and their like run about, playing their innocent games. Some careless person had evidently left the gate unlocked, and the fight, or whatever it was, must be taking place inside the Inclosure!

Mr. Tapster tried in vain to see what was going on inside the railings, but everything beyond the brightly lighted road was wrapped in gray darkness. Some one suddenly held up[Pg 143] high a flaming torch, and the watcher at the window saw that the shadowy crowd which had managed to force its way into the Park hung together, like bees swarming, on the farther lawn through which flowed the Serpentine. With the gleaming of the yellow, wavering light there had fallen a sudden hush and silence, and Mr. Tapster wondered uneasily what those people were doing there, and what it was they were pressing forward so eagerly to see.

Then he realized that it must have been a fight, after all, for now the crowd was parting in two, and down the lane so formed Mr. Tapster saw coming toward the gate, and so in a sense toward himself, a rather pitiful little procession. Some one had evidently been injured, and that seriously; for four men, bearing a sheep-hurdle on which lay a huddled mass, were walking slowly toward the gate, and he heard distinctly the gruffly uttered words: "Stand back, please—back, there! We're going across the road." The now large crowd suddenly swayed forward; indeed, to Mr. Tapster's astonished eyes, they seemed to be actually making a rush for his house, and a moment later they were pressing around his area-railings.

Looking down on the upturned faces below him, Mr. Tapster was very glad that a stout pane of glass stood between himself and the sinister-looking men and women who seemed to be staring up at him, or rather at his windows, with faces full of cruel, wolfish curiosity. He let the blind fall to gently. His interest in the vulgar, sordid scene had suddenly died down; the drama was now over; in a moment the crowd would disperse, the human vermin (but Mr. Tapster would never have used, even to himself, so coarse an expression) would be on their way back to their burrows. But before he had even time to rearrange the curtains in their right folds, there came a sudden loud, persistent knocking at his front door.

Mr. Tapster turned around sharply, feeling justly incensed. Of course, he knew what it was—some good-for-nothing urchin finding a vent for his excited feelings. His parlor-maid, who was never in any hurry to open the door,—she had once kept him waiting ten minutes when he had forgotten his latch-key,—would certainly take no notice of this unseemly noise, but he, James Tapster, would himself hurry out and try to catch the delinquent, take his name and address, and thoroughly frighten him.

As he reached the door of the dining-room, Mr. Tapster heard the front door open—open, too,—and this was certainly very surprising,—from the outside! In the hall he saw that it[Pg 144] was a policeman—in fact, the officer on point duty close by—who had opened his front door, and apparently with a latch-key.

The constable spoke, as constables always do to the Mr. Tapsters of this world, in respectful and subdued tones:

"Can I just come in and speak to you, sir? There's been a sad accident—your lady fallen in the water; we found these keys in her pocket, and then some one said she was Mrs. Tapster"; and the policeman held out the two keys which had played a not unimportant part in Mr. Tapster's interview with Flossy. "A man on the bridge saw her go in," went on the policeman, "so she wasn't in the water long,—something like a quarter of an hour,—for we soon found her. I suppose you would like her taken up-stairs, sir?"

Mr. Tapster's round, prominent eyes were shadowed with a great horror and an even greater surprise. He stood staring at the man before him, his hands clasped in a wholly unconscious gesture of supplication.

The constable gradually edged himself backward into the dining-room. Realizing that he must take on himself the onus of decision, he gave a quiet look round.

"If that's the case," he said firmly, "we had better bring her in here; that sofa that you have there, sir, will do nicely for her to be laid upon while they try to bring her round. We've got a doctor already."

Mr. Tapster bent his head; he was too much bewildered to propose any other plan; and then he turned, turned to see his hall invaded by a strange and sinister quartet. It was composed of two policemen and of two of those loafers of whom he so greatly disapproved. They were carrying a hurdle from which Mr. Tapster quickly averted his eyes. But, though he was able to shut out the sight he feared to see, he could not prevent himself from hearing certain sounds, those, for instance, made by the two loafers, who breathed with ostentatious difficulty as if to show they were unaccustomed to bearing even so comparatively light a burden as Flossy drowned.

There came a sudden short whisper-filled delay. The doorway of the dining-room was found to be too narrow, and the hurdle was perforce left in the hall.

An urgent voice, full of wholly unconscious irony, muttered in Mr. Tapster's ear: "Of course, you would like to see her, sir," and he felt himself being propelled forward. Making an effort to bear himself so that he should not feel afterward ashamed of his lack of nerve, he forced himself to stare with dread-filled yet fascinated eyes at that which had just been laid upon the leather sofa.

Flossy's hat, the shabby hat which had shocked Mr. Tapster's sense of what was seemly, was gone; her fair hair had all come down, and hung in pale-gold wisps about the face already fixed in the soft dignity which seems so soon to drape the features of those who die by drowning. Her widely opened eyes were now wholly emptied of the anguish with which they had gazed on Mr. Tapster in this very room less than an hour ago. Her mean brown serge gown, from which the water was still dripping, clung closely to her limbs, revealing the slender body which had four times endured, on behalf of Mr. Tapster, the greatest of woman's natural ordeals. But that thought, it is scarcely necessary to say, did not come to add an extra pang to those which that unfortunate man was now suffering, for Mr. Tapster naturally thought maternity was in every married woman's day's work—and pleasure.

It might have been a moment, for all that he knew, or it might have been an hour, when at last something came to relieve the unbearable tension of Mr. Tapster's feelings. He had been standing aside, helpless, aware of and yet not watching the efforts made to restore Flossy to consciousness.

The doctor raised himself and straightened his cramped shoulders and tired arms. With a look of great concern on his face, he approached the bereaved husband.

"I'm afraid it's no good," he said; "the shock of the plunge in the cold water probably killed her. She was evidently in poor health, and—and ill-nourished; but, of course, we shall go on for some time longer, and——"

But whatever he had meant to say remained unspoken, for a telegraph-boy, with the impudence natural to his kind, was forcing his way into and through the crowded room. "James Tapster, Esquire?" he cried in a high, childish treble.

The master of the house held out his hand mechanically. He took the buff envelop and stared down at it, sufficiently master of himself to perceive that some fool had apparently imagined Cumberland Crescent to be in South London; before his eyes swam the line, "Delayed in transmission." Then, opening the envelop, he saw the message for which he had now been waiting so eagerly for some days; but it was with indifference that he read the words,

PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS WAR ON CONGRESS

CARL SCHURZ

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

I was on the point of returning to the West when I received a message from Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the New York Tribune, asking me to take charge of the news bureau of that journal in Washington, as its chief correspondent. Although the terms offered by Mr. Greeley were tempting, I was disinclined to accept, because I doubted whether the work would be congenial to me, and because it would keep me in the East. But Mr. Greeley, as well as some of my friends in Congress, persuaded me that, since I had studied the condition of things in the South and could give reliable information concerning it, my presence in Washington might be useful while the Southern question was under debate. This determined me to assent, with the understanding, however, that I should not consider myself bound beyond the pending session of Congress.

Thus I entered the journalistic fraternity. My most agreeable experience consisted in my association with other members of the craft. I found among the correspondents of the press a number of gentlemen of uncommon ability and high principle—genuine gentlemen, who loved truth for its own sake, who heartily detested sham and false pretense, and whose sense of honor was of the finest. This was the rule, to which, as to all rules, there were of course some exceptions; but they were rare. My more or less intimate contact with public men high and low was not so uniformly gratifying. I enjoyed, indeed, the privilege of meeting statesmen of high purpose, of well-stored minds, of unselfish patriotism, and of the courage of their convictions. But disgustingly large was, on the other hand, the number of small, selfish politicians I ran against—men who seemed to know no higher end than the advantage of their party, which involved their own; who were always nervously sniffing for the popular breeze; whose most demonstrative ebullitions of virtue consisted in the most violent denunciations of the opposition; whose moral courage quaked at the appearance of the slightest danger to their own or their party's fortunes; and whose littlenesses exposed them sometimes with involuntary frankness to the newspaper correspondent whom they approached to beg for a "favorable notice" or for the suppression of an unwelcome news item. They were by no means in all instances men of small parts. On the contrary, there were men of marked ability and large acquirements among them. But never until then had I known how great a moral coward a member of Congress may be.

It is probably now as it was then. There were few places in the United States where[Pg 146] the public men appearing on the national stage were judged as fairly and accurately as they were in Newspaper Row in Washington.

I remained at the head of the Tribune office in Washington, according to my promise to Mr. Greeley, to the end of the winter season, and then accepted the chief-editorship of the Detroit Post, a new journal established at Detroit, Michigan, which was offered to me—I might almost say urged upon me—by Senator Zachariah Chandler. In the meantime I had occasion to witness the beginning of the political war between the executive and the legislative power concerning the reconstruction of the "States lately in rebellion."

The Beginnings of the Struggle

I am sure I do not exaggerate when I say that this political war has been one of the most unfortunate events in the history of this Republic, for it made the most important problem of the time, a problem of extraordinary complexity, which required the calmest and most delicate and circumspect treatment, the foot-ball of a personal and party brawl which was in the highest degree apt to inflame the passions and to obscure the judgment of everybody concerned[Pg 147] in it. Since my return from the South, the evil effects of Mr. Johnson's conduct in encouraging the reactionary spirit prevalent among the Southern whites had become more and more evident and alarming from day to day. Charles Sumner told me that his personal experience with the President had been very much like mine. When Sumner left Washington in the spring, he had received from Mr. Johnson at repeated intervals the most emphatic assurances that he would do nothing to precipitate the restoration of the "States lately in rebellion" to the full exercise of self-governing functions, and even that he favored the extension of the suffrage to the freedmen. The two men had parted with all the appearance of a perfect friendly understanding. But when the Senator returned to Washington in the late autumn that understanding seemed to have entirely vanished from the President's mind and to have given place to an irritated temper and a certain acerbity of tone in the assertion of the "President's policy."

From various other members of Congress I heard the same story. Mr. Johnson, strikingly unlike Abraham Lincoln, evidently belonged to that unfortunate class of men with whom a difference of opinion on any important matter will at once cause personal ill feeling and a disturbance of friendly intercourse. By many Congressmen Mr. Johnson was regarded as one who had broken faith, and the memory of the disgraceful exhibition of himself in a drunken state at the inauguration ceremonies, which under ordinary circumstances everybody would have been glad to forget, was revived, so as to make him appear as a person of ungentlemanly character. All these things combined to impart to the controversies which followed a flavor of reckless defiance and rancorous bitterness, the outbursts of which were sometimes almost ferocious.

The first gun of the political war between the President and Congress, which was to rage four years, was fired by Thaddeus Stevens in the House of Representatives by the introduction, even before the hearing of the President's Message, of the resolution already mentioned, which substantially proclaimed that the reconstruction of the late rebel States was the business, not of the President alone, but of Congress. This theory, which was constitutionally correct, was readily supported by the Republican majority, and thus the war[Pg 148] was declared. Of Republican dissenters who openly took the President's part, there were but few—in the Senate, Doolittle of Wisconsin, Dixon of Connecticut, Norton of Minnesota, Cowan of Pennsylvania, and, for a short period, Morgan of New York, as the personal friend of Mr. Seward. In the House of Representatives, Mr. Raymond of New York, the famous founder of the New York Times, acted as the principal Republican champion of the "President's policy."

Stevens the Dominating Figure of the Struggle

Thaddeus Stevens was the acknowledged leader of the Republicans in the House. Few historic characters have ever been more differently judged from different points of view. A Southern writer of fiction has painted him as the fiend incarnate; others have spoken of him as a great leader of his time, far-sighted, a man of uncompromising convictions, intellectually honest, of unflinching courage and energy. I had come into personal contact with him in the Presidential campaigns of 1860 and 1864, when he seemed to be pleased with my efforts. I had once heard him make a stump speech which was evidently inspired by intense hatred of slavery, and remarkable for argumentative pith and sarcastic wit. But the impression his personality made upon me was not sympathetic: his face, long and pallid, topped with an ample dark-brown wig which was at the first glance recognized as such; beetling brows overhanging keen eyes of uncertain color which sometimes seemed to scintillate with a sudden gleam; the under lip defiantly protruding; the whole expression usually stern. His figure would have looked stalwart but for a deformed foot which made him bend and limp. His conversation, carried on in a hollow voice devoid of music, easily disclosed a well-informed mind, but also a certain absolutism of opinion, with contemptuous scorn for adverse argument. He belonged to the fierce class of anti-slavery men who were inspired by humane sympathy with the slave and righteous abhorrence of slavery, but also by hatred of the slaveholder. What he himself seemed to enjoy most in his talk was his sardonic humor, which he made play upon men and things like lurid freaks of lightning. He shot out such sallies with a fearfully serious mien, or at least he accompanied them with a grim smile which was not at all like Abraham Lincoln's hearty laugh at his own jests.

Thus Mr. Stevens' discourse was apt to make him appear a hardened cynic, inaccessible to the finer feelings, and indifferent whether he gave pain or pleasure. But now and then a remark escaped him—I say "escaped him," because he evidently preferred to wear the acrid tendencies of his character on the outside—which indicated that there was behind his cynicism a rich fund of human kindness and sympathy. And this was strongly confirmed by his neighbors at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, his home, where on one of my campaigning tours I once spent a day and a night. With them, even with many of his political opponents,[Pg 150] "old Thad," as they called him, appeared to be eminently popular. They had no end of stories to tell about the protection he had given to fugitive slaves, sometimes at much risk and sacrifice to himself, and of the many benefactions he had bestowed with a lavish hand upon the widows and orphans and other persons in need, and of his generous fidelity to his friends. They did not, indeed, revere him as a model of virtue, but of the occasional lapses of his bachelor life from correct moral standards, which seemed to be well known and freely talked about, they spoke with affectionate lenity of judgment.

When I saw him again in Washington at the opening of the Thirty-ninth Congress, in December, 1865, he looked very much aged since our last meeting, and infirm in health. In repose his face was like a death-mask, and he was carried in a chair to his seat in the House by two stalwart young negroes. There is good authority for the story that once when they had set him down, he said to them, with his grim humor: "Thank you, my good fellows. What shall I do when you are dead and gone?" But his eyes glowed from under his bushy brows with the old keen sparkle, and his mind was as alert as ever. It may be that his age—he was then seventy-four—and his physical infirmities, admonishing him that at best he would have only a few years more to live, served to inspire him with an impatient craving and a fierce determination to make the best of his time, and thus to intensify the activity of his mental energies. To compass the abolition of slavery had been the passion of his life. He had hailed the Civil War as the great opportunity. He had never been quite satisfied with Lincoln, whose policy seemed to him too dilatory. He demanded quick, sharp, and decisive blows.

Now that the abolition of slavery was actually decreed, he saw President Johnson follow a policy which, in his view, threatened to undo the great work. His scornful anger at Andrew Johnson was equaled only by his contempt for the Republicans who sided with the President. He was bound to defeat this reactionary attempt and to see slavery thoroughly killed beyond the possibility of resurrection, at any cost. As to the means to be employed, he scrupled little. He wanted the largest possible Republican majority in Congress, and to this end he would have expelled any number of Democrats from their seats, by hook or crook. When my old friend and quondam law partner, General Halbert E. Paine, who was chairman of the Committee on Elections in the House, told him that, in a certain contested election case to be voted upon, both contestants were rascals, Stevens simply asked: "Well, which is our rascal?" He said this, not in jest, but with perfect seriousness. He would have seated Beelzebub in preference to the angel Gabriel, had he believed Beelzebub to be more certain than Gabriel to aid him in beating the President's reconstruction policy. His speeches were short, peremptory, and commanding. He bluntly avowed his purposes, however extreme they seemed to be. He disdained to make them more palatable by any art of persuasion, or to soften the asperity of his attacks by charitable circumlocution. There was no hypocrisy, no cant in his utterances. With inexorable intellectual honesty, he drew all the logical conclusions from his premises. He was a terror in debate. Whenever provoked, he brought his batteries of merciless sarcasm into play with deadly effect. Not seldom, a single sentence sufficed to lay a daring antagonist sprawling on the ground amid the roaring laughter of the House, the luckless victim feeling as if he had heedlessly touched a[Pg 151] heavily charged electric wire. No wonder that even the readiest and boldest debaters were cautious in approaching old Thaddeus Stevens too closely, lest something stunning and sudden happen to them. Thus the fear he inspired became a distinct element of power in his leadership—not a wholesome element, indeed, at the time of a great problem which required the most circumspect and dispassionate treatment.

William Pitt Fessenden

A statesman of a very different stamp was Senator Fessenden of Maine, who, being at the head of the senatorial part of the joint Committee on Reconstruction, presided over that important body. William Pitt Fessenden was a man who might easily have been overlooked in a crowd. There was nothing in his slight figure, his thin face framed in spare gray hair and side whiskers, and his quiet demeanor, to attract particular notice. Neither did his appearance in the Senate Chamber impress one at first sight as that of a great power in that important assembly. I saw him more than once there walk with slow steps up and down in the open space behind the seats, with his hands in his trousers pockets, with seeming listlessness, while another senator was speaking, and then ask to be heard, and, without changing his attitude, make an argument in a calm conversational tone, unmixed with the slightest oratorical flourish, so solid and complete that little more remained to be said on the subject in question. He gave the impression of having at his disposal a rich and perfectly ordered store of thought and knowledge upon which he could draw with perfect ease and assurance. When I was first introduced to him, he appeared to be rather distant in manner than inviting friendly approach. But I was told that ill health had made him unsociable and somewhat morose and testy, and, indeed, there was often the trace of suffering and weariness in his face. It was also remarked in the Senate that at times he was ill-tempered and inclined to indulge in biting sarcasms and to administer unkind lectures to other senators, which in some instances disturbed his personal intercourse with his colleagues. But there was not one of them who did not hold him in the highest esteem as a statesman of commanding ability and of lofty ideals, as a gentleman of truth and conscience, as a great jurist and an eminent constitutional lawyer, as a party man of most honorable principles and methods, and as a patriot of noblest ambition for his country.

Being a man also of conservative instincts, averse to unnecessary conflicts, and always disinclined to go to extremes, in action as well as in language, he was expected to exert a moderating influence in his committee; and this expectation was not disappointed so far as his efforts to prevent a final breach between the President and the Republican majority in Congress were concerned. But regarding the main question whether the "States lately in rebellion" should be fully restored to their self-governing functions and to full participation in the government of the Republic without having given reasonable guaranties for the maintenance of the "legitimate results of the war," he was in[Pg 152] point of principle not far apart from Mr. Stevens.

The President's Logic

It must be admitted that, if we accept his premises, Mr. Johnson made in point of logic a pretty plausible case. His proposition was that a State, in the view of the Federal Constitution, is indestructible; that an ordinance of secession adopted by its inhabitants, or its political organs, did not take it out of the Union; that by declaring and treating those ordinances of secession as "null and void," of no force, virtually non-existent, the Federal government itself had accepted and sanctioned that theory; that during the rebellion the constitutional rights and functions of those States were merely suspended, and that when the rebellion ceased they were ipso facto restored; that, therefore, the rebellion having actually ceased, those States were at once entitled to their former rights and privileges—that is, to the recognition of their self-elected State governments and to their representation in Congress. Admitting the premises, this was logically correct in the abstract.

But this was one of the cases to which a saying, many years later set afloat by President Cleveland, might properly have been applied: we were confronting a condition, not a theory. The condition was this: Certain States had through their regular political organs declared themselves independent of the Union. They had, for all practical purposes, actually separated themselves from the Union. They had made war upon the Union. That war put those States in a position not foreseen by the Constitution. It imposed upon the government of the Union duties not foreseen by the Constitution; by "military necessity," war necessity, the Union was compelled to emancipate the negroes from slavery and to accept their military services. The war had compelled the government of the Union to levy large loans of money and thus to contract a huge public debt. The government had also, in the course of the war, the aid of the Union men of the South. It had thus assumed solemn obligations for value received or services rendered. It had assumed the duty to protect the emancipated negroes in their freedom, the Southern Union men in their security, and the public creditor from loss. This duty was a duty of honor as well as of policy. The Union could, therefore, not consent, either in point of honor or of sound policy, to the restoration of the late rebel States to the functions of self-government and to full participation in the national government so long as that restoration was reasonably certain to put the freedom of the emancipated slaves, or the security of the Southern Union men, or the rights of the public creditor, into serious jeopardy.

Lincoln's Policy versus Johnson's

It was pretended at the time, and it has since been asserted by historians and publicists of high standing, that Mr. Johnson's Reconstruction policy was only a continuation of that of Mr. Lincoln. This was true only in a superficial sense, and not in reality. Mr. Lincoln had, indeed, put forth reconstruction plans which contemplated an early restoration of some of the rebel States; but he had done this while the Civil War was still going on, and for the evident purpose of encouraging loyal movements[Pg 153] in those States and of weakening the Confederate State governments there by opposing to them governments organized in the interest of the Union, which could serve as rallying-points to the Union men. So long as the rebellion continued in any form and to any extent, the State governments he contemplated would have been substantially in the control of really loyal men who had been on the side of the Union during the war. Moreover, he always emphatically affirmed, in public as well as private utterance, that no plan of reconstruction he had ever put forth was meant to be "exclusive and inflexible," but might be changed according to different circumstances.

Now circumstances did change; they changed essentially with the collapse of the Confederacy. There was no more organized armed resistance to the national government, to distract which loyal State governments in the South might have been efficacious. But there was an effort of persons lately in rebellion to get possession of the reconstructed Southern State governments for the purpose, in part, of using their power to save or restore as much of the system of slavery as could be saved or restored. The success of these efforts was to be accomplished by the precipitate and unconditional readmission of the late rebel States to all their constitutional functions. This situation had not yet developed when Lincoln was assassinated. He had not contemplated it when he put forth his plans of reconstructing Louisiana and the other States. Had he lived, he would have as ardently wished to stop bloodshed and to reunite all the States as he ever did. But is it to be supposed, for a moment, that, seeing the late master class in the South still under the influence of their old traditional notions and prejudices, and at the same time sorely pressed by the distressing necessities of their situation, intent upon subjecting the freedmen again to a system very much akin to slavery, Lincoln would have consented to abandon those freedmen to the mercies of that master class!

The Personal Bitterness of the Struggle

No less striking was the difference of the two policies in what may be called the personal character of the controversies of the time. When the Republican majority in Congress had already declared its unwillingness to accept President Johnson's leadership in the matter of reconstruction, a strong desire was still manifested by many Republican senators and members of the House to prevent a decided and irremediable breach with the President. Some of them were sanguine enough to hope that more or less harmonious coöperation, or at least a peaceable modus vivendi, might still be obtained. Others apprehended that the President's policy, with its plausibilities, might after all find favor with the popular mind, which was naturally tired of strife and excitement, eager for peace and quiet, and that its opponents might appear as reckless disturbers. Still others stood in fear of a rupture in the Republican party, which, among other evil consequences, might prove disastrous to their own political fortunes. Several men of importance, such as Fessenden and Sherman in the Senate and some prominent members of the House, seriously endeavored to pour oil upon the agitated waters by making speeches of a conciliatory tenor. Indeed, if Andrew Johnson had possessed only a little of Abraham Lincoln's sweet temper, generous tolerance, and patient tact in the treatment of opponents, he might at least have prevented the conflict of opinions from degenerating into an angry and vicious personal brawl. But the brawl was Johnson's congenial atmosphere.

The Judiciary Committee of the Senate, on January 12, 1866, reported a bill to continue the existence, to increase the personnel, and to enlarge the powers of the Freedmen's Bureau. It was discussed in both Houses with great thoroughness and in a temperate spirit, and the necessity of the measure for the protection of the freedmen and the introduction of free labor in the South was so generally acknowledged that the recognized Republican friends of the President in the Senate as well as in the House supported it. It passed by overwhelming majorities in both Houses, and everybody, even those most intimate with the President, confidently expected that he would willingly accept and sign it. But on the 19th of February he returned it with his veto, mainly on the assumed ground that it was unnecessary and unconstitutional, and also because it was passed by a Congress from which eleven States, those lately in rebellion, were excluded—thus throwing out a dark hint that before the admission of the late rebel States to representation this Congress might be considered constitutionally unable to make any valid laws at all. Senator Trumbull, in an uncommonly able, statesmanlike, and calm speech, combated the President's arguments and moved that the bill pass, the President's veto notwithstanding. But the "Administration Republicans," although they had voted for the bill, now voted to sustain the veto, and, there being no two-thirds majority to overcome it, the veto prevailed. Thus President Johnson had won a victory over the Republican majority in Congress. This victory may have made him[Pg 154] believe that he would be able to kill with his veto all legislation unpalatable to him, and that, therefore, he was actually master of the situation. He made the grave mistake of underestimating the opposition.

A Humiliating Spectacle

On February 22, 1866, a public meeting was held in Washington for the purpose of expressing popular approval of the President's reconstruction policy. The crowd marched from the meeting-place to the White House to congratulate the President upon his successful veto of the Freedmen's Bureau Bill. The President, called upon to make a speech in response, could not resist the temptation. He then dealt a blow to himself from which he never recovered. He spoke, in the egotistic strain usual with him, of the righteousness of his own course, and then began to inveigh in the most violent terms against those who opposed him. He denounced the joint Committee on Reconstruction, the committee headed by Fessenden, as "an irresponsible central directory" that had assumed the powers of Congress, described how he had fought the leaders of the rebellion, and added that there were men on the other side of the line who also worked for the dissolution of the Union. By this time some of the uproarious crowd felt that he had descended to their level, and called for names. He mentioned Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips as men who worked against the fundamental principles of the government, and excited the boisterous merriment of the audience by calling John W. Forney, the Secretary of the Senate and a prominent journalist, "a dead duck" upon whom "he would not waste his ammunition." Again he spoke of his rise from humble origin,—a tailor who "always made a close fit,"—and broadly insinuated that there were men in high places who were not satisfied with Lincoln's blood, but, wanting more, thought of getting rid of him, too, in the same way.

I remember well the impression made by this speech as it came out in the newspapers. Many if not most of the public men I saw in Washington, remembering the disgraceful appearance of Andrew Johnson in a drunken state at the inauguration, at once expressed a belief that he must have been in the same condition when delivering that speech. Most of the newspapers favoring the President's policy were struck dumb. Of those opposing him, most of them spoke of it in grave but evidently restrained language. The general feeling was one of profound shame and humiliation in behalf of the country.

In Congress, where Mr. Stevens, with his characteristic sarcasm, described the whole story of the President's speech as a malignant invention of Mr. Johnson's enemies, the hope of preventing a permanent breach between him and the Republican majority was even then not entirely extinct. On the 26th of February, Sherman made a long and carefully prepared speech in the Senate, advocating harmony. He recounted all the virtues Andrew Johnson professed and all the services he had rendered, and solemnly affirmed his belief that he had always acted upon patriotic motives and in good faith. But he could not refrain from "deeply regretting his speech of the 22d of February," He added that it was "impossible to conceive a more humiliating spectacle than the President of the United States invoking the wild passions of a mob around him with the utterance of such sentiments as he uttered on that day." Still, Mr. Sherman thought that "this was no time to quarrel with the Chief Magistrate." Other prominent Republicans, such as General J. D. Cox of Ohio—one of the noblest men I have ever known,—called upon him to expostulate with him in a friendly spirit, and he gave them amiable assurances, which, however, subsequently turned out to have been without meaning. Then something happened which cut off the last chance of mutual approach.

On March 13th the House passed the Civil Rights Bill, which the Senate had already passed on the 2d of February. Its main provision was that all persons born in the United States, excepting Indians, not taxed, were declared to be citizens of the United States, and such citizens of every race and color should have the same right in every State and Territory of the United States to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to have the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property as was enjoyed by white citizens. The bill had nothing to do with "social equity," and did not in any way interfere with Mr. Johnson's scheme of reconstruction. In fact, it was asserted, no doubt truthfully, that Mr. Johnson himself had at various times shown himself, by word and act, favorable to its provisions. It appeared, indeed, in every one of its features so reasonable and so necessary for the enforcement of the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment prohibiting slavery, that disapproval of it by the President was regarded as almost impossible. Aside from the merits of the bill, there was another reason,[Pg 155] a reason of policy, for the President to sign it. Had he done so, he would have greatly encouraged the conciliatory spirit which, in spite of all that had happened, was still flickering in many Republican bosoms, and he might thus, even at this late hour, have secured an effective following among the Republicans in Congress. But he did not. He returned the bill to Congress with a veto message so weak in argument that it appeared as if he had been laboriously groping for pretexts to kill the bill. One of the principal reasons he gave was again the sinister one that Congress had passed the bill while eleven States were unrepresented, thus repeating the threatening hint that the validity of the laws made by such a Congress might be questioned.

False Encouragement to the South

Congress promptly passed the bill over the President's veto by a two-thirds majority in each House, and thus the Civil Rights Bill became a law. President Johnson's defeat was more fatal than appeared on the surface. The prestige he had won by the success of his veto of the Freedmen's Bureau Bill was lost again. The Republicans, whom in some way he had led to expect that he would sign the Civil Rights Bill, now believed him to be an insincere man capable of any treachery. The last chance of an accommodation with the Republican party was now utterly gone. But, worse than all, the reactionists in the South, who were bent upon curtailing the freedom of the emancipated negroes as much as possible, received his veto of the Civil Rights Bill with shouts of delight. Believing him now unalterably opposed to the bestowal, upon the freedmen, of equal civil rights such as were specified in the bill, they hailed President Johnson as their champion more loudly than ever. Undisturbed by the defeat of the veto, which they looked upon as a mere temporary accident, they easily persuaded themselves that the President, aided by the Administration Republicans and the Democratic party at the North, would at last surely prevail, and that now they might safely deal with the negro and the labor question in the South as they pleased. The reactionary element felt itself encouraged to the point of foolhardiness by the President's attitude. Legislative enactments and municipal ordinances and regulations tending to reduce the colored people to a state of semi-slavery multiplied at a lively rate. Measures taken for the protection of the emancipated slaves were indiscriminately denounced in the name of the Constitution of the United States as acts of insufferable tyranny. The instant admission to seats in the national Congress of senators and representatives from the "States lately in rebellion" was loudly demanded as a constitutional right, and for these seats men were presented who but yesterday had stood in arms against the national government, or who had held high place in the insurrectionary Confederacy. And the highest authority cited for all these denunciations and demands was Andrew Johnson, President of the United States.

The impression made by these things upon the minds of the Northern people can easily be imagined. Men of sober ways of thinking, not accessible to sensational appeals, asked themselves quite seriously whether there was not real danger that the legitimate results of the war, for the achievement of which they had sacrificed uncounted thousands of lives and the fruits of many, many years of labor, were in grave jeopardy again. Their alarm was not artificially produced by political agitation; it was sincere and profound, and began to grow angry. The gradual softening of the passions and resentments of the war was checked. The feeling that the Union had to be saved once more from the rule of the "rebels with the President at their head" spread with fearful rapidity, and well-meaning people looking to Congress to come to the rescue were becoming less and less squeamish as to the character of the means to be used to that end.

This popular temper could not fail to exercise its influence upon Congress and to stimulate the radical tendencies among its members. Even men of a comparatively conservative and cautious disposition admitted that strong remedies were necessary to avert the threatening danger, and they soon turned to the most drastic as the best. Moreover, the partizan motive pressed to the front to reinforce the patriotic purpose. It had gradually become evident that President Johnson, whether such had been his original design or not,—probably not,—would by his political course be led into the Democratic party. The Democrats, delighted, of course, with the prospect of capturing a President elected by the Republicans, zealously supported his measures and flattered his vanity without stint. The old alliance between the pro-slavery sentiment in the South and the Democratic party in the North was thus revived—that alliance which had already cost the South so dearly in the recent past by making Southern people believe that if they revolted against the Federal Government the Northern Democracy would stand by them and help them to victory.

THE JULY INSTALMENT OF CARL SCHURZ' MEMOIRS WILL CONCLUDE THE STORY OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S STRUGGLE WITH CONGRESS[Pg 156]

THE CRYSTAL-GAZER

BY MARY S. WATTS

AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT NORTH ROAD," ETC.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRANK A. NANKIVELL

The carrier's cart—for my means afforded no more lordly style of travel—set me down at an elbow of white highroad, whence, between the sloping hills, I could see a V-shaped patch of blue, this half water and that sky; here and there the gable of a farmhouse with a plume of smoke streaming sidewise; and below me, in the exact point of the V, the masts and naked yards of a ketch at her moorings. Even in that sheltered harbor, to judge by the faint oscillations of her masts, she felt the tug of the waters around her keel. There had been a storm the night before; without, the sea ran strong about all these exposed coasts; and I knew that, hidden from sight behind the upper headland, the surf must be bursting in a cloud over the Brown Cow, and the perturbed tide setting like a mill-race between that great dun rock and the shore through the narrow gut we called the Cat's Mouth.

"You'll be noticing some changes, Mr. Nick?" the carrier hinted at last, lingering to observe me. "Well, there's a deal may happen in two or three years. You can't look to find things just the way you left 'em."

He used a certain respectful familiarity, having known me all my life, and, as he spoke, eyed me with the kind and open curiosity of a dog. He was a gentle little man, with a manner oddly compounded of the sailor's simplicity and the rustic's bootless cunning,—for he had followed both walks in his day,—and was popularly held to be somewhat weak-witted since a fall from the masthead to the decks of the brig Hyperion some years before.

"I am not near enough to see any changes yet, Crump," I answered him. "The changes, if any, show most, I dare say, in myself."

"So they do, sir; so they do," he assented heartily. "My wife used to say you were a pretty boy, and had the makings of a fine, personable man. First thing I thought, when I clapped eyes on you to-day, was: 'Well, this here's a lesson to Sarah not to be hasty in her judgments!' 'Tain't often I get the better o' Sarah, you know, sir. They tell me you've been in Italy and learned to paint?"

"I'm afraid I haven't quite learned all the art yet, Crump. It takes more than two or three years."

"Depends on the person, I shouldn't wonder," he said, wagging his head. "Some people are slow by nature. Could a man make his living by it, d'ye think, sir?"

I answered this devious inquiry as to my own financial standing by assuring him that I had[Pg 157] contrived so far to make mine. "I'm not riding in my coach-and-four yet, as you see, Crump, but the time may come."

"I'm sure I hope it will, Mr. Nick," he said rather dubiously. "But it's kind o' tempting Providence, seems to me. You might 'a' been walking your own quarter-deck, captain o' some tall East Indiaman by this, like your father and grandfather before you, making a safe, easy living, and looked up to by everybody."

I interrupted his moralizing to ask, as, indeed, I had already done more than once, without being able to get his attention: "How does my grandfather seem?"

Momentary gravity fell upon him. "He—he don't always answer the helm, Mr. Nicol," he said, and touched his forehead with a meaning look. "Barring that, I'd rate him seaworthy, for all he's cruised so long—nigh eighty year, ain't it?"

"He ain't exactly alone," said Crump, with an uneasy glance into my face. "He's signed on two new hands here lately—about a month ago, I b'lieve. I dessay he was making pretty heavy weather of it by himself, and so he—er—well——" He cleared his throat, hesitating in an odd embarrassment; he plainly felt that here was information bound to be distasteful, and set about imparting it with a painful diplomacy. "The cap'n—Cap'n Pendarves, your grandfather, sir, was, as you might say, short-handed, you being in foreign parts, and old John Behenna having slipped his cable 'long about the last o' May, as I was telling you; and so the cap'n he ups and ships these here—and—and, in fac', Mr. Nick, one of 'em's a woman!" He drew a long breath and wiped his forehead.

"You don't mean he's married!" I shouted, and with, I am afraid, a pretty strong term of disapproval.

"There, now, I thought you'd take it that way!" Crump remarked, not without gratification. "But it ain't so bad as that, Mr. Nicol." And he went on to explain, with a variety of nautical metaphors, that the couple, an elderly man and a young girl supposedly his grandchild, had appeared in Chepstow some weeks ago during fair-time; that the young woman "took observations," which I translated to mean that she told fortunes, supporting them both, it would seem, by the pennies she gained this way, for the man did no work, and was most often seen "hove to, transhipping cargo," at the bar of the Three Old Cronies or elsewhere, Crump said. He did not know how or when or where my grandfather had first fallen in with these vagabonds. For several successive days he had been noticed in their company, or laying a straight course for the little booth wherein the girl plied her mean trade; and then, all at once, to the stupefied astonishment of Chepstow,—where the captain was reckoned, with reason, a particularly hard, sour, dour sort of body, anything but friendly or hospitable,—the pair of them were discovered comfortably installed beneath the Pendarves' roof, as snug as if they had lived there all their lives and never meant to go away! The thing was a mystery; it went near to being a scandal. For a final touch, Crump assured me that these precious gentry were all but nameless; no one had ever heard the woman called anything, and the man's name defied pronunciation.

