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The Book of Susan: A Novel

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Title: The Book of Susan: A Novel

Author: Lee Wilson Dodd


        
Release date: August 10, 2010 [eBook #33400]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK OF SUSAN: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Emmy and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net











THE

BOOK OF SUSAN

_A Novel_

BY LEE WILSON DODD

[Illustration]

          "_Though she track the wilds,
            Though she breast the crags,
            Choosing no path--
            Her kirtle tears not,
            Her ankles gleam,
            Her sandals are silver._"


          NEW YORK
          E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
          681 FIFTH AVENUE




          COPYRIGHT, 1920,
          BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

          _All Rights Reserved_

          _First printing      April, 1920_
          _Second printing     April, 1920_
          _Third printing       June, 1920_
          _Fourth printing      June, 1920_
          _Fifth printing       July, 1920_
          _Sixth printing       July, 1920_
          _Seventh printing   August, 1920_
          _Eighth printing    August, 1920_
          _Ninth printing     August, 1920_
          _Tenth printing     August, 1920_
          _Eleventh printing  August, 1920_
          _Twelfth printing   August, 1920_

          Printed in the United States of America




          JOSEPHI FRATRIBUS

          NON QUOD VOLUI
          SED QUOD POTUI




CONTENTS


                                 PAGE
          THE FIRST CHAPTER        1
          THE SECOND CHAPTER      24
          THE THIRD CHAPTER       62
          THE FOURTH CHAPTER     131
          THE FIFTH CHAPTER      153
          THE SIXTH CHAPTER      221
          THE LAST CHAPTER       238




THE BOOK OF SUSAN




THE FIRST CHAPTER


I

IT happens that I twice saw Susan's mother, one of those soiled rags of
humanity used by careless husbands for wiping their boots; but Susan
does not remember her. John Stuart Mill studied Greek at three, and
there is a Russian author who recalls being weaned as the first of his
many bitter experiences. Either Susan's mental life did not waken so
early or the record has faded. She remembers only the consolate husband,
her father; remembers him only too well. The backs of his square,
angry-looking hands were covered with an unpleasant growth of reddish
bristles; his nostrils were hairy, too, and seemed formed by Nature
solely for the purpose of snorting with wrath. It must not be held
against Susan that she never loved her father; he was not created to
inspire the softer emotions. Nor am I altogether certain just why he was
created at all.

Nevertheless, Robert Blake was in his soberer hours--say, from Tuesdays
to Fridays--an expert mechanic, thoroughly conversant with the interior
lack of economy of most makes of automobiles. He had charge of the
repair department of the Eureka Garage, New Haven, where my
not-too-robust touring car of those primitive days spent, during the
spring of 1907, many weeks of interesting and expensive invalidism. I
forget how many major operations it underwent.

It was not at the Eureka Garage, however, that I first met Bob Blake.
Nine years before I there found him again, I had defended him in
court--as it happens, successfully--on a charge of assault with intent
to kill. That was almost my first case, and not far--thank heaven--from
my last. Bob's defense, I remember, was assigned to me by a judge who
had once borrowed fifty dollars from my father, which he never repaid;
at least, not in cash. There are more convenient methods. True, my
father was no longer living at the time I was appointed to defend Bob;
but that is a detail.

Susan was then four years old. I can't say I recall her, if I even laid
eyes on her. But Mrs. Bob appeared as a witness, at my request--it was
all but her final appearance, poor woman; she died of an embolism within
a week--and I remember she told the court that a kinder husband and
father than Bob had never existed. I remember, too, that the court
pursed its lips and the gentlemen of the jury grinned approvingly, for
Mrs. Bob could not easily conceal something very like the remains of a
purple eye, which she attributed to hearing a suspicious noise one night
down cellar, a sort of squeaking noise, and to falling over the cat on
her tour of investigation--with various circumstantial _minutiae_ of no
present importance.

The important thing is, that Bob went scot-free and was as nearly
grateful as his temperament permitted. His assault--with an umbrella
stand--had been upon a fellow reveller of no proved worth to the
community, and perhaps this may have influenced the jury's unexpected
verdict.

Of Susan herself my first impression was gained at the Eureka Garage.
Bob Blake, just then, was lying beneath my car, near which I hovered
listening to his voluble but stereotyped profanity. He had lost the nut
from a bolt, and, unduly constricted, sought it vainly, while his tongue
followed the line of least resistance. I was marveling at the energy of
his wrath and the poverty of his imagination, when I became aware of a
small being beside me, in plaid calico. She had eager black
eyes--terrier's eyes--in a white, whimsical little face. One very long
and very thin black pigtail dangled over her left shoulder and down
across her flat chest to her waist, where it was tied with a shoe string
and ended lankly, without even the semblance of a curl. In her right
hand she bore a full dinner pail, and with her left thumb she pointed
toward the surging darkness beneath my car.

"Say, mister, please," said the small being, "if I was to put this down,
would you mind telling him his dinner's come?"

"Not a bit," I responded. "Are you Bob's youngster?"

"I'm Susan Blake," she answered; and very softly placed the dinner pail
on the step of the car.

"Why don't you wait and see your father?" I suggested. "He'll come up
for air in a minute."

"That's why I'm going now," said Susan.

Whereupon she gave a single half skip--the very ghost of a skip--then
walked demurely from me and out through the great door.


II

Bob Blake, in those days, lived in a somewhat dilapidated four-room
house, off toward the wrong end of Birch Street. His family arrangements
were peculiar. He had never married again; but not very long after his
wife's death a dull-eyed, rather mussy young woman, with a fondness for
rouge pots, had taken up her abode with him--to the scandal and
fascination of the neighborhood. It was an outrage, of course! With a
child in the house, too! Something ought to be done about it!

Yet, oddly enough, nothing that much worried Bob ever was done about
it, reckoning the various shocked-and-grieved forms of conversation as
nothing. As he never tired of asserting, Bob didn't give a damn for the
cackle of a lot of hens. He guessed he knew his way about; and so did
Pearl. Let the damned hens cackle their heads off; he was satisfied!

And so, eventually, I am forced to believe, were the hens. In the
earlier days of the scandal there was much clitter-clatter of having the
law on him, serving papers, and the like; but, as hen cackle sometimes
will, it came to precisely naught. Nor am I certain that, as the years
passed, the neighborhood did not grow a little proud of its one crimson
patch of wickedness; I am reasonably certain, indeed, that more than one
drab life took on a little borrowed flush of excitement from its
proximity.

Of course no decent, God-fearing woman would ever greet either Bob or
Pearl; but every time one passed either of them without a nod or a
"How's things to-day?" it gave one something to talk about, at home, or
over any amicable fence.

As for the men, they too were forbidden to speak; but men, most of them,
are unruly creatures if at large. You can't trust them safely five
minutes beyond the sound of your voice.

There was even one man, old Heinze, proprietor of the Birch Street
grocery store, who now and then cautiously put forth a revolutionary
sentiment.

"Dey lifs alvays togedder--like man unt vife--nod? Vere iss der
diffurunz, Mrs. Shay?"

"Shame on you for _them_ words, Mr. Heinze!"

"_Aber_"--with a slow, wide smile--"vere iss der diffurunz, Mrs. Shay? I
leaf id to you?"

That Pearl and Bob lived always together cannot be denied, and perhaps
they also lived as some men and their lawful wives are accustomed to
live--off toward the wrong end of city streets; and occasionally, no
doubt, toward the right end of them as well. Midweek, things wore along
dully enough, but over Sunday came drink and ructions. Susan says she
has never been able to understand why Sunday happens to be called a day
of rest. The day of arrest, she was once guilty of naming it.

Bob's neighbors, I fear, were not half so scandalized by his week-end
drunkenness as by what Mrs. Perkins--three doors nearer the right end of
Birch Street--invariably called his "brazen immorality." Intoxication
was not a rare vice in that miscellaneous block or two of factory
operatives. Nor can it be said that immorality, in the sense of Mrs.
Perkins, was so much rare as it was nervously concealed. The unique
quality of Bob's sin lay in its brazen element; that was what stamped
him peculiarly as a social outlaw.

Bob accepted this position, if sober, with a grim disregard. He had a
bitter, lowering nature at best, and when not profane was taciturn. As
for Pearl, social outlawry may be said to have been her native element.
She had a hazy mind in a lazy body, and liked better than most things
just to sit in a rocking-chair and polish her finger nails, as
distinguished from cleaning them. Only the guiltless member of this
family group really suffered from its low social estate, but she
suffered acutely. Little Susan could not abide being a social outlaw.

True, she was not always included in the general condemnation of her
family by the grown-ups; but the children were ruthless. They pointed
fingers, and there was much conscious giggling behind her back; while
some of the daintier little girls--the very little girls whom Susan
particularly longed to chum with--had been forbidden to play with "that
child," and were not at all averse to telling her so, flatly, with tiny
chins in air and a devastating expression of rectitude on their smug
little faces. At such times Susan would fight back impending cataracts,
stick her own freckled nose toward the firmament, and even, I regret to
say, if persistently harassed, thrust forth a rigid pink tongue. This,
Susan has since informed me, is the embryonic state of "swearing like
anything."

The little boys, on the whole, were better. They often said cruel
things, but Susan felt that they said them in a quite different spirit
from their instinctively snobbish and Grundyish sisters--said them
merely by way of bravado, or just for the fun of seeing whether or not
she would cry. And then they often let her join in their games, and on
those happy occasions treated her quite as an equal, with an impartial
and, to Susan, entirely blissful roughness. Susan early decided that she
liked boys much better than girls.

There was, for example, Jimmy Kane, whose widowed mother took in
washing, and so never had any time to clean up her huddled flat, over
Heinze's grocery store, or her family of four--two boys and two girls.
No one ever saw skin, as in itself it really is, on the faces of Mrs.
Kane's children, and Jimmy was always, if comparison be possible, the
grimiest of the brood. For some reason Jimmy always had a perpetual
slight cold, and his funny flat button of a nose wept, winter and summer
alike, though never into an unnecessary handkerchief. His coat-sleeve
served, even if its ministrations did not add to the tidiness of his
countenance.

Susan often wished she might scrub him, just to see what he really
looked like; for she idolized Jimmy. Not that Jimmy ever had paid any
special attention to her, except on one occasion. It was merely that he
accepted her as part of the human scheme of things, which in itself
would almost have been enough to win Susan's affectionate admiration.
But one day, as I have hinted, he became the god of her idolatry.

The incident is not precisely idyllic. A certain Joe--Giuseppe
Gonfarone; _aetat._ 14--whose father peddled fruit and vegetables, had
recently come into the neighborhood; a black-curled, brown-eyed little
devil, already far too wise in the manifold unseemliness of this sad old
planet. Joe was strong, stocky, aggressive, and soon posed as something
of a bully among the younger boys along Birch Street. Within less than a
month he had infected the minds of many with a new and rich vocabulary
of oaths and smutty words. Joe was not of the unconsciously
foul-mouthed; he relished his depravity. In fact, youngster as he was,
Joe had in him the makings of that slimiest product of our cities--the
street pimp, or cadet.

It was one fine spring day, three years or so before I met Susan in the
Eureka Garage, that Joe, with a group of Birch Street boys, was playing
marbles for keeps, just at the bottom of the long incline which carries
Birch Street down to the swamp land and general dump at the base of East
Rock. Susan was returning home from Orange Street, after bearing her
father his full dinner pail, and as she came up to the boys she halted
on one foot, using the toe of her free foot meanwhile to scratch
mosquito bites upward along her supporting shin.

"H'lo, Susan!" called Jimmy Kane, with his perfunctory good nature.
"What's bitin' you?"

Then it was his turn to knuckle-down. Susan, still balanced cranelike,
watched him eager-eyed, and was so delighted when he knocked a fine fat
reeler of Joe's out of the ring, jumping up with a yell of triumph to
pocket it, that she too gave a shrill cheer: "Oh, goody! I knew you'd
win!"

The note of ecstasy in her tone infuriated Joe. "Say!" he shrieked. "You
getta hell outta here!"

Susan's smile vanished; her white, even teeth--she had all her front
ones, she tells me; she was ten--clicked audibly together.

"It's no business of yours!" she retorted.

"You're right; it ain't!" This from Jimmy, still in high good humor.
"You stay here if you want. You're as good as him!"

"Who's as good as me?"

"She is!"

"_Her?_" Joe's lips curled back. He turned to the other boys, who had
all scrambled to their feet by this time and, instinctively scenting
mischief, were standing in a sort of ring. "He says she's good as me!"

Two of the smallest boys tittered, from pure excitement. Susan's nose
went up.

"I'm better. I'm not a dago!"

Joe leaped toward Susan and thrust his dense, bull-like head forward,
till his eyes were glaring into hers.

"Mebbe I live lika you--eh? Mebbe I live," cried Joe, "with a dirty
_whore_!"

There was a gasp from the encircling boys as Susan fell back from this
word, which she did not wholly comprehend, but whose vileness she felt,
somehow, in her very flesh. Joe, baring gorilla teeth, burst into coarse
jubilation.

It was just at this point that Jimmy Kane, younger than Joe by a year or
more, and far slighter, jumped on the little ruffian--alas, from
behind!--and dealt him as powerful a blow on the head as he could
compass; a blow whose effectiveness, I reluctantly admit, was enhanced
by the half brick with which Jimmy had first of all prudently provided
himself. Joe Gonfarone went to earth, inert, but bleeding profusely.

There was a scuttling of frightened feet in every direction. Susan
herself did not stop running until she reached the very top of the Birch
Street incline. Then she looked back, her eyes lambent, her heart
throbbing, not alone from the rapid ascent. Yes, there was Jimmy--_her_
Jimmy!--kneeling in the dust by the still prostrate Joe. Susan could not
hear him, but she knew somehow from his attitude that he was scared to
death, and that he was asking Joe if he was hurt much. She agonized with
her champion, feeling none the less proud of him, and she waited for him
at the top of the rise, hoping to thank him, longing to kiss his hands.

But Jimmy, when he did pass her, went by without a glance, at top speed.
He was bound for a doctor. So Susan never really managed to thank Jimmy
at all. She merely idolized him in secret, a process which proved,
however, fairly heart-warming and, in the main, satisfactory.

It took three stitches to mend Joe's head--a fact famous in the junior
annals of Birch Street for some years--and soon after he appeared,
somewhat broken in spirit, in the street again, his parents moved him,
Margharita and the sloe-eyed twins to Bridgeport--very much, be it
admitted, to the relief of Jimmy Kane, who had lived for three weeks
nursing a lonely fear of dark reprisals.


III

There was one thing about Bob Blake's four-room house--it exactly fitted
his family. The floor plan was simple and economically efficient.
Between the monolithic door slab--relic of a time when Bob's house had
been frankly "in the country"--and the public street lay a walk formed
of a single plank supported on chance-set bricks. From the door slab one
stepped through the front doorway directly into the parlor. Beyond the
parlor lay the kitchen, from which one could pass out through a narrow
door to a patch of weed-grown back yard. A ladderlike stair led up from
one side of the kitchen, opposite to the single window and the small
coal range. At the top of the stair was a slit of unlighted hallway with
a door near either end of it. The door toward Birch Street gave upon the
bedroom occupied by Bob and Pearl; the rearward door led to Susan's
sternly ascetic cubiculum. No one of these four rooms could be described
as spacious, but the parlor and Bob's bedroom may have been twelve by
fifteen or thereabouts. Susan's quarters were a scant ten by ten.

The solider and more useful pieces of furniture in the house belonged to
the regime of Susan's mother--the great black-walnut bed which almost
filled the front bedroom; Susan's single iron cot frame; the parlor
table with its marble top; the melodeon; the kitchen range; and the deal
table in the kitchen, upon which, impartially, food was prepared and
meals were served. To these respectable properties Pearl had added from
time to time certain other objects of interest or art.

Thus, in the parlor, there was a cane rocking-chair, gilded; and on the
wall above the melodeon hung a banjo suspended from a nail by a broad
sash of soiled blue ribbon. On the drumhead of the banjo someone had
painted a bunch of nondescript flowers, and Pearl always claimed these
as her own handiwork, wrought in happier days. This was her one eagerly
contested point of pride; for Bob, when in liquor, invariably denied the
possibility of her ever having painted "that there bouquet." This flat
denial was always the starting point for those more violent Sunday-night
quarrels, which had done so much to reduce the furniture of the house to
its stouter, more imperishable elements.

During the brief interval between the death of Susan's mother and the
arrival of Pearl, Bob had placed his domestic affairs in the hands of an
old negro-woman, who came in during the day to clean up, keep an eye on
Susan and prepare Bob's dinner. Most of the hours during Bob's absence
this poor old creature spent in a rocking-chair, nodding in and out of
sleep; and it was rather baby Susan, sprawling about the kitchen floor,
who kept an eye on her, than the reverse. Pearl's installation had
changed all that. Bob naturally expected any woman he chose to support
to work for her board and lodging; and it may be that at first Pearl had
been too grateful for any shelter to risk jeopardizing her good luck by
shirking. There seems to be no doubt that for a while she did her poor
utmost to keep house--but the sloven in her was too deeply rooted not to
flower.

By the time Susan was six or seven the interior condition of Bob's
house was too crawlingly unpleasant to bear exact description; and even
Bob, though callous enough in such matters, began to have serious
thoughts of giving Pearl the slip--not to mention his landlord--and of
running off with Susan to some other city, where he could make a fresh
start and perhaps contrive now and then to get something decent to eat
set before him. It never occurred to him to give Susan the slip as
well--which would have freed his hands; not because he had a soft spot
somewhere for the child, nor because he felt toward her any special
sense of moral obligation. Simply, it never occurred to him. Susan was
his kid; and if he went she went with him, along with his pipe, his shop
tools, and his set of six English razors--his dearest possession, of
which he was jealously and irascibly proud.

But, as it happens, Bob never acted upon this slowly forming desire to
escape; the desire was quietly checked and insensibly receded; and for
this Susan herself was directly responsible.

Very early in life she began to supplement Pearl's feeble housewifery,
but it was not until her ninth year that Susan decided to bring about a
domestic revolution. Whether or no hatred of dirt be inheritable, I
leave to biologists, merely thumbnailing two facts for their
consideration: Susan's mother had hated dirt with an unappeasable
hatred; her nightly, after-supper, insensate pursuit of imaginary
cobwebs had been one of Bob's choicest grievances against her. And
little Susan hated dirt, in all its forms, with an almost equal venom,
but with a brain at once more active and more unreeling. She had good
reason to hate it. She must either have hated it or been subdued to it.
For five years, more or less, she had lived in the midst of dirt and
suffered. It had seemed to her one of the inexpungable evils of
existence, like mosquitoes, or her father's temper, or the smell of
Pearl's cheap talcum powder when warmed by the fumes of cooking cabbage.
But gradually it came upon her that dirt only accumulated in the absence
of a will to removal.

Once her outreaching mind had grasped--without wordily
formulating--this physical and moral law, her course was plain. Since
the will to removal was dormant or missing in Pearl, she must supply it.
Within the scope of her childish strength, she did supply it. Susan
insists that it took her two years merely to overcome the handicap of
Pearl's neglect. Her self-taught technique was faulty; proper tools were
lacking. There was a bucket which, when filled, she could not lift; a
broom that tripped her; high corners she could not reach--corners she
had to grow up to, even with the aid of a chair. But in the end she
triumphed. By the time she was thirteen--she was thirteen when I first
saw in the Eureka Garage--Bob's four rooms were spotless six and
one-half days out of every seven.

Even Pearl, in her flaccid way, approved the change. "It beats hell,"
she remarked affably to Bob one night, "how that ugly little monkey
likes to scrub things. She's a real help to me, that child is. But no
comp'ny. And she's a sight."

"Well," growled Bob, "she comes by that honest. So was the old woman."
They were annoyed when Susan, sitting by them, for the first time within
their memory burst into flooding, uncontrollable tears.


IV

I should probably, in my own flaccid way, have lost all track of Susan,
if it had not been for certain ugly things that befell in Bob's
four-room house one breathless evening--June twentieth of the year 1907.
It is a date stamped into my consciousness like a notarial seal. For one
thing it happened to be my birthday--my thirty-third, which I was not
precisely celebrating, since it was also the anniversary of the day my
wife had left me, two years before. Nor was I entirely pleased to have
become, suddenly, thirty-three. I counted it the threshold of
middle-age. Now that eleven years have passed, and with them my health
and the world's futile pretense at peace, I am feeling younger.

This book is about Susan, but it will be simpler if you know something,
too, concerning her scribe. Fortunately there is not much that it will
be needful to tell.

I was--in those bad, grossly comfortable old days--that least happy of
Nature's experiments, a man whose inherited income permitted him to be
an idler, and whose tastes urged him to write precious little essays
about precious little for the more precious reviews. My half-hearted
attempt to practice law I had long abandoned. I lived in a commodious,
inherited mansion on Hillhouse Avenue--an avenue which in all fairness
must be called aristocratic, since it has no wrong end to it. It is
right at both ends, so, naturally, though broad, it is not very long. My
grandfather, toward the end of a profitably ill-spent life, built this
mansion of sad-colored stone in a somewhat mixed Italian style; my
father filled it with expensive and unsightly movables--the spoils of a
grand European tour; and I, in my turn, had emptied it of these
treasures and refilled it with my own carefully chosen collection of
rare furniture, rare Oriental carpets, rare first editions, and costly
_objets d'art_. This collection I then anxiously believed, and do still
in part believe, to be beautiful--though I am no longer haunted by an
earlier fear lest the next generation should repudiate my taste and
reverse my opinion. Let the auction rooms of 1960 decide. Neither in
flesh nor in spirit shall I attend them.

