BOOK FOUR

Canaan

“Speak when you’re spoken to!” the Queen sharply interrupted her.

“But if everybody obeyed that rule,” said Alice ... “and if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other person always waited for _you_ to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything....”

XXIII

MY LORD AND EKE MY MASTER

But Gorgas did not hear from Allen Blynn, nor did he send couriers. For nearly a week he permitted himself to be led about by Diccon in the rôle of a “candidate,” growing each day more rebellious, and finally he had decamped. There was one important luncheon “to meet Professor Allen Blynn” which had to get along without its chief guest. The professor had seized his grip and fled. Rumor had it that he had buried himself in the University library, but Gorgas soon discovered that he had been seen under his own shade trees with his young pupils; and there she found him.

He looked older, she noted as she peered cautiously at him through a hedge. And what was that on the end of his chin which waggled as he talked? Mercy! It was the beginnings of a beard! That tuft was certainly the sign of a man absorbed in his affairs or worried beyond peradventure.

For some time she watched him through the hedge--“Getting used to the chin-thing,” she told him later. Howard Croft, the cripple boy, was reading aloud from a portentous history of philosophy; the two seemed to be stopping at every sentence to talk it out. She had rarely seen Allen Blynn so terribly in earnest.

When she finally stepped through the hedge and came up to the studious pair, Allen gave her a nod, as much as to say, “Sit down and pretend to be busy or you’ll frighten this shy bird off.”

For an hour she sketched beards of all nations, from Belshazzarian curls to the latest French twist, adroitly arranging it so that the boy could not see her.

“You like to make folks suffer, Allen Blynn,” Gorgas scolded gently after the boy had gone. “How do you suppose the Leverings have stood all this waiting for you to come over and tell us the latest? I just couldn’t stand it any longer. If I don’t hear all about Holden and other things I’ll blow up. I’m to take you back with me for dinner. The old crowd--some of them--are to drop in. Oh, the papers have told everything, so you needn’t fear.”

And all the time her mirthful eyes were fastened on his chin.

“I cannot talk about it,” his lips closed firmly. “It makes me ill even to think of it. That’s why I have been working on the youngsters so solidly. It’s the only antidote.”

She broke into sudden laughter. “It waggles when you talk.” She imitated by thrusting her own chin up and down grotesquely. “Why--oh, why did you do it?”

“Oh!” he came out of his perplexity. “My Van Dyke? A barber persuaded me. My chin is all bristles, and it was too sensitive for shaving. He fixed it this way, and I have forgotten to remove it.”

“I thought maybe it was penance for sins,” she choked back her laughter.

“Don’t you like it?”

“Yes,” she steadied herself. “I like--anything that’s funny!... Wait.... I thought I was used to it, but I see it’ll take some time.... There! I’ll be good and won’t laugh at the big man. Come!” she tapped him cheerfully on the arm. “Come along with me. We’ve wasted loads of time already.... And trust that crowd for making you forget. When they see that--whisker! oh!” she held her handkerchief to her mouth. “You are _too_ funny, Allen Blynn! They’ll want you to talk all night--to see--it go up and down!”

As they walked along the shaded streets, she ceased joking him, except for an occasional mischievous peer around at the tufted chin. His good humor was equal to hers; but they soon settled into a more serious chat.

The dinner had some of its old-time gaiety and irresponsibility. Morris and Bea Wilcox were at the announcement stage and therefore open to persistent raillery. Diccon was there to keep the topic away from Holden, and Betty and Mary had brought their young husbands. Far in the background, seated like an accustomed idol, Leopold smiled wisely over the whole.

One may be sure that Blynn’s beard was greeted with excess of emotion. Beards were a rarity then; they were restricted by tacit law to dentists, young physicians, returning European tourists, and war veterans.

Almost the only difference between these dinner-parties and the others of five years ago was that they broke up earlier. There were trains to catch; there was the next day’s work; and in some cases there had begun to be babies to go back to. By ten o’clock Allen Blynn was alone with the Leverings.

Everyone had avoided the topic of Holden with obvious premeditation. Diccon had passed the word along to “drop it,” but in the more intimate situation with the Leverings questions were bound to arise.

“Diccon will have to do without me,” Allen spoke up with sudden firmness. “I am a candidate, I suppose; but I refuse to campaign.”

Diccon had managed things with distressing brilliancy. Doubting members of the trustees had to be dined and talked into reason. And they had to be paid.

“Paid?” Kate and Gorgas asked together. Mrs. Levering had elected to keep out of the conversation; her instinctive interest was to pilot the boat, not to take part in the ship’s concert.

“Yes, paid,” nodded Blynn grimly. “Paid in blood.”

“Oh,” the girls gasped in relief. Blood was permitted; money, never.

“Yes,” he explained; “I had to entertain, tell sprightly stories, plunge into theories of education, and act all the while with sweeping smile and glittering eye--and voluble! as Tutivillus himself. And not just to one person or to one group of persons, mind you; but to every Tom, Dick and Harry whom Diccon sicked on me. If they had come in battalions I could have done it, but they came in single file. When Diccon finally started to use me, we had dinners every night and luncheons every day, except one day, when we had two luncheons. Diccon said there was no other way out of it.”

“I wouldn’t have done that for a peck of presidents,” said Gorgas firmly. “I’d have been myself.”

“Myself!” echoed Allen. “Bless my soul! Myself during that whole trip was a silent, sullen, nasty-tongued person. If I had ever let myself out of the box he would have first lambasted the whole crew and then sunk back into a silent scowl. You know how it is. Haven’t you done the same thing when you were the charming hostess?” Blynn appealed to them.

“Oh, yes, indeed,” everyone chorused, including Mrs. Levering.

“There are times,” Kate remembered, “when I am strongly tempted to have fake hysterics in the middle of the dinner, just to drive them home.”

“Exactly!” he nodded firmly. “So I avoided a scene and drove myself home.” And therefore, one day he did not “meet” one fussy little member.

“I just couldn’t stand that fellow,” Blynn grew rigid. “He is a puffy-looking, self-assertive sort of nobody. Everybody knows that he was appointed on the board because he is a relative of a man who has a friend who was able to influence somebody who knew somebody who could get him the appointment--one of those absurd selections that happen every now and then in America, due to the hysteric ambition of some small person, helped out by the easy-going American character. Well, this Nobody presumes to busy himself with the affairs of Holden, talks about it, bothers everybody as if he really had judgment. I couldn’t trust myself near him. If he had got off any of those loud-mouthed advices of his, before others, too, I’d have shut him up with his own history. So I concluded that the best thing I could do for Diccon was to vanish. I came home and locked myself up in the University library and hit on a fine trail--I analyzed pretty much all the ways in which the Elizabethan courtier complimented his lady. There’s little in it for subtle minds, but it will make a splendid popular lecture.”

Then, to avoid what was obviously to him a distressing remembrance, he dropped Holden and its affairs and told them about the gallant Elizabethan gentlemen.

“I wonder what the Elizabethan women thought about all that stuff,” the practical Gorgas summed up.

“It isn’t all stuff,” protested the professor.

“Didn’t the ladies ever reply?” questioned Kate.

“Not a word,” said Allen. “Their silence is profound. Every mother’s son was busy writing sonnets to his mistress’ eyebrow, but the ladies stood pat. The secret of high diplomacy is, Never divulge; keep ’em guessing. And they did!”

“I wish they had written,” Gorgas was thoughtful.

“No doubt they felt things as keenly as the men.... All the men wore beards, I suppose?” she continued irrelevantly.

“Undoubtedly,” Blynn’s mind was rarely personal. The merry face of Gorgas, he did not note at all; nor her attempts, with hand at mouth, to hold back a volume of laughter; nor Kate’s furtive, elderly signal of rebuke to the grinning sister. With eye mostly upon Kate, who was presenting a polite face of assumed interest, the young professor poured forth a dissertation on Elizabethan tonsorial fashions. He was summing up his conclusions when his attention was attracted by a badly suppressed squeak of laughter from Gorgas. “The beard,” he was saying, “was the sign of the gentleman, and the sign of the man. Of course they--what are you grinning at, you Cheshire kitten? Oh! see here, I’ll pluck this thing off tomorrow. I didn’t mean to wear it, anyway. It was forced on me by a villainous barber.”

Everyone protested except Gorgas.

“I think you had better take it off,” she shook her head. “I’ve been bubbling with shut-in laughter all evening. I like fun, but this--is--carrying things a little--too far.” She pushed her laughter back with her handkerchief. “I don’t wonder the Elizabethan ladies didn’t reply. Poems praising men’s eyes and noses and beards! Là! là! _là!_ là! That would be _too_ funny!”

It was a relief to get away from Holden and its small politics. Elizabethan lyrics were such a remove. So he left them in a cheerful mood and promised to come back soon, with his notes, and let them have his amorous studies, that substitute for fussy little trustees.

The next morning his mail brought him an unsigned communication in the sprawling hand of Gorgas Levering. Evidently she had penned it after he had gone the night before. It read:

To My Lord and Eke My Master

Thy beard is waggling in my thoughts, I find, Oh, lord and master, chosen of my heart; Thy loving prattle have I heard but part, The waggling beard distracted all my mind. And those gray eyes--or are they slightly green?-- I did not see, nor either freckled cheek, Nor teeth, nor ear, nor bald spot on the peak: The waggle, waggle, waggle held the scene.

I like thee, master, for thy forehead seared By crash of pewters foaming to the brink; I like thee, master, for thy fingers pink That never once hath honest labor smeared; I like thee for thy nose’s Roman kink, But Zooks! I _love_ that waggle, waggle beard.

To which was added,

P.S. But I don’t. I hate it.

XXIV

THE HOLD-UP

Allen Blynn’s smile at breakfast that morning was quite Pestalozzian. The mother looked across at him with much the same seraphic glow, simply reflected.

“Just listen to this from Gorgas, mother. It’s a perfect little bit of satire. Oh, this is rich!” He read with outright joy.

“I like thee, master, for thy fingers pink That never once hath honest labor smeared; I like thee for thy nose’s Roman kink, But Zooks! I _love_ that waggle, waggle beard!”

The mother was keen enough to see the cleverness and as well the poet’s criticism of her son’s tuft of beard.

“It is rather rough, my dear,” she looked over mildly.

“Do you think so?” he was surprised. “That’s remarkably smooth verse, mother. It just flows straight to the point. And the sonnet structure! It’s perfect. I don’t think it a bit rough, mother.”

“I was not considering the verse, my dear,” she managed to say. “Motherlike, I was thinking only of my son’s ornamented chin. It _is_ rather rough and bristly--the chin, not the sonnet. And it does--uh--waggle when you talk, my dear.”

“It goes today, mother,” he eyed the postscript carefully. “I’ve pledged my word.” But his mind went out to the little girl who was ever tossing odd rhymes at him. “I didn’t suspect she could put anything into such shape as this. We’ve been reading a lot of verse together; it has counted; no doubt, it has counted.” The Pestalozzian smile of triumph was still on his face.

“What wonders you have done with Gorgas,” the mother shared his pride.

That brought him down like a shot.

“Nonsense!” he exploded. “She’s the only one of all my children who has baffled me. Everything she has is her own. I try to teach her one thing, she comes forth with something different and unexpected--like this,” flourishing the sonnet. “She picks her own way about. Some children will bloom in spite of teachers; but we teachers have a habit of taking credit for all our smart ones. Did you ever try to stop a dandelion from thriving?”

Another letter of his small packet was not so consoling.

“Schmuhl is in town!” he ejaculated. “Diccon says I must have luncheon with him at the Union League.”

“And pray, who is Schmuhl?”

“A trustee and a big wig,” he explained, but without enthusiasm. “He’s a corporation lawyer; never seems to work; but he does work, like a rat, in the dark. He’s the ‘legislative man’ at Holden. He can do anything with law-makers. He seems thoroughly gentle and harmless. But ... I will not meet him.”

“Why, my dear?” the mother asked.

“I shall resign from Holden College and demand that my name shall not be considered for the presidency,” he went on sternly.

“If it worries you, my dear,” the mother spoke complacently; she had enormous confidence that anything her boy should decide to do would be therefore exactly right.

“Without an atom of proof I sense this Schmuhl. He makes laws--how, I do not know, but I strongly suspect the method. Laws are essential to colleges that depend partly on state appropriations. Therefore I would need Schmuhl. And I decline to need him! It would be a continuous ‘hold-up’ and I decline to be ‘held up’ by the Schmuhls of this world. They call him respectable; I call him infamous, and I refuse to link my life with his!”

Almost abruptly he left for his writing desk. In a short while he was trudging down the street with letters in his hand. He strode forward indignantly, and he dropped the letters in the corner mail box with something of the thrust of a righteous man spurning evil. “Top-o’-the Hill” began to loom up as a blessed certainty.

He strode into a barbershop and had the offending beard removed; and still striding, he went on to the Leverings. On the lawn he met Bardek, Kate, and Gorgas; they had not ceased discussing the fortunes of Allen. “I have resigned from Holden; I will not be a candidate,” he announced bluntly. Briefly he sketched his reasons.

Gorgas and Kate received the news with amazement. Already they had begun to feel some of the pride of their friend’s success. As Bardek had hinted, the “little place” was being called a big name by the world; some of the world’s valuation was slowly changing their own. It would seem almost like a defeat to back out now. They even forgot to notice the absence of the beard.

“It would mean machination and continual intrigue,” Blynn shook his head firmly. “And I’m not the man for that. Good old Galt. Somehow I begin to see his side of the thing. A fine, old sport he was, too; he never ‘peached.’ No matter how hard they ran him he never whimpered. I wonder what he thought of me--a tricky politician, I guess, shouting for ‘the youth of America’ and secretly pulling wires for the presidency. Ugh! What a job!”

“My dear good friend,” Bardek interposed. “This President Galt, I know him; he is good sport, yes; and he twist about and turn and you cannot catch him--yes; I know him. But also! He know you. That is the business of wise old Galts to know peoples. Oh, he know you. From the day he first see you he know you. Your face, it is all on the outside--”

“Gracious! I hope so,” he stroked his face thoughtfully.

