BOOK THREE

The Call to be Free

It was all very well to say, “Drink Me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do _that_ in a hurry: “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked _poison_ or not.”... She had never forgotten that if you drink much from a bottle marked “poison,” it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.

XVI

RATS!

The Levering spring-house had long ago gone to pieces to furnish part of the masonry of a new workshop, designed by Bardek and built by Mac, with everybody assisting. They picked a spot at the north of the orchard, where the light was right, and distant enough from habitation to allow for the most riotous hammering. A great chimney with both hand- and foot-bellows forge was the center about which the one-story, roomy structure spread.

The Leverings hardly knew what was going on. They had this satisfaction, however: Gorgas was on her own grounds, Mac was always within hail and Bardek, his wife, and the two shining-eyed youngsters had so won the affection of everyone that they were added as theoretic protectors. When young men called, they sauntered around to the cozy shop, looked on, smoked at their ease and drank continuous tea and ate toasted muffins. Kate often spent mornings there, pottering over punched brass, and thinking, to the pantomimic disgust of Bardek, that she was a workman, too. But no one seemed quite aware that a serious art was being studied in that busy quarter.

Mrs. Levering began to get inklings of the deep nature of the undertaking when a big order for a complete hand-wrought silver service was finished, dispatched, and the check forwarded. Bardek had been the business manager in securing that and other orders which followed, and he had overseen the designing and had plotted out the work; but the labor and the return were placed entirely to Gorgas’ account.

“My dear child,” the mother’s eyes focused agreeably upon the amount. “This is dreadful! You’re actually making money! Are you sure you are not taking advantage of someone? How could a little girl like you earn so much?”

But she soon accustomed herself to that sort of thing, and promptly let Gorgas take out a separate bank account, and thriftily watched the amount swell. It was quite proper, she assured herself, for a girl to make money, provided she stayed at home, and provided, too, it was something respectable, like--uh--art. Of course, this metal business was art; at least, the silver part was--she was somewhat dubious over the copper, really, the most artistic accomplishment of the shop; and the settings of copper and semi-precious stones, the hand-wrought gold rings--that was art and respectable. She wished, of course, that there were no necessity for the ugly forge and for the heavy malleting; but then, that was all done in the secluded shop away from the street. To think that all this silly pottering had turned out to be worth something! What a wonderful adviser was Allen Blynn! When she thought of the pleasant checks, she was grateful that she had been too busy at the time to oppose the building of the shop.

But in spite of the obvious fact that Gorgas was able to earn her own way, the mother continued to keep a controlling hand, as if the child were still a toddler needing protection, and not an independent young woman of seventeen: her letters had still to be O. K.’d, the hours of retiring were not to be changed, and the other claims of womanhood, the style of gown and hat and the mode of wearing the hair--these were still matters of maternal jurisdiction. And being the younger daughter she had more mothering--as is often the case--than Kate, who had long ago secured her rights to do as she pleased.

There were suggestions of rebellion and occasional flurries of attack and retreat. At seventeen, Gorgas had gained her right to give all her mornings to the “smitty,” as the shop was locally dubbed; she had won out in her right to play tennis and hockey, to bicycle and--an ability discovered by Bardek--to fence.

“Why can’t you just ride or drive and take walks?” the mother had complained. “These other games are so boyish and ‘tough,’ my dear. They give you a color like a hoyden--positively I was ashamed of you last Wednesday at dinner--and you have a stride like a young rowdy. Of course, I can’t tell you it’s not ladylike. I see that has no effect upon you; but you might consider how I feel when you walk through the streets in that tennis costume--I suppose one might call it a costume. In a boy it is all right; young Morris is quite attractive; but you, you look positively unsexed, Gorgas--I’m almost ashamed to use the word. And really, my dear, I must object to your putting off stays. You will never come around if you don’t begin early. Your figure is--well, is there no proper womanly argument that can reach you?”

“Health, first, mother,” Gorgas would say firmly. “I work hard all morning, I practice at music, to please you, and I must keep up my reading. Then, open air for me and a stiff fight and a shower. That makes me sing; makes me fit to do things. I wouldn’t have an original design in my head if I cooped up like most women. They are talking about voting! I’m with them there, but good Heavens! they could be enfranchised tomorrow if they could only break loose and live a decent, wholesome life.”

The severest quarrel was over clothes. Gorgas’ artistic sense was a deep-rooted thing. She protested, but without result, against the slave-like selection of “what everybody was wearing.” Women seemed to be uniformed like a squad of infantry, irrespective of individual build or personal taste. That repelled her. Not that she wanted to do anything eccentric; it was just her desire to be inconspicuous that led to a wish to study herself and, within the restrictions of the prevailing vogue, to clothe herself true to her own personal note.

Blynn had walked with her on one of his rare holidays home--lecturing usually kept him busy in vacation time--when she was driven out of herself and into stolidity by the mere fact of an outrageous puffed-sleeve affair, over which her mother had spent hours of selecting. To Gorgas, it was like wearing some other person’s clothing. She had gawked about, submerged in self-consciousness; and her chagrin she expressed in vindictive attacks on the unoffending Allen.

Gorgas resolved to end it then and there. One afternoon in February, 1893--Gorgas was seventeen and a half, but felt tremendously older--she interviewed the chief cutter of a smart Walnut street tailoring establishment and outlined to him her plans for a series of frocks and coats that made his eyes glisten. She produced a check for part-payment, and made it peremptorily clear that her own ideas were to prevail or no sale.

“Mother, I’ve ordered some spring clothes,” she let the news out bluntly. “I won’t stand being dressed and undressed and being put to bed any longer. You’d better get used to the idea, for it’s to be the thing. I’m paying my way now and I’ve got to go it on my own.”

And then she left immediately for the “smitty.”

Those were stormy days in the Levering family, but the disturbance was all from the elders. Gorgas was serene and calm. They were sure Gorgas would adopt some reckless fashion that would put them down before everybody, probably a bifurcated skirt or an out-and-out Dr. Mary Walker attire. There was much talk in the air at that period of boldly abolishing the dress distinction of sex. But when Gorgas appeared before them one afternoon in a neat, inconspicuous, tailor-made gown, right as to style, but with a mysterious wonder in it of something just beyond the style, the family capitulated. Capitulated? They broke ranks and rushed over one another to cheer the enemy.

Mount Airy, after all, had always been a country village. Its main charm, in spite of its nearness to a large city, was not its suburbanity, but its rurality. And it was well-known that the most careful copying by Mount Airyites of the designs in Godey’s “Lady Book,” would always be crude and home-made when compared with exactly the same pattern worn by the city ladies who could be seen any day moving in and out of certain exclusive in-town shops. The distinguishing difference is not so much one of material as of art.

In that apparel Gorgas could have argued the family out of its house and grounds. Oh, the subtle overpowering authority of the right gown! It will give strength to weakness, add courage to the natural craven, and overawe even Lizzie-in-the-kitchen. If I were a physician I would make most of my prescriptions on the blanks of proper tailors. Most women are not ill, they are simply inadequately gowned; their strength is oozing away through the terrible struggle to feel better than they look. And it is not primarily a question of money; it is a matter of taste and intelligence.

The young men responded instantly to the new touch. They didn’t know how it had happened, but the news passed quickly along that Gorgas Levering was “all right.” Callers, formal and informal, of all ages from sixteen to thirty-five, dropped in or begged permission, according to the type. The “smitty,” on Thursday afternoons, became a sort of rendezvous for all this fluttering group. Work and play were declared off, and the reception of guests was in order. Mrs. Levering occasionally dropped in, in her capacity as overseer, but Kate was always present, the mother’s viceroy; and Bea Wilcox and a few of Gorgas’ intimates; and, of course, Bardek.

Here they sang, chatted and danced as the mood seized. And on clear, summer afternoons there was always the tennis-court and the shadowy orchard; in winter there was hockey and skating on the Wissahickon at Valley Green, or, more often, roastings and toastings before the huge log fire in the “smitty.”

Gorgas’ permanent exhibition of unsold work brought other visitors. These came at all times. Usually, it was Bardek’s business to do the explaining and the selling, a duty he loved, and some of the customers became regular visitors and eventually slipped over into the Thursday afternoon group. Not that the Thursday afternoon group could be kept away at other times. Gorgas rather welcomed the opportunity to chat while she worked, but she always worked--except once.

One Thursday in April Morris took Gorgas aside and asked if he couldn’t come the next day in the morning and have a private talk with her.

She looked him over suspiciously.

“We’ve been partners for a long while, Neddie,” she summed up her look. “This sounds mighty strange and mysterious. Give me a hint beforehand. What’s up?”

“Can’t do it here,” he scowled at the crowd. “I’ll be in at about eleven. What d’y’ say?”

“How absurd you are,” she held him off to search his face. “You know anyone may see me at any time.”

“I know,” he hastened to explain awkwardly in the midst of the chatter and movement. “This is different. This is something--I can’t tell you here.”

“Well,” she patted him on the arm, “come along, sonny. You’ll have to talk loud. I’ve got a special fine lot of hammering to do that won’t wait.”

That night she tossed about and brought herself to book.

Morris had been behaving lately in a way they do before they begin to go to pieces and become temporary asses in the presence of their Titania. He had lost his fine spirit of _camaraderie_. He had been glaring at his fraternity pin, which Gorgas used, like a dozen other such articles, to adorn the dress it best suited. He had been moody and listless--the usual symptoms; and he had been hanging about like a stupid.

Try as she might she couldn’t get a thrill out of the thought. Ned Morris was a brother; that was all; a splendid chum, the sort at fellow you get terribly used to and wouldn’t give up without a fight. But anything else-- Horrors! It was profanation of friendship to think it.

Nevertheless, she enjoyed the prospect of an adorer. It gave her the most unaccountable feeling of elation and self-pity and yearning and depression--all enjoyable sensations, every one. It attacked her so hard that she arose at sun-up, ate no breakfast, and let the metal work slide.

“You do not work today?” Bardek looked up from his bench, where he was inlaying a hair-like design of silver in the softest copper.

“Nope.”

“You are sick, may be?”

“Goodness, no!”

Hammer, hammer, hammer.

“Goin’ to jus’--loaf, eh?”

“Rather.”

Hammer, hammer.

“Ah! you fight the French revolution all over again with the mother?” he guessed. “_Bome! bome!_ Down will go t’e Bastile. Huzza! Out come the prisoners--little ladies who t’eir mutters have boxed up! _Vive la révolution des jeunes filles!_”

Hammer, hammer, hammer.

“What?” he looked up.

“Wrong tack, Bardek. Take in a reef.”

“Eh? What?”

“And let down your jib.”

“_Nom du nom!_ What language you talk?” Tap, tap, tap. “Somebody come, eh?”

“Yes; Morris.”

“Ho-ho-o-o!” softly, as much as to say, “So that’s the way the wind blows.” “Ho-ho-o-o!” louder, meaning, “I’ve been suspecting that boy.” “Ho-ho-o-o!” very wisely, with a glance that said, “I understand what’s in your little head, missy!”

“Oh, rats! Bardek.”

She arose and tried a few strokes, but soon gave it up.

“Perhaps Morris he would take share in partnership?” Bardek inquired with grotesque sympathy.

“Rats!” she called back.

“R-rats!” Bardek laughed as he tapped. “Rats--it is the meaning of what? When I say, ‘How beautiful is Miss Gorgas, this morning,’ Miss Gorgas say, ‘Rats!’--that is to say, ‘Thank you so much for compliment.’ When I say, ‘She work too hard, she must play more,’ Miss Gorgas say, ‘Rats!’--that is to say, ‘Do you think I small child, eh?’ If I say, ‘When you going marry, Miss Gorgas?’ Miss Gorgas say, ‘Rats!’--which is to say, ‘Shut up, you ol’ fool, and mind own business.’ It is vairy convenient; one nice, little word do for everything. It mean, ‘I don’t believe you’; it mean, ‘Go bag your head’; it mean, ‘Not on your tin-type.’ Jus’ now it mean, ‘Mr. Morris will talk to Miss Gorgas on vairy important matter. Ol’ Bardek better take holiday and fix more w’ite-wash in his house.’”

“Rats! Bardek,” she stopped him. “Stay where you are. I don’t want to seem to be clearing everybody out for Ned Morris. If we want to talk privately, we’ll go into the orchard. It’s warm enough outside.”

Bardek grinned so openly that she was forced into some sort of explanation. She talked earnestly and Bardek affected to be perfectly guileless.

“Morris is just a good friend, Bardek; not a thing more. Not a thing more.”

“Rats!” roared Bardek, suddenly slipping from earnest solicitude into loud irony. “Oh, I love that nice, easy, little word. It saves so much breath. I say, ‘Rats!’ and I mean, oh, a whole lot. With one word I say, ‘Don’t you be telling me all that foolishness about friend business and all that. The friend business is all played out. It had one grand failure, long ago, when Adam thought he try. Mr. Morris, he just like Adam. He hang ’round ’while and watch animals and sleep in the sun. Then, one day he wake up and he say he want nice, long talk, all alone; and Eve, she dress up in nice clothes, she can’t work, can’t hammer, can’t sit down, can’t walk, can’t do one thing but look and look and look at not’ing at all, and say, ‘Rats!’ All that for one little word!”

“Double fault, Bardek; you’re putting too many in the net.”

That was one way thoroughly to mystify the earnest student of English. Bardek studied hard, but never succeeded in getting the hang of American sporting terms. “Get a good lead! Go down with his arm! Two out; play for the batter! 68-22, through left-guard!” These phrases seemed to have meaning to Americans, but not one spark of intelligence was in them for the many-languaged Bohemian.

“I put too many into the net?” he repeated. “T’e English cannot be one of my native speeches, but when I see all these nice--” he drawled it into something like “nah-ees”--“young boys flying so like butterfly ’round Miss Gorgas I zink she do not put _one_ into the net!”

Gorgas was busy sorting out some long branches of fresh willow for a corner decoration. She looked over sideways at Bardek, who tapped away with the air of a man who has made a hit. But she silenced him.

“Play in, boys; he’s going to bunt,” she remarked and watched with satisfaction the grin fade from Bardek’s face and in its place appear the rapt expression of a puzzled linguist.

“What is this--‘bunt’?” he asked at last, his mind completely off guard.

“It is an unexpected bingle, Bardek, that puts the infield in the soup,” she explained serenely as she left the “smitty” for more willow branches.

