BOOK TWO

The Hidden River

“I wish you wouldn’t squeeze so,” said the Dormouse, who was sitting next to her. “I can hardly breathe.”

“I can’t help it,” said Alice very meekly. “I’m growing.”

XI

SIXTEEN

Gorgas was now fastened up to a schedule--her life became organized. Without a word she gave up her open fight against the unreasonableness of the traditional school customs; accepted the absurdities, and performed the mechanical tasks as if they were really worth doing; and she found, after a while, that, once the ritual was learned, the service was not very exacting either in brain or time.

The need for tutoring being eliminated, the regular weekly dinners at Levering’s gradually broke off. Readings in literature were tried once or twice with a small group, but they developed into rather tame and stilted affairs, and were dropped.

The winter of ’88 and ’89 drifted by before anyone was ready for it to go. The next year Blynn spent in Germany, where all good scholars went in those days, and during the winter that followed his return, the intimate connection with the Leverings seemed almost ready to break off naturally.

Several times Blynn and Gorgas took the afternoon to themselves and read poetry and talked. There was nothing tame nor stilted about these literary exercises; rather, they were warm with the glow of sincere feeling; but they never achieved the perfect freedom of the earlier meetings. Allen Blynn seemed to be growing aloof and pedagogic, and Gorgas was enveloped for good in the protective reserve of the young woman.

Leopold dropped in upon the Leverings with a semblance of regularity. In a crowd he was smilingly silent; but as an intimate guest he came out and talked. The latest news of the biological sciences--all the new mysteries and dramatic new discoveries--he put before them simply and clearly, although he made no concessions to Gorgas’ youth. She thrilled with gratitude because he never once spoke to her in a patronizing way or seemed to consider for one moment that she could not comprehend every discussion; and her acquisitive young soul expanded.

And Ned Morris went on playing tennis with Gorgas until a place had to be set for him regularly at the Levering luncheons and dinners, and on the days of five a. m. practice games, at breakfast, too.

She was sixteen in September--September 10, 1891--and gave a “party”--one of those affairs where everything is planned seriously, as if for excited children--a cake with candles, ice cream in animal moulds, snap bonbons, and guests in semi-masquerade--but where all the so-called children smile satirically and go through the ceremonies in exaggerated earnest. It is really a farewell to childhood.

Kate wrote Blynn his invitation. “Gorgas,” she said, “insists upon celebrating her sixteenth anniversary with due ceremonies of cake and candle and partner. At her suggestion and with the approval of myself I herewith invite you to come and be my partner. Take care before accepting. I have no idea of the duties of partners. Perhaps you may have to bob for apples in tubs; or you may have to play ‘Copenhagen’ and kiss the little girls. It will be outlandish and _non compos_ and characteristic of the Levering Liberty Hall--that you may be assured. I fancy that we old folks will look on, (Gracious! I am twenty-five. O Petruchio, why stayest thou so long in Verona!) while the children cavort.

“The ladies will masquerade mildly. I shall wear my mother’s evening gown of 1861; so you must perforce keep a respectable distance.”

To the great satisfaction of everyone--they all were busy folks and had had a slight chill at the suggestion of children’s party--the guests were simply the old dinner group with the addition of Bea Wilcox. Diccon and Davis were wringing each other’s hands as Blynn entered; Leopold was gaily chatting with Gorgas in French; and Mary Weston and Betty Sommers were crowding around Ed Morris, shaking both hands at once.

“What has Ed been up to now?” inquired Blynn. “Graduated or something?”

Everyone laughed; Blynn looked so eager and so innocent of the world’s doings.

“Ed’s ’89,” Leopold reminded Blynn.

“You ought to know,” chirped Davis, “your marks probably pulled him through.”

Mary Weston took Blynn by the lapels. “Allen Blynn, don’t you really and honestly read the newspapers? Ed Morris has done gone and won the tennis singles championship of Philadelphia county.”

“By the Great Horn Spoon, boy!” Blynn gripped his hand. “I’m mighty glad to know that. Why, I did see an account of some Morris taking the trophy,” he defended himself, “but I didn’t connect you with the business. Why, man, I’d have been there to see you do it.”

“And you didn’t hear about the exhibition mixed doubles, either,” Bea tugged at his other lapel.

“Bless us all!” cried Allen, “don’t tell me you have taken in Montgomery and Lancaster counties, too?”

“It was only an exhibition, Bea,” Gorgas called out from across the room, “the others didn’t half try.”

“Hush, child,” retorted Bea, “when yo’ mammy’s talkin’! The fact is--the latest news is--that Gorgas Levering and Edwin Morris gave a jim-crickety exhibition against the champion ‘mixers’ of the East and--”

“Bless us again!” exclaimed Allen, “don’t tell me that they beat ’em; eh?”

“Yes!” said Bea, “they beat ’em.”

Chorus of protests followed; a babel of correction. Blynn stopped his ears, until Gorgas could be heard.

“No, Mr. Blynn,” she said, “we lost two sets of 10-8 each. We were nearly fagged, weren’t we, Ed? And they were fresh as daisies. They didn’t try; and Ed did all the work. What did you fib for, Bea, and drop us down so hard?”

“I repeat,” said Bea solemnly, “_They_ beat _’em_. Who’s to dispute that? The professor of English here asked, ‘Did _they_ beat _’em_,’ and I just wanted him to take more care and pains with his English and not go sp-pilling his p-pronouns p-promiscuously all over the p-place. So, I just said, ‘Yes; _they_ did beat _’em_.’ And so they did.”

“Aw! What’s pronouns between friends?” queried Diccon, the editor. “Here the girls get all togged out in their mothers’ clothes, and we’re talking ‘newspaper.’” That brought a fresh outburst, mainly an attack on Diccon.

“Sport’s ‘newspaper,’” he explained laconically. “I make ’em--’em here stands for both sports and newspaper. What’s in the newspaper is sport; the rest don’t happen. Blynn didn’t know anything about Morris because he forgets to read the newspapers--and I ran Ed in on the first page, too. Ah!” he sighed, “What is fame?”

At that moment Kate came slowly into the room and courtesied. She wore the small hoops of a young lady of ’61, a dainty costume, when it is not exaggerated; and some of the charm of that sedate attire found its way by contagion into the personality of the wearer. Gentleness and sweetness were her prevailing charms that evening.

Blynn watched her with open interest; an occupation which she did not miss, even when her back was toward him; but he was only thinking how that crinoline period had been much maligned, and was fancying that her mother must have been just such a shy, timorous creature a quarter of a century ago.

Mary and Betty had discovered ill-mated parts of gowns of the early ’80’s--skin-tight sleeves, lace shawl and enormous bustles. Bea Wilcox wore a genuine child’s dress, her younger sister’s, and, with her height, looked as scandalous as she intended.

Later, on the lantern-lighted porch, Blynn was aware of Gorgas standing beside him holding out a hand and asking:

“Weren’t you ever coming over to greet me and wish me congratulations?”

“By the Great Horn Spoon!” he ejaculated, looking her over open-eyed. “What’s happened to you?”

“I’ve growed up, M’sieu’.” Something had certainly happened to her. Her masquerade consisted simply of the gown her sister Keyser would have worn that evening if there had been no disguising. Besides, she had coiled her hair.

“This beats the tennis-court all hollow,” he murmured, patently dumbfounded by the change. “_Retro, Sathanas!_ Get thee behind me, silk and satin!”

“Do you like it?” she asked; but staring admiration glowed from him.

“_Ein tousand ein hundred ein und zwanzig!_” he swore à la Bardek. “It’s uncanny, eerie, spooky!”

“I did it all for you,” she confided frankly. “Hid the--uh-- underpinnings.”

“But good Scotland, girl!” he replied. “That’s not the way to please me! Oh, it’s glorious. Goodness! You are stunning! But you always upset me when you--uh--go without--uh--underpinnings, you know. Disconcerts me.” His tone was that of the older-man-joking-with-little-girl; but his eyes shone with admiration. “Makes me think I ought to treat you the way--eh--I ought to be ashamed of myself for wanting to. If you’d only giggle or simper--things you never do, thank Peter!--it would give me the cue, occasionally.”

“I see you are impressed,” she smiled and tapped him on the arm. “That’s what I did it for--just that.... You’ve got the wrong idea about fifteen and sixteen. Older persons always do. Fifteen and sixteen don’t feel at all childlike, I can tell you. I’ll never be any older than I am now. My mind’s grown up--”

“‘I do not wear motley in my brain, madonna,’” he quoted the wise clown, Feste.

“That’s just it,” comprehending; “and it’s insufferable to dress us the way they do--skirts that are neither long nor short, hair hanging or half brought up with ribbons. And,” she whispered, “you get positively ashamed of your--underpinnings. I’ve let out the hem of some of my skirts myself--on the quiet. You don’t know how comfortable and at home I feel in this.” She took several easy steps forward and back. “But mother won’t listen to me. I’d be grown up from now on if she’d let me.”

Others of the party were swarming out on the porch. Kate was coming forward to claim her partner.

“Listen, _mon capitaine_,” Gorgas spoke hurriedly. “I want to have a powwow with you. Stay a few moments after the others are gone; will you?”

He agreed, hardly comprehending what she had said. Her eyes were searching him as of old and her hand was ever so lightly touching his arm. All convention to the contrary, she was a woman, no doubt; but it was the delightful childlike quality about her that really thrilled him. He was thinking, now that she looked so stately and poised, how, after all, it was as a child that she appealed to him. A strong, painful desire swept him to have just such a brood of his own about him. His impulses were domestic and parental, and he was twenty-six and childless.

Kate was talking to him and he was answering with one-half of his mind. The other half was following Gorgas as she swept across the porch and onto the lawn to claim her partner, Ed Morris. Morris was offering an arm grotesquely in tribute to her long skirts. They marched off gaily.

That’s the way she would go, he tried to assure himself. Some chap of her own generation would take her away, and then she would be lost. It was the fate of parents to lose their offspring. Real fathers, however, had rights and claims. They could put their arms about their daughters, pat their cheeks and listen to their prattle, no matter who else owned them; and there would be no horrid suspicions about the matter. As he heard the ripples of laughter that came from their confidential talks out on the lawn, he had a little pang of regret. “_Mon père_,” he remembered how she had once dubbed him. “_Mon père_,” he nodded to himself, “is about to lose his _enfant_; and it isn’t at all a pleasant sensation.... It’s like pups,” he grinned. “There’s no use trying to own them. You get your affection all tied up and then they die and you have to begin all over with a new lot. The thing to do is to give ’em away quick and forget ’em.”

XII

MIXED RENDEZVOUS

Everywhere at the “party” Morris and Gorgas were naturally together. They made such a perfect tennis team that each got to know instinctively what the other was thinking. Scraps of private pass-words and codes flashed back and forth, references to games and experiences they had in common. He was always being called upon to work at setting up chairs or untying ribbons or fastening up a fallen lantern.

“Edwin,” she would turn. “Take a look at my back hair, will you? Isn’t that hair-pin tumbling out?”

He would inspect critically and put the offending member into shape, like a familiar brother.

“Don’t forget the bonbons,” she would call after him, as he hurried about preparing things, like one of the family. “They’re where you put them--on the top shelf in the pantry, you know.”

