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A Far Country — Complete

by Winston Churchill · English · Gutenberg #3739 · 974,034 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Far Country — Complete

Author: Winston Churchill


        
Release date: October 17, 2004 [eBook #3739]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3739

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A FAR COUNTRY — COMPLETE ***



Produced by Pat Castevans and David Widger





A FAR COUNTRY

By Winston Churchill




BOOK 1.




I.

My name is Hugh Paret. I was a corporation lawyer, but by no means a
typical one, the choice of my profession being merely incidental, and
due, as will be seen, to the accident of environment. The book I am
about to write might aptly be called The Autobiography of a Romanticist.
In that sense, if in no other, I have been a typical American, regarding
my country as the happy hunting-ground of enlightened self-interest, as
a function of my desires. Whether or not I have completely got rid of
this romantic virus I must leave to those the aim of whose existence
is to eradicate it from our literature and our life. A somewhat Augean
task!

I have been impelled therefore to make an attempt at setting forth, with
what frankness and sincerity I may, with those powers of selection of
which I am capable, the life I have lived in this modern America; the
passions I have known, the evils I have done. I endeavour to write a
biography of the inner life; but in order to do this I shall have to
relate those causal experiences of the outer existence that take place
in the world of space and time, in the four walls of the home, in the
school and university, in the noisy streets, in the realm of business
and politics. I shall try to set down, impartially, the motives that
have impelled my actions, to reveal in some degree the amazing mixture
of good and evil which has made me what I am to-day: to avoid the tricks
of memory and resist the inherent desire to present myself other and
better than I am. Your American romanticist is a sentimental spoiled
child who believes in miracles, whose needs are mostly baubles, whose
desires are dreams. Expediency is his motto. Innocent of a knowledge
of the principles of the universe, he lives in a state of ceaseless
activity, admitting no limitations, impatient of all restrictions.
What he wants, he wants very badly indeed. This wanting things was the
corner-stone of my character, and I believe that the science of the
future will bear me out when I say that it might have been differently
built upon. Certain it is that the system of education in vogue in the
70's and 80's never contemplated the search for natural corner-stones.

At all events, when I look back upon the boy I was, I see the beginnings
of a real person who fades little by little as manhood arrives and
advances, until suddenly I am aware that a stranger has taken his
place....

I lived in a city which is now some twelve hours distant from the
Atlantic seaboard. A very different city, too, it was in youth, in my
grandfather's day and my father's, even in my own boyhood, from what it
has since become in this most material of ages.

There is a book of my photographs, preserved by my mother, which I
have been looking over lately. First is presented a plump child of two,
gazing in smiling trustfulness upon a world of sunshine; later on a
lean boy in plaided kilts, whose wavy, chestnut-brown hair has been
most carefully parted on the side by Norah, his nurse. The face is
still childish. Then appears a youth of fourteen or thereabout in long
trousers and the queerest of short jackets, standing beside a marble
table against a classic background; he is smiling still in undiminished
hope and trust, despite increasing vexations and crossings, meaningless
lessons which had to be learned, disciplines to rack an aspiring soul,
and long, uncomfortable hours in the stiff pew of the First Presbyterian
Church. Associated with this torture is a peculiar Sunday smell and the
faint rustling of silk dresses. I can see the stern black figure of Dr.
Pound, who made interminable statements to the Lord.

“Oh, Lord,” I can hear him say, “thou knowest...”

These pictures, though yellowed and faded, suggest vividly the being
I once was, the feelings that possessed and animated me, love for my
playmates, vague impulses struggling for expression in a world forever
thwarting them. I recall, too, innocent dreams of a future unidentified,
dreams from which I emerged vibrating with an energy that was lost for
lack of a definite objective: yet it was constantly being renewed. I
often wonder what I might have become if it could have been harnessed,
directed! Speculations are vain. Calvinism, though it had begun to make
compromises, was still a force in those days, inimical to spontaneity
and human instincts. And when I think of Calvinism I see, not Dr. Pound,
who preached it, but my father, who practised and embodied it. I loved
him, but he made of righteousness a stern and terrible thing implying
not joy, but punishment, the suppression rather than the expansion of
aspirations. His religion seemed woven all of austerity, contained
no shining threads to catch my eye. Dreams, to him, were matters for
suspicion and distrust.

I sometimes ask myself, as I gaze upon his portrait now, the duplicate
of the one painted for the Bar Association, whether he ever could have
felt the secret, hot thrills I knew and did not identify with religion.
His religion was real to him, though he failed utterly to make it
comprehensible to me. The apparent calmness, evenness of his life awed
me. A successful lawyer, a respected and trusted citizen, was he lacking
somewhat in virility, vitality? I cannot judge him, even to-day. I
never knew him. There were times in my youth when the curtain of his
unfamiliar spirit was withdrawn a little: and once, after I had passed
the crisis of some childhood disease, I awoke to find him bending over
my bed with a tender expression that surprised and puzzled me.

He was well educated, and from his portrait a shrewd observer might
divine in him a genteel taste for literature. The fine features bear
witness to the influence of an American environment, yet suggest
the intellectual Englishman of Matthew Arnold's time. The face is
distinguished, ascetic, the chestnut hair lighter and thinner than my
own; the side whiskers are not too obtrusive, the eyes blue-grey. There
is a large black cravat crossed and held by a cameo pin, and the coat
has odd, narrow lapels. His habits of mind were English, although he
harmonized well enough with the manners and traditions of a city whose
inheritance was Scotch-Irish; and he invariably drank tea for breakfast.
One of my earliest recollections is of the silver breakfast service and
egg-cups which my great-grandfather brought with him from Sheffield to
Philadelphia shortly after the Revolution. His son, Dr. Hugh Moreton
Paret, after whom I was named, was the best known physician of the city
in the decorous, Second Bank days.

My mother was Sarah Breck. Hers was my Scotch-Irish side. Old Benjamin
Breck, her grandfather, undaunted by sea or wilderness, had come
straight from Belfast to the little log settlement by the great river
that mirrored then the mantle of primeval forest on the hills. So much
for chance. He kept a store with a side porch and square-paned windows,
where hams and sides of bacon and sugar loaves in blue glazed paper hung
beside ploughs and calico prints, barrels of flour, of molasses and rum,
all of which had been somehow marvellously transported over the passes
of those forbidding mountains,--passes we blithely thread to-day in
dining cars and compartment sleepers. Behind the store were moored the
barges that floated down on the swift current to the Ohio, carrying
goods to even remoter settlements in the western wilderness.

Benjamin, in addition to his emigrant's leather box, brought with him
some of that pigment that was to dye the locality for generations a
deep blue. I refer, of course, to his Presbyterianism. And in order the
better to ensure to his progeny the fastness of this dye, he married
the granddaughter of a famous divine, celebrated in the annals of New
England,--no doubt with some injustice,--as a staunch advocate on the
doctrine of infant damnation. My cousin Robert Breck had old Benjamin's
portrait, which has since gone to the Kinley's. Heaven knows who painted
it, though no great art were needed to suggest on canvas the tough
fabric of that sitter, who was more Irish than Scotch. The heavy
stick he holds might, with a slight stretch of the imagination, be a
blackthorn; his head looks capable of withstanding many blows; his hand
of giving many. And, as I gazed the other day at this picture hanging in
the shabby suburban parlour, I could only contrast him with his anaemic
descendants who possessed the likeness. Between the children of poor
Mary Kinley,--Cousin Robert's daughter, and the hardy stock of the old
country there is a gap indeed!

Benjamin Breck made the foundation of a fortune. It was his son who
built on the Second Bank the wide, corniced mansion in which to house
comfortably his eight children. There, two tiers above the river, lived
my paternal grandfather, Dr. Paret, the Breck's physician and friend;
the Durretts and the Hambletons, iron-masters; the Hollisters, Sherwins,
the McAlerys and Ewanses,--Breck connections,--the Willetts and Ogilvys;
in short, everyone of importance in the days between the 'thirties and
the Civil War. Theirs were generous houses surrounded by shade trees,
with glorious back yards--I have been told--where apricots and pears and
peaches and even nectarines grew.

The business of Breck and Company, wholesale grocers, descended to my
mother's first cousin, Robert Breck, who lived at Claremore. The very
sound of that word once sufficed to give me a shiver of delight; but
the Claremore I knew has disappeared as completely as Atlantis, and
the place is now a suburb (hateful word!) cut up into building lots
and connected with Boyne Street and the business section of the city
by trolley lines. Then it was “the country,” and fairly saturated with
romance. Cousin Robert, when he came into town to spend his days at the
store, brought with him some of this romance, I had almost said of this
aroma. He was no suburbanite, but rural to the backbone, professing a
most proper contempt for dwellers in towns.

Every summer day that dawned held Claremore as a possibility. And such
was my capacity for joy that my appetite would depart completely when I
heard my mother say, questioningly and with proper wifely respect--

“If you're really going off on a business trip for a day or two, Mr.
Paret” (she generally addressed my father thus formally), “I think I'll
go to Robert's and take Hugh.”

“Shall I tell Norah to pack, mother,” I would exclaim, starting up.

“We'll see what your father thinks, my dear.”

“Remain at the table until you are excused, Hugh,” he would say.

Released at length, I would rush to Norah, who always rejoiced with
me, and then to the wire fence which marked the boundary of the Peters
domain next door, eager, with the refreshing lack of consideration
characteristic of youth, to announce to the Peterses--who were to remain
at home the news of my good fortune. There would be Tom and Alfred and
Russell and Julia and little Myra with her grass-stained knees, faring
forth to seek the adventures of a new day in the shady western yard.
Myra was too young not to look wistful at my news, but the others
pretended indifference, seeking to lessen my triumph. And it was Julia
who invariably retorted “We can go out to Uncle Jake's farm whenever we
want to. Can't we, Tom?”...

No journey ever taken since has equalled in ecstasy that leisurely trip
of thirteen miles in the narrow-gauge railroad that wound through hot
fields of nodding corn tassels and between delicious, acrid-smelling
woods to Claremore. No silent palace “sleeping in the sun,” no edifice
decreed by Kubla Khan could have worn more glamour than the house of
Cousin Robert Breck.

It stood half a mile from the drowsy village, deep in its own grounds
amidst lawns splashed with shadows, with gravel paths edged--in
barbarous fashion, if you please with shells. There were flower beds of
equally barbarous design; and two iron deer, which, like the figures
on Keats's Grecian urn, were ever ready poised to flee,--and yet never
fled. For Cousin Robert was rich, as riches went in those days: not only
rich, but comfortable. Stretching behind the house were sweet meadows of
hay and red clover basking in the heat, orchards where the cows cropped
beneath the trees, arbours where purple clusters of Concords hung
beneath warm leaves: there were woods beyond, into which, under the
guidance of Willie Breck, I made adventurous excursions, and in the
autumn gathered hickories and walnuts. The house was a rambling, wooden
mansion painted grey, with red scroll-work on its porches and horsehair
furniture inside. Oh, the smell of its darkened interior on a midsummer
day! Like the flavour of that choicest of tropical fruits, the
mangosteen, it baffles analysis, and the nearest I can come to it is a
mixture of matting and corn-bread, with another element too subtle to
define.

The hospitality of that house! One would have thought we had arrived,
my mother and I, from the ends of the earth, such was the welcome we got
from Cousin Jenny, Cousin Robert's wife, from Mary and Helen with the
flaxen pig-tails, from Willie, whom I recall as permanently without
shoes or stockings. Met and embraced by Cousin Jenny at the station and
driven to the house in the squeaky surrey, the moment we arrived she and
my mother would put on the dressing-sacks I associated with hot weather,
and sit sewing all day long in rocking-chairs at the coolest end of the
piazza. The women of that day scorned lying down, except at night, and
as evening came on they donned starched dresses; I recall in particular
one my mother wore, with little vertical stripes of black and white, and
a full skirt. And how they talked, from the beginning of the visit until
the end! I have often since wondered where the topics came from.

It was not until nearly seven o'clock that the train arrived which
brought home my Cousin Robert. He was a big man; his features and even
his ample moustache gave a disconcerting impression of rugged integrity,
and I remember him chiefly in an alpaca or seersucker coat. Though much
less formal, more democratic--in a word--than my father, I stood in
awe of him for a different reason, and this I know now was because
he possessed the penetration to discern the flaws in my youthful
character,--flaws that persisted in manhood. None so quick as Cousin
Robert to detect deceptions which were hidden from my mother.

His hobby was carpentering, and he had a little shop beside the
stable filled with shining tools which Willie and I, in spite of their
attractions, were forbidden to touch. Willie, by dire experience, had
learned to keep the law; but on one occasion I stole in alone, and
promptly cut my finger with a chisel. My mother and Cousin Jenny
accepted the fiction that the injury had been done with a flint
arrowhead that Willie had given me, but when Cousin Robert came home and
saw my bound hand and heard the story, he gave me a certain look which
sticks in my mind.

“Wonderful people, those Indians were!” he observed. “They could make
arrowheads as sharp as chisels.”

I was most uncomfortable....

He had a strong voice, and spoke with a rising inflection and a marked
accent that still remains peculiar to our locality, although it was much
modified in my mother and not at all noticeable in my father; with an
odd nasal alteration of the burr our Scotch-Irish ancestors had brought
with them across the seas. For instance, he always called my father
Mr. Par-r-ret. He had an admiration and respect for him that seemed
to forbid the informality of “Matthew.” It was shared by others of my
father's friends and relations.

“Sarah,” Cousin Robert would say to my mother, “you're coddling that
boy, you ought to lam him oftener. Hand him over to me for a couple of
months--I'll put him through his paces.... So you're going to send him
to college, are you? He's too good for old Benjamin's grocery business.”

He was very fond of my mother, though he lectured her soundly for her
weakness in indulging me. I can see him as he sat at the head of the
supper table, carving liberal helpings which Mary and Helen and Willie
devoured with country appetites, watching our plates.

“What's the matter, Hugh? You haven't eaten all your lamb.”

“He doesn't like fat, Robert,” my mother explained.

“I'd teach him to like it if he were my boy.”

“Well, Robert, he isn't your boy,” Cousin Jenny would remind him....
His bark was worse than his bite. Like many kind people he made use of
brusqueness to hide an inner tenderness, and on the train he was hail
fellow well met with every Tom, Dick and Harry that commuted,--although
the word was not invented in those days,--and the conductor and brakeman
too. But he had his standards, and held to them....

Mine was not a questioning childhood, and I was willing to accept the
scheme of things as presented to me entire. In my tenderer years, when
I had broken one of the commandments on my father's tablet (there were
more than ten), and had, on his home-coming, been sent to bed, my mother
would come softly upstairs after supper with a book in her hand; a book
of selected Bible stories on which Dr. Pound had set the seal of his
approval, with a glazed picture cover, representing Daniel in the lions'
den and an angel standing beside him. On the somewhat specious plea that
Holy Writ might have a chastening effect, she was permitted to minister
to me in my shame. The amazing adventure of Shadrach, Meshach and
Abednego particularly appealed to an imagination needing little
stimulation. It never occurred to me to doubt that these gentlemen had
triumphed over caloric laws. But out of my window, at the back of the
second storey, I often saw a sudden, crimson glow in the sky to the
southward, as though that part of the city had caught fire. There were
the big steel-works, my mother told me, belonging to Mr. Durrett and
Mr. Hambleton, the father of Ralph Hambleton and the grandfather of
Hambleton Durrett, my schoolmates at Miss Caroline's. I invariably
connected the glow, not with Hambleton and Ralph, but with Shadrach,
Meshach and Abednego! Later on, when my father took me to the
steel-works, and I beheld with awe a huge pot filled with molten metal
that ran out of it like water, I asked him--if I leaped into that
stream, could God save me? He was shocked. Miracles, he told me, didn't
happen any more.