Upon all this agreeable intelligence, we parted, as Crump's way was by the round-about hill road, while I struck straight across by short cuts to my grandfathers house. If I had been content to loiter on the path heretofore, no amount of haste could satisfy me now. I doubt if any honest artist lad returning to the place of his birth after three years' absence ever met a grayer welcome. I had left my grandfather unimpaired, and it was well-nigh impossible to figure that harsh and domineering spirit in decay. Abram Pendarves belonged to the ancient hearty, savage race of British sea-captains, now fast waning to extinction. After a youth of wild and black adventure under the rule of just such salt-water despots as he himself became, he had spent some two score years practising the tyrannies and what one may call the brutal virtues he had learned on every sea and beneath every sky this planet owns; then came at last to settle down in the storm-beaten house on the cliffs by Chepstow (the house his father's father had built), whence he could see the surf whiten on the rocks and gulls forever circling about the Brown Cow. His was a narrow and surly old age, not overwell provided, for he had never been a thrifty man; and he found among the rattletrap furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as worthless—a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant, fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners, making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the blossoming orchards of spring with a crazy delight in color. I fear there was not much affection between this ill-matched couple. For long years I saw in my grandfather only a coarse, violent old man, niggardly and censorious. And to him there[Pg 158] was doubtless something unwholesome and repellent in the most innocent of my tastes; I could not even sin roundly, like other boys, by pilfering or truantry, but must display an exotic passion for reading forbidden books, an abhorred dexterity at caricature. I think we were equally headstrong and unreasonable, I in my young way, he in his old one; and as I trudged along the quiet homeward paths, it shamed me to remember with what hard words we had parted.

The sun was going down as I conquered the last steep rise toward my grandfather's gate. Hereabouts a pair of steps had been cut into the cliff and a hand-rail erected to help the visitor against the wind, coming, as it so often did, in flaws of extraordinary force and fury around the headland. From this high point a great expanse of ocean filled the eye, and the ceaseless, uneasy rumor of water assailed one even in the fairest weather. There was always a thin run of surf about the base of the Brown Cow and among those narrow conical rocks which, set in a rough crescent near the lower end of the Cat's Mouth, had not inaptly been named the Cat's Teeth.

The path followed the edge of the cliff on the hither side of a stone wall, behind which some few experienced old apple-trees bent and flattened themselves into strange, tortuous shapes to escape the winds. The inclosure went by the name of orchard, though it was in truth little else than a wild jungle of weeds and rubbish; but one tree in the most sheltered corner yearly made a conscientious effort to supply us with a bushel or so of pippins, and adventurous Chepstow urchins as regularly defeated the hope. I purposed to shorten my road by crossing here; and so, finding a toe-rest in certain familiar crannies of the masonry, clambered easily to the top of the wall, and paused there a moment,[Pg 159] astride of the coping, to put aside the branches and take a distant view of the forlorn pile of ruins I called home. It was a dreary place; its roofs sagged, its chimneys leaned at perilous slants. Yet my heart warmed to the sight of it. I took hold of the stoutest bough to swing me to the ground, when——

I was so startled as nearly to lose my hold, and came down with a run and hands well scored on the rough bark. There I stood, knee-high in rank undergrowth, staring all about in a surprise that must have been not a little ludicrous, for the voice uttered a short cicada-chirrup of laughter, shrill and sweet.

I looked. She was standing almost immediately beneath the place where I had climbed over; my boot must have grazed her. She was what old women call a slip of a girl, in a cotton gown, white, figured with fine sprigs of green sadly faded, for it was not new. The wind whipped her red hair into her eyes. Her face was very much freckled; properly speaking, it was one freckle from brow to chin. She wore, besides, as I remember, a little muslin tucker (I think the garment is so named) and a little frilled muslin apron; and these articles, together with her old print frock, were washed, starched, and ironed to a degree it hath not entered into the mind of man to conceive. I took off my hat; and something about this young woman moved me thereafter hastily to adjust my cravat and shirt-ruffle. I believe these signs of perturbation (which were entirely genuine) pleased her in some subtle way, like a tribute, for she stopped to inquire: "You want to cut through here to the highroad? I'm very sorry, but I really cannot allow it. I've had a great deal of trouble keeping the village boys away from this tree. These are fine apples and good winter keepers—that is, I think they are——" she added a little tentatively, searching my face. "You didn't see the sign, I suppose?"

I followed her gesture and beheld, nailed aloft on the stub of a dead tree, a square of white planking whereon was neatly lettered the legend:

NO TRESPASSING UNDER PENALTY OF

THE LAW

Abram and Nicol Pendarves, Proprietors

per Mary Smith

I gazed from her to the sign-board, all but speechless. "It's very well done," I managed to get out at last.

"Yes, isn't it? But, somehow, it doesn't keep the boys from coming. They're not at all law-abiding. I don't think they've been very well brought up. And then, of course, they're not accustomed to seeing any one in charge here." She looked around, and smoothed her apron with the most astonishing little air of resource and command. "I saw a bill with the names at the bottom that way, and per So-and-So below, so I copied it," she continued, surveying her handiwork fondly.

"Yes." And now she looked at me, and away again, with a strange and sudden flush. "Yes, Smith. That's—that's a very good name, I think." There was a kind of tremulous defiance in her tone, as if she half expected me to question it.

"I've heard it before, I believe," said I stupidly—for, in fact, I had scarcely yet got myself together. "You live here?"

She nodded, with a perplexed and inquiring eye on me. "I'm Captain Pendarves' housekeeper," she said, with a prim and bridling air, and once more her expression challenged me. "Deny it if you can, sir!" was evidently her unspoken thought.

"And how long has my—ahem!—has Captain Pendarves been employing you, may I ask?" I said, wondering that Crump had not prepared me for this as for the other changes.

"Young man," said Mary Smith severely, "I have no time to stand here answering idle questions. If you want to see Captain Pendarves, I will speak to him; but if not, I really think you had better be getting on, for it's late."

"I was thinking of stopping awhile," said I humbly, "with my grandfather. You see, I'm Nicol Pendarves."

Had I said, "I am the Prince of Darkness," the announcement could not have wrought a more appalling change in her. She fell back a step, putting out one faltering hand to the wall for support. Her small bullying mien vanished like a garment twitched from her shoulders by unseen magic. Her face blanched piteously; terror looked from her eyes. "Oh, I was afraid of this!" she gasped, in a voice that went to the heart. "Sir, I—I—meant no harm!"

"Harm!" said I, both touched and puzzled. "Why, you've done none. There is no need for excuses. I never saw a better steward; you did not know me, and you were within your rights to send me about my business."

"Sir," she said, still in a tremble, "I have[Pg 160] done no wrong. You will find everything just as you left it."

"I shall find everything in a good deal better case, judging by what I've seen already, I think," said I heartily. "How long have you been here?"

"Then," said I, "maybe you can tell me something about the drift of things here. For—not to boggle about it—I am in some uneasiness, Miss Smith. These people—this man and woman who I hear have settled themselves upon Captain Pendarves of late—who are they? what are they?"

As I spoke we emerged upon the stone-paved walk leading to our kitchen door; it had been picked free of weeds, and the currant-bushes on either side trimly harnessed up to a set of stakes. A white curtain flounced behind the old lattice; there was a row of flowering geraniums in pots upon the sill. Through the open door you might see a clear fire and Mary Smith's saucepans glowing on the wall. The place, I thought, wore, for a kitchen, the best air conceivable of decent and humble dignity; nor would one have supposed that mere thrift and cleanliness could be so comely. I turned to her with some such words, and found her facing me, so much of haggard trouble in her eyes that I stopped, aghast.

"Sir," she said, twisting her fingers, "I see you do not understand—I thought you knew. I—I am the woman you speak of. Your grandfather is within, and the other—the man—with him."

III

Our old house being designed and built with a shiplike compactness, there was but one room on the ground floor besides the kitchen and its offices. It was a plain, comfortable place, wainscoted about, with shelves and lockers in the whimsical copy of a vessel's cabin. And it contained the single work of art our establishment could show; that is, a portrait of my grandfather's grandfather,—he who founded this house,—in a finicking attitude, with a brocade coat and a pair of compasses. In his rear were to be seen a pillar and a red velvet curtain, and (distantly) a fine storm of clouds and lightning. Never was a respectable old sailorman so misrepresented; but all his descendants except one regarded this gaudy daub with almost religious veneration. Every family has its one great man; the admiral was ours. His was the distinction of being the only Pendarves who had ever managed to amass a fortune. It had dribbled through the fingers of succeeding generations; but there was a tradition that some part of it, buried or otherwise secreted with an admirable forethought by the old gentleman, might yet be discovered, to the further glorification of our house.

The picture hung directly opposite the door, favoring me, as I entered, with a disconcerting smirk; it needed no great stretch of fancy to credit him with cherishing some secret and villainous joke. Beneath it sat my grandfather, with his pipe, in the same place and attitude as I remembered him for upward of twenty years, but so spectral a likeness of himself that the sight of him shocked me like a blow. He had wasted to a mere parchment envelop of bones, and the eyes he turned to mine were bright with inward fever. I had looked for I do not know what signs of an unstable mind, but at first, save for the eyes, saw none. He showed only a not too well pleased surprise.

"Nicol!" he said, and pushed back his chair, without rising. "Nicol!" and then for a moment sat staring closely at me under his heavy brows. With his next action something of the horror of his affliction came home to me, for I saw that, but for some confused sense that I had been absent against his will, he had utterly forgot everything concerning me, the terms of our last meeting, and the events of many years besides.

"Hush, and sit down!" he said, in the habitually chiding tone he had used to the boy of ten or twelve. "Take your books and get your lesson!" He pointed with the stem of his pipe to a stool in the corner where, as a lad, I had passed more than one grim hour, and turned to his companion, as older people turn from the interruptions of children.

Mary Smith, following behind, touched me gently on the arm. "Go and sit down," she formed the words with her lips rather than voiced them.

There sat beside my grandfather a vast, fat creature with a forest of greasy black hair and beard about his pallid face; his heavy hands lay motionless in his lap, forcibly reminding me of an image I had seen of some Oriental god upon his throne. His eyes were scarcely opened, his breathing was almost imperceptible; a gross animal content appeared in him as of a full-fed, lethargic crocodile. Side by side, he and the gaunt, fierce-eyed old man presented no mean allegory of spirit and body. A table was before them, and in the middle of it a toy the like of which I had never seen in this house or elsewhere—a globe of crystal, perhaps the size of an orange, held up on a little bronze pedestal. The fat man's eyes, or so much of them as one[Pg 161] might see, were fixed upon this thing with a kind of stupid intensity; one could have fancied him paying tribute to some idolatrous shrine. The captain watched him with an equal earnestness; so might the Roman mob have hung upon the reading of the sacred entrails; and there was about it the air of a well-practised, familiar rite. At last my grandfather asked:

"Ay, that's it, that's it," said the captain, and sent a quick, searching look about the room. "Doubloons—pieces-of-eight—Spanish pillar-dollars—doubloons, doubloons! That is what it would likely be made up of, eh? But where—try to see that—where?"

Another interval of silent gazing, and the[Pg 162] oracle uttered some further statement, which my grandfather received with an impatient groan.

"Doubloons—piles of gold—I know!" he said. "And a ship. But whereabouts was it, eh? Surely you can see whereabouts it was?"

I could have found it in me to laugh at the whole miserable hocus-pocus, had I been less indignant. The situation was, besides, sufficiently grave; and as I listened to this silly and profane juggling, and observed the wildness of my grandfather's bearing, it became plain to me that he could not long endure such an influence. I guessed from his talk that the old man's disorder was based upon the idea of treasure lost, sunk, or hidden hereabout; for our coast was dangerous, a menace to vessels, and not innocent, besides, of smugglers and worse. Perhaps the poverty of his later years was at the root of his delusion; perhaps his madness would have taken this form anyhow. However he had fallen into the fat man's hands, this was the secret of the latter's power. While I pondered gloomily, the sitting (so to call it) came to an end. Perhaps my unwelcome appearance somewhat contracted it. My grandfather lapsed into his chair, his chin on his chest, brooding. Excitement died in him almost visibly, like the flickering down of a spent fire. Instead of eighty, he looked a hundred and eighty, and his face was as lifeless as a mummy's.

"Zaira!" said the fat man, raising his thick lids (but I fancied he had already taken some shrewd peeps at me from under them), "I have slept, and the spirit has spoken. Arise! take away the mirror of Time and Space!"

And hereupon the girl, advancing with a shamed glance at me, carried the globe to one of the lockers, shoved it in, and slammed the door on it savagely.

"Have a care!" the seer warned her somberly; the mirror of Time and Space, apparently, was not immune from the ordinary risks of mirrors, as one might have expected so august an instrument to be. When speaking aloud thus, he used a great rolling, sonorous voice; it filled the room until the very window-panes vibrated.

She gave him a look of angry rebellion, opened her lips as if to retort with some stinging word, stood irresolute a moment with eyes that wavered between the three of us, then walked off, leaving us sitting facing each other in silence.

The fat man and I exchanged a long stare, I choking down my temper, he smooth and placid, to outward seeming, as the idol he resembled. The resolution with which he stuck to his silly pose was, in its way, a rogue's masterpiece; nothing more exasperating than this stolid effrontery was ever devised. The scoundrel feared, and yet knew he had, in a sense, the better of me; the helpless old man between us was his shield.

"Young man," he said at last, in the same booming monotone, "have you the gift of the seeing eye?"

"I have more the gift of the feeling fist, I think," said I, with what calmness I could muster. "If you doubt it, sir, I shall be pleased to show you. I am Nicol Pendarves, as a soothsayer like yourself will have guessed already. Perhaps you will honor me with your name and business here?"

"Many names are mine," he answered, and made a solemn gesture. "Many names are mine——"

He went on, unruffled, in his great voice, as if I had not spoken: "Many names have been mine through the uncounted eons—many names. In this flesh men call me Constantine Paphluoides."

It was no wonder Chepstow could not turn its tongue about that name; that and his manner together must have dumfounded our straight-thinking townspeople. I do not remember—indeed, I took no pains to note—what else he said; bits of mythology, history, poetry, rolled from him in a cataract of meaningless noise. Had I been an ardent disciple sitting at his feet, he could not have feigned a greater exaltation. The fellow was at once dull and crafty; he loosed this gust of windy rhetoric at me as if he thought to win upon me by mere sound and fury signifying nothing.

I got up at length, when I had had enough of him, and, walking across to where he sat, "Mr. Constantine Paphluoides," said I, "this is my house; I give you until to-morrow morning to leave it; you will go quietly and without any formalities of farewell. You will find it expedient to obey me: otherwise, although I have not consulted the mirror of Time and Space, I should not be surprised if it revealed you, to the seeing eye, in the town jail and later in the stocks."

He made no answer, but sat staring at me, blinking, and opening and shutting his mouth in a gasping fashion like a fish. I had striven to speak quietly, but (being in a breathing heat of anger) must unconsciously have raised my voice, for unexpectedly, and, as it were, for a warning, my grandfather came out of his semi-stupor[Pg 163] and straightened up, eying me over with a kind of wandering severity.

"Nicol, go to bed! You hear me? Go to bed!" He reached, cursing, for his cane. There was a grotesque familiarity in the act. With that very cane he had sought to coerce me into the straight and narrow road, as he conceived it, how many times during all my childhood!

"Go to bed, I tell you!" he screamed, and half rose, brandishing his rod of correction.

Somebody pulled at my sleeve; it was the girl. "Please come away, Mr. Pendarves; please do come away, sir, just for a minute, and then he'll forget it," she urged; and, with her earnest air of responsibility: "It's so bad for him."

In the kitchen, Zaira Mary Smith was getting supper ready, as it appeared. I followed her out passively, and sat down in a sort of maze. It seemed incredible that, amid the shabby tragedy of this household, there should be time or thought for the kindly business of spreading a meal. The girl marched briskly to and fro, stooping to the oven door, tinkling softly among her spoons and bowls, evidently taking a timid zest in her labors. It made her seem the most sane, assured, and stable person among us, spite of her position. I could have imagined her singing as she went, had it not been for my presence. She was desperately conscious of me, watching me askant[Pg 164] with the curiously commingled fear and trustfulness of a child. Nor, notwithstanding the untruths or half-truths she had told me, could her connection with the abominable rogue-fool in the next room appear other than an enormity—as if she might be the enchanted heroine of some fairy-tale, condemned to the service of a monster. At last, when she came and laid a board and pan on the table beside me, and, rolling up the sleeves about her capable, round little arms, began a severe maltreatment of a batch of dough, I could keep silence no longer; curiosity crowded every other feeling out of me.

She rested her hands on the edge of the bowl an instant. "About us?" she said, with a quick glance at me. She gave the dough one or two perfunctory pats and punches, biting her lips; and then suddenly, with a rush of color, her face puckered together, she clapped her befloured hands over it, and fell on the nearest bench in a perfect whirlwind of sobs.

"I—I—I w-w-wanted to be respectable!" was all I could make out between gasps—but that was staggering enough news, I thought. She wanted to be respectable!

She went on: "I didn't come here of my own free will, Mr. Pendarves, truly I didn't; but when we came, and I saw how nice I could make it,—and I never had a home before,—I knew, if you ever came back, that would end it all, and I did so hope you wouldn't!"

She nodded, a little doubtfully. "I didn't think of it just that way," she said. "But—yes, I suppose any one would put it so. Only—I haven't hurt anything, Mr. Pendarves; I—I only scrubbed—and cooked—and cleaned a little. I was so happy: there was no harm, it seemed to me. And when I pretended to be the housekeeper, that—that was just a little game I played with myself; it was silly, I dare say, but, after all, it did no harm, either. It was like another game I play by myself sometimes—of having a birthday, you know? I put little things I've made beside the bed, and when I wake up in the morning, I make believe it's my birthday, and I'm so surprised at all the presents I've got! It's silly, isn't it?' I knew you'd laugh."

She shook her head. No, she did not know that. She had never known anything about her father and mother. She was not even certain of her own name. "He calls me Zaira," she said, with a scornful jerk of her auburn head toward the other room; "but that's a stupid name, and I hate it. I tell every one my name's Mary Smith. Why not? I might as well call myself what I like—nobody cares. I think Mary Smith's beautiful, don't you? It's so respectable, isn't it?" she added wistfully.

Of her childhood she could remember nothing but being in some sort of school or institution (a home for foundlings, most likely) governed by nuns, or at least by women who went about in black stuff dresses and white caps, and whom one called ma sœur—for this was in southern France, she thought. The life was clean, decorous, and peaceful, and she might have grown up to wear a white cap herself, and herd little waifs into chapel; but when she was probably ten or eleven years old, the fat man came and took her away, and they had been wandering up and down the world ever since. He said he was her uncle, but she was no more sure of that than of anything else concerning herself.

When they had been in Chepstow a time, she said, her uncle came into their fortune-telling booth one day with Captain Pendarves, whose name she did not then know. He talked a great deal in an excited way about finding some treasure——"money I think he said his father or grandfather had hidden a long while ago. He kept saying it would all be in 'doubloons, doubloons,' because it was got in the Spanish Main and brought here in a ship. And he said there was treasure, heaps of it, in the bottom of the Cat's Mouth, where ships had sunk, gold pieces all in amongst the ribs of dead men. Mr. Pendarves,"—she looked at me with a shy, awed sympathy,—"I saw your grandfather was—was——"

"I'm afraid so. I thought shame to beguile a poor old man that way, but, sir, I could not stop it. He came every day, and they looked in the crystal—just as they were doing this afternoon, you know. He's worse now; I think he forgets betweenwhiles what was said the last time they looked. Then, one day, he told me we were to come here to live. It was wrong—I knew it; but when I saw it, and thought what I could do—and I did so want to have a home and—and be respectable—and I thought, too, if I worked hard and made it nice, it would be a—a kind of payment, wouldn't it? I couldn't help longing to——"

"Well, then, why leave it?" said I. "He has to, surely; but that need make no difference to you. We must have a housekeeper, you know."

She gave me a woeful glance; and I understood that, according to her poor little code, it would be more "respectable" to resume her journeyings with the fat crystal-gazer than to stay in the house with Nick Pendarves as his grandfather's housekeeper. Here was a ticklish point to argue with her; and, for all her tears, there was a firmness in the set of her chin (it was dented with a dimple) that warned me such argument would be a waste of time. She had made up her mind, and would stand to it at all costs. It was martyrdom in an eminently feminine style; women deliver themselves up to it day by day, and contrive to be perfectly unreasonable, yet somehow in the right. She wiped her eyes presently, shut her mouth on a sob, and went resolutely about her work. We had, after all, a tolerably cheerful evening in the kitchen. It seemed wisest for me not to show myself again before Captain Pendarves, but I am afraid I did not repine greatly at the banishment. As the door swung to and fro behind Mary carrying their dishes, I caught glimpses of the gloomy parlor, my grandfather huddled in his chair by the table, with bright, roving eyes; the sorcerer surprisingly busy about the food for a person of his ethereal habits; and, on the wall beyond, old Admiral Pendarves simpering eternally over his private fun.

The wind came up strong again after sunset, and all night long went noisily about the gables, and piped down our trembling old chimneys. It did not lessen with the approach of morning, and when I thrust open the window, an hour or so after dawn, there was a low-hanging gray sky and a great, driving stir in the air. I had hardly pushed the casement out, had one brief vision of bare tormented trees, felt a slap of rain, and heard, not far away, the measured beating of breakers as they charged at the foot of our cliff, when the wind, plucking the latch from my grasp, slammed the lattice and went yelling around the corner of the house like a jocular demon. I began to dress, thinking, as I had often thought before, that the place had a kind of fantastic kinship with the sea; every timber in it seemed to strain and creak to the repeated onsets of the storm, like those of any ship. The house stood steady enough, yet our position, open to all the winds of heaven, and within a few hundred paces of the furious water, was surely such as none but a sailor would have chosen. We rode out the weather in the open, so to speak, with abundant sea-room. And, for the better carrying out of the simile, there presently arose, somewhere outside, a long, drawling hail, calculated, with a mariner's nicety, to overcome the wind. "Ah-o-oy! The house, ah-o-oy!"

It came from the landward-looking or highroad side of the house—about two points on the starboard bow, as old Crump would have said. And, in fact, when I reached the door, there was Crump himself huddled in a pea-jacket on the seat of his cart, with his gray pony drooping dolefully between the shafts. I could just see them above the ragged hedge that divided our little front yard from the public way. Towering columns of rain swept across the landscape; Crump and the pony looked soaked to the core; and I was admiring the Spartan devotion to duty that brought him out at this hour, in such weather, when he began another wailing like a castaway banshee: "Ah-o-oy, the house! Pendarves, ah-o-oy!"

I set a hand to either side of my mouth and roared an answering hail to him up the wind. We were a bare twenty yards apart, but if he had not chanced at that moment to look in my direction, I doubt if he would have been aware of me, for all my efforts. The wind, in a fresh swoop, snatched the sound from my lips and ranged through the house with a turmoil of banging doors, falling crockery, and wildly fluttering draperies. As it was, he caught sight of me, shouted something unintelligible, and gesticulated toward a formless heap tucked up in oilskins behind him in the cart. Then he descended laboriously and signaled for help to remove it.

"What is it? What has he got?" screamed Mary Smith in my ear. She must have come running from the back of the house at the recent outburst of racket. Her petticoats swirled; her red curls streamed (they were shining with wet). She had certainly been outdoors already, as early as it was, in the teeth of all this blow, and I was startled by the pale anxiety of her look. "What is it? Who is there?" she cried again shrilly.

"Oh, Mr. Pendarves, haven't you seen them? They are both gone! I've looked everywhere about the house. They were gone when I got up, and I can't find them high or low!"

She nodded, with terror-struck eyes on me; then, raising on tiptoe, screamed painfully, with[Pg 166] her mouth close to my ear (it was almost impossible to hear otherwise): "He—your grandfather—has done it before. He's always restless in a storm. He goes down to the shore sometimes. I'm so afraid——" her look said the rest.

"Ask him—ask Crump; maybe he's seen them," she added in a shriek, as I started to the carrier's help. It was but a few steps to the gate, yet I reached it wet through, half blinded by sheets of water driven slantwise in my face, and with the breath nearly beaten out of me. In the open, thus, the storm seemed to increase tenfold in violence; it filled the vast cloudy hollow of the sky with reverberating din; and I felt, or fancied I felt, the solid ground shiver with the pounding of the waves on the ledges along the Cat's Mouth.

Crump greeted me with a cheerful grin; he had all the seaman's tolerance for the vagaries of the weather.

"Coming on to blow some, ain't it?" he remarked at the top of his lungs. "Your old apple-tree's carried away—that one in the corner of the orchard, I mean. I could see it as I came along by the upper road."

He could not have understood the question, for he answered, squinting up at me knowingly as he stooped over his end of my chest: "I see you got rid of him, Mr. Nick, and in short order, too. I spoke him a little way back, bound for Sidmouth with all sails set—at least, he was laying a course that way. Come on board, ma'am!" He pulled his forelock and made a leg respectfully before Mary (albeit eying her with no small interest) as we shoved our burden through the door. The girl clapped it shut, with a sharp struggle against the draught, and in the momentary silence that followed we stood awkwardly and apprehensively surveying one another, while the hurricane rumbled outside.

"Seen the cap'n? Why, no, sir," he said, surprised. "I was telling you I saw——" He stopped, with a glance at Mary.

"I was saying he crossed my bows laying his course for Sidmouth, or that way," said Crump, evidently striving for a witness-box exactness. "He didn't answer my hail. Looked like he was in too much of a hurry."

Mary cast a troubled look about. "Did he have anything with him? A portmanteau, or carpet-bag, or anything to carry clothes?"

"Not that I noticed," said Crump carefully. "Looked as if he was going out in ballast—except his pockets; there was something in his pockets, I should say."

I stared at Mary in some perplexity. What the fat man did, or what should become of him, were, indeed, matters of indifference to me, except so far as they concerned her. I was well enough pleased that he should go, but there was something unusual in the manner of his going; it was a headlong flight. To tell the truth, I had looked for further trouble with him. What would the girl do now? And where was Captain Pendarves? She met me with eyes at once frightened and resolute.

"First of all we must find Captain Pendarves—we must go look for him," she said, answering my thought and making up my mind for me in a trice. (She has a way of doing this, displaying the most unerring accuracy at it any time these twenty years!) And, in the turn of a hand, she had kilted up her skirts, tied a shawl, over her head, and was making for the kitchen door.

"But, Mary!" I cried, and tried to withhold her. "What good can you do? Here is Crump, and here am I. We'll find them both. This is no work for a woman. You are wet, you may get hurt——"

"And you?" she retorted. Then, in a lower voice, "Don't stop me, Mr. Pendarves; don't try to keep me from going. I can't stay quietly here, and wait, and wait, and not know what's happened. I think I should go mad. I must go. You are wasting time; your grandfather—oh, can't you understand?"

I understood only that she was frantic with anxiety, and might have offered further remonstrance had it not been for the sudden defection of Crump. He edged a little nearer, and gently jogged my elbow.

"I'm with ye, miss," he announced, with startling alacrity; and, as we followed her out, he explained to me in a hoarse and perfectly audible whisper behind one hand: "I'm always with 'em when they get that look on, Mr. Nicol. Catch me adrift on a lee shore! I've learned a lot since I signed with Sarah."

The breakfast-table had been laid, and the empty chairs stood around it in their places, under the smiling supervision of the admiral's portrait. In the kitchen, Mary had a bright fire going, her neat towels hanging to dry. She opened the door, and the next instant this pretty and comforting picture was shut behind us, and there we were crouching in the rain under the eaves, with the wind bellowing overhead.[Pg 167]

Mary stood on tiptoe again to scream: "I've been all over except in the orchard—you can see the shore from there."

I took her hand within my arm, and we struggled forward. As we drew nearer the cliff, the loud and awful noise of breakers in the Cat's Mouth silenced the storm; yet the wind was no whit diminished. A man could hardly have kept his feet, I think, along the cliff path. Before we reached the corner where the ancient tree that had weathered so many gales lay prostrate, uprooted at last, although we had as yet no view of the immediate shore, we could see a white aureole of spray hang, vanish, and return in a breath, yards in air above the Brown Cow. We fetched a compass around the orchard, stumbling and staggering among stumps and matted weeds and half-hidden logs without finding my grandfather, or any trace of him; and Crump having dropped behind, we had lost sight of him when that eery screech he adopted to make himself heard traveled to us down the wind. He was kneeling by the dislodged roots of our old tree, and, as he caught my eye, began an uncouth pantomime of surprise and wonder; then stooped, grasped a handful of something, and held it aloft with extravagant gestures. He bawled again, and, having got closer by this time, I heard the words:[Pg 168]

The spectacle put our search momentarily from my mind. I knew Crump's head to be none of the strongest, and I should never have guessed what had actually happened—for surely this was a strange place and way in which to stumble upon old Admiral Pendarves' treasure!

Yet that was what the carrier had done; he was never saner in his life. It lay before us, a considerable heap of gold and silver coins, tarnished but recognizable, in a rotting wooden keg sunk into the ground at the foot of the tree and partly meshed in its roots. Crump plowed among the coins with his hand.

"There's a mort of money here, Mr. Nicol," he said, "and there's been more. Look, here's some of it scattered out in the grass; it couldn't have got away out there of itself. And here's a footprint in the mud." He looked up thoughtfully. "Likely some of it's on its way to Sidmouth now," said he. "I thought his pockets bulged."

Something in this attitude must have moved Crump to his next remark. He looked us both over with an impartial and dispassionate air, cast a calculating eye on the treasure; then, "Enough left to get married and set up on, anyway," he said weightily. "There's worse things in the world than being married—though you'd hardly believe it. That's what I often says to Sarah!"

At that Mary Smith snatched her hand suddenly from mine and moved toward the edge of the cliff, crying out that we must continue our search. I climbed the orchard wall and looked along the shore. Here the cliff dropped away almost sheer, and the narrow strip of shingle at its base was lost in the surf. Farther to the north it widened a little with the curve of the shore, and through a swaying curtain of rain I could follow it to a point we called the Notch, near the entrance of the Cat's Mouth; of late years they have dredged the channel and moored a bell-buoy off this headland. There was nothing alive in sight; some prone black objects I saw, with a start, were only a few fisher-boats drawn up on the sand, and none too safe. I looked out to sea; the tide was making, and, where the strait drew in toward the Cat's Teeth, the waves fought and clamored with a horrid vigor, like living monsters. Their huge voices outdid the winds, and, as one after another made forward, towered, and broke upon the reefs, the Teeth disappeared in a welter of foam. Hereabout we found the old man at last.

Where he had got a boat, or with what madman's strength he had launched it, we could not guess. It was midway of the Cat's Mouth that I first caught sight of him, at no great distance measured by feet and inches, but as far beyond human aid as if the wide Atlantic had separated us. He was standing up in the stern, with folded arms, in something the posture he may have maintained on the poop of his ship in old days—where, perhaps, he fancied himself at this moment. I trust that reason was withheld from him in the utter hour; and certainly, although I could not discern his features, I saw him make no gesture either to invite help or to indicate that he had any understanding of his position. If mad, I thought (right or wrong) his death thus less ignoble than his life had become; if sane, he held a strong and steadfast heart, and bore himself well on his last voyage. By some strange chance, the boat spun and tossed among the breakers, yet kept an even keel, and boat and man together made a viking end. For, so standing, unconscious or unmoved, he went down, before our eyes, between the white and pointed reefs of the Cat's Teeth.

BOB, DÉBUTANT

BY HENRY GARDNER HUNTING

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DENMAN FINK

Of course, Bob knew that, as an abstract ethical principle, it is wrong to fight. His mother had been endeavoring to impress that idea upon him, from the moment it was first decided that he should go to public school till his books and his lunch-box were packed and he was on his way thither; and she had succeeded fairly well, for she had exacted a promise from him faithfully to avoid personal encounters as wholly sinful and unbecoming.

As a matter of fact, Bob knew only so much about fighting as he had learned through round-eyed, somewhat frightened observation of a very few entirely bloodless encounters among older boys; and, inasmuch as he had found himself consistently excluded from nearly all other, more peaceful pursuits and interests of these older ones, it was not unnatural that he should feel merely a spectator's interest in their fistic battles also, and that he should look upon them as he would have looked upon any other natural phenomenon—with some excitement, perhaps, but with no personal concern.

Bob admired his mother. To him, she was the most beautiful and the most resourceful woman in the world. He had found her judgment upon many subjects so wise that he was quite prepared to believe her position in this matter (which did not appear to be vital) completely and unquestionably correct, and to promise accordingly.

But conditions which exist on the big, bare public-school playgrounds, away alike from parental restraint and parental protection, are quite different from those in the home door-yard, and the code which obtains in the ward-school world is not an open book to all mothers of chubby-fisted sons who are called upon to observe it. It seems difficult for mothers to comprehend that a normal boy's standing on the school-ground is, like that of a young cock in a barn-yard, simply a matter of mettle and muscle.

So it was as early as Bob's second day at school—on the first Papa Jack had gone with him—that a revelation came both to him and to his mother. To him it was a painful revelation,[Pg 170] first because he had this new code to learn, and afterward because of his promise; and it was the latter thing that made the real difficulty. When you are a small boy you can easily adapt yourself and your habits of mind to new conditions and environment; but when you have some one else to think of, and when you are bound by a promise, that complicates matters.

Now, one "Curly" Davis—who was said to have been christened Charles, but whose astonishingly spiral locks surely constituted better authority for a name than any possible application of baptismal water—was, by right of reputed might, dictator of the Vine Street Primary. Curly was alleged to be of pugnacious disposition, and had not been bred to appreciation of the Golden Rule. He had the outward bearing of one who has reason for confidence in his personal prowess. He was popularly believed to have fought many fights and fierce,—just when and where his admirers seemed not to consider important,—and he had a reputation for ferocity rather disproportionate to his stature. He had a way of glaring at you, too, if you happened to be a new boy at school, which was sufficiently suggestive of a sanguinary temperament to overawe the average youngster and to render quite unnecessary any more active demonstration.

Like all despots who rule through fear, Curly had a following. It was made up of lesser lights of like tastes and ambitions, who toadied to and imitated the tyrant simply to avoid the unpleasant necessities which the alternative involved. These followers, numbering some six or eight, through their unity of aim and Curly's leadership, had gained a certain ascendency over the far greater, but unorganized, body of would-be independents who, chafe as they might under the yoke, dared not attempt to throw it off; and these loyal retainers were zealous in service of their lord's interests and pleasure.

On that beautiful fall morning when Bob first went alone to school, he had not been ten minutes on the playground, standing upon its outer edge, school-bag and lunch-box in hand, to gaze upon its novelties, before a satellite of Curly's, one Percy Emery, espied him. Instantly it was as though Percy had discovered some new quarry, unearthed a fresh specimen of some genus, edible and choice.

"Hi, Curly," he yelled, with the eager loyalty of his kind, "come 'ere. 'Ere's a new one. Look at the school-bag to 'im."

Curly, who was at the moment engaged in the pleasing pastime of hectoring a scared little five-year-old who ought still to have been in the[Pg 171] kindergarten, pricked up his ears at the cry and, like a hungry bird of prey leaving a mouse for a lamb, promptly swooped down upon the new game. His movement was the signal for the gathering of a crowd, and, before Bob was fairly aware that he was the object of attention, he had become the center of a curious group whose interest, if not wholly hostile, was in the main certainly not friendly. The dictator himself confronted him with unmistakably bellicose intentions.

"New shoes!" said Curly contemptuously, selecting the first obviously vulnerable point open to a shaft of insult. "New shoes! Spit on 'em!" He suited the action to the word, and immediately word and act alike were imitated by two or three of his more ardent admirers.

"Stop!" said Bob. He did not know what it meant. He backed away from his persecutors.

"Bob! Bob-tail! Bob-cat!" chanted Curly, in gratuitous insult of which only bantam shamelessness is capable. "Stop, will I? Who'll make me? You? You want to fight?"

He danced about Bob's quiet little figure, snapping his fingers in the new boy's eyes. Then, suddenly, he swung his wiry body and swept a stinging blow in Bob's face.

A yell of delight from the despot's own drowned a weaker chorus of protest. Curly backed and squared, ready for some show of retaliation or resistance, a scornful little grin on his face.

But Bob did not move. Curly's blow had landed fair on the tender little red lip, and it had cut against the teeth behind; a tiny scarlet stream flowed down Bob's smooth little chin. In his eyes the dizziness of the first jar gradually gave way to slow amazement. Then the tears welled up, hot tears which overflowed the lids and ran scalding down the cheeks, but they did not conceal or quench a glitter which grew to a bright flame behind them.

Bob's school-bag and lunch-box dropped from his hands. The pudgy fists which had never before been clinched with belligerent purpose, but which were, nevertheless, a boy's fists, doubled themselves into hard little knots; but still he stood quiet.

So far as his whirling little mind could think, he thought thus: So this was fighting; this was what he had promised mother not to do; what he had promised—had promised—promised. He was not so big, this boy who had struck him,[Pg 172] not so big. Bob was not afraid. But that a promise is a thing to be kept inviolate he had learned, oh, years ago, from Papa Jack, along with all the other of-course-ities of life, like telling the truth, keeping your troubles to yourself, and not being a cry-baby or a telltale. And a promise to mother—well, nothing could be more sacred. Yet here was a new condition which he had never met before, a new situation which suddenly made him see in an altogether different aspect a question supposedly settled—this question of to fight or not to fight. It made his sweeping promise to mother suddenly seem to have been very ill-advised indeed. He wondered if his mother could have known that he would meet this kind of thing at school. In that first instant after Curly's blow was struck, instinct told him that fists were made to be used, and reason added that self-defense is right; and now something else was stirring in his heart—something which might not, perhaps, be wholly unexpected, under such circumstances, to stir in the heart of a boy whose grandfather had carried a musket at Gettysburg and whose father had worn khaki at San Juan. He wondered if his mother could have known.

