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FANTASIES
THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ
I
John T. Unger came from a family that had been well
known in Hades—a small town on the Mississippi River
—for several generations. John's father had held the
amateur golf championship through many a heated contest;
Mrs. Unger was known "from hot-box to hot-bed,"
as the local phrase went, for her political addresses; and
young John T. Unger, who had just turned sixteen, had
danced all the latest dances from New York before he
put on long trousers. And now, for a certain time, he
was to be away from home. That respect for a New
England education which is the bane of all provincial
places, which drains them yearly of their most promising
young men, had seized upon his parents. Nothing
would suit them but that he should go to St. Midas'
School near Boston—Hades was too small to hold their
darling and gifted son.
Now in Hades—as you know if you ever have been
there—the names of the more fashionable preparatory
schools and colleges mean very little. The inhabitants
have been so long out of the world that, though they
make a show of keeping up to date in dress and manners
and literature, they depend to a great extent on hearsay,
and a function that in Hades would be considered
elaborate would doubtless be hailed by a Chicago beef-princess
as "perhaps a little tacky."
John T. Unger was on the eve of departure. Mrs.
Unger, with maternal fatuity, packed his trunks full of
linen suits and electric fans, and Mr. Unger presented
his son with an asbestos pocket-book stuffed with money.
"Remember, you are always welcome here," he said.
"You can be sure, boy, that we'll keep the home fires
burning."
"I know," answered John huskily.
"Don't forget who you are and where you come from,"
continued his father proudly, "and you can do nothing
to harm you. You are an Unger—from Hades."
So the old man and the young shook hands and John
walked away with tears streaming from his eyes. Ten
minutes later he had passed outside the city limits, and
he stopped to glance back for the last time. Over the
gates the old-fashioned Victorian motto seemed strangely
attractive to him. His father had tried time and time
again to have it changed to something with a little more
push and verve about it, such as "Hades—Your Opportunity,"
or else a plain "Welcome" sign set over a
hearty handshake pricked out in electric lights. The
old motto was a little depressing, Mr. Unger had thought
—but now. . . .
So John took his look and then set his face resolutely
toward his destination. And, as he turned away, the
lights of Hades against the sky seemed full of a warm
and passionate beauty.
St. Midas' School is half an hour from Boston in a
Rolls-Pierce motor-car. The actual distance will never
be known, for no one, except John T. Unger, had ever
arrived there save in a Rolls-Pierce and probably no
one ever will again. St. Midas' is the most expensive
and the most exclusive boys' preparatory school in the
world.
John's first two years there passed pleasantly. The
fathers of all the boys were money-kings and John spent
his summers visiting at fashionable resorts. While he
was very fond of all the boys he visited, their fathers
way he often wondered at their exceeding sameness.
When he told them where his home was they would
ask jovially, "Pretty hot down there?" and John would
muster a faint smile and answer, "It certainly is." His
response would have been heartier had they not all made
this joke—at best varying it with, "Is it hot enough
for you down there?" which he hated just as much.
In the middle of his second year at school, a quiet,
handsome boy named Percy Washington had been put
in John's form. The newcomer was pleasant in his manner
and exceedingly well dressed even for St. Midas',
but for some reason he kept aloof from the other boys.
The only person with whom he was intimate was John
T. Unger, but even to John he was entirely uncommunicative
concerning his home or his family. That he was
wealthy went without saying, but beyond a few such
deductions John knew little of his friend, so it promised
rich confectionery for his curiosity when Percy invited
him to spend the summer at his home "in the West."
He accepted, without hesitation.
It was only when they were in the train that Percy
became, for the first time, rather communicative. One
day while they were eating lunch in the dining-car and
discussing the imperfect characters of several of the
boys at school, Percy suddenly changed his tone and
made an abrupt remark.
"My father," he said, "is by far the richest man in
the world."
"Oh," said John, politely. He could think of no answer
to make to this confidence. He considered "That's
very nice," but it sounded hollow and was on the point
of saying, "Really?" but refrained since it would seem
to question Percy's statement. And such an astounding
statement could scarcely be questioned.
"By far the richest," repeated Percy.
"I was reading in the World Almanac," began John,
"that there was one man in America with an income of
over five million a year and four men with incomes of
over three million a year, and—"
"Oh, they're nothing." Percy's mouth was a half-moon
of scorn. "Catch-penny capitalists, financial
small-fry, petty merchants and money-lenders. My
father could buy them out and not know he'd done it."
"But how does he—"
"Why haven't they put down his income tax? Because
he doesn't pay any. At least he pays a little one
—but he doesn't pay any on his real income."
"He must be very rich," said John simply. "I'm
glad. I like very rich people.
"The richer a fella is, the better I like him." There
was a look of passionate frankness upon his dark face.
"I visited the Schnlitzer-Murphys last Easter. Vivian
Schnlitzer-Murphy had rubies as big as hen's eggs,
and sapphires that were like globes with lights inside
them—"
"I love jewels," agreed Percy enthusiastically. "Of
course I wouldn't want any one at school to know about
it, but I've got quite a collection myself. I used to
collect them instead of stamps."
"And diamonds," continued John eagerly. "The
Schnlitzer-Murphys had diamonds as big as walnuts—"
"That's nothing." Percy had leaned forward and
dropped his voice to a low whisper. "That's nothing
at all. My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton
Hotel."
II
The Montana sunset lay between two mountains like
a gigantic bruise from which dark arteries spread themselves
the sky crouched the village of Fish, minute, dismal, and
forgotten. There were twelve men, so it was said, in
the village of Fish, twelve sombre and inexplicable
souls who sucked a lean milk from the almost literally
bare rock upon which a mysterious populatory force
had begotten them. They had become a race apart,
these twelve men of Fish, like some species developed
by an early whim of nature, which on second thought
had abandoned them to struggle and extermination.
Out of the blue-black bruise in the distance crept a
long line of moving lights upon the desolation of the
land, and the twelve men of Fish gathered like ghosts
at the shanty depot to watch the passing of the seven
o'clock train, the Transcontinental Express from Chicago.
Six times or so a year the Transcontinental Express,
through some inconceivable jurisdiction, stopped
at the village of Fish, and when this occurred a figure
or so would disembark, mount into a buggy that always
appeared from out of the dusk, and drive off toward
the bruised sunset. The observation of this pointless
and preposterous phenomenon had become a sort of
cult among the men of Fish. To observe, that was all;
there remained in them none of the vital quality of illusion
which would make them wonder or speculate,
else a religion might have grown up around these mysterious
visitations. But the men of Fish were beyond
all religion—the barest and most savage tenets of even
Christianity could gain no foothold on that barren rock
—so there was no altar, no priest, no sacrifice; only
each night at seven the silent concourse by the shanty
depot, a congregation who lifted up a prayer of dim,
anæmic wonder.
On this June night, the Great Brakeman, whom, had
they deified any one, they might well have chosen as
o'clock train should leave its human (or inhuman)
deposit at Fish. At two minutes after seven Percy
Washington and John T. Unger disembarked, hurried
past the spellbound, the agape, the fearsome eyes of
the twelve men of Fish, mounted into a buggy which
had obviously appeared from nowhere, and drove away.
After half an hour, when the twilight had coagulated
into dark, the silent negro who was driving the buggy
hailed an opaque body somewhere ahead of them in the
gloom. In response to his cry, it turned upon them a
luminous disk which regarded them like a malignant eye
out of the unfathomable night. As they came closer,
John saw that it was the tail-light of an immense automobile,
larger and more magnificent than any he had
ever seen. Its body was of gleaming metal richer than
nickel and lighter than silver, and the hubs of the wheels
were studded with iridescent geometric figures of green
and yellow—John did not dare to guess whether they
were glass or jewel.
Two negroes, dressed in glittering livery such as one
sees in pictures of royal processions in London, were
standing at attention beside the car and as the two young
men dismounted from the buggy they were greeted in
some language which the guest could not understand,
but which seemed to be an extreme form of the Southern
negro's dialect.
"Get in," said Percy to his friend, as their trunks
were tossed to the ebony roof of the limousine. "Sorry
we had to bring you this far in that buggy, but of course
it wouldn't do for the people on the train or those God-forsaken
fellas in Fish to see this automobile."
"Gosh! What a car!" This ejaculation was provoked
by its interior. John saw that the upholstery
consisted of a thousand minute and exquisite tapestries
upon a background of cloth of gold. The two armchair
seats in which the boys luxuriated were covered with
stuff that resembled duvetyn, but seemed woven in numberless
colors of the ends of ostrich feathers.
"What a car!" cried John again, in amazement.
"This thing?" Percy laughed. "Why, it's just an
old junk we use for a station wagon."
By this time they were gliding along through the darkness
toward the break between the two mountains.
"We'll be there in an hour and a half," said Percy,
looking at the clock. "I may as well tell you it's not
going to be like anything you ever saw before."
If the car was any indication of what John would
see, he was prepared to be astonished indeed. The simple
piety prevalent in Hades has the earnest worship
of and respect for riches as the first article of its creed
—had John felt otherwise than radiantly humble before
them, his parents would have turned away in horror
at the blashemy.
They had now reached and were entering the break
between the two mountains and almost immediately
the way became much rougher.
"If the moon shone down here, you'd see that we're
in a big gulch," said Percy, trying to peer out of the
window. He spoke a few words into the mouthpiece
and immediately the footman turned on a search-light
and swept the hillsides with an immense beam.
"Rocky, you see. An ordinary car would be knocked
to pieces in half an hour. In fact, it'd take a tank to
navigate it unless you knew the way. You notice we're
going uphill now."
They were obviously ascending, and within a few
minutes the car was crossing a high rise, where they
caught a glimpse of a pale moon newly risen in the distance.
took shape out of the dark beside it—these were negroes
also. Again the two young men were saluted in the
same dimly recognizable dialect; then the negroes set
to work and four immense cables dangling from overhead
were attached with hooks to the hubs of the great
jeweled wheels. At a resounding "Hey-yah!" John
felt the car being lifted slowly from the ground—up and
up—clear of the tallest rocks on both sides—then higher,
until he could see a wavy, moonlit valley stretched out
before him in sharp contrast to the quagmire of rocks
that they had just left. Only on one side was there
still rock—and then suddenly there was no rock beside
them or anywhere around.
It was apparent that they had surmounted some immense
knife-blade of stone, projecting perpendicularly
into the air. In a moment they were going down again,
and finally with a soft bump they were landed upon the
smooth earth.
"The worst is over," said Percy, squinting out the
window. "It's only five miles from here, and our own
road—tapestry brick—all the way. This belongs to
us. This is where the United States ends, father says."
"Are we in Canada?"
"We are not. We're in the middle of the Montana
Rockies. But you are now on the only five square miles
of land in the country that's never been surveyed."
"Why hasn't it? Did they forget it?"
"No," said Percy, grinning, "they tried to do it three
times. The first time my grandfather corrupted a whole
department of the State survey; the second time he had
the official maps of the United States tinkered with—
that held them for fifteen years. The last time was
harder. My father fixed it so that their compasses were
in the strongest magnetic field ever artificially set up.
a slight defection that would allow for this territory not
to appear, and he substituted them for the ones that
were to be used. Then he had a river deflected and he
had what looked like a village built up on its banks—so
that they'd see it, and think it was a town ten miles
farther up the valley. There's only one thing my father's
afraid of," he concluded, "only one thing in the world
that could be used to find us out."
"What's that?"
Percy sank his voice to a whisper.
"Aeroplanes," he breathed. "We've got half a dozen
anti-aircraft guns and we've arranged it so far—but
there've been a few deaths and a great many prisoners.
Not that we mind that, you know, father and I, but it
upsets mother and the girls, and there's always the
chance that some time we won't be able to arrange it."
Shreds and tatters of chinchilla, courtesy clouds in the
green moon's heaven, were passing the green moon like
precious Eastern stuffs paraded for the inspection of some
Tartar Khan. It seemed to John that it was day, and
that he was looking at some lads sailing above him in the
air, showering down tracts and patent medicine circulars,
with their messages of hope for despairing, rockbound
hamlets. It seemed to him that he could see
them look down out of the clouds and stare—and stare
at whatever there was to stare at in this place whither
he was bound— What then? Were they induced
to land by some insidious device there to be immured
far from patent medicines and from tracts until the judgment
day—or, should they fail to fall into the trap,
did a quick puff of smoke and the sharp round of a splitting
shell bring them drooping to earth—and "upset"
Percy's mother and sisters. John shook his head and
the wraith of a hollow laugh issued silently from his
here? What a moral expedient of a bizarre Crœsus?
What terrible and golden mystery? . . .
The chinchilla clouds had drifted past now and outside
the Montana night was bright as day. The tapestry
brick of the road was smooth to the tread of the great
tires as they rounded a still, moonlit lake; they passed
into darkness for a moment, a pine grove, pungent and
cool, then they came out into a broad avenue of lawn
and John's exclamation of pleasure was simultaneous
with Percy's taciturn "We're home."
Full in the light of the stars, an exquisite château
rose from the borders of the lake, climbed in marble
radiance half the height of an adjoining mountain, then
melted in grace, in perfect symmetry, in translucent
feminine languor, into the massed darkness of a forest
of pine. The many towers, the slender tracery of the
sloping parapets, the chiselled wonder of a thousand
yellow windows with their oblongs and hectagons and
triangles of golden light, the shattered softness of the
intersecting planes of star-shine and blue shade, all
trembled on John's spirit like a chord of music. On one
of the towers, the tallest, the blackest at its base, an
arrangement of exterior lights at the top made a sort
of floating fairyland—and as John gazed up in warm
enchantment the faint acciaccare sound of violins
drifted down in a rococo harmony that was like nothing
he had ever heard before. Then in a moment the car
stopped before wide, high marble steps around which
the night air was fragrant with a host of flowers. At
the top of the steps two great doors swung silently
open and amber light flooded out upon the darkness,
silhouetting the figure of an exquisite lady with black,
high-piled hair, who held out her arms toward them.
"Mother," Percy was saying, "this is my friend, John
Unger, from Hades."
Afterward John remembered that first night as a daze
of many colors, of quick sensory impressions, of music
soft as a voice in love, and of the beauty of things, lights
and shadows, and motions and faces. There was a white-haired
man who stood drinking a many-hued cordial
from a crystal thimble set on a golden stem. There
was a girl with a flowery face, dressed like Titania with
braided sapphires in her hair. There was a room where
the solid, soft gold of the walls yielded to the pressure
of his hand, and a room that was like a platonic conception
of the ultimate prison—ceiling, floor, and all,
it was lined with an unbroken mass of diamonds, diamonds
of every size and shape, until, lit with tall violet
lamps in the corners, it dazzled the eyes with a whiteness
that could be compared only with itself, beyond
human wish or dream.
Through a maze of these rooms the two boys wandred.
Sometimes the floor under their feet would flame
in brilliant patterns from lighting below, patterns of
barbaric clashing colors, of pastel delicacy, of sheer whiteness,
or of subtle and intricate mosaic, surely from some
mosque on the Adriatic Sea. Sometimes beneath layers
of thick crystal he would see blue or green water swirling,
inhabited by vivid fish and growths of rainbow
foliage. Then they would be treading on furs of
every texture and color or along corridors of palest
ivory, unbroken as though carved complete from the
gigantic tusks of dinosaurs extinct before the age of
man. . . .
Then a hazily remembered transition, and they were
at dinner—where each plate was of two almost imperceptible
layers of solid diamond between which was
curiously worked a filigree of emerald design, a shaving
sliced from green air. Music, plangent and unobtrusive,
drifted down through far corridors—his chair, feathered
and curved insidiously to his back, seemed to engulf
He tried drowsily to answer a question that had been
asked him, but the honeyed luxury that clasped his body
added to the illusion of sleep—jewels, fabrics, wines, and
metals blurred before his eyes into a sweet mist. . . .
"Yes," he replied with a polite effort, "it certainly is
hot enough for me down there."
He managed to add a ghostly laugh; then, without
movement, without resistance, he seemed to float off
and away, leaving an iced dessert that was pink as a
dream. . . . He fell asleep.
When he awoke he knew that several hours had
passed. He was in a great quiet room with ebony walls
and a dull illumination that was too faint, too subtle,
to be called a light. His young host was standing over
him.
"You fell asleep at dinner," Percy was saying. "I
nearly did, too—it was such a treat to be comfortable
again after this year of school. Servants undressed and
bathed you while you were sleeping."
"Is this a bed or a cloud?" sighed John. "Percy,
Percy—before you go, I want to apologize."
"For what?"
"For doubting you when you said you had a diamond
as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel."
Percy smiled.
"I thought you didn't believe me. It's that mountain,
you know."
"What mountain?"
"The mountain the château rests on. It's not very
big, for a mountain. But except about fifty feet of sod
and gravel on top it's solid diamond. One diamond,
one cubic mile without a flaw. Aren't you listening?
Say—"
But John T. Unger had again fallen asleep.
III
Morning. As he awoke he perceived drowsily that
the room had at the same moment become dense with
sunlight. The ebony panels of one wall had slid aside
on a sort of track, leaving his chamber half open to the
day. A large negro in a white uniform stood beside his
bed.
"Good-evening," muttered John, summoning his
brains from the wild places.
"Good-morning, sir. Are you ready for your bath,
sir? Oh, don't get up—I'll put you in, if you'll just
unbutton your pajamas—there. Thank you, sir."
John lay quietly as his pajamas were removed—he
was amused and delighted; he expected to be lifted like
a child by this black Gargantua who was tending him,
but nothing of the sort happened; instead he felt the
bed tilt up slowly on its side—he began to roll, startled
at first, in the direction of the wall, but when he reached
the wall its drapery gave way, and sliding two yards
farther down a fleecy incline he plumped gently into
water the same temperature as his body.
He looked about him. The runway or rollway on
which he had arrived had folded gently back into place.
He had been projected into another chamber and was
sitting in a sunken bath with his head just above the
level of the floor. All about him, lining the walls of the
room and the sides and bottom of the bath itself, was a
blue aquarium, and gazing through the crystal surface
on which he sat, he could see fish swimming among
amber lights and even gliding without curiosity past
his outstretched toes, which were separated from them
only by the thickness of the crystal. From overhead,
sunlight came down through sea-green glass.
"I suppose, sir, that you'd like hot rosewater and
soapsuds this morning, sir—and perhaps cold salt water
to finish."
The negro was standing beside him.
"Yes," agreed John, smiling inanely, "as you please."
Any idea of ordering this bath according to his own
meagre standards of living would have been priggish
and not a little wicked.
The negro pressed a button and a warm rain began to
fall, apparently from overhead, but really, so John discovered
after a moment, from a fountain arrangement
near by. The water turned to a pale rose color and jets
of liquid soap spurted into it from four miniature walrus
heads at the corners of the bath. In a moment a
dozen little paddle-wheels, fixed to the sides, had churned
the mixture into a radiant rainbow of pink foam which
enveloped him softly with its delicious lightness, and
burst in shining, rosy bubbles here and there about him.
"Shall I turn on the moving-picture machine, sir?"
suggested the negro deferentially. "There's a good one-reel
comedy in this machine to-day, or I can put in a
serious piece in a moment, if you prefer it."
"No, thanks," answered John, politely but firmly.
He was enjoying his bath too much to desire any distraction.
But distraction came. In a moment he was
listening intently to the sound of flutes from just outside,
flutes dripping a melody that was like a waterfall,
cool and green as the room itself, accompanying a frothy
piccolo, in play more fragile than the lace of suds that
covered and charmed him.
After a cold salt-water bracer and a cold fresh finish,
he stepped out and into a fleecy robe, and upon a couch
covered with the same material he was rubbed with oil,
alcohol, and spice. Later he sat in a voluptuous chair
while he was shaved and his hair was trimmed.
"Mr. Percy is waiting in your sitting-room," said the
negro, when these operations were finished. "My name
is Gygsum, Mr. Unger, sir. I am to see to Mr. Unger
every morning."
John walked out into the brisk sunshine of his living-room,
where he found breakfast waiting for him and
Percy, gorgeous in white kid knickerbockers, smoking
in an easy chair.
IV
This is a story of the Washington family as Percy
sketched it for John during breakfast.
The father of the present Mr. Washington had been
a Virginian, a direct descendant of George Washington,
and Lord Baltimore. At the close of the Civil War he
was a twenty-five-year-old Colonel with a played-out
plantation and about a thousand dollars in gold.
Fitz-Norman Culpepper Washington, for that was the
young Colonel's name, decided to present the Virginia
estate to his younger brother and go West. He selected
two dozen of the most faithful blacks, who, of course,
worshipped him, and bought twenty-five tickets to the
West, where he intended to take out land in their names
and start a sheep and cattle ranch.
When he had been in Montana for less than a month
and things were going very poorly indeed, he stumbled
on his great discovery. He had lost his way when riding
in the hills, and after a day without food he began to
grow hungry. As he was without his rifle, he was forced
to pursue a squirrel, and in the course of the pursuit he
noticed that it was carrying something shiny in its
mouth. Just before it vanished into its hole—for Providence
did not intend that this squirrel should alleviate
his hunger—it dropped its burden. Sitting down to
consider the situation Fitz-Norman's eye was caught
had completely lost his appetite and gained one hundred
thousand dollars. The squirrel, which had refused
with annoying persistence to become food, had
made him a present of a large and perfect diamond.
Late that night he found his way to camp and twelve
hours later all the males among his darkies were back
by the squirrel hole digging furiously at the side of the
mountain. He told them he had discovered a rhinestone
mine, and, as only one or two of them had ever
seen even a small diamond before, they believed him,
without question. When the magnitude of his discovery
became apparent to him, he found himself in a quandary.
The mountain was a diamond—it was literally nothing
else but solid diamond. He filled four saddle bags full
of glittering samples and started on horseback for St.
Paul. There he managed to dispose of half a dozen
small stones—when he tried a larger one a storekeeper
fainted and Fitz-Norman was arrested as a public disturber.
He escaped from jail and caught the train for
New York, where he sold a few medium-sized diamonds
and received in exchange about two hundred thousand
dollars in gold. But he did not dare to produce any
exceptional gems—in fact, he left New York just in
time. Tremendous excitement had been created in
jewelry circles, not so much by the size of his diamonds
as by their appearance in the city from mysterious
sources. Wild rumors became current that a diamond
mine had been discovered in the Catskills, on the Jersey
coast, on Long Island, beneath Washington Square.
