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The Sick-a-Bed Lady

by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott · English · Gutenberg #34829 · 448,901 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Sick-a-Bed Lady

Author: Eleanor Hallowell Abbott


        
Release date: January 3, 2011 [eBook #34829]

Language: English

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THE SICK-A-BED LADY

[Illustration: "_That_ will help you remember where your mouth is"]


THE SICK-A-BED LADY

And Also
Hickory Dock, The Very Tired Girl, The Happy-Day,
Something That Happened in October, The Amateur Lover,
Heart of The City, The Pink Sash, Woman's Only Business

by

ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT

Author of "Molly Make-Believe"

Illustrated







New York
The Century Co.
1911

Copyright, 1911, by
The Century Co.

Copyright, 1905, 1907, by P. F. Collier & Son
Copyright, 1905, by J. B. Lippincott Company
Copyright, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1910, by The Ridgway Company
Copyright, 1910, by The Success Company

Published, October, 1911




          TO
          THE MEMORY OF
          TWO FATHERS




CONTENTS


                                                            PAGE
    THE SICK-A-BED LADY                                        3
    HICKORY DOCK                                              33
    THE VERY TIRED GIRL                                       57
    THE HAPPY-DAY                                             89
    THE RUNAWAY ROAD                                         127
    SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED IN OCTOBER                       161
    THE AMATEUR LOVER                                        195
    HEART OF THE CITY                                        253
    THE PINK SASH                                            291
    WOMAN'S ONLY BUSINESS                                    331




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  "_That_ will help you remember where your mouth is"     _Frontispiece_
                                                            FACING PAGE
  With no other object, except to get home                           58
  The blue ocean was the most wonderful thing of all                 96
  Instinctively she clasped it to her                               146
  The four of us who remained huddled very close around the fire    164
  "Hello, all you animals!" she cried                               244
  The lone, accentuated figure of a boy violinist                   256
  "Is--a--pink--sash--exactly a--a--passion?"                       298
  "Oh, I wish I had a sister," fretted the boy                      364




THE SICK-A-BED LADY


THE Sick-A-Bed Lady lived in a huge old-fashioned mahogany bedstead,
with solid silk sheets, and three great squashy silk pillows edged with
fluffy ruffles. On a table beside the Sick-A-Bed Lady was a tiny little,
shiny little bell that tinkled exactly like silver raindrops on a golden
roof, and all around this Lady and this Bedstead and this Bell was a
big, square, shadowy room with a smutty fireplace, four small paned
windows, and a chintzy wall-paper showered profusely with high-handled
baskets of lavender flowers over which strange green birds hovered
languidly.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Sick-A-Bed Lady, herself, was as old as twenty, but she did not look
more than fifteen with her little wistful white face against the creamy
pillows and her soft brown hair braided in two thick pigtails and tied
with great pink bows behind each ear.

When the Sick-A-Bed Lady felt like sitting up high against her pillows,
she could look out across the footboard through her opposite window. Now
through that opposite window was a marvelous vista--an old-fashioned
garden, millions of miles of ocean, and then--France! And when the wind
was in just the right direction there was a perfectly wonderful smell to
be smelled--part of it was Cinnamon Pink and part of it was
Salt-Sea-Weed, but most of it, of course, was--France. There were days
and days, too, when any one with sense could feel that the waves beat
perkily against the shore with a very strong French accent, and that all
one's French verbs, particularly "_J'aime_, _Tu aimes_, _Il aime_," were
coming home to rest. What else was there to think about in bed but funny
things like that?

It was the Old Doctor who had brought the Sick-A-Bed Lady to the big
white house at the edge of the Ocean, and placed her in the cool, quaint
room with its front windows quizzing dreamily out to sea, and its side
windows cuddled close to the curving village street. It was a long,
tiresome, dangerous journey, and the Sick-A-Bed Lady in feverish fancy
had moaned: "I shall die, I shall die, I shall _die_," every step of the
way, but, after all, it was the Old Doctor who did the dying! Just like
a snap of the finger he went at the end of two weeks, and the
Sick-A-Bed Lady rallied to the shock with a plaintive: "Seems to me he
was in an _awful_ hurry," and fell back on her soft bed into days of
unconsciousness that were broken only by riotous visions day and night
of an old man rushing frantically up to a great white throne yelling:
"One, two, three, for Myself!"

Out of this trouble the Sick-A-Bed Lady woke one day to find herself
quite alone and quite alive. She had often felt alone before, but it was
a long time since she had felt alive. The world seemed very pleasant.
The flowers on the wall-paper were still unwilted, and the green paper
birds hung airily without fatigue. The room was full of the most
enticing odor of cinnamon pinks, and by raising herself up in bed the
merest trifle she could get a smell of good salt, a smell which somehow
you couldn't get unless you actually _saw_ the Ocean, but just as she
was laboriously tugging herself up an atom higher, trying to find the
teeniest, weeniest sniff of France, everything went suddenly black and
silver before her eyes, and she fell down, down, down, as much as forty
miles into Nothing At All.

When she woke up again all limp and wappsy there was a Young Man's Face
on the Footboard of the bed; just an isolated, unconnected sort of face
that might have blossomed from the footboard, or might have been merely
a mirage on the horizon. Whatever it was, though, it kept staring at
her fixedly, balancing itself all the while most perfectly on its chin.
It was a funny sight, and while the Sick-A-Bed Lady was puckering her
forehead trying to think out what it all meant the Young Man's Face
smiled at her and said "_Boo!_" and the Sick-A-Bed Lady tiptilted her
chin weakly and said--"Boo _yourself_!" Then the Sick-A-Bed Lady fell
into her fearful stupor again, and the Young Man's Face ran home as fast
as it could to tell its Best Friend that the Sick-A-Bed Lady had spoken
her first sane word for five weeks. He thought it was a splendid
victory, but when he tried to explain it to his friend, he found that
"Boo _yourself_!" seemed a fatuous proof of so startling a truth, and
was obliged to compromise with considerable dignity on the statement:
"Well, of course, it wasn't so much what she said as the _way_ she said
it."

For days and days that followed, the Sick-A-Bed Lady was conscious of
nothing except the Young Man's Face on the footboard of the bed. It
never seemed to wabble, it never seemed to waver, but just stayed there
perfectly balanced on the point of its chin, watching her gravely with
its blue, blue eyes. There was a cleft in its chin, too, that you could
have stroked with your finger if--you could have. Of course, there were
some times when she went to sleep, and some times when she just seemed
to go _out_ like a candle, but whenever she came back from _anything_
there was always the Young Man's Face for comfort.

The Sick-A-Bed Lady was so sick that she thought all over her body
instead of in her head, so that it was very hard to concentrate any
particular thought in her mouth, but at last one afternoon with a mighty
struggle she opened her half-closed eyes, looked right in the Young
Man's Face and said: "Got any arms?"

The Young Man's Face nodded perfectly politely, and smiled as he raised
two strong, lean hands to the edge of the footboard, and hunched his
shoulders obligingly across the sky line.

"How do you feel?" he asked very gently.

Then the Sick-A-Bed Lady knew at once that it was the Young Doctor, and
wondered why she hadn't thought of it before.

"Am I pretty sick?" she whispered deferentially.

"Yes--I think you are _very pretty_--sick," said the Young Doctor, and
he towered up to a terrible, leggy height and laughed joyously, though
there was almost no sound to his laugh. Then he went over to the window
and began to jingle small bottles, and the Sick-A-Bed Lady lay and
watched him furtively and thought about his compliment, and wondered why
when she wanted to smile and say "Thank you" her mouth should shut
tight and her left foot wiggle, instead.

When the Young Doctor had finished jingling bottles, he came and sat
down beside her and fed her something wet out of a cool spoon, which she
swallowed and swallowed and swallowed, feeling all the while like a very
sick brown-eyed dog that couldn't wag anything but the far-away tip of
its tail. When she got through swallowing she wanted very much to stand
up and make a low bow, but instead she touched the warm little end of
her tongue to the Young Doctor's hand. After that, though, for quite a
few minutes her brain felt clean and tidy, and she talked quite
pleasantly to the Young Doctor: "Have you got any bones in your arms?"
she asked wistfully.

"Why, yes, indeed," said the Young Doctor, "rather more than the usual
number of bones. Why?"

"I'd give my life," said the Sick-A-Bed Lady, "if there were bones in my
silky pillows." She faltered a moment and then continued bravely: "Would
you mind--holding me up stiff and strong for a second? There's no bottom
to my bed, there's no top to my brain, and if I can't find a hard edge
to something I shall topple right off the earth. So would you mind
holding me like an _edge_ for a moment--that is--if there's no lady to
care? I'm not a little girl," she added conscientiously--"I'm twenty
years old."

So the Young Doctor slipped over gently behind her and lifted her limp
form up into the lean, solid curve of his arm and shoulder. It wasn't
exactly a sumptuous corner like silken pillows, but it felt as glad as
the first rock you strike on a life-swim for shore, and the Sick-A-Bed
Lady dropped right off to sleep sitting bolt upright, wondering vaguely
how she happened to have two hearts, one that fluttered in the usual
place, and one that pounded rather noisily in her back somewhere between
her shoulder-blades.

On his way home that day the Young Doctor stopped for a long while at
his Best Friend's house to discuss some curious features of the Case.

"Anything new turned up?" asked the Best Friend.

"Nothing," said the Young Doctor, pulling moodily at his cigar.

"Well, it certainly beats _me_," exclaimed the Best Friend, "how any
long-headed, shrewd old fellow like the Old Doctor could have brought a
raving fever patient here and installed her in his own house under that
clumsy Old Housekeeper without once mentioning to any one who the girl
was, or where to communicate with her people. Great Heavens, the Old
Doctor knew what a poor 'risk' he was. He knew absolutely that that
heart of his would burst some day like a firecracker."

"The Old Doctor never was very communicative," mused the Young Doctor,
with a slight grimace that might have suggested professional memories
not strictly pleasant. "But I'll surely never forget him as long as
ether exists," he added whimsically. "Why, you'd have thought the old
chap invented ether--you'd have thought he ate it, drank it, bathed in
it. I hope the _smell_ of my profession will never be the only part of
it I'm willing to share."

"That's all right," said the Best Friend, "that's all right. If he
wanted to go off every Winter to the States and work in the Hospitals,
and come back every Spring smelling like a Surgical Ward, with a lot of
wonderful information which he kept to himself, why, that was his own
business. He was a plucky old fellow anyway to go at all. But what I'm
kicking at is his wicked carelessness in bringing this young girl here
in a critical illness without taking a single soul into his confidence.
Here he's dead and buried for weeks, and the Girl's people are probably
worrying themselves crazy about not hearing from her. But why don't they
write? Why in thunder don't they write?"

"Don't ask me!" cried the Young Doctor nervously. "I don't know! I don't
know anything about it. Why, I don't even know whether the Girl is
going to live. I don't even know whether she'll ever be sane again. How
can I stop to quiz about her name and her home, when, perhaps, her whole
life and reason rests in my foolish hands that have never done anything
yet much more vital than usher a perfectly willing baby into life, or
tinker with croup in some chunky throat? There's only one thing in the
case that I'm sure of, and that is that she doesn't know herself who she
is, and the effort to remember might snap her utterly. She's just a
thread.

"I have an idea--" the Young Doctor shook his shoulders as though to
shake off his more somber thoughts--"I have an idea that the Old Doctor
rather counted on building up a sort of informal sanitarium here. He was
daft, you know, about the climate on this particular stretch of coast.
You remember that he brought home some athlete last Summer--pretty bad
case of breakdown, too, but the Old Doctor cured him like a magician;
and the Spring before that there was a little lad with epilepsy, wasn't
there? The Old Doctor let me look at him once just to tease me. And
before that--I can count up half-a-dozen people of that sort, people
whom you would have said were 'gone-ers,' too. Oh, the Old Doctor would
have brought home a dead man to cure if any one had 'stumped' him. And
I guess this present case was a 'stump' fast enough. Why, she was raging
like a prairie fire when they brought her here. No other man would have
dared to travel. And they put her down in a great silk bed like a
fairy-story, and the Old Doctor sat and watched her night and day
studying her like a fiend, and she got better after a while: not keen,
you know, but funny like a child, cooing and crooning over her pretty
room, and tickled to pieces with the ocean, and vain as a kitten over
her pink ribbons--the Old Doctor wouldn't let them cut her hair--and
everything went on like that, till in a horrid flash the Old Doctor
dropped dead that morning at the breakfast table, the little girl went
loony again, and every possible clew to her identity was wiped off the
earth!"

"No baggage?" suggested the Best Friend.

"Why, of course, there was baggage!" the Young Doctor exclaimed, "a
great trunk. Haven't the Housekeeper and I rummaged and rummaged it till
I can feel the tickle of lace across my wrists even in my sleep? Why,
man alive! she's a _rich_ girl. There never were such clothes in our
town before. She's no free hospital pauper whom the Old Doctor
obligingly took off their hands. That is, I don't see how she can be!

"Oh, well," he continued bitterly, "everybody in town calls her just the
Sick-A-Bed Lady, and pretty soon it will be the Death-Bed Lady, and
then it will be the Dead-and-Buried Lady--and that's all we'll ever know
about it." He shivered clammily as he finished and reached for a
scorching glass of whisky on the table.

But the Young Doctor did not feel so lugubrious the next day and the
next and the next, when he found the Sick-A-Bed Lady rallying slowly but
surely to the skill of his head and hands. To be frank, she still lay
for hours at a time in a sort of gentle daze watching the world go by
without her, but little by little her body strengthened as a wilted
flower freshens in water, and little by little she struggled harder for
words that even then did not always match her thoughts.

The village continued to speculate about her lost identity, but the
Young Doctor seemed to worry less and less about it as time went on. If
the sweetest little girl you ever saw knew perfectly whom you meant when
you said "Dear," what was the use of hunting up such prosy names as May
or Alice? And as to her funny speeches, was there anything in the world
more piquant than to be called a "beautiful horse," when she meant a
"kind doctor"? Was there anything dearer than her absurd wrath over her
blunders, or the way she shook her head like an angry little heifer,
when she occasionally forgot altogether how to talk? It was at one of
these latter times that the Young Doctor, watching her desperate
struggle to focus her speech, forgot all about her twenty years and
stooped down suddenly and kissed her square on her mouth.

"There," he laughed, "_that_ will help you remember where your mouth
is!" But it was astonishing after that how many times he had to remind
her.

He couldn't help loving her. No man could have helped loving her. She
was so little and dear and gentle and--lost.

The Sick-A-Bed Lady herself didn't know who she was, but she would have
perished with fright if she had realized that no one in the village, and
not even the Young Doctor himself, could guess her identity.

The Young Doctor knew everything else in the world; why shouldn't he
know who she was? He knew all about France being directly opposite the
house; he had known it ever since he was a boy, and had been glad about
it. He stopped her trying to count the green birds on the wall-paper
because he "knew positively" that there were four hundred and seventeen
whole birds, and nineteen half birds cut off by the wainscoting. He
never laughed at her when she slid down the side of her bed by the
village street window, and went to sleep with her curly head pillowed on
the hard, white sill. He never laughed, because he understood perfectly
that if you hung one white arm down over the sidewalk when you went to
sleep, sometimes little children would come and put flowers in your
hand, or, more wonderful still, perhaps, a yellow collie dog would come
and lick your fingers.

Nothing could surprise the Young Doctor. Sometimes the Sick-A-Bed Lady
took thoughts she did have and mixed them up with thoughts she didn't
have, and _sprung_ them on the poor Young Doctor, but he always said,
"Why, of _course_," as simply as possible.

But more than all the other wise things he knew was the wise one about
smelly things. He knew that when you were very, very, _very_ sick,
nothing pleased you so much as nice, smelly things. He brought wild
strawberries, for instance, not so much to eat as to smell, but when he
wasn't looking she gobbled them down as fast as she could. And he
brought her all kinds of flowers, one or two at a time, and seemed so
disappointed when she just sniffed them and smiled; but one day he
brought her a spray of yellow jasmine, and she snatched it up and kissed
it and cried "_Home_," and the Young Doctor was so pleased that he wrote
it right down in a little book and ran away to study up something. He
let her smell the fresh green bank-notes in his pocketbook. Oh, they
were good to smell, and after a while she said "Shops." He brought her
a tiny phial of gasoline from his neighbor's automobile, and she
crinkled up her nose in disgust and called it "gloves" and slapped it
playfully out of his hand. But when he brought her his riding-coat she
rubbed her cheek against it and whispered some funny chirruppy things.
His pipe, though, was the most confusing symbol of all. It was his best
pipe, too, and she snuggled it up to her nose and cried "_You, y-o-u_!"
and hid it under her pillow and wouldn't give it back to him, and though
he tried her a dozen times about it, she never acknowledged any
association except that joyous, "_Y-o-u_!"

So day by day she gained in consecutive thought till at last she grew so
reasonable as to ask: "Why do you call me _Dear_?"

And the Young Doctor forgot all about his earliest reason and answered
perfectly simply: "Because I love you."

Then some of the evenings grew to be almost sweetheart evenings, though
the Sick-A-Bed Lady's fragile childishness keyed the Young Doctor into
an almost uncanny tenderness and restraint.

Those were wonderful evenings, though, after the Sick-A-Bed Lady began
to get better and better. A good deal of the Young Doctor's practice was
scattered up and down the coast, and after the dust and sweat and glare
and rumble of his long day he would come back to the sleepy village in
the early evening, plunge for a freshening swim into the salt water,
don his white clothes and saunter round to the quaint old house at the
edge of the ocean. Here in the breezy kitchen he often sat for as long
as an hour, talking with the Old Housekeeper, till the Sick-A-Bed Lady's
tiny silver bell rang out with absurd peremptoriness. Then for as much
time as seemed wise he went and sat with the Sick-A-Bed Lady.

One night, one full-moon night, he came back from his day's work
extraordinarily tired and fretted after a series of strident
experiences, and hurried to the old house as to a veritable Haven of
Refuge. The Housekeeper was busy with village company, so he postponed
her report and went at once to the Sick-A-Bed Lady's room.

Only fools lit lights on such a night as that, and he threw himself down
in the big chair by the bedside, and fairly basked in peacefulness and
moonlight and content, while the Sick-A-Bed Lady leaned over and stroked
his hair with her little white fingers, crooning some pleasant, childish
thing about "nice, smoky Boy." There was no fret or fuss or even sound
in the room, except the drowsy murmur of voices in the Garden, and the
churky splash of little waves against the shore.

"Hear the French Verbs," said the Sick-A-Bed Lady, at last, with
deliberate mischief. Then she shut her lips tight and waved her hands
distractedly after a manner she had when she wished to imply that she
was suddenly stricken dumb. The Young Doctor laughed and reached over
and kissed her.

"_J'aime_," he said.

"_J'aime_," the Sick-A-Bed Lady repeated.

"_Tu aimes_," he persisted.

"_Tu aimes_," she echoed on his lips.

--Then--"There'll be no '_he_ loves' to our story," he cried suddenly,
and caught her so fiercely to his breast that she gave a little quick
gasp of pain and struggled back on her pillows, and the Young Doctor
jumped up in bitter, stinging contrition and strode out of the room.
Just across the threshold he met the Old Housekeeper with a clattering
tray of dishes.

"I'm going down to the Library to smoke," he said huskily to her. "Come
there when you've finished. I want to talk with you."

His thoughts of himself were not kind as he wandered into the library
and settled down in the first big chair that struck his fancy.

Then he fell to wondering whether there was anything gross about his
love, because it took no heed of mental qualifications. He thought of at
least three houses in the village where that very night he would have
found lights and laughter and clever talk, and the prodding sympathy of
earnest women who made the sternest happening of the day seem nothing
more than a dress rehearsal for the evening's narration of it. Then he
thought again of the big, quiet room upstairs, with its unquestioning
peace and love and restfulness and content. What was the best thing
after all that a woman could bring to a man? Yet a year ago he had
bragged of the blatant braininess of his best woman friend! He began to
laugh at himself.

Slowly the incongruities of the whole situation bore in upon him, and he
sat and smoked and smiled in moody silence, staring with skeptical
interest at the dimly lighted room around him. It was certainly the Old
Doctor's private study, and realization of just what that meant came
over him ironically.

The Old Doctor had been very stingy with his house and his books and his
knowledge and his patients. It was natural perhaps under the
professional circumstances of waning Age and waxing Youth. Yet the fact
remained. Never before in five years of village association had the
Young Doctor crossed the threshold of the Old Doctor's home, yet now he
came and went like the Man of the House. Here he sat at this instant in
the Old Doctor's private study, in the Old Doctor's chair, his feet upon
the Old Doctor's table, and the whole great room with its tier after
tier of bookcases, and its drawer after drawer of probable memoranda
_free_ before him. He could imagine the Old Doctor's impotent wrath over
such a contingency, yet he felt no sentimental mawkishness over his own
position. As far as he knew the Dead were dead.

Sitting there in the Old Doctor's study, he conjured up scene after
scene of the Old Doctor's irascibility and exclusiveness. Even as late
as the Sick-A-Bed Lady's arrival, the Old Doctor had snubbed him
unmercifully before a crowd of people. It was at the station when the
little sick stranger was being taken off the car and put into a
carriage, and the Old Doctor had hailed the Younger with unwonted
friendliness.

"I've got a case in there that would make you famous if you could master
it," he said.

The Young Doctor remembered perfectly how he had walked into the trap.

"What is it?" he had cried eagerly.

"That's none of your business," chuckled the Old Doctor, and drove away
with all the platform loafers shouting with delight.

Well, it seemed to be the Young Doctor's business _now_, and he got up,
turned the lamp higher and began to hunt through the Old Doctor's rarest
books for some light on certain curious developments in the Sick-A-Bed
Lady's case.