But Bob's fists only clinched; they did not strike. All the sturdy little muscles in his small body stiffened, and he stood with head up and eyes blazing, but he did not strike. And then the school-bell suddenly began to ring, and the group about him broke away; and Curly Davis started off, shouting back something about fixing him after school, and—he was alone.

Bob stood still. He realized that the last bell for school had rung. He knew that he should have gone in with the others. That was what he had been sent to school for, certainly. But he stood still.

The tears had dried upon his face, and so had the thin little line of red on his chin. His lip was swelling, and felt as if a hazelnut or a big bean had been pushed up under it and were sticking to and stinging the skin. He stooped and picked up his school-bag and lunch-box, stood still again for a moment, and then walked away. He was not going to school, and, naturally, as there was nowhere else to go, he was going home.

But a great, heavy weight seemed to have settled down upon his breast and pressed in upon it, and it was hard to breathe. His thoughts were still confused, but he was wondering—wondering. Why was it? Why had[Pg 173] they treated him so? Why had they singled him out to attack him? Why had that boy with the curly hair struck him? Why had the others laughed? Didn't they like him? Didn't any one like him? Why, what had he done? His heart swelled with sudden misery and wretchedness. Why was such an unkind thing permitted in the world? And then again returned that something which stirred inside him, something hot and hard, which made his cheeks and eyes burn and his fingers clinch once more. And then again the question, "Could mother have known?"

Mrs. McAllister saw him coming a block away, and she ran down to the gate to meet him as he trudged in. Bob looked up into his mother's face. The quick concern in her eyes, as she saw the battered little lip and the stained chin, came nearer to making him sob than Curly's blow had done; but, though the tears would well up and his throat felt very tight, he only swallowed and carefully wet the puffed lip with his tongue.

"Why, Bobbie, Bobbie, what is the matter?" cried his mother, dropping down on her knees on the walk beside him. She put both her hands on his shoulders and turned his face toward her; and Bob looked straight into her troubled blue eyes, and suddenly began to feel better—began to feel, indeed, that he did not have to care so much, after all.

Again he shook his head. He didn't know just how to tell her. It wasn't fighting. At least, he didn't fight; it had been that other boy. But, somehow, he did not want to say that; he did not want to tell; he wanted something, but he did not know just what it was. He found himself forgetting how he had felt a moment before, and then he discovered that he was not thinking about what he wanted at all. He was thinking what a very blue blue his mother's eyes were when she looked at him so, and, all at once, he felt more sorry for her than for himself, because she looked so troubled; and he kissed her quickly, and hurt his lip.

Mrs. McAllister led him into the house. "Won't you tell mother, Bob?" she asked.

But he couldn't. He was feeling better—much better—but he couldn't tell. There was another reason now, that he hadn't thought of before: it would make her feel more sorry. And[Pg 174] after all, it didn't matter so much; that is, it didn't if— He looked up at her with a new thought.

"But, Bob, you must tell mother all about it," she was saying, as she carefully bathed his chin and lip, and so he had to shake his head again.

Bob considered. No, he couldn't tell Papa Jack, either. He felt pretty sure father himself wouldn't tell about such a thing if he were a boy. He was silent.

Mrs. McAllister began to move about her work, though she still looked at him frequently and anxiously. Bob went away to the window, and stood looking out. He remembered how he had started out that morning, with school-bag and lunch; he remembered how he had approached the school-grounds, and how big and strange and attractive a place it had seemed to him at first, and what a good time all those boys had been having; and then he remembered how, suddenly, he had found them all around him, summoned by the call of that boy with the hateful grin, and how Curly Davis had sneered and spat and struck. Suddenly he found himself tingling all over, and pressing a burning forehead against the cool glass, and digging his knuckles into the corner of the sash till they ached. Then he went into the library, and lay down on father's big leather couch, and thought and thought.

Papa Jack came home for lunch at noon, and mother told him. Bob heard them in the hall.

"He says he didn't fight," said his mother, "and he says he didn't fall down. He won't tell me, and I told him he must tell you. I don't know why he doesn't want to tell; he isn't ashamed or very much frightened, and he didn't cry after he came home."

Bob heard Papa Jack's footsteps cross the hall and come in upon the hard-wood library floor, and then on the big rug by the library couch. Papa Jack sat down beside him and put his big fingers around Bob's little ones.

Bob looked up and smiled. Always such a pleasant, warm feeling came over him when Papa Jack came near him and talked to him.

But Bob could not reply. His eyes grew serious as they looked back into his father's.

"What did this, Bob?" asked Papa Jack, gently touching the hazelnut bruise with a finger.

Papa Jack drew his mustache down between his lip and teeth. "Hm! He did, eh? What else?"

Mr. McAllister looked out the window and his fingers closed tightly around Bob's. "When was this, Bob—before school?"

"I see." Papa Jack's eyes suddenly lighted with something Bob did not understand, and he sat looking down at Bob for a long minute. "I see," he said again, and then he turned and called to mother. "Helen!" And mother came in, with a piece of white sewing in her hands.

"Helen," said Papa Jack, "it's a case of bullying. The boy promised you not to fight, and he didn't. It's a mistake, mother. He's been set upon by some young bully, and couldn't defend himself because of his promise."

Mother looked at Bob; there was distress in her eyes, but something else came into them, too.

"It's only the beginning, dear—the beginning of battles," said Papa Jack, and he put his other hand on mother's.

"Bob," he said, "mother doesn't mean you're not to defend yourself. Understand? By fighting, mother only means beginning fights, picking fights, provoking other boys to fight. We have to defend ourselves. It isn't right to pick a fight; that's what mother means."

"There's only one way among boys, Helen[Pg 175] dear. The bullies must be fought, you know. Our boy's got to be a boy's boy if he's to be a man's man by-and-by."

Suddenly mother bent over and kissed Bob, and held him, with her arms thrust under and about him—held him hard.

"The only thing, Bob, is to be a man always. Be square and white. Do the right thing. I can't tell you what it will be every time; neither can anybody else: but you your own self will know. It may be right even to fight sometimes, for yourself and for others who are bullied; but every boy knows for himself when it's right and when it's wrong. If he does as he knows, he'll do right."

It was a quiet lunch that day. Father and mother talked little and the meal was quickly over. Bob hardly knew what he himself ate or did or thought. There was a strange excitement in his heart and in his head, a feeling that he could not define. It was not that he was going back to school after dinner. It was not that he would probably meet those boys again, nor that he would sooner or later have to face again that Curly Davis. Neither was it that, when he did face Curly Davis, he meant to—yes, to fight him. No, it was none of these things, though his heart did beat the faster as he thought of them. It was something else; it was something about what his father had said, not so much his words, but the way he had said "a man's man" and "we must defend ourselves"—something that thrilled him, made him proud and humble, all at once. Someway, father seemed to have taken a new attitude toward him, and in that change even Bob seemed to see father's recognition that babyhood was over for his small son.

Mother stood in the door and watched him go. She had been crying again, a little; she had even wanted to keep him at home. But father had said, "No, let him go; as well now as to-morrow," and so she had kissed him and cried again, a little. And then she had begged him to "try to keep away from those bad little boys," and to "play only with good boys who did not want to fight"; and Bob had said yes—doubtfully. He waved his hand to her from the gate, and again from the corner of the block, and then he set his face once more toward school, and walked very fast.

It was five o'clock when Bob came home again. School closed at four, but the clock on the library mantel was tinkling five when he opened the door and closed it very softly. He didn't want mother to see him just then.

He was trembling and very white—his little mirror by the window showed him that. There was a brown-and-blue bruise just in the corner of his little brown eyebrow, of which he had felt carefully a dozen times on the way home, but which did not look so big in the glass as it had felt. There was a rubbed place on his chin, and the soft knuckles of his hands were grimy and stained. He laid his school-bag and box carefully on a chair, and went to look out the window for a moment. And then a strange feeling came over him.

—This was his little room; yes, it was his—the same little room; the same white curtains, the same little window, the same view of the little green door-yard and the apple-tree and the cedar-hedge; the same soft sunset light coming in upon him where it had come so many, many other evenings, ever since he could remember. But the boy—that little boy who had looked upon it all, who had lived there and loved the white curtains and the sun and the apple-tree—where was he? he wondered.

When he closed his eyes he could see just one thing—one whirling, seething vision: a ring of boys, excited, eager, yelling, laughing, cheering, with only here and there a frightened face; and there in the midst himself and another—some one who was striking and kicking and scratching at him, but whose blows he did not seem to feel, so hard and fierce and fast he himself was striking, and so hotly ran his blood. And in his ears were ringing the cries which had gone up at the end, when that other boy—he of the curly hair—had suddenly, at last, turned from him and run away through the crowd, beaten and sniveling and—alone. And he remembered that he had felt sorry then—oh, so sorry—sorry for that other boy!

He washed his face and hands carefully, and looked again in the little mirror. Perhaps mother wouldn't notice—much. He opened his door and crept softly down the stairs and into the library, and there was mother, looking anxiously from the window, and father, who had just come in, putting on his hat as if he were going out again. And they both turned and looked at him; and mother ran and caught him up in her arms, just as if he were that baby-boy again—that baby he had been yesterday. He wondered.

Father looked at the brown bruise and the scuffed knuckles critically, while mother held him with her face against his hair.

"Do you think he'll bother you any more, Bob?" father asked, just as if the whole story had been told.

Bob shook his head, and mother suddenly clasped him closer, while father turned away with a grim smile. And Bob himself just wondered—wondered about that baby-boy he had been yesterday.[Pg 176]

TWO PORTRAITS BY GILBERT STUART

A NOTE ON A RECENT ACCESSION OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

BY SAMUEL ISHAM

The name of Don Josef de Jaudenes y Nebot has not impressed itself deeply on the memory of the world. It does not appear in the great, many-volumed biographical dictionaries nor in the indexes of the standard histories of the United States. Even in the library of the Hispanic Society of America there is no record of him. He was, however, a man of some importance in the early diplomacy of the nation. The beginning of his official career may be definitely determined by a letter of Washington's of July 20, 1791, in which he says: "I yesterday had Mr. Jaudenes, who was in this country with Mr. Gardoqui and is now come over in a public character, presented to me for the first time by Mr. Jefferson."

Gardoqui came to America in 1786 as chargé d'affaires for the negotiation of a treaty with Spain. The "public character" in which Jaudenes was presented in 1791 was that of commissioner of Spain, and he had united with him on the commission Josef de Viar, all their official documents being signed with both names. Their main business, like Gardoqui's, was the negotiation of a treaty between Spain and the United States; a treaty which was to settle boundaries, rights of trade between the two nations, and also the question of the "occlusion" of the Mississippi River; but there was much outside diplomatic sparring over the disputes between the Governor of Louisiana and the Georgians about trespasses and conflicting rights. The last communication of the commissioners was dated in 1794. The next year the negotiations were transferred to Madrid and the treaty was signed there and Jaudenes probably then returned to Spain. There seems to be no trace of him after that.

The only other facts in regard to him are to be gathered from the two pictures recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which are the subject of this article. They are signed G. Stuart, R. A., New York, September 8, 1794, and bear inscriptions in Spanish which, to complete the record, are here given in full:

Don Josef de Jaudenes y Nebot Comisario Ordenador de los Reales Exercitos y Ministro Embiado de Su Magestad Catholica cerca de los Estados Unidos de America. Nació en la Ciudad de Valencia Reyno de España el 25 de Marzo de 1764.

Doña Matilde Stoughton de Jaudenes—Esposa de Don Josef de Jaudenes y Nebot Comisario Ordenador de los Reales Exercitos de Su Magestad Catholica y su Ministro Embiado cerca de los Estados Unidos de America. Nació en la Ciudad de Nueva-York en los Estados Unidos el 11 de Enero de 1778.

We learn from these that Don Josef was thirty and his bride in her seventeenth year, and that she was born in New York. Unfortunately this is all that we know about her. Stoughton is a sufficiently familiar name in the colonial records of the New England and Middle States, but the lady of the portrait has not yet been identified nor has a search of the newspapers of the day revealed any mention of her marriage. It may very probably have taken place on September 8th, 1794, the date placed after Stuart's name on both canvases; but the journalists of that time took less note of such international alliances than those of the present. Something more about the lady is, however, certain to be found by the genealogists and delvers in old diaries and correspondence, for the wedding of the young Spanish diplomat with the pretty American girl just midway in her teens must have set tongues wagging and pens inditing. How the match turned out we do not know, but some argument as to their happiness may be based on the fact that Jaudenes' successor, the Marquis d'Yrujo, followed his example and took an American bride in the person of Miss Sally McKean, who was also painted by Stuart.

Two Portraits by Gilbert Stuart

reproduced by permission of

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Printed from plates made by the Colorplate Engraving Company, New York

Having thus disposed (somewhat unsatisfactorily, it is true) of the personality of the sitters, we can turn to the portraits themselves. The accompanying reproductions make extended description unnecessary. They are characteristic Stuarts, more elaborate, more complete, than most of his subsequent work,[Pg 177] but showing clearly his personal point of view and the difference between his portraits and those of his contemporaries. He is less poetic, more literal than the rivals with whom he had contended, not unsuccessfully, for the patronage of London society. For him a pretty girl is a pretty girl, and it is enough. He seats her comfortably in a chair and paints her as she is. One cannot imagine him turning her into a nymph, a shepherdess, or a priestess of Hymen, or painting her with a very modish coiffure on her head and a pair of blue-ribboned sandals on her bare feet. These things Reynolds did habitually and moreover put his figures in attitudes with up-rolled eyes and extended arms and filled out his larger canvases with altars and tombs and allegorical attributes. This he did to bring his pictures in accord with those of the old masters whom he laboriously studied and deeply admired. His achievement fully justified him. His sumptuous canvases, rich in color, elaborate in composition, perfected with every technical resource, have ever since remained unequalled of their kind.

In spite of his stay in West's studio, Stuart had none of this respect for tradition nor any wish to attempt the grand style. In this he was more like Gainsborough, but Gainsborough invested his portraits, even of prosaic sitters, with a strange, penetrating, poetic charm such as no other painter has been able to convey. Ranking artists in the order of their merit is an unprofitable business, but it may gratify some methodical minds to have it stated that these canvases by Stuart are not in the same class as good Gainsboroughs or Reynolds. With the best of other contemporary portraits they stand approximately on a footing of equality. In spite of the quiet pose, the lack of strongly contrasted light and shade and all of the clever tricks and forced accents of Lawrence and his followers, they are alive and alert. The characterization is excellent. The young people were not of so profound or complicated a nature as the Father of his Country, and the faces are not wrought out with the delicate subtlety of the Gibbs-Channing Washington which hangs between them, but they are clear-cut, compelling belief in their truth. The execution, too, has all of Stuart's skill. Others may have attempted higher things, but none did what he attempted with such perfect ease and sureness. In neither of the canvases is there a sign of uncertainty, hesitation, or alteration. Each touch is put exactly where it should be and left. There is none of the scumbling and glazing and re-working so common in the English portraits of the time. It is to this that the canvases owe their admirable freshness which makes them look as if painted yesterday. The heads have all of Stuart's pearly gray and rose tones unimpaired by ill-usage or restoration. The clothes and accessories are more swiftly and summarily done, the silver lace and the high lights being touched in with amazing sureness and cleverness. The composition and arrangement is pleasing, and Stuart's besetting fault of putting his heads too low on the canvas is excused and justified in the case of Don Josef by the necessity of having his portrait correspond with that of his wife, whose elaborate and stylish head-dress fills the top of her picture. In short, New York is to be congratulated on the winning back after a sojourn abroad of more than a century of these two most important and charming paintings executed here in the early days of the Republic.

At this point this article might well end, but there may be some who recall that last summer for a week or so there appeared in the papers articles headed "Fakes at the Museum" or "The Metropolitan Gets Lemons," which assailed the genuineness of these portraits. The discussion did not get far beyond the daily press, which, after its habit, registered the charges as picturesquely and vehemently as it could, but attempted no serious investigation of them. They were brought by a critic whose position as a special student of Stuart entitled them to respectful consideration, but after giving them that they do not seem conclusive or even important. They were based on the fact that the pictures were signed G. Stuart, R. A., and bore coats of arms and long Spanish inscriptions. It was claimed that this made the genuineness of the canvases doubtful, for Stuart signed few of his paintings—possibly none except the standing Washington in the Philadelphia Academy; he was not an R. A. (Royal Academician); nor was he a heraldic illuminator. Furthermore, the painting of the male portrait and the dress and accessories in the companion piece did not seem to the critic to agree with Stuart's handling. To make his impressions fit with the pictures, the critic supposed that Stuart painted a smaller portrait of Jaudenes and started one of his wife, which through some freak of temper he left (as he frequently did) with only the head and part of the background finished. These being brought to Spain, some artist there finished the lady's portrait, painted from Stuart's original a companion piece of her husband, and added to both the coats of arms, the inscriptions, and Stuart's name.

Now, frankly, this is not possible. As for the portrait of Doña Matilde being left unfinished, there exists in Stuart's handwriting a[Pg 178] list of gentlemen who are to have copies of his portrait of Washington, consisting of thirty-two names. A few take two copies, no one takes more save Jaudenes, who subscribes for five. The list is dated April 20th, 1795, which is seven months after the date on the pictures, and is the strongest possible evidence that Jaudenes was greatly pleased with Stuart—presumably on account of these portraits—and is entirely irreconcilable with the idea that the painter had quarreled with the diplomat's wife or left her portrait unfinished.

As to the coats of arms, the most casual examination makes it clear that they were painted by another hand than executed any part of the portraits. In all probability they were done after the canvases reached Spain, and the inscriptions and signatures would naturally have been added at the same time. Stuart would never have engrossed a long Spanish inscription, and that he should have signed his name (contrary to his habit) and have added the "R. A." to which he had no right is most unlikely. What is most unlikely of all, however, is that there should have been found in Spain an artist capable of painting a portrait like the Don Josef. Both heads are absolutely alike in handling, in texture, in mixing of the pigments, and in all of those things are absolutely characteristic of Stuart, whose methods were peculiarly his own and could not be caught even by men like Sully, who not only intently studied his processes but sat and watched him when he was at work. That a Spaniard with entirely different training and ideals could have reproduced them is impossible.

As for the costumes, it may be admitted that they differ from most of Stuart's American work; but the difference is more in subject than in method and is chiefly noticeable because he never again painted a gentleman in silver-sprigged scarlet waistcoat and small clothes. He hated such work, and his position in America enabled him to do as he chose, and he could tell sitters that if they wanted clothes they could go to a mantua-maker or a tailor, he painted the works of God. So distasteful was such labor to him that we know that he employed assistants in the details of some of his Washington portraits. In the present canvases the heads are painted with an interest and a thoroughness very different from that displayed in the costumes. These latter are skilfully done. The dexterity displayed is amazing and such as no copyist is at all likely to have had, but it is dexterity applied to getting a striking result as quickly as possible and with the least possible effort of hand or brain.

Now, to explain this, we should remember that Stuart only returned to America in 1793, and the pictures are both dated September 8, 1794. Whatever that date may mean, both pictures were presumably finished before then and were thus among the first, perhaps the very first, important works that Stuart did in New York. He would consequently have every motive, both from the desire to establish his reputation and from the position and charm of his sitters, to do his very best. The workmanship should be compared, not with what he did afterwards in America but rather with what he had done before in England and Ireland, when he was compelled by the exigencies of his sitters and the rivalry of his fellow artists to give some importance to costume and composition. Unfortunately, Stuart's foreign work is practically unknown to Americans (and to foreigners also, for that matter). There is little of it in the public galleries, and a large proportion of it has probably been rechristened with other and more attractive names. As far as we may judge from a few examples and from the many engravings after it (some of them large enough and good enough to give an idea of the handling), the costumes were done much in the style of those we are considering.

After all, the strongest argument for the authenticity of the portraits is the portraits themselves. They are beautiful, they are skilful, done in Stuart's style and entirely worthy of him. To suppose them done by any one else involves the doubter at once in a maze of improbabilities and impossibilities. The present writer is willing to put himself on record as quite convinced that they were painted by Stuart and are wholly by his own hand and are unusually important specimens of his work.[Pg 179]

MARY BAKER G. EDDY

THE STORY OF HER LIFE AND THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

GEORGINE MILMINE

XIV

MRS. EDDY'S BOOK AND DOCTRINE

"No human tongue or pen taught me the Science contained in this book, 'Science and Health'; and neither tongue nor pen can overthrow it."—Mary Baker G. Eddy.

Although Mrs. Eddy's book, "Science and Health," was not published until 1875, from the time Mrs. Eddy left P. P. Quimby in 1864 she had been struggling to get his theories before the public. Dr. Patterson, her second husband, left her in 1866, and for the next four years Mrs. Eddy was able to make a bare living by her "Science," wandering about among the little shoe towns near Boston and teaching Quimby's theories here and there for her board and lodging. She went from house to house with her precious copy of Quimby's "Questions and Answers"[2] and the pile of letter-paper, covered with her own notes, which she was forever rewriting and revising. The one thing that everybody knew about Mrs. Glover (Eddy) was that she "was writing a book." While she was staying with the Wentworths, in Stoughton, she carried her pile of manuscript to Boston, and when the printer to whom she showed it demanded to be paid in advance, she tried to persuade Mrs. Wentworth to lend her the money. Had the printer who looked over that confused mass of notes known that they were the nucleus of a book of which over five hundred thousand copies would be sold by 1907, and had he printed the manuscript then and there, Christian Science in its present form would never have existed. For at that time Mrs. Eddy had not dreamed of calling her system of mind cure anything but Dr. Quimby's "Science." She talked of Quimby to every one she met; could talk, indeed, of little else. When she introduced the subject of mental healing to a stranger—and she never lost an opportunity—it was always with that conscious smile and the set phrases which the village girls used to imitate: "I learned this from Dr. Quimby, and he made me promise to teach at least two persons before I die."

The story of the Quimby manuscript from 1867 to 1875 and of the gradual growth of Mrs. Eddy's feeling of possession, has already been recounted in an earlier chapter of this history.[3] By the time the first edition of "Science and Health" appeared, Mrs. Eddy said no more about Quimby or her promise to him. Mrs. Eddy has always been able to believe anything she wishes to believe, especially about her own conduct and about that of persons who have displeased her, and it is very probable that by this time she had persuaded herself that she really owed very little to the old Maine philosopher.

How "Science and Health" was Published

Although Mrs. Eddy had been working upon her book for about eight years, writing and rewriting with almost incredible patience, she was unwilling to assume any financial risk in getting it printed. George Barry and Elizabeth Newhall, two of her students, agreed to furnish the sum of one thousand dollars, which the Boston printer asked for issuing an edition of one thousand copies. Mrs. Eddy made so many changes in the proofs, continuing her revisions even after the plates had been cast, that she ran the cost of the edition up to about twenty-two hundred dollars, and Miss[Pg 180] Newhall and Mr. Barry lost about fifteen hundred dollars on the book. They would, indeed, have lost more, had not Daniel Spofford, much against Mrs. Eddy's will, paid over to them six hundred dollars which he had received for the copies of the book he had sold. Although Mrs. Eddy at that time owned the house in which she lived and had some money in bank, she did not, either then or later, suggest reimbursing Barry or Miss Newhall for their loss.

Aside from the fact that she was unwilling to risk money upon it, Mrs. Eddy believed intensely in her book. One of her devoted students sent copies of "Science and Health" to the University of Heidelberg, to Thomas Carlyle, and to several noted theologians. But the book made no stir outside of Lynn, where it caused some perplexity. There was little about it, indeed, to suggest that it would be an historic volume. It was a book of 564 pages, badly printed and poorly bound; a mass of inconsequential statements and ill-constructed, ambiguous sentences which wander about the page with their arms full, so to speak, heedlessly dropping unrelated clauses about as they go.

Although the basic ideas of the book are Quimby's, and even much of the terminology, the first edition of "Science and Health" was certainly written by Mrs. Eddy. Not only is there every internal evidence of her hand in the style of the book, but a number of her students are still alive who went over portions of the manuscript with her and worked with her upon the proofs. The same George Barry who helped to pay for the publication of the book copied out in longhand twenty-five hundred pages of the manuscript. He brought suit against Mrs. Eddy for payment for "copying the manuscript of the book 'Science and Health,' and aiding in the arrangement of capital letters and some of the grammatical constructions." He produced some of Mrs. Eddy's manuscript in court, and the judge allowed him more than the usual copyist's rate "on account of the difficulty which a portion of the pages presented to the copyist by reason of erasures and interlineations," as it is put in the judge's finding.

Although Mrs. Eddy's book has been enlarged and greatly improved as to its order and grammar, the first edition contains all the essential elements of her philosophy, if such it may be called. Mr. Wiggin did good work in translating the book into comparatively conventional English, and gave a kind of unity to paragraphs and sentences, and later revisers have greatly improved upon his work; but the first edition gave a fairly complete and, on the whole, a comprehensible statement of Mrs. Eddy's platform.

Mrs. Eddy's religion claims to be a system of metaphysics, a system of therapeutics, and an improved form of Christianity. As the founder of a system of idealistic philosophy, Mrs. Eddy does indeed, as Mr. Alfred Farlow says, "begin where the sages of the world left off." Other philosophers have reached the conclusion that we can have no absolute knowledge of matter, since our evidence regarding it consists of sense impressions, and that we can absolutely assert of matter only that it exists in human consciousness; but Mrs. Eddy begins boldly with, "There is no such thing as matter." She reaches her conclusion by steps which she deems complete and logical:

Mrs. Eddy calls attention to the fact that even if read backward, these propositions mean identically the same as when read in the usual order, and she seems to regard this as conclusive proof of their logical truth. She says, "The metaphysics of Christian Science, like the rules of mathematics, prove the rule by inversion. For example: there is no pain in Truth, and no truth in pain; no nerve in Mind, and no mind in nerve; no matter in Mind, and no mind in matter," etc.

In his article upon Christian Science, published in The Atlantic Monthly, April, 1904, Dr. John Churchman says:

The uncompromising idealism, however, which Mrs. Eddy offers us not only has these defects, but is guilty of a far more serious charge. It poses as an explanation, and is in reality a total evasion. To deny that matter exists, and assert that it is an illusion, is only another way of asserting its existence; you are freed by your suggestion from explaining the fact, but forced by it to explain the illusion. It is the old mistake of imagining that an escape from a problem is a solution. You are out of the frying-pan, it is true, but you are in the fire instead.[4]

Having thus disposed of matter, Mrs. Eddy seems to think that her definition has actually changed the nature of the case, and that though we live in houses, eat food, and endure the changes of the seasons, our relation to the material universe is changed because she has defined matter as an illusion.

It is not, however, Mrs. Eddy's definition which is so remarkable, but her application of it. Having stated that matter is an illusion, she asserts that "matter cannot take cold";[5] that matter cannot "ache, swell and be inflamed";[6] that a boil cannot ache;[7] that "every law of matter or the body, supposed to govern man, is rendered null and void by the law of God".[8]

There is No Material Universe

Quimby acknowledged the actual existence of the universe, of the physical body, and of disease; Mrs. Eddy teaches that they are all illusory. The earth, the sun, the millions of stars, says Mrs. Eddy, exist only in erring "mortal mind"; and mortal mind itself does not exist. All phenomena of nature are merely illusory expressions of this fundamental error. "The compound minerals or aggregate substances composing the earth, the relations which constituent masses hold to each other, the magnitudes, distances, and revolution of the celestial bodies, are of no real importance.... Material substances, astronomical calculations, and all the paraphernalia of speculative theories ... will ultimately vanish, swallowed up in the infinite calculus of spirit." "Earthquake, wind, wave, lightning, fire, bestial ferocity" are merely the "vapid fury of mortal mind." "Heat and cold are products of mind"—even a "mill at work, or the action of a water wheel," is only a manifestation of "mortal mind force." Apart from mortal belief, there is no such thing as climate.

"Repulsion, attraction, cohesion, and powers supposed to belong to matter are constituents of mind," Mrs. Eddy says. By this she does not mean that these forces exist, for us, in our minds, but that at some time in the dim past "mortal mind" imagined matter and imagined these properties in it. Christ, she says, was able to walk upon the water and to roll away the stone of the sepulcher because he had overcome the human belief in the laws of gravity. (Yet, Mrs. Eddy is continually reminding us that the fall of an apple led Newton to discover a great law, etc.) "Geology," Mrs. Eddy says, "has never explained the earth's formations. It cannot explain them." "Natural Science is not really natural or scientific, because it is deduced from the evidences of the senses." "Vertebra, articulata, mollusca, and radiata are evolved by mortal and material thought." "Theorizing about man's development from mushrooms to monkeys, and from monkeys into men, amounts to nothing in the right direction, and very much in the wrong." But it is not only with the natural sciences that Mrs. Eddy is displeased. "Human history," she says, "needs to be revised, and the material record expunged."

Having dismissed the history of the race as trivial, the natural sciences as unscientific, the evidence of the senses as a cheat, and matter as non-existent, Mrs. Eddy proceeds to propound her own curious theory of the Universe and man. She has a theory; incomplete, but ingenious.

Mrs. Eddy's Exegesis

Mrs. Eddy says that her theory of the universe is founded, not upon human wisdom, but upon the Bible; and so it is, but she uses both addition and subtraction very liberally to get her Biblical corroboration. The Bible may be interpreted in two ways, Mrs. Eddy says, literally and spiritually, and what she sets out to do is to give us the spiritual interpretation. Her method is simple. She starts with the propositions that all is God and that there is no matter, and then reconstructs the Bible to accommodate these statements. Such portions of the Bible as can be made, by judicious treatment, to corroborate her theory, she takes and "spiritually interprets,"[9] that is, tells us once and for all what the passages really mean; and such portions as cannot possibly be converted into affirmative evidence she rejects as errors of the early copyists. Mrs. Eddy insists that the Bible is the record of truth, but a study of her exegesis shows that only such portions of it as meet with Mrs. Eddy's approval and lend themselves—under very rough handling—to the support of her theory, are accepted as the record of truth; the rest is thrown out as a mass of erroneous transcription. Mrs. Eddy's keen eye at once detects those meaningless passages which have for so long beguiled the world, just as it readily sees in familiar texts an entirely new meaning. She explains the creation of the world from the account in the first chapter of Genesis, but the unknown author of this disputed book would never recognize his narrative when Mrs. Eddy gets through with it.[Pg 182]

Mrs. Eddy's Account of the Creation[10]

To begin with, Mrs. Eddy says, there was God, "All and in all, the eternal Principle." This Principle is both masculine and feminine; "Gender is embraced in Spirit, else God could never have shadowed forth from out Himself, the idea of male and female." But, Mrs. Eddy adds, "We have not as much authority for calling God masculine as feminine, the latter being the last, therefore highest idea given of Him."

Mrs. Eddy next sets about the creation. The "waters" out of which God brought the dry land, she says, were "Love"; the dry land itself was "the condensed idea of creation." When God divided the light from the darkness, it means, says Mrs. Eddy, that "Truth and error were distinct from the beginning, and never mingled." But Mrs. Eddy has always insisted on the idea that "error" is a delusion which arose first in the mind of mortal man; what is error doing away back here before man was created, and why was God himself compelled to take measures against it? Certainly the account of the Creation which came from Lynn is even more perplexing than that which is related in the Pentateuch.

With regard to the creation of grass and herbs, Mrs. Eddy eagerly points out that "God made every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew." And that, she says, proves that "creations of Wisdom are not dependent on laws of matter, but on Intelligence alone." She admits here that the Universe is the "idea of Creative Wisdom," which is getting dangerously near the very old idea that matter is but a manifestation of spirit. Call the universe "matter," and Mrs. Eddy flies into a rage; call it "an idea of God," and she is serenely complaisant. There was certainly never any one so put about and tricked by mere words; on the whole, it may be said that the English language has avenged itself on Mrs. Eddy.

Arriving at the creation of the beasts of the field, Mrs. Eddy says that "The beast and reptile made by Love and Wisdom were neither carnivorous nor poisonous." Ferocious tendencies in animals are entirely the product of man's imagination. Daniel understood this, we are told, and that is why the lions did not hurt him.

When she comes to the creation of man, Mrs. Eddy accepts the first account given in Genesis, but the second, which states that God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, she rejects as untrustworthy. The first account, she says, "was science; the second was metaphorical and mythical, even the supposed utterances of matter; the scripture not being understood by its translators, was misinterpreted."

The Story of Adam

"The history of Adam is allegorical throughout, a description of error and its results," etc. Man was created in God's likeness, free from sin, sickness, and death; but this Adam, who crept in, Mrs. Eddy does not explain how, was the origin of our belief that there is life in matter and was to obstruct our growth in spirituality. Mrs. Eddy says, "Divide the name Adam into two syllables, and it reads, a dam, or obstruction." This original method of word-analysis she seems to regard as final evidence concerning Adam. About the creation of Eve, Mrs. Eddy changes her mind. In the later editions of her book she says it is absurd to believe that God ever put Adam into a hypnotic sleep and performed "a surgical operation" upon him. In the first edition she says it is a mere chance that the human race is not still propagated by the removal of man's ribs. "The belief regarding the origin of mortal man has changed since Adam produced Eve, and the only reason a rib is not the present mode of evolution is because of this change," etc.

Not to be warned by the footprints of time, Mrs. Eddy pauses in her revision of Genesis to wonder "whence came the wife of Cain?" But on the whole she profits by the story of Cain, for here she finds one of those little etymological clews which never escape her penetration. The fact that Adam and all his race were but a dream of mortal mind is proved, she says, by the fact that Cain went "to dwell in the land of Nod, the land of dreams and illusions." Mrs. Eddy offers this seriously, as "scientific" exegesis.

Mrs. Eddy's conclusion about the Creation seems to be that we are all in reality the offspring of the first creation recounted in Genesis, in which man is not named but is simply said to be in the image of God; but we think we are the children of the creation described in the second chapter; of the race that imagined sickness, sin, and death for itself. The tree of knowledge which caused Adam's fall, Mrs. Eddy says, was the belief of life in matter, and she suggests that the forbidden fruit which Eve gave to Adam may have been "a medical work, perhaps."

Mrs. Eddy Denies the Atonement

When she comes to the Atonement, Mrs. Eddy says that Christ did not come to save[Pg 183] mankind from sin, but to show us that sin is a thing imagined by mortal mind, that it is an illusion which can be overcome, like sickness and death. It was by his understanding of the truths of Christian Science that Christ remained sinless, healed the sick, and that he "demonstrated" over death in the sepulcher and rose on the third day. His sacrifice had no more efficacy than that of any other man who dies as a result of his labors to bring a new truth into the world, and we profit by his death only as we realize the nothingness of sickness, sin, and death. "God's wrath, vented on his only son, is without logic or humanity, and but a man-made belief."

The Trinity, as commonly accepted, Mrs. Eddy denies, though she seems to admit a kind of triune nature in God by saying over and over again that he is "Love, Truth, and Life."

The Holy Ghost she defines as Christian Science; "This Comforter I understand to be Divine Science."

Mrs. Eddy's Revision of the Lord's Prayer

In the course of Mrs. Eddy's revision of the Bible, she paused to "spiritually interpret" the Lord's prayer. She has revised the prayer a great many times, and different renderings of it are given in different editions of "Science and Health." The following is taken from the edition of 1902:

"Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious, adorable One. Thy kingdom is within us, Thou art ever-present. Enable us to know—as in heaven, so on earth—God is supreme. Give us grace for to-day; feed the famished affections. And infinite Love is reflected in love. And Love leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth from sin, disease, and death. For God is now and forever all Life, Truth, and Love."

In this interpretation the petitions have been converted into affirmations, and Mrs. Eddy's prayer seems a somewhat dry enumeration of the properties of the Deity rather than a supplication.

This method of "spiritual interpretation" has given Mrs. Eddy the habit of a highly empirical use of English. At the back of her book, "Science and Health," there is a glossary in which a long list of serviceable old English words are said to mean very especial things. The word "bridegroom" means "spiritual understanding"; "death" means "an illusion"; "evening" means "mistiness of mortal thought"; "mother" means God, etc., etc. The seventh commandment, Mrs. Eddy insists, is an injunction against adulterating Christian Science, although she also admits the meaning ordinarily attached to it. In the Journal of November, 1889, there is a long discussion of the ten commandments by the editor, in which he takes up both personal chastity and the Pure Food laws under the command, "Thou shalt not commit adultery."

Mrs. Eddy insists, and doubtless believes, that her "Science" is simply an elaboration, a more advanced explanation, of the teachings of the New Testament. Yet on the subject of repentance, which occupies so important a place in the teachings of Christ, we hear never a word, and upon that consciousness of sin, which is the burden of the Epistles, she is consistently silent. Paul's reiterated explanation of original sin, of the Atonement and Redemption, are ignored. "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive" is made to read: "As in error all die, so in Truth shall all," etc. Even Paul's "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" is made substantially to mean, Who shall deliver me from the belief that there is sensation in matter? Whatever cannot be "spiritually interpreted" into a confirmation of Mrs. Eddy's theory that sin, sickness, and death are non-existent, she refuses to consider.