Excursion trains, packed with men carrying picks and
shovels, began to leave New York hourly, bound for
various neighboring El Dorados. But by that time
young Fitz-Norman was on his way back to Montana.
By the end of a fortnight he had estimated that the
quantity to all the rest of the diamonds known to exist
in the world. There was no valuing it by any regular
computation, however, for it was one solid diamond—
and if it were offered for sale not only would the bottom
fall out of the market, but also, if the value should vary
with its size in the usual arithmetical progression, there
would not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth
part of it. And what could any one do with a diamond
that size?
It was an amazing predicament. He was, in one
sense, the richest man that ever lived—and yet was he
worth anything at all? If his secret should transpire
there was no telling to what measures the Government
might resort in order to prevent a panic, in gold as well
as in jewels. They might take over the claim immediately
and institute a monopoly.
There was no alternative—he must market his mountain
in secret. He sent South for his younger brother
and put him in charge of his colored following—darkies
who had never realized that slavery was abolished. To
make sure of this, he read them a proclamation that he
had composed, which announced that General Forrest
had reorganized the shattered Southern armies and defeated
the North in one pitched battle. The negroes
believed him implicitly. They passed a vote declaring
it a good thing and held revival services immediately.
Fitz-Norman himself set out for foreign parts with
one hundred thousand dollars and two trunks filled with
rough diamonds of all sizes. He sailed for Russia in a
Chinese junk and six months after his departure from
Montana he was in St. Petersburg. He took obscure
lodgings and called immediately upon the court jeweller,
announcing that he had a diamond for the Czar. He
remained in St. Petersburg for two weeks, in constant
and afraid to visit his trunks more than three or
four times during the whole fortnight.
On his promise to return in a year with larger and finer
stones, he was allowed to leave for India. Before he
left, however, the Court Treasurers had deposited to
his credit, in American banks, the sum of fifteen million
dollars—under four different aliases.
He returned to America in 1868, having been gone a
little over two years. He had visited the capitals of
twenty-two countries and talked with five emperors,
eleven kings, three princes, a shah, a khan, and a sultan.
At that time Fitz-Norman estimated his own
wealth at one billion dollars. One fact worked consistently
against the disclosure of his secret. No one of
his larger diamonds remained in the public eye for a
week before being invested with a history of enough
fatalities, amours, revolutions, and wars to have occupied
it from the days of the first Babylonian Empire.
From 1870 until his death in 1900, the history of Fitz-Norman
Washington was a long epic in gold. There
were side issues, of course—he evaded the surveys, he
married a Virginia lady, by whom he had a single son,
and he was compelled, due to a series of unfortunate
complications, to murder his brother, whose unfortunate
habit of drinking himself into an indiscreet stupor had
several times endangered their safety. But very few
other murders stained these happy years of progress
and expansion.
Just before he died he changed his policy, and with all
but a few million dollars of his outside wealth bought
up rare minerals in bulk, which he deposited in the safety
vaults of banks all over the world, marked as bric-à-brac.
His son, Braddock Tarleton Washington, followed this
policy on an even more tensive scale. The minerals
—so that the equivalent of a billion dollars in gold could
be placed in a receptacle no bigger than a cigar box.
When Fitz-Norman had been dead three years his
son, Braddock, decided that the business had gone far
enough. The amount of wealth that he and his father
had taken out of the mountain was beyond all exact
computation. He kept a note-book in cipher in which
he set down the approximate quantity of radium in
each of the thousand banks he patronized, and recorded
the alias under which it was held. Then he did a very
simple thing—he sealed up the mine.
He sealed up the mine. What had been taken out of
it would support all the Washingtons yet to be born in
unparalleled luxury for generations. His one care must
be the protection of his secret, lest in the possible panic
attendant on its discovery he should be reduced with
all the property-holders in the world to utter poverty.
This was the family among whom John T. Unger was
staying. This was the story he heard in his silver-walled
living-room the morning after his arrival.
V
After breakfast, John found his way out the great
marble entrance, and looked curiously at the scene before
him. The whole valley, from the diamond mountain
to the steep granite cliff five miles away, still gave
off a breath of golden haze which hovered idly above
the fine sweep of lawns and lakes and gardens. Here
and there clusters of elms made delicate groves of shade,
contrasting strangely with the tough masses of pine
forest that held the hills in a grip of dark-blue green.
Even as John looked he saw three fawns in single file
patter out from one clump about a half mile away and
half-light of another. John would not have been surprised
to see a goat-foot piping his way among the trees
or to catch a glimpse of pink nymph-skin and flying
yellow hair between the greenest of the green leaves.
In some such cool hope he descended the marble
steps, disturbing faintly the sleep of two silky Russian
wolfhounds at the bottom, and set off along a walk of
white and blue brick that seemed to lead in no particular
direction.
He was enjoying himself as much as he was able. It
is youth's felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can
never live in the present, but must always be measuring
up the day against its own radiantly imagined future—
flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations
and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable
young dream.
John rounded a soft corner where the massed rosebushes
filled the air with heavy scent, and struck off
across a park toward a patch of moss under some trees.
He had never lain upon moss, and he wanted to see
whether it was really soft enough to justify the use of
its name as an adjective. Then he saw a girl coming
toward him over the grass. She was the most beautiful
person he had ever seen.
She was dressed in a white little gown that came just
below her knees, and a wreath of mignonettes clasped
with blue slices of sapphire bound up her hair. Her pink
bare feet scattered the dew before them as she came.
She was younger than John—not more than sixteen.
"Hello," she cried softly, "I'm Kismine."
She was much more than that to John already. He
advanced toward her, scarcely moving as he drew near
lest he should tread on her bare toes.
"You haven't met me," said her soft voice. Her blue
"You met my sister, Jasmine, last night. I was sick
with lettuce poisoning," went on her soft voice, and her
eyes continued, "and when I'm sick I'm sweet—and
when I'm well."
"You have made an enormous impression on me,"
said John's eyes, "and I'm not so slow myself"—"How
do you do?" said his voice. "I hope you're better this
morning."—"You darling," added his eyes tremulously.
John observed that they had been walking along
the path. On her suggestion they sat down together
upon the moss, the softness of which he failed to determine.
He was critical about women. A single defect—a
thick ankle, a hoarse voice, a glass eye—was enough to
make him utterly indifferent. And here for the first
time in his life he was beside a girl who seemed to him
the incarnation of physical perfection.
"Are you from the East?" asked Kismine with
charming interest.
"No," answered John simply. "I'm from Hades."
Either she had never heard of Hades, or she could
think of no pleasant comment to make upon it, for she
did not discuss it further.
"I'm going East to school this fall," she said. "D'you
think I'll like it? I'm going to New York to Miss
Bulge's. It's very strict, but you see over the weekends
I'm going to live at home with the family in our
New York house, because father heard that the girls
had to go walking two by two."
"Your father wants you to be proud," observed
John.
"We are," she answered, her eyes shining with dignity.
"None of us has ever been punished. Father
said we never should be. Once when my sister Jasmine
got up and limped away.
"Mother was—well, a little startled," continued Kismine,
"when she heard that you were from—from where
you are from, you know. She said that when she was
a young girl—but then, you see, she's a Spaniard and
old-fashioned."
"Do you spend much time out here?" asked John,
to conceal the fact that he was somewhat hurt by this
remark. It seemed an unkind allusion to his provincialism.
"Percy and Jasmine and I are here every summer,
but next summer Jasmine is going to Newport. She's
coming out in London a year from this fall. She'll be
presented at court."
"Do you know," began John hesitantly, "you're
much more sophisticated than I thought you were when
I first saw you?"
"Oh, no, I'm not," she exclaimed hurriedly. "Oh,
I wouldn't think of being. I think that sophisticated
young people are terribly common, don't you? I'm not
at all, really. If you say I am, I'm going to cry."
She was so distressed that her lip was trembling.
John was impelled to protest:
"I didn't mean that; I only said it to tease you."
"Because I wouldn't mind if I were," she persisted,
"but I'm not. I'm very innocent and girlish. I never
smoke, or drink, or read anything except poetry. I
know scarcely any mathematics or chemistry. I dress
very simply—in fact, I scarcely dress at all. I think
sophisticated is the last thing you can say about me. I
believe that girls ought to enjoy their youths in a
wholesome way."
"I do, too," said John heartily.
Kismine was cheerful again. She smiled at him, and
eye.
"I like you," she whispered, intimately. "Are you
going to spend all your time with Percy while you're
here, or will you be nice to me? Just think—I'm absolutely
fresh ground. I've never had a boy in love with
me in all my life. I've never been allowed even to see
boys alone—except Percy. I came all the way out here
into this grove hoping to run into you, where the family
wouldn't be around."
Deeply flattered, John bowed from the hips as he had
been taught at dancing school in Hades.
"We'd better go now," said Kismine sweetly. "I
have to be with mother at eleven. You haven't asked
me to kiss you once. I thought boys always did that
nowadays."
John drew himself up proudly.
"Some of them do," he answered, "but not me.
Girls don't do that sort of thing—in Hades."
Side by side they walked back toward the house.
VI
John stood facing Mr. Braddock Washington in the
full sunlight. The elder man was about forty with a
proud, vacuous face, intelligent eyes, and a robust figure.
In the mornings he smelt of horses—the best horses. He
carried a plain walking-stick of gray birch with a single
large opal for a grip. He and Percy were showing John
around.
"The slaves' quarters are there." His walking-stick
indicated a cloister of marble on their left that ran in
graceful Gothic along the side of the mountain. "In
my youth I was distracted for a while from the business
of life by a period of absurd idealism. During that
every one of their rooms with a tile bath."
"I suppose," ventured John, with an ingratiating
laugh, "that they used the bathtubs to keep coal in.
Mr. Schnlitzer-Murphy told me that once he—"
"The opinions of Mr. Schnlitzer-Murphy are of little
importance, I should imagine," interrupted Braddock
Washington, coldly. "My slaves did not keep coal in
their bathtubs. They had orders to bathe every day,
and they did. If they hadn't I might have ordered a
sulphuric acid shampoo. I discontinued the baths for
quite another reason. Several of them caught cold and
died. Water is not good for certain races—except as a
beverage."
John laughed, and then decided to nod his head in
sober agreement. Braddock Washington made him
uncomfortable.
"All these negroes are descendants of the ones my
father brought North with him. There are about two
hundred and fifty now. You notice that they've lived
so long apart from the world that their original dialect
has become an almost indistinguishable patois. We
bring a few of them up to speak English—my secretary
and two or three of the house servants.
"This is the golf course," he continued, as they strolled
along the velvet winter grass. "It's all a green, you see
—no fairway, no rough, no hazards."
He smiled pleasantly at John.
"Many men in the cage, father?" asked Percy suddenly.
Braddock Washington stumbled, and let forth an involuntary
curse.
"One less than there should be," he ejaculated darkly
—and then added after a moment, "We've had difficulties."
"Mother was telling me," exclaimed Percy, "that
Italian teacher—"
"A ghastly error," said Braddock Washington angrily.
"But of course there's a good chance that we may have
got him. Perhaps he fell somewhere in the woods or
stumbled over a cliff. And then there's always the probability
that if he did get away his story wouldn't be
believed. Nevertheless, I've had two dozen men looking
for him in different towns around here."
"And no luck?"
"Some. Fourteen of them reported to my agent
that they'd each killed a man answering to that description,
but of course it was probably only the reward
they were after—"
He broke off. They had come to a large cavity in
the earth about the circumference of a merry-go-round
and covered by a strong iron grating. Braddock Washington
beckoned to John, and pointed his cane down
through the grating. John stepped to the edge and
gazed. Immediately his ears were assailed by a wild
clamor from below.
"Come on down to Hell!"
"Hello, kiddo, how's the air up there?"
"Hey! Throw us a rope!"
"Got an old doughnut, Buddy, or a couple of secondhand
sandwiches?"
"Say, fella, if you'll push down that guy you're
with, we'll show you a quick disappearance scene."
"Paste him one for me, will you?"
It was too dark to see clearly into the pit below, but
John could tell from the coarse optimism and rugged
vitality of the remarks and voices that they proceeded
from middle-class Americans of the more spirited type.
Then Mr. Washington put out his cane and touched a
button in the grass, and the scene below sprang into light.
"These are some adventurous mariners who had the
misfortune to discover El Dorado," he remarked.
Below them there had appeared a large hollow in the
earth shaped like the interior of a bowl. The sides were
steep and apparently of polished glass, and on its slightly
concave surface stood about two dozen men clad in
the half costume, half uniform, of aviators. Their upturned
faces, lit with wrath, with malice, with despair,
with cynical humor, were covered by long growths of
beard, but with the exception of a few who had pined
perceptibly away, they seemed to be a well-fed, healthy
lot.
Braddock Washington drew a garden chair to the
edge of the pit and sat down.
"Well, how are you, boys?" he inquired genially.
A chorus of execration in which all joined except a
few too dispirited to cry out, rose up into the sunny
air, but Braddock Washington heard it with unruffled
composure. When its last echo had died away he spoke
again.
"Have you thought up a way out of your difficulty?"
From here and there among them a remark floated up.
"We decided to stay here for love!"
"Bring us up there and we'll find us a way!"
Braddock Washington waited until they were again
quiet. Then he said:
"I've told you the situation. I don't want you here.
I wish to heaven I'd never seen you. Your own curiosity
got you here, and any time that you can think
of a way out which protects me and my interests I'll
be glad to consider it. But so long as you confine your
efforts to digging tunnels—yes, I know about the new
one you've started—you won't get very far. This
isn't as hard on you as you make it out, with all your
howling for the loved ones at home. If you were the
you'd never have taken up aviation."
A tall man moved apart from the others, and held up
his hand to call his captor's attention to what he was
about to say.
"Let me ask you a few questions!" he cried. "You
pretend to be a fair-minded man."
"How absurd. How could a man of my position be
fair-minded toward you? You might as well speak of a
Spaniard being fair-minded toward a piece of steak."
At this harsh observation the faces of the two dozen
steaks fell, but the tall man continued:
"All right!" he cried. "We've argued this out before.
You're not a humanitarian and you're not fair-minded,
but you're human—at least you say you are—
and you ought to be able to put yourself in our place
for long enough to think how—how—how—
"How what?" demanded Washington, coldly.
"—how unnecessary—"
"Not to me."
"Well,—how cruel—"
"We've covered that. Cruelty doesn't exist where
self-preservation is involved. You've been soldiers; you
know that. Try another."
"Well, then, how stupid."
"There," admitted Washington, "I grant you that.
But try to think of an alternative. I've offered to have
all or any of you painlessly executed if you wish. I've
offered to have your wives, sweethearts, children, and
mothers kidnapped and brought out here. I'll enlarge
your place down there and feed and clothe you the rest
of your lives. If there was some method of producing
permanent amnesia I'd have all of you operated on and
released immediately, somewhere outside of my preserves.
But that's as far as my ideas go."
"How about trusting us not to peach on you?" cried
some one.
"You don't proffer that suggestion seriously," said
Washington, with an expression of scorn. "I did take
out one man to teach my daughter Italian. Last week
he got away."
A wild yell of jubilation went up suddenly from two
dozen throats and a pandemonium of joy ensued. The
prisoners clog-danced and cheered and yodled and
wrestled with one another in a sudden uprush of animal
spirits. They even ran up the glass sides of the bowl as
far as they could, and slid back to the bottom upon the
natural cushions of their bodies. The tall man started
a song in which they all joined—
On a sour apple tree—"
Braddock Washington sat in inscrutable silence until
the song was over.
"You see," he remarked, when he could gain a modicum
of attention. "I bear you no ill-will. I like to
see you enjoying yourselves. That's why I didn't
tell you the whole story at once. The man—what was
his name? Critchtichiello?—was shot by some of my
agents in fourteen different places."
Not guessing that the places referred to were cities,
the tumult of rejoicing subsided immediately.
"Nevertheless," cried Washington with a touch of
anger, "he tried to run away. Do you expect me to
take chances with any of you after an experience like
that?"
Again a series of ejaculations went up.
"Sure!"
"Would your daughter like to learn Chinese?"
"Hey, I can speak Italian! My mother was a wop."
"Maybe she'd like t'learna speak N'Yawk!"
"If she's the little one with the big blue eyes I can
teach her a lot of things better than Italian."
"I know some Irish songs—and I could hammer
brass once't."
Mr. Washington reached forward suddenly with his
cane and pushed the button in the grass so that the picture
below went out instantly, and there remained only
that great dark mouth covered dismally with the black
teeth of the grating.
"Hey!" called a single voice from below, "you ain't
goin' away without givin' us your blessing?"
But Mr. Washington, followed by the two boys, was
already strolling on toward the ninth hole of the golf
course, as though the pit and its contents were no more
than a hazard over which his facile iron had triumphed
with ease.
VII
July under the lee of the diamond mountain was a
month of blanket nights and of warm, glowing days.
John and Kismine were in love. He did not know that
the little gold football (inscribed with the legend Pro
deo et patria et St. Mida) which he had given her
rested on a platinum chain next to her bosom. But it
did. And she for her part was not aware that a large
sapphire which had dropped one day from her simple
coiffure was stowed away tenderly in John's jewel box.
Late one afternoon when the ruby and ermine music
room was quiet, they spent an hour there together. He
held her hand and she gave him such a look that he whispered
her name aloud. She bent toward him—then
hesitated.
"Did you say `Kismine'?" she asked softly, "or—"
She had wanted to be sure. She thought she might
have misunderstood.
Neither of them had ever kissed before, but in the
course of an hour it seemed to make little difference.
The afternoon drifted away. That night when a last
breath of music drifted down from the highest tower,
they each lay awake, happily dreaming over the separate
minutes of the day. They had decided to be married
as soon as possible.
VIII
Every day Mr. Washington and the two young men
went hunting or fishing in the deep forests or played
golf around the somnolent course—games which John
diplomatically allowed his host to win—or swam in the
mountain coolness of the lake. John found Mr. Washington
a somewhat exacting personality—utterly uninterested
in any ideas or opinions except his own. Mrs.
Washington was aloof and reserved at all times. She
was apparently indifferent to her two daughters, and
entirely absorbed in her son Percy, with whom she held
interminable conversations in rapid Spanish at dinner.
Jasmine, the elder daughter, resembled Kismine in
appearance—except that she was somewhat bow-legged,
and terminated in large hands and feet—but was utterly
unlike her in temperament. Her favorite books had to
do with poor girls who kept house for widowed fathers.
John learned from Kismine that Jasmine had never
recovered from the shock and disappointment caused
her by the termination of the World War, just as she
was about to start for Europe as a canteen expert. She
had even pined away for a time, and Braddock Washington
had taken steps to promote a new war in the
Balkans—but she had seen a photograph of some
proceedings. But Percy and Kismine seemed to have
inherited the arrogant attitude in all its harsh magnificence
from their father. A chaste and consistent
selfishness ran like a pattern through their every idea.
John was enchanted by the wonders of the château
and the valley. Braddock Washington, so Percy told
him, had caused to be kidnapped a landscape gardener,
an architect, a designer of state settings, and a French
decadent poet left over from the last century. He had
put his entire force of negroes at their disposal, guaranteed
to supply them with any materials that the world
could offer, and left them to work out some ideas of
their own. But one by one they had shown their uselessness.
The decadent poet had at once begun bewailing
his separation from the boulevards in spring—
he made some vague remarks about spices, apes, and
ivories, but said nothing that was of any practical value.
The stage designer on his part wanted to make the whole
valley a series of tricks and sensational effects—a state
of things that the Washingtons would soon have grown
tired of. And as for the architect and the landscape
gardener, they thought only in terms of convention.
They must make this like this and that like that.
But they had, at least, solved the problem of what
was to be done with them—they all went mad early
one morning after spending the night in a single room
trying to agree upon the location of a fountain, and were
now confined comfortably in an insane asylum at Westport,
Connecticut.
"But," inquired John curiously, "who did plan all
your wonderful reception rooms and halls, and approaches
and bathrooms—?"
"Well," answered Percy, "I blush to tell you, but it
was a moving-picture fella. He was the only man we
amount of money, though he did tuck his napkin in his
collar and couldn't read or write."
As August drew to a close John began to regret that he
must soon go back to school. He and Kismine had decided
to elope the following June.
"It would be nicer to be married here," Kismine confessed,
"but of course I could never get father's permission
to marry you at all. Next to that I'd rather elope.
It's terrible for wealthy people to be married in America
at present—they always have to send out bulletins to
the press saying that they're going to be married in
remnants, when what they mean is just a peck of old
second-hand pearls and some used lace worn once by
the Empress Eugènie."
"I know," agreed John fervently. "When I was
visiting the Schnlitzer-Murphys, the eldest daughter,
Gwendolyn, married a man whose father owns half of
West Virginia. She wrote home saying what a tough
struggle she was carrying on on his salary as a bank
clerk—and then she ended up by saying that `Thank
God, I have four good maids anyhow, and that helps
a little.' "
"It's absurd," commented Kismine. "Think of the
millions and millions of people in the world, laborers
and all, who get along with only two maids."
One afternoon late in August a chance remark of
Kismine's changed the face of the entire situation, and
threw John into a state of terror.
They were in their favorite grove, and between kisses
John was indulging in some romantic forebodings which
he fancied added poignancy to their relations.
"Sometimes I think we'll never marry," he said sadly.
"You're too wealthy, too magnificent. No one as rich
as you are can be like other girls. I should marry the
from Omaha or Sioux City, and be content with her half-million."
"I knew the daughter of a wholesale hardware man
once," remarked Kismine. "I don't think you'd have
been contented with her. She was a friend of my sister's.
She visited here."
"Oh, then you've had other guests?" exclaimed John
in surprise.
Kismine seemed to regret her words.
"Oh, yes," she said hurriedly, "we've had a few."
"But aren't you—wasn't your father afraid they'd
talk outside?"
"Oh, to some extent, to some extent," she answered.
"Let's talk about something pleasanter."
But John's curiosity was aroused.
"Something pleasanter!" he demanded. "What's
unpleasant about that? Weren't they nice girls?"
To his great surprise Kismine began to weep.
"Yes—th—that's the—the whole t-trouble. I grew
qu-quite attached to some of them. So did Jasmine,
but she kept inv-viting them anyway. I couldn't
understand it."
A dark suspicion was born in John's heart.