He was just in the midst of this hunt when the Old Housekeeper glided
in like a ghost and startled him.

"Sit down," he said absent-mindedly, and went on with his reading. He
had almost forgotten her presence when she coughed and said: "Excuse me,
sir, but I've something very special to say to you."

The Young Doctor looked up in surprise and saw that the Woman's face was
ashy white.

"I--don't--think--you quite--understand the case," she stammered. "I
think the little lady upstairs is going to be a Mother!"

The Young Doctor put his hand up to his face, and his face felt like
parchment. He put his hand down to the book again, and the book cover
quivered like flesh.

"What do you m-e-a-n?" he asked.

"I'll tell you what I mean," said the Old Housekeeper, and led him back
to the sick room.

Two hours later the Young Doctor staggered into his Best Friend's house
clutching a sheet of letter paper in his hand. His shoulders dragged as
though under a pack, and every trace of boyishness was wrung like a rag
out of his face.

"For Heaven's sake, what's the matter?" cried his friend, starting up.

"Nothing," muttered the Young Doctor, "except the Sick-A-Bed Lady."

"When did she die? What happened?"

The Young Doctor made a gesture of dissent and crawled into a chair and
began to fumble with the paper in his hand. Then he shivered and stared
his Best Friend straight in the face.

"You might say," he stammered, "that I have just heard from the
Sick-A-Bed Lady's Husband--" he choked at the word, and his Friend sat
up with astonishment: "You heard me _say_ I had heard from the
Sick-A-Bed Lady's Husband?" he persisted. "_You_ heard me say it, mind
you. You heard me say that her Husband is sick in Japan--detained
indefinitely--so we are afraid he won't get here in time for her
confinement--"

The sweat broke out in great drops on his forehead, and his hand that
held the sheet of paper shook like a hand that has strained its muscles
with heavy weights.

The Best Friend took a scathing glance at the scribbled words on the
paper and laughed mirthlessly.

"You're a good fool," he said, "a good fool, and I'll publish your
blessed lie to the whole stupid village, if that's what you want."

But the Young Doctor sat oblivious with his head in his hands,
muttering: "Blind fool, blind fool, how could I have been such a blind
fool?"

"What is it to _you_?" asked his Best Friend abruptly.

The Young Doctor jumped to his feet and squared his shoulders.

"It's _this_ to me," he cried, "that I wanted her for my own! I could
have cured her. I tell you I could have cured her. I wanted her for my
own!"

"She's only a waif," said the Best Friend tersely.

"Waif?" cried the Young Doctor, "_waif_? No woman whom I love is a
_waif_!" His face blazed furiously. "The woman I _love_--that little
gentle girl--a waif?--without a home?--I would make a cool home for her
out of Hell itself, if it was necessary! Damn, damn, _damn_ the brute
that deserted her, but _home is all around her_ NOW! Do I think the Old
Doctor guessed about it? _N-o!_ Nobody could have guessed about it.
Nobody could have known about it much before this. You say _again_ she
isn't _anybody's_? I'll prove to you as soon as it's decent that she's
_mine_."

His Best Friend took him by the shoulder and shook him roughly.

"It is no time," he said, "for you to be courting a woman."

"I'll court my Sweetheart when and where I choose!" the Young Doctor
answered defiantly, and left the house.

The night seemed a thousand miles long to him, but when he slept at
last and woke again, the air was fresh and hopeful with a new day. He
dressed quickly and hurried off to the scene of last night's tragedy,
where he found the Old Housekeeper arguing in the doorway with a small
boy. She turned to the Doctor complacently. "He's begging for the
postage stamp off the Japanese letter," she exclaimed, "and I'm just
telling him I sent it to my Sister's boy in Montreal."

There was no slightest trace of self-consciousness in her manner, and
the Young Doctor could not help but smile as he beckoned her into the
house and shut the door.

Then, "Have you told her?" he asked eagerly.

The Old Housekeeper humped her shoulders against the door and folded her
arms sumptuously. "No, I haven't told her," she said, "and I'm not going
to. I don't dar'st! I help you out about your business same as I helped
the Old Doctor out about his business. That's all right. That's as it
should be. And I'll go skipping up those stairs to tell the little lady
any highfaluting, pleasant yarn that you can invent, but I don't budge
one single step to tell that poor, innocent, loony Lamb--the _truth_. It
isn't ugliness, Doctor. I haven't got the strength, that's all!"

Just then the little silver bell tinkled, and the Doctor went heavily up
the few steps that swung the Sick-A-Bed Lady's room just out of line of
real upstairs or downstairs.

The Sick-A-Bed Lady was lying in glorious state, arrayed in a wonderful
pale green kimono with shimmering silver birds on it.

"You stayed too long downstairs," she asserted and went on trying to cut
out pictures from a magazine.

The Young Doctor stood at the window looking out to sea as long as his
legs would hold him, and then he came back and sat down on the edge of
the bed.

"What's your name, Honey?" he asked with a forced smile.

"Why, 'Dear,' of course," she answered and dropped her scissors in
surprise.

"What's my name?" he continued, fencing for time.

"Just '_Boy_,'" she said with sweet, contented positiveness.

The Young Doctor shivered and got up and started to leave the room, but
at the threshold he stopped resolutely and came back and sat down again.

This time he took his Mother's wedding ring from his little finger and
twirled it with apparent aimlessness in his hands.

Its glint caught the Sick-A-Bed Lady's eye, and she took it daintily in
her fingers and examined it carefully. Then, as though it recalled some
vague memory, she crinkled up her forehead and started to get out of
bed. The Young Doctor watched her with agonized interest. She went
direct to her bureau and began to search diligently through all the
drawers, but when she reached the lower drawer and found some
bright-colored ribbons she forgot her original quest, whatever it was,
and brought all the ribbons back to bed with her.

The Young Doctor started to leave her again, this time with a little
gesture which she took to be anger, but he had not gone further than the
head of the stairs before she called him back in a voice that was
startlingly mature and reasonable.

"Oh, Boy, come back," she cried. "I'll be good. What do you want?"

The Young Doctor came doubtfully.

"Do you understand me to-day?" he asked in a voice that sent an ominous
chill to her heart. "Can you think pretty clearly to-day?"

She nodded her head. "Yes," she answered; "it's a good day."

"Do you know what marriage is?" he asked abruptly.

"Oh, yes," she said, but her face clouded perceptibly.

Then he took her in his arms and told her plainly, brutally, clumsily,
without preface, without comment: "Honey, you are going to have a
child."

For a second her mind wavered before him. He could actually see the
totter in her eyes, and braced himself for the final hopeless crash, but
suddenly all her being focused to the realization of his words, and she
pushed at him with her hands and cried: "No--No--Oh, my God--_n-o_!" and
fainted in his arms.

When she woke up again the little-girl look was all gone from her face,
and though the Young Doctor smiled and smiled and smiled, he could not
smile it back again. She just lay and watched him questioningly.

"Sweetheart," he whispered at last, "do you remember what I told you?"

"Yes," she answered gravely, "I remember that, but I don't remember what
it means. Is it all right? Is it all right to _you_?"

"Yes," said the Young Doctor, "it's--all--right to--me."

Then the Sick-A-Bed Lady turned her little face wearily away on her
pillow and went back to those dreams of hers which no one could fathom.

For all the dragging weeks and months that followed she lay in her bed
or groped her way round her room in a sort of timid stupor. Whenever the
Young Doctor was there she clung to him desperately and seemed to find
her only comfort in his presence, but when she talked to him it was
babbling talk of things and places he could not understand. All the
village feared for the imminent tragedy in the great white house, and
mourned the pathetic absence of the young husband, and the Young Doctor
went his sorrowful way cursing that other "boy" who had wrought this
final disaster on a girl's life.

But when the Sick-A-Bed Lady's hour of trial came and some one held the
merciful cone of ether to her face, the Sick-A-Bed Lady took one deep,
heedless breath, then gave suddenly a great gasp, snatched the cone from
her face, struggled up and stretched out her arms and cried, "Boy--Boy!"

The Young Doctor came running to her and saw that her eyes were big and
startled and sharp with terror:

"Oh, Boy--_Boy_," she cried, "the Ether!--I remember _everything_
now--I--was his wife--the Old Doctor's Wife!"

The Young Doctor tried to replace the cone, but she beat at him
furiously with her hands, crying:

"No, No, No!--If you give me Ether I shall die thinking of him!--Oh,
no!--_n-o_!"

The Young Doctor's face was like chalk. His knees shook under him.

"My God!" he said, "what _can_ I give you!"

The Sick-A-Bed Lady looked up at him and smiled a tortured, gallant
smile. "Give me something to keep me here," she gasped! "Give me a token
of you! Give me your little briarwood pipe to smell--and give it to
me--quickly!"




HICKORY DOCK

Used by permission of _Lippincott's Magazine_.


THIS is the story of Hickory Dock, and of a Man and a Girl who trifled
with Time.

Hickory Dock was a clock, and, of course, the Man, being a man, called
it a clock, but the Girl, being a girl, called it a Hickory Dock for no
more legitimate reason than that once upon a time

          "Hickory, Dickory, Dock,
           A Mouse ran up the Clock."

--Girls are funny things.

The Man and the Girl were very busy collecting a Home--in one room. They
were just as poor as Art and Music could make them, but poverty does not
matter much to lovers. The Man had collected the Girl, a wee diamond
ring, a big Morris chair, two or three green and rose rugs, a shiny
chafing-dish, and various incidentals. The Girl was no less
discriminating. She had accumulated the Man, a Bagdad couch-cover,
half-a-dozen pictures, a huge gilt mirror, three or four bits of fine
china and silver, and a fair-sized boxful of lace and ruffles that
idled under the couch until the Wedding-Day. The room was strikingly
homelike, masculinely homelike, in all its features, but it was by no
means home--yet. No place is home until _two_ people have latch-keys.
The Girl wore _her_ key ostentatiously on a long, fine chain round her
neck, but its mate hung high and dusty on a brass hook over the
fireplace, and the sight of it teased the Man more than anything else
that had ever happened to him in his life. The Girl was easily mistress
of the situation, but the Man, you see, was not yet Master.

It was tacitly understood that if the Wedding-Day _ever_ arrived, the
Girl should slip the extra key into her husband's hand the very first
second that the Minister closed his eyes for the blessing. She would
have chosen to do this openly in exchange for her ring, but the Man
contended that it might not be legal to be married with a
latch-key--some ministers are so particular. It was a joke,
anyway--everything except the Wedding-Day itself. Meanwhile Hickory Dock
kept track of the passing hours.

When the Man first brought Hickory Dock to the Girl, in a mysteriously
pulsating tissue-paper package, the Girl pretended at once that she
thought it was a dynamite bomb, and dropped it precipitously on the
table and sought immediate refuge in the Man's arms, from which
propitious haven she ventured forth at last and picked up the package
gingerly, and rubbed her cheek against it--after the manner of girls
with bombs. Then she began to tug at the string and tear at the paper.

"Why, it's a Hickory Dock!" she exclaimed with delight,--"a real, live
Hickory Dock!" and brandished the gift on high to the imminent peril of
time and chance, and then fled back to the Man's arms with no excuse
whatsoever. She was a bold little lover.

"But it's a _c-l-o-c-k_," remonstrated the Man with whimsical
impatience. He had spent half his month's earnings on the gift. "Why
can't you call it a clock? Why can't you _ever_ call things by their
right names?"

Then the Girl dimpled and blushed and burrowed her head in his shoulder,
and whispered humbly, "Right name? Right names? Call things by their
right names? Would you rather I called _you_ by your right name--Mr.
James Herbert Humphrey Jason?"

_That_ settled the matter--settled it so hard that the Girl had to
whisper the Man's wrong name seven times in his ear before he was
satisfied. No man is practical about everything.

There are a good many things to do when you are in love, but the Girl
did not mean that the _Art of Conversation_ should be altogether lost,
so she plunged for a topic.

"I think it was beautiful of you to give me a Hickory Dock," she
ventured at last.

The Man shifted a trifle uneasily and laughed. "I thought perhaps it
would please you," he stammered. "You see, now I have given you _all my
time_."

The Girl chuckled with amused delight. "Yes--all your time. And it's
nice to have a Hickory Dock that says 'Till he comes! Till he comes!
Till he comes!'"

"Till he comes to--_stay_," persisted the Man. There was no sparkle in
his sentiment. He said things very plainly, but his words drove the Girl
across the room to the window with her face flaming. He jumped and
followed her, and caught her almost roughly by the shoulder and turned
her round.

"Rosalie, Rosalie," he demanded, "will you love me till the _end of
time_?" There was no gallantry in his face but a great, dogged
persistency that frightened the Girl into a flippant answer. She brushed
her fluff of hair across his face and struggled away from him.

"I will love you," she teased, "until--the clock stops."

Then the Man burst out laughing, suddenly and unexpectedly, like a boy,
and romped her back again across the room, and snatched up the clock and
stole away the key.

"Hickory Dock shall _never_ stop!" he cried triumphantly. "I will wind
it till I die. And no one else must ever meddle with it."

"But suppose you forget?" the Girl suggested half wistfully.

"I shall _never_ forget," said the Man. "I will wind Hickory Dock every
week as long as I live. I _p-r-o-m-i-s-e_!" His lips shut almost
defiantly.

"But it isn't fair," the Girl insisted. "It isn't fair for me to let you
make such a long promise. You--might--stop--loving me." Her eyes filled
quickly with tears. "Promise me just for one year,"--she stamped her
foot,--"I won't take any other promise."

So, half provoked and half amused, the Man bound himself then and there
for the paltry term of a year. But to fulfil his own sincerity and
seriousness he took the clock and stopped it for a moment that he might
start it up again with the Girl close in his arms. A half-frightened,
half-willing captive, she stood in her prison and looked with furtive
eyes into the little, potential face of Hickory Dock.

"You--and I--for--_all time_," whispered the Man solemnly as he started
the little mechanism throbbing once more on its way, and he stooped
down to seal the pledge with a kiss, but once more the significance of
his word and act startled the Girl, and she clutched at the clock and
ran across the room with it, and set it down very hard on her desk
beside the Man's picture. Then, half ashamed of her flight, she stooped
down suddenly and patted the little, ticking surface of ebony and glass
and silver.

"It's a wonderful little Hickory Dock," she mused softly. "I never saw
one just like it before."

The Man hesitated for a second and drew his mouth into a funny twist. "I
don't believe there _is_ another one like it in all the world," he
acknowledged, half laughingly,--"that is, not _just_ like it. I've had
it fixed so that it won't strike _eleven_. I'm utterly tired of having
you say 'There! it's eleven o'clock and you've _got_ to go home.' _Now_,
after ten o'clock nothing can strike till twelve, and that gives me two
whole hours to use my own judgment in."

The Girl took one eager step towards him, when suddenly over the city
roofs and across the square came the hateful, strident chime of
midnight. Midnight? _Midnight?_ The Girl rushed frantically to her
closet and pulled the Man's coat out from among her fluffy dresses and
thrust it into his hands, and he fled distractedly for his train without
"Good-by."

That was the trouble with having a lover who lived so far away and was
so busy that he could come only one evening a week. Long as you could
make that one evening, something always got crowded out. If you made
love, there was no time to talk. If you talked, there was no time to
make love. If you spent a great time in greetings, it curtailed your
good-by. If you began your good-by any earlier, why, it cut your evening
right in two. So the Girl sat and sulked a sad little while over the
general misery of the situation, until at last, to comfort herself with
the only means at hand, she went over to the closet and opened the door
just wide enough to stick her nose in and sniff ecstatically.

"Oh! O--h!" she crooned. "O--h! What a nice, smoky smell."

Then she took Hickory Dock and went to bed. This method of bunking was
nice for her, but it played sad havoc with Hickory Dock, who lay on his
back and whizzed and whirred and spun around at such a rate that when
morning came he was minutes and hours, not to say days, ahead of time.

This gain in time seemed rather an advantage to the Girl. She felt that
it was a good omen and must in some manner hasten the Wedding-Day, but
when she confided the same to the Man at his next visit he viewed the
fact with righteous scorn, though the fancy itself pleased him
mightily. The Girl learned that night, however, to eschew Hickory Dock
as a rag doll. She did not learn this, though, through any particular
solicitude for Hickory Dock, but rather because she had to stand by
respectfully a whole precious hour and watch the Man's lean, clever
fingers tinker with the little, jeweled mechanism. It was a fearful
waste of time. "You are so kind to _little_ things," she whispered at
last, with a catch in her voice that made the Man drop his work suddenly
and give all his attention to _big_ things. And another evening went,
while Hickory Dock stood up like a hero and refused to strike eleven.

So every Sunday night throughout the Winter and the Spring and the
Summer, the Man came joyously climbing up the long stairs to the Girl's
room, and every Sunday night Hickory Dock was started off on a fresh
round of Time and Love.

Hickory Dock, indeed, became a very precious object, for both Man and
Girl had reached that particular stage of love where they craved the
wonderful sensation of owning some vital thing together. But they were
so busy loving that they did not recognize the instinct. The man looked
upon Hickory Dock as an exceedingly blessed toy. The Girl grew gradually
to cherish the little clock with a certain tender superstition and
tingling reverence that sent her heart pounding every time the Man's
fingers turned to any casual tinkering.

And the Girl grew so exquisitely dear that the Man thought all women
were like her. And the Man grew so sturdily precious that the Girl knew
positively there was no person on earth to be compared with him. Over
this happiness Hickory Dock presided throbbingly, and though he balked
sometimes and bolted or lagged, he never stopped, and he never struck
eleven.

Thus things went on in the customary way that things do go on with men
and girls--until the Chronic Quarrel happened. The Chronic Quarrel was a
trouble quite distinct from any ordinary lovers' disturbance, and it was
a very silly little thing like this: The Girl had a nature that was
emotionally apprehensive. She was always looking, as it were, for "dead
men in the woods." She was always saying, "Suppose you get tired of me?"
"Suppose I died?" "Suppose I found out that you had a wife living?"
"Suppose you lost all your legs and arms in a railroad accident when you
were coming here some Sunday night?"

And one day the Man had snapped her short with "Suppose? Suppose? What
arrant nonsense! Suppose?--Suppose I fall in love with the Girl in the
Office?"

It seemed to him the most extravagant supposition that he could
possibly imagine, and he was perfectly delighted with its effect on his
Sweetheart. She grew silent at once and very wistful.

After that he met all her apprehensions with "Suppose?--Suppose I fall
in love with the Girl in the Office!"

And one day the Girl looked up at him with hot tears in her eyes and
said tersely, "Well, why don't you fall in love with her if you _want_
to?"

That, of course, made a little trouble, but it was delicious fun making
up, and the "Girl in the Office" became gradually one of those
irresistibly dangerous jokes that always begin with laughter and end
just as invariably with tears. When the Girl was sad or blue the Man was
clumsy enough to try and cheer her with facetious allusions to the "Girl
in the Office," and when the Girl was supremely, radiantly happy she
used to boast, "Why, I'm so happy I don't care a _rap_ about your old
'Girl in the Office.'" But whatever way the joke began, it always ended
disastrously, with bitterness and tears, yet neither Man nor Girl could
bear to formally taboo the subject lest it should look like the first
shirking of their perfect intimacy and freedom of speech. The Man felt
that in love like theirs he ought to be able to say anything he wanted
to, so he kept on saying it, while the Girl claimed an equal if more
caustic liberty of expression, and the Chronic Quarrel began to fester
a little round its edges.

One night in November, when Hickory Dock was nearly a year old in love,
the Chronic Quarrel came to a climax. The Man was very listless that
evening, and absent-minded, and altogether inadequate. The Girl accused
him of indifference. He accused her in return of a shrewish temper. She
suggested that perhaps he regretted his visit. He failed to contradict
her. Then the Girl drew herself up to an absurd height for so small a
creature and said stiffly,--

"You don't have to come next Sunday night if you don't want to."

At her scathing words the Man straightened up very suddenly in his chair
and gazed over at the little clock in a startled sort of way.

"Why, of course I shall come," he retorted impulsively, "Hickory Dock
needs me, if you don't."

"Oh, come and wind the clock by all means," flared the Girl. "I'm glad
_something_ needs you!"

Then the Man followed his own judgment and went home, though it was only
ten o'clock.

"I'm not going to write to him this week," sobbed poor Rosalie. "I think
he's very disagreeable."

But when the next Sunday came and the Man was _late_, it seemed as
though an Eternity had been tacked onto a hundred years. It was fully
quarter-past eight before he came climbing up the stairs.

The Girl looked scornfully at the clock. Her throat ached like a bruise.
"You didn't hurry yourself much, did you?" she asked spitefully.

The Man looked up quickly and bit his lip. "The train was late," he
replied briefly. He did not stop to take off his coat, but walked over
to the table and wound Hickory Dock. Then he hesitated the smallest
possible fraction of a moment, but the Girl made no move, so he picked
up his hat and started for the door.

The Girl's heart sank, but her pride rose proportionally. "Is that all
you came for?" she flushed. "Good! I am very tired to-night."

Then the Man went away. She counted every footfall on the stairs. In the
little hush at the street doorway she felt that he must surely turn and
come running back again, breathless and eager, with outstretched arms
and all the kisses she was starving for. But when she heard the front
door slam with a vicious finality she went and threw herself, sobbing on
the couch. "Fifty miles just to wind a clock!" she raged in grief and
chagrin. "I'll punish him for it if that's all he comes for."