At supper the cake was cut and each candle blown out with a rhymed wish. Gorgas had arranged the seating with Blynn on one side and Morris on the other. With Morris she squabbled playfully like a child, but to Blynn she turned an impish womanly mien.

“Take your elbows off the table, Eddie,” she pretended to give little sisterly slaps. “Where are your company manners?”

To Blynn she would turn the next minute, and mimic a lady dining out.

“The plans for this winter’s opera are stupid; don’t you think? Nothing but Wahgner--we’re getting our share of Wahgner--and the old Fausts and Carmens and Trovatores. That new opera of Puccini is already stale in Vienna, and we haven’t heard even excerpts in the orchestra. It’s like a stage given up to continuous Uncle Tom’s Cabins.”

Another time she came at him with the intonation of a gushing old lady. “How _int_’r’sting!” she beamed suddenly at one of his remarks about the Academy exhibition, a topic she had forced on him. “_Have_ you seen the Cyclor_ah_ma of Gettysburg? They say it is _re_-ally _thrill_-ling. _Quite_ the illusion of distance, you know. One _ought_ to go.”

For some unexplainable reason Blynn’s humor failed him. He tried to talk with her on the strange themes she irrelevantly suggested, inwardly registering his protest at the changes of personality in people. Some of his best college chums had grown into impossible young-old men and the liveliest girls of his teens frequently developed into stupid matrons. Gorgas, he conjectured gloomily, was losing all her naturalness; her individual mind was being moulded in the common cast.

He turned his attention to Kate. She had not changed, save in so far as her delicate silk attire gave her a temporary flavor of blue china and tea roses.

“What is the good news out of Verona?” he inquired.

“Petruchio has not yet arrived,” she answered promptly.

“Ah! You are not shrewish enough. Katharina had a reputation for ugliness of temper.”

“Ask Gorgas,” she smiled. “She and I have some fearful fracases sometimes--not often, though.” She leaned back to get a good view of her sister. “Doesn’t she look lovely, tonight! It is so droll to see her in my gown. I hope I look as well in it. The child is growing up fast. Ah, me! She’s my age-warner. I shall be jealous of her soon.”

“I say, Allen,” Diccon called, “going to take that professorship at Holden?”

“Why, how under heaven did you know about that?” asked the astonished Blynn.

“Newspaper,” said Diccon. “We know everything; before it happens, too. Want me to run it in, front-page display?” he grinned.

“Bless my soul! Please don’t do anything like that, Diccon. It’s a small matter--big for me, of course--but of no public interest.”

A general chorus forced him to a more public explanation. Holden College had offered him the chair held by his old professor of English. It meant more money--an unimportant matter; but, it meant the head of things, even though they were small things, and the chance to work under his own lead. He had not decided, although as it stood now he believed he would not go. The big university had its own attraction; one might meet an intolerable narrowness in a small place; and there were his “children,” about whom he felt more or less responsibility. To be sure, they could be taken care of.

“Go!” said Diccon with almost a snap. “Get out of this. You’re just a trailer here. Never get anything in your home town. Go away. Be a mystery. They’ll want you back some day, when others find out you’re worth wanting. Band waiting for you, too. My advice is to clear out. That’s what I ought to’ve done--long ago.”

The company fell to a discussion of why prophets and professors were honored in all cities save their own. Under cover of the general talk, Gorgas tapped Allen on the sleeve, her characteristic way of getting his attention, and spoke in her proper rôle, as old-time “pal.”

“Does this mean something for you, _mon capitaine_?”

“I suppose it does,” he replied. “Somehow I don’t seem to have any judgment in my own affairs. Prudence tells me to go; it _is_ an opportunity; but I have almost made up my mind to plod along where I am.”

“Just what do you mean by opportunity?” she asked.

He explained. As he talked, the really flattering offer began to have some meaning for him. It seemed now as if he had been careless in letting the letter from the President go for three or four days without so much as a reply. But that’s the way he had always neglected his personal advancement.

“I don’t know whether to let you go or not,” Gorgas speculated. “Of course, you would be down Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter and vacations?”

“Sure to.”

“You might just as well go, for all I have seen of you lately,” she added. “Why did you suddenly give me up?”

“I think you have hit upon the one reason that made me think of declining the Holden offer,” he was thinking hard and did not seem to have heard her question. “I’m lazy, I suppose; I hate to make changes. Holden would mean boarding and no real home. It would mean giving up a mighty pleasant work here and a lot of good fellows,” looking about the table.

Her question seemed to come slowly to the front of his mind. He would have made some sort of rejoinder, but she was at the moment scolding Morris, who was pretending to eat ice cream from a knife.

They were rising and breaking up before she spoke to him again.

“Don’t forget, _mon capitaine_,” she plucked his sleeve. “You are to stay after the others.”

“Oh, yes,” his face lighted up. “Count on me.... It will be like old times.”

“How frightfully time flies,” she reverted suddenly to a burlesque of the bored lady-out-to-dinner. “Why it seems only yestehdee that we wuh children togetheh.”

Like a belated jest he began to see through her strange airs. “I’ve been frightfully stupid tonight,” he admitted. “Some of your fooling was too delicate for me; it got completely by--”

“I’m simply living up to my gown, sir,--in spots.”

His rather old-young face looked its honest admiration.

“What’s that thing-em-bob on your--oh! Do you belong to a sorority? Why, bless my soul! It’s a fraternity pin--eh? remade into a brooch.... Whose is it?”

“Edwin’s; he had it done for my birthday; nifty, isn’t it?... You didn’t give me anything, miser.”

“Little girls shouldn’t wear men’s fraternity pins,” he scolded gently.

“_Oui, mon père._”

“‘_Mon père_’--ugh! That’s wicked of you, to remind me of my years.... But you know about the custom, don’t you?”

“Tell me.”

“Oh, perhaps it doesn’t always count. In my ‘frat’ it’s a pretty serious crime, punishable by drinking a quart of quashia-water, to give your emblem to anyone but _the_ lady. It’s the old, ancient ‘token’ over again; love is blind and lovers are dumb; the token given and the token received is the time-honored language of a contract begun.... But there! That’s all nonsense.... Of course, you can wear it without any significance at all. You’re hardly old enough to contemplate an engagement.”

“Don’t you be too sure, Mr. Professor,” she hummed wisely as she strolled away to bid farewell to her guests.

Edwin was sauntering by. She whistled a private signal which brought him swiftly about with an “Aye! aye! sir!” “Don’t forget, you’re to stay till the rest have gone,” she whispered quite audibly.

“Not your Uncle Dudley,” Edwin responded cheerily.

* * * * *

Kate seemed to know that Blynn would remain later, for she piloted him to the library as a matter of course. Mr. and Mrs. Levering were reading in the alcove in the far end of the big room.

“Let’s ‘owl,’” she suggested. “Owl” was the family name for the family habit of staying up late. “Let’s ‘owl’ and talk. I’m broad awake. What kind of chairs did they have, mother, in ’61? I have the hardest time finding one that fits the hoop.”

She tried several chairs prettily. Certainly that style of apparel increased the helplessness of women, usually a beauty asset.

“Come over here, child,” called the mother, “and I’ll show you a trick.”

The trick consisted in slyly slipping out of the hoops--a kind of detachable understructure--and leaving them in the alcove.

While he waited, Blynn could hear little contagious, intimate laughters from the lawn. Gorgas and Morris were helping McAlley extinguish the Chinese lanterns and, youthlike, were taking their time about it.

“I’m the decoy,” thought Allen, rubbing one palm along the side of the face. “Oh, these children! They fascinate me with their nimble intelligence and their mysterious changes. It’s a great business, dealing in children. They give one an enormous amount of joy--I fancy it’s the best thing I do, after all; but they set me hungering for a pack of my own that won’t desert me when I’ve given them all my toys to play with.... I believe that little minx was flirting with both of us tonight. Trying out her new wings! The gown made her conscious of things. Ah, well,” he yawned.... “Hello! What did you do with the flare-bellows?”

Kate trailed in with a large quantity of subdued skirt.

“I took the machinery out.... Now! I can sit comfortably at last. Oh! I’m tired.”

She dropped among a lot of cushions in front of him.

“Any more interesting Elizabethan theories?” she began.

“Plenty,” he replied. “At present I am interested in Elizabethan devils.”

“Tell me about them.”

“Well,” he hesitated, and then went on, just like a professor! “King James claimed that flying devils tried to upset his boat in the North Sea, and he personally attended the trial of a lot of old bedlams, who confessed and were burned. But in some old documents in the University I have found something even more exciting. One of the genuinely thrilling things that I’ve come across is Dr. Dee’s diary, scribbled on the margins of old almanacs. He was an astrologer, alchemist, mathematician, spiritualist, physician, in other words, a 16th century scientist. Elizabeth consulted him for propitious days; that is, she had her fortune told.”

Kate snuggled up to listen. He went on thoughtfully.

“Dee records his cases. Susan G. came to see him about her devil. He tries to exorcise it by the laying on of hands and much imperative Latin. Then she goes away relieved. A servant in the house has an incorrigible evil spirit. There is much praying over her case and a deal of incantation without permanent cure. One day she slips by him on the stairs. His professional eye has seen symptoms of the inward struggle between imp and human. He follows quickly. She slides behind a door at the bottom of the stair. He hears a gurgling sound and the fall of a heavy body. Behind the door lies the poor maid. The devil had tempted her to cut her throat, he says, so that she could die in sin and be his in æternum.”

“I suppose you believe in the Elizabethan devil?”

“Doesn’t everybody? We’re coming back to witches and devils. The Psychological Research Society is only 19th century for Dr. Dee; and what with telepathic influence urging to crime, and multiple personalities, I don’t see anything in Elizabethan so-called superstition that we moderns haven’t improved upon.”

“So love is a contagious disease,” Kate ruminated, “and most of us are possessed of devils. Charming thoughts! At that rate, one might marry a devil.”

“Many do,” he laughed.

“The devil might have me,” she mused, “if he came in some guises.”

“You think you’re joking, but you’re not,” he came back in his characteristic bluntness. “Beatrice jested in exactly the same tone. ‘I may sit in a corner,’ she sighed, ‘and cry heigh-ho for a husband!’--but gave herself mightily away then. And do you remember Margaret’s reply? ‘Methinks you look with your eyes as other women do,’ said she. Now you, Miss Levering, you want to marry; of course, you do. It’s as natural a desire as hunger. ‘You look with your eyes as other women do.’ Millions of women feel exactly as you do; and, alack, millions for some confounded civilized reason don’t get the chance; or they won’t take a chance when they get one. If I were you I’d learn to do something--fill your mind with an absorbing occupation, basket weaving, rug making, study, writing--something; act as if you were never to catch the infection, or whatever it is.... That’s what I’m doing.... Why don’t you be a librarian?”

“You are the frankest man I know,” she spoke after a moment’s contemplation of his earnest face. “I believe you are right.... I am loafing my life away. And I’m useless as--” she shut her lips together firmly. Tears glistened in the lamp-light.

He leaned forward with great brotherly sympathy.

