Part 2

"That is but paltering. Thee knows well it is at once a forbidden thing and a monument beyond the regulation in height, and therefore doubly offensive to the Meeting. We will not tolerate such folly. I say to thee again, take the unholy thing down. Will thee urge disrespect to the whole Society? Thee knows it is in opposition to all our teaching. What devil's spirit has seized upon thee?"

"Thee may storm," stoutly answered Roger, "but I am not to be frightened. This plot of ground is mine. This figure is also mine. It is a blessed comfort, a sign of love and not a thing of evil--and I will not take it away from here for thee nor for all the elders."

Nicholas, perceiving that Roger was not to be coerced at the moment, ceased argument, but his wrath did not cool.

"Thee shall come before the Meeting forthwith."

The following day a summons was issued calling a council, and a messenger came to Roger calling him before his elders in judgment.

Thereupon a sharp division was set up among the neighbors and the discussion spread among the Friends. The question of "Free Will in Burial Stones" was hotly debated wherever two or three of the members met, so that the mind of each was firmly made up by the time the Meeting came together to try the question publicly. "I see no wrong in it," said some. "It is disgraceful," others heatedly charged.

Roger's act was denounced by his own family as treason to the Meeting, as well as heretical to the faith, and his father, old Nathan Barnes, rising with solemn and mournful dignity, admitted this.

"I know not what I have done that a son of mine should bring such shame and sorrow to my old age. It is the influence of the world's people whose licentious teachings corrupt even the most steadfast of our youth. We came here--to this lonely place--to get away from the world's people. They thicken about us now, these worldlings; hence I favor another journey into a far wilderness where we can live at peace, shut away from the contamination of these greedy and blasphemous idolators."

All realized that he spoke in anger as well as in sorrow, and the more candid and cool-headed of the Friends deplored his words, for they had long since determined that the world's forces must be met and endured; but Jacob Farnum was quick to declare himself.

"The welfare of our Society demands the punishment of Roger Barnes. I move that a committee be appointed to proceed to the burial ground and throw down and break in pieces this graven image."

Here something unexpectedly hot and fierce filled Roger's heart to the exclusion of his peaceful teaching and his lifelong awe of his elders. Rising to his feet he violently exclaimed: "By what right will thee so act? Is it more wicked to have a marble portrait than an ambrotype? It is true that I learned the secrets of sculpture from one of the world's people; it is true that an outsider has cut the stone, but I believe his trade to be worthy and his work justifiable. I believe in such portraits." He addressed himself to Nicholas Asche: "Had thee permitted Rachel to have had a daguerreotype, it would not have been necessary for me to treat with this carver of stone, who is, notwithstanding, a man of probity. I will not have him traduced by anyone present," he ended with a threat in his eyes; "he is my friend."

Thereupon Nicholas Asche curtly answered: "There also thee is gravely at fault. Thee has brought my daughter Ruth under the baleful influence of this worldling; and she is even now filled with admiration for him. She too needs be admonished of the elders for too much thinking upon light affairs. Thee is a traitor to thy sister-in-law, Roger Barnes, as thee is a traitor to the Meeting. To permit thee to go thy present ways would be to open our gates to vanity and envy and all imaginable folly. If thee does not at once remove this graven image from our burial grounds, we will ourselves proceed against it and break it and throw it into the highway."

Then again young Roger rose in his seat and with his strong hands doubled into weapons cried out: "Thee will do well to take this matter guardedly and my words to heart, for I tell thee that whosoever goes near to lay rude hands on that fair form will himself be thrown down. I will break him like a staff across my knee."

He stood thus for a moment like a proud young athlete, meeting the eye of his opponent, then, as no one spoke, turned and strode out, resolute to be first on the ground, ready to defend with his whole strength the marble embodiment of his vanished wife.

And yet, even as he walked away from the church, hot and blinded with anger, he began to ache with an indefinable, increasing sorrow. He had expected opposition, but not such fury as this. He had noted the downcast eyes of his friends. It seemed as if something very precious had gone out of his life--as though the whole world had suddenly become inimical.

"They were ashamed of me," he said and his heart sank, for notwithstanding his resentment he loved the Meeting and its ways. For the most part the faces of the congregation were dear to him and the pain that sprang from a knowledge that he had cut himself off from those he respected soon softened his indignation. Nevertheless he hurried on to the burying ground.

It was a glorious September day and all through the fields the crickets were softly singing as if in celebration of the gathered ample harvest. They spoke from the green grass above the graves with the same insistent cheer as from the sere stubble, but Roger heard them not, for his ears still rang with the elder's stern voice and his eyes were darkened by the lowering brows of his father's moody face. Only when the statue rose before him white and still and fair in the misty sunlight did his mood lighten.