So the next Sunday night she took Hickory Dock with a cruel jerk, and
put him on the floor just outside her door, and left a candle burning so
that the Man could not possibly fail to see what was intended. "If all
he comes for is to wind the clock, just because he _promised_, there's
no earthly use of his coming in," she reasoned, and went into her room
and shut and locked her door, waiting nervously with clutched hands for
the footfall on the stairs. "He loves some one else! He loves some one
else!" she kept prodding herself.

Just at eight o'clock the Man came. She heard him very distinctly on the
creaky board at the head of the stairs, and her heart beat to
suffocation. Then she heard him come close to the door, as though he
stooped down, and then he--laughed.

"Oh, very well," thought the Girl. "So he thinks it's funny, does he? He
has no business to laugh while I am crying, even if he does love some
one else.--I _hate him_!"

The Man knocked on the door very softly, and the Girl gripped tight hold
of her chair for fear she should jump up and let him in. He knocked
again, and she heard him give a strange little gasp of surprise. Then he
tried the door-handle. It turned fatuously, but the door would not open.
He pushed his weight against it,--she could almost feel the soft whirr
of his coat on the wood,--but the door would not yield.--Then he turned
very suddenly and went away.

The Girl got up with a sort of gloating look, as though she liked her
pain. "Next Sunday night is the last Sunday night of his year's
promise," she brooded; "then everything will be over. He will see how
wise I was not to let him promise forever and ever. I will send Hickory
Dock to him by express to save his coming for the final ceremony." Then
she went out and got Hickory Dock and brought him in and shook him, but
Hickory Dock continued to tick, "Till he comes! Till he comes! Till he
comes!"

It was a very tedious week. It is perfectly absurd to measure a week by
the fact that seven days make it--some days are longer than others. By
Wednesday the Girl's proud little heart had capitulated utterly, and she
decided not to send Hickory Dock away by express, but to let things take
their natural course. And every time she thought of the "natural course"
her heart began to pound with expectation. Of course, she would not
acknowledge that she really expected the Man to come after her cruel
treatment of him the previous week. "Everything is over. Everything is
over," she kept preaching to herself with many gestures and
illustrations; but next to God she put her faith in promises, and hadn't
the Man promised a great, sacred lover's promise that he would come
every Sunday for a year? So when the final Sunday actually came she went
to her wedding-box and took out her "second best" of everything, silk
and ruffles and laces, and dressed herself up for sheer pride and joy,
with tingling thoughts of the night when she should wear her "first
best" things. She put on a soft, little, white Summer dress that the Man
liked better than anything else, and stuck a pink bow in her hair, and
big rosettes on her slippers, and drew the big Morris chair towards the
fire, and brought the Man's pipe and tobacco-box from behind the gilt
mirror. Then she took Hickory Dock very tenderly and put him outside the
door, with two pink candles flaming beside him, and a huge pink rose
over his left ear. She thought the Man could smell the rose the second
he opened the street door. Then she went back to her room, and left her
door a wee crack open, and crouched down on the floor close to it, like
a happy, wounded thing, and _waited_--

But the Man did not come. Eight o'clock, nine o'clock, ten o'clock,
eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock, she waited, cramped and cold, hoping
against hope, fearing against fear. Every creak on the stairs thrilled
her. Every fresh disappointment chilled her right through to her heart.
She sat and rocked herself in a huddled heap of pain, she taunted
herself with lack of spirit, she goaded herself with intricate
remorse--but she never left her bitter vigil until half-past two. Then
some clatter of milkmen in the street roused her to the realization of a
new day, and she got up dazed and icy, like one in a dream, and limped
over to her couch and threw herself down to sleep like a drunken person.

Late the next morning she woke heavily with a vague, dull sense of loss
which she could not immediately explain. She lay and looked with
astonishment at the wrinkled folds of the white mull dress that bound
her limbs like a shroud. She clutched at the tightness of her collar,
and fingered with surprise the pink bow in her hair. Then slowly, one by
one, the events of the previous night came back to her in all their
significance, and with a muffled scream of heartbreak she buried her
face in the pillow. She cried till her heart felt like a clenched fist
within her, and then, with her passion exhausted, she got up like a
little, cold, rumpled ghost and pattered out to the hall in her
silk-stockinged feet, and picked up Hickory Dock with his wilted pink
rose and brought him in and put him back on her desk. Then she brought
in the mussy, pink-smooched candlesticks and stowed them far away in her
closet behind everything else. The faintest possible scent of
tobacco-smoke came to her from the closet depths, and as she reached
instinctively to take a sad little whiff she became suddenly conscious
that there was a strange, uncanny _hush_ in the room, as though a soul
had left its body. She turned back quickly and cried out with a
smothered cry. Hickory Dock had stopped!

"Until--the--end--of--Time," she gasped, and staggered hard against the
closet-door. Then in a flash she burst out laughing stridently, and
rushed for Hickory Dock and grabbed him by his little silver handle,
opened the window with a bang, and threw him with all her might and main
down into the brick alley four stories below, where he fell with a
sickening crash among a wee handful of scattered rose petals.

--The days that followed were like horrid dreams, the nights, like
hideous realities. The fire would not burn. The sun and moon would not
shine, and life itself settled down like a pall. Every detail of that
Sunday night stamped and re stamped itself upon her mind. Back of her
outraged love was the crueller pain of her outraged faith. The Man of
his own free will had made a sacred promise and broken it! She realized
now for the first time in her life why men went to the devil because
women had failed them--not disappointed them, but _failed_ them! She
could even imagine how poor mothers felt when fathers shirked their
fatherhood. She tasted in one week's imagination all possible woman
sorrows of the world.

At the end of the second week she began to realize the depth of
isolation into which her engagement had thrown her. For a year and a
half she had thought nothing, dreamed nothing, cared for nothing except
the Man. Now, with the Man swept away, there was no place to turn either
for comfort or amusement.

At the end of the third week, when no word came, she began to gather
together all the Man's little personal effects, and consigned them to a
box out of sight--the pipe and tobacco, a favorite book, his soft
Turkish slippers, his best gloves, and even a little poem which he had
written for her to set to music. It was a pretty little love-song that
they had made together, but as she hummed it over now for the last time
she wondered if, after all, _woman's music_ did not do more than man's
words to make love Singable.

When a month was up she began to strip the room of everything that the
Man had brought towards the making of their Home. It was like stripping
tendons. She had never realized before how thoroughly the Man's
personality had dominated her room as well as her life. When she had
crowded his books, his pictures, his college trophies, his Morris chair,
his rugs, into one corner of her room and covered them with two big
sheets, her little, paltry, feminine possessions looked like chiffon in
a desert.

While she was pondering what to do next her rent fell due. The month's
idling had completely emptied her pewter savings-bank that she had been
keeping as a sort of precious joke for the Honeymoon. The rent-bill
startled her into spasmodic efforts at composition. She had been quite
busy for a year writing songs for some Educational people, but how could
one make harmony with a heart full of discord and all life off the key.
A single week convinced her of the utter futility of these efforts. In
one high-strung, wakeful night she decided all at once to give up the
whole struggle and go back to her little country village, where at least
she would find free food and shelter until she could get her grip again.

For three days she struggled heroically with burlap and packing-boxes.
She felt as though every nail she pounded was hurting the Man as well as
herself, and she pounded just as hard as she possibly could.

When the room was stripped of every atom of personality except her
couch, and the duplicate latch-key, which still hung high and dusty, a
deliciously cruel thought came to the Girl, and the irony of it set her
eyes flashing. On the night before her intended departure she took the
key and put it into a pretty little box and sent it to the Man.

"He'll know by that token," she said, "that there's no more 'Home' for
him and me. He will get his furniture a few days later, and then he will
see that everything is scattered and shattered. Even if he's married by
this time, the key will hurt him, for his wife will want to know what it
means, and he never can tell her."

Then she cried so hard that her overwrought, half-starved little body
collapsed, and she crept into her bed and was sick all night and all the
next day, so that there was no possible thought or chance of packing or
traveling. But towards the second evening she struggled up to get
herself a taste of food and wine from her cupboard, and, wrapping
herself in her pink kimono, huddled over the fire to try and find a
little blaze and cheer.

Just as the flames commenced to flush her cheeks the lock clicked. She
started up in alarm. The door opened abruptly, and the Man strode in
with a very determined, husbandly look on his haggard face. For the
fraction of a second he stood and looked at her pitifully frightened and
disheveled little figure.

"Forgive me," he cried, "but I _had_ to come like this." Then he took
one mighty stride and caught her up in his arms and carried her back to
her open bed and tucked her in like a child while she clung to his neck
laughing and sobbing and crying as though her brain was turned. He
smoothed her hair, he kissed her eyes, he rubbed his rough cheek
confidently against her soft one, and finally, when her convulsive
tremors quieted a little, he reached down into his great overcoat pocket
and took out poor, battered, mutilated Hickory Dock.

"I found him down in the Janitor's office just now," he explained, and
his mouth twitched just the merest trifle at the corners.

"Don't smile," said the Girl, sitting up suddenly very straight and
stiff. "Don't smile till you know the whole truth. _I_ broke Hickory
Dock. I threw him _purposely_ four stories down into the brick alley!"

The Man began to examine Hickory Dock very carefully.

"I should judge that it was a _brick_ alley," he remarked with an odd
twist of his lips, as he tossed the shattered little clock over to the
burlap-covered armchair.

Then he took the Girl very quietly and tenderly in his arms again, and
gazed down into her eyes with a look that was new to him.

"Rosalie," he whispered, "I will mend Hickory Dock for you if it takes
a thousand years,"--his voice choked,--"but I wish to God I could mend
my broken promise as easily!"

And Rosalie smiled through her tears and said,--

"Sweetheart-Man, you do love me?"

"With all my heart and soul and body and breath, and past and present
and future I _love you_!" said the Man.

Then Rosalie kissed a little path to his ear, and whispered, oh, so
softly,--

"Sweetheart-Man, I love _you_ just that same way."

And Hickory Dock, the Angel, never ticked the passing of a single
second, but lay on his back looking straight up to Heaven with his two
little battered hands clasped eternally at Love's _high noon_.




THE VERY TIRED GIRL


ON one of those wet, warm, slushy February nights when the vapid air
sags like sodden wool in your lungs, and your cheek-bones bore through
your flesh, and your leaden feet seem strung directly from the roots of
your eyes, three girls stampeded their way through the jostling, peevish
street crowds with no other object in Heaven or Earth except just to
get--HOME.

It was supper time, too, somewhere between six and seven, the caved-in
hour of the day when the ruddy ghost of Other People's dinners flaunts
itself rather grossly in the pallid nostrils of Her Who Lives by the
Chafing-Dish.

One of the girls was a Medical Masseuse, trained brain and brawn in the
German Hospitals. One was a Public School Teacher with a tickle of chalk
dust in her lungs. One was a Cartoon Artist with a heart like chiffon
and a wit as accidentally malicious as the jab of a pin in a flirt's
belt.

All three of them were silly with fatigue. The writhing city cavorted
before them like a sick clown. A lame cab horse went strutting like a
mechanical toy. Crape on a door would have plunged them into hysterics.
Were you ever as tired as that?

It was, in short, the kind of night that rips out every one according to
his stitch. Rhoda Hanlan the Masseuse was ostentatiously sewed with
double thread and backstitched at that. Even the little Teacher, Ruth
MacLaurin, had a physique that was embroidered if not darned across its
raveled places. But Noreen Gaudette, the Cartoon Drawer, with her
spangled brain and her tissue-paper body, was merely basted together
with a single silken thread. It was the knowledge of being only basted
that gave Noreen the droll, puckered terror in her eyes whenever Life
tugged at her with any specially inordinate strain.

Yet it was Noreen who was popularly supposed to be built with an
electric battery instead of a heart.

The boarding-house that welcomed the three was rather tall for beauty,
narrow-shouldered, flat-chested, hunched together in the block like a
prudish, dour old spinster overcrowded in a street car. To call such a
house "Home" was like calling such a spinster "Mother." But the three
girls called it "Home" and rather liked the saucy taste of the word in
their mouths.

Across the threshold in a final spurt of energy the jaded girls pushed
with the joyous realization that there were now only five flights of
stairs between themselves and their own attic studio.

On the first floor the usual dreary vision greeted them of a hall table
strewn with stale letters--most evidently bills, which no one seemed in
a hurry to appropriate.

It was twenty-two stumbling, bundle-dropping steps to the next floor,
where the strictly Bachelor Quarters with half-swung doors emitted a
pleasant gritty sound of masculine voices, and a sumptuous cloud of
cigarette smoke which led the way frowardly up twenty-two more toiling
steps to the Old Maid's Floor, buffeted itself naughtily against the
sternly shut doors, and then mounted triumphantly like sweet incense to
the Romance Floor, where with door alluringly open the Much-Loved Girl
and her Mother were frankly and ingenuously preparing for the
Monday-Night-Lover's visit.

The vision of the Much-Loved Girl smote like a brutal flashlight upon
the three girls in the hall.

Out of curl, out of breath, jaded of face, bedraggled of clothes, they
stopped abruptly and stared into the vista.

Before their fretted eyes the room stretched fresh and clean as a newly
returned laundry package. The green rugs lay like velvet grass across
the floor. The chintz-covered furniture crisped like the crust of a
cake. Facing the gilt-bound mirror, the Much-Loved Girl sat joyously in
all her lingerie-waisted, lace-paper freshness, while her Mother hovered
over her to give one last maternal touch to a particularly rampageous
blond curl.

[Illustration: With no other object, except to get home]

The Much-Loved Girl was a cordial person. Her liquid, mirrored
reflection nodded gaily out into the hall. There was no fatigue in the
sparkling face. There was no rain or fog. There was no street-corner
insult. There was no harried stress of wherewithal. There was just
Youth, and Girl, and Cherishing.

She made the Masseuse and the little School Teacher think of a pale-pink
rose in a cut-glass vase. But she made Noreen Gaudette _feel_ like a
vegetable in a boiled dinner.

With one despairing gasp--half-chuckle and half-sob--the three girls
pulled themselves together and dashed up the last flight of stairs to
the Trunk-Room Floor, and their own attic studio, where bumping through
the darkness they turned a sulky stream of light upon a room more
tired-looking than themselves, and then, with almost fierce abandon,
collapsed into the nearest resting-places that they could reach.

It was a long time before any one spoke.

Between the treacherous breeze of the open window and a withering
blast of furnace heat the wilted muslin curtain swayed back and forth
with languid rhythm. Across the damp night air came faintly the
yearning, lovery smell of violets, and the far-off, mournful whine of a
sick hand-organ.

On the black fur hearth-rug Rhoda, the red-haired, lay prostrated like a
broken tiger lily with her long, lithe hands clutched desperately at her
temples.

"I am so tired," she said. "I am so tired that I can actually feel my
hair fade."

Ruth, the little Public School Teacher, laughed derisively from her
pillowed couch where she struggled intermittently with her suffocating
collar and the pinchy buckles on her overshoes.

"That's nothing," she asserted wanly. "I am so tired that I would like
to build me a pink-wadded silk house, just the shape of a slipper, where
I could snuggle down in the toe and go to sleep for a--million years. It
isn't to-morrow's early morning that racks me, it's the thought of all
the early mornings between now and the Judgment Day. Oh, any sentimental
person can cry at night, but when you begin to cry in the morning--to
lie awake and cry in the morning--" Her face sickened suddenly. "Did you
see that Mother downstairs?" she gasped, "fixing that curl? Think of
having a Mother!"

Then Noreen Gaudette opened her great gray eyes and grinned
diabolically. She had a funny little manner of cartooning her emotions.

"Think of having a Mother?" she scoffed. "What nonsense!--_Think of
having a c-u-r-l!_

"You talk like Sunday-Paper debutantes," she drawled. "You don't know
anything about being tired. Why, I am so tired--I am so tired--that I
wish--I wish that the first man who ever proposed to me would come back
and ask me--_again_!"

It was then that the Landlady, knocking at the door, presented a card,
"Mr. Ernest T. Dextwood," for Miss Gaudette, and the innocent-looking
conversation exploded suddenly like a short-fused firecracker.

Rhoda in an instant was sitting bolt upright with her arms around her
knees rocking to and fro in convulsive delight. Ruth much more
thoughtfully jumped for Noreen's bureau drawer. But Noreen herself,
after one long, hyphenated "Oh, my _H-e-a-v-e-n-s_!" threw off her damp,
wrinkled coat, stalked over to the open window, and knelt down
quiveringly where she could smother her blazing face in the inconsequent
darkness.

For miles and miles the teasing lights of Other Women's homes stretched
out before her. From the window-sill below her rose the persistent
purple smell of violets, and the cooing, gauzy laughter of the
Much-Loved Girl. Fatigue was in the damp air, surely, but Spring was
also there, and Lonesomeness, and worst of all, that desolating sense of
patient, dying snow wasting away before one's eyes like Life itself.

When Noreen turned again to her friends her eyelids drooped defiantly
across her eyes. Her lips were like a scarlet petal under the bite of
her teeth. There in the jetty black and scathing white of her dress she
loomed up suddenly like one of her own best drawings--pulseless ink and
stale white paper vitalized all in an instant by some miraculous
emotional power. A living Cartoon of "_Fatigue_" she stood
there--"_Fatigue_," as she herself would have drawn it--no flaccid
failure of wilted bone and sagging flesh, but _Verve_--the taut Brain's
pitiless rally of the Body that can not afford to rest--the verve of
Factory Lights blazing overtime, the verve of the Runner who drops at
his goal.

"All the time I am gone," she grinned, "pray over and over, 'Lead Noreen
not into temptation.'" Her voice broke suddenly into wistful laughter:
"Why to meet again a man who used to love you--it's like offering
store-credit to a pauper."

Then she slammed the door behind her and started downstairs for the
bleak, plush parlor, with a chaotic sense of absurdity and bravado.

But when she reached the middle of the bachelor stairway and looked down
casually and spied her clumsy arctics butting out from her wet-edged
skirt all her nervousness focused instantly in her shaking knees, and
she collapsed abruptly on the friendly dark stair and clutching hold of
the banister, began to whimper.

In the midst of her stifled tears a door banged hard above her, the
floor creaked under a sturdy step, and the tall, narrow form of the
Political Economist silhouetted itself against the feeble light of the
upper landing.

One step down he came into the darkness--two steps, three steps, four,
until at last in choking miserable embarrassment, Noreen cried out
hysterically:

"Don't step on me--I'm _crying_!"

With a gasp of astonishment the young man struck a sputtering match and
bent down waving it before him.

"Why, it's _you_, Miss Gaudette," he exclaimed with relief. "What's the
matter? Are you ill? What are you crying about?" and he dropped down
beside her and commenced to fan her frantically with his hat.

"What _are_ you crying about?" he persisted helplessly, drugged
man-like, by the same embarrassment that mounted like wine to the
woman's brain.

Noreen began to laugh snuffingly.

"I'm not crying about anything special," she acknowledged. "I'm just
crying. I'm crying partly because I'm tired--and partly because I've got
my overshoes on--but _mostly_"--her voice began to catch again--"but
mostly--because there's a _man_ waiting to see me in the parlor."

The Political Economist shifted uneasily in his rain coat and stared
into Noreen's eyes.

"Great Heavens!" he stammered. "Do you always cry when men come to see
you? Is that why you never invited _me_ to call?"

Noreen shook her head. "I never have men come to see me," she answered
quite simply. "I go to see _them_. I study in their studios. I work on
their newspapers. I caricature their enemies. Oh, it isn't _men_ that
I'm afraid of," she added blithely, "but _this_ is something particular.
_This_ is something really very funny. Did you ever make a wish that
something perfectly preposterous would happen?"

"Oh, yes," said the Political Economist reassuringly. "This very day I
said that I wished my Stenographer would swallow the telephone."

"But she didn't swallow it, did she?" persisted Noreen triumphantly.
"Now I said that I wished some one would swallow the telephone and she
_did_ swallow it!"

Then her face in the dusky light flared piteously with harlequined
emotions. Her eyes blazed bright with toy excitement. Her lips curved
impishly with exaggerated drollery. But when for a second her head
drooped back against the banister her jaded small face looked for all
the world like a death-mask of a Jester.

The Political Economist's heart crinkled uncomfortably within him.

"Why, you poor little girl," he said. "I didn't know that women got as
tired as that. Let me take off your overshoes."

Noreen stood up like a well-trained pony and shed her clumsy footgear.

The Man's voice grew peremptory. "Your skirt is sopping wet. Are you
crazy? Didn't have time to get into dry things? Nonsense! Have you had
any supper? What? _N-o?_ Wait a minute."

In an instant he was flying up the stairs, and when he came back there
was a big glass of cool milk in his hand.

Noreen drank it ravenously, and then started downstairs with abrupt,
quick courage.

When she reached the ground floor the Political Economist leaned over
the banisters and shouted in a piercing whisper:

"I'll leave your overshoes outside my door where you can get them on
your way up later."

Then he laughed teasingly and added:
"I--hope--you'll--have--a--good--time."

And Noreen, cleaving for one last second to the outer edge of the
banisters, smiled up at him, so strainingly _up_, that her face, to the
man above her, looked like a little flat white plate with a
crimson-lipped rose wilting on it.

Then she disappeared into the parlor.

With equal abruptness the Political Economist changed his mind about
going out, and went back instead to his own room and plunged himself
down in his chair, and smoked and thought, until his friend, the Poet at
the big writing-desk, slapped down his manuscript and stared at him
inquisitively.