The tragi-comedy of my luckless marriage I shall not stop here to
explain, but its rather mysterious ending had at first largely cut me
off from my old family friends and my socially correct acquaintances.
When Gertrude left me, their sympathies, or their sense of security,
went with her. I can hardly blame them. There had been no glaring
scandal, but the fault was inferentially mine. To speak quite brutally,
I did not altogether regret their loss. Too many of them had bored me
for too many years. I was glad to rely more on the companionship of
certain writers and painters which my scribbling had quietly won for me,
here and in France. I traveled about a good deal. When at home, I kept
my guest rooms filled--often, in the horrid phrase, with "visitors of
distinction."

In this way I became a social problem, locally, of some magnitude.
Visitors of distinction--even when of eccentric distinction--cannot
easily be ignored in a university town. Thus it made it a little
awkward, perhaps, that I should so often prove to be their host; a
little--less, on the whole, than one would suppose. Within two
years--just following Ballou's brief stay with me, on his way to
introduce that now forgotten nine-days wonder, Polymorphous Prose, among
initiates of the Plymouth Rock Poetry Guild, at Boston--my slight
remaining ineligibility was tacitly and finally ignored. The old family
friends began to hint that Gertrude, though a splendid woman, had always
been a little austere. Possibly there were faults on both sides. One
never knew.

And it was just at this hour of social reestablishment that my birthday
swung round again, for the thirty-third time, and brought with it a
change in my outer life which was to lead on to even greater changes in
all my modes of thinking and feeling. Odd, that a drunken quarrel in a
four-room house toward the wrong end of Birch Street could so affect the
destiny of a luxurious _dilettante_, living at the very center of bonded
respectability, in a mansion of sad-colored stone, on a short broad
avenue which is right at both ends!


V

"Never in this (obviously outcast) world!" grumbled Bob Blake, bringing
his malletlike fist down on the marble top of the parlor table.

The blow made his half-filled glass jump and clinkle; so he emptied it
slowly, then poured in four fingers more, forgetting to add water this
time, and sullenly pushed the bottle across to Pearl. But Pearl was
fretful. Her watery blue eyes were fixed upon the drumhead of the banjo,
where it hung suspended above the melodeon.

"I did so paint them flowers. And well you know it. What's the good of
bein' so mean? If you wasn't heeled you'd let me have it my way. Didn't
I bring that banjo with me?"

"Hungh! Say you did. What does that prove?"

"I guess it proves somethin', all right."

"Proves you swiped it, likely."

"Me! I ain't that kind, thanks."

"The hell you ain't."

"If you're tryin' to get gay, cut it out!"

"Not me."

"Well, then--quit!"

This was shortly after supper. It was an unusually hot, humid evening;
doors and windows stood open to no purpose; and Susan was sitting out on
the monolithic door slab, fighting off mosquitoes. She found that this
defensive warfare partly distracted her from the witless, interminable
bickering within. Moreover, the striated effluvia of whisky, talcum
powder, and perspiration had made her head feel a little queer. By
comparison, the fetid breath from the exposed mud banks of the salt
marsh was almost refreshing.

Possibly it was because her head did feel a little queer that Susan
began presently to wonder about things. Between her days at the
neighboring public school and her voluntary rounds of housework, Susan
had not of late years had much waking time to herself. In younger and
less crowded hours, before her father had been informed by the
authorities that he must either send his child to school or take the
consequences, Susan had put in all her spare moments at wondering. She
would see a toad in the back yard, for example, under a plantain leaf,
and she would begin to wonder. She would wonder what it felt like to be
a toad. And before very long something would happen to her, inside, and
she would _be_ a toad. She would have toad thoughts and toad
feelings.... There would stretch above her a dim, green, balancing
canopy--the plantain leaf. All about her were soaring, translucent
fronds--the grass. It was cool there under the plantain leaf; but she
was enormously fat and ugly, her brain felt like sooty cobwebs, and
nobody loved her.

Still, she didn't care much. She could feel her soft gray throat, like
a blown-into glove finger, pulsing slowly--which was almost as soothing
a sensation as letting the swing die down. It made her feel as if
Someone--some great unhappy cloudlike Being--were making up a song, a
song about most everything; chanting it sleepily to himself--or was it
_herself_?--somewhere; and as if she were part of this beautiful,
unhappy song. But all the time she knew that if that white fluffy
restlessness--that moth miller--fluttered only a little nearer among
those golden-green fronds, she knew if it reached the cool rim of her
plantain shade, she knew, then, that something terrible would happen to
her--knew that something swift and blind, that she couldn't help, would
coil deep within her like a spring and so launch her forward,
open-jawed. It was awful--awful for the moth miller--but she couldn't
_not_ do it. She was a toad....

And it was the same with her father. There were things he couldn't not
do. She could be--sitting very still in a corner--_be_ her father, when
he was angry; and she knew he couldn't help it. It was just a dark slow
whirling inside, with red sparks flying swiftly out from it. And it hurt
while it lasted. Being her father like that always made her sorry for
him. But she wished, and she felt he must often wish, that he couldn't
be at all. There were lots of live things that would be happier if they
weren't live things; and _if_ they weren't, Susan felt, the great
cloudlike Being would be less unhappy too.

Naturally, I am giving you Susan's later interpretations of her
pre-schoolday wonderings; and a number of you would gasp a little,
knowing what firm, delicate imaginings all Susan Blake's later
interpretations were, if I should give you her pen name as well--which I
have promised myself not to do. This is not an official study of a young
writer of peculiar distinction; it is merely an unpretending book about
a little girl I knew and a young married woman I still know--one and the
same person. It is what I have named it--that only: _The Book of Susan_.

Meanwhile, this humid June night--to the sordid accompaniment of Bob
and Pearl snarling at each other half-drunkenly within--Susan waits for
us on the monolithic door slab; and there is a new wonder in her dizzy
little head. I can't do better than let her tell you in her own words
what this new wonder was like.

"Ambo, dear"--my name, by the way, is Ambrose Hunt; Captain Hunt, of the
American Red Cross, at the present writing, which I could date from a
sleepy little village in Southern France--"Ambo, dear, it was the moon,
mostly. There was a pink bud of light in the heat mist, way off beyond
East Rock, and then the great wild rose of the moon opened slowly
through it. Papa, inside, was sounding just like a dog when he's
bullying another dog, walking up on the points of his toes, stiff
legged, round him. So I tried to escape, tried to be the moon; tried to
feel floaty and shining and beautiful, and--and remote. But I couldn't
manage it. I never could make myself be anything not alive. I've tried
to be stones, but it's no good. It won't work. I can be trees--a little.
But usually I have to be animals, or men and women--and of course
they're animals too.

"So I began wondering why I liked the moon, why just looking at it made
me feel happy. It couldn't talk to me; or love me. All it could do was
to be up there, sometimes, and shine. Then I remembered about mythology.
Miss Chisholm, in school, was always telling us about gods and
goddesses. She said we were children, so we could recreate the gods for
ourselves, because they belonged to the child age of the world. She
talked like that a lot, in a faded-leaf voice, and none of us ever
understood her. The truth is, Ambo, we never paid any attention to her;
she smiled too much and too sadly, without meaning it; and her eyelashes
were white. All the same, that night somehow I remembered Artemis, the
virgin moon goddess, who slipped silently through dark woods at dusk,
hunting with a silvery bow. Being a virgin seemed to mean that you
didn't care much for boys. But I did always like boys better than girls,
so I decided I could never be a virgin. And yet I loved the thought of
Artemis from that moment. I began to think about her--oh,
intensely!--always keeping off by herself; cool, and shining, and--and
detached. And there was one boy she _had_ cared for; I remembered that,
too, though I couldn't remember his name. A naked, brown sort of boy,
who kept off by himself on blue, distant hills. So Artemis wasn't really
a virgin at all. She was just--awfully particular. She liked clean, open
places, and the winds, and clear, swift water. What she hated most was
_stuffiness_! That's why I decided then and there, Ambo, that Artemis
should be my goddess, my own pet goddess; and I made up a prayer to her.
I've never forgotten it. I often say it still....

          _Dearest, dearest Far-Away,
           Can you hear me when I pray?
           Can you hear me when I cry?
           Would you care if I should die?
           No, you wouldn't care at all;
           But I love you most of all._

"It isn't very good, Ambo, but it's the first rhyme I ever made up out
of my own head. And I just talked it right off to Artemis without any
trouble. But I had hardly finished it, when----"

What had happened next was the crash of glassware, followed by Bob's
thick voice, bellowing: "C'm ba' here! Damned slut! Tell yeh t' c'm ba'
an'--an' 'pol'gize!"

Susan heard a strangling screech from Pearl, the jar of a heavy piece of
furniture overturned. The child's first impulse was to run out into
Birch Street and scream for help. She tells me her spine knew all at
once that something terrible had happened--or was going to happen. Then,
in an odd flash of hallucination, she saw _Artemis_ poised the
fleetingest second before her--beautiful, a little disdainful, divinely
unafraid. So Susan gulped, dug her nails fiercely into her palms, and
hurried back through the parlor into the kitchen, where she stumbled
across the overturned table and fell, badly bruising her cheek.

As she scrambled to her feet a door slammed to, above. Her father, in a
grotesque crouching posture, was mounting the ladderlike stair. On the
floor at the stair's foot lay the parchment head of Pearl's banjo, which
he had cut from its frame. Susan distinctly caught the smudged pinks and
blues of the nondescript flowers. She realized at once that her father
was bound on no good errand. And Pearl was trapped. Susan called to her
father, daringly, a little wildly. He slued round to her, leaning
heavily on the stair rail, his face green-white, his lips held back by
some evil reflex in a fixed, appalling grin.

It was the face of a madman.... He raised his right hand, slowly, and a
tiny prismatic gleam darted from the blade of an opened razor--one of
his precious set of six. He had evidently used it to destroy the banjo
head, which he would never have done in his right mind. But now he made
a shocking gesture with the blade, significant of other uses; then
turned, crouching once more, to continue upward. Susan tried to cry out,
tried to follow him, until the room slid from its moorings into a
whirlpool of humming blackness....

       *       *       *       *       *

That is all Susan remembers for some time. It is just as well.


VI

What Susan next recalls is an intense blare of light, rousing her from
her nothingness, like trumpets. Her immediate confused notion was that
the gates of hell had been flung wide for her; and when a tall black
figure presently cut across the merciless rays and towered before her,
she thought it must be the devil. But the intense blare came from the
head lights of my touring car, and the tall black devil was I. A greatly
puzzled and compassionate devil I was too! Maltby Phar--that exquisite
anarchist--was staying with me, and we had run down to the shore for
dinner, hoping to mitigate the heat by the ride, and my new sensation of
frustrate middle-age by broiled live lobsters. It was past eleven. I had
just dropped Maltby at the house and had run my car round to the garage
where Bob worked, meaning to leave it there overnight so Bob could begin
patching at it the first thing in the morning. It had been bucking its
way along on three cylinders or less all day.

Bob's garage lay back from the street down a narrow alley. Judge, then,
of my astonishment as I nosed my car up to its shut double doors! There,
on the concrete incline before the doors, lay a small crumpled figure,
half-curled, like an unearthed cut-worm, about a shining dinner pail. I
brought the car to a sudden dead stop. The small figure partly
uncrumpled, and a white, blinded little face lifted toward me. It was
Bob's youngster! What was she up to, lying there on the ribbed concrete
at this time of night? And in heaven's name--why the dinner pail? I
jumped down to investigate.

"You're Susan Blake, aren't you?"

"Yes"--with a whispered gasp--"your Royal Highness."

Susan says she doesn't know just why she addressed the devil in that
way, unless she was trying to flatter him and so get round him.

"I'm not so awfully bad," she went on, "if you don't count thinking
things too much!"

The right cheek of her otherwise delicately modeled child's face was a
swollen lump of purple and green. I dropped down on one knee beside her.

"Why, you poor little lady! You're hurt!"

Instantly she sprang to her feet, wild-eyed.

"No, no! It's not me--it's Pearl! Oh, quick--please! He had a razor!"

"Razor? _Who_ did?" I seized her hands. "I'm Mr. Hunt, dear. Your father
often works on my car. Tell me what's wrong!"

She was still half dazed. "I--I can't see why I'm down here--with
papa's dinner pail. Pearl was upstairs, and I tried to stop him from
going." Then she began to whimper like a whipped puppy. "It's all mixed.
I'm scared."

"Of course--of course you are; but it's going to be all right." I led
her to the car and lifted her to the front seat. "Hold on a minute,
Susan. I'll be back with you in less than no time!"

I sounded my horn impatiently. After an interval, a slow-footed car
washer inside the garage began trundling the doors back to admit me. I
ran to him.

No. Bob, he left at six, same as usual. He hadn't been round since....
His kid, eh? Mebbe the heat had turned her queer. Nuff to addle most
folks, the heat was....

I saw that he knew nothing, and snapped him off with a sharp request to
crank the car for me. As he did so, I jumped in beside Susan.

"Where do you live, Susan? Oh, yes, of course--Birch Street. Bob told me
that.... Eh? You don't want to go home?"

"Never, please. Never, never! I _won't_!" Proclaiming this, she flung
Bob's dinner pail from her and it bounced and clattered down the
asphalt. "It's too late," she added, in a frightened whisper: "I know it
is!"

Then she seized my arm--thereby almost wrecking us against a fire
hydrant--and clung to me, sobbing. I was puzzled and--yes--alarmed. Bob
was a bad customer. The child's bruised face ... something she had said
about a razor----? And instantly I made up my mind.

"I'll take you to my house, Susan. Mrs. Parrot"--Mrs. Parrot was my
housekeeper--"will fix you up for to-night. Then I'll go round and see
Bob; see what's wrong." I felt her thin fingers dig into my arm
convulsively. "Yes," I reassured her, taking a corner perilously at full
speed, "that will be much better. You'll like Mrs. Parrot."

Rather recklessly, I hoped this might prove to be true; for Mrs. Parrot
was a little difficult at times....

It was Maltby Phar who saw me coming up the steps with a limp child in
my arms, and who opened the screen door for me. "Aha!" he exclaimed.
"Done it this time, eh! Always knew you would, sooner or later. You're
too damned absent-minded to drive a car. You----"

"Nonsense!" I struck in. "Tell Mrs. Parrot to ring up Doctor Stevens.
Then send her to me." And I continued on upstairs with Susan.

When Mrs. Parrot came, Susan was lying with closed eyes in the middle of
a great white embroidered coverlet, upon which her shoes had smeared
greasy, permanent-looking stains.

"Mercy," sighed Mrs. Parrot, "if you've killed the poor creature,
nobody's sorrier than I am! But why couldn't you have laid her down on
the floor? She wouldn't have known."

In certain respects Mrs. Parrot was invaluable to me; but then and there
I suspected that Mrs. Parrot would, in the not-too-distant future, have
to go.

Within five minutes Doctor Stevens arrived, and, after hurried
explanations, Maltby and I left him in charge--and then made twenty-five
an hour to Birch Street.

However, Susan's intuitions had been correct. We found Bob's four-room
house quite easily. It was the house with the crowd in front of it....
We were an hour too late.

"Cut her throat clean acrost; and his own after," shrilled Mrs. Perkins
to us--Mrs. Perkins, who lived three doors nearer the right end of Birch
Street. "But it's only what was to be looked for, and I guess it'll be a
lesson to some. You can't expect no better end than that," perorated
Mrs. Perkins to us and her excited neighbors, while her small gray-green
eyes snapped with electric malice, "you can't expect no better end than
that to sech _brazen_ immorality!"

"My God," groaned Maltby, as we sped away, "How they have enjoyed it
all! Why, you almost ruined the evening for them when you told them
you'd found the child! They were hoping to discover her body in the
cellar or down the well. Ugh! What a world!

"By the way," he added, as we turned once more into the dignified
breadth of Hillhouse Avenue, "what'll you do with the homely little
brat? Put her in some kind of awful institution?"

The bland tone of his assumption irritated me. I ground on the brakes.

"Certainly not! I like her. If she returns the compliment, and her
relatives don't claim her, she'll stay on here with me."

"Hum. Bravo.... About two weeks," said Maltby Phar.




THE SECOND CHAPTER


I

IT was not Susan who left me at the end of two weeks; it was Mrs.
Parrot. Maltby had departed within three days, hastening perforce to
editorial duties in New York. He then edited, with much furtive groaning
to sympathetic friends, the _Garden Exquisite_, a monthly magazine _de
luxe_, devoted chiefly to advertising matter, and to photographs
taken--by request of far-seeing wives and daughters--at the country
clubs and on the country estates of our minor millionaires. For a
philosophical anarch, rather a quaint occupation! Yet one must live....
Maltby, however, had threatened a return as soon as possible, "to look
over the piteous _debacle_." There was no probability that Mrs. Parrot
would ever return.

"You cannot expect me," maintained Mrs. Parrot, "to wait on the child of
a murdering suicide. Especially," she added, "when he was nothing but a
common sort of man to begin with. I'm as sorry for that poor little
creature as anybody in New Haven; but there are places for such."

That was her ultimatum. My reply was two weeks' notice, and a
considerable monetary gift to soften the blow.

Hillhouse Avenue, in general, so far as I could discover, rather
sympathized with Mrs. Parrot. She at once obtained an excellent post,
becoming housekeeper for the Misses Carstairs, spinster sisters of
incredible age, who lived only two doors from me in a respectable
mansion whose portico resembled an Egyptian tomb. Wandering freshmen
from the Yale campus frequently mistook it for the home office of one of
the stealthier secret societies.

There, silently ensconced, Mrs. Parrot burned with a hard, gemlike
flame, and awaited my final downfall. So did the Misses Carstairs, who,
being cousins of my wife, had remained firmly in opposition. And rumor
had it that other members of neighboring families were suffering
discomfort from the proximity of Susan. It was as if a tiny, almost
negligible speck of coal dust had blown into the calm, watchful eye of
the _genius loci_, and was gradually inflaming it--with resultant
nervous irritation to all its members.

Susan was happily unconscious of these things. Her gift of intuition had
not yet projected itself into that ethereal region which conserves the
more tenuous tone and the subtler distinction--denominate "society." For
the immediate moment she was bounded in a nutshell, yet seemed to count
herself a princess of infinite space--yes, in spite of bad dreams.
We--Doctor Stevens and I--had put her to bed in the large, coolly
distinguished corner room formerly occupied by Gertrude. This room
opened directly into my own. Doctor Stevens counselled bed for a few
days, and Susan seemed well content to obey his mandate. Meanwhile, I
had requested Mrs. Parrot to buy various necessities for
her--toothbrushes, nightdresses, day dresses, petticoats, and so on.
Mrs. Parrot had supposed I should want the toilet articles inexpensive,
and the clothing plain but good.

"Good, by all means, Mrs. Parrot," I had corrected, "but not plain. As
pretty and frilly as possible!"

Mrs. Parrot had been inclined to argue the matter.

"When that poor little creature goes from here," she had maintained,
"flimsy, fussy things will be of no service to her. None. She'll need
coarse, substantial articles that will bear usage."

"Do you like to wear coarse, substantial articles, Mrs. Parrot?" I had
mildly asked. "So far as I am permitted to observe----"

Mrs. Parrot had resented the implication. "I hope in my outer person,
Mr. Hunt, that I show a decent respect for my employers, but I've never
been one to pamper myself on linjery, if I may use the word--not
believing it wholesome. Nor to discuss it with gentlemen. But if I don't
know what it's wisest and best to buy in this case, who," she had
demanded of heaven, "does?"

"Possibly," heaven not replying, had been my response, "_I_ do. At any
rate, I can try."

It was fun trying. I ran down on the eight o'clock to New York and
strolled up and down Fifth Avenue, shopping here and there as the fancy
moved me. Shopping--with a well-filled pocketbook--is not a difficult
art. Women exaggerate its difficulties for their own malign purposes. In
two hours of the most casual activity I had bought a great number of
delightful things--for my little daughter, you know. Her age?... Oh,
well--I should think about fourteen. Let's call it 'going on fourteen.'
Then it's sure to be all right.

It _was_ all right--essentially. By which I mean that the parties of the
first and second parts--to wit, Susan and I--were entirely and
blissfully satisfied.

Susan liked particularly a lacy sort of nightgown all knotted over with
little pink ribbony rosebuds; there was a coquettish boudoir cap to
match it--suggestive somehow of the caps village maidens used to wear in
old-fashioned comic operas; and a pink silk kimono embroidered with
white chrysanthemums, to top off the general effect. Needless to say,
Mrs. Parrot disapproved of the general effect, deeming it, no doubt with
some reason, a thought flamboyant for Gertrude's coolly distinguished
corner room.

But Susan, propped straight up by now against pillows, wantoned in this
finery. She would stroke the pink silk of the kimono with her thin,
sensitive fingers, sigh deeply, happily, then close her eyes.

There was nothing much wrong with her. The green-and-purple bruise on
her cheek--a somber note which would not harmonize with the frivolity of
the boudoir cap--was no longer painful. But, as Doctor Stevens put it,
"The little monkey's all in." She was tired, tired out to the last tiny
filament of her tiniest nerve....

During those first days with me she asked no awkward questions; and few
of any kind. Indeed, she rarely spoke at all, except with her
always-speaking black eyes. For the time being the restless-terrier-look
had gone from them; they were quiet and deep, and said "_Thank you_," to
Doctor Stevens, to Mrs. Parrot, to me, with a hundred modulating shades
of expression. In spite of a clear-white, finely drawn face, against
which the purple bruise stood out in shocking relief; in spite of
entirely straight but gossamery black hair; in spite of a rather short
nose and a rather wide mouth--there was a fascination about the child
which no one, not even the hostile Mrs. Parrot, wholly escaped.