“Yes,” Bardek continued. “You will always be that way. You let your thinkings grow right up, so they show in your eyes and around the corners of your mouth. You would never make little diplomat--great statesman? Yes? Perhaps; for you would fool all the little liars and gamblers--they would look on your face and see what is to them an unknown t’ing, the truth. It is vairy confusing to little statesmen--the truth, m’sieu’. When the big Bismarck was in corner he quick tell the truth so’s nobody would believe and all go the wrong way. Sometime, I, too, have tol’ t’ truth.”

“Well, I hope so!” laughed Blynn. “But we’re all forgetting the main business in hand. Top-o’-the-Hill is emerging out of dreamland into reality. Come, Miss Manager, let’s discuss plans. Holden will find my resignation in tomorrow’s mail.”

The plans were even better matured than Blynn had hoped for. Kate had kept at work--“To keep my mind off Petruchio”--she had told him. Mac had already cleaned paths and had made a rough estimate of the building needs. There was much to be done there; but with some outside hired help, and everybody joining in, September should see a school-house prepared for those parents who had courage to trust their children to the experimenters. Blynn’s work was already mapped out on a card. First was the writing of the “prospectus.” He could do that “trick” with the proper sense and style. It wasn’t to be a pedagogical document, but a thriller to win parents over.

Blynn agreed, but insisted upon one further condition. The property must be assessed at a marketable figure and a proper rental paid.

“Trust your manager,” advised Kate. “I don’t intend to give anything away. A stock-company is to be formed, which will buy the land and house. I will take 51 per cent. of the shares as security and to control you reckless ones. The stock-company pays taxes and improvements; but I insist upon the wild rose and all the literary ceremonies.”

“Right!” agreed Allen. “The first wild rose of spring shall be yours; but this is something more than poetry; it is almost my only means of livelihood. I should be needlessly worried if I felt for a single minute that the thing did not pay for itself entirely. I cannot live on your property, Kate.”

“Now, that is vairy strange,” Bardek commented when the matter had been made clear to him. “You cannot take the ol’ house and little earth.”--He said something like “leetle airt,” but it was perfectly clear as he spoke it.--“Oh, no! You would have such shame! But you would take it quick if I be fool and sell it cheap! You cannot take money! But you take rent from poor peoples who cannot pay! And you not take my ol’, good coat which is now too little for me! Ach! you would be beggar! But you take present from me of my best workmanship which give me much labor and a big pain in t’ back! And you take my dinner at my table wit’ no shame at all; and my laughter and all my good talk and my friendliness, which take all my life to make and cost me--everyt’ing! It is strange! As for me--poof!--I have not the shame. When you give and I want, I jus’ take and forget, like wind and rain.”

For the next few days they toiled like slaves on the “property.” They dug, planted, cut weeds, sawed and even plastered. Bardek secured the help of one or two Italians to do the heavy hauling. “Work is good,” he argued, “it is the only medicine; but a broken back, it is not good. The little men of Italy? Ah! They are built so. See how they laugh! I talk to them of Garibaldi and zoop! they carry like demons.”

As they trudged home one weary afternoon, full of exultant hopes, a newspaper fell into their hands. Blynn’s picture had caught Kate’s quick eye. “Blynn, Holden’s Chief,” ran the headlines. It told of a special meeting of the board of trustees, and reviewed Blynn’s history with the accuracy of a fond parent. The vote was 7 to 2.

“Never you mind,” Blynn grew rigid as he turned to his friends. “That won’t go! I told Diccon to withdraw my name; I see he didn’t. It’s all right, Kate. I’ll get out of this somehow. I’ve been to the top of Pisgah; there’ll be no turning back until we reach the Promised Land.”

“Not when I have worked like a coal miner,” implored Bardek. “Who would give me my ol’ back back?--Oof! _wass für eine Sprache!_ What a language!--give a back back! Ho!”

“That’s good business,” Kate nodded her head, satisfied. “I’m glad they elected you. It will boom Top-o’-the-Hill immensely. I’ll have it easy financing this job. The trouble will be to keep the money from swamping us.”

“‘The President of Holden College resigns to become a kindergartner,’” exclaimed Gorgas. “Allen Blynn, that’s _too_ funny. It’s almost as funny as the waggle-waggle beard!”

“You minx!” he shook a finger at her. “Are you cogitating another sonnet?”

“I _may_ get on my poet-bonnet!” she smiled at him.

XXV

DAGO

At the suggestion of Gorgas, Leopold became a member of the staff of “Top-o’-the-Hill.” Of all the old group that used to make rendezvous of the Levering house, Leopold and Blynn were the only two who kept up the relationship; but both men were rather intermittent visitors. Leopold--everyone said “Leopold,” possibly because of the impossible surname, Hayim--called punctiliously upon Mrs. Levering, although Mrs. Levering saw little of him. Gorgas and he spent the time exercising their French. He was a silent, grave man, with a far-off friendly smile; and, once enticed, he could talk out of a rare life. On festival occasions he could always be counted upon for a plaintive song.

“Leopold will do the science, you know,” Gorgas explained. “I have talked it over with him. You should have seen his fine eyes sparkle! He’s got heaps of money, you know; we’ll make him treasurer. Besides, he’s English. That will give _such_ a tone!”

What a varied group it was! At night they drew up the staff as it would be printed in the “prospectus.” The list of names and qualifications was almost formidable when one considered how informal and unregulated all their teaching hoped to be; and in that list they stumbled over the name of Bardek. He would never admit any other names. “Jus’ Bardek,” he would say. “Why have more than one name? Even one is hard to remember.” Here is the first faculty of “Top-o’-the-Hill,” that prototype of the “new schools” which were soon to spring up all over America:

IN CHARGE:

MR. ALLEN BLYNN Holden and Jena

MISS KEYSER LEVERING The Warren School

ASSOCIATES:

MR. HAYIM LEOPOLD Harrow and Cambridge

MR. BARDEK Naples and Bordeaux

MISS GORGAS LEVERING School of Applied Arts

“It sounds so learned,” Allen looked on ruefully. “We oughtn’t to print it.”

“It ought to sound learned,” said Kate.

“But we are to deal with young life, not learning,” he reminded her.

“We’ll do all of that,” she assured him. “This list of names is just advertising. No one will question us after they see all our vast qualifications; they won’t even inquire if we have them. This,” tapping the sheet, “will bring us more paying pupils than any other page in the pamphlet. I know these people. ‘Jena,’ ‘Bordeaux,’ ‘Harrow,’ ‘Cambridge’--why, that’s as good as paying dividends already. You watch.”

“When you go fishing, my friend,” Bardek’s eyes twinkled, “it would be big fool if you not put on the dying worm or the already dead insect. Of _course_,” spreading his hands, “you might say to the fish, ‘Come, jump on my hook; it won’t hurt you any worse jus’ because the dead insect is not there. Come; quick; get it over.’ Ah! no! The fish are too wise.

“Titles and degrees and all that,” Bardek went on, “they are vairy great power. We see little men wit’ big decorations, and we come to them and ask questions, and prod them with the stick of our minds, and we turn them round and round and open their mouths and look down their throats. How we tremble! At any minute dese great man may say some wise thing! And you stay and stay for hundert t’ousand years and he say, nothing--nothing that you don’t know when you were small boy. ‘It look like rain,’ maybe he say after two, t’ree thousand years. But the world! Ah! It walks in a great wide circle and will not come near the great man. Mystery! Mystery! They are afraid of his wisdom. It will strike them dead, like lightning. So they send their children to him.

“And the children! First they are afraid--they believe then all the papa and mamma has tol’ dem. Then they find he don’t know what happened in the world day before it was yesterday. And soon they laugh. Then he grow red in face and scold; and then because they have pains of laughter they stop. And all their days they meet ol’ school friend and they sit and drink and eat and laugh at that ol’ fool who did not know what happens the day before it was yesterday.

“And t’en t’ey send _dere_ children to him and make beeg stories how great is that man!

“Oh, put the dead insect on the hook, my friend: or there will be no little pupils and we will be so hungry to teach t’at we fall on each other and teach.”

It was precisely as Kate had predicted. She seemed to know exactly where to drop her printed bait. By August she had closed the doors and had engineered a waiting list, for they were resolved the first year to begin with small numbers.

“We’ll pay you your wages and have something besides for improvements,” she announced to Blynn.

Of all that enthusiastic lot of teachers he was the only one who could not afford to give his time without salary. It hurt him to take that money, but his good sense showed him that there was no other way out. It was shame of the sort that Bardek thought so strange, and it must be downed. He reflected with some grimness that while the others were giving energy, joy, and enthusiasm to the work, he was offering all that and something much harder to give, his pride as an independent man.

To no one he spoke of this. In spite of his innocence and in spite of the face which, as Bardek claimed, he wore for the most part “on the outside,” Blynn could mask a hundred worries back of his Pestalozzian smile. Yet Gorgas knew. She had pieced together his jests and his half-uttered opinions.

They had worked all day together on a baseball diamond and were celebrating the conclusion by a picnic supper on the grounds of “Top-o’-the-Hill.”

“Mein guter Kamarade,” she whispered, “you mustn’t feel bad about that fool salary.”

“Oh, I don’t,” he smiled.

“Yes, you do,” she nodded wisely. “I’m onto your curves, old chap. I’ll just have to talk to you like a Dutch uncle. I’ve a scheme, too; better than anything Kate gets off. _Now_--mustn’t it be grand?”

“Phew!” he affected seriousness. “It must be a corker. Let’s hear it.”

“Here? Wouldn’t that be funny,” she asked herself aloud. “Wouldn’t that be _too_ funny!” The idea amused her. “Oh, no, _mon capitaine_, not here before all these folks. It’s--it’s private. Yes,” she mused, “it’s quite private.... You must let me have an interview. I’ve been trying to have one with you ever since June.”

“Why, my dear child!” he was surprised. “We’ve been together nearly every blessed day, taken walks together and all that!”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “I’ve tried to say it--and couldn’t. But I’m going to dive in soon. That’s what I came to your house for, in June; you remember when you were teaching the Croft boy? If he hadn’t been there I’d have done it then. Hush!” she raised a finger. “They’re coming back. Not a word.... It’s partly about _him_.” She nudged toward Leopold.

That was an exasperating way to end a conversation, characteristic of Gorgas--just like an exciting continuous story. “It’s partly about _him_.” About Leopold?

Leopold had never ceased his subtle interest in Gorgas since the night of their first conversation in French. He was both French and English, and, back of that, the Oriental. He seemed ever ready to do two contradictory things; to leap into the breach and seize the enemy by the throat, or to stand, courageous as the day, and undisturbed take every shock. One of these--the French or the English--might have won out and given him a positive emotional character, but the persistent Hebrew, trained to keep emotions in check, to pass them in review before hard, good sense, held the two contrary horses together and dominated from the driver’s seat. One needs a mixed metaphor to describe Leopold.

There was much more to Leopold than that--what forked, straddling biped can be summed up in a phrase?--he had the smile of compassion and the hovering sadness of those who have looked upon the world from afar off, who have travelled sympathetically among peoples and have seen the splendid futility of the life effort.

It was generally believed that Leopold was rich. He admitted a competence, but his life was simple. Ah! Blynn had a swift thought of comprehension. Leopold was to furnish the salary! That was it. Wise little Gorgas had thought to dissipate a man’s pride in being self-supporting by shifting the source of income from a stock-company to a person! Women will never understand that side of man, he mused; the fierce hatred of leaning upon another. In illness women are meek and saintly; when men become sick and incapacitated they grow unbearable, their maimed spirits cry out against the very charity that would make them whole. Women live in dependence without shame. They take furs and carriages and spending money from their fathers. Even a boy of sixteen begins to rebel. He cannot take things, even from fathers; he must earn.

Over the sprightly little fire Blynn told them of Diccon.

“You know how mean I felt because I had to leave him in the lurch,” he said. “Well! Diccon was just fine about it. He said he suspected that turn of affairs all along and had prepared for it.

“What a loyal chap that Diccon is! He said his only interest was in having the post officially tendered me; he really didn’t care what I did with it. He said just what you remarked the other day, that the election would make my name valuable anywhere else I went. I told him about ‘Top-o’-the-Hill.’ He said, ‘Bully! It’ll be a great go. Put me on the trustees, will you?’”

“Let’s!” suggested Gorgas. “I like Diccon. He’s got sense. We haven’t.”

“What!” they shouted.

“We’re dreaming,” she nodded wisely. “We need his kind to prevent us soaring right up in the air like a balloon and--”

“And go bust, eh?” continued Bardek.

“Just that,” said Gorgas. “We need ballast badly.”

They could hardly eat, these dreamers, until the new idea had been incorporated. A board of advisers was drawn up to give ballast: it included Diccon, and the rector of Grace Church, the butter-and-egg man, others of the tennis-court group, and three influential “mothers.”

“We’ll get out a second edition of the prospectus,” Kate smiled her satisfaction. “That front page will look slick! We’ll charge ’em two hundred next year.”

Bardek brought the Italian laborers to the picnic supper. They demurred mightily at first, but Gorgas won them by a neat speech of invitation in Italian. How their eyes glistened, not for the good things to eat, although that must have touched them, but for the sound of that rich Italian speech.

“They are so hungry for words,” laughed Bardek; “the sound of your own language in a strange land--ah! that is sweet. One day I pass an ol’ woman wit’ bundle of sticks and she say, ‘Dam t’ose t’ings; t’ey won’t stay on my ol’ head’; but she say it in Czech, the clicking-clacking Czech which my mother spoke to me.” He burst into a strange rattle of exclamations. “That is the sweet Czech, my friends. It sounds not so sweet to you, eh? No? Your ear it is not right. Suppose you was in the middle of China and could never go to your home and, quick, you hear little children wit’ high American voice sing in the evening,

‘Here we go ’round the mulberry bush, Mulberry bush, mulberry bush, Here we go ’round the mulberry bush, So early in the morning.’

“Ach! Gott, would you not cry?