“When did they stop?” I demanded.

“About two thousand years ago, my son,” he replied gravely.

“Then,” said I, “no matter how much I believed in God, he wouldn't save
me if I jumped into the big kettle for his sake?”

For this I was properly rebuked and silenced.

My boyhood was filled with obsessing desires. If God, for example, had
cast down, out of his abundant store, manna and quail in the desert,
why couldn't he fling me a little pocket money? A paltry quarter of
a dollar, let us say, which to me represented wealth. To avoid the
reproach of the Pharisees, I went into the closet of my bed-chamber to
pray, requesting that the quarter should be dropped on the north side of
Lyme Street, between Stamford and Tryon; in short, as conveniently near
home as possible. Then I issued forth, not feeling overconfident, but
hoping. Tom Peters, leaning over the ornamental cast-iron fence which
separated his front yard from the street, presently spied me scanning
the sidewalk.

“What are you looking for, Hugh?” he demanded with interest.

“Oh, something I dropped,” I answered uneasily.

“What?”

Naturally, I refused to tell. It was a broiling, midsummer day; Julia
and Russell, who had been warned to stay in the shade, but who were
engaged in the experiment of throwing the yellow cat from the top of
the lattice fence to see if she would alight on her feet, were presently
attracted, and joined in the search. The mystery which I threw around it
added to its interest, and I was not inconsiderably annoyed. Suppose one
of them were to find the quarter which God had intended for me? Would
that be justice?

“It's nothing,” I said, and pretended to abandon the quest--to be
renewed later. But this ruse failed; they continued obstinately to
search; and after a few minutes Tom, with a shout, picked out of a hot
crevice between the bricks--a nickel!

“It's mine!” I cried fiercely.

“Did you lose it?” demanded Julia, the canny one, as Tom was about to
give it up.

My lying was generally reserved for my elders.

“N-no,” I said hesitatingly, “but it's mine all the same. It was--sent
to me.”

“Sent to you!” they exclaimed, in a chorus of protest and derision. And
how, indeed, was I to make good my claim? The Peterses, when assembled,
were a clan, led by Julia and in matters of controversy, moved as one.
How was I to tell them that in answer to my prayers for twenty-five
cents, God had deemed five all that was good for me?

“Some--somebody dropped it there for me.”

“Who?” demanded the chorus. “Say, that's a good one!”

Tears suddenly blinded me. Overcome by chagrin, I turned and flew into
the house and upstairs into my room, locking the door behind me. An
interval ensued, during which I nursed my sense of wrong, and it pleased
me to think that the money would bring a curse on the Peters family. At
length there came a knock on the door, and a voice calling my name.

“Hugh! Hugh!”

It was Tom.

“Hughie, won't you let me in? I want to give you the nickel.”

“Keep it!” I shouted back. “You found it.”

Another interval, and then more knocking.

“Open up,” he said coaxingly. “I--I want to talk to you.”

I relented, and let him in. He pressed the coin into my hand. I refused;
he pleaded.

“You found it,” I said, “it's yours.”

“But--but you were looking for it.”

“That makes no difference,” I declared magnanimously.

Curiosity overcame him.

“Say, Hughie, if you didn't drop it, who on earth did?”

“Nobody on earth,” I replied cryptically....

Naturally, I declined to reveal the secret. Nor was this by any means
the only secret I held over the Peters family, who never quite knew what
to make of me. They were not troubled with imaginations. Julia was a
little older than Tom and had a sharp tongue, but over him I exercised
a distinct fascination, and I knew it. Literal himself, good-natured and
warm-hearted, the gift I had of tingeing life with romance (to put the
thing optimistically), of creating kingdoms out of back yards--at which
Julia and Russell sniffed--held his allegiance firm.




II.

I must have been about twelve years of age when I realized that I was
possessed of the bard's inheritance. A momentous journey I made with
my parents to Boston about this time not only stimulated this gift, but
gave me the advantage of which other travellers before me have likewise
availed themselves--of being able to take certain poetic liberties with
a distant land that my friends at home had never seen. Often during the
heat of summer noons when we were assembled under the big maple beside
the lattice fence in the Peters' yard, the spirit would move me to
relate the most amazing of adventures. Our train, for instance, had been
held up in the night by a band of robbers in black masks, and rescued by
a traveller who bore a striking resemblance to my Cousin Robert Breck.
He had shot two of the robbers. These fabrications, once started, flowed
from me with ridiculous ease. I experienced an unwonted exhilaration,
exaltation; I began to believe that they had actually occurred. In vain
the astute Julia asserted that there were no train robbers in the east.
What had my father done? Well, he had been very brave, but he had had no
pistol. Had I been frightened? No, not at all; I, too, had wished for
a pistol. Why hadn't I spoken of this before? Well, so many things
had happened to me I couldn't tell them all at once. It was plain that
Julia, though often fascinated against her will, deemed this sort of
thing distinctly immoral.

I was a boy divided in two. One part of me dwelt in a fanciful realm
of his own weaving, and the other part was a commonplace and protesting
inhabitant of a world of lessons, disappointments and discipline. My
instincts were not vicious. Ideas bubbled up within me continually
from an apparently inexhaustible spring, and the very strength of the
longings they set in motion puzzled and troubled my parents: what I
seem to see most distinctly now is a young mind engaged in a ceaseless
struggle for self-expression, for self-development, against the inertia
of a tradition of which my father was the embodiment. He was an enigma
to me then. He sincerely loved me, he cherished ambitions concerning me,
yet thwarted every natural, budding growth, until I grew unconsciously
to regard him as my enemy, although I had an affection for him and a
pride in him that flared up at times. Instead of confiding to him my
aspirations, vague though they were, I became more and more secretive as
I grew older. I knew instinctively that he regarded these aspirations
as evidences in my character of serious moral flaws. And I would sooner
have suffered many afternoons of his favourite punishment--solitary
confinement in my room--than reveal to him those occasional fits of
creative fancy which caused me to neglect my lessons in order to put
them on paper. Loving literature, in his way, he was characteristically
incapable of recognizing the literary instinct, and the symptoms of its
early stages he mistook for inherent frivolity, for lack of respect
for the truth; in brief, for original sin. At the age of fourteen I had
begun secretly (alas, how many things I did secretly!) to write stories
of a sort, stories that never were finished.

He regarded reading as duty, not pleasure. He laid out books for me,
which I neglected. He was part and parcel of that American environment
in which literary ambition was regarded as sheer madness. And no one
who has not experienced that environment can have any conception of the
pressure it exerted to stifle originality, to thrust the new generation
into its religious and commercial moulds. Shall we ever, I wonder,
develop the enlightened education that will know how to take advantage
of such initiative as was mine? that will be on the watch for it,
sympathize with it and guide it to fruition?

I was conscious of still another creative need, that of dramatizing
my ideas, of converting them into action. And this need was to lead me
farther than ever afield from the path of righteousness. The concrete
realization of ideas, as many geniuses will testify, is an expensive
undertaking, requiring a little pocket money; and I have already touched
upon that subject. My father did not believe in pocket money. A sea
story that my Cousin Donald Ewan gave me at Christmas inspired me to
compose one of a somewhat different nature; incidentally, I deemed it
a vast improvement on Cousin Donald's book. Now, if I only had a boat,
with the assistance of Ham Durrett and Tom Peters, Gene Hollister and
Perry Blackwood and other friends, this story of mine might be
staged. There were, however, as usual, certain seemingly insuperable
difficulties: in the first place, it was winter time; in the second, no
facilities existed in the city for operations of a nautical character;
and, lastly, my Christmas money amounted only to five dollars. It was my
father who pointed out these and other objections. For, after a careful
perusal of the price lists I had sent for, I had been forced to appeal
to him to supply additional funds with which to purchase a row-boat.
Incidentally, he read me a lecture on extravagance, referred to my last
month's report at the Academy, and finished by declaring that he would
not permit me to have a boat even in the highly improbable case of
somebody's presenting me with one. Let it not be imagined that my ardour
or my determination were extinguished. Shortly after I had retired from
his presence it occurred to me that he had said nothing to forbid my
making a boat, and the first thing I did after school that day was to
procure, for twenty-five cents, a second-hand book on boat construction.
The woodshed was chosen as a shipbuilding establishment. It was
convenient--and my father never went into the back yard in cold weather.
Inquiries of lumber-yards developing the disconcerting fact that four
dollars and seventy-five cents was inadequate to buy the material
itself, to say nothing of the cost of steaming and bending the ribs, I
reluctantly abandoned the ideal of the graceful craft I had sketched,
and compromised on a flat bottom. Observe how the ways of deception lead
to transgression: I recalled the cast-off lumber pile of Jarvis,
the carpenter, a good-natured Englishman, coarse and fat: in our
neighbourhood his reputation for obscenity was so well known to mothers
that I had been forbidden to go near him or his shop. Grits Jarvis, his
son, who had inherited the talent, was also contraband. I can see
now the huge bulk of the elder Jarvis as he stood in the melting,
soot-powdered snow in front of his shop, and hear his comments on my
pertinacity.

“If you ever wants another man's missus when you grows up, my lad, Gawd
'elp 'im!”

“Why should I want another man's wife when I don't want one of my own?”
 I demanded, indignant.

He laughed with his customary lack of moderation.

“You mind what old Jarvis says,” he cried. “What you wants, you gets.”

I did get his boards, by sheer insistence. No doubt they were not very
valuable, and without question he more than made up for them in my
mother's bill. I also got something else of equal value to me at the
moment,--the assistance of Grits, the contraband; daily, after school,
I smuggled him into the shed through the alley, acquiring likewise the
services of Tom Peters, which was more of a triumph than it would seem.
Tom always had to be “worked up” to participation in my ideas, but in
the end he almost invariably succumbed. The notion of building a boat in
the dead of winter, and so far from her native element, naturally struck
him at first as ridiculous. Where in Jehoshaphat was I going to sail it
if I ever got it made? He much preferred to throw snowballs at innocent
wagon drivers.

All that Tom saw, at first, was a dirty, coal-spattered shed with dim
recesses, for it was lighted on one side only, and its temperature was
somewhere below freezing. Surely he could not be blamed for a tempered
enthusiasm! But for me, all the dirt and cold and discomfort were
blotted out, and I beheld a gallant craft manned by sturdy seamen
forging her way across blue water in the South Seas. Treasure Island,
alas, was as yet unwritten; but among my father's books were two old
volumes in which I had hitherto taken no interest, with crude engravings
of palms and coral reefs, of naked savages and tropical mountains
covered with jungle, the adventures, in brief, of one Captain Cook. I
also discovered a book by a later traveller. Spurred on by a mysterious
motive power, and to the great neglect of the pons asinorum and the
staple products of the Southern States, I gathered an amazing amount of
information concerning a remote portion of the globe, of head-hunters
and poisoned stakes, of typhoons, of queer war-craft that crept up on
you while you were dismantling galleons, when desperate hand-to-hand
encounters ensued. Little by little as I wove all this into personal
adventures soon to be realized, Tom forgot the snowballs and the
maddened grocery-men who chased him around the block; while Grits would
occasionally stop sawing and cry out:--“Ah, s'y!” frequently adding that
he would be G--d--d.

The cold woodshed became a chantry on the New England coast, the alley
the wintry sea soon to embrace our ship, the saw-horses--which stood
between a coal-bin on one side and unused stalls filled with rubbish
and kindling on the other--the ways; the yard behind the lattice fence
became a backwater, the flapping clothes the sails of ships that took
refuge there--on Mondays and Tuesdays. Even my father was symbolized
with unparalleled audacity as a watchful government which had, up to the
present, no inkling of our semi-piratical intentions! The cook and the
housemaid, though remonstrating against the presence of Grits, were
friendly confederates; likewise old Cephas, the darkey who, from my
earliest memory, carried coal and wood and blacked the shoes, washed the
windows and scrubbed the steps.

One afternoon Tom went to work....

The history of the building of the good ship Petrel is similar to that
of all created things, a story of trial and error and waste. At last,
one March day she stood ready for launching. She had even been caulked;
for Grits, from an unknown and unquestionably dubious source, had
procured a bucket of tar, which we heated over afire in the alley and
smeared into every crack. It was natural that the news of such a feat
as we were accomplishing should have leaked out, that the “yard” should
have been visited from time to time by interested friends, some of whom
came to admire, some to scoff, and all to speculate. Among the scoffers,
of course, was Ralph Hambleton, who stood with his hands in his pockets
and cheerfully predicted all sorts of dire calamities. Ralph was always
a superior boy, tall and a trifle saturnine and cynical, with an
amazing self-confidence not wholly due to the wealth of his father, the
iron-master. He was older than I.

“She won't float five minutes, if you ever get her to the water,” was
his comment, and in this he was supported on general principles by Julia
and Russell Peters. Ralph would have none of the Petrel, or of the South
Seas either; but he wanted,--so he said,--“to be in at the death.” The
Hambletons were one of the few families who at that time went to the sea
for the summer, and from a practical knowledge of craft in general Ralph
was not slow to point out the defects of ours. Tom and I defended her
passionately.

Ralph was not a romanticist. He was a born leader, excelling at
organized games, exercising over boys the sort of fascination that comes
from doing everything better and more easily than others. It was only
during the progress of such enterprises as this affair of the Petrel
that I succeeded in winning their allegiance; bit by bit, as Tom's had
been won, fanning their enthusiasm by impersonating at once Achilles
and Homer, recruiting while relating the Odyssey of the expedition in
glowing colours. Ralph always scoffed, and when I had no scheme on foot
they went back to him. Having surveyed the boat and predicted calamity,
he departed, leaving a circle of quaint and youthful figures around the
Petrel in the shed: Gene Hollister, romantically inclined, yet somewhat
hampered by a strict parental supervision; Ralph's cousin Ham Durrett,
who was even then a rather fat boy, good-natured but selfish; Don and
Harry Ewan, my second cousins; Mac and Nancy Willett and Sam and Sophy
McAlery. Nancy was a tomboy, not to be denied, and Sophy her shadow. We
held a council, the all-important question of which was how to get the
Petrel to the water, and what water to get her to. The river was not to
be thought of, and Blackstone Lake some six miles from town. Finally,
Logan's mill-pond was decided on,--a muddy sheet on the outskirts of
the city. But how to get her to Logan's mill-pond? Cephas was at length
consulted. It turned out that he had a coloured friend who went by the
impressive name of Thomas Jefferson Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver),
who was in the express business; and who, after surveying the boat
with some misgivings,--for she was ten feet long,--finally consented to
transport her to “tide-water” for the sum of two dollars. But it proved
that our combined resources only amounted to a dollar and seventy-five
cents. Ham Durrett never contributed to anything. On this sum Thomas
Jefferson compromised.