"That poor, peeny little creature," admitted Mrs. Parrot, on the very
morning she left me, "has a way of looking at you--so you can't talk to
her like you'd ought to. It's somebody's duty to speak to her in a
Christian spirit. She never says her prayers. Nor mentions her father.
And don't seem to care what's happened to him, or why she's here, or
what's to come to her. And what is to come to her," demanded Mrs.
Parrot, "if she stays on in this house, without a God-fearing woman, and
one you can't fool most days? Not that I could be persuaded, having made
other arrangements. And if I may say a last word, the wild talk I've
heard here isn't what I've been used to. Nor to be approved of. No
vulgarity. None. I don't accuse. But free with matters better left to
the church; or in the dark--where they belong. All I hold is, that some
things are sacred, and some unmentionable; and conversation should take
cognizance of such!"

I had never known her so moved or so eloquent. I strove to reassure her.

"You are quite right, Mrs. Parrot. I apologize for any painful moments
my friends and I have given you. But don't worry too much about Susan.
So far as Susan's concerned, I promise to 'take cognizance' in every
possible direction."

It was clear to me that I should have to expend a good deal of care upon
engaging another housekeeper at once. And, of course, a governess--for
lessons and things. And a maid? Yes; Susan would need a maid, if only to
do her mending. Obviously, neither the housekeeper, the governess, nor I
could be expected to take cognizance of that.


II

But I anticipate. Two weeks before Mrs. Parrot's peroration, on the very
evening of the day Maltby Phar had left me, Susan and I had had our
first good talk together. My memorable shopping tour had not yet come
off, and Susan, having pecked birdlike at a very light supper, was
resting--semi-recumbent--in bed, clothed in a suit of canary-yellow
pajamas, two sizes too big for her, which I was rather shaken to
discover belonged to Nora, my quiet little Irish parlor maid. I had not
supposed that Nora indulged in night gear filched from musical comedy.
However, Nora had meant to be kind in a good cause; though canary yellow
is emphatically a color for the flushed and buxom and should never be
selected for peeny, anemic little girls. It did make Susan look middling
ghastly, as if quarantined from all access to Hygeia, the goddess!
Perhaps that is why, when I perched beside her on the edge of Gertrude's
colonial four-poster, I felt an unaccustomed prickling sensation back of
my eyes.

"How goes it, canary bird?" I asked, taking the thin, blue-threaded hand
that lay nearest to me.

Susan's fingers at once curled trustfully to mine, and there came
something very like a momentary glimmer of mischief into her dark eyes.

"If I was an honest-to-God canary, I could sing to you," said Susan.
"I'd like to do something for you, Mr. Hunt. Something you'd like, I
mean."

"Well, you can, dear. You can stop calling me 'Mr. Hunt'! My first
name's pretty awkward, though. It's Ambrose."

For an instant Susan considered my first name, critically, then very
slowly shook her head. "It's a nice name. It's _too_ nice, isn't it--for
every day?"

I laughed. "But it's all I have, Susan. What shall we do about it?"

Then Susan laughed, too; it was the first time I had heard her laugh. "I
guess your mother was feeling kind of stuck up when she called you
that!"

"Most mothers do feel kind of stuck up over their first babies, Susan."

She considered this, and nodded assent, "But it's silly of them,
anyway," she announced. "There are so many babies all the time,
everywhere. There's nothing new about babies, Ambo."

"Aha!" I exclaimed. "You knew from the first how to chasten my stuck-up
name, didn't you? 'Ambo' is a delightful improvement."

"It's more like you," said Susan, tightening her fingers briefly on
mine.

And presently she closed her eyes. When, after a long still interval,
she opened them, they were cypress-shaded pools.

"Tell me what happened, Ambo."

"He's dead, Susan. Pearl's dead, too."

She closed her eyes again, and two big tears slipped out from between
her lids, wetting her thick eyelashes and staining her bruised and her
pallid cheek.

"He couldn't help it. He was made like that, inside. He was no damn
good, Ambo. That's what he was always saying to Pearl--'You're no damn
good.' She wasn't, either. And he wasn't, much. I guess it's better for
him and Pearl to _be_ dead."

This--and the two big tears--was her good-by to Bob, to Pearl, to the
four-room house; her good-by to Birch Street. It shocked me at the time.
I released her hand and stood up to light a cigarette--staring the while
at Susan. Where had she found her precocious brains? And had she no
heart? Had something of Bob's granitic harshness entered into this
uncanny, this unnatural child? Should I live to regret my decision to
care for her, to educate her? When I died, would she say--to whom?--"I
guess it's better for him to _be_ dead. Poor Ambo! He was no damn good."

But even as I shuddered, I smiled. For, after all, she was right; the
child was right. She had merely uttered, truthfully, thoughts which a
more conventional mind, more conventionally disciplined, would have
known how to conceal--yes, to conceal even from itself. Genius was very
like that.

"Susan!" I suddenly demanded. "Have you any relatives who will try to
claim you?"

"Claim me?"

"Yes. Want to take care of you?"

"Mamma's sister-in-law lives in Hoboken," said Susan. "But she's a
widow; and she's got seven already."

"Would you like to stay here with me?"

For all answer she flopped sidelong down from the pillows and hid her
bruised face in the counterpane. Her slight, canary-clad shoulders were
shaken with stifled weeping.

"That settles it!" I affirmed. "I'll see my lawyer in the morning, and
he'll get the court to appoint me your guardian. Come now! If you cry
about it, I'll think you don't want me for guardian. Do you?"

She turned a blubbered, wistful face toward me from the counterpane. Her
eyes answered me. I leaned over, smoothed a pillow and slipped it
beneath her tired head, then kissed her unbruised cheek and walked
quietly back into my own room--where I rang for Mrs. Parrot.

When she arrived, "Mrs. Parrot," I suggested, "please make Susan
comfortable for the night, will you? And I'll appreciate it if you treat
her exactly as you would my own child."

It took Mrs. Parrot at least a minute to hit upon something she quite
dared to leave with me.

"Very well, Mr. Hunt. Not having an own child, and not knowing--you can
say that. Not that it's the same thing, though you _do_ say it! But I'll
make her comfortable--and time tells. In darker days, I hope you'll be
able to say that poor, peeny little creature has done the same by you."

"Thank you, Mrs. Parrot. Good-night."

"A good night to you, Mr. Hunt," elaborated Mrs. Parrot, not without
malice; "many of them, Mr. Hunt; many of them, I'm sure."


III

By the time Mrs. Parrot left us, housekeeper, governess, and maid had
been obtained in New York through agencies of the highest
respectability.

Miss Goucher, the housekeeper, proved to be a tall, big-framed spinster,
rising fifty; a capable, taciturn woman with a positive talent for
minding her own affairs. She had bleak, light-gray eyes, a rudderlike
nose, and a harsh, positive way of speech that was less disagreeable
than it might have been, because she so seldom spoke at all. Having
hoped for a more amiable presence, I was of two minds over keeping her;
but she took charge of my house so promptly and efficiently, and effaced
herself so thoroughly--a difficult feat for so definite a figure--that
in the end there was nothing I could complain of; and so she stayed.

Miss Disbrow on the other hand, who came as governess, was all that I
had dared to wish for; a graceful, light-footed, soft-voiced girl--she
was not yet thirty--with charming manners, a fluent command of the
purest convent-taught French, a nice touch on the piano, and apparently
some slight acquaintance with the solider branches. Merely to associate
with Miss Disbrow would, I felt, do much for Susan.

I was less certain about Sonia, the maid. I had asked for a middle-aged
English maid. Sonia was Russian, and she was only twenty-three. But she
was sent directly to me from service with Countess
Dimbrovitski--formerly, as you know, Maud Hochstetter, of Omaha--and
brought with her a most glowing reference for skill, honesty, and
unfailing tact. Countess Dimbrovitski did not explain in the reference,
dated from Newport, why she had permitted this paragon to slip from her;
nor did it occur to me to investigate the point. But Sonia later
explained it all, in intimate detail, to Susan--as we shall see.

I had feared that Susan might be at first a little bewildered by the
attentions of Sonia and of Miss Disbrow; so I explained the unusual
situation to Miss Goucher and Miss Disbrow--with certain
reservations--and asked them to make it clear to Sonia. Miss Goucher
merely nodded, curtly enough, and said she understood. Miss Disbrow
proved more curious and more voluble.

"How wonderful of you, Mr. Hunt!" she exclaimed. "To take in a poor
little waif and do all this for her! Personally, I count it a privilege
to be allowed some share in so generous an action. Oh, but I do--I do.
One likes to feel, even when forced to work for one's living, that one
has some little opportunity to do good in the world. Life isn't," asked
Miss Disbrow, "all money-grubbing and selfishness, is it?" And as I
found no ready answer, she concluded: "But I need hardly ask that of
you!"

For the fleetingest second I found myself wondering whether Miss
Disbrow, deep down in her hidden heart, might not be a minx. Yet her
glance, the happiest mixture of frankness, timidity, and respectful
admiration, disarmed me. I dismissed the unworthy suspicion as absurd.

I was a little troubled, though, when Susan that same evening after
dinner came to me in the library and seated herself on a low stool
facing my easy-chair.

"Ambo," she said, "I've been blind as blind, haven't I?"

"Have you?" I responded. "For a blind girl, it's wonderful how you find
your way about!"

"But I'm not joking--and that's just it," said Susan.

"What's wrong, dear?" I asked. "I see something is."

"Yes. I am. The wrongest possible. I've just dumped myself on you, and
stayed here; and--and I've no damn business here at all!"

"I thought we were going to forget the damns and hells, Susan?"

"We are," said Susan, coloring sharply and looking as if she wanted to
cry. "But when you've heard them, and worse, every minute all your
life--it's pretty hard to forget. You must scold me more!" Then with a
swift movement she leaned forward and laid her cheek on my knee. "You're
too good to me, Ambo. I oughtn't to be here--wearing wonderful dresses,
having a maid to do my hair and--and polish me and button me and mend
me. I wasn't meant to have an easy time; I wasn't born for it. First
thing you know, Ambo, I'll get to thinking I was--and be mean to you
somehow!"

"I'll risk that, Susan."

"Yes, but I oughtn't to let you. I could learn to be somebody's maid
like Sonia; and if I study hard--and I'm going to!--some day I could be
a governess like Miss Disbrow; only really know things, not just
pretend. Or when I'm old enough, a housekeeper like Miss Goucher! That's
what you should make me do--work for you! I can clean things better than
Nora now; I never skip underneaths. Truly, Ambo, it's all wrong, my
having people work for me--at your expense. I know it is! Miss Disbrow
made it all clear as clear, right away."

"What! Has Miss Disbrow been stuffing this nonsense into your head!" I
was furious.

"Oh, not in words!" cried Susan. "She talks just the other way. She
keeps telling me how fortunate I am to have a guardian like you, and how
I must be so careful never to annoy you or make you regret what you've
done for me. Then she sighs and says life is very hard and unjust to
many girls born with more advantages. Of course she means herself, Ambo.
You see, she hates having to work at all. She's much nicer to look at
and talk to, but she reminds me of Pearl. She's no damn--she's no good,
Ambo dear. She's hard where she ought to be soft, and soft where she
ought to be hard. She tries to get round people, so she can coax things
out of them. But she'll never get round Miss Goucher, Ambo--or me." And
Susan hesitated, lifting her head from my knee and looking up at me
doubtfully, only to add, "I--I'm not so sure about _you_."

"Indeed. You think, possibly, Miss Disbrow might get round me, eh?"

"Well, she might--if I wasn't here," said Susan. "She might marry you."

My explosion of laughter--I am ordinarily a quiet person--startled
Susan. "Have I said something awful again?" she cried.

"Dreadful!" I sputtered, wiping my eyes. "Why, you little goose! Don't
you see how I need you? To plumb the depths for me--to protect me? I
thought I was your guardian, Susan; but that's just my mannish
complacency. I'm not your guardian at all, dear. You're mine."

But I saw at once that my mirth had confused her, had hurt her
feelings.... I reached out for her hands and drew her upon my knees.

"Susan," I said, "Miss Disbrow couldn't marry me even if she got round
me, and wanted to. You see, I have a wife already."

Susan stared at me with wide, frightened eyes. "You have, Ambo? Where is
she?"

"She left me two years ago."

"Left you?" It was evident that she did not understand. "Oh--what will
she say when she comes home and finds _me_ here? She won't like it; she
won't like me!" wailed Susan. "I know she won't."

"Hush, dear. She's not coming home again. She made up her mind that she
couldn't live with me any more."

"What's her name?"

"Gertrude."

"Why couldn't she live with you, Ambo?"

"She said I was cruel to her."

"_Weren't_ you good to her, Ambo? Why? Didn't you like her?"

The rapid questions were so unexpected, so searching, that I gasped. And
my first impulse was to lie to Susan, to put her off with a few
conventional phrases--phrases that would lead the child to suppose me a
wronged, lonely, broken-hearted man. This would win me a sympathy I had
not quite realized that I craved. But Susan's eyes were merciless, and I
couldn't manage it. Instead, I surprised myself by blurting out: "That's
about it, Susan. I didn't like her--enough. We couldn't hit it off,
somehow. I'm afraid I wasn't very kind."

Instantly Susan's thin arms went about my neck, and her cheek was
pressed tight to mine.

"Poor Ambo!" she whispered. "I'm so sorry you weren't kind. It must
_hurt_ you so." Then she jumped from my knees.

"Ambo!" she demanded. "Is my room--_her_ room? Is it?"

"Certainly not. It isn't hers any more. She's never coming back, I tell
you. She put me out of her life once for all; and God knows I've put her
out of mine!"

"If you can't let me have another room, Ambo--I'll have to go."

"Why? Hang it all, Susan, don't be silly! Don't make difficulties where
none exist! What an odd, overstrained child you are!" I was a little
annoyed.

"Yes," nodded Susan gravely, "I see now why Gertrude left you. But she
must be awfully stupid not to know it's only your outside that's made
like that!"

Next morning, without a permissive word from me, Susan had Miss Goucher
move all her things to a small bedroom at the back of the house,
overlooking the garden. This silent flitting irritated me not a little,
and that afternoon I had a frank little talk with Miss Disbrow--franker,
perhaps, than I had intended. Miss Disbrow at once gave me notice, and
left for New York within two hours, letting it be known that she
expected her trunks to be sent after her.

"Gutter-snipes are not my specialty," was her parting word.


IV

There proved to be little difficulty in getting myself appointed Susan's
guardian. No one else wanted the child.

I promised the court to do my best for her; to treat her, in fact, as I
would my own flesh and blood. It might well be, I said, that before long
I should legally adopt her. In any event, if this for some unforeseen
reason proved inadvisable, I assured the court that Susan's future would
be provided for. The court benignly replied that, as it stood, I was
acting very handsomely in the matter; very handsomely; no doubt about
it. But there was a dim glimmer behind the juridic spectacles that
seemed to imply: "Handsomely, my dear sir, but whether wisely or no is
another question, which, as the official champion of widows and orphans,
I am not called upon to decide."

It was with a new sense of responsibility that I opened an account in
Susan's name with a local savings bank, and a week later added a short
but efficient codicil to my will.

In the meantime--but with alert suspicions--I interviewed several highly
recommended applicants for Miss Disbrow's deserted post; only to find
them wanting. Poor things! Combined, they could hardly have met all the
requirements, aesthetic and intellectual, which I had now set my heart
upon finding in one lone governess for Susan! It would have needed, by
this, a subtly modernized Hypatia to fulfill my ideal.

I might, of course, have waited for October to send Susan to a select
private school in the vicinage, patronized by the little daughters of
our more cautious families. It was, by neighborly consent, an excellent
school, where carefully sterilized cultures--physical, moral, mental,
and social--were painlessly injected into the blue blood streams of our
very nicest young girls. I say that I might have done so, but this is a
euphemism. On the one hand, I shrank from exposing Susan to possible
snubs; on the other, a little bird whispered that Miss Garnett,
principal of the school, would not care to expose her carefully
sterilized cultures to an alien contagion. Bearers of contagion--whether
physical, moral, mental, or social--were not sympathetic to Miss
Garnett's _clientele_. In Mrs. Parrot's iron phrase, there are places
for such.

Public schools, to wit! But in those long-past days--before Susan taught
me that there are just two kinds of persons, big and little; those you
can do nothing for, because they can do nothing for themselves, and
those you can do nothing for, because they can do everything for
themselves--in those days, I admit that I had my own finicky fears.
Public schools were all very well for the children of men who could
afford nothing better. They had, for example, given Bob Blake's daughter
a pretty fair preliminary training; but they would never do for Ambrose
Hunt's ward. _Noblesse_--or, at any rate, _largesse_--_oblige_.

Yet here was a quandary: Public schools, in my estimation, being too
vulgar for Susan; and Susan, in the estimation of Hillhouse Avenue,
being too vulgar for private ones; yea, and though I still took
cognizance, no subtly modernized Hypatia coming to me highly recommended
for a job--how in the name of useless prosperity was I to get poor
little Susan properly educated at all!

It was Susan who solved this difficulty for me, as she was destined to
solve most of my future difficulties, and all of her own.

She soon turned the public world about her into an extra-select,
super-private school. She impressed all who came into contact with her,
and made of them her devoted--if often unconscious--instructors. And she
began by impressing Miss Goucher and Nora and Sonia, and Philip Farmer,
assistant professor of philosophy in Yale University; and Maltby Phar,
anarchist editor of _The Garden Exquisite_; and--first and chiefly--me.

The case of Phil Farmer was typical. Phil and I had been classmates in
the dark backward and abysm, and we were still, in a manner of speaking,
friends. I mean that, though we had few tastes in common, we kept on
liking each other a good deal. Phil was a gentle-hearted, stiff-headed
sort of man, with a conscience--formed for him and handed on by a long
line of Unitarian ministers--a conscience which drove him to incredible
labor at altitudes few of us attain, and where even Phil, it seemed to
me, found breathing difficult. Not having been thrown with much feminine
society on his chosen heights, he had remained a bachelor. The
Metaphysical Mountains are said to be infested with women, but they
cluster, I am told, below the snow line. Phil did not even meet them by
climbing through them; he always ballooned straight up for the
Unmelting; and when he occasionally dropped down, his psychic chill
seldom wore entirely off before he was ready to ascend again. This
protected him; for he was a tall, dark-haired fellow whose features had
the clear-cut gravity of an Indian chieftain; his rare, friendly smile
was a delight. So he would hardly otherwise have escaped.

Perhaps once a week it was his habit to drop in after dinner and share
with me three or four pipes' worth of desultory conversation. We seldom
talked shop; since mine did not interest him, nor his me. Mostly we just
ambled aimlessly round the outskirts of some chance neutral topic--who
would win the big game, for example. It amused neither of us, but it
rested us both.

One night, perhaps a month after Susan had come to me, I returned late
from a hot day's trip to New York--one more unsuccessful quest after
Hypatia Rediviva--and found Phil and Susan sitting together on the
screened terrace at the back of my house, overlooking the garden. It was
not my custom to spend the muggy midsummer months in town, but this year
I had been unwilling to leave until I could capture and carry off
Hypatia Rediviva with me. Moreover, I did not know where to go. The
cottage at Watch Hill belonged to Gertrude, and was in consequence no
longer used by either of us. As a grass widower I had, in summer, just
travelled about. Now, with a ward of fourteen to care for, just
travelling about no longer seemed the easiest solution; yet I hated
camps and summer hotels. I should have to rent a place somewhere, that
was certain; but where? With the world to choose from, a choice proved
difficult. I was marking time.

My stuffy fruitless trip had decided me to mark time no longer. Hypatia
or no Hypatia, Susan must be taken to the hills or the sea. It was this
thought that simmered in my brain as I strolled out to the garden
terrace and overheard Susan say to Phil: "But I think it's _much_ easier
to believe in the devil than it is in God! Don't you? The devil isn't
all-wise, all-good, all-everything! He's a lot more like _us_."

I stopped short and shamelessly listened.

"That's an interesting concept," responded Phil, with his slow, friendly
gravity. "You mean, I suppose, that if we must be anthropomorphic, we
ought at least to be consistent."

"Wouldn't it be funny," said Susan, "if I did mean that without knowing
it?" There was no flippancy, no irony in her tone.
"'_An-thro-po-mor-phic_ ... '" she added, savoring its
long-drawn-outness. Susan never missed a strange word; she always
pounced on it at once, unerringly, and made it hers.

"That's a Greek word," explained Phil.

"It's a good word," said Susan, "if it has a tremendous lot packed up in
it. If it hasn't, it's much too long."

"I agree with you," said Phil; "but it has."

"What?" asked Susan.

"It would take me an hour to tell you."

"Oh, I'm glad!" cried Susan. "It must be a wonderful word! Please go on
till Ambo comes!"

I decided to take a bath, and tiptoed softly and undetected away.


V

After that evening Phil began to drop in every two or three nights, and
he did not hesitate to tell me that the increasing frequency of his
visits was due to his progressive interest in Susan.

"She's a curious child," he explained; which was true in any sense you
chose to take it, and all the way back to the Latin _curiosus_,
"careful, diligent, thoughtful; from _cura_, care," and so on....

"I've never seen much of children," Phil continued; "never had many
chances, as it happens. My sister has three boys, but she's married to a
narrow-gauge missionary, and lives--to call it that--in Ping Lung, or
some such place. I've the right address somewhere, I think--in a
notebook. Bertha sends me snapshots of the boys from time to time, but I
can't say I've ever felt lonely because of their exile. Funny. Perhaps
it's because I never liked Bertha much. Bertha has a sloppy mind--you
know, with chance scraps of things floating round in it. Nothing
coheres. But you take this youngster of yours, now--I call her
yours----"

"Do!" I interjected.

"Well, there's the opposite extreme! Susan links everything up,
everything she gets hold of--facts, fancies, guesses, feelings; the
whole psychic menagerie. Chains them all together somehow, and seems to
think they'll get on comfortably in the same tent. Of course they
won't--can't--and that's the danger for her! But she's stimulating,
Hunt"--Phil always called me Hunt, as if just failing whole-heartedly to
accept me--"she's positively stimulating! A mind like that must be
trained; thoroughly, I mean. We must do our best for her."