Mrs. Eddy's Therapeutics

Mrs. Eddy's theology is, of course, a mere derivative of her system of therapeutics, an attempt to base her peculiar variety of mind-cure upon Biblical authority. In her therapeutics there is nothing new except its extremeness. That the mind is able, in a large degree, to prevent or to cause sickness and even death, all thinking people admit. Mrs. Eddy's fundamental propositions are that death is wholly unnecessary and that the body and the organs of the body have nothing to do with life. A man could live just as well after his lungs had been removed as before, if he but thought he could. "Cold, heat, exercise, study, food, infection, etc., never caused a sick or healthy condition in man." "Scrofula, fever, consumption, rheumatism or small-pox never produced pain or inharmony." "A dislocation of the tarsal joint (ankle-joint) would produce insanity as perceptible as that produced by congestion of the brain, were it not that mortal mind thinks this joint less intimately connected with mind than is the brain."

Sight and hearing do not depend upon the eyes and ears. The nervous system can really cause no suffering. "Nerves are not the source of pain or pleasure." "Nerves have no more sensation, apart from what belief bestows[Pg 184] upon them, than the fibre of a plant." What really suffers is mind, or belief; and, if we change that belief, the pain will disappear. "You say a boil is painful," says Mrs. Eddy, "but that is impossible, for matter without mind is not painful. The boil simply manifests your belief in pain, through inflammation and swelling; and you call this belief a boil."

Mrs. Eddy even argues against spanking children because "the use of the rod is virtually a declaration to the child's mind that sensation belongs to matter."[11]

Mrs. Eddy's idea is that our lungs are necessary to us because we think they are, just as we think heavy underwear is necessary in winter. Horses and cows, certainly, do not think much about their lungs, but Mrs. Eddy says that domestic animals are controlled by the beliefs of their human masters, and that we have corrupted the horse and have taught him to have epizoötic and colic. "What," says Mrs. Eddy, "if the lungs are ulcerated? God is more to a man than his lungs." "Have no fears that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed.... Your body would suffer no more from tension or wounds than would the trunk of a tree which you gash, were it not for mortal mind."

All functional and organic diseases are produced by a popular belief in their reality. "No gastric juice accumulates ... apart from the action of mortal thought."

"Inflammation, hemorrhages, tubercles, decompositions are all dream shadows," "Man is the same after, as before, a bone is broken or a head chopped off."

But as to who invented the idea of pain and whence came the superstition that we must have lungs to breathe and that the heart is necessary to life, Mrs. Eddy maintains a discreet silence. Sin, sickness, and death, she says, are beliefs which originated in mortal mind. And how and when did mortal mind originate? Mortal mind does not exist, she answers, therefore it had no origin. This reasoning satisfies her; she believes it perfectly adequate.

It is not only the diseased body which is to be disregarded and put out of mind, but all hygienic precautions. Mrs. Eddy particularly objects to diets, and she says that one food is as good as another. God gave man "dominion not only over the fish in the sea, but over the fish in the stomach also," she once said.

There is no such thing as fatigue: "You would not say that a wheel is fatigued; and yet the body is just as material as the wheel. If it were not for what the human mind says of the body, the body would never be weary, any more than the inanimate wheel."

Mrs. Eddy denies that physical exercise strengthens the muscles. "Because the muscles of the blacksmith's arm are strongly developed, it does not follow that exercise has produced this result, or that a less-used arm must be weak.... The trip-hammer is not increased in size by exercise. Why not, since muscles are as material as wood and iron?"

Constant bathing, Mrs. Eddy says, received a "useful rebuke from Jesus' precept, 'Take no thought ... for the body,' We must beware of making clean merely the outside of the platter."

A Sensationless Body the Goal of Existence

"A sensationless body," Mrs. Eddy says, is the ultimate hope of Christian Science. Since insensibility to pain is the ultimate good which her system of philosophy offers, it is natural that she should often point us to the lower forms of animal life for our exemplars. "The conditions of life become less imperative in lower organisms, or where there is less mind and belief on this subject." She points out hopefully that certain marine animals multiply their species by self-division. "The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better. When the unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again." If we but believed that matter has no sensation, "then the human limb would be replaced as readily as the lobster's claw." She points out the fact that flowers produce their seed without pain. "The snowbird sings and soars amid the blasts; he has no catarrh from wet feet."

Mrs. Eddy's Physiology

The most discouraging thing about Mrs. Eddy's dissertations upon anatomy and physiology is that she seems to know so little about the physical facts and laws which she despises. She says, for instance, that a father "plunged his infant babe, only a few hours old, into water for several minutes and repeated this operation daily until the child could remain under water for twenty minutes, moving and playing without harm, like a fish." Does Mrs. Eddy actually believe that a child could live under water for twenty minutes? Again: "The supposition that we can correct insanity by the use of purgatives and narcotics is in itself a species of insanity." Where did Mrs. Eddy get the idea that such treatment was ever supposed to cure "insanity"? Mrs. Eddy says the fact that a finger which has been amputated continues to hurt is proof that nerves have nothing[Pg 185] to do with pain, because, she states, "the nerve is gone"!

Mrs. Eddy says that when we burn a finger, not fire but mortal mind causes the injury. To this statement she adds: "Holy inspiration has created states of mind which are able to nullify the action of the flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might produce spontaneous combustion." That is, if mortal mind worked hard enough, we could burn our fingers without any fire, or we could produce the fire by willing it.

The action of drugs depends entirely upon the belief of mortal mind. Stimulants, narcotics, poisons, affect the system solely because they are reputed to do so. And yet, with all her ingenuity, Mrs. Eddy has to admit that if a man took arsenic unknowingly it would probably kill him. This, she says, is because of the consensus of opinion that arsenic is deadly. Such would probably be her explanation of the destructive processes which go on in the world without the knowledge of man; fire consumes the forest, the tiger kills the antelope, and the bite of the cobra kills the tiger because the human mind has attributed such tendencies to fire, to the tiger, and to the cobra.

Mrs. Eddy's View of History

All the emanations of mortal mind are evil. Our redemption, Mrs. Eddy says, lies in Divine Mind, of which we are a part. "Spirit imparts the understanding which leads into all Truth.... This understanding is not intellectual, is not aided by scholarly attainments." There is no mistaking Mrs. Eddy's meaning; the thing in us which is capable of cultivation and expansion, that which inquires and investigates and reasons, is mortal mind, and is therefore evil. All the physical sciences are the harmful inventions of mortal mind, and the slow and painful accumulation of exact knowledge has been but the harmful activity of the baser element in human nature. There was never such a discouraging view of human history.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that everything which civilization most cherishes has been the direct result of that spirit of inquiry and of those inductive processes of reasoning which Mrs. Eddy despises. If the morality of the civilized world is higher to-day than it was in the fifth century, it is not because men know any more about moral laws than they did two thousand years ago, but because this same spirit of inquiry has made cleaner living possible and imperative. Mrs. Eddy says that Christian Science would abolish war; but the diminution of war has come about, not through any growth of "Divine Mind" but, as Buckle pointed out, through three triumphs of the experimental tendency of the intellect;—the discovery of gunpowder, the discovery that war was detrimental to trade and to the best economic conditions, and the improvement in methods of transportation. Contemplating the history of civilization from Mrs. Eddy's point of view, we have simply gone on developing this injurious thing, "mortal mind"—applying our intelligence to the study of the physical universe—and have gone on piling up false belief on false belief. It is "matter" that is our great delusion and that stands between us and a full understanding of God; and matter exists, or seems to exist, only because we have invented it and invented laws to govern it and have given properties to its various manifestations. The more we know about the physical universe, the heavier do we make our chains; our progress in the physical sciences does but increase the dose of the drug which enslaves us. And there have been but two breaks in this jumbled dream of "error": the first when Jesus Christ "demonstrated the nothingness of matter," the second when Mrs. Eddy proclaimed its nothingness from Lynn.

With a "sensationless body" for the goal of existence, the savage was certainly much higher in "the scale of being" than the nations of modern Europe, and Mrs. Eddy is perfectly right when she refers us to the amœba and crustacea. Happy, indeed, the lobster who thinks so little about his anatomy that his lost claw is replaced by another!

From all her flights Mrs. Eddy comes back to her starting-point: physical well-being. Not for a single page are we permitted to forget that her religion is primarily a kind of "doctoring"; therapeutics made religion, or religion made therapeutics. She makes the fact that Christ healed the sick the principal feature of his mission, and makes it authority for her assumption that religion and therapeutics are essentially one. Certainly the burden of the New Testament is not that man may avoid suffering, but that he may suffer with noble fortitude.

Lack of Religious Feeling in Mrs. Eddy's Book

But it is before such a word as fortitude that Mrs. Eddy's book takes on its most discouraging aspect. Her foolish logic, her ignorance of the human body, the liberties which she takes with the Bible, and her burlesque exegesis, could easily be overlooked if there were any nobility of feeling to be found in "Science and Health"; any great-hearted pity for suffering, any humility[Pg 186] or self-forgetfulness before the mysteries of life. Mrs. Eddy professes to believe that she has found the Truth, and that all the long centuries behind her have gone out in darkness and wasted effort, yet not one page of her book is tinged with compassion. "Oh that mine head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" If there were one sentence like that in "Science and Health" no one would stop to quarrel with Mrs. Eddy's metaphysics.

But if there is little intelligence displayed in Mrs. Eddy's book, there is even less emotion. It is not exaggeration to say that "Science and Health" is absolutely devoid of religious feeling. God remains for Mrs. Eddy a "principle" indeed, toward which she has no attitude but that of a somewhat patronizing and platitudinous expositor. She discusses sin and death and human suffering as if they were curves or equations.

Malicious Animal Magnetism

In all the editions of Mrs. Eddy's book there is the same shiftiness, the same hardness, and the same astonishing complacency, and the text of the first three editions is disfigured by innumerable ebullitions of spite and hatred. In the first edition the first fifteen pages of the chapter on "Healing the Sick" are given up to an attack upon Richard Kennedy, the young man who was her first practitioner, and of whose personal popularity she was so bitterly jealous. The second edition, a small volume, is largely made up of denunciations of Daniel Spofford. The third edition opens with a preface (signed Asa G. Eddy) attacking Edward Arens, and contains the famous chapter on "Demonology" in which Mrs. Eddy devotes forty-six pages to settling scores with half a dozen of her early students, charging one and another with theft, adultery, murder, blackmail, etc. The Reverend Mr. Wiggin, when he revised Mrs. Eddy's book in 1885, persuaded her to omit these vituperative passages on the ground that they were libelous.

Mrs. Eddy's one original elemental contribution to Quimbyism, was her doctrine of Malicious Animal Magnetism; a grewsome superstition born of her own vindictiveness and distrust. Mrs. Eddy's more enlightened followers have for years tried to divert attention from this one of her doctrines, and there are hundreds of Christian Scientists in the field who know and think very little about it. But it has been a very important consideration in the lives of those who have come into personal contact with Mrs. Eddy. Between 1875 and 1888 many of Mrs. Eddy's students left her because in her lectures and conversation she dwelt more upon the malign power of mesmerism than upon the salutary power of truth. In her contributions to the Journal during those years she frequently took up Animal Magnetism; she tells her followers over and over again that she will denounce it, and that she will not be silenced. For several years there was a regular department in the Journal with the caption "Animal Magnetism," but the crimes which were charged to mesmerists were by no means confined to this department. "Also they have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their pleasure, and we are in great distress," the Journal again and again affirms.

Poverty a False Belief

Mrs. Eddy surmounts economics as easily as she does physics and chemistry and physiology. Poverty is only a form of "error," a false belief. It can be abolished as readily as sin or disease or old age. She advertised the first edition of "Science and Health" as a book that "affords an opportunity to acquire a profession by which you can accumulate a fortune." "In the early history of Christian Science," Mrs. Eddy says, "among my thousands of students few were wealthy. Now, Christian Scientists are not indigent; and their comfortable fortunes are acquired by healing mankind morally, physically, and spiritually." Her healers should be well paid, she says. "Christian Science demonstrates that the patient who pays what he is able to pay, is more apt to recover than he who withholds a slight equivalent for health." In Mrs. Eddy's book [12] she publishes a long testimonial from a man who relates how Christian Science has helped him in his business.

This view of poverty has been generally accepted among Mrs. Eddy's followers. One contributor to the Journal writes: "We were demonstrating over a lack of means, which we had learned was just as much a claim of error to be overcome with truth as ever sickness or sin was."[13]

Another contributor writes: "The lack of means is a lupine ghost sired by the same spectre as the lack of health, and both must be met and put to flight by the same mighty weapons of our spiritual warfare."[14]

In the files of the Journal there are many reports of the material prosperity of individual Christian Scientists. It is an evidence of "at-oneness" with God to prosper in business just as it is to overcome disease.[Pg 187]

"Is it reasonable to believe, as we have believed, that popular fancy, whims, climate, the state of politics, any or all of a hundred lawless elements, are able to ruin a man's business while he stands by and doesn't know enough even to make an intelligent protest?"

Government, civilization, and even "climate" are demonstrated to be unreal, but the reality and importance of "business" is never questioned, and that each and every Christian Scientist should get on in the world remains a matter of indubitable moment, even to Mrs. Eddy herself.

Mrs. Eddy's Views on Marriage

Among the many incidental ideas which Mrs. Eddy has added to Quimbyism are her theory that the Godhead is more feminine than masculine, and her qualified disapproval of matrimony. Quimby himself had a large family and saw nothing unspiritual in marriage. In defining the real purpose of marriage Mrs. Eddy says nothing about children; "to happify existence by constant intercourse with those adapted to elevate it, is the true purpose of marriage." In her chapter on marriage she says: "The scientific morale of marriage is spiritual unity.... Proportionately as human generation ceases, the unbroken links of eternal harmonious being will be spiritually discerned."

In her chapter called "Wedlock" in Miscellaneous Writings (1897) Mrs. Eddy, after a vague and evasive discussion of the subject, squarely puts the question: "Is marriage nearer right than celibacy? Human knowledge inculcates that it is, while Science indicates that it is not." In the same chapter she further says: "Human nature has bestowed on a wife the right to become a mother; but if the wife esteems not this privilege, by mutual consent, exalted and increased affections, she may win a higher."

Mrs. Eddy apparently believes that Jesus Christ taught us to ignore family relations: "Jesus acknowledged no ties of the flesh. He said: 'Call no man your father upon the earth; for one is your father which is in heaven.' Again he asked: 'Who is my mother, and who are my brethren but they who will do the will of my father?' We have no record of his calling any man by the name of father."

Future of Christian Science

Whoever has watched the amazing growth of the Christian Science sect must feel some curiosity as to its future. Mrs. Eddy's followers are by no means the only people who are trying to meet, by suggestive treatment, nervous diseases and the many functional disorders which result from overwork, worry, and discouragement. The foremost neurologists of all countries are employing more and more this suggestive method which is the essential reality in Christian Science healing. The followers of the "New Thought" school apply this principle in their own way, and the hundreds of unaffiliated "mind curists" and "mental healers" are each applying it in ways more or less honest and legitimate.

In October, 1906, Dr. Elwood Worcester and Dr. Samuel McComb, the rector and the associate rector of the Emmanuel (Episcopal) Church of Boston, organized the Emmanuel Church Health Class, for the treatment of nervous disorders. Believing that, as Professor William James has said, "the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith," the workers at Emmanuel Church have been endeavoring to cure nervous disorders by putting the patient at peace with himself. Every patient is examined by a physician, and if the root of his disorder proves to be nervous (hysteria, alcoholism, a drug habit, insomnia, or any one of the many forms of neurasthenia) he is admitted into the Health Class for psycho-therapeutical treatment. Here he is encouraged to unburden himself of the distress or perplexity which haunts him, and is given the kind of suggestive treatment which seems best adapted to his disorder. Dr. Worcester studied psychology under Wundt, in Germany, and taught it for six years at Lehigh University. Dr. McComb studied psychology at Oxford. The records of the Emmanuel Health Class show that of the 178 cases treated between March, 1907, and November, 1907, the condition of seventy-five patients has been improved, forty-eight have not been helped at all, while in fifty-five cases the result is unknown.[15]

Mrs. Eddy's Opposition to the Mind Cure Movement

Mrs. Eddy and her followers have given a demonstration too great to be overlooked, of the fact that many ills which the sufferer believes entirely physical can be reached and eradicated by "ministering to a mind diseased," by persuading the sick man continually to suggest to himself ideas of health and hope[Pg 188] and happiness and usefulness, instead of brooding upon the emptiness and unanswered needs of his life or upon his failing physical powers. Mrs. Eddy's sect, more than any other one of the cults which believe in and practise this method of bettering the patient's physical condition through his mind, has forced the most hide-bound medical practitioners to take account of this old but newly applied force in therapeutics.

But what is Mrs. Eddy's own attitude toward the general awakening to the value of psycho-therapeutics in the treatment of human diseases? She declares that every kind of mind cure and suggestive treatment except her own is dangerous and harmful. As one of Mrs. Eddy's students wrote in the Christian Science Journal, September, 1901, "The loyal Christian Scientist knows that neither he nor his patient should read or study the books of any other author than those of our beloved Leader in order to learn the Science of the Christ truth, which she is teaching and demonstrating to this age."

Mrs. Eddy's own editorials in the Journal are never so bitter as when she is attacking the mental healers who do not practise her own copyrighted variety of mind cure. Recently the Christian Science Sentinel of January 18, 1908, stated that Mrs. Eddy cannot countenance the work done at the Emmanuel Church. Mr. Archibald McClellan, the editor of that publication, published an article entitled "No Christian Psychology." He says: "Christian Psychology is equivalent to Christian phrenology, physiology and mythology, whereas Jesus predicted and demonstrated Christian healing on the basis of Spirit, God. He never complicated Spirit with matter, etc.... Her teachings (Mrs. Eddy's) show further that she cannot consistently endorse as Christianity the two distinctly contradictory statements and points of view contained in the term 'Christian psychology'—otherwise Christian materialism."

Mrs. Eddy holds that any system of healing which at all takes account of, or admits physical structure, is not Christian.

Mrs. Eddy's endeavor has been to convert a universal principle into a personal property. And she has gone a wonderfully long way toward doing it. Thousands of people believe that they owe their health and happiness to a healing principle which was revealed by God to Mrs. Eddy and by Mrs. Eddy to mankind; that since the ministry of Jesus Christ upon earth no one of the human race has understood this principle except Mrs. Eddy, and that she is the only human being now alive who fully understands it; that when she dies her works alone will stand between the world and darkness.

But all the while that Mrs. Eddy was energetically copyrighting, and pruning, and expelling, and disciplining, that other stream which came from Quimby, through Dr. Evans and through Julius Dresser and his wife, was slowly and quietly doing its work.[16] Mind Cure and New Thought grew up side by side with Christian Science. As organizations they were not nearly so effective, and their ranks, like Mrs. Eddy's, were often darkened by the adventuress and the battered soldier of fortune. But the Mental healers and the New Thought healers treated the sick on exactly the same principle which Mrs. Eddy's successful healers employed.

As to the future of Mrs. Eddy's church, her own attitude toward every attempt to investigate and to apply liberally the principle of mental healing, seems to determine that. It has been possible for her, during her own lifetime, absolutely to prohibit preaching, thinking, independent writing,—investigation or inquiry of any sort—in her churches. But after her death, when that compelling hand is withdrawn, either the church must renew itself from among the ignorant and superstitious, as Mormonism has done, or it must permit its members to use their minds. Those who use their minds will discover that Christian Science is only one method of applying a general truth, and that it is a method which is hampered by a great deal that is illogical and absurd; that if Christian Science, as Mrs. Eddy has promulgated it, were universally believed and practised, it would be the revolt of a species against its own physical structure; against its relation to its natural physical environment, against the needs of its own physical organism, against the perpetuation of its kind. The moment a Christian Scientist realizes that the helpful and hopeful principle of his religion can operate quite independently of all the inconsequential theories which Mrs. Eddy has attached to it, that moment he is, of course, lost to Mrs. Eddy. Mrs. Eddy's church organization stands as a sort of dyke between the general principle of mind cure[Pg 189] and Mrs. Eddy's very empirical, violent, and temperamental interpretation of that principle. It is the future of psycho-therapeutics that will determine the future of Christian Science. If "Mind Cure," "Christian Psychology," and regular physicians offer the benefits of suggestive treatment in a more rational and direct way than does Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy's church will find in them very formidable competition. On the other hand, if Christian Scientists throw down their barriers and join the general mind-cure movement, and the two branches of Quimbyism meet, then half of Mrs. Eddy's life-work is lost. The labor of her days has been to keep these two streams apart; to prove one the true and the other the false. Her efforts to stem the progress of all other schools of mental healing have been secondary only to her efforts to advance her own. Yet, unconsciously and against her own wish, she has been the most effective instrument in promoting the interest of the whole movement.

On the theoretical side, Mrs. Eddy's contribution to mental healing has been, in the main, fallacious, pseudodoxal, and absurd, but upon the practical side she has been wonderfully efficient. New movements are usually launched and old ideas are revivified, not through the efforts of a group of people, but through one person. These dynamic personalities have not always conformed to our highest ideals; their effectiveness has not always been associated with a large intelligence or with nobility of character. Not infrequently it has been true of them—as it seems to be true of Mrs. Eddy—that their power was generated in the ferment of an inharmonious and violent nature. But, for practical purposes, it is only fair to measure them by their actual accomplishment and by the machinery they have set in motion.

THE END

HER FRUITS

MARY ELEANOR ROBERTS

These are her fruits, kindness and gentleness,
And gratefully we take them at her hands;
Patience she has, and pity for distress,
And love that understands.

Ah, ask not how such rich reward was won,
How sharp the harrow in the former years,
Or mellowed in what agony of sun,
Or watered with what tears.
[Pg 190]

THE KEY TO THE DOOR

BY FIELDING BALL

ILLUSTRATIONS BY WALTER JACK DUNCAN

"There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see.
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There was—and then no more of Thee and Me."

The postmaster was lounging in an open window, cleaning his fingernails with his pocket-knife, as Allison went into the post-office. He rose with some show of animation at sight of the tall, boyish figure in the doorway.

"I got a hired girl for you all right, Mr. Allison," he said, advancing to meet him. "Used to work down to Webb City, in a restaurant, but got tired of it—hours too hard. She's a good cook, and she knows how to get things on the table so they look real nice—I knew that would mean considerable to you folks."

He went on to dwell at length upon the girl's good points, becoming more nervously demonstrative in his praise as he found that Allison's face reflected none of his enthusiasm, but remained unexpectedly impassive and non-committal.

"You have been very kind, Mr. Barbour," he said, with impersonal civility. "Would you be so good as to get me my mail?"

He took the letters which the man handed him and walked out without giving him another glance.

Just outside of the door he met Jim Brown, man-of-all-work at the station. Allison himself was station agent. Allison looked at Jim as he passed with such a cold, unswerving gaze that in spite of himself the other dropped his eyes. Jim had been present at the interview between Billings and Allison that morning; Allison knew that he was coming now to tell the postmaster about it. The young man set his lips hard at the thought of some of the things he had done during the last two weeks, when he had been full of glad confidence in himself and in this invention of his—this brake which Billings had told him an hour ago was not worth the stuff of which it was made. The recountal of his performance would doubtless afford much entertainment to the pair in the post-office. Just yesterday he had asked the postmaster to find for him, if possible, a capable maid-servant, and had said, without thinking anything in particular about it, that he would pay a satisfactory girl five dollars a week. Five dollars a week—it had not seemed much to him; he had been amused by Barbour's evident astonishment. To-day he saw more reason in it.... Then there was that perfume for Gertrude—he should have to countermand his order for that. He had no choice in the matter, he told himself, with bitter resentment that a paltry nine dollars should mean so much to him. In spite of the fact that he had come to this decision before he reached the drug store, he did not go in, but walked past with his head in the air, looking neither to right nor to left. He felt as though every one must already know of the morning's experience; and he was fearful of meeting eyes alight with cynical understanding.

The postmaster and Jim watched the young man from the post-office door as he made his way up the one hilly street of the little town. The soldierly precision of his carriage and gait, together with a certain air of distinction about his clothes, made him seem singularly out of keeping with all about him—the narrow, stony road, the straggling white houses on each side of it, the unkempt yards, the neglected trees, the dilapidated sidewalks half hidden by an amazing growth of dog-fennel.

"You'd know somep'n had gone wrong by the way he had his head reared back, wouldn't you?" Jim asked with a smile on his dark face.

He had just finished telling Barbour of what had happened that morning. Several days before,[Pg 191] Allison had got word from the railroad company that some time this week they would send a man to tell him what offer they were prepared to make for the brake on which he had been working for so many weeks, and had finally finished; and this morning Billings had put in his appearance. The brake was practically good for nothing, he assured Allison—certainly not worth a cent to the company; and he told him the reasons why this was so.

He went on to say, however, that he felt sorry for Allison,—sorry for that nice little wife of his,—Jim smiled grimly as he repeated the condescending phrase,—that he knew they were having a mighty hard time of it. Sixty dollars a month was not enough for a single man to live on decently, much less a married one; and the way in which Allison had been brought up made it harder. He didn't mean to criticize Allison's father—he didn't believe in criticizing the dead—but he certainly should not bring up his son in such a way that he couldn't make a living for himself if necessary. You never could tell what was going to happen in this world; Allison wasn't the first gay young fellow who had grown up not expecting ever to have to do a day's work, and then all of a sudden had found himself glad to get almost any sort of a job. Well, as he said, he was sorry for Allison, and ready to help him out a little. He meant to see to it that Allison got something out of this brake of his—a couple of hundred dollars, perhaps; of course, two hundred dollars wasn't a great deal; it wouldn't mean much to him—Billings—but it would probably mean considerable to Allison.

"Never changed face. Set there starin' at Billings with those darned cool eyes o' his that look's if they'd never blink 'f a cannon went off under his very nose—waited till Billings got good and done, 'n' then said with that high 'n' mighty air of his, f'r all the world's if he was speakin' to some poor, half-witted Swede: 'Two hundred dollars doesn't mean as much to me as you think, Mr. Billings.' Then he stopped a minute, 'n' went on in a little diff'rent tone, 'You needn't concern yourself any further about me and my troubles'—'n' that had very much the sound of 'I'll make kindling-wood of you if you do!' Then he looks at his watch. 'I've given you all the time I can spare,' says he; and with that he swings around 'n' begins looking over some papers on his desk. Billings reddened up a little—coughed 'n' wriggled around in his chair, 'n' tried to get up courage to say somethin' more—but he simply didn't darst. He went off finally lookin' sort o' cheap. Mist' Allison never give him another glance, no more'n 's if he was that dog o' yours."

The postmaster was silent for a minute or two. Then he turned to Jim. "I'm not particularly sorry to see Billings get left," he said. "Still, it might be just as well for Mr. Allison if he'd have kept on the right side of Billings from the start. There's no use talking, he's got an awfully uppish way with him, that boy."

Jim nodded an emphatic assent. Along with other smaller grievances there still rankled in his mind the memory of how, when Allison had first come as station agent to the little town, a year ago now, he had one day asked Jim if he did not suppose that the nice-looking girl who had passed their house with Jim the Sunday before could be induced to come and work for them. Allison had asked the question in all innocence, not dreaming that this unshaven young man in blue seersucker shirt and greasy trousers considered himself in every way Allison's equal, and was as much affronted by this suggestion as Allison would have been by one of the same sort. Jim could not forgive him for it—any admiration he felt for Allison was invariably tempered by resentful remembrance.

"It's about time he woke up to the fact that he doesn't have a father worth two millions behind him these days," Barbour went on. "Extravagant! Lord, he never stops to ask what a thing costs before getting it, as long as he has money in his pockets. Went into the book-store the other afternoon to get some magazines—carried off about everything Henry had in the place. Three dollars and fifteen cents his bill was. Never thinks, when he's buying anything in the way of shirts or ties, of getting less than half a dozen at a time—s'pose he hasn't found out you can buy them any other way. And his laundry bills—guess he about runs the laundry. And just yesterday he was telling me in the most off-hand way that he would pay five dollars a week to a hired girl. Five dollars a week! I could hardly believe my ears. But I guess he's gone back on that." The postmaster smiled sourly.

The young man of whom they were talking was almost at the top of the hill by this time. So far he had met few people; and those whom he had met had not forced any formal recognition from him. But as he passed Mrs. Jennings, she called out a greeting that could not be ignored. Gertrude had stopped once to talk to her and to admire her collection of shells; and since then every noon and night he found her waiting here by her gate to speak to him; and she invariably asked the same question about his wife, always in the same tone, always with the same inflection. The meeting with[Pg 192] her had become one of the frightfully unvarying things of his day. As he walked on now, he saw stretching before him an interminable vista of days, weeks, years—one deadly sameness of hard work, long hours, scanty pay, poor living, growing debts—and inextricably mixed up with it all, this dreary, gaunt black figure, waiting always for him at the top of the hill.... He had not realized what it meant to him, the success of his invention—how much he was depending on it. He felt now as he might if, moving blindly through a dark passage, hoping any minute to see a glimmer of light ahead, an outlet into the open air, he had run full into a locked door—a door to which he had no key.

The thought of going home to his wife brought no comfort with it. They had long ago ceased to be honest with each other, Gertrude and he; their attempts to make the best of a sorry situation had in the end become a barrier which held them apart. Gertrude would not admit that she was ever tired, or lonesome, or discouraged; would find no fault with their poor little house, their scanty means, her unaccustomed duties. She never spoke of the past any more, nor of the future, lest in that there might be an implied criticism of the present; she was resolutely, unvaryingly, aggressively contented. But this contentment was too constant, too uniform, like false color on a woman's cheek. He sometimes wished she would throw pretense to the winds—would put her head on his shoulder, and sob and cry, and confess that she wished she were dead—or that she would upbraid him, reproach him, call him some of the hard names he called himself. But she was insistently cheerful; and there was nothing for him to do, in the face of this, but play an awkward second to her, ignore his aching back, his sore hands, his throbbing head, and keep a resolute silence as to all that happened to vex and humiliate and perplex and hurt him. It was not always easy; to-day he was conscious that he was walking more and more slowly as he drew near the house.

How poor and forlorn it looked in this glare of light! During these last weeks his thoughts had turned often to that stately house where he had lived for nineteen years—its green, close-clipped lawn glistening under a perpetual play of water, its great beds of white and green and cardinal foliage plants, its shut-in porches, its awnings, its flowering shrubs, its vines, its heavy iron fence. He looked with bitter attentiveness at the dingy frame cottage he was approaching, noticing each homely detail—the dish-towels spread on the bushes in the back yard, the mop hanging by the door, the kerosene can under the step, the lean hen scuttling away under the currant bushes, the vegetable garden lying parched and dry along the fence. There was a small artificial mound of stones at one side of the house, with a somewhat scanty growth of portulaca springing from its top. The last occupant of the house was responsible for that adornment. Allison wondered how they had happened to leave it there so long. That mound of stones—all his hopes might have been buried under it and he could not have hated it more. It stood, somehow, for all that chafed and irritated him here—the moral, mental, and physical stuntedness of the people—their petty ambitions, petty jealousies, petty quarrels, petty virtues.

Allison was seized with a sudden vague fear as he saw on the kitchen window-sill, just where he had left it at seven this morning, the package which Gertrude had promised to take to Mr. Fulton as soon as she had finished the breakfast dishes. He noticed almost at the same instant that the kitchen door was open; countless flies were sailing in and out; and there on the cellar door, in the blazing sunlight, was the morning's milk, thick and sour by this time. He quickened his steps—made his way hurriedly through the kitchen and dining-room, noticing, as he went, various signs of disorder. The kitchen fire was out—the floor unswept; the coffee he had knocked over when he had built the fire this morning lay where it had fallen: the room was full of its pungent odor. On the dining-room table were the remnants of breakfast, the oatmeal dry and stiff, the butter melted down to a thin oil. In the front room he found Gertrude, bending a flushed face over something she was writing. She gave a start of fright as he came in—then got very red.

"I sat down to write a little of that play I was telling you about last night"—she was picking up her papers with frantic haste as she spoke—"and I had no idea it was getting so late." She cast an appalled glance around the room, and hurried out to begin clearing off the table, making a great clatter with the dishes in her excitement and haste.

Allison stood for a minute looking after her wearily. Her manner hurt him. More than once, in days gone by, he had told her fondly that when she married him she should do nothing but what she liked to do—if she chose, she might work on her little dialogues and fairy stories from morning till night. The air of frightened apology which she wore—this servile haste—pained and irritated him. He threw himself into a chair and began mechanically to look over the mail which the postmaster had handed him. A week ago he had written to an Eastern firm asking for a catalogue of the[Pg 194] refrigerators they made. Here it was—bulky, imposing, abounding in alluring pictures of tile-lined refrigerators filled with game, fish, fruit, wine. He found he could buy their smallest and most inexpensive refrigerator, "built especially to supply a demand for low-priced goods,"—so the advertisement ran—for forty-five dollars. He dropped the book, and turned to his other letter. It was from a great retail dry-goods house, and was in answer to a request he had made for samples of dotted swiss—he had thought he would like to get Gertrude a dress such as she had worn when he first knew her. The samples were sent, and along with them a letter expressing pleasure at being able to serve him, and a desire further to accommodate him whenever possible; its extreme deference and respect was like a calculated sarcasm. He pushed it away from him and leaned back in his chair, looking about the room with a curious stare, as a convict, who has just heard that his sentence is for life, might gaze at the walls of his cell. It was a low-ceiled room, with an uneven floor, cheap woodwork, painted in an unsuccessful imitation of natural wood, and walls hung with faded paper of an indeterminate pattern and even more indeterminate color. To-day it was in greater confusion than usual, with white dust thick on table and chair, a window-shade askew, the music-rack disarranged, and a plate of grape-skins which Allison had left last night on the piano still standing there. But it was not the disorder which irritated Allison most, nor the signs of poverty, but the fact that the poverty was so genteel, so self-respecting, so determined to make the best of things and present a brave front to the world. The kerosene lamp had a shade of red, crinkled tissue-paper—the cheap net curtains were arranged with the utmost elaboration—a rug was artfully laid down in such a way as almost to cover the square of zinc on which the stove stood in the winter time, and all of Gertrude's photographs were placed with a view to concealing various defects and deficiencies. His loathing for all this was intensified by a memory of vast rooms stretching out one after the other, hushed and cool, with gracious shadows lending their mystery and romance to everything. With sudden restlessness he rose, and walked over to the window; but the smell of dust and dry, dead vegetation smothered him. Gertrude had raked the long, sparse brown grass all in one direction; it had a grotesque look of having been combed.

He seized his hat, and went to get Mr. Fulton's package from the window-sill. He had barely turned toward the gate, however, when his wife hurried out, remonstrating, apologizing, with an urgent hand on his arm. "It is important that Mr. Fulton should get these papers to-day," he said stiffly. It did not really matter whether Mr. Fulton got the roll of agricultural papers to-day, to-morrow, or next week; but Allison felt the necessity for doing something, it did not much matter what, to crush down his growing despair; and this was the only thing which suggested itself. Gertrude was persistent, however, in her entreaties that he come back; it was frightfully hot, and he already looked tired; she would take the papers to Mr. Fulton right after luncheon. He yielded at last, from sheer languidness, and came silently into the house. Gertrude's moist face, her loud, anxious voice, her warm, clinging hand, were exceedingly disagreeable to him—so much so that finally the desire to escape them became more importunate than any other.

He was again standing by the window, gazing out, when his wife came into the dining-room to set the table. He did not turn—gave no sign of seeing her.

"What are you thinking about, Philip?" she asked presently, with an effort to make her question sound casual.

"I am not thinking—at least I am trying not to," Allison answered, in a somewhat strained, unnatural voice. Why would she not leave him alone? Could she not see that he did not wish to talk?

"What was the last thing that you were thinking about before you stopped?" Gertrude spoke with painstaking gaiety.

Would she always keep up this dissimulation? Allison asked himself. For his part, he was done with it!

"I was thinking that this place was fit for a dog-kennel—and for nothing else!" he said. All the bitterness that was eating out his heart was in the low words.

"It does look pretty bad to-day," Gertrude acquiesced, after an appreciable interval of time.

"To-day!" Allison gave a hard, contemptuous little laugh. "As though it ever looked any other way!"

Gertrude did not reply.... When Allison noticed her silence, and turned to look at her, he saw that there was a peculiar light in her eyes, a red flush over all her face; after a moment's dazed wonder, he realized that she had misunderstood him—had misunderstood him utterly. His thoughts had been on the sagging floors, the cheap furniture, the marred wall-paper, the miserable ugliness and poverty of the house, and everything in it; but she had seen in his remark only scorn for her housekeeping, irritation at the room's untidiness. She[Pg 195] was very angry. As Allison realized this, a sudden fierce satisfaction possessed him. Now at last she would speak out, without pretence, without reserve! He should hear the truth at last.

But the wrathful look died out of her eyes. She began arranging the knives and forks, looking suddenly old, and steady, and sober.

"No, you're not." Allison made his tone as ugly as possible—and waited. Surely she would turn upon him now, overwhelm him with bitter words!