"Do you mean that they told, and your father had
them—removed?"
"Worse than that," she muttered brokenly. "Father
took no chances—and Jasmine kept writing them to
come, and they had such a good time!"
She was overcome by a paroxysm of grief.
Stunned with the horror of this revelation, John sat
there open-mouthed, feeling the nerves of his body twitter
like so many sparrows perched upon his spinal column.
"Now, I've told you, and I shouldn't have," she said,
calming suddenly and drying her dark blue eyes.
"Do you mean to say that your father had them
murdered before they left?"
She nodded.
"In August usually—or early in September. It's
only natural for us to get all the pleasure out of them
that we can first."
"How abominable! How—why, I must be going
crazy! Did you really admit that—"
"I did," interrupted Kismine, shrugging her shoulders.
"We can't very well imprison them like those
aviators, where they'd be a continual reproach to us
every day. And it's always been made easier for Jasmine
and me, because father had it done sooner than
we expected. In that way we avoided any farewell
scene—"
"So you murdered them! Uh!" cried John.
"It was done very nicely. They were drugged while
they were asleep—and their families were always told
that they died of scarlet fever in Butte."
"But—I fail to understand why you kept on inviting
them!"
"I didn't," burst out Kismine. "I never invited one.
Jasmine did. And they always had a very good time.
She'd give them the nicest presents toward the last.
I shall probably have visitors too—I'll harden up to it.
We can't let such an inevitable thing as death stand in
the way of enjoying life while we have it. Think how
lonesome it'd be out here if we never had any one. Why,
father and mother have sacrificed some of their best
friends just as we have."
"And so," cried John accusingly, "and so you were
letting me make love to you and pretending to return
it, and talking about marriage, all the time knowing
perfectly well that I'd never get out of here alive—"
"No," she protested passionately. "Not any more.
I thought your last days might as well be pleasant for
both of us. But then I fell in love with you, and—and
I'm honestly sorry you're going to—going to be put
away—though I'd rather you'd be put away than ever
kiss another girl."
"Oh, you would, would you?" cried John ferociously.
"Much rather. Besides, I've always heard that a
girl can have more fun with a man whom she knows
she can never marry. Oh, why did I tell you? I've
probably spoiled your whole good time now, and we
were really enjoying things when you didn't know it. I
knew it would make things sort of depressing for you."
"Oh, you did, did you?" John's voice trembled with
anger. "I've heard about enough of this. If you
haven't any more pride and decency than to have an
affair with a fellow that you know isn't much better
than a corpse, I don't want to have any more to do with
you!"
"You're not a corpse!" she protested in horror.
"You're not a corpse! I won't have you saying that
I kissed a corpse!"
"I said nothing of the sort!"
"You did! You said I kissed a corpse!"
"I didn't!"
Their voices had risen, but upon a sudden interruption
they both subsided into immediate silence. Footsteps
were coming along the path in their direction,
and a moment later the rose bushes were parted displaying
Braddock Washington, whose intelligent eyes set
in his good-looking vacuous face were peering in at them.
"Who kissed a corpse?" he demanded in obvious
disapproval.
"Nobody," answered Kismine quickly. "We were
just joking."
"What are you two doing here, anyhow?" he demanded
gruffly. "Kismine, you ought to be—to be
reading or playing golf with your sister. Go read! Go
play golf! Don't let me find you here when I come
back!"
Then he bowed at John and went up the path.
"See?" said Kismine crossly, when he was out of
hearing. "You've spoiled it all. We can never meet
any more. He won't let me meet you. He'd have you
poisoned if he thought we were in love."
"We're not, any more!" cried John fiercely, "so he
can set his mind at rest upon that. Moreover, don't
fool yourself that I'm going to stay around here. Inside
of six hours I'll be over those mountains, if I have to
gnaw a passage through them, and on my way East."
They had both got to their feet, and at this remark
Kismine came close and put her arm through his.
"I'm going, too."
"You must be crazy—"
"Of course I'm going," she interrupted impatiently.
"You most certainly are not. You—"
"Very well," she said quietly, "we'll catch up with
father now and talk it over with him."
Defeated, John mustered a sickly smile.
"Very well, dearest," he agreed, with pale and unconvincing
affection, "we'll go together."
His love for her returned and settled placidly on his
heart. She was his—she would go with him to share
his dangers. He put his arms about her and kissed her
fervently. After all she loved him; she had saved him,
in fact.
Discussing the matter, they walked slowly back toward
the château. They decided that since Braddock Washington
had seen them together they had best depart
the next night. Nevertheless, John's lips were unusually
spoonful of peacock soup into his left lung. He had to
be carried into the turquoise and sable card-room and
pounded on the back by one of the under-butlers, which
Percy considered a great joke.
IX
Long after midnight John's body gave a nervous jerk,
and he sat suddenly upright, staring into the veils of
somnolence that draped the room. Through the squares
of blue darkness that were his open windows, he had
heard a faint far-away sound that died upon a bed of
wind before identifying itself on his memory, clouded
with uneasy dreams. But the sharp noise that had succeeded
it was nearer, was just outside the room—the
click of a turned knob, a footstep, a whisper, he could
not tell; a hard lump gathered in the pit of his stomach,
and his whole body ached in the moment that he strained
agonizingly to hear. Then one of the veils seemed to
dissolve, and he saw a vague figure standing by the door,
a figure only faintly limned and blocked in upon the
darkness, mingled so with the folds of the drapery as
to seem distorted, like a reflection seen in a dirty pane
of glass.
With a sudden movement of fright or resolution John
pressed the button by his bedside, and the next moment
he was sitting in the green sunken bath of the adjoining
room, waked into alertness by the shock of the cold
water which half filled it.
He sprang out, and, his wet pajamas scattering a
heavy trickle of water behind him, ran for the aquamarine
door which he knew led out onto the ivory
landing of the second floor. The door opened noiselessly.
A single crimson lamp burning in a great dome
with a poignant beauty. For a moment John
hesitated, appalled by the silent splendor massed about
him, seeming to envelop in its gigantic folds and contours
the solitary drenched little figure shivering upon the
ivory landing. Then simultaneously two things happened.
The door of his own sitting-room swung open,
precipitating three naked negroes into the hall—and,
as John swayed in wild terror toward the stairway, another
door slid back in the wall on the other side of the
corridor, and John saw Braddock Washington standing
in the lighted lift, wearing a fur coat and a pair of riding
boots which reached to his knees and displayed, above,
the glow of his rose-colored pajamas.
On the instant the three negroes—John had never
seen any of them before, and it flashed through his mind
that they must be the professional executioners—paused
in their movement toward John, and turned expectantly
to the man in the lift, who burst out with an imperious
command:
"Get in here! All three of you! Quick as hell!"
Then, within the instant, the three negroes darted
into the cage, the oblong of light was blotted out as the
lift door slid shut, and John was again alone in the hall.
He slumped weakly down against an ivory stair.
It was apparent that something portentous had occurred,
something which, for the moment at least, had
postponed his own petty disaster. What was it? Had
the negroes risen in revolt? Had the aviators forced
aside the iron bars of the grating? Or had the men of
Fish stumbled blindly through the hills and gazed with
bleak, joyless eyes upon the gaudy valley? John did
not know. He heard a faint whir of air as the lift
whizzed up again, and then, a moment later, as it descended.
It was probable that Percy was hurrying to
was his opportunity to join Kismine and plan an immediate
escape. He waited until the lift had been silent
for several minutes; shivering a little with the night
cool that whipped in through his wet pajamas, he returned
to his room and dressed himself quickly. Then
he mounted a long flight of stairs and turned down the
corridor carpeted with Russian sable which led to Kismine's
suite.
The door of her sitting-room was open and the lamps
were lighted. Kismine, in an angora kimono, stood
near the window of the room in a listening attitude, and
as John entered noiselessly she turned toward him.
"Oh, it's you!" she whispered, crossing the room to
him. "Did you hear them?"
"I heard your father's slaves in my—"
"No," she interrupted excitedly. "Aeroplanes!"
"Aeroplanes? Perhaps that was the sound that woke
me."
"There're at least a dozen. I saw one a few moments
ago dead against the moon. The guard back by the
cliff fired his rifle and that's what roused father. We're
going to open on them right away."
"Are they here on purpose?"
"Yes—it's that Italian who got away—"
Simultaneously with her last word, a succession of
sharp cracks tumbled in through the open window.
Kismine uttered a little cry, took a penny with fumbling
fingers from a box on her dresser, and ran to one of the
electric lights. In an instant the entire château was in
darkness—she had blown out the fuse.
"Come on!" she cried to him. "We'll go up to the roof
garden, and watch it from there!"
Drawing a cape about her, she took his hand, and they
found their way out the door. It was only a step to
them upward he put his arms around her in the darkness
and kissed her mouth. Romance had come to John
Unger at last. A minute later they had stepped out
upon the star-white platform. Above, under the misty
moon, sliding in and out of the patches of cloud that
eddied below it, floated a dozen dark-winged bodies in
a constant circling course. From here and there in the
valley flashes of fire leaped toward them, followed by
sharp detonations. Kismine clapped her hands with
pleasure, which, a moment later, turned to dismay as
the aeroplanes at some prearranged signal, began to
release their bombs and the whole of the valley became
a panorama of deep reverberate sound and lurid light.
Before long the aim of the attackers became concentrated
upon the points where the anti-aircraft guns
were situated, and one of them was almost immediately
reduced to a giant cinder to lie smouldering in a park
of rose bushes.
"Kismine," begged John, "you'll be glad when I tell
you that this attack came on the eve of my murder.
If I hadn't heard that guard shoot off his gun back by
the pass I should now be stone dead—"
"I can't hear you!" cried Kismine, intent on the scene
before her. "You'll have to talk louder!"
"I simply said," shouted John, "that we'd better get
out before they begin to shell the château!"
Suddenly the whole portico of the negro quarters
cracked asunder, a geyser of flame shot up from under
the colonnades, and great fragments of jagged marble
were hurled as far as the borders of the lake.
"There go fifty thousand dollars' worth of slaves,"
cried Kismine, "at prewar prices. So few Americans
have any respect for property."
John renewed his efforts to compel her to leave. The
by minute, and only two of the anti-aircraft guns were
still retaliating. It was obvious that the garrison, encircled
with fire, could not hold out much longer.
"Come on!" cried John, pulling Kismine's arm,
"we've got to go. Do you realize that those aviators
will kill you without question if they find you?"
She consented reluctantly.
"We'll have to wake Jasmine!" she said, as they hurried
toward the lift. Then she added in a sort of childish
delight: "We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in
books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free
and poor! What fun!" She stopped and raised her
lips to him in a delighted kiss.
"It's impossible to be both together," said John
grimly. "People have found that out. And I should
choose to be free as preferable of the two. As an extra
caution you'd better dump the contents of your jewel
box into your pockets."
Ten minutes later the two girls met John in the dark
corridor and they descended to the main floor of the
château. Passing for the last time through the magnificence
of the splendid halls, they stood for a moment
out on the terrace, watching the burning negro quarters
and the flaming embers of two planes which had fallen
on the other side of the lake. A solitary gun was still
keeping up a sturdy popping, and the attackers seemed
timorous about descending lower, but sent their thunderous
fireworks in a circle around it, until any chance
shot might annihilate its Ethiopian crew.
John and the two sisters passed down the marble
steps, turned sharply to the left, and began to ascend
a narrow path that wound like a garter about the diamond
mountain. Kismine knew a heavily wooded spot
half-way up where they could lie concealed and yet be
make an escape, when it should be necessary, along a
secret path laid in a rocky gully.
X
It was three o'clock when they attained their destination.
The obliging and phlegmatic Jasmine fell off to
sleep immediately, leaning against the trunk of a large
tree, while John and Kismine sat, his arm around her,
and watched the desperate ebb and flow of the dying
battle among the ruins of a vista that had been a garden
spot that morning. Shortly after four o'clock the last
remaining gun gave out a clanging sound and went out
of action in a swift tongue of red smoke. Though the
moon was down, they saw that the flying bodies were
circling closer to the earth. When the planes had made
certain that the beleaguered possessed no further resources,
they would land and the dark and glittering
reign of the Washingtons would be over.
With the cessation of the firing the valley grew quiet.
The embers of the two aeroplanes glowed like the eyes
of some monster crouching in the grass. The château
stood dark and silent, beautiful without light as it had
been beautiful in the sun, while the woody rattles of
Nemesis filled the air above with a growing and receding
complaint. Then John perceived that Kismine,
like her sister, had fallen sound asleep.
It was long after four when he became aware of footsteps
along the path they had lately followed, and he
waited in breathless silence until the persons to whom
they belonged had passed the vantage-point he occupied.
There was a faint stir in the air now that was not of
human origin, and the dew was cold; he knew that the
dawn would break soon. John waited until the steps
Then he followed. About half-way to the
steep summit the trees fell away and a hard saddle of
rock spread itself over the diamond beneath. Just before
he reached this point he slowed down his pace,
warned by an animal sense that there was life just ahead
of him. Coming to a high boulder, he lifted his head
gradually above its edge. His curiosity was rewarded;
this is what he saw:
Braddock Washington was standing there motionless,
silhouetted against the gray sky without sound or sign
of life. As the dawn came up out of the east, lending a
cold green color to the earth, it brought the solitary
figure into insignificant contrast with the new day.
While John watched, his host remained for a few moments
absorbed in some inscrutable contemplation;
then he signalled to the two negroes who crouched at his
feet to lift the burden which lay between them. As
they struggled upright, the first yellow beam of the sun
struck through the innumerable prisms of an immense
and exquisitely chiselled diamond—and a white radiance
was kindled that glowed upon the air like a fragment of
the morning star. The bearers staggered beneath its
weight for a moment—then their rippling muscles caught
and hardened under the wet shine of the skins and the
three figures were again motionless in their defiant
impotency before the heavens.
After a while the white man lifted his head and slowly
raised his arms in a gesture of attention, as one who would
call a great crowd to hear—but there was no crowd, only
the vast silence of the mountain and the sky, broken by
faint bird voices down among the trees. The figure on
the saddle of rock began to speak ponderously and with
an inextinguishable pride.
"You out there—" he cried in a trembling voice.
his head held attentively as though he were expecting
an answer. John strained his eyes to see whether
there might be men coming down the mountain, but the
mountain was bare of human life. There was only sky
and a mocking flute of wind along the tree-tops. Could
Washington be praying? For a moment John wondered.
Then the illusion passed—there was something in the
man's whole attitude antithetical to prayer.
"Oh, you above there!"
The voice was become strong and confident. This
was no forlorn supplication. If anything, there was in
it a quality of monstrous condescension.
"You there—"
Words, too quickly uttered to be understood, flowing
one into the other. . . . John listened breathlessly,
catching a phrase here and there, while the voice broke
off, resumed, broke off again—now strong and argumentative,
now colored with a slow, puzzled impatience.
Then a conviction commenced to dawn on the single
listener, and as realization crept over him a spray of
quick blood rushed through his arteries. Braddock
Washington was offering a bribe to God!
That was it—there was no doubt. The diamond in
the arms of his slaves was some advance sample, a promise
of more to follow.
That, John perceived after a time, was the thread
running through his sentences. Prometheus Enriched
was calling to witness forgotten sacrifices, forgotten
rituals, prayers obsolete before the birth of Christ.
For a while his discourse took the form of reminding God
of this gift or that which Divinity had deigned to accept
from men—great churches if he would rescue cities from
the plague, gifts of myrrh and gold, of human lives and
beautiful women and captive armies, of children and
harvests and cities, whole conquered lands that had been
offered up in lust or blood for His appeasal, buying a
meed's worth of alleviation from the Divine wrath—
and now he, Braddock Washington, Emperor of Diamonds,
king and priest of the age of gold, arbiter of
splendor and luxury, would offer up a treasure such as
princes before him had never dreamed of, offer it up
not in suppliance, but in pride.
He would give to God, he continued, getting down to
specifications, the greatest diamond in the world. This
diamond would be cut with many more thousand facets
than there were leaves on a tree, and yet the whole diamond
would be shaped with the perfection of a stone no
bigger than a fly. Many men would work upon it for
many years. It would be set in a great dome of beaten
gold, wonderfully carved and equipped with gates of
opal and crusted sapphire. In the middle would be hollowed
out a chapel presided over by an altar of iridescent,
decomposing, ever-changing radium which would
burn out the eyes of any worshipper who lifted up his
head from prayer—and on this altar there would be
slain for the amusement of the Divine Benefactor any
victim He should choose, even though it should be the
greatest and most powerful man alive.
In return he asked only a simple thing, a thing that for
God would be absurdly easy—only that matters should
be as they were yesterday at this hour and that they
should so remain. So very simple! Let but the heavens
open, swallowing these men and their aeroplanes—
and then close again. Let him have his slaves once
more, restored to life and well.
There was no one else with whom he had ever needed
to treat or bargain.
He doubted only whether he had made his bribe big
in man's image, so it had been said: He must have His
price. And the price would be rare—no cathedral whose
building consumed many years, no pyramid constructed
by ten thousand workmen, would be like this cathedral,
this pyramid.
He paused here. That was his proposition. Everything
would be up to specifications and there was nothing
vulgar in his assertion that it would be cheap at the
price. He implied that Providence could take it or
leave it.
As he approached the end his sentences became
broken, became short and uncertain, and his body
seemed tense, seemed strained to catch the slightest
pressure or whisper of life in the spaces around him.
His hair had turned gradually white as he talked, and
now he lifted his head high to the heavens like a prophet
of old—magnificently mad.
Then, as John stared in giddy fascination, it seemed
to him that a curious phenomenon took place somewhere
around him. It was as though the sky had darkened
for an instant, as though there had been a sudden murmur
in a gust of wind, a sound of far-away trumpets,
a sighing like the rustle of a great silken robe—for a
time the whole of nature round about partook of this
darkness; the birds' song ceased; the trees were still,
and far over the mountain there was a mutter of dull,
menacing thunder.
That was all. The wind died along the tall grasses of
the valley. The dawn and the day resumed their place
in a time, and the risen sun sent hot waves of yellow
mist that made its path bright before it. The leaves
laughed in the sun, and their laughter shook the trees
until each bough was like a girl's school in fairyland.
God had refused to accept the bribe.
For another moment John watched the triumph of
the day. Then, turning, he saw a flutter of brown down
by the lake, then another flutter, then another, like
the dance of golden angels alighting from the clouds.
The aeroplanes had come to earth.
John slid off the boulder and ran down the side of
the mountain to the clump of trees, where the two girls
were awake and waiting for him. Kismine sprang to
her feet, the jewels in her pockets jingling, a question on
her parted lips, but instinct told John that there was no
time for words. They must get off the mountain without
losing a moment. He seized a hand of each, and
in silence they threaded the tree-trunks, washed with
light now and with the rising mist. Behind them from
the valley came no sound at all, except the complaint
of the peacocks far away and the pleasant undertone of
morning.
When they had gone about half a mile, they avoided
the park land and entered a narrow path that led over
the next rise of ground. At the highest point of this
they paused and turned around. Their eyes rested
upon the mountainside they had just left—oppressed
by some dark sense of tragic impendency.
Clear against the sky a broken, white-haired man was
slowly descending the steep slope, followed by two gigantic
and emotionless negroes, who carried a burden
between them which still flashed and glittered in the
sun. Half-way down two other figures joined them—
John could see that they were Mrs. Washington and
her son, upon whose arm she leaned. The aviators had
clambered from their machines to the sweeping lawn in
front of the château, and with rifles in hand were starting
up the diamond mountain in skirmishing formation.
But the little group of five which had formed farther
up and was engrossing all the watchers' attention had
and pulled up what appeared to be a trap-door in the
side of the mountain. Into this they all disappeared,
the white-haired man first, then his wife and son, finally
the two negroes, the glittering tips of whose jeweled
head-dresses caught the sun for a moment before the
trap-door descended and engulfed them all.
Kismine clutched John's arm.
"Oh," she cried wildly, "where are they going?
What are they going to do?"
"It must be some underground way of escape—"
A little scream from the two girls interrupted his
sentence.
"Don't you see?" sobbed Kismine hysterically.
"The mountain is wired!"
Even as she spoke John put up his hands to shield
his sight. Before their eyes the whole surface of the
mountain had changed suddenly to a dazzling burning
yellow, which showed up through the jacket of turf as
light shows through a human hand. For a moment
the intolerable glow continued, and then like an extinguished
filament it disappeared, revealing a black waste
from which blue smoke arose slowly, carrying off with
it what remained of vegetation and of human flesh. Of
the aviators there was left neither blood nor bone—they
were consumed as completely as the five souls who had
gone inside.
Simultaneously, and with an immense concussion,
the château literally threw itself into the air, bursting
into flaming fragments as it rose, and then tumbling
back upon itself in a smoking pile that lay projecting
half into the water of the lake. There was no fire—
what smoke there was drifted off mingling with the
sunshine, and for a few minutes longer a powdery dust
of marble drifted from the great featureless pile that
sound and the three people were alone in the valley.
XI
At sunset John and his two companions reached the
high cliff which had marked the boundaries of the Washingtons'
dominion, and looking back found the valley tranquil
and lovely in the dusk. They sat down to finish the
food which Jasmine had brought with her in a basket.
"There!" she said, as she spread the table-cloth and
put the sandwiches in a neat pile upon it. "Don't they
look tempting? I always think that food tastes better
outdoors."
"With that remark," remarked Kismine, "Jasmine
enters the middle class."
"Now," said John eagerly, "turn out your pocket and
let's see what jewels you brought along. If you made
a good selection we three ought to live comfortably all
the rest of our lives."
Obediently Kismine put her hand in her pocket and
tossed two handfuls of glittering stones before him.
"Not so bad," cried John, enthusiastically. "They
aren't very big, but—Hello!" His expression changed
as he held one of them up to the declining sun. "Why,
these aren't diamonds! There's something the matter!"
"By golly!" exclaimed Kismine, with a startled look.
"What an idiot I am!"
"Why, these are rhinestones!" cried John.
"I know." She broke into a laugh. "I opened the
wrong drawer. They belonged on the dress of a girl
who visited Jasmine. I got her to give them to me in
exchange for diamonds. I'd never seen anything but
precious stones before."
"And this is what you brought?"
"I'm afraid so." She fingered the brilliants wistfully.