The "we" amused me and--yes, I confess it--nettled me a little.

"Don't worry about that," I said, and more dryly than I had meant to;
"I'm combing the country now for a suitable governess."

"Governess!" Phil snorted. "You don't want a governess for Susan. You
want, for this job," he insisted, "a male intellect--a vigorous,
disciplined male intellect. Music, dancing, water colors--pshaw!
Deportment--how to enter a drawing-room! Fiddle-faddle! How to enter the
Kingdom of God! That's more Susan's style," cried Phil, with a most
unaccustomed heat.

I laughed at him.

"Are you willing to take her on, Phil?" I asked. "I believe it's been
done; Epicurus had a female pupil or two."

"I have taken her on," Phil replied, quite without resentment. "Hadn't
you noticed it?"

"Yes," I said; "only, it's the other way round."

"I've been appropriated, is that it?"

"Yes; by Susan. We all have, Phil. That vampire child is simply draining
us, my dear fellow."

"All right," said Phil, after a second's pause, "if she's a _spiritual_
vampire, so much the better. Only, she'll need a firm hand. We must give
her suck at regular hours; draw up a plan. You can tackle the languages,
if you like--aesthetics, and all that. I'll pin her down to math and
logic--teach her to _think_ straight. We can safely leave her to pick up
history and sociology and such things for herself. You've a middling
good library, and she'll browse."

"Oh, she'll browse! She's browsing now."

"Poetry?" demanded Phil, suspicion in his tone, anxiety in his eyes.
"If she runs amuck with poetry too soon, there's no hope for her. She'll
get to taking sensations for ideas, and that's fatal. A mind like
Susan's----"

What further he said I missed; a distant tinkle from the front-door bell
had distracted me.

It was Maltby Phar. He came out to us on the garden terrace, unexpected
and unannounced.

"Whether you like it or not," he sighed luxuriously, "I'm here for a
week. How's the great experiment--eh? Am I too late for the bust-up?"
Then he nodded to Phil. "How are you, Mr. Farmer? Delighted to meet an
old adversary! Shall it be swords or pistols this time? Or clubs? But I
warn you, I'm no fit foe; I'm soft. Making up our mammoth Christmas
Number in July always unnerves me. By the time I had looked over a dozen
designs for our cover this morning and found Gaspar, Melchior, and
Balthazar in every one of them, mounted on fancy camels, and heading for
an exaggerated star in the right upper dark-blue corner, I succumbed to
heat and profanity, turned 'em all face downward, shuffled 'em, grabbed
one at random, and then fled for solace! Solace," he added, dropping
into a wicker armchair, "can begin, if you like, by taking a cool,
mellow, liquid form."

I rang.

Phil, I saw, was looking annoyed. He disliked Maltby Phar, openly
disliked him; so I felt certain--I was perhaps rather hoping--that he
would take this opportunity to escape. With Phil I was never then
entirely at ease; but in those days I was wholly so with Maltby. Miss
Goucher answered my summons in person, and I suggested a sauterne cup
for my friends. Phil frowned on the suggestion, but Maltby beamed. The
ayes had it, and Miss Goucher, who had remained neutral, withdrew. It
was Phil's chance; yet he surprised me by settling back and refilling
his pipe.

"When you came, Mr. Phar," he said, his tone withdrawing toward
formality, "we were discussing the education of Susan."

"Then I came just in time!" cried Maltby.

"For what?" I queried.

"I may prevent a catastrophe. If you're really going to see this thing
through, Boz"--his name for me--"for God's sake do a little clear
thinking first! Don't drift. Don't flounder. Don't wallow. Scrap all
your musty, inbred prejudices once for all, and see that at least one
kid on this filthy old planet gets a plain, honest, unsentimentalized
account of what she is and what the world is. If you can bring yourself
to do that, Susan will be unique. She will be the first educated woman
in America."

"'What she is and what the world is,'" repeated Phil, slowly. "What is
the world, may I ask? And what is Susan?"

There was a felt tenseness in the moment; the hush before battle. We
leaned forward a little from our easy-chairs, and no one of us noticed
that Susan had slipped noiselessly to the window seat by the opened
library window which gave upon the terrace. But there, as we later
discovered, she was; and there, for the present silently, she remained.

"The world," began Maltby Phar sententiously, "is a pigsty."

"Very well," interrupted Phil; "I'll grant you that to start with. What
follows?"

"What we see about us," said Maltby.

"And what do we see?" asked Phil.

At this inopportune moment Miss Goucher reappeared, bearing a Sheffield
tray, on which stood three antique Venetian goblets, and a tall pitcher
of rare Bohemian glass, filled to the brim with an iced sauterne cup
garnished with fresh strawberries and thin disks of pineapple. Nothing
less suggestive of the conventional back-lot piggery could have been
imagined. By the time a table had been placed, our goblets filled, and
Miss Goucher had retired, Maltby had decided to try for a new opening.

"Excellent!" he resumed, having drained and refilled his goblet. "Now,
Mr. Farmer, if you really wish to know what the world is, and what Susan
is, I am ready. Have with you! And by the way, Boz," he interjected,
sipping his wine, "your new housekeeper is one in a thousand. Mrs.
Parrot was admirable; I've been absurdly regretting her loss. But Mrs.
Parrot never quite rose to _this_!"

Phil's tongue clicked an impatient protest against the roof of his
mouth. "I am still unenlightened, Mr. Phar."

"True," said Maltby. "That's the worst of you romantic idealists. It's
your permanent condition." He settled back in his chair, and fell to his
old trick of slowly caressing the back of his left hand with the palm of
his right. "The world, my dear Mr. Farmer," he continued, "the universe,
indeed, as we have come gradually to know it, is an infinity of blindly
clashing forces. They have always existed, they will always exist; they
have always been blind, and they always will be. Anything may happen in
such an infinity, and we--this world of men and microbes--are one of the
things which has temporarily happened. It's regrettable, but it is so.
And though there is nothing final we can do about it, and very little in
any sense, still--this curious accident of the human intellect enables
us to do something. We can at least admit the plain facts of our
horrible case. Here, a self-realizing accident, we briefly are. Death
will dissipate us one by one, and the world in due time. That much we
know. But while we last, why must we add imaginary evils to our real
ones, and torment ourselves with false hopes and ridiculous fears?

"Why can't each one of us learn to say: 'I am an accident of no
consequence in a world that means nothing. I might be a stone, but I
happen to be a man. Hence, certain things give me pleasure, others pain.
And, obviously, in an accidental, meaningless world I can owe no duty to
anyone but myself. I owe it to myself to get as much pleasure and to
avoid as much pain as possible. Unswerving egotism should be my law.'"
He paused to sip again, with a side glance toward Phil.

"Elementary, all this, I admit. I apologize for restating it to a
scholar. But such are the facts as science reveals them--are they not?
You have to try somehow to go beyond science to get round them. And
where do you go--you romantic idealists? Where _can_ you go? Nowhere
outside of yourselves, I take it. So you plunge, perforce, down below
the threshold of reason into a mad chaos of instinct and desire and
dream. And what _there_ do you find? Bugaboos, my dear sir, simply
bugaboos: divine orders, hells, heavens, purgatories, moral
sanctions--all the wild insanity, in two words, that had made our
wretched lives even less worth living than they could and should be!"

"_Should?_ Why _should_?" asked Phil. "Granting your universe, who gives
a negligible damn for a little discomfort more or less?"

"I do!" Maltby asserted. "I want all the comfort I can get; and I could
get far more in a world of clear-seeing, secular egotists than I can in
this mixed mess of superstitious, sentimental idealists which we choose
to call civilized society! Take just one minor practical illustration:
Say that some virgin has wakened my desire, and I hers. In a reasonable
society we could give each other a certain amount of passing
satisfaction. But do we do it? No. The virgin has been taught to believe
in a mystical, mischievous something, called Purity! To follow her
natural instinct would be a sin. If you sin and get caught on earth,
society will punish you; and if you don't get caught here, you'll
infallibly get caught hereafter--and then God will punish you. So the
virgin tortures herself and tortures me--unless I'm willing to marry
her, which would be certain to prove the worst of tortures for us both.
And there you are."

It was at this point that Susan spoke from her window.

"Pearl and papa weren't married, Mr. Phar; but they didn't get much fun
out of not being."

I confess that I felt a nervous chill start at the base of my spine and
shiver up toward my scalp. Even Phil, the man of Indian gravity, looked
for an instant perturbed.

"Susan!" I demanded sharply. "Have you been listening?"

"Mustn't I listen?" asked Susan. "Why not? Are you cross, Ambo?"

"The mischief's done," said Phil to me quietly; "better not make a point
of it."

"Please don't be cross, Ambo," Susan pleaded, slipping through the
window to the terrace and coming straight over to me. "Mr. Phar feels
just the way papa did about things; only papa couldn't talk so
splendidly. He had a very poor vocabulary"--"Vocabulary!" I
gasped--"except nasty words and swearing. But he meant just what Mr.
Phar means, _inside_."

Phil, as she ended, began to make strange choking noises and retired
suddenly into his handkerchief. Maltby put down his glass and stared at
Susan.

"Young person," he finally said, "you ought to be spanked! Don't you
know it's an unforgivable sin to spy on your elders!"

"But you don't believe in sin," responded Susan calmly, without the
tiniest suspicion of pertness in her tone or bearing. "You believe in
doing what you want to. _I_ wanted to hear what you were saying, Mr.
Phar."

"Of course you did!" Phil struck in. "But next time, Susan, as a
concession to good manners, you might let us know you're in the
neighborhood--?"

Susan bit her lower lip very hard before she managed to reply.

"Yes. I will next time. I'm sorry, Phil." (_Phil!_) Then she turned to
Maltby. "But I wasn't spying! I just didn't know you would any of you
mind."

"We don't, really," I said. "Sit down, dear. You're always welcome." I
had been doing some stiff, concentrated thinking in the last three
minutes, and now I had taken the plunge. "The truth is, Susan," I went
on, "that most children who live in good homes, who are what is called
'well brought up,' are carefully sheltered from any facts or words or
thoughts which their parents do not consider wholesome or pleasant.
Parents try to give their children only what they have found to be best
in life; they try to keep them in ignorance of everything else."

"But they can't," said Susan. "At least, they couldn't in Birch Street."

"No. Nor elsewhere. But they try. And they always make believe to
themselves that they have succeeded. So it's supposed to be very
shocking and dangerous for a girl of your age to listen to the free
conversation of men of our age. That's the reason we all felt a little
guilty, at first, when we found you'd been overhearing us."

"How funny," said Susan. "Papa never cared."

"Good for him!" exclaimed Maltby. "I didn't feel guilty, for one! I
refuse to be convicted of so hypocritically squeamish a reaction!"

"Oh!" Susan sighed, almost with rapture. "You know such a lot of words,
Mr. Phar! You can say anything."

"Thanks," said Maltby; "I rather flatter myself that I can."

"And you _do_!" grunted Phil. "But words," he took up the dropped
threads rather awkwardly, "are nothing in themselves, Susan. You are too
fond of mere words. It isn't words that matter; it's ideas."

"Yes, Phil," said Susan meekly, "but I love words--best of all when
they're pictures."

Phil frowned, without visible effect upon Susan. I saw that her mind had
gone elsewhere.

"Ambo?"

"Yes, dear?"

"You mustn't ever worry about me, Ambo. My hearing or knowing things--or
saying them. I--I guess I'm different."

Maltby's face was a study in suppressed amazement; Phil was still
frowning. It was all too much for me, and I laughed--laughed from the
lower ribs!

Susan laughed with me, springing from her chair to throw her arms
tightly round my neck in one big joyous suffocating hug!

"Oh, Ambo!" she cried, breathless. "Isn't it going to be fun--all of
us--together--now we can _talk_!"


VI

The following evening, after dinner, Maltby Phar, still a little ruffled
by Susan's unexpected vivacities of the night before, retired to the
library with pipe and book, and Susan and I sat alone together on the
garden terrace. It was dusk. The heavy air of the past week had been
quickened and purified by an afternoon thunderstorm. Little cool puffs
came to us across a bed of glimmering white phlox, bearing with them its
peculiar, loamy fragrance. Smoke from my excellent cigarette eddied now
and then toward Susan.

Silence had stolen upon her as the afterglow faded, revealing the first
patient stars. Already I had learned to respect Susan's silences. She
was not, in the usual sense of uncertain temper, of nervous
irritability, a moody child; yet she had her moods--moods, if I may put
it so, of extraordinary definition. There were hours, not too frequent
to be disturbing, when she _withdrew_; there is no better word for it.
At such times her thin, alert little frame was motionless; she would sit
as if holding a pose for a portrait, her chin a trifle lifted, her eyes
focusing on no visible object, her hands lying--always with the palms
upward--in her lap. I supposed that now, with the veiled yet sharply
scented dusk, such a mood had crept upon her. But for once I was
mistaken. Susan, this time, had not withdrawn; she was intensely aware.

"Ambo"--the suddenness with which she spoke startled me--"you ought to
have lots of children. You ought to have a boy, anyway; not just a
girl."

"A boy? Why, dear? Are you lonely?"

"Of course not; with you--and Phil!"

"Then whatever in the world put such a crazy----"

Susan interrupted; a bad habit of hers, never subsequently broken, and
due, doubtless, to an instinctive impatience of foreseeable remarks.

"You're so awfully rich, Ambo. You could have dozens and not feel
it--except that they'd get in your way sometimes and make your outside
cross. But two wouldn't be much more trouble than one. It might seem a
little crowded--at first; but after while, Ambo, you'd hardly notice
it."

"Possibly. Still--nice boys don't grow on bushes, Susan. Not the kind of
brothers I should have to insist upon for you!"

"I'm not so fussy as all that," said Susan. "And it isn't fair that I
should have everything. Besides, Ambo, boys are much nicer than girls.
Honestly they are."

"Oh, are they! I'm afraid you haven't had much experience with boys!
Most of them are disgusting young savages. Really, Susan! Their hands
and feet are too big for them, and their voices don't fit. They're
always breaking things--irreplaceable things for choice, and raising the
devil of a row. Take my word for it, dear, please. I'm an ex-boy myself;
I know all about 'em! They were never created for civilized human
companionship. Why, I'd rather give you a young grizzly bear and be done
with it, than present you with the common-or-garden brother! But if
you'd like a nice quiet little sister some day, maybe----"

"I wouldn't," said Susan.

She was silent again for several moments, pondering. I observed her
furtively. Nothing was more distant from my desire than any addition, of
any age, male or female, to my present family. Heaven, in its great and
unwonted kindness, had sent me Susan; she was--to my thinking--perfect;
and she was enough. Whether in art or in life I am no lover of an
avoidable anticlimax. But Susan's secret purposes were not mine.

"Ambo," she resumed, "I guess if you'd ever lived in Birch Street you'd
feel differently about boys."

"I doubt it, Susan."

"I'm sure you'd feel differently about Jimmy."

"Jimmy?"

"Jimmy Kane, Ambo--_my_ Jimmy. Haven't I ever told you about him?"

Guilefully, persuasively, she edged her chair nearer to mine.

It was then that I first learned of Jimmy's battle for Susan, of the
bloody but righteous downfall of Giuseppe Gonfarone, and of many another
incident long treasured in the junior annals of Birch Street. Thus,
little by little, though the night deepened about us, my eyes were
unsealed. What a small world I had always lived in! For how long had it
seemed to me that romance was--approximately--dead! My fingers tightened
on Susan's, while the much-interrogated stars hung above us in their
mysterious orbits and---- But no, that is the pathetic fallacy.
Stars--are they not matter, merely? They could not smile.

"Don't you truly think, Ambo," suggested Susan, "that Jimmy ought to
have a better chance? If he doesn't get it, he'll have to work in a
factory all his life. And here I am--with you!"

"Yes. But consider, Susan--there are thousands of boys like Jimmy. I
can't father them all, you know."

"I don't want you to father them all," said Susan; "and there isn't
anybody like Jimmy! You'll see."

It came over me as she spoke that I was, however unwillingly,
predestined to see.

Maltby Phar thought otherwise. That night, after Susan had gone up to
bed, I talked the thing over with him--trying for an airy, detached
tone; the tone of one who discusses an indifferent matter for want of a
more urgent. Maltby was not, I fear, deceived.

"My dear Boz," he pleaded, "buck up! Get a fresh grip on your
individuality and haul it back from the brink of destruction! If you
don't, that little she-demon above-stairs will push it over into the
gulf, once for all! You'll be nobody. You'll be her dupe--her slave. How
can you smile, man! I'm quite serious, and I warn you. Fight the good
fight! Defend the supreme rights of your ego, before it's too late!"

"Why these tragic accents?" I parried. "It's not likely the washlady's
kid would want to come; or his mother let him. Susan idealizes him, of
course. He's probably quite commonplace and content as he is. No harm,
though, if it pleases Susan, in looking him over?"

Maltby took up his book again. He dismissed me. "Whom the gods
destroy----" he muttered, and ostentatiously turned a page.


VII

My feeling that I was predestined to see, with Susan, that there wasn't
anybody like Jimmy--that I was further predestined to take him into my
heart and home--proved, very much to my own surprise and to the
disappointment of Susan, to be unjustified. This was the first bitter
defeat that Susan had been called upon to bear since leaving Birch
Street. She took it quietly, but deeply, which troubled my private sense
of relief, and indeed turned it into something very like regret. The
simple fact was that much had happened in Birch Street since the tragedy
of the four-room house; life had not stood still there; chance and
change--deaths and marriages and births--had altered the circumstances
of whole families. In short, that steady flux of mortality, which
respects neither the dignity of the Hillhouse Avenues nor the obscurity
of the Birch Streets of the world, had in its secret courses already
borne Jimmy Kane--elsewhere. Precisely where, even his mother did not
know; and first and last it was her entire and passionate ignorance as
to Jimmy's present location which foiled us. "West" is a geographical
expression certainly, but it is not an address.

Jimmy's mother lived with her unwashed brood, you will remember, above
old Heinze's grocery store, and on the following afternoon I ran Susan
over there for a tactful reconnaissance. At Susan's request we went
slowly along Birch Street from its extreme right end to its ultimate
wrong, crossing the waste land and general dump at the base of East
Rock--historic ground!--mounting the long incline beyond, and so passing
the four-room house, which now seemed to be occupied by at least three
families of that hardy, prolific race discourteously known to young
America as "wops." Throughout this little tour Susan withdrew, and I
respected her silence. She had not yet spoken when we stopped at
Heinze's corner and descended.

Here first it was that forebodings of chance and change met us upon the
pavement, in the person of old Heinze himself, standing melancholy and
pensive before the screened doorway of his domain. Him Susan accosted.
He did not at first recognize her, but recollection returned to him as
she spoke.

"_Ach_, so!" he exclaimed, peering with mildest surprise above
steel-rimmed spectacles. "Id iss you--nod? Leedle Susanna!"

My formal introduction followed; nor was it without a glow of
satisfaction that I heard old Heinze assure me that he had read certain
of my occasional essays with attention and respect. "Ard for ard--yah!
Dot iss your credo," he informed me, with tranquil noddings of his
bumpy, oddly shaped skull. "Dot iss der credo of all arisdograds. Id iss
nod mine."

But Susan was in no mood for general ideas; she descended at once to
particulars, and announced that we were going up to see Mrs. Kane. Then
old Heinze snaggily, and I thought rather wearily, smiled.

"_Aber_," he objected, lifting twisted, rheumatic hands, "dere iss no
more such a vooman! Alretty, leedle Susanna, I haf peen an oldt fool
like oders. I haf made her my vife." And though he continued to smile,
he also sighed.

Our ensuing interview with Frau Heinze, formerly the Widow Kane, fully
interpreted this sigh. Prosperity, Susan later assured me, had not
improved her. She greeted us, above the shop, in her small, shiny,
colored lithograph of a parlor, with unveiled suspicion. Her eyes were
hostile. She seemed to take it for granted, did Mrs. Heinze, that we
could have no kindly purpose in intruding upon her. A dumpy, grumpy
little woman, with the parboiled hands and complexion of long years at
the wash-tubs, her present state of comparative freedom from bondage had
not lightened her heart. Her irritability, I told Susan after our
escape, was doubtless due to the fact that she could not share in old
Heinze's intellectual and literary tastes. Susan laughed.

"She wouldn't bother much about that; Birch Street's never lonely, and
it's only a step to the State Street movies. No; I think it's corsets."

Corsets? The word threw a flood of light. I saw at once that it must be
a strain upon any disposition to return after a long and figureless
widowhood to the steel, buckram, and rebellious curves of conventional
married life. I remembered the harnesslike creaking of Mrs. Heinze's
waistline, and forgave her much.

There was really a good deal to forgive. It was neither Susan's fault
nor mine that turned our call into a bad quarter of an hour. I had
looked for a pretty scene as I mounted the stairs behind Susan. I had
pictured the child, in her gay summer frock, bursting like sunshine into
Mrs. Heinze's stuffy quarters--and so forth. Nothing of the kind
occurred.

"Who is ut?" demanded Mrs. Heinze, peering forth. "Oh, it's you--Bob
Blake's girl. What do you want?" Susan explained. "Well, come in then,"
said Mrs. Heinze.

Susan, less daunted than I by her reception, marched in and asked at
once for Jimmy. At the sound of his name Mrs. Heinze's suspicions were
sharply focused. If the gentleman knew anything about Jimmy, all right,
let him say so! It wouldn't surprise her to hear he'd been gettin'
himself into trouble! It would surprise her much more, she implied, if
he had not. But if he had, she couldn't be responsible--nor Heinze
either, the poor man! Jimmy was sixteen--a man grown, you might say. Let
him look after himself, then; and more shame to him for the way he'd
acted!