"How beautiful it is," he exclaimed. "How can they desire to destroy it?"

Nevertheless he was smitten with a kind of dismay as he looked around upon the low, drab headstones and perceived with what singular significance the marble rose above them. "In truth I have dared much in doing this thing." It was as if he had been led by some inner spirit braver than himself.

And then--even as he raised a first glance to the statue--a pang of keen surprise shot through his heart. The face was changed. Something new had come into it. It was not his Rachel! With hand pressed upon his chilling heart he studied it with new understanding. He had known that it somewhat resembled Ruth, for Ruth indeed resembled Rachel--but that it was verily in every line and shadow a portrait of the living and not of the dead he now realized for the first time.

"The sculptor has deceived me!" he cried. "He loves Ruth and with the craft of a lover has wrought out his design deliberately and with cunning. He has carved the cold stone to the form of his own desire. How blind I have been."

In complete comprehension he addressed the statue: "Thee is but a symbol of this artist's love for another after all. Nicholas Asche was right. This sculptor under cover of my love--in pretending to work out my ideal--has betrayed me and bewitched Ruth."

Ruth, his constant sunny companion, the keeper, the almost second mother of his child, had been snared by the fowler! He no longer doubted it. He recalled the gladness with which she always accompanied him to the sculptor's studio and her silence and preoccupation on the homeward drive. She loved the artist. She was about to be taken away.

Something fierce and wild clutched at his throat and with a groan he fell upon the ground beneath the figure: "Oh, Ruth, Ruth! Am I to lose thee too?"

At this moment he forgot all else but the sweet girl who had become so necessary to his life. Truly, to lose all hope of her was to be doubly bereaved. "I am now most surely solitary," he mourned. "What will become of me hereafter? Who will care for my little son?"

While still he lay there, dark with despair and lax with weakness, Ruth and the sculptor came up the walk to the gate and saw his prostrate form. Ruth checked the sculptor's advance. "Let me go up to him alone," she said, and approached where Roger lay. She did not know the true cause of his grief, but she pitied him: "Do not grieve, Roger; they will not dare to touch the figure."

He looked up at her with a glance which was at once old and strange, but uttered no word of reply, only steadfastly regarded her; then his head dropped upon his arm and his body shook only with sobbing.

She spoke again: "Thee must not despair. There are quite as many for thee as there are against thee. All the young people are on thy side. No one will dare to harm the statue."

As they stood thus Conrad approached and said: "What does it matter? Come out from among these narrow folk. Ruth is to come out and be my wife. Why do you stay to be worried by the elders who----"

He spoke no further, for Roger waved his hand in dismissal of them and cried out in most lamentable voice: "Leave me. Leave me," and again hid his face in his hands.

In troubled wonder the young people moved away slowly, Ruth with tear-filled eyes, Conrad very grave. Together they took their stand at the gate to guard against the approach of others less sympathetic. "His grief is profound," said Ruth, "but the statue will comfort him."

Roger, overwhelmed now by another emotion--a sense of shame, of deep contrition--was face to face with a clear conception of his disloyalty to the dead. Aye, the statue was Ruth. Its youth, its tender, timid smile, its arch brow, all were hers, and as he remembered how Conrad had taken the small unresisting hand in his, he knew himself to be baser than Nicholas Asche had dared imagine. "I loved thee," he confessed; "not as I loved Rachel--but in a most human way. My life has closed round thee. I have unconsciously thought of thee as the guardian of my child. Thy shining figure I have placed in the glow of my fire."

This was true. Ruth had not displaced the love he still bore for his sweet wife--but she had made it an echo of passion, a dim song, a tender and haunting memory of his youth.

The sun sank and dusk came on while still he lay at the statue's feet in remorseful agony of soul, and those who came near enough to speak with him respected his wish and left him undisturbed.

Softly the darkness rose and a warm and mellow night covered the mourner, clothing the marble maid with mystery.

The crickets singing innumerably all about him came at last to express in some subtle way the futility of his own purpose, the smallness of his own affairs, and as he listened he lost the sharpness of his grief. His despair lightened. He ceased to accuse; his desire of battle died. "How could Conrad know that I had grown disloyal? And how was Ruth to perceive my change of heart? The treachery is mine, all mine, dear angel, but I will atone. I will atone. Forgive me. Come to me and forgive me! Comfort me."

Within his heart the spirit of resentment gave way to one of humbleness, of submission. The contest for a place among these gray old monuments no longer seemed worthy--or rather he felt himself no longer worthy to wage it. His disloyalty to his dead disqualified him as a base act disqualified the knights of old. "My cause is lost because my heart was false!" he said.