"I think I like these better. I'm a little tired
of diamonds."
"Very well," said John gloomily. "We'll have to
live in Hades. And you will grow old telling incredulous
women that you got the wrong drawer. Unfortunately
your father's bank-books were consumed
with him."
"Well, what's the matter with Hades?"
"If I come home with a wife at my age my father is
just as liable as not to cut me off with a hot coal, as they
say down there."
Jasmine spoke up.
"I love washing," she said quietly. "I have always
washed my own handkerchiefs. I'll take in laundry
and support you both."
"Do they have washwomen in Hades?" asked Kismine
innocently.
"Of course," answered John. "It's just like anywhere
else."
"I thought—perhaps it was too hot to wear any
clothes."
John laughed.
"Just try it!" he suggested. "They'll run you out
before you're half started."
"Will father be there?" she asked.
John turned to her in astonishment.
"Your father is dead," he replied somberly. "Why
should he go to Hades? You have it confused with
another place that was abolished long ago."
After supper they folded up the table-cloth and spread
their blankets for the night.
"What a dream it was," Kismine sighed, gazing up
at the stars. "How strange it seems to be here with one
dress and a penniless fiancé!
"Under the stars," she repeated. "I never noticed
the stars before. I always thought of them as great big
diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten
me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my
youth."
"It was a dream," said John quietly. "Everybody's
youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness."
"How pleasant then to be insane!"
"So I'm told," said John gloomily. "I don't know
any longer. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a
year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness
that we can all try. There are only diamonds
in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby
gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will
make the usual nothing of it." He shivered. "Turn
up your coat collar, little girl, the night's full of chill
and you'll get pneumonia. His was a great sin who
first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few
hours."
So wrapping himself in his blanket he fell off to sleep.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN
BUTTON
As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born
at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of
medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young
shall be uttered upon the anesthetic air of a hospital,
preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs.
Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they
decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first
baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this
anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing
history I am about to set down will never be known.
I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for
yourself.
The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both
social and financial, in ante-bellum Baltimore. They
were related to the This Family and the That Family,
which, as every Southerner knew, entitled them to membership
in that enormous peerage which largely populated
the Confederacy. This was their first experience
with the charming old custom of having babies—Mr.
Button was naturally nervous. He hoped it would be
a boy so that he could be sent to Yale College in Connecticut,
at which institution Mr. Button himself had
been known for four years by the somewhat obvious
nickname of "Cuff."
On the September morning consecrated to the enormous
event he arose nervously at six o'clock, dressed
himself, adjusted an impeccable stock, and hurried forth
through the streets of Baltimore to the hospital, to determine
new life upon its bosom.
When he was approximately a hundred yards from
the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen
he saw Doctor Keene, the family physician, descending
the front steps, rubbing his hands together
with a washing movement—as all doctors are required
to do by the unwritten ethics of their profession.
Mr. Roger Button, the president of Roger Button &
Co., Wholesale Hardware, began to run toward Doctor
Keene with much less dignity than was expected from
a Southern gentleman of that picturesque period.
"Doctor Keene!" he called. "Oh, Doctor Keene!"
The doctor heard him, faced around, and stood waiting,
a curious expression settling on his harsh, medicinal
face as Mr. Button drew near.
"What happened?" demanded Mr. Button, as he
came up in a gasping rush. "What was it? How is
she? A boy? Who is it? What—"
"Talk sense!" said Doctor Keene sharply. He appeared
somewhat irritated.
"Is the child born?" begged Mr. Button.
Doctor Keene frowned. "Why, yes, I suppose so—
after a fashion." Again he threw a curious glance at
Mr. Button.
"Is my wife all right?"
"Yes."
"Is it a boy or a girl?"
"Here now!" cried Doctor Keene in a perfect passion
of irritation, "I'll ask you to go and see for yourself.
Outrageous!" He snapped the last word out in
almost one syllable, then he turned away muttering:
"Do you imagine a case like this will help my professional
reputation? One more would ruin me—ruin
anybody."
"What's the matter?" demanded Mr. Button, appalled.
"Triplets?"
"No, not triplets!" answered the doctor cuttingly.
"What's more, you can go and see for yourself. And
get another doctor. I brought you into the world, young
man, and I've been physician to your family for forty
years, but I'm through with you! I don't want to see
you or any of your relatives ever again! Good-by!"
Then he turned sharply, and without another word
climbed into his phaeton, which was waiting at the curbstone,
and drove severely away.
Mr. Button stood there upon the sidewalk, stupefied
and trembling from head to foot. What horrible mishap
had occurred? He had suddenly lost all desire to go
into the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen—it
was with the greatest difficulty that, a moment
later, he forced himself to mount the steps and
enter the front door.
A nurse was sitting behind a desk in the opaque
gloom of the hall. Swallowing his shame, Mr. Button
approached her.
"Good-morning," she remarked, looking up at him
pleasantly.
"Good-morning. I—I am Mr. Button."
At this a look of utter terror spread itself over the
girl's face. She rose to her feet and seemed about to
fly from the hall, restraining herself only with the most
apparent difficulty.
"I want to see my child," said Mr. Button.
The nurse gave a little scream. "Oh—of course!"
she cried hysterically. "Up-stairs. Right up-stairs. Go
—up!"
She pointed the direction, and Mr. Button, bathed in
a cool perspiration, turned falteringly, and began to
mount to the second floor. In the upper hall he addressed
hand. "I'm Mr. Button," he managed to articulate.
"I want to see my—"
Clank! The basin clattered to the floor and rolled
in the direction of the stairs. Clank! Clank! It began
a methodical descent as if sharing in the general
terror which this gentleman provoked.
"I want to see my child!" Mr. Button almost
shrieked. He was on the verge of collapse.
Clank! The basin had reached the first floor. The
nurse regained control of herself, and threw Mr. Button
a look of hearty contempt.
"All right, Mr. Button," she agreed in a hushed voice.
"Very well! But if you knew what state it's put us all
in this morning! It's perfectly outrageous! The hospital
will never have the ghost of a reputation after—"
"Hurry!" he cried hoarsely. "I can't stand this!"
"Come this way, then, Mr. Button."
He dragged himself after her. At the end of a long
hall they reached a room from which proceeded a variety
of howls—indeed, a room which, in later parlance, would
have been known as the "crying-room." They entered.
Ranged around the walls were half a dozen white-enameled
rolling cribs, each with a tag tied at the head.
"Well," gasped Mr. Button, "which is mine?"
"There!" said the nurse.
Mr. Button's eyes followed her pointing finger, and
this is what he saw. Wrapped in a voluminous white
blanket, and partially crammed into one of the cribs,
there sat an old man apparently about seventy years of
age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his
chin dripped a long smoke-colored beard, which waved
absurdly back and forth, fanned by the breeze coming
in at the window. He looked up at Mr. Button with
dim, faded eyes in which lurked a puzzled question.
"Am I mad?" thundered Mr. Button, his terror resolving
into rage. "Is this some ghastly hospital joke?"
"It doesn't seem like a joke to us," replied the nurse
severely. "And I don't know whether you're mad or
not—but that is most certainly your child."
The cool perspiration redoubled on Mr. Button's
forehead. He closed his eyes, and then, opening them,
looked again. There was no mistake—he was gazing at
a man of threescore and ten—a baby of threescore and
ten, a baby whose feet hung over the sides of the crib
in which it was reposing.
The old man looked placidly from one to the other
for a moment, and then suddenly spoke in a cracked and
ancient voice. "Are you my father?" he demanded.
Mr. Button and the nurse started violently.
"Because if you are," went on the old man querulously,
"I wish you'd get me out of this place—or, at
least, get them to put a comfortable rocker in here."
"Where in God's name did you come from? Who are
you?" burst out Mr. Button frantically.
"I can't tell you exactly who I am," replied the querulous
whine, "because I've only been born a few hours—
but my last name is certainly Button."
"You lie! You're an impostor!"
The old man turned wearily to the nurse. "Nice
way to welcome a new-born child," he complained in a
weak voice. "Tell him he's wrong, why don't you?"
"You're wrong, Mr. Button," said the nurse severely.
"This is your child, and you'll have to make the best of
it. We're going to ask you to take him home with you
as soon as possible—some time to-day."
"Home?" repeated Mr. Button incredulously.
"Yes, we can't have him here. We really can't,
you know?"
"I'm right glad of it," whined the old man. "This is
all this yelling and howling, I haven't been able to get a
wink of sleep. I asked for something to eat"—here his
voice rose to a shrill note of protest—"and they brought
me a bottle of milk!"
Mr. Button sank down upon a chair near his son and
concealed his face in his hands. "My heavens!" he
murmured, in an ecstasy of horror. "What will people
say? What must I do?"
"You'll have to take him home," insisted the nurse—
"immediately!"
A grotesque picture formed itself with dreadful
clarity before the eyes of the tortured man—a picture of
himself walking through the crowded streets of the city
with this appalling apparition stalking by his side. "I
can't. I can't," he moaned.
People would stop to speak to him, and what was he
going to say? He would have to introduce this—this
septuagenarian: "This is my son, born early this
morning." And then the old man would gather his
blanket around him and they would plod on, past the
bustling stores, the slave market—for a dark instant
Mr. Button wished passionately that his son was black
—past the luxurious houses of the residential district,
past the home for the aged. . . .
"Come! Pull yourself together," commanded the
nurse.
"See here," the old man announced suddenly, "if
you think I'm going to walk home in this blanket, you're
entirely mistaken."
"Babies always have blankets."
With a malicious crackle the old man held up a small
white swaddling garment. "Look!" he quavered.
"This is what they had ready for me."
"Babies always wear those," said the nurse primly.
"Well," said the old man, "this baby's not going to
wear anything in about two minutes. This blanket
itches. They might at least have given me a sheet."
"Keep it on! Keep it on!" said Mr. Button hurriedly.
He turned to the nurse. "What'll I do?"
"Go down town and buy your son some clothes."
Mr. Button's son's voice followed him down into the
hall: "And a cane, father. I want to have a cane."
Mr. Button banged the outer door savagely. . . .
II
"Good-morning," Mr. Button said, nervously, to the
clerk in the Chesapeake Dry Goods Company. "I want
to buy some clothes for my child."
"How old is your child, sir?"
"About six hours," answered Mr. Button, without
due consideration.
"Babies' supply department in the rear."
"Why, I don't think—I'm not sure that's what I
want. It's—he's an unusually large-size child. Ecceptionally—ah—large."
"They have the largest child's sizes."
"Where is the boys' department?" inquired Mr.
Button, shifting his ground desperately. He felt that
the clerk must surely scent his shameful secret.
"Right here."
"Well—" He hesitated. The notion of dressing his
son in men's clothes was repugnant to him. If, say,
he could only find a very large boy's suit, he might cut
off that long and awful beard, dye the white hair brown,
and thus manage to conceal the worst, and to retain
something of his own self-respect—not to mention his
position in Baltimore society.
But a frantic inspection of the boys' department revealed
the store, of course—in such cases it is the thing to blame
the store.
"How old did you say that boy of yours was?" demanded
the clerk curiously.
"He's—sixteen."
"Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought you said six hours.
You'll find the youths' department in the next aisle."
Mr. Button turned miserably away. Then he stopped,
brightened, and pointed his finger toward a dressed
dummy in the window display. "There!" he exclaimed.
"I'll take that suit, out there on the dummy."
The clerk stared. "Why," he protested, "that's not
a child's suit. At least it is, but it's for fancy dress.
You could wear it yourself!"
"Wrap it up," insisted his customer nervously.
"That's what I want."
The astonished clerk obeyed.
Back at the hospital Mr. Button entered the nursery
and almost threw the package at his son. "Here's your
clothes," he snapped out.
The old man untied the package and viewed the contents
with a quizzical eye.
"They look sort of funny to me," he complained.
"I don't want to be made a monkey of—"
"You've made a monkey of me!" retorted Mr. Button
fiercely. "Never you mind how funny you look.
Put them on—or I'll—or I'll spank you." He swallowed
uneasily at the penultimate word, feeling nevertheless
that it was the proper thing to say.
"All right, father"—this with a grotesque simulation
of filial respect—"you've lived longer; you know
best. Just as you say."
As before, the sound of the word "father" caused
Mr. Button to start violently.
"And hurry."
"I'm hurrying, father."
When his son was dressed Mr. Button regarded him
with depression. The costume consisted of dotted socks,
pink pants, and a belted blouse with a wide white collar.
Over the latter waved the long whitish beard, drooping
almost to the waist. The effect was not good.
"Wait!"
Mr. Button seized a hospital shears and with three
quick snaps amputated a large section of the beard. But
even with this improvement the ensemble fell far short
of perfection. The remaining brush of scraggly hair,
the watery eyes, the ancient teeth, seemed oddly out of
tone with the gayety of the costume. Mr. Button,
however, was obdurate—he held out his hand. "Come
along!" he said sternly.
His son took the hand trustingly. "What are you
going to call me, dad?" he quavered as they walked from
the nursery—"just `baby' for a while? till you think of
a better name?"
Mr. Button grunted. "I don't know," he answered
harshly. "I think we'll call you Methuselah."
III
Even after the new addition to the Button family
had had his hair cut short and then dyed to a sparse unnatural
black, had had his face shaved so close that it
glistened, and had been attired in small-boy clothes made
to order by a flabbergasted tailor, it was impossible for
Mr. Button to ignore the fact that his son was a poor
excuse for a first family baby. Despite his aged stoop,
Benjamin Button—for it was by this name they called
him instead of by the appropriate but invidious Methuselah—was
five feet eight inches tall. His clothes did not
eyebrows disguise the fact that the eyes underneath
were faded and watery and tired. In fact, the baby-nurse
who had been engaged in advance left the house
after one look, in a state of considerable indignation.
But Mr. Button persisted in his unwavering purpose.
Benjamin was a baby, and a baby he should remain.
At first he declared that if Benjamin didn't like warm
milk he could go without food altogether, but he was
finally prevailed upon to allow his son bread and butter,
and even oatmeal by way of a compromise. One day
he brought home a rattle and, giving it to Benjamin,
insisted in no uncertain terms that he should "play
with it," whereupon the old man took it with a weary
expression and could be heard jingling it obediently at
intervals throughout the day.
There can be no doubt, though, that the rattle bored
him, and that he found other and more soothing amousements
when he was left alone. For instance, Mr. Button
discovered one day that during the preceding week
he had smoked more cigars than ever before—a phenomenon
which was explained a few days later when,
entering the nursery unexpectedly, he found the room
full of faint blue haze and Benjamin, with a guilty expression
on his face, trying to conceal the butt of a dark
Havana. This, of course, called for a severe spanking,
but Mr. Button found that he could not bring himself
to administer it. He merely warned his son that he
would "stunt his growth."
Nevertheless he persisted in his attitude. He brought
home lead soldiers, he brought toy trains, he brought
large pleasant animals made of cotton, and, to perfect
the illusion which he was creating—for himself at least—
he passionately demanded of the clerk in the toy-store
whether "the paint would come off the pink duck if the
efforts, Benjamin refused to be interested. He would
steal down the back stairs and return to the nursery
with a volume of the "Encyclopædia Britannica," over
which he would pore through an afternoon, while his
cotton cows and his Noah's ark were left neglected on
the floor. Against such a stubbornness Mr. Button's
efforts were of little avail.
The sensation created in Baltimore was, at first,
prodigious. What the mishap would have cost the Buttons
and their kinsfolk socially cannot be determined,
for the outbreak of the Civil War drew the city's attention
to other things. A few people who were unfailingly
polite racked their brains for compliments to give to the
parents—and finally hit upon the ingenious device of
declaring that the baby resembled his grandfather, a
fact which, due to the standard state of decay common
to all men of seventy, could not be denied. Mr. and
Mrs. Roger Button were not pleased, and Benjamin's
grandfather was furiously insulted.
Benjamin, once he left the hospital, took life as he
found it. Several small boys were brought to see him,
and he spent a stiff-jointed afternoon trying to work up
an interest in tops and marbles—he even managed, quite
accidentally, to break a kitchen window with a stone
from a sling shot, a feat which secretly delighted his
father.
Thereafter Benjamin contrived to break something
every day, but he did these things only because they
were expected of him, and because he was by nature
obliging.
When his grandfather's initial antagonism wore off,
Benjamin and that gentleman took enormous pleasure in
one another's company. They would sit for hours, these
two so far apart in age and experience, and, like old
of the day. Benjamin felt more at ease in his grandfather's
presence than in his parents'—they seemed always
somewhat in awe of him and, despite the dictatorial
authority they exercised over him, frequently
addressed him as "Mr."
He was as puzzled as any one else at the apparently
advanced age of his mind and body at birth. He read
up on it in the medical journal, but found that no such
case had been previously recorded. At his father's
urging he made an honest attempt to play with other
boys, and frequently he joined in the milder games—
football shook him up too much, and he feared that in
case of a fracture his ancient bones would refuse to knit.
When he was five he was sent to kindergarten, where
he was initiated into the art of pasting green paper on
orange paper, of weaving colored maps and manufacturing
eternal cardboard necklaces. He was inclined
to drowse off to sleep in the middle of these tasks, a habit
which both irritated and frightened his young teacher.
To his relief she complained to his parents, and he was
removed from the school. The Roger Buttons told
their friends that they felt he was too young.
By the time he was twelve years old his parents had
grown used to him. Indeed, so strong is the force of
custom that they no longer felt that he was different
from any other child—except when some curious anomaly
reminded them of the fact. But one day a few weeks
after his twelfth birthday, while looking in the mirror,
Benjamin made, or thought he made, an astonishing discovery.
Did his eyes deceive him, or had his hair
turned in the dozen years of his life from white to iron-gray
under its concealing dye? Was the network of
wrinkles on his face becoming less pronounced? Was
his skin healthier and firmer, with even a touch of ruddy
longer stooped and that his physical condition had improved
since the early days of his life.
"Can it be—?" he thought to himself, or, rather,
scarcely dared to think.
He went to his father. "I am grown," he announced
determinedly. "I want to put on long trousers."
His father hesitated. "Well," he said finally, "I
don't know. Fourteen is the age for putting on long
trousers—and you are only twelve."
"But you'll have to admit," protested Benjamin,
"that I'm big for my age."
His father looked at him with illusory speculation.
"Oh, I'm not so sure of that," he said. "I was as big
as you when I was twelve."
This was not true—it was all part of Roger Button's
silent agreement with himself to believe in his son's
normality.
Finally a compromise was reached. Benjamin was to
continue to dye his hair. He was to make a better
attempt to play with boys of his own age. He was not
to wear his spectacles or carry a cane in the street. In
return for these concessions he was allowed his first
suit of long trousers. . . .
IV
Of the life of Benjamin Button between his twelfth
and twenty-first year I intend to say little. Suffice to
record that they were years of normal ungrowth. When
Benjamin was eighteen he was erect as a man of fifty;
he had more hair and it was of a dark gray; his step
was firm, his voice had lost its cracked quaver and descended
to a healthy baritone. So his father sent him up
to Connecticut to take examinations for entrance to
a member of the freshman class.
On the third day following his matriculation he received
a notification from Mr. Hart, the college registrar,
to call at his office and arrange his schedule. Benjamin,
glancing in the mirror, decided that his hair needed
a new application of its brown dye, but an anxious inspection
of his bureau drawer disclosed that the dye
bottle was not there. Then he remembered—he had
emptied it the day before and thrown it away.
He was in a dilemma. He was due at the registrar's
in five minutes. There seemed to be no help for it—he
must go as he was. He did.
"Good-morning," said the registrar politely. "You've
come to inquire about your son."
"Why, as a matter of fact, my name's Button—" began
Benjamin, but Mr. Hart cut him off.
"I'm very glad to meet you, Mr. Button. I'm expecting
your son here any minute."
"That's me!" burst out Benjamin. "I'm a freshman."
"What!"
"I'm a freshman."
"Surely you're joking."
"Not at all."
The registrar frowned and glanced at a card before
him. "Why, I have Mr. Benjamin Button's age down
here as eighteen."
"That's my age," asserted Benjamin, flushing slightly.
The registrar eyed him wearily. "Now surely, Mr.
Button, you don't expect me to believe that."
Benjamin smiled wearily. "I am eighteen," he repeated.
The registrar pointed sternly to the door. "Get out,"
he said. "Get out of college and get out of town. You
are a dangerous lunatic."
"I am eighteen."
Mr. Hart opened the door. "The idea!" he shouted.
"A man of your age trying to enter here as a freshman.
Eighteen years old, are you? Well, I'll give you eighteen
minutes to get out of town."
Benjamin Button walked with dignity from the room,
and half a dozen undergraduates, who were waiting in
the hall, followed him curiously with their eyes. When
he had gone a little way he turned around, faced the infuriated
registrar, who was still standing in the doorway,
and repeated in a firm voice: "I am eighteen years old."
To a chorus of titters which went up from the group of
undergraduates, Benjamin walked away.
But he was not fated to escape so easily. On his
melancholy walk to the railroad station he found that
he was being followed by a group, then by a swarm,
and finally by a dense mass of undergraduates. The
word had gone around that a lunatic had passed the entrance
examinations for Yale and attempted to palm
himself off as a youth of eighteen. A fever of excitement
permeated the college. Men ran hatless out of
classes, the football team abandoned its practice and
joined the mob, professors' wives with bonnets awry
and bustles out of position, ran shouting after the procession,
from which proceeded a continual succession of
remarks aimed at the tender sensibilities of Benjamin
Button.
"He must be the Wandering Jew!"
"He ought to go to prep school at his age!"
"Look at the infant prodigy!"
"He thought this was the old men's home."
"Go up to Harvard!"
Benjamin increased his gait, and soon he was running.
He would show them! He would go to Harvard, and
then they would regret these ill-considered taunts!
Safely on board the train for Baltimore, he put his
head from the window. "You'll regret this!" he
shouted.
"Ha-ha!" the undergraduates laughed. "Ha-ha-ha!"
It was the biggest mistake that Yale College had
ever made. . . .
V
In 1880 Benjamin Button was twenty years old, and
he signalized his birthday by going to work for his father
in Roger Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware. It was
in that same year that he began "going out socially"—
that is, his father insisted on taking him to several
fashionable dances. Roger Button was now fifty, and
he and his son were more and more companionable—in
fact, since Benjamin had ceased to dye his hair (which
was still grayish) they appeared about the same age,
and could have passed for brothers.