But what way he had acted, and why, Susan at first found it difficult to
determine.

"Oh!" she at length protested, following cloudy suggestions of evil
courses. "Jimmy couldn't do anything mean! You know he couldn't. It
isn't in him!"

"Isn't ut indeed! Me slavin' for him and the childer ever since Kane was
took off sudden--and not a cint saved for the livin'--let alone the
dead! Slavin' and worritin'--the way you'd think Jimmy'd 'a' jumped wid
joy when Heinze offered! And an easier man not to be found--though he's
got his notions. What man hasn't? If it's not one thing, it's another.
'Except his beer, he don't drink much,' I says to Jimmy; 'and that's
more than I could say for your own father, rest his soul!' 'My father
wasn't a Dutchman,' Jimmy says; givin' me his lip to me face. 'He didn't
talk out against the Pope,' he says. 'Nor the Pris'dint,' he says. 'He
wasn't a stinkin' Socialist,' he says--usin' them very words! 'No,' I
says, 'he was a Demycrat--and what's ut to you? All men'll be blatherin'
polytics after hours,' I says. 'Heinze manes no harm by ut, no more nor
the rest. 'Tis just his talk,' I says. And after that we had more words,
and I laid me palm to his head."

"Oh!" cried Susan.

"I'll not take lip from a son of mine, Susan Blake; nor from you, wid
all your grand clothes! I've seen you too often lackin' a modest stitch
to your back!"

I hastened to intervene.

"We'll not trouble you longer, Mrs. Heinze, if you'll only be good
enough to tell me where Jimmy is now. He was very kind to Susan once,
and she wants to thank him in some way. I've a proposition to make
him--which might be to his advantage."

"Oh--so that's ut at last! Well, Susan Blake, you've had the grand luck
for the likes of you! But you're too late. Jimmy's gone."

"Gone?"

"'Tis the gratitude I get for raisin' him! Gone he is, wid what he'd
laid by--twinty-sivin dollars--and no word to nobody. There's a son for
ye!"

"But--oh, Mrs. Heinze--gone _where_?"

"West. That's all I know," said Mrs. Heinze. "He left a line to say he'd
gone West. We've not had a scrap from him since. If he comes to a bad
end----"

"Jimmy won't come to a bad end!" struck in Susan sharply. "He did just
right to leave you. Good-by." With that she seized my arm and swept me
with her from the room.

"Glory be to God! Susan Blake--the airs of her now!" followed us
shrilly, satirically, down the stairs.


VIII

Maltby's visit came to an end, and for the first time I did not regret
his departure. For some reason, which perhaps purposely I left
unanalyzed, Maltby was beginning to get a trifle on my nerves. But let
that pass. Once he was gone, Phil Farmer drew a long breath and plunged
with characteristic thoroughness into his comprehensive scheme for the
education of Susan. Her enthusiasm for this scheme was no less
contagious than his own, and I soon found myself yielding to her wish to
stay on in New Haven through the summer, and let in for daily lessons at
regular hours--very much to my astonishment, the role of schoolmaster
being one which I had always flattered myself I was temperamentally
unfitted to sustain.

I soon discovered, however, that teaching a mentally alert, whimsically
unexpected, stubbornly diligent, and always grateful pupil is among the
most stimulating and delightful of human occupations. My own psychic
laziness, which had been long creeping upon me, vanished in this new
atmosphere of competition--competition, for that is what it came to,
with the unwearying Phil. It was a real renascence for me. Forsaken
gods! how I studied--off hours and on the sly! My French was excellent,
my Italian fair; but my small Latin and less Greek needed endless
attention. Yet I rather preen myself upon my success; though Phil has
always maintained that I overfed Susan with aesthetic flummery, thus
dulling the edge of her appetite for his own more wholesome daily bread.

In one respect, at least, I disagreed fundamentally with Phil, and
here--through sheer force of conviction--I triumphed. Phil, who lived
exclusively in things of the mind, would have turned this sensitive
child into a bemused scholar, a female bookworm. This, simply, I would
not and did not permit. If she had a soul, she had a body, too, and I
was determined that it should be a vigorous, happy body before all else.
For her sake solely--for I am too easily an indolent man--I took up
riding again, and tennis, and even pushed myself into golf; with the
result that my nervous dyspepsia vanished, and my irritability along
with it; with the more excellent result that Susan filled and bloomed
and ate (for her) three really astonishing meals a day.

It was a busy life--a wonderful life! Hard work--hard
play--fun--travel.... Ah, those years!

But I am leaping ahead----!

Yet I have but one incident left to record of those earliest days with
Susan--an incident which had important, though delayed,
results--affecting in various ways, for long unforeseen, Susan's career,
and the destiny of several other persons, myself among them.

Sonia, Susan's little Russian maid, was at the bottom of it all; and
the first hint of the rather sordid affair came to me, all unprepared,
from the lips of Miss Goucher. She sought me out in my private study,
whither I had retired after dinner to write a letter or two--a most
unusual proceeding on her part, and on mine--and she asked at once in
her brief, hard, respectful manner for ten minutes of my time. I rose
and placed a chair for her, uncomfortably certain that this could be no
trivial errand; she seated herself, angularly erect, holding her
feelings well in hand.

"Mr. Hunt," she began, "have I your permission to discharge Sonia?"

My face showed my surprise.

"But Susan likes her, doesn't she, Miss Goucher? And she seems
efficient?"

"Yes. A little careless perhaps; but then, she's young. It isn't her
service I object to."

"What is the trouble?"

"It is a question of character, Mr. Hunt. I have reason to think her
lacking in--self-respect."

"You mean--immoral?" I asked, using the word in the restricted sense
which I assumed Miss Goucher, like most maiden ladies, exclusively
attached to it. To my astonishment Miss Goucher insisted upon more
definition.

"No, I shouldn't say that. She tells a good many little fibs, but she's
not at heart dishonest. And I'm by no means certain she can be held
responsible for her weakness in respect to men." A slight flush just
tinged Miss Goucher's prominent cheek bones; but duty was duty, and she
persevered. "She has a bad inheritance, I think; and until she came
here, Mr. Hunt, her environment was always--unfortunate. If it were not
for Susan, I shouldn't have spoken. I should have felt it my duty to try
to protect the child and---- However," added Miss Goucher, "I doubt
whether much can be done for Sonia. So my first duty is certainly to
Miss Susan, and to you."

Susan's quiet admiration for Miss Goucher had more or less puzzled me
hitherto, but now my own opinion of Miss Goucher soared heavenward. Why,
the woman was remarkable--far more so than I had remotely suspected! She
had a mind above her station, respectable though her station might well
be held to be.

"My dear Miss Goucher," I exclaimed, "it is perfectly evident to me
that my interests are more than safe in your keeping. Do what you think
best, by all means!"

"Unfortunately, Mr. Hunt," said Miss Goucher, "that is what I cannot
do."

"May I ask why?"

"Society would not permit me," answered Miss Goucher.

"Please explain," I gasped.

"Sonia will cause a great deal of suffering in the world," said Miss
Goucher, the color on her cheek bones deepening, while she avoided my
glance. "For herself--and others. In my opinion--which I am aware is not
widely shared--she should be placed in a lethal chamber and painlessly
removed. We are learning to 'swat the fly,'" continued Miss Goucher,
"because it benefits no one and spreads many human ills. Some day we
shall learn to swat--other things." Calmly she rose to take her leave.
Excitedly eager, I sprang up to detain her.

"Don't go, Miss Goucher! Your views are really most interesting--though,
as you say, not widely accepted. Certainly not by me. Your plan of a
lethal chamber for weak sisters and brothers strikes me as--well,
drastic. Do sit down."

Again Miss Goucher perched primly upright on the outer edge of the chair
beside my own. "I felt bound to state my views truthfully," she said,
"since you asked for them. But I never intrude them upon others. I'm not
a social rebel, Mr. Hunt. I lack self-confidence for that. When I differ
from the received opinion I always suspect that I am quite wrong.
Probably I am in this case. But I think society would agree with me that
Sonia is not a fit maid for Susan."

"Beyond a shadow of doubt," I assented. "But may I ask on what grounds
you suspect Sonia?"

"It is certainly your right," replied Miss Goucher; "but if you insist
upon an answer I shall have to give notice."

"Then I shall certainly not insist."

"Thank you, Mr. Hunt," said Miss Goucher, rising once more. "I
appreciate this." And she walked from the room.

It was the next afternoon that Susan burst into my study without
knocking--a breach of manners which she had recently learned to conquer,
so the irruption surprised me. But I noted instantly that Susan's
agitation had carried her far beyond all thought for trifles. Never had
I seen her like this. Her whole being was vibrant with emotional stress.

"Ambo!" she cried, all but slamming the door behind her. "Sonia mustn't
go! I won't let her go! You and Miss Goucher may think what you
please--I won't, Ambo! It's wicked! You don't want Sonia to be like
Tilly Jaretski, do you?"

"Like Tilly Jaretski?" My astonishment was so great that I babbled the
unfamiliar name merely to gain time, collect my senses.

"Yes!" urged Susan, almost leaping to my side, and seizing my arm with
tense fingers. "She'll be just like Tilly was, along State Street--after
her baby came. Tilly wasn't a bit like Pearl, Ambo; and Sonia isn't
either! But she's going to have a baby, too, Ambo, like Tilly."

With a wrench of my entire nervous system I, in one agonizing second,
completely dislocated the prejudices of a lifetime, and rose to the
situation confronting me. O Hillhouse Avenue, right at both ends! How
little you had prepared me for this precocious knowledge of
life--knowledge that utterly degrades or most wonderfully saves--which
these children, out toward the wrong end of the Birch Streets of the
world, drink in almost with their mothers' milk! How far I, a grown
man--a cultured, sophisticated man--must travel, Susan, even to begin to
equal your simple acceptance of naked, ugly fact--sheer fact--seen,
smelt, heard, tasted! How far--how far!

"Susan," I said gravely, "does Miss Goucher know about Sonia?"

"I don't know. I suppose so. I haven't seen her yet. When Sonia came to
me, crying--I ran straight in here!"

"And how long have _you_ known?"

"Over a week. Sonia told me all about it, Ambo. Count Dimbrovitski got
her in trouble. She loved him, Ambo--her way. She doesn't any more.
Sonia can't love anybody long; he can't, either. That's why his wife
sent Sonia off. Sonia says she knows her husband's like that, but so
long as she can hush things up, she doesn't care. Sonia says she has a
lover herself, and Count Dim doesn't care much either. Oh, Ambo--how
_stuffy_ some people are! I don't mean Sonia. She's just pitiful--like
Tilly. But those others--they're different--I can feel it! Oh, how
_Artemis_ must hate them, Ambo!"

Susan's tense fingers relaxed, slipping from my arm; she slid down to
the floor, huddled, and leaning against the padded side of my chair
buried her face in her hands.

Very quietly I rose, not to disturb her, and crossing to the interphone
requested Miss Goucher's presence. My thoughts raced crazily on. In
advance of Miss Goucher's coming I had dramatized my interview with her
in seven different and unsatisfactory ways. When she at last entered, my
temple pulses were beating and my tongue was stiff and dry. Susan,
except for her shaken shoulders, had not stirred.

"Miss Goucher," I managed to begin, "shut the door, please.... You see
this poor child----?"

Miss Goucher saw. Over her harsh, positive features fell a sort of
transforming veil. It seemed to me suddenly--if for that moment
only--that Miss Goucher was very beautiful.

"If you wouldn't mind," she suggested, "leaving her with me?"

Well, I had not in advance dramatized our meeting in this way. In all
the seven scenes that had flashed through me, I had stood, an
unquestioned star, at the center of the stage. I had not foreseen an
exit. But I most humbly and gratefully accepted one now.

Precisely what took place, what words were said there, in my study,
following my humble exit, I have never learned, either from Miss Goucher
or from Susan. I know only that from that hour forth the bond between
them became what sentimentalists fondly suppose the relationship between
mother and daughter must always be--what, alas, it so rarely, but then
so beautifully, is.

I date from that hour Miss Goucher's abandonment of her predilection for
the lethal chamber; at least, she never spoke of it again. And Sonia
stayed with us. Her boy was born in my house, and there for three happy
years was nourished and shamelessly spoiled; at the end of which time
Sonia found a husband in the person of young Jack Palumbo,
unquestionably the pick of all our Hillhouse Avenue chauffeurs. Their
marriage caused a brief scandal in the neighborhood, but was soon
accepted as an authentic and successful fact.

Chance and change are not always villains, you observe; the
temperamental Sonia has grown stout and placid, and has increased the
world's legitimate population by three. Nevertheless, it is the
consensus of opinion that little Ivan, her first-born, is the golden
arrow in her quiver--an opinion in which Jack Palumbo delightedly, if
rather surprisingly, concurs.

And so much for Sonia.... Let the curtain quietly descend. When it rises
again, six years will have passed; good years--and therefore unrecorded.
Your scribe, Susan, is now nearing forty; and you---- Great heavens, is
it possible! Can you be "going on"--twenty?

Yes, dear---- You are.




THE THIRD CHAPTER


I

IT was October; the year, 1913. Susan, Miss Goucher and I had just
returned from Liverpool on the good ship "Lusitania"--there was a good
ship "Lusitania" in those days--after a delightful summer spent in Italy
and France. Susan and I entirely agree that the season for Italy is
midsummer. Italy is not Italy until she has drunk deep of the sun; until
a haze of whitest dust floats up from the slow hoofs of her white oxen
along Umbrian or Tuscan roads. You will never get from her churches all
they can give unless they have been to you as shadows of great rocks in
a weary land. To step from reverberating glare to vast cool dimness--ah,
that is to know at last the meaning of sanctuary!

But to step from a North River pier into a cynical taxi, solely
energized by our great American principle of "Take a chance!"--to be
bumped and slithered by that energizing principle across the main
traffic streams of impatient New York--that is to reawaken to all the
doubt and distraction, the implacable multiplicity of a scientifically
disordered world!

New Haven was better; Hillhouse Avenue preserving especially--through
valorous prodigies of rejection--much of its ancient, slightly
disdainful, studiously inconspicuous calm.

Phil Farmer was waiting for us at the doorstep. For all his inclusive
greeting, his warm, welcoming smile, he looked older, did Phil, leaner
somehow, more finely drawn. There was a something hungry about
him--something in his eyes. But if Susan, who notices most things, noted
it, she did not speak of her impression to me. She almost hugged Phil as
she jumped out to greet him and dragged him with her up the steps to the
door.

And now, if this portion of Susan's history is to be truthfully
recorded, certain facts may as well be set down at once, clearly, in due
order, without shame.

1. Phil Farmer was, by this time, hopelessly in love with Susan.

2. So was Maltby Phar.

3. So was I.

It should now be possible for a modest but intelligent reader to follow
the approaching pages without undue fatigue.


II

Susan never kept a diary, she tells me, but she had, like most beginning
authors, the habit of scribbling things down, which she never intended
to keep, and then could seldom bring herself to destroy. To a writer all
that his pen leaves behind it seems sacred; it is, I treacherously
submit, a private grief to any of us to blot a line. Such is our vanity.
However inept the work which we force ourselves or are prevailed upon to
destroy, the unhappy doubt always lingers: "If I had only saved it? One
can't be sure? Perhaps posterity----?"

Susan, thank God, was not and probably is not exempt from this folly. It
enables me from this time forward to present certain passages--mere
scraps and jottings--from her notebooks, which she has not hesitated to
turn over to me.

"I don't approve, Ambo," was her comment, "but if you _will_ write
nonsense about me, I can't help it. What I can help, a little, is your
writing nonsense about yourself or Phil or the rest. It's only fair to
let me get a word in edgeways, now and then--if only for your sake and
theirs."

That is not, however, my own reason for giving you occasional peeps
into these notebooks of Susan's.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I'm beginning to wish that Shelley might have had a sense of humor.
'Epipsychidion' is really too absurd. 'Sweet benediction in the eternal
curse!' Imagine, under any condition of sanity, calling any woman that!
Or 'Thou star above the storm!'--beautiful as the image is. 'Thou storm
upon the star!' would make much worse poetry, but much better sense....
Isn't it strange that I can't feel this about Wordsworth? He was better
off without humor, for all his solemn-donkey spots--and it's better for
us that he didn't have it. It's probably better for us, too, that
Shelley didn't have it--but it wasn't better for _him_.
Diddle-diddle-dumpling--what stuff all this is! Go to bed, Susan."

       *       *       *       *       *

"There's no use pretending things are different, Susan Blake; you might
as well face them and see them through, open-eyed. What does being in
love mean?

"I suppose if one is really in love, head over heels, one doesn't care
what it means. But I don't like pouncing, overwhelming things--things
that crush and blast and scorch and blind. I don't like cyclones and
earthquakes and conflagrations--at least, I've never experienced any,
but I know I shouldn't like them if I did. But I don't think I'd be so
terribly afraid of them--though I might. I think I'd be more--sort
of--indignant--disgusted."

       *       *       *       *       *

Editor's Note: Such English! But pungent stylist as Susan is now
acknowledged to be, she is still, in the opinion of academic critics,
not sufficiently attentive to formal niceties of diction. She remains
too wayward, too impressionistic; in a word, too personal. I am inclined
to agree, and yet--am I?

       *       *       *       *       *

"It's all very well to stamp round declaiming that you're captain of
your soul, but if an earthquake--even a tiny one--comes and shakes your
house like a dice box and then scatters you and the family out of it
like dice--it wouldn't sound very appropriate for your epitaph. 'I am
the master of my fate' would always look silly on a tombstone. Why
aren't tombstones a good test for poetry--some poetry? I've never seen
anything on a tombstone that looked real--not even the names and dates.

"But _does_ love have to be like an earthquake? If it does, then it's
just a blind force, and I don't like blind forces. It's stupid to be
blind oneself; but it's worse to have blind stupid things butting into
one and pushing one about.

"Hang it, I don't believe love has to be stupid and blind, and go
thrashing through things! Ambo isn't thrashing through things--or Phil
either. But, of course, they wouldn't. That's exactly what I mean about
love; it can be tamed, civilized. No, not civilized--just tamed.
_Cowed?_ Then it's still as wild as ever underneath? I'm afraid it is.
Oh, dear!

"Phil and Ambo really are captains of their souls though, so far as
things in general let them be. _Things in general_--what a funny name
for God! But isn't God just a short solemn name for things in general?
There I go again. Phil says I'm always taking God's name in vain. He
thinks I lack reverence. I don't, really. What I lack is--reticence.
That's different--isn't it, Ambo?"

       *       *       *       *       *

The above extracts date back a little. The following were jotted early
in November, 1913, not long after our return from overseas.

       *       *       *       *       *

"This is growing serious, Susan Blake. Phil has asked you to marry him,
and says he needs you. Ditto Maltby; only he says he wants you. Which,
too obviously, he does. Poor Maltby--imagine his trying to stoop so low
as matrimony, even to conquer! As for Ambo--Ambo says nothing, bless
him--but I think he wants and needs you most of all. Well, Susan?"

       *       *       *       *       *

"Jimmy's back. I saw him yesterday. He didn't know me."

"Sex is a miserable nuisance. It muddles things--interferes with honest
human values. It's just Nature making fools of us for her own private
ends. These are not pretty sentiments for a young girl, Susan Blake!"

       *       *       *       *       *

"Speak up, Susan--clear the air! You are living here under false
pretenses. If you can't manage to feel like Ambo's daughter--you
oughtn't to stay."


III

It was perhaps when reticent Phil finally spoke to me of his love for
Susan that I first fully realized my own predicament--a most unpleasant
discovery; one which I determined should never interfere with Susan's
peace of mind or with the possible chances of other, more eligible, men.
As Susan's guardian, I could not for a moment countenance her receiving
more than friendly attention from a man already married, and no longer
young. A grim, confused hour in my study convinced me that I was an
impossible, even an absurd, _parti_. This conviction brought with it
pain so sharp, so nearly unendurable, that I wondered in my weakness how
it was to be unflinchingly borne. Yet borne it must be, and without
betrayal. It did not occur to me, in my mature folly, that I was
already, and had for long been, self-betrayed.

"Steady, you old fool!" whispered my familiar demon. "This isn't going
to be child's play, you know. This is an hour-by-hour torture you've set
out to grin and bear and live through. You'll never make the grade, if
you don't take cognizance in advance. The road's devilishly steep and
icy, and the corners are bad. What's more, there's no end to it; the
crest's never in sight. Clamp your chains on and get into low....
Steady!

"But, of course," whispered my familiar demon, "there's probably an
easier way round. Why attempt the impossible? Think what you've done for
Susan! Gratitude, my dear sir--affectionate gratitude--is a long step in
the right direction ... if it is the right direction. I don't say it is;
I merely suggest, _en passant_, that it may be. Suppose, for example,
that Susan----"

"Damn you!" I spat out, jumping from my chair. "You contemptible swine!"

Congested blood whined in my ears like a faint jeering laughter. I paced
the room, raging--only to sink down again, exhausted, my face and hands
clammy.

"What a hideous exhibition," I said, distinctly addressing a grotesque
porcelain Buddha on the mantelpiece. Contrary, I believe, to my
expectations, he did not reply. My familiar demon forestalled him.

"If by taking a merely conventional attitude," he murmured, "you defeat
the natural flowering of two lives----? Who are you to decide that the
voice of Nature is not also the voice of God? Supposing, for the moment,
that God is other than a poetic expression. If her eyes didn't haunt
you," continued my familiar demon, "or a certain way she has of turning
her head, like a poised poppy...."