XVII

AN UNEXPECTED BINGLE

For awhile Bardek tapped away and struggled with the slang of the ’90’s. “‘Bingle,’” he murmured and shook his head. “‘Bunt,’ ‘Soup,’ I have lost the art of taking in languages. I grow old. My cerebellum turns to that same ‘soup.’”

Bardek sighed, a genuine old-fashioned sigh, full of undefined longing. Uncomfortable feelings swept over him, whose source he knew not.

“_Nom de la manne céleste!_” he ejaculated, putting down his hammer. Wide-eyed, he gazed out of the window toward the fast budding maples. It was a French day, _sans doute_. “Spring!” he exulted aloud in the appropriate language. “How it is ever beautiful, the spring. In France, best of all, but even here in Mount Airy it is good, the spring. In my old trunk the sap goes up, up, and spins my thoughts about. I am full of ideas in the spring, little shoots of thinking and buds and leaves of grand notions. How I can do things in the spring!” But he stood listlessly gazing. “Do? Bah! I can do nothing but dream of what I can never do; ... but it is good.”

Slowly his mind drifted to Gorgas and then back to the starting point of their conversation. His face lighted up, beamed with sympathy.

“So, that is what it is!” he chuckled. “He is a good fellow, Neddie. Nice, clean American fellow. But he is only boy wit’ face like girl. How young is all America! When I was twenty I was man. I had been in army. I had learned my work in life. I had seen the world. Now I am forty and old man. All the little American children of thirty, forty, fifty,--Professor Blynn, Miss Kate, Mrs. Levering, they all come to ask me what to do; me, Bardek! I have the wisdom of old gentleman about to sit down and die. Phoo-ee!” He puffed out a big breath and looked joyfully out of the window. “And I am ten t’ousand years younger than all of them put together.”

The flooding thoughts of spring were too much for Bardek. He doffed his apron, put his tools carefully in their racks and made ready to get out into the open. He hummed like a prowling bumble-bee as he tossed things about.

“Hello, Bardek. Where’s Gorgas?” Morris spoke from the doorway.

“Ah!” Bardek turned jubilantly, came forward in great strides and shook the young man warmly by both hands. “She is here! She is here!” he exulted, looking the astonished Morris over joyfully. “Jus’ you sit yourself. The big easy chair? No!” He dragged forward a cushioned settle. “_V’là!_ It is the best for little _tête-à-tête_. Oh, you lucky young man! To have Miss Gorgas to talk to all alone. See! I will jus’ pull down this window thing, as-- Where is she, that Eve who cannot work this morning--” He looked anxiously out of the door toward the orchard.

“Can’t work?” Morris inquired. “What’s the trouble, Bardek? Ill?”

“Ill?” Bardek exploded. “Oh, yes. She is--ho!--yes, it is a disease, vairy, vairy dangerous. It is good to get it early, like the chicken-poxes and measles. Hey!” looking at him curiously. “You, Neddie; don’t you ever feel like kicking out all the little life-businesses and rushing out into woods away from every one, to weep and laugh and sleep and swear and pray? Look inside. Close your eyes and look inside. Have you not got terrible voice in t’ere what say: _Prenez la clef des champs! Faites l’école buissonnière!_ Take the key of the fields and play truant in the woods!... Day like dese! How can men stay in chicken-houses!”

He slipped out of a workman’s blouse and ruffled his hair excitedly.

“That’s spring fever, Bardek,” Morris explained. “Guess I’ve got a touch of it, too.” He yawned and began to make a cigarette. Then he turned the logs over in the grate.

“Miss Gorgas,” Bardek motioned eloquently toward the orchard, “is jus’ out in the trees, watching young leaves come.”

Bardek struck an expectant attitude.

Morris drew the settle up to the fire and picked up a book.

“The spring fever have made you dumb, perhaps? I say she is jus’ out! Two, t’ree steps,” he looked out of the window, “at the big cherry she is now ... eh?”

“Thanks, Bardek,” Morris yawned and stretched his legs. “I’ll just smoke and read a little.... She’ll be back presently, I suppose.”

The Bohemian stared. Then he seized a huge hammer and smote mightily, like Tubalcain himself.

“Holy mackerel, Bardek!” Morris turned, laughing. “This is only a stone hut, you know.... What y’ making, a battleship?”

“You have not put many in t’e net lately, eh?” Bardek stopped to inquire irrelevantly. He was experimenting with the new phrases.

“Oh, my full share, I fancy. What makes you ask?”

Bardek was bitterly indignant, but the emotion was lost on Morris’ back.

“I though’ you came here dis morning to, ah, bunt. What?”

“Bunt?”

“Yess.... Bingle.”

“Bingle?”

“Yess, bingle.”

“It’s lost on me, old man. I came here to talk to Gorgas.”

He resumed his reading, smoked at leisure and turned over pages carelessly. Bardek smote one vicious blow and exclaimed:

“Then you don’t want to--ah--get in the soup wit’ Miss Gorgas, eh?”

“What?”

Morris swung completely around.

“You have spring fever? _You?_ Yah!” Bardek ejaculated his disgust in unspellable exclamations. “_Ah, non! non! non! non! non!_ You are lazy? Yess. You like comfortable seat at small fire? Yess. But you still froze up like dead tree. The sap, it not yet run up. I tell you, ‘Miss Gorgas is in orchard.’ You say, ‘Oh, vairy well,’ and fix nice cushions to sit. I say, ‘She is one, two, t’ree step away.’ You roll cigarette and read book. _Nom d’une pipe!_ How you sit and smoke when live woman wait for you, eh? One, two, t’ree step at the big cherry, eh? Name of a pipe! Your blood, it is water! Me, I go out!” He seized his hat. “I, I am yet young, alive, and sprout green things. I ’fraid I stay and catch your fever. Spring fever? _Peste! Nom du nom!_ It is a disease of the winter, you have, my friend.”

In a trice Bardek was plunging down the lane, which led to Montgomery county. “_Ah! que je suis un petit oiseau_,” he was singing gloriously.

* * * * *

Gorgas sat in the sun on a bench under the bursting cherry tree, her hands clasping her knees and her eyes wide awake and staring. Somehow, that morning, her mind would not advance to conclusions; it remained dead-locked between the thought of Morris and all that he would probably say, and the answer that she knew she must make. But she would not let herself decide; she liked to play with the idea, to toss it about among the possibilities, view it from strange angles. Marriage was probably just this sort of thing--a little talk with a man, an agreement, dresses, the march up the aisle, and years together. Anything else was just romance, the stuff one makes fiction out of. Fiction! How well named!

But it was not the way she dreamed the event would happen. Her notion of felicity was much more strenuous and fearsome. At any time she wanted she could walk into the “smitty,” say “Hello, Neddie,” and end the whole business. There was nothing daring about that. But shouldn’t there be something to be afraid of?

Her man should surprise her--she thought out her best theory; she had several, depending on the mood!--come upon her at, say, twilight. She would like to see his staring, laughing face peer suddenly over her shoulder, and in a moment find herself in his mad grip. She should become weak with positive fright, and be a little afraid of him all her life. “I should probably scratch and bite,” she thought, “but he must laugh, and perhaps pinch my ear, till I yelped and let go.”

There was nothing frightening about Neddie Morris. Well; one had better go in and have it over. She would offer him tea.... If he drank it she would hate him. Pshaw! Life is just tea drinking, after all. It spoils one to dream of the impossible.... Oh, this spring weather! Ha-ho-hum!... Let him wait.... This thing has to be thought out. Let’s see; where were we?... But her mind hung motionless.

From her bench she could see Morris lighting a cigarette; but she remained and basked in her own dreams. Some things are better the longer they are postponed. Those cherry buds were just straining to get out. Look at that wise, silly robin tugging away at a tuft of string tangled on a stick! Everything was unfolding and getting ready for new life--even Gorgas.

Thundering mallet blows came from the “smitty.” It did not sound like Bardek. Certainly if he threw that sort of reckless force upon the frail lace-like silver upon which he should be working, there would be something annihilated. Perhaps Morris was growing impatient. Well--she hugged her knees--he would have to wait. She couldn’t go in to him until she had made up her mind about him.

Why should one ever decide? The joy of living is expecting. Who ever wants anything he gets? Possession is the beginning of dissatisfaction. Even if exactly the right man ... exactly the right man! ... should be waiting in the “smitty” it would be better to let him wait. The right man! Her eyes closed as she pictured that man, sitting expectant in the “smitty,” never dreaming she was so near; oh, the shivering ecstasy of holding him there forever with all his story yet to tell. Into her memory came lines from “The Grecian Urn,” which she and Allen Blynn had learned together; with eyes still closed she spoke them reverently aloud:

“... happy love! Forever warm, and still to be enjoyed, Forever panting and forever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”

“Hello, Gorgas,” Morris blundered upon her. “What are you mumbling? Poetry? Sounded like something with jiggles in it. Are you warm enough out here? I’ve got the shivers. C-come on b-back in the ‘smitty.’ We can t-talk better there. C-come on.”

“Wait. Please!” she begged. “Let’s don’t go back just yet. The--uh--everything’s so wonderful and springy out here. Don’t let’s talk just yet. Just listen to the sparrows.”

“Ug-g-g!” he shivered. “W-w-onderful l-l-ittl-le p-p-pests. How do you s-s-tand it? Without your c-coat, too. I’m g-going in.”

He danced a clog and flapped his arms, while he sang:

“In Ireland I was a blithering lad, Yit I niver had said I had more than I had, But when I set sail for America, Gad! My tongue, it started to wag! When I got on the brig I lost my brogue, And then I began to brag.”

“_Don’t do that!_” she snapped suddenly. He stopped. “You look ridiculous.” Then penitently, “I was thinking lovely thoughts, and you jarred the picture.... Let’s go in.”

The settle, arranged beautifully before the fire, made her thoughtful. He started for it and beckoned her to follow, but she let him take the huge seat alone.

“That fire is too warm for me this morning,” she excused herself for sitting on a near-by hassock, where she could hug her knees and look up at him. In that position, while he talked and smoked innumerable cigarettes, she watched him dreamily.

There were few finer fellows than Ned Morris, she told herself. He was not only good to look at but he was a good “pard” and an unequaled sportsman. He had a reputation, too, a name--of course, that was not a thing to consider, yet a woman likes her man to be known for right qualities. It would be a comfort to have folks say, “Oh, Ned Morris, the tennis Morris?” Rather vain, that; but there are a hundred kinds of vanity, and some are virtues.

“What I wanted to see you about, Gorgas,” he began finally, looking suddenly at the grandfather clock in the corner--

“Not just yet, Ned,” Gorgas protested quietly. “Tell me about the Boys’ Club dinner first. I understand it went off like a Bellevue spread.”

Goodness! It was almost out, and then it would be all over, a pretty little dream spoiled by waking. Why are men so straightforward and possessing? Of course, she liked them best when they came selfishly demanding things. Meek ones--well, they might inherit the earth, but they could not share her goods and chattels.... Perhaps they would have to give up being friends.... No ... that would never do.... She began to see ... decision was slowly coming ... rather than break with him altogether she would just take him over, have one everlasting final row with the mater and decamp for--

“But I must get down to business, Gorgas,” he suddenly changed the topic. “What I’m going to say to you is darned hard to get out, so I’m just going to plump it at you like--”

She leaned forward and laid two nervous hands upon his nearest arm.

“Couldn’t you--couldn’t you just not say anything, Ned?... Couldn’t you wait until--tomorrow or next month?”

He stopped a smoke-ring in the act of being launched and looked at her searchingly. She was staring up at him with distress in her brown eyes.

“Why, what’s the matter, old girl?” he inquired solicitously. “I don’t believe you’re feeling fit, today. If you say so, I’ll cut out.” He arose, but she still sat watching him. “Awfully sorry if I’ve blundered around here when--I might have noticed you were not working today. Of course, I wanted to talk this thing out with you. It’s got to be done--and mighty soon, I can tell you. But, if you think the other way, why, I’ll just drop it for awhile.... But gee! I did so hope I could get this thing settled....”

“I think I know what you are going to say, Ned,” she arose, too. “And I’m going to let you say it. I couldn’t make up my mind until this minute. You are right; it must be settled now. It wouldn’t be fair to you to wait another day.... Go on.”

“Don’t see how you knew,” he wondered, “unless Bea told you.”

“Bea? Bea Wilcox?”

“Yes,” he went on hurriedly. “It’s the fraternity pin. I’ve got to let the cat out of the bag, I suppose. It’s a dead secret yet. Bea and I have about agreed to--uh--make it up. Uh--you know what I mean. Been keeping it rather dark, of course. She hasn’t quite come over yet.... She doesn’t seem to understand about the ‘frat’ pin.... Thinks it means a lot of nonsense. I offered her another, but she won’t take it. Says a girl who wears a man’s ‘frat’ pin is as good as engaged to him, and all that sort of stuff. What I want to know is--oh, this is a rotten thing to have to say--what I thought was that you wouldn’t mind giving it back and sort o’ explain things to Bea. She got real nasty over it, flared up and--what’s the matter? By George! You _are_ ill; aren’t you? Shan’t I send for somebody or something?”

Gorgas was on the settle, her face buried in her hands, and laughing hysterically. Gasps and volleys of laughter followed in quick succession.

“Oh, Neddie!” she cried, “you’ve played a cracker-jack joke on me. Oh! oh!” she breathed hard in the endeavor to recover. “You’ve given me--a--pain on the inside.... I thought--good heavens, will I ever get over this!” She sat up with an effort and dried her laughing eyes. “I thought all the time it was me you wanted! You looked so silly ... and ... mooney ... and I was ready to give you the mitten.... I think I was. You got me so flabbergasted and sentimental, I don’t know what I’d have done. It made me so sorry for you I was almost ready to cry ... and now....” she went off again. “I’ll get a bad cold from this,” she sniffed at a ball of handkerchief. “Oh, boy, I haven’t been so upset and turned about for a dog’s age.... And how in the name of scandal have you kept this affair so dark? I see Bea every other day and she hasn’t blinked an eyelash. The she-fox! I’ll have her scalp for this.”

Morris did not join in the merriment. He grinned occasionally, but it was a forced grimace. He was looking at Gorgas and making contrasts. Gorgas had always seemed just a good chum, but suddenly she seemed to have put on sex. To add to the humor, he tried clumsily to make excuses for not thinking of her in a more complimentary way. Bea _was_ rather stormy and unreasonable. And Gorgas was growing more stunning every day. Doubts began to assail him.