“I did cry and hug that ol’ woman and tell her in her own Czech that I be long-gone son. And she believe me! I make her say, ‘Dam t’ose sticks,’ five, ten times and give her silver dollar for each time she speak. Ach! if she do not go mad after that! Somewhere in America is a crazy woman, all her life-time singing and shouting, ‘Dam t’ose sticks!’”

“We’ve caught you at last, Bardek,” Gorgas cried. “You are Czech! That’s what you are!”

“Oh, no!” he protested. “I am cosmopolitan. My mother, she was Czech when I was boy; but before t’at she was many t’ings; and after, many t’ings. I am cosmopolitan,” he claimed again. To Leopold and to Gorgas he spoke in French, to Blynn he made his remarks in German, and to the Italians he talked in their own tongue. The very _timbre_ and rhythm of his voice changed with each language; he had the music of each in his head.

“Ask Caproni, here,” he boasted, “if I am not Italian.”

Gorgas inquired in their language.

“Him?” their eyes opened in surprise at the question. “Oh, but, yes, milady. He is grand signor, Italian gentleman. He has lived in Milan, Napoli, everywhere, even in our own Sicily. Italian? Oh, but yes. French? You would make fun, milady? He speak French as we in Sicily speak French; ah! he talk Italian from the heart.”

While Gorgas translated, Bardek sat transfigured.

“You see!” he shook his great, round head in pride.

“And I would take oath you are French,” Leopold remarked quietly. “You have tones and nuances of the Loire--”

“Oh, yes, I have lived on the Loire,” he admitted, “and also in Brittany.” For example, he shifted back and forth between the patois of the north and south of France.

“I say again that I am cosmopolitan,” he averred. “The Bohemian belongs to all countries. In New York city is a Bohemia which New York city does not know. There we talk all languages and listen to the pulses of the world. New York is a little place, full of the small thinkings of little places. It has great pride and wonderful industry--just like little places--but of the doings of the great world, it knows everything too late. Long before the big wars the Bohemia of New York city knows what is to be, and prepares; one day New York city wake up and scream the stale news. So wit’ everyt’ing.

“But I should not so talk,” he shook his head sadly. “I am no longer cosmopolitan.”

They tried for some time to get him to tell them why. At first he would not speak. Sadness enveloped him. After a while he laughed.

“I am not sorry; it is good,” he said, with characteristic optimism. “In America one cannot be cosmopolitan, I see. America is too strong, it sucks t’ blood out. In Europe I could change my skin and still be--deep--myself, Bardek, Citizen of No Place. Always I could be French and still look on like foreign; or German or Dutch or Spanish or Polish or Italian or anyt’ing. Jus’ so I be in America for long time. Zen somet’ing happen to me. I eat poison grass, or somet’ing. My skin, it does not change; it gets tough.

“Sometimes when I talk French or Italian to my boys or to Miss Gorgas, I must stop and t’ink for the word. Me, Bardek, stop to think! It is terrible, my friend, to have big things bubbling inside and no word at the mout’! And always the English word, it come. And such English! Ach! My boys, dey laugh and make fun--when they t’ink I do not look--and they say, ‘Dago.’ Oof! Sometimes I beat t’em in six languages; but, sometimes, too, I laugh.... ‘Dago!’ It is so.”

A chorus of protests told him how well he spoke English.

Leopold scolded him for his desponding. “It is thinking that counts, my dear Bardek,” he said, “not words. Greek is a wonderful language, but without Plato or Homer and Aesculus or Sophocles and Aristophanes, it would be a dead instrument. You _think_, my dear Bardek. If you spoke in Pennsylvania-Dutch you would be worth listening to.”

“And your English is better than English,” spoke up the loyal Gorgas. “It is softer and lovelier and beautifully strange.”

“Thank you,” he smiled. “I like you to say zat. A good lie, you owe it to a friend, to make him happy. What! You laugh? But it is not sin to lie. You do not read your Bible, my friend. To kill? steal? yes. To bear false witness? yes. But the good Moses was too wise to say, ‘Thou shalt not lie.’... Yet I am ‘Dago,’ jus’ like dese Italian ol’ men.

“Oh, I know; it is right,” he continued. “The Italian, oh, he will come to America and he say, ‘I will live like pig and make much money and go back to my country and live like prince. Yah! He stay wit’ his own people and talk, talk, talk his own speech. He laugh at funny Americans. Yah! Soon he must hide his fine clothes of colors and put on grease-pants and ol’ hat. It is not good to make money when peoples laugh. Yah! And zen he must learn little English, and he speak ‘Dago,’ jus’ like me. Or how can he make the much money, eh? Yah! To his little boys and girls he talk ze good language of his own land; but zey? Ach! Zey will not. In ze house, yes; so not to get ze beatings. But in ze street, là! là! _là!_ là! Gabble, gabble, gabble. Some day zey make fun of daddy and wink and say, ‘Dago!’

“And he is ‘Dago.’ Soon he find himself talking ‘Dago’ in house, even wit’ his wife. Once he fight and beat her and all cry curses--in his own speech? Ah, no; in ‘Dago.’ He call her ‘Dam dog’ and she say to him ‘Go t’ ’ell!’ and zen he is done. His skin cannot change. All his life he is not’ing--he is American.”

It was the strong America seizing on the immigrant and twisting him into a new mold. The children would be Americans, but the old ones, they were wrecked in the process. The Germans became “Dutchmen”; the Irish became “Micks”; the Poles became “Hunkies,” and the Italians “Dagos.”

“But sometimes they go back,” ventured Blynn.

Bardek laughed at the picture his mind conjured.

“Oh, yes, they go back. Là! là! _là!_ là! What a comic! The people of their own land rush out of t’ house to see t’ funny t’ing. Là! là! _là!_ là! The dead clot’es of ragman! The gol’ watch-chain for t’ tie big dog! Zen they talk! It is no language. Perhaps they stay to be comic all their lives? Ah, no. For they get sick for America, where the little boys and girls go to school. They do not rest till zey go back and be once more ‘Dago.’”

The twilight came slowly about them while they lingered over the camp-fire. Some of Bardek’s brooding spirit had infected them; but it did not drive them home. Night began to make its claims for a habitation, and the stars of a fine August evening shone clear, yet they stayed to hear Leopold talk of his boyhood days at Harrow. Finally they joined hands with him and formed the circle about the ebbing fire--as Harrow “old boys” have done for generations--while they sang the Harrow parting song:

Forty year on, when afar and asunder Parted are those who are singing today, When you look back, and forgetfully wonder What you were like in your work and your play; Then it may be, there will often come o’er you Glimpses of notes, like the catch of a song-- Visions of boyhood shall float them before you, Echoes of dreamland shall bear them along. Follow up! Follow up! Follow up! Till the field ring again and again With the tramp of the twenty-two men. Follow up! Follow up!

XXVI

THE BIOLOGIST AND THE PURITAN

The solemnity of the parting song had driven Bardek off alone. Allen and Kate walked along ahead, but at the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks, a dark, forbidding place, Allen insisted upon stopping to wait for Gorgas and Leopold, who were straggling far in the rear. Fumbling accidentally in his pockets, Blynn produced his morning mail, two letters, still unopened. They moved up to the lights of the station to see what it would disclose. One was from Gorgas--she had a habit of jotting notes to persons she met every day. He glanced at it hurriedly, but in the bad light did not catch the full meaning. The other letter set him dancing.

“Can you spare me for the remainder of the month, Madam Manager, and part of September?” he asked. His eyes showed good news.

“Is it money?” the practical manager asked first.

“Bushels!” he cried. “Diccon has booked a series of lectures in a string of cities,” he read, “Rochester, Ithaca, Albany, Providence and Boston. I cover the route three times, fifteen lectures in five weeks, at--what do you think? One hundred dollars each and expenses!”

“How much is that altogether?” Kate was figuring.

“I don’t know. I’m so excited, I can’t count. One hundred apiece--child’s play! I’ve got ’em all done. Isn’t it great! and isn’t it robbery! ‘Each local center pays three hundred dollars,’ he read, ‘and expenses, which makes it one hundred dollars per lecture. I hope this is not too slight an honorarium.’ Golly! Too slight? Let me confess something, Kate. I don’t take any pennies out of the cash-drawer of Top-o’-the-Hill. By George! you don’t know how splendid I feel to be able to face those children like a man. That ‘salary’--oh, you were managing it beautifully, I know--but that ‘salary’ was choking me, even before I got any. I’m glad that’s all over and settled.”

* * * * *

They were strolling toward home through the wooded Seminary grounds, on which site once stood the old “Classical and Military Lyceum,” where Beauregarde, Meade and many another Northern and Southern officer received preliminary training. Over these same grounds, in 1777, came Sullivan’s men, driving the British advance post before them; and a little later, on that October morning, General Washington rode down the “Great Road” with his eager staff.

“I dug a cannon-ball out of my garden the other day,” Allen remarked abruptly. The thrill of the evening was upon them and they had had no need for speech; but if the man would talk, Kate would tuck her hand in his arm and be content. “A little round, rusty thing, about as big as your fist--it made me a little more reverent toward this old battleground.... The Continentals came up out of the fog over there,” he pointed earnestly, although it was almost too dark to see him, “surprised the pickets in the Allen House and bayoneted every one--poor devils!... They swept on over this ground, firing from behind trees, for the Fifty-second British Light Infantry, who were tenting over there in the fields beyond the New Street, were stirring out like hornets--and such a bugling and banging there must have been!... The Fifty-second put up a running fight and weren’t able to make a stand for nearly a mile.... Think of it! Washington himself followed right after Sullivan’s men--perhaps he rode over this very spot!... Doesn’t it excite you?”

“Not a bit, Sentimental Sir,” she laughed coolly.

“You are standing, mebbe, on historic spots, madam!” he mocked her laughter with assumed sternness. “That battle came near to deciding everything--think of the historic persons who struggled here--Washington and Wayne, and Lafayette, and--and--”

“And me,” she helped.

“Since when have you become an historic person, madam?”

“‘On this spot,’” she quoted an imaginary stone, “‘one wonderful evening late in August in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-two, stood Keyser Levering, familiarly known as Kate, with her arm linked comfortably in that of a poetic but pleasant person otherwise unknown.’... Washington and Lafayette were nice boys,” said she, “and that battle was their fun, but standing here very much alive and living my little life is all the history I’ll ever have; so I’ve got to make the most of it.... Sentimental Sir, aren’t you going to get all worked up over historic me, standing here?--or do I have to be dead before it is proper to become really stirred?”

She waited expectantly. Kate had told her story to this man in as many veiled ways as is permitted to a lady; but each time he had looked at her earnestly, as if she had propounded a serious riddle. And always it amused her--at least she smiled gamely--to see how really obtuse this clever man could be. This time, in the darkening night, she could not see his eyes as he bent forward; but she felt his arm tighten and the brotherly pat of his hand upon her own.

“You’re all right, Kate,” he said; and then, “Good old Kate!” which he repeated with great satisfaction. A second later, he asked irrelevantly, “Where are those children?” meaning Gorgas and Leopold.

They peered fruitlessly into the darkness, and even retraced their steps a part of the way down the Valley, but there was no sign of them.

“They have felt the spell of the evening and have tracked off,” Kate suggested. “Didn’t Leopold do that song well? ‘Forty year on when afar and asunder,’” she sang. “It gave me a thrill, I tell you.”

“Me, too,” Blynn pressed his lips together. “And how he felt it! Did you see him straining to keep the tears back? Think what it meant to him, that old parting song of Harrow!”

The floating melody and the words of the song lingered. By association, the thought of Gorgas came into their minds.

“They’ll be home before us,” Kate spoke out. “While we’ve been dawdling along they have probably taken some short cut. It may be Gorgas has dragged Leopold on one of her ‘bee-lines.’”

“Well, well!” Blynn laughed. “At night, too. Gorgas claims that’s to be one of the studies in Top-o’-the-Hill. ‘Cut a straight path,’ she says, ‘like a bee, only bee-ier:

‘Through bush, through briar, Ice, rain, water, fire; Over river, up tree, Bee-ier than a flying bee, Through hedge and over gate, Straight! straight! straight! straight!’

“She goes up one side of a tree and down the other like a squirrel! I was on one last Wednesday. Phew! She chose a southeast ‘bee-line’ and insisted upon fording the Schuylkill river, clothes and all! She said her conscience wouldn’t let her back out. I just had to follow to keep her from mischief.”

They were not at home, however, when Kate and Allen arrived, nor did they come in for hours after. Then Gorgas walked in alone. She was rather disheveled. With only a slight word of greeting, she went up the stairs as if she were tired out.

“Another ‘bee-line,’ Gorgas?” Blynn asked cheerfully.

She stopped on the landing and looked back at him.

“You bet!” she nodded almost angrily and moved swiftly up the stairs.

“What is a ‘bee-line’?” Leopold, at the doorway, asked quietly. He was spick and orderly as ever, save that his tie was completely off its moorings and hanging over his left shoulder.

Blynn explained, quoting the verses of the game, and joked about the tell-tale tie.

“Ah!” Leopold adjusted the cravat thoughtfully. “She did not give a name to it.”

* * * * *

That night Blynn and Leopold walked home together. They talked of Gorgas as if the theme had been set in advance. She came abruptly into their conversation, but so intent was each upon his own thought that neither considered the need of apology or explanation. Without introduction, Leopold began:

“She is beautifully unschooled. It is a rare thing nowadays to meet a natural woman--and with the beginnings of a mind.”

“Sometimes,” Blynn pondered as he talked, “I have taken pride in having shaped that mind of hers. But--she is herself, and would have been herself without any help or hindrance from me.”

“You have done much for her,” Leopold protested.

“Nonsense!”

“Much! I recognize it. Some of your Puritan conscience is in her.”

“How do you make that out?”

Leopold pondered in turn. “Tonight she--and on other nights, too--she--but I can’t give illustrations.”

Blynn looked at him. “I think I understand,” he brightened up. “She is just naturally moral.”

Leopold laughed quietly. “Moral! What a wretched word!”