“I did not mean to hurt--”

“Oh, no! no! no! You? You hurt? My dear, dear man! You haven’t the power to hurt--you are so transparent and sincere. It’s--it’s the devil in me, I suppose,” she laughed nervously, “that did the stabbing.... But what is a woman to do? Sit and wait for some accidental man to give her the only thing she has been made fit for? I wish I did have a job. But, lordy! wouldn’t there be a roar if I hired out! Father Levering would have a stroke!”

She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.

“Let’s go out in the air,” she suggested.

The lanterns had been extinguished, but in the September starlight the wide lawn was awake and glowing. There they talked familiarly until the Seminary tower spoke a heavy “one.”

Kate had unburdened, as women and children did to Blynn; and he had filled her with good, courageous thinking, his native gift. They seemed infinitely acquainted as they approached the cosy light of the library; and Kate was happy again. Her little laugh punctuated the conversation often.

Gorgas? Where had she gone? Blynn made a futile search. Ah, children! children! he thought grimly; the subtle September night had taken them off. He tried the bower at the end of the orchard, whistling first, as a precaution--Blynn was a good sportsman--but she was not on the grounds, nor in the house.

McAlley, with his lantern, came sleepily out into the light of the path.

“Mr. Blynn,” he beckoned; and then in great secrecy, “Gorgas--she’s went to bed. She gives me this letter for you. Faith! It’s a cat-nap I’ve been takin’, and almost forgot it all.... Good night, Mr. Blynn.”

“Good night, Mac.”

The little note said:

_Mon Capitaine:_

I waited for you ever so long, and then I peeked in at you, but you seemed so happy with Kate that I just waited a little longer and then went trotting off to sleep. I have so much to tell you. Edwin plays in the finals at Haverford, Wednesday. Come and take me, please do. You’re to get your own luncheon. We start promptly at twelve, because Mac is going to drive us over. We can watch the game from the carriage. Edwin will get the Club to serve tea. I’ve seen Bardek again. And I’m to have an exhibit at the Art School.

_Comme toujours toute à toi_,

G.

P. S’s. 1. Mother says I may go if you take me. She won’t listen to anybody else going along.

2. I gave Edwin back his frat. pin temp--would say temperarilly if I could spell it.

3. Kate looked happy, too. _Wouldn’t that be fine!!_

“The little matchmaker!” he chuckled at the stars; “concocted the rendezvous and all.... It’s young Bianca getting the elder Katherina out of the way, again!... Shrewd!... And her whole-hearted unselfish self, too.... Well, I feel decidedly better. Morris--dandy chap, clean, straight sort. I know ’em; true as--” His mind trailed off in search of a strong comparison. “Indecision is the vice of life.” He walked briskly and tried to shake off uncomfortable thoughts. “It’s fine to have things settled.... Oh, the luxurious sensation of a mind finally made up!” But he walked with a long stride, his hands thrust deep into pockets; and his eyes were staring ahead as if trying to pluck a new decision out of the darkness.

XIII

TOPIC NUMBER FOUR

Where are the landaus and barouches of yesteryear, overpowering symbols of upper caste? Gone with the calash, the chaise, the coach and the cabriolet. The formal vehicle of the Leverings was called “the carriage” to distinguish it from the informal surrey. The “carriage” was always driven by Mac, who donned for the purpose a special outfit--Mr. Levering’s minim of Quaker blood balked at anything suggesting livery--aimed to indicate that Mac was just a remove and a half from membership in the family. Mac’s name for them was “his blacks,” which the Leverings adopted as a private code.

“Oh, Mac!” Kate would haloo from the rear porch. “‘Blacks’ at three.”

“’Right, Mis’ Lev’ring.” Mac would quite comprehend that a call or a drive was on the program for the afternoon.

On the drive to Haverford, Mac was resplendent in new “blacks”; his white linen ascot shone beatifically from its dark setting, and his new square-blocked hat had a small cockade at the side--clearly contraband that had escaped the eye of Father Levering. The carriage was eloquent of labor.

Blynn remarked the added note of luxury.

“We just had to smart up a bit,” explained Gorgas. “We can’t look shabby and have those ‘main-liners’ elevating lorgnettes at us _all_ the afternoon.... Oh, I’ve been preparing for this for months, getting a little new harness here and there, and some fresh paint, and working Dad for new ‘blacks’ for Mac. This is the first time I put them all together. Ain’t we stylish?... Come, get in; we must make the most of every minute--”

“But aren’t we frightfully early? The games aren’t until four o’clock, I understand,” Blynn stood stupidly contemplating his watch.

“In, _mon capitaine_!” she commanded, “before mother changes her mind and sends Kate along.... Do exactly what you’re told. I’m Pippa today,” parodying, “This is my _one_ holiday in the _whole_ year!... We’re off, Mac; Cresheim, you know.”

“I ought to have worn my store clothes,” Blynn remarked ruefully. “This is awful grand.... Ought to have been a band playing as we started off, flags waving, whistles blowing--”

“Hush!” she plucked his arm eagerly. “Don’t let’s waste time. I have so much to tell you.”

“Well,” he looked at her in his old rôle of father-confessor, “what has the naughty child been doing lately?”

“First, this is the longest skirt I ever owned.” She kicked out and showed just an inch or two above her high shoe-tops. “We had a big row over it. Kate says I’m rushing things too fast; want to be old before my time. Mother says the neighborhood wouldn’t hear of long skirts and hair completely up. I say, I’m as old as I dress. Nobody looks you up in the Bible as you walk along the street. I don’t wear ‘1874 September 10th’ on my forehead. And as for the neighbors--” she laughed. “Do you remember how Bardek bristled once when you spoke about something being all right, but dangerous because contrary to public opinion?”

“Oh, I want to know,” he interrupted; “you say you’ve seen Bardek.”

“We haven’t reached that topic yet, Mr. Professor;” she settled back comfortably. “That’s a subject we shall take up later in the course. At present, we are discussing clothes. You got me this long dress. Thank you.”

“I? Pray, how?”

“I put it to mother how you would feel taking care of a child all day. They had me all planned for a dotted Swiss, pink sash, and a floppy leghorn--ugh! and my hair down like Alice in Wonderland’s!... So, I stormed and used you for argument. Quoted you, too--things you would have said, if--if you had said ’em. I pictured the thing; made them see us walking hand-in-hand, before all that Main-line crowd, Father Rollo and daughter Rollo--me lost in that leghorn! Well, they compromised on this.”

“You did it mighty quick,” he remarked thoughtfully. His eye took in the satisfying effect of the close-fitting silk “basque,” with its soft, flaring sleeves drooping in mysterious folds from the shoulders, and the oldish dark hat with its snug cluster of blood-red roses.

“One whole month,” she told him. “The dressmaker comes only on Mondays, you know.”

“A month?” He was puzzled. “You didn’t know I was coming with you a month ago?”

“Oh, yes, I did, _mon capitaine_,” she chuckled. “You were all planned, too.”

“Bless my soul!” he ejaculated.

“Topic number two,” she announced, “is Holden. Of course, you are going to take that professorship?”

“No!” he spoke sharply. “I can’t possibly do it--The fact is--well, I’ll tell you--Diccon got it for me. He’s a member of the trustees. I didn’t know that. He just pulled for me--awfully fine of him; but he used the bludgeon of newspaper power and every trick he could lay hold of. There was an immense competition--I didn’t know that, either--and he won out by a big majority, against the President’s candidate, too. I wormed it out of him. He says it’s all right--says that’s the way it’s done.... Says he’ll make me President next.... Gross!... And I thought they had read my little studies--Pooh! There’s something humiliating in that sort of thing--even if it is customary. I told Diccon I couldn’t take it.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He said, ‘Think it over.’ I have thought it over. It’s no use.”

“I agree with Diccon,” she spoke firmly. “You ought to go. You must take things the way they’re given. I got this dress by arguing the family out of their best judgment. I fibbed a little and put up an artificial storm--pure dramatics, every bit of it--all the time I was thinking how nice a chocolate soda water would taste--I just bulldozed them into giving in. I asked for more than I possibly could get and got what I really wanted. You’re too--too poetic. My advice is to go to Holden and be somebody. The other fellows were playing the same game--don’t forget that!--and they lost. Oh, it was not ideal, but it was perfectly fair. Your friends had the stronger pull, that’s all.”

“I abominate ‘pull,’” he muttered, “all I’ve ever--”

She put a hand squarely across his lips and held it there.

“Hush!” she warned. “That topic is overboard, for the present. Let’s be happy on this ‘_one_ holiday of the _whole_ year.’” She rolled her eyes, like an ingenuous Pippa. “Topic number three is very near. I can hear it.” She raised her hand to make a funnel of it. “Hoo-eeee!” she called across the ravine.

“Hoo-eee!” came a familiar bass, followed by a crashing of bushes. Mac stopped as if on signal.

“_Grüss Gott! Herr Professor!_” he greeted Blynn; “H’lo, Mac!” he dropped into colloquial English for the driver; but nothing but French would do for the lady, “_Jolie à croquer, la petite gosse!_”

Bardek, round-faced and smiling, held out gripping hands to all three. As if it had been arranged he clambered into the carriage and drove on with them.

“How fine it is to see you!” he looked affectionately at Blynn. “This is not a good French day--only half and half,” he swept the sky critically, “or I would kiss you on both cheek. Ha! How you would jump! Oh, but you are so cold in America! You shake the hand, sometimes--good!--but you miss much warmth, much flow of blood. The love of man for woman, you have so! so!” a shrug that showed our lack even there, “but the love of man for man you have not at all--a great thing.”

“Bardek,” Gorgas broke in, “I will not have you making speeches all over the place. You--”

“In Bohemia,” he went joyfully on, waving an apologetic hand at the interrupter, “we embrace and kiss and have hot feelings. Here, you bow or say, ‘H’lo’ or ‘So long, ol’ man.’ Ach! We are flesh and blood. We were made to tingle when we touch. You don’t half love what you don’t touch. I keep my hands off this little missy--she would not let me smooth her and pat her; she jump so! And you, Miester Bleen--là! là! _là!_ là!--if I hold you in my arms--or the good Mac there, who I love, too--and kiss you on the ears and on the head! Cr-r-azy! What you say? Nut-ty! To ze Blockley Assylumm, queek! Before he run about and bite somebody else. Eh? It is so, is it not?”

“I often feel like that,” Blynn confessed, “with men, I mean.”

“Of _course_, you do,” Bardek arched his brows. “You are human being wit’ nerves,” he said “ner-r-ufs”--“and you have gr-reat power of affection bottled up, corked, inside of you. But, you are ashamed, eh? to show it?”

“Undoubtedly, quite ashamed. I often want to throw my arms over a good man friend--like Leopold, for instance--but--I’d die first.”

“There!” he turned to Gorgas. “He would die for that! For a little not’ing peoples die. In Turkey the lady would die if she show the lip; in America, the lady would die if she show the foot; in Paris, the lady would die if she _not_ show the foot. In England, the lady and the man sneak away quiet and take the baths in boxes in the ocean; in America they dance together in the water and show the ladies how to float, so! And, oh! so little clothes. Poof! Bah! I would die but for only one thing--when I cannot longer get a good breath! All else is jus’ foolishness. I--”

“Bardek,” interrupted Gorgas, “if you talk any longer I’ll turn you over to the police as a public nuisance.”