"Lord Almighty! I wish I could draw!" said the Political Economist. It
was not so much an exclamation as a reverent entreaty. His eyes narrowed
sketchily across the vision that haunted him. "If I could draw," he
persisted, "I'd make a picture that would hit the world like a knuckled
fist straight between its selfish old eyes. And I'd call that picture
'Talent.' I'd make an ocean chopping white and squally, with _black_
clouds scudding like fury across the sky, and no land in sight except
rocks. And I'd fill that ocean full of sharks and things--not showing
too much, you know, but just an occasional shimmer of fins through the
foam. And I'd make a sailboat scooting along, tipped 'way over on her
side toward you, with just a slip of an eager-faced girl in it. And I'd
wedge her in there, wind-blown, spray-dashed, foot and back braced to
the death, with the tiller in one hand and the sheet in the other, and
weather-almighty roaring all around her. And I'd make the riskiest
little leak in the bottom of that boat rammed desperately with a box of
chocolates, and a bunch of violets, and a large paper compliment in a
man's handwriting reading: 'Oh, how _clever_ you are.' And I'd have that
girl's face haggard with hunger, starved for sleep, tense with fear,
ravished with excitement. But I'd have her chin _up_, and her eyes
_open_, and the tiniest tilt of a quizzical smile hounding you like mad
across the snug, gilt frame. Maybe, too, I'd have a woman's magazine
blowing around telling in chaste language how to keep the hair 'smooth'
and the hands 'velvety,' and admonishing girls above all things not to
be eaten by sharks! Good Heavens, Man!" he finished disjointedly, "a
girl doesn't know how to sail a boat anyway!"

"_W-h-a-t_ are you talking about?" moaned the Poet.

The Political Economist began to knock the ashes furiously out of his
pipe.

"What am I talking about?" he cried; "I'm talking about _girls_. I've
always said that I'd gladly fall in love if I only could decide what
kind of a girl I wanted to fall in love with. Well, I've decided!"

The Poet's face furrowed. "Is it the Much-Loved Girl?" he stammered.

The Political Economist's smoldering temper began to blaze.

"No, it isn't," ejaculated the Political Economist. "The Much-Loved Girl
is a sweet enough, airy, fairy sort of girl, but I'm not going to fall
in love with just a pretty valentine."

"Going to try a 'Comic'?" the Poet suggested pleasantly.

The Political Economist ignored the impertinence. "I am reasonably well
off," he continued meditatively, "and I'm reasonably good-looking, and
I've contributed eleven articles on 'Men and Women' to modern economic
literature, but it's dawned on me all of a sudden that in spite of all
my beauteous theories regarding life in general, I am just one big shirk
when it comes to life in particular."

The Poet put down his pen and pushed aside his bottle of rhyming fluid,
and began to take notice.

"Whom are you going to fall in love with?" he demanded.

The Political Economist sank back into his chair.

"I don't quite know," he added simply, "but she's going to be some
tired girl. Whatever else she may or may not be, she's got to be a tired
girl."

"A tired girl?" scoffed the Poet. "That's no kind of a girl to marry.
Choose somebody who's all pink and white freshness. That's the kind of a
girl to make a man happy."

The Political Economist smiled a bit viciously behind his cigar.

"Half an hour ago," he affirmed, "I was a beast just like you. Good
Heavens! Man," he cried out suddenly, "did you ever see a girl cry?
Really cry, I mean. Not because her manicure scissors jabbed her thumb,
but because her great, strong, tyrant, sexless brain had goaded her poor
little woman-body to the very cruelest, last vestige of its strength and
spirit. Did you ever see a girl like that Miss Gaudette upstairs--she's
the Artist, you know, who did those cartoons last year that played the
devil itself with 'Congress Assembled'--did you ever see a girl like
_that_ just plain thrown down, tripped in her tracks, sobbing like a
hurt, tired child? Your pink and white prettiness can cry like a rampant
tragedy-queen all she wants to over a misfitted collar, but my hand is
going here and now to the big-brained girl who cries like a child!"

"In short," interrupted the Poet, "you are going to help--Miss Gaudette
sail her boat?"

"Y-e-s," said the Political Economist.

"And so," mocked the Poet, "you are going to jump aboard and steer the
young lady adroitly to some port of your own choosing?"

The older man's jaws tightened ominously. "No, by the Lord Almighty,
that's just what I am not going to do!" he promised. "I'm going to help
her sail to the port of her own choosing!"

The Poet began to rummage in his mind for adequate arguments. "Oh,
allegorically," he conceded, "your scheme is utterly charming, but from
any material, matrimonial point of view I should want to remind myself
pretty hard that overwrought brains do not focus very easily on domestic
interests, nor do arms which have tugged as you say at 'sheets' and
'tillers' curve very dimplingly around youngsters' shoulders."

The Political Economist blew seven mighty smoke-puffs from his pipe.

"That would be the economic price I deserve to pay for not having
arrived earlier on the scene," he said quietly.

The Poet began to chuckle. "You certainly are hard hit," he scoffed.

          "Political Economy
           Gone to rhyme with Hominy!

It's an exquisite scheme!"

"It's a rotten rhyme," attested the Political Economist, and strode over
to the mantelpiece, where he began to hunt for a long piece of twine.

"Miss Gaudette," he continued, "is downstairs in the parlor now
entertaining a caller--some resurrected beau, I believe. Anyway, she
left her overshoes outside my door to get when she comes up again, and
I'm going to tie one end of this string to them and the other end to my
wrist, so that when she picks up her shoes a few hours later it will
wake me from my nap, and I can make one grand rush for the hall and--"

"Propose then and there?" quizzed the Poet.

"No, not exactly. But I'm going to ask her if she'll let me fall in love
with her."

The Poet sniffed palpably and left the room.

But the Political Economist lay back in his chair and went to sleep with
a great, pleasant expectancy in his heart.

When he woke at last with a sharp, tugging pain at his wrist the room
was utterly dark, and the little French clock had stopped aghast and
clasped its hands at eleven.

For a second he rubbed his eyes in perplexity. Then he jumped to his
feet, fumbled across the room and opened the door to find Noreen staring
with astonishment at the tied overshoes.

"Oh, I wanted to speak to you," he began. Then his eyes focused in
amazement on a perfectly huge bunch of violets which Noreen was clasping
desperately in her arms.

"Good Heavens!" he cried. "Is anybody dead?"

But Noreen held the violets up like a bulwark and commenced to laugh
across them.

"He did propose," she said, "and I accepted him! Does it look as though
I had chosen to be engaged with violets instead of a ring?" she
suggested blithely. "It's only that I asked him if he would be apt to
send me violets, and when he said: 'Yes, every week,' I just asked if I
please couldn't have them all at once. There must be a Billion dollars'
worth here. I'm going to have a tea-party to-morrow and invite the
Much-Loved Girl." The conscious, childish malice of her words twisted
her lips into an elfish smile. "It's Mr. Ernest Dextwood," she rattled
on: "Ernest Dextwood, the Coffee Merchant. He's a widower now--with
three children. Do--you--think--that--I--will--make--a--good--stepmother?"

The violets began to quiver against her breast, but her chin went higher
in rank defiance of the perplexing _something_ which she saw in the
Political Economist's narrowing eyes. She began to quote with playful
recklessness Byron's pert parody:

          "There is a tide in the affairs of women
           Which taken at its flood leads--God Knows Where."

But when the Political Economist did not answer her, but only stared
with brooding, troubled eyes, she caught her breath with a sudden
terrifying illumination. "Ouch!" she said. "O-u-c-h!" and wilted
instantly like a frost-bitten rose under heat. All the bravado, all the
stamina, all the glint of her, vanished utterly.

"Mr. Political Economist," she stammered, "Life--is--too--hard--for--me.
I am not Rhoda Hanlan with her sturdy German peasant stock. I am not
Ruth MacLaurin with her Scotch-plaited New Englandism. Nationality
doesn't count with me. My Father was a Violinist. My Mother was an
Actress. In order to marry, my Father swapped his music for discordant
factory noises, and my Mother shirked a dozen successful roles to give
one life-long, very poor imitation of Happiness. My Father died of too
much to drink. My Mother died of too little to eat. And I was bred, I
guess, of very bitter love, of conscious sacrifice--of thwarted
genius--of defeated vanity. Life--is--too--hard--for--me--_alone_. I can
not finance it. I can not safeguard it. I can not weather it. _I am not
seaworthy!_ You might be willing to risk your _own_ self-consciousness,
but when the dead begin to come back and clamor in you--when you laugh
unexpectedly with your Father's restive voice--when you quicken
unexplainably to the Lure of gilt and tinsel--" A whimper of pain went
scudding across her face, and she put back her head and grinned--"You
can keep my overshoes for a souvenir," she finished abruptly. "I'm not
allowed any more to go out when it storms!" Then she turned like a flash
and ran swiftly up the stairs.

When he heard the door slam hard behind her, the Political Economist
fumbled his way back through the darkened room to his Morris chair, and
threw himself down again. Ernest Dextwood? He knew him well, a
prosperous, kindly, yet domestically tyrannical man, bright in the
office, stupid at home. Ernest Dextwood! So much less of a girl would
have done for him.

A widower with three children? The eager, unspent emotionalism of
Noreen's face flaunted itself across his smoky vision. All that hunger
for Life, for Love, for Beauty, for Sympathy, to be blunted once for all
in a stale, misfitting, ready-made home? A widower with three children!
God in Heaven, was she as tired as that!

It was a whole long week before he saw Noreen again. When he met her at
last she had just come in from automobiling, all rosy-faced and out of
breath, with her thin little face peering almost plumply from its heavy
swathings of light-blue veiling, and her slender figure deeply wrapped
in a wondrous covert coat.

Rhoda Hanlan and Ruth MacLaurin were close behind her, much more
prosaically garnished in golf capes and brown-colored mufflers. The
Political Economist stood by on the stairs to let them pass, and Noreen
looked back at him and called out gaily:

"It's lots of fun to be engaged. We're all enjoying it very much. It's
bully!"

The next time he saw her she was on her way downstairs to the parlor, in
a long-tailed, soft, black evening gown that bothered her a bit about
managing. Her dark hair was piled up high on her head, and she had the
same mischievous, amateur-theatrical charm that the blue chiffon veil
and covert coat had given her.

Quite frankly she demanded the Political Economist's appreciation of her
appearance.

"Just see how nice I can look when I really try?" she challenged him,
"but it took me all day to do it, and my work went to smash--and my
dress cost seventy dollars," she finished wryly.

But the Political Economist was surly about his compliment.

"No, I like you better in your little business suit," he attested
gruffly. And he lied, and he knew that he lied, for never before had he
seen the shrewd piquancy of her eyes so utterly swamped by just the
wild, sweet lure of girlhood.

Some time in May, however, when the shop windows were gay with women's
luxuries, he caught a hurried glimpse of her face gazing rather
tragically at a splurge of lilac-trimmed hats.

Later in the month he passed her in the Park, cuddled up on a bench,
with her shabby business suit scrunched tight around her, her elbows on
her knees, her chin burrowed in her hands, and her fiercely narrowed
eyes quaffing like some outlawed thing at the lusty new green grass, the
splashing fountain, the pinky flush of flowering quince. But when he
stopped to speak to her she jumped up quickly and pleaded the haste of
an errand.

It was two weeks later in scorching June that the biggest warehouses on
the river caught fire in the early part of the evening. The day had been
as harsh as a shining, splintery plank. The night was like a gray silk
pillow. In blissful, soothing consciousness of perfect comfort every one
in the boarding-house climbed up on the roof to watch the gorgeous,
fearful conflagration across the city. The Landlady's voice piped high
and shrill discussing the value of insurance. The Old Maids scuttled
together under their knitted shawls. The Much-Loved Girl sat amiably
enthroned among the bachelors with one man's coat across her shoulders,
another man's cap on her yellow head, and two deliciously timid hands
clutched at the coat-sleeves of the two men nearest her. Whenever she
bent her head she trailed the fluff of her hair across the enraptured
eyelids of the Poet.

Only Noreen Gaudette was missing.

"Where is Miss Gaudette?" probed the Political Economist.

The Masseuse answered vehemently: "Why, Noreen's getting ready to go to
the fire. Her paper sent for her just as we came up. There's an awful
row on, you know, about the inefficiency of the Fire Department, and
there's no other person in all the city who can make people look as
silly as Noreen can. If this thing appeals to her to-night, and she gets
good and mad enough, and keeps her nerve, there'll be the biggest
overhauling of the Fire Department that _you_ ever saw! But I'm sorry it
happened. It will be an all-night job, and Noreen is almost dead enough
as it is."

"An 'all-night job'?" The Much-Loved Girl gasped out her startled sense
of propriety, and snuggled back against the shoulder of the man who sat
nearest to her. She was very genuinely sorry for any one who had to be
improper.

The Political Economist, noting the incident in its entirety, turned
abruptly on his heel, climbed down the tremulous ladder to the
trunk-room floor and knocked peremptorily at Noreen's door.

In reply to the answer which he thought he heard, he turned the handle
of the door and entered. The gas jet sizzled blatantly across the room,
and a tiny blue flame toiled laboriously in a cooking lamp beneath a pot
of water. The room was reeking strong with the smell of coffee, the rank
brew that wafted him back in nervous terror to his college days and the
ghastly eve of his final examinations. A coat, a hat, a mouse-gray
sweater, a sketch-book, and a bunch of pencils were thrown together on
the edge of the divan. Crouched on the floor with head and shoulders
prostrate across her easel chair and thin hands straining at the
woodwork was Noreen Gaudette. The startled face that lifted to his was
haggard with the energy of a year rallied to the needs of an hour.

"I thought you told me to come in," said the Political Economist. "I
came down to go to the fire with you."

Noreen was on her feet in an instant, hurrying into her hat and coat,
and quaffing greedily at the reeking coffee.

"You ought to have some one to look after you," persisted the man.
"Where's Mr. Dextwood?"

Noreen stood still in the middle of the floor and stared at him.

"Why, I've broken my engagement," she exclaimed, trying hard to speak
tamely and reserve every possible fraction of her artificial energy.

"Oh, yes," she smiled wanly, "I couldn't afford to be engaged! I
couldn't afford the time. I couldn't afford the money. I couldn't afford
the mental distraction. I'm working again now, but it's horribly hard to
get back into the mood. My drawing has all gone to smash. But I'll get
the hang of it again pretty soon."

"You look in mighty poor shape to work to-night," said the Political
Economist. "What makes you go?"

"What makes me go?" cried Noreen, with an extravagant burst of
vehemence. "What makes me go?--Why, if I make good to-night on those
Fire-Department Pictures I get a Hundred Dollars, as well as the
assurance of all the Republican cartooning for the next city election.
It's worth a lot of money to me!"

"Enough to kill yourself for?" probed the Man.

Noreen's mouth began to twist. "Yes--if you still owe for your
automobile coat, and your black evening gown, and your room rent and a
few other trifles of that sort. But come on, if you'll promise not to
talk to me till it's all over." Like a pair of youngsters they scurried
down the stairs, jumped into the waiting cab, and galloped off toward
the river edge of the city.

True to his promise, the Political Economist did not speak to her, but
he certainly had not promised to keep his eyes shut as well as his
mouth. From the very first she sat far forward on the seat where the
passing street-lights blazed upon her unconscious face. The Man, the
cab, love-making, debt-paying, all were forgotten in her desperate
effort to keep keyed up to the working-point. Her brain was hurriedly
sketching in her backgrounds. Her suddenly narrowed eyes foretold the
tingling pride in some particular imagining. The flashing twist of her
smile predicted the touch of malice that was to make her pictures the
sensation of--a day.

The finish of the three-mile drive found her jubilant, prescient,
pulsing with power. The glow from the flames lit up the cab like a room.
The engine bells clanged around them. Sparks glittered. Steam hissed.
When the cabman's horse refused to scorch his nose any nearer the
conflagration, Noreen turned to the Political Economist with some
embarrassment. "If you really want to help me," she pleaded, "you'll
stay here in the cab and wait for me."

Then, before the Political Economist could offer his angry protest, she
had opened the door, jumped from the step, and disappeared into the
surging, rowdy throng of spectators. A tedious hour later the cab door
opened abruptly, and Noreen reappeared.

Her hat was slouched down over her heat-scorched eyes. Her shoulders
were limp. Her face was dull, dumb, gray, like a Japanese lantern robbed
of its candle. Bluntly she thrust her sketch-book into his hands and
threw herself down on the seat beside him.

"Oh, take me home," she begged. "Oh, take me home _quick_. It's no use,"
she added with a shrug, "I've seen the whole performance. I've been
everywhere--inside the ropes--up on the roofs--out on the waterfront.
The Fire Department Men are not 'inefficient.' They're simply _bully_!
_And I make no caricatures of heroes!_"

The lurch of the cab wheel against a curbstone jerked a faint smile into
her face. "Isn't it horrid," she complained, "to have a Talent and a
Living that depend altogether upon your _getting mad_?" Then her eyes
flooded with worry. "What _shall_ I do?"

"You'll marry me," said the Political Economist.

"Oh, no!" gasped Noreen. "I shall never, never marry any one! I told you
that I couldn't afford to be engaged. It takes too much time, and
besides," her color flamed piteously, "I didn't like being engaged."

"I didn't ask you to be engaged," persisted the Political Economist. "I
didn't ask you to serve any underpaid, ill-fed, half-hearted
apprenticeship to Happiness. I asked you to be married."

"Oh, no!" sighed Noreen. "I shall never marry any one."

The Political Economist began to laugh. "Going to be an old maid?" he
teased.

The high lights flamed into Noreen's eyes. She braced herself into the
corner of the carriage and fairly hurled her defiance at him.
Indomitable purpose raged in her heart, unutterable pathos drooped
around her lips. Every atom of blood in her body was working instantly
in her brain. No single drop of it loafed in her cheeks under the flimsy
guise of embarrassment.

"I am not an 'Old Maid!' I am not! No one who creates anything is an
'Old Maid'!"

The passion of her mood broke suddenly into wilful laughter. She shook
her head at him threateningly.

"Don't you ever dare to call me an 'Old Maid' again.--But I'll tell you
just what you can call me--Women are supposed to be the Poetry of Life,
aren't they--the Sonnet, the Lyric, the Limerick? Well--I am blank
verse. _That_ is the trouble with me. I simply _do not rhyme_.--That is
all!"

"Will you marry me?" persisted the Political Economist.

Noreen shook her head. "No!" she repeated. "You don't seem to
understand. Marriage is not for me. I tell you that I am Blank Verse. I
am _Talent_, and I do not _rhyme_ with Love. I am _Talent_ and I do not
rhyme with _Man_. There is no place in my life for you. You can not come
into my verse and rhyme with me!"

"Aren't you a little bit exclusive?" goaded the Political Economist.

Noreen nodded gravely. "Yes," she said, "I am brutally exclusive. But
everybody isn't. Life is so easy for some women. Now, the Much-Loved
Girl is nothing in the world except 'Miss.' She rhymes inevitably with
almost anybody's kiss.--_I_ am not just '_Miss_.' The Much-Loved Girl is
nothing in the world except 'Girl.'--She rhymes inevitably with 'Curl.'
_I_ am not just '_Girl_.' She is 'Coy' and rhymes with 'Boy.' She is
'Simple' and rhymes with 'Dimple.' _I am none of those things!_ I
haven't the Lure of the Sonnet. I haven't the Charm of the Lyric. I
haven't the Bait of the Limerick. At the very best I am 'Brain' and
rhyme with 'Pain.' And I wish I was _dead_!"

The Political Economist's heart was pounding like a gong smothered in
velvet. But he stooped over very quietly and pushed the floor cushion
under her feet and snuggled the mouse-gray sweater into a pillowed roll
behind her aching neck. Then from his own remotest corner he reached out
casually and rallied her limp, cold hand into the firm, warm clasp of
his vibrant fingers.

"Of course, you never have rhymed," he said. "How could you possibly
have rhymed when--_I am the missing lines of your verse_?" His clasp
tightened. "Never mind about Poetry to-night, Dear, but _to-morrow_
we'll take your little incomplete lonesome verse and quicken it into a
Love-Song that will make the Oldest Angel in Heaven sit up and
carol!"




THE HAPPY-DAY


IT was not you, yourself, who invented your Happy-day. It was your
Father, long ago in little-lad time, when a Happy-Day or a Wooden
Soldier or High Heaven itself lay equally tame and giftable in the
cuddling, curving hollow of a Father's hand.

Your Father must have been a very great Genius. How else could he have
invented any happy thing in the black-oak library?

The black-oak library was a cross-looking room, dingy, lowering, and
altogether boggy. You could not stamp your boot across the threshold
without joggling the heart-beats out of the gaunt old clock that loomed
in the darkermost corner of the alcove. You could not tiptoe to the
candy box without plunging headlong into a stratum of creakiness that
puckered your spine as though an electric devil were pulling the very
last basting thread out of your little soul. Oh, it must have been a
very, very aged room. The darkness was abhorrent to you. The dampness
reeked with the stale, sad breath of ancient storms. Worst of all,
blood-red curtains clotted at the windows; rusty swords and daggers hung
most imminently from the walls, and along the smutted hearth a huge,
moth-eaten tiger skin humped up its head in really terrible ferocity.

Through all the room there was no lively spot except the fireplace
itself.

Usually, white birch logs flamed on the hearth with pleasant, crackling
cheerfulness, but on this special day you noted with alarm that between
the gleaming andirons a soft, red-leather book writhed and bubbled with
little gray wisps of pain, while out of a charry, smoochy mass of
nothingness a blue-flowered muslin sleeve stretched pleadingly toward
you for an instant, shuddered, blazed, and was--gone.

It was there that your Father caught you, with that funny, strange sniff
of havoc in your nostrils.

It was there that your Father told you his news.

When you are only a little, little boy and your Father snatches you
suddenly up in his arms and tells you that he is going to be married
again, it is very astonishing. You had always supposed that your Father
was perfectly married! In the dazzling sunshine of the village church
was there not a thrilly blue window that said quite distinctly, "Clarice
Val Dere" (that was your Mother) "Lived" (_Lived_, it said!) "June,
1860--December, 1880"? All the other windows said "Died" on them. Why
should your Father marry again?