Saturday dawned clear, with a stiff March wind catching up the dust into
eddies and whirling it down the street. No sooner was my father safely
on his way to his office than Thomas Jefferson was reported to be in
the alley, where we assembled, surveying with some misgivings Thomas
Jefferson's steed, whose ability to haul the Petrel two miles seemed
somewhat doubtful. Other difficulties developed; the door in the back of
the shed proved to be too narrow for our ship's beam. But men embarked
on a desperate enterprise are not to be stopped by such trifles, and
the problem was solved by sawing out two adjoining boards. These were
afterwards replaced with skill by the ship's carpenter, Able Seaman
Grits Jarvis. Then the Petrel by heroic efforts was got into the wagon,
the seat of which had been removed, old Thomas Jefferson perched himself
precariously in the bow and protestingly gathered up his rope-patched
reins.

“Folks'll 'low I'se plum crazy, drivin' dis yere boat,” he declared,
observing with concern that some four feet of the stern projected over
the tail-board. “Ef she topples, I'll git to heaven quicker'n a bullet.”

When one is shanghaied, however,--in the hands of buccaneers,--it is
too late to withdraw. Six shoulders upheld the rear end of the Petrel,
others shoved, and Thomas Jefferson's rickety horse began to move
forward in spite of himself. An expression of sheer terror might have
been observed on the old negro's crinkled face, but his voice was
drowned, and we swept out of the alley. Scarcely had we travelled a
block before we began to be joined by all the boys along the line of
march; marbles, tops, and even incipient baseball games were abandoned
that Saturday morning; people ran out of their houses, teamsters halted
their carts. The breathless excitement, the exaltation I had felt on
leaving the alley were now tinged with other feelings, unanticipated,
but not wholly lacking in delectable quality,--concern and awe at these
unforeseen forces I had raised, at this ever growing and enthusiastic
body of volunteers springing up like dragon's teeth in our path. After
all, was not I the hero of this triumphal procession? The thought was
consoling, exhilarating. And here was Nancy marching at my side, a
little subdued, perhaps, but unquestionably admiring and realizing that
it was I who had created all this. Nancy, who was the aptest of pupils,
the most loyal of followers, though I did not yet value her devotion at
its real worth, because she was a girl. Her imagination kindled at my
touch. And on this eventful occasion she carried in her arms a parcel,
the contents of which were unknown to all but ourselves. At length we
reached the muddy shores of Logan's pond, where two score eager hands
volunteered to assist the Petrel into her native element.

Alas! that the reality never attains to the vision. I had beheld, in my
dreams, the Petrel about to take the water, and Nancy Willett standing
very straight making a little speech and crashing a bottle of wine
across the bows. This was the content of the mysterious parcel; she
had stolen it from her father's cellar. But the number of uninvited
spectators, which had not been foreseen, considerably modified the
programme,--as the newspapers would have said. They pushed and crowded
around the ship, and made frank and even brutal remarks as to her
seaworthiness; even Nancy, inured though she was to the masculine sex,
had fled to the heights, and it looked at this supreme moment as though
we should have to fight for the Petrel. An attempt to muster her doughty
buccaneers failed; the gunner too had fled,--Gene Hollister; Ham Durrett
and the Ewanses were nowhere to be seen, and a muster revealed only Tom,
the fidus Achates, and Grits Jarvis.

“Ah, s'y!” he exclaimed in the teeth of the menacing hordes. “Stand
back, carn't yer? I'll bash yer face in, Johnny. Whose boat is this?”

Shall it be whispered that I regretted his belligerency? Here, in truth,
was the drama staged,--my drama, had I only been able to realize it. The
good ship beached, the headhunters hemming us in on all sides, the scene
prepared for one of those struggles against frightful odds which I had
so graphically related as an essential part of our adventures.

“Let's roll the cuss in the fancy collar,” proposed one of the
head-hunters,--meaning me.

“I'll stove yer slats if yer touch him,” said Grits, and then resorted
to appeal. “I s'y, carn't yer stand back and let a chap 'ave a charnst?”

The head-hunters only jeered. And what shall be said of the Captain
in this moment of peril? Shall it be told that his heart was beating
wildly?--bumping were a better word. He was trying to remember that
he was the Captain. Otherwise, he must admit with shame that he, too,
should have fled. So much for romance when the test comes. Will he
remain to fall fighting for his ship? Like Horatius, he glanced up at
the hill, where, instead of the porch of the home where he would fain
have been, he beheld a wisp of a girl standing alone, her hat on the
back of her head, her hair flying in the wind, gazing intently down at
him in his danger. The renegade crew was nowhere to be seen. There are
those who demand the presence of a woman in order to be heroes....

“Give us a chance, can't you?” he cried, repeating Grits's appeal in
not quite such a stentorian tone as he would have liked, while his hand
trembled on the gunwale. Tom Peters, it must be acknowledged, was much
more of a buccaneer when it was a question of deeds, for he planted
himself in the way of the belligerent chief of the head-hunters (who
spoke with a decided brogue).

“Get out of the way!” said Tom, with a little squeak in his voice. Yet
there he was, and he deserves a tribute.

An unlooked-for diversion saved us from annihilation, in the shape of
one who had a talent for creating them. We were bewilderingly aware of a
girlish figure amongst us.

“You cowards!” she cried. “You cowards!”

Lithe, and fairly quivering with passion, it was Nancy who showed us
how to face the head-hunters. They gave back. They would have been brave
indeed if they had not retreated before such an intense little nucleus
of energy and indignation!...

“Ah, give 'em a chanst,” said their chief, after a moment.... He even
helped to push the boat towards the water. But he did not volunteer to
be one of those to man the Petrel on her maiden voyage. Nor did
Logan's pond, that wild March day, greatly resemble the South Seas.
Nevertheless, my eye on Nancy, I stepped proudly aboard and seized
an “oar.” Grits and Tom followed,--when suddenly the Petrel sank
considerably below the water-line as her builders had estimated it. Ere
we fully realized this, the now friendly head-hunters had given us
a shove, and we were off! The Captain, who should have been waving
good-bye to his lady love from the poop, sat down abruptly,--the crew
likewise; not, however, before she had heeled to the scuppers, and
a half-bucket of iced water had run it. Head-hunters were mere daily
episodes in Grits's existence, but water... He muttered something in
cockney that sounded like a prayer.... The wind was rapidly driving
us toward the middle of the pond, and something cold and ticklish was
seeping through the seats of our trousers. We sat like statues....

The bright scene etched itself in my memory--the bare brown slopes with
which the pond was bordered, the Irish shanties, the clothes-lines with
red flannel shirts snapping in the biting wind; Nancy motionless on the
bank; the group behind her, silent now, impressed in spite of itself at
the sight of our intrepidity.

The Petrel was sailing stern first.... Would any of us, indeed, ever see
home again? I thought of my father's wrath turned to sorrow because he
had refused to gratify a son's natural wish and present him with a real
rowboat.... Out of the corners of our eyes we watched the water creeping
around the gunwale, and the very muddiness of it seemed to enhance its
coldness, to make the horrors of its depths more mysterious and hideous.
The voice of Grits startled us.

“O Gawd,” he was saying, “we're a-going to sink, and I carn't swim! The
blarsted tar's give way back here.”

“Is she leaking?” I cried.

“She's a-filling up like a bath tub,” he lamented.

Slowly but perceptibly, in truth, the bow was rising, and above the
whistling of the wind I could hear his chattering as she settled....
Then several things happened simultaneously: an agonized cry behind me,
distant shouts from the shore, a sudden upward lunge of the bow, and
the torture of being submerged, inch by inch, in the icy, yellow water.
Despite the splashing behind me, I sat as though paralyzed until I was
waist deep and the boards turned under me, and then, with a spasmodic
contraction of my whole being I struck out--only to find my feet on the
muddy bottom. Such was the inglorious end of the good ship Petrel! For
she went down, with all hands, in little more than half a fathom of
water.... It was not until then I realized that we had been blown clear
across the pond!

Figures were running along the shore. And as Tom and I emerged dragging
Grits between us,--for he might have been drowned there abjectly in the
shallows,--we were met by a stout and bare-armed Irishwoman whose scanty
hair, I remember, was drawn into a tight knot behind her head; and who
seized us, all three, as though we were a bunch of carrots.

“Come along wid ye!” she cried.

Shivering, we followed her up the hill, the spectators of the tragedy,
who by this time had come around the pond, trailing after. Nancy was not
among them. Inside the shanty into which we were thrust were two small
children crawling about the floor, and the place was filled with steam
from a wash-tub against the wall and a boiler on the stove. With a
vigorous injunction to make themselves scarce, the Irishwoman slammed
the door in the faces of the curious and ordered us to remove our
clothes. Grits was put to bed in a corner, while Tom and I, provided
with various garments, huddled over the stove. There fell to my lot the
red flannel shirt which I had seen on the clothes-line. She gave us
hot coffee, and was back at her wash-tub in no time at all, her entire
comment on a proceeding that seemed to Tom and me to have certain
elements of gravity being, “By's will be by's!” The final ironical touch
was given the anti-climax when our rescuer turned out to be the mother
of the chief of the head-hunters himself! He had lingered perforce with
his brothers and sister outside the cabin until dinner time, and when he
came in he was meek as Moses.

Thus the ready hospitality of the poor, which passed over the heads
of Tom and me as we ate bread and onions and potatoes with a ravenous
hunger. It must have been about two o'clock in the afternoon when we
bade good-bye to our preserver and departed for home....

At first we went at a dog-trot, but presently slowed down to discuss the
future looming portentously ahead of us. Since entire concealment was
now impossible, the question was,--how complete a confession would be
necessary? Our cases, indeed, were dissimilar, and Tom's incentive to
hold back the facts was not nearly so great as mine. It sometimes seemed
to me in those days unjust that the Peterses were able on the whole
to keep out of criminal difficulties, in which I was more or less
continuously involved: for it did not strike me that their sins were not
those of the imagination. The method of Tom's father was the slipper. He
and Tom understood each other, while between my father and myself was a
great gulf fixed. Not that Tom yearned for the slipper; but he regarded
its occasional applications as being as inevitable as changes in the
weather; lying did not come easily to him, and left to himself he much
preferred to confess and have the matter over with. I have already
suggested that I had cultivated lying, that weapon of the weaker party,
in some degree, at least, in self-defence.

Tom was loyal. Moreover, my conviction would probably deprive him
for six whole afternoons of my company, on which he was more or less
dependent. But the defence of this case presented unusual difficulties,
and we stopped several times to thrash them out. We had been absent from
dinner, and doubtless by this time Julia had informed Tom's mother of
the expedition, and anyone could see that our clothing had been wet. So
I lingered in no little anxiety behind the Peters stable while he made
the investigation. Our spirits rose considerably when he returned to
report that Julia had unexpectedly been a trump, having quieted his
mother by the surmise that he was spending the day with his Aunt Fanny.
So far, so good. The problem now was to decide upon what to admit. For
we must both tell the same story.

It was agreed that we had fallen into Logan's Pond from a raft: my
suggestion. Well, said Tom, the Petrel hadn't proved much better than a
raft, after all. I was in no mood to defend her.

This designation of the Petrel as a “raft” was my first legal quibble.
The question to be decided by the court was, What is a raft? just as
the supreme tribunal of the land has been required, in later years, to
decide, What is whiskey? The thing to be concealed if possible was the
building of the “raft,” although this information was already in the
possession of a number of persons, whose fathers might at any moment
see fit to congratulate my own on being the parent of a genius. It was a
risk, however, that had to be run. And, secondly, since Grits Jarvis was
contraband, nothing was to be said about him.

I have not said much about my mother, who might have been likened on
such occasions to a grand jury compelled to indict, yet torn between
loyalty to an oath and sympathy with the defendant. I went through the
Peters yard, climbed the wire fence, my object being to discover first
from Ella, the housemaid, or Hannah, the cook, how much was known in
high quarters. It was Hannah who, as I opened the kitchen door, turned
at the sound, and set down the saucepan she was scouring.

“Is it home ye are? Mercy to goodness!” (this on beholding my shrunken
costume) “Glory be to God you're not drownded! and your mother worritin'
her heart out! So it's into the wather ye were?”

I admitted it.

“Hannah?” I said softly.

“What then?”

“Does mother know--about the boat?”

“Now don't ye be wheedlin'.”

I managed to discover, however, that my mother did not know, and
surmised that the best reason why she had not been told had to do with
Hannah's criminal acquiescence concerning the operations in the shed. I
ran into the front hall and up the stairs, and my mother heard me coming
and met me on the landing.

“Hugh, where have you been?”

As I emerged from the semi-darkness of the stairway she caught sight of
my dwindled garments, of the trousers well above my ankles. Suddenly she
had me in her arms and was kissing me passionately. As she stood before
me in her grey, belted skirt, the familiar red-and-white cameo at her
throat, her heavy hair parted in the middle, in her eyes was an odd,
appealing look which I know now was a sign of mother love struggling
with a Presbyterian conscience. Though she inherited that conscience,
I have often thought she might have succeeded in casting it off--or at
least some of it--had it not been for the fact that in spite of herself
she worshipped its incarnation in the shape of my father. Her voice
trembled a little as she drew me to the sofa beside the window.

“Tell me about what happened, my son,” she said.

It was a terrible moment for me. For my affections were still
quiveringly alive in those days, and I loved her. I had for an instant
an instinctive impulse to tell her the whole story,--South Sea Islands
and all! And I could have done it had I not beheld looming behind her
another figure which represented a stern and unsympathetic Authority,
and somehow made her, suddenly, of small account. Not that she would
have understood the romance, but she would have comprehended me. I knew
that she was powerless to save me from the wrath to come. I wept. It was
because I hated to lie to her,--yet I did so. Fear gripped me, and--like
some respectable criminals I have since known--I understood that any
confession I made would inexorably be used against me.... I wonder
whether she knew I was lying? At any rate, the case appeared to be a
grave one, and I was presently remanded to my room to be held over for
trial....

Vividly, as I write, I recall the misery of the hours I have spent,
while awaiting sentence, in the little chamber with the honeysuckle
wall-paper and steel engravings of happy but dumpy children romping in
the fields and groves. On this particular March afternoon the weather
had become morne, as the French say; and I looked down sadly into the
grey back yard which the wind of the morning had strewn with chips from
the Petrel. At last, when shadows were gathering in the corners of the
room, I heard footsteps. Ella appeared, prim and virtuous, yet a little
commiserating. My father wished to see me, downstairs. It was not the
first time she had brought that summons, and always her manner was the
same!

The scene of my trials was always the sitting room, lined with grim
books in their walnut cases. And my father sat, like a judge, behind the
big desk where he did his work when at home. Oh, the distance between us
at such an hour! I entered as delicately as Agag, and the expression in
his eye seemed to convict me before I could open my mouth.

“Hugh,” he said, “your mother tells me that you have confessed to going,
without permission, to Logan's Pond, where you embarked on a raft and
fell into the water.”

The slight emphasis he contrived to put on the word raft sent a colder
shiver down my spine than the iced water had done. What did he know? or
was this mere suspicion? Too late, now, at any rate, to plead guilty.

“It was a sort of a raft, sir,” I stammered.

“A sort of a raft,” repeated my father. “Where, may I ask, did you find
it?”

“I--I didn't exactly find it, sir.”