“See!” he cried. “How queek I be still. _Me voilà! Silencieux comme une carpe_--still like fish!”

“This is strictly business, Mr. Blynn. Bardek has been helping me with my exhibition at the Applied Arts--”

“And it is won-derful, her work. I--ach! That is one thing I die for, if they pass law to make me to shut up.”

“They’re going to give me a special exhibition--‘One-man Show,’ they call it. Bardek came back in August, and we’ve been working together in my smithy--the old spring-house, you know. I couldn’t go down the Valley any longer; it wouldn’t look right--”

“_Nom d’une pipe_!” he blurted. “The land of liberty. Bah!... Excuse!--_Toujours silencieux!_”

“So, we worked him in as a friend of Mac’s. Dad actually hired him once to whitewash the palings!” she chuckled merrily at the thought, as did Bardek.

“Me! W’itewashes! Oop!” he clapped his hand across his ready mouth.

“Now I have a plan. Bardek is to take that little house back of us.”

“_Take_?” asked Bardek. “How do you _take_ house?”

She shook a warning finger.

“The little white cottage, with the garden. You own it; don’t you? It is never rented. Well, Bardek is to live there, and do copper work. You come to see Mother Levering and pump her full of Bardek and have him hired for a teacher--to get ready for the exposition, you know. Say anything; make up something. Mother believes anything you tell her.”

“_Wait!_” exploded Bardek. “Please give me to speak. I to live in a house? W’ite house wit’ garden? and plumbing? and window sashes? and tables and chairs? and doors?”

To each article of the inventory Gorgas nodded.

“For me,” she added. “All for me.”

He turned energetically to Blynn. “I make mistake. There is one other t’ing I die for--to live like chicken in a house....” He looked at her curiously. “_Nom d’une pipe!_” he speculated. “I see I am going to do that t’ing.... _Nom du nom d’une pipe!_ I am going to live in a house! Wah!” he laughed aloud, head thrown back. “You do not know w’at you ask. And I do not know w’at I do. I swear, ten, fifteen year ago, I take big oath that I nevair again live in house--some day I tell you zat story--and now,” he recovered and looked at Gorgas solemnly, “I do t’at t’ing.... All ri’--for you! Good! Bury me in your w’ite house.... _Nom du nom du nom d’une pipe!_”

“That’s settled,” she turned now to Blynn. “We think twelve dollars a month is a good price for the cottage--especially since you haven’t rented it for ever so long. Mac will get it put in good shape for you. Is it a go?... For me!”

“Take it for nothing,” said Blynn.

“Well, we’ll call it eight dollars, then,” she resumed.

“Ho!” cried Bardek, highly amused. “She is good at the bargain. In my country the woman get everything cheap.”

“Here’s where you get out, Bardek.”

“Ach, so soon! Well, I get in, I go housekeeping, I get out--_comme tu voudras, mon enfant_. Some day, she say, ‘Bardek, go jump in Schuylkill river, please,’ and I say, ‘Yes, miss, jus’ please wait till I put on my coat.’... Goodby, Mr. Blynn; Goodby, ol’ Mac; adieu, Madam Pompadour, who make kings of the earth go live in little w’ite closets. _Adieu!_”

Farewells were waved until Bardek could be seen no longer.

“Topic number four,” she took up the next part of her program abruptly. “I’m not going to let you drop me, Allen Blynn.... I just won’t stand it.”

She spoke hurriedly and nervously. Allen Blynn was quite taken by surprise.

“It isn’t fair. You said you would take charge of me, my education, I mean; you told mother you would; everybody thought so, too; and then, you just--walked out.... For the last year I’ve seen you only once or twice on the streets, and you’re always rushing somewhere.... What have I done?... We’ve got to settle this thing right here and now. I’ve been thinking and thinking and I can’t make it out. You just avoid me as if I weren’t fit to--” the storm began to subside. “Of course, I don’t mean that. But why can’t we be good pals, like we were? Why not, _mon capitaine_?”

The abruptness of the thing almost overwhelmed him. The contrast between her gaiety in dealing with Bardek and the almost bitter seriousness of the present mood was a shock.

His excuses she listened to without a word of interruption. He began by showing that when he found schools for her his business as educational agent was at an end. Then his university teaching, his studying, his writings, and the care of his little charges, who could not always go to expensive schools, all that had absorbed him. Besides, the old group had broken up of its own accord--one of those accidental, unplanned things that happen. His year in Germany, too, had made an unlooked for break. There he ended.

“When you were in Germany,” she spoke with great deliberation, “I wrote to you. Didn’t you get the letter?”

“Why, yes--to be sure, I did. Of course, I did--eh--Didn’t I answer it?”

“You know you did not.”

He knew, and showed it painfully.

“Why?” she kept to the point.

He couldn’t exactly say; he was always careless; wretched personal habits he had.

“I am asking you a question. Why did you not answer my letter?”

“Oh, how can I tell you, Gorgas,” he writhed, but she was merciless.

“That’s what I intend to find out. It’s got to be settled right now--this whole business.”

“Very well,” he concluded. “I’ll try to tell you. Your letter was all right--”

“No, it wasn’t. It was six, gushing, gloomy pages of homesickness for you. I had the blues awfully. Nobody around the house attempts to try to understand me or give me a fair show. You came along with a whole new world and called me ‘pal’ and let me in, and when you shipped off without ever giving me a hint that you were going, I was so flabbergasted I sat down and poured out. I posted it that night--in the rain--and cried the rest of the night because I had sent it. But I said, ‘Allen Blynn is the one man on earth who will understand a lonely child.’... But, it seems you didn’t.... Can’t you realize the--the--agony of every day that brought--nothing? If you had scolded me or something, I should have felt all right. But you just--shut up.”

She stared ahead of her in blurred indignation. The little, blood-red roses on her hat were trembling. He could see that she was striving to control her excited breathing.

“Little girl,” he spoke kindly, “that was a great blunder of mine. To think that I hurt you--is almost unbearable.... I thought I understood children, but, bless my soul!--I don’t know the beginnings. Let me tell you something. I am quite sure that every time I got hold of a pen or pencil, even to write so much as a postal card, I thought of your letter and wondered what I should do. I couldn’t decide. Several times I planned letters to you--”

“Honest! You really did?” she gasped.

“Yes, indeed. But, you see, I didn’t at all understand your letter. I’ve received loads of letters from children, but this one--why, child, it was--oh, now that I understand your ‘blues’ and all that sort of thing, it’s clear enough. But, you see, this was too--too--”

“Go on,” she spoke determinedly; “it was! I meant it to be!”

He made up his mind to speak plainly to her.

“You were a little child,” he began.

“I wish you wouldn’t forever harp on ‘child.’ I was no child. I was fifteen years old, and knew exactly what I was about. If I had been a fifteen-year-old puppy you’d have given me credit for something.”

“That’s just the point--the only point; you were not a puppy, but a girl-child of fifteen, writing a very sentimental letter to a man of twenty-five. The rules of the game are very clear, my dear. The man of twenty-five must not encourage sentiment, or he is a--a--foul thing. It’s the law of our civilization; and I was not free to break it.”

“‘America! Ze lant of Leeberty!’” she mimicked Bardek softly. “‘You couldn’t write what you thought.... No, I see that.... You’d have been ashamed, wouldn’t you?... It is one of t’ t’ings you would die for, eh? _Wass?_’”

“Absolutely!” he spoke with conviction. “Bless my soul!”

“All right,” she regarded him carefully. “You are forgiven--almost.... You made me so blamed mad, by just letting me slide that way, that I could have done things to you. Well, that’s all over and I feel better. I couldn’t quarrel with anybody very long today; this new dress fits too well; but I just had to have this thing out with you, Allen Blynn, or--or--” She could not think of an adequate figure of speech.

“Now,” she went on; “topic number--what number is it? Five, I think. Topic number five. Tell me all about Germany. That’s the last topic till we reach Haverford. Just go on, and on, and talk and talk, and I’ll snuggle up in this corner and listen.... Hurry!... Begin!”

She leaned back in the cushion with a rug tucked up and around her as warm and contented as a sleepy kitten.

He talked of Germany, and world politics, and literature and pedagogy. When he drooped, she stirred him on.

As they drew near Haverford he asked her a question about the games. She gave no answer. Propped in her corner, just beside the wrinkles made where the hood of the carriage is thrown back, she was having a contented, smiling slumber.

He watched her as she slept, mused on her calms and her storms, speculated as to what sort of character was emerging. As they drew into the Club gateway, he touched her gently.

“I have guarded thy couch, fair Titania,” he said; “I, Bottom, the weaver, have done that thing.”

“Where’s Peaseblossom?” he took her cue quickly.

Blynn jerked his thumb toward the diminutive Mac, who had now begun to stiffen up and look his smartest before the superior broughams in the lane about him.

“Peaseblossom in ‘blacks,’” she gurgled. “Oh! oh! That is _too_ funny!”

“Topic number six,” he announced quietly. “I intend to take your advice about Holden. I’m going.”

“When?”

“October; next month.”

She pondered for a second or two and then nodded a determined head.

“Good boy!” she patted him on the arm. “Bully! Now you’re talking like a grown-up man.”

XIV

A MORRIS DAY

Only a small gallery followed the tennis tournament. Although there were some splendid outside entries and the match took on the flavor of a semi-official eastern championship, the newspapers--according to Diccon--had not yet made tennis a sport. A magnificent cup, with some good names already on it, was the trophy; and the finals in singles, between Morris and Clarke, would decide the year’s holder.

While Mac was engineering a good spot for the carriage, Gorgas scanned the players’ quarters for signs of Morris. Soon a white figure--“ducks,” white cap, open-throated shirt--waved in the distance and began to make toward them.

“Allen Blynn,” Gorgas spoke quietly, “don’t you back-pedal for one minute on that Holden job.” It was the day of the bicycle. “You’ve won it according to the rules. You’ve just got to go. I’m mighty glad you’re thinking sensibly about it. Now, that’s all the time I can give you--the rest of the day belongs to Edwin Morris. Wish it were baseball, so we could root for him. Hello, boy, how are you feeling?”

“Never better,” said the boy.

Morris tossed back a lock of hair as he came up smiling. Lithe, clean-looking suppleness he showed; shy almost; lounging; giving no sign of superior physical power; that unique creature, a new species, the American college-athlete.

“You’re going to win, of course,” Gorgas searched his face admiringly.

“The trouble is,” he drawled, “Clarke says he feels fit, too. We’ve agreed to let loose and give you a show for your penny.”

Blynn inquired, “Forgive me, Edwin, for not knowing who Clarke is. He’s your friend, the enemy; is he not?”

“Fancy not knowing Clarke, Hudson Clarke!” Gorgas looked at him in wonderment. “He’s the foxiest tenniser outside of dear old Lun’non. We’d be lucky to get his scalp, I tell you.”

Her loyalty was immense. She filled Morris with the glow of success, keyed him up with little whispers of faith, and gave him something to fight for.

On his white shirt the tiny fraternity brooch made a conspicuous mark. Gorgas reached over and carefully disengaged the patent fastening and, with equal care, pinned it upon her own proud new gown. Morris watched her without speaking. She gave it several little pats to see if it were secure and then talked into his right ear.