One night in August they got into the phaeton attired
in their full-dress suits and drove out to a dance at the
Shevlins' country house, situated just outside of Baltimore.
It was a gorgeous evening. A full moon drenched
the road to the lustreless color of platinum, and late-blooming
harvest flowers breathed into the motionless
air aromas that were like low, half-heard laughter. The
open country, carpeted for rods around with bright
wheat, was translucent as in the day. It was almost
impossible not to be affected by the sheer beauty of
the sky—almost.
"There's a great future in the dry-goods business,"
Roger Button was saying. He was not a spiritual
man—his esthetic sense was rudimentary.
"Old fellows like me can't learn new tricks," he observed
profoundly. "It's you youngsters with energy
and vitality that have the great future before you."
Far up the road the lights of the Shevlins' country
house drifted into view, and presently there was a sighing
sound that crept persistently toward them—it
might have been the fine plaint of violins or the rustle
of the silver wheat under the moon.
They pulled up behind a handsome brougham whose
passengers were disembarking at the door. A lady got
out, then an elderly gentleman, then another young
lady, beautiful as sin. Benjamin started; an almost
chemical change seemed to dissolve and recompose the
very elements of his body. A rigor passed over him,
blood rose into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a
steady thumping in his ears. It was first love.
The girl was slender and frail, with hair that was ashen
under the moon and honey-colored under the sputtering
gas-lamps of the porch. Over her shoulders was thrown
a Spanish mantilla of softest yellow, butterflied in black;
her feet were glittering buttons at the hem of her bustled
dress.
Roger Button leaned over to his son. "That," he
said, "is young Hildegarde Moncrief, the daughter of
General Moncrief."
Benjamin nodded coldly. "Pretty little thing," he
said indifferently. But when the negro boy had led
the buggy away, he added: "Dad, you might introduce
me to her."
They approached a group of which Miss Moncrief
was the centre. Reared in the old tradition, she courtesied
low before Benjamin. Yes, he might have a dance.
He thanked her and walked away—staggered away.
The interval until the time for his turn should arrive
dragged itself out interminably. He stood close to the
wall, silent, inscrutable, watching with murderous eyes
the young bloods of Baltimore as they eddied around
Hildegarde Moncrief, passionate admiration in their
intolerably rosy! Their curling brown whiskers aroused
in him a feeling equivalent to indigestion.
But when his own time came, and he drifted with her
out upon the changing floor to the music of the latest
waltz from Paris, his jealousies and anxieties melted
from him like a mantle of snow. Blind with enchantment,
he felt that life was just beginning.
"You and your brother got here just as we did, didn't
you?" asked Hildegarde, looking up at him with eyes
that were like bright blue enamel.
Benjamin hesitated. If she took him for his father's
brother, would it be best to enlighten her? He remembered
his experience at Yale, so he decided against it.
It would be rude to contradict a lady; it would be criminal
to mar this exquisite occasion with the grotesque
story of his origin. Later, perhaps. So he nodded,
smiled, listened, was happy.
"I like men of your age," Hildegarde told him.
"Young boys are so idiotic. They tell me how much
champagne they drink at college, and how much money
they lose playing cards. Men of your age know how to
appreciate women."
Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal—
with an effort he choked back the impulse.
"You're just the romantic age," she continued—
"fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly-wise; thirty is apt to
be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories
that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is—oh, sixty is too
near seventy; but fifty is the mcllow age. I love fifty."
Fifty seemed to Benjamin a glorious age. He longed
passionately to be fifty.
"I've always said," went on Hildegarde, "that I'd
rather marry a man of fifty and be taken care of than
marry a man of thirty and take care of him."
For Benjamin the rest of the evening was bathed in a
honey-colored mist. Hildegarde gave him two more
dances, and they discovered that they were marvellously
in accord on all the questions of the day. She was to
go driving with him on the following Sunday, and then
they would discuss all these questions further.
Going home in the phaeton just before the crack of
dawn, when the first bees were humming and the fading
moon glimmered in the cool dew, Benjamin knew vaguely
that his father was discussing wholesale hardware.
". . . . And what do you think should merit our
biggest attention after hammers and nails?" the elder
Button was saying.
"Love," replied Benjamin absent-mindedly.
"Lugs?" exclaimed Roger Button. "Why, I've just
covered the question of lugs."
Benjamin regarded him with dazed eyes just as the
eastern sky was suddenly cracked with light, and an
oriole yawned piercingly in the quickening trees. . . .
VI
When, six months later, the engagement of Miss
Hildegarde Moncrief to Mr. Benjamin Button was made
known (I say "made known," for General Moncrief declared
he would rather fall upon his sword than announce
it), the excitement in Baltimore society reached a feverish
pitch. The almost forgotten story of Benjamin's
birth was remembered and sent out upon the winds of
scandal in picaresque and incredible forms. It was said
that Benjamin was really the father of Roger Button,
that he was his brother who had been in prison for forty
years, that he was John Wilkes Booth in disguise—and,
finally, that he had two small conical horns sprouting
from his head.
The Sunday supplements of the New York papers
played up the case with fascinating sketches which
showed the head of Benjamin Button attached to a fish,
to a snake, and, finally, to a body of solid brass. He became
known, journalistically, as the Mystery Man of
Maryland. But the true story, as is usually the case,
had a very small circulation.
However, every one agreed with General Moncrief
that it was "criminal" for a lovely girl who could have
married any beau in Baltimore to throw herself into the
arms of a man who was assuredly fifty. In vain Mr.
Roger Button published his son's birth certificate in
large type in the Baltimore Blaze. No one believed it.
You had only to look at Benjamin and see.
On the part of the two people most concerned there
was no wavering. So many of the stories about her
fiancé were false that Hildegarde refused stubbornly to
believe even the true one. In vain General Moncrief
pointed out to her the high mortality among men of
fifty—or, at least, among men who looked fifty; in vain
he told her of the instability of the wholesale hardware
business. Hildegarde had chosen to marry for mellowness—and
marry she did. . . .
VII
In one particular, at least, the friends of Hildegarde
Moncrief were mistaken. The wholesale hardware business
prospered amazingly. In the fifteen years between
Benjamin Button's marriage in 1880 and his father's retirement
in 1895, the family fortune was doubled—and
this was due largely to the younger member of the firm.
Needless to say, Baltimore eventually received the
couple to its bosom. Even old General Moncrief became
reconciled to his son-in-law when Benjamin gave
War" in twenty volumes, which had been refused by
nine prominent publishers.
In Benjamin himself fifteen years had wrought many
changes. It seemed to him that the blood flowed with
new vigor through his veins. It began to be a pleasure
to rise in the morning, to walk with an active step along
the busy, sunny street, to work untiringly with his shipments
of hammers and his cargoes of nails. It was in
1890 that he executed his famous business coup: he
brought up the suggestion that all nails used in nailing
up the boxes in which nails are shipped are the property of
the shippee, a proposal which became a statute, was approved
by Chief Justice Fossile, and saved Roger Button
and Company, Wholesale Hardware, more than six hundred
nails every year.
In addition, Benjamin discovered that he was becoming
more and more attracted by the gay side of life. It
was typical of his growing enthusiasm for pleasure that
he was the first man in the city of Baltimore to own and
run an automobile. Meeting him on the street, his contemporaries
would stare enviously at the picture he made
of health and vitality.
"He seems to grow younger every year," they would
remark. And if old Roger Button, now sixty-five years
old, had failed at first to give a proper welcome to his
son he atoned at last by bestowing on him what
amounted to adulation.
And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it
will be well to pass over as quickly as possible. There
was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button: his
wife had ceased to attract him.
At that time Hildegarde was a woman of thirty-five,
with a son, Roscoe, fourteen years old. In the early
days of their marriage Benjamin had worshipped her.
an unexciting brown, the blue enamel of her eyes assumed
the aspect of cheap crockery—moreover, and most of
all, she had become too settled in her ways, too placid,
too content, too anemic in her excitements, and too
sober in her taste. As a bride it had been she who had
"dragged" Benjamin to dances and dinners—now conditions
were reversed. She went out socially with him,
but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that
eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one
day and stays with us to the end.
Benjamin's discontent waxed stronger. At the outbreak
of the Spanish-American War in 1898 his home had
for him so little charm that he decided to join the army.
With his business influence he obtained a commission as
captain, and proved so adaptable to the work that he
was made a major, and finally a lieutenant-colonel just
in time to participate in the celebrated charge up San
Juan Hill. He was slightly wounded, and received a
medal.
Benjamin had become so attached to the activity and
excitement of army life that he regretted to give it up,
but his business required attention, so he resigned his
commission and came home. He was met at the station
by a brass band and escorted to his house.
VIII
Hildegarde, waving a large silk flag, greeted him on
the porch, and even as he kissed her he felt with a sinking
of the heart that these three years had taken their
toll. She was a woman of forty now, with a faint
skirmish line of gray hairs in her head. The sight depressed
him.
Up in his room he saw his reflection in the familiar
with anxiety, comparing it after a moment with a photograph
of himself in uniform taken just before the war.
"Good Lord!" he said aloud. The process was continuing.
There was no doubt of it—he looked now like
a man of thirty. Instead of being delighted, he was uneasy—he
was growing younger. He had hitherto hoped
that once he reached a bodily age equivalent to his age
in years, the grotesque phenomenon which had marked
his birth would cease to function. He shuddered. His
destiny seemed to him awful, incredible.
When he came down-stairs Hildegarde was waiting
for him. She appeared annoyed, and he wondered if
she had at last discovered that there was something
amiss. It was with an effort to relieve the tension between
them that he broached the matter at dinner in
what he considered a delicate way.
"Well," he remarked lightly, "everybody says I
look younger than ever."
Hildegarde regarded him with scorn. She sniffed.
"Do you think it's anything to boast about?"
"I'm not boasting," he asserted uncomfortably.
She sniffed again. "The idea," she said, and after a
moment: "I should think you'd have enough pride to
stop it."
"How can I?" he demanded.
"I'm not going to argue with you," she retorted.
"But there's a right way of doing things and a wrong
way. If you've made up your mind to be different
from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you,
but I really don't think it's very considerate."
"But, Hildegarde, I can't help it."
"You can too. You're simply stubborn. You think
you don't want to be like any one else. You always have
been that way, and you always will be. But just think
you do—what would the world be like?"
As this was an inane and unanswerable argument
Benjamin made no reply, and from that time on a chasm
began to widen between them. He wondered what possible
fascination she had ever exercised over him.
To add to the breach, he found, as the new century
gathered headway, that his thirst for gayety grew
stronger. Never a party of any kind in the city of
Baltimore but he was there, dancing with the prettiest
of the young married women, chatting with the most
popular of the débutantes, and finding their company
charming, while his wife, a dowager of evil omen, sat
among the chaperons, now in haughty disapproval, and
now following him with solemn, puzzled, and reproachful
eyes.
"Look!" people would remark. "What a pity! A
young fellow that age tied to a woman of forty-five. He
must be twenty years younger than his wife." They had
forgotten—as people inevitably forget—that back in
1880 their mammas and papas had also remarked about
this same ill-matched pair.
Benjamin's growing unhappiness at home was compensated
for by his many new interests. He took up
golf and made a great success of it. He went in for
dancing: in 1906 he was an expert at "The Boston," and
in 1908 he was considered proficient at the "Maxixe,"
while in 1909 his "Castle Walk" was the envy of every
young man in town.
His social activities, of course, interfered to some extent
with his business, but then he had worked hard at
wholesale hardware for twenty-five years and felt that
he could soon hand it on to his son, Roscoe, who had
recently graduated from Harvard.
He and his son were, in fact, often mistaken for each
fear which had come over him on his return
from the Spanish-American War, and grew to take a
naïve pleasure in his appearance. There was only one
fly in the delicious ointment—he hated to appear in
public with his wife. Hildegarde was almost fifty,
and the sight of her made him feel absurd. . . .
IX
One September day in 1910—a few years after Roger
Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware, had been handed
over to young Roscoe Button—a man, apparently about
twenty years old, entered himself as a freshman at
Harvard University in Cambridge. He did not make
the mistake of announcing that he would never see
fifty again nor did he mention the fact that his son had
been graduated from the same institution ten years before.
He was admitted, and almost immediately attained a
prominent position in the class, partly because he seemed
a little older than the other freshmen, whose average
age was about eighteen.
But his success was largely due to the fact that in the
football game with Yale he played so brilliantly, with so
much dash and with such a cold, remorseless anger that
he scored seven touchdowns and fourteen field goals for
Harvard, and caused one entire eleven of Yale men to
be carried singly from the field, unconscious. He was
the most celebrated man in college.
Strange to say, in his third or junior year he was
scarcely able to "make" the team. The coaches said
that he had lost weight, and it seemed to the more observant
among them that he was not quite as tall as
before. He made no touchdowns—indeed, he was retained
reputation would bring terror and disorganization to
the Yale team.
In his senior year he did not make the team at all. He
had grown so slight and frail that one day he was taken
by some sophomores for a freshman, an incident which
humiliated him terribly. He became known as something
of a prodigy—a senior who was surely no more
than sixteen—and he was often shocked at the worldliness
of some of his classmates. His studies seemed
harder to him—he felt that they were too advanced. He
had heard his classmates speak of St. Midas', the famous
preparatory school, at which so many of them had prepared
for college, and he determined after his graduation
to enter himself at St. Midas', where the sheltered
life among boys his own size would be more congenial
to him.
Upon his graduation in 1914 he went home to Baltimore
with his Harvard diploma in his pocket. Hildegarde
was now residing in Italy, so Benjamin went to
live with his son, Roscoe. But though he was welcomed
in a general way, there was obviously no heartiness in
Roscoe's feeling toward him—there was even perceptible
a tendency on his son's part to think that Benjamin,
as he moped about the house in adolescent mooniness,
was somewhat in the way. Roscie was married now and
prominent in Baltimore life, and he wanted no scandal
to creep out in connection with his family.
Benjamin, no longer persona grata with the débutantes
and younger college set, found himself left much
alone, except for the companionship of three or four
fifteen-year-old boys in the neighborhood. His idea of
going to St. Midas' school recurred to him.
"Say," he said to Roscoe one day, "I've told you over
and over that I want to go to prep school."
"Well, go, then," replied Roscoe shortly. The matter
was distasteful to him, and he wished to avoid a
discussion.
"I can't go alone," said Benjamin helplessly. "You'll
have to enter me and take me up there."
"I haven't got time," declared Roscoe abruptly. His
eyes narrowed and he looked uneasily at his father.
"As a matter of fact," he added, "you'd better not go
on with this business much longer. You better pull up
short. You better—you better"—he paused and his
face crimsoned as he sought for words—"you better
turn right around and start back the other way. This
has gone too far to be a joke. It isn't funny any longer.
You—you behave yourself!"
Benjamin looked at him, on the verge of tears.
"And another thing," continued Roscoe, "when visitors
are in the house I want you to call me `Uncle'—not
`Roscoe,' but `Uncle,' do you understand? It looks
absurd for a boy of fifteen to call me by my first name.
Perhaps you'd better call me `Uncle' all the time, so
you'll get used to it."
With a harsh look at his father, Roscoe turned
away. . . .
X
At the termination of this interview, Benjamin wandered
dismally up-stairs and stared at himself in the
mirror. He had not shaved for three months, but he
could find nothing on his face but a faint white down
with which it seemed unnecessary to meddle. When he
had first come home from Harvard, Roscoe had approached
him with the proposition that he should wear
eye-glasses and imitation whiskers glued to his cheeks,
and it had seemed for a moment that the farce of his
early years was to be repeated. But whiskers had
had reluctantly relented.
Benjamin opened a book of boys' stories, "The Boy
Scouts in Bimini Bay," and began to read. But he
found himself thinking persistently about the war.
America had joined the Allied cause during the preceding
month, and Benjamin wanted to enlist, but, alas,
sixteen was the minimum age, and he did not look that
old. His true age, which was fifty-seven, would have
disqualified him, anyway.
There was a knock at his door, and the butler appeared
with a letter bearing a large official legend in
the corner and addressed to Mr. Benjamin Button.
Benjamin tore it open eagerly, and read the enclosure
with delight. It informed him that many reserve officers
who had served in the Spanish-American War were
being called back into service with a higher rank, and it
enclosed his commission as brigadier-general in the United
States army with orders to report immediately.
Benjamin jumped to his feet fairly quivering with
enthusiasm. This was what he had wanted. He seized
his cap and ten minutes later he had entered a large
tailoring establishment on Charles Street, and asked in
his uncertain treble to be measured for a uniform.
"Want to play soldier, sonny?" demanded a clerk,
casually.
Benjamin flushed. "Say! Never mind what I
want!" he retorted angrily. "My name's Button and
I live on Mt. Vernon Place, so you know I'm good for
it."
"Well," admitted the clerk, hesitantly, "if you're
not, I guess your daddy is, all right."
Benjamin was measured, and a week later his uniform
was completed. He had difficulty in obtaining the
proper general's insignia because the dealer kept insisting
would look just as well and be much more fun to play
with.
Saying nothing to Roscoe, he left the house one night
and proceeded by train to Camp Mosby, in South Carolina,
where he was to command an infantry brigade.
On a sultry April day he approached the entrance to
the camp, paid off the taxicab which had brought him
from the station, and turned to the sentry on guard.
"Get some one to handle my luggage!" he said briskly.
The sentry eyed him reproachfully. "Say," he remarked,
"where you goin' with the general's duds,
sonny?"
Benjamin, veteran of the Spanish-American War,
whirled upon him with fire in his eye, but with, alas,
a changing treble voice.
"Come to attention!" he tried to thunder; he paused
for breath—then suddenly he saw the sentry snap his
heels together and bring his rifle to the present. Benjamin
concealed a smile of gratification, but when he
glanced around his smile faded. It was not he who had
inspired obedience, but an imposing artillery colonel who
was approaching on horseback.
"Colonel!" called Benjamin shrilly.
The colonel came up, drew rein, and looked coolly
down at him with a twinkle in his eyes. "Whose little
boy are you?" he demanded kindly.
"I'll soon darn well show you whose little boy I
am!" retorted Benjamin in a ferocious voice. "Get
down off that horse!"
The colonel roared with laughter.
"You want him, eh, general?"
"Here!" cried Benjamin desperately. "Read this."
And he thrust his commission toward the colonel.
The colonel read it, his eyes popping from their sockets.
"Where'd you get this?" he demanded, slipping the
document into his own pocket.
"I got it from the Government, as you'll soon find
out!"
"You come along with me," said the colonel with a
peculiar look. "We'll go up to headquarters and talk
this over. Come along."
The colonel turned and began walking his horse in
the direction of headquarters. There was nothing for
Benjamin to do but follow with as much dignity as possible—meanwhile
promising himself a stern revenge.
But this revenge did not materialize. Two days
later, however, his son Roscoe materialized from Baltimore,
hot and cross from a hasty trip, and escorted the
weeping general, sans uniform, back to his home.
XI
In 1920 Roscoe Button's first child was born. During
the attendant festivities, however, no one thought
it "the thing" to mention that the little grubby boy,
apparently about ten years of age who played around
the house with lead soldiers and a miniature circus, was
the new baby's own grandfather.
No one disliked the little boy whose fresh, cheerful
face was crossed with just a hint of sadness, but to Roscoe
Button his presence was a source of torment. In the
idiom of his generation Roscoe did not consider the
matter "efficient." It seemed to him that his father,
in refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a "red-blooded
he-man"—this was Roscoe's favorite expression—but
in a curious and perverse manner. Indeed,
to think about the matter for as much as a half an hour
drove him to the edge of insanity. Roscoe believed that
"live wires" should keep young, but carrying it out on
Roscoe rested.
Five years later Roscoe's little boy had grown old
enough to play childish games with little Benjamin
under the supervision of the same nurse. Roscoe took
them both to kindergarten on the same day and Benjamin
found that playing with little strips of colored
paper, making mats and chains and curious and beautiful
designs, was the most fascinating game in the world.
Once he was bad and had to stand in the corner—then
he cried—but for the most part there were gay hours in
the cheerful room, with the sunlight coming in the windows
and Miss Bailey's kind hand resting for a moment
now and then in his tousled hair.
Roscoe's son moved up into the first grade after a
year, but Benjamin stayed on in the kindergarten. He
was very happy. Sometimes when other tots talked
about what they would do when they grew up a shadow
would cross his little face as if in a dim, childish way he
realized that those were things in which he was never to
share.
The days flowed on in monotonous content. He went
back a third year to the kindergarten, but he was too
little now to understand what the bright shining strips
of paper were for. He cried because the other boys
were bigger than he and he was afraid of them. The
teacher talked to him, but though he tried to understand
he could not understand at all.
He was taken from the kindergarten. His nurse,
Nana, in her starched gingham dress, became the centre
of his tiny world. On bright days they walked in the
park; Nana would point at a great gray monster and
say "elephant," and Benjamin would say it after her,
and when he was being undressed for bed that night he
would say it over and over aloud to her: "Elyphant,
on the bed, which was fun, because if you sat down exactly
right it would bounce you up on your feet again,
and if you said "Ah" for a long time while you jumped
you got a very pleasing broken vocal effect.
He loved to take a big cane from the hatrack and go
around hitting chairs and tables with it and saying:
"Fight, fight, fight." When there were people there
the old ladies would cluck at him, which interested him,
and the young ladies would try to kiss him, which he
submitted to with mild boredom. And when the long
day was done at five o'clock he would go up-stairs with
Nana and be fed oatmeal and nice soft mushy foods with
a spoon.
There were no troublesome memories in his childish
sleep; no token came to him of his brave days at college,
of the glittering years when he flustered the hearts
of many girls. There were only the white, safe walls
of his crib and Nana and a man who came to see him
sometimes, and a great big orange ball that Nana pointed
at just before his twilight bed hour and called "sun."
When the sun went his eyes were sleepy—there were no
dreams, no dreams to haunt him.
The past—the wild charge at the head of his men up
San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he
worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy
city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before
that when he sat smoking far into the night in the
gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his
grandfather—all these had faded like unsubstantial
dreams from his mind as though they had never been.
He did not remember. He did not remember clearly
whether the milk was warm or cool at his last feeding or
how the days passed—there was only his crib and Nana's
familiar presence. And then he remembered nothing.
the noons and nights he breathed and over him there
were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely
heard, and faintly differentiated smells, and light and
darkness.
Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim
faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma
of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind.
TARQUIN OF CHEAPSIDE
Running footsteps—light, soft-soled shoes made of
curious leathery cloth brought from Ceylon setting the
pace; thick flowing boots, two pairs, dark blue and gilt,
reflecting the moonlight in blunt gleams and splotches,
following a stone's throw behind.
Soft Shoes flashes through a patch of moonlight, then
darts into a blind labyrinth of alleys and becomes only
an intermittent scuffle ahead somewhere in the enfolding
darkness. In go Flowing Boots, with short swords
lurching and long plumes awry, finding a breath to curse
God and the black lanes of London.
Soft Shoes leaps a shadowy gate and crackles through
a hedgerow. Flowing Boots leap the gate and crackles
through the hedgerow—and there, startlingly, is the
watch ahead—two murderous pikemen of ferocious cast
of mouth acquired in Holland and the Spanish marches.
But there is no cry for help. The pursued does not fall
panting at the feet of the watch, clutching a purse;
neither do the pursuers raise a hue and cry. Soft Shoes
goes by in a rush of swift air. The watch curse and
hesitate, glance after the fugitive, and then spread their
pikes grimly across the road and wait for Flowing Boots.
Darkness, like a great hand, cuts off the even flow of the
moon.
The hand moves off the moon whose pale caress finds
again the eaves and lintels, and the watch, wounded and
tumbled in the dust. Up the street one of Flowing
Boots leaves a black trail of spots until he binds himself,
clumsily as he runs, with fine lace caught from his
throat.
It was no affair for the watch: Satan was at large tonight
and Satan seemed to be he who appeared dimly
in front, heel over gate, knee over fence. Moreover,
the adversary was obviously travelling near home or at
least in that section of London consecrated to his coarser
whims, for the street narrowed like a road in a picture
and the houses bent over further and further, cooping
in natural ambushes suitable for murder and its histrionic
sister, sudden death.
Down long and sinuous lanes twisted the hunted
and the harriers, always in and out of the moon in a
perpetual queen's move over a checker-board of glints
and patches. Ahead, the quarry, minus his leather
jerkin now and half blinded by drips of sweat, had
taken to scanning his ground desperately on both sides.
As a result he suddenly slowed short, and retracing his
steps a bit scooted up an alley so dark that it seemed that
here sun and moon had been in eclipse since the last
glacier slipped roaring over the earth. Two hundred
yards down he stopped and crammed himself into a
niche in the wall where he huddled and panted silently,
a grotesque god without bulk or outline in the gloom.
Flowing Boots, two pairs, drew near, came up, went
by, halted twenty yards beyond him, and spoke in deeplunged,
scanty whispers:
"I was attune to that scuffle; it stopped."
"Within twenty paces."
"He's hid."
"Stay together now and we'll cut him up."
The voice faded into a low crunch of a boot, nor did
Soft Shoes wait to hear more—he sprang in three leaps
across the alley, where he bounded up, flapped for a
moment on the top of the wall like a huge bird, and disappeared,
gulped down by the hungry night at a mouthful.
II
He read aloud, had he the breath,
His every thought was with the dead,
And so he read himself to death."
Any visitor to the old James the First graveyard near
Peat's Hill may spell out this bit of doggerel, undoubtedly
one of the worst recorded of an Elizabethan, on the
tomb of Wessel Caxter.
This death of his, says the antiquary, occurred when
he was thirty-seven, but as this story is concerned with
the night of a certain chase through darkness, we find
him still alive, still reading. His eyes were somewhat
dim, his stomach somewhat obvious—he was a misbuilt
man and indolent—oh, Heavens! But an era is an
era, and in the reign of Elizabeth, by the grace of Luther,
Queen of England, no man could help but catch the
spirit of enthusiasm. Every loft in Cheapside published
its Magnum Folium (or magazine) of the new
blank verse; the Cheapside Players would produce anything
on sight as long as it "got away from those reactionary
miracle plays," and the English Bible had run
through seven "very large" printings in as many
months.
So Wessel Caxter (who in his youth had gone to sea)
was now a reader of all on which he could lay his hands—
he read manuscripts in holy friendship; he dined rotten
poets; he loitered about the shops where the Magna
Folia were printed, and he listened tolerantly while the
young playwrights wrangled and bickered among themselves,
and behind each other's backs made bitter and
malicious charges of plagiarism or anything else they
could think of.
To-night he had a book, a piece of work which, though
inordinately versed, contained, he thought, some rather
excellent political satire. "The Faerie Queene" by Edmund
Spenser lay before him under the tremulous
candle-light. He had ploughed through a canto; he was
beginning another:
The Legend of Britomartis or of Chastity
It falls me here to write of Chastity.The fayrest vertue, far above the rest. . . .
A sudden rush of feet on the stairs, a rusty swing-open
of the thin door, and a man thrust himself into the
room, a man without a jerkin, panting, sobbing, on the
verge of collapse.
"Wessel," words choked him, "stick me away somewhere,
love of Our Lady!"
Caxter rose, carefully closing his book, and bolted
the door in some concern.
"I'm pursued," cried out Soft Shoes. "I vow there's
two short-witted blades trying to make me into mincemeat
and near succeeding. They saw me hop the back
wall!"
"It would need," said Wessel, looking at him curiously,
"several battalions armed with blunderbusses, and two
or three Armadas, to keep you reasonably secure from
the revenges of the world."
Soft Shoes smiled with satisfaction. His sobbing
gasps were giving way to quick, precise breathing; his
hunted air had faded to a faintly perturbed irony.
"I feel little surprise," continued Wessel.
"They were two such dreary apes."
"Making a total of three."
"Only two unless you stick me away. Man, man,
come alive; they'll be on the stairs in a spark's age."
Wessel took a dismantled pike-staff from the corner,
and raising it to the high ceiling, dislodged a rough trapdoor
opening into a garret above.
"There's no ladder."
He moved a bench under the trap, upon which Soft
Shoes mounted, crouched, hesitated, crouched again,
and then leaped amazingly upward. He caught at the
edge of the aperture and swung back and forth for a
moment, shifting his hold; finally doubled up and disappeared
into the darkness above. There was a scurry,
a migration of rats, as the trap-door was replaced; . . .
silence.
Wessel returned to his reading-table, opened to the
Legend of Britomartis or of Chastity—and waited.
Almost a minute later there was a scramble on the
stairs and an intolerable hammering at the door. Wessel
sighed and, picking up his candle, rose.
"Who's there?"
"Open the door!"
"Who's there?"
An aching blow frightened the frail wood, splintered
it around the edge. Wessel opened it a scarce three
inches, and held the candle high. His was to play the
timorous, the super-respectable citizen, disgracefully
disturbed.
"One small hour of the night for rest. Is that too
much to ask from every brawler and—"
"Quiet, gossip! Have you seen a perspiring fellow?"
The shadows of two gallants fell in immense wavering
outlines over the narrow stairs; by the light Wessel
scrutinized them closely. Gentlemen, they were, hastily
but richly dressed—one of them wounded severely
in the hand, both radiating a sort of furious horror.
Waving aside Wessel's ready miscomprehension, they
pushed by him into the room and with their swords
suspected dark spots in the room, further extending
their search to Wessel's bedchamber.
"Is he hid here?" demanded the wounded man
fiercely.
"Is who here?"
"Any man but you."
"Only two others that I know of."
For a second Wessel feared that he had been too
damned funny, for the gallants made as though to prick
him through.
"I heard a man on the stairs," he said hastily, "full
five minutes ago, it was. He most certainly failed to
come up."
He went on to explain his absorption in "The Faerie
Queene" but, for the moment at least, his visitors, like
the great saints, were anæsthetic to culture.
"What's been done?" inquired Wessel.
"Violence!" said the man with the wounded hand.
Wessel noticed that his eyes were quite wild. "My own
sister. Oh, Christ in heaven, give us this man!"
Wessel winced.
"Who is the man?"
"God's word! We know not even that. What's
that trap up there?" he added suddenly.
"It's nailed down. It's not been used for years."
He thought of the pole in the corner and quailed in his
belly, but the utter despair of the two men dulled their
astuteness.
"It would take a ladder for any one not a tumbler,"
said the wounded man listlessly.
His companion broke into hysterical laughter.
"A tumbler. Oh, a tumbler. Oh—"
Wessel stared at them in wonder.
"That appeals to my most tragic humor," cried the
man, "that no one—oh, no one—could get up there but
a tumbler."
The gallant with the wounded hand snapped his
good fingers impatiently.
"We must go next door—and then on—"
Helplessly they went as two walking under a dark
and storm-swept sky.
Wessel closed and bolted the door and stood a moment
by it, frowning in pity.
A low-breathed "Ha!" made him look up. Soft Shoes
had already raised the trap and was looking down into
the room, his rather elfish face squeezed into a grimace,
half of distaste, half of sardonic amusement.
"They take off their heads with their helmets," he
remarked in a whisper, "but as for you and me, Wessel,
we are two cunning men."
"Now you be cursed," cried Wessel vehemently. "I
knew you for a dog, but when I hear even the half of a
tale like this, I know you for such a dirty cur that I am
minded to club your skull."
Soft Shoes stared at him, blinking.
"At all events," he replied finally, "I find dignity impossible
in this position."
With this he let his body through the trap, hung for
an instant, and dropped the seven feet to the floor.
"There was a rat considered my ear with the air of a
gourmet," he continued, dusting his hands on his
breeches. "I told him in the rat's peculiar idiom that
I was deadly poison, so he took himself off."
"Let's hear of this night's lechery!" insisted Wessel
angrily.
Soft Shoes touched his thumb to his nose and wiggled
the fingers derisively at Wessel.
"Street gamin!" muttered Wessel.
"Have you any paper?" demanded Soft Shoes irrelevantly,
and then rudely added, "or can you write?"
"Why should I give you paper?"
"You wanted to hear of the night's entertainment.
So you shall, an you give me pen, ink, a sheaf of paper,
and a room to myself."
Wessel hesitated.
"Get out!" he said finally.
"As you will. Yet you have missed a most intriguing
story."
Wessel wavered—he was soft as taffy, that man—
gave in. Soft Shoes went into the adjoining room with
the begrudged writing materials and precisely closed the
door. Wessel grunted and returned to "The Faerie
Queene"; so silence came once more upon the house.
III
Three o'clock went into four. The room paled, the
dark outside was shot through with damp and chill,
and Wessel, cupping his brain in his hands, bent low over
his table, tracing through the pattern of knights and
fairies and the harrowing distresses of many girls.
There were dragons chortling along the narrow street
outside; when the sleepy armorer's boy began his work
at half-past five the heavy clink and chank of plate and
linked mail swelled to the echo of a marching cavalcade.
A fog shut down at the first flare of dawn, and the room
was grayish yellow at six when Wessel tiptoed to his
cupboard bedchamber and pulled open the door. His
guest turned on him a face pale as parchment in which
two distraught eyes burned like great red letters. He
had drawn a chair close to Wessel's prie-dieu which he
was using as a desk; and on it was an amazing stack of
and returned to his siren, calling himself fool for
not claiming his bed here at dawn.
The clump of boots outside, the croaking of old beldames
from attic to attic, the dull murmur of morning,
unnerved him, and, dozing, he slumped in his chair, his
brain, overladen with sound and color, working intolerably
over the imagery that stacked it. In this restless
dream of his he was one of a thousand groaning bodies
crushed near the sun, a helpless bridge for the strong-eyed
Apollo. The dream tore at him, scraped along
his mind like a ragged knife. When a hot hand touched
his shoulder, he awoke with what was nearly a scream
to find the fog thick in the room and his guest, a gray
ghost of misty stuff, beside him with a pile of paper in
his hand.
"It should be a most intriguing tale, I believe, though
it requires some going over. May I ask you to lock it
away, and in God's name let me sleep?"
He waited for no answer, but thrust the pile at Wessel,
and literally poured himself like stuff from a suddenly
inverted bottle upon a couch in the corner; slept, with
his breathing regular, but his brow wrinkled in a curious
and somewhat uncanny manner.
Wessel yawned sleepily and, glancing at the scrawled,
uncertain first page, he began reading aloud very softly:
The Rape of Lucrece
"From the besieged Ardea all in post,Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,
Lust-breathing Tarquin leaves the Roman host—"
"O RUSSET WITCH!"
Merlin Grainger was employed by the Moonlight
Quill Bookshop, which you may have visited, just
around the corner from the Ritz-Carlton on Forty-seventh
Street. The Moonlight Quill is, or rather was,
a very romantic little store, considered radical and admitted
dark. It was spotted interiorly with red and
orange posters of breathless exotic intent, and lit no less
by the shiny reflecting bindings of special editions than
by the great squat lamp of crimson satin that, lighted
through all the day, swung overhead. It was truly a
mellow bookshop. The words "Moonlight Quill" were
worked over the door in a sort of serpentine embroidery.
The windows seemed always full of something that had
passed the literary censors with little to spare; volumes
with covers of deep orange which offer their titles on
little white paper squares. And over all there was the
smell of the musk, which the clever, inscrutable Mr.
Moonlight Quill ordered to be sprinkled about—the smell
half of a curiosity shop in Dickens' London and half of
a coffee-house on the warm shores of the Bosphorus.
From nine until five-thirty Merlin Grainger asked
bored old ladies in black and young men with dark circles
under their eyes if they "cared for this fellow" or
were interested in first editions. Did they buy novels
with Arabs on the cover, or books which gave Shakespeare's
newest sonnets as dictated psychically to Miss
Sutton of South Dakota? he sniffed. As a matter of
fact, his own taste ran to these latter, but as an employee
at the Moonlight Quill he assumed for the working day
the attitude of a disillusioned connoisseur.
After he had crawled over the window display to pull
said good-bye to the mysterious Mr. Moonlight Quill
and the lady clerk, Miss McCracken, and the lady
stenographer, Miss Masters, he went home to the girl,
Caroline. He did not eat supper with Caroline. It
is unbelievable that Caroline would have considered
eating off his bureau with the collar buttons dangerously
near the cottage cheese, and the ends of Merlin's necktie
just missing his glass of milk—he had never asked her
to eat with him. He ate alone. He went into Braegdort's
delicatessen on Sixth Avenue and bought a box
of crackers, a tube of anchovy paste, and some oranges,
or else a little jar of sausages and some potato salad and
a bottled soft drink, and with these in a brown package
he went to his room at Fifty-something West Fifty-eighth
Street and ate his supper and saw Caroline.
Caroline was a very young and gay person who lived
with some older lady and was possibly nineteen. She
was like a ghost in that she never existed until evening.
She sprang into life when the lights went on in her apartment
at about six, and she disappeared, at the latest,
about midnight. Her apartment was a nice one, in a
nice building with a white stone front, opposite the south
side of Central Park. The back of her apartment faced
the single window of the single room occupied by the
single Mr. Grainger.
He called her Caroline because there was a picture
that looked like her on the jacket of a book of that name
down at the Moonlight Quill.
Now, Merlin Grainger was a thin young man of
twenty-five, with dark hair and no mustache or beard
or anything like that, but Caroline was dazzling and
light, with a shimmering morass of russet waves to take
the place of hair, and the sort of features that remind you
of kisses—the sort of features you thought belonged to
picture, didn't. She dressed in pink or blue usually,
but of late she had sometimes put on a slender black
gown that was evidently her especial pride, for whenever
she wore it she would stand regarding a certain place
on the wall, which Merlin thought must be a mirror.
She sat usually in the profile chair near the window, but
sometimes honored the chaise longue by the lamp, and
often she leaned 'way back and smoked a cigarette with
posturings of her arms and hands that Merlin considered
very graceful.
At another time she had come to the window and stood
in it magnificently, and looked out because the moon had
lost its way and was dripping the strangest and most
transforming brilliance into the areaway between, turning
the motif of ash-cans and clothes-lines into a vivid
impressionism of silver casks and gigantic gossamer
cobwebs. Merlin was sitting in plain sight, eating cottage
cheese with sugar and milk on it; and so quickly
did he reach out for the window cord that he tipped the
cottage cheese into his lap with his free hand—and the
milk was cold and the sugar made spots on his trousers,
and he was sure that she had seen him after all.
Sometimes there were callers—men in dinner coats,
who stood and bowed, hat in hand and coat on arm, as
they talked to Caroline; then bowed some more and
followed her out of the light, obviously bound for a play
or for a dance. Other young men came and sat and
smoked cigarettes, and seemed trying to tell Caroline
something—she sitting either in the profile chair and
watching them with eager intentness or else in the
chaise longue by the lamp, looking very lovely and youthfully
inscrutable indeed.
Merlin enjoyed these calls. Of some of the men he
approved. Others won only his grudging toleration,
caller, a man with black hair and a black goatee and a
pitch-dark soul, who seemed to Merlin vaguely familiar,
but whom he was never quite able to recognize.
Now, Merlin's whole life was not "bound up with this
romance he had constructed"; it was not "the happiest
hour of his day." He never arrived in time to rescue
Caroline from "clutches"; nor did he even marry her.
A much stranger thing happened than any of these, and
it is this strange thing that will presently be set down
here. It began one October afternoon when she walked
briskly into the mellow interior of the Moonlight Quill.
It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end
of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray
in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze
was crying down the streets, whisking along battered
newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were
pricking out all the windows—it was so desolate that
one was sorry for the tops of sky-scrapers lost up there in
the dark green and gray heaven, and felt that now surely
the farce was to close, and presently all the buildings
would collapse like card houses, and pile up in a dusty,
sardonic heap upon all the millions who presumed to
wind in and out of them.
At least these were the sort of musings that lay heavily
upon the soul of Merlin Grainger, as he stood by the window
putting a dozen books back in a row, after a cyclonic
visit by a lady with ermine trimmings. He looked out
of the window full of the most distressing thoughts—of
the early novels of H. G. Wells, of the book of Genesis,
of how Thomas Edison had said that in thirty years
there would be no dwelling-houses upon the island, but
only a vast and turbulent bazaar; and then he set the
last book right side up, turned—and Caroline walked
coolly into the shop.
She was dressed in a jaunty but conventional walking
costume—he remembered this when he thought about
it later. Her skirt was plaid, pleated like a concertina;
her jacket was a soft but brisk tan; her shoes and spats
were brown and her hat, small and trim, completed her
like the top of a very expensive and beautifully filled
candy box.
Merlin, breathless and startled, advanced nervously
toward her.
"Good-afternoon—" he said, and then stopped—why,
he did not know, except that it came to him that something
very portentous in his life was about to occur,
and that it would need no furbishing but silence, and the
proper amount of expectant attention. And in that
minute before the thing began to happen he had the
sense of a breathless second hanging suspended in time:
he saw through the glass partition that bounded off the
little office the malevolent conical head of his employer,
Mr. Moonlight Quill, bent over his correspondence.
He saw Miss McCracken and Miss Masters as two
patches of hair drooping over piles of paper; he saw the
crimson lamp overhead, and noticed with a touch of
pleasure how really pleasant and romantic it made the
book-store seem.
Then the thing happened, or rather it began to happen.
Caroline picked up a volume of poems lying loose
upon a pile, fingered it absently with her slender white
hand, and suddenly, with an easy gesture, tossed it upward
toward the ceiling, where it disappeared in the
crimson lamp and lodged there, seen through the illuminated
silk as a dark, bulging rectangle. This
pleased her—she broke into young, contagious laughter,
in which Merlin found himself presently joining.
"It stayed up!" she cried merrily. "It stayed up,
didn't it?" To both of them this seemed the height of
bookshop, and Merlin was glad to find that her voice
was rich and full of sorcery.
"Try another," he found himself suggesting—"try a
red one."
At this her laughter increased, and she had to rest her
hands upon the stack to steady herself.
"Try another," she managed to articulate between
spasms of mirth. "Oh, golly, try another!"
"Try two."
"Yes, try two. Oh, I'll choke if I don't stop laughing.
Here it goes."
Suiting her action to the word, she picked up a red
book and sent it in a gentle hyperbola toward the
ceiling, where it sank into the lamp beside the first. It
was a few minutes before either of them could do more
than rock back and forth in helpless glee; but then by
mutual agreement they took up the sport anew, this
time in unison. Merlin seized a large, specially bound
French classic and whirled it upward. Applauding his
own accuracy, he took a best-seller in one hand and a
book on barnacles in the other, and waited breathlessly
while she made her shot. Then the business waxed fast
and furious—sometimes they alternated, and, watching,
he found how supple she was in every movement;
sometimes one of them made shot after shot, picking up
the nearest book, sending it off, merely taking time to
follow it with a glance before reaching for another.
Within three minutes they had cleared a little place on
the table, and the lamp of crimson satin was so bulging
with books that it was near breaking.
"Silly game, basket-ball," she cried scornfully as a
book left her hand. "High-school girls play it in hideous
bloomers."
"Idiotic," he agreed.
She paused in the act of tossing a book, and replaced
it suddenly in its position on the table.
"I think we've got room to sit down now," she said
gravely.
They had; they had cleared an ample space for two.
With a faint touch of nervousness Merlin glanced toward
Mr. Moonlight Quill's glass partition, but the three
heads were still bent earnestly over their work, and it
was evident that they had not seen what had gone on
in the shop. So when Caroline put her hands on the
table and hoisted herself up Merlin calmly imitated
her, and they sat side by side looking very earnestly at
each other.
"I had to see you," she began, with a rather pathetic
expression in her brown eyes.
"I know."
"It was that last time," she continued, her voice
trembling a little, though she tried to keep it steady.
"I was frightened. I don't like you to eat off the dresser.
I'm so afraid you'll—you'll swallow a collar button."
"I did once—almost," he confessed reluctantly, "but
it's not so easy, you know. I mean you can swallow
the flat part easy enough or else the other part—that
is, separately—but for a whole collar button you'd
have to have a specially made throat." He was astonishing
himself by the debonnaire appropriateness of his
remarks. Words seemed for the first time in his life
to run at him shrieking to be used, gathering themselves
into carefully arranged squads and platoons, and being
presented to him by punctilious adjutants of paragraphs.
"That's what scared me," she said. "I knew you
had to have a specially made throat—and I knew, at
least I felt sure, that you didn't have one."
He nodded frankly.
"I haven't. It costs money to have one—more
money unfortunately than I possess."