In your Dear Father's arms you gasped, "Going to be _married_?" and your
two eyes must have popped right out of your head, for your Father
stooped down very suddenly and kissed them hard--whack, whack, back into
place.

"N--o, not going to be married," he corrected, "but going to be
married--again."

He spoke as though there were a great difference; but it was man-talk
and you did not understand it.

Then he gathered you into the big, dark chair and pushed you way out on
his knees and scrunched your cheeks in his hands and ate your face all
up with his big eyes. When he spoke at last, his voice was way down deep
like a bass drum.

"Little Boy Jack," he said, "you must never, never, never forget your
Dear Mother!"

His words and the bir-r-r of them shook you like a leaf.

"But what was my Dear Mother like?" you whimpered. You had never seen
your Mother.

Then your Father jumped up and walked hard on the creaky floor. When he
turned round again, his eyes were all wet and shiny like a brown
stained-glass window.

"What was your Dear Mother like?" he repeated. "Your Dear Mother was
like--was like--the flash of a white wing across a stormy sea. And your
Dear Mother's name was 'Clarice.' I give it to you for a Memorial. What
better Memorial could a little boy have than his Dear Mother's name? And
there is a date--" His voice grew suddenly harsh and hard like iron, and
his lips puckered on his words as with a taste of rust--"there is a
date--the 26th of April--No, that is too hard a date for a little boy's
memory! It was a Thursday. I give you Thursday for your--Happy-Day.
'Clarice' for a Memorial, and Thursday for your Happy-Day." His words
began to beat on you like blows. "As--long--as--you--live," he cried,
"be very kind to any one who is named 'Clarice.' And no matter what Time
brings you--weeks, months, years, centuries--_keep Thursday for your
Happy-Day_. No cruelty must ever defame it, no malice, no gross
bitterness."

Then he crushed you close to him for the millionth, billionth fraction
of a second, and went away, while you stayed behind in the scary
black-oak library, feeling as big and achy and responsible as you used
to feel when you and your Dear Father were carrying a heavy suit-case
together and your Dear Father let go his share just a moment to light
his brown cigar. It gave you a beautiful feeling in your head, but way
off in your stomach it tugged some.

So you crept away to bed at last, and dreamed that on a shining path
leading straight from your front door to Heaven you had to carry all
alone two perfectly huge suit-cases packed tight with love, and one of
the suit-cases was marked "Clarice" and one was marked "Thursday." Tug,
tug, tug, you went, and stumble, stumble, stumble, but your Dear Father
could not help you at all because he was perfectly busy carrying a fat
leather bag, some golf sticks, and a bull-terrier for a strange lady.

It was not a pleasant dream, and you screamed out so loud in the night
that the Housekeeper-Woman had to come and comfort you. It was the
Housekeeper-Woman who told you that on the morrow your Father was going
far off across the salt seas. It was the Housekeeper-Woman who told you
that you, yourself, were to be given away to a Grandmother-Lady in
Massachusetts. It was also the Housekeeper-Woman who told you that your
puppy dog Bruno--Bruno the big, the black, the curly, the waggy, was not
to be included in the family gift to the Grandmother-Lady. Everybody
reasoned, it seemed, that you would not need Bruno because there would
be so many other dogs in Massachusetts. That was just the trouble. They
_would_ all be "other dogs." It was Bruno that you wanted, for he was
the only _dog_, just as _you_ were the only _boy_ in the world. All the
rest were only "other boys." You could have explained the matter
perfectly to your Father if the Housekeeper-Woman had not made you cry
so that you broke your explainer. But later in the night the most
beautiful thought came to you. At first perhaps it tasted a little bit
sly in your mouth, but after a second it spread like ginger, warm and
sweet over your whole body except your toes, and you crept out of bed
like a flannel ghost and fumbled your way down the black hall to your
Dear Father's room and woke him shamelessly from his sleep. His eyes in
the moonlight gleamed like two frightened dreams.

"Dear Father," you cried--you could hardly get the words fast enough out
of your mouth--"Dear--Father--I--do--not--think--Bruno--is--a--very--good
--name--for--a--big--black--dog--I--am--going--to--name--him--Clarice
--instead!"

That was how you and Bruno-Clarice happened to celebrate together your
first Happy-Day with a long, magic, joggling train journey to
Massachusetts--the only original _boy_ and the only original _dog_ in
all the world.

The Grandmother-Lady proved to be a very pleasant purple sort of
person. Exactly whose Grandmother she was, you never found out. She was
not your Father's mother. She was not your Mother's mother. With these
links missing, whose Grandmother could she be? You could hardly press
the matter further without subjecting her to the possible mortification
of confessing that she was only adopted. Maybe, crudest of all, she was
just a Paid-Grandmother.

The Grandmother-Lady lived in a perfectly brown house in a perfectly
green garden on the edge of a perfectly blue ocean. That was the Sight
of it. Salted mignonette was the Smell of it. And a fresh wind flapping
through tall poplar trees was always and forever the Sound of it.

The brown house itself was the living image of a prim, old-fashioned
bureau backed up bleakly to the street, with its piazza side yanked out
boldly into the garden like a riotous bureau drawer, through which the
Rising Sun rummaged every morning for some particular new shade of
scarlet or yellow nasturtiums. As though quite shocked by such bizarre
untidiness, the green garden ran tattling like mad down to the ocean and
was most frantically shooed back again, so that its little trees and
shrubs and flowers fluttered in a perpetual nervous panic of not knowing
which way to blow.

[Illustration: The blue ocean was the most wonderful thing of all]

But the blue ocean was the most wonderful thing of all. Never was there
such an ocean! Right from the far-away edge of the sky it came, roaring,
ranting, rumpling, till it broke against the beach all white and frilly
like the Grandmother-Lady's best ruching. It was morning when you saw
the ocean first, and its pleasant waters gleamed like a gorgeous,
bright-blue looking-glass covered with paper ships all filled with Other
Boys' fathers. It was not till the first night came down--black and
mournful and moany--it was not till the first night came down that you
saw that the ocean was Much Too Large. There in your chill linen bed,
with the fear of Sea and Night and Strangers upon you, you discovered a
very strange droll thing--that your Father was a Person and might
therefore leave you, but that your Mother was a _feeling_ and would
never, never, never forsake you. Bruno-Clarice, slapping his fat, black
tail against your bedroom floor, was something of a _feeling_ too.

Most fortunately for your well-being, the Grandmother-Lady's house was
not too isolated from its neighbors. To be sure, a tall, stiff hedge
separated the green garden from the lavender-and-pink garden next door,
but a great scraggly hole in the hedge gave a beautiful prickly zest to
friendly communication.

More than this, two children lived on the other side of the hedge.
You had never had any playmates before in all your life!

One of the children was just Another Boy--a duplicate of you. But the
other one was--_the only original girl_. Next to the big ocean, she was
the surprise of your life. She wore skirts instead of clothes. She wore
curls instead of hair. She wore stockings instead of legs. She cried
when you laughed. She laughed when you cried. She was funny from the
very first second, even when the Boy asked you if your big dog would
bite. The Boy stood off and kept right on asking: "Will he bite? Will he
bite? _W-i-l-l_ he _bite_?" But the Girl took a great rough stick and
pried open Bruno-Clarice's tusky mouth _to see if he would_, and when he
_g-r-o-w-l-e-d_, she just kissed him smack on his black nose and called
him "A Precious," and said, "Why, of course he'll bite."

The Boy was ten years old--a year older, and much fatter than you. His
name was Sam. The Girl was only eight years old, and you could not tell
at first whether she was thin or fat, she was so ruffledy. She had a
horrid dressy name, "Sophia." But everybody called her Ladykin.

Oh, it is fun to make a boat that will flop sideways through the waves.
It is fun to make a windmill that will whirl and whirl in the grass. It
is fun to make an education. It is fun to make a fortune. But most of
anything in the world it is fun to make a _friend_!

You had never made a _friend_ before. First of all you asked, "How old
are you?" "Can you do fractions?" "Can you name the capes on the west
coast of Africa?" "What is your favorite color? Green? Blue? Pink? Red?
Or yellow?" Sam voted for green. Ladykin chose green _and_ blue _and_
pink _and_ red _and_ yellow, _also_ purple. Then you asked, "Which are
you most afraid of, the Judgment Day or a Submarine Boat?" Sam chose the
Submarine Boat right off, so you had to take the Judgment Day, which was
not a very pleasant fear to have for a pet. Ladykin declared that she
wasn't afraid of anything in the world except of Being Homely. Wasn't
that a silly fear? Then you got a little more intimate and asked, "What
is your Father's business?" Sam and Ladykin's Father kept a huge candy
store. It was mortifying to have to confess that your Father was only an
Artist, but you laid great stress on his large eyes and his long
fingers.

Then you three went off to the sandy beach and climbed up on a great
huddly gray rock to watch the huge yellow sun go down all shiny and
important, like a twenty-dollar gold piece in a wad of pink cotton
batting. The tide was going out, too, the mean old "injun-giver,"
taking back all the pretty, chuckling pebbles, the shining ropes of
seaweed, the dear salt secrets it had brought so teasingly to your feet
a few hours earlier. You were very lonesome. But not till the gold and
pink was almost gone from the sky did you screw your courage up to its
supreme point. First you threw four stones very far out into the surf,
then--

"What--is--your--Mother--like?" you whispered.

Ladykin went to her answer with impetuous certainty:

"Our Mother," she announced, "is fat and short and wears skin-tight
dresses, and is President of the Woman's Club, and is sometimes cross."

A great glory came upon you and you clutched for wonder at the choking
neck of your little blouse.

"M-y Mother," you said, "m-y Mother is like the Flash of a White Wing
across a Stormy Sea!"

You started to say more, but with a wild war-whoop of amusement, Sam
lost his balance and fell sprawling into the sand. "Oh, what a funny
Mother!" he shouted, but Ladykin jumped down on him furiously and began
to kick him with her scarlet sandals. "Hush! hush!" she cried, "Jack's
Mother is dead!" and then in an instant she had clambered back to your
side again and snuggled her little soft girl-cheek close against yours,
while with one tremulous hand she pointed way out beyond the surf line
where a solitary, snow-white gull swooped down into the Blue. "Look!"
she gasped, "L-o-o-k!" and when you turned to her with a sudden gulping
sob, she kissed you warm and sweet upon your lips.

It was not a Father kiss with two tight arms and a scrunching pain. It
was not a Grandmother-Lady kiss complimenting your clean face. It was
not a Bruno-Clarice kiss, mute and wistful and lappy. There was no pain
in it. There was no compliment. There was no doggish fealty. There was
just _sweetness_.

Then you looked straight at Ladykin, and Ladykin looked straight at you,
looked and _looked_ and LOOKED, and you both gasped right out loud
before the first miracle of your life, the Miracle of the Mating of
Thoughts. Without a word of suggestion, without a word of explanation,
you and Ladykin clasped hands and tiptoed stealthily off to the very
edge of the water, and knelt down slushily in the sand, and stooped way
over, oh, way, way over, with the cold waves squirting up your cuffs;
and kissed two perfectly round floaty kisses out to the White Sea-Gull,
and after a minute the White Gull rose in the sky, swirled round and
round and round, stopped for a second, and then with a wild cry swooped
down again into the blue--Once! Twice! and then with a great fountainy
splash of wings rose high in the air like a white silk kite and went
scudding off like mad into the Grayness, then into the Blackness, then
into the Nothingness of the night. And you stayed behind on that
pleasant, safe, sandy edge of things with all the sweetness gone from
your lips, and nothing left you in all the world but the thudding of
your heart, and a queer, sad, salty pucker on your tongue that gave you
a thirst not so much for water as for _life_.

Oh, you learned a great deal about living in those first few days and
weeks and months at the Grandmother-Lady's house.

You learned, for instance, that if you wanted to _do_ things, Boys were
best; but if you wanted to _think_ things, then Girls were infinitely
superior. You, yourself, were part Thinker and part Doer.

Sam was a _doer_ from start to finish, strong of limb, long of wind,
sturdy of purpose. But Sam was certainly prosy in his head. Ladykin, on
the contrary, had "gray matter" that jumped like a squirrel in its cage,
and fled hither and yon, and turned somersaults, and leaped through
hoops, and was altogether alert beyond description. But she could not
_do_ things. She could not stay in the nice ocean five minutes without
turning blue. She could not climb a tree without falling and bumping
her nose. She could not fight without getting mad. Out of these proven
facts you evolved a beautiful theory that if Thinky-Girls could only be
taught to _do_ things, they would make the most perfect playmates in all
the wide, wide world. Yet somehow you never made a theory to improve
Sam, though Sam's inability to think invariably filled you with a very
cross, unholy contempt for him, while Ladykin's inability to _do_ only
served to thrill you with the most delicious, sweet, puffy pride in
_yourself_.

Sam was very evidently a Person. Ladykin was a Feeling. You began almost
at once to distinguish between Persons and Feelings. Anything that
straightened out your head was a Person. Anything that puckered up your
heart was a Feeling. Your Father, you had found out, was a Person. The
Grandmother-Lady was a Person. Sam was a Person. Sunshine was a Person.
A Horse was a Person. A Chrysanthemum was a Person. But your Mother was
a Feeling. And Ladykin was a Feeling. And Bruno-Clarice was a Feeling.
And the Ocean Blue was a Feeling. And a Church Organ was a Feeling. And
the Smell of a June Rose was a Feeling. Perhaps your Happy-Day was the
biggest Feeling of All.

Thursday, to be sure, came only once a week, but--_such a Thursday_!
Even now, if you shut your eyes tight and gasp a quick breath, you can
sense once more the sweet, crisp joy of fresh, starched clothes, and
the pleasant, shiny jingle of new pennies in your small white cotton
pockets. White? Yes; your Father had said that always on that day you
should go like a little white Flag of Truce on an embassy to Fate. And
Happiness? Could anything in the world make more for happiness than to
be perfectly clean in the morning and perfectly dirty at night, with
something rather frisky to eat for dinner, and Sam and Ladykin
invariably invited to supper? Your Happy-Day was your Sacristy, too.
Nobody ever punished you on Thursday. Nobody was ever cross to you on
Thursday. Even if you were very black-bad the last thing Wednesday
night, you were perfectly, blissfully, lusciously safe until Friday
morning.

Oh, a Happy-Day was a very simple thing to manage compared with the
terrible difficulties of being kind to everybody named "Clarice." There
was _nobody_ named Clarice! In all the town, in all the directory, in
all the telephone books, you and Ladykin could not find a single person
named Clarice. Once in a New York newspaper you read about a young
Clarice-Lady of such and such a street who fell and broke her hip; and
you took twenty shiny pennies of your money and bought a beautiful,
hand-painted celluloid brush-holder and sent it to her; but you never,
never heard that it did her any good. You did not want your Father to
be mad at you, but Ladykin reasoned you out of your possible worry by
showing you how if you ever saw your Father again you could at least
plant your feet firmly, fold your arms, puff out your chest, and affirm
distinctly: "Dear Father, I have _never_ been cruel to _any one_ named
'Clarice.'" Ladykin knew perfectly well how to manage it. Ladykin knew
perfectly well how to manage everything.

Sam was the stupid one. Sam took a certain pleasure in Bruno-Clarice,
but he never realized that Bruno-Clarice was a sacred dog. Sam thought
that it was very fine for you to have a Happy-Day, with Clean Clothes,
and Ice-Cream, and Pennies, but he never almost _burst_ with the wonder
of the day.

Sam thought that it was pleasant enough for you to have a dead Mother
who was like "the flash of a white wing across a stormy sea," but he did
not see any possible connection between that fact and stoning all the
white sea-gulls in sight. Ladykin, on the contrary, told Sam distinctly
that she'd knock his head off if he ever hit a gull, but fortunately--or
unfortunately--Ladykin's aim was not so sure as Sam's. It was you who
had to stay behind on the beach and pommel more than half the life out
of Sam while Ladykin, pink as a posy in her best muslin, scared to death
of wet and cold, plunged out to her little neck in the chopping waves
to rescue a quivering fluff of feathers that struggled broken-winged
against the cruel, drowning water. "Gulls are gulls!" persisted Sam with
every blubbering breath. "Gulls are _Mothers_!" gasped Ladykin,
staggering from the surf all drenched and dripping like a bursted
water-pail. "Well, boy-gulls are gulls!" Sam screamed in a perfect
explosion of outraged _truth_. But Ladykin defied him to the last.
Through chattering teeth her vehement reassertion sounded like some
horrid, wicked blasphemy: "Nnnnnnnnnnnn-oo! Bbb-o-y ggggg-ggulls are
MMMMMM-Mothers too!" Then with that pulsing drench of feathers cuddled
close to her breast, she struggled off alone to the house to have the
Croup, while you and Sam went cheerily up the beach to find some shiners
and some seaweed for your new gull hospital. Not till you were quite an
old boy did you ever find out what became of that gull. Sacred
Bruno-Clarice ate him. Ladykin, it seems, knew always what had happened
to him, but she never dreamed of telling you till you were old enough to
bear it. To Ladykin, Truth out of season was sourer than strawberries at
Christmas time.

Sam would have told you _anything_ the very first second that he found
it out. Sam was perfectly great for Truth. He could tell more Great
Black Truths in one day than there were thunder-clouds in the whole hot
summer sky. This quality made Sam just a little bit dangerous in a
crowd. He was always and forever shooting people with Truths that he
didn't know were loaded. He was always telling the Grandmother-Lady, for
instance, that her hair looked _exactly_ like a wig. He was always
telling Ladykin that she smelled of raspberry jam. He was always telling
you that he didn't believe your Father really loved you. Oh, everything
that Sam said was as straight and lank and honest as a lady's hair when
it's out of crimp. Nothing in the world could be straighter than that.

But sometimes, when you had played sturdily with Sam for a good many
hours, you used to coax Ladykin off all alone to the puffy,
scorchy-looking smoke tree, where you could cuddle up on the rustic seat
and rest your Honesty. And when you were thoroughly rested, you used to
stretch your little arms behind your yawning face and beg:

"Oh, Ladykin, wouldn't you, couldn't you _please_ say something curly?"

Ladykin's mind seemed to curl perfectly naturally. The crimp of it never
came out. Almost any time you could take her words that looked so little
and tight, and unwind them and unwind them into yards and yards and
yards of pleasant, magic meanings.

There were no magic meanings in Sam's words. Sam, for instance, could
throw as many as a hundred stones into the water, yet when he got
through he just lay down in the sand and groaned, "Oh, how tired I am!
Oh, how tired I am!" But Ladykin, after she'd thrown only two
stones--one that hit the beach, and one that hit you--would stand right
up and declare that her arm was "_be_-witched." Tired? No, not a bit of
it, but "_be_-witched!" Hadn't she seen, hadn't you seen, hadn't
everybody seen that _perfectly awful_ sea-witch's head that popped out
of the wave just after she had thrown her first stone? Oh, indeed, and
it wasn't the first time either that she had been so frightened! Once
when she was sitting on the sand counting sea-shells, hadn't the Witch
swooped right out of the water and grabbed her legs? So, now if you
wanted to break the cruel spell, save Ladykin's life, marry Ladykin, and
live in a solid turquoise palace--where all the walls were papered with
foreign postage-stamps, and no duplicates--you, not Sam, but _you_,
_you_, chosen of all the world, must go down to the little harbor
between the two highest, reariest rocks and stick a spiked stick through
every wave that came in. There was no other way! Now you, yourself,
might possibly have invented the witch, but you never, never would have
thought of harpooning the waves and falling in and drowning your best
suit, while Ladykin rested her arms.

Yet in the enforced punishment of an early bedtime you were not
bereaved, but lay in rapturous delight untangling the minutest detail of
Ladykin's words, till turquoise cities blazed like a turquoise
flashlight across your startled senses, wonderful little princes and
princesses kowtowed perpetually to royal Mother Ladykin and royal Father
Yourself, and life-sized postage-stamps loomed so lusciously large that
envelopes had to be pasted to the corners of stamps instead of stamps to
the corners of envelopes. And before you had half straightened out the
whole thought, you were fast asleep, and then fast awake, and it was
suddenly morning! Oh, it is very comforting to have a playmate who can
say curly things.

Sometimes, too, when Sam's and Ladykin's Mother had been rude to them
about brushing their teeth or tracking perfectly good mud into the
parlor, and Sam had gone off to ease his sorrow, scating hens or stoning
cats, you and Ladykin would steal down to the gray rock on the beach to
watch the white, soft, pleasant sea-gulls. There were times, you think,
when Ladykin wished that _her_ Mother was a sea-gull. Then you used to
wonder and wonder about your own Mother, and tell Ladykin all over
again about the creaky, black-oak library, and the smoky, smelly
hearth-fire with the hurt red book, and the blue-flowered muslin sleeve
beckoning and beckoning to you; and Ladykin used to explain to you how,
very evidently, you were the only souvenir that your Father did not
burn. With that thought in mind, you used to try and guess what could
possibly have happened long ago on a Thursday to make a Happy-Day
forever and ever. Ladykin said that of course it was something about
"Love," but when you ran off to ask the Grandmother-Lady just exactly
what Love was, the Grandmother-Lady only laughed and said that Love was
a fever that came along a few years after chicken-pox and measles and
scarlet fever. Ladykin was saucy about it. "That may be _true_," Ladykin
acknowledged, "but _t'aint so_!" Then you went and found Sam and asked
him if he knew what Love was. Sam knew at once. Sam said that Love was
the feeling that one had for mathematics. Now that was all _bosh_, for
the feeling that you and Ladykin had for Mathematics would not have made
a Happy-Day for a cow.