“Oh, I don’t mean--”

“Don’t explain, friend Allen. I know you don’t mean the little prudential codes of playing safe and getting on in life. You mean that she has principles of conduct which she has thought out--”

“No,” explained Blynn. “I don’t mean that at all. She has principles of conduct, all right, but they are not thought out; they are instinctive. She plays fair by instinct; she couldn’t want to take advantage: not because she has reasoned the thing out, but because--because she just knows it isn’t the square thing to do. And then she has a powerful lot of self-respect without a trace of vanity. She--”

The two men interrupted each other continually. That was their method--tossing the idea back and forth.

“Yes,” Leopold took it up, “she fights reason without any reason at all, and won’t let herself go. She admits things with delicious candor; she has wants and owns up to them, but she won’t let herself satisfy them. She knows her instincts, but she holds them down.”

“Good!” Blynn commented. “She has character. Control--that’s the whole of character. But we’re talking very vaguely. Wants! Instincts! What sort? They may be friends or enemies.”

“Ha!” Leopold interjected gleefully. “That’s her very phrase! I can see your coaching there, old boy! And you’ve done a good job--so far.”

“I’m glad,” said Blynn simply. The thoughts of the two men were on totally different levels. For over an hour that night off in Cresheim Valley, Leopold had been matching his instincts against that very control which meant in Gorgas, character. All the rushing events of that tremulous night were in his mind as he talked; but Blynn, characteristically, considered only the general application of his theory. “I’m glad,” he went on. “I wasn’t sure. Her mother is practically useless to her--so is her sister, for that matter. I have planted a few seed-ideas, that is all. If they’ve rooted, I’m glad. But, gracious me! She’s had no chance to test herself. That may come; but it will be later, when she’s older and better able to be her own master. She’s quite sheltered here. No one will bother her here. What--”

Blynn stopped speaking. A self-satisfied exclamation from Leopold arrested his thinking. Some of his own dormant instincts began to tug at his mind--suspicion, among others and a swift, unreasoned touch of jealousy; but he checked himself and went on. “Of course, I have been able to do very little. A man must generalize, he must--”

“She understood all your generalizations,” Leopold interrupted.

“Did she say--but--how could you know?”

“She told me.”

“Told you what?”

“Well, among other things, she told me your story of the pale wanderer who turned a whole city full of people into lepers. Ugh! That was an ugly dose! It got into her, somehow, and sickened her. It has made her afraid to let go. Leper! Ugh! How could you?”

“Because it is life,” Blynn spoke warmly. “Ignorance is the only sin. You remember your Socrates. If we really knew all, he said, we would never embrace evil. Ignorance makes our criminals, it makes our slums, it brings into the world cripple-minded children, it separates mothers and fathers, breeds disease, and corrupts the best of us. We don’t take evil into our lives because we believe it to be evil, but because we ignorantly think it good.”

“Phew!” Leopold affected concern. “You _are_ a Puritan! Scratch a Puritan and find a preacher!... Well; you’ve made her half a Puritan--you and your ghastly leper--and it is a good thing.” Leopold nodded sagely. “At first, I did not like it. It seemed inconsistent with her strong sense of individual freedom. I am not much of a Puritan myself. I obey my will. I do not let it be balked by creed or dictum made by others. And I have always believed in giving the same freedom to everyone. That is my idea of tolerance. But she is not that way--and, strange, I am glad!”

They talked for a desultory moment on freedom and restrictions, but Leopold came back to Gorgas.

“She is not wholly Puritan,” he explained. “At times--no; at other times--tonight, for instance--she takes fright, calls on her little gods, and fights. You it is, I gather, who have planted that in her--”

“Oh, no!” Blynn protested grimly. The generalities of Leopold began to assume horrid, specific meanings. His slow mind was racing to catch up with the events. The “bee-line,” the angry, disheveled Gorgas mounting the stairs, the cravat so accusingly awry--what did they mean? Suddenly his memory began to piece data together, material that had been observed by his eyes, that had been recorded on the phonographic-disk of a brain, but which never before had been summoned into consciousness. The pictures that he conjured made him ill, and as he walked he drew in deep breaths to steady himself. “Oh, no!” he repeated, while his mind throbbed, “I taught her nothing. She has her own character, predestined to grow into its own as an oak from an acorn. You can’t spread morals on children like stucco on a wall. Character is the self revealed. You can only bring it out. But with Gorgas I didn’t even bring it out. It was always there.”

“I believe you,” Leopold answered. “You are quite right. And I am glad. Strange that I should want in a woman the qualities that I do not respect myself.”

“You want--Gorgas?”

“Yes.”

Leopold went on calmly, but Allen only half heeded him; through the dark they strode, the biologist pursuing serenely his theory, the other hearing only the turmoil of his own wild thoughts. Finally the pleasant voice at his side caught Allen’s attention. Leopold was saying:

“There is something, after all, in that old worship of chastity in women--the ‘double-standard,’ as we call it today--something more than merely the echo of the age of chivalry or the offshoot of the worship of the Virgin. It is an ingrained necessity, I am finding. A man must be sure of his woman. Faithfulness, constancy, unconquerability--those are the qualities that hold us. If the woman surrenders easily, we men suspect that the next comer will have the same victory. Then the Othello-Desdemona business! The ideal method, I fancy, is savage seizure, like the Sabines. The longer they struggle, the longer they’ll stay contented in captivity. I’m a biologist. In biology all mating is war of sex. Gorgas--well--let me give you an added confidence--tonight I took her in my arms forcibly--”

“Leopold!” Blynn clutched him by the arm.

“Don’t be alarmed, my Puritan friend,” Leopold laughed pleasantly. “I am simply courting that young lady--”

“She is only a child!” Blynn gasped.

“She is seventeen--will be eighteen shortly. Biology calls that quite old enough.”

Blynn dropped his grasp. “She is only a child,” he repeated firmly.

“My mother was married and had children at seventeen,” Leopold considered for a moment. The agitation of his companion was hid by the darkness. “Child? Oh, no, my dear Allen--she is a full-grown woman--charged with womanhood. Well, she broke away tonight.... At first, I was angry--then I was glad. Her resistance is the measure of her constancy.... You don’t mind my talking out this way, old fellow.”

“No! no! Go on!”

But he did not go on. Leopold’s sensitiveness was slowly taking account of the long stride of the man by his side. As they passed a street-lamp he saw the white face staring ahead into the night, and caught the firm lips and the long, deep breathing.

“You are fond of her?” Leopold asked mildly.

No answer; but in that vibrating moment words were not essential.

Unconscious of direction, the two men had been marching on across the city-line, and were now pacing through a deeply wooded lane in Montgomery county.

“I always fancied it was a purely pedagogic interest,” Leopold remarked, as if to the trees lined thick along the road.

Again there was no answer.

“So!” Leopold spoke with sympathy. “I did not know. Forgive me.”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

They tramped along sturdily.

“Have you told her that you--”

“Merciful heavens!” Blynn broke forth; but restrained further speech.

“Why not?” Leopold asked kindly.

“She is a child. Oh, yes! yes! yes!” he struck down the attempted interruption. “I have taken her by the hand and led her as an older brother might take his little sister. I have watched over her ... talked to her of books, of life, of God.... I have been the confidant of her little troubles and have--have--tried to give her courage and--understanding. She has opened the door of her life to me. I have stepped within and have broken bread with her. Now ... how could I desecrate ... how could I sully ... I don’t mean that. It is hard for me to say, Leopold. I can’t explain it to you. To me she is still a serious-eyed, fearless child, who has come to me in the perfect faith of innocence.... My reason doesn’t tell me that. My reason tells me to go and seize her, fight you for her, and carry her off. But there’s something else.... You call it Puritan.... Maybe it is racial, or an inheritance. Maybe it is only superstition. Whatever it is, it holds me fast. I am chained, bound absolutely. I cannot speak. I cannot go to that child and--and--unmask.... Let’s go back.”

They turned and trudged along the uneven road without speaking until a stray light or two along the Chestnut Hill Pike told them they were coming back into the village.

“I have been wondering,” Leopold spoke thoughtfully, “what it is that draws us to our mates. Nobody knows. It is the greatest mystery in creation. Let us face the facts: Gorgas is a remarkable girl; she thinks; she has unusual abilities. Good! But that is not what draws us. I know dozens of women who are her superior--women whose conversation is--well!--shall I say more congenial? The truth is, Gorgas is not ready to enter on an intellectual level with either of us. In fact--well!--her education must be kept up--uh--afterwards. You are right; in many respects she is yet a child. I see things as a biologist: I fancy that her charm, after all, is her youth and her astonishing health. That is the mating cry--health.”

“If you don’t mind, Leopold,” Blynn stopped, “I’ll leave you here and cut off across this field alone.”

Leopold laughed pleasantly.

“I shock your good old Puritan soul, I see. Nothing shocks me. God made all, and there is no high nor low--that’s my simple creed. And don’t forget that in biology man is not different from the rest of creation; we are only _vertebrata_, my good friend, subject all to the same law of life; biology knows no Chosen Species. Good night, old Allen.... I am sorry we did not have this talk earlier. I am not strong for self-sacrifice, but, really, I believe, if I had known, I--well, I would not have let things go so far.”

Blynn looked hard at him, in his eyes the fire of a zealot.

“Things have--have--gone far; have they?”

“Quite,” said Leopold. “Quite far.”

After that night Blynn withdrew abruptly from the daily councils at “Top-o’-the-Hill.” The preparation of the lectures seemed to be taking all his time. He dropped in on the group once or twice for a moment’s chat, and to see the progress, but his mind seemed ever hard at work, selecting and rejecting material. That series must be a great go, he explained; he would put his best into it, and give them the worth of their money. In two weeks he was off to Rochester.

XXVII

TZOO-OOM!

When Allen left for his lecture tour, Gorgas immediately knocked off work and gave herself up to gloomy thoughts. She began to discover what a lonely child she had always been; she who had had parents, but no real mother and father; and now _mon capitaine_ (_mon duc, mon prince!_) was busy with his own affairs. Bardek, too, had been in the depths--it was Leopold’s doleful song that had set him off. “One should not sing of ‘For-r-ty year-r on,’” he growled, “not when one is for-r-ty year-r on!” The “smitty” was therefore deserted. And Leopold had been absolutely debarred from the Leverings; Gorgas would send for him when she wanted him.

There comes a night when lights go up in Bardek’s “white-wash house.” Gorgas is gloomily swinging in a hammock in the orchard. She listens to the clatter and to the singing, and knows that Bardek has recovered his spirits. Are they dancing? She can hear the thump of the children’s heavy shoes, and she can see forms flash back and forth between the light and the window. Bardek’s voice is roaring; and an occasional squeal from the inexpressive little wife is a certain sign of good times.

Hey ho! She, too, could be happy if she chose. Off there in the dark, Leopold was waiting; waiting with fearful, confident patience, she thought and shuddered. If she chose--but she could not will to choose. Not yet, at any rate; she would wait a while.

After a time the noise subsided in Bardek’s cottage. The lamp moved into the kitchen, and finally it travelled up the stairs and into the children’s room. It was the putting-to-bed hour, a happy sky-larking time in the Bardek household.

So much happiness near at hand was almost too much for Gorgas. The shrill voices of the children especially were painful as they came clear on the night air; it made her feel more motherless and deserted than is quite bearable. She turned her back to the joyous windows and strove fiercely to keep down the desire to give way to tears. But they would come; little trickling ones first; then huge, coursing ones; and, finally, a very deluge.

The man who had been her “lord and master” all her life--all the life that counted--had gone gravely away without so much as a smiling goodby. For days she had been watching him hungrily as he talked with seriousness--to everybody but to her--of his dates, cities, halls, subjects; and she could glean nothing from his sober face but an alarming interest in lectures. All her life she had given him the first place in her heart and was content; with an absurd faith, as the days of her childhood flitted by, that all would surely be right in the end; and now she was telling herself that she had been deceived by a dream. He was not for her; to him she was a child, an interesting child, to be sure, capable in many ways above other children, but only one of a hundred or more of his “cases,” one which he had probably card-catalogued under the “L’s,” with penciled notes--a pedagogic specimen!

It was hateful, and she cried aloud her protest; it was unfair; and it was not to be endured. But even as she protested wildly in the dark of the orchard, she felt the pitiless certainty of the facts; for once more she had written him a letter--to be sure, it was only a funny little request for an “interview with the great man,” written under his very nose, and put in his own hand to mail; with characteristic disregard of her he had posted the letter without once looking at it--and he had neglected to answer it.

On the day before he left Mount Airy, she had seen the small gray note among a bundle that he had sorted out in public; and the sight of it had sent her face flaming, as if it would shout its contents to all the world; but he had given it one frowning stare and passed it over without a touch of recognition, so intent was he on his own affairs.

No better proof, she thought, of the gulf that separated them. Morris had taught her to be a “sport,” and all her instinct bade her bear without flinching. She would face the facts, be they or be they not to her hurt--but, oh, the bitterness of the reality. Her childhood’s dream was far better, picturing something always off in the future, always a possible event.... If--

No. His face was “on the outside” as Bardek had said; and during those last few days could there be any mistaking of the calm, self-absorbed Allen? If it had been hers to choose, would she have elected a public lecture tour as against the partner of her soul?

Oh, no! Though Boston and New York and all the cities of Christendom called in dulcet tones! Oh, no!

The lamp had come down in the Bardek house. In the Levering home a low light burned in the library. Her mother and father were there, she knew; but the thought of meeting them and talking of everyday matters was too repellent. How far away they were from her now, and always had been! And how much, just now, she needed the comfort of communion. She gazed wistfully at Bardek’s gay light. His great laugh came through the trees and cheered her wonderfully. Dear old Bardek, mother and sister and father-confessor, all rolled into one! She would go to Bardek and lay her little troubles in his huge palm.

The Bardek house was without corridors. One opened the front door and stood within. And who would dream of knocking at that democratic portal! So she slipped noiselessly along the grass, which grew to the very edge of the house, turned the knob quietly and entered.

Bardek was facing her, standing like a statue in the middle of the low room. The light was behind him, so that Gorgas, coming in out of the darkness, was not able instantly to comprehend that the little wife, clad in the gayest of garments, deep reds and greens, with a glorious scarf of gold about her head, was folded snugly in the Bohemian’s sturdy arms.