“Don’t look at me that way, Ned,” she expostulated, still shaken by flurries of merriment. “That’s what fooled me lately. That moonstruck gaze! Oh! You should save them for Bea. No! On second thought you had better shoot them all at me.... Bea _might_ change her mind.... Now! I feel better.”

She was touching her eyes quietly, and Morris was standing above her looking down thoughtfully, when Bardek poked a cautious head in the door. Seeing all quiet, he attempted to steal across the room to the corner where he kept a bludgeon of a stick, which he loved to carry with him on his walks.

Gorgas caught him in the act of skipping through the door.

“Come back here, you truant,” she called.

He looked in, smiling knowingly.

“All settled up?” he inquired mildly.

“Yes,” Gorgas smiled back. “Everything O. K.”

“O. K.,” he hummed. “So he bunt? Eh?”

Nobody answered.

“When you take you’ w’ite-wash house, eh?”

“But he didn’t bunt, Bardek,” she laughed mischievously.

“Not bunt? Then why everyt’ing--O. K.?” he demanded.

“No, Bardek,” she explained. “You see, it was this way. I played in for a bunt--”

“You played in for a bunt? You! I see that--”

“But instead of bunting, he biffed one on the nose--”

“Biffed? On the nose? _Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?_”

“Yes, on the nose for a homer.”

Bardek’s face was blank.

“In other words, Bardek--”

“I _hope_ you have the other words,” he said helplessly.

“We can’t agree on that white-wash business, Neddie and I. So, it’s all off. Game postponed on account of previous engagement.”

“Phoo-ee! but how glad I am! Pos’pone!” Bardek stamped his stick on the floor. “How glad I am! First I thought I was happy, and then I found out when I walk through the woods that it was not happiness. I say, ‘It is not happiness, then what is it? Something like happiness; it make me laugh and jump and cry and feel hot and cold and glad and sick.’ Then I find out. It comes to me. It is not happiness I feel. It is misery. You--nice, clean you--to go off and give up to small boy like little Neddie here who don’t know nothing. I come back; I think, maybe if I see him first I can make him understand that he mus’ wait till he grow up and have mind. He smoke cigarette, vairy good. He sit down, nah-eese; he read book, oh, not bad--but he not real man wit’ arteries and muscles and hot forge-fires down inside. He jus’ littl’ puppy that play wit’ tail.... But I come back and all is lovely.... Now!” he seized his smudgy blouse, “I can work!”

He snatched his hammer and bent to his delicate task. Meanwhile, Gorgas was entering into the plot to satisfy the tyrannic Bea.

But Morris took a new tack. He wasn’t sure now that he wanted the old pin back. Girls shouldn’t be so domineering. They needed lessons, sometimes.

“You’ve upset me, Gorgas,” confessed Morris. “I’m just finding out what a lot I think of you.... Bea and I--well, we’re not so sure, either of us. I--perhaps--”

“Say!” called Bardek. “What you mean by zat ‘home-run’; eh?”

“Just you watch Ned Morris,” she replied, looking at Ned with the compelling face of a determined mother. “If he doesn’t make one without so much as another word I’ll call strikes on him.... One! Two--”

“I’m off,” laughed Ned, but he swung his hand and wafted a suspicious-looking salute at her.

* * * * *

“Now for work,” said Gorgas firmly, donning her apron.

But instead, she looked out of the window at the robins frantically building their nests. One set was at work just above in the eaves. Most interesting chaps; so energetic and serious. The silence in the shop caught her attention. She turned around. Bardek, too, was leaning over his bench and staring at the greening world outside.

He turned swiftly and met her gaze. One deprecatory glance he tossed toward the idle work-bench and then a meaningful sweep toward all of outdoors. They both stood silent, stirred by the invitation of the morning; and they laughed like guilty children about to slip away from school.

Suddenly he spread out his hands and broke into vehement Italian.

“The mother is calling all her little children,” he protested. “Wise old Demeter is leaning over the edge of the black pit of Hell-mouth, talking love talk to her daughter Proserpina, who comes forth with garlands and sprigs of little blossoming things and all the breezes of spring. Come, _Proserpina mia_! Let us do a bacchanal in the white sunlight, push through branch and briar, and loaf on the bare earth and sing the song of the hour!... Come!”

“Come?” she echoed. “Let someone try to stop me. Wait! Just wait till I change this clumsy skirt.” Into a capacious closet she shut herself and in half a minute sprang forth. “_Comme ça!_” she fell into the familiar French. “We’re off! I feel so healthy and strong that I could run a dozen miles without taking a long breath.”

“And I,” cried Bardek, back into French. “I? With one little jump--so!--I could hop over the stars! Come!”

He tucked her arm in his and marched out, singing of _Le Roi D’ Yvetot_, that jolly old king who lived in a mud hut, went to bed early, and got up late, who didn’t care a fippence for fame or reputation; his crown was a cotton cap and his sole bodyguard a lazy hound.

Through the orchard they trudged, both joining in the laughing chorus,

Oh! oh! oh! oh! ah! ah! ah! ah! Quel bon petit roi c’était là là! là! Oh! oh! oh! oh ah! ah! ah! ah! Quel bon petit roi c’était là là! là!

XVIII

A PARABLE OF IGNORANCE

That night Gorgas wrote a long letter to Allen Blynn. It was so unlike the usual stilted newsletters that it made him wonder. The transition between childlike scraps of information and a flowing, spirited communication, was absolutely abrupt, as if she had been holding herself back all this while--as in reality she had done--assuming a naïveté not natural. This letter was a splendid personal outpouring; it did not contain a single reference to the doings of social Mount Airyites.

The theme was, Woman and her desire to be a free, untrammeled spirit, to express herself in work and play, to let develop whatever was within, not caring what happens. She wished she had the courage to give herself free rein, she told him, to be able not to care about the opinions of others, a crushing force, and so find out what were her possibilities. All personal development, all development of peoples, is a revolt and a demand for the right to grow. It is they who “give in” who eventually give up and become stamped with the mark of a caste. One must have room to expand, even if one smashes the receptacle which holds things together. In such broad generalization she summed up her view.

Her own character, she knew, had been made by her little rebellions. Bardek had taught her the meaning of freedom; but she lacked his courage to be really herself. “You don’t know what you have in there,” he would often say, tapping his heart and his head. “Only God knows, who gave you great forces to use.” She was seventeen and thoroughly matured, she admitted, yet custom hardly sanctioned even her apparel. What she had achieved in that department was won by fighting; and it was a fact, she bore witness in every daily movement, that until she had boldly adopted the costume of womanhood she had not been able to think the thoughts of woman. So small a thing as inches on a skirt influenced mightily one’s very thinking. How strange was that; but how much more powerful were other restrictions. Until one accepted freedom and moved forward, there was a stoppage of mental growth.

Many things she would like to do but dared not. At this moment, if she had the courage, she told him, she would slip into a travelling-gown, pack a bag, and take a sleeper for Holden. In the morning she would go straight to her _capitaine_, Allen Blynn, have breakfast with him and spend the day talking anything that chose to come into their heads, and read poetry, and let the world slip. The spring air had done this thing to her--she knew that; but why should one resist the call of spring. Cherry blossoms did not resist. Neither did the veriest worms. All night long Birchall’s dog had barked his delight. Why shouldn’t he? He didn’t consider, “Gorgas Levering is trying to sleep; I should not do this natural thing; I will resist the overpowering temptation to yowl.” If he did he would cease to be a dog. Next spring it would be easier for him to shut up; and in a few years he would move into a porch-house and be writing essays on the immorality of any barking whatever. By that time he would be wearing piccadilly collars and eye-glasses.

Some day she would break loose and express herself. She had done so in a number of small things. Phew! How the good mater would carry on if she knew!

For illustration, Gorgas gave a sketchy account of her holiday with Bardek. They had tramped across country to Chestnut Hill, and up the Whitemarsh Valley, where in a thick of young willows by the upper reaches of the Wissahickon they had struck camp. They built a fire and had luscious broiled chicken empaled on sticks--Bardek had negotiated for the chickens at a near-by farm house. For hours they lolled on the ground, Bardek’s thick coat serving as a protection from the damp earth, stirred the fire, and talked themselves out. They should have started for home, of course, but it was Gorgas who declined to go back, and Bardek had consoled himself with the sight of an occasional puffing train off beyond the trees; when they willed they could whisk back to Mount Airy in a half-hour or less.

Then, as the warm sun was slanting warningly toward the west, Gorgas, prowling among the willows, came upon an amateur spring-board disclosing a swimming-hole, shut in from all the world. The day was exceptionally warm, but when she shouted with delight and invited him to dare her to dive in, Bardek was wise enough to know the dangerous deception in the day and season, and ordered her most thunderously to do no such thing. And therein Bardek was not wise at all. She would not be ordered about by anyone, she had retorted angrily; she would do as she pleased; and when he strode forward, talking the while as if he were disciplining one of his youngsters, she plunged in. And just to show that she was master of herself, she had swum about deliberately in the tingling water until he changed his tone and pleaded with her to come out.

That, of course, put trains out of the question. The miles to Mount Airy must be walked, and at a good pace, too. The stimulating chill of that water she recorded as one of the most satisfying shocks of her young experience; and the swift tramp homeward on an exquisitely warm April night was altogether good.

Bardek, mindful of added trouble to Gorgas if the Leverings should glimpse him, discreetly dropped out at his white-washed cottage; so to Gorgas it was left to face the family alone. It was close to midnight. The Levering household was awake and watching, one might be sure, and full of silly speculation.

There was a row, of course; but not a word of explanation from Gorgas. She answered questions with tantalizing vagueness, foraged for food and ate hungrily, but only stared like Ophelia at their admonitory speeches.

Presently they noticed her closer resemblance to Ophelia, the damp hair, and presented the theory that she had fallen into the water. The thought of swimming in April did not occur to them. As that drew sympathy and a cessation of fault-finding she affected a clever shiver or two and was put to bed with much solicitude and a comforting drink of hot lemonade. At this hour she was presumed to be sleeping.

What good would explanations have done? She asked Blynn. The net result had been good, physically, mentally and spiritually good. She had let loose struggling feeling and had the fine bounding recompense that always comes when mother nature says, Give. To tell the bare facts would be to tell a sort of untruth; certain persons--the plaster-of-paris sort--are incapable of receiving; preconceived notions of conduct have “set” them forever.

Even this long letter, now coming to an abrupt close, was helpful and right. Nature had not said, Sleep--although she was saying it now, and mighty strong, too--but she had said, Give; write; tell Allen Blynn. And if Allen Blynn would mail his letters before ten o’clock at night Gorgas Levering would be the first to claim them in the morning. Spying over one’s letters would be the next thing to take up with the family!

Allen Blynn’s reply was dispatched immediately and strictly according to mailing directions. It was in long-hand, a tacit sign hereafter of the distinction between public and private readings.

The theme of his letter was freedom. To be free--that was the history of all human conflict and the goal of civilization. He was with her so thoroughly in her attempt to be herself that she glowed with the spirit of vindicated right. Here was an “authority” giving her that necessary courage so much needed by those who fight alone.

That was distinctly Blynn’s way with children, to start with agreement, gain loyalty, divert the terrific force of opposition--a pedagogic jiu-jitsu which turned all the energies his way.

“But here we come to a puzzle,” he went on, “which nobody yet has satisfactorily solved. Obey your instincts? All right. It is a great principle. But which instincts? The instinct to assert the best that is in us? Oh, yes, indeed. The instinct to be strong, to produce worthily, to live without mental or physical pain? Undoubtedly. But should we give play to other instincts, too, equally natural and equally struggling to express themselves; the instinct to kill, for instance; to grovel; to run away; to save one’s skin at the expense of one’s ideas; to be unclean; to be slothful; diseased; to sneak and lie and bear false witness? I am not mentioning the worst ones, but if you were a man I could. No doubt you are old enough to have heard of some. In other words, there is a war among our most natural desires, and the game is to him who exercises the high, and atrophies the base in us. That’s the old quarrel over good and evil, the archangel of the Lord against Lucifer and his demons.

“Whenever I feel most the desire to ‘break loose,’ as you say, and have my momentary will, I think of certain creatures about me who have tried that game to the full,--the blear-eyed wretches who sun themselves in the parks or nod and drowse in the reading-rooms of the public libraries; and of that hunted-looking crew of hideous women who prowl the streets in ones and twos after nightfall. All of these were young and fair once, and laughed, and felt the call to be themselves. Think of it!

“How can you judge where your desire will lead? The child would eat nothing but ice cream and cake. Some forlorn little kiddies, whom I meet in my journeys through the city, have been allowed to have their will. I see them satisfying their natural hunger craving while mothers look on complacently and permit the growth of a brood of malnutritioned youngsters. We wiser folks, passing by, we know the end. We are like prophets foreseeing calamity.

“Well, what is to guide us? Wisdom. And how shall we know wisdom? That is hard, I admit; but some of it is found in the curbs and restrictions of society. The very repressions that gall you may be the law that keeps you from eventual destruction. Society is not always right, not by a jugful, and revolutionists there must be to amend and abolish. But one must have care. For the ancient régime one might unwittingly substitute The Terror.

“Your letter has inspired me to write a parable. Half the morning I have been toiling over it, shaping and reshaping the phrases--is there any exercise more delightful! I have added to my joy by trying to put it into the stately English of Elizabeth, which even at its worst is touched with subtle beauty. It doesn’t satisfy just yet, so I shall wait.

“The title is clear to me. ‘Ignorance.’ No one should feel hurt by the accusation of ignorance; it is the common mortal possession.

“Before I close I must tell you more of my great mystery, ‘The Lady of the Interruption.’”

After one has been very serious with children, he knew, it is always prudent to shift the topic abruptly, as if all that has been said has no personal application whatever.

“She is present quite often at my extension lectures. Once or twice I have seen her distinctly, and have learned to look for my cues by her nods of approval or her smiling disdain. So far, she has not ‘interrupted’; but I am ready any moment. After the lecture we open the question-box and have a fifteen minute rapid answering of queries. Lately she has been asking questions, which, needless to say, I do not read aloud. Here is one.