He felt no shame in saying this—rather a delight in
making the admission—he knew that nothing he could
say or do would be beyond her comprehension; least
of all his poverty, and the practical impossibility of ever
extricating himself from it.
Caroline looked down at her wrist watch, and with a
little cry slid from the table to her feet.
"It's after five," she cried. "I didn't realize. I have
to be at the Ritz at five-thirty. Let's hurry and get
this done. I've got a bet on it."
With one accord they set to work. Caroline began
the matter by seizing a book on insects and sending it
whizzing, and finally crashing through the glass partition
that housed Mr. Moonlight Quill. The proprietor
glanced up with a wild look, brushed a few pieces of
glass from his desk, and went on with his letters. Miss
McCracken gave no sign of having heard—only Miss
Masters started and gave a little frightened scream before
she bent to her task again.
But to Merlin and Caroline it didn't matter. In a
perfect orgy of energy they were hurling book after book
in all directions, until sometimes three or four were in
the air at once, smashing against shelves, cracking the
glass of pictures on the walls, falling in bruised and torn
heaps upon the floor. It was fortunate that no customers
happened to come in, for it is certain they would never
have come in again—the noise was too tremendous, a
noise of smashing and ripping and tearing, mixed now
and then with the tinkling of glass, the quick breathing
of the two throwers, and the intermittent outbursts of
laughter to which both of them periodically surrendered.
At five-thirty Caroline tossed a last book at the lamp,
and so gave the final impetus to the load it carried. The
splattering of white and color to the already littered
floor. Then with a sigh of relief she turned to Merlin
and held out her hand.
"Good-by," she said simply.
"Are you going?" He knew she was. His question
was simply a lingering wile to detain her and extract
for another moment that dazzling essence of light he
drew from her presence, to continue his enormous satisfaction
in her features, which were like kisses and, he
thought, like the features of a girl he had known back in
1910. For a minute he pressed the softness of her hand
—then she smiled and withdrew it and, before he could
spring to open the door, she had done it herself and was
gone out into the turbid and ominous twilight that
brooded narrowly over Forty-seventh Street.
I would like to tell you how Merlin, having seen how
beauty regards the wisdom of the years, walked into the
little partition of Mr. Moonlight Quill and gave up his
job then and there; thence issuing out into the street a
much finer and nobler and increasingly ironic man. But
the truth is much more commonplace. Merlin Grainger
stood up and surveyed the wreck of the bookshop, the
ruined volumes, the torn silk remnants of the once beautiful
crimson lamp, the crystalline sprinkling of broken
glass which lay in iridescent dust over the whole interior
—and then he went to a corner where a broom was kept
and began cleaning up and rearranging and, as far as he
was able, restoring the shop to its former condition. He
found that, though some few of the books were uninjured,
most of them had suffered in varying extents.
The backs were off some, the pages were torn from others,
still others were just slightly cracked in the front, which,
as all careless book returners know, makes a book unsalable,
and therefore second-hand.
Nevertheless by six o'clock he had done much to repair
the damage. He had returned the books to their
original places, swept the floor, and put new lights in
the sockets overhead. The red shade itself was ruined
beyond redemption, and Merlin thought in some trepidation
that the money to replace it might have to come
out of his salary. At six, therefore, having done the
best he could, he crawled over the front window display
to pull down the blind. As he was treading delicately
back, he saw Mr. Moonlight Quill rise from his desk,
put on his overcoat and hat, and emerge into the shop.
He nodded mysteriously at Merlin and went toward the
door. With his hand on the knob he paused, turned
around, and in a voice curiously compounded of ferocity
and uncertainty, he said:
"If that girl comes in here again, you tell her to behave."
With that he opened the door, drowning Merlin's
meek "Yessir" in its creak, and went out.
Merlin stood there for a moment, deciding wisely
not to worry about what was for the present only a
possible futurity, and then he went into the back of the
shop and invited Miss Masters to have supper with him
at Pulpat's French Restaurant, where one could still
obtain red wine at dinner, despite the Great Federal
Government. Miss Masters accepted.
"Wine makes me feel all tingly," she said.
Merlin laughed inwardly as he compared her to Caroline,
or rather as he didn't compare her. There was no
comparison.
II
Mr. Moonlight Quill, mysterious, exotic, and oriental
in temperament was, nevertheless, a man of decision.
And it was with decision that he approached the problem
equal to the original cost of his entire stock—a step
which for certain private reasons he did not wish to take
—it would be impossible for him to continue in business
with the Moonlight Quill as before. There was but one
thing to do. He promptly turned his establishment
from an up-to-the-minute book-store into a second-hand
bookshop. The damaged books were marked down from
twenty-five to fifty per cent, the name over the door
whose serpentine embroidery had once shone so insolently
bright, was allowed to grow dim and take on the
indescribably vague color of old paint, and, having a
strong penchant for ceremonial, the proprietor even
went so far as to buy two skull-caps of shoddy red felt,
one for himself and one for his clerk, Merlin Grainger.
Moreover, he let his goatee grow until it resembled the
tail-feathers of an ancient sparrow and substituted for
a once dapper business suit a reverence-inspiring affair
of shiny alpaca.
In fact, within a year after Caroline's catastrophic
visit to the bookshop the only thing in it that preserved
any semblance of being up to date was Miss Masters.
Miss McCracken had followed in the footsteps of Mr.
Moonlight Quill and become an intolerable dowd.
For Merlin too, from a feeling compounded of loyalty
and listlessness, had let his exterior take on the semblance
of a deserted garden. He accepted the red felt skullcap
as a symbol of his decay. Always a young man
known as a "pusher," he had been, since the day of his
graduation from the manual training department of a
New York High School, an inveterate brusher of clothes,
hair, teeth, and even eyebrows, and had learned the
value of laying all his clean socks toe upon toe and heel
upon heel in a certain drawer of his bureau, which would
be known as the sock drawer.
These things, he felt, had won him his place in the
greatest splendor of the Moonlight Quill. It was due to
them that he was not still making "chests useful for
keeping things," as he was taught with breathless practicality
in High School, and selling them to whoever
had use of such chests—possibly undertakers. Nevertheless
when the progressive Moonlight Quill became
the retrogressive Moonlight Quill he preferred to sink
with it, and so took to letting his suits gather undisturbed
the wispy burdens of the air and to throwing his
socks indiscriminately into the shirt drawer, the underwear
drawer, and even into no drawer at all. It was not
uncommon in his new carelessness to let many of his
clean clothes go directly back to the laundry without
having ever been worn, a common eccentricity of impoverished
bachelors. And this in the face of his favorite
magazines, which at that time were fairly staggering
with articles by successful authors against the frightful
impudence of the condemned poor, such as the buying
of wearable shirts and nice cuts of meat, and the
fact that they preferred good investments in personal
jewelry to respectable ones in four per cent saving-banks.
It was indeed a strange state of affairs and a sorry
one for many worthy and God-fearing men. For the
first time in the history of the Republic almost any negro
north of Georgia could change a one-dollar bill. But
as at that time the cent was rapidly approaching the
purchasing power of the Chinese ubu and was only a
thing you got back occasionally after paying for a soft
drink, and could use merely in getting your correct
weight, this was perhaps not so strange a phenomenon
as it at first seems. It was too curious a state of things,
however, for Merlin Grainger to take the step that he
did take—the hazardous, almost involuntary step of
accepted him.
It was at Pulpat's on Saturday night and over a $1.75
bottle of water diluted with vin ordinaire that the proposal
occurred.
"Wine makes me feel all tingly, doesn't it you?"
chattered Miss Masters gaily.
"Yes," answered Merlin absently; and then, after a
long and pregnant pause: "Miss Masters—Olive—I
want to say something to you if you'll listen to me."
The tingliness of Miss Masters (who knew what was
coming) increased until it seemed that she would shortly
be electrocuted by her own nervous reactions. But her
"Yes, Merlin," came without a sign or flicker of interior
disturbance. Merlin swallowed a stray bit of air that
he found in his mouth.
"I have no fortune," he said with the manner of
making an announcement. "I have no fortune at all."
Their eyes met, locked, became wistful, and dreamy
and beautiful.
"Olive," he told her, "I love you."
"I love you too, Merlin," she answered simply.
"Shall we have another bottle of wine?"
"Yes," he cried, his heart beating at a great rate.
"Do you mean—"
"To drink to our engagement," she interrupted
bravely. "May it be a short one!"
"No!" he almost shouted, bringing his fist fiercely
down upon the table. "May it last forever!"
"What?"
"I mean—oh, I see what you mean. You're right.
May it be a short one." He laughed and added, "My
error."
After the wine arrived they discussed the matter
thoroughly.
"We'll have to take a small apartment at first," he
said, "and I believe, yes, by golly, I know there's a
small one in the house where I live, a big room and a
sort of a dressing-room-kitchenette and the use of a
bath on the same floor."
She clapped her hands happily, and he thought how
pretty she was really, that is, the upper part of her face—
from the bridge of the nose down she was somewhat out
of true. She continued enthusiastically:
"And as soon as we can afford it we'll take a real swell
apartment, with an elevator and a telephone girl."
"And after that a place in the country—and a car."
"I can't imagine nothing more fun. Can you?"
Merlin fell silent a moment. He was thinking that
he would have to give up his room, the fourth floor rear.
Yet it mattered very little now. During the past year and
a half—in fact, from the very date of Caroline's visit to
the Moonlight Quill—he had never seen her. For a week
after that visit her lights had failed to go on—darkness
brooded out into the areaway, seemed to grope blindly
in at his expectant, uncurtained window. Then the
lights had appeared at last, and instead of Caroline and
her callers they showed a stodgy family—a little man
with a bristly mustache and a full-bosomed woman
who spent her evenings patting her hips and rearranging
bric-à-brac. After two days of them Merlin had
callously pulled down his shade.
No, Merlin could think of nothing more fun than rising
in the world with Olive. There would be a cottage in
a suburb, a cottage painted blue, just one class below
the sort of cottages that are of white stucco with a
green roof. In the grass around the cottage would be
rusty trowels and a broken green bench and a baby-carriage
with a wicker body that sagged to the left.
And around the grass and the baby-carriage and the
the arms of Olive, a little stouter, the arms of her neoOlivian
period, when, as she walked, her cheeks would
tremble up and down ever so slightly from too much
face-massaging. He could hear her voice now, two
spoons' length away:
"I knew you were going to say this to-night, Merlin.
I could see—"
She could see. Ah—suddenly he wondered how much
she could see. Could she see that the girl who had come
in with a party of three men and sat down at the next
table was Caroline? Ah, could she see that? Could
she see that the men brought with them liquor far more
potent than Pulpat's red ink condensed threefold . . . ?
Merlin stared breathlessly, half-hearing through an
auditory ether Olive's low, soft monologue, as like a persistent
honey-bee she sucked sweetness from her memorable
hour. Merlin was listening to the clinking of
ice and the fine laughter of all four at some pleasantry—
and that laughter of Caroline's that he knew so well
stirred him, lifted him, called his heart imperiously
over to her table, whither it obediently went. He could
see her quite plainly, and he fancied that in the last year
and a half she had changed, if ever so slightly. Was
it the light or were her cheeks a little thinner and her
eyes less fresh, if more liquid, than of old? Yet the
shadows were still purple in her russet hair; her mouth
hinted yet of kisses, as did the profile that came sometimes
between his eyes and a row of books, when it was
twilight in the bookshop where the crimson lamp presided
no more.
And she had been drinking. The threefold flush in
her cheeks was compounded of youth and wine and fine
cosmetic—that he could tell. She was making great
amusement for the young man on her left and the portly
her, for the latter from time to time uttered the shocked
and mildly reproachful cackles of another generation.
Merlin caught the words of a song she was intermittently
singing—
Don't cross the bridge 'til you're there—"
The portly person filled her glass with chill amber.
A waiter after several trips about the table, and many
helpless glances at Caroline, who was maintaining a
cheerful, futile questionnaire as to the succulence of this
dish or that, managed to obtain the semblance of an
order and hurried away. . . .
Olive was speaking to Merlin—
"When, then?" she asked, her voice faintly shaded
with disappointment. He realized that he had just
answered no to some question she had asked him.
"Oh, sometime."
"Don't you—care?"
A rather pathetic poignancy in her question brought
his eyes back to her.
"As soon as possible, dear," he replied with surprising
tenderness. "In two months—in June."
"So soon?" Her delightful excitement quite took her
breath away.
"Oh, yes, I think we'd better say June. No use
waiting."
Olive began to pretend that two months was really
too short a time for her to make preparations. Wasn't
he a bad boy! Wasn't he impatient, though! Well,
she'd show him he mustn't be too quick with her. Indeed
he was so sudden she didn't exactly know whether
she ought to marry him at all.
"June," he repeated sternly.
Olive sighed and smiled and drank her coffee, her
little finger lifted high above the others in true refined
fashion. A stray thought came to Merlin that he would
like to buy five rings and throw at it.
"By gosh!" he exclaimed aloud. Soon he would be
putting rings on one of her fingers.
His eyes swung sharply to the right. The party of
four had become so riotous that the head-waiter had
approached and spoken to them. Caroline was arguing
with this head-waiter in a raised voice, a voice so clear
and young that it seemed as though the whole restaurant
would listen—the whole restaurant except Olive Masters,
self-absorbed in her new secret.
"How do you do?" Caroline was saying. "Probably
the handsomest head-waiter in captivity. Too much
noise? Very unfortunate. Something'll have to be
done about it. Gerald"—she addressed the man on her
right—"the head-waiter says there's too much noise.
Appeals to us to have it stopped. What'll I say?"
"Sh!" remonstrated Gerald, with laughter. "Sh!"
and Merlin heard him add in an undertone: "All the
bourgeoisie will be aroused. This is where the floorwalkers
learn French."
Caroline sat up straight in sudden alertness.
"Where's a floorwalker?" she cried. "Show me a
floorwalker." This seemed to amuse the party, for they
all, including Caroline, burst into renewed laughter.
The head-waiter, after a last conscientious but despairing
admonition, became Gallic with his shoulders and
retired into the background.
Pulpat's, as every one knows, has the unvarying respectability
of the table d'hôte. It is not a gay place
in the conventional sense. One comes, drinks the red
wine, talks perhaps a little more and a little louder than
It closes up at nine-thirty, tight as a drum; the policeman
is paid off and given an extra bottle of wine for the
missis, the coat-room girl hands her tips to the collector,
and then darkness crushes the little round tables
out of sight and life. But excitement was prepared for
Pulpat's this evening—excitement of no mean variety.
A girl with russet, purple-shadowed hair mounted to
her table-top and began to dance thereon.
"Sacré nom de Dieu! Come down off there!" cried the
head-waiter. "Stop that music!"
But the musicians were already playing so loud that
they could pretend not to hear his order; having once
been young, they played louder and gayer than ever, and
Caroline danced with grace and vivacity, her pink,
filmy dress swirling about her, her agile arms playing in
supple, tenuous gestures along the smoky air.
A group of Frenchmen at a table near by broke into
cries of applause, in which other parties joined—in a
moment the room was full of clapping and shouting;
half the diners were on their feet, crowding up, and on
the outskirts the hastily summoned proprietor was
giving indistinct vocal evidences of his desire to put an
end to this thing as quickly as possible.
". . . Merlin!" cried Olive, awake, aroused at
last; "she's such a wicked girl! Let's get out—now!"
The fascinated Merlin protested feebly that the check
was not paid.
"It's all right. Lay five dollars on the table. I
despise that girl. I can't bear to look at her." She was
on her feet now, tugging at Merlin's arm.
Helplessly, listlessly, and then with what amounted
to downright unwillingness, Merlin rose, followed Olive
dumbly as she picked her way through the delirious
clamor, now approaching its height and threatening to
took his coat and stumbled up half a dozen steps into
the moist April air outside, his ears still ringing with the
sound of light feet on the table and of laughter all about
and over the little world of the café. In silence they
walked along toward Fifth Avenue and a bus.
It was not until next day that she told him about the
wedding—how she had moved the date forward: it was
much better that they should be married on the first of
May.
III
And married they were, in a somewhat stuffy manner,
under the chandelier of the flat where Olive lived with
her mother. After marriage came elation, and then,
gradually, the growth of weariness. Responsibility descended
upon Merlin, the responsibility of making his
thirty dollars a week and her twenty suffice to keep
them respectably fat and to hide with decent garments
the evidence that they were.
It was decided after several weeks of disastrous and
well-nigh humiliating experiments with restaurants that
they would join the great army of the delicatessen-fed,
so he took up his old way of life again, in that he stopped
every evening at Braegdort's delicatessen and bought potatoes
in salad, ham in slices, and sometimes even stuffed
tomatoes in bursts of extravagance.
Then he would trudge homeward, enter the dark hallway,
and climb three rickety flights of stairs covered
by an ancient carpet of long obliterated design. The
hall had an ancient smell—of the vegetables of 1880, of
the furniture polish in vogue when "Adam-and-Eve"
Bryan ran against William McKinley, of portières an
ounce heavier with dust, from worn-out shoes and lint
from dresses turned long since into patch-work quilts.
and made poignant at each landing by the aura of contemporary
cooking, then, as he began the next flight,
diminishing into the odor of the dead routine of dead
generations.
Eventually would occur the door of his room, which
slipped open with indecent willingness and closed with
almost a sniff upon his "Hello, dear! Got a treat for
you to-night."
Olive, who always rode home on the bus to "get a
morsel of air," would be making the bed and hanging up
things. At his call she would come up to him and give
him a quick kiss with wide-open eyes, while he held her
upright like a ladder, his hands on her two arms, as
though she were a thing without equilibrium, and would,
once he relinquished hold, fall stiffly backward to the
floor. This is the kiss that comes in with the second
year of marriage, succeeding the bridegroom kiss (which
is rather stagey at best, say those who know about such
things, and apt to be copied from passionate movies).
Then came supper, and after that they went out for a
walk, up two blocks and through Central Park, or sometimes
to a moving picture, which taught them patiently
that they were the sort of people for whom life was ordered,
and that something very grand and brave and
beautiful would soon happen to them if they were docile
and obedient to their rightful superiors and kept away
from pleasure.
Such was their day for three years. Then change
came into their lives: Olive had a baby, and as a result
Merlin had a new influx of material resources. In the
third week of Olive's confinement, after an hour of nervous
rehearsing, he went into the office of Mr. Moonlight
Quill and demanded an enormous increase in
salary.
"I've been here ten years," he said; "since I was
nineteen. I've always tried to do my best in the interests
of the business."
Mr. Moonlight Quill said that he would think it over.
Next morning he announced, to Merlin's great delight,
that he was going to put into effect a project long premeditated—he
was going to retire from active work in
the bookshop, confining himself to periodic visits and
leaving Merlin as manager with a salary of fifty dollars
a week and a one-tenth interest in the business. When
the old man finished, Merlin's cheeks were glowing and
his eyes full of tears. He seized his employer's hand and
shook it violently, saying over and over again:
"It's very nice of you, sir. It's very white of you.
It's very, very nice of you."
So after ten years of faithful work in the store he had
won out at last. Looking back, he saw his own progress
toward this hill of elation no longer as a sometimes
sordid and always gray decade of worry and failing enthusiasm
and failing dreams, years when the moonlight
had grown duller in the areaway and the youth had
faded out of Olive's face, but as a glorious and triumphant
climb over obstacles which he had determinedly
surmounted by unconquerable will-power. The optimistic
self-delusion that had kept him from misery was
seen now in the golden garments of stern resolution.
Half a dozen times he had taken steps to leave the Moonlight
Quill and soar upward, but through sheer faintheartedness
he had stayed on. Strangely enough he
now thought that those were times when he had exerted
tremendous persistence and had "determined" to fight
it out where he was.
At any rate, let us not for this moment begrudge
Merlin his new and magnificent view of himself. He
had arrived. At thirty he had reached a post of importance.
invested every penny in his pocket in the most tremendous
feast that Braegdort's delicatessen offered, and
staggered homeward with the great news and four gigantic
paper bags. The fact that Olive was too sick to
eat, that he made himself faintly but unmistakably ill
by a struggle with four stuffed tomatoes, and that most
of the food deteriorated rapidly in an iceless ice-box all
next day did not mar the occasion. For the first time
since the week of his marriage Merlin Grainer lived
under a sky of unclouded tranquillity.
The baby boy was christened Arthur, and life became
dignified, significant, and, at length, centered. Merlin
and Olive resigned themselves to a somewhat secondary
place in their own cosmos; but what they lost in personality
they regained in a sort of primordial pride.
The country house did not come, but a month in an
Asbury Park boarding-house each summer filled the
gap; and during Merlin's two weeks' holiday this excursion
assumed the air of a really merry jaunt—especially
when, with the baby asleep in a wide room opening technically
on the sea, Merlin strolled with Olive along the
thronged board-walk puffing at his cigar and trying to
look like twenty thousand a year.
With some alarm at the slowing up of the days and
the accelerating of the years, Merlin became thirty-one,
thirty-two—then almost with a rush arrived at that
age which, with all its washing and panning, can only
muster a bare handful of the precious stuff of youth: he
became thirty-five. And one day on Fifth Avenue he
saw Caroline.
It was Sunday, a radiant, flowerful Easter morning
and the avenue was a pageant of lilies and cutaways
and happy April-colored bonnets. Twelve o'clock: the
great churches were letting out their people—St. Simon's,
doors like wide mouths until the people pouring forth
surely resembled happy laughter as they met and
strolled and chattered, or else waved white bouquets at
waiting chauffeurs.
In front of the Church of the Epistles stood its twelve
vestrymen, carrying out the time-honored custom of
giving away Easter eggs full of face-powder to the
church-going débutantes of the year. Around them
delightedly danced the two thousand miraculously
groomed children of the very rich, correctly cute and
curled, shining like sparkling little jewels upon their
mothers' fingers. Speaks the sentimentalist for the
children of the poor? Ah, but the children of the rich,
laundered, sweet-smelling, complexioned of the country,
and, above all, with soft, in-door voices.
Little Arthur was five, child of the middle class. Undistinguished,
unnoticed, with a nose that forever
marred what Grecian yearnings his features might have
had, he held tightly to his mother's warm, sticky hand,
and, with Merlin on his other side, moved upon the
home-coming throng. At Fifty-third Street, where
there were two churches, the congestion was at its thickest,
its richest. Their progress was of necessity retarded
to such an extent that even little Arthur had not the
slightest difficulty in keeping up. Then it was that
Merlin perceived an open landaulet of deepest crimson,
with handsome nickel trimmings, glide slowly up to
the curb and come to a stop. In it sat Caroline.