But even if there were a great many things that you could not find out,
it was a good deal of fun to grow up. Apart from a few stomach-aches
and two or three gnawing pains in the calves of your legs, aging was a
most alluring process.

Springs, summers, autumns, winters, went hurtling over one another, till
all of a sudden, without the slightest effort on your part, you were
fifteen years old, Bruno-Clarice had grown to be a sober, industrious,
middle-aged dog, Sam was idolatrously addicted to geometry, and Ladykin
subscribed to a fashion magazine for the benefit of her paper dolls.

Most astonishing of all, however, your Father had invited you to go to
Germany and visit him. It was a glorious invitation. You were all
athrill with the geography and love of it. Already your nostrils
crinkled to the lure of tar and oakum. Already your vision feasted on
the parrot-colored crowds of Come-igrants and Go-igrants that huddled
along the wharves with their eager, jabbering faces and their soggy,
wadded feet.

Oh, the prospect of the journey was a most beautiful experience, but
when the actual Eve of Departure came, the scissors of separation
gleamed rather hard and sharp in the air, and you hunched your neck a
little bit wincingly before the final crunching snip. That last evening
was a dreadful evening. The Cook sat sobbing in the kitchen. The
Grandmother-Lady's eyes were red with sewing. The air was all heavy with
_goingawayness_. To escape the strangle of it, you fled to the beach
with Bruno-Clarice tagging in mournful excitement at your heels, his
smutty nose all a-sniff with the foreboding leathery smell of trunks and
bags. There on the beach in a scoopy hollow of sand backed up against
the old gray rock were Sam and Ladykin. Sam's round, fat face was
fretted like a pug-dog's, and Ladykin's eyes were blinky-wet with tears.

It was not a pleasant time to say good-by. It had been a beautiful,
smooth-skied day, crisp and fresh and bright-colored as a "Sunday
supplement"; but now the clouds piled gray and crumpled in the west like
a poor stale, thrown-away newspaper, with just a sputtering blaze in one
corner like the kindling of a half-hearted match.

"_Please_ be kind to Bruno-Clarice," you began; "I shall miss you very
much--very, very much. But I will come back--"

"N--o, I do not think you will come back," said Ladykin. "You will go to
Germany to live with your Father and your Play-Mother, and you will
gargle all your words like a throat tonic till you don't know how to be
friends in English any more; and even if you did come back Bruno-Clarice
would bark at you, and I shall be married, and Sam will have a long,
black beard."

Now you could have borne Ladykin's marriage; you could even have borne
Bruno-Clarice's barking at you; but you could not, simply could not bear
the thought of Sam's growing a long black beard without you. Even
Ladykin with all her wonderfulness sat utterly helpless before the
terrible, unexpected climax of her words. It was Sam who leaped into the
breach. The clutch of his hand was like the grit of sand-paper. "Jack,"
he stammered, "Jack, I promise you--anyhow I won't _cut_ my beard until
you come!"

       *       *       *       *       *

It was certainly only the thought of Sam's faithful beard that sustained
you on your rough, blue voyage to Germany. It was certainly only the
thought of Sam's faithful beard that rallied your smitten forces when
you met your Father face to face and saw him reel back white as chalk
against the silky shoulder of your Play-Mother, and hide his eyes behind
the crook of his elbow.

It is not pleasant to make people turn white as chalk, even in Germany.
Worse yet, every day your Father grew whiter and whiter and whiter, and
every day your pretty Play-Mother wrinkled her forehead more and more in
a strange, hurty sort of trouble. Never once did you dare think of
Ladykin. Never once did you dare think of Bruno-Clarice. You just named
all your upper teeth "Sam," and all your lower teeth "Sam," and ground
them into each other all day long--"Sam! Sam! Sam!" over and over and
over. There were also no Happy-Days in Germany, and nobody ever spoke of
Clarice.

You were pretty glad at last after a month when your Father came to you
with his most beautiful face and his most loving hands, and said:

"Little Boy Jack, there is no use in it. You have got to go away again.
You are a wound that will not heal. It is your Dear Mother's eyes. It is
your Dear Mother's mouth. It is your Dear Mother's smile. God forgive
me, but I cannot bear it! I am going to send you away to school in
England."

You put your finger cautiously up to your eyes and traced their round,
firm contour. Your Mother's eyes? They felt like two heaping
teaspoonfuls of tears. Your Mother's mouth? Desperately you poked it
into a smile. "Going to send me away to school in England?" you
stammered. "Never mind. Sam will not cut his beard until I come."

"_What?_" cried your Father in a great voice. "_W-h-a-t?_"

But you pretended that you had not said anything, because it was
boy-talk and your Father would not have understood it.

Never, never, never had you seen your Father so suffering; yet when he
took you in his arms and raised your face to his and quizzed you:
"Little Boy Jack, do you love me? Do you love me?" you scanned him out
of your Mother's made-over eyes and answered him out of your Mother's
made-over mouth:

"N--o! N--o! I _don't_ love you!"

And he jumped back as though you had knifed him, and then laughed out
loud as though he were glad of the pain.

"But I ask you this," he persisted, and the shine in his eyes was like a
sunset glow in the deep woods, and the touch of his hands would have
lured you into the very heart of the flame. "It is not probable," he
said, "that your Dear Mother's child and mine will go through Life
without knowing Love. When your Love-Time comes, if you understand all
Love's tragedies _then_, and forgive me, will you send me a message?"

"Oh, yes," you cried out suddenly. "Oh, yes! Oh, yes! Oh, yes!" and
clung to him frantically with your own boyish hands, and kissed him with
your Mother's mouth. But you did not love him. It was your Mother's
mouth that loved him.

So you went away to school in England and grew up and up and up some
more; but somehow this latter growing up was a dull process without
savor, and the years went by as briefly and inconsequently as a few
dismissing sentences in a paragraph. There were plenty of people to work
with and play with, but almost no one to think with, and your
hard-wrought book knowledge faded to nothingness compared to the three
paramount convictions of your youthful experience, namely, that neither
coffee nor ocean nor Life tasted as good as it smelled.

And then when you were almost twenty-one you met "Clarice"!

It was a Christmas supper party in a cafe. Some one looked up suddenly
and called the name "Clarice! Clarice!" and when your startled eyes shot
to the mark and saw her there in her easy, dashing, gorgeous beauty,
something in your brain curdled, and all the lonesomeness, all the
mystery, all the elusiveness of Life pounded suddenly in your heart like
a captured Will-o'-the-Wisp. "Clarice?" Here, then, was the end of your
journey? The eternal kindness? The flash of a white wing across _your_
stormy sea? "Clarice!" And you looked across unbidden into her eyes and
smiled at her a gaspy, astonished smile that brought the strangest light
into her face.

Oh, but Clarice was very beautiful! Never had you seen such a type. Her
hair was black and solemn as crape. Her eyes were bright and noisy as
jet. Her heart was barren as a blot of ink. And she took your dreamy,
paper-white boy life and scourged it like a tongue of flame across a
field of Easter lilies!

And when the wonder of the flame was gone, you sat aghast in your room
among the charred, scorched fragments of your Youth. The thirst for
death was very strong upon you, and the little, long, narrow cup of your
revolver gleamed very brimming full of death's elixir. Even the
June-time could not save you. Your Mother's name was an agony on your
lips. The frenzied reiteration of your thoughts scraped on your brain
like a sledge on gravel. You would drink very deep, you thought, of your
little slim cup of death. Yet the thing that was tortured within you was
scarcely Love, and you had no message of understanding for your Father.
Just with wrecked life, wrecked faith, wrecked courage, you huddled at
your desk, catching your breath for a second before you should reach out
your fretted fingers for the little cool cunning, toy hand of Death.

"Once again," you said to yourself, "once again I will listen to the
children's voices in the garden. Once again I will lure the smell of
June roses into my heart." The children prattled and passed. Your hand
reached out and fumbled. Once more you shut your scalding eyes, hunched
up your shoulders, and breathed in like an ultimate tide the ravishing
sweetness of the June--one breath, another, another--longer--longer. Oh,
God in Heaven, if one could only die of such an anesthetic--smothered
with sweetbrier, spiced with saffron, buried in bride roses. _Die?_ Your
wild hand leaped to the task and faltered stricken before the strange,
grim fact that blazed across your consciousness. It was Thursday. It was
your "Happy-Day!" Your Father's words came pounding back like blows into
your sore brain! Your "Happy-Day!" "No cruelty must ever defame it, no
malice, no gross bitterness!" Somewhere in air or sky or sea there was a
Mother-Woman who must not be _hurt_. Your "Happy-Day?" HAPPY-DAY? Rage
and sorrow broke like a fearful storm across your senses, and you put
down your head and cried like a child.

Tears? Again you felt on your lips that queer, sad, salty pucker, that
taste of the sea that gave you a thirst not so much for water as for
Life. _Life?_ _Life?_ The thought thrilled through you like new nerves.
Your ashy pulses burst into flame. Your dull heart jumped. Your vision
woke. Your memory quickened. You saw the ocean, blue, blue, blue before
you. You saw a small, rude boy lie sprawling in the sand. You saw a
little girl's face, wild with wonder, tremulous with sweetness. You felt
again the flutter of a kiss against your cheek. The little girl
who--understood. Your salt lips puckered into a smile, and the smile ran
back like a fuse into the inherent happiness of your heart. Sam?
Ladykin? Home? You began to laugh! Haggard, harried, wrecked, ruined,
you began to laugh! Then, faltering like a hysterical girl, you
staggered down the stairs, out of the house, along the streets to the
cable office, and sent a message to Sam.

"How long is your beard?" the message said. "How long is your beard?"
Just that silly, magic message across miles and miles and miles of waves
and seaweeds. How the great cable must have simpered with the
foolishness of it. How the pink coral must have chuckled. How the big,
tin-foiled fishes must have wondered.

You did not wait for an answer. What answer was there? You could picture
Sam standing in stupefied awkwardness before the amazing nothingness of
such a message. But Ladykin would remember. Oh, yes, Ladykin would
remember. You could see her peering past Sam's shoulder and snatching
out suddenly for the fluttering paper. Ladykin would remember. What were
six years?

Joy sang in your heart like a purr of a sea-shell. The blue blur of
ocean, the dear green smell of mignonette, the rush of wind through the
poplar trees were tonic memories to you. You did not wait to pack your
things. You did not wait to notify your Father. You sped like a wild boy
to the first wharf, to the first steamer that you could find.

The week's ocean voyage went by like a year. The silly waves dragged on
the steamer like a tired child on the skirts of its mother. Haste raged
in your veins like a fever. You wanted to throw all the fat, heavy
passengers overboard. You wanted to swim ahead with a towing rope in
your teeth. You wanted to kill the Captain when he stuttered. You wanted
to flay the cook for serving an extra course for dinner. Yet all the
while the huge machinery throbbed in rhythm, "Time _will_ pass. It
_always does_. It _always does_. It _always does_."

And then at last you stood again on your Native Land, _alive, well,
vital, at home_!

With the sensation of an unbroken miracle, you found your way again to
the little Massachusetts sea town, along the peaceful village walk to
the big brown house that turned so bleakly to the street. There on the
steps, wonder of wonders, you found two elderly people, Bruno-Clarice
and the Grandmother-Lady, and your knees gave out very suddenly and you
sank down beside Bruno-Clarice and smothered the bark right out of him.

"Good lack!" cried the Grandmother-Lady, "Good _lack_!" and made so
much noise that Sam himself came running like mad from the next house;
and though he had no beard, you liked him very much and shook and shook
his hand until he squealed.

With the Grandmother-Lady plying you with questions, and Sam feeling
your muscle, and Bruno-Clarice trying to crawl into your lap like a
pug-dog baby, it was almost half an hour before you had a chance to ask,

"Where is Ladykin?"

"She's down on the beach," said Sam. "I'll go and help you find her."

You looked at Sam speculatively. "I'll give you ten dollars if you
won't," you said.

Sam considered the matter gravely before he began to grin. "I wouldn't
think of charging you more than five," he acquiesced.

So you went off with Bruno-Clarice hobbling close at your heels to find
Ladykin for yourself. When you saw her she was perched up on the very
top of the huddly gray rock playing tinkle tunes on her mandolin, and
you stole up so quietly behind her that she did not see you till you
were close beside her.

Then she turned very suddenly and looked down upon you and pretended
that she did not know you, with her color coming and going all luminous
and intermittent like a pink and white flashlight. In six years you had
not seen such a wonderful playmatey face.

"Who are you?" she asked. "Who are you?"

"I am 'Little Boy Jack' come back to marry you," you began, but
something in the wistful, shy girl-tenderness of her face and eyes
choked your bantering words right off in your throat.

"Yes, Ladykin," you said, "I have come home, and I am very tired, and I
am very sad, and I am very lonesome, and I have not been a very good
boy. But please be good to me! I am so lonesome I cannot wait to make
love to you. Oh, _please_, _please_ love me _n-o-w_. I _need_ you to
love me N-O-W!"

Ladykin frowned. It was not a cross frown. It was just a sort of a cosy
corner for her thoughts. Surprise cuddled there, and a sorry feeling,
and a great tenderness.

"You have not been a very good boy?" she repeated after you.

The memory of a year crowded blackly upon you. "No," you said, "I have
not been a very good boy, and I am very suffering-sad. But _please_ love
me, and forgive me. No one has ever loved me!"

The surprise and the sorry feeling in Ladykin's forehead crowded
together to make room for something that was just _womanliness_. She
began to smile. It was the smile of a hurt person when the opiate first
begins to overtake the pain.

"Oh, I'm sure it was an accidental badness," she volunteered softly. "If
I were accidentally bad, you would forgive _me_, wouldn't you?"

"Oh, yes, yes, yes," you stammered, and reached up your lonesome hands
to her.

"Then you don't have to make love," she whispered. "It's all made," and
slipped down into your arms.

But something troubled her, and after a minute she pushed you away and
tried to renounce you.

"But it is not Thursday," she sobbed; "it is Wednesday; and my name is
not 'Clarice'; it is Ladykin."

Then all the boyishness died out of you--the sweet, idle reveries, the
mystic responsibilities. You shook your Father's dream from your eyes,
and squared your shoulders for your own realities.

"A Man must make his own Happy-Day," you cried, "and a Man must choose
his own Mate!"

Before your vehemence Ladykin winced back against the rock and eyed you
fearsomely.

"Oh, I will love you and cherish you," you pleaded.

But Ladykin shook her head. "That is not enough," she whispered. There
was a kind of holy scorn in her eyes.

Then a White Gull flashed like an apparition before your sight.
Ladykin's whole figure drooped, her cheek paled, her little mouth
quivered, her vision narrowed. There with her eyes on the White Gull and
your eyes fixed on hers, you saw her shy thoughts journey into the
Future. You saw her eyes smile, sadden, brim with tears, smile again,
and come homing back to you with a timid, glad surprise as she realized
that your thoughts too had gone all the long journey with her.

She reached out one little hand to you. It was very cold.

"If I should pass like the flash of a white wing," she questioned,
"would you be true to me--and _mine_?"

The Past, the Present, the Future rushed over you in tumult. Your lips
could hardly crowd so big a vow into so small a word. "Oh, YES, YES,
YES!" you cried.

In reverent mastery you raised her face to yours. "A Man must make his
own Happy-Day," you repeated. "A Man must make his own Happy-Day!"

Timorously, yet assentingly, she came back to your arms. The whisper of
her lips against your ear was like the flutter of a rose petal.

"It will be Wednesday, then," she said, "for us and--ours."

Clanging a strident bell across the magic stillness of the garden, Sam
bore down upon you like a steam-engine out of tune.

"Oh, I say," he shouted, "for heaven's sake cut it out and come to
supper."

The startled impulse of your refusal faded before the mute appeal in
Ladykin's eyes.

"All right," you answered; "but first I must go and cable 'love' to my
Father."

"Oh, hurry!" cried Ladykin. Her word was crumpled and shy as a kiss.

"Oh, hurry!" cried Sam. His thought was straight and frank as a knife
and fork.

Joy sang in your heart like a prayer that rhymed. Your eager heart was
pounding like a race horse. The clouds in the sky were scudding to
sunset. The surf on the beach seemed all out of breath. The green meadow
path to the village stretched like the paltriest trifle before a man's
fleet running pace.

"But I can't hurry," you said, for Bruno-Clarice came poking his
grizzled old nose into your hand. "Oh, wait for me," he seemed to plead.
"Oh, please, _please_ wait for me."




THE RUNAWAY ROAD


THE Road ran spitefully up a steep, hot, rocky, utterly shadeless hill,
and then at the top turned suddenly in a flirty little green loop, and
looked back, and called "Follow me!"

Wouldn't you have considered that a dare?

The Girl and the White Pony certainly took it as such, and proceeded at
once to "follow," though the White Pony stumbled clatteringly on the
rolling stones, and the Girl had to cling for dear life to the rocking
pommels of her saddle.

It was a cruel climb, puff--pant--scramble--dust--glare--every step of
the way, but when the two adventurers really reached the summit at last,
a great dark chestnut-tree loomed up for shade, every sweet-smelling
breeze in the world was there to welcome them, and the whole green
valley below stretched out before them in the shining, woodsy wonder of
high noon and high June.

You know, yourself, just how the world looks and feels and smells at
high noon of a high June!

Even a pony stands majestically on the summit of a high hill--neck
arched, eyes rolling, mane blowing, nostrils quivering. Even a girl
feels a tug of power at her heart.

And still the Road cried "Follow me!" though it never turned its head
again in doubt or coquetry. It was a kind-looking Road now, all gracious
and sweet and tender, with rustly green overhead, and soft green
underfoot, and the pleasant, buzzing drone of bees along its clovered
edges.

"We might just as well follow it and see," argued the Girl, and the
White Pony took the suggestion with a wild leap and cantered eagerly
along the desired way.

It was such an extraordinarily lonesome Road that you could scarcely
blame it for picking up companionship as best it might. There was
stretch after stretch of pasture, and stretch after stretch of woodland,
and stretch after stretch of black-stumped clearing--with never a house
to cheer it, or a human echo to break its ghostly stillness. Yet with
all its isolation and remoteness the landscape had that certain vibrant,
vivid air of self-consciousness that thrills you with an uncanny sense
of an invisible presence--somewhere. It's just a trick of June!

Tramps, pirates, even cannibals, seemed deliciously imminent. The Girl
remembered reading once of a lonely woman bicyclist who met a runaway
circus elephant at the turn of a country road. Twelve miles from home is
a long way off to have anything happen.

Her heart began to quicken with the joyous sort of fear that is one of
the prime sweets of youth. It's only when fear reaches your head that it
hurts. The loneliness, the mystery, the uncertainty, were tonic to her.
The color spotted in her cheeks. Her eyes narrowed defensively to every
startling detail of woods or turf. Her ears rang with the sudden, new
acuteness of her hearing. She felt as though she and the White Pony were
stalking right across the heartstrings of the earth. Once the White Pony
caught his foot and sent a scared sob into her throat.

Oh, everything was magic! A little brown rabbit reared up in the Road as
big as a kangaroo, and beckoned her with his ears. A red-winged
blackbird bulky as an eagle trumpeted a swamp-secret to her as he
passed. A tiny chipmunk in the wall loomed like a lion in his lair, and
sent a huge rock crashing like an avalanche into the field. The whole
green and blue world seemed tingling with toy noises, made suddenly big.

The White Pony's mouth was frothing with the curb. The White Pony's
coat was reeking wet with noon and nervousness, but the Girl sat tense
and smiling and important in her saddle, as though just once for all
time she was the only italicized word in the Book of Life.

"It's just the kind of a road that I like to travel alone," she gasped,
a little breathlessly, "but if I were engaged and my man let me do it, I
should consider him--careless."

That was exactly the sort of Road it was!

Yet after three or four miles the White Pony shook all the skittishness
out of his feet, and settled down to a zigzag, browsing-clover gait, and
the Girl relaxed at last, and sat loosely to ease her own muscles, and
slid the bridle trustingly across the White Pony's neck.

Then she began to sing. Never in all her life had she sung outside the
restricting cage of house or church. A green and blue loneliness on a
June day is really the only place in the world that is big enough for
singing! In dainty ballad, in impassioned hymn, in opera, in anthem, the
Girl's voice, high and sweet and wild as a boy's, rang out in fluttering
tremolo. Over and over again, as though half unconscious of the words,
but enraptured with the melody, she dwelt at last on that dream-song of
every ecstatic young soul who tarries for a moment on the edge of an
unfocused exultation:

          The King of Love my Shepherd is
            Whose Goodness faileth never,
          I nothing lack if I am _his_
            And he is _mine f-o-r-e-v-e-r_!
            Forever!----Is _mine f-o-r-e-v-e-r_!

Her pulsing, passionate crescendo came echoing back to her from a gray
granite hillside, and sent a reverent thrill of power across her senses.

Then--suddenly--into her rhapsody broke the astonishing, harsh clash and
clatter of a hay-rake. The White Pony lurched, stood stock-still, gave a
hideous snort of terror, grabbed the bit in his teeth, and bolted like
mad on and on and on and on till a quick curve in the Road dashed him
into the very lap of a tiny old gray farmhouse that completely blocked
the way.

In another second he would have stumbled across the threshold and hurled
his rider precipitously into the front hall if she had not at that very
second recovered her "yank-hold" on his churning mouth and wrenched him
back so hard that any animal but a horse would have sat down.

Then the girl straightened up very tremblingly in her saddle and said
"O--h!"

Some one had to say something, for there in the dooryard close beside
her were an Artist, a Bossy, and a White Bulldog, who all
instantaneously, without the slightest cordiality or greeting, stopped
whatever they were doing and began to stare at her.