“Oh!” cried Gorgas, and started back.

“Come in!” welcomed Bardek, without moving the fraction of an inch, save the necessary tightening of his hold on the shy wife.

“Oh, no! No!” cried Gorgas, shocked at her intrusion.

“Come in, I say!” roared Bardek. “We jus’ celebr-r-rate our marriage--zat is all. Come in, and see how it is done.... Be still, Bit-of-my-heart,” he called to the struggling wife, but in some staccato dialect of Hungary. “We must be the teacher of the beautiful Gorgas in all things, and this is what she should learn to do; and it must be done well, or life itself is spilled to the wind.” This he translated gayly to Gorgas. “Come in, _Liebschen_! This is our marriage day. It is the day I take the wonderful woman when she is but wonderful girl, take her right out of the street where she squat beside the orange cart wit’ her peddling mother; and I do not know her name; and I will not know it, so I can call her love names all her life--I take her from her oranges, and quick into the biggest cathedral in all Hungary, and kneel before the altar, and call upon the priest to come marry us before I cut him open to see what make him so fat and slow.”

The invitation in their eyes was so real that Gorgas slipped weakly to a chair near the door.

“He say to wait five, six, seven week or it not a marriage,” Bardek went on. “‘Five, six, seven week!’ I cry; ‘in that time she be grow up and ol’ woman! And I? Every day of zose week I die of waiting. Five, six, seven week? Not five, six, seven minute!’; and I scare zat priest by the things I say. And when I show him gold, he not so scared, but raise up the hands and make the language which I give him to make.

“And when all is done, ‘_Tzoom!_’ I cry, and explain: ‘Zat is the big bell up in Heaven which bring all the angels to the Gates of Earth, through which they now look down; and _Tzoo-oom!_’--he nearly drop dead for think I be madman!--‘zat is the bell which break open the Gates of Earth and fling the glad angels toward this good world of love; and _Tzoo-oo-oom!_’ I roar like the roar of Saint Peters in Rome when they make the new Pope, ‘_zat_ is the bell which make this woman _of_ my blood and _of_ my flesh, and carry us together, up straight up, up, up with the singing angels to the Heaven itself.’ And zen I take her in my arms, and lift her to her little toes, and hug her till she forget for little while to live!... Ah! But she nevair forget _zat_ marriage! Nevair!”

As he talked he interrupted himself often to utter weird sayings to the happy wife, so that she half turned in his arms, and seemed to understand that he was telling Gorgas of the wonderful wedding day. And Gorgas contemplated their happiness with the greatest sympathy and with a longing that was akin to pain.

“So!” Bardek went on jubilantly. “On zat wonderful day in May, which we now celebr-r-ate--ah. May is in Hungary of all months the--”

“But Bardek,” Gorgas interrupted, for a moment forgetting her personal grief. “This is not May, it is September.” She could not be mistaken about this, for in three days it would be the tenth, her birthday, and Allen had promised her a mysterious gift on that day.

“Of course!” smiled Bardek. “So we celebr-r-ate our marriage.”

“But if it was May when you--”

“You would wait until it come May again?” he inquired mildly.

By this time he had sat himself in a big chair, and the wife had dropped to the floor, draping herself about his knee. The scarf of gold spread out in a brilliant streamer; the greens and reds of her Hungarian costume tumbled over one another in a riot of unpremeditated folds. The blood was afire in her gypsy face, and her eyes were two dark lights. By the magic of adoration this peasant woman was transformed into a thing of rare delight.

“But if you were married in May,” Gorgas was saying, “you could not have an anniversary until--”

“Ho!” cried Bardek in great glee, and then communicated exultant things to the gay wife, patting her on the head the while, and tweaking her brown ears. “Ho!” he turned to Gorgas. “You would wait until it come May again! You are like the priest who I scare all the Latin out of! You would wait five, six, seven week! You would wait until the earth go about the sun just _so_!--until the constellations of the heavens be just _so_! You cannot praise God until it be Sunday; you cannot be married when Nature cries out it is time, and you would let the calendar make you slave when you would have anniversary! Ho! It is superstitious you are! Sometimes I have celebr-r-ated zat marriage three times in one month! Here is my calendar of days!” he slapped his heart right lustily.

“Many things might make me celebr-r-ate,” he went on. “This time it was your Leopold and his ugly song. ‘For-r-ty year-r on, when afar-r and asunder-r,’” he rolled his r’s vigorously. “It is a song that give me the blue devils of regret. ‘For-r-ty year-r on!’ it is no song to sing, when it is I, Bardek, who is ‘for-r-ty year-r on,’ and do not want to remember zat it is so! ‘For-r-ty year-r on!’ Heugh! It is a ol’ man’s song; and I must sing it over and over in my brain, till I cannot work, and grow sick wit’ thoughts of gray head and teeth falling out, and feel my bones go stiff, and--heugh! So I be ol’ man for two, three day, and zen I make celebr-r-ation and chase the bad thoughts out. To this little Bit-of-my-heart I say, ‘Quick, get into the beautiful clothes of Hungary, put on the scarf of gold, and the earrings and the spangles of gold, and we will have again our marriage day! _Tzoo-oom!_’” he boomed suddenly, and caressed the lady’s head with huge confidence. “And now I am young again!”

Even though he had seemed so absorbed in his own contemplations, Bardek’s quick eye had noted the droop in Gorgas’ shoulders, and the discouraging sadness in her mien.

“Zat song?” he asked her; “it make ugly thoughts for you, too; eh, my Gorgas?”

She tried to speak, but found it easier to shake her head. No; it was not the song that had taken the spring out of her life.

“U-m!” hummed Bardek sympathetically. And then, with characteristic abruptness, he asked, “When is it zat you go to the priest and make the bells of Heaven go, _tzoom!_--eh?”

This was too much for Gorgas. It brought with benumbing clearness the vision of her own forlorn place in the world. There would be for her no exulting Bardek to seize her out of the street beside her cart of oranges, carry her to the nearest altar, and start the very heavens a-tzooming for joy. But she was too brave a lass to weep in the presence of Bardek and his lady, although it was a glistening eye and a trembling lip which smiled gamely at them.

“Leopold--” she began, but words were too difficult; so she stopped pathetically, and seemed to beg Bardek to understand.

“H-m,” said he. “Leopold, eh?... He is very wonderful man.... Very smart.... He know--everything.” Bardek spread out his palms humbly. “You would celebr-r-ate wit’ Leopold, eh?” He watched her narrowly, but she did not answer. “Of course, you would know. You would not have to look in a book for to find out _zat_--or to ask the mother if it be so!... You would know.... And it is very important to know; for if you do not know whether you will want to smash the calendar and have two, three celebr-r-ation in one month, and all the times after which you do live together,” he spread his palms a trifle higher, “well, zen you should not begin--much better to die.... So it is Leopold, eh?”

“No!” she struggled to her feet. “No, Bardek, it is not Leopold. He wants me, but I won’t have him. I won’t! He frightens me, and always did, from the time he began to watch me, like a big, big--” She could not find the word. “It is not Leopold!”

Bardek’s sudden laugh drew her out of her tragic plane, and in some inexplicable way gave her a touch of gladness.

“I _know_ zat it is not Leopold!” he cried. “I could see it in your two eyes zat it is not! And I could see it in your two eyes who zat it is! Ah! Your eyes zey tell me whenever you do look at him!... And zat is _so_ right now! _So_ right!...”

His own two eyes beamed and sparkled upon her, and seemed to shout congratulations, and many happy returns of the day. To his wife he confided uproariously; so clearly, indeed, that Gorgas understood every word and gesture; and as he mounted to Hungarian eloquence, she began to catch some of the contagion of his confidence: the despairing thoughts born of reality began to clear out, vanish like a cloud rack before the west wind; and she revived her spirits with the vitality of Bardek’s optimism.

At his call she came over and sat down on the floor beside the wife, Bardek presiding above them like a patriarch of old. And the wife, so often smilingly mute in that household, broke forth in a musical chirping of congratulations, and stroked Gorgas’ hair, and patted her cheek, and welcomed her to the inner shrine of spouses! To Gorgas it was a very blessed ordination. For a little while she would pretend, she defended herself, and then--

But Bardek was in full flow: “With him, with the good Allen, you would celebr-r-ate; eh, _mein Liebschen, ma fleur du bois?_ Marriage? Ho! Zat is easy to do--it take five, six week; or it take five, six minute--but to celebr-r-ate, it must last all the life! There are many peoples who have had just marriage, with confetti, and bands and dancing and much wine, but zey will never, never celebr-r-ate! Ho! It would be comic to see zem even to try! Comic? It would be pain!... For to celebr-r-ate, it is to be two peoples wit’ body and bone and blood of one--See!--ze blood it go up my arm, and through my aor-r-ta, and _presto!_ it is humming along zis little woman’s pink ear and making the eyes to dance! And ze daughter of ze peddling mother must in dose times rise to be ze queen of all ze wor-r-ld--_regina dei gratia et potentissima et pulchrissima!_... Look at her, _mein Liebschen_. To you she is, I know not what strange child of Europa--”

“She is beautiful!” murmured Gorgas.

“Ah! I make you see a little wit’ my eyes,” his voice grew tender; “but you do not know. Even you, my Gorgas, are as nothing to her. You are good--_mais oui!_--but I would not walk wit’ you one, two, t’ree step when _she_ crook the finger and smile, ‘_Come!_’”

All this was very wonderful to Gorgas, this most intimate revelation of the deep privacy of domestic happiness; and because she believed that it was the true state of all right marriages, she reveled in its beauty; and then she shivered at the stark reality that was hers. For her there would be no “celebrations.”

But she would not give way again. “That’s all very pretty and poetic, Bardek,” she sat up straight, and seemed to fling off the romantic spell which the Bohemian had set vibrating. “I’m better now. Had a good cry out there,” she jabbed a hand toward the orchard. “Lonesome, I guess. Came in here to get cheered up--and you did it! Sure did!” She searched the room with wondering eyes, as if trying to comprehend how a hut like this could be so charged with happiness. “But I’m different, Bardek.” That was her own answer to the survey she had just made. “I wanted something ... and wanted it ... more--well! why talk about it--” With a great effort she controlled a quavering voice. “I am not to have it--that’s all.”

Bardek watched her with deep sympathy. All the time, he stroked the head of the gypsy girl at his knee, and seemed to agree with Gorgas. But to himself he said, as he admitted later, “She must suffer first, because it is the demand of love that we suffer; in no other way can we give it its true value; and then she will believe better when she has plumbed the depths of doubt.”

She got a grip on herself and went on: “I must not fool myself any longer.... It is madness.... I’d soon be fit for nothing.... Leopold is all right. I’ve known him all my life. He likes me, and, in a way, I like him. We have had great times together. I’ll get over the shock of his liking me in the way--in the way he does.... Got sort of used to it already. I told him I’d let him know. He’s waiting. He said I didn’t know myself ... that I’d come to him ... ‘like the tides rise and follow the irresistible moon,’ he said.... I guess he was right.... He knows a lot about me! It seems a little bit unfair, but I suppose-- Suppose, nothing!” She got herself up suddenly from the comfortable floor, and, at the motion, seemed to bring her resolutions together. “I can’t stand this any longer,” she turned to Bardek. “Leopold it is and must be--I’d better get used to it--and all I’ve got to do is to walk down that road twenty steps and whistle.”

She moved resolutely toward the door. “There is one way to settle it once and for all,” she said, “a sure way to end all the suffering which comes of uncertainty--and it is better,” she insisted, “to stop forever the doubt and the pain.”

“Twenty paces down the road,” thought Bardek. “Why, then it would be all over for the little Gorgas, and settled for life--like two puffs of a cigarette!”

Her hand was on the knob before Bardek called softly to her.

“Yes, Bardek?” she asked, for he had not spoken more than her name. She looked magnificently strong and able as she stood blocked out in dark tints against his white door; and the weariness and the despondency had gone from her; wavering uncertainty had made place for the mind made up. She could not have her first wish; very well; she would accept the next best, and it would not be done half-heartedly; and once accepted, she would be loyal to the death. All this Bardek noted as he looked at her.

“But it is another story zat I happen to know,” he began softly. “Allen Blynn has not told me in words, for then I could not speak wit’out being tattle-tale, but I have listened wit’ my eyes and wit’ my heart--oh, a very good ear my heart has!--and so I know zat it is the good Allen who prays on his knees every night zat some day he will have courage to ask my Gorgas to try to like him--jus’ a leetle bit, mebbe!”

Slowly he drew her from the door. She protested. He argued subtly--it was the fight, he said, against the Evil One for the life of a woman, so it needs must be subtle. Slowly he drew her again to her place beside him on the floor. And then he poured forth the eloquence that only Bardek could summon. He made her cry and he made her laugh; and he filled her with hope. Who could doubt Bardek when he rose to his best? And when the theme is Love--ah! Bardek could have made great strides toward converting the Evil One himself!

“But how do you know, Bardek?” Gorgas demanded.

Ah, he knew! He, Bardek, had been born with both of his two eyes open! The ways of Allen Blynn were not hidden from him. And the little Gorgas must not let despair and fear in at the heart, for they are the father and mother of failure. Much he told her of Allen, evidence that piled up against the absent swain, until some of the despair and fear fled at his strong touch. The protestings of Gorgas grew weaker as Bardek plied his argument.

Among other matters he related one of the many debates which he and Allen had had together. Blynn had been standing for a reaction against the type of freedom--free will, free love, free anything--which had been pulsing from the “lunacy fringe” of the radicals for a generation or more. “They do not seem to understand,” Blynn had argued, “that there is something higher than individual will--or even the individual nation’s will, as Alexander and Napoleon have long ago found out--something which demands surrender, acquiescence.” Bardek had been defending life as the expression of the individual right to live; Blynn had taken the side of individual renunciation. “But there _is_ a divine, far-off event to which the whole creation moves,” said Blynn; “and while our irresistible part is that of free spirits, yet we are most free when we bind the law upon ourselves.” That was the philosophy of Allen Blynn.