“‘Don’t you think that a professor of English should take as much care in purchasing wearing apparel as he does in the selection of his phrases? Or do you believe that a hump at the back of the coat is essential to professional dignity; or that a white waistcoat for evening wear would be too undemocratic in a republic?’

“She has been hinting several times that my personal appearance could be improved without loss of vocal delivery! Isn’t it the most eccentric thing you ever heard of? And the strangest part of it all is that I enjoy it. I find she is quite right in a number of points. I am a shabby beggar. The total effect has been to send me to a good tailor. Oh, we’re quite spruce, nowadays, I tell you! Her latest question was:

“‘You follow my suggestions, but you do not read my questions aloud. Be careful, or I shall expose you again.’

“Is she simply odd-brained, or a great humorist? Pray, put your mind to it. I’m tremendously interested.”

It was not difficult for Gorgas to decide about the lady, but she did not write her full conclusions to Allen Blynn; if the lady were mad, there was method in it. What she did write was to inquire more about her appearance. Did she smile or look over-serious? Was she dark or light?

Men are the most artless creatures, she thought; women could take outrageous liberties with them and they never suspect anything. And of all artless men, Allen Blynn was the easiest. He was so chivalrous, so ready to serve. A woman had but to say, “Sit by me and talk,” or, “Spend Wednesday afternoon with me,” and Allen would drop his dearest interest to do the lady’s bidding; and with such flattering attention, too.

The “Lady of the Interruption” was going to needless lengths to capture the services of Allen Blynn, Gorgas thought. How easy to see through her ruse; although one had to admit that she was a daring creature, and intelligent, too. One could not help admiring her supreme nerve. Undoubtedly, she was “expressing herself,” and defying all that same code of society which forbids a young woman to debate in public.

A day or two later a typewritten letter, obviously for family reading, came to Gorgas, containing the simple statement that he thought the Leverings might be interested in the enclosed bit of writing.

A PARABLE OF IGNORANCE

His turban was a strange purple, and his gown was the orange of the dust of the road; and in his hand he bore no staff but a branch of wild grape. Although he had travelled far, yet was his face white; white like those hermits that dwell apart in caves; white was he as the live white of the growing lily, as the pallor of the moon in daylight; and the men and women of the city marvelled, for they were a dark people that worked in the furrows of the earth and lived daily in the sun.

Now the stranger would have passed on, but they came out from the gates of their city to gaze upon him. Some stood in the way and hindered, some touched reverently the hem of his robe, and many besought him to enter into their houses and stay with them.

But he said unto them, A wanderer have I been all the days of my manhood and must fare alone; although best of all things I love friends and companionship. And he would have turned back, even at the gate of the city, but they pressed him to come among them, if only for a little while. Friends, they cried, thou shalt have an abundance; for here everyone worketh with his hands in the fields, and each is neighbor to another. And he hearkened to them and said no word, but looked upon them as one with great longing. So he tarried with them.

And straightway some among them began to toil less in the heat of the day, and some wove coverings of straw to keep their faces from the light of the sun; and they said to one another in the market-place, How beautiful is the whiteness of the face and the hands of him that stooped to come among us. We are a rough people, dark of skin; from of old have we toiled with our hands and have lifted up our faces daily to the burning heavens, and see what it hath profited us. Would that we were as the holy man is.

Then went some to him in the night and told of their great desire to be as he. And one who was nearest him said unto him, Tell me, I pray thee, wherein thy comeliness lieth and wherewith we might be as thou art. And when they one and all pressed upon him to say wherewith they might be as he, he smiled and regarded them with great tenderness.

Yet he passed his hands over the faces of those whom he loved, and blessed them, and, behold, they lost their roughness and became smooth and fair and of the whiteness of the clouds of heaven.

And one by one to each as he asked he laid his hands upon the brow and upon the cheek and upon the lips and upon the strong limbs, and blessed them, and they became as the Wanderer was, and went away rejoicing at the miracle wrought upon their bodies.

Much honor, they offered him, even silver and jewels; but none of these would he have save the daily bread and wine, claiming only their friendliness.

And when the day came that he had set for his departure, there was much sorrow, so that the Wanderer tarried longer. And again and again was the day put off until he had sojourned with them a full twelfth-month. The day of his coming they named for a holy day and the year of that day they celebrated with feasting and thanksgiving, for now few of them were not fair.

But on the evening of that day the Wanderer fell ill; and he called about him those who had been chiefly his companions, and said, I am to die. But they cried aloud that it could not be; that they whom he had comforted would comfort him also; that as he had ministered unto them so would they to him. Of a surety, they said, he would live to be strong again and, in the fullness of time, see age come with honor.

But he answered, I am to die. I am to die, he said, and turned his face quietly to the wall, quietly as of one who had finished a good task and was content.

Thereupon they besought him to tell them what they might do to save him, to which of his gods they might pray and offer sacrifice. And he turned and answered. Of all earthly things, best loved I friends and companionship. These ye have given me in abundance. Yet am I to die; for surely ye have known all this while, as ye turned me from my journey and led me through the gates of your city, as ye gave me of the bread and wine, as ye visited me and comforted me daily with friendliness; surely ye knew as ye begged the secret of my comeliness and bade me lay my hands upon thy brow, thy cheek, your lips and your strong limbs, surely ye knew: I am a leper.

XIX

TOBOGGANING

Ned Morris’ behavior toward Gorgas underwent a decided change. His tone grew discreet and secretive and intimate; he seemed forever smirking, as if charged with unexpressed humor, the possessor of a private joke.

“Good morning, sweetheart,” he would whisper his greeting, although it might be evening.

And she would look up from her work with equal appreciation of the common jest and remark, “Merry Christmas, pretty boy,” but go on with her work.

When others were present he gave no sign, but so soon as the two were alone he hovered near, playing the open swain, but purely a dramatic rôle. It was very amusing. Gorgas liked the drama and the spirit in which it was played.

As she hammered he would sing an air from the new Robin Hood, “Churning, churning, churning, all the live-long day,” and act beautifully the tipsy sheriff of Nottingham. Or he would plead with mock mournfulness, “Oh, promise me that some day you and I will take our love together ’neath some sky,” and so forth.

Dangerous topics kept coming to the fore in their conversation, dangerous with stirring April in the pulse of things, and two healthy youngsters alone together. Ned seemed to have ample afternoons to give. He was third year medical school, which should have meant work, but he claimed to have everything “stowed away” for the May finals. At any rate, the spring recess was near at hand; he could “plug up” then.

They tried out the courts on fine days. The ground was still soft, but by dint of much rolling they managed to get some practice; most of the time, however, they sat on the bench in the sun, and, warmly wrapped in woolens, breathed the exquisite air and talked. He grew dexterous in putting sleeves into coats, playing gentleman-in-waiting, and while ordinarily she resented anyone touching her, she found herself enjoying these little signs of fond care of her.

He had been smoothing out a collar and tucking a “sweater” snugly back of her ears, carefully brushing away the hair, and tapping each little ear jokingly. Meanwhile he had drawn out a log for her feet and with the aid of a steamer-rug had tucked her in comfortably.

“I feel like a mummy,” she laughed, and bathed contentedly in the warm sun.

“You look like a seraph,” he eyed her critically.

“Seraphs don’t have feet,” she corrected.

“What!” he exclaimed. “Don’t tell me that! Nor little, fat, brown ears, either?”

“Nope.”

“Nor crinkly, brown hair what won’t stay fixed?” he deftly put back a fluttering strand.

“Nope.”

“Nor soft, mellow voices what sez ‘nope’?”

“Nope; they always toot through trumpets--or is it shawms?”

“Well, I’ll be dinged!” he swore.

“You’re quite likely to be.”

“All right,” cheerfully, “let’s be dinged together? Eh? What y’say?”

“Mebbe; how do you begin?”

“_Facilis descensus Averni_,” he suggested.

“Talk a language I understand,” but she quite understood that stale Latin quotation, “Easy is the road down.”

“That is to say,” Morris cast about for a translation. “‘Let her go, Gallagher, and boomp! you’re at the bottom!’ Let’s--uh--let’s toboggan?”

He slipped a hand under the steamer-rug and grasped her wrist.

She considered for a moment or two, but she gave no answering touch.

“You’re dead cold,” he withdrew and chirped gaily. “No blood in you. You couldn’t _descensus_ for a cent. What you need is a series of stiff lessons.”

“Isn’t this just jim-dandy,” she murmured, ignoring his talk. “Golly! It’s good sometimes to be just alive.” He grew quiet. “I heard all you said, Neddie. I’m not inattentive. Go on and talk. I like to hear you prattle. But I’m so comforty. I don’t want to think.... And it’s so nice to be taken care of, tucked in, and all that.” She kicked out a foot. “There! It’s out again. Be a good boy and fix the mummy’s legs.”

“And he fixed them up so care-ful-ee,” he sang as he worked, “That now he’s the ruler of the Queen’s nav-ee.”

He smoked and they both lapsed into silence, while his eyes watched her with frank approval.

“Women like to be helpless,” she spoke out the summing up of her thinking. “I always thought I despised those frail beseeching-looking things that hang around like dolls and let men fetch and carry for them. I always did for myself--usually could do it better than any man; but lately, I’ve got a case of the ‘delicates.’ You’re responsible, Neddie; you’ve been taking such delicious care of me that I have succumbed. ‘Let her go, Gallagher and boomp! I’m at the bottom.’ Just tuck in that flapping hair, won’t you? I don’t want to move.”

A dutiful and faithful squire Morris became; and no one thought anything of it. Mrs. Levering frequently came to the “smitty” to watch the work or to chat with Gorgas about little teas and small receptions that kept an informal atmosphere moving in the neighborhood; Gorgas was clever in thinking up original things, decorations and so on. Ned’s presence was accepted as a matter of course. Had he not grown up in the neighborhood, and were not he and Gorgas perpetual tennis partners? But it is doubtful if she ever asked herself even so much as that; her serene assumption of the careful mother had annihilated all thinking on the subject.

“My daughters,” she confessed to a caller who was interested in seeing the “smitty,” “are pretty much about what I planned. It is almost wholly a question of management, I think. For instance, I decided that Keyser should like music. She rebelled, naturally; but I held her to it--my will was the stronger. Now she plays rather nicely, I think; and she’s very grateful, I can tell, for my insistence. Gorgas has been a trial, I must say; but look how she has come around! There was a time when we could hardly have a decent conversation together,” she laughed, “but now we’re quite chums.

“And then there’s that awful question of boys. I have never had the question. For us it just doesn’t exist. My scheme is very simple. I keep a lot of social things going on right at home; the girls have a good time, and I know everything that is happening.”

While Mrs. Levering talked, Ned Morris was saying pretty nothings in Gorgas’ ear.

“It seems to me, young man,” Gorgas told him in a secretive undertone, “that you are making the right speech to the wrong party. Bea Wilcox is the young lady who should have patent rights on that kind of talk. Or have you broken off?”

Ned made a wry face. “Friday nights,” he said, “I pay my addresses to the lady. Mother’s an awful stickler. You have to go home at ten o’clock, the time they unchain the mastiff. Broken off? Not exactly. Sort of mangled. Bea’s nasty lately. Can’t make her out. But this isn’t Bea’s party; I’m talking to your right ear.”

“The right ear is heartily ashamed of you,” she turned completely around. “Try the left ear; it’s not used to you yet.”

So they chatted nonsense and--drifted.

When the mother had gone she brushed him aside and took up a mallet.

“You are keeping me from my work,” she protested, but not with much force.

“Aw; you don’t want to work. You’re just bluffing. How can you pretend to work on days like these?”

Nevertheless, she began a gentle rhythmic tapping.

“‘Churning, churning, churning all the live-long day,’” Ned sang, keeping time to the beats. Leaning over he took hold of the handle, closed his hand over hers, and continued the singing. She joined in the second part, and laughingly enacted the rôle of the milk-maid where the sheriff aims to instruct Guy of Gisbond into the mysteries of courting. The scene ends with the sheriff drawing closer and closer until he turns to implant a kiss on the dairy-maid.

Gorgas ducked half-successfully, and gave the timidest imitation of a slap. In the wrestling that ensued she became somewhat flushed and disheveled, and Ned’s soft collar was wrenched quite buttonless; so that, although the warning of Mrs. Levering and her guest returning gave ample time for a quick recovery of the mallet, it allowed no opportunity for anything else.

“My dear,” the mother’s voice was solicitous, “I’m afraid you’re working too hard this morning. Don’t overdo it. You look positively done up. Don’t you think you had better lie down and rest, dear?”

Gorgas held herself in check and answered properly and dutifully, but volumes of pent-up laughter threatened to explode. The situation was made especially tense by the comic expression of sadness assumed by Morris--it seemed to convey a mountain of sympathy for the hard lot of the workwoman--and by the idiotic smile of sympathy from the stupid guest. Any person with half an eye could have seen that these two young persons had been tussling together.

Only the severest restraint held them in check until Mrs. Levering had piloted her visitor out of the “smitty” and into the front garden. Then the two culprits sprawled on the work-bench and laughed themselves into hiccoughs.

“What fools these elderly mortals be,” was Morris’ comment, on partial recovery. “They don’t know a hawk from a hand organ. ‘Oh, Gorgie, deah,’” he mimicked. “‘Are you suah you are not working too hahd?’”

When Bardek came in an hour later he found Gorgas and Ned sitting together on the big settle. Gorgas had her sleeve turned back and a handkerchief bound to her arm. He gave one careful look at them, walked quickly over to Gorgas’ bench, inspected the progress made, and softly whistled.

“We’re discussing important matters, Bardek,” Gorgas explained. The sly twinkle in his eye was not to be endured passively. “Ned’s telling me about his medical courses.”

Bardek whistled a strange, unfinished bar.

“Tell it to t’e marines,” he nodded significantly.

“Honest, Bardek,” Ned assured him. “I was showing her how we bandage in emergencies without proper material at hand.”

“Rats!” Bardek exulted at his ability to use the prevailing lingo. A moment later, he added, “If Miss Gorgas ever finish zat order,” jerking his arm toward her bench, “Neddie must soon make ’not’er home-run, eh?”

“Hug the bag; pitcher’s got the ball!” Morris retorted.

“Look out for a steal!” put in Gorgas over her shoulder.

“There he goes!” shouted Ned. “Slide! slide!... Safe by a mile!”

“Somebody coach third,” called Gorgas.