She made no answer of any kind, however, but turned and hurried into the kitchen, striking her arm clumsily against one side of the door as she passed through, as though she had not seen very well. He heard her moving rapidly about, getting his luncheon. She brought it in with her head in the air and her lips compressed. The coffee was muddy, the steak burned, the creamed potatoes scorched—she had been having bad luck. Allison ate every scrap of what she brought him. He did not dare look at her—did not dare ask her to forgive him. What right had he to do that? He lingered on the steps some time before starting for the station, fussing with his cuff, pulling his hat into shape, breaking off from the tree at the corner of the house the branch Gertrude had complained was in her way. His wife usually followed him to the door to tell him good-by; but to-day she was sweeping the dining-room vigorously, singing the while a very gay and cheerful tune. It was one to which they had often danced together in the old days; at the same moment at which he realized it, the song stopped, as though Gertrude had been silenced by the same memory that had come to him. He whistled tentatively; but she did not answer, though she was near enough to hear, as he knew from the sound of her broom.

Allison went about his work that afternoon with a droop to his head, and a dullness about his dark eyes, which Jim noticed with vague discomfort, and which made him wish heartily that he had not confided to the postmaster the story of Billings and the brake. He had quarreled with Gertrude—everything else seemed insignificant to Allison beside that. He had quarreled with Gertrude—Gertrude, who had been so brave, so uncomplaining, so patient, so forbearing—had gone away from her with the shadow of a misunderstanding between them. He kept repeating to himself everything he had said and everything she had said, recalling every tone and gesture. He wondered how he could have felt such a shrinking dislike as she stood with her hand—her poor little scarred hand!—on his arm, begging him to come back, to let her take the papers to Mr. Fulton. How sweet she had been—how sweet! And he!

He started for home a little earlier than usual—Jim urged him to go, with a certain rough friendliness, saying that he could look out for things at the station. On his way home Allison went to the post-office, hoping to get a letter for Gertrude from her mother or sister, and he told the postmaster very humbly and simply why he had not felt like talking this noon, and of the fact that he could not really afford to pay five dollars a week for a maid. It was very strange, but after he had begun, it was not at all hard to go on. He wondered vaguely how he could have thought the postmaster a meddlesome, malicious, vulgar young man; he seemed very sensible and friendly and respectful to-night.

Mrs. Jennings stood at the top of the hill, gaunt and black as usual; somehow Allison did not feel the usual resentment. He stopped to speak to her with unwonted warmth; and when, encouraged by his manner, she began to talk about Gertrude, and what a pretty girl, and what a smart girl, and what a sweet girl she was, he felt a sudden kindness for the old lady, and accepted almost demonstratively the bunch of magenta and orange vinnias she gave him to take to his wife.

As Allison went into the house, he noticed signs of a vigorous cleaning. The back steps had been scrubbed—were still wet; the kitchen floor was as white as the rough, dark boards could be made; the dining-room table was set with their finest table-cloth and prettiest dishes, and was gay with yellow flowers; fresh white curtains, breathing out sweetness, hung at the windows. A note was pinned to the corner of the table.

"If you should get home before I do," it ran, "this is to tell you that I have gone to Mr. Fulton's with those papers I promised to take right after luncheon—I forgot all about them till just now. I'll be back in three-quarters of an hour sure; it's half-past five now. Supper's all ready now but making the coffee. Be sure and wait."

He smoothed the hurried scrawl out tenderly, feeling as if something hard and cold in his left side had melted with a sudden gush of warmth. Back in three-quarters of an hour! He laughed aloud at the sanguineness of it. Why, it took him forty minutes to go to Mr. Fulton's and back! And the idea of telling him to be sure and wait! The little goose! Did she think he would take himself off in a temper at not finding her, as he had once months ago? He went out[Pg 197] to the kitchen to put his flowers in water, and to finish slicing an egg over the top of the bowl of salad there—Gertrude had evidently just begun to do it when the package outside the window caught her eye. He put on some water for the coffee, and brought in an armful of wood; then he strolled to the gate to wait for his wife. The neighbor's two-year-old baby came staggering down the walk in front of the house. Allison caught up the child in his arms, and lifted it to the top of the gate-post, beside him. This was the little girl for whom Gertrude had been making a dress the other day; she had looked very shocked—Gertrude—when he had asked her if she proposed to make clothes for all the dirty little brats in the neighborhood, and had told him with some dignity that Dolly was a very pretty baby, and was kept as clean as could be expected. Dolly was a pretty baby. He tightened the arm that was about her a little, and began to talk clumsy baby-talk to her; her mother looked on with a pleased smile from her front door. The sun was setting, and a strange bright peace was on everything.

Suddenly Allison's eyes were caught by an unaccustomed sight—a crowd of people, men, women, and children, advancing down the road, slowly, steadily, and silently—very silently. He surveyed them curiously, ignorantly. Suddenly a man spoke to the one next him—Allison saw the dip of his head—and almost at the same instant a child—a twelve-year-old girl—put up her hands to shade her eyes, staring intently at Allison, and then with a loud shriek ran wildly, blindly, in the other direction. And then Allison knew that this silent company meant disaster to him.

They dragged him away before he caught more than a glimpse of what they had in their midst—the limp, white-faced thing in the silly pink dress he had liked. She had started home by the short way, they told him—the short way over the old bridge—the bridge that every one knew was not safe. And how it happened no one could say—perhaps she had stumbled and caught hold of the rotten railing, and it had given under her hand; at any rate they had found her in the dry river-bottom, thirty feet below. He looked at them very calmly as they finished. "She is dead," he said quietly, "there is no need to tell me that." And then, suddenly, without a cry or any warning, he toppled over against the man nearest him.

But she was not dead. He came out of his delirium and fever three weeks later to find her limping around the room, looking a little pale and tired, but very pretty in some sort of ruffled white dress, with her hair done up in the puffs and rolls he had always liked. People had been very good, she told him when he was strong enough to listen and understand. The doctor had said that he could eat eggs before he could eat anything else—so everybody had been sending fresh eggs. Mary said she was going to buy an incubator and start to raising chickens—they couldn't eat half the eggs that were sent in, even if they ate nothing but custard. Mary was the pretty girl that they had seen walking with Mr. Brown one Sunday, and had thought would be a nice person to have around. She was going to stay with them all winter; Gertrude was going to teach her German and music, and she was going to teach Gertrude how to cook. She was doing all the work just now, she and the neighbors. Mrs. Ferry came in every morning to scrub the kitchen and black the stove. They said Gertrude must keep her hands nice—Philip had seemed more worried about her hands than about anything else, all the time he was sick. Did he see how soft and white they were? She had been washing them in buttermilk—the doctor's wife had suggested that—and putting some sort of cream on them that Mr. Gilson, the young man who clerked in the drug store, had sent up by Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown had been so kind—it had been he who had sat up with Philip when his fever was at its worst—he had chopped all the ice that they had used from first to last. He was out in the back yard now, fixing—but there, that was to be a surprise.

Allison lay very still, smoothing his wife's hand, and looking out through the open door at the dry grass of the yard, browner, dustier than ever, and at the portulaca waving on top of the pyramid of stones. He could hear Jim's whistle as he moved about the yard; some one at the back door was talking to Mary in a hushed, eager undertone; over on her porch Dolly was singing happily, sinking her voice to a mere murmur now and then at a low remonstrance from within the house. It all made a sort of accompaniment to Gertrude's happy talk.

Suddenly she stopped, and leaned her cheek against his, with a little sigh. "Isn't it a nice world, dear?" she whispered.

He turned so that he could look into her eyes, and said, with a little tremble in his voice:

THE WAYFARERS

MARY STEWART CUTTING

AUTHOR OF "LITTLE STORIES OF COURTSHIP," "LITTLE STORIES OF MARRIED LIFE," ETC.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALICE BARBER STEPHENS

XIX

"Slipped through your fingers like that! Like a—" Leverich's words were not fit for print. He had been away for a couple of days, and now sat tilted back in his office chair, a heavy, leather-covered thing not meant for tilting, his face puffed with anger, his mouth snarling—a wild beast balked of his prey. His eyes, ferociously insolent, dwelt on Justin, who, fine and keen and smiling a little, sat opposite him. Brute anger never had any effect on Justin but to give him a contemptuous, chill self-possession.

"Cater's been sending new consignments as fast as they could go for the past three days; he's loaded up with machines."

Leverich swore again. "Confounded fools, not to have made terms with Hardanger first! If we'd only known! If there was only some way to put a spoke in the wheel, even yet!"

"Oh, I've got the spoke, easily enough," said Justin indifferently. "The only trouble is, I can't use it."

"Got a spoke! Why in heaven didn't you say that before?" Leverich came down on the front legs of his chair with a force that sent it rolling ahead on its casters. "What are you sitting here for? What do you mean by telling me that you can't use it?"

"I can't, I tell you, Leverich. The information came to me in such a way that I can't touch it."

"What's the sense of talking, Leverich? Proof or no, I tell you, I can't use it. This isn't any funny business; you can see that. Don't you suppose, if I could use it, that I would? But there are some things a man can't do. At any rate, I can't. And that settles it."

Heaven knows he had gone over the matter insistently enough in the last few days, since the combination had been unwillingly given into his hands, but always with the foregone conclusion. The devil, as a rule, doesn't actively try to tempt us to evil: he simply confuses us, so that we are kept from using our reason. But this time he had no field for action. To use secret information against Cater, that could never have been had but for Cater's kindness to him in helping him to those bars in time of need, was first, last, and every time impossible to Justin Alexander. It was vain for argument to suggest that this very deed of kindness had worked his disaster—the fact remained the same. He might do other things; he might do worse things: this thing he could not do—not though the refusal worked his own ruin, not though Cater's ruin with Hardanger was insured anyway, but too late for the typometer to profit by it. Even if the typometer could by some means keep afloat until that day arrived, it would take a couple of years for such a timing-machine to regain its prestige in a foreign country.

Justin had no excess of sentiment; no quixotic impulse urged him to go and tell Cater what he had learned. It was Cater's business to look after his end of the game. If the price of material or labor was too cheap, he must know that there was something wrong with it. The stream of Justin's mind ran clear in spite of that feeling of sharp practice toward himself—nay, because of it; it was impossible to use the[Pg 200] weapon that a former kindness had placed in his hand. He looked at Leverich now with an expression which the latter quieted himself to meet. This was a situation, not for bluster and rage, but to be competently grappled with.

"How about your obligations? Do you call this fair dealing to us, Alexander? There's Lewiston's note; once this deal was settled, we would have paid that, as you know. But it's out of the question as things stand. We'll have to get our money out the best way we can. If this is your sense of honor—to sacrifice your friends! See here, Alexander, let's talk this out. When it comes to talking of ruin, no man can afford to stand on terms. We didn't put you into the typometer business on any kindergarten principles—it isn't to form your character. What we did, we did for profit; and if the profit isn't there, we get out. We've no objection to doing a kindness for any one, if we can do it and make a profit; but it stands to reason that we're not in the business for philanthropy any more than for kindergartening. We liked you, and we were willing to give you a place in the game if you could run it to suit us. But we don't consider any scheme that doesn't make money. What doesn't make money has to go. Profit, profit, profit—that's what every sane man puts first, and there's no justice in losing a chance to make it. What you lose, another man takes. If you make another man's wife and children better off, you stint your own. You've got to consider a question on all sides. No woman respects a man who can't make money; it's his everlasting business to make money, and she knows it. Your wife won't think much of your fine scruples if she's to go without for 'em. And, by the Lord, she's right! When you go into business, you've got to make up your mind to one of two things: you've either got to step hard on the necks of those below you, or you've got to lie down and let them wipe their feet on you."

Leverich had stopped at intervals for comment from Justin. Since none was offered, he went on, with the large and easy manner of one who feels the justice of his convictions: "No man ever accused me of being close. I'm free-handed, if I say it that shouldn't. I like to give, and I do give. If there's money wanted for charity, the committees know very well where to come. And my wife likes to give,[Pg 201] too; her name's on the books of twenty charitable organizations. But we give out of money I've made by not being free-handed—by getting every last cent that belonged to me. You see, I don't leave my wife out of my calculations—any man's a fool that does. She's got the right to have as good as I can give her. I wouldn't talk like this to most men, Alexander, but between you and me it's different. It pays to keep your wife in a good humor, when you've got to go home after a hard day's work; you take a dissatisfied woman, and she'll make your home a hell. I know men—Great Scott! I don't know how they live!" He paused again. Justin did not answer. He sat with his head on his hand, looking, not at Leverich, but to one side of him.

"When I say I've made the money," continued Leverich, "I mean that I actually have made most of it—made it out of nothing! like the first chapter of Genesis. If a man has money to start with, he can add to it as easily as you can roll up a snowball. It's no credit to him. But I've had only my brains. I've seen money where other men couldn't, and nothing has stood in my way of getting to it. That's the whole secret of success. And my attitude's fair—you couldn't find a fairer. When one of your clerks falls sick, you pay him his full salary for three or four months till he's around again. I know! Well, I don't do any such stunts. When I was a clerk myself, I was on the sick-list once for three months, and nobody paid me. After the first month I was bounced, and I didn't expect anything else. I didn't expect any philanthropical business, and I don't give it. That's fair, isn't it? I don't give quarter, and I don't expect any. If I'm squeezed, I pay. I don't stand still in the middle of a deal and snivel about what I can do and what I can't do. I don't snivel about what you call moral obligations. I only recognize money obligations. Why, see here, Alexander," he broke off, "if you use the influence you spoke of, you don't have to tell me what it is—you don't have to tell anybody but Hardanger. Cater himself needn't know that you had anything to do with it."

"Very well, then; it comes down to this: If you fail us now, out of any of your fool scruples toward that poor devil across the street,—who's bound to get the blood sucked out of him anyway,—you ruin your own prospects, and[Pg 202] you try and cheat us out of the money we put up on you. By ——, if you see any honor in that, I don't."

"Mr. Leverich," said Justin, raising his head simply, with a steely gleam in his eyes that matched the other's, "when I try to cheat you or Lewiston or any man out of what has been put up on me, I'll give you leave to say what you please. At present I'll say good morning."

Leverich shrugged his shoulders and turned his back as he bent over his desk. Justin picked up his hat and went out, brushing, as he did so, against a dark, pleasant-faced man who had been sitting in the next room. Something in his face instantly conveyed to Justin the knowledge that the conversation he had just been engaged in had grown louder than the partition warranted. The next instant he recognized the man as a Mr. Warren, of Rondell & Co. Both men turned to look back at each other, and both bowed. The action had a certain definiteness in it, unwarranted by the slightness[Pg 203] of the meeting. The next moment Justin was in the street.

The active clash of steel always roused the blood in him; he felt actively stronger for combat. He was competently apportioning toward Lewiston's note the different sums coming in this month. There were large bills to be paid to the typometer's credit by several firms, one of them Coneways'. Coneways represented the largest counted-in asset for the entire year—it was the backbone of the establishment. If it went to Lewiston, what would be left for the business? That could come next. Lewiston was first. Leverich and Martin would exact every penny of their principal after these intervening six months of the year were over. Well, let them! Lewiston's note was what he had to think of now.

All business undertakings, no matter how wild, how precarious, to the sense of the beholder, are started with confidence in their ultimate success; it is the one trite, universal reason for starting—that faith is the capital that all possess in common. Some of these doubtful ventures, while never really succeeding, do not really fail at once. They are always hard up, but they keep on, though gradually sinking lower all the time. Others seem to exist by the continuance of that first faith alone—a sheer optimism that keeps the courage alive and keen enough to seize hold of the slightest driftwood of opportunity, binding this flotsam into a raft that takes them triumphantly out on the high tide. For all the long drag, the anxiety, the physical strain, the harassment, failure in itself seemed as inherently impossible to Justin as that he should be stricken blind or lose the use of his limbs. He must think harder to find a way of accomplishment; that was all.

His step had its own peculiar ring in it as he left Leverich's, but it lost somewhat of its alertness as he turned down the street that led to the factory, unaltered, since his first coming to it, save for the transformation of the neglected house he had noticed then, with its gruesome interior, which had been turned into a freshly painted shop long ago. The effect of association is inexorable. There was not a corner, not a building, along that too familiar way, that was not hung with some thought of care. There were moments of such strong repulsion that he felt as if he couldn't turn down that street again—moments lately when to enter the factory with its red-brick-arched yawning mouth of a doorway occasioned a physical nausea—a foolish, womanish state which irritated him.

The mail brought him the usual miscellaneous assortment of orders and bills, and letters on minor points, and questions as to the typometer. The mail was rather apt to be encouraging in its suggestions of a large trade. Two letters this morning were full of enthusiastic encomium on the use of the machine. In spite[Pg 204] of an enormous and long-outstanding bill for office stationery, insistently clamorous for payment—one of those bills looked upon as trifles until they suddenly become staggering—there was, after the mail, a general feeling of wielding the destiny of a large part of the world, where the typometer was a power.

A little woman whose husband, now dead, had been in his employ came in to get help in collecting his insurance; she was timid before Justin, deeply grateful for his kind and effective assistance. Two men came in, at different times, for advice and introductions to important people. A friend brought in a possible customer from the Sandwich Islands. There was all that aura of prosperity that has nothing to do with the payment of one's bills.

Justin took both the friend and the customer out to lunch, his agreeable sense of hospitality only dimmed by the disagreeable fact of its taking every cent of the five dollars he had expected to last for the week. He was "strapped." The luncheon took longer, also, than he had counted on its doing. The morning, begun well, seemed to lead up only to sordid and anxious details—a sense of non-accomplishment, induced also by small requisitions from different people, requiring cash from a cash-drawer that was usually empty.

It was a welcome relief to figure, with Harker's assistance, on the large sums coming in at the end of the month from Coneways. There were a hundred ways for them to go, but they were to go to Lewiston. Perhaps, after all, as Harker astutely suggested, Lewiston would be satisfied with a partial payment and extend the rest of the note. While they were still consulting, word was brought in that Mr. Lewiston was there.

Mr. Lewiston was a young man, small-featured, black-haired, smooth-shaven, and with an air of nattiness and fashion, set at odds at present by a very pale and anxious face and eager, dilated black eyes. He cut short Justin's greeting with the words:

"Well, I was just wanting to speak to you about it myself," said Justin easily. "Have a cigar?"

"Thank you," said Lewiston mechanically, and as mechanically holding out his hand for the cigar, evidently forgetting it the next moment. "The fact is, I don't want to seem importunate, but if you could pay off that note fifteen days before date,—a week from to-day, that is,—we'd discount it to satisfy you, if you can collect now. I didn't want to bother you[Pg 205] about it, and I tried outside first, but nobody will take up the paper just now, except at a ruinous rate. If you could make it convenient, Alexander." Young Lewiston sat with his small, eager face bent forward over his knees, his lips twitching slightly. "You know, that money wasn't loaned on strictly business principles, Alexander, but for friendship; I got father to consent to it. And if you could let us have it now, it would save us a world of trouble. It's really not much—only ten thousand."

Justin shook his head, his keen blue eyes fixed on the other. "I can't let you have it, Lewiston; I wish I could! But I'm waiting payments myself. Can't you pull out without it?"

Lewiston drew in his breath. "Oh, yes, of course we'll have to; but it means— Well, I know you would if you could, Alexander; I told father so—father in a way holds me responsible. He was in London when I renewed the note the last time. There isn't anything to interfere with the payment when it's due?"

"For if that should slip up—" continued young Lewiston, wrapped in somber contemplation of his own affairs alone; he threw his arms outward with a gesture suddenly tragic in its intensity, paused an instant, then wrung Justin's hand silently and departed.

Justin wheeled a chair around with an instantly brightened face. "Sit down. I'm mighty glad to see you." He looked smilingly at his visitor, whose presence, long-limbed, straight, clean, and clear-eyed, always elicited a peculiar admiration from other men. "I heard that you had a room at the Snows' now, while Billy is away, but I haven't laid eyes on you for a month."

"I've been coming in on a later train every morning and going out again on a very much later one at night. I'm back in town on the paper for a while."

"Why don't you settle down to something worth while?" asked Justin, with the reserved disapproval of the business man for any mode of life but his own.

"Settle down to this kind of thing?" said[Pg 206] Girard thoughtfully. "Well, I did think of it last year, when I undertook those commissions for you. But what's the use—yet awhile, at any rate? You see, I can always make enough money for what I want and to spare, and there's nobody else to care. I like my liberty! The love of trade doesn't take hold of me, somehow—and you have to have such a tremendous amount of capital to keep your place. By the way, have you sold the island yet?" The island was a small one up near Nova Scotia, taken once for a debt.

"Fine," said Justin in a conventionally prosperous tone, with a sudden sight of a bottomless pit yawning below him. "I've a few things on my mind lately—but they're all right now. By the way, how do you like it at the Snows'?"

"Oh, all right." Girard's gray eyes smiled in an irrepressible smile. "I score high at present. They all approve of me, and I am told that I am the only man who has never run into the Boston fern or got tangled in the Wandering Jew. Miss Bertha and I have long talks together—she's great. As for Mrs. Snow—she heard Sutton speak of her the other night to Ada as 'the old lady,' I assure you that since—" He shook his head, and both men laughed.

"Thank you," said Girard, an indefinable stiffening change instantly coming over him. "By the way, I mustn't forget what I came for, before I hurry off."

He took some bills out of his long, flat leather wallet as he rose. "Do you remember lending that sixty dollars to my friend Keston last year? He turned up yesterday, and asked me to see that you got this."

"I'd forgotten all about it," averred Justin. He had not realized until he took the bills that he had been keeping up all day by main strength, with that caved-in sensation of there being nothing back of it—nothing back of it. There are times when the touch of money is as the elixir of life. Justin, holding on by the skin of his teeth for ten thousand dollars, and needing imperatively at least as much more, felt that with this paltry sixty dollars it was suddenly possible to draw a free breath, felt a sheer lightness of spirit that showed how terrible was the persistent weight under which he was living. The very feeling of those separate bills in his pocket made him calmly sanguine.

He got ready to go home a little earlier than usual, saying lightly to Harker, who had come in for his signature to some papers:

"Those payments will begin to straggle in next week. Coneways' isn't due until the 31st—the very last minute! But he's always prompt, thank Heaven—what are you doing?"

He even thought of Lois on his way, and stopped to buy her some flowers. It was the first time he had thought of her unconsciously for a week. While he was waiting for a car to pass before he crossed the street, his eye caught the headline on a paper a newsboy was holding out to him:

GREAT CRASH

CONEWAYS & CO. FAIL

IN BOSTON

"I don't think Justin looks very well," said Dosia that afternoon. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, with her arms spread out half-protectingly over Lois. The latter was only resting; she had been up and around the house now for three or four weeks, and, although she looked unusually fragile, seemed well, if not very strong.

The baby, wrapped in a blue embroidered blanket, with only a round forehead and a small pink nose visible, was of that satisfactory variety entirely given to sleep. Zaidee and even Redge, adoring little sister and brother, had been allowed to hold him in their arms, so securely unstirring was their little burden. Lois, who had passionately rebelled against the prospect of additional motherhood, exhibited a not unusual phase of it now in as passionately adoring this second boy. He seemed peculiarly, intensely her own, not only a baby, but a spiritual possession that communicated a new strength to her. Lois was changed. She had always been beautiful, as a matter of fact, but there was something withheld, mysterious, in her expression, as if she were taking counsel of some half-slumberous force within, as of one listening at a shell for the murmur of the ocean.

Not only Lois, but everything else, seemed changed to Dosia, at the same time being also flatly, unchangeably natural. She had longed—oh, how she had longed!—to be back here. Even while loving and working in her so-called home, she had felt that this was her real home, although here her cruelest blows had fallen on her; even while bleeding with the wrench of[Pg 207] parting from her own flesh and blood, she had felt that this was the real home, for here she had really lived; and it was the home of the nicer, more delicate instincts. After the crude housekeeping, the lack of comforts that made the simplest nursing a grinding struggle with circumstance, it was a blessed relief to get back to a sphere where minor details were all in order as a matter of course. The Alexanders, with their three children, kept only one maid now; but even that restriction did not prevent the unlimited flow of hot and cold water!

Yet she had also dreaded this returning,—how she had dreaded it!—with that old sickening shame which came over her inevitably as she thought of certain people and places and days. The mere thought of seeing Mrs. Leverich or George Sutton and that chorus of onlookers was like passing through fire. One braces one's self to withstand the pain of scenes of joy or sorrow revisited, to find that, after all, when the moment comes, there is little of that dreaded pain. It has been lived through and the climax passed in that previsioning which imagination made more intense, more harrowingly real, than the reality.

Mrs. Leverich stopped her carriage one day to greet Dosia, and to ask her, with a tentative semblance of her old effusion, to come and make her a visit—an effusion which immediately died down into complete non-interest, on Dosia's polite refusal; and the incident was not especially heart-racking at the time, though afterward it set her unaccountably trembling. Mrs. Leverich had in the carriage with her a small, thin, long-nosed man with a pale-reddish mustache and hair, who, gossip said, passed most of his time at the Leverichs'—he was seen out driving alone with Myra nearly every day. He was "an old friend from home." It had been gossip at first, but it was growing to be scandal now, with audible wonder as to how much Mr. Leverich knew about it.

Her avoidance of George Sutton was as nothing to his desire of avoiding her. He dived with surreptitious haste down side streets when he saw her coming, or disappeared within shop doorways. Once, when Dosia confronted him inadvertently on the platform of a car, and he had perforce to take off his hat and murmur, "Good morning," he turned pale and was evidently scared to death. After this he only appeared in the village street guarded on either side by a female Snow—usually Ada and her mother, though occasionally Bertha served as escort instead of the latter. The elder Snows, in spite of this apparent security, were in a state of constant nervous tension over Mr. Sutton's attention to Ada. He had not "spoken" yet, but it had begun to be felt severely of late that he ought to speak. Whenever Ada came into the house, her face was eagerly scanned by both mother and sister to see from its look if it bore any trace of the fateful words having been uttered. Every one knew, though how no one could tell, that that bold thing, Dosia Linden, had tried to get him once, and failed.

The thing that had unaccountably stirred her most since her arrival was an unexpected meeting with Bailey Girard. Dosia, with Zaidee and Redge held by either hand and pressing close to her as they walked merrily along, suddenly came upon a gray-clad figure emerging from the post-office. He seemed to make an instinctive movement as if to draw back, that sent the swift color to her cheeks and then turned them white. Were all the men in the place trying to avoid her? Dosia thought, with bitter humor; but, if it were so, he instantly recovered himself, and came forward, hat in hand, with a quick access of bright courtesy, a punctilious warmth of manner. He walked along with her a few paces as he talked, lifting Zaidee over a flooded crossing, before going once more on his way. He was nothing to her, the stranger who had killed her ideal; yet all day it was as if his image were photographed in the colors of life upon the retina of her eye. She could not push it away, try as she might.

Of Lawson Dosia had heard only such vague rumors as had sifted through the letters written by Lois. He had been reported as going on in his old way in the mining-camps, drifting from one to another. She heard nothing more now. He was the only one who had really loved her up here, except Lois, who loved her now. Dosia had slipped into her new position of sister and helper as if she had always filled it. She was not an outsider any more; she belonged.

As she sat bending over Lois now, her attitude was instinct with something high-mindedly lovely. The Dosia who had only wanted to be loved now felt—after a year of trial and conflict with death—that she only wanted, and with the same youthful intensity, to be very good, even though it seemed sometimes to that same youthfulness a strange and tragic thing that it should be all she wanted. The mysterious, fathomless depression of youth, as of something akin to unknown primal depths of loneliness, sometimes laid its chill hand on her heart; but when Dosia "said her prayers," she got, child-fashion, very near to a Some One who brought her an intimate tender comfort of resurrection and of life.

"I don't think Justin seems well," she repeated, Lois, looking up at her with calmly expressionless[Pg 208] eyes from her pillow, having taken no notice of the remark. "He has changed, I think, even in the ten days since I came."

"He has something on his mind," assented Lois, with a note of languor in her voice. "I suppose it's the business. I made up my mind to ask him about it to-night. He has been out every evening lately, and I hardly see him at all before he goes off in the morning, now that I don't get down to breakfast."

"Oh, he gave me a message for you this morning," cried Dosia, with compunction at having so far forgotten it. "He said that Mr. Larue had come in to inquire about you yesterday. He is going to send you a basket of strawberries and roses from his place at Collingswood to-morrow."

"Eugene Larue!" Lois' lips relaxed into a pleased curve; a slight color touched her cheek. "That was very nice of him. He knew I'd like to look forward to getting them. Strawberries and roses!"

"I met Mr. Girard in the street to-day; he asked after you," continued Dosia, with the feeling that if she spoke of him she might get that tiresome, insistent image of him from before her eyes.

It was one of the strange and melancholy ironies of life that the man of all others whom she had desired to meet should be thrown daily in her pathway now, after that desire was gone!

"You'd better not talk any more now, Lois; you look tired. It's time for you to take a little rest. I'll see to the children. I hope baby will stay asleep. Let me pull this coverlet over you. Shall I pull down the shades?"

"No, I'd rather have the light. Please hand me that book over there on the stand," said Lois, holding out her hand for the big, old-fashioned brown volume that Dosia brought to her.

"You oughtn't to read; you ought to go to sleep," said Dosia, with tender severity.

"I'm not going to read," returned Lois pacifically. Her hand closed over the book, she smiled, and Dosia closed the door. Lois turned to the sleeping child with a peculiar delight in being quite alone with him—alone with him, to think.

The book was a novel of some forty years ago, called, as the title-page proclaimed, "A Woman's Kingdom," and written by Dinah Maria Mulock. A neighbor had brought it in to Lois during the first month of her convalescence. In all the time she had had it, she had never read any further than that title-page.

There is often more in the birth of a child than the coming of another son or daughter into the world. Between those forces of life and death a woman may also get her chance to be born anew, made over again, spiritually as well as physically. In those long, restful hours afterward, when suspense is over and pain is over, and there is a freedom from household cares, and one is looked upon with renewed tenderness, the thoughts may flow over long, long ways. To face danger bravely in itself gives strength for the clearer vision; and a peculiarly loved child unlocks with its tiny hands springs unknown before.

Lois, though she had been a mother twice before, had never felt toward either of the other children at all as she did now toward this little boy. She could not bear to be parted from him. Somehow that terrible corrosive selfishness had been blessedly taken away from her—for a little while only? She only felt at first that she must not think of those horrible depths, for fear of slipping back into the pit again; even to think of the slimy powers of darkness gave them a fresh hold on one. She put off her return to that soul-embracing egotism. It was sweet to lie there and meet the tender gentleness of her husband's gaze when he came home, and to talk to him about the baby as a child might talk about a new toy, though she could not but begin to perceive that she was as far, far out of his real life as if she had indeed been a child.

One evening he came in to sit by her,—her convalescence had been a long and dragging one,—and she had paused in the midst of telling him something to await an answer. None came. She spoke again, and raised herself to look. Then she saw that even within that brief space he had fallen asleep, as a man may who is thoroughly exhausted. Thoroughly exhausted! Everything proclaimed it—his attitude, grimly grotesque in the dim light, one leg stretched out half in front of the other, as he had dropped into the seat, his relaxed arms hanging down, his head resting sidewise against the back of the chair, with the face sharply upturned. The shadows lay in the hollows under his cheek-bones and in those lines that marked his temples. Divested of color and the transforming play of expression, he looked strangely old, terribly lifeless. He slept without moving,—almost, it seemed, without breathing,—while Lois, with a new dread, watched him with frightened, dilated, fascinated eyes. How had he grown like this? What unnoticed change had been at work? She called him again, but he did not hear; she stretched out her arm, but he was just beyond reach. Suddenly it seemed to her that he was dead, and that she could[Pg 209] never reach him again; an icy hand seemed to have been laid on her heart. What if never, never, never——

"Oh, you frightened me so! Don't go to sleep like that again," said Lois, with a shaking voice. "Come here."

He came and knelt down by her, and she pressed his cheek close to hers with a rush of painful emotion. "Why, you mustn't get worked up over a little thing like that," he objected lightly, going out of the room afterward with a reassuring smile at her, while she gazed after him with strangely awakened eyes. For the first time in months, she thought of him without any thought of benefit to herself.

The next day the neighbor sent her over the book; the title arrested her attention oddly—"The Woman's Kingdom." Another phrase correlated with it in her memory—"Queen of the Home." That was supposed to be woman's domain, where she was the sovereign power; there she was helper, sustainer, director, the dear dispenser of favors. The woman's kingdom, queen of the home. Gradually the words led her down long lanes of retrospect, led by the rose-leaf touch of the baby's fingers; they kept her strong. What kingdom had she ever made her own? She, poor, bedraggled, complaining suppliant, a beggar where she should have been a queen! Home and the heart of her husband—there lay her woman's kingdom, her realm, her God-given province. She had had the ordering of it, none other: she had married a good man. Glad or sorry, that kingdom was as her rule made it; she must be judged by her government—as she was queen enough to hold it. She fell asleep that day thinking of the words.

Day by day, other thoughts came to her more or less disconnectedly,—set in motion by those magic words,—when she lay at rest in the afternoons, with the book in her fingers and the dear little baby form close beside her. Lois was one of those women of intense feeling who can never perceive from imagination, but only from experience—who cannot even adequately sympathize with sorrows and conditions which they have not personally experienced. No advice touches them, for the words that embody it are in a language not yet understood. The mistakes of the past seem to have been necessary, when they look back. Given the same circumstances, they could not have acted differently; but they seldom look back—the present, that is always climbing on into the future, occupies them exclusively.

Lois with "The Woman's Kingdom" in her hand, felt that some source of power and happiness which she had not realized had slipped from her grasp, yet might still be hers. So many disconnected, half-childish thoughts came with the words—historic names of women whom men had loved devotedly, who had kept them as their friends and lovers even when they themselves had grown old, women who had never lost their charm. There were those women of the French salons, who could interest even other generations; queens indeed! She couldn't really interest one man! She thought over the married couples of her acquaintance, in search of those who should reveal some secret, some guiding light. One woman across the street had no other object in life than purveying to the household comfort of her husband, and seemed, good soul, to expect nothing from him in return; if William liked his fish, she was repaid. A couple farther down appeared to be held together by the fact of marriage, nothing more; they were bored to death by each other's society. Another couple were happily absorbed in their children, to whom they were both sacrificially subordinate. With none of these conditions could Lois be satisfied. Then, there were the women who always spoke as if a man were an animal and a woman were not a woman, but a spirit; but Lois was very much a woman! She settled at last, after penetrative thought, on one husband and wife, the latter a plain little person no longer young. Every man liked to go to her charming, comfortable house; every man admired her; and that her husband, a very handsome man himself, admired her most of all was unobtrusively evident. Every look, every gesture, betrayed the charming, vivifying unity between those two. How was it accomplished?

How could one interest a man like that? There was Eugene Larue—she could interest him! The thought of him always gave her a sense of conscious power; he paid her homage. She did not know what his relations were with other women, but of his with her she was sure: she felt her woman's kingdom. If you could talk to the soul of a man like that as if he had the soul of an angel, and learn from him what you wanted to know—get his guidance— But Lois was before all things inviolably a wife, with the instinctive dignity of one. The sympathy between her and Eugene Larue was so deep that she feared sometimes that in some brief moment she might reveal in words, to be forever regretted afterward, conditions which he knew without her telling. To be loved as Eugene Larue would love a woman! But his wife had not cared to be loved that way. She took deep, thoughtful counsel of her heart. If they two, she and Eugene, had met while both were free?[Pg 210] The answer was what she had known it would be, else she had not dared to make the test. The man who was her husband was the only man who could ever have been her husband. Justin!

With "The Woman's Kingdom" in her hand now, her lips touching the cheek of the soft little darling thing beside her, she felt that some new knowledge had been gradually revealed to her, of which she was now really aware only for the first time. Justin was not looking well—that was what Dosia had said. Oh, he was not looking well! But she would make him forget his cares, his anxieties, with this new-found power of hers; she would bewitch him, take him off his feet, so that he would be able to think of nothing, of no one, but her—he had not always thought of her. She would not pity herself. She would learn to laugh, even if it took heroic effort; men liked you to laugh. She had always taken everything too seriously. The vision of his sleeping, dead face of a month ago frightened her for a moment, painfully; but he had seemed better since, though, as Dosia said, he didn't look well. Oh, when he came home to-night——!

She dressed herself with a new care, putting on a soft yellowish gown with a yoke of creamy lace, unworn for months. The color was more brilliant than ever in her cheeks, her lips redder, her eyes more deeply blue. The children exclaimed over their "pretty mama." She looked younger, more beautiful, than Dosia had ever seen her. She could not help saying:

"How lovely you are, Lois! And you're all dressed up, too; do you expect any one?"

"Only Justin"! The words brought an exquisite joy with them—only Justin, the one man in all the world for her. There was but a half-hour now until dinner-time. It had passed, and he had not come; but he was often late— Still he did not come; that happened too, sometimes. The two women sat down to dinner alone, at last. The baby woke up afterward, an unusual thing, and wailed, and would not stop. Lois, divested of her rich apparel and once more swathed in a loose, shabby gown, rocked and soothed the infant interminably, while Dosia, her efforts to help unavailing, crouched over a book down-stairs, trying to read. After an interval of quiet she went up-stairs, to find Lois at last lying down.

"It's eleven o'clock, Lois; I think I'll go to bed. Shall I leave the gas burning down-stairs?"