“He is not one to seize the daughter of the orange woman,” laughed Bardek, “and zen make a new service of marriage for himself! Ho! He would beat his breast wit’ ze big stone and wait four, five, six week! Now you! You are like me--it make you sick to wait. So! I say, do not wait. Go to him. Tell him to hurry. Tell him you cannot wait for God’s big universe to come to end, but it must come now! Go to him, _Liebschen_! Go to him!”

“I have always wanted to,” agreed Gorgas. “Many times I started to--but I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” asked the fearless man.

“Women do not do that, Bardek.”

He raged at her. “How often have I taught you not to be afraid of what women do or do not! It is woman who will be the last slave on the free earth; and it is because she _want_ to be slave. I will not have you, my Gorgas, be like all ze others! Go, and _be_!”

“But he is in Boston,” she faltered. She knew his itinerary by heart.

“Go to him, _ma fleurie_. Lives have been lost through pride, through not saying the word when it is time. Boston is not yet Babylon, but for you, _mein Liebschen_, there it is zat ze tower to Heaven is. Go to him.”

“I know just what I shall say,” she laughed. The natural tint of health was back in her face. “I have said it so often to myself.”

“Of course you have!” he agreed heartily. “And you will say it over again for many years. And the speeches he will say to you! _Himmel!_ _What_ a dam will burst and drown all the little valleys when one of zese Puritans go loose! Zey try hard all the life to live like Saint Acetum, the Vinegar Saint who is always repairing ze roof of ze Heaven; and when zey topple over and fall, it is a great distance!... You will be eaten alive, my Gorgas; and it is a very pleasant experience, vairy pleasant and good!”

And that night a happy, exulting young woman, charged with uncalculable joy, strode across the lawn and through the orchard, with never a fear nor a despair, those sad parents of failure.

XXVIII

THE MIDNIGHT EXPRESS

At Boston Allen Blynn was preparing to loaf about the old town at his ease until the door should open for his second lecture in that city. At eleven o’clock he was on his knees at the bed; he could not quite make up his mind which was the easiest pair of shoes for walking.

A knock at his door, the deferential tap of a well-feed “bell-hop” brought his cheery, “Come!” but he did not look around.

“Good morning, Professor,” greeted Gorgas, fresh and radiant.

“Gracious!” ejaculated the astonished Blynn.

“Don’t let me interrupt your rosary,” she laughed.

He jumped to his feet--still unadorned with shoes--and grasped both her extended hands.

“Well! Well!” he looked at her from several angles. “If this doesn’t beat the Pennsylvania-Dutch! How did you get here? Another ‘bee-line,’ eh? By the Great Horn Spoon, I’m glad to see you! Did the whole family come up? Where is Kate?” he made a motion as if to look into the hall, but quickly gave up because of the more overpowering desire to gaze at his entrancing visitor. “And how did you know I was here?”

“Hold on!” she stopped him. “This is no blooming quiz. I’m alone, _mon capitaine_. I just--came.”

His mind would not quite focus on the fact.

“I see!” he managed to say, but he did not see.

She produced a cardboard. “Thought I’d boost your little lecture by buying a ticket,” she explained.

“Alone!” he exclaimed. “When did you come?”

“On the Federal express, night before last. I mixed up your dates. Thought you were due in Boston yesterday. So I just naturally waited over.” She walked toward the window. “Great view you have here; simply great!” He seized the nearest pair of shoes and struggled into them. Then he followed her to the window.

“Does Mrs. Levering know you have come?” he asked, full of the proprieties.

She sang a bar of a popular hit.

“Do you know what you’re about? Does your mother know you’re out?

“I didn’t say exactly where I was going; I don’t think I did,” she turned reflectively. “Why should I?”

He tried to explain. She was still a child, seventeen years old, he told her.

“I’m eighteen the tenth of this month, and that’s tomorrow,” she corrected.

He knew that. Still--he argued further.

“Why _will_ you persist in looking down on me?” she stamped her foot, just like a child. “I’ve been on my own since I was knee high to a grasshopper. I’m making my own living; I do a man’s work and, by your own Horn Spoon, I can take care of myself. Look here: yesterday afternoon I sunned myself in the Common on a bench--”

“Heavens!” he muttered.

“You should use just the opposite word,” she commented complacently. “I just sat there and counted the men who ogled me and the ones who sat down and tried to talk.”

“Goodness!” said he.

“Opposite again,” she corrected. “They were just imps. Well, they didn’t waste much time on me, I tell you! Superior disdain, that’s the trick.”

The professor was flabbergasted. He told her so, and tried to make clear the risks she was running.

She laughed at him. “Now don’t be preachy, Allen Blynn; I’m in Boston to get ideas from the Jewelers’ Exposition--that, among other things. I’m a business woman, you know. It’s a new species; get used to it.”

The Jewelers’ Exposition was a discovery of the day before. It would not do to be too abrupt with Allen Blynn.

By the time he had gone with her to the Exposition and had heard her wise talk to the exhibitors, he was almost used to it; and by the time he had watched her taking notes and making sketches, he was quite reconciled. Then they just prowled.

“Let’s go window-cracking?” she suggested.

“Not for a minute!” he pretended alarm.

“Don’t you know ‘window-cracking’?” she looked incredulously. “Where _is_ your knowledge of English? That’s my private word for looking in every window along one street and picking out the things you would buy, and not buying a thing. It’s great fun, and awfully cheap.”

So they went “window-cracking,” like penniless children.

They lunched in style at the best hotel and lived many weeks together in one afternoon. She gave him time to get his notes together for the lecture, drove with him to the hall and sat in the middle of the audience, an enraptured vision to stir him to his best.

At the close of the lecture he hurried to her.

“I have a surprise for you,” he whispered; “you are not the only lady that takes long journeys to help out struggling lecturers. I want you to meet ‘The Lady of the Interruption.’”

Her glance fell. “I hate her,” she said.

“S-sh!” he smiled and turned to a gracious matronly woman of about fifty-five.

“Mrs. Fellows, here’s my little girl, Gorgas,” he said.

“No longer a little girl,” Mrs. Fellows extended a hand.

“You are the ‘Lady’?” Gorgas gasped.

“Yes,” the “Lady” responded pleasantly. “You thought I was young and attractive, and you are happy to find I am not.”

“But you _are_ attractive--you are lovely!” Gorgas shot out impulsively.

“Ah! thank you,” the Lady bowed herself away; “that is a nice speech. And I know you think you mean it.”

She was gone and others crowded around.

“Why didn’t you tell me she was old?” Gorgas inquired.

“It was a stupid joke of mine not to,” he replied as they struggled through the crowd. “I found her out long ago. She has had great troubles--death in a very frightful form. She has considerable wealth but gives her whole life to charity. Eccentric, a little; but her mind is mighty keen, I can tell you. I am very fond of her; that is why I did not like to discuss her with anyone after I found out.”

At half-past ten they were having supper in a gaudy grill-room, thrilling with the strumming of an Hungarian “orchestra” and the stirring air of city-bohemias.

Then Allen Blynn came partly to his senses. “You’re going home tonight,” he said firmly.

“On the ‘Midnight,’” she agreed, and displayed her Pullman ticket.

“Good!” he exclaimed, relieved. “I’m half responsible, you know,” he added. “It’s a great lark. I’m just chuck full of joy; but we must ship you off tonight.”

“Let’s quarrel a little bit, first,” she smiled. “We have had some dandy quarrels, haven’t we?”

He couldn’t remember any; then she would start one.

“First,” she began, “I want to know why you didn’t walk home with me the night of the picnic at Top-o’-the-Hill--when Leopold sang ‘Forty year on.’ I wrote you a little note asking you to go with me. You trotted off with Kate and left me with Leopold. We had the deuce of a time, I can tell you.”

Conscience-stricken, he remembered that half-read letter. The offer of the lectures had swamped his mind.

The explanation satisfied.

“Leopold wants to marry me,” she blurted out next.

“I know,” he replied gravely. “He told me as much,--but at seventeen! Think of it!”

“I wish you would not always be telling me that I am--” she began indignantly.

“But you are, you know,” he told her quietly. “Leopold is as old as I, but a man couldn’t possib--”

“Oh,” she laughed. “He couldn’t? _Couldn’t_ he! He’s been dogging me for ever so long. You make a big mistake about years. Everybody does. At thirteen, when I first talked with you, I was as much a woman as I am now or ever will be. And I’ve been sitting back trying to behave myself like a doll. At fifteen I had my height and--everything; and now I’m eighteen. I can’t stay in the refrigerator any longer, I tell you.... Leopold? Child? Let me tell you something, Allen Blynn. Leopold and I had a fight that night. Not words, remember; but an ugly real fight, with fists and hands.... He knows I’m no child.... Now wait!” she held up her hand. “Leopold’s all right. He wants to marry me. He did just what he ought to have done. It was all right, absolutely right. It was my fault again. You went off and deserted me--and I just didn’t care what happened to me. Then I had to fight my way out. _Nom d’une pipe! Nom du nom d’une pipe!_... And that isn’t all. I must shock your old professorial head a little. There was another.... But I woke up and got out. Your letter did it--the one on morals and instincts, and that terrible story of the leper; don’t you remember?”

Yes, he remembered. The little woman before him was opening up astonishing vistas into her stirring life. But she was a child, he insisted. The general appearance was that of a woman; but that was a trick of hat and gown and hair, a disguise easily seen through. Her face was womanly, and her voice; but in both were cries of very young life. Her very wonderful health, the thing that gave her beauty--that was youth; and her frankness was the innocence of youth.

“Do you know what Bardek means by Saint Acetum?” she asked him suddenly. She had been studying his rather solemn-smiling face, delighting in its fine seriousness--made fine, she thought, by the light of a smile that hovered ever in the eyes and in and out the firm lips.

“What does Bardek mean by anything!” Allen chuckled contentedly, the solemnity quite fading from his face at the thought of the unfathomable Bardek. “Saint Acetum? I never heard of the person.”

“Oh!” Gorgas laughed in her impulsive way. “Saint Acetum is you!--The Vinegar Saint! Oh, Allen Blynn, that is _too_ funny!...” Allen frowned at her inquiringly. “That’s just the way he would look, too--stern, and wise, and worried--”

“Worried?”

“For fear the roof would fall in, you know.”

“Roof?” he glanced apprehensively at the ceiling.

“Saint Acetum, you know--” she tried to explain. His serious face was delightfully comic; in a flash she saw how it would be immensely jolly, and assuring, to have him gazing at her forever as if she needed the firmest and sternest looking after.

“Saint Acetum?” he cogitated. “There ain’t no such animal.”

“Oh, yes,” she continued, “Bardek says--”

“Bardek invented him, then.”

“Of _course_, silly! That’s the fun of it. Saint Acetum is forever repairing ‘ze roof of ze Heaven’; and there he is up there all alone, patching and patching, and always looking for trouble; and he won’t _ever_ come down and have a good time with the angels--not even once! It might rain, you see. And Bardek says, that’s just like you, Allen Blynn--”

“Isn’t Bardek a wonder!” His eyes glowed with delight in the Bohemian’s comic fantasy. “And isn’t that just like him!... The Vinegar Saint!... Well!...” A strong flash of determination came into his face suddenly. “And he is quite right!... _Someone_ must keep watch lest the Heavens fall! And they might fall, you know,” he added whimsically. “You believe that God is good, and all-wise, and all-powerful, don’t you?”

She nodded. “One must,” she said. “It would be terrible not to.”

“He is good, and wise; but perhaps not all-wise. And sometimes I think He is not all-powerful. The Old One has won some of the battles--in Eden, for instance. Sometimes I fancy--it is an ancient belief--that the long battle between Good and Evil, begun aeons ago in chaos, is still at its height, and that the outcome might even be in doubt; and then I fancy that He needs us--some of us--on the firing line; or, like your Vinegar Saint, guarding the outposts. Perhaps we are sometimes a brake on progress, but often we are the ones who save liberty from liberty’s self. You know, we Allens were Tories in the Revolution; we were for the existing order then, and against the revolutionists. There must be a drop or two of reactionary blood still in me!... Vinegar Saint! Good! But don’t think that the poor old chap loves the endless patching, or that the songs of the angels don’t tempt him mightily to shirk his job.... And if he gets to looking too fierce and vinegary, it’s because--”

“It’s because he is a dear old honest _capitaine_,” she cried; “and I’d rather have him vinegary any day than--”

“Peppery?” he joked, determined not to be solemn.

“Yes, or even sugary. Ugh!” she affected a delightful shudder. “How I hate the sweety ones!”

This was a pleasing savor to the Vinegar Saint, and for a moment or two he forgot his patchings, and reveled in the unsaintly joy of flattery; then he remembered abruptly.

“What are you going to do about Leopold?” he asked.

“It depends upon you, _mon capitaine_,” she replied calmly. “If you don’t want me, Allen Blynn--_anybody_ can have me. There! It’s out! I’ve made up my mind to say this to you for almost a year. Let me--”

A preposterous waiter had to be dealt with. He was recommending some custard concoction with a dash of white wine, and inquiring about such irrelevant matters as demi-tasses or full cups. Gorgas had to be appealed to. She made selections deliberately, but her fingers were nervously restless.

“So you will take the wine-sauce?” the waiter was most interested.

“Yes,” said Blynn.

“Or would you prefer it with cream?”

“Yes,” said Blynn.

“Perhaps M’sieu’ would rather have the sliced oranges?”

“Yes, yes,” said Blynn in great distress, “Anything, old man. You fix it up. Anything. Just cut along like a good fellow, will you?”

“Don’t look so frowning, _mon capitaine_,” Gorgas smiled across the table, but her eyes belied that smile. “Don’t speak yet. Let me show you how I look at this thing. If I stop now, I’ll never begin again. And I just can’t stand keeping it inside.... When you came to me at the tennis-court five years ago and took me for a grown woman, the thing was done; right there. I’ve never got over it. I’ve tried; but it was no use; it got worse. I sent you to Holden to get rid of you.... You scared me.... You saw it, I guess. My eyes must have shown, for you got out of the way.... That’s why you suddenly fled to Holden; wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” dumbly.