“Ah!” said my father. (It was the moment to glance meaningly at the
jury.) The prisoner gulped. “You didn't exactly find it, then. Will you
kindly explain how you came by it?”

“Well, sir, we--I--put it together.”

“Have you any objection to stating, Hugh, in plain English, that you
made it?”

“No, sir, I suppose you might say that I made it.”

“Or that it was intended for a row-boat?”

Here was the time to appeal, to force a decision as to what constituted
a row-boat.

“Perhaps it might be called a row-boat, sir,” I said abjectly.

“Or that, in direct opposition to my wishes and commands in forbidding
you to have a boat, to spend your money foolishly and wickedly on a
whim, you constructed one secretly in the woodshed, took out a part of
the back partition, thus destroying property that did, not belong
to you, and had the boat carted this morning to Logan's Pond?” I was
silent, utterly undone. Evidently he had specific information.... There
are certain expressions that are, at times, more than mere figures of
speech, and now my father's wrath seemed literally towering. It added
visibly to his stature.

“Hugh,” he said, in a voice that penetrated to the very corners of my
soul, “I utterly fail to understand you. I cannot imagine how a son
of mine, a son of your mother who is the very soul of truthfulness and
honour--can be a liar.” (Oh, the terrible emphasis he put on that word!)
“Nor is it as if this were a new tendency--I have punished you for it
before. Your mother and I have tried to do our duty by you, to instil
into you Christian teaching. But it seems wholly useless. I confess that
I am at a less how to proceed. You seem to have no conscience whatever,
no conception of what you owe to your parents and your God. You not only
persistently disregard my wishes and commands, but you have, for many
months, been leading a double life, facing me every day, while you were
secretly and continually disobeying me. I shudder to think where this
determination of yours to have what you desire at any price will lead
you in the future. It is just such a desire that distinguishes wicked
men from good.”

I will not linger upon a scene the very remembrance of which is painful
to this day.... I went from my father's presence in disgrace, in an
agony of spirit that was overwhelming, to lock the door of my room and
drop face downward on the bed, to sob until my muscles twitched. For he
had, indeed, put into me an awful fear. The greatest horror of my
boyish imagination was a wicked man. Was I, as he had declared, utterly
depraved and doomed in spite of myself to be one?

There came a knock at my door--Ella with my supper. I refused to open,
and sent her away, to fall on my knees in the darkness and pray wildly
to a God whose attributes and character were sufficiently confused in my
mind. On the one hand was the stern, despotic Monarch of the Westminster
Catechism, whom I addressed out of habit, the Father who condemned a
portion of his children from the cradle. Was I one of those who he had
decreed before I was born must suffer the tortures of the flames of
hell? Putting two and two together, what I had learned in Sunday school
and gathered from parts of Dr. Pound's sermons, and the intimation of
my father that wickedness was within me, like an incurable disease,--was
not mine the logical conclusion? What, then, was the use of praying?...
My supplications ceased abruptly. And my ever ready imagination, stirred
to its depths, beheld that awful scene of the last day: the darkness,
such as sometimes creeps over the city in winter, when the jaundiced
smoke falls down and we read at noonday by gas-light. I beheld the
tortured faces of the wicked gathered on the one side, and my mother
on the other amongst the blessed, gazing across the gulf at me with
yearning and compassion. Strange that it did not strike me that the
sight of the condemned whom they had loved in life would have marred if
not destroyed the happiness of the chosen, about to receive their crowns
and harps! What a theology--that made the Creator and Preserver of all
mankind thus illogical!




III.

Although I was imaginative, I was not morbidly introspective, and by the
end of the first day of my incarceration my interest in that solution
had waned. At times, however, I actually yearned for someone in whom I
could confide, who could suggest a solution. I repeat, I would not for
worlds have asked my father or my mother or Dr. Pound, of whom I had a
wholesome fear, or perhaps an unwholesome one. Except at morning Bible
reading and at church my parents never mentioned the name of the Deity,
save to instruct me formally. Intended or no, the effect of my religious
training was to make me ashamed of discussing spiritual matters,
and naturally I failed to perceive that this was because it laid
its emphasis on personal salvation.... I did not, however, become an
unbeliever, for I was not of a nature to contemplate with equanimity a
godless universe....

My sufferings during these series of afternoon confinements did not come
from remorse, but were the result of a vague sense of injury; and their
effect was to generate within me a strange motive power, a desire to do
something that would astound my father and eventually wring from him the
confession that he had misjudged me. To be sure, I should have to wait
until early manhood, at least, for the accomplishment of such a coup.
Might it not be that I was an embryonic literary genius? Many were the
books I began in this ecstasy of self-vindication, only to abandon them
when my confinement came to an end.

It was about this time, I think, that I experienced one of those shocks
which have a permanent effect upon character. It was then the custom
for ladies to spend the day with one another, bringing their sewing; and
sometimes, when I unexpectedly entered the sitting-room, the voices of
my mother's visitors would drop to a whisper. One afternoon I returned
from school to pause at the head of the stairs. Cousin Bertha Ewan and
Mrs. McAlery were discussing with my mother an affair that I judged from
the awed tone in which they spoke might prove interesting.

“Poor Grace,” Mrs. McAlery was saying, “I imagine she's paid a heavy
penalty. No man alive will be faithful under those circumstances.”

I stopped at the head of the stairs, with a delicious, guilty feeling.

“Have they ever heard of her?” Cousin Bertha asked.

“It is thought they went to Spain,” replied Mrs. McAlery, solemnly, yet
not without a certain zest. “Mr. Jules Hollister will not have her name
mentioned in his presence, you know. And Whitcomb chased them as far as
New York with a horse-pistol in his pocket. The report is that he got
to the dock just as the ship sailed. And then, you know, he went to live
somewhere out West,--in Iowa, I believe.”

“Did he ever get a divorce?” Cousin Bertha inquired.

“He was too good a church member, my dear,” my mother reminded her.

“Well, I'd have got one quick enough, church member or no church
member,” declared Cousin Bertha, who had in her elements of daring.

“Not that I mean for a moment to excuse her,” Mrs. McAlery put in, “but
Edward Whitcomb did have a frightful temper, and he was awfully strict
with her, and he was old enough, anyhow, to be her father. Grace
Hollister was the last woman in the world I should have suspected of
doing so hideous a thing. She was so sweet and simple.”

“Jennings was very attractive,” said my Cousin Bertha. “I don't think I
ever saw a handsomer man. Now, if he had looked at me--”

The sentence was never finished, for at this crucial moment I dropped a
grammar....

I had heard enough, however, to excite my curiosity to the highest
pitch. And that evening, when I came in at five o'clock to study, I
asked my mother what had become of Gene Hollister's aunt.

“She went away, Hugh,” replied my mother, looking greatly troubled.

“Why?” I persisted.

“It is something you are too young to understand.”

Of course I started an investigation, and the next day at school I
asked the question of Gene Hollister himself, only to discover that he
believed his aunt to be dead! And that night he asked his mother if his
Aunt Grace were really alive, after all? Whereupon complications and
explanations ensued between our parents, of which we saw only the
surface signs.... My father accused me of eavesdropping (which I
denied), and sentenced me to an afternoon of solitary confinement for
repeating something which I had heard in private. I have reason to
believe that my mother was also reprimanded.

It must not be supposed that I permitted the matter to rest. In addition
to Grits Jarvis, there was another contraband among my acquaintances,
namely, Alec Pound, the scrape-grace son of the Reverend Doctor Pound.
Alec had an encyclopaedic mind, especially well stocked with the kind of
knowledge I now desired; first and last he taught me much, which I would
better have got in another way. To him I appealed and got the story, my
worst suspicions being confirmed. Mrs. Whitcomb's house had been across
the alley from that of Mr. Jennings, but no one knew that anything
was “going on,” though there had been signals from the windows--the
neighbours afterwards remembered....

I listened shudderingly.

“But,” I cried, “they were both married!”

“What difference does that make when you love a woman?” Alec replied
grandly. “I could tell you much worse things than that.”

This he proceeded to do. Fascinated, I listened with a sickening
sensation. It was a mild afternoon in spring, and we stood in the deep
limestone gutter in front of the parsonage, a little Gothic wooden house
set in a gloomy yard.

“I thought,” said I, “that people couldn't love any more after they were
married, except each other.”

Alec looked at me pityingly.

“You'll get over that notion,” he assured me.

Thus another ingredient entered my character. Denied its food at
home, good food, my soul eagerly consumed and made part of itself the
fermenting stuff that Alec Pound so willing distributed. And it was
fermenting stuff. Let us see what it did to me. Working slowly but
surely, it changed for me the dawning mystery of sex into an evil
instead of a holy one. The knowledge of the tragedy of Grace Hollister
started me to seeking restlessly, on bookshelves and elsewhere, for
a secret that forever eluded me, and forever led me on. The word
fermenting aptly describes the process begun, suggesting as it does
something closed up, away from air and sunlight, continually working in
secret, engendering forces that fascinated, yet inspired me with fear.
Undoubtedly this secretiveness of our elders was due to the pernicious
dualism of their orthodox Christianity, in which love was carnal and
therefore evil, and the flesh not the gracious soil of the spirit, but
something to be deplored and condemned, exorcised and transformed by
the miracle of grace. Now love had become a terrible power (gripping me)
whose enchantment drove men and women from home and friends and kindred
to the uttermost parts of the earth....

It was long before I got to sleep that night after my talk with Alec
Pound. I alternated between the horror and the romance of the story I
had heard, supplying for myself the details he had omitted: I beheld
the signals from the windows, the clandestine meetings, the sudden and
desperate flight. And to think that all this could have happened in our
city not five blocks from where I lay!

My consternation and horror were concentrated on the man,--and yet I
recall a curious bifurcation. Instead of experiencing that automatic
righteous indignation which my father and mother had felt, which had
animated old Mr. Jules Hollister when he had sternly forbidden his
daughter's name to be mentioned in his presence, which had made these
people outcasts, there welled up within me an intense sympathy and
pity. By an instinctive process somehow linked with other experiences,
I seemed to be able to enter into the feelings of these two outcasts,
to understand the fearful yet fascinating nature of the impulse that
had led them to elude the vigilance and probity of a world with which
I myself was at odds. I pictured them in a remote land, shunned by
mankind. Was there something within me that might eventually draw me
to do likewise? The desire in me to which my father had referred, which
would brook no opposition, which twisted and squirmed until it found its
way to its object? I recalled the words of Jarvis, the carpenter, that
if I ever set my heart on another man's wife, God help him. God help me!

A wicked man! I had never beheld the handsome and fascinating Mr.
Jennings, but I visualised him now; dark, like all villains, with a
black moustache and snapping black eyes. He carried a cane. I always
associated canes with villains. Whereupon I arose, groped for the
matches, lighted the gas, and gazing at myself in the mirror was a
little reassured to find nothing sinister in my countenance....

Next to my father's faith in a Moral Governor of the Universe was his
belief in the Tariff and the Republican Party. And this belief, among
others, he handed on to me. On the cinder playground of the Academy
we Republicans used to wage, during campaigns, pitched battles for the
Tariff. It did not take a great deal of courage to be a Republican
in our city, and I was brought up to believe that Democrats
were irrational, inferior, and--with certain exceptions like the
Hollisters--dirty beings. There was only one degree lower, and that was
to be a mugwump. It was no wonder that the Hollisters were Democrats,
for they had a queer streak in them; owing, no doubt, to the fact that
old Mr. Jules Hollister's mother had been a Frenchwoman. He looked like
a Frenchman, by the way, and always wore a skullcap.

I remember one autumn afternoon having a violent quarrel with
Gene Hollister that bade fair to end in blows, when he suddenly
demanded:--“I'll bet you anything you don't know why you're a
Republican.”

“It's because I'm for the Tariff,” I replied triumphantly.

But his next question floored me. What, for example, was the Tariff? I
tried to bluster it out, but with no success.

“Do you know?” I cried finally, with sudden inspiration.

It turned out that he did not.

“Aren't we darned idiots,” he asked, “to get fighting over something we
don't know anything about?”

That was Gene's French blood, of course. But his question rankled. And
how was I to know that he would have got as little satisfaction if he
had hurled it into the marching ranks of those imposing torch-light
processions which sometimes passed our house at night, with drums
beating and fifes screaming and torches waving,--thousands of citizens
who were for the Tariff for the same reason as I: to wit, because they
were Republicans.

Yet my father lived and died in the firm belief that the United States
of America was a democracy!

Resolved not to be caught a second time in such a humiliating position
by a Democrat, I asked my father that night what the Tariff was. But I
was too young to understand it, he said. I was to take his word for it
that the country would go to the dogs if the Democrats got in and the
Tariff were taken away. Here, in a nutshell, though neither he nor
I realized it, was the political instruction of the marching hordes.
Theirs not to reason why. I was too young, they too ignorant. Such is
the method of Authority!

The steel-mills of Mr. Durrett and Mr. Hambleton, he continued, would
be forced to shut down, and thousands of workmen would starve. This was
just a sample of what would happen. Prosperity would cease, he declared.
That word, Prosperity, made a deep impression on me, and I recall the
certain reverential emphasis he laid on it. And while my solicitude for
the workmen was not so great as his and Mr. Durrett's, I was concerned
as to what would happen to us if those twin gods, the Tariff and
Prosperity, should take their departure from the land. Knowing my love
for the good things of the table, my father intimated, with a rare
humour I failed to appreciate, that we should have to live henceforth
in spartan simplicity. After that, like the intelligent workman, I was
firmer than ever for the Tariff.

Such was the idealistic plane on which--and from a good man--I received
my first political instruction! And for a long time I connected the
dominance of the Republican Party with the continuation of manna and
quails, in other words, with nothing that had to do with the spiritual
welfare of any citizen, but with clothing and food and material
comforts. My education was progressing....

Though my father revered Plato and Aristotle, he did not, apparently,
take very seriously the contention that that government alone is good
“which seeks to attain the permanent interests of the governed by
evolving the character of its citizens.” To put the matter brutally,
politics, despite the lofty sentiments on the transparencies in
torchlight processions, had only to do with the belly, not the soul.

Politics and government, one perceives, had nothing to do with religion,
nor education with any of these. A secularized and disjointed world! Our
leading citizens, learned in the classics though some of them might be,
paid no heed to the dictum of the Greek idealist, who was more practical
than they would have supposed. “The man who does not carry his city
within his heart is a spiritual starveling.”

One evening, a year or two after that tariff campaign, I was pretending
to study my lessons under the student lamp in the sitting-room while my
mother sewed and my father wrote at his desk, when there was a ring
at the door-bell. I welcomed any interruption, even though the
visitor proved to be only the druggist's boy; and there was always
the possibility of a telegram announcing, for instance, the death of a
relative. Such had once been the case when my Uncle Avery Paret had died
in New York, and I was taken out of school for a blissful four days for
the funeral.