As once before, Lois waited for that train—yet how differently! If that injured feeling rose, for an instant, at his not having sent her word, she crushed it back as one would crush the head of a viper that showed itself between the crevices of the hearthstone. She would not pity herself—she would not pity herself! She knew now that madness lay that way.

The night was clear and warm, the stars were shining, as she got up and sat by the window, looking out from behind the curtain, her beautiful braided hair over one shoulder. The last train came in; the people from it, in twos and threes, straggled down the street, but not Justin. He must have missed that last train out. Of course he must have missed it!

We are apt to fancy causeless disaster to those we love; the amount of "worry" more or less willingly indulged in by uncontrolled minds seems at times enough to swamp the understanding: yet there is a foreboding, unsought, unwelcomed, combated, which, once felt, can never be counterfeited; it carries with it some chill, unfathomed quality of truth.

XXI

"Not yet, Mrs. Alexander. I'm sorry—oh, so sorry—to have nothing more to tell you. But I'm sure we'll hear something before morning."

Bailey Girard spoke with confidence, his eyes bent controllingly on Lois, who trembled as she stood in the little hallway, looking up at him, with Dosia behind her. This was the third night since that one when Justin had failed to appear, and there had been no word from him in the interim. Owing to that curious way that women have of waiting for events to happen that will end suspense, rather than seeking to end it by any unaccustomed action of their own, no inquiry had been made at the Typometer Company until late in the afternoon of the next day, which had been passed in the hourly expectation of hearing from Justin or seeing him walk in. However, nobody at the company knew anything of Justin's movements, except that he had left the office rather early the afternoon before, and had been seen to take a car going up-town. It was presumable that he had been called suddenly out of town, and had sent some word to Mrs. Alexander that had miscarried.

That evening, however, Lois sent for Leverich, who was evidently bothered; though[Pg 211] bluffly and rather irritatingly making light of her fears, he seemed to be both a little reluctant and a little contemptuous.

"My dear Mrs. Alexander, you can't expect a fellow to be always tied to his wife's apron-strings! He doesn't tell you everything. We like to have a free foot once in a while. Why, my wife's glad when I get off for a day or two—coaxes me to go away herself! And as for anything happening to Alexander—well, an able-bodied man can look out for himself every time; there's nothing in the world to be anxious about. He's meant to wire to you and forgotten to do it, that's all. I did that myself last year, when I was called away suddenly; but Myra didn't turn a hair. She knew I was all right. And if I were you, Mrs. Alexander,—this is just a tip,—I wouldn't go around telling every one that he's gone off and you don't know where he is. It's the kind of thing folks get talking about in all kinds of ways; his affairs aren't in any too good shape, as he may have told you."

"Oh, yes, of course—all right; but—I wouldn't go around wondering about his being away; he's got his own reasons. You haven't a telephone, have you? I'll send around word to have one put in to-day. I'll tell you what: I'll ask Bailey Girard to come around and see you on the quiet—he's got lots of wires he can pull. You won't need me any more."

Leverich's meeting with Dosia had been characterized by a sort of brusque uninterest. He seemed to her indefinably lowered and coarsened in some way; his cheeks sagged; in his eyes was an unpleasant admission that he must bluster to avoid the detection of some weakness. And Dosia had lived in his house, eaten at his table, received benefits from him, caressed him prettily! He had been really kind to her. She ought not to let that fact be defaced. But everything connected with that time seemed now to lower her in retrospect, to fill her with a sort of horror. All his loud rebuttal of anxiety now could not cover an undercurrent of uneasiness that made the anxiety of the two women tenfold greater when he was gone.

Mr. Girard had come twice the next morning. Dosia, as well as Lois, had seen him both times. He had greeted her with matter-of-fact courtesy, and appealed to her with earnest painstaking, whenever necessary, for details or confirmation, in their mutual office of helpers to Mrs. Alexander; but the retrieving warmth and intimacy of his manner the day he had avoided her in the street was lacking. There was certainly nothing in Dosia's quietly impersonal attitude to call it forth. Her face no longer swiftly mirrored each fleeting emotion at all times, for any one to see. Poor Dosia had learned in a bitter school her woman's lesson of concealment.

But, if Girard were only sensibly consulting with her, toward Lois his sympathy was instinct with strength and helpfulness. He seemed to have affiliations with reporters, with telegraph operators, with a hundred lower runways of life unknown to other people. He gave the tortured wife the feeling so dear, so sustaining to one in sorrow, of his being entirely one with her in its absorption—of there being no other interest, no other issue in life, but this one of Justin's return. When Girard came, bright and alert and confident, all fears seemed to be set at rest; during the few minutes that he stayed all difficulties were swept away, everything was on the right train, word would arrive from Justin at once; and when he left, all was black and terrible again.

The children had clung to Dosia in the hours of these strange days when mama never seemed to hear their questions. Dosia read to them, made merry for them, and saw to her household, which was dependent on the services of a new and untrained maid, going back in the interval to put her young arms around Lois and hold her close with aching pity.

The suspense of these days had changed Lois terribly. Her cheeks were hollow, her mouth was drawn, her eyes looked twice their natural size, with the black circles below them. Only the knowledge that her baby's welfare—perhaps his life—depended on her, kept her from giving way entirely. Redge, always a complicating child, had an attack of croup, which necessitated a visit from the doctor and further anxiety. Toward afternoon of this third day a man came to put in the telephone, which set them in touch with the unseen world. Girard's voice over it later had been mistakenly understood to promise an immediate ending of the mystery.

Everything was excitement: delicacies were bought, in case Justin might like them; Redge and Zaidee were hurriedly dressed in their best "to see dear papa," and, even though they had to go to bed without the desired result, Redge in a fresh spasm of coughing, it was with the repeated promise that the father should come up-stairs to kiss them as soon as he got in.

Expectation had been unwarrantedly raised so high in the suddenly sanguine heart of Lois that now, to-night, at Girard's word that nothing more had been heard, as she was still looking up at him everything turned black before her. She found herself half lying on the little spindle-legged sofa, without knowing how she[Pg 212] got there, her head pillowed on a green silken cushion, with Dosia fanning her, while Girard leaned against the little mirrored mantelpiece with set face and contracted brows. Presently Lois pushed away the fan, made a motion as if to rise, only to relapse again on the cushion, looked up at Girard, and tried to smile with piteous, brimming eyes.

"Ah, don't!" he said, with a quick gesture. His voice had an odd sound, as if drawing breath hurt him, yet with it mingled also a compassionate tenderness so great that it seemed to inform not only his face but his whole attitude as he bent over her.

He made a swift gesture of protest. "There's one thing I can't stand—to see a woman suffer."

She waited a moment, as if to take in his words, and then motioned him to the seat beside her. When she spoke again, it was slowly, as if she were trying to concentrate her mind:

He saw that she wished to forget her own trouble for a moment in that of another, yet the effort to obey evidently cost him much. They had both spoken as if they two were alone in the room. Dosia, who had withdrawn to the ottoman some paces away, out of the radius of the lamp, sat there in her white cotton frock, leaning a little forward, her hands clasped loosely in her lap, her face upraised and her eyes looking somewhere beyond. So still was she, so gentle, so fair, that she might have been a spirit outside the stormy circle in which these two communed. (In such moments as these she prayed for Lawson.)

"I"—it was Girard who spoke at last—"my mother—Cater said once that he'd told you something about me."

"I was so little when we drifted off. I didn't know how to help, how to save anything. Yet it has always seemed to me since that I ought to have known—I ought to have known!" His hands clenched; his voice had subsided to a groan.

"Perhaps. I've always hoped so, in my saner moments. We stumbled along from day to day, and slept out at night, always trying to keep away from people, when—she thought we were going home, and that they would prevent me." He stopped for a moment, and then went on, driven by that Ancient Mariner spirit which makes people, once they have touched on a forbidden subject, probe it to its haunting depths. "Did Cater tell you how she died? She died in a barn. My mother! She used to hold me in her arms at night, and make me rest my head against her bosom when I was tired; and I didn't even have a pillow for her when she was dying! It's one of those things you can never make up for—that you can never change, no matter how you live, no matter what you do. It comes back to you when you least expect it."

Both were silent for a while before Lois murmured: "But the pain ended in happiness and peace for her. It would hurt her more than anything to know that you grieved."

"Yes, I believe that," he acquiesced simply. "I'm glad you said it now. I couldn't rest until I got money enough to take her out of her pauper grave and lay her by the side of her own people at home."

"Oh, that's nothing!" He squared his shoulders with unconscious rebuttal of sympathy. "When I was a kid, perhaps—but I get a lot of pleasure out of life."

"But you must be lonely without any one belonging to you," said Lois, trying to grope her way into the labyrinth. "Wouldn't you be happier if you were married?"

He laughed involuntarily and shook his head, with a slight flush that seemed to come from the embarrassment of some secret thought. The action, and the change of expression, made him singularly charming. "Possibly; but the chance of that is small. Women—that is, unmarried women—don't care for my society."

"Oh, oh!" protested Lois, with quick knowledge, as she looked at him, of how much the reverse the truth must be. "But if you found the right woman you might make her care for you."

He shook his head, with a sudden gleam in his gray eyes. "No; there you're wrong. I'd never make any woman care for me, because I'd never want to. If she couldn't care for me without my making her—! I'd have to know, when I first looked at her, that she was mine. And if she were not, if she did not care for me herself, I'd never want to make her—never!"

"Oh, oh!" protested Lois again, with interested amusement, shattered the next instant as a fragile glass may be shattered by the blow of a hammer.

The telephone-bell had rung, and Girard ran to it, closing the intervening door behind him. The curtain of anxiety, lifted for breathing-space for a moment, hung over them again somberly, like a pall. Where was Justin?[Pg 213]

The two women clinging together hung breathlessly on Girard's movements; his low, murmuring voice told nothing. When he returned to where they stood, his face was impassive.

"I'm coming back, if you'll let me." He bent over Lois with that earnest look which seemed somehow to insure protection. "I want you to let me stay down-stairs here all night, if you will. I'm going to make arrangements to get a special message through, no matter what time it comes, and I'll sit here in the parlor and wait for it, so that you two ladies can sleep."

"Oh, I'd be so glad to have you here! Redge has that croupy cough again. But you can't sit up," said Lois.

"Why not? It's luxury to stay awake in a comfortable chair with a lot of books around. I'll be back in a couple of hours without fail."

A couple of hours! If he had said a couple of years, the words could have brought, it seemed, no deeper sense of desolation. Hardly had he gone, however, when the door-bell rang, and word was brought to Lois, who with Dosia had gone up-stairs, that it was Mr. Harker from the typometer office. The visitor, a tall, colorless, darkly sack-coated man, with a jaded necktie, had entered the little drawing-room with a decorously self-effacing step, and sat now on the edge of his chair, his body bent forward and his hat still held in one hand, with an effect of being entirely isolated from social relations and existing here solely at the behest of business. He rose as Lois came into the room, and handed her a small packet, in response to her greeting, before reseating himself.

"Thank you very much," said Lois. "This is the money, I suppose. I'm sorry you went to the trouble of bringing it out yourself. I thought you might send me out a check."

Mr. Harker shook his head with a grim semblance of a smile. "That's the trouble, Mrs. Alexander. We can't send any checks. Mr. Alexander is the one who does that. Everything is in Mr. Alexander's name. I went to Mr. Leverich to-day to see how we were going to straighten out things; but he doesn't seem inclined to take hold at all, though he could help us out easily enough if he wanted to. I—there's no use keeping it back, Mrs. Alexander. This is a pretty bad time for Mr. Alexander to stay away. He ought to be home."

"Exactly. His absence places us all in a very strange, very unpleasant position." Mr. Harker spoke with a sort of somber monotony, with his gaze on the ground. "The business requires the most particular management at the moment—the most particular. I—" He raised his eyes with such tragic earnestness that Lois realized for the first time that this manner of his might not be his usual manner, but was called forth by the stress of anxiety. For the first time also, the force of the daily tie of business companionship was borne in upon her. She looked at Mr. Harker. This man spent more waking hours with Justin than she did—knew him, perhaps, in a sense, better.

He went on now, with a tremor in his voice: "Mrs. Alexander, your husband and I have worked together for a year and a half now, with never a word between us. I'm ready to swear by him any moment, if I've got him to swear by. I'll back him up in anything, no matter what, if it's his say-so. We've pulled through a good many tight places. But I can't do it alone; it's madness to try. If he doesn't show up, I'd better close the place down at once."

"Why? Because, Mrs. Alexander, this is no time to mince words. If you know where your husband is, for God's sake, get word to him to come back—every minute is precious. He may be ill,—Heaven knows he had enough to make him so; my wife knows the strain I've been through; she says she wonders I'm alive,—but he can't look after his health now. If he's on top of ground, he's got to come. I've put every cent I own into this business. I haven't drawn my whole salary, even, for months. I don't know what reasons he has for staying away, but his nerve mustn't give out now."

"Mr. Harker!" cried Lois. She turned blankly to Dosia, who had come forward. "What does he mean?"

"She doesn't know where her husband is," said the girl convincingly. Her eyes and Mr. Harker's met. The somber eagerness faded out of his; he sighed and rose.

"Anything I can do for you, Mrs. Alexander? I think I'll hurry to catch the next train; I haven't been home to my dinner yet."

"Oh, that's nothing. I'm used to it," returned Mr. Harker, with a pale smile and the passive, self-effacing business manner as he departed, while Lois went up-stairs once more. The baby cried, and she soothed him, holding the warm little form close, closer to her—some thing tangible before she put him down again[Pg 214] to step back into this strange void where Justin was not.

For the first time, in this meeting with Mr. Harker, Lois realized the existence of a world beyond her ken—a world that had been Justin's. New as the visitor's words had been, they seemed to open to her a vision of herculean struggle: the way this man had looked—his wife had "wondered that he was still alive." And Justin—where was he now? She had not noticed, she had not wondered—until lately.

Slight as seemed her recognition, her sympathy, her help, it was the one thing now that kept her reason firm. She knew that she had not been all unfaithful; sometimes he had been rested, sometimes cheered, when she was near. She had suffered, too; she had longed for his help and sympathy. No, she would not think of that; she would not. When two are separated, one must love enough to bridge the gulf—what matter which one? It seemed now as if there were so much that she might have given, if all this torrent of love that nearly broke her heart might have been poured out and poured out at his feet—lavished on him, without regard to need or fitness or expense, as Mary lavished her precious box of spikenard on One she loved. Now that he was gone, there could be nothing too hard to have done for him, no words too sweet for her to have said to him.

Redge woke up and cried for her, and she told him hoarsely to be still; and then, suddenly conscience-stricken and fearful at the slighting of this other demand of love,—what awful reprisal might it not exact from her?—she went to kiss the child, to infold him in her arms, the boy that Justin loved, before she bade him go to sleep, for mother would stay by her darling. And, left to herself again, the grinding and destroying wheel of thought had her bound to it once more.

He could not have left her of his own will! If he did not come, it would be because he was dead—and then he could never know, never, never know. There would be nothing left to her but the place where he had been. She looked at the walls and the homely furnishings as one seeing them for the first time bare forever of the beloved presence, and fell on her knees, and went on them around the room, dragging herself from chair to sofa, from sofa to bed,—these were the Stations of the Cross that she was making,—with sobs and cries, low and inarticulate, yet carrying with them the awful anguish of a heart laid bare before the Almighty. Here his dear hand had rested, while he thought of her; on this table—here—and here; and here his head had lain. Her tears ceased; she buried her face in the pillow. She must go after him, wherever he was, in this world or another. For he was her husband. Where he was she must be, either in body or in spirit.

The telephone-bell rang, and Dosia answered it, the voice at the other end inquiring for Mr. Girard, cautiously, it seemed, withholding information from any other. The doctor rang up, in response to an earlier call, with directions for Redge. Hardly had the receiver been laid down when the door-bell clanged. This was to be a night of the ringing of bells!

XXII

This time, of course, the visitor was Mrs. Snow. In any exigency, any mind-and body-absorbing event of life, the inopportune presence of Mrs. Snow was inexorably to be counted on, though it came always as one of those exasperating recurrences which bring with them a ridiculously fresh irritation each time. It seemed to be the one extra thing you couldn't stand. In either trouble or joy, she affected one like a clinging, ankle-flapping mackintosh on a rainy day. She bowed now to Dosia with a patronizing dignity, pointed by the plaintive warmth of the greeting to Lois, who had come hurrying down-stairs out of those passion-depths of darkness, so that Mrs. Snow wouldn't suspect anything. She had an uncanny faculty of divining just what you didn't want her to.

Once before Lois had suspended tragedy for Mrs. Snow. The same things happen to us over and over again daily in our crowded yet restricted lives—it is we who change in our meeting with them. We have our great passions, our great joys, our heartbreaks, no matter how small our environment.

"How do you do, my dear? Mr. Girard has just told me that he was going to stay here to-night, in Mr. Alexander's absence. He said little Redge was threatened with the croup. Now, if I had only known that Mr. Alexander was away, I could have come and stayed with you!"

"Oh, that wasn't at all necessary," said Lois hastily. "Thank you very much. Do sit down, won't you, Mrs. Snow?"

"Only for a minute, then; I must go back to Bertha," said Mrs. Snow, seating herself and fumbling for something under her cloak. "I just came over to read you a letter. It's in my bag—I can't seem to find it. Well, perhaps I'd better rest for a minute." Mrs. Snow's face looked unusually lined and set; in spite of her plaintiveness, her eyes had a harassed glitter.

"Yes; Ada would have come around here with me, but she was expecting Mr. Sutton. She was expecting him last night, but he didn't come. If I were a young lady, I'd let a gentleman wait for me the next time; it used to be thought more attractive, in my day: but Ada's so afraid of not seeming cordial; gentlemen seem to be so sensitive nowadays! I said to her, 'Ada, when a man is enough at home in a house to kick the cat, and ask for cake whenever he feels like it, I do not see that it is necessary to stand on ceremony with him.' But Ada thinks differently."

"Yes," sighed Mrs. Snow. "As I was saying to Bertha, you don't find a young man like Mr. Girard, so considerate of every one—not that he's so very young, either; I'm sure he often appears much older than he is. It's his manner—he has a manner like my dear father. He and Bertha have long chats together; really, he is what I would call quite attentive, though she won't hear of such a thing—but sometimes young men do take a great fancy for older girls. I had a friend who married a gentleman twenty-seven years younger—he died soon afterward. But many people think nothing of a little difference of twelve or fifteen years. I said to Bertha this morning, 'Bertha, if you'd dress yourself a little younger—if you'd only wear a blue bow in your hair.' But no; I can't say anything nowadays to my own children without being flown at!" Mrs. Snow's voice trembled. "If my darling William were here!"

"My dear, he's in Chicago. I came over to read you a letter from him that I got to-night. That new postman left it at the Scovels', by mistake, and they never sent it over until a little while ago. There was a sentence in it," Mrs. Snow was fumbling with a paper, "that I thought you'd like to hear. Where is it? Let me see. 'Next month I hope to be able to send you more'—no, no, that's not it. 'When my socks get holes in them I throw them'—that's not it, either. Oh! he says, 'I caught a glimpse of Mr. Alexander last night, getting on a West Side car'—this was written yesterday morning. 'I called to him, but too late. I'm sorry, for I'd like to have seen him,' That's all; but Mr. Girard seemed so pleased with the letter, I promised that I would bring it around to you that very minute,—he had to run for the train,—but I was detained. He thought you'd like to hear that William had seen Mr. Alexander."

Like to hear! The relief for the moment turned Lois faint. Yet, after Mrs. Snow went, the torturing questions began to repeat themselves again. Justin was alive—Justin was alive on Tuesday night. Was he alive now? And why had he gone to Chicago at all? Why had he sent her no word? The wall between them seemed only the more opaque. Every fear that imagination could devise seemed to center around this new fact.

She and Dosia went around, straightening up the little drawing-room, making it ready for Girard's occupancy—pulling out a big chair for his use, and putting fresh books on the table. The maid had long ago gone to bed, and there was coffee to be made for him—he might get hungry in the night. When he came in at last, he brought all the brightness and courage of hope with him. He had wired to William; he had phoned to a dozen different places in Chicago.

"It doesn't seem to me I've helped you very much so far. Our one clue has been from Mrs. Snow. I want you to go to bed now, and to sleep, Mrs. Alexander; take all the rest you can. I'm here to do the watching. If there's anything really to tell, I'll call you. I promise faithfully. What is it, Miss Linden? Did you want to speak to me?"

His eyes assented. "Yes, I know. I went there—to the place that they—but it wasn't Alexander, I'm glad to say, though I was afraid when I went in——"

Another strange night had begun, with the master of the house away. Lois went to her room to lie down clothed, jumping up to come to the head of the stairs whenever the telephone-bell rang, and then going back again when she found that those who were consulting were asking for information instead of giving it; but by and by the messages ceased.

Suppose Justin never came back! She began to feel that he had been gone for years, and tried confusedly to plan out the future. There were the children—how should she support them? She must support them. It was hard to get work when you had a baby. If she hadn't the baby—no one should take the baby from her! She clasped him to her for a moment in terror, as if she were being hunted, before she grew calm and began planning again. There was only a little money left. To-morrow they must still eat. She must make the money last.

Dosia, on the bed by Redge's crib, went softly after a while into the other room, and saw that[Pg 216] Lois at last slept, though she herself could not. Each time that she saw Girard he seemed more and more a stranger, so far removed was he from her dream of him. Through all his softness, his gentleness, she felt the streak of hardness, if nobody else did (though Mr. Cater, she remembered now, had spoken of it too), that the fires of adversity had molded. Perhaps no man could have worked up from the cruel circumstances of his early days without that hardening streak to uphold him. She divined, with some surprising new power of divination, that, for all his strong, capable dealing with actualities, his magnetic drawing of men, for the inner conduct of his own life he was shyly dependent on odd, deeply held theory—theory that he had solitarily woven for himself. She felt impersonally sorry for him, as for a boy who must be disappointed, though he was nothing to her.

Yet, as Dosia lay there in the dumb stretches of the night, her tired eyes wide open, close to Redge's crib, with his little hot hand clinging to hers, the mere fact of Girard's bodily presence in the house, down-stairs, seemed something overpoweringly insistent; she couldn't get away from it. It gave her, apparently, neither pleasure nor pain; it called forth no conscious excitement as had been the case with Lawson—unless this strange, rarefied sense was a higher excitement. This consciousness of his presence was, tiresomely enough, something not to be escaped from; it pulsed in every vein, keeping her awake. She tried to lose it in the thought of Lois' great trouble, of this weighting, pitiful mystery of Justin's absence—of what it meant to him and to the household. She tried to lose it in the thought of Lawson, with the prayer that always instinctively came at his name. Nothing availed; through everything was that wearing, persistent consciousness of Girard's bodily presence down-stairs. If it would only fade out, so that she might sleep, she was so tired! The clock struck two. A voice spoke from the other room, sending her to her feet instantly:

Lois shivered. "I think, when Redge wakes up next, you'd better give him a drink of water; he sounds so hoarse. I've used all I brought up. Do you mind going down to get some more? I would go myself, but I can't slip my arm from under baby; he wakes when I move. Here is the pitcher."

"Yes," said Dosia, stopping for a moment to pull the coverlet tenderly over Lois, before stepping out into the lighted hall.

It seemed very silent; there was no sound from below. Dosia went down the low, wide stairs with that indescribable air of the watcher in the night. Her white cotton gown, the same that she had worn throughout the afternoon, had lost its freshness, and clung to her figure in twisted folds; the waist was slightly open at the throat, and the long white necktie hung half untied. One cheek was warm where it had pressed the pillow; the other was pale, and her hair, half loosened, hung against it. Her eyes, very blue, showed a rayed starriness, the pupils contracted from the sudden light—her expression, tired and half bewildered, had in it somewhat of the little lost look of a child, up in the unwonted middle of the night, who might go naturally and comfortably into any kind arms held out to her. The turn of the stairs brought her fronting the little drawing-room and the figure of Girard, who sat leaning forward, smoking, in the Morris chair, with his elbow resting on the arm of it and his head on his hand. The books and bric-à-brac on the table beside him had been pushed back to make room for the tray containing the coffee-pot, a cup and saucer, and a plate with some biscuits. A newspaper lay on the floor at his feet. Notwithstanding the light in the hallway and the room, there was that odd atmospheric effect which belongs only to the late and solitary hours of the night, when the very furniture itself seems to share in a chill detachment from the life of the day. Yet, in the midst of this night silence, this withdrawing of the ordinary vital forces, the figure of Bailey Girard seemed to be extraordinarily instinct with vitality, even in that second before he moved; his attitude, his eyes, his expression, were informed with such intense and eager thoughts that it was as startling, as instantly arresting, as the blast of a trumpet.

At the sound of Dosia's light oncoming step opposite the door, he rose at once—however, laying the cigar on the table—and with a quick stride stood beside her. He seemed tall and unexpectedly dazzling as he confronted her; his deep-set gray eyes were very brilliant.

"No—oh, no; the children have been restless, that is all," said Dosia, recovering, with annoyed self-possession, from a momentary shock, and feeling disagreeably conscious of looking tumbled and forlorn. "I came down to get a pitcher of water."

"Thank you. The water isn't running in the butler's pantry; I have to go in the kitchen for it. If you would light the gas there for me——"[Pg 217]

"Yes, certainly," he responded promptly, pushing the portières aside to make a passage for her, as he went ahead to scratch a match and light the long, one-armed flickering kitchen burner. The bare, deeply shadowed floor, the kitchen table, the blank windows, and the blackened range, in which the fire was out, came desolately into view. There was a sense as of deep darkness of the night outside around everything.

A large white cat lying on a red-striped cushion on a chair by the chilly hearth stretched itself and blinked its yellow eyes toward the two intruders.

"Let me fill this," said Girard, taking the pitcher from her—a rather large, clumsy majolica article with a twisted vine for a handle—and carrying it over to the faucet. The intimacy of the hour and the scene emphasized the more the punctilious aloofness of this enforced companionship.

Dosia leaned back against the table, while he let the water run, that it might grow cold. It sounded in the silence as if it were falling on a drumhead. The moment—it was hardly more—seemed interminable to Dosia. The white cat, jumping up on the table, put its paws on her shoulders, and she leaned back very absently, and curved her throat sideways, that her cheek might touch him in recognition. Some inner thought claimed her, to the exclusion of the present; her eyes, looking dreamily before her, took on that expression that was indescribably gentle, intolerably sweet.

Dosia has been ill described if it has not been made evident that to caress, to touch her, seemed the involuntarily natural expression of any feeling toward her. Something in the bright, tendril-curling hair, the curve of her young cheek, the curve of her red lips, her light, yet round form, with its confiding, unconscious movements, made as inevitable an allure as the soft rosiness of a darling child, with always the suggestion of that illusive spirit that dared, and retreated, ever giving, ere it veiled itself, the promise of some lovelier glimpse to come.

The water had stopped running, and Dosia straightened herself. She raised her head, to meet his eyes upon her. What was in them? The color flamed in her face and left her white, although in a second there was nothing more to see in his but a deep and guarded gentleness as he came toward her with the pitcher.

"Thank you, it isn't necessary. I'll go along, if you'll wait and turn out the light."

"Very well. You're sure it's not too heavy for you?" he asked anxiously, as her wrists bent a little with the weight.

"Oh, no, indeed," said Dosia quickly, turning to go. At that moment the white cat, jumping down from the table in front of her, rubbed itself against her skirts, and she stumbled slightly.

"Take care!" cried Girard, grasping the shaking pitcher over her slight hold of it.

Their hands touched—for the first time since the night of disaster, the night of her trust and his protection. The next instant there was a crash; the fragments of the jug lay upon the kitchen floor, the water streaming over it in rivulets.

"Yes, I'm coming," Dosia called back. "There's nothing the matter!" She had run from the room without looking up at that figure beside her, snatching a glass of water automatically from the dining-table as she passed by it. Fast as her feet might carry her, they could not keep pace with her beating heart.

When the telephone-bell rang a moment after, it was to confirm the tidings given before. Justin was in Chicago.

THE PROBLEMS OF SUICIDE

BY GEORGE KENNAN

Few branches of sociological investigation have more practical importance, or present a greater number of problems, difficulties, and interesting speculative questions, than the branch that deals with the complex, varied, and often inexplicable phenomena of suicide. When we consider the fact that more than ten thousand persons take their own lives in the United States every year, that more than seventy thousand die annually by their own hands in Europe, and that the suicide rate is constantly and rapidly increasing throughout the greater part of the civilized world, we are forced to admit that, from the view-point of vital economy at least, the subject is one of the utmost gravity. In 1881 the annual suicide rate of the United States was only 12 per million of the population, and our total number of suicides was only 605; last year our suicide rate had risen to 126 per million, and our suicides numbered 10,782. If the present rate of increase be maintained, we shall lose by suicide, in the next five years, nearly as many lives as were lost by the Union armies in battle in the five years of the Civil War. We are already losing annually from this cause more men than were killed on the Union side in the three great battles of Gettysburg, Spottsylvania, and the Wilderness taken together.

Statisticians have estimated that, in the world as a whole, there is a suicide every three minutes, and we know, with an approximation to certainty, that there is a suicide every six minutes and a half in Europe and the United States alone. Suicide has cost France 274,000 lives since 1871, Germany 158,000 since 1893, and the United States 120,000 since 1890. I need hardly point out the practical importance of the questions that present themselves in connection with this abnormal and apparently unnecessary waste of human life. Among such questions are: Upon what general and world-wide conditions does suicide depend? Are any of its causes removable? What are the reasons for the steady and progressive increase of self-destruction in civilized countries? Is suicide controlled or affected by any natural laws, and, if so, by what laws? These are all questions of practical importance, because upon the answers to them depends the possibility of economizing human life and increasing the sum total of human happiness. But the subject is one of deep interest, entirely apart from its practical importance.

Psychological Problems of Suicide

In some of its aspects, suicide raises psychological questions which bristle with difficulties, but which, nevertheless, pique the curiosity and demand explanatory answers. Why, for example, is the rate of suicide strictly dependent everywhere upon season and weather? Why is the tendency to self-destruction lessened by war? What is the explanation of suicide in the face of impending death, when there is still a fair chance of escape, or when the natural death that is threatened would involve less suffering than the act of self-destruction? What is the mental state of the hundreds of persons who kill themselves every year upon what would seem to be absurdly inadequate provocation—of the man, for example, who commits suicide because his wife declines to get out his clean underclothes, or the woman who takes poison because she has received a comic valentine? In its religious aspect, why is the tendency to suicide greatest among Protestant Christians and least among Mohammedans and Jews? In its racial aspect, why is the suicide rate of Japan eight times that of Portugal, and the rate of American whites eight or ten times that of full-blooded American blacks? Why do the Slavs of Bohemia kill themselves at the rate of 158 per million, while the Slavs of Russia commit suicide at the rate of only 31 per million? Why do emigrants, going to a new country, carry their national suicide rates with them, and maintain such rates, with little or no alteration, long after their environment has completely changed? These questions may not have great practical importance, but, from the view-point of the psychologist and the sociologist, they are full of speculative interest.

When we study the phenomena of suicide as[Pg 219] they appear in the light of statistics, we are struck by the fact that among the general and world-wide conditions that limit or control the suicidal impulse are weather and war. Other factors, such as education, religion, or economic status, may seem to be more influential, if observation be limited to a single nation or a single continent; but if a comprehensive survey be made of the whole world, weather and war will be seen to take a prominent place among the few agencies that affect uniformly the suicidal tendency.

As soon as accurate and trustworthy statistics of self-destruction became available in Europe, sociologists began to study the question whether suicide is controlled or regulated in any way by natural laws, and, if so, whether cosmical causes, such as climate, temperature, season, and weather, have any perceptible influence upon the suicide rate. It was soon discovered that the tendency to self-destruction is greatest in the zone lying between the fiftieth and fifty-fifth parallels of north latitude. South of forty-three degrees the annual suicide rate is only 21 per million, and north of fifty-five degrees it is only 88 per million; but between the parallels of forty-three and fifty it rises to 93 per million, and between fifty and fifty-five it reaches its maximum of 172 per million. The suicide belt, therefore, lies in the north temperate zone, where the climate is most favorable to human development and happiness. This fact, however, does not prove that a moderate and equable climate predisposes to suicide. Things may coexist without being in any way related to each other, and the frequency of suicide in the north temperate zone may be due wholly to the fact that the zone in question is the home of the most cultivated races and the seat of the highest and most complicated civilization. In this zone the struggle for life is fiercest, the interference with natural laws is most extensive, and the physical and emotional wear and tear of the economic contest is most acutely felt. It is more than probable, therefore, that the high rate of suicide in the north temperate zone is due to the civilization, rather than to the climate, of that region. This phase of the subject need not be discussed at length, because all competent authorities agree that climate, in its relation to suicide, is not a controlling or determining factor.

A very different state of affairs appears, however, when we bring the suicide rate into correlation with season and weather. Long ago, before accurate statistics made a scientific investigation of the subject possible, there was a widely prevalent popular belief that dark and dismal months of the year, and gloomy, rainy, or uncomfortable weather, predisposed mankind to self-destruction, and that the suicide rate was highest in November or December, and lowest in spring or early summer.

Spring and Summer the Suicide Seasons

The French philosopher Montesquieu went so far as to explain the supposed frequency of suicide in London by connecting it with English rains and fogs. It was only natural, he argued, that unhappy people should kill themselves in a country where the autumnal and winter months were so dark, and where there was so much gloomy, depressing weather. When, however, investigators began to study the subject in the light of accurate statistics, when they grouped suicides by months and compared one month with another, they were surprised to find that the tendency to suicide was greatest, not in the gloomy and depressing months of November and December, but in the bright and cheerful month of June. In 1898 Dr. Oscar Geck, of Strasburg, published statistics of about 100,000 suicides that took place in Prussia in the twenty-year period between 1876 and 1896. They showed that, so far at least as Prussia was concerned, suicides invariably attained their maximum in June and their minimum in December. There was a constant rise in the suicide curve from January to the end of June, and a constant decline from June to the end of the first winter month.

Durkheim, of Paris, and Dr. Gubski, of St. Petersburg, who are among the most recent investigators of the subject, assert that, so far as the seasonal distribution of suicides is concerned, the figures for Prussia hold good throughout Europe. June is everywhere the suicide month, and December is everywhere the month in which self-destruction is least frequent. Durkheim gives tabulated statistics for seven of the principal countries of Europe, which show conclusively that, in point of predisposing tendency to suicide, the four seasons stand in the following order: summer first, spring second, autumn third, and winter last.[17] Even in Russia, which differs most from the rest of Europe in ethnology and economic status, the seasonal distribution of suicides[Pg 220] is the same. Dr. Gubski's statistics show that of every thousand Russian suicides, 328 take place in summer, 272 in spring, 215 in autumn, and 185 in winter. If we divide the year into halves, and group the suicides in semi-annual periods, we find that 600 occur in the pleasant spring and summer months and only 400 in the gloomy months of winter and fall.

A study of American statistics brings us to almost exactly the same result. In September, 1895, Dr. Forbes Winslow, of New York, read a paper before the medico-legal congress which was then in session in that city upon the subject of "Suicide as a Mental Epidemic." The statistics which he submitted showed that in the United States, as in Europe, suicide reaches its maximum in June and falls to its minimum in December. The average annual number of American suicides in June is 336 and in December 217. If we divide the year into halves and compare the figures of the semi-annual periods with those of Russia, the correspondence is almost startling.

Notwithstanding the immense difference between the population of Russia and that of the United States, in environment, in education, in religion, in inherited character, in temperament, and in civilization generally, the mysterious law that controls the seasonal distribution of suicides operates in America exactly as it operates in the great empire of the Slavs. In Russia, out of every thousand suicides, the number who kill themselves in the fall-and-winter half of the year is precisely 400; in America it is 386. In Russia, the proportion per thousand in the spring-and-summer half of the year is 600; in America it is 614. There is a slightly greater tendency to spring-and-summer suicide in the United States than in Russia, but the variation is only a little more than one per cent., and taking into consideration the great difference between the oppressed and ignorant peasants of Russia, and the free, well-educated citizens of our own country, the practical identity of their seasonal suicide rates seems to me a most extraordinary social and psychological fact.

This, however, is by no means a complete statement of the problem involved in the seasonal distribution of suicides. Spring and summer are the suicide seasons, not only among the closely related nationalities of Europe and the United States, but among the ethnologically alien peoples of the Far East. The reports of the Statistical Bureau of Japan show that between 1899 and 1903 the average annual number of suicides was 8,840. They were distributed through the year as follows: winter 1,711, spring 2,475, summer 2,703, fall 1,951. If we divide the year into halves, we find that 59 per cent. of the Japanese suicides occur in the spring and summer months and only 41 per cent. in the months of fall and winter. This corresponds almost exactly with the annual distribution of suicides in the United States, in Russia, and in Europe as a whole. The seasonal percentages may be shown in tabular form as follows:[18]

It thus appears that the tendency of mankind to commit suicide in spring and summer, rather than in fall and winter, is quite as strongly marked in Japan as it is in Europe and America. Despite all differences of character and environment, the suicidal impulses of Yankee, muzhik, and coolie are governed by the same law.