“I knew.... It was beastly the way you cut me.... Don’t speak yet.... I don’t blame you.... Sometimes I’d catch you looking at me like a hungry dog, afraid to come near for fear I’d beat you or something. I know what was the matter. You were afraid of encouraging a child. Mercy! Encourage? That was just the way to make me rabid! Well, I resolved to grow up. I fought the family until I could dress the part, and I fooled everybody but you.... And now I _am_ grown up.... It’s no fooling now.... And there you are, as far away as ever. So I said to myself, that man will have to be approached and stormed. He’ll never marry anybody, unless somebody asks him. No, you wouldn’t, Allen Blynn. You’re not a bit aggressive; you’re too courteous, too afraid of hurting folks’ feelings. Well, I want to be hurt.... So I’m coming right at you. Here’s your chance, Allen Blynn.... Wait!... I figured it this way. It’s all mere custom, this woman-sitting-back-and-waiting business. I’ve got the same desire for my man as any man has for his woman. I want him. Shall I let him slip by? Not I. I’m going right for him. He’ll be startled at first, just the way women are--oh! I’ve talked with a lot of ’em!--but keeping right at it brings everything. Half the women don’t want the men that come at them; but the thought gets into their brains and grows until it bubbles over and swamps ’em. Oh, I know. Neddie Morris nearly had me, and so did Leopold; if you hadn’t been in my head one of ’em would have got me; it was just a matter of sliding.... Now, Allen Blynn, you’re my man.” They were very close together at their diminutive little table. She could have touched his arms, almost without leaning forward. Her voice grew very soft and tender as she added, “Aren’t I the brazen one!”

“Little woman,” he spoke with the greatest kindness. “Will you let me think this out?”

She nodded. For a half-hour they watched the silly crowd and nibbled at sweetish frothy desserts and sipped at cold coffees. Overbibulous folks laughed in high keys, and the Hungarian orchestra, taking its cue from the diners, grew noisier and noisier. At this moment the bandsmen were working vigorously on the quietest of love themes; castanets and cymbals clashed and tanged and told all the world about “long years ago in old Madrid, where softly sighs of love the light guitar.” The song had taken the country only a few years before, and had now reached the stage of orchestral “variations.” The Hungarian leader was consumed with passion and beer; he gesticulated and shouted to his workers, and they bent to their task. Every child in America knew the absurd words. Even Allen Blynn knew them!

Come, my love, the stars are shining, Time is flying, Love is sighing, Come, my love, my heart is pining Here alone I wait for thee.

Mischievously Gorgas accompanied with the words of the refrain, she pianissimo, the orchestra thundering double forte to its climax. They smiled guiltily as they thought of the smashing, gesticulating music and the personal significance of the libretto.

“Well,” he turned to her.

“Well?” she rested her arms on the little table so that her two hands almost touched him.

“This is the greatest experience of my life,” he said soberly, “absolutely the greatest and the finest.” His face shone with exultation. “It is the last thing I dreamed of. I thought it was Leopold. The fact is--well, I was mortally sure. We talked together just before I left. He didn’t tell me outright, but I knew, of course. Naturally I couldn’t guess the details.... That _is_ a revelation!...”

Already she thought she had read his answer and withdrew her hands ever so slightly. Except for a deeply flushed face and sparkling eyes she gave no other sign; she was prepared for it to take time!

“Here alone I wait for thee!” the orchestra shouted.

“It’s hard to talk here. Come,” he looked earnestly at his watch as if he had never seen one before. “We’ll cab it for my hotel, where I must get your birthday gift--the manuscript book, you know.... Then I’ll see you to your train.... We have barely a half-hour.”

St. Acetum had not tumbled from the roof of the Heaven as Bardek had predicted; he seemed, rather, to be all too intent on his eternal patching and repairing. It was very assuring; one felt safe and protected; now, whatever else happened, the Heavens would not fall! For in spite of Bardek’s jests at the expense of the Saint, Gorgas knew that the good man would not so easily desert his high duties for anything merely personal. Still, she wished that he might at least just look down!

At her side of the cab she sat rigid; without a word she let him get out at the hotel and return with the gift; but as they drew near the railway terminal, she put a trembling hand on his shoulder.

“Won’t you even touch me?” she asked plaintively.

“Please! please!” he begged; and she withdrew to her place. _Nom d’une pipe! Nom du nom d’une pipe!_

“I’m not a bit sorry I came,” she said finally.

“Nor am I! Nor am I!” he replied fervently. “I feel--glorified!”

They walked slowly, like two tired persons, to her car. He saw about her tickets and bade her goodby at the steps.

“Is there--somebody else?” she asked quietly.

“Gracious, no!” he cried; but immediately he said, “Wait!” and looked worried. “Yes,” he corrected, “there is--and there isn’t at all!” His lips closed firmly, but his eyes seemed to be telling her not to believe a word of it.

“This little book,” he put the package into her hand hastily, as if he were eager to change the topic, “is five years of my life. It will explain what I have not been able to say to you tonight. But you are not to open it until your eighteenth birthday.”

“That is tomorrow--and tomorrow is almost here,” she told him. “In a few moments I’ll be eighteen.”

“Yes, I know!” he agreed. “So you will be! Well! well! On your ride home, then, you may read it. There is just one condition: you must begin at the beginning, and go straight through--‘Through hedge and over gate. Straight! straight! straight! straight!’” he quoted. “Promise!”

She promised.

The porters began to take on the appearance of getting under way; the Midnight Express was a punctual institution.

“All aboard!” someone called afar off. “Express for Philadelphia and Washington! All aboard!”

She leaned up to him with flaming invitation in her face.

“No one will know,” she said. “Quick! They’ll think we’re brother and sister!”

A big clock tolled the first stroke of twelve. He took her face in his hands so tempestuously as to startle and hurt, but she laughed.

“All aboard!”

“Go quick!” he cried.

The conductor was impatient. Boom! boom! the big clock finished out its twelve slow strokes.

“Many happy returns of the day,” he called after the moving train. She said nothing, but she waved until the darkness enveloped her.

XXIX

“STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT!”

“I’m not a bit sorry I came,” she said aloud as she fumbled around the zigzag corners of two Pullmans until she reached her own drawing-room. And she was not; she was most unreasonably elated; she had, she knew not why, all the humming sensations of victory. It was unaccountable. She sat on her couch and tried to fathom the meaning of her snug contentedness. She retold the full day together, the “window-cracking,” the luncheon in state, the jogs about strange streets, the applauding crowd at the lecture, the garish Hungarian café, the confession and its almost painful reception, and the tumultuous parting. She ought to have been depressed, but she was throbbing with joy. “It was good, every minute of it,” she said.

Mechanically she undid the wrappings from Allen’s birthday gift, arranged the pillows and the light, and prepared to read. The outside of the book was the simple adjustable cover of a college note-book, but a gold-leafed title had been printed across the front:

Unclaimed Letters

She turned to the first page carefully, remembering,

Through hedge, over gate Straight! straight! straight! straight!

There she found a subtitle: Letters to Gorgas Levering; to be delivered into her hands on the twentieth anniversary of her birth; dictated from time to time by the heart of an old comrade and withheld from the post by his conscience. (Later note: “twentieth” amended to “eighteenth” but under stern protest of said conscience.)

The first letter was dated June 17, 1888. It was a date she knew by heart. Every year she had celebrated secretly the anniversary of the meeting at the tennis-court. She read:

“Dear Gorgas Levering: You have given me a psychological shock: you have unhinged my reason, let loose my emotions, and upset my moral apple cart! You did all that, and you know nothing about it. When you grow up--say, at twenty or twenty-one--I shall present you with this document of evidence, and if you have any sense of decency at that age you will be shocked too. No little girl of thirteen with a face like a madonna should be allowed to tuck her legs under her pinafore and impose upon a grown up man what shaves every day. (The seeming irrelevancy of these remarks is not due to lunacy--although it is yet disputed if the moon does not have something to do with it--but to a fine scientific ardor. All the facts must be recorded and in this case concealed legs is facts.)

“All my life I have stopped in the middle of experience and recorded my feelings. I say, ‘Allen Blynn, you feel this way or that way.’ This helps me to remember later; for all our lives we are stuffing and changing and forgetting our former selves. Hence I hereby solemnly affirm that if I had the courage to smash all the conventions of my civilization and put a good-sized gash into the moral code of my contemporaries, I, Allen Blynn, male, white, and a voter, would have picked you up in my arms today at the tennis-courts, hugged the daylight out of you, tossed you across my shoulders, made straight for the nearest clergyman and married you--with one hand across your mouth to prevent your squealing and the other firmly grasping your struggling legs.

“That would be kidnapping--punishable by life imprisonment. I know it. And also grand larceny. Of course it is. And something like piracy. Right! Yet, I did none of these things; sheer cowardice held my hands; but if to have murder in the heart is to be murderer, as I believe, then I stand here convicted of the desire to own you, bag and baggage, legs, and all.

“And you are thirteen years old, and I am twenty-three!

“It is shameful, isn’t it? But I am brazenly unashamed. That is the Lord’s own psychological truth!

“Your kidnapper at heart,

“Allen Blynn.”

“And I wouldn’t have squealed a bit,” Gorgas crooned. “I’d have trotted right along--in the lead, too. I bet he doesn’t know the shortest cut to the parsonage.”

“June 21,” the next letter began.

“That was the Wednesday afternoon he first came to the house,” she commented.

“Dear Gorgas Levering: Psychological facts are accumulating.

“Fact No. 1: I am still a criminal-at-large and more dangerous than ever.

“Fact No. 2: I slipped back five years this afternoon and became eighteen. The proof is we both had a gallumptious time mimicking the neighborhood and acted like a pair of school children. Further proof is that you continually did make eyes at me, and, in spite of all the roaring protestations of something that’s left of my conscience, my own did slip several times. They really did slip: they slid nearer and nearer; from your chin they drew up to the tip of your nose; clambered up, up, slowly, overran the mark, and perched perilously on the right eyebrow; leaned over for a dizzy second and--slipped into untold brown fathoms. Once I was nearly drowned. It was the most terrifying sensation of my young manhood.

“Fact No. 3: I was mortally ashamed--put that down to my credit (you were not, you rogue!) and resolved never to do it again. The Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law.

“Fact No. 4: That gypsy scamp scares me into trembles. When you told me of him I had murder in my heart, then and there; all the fierce primitive desire to meet that beast and beat him into pulp. My voice shook so when I asked you about him that I was certain you noticed it. My nesting instincts are coming with a rush--and they are most terrifying.

“Fact No. 5: In daylight I admit none of these things. I am very moral and civilized in daylight. Only at night when I sit before this white paper does my inward, honest self come to the fore and disport his naked savagery.

“Fact No. 6: The two ‘me’s’ are fighting each other; daylight against darkness. Daylight is going to win, or it’s all over with Allen Blynn (see the state your rhyming’s put me in!)

“Still criminal,

“Allen Blynn.”

The next letters were full of vindictive hatred of Bardek. Allen had gone to the old mill and found it deserted. He told how all his talk on Elizabethan love with Kate as they drove along the Wissahickon was only the outward voice speaking; within were throbbing anxious cries for a little child off in the woods with--what sort of a man? The Lord only knew. Elizabethan love--contagion, infection, plague and what not--he had them all, a virulent case. With wide eyes Gorgas read of his tramp back into the dark of Cresheim Valley and how he had seen her forlorn little figure pacing thoughtfully beside “Gyp.” Only vigorous conscience withheld his hands from touching her as she passed by.

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty--terrible! a life-time of exile. Perhaps one might make it nineteen--No! said Conscience, roaring outrageously. Well, twenty, then.

The “German days,” “French days,” and “Italian days” followed in review, while Gorgas passed from thirteen to fourteen. His joy at the discovery of the simple sincerity of Bardek flowed through the pages, with just a hint of watchfulness. “He is a man, a free-thinker, a free-lover, too, I suspect,” he warned her. “Look out for him, child; but you need not do that. I am on eternal guard, now. He has no conscience, that is certain; but in some matters neither have I. If he makes a step toward you ‘I would eat his heart out in the market-place!’ But I have faith in Bardek, an unreasoned thing, but clear enough. Time will tell.

“And I’m watching you, too, Golden Child. Your brown eyes do not behave themselves. They explore, explore, explore, until I am ready to reach out my hand and close them against myself. And you continually do pluck at my sleeve and touch my wrist nervously with the tips of your hot fingers and send my blood slamming and jamming and ramming and cramming like the waters go down at Lodore. You have no conscience, either; that’s plain. Well, here’s where I begin my long vigil. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty--it is life imprisonment. I’ll be an old man! Shall we say nineteen then? Golly! What a racket Conscience sets up!”

At another time he wrote briefly. “You stood in the narrow path today, when we found that Bardek had gone, and reached out your arms to me. By the Great Horn Spoon! By the Dipper and the Little Bear! _And_ the Pole Star! _And_ the Pleiades! Don’t ever do that again! Zounds! Flesh and blood, that’s all I’m made of! Fra Lippo Lippi said that. Fortunately for you and me I’m flesh and blood plus a Conscience.”

“And I never guessed it!” Gorgas communed with herself. “If I had--” The first touch of remorse seized her for the lost chances of life, and a little anger at the laws of polite society, and a pang of jealousy for that “other” whom he had so dubiously confessed.

“Why does he torture me with this book of letters?” she marvelled. A few leaves slipped through her fingers; she turned impatiently toward the concluding pages, but stopped. “I’ll play fair,” she said. “Straight! straight! straight! straight!”

Morris came into the letters. Allen had noticed greedily their intimacy and lamented the early bookishness that had prevented his ever being more than a spectator at athletics. Some of the fierce passions of envy seized him. He was gloriously frank. “I’m a half-man,” he exclaimed. “They let me sit and spell out books and praised me until my vanity led me further and further away from real life. Why couldn’t they have driven me off to baseball and football and all that! The world praises the pedant, but the young woman goes straight to a _man_. I have had the education of a woman--and even women are repudiating it, nowadays.”