I went tiptoeing into the hall and peeped over the banisters while Ella
opened the door. I heard a voice which I recognized as that of Perry
Blackwood's father asking for Mr. Paret; and then to my astonishment, I
saw filing after him into the parlour some ten or twelve persons. With
the exception of Mr. Ogilvy, who belonged to one of our old families,
and Mr. Watling, a lawyer who had married the youngest of Gene
Hollister's aunts, the visitors entered stealthily, after the manner of
burglars; some of these were heavy-jowled, and all had an air of mystery
that raised my curiosity and excitement to the highest pitch. I caught
hold of Ella as she came up the stairs, but she tore herself free, and
announced to my father that Mr. Josiah Blackwood and other gentlemen had
asked to see him. My father seemed puzzled as he went downstairs.... A
long interval elapsed, during which I did not make even a pretence of
looking at my arithmetic. At times the low hum of voices rose to what
was almost an uproar, and on occasions I distinguished a marked Irish
brogue.

“I wonder what they want?” said my mother, nervously.

At last we heard the front door shut behind them, and my father came
upstairs, his usually serene face wearing a disturbed expression.

“Who in the world was it, Mr. Paret?” asked my mother.

My father sat down in the arm-chair. He was clearly making an effort for
self-control.

“Blackwood and Ogilvy and Watling and some city politicians,” he
exclaimed.

“Politicians!” she repeated. “What did they want? That is, if it's
anything you can tell me,” she added apologetically.

“They wished me to be the Republican candidate for the mayor of this
city.”

This tremendous news took me off my feet. My father mayor!

“Of course you didn't consider it, Mr. Paret,” my mother was saying.

“Consider it!” he echoed reprovingly. “I can't imagine what Ogilvy and
Watling and Josiah Blackwood were thinking of! They are out of their
heads. I as much as told them so.”

This was more than I could bear, for I had already pictured myself
telling the news to envious schoolmates.

“Oh, father, why didn't you take it?” I cried.

By this time, when he turned to me, he had regained his usual
expression.

“You don't know what you're talking about, Hugh,” he said. “Accept a
political office! That sort of thing is left to politicians.”

The tone in which he spoke warned me that a continuation of the
conversation would be unwise, and my mother also understood that the
discussion was closed. He went back to his desk, and began writing again
as though nothing had happened.

As for me, I was left in a palpitating state of excitement which my
father's self-control or sang-froid only served to irritate and enhance,
and my head was fairly spinning as, covertly, I watched his pen steadily
covering the paper.

How could he--how could any man of flesh and blood sit down calmly after
having been offered the highest honour in the gift of his community! And
he had spurned it as if Mr. Blackwood and the others had gratuitously
insulted him! And how was it, if my father so revered the Republican
Party that he would not suffer it to be mentioned slightingly in his
presence, that he had refused contemptuously to be its mayor?...

The next day at school, however, I managed to let it be known that the
offer had been made and declined. After all, this seemed to make my
father a bigger man than if he had accepted it. Naturally I was asked
why he had declined it.

“He wouldn't take it,” I replied scornfully. “Office-holding should be
left to politicians.”

Ralph Hambleton, with his precocious and cynical knowledge of the
world, minimized my triumph by declaring that he would rather be his
grandfather, Nathaniel Durrett, than the mayor of the biggest city in
the country. Politicians, he said, were bloodsuckers and thieves, and
the only reason for holding office was that it enabled one to steal the
taxpayers' money....

As I have intimated, my vision of a future literary career waxed and
waned, but a belief that I was going to be Somebody rarely deserted
me. If not a literary lion, what was that Somebody to be? Such an
environment as mine was woefully lacking in heroic figures to satisfy
the romantic soul. In view of the experience I have just related, it is
not surprising that the notion of becoming a statesman did not appeal
to me; nor is it to be wondered at, despite the somewhat exaggerated
respect and awe in which Ralph's grandfather was held by my father and
other influential persons, that I failed to be stirred by the elements
of greatness in the grim personality of our first citizen, the
iron-master. For he possessed such elements. He lived alone in Ingrain
Street in an uncompromising mansion I always associated with the
Sabbath, not only because I used to be taken there on decorous Sunday
visits by my father, but because it was the very quintessence of
Presbyterianism. The moment I entered its “portals”--as Mr. Hawthorne
appropriately would have called them--my spirit was overwhelmed and
suffocated by its formality and orderliness. Within its stern walls
Nathaniel Durrett had made a model universe of his own, such as the
Deity of the Westminster Confession had no doubt meant his greater one
to be if man had not rebelled and foiled him.... It was a world from
which I was determined to escape at any cost.

My father and I were always ushered into the gloomy library, with its
high ceiling, with its long windows that reached almost to the rococo
cornice, with its cold marble mantelpiece that reminded me of a
tombstone, with its interminable book shelves filled with yellow
bindings. On the centre table, in addition to a ponderous Bible, was one
of those old-fashioned carafes of red glass tipped with blue surmounted
by a tumbler of blue tipped with red. Behind this table Mr. Durrett sat
reading a volume of sermons, a really handsome old man in his black tie
and pleated shirt; tall and spare, straight as a ramrod, with a finely
moulded head and straight nose and sinewy hands the colour of mulberry
stain. He called my father by his first name, an immense compliment,
considering how few dared to do so.

“Well, Matthew,” the old man would remark, after they had discussed Dr.
Pound's latest flight on the nature of the Trinity or the depravity of
man, or horticulture, or the Republican Party, “do you have any better
news of Hugh at school?”

“I regret to say, Mr. Durrett,” my father would reply, “that he does not
yet seem to be aroused to a sense of his opportunities.”

Whereupon Mr. Durrett would gimble me with a blue eye that lurked
beneath grizzled brows, quite as painful a proceeding as if he used an
iron tool. I almost pity myself when I think of what a forlorn stranger
I was in their company. They two, indeed, were of one kind, and I of
another sort who could never understand them,--nor they me. To what
depths of despair they reduced me they never knew, and yet they were
doing it all for my good! They only managed to convince me that my
love of folly was ineradicable, and that I was on my way head first
for perdition. I always looked, during these excruciating and personal
moments, at the coloured glass bottle.

“It grieves me to hear it, Hugh,” Mr. Durrett invariably declared.
“You'll never come to any good without study. Now when I was your
age...”

I knew his history by heart, a common one in this country, although
he made an honourable name instead of a dishonourable one. And when I
contrast him with those of his successors whom I was to know later...!
But I shall not anticipate. American genius had not then evolved the
false entry method of overcapitalization. A thrilling history, Mr.
Durrett's, could I but have entered into it. I did not reflect then that
this stern old man must have throbbed once; nay, fire and energy still
remained in his bowels, else he could not have continued to dominate a
city. Nor did it occur to me that the great steel-works that lighted the
southern sky were the result of a passion, of dreams similar to those
possessing me, but which I could not express. He had founded a family
whose position was virtually hereditary, gained riches which for those
days were great, compelled men to speak his name with a certain awe.
But of what use were such riches as his when his religion and morality
compelled him to banish from him all the joys in the power of riches to
bring?

No, I didn't want to be an iron-master. But it may have been about
this time that I began to be impressed with the power of wealth, the
adulation and reverence it commanded, the importance in which it clothed
all who shared in it....

The private school I attended in the company of other boys with whom I
was brought up was called Densmore Academy, a large, square building
of a then hideous modernity, built of smooth, orange-red bricks with
threads of black mortar between them. One reads of happy school days,
yet I fail to recall any really happy hours spent there, even in the
yard, which was covered with black cinders that cut you when you fell.
I think of it as a penitentiary, and the memory of the barred lower
windows gives substance to this impression.

I suppose I learned something during the seven years of my
incarceration. All of value, had its teachers known anything of youthful
psychology, of natural bent, could have been put into me in three. At
least four criminally wasted years, to say nothing of the benumbing
and desiccating effect of that old system of education! Chalk and
chalk-dust! The Mediterranean a tinted portion of the map, Italy a man's
boot which I drew painfully, with many yawns; history no glorious epic
revealing as it unrolls the Meaning of Things, no revelation of that
wondrous distillation of the Spirit of man, but an endless marching and
counter-marching up and down the map, weary columns of figures to
be learned by rote instantly to be forgotten again. “On June the 7th
General So-and-so proceeded with his whole army--” where? What does
it matter? One little chapter of Carlyle, illuminated by a teacher
of understanding, were worth a million such text-books. Alas, for the
hatred of Virgil! “Paret” (a shiver), “begin at the one hundred
and thirtieth line and translate!” I can hear myself droning out in
detestable English a meaningless portion of that endless journey of
the pious AEneas; can see Gene Hollister, with heart-rending glances of
despair, stumbling through Cornelius Nepos in an unventilated room with
chalk-rubbed blackboards and heavy odours of ink and stale lunch. And
I graduated from Densmore Academy, the best school in our city, in the
80's, without having been taught even the rudiments of citizenship.

Knowledge was presented to us as a corpse, which bit by bit we
painfully dissected. We never glimpsed the living, growing thing, never
experienced the Spirit, the same spirit that was able magically to
waft me from a wintry Lyme Street to the South Seas, the energizing,
electrifying Spirit of true achievement, of life, of God himself. Little
by little its flames were smothered until in manhood there seemed no
spark of it left alive. Many years were to pass ere it was to revive
again, as by a miracle. I travelled. Awakening at dawn, I saw, framed
in a port-hole, rose-red Seriphos set in a living blue that paled the
sapphire; the seas Ulysses had sailed, and the company of the Argonauts.
My soul was steeped in unimagined colour, and in the memory of one
rapturous instant is gathered what I was soon to see of Greece, is
focussed the meaning of history, poetry and art. I was to stand one
evening in spring on the mound where heroes sleep and gaze upon the
plain of Marathon between darkening mountains and the blue thread of the
strait peaceful now, flushed with pink and white blossoms of fruit
and almond trees; to sit on the cliff-throne whence a Persian King had
looked down upon a Salamis fought and lost.... In that port-hole glimpse
a Themistocles was revealed, a Socrates, a Homer and a Phidias, an
AEschylus, and a Pericles; yes, and a John brooding Revelations on his
sea-girt rock as twilight falls over the waters....

I saw the Roman Empire, that Scarlet Woman whose sands were dyed
crimson with blood to appease her harlotry, whose ships were laden with
treasures from the immutable East, grain from the valley of the Nile,
spices from Arabia, precious purple stuffs from Tyre, tribute and spoil,
slaves and jewels from conquered nations she absorbed; and yet whose
very emperors were the unconscious instruments of a Progress they wot
not of, preserved to the West by Marathon and Salamis. With Caesar's
legions its message went forth across Hispania to the cliffs of the
wild western ocean, through Hercynian forests to tribes that dwelt where
great rivers roll up their bars by misty, northern seas, and even to
Celtic fastnesses beyond the Wall....




IV.

In and out of my early memories like a dancing ray of sunlight flits
the spirit of Nancy. I was always fond of her, but in extreme youth I
accepted her incense with masculine complacency and took her allegiance
for granted, never seeking to fathom the nature of the spell I exercised
over her. Naturally other children teased me about her; but what was
worse, with that charming lack of self-consciousness and consideration
for what in after life are called the finer feelings, they teased her
about me before me, my presence deterring them not at all. I can see
them hopping around her in the Peters yard crying out:--“Nancy's in love
with Hugh! Nancy's in love with Hugh!”

A sufficiently thrilling pastime, this, for Nancy could take care of
herself. I was a bungler beside her when it came to retaliation, and
not the least of her attractions for me was her capacity for anger: fury
would be a better term. She would fly at them--even as she flew at the
head-hunters when the Petrel was menaced; and she could run like a
deer. Woe to the unfortunate victim she overtook! Masculine strength,
exercised apologetically, availed but little, and I have seen Russell
Peters and Gene Hollister retire from such encounters humiliated and
weeping. She never caught Ralph; his methods of torture were more
intelligent and subtle than Gene's and Russell's, but she was his equal
when it came to a question of tongues.

“I know what's the matter with you, Ralph Hambleton,” she would
say. “You're jealous.” An accusation that invariably put him on the
defensive. “You think all the girls are in love with you, don't you?”

These scenes I found somewhat embarrassing. Not so Nancy. After
discomfiting her tormenters, or wounding and scattering them, she would
return to my side.... In spite of her frankly expressed preference
for me she had an elusiveness that made a continual appeal to my
imagination. She was never obvious or commonplace, and long before I
began to experience the discomforts and sufferings of youthful love
I was fascinated by a nature eloquent with contradictions and
inconsistencies. She was a tomboy, yet her own sex was enhanced rather
than overwhelmed by contact with the other: and no matter how many trees
she climbed she never seemed to lose her daintiness. It was innate.

She could, at times, be surprisingly demure. These impressions of her
daintiness and demureness are particularly vivid in a picture my memory
has retained of our walking together, unattended, to Susan Blackwood's
birthday party. She must have been about twelve years old. It was the
first time I had escorted her or any other girl to a party; Mrs. Willett
had smiled over the proceeding, but Nancy and I took it most seriously,
as symbolic of things to come. I can see Powell Street, where Nancy
lived, at four o'clock on a mild and cloudy December afternoon, the
decorous, retiring houses, Nancy on one side of the pavement by the iron
fences and I on the other by the tree boxes. I can't remember her dress,
only the exquisite sense of her slimness and daintiness comes back to
me, of her dark hair in a long braid tied with a red ribbon, of her
slender legs clad in black stockings of shining silk. We felt the
occasion to be somehow too significant, too eloquent for words....

In silence we climbed the flight of stone steps that led up to the
Blackwood mansion, when suddenly the door was opened, letting out sounds
of music and revelry. Mr. Blackwood's coloured butler, Ned, beamed at us
hospitably, inviting us to enter the brightness within. The shades were
drawn, the carpets were covered with festal canvas, the folding
doors between the square rooms were flung back, the prisms of the
big chandeliers flung their light over animated groups of matrons and
children. Mrs. Watling, the mother of the Watling twins--too young to be
present was directing with vivacity the game of “King William was King
James's son,” and Mrs. McAlery was playing the piano.

       “Now choose you East, now choose you West,
        Now choose the one you love the best!”

Tom Peters, in a velvet suit and consequently very miserable, refused
to embrace Ethel Hollister; while the scornful Julia lurked in a corner:
nothing would induce her to enter such a foolish game. I experienced
a novel discomfiture when Ralph kissed Nancy.... Afterwards came the
feast, from which Ham Durrett, in a pink paper cap with streamers, was
at length forcibly removed by his mother. Thus early did he betray his
love for the flesh pots....

It was not until I was sixteen that a player came and touched the keys
of my soul, and it awoke, bewildered, at these first tender notes. The
music quickened, tripping in ecstasy, to change by subtle phrases into
themes of exquisite suffering hitherto unexperienced. I knew that I
loved Nancy.

With the advent of longer dresses that reached to her shoe tops a change
had come over her. The tomboy, the willing camp-follower who loved me
and was unashamed, were gone forever, and a mysterious, transfigured
being, neither girl nor woman, had magically been evolved. Could it be
possible that she loved me still? My complacency had vanished; suddenly
I had become the aggressor, if only I had known how to “aggress”; but
in her presence I was seized by an accursed shyness that paralyzed my
tongue, and the things I had planned to say were left unuttered. It was
something--though I did not realize it--to be able to feel like that.

The time came when I could no longer keep this thing to myself. The need
of an outlet, of a confidant, became imperative, and I sought out Tom
Peters. It was in February; I remember because I had ventured--with
incredible daring--to send Nancy an elaborate, rosy Valentine; written
on the back of it in a handwriting all too thinly disguised was the
following verse, the triumphant result of much hard thinking in school
hours:--

          Should you of this the sender guess
          Without another sign,
          Would you repent, and rest content
          To be his Valentine

I grew hot and cold by turns when I thought of its possible effects on
my chances.