“Vairy good,” agreed Bardek, who was quite aware that all this nonsense was aimed at him. “Vairy good. That talk I do not know; but I know some t’ings.” He marched toward the door. “I not so _beeg_ a fool to stand around and stop nice little boy-girl love-making. _Je n’aime pas à faire le fâcheux troisieme._ I know when three is one too many! _Au revoir, les enfants!_” and he was gone.

The effect was sobering.

“The blithering fool!” ejaculated Gorgas.

Off in the distance they could hear Bardek singing lustily.

“Oh! oh! oh! oh! ah! ah! ah! ah! “Quel bon petit roi c’était là! là! là!”

“Oh, he’s a wise boy, all right,” commented Ned. “_He_ knows a hawk from a hand organ, O. K.”

“Hush!” Gorgas shook a finger under his nose. “That’s not the proper way to talk. We’re not--”

“Aren’t we?... Then let’s!”

She tried to gather her thoughts together. If this had been almost any other man, some chap she didn’t know like a brother, she would have sent him about his business instanter. But Ned was such a familiar figure, like a bit of accustomed furniture. One was so thoroughly used to him and his nonsense that much could be allowed without offence. Her mind would not face the real situation, however; it fought away from it for fear of stopping things.

Love-making? Nonsense.... What was it, then?... Oh, bother! Don’t think about it. Just let things go. “Let her go, Gallagher! and boomp! we’re at the bottom.”

There was nothing wrong in just drifting comfortably through new experiences. Ned didn’t mean anything. He was as good as engaged to Bea. But was this fair to Bea?... Oh, shucks! Why take up disagreeable topics?... Hang Bardek, anyway.... He spoilt all the fun.... It made them both self-conscious.

Ned was sitting on the arm of the settle, affecting to smooth out the bandage on her arm, but she knew he was not doing that at all. She was leaning against him. Perhaps she ought to get up and clear him out. But she did no such thing. It was very comforty, there.

It was more than comforty; of that she became aware when his head leaned over quietly and his face pressed against her temples. She could feel his hand tremble, and she knew that her face was burning with the touch of his.

She did not move away, but she said quietly, “Why do you do this, Ned? It isn’t right, and you know it.”

“Why?” his voice shook.

“There’s Bea.”

“Oh, Bea’s all right,” he parried.

“Are you going to marry Bea?”

“Oh, I guess so; forget it. Let’s--let’s just toboggan.”

She closed her eyes and let the thrill of the contact suffuse her.

“But you don’t care--” she struggled to see the thing straight.

“_Don’t_ I?”

“And neither do I. We’re just good friends, like brother and sister. And we’re letting something get hold of us and make us wild.”

“All right. Let her go, Gallagher--” he chuckled.

“But how can we? It isn’t--love-making at all!... What is it?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. I didn’t invent this thing.... We’re just human, I suppose.”

Mrs. Levering’s voice could be heard calling for Mac. The two riotous young hearts beat violently at the sudden thought of detection; but they did not stir.

Fear shook her; if the mother had quietly opened the door before them and stared, in combined astonishment and indignation, Gorgas felt that she should be unable to get up. It was the sensation of dreams where we are about to be devoured by some hideous beast, yet can neither cry out nor move.

“Suppose mother should walk in that door!” she whispered. “That’s the way she always comes--from the house.”

“It’s locked,” he whispered back. There was no cause for the lower voice, save sheer excitement.

After a moment she asked, “How do you know?”

“I locked it myself.”

“When?”

“When she went out.... I slipped the bolt.... Let’s forget about it.”

From her silence he caught the need of making some defense.

“Maybe it isn’t love-making,” he argued. “I think it isn’t, myself. It’s a fair exchange, and therefore robs nobody.”

She did not move away, but she had not surrendered. Off in the depths of her mind something was striving to be heard. It seemed like long strings of sentences, too far off to be deciphered, marching, marching, in an undulating line over hill and valley, hurrying to her aid. She smiled as she recalled Mark Twain’s picture of the German language sprawling in that same fashion with a separable verb tacked on the end.

“I didn’t mean to do this,” he poured in her ear. “It was not in my thoughts until you put it there that day you and I talked about the ‘frat’ pin. Since then I have been aching to--do this. It’s nature. It’s just instinct, I suppose.”

Instinct! That was it. The marching line of words came clearly into view now. “There are good instincts and bad instincts,” it shouted at her. “Which will you have? Take your choice. The archangel of the Lord offers you one; Lucifer and his demons offer you another. Choose; and be exalted or forever damned.”

She twisted his arms from around her and got up.

“We’re both a little mad, I think.” She steadied herself and looked away from his eager eyes. “This won’t do. No!” She faced him and pushed him away. “Stop it, I tell you. I’m awake now. For a minute or two I was drunk.... What a storm you raised in me, Neddie Morris!... Oof! Let’s get out of here and breathe some air. I’m suffocated.”

For the remainder of that day she was obdurate. He was not permitted to touch her. Eventually he became bitter, tried unsuccessfully to quarrel with her, and finally left her in a huff.

And she was not ashamed. That was the oddest consequence, she thought. There was nothing, then, to tell her whether this instinct was a good or a bad one. It had seemed so right and natural, and--this she reluctantly confessed--it had been absolutely satisfactory.

She recalled the eager people who begged of the pale stranger to sojourn with them. How beautiful he must have appeared to them, just as this first experience was beautiful. Ignorance of the obvious had blinded their eyes as it now blinded hers. Leprosy! Hideous! But the “tobogganing,” what else did it lead to? She knew enough of her sisterhood to be aware of the wages eventually paid.

Almost the last touch of girlhood went from her that hour. Maturity lurked in her eyes as never before; in her step and carriage, even in the tones of her voice. The last trace of awkwardness in gait and speech disappeared, vanished suddenly. The ship had found herself and was surging through the tossing seas. Slight as the experience had been, it had not been slight in its effects. It gave her a kind of pride, as of one who had achieved something; and,--what strange thoughts go packed together!--it filled her with understanding sympathy for all wayward women. From that hour, another odd result, she became her mother’s intimate and friend. There were no more “rows”; and, so inconsistent a thing is memory, no one seemed to remember that Gorgas had ever been a difficult problem in the family.

And Ned? After a few days he adjusted himself to the changed situation; and, man-like, forgot that it had occurred. His medical studies began to pull him--when one interest is out, others always take its place--and the old jollity of manner came racing back.

Almost at their next encounter, over which Gorgas had been a little fearful, he met her eagerly with:

“Say, old girl, Bea treats me like a civilized compatriot now. Don’t see what she ever went on a strike for. I hadn’t done anything. Honest! Nothing that I know of. Well, she’s forgiven me for doing nothing and all’s hunky-dory.... She thinks you know. Say, be a good girl and make her tell you. She’s dying to talk it out with you; but she’s afraid. Sort of nervous and shy, you know.... Oh, she’s O. K. and A1, that little girl.”

What comic animals we are, she thought as she searched his eyes and saw there nothing but loyalty to the other woman. Do not the high gods sometimes hold their hands to their faces and smile?...

Let her go, Gallagher, and, boomp! we’re at the bottom....

Surely ye knew.... _I am a leper!_...

What a topic of conversation for Allen Blynn when he comes down for the Easter holidays. How much should she tell? It depended much on what sort of a debate they could manage to have together. Several apocryphal versions she thought out and discarded. The best of them was a hypothetical case of a girl who had confessed. Certainly she would not have the courage to talk the affair out boldly with Allen Blynn. Not that she felt the least guilt, but any telling would, somehow, be unfair to the facts. Who could transmute into puffed vocables the rich data of life? It would be like transposing a cumulus cloud-bank into a major chord. The life and the autobiography are never the same.

When Allen Blynn came she managed to secure a large share of his time; but even the third cousin of the topic was not broached. Her voice fled from all suggestion of anything so personal; possibly because he looked so much older and stronger: his forehead seemed to bulge more, his voice had grown heavier, and new little muscles began to show about his mouth, signs of much public speaking. Instead, she plied him with questions about Holden, with which she felt only a remote interest.

And they talked of the mysterious lady. Blynn grew gay at the thought of her.

“I’m hot on her trail,” he assured her. “When I go for her at the close of the lecture, she slips out. She is always at the end of the hall. And no one knows her. I have questioned dozens of persons who have been sitting near.”

“She watches you, I suppose, while you talk?” Gorgas asked.

“Tremendously! She leans forward and fixes me with her eyes. I think they must be black. Even across a big hall they burn at me.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Shouldn’t you expect it to? But it doesn’t. I get positive strength from her. She is the most attentive person I ever address. Every twist of her head is eloquent; I can catch the register of the value of everything I say. But I must get to know her better. She has ideas; no doubt of that; or I dream she has. And perhaps I am under some obligation to her. Someone has recently presented me with a mighty valuable book. It is a first edition, in good condition, too, of the second series of Bacon’s essays. Of course, I only guess that she sent it. It had my name on the cover, in a script that resembles hers. It was left in my room, too. Someone must have walked in and placed it on the table.... Which reminds me that I have a book for you.”

“Let’s see it.”

“Not until September 10th.”

“My birthday!”

“Yes. It is a first edition, and the only copy made.”

“It must be very valuable,” her eyes opened.

“It is to me. I hope it may be to you. I can tell you this much, I wrote it myself--”

“Oh, splendid! The MS. of a book! I shall be delighted. What a nice kind of present.”

“I hope you will think so,” he rumpled his hair comically. “I’ve put a lot into it--five years. But that’s all I’m going to tell you,” he foresaw her question. “Birthday gifts are secrets.... You won’t tell anybody about it, will you?”

She agreed. What girl does not hug a secret?

“But oh, Allen Blynn, why did you tell me in April? I shall wear myself out thinking-- Is it fiction?” beaming.

“Bless my soul, no!”

“Oh, a book on literature!” mildly enthusiastic.

“No-o.”

“Pedagogy?” mournfully.

“Certainly not!”

“Essays?” brightening up.

“Here, stop this; I’ll be giving it away in a minute. I won’t say another word. Wait.”

May, June, July, August, September; five months of guessing. How delightful--and how wicked!

XX

A CONNOISSEUR OF JOY

Bardek and his family had done astonishingly well with the “boards and plaster” of their white-washed cottage. It had been something more than a novel experience; genuine domestic roots had sprouted and held him. Assisted in emergencies by Mrs. Mac, the young wife fell into the ways of other women with remarkable instinctiveness, and the two babies flourished into rugged boyhood, went to bed like other lads, swam, quarreled and played miniature baseball with the neighbors’ children.

Perhaps the workshop held Bardek more than anything else; but he never ceased to marvel at his own surrender.

“I let myself, I, Bardek,” he would exclaim with comic seriousness, “be tied up like dog with chain.”

But he broke loose many times. Without notice he would be off; the little white cottage would give forth no sounds of singing or scrubbing; the children’s shrill voices would cease. One need not then bother further about Bardek for many days. Perhaps the doors would be closed, but the windows rarely; and often the wash was left flapping on the line. It was Mrs. Mac’s eye that saw that everything was put shipshape after one of these abrupt exoduses.

“It is good to be away,” on his return Bardek would say as he dropped his pack before the door and sniffed at the well-scrubbed pine floors and took in the general clean-up which Mrs. Mac could not refuse to an untidy dwelling. “The kennel gets in the nose; then one must gnaw the rope and be off and get new scents, and so to come back glad to the old. Ah! Nature is a great sweetener and cleaner. Ach! It is good to sit on hard chair! And how strong and fine smell the boards!”

And Mrs. Mac would lean in the doorway and listen to his sighs of satisfaction; and her eyes and her red cheeks would glow with pride.

Bardek would come back with something more than a nostalgia for boards and plaster; splendid orders he would bring for his own special work, and enough for Gorgas to keep her busy and prosperous. After one of these journeys there would be much excitement in the “smitty.” The lamp would burn at night. A clean spot would be cleared, the drawing boards would come down, and design would flourish.

* * * * *

And now once more had Bardek quietly decamped, silently stole away like the Arabs.

His pilgrimage was prolonged far beyond the usual hegira. April became May and May gave place to June, but no intimation came of the Bohemians. Mrs. Mac had time to give the cottage a complete house-cleaning, and Mac put new whitewash everywhere, on the broad boards that made the frame and on all the posts, and on the chicken-houses, and on the long, low fence which encircled the garden. Backed by a perfect mass of green shrubs and trees, and with a mighty Norway maple sheltering all, the little cottage cried out with welcome, but remained vacant.

Gorgas found herself almost helpless without the daily consultations with the master. At first she put things aside unfinished, hoping against an early return, but as the days lengthened into summer and the white cottage remained tenantless, she was forced to work out her problems alone. It was a dreary task, lacking the companionship of that bubbling cosmopolitan. How much he meant to her! Hardly had she realized that before. Just before he left, he had seemed moody and disappointed. She resolved to be kinder to him; to cease having jokes at his expense. Their baseball slang seemed to annoy him; or was he joking, too? One never could tell.

He was rarely angry, but once she had seen the inner ferocity of the man. A group of Italian railway laborers, sauntering by the “smitty” where they had no right to be, had stopped to peer in at the odd spectacle of a girl blowing a forge.

They talked in their own tongue. It was an unfamiliar patois to Gorgas; although she could comprehend their general meaning. Their guttural interrogation changed to amusement; references to the young woman became pointed and finally personal. They saw, far off in the corner, the thick-set man tapping gently at his bench, but they rested secure in what they were accustomed to find an incomprehensible speech. One quiet utterance from a beady-eyed youth, who led the others in the doorway, set the company in gusts of laughter, which was followed by a clatter of attempts to imitate their bold companion.

From the depths of the “smitty” the roaring voice of Bardek was suddenly heard calling upon them in their own tongue to run for their lives. A flying mallet crashed against the door-post and rebounded off to the leader’s shoulder. Almost before they could comprehend the curses hurled at them, the flaming form of Bardek appeared in the doorway, breathing carefully chosen Italian. Blows he rained upon them and kicks, delivered with precision. In terrified rout they scattered, straight through Mac’s perfect garden and over the fence, carrying part of it with them. Had anyone faltered he would probably have been killed.

It was a half-hour before Bardek subsided; and all the while he had bubbled Italian. Finally, little chuckles of deep laughter came in flurries to the surface. The voluble cries and prayers of the retreating Italians he repeated, first with irony, then with full comprehension of their comic possibilities.