As he droned on within me, the mantelpiece blurred and thinned to the
blue haze of a distant Tuscan hill, and the little porcelain Buddha sat
upon this hill, very far off now and changed oddly to the semblance of a
tiny huddled town. We were climbing along a white road toward that far
hill, that tiny town.

"Ambo," she was saying, "that isn't East Rock--it's Monte Senario. And
this isn't Birch Street--it's the Faenzan Way. How do you do it,
Ambo--you wonderful magician! Just with a wave of your wand you change
the world for me; you give me--all this!"

A bee droned at my ear: "Gratitude, my dear sir. Affectionate gratitude.
A long step."

"Damn you!" I whimpered.... But the grotesque porcelain Buddha was
there again, on the mantelshelf. The creases in his little fat belly
disgusted me; they were loathsome. I rose. "At least," I said to him, "I
can live without _you_!" Then I seized him and shattered him against the
fireplace tiles. It was an enormous relief.

Followed a knock at my door that I answered calmly: "Who is it? Come
in."

Miss Goucher never came to me without a mission; she had one now.

"Mr. Hunt," she said, "I should like to talk to you very plainly. May I?
It's about Susan." I nodded. "Mr. Hunt," she continued resolutely,
"Susan is in a very difficult position here. I don't say that she isn't
entirely equal to meeting it; but I dread the nervous strain for her--if
you understand?"

"Not entirely, Miss Goucher; perhaps, not at all."

"I was afraid of this," she responded unhappily. "But I must go on--for
her sake."

Knowing well that Miss Goucher would face death smiling for Susan's
sake, her repressed agitation alarmed me. "Good heavens!" I exclaimed.
"Is there anything really wrong?"

"A good deal." She paused, her lips whitening as she knit them together,
lest any ill-considered word should slip from her. Miss Goucher never
loosed her arrows at random; she always tried for the bull's-eye, and
usually with success.

"I am speaking in strict confidence--to Susan's protector and legal
guardian. Please try to fill in what I leave unsaid. It is very
unfortunate for Susan's peace of mind that you should happen to be a
married man."

"For _her_ peace of mind!"

"Yes."

"Wait! I daren't trust myself to fill in what you leave unsaid. It's
too--preposterous. Do you mean---- But you can't mean that you imagine
Susan to be in love with--her grandfather?" My heart pounded,
suffocating me; with fright, I think.

"No," said Miss Goucher, coldly; "Susan is not in love with her
grandfather. She is with you."

I could manage no response but an angry one. "That's a dangerous
statement, Miss Goucher! Whether true or not--it ruins everything. You
have made our life here together impossible."

"It is impossible," said Miss Goucher. "It became so last summer. I knew
then it could not go on much longer."

"But I question this! I deny that Susan feels for me more
than--gratitude and affection."

"Gratitude is rare," said Miss Goucher enigmatically, her eyes fixed
upon the fragments of Buddha littering my hearth. "True gratitude," she
added, "is a strong emotion. When it passes between a man and a woman,
it is like flame."

"Very interesting!" I snapped. "But hardly enough to have brought you
here to me with this!"

"She feels that you need her," said Miss Goucher.

"I do," was my reply.

"Susan doesn't need _you_," said Miss Goucher. "I don't wish to be
brutal; but she doesn't. In spite of this, she can easily stand alone."

"I see. And you think that would be best?"

"Naturally. Don't you?"

"I'm not so sure."

As I muttered this my eyes, too, fixed themselves on the fragments of
Buddha. Would the woman never go! I hated her; it seemed to me now that
I had always hated her. What was she after all but a superior kind of
servant--presuming in this way! The irritation of these thoughts swung
me suddenly round to wound her, if I might, with sarcasm, with implied
contempt. But it is impossible to wound the air. With her customary
economy of explanation Miss Goucher had, pitilessly, left me to myself.


IV

The evening of this already comfortless day I now recall as one of the
most exasperating of my life. Maltby Phar arrived for dinner and the
week-end--an exasperation foreseen; Phil came in after dinner--another;
but what I did not foresee was that Lucette Arthur would bring her
malicious self and her unspeakably tedious husband for a formal call.
Lucette was an old friend of Gertrude, and I always suspected that her
occasional evening visits were followed by a detailed report; in fact, I
rather encouraged them, and returned them promptly, hoping that they
were. In my harmless way of life even Lucette's talent for snooping
could find, I felt, little to feed upon, and it did not wholly displease
me that Gertrude should be now and then forced to recognize this.

The coming of Susan had, not unnaturally, for a time, provided Lucette
with a wealth of interesting conjecture; she had even gone so far as to
intimate that Gertrude felt I was making--the expression is entirely
mine--an ass of myself, which neither surprised nor disturbed me, since
Gertrude had always had a tendency to feel that my talents lay in that
direction. But, on the whole, up to this time--barring the Sonia
incident, which had afforded her a good deal of scope, but which, after
all, could not be safely misinterpreted--Lucette had found at my house
pretty thin pickings for scandal; and I could only wonder at the
unwearying patience with which she pursued her quest.

She arrived with poor Doctor Arthur in tow--Dr. Lyman Arthur, who
professed Primitive Eschatology in the School of Religion: eschatology
being "that branch of theology which treats of the end of the world and
man's condition or state after death"--just upon the heels of Phil, who
shot me a despairing glance as we rose to greet them.

But Susan, I thought, welcomed them with undisguised relief. She had
been surpassing herself before the fire, chatting blithely, wittily,
even a little recklessly; but there are gayer evenings conceivable than
one spent in the presence of three doleful men, two of whom have
proposed marriage to you, and one of whom would have done so if he were
not married already. Almost anything, even open espionage and covert
eschatology, was better than that.

Lucette--the name suggests Parisian vivacity, but she was really large
and physically languid and very blonde, scented at once, I felt, a
something faintly brimstoneish in the atmosphere of my model home, and
forthwith prepared herself for a protracted and pleasant evening. It so
happened that the Arthurs had never met Maltby, and Susan carried
through the ceremony of introduction with a fine swinging rhythm which
settled us as one group before the fire and for some moments at least
kept the conversation animated and general.

But Eschatology, brooding in the background, soon put an end to this
somewhat hectic social burst. The mere unnoted presence of Dr. Lyman
Arthur, peering nearsightedly in at the doorway on a children's party,
has been known, I am told, to slay youngling joy and turn little tots
self-conscious, so that they could no longer be induced by agonized
mothers to go to Jerusalem, or clap-in clap-out. His presence now,
gradually but surely, had much the same effect. Seated at Maltby's
elbow, he passed into the silence and drew us, struggling but helpless,
after him. For five horrible seconds nothing was heard but the impolite,
ironic whispering of little flames on the hearth. Was this man's
condition or state after death? Eschatology had conquered.

Susan, in duty bound as hostess, broke the spell, but it cannot be said
she rose to the occasion. "Is it a party in a parlor," she murmured
wistfully to the flames, "all silent and all--damned?"

Perceiving that Lucette supposed this to be original sin, I laughed much
more loudly than cheerfully, exclaiming "Good old Wordsworth!" as I did
so.

Then Maltby's evil genius laid hold on him.

"By the way," he snorted, "they tell me one of you academic ghouls has
discovered that Wordsworth had an illegitimate daughter--whatever _that_
means! Any truth in it? I hope so. It's the humanest thing I ever heard
about the old sheep!"

Doctor Arthur cleared his throat, very cautiously; and it was evident
that Maltby had not helped us much. Phil, in another vein, helped us
little more.

"I wonder," he asked, "if anyone reads Wordsworth now--except Susan?"

No one, not even Susan, seemed interested in this question; and the
little flames chuckled quietly once more.

Something had to be done.

"Doctor," I began, turning toward Eschatology, and knowing no more than
my Kazak hearthrug what I was going to say, "is it true that----"

"Undoubtedly," intoned Eschatology, thereby saving me from the pit I was
digging for myself. My incomplete question must have chimed with Doctor
Arthur's private reflections, and he seemed to suppose some
controversial matter under discussion. "Undoubtedly," he repeated....
"And what is even more important is this----"

But Lucette silenced him with a "Why is it, dear, that you always let
your cigar burn down at one side? It does look so untidy." And she
leaned to me. "What delightfully daring discussions you must all of you
have here together! You're all so terribly intellectual, aren't you? But
do you never talk of anything but books and art and ideas? I'm sure you
must," she added, fixing me with impenetrable blue eyes.

"Often," I smiled back; "even the weather has charms for us. Even food."

Her inquisitive upper lip curled and dismissed me.

"Why is it," she demanded, turning suddenly on Susan, "that I don't see
you round more with the college boys? They're much more suitable to your
age, you know, than Ambrose or Phil. I hope you don't frighten them off,
my dear, by mentioning Wordsworth? Boys dislike bluestockings; and
you're much too charming to wear them anyway. Oh, but you really are! I
must take charge of you--get you out more where you belong, away from
these dreadful old fogies!" Lucette laughed her languid, purring,
dangerous laughter. "I'm serious, Miss Blake. You musn't let them
monopolize you; they will if you're not careful. They're just selfish
enough to want to keep you to themselves."

The tone was badinage; but the remark struck home and left us
speechless. Lucette shifted the tiller slightly and filled her sails.
"Next thing you know, Miss Blake, they'll be asking you to marry them.
Individually, of course--not collectively. And, of course--not Ambrose!
At least you're safe there," she hastily added; "aren't you?"

Maltby, I saw, was furious; bent on brutalities. Before I could check
him, "Why?" he growled. "Why, Mrs. Arthur, do you assume that Susan is
safe with Boz?"

"Well," she responded with a slow shrug of her shoulders,
"naturally----"

"Unnaturally!" snapped Maltby. "Unless forbidden fruit has ceased to
appeal to your sex. I was not aware that it had."

Phil's eyes were signalling honest distress. Susan unexpectedly rose
from her chair. Deep spots of color burned on her cheeks, but she spoke
with dignity. "I have never disliked any conversation so much, Mrs.
Arthur. Good night." She walked from the room. Phil jumped up without a
word and hurried after her. Then we all rose.

It seemed, however, that apologies were useless. Doctor Arthur had no
need for them, since he had not perceived a slight, and was only too
happy to find himself released from bondage; as for Lucette, her assumed
frigidity could not conceal her flaming triumph. As a social being, for
the sake of the _mores_, she must resent Susan's snub; but I saw that
she would not have had things happen otherwise for a string of matched
pearls. At last, at last her patience had been rewarded! I could almost
have written for her the report to Gertrude--with nothing explicitly
stated, and nothing overlooked.

Maltby, after their departure, continued truculent, and having no one
else to rough-house decided to rough-house me. The lengthening absence
of Susan and Phil had much to do with his irritation, and something no
doubt with mine. For men of mature years we presently developed a very
pretty little gutter-snipe quarrel.

"Damn it, Boz," he summed his grievances, "it comes precisely to this:
You're playing dog in the manger here. By your attitude, by every kind
of sneaking suggestion, you poison Susan's mind against me. Hang it, I'm
not vain--but at least I'm presentable, and I've been called amusing.
Other women have found me so. And to speak quite frankly, it isn't every
man in my position who would offer marriage to a girl whose father----"

"I'd stop there, Maltby, if I were you!"

"My dear man, you and I are above such prejudices, of course! But it's
only common sense to acknowledge that they exist. Susan's the most
infernally seductive accident that ever happened on this middle-class
planet! But all the same, there's a family history back of her that not
one man in fifty would be able to forget. My point is, that with all her
seduction, physical and mental, she's not in the ordinary sense
marriageable. And it's the ordinary sense of such things that runs the
world."

"Well----"

"Well--there you are! I offer her far more than she could reasonably
hope for; or you for her. I'm well fixed, I know everybody worth
knowing; I can give her a good time, and I can help her to a career. It
strikes me that if you had Susan's good at heart, you'd occasionally
suggest these thing's to her--even urge them upon her. As her guardian
you must have some slight feeling of responsibility?"

"None whatever."

"What!"

"None whatever--so far as Susan's deeper personal life is concerned.
That is her affair, not mine."

"Then you'd be satisfied to have her throw herself away?"

"If she insisted, yes. But Susan's not likely to throw herself away."

"Oh, isn't she! Let me tell you this, Boz, once for all: You're in love
with the girl yourself, and though you may not know it, you've no
intention of letting anyone else have a chance."

"Well," I flashed, "if you were in my shoes--would _you_?"

The vulgarity of our give and take did not escape me, but in my then
state of rage I seemed powerless to escape vulgarity. I revelled in
vulgarity. It refreshed me. I could have throttled Maltby, and I am
quite certain he was itching to throttle me. We were both longing to
throttle Phil. Indeed, we almost leaped at him as he stopped in the hall
doorway to toss us an unnaturally gruff good night.

"Where's Susan?" I demanded.

"In your study," Phil mumbled, hunching into his overcoat; "she's
waiting to see you." Then he seized his shapeless soft hat and--the good
old phrase best describes it--made off.

"She's got to see me first!" Maltby hurled at me, coarsely, savagely, as
he started past.

I grabbed his arm and held him. It thrilled me to realize how soft he
was for all his bulk, to feel that physically I was the stronger.

"Wait!" I said. "This sort of thing has gone far enough. We'll stop
_grovelling_--if you don't mind! If we can't give Susan something better
than this, we've been cheating her. It's a pity she ever left Birch
Street."

Maltby stared at me with slowly stirring comprehension.

"Yes," he at length muttered, grudgingly enough; "perhaps you're right.
It's been an absurd spectacle all round. But then, life is."

"Wait for me here," I responded. "We'll stop butting at each other like
stags, and try to talk things over like men. I'm just going to send
Susan to bed."

That _was_ my intention. I went to her in the study as a big brother
might go, meaning good counsel. It was certainly not my intention to let
her run into my arms and press her face to my shoulder. She clung to me
with passion, but without joy, and her voice came through the tumult of
my senses as if from a long way off.

"Ambo, Ambo! You've asked nothing--and you want me most of all. I _must_
make somebody happy!"

It was the voice of a child.


V

I could not face Maltby again that evening, as I had promised, for our
good sensible man-to-man talk; a lapse in courage which reduced him to
rabid speculation and restless fury. So furious was he, indeed, after a
long hour alone, that he telephoned for a taxi, grabbed his suitcase,
and caught a slow midnight local for New York--from which electric
center he hissed back over the wires three ominous words to ruin my
solitary breakfast:

       *       *       *       *       *

          "He laughs best----        M. PHAR."

       *       *       *       *       *

While my egg solidified and the toast grew rigid I meditated a humble
apologetic reply, but in the end I could not with honesty compose one;
though I granted him just cause for anger. With that, for the time
being, I dismissed him. There were more immediate problems, threatening,
inescapable, that must presently be solved.

Susan, always an early riser, usually had a bite of breakfast at seven
o'clock--brought to her by the faithful Miss Goucher--and then remained
in her room to work until lunch time. For about a year past I had so far
caught the contagion of her example as to write in my study three hours
every morning; a regularity I should formerly have despised.
Dilettantism always demands a fine frenzy, but now it astounded me to
discover how much respectable writing one could do without waiting for
the spark from heaven; one could pass beyond the range of an occasional
article and even aspire to a book. Only the final pages of my first real
book--_Aristocracy and Art_, an essay in aesthetic and social
criticism--remained to be written; and Susan had made me swear by the
Quanglewangle's Hat, her favorite symbol, to push on with it each
morning till the job was done.

Well, _Aristocracy and Art_ has since been published and, I am glad to
say, forgotten. Conceived in superciliousness and swaddled in
preciosity, it is one of the sins I now strive hardest to expiate. But
in those days it expressed clearly enough the crusted aridity of my
soul. However----

I had hoped, of course, that Susan would break over this morning and
breakfast with me. She did not; and from sheer habit I took to my study
and found myself in the chair before my desk. It was my purpose to think
things out, and perhaps that is what I supposed myself to be doing as I
stared dully at an ink blob on my blotter. It looked--and I was
idiotically pleased by the resemblance--rather like a shark. All it
needed was some teeth and a pair of flukes for its tail. Methodically I
opened my fountain pen and supplied these, thereby reducing one fragment
of chaos to order; and then my eye fell upon a half-scribbled sheet,
marked "Page 224."

The final sentence on the sheet caught at me and annoyed me; it was
ill-constructed. Presently it began to rearrange itself in whatever
portion of us it is that these shapings and reshapings take place.
Something in its rhythm, too, displeased me; it was mannered; it
minuetted; it echoed Pater at his worst. It should be simpler, stronger.
Why, naturally! I lopped at it, compressed it, pulled it about....

There! At last the naked idea got the clean expression it deserved; and
it led now directly to a brief, clear paragraph of transition. I had
been worrying over that transition the morning before when my pen
stopped; now it came with a smooth rush, carrying me forward and on.

Incredible, but for one swiftly annihilated hour I forgot all my
insoluble life problems! Art, that ancient Circe, had waved her wand; I
was happy--and it was enough. I forgot even Susan.

Meanwhile, Susan, busy at her notebook, had all but forgotten me.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Am I in love with Ambo, or am I just trying to be for his sake? If
happiness is a test, then I can't be in love with him, for there is no
happiness in me. But what has happiness to do with love? It's just as I
told nice old Phil last night. To be in love is to be silly enough to
suppose that some other silly can gather manna for you from the meadows
of heaven. Meanwhile, the other silly is supposing much the same
nonsense about you--or if he isn't, then the sun goes black. What lovers
seem to value most in each other is premature softening of the brain.
But surely the union of two vain hopes in a single disappointment can
never mean joy? No. You might as well get it said, Susan. Love is two
broken reeds trying to be a Doric column.

"Still, there must be some test. Is it passion? How can it be?

"When I ran to Ambo last night I was pure rhythm and flame; but this
morning I'm the hour before sunrise. No; I'm the outpost star, the one
the comets turn--the one that peers off into nowhere.

"Perhaps if Ambo came to me now I should flame again; or perhaps I
should only make believe for his sake. Is wanting to make believe for
another's sake enough? Why not? I've no patience with lovers who are
always rhythm and flame. Even if they exist--outside of _maisons de
sante_--what good are they? Poets can rave about them, I suppose--that's
something; but imagine coming to the end of life and finding that one
had merely furnished good copy for Swinburne! No, thank you, Mrs.
Hephaestus--you beautiful, shameless humbug! I prefer Apollo's lonely
magic to yours. I'd rather be Swinburne than Iseult. If there's any
singing left to be done I shall try to do part of it myself.

"There, you see; already you've forgotten Ambo completely--now you'll
have to turn back and hunt for him. And if he's really working on
_Aristocracy and Art_ this morning, as he should be, then he has almost
certainly forgotten you. Oh, dear! but he isn't--and he hasn't! Here he
comes----"

       *       *       *       *       *

Yes, I came; but not to ask for assurances of love. Man is so naively
egotist, it takes a good deal to convince him, once the idea has been
accepted, that he is not the object of an unalterable devotion. Frankly,
I took it for granted now that Susan loved me, and would continue to
love me till her dying hour.

What I really came to say to her, under the calming and strengthening
influence of two or three rather well-written pages, was that our
situation had definitely become untenable. I am an emancipated talker,
but I am not an emancipated man; the distinction is important; the hold
of mere custom upon me is strong. I could not see myself asking Susan to
defy the world with me; or if I could just see it for my own sake, I
certainly couldn't for hers. Nor could I see it for Gertrude's.
Gertrude, after all, was my wife; and though she chose to feel I had
driven her from my society, I knew that she did not feel willing to seek
divorce for herself or to grant the freedom of it to me. On this point
her convictions, having a religious sanction, were permanent. Gentle
manners, then, if nothing higher, forbade me to seize the freedom she
denied me. Having persuaded Gertrude, in good faith, to enter into an
unconditional contract with me for life, I could no more bring myself to
break it than I could have forced myself to steal another's money by
raising a check.

My New England ancestors had distilled into my blood certain
prejudices; only, where my great-grandfather, or even my grandfather,
would have said that he refrained from evil because he feared God, I was
content merely to feel that there are some things a gentleman doesn't
stoop to. With them it was the stern daughter of the voice of God who
ruled thoughts and acts; with me it was, if anything, the class
obligations of culture, breeding, good form. Just as I wore correct
wedding garments at a wedding, and would far rather have cut my throat
with a knife than carry food on it from plate to mouth, so, in the face
of any of life's moral or emotional crises, I clung to what instinct and
cultivation told me were the correct sentiments.

Gertrude, it is true, was not precisely fulfilling her part in our
contract, but then--Gertrude was a woman; and the excusable frailties of
women should always be regarded as trumpet calls to the chivalry of man.
Absurdly primitive, such ideas as these! Seated with Maltby Phar in my
study, I had laughed them out of court many a time; for I could talk
pure Bernard Shaw--our prophet of those days--with anybody, and even go
him one better. But when it came to the pinch of decisive action I had
always thrown back to my sources and left the responsibility on them. I
did so now.

Yet it was hard to speak of anything but enchantment, witchery,
fascination, when, from her desk, Susan looked round to me, faintly
puzzled, faintly smiling. She was not a pretty girl, as young
America--its taste superbly catered to by popular magazines--understands
that phrase; nor was she beautiful by any severe classic
standard--unless you are willing to accept certain early Italians as
having established classic standards; not such faultless painters as
Raphael or Andrea del Sarto, but three or four of the wayward lesser men
whose strangely personal vision created new and unexpected types of
loveliness. Not that I recall a single head by any one of them that
prefigured Susan; not that I am helping you, baffled reader, to see her.
Words are a dull medium for portraiture, or I am too dull a dog to catch
with them even a phantasmal likeness. It is the mixture of dark and
bright in Susan that eludes me; she is all soft shadow and sharpest
gleams. But that is nonsense. I give it up.

It was really, then, a triumph for my ancestors that I did not throw
myself on my knees beside her chair--the true romantic attitude, when
all's said--and draw her dark-bright face down to mine. I halted instead
just within the doorway, retaining a deathlike grip on the door-knob.