He was very unfair to himself in these despondent pages. Gorgas quarreled with every line. She scolded him; told him what his real qualities were and advised him to have more sense or she would skip. It was the “Sorrows of Allen Blynn,” the aching of strong youth before he has found his place, when he cries out upon his own unfitness for any place at all. “These are just my growing pains, child,” he was wise enough to write. “Don’t bother your little head about them; it’ll come out all right eventually.” But it made her uncomfortable and weepy.

At the top of the next page a street address gave her a sudden pleasurable thrill:

18/a Fürstenstrasse, München, Deutschland.

“Oh!” Gorgas gasped in delight. “He really did write from Germany, after all.”

“_Mein Kindschen_,” it began. “Frau Schloss talked of your letter even before she would arrange the price of breakfasts and bed. There has been a great to do over your letter. It came several days before I arrived. And it was a bulky document--thick, extravagant American letter-paper is to the German mind like feeding lamb chops to stray dogs. And it lacked stamps mightily.

“The question that confronted the Frau Schloss, the Herr Schloss, the Gemüse Frau, who keeps a green-grocery below stairs, and the Herr Postman--the question that has stirred them for the past fortnight is whether it is a safe investment to pay the overdue postage, trusting that the Herr Professor would later make restitution plus _trinkgeld_; or deny all knowledge of the Herr Professor and throw the responsibility upon the efficient German postal service. Well! They decided that the Herr Professor would be an easy American mark, as he had been on former visits; so they paid out real money, received the letter, and took the big risk that I might not have recovered from the American madness of paying large sums with a smile.

“As I arrived in the Fürstenstrasse, Frau Schloss saw me from the window above the green-grocery and hastened down the dark stair and through the darker alley of a vestibule (where the Gemüse Frau keeps her push-cart) to meet me breathless in front of the Vegetable Lady’s display.

“‘I suppose I may have my old rooms?’ I asked, after the first formal greetings.

“‘Oh, the letter, my honored Herr Professor!’ she began tragically.

“‘Ah!’ I caught her up. ‘I cannot have the rooms then? I’m sorry.’

“‘Yes! yes!’ she assured me, ‘Yes, honored Herr Professor. The rooms are ready. And the letter is ready, too! It came a week ago. We have kept it for you--’

“‘We have kept it,’ said Herr Schloss, emerging from the dark hall.

“‘--and have paid,’ beamed Frau Schloss anxiously.

“‘We have indeed paid,’ helped Herr Schloss.

“‘I have seen them pay,’ corroborated the Gemüse Frau, looming from the dark doorway.

“Oh, they held me with a glittering eye, Frau Schloss, Herr Schloss, and the Gemüse Frau, as I listened to their tale, awaited the bringing forth of the letter and stood silent and noncommittal throughout the profuse explanation of each glaring governmental mark that announced money due.

“‘Bless my soul!’ I cried in English; ‘it’s from Gorgas.’ And I ripped it open right before them, ejaculated my joy in their very faces--we were still on the sidewalk in front of the house--thanked them in flowery German and passed rapidly by to my old rooms without so much as a hint of payment.

“They followed me.

“‘Is it then an important letter?’ anxiously inquired the Frau Schloss.

“‘Important?’ I echoed. ‘It is worth a million Dutch thalers.’

“Then I saw their faces. ‘Oh’ I sensed their trouble. ‘My best thanks for your thoughtfulness; pray, accept this little token,’ and I passed the lady the sum of twelve cents--a silver fifty-pfennig piece--a Bavarian ransom. As the postage amounted to only twenty-five pfennig, this gave the family a clear rake-off of six American cents. Ah! there was joy in the Schloss family that night, and for days the Gemüse Frau shone by reflected glory. Thrift! What would we Americans in Germany do without thrift in the Germans!

“I am purposely keeping away from your letter. All this introductory setting is to tantalize myself, to force myself to be calm and see things straight. At the slightest excuse I could gush forth on these pages a quantity and quality of sentiment that would make your six-page outcry seem quite sensible and respectable. (And it is neither, you know, _mein Kindschen_.) You tell me things here that I know only too well. Maybe that’s why I am in Germany. You hint that I could marry you by crooking my little finger. Down here in Bavaria they often do that sort of thing at exactly your age--fifteen and one-half. But if I should do it, or encourage you to think that I might even want to do it--well! I have read enough Italian literature to know that there is a particularly private pit in Hell reserved for those chaps. So I am going to perform a bit of moral cruelty which makes me ill to think of--and is bound to make me iller as the days and nights go by--I am going to ignore your truthful little confession; act brutally as if you had never penned it; pretend that I never could guess how you would count the days it takes for a letter to cross the ocean, arrive at Hamburg, drift down to Munich; how you would count again the days it takes a reply to come up to Hamburg and sail to New York; how for days and days and months and months you would watch for the postman, trying all the while to look unconcerned, and find each day--silence. You are not the kind of child to grow busy with your playthings and forget. I know how you will suffer--worse now, perhaps, than if you were older. And I make you suffer because there is no other way.

“There is no other way; I may make no explanation. If I told you the truth you would probably take the next steamer for Europe; and if I acted the way I feel, I’d probably meet you half way over. And I can’t write you a lame acknowledgment that I have received your letter, have it on file and will attend to your order in due course. The coldest thing I wrote would burn with the lie that it carried and you would guess and be tempted by me. No. I am like a man in love with his friend’s wife. There is nothing to do. I must keep the faith--which means, in this case, silence.

“It is so horrible, the thing I must do, that I almost forget how you have paid in advance for my necessary brutality. This fragile, badly-spelled, pink-rose-leaf confession of yours, so delicately real, like a half-opened cherry-bud, warm, fragrant, potent with all that is to be! I could send it back to you, _mein Kindschen_, and say, ‘All that you own here, I confess again to you. Speak; and whatever you say, that will be but the echo of myself.’

“And I shall say nothing. But my heart is full of pity, _mein Kindschen_.”

They were crossing the river above New York city before she had been able to finish three-quarters of the book; the cars were shifted carefully and tenderly to a flat-bottomed ferry; in a few moments they were being towed down the river to Jersey City. She could look out of her window and see the lights of the river and hear the water lapping the sides of the boat. Much meditation had gone with each page; and she was reluctant to come to the impending end.

Leopold appeared in the letters. “I am playing a losing game, I know,” he wrote. “While I wait and look fatherly (and get called _mon père_--ugh!) someone else, less scrupulous--and a blamed sight more natural!--will reach out and take you.... _Nom d’une pipe!_... My word is given, however, and I will not break it. _Hier stehe ich, Gott mir helfen, ich kann nicht anders_; so said Luther, or something like that, on a matter that seems to me less important!”

Almost immediately after this he was rowing most gloriously with Conscience and bringing the years down to eighteen. “Something ought to be knocked off for good behavior,” he argued; “every decent prison allows that. But there’s the final stand. One step this side--one minute even, and I’d never forgive myself. Seventeen, eighteen! Two years of acting-grandfather, playing the wise old professor, _so_ interested in education! Rats!”

Now he was leaving abruptly for Holden, decamping in the night, fleeing before the attack of the tempter. The devil had got into him; the Old One needed vigorous exorcising.

The Old One came in for a long essay. The devil was God’s ally, he found out; Lucifer tried men out, tested them, showed up the flaws, taught them exactly what to amend, reject or add. Spiritual perfection was not possible without a healthy, vigorous tussle with the Old One.

“I know when he is coming,” he claimed; “first, I hear the cries of the old mystery-play devils, ‘Out haro! Out haro! Out! out! out!’ just like a pack of yelping dogs on a hot scent. Then I find my heart, blood, lungs, vertebræ, stomach, legs, and sympathetic nervous system all going back on me. The flesh and the devils are old cronies, you know. ‘Out! out! Out haro! Out! out!’ he howls, nearer and nearer; my whole physical ‘me’ tugs and yowls and bites at the leash.

“Then the real ‘me’ takes a fresh grip and holds fast. I slip and slide a little, but dig my feet in the stones, and pray--”

“I know. I know,” nodded Gorgas.

“--Then I throw the thong over my shoulders,” Allen went on, “turn my back on the fiend and drag that other part of ‘me,’ heart, stomach, and all, straight up on firm ground. Every step’s a better one.”

“My legs get away from me,” Gorgas commented ruefully. “They just took me off to Boston. And I’m not a bit sorry--and _that’s_ funny, too.”

Seventeen was the hardest year. The grown-up gowns were not lost on him. “Attire of the devil’s making,” he wrote. “A snare of the Old One,--_Retro, Sathanas!_ Get thee behind me. Not a minute before the hour set, or all my life I shall feel depraved.”

The Old One argued with him. He gave a part of the debate:

“Old One: Why grow solemn-faced over so simple a matter! She’s a woman and you’re a man.

“Allen B.: She’s a child and I _am_ a man, thank the Lord, full-grown and in control of himself.

“Old One: (sneering) Are you a man? Oh, no, you’re not. You’re neither male nor female. You’re a pedagogue.

“A. B.: (wincing) _Touchez bien!_ A hit! Whatever I am, I am going to be decent.

“Old One: (artfully) All the unnatural things and all the disagreeable ones are decent. In Constantinople it isn’t decent for a woman to show her lips. Man invented that word, ‘decent.’ With God there is no decent or indecent. He made ’em all, the good and the bad. Don’t you know your Browning? He made you, Allen Blynn, what you are.

“A. B.: And he made you, you canker! And he made me strong to fight you. _Retro!_ Imp of Darkness! ’Raus!

“Old One: _Are_ you so strong?

“A. B.: No!... Get out!

“Old One: Neither is Leopold--Leopold, your bosom-friend--

“A. B.: (smiting him) Back to hell, you miserable liar! Back! Back!

“Old One: (retreating) Ho! ho! ho! ho! Out haro! out haro! ho! ho! Neither is Leopold!... Leopold!... Leopold!”

On other pages he was full of hope. The dream had come true. He was planning out his life with her. “We must make this go right,” he said. “The world is writing its books against us. Every little novelist and every little playwright is hinting dark things against marriage. They sneer at all the habits of the race and cry, ‘Liberty for the emotions.’ ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they tempt, ‘and also thy neighbor’s wife. Marriage is servitude and a restriction; let’s wallow and be natural.’ Liars and servants of the Old One, every mother’s son. But we must watch carefully. Marriage is like any other attempt at living; it must be tended and watched and fed, not squandered or tossed about. We’ll spend our store of affection like other gifts, not lavishly all at once in one mad spree, but with rare economy; and we’ll keep adding new funds to the old by sharing associations together. We must not begin to have separate interests or even different friends. Marriage is a wonderful art; the ideal is ever beyond achievement, but it is worth striving for.... Did you say, ‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus’?

“I have two complete and separate lives,” he wrote further; “the one I live in the day-time, serious, mature, full of windy arguments of state, books, religion, literature, education; the one I live at night when the hurlyburly of the day is done and I travel these pages with you. My very style is different in these two personalities. In the broad light of day I am somewhat stilted and over-oldish for one so young; here with you sitting sleepy-eyed in the chair before me, I am lithe and bold and gay and boyish. There are no sweethearts in the day-time for Allen Blynn. And that’s a good thing, too; or he couldn’t do a proper day’s work. Sometimes you do bob in, but I rise politely, put on my spectacles, usher you firmly to the door and bid you a pleasant but peremptory ‘good morning.’ Sometimes you slip in by the window, and then I am done for.”

The “Lady of the Interruption” came in for a comment or two. “You have a wrong notion of that Lady; and I have encouraged it; you ask such persistent questions about her eyes and her hair and her dresses--about all of which I know nothing. She is at least fifty, but I have carefully concealed that from you. Your wide-open eyes see a life-partner there and I affect to wonder if it might not be. That’s playing the game square--a little too square, perhaps. At any rate it is right penance for all my sins of desire; and it pleases Conscience mightily and makes the Old One howl.”

Those dictated letters to the family! Great Scott! How self-conscious and bookish they were. Daylight wrote every line of them, affirmed Allen Blynn.

* * * * *

Dawn was slowly touching the edge of a New Jersey pine wood; but Gorgas was not at all aware of that. Never had sleep seemed so foreign to her needs.

Breathlessly she read on until within a page or two of the end.

“What does he mean? What does he mean?” she fingered the scant leaves that remained. “He said there was another--‘There is--and there isn’t at all,’ he said.”

The end came abruptly. It was dated only a few weeks ago. Before he had left for his lecture trip he had had a casual talk with Leopold, he wrote. What Leopold really said is not recorded--Leopold was too honest a man to have lied--but, nevertheless, Allen Blynn came away with the certain impression that the long vigil had come to naught. Poets, lovers and madmen have such seething brains!

“I have climbed to my ‘Top-o’-the-hill,’” wrote Allen; “beyond is Canaan, but it is not for me.”

“How could he? How could he?” Gorgas whispered. “This is terrible, Allen Blynn.” Solicitude for her man quite outweighed her own loss.

She read on: “Within sight of the promised land I must die and be buried in the Valley of Moab,” he wrote on the final page. “What sin I have committed I know not.... And now you will never find me out, my child. Your birthday gift--this book of absurd confessions--must be buried with me.

“‘And Jehovah showed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan and all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, and the South, and the Plain of the Valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar.... And He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab; but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’”

“Finis” was written in deliberate ink; but a white space below had left room for a scrawl in pencil: “You are out there in the cab, little woman, and Canaan is around and about me; yet I must not speak. When you read these pages you will know and understand. The Old One is fighting hard with me to break the faith; but I cannot, now. _Our life together must not begin this way._ You must go home, and I must not have it on my soul that I even so much as touched you. There is a way that _seemeth_ right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. In my stupid, iron-set, prejudiced, superstitious brain you are a child until tomorrow. Tomorrow you will be something other, my right woman. That other I will claim, but--tomorrow. _Tomorrow!_

“Your ecstatic, maybe-foolish, and altogether glorified,

“VINEGAR SAINT.”

“Oh, Allen Blynn! Allen Blynn!” the tearful little woman laughed in her joy. “You are _too_ funny! You are _too, too_ funny!”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

No attempt was made to standardize dialect.