“That’s for good luck.”

“Going to keep it?” he grinned. He knew all about the significance of wearing a man’s fraternity pin.

“There’s never no telling. Mebbe; if you win.”

“She’s rather savage, don’t you think?” Blynn leaned forward and rallied her. “Think how all Clarke’s little girls will feel if he loses.”

“That’s their affair,” she shut her lips. “We’re after that cup, aren’t we, boy? When we play we go in hard; no quarter; divil take the hindmost. That’s the only way to play. Slash ’em, knock ’em over, go for ’em. I just hate the chap I’m playing against--until the game’s over.”

“Contrariwise?” Morris jested.

“_Sans doute_,” she patted him on the head, “until the game’s over.”

They chatted together like chums, until the call came for the finals.

To Blynn those two young persons seemed suddenly alien; it was his first sense of moving away from very young life. It comes to some men in the twenties and to others not until much later. One day you find yourself a stranger to the prattle about you; it may be you grow a little testy at its inanities, its silly repetitions and obvious repartee; or perhaps you try to join in, and find the youngsters combining to laugh at your clumsiness. Over there, smoking stolidly in the easy chairs, there is where you belong. You stare and figure out ages and discover to your consternation that you do belong over there. Then some old, old, lady to whom you feel like saying, “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am”--if that was the salutation of your own day--comes burbling forward to claim you as a contemporary. And with the laughter of the children still in your ears, and half claiming your attention, you begin lamely to talk life insurance or the present administration’s foreign policy.

After Morris had gone, Blynn felt very uncomfortable. He would have given much to be able to slip quietly out and get at his note-taking on Scot’s “Discoverie of Witchcraft”; or to have some member of his “contemporary club” stroll by and take a seat in the carriage. He didn’t know what to say to this strange young person before him; especially after he had witnessed the kind of prattle youth carries on nowadays. (Did he ever talk that way to girls? he wondered. He couldn’t remember--another sign of distance.)

But, Gorgas was true to her word. The remainder of that day was given over to Edwin Morris. After all, tennis was her trade; she was looking on with a craftsman’s eye, catching the meaning of every serve and return.

The first set was a battle. Both men kept to their agreement to wade in and give the small crowd an exhibition. Deuce games were frequent. After 4-3 in favor of Clarke, Morris’ serve evened it to 4-4. By a squeak it went to 5-4--Clarke had slipped to the ground in trying for an easy ball--and Morris took his own serve for the set: 6-4.

Gorgas could hardly contain her joy. She applauded with little, rapid slaps upon her kid gloves and called to Blynn to help with the noise. Her gloves came ripping off so that she could make her allegiance heard.

“Oh, that serve!” she chuckled. “It looks, oh, so easy; but it’s a fooler. He invented it and uses it only when he needs a point. It has hardly a bounce to it; just skims along the grass. Edwin! Edwin!” she talked but forebore calling. “We’re here!” When he glanced slowly over, grinning sheepishly as if he had done something wrong, she tugged at his fraternity brooch and made as if to wave it.

In the second set Morris maintained the lead until 5-4. It looked like both sets and the trophy, but Clarke let loose, as if mad, evened the score and tore through to 7-5 and set.

It still had the appearance of a Morris day. Clarke was evidently winded and worn. He was strangely pale; the good-natured smile was rather fixed; but he stood up gamely for the third and final set.

“You’ve got him, boy,” Gorgas murmured, just loud enough for Blynn. “Steady! Just keep her traveling.... That’s the way! Let him put ’em out!... Make him work! He’s going down! See him breathe!... That’s the way! Play safe!... Whoopee! Did you see that ‘Lawford’?” And so on, straining and pulling with every smack of the ball.

Clarke deliberately gave a game away, evidently to secure a rest. The score stood 4-2 in favor of Morris. They were changing courts, Morris with steady steps, Clarke with a drag. They said a few words as they passed the net. Clarke shook his head and dropped on one knee, ripped off the top lace of his shoe to adjust a white ankle brace. During the next game Clarke barely stirred from one spot on the court; naturally, the score was with Morris at 5-2.

Gorgas stopped her chatter. “Clarke put his ankle out when he slipped,” she told Blynn.

“How do you know?” Blynn was aware of something strange in the playing. “He isn’t moving much, but he’s doing rather well, just now.”

“Don’t you _see_?” she went on. “He’s all in. _Look_ how white he is.... They ought to stop the game. It’s a pity!” She suffered in sympathy with every swing Clarke made to hold back defeat. “They oughtn’t to allow it.... Why doesn’t Edwin see he’s not trying for anything.”

Then followed the absurdest bit of tennis that two really good players ever put up before spectators. Double faults were common; wide balls; missed shots that Blynn himself could have handled. Clarke was plainly given three games. Score 5-5.

Once the men seemed to be disputing. Something that Morris said drove the smile from Clarke’s face, but not the pallor; and he came back for a few moments with his old-time form.

“Good work!” Morris called. The score was Clarke’s at 6-5. It began suddenly to grow dark from a threatening storm.

The men slackened again, each seeming to give way to the other. The shots were all going to the center of the court. No one seemed to be trying to get by the other. It was so amateurish that the men themselves occasionally laughed. Back and forth the ball sailed peacefully--neither man budged--until, in the nature of things, it dropped into the net or went out of bounds. Two automatons, fixed near the back line, with power to lean and swing arms, that was the picture they presented. Nevertheless, under these absurd conditions, the men were playing with dogged earnestness. The game was desperately disputed, Clarke finally winning the set at 7-5, and with it, the trophy.

“Tiddledywinks!” Gorgas summed up the game. “But glory be!” she turned a shining face to Blynn. “Wasn’t that the dandy thing to do? I’d not have spoken to him if he’d won that cup against a lame man. Look at Clarke. They’re carrying him off. He knows Ed let up. But, really, the way they played made it perfectly fair. It was anybody’s game. They might have spun a quarter for it.... And Neddie did so want to win.... He never said so; but I know. This is an awful swell cup, Allen Blynn. The winner always is somebody for a year, I tell you. Ed worked so hard to get in shape for this.... It’s a _darn_ shame.... Here! get out and take a walk and tell me when Ed comes with the tea-things. I’m g-going to--stay in here a-lone for a-while.... Get out! I tell you.... Get out!”

While Blynn drew up the carriage hood as a precaution against the coming shower, he could hear her quietly having her disappointment out in little diminishing sobs. He looked at the sky; both storms threatened to be over soon.

Sprinkles of rain and Edwin with hot buttered muffins and a tray full of cups appeared at the same time.

“There’s plenty of tea and things,” he called merrily. “Everybody’s clearing out on account of the shower.... Wait till I gather in a few more hot muffins.”

Gorgas’ eyes followed him. He did not miss that; nor the whispered, “Fine work, old chap; we saw what you did.” But, characteristically, he said nothing about the game or its outcome.

“Good sport, Clarke,” Morris said later, the nearest he came to discussing it. “Must have been ready to flop.... Cleaned me up in that second set; with a cracked ankle, too. Only thing to do--bring it on the level as near as possible. Seems a shame. Clarke didn’t want to win that way. Neither of us did.”

During the brief shower, Gorgas mothered him, tucked the rug about him, fed him muffins, and decided just the proper color of tea for a hero. And then she insisted that he drive back with them.

As Blynn thought of the spectacle of those two youngsters picnicking together, facing him all the way home, and talking their private jargon, he decided for the seat beside Mac.

“Good work, Professor,” Morris laughed. “We don’t like to hurry you off, _but_--”

The children seemed carried away by some unguessable joke.

“What’s the matter?” Blynn beamed down on them benignly. “Is my tie jumping the track in back?” That was one of his constant fears. His right hand explored the neck.

“Oh, your _back’s_ all right,” Morris could hardly hold his joy at Blynn’s obtuseness. “_Back’s_ fine!” Then he began to chant a college song of the hour, keeping time by rapid pats on his knees.

“We were yachting and the chaperone Was blind and deaf and dumb, Why, she couldn’t hear the thump and crash Of cymbal and of drum, When we shot off three salutes For the captain of the fleet She remarked, ‘Oh hear the dicky birdie! Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!’”

Blynn found Mac a contemporary. They talked of England’s treatment of Ireland, of the causes of immigration and what the world was coming to, anyway. It was good talk, grown-man’s fodder; while, back of them, the youngsters, tucked up in a rug, sang songs, comic and sentimental, flashed nonsense back and forth, recited absurd verse, and even hallooed to passersby. Bless our soul! Did we ever go through that stage? Perhaps. Then praise be to memory for forgetting all about it!

Twilight found them ambling along the Wissahickon drive. In the woodland it was almost dark.

“This ’ere Bardek,” Mac shook his head, “’e’s a funny feller.”

“You’ve come to know him pretty well, I suppose, Mac,” prodded Blynn.

“Ye-es,” Mac busied himself holding in the horses while they passed a returning “century run” of bicycles, each one with a different kind of bell and a different light. “Plagued bikes!--jes’ clutter up the road. No pleasure drivin’ no more.” After the main body had passed, the stragglers were easy to avoid. “Oh, he’s all right--I guess, but--well, he talks a lot, now; don’t he?”

“His talk is rich,” said Blynn. “It has the charm of straight thinking, unbiased thinking. He’s travelled a great deal and is naturally observant. I don’t always agree with him, but I like his talk.”

“Do y’ understan’ all he’s drivin’ at?” Mac seemed incredulous of anyone doing that. “An’ d’ y’ think he understan’s it ’isself?”

Without waiting for an answer to his question, Mac went on:

“Now, I don’t say I don’t like him, ’cause I do. He stands by Miss Gorgas, as if she might be his own daughter. That’s all right. But--” Mac glanced back furtively--“he gives me a lot o’ talk about marriage, which, as bein’ a respectable marri’d man, m’self, I’m not takin’ no stock in. Wimmen may be one thing, and wimmen may be another; but marri’d is marri’d--that’s my way o’ thinkin’. It’s the way I was brung up and I sticks to it. He’s got migh-ty funny notions about marriage--migh-ty funny. It’s my opinion, and it’s me wife’s opinion, that he ain’t never marri’d to th’t little woman in the glen. Mind, I’m not asayin’ it is nor it taint so. All that I know is ’e don’t believe much in marriage. Dangerous character, I call ’im; but, I do like to have ’im aroun’.... Why, he don’t believe in property, nor money, nor the church nor nothin’. He says he thinks God is interested in gnats and horseflies! Think o’ that, now!... I was pullin’ up weeds in the garden once, and he looked at me and laughed. ‘Why you change all God’s plans for, you ol’ Mac?’ he sez. ‘Takes a lot o’ time to make nice clean weed. You don’t like the way the Lord made the earth, eh? In six day,’ he sez, ‘the Lord created heaven and earth and all that therein is, and ol’ Mac he spend all his life pullin’ it up and makin’ it better. An’ w’at you grow?’ he sez. ‘Ugh! tomat! ugh! Gott,’ he sez, ‘spoil ni-ce fre-sh weed for ol’ tomat! ugh!’ and he makes faces and waves ’is hands.... Now, w’at you agoin’ to do with a feller like that?”

“Don’t do anything,” laughed Blynn. “Just enjoy him.”