"Dear," I blurted, "it won't do. It's the end of the road. We can't go
on."

"Can we turn back?" asked Susan.

I wonder the solid bronze knob did not shatter like hollow glass in my
hand.

"You must help me," I muttered.

"Yes," said Susan, all quiet shadow now, gleamless; "I'll help you."

Half an hour after I left her she telephoned and dispatched the
following telegram, signed "Susan Blake," to Gertrude at her New York
address:

          "_Either come back to him or set him free. Urgent._"


VI

The reply--a note from Gertrude, the ink hardly dry on it, written from
the Egyptian tomb of the Misses Carstairs--came directly to me that
evening; and Mrs. Parrot was the messenger. Her expression, as she
mutely handed me the note, was ineffable. I read the note with
sensations of suffocation; an answer was requested.

"Tell Mrs. Hunt," I said firmly to Mrs. Parrot, "that it was she who
left me, and I am stubbornly determined to make no advances. If she
cares to see me I shall be glad to see her. She has only to walk a few
yards, climb a few easy steps, and ring the bell."

My courtesy was truly elaborate as I conducted Mrs. Parrot to the door.
Her response was disturbing.

"It's not for me to make observations," said Mrs. Parrot, "the situation
being delicate, and not likely to improve. But if I was you, Mr. Hunt,
I'd not be too stiff. No; I'd not be. I would not. No. Not if I valued
the young lady's reputation."

Like the Pope's mule, Mrs. Parrot had saved her kick many years. I can
testify to its power.

Thirty minutes later this superkick landed me, when I came crashing back
to earth, at the door of the Egyptian tomb.

"How hard it is," says Dante, "to climb another's stairs," and he might
have added to ring another's bell, under certain conditions of spiritual
humiliation and stress. Thank the gods--all of them--it was not Mrs.
Parrot who admitted me and took my card!

I waited miserably in the large, ill-lighted reception vault of the
tomb, which smelt appropriately of lilies, as if the undertaker had
recently done his worst. How well I remembered it, how long I had
avoided it! It was here of all places, under the contemptuous eye of old
Ephraim Carstairs, grim ancestral founder of this family's fortunes,
that Gertrude had at last consented to be my wife. And there he still
lorded it above the fireplace, unchanged, glaring down malignantly
through the shadows, his stiff neck bandaged like a mummy's, his hard,
high cheek bones and cavernous eyes making him the very image of bugaboo
death. What an eavesdropper for the approaching reconciliation; for that
was what it had come to. That was what it would have to be!

It was not Gertrude who came down to me; it was Lucette. Lucette--all
graciousness, all sympathetic understanding, all feline smiles! Dear
Gertrude had 'phoned her on arriving, and she had rushed to her at once!
Dear Gertrude had such a desperate headache! She couldn't possibly see
me to-night. She was really ill, had been growing rapidly worse for an
hour. Perhaps to-morrow?

I was in no mood to be tricked by this stale subterfuge.

"See here, Lucette," I said sternly, "I'm not going to fence with you or
fool round at cross purposes. Less than an hour ago Gertrude sent over a
note, asking me to call."

"To which you returned an insufferable verbal reply."

"A bad-tempered reply, I admit. No insult was intended. And I've come
now to apologize for the temper."

"Oh, dear!" sighed Lucette. "Men always do their thinking too late. I
wish I could reassure you; but the mischief seems to be done. Poor
Gertrude is furious."

"Then the headache is--hypothetical?"

"An excuse, you mean? I wish it were, for her sake!" Lucette's eyes
positively caressed me, as a tiger might lick the still-warm muzzle of
an antelope, its proximate meal. "If you could see her face, poor
creature! She's in torment."

"I'm sorry."

"Isn't that--what you called her headache?"

"No. I'm ashamed of my boorishness. Let me see Gertrude and tell her
so."

Lucette smiled, slightly shaking her head. "Impossible--till she's
feeling better. And not then--unless she changes her mind. You see,
Ambrose, Mrs. Parrot's version of your reply was the last straw."

"No doubt she improved on the original," I muttered.

"Oh, no doubt," agreed Lucette calmly. "She would. It was silly of you
not to think of that."

"Yes," I snapped. "Men always underestimate a woman's malice."

"They have so many distractions, poor dears. Men, I mean. And we have so
few. You can put that in your next article, Ambrose?" She straightened
her languid curves deliberately, as if preparing to rise.

"Please!" I exclaimed. "I'm not ready for dismissal yet. We'll get down
to facts, if you don't mind. Why is Gertrude here at all? After years of
silence? Did you send for her?"

Lucette's spine slowly relaxed, her shoulders drooped once more. "I? My
dear Ambrose, why on earth should I do a thing like that?"

"I don't know. The point is, did you?"

"You think it in character?"

"Oh--be candid! I don't mean directly, of course. But is she here
because of anything you may have telephoned her--after your call last
night?"

"Really, Ambrose! This is a little too much, even from you."

"Forgive me--I insist! Is she?"

"You must have a very bad conscience," replied Lucette.

"I am more interested in yours."

She laughed luxuriously, "Mine has never been clearer."

Did the woman want me to stop her breath with bare hands? I gripped the
mahogany arms of my stiff Chippendale chair.

"Listen to me, Lucette! I know this is all very thrilling and amusing
for you. Vivisection must have its charms, of course--for an expert. But
I venture to remind you that once upon a time you were not a bad-hearted
girl, and you must have some remnants of human sympathy about you
somewhere. Am I wrong?"

"You're hideously rude."

"Granted. But I must place you. I won't accept you as an onlooker.
Either you'll fight me or help me--or clear out. Is that plain?"

"You're worse than rude," said Lucette; "you're a beast! I always
wondered why Gertrude couldn't live with you. Now I know."

"That's better," I hazarded. "We're beginning to understand each other.
Now let's lay all our cards face up on the table?"

Lucette stared at me a moment, her lips pursed, dubious, her
impenetrable blue eyes holding mine.

"I will, if you will," she said finally. "Let's."

It was dangerous, I knew, to take her at her word; yet I ventured.

"I've a weak hand, Lucette; but there's one honest ace of trumps in it."

"There could hardly be two," smiled Lucette.

"No; I count on that. In a pinch, I shall take the one trick essential,
and throw the others away." I leaned to her and spoke slowly: "There is
no reason, affecting her honor or rights, why Gertrude may not return to
her home--if she so desires. I think you understand me?"

"Perfectly. You wish to protect Miss Blake. You would try to do that in
any case, wouldn't you? But I'm rather afraid you're too late. I'm
afraid Miss Blake has handicapped you too heavily. If so, it was clever
of her--for she must have done it on purpose. You see, Ambrose, it was
she who sent for Gertrude."

"Susan!"

"Susan. Telegraphed her--of all things!--either to come home to you or
set you free. The implication's transparent. Especially as I had thought
it my duty to warn Gertrude in advance--and as Mr. Phar sent her, by
messenger, a vague but very disturbing note this morning."

"Maltby?"

"Yes. His note was delivered not five minutes ahead of Susan's wire.
Gertrude caught the next train. And there you are."

Well, at least I began to see now, dimly, where Maltby was, where Susan
was, where we all were--except, possibly Gertrude. Putting enormous
constraint on my leaping nerves, I subdued every trace of anger.

"Two more questions, Lucette. Do you believe me when I say, with all the
sincerity I'm capable of, that Susan is slandered by these suspicions?"

"Really," answered Lucette, with a little worried frown, as if anxiously
balancing alternatives, "I'm not, am I, in a position to judge?"

I swallowed hard. "All right," I managed to say coldly. "Then I have
placed you. You're not an onlooker--you're an open foe."

"And the second question, Ambrose?"

"What, precisely, does Gertrude want from me?"

"I'm not, am I, in a position to judge?" repeated Lucette. "But one
supposes it depends a little on what you're expecting--from her?"

"All I humbly plead for," said I, "is a chance to see Gertrude alone and
talk things over."

"Don't you mean talk _her_ over?" suggested Lucette. "And aren't you,"
she murmured, "forgetting the last straw?"


VII

My confusion of mind, my consternation, as I left the Egyptian tomb, was
pitiable. One thing, one only, I saw with distinctness: The being I
loved best was to be harried and smirched, an innocent victim of the
folly and malignity of others.

"Never," I muttered, "Never--never--never!"

This was all very grim and virile; yet I knew that I could grit my teeth
and mutter Never! from now till the moon blossomed, without in any way
affecting the wretched situation. Words, emotional contortions,
attitudes--would not help Susan; something sensible must be done--the
sooner the better. Something sensible and decisive--but what? There were
so many factors involved, human, incalculable factors; my thought
staggered among them, fumbling like a drunken man for the one right door
that must be found and opened with the one right key. It was no use; I
should never be able to manage it alone. To whom could I appeal? Susan,
for the time being, was out of the question; Maltby had maliciously
betrayed a long friendship. Phil? Why of course, there was always Phil?
Why hadn't I thought of him before?

I turned sharply and swung into a rapid stride. With some difficulty I
kept myself from running. Phil seemed to me suddenly an intellectual
giant, a man of infinite heart and unclouded will. Why had I never
appreciated him at his true worth? My whirling perplexities would have
no terrors for him; he would at once see through them to the very thing
that should at once be undertaken. Singular effect of an overwhelming
desire and need! Faith is always born of desperation. We are forced by
deep-lying instincts to trust something, someone, when we can no longer
trust ourselves. As I hurried down York Street to his door, my sudden
faith in Phil was like the faith of a broken-spirited convert in the
wisdom and mercy of God.

Phil's quarters were on the top floor of a rooming-house for students;
he had the whole top floor to himself and had lived there simply and
contentedly many years, with his books, his pipes, his papers, and his
small open wood fire. Phil is not destitute of taste, but he is by no
means an aesthete. His furniture is of the ordinary college-room
type--Morris chair of fumed oak, and so on--picked up as he needed it at
the nearest department store; but he has two or three really good framed
etchings on the walls of his study; one Seymour Haden in particular--the
_Erith Marshes_--which I have often tried to persuade him to part with.
There is a blending of austerity and subtlety in the work of the great
painter-etchers that could not but appeal to this austere yet finely
organized man.

His books are wonderful--not for edition or binding--he is not a
bibliophile; they are wonderful because he keeps nothing he has not
found it worth while to annotate. There is no volume on his shelves
whose inside covers and margins are not filled with criticism or
suggestive comment in his neat spiderwebby hand; and Phil's marginal
notes are usually far better reading than the original text. Susan
warmly maintains that she owes more to the inside covers of Phil's books
than to any other source; insists, in fact, that a brief note in his
copy of Santayana's _Reason in Common Sense_, at the end of the first
chapter, established her belief once for all in mind as a true thing, an
indestructible and creative reality, destined after infinite struggle to
win its grim fight with chaos. I confess I could never myself see in
this note anything to produce so amazing an affirmation; but in these
matters I am a worm; I have not the philosophic _flair_. Here it is:

"'We know that life is a dream, and how should thinking be more?'
Because, my dear Mr. Santayana, a dream cannot propagate dreams and
realize them to be such. The answer is sufficient."

Well, certainly Susan, too, seemed to feel it sufficient; and perhaps I
should agree if I better understood the answer.... But I have now
breasted four flights to Phil and am knocking impatiently.... He opened
to me and welcomed me cordially, all trace of his parting gruffness of
the other evening having vanished, though he was still haggard about the
eyes. He was not alone. Through the smoke haze of his study I saw a
well-built youngster standing near the fireplace, pipe in hand; some
college boy, of course, whom Phil was being kind to. Phil was forever
permitting these raw boys to cut in upon his precious hours of privacy;
yet he was at the opposite pole from certain faculty members, common to
all seats of learning, who toady to the student body for a popularity
which they feel to be a good business asset, or which they find the one
attainable satisfaction for their tottering self-esteem.

Phil, who had had to struggle for his own education, was genuinely fond
of young men who cared enough for education to be willing to struggle
for theirs. He had become unobtrusively, by a kind of natural affinity,
the elder brother of those undergraduates who were seekers in any sense
for the things of the mind. For the rest, the triumphant majority--fine,
manly young fellows as they usually were, in official oratory at
least--he was as blankly indifferent as they were to him.

"My enthusiasm for humanity is limited, fatally limited," he would
pleasantly admit. "For the human turnip, even when it's a prize
specimen, I have no spontaneous affection whatever."

On the other hand it was not the brilliant, exceptional boy whom he best
loved. It was rather the boy whose interest in life, whose curiosity,
was just stirring toward wakefulness after a long prenatal and postnatal
sleep. For such boys Phil poured forth treasures of sympathetic
understanding; and it was such a youth, I presume, who stood by the
fireplace now, awkwardly uncertain whether my coming meant that he
should take his leave.

His presence annoyed me. On more than one occasion I had run into this
sort of thing at Phil's rooms, had suffered from the curious inability
of the undergraduate, even when he longs himself to escape, to end a
visit--take his hat, say good-by simply, and go. It doesn't strike one
offhand as a social accomplishment of enormous difficulty; yet it must
be--it so paralyzes the social resourcefulness of the young.

Phil introduced me to Mr. Kane, and Mr. Kane drooped his right
shoulder--the correct attitude for this form of assault--grasped my
hand, and shattered my nerves--with the dislocating squeeze which young
America has perfected as the high sign of all that is virile and
sincere. I sank into a chair to recover, and to my consternation Mr.
Kane, too, sat down.

"Jimmy's just come to us," said Phil, relighting his pipe. "He passed
his entrance examinations in Detroit last spring, but he had to finish
up a job he was on out there before coming East. So he has a good deal
of work to make up, first and last. And it's all the harder for him,
because he's dependent upon himself for support."

"Oh," said Jimmy, "what I've saved'll last me through this year, I
guess."

"Yes," Phil agreed; "but it's a pity to touch what you've saved." He
turned to me. "You see, Hunt, we're talking over all the prospects.
Aren't we, Jimmy?"

"Yes, sir," answered Jimmy. "Prof. Farmer thinks," he added, "that I may
be making a mistake to try it here; he thinks it may be a waste of time.
I'm kind of up in the air about it, myself."

"Jimmy's rather a special case," struck in Phil, dropping into a Morris
chair and thrusting his legs out. "He's twenty-two now; and he's already
made remarkably good as an expert mechanic. He left his home here over
six years ago, worked his way to Detroit, applied for a job and got it.
Now there's probably no one in New Haven who knows more than this young
man about gas engines, steel alloys, shop organization, and all that.
The little job that detained him was the working out of some minor but
important economy in the manufacture of automobiles. He suggested it by
letter to the president of the company himself, readily obtained several
interviews with his chief, and was given a chance to try it out.

"It has proved its practical worth already, though you and I are far too
ignorant to understand it. As a result, the president of the company
offered him a much higher position at an excellent salary. It's open to
him still, if he chooses to go back for it. But Jimmy has decided to
turn it down for a college education. And I'm wondering, Hunt, whether
Yale has anything to give him that will justify such a
sacrifice--anything that he couldn't obtain for himself, at much less
expense, without three years waste of time and opportunity. How does it
strike you, old man? What would you say, offhand, without weighing the
matter?"

What I wanted to say was, "Damn it all! I'm not here at this time of
night to interest myself in the elementary problems of Jimmy Kane!" In
fact, I did say it to myself, with considerable energy--only to stop at
the name, to stare at the boy before me, and to exclaim in a swift flash
of connection, "Great Scott! Are you _Susan's_ Jimmy?"

"'Susan's Jimmy'!" snorted Phil, with a peculiar grin. "Of course he's
Susan's Jimmy! I wondered how long it would take you!"

As for Susan's Jimmy, his expression was one of desolated amazement.
Either his host and his host's friend, or he himself--had gone suddenly
mad! The drop of his jaw was parentheses about a question mark. His blue
eyes piteously stared.

"I guess I'm not on, sir," he mumbled to Phil, blushing hotly.

He was really a most attractive youth, considering his origins. I eyed
him now shamelessly, and was forced to wonder that the wrong end of
Birch Street should have produced not only Susan--who would have proved
the phoenix of any environment--but this pleasant-faced,
confidence-inspiring boy, whose expression so oddly mingled simplicity,
energy, stubborn self-respect, and the cheerfulness of good health, an
unspoiled will, and a hopeful heart. He seemed at once too mature for
his years and too naive; concentration had already modelled his
forehead, but there was innocence in his eyes. Innocence--I can only
call it that. His eyes looked out at the world with the happiest candor;
and I found myself predicting of him what I had never yet predicted of
mortal woman or man: "He's capable of anything--but sophistication;
he'll get on, he'll arrive somewhere--but he will never change."

Phil, meanwhile, had eased his embarrassment with a friendly laugh.
"It's all right, Jimmy; we're not the lunatics we sound. Don't you
remember Bob Blake's kid on Birch Street?"

"Oh! Her?"

"Mr. Hunt became her guardian, you know, after----"

"Oh!" interrupted Jimmy, beaming on me. "You're the gentleman that----"

"Yes," I responded; "I'm the unbelievably fortunate man."

"She was a queer little kid," reflected Jimmy. "I haven't thought about
her for a long time."

"That's ungrateful of you," said Phil; "but of course you couldn't know
that."

Question mark and parentheses formed again.

"Phil means," I explained, "that Susan has never forgotten you. It seems
you did battle for her once, down at the bottom of the Birch Street
incline?"

"Oh, gee!" grinned Jimmy. "The time I laid out Joe Gonfarone? Maybe I
wasn't scared stiff that day! Well, what d'y' think of her remembering
that!"

"You'll find it's a peculiarity of Susan," said Phil, "that she doesn't
forget anything."

"Why--she must be grown up by this time," surmised Jimmy. "It was mighty
fine of you, Mr. Hunt, to do what you did! I'd kind of like to see her
again some day. But maybe she'd rather not," he added quickly.

"Why?" asked Phil.

"Well," said Jimmy, "she had a pretty raw deal on Birch Street. Seeing
me--might bring back things?"

"It couldn't," I reassured him. "Susan has never let go of them. She
uses all her experience, every part of it, every day."

Jimmy grinned again. "It must keep her hustling! But she always was
different, I guess, from the rest of us." With a vague wonder, he
addressed us both: "You think a lot of her, don't you?"

For some detached, ironic god this moment must have been exquisite. I
envied the god his detachment. The blank that had followed his question
puzzled Jimmy and turned him awkward. He fidgeted with his feet.

"Well," he finally achieved, "I guess I'd better be off, professor. I'll
think over all you said."

"Do," counselled Phil, rising, "and come to see me to-morrow. We mustn't
let you take a false step if we can avoid it."

"It's certainly great of you to show so much interest," said Jimmy,
hunching himself at last out of his chair. "I appreciate it a lot." He
hesitated, then plunged. "It's been well worth it to me to come East
again--just to meet _you_."

"Nonsense!" laughed Phil, shepherding him skillfully toward the door....

When he turned back to me, it was with the evident intention of
discussing further Jimmy's personal and educational problems; but I
rebelled.

"Phil," I said, "I know what Susan means to you, and you know--I
think--what she means to me. Now, through my weakness, stupidity, or
something, Susan's in danger. Sit down please, and let me talk. I'm
going to give you all the facts, everything--a full confession. It's
bound, for many reasons, to be painful for both of us. I'm sorry, old
man--but we'll have to rise to it for Susan's sake; see this thing
through together. I feel utterly imbecile and helpless alone."

Half an hour later I had ended my monologue, and we both sat silent,
staring at the dulled embers on the hearth....

At length Phil drew in a slow, involuntary breath.

"Hunt," he said, "it's a humiliating thing for a professional
philosopher to admit, but I simply can't trust myself to advise you. I
don't know what you ought to do; I don't know what Susan ought to do; or
what I should do. I don't even know what your wife should do; though I
feel fairly certain that whatever it is, she will try something else.
Frankly, I'm too much a part of it all, too heartsick, for honest
thought."

He smiled drearily and added, as if at random: "'Physician, heal
thyself.' What an abysmal joke! How the fiends of hell must treasure it.
They have only one better--'Man is a reasonable being!'" He rose, or
rather he seemed to be propelled from his chair. "Hunt! Would you really
like to know what all my days and nights of intense study have come to?
The kind of man you've turned to for strength? My life has come to just
this: I love her, and she doesn't love me!

"Oh!" he cried--"Go home. For God's sake, go home! I'm ashamed...."

So I departed, like Omar, through the same door wherein I went; but not
before I had grasped--as it seemed to me for the first time--Phil's
hand.


VIII

There are some verses in Susan's notebook of this period, themselves
undated, and never subsequently published, which--from their position on
the page--must have been written about this time and may have been
during the course of the momentous evening on which I met Jimmy Kane at
Phil Farmer's rooms. I give them now, not as a favorable specimen of her
work, since she thought best to exclude them from her first volume, but
because they throw some light at least on the complicated and rather
obscure state of mind that was then hers. They have no title, and need
none. If you should feel they need interpretation--"_guarda e passa_"!
They are not for you.

          _Though she rose from the sea
           There were stains upon her whiteness;
           All earth's waters had not sleeked her clean.
           For no tides gave her birth,
           Nor the salt, glimmering middle depths;
           But slime spawned her, the couch of life,
           The sunless ooze,
           The green bed of Poseidon,
           Where with sordid Chaos he mingles obscurely.
           Her flanks were of veined marble;
           There were stains upon her._

          _But she who passes, lonely,
           Through waste places,
           Through bog and forest;
           Who follows boar and stag
           Unwearied;
           Who sleeps, fearless, among the hills;
           Though she track the wilds,
           Though she breast the crags,
           Choosing no path--
           Her kirtle tears not,
           Her ankles gleam,
           Her sandals are silver._


IX

It was midnight when I reached my own door that night, but I was in no
mood for lying in bed stark awake in the spiritual isolation of
darkness. I went straight to my study, meaning to make up a fire and
then hypnotize myself into some form of lethargy by letting my eyes
follow the printed lines of a book. If reading in any other sense than
physical habit proved beyond me, at least the narcotic monotony of habit
might serve.