She was dressed in black, a tight-fitting gown trimmed
with lavender, flowered at the waist with a corsage of
orchids. Merlin started and then gazed at her fearfully.
For the first time in the eight years since his
marriage he was encountering the girl again. But a girl
no longer. Her figure was slim as ever—or perhaps
adolescence, had gone the way of the first blooming
of her cheeks. But she was beautiful; dignity was
there now, and the charming lines of a fortuitous nine-and-twenty;
and she sat in the car with such perfect
appropriateness and self-possession that it made him
breathless to watch her.
Suddenly she smiled—the smile of old, bright as that
very Easter and its flowers, mellower than ever—yet
somehow with not quite the radiance and infinite promise
of that first smile back there in the bookshop nine
years before. It was a steelier smile, disillusioned
and sad.
But it was soft enough and smile enough to make a
pair of young men in cutaway coats hurry over, to pull
their high hats off their wetted, iridescent hair; to bring
them, flustered and bowing, to the edge of her landaulet,
where her lavender gloves gently touched their gray
ones. And these two were presently joined by another,
and then two more, until there was a rapidly swelling
crowd around the landaulet. Merlin would hear a
young man beside him say to his perhaps well-favored
companion:
"If you'll just pardon me a moment, there's some one
I have to speak to. Walk right ahead. I'll catch up."
Within three minutes every inch of the landaulet,
front, back, and side, was occupied by a man—a man
trying to construct a sentence clever enough to find its
way to Caroline through the stream of conversation.
Luckily for Merlin a portion of little Arthur's clothing
had chosen the opportunity to threaten a collapse, and
Olive had hurriedly rushed him over against a building
for some extemporaneous repair work, so Merlin was
able to watch, unhindered, the salon in the street.
The crowd swelled. A row formed in back of the first,
from a black bouquet, sat Caroline enthroned in her
obliterated car, nodding and crying salutations and
smiling with such true happiness that, of a sudden, a
new relay of gentlemen had left their wives and consorts
and were striding toward her.
The crowd, now phalanx deep, began to be augmented
by the merely curious; men of all ages who could not
possibly have known Caroline jostled over and melted
into the circle of ever-increasing diameter, until the lady
in lavender was the centre of a vast impromptu auditorium.
All about her were faces—clean-shaven, bewhiskered,
old, young, ageless, and now, here and there, a woman.
The mass was rapidly spreading to the opposite curb,
and, as St. Anthony's around the corner let out its
box-holders, it overflowed to the sidewalk and crushed
up against the iron picket-fence of a millionaire across
the street. The motors speeding along the avenue were
compelled to stop, and in a jiffy were piled three, five,
and six deep at the edge of the crowd; auto-busses, top-heavy
turtles of traffic, plunged into the jam, their
passengers crowding to the edges of the roofs in wild
excitement and peering down into the centre of the
mass, which presently could hardly be seen from the
mass's edge.
The crush had become terrific. No fashionable audience
at a Yale-Princeton football game, no damp mob
at a world's series, could be compared with the panoply
that talked, stared, laughed, and honked about the
lady in black and lavender. It was stupendous; it was
terrible. A quarter mile down the block a half-frantic
policeman called his precinct; on the same corner a
frightened civilian crashed in the glass of a fire-alarm
and sent in a wild pæan for all the fire-engines of the
a hysterical old maid telephoned in turn for the prohibition
enforcement agent, the special deputies on Bolshevism,
and the maternity ward of Bellevue Hospital.
The noise increased. The first fire-engine arrived,
filling the Sunday air with smoke, clanging and crying
a brazen, metallic message down the high, resounding
walls. In the notion that some terrible calamity had
overtaken the city, two excited deacons ordered special
services immediately and set tolling the great bells of St.
Hilda's and St. Anthony's, presently joined by the jealous
gongs of St. Simon's and the Church of the Epistles.
Even far off in the Hudson and the East River the sounds
of the commotion were heard, and the ferry-boats and
tugs and ocean liners set up sirens and whistles that
sailed in melancholy cadence, now varied, now reiterated,
across the whole diagonal width of the city from Riverside
Drive to the gray water-fronts of the lower East
Side. . . .
In the centre of her landaulet sat the lady in black
and lavender, chatting pleasantly first with one, then
with another of that fortunate few in cutaways who had
found their way to speaking distance in the first rush.
After a while she glanced around her and beside her
with a look of growing annoyance.
She yawned and asked the man nearest her if he
couldn't run in somewhere and get her a glass of water.
The man apologized in some embarrassment. He could
not have moved hand or foot. He could not have
scratched his own ear. . . .
As the first blast of the river sirens keened along the
air, Olive fastened the last safety-pin in little Arthur's
rompers and looked up. Merlin saw her start, stiffen
slowly like hardening stucco, and then give a little gasp
of surprise and disapproval.
"That woman," she cried suddenly. "Oh!"
She flashed a glance at Merlin that mingled reproach
and pain, and without another word gathered up little
Arthur with one hand, grasped her husband by the
other, and darted amazingly in a winding, bumping canter
through the crowd. Somehow people gave way before
her; somehow she managed to retain her grasp on
her son and husband; somehow she managed to emerge
two blocks up, battered and dishevelled, into an open
space, and, without slowing up her pace, darted down a
side-street. Then at last, when uproar had died away
into a dim and distant clamor, did she come to a walk
and set little Arthur upon his feet.
"And on Sunday, too! Hasn't she disgraced herself
enough?" This was her only comment. She said it
to Arthur, as she seemed to address her remarks to Arthur
throughout the remainder of the day. For some curious
and esoteric reason she had never once looked at
her husband during the entire retreat.
IV
The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve
before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing
merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of
ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel
colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing
and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the
merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence, as never,
surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters
of youth. For most men and women these thirty years
are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat
first from a front with many shelters, those myriad
amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less,
when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our
whom we are anæsthetic; ending up at last in a solitary,
desolate strong point that is not strong, where the
shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard
as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for
death.
At forty, then, Merlin was no different from himself
at thirty-five; a larger paunch, a gray twinkling near
his ears, a more certain lack of vivacity in his walk.
His forty-five differed from his forty by a like margin,
unless one mention a slight deafness in his left ear.
But at fifty-five the process had become a chemical
change of immense rapidity. Yearly he was more and
more an "old man" to his family—senile almost, so far
as his wife was concerned. He was by this time complete
owner of the bookshop. The mysterious Mr.
Moonlight Quill, dead some five years and not survived
by his wife, had deeded the whole stock and store to
him, and there he still spent his days, conversant now
by name with almost all that man has recorded for three
thousand years, a human catalogue, an authority upon
tooling and binding, upon folios and first editions, an
accurate inventory of a thousand authors whom he could
never have understood and had certainly never read.
At sixty-five he distinctly doddered. He had assumed
the melancholy habits of the aged so often portrayed
by the second old man in standard Victorian comedies.
He consumed vast warehouses of time searching for mislaid
spectacles. He "nagged" his wife and was nagged
in turn. He told the same jokes three or four times a
year at the family table, and gave his son weird, impossible
directions as to his conduct in life. Mentally and
materially he was so entirely different from the Merlin
Grainger of twenty-five that it seemed incongruous that
he should bear the same name.
He worked still in the bookshop with the assistance
of a youth, whom, of course, he considered very idle,
indeed, and a new young woman, Miss Gaffney. Miss
McCracken, ancient and unvenerable as himself, still
kept the accounts. Young Arthur was gone into Wall
Street to sell bonds, as all the young men seemed to be
doing in that day. This, of course, was as it should be.
Let old Merlin get what magic he could from his books—
the place of young King Arthur was in the countinghouse.
One afternoon at four when he had slipped noiselessly
up to the front of the store on his soft-soled slippers,
led by a newly formed habit, of which, to be fair, he
was rather ashamed, of spying upon the young man
clerk, he looked casually out of the front window, straining
his faded eyesight to reach the street. A limousine,
large, portentous, impressive, had drawn to the curb, and
the chauffeur, after dismounting and holding some sort
of conversation with persons in the interior of the car,
turned about and advanced in a bewildered fashion
toward the entrance of the Moonlight Quill. He opened
the door, shuffled in, and, glancing uncertainly at the old
man in the skull-cap, addressed him in a thick, murky
voice, as though his words came through a fog.
"Do you—do you sell additions?"
Merlin nodded.
"The arithmetic books are in the back of the store."
The chauffeur took off his cap and scratched a close-cropped,
fuzzy head.
"Oh, naw. This I want's a detecatif story." He jerked
a thumb back toward the limousine. "She seen it in
the paper. Firs' addition."
Merlin's interest quickened. Here was possibly a
big sale.
"Oh, editions. Yes, we've advertised some firsts,
title?"
"I forget. About a crime."
"About a crime. I have—well, I have `The Crimes
of the Borgias'—full morocco, London 1769, beautifully—"
"Naw," interrupted the chauffeur, "this was one fella
did this crime. She seen you had it for sale in the
paper." He rejected several possible titles with the air
of connoisseur.
" `Silver Bones,' " he announced suddenly out of a
slight pause.
"What?" demanded Merlin, suspecting that the stiffness
of his sinews were being commented on.
"Silver Bones. That was the guy that done the
crime."
"Silver Bones?"
"Silver Bones. Indian, maybe."
Merlin stroked his grizzly cheeks.
"Gees, Mister," went on the prospective purchaser,
"if you wanna save me an awful bawlin' out jes' try an'
think. The old lady goes wile if everything don't run
smooth."
But Merlin's musings on the subject of Silver Bones
were as futile as his obliging search through the shelves,
and five minutes later a very dejected charioteer wound
his way back to his mistress. Through the glass Merlin
could see the visible symbols of a tremendous uproar
going on in the interior of the limousine. The chauffeur
made wild, appealing gestures of his innocence, evidently
to no avail, for when he turned around and climbed
back into the driver's seat his expression was not a little
dejected.
Then the door of the limousine opened and gave forth
a pale and slender young man of about twenty, dressed
cane. He entered the shop, walked past Merlin, and
proceeded to take out a cigarette and light it. Merlin
approached him.
"Anything I can do for you, sir?"
"Old boy," said the youth coolly, "there are seveereal
things. You can first let me smoke my ciggy in here out
of sight of that old lady in the limousine, who happens
to be my grandmother. Her knowledge as to whether
I smoke it or not before my majority happens to be a
matter of five thousand dollars to me. The second thing
is that you should look up your first edition of the
`Crime of Sylvester Bonnard' that you advertised in
last Sunday's Times. My grandmother there happens
to want to take it off your hands."
Detecatif story! Crime of somebody! Silver Bones!
All was explained. With a faint deprecatory chuckle,
as if to say that he would have enjoyed this had life
put him in the habit of enjoying anything, Merlin doddered
away to the back of his shop where his treasures
were kept, to get this latest investment which he had
picked up rather cheaply at the sale of a big collection.
When he returned with it the young man was drawing
on his cigarette and blowing out quantities of smoke
with immense satisfaction.
"My God!" he said. "She keeps me so close to her
the entire day running idiotic errands that this happens
to be my first puff in six hours. What's the world coming
to, I ask you, when a feeble old lady in the milk-toast
era can dictate to a man as to his personal vices? I
happen to be unwilling to be so dictated to. Let's see
the book."
Merlin passed it to him tenderly and the young man,
after opening it with a carelessness that gave a momentary
jump to the book-dealer's heart, ran through
the pages with his thumb.
"No illustrations, eh?" he commented. "Well, old
boy, what's it worth? Speak up! We're willing to
give you a fair price, though why I don't know."
"One hundred dollars," said Merlin with a frown.
The young man gave a startled whistle.
"Whew! Come on. You're not dealing with somebody
from the cornbelt. I happen to be a city-bred
man and my grandmother happens to be a city-bred
woman, though I'll admit it'd take a special tax appropriation
to keep her in repair. We'll give you twenty-five
dollars, and let me tell you that's liberal. We've
got books in our attic, up in our attic with my old playthings,
that were written before the old boy that wrote
this was born."
Merlin stiffened, expressing a rigid and meticulous
horror.
"Did your grandmother give you twenty-five dollars
to buy this with?"
"She did not. She gave me fifty, but she expects
change. I know that old lady."
"You tell her," said Merlin with dignity, "that she
has missed a very great bargain."
"Give you forty," urged the young man. "Come on
now—be reasonable and don't try to hold us up—"
Merlin had wheeled around with the precious volume
under his arm and was about to return it to its special
drawer in his office when there was a sudden interruption.
With unheard-of magnificence the front door
burst rather than swung open, and admitted into the
dark interior a regal apparition in black silk and fur
which bore rapidly down upon him. The cigarette
leaped from the fingers of the urban young man and he
gave breath to an inadvertent "Damn!"—but it was
upon Merlin that the entrance seemed to have the most
remarkable and incongruous effect—so strong an effect
that the greatest treasure of his shop slipped from his
stood Caroline.
She was an old woman, an old woman remarkably
preserved, unusually handsome, unusually erect, but
still an old woman. Her hair was a soft, beautiful
white, elaborately dressed and jewelled; her face, faintly
rouged à la grande dame, showed webs of wrinkles at
the edges of her eyes and two deeper lines in the form of
stanchions connected her nose with the corners of her
mouth. Her eyes were dim, ill natured, and querulous.
But it was Caroline without a doubt: Caroline's features
though in decay; Caroline's figure, if brittle and
stiff in movement; Caroline's manner, unmistakably
compounded of a delightful insolence and an enviable
self assurance; and, most of all, Caroline's voice, broken
and shaky, yet with a ring in it that still could and did
make chauffeurs want to drive laundry wagons and
cause cigarettes to fall from the fingers of urban grandsons.
She stood and sniffed. Her eyes found the cigarette
upon the floor.
"What's that?" she cried. The words were not a
question—they were an entire litany of suspicion, accusation,
confirmation, and decision. She tarried over
them scarcely an instant. "Stand up!" she said to her
grandson, "stand up and blow that nicotine out of your
lungs!"
The young man looked at her in trepidation.
"Blow!" she commanded.
He pursed his lips feebly and blew into the air.
"Blow!" she repeated, more peremptorily than before.
He blew again, helplessly, ridiculously.
"Do you realize," she went on briskly, "that you've
forfeited five thousand dollars in five minutes?"
Merlin momentarily expected the young man to fall
nature that he remained standing—even blew
again into the air, partly from nervousness, partly, no
doubt, with some vague hope of reingratiating himself.
"Young ass!" cried Caroline. "Once more, just
once more and you leave college and go to work."
This threat had such an overwhelming effect upon
the young man that he took on an even paler pallor than
was natural to him. But Caroline was not through.
"Do you think I don't know what you and your
brothers, yes, and your asinine father too, think of me?
Well, I do. You think I'm senile. You think I'm
soft. I'm not!" She struck herself with her fist as
though to prove that she was a mass of muscle and
sinew. "And I'll have more brains left when you've
got me laid out in the drawing-room some sunny day
than you and the rest of them were born with."
"But Grandmother—"
"Be quiet. You, a thin little stick of a boy, who if it
weren't for my money might have risen to be a journeyman
barber out in the Bronx—Let me see your hands.
Ugh! The hands of a barber—you presume to be smart
with me, who once had three counts and a bona-fide duke,
not to mention half a dozen papal titles pursue me from
the city of Rome to the city of New York." She paused,
took breath. "Stand up! Blow!"
The young man obediently blew. Simultaneously
the door opened and an excited gentleman of middle age
who wore a coat and hat trimmed with fur, and seemed,
moreover, to be trimmed with the same sort of fur himself
on upper lip and chin, rushed into the store and up
to Caroline.
"Found you at last," he cried. "Been looking for
you all over town. Tried your house on the 'phone and
called the Moonlight—"
Caroline turned to him irritably.
"Do I employ you for your reminiscences?" she
snapped. "Are you my tutor or my broker?"
"Your broker," confessed the fur-trimmed man, taken
somewhat aback. "I beg your pardon. I came about
that phonograph stock. I can sell for a hundred and
five."
"Then do it."
"Very well. I thought I'd better—"
"Go sell it. I'm talking to my grandson."
"Very well. I—"
"Good-by."
"Good-by, Madame." The fur-trimmed man made
a slight bow and hurried in some confusion from the
shop.
"As for you," said Caroline, turning to her grandson,
"you stay just where you are and be quiet."
She turned to Merlin and included his entire length
in a not unfriendly survey. Then she smiled and he
found himself smiling too. In an instant they had both
broken into a cracked but none the less spontaneous
chuckle. She seized his arm and hurried him to the
other side of the store. There they stopped, faced each
other, and gave vent to another long fit of senile glee.
"It's the only way," she gasped in a sort of triumphant
malignity. "The only thing that keeps old folks like
me happy is the sense that they can make other people
step around. To be old and rich and have poor descendants
is almost as much fun as to be young and
beautiful and have ugly sisters."
"Oh, yes," chuckled Merlin. "I know. I envy you."
She nodded, blinking.
"The last time I was in here, forty years ago," she
your heels."
"I was," he confessed.
"My visit must have meant a good deal to you."
"You have all along," he exclaimed. "I thought—I
used to think at first that you were a real person—
human, I mean."
She laughed.
"Many men have thought me inhuman."
"But now," continued Merlin excitedly, "I understand.
Understanding is allowed to us old people—
after nothing much matters. I see now that on a certain
night when you danced upon a table-top you were
nothing but my romantic yearning for a beautiful and
perverse woman."
Her old eyes were far away, her voice no more than
the echo of a forgotten dream.
"How I danced that night! I remember."
"You were making an attempt at me. Olive's arms
were closing about me and you warned me to be free and
keep my measure of youth and irresponsibility. But
it seemed like an effect gotten up at the last moment.
It came too late."
"You are very old," she said inscrutably. "I did not
realize."
"Also I have not forgotten what you did to me when
I was thirty-five. You shook me with that traffic tie-up.
It was a magnificent effort. The beauty and power you
radiated! You became personified even to my wife, and
she feared you. For weeks I wanted to slip out of the
house at dark and forget the stuffiness of life with music
and cocktails and a girl to make me young. But then
—I no longer knew how."
"And now you are so very old."
With a sort of awe she moved back and away from him.
"Yes, leave me!" he cried. "You are old also; the
spirit withers with the skin. Have you come here only
to tell me something I had best forget: that to be old
and poor is perhaps more wretched than to be old and
rich; to remind me that my son hurls my gray failure in
my face?"
"Give me my book," she commanded harshly. "Be
quick, old man!"
Merlin looked at her once more and then patiently
obeyed. He picked up the book and handed it to her,
shaking his head when she offered him a bill.
"Why go through the farce of paying me? Once
you made me wreck these very premises."
"I did," she said in anger, "and I'm glad. Perhaps
there had been enough done to ruin me."
She gave him a glance, half disdain, half ill-concealed
uneasiness, and with a brisk word to her urban grandson
moved toward the door.
Then she was gone—out of his shop—out of his life.
The door clicked. With a sigh he turned and walked
brokenly back toward the glass partition that enclosed
the yellowed accounts of many years as well as the mellowed,
wrinkled Miss McCracken.
Merlin regarded her parched, cobwebbed face with
an odd sort of pity. She, at any rate, had had less from
life than he. No rebellious, romantic spirit cropping out
unbidden had, in its memorable moments, given her life
a zest and a glory.
Then Miss McCracken looked up and spoke to him:
"Still a spunky old piece, isn't she?"
Merlin started.
"Who?"
"Old Alicia Dare. Mrs. Thomas Allerdyce she is
now, of course; has been these thirty years."
"What? I don't understand you." Merlin sat down
suddenly in his swivel chair; his eyes were wide.
"Why, surely, Mr. Grainger, you can't tell me that
you've forgotten her, when for ten years she was the
most notorious character in New York. Why, one time
when she was the corespondent in the Throckmorton
divorce case she attracted so much attention on Fifth
Avenue that there was a traffic tie-up. Didn't you read
about it in the papers."
"I never used to read the papers." His ancient brain
was whirring.
"Well, you can't have forgotten the time she came in
here and ruined the business. Let me tell you I came
near asking Mr. Moonlight Quill for my salary, and
clearing out."
"Do you mean that—that you saw her?"
"Saw her! How could I help it with the racket
that went on. Heaven knows Mr. Moonlight Quill
didn't like it either, but of course he didn't say anything.
He was daffy about her and she could twist him around
her little finger. The second he opposed one of her whims
she'd threaten to tell his wife on him. Served him right.
The idea of that man falling for a pretty adventuress!
Of course he was never rich enough for her, even though
the shop paid well in those days."
"But when I saw her," stammered Merlin, "that is,
when I thought I saw her, she lived with her mother."
"Mother, trash!" said Miss McCracken indignantly.
"She had a woman there she called `Aunty' who was no
more related to her than I am. Oh, she was a bad one
—but clever. Right after the Throckmorton divorce
case she married Thomas Allerdyce, and made herself
secure for life."
"Who was she?" cried Merlin. "For God's sake what
was she—a witch?"
"Why, she was Alicia Dare, the dancer, of course.
In those days you couldn't pick up a paper without finding
her picture."
Merlin sat very quiet, his brain suddenly fatigued
and stilled. He was an old man now indeed, so old that
it was impossible for him to dream of ever having been
young, so old that the glamour was gone out of the world,
passing not into the faces of children and into the persistent
comforts of warmth and life, but passing out of
the range of sight and feeling. He was never to smile
again or to sit in a long reverie when spring evenings
wafted the cries of children in at his window until gradually
they became the friends of his boyhood out there,
urging him to come and play before the last dark came
down. He was too old now even for memories.
That night he sat at supper with his wife and son, who
had used him for their blind purposes. Olive said:
"Don't sit there like a death's-head. Say something."
"Let him sit quiet," growled Arthur. "If you encourage
him he'll tell us a story we've heard a hundred
times before."
Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o'clock.
When he was in his room and had closed the door tight
he stood by it for a moment, his thin limbs trembling.
He knew now that he had always been a fool.
"O Russet Witch!"
But it was too late. He had angered Providence by
resisting too many temptations. There was nothing
left but heaven, where he would meet only those who,
like him, had wasted earth.
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