So during the long hours of the night he kept remorseful vigil. The moon set, the darkness deepened, cool, odorous, musical with lulling songs of insects; and still he lingered, imploring solace, seeking relief from self-reproach. At last, just before dawn, the spirit of his dead Rachel stepped from the shadow. She approached him and bending above him softly said:

"Dear heart, it is true I am not within the graven image. You have no need of it. Go home. There I am, always near thee and the child. I am not for others; I am thine. Return. Make thy peace with the elders. Thee must not live solitary and sad. Our son waits for thee, and when thee sits beside his bed, I will be there."

He woke chilled and wet with the midnight damp, but in his heart a new-found sense of peace had come. His interest in the statue was at an end. He now knew that it was neither the monument he had desired nor the image of his love. "How gross I have been," he said, addressing himself to the unseen presence, "to think that the beauty of my dead could be embodied in stone! Ruth shall go her ways to happiness with my blessing."

In this mood he rose and went to his home, deeply resolved to put aside his idolatry of Ruth even as he had put behind him the gleaming, beautiful figure beneath the shadow of the oak.

Masterpieces

_By Ethel Hueston_

Give me my pen, For I would write fine thoughts, pure thoughts, To touch men's hearts with tenderness, To fire with zeal for service grim, To cheer with mirth when skies are dull; Give me my pen, For I would write a masterpiece.

Yet stay a while, For I must put away these toys, And wash this chubby, grimy face, And kiss this little hurting bruise, And hum a bedtime lullaby-- Take back the pen: This is a woman's masterpiece.

Bread

_By Ellis Parker Butler_

They came to Iowa in a prairie schooner with a rounded canvas top and where the canvas was brought together at the rear of the wagon it left a little window above the tailboard. On the floor of the wagon was a heap of hay and an old quilt out of which the matted cotton protruded, and on this Martha and Eben used to sit, looking out of the window. Martha was a little over two years old and Eben was four.

They crossed the Mississippi at Muscatine on the ferry. It was about noon and old Hodges, the crew of the ferry, who was as crooked as the branches of an English oak because the huge branch of an English oak had fallen on him when he was young, took his dinner from his tin pail. He looked up and saw the two eager little faces.

"Want a bite to eat?" he asked, and he peeled apart two thick slices of bread, thickly buttered, and handed them up to the two youngsters. This, a slice of Mrs. Hodges' good wheat bread, was Martha's welcome to Iowa. The butter was as fragrant as a flower and the bread was moist and succulent, delicious to the touch and the taste. Martha ate it all, even to the last crumb of crust, and, although she did not know it, the gift, the acceptance and the eating was a sacrament--the welcome of bountiful Iowa.

As the prairie schooner rolled its slow way inward into the state there were more slices of bread. The father stopped the weary horses at many houses, shacks and dugouts; and always there was a woman to come to the wagon with a slice of bread for Martha, and one for Eben, for that was the Iowa way. Sometimes the bread was buttered, sometimes it was spread with jelly, sometimes it was bread alone. It was all good bread.

There were days at a time, after they reached the new home, when there was nothing to eat but bread, but there was always that. The neighbors did not wait to be asked to lend; they brought flour unasked and Martha's mother kneaded it and set it to rise and baked it. Then the harvests began to come in uninterrupted succession of wealth, and the dugout became a house, and barns arose, and a school was built, and Martha and Eben went along the dusty, unfenced road, barefooted, happy, well fed, or in winter leaped through the snowdrifts. In their well-filled lunch pail there was always plenty and always bread.

In time Martha taught school, now in one district and now in another; and everywhere, wherever she boarded, there was good wheat bread and plenty of it. She remembered the boarding places by their bread. Some had bread as good as her mother's; some had bread not as good. During her first vacation her mother taught her to make bread. Her very first baking was a success. John Cartwright, coming to the kitchen door just as she was drawing the black bread-pan from the oven on that hot July day, saw her eyes sparkle with triumph as she saw the rich brown loaves.

"Isn't it beautiful? It is my first bread, John," she said, as she stood, flushed and triumphant.

"It smells like mother's," he said, "but she don't seem to get her'n so nice and brown."

"I guess Martha is a natural bread-maker," said her mother proudly. "Some is and some ain't."

Always good bread and plenty of it! That was Iowa. And it was of Martha's bread they partook around the kitchen table the next year--Eben and John, Martha and her father and mother--just before the two young men drove to the county seat to enlist.

"I guess we won't get bread like this in the army," John said, and he was right.