But I found a fire, already falling to embers, and Susan before it,
curled into my big wing chair, her feet beneath her, her hands lying
palms upward in her lap. This picture fixed me in the doorway while my
throat tightened. Susan did not stir, but she was not sleeping. She had
withdrawn.

Presently she spoke, absently--from Saturn's rings; or the moon.

"Ambo? I've been waiting to talk to you; but now I can't or I'll lose
it--the whole movement. It's like a symphony--great brasses groaning and
cursing--and then violins tearing through the tumult to soar above it."

Her eyes shut for a moment. When she opened them again it was to shake
herself free from whatever spell had bound her. She half yawned, and
smiled.

"Gone, dear--all gone. It's not your fault. Words wouldn't hold it.
Music might--but music doesn't come.... Oh, poor Ambo--you've had a
wretched time of it! How tired you look!"

I shut the door quietly and went to her, sitting on the hearth rug at
her feet, my knees in my arms.

"Sweetheart," I said, "it seems that in spite of myself I've done you
little good and about all the harm possible." And I made a clean breast
of all the facts and fears that the evening had developed. "So you see,"
I ended, "what my guardianship amounts to!"

Susan's hand came to my shoulder and drew me back against her knees; she
did not remove her hand.

"Ambo," she protested gently, "I'm just a little angry with you, I
think."

"No wonder!"

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "If I am angry it's because you can say stupid
things like that! Don't you see, Ambo, the very moment things grow
difficult for us you forget to believe in me--begin to act as if I were
a common or garden fool? I'm not, though. Surely you must know in your
heart that everything you're afraid of for me doesn't matter in the
least. What harm could slander or scandal possibly do me, dear? Me, I
mean? I shouldn't like it, of course, because I hate everything stodgy
and _formidablement bete_. But if it happens, I shan't lose much sleep
over it. You're worrying about the wrong things, Ambo; things that don't
even touch our real problem. And the real problem may prove to be the
real tragedy, too."

"Tragedy?" I mumbled.

"Oh, I hope not--I think not! It all depends on whether you care for
freedom; on whether you're really passion's slave. I don't believe you
are."

The words wounded me. I shifted, to look up at, to question, her shadowy
face. "Susan, what do you mean?"

"I suppose I mean that _I'm_ not, Ambo. You're far dearer to me than
anybody else on earth; your happiness, your peace, mean everything to
me. If you honestly can't find life worth while without me--can't--I'll
go with you anywhere; or face the music with you right here. First,
though, I must be sincere with you. I can live away from you, and still
make a life for myself. Except your day-by-day companionship--I'd be
lonely without that, of course--I shouldn't lose anything that seems to
me really worth keeping. Above all, I shouldn't really lose you."

"Susan! You're planning to leave me!"

"But, Ambo--it's only what you've felt to be necessary; what you've been
planning for me!"

"As a duty--at the bitterest possible cost! How different that is! You
not only plan to leave me--I feel that you want to!"

"Yes, I want to. But only if you can understand why."

"I don't understand!"

"Ah, wait, Ambo! You're not speaking for yourself. You're a slave now,
speaking for your master. But it's _you_ I want to talk to!"

I snarled at this. "Why? When you've discovered your mistake so soon!...
You don't love me."

She sighed, deeply unhappy; though my thin-skinned self-esteem wrung
from her sigh a shade of impatience, too.

"If not, dear," she said, "we had better find it out before it's too
late. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps love is something I only guess at
and go wrong about. If love means that I should be utterly lost in you
and nothing without you--if it means that I would rather die than leave
you--well, then I don't love you. But all the same, if love honestly
means that to you--I can't and won't go away." She put out her hand
again swiftly, and tightened her fingers on mine.

"It's a test, then. Is that it?" I demanded. "You want to go because
you're not sure?"

"I'm sure of what I feel," she broke in; "and more than that, I doubt if
I'm made so that I can ever feel more. No; that isn't why I want to go.
I'll go if you can let me, because--oh, I've got to say it,
Ambo!--because at heart I love freedom better than I love love--or you.
And there's something else. I'm afraid of--please try to understand
this, dear--I'm afraid of stuffiness for us both!"

"Stuffiness?"

"Sex _is_ stuffy, Ambo. The more people let it mess up their lives for
them, the stuffier they grow. It's really what you've been afraid of for
me--though you don't put it that way. But you hate the thought of people
saying--with all the muddy little undercurrents they stir up round such
things--that you and I have been passion's slaves. We haven't been--but
we might be; and suppose we were. It's the truth about us--not the
lies--that makes all the difference. You're you--and I'm I. It's because
we're worth while to ourselves that we're worth while to each other.
Isn't that true? But how long shall we be worth anything to ourselves or
to each other if we accept love as slavery, and get to feeling that we
can't face life, if it seems best, alone? Ambo, dear, do you see at all
what I'm driving at?"

Yes; I was beginning to see. Miss Goucher's desolate words came
suddenly back to me: "Susan doesn't need _you_."


X

Next morning, while I supposed her at work in her room, Susan slipped
down the back stairs and off through the garden. It was a heavy forenoon
for me, perhaps the bleakest and dreariest of my life. But it was a busy
forenoon for Susan. She began its activities by a brave intuitive
stroke. She entered the Egyptian tomb and demanded an interview with
Gertrude. What is stranger, she carried her point--as I was presently to
be made aware.

Miss Goucher tapped at the door, entered, and handed me a card. So
Gertrude had changed her mind; Gertrude had come. I stared, foolishly
blank, at the card between, my fingers, while Miss Goucher by perfect
stillness effaced herself, leaving me to my lack of thought.

"Well," I finally muttered, "sooner or later----"

Miss Goucher, perhaps too eagerly, took this for assent. "Shall I say to
Mrs. Hunt that you are coming down?"

I forced a smile, fatuously enough, and rose.

"When I'm down already? Surely you can see, Miss Goucher, that I've
touched the bottom?" Miss Goucher did not reply. "I'll go myself at
once," I added formally. "Thank you, Miss Goucher."

Gertrude was waiting in the small Georgian reception room, whose
detailed correctness had been due to her own; waiting without any vulgar
pretense at entire composure. She was walking slowly about, her color
was high, and it startled me to find her so little altered. Not a day
seemed to have added itself; she looked under thirty, though I knew her
to be thirty-five; she was even handsomer than I had chosen to remember.
Even in her present unusual restlessness, the old distinction, the old
patrician authority was hers. Her spirit imposed itself, as always; one
could take Gertrude only as she wished to be taken--seriously--humbly
grateful if exempted from disdain. Gertrude never spoke for herself
alone; she was at all times representative--almost symbolic. Homage met
in her not a personal gratitude, but the approval of a high, unbroken
tradition. She accepted it graciously, without obvious egotism, not as
due to her as a temporal being, but as due--under God--to that timeless
entity, her class. I am not satirizing Gertrude; I am praising her. She,
more than any person I have ever known, made of her perishing substance
the temple of a completely realized ideal.

It was, I am forced to assume, because I had failed in entire respect
for and submission to this ideal that she had finally abandoned me. It
was not so much incompatibility of temperament as incompatibility of
worship. She had removed a hallowed shrine from a felt indifference and
a possible contamination. That was all, but it was everything. And as I
walked into the reception room I saw that the shrine was still
beautiful, faultlessly tended, and ready for any absolute but dignified
sacrifice.

"Gertrude," I began, "it's splendid of you to overlook my inexcusable
rudeness of yesterday! I'm very grateful."

"I have not forgiven you," she replied, with casual indignation--just
enough for sincerity and not a shade too much for art. "Don't imagine
it's pleasant for me to be here. I should hardly have risked your
misinterpreting it, if any other course had seemed possible."

"You might simply have waited," I said. "It was my intention to call
this evening, if only to ask after your health."

"I could not have received you," said Gertrude.

"You find it less difficult here?"

"Less humiliating. I'm not, at least, receiving a husband who wishes to
plead for reconciliation--on intolerable grounds."

"May I offer you a chair? Better still--why not come to the study? We're
so much less likely to be disturbed."

She accepted my suggestion with a slight nod, and herself led the way.

"Now, Gertrude," I resumed, when she had consented to an easy-chair and
had permitted me to close the door, "whatever the situation and
misunderstandings between us, can't we discuss them"--and I ventured a
smile--"more informally, in a freer spirit?"

She caught me up. "Freer! But I understand--less disciplined. How very
like you, Ambrose. How unchanged you are."

"And you, Gertrude! It's a compliment you should easily forgive."

She preferred to ignore it. "Miss Blake," she announced, "has just been
with me for an hour."

She waited the effect of this. The effect was considerable, plunging me
into dark amazement and conjecture. Not daring to make the tiniest guess
as to the result of so fantastic an interview, I was left not merely
tongue-tied but brain-tied. Gertrude saw at once that she had beggared
me and could now at her leisure dole out the equal humiliation of alms
withheld or bestowed.

"Given your curious social astigmatism and her curious mixed charm--so
subtle and so deeply uncivilized--I can see, of course, why she has
bewitched you," said Gertrude reflectively, and paused. "And I can see,"
she continued, musing, as if she had adopted the stage convention of
soliloquy, "why you have just failed to capture her imagination. For you
have failed--but you can hardly be aware how completely."

"Whether or not I'm aware," I snapped, "seems negligible! Susan feels
she must leave me, and she'll probably act with her usual promptness. Is
that what she called to tell you?"

"Partly," acknowledged Gertrude, resuming then her soliloquy: "You've
given her--as you would--a ridiculous education. She seems to have
instincts, impulses, which--all things considered--might have bloomed if
cultivated. As it is, you found her crude, and, in spite of all the
culture you've crammed upon her, you've left her so. She's
emancipated--that is, public; she's thrown away the locks and keys of
her mind. I grant she has one. But apparently no one has even suggested
to her that the essence of being rare, of being fine, is knowing what to
omit, what to reject, what to conceal. I find my own people,
Ambrose--and they're the _right_ people, the only ones worth finding--by
feeling secure with them; I can trust them not to go too far. They have
decorum, taste. Oh, I admit we're upholding a lost cause! You're a
deserter from it--and Miss Blake doesn't even suspect its existence.
Still"--with a private smile--"her crudity had certain immediate
advantages this morning."

Ignoring rarity, fineness, I sank to the indecorum of a frankly human
grin. "In other words, Gertrude, Susan omitted so little, went so much
too far, that she actually forced you for once to get down to brass
tacks!"

Gertrude frowned. "She stripped herself naked before a stranger--if
that's what you mean."

"With the result, Gertrude?"

"Ah, that's why I'm here--as a duty I owe myself. I'm bound to say my
suspicions were unjust--to Miss Blake, at least. I'll even go beyond
that----"

"Careful, Gertrude! Evil communications corrupt good manners."

"Yes," she responded quickly, rising, "they do--always; that's why I'm
not here to stay. But all I have left for you, Ambrose, is this: I'm
convinced now that in one respect I've been quite wrong. Miss Blake
convinced me this morning that her astounding telegram had at least one
merit. It happened to be true. I _should_ either live with you or set
you free. I've felt this myself, from time to time, but divorce, for
many reasons...." She paused, then added: "However, it seems inevitable.
If you wish to divorce me, you have legal grounds--desertion; I even
advise it, and I shall make no defense. As for your amazing ward--make
your mind quite easy about her. If any rumors should annoy you, they'll
not come from me. And I shall speak to Lucette." She moved to the door,
opening it slowly. "That's all, I think, Ambrose?"

"It's not even a beginning," I cried.

"Think of it, rather, as an ending."

"Impossible! I--I'm abashed, Gertrude! What you propose is out of the
question. Why not think better of returning here? The heydey's past for
both of us. My dream--always a wild dream--is passing; and I can promise
sincere understanding and respect."

"I could not promise so easily," said Gertrude; "nor so much. No; don't
come with me," she added. "I know my way perfectly well alone."

Nevertheless, I went with her to the front door, as I ought, in no
perfunctory spirit. It was more than a courteous habit; it was a genuine
tribute of admiration. I admired her beauty, her impeccable bearing, her
frock, her furs, her intellect, the ease and distinction of her triumph.
She left me crushed; yet it was a privilege to have known her--to have
wooed her, won her, lost her; and now to have received my _coup de
grace_ from her competent, disdainful hands. I wished her well, knowing
the wish superfluous. In this, if nothing else, she resembled Susan--she
did not need me; she could stand alone. It was her tragedy, in the
French classic manner, that she must. Would it also in another manner,
in a deeper and--I can think of no homelier word--more cosmic sense,
prove to be Susan's?

But my own stuffy problem drama, whether tragic or absurd, had now
reached a crisis and developed its final question: How in the absence of
Susan to stand at all?


XI

From her interview with Gertrude, Susan went straight on to Phil's
rooms, not even stopping to consider the possible proprieties involved.
But, five minutes before her arrival, Phil had been summoned to the
Graduates Club to receive a long-distance call from his Boston
publisher; and it was Jimmy Kane who answered her knock and opened the
study door. He had been in conference with Phil on his private problems
and Phil had asked him to await his return. All this he thought it
courteous to explain to the peach of a girl before him, whose presence
at the door puzzled him mightily, and whose disturbing eyes held his, he
thought, rather too intimately and quizzically for a stranger's.

She could hardly be some graduate student in philosophy; she was too
young and too flossy for that. "Flossy," in Jimmy's economical
vocabulary, was a symbol for many subtle shades of meaning: it implied,
for any maiden it fitted, an elegance not too cold to be alluring; the
possession of that something more than the peace of God which a friend
told Emerson always entered her heart when she knew herself to be well
dressed. Flossy--to generalize--Jimmy had not observed the women
graduate students to be, though he bore them no ill will. To be truly
flossy was, after all, a privilege reserved for a chosen few, born to a
certain circle which Jimmy had never sought to penetrate.

One--and a curiously entrancing specimen--of the chosen evidently stood
watching him now, and he wished that her entire self-possession did not
so utterly imperil his own. What was she doing alone, anyway, this
society girl--in a students' rooming house--at Prof. Farmer's door? Why
couldn't she tell him? And why were her eyes making fun of him--or
weren't they? His fingers went instinctively to his--perhaps too hastily
selected?--cravat.

Then Susan really did laugh, but happily, not unkindly, and walked on in
past him, shutting the door behind her as she came.

"Jimmy Kane," she said, "if I weren't so gorgeously glad to see you
again, I could beat you for not remembering!"

"Good Lord!" he babbled. "Why--good Lord! You're Susan!"

It was all too much for him; concealment was impossible--he was
flabbergasted. Sparkling with sheer delight at his _gaucherie_, Susan
put out both hands. Her impulsiveness instantly revived him; he seized
her hands for a moment as he might have gripped a long-lost boy
friend's.

"You never guessed I could look so--presentable, did you?" demanded
Susan.

"Presentable!" The word jarred on him, it was so dully inadequate.

"I have a maid," continued Susan demurely. "Everything in Ambo's
house--Ambo is my guardian, you know; Mr. Hunt--well, everything in his
house is a work of art. So he pays a maid to see that I am--always. I am
simply clay in her hands, and it does make a difference. But I didn't
have a maid on Birch Street, Jimmy."

Jimmy's blue eyes capered. This was American humor--the kind he was born
to and could understand. Happiness and ease returned with it. If Susan
could talk like that while looking like that--well, Susan was _there_!
She was all right.

Within five minutes he was giving her a brief, comradely chronicle of
the missing years, and when Phil got back it was to find them seated
together, Susan leaning a little forward from the depths of a Morris
chair to follow more attentively Jimmy's minute technical description of
the nature of the steel alloys used in the manufacture of automobiles.

They rose at Phil's entrance with a mingling, eager chatter of
explanation. Phil later--much later--admitted to me that he had never
felt till that moment how damnably he was past forty, and how fatally
Susan was not. He further admitted that it was far from the most
agreeable discovery of a studious life.

"What do you think, Prof. Farmer," exclaimed Jimmy, "of our meeting
again accidentally like this--and me not knowing Susan! You can't beat
that much for a small world!"

Phil sought Susan's eye, and was somewhat relieved by the quizzical
though delighted gleam in it.

"Well, Jimmy," he responded gravely, "truth compels me to state that I
have heard of stranger encounters--less inevitable ones, at least. I
really have."

"But you never heard of a nicer one," said Susan. "Haven't I always told
you and Ambo that Jimmy would be like this?"

"Sort of foolish?" grinned Jimmy, with reawakening constraint. "I'll bet
you have, too."

Susan shook her head, solemn and slow; but the corners of her mouth
meant mischief.

"No, Jimmy, not foolish; just--natural. Just--sort of--_you_."

At this point, Jimmy hastily remembered that he must beat it, pleading
what Phil knew to be an imaginary recitation. But he did not escape
without finding himself invited to dinner for that very evening,
informally of course--Susan suspected the absence of even a dinner coat:
Phil would bring him. It was really Phil who accepted for him, while
Jimmy was still muddling through his thanks and toiling on to needless
apologies.

"If I've been too"--he almost said "fresh," but sank to--"familiar,
calling you by your first name, I mean--I wouldn't like you to
think--but coming all of a sudden like this, what I mean is----"

"Oh, run along!" called Susan gayly. "Forget it, Jimmy! You're spoiling
everything."

"That's what I m-mean," stammered Jimmy, and was gone.

"But he does mean well, Susan," Phil pleaded for him, after closing the
door.

It puzzled him to note that Susan's face instantly clouded; there was
reproof in her tone. "That was patronizing, Phil. I won't have anybody
patronize Jimmy. He's perfect."

Phil was oddly nettled by this reproof and grew stubborn and detached.
"He's a nice boy, certainly; and has the makings of a real man. I
believe in him. Still--heaven knows!--he's not precisely a subtle soul."

Susan's brow had cleared again. "That's what I m-mean!" she laughed,
mimicking Jimmy without satire, as if for the pure pleasure of
recollection. "The truth is, Phil, I'm rather fed up on
subtlety--especially my own. Sometimes I think it's just a polite term
for futility, with a dash of intellectual snobbishness thrown in. It
must be saner, cleaner, healthier, to take life straight."

"And now, Phil dear," she said, dismissing the matter, as if settling
back solidly to earth after a pleasantly breathless aerial spin, "I need
your advice. Can I earn my living as a writer? I'll write anything that
pays, so I think I can. Fashion notes--anything! Sister and I"--"Sister"
being Susan's pet name for Miss Goucher--"are running away to New York
on Monday--to make our fortunes. You mustn't tell Ambo--yet; I'll tell
him in my own way. And I must _make_ my own way now, Phil. I've been a
lazy parasite long enough--too long! So please sit down and write me
subtle letters of introduction to any publishers you know. Maltby is
bound to help me, of course. You see, I'm feeling ruthless--or
shameless; I shall pull every wire in sight. So I'm counting on _The
Garden Exquisite_ for immediate bread and butter. I did my first article
for it in an hour when I first woke up this morning--just the
smarty-party piffle its readers and advertisers seem to demand.

"This sort of thing, Phil: 'The poets are wrong, as usual. Wild flowers
are not shy and humble, they are exclusive. How to know them is still a
social problem in American life, and very few of us have attained this
aristocratic distinction.' And so on! Two thousand silly salable
words--and I can turn on that soda-water tap at will. Are you listening?
Please tell me you don't think poor Sister--she refuses to leave me, and
I wouldn't let her anyway--will have to undergo martyrdom in a cheap
hall bedroom for the rest of her days?"

Needless to say, Phil did not approve of Susan's plan. He agreed with
her that under the given conditions she could not remain with me in New
Haven; and he commended her courage, her desire for independence. But
Susan would never, he felt, find her true pathway to independence,
either material or spiritual, as a journalistic free-lance in New York.
He admitted the insatiable public thirst for soda-water, but saw no
reason why Susan should waste herself in catering to it. He was by no
means certain that she could cater to it if she would.

"You'll too often discover," he warned her, "that your tap is running an
unmarketable beverage. The mortal taste for nectar is still undeveloped;
it remains the drink of the gods."

"But," Susan objected, "I can't let Ambo pay my bills from now on--I
can't! And Sister and I must live decently somehow! I'd like nothing
better than to be a perpetual fountain of nectar--supposing, you nice
old Phil, that I've ever really had the secret of distilling a single
drop of it. But you say yourself there's no market for it this side of
heaven, which is where we all happen to be. What do you want me to do?"

"Marry me."

"It wouldn't be fair to you, dear."

There was a momentary pause.

"Then," said Phil earnestly, "I want you to let Hunt--or if you can't
bring yourself to do that--to let _me_ loan you money enough from time
to time to live on simply and comfortably for a few years, while you
study and think and write in your own free way--till you've found
yourself. My nectar simile was nonsense, just as your soda-water tap
was. You have brains and a soul, and the combination means a shining
career of some kind--even on earth. Don't fritter your genius away in
makeshift activities. Mankind needs the best we have in us; the best's
none too good. It's a duty--no, it's more than that--it's a true
_religion_ to get that expressed somehow--whether in terms of action or
thought or beauty. I know, of course, you feel this as I do, and mean to
win through to it in the end. But why handicap yourself so cruelly at
the start?"

Phil tells me that Susan, while he urged this upon her, quietly
withdrew and did not return for some little time after he had ceased to
speak. He was not even certain she had fully heard him out until she
suddenly leaned to him from her chair and gave his hand an affectionate,
grateful squeeze.

"Yes, Phil," she said, "it is a religion--it's perhaps the only religion
I shall ever have. But for that very reason I must accept it in my own
way. And I'm sure--it's part of my faith--that any

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