One of those useless, slushy afternoons, I took Tom for a walk that led
us, as dusk came on, past Nancy's house. Only by painful degrees did
I succeed in overcoming my bashfulness; but Tom, when at last I had
blurted out the secret, was most sympathetic, although the ailment from
which I suffered was as yet outside of the realm of his experience.
I have used the word “ailment” advisedly, since he evidently put my
trouble in the same category with diphtheria or scarlet fever, remarking
that it was “darned hard luck.” In vain I sought to explain that I did
not regard it as such in the least; there was suffering, I admitted, but
a degree of bliss none could comprehend who had not felt it. He refused
to be envious, or at least to betray envy; yet he was curious, asking
many questions, and I had reason to think before we parted that his
admiration for me was increased. Was it possible that he, too, didn't
love Nancy? No, it was funny, but he didn't. He failed to see much in
girls: his tone remained commiserating, yet he began to take an interest
in the progress of my suit.

For a time I had no progress to report. Out of consideration for those
members of our weekly dancing class whose parents were Episcopalians the
meetings were discontinued during Lent, and to call would have demanded
a courage not in me; I should have become an object of ridicule among
my friends and I would have died rather than face Nancy's mother and the
members of her household. I set about making ingenious plans with a view
to encounters that might appear casual. Nancy's school was dismissed at
two, so was mine. By walking fast I could reach Salisbury Street, near
St. Mary's Seminary for Young Ladies, in time to catch her, but even
then for many days I was doomed to disappointment. She was either in
company with other girls, or else she had taken another route; this
I surmised led past Sophy McAlery's house, and I enlisted Tom as a
confederate. He was to make straight for the McAlery's on Elm while I
followed Powell, two short blocks away, and if Nancy went to Sophy's and
left there alone he was to announce the fact by a preconcerted signal.
Through long and persistent practice he had acquired a whistle shrill
enough to wake the dead, accomplished by placing a finger of each hand
between his teeth;--a gift that was the envy of his acquaintances, and
the subject of much discussion as to whether his teeth were peculiar.
Tom insisted that they were; it was an added distinction.

On this occasion he came up behind Nancy as she was leaving Sophy's gate
and immediately sounded the alarm. She leaped in the air, dropped her
school-books and whirled on him.

“Tom Peters! How dare you frighten me so!” she cried.

Tom regarded her in sudden dismay.

“I--I didn't mean to,” he said. “I didn't think you were so near.”

“But you must have seen me.”

“I wasn't paying much attention,” he equivocated,--a remark not
calculated to appease her anger.

“Why were you doing it?”

“I was just practising,” said Tom.

“Practising!” exclaimed Nancy, scornfully. “I shouldn't think you needed
to practise that any more.”

“Oh, I've done it louder,” he declared, “Listen!”

She seized his hands, snatching them away from his lips. At this
critical moment I appeared around the corner considerably out of breath,
my heart beating like a watchman's rattle. I tried to feign nonchalance.

“Hello, Tom,” I said. “Hello, Nancy. What's the matter?”

“It's Tom--he frightened me out of my senses.” Dropping his wrists, she
gave me a most disconcerting look; there was in it the suspicion of a
smile. “What are you doing here, Hugh?”

“I heard Tom,” I explained.

“I should think you might have. Where were you?”

“Over in another street,” I answered, with deliberate vagueness. Nancy
had suddenly become demure. I did not dare look at her, but I had a most
uncomfortable notion that she suspected the plot. Meanwhile we had
begun to walk along, all three of us, Tom, obviously ill at ease and
discomfited, lagging a little behind. Just before we reached the corner
I managed to kick him. His departure was by no means graceful.

“I've got to go;” he announced abruptly, and turned down the side
street. We watched his sturdy figure as it receded.

“Well, of all queer boys!” said Nancy, and we walked on again.

“He's my best friend,” I replied warmly.

“He doesn't seem to care much for your company,” said Nancy.

“Oh, they have dinner at half past two,” I explained.

“Aren't you afraid of missing yours, Hugh?” she asked wickedly.

“I've got time. I'd--I'd rather be with you.” After making which
audacious remark I was seized by a spasm of apprehension. But nothing
happened. Nancy remained demure. She didn't remind me that I had
reflected upon Tom.

“That's nice of you, Hugh.”

“Oh, I'm not saying it because it's nice,” I faltered. “I'd rather be
with you than--with anybody.”

This was indeed the acme of daring. I couldn't believe I had actually
said it. But again I received no rebuke; instead came a remark that set
me palpitating, that I treasured for many weeks to come.

“I got a very nice valentine,” she informed me.

“What was it like?” I asked thickly.

“Oh, beautiful! All pink lace and--and Cupids, and the picture of a
young man and a young woman in a garden.”

“Was that all?”

“Oh, no, there was a verse, in the oddest handwriting. I wonder who sent
it?”

“Perhaps Ralph,” I hazarded ecstatically.

“Ralph couldn't write poetry,” she replied disdainfully. “Besides, it
was very good poetry.”

I suggested other possible authors and admirers. She rejected them all.
We reached her gate, and I lingered. As she looked down at me from
the stone steps her eyes shone with a soft light that filled me with
radiance, and into her voice had come a questioning, shy note that
thrilled the more because it revealed a new Nancy of whom I had not
dreamed.

“Perhaps I'll meet you again--coming from school,” I said.

“Perhaps,” she answered. “You'll be late to dinner, Hugh, if you don't
go....”

I was late, and unable to eat much dinner, somewhat to my mother's
alarm. Love had taken away my appetite.... After dinner, when I was
wandering aimlessly about the yard, Tom appeared on the other side of
the fence.

“Don't ever ask me to do that again,” he said gloomily.

I did meet Nancy again coming from school, not every day, but nearly
every day. At first we pretended that there was no arrangement in this,
and we both feigned surprise when we encountered one another. It
was Nancy who possessed the courage that I lacked. One afternoon she
said:--“I think I'd better walk with the girls to-morrow, Hugh.”

I protested, but she was firm. And after that it was an understood thing
that on certain days I should go directly home, feeling like an exile.
Sophy McAlery had begun to complain: and I gathered that Sophy was
Nancy's confidante. The other girls had begun to gossip. It was Nancy
who conceived the brilliant idea--the more delightful because she said
nothing about it to me--of making use of Sophy. She would leave school
with Sophy, and I waited on the corner near the McAlery house. Poor
Sophy! She was always of those who piped while others danced. In those
days she had two straw-coloured pigtails, and her plain, faithful face
is before me as I write. She never betrayed to me the excitement that
filled her at being the accomplice of our romance.

Gossip raged, of course. Far from being disturbed, we used it, so to
speak, as a handle for our love-making, which was carried on in an
inferential rather than a direct fashion. Were they saying that we were
lovers? Delightful! We laughed at one another in the sunshine.... At
last we achieved the great adventure of a clandestine meeting and went
for a walk in the afternoon, avoiding the houses of our friends. I've
forgotten which of us had the boldness to propose it. The crocuses and
tulips had broken the black mould, the flower beds in the front yards
were beginning to blaze with scarlet and yellow, the lawns had turned a
living green. What did we talk about? The substance has vanished, only
the flavour remains.

One awoke of a morning to the twittering of birds, to walk to school
amidst delicate, lace-like shadows of great trees acloud with old gold:
the buds lay curled like tiny feathers on the pavements. Suddenly the
shade was dense, the sunlight white and glaring, the odour of lilacs
heavy in the air, spring in all its fulness had come,--spring and Nancy.
Just so subtly, yet with the same seeming suddenness had budded and come
to leaf and flower a perfect understanding, which nevertheless
remained undefined. This, I had no doubt, was my fault, and due to the
incomprehensible shyness her presence continued to inspire. Although we
did not altogether abandon our secret trysts, we began to meet in more
natural ways; there were garden parties and picnics where we strayed
together through the woods and fields, pausing to tear off, one by
one, the petals of a daisy, “She loves me, she loves me not.” I never
ventured to kiss her; I always thought afterwards I might have done so,
she had seemed so willing, her eyes had shone so expectantly as I sat
beside her on the grass; nor can I tell why I desired to kiss her save
that this was the traditional thing to do to the lady one loved. To be
sure, the very touch of her hand was galvanic. Paradoxically, I saw the
human side of her, the yielding gentleness that always amazed me, yet I
never overcame my awe of the divine; she was a being sacrosanct. Whether
this idealism were innate or the result of such romances as I had read
I cannot say.... I got, indeed, an avowal of a sort. The weekly dancing
classes having begun again, on one occasion when she had waltzed twice
with Gene Hollister I protested.

“Don't be silly, Hugh,” she whispered. “Of course I like you better than
anyone else--you ought to know that.”

We never got to the word “love,” but we knew the feeling.

One cloud alone flung its shadow across these idyllic days. Before I
was fully aware of it I had drawn very near to the first great
junction-point of my life, my graduation from Densmore Academy. We were
to “change cars,” in the language of Principal Haime. Well enough for
the fortunate ones who were to continue the academic journey, which
implied a postponement of the serious business of life; but month after
month of the last term had passed without a hint from my father that I
was to change cars. Again and again I almost succeeded in screwing up
my courage to the point of mentioning college to him,--never quite; his
manner, though kind and calm, somehow strengthened my suspicion that
I had been judged and found wanting, and doomed to “business”: galley
slavery, I deemed it, humdrum, prosaic, degrading! When I thought of it
at night I experienced almost a frenzy of self-pity. My father couldn't
intend to do that, just because my monthly reports hadn't always been
what he thought they ought to be! Gene Hollister's were no better, if as
good, and he was going to Princeton. Was I, Hugh Paret, to be denied
the distinction of being a college man, the delights of university
existence, cruelly separated and set apart from my friends whom I loved!
held up to the world and especially to Nancy Willett as good for nothing
else! The thought was unbearable. Characteristically, I hoped against
hope.

I have mentioned garden parties. One of our annual institutions was Mrs.
Willett's children's party in May; for the Willett house had a garden
that covered almost a quarter of a block. Mrs. Willett loved children,
the greatest regret of her life being that providence had denied her a
large family. As far back as my memory goes she had been something of
an invalid; she had a sweet, sad face, and delicate hands so thin as to
seem almost transparent; and she always sat in a chair under the great
tree on the lawn, smiling at us as we soared to dizzy heights in the
swing, or played croquet, or scurried through the paths, and in and out
of the latticed summer-house with shrieks of laughter and terror. It all
ended with a feast at a long table made of sawhorses and boards covered
with a white cloth, and when the cake was cut there was wild excitement
as to who would get the ring and who the thimble.

We were more decorous, or rather more awkward now, and the party began
with a formal period when the boys gathered in a group and pretended
indifference to the girls. The girls were cleverer at it, and actually
achieved the impression that they were indifferent. We kept an eye on
them, uneasily, while we talked. To be in Nancy's presence and not alone
with Nancy was agonizing, and I wondered at a sang-froid beyond my power
to achieve, accused her of coldness, my sufferings being the greater
because she seemed more beautiful, daintier, more irreproachable than
I had ever seen her. Even at that early age she gave evidence of the
social gift, and it was due to her efforts that we forgot our best
clothes and our newly born self-consciousness. When I begged her to slip
away with me among the currant bushes she whispered:--“I can't, Hugh.
I'm the hostess, you know.”

I had gone there in a flutter of anticipation, but nothing went right
that day. There was dancing in the big rooms that looked out on the
garden; the only girl with whom I cared to dance was Nancy, and she was
busy finding partners for the backward members of both sexes; though she
was my partner, to be sure, when it all wound up with a Virginia reel on
the lawn. Then, at supper, to cap the climax of untoward incidents, an
animated discussion was begun as to the relative merits of the various
colleges, the girls, too, taking sides. Mac Willett, Nancy's cousin, was
going to Yale, Gene Hollister to Princeton, the Ewan boys to our State
University, while Perry Blackwood and Ralph Hambleton and Ham Durrett
were destined for Harvard; Tom Peters, also, though he was not to
graduate from the Academy for another year. I might have known that
Ralph would have suspected my misery. He sat triumphantly next to Nancy
herself, while I had been told off to entertain the faithful Sophy.
Noticing my silence, he demanded wickedly:--“Where are you going, Hugh?”

“Harvard, I think,” I answered with as bold a front as I could muster.
“I haven't talked it over with my father yet.” It was intolerable to
admit that I of them all was to be left behind.

Nancy looked at me in surprise. She was always downright.

“Oh, Hugh, doesn't your father mean to put you in business?” she
exclaimed.

A hot flush spread over my face. Even to her I had not betrayed my
apprehensions on this painful subject. Perhaps it was because of this
very reason, knowing me as she did, that she had divined my fate. Could
my father have spoken of it to anyone?

“Not that I know of,” I said angrily. I wondered if she knew how deeply
she had hurt me. The others laughed. The colour rose in Nancy's cheeks,
and she gave me an appealing, almost tearful look, but my heart had
hardened. As soon as supper was over I left the table to wander, nursing
my wrongs, in a far corner of the garden, gay shouts and laughter still
echoing in my ears. I was negligible, even my pathetic subterfuge had
been detected and cruelly ridiculed by these friends whom I had
always loved and sought out, and who now were so absorbed in their own
prospects and happiness that they cared nothing for mine. And Nancy!
I had been betrayed by Nancy!... Twilight was coming on. I remember
glancing down miserably at the new blue suit I had put on so hopefully
for the first time that afternoon.

Separating the garden from the street was a high, smooth board fence
with a little gate in it, and I had my hand on the latch when I heard
the sound of hurrying steps on the gravel path and a familiar voice
calling my name.

“Hugh! Hugh!”

I turned. Nancy stood before me.

“Hugh, you're not going!”

“Yes, I am.”

“Why?”

“If you don't know, there's no use telling you.”

“Just because I said your father intended to put you in business!
Oh, Hugh, why are you so foolish and so proud? Do you suppose that
anyone--that I--think any the worse of you?”

Yes, she had read me, she alone had entered into the source of that
prevarication, the complex feelings from which it sprang. But at
that moment I could not forgive her for humiliating me. I hugged my
grievance.

“It was true, what I said,” I declared hotly. “My father has not spoken.
It is true that I'm going to college, because I'll make it true. I may
not go this year.”

She stood staring in sheer surprise at sight of my sudden, quivering
passion. I think the very intensity of it frightened her. And then,
without more ado, I opened the gate and was gone....

That night, though I did not realize it, my journey into a Far Country
was begun.

The misery that followed this incident had one compensating factor.
Although too late to electrify Densmore and Principal Haime with my
scholarship, I was determined to go to college now, somehow, sometime.
I would show my father, these companions of mine, and above all Nancy
herself the stuff of which I was made, compel them sooner or later
to admit that they had misjudged me. I had been possessed by similar
resolutions before, though none so strong, and they had a way of sinking
below the surface of my consciousness, only to rise again and again
until by sheer pressure they achieved realization.