Suicide Weather

The evidence above set forth, and much more for which I cannot here find space, seems conclusively to establish the fact that, throughout the civilized world, the pleasantest seasons of the year are most conducive to suicide. The question then arises, Does this rule hold good if applied to the pleasantest days of the pleasantest seasons? In other words, is the tendency to suicide greater on clear, dry, and sunny days in June than on dark, cloudy, and rainy days in June? Professor Edwin G. Dexter, of the University of Illinois, published in the Popular Science Monthly, in April, 1901, a long and interesting paper entitled "Suicide and the Weather," in which he gave the result of a comparison between the police records of 1,962 cases of suicide in the city of New York and the records of the New York Weather Bureau for all the days on which these suicides occurred. His comparisons and computations, which seem to have been made with great thoroughness and care, show not only that the tendency to suicide is greatest in the spring and summer months, but that it is most marked on the clearest, sunniest, and pleasantest days of those months. To state his conclusions in his own words: "The clear, dry days show the greatest number of suicides, and the wet, partly cloudy days the least; and with differences too great to be attributed [Pg 221]to accident or chance. In fact, there are thirty-one per cent. more suicides on dry than on wet days, and twenty-one per cent. more on clear days than on days that are partly cloudy."

It thus appears that, as a rule, the tendency to suicide, throughout the civilized world, is greatest in the pleasantest seasons of the year; that it is everywhere greatest in the pleasantest month of the pleasantest season; and that in New York City it is greatest on the clearest and sunniest days of the pleasantest month. From the point of view of science, therefore, it is perfectly reasonable and absolutely accurate to say on a beautiful, sunny day in early June, "This is regular suicide weather."

Now, what is the explanation of this world-wide tendency to self-destruction in the seasons, months, and days when life would seem to be best worth living? The cause, whatever it be, can have no connection with race, religion, history, political status, or geographical location, because it acts uniformly among peoples as widely different, in all these respects, as the Russians, the Italians, the Americans, and the Japanese. It is evidently a cosmic cause, but what is its nature?

Some investigators have suggested that the suicidal tendency is dependent on heat; but June is not the hottest month, nor is December the coldest. Durkheim has tested this conjecture by comparing temperatures with suicides in France, Italy, and Prussia. He finds that, in all three of these countries, suicides reach their maximum in June and their minimum in December, while the temperature does not rise to its maximum until July and does not fall to its minimum until January.[19] Moreover, if heat were a predisposing cause of suicide, we should find the suicide rate of Europeans much higher in the tropics than it is in the north temperate zone; but such is not the case. Heat, therefore, as a possible cause, must be eliminated. Other writers, including Dr. Gubski, have called attention to the very close relation between suicide and light. It is true that daylight, if measured by hours, has its minimum in December and its maximum in June, in precise correspondence with the seasonal rates of suicide; but what about the equinoctial periods of March and September?

If light be the efficient cause, the tendency to suicide should be as great at the time of the fall equinox as it is at the time of the spring equinox; but this is not the case. Two hundred and seventy-two suicides out of every thousand occur in the vernal equinoctial period and only two hundred and fifteen in the autumnal equinoctial period, and this proportion holds good throughout the whole northern hemisphere. Light, therefore, must also be eliminated.

Morselli suggests that suicide is influenced by the first heat of early spring and summer, which "seizes upon the organism not yet acclimated and still under the influence of the cold season." But is there any such thing as winter debility, and, if so, why should it last until June? Many physicians, on the other hand, assert that during the period of early summer the organism, instead of being debilitated, is working at a high tension, that every function of mind and body is then more active than at any other period of the year, and, that, consequently, there is then greater liability to sudden mental and physical collapse. But there is no evidence to show that suicides, generally, are caused by seasonal overtension and subsequent collapse.

Goldwin Smith thinks that with the revival of vitality in the spring and early summer "all feelings and impressions become more lively," those that impel to suicide among the rest. But if all the feelings "become more lively," why do not the stimulated sensations of joy and pleasure on a beautiful day in June overcome, or at least evenly balance, the stimulated sensations of suffering and unhappiness?

Influence of Environment on Self-Destruction

None of these explanations is at all satisfactory, and it seems to me that the solution of the problem is to be found, not in the mere physical action of light, heat, or weather on the human body, but in the influence of the whole environment on the human mind. Sir Arthur Helps was the first, so far as I know, to suggest that the increased tendency to suicide in spring and summer is due to a psychological rather than a physical cause. Speaking, in "Realmah," of the fact that suicides are more frequent on pleasant days than on unpleasant ones, he says: "Perhaps it is because, on these beautiful days, the higher powers seem to be more beneficent; and the wretch overladen with misery thinks that he can trust more to their mercy."

This explanation is little more satisfactory than the others; but it does, nevertheless, recognize and take into account the influence of the environment on a preëxisting emotional state. It errs only in interpretation. The smiling, happy, joyous aspect of Nature in June does not inspire the unhappy man with confidence in the beneficence and mercy[Pg 222] of the higher powers. On the contrary, it shows him that the higher powers pay no attention at all to his feelings and have no sympathy whatever with his grief. The blue skies, sunshine, leafy trees, and singing birds, which make up the environment of June, add to the happiness of the man who is happy already, but they intensify, by contrast, the misery of the man who is already miserable. In November and December, when all is dark, bare, and cheerless, Nature seems to be in sympathy with the unhappy man's mood, and from that voiceless, pitying sympathy of the great World-Mother he derives a certain sustaining comfort and consolation. In June his mood is the same, but the mood of Nature has changed. The great World-Mother no longer sympathizes with his grief, but laughs him to scorn with her sunshine, her blossoming flowers, her leafy trees, and her jubilation of mating birds. He looks about him and thinks: "Everybody is happy, everything is rejoicing. I am the solitary exception; I am the only living thing that is out of place." And then there comes upon him a heartbreaking sense of loneliness, a feeling of complete isolation, as if the great, happy world had cast him off and gone on its way singing. He has thought of suicide before—he has thought of it often; and now, when the world, in its triumphant gladness, ignores his very existence, when there is no longer sympathy, nor pity, nor any further hope of a share in the happiness that he sees about him, it seems to him that the time for self-destruction has come. Whether he be a Russian, an American, or a Japanese, he can observe and he can feel: and when he sees that the whole world is jubilant, while he himself is wretched, he becomes more acutely conscious than ever before of his loneliness and misery, and resolves to give up the struggle and get out of the way of the world's laughing, singing, summer-carnival procession. He ends his life; and in some Russian, American, or Japanese table of statistics his death adds one more to the suicides in June.[20]

The close relation that exists between suicide and war was first brought to my attention by the sudden and remarkable decrease of suicide in the United States in 1898, the year of the war with Spain. Instead of increasing that year, as it had every previous year for more than a decade, the number of suicides decreased suddenly from 6,600 to 5,920, a falling off of 680 cases. Then, when the war in the Philippines followed the war in Cuba, the number was again reduced by 580 cases. When, however, in 1900, we began to lose interest in the Philippines and to think of our own home troubles and trials, the number of suicides rose suddenly from 5,340 to 7,245, an increase of 1,905 cases in two years. The decrease in the suicide rate during the war was nearly 16 per cent., and the increase after the war about 23 per cent.

War As a Deterrent to Suicide

This struck me as a phenomenon interesting enough to warrant investigation, and I began study of it by looking up the statistics of suicide in the national capital. It seemed to me that if the decrease in 1898 was due to a general economic cause, it would not be particularly noticeable in the city of Washington, for the reason that Washington is not a manufacturing or business center. If, on the other hand, the fall in the suicide rate was really due to the war as a specific cause, it would be most marked at the nation's capital, where the war attracted most attention and created most excitement. I went to the District Health Office and made an examination of the suicide records for a term of six years, beginning with 1895 and ending with 1900. I found not only that the depression in the Washington suicide curve was precisely synchronous with that of the national suicide curve, but that it was much deeper, amounting, in fact, to a sudden decrease of fifty per cent.

As suicides are tabulated in the Health Office of the District of Columbia by months, I was able to ascertain, furthermore, that the decrease began, not in the first month of the year, but in the spring months, when the war excitement became epidemic. Normally, the suicide rate should have risen, from January to June, in accordance with the seasonal law; but, instead of so doing, it fell rapidly at the very time when it should have been approaching its maximum. The colored population of the city, taken separately, was affected in the same way and to an even greater degree, the number of suicides among the blacks falling off fifty-six per cent., as compared with fifty per cent. among the whites. The number of suicides in both races remained low throughout the year 1899, and then rose suddenly in 1900, an almost precise correspondence with the suicide curve of the nation as a whole.

During our Civil War the suicidal tendency was affected in the same way,[Pg 223] but to a much greater extent. I have not been able to find mortality statistics of the whole country for the period in question, but in New York City the average rate of suicide in the five years of the Civil War was forty-two per cent. lower than the average for the five preceding years, and forty-three per cent. lower than the average for the five subsequent years. In the State of Massachusetts, where accurate statistics were kept, the number of suicides decreased seventeen per cent. in the five-year period from 1861 to 1865, as compared with the five-year period from 1856 to 1860.

In Europe the restraining influence of war upon the suicidal impulse is equally marked. The war between Austria and Italy in 1866 decreased the suicide rate of each country about fourteen per cent. The Franco-German war of 1870-71 lowered the suicide rate of Saxony 8.0 per cent., that of Prussia 11.4 per cent., and that of France 18.7 per cent. The reduction was greatest in France, because the German invasion of that country made the war excitement there much more general and intense than it was in Saxony or Prussia.

An explanation of the decrease of suicide in time of war may be found, perhaps, in the power that any strong excitement has to change the current of thought and substitute one emotion for another. Suicide, among civilized peoples, is largely due to morbid introspection and long brooding over real or imaginary trouble; and anything that takes a man's mind away from his own unhappiness, and gives him a keen interest in things or events about him, weakens his suicidal impulse. An unhappy man might resolve to end his life, and might load a revolver with the intention of shooting himself; but if he should happen to see a couple of his neighbors fighting in his front door-yard, he would probably lay the revolver aside, for a time, and watch the combat. The cause of his unhappiness would still remain, but the current of his thought would suddenly be diverted into a new channel and his despondency would give way to the excitement of a fresh and vivid interest. War acts upon men in the same way, but with greater force.

Then, too, war restrains suicide by strengthening the bonds of social sympathy and drawing large masses of people more closely together. The unhappy man always thinks of himself as lonely, isolated, and out of harmony with his environment; but when, as a result of the victories or defeats of war, he finds himself participating in the triumph or sharing the grief of thousands of other persons, the mere consciousness of sympathetic association with his fellow-men becomes a source of comfort and consolation to him and makes his life more endurable. But war is not the only agency that exerts a restraining influence upon self-destruction. Any great calamity which causes intense public excitement, and which at the same time draws people together in friendly sympathy and coöperation, lowers the suicide rate. The calamity may greatly intensify suffering, and may make life, for a time, almost intolerable; but it does not increase the number of persons who try to escape from life; on the contrary, it reduces it.

San Francisco Earthquake Decreased Suicides

A striking illustration of this fact was furnished by San Francisco in 1906. Before the earthquake and fire of April 18 the suicides in that city averaged twelve a week. After the earthquake, when the whole population was homeless, destitute, and exposed to hardships and privations of every kind, there were only three suicides in two months. The decrease, therefore, in the suicide rate was more than 97 per cent. This surprising result of a disheartening and depressing calamity was due partly to the excitement of life under new and extraordinary conditions, and partly to the feeling, which every man had, that he was enduring and working with a host of sympathetic comrades, and not suffering and striving alone. If life were always vividly interesting, as it was in San Francisco after the earthquake, and if all men worked and suffered together as the San Franciscans did for a few weeks, suicide would not end ten thousand American lives every year, as it does now.

The dependence of suicide upon such conditions as age, sex, occupation, and religion does not offer any problem as difficult and baffling as that involved in the relation of suicide to weather, nor any as curious and suggestive as that which connects suicide with war; but there is hardly a phase of the subject that does not present some more or less interesting question. The researches of Durkheim and Gubski show that, after the period of childhood, the tendency to suicide increases steadily with advancing age. In France, for example, if the population be segregated in groups comprising all persons ten to twenty years of age, all persons twenty to thirty years of age, all persons thirty to forty years of age, and so on, by decades, the annual number of suicides per million rises as follows: first group 56, second group 130, third 155, fourth 204, fifth 217, sixth 274, seventh 317, and the rate finally reaches its maximum in the group that comprises persons more than eighty[Pg 224] years of age.

In the United States, the rate increases from 128 per million, in the age group comprising persons under forty-five, to 300 per million in the age group comprising persons over sixty-five. The figures vary in different countries, according to the hereditary national suicide tendencies; but the steady increase with advancing age is common to all. These statistics would seem to support the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer, and to prove that the longer one lives the less one wants to live; but it must not be forgotten that the suicide rate is a measure of exceptional unhappiness, not of the general welfare.

In the suicidal tendencies of the sexes there is, as might be expected, a very great difference. In all countries and in all parts of the world, suicides among women are far less frequent than among men. The ratio varies from one to two to two to five. This difference is generally attributed to the supposed fact that women are sheltered and protected by men, as well as by their domestic environment, and that, consequently, they suffer less from the wear and tear of life; but I doubt very much the adequacy of this explanation. The life of women, in the world at large, is quite as hard as that of men, and often harder. In the higher and wealthier classes of society women may be, and doubtless are, sheltered and protected; but in the poorer classes they take their full share of the suffering, even if they do not bear the brunt of the struggle.

The hundreds of Russian women who between 1877 and 1885 were exiled to eastern Siberia for political offenses had no shelter or protection whatever, and must necessarily have suffered more than the exiled men from the hardships and privations of banishment; and yet, I am quite sure that I understate the fact when I say that the number of suicides among the men was at least five times greater than it was among the women. The exiled men themselves admitted to me that when it came to the endurance of suffering against which no fight could be made and from which there was no escape, the women were greatly their superiors. The infrequency of self-destruction among women, as compared with that among men, seems to me to be due, not to their comparative immunity from suffering, but to three other causes, namely, first, a greater power of patient, passive endurance, when there is no fight to be made; second, a mind and heart that are more influenced by feelings and beliefs that may be called religious; and, third, a peculiar capacity for self-restraint and self-preservation, based on the maternal instinct, that is, on closer and more intimate relations with, stronger love for, and greater devotion to young children.

A study of the relation that suicide bears to occupation discloses some interesting and noteworthy facts. The first is that soldiers, both in Europe and in the United States, must be put in a class by themselves, for the reason that the suicide rate of army officers and men is so much higher than that of the populations to which they belong that they can hardly be included in the same category. In Prussia, for example, the proportion of military suicides to civilian suicides is 1½ to 1; in England 2½ to 1; in Italy 5 to 1; in Austria 10 to 1; and in Russia nearly 11 to 1. Even in the United States, the tendency of soldiers to kill themselves is 8½ times that of adult men in civil life.

This disproportionately high suicide rate in armies is not easy of explanation. In countries where military service is compulsory, and where inexperienced young men, torn suddenly from their families, are subjected to rigorous discipline in a strange and uncongenial environment, the suicidal impulse may be intensified by homesickness, loneliness, humiliation, and the monotony of camp or barrack life; but in our own country, where the army is filled by voluntary enlistment, and where the relations between officers and men are fairly sympathetic and cordial, there would seem to be fewer reasons for unhappiness and suffering than in the military service of Italy, Austria, or Russia. The American soldier is generally well taken care of and well treated; and while his life, in time of peace, is not exciting, it is easier and less monotonous than that of a factory operative, and it is hard to understand why he should be abnormally disposed to self-destruction. His suicidal tendency, however, is reduced by war, just as that of the civil population is, and for the same reasons.

Professional Classes Furnish Most Suicides

Statistics of self-destruction are not yet accurate and detailed enough to enable us to determine the relation that suicide bears to business employment; but it may be said, in a general way, that the occupations in which the suicide rate is lowest are those that involve rough manual labor out of doors and employ men of comparatively little educational culture, such as miners, quarrymen, shipwrights, fishermen, gardeners, bricklayers, and masons. Next come farmers, shopkeepers, and town artisans. And at the head of the list, with the highest suicide rate of[Pg 225] all, are physicians, journalists, teachers, and lawyers. The tendency of these professional classes to commit suicide is from one and a half to three times as great as that of the population generally.

Clergymen, however, who also constitute an educated professional class, have a suicide rate which is only half that of the population as a whole, and this is undoubtedly due to the restraining influence of religion, which is much stronger in clergymen than in laymen. The relation of suicide to religion raises a number of curious and interesting questions, but, unfortunately, the religious factor is so involved with other factors in the complicated problem of self-destruction that it is almost impossible to isolate it so as to study it alone. For example, the suicide rate of Protestant Christians in the northern part of Ireland is twice that of Roman Catholics in the southern part; but here education comes in as a complication: the Protestants are generally better educated than the Catholics, and their higher suicide rate may be due to their education and not to the form of their religion. In Europe generally, the tendency to suicide is much greater among both Protestants and Catholics than among Jews; but here education, race, and economic condition all come in as complicating factors, so that it is impossible to credit the Jewish faith alone with the lower rate. In view, however, of the fact that the suicide rate of the Protestant cantons in Switzerland is nearly four times that of the Catholic cantons, it seems probable that Catholicism, as a form of religious belief, does restrain the suicidal impulse. The efficient cause may be the Catholic practice of confessing to priests, which probably gives much encouragement and consolation to unhappy but devout believers, and thus induces many of them to struggle on in spite of misfortune and depression.

The Salvation Army, in attempting to lessen self-destruction by opening "anti-suicide bureaus" in large cities, and by inviting persons who are contemplating suicide to visit these bureaus and talk over their troubles, is virtually introducing a system of confession which, so far as this particular evil is concerned, resembles that of the Catholic Church.

In view, however, of the conflicting nature of the evidence, and the extreme difficulty of disentangling religious factors from other important factors, I doubt the possibility of drawing any trustworthy conclusions with regard to the dependence of suicide upon religious belief. It may be said, as a matter of record, that the tendency to self-destruction is greatest among Protestant Christians, next largest among Roman Catholics and Orthodox Greeks, and lowest among Mohammedans and Jews; but the differences are not certainly due to religion.

The dependence of suicide upon nationality and race presents a number of problems of great interest, but of extraordinary difficulty and complexity. I can state a few of these problems, but I cannot solve any of them.

Among the highest suicide rates in Europe are those of Saxony and Denmark, and among the lowest those of Italy, Portugal, and Spain. You may perhaps conclude, from this, that the tendency to self-destruction is much greater among the Slavs and Scandinavians of the north than it is among the Latin peoples of the south, and that the differences are due to latitude or race; but your specious generalization is shattered when you discover that the suicide rates of Norway and Russia, both northern countries inhabited by Scandinavians and Slavs, are almost as low as those of Italy, Portugal, and Spain, all southern countries inhabited by Latins.

From an ethnological point of view, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are nearly homogeneous Scandinavian states, and we should therefore expect their suicide rates to be nearly if not quite identical; but the rate of Denmark is twice that of Sweden and three times that of Norway.

The Slavs of Bohemia do not differ ethnologically from the Slavs of Dalmatia, but the suicide rate of the one group is 158 per million, while that of the other is only 14 per million. Saxony is not far away, geographically, from Belgium; but the suicide rate of the former is 324 per million, while that of the latter is only 128 per million.

I am unable to offer even a conjectural solution of the problems involved in the differences thus shown to exist between populations that are ethnologically identical, or that stand at nearly the same level of educational culture and economic well being.

Germany's High Suicide Rates

The extremely high suicide rate of the Germanic peoples long ago attracted the attention of European sociologists, but, so far as I know, it has never been satisfactorily explained. If it were limited to adults it might possibly be attributed to economic causes, particularly to the rapid development of manufacturing industry, which seems everywhere to increase the suicidal tendency; but self-destruction in Germany is almost as common among children as among grown people. Between 1883 and[Pg 226] 1903 there were 1,125 suicides among the pupils of the public schools in Prussia alone, and most of them were of boys and girls under fifteen years of age. An investigation made by the ministry of public instruction showed that this prevalence of suicide among children was not due to the conditions of modern life in cities, inasmuch as the proportion of cases was fully as large in places of the smallest size as in crowded centers of population. It seemed to be due, rather, to an inherent suicidal tendency in the race.

Racial characteristics, however, do not by any means account for the extraordinary differences in suicide rates that we find among the European peoples, as shown in the following table:[21]

EUROPEAN PEOPLES GROUPED RACIALLY

NUMBER OF SUICIDES PER MILLION INHABITANTS

I. Slavs

II. Scandinavians

III. Latins

IV. Germans

V. English

VI. Asiatics

It is difficult to assign definite or satisfactory reasons for the wide differences shown in the above table. Skelton has suggested that the low suicide rates of certain countries are due to emigration, "which provides an outlet for a great deal of misery and constitutes a hopeful alternative to suicide"; but this conjecture, although ingenious, is hardly supported by the facts. It might perhaps explain the low suicide rates of Italy and Ireland, but it does not account for the equally low suicide rate of the Russian peasants, who emigrate hardly at all, nor for the extremely high suicide rate of the Germans, who emigrate in large numbers. Neither does it throw any light upon the persistence of national suicide rates long after emigration. The generalization that seems to harmonize and explain the greatest number of facts is that suicide is most prevalent in countries where education goes hand in hand with highly developed manufacturing industry. In Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Russia the people have little education, manufacturing industries are feebly developed, and the suicide rate is low. In Saxony the percentage of illiteracy is very small, more than half of the population work in factories, and the suicide rate is the highest in Europe. I do not dare to assert that even this rude generalization is warranted by the facts; but, if it were sustained, it would seem to show that suicide is a by-product of the great, complicated machine that we call modern civilization.

Whatever may be the reasons for differences in national suicide rates, and whatever may be the causes that have produced them, there is little doubt, I think, that the rates themselves are true manifestations of national character, and that they are as permanent as the character of which they are an outcome. When, therefore, a people migrates from one place to another, it takes both its character and its suicide rate to the new location. This is clearly apparent in the vital statistics of immigrants who come from various parts of Europe to the United States. Such immigrants, as a rule, prosper here and become happier here, but the increased prosperity and happiness do not greatly affect the suicidal tendencies that they had when they were poor and wretched in their original homes. Even their descendants, born in America, keep substantially unchanged the suicide rates that they have inherited, with their character, from their European ancestors. The Germans who came here forty or fifty years ago brought a high suicide rate with them, and their descendants maintain it. The Irish, on the contrary, brought a low suicide rate to this country, and their children have it still. In the following table will be found the suicide rates of a few nationalities in Europe and of their descendants in the United States.[22][Pg 227]

SUICIDES PER MILLION OF POPULATION

In an address delivered before the Anthropological Society of Washington, D. C., on October 19, 1880, Mr. M. B. W. Hough said: "As long as the features of the ancestor are repeated in his descendants, so long will the traits of his character reappear. Language may change, customs be left behind, races may migrate from place to place and subsist on whatever the country they occupy affords; but their fundamental characteristics will survive, because they are comparatively uninfluenced by the mere accidents of nutrition." This statement is as true of suicide as it is of other manifestations of national character.

Odd Methods Employed by Suicides

Nothing is more surprising in the records of suicide than the extraordinary variety and novelty of the methods to which man has resorted in his efforts to escape from the sufferings and misfortunes of life. One would naturally suppose that a person who had made up his mind to commit suicide would do so in the easiest, most convenient, and least painful way; but the literature of the subject proves conclusively that hundreds of suicides, every year, take their lives in the most difficult, agonizing, and extraordinary ways; and that there is hardly a possible or conceivable method of self-destruction that has not been tried. When I clipped from a newspaper my first case of self-cremation with kerosene and a match, I regarded it as rather a remarkable and unusual method of taking life; but I soon discovered that self-cremation is comparatively common. When I learned that Mary Reinhardt, of New York, had sung "Rock of Ages" and had then killed herself by inhaling gas in a barrel stuffed with pillows, I thought it a curious and noteworthy case; but when I compared it with suicides that came to my knowledge later, it seemed quite simple and natural. I have well-authenticated cases in which men or women have committed suicide by hanging themselves, or taking poison, in the tops of high trees; by throwing themselves upon swiftly revolving circular saws; by exploding dynamite in their mouths; by thrusting red-hot pokers down their throats; by hugging red-hot stoves; by stripping themselves naked and allowing themselves to freeze to death on winter snow-drifts out of doors, or on piles of ice in refrigerator-cars; by lacerating their throats on barbed-wire fences; by drowning themselves head downward in barrels; by suffocating themselves head downward in chimneys; by diving into white-hot coke-ovens; by throwing themselves into craters of volcanoes; by shooting themselves with ingenious combinations of a rifle with a sewing-machine; by strangling themselves with their hair; by swallowing poisonous spiders; by piercing their hearts with corkscrews and darning-needles; by cutting their throats with hand-saws and sheep-shears; by hanging themselves with grape vines; by swallowing strips of under-clothing and buckles of suspenders; by forcing teams of horses to tear their heads off; by drowning themselves in vats of soft soap; by plunging into retorts of molten glass; by jumping into slaughter-house tanks of blood; by decapitation with home-made guillotines; and by self-crucifixion.

Of course, persons who resort to such methods as these are, in most cases, mentally unsound. A man who shoots, hangs, poisons, or drowns himself may be sane; but the man who crucifies himself, buries himself alive, cuts his throat on a barbed-wire fence, or climbs into the top of a tree to take poison, is evidently on the border-line of insanity, even if he be not a recognized lunatic.

The most prevalent methods of suicide in Europe are, first, hanging, second, drowning. In the United States they are, first, poisoning, second, shooting. About three fourths of all the persons who commit suicide in the United States use pistol or poison. The difference between European and American methods is probably due to the fact that on the other side of the Atlantic drugs and fire-arms are not so easily obtainable as they are here, and Europeans therefore resort to water and the rope as the best and surest means accessible. Police restrictions and regulations make it almost impossible for a Russian peasant to get either poison or a pistol; but all the police in the empire cannot prevent him from drowning himself in a pond, or hanging himself in his own barn.

A careful comparison of all the facts accessible seems to show that in Europe, at least, suicide bears a certain definite relation to education and manufactures; and that, as I have already said, it is a by-product of the great, complicated world-machine that we call modern civilization. Its specific causes, so far as they can be ascertained, are, on the educational side, the development of increased nervous and psychic sensibility, which makes men feel more acutely all wants, deprivations,[Pg 228] misfortunes, and sufferings; and, on the manufacturing side, a monotony of employment which wearies and exhausts the body while it gives little exercise to the educated mind and leaves the latter free to brood over its unsatisfied longings and desires, as well as its many trials and disappointments. There are other causes, such as the growing disproportion between wants generally and the means of gratification generally; alcoholism; unhealthful work, especially in manufacturing districts; barrack and tenement-house life; and all the evils incident to poverty, overcrowding, and bad sanitary conditions in cities. So far as I can see, these causes, at present, are not removable. Education must continue to intensify sensibility and increase the number of men's wants, and the great economic machine must grind on, even though it crush thousands of human beings, every year, in the cogs of its innumerable wheels. A high suicide rate is part of the price that we pay for the educational and material achievements upon which we pride ourselves. We have greatly multiplied the means of human happiness, but whether, on the whole, we have increased the sum total of human happiness is perhaps an open question. In any event, the high and rapidly increasing suicide rate shows that we are pushing the weaklings to the wall.

The question of what can be done to lessen the suicide tendency and check this great waste of human power and energy brings me to the only important cause of self-destruction which seems to me removable, and that is newspaper publicity. No argument is needed to prove that man is essentially an imitative animal. In dress, in behavior, in speech, in modes of thought, and in social conventions, we are all prone to do what we see others do; and when unhappy men and women learn, from the newspapers, that scores of other unhappy people are daily escaping from their troubles through the always open door of suicide, when familiarity with the idea of self-destruction deprives the act of all its natural terror, it is not at all surprising that they yield to what seems to be the general current of their social environment. I have, in my own collection of material, a surprisingly large number of cases in which the suicidal act may be traced directly to newspaper publicity and imitation; but I must limit myself to a single striking illustration—the suicidal epidemic in Emporia, Kansas, in the summer of 1901. As a result, apparently, of the publication of the details of two or three suicides of people prominent in that little Kansas town, there broke out an epidemic of self-destruction which culminated in the sunny, flowery month of June, and which carried the annual suicide rate from about 90 per million to 1,665 per million—a rate five times greater than that of Saxony. Mr. Morse, the mayor of the city, consulted the Board of Health, and decided to stop the publication of the details of suicides in the local papers, even if it should require the employment of force. He issued a proclamation, on the 16th of June, in which he said: "I have consulted the Board of Health, and if the Emporia papers do not comply with my request, I shall have a right to stop, and I will stop summarily, the publication of these suicide details, under the law providing for the suppression of epidemics. There is clearly an epidemic in this city, and although it is mental, it is none the less deadly. Its contagion may be clearly shown to come from what is known in medicine as the psychic suggestion, found in the publication of the details of suicides. If the paper on which the local journals are printed had been kept in a place infected with small-pox, I could demand that the journals stop using that paper, or stop publication. If they spread another contagion—the contagious suggestion of suicide—I believe the liberty of the press is not to be considered before the public welfare, and that the courts would sustain me in using force to prevent the publication of newspapers containing matter clearly deleterious to the public health."

I believe that the reasoning of Mayor Morse is perfectly sound, and that the position taken by him is absolutely impregnable. The prevention of the publication of suicides in the newspapers of a State would require a special legislative act, but it would probably do more to lessen the suicidal tendency than any other single measure that could be taken. In the winter of 1902, Representative Jenkins introduced in the National House of Representatives a bill making periodicals containing details of suicides unmailable; but I think it was never reported from committee.

The Emotional Temperament as a Cause

There is one other way in which the suicide rate may possibly be lowered, or at least held in check, and that is through the cultivation of what may be called the heroic spirit. We are becoming too emotional and sentimental, and too much inclined to regard weakness with sympathy, instead of with the contempt that it generally deserves. In the language of the prize ring, the pugilist who lies down while he can yet stand and see is called a "quitter." It would be harsh and unjust to apply to all[Pg 229] suicides this opprobrious name; but there can be little doubt, I think, that the majority of them are weaklings who give up and lie down while they still have a fighting chance.

Readers of shipping news may still remember the wreck of a German kerosene steamer on the wildest, most precipitous part of the coast of Newfoundland, in February, 1901. The steamer took fire during a heavy winter gale, and the captain ran her ashore, at the nearest point of land, with the hope of saving the lives of the crew. She struck on a submerged reef in a little cove, about an eighth of a mile from a coast which was three or four hundred feet high and as precipitous as a wall. When she was first seen by a few fishermen at daylight, her boats were gone, and all of her crew had apparently perished except three men. Two were standing on the bridge, and one was lashed aloft in the fore-rigging. About ten o'clock in the forenoon a tremendous sea carried away the bridge and the two men on it, and they were seen no more. At three o'clock in the afternoon the solitary survivor,—the man in the fore-rigging,—who was evidently suffering intensely from hunger and cold, unlashed himself, threshed his arms against his body for five minutes to restore the circulation in them, and then took off his coat, waved his hand to the fishermen on top of the cliff, climbed down the shrouds, and plunged into the sea—but not to commit suicide. He swam to the shore, made three attempts in different places to get a footing among the rocks at the base of the cliff, but was swept away every time by the surf, and finally abandoned the attempt as hopeless. At that crisis in the struggle ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have given up and allowed themselves to drown; but this man was not a "quitter." He turned his face again seaward, struck out for the half-submerged ship, and after a long and desperate struggle succeeded in reaching her and getting on board. He climbed the fore-shrouds, waved his hand to the pitying but powerless fishermen on the edge of the cliff, and lashed himself again in the rigging. At intervals, until dark, he made signals to the fishermen to show that he was yet alive. At daybreak on the following morning he could still be seen in the fore-rigging, but his head had fallen on his breast and he was motionless. He had frozen to death in the night. That man died, as a man in adverse circumstances ought to die, fighting to the last. You may call it foolish, and say that he might better have ended his sufferings by allowing himself to drown when he found that he could not make a landing at the base of the cliff; but deep down in your hearts you pay secret homage to his courage, his endurance, and his indomitable will. He was defeated at last, but, so long as he had consciousness, neither fire nor cold nor tempest could break down his manhood.

The Caucasian mountaineers have a proverb which says: "Heroism is endurance for one moment more." That proverb recognizes the fact that in this world the human spirit, with its dominating force, the will, may be and ought to be superior to all bodily sensations and all accidents of environment. We should not only feel, but we should teach, by our conversation and by our literature, that, in the struggle of life, it is essentially a noble thing and a heroic thing to die fighting. In a recent psychological story called "My Friend Will," Charles F. Lummis pays a striking tribute to the power of the human mind over the accidents of life and chance when he makes his "friend Will" say: "I am bigger than anything that can happen to me. All these things—sorrow, misfortune, and suffering—are outside my door. I'm in the house and I've got the key!"

PRAIRIE DAWN

BY WILLA SIBERT CATHER

A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;
A pungent odor from the dusty sage;
A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;
A breaking of the distant table-lands
Through purple mists ascending, and the flare
Of water ditches silver in the light;
A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;
A sudden sickness for the hills of home.

—From April Twilights.
[Pg 230]

THE DOINGS OF THE DEVIL

BY HARVEY J. O'HIGGINS

ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS FOGARTY

Mrs. Cregan wept, and her tears were ludicrous. She was as fat as a Falstaff. Her features were as ill-suited for the expression of grief as a circus clown's. She had not even a channel in her plump cheeks to drain the tears from the corners of her eyes; and the slow drops, large and unctuous, trickled down her round jowl and soaked into her bonnet-strings, leaving her cheeks as fresh and as ruddy in the sunlight as if they had been merely wet with perspiration. Her eyes stared, unpuckered, apparently unconscious that they wept. Her mouth was tight in an expression of resentful determination. Only her little round chin trembled—like a child's.

And yet Mrs. Cregan was as nearly heart-broken as she had ever been in her life. She was leaving her husband; what was more grievous to her, she was leaving her home; she was on the streets of New York, with her small savings in her greasy purse—clasped tightly in her two hands under her "Sunday cape," that was trimmed with fringe and tassels in a way to remind you of a lambrequin. She did not know where to go. There was no one to whom she could turn for aid, and she would not go to any one for pity. Behind her was the wreck of a breakfast table—the visible symbol of her ruined home—with a cursing Irishman, whom nobody could live with any longer, shouting, "Your house, is it? I'll show yeh whose house it is! I'll show yeh! I'll break ev'ry danged thing in the place!" Before her were the crooked byways of what had once been "Greenwich village," as quiet as a desert, and as indifferent, in the early morning radiance, with shuttered windows and closed doors.

The domestic peace of those old streets made her own homelessness the more pitiful to her. She felt as she had felt once before—years before—in her childhood, when she had set sail with her parents for America. It had been a cold day; and the mists had steamed up horridly from the water, with a desolate, wet sea-odor; and the memory of the sunlight on green fields and the warm perfume of the land had been like a longing for health and daylight to the darkness of a death-bed. The future had threatened her with the terrors of an unknown world. The past—despite its poverty and starvation—had been as dear as life. She had suffered all those pangs of dissolution that assail the home-loving Irish when they have to leave what association has made dear to them; for, with the Irish, familiarity does not breed contempt but affection.

She suffered these same miseries now. She saw her home through tears of regret, though unhappiness had driven her from it. And her lips were set in a determination never to return to Cregan, though her chin trembled with pity of herself in the determination.

Some distance behind her came a smaller woman, as shrunken, as withered, and as yellow as an old leaf. Even her shoes seemed to have dried and shriveled, curling up at the toes. And she fluttered along in the light morning breeze, holding back against it, on her heels, with an odd effect of being carried forward faster than she wished to go.

She was Mrs. Byrne, from the floor below Mrs. Cregan's flat, and she had been starting out on a secret errand of her own when she heard the quarrel overhead and stopped to hear the end of it. There was something guilty in her manner, and she was evidently struggling between her desire to reach the next street unseen by Mrs. Cregan and her desire to know what had happened in the Cregan flat. Her curiosity proved the stronger.

She let the wind blow her alongside her friend's portly despair. She said, in the hoarse whisper that was all she had left of her voice: "Is it yerself, Missus Cregan? Yuh're off to choorch early this mornin'."

Mrs. Cregan looked around, blinking to clear her eyes. "Choorch?" she said, on the plaintiveness of a high note that broke in her throat.

"Yuh're cryin', woman!". Her look of craftiness had changed at once to one of[Pg 231] startled distress. "Come back out o' this with yuh." She caught Mrs. Cregan's arm. "It's no thing to be doin' on the street! Come back, now. Where're yuh goin'?"

Mrs. Cregan marched stolidly ahead and carried her neighbor with her. "I've quit 'm."

Mrs. Byrne expressed her emotion and showed her tact by silently compressing her lips.

"I've quit 'im, fer good an' all." She stroked a tear down her cheek with a thick forefinger. "I'll niver go back. Niver!"

"Come away with yuh, Mary Cregan," Mrs. Byrne cried, in her breathy huskiness. "At your age! Faith, yuh're as flighty as one o' them girls with the pink silk petticoats. He's yer husban', ain't he? D'yuh think yuh were married over the broomstick? Come an' behave yerself like a decent woman. What'd Father Dumphy say to this, think yuh?"

"He's a man. I know what he'd say. He'd tell me to go back to Cregan. I'll niver go back. Niver!"