"When I'm chawing this sow-belly and hard tack," Eben wrote, "I wish I had some of that bread of yours, Marth. I guess this war won't last long and the minute it is over you'll see me skedaddling home for some of your bread. Tell ma I'm well and----"

They brought his body home because he was not killed outright but lived almost two weeks in the hospital at St. Louis after he was wounded. Martha scraped the dough from her fingers to go to the door when her father drove up with the precious, lifeless form. That day her bread was not as good as usual.

Martha and John were married the month he came back from the war, and the bread that was eaten at the wedding dinner was Martha's own baking. The bread that was eaten by those who came to prepare her mother for the grave and by those who came, a year later, to lay away her father, was Martha's. Once, twice, three times, four times Martha did a double baking, to "last over," so that there might be bread in the house while the babies were being born. Every week, except those four weeks, she baked bread.

In succession the small boys and girls of her own began coming to the kitchen door pleading, "Ma, may I have a piece of bread an' butter?" Always they might. There was always plenty of bread; it was Iowa.

In time Martha became something of a fanatic about flour. One kind was the best flour in the world; she would have no other. Once, when John brought back another brand, she sent him back to town with it. Her bread was so well known that the flour dealer in town was wont to say, "This is the kind Mis' Cartwright uses; I guess I can't say no more'n that." Eight times in twenty years she won the blue ribbon at the county fair for her loaves; the twelve other times John swore the judges were prejudiced. "It ain't the flour; that I do know!" Martha would answer.

Presently there were children of her children coming on Sunday to spend the day with the "old folks," and there was always enough bread for all. Sometime in the afternoon the big loaf would be taken out of the discarded tin boiler that served as a bread-box and the children would have a "piece"--huge slices of bread, limber in the hand, spread with brown sugar, or jelly, or honey, or dripping with jam. Then, one Sunday, young John's wife brought a loaf of her own bread to show Martha. They battled pleasantly for two hours over the merits of two brands of flour, comparing the bread, but Martha would no more have given up her own brand than she would have deserted the Methodist Church to become a Mahometan!

Then came a time when John had difficulty in holding his pipe in his mouth because his "pipe tooth" was gone. He no longer ate the crusts of Martha's bread except when he dipped them in his coffee. There was a strong, young girl to do the housework but Martha still made the bread, just such beautiful, richly browned, fragrant bread as she had made in her younger days. There had never been a week without the good bread, for this was Iowa.

One day, as she was kneading the dough, she stopped suddenly and put her hand to her side, under her heart. She had to wait several minutes before she could go on with the kneading. Then she shaped the bread into loaves and put it in the pan and put the pan in the oven. She went out on the porch, where John was sitting, and talked about the weather, and then of a grandson, Horace, who was the first to enlist for the great war that was wracking the world. She mentioned the poor Belgians.

"And us so comfortable here, and all!" she said. "When I think of them not having bread enough to eat----"

"I warrant they never did have bread like yours to eat, ma," said John.

She rocked slowly, happy and proud that her man thought that, and then she went in to take the fresh loaves from the oven. They were crisp and golden brown as always, great, plump, nourishing loaves of good wheat bread. She carried the pan to the table.

"Bertha," she said, "I'll let you put the bread away. I guess I'll go up and lie down awhile; I don't feel right well."

She stopped at the foot of the stairs to tell John she was going up; that she did not feel very well.

"If I don't come down to supper," she said, "you can have Bertha cut a loaf of the fresh bread, but you'd better not eat too much of it, John; it don't always agree with you. There's plenty of the other loaf left."

She did not come down again, not Martha herself. She did not mourn because she could not come down again. She had lived her life and it had been a good life, happy, well-nourished, satisfying as her own bread had been. And so, when they came back from leaving Martha beside the brother who had died so many years before, the last loaf of her last baking was cut and eaten around the kitchen table--the youngsters biting eagerly into the thick slices, the elders tasting with thoughts not on the bread at all, and old John crumbling the bread in his fingers and thinking of long past years.

At Kamakura: 1917

_By Arthur Davison Ficke_

The world shakes with the terrible tramp of war And the foe's menace swirls through every sea. But here the Buddha still broods ceaselessly In hush more real than our strange tumults are.

Here where the fighting hosts of long ago Once clashed and fell, here where the armored hordes Razed the great city with their flashing swords, Now only waves flash, only breezes blow.

That Iowa Town

_By Oney Fred Sweet_

According to the popular songs, we are apt to get the impression that the only section of the country where there is moonlight and a waiting sweetheart and a home worth longing for is down in Dixie. Judging from the movies, a plot to appeal must have a mountain or a desert setting of the West. Fictionists, so many of them, seem to think they must locate their heroines on Fifth Avenue and their heroes at sea. But could I write songs or direct cinema dramas or pen novels I'd get my inspiration from that Iowa town.