“An’ he’s a anarchist, too,” Mac’s head shook very dolefully at that. “Sez he is, ’imself. Sez he’s as much anarchist as anything. That’s purt-ty bad, Mr. Blynn. Herr Most and all them Chicago fellers! Um! An’ y’ can’t help likin’ ’im! I’d do almost anything for Bardek--think o’ that, now!--most anything--I hev already lied for him!--think o’ that, now, him as good as an anarchist and me a respectable marri’d man!”

Out of the dark of Cresheim road came a sonorous voice. It was far off, moving toward them. The song was evidently improvised, both words and music. The refrain, which had been more carefully worked up, came clear across the night.

“Oh, boards and plaster! Boards and plaster! Nail me in the w’ite-wash house. _La porte fermée_ Good air, _adië_ I live like mouse, I live like cows.”

(“Cows” rhymed perfectly with “house.”)

The singer sighted the dull lamps of the carriage and shouted a mighty “Whoo-ee!” which was answered quickly by Gorgas.

“I haf moved from one t’ousand B. C. straight--plumpf!--into the nineteen century.” Bardek bobbed up before them, but Bardek with waving mustachio gone, Bardek shaved and hair-cutted, Bardek in new soft hat, rolling low collar and a roomy new suit of clothes! He was quite resplendent and stunning, but outwardly a brand new Bardek.

“_Presto!_ I jump into respectables,” he bowed. “My family is moved. They have all said the prayers and skipped to sleep. Ah! Ol’ Mac, you are no more to be the on’y respectable married man in all America.”

With laughter they helped him into the carriage.

“I give my wife and kiddies one gran’ scare. They t’ink I am some strange feller, till I talk--ah! Who talk like Bardek! In six languages I prove myself. So! I gif up liberty an’ become American slave. In America all men are slave to women and children. _Freiheit, adië!_”

Questions brought out the fact that he had taken possession of the white cottage, moved his family in--to the great joy of the children--and had marched off to the nearest barber and then to the nearest clothing store.

“I say to the barber, ‘Make me like American!’ He say, ‘It cost you much--one-half dollar!’ I say, ‘Here is one _whole_ dollar. This is a big job; don’t do it _half_!’ Then he clip, clip, clip, but I say nothings. ‘Americans wear the “clean face,”’ he stop and say. I say, ‘I _talk_ vairy well myself; _do_!’ I t’ink with ‘clean face’ he means wash it; but hoh! he mean ‘cut it off!’ So I learn some new English and look like a fat, little, stupid priest, eh, Mac? We go to mass, Sunday, eh, ol’ Mac? But not confession! _Ach, du lieber Gott!_ When I tell all my little sins it would be Sunday again! How you like me, eh?”

It was hard to get used to the new Bardek; the vagabond had made way for a distinguished foreigner. They discovered, in looking him over, that it was the sweeping mustachio which gave him the appearance of desperado. The broad forehead, the deep eyes, the great nose, the laughing lips and the huge chin were well worth exposing. It was like the transformation wrought when campers come out of the woods, quite undistinguishable from the native guides, and, after one hour’s refurbishing and barbering, become gentlemen. There would be no doubt, thought Blynn, of a welcome for Bardek at the Leverings.

“It is a good feeling,” Bardek stroked his newly shorn face. “My skin has changed into American. I cannot yet spit, but, if I try--mebbe.... The wife, oh, she run all t’rough the rooms, and the children, too; and they laugh and fall on the floor and laugh. They go out to breathe and come in and stay as long as they can--_La porte fermée_. Good air _adië_--like sea diver--till I open windows. We go to store and buy broom and bed and--everything. In little while, we fix things. Wife, she go to Mac’s house and peek in window to see where bed go--she on’y little girl when I take her. An’ good Mrs. Mac, she come over and laugh and they all laugh. We all so silly. Then, Mrs. Mac, she change everything different, while she near die laughing. We have bed in the kitchen, she say, and stoves in the yard with the pump. But, Mrs. Mac she fix all. And how we work! Ach! My bones hurt. We are vairy grand. _Ma foi!_ My wife, she cry and say she afraid. The bed go c-r-r-eck, cr-r-eck, and go down, down, down. But she vairy tired and she sleep. Then I go out and pull door-bell. _Là! là! là! là!_ I wait, holdin’ in big laugh. I think I see whole dam’ business come crying for the devils have come to get t’em. I wait. I hold my laugh back. I ring loud. So! Schwurunkl-angl-unkl-angl-angle! All so still. I go up the crooked steps--some day I break my neck, there!--_V’là!_ Sleep like dead.... Me! Wah-oo-eep!” he yawned. “I sleep stan’ up.”

He began a second, healthy, out-in-the-woods yawn, which extended amid comfortable “ah’s” and “oh’s” and “ee’s” until it snapped back in ecstatic relief.

“Oh-wo-wo-wo!” imitated Gorgas. “You’ve ow! wow! got me go-ow-ing too, Bardek. I’m so-ow-oh slee-py.”

Everyone yawned. Bardek outdid himself. Mac nearly dislocated his jaw.

In a moment or two Bardek was put down at his “boards and plaster,” and Gorgas, Blynn and Morris were saying farewells.

“My pin,” Morris was holding out a hand.

“I think I’ll keep it,” she pushed his hand aside. “You deserve something for today’s work. You were _great_, boy; simply great!”

Morris said his goodbys quickly and was off to catch a town train.

“And, now, Mr. Professor,” Gorgas turned to Blynn, “I’m going to write to you when you arrive at Holden, and if you don’t answer within five days--I’ll--”

“What will you do, child?”

She looked at him steadily. Smiles and little frowns came and went, like gust ripples on a pond.

“Don’t ever put a girl through that sort of thing again. You don’t know what it is to be eaten up with shame--every day, too, for months and months. Well! We’ve dropped that; haven’t we? But I’m still a little hot about it.... Good night, Allen Blynn ... and good luck to you ... and remember; don’t back-pedal.”

“Good night, I’m on my mettle,” he tried her old rhyming game, as he walked away.

“And answer letters,” she retorted, and added, “or with Gorgas Levering you’ll have to settle.”

XV

THE LADY OF THE INTERRUPTION

She wrote to him at regular intervals, and he answered dutifully. To him they were the little letters of a lost child; not entirely lost, for much of the child was in her scrawling notes. With many persons the written word is much more intelligent than the oral; but with Gorgas Levering, who in a chat would easily give the impression of the grown woman, letter-writing exhibited a youngster still in the teens.

She did not seem to know what to say; one wonders why she wrote; indeed, half of the letter would be announcements of why she could not write. And the spelling! For a young lady who spoke and read fluently in four languages, that spelling was inexplicable.

Once Blynn sent back a letter with all the misspelled words underscored in red ink, and with the fatherly suggestion that she look them up and send him a re-written copy.

Her answer was a shocker; every word was purposely put out of gear.

“Deer Proffessorr,” it ran. “Eye kannott korresspponndd eney longerr wwithh U.

“Wun: U R 2 smarrt,

“Too: Ewer minde iz teecher-krazy an kant C anything butt lettres an semi-coalons.

“Thre: Eye kan beet U left handed inn tennes

“Ewers,

“GOARGASS.”

But she tried. Evidence was abundant enough. All suspicious words were left either totally blank or half-begun, to be finished out laboriously later via a small dictionary. The dictionary was not always employed immediately--her letters were regularly written at the sleepiest hour of the night; so that Blynn had the greatest joy in seeing dozens of hard words, like “disappoint” and “necessary,” flaring at him in two different kinds of ink, black for the first half and pale blue for the tails. His prize-letter--which he did not dare twit her about, for fear the supply would suddenly cease--was a mysterious thing, full of beginnings and no tails at all! Evidently sleep had overtaken the dictionary benediction.

In their correspondence during the first college terms at Holden, while she was growing from sixteen to almost eighteen, there was hardly a personal note struck. One would not suspect that they had ever been acquainted. Hers resembled school exercises more than anything else, full of incoherent announcements of local news. His, on the other hand, were short stories of Holden life; gathered together they might have been published as the personal impressions of Professor Blynn on the manners and customs of Holdonians. They were brisk, sprightly narratives, rather longish, for he dictated them to a by-the-hour stenographer, but rich in personal flavor and really interesting. The Levering family read them in turn as they might have passed on the numbers of a serial story.

From Gorgas, Allen knew that his letters were public property. That may have had some effect upon their construction and style; certainly, they grew in finished form and came to lend themselves easily to public family reading.

But none of the matters that troubled him, nor any of his pedagogic dreams or literary ambitions found their way into these chatty epistles. It was a selected, semi-impersonal college world that he sorted out and presented to the Levering family; but a real one, for all that.

Through these newsletters Gorgas knew that he had been lured by the siren of the lecture platform--always lying in wait for talkative young professors. Diccon saw to it that every public utterance of the distinguished young scholar who had been called to the chair of English in Holden College should be properly placed before the readers of the city newspapers. It worried Blynn, to be sure, to find his casual illustration made the subject of “small-heads”--there is nothing more frightful to sincere teachers than this sort of up-side-down publicity--but he solaced himself by hoping no one would see it.

In Mount Airy Gorgas Levering was searching every page for such notices and was happy to get even a three-line flyer just above the obituaries; and she cut them out and pasted them in a scrap-book. She felt responsible for his going to Holden, she assured herself, and she developed an I-told-you-so spirit with every discovery of what she believed to be proper fame. “Professor Allen Blynn, head of the division of English of Holden College, also spoke,” was often sufficient proof to her of her wisdom in advising him to go up to the larger work.

She learned, too, of other matters, his phenomenal success in teaching his young children by way of correspondence, his pedagogic reforms in the administration at Holden, all of which she mused over with something akin to maternal calm; but one day his letter broke forth with the discovery of a “lady,” and Gorgas grew apprehensive and suspicious and on guard.

“My dear Leverings,” he wrote. “Here’s Mystery for you! And a Lady! And local newspaper notoriety--not yet scandalous!”

He had been lecturing before the Alpha Women’s Club on “The Dull Pleasures of the Mob.” It was one of those defenses of the intellectual life which every enthusiastic scholar is prepared to utter at a moment’s notice. The intellectual audience were proud of him; they applauded every one of his clever shafts as justification for their life of charming indolence. Then he forgot himself and inquired:

“Is there any question on that point?”

That was an absent-minded schoolroom phrase.

“Yes; there is a question on that point,” came a strong pleasant voice from the extreme end of the hall. He could not at first discern the lady, for she did not rise. “Do you really believe all this twaddle you are giving us, or are you just ‘parroting’ from a book?”

The very young ladies laughed gayly. The rascals! They had been taking notes on all his golden utterances; yet they turned in glee to search out the rebellious questionist. The elders buzzed their horror; but they, too, squirmed about, curious to behold the cause of so inhospitable an interruption.

“Oh, never mind,” the voice boomed out patiently. “It’s a hopeless thing to ask anyone.”

She arose to go. Everyone could see the commanding figure and the perfect smile of good nature which half atoned for the rather shocking speech.