Yet I might have returned to Nancy if something had not occurred which
I would have thought unbelievable: she began to show a marked preference
for Ralph Hambleton. At first I regarded this affair as the most obvious
of retaliations. She, likewise, had pride. Gradually, however, a feeling
of uneasiness crept over me: as pretence, her performance was altogether
too realistic; she threw her whole soul into it, danced with Ralph as
often as she had ever danced with me, took walks with him, deferred
to his opinions until, in spite of myself, I became convinced that the
preference was genuine. I was a curious mixture of self-confidence and
self-depreciation, and never had his superiority seemed more patent than
now. His air of satisfaction was maddening.

How well I remember his triumph on that hot, June morning of our
graduation from Densmore, a triumph he had apparently achieved without
labour, and which he seemed to despise. A fitful breeze blew through the
chapel at the top of the building; we, the graduates, sat in two rows
next to the platform, and behind us the wooden benches nicked by many
knives--were filled with sisters and mothers and fathers, some anxious,
some proud and some sad. So brief a span, like that summer's day, and
youth was gone! Would the time come when we, too, should sit by the
waters of Babylon and sigh for it? The world was upside down.

We read the one hundred and third psalm. Then Principal Haime, in
his long “Prince Albert” and a ridiculously inadequate collar that
emphasized his scrawny neck, reminded us of the sacred associations we
had formed, of the peculiar responsibilities that rested on us, who
were the privileged of the city. “We had crossed to-day,” he said,
“an invisible threshold. Some were to go on to higher institutions of
learning. Others...” I gulped. Quoting the Scriptures, he complimented
those who had made the most of their opportunities. And it was then
that he called out, impressively, the name of Ralph Forrester Hambleton.
Summa cum laude! Suddenly I was seized with passionate, vehement regrets
at the sound of the applause. I might have been the prize scholar,
instead of Ralph, if I had only worked, if I had only realized what
this focussing day of graduation meant! I might have been a marked
individual, with people murmuring words of admiration, of speculation
concerning the brilliancy of my future!... When at last my name
was called and I rose to receive my diploma it seemed as though my
incompetency had been proclaimed to the world...

That evening I stood in the narrow gallery of the flag-decked gymnasium
and watched Nancy dancing with Ralph.

I let her go without protest or reproach. A mysterious lesion seemed to
have taken place, I felt astonished and relieved, yet I was heavy with
sadness. My emancipation had been bought at a price. Something hitherto
spontaneous, warm and living was withering within me.




V.

It was true to my father's character that he should have waited until
the day after graduation to discuss my future, if discussion be the
proper word. The next evening at supper he informed me that he wished
to talk to me in the sitting-room, whither I followed him with a sinking
heart. He seated himself at his desk, and sat for a moment gazing at me
with a curious and benumbing expression, and then the blow fell.

“Hugh, I have spoken to your Cousin Robert Breck about you, and he has
kindly consented to give you a trial.”

“To give me a trial, sir!” I exclaimed.

“To employ you at a small but reasonable salary.”

I could find no words to express my dismay. My dreams had come to this,
that I was to be made a clerk in a grocery store! The fact that it was a
wholesale grocery store was little consolation.

“But father,” I faltered, “I don't want to go into business.”

“Ah!” The sharpness of the exclamation might have betrayed to me the
pain in which he was, but he recovered himself instantly. And I could
see nothing but an inexorable justice closing in on me mechanically;
a blind justice, in its inability to read my soul. “The time to have
decided that,” he declared, “was some years ago, my son. I have given
you the best schooling a boy can have, and you have not shown the least
appreciation of your advantages. I do not enjoy saying this, Hugh,
but in spite of all my efforts and of those of your mother, you have
remained undeveloped and irresponsible. My hope, as you know, was to
have made you a professional man, a lawyer, and to take you into my
office. My father and grandfather were professional men before me. But
you are wholly lacking in ambition.”

And I had burned with it all my life!

“I have ambition,” I cried, the tears forcing themselves to my eyes.

“Ambition--for what, my son?”

I hesitated. How could I tell him that my longings to do something,
to be somebody in the world were never more keen than at that moment?
Matthew Arnold had not then written his definition of God as the stream
of tendency by which we fulfil the laws of our being; and my father,
at any rate, would not have acquiesced in the definition. Dimly but
passionately I felt then, as I had always felt, that I had a mission to
perform, a service to do which ultimately would be revealed to me. But
the hopelessness of explaining this took on, now, the proportions of a
tragedy. And I could only gaze at him.

“What kind of ambition, Hugh?” he repeated sadly.

“I--I have sometimes thought I could write, sir, if I had a chance. I
like it better than anything else. I--I have tried it. And if I could
only go to college--”

“Literature!” There was in his voice a scandalized note.

“Why not, father?” I asked weakly.

And now it was he who, for the first time, seemed to be at a loss to
express himself. He turned in his chair, and with a sweep of the hand
indicated the long rows of musty-backed volumes. “Here,” he said, “you
have had at your disposal as well-assorted a small library as the city
contains, and you have not availed yourself of it. Yet you talk to me
of literature as a profession. I am afraid, Hugh, that this is merely
another indication of your desire to shun hard work, and I must tell
you frankly that I fail to see in you the least qualification for such
a career. You have not even inherited my taste for books. I venture
to say, for instance, that you have never even read a paragraph of
Plutarch, and yet when I was your age I was completely familiar with the
Lives. You will not read Scott or Dickens.”

The impeachment was not to be denied, for the classics were hateful to
me. Naturally I was afraid to make such a damning admission. My father
had succeeded in presenting my ambition as the height of absurdity and
presumption, and with something of the despair of a shipwrecked mariner
my eyes rested on the green expanses of those book-backs, Bohn's
Standard Library! Nor did it occur to him or to me that one might be
great in literature without having read so much as a gritty page of
them....

He finished his argument by reminding me that worthless persons sought
to enter the arts in the search for a fool's paradise, and in order
to satisfy a reprehensible craving for notoriety. The implication was
clear, that imaginative production could not be classed as hard work.
And he assured me that literature was a profession in which no one could
afford to be second class. A Longfellow, a Harriet Beecher Stowe, or
nothing. This was a practical age and a practical country. We had indeed
produced Irvings and Hawthornes, but the future of American letters was,
to say the least, problematical. We were a utilitarian people who would
never create a great literature, and he reminded me that the days of the
romantic and the picturesque had passed. He gathered that I desired to
be a novelist. Well, novelists, with certain exceptions, were fantastic
fellows who blew iridescent soap-bubbles and who had no morals. In the
face of such a philosophy as his I was mute. The world appeared a dreary
place of musty offices and smoky steel-works, of coal dust, of labour
without a spark of inspiration. And that other, the world of my dreams,
simply did not exist.

Incidentally my father had condemned Cousin Robert's wholesale grocery
business as a refuge of the lesser of intellect that could not achieve
the professions,--an inference not calculated to stir my ambition and
liking for it at the start.

I began my business career on the following Monday morning. At
breakfast, held earlier than usual on my account, my mother's sympathy
was the more eloquent for being unspoken, while my father wore an air of
unwonted cheerfulness; charging me, when I departed, to give his kindest
remembrances to my Cousin Robert Breck. With a sense of martyrdom
somehow deepened by this attitude of my parents I boarded a horse-car
and went down town. Early though it was, the narrow streets of the
wholesale district reverberated with the rattle of trucks and echoed
with the shouts of drivers. The day promised to be scorching. At
the door of the warehouse of Breck and Company I was greeted by the
ineffable smell of groceries in which the suggestion of parched coffee
prevailed. This is the sharpest remembrance of all, and even to-day
that odour affects me somewhat in the manner that the interior of a
ship affects a person prone to seasickness. My Cousin Robert, in his
well-worn alpaca coat, was already seated at his desk behind the clouded
glass partition next the alley at the back of the store, and as I
entered he gazed at me over his steel-rimmed spectacles with that same
disturbing look of clairvoyance I have already mentioned as one of his
characteristics. The grey eyes were quizzical, and yet seemed to express
a little commiseration.

“Well, Hugh, you've decided to honour us, have you?” he asked.

“I'm much obliged for giving me the place, Cousin Robert,” I replied.

But he had no use for that sort of politeness, and he saw through me, as
always.

“So you're not too tony for the grocery business, eh?”

“Oh, no, sir.”

“It was good enough for old Benjamin Breck,” he said. “Well, I'll give
you a fair trial, my boy, and no favouritism on account of relationship,
any more than to Willie.”

His strong voice resounded through the store, and presently my cousin
Willie appeared in answer to his summons, the same Willie who used to
lead me, on mischief bent, through the barns and woods and fields of
Claremore. He was barefoot no longer, though freckled still, grown lanky
and tall; he wore a coarse blue apron that fell below his knees, and a
pencil was stuck behind his ear.

“Get an apron for Hugh,” said his father.

Willie's grin grew wider.

“I'll fit him out,” he said.

“Start him in the shipping department,” directed Cousin Robert, and
turned to his letters.

I was forthwith provided with an apron, and introduced to the slim and
anaemic but cheerful Johnny Hedges, the shipping clerk, hard at work in
the alley. Secretly I looked down on my fellow-clerks, as one destined
for a higher mission, made out of better stuff,--finer stuff. Despite
my attempt to hide this sense of superiority they were swift to discover
it; and perhaps it is to my credit as well as theirs that they did not
resent it. Curiously enough, they seemed to acknowledge it. Before the
week was out I had earned the nickname of Beau Brummel.

“Say, Beau,” Johnny Hedges would ask, when I appeared of a morning,
“what happened in the great world last night?”

I had an affection for them, these fellow-clerks, and I often
wondered at their contentment with the drab lives they led, at their
self-congratulation for “having a job” at Breck and Company's.

“You don't mean to say you like this kind of work?” I exclaimed one day
to Johnny Hedges, as we sat on barrels of XXXX flour looking out at the
hot sunlight in the alley.

“It ain't a question of liking it, Beau,” he rebuked me. “It's all very
well for you to talk, since your father's a millionaire” (a fiction so
firmly embedded in their heads that no amount of denial affected it),
“but what do you think would happen to me if I was fired? I couldn't
go home and take it easy--you bet not. I just want to shake hands with
myself when I think that I've got a home, and a job like this. I know
a feller--a hard worker he was, too who walked the pavements for three
months when the Colvers failed, and couldn't get nothing, and took to
drink, and the last I heard of him he was sleeping in police stations
and walking the ties, and his wife's a waitress at a cheap hotel. Don't
you think it's easy to get a job.”

I was momentarily sobered by the earnestness with which he brought home
to me the relentlessness of our civilization. It seemed incredible. I
should have learned a lesson in that store. Barring a few discordant
days when the orders came in too fast or when we were short handed
because of sickness, it was a veritable hive of happiness; morning after
morning clerks and porters arrived, pale, yet smiling, and laboured with
cheerfulness from eight o'clock until six, and departed as cheerfully
for modest homes in obscure neighbourhoods that seemed to me areas of
exile. They were troubled with no visions of better things. When
the travelling men came in from the “road” there was great hilarity.
Important personages, these, looked up to by the city clerks; jolly,
reckless, Elizabethan-like rovers, who had tasted of the wine of
liberty--and of other wines with the ineradicable lust for the road in
their blood. No more routine for Jimmy Bowles, who was king of them all.
I shudder to think how much of my knowledge of life I owe to this Jimmy,
whose stories would have filled a quarto volume, but could on no account
have been published; for a self-respecting post-office would not have
allowed them to pass through the mails. As it was, Jimmy gave them
circulation enough. I can still see his round face, with the nose just
indicated, his wicked, twinkling little eyes, and I can hear his husky
voice fall to a whisper when “the boss” passed through the store. Jimmy,
when visiting us, always had a group around him. His audacity with women
amazed me, for he never passed one of the “lady clerks” without some
form of caress, which they resented but invariably laughed at. One day
he imparted to me his code of morality: he never made love to another
man's wife, so he assured me, if he knew the man! The secret of life he
had discovered in laughter, and by laughter he sold quantities of Cousin
Robert's groceries.

Mr. Bowles boasted of a catholic acquaintance in all the cities of his
district, but before venturing forth to conquer these he had learned his
own city by heart. My Cousin Robert was not aware of the fact that Mr.
Bowles “showed” the town to certain customers. He even desired to show
it to me, but an epicurean strain in my nature held me back. Johnny
Hedges went with him occasionally, and Henry Schneider, the bill clerk,
and I listened eagerly to their experiences, afterwards confiding them
to Tom....

There were times when, driven by an overwhelming curiosity, I ventured
into certain strange streets, alone, shivering with cold and excitement,
gripped by a fascination I did not comprehend, my eyes now averted, now
irresistibly raised toward the white streaks of light that outlined the
windows of dark houses....

One winter evening as I was going home, I encountered at the mail-box
a young woman who shot at me a queer, twisted smile. I stood still, as
though stunned, looking after her, and when halfway across the slushy
street she turned and smiled again. Prodigiously excited, I followed
her, fearful that I might be seen by someone who knew me, nor was it
until she reached an unfamiliar street that I ventured to overtake her.
She confounded me by facing me.

“Get out!” she cried fiercely.

I halted in my tracks, overwhelmed with shame. But she continued to
regard me by the light of the street lamp.

“You didn't want to be seen with me on Second Street, did you? You're
one of those sneaking swells.”

The shock of this sudden onslaught was tremendous. I stood frozen to the
spot, trembling, convicted, for I knew that her accusation was just; I
had wounded her, and I had a desire to make amends.

“I'm sorry,” I faltered. “I didn't mean--to offend you. And you
smiled--” I got no farther. She began to laugh, and so loudly that I
glanced anxiously about. I would have fled, but something still held me,
something that belied the harshness of her laugh.

“You're just a kid,” she told me. “Say, you get along home, and tell
your mamma I sent you.”

Whereupon I departed in a state of humiliation and self-reproach I had
never before known, wandering about aimlessly for a long time. When at
length I arrived at home, late for supper, my mother's solicitude only
served to deepen my pain. She went to the kitchen herself to see if my
mince-pie were hot, and served me with her own hands. My father remained
at his place at the head of the table while I tried to eat, smiling
indulgently at her ministrations.

“Oh, a little hard work won't hurt him, Sarah,” he said. “When I was his
age I often worked until eleven o'clock and never felt the worse for it.
Business must be pretty good, eh, Hugh?”

I had never seen him in a more relaxing mood, a more approving one.
My mother sat down beside me.... Words seem useless to express the
complicated nature of my suffering at that moment,--my remorse, my
sense of deception, of hypocrisy,--yes, and my terror. I tried to talk
naturally, to answer my father's questions about affairs at the store,
while all the time my eyes rested upon the objects of the room, familiar
since childhood. Here were warmth, love, and safety. Why could I not be
content with them, thankful for them? What was it in me that drove me
from these sheltering walls out into the dark places? I glanced at my
father. Had he ever known these wild, destroying desires? Oh, if I only
could have confided in him! The very idea of it was preposterous. Such
placidity as theirs would never understand the nature of my temptations,
and I pictured to myself their horror and despair at my revelation. In
imagination I beheld their figures receding while I drifted out to sea,
alone. Would the tide--which was somehow within me--carry me out and
out, in spite of all I could do?

     “Give me that man
     That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
     In my heart's core....”