Now it's all very well to go dashing like mad into a person's front yard
on a runaway horse. Anybody could see that you didn't do it on purpose;
but when at last you have stopped dashing, what are you going to do
next, particularly when the Road doesn't go any farther? Shall you say,
"Isn't this a pleasant summer?" or "What did you really like best at the
theater last winter?" If you gallop out it looks as though you were
frightened. If you amble out, you might hear some one laugh behind your
back, which is infinitely worse than being grabbed on the stairs.

The situation was excessively awkward. And the Artist evidently was not
clever in conversational emergencies.

The Girl straightened her gray slouch hat. Then she ran the cool metal
butt of her riding-whip back and forth under the White Pony's sweltering
mane. Then she swallowed very hard once or twice and remarked inanely:

"Did the Road go right into the house?"

"Yes," said the Artist, with a nervous blue dab at his canvas.

The Girl's ire rose at his churlishness. "If that is so," she announced,
"if the Road really went right into the house, I'll just wait here a
minute till it comes out again."

But the Artist never smiled an atom to make things easier, though the
Bossy began to tug most joyously at his chain, and the White Bulldog
rolled over and over with delight.

The Girl would have given anything now to escape at full speed down the
Road along which she had come, but escape of that sort had suddenly
assumed the qualities of a panicky, ignominious retreat, so she parried
for time by riding right up behind the Artist and watching him change a
perfectly blue canvas sky into a regular tornado.

"Oh, do you think it's going to rain as hard as that?" she teased.
"Perhaps I'd better settle down here until the storm is over."

But the Artist never smiled or spoke. He just painted and sniffed as
though he worked by steam, and when his ears had finally grown so
crimson that apoplexy seemed impending, she took pity on his miserable
embarrassment and backed even the shadow of her pony out of his sight.
Then with a desperate effort at perfect ease she remarked:

"Well--I guess I'll ride round to your back door. Perhaps the Road came
out that way and went on without me."

But though she and the White Pony hunted in every direction through
white birch and swaying alders, they found no possible path by which the
Road could have escaped, and were obliged at last to return with some
hauteur, and make as dignified an exit as possible from the scene.

The Artist bowed with stiff relief at their departure, but the White
Bulldog preceded them with friendly romps and yells, and the Bossy
pulled up his iron hitching stake and chain and came clanking after them
with furious bounds and jingles.

No one but the White Pony would have stood the racket for a moment, and
even the White Pony began to feel a bit staccato in his feet. The Girl
kept her saddle like a circus rider, but the amusement on her face was
just a trifle studied. It was a fine procession, clamor and all, with
the Bulldog scouting ahead, the White Pony following skittishly, and the
Bossy see-sawing behind, clanking a dungeon chain that left a cloud of
dust as far as you could see.

It must have startled the Youngish Man who loomed up suddenly at a bend
of the Road and caught the wriggling Bulldog in his arms.

"Who comes here?" he cried with a regular war-whoop of a challenge. "Who
comes here?"

"Just a lady and a bossy," said the Girl, as she reined in the Pony
abruptly, and sent the Bossy caroming off into the bushes.

"But it's my brother's Bossy," protested the Youngish Man.

"Oh, no, it isn't," the Girl explained a little wearily. "It's mine now.
It chose between us."

The Youngish Man eyed her with some amusement.

"Did you really see my brother at the house?" he probed.

The Girl nodded, flushing. It was very hot, and she was beginning to
feel just a wee bit faint and hungry and irritable.

"Yes, I saw your brother," she reiterated, "but I didn't seem to care
for him. I rode by mistake right into the picture he was painting.
There's probably paint all over me. It was very awkward, and he didn't
do a thing to make it easier. I abominate that kind of person. If a man
can't do anything else he can always ask you if you wouldn't like a
drink of water!" She scowled indignantly. "It was the Road's fault
anyway! I was just exploring, and the Road cried 'Follow me,' and I
followed--a little faster than I meant to--and the Road ran right into
your house and shut the door. Oh, _slammed_ the door right in my face!"

"Would you like a drink of water, _now_?" suggested the Youngish Man.

"No, I thank you," said the Girl, with stubborn dignity, and then
weakened to the alluring offer with "But my White Pony is very cruelly
thirsty."

Both adventurers looked pretty jaded with heat and dust.

The Youngish Man led the way into a tiny, pungent wood-path that ended
in a gurgling spring-hole, where the White Pony nuzzled his nose with
deep-breathed, dripping satisfaction, while the Girl kept to her saddle
and looked down on the Youngish Man with frank interest.

He looked very picturesque and brown and clever in his khaki suit with a
game bag slung across his shoulder.

"You're not a hunter," she exclaimed impulsively. "You're not a
hunter--because you haven't any gun."

"No," said the Man, "I'm a collector."

The Girl cried out with pleasure and clapped her hands. "A
collector?--oh, goody! So am I! What do you collect? Minerals? Oh--dear!
_Mine_ is lots more interesting. I collect adventures."

"Adventures?" The Man made no slightest effort to conceal his amused
curiosity. "Adventures? Now I call that a jolly thing to collect. Is it
a good country to work in? And what have you found?"

The Girl smiled at him appreciatively--a little flitting, whimsical
sort of smile, and commenced to rummage in the blouse of her white
shirt-waist, from which she finally produced a small, red-covered
notebook. She fluttered its diminutive pages for a second, and then
began to laugh:

"You'd better sit down if you really want to hear what I've found."

The Man dropped comfortably into place beside the spring and watched
her. She was very watchable. Some people have to be beautiful to rivet
your attention. Some people _don't_ have to be. It's all a matter of
temperament. Her hair was very, very brown, though, and her eyes were
deep and wide and hazel, and the red in her cheeks came and went with
every throb of her heart.

"Of course," she explained apologetically, "of course I haven't found a
lot of things yet--I've only been working at it a little while. But I've
collected a 'Runaway Accident with the Rural Free-Delivery Man.' It was
awfully scary and interesting. And I've collected a 'Den of Little Foxes
Down in the Woods Back of My House,' and 'Two Sunrises with a Crazy
Woman who Thinks that the Sun Can't Get Up Until She Does,' and I've
collected a 'Country Camp-Meeting all Hallelujahs and By Goshes,' and a
'Circus Where I Spent All Day with the Snake-Charmer,' and a 'Midnight
Ride Alone through the Rosedale Woods in a Thunder-Storm.' Of course,
as I say, I haven't found a lot of things yet, but then it's only the
middle of June and I have two more weeks' vacation yet."

The Man put back his head and laughed, but it was a pleasant sort of
laugh that flooded all the stern lines in his face.

"I'm sure I never thought of making a regular business of collecting
adventures," he admitted, "but it certainly is a splendid idea. But
aren't you ever afraid?" he asked. "Aren't you ever afraid, for
instance, riding round on a lonesome trip like this?"

The Girl laughed. "Yes," she acknowledged, "I'm often afraid
of--squirrels--and falling twigs--and black-looking stumps. I'm often
afraid of toy noises and toy fears--but I never saw a real fear in all
my life. Even when you jumped up in the Road I wasn't afraid of
you--because you are a gentleman--and--gentlemen are my friends."

"Have you many friends?" asked the Man. The question seemed amusingly
justifiable. "You look to me about eighteen. Girls of your age are
usually too busy collecting Love to collect anything else--even ideas.
Have you collected any Love?"

The Girl threw out her hands in joking protest. "Collected any Love?
Why, I don't even know what Love looks like! Maybe what I'd collect
would be--poison ivy." Her eyes narrowed a little. Her voice quivered
the merest trifle. "There's a Boy at Home--who talks--a little--about
it. But how can I tell that it's Love?"

Her sudden vehemency startled him. "Where _is_ 'Home'?" he asked.

For immediate answer the Girl slipped down from the White Pony's back,
and loosened the saddle creakingly before she helped herself to a long,
dripping draught from the birch cup that hung just over the spring.

"You're nice to talk to," she acknowledged, "and almost no one is nice
to talk to. It's a whole year since I've talked right out to any one!
Where do I live? Well, my headquarters are in New York, but my
heartquarters are over at Rosedale. There's quite a difference, you
know!"

"Yes," said the Man, "I remember--there used to--be--quite a difference.
But how did you ever happen to think of collecting adventures?"

The girl pulled at the White Pony's mane for a long, hesitating moment,
then she turned and looked searchingly into the Man's face. She very
evidently liked what she saw.

"I collect adventures because I am lonesome!" Her voice shook a little,
but her eyes were frankly untroubled. "I collect adventures because the
life that interests me doesn't happen to come to me, and I have to go
out and search for it!--I'm companion all the year to a woman who
doesn't know right from wrong in any dear, big sense, but who could
define propriety and impropriety to you till your ears split. And all
her friends are just like her. They haven't any mental muscle to them.
It's just dress and etiquette, dress and etiquette, dress and etiquette!
So I have to live all alone in my head, and think and think and think,
till my poor brain churns and overlaps like a surf without any shore. Do
you know what I mean? Then when my June vacation comes, I run right off
to Rosedale and collect all the adventures I possibly can to take back
with me for the long dreary year. Things to think about, you know, when
I have to sit up at night giving medicine, or when I have to mend heavy
black silk clothes, or when the dinners are so long that I could scream
over the extra delay of a salad course. So I make June a sort of pranky,
fancy-dress party for my soul. Do you know what I mean?"

"Yes, I know what you mean," said the Man. "I know just what you mean.
You mean you're eighteen. That's the whole of it. You mean that there's
no fence to your pasture, no bottom to your cup, no crust to your bread.
You mean that you can't sleep at night for the pounding of your heart.
You mean most of all that there's no limit to your vision. You're
inordinately keen after life. That's all. You'll get over it!"

"_I won't get over it!_" There was fire in the Girl's eyes and she drew
her breath sharply. "I say I _won't_ get over it! There's nothing on
earth that could stale me! If I live to be a hundred I sha'n't
wither!--why, how could I?"

Buoyant, blooming, aquiver with startled emotions, she threw out her
hands with a passionate gesture of protest.

The Man shook his shoulders and jumped up. "Perhaps you're right," he
muttered. "Perhaps you _are_ the kind that won't ever grow old. If you
are--Heaven help you! Youth's nothing but a wound, anyway. Do you want
to be a wound that never heals?" He laughed stridently.

Then the Girl began to fumble through sudden tears at the buckles of her
saddle. Her growing hunger and faintness and the heat of the day were
telling on her.

"You must think me a crazy fool," she confessed, "the way I have plunged
into personalities. Why, I could go a whole year with an alien
running-mate and never breathe a word or a sigh about myself, but with
some people--the second you see them you know they are part of your
chord. Chord is the only term in music that I understand, and I
understand that as though I had made the word myself." She tried to
laugh. "Now I'm going home! I've had a good time. You seem almost like a
friend. I've never had a talky friend."

And she was in her saddle and half-way down the wood-path before his
mind quickened to cry out "Stop! Wait a minute!"

A little out of breath he caught up with her, and stood for a moment
like an embarrassed schoolboy, though his face in the sunlight was as
old as young forty.

"I'm afraid you haven't had much of an adventure this morning," he
volunteered whimsically. "If you really want an adventure why don't you
come back to the house and have dinner with my brother and me? There's
no one else there. Think how it would tease my brother! You're twelve or
fifteen miles from home, and it's already two o'clock and very hot. My
brother has done some pictures that are going to be talked about next
winter, and I--I've got rather a conspicuous position ahead of me in
Washington. Wouldn't it amuse you a little bit afterward, if any one
spoke of us, to remember our little farmhouse dinner to-day?--Would you
be afraid to come?" His last question was very direct.

A look came into the Girl's eyes that was very good for a man to see.

"Why, of course I wouldn't be afraid to come," she said. "Gentlemen are
my friends."

But she was shy about going, just the same, with a certain frank, boyish
shyness that only served to emphasize the general artlessness of her
verve.

With a quick dive into the bushes the Man collared the Bossy and
transferred his clanking chain to the bit of the astonished White Pony.

"Now you've got to come," he laughed up at her, and the whole party
started back for the tiny old gray farmhouse where the Artist greeted
them with sad concern.

"I've brought Miss Girl back to have dinner with us," announced the
Pony-leader cheerfully, relying on his brother's serious nature to
overlook any strangeness of nomenclature. "You evidently didn't remember
meeting her at Mrs. Moyne's house-party last spring?"

The Girl fell readily into the game. She turned the White Pony loose in
the dooryard, and then went into the queer old kitchen, rolled up her
sleeves, wound herself round with a blue-checked apron, and commenced to
work. She had a deft touch at household matters, and the Man followed
her about as humbly as though he himself had not been adequately
providing meals for the past two months.

The color rose high in the Girl's cheeks, and her voice took on the
thrill and breathiness of amused excitement. Wherever she found a huddle
of best china or linen or silver she raided it for her use, and the
table flared forth at last with a dainty, inconsequent prettiness that
quite defied the Artist's prescribed rules for beauty.

It was a funny dinner, with an endless amount of significant bantering
going on right under the Artist's sunburned nose. Yet for all the mirth
of the situation, the Girl had quite a chance to study the face of her
special host, in all its full detail of worldliness, of spirituality, of
hardness, of sweetness. Her final impression, as her first one, was of a
wonderful affinity and congeniality. "His face is like a harbor for all
my stormy thoughts," was the way she described it to herself.

After dinner the three washed up the dishes as sedately as though they
had been working together day-in, day-out through the whole season, and
after that the Artist escaped as quickly as possible to catch a cloud
effect which he seemed to consider preposterously vital.

Then with a dreary little feeling of a prize-pleasure all spent and
gone, the Girl went over to the mirror in the sitting-room and pinned on
her gray slouch hat and patted her hair and straightened her belt.

But it was not her own reflection that interested her most. The mirror
made a fine frame for the whole quaint room, with its dingy landscape
wall-paper from which the scarlet petticoat of a shepherdess or the
vivid green of a garland stood out with cheerful crudity. The battered,
blackened fireplace was lurid here and there with gleams of copper
kettles, and a huge gray cat purred comfortably in the curving seat of a
sun-baked rocking-chair.

It was a good picture to take home in your mind for remembrance, when
walls should be brick and rooms ornate and life hackneyed, and the Girl
shut her eyes for a second, experimentally, to fix the vision in her
consciousness.

When she opened her eyes again the Man was struggling through the
doorway dragging a small, heavy trunk.

"Oh, don't go yet!" he exclaimed. "Here are a lot of your things in this
trunk. I brought them in to show you."

And he dragged the trunk to the middle of the room and knelt down on the
floor and commenced to unlock it.

"_My_ things?" cried the Girl in amazement, and ran across the room and
sat down on the floor beside him. "_My_ things?"

There was a funny little twist to the Man's mouth that never relaxed all
the time he was tinkering with the lock. "Yes--_your_ things," was all
he said till the catch yielded finally, and he raised the cover to
display the full contents to his companion's curious eyes.

[Illustration: Instinctively she clasped it to her]

"Oh--_books_!" she cried out, with a sudden, sweeping flush of
comprehension, and darted her hand into the dusty pile and pulled out a
well-worn copy of the Rubaiyat. Instinctively she clasped it to her.

"I thought so!" said the Youngish Man quizzically. "I thought that was
one of your books.

          "When Time lets slip a little, perfect hour,
           Oh, take it--for it will not come again."

His eyes narrowed, and his hands reached nervously to regain possession
of the volume. Then he laughed.

"_I_, also, used to think that Life was made for me," he scoffed
teasingly. "It's a glorious idea--as long as it lasts! You take every
harsh old happening and every flimsy friendship and line it with your
own silk, and then sit by and say, 'Oh, _isn't_ the World a rustly,
shimmery, luxurious place!' And all the time the happening _is_ harsh,
and the friendship _is_ flimsy, and it's just your own perishable silk
lining that does the rustle and the shimmer and the luxury act. Oh, I
suppose that's 'woman talk' about silk linings, but I know a thing or
two, even if I am a man."

But the radiancy of the Girl's face defied his cynicism utterly. Her
eyes were absolutely fathomless with Youth.

Then his mood changed suddenly. He reached out with a little brooding
gesture of protection. "These are my college books," he confided, "my
Dream Library. I've scarcely thought of them for a dozen years. I don't
meet many dreamers nowadays. You've probably got a lot of newer books
than these, but I'll wager you anything in the world that every book
here is a precious friend to you. I shouldn't wonder if your own copies
opened exactly to the same places. Here's young Keats with his shadowing
tragedy. How you have mooned over it. And here's Tennyson. What about
the starlit vision:

          "And on her lover's arm she leant,
            And round her waist she felt it fold,--"

The Girl took up the words softly in unison:

          "And far across the hills they went
           To that new world which is the old."

In rushing, eager tenderness she browsed through one book after another,
sometimes silently, sometimes with a little crooning quotation, where
corners were turned down. And when she had quite finished, her eyes
were like stars, and she looked up tremulously, and whispered:

"Why, we--like--just--the--same--things."

But the Youngish Man did not smile back at her. His face in that second
turned suddenly old-looking and haggard and gray. He threw the books
back into their places, and slammed the trunk-cover with a bang.

For just the infinitesimal fraction of a second the Man and the Girl
looked into each other's eyes. For just that infinitesimal fraction of a
second the Man's eyes were as unfathomable as the Girl's.

Then with a great sniff and scratching and whine, the White Bulldog
pushed his way into the room, and the Girl jumped up in alarm to note
that the sun was dropping very low in the west, and that the shadows of
late afternoon crept palpably over her companion's face.

For a moment the two stood awkwardly without a word, and then the Girl
with a conscious effort at lightness queried:

"But _where_ did the Runaway Road go to? I _must_ find out."

The Youngish Man turned as though something had startled him.

"Wouldn't you rather leave things just as they are?" he asked.

"NO!" The Girl stamped her foot vehemently. "NO! I want everything. I
want the whole adventure."

"The whole adventure?" The Youngish Man winced at the phrase, and then
laughed to cover his seriousness.

"All right," he acquiesced. "I'll show you just where the Runaway Road
goes to."

Without further explanation he stepped to the dooryard and scooped up
two heaping handfuls of gravel from the Road. As he came back into the
room he trailed a little line of earth across the floor to the foot of
the stairs, and threw the remaining handful up the steps just as a
heedless child might have done.

"Go follow your Runaway Road," he smiled, "and see where it leads to, if
you are so eager! I'm going down to the woods to see if my brother is
quite lost in his clouds."

Wasn't that _another_ dare? It seemed a craven thing to tease for a
climax and then shirk it. She had never shirked anything yet that was
right, no matter how unusual it was.

She started for the stairs. One step, two steps, three steps, four
steps--her riding-boots grated on the gravel. "Oh, you funny Runaway
Road," she trembled, "where _do_ you go to?"

At the top stairs a tiny waft of earth turned her definitely into the
first doorway.

She took one step across the threshold, and then stood stock-still and
stared. It was a _woman's room_. And from floor to ceiling and from wall
to wall flaunted an incongruous, moneyed effort to blot out all
temperament and pang and trenchant life-history from one spot at least
of the little old gray farmhouse. Bauble was there, and fashion and
novelty, but the whole gay decoration looked and felt like the sumptuous
dressing of a child whom one _hated_.

With a gasp of surprise the Girl went over and looked at herself in the
mirror.

"Wouldn't I look queer in a room like this?" she whispered to herself.
But she didn't look queer at all. She only felt queer, like a flatted
note.

Then she hurried right down the stairs again, and went out in the yard,
and caught the White Pony, and climbed up into her saddle.

The Youngish Man came running to say good-by.

"Well?" he said.

The Girl's eyes were steady as her hand. If her heart fluttered there
was no sign of it.

"Why, it was a _woman's_ room," she answered to his inflection.

"Yes," said the Youngish Man quite simply. "It is my wife's room. My
wife is in Europe getting her winter clothes. All people do not
happen--to--like--the--same--things."

The Girl put out her hand to him with bright-faced friendliness.

"In Europe?" she repeated. "Indeed, I shall not be so local when I think
of her. Wherever she is--all the time--I shall always think of your wife
as being--most of anything else--_in luck_."

She drew back her hand and chirruped to the White Pony, but the Youngish
Man detained her.

"Wait a second," he begged. "Here's a copy of Matthew Arnold for you to
take home as a token, though there's only one thing in it for us, and
you won't care for that until you are forty. You can play it's about the
mountains that you pass going home. Here it is:

          "Unaffrighted by the silence round them,
             Undistracted by the sights they see,
          _THESE_ demand not that the things about them
             Yield them love, amusement, sympathy."

"Rather cracked-ice comfort, isn't it?" the Girl laughed as she tucked
the little book into her blouse.

"Rather," said the Youngish Man, "but cracked ice is good for fevers,
and Youth is the most raging fever that I know about."

Then he stood back from the White Pony, and smiled quizzically, and the
Girl turned the White Pony's head, and started down the Road.

Just before the first curve in the alders, she whirled in her saddle and
looked back. The Youngish Man was still standing there watching her, and
she held up her hand as a final signal. Then the Road curved her out of
sight.

It was chilly now in the gloaming shade of the woods, and home seemed a
long way off. After a mile or two the White Pony dragged as though his
feet were sore, and when she tried to force him into a jarring canter
the sharp corners of the Matthew Arnold book goaded cruelly against her
breast.

"It isn't going to be a very pleasant ride," she said. "But it was quite
an adventure. I don't know whether to call it the 'Adventure of the
Runaway Road' or the 'Adventure of the Little Perfect Hour.'"

Then she shivered a little and tried to keep the White Pony in the
rapidly fading sun spots of the Road, but the shadows grew thicker and
cracklier and more lonesome every minute, and the only familiar sound of
life to be heard was 'way off in the distance, where some little lost
bossy was calling plaintively for its mother.