“Go on, little man,” she nodded. “You’re giving them what they want, I suppose”--waving an arm over the audience--“or what they are trained to believe they want. Perhaps they deserve it,” she laughed. “But I’m a little sorry for you”; she turned to the speaker directly, as she gathered up her belongings; “you look like the sort who could do better--with a little honest tutoring.”

“Don’t go, my dear lady, I beg of you,” Blynn called after her. Lecturers soon get used to eccentric debaters from the floor; although this one was decidedly of uncommon mould. She stopped at the door. “Please come back--let us reason together. If you don’t mind, I don’t. You can’t imagine what a great relief it is to get an interruption.”

She watched Blynn good naturedly, wavering between the desire to speak and the feeling of the futility of saying anything.

Blynn went on coaxingly.

“You stir my male curiosity deeply. All my life I have been respected and revered, treated like a special shipment of something valuable. You cannot know how lonely I have been. Why, even my students respect me.”

She wavered. Already she had dropped her muff into a rear seat.

“I can’t tell you how eager I am to be exposed,” Blynn smiled engagingly and waved a welcoming hand. “Do come back and let us dispute as did Plato and his friends; amicably, if possible, but always in the name of high truth.... You were saying, O Unknown One.”

“I was saying what was in my mind, O Knowing One,” she replied. “But I am sorry now that I spoke. Your question seemed to touch a spring--the spring of ‘high truth.’ High truth, I fear, is a rude, uncivilized thing--most of us keep it thoroughly well guarded--I apologize for employing it here. But--” she fastened him with her motherly smile, “please don’t talk so confidently of the dull pleasures of the mob. Perhaps, as you suggest, Browning and Swinburne touch only the ultra-violet mind; talk about that, it is within your sphere; but until you know more about people, let the mob alone. To know the secret you have to be a mob yourself.... Forgive me for talking straight out, Professor. It is an uncultivated thing to do, I know; but it is right in the spirit of the mob, one of its dull pleasures.... I must go.... If I stay I’ll break out, and then someone would have to read me the riot act.... You’re a first-rate book, Professor; I should enjoy you--on a shelf; but you have never really _been_. Goodby.”

Of course Blynn turned the event to account and made several quick epigrams out of the affair.

“The audience cheered my little sallies,” he wrote, “which I accepted as proof of their regard--a vote of confidence, as it were, after a thundering attack from the opposition. Everyone apologized and told me that I had handled the situation with proper urbanity. No one seems to know her. She is not a member of the Alpha Women’s Club. But I’m glad she spoke out; to tell the truth, my dull lecture was boring even me!”

The newspapers got a story out of the interruption; and for a nine-days the cartoonist played up professors and “the dull pleasures of the mob.” One of the hits in a touring musical comedy company had its source here.

“Are you happy, Mike?”

“Sure, perfesser, I’m happy; ain’t I got a headache!”

Gorgas wrote a single sentence of disapproval of the lady’s rudeness and in postscript inquired, “How old is she?”

And Blynn came back with an imitation of the laconic note.

“Dear Gorgas: She was not rude, but enchanting.

“P. S. She is as old as truth, which is ever young and beautiful.”

The “Lady” came in for occasional notice in nearly every letter. “The ‘Interruption,’” he wrote, “has had a disturbing effect on me. Somehow between my audiences and myself the phantom smile of the unknown mocks me, although I haven’t seen her again. When I speak confidently out of my store of book-knowledge the smile seems to broaden into a grin; but when I quote Aristotle or Plato, it positively laughs in derision.”

In public, he explained, he had come to be consciously on the defensive. He began to avoid book authorities and seek illustration from his slender personal experience of men and things. Occasionally she drove him to take off his glasses and look about him. In his off hours, instead of burrowing in the library, he walked about the streets and observed the throngs. He wandered along the aisles of department stores, chatted with policemen, and elbowed workmen in the trolley cars; sat in the public squares and talked with the old men who sun themselves there daily, and with the youngish tramps, down at the heel and beery.

Once he had wandered on a wharf where excursionists were about to embark for a brief trip down the river. A rosy mother was struggling with a huge picnic basket and a medley of children. She let him help her with the next youngest baby, while the husband with two toddlers was surging ahead to secure a good seat. Before Blynn had quite made up his mind what to do next, the boat had slid off into the stream and he was in for a first-hand experience of the “dull pleasures of the mob.”

It was pleasure, he had to admit some hours later, but by no means dull. He exhausted all the slot devices for chewing gum and chocolate, weighed the kiddies on all the machines, invested wholesale in lemonade and bananas, and actually waltzed to the strains of a harp and one violin. At Houston Park they swooped down upon the carrousel, captured places on the scenic railway by vulgar bribery, and eventually “set ’em up” to a dessert of “hoky-poky” ice cream, as part-payment for a share of the basket lunch.

The young husband permitted all this gallantry without surprise. Indeed, in the twilight trip homeward Blynn and he sat together in the stern of the boat and smoked out a fine friendship--one exhausted kiddie asleep content in the professor’s arms--and there it was he paid Blynn the fine compliment of inquiring where he “worked.”

“At Holden College,” Blynn replied, guiltily waving a hand in a vague professional manner, the which his companion seemed to take as the motions of mopping a floor.

“Purdy soft, hey?” he grinned.

“Tolerable,” said Blynn.

“Women do all the scrubbin’,” he volunteered.

“Aye, and they do it well,” Blynn told him.

“An’ all summer nothin’ to do at all!” he mused. “Purdy soft! Purdy soft!”

He looked at Blynn proudly, as if the securing of such a sinecure was in itself a worthy act.

“I express for Hamilton’s,” he confided. “Furniture vans,” he added in answer to an inquiring look. “Some days we jess ‘move,’ but most times we hussels pianos. Y’back feels it nights, I tell y’. But, y’ sleeps good.”

“Ah!” Blynn said. “I envy you there. I don’t ‘sleep good’ at all. Half the night I lie awake thinking of foolish unnecessary things.”

“Y’ ain’t got no work to do!” the expressman spoke with emphasis. “It’ll give any man the bug-eye. What you want is a reg-u-lar job. What you’re a-doin’, that’s a woman’s business. Oh, I’ve tried my hand at cinches--grass cutting, drivin’ a wagon, takin’ the dog out walkin’. Made me sick. I got to put _guts_ in my job. That’s what _you_ need--a job y’ got to put _guts_ in.”

As the talk grew confidential at parting he let the professor lend him five dollars without the shadow of a protest. There was nothing squeamish, self-conscious or over-modest about the expressman. “Sure!” he said and pocketed the bill without more ado. He treated Blynn so like an equal that the university man stalked off elated as if he had just been admitted to an exclusive fraternity.

It was through such wild adventures that Blynn graduated to a deed of daring. One cool, spring Saturday night found him strolling along the badly lighted streets of a section known as “The Ditch.” The swinging doors of an odorous “saloon,” backed by a glaring warm light, which made the dark street a shade dimmer, seemed to bid a “Welcome All!” He went in.

The faces of the lounging drinkers at the bar were worth many times the small admission fee, the price of a strangling glass of ginger ale. They were like characters in a modern Morality Play, Blynn thought, as he named them in order: “Simple,” thin nose, hanging lip and lack-lustre eye; “Low-brow,” a rogue by right of inheritance; “Toothless,” a boy with the face of a crone; “Evil,” selfish to the point of cruelty; “Braggart,” serious and self-contemplative; “Sloth,” simply fat.

Speech was gone to a mumble; cackles of laughter arose over nothing at all; futile drivel slavered from the chin.

“’S my treat--godda drink ’th me!” fumbled “Simple,” displaying a bill.

The well-groomed barkeep and owner swept it off into his resplendent cash-register and began the swift passing out of the accustomed drinks. Blynn’s second ginger ale was slid beside him before he could guess the meaning of the action.

And so treating went the rounds. Here and there pay-envelopes were opened and tossed on the counter with bravado. To Blynn’s amazement the alert barkeep boldly kept the change of those who were too far gone to protest. When “Evil” called blasphemously for his money the barkeep roared with delight and spun the coins out from behind a concealed glass.

“Thought I’d got you that time, Pete!” he shouted gayly.

No one seemed to notice that Blynn’s pile of ginger ale was untouched. He had resolved not to be a party to the disgusting custom. So he was about to pay his little bill and depart, when an almost inarticulate soliloquy from “Evil,” the least sodden of the lot, stopped him short and sent his head aflaming.

“Wife’s sick ’gin, dam ’er. _Tol’_ ’er, break ’er head. _Will_ break ’er head w’enna g’ home. Las’ night--las’ night--’noth’ dam brat.... Allus havin’ dam brats.... Locked ’er up; ’did. Tol’ ’er, break ’er head. _Will_ break ’er head w’enna g’ home.”

He went on with this maudlin talk, to which no one attended. Ordinarily, Allen Blynn looked on the miseries of the poor with a mild professorial eye. The world is a horrible place for some folks, “a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night”; no remedy is nigh; we must sigh in pity and pass on to our own compelling tasks.

But this fellow’s story, which he enlarged upon until there was no doubt of his meaning, Blynn viewed in no spirit of philosophic calm. Perhaps the alcoholic air of the place had got into his vitals, and had stirred them; perhaps that hidden, scourging priest within him had broken forth to battle with the evil one; perhaps the Lady had made him realize that he lacked something of being a man: at any rate, he strode up back of that villainous beer-sop and spun him about so that his back leaned at an angle against the bar and his feet spread out in front of him.

“Where do you live?” Blynn darted the question at him so fiercely that he answered automatically.

“Twenty-six Hogan street,” he growled, then slid heavily and sat down in the gutter before the bar. From this posture he hurled weak curses.

The barkeep leaped adroitly across the bar, shoved Blynn aside with, “Here you! Get out o’ this. Tryin’ to start somethin’?” while he jerked his customer to normal human posture.

“Evil” reached for a glass and hurled it at random. The shot slid him down again into the gutter; the glass fell wide with a glorious crash. “Low-brow” seized a bottle, but was too weak to hold it. It slipped to the floor, almost an echo of the other smash. “Simple” came up behind, with only the friendliest intentions, no doubt, and put one beery arm about the professor’s shoulder. Blynn turned swiftly at the heavy touch and embraced him--without love, one may be sure--thereby projecting upon his shirtfront the full contents of that beer-mug, a cavernous vessel holding, at least, a quart. The vile odor was a lasting memory.

The embrace had been a clumsy thing, but the divorce was swift and artistic. As Blynn instinctively shoved “Simple” forward--the cold beer against the chest gave impetus to the push--the barkeep’s grip on “Simple’s” collar sent him spilling backward. On the way he carried “Toothless” with him. “Sloth” never even looked around; he leaned comfortably against the bar and mumbled in his beer.

All these movements Blynn watched with interested eyes, caught every sound as if it were data for a book. One-half of his mind was a spectator, cool, undisturbed, careless of the outcome, concerned only with the spectacle; the other was saying over and over again, “26 Hogan street! 26 Hogan street!” and it was throbbing with rage.

“Here’s my money for one glass of ginger ale,” Blynn confronted the barkeep. “And I want my change--all of it, do you hear! You’ve robbed every drunken sot in the room except that vile cur,” pointing to “Evil” still sprawling in the gutter before the bar. “I’ve seen you steal their money out of their pay-envelopes. Give me my change, you viper!” He slapped a twenty-five cent piece on the sopping counter. “Give me my change, you bloodsucker, you poisoner, you--”

“Git out!” the barkeep yelled as he rushed at him. “Git out!”