"I'll niver go back. Niver! He's broke me best chiny—an' kicked the leg off the chair—an' overtoorned the table—an' ordered me out o' the little bit o' home I been all these years puttin' together. The teapot th' ol' man brought from Ireland—the very teapot—smashed to smithereens! An' the little white dishes with the gilt trimmin's I had to me weddin' day, Mrs. Byrne! There was the poor things all broke to bits!" She stopped to point at the sidewalk, as if the wreckage lay there before her. "All me little bit o' chiny. All of it. All of it, Mrs. Byrne. Ev'ry bit! Boorsted!"

Her tears choked her. She could not express the piercing irreparability of the injury. It would not have been so bad if he had beaten her; a hurt will heal. But the innocent, wee cups—and the fat old brown teapot—and the sweet little chair with its pretty legs, carved and turned so daintily! She had washed them and wiped them, and dusted and polished them, and been so careful of them and felt so proud of them, for twenty years past. And, now, there they were lying, all in bits—past mending—gone forever. And they so pretty and so harmless.

The crash as they fell on the floor had sounded in her ears like the scream of a child murdered.

She started forward again, determinedly. "I'll niver go back to 'm. He can have his house to himsilf.... What do I care for Father Dumphy? He wants nothin' but the dime I leaves at the choorch doore, an' the dime I drops on the plate! Whin me poorse's impty, he'll not bother his head about me!"

"Shame on yuh!" Mrs. Byrne wheezed, with her eye on the house she was passing. "Yuh talk no better than a Prod'stunt."

"An' if I was a Prod'stint," she cried, "I'd not have to pay money iv'ry time I wanted to hear mass. I'd not be out on the street here, not knowin' where I'm goin' to, ner how I'm to live. It's thim that knows how to take care o' their own—givin' the women worrk, an' takin' the childer off to the farrms, an' all the like o' that. You Dogans——"

Mrs. Byrne glanced about her fearfully, "Stop yer talk, now. Stop yer talk. Stop it before someone hears yuh makin' a big fool o' yerself."

"I'll not stop it. What do I care who hears me? I'm goin' off from here fer good an' all. 'Twill know me no more. 'Twill not. I'm done with it all. I'm done with it." She held out her purse. "I've got me bit o' money. I'll hire me a little room up-town. I'm done with him an' Father Dumphy an' the whole dang lot o' yuz. Slavin' an' savin' fer nothin' at all. I'll worrk fer mesilf now, an' none other. Neither Cregan ner the choorch ner no one ilse 'll get a penny's good o' me no more. I got no one in the wide worrld but mesilf to look to, an' I'll go it alone."

Mrs. Byrne was a little woman of a somewhat sinister aspect, her dull eyes very deep in their wrinkles, her nose pushed aside out of the perpendicular, her long lips stretched tightly over protruding teeth. She was as curious as an old monkey; but it was not only her curiosity that made her the busiest gossip and the most charitable "good soul" in the street; she had her share of human kindness, and if she was as crafty as a hypocrite, it was because she enjoyed handling men and women, like a politician.

Seeing that Mrs. Cregan was beyond the reach of shame or the appeal of the priest, she said: "Well, I don't blame yuh, woman. Cregan's a fool—like all the rest o' the men. An' yerself such a good manager. Well, well! Yer rooms was that purty 't 'ud make yuh wistful. Where will yuh be goin'?"

Mrs. Byrne hitched up her shawl. "Come along then to the da-ary restr'unt. There's no[Pg 232] one home to miss me. Ill take a bit o' holiday, this mornin', meself. I've been wantin' to taste one o' those batter cakes they make in the restr'unt windahs, this long enough."

"I have not" Mrs. Byrne replied. "I was off to the grocer to buy some sugar when yuh stopped me."

It was a lie. She had, in fact; started out, secretly, on a guilty errand which she should not acknowledge.

"It's a lonely meal I'd 've been havin'," she said, "with Byrne down at the boiler house an' the boy off on his run."

Mrs. Cregan did not reply, and they came to Sixth Avenue without more words. They paused before a dairy restaurant that advertised its "Surpassing Coffee" in white-enamel letters on its shop-front windows. Mrs. Cregan's hunger drew her in, but slowly; and Mrs. Byrne followed, coughing to conceal her embarrassment.

It was the first time that Mrs. Byrne had ever sat down in any public restaurant, except the eating-halls at Coney Island (where she went with "basket parties") or the ice-cream "parlors" at Fort George. And she glanced about her at tiled walls and mosaic floors with a furtiveness that was none the less critical for being so sly. "It's eatin' in a bathroom we are," she whispered. "An' will yuh look at the cup yonder. The sides of it are that thick there's scarce room fer the coffee in it! Well, well! It do beat the Dutch! They're drawin' the drink out of a boiler big enough fer wash day." The approach of a waitress silenced her. When she saw that Mrs. Cregan was not going to speak, she looked up at the girl with a bargain-counter keenness. "Have y' any pancakes fit t' eat? How much are they? Ten cents! Fer how many? Fer three pancakes? Fer three! D'yuh hear that?" she appealed to Mrs. Cregan. "Come home with me, that's a good woman. It's a sin to pay it. Three cents fer a pancake! Aw, come along out o' this. Ten cents! We c'u'd get two loaves o' bread fer the money an' live on it fer a week!"

But Mrs. Cregan was beyond the reach of practicalities, and she ordered her buckwheat cakes and coffee with an air that was mournfully distrait. Mrs. Byrne made a vain attempt to get her own cakes from the waitress for five cents, and then resigned herself to the senseless extravagance. "Yuh'll not make yer own[Pg 233] livin' an' eat the likes o' this," she grumbled asthmatically. "Yuh'd better be savin' yer money."

Mrs. Cregan was looking at the thick china with a sort of aggrieved despondence. (It was almost the expression of a bereaved mother looking at one of her neighbor's children and thinking it a healthy, ugly brat whom nobody would have missed!) She stared at the bare walls and the bare tables of the restaurant, and found the place, by comparison with her own cozy flat, as unhome-like as the waiting-room of a railroad station—the waiting-room of a railroad station when you have said good-bye to your past and the train has not yet arrived to carry you to your future.

As her pancakes were served to her, she bent over the plate to hide a tear that trickled down her nose. It splashed on the piece of food that she raised to her mouth. She ate it—tear and all.

Mrs. Cregan ate, and the food helped, to stop her tears. It was the strong coffee, at last, that brought her back her voice. "If it'd b'en him, he'd 'a' gone an' got drunk," she said, wiping her cheeks with her napkin. "The men have the best of it. Us women have to take it all starin' sober."

"They're no more than children," Mrs. Byrne replied, "an' they're to be treated as such. Sure, Cregan couldn't live without yuh. He'd have no buttons to his pants in a week."

"An' him!" Mrs. Cregan cried. "Iver, since the Raypublicuns got licked, there's be'n no gettin' on with him at all. Thim Sunday papers 've toorned his head. He's all blather about his rights an' his wrongs. Th' other moornin' didn't I try to get on his bus from the wrong side o' the crossin', an' he bawls at me: 'Th' other side! Th' other side! Yuh're no better than any one ilse!' An' I had to chase through the mud after him! The little wizened runt! He's talkin' like an arnachist! An' that's why he smashed me dish. He'll have no one say 'No' to 'im.... Ah, Mrs. Byrne, niver marry a man older than yersilf."

"Thank yuh," Mrs. Byrne replied with hoarse sarcasm. "I'm not likely to, at my age." She added, consolingly: "Cregan's young fer his years. Drivin' a Fift' Avenah bus is fine, preservin', outdoor work."

"It is that!" And Mrs. Cregan's tone remarked that the fact was the more to be deplored. "He'll be crankier an' crabbeder the older he grows." She dipped to her coffee and swallowed hard.

Mrs. Byrne had screwed up her eyes to squint at an idea that could not well be looked in the face. When she spoke it was to say slyly: "God forbid! But they do go off sometimes in a puff. He looks as if he'd live fer long enough, thank Heaven. But yuh never can tell."

Mrs. Cregan blinked, held her hand for a moment, and then began hastily to fill her mouth with food. The silence that ensued was long enough to take on an appearance of guilt.

"Yuh never can tell," she began, "unless yuh have doin's with the devil—like them gipsies that see what's comin' by lookin' in the flat o' yer hand. There's one o' them aroun' the corner, an' they say she told Minnie Doyle the name o' the man she was to marry. An' he married her, at that!" Mrs. Cregan looked blank. Mrs. Byrne leaned forward to her. "I never whispered it to a livin' soul but yerself—but it was her told Mrs. Gunn that her last was to be a boy. A good month ahead! An' when she saw it was true she had no peace o' mind till she heard the priest say the words over the poor child an' saw that the sprinkle o' holy water didn't bubble off him like yuh'd sprinkled it on a hot stove." Mrs. Cregan's vacant regard had slowly gathered a gleam of startled intelligence. "An' if I was yerself, Mrs. Cregan—not knowin'[Pg 234] where I was to go to, ner how I was to live—I'd go an' have a talk with her before I went further, d'yuh see?"

"'Tis not. When I told Father Dumphy what I'd done, he called me an ol' fool an' gave me an extry litany fer penance. What's a litany!"

"Yuh w'd not. Come along with me. I was goin'. I got troubles o' me own. Never mind that. There's nothin' to be scared of. Nothin' at all. No one'll see us. I been there meself, many's the time, an' no one knows it."

III

Mrs. Byrne entered the "reception rooms" of Madame Wampa, "clairvoyant, palmist, and card-reader," with the propitiatory smile of the woman who knows she is doing wrong but is prepared to argue that there is "no great harm into it." She was followed by Mrs. Cregan, as guiltily reverential as if she were an altar boy who had been persuaded to join in some mischievous trespass on the "sanctuary." Madame Wampa received them, professionally insolent in her indifference. Mrs. Byrne explained that she wanted only a "small card reading" for twenty-five cents. Madame Wampa said curtly: "Sit down!"

She had been a music-hall singer when her husband was a sleight-of-hand artist, "The Great Malino, the Wizard of Milan." Her voice had long since left her; she had nothing of her beauty but its yellow ruins; and her life was made up of the consideration of two great grievances: first, that her husband was always idle, and second, that her landlord overcharged her for her rooms on account of the nature of her "business."

She saw nothing in Mrs. Byrne and Mrs. Cregan but their inability to help her pay her rent. She said: "I give a full trance readin' with names, dates, and all questions answered, for a dollar, or a full card readin' for fifty cents. It's impossible to tell much for a quarter."

Madame Wampa said "Very well," in a tone of haughty resignation. She turned to a booth that had been made of turkey-red chintz in one corner of the room. She lit a small red lamp and sat down before a little bamboo table. A toy angel from a Christmas tree hung above her. A stuffed alligator sat up, on its hind legs, beside her—a porcelain bell hung on a red ribbon about its neck—to grin with a cheerful uncanniness on the rigmaroles of magic.

Mrs. Byrne entered the gipsy tent, and Mrs. Cregan was left alone in the atmosphere of a bespangled past reduced to its lowest terms of imposture. There were strings of Indian corn hanging from the ceiling, Chinese coins and rabbits' feet on the walls, a horseshoe wrapped in tinfoil over the door, and a collection of absurdly grotesque bric-à-brac on shelves and tables. There were necklaces of lucky beads for sale, and love charms in the shape of small glass hearts enclosing imitation shamrocks, and dream books and manuals of palmistry and gipsy cards for fortune-telling, and photographs of Madame Wampa in a gorgeous evening dress trimmed with feathers. Over all was a smoky odor of kerosene from an oil heater.

Mrs. Cregan looked from side to side with a vaguely worried feeling that it must take a power of dusting and wiping to keep such a clutter of things clean; and this feeling gradually rose into her consciousness above the dull stupefaction of her grief.

Madame Wampa, in the chintz tent, recited without expression: "Though you travel east or west, may your luck be the best." She dropped her voice to a toneless mutter about a "journey," and some papers that were to be signed, and a "false" dark woman who pretended to be Mrs. Byrne's friend, but would do her an injury.[Pg 235]

Mrs. Cregan sat as if she were waiting for her turn to enter a confessional, her hands folded, her head dropped. She heard Mrs. Byrne whispering hoarsely, but she did not listen.

She shuffled her cards and sighed. She was professionally acquainted with many griefs, and she took her toll of them. They meant no more to her than sickness does to a quack. She looked up at Mrs. Cregan's entrance almost absent-mindedly.

But there was, at once, something so helplessly stricken about the woman's plump despair, so infantile, so touchingly ridiculous, that Madame Wampa even smiled faintly and moved the bamboo table to let Mrs. Cregan squeeze into the chair that waited her. She sat down and held out her money in her palm. Madame Wampa took her hand. "I will tell you," she said. "I will see it in your hand."

She crossed the palm three times with the coin, and began in the monotonous voice and with the expressionless face of the fakir: "You are married. Many years. I see many years. You have not been happy. Monday is your unlucky day. Do not begin anything on Monday. You are thinkin' of takin' a journey—somethin'—some change. It will not end well. You had better remain without the change—whatever it is. There is a man—a man who has horses—who drives horses, perhaps. I see horses. He will meet with an accident—I think, a runaway—a collision, perhaps. He will be hurt. He will be—hurt. Yes. He is an old man. It will be bad. He may die. Perhaps. He is a relative—related to you. You must beware of animals. One will do you an injury. You will never be rich—but comfortable. The best of your life is comin'. You will have your wish."

She had finished, but Mrs. Cregan did not move. She had drawn back in her chair. Her mouth had loosened; her hand lay limp on the table; all her intelligence seemed to have concentrated in her eyes in an expression of guilty and horrified surprise. She said faintly: "Is't Cregan?"

Madame Wampa shrugged one shoulder in her red kimono. "The lines do not say." She blew out the lamp and rose from the table. "That is all. It is impossible to tell much for a quarter. I give a full trance readin', with names, dates, and all questions answered——"

Mrs. Cregan "blessed" herself,—with the sign of the cross,—gasped, "God forgi' me!" and blundered out into the room. Mrs. Byrne cried: "What's wrong?" Mrs. Cregan did not hear. She stampeded to the door in the ponderous fright of a panic-stricken elephant. Her one thought was to find a place where she might get on her knees.... Cregan! It was himself! It was Dinny! Killed, maybe! She had blasphemed against the Church and Father Dumphy, and she must pray. She must pray for herself and for Cregan. She would "take back" everything she had said. She would never leave him. She would be good.

Mrs. Byrne tugged at her cape. "Whist! Whist! What's come over yuh, woman? What is it?"

That was all that could be had out of her. Even when she reached her home again, and Mrs. Byrne followed her in, afraid of leaving the frightened woman alone lest she should "blab" the whole secret to the first person she met,—even then Mrs. Cregan could not speak until she had gathered up the broken dishes and propped the broken chair against the wall, as frantically as if she were trying to conceal the evidence of a crime. Then she sank down on a sofa and burst into tears. "The poor creature!" she wept. "The poor ol' man. Poor Dinny!"

Mrs. Byrne folded her arms. "Mary Cregan," she said, in hoarse disgust, "when yuh've done makin' a fool o' yerself, I'll trouble yuh to listen to me. Now! If y' ever breathe a word o' this to Cregan, he'll laugh himself blind! Mind yuh that! He'll not believe yuh. No one'll believe yuh. No one! An' if yuh don't want somethin' turrible to happen, yuh'll say nothin', but yuh'll behave yerself like a decent married woman an' go to church an' say yer prayers against trouble. That woman with the cards says whatever th' old Nick puts into her head to say."

Mrs. Byrne drew herself up like a prophetess. "Dip yer hand in holy water, an' yuh'll hear no more of it. Now, then. Behave yerself."

"I was wishin' it!" she wailed. "I was wishin' somethin' 'd happen to him to leave me free here in m' own home!"

"An' that," Mrs. Byrne said, "is the judgment o' heaven on yuh fer carin' more fer yer dishes than yuh did fer yer husband. Yuh're a good manager, Mrs. Cregan, but yuh've been a dang poor wife. Think of yer man first an' yer house after, an' yuh'll be a happier woman, I tell yuh."

And he has been spared to her. At first he was suspicious of her subdued manner and remorseful[Pg 236] gentleness; and for a long time he watched her, very warily, with an eye for treachery. Then he understood that she had succumbed to his masterful handling of her, and he was masculinely proud of his conquest.

Mrs. Cregan is beginning to hope that she has warded off the predicted bad fortune by her devoutness, but she still has her fears. "Twas the doin's o' the divil," she says to Mrs. Byrne.

"He had a hand in it, no doubt," Mrs. Byrne agrees. "An' how's Cregan?" she says, "Well, I'm glad o' that.... An' the new dishes?... Good luck to them. Yuh're off early to church again."[Pg 237]

YOUNG HENRY AND THE OLD MAN

BY JOHN M. OSKISON

The ranchman and I were discussing courage. I had that day seen young Henry Thomas mount and ride a horse which had bucked in a way to impress the imagination. I spoke of it.

"Was it the gray?" queried Brunner, and when I said it was, he scoffed. "That horse is trained to buck just the way young Henry wants him, and he hobbles the stirrups."

Brunner's scepticism was disappointing. I ventured to speak of another instance that seemed to illustrate the nerve of Henry Thomas:

"Didn't he help capture the 'Kep' Queen bunch of outlaws a few years ago? I've heard he showed nerve then."

"I reckon you have." Brunner glanced across at me, then stooped to dig a live coal out of the ashes. He held it for half a minute before packing it into the bowl of his pipe, shifting it imperceptibly in his toughened hand as he studied the backlog. When his tobacco was burning steadily, he spoke:

"I can tell you the truth about young Henry—and the old man, too." I thought his tone changed. "Twenty-four years ago I came to this Indian country. For twelve years I rode with the posses as a deputy marshal and for twelve years now I've been running cattle here on Cabin Creek. I've been all over the Territory. I know every man in the Cherokee Nation that ever handled a hot iron. And I know young Henry Thomas, too.

"It was in 1882 that Queen 'went bad,' and began to hold up trains on the 'Katy' and 'Frisco roads. All of that fall and winter we were after him and his gang, but we never got a sight of them. They were 'goers' all right, and when we came up to a two-weeks-old camp-fire they'd built, we thought we were lucky.

"For six months after the first of the year they did nothing. We heard that Queen was in California. Then, in June, 1883, while I was at Muscogee, I got a telegram from 'Cap' White asking me to report at once to him at Red Oak. Paden Tolbert and I caught the eleven o'clock train up, dropping off at Red Oak at one in the morning. 'Cap' met us, told us he had two men ready, and that the five of us would start for Pryor Creek at once.

"It was a fifteen-mile ride. We planned to pick up four men from the ranches on the way down, and get to 'Kep' Queen's camp at daylight. We had been told that there were five men in the camp, that they had been in the Pryor Creek woods for two days, and that it was their plan to hold up the flyer from the north next evening. 'Cap' White was sure of his information, and he had decided upon the men he wanted from the ranches. The two Thomases—old man Henry and young Henry—were picked out, for there was no one else in the family except a younger brother of eighteen, who has since died. 'Bud' Ryder and Jim Kelso were the other two—both good on horses and handy with a gun.

"'Cap' was proud of his posse when he finally got us together. The Thomases came out and joined us like bees a-swarming. The young fellow was all up in the air with excitement, like a boy going to a circus. He was so brash that at first we couldn't keep him from riding on ahead of the rest of us; you'd think he wanted to bring in the bunch all by himself.

"That was all right; brash, eager young fellows ain't always so brave when trouble begins, but they steady into good fighters. It's hard enough to get 'em that want to go after a man like 'Cap' Queen at all."

Brunner told me then of the fight in the woods at daybreak. It was his summary of young Henry Thomas that interested me.

One of the men whom White took from Red Oak led the posse to the camp on Pryor Creek. It was on a ledge on a hillside. The fires had been built under a jutting rock. Only a bush wren could have hidden its nest more completely—Bruce had been lucky in spying it out. He told White that there was but one unprotected approach—a long unused trail that led down from the cliff-top and ended in a briar tangle fifty feet above the ledge. That trail, it was evident, 'Kep' Queen did not know existed.

Young Thomas had ridden with Brunner, seeking him out, as the novice always seeks out the veteran, to practise his valorous speeches[Pg 238] upon. For four hours young Thomas talked about bravery, with illustrations. From one incident to another he skipped, for the history of outlawry west of St. Louis, in the last generation, was more familiar to him than many another topic he had gathered from books. Brunner could have set him right on the facts many times, but what was the use?

After a time the youngster's monologue became a sort of soothing hum, for which the other was grateful. "I was cross and sleepy and chilly and nervous," Brunner explained, "and the boy's gabble rested me."

I gathered that the young man was more excited than he cared to confess, even to himself. He talked, as others whistle, to "keep up his courage." Yet the implication that he needed distraction or stimulation would have angered him. Youth and courage are twins, or should be, and a man of twenty-two takes it for granted. At forty, a man may confess to turning tail and yet save his self-respect. I had heard Brunner tell of "back downs" that would have shamed a young village constable, and it had never occurred to me to question his courage.

It was only in the last mile of their ride that the chatter of young Thomas really became audible to Brunner.

"I woke up," he said, "and actually listened to him. I don't remember exactly what he was saying, but this was the idea: 'All of you fellows that chase outlaws make too much fuss about it.' Well, some of us do, though the newspapers and the wind-bags that follow us around make ten times the fuss we do. He went on to say that the only way to nab a horse-thief or an express robber was to go right up to him, don't you know, like the little boy went up to the sign-post that he thought was a ghost.

"It's a good theory and generally works. I told him so, and then apologized for doing any other way. The way I thought about this business of a deputy marshal's was the way an old soldier thinks about war. I was hired to get the criminals, and not to be caught by the criminals, to shoot the bad man, if I had to, but not to be shot by the bad man if there was any way to help it. One way to help it is to run and hide. It's a good way, too, for I've tried it."

The young man roused Brunner's curiosity. It was possible that he might be of the exceptional breed that puts a fine theory to the test of action.

"I decided to watch him," the ranchman told me, "and see if he would play up to his big talk. When we left our ponies, half a mile from the camp, I pretended to argue with 'Cap' White, told him he ought to leave young Thomas with the horses and not get such a boy as that all shot up. 'Cap' caught my point and begged him to stay, but, of course, he wouldn't hear of it. 'I'll stick to Brunner,' says he.

"When we started afoot, we trailed out single file, and I noticed that old man Thomas waited for the boy and me to pass him, dropping in right behind his son. 'Cap' was in front, then Bruce, then Paden Tolbert, then Ryder and Kelso, and then I and the Thomases. The old man was at the tail of the procession.

"Old man Thomas was the kind that you never think about one way or the other. You said to yourself that he would do his share, whatever it amounted to, and you wouldn't have to bother about him. That's your notion of him, ain't it?"

It was my notion of the older Thomas. I don't think a more commonplace looking man ever lived. Brunner told me that he had not changed in fourteen years.

"'Young Henry swells around and talks big; the old man he says nothing and chaws tobacco,' That's the way people size 'em up around here." Brunner thus confirmed my own impression of the pair.

"What a man can see out of the back of his head," Brunner went on, "is a lot different from what comes in front of his eyes. He feels a lot that don't make a sound and that ain't visible. I did see, out of the corner of my eye, that young Henry Thomas was dropping behind me little by little, but I didn't see why it was he moved up again. I know why, though. The old man had ordered him up—not in words, you understand, for I could have heard a whisper in the still dawn, the way we were snaking it over the trail. From that time on, every foot of the way, the old man drove the boy. You ask me how, and I can't tell you. There wasn't a word, not a motion that I could see, but all the time it was one man driving the other as plain as could be. And it wasn't easy. I felt that young Henry was worse than balky, that he would have broke through the bushes and run off screaming if that old man had taken his eyes off of him for ten seconds.

"A quarter of a mile it was, and we went slow—twenty feet forward picking our way, then the eight of us would stop to listen. If you ever get a chance, ask young Henry how long that trail was. If he don't stop to think, he'll tell you we crawled through the bushes for five miles, but if he remembers his part as the hero of the fight, he'll say, 'Oh, we sneaked a hundred yards or so before lighting into Queen's bunch.'"

The trail from above ended in a briar tangle[Pg 239] fifty feet up the hill from the ledge on which four of the five outlaws slept. The fifth man, posted as a sentry, was on the lower trail, somewhere out of sight of the party led by "Cap" White. When the deputies came up to the briars, therefore, they could see no one. As soon as the four sleepers came out of shelter, however, White's men could cover them with their guns.

What had to be done, obviously, was to rouse the four outlaws without revealing the presence of the deputies above. It could be done by some one in the woods below the ledge. But the outpost was down there to reckon with. They could not all be trapped merely by waiting, for they would come out, after waking, one by one; and White wanted the whole bunch.

It was decided that three men should be sent, by a round-about trail, down to the creek; that they should follow it up until they got opposite to the ledge; and that they should then rouse the sleeping men. They were also to find the sentry and capture him. The risk was that the sentry might discover the three first and spoil the chance to take him. The detail might be dangerous, though with luck it should prove easy.

Brunner was assigned to lead the three. Young Thomas and Kelso were named by White as the other two, but Brunner, who had been aware of that duel on the trail, said he preferred the old man to Jim Kelso.

They beat back for a short distance, then, separating, dropped down the steep hillside to the creek. In open order, they went forward quietly, slowly; they might come upon 'Kep' Queen's outpost at any turn. Now and then they came in sight of one another. Each time Brunner saw that the old man was edging closer to his son. Still there was no word spoken—only a grim old man's gray eyes were fixed upon a young man's shifting, over-bright eyes, and the young man moved on, cautiously.

Brunner held close to the creek bank; the old man was twenty yards away and moving farther out as he approached his son. So they advanced, abreast, until they came out upon the trail leading up to the ledge. Then Brunner saw old man Thomas run, with short, noiseless steps, to young Henry's side and point up the trail. Hidden from both and out of sight of what had attracted the old man's attention, Brunner yet knew what was happening. Farther up the trail was the sentry, half asleep in the chill dawn.

Brunner saw, as he himself came up cautiously, that the old man was whispering to young Henry. He grasped the boy's arm, half-shoving him forward and pointing with his rifle. The youngster moved a step, then turned with a look of utter panic on his face. His father's eyes glared; a sort of savage anger blazed on his face. From his grip on young Henry's arm, the old man's hand sprang to the boy's throat. There was one fierce, terrible shake, a sort of gurgling scream that expressed terror, and protest, too, but which was scarcely audible to Brunner, twenty feet away. In the tone of a man enraged to the point of madness, old man Thomas snapped out:

Young Henry shook himself free, his terror replaced by a sudden, resentful anger. Fifty yards away the sentry nodded, his back against a tree and his gun across his lap. Brunner saw the man now, and stepped aside to cover him as young Henry approached. But there was no need of that. The boy was swift and noiseless; before the outlaw could wake or move, his gun was in Henry's hand, and he heard the command, "hands up!"

The sentry was quick-witted. He couldn't shoot, but he could yell. Brunner, however was ready for that. He began to bawl a reveler's song, popular with cowboys on a spree, and old man Thomas joined him. From above, it sounded as if a drunken riot had broken out, in which the outpost's warning shout became only a meaningless discord. The babel brought the four sleeping men out of their blankets. They listened a moment, then stepped out in view of the posse in the briars.

As Brunner came up, old man Thomas turned to face him. On his seamed face the sweat had almost dried, but when he shoved his hat up with his forearm, his sleeve came away from his forehead damp. The compelling glitter in the gray eyes turned to a challenging stare. Brunner met it, then glanced up the trail towards young Thomas and his captive.

"Yes," the old man triumphed, "my boy got him. He captured 'Kep' Queen himself."

"I reckon you've heard young Henry's story of how he got 'Kep' Queen," Brunner finished. "If you've ever talked with him when he was out of sight of the old man, I know you have. What I've told you to-night is what old man Henry could tell if he wanted to. But he never will. As I said awhile ago, 'young Henry swells around and talks big; the old man he says nothing and chaws tobacco.'"[Pg 240]

EDITORIAL

THE TRUTH OF ORCHARD'S STORY

McClure's Magazine printed during last summer and fall the Autobiography of Harry Orchard, with its confessions of wholesale assassinations during the labor war in the mining districts of the West. There was, at that time, repeated and angry denial of the truth of his story; and, since the acquittal of W. D. Haywood, secretary and treasurer of the Western Federation of Miners, and of George A. Pettibone, whom Orchard charged with being the instigators of his crimes, their adherents have, of course, maintained that Orchard's story has been entirely disproved.

Logically, this does not follow. The acquittal of these two men means nothing more than that they were not proved guilty to the satisfaction of the juries trying them. Before a final judgment as to the truth or falsity of Orchard's statement is made, the last development in this matter must be thoroughly considered. On March 18, Orchard, persisting in his story to the last, pleaded guilty to the murder of Governor Frank Steunenberg, at Caldwell, Idaho, and was sentenced to be hanged—with the recommendation by the presiding judge that his sentence be commuted to life imprisonment by the Prison Board of the State. In pronouncing sentence upon Orchard, Judge Fremont Wood, who presided over the trials of both Haywood and Pettibone, expressed his belief in Orchard's story in a most convincing way. The parts of the Judge's statement dealing with Orchard's testimony, which follow, are of peculiar value to those desiring to arrive at a final conclusion regarding the responsibility for the campaign of murders which took place during the labor wars of the Western Federation of Miners; they are the summing up of the entire matter by a mind whose judicial fairness has been recognized by both parties in this great controversy.

"I am more than satisfied," said Judge Wood, "that the defendant now at the bar of this court awaiting final sentence has not only acted in good faith in making the disclosures that he did, but that he also testified fully and fairly to the whole truth, withholding nothing that was material and declaring nothing that had not actually taken place.

"During the two trials the testimony of the defendant covered a long series of transactions involving personal relations between himself and many others. In the first trial he was subjected to the most critical cross-examination by very able counsel for at least six days, and I do not now recall that at any point he contradicted himself in any material manner, but on the other hand disclosed his connection with many crimes that were probably not known to the attorneys for the State, at least not brought out by them on the direct examination of the witness.

"Upon the second trial the same testimony underwent a most thorough and critical examination and in no particular was there any discrepancy in a material matter between the testimony given upon the latter trial as compared with the testimony given by the same witness at the former trial. I am of the opinion that no man living could conceive the stories of crime told by the witness and maintain himself under the merciless fire of the leading cross-examining attorneys of the country unless upon the theory that he was testifying to facts and to circumstances which had an actual existence within his own experience.

"A child can testify truly and maintain itself on cross-examination. A man may be able to frame his testimony and testify falsely to a brief statement of facts involving a short and single transaction and maintain himself on cross-examination.

"But I cannot conceive of a case where even the greatest intellect can conceive a story of crime covering years of duration, with constantly shifting scenes and changing characters, and maintain that story with circumstantial detail as to times, places, persons, and particular circumstances and under as merciless a cross-examination as was ever given a witness in an American court unless the witness thus testifying was speaking truthfully and without any attempt either to misrepresent or conceal.... It is my opinion, after a careful examination of this case in all its details, that this defendant and the crimes which he committed were only the natural product and outcome of the system which he represented and the doctrines taught by its leaders, some of which were boldly proclaimed and maintained, even upon the trial of the defendant Haywood.

"This defendant had evidently become imbued with the idea inculcated by those around him that the organized miners were engaged in an industrial warfare upon one side of which his own organization was alone represented, while on the other hand they were confronted with the powers of organized capital, supported by executive authority, and which counter organization included, or at least controlled, the courts, which were the final arbiters upon all legal questions involved.

"With the promulgation of such doctrines it is not a difficult matter for some people to justify murder, arson, and other outrages, and I am satisfied that it was that condition of mind that sustained, bore up and nerved on this defendant and his associates in the commission of the various crimes with which he was connected."

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Many typical instances of Christian Science logic may be found in Mr. Alfred Farlow's answer to Dr. Churchman's article (Christian Science Journal, 1904). Mr. Farlow takes up Dr. Churchman's statement, "To deny that matter exists and assert that it is an illusion, is only another way of asserting its existence." Says Mr. Farlow: "According to this logic, when a defendant denies a charge brought against him in court, he is only choosing a method of asserting its truth."

Mr. Farlow seems to think that Mrs. Eddy arrived at her discovery of the non-existence of matter, not by any process of reasoning, but by personal experience. He says:

"From doubting matter and learning by experience its utter emptiness Mrs. Eddy began to search for the universal spiritual cause, and having found it through actual demonstration in spirit, she was obliged in consistence therewith to deny the material sense of existence."

Mr. Farlow seems to consider the logic of this progression inevitable.

[16] The reader who is interested in Quimby's teaching and healing is referred to "The True History of Mental Science," by Julius A. Dresser, published by George H. Ellis, 272 Congress Street, Boston.

Dr. Warren F. Evans, in his book, "Mental Medicine," published three years before the first edition of "Science and Health," said: "Disease being in its root a wrong belief, change that belief and we cure the disease. By faith we are thus made whole. There is a law here which the world will sometime understand and use in the cure of the diseases that afflict mankind. The late Dr. Quimby, of Portland, one of the most successful healers of this or any age, embraced this view of the nature of disease, and by a long succession of the most remarkable cures, effected by psychopathic remedies, at the same time proved the truth of the theory and the efficiency of that mode of treatment. Had he lived in a remote age or country, the wonderful facts which occurred in his practise would now have been deemed either mythical or miraculous. He seemed to reproduce the wonders of Gospel history. But all this was only an exhibition of the force of suggestion, or the action of the law of faith, over a patient in the impressible condition."

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE, VOL 31, NO 2, JUNE 1908 ***

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	In Dalmatia (about 1896)	14
	European Russia (1900)	31
	Bulgaria (about 1900)	118

	In Norway (1901-'05)	65
	Sweden (1900-'04)	142
	Denmark (1901-'05)	227

	In Ireland (1906)	34
	Scotland (1905)	65
	England and Wales (1906)	100
	Australasia (1903)	121
	United States (1907)	126

Country	Summer	Spring	Fall	Winter	Total
Denmark	312	284	227	177	1,000
Belgium	301	275	229	195	1,000
France	306	283	210	201	1,000
Saxony	307	281	217	195	1,000
Bavaria	308	282	218	192	1,000
Austria	315	281	219	185	1,000
Prussia	290	284	227	199	1,000

	United
	States	Russia	Europe	Japan
	per cent.	per cent.	per cent.	per cent.
Spring and summer	61	60	59	59
Fall and winter	39	40	41	41

	In Spain (1893)	21
	Portugal (1906)	23
	Italy (1901-'05)	64
	France (1900-'04)	227

	In Austria (1902)	173
	Prussia (1902-'06)	201
	Saxony (1902-06)	324
	Bavaria (1902-'06)	141

Nationalities	In Europe	In the U. S.
Native Americans	68
Hungarians	114	118
Germans	213	193
French	228	220
English	100	104

The Project Gutenberg eBook of McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908

McCLURE'S MAGAZINE

VOL. XXXI JUNE, 1908 No. 2

CONTENTS

MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA[1]

BY

ELLEN TERRY

The Unknown Dangers of America

New York Before the "Sky-scrapers"

Irving Brings Shakespeare to America

Our First Appearance Before an American Audience

American Clothes

The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Robert Taber

Dramatic Criticism in America

William Winter and His Children

Discovering the Southern Darkey

American Women

THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE

BY MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR G. DOVE

PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS WAR ON CONGRESS

BY

CARL SCHURZ

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

The Beginnings of the Struggle

Stevens the Dominating Figure of the Struggle

William Pitt Fessenden

The President's Logic

Lincoln's Policy versus Johnson's

The Personal Bitterness of the Struggle

A Humiliating Spectacle

False Encouragement to the South

THE CRYSTAL-GAZER

BY MARY S. WATTS

AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT NORTH ROAD," ETC.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRANK A. NANKIVELL

II

NO TRESPASSING UNDER PENALTY OF

THE LAW

Abram and Nicol Pendarves, Proprietors

per Mary Smith

III

IV

V

BOB, DÉBUTANT

BY HENRY GARDNER HUNTING

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DENMAN FINK

TWO PORTRAITS BY GILBERT STUART

A NOTE ON A RECENT ACCESSION OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

BY SAMUEL ISHAM

Two Portraits by Gilbert Stuart

reproduced by permission of

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Printed from plates made by the Colorplate Engraving Company, New York

MARY BAKER G. EDDY

THE STORY OF HER LIFE AND THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

BY

GEORGINE MILMINE

XIV

MRS. EDDY'S BOOK AND DOCTRINE

How "Science and Health" was Published

There is No Material Universe

Mrs. Eddy's Exegesis

Mrs. Eddy's Account of the Creation[10]

The Story of Adam

Mrs. Eddy Denies the Atonement

Mrs. Eddy's Revision of the Lord's Prayer

Mrs. Eddy's Therapeutics

A Sensationless Body the Goal of Existence

Mrs. Eddy's Physiology

Mrs. Eddy's View of History

Lack of Religious Feeling in Mrs. Eddy's Book

Malicious Animal Magnetism

Poverty a False Belief

Mrs. Eddy's Views on Marriage

Future of Christian Science

Mrs. Eddy's Opposition to the Mind Cure Movement

THE END

HER FRUITS

MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA [1]