“I must have care,” he warned himself. “Inside I am the big, sacred, mad bull of the old Greek, Dionusos. It is foolishness. To roar and kill, and for hot words, little harmless words, puffs of silly wind. For just that a man may give up a great fine life which the good Lord has made.... When I was jus’ a man I bellow like that, in Wien it was, and the man was big, a great Austrian.... We fight, and all for words. He speak against the France, and I have jus’ come from the France, and inside am I all French.” Bardek considered for a moment. “It was a bad day for that big Austrian when he speak against the France.... _Eh bien_, for that I am here!... Well, _le bon Dieu_,” he shrugged, “he it is, not Bardek, who manages.”

But Bardek was not back, even to tease with American slang, Bardek who hovered over her with eloquent eye, who hungered to touch her, to smooth her forehead and grip her to him, but who ever remained aloof, a picture of magnificent restraint. Somehow, she hardly dared touch him herself, she who was so free with the others that came about the “smitty.” The mad bull of the old Greek, Dionusos, seemed sometimes as if it needed only a resting of the hand on the arm to give signal for a wild devouring.

“I am just like his child,” she mused, “and--I must be honest--he is more my father than my father. It is wretched that we can’t show our affection in some human way.... _Nom d’une pipe!_ Why does he not come back!... He must stop this gallivanting; I just can’t stand it.”

One splendid June morning, as she plodded listlessly over her bench, an answer came to her call. It was the familiar voice of two noisy children disputing in French over the possession of the drinking dipper. In the house they heard only German; outside, the speech was French; on the long pilgrimages and on daily prowlings with the father through Cresheim, the language was Italian. The back-yard being undisputed French territory the little Bohemians were “tutoyéing” most belligerently.

“Bardek!” shouted Gorgas. “Bardek!” she cried, and was out of the door and over the white fence.

“Là! là! _là!_ là! mon enfant!” he shouted in reply. “I come; like the _la grande vitesse_, quick I come!”

Into each other’s arms they rushed. He swung her around and kissed her hair and cried over her like a veteran of the war returning safe to his children. Before she could recover, the boys had grabbed her knees, and the ordinarily stolid Lady Bardek had swooped upon her with much bubbling of Hungarian and weepings and wet kissings.

Bardek pulsated language. One would never, never go away again! Oh, it was so good to be home! Never, never, would one go away again; not until the next time--eh, what?--until the soul grew sick with sameness and ran away for the pleasure of coming back. How could one get such joy without the suffering of absence? How do you know what you love until you try for one little while to give it up? The white-faced bald heads who keep, keep, keep; ah! what do they have--nothing. Life is rhythm, not stillness; back and forth, give up and take back, so swing the tides of earth and the bountiful blessings of heaven.

“I,” cried Bardek, striking a pose, “I am the connoisseur of joy. It is not given to the rich to be happy, nor to the poor; both can be very miserable. I have studied and know the secret of living. Here is one of my secrets: When you love most, make it a grand sacrifice; go away; desert; fly for your life from that which gives life, and some day when you are far away, you hear the cry for you, oh! such a pitiful tenderness, it make you weep--inside. Have you loved? Oh, you thought yes. But now you know; never have you believed to love so much. Inside you have been cleaned out, burned dry, made ready to receive the blessing.... Then you come back. Rush fast? Right away? Oh, _non! non! non!_ You wait. You suffer some little more. It is necessary. Soon you cannot rest where you are. But yet you do not rush; you hold fast and slip slow, slow, toward ‘home.’ Exquisite! The passion of going nearer, nearer! Each day the miles on the sign-post say littler and littler. Now it is sixty mile; now it is only forty-t’ree; now it is ten’s and five’s and two’s. You see all the home things, the skies and the grass and the cows and the--ach! _Gott im Himmel_, I cannot say it.... _Ein tousand ein hundred ein und zwanzig!_ I am full of the joy. It is too much!”

Everybody wept gloriously. It was the feast of tears, a celebration of the joy that cometh in the morning. And they laughed and they talked and they ran through the little house and admired and patted and loved and kissed even the clean white crockery.

“You have miss me, eh?” Bardek eyed her with confidence.

Gorgas nodded.

“Ah, my child,” he patted her cheek, “now you know, too.... It was pain, was it not? Ah, yes. It must be. _Qui sait aimer sait mourir._ But ah! what would you give for your suffering? Eh? Nothings! The pain is part of the joy!”

Bardek came back with something more than accumulative joy; he brought cash for work done and orders for more. New York city had evidently been on the route of his travels, for a famous firm of jewelers was on his list. One knew better than to question Bardek either about his journeys or about his past. “Only the old and the foolish chew over again the past,” he would say. “I have been; it is part of me; you see it all in my face, in my talk, in my ‘me’ which is thus transformed: or I have it not. When I grow too feeble to live in the present, then, perhaps, will I live in the past; but more likely will I take then the quick jump into the great future.”

He was eager to go at his planning. The designs were talked over; sketches made, discarded and approved; the material tested and sorted, and the benches cleaned for action.

For several days the “smitty” was too busy for talk, except such business-like conversation as was needed to push the work forward; all copper does not anneal with the same result, nor does all charcoal burn with the same intensity; but after the plate, candlestick, candelabrum or vase had begun to reach a half-recognizable shape, there would be a lull.

“How is that Neddie fellow?” Bardek inquired. “I don’t see him hanging about and making the smile of idleness. More ‘home-run,’ eh?”

She explained that he was busy with his medical courses and, further, that Bea Wilcox had laid claims upon all his surplus time.

“Now, that is so much better,” honest Bardek nodded approval. “He is nice boy; nice, clean boy. I like--when the day’s work is done--to take him on my knee and sing sweet, sleepy songs, _‘Schlaf’, Kindschen, schlaf’,’ und so weiter_.... But he smoke too many cigarette: so he will not grow.”

“He is twenty-two, Bardek,” Gorgas rejoined, but not disclosing in her tone any defense of Morris. “That is five years older than I.”

“You!” Bardek gazed at her. “Ha! You! Little Neddie will never be so old as Miss Gorgas. You take by years? Ah, that such wrong way to make measure. Today the whole world is one day older than yesterday, but is every man of the world just one day older? _Ach, gar nichts!_ There are some who have lived--ah! how they have lived while the slow hours of last night moved away!--and there are some who have made one jump from child to man, and there are some baby-women who have in that little day turned to be mothers of babies, and there are some who have stood just where they are, and others who have gone back from jus’ fool to imbecile. The day, the month, the year, it is nothing. When I would know the age I do not look in the calendar--_ach, nein!_--I look in the eyes. Back of eyes, sprawling out nicely on soft, gray stuff, is _you_! Jus’ there!” he tapped his forehead. “In little children, I have seen, back there, wise old folks--you were jus’ such a little wise one when you first came to me. Your Neddie is jus’ boy--nice, clean, fresh boy. Oh, he will make nice man some day--if he grow up.”

It was difficult to know when Bardek spoke out of his serious opinions or through a desire to stir up his listeners. In English, especially, was he hard to fathom. Sometimes his auditors had laughed at the wrong spot, had taken his most earnest talk as if intended for droll humor. It was not prudent so to do; for then Bardek called on his heavy artillery of irony and satire, and woe betide the weakling who stood before him: the personal blemish of his opponent, moral or physical, which society had agreed to ignore, was trotted out for inspection, caparisoned with many unique beauties of language. To Gorgas, Ned Morris had seemed quite a man; but she deferred questioning Bardek too closely on that point.

Instead, she seemed to shift the subject.

“I envy you your freedom, Bardek,” she sighed. “When you want a thing, you just go and take it. If you want to cut loose you can say, ‘Let her go, Gallagher’ and boomp! you’re at the bottom. It takes courage, I tell you. One has to just stop caring for everybody and what everybody thinks. I can’t. I can’t be free. I’d like to break away and, if I wanted to, eat my breakfast in the middle of Main street--in my bare feet, too; but I couldn’t do it. Not that I care an awful lot about what folks say. It isn’t exactly that; but I’d be scared stiff. I might get as far as Main street with my oatmeal and roll, but my teeth would be chattering so much from fright that I couldn’t get the breakfast down.”

Bardek thought the matter over carefully. Then he eyed her seriously and asked:

“Something in your mind, it troubles you, eh?”

“Oh, no.”

He was not convinced.

“When you have great troubles, tell somebody. Confession is good. That what makes ol’ Mac such a fine man. He is always clean, is ol’ Mac. Every Saturday night he stand in line and think of the bad in him--it is not much, but no matter--then he soon be on his knees to tell the father and when he come out he is all w’ite-wash inside. Ol’ Mac, his mind is not always full of dead matters and ferments and things that go bad. His mind is like my house after Mrs. Mac have come to slop hot soap-water over everyt’ing. I know. Sometimes I, too, go to father and tell him everything.... No troubles, eh?”

“Oh, nothing’s the matter with me, Bardek; that is, nothing worth telling.”

“Very well,” he nodded. “When you make confession you must want to do it. Your inside will tell you it is time when.”

“That’s just what I want to know, Bardek,” she brought him back. “You listen to what the ‘inside’ bids you do, and you never question what the ‘outside’ would say. That’s freedom. I wish I had it.”

He worked for some time at his designing, as if he did not care to discuss the matter further. Occasionally, he looked over his shoulder at her, staring into her eyes as if to see what was within.

“So you would be free?” he asked quietly. “Well, it is easy. But first, you must know what freedom is--and that is hard. I have had many thoughts about freedom and have changed my mind many, many times; and just now I am not so sure as I was three, five, ten year ago. Once I t’ink freedom is ‘do as you please.’ In America you say that so much, ‘I do as I please.’ It is vairy nice. But ‘as I please’ is sometime not nice. For one, two, three minutes, yes. When you jump into nice, cold water and swim when it is yet April, ‘Oh!’ you say, ‘it is fine!’ but the next day you sneeze and for two weeks you have bad cold. That not vairy nice, eh? Now, I think you have not freedom then. You put great chains on you which keep you in house for two weeks when you would please go out. Sometimes it is freedom to be wise and not do ‘as I please.’

“You t’ink to sit in Main street and eat breakfast is freedom. You are right, quite right, if that is what you do want. But also, you want peoples to like you and not to laugh and touch the head and say, ‘What a crazy, silly child!’ You must choose. Well, you find you didn’t want to sit in Main street; not at all. It give you just what you don’t want.

“Life is full of jus’ that. ‘To do as you please,’ yes, that is to be free. But it is so hard to know what will please. You want swim in April spring water? You do not want cold in head? You cannot have both, my child. Freedom is to know what one to take. And who is to tell? It is hard, vairy hard.

“Then there are the other peoples--the great crowd, of them I do not think much--but of vairy few, my wife and those big boys, and you, Miss Gorgas, and of ol’ Mac--well, of them I do care. To keep them happy I must not have somet’ings. I _please_ not to have them. I want them vairy much--oh, vairy much I want them--but so do I want to see the good friends with smiling face. I have freedom--yes--but I lose much. And it is good to lose.”

Gorgas was thinking how similar were the philosophies of Bardek and Allen Blynn, although each expressed his point of view in different ways. Here was an essential agreement on the mystic puzzle of human conduct, and by men who looked upon life from nearly opposite angles. It was as if Puritan and Cavalier, Stoic and Epicurean, Spartan and Athenian had for once settled their eternal quarrel.

“How did you learn all this?” Gorgas asked.

“By much troubles and much pains,” he shook his head. “You get one little cold in head. Ah! That is nothing. You learn so cheap! But I? I have walked in blood.... _Nom d’une pipe!_ how I pay to know so little!”

Whatever were the experiences that Bardek conjured up, it prevented further speech. So they hammered away for the remainder of that morning without further discussion. Occasionally in the pauses she would hear Bardek muttering his _nom d’une pipe!_--a sign of great perturbation.

And she was glad. Clearness had come into her thinking. In her mind now she was certain of the track for a little way ahead. She had asked about freedom because she meant to liberate herself from a great thralldom, but she had feared the consequences; now that she had been taught to face all the choices, all the possible results, she had chosen and was content.

XXI

EVE’S CHOICE

Meanwhile Allen Blynn, packing up his belongings at the end of the term, was far from either decision or content. The faculty of Holden College had divided bitterly on the question of the introduction of “electives.” Nowadays electives are accepted so serenely that one forgets how sinful they were some twenty or more years ago; but we shall not here touch the terrible battle which waged over the contention of the conservatives that a college senior could not hope to be a gentleman unless he had read the “Pseudolus” of Maccius Plautus. It is enough to know that, led by the example of Eliot of Harvard, Blynn had joined the sinful radicals and was openly preaching the “new education.”

This young man, who could be so eloquent with Gorgas Levering on the subject of Conservatism in Private Conduct, found himself an unwilling Public Reformer in Education. In his private thoughts he bound the law rigorously upon himself, but in public he was an impatient radical demanding that Holden College should cease weeping sentimentally over its eighteenth century past and begin to do its duty toward the children of the present year of grace. He did not know that that sort of inconsistency is alarmingly common. A man may be in favor of freedom as regards his country, but not as regards the goings and comings of his wife; a man may love his neighbor as himself on Sundays, yet unmercifully send promissory notes to protest on Mondays.

Naturally the students were solid for the electives and against Maccius Plautus and all his tribe, and with bonfires and shoutings they lauded their spokesman on the faculty. But it was the newspapers that shot the controversy out of its local setting and made it semi-national and glaringly notorious. And it was not all due to the managing of Diccon. Some men are naturally dramatic; all that they do is already good “news”; and once in the headlines it is almost impossible to keep out. Let a lawyer win a scandalous case or a clergyman defy his bishop; for the remainder of his days he cannot so much as visit the zoological garden without having the matter publicly heralded. The papers gave space to the Holden reforms because Blynn was back of them. Blynn could be counted on for spectacular things. “The Lady of the Interruption” had made him a perpetual headliner!

It was a heavy-hearted young man, therefore, who travelled toward Mount Airy the next morning, unable to escape some of the congratulations or to avoid seeing his picture flaring on the inside page of newspapers held by fellow passengers. He assumed the guilty skulk of an embezzling cashier, fearful lest he should find some casual eye comparing him with the photograph. He wondered what dreadful things they had said about him, but dared not read. The newspaper “boys” liked him--all boys did; they showed their affection by writing him up as if he were a pedagogic Luther, and it made him almost ill. “Rumors” of the resignation of President Galt and the election of President Blynn had been heard by the astute scribe. Dear old Rumor, patron saint of reporters!