He yelled much more. He told Blynn things concerning his past that were biologically impossible and made prophetic assertions about the future. His speeches were wild enough but his actions were genuinely savage. Before Blynn could get into any proper pugilistic position the barkeep had welted him across the side of the head with a huge fist.

The Lady had called him a first-rate book! A book? Not much!

It would be a pleasant thing to say here that Allen Blynn had trained in his youth with a football team or that he had taken recent boxing lessons from Corbett’s sparring partner. The truth is that his physical condition was only that of an abstemious “professor” the spry side of thirty, who jogged daily about the gymnasium track, or pulled a few perfunctory chest-weights, just to give edge to the evening meal. But that unexpected blow on the side of the head maddened him and summoned triple strength.

In one spring he had that barkeep by the throat and had carried him to the floor over the sprawling legs of “Simple.” Seizing him by his flap ears he was fiercely pounding his head against the floor, when he found himself lifted in the air by two bluecoats, turned about and sent forward at a fearful angle, through the swing-doors, into the darkened alley of a street. As he went out someone smashed the side of his head with a bottle, and he always maintained the theory that an officer near the door had assisted accurately with a boot; but his greatest joy as he sprawled on the pavement was the feeling--later discovered to be an illusion--that he still held in his hands the remains of the barkeep’s ears.

On the way to 26 Hogan street he laughed and sang and exulted in strange words. Before his mind he summoned the barkeep and that Satan’s limb, “Evil,” and invited them to “Come on!” Names he called them, mouthfilling, rhythmic cadences; anathema that never had been in his vocabulary before, but which every man who has mingled with other men knows by instinct.

And she had called him a book!

By ’phone and messenger, help was brought to “26 Hogan street.” They broke in the locked door, conveyed the sick woman to the care of good nurses, clean linen and real food. Her little brood they kept with her, and so, in this one instance out of many, lightened the dark hours of the very poor. Blynn confessed with shame that before this experience he had not really known of their existence.

Soon after the groggery episode Professor Blynn was scheduled for a banquet speech at the annual meeting of a local Drama Club. The subject, selected long before, was “Realism in Modern Dramatic Art and the Decadence of True Fantasy.” Certain notes which he had put lovingly together for that evening were not at all consulted as he talked. The musty references to Freytag, Horace, and Boileau did not suit his mood. He could not get out of his mind some of the stirring realities of the life about him; so, casually, and without any deep professional manner, he talked of the material near at hand out of which great dramas might come. He drew on his most recent stores. For stage setting he proferred the blinking steamboats on the dark river, crowded with returning excursionists, and humming with harp and violin; for characters, “Simple,” “Low-brow,” “Evil,” “Toothless,” “Braggart,” “Sloth”; and for theme, The Birth of New Life in the Houses of Failure.

The newspaper boys were bent on putting him back on the first page--he grinned inwardly at the story he really could give them! That is why they condensed the remarks of really important speakers and put Allen Blynn forth almost verbatim.

Out of it all he got one dubious result, a letter.

“You are getting on, my dear Professor,” it began abruptly, without heading or date line. “You are no longer a _book_; you have developed into a _newspaper_. Eventually, you may become wholly human. Press on.”

It was signed, “The Lady of the Interruption,” a title he remembered he had given her when reporters had interviewed him about her on her first startling appearance.

At various times these and other exciting adventures were dictated to the impersonal stenographer-by-the-hour and mailed to the Levering family.

“The anonymity of the Lady distresses me,” he wrote once. “If I could put my whole case before her, I am sure she would give me a higher rating. For already one of my friends of the Public Square benches has found me out and successfully negotiated the loan of a dollar. Let someone try to get an unearned dollar out of any ‘newspaper.’”

And that was not all. His companion of the excursion steamer--the male--had caught him on the campus, where no doubt he had been lying in wait, and had sold him tickets for the annual Expressmen’s Ball.

“Perfes’r--” he began.

“But I am the janitor; am I not?” Blynn smiled.

“Am I not!” he mimicked, “‘Am-I-not’ ain’t never been no janitor.... ‘Am I not!’” he got a deal of amusement out of the phrase. “Knew y’ was a profess’r all the time. Wharf watchman tol’ me. Said you was a smart gab-fester, too. He’s heard you--a Socialist, he is.”

“Lately,” wrote Blynn, “he has been seeking my advice on a number of family matters, leading up to hints for loans. An unkempt, overgrown daughter came to my rooms yesterday with a note. I was stone-cold; but it almost made me ill.

“And now ‘Evil’ has found me out. He objects at the hospital because of my card on a bunch of roses; and threatens to sue me for personal assault; I presume he will complete the charge by adding alienation of his wife’s affections! A book I may have been, raised thence to a daily journal, but, Leverings all, I appeal to you for promotion; assault and alienation are right human qualities.

“Faithfully yours,

“Allen Blynn.

“I am on the trail of the Lady.”

The Leverings agreed that the “Lady of the Interruption” was a delightful mystery--all except Gorgas; but she said little at home. She put the case to Bea Wilcox, and to Bardek.

“What do I think of her?” Bea echoed her inquiry. “I think she’s no lady at all.”

“That’s what I think. I--” Gorgas began eagerly.

“I think she’s a Brass Image,” said Bea.

“It is so!” Bardek agreed solemnly, who knew nothing of the subtile English meanings of “brass.” “And it is before such images that men do often bow in worship. If she is young, as you say, and if she come to the man and fight him, then it is the female hunting the male for herself.”

“What _are_ you driving at, Bardek?” Bea broke in. “Females, as you call them, don’t hunt males. It’s the other way about.” She put her arm around Gorgas and rocked back and forth in a characteristic attitude. “We know--us girls know--don’t we, Browny?”

“Oh, yes!” Bardek had open contempt for Bea’s mind. “You talk like most peoples who do not see anything. Look at all the hats of women! Dead birds and painted flowers and rags and wires! Ugly? Phuh! But zey do not see zat zey are ugly. So! When you will want your man, you will go to him--like all t’others--and you cry out to him that you are here; and he will not come at first; and zen you will wear crazy clothes, and dance and beat a drum until he must see you. And all the time you will not know that you do that. You will not see.... But _how_ you will beat zat drum!”

“Professor Blynn would not listen to her!” Gorgas announced irrelevantly. Her mind was on the Lady of the Interruption; there was defiance in her tone, a note of challenge to the unknown trespasser, none of which was lost on Bardek. He shaded his bushy brows a trifle, and he gazed thoughtfully into her flushed face as if he had suddenly discovered something new and interesting there; but he gave no other sign of what might be his own surmises.

“Do you think so, Bardek?” she persisted.

“No-o,” he hesitated; “not at the first.” A smile began to flutter across his face; then he roared in sudden laughter. “He is so far up--at the top of the Heaven! _How_ she must beat her little drum for to make Saint Acetum to hear!”

“Who is Saint Acetum?” both girls asked.

Bardek sobered abruptly. “You do not know Saint Acetum?” he asked gravely.

No; they did not know. Saints were not in fashion any more. This is not the Middle Ages, Bardek. But they should be ashamed, nevertheless, he told them, and scolded beautifully. Then he explained:

“Saint Acetum it is who is forever repairing ze roof of ze Heaven. Can you not see him up there--far superior in altitude to all the angels of Heaven, and slowly feeling zat he _is_ superior?”

But what had Saint Acetum to do with Mr. Blynn?

“Ho!” cried Bardek. “Mr. Blynn, he is so good! Like Saint Acetum he is worried zat ze roof of ze Heaven may fall down; so it is zat he is always fixing, fixing; and he will not listen even when ze good angels call to come down and be for a little time happy.... And you have not heard of Saint Acetum? _Nom du nom!_ And you are not ashamed of zat?”

“Acetum?” repeated Bea. “What a funny name.”

“‘Acetum,’ it is ‘vinegar,’” Bardek explained. “Zat is Latin, Miss Bea, of which you know nothings, because you have gone to school--”

“Oh, we had Latin in school; didn’t we, Browny?”

“Zat is what I say,” nodded Bardek firmly. “You know nothings. What! You do not know about Saint Acetum, ze Vinegar Saint; you do not know--” Bardek burst suddenly into ironic laughter--“because it is I, Bardek, who have jus’ made him up out of my head!”

“Oh!” laughed Gorgas, somehow relieved at the thought that the Vinegar Saint was merely an invention of Bardek. “Allen Blynn, the Vinegar Saint! That is _too_ funny!”

“So you see,” Bardek was exulting in his cleverness, “_how_ she must beat her little drum, that Lady, to draw down Saint Acetum, who is always repairing ze roof of ze Heaven?”

Gorgas was sobered instantly. “Do you think that woman is trying to marry Mr. Blynn?” she asked anxiously.

“No,” Bardek replied, while he watched her out of half-closed eyes; “I do not say so much. I think she do not know what she do. But she is _vairy_ interested--oh, _vairy_ interested--in the nice young man. She do not like him? Oh, no! But she go, and go; and she talk and she write. In all the great big world there is but one reason for that. The little roots of the weeds, zey shove and push and work and zey do not know why, but one day zey come out where is water; and _zen_ zey know why.”

“It is terrible!” the words escaped Gorgas involuntarily. It gave her an inexpressible sensation of illness to think of _mon capitaine_ at the mercy of so irresistible a force.

“Oh, no!” laughed Bardek; “it is not terrible. No! It is vairy wonderful and _le bon Dieu_, he has made it so!”

_Le bon Dieu!_ Ah, no! It could not be from heaven, or why should the very thought of it torment her?

She went home to nights of acute distress and days of smiling mockery. She listened to all sorts of inquiries about her health, parried the questions with vague fibbings; but she knew the cause of the storm that raged within.

Then came a night of resignation. She surprised herself--and blamed herself, too--at her easy recovery. What powers of adaptability we have! The deepest grief is, somehow, assuaged. If it was to be; it was to be. She found herself, one day, laughing at herself. A fortnight later, she was lost in the preparation for her graduation from The Misses Warren’s Select French and English School for Young Ladies. The sorrows of seventeen are not fatal. Yes; she was quite herself now, marvelling only occasionally at the turbulence that had shaken her.

And therein she deceived herself, as all of us continually do. She was quite her serene self--so she thought. We know so little about ourselves, about what we think, about what we want, even about what we are doing. We talk much--confidently; we declaim, make speeches, deny vehemently, or affirm with hand upraised: but deep within us, like a Hidden River, flows the unconscious life. When it wells to the surface we know it for the first time, cry out in fear, or exult. When it subsides we say, “It is not there!” We are poor witnesses, with all our boastings and modesties, poor witnesses either for or against ourselves.

“I wonder where my roots are going?” Gorgas asked herself. For answer she dropped the consideration of the width of ribbon she would wear on her graduation dress and sat down to write a letter to Allen Blynn. It was a burst of personal confession--the Hidden River was welling very, very near the surface!--and most particularly she told him about the “Brass Image,” and warned him. Then she read it over and destroyed it.

“Oh, I guess I’m not brassy enough,” she said and shook her head.