There were plenty of unfamiliar sounds, though. Things--nothing special,
but just Things--sighed mournfully from behind a looming boulder.
Something dark, with gleaming eyes, scudded madly through the woods. A
ghastly, mawkish chill like tomb-air blew dankly from the swamp. Myriads
of tiny insects droned venomously. The White Pony shied at a flash of
heat lightning, and stumbled bunglingly on a rolling stone. Worst of
all, far behind her, sounded the unmistakable tagging step of some
stealthy creature.

For the first time in her life the girl was frightened--hideously,
sickeningly frightened of Night!

Back in the open clearing round the tiny farmhouse, the light, of
course, still lingered in a lulling yellow-gray. It would be an hour
yet, she reasoned, before the great, black loneliness settled there. She
could picture the little, simple, homely, companionable activities of
early evening--the sputter of a candle, the good smell of a pipe, the
steamy murmur of a boiling kettle. O--h! But could one go back wildly
and say: "It is darker and cracklier than I supposed in the woods, and I
am a wilful Girl, and there are fifteen wilful miles between me and
home--and there is a cemetery on the way, and a new grave--and a
squalid camp of gypsies--and a broken bridge--_and I am afraid! What
shall I do?_"

She laughed aloud at the absurdity, and cut at the White Pony sharply
with her whip. It would be lighter, she thought, on the open village
road below the hill.

Love? Amusement? Sympathy? She shook her young fist defiantly at the
hulking contour of a stolid, bored old mountain that loomed up through a
gap in the trees. "_Drat_ Self-sufficiency," she cursed, with a vehement
little-girl curse. "I won't be a bored old Mountain. I _won't_! I
_won't_! I _won't_!"

All her short, eager life, it seemed, she had been floundering like a
stranger in a strange land--no father or mother, no chum, no friend, no
lover, no anything--and now just for a flash, just for one "little,
perfect hour" she had found a voice at last that _spoke her own
language_, and the voice belonged to a Man who belonged to another
woman!

She remembered her morning's singing with a bitter pang. "_Nothing_ is
mine forever. Nothing, _nothing_, NOTHING!" she sobbed.

A great, black, smothering isolation like a pall settled down over her,
and seemed to pin itself with a stab through her heart. Everybody, once
in his time, has tried to imagine his Dearest-one absolutely
nonexistent, unborn, and tortured himself with the possibility of such a
ghostly vacuum in his life. To the Girl suddenly it seemed as though
puzzled, lonely, unmated, all her short years, she had stumbled now
precipitously on the Great Cause Of It--a _vacuum_. It was not that she
had lost any one, or missed any one. _It was simply that some one had
never been born!_

The thought filled her with a whimsical new terror. She pounded the
White Pony into a gallop and covered the last half-mile of the Runaway
Road. At the crest of the hill the valley vista brightened palely and
the White Pony gave a whimper of awakened home instinct. Cautiously,
warily, with legs folding like a jack-knife he began the hazardous
descent.

Was he sleepy? Was he clumsy? Was he footsore? Just before the Runaway
Road smoothed out into the village highway his knees wilted suddenly
under him, and he pitched headlong with a hideous lurch that sent the
Girl hurtling over his neck into a pitiful, cluttered heap among the
dust and stones, where he came back after his first panicky run, and
blew over her with dilated nostrils, and whimpered a little before he
strayed off to a clover patch on the highway below.

Twilight deepened to darkness. Darkness quickened at last to stars. It
was Night, real Night, black alike in meadow, wood, and dooryard,
before the Girl opened her eyes again. Part of an orange moon, waning,
wasted, decadent, glowed dully in the sky.

For a long time, stark-still and numb, she lay staring up into space,
conscious of nothing except consciousness. It was a floaty sort of
feeling. Was she dead? That was the first thought that twittered in her
brain. Gradually, though, the reassuring edges of her cheeks loomed into
sight, and a beautiful, real pain racked along her spine and through her
side. It was the pain that whetted her curiosity. "If it's my neck
that's broken," she reasoned, "it's all over. If it's my heart it's only
just begun."

Then she wriggled one hand very cautiously, and a White Doggish
Something came over and licked her fingers. It felt very kind and
refreshing.

Now and then on the road below, a carriage rattled by, or one voice
called to another. She didn't exactly care that no one noticed her, or
rescued her--indeed, she was perfectly, sluggishly comfortable--but she
remembered with alarming distinctness that once, on a scorching city
pavement, she had gone right by a bruised purple pansy that lay wilting
underfoot. She could remember just how it looked. It had a funny little
face, purple and yellow, and all twisted with pain. And she had gone
right by. And she felt very sorry about it now.

She was still thinking about that purple pansy an hour later, when she
heard the screeching toot of an automobile, the snort of a horse, and
the terrified clatter of hoofs up the hill. Then the White Doggish
Something leaped up and barked a sharp, fluttery bark like a signal.

The next thing she knew, pleasant voices and a lantern were coming
toward her. "They will be frightened," she thought, "to find a body in
the Road." So, "Coo-o! Coo-o!" she cried in a faint little voice.

Then quickly a bright light poured into her face, and she swallowed very
hard with her eyes for a whole minute before she could see that two men
were bending over her. One of the men was just a man, but the other one
was the Boy From Home. As soon as she saw him she began to cry very
softly to herself, and the Boy From Home took her right up in his great,
strong arms and carried her down to the cushioned comfort of the
automobile.

"Where--did--you--come--from?" she whispered smotheringly into his
shoulder.

The harried, boyish face broke brightly into a smile.

"I came from Rosedale to-night, to find _you_!" he said. "But they sent
me up here on business to survey a new Road."

"To survey a new Road?" she gasped. "That's--good. All the Roads that I
know--go--to--Other People's Homes."

Her head began to droop limply to one side. She felt her senses reeling
away from her again. "If--I--loved--you," she hurried to ask,
"would--you--make--me--a--safe Road--_all my own_?"

The Boy From Home gave a scathing glance at the hill that reared like a
crag out of the darkness.

"If I couldn't make a safer Road than _that_--" he began, then stopped
abruptly, with a sudden flash of illumination, and brushed his trembling
lips across her hair.

"I'll make you the safest, smoothest Road that ever happened," he said,
"if I have to dig it with my fingers and gnaw it with my teeth."

A little, snuggling sigh of contentment slipped from the Girl's lips.

"Do--you--suppose," she whispered,
"do--you--suppose--that--after--all--_this_--was--the real--end--of--the
Runaway Road?"




SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED IN OCTOBER


MONDAY, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, it had rained. Day in, day
out, day in, day out, day in, it had rained and rained and rained and
rained and rained, till by Friday night the great blue mountains loomed
like a chunk of ruined velvet, and the fog along the valley lay thick
and gross as mildewed porridge.

It was a horrid storm. Slop and shiver and rotting leaves were rampant.
Even in Alrik's snug little house the chairs were wetter than moss.
Clothes in the closets hung lank and clammy as undried bathing-suits.
Worst of all, across every mirror lay a breathy, sad gray mist, as
though ghosts had been back to whimper there over their lost faces.

It had never been so before in the first week of October.

There were seven of us who used to tryst there together every year in
the gorgeous Scotch-plaid Autumn, when the reds and greens and blues
and browns and yellows lapped and overlapped like a festive little kilt
for the Young Winter, and every crisp, sweet day that dawned was like
the taste of cider and the smell of grapes.

That is the kind of October well worth living, and seven people make a
wonderfully proper number to play together in the country, particularly
if six of you are men and women, and one of you is a dog.

Yet, after all, it was October, and October alone, that lured us. We
certainly differed astonishingly in most of our other tastes.

Three of us belonged to the peaceful Maine woods--Alrik and Alrik's Wife
and his Growly-Dog-Gruff. Four of us came from the rackety cities--the
Partridge Hunter, the Blue Serge Man, the Pretty Lady, and Myself--a
newspaper woman.

Incidentally, I may add that the Blue Serge Man and the Pretty Lady were
husband and wife, but did not care much about it, having been married,
very evidently, in some gorgeously ornate silver-plated emotion that
they had mistaken at the time for the "sterling" article. The shine and
beauty of the marriage had long since worn away, leaving things quite a
little bit edgy here and there. Alrik's young spouse was, wonder of
wonders, a transplanted New York chorus girl. No other biographical
data are necessary except that Growly-Dog-Gruff was a brawling, black,
fat-faced mongrel whose complete sense of humor had been slammed in the
door at a very early age. For some inexplainable reason, he seemed to
hold all the rest of the crowd responsible for the catastrophe, but was
wildly devoted to me. He showed this devotion by never biting me as hard
as he bit the others.

Yet even with Growly-Dog-Gruff included among our assets, we had always
considered ourselves an extremely superior crowd.

There were seven of us, I said, who _used_ to tryst there together every
autumn. But now, since the year before, three of us had _gone_, Alrik's
Wife, Alrik's Dog, and the Blue Serge Man. So the four of us who
remained huddled very close around the fire on that stormy, dreary,
ghastly first night of our reunion, and talked-talked-talked and
laughed-laughed-laughed just as fast as we possibly could for fear that
a moment's silence would plunge us all down, whether or no, into the
sorrow-chasm that lurked so consciously on every side. Yet we certainly
looked and acted like a very jovial quartet.

The Pretty Lady, to be sure, was a black wisp of crape in her prim,
four-footed chair; but Alrik's huge bulk tipped jauntily back against
the wainscoting in a gaudy-colored Mackinaw suit, with merely a broad
band of black across his left sleeve--as one who, neither affirming nor
denying the formalities of grief, would laconically warn the public at
large to "Keep Off My Sorrow." I liked Alrik, and I had liked Alrik's
Wife. But I had loved Alrik's Dog. I do not care especially for temper
in women, but a surly dog, or a surly man, is as irresistibly funny to
me as Chinese music, there is so little plot to any of them.

[Illustration: The four of us who remained huddled very close around the
fire]

But now on the hearth-rug at my feet the Partridge Hunter lay in amiable
corduroy comfort, with the little puff of his pipe and his lips
throbbing out in pleasant, dozy regularity. He had traveled in Japan
since last we met, and one's blood flowed pink and gold and purple,
one's flesh turned silk, one's eyes onyx, before the wonder of his
narrative.

No one was to be outdone in adventurous recital. Alrik had spent the
summer guiding a party of amateur sports along the Allagash, and his
garbled account of it would have stocked a comic paper for a month. The
Pretty Lady had christened a warship, and her eager, brooky voice went
rippling and churtling through such major details as blue chiffon velvet
and the goldiest kind of champagne. Even Alrik's raw-boned Old Mother,
clinking dirty supper dishes out in the kitchen, had a crackle-voiced
tale of excitement to contribute about a floundering spring bear that
she had soused with soap-suds from her woodshed window.

But all the time the storm grew worse and worse. The poor, tiny old
house tore and writhed under the strain. Now and again a shutter blew
shrilly loose, or a chimney brick thudded down, or a great sheet of rain
sucked itself up like a whirlpool and then came drenching and hurtling
itself in a perfect frenzy against the frail, clattering window-panes.

It was a good night for four friends to be housed together in a red, red
room, where the low ceiling brooded over you like a face and the warped
floor curled around you like the cuddle of a hand. A living-room should
always be red, I think, like the walls of a heart, and cluttered, as
Alrik's was, with every possible object, mean or fine, funny or
pathetic, that typifies the owner's personal experience.

Yet there are people, I suppose, people stuffed with arts, not hearts,
who would have monotoned Alrik's bright walls a dull brain-gray, ripped
down the furs, the fishing-tackle, the stuffed owls, the gaudy
theatrical posters, the shelf of glasses, the spooky hair wreaths, the
really terrible crayon portrait of some much-beloved ancient grandame;
and, supplementing it all with a single, homesick Japanese print,
yearning across the vacuum at a chalky white bust of a perfect stranger
like Psyche or Ruskin, would have called the whole effect more
"successful." Just as though the crudest possible room that represents
the affections is not infinitely more worth while than the most esoteric
apartment that represents the intellect.

There were certainly no vacuums in Alrik's room. Everything in it was
crowded and scrunched together like a hard, friendly hand-shake. It was
the most fiercely, primitively sincere room that I have ever seen, and
king or peasant therefore would have felt equally at home in it. Surely
no mere man could have crossed the humpy threshold without a blissful,
instinctive desire to keep on his hat and take off his boots. Alrik knew
how to make a room "homeful." Alrik knew everything in the world except
grammar.

Red warmth, yellow cheer, and all-colored jollity were there with us.

Faster and faster we talked, and louder and louder we laughed, until at
last, when the conversation lost its breath utterly, Alrik jumped up
with a grin and started our old friend the phonograph. His first choice
of music was a grotesque _duo_ by two back-yard cats. It was one of
those irresistibly silly minstrel things that would have exploded any
decent bishop in the midst of his sermon. Certainly no one of us had
ever yet been able to withstand it. _But now no bristling, injuriated
dog jumped from his sleep and charged like a whole regiment on the
perfectly innocent garden._ And the duo somehow seemed strangely flat.

"Here is something we used to like," suggested Alrik desperately, and
started a splendid barytone rendering of "Drink to Me Only with Thine
Eyes." _But no high-pitched, mocking tenor voice took up the solemn
velvet song and flirted it like a cheap chiffon scarf._ And the Pretty
Lady rose very suddenly and went out to the kitchen indefinitely "for a
glass of water." It was funny about the Blue Serge Man. I had not liked
him overmuch, but I missed _not-liking-him_ with a crick in my heart
that was almost sorrow.

"Oh, for heaven's sake try some other music!" cried the Partridge Hunter
venomously, and Alrik clutched out wildly for the first thing he could
reach. It was "Give My Regards to Broadway." We had practically worn out
the record the year before, but its mutilated remains whirred along,
dropping an occasional note or word, with the same cheerful spunk and
unconcern that characterized the song itself:

          "Give my regards to Broadway,
           Remember me to Herald Square,
           Tell all the--whirry--whirry, whirrrrry--whirrrrrrr
           That I will soon be there."

The Partridge Hunter began instantly to beat muffled time with his soft
felt slippers. Alrik plunged as usual into a fearfully clever and
clattery imitation of an ox shying at a street-car. _But what of it? No
wakened, sparkling-eyed girl came stealing forth from her corner to
cuddle her blazing cheek against the cool, brass-colored jowl of the
phonograph horn._ An All-Goneness is an amazing thing. It was strange
about Alrik's Wife. Her presence had been as negative as a dead gray
dove. But her _absence_ was like scarlet strung with bells!

The evening began to drag out like a tortured rubber band getting ready
to snap.

It was surely eleven o'clock before the Pretty Lady returned from the
kitchen with our hot lemonades. The tall glasses jingled together
pleasantly on the tray. The height was there, the breadth, the precious,
steaming fragrance. _But the Blue Serge Man had always mixed our
nightcaps for us._

With grandiloquent pleasantry, the Partridge Hunter jumped to his feet,
raised his glass, toasted "Happy Days," choked on the first swallow,
bungled his grasp, and dropped the whole glass in shattering, messy
fragments to the floor.

"Lord," he muttered under his breath, "one could stand missing a fellow
in a church or a graveyard or a mournful sunset glow--but to miss him
in a foolish, folksy--hot lemonade!--Lord!" And he shook his shoulders
almost angrily and threw himself down again on the hearth-rug.

The darkening room was warm as an oven now, and the great, soft, glowing
pile of apple-wood embers lured one's drowsy eyes like a flame-colored
pillow. No one spoke at all until midnight.

But the clock had only just finished complaining about the hour when the
Partridge Hunter straightened up abruptly and cried out to no one in
particular:

"Well, I simply can't bluff this out any longer. I've just _got_ to know
how it all happened!"

No one stopped to question his meaning. No one stopped to parry with
word or phrase. Like two tense music-boxes wound to their utmost
resonance, but with mechanism only just that instant released, Alrik and
the Pretty Lady burst into sound.

The Pretty Lady spoke first. Her breath was short and raspy and cross,
like the breath of a person who runs for a train--and misses it.

"It was--in--Florida," she gasped, "the--last--of March. The sailboat
was a dreadful, flimsy, shattered thing. But he _would_ go out in
it--_alone_--storm or no storm!" She spoke with a sudden sense of
emotional importance, with a certain strange, fierce, new pride in the
shortcomings of her Man. "He must have swamped within an hour. They
found his boat. But they never found his body. Just as one could always
find his pocket, but never his watch--his purse, but never his money--his
song, but never his soul." Her broken self-control plunged deeper and
deeper into bitterness. "It was a stupid--wicked--wilful--accident,"
she persisted, "and I can see him in his last, smothery--astonished--
moment--just--as--as--plainly--as--though--I--had--been--there.
Do you think for an instant that he would swallow even--Death--without
making a fuss about it? Can't you hear him rage and sputter: '_This_ is
too salt! _This_ is too cold! Take it away and bring me another!' While
all the time his frenzied mind was racing up and down some precious,
memoried playground like the Harvard Stadium or the New York Hippodrome,
whimpering, 'Everybody'll be there except--_me_--except M-E!'"

The Pretty Lady's voice took on a sudden hurt, left-out resentment. "Of
course," she hurried on, "he wasn't exactly sad to go--nothing could
make him sad. But I know that it must have made him very _mad_. He had
just bought a new automobile. And he had rented a summer place at
Marblehead. And he wanted to play tennis in June--"

She paused for an instant's breath, and Alrik crashed like a moose into
the silence.

"It was lung trouble!" he attested vehemently. "Cough, cough, cough, all
the time. It came on specially worse in April, and she died in May. She
wasn't never very strong, you know, but she'd been brought up in your
wicked old steam-heated New York, and she would persist in wearing
tissue-paper clothes right through our rotten icy winters up here. And
when I tried to dose her like the doctor said, with cod-liver oil or any
of them thick things, I couldn't fool her--she just up an' said it was
nothin' but liquid flannel, and spit it out and sassed me. And
Gruff--Growly-Dog-Gruff," he finished hastily, "I don't know what ailed
him. He jus' kind of followed along about June."

The Partridge Hunter drew a long, heavy breath. When he spoke at last,
his voice sounded like the voice of a man who holds his hat in his hand,
and the puffs of smoke from his pipe made a sort of little halo round
his words.

"Isn't it nice," he mused, "to think that while we four are cozying
here to-night in the same jolly old haunts, perhaps they three--Man,
Girl, and Dog--are cuddling off together somewhere in the big,
spooky Unknown, in the shade of a cloud, or the shine of a
star--talking--perhaps--about--_us_?"

The whimsical comfort of the thought pleased me. I did not want any one
to be alone on such a night.

But Alrick's tilted chair came crashing down on the floor with a
resounding whack. His eyes were blazing.

"She _ain't_ with him!" he cried. "She _ain't_, she AIN'T, she A-I-N-'T!
I won't have it. Why, it's the middle of the night!"

And in that electric instant I saw the Pretty Lady's face set rigidly,
all except her mouth, which twisted in my direction.

"I'll wager she _is_ with him," she whispered under her breath. "She
always did tag him wherever he went!"

Then I felt the toe of my slipper meet the recumbent elbow of the
Partridge Hunter. Had I reached out to him? Or had he reached back to
me? There was no time to find out, for the smooth, round conversation
shattered prickingly in the hand like a blown-glass bauble, and with
much nervous laughter and far-fetched joke-making, we rose, rummaged
round for our candles, and climbed upstairs to bed.

Alrik's Old Mother burrowed into a corner under the eaves.

The Pretty Lady had her usual room, and mine was next to hers. For a
lingering moment I dallied with her, craving some tiny, absurd bit of
loving service. First, I helped her with a balky hook on her collar.
Then I started to put her traveling coat and hat away in the closet. On
the upper shelf something a little bit scary brushed my hands. _It was
the Blue Serge Man's cap, with a ragged gash across it where
Growly-Dog-Gruff had worried it on a day I remembered well._ With a
hurried glance over my shoulder to make sure that the Pretty Lady had
not also spied it, I reached up and shoved it--oh, 'way, 'way back out
of sight, where no one but a detective or a lover could possibly find
it.

Then I hurried off to my room with a most garish human wonder: How could
a _man_ be all gone, but his silly cap _last_?

My little room was just as I remembered it, bare, bleak, and gruesomely
clean, with a rag rug, a worsted motto, and a pink china vase for really
sensuous ornamentation. I opened the cheap pine bureau to stow away my
things. _A trinket jingled--a tawdry rhinestone side-comb. Caught in the
setting was a tiny wisp of brown hair._ I slammed the drawer with a
bang, and opened another. _Metal and leather slid heavily along the
bottom._ It might have been my beast's collar, if distinctly across the
name-plate had not run the terse phrase "Alrik's Cross Dog." I did not
like to have my bureau haunted! When I slammed that drawer, it cracked
the looking-glass.

Then, with candle burning just as cheerfully as possible, I lay down on
the bed in all my clothes and began to _wake up_--wider and wider and
wider.

My reason lay quite dormant like some drugged thing but my memory,
photographic as a lens, began to reproduce the ruddy, blond face of the
Blue Serge Man beaming across a chafing-dish; the mournful, sobbing
sound of a dog's dream; the crisp, starched, Monday smell of the blue
gingham aprons that Alrik's Wife used to wear. The vision was altogether
too vivid to be pleasant.

Then the wet wind blew in through the window like a splash of alcohol,
chilling, revivifying, stinging as a whip-lash. The tormented candle
flame struggled furiously for a moment, and went out, hurtling the black
night down upon me like some choking avalanche of horror. In utter
idiotic panic I jumped from my bed and clawed my way toward the feeble
gray glow of the window-frame. The dark dooryard before me was drenched
with rain. The tall linden trees waved and mourned 

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