Diccon did his share in the home town; he wrote beautiful imitation telegrams to his paper, briefly summing up the essential matter in dispute and making out a clear victory for their fellow-townsman, whose call to an important post in another city had been thus so thoroughly justified.

Blynn protested, but Diccon claimed to be powerless. “You’re ‘news’ now, old man,” he explained. “Nothing on earth could keep you from publicity. When newspapers begin to give you four or five thousand dollars’ worth of free advertising, it is because they think it pays. Once they have made you famous--”

“Infamous!” suggested Blynn.

“Same thing”; Diccon was undisturbed; “they’d do the same by you if you scuttled a hospital and got off with the job. When they go in to make you known to thousands of readers they have created customers for that sort of news. Every time you’re mentioned after that, they are assured of satisfied nods from their patrons. You are a continued story, a never-ending serial.... And you can’t expect me to howl, can you? You have made good, as I knew you would. Well, that cleans my slate. No one can say I pulled for a friend. You happened to be my friend, but also you happened to be the best man for the job.”

“Accident! accident!” cried Blynn; “accident and the absurdity of news values.”

In that frame of mind he dropped in on the Leverings. Mrs. Levering and Kate were sewing on the lawn at the rear in the shade of their huge chestnut trees. Gorgas was in town purchasing materials for the “smitty.”

The old familiarity was there in their greetings and something of warmth due to the natural joy in another’s success; but there was also a deferential treatment due to his newspaper fame, which made him uncomfortable.

“My dear Professor Blynn,” Mrs. Levering beamed toward him, “I do wish I could get courage to ask you to glance over the literary program of our little club. We’re not at all satisfied with the plans for next year; of course, we are all amateurs without taste or knowledge. But I’m afraid you are so busy with--”

“Not at all!” Blynn broke in. “Do let me work with you. I should be delighted. I have bushels of time and I’ll dig for you like a good gardener, provided--you don’t call me ‘professor.’”

“Oh, you’re too modest.”

“Not at all; I’m too proud!” he laughed. “In America ‘professor’ and ‘doctor’ are the inferior titles; ‘Mr.’ is really the mark of distinction. I like the way they say ‘Mr.’ Eliot in Cambridge. Fancy saying ‘Professor’ Eliot or even ‘Dr.’ Eliot! It would be like referring to Dr. George Washington! And he was an LL. D., too; both Harvard and U. of P.; but who remembers that? I have been ‘professored’ all my life. You don’t know how I yearn--like a small boy--to be called ‘Mr.’”

“Mr.” was agreed upon by Mrs. Levering, although Kate demurred.

“We always call you ‘Allen Blynn’ when we talk of you here at home,” she remarked thoughtfully. “I always say ‘Allen.’ You call me Kate; perhaps I had better dub you--”

“‘Pete’--for Petruchio,” he joked. “You can’t tell, you know. Fine weather like this, the germ is everywhere.” He was reminding her of his theory that love was a contagion.

“I fear you are immune,” she looked up from her embroidery frame and searched his face comically.

His eyes had the far-off stare of men who dream much. Your thinker is no great lover, she thought. He is too busy with the affections of his brain, the little loves of his own creation; even in their most animated conversations they seem only to half attend to what is going on about them.

“Please don’t say that,” Blynn protested. “Why, vaccination takes on me terribly. I am awfully susceptible. You don’t know how I want to be--uh--quarantined and posted as a dangerous case.”

Mrs. Levering arose. “Of all nasty talk!” she smiled. “Germs and disease! I fear I don’t quite follow you two young persons. And, besides, there is a garden in the back of the house that demands my inspection. Ugh! How can you laugh in the same breath with germs!” She moved off toward her garden.

“Where’s the child?” Blynn looked toward the “smitty.”

“What child?” Kate followed his gaze. “Oh, Gorgas? Child! You haven’t seen her since spring, have you? That child is sprouting, I tell you. She’s taller than I, by an inch or two. And her gowns! She’s been spreading herself lately! Gracious! You won’t dare to call her child--”

“Why, she’s only seventeen!”

“In years, yes; but in experience and general get-up she is twenty-five. Really, she’s quite stunning. It’s made me spruce up, I can tell you.... But, I’m not sorry, you know.... I say, I’m not sorry.”

“Why?” coming back abruptly to the lady before him.

“If Bianca has enough swains Katherina may have a chance with the left-overs.”

“Do you recall the advice I gave you the last time we were talking on this subject!” Blynn leaned forward and grew earnest.

She nodded and exhibited her embroidery.

“This is all I’m fit for.”

“Don’t say that. It isn’t fair to yourself, and it isn’t true. I wish you would let me take you in hand. I have had boys who have felt just as you do, until I enticed them really to get started at something.”

She agreed that it sounded exciting, but Petruchio might come along; one was never without hope; and then, smash! would go all the toil.

He pondered over that, and questioned why a woman’s occupation should go smash! just because she married.

“Women don’t want any other occupation,” she confessed. “I don’t.”

“I bet a dollar it’s pure use and wont!” he exclaimed. “Nobody can tell what is just custom and what is not, until after we’re dead a thousand years. Women don’t throw themselves into careers with the same daring energy as men, because they have to keep such a terrible look-out for marriage. At any moment, from around the corner, as you once said, their future may assail them. It’s almost as if a young man got up in the morning a barrel-maker and by night found himself a deep-sea diver! That’s disconcerting. I should think the excitement of guessing what might happen would play havoc with that cooperage business.”

They speculated on the uncertainty of a girl’s life; uncertain until some man decided for her.

“You see,” Kate explained. “A boy has his fortune to make and knows it depends upon a lot of acquired qualities; and unless he’s exceptional he can predict pretty well what that fortune is going to be. All that he has to do is to look at his father. Now a girl, no matter what her father or mother may be, has every chance in the world. A prince might choose her--haven’t royal dukes married chorus girls?--or the grocer’s apprentice, or the next governor of the State, or--the head of the division of English.”

He acknowledged the point, but his mind was concentrated on something else.

“And nobody may choose her at all,” he added significantly.

“But she won’t know that till she’s dead,” Kate responded gaily. “And not even then, perhaps--‘There is hope beyond the grave,’ you know!”

“There’s my point,” he stuck out an argumentative finger, his earnest eye quite showing that he had missed her light pleasantry. “She ought to know it long before. She ought to face the fact of the million or so of unmarried women--good, fine women, too. She ought to presume from the very beginning--her mother should put it into her head--that in all probability she will not marry. The dreams should be deliberately shaken out of her; the years of pretty primping and ogling I would abolish without a qualm. The women on parade! Ugh! I fly from them and find shelter with the aged married ones.

“Now you,” he turned to her with such frankness as quite to disarm the direct speech. “You live in a village, revolving in an eddy; it would be a sheer accident if your mate found you.”

“I might take Eve’s choice,” she reflected. How amused she seemed!

“What was that?” he interrupted his argument. The phrase was new to him.

“The only man available.”

“Ah! Eve’s choice! The only man available and the man God created for her. That’s a wonderful choice and a rare combination in history, you must admit.”

No; she must face the facts. She was a member of the most unmarriageable class of women, those who are neither rich nor poor, yet who sit at home unknown.

Mrs. Levering could be seen occasionally hovering over her garden. Once or twice she stood erect, her ample figure surrounded by all the flowers of June, and surveyed with satisfaction the two earnest young persons. A few more such _tête-à-têtes_, that was all. Let them be together. Somehow, she felt that she had managed things excellently. Some persons would take credit for the laws of nature. If the sun should shine brightly on her lawn party she would accept congratulations as if it were a right tribute to her cleverness.

“You’ll do, Allen Blynn,” Mrs. Levering remarked to a drooping rose-bud. Allen was talking earnestly with head and hands. Kate seemed to be looking absently away. “But Keyser Levering will have to be spoken to,” she added. “I’m afraid she is too cold.”

Then she ordered Louisa to prepare a platter of sweet cakes and an iced lemon drink, carefully concocted to suit the warm weather.

She might have recalled the order if she had known at that moment Allen Blynn was proving to Keyser Levering that as marrying for her was probably out of the question it behooved her instantly to find a sensible life-job!

And she found it. By accident the work that she was destined to do unfolded to her. And by the same accident Allen Blynn found his own work.

XXII

TOP-O’-THE-HILL

Through the deep Hood of the woods a murmur seemed to creep, The Schuylkill whispering in a voice of sleep. All else was still. The oxen from their plows Rested at last, and from their long day’s browse Came the dun files of Krisheim’s home-bound cows.

--From _The Pennsylvania Pilgrim_.

As Mrs. Levering, flanked by Louisa and the refreshments, moved toward them, Kate shifted the subject.

“Did you know I have been coaching the Croft boy?”

“No!” he was surprised. “He hasn’t said anything to me about it. Since when?”

“Practically all winter.”

“Well! well!” he ejaculated. “I thought that chap was coming up strong. You quite take the wind out of my sails. I had been giving myself all sorts of kudos over that case. And here it’s you, all the time. How did it happen?”

“He brought me over one of your letters,” she explained as she helped with sugar. “Your stenographer by-the-hour had mixed up an important direction. He disliked to ask you about it--you know how shy he is--so he put it to me. I puzzled it out; we became very well acquainted and began to hold regular irregular sessions together.... I enjoyed your letters immensely. Once, you took him to task about a stupid error which was really mine. He had a good laugh at me, I can tell you. Isn’t he a pathetic little fellow?”

“He’ll be a great thinker some day,” Blynn avowed. “You’ll be proud of your share in the making of him.”

Mrs. Levering was pleased to hear them discussing methods of pedagogy so intimately.

“You’ll have Keyser turning school-mistress, yet,” she suggested. But her smile showed that she had no such fear.

“And why not!” Blynn seized the idea. “Oh, I don’t mean the regular kind; normal training, public school and all that sort of thing. That’s fine, too; but it’s overcrowded with women, and the whole business is set like a plaster cast. I almost despair of seeing any development there; routine and habit have fastened themselves upon the institution. I have dreams of another kind of teacher, something like Pestalozzi, gathering his little ones about him and teaching them without ever their being aware.”

He told them about Pestalozzi. When the scourge of war swept over Switzerland in 1798 neither men nor women were spared. It was a massacre. Pestalozzi’s heart went out to the children. In a ruined convent on the shores of Lake Lucerne, he gathered the deserted little ones about him and shared their sufferings. They had neither home nor parents, and they were hungry. “I cannot fight,” he said; “I cannot raise my hand against my brother; but the children of my brother, the fatherless children, these I can serve, their piteous little bodies I can save, and their starving desolate souls.” Blynn darted into the library and brought out a book and read them Pestalozzi’s own story. “‘My hand lay in their hand, my eye was their eye, my tears flowed with their tears, and my laughter mingled with their laughter. They were out of the raging world; they were with me, and I was with them. Their meat was mine, their drink was mine. I had nothing, no friends, no servants; I had them alone. When they were well I stood in their midst; when they were ill I was at their side. I was the last who went to bed at night, the first who rose in the morning. Even in bed I prayed and talked with them until they were asleep,--they wished it to be so.’”

Blynn closed the book reverently. “They say he was an unhandsome man, but that he had a wonderful transforming smile. He saw into the heart of children. I should be happy if I were that sort.

“My dream is to have just such a school,” Blynn continued. “I have even gone as far as to pick out the site--off in Cresheim Valley. We should have to select our teachers with the utmost care. They must be gifted to communicate freely with children. Communication is everything. I don’t care much about what they know, although we must have skill there, too, especially in art work and languages; but the main thing in teaching is not knowledge, but wisdom.”

Mrs. Levering voiced the discontent of parents with schools as they are and expressed the belief that there would be no difficulty in securing paying pupils.

“It would be a great joy to spend one’s life at that task,” he mused.

“Why don’t you?” Kate inquired quietly.

Well, he was a professor of English; that was the first reason. His studies had all been to prepare him for scholarship. One could not go against one’s life preparation. The main reason seemed to be the matter of expense. Elisha might begin such an undertaking, but not without the ravens. It costs money even to do good. To open such a school and keep it going would require a never-ending store of health and good cheer. The vitality of the staff would be absolutely essential to its life. Worry over money or, worse, the necessity of putting good energy into outside work--that would wear down the most courageous spirit and would mean slow failure.

But his mind was on the theme. He sketched the ideal environment for children as he saw it clear before him. There should be much out-of-doors, and glorious muscle-stretching play; health should come first, and then the searching discovery of individual aptitude. The world’s store of necessary information would be transferred as naturally and as imperceptibly as growth. The children would never once object; the enormous turbines of curiosity would actually drive them along; give a child half a chance and he will question himself into intelligence.

And what a pace these youngsters would travel! He had one boy--one of his “cases” whom he taught personally and by correspondence--who had done four years of grammar school work in eight months.

“He was not forced,” Blynn explained; “he was enticed to discover his speed. We dawdle mightily in our long years of preparation. Think of deciding before you were born that you must not study fractions until you are eleven years of age! You should see some of my six-year-old lads eat up fractions! They love ’em! Especially the vulgar and the improper ones!”

“Allen Blynn,” Kate remarked, “with all your gift for discovering the genius of others, you haven’t found out your own ability.”

“And what is that, pray?”

“At heart you’re not really a college professor--”

“I believe you,” earnestly. “I’m afraid I ‘profess’ for a livelihood and for the excitement that’s in it. The racket I’ve stirred up in Holden; phew! But what can I do?” he spread out his hands pathetically. “I am ‘professing’ because scholarship is not endowed. Scholarship and teaching! They are the antipodes! Scratch a fine scholar and you’ll probably find a wretched teacher.”

“I doubt if you are even a scholar,” she persisted.

“Please be more careful, Keyser,” Mrs. Levering looked up from her sewing. “You mustn’t be flippant, you know. That’s _one_ of the things the Leverings do not do, whatever else they may be guilty of.”

“I’m very much in earnest, mother,” Kate continued. “Allen Blynn is a genius with little children. He should be a primary teacher, that’s--”

“Gracious!” Mrs. Levering stared. “Why not hire him as a coachman or gardener! Primary teacher! That’s a sort of public nursery governess, isn’t it?”

Blynn was regarding Kate in deep perplexity.

“Remember Pestalozzi,” she ignored her mother. “You have just his spirit and just his gift. You have something of his face, too. Oh, I know they say he was a plain man, but they called Lincoln that. Few people understand the beauty of ruggedness--”

“Thanks,” he bowed.

“Children always understand. And they thoroughly comprehend you, Allen Blynn. I have watched you at your work. It’s--it’s just great! That’s _your_ job, sir!”

“Oh, I hope you’re right,” he glowed innocently. “Wouldn’t it be fine! You could help-- There! That’s your job, madam!”

“And Gorgas could do the shop end--” Kate put in enthusiastically.

“And Bardek!” remembered Allen. “Wouldn’t he be a cracker-jack at the languages!--”

“And Mac,” remarked Mrs. Levering satirically. “He could teach horsemanship and stabling.”

“Why not!” exclaimed both Kate and Allen. “Mac cares for horses the way everybody should care for children,” said one. “He’s the sort of teacher I should want for myself,” said the other.

And so they chattered until Allen remembered that the lack of funds stood forever in the way.

“But I couldn’t finance it,” he concluded gloomily. “I’m no good at the money business. If a man owed me fifty dollars--there are several who do!--I’d never get it unless he volunteered to pay. That’s the reason I enjoy my ‘cases’ so much. If anyone forced me to accept money I would decamp. I have no financial ability.”

“Neither had Pestalozzi,” Kate reminded him.

“To be sure he hadn’t,” he mused. “But that’s why he failed.”

“But he didn’t have a manager.”

“Neither have I.”

“Let me take the post?”

For the first time Mrs. Levering saw some sense in their talk. A secret admiration for the daughter’s astuteness almost showed in her face.

“Just you let Keyser manage for you, Mr. Blynn,” the mother nodded her head significantly. “She runs this house--and everybody in it. When it comes to money Keyser can do wonders on nothing.”

“I can believe it,” laughed Blynn. “Pennsylvania-German thrift is notorious. But how could you ‘manage’? We haven’t a red cent.”

“Let us see,” Kate searched among her sewing things for paper and pencil. “What is your income outside of your salary at Holden?”

“How _can_ you be so impertinent?” the mother interfered.

“Oh, no,” Blynn urged. “This is not impertinent, it’s important. She should ask that first. It will bring the school of cards down at the first shot. Outside of salary and lectures and writings, my sure income is exactly $96 per annum, the rental of Bardek’s house. I have a half-dozen other small properties. Sometimes I have had as much as $600 a year. It practically put me through college. Of course, mother has her own. Just at present I am pulling about $300. The reason I know is that I have just had an annual report from the agent. But Bardek is the only sure tenant. The dream’s up, my lady; oats is too high.”

“Do you think so?” she was calmly figuring. “Please let me do the managering, if I am to be manager.” After a moment or two of consideration she looked up satisfied. But first she asked questions. They included a complete list of his “cases.” Alongside of each one she checked those who could pay and those who could not.

“Here’s my scheme,” she showed him her paper. “I’ll rent you five acres of woodland for the grounds. There’s a good stone house there. It needs fixing up. I’ll attend to that. It’s just off the old mill above Cresheim Creek, where the road forks and goes up, you know, at the top of the hill.”

“‘Top-o’-the-Hill!’” he exclaimed. “We’ll call it ‘Top-o’-the-Hill.’ But,” ruefully, “where are we going to get the rent?”

“On the premises,” she continued. “I shall retain 51% of the stock and demand one wild rose paid to me every year with proper literary ceremonies.”

“A Pageant of the Wild Rose,” said he. “We shall crown you queen and I will recite. Listen! Wouldn’t this be nice and lugubrious. It’s old Dick Fanshawe’s fancy of complimenting his lady-love three hundred years ago.”

He began with, “Blown in the morning, thou shalt fade ere noon”--but she interrupted at the first line.

“I should particularly fancy that when I am growing aged and the petals begin to drop off. But to come down to business,” the manager referred to her paper; “would keeping up your outside lectures be too much for you?”

“Not at all,” he rejoined. “That is mere play. I figured out once that I could just about make a living by giving one or two series each year.”

“Well, then, that’s disposed of,” she resumed. “We could charge $100 a year to each pupil I have checked on this list, and let the others come in free. Bardek and Gorgas and I would serve without pay. I don’t need it and the other two are making lots of money. They really ought to contribute something. We can guarantee you, with your lectures and your rentals,” she verified carefully the totals in her memoranda, “two thousand a year at the least, which ought to be enough. When we can afford it we’ll take all your time. And we’ll see about those houses of yours, too; just put them in my hands and I’ll boost your cash account, I have some of that same sort of property myself and you bet your buttons I don’t let any agent monkey with them.”

Gorgas bounded in with a roseate greeting, and after her gown had been admired the project was gone over again.

“I’d love it,” she chirped. “Let me pay all the bills. I’ve got loads of money.”

They talked of the business and of the proposal for awhile and then drifted into an animated discussion of methods. The children must spend the whole day with them. There would be a fine midday dinner, a powerful educational instrument. They would teach the three r’s and all the informational necessities, but they would also cultivate the graces of cheerfulness, unselfishness, fair play, courage, restraint and table manners. There should be no scoldings and no punishments; and while they might talk and sing and even dance in languages, there should be no conjugations! And there would be tree climbing, and sledding, baseball and tennis and swimming and skating and riding, and dancing, all a part of the course of study. They even got so far as outlining a prospectus and selecting a name. Of a host of suggestions, “Top-o’-the-Hill” remained first choice.

“It is from the top of that hill,” said Blynn, “that I always see Whittier’s ‘dun files of Krisheim’s home-bound cows’ and hear them clanking their bells up the rough road. Do you know, milady,” he turned to Kate, “that John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a considerable poem on our little Valley?”

“Did he?” she asked, with a smiling lack of interest. “I am not very poetic, you know--just a practical person who owns some earth, the very spot for your school.”

A messenger-boy bicycled slowly along the road, peering here and there at houses on either side. He stopped to inquire at the Williams’ and came back to the Levering gate. Mrs. Levering walked forward. Gorgas, Kate, and Allen were lost in their discussion.

“It’s a telegram for you, Mr. Blynn,” Mrs. Levering handed him the envelope. “Your mother sent him over here. It is prepaid. I have signed for you.”

His face, after he had read the paper carefully, gave the three women a fright, but he hastened to reassure them.

“Perhaps it is good news,” he said; “I don’t know. It really frightens me.” He searched their faces hesitantly, then decided. “I am told to keep this information strictly to myself, but I’m sure it will not do harm to tell you, especially Gorgas and Kate, after all your beautiful plans. I’m afraid they’re knocked sky-high. It is from Diccon. He is at Holden now attending a special meeting of the trustees. Oh, it’s really dreadful.”

He read:

“Strictly private information not yet made public. President Galt will resign to take effect next term. He goes on retirement at full salary. Trustees to engineer a monster farewell dinner of alumni. He goes out covered with laurels. Says he recognizes time to make a climax of his life-work and will leave the working out of the new plans to younger hands. He is not unfavorable to you as his successor. Straw vote of board shows you to be the candidate of majority for presidency. Come to Holden immediately. Don’t see anybody; don’t decide anything. Above all, don’t talk. Remember you know nothing. Wire.

“DICCON.”

“How perfectly splendid!” exclaimed Mrs. Levering.

The other members of the group looked like a trio of sentenced convicts.

“How can you say that, mother!” Kate spoke sharply. “Everything was so lovely--and now there’ll be no Top-o’-the-Hill.”

“It’s beastly,” snapped Gorgas. “I hate Holden; always did. Squabbling, little, petty kid-factory.”

“It’s awful!” murmured the candidate of a majority of the trustees.

But eventually they talked off their disappointment and began to see things from a less personal point of view. Blynn showed them the absurdity of his own qualifications; there were other men in the faculty to whom the elevation would be not only welcome but deserving.

“I am an accident,” he went on. “I got into the limelight. I took other men’s ideas and had the spokesman rôle. Everybody understood; I made no secret of it. Some folks can talk and others can’t. That’s all there is to it.... I suppose I’m a dramatic sort of chap. Diccon says I am. I get heated up with enthusiasm, the preacher in me comes to the front, and I splutter figures of speech.... In my lectures it comes out, and when I get the most applause,” he bowed his head, “I am the most ashamed. I like to thrill ’em, work the stops, soft pedal, _vox humana_ and all that. I don’t mean to play on their feelings. I am honest with my own feelings but--there’s the trouble!--I do have feelings; and I show ’em.

“It’s my running tongue that got me in this fix. Why does everybody put such foolish value on the talker! Talkers ought to be suppressed!”

Gorgas came to her senses first.

“I’m over my mad now,” she said. “Of course, you’ve got to go, whether you want to or not. They call it duty, I believe. That means something disagreeable that your insides won’t let you shirk. You can’t back out, Allen Blynn. I advised you to go to Holden. In fact, I had just this thing in mind. I wanted you to be big and famous and talked about. Well, you are. I’m not happy about it. This splendid idea of a school in Cresheim Valley where we could all work together and be somebodies ourselves--it’s an awful come-down to have to chuck it--”

“Gorgas!” mildly from Mrs. Levering. “That talk doesn’t go at all with your lady-like clothes. I wish you wouldn’t say ‘chuck it.’”

“Mother, I’m almost tempted to say ‘Rats!’”

“Horrors!” the mother flung up her hands. “Say ‘chuck it’ if you must. That other word is positively vulgar. I can’t see why so many nice young boys and girls use such slang. Slang of the right sort, Mr. Blynn, I don’t mind; but the latest corruptions of the language are just low. Don’t toss those gloves on the ground, Gorgas, even if you do pay for them yourself. You have no proper reverence for fine clothes.”

“I’m ready to swear, mother, at any moment. Look out!” Gorgas smiled grimly.

“_Ein tousand ein hundred ein und zwanzig!_” helped Blynn. He was beginning to recover from the shock.

“_Name of the name of a pipe!_” she added, and suggested, “Let’s talk it over with Bardek.”

“Good!” everyone agreed, and they were off to the white cottage.

Bardek was riding both children on his back, a French lancer charging flying Germans. The air was full of rippling French, fierce manifestations of ancient hatred. The children were echoing every annihilating threat.

“You see at once a lesson in patriotism and savagery and the French language,” he explained after he had dismissed the cavalry. “The professor has come back. Good!” He shook hands effusively. “Do not be afraid. I will not kiss you. See! I hold myself back. It is for me a lesson in courage; I subdue the flesh.” He beat his breast like St. Jerome. “Sit, children,” he pointed to the collection of large flat-topped rocks which flanked his door.

They talked all together and told him of “Top-o’-the-Hill” and the imminent presidency of Holden. The latter topic did not reach Bardek at all.

“That Top-o’-the-Hill,”--he called it “Tope-o-t’-Heel”--“it is grand! I would like that--oh, so much. The ‘smithy’ it is good--it keep me alive and it make me forget--but to teach the little children, zat, my friends,” tears came to his eyes and his English went to pieces, “is what I--it is what--in English I cannot,” he blurted in torrential French. “That is what I am, teacher of children. In École Nouvelle at Grenoble I taught the little ones the languages! I can do that; ah, how well I can do that!--_I have the certificate of the University of Naples!_” he roared, and struck an attitude. “_And I am bachelier ès lettres de l’Université de Bordeaux!_”

The group was tremendously impressed. They told him so noisily, and soothed his pride.

“But in my silliness,” he slipped into his normal self, “I fight the big Austrian and then I must go away. This I should not tell you, but--it is told.”

It was hard to break his enthusiasm. Little by little it came to him that Top-o’-the-Hill was a dream. He held himself in with great restraint while Holden and its presidency was put before him.

“You should go, my friend,” he advised quietly. “It is a great honor--to be president of a big university and you so young. These other little schools for little fellows, they can be made by anybody; but the university, it is vairy important. When the time comes to succeed, one must not go back of the gods who send things. I have always had my will; I have laughed at fortune and I have been happy. But I know what it is to have the great thought in the brain to go up, up, up and be a man famous. They tell me you have that already. They talk about you out in the great world there,” he seemed deeply thoughtful over such honors. “And it is right. You are good. And you should not turn away from the big world and be like ol’ Bardek, who has nothings but for you kind friends. It is not always happy to be exile and live like pig.... So we must not have the little school at the top o’ the hill? It is a great pity--for me, and for the little fellows. _Nom d’une pipe!_” he grew more and more agitated. “What a thing to choose between, honors and presidents--and the little fellows. Oh, it is nice to have your name in beeg preent and to have all the little men bow and look up at you--but _nom du nom d’une pipe!_” His agitation increased. “It would not do to make Bardek to choose. I would put in one hand all the great nothings of the universities and poof!” he blew savagely. “It is wort’ one good laugh--jus’ that.... But,” he recovered himself, “men are not the same. And it is good. A world full of Bardeks! Hoi, yoi! It would be the ol’ devil who would have to laugh.... I do not want to discourage you, my friend. Go to your little place. The world will call it with big name. Maybe you, after while, will believe it, too. That is the way wit’ man. Go on! Be busy all day at typewriter. Run! Hurry!... Smile and laugh when you would better cry! Go up! Be success! But I am so sorry that we not have zat Tope-o’-t’-Heel. _Nom d’une pipe!_”

Bardek turned abruptly and marched like a corporal of the guard straight into his white cottage. Kate stepped on ahead down the path and disappeared within the house. Gorgas pumped Allen’s hand at parting as if to assure him that although convicted and sentenced she would stand by him no matter what public opinion said.

“This spoils something else for me,” she said. “I can’t talk about it now. Don’t ask. When do you go up to Holden?”

“Tonight, I fear,” he confessed guiltily.

“You will write to me?”

“Oh, I shall be gone for only a day or two, a week at the most. But I’ll write anyway,” he read her face, “though you may have to be satisfied with a dictated family letter.”

“That’s better than silence.”

He could think of nothing to say, he the much heralded talker! Her rather heavy voice had given an intonation to the sentence which seemed to hold it in the air. “That’s better than silence.”

“It sounds like the ending of Hamlet,” he managed to be gay. “‘The rest is silence,’ you know. Goodby, child.”

“Aufwiederhören, mein guter Kamarade.”

“Aufwiederhören?” he repeated. “You shall hear from me if I have to send couriers!”