I did not shirk my tasks at the store, although I never got over the
feeling that a fine instrument was being employed where a coarser one
would have done equally well. There were moments when I was almost
overcome by surges of self-commiseration and of impotent anger: for
instance, I was once driven out of a shop by an incensed German grocer
whom I had asked to settle a long-standing account. Yet the days passed,
the daily grind absorbed my energies, and when I was not collecting, or
tediously going over the stock in the dim recesses of the store, I was
running errands in the wholesale district, treading the burning brick of
the pavements, dodging heavy trucks and drays and perspiring clerks who
flew about with memorandum pads in their hands, or awaiting the pleasure
of bank tellers. Save Harvey, the venerable porter, I was the last to
leave the store in the evening, and I always came away with the taste on
my palate of Breck and Company's mail, it being my final duty to “lick”
 the whole of it and deposit it in the box at the corner. The gum on the
envelopes tasted of winter-green.

My Cousin Robert was somewhat astonished at my application.

“We'll make a man of you yet, Hugh,” he said to me once, when I had
performed a commission with unexpected despatch....

Business was his all-in-all, and he had an undisguised contempt for
higher education. To send a boy to college was, in his opinion, to run
no inconsiderable risk of ruining him. What did they amount to when they
came home, strutting like peacocks, full of fads and fancies, and much
too good to associate with decent, hard-working citizens? Nevertheless
when autumn came and my friends departed with eclat for the East, I was
desperate indeed! Even the contemplation of Robert Breck did not console
me, and yet here, in truth, was a life which might have served me as a
model. His store was his castle; and his reputation for integrity and
square dealing as wide as the city. Often I used to watch him with a
certain envy as he stood in the doorway, his hands in his pockets,
and greeted fellow-merchant and banker with his genuine and dignified
directness. This man was his own master. They all called him “Robert,”
 and they made it clear by their manner that they knew they were
addressing one who fulfilled his obligations and asked no favours.

Crusty old Nathaniel Durrett once declared that when you bought a bill
of goods from Robert Breck you did not have to check up the invoice or
employ a chemist. Here was a character to mould upon. If my ambition
could but have been bounded by Breck and Company, I, too, might have
come to stand in that doorway content with a tribute that was greater
than Caesar's.

I had been dreading the Christmas holidays, which were indeed to be no
holidays for me. And when at length they arrived they brought with them
from the East certain heroes fashionably clad, citizens now of a larger
world than mine. These former companions had become superior beings,
they could not help showing it, and their presence destroyed the Balance
of Things. For alas, I had not wholly abjured the feminine sex after
all! And from being a somewhat important factor in the lives of Ruth
Hollister and other young women I suddenly became of no account. New
interests, new rivalries and loyalties had arisen in which I had no
share; I must perforce busy myself with invoices of flour and coffee and
canned fruits while sleigh rides and coasting and skating expeditions
to Blackstone Lake followed one another day after day,--for the irony of
circumstances had decreed a winter uncommonly cold. There were evening
parties, too, where I felt like an alien, though my friends were guilty
of no conscious neglect; and had I been able to accept the situation
simply, I should not have suffered.

The principal event of those holidays was a play given in the old
Hambleton house (which later became the Boyne Club), under the direction
of the lively and talented Mrs. Watling. I was invited, indeed, to
participate; but even if I had had the desire I could not have done
so, since the rehearsals were carried on in the daytime. Nancy was the
leading lady. I have neglected to mention that she too had been away
almost continuously since our misunderstanding, for the summer in the
mountains,--a sojourn recommended for her mother's health; and in the
autumn she had somewhat abruptly decided to go East to boarding-school
at Farmington. During the brief months of her absence she had
marvellously acquired maturity and aplomb, a worldliness of manner and a
certain frivolity that seemed to put those who surrounded her on a lower
plane. She was only seventeen, yet she seemed the woman of thirty whose
role she played. First there were murmurs, then sustained applause. I
scarcely recognized her: she had taken wings and soared far above me,
suggesting a sphere of power and luxury hitherto unimagined and beyond
the scope of the world to which I belonged.

Her triumph was genuine. When the play was over she was immediately
surrounded by enthusiastic admirers eager to congratulate her, to dance
with her. I too would have gone forward, but a sense of inadequacy, of
unimportance, of an inability to cope with her, held me back, and from a
corner I watched her sweeping around the room, holding up her train, and
leaning on the arm of Bob Lansing, a classmate whom Ralph had brought
home from Harvard. Then it was Ralph's turn: that affair seemed still
to be going on. My feelings were a strange medley of despondency and
stimulation....

Our eyes met. Her partner now was Ham Durrett. Capriciously releasing
him, she stood before me,

“Hugh, you haven't asked me to dance, or even told me what you thought
of the play.”

“I thought it was splendid,” I said lamely.

Because she refrained from replying I was farther than ever from
understanding her. How was I to divine what she felt? or whether any
longer she felt at all? Here, in this costume of a woman of the world,
with the string of pearls at her neck to give her the final touch of
brilliancy, was a strange, new creature who baffled and silenced me....
We had not gone halfway across the room when she halted abruptly.

“I'm tired,” she exclaimed. “I don't feel like dancing just now,” and
led the way to the big, rose punch-bowl, one of the Durretts' most
cherished possessions. Glancing up at me over the glass of lemonade I
had given her she went on: “Why haven't you been to see me since I came
home? I've wanted to talk to you, to hear how you are getting along.”

Was she trying to make amends, or reminding me in this subtle way of
the cause of our quarrel? What I was aware of as I looked at her was
an attitude, a vantage point apparently gained by contact with that
mysterious outer world which thus vicariously had laid its spell on me;
I was tremendously struck by the thought that to achieve this attitude
meant emancipation, invulnerability against the aches and pains which
otherwise our fellow-beings had the power to give us; mastery over
life,--the ability to choose calmly, as from a height, what were best
for one's self, untroubled by loves and hates. Untroubled by loves and
hates! At that very moment, paradoxically, I loved her madly, but with a
love not of the old quality, a love that demanded a vantage point of its
own. Even though she had made an advance--and some elusiveness in her
manner led me to doubt it I could not go to her now. I must go as a
conqueror,--a conqueror in the lists she herself had chosen, where the
prize is power.

“Oh, I'm getting along pretty well,” I said. “At any rate, they don't
complain of me.”

“Somehow,” she ventured, “somehow it's hard to think of you as a
business man.”

I took this for a reference to the boast I had made that I would go to
college.

“Business isn't so bad as it might be,” I assured her.

“I think a man ought to go away to college,” she declared, in what
seemed another tone. “He makes friends, learns certain things,--it gives
him finish. We are very provincial here.”

Provincial! I did not stop to reflect how recently she must have
acquired the word; it summed up precisely the self-estimate at which I
had arrived. The sting went deep. Before I could think of an effective
reply Nancy was being carried off by the young man from the East, who
was clearly infatuated. He was not provincial. She smiled back at
me brightly over his shoulder.... In that instant were fused in one
resolution all the discordant elements within me of aspiration and
discontent. It was not so much that I would show Nancy what I intended
to do--I would show myself; and I felt a sudden elation, and accession
of power that enabled me momentarily to despise the puppets with whom
she danced.... From this mood I was awakened with a start to feel a hand
on my shoulder, and I turned to confront her father, McAlery Willett;
a gregarious, easygoing, pleasure-loving gentleman who made only a
pretence of business, having inherited an ample fortune from his father,
unique among his generation in our city in that he paid some attention
to fashion in his dress; good living was already beginning to affect his
figure. His mellow voice had a way of breaking an octave.

“Don't worry, my boy,” he said. “You stick to business. These college
fellows are cocks of the walk just now, but some day you'll be able to
snap your fingers at all of 'em.”

The next day was dark, overcast, smoky, damp-the soft, unwholesome
dampness that follows a spell of hard frost. I spent the morning and
afternoon on the gloomy third floor of Breck and Company, making a list
of the stock. I remember the place as though I had just stepped out
of it, the freight elevator at the back, the dusty, iron columns,
the continuous piles of cases and bags and barrels with narrow aisles
between them; the dirty windows, spotted and soot-streaked, that looked
down on Second Street. I was determined now to escape from all this, and
I had my plan in mind.

No sooner had I swallowed my supper that evening than I set out at a
swift pace for a modest residence district ten blocks away, coming to a
little frame house set back in a yard,--one of those houses in which
the ringing of the front door-bell produces the greatest commotion;
children's voices were excitedly raised and then hushed. After a brief
silence the door was opened by a pleasant-faced, brown-bearded man, who
stood staring at me in surprise. His hair was rumpled, he wore an old
house coat with a hole in the elbow, and with one finger he kept his
place in the book which he held in his hand.

“Hugh Paret!” he exclaimed.

He ushered me into a little parlour lighted by two lamps, that bore
every evidence of having been recently vacated. Its features somehow
bespoke a struggle for existence; as though its occupants had
worried much and loved much. It was a room best described by the word
“home”--home made more precious by a certain precariousness. Toys and
school-books strewed the floor, a sewing-bag and apron lay across the
sofa, and in one corner was a roll-topped desk of varnished oak. The
seats of the chairs were comfortably depressed.

So this was where Mr. Wood lived! Mr. Wood, instructor in Latin and
Greek at Densmore Academy. It was now borne in on me for the first time
that he did live and have his ties like any other human being, instead
of just appearing magically from nowhere on a platform in a chalky room
at nine every morning, to vanish again in the afternoon. I had formerly
stood in awe of his presence. But now I was suddenly possessed by an
embarrassment, and (shall I say it?) by a commiseration bordering on
contempt for a man who would consent to live thus for the sake of being
a schoolteacher. How strange that civilization should set such a high
value on education and treat its functionaries with such neglect!

Mr. Wood's surprise at seeing me was genuine. For I had never shown
a particular interest in him, nor in the knowledge which he strove to
impart.

“I thought you had forgotten me, Hugh,” he said, and added whimsically:
“most boys do, when they graduate.”

I felt the reproach, which made it the more difficult for me to state my
errand.

“I knew you sometimes took pupils in the evening, Mr. Wood.”

“Pupils,--yes,” he replied, still eyeing me. Suddenly his eyes twinkled.
He had indeed no reason to suspect me of thirsting for learning. “But I
was under the impression that you had gone into business, Hugh.”

“The fact is, sir,” I explained somewhat painfully, “that I am not
satisfied with business. I feel--as if I ought to know more. And I came
to see if you would give me lessons about three nights a week, because I
want to take the Harvard examinations next summer.”

Thus I made it appear, and so persuaded myself, that my ambition had
been prompted by a craving for knowledge. As soon as he could recover
himself he reminded me that he had on many occasions declared I had a
brain.

“Your father must be very happy over this decision of yours,” he said.

That was the point, I told him. It was to be a surprise for my father; I
was to take the examinations first, and inform him afterwards.

To my intense relief, Mr. Wood found the scheme wholly laudable, and
entered into it with zest. He produced examinations of preceding
years from a pigeonhole in his desk, and inside of half an hour the
arrangement was made, the price of the lessons settled. They were well
within my salary, which recently had been raised....

When I went down town, or collecting bills for Breck and Company, I took
a text-book along with me in the street-cars. Now at last I had behind
my studies a driving force. Algebra, Latin, Greek and history became
worth while, means to an end. I astonished Mr. Wood; and sometimes he
would tilt back his chair, take off his spectacles and pull his beard.

“Why in the name of all the sages,” he would demand, “couldn't you have
done this well at school? You might have led your class, instead of
Ralph Hambleton.”

I grew very fond of Mr. Wood, and even of his thin little wife, who
occasionally flitted into the room after we had finished. I fully
intended to keep up with them in after life, but I never did. I forgot
them completely....

My parents were not wholly easy in their minds concerning me; they were
bewildered by the new aspect I presented. For my lately acquired motive
was strong enough to compel me to restrict myself socially, and the
evenings I spent at home were given to study, usually in my own room.
Once I was caught with a Latin grammar: I was just “looking over it,” I
said. My mother sighed. I knew what was in her mind; she had always
been secretly disappointed that I had not been sent to college. And
presently, when my father went out to attend a trustee's meeting, the
impulse to confide in her almost overcame me; I loved her with that
affection which goes out to those whom we feel understand us, but I was
learning to restrain my feelings. She looked at me wistfully.... I knew
that she would insist on telling my father, and thus possibly frustrate
my plans. That I was not discovered was due to a certain quixotic twist
in my father's character. I was working now, and though not actually
earning my own living, he no longer felt justified in prying into my
affairs.

When June arrived, however, my tutor began to show signs that his
conscience was troubling him, and one night he delivered his ultimatum.
The joke had gone far enough, he implied. My intentions, indeed, he
found praiseworthy, but in his opinion it was high time that my father
were informed of them; he was determined to call at my father's office.

The next morning was blue with the presage of showers; blue, too,
with the presage of fate. An interminable morning. My tasks had become
utterly distasteful. And in the afternoon, so when I sat down to make
out invoices, I wrote automatically the names of the familiar customers,
my mind now exalted by hope, now depressed by anxiety. The result of
an interview perhaps even now going on would determine whether or no I
should be immediately released from a slavery I detested. Would Mr.
Wood persuade my father? If not, I was prepared to take more desperate
measures; remain in the grocery business I would not. In the evening,
as I hurried homeward from the corner where the Boyne Street car had
dropped me, I halted suddenly in front of the Peters house, absorbing
the scene where my childhood had been spent: each of these spreading
maples was an old friend, and in these yards I had played and dreamed.
An unaccountable sadness passed over me as I walked on toward our
gate; I entered it, gained the doorway of the house and went upstairs,
glancing into the sitting room. My mother sat by the window, sewing. She
looked up at me with an ineffable expression, in which I read a trace of
tears.

“Hugh!” she exclaimed.

I felt very uncomfortable, and stood looking down at her.

“Why didn't you tell us, my son?” In her voice was in truth reproach;
yet mingled with that was another note, which I think was pride.

“What has father said?” I asked.

“Oh, my dear, he will tell you himself. I--I don't know--he will talk to
you.”

Suddenly she seized my hands and drew me down to her, and then held
me away, gazing into my face with a passionate questioning, her
lips smiling, her eyes wet. What did she see? Was there a subtler
relationship between our natures than I guessed? Did she understand by
some instinctive power the riddle within me? divine through love the
force that was driving me on she knew not whither, nor I? At the sound
of my father's step in the hall she released me. He came in as though
nothing had happened.

“Well, Hugh, are you home?” he said....

Never had I been more impressed, more bewildered by his self-command
than at that time. Save for the fact that my mother talked less than
usual, supper passed as though nothing had happened. Whether I had
shaken him, disappointed him, or gained his reluctant approval I
could not tell. Gradually his outward calmness turned my suspense to
irritation....

But when at length we were alone together, I gained a certain
reassurance. His manner was not severe. He hesitated a little before
beginning.

“I must confess, Hugh; that I scarcely know what to say about this
proceeding of yours. The thing that strikes me most forcibly is that you
might have confided in your mother and myself.”

Hope flashed up within me, like an explosion.

“I--I wanted to surprise you, father. And then, you see, I thought it
would be wiser to find out first how well I was likely to do at the
examinations.”

My father looked at me. Unfortunately he possessed neither a sense of
humour nor a sense of tragedy sufficient to meet such a situation. For
the first time in my life I beheld him at a disadvantage; for I had,
somehow, managed at length to force him out of position, and he was
puzzled. I was quick to play my trump card.

“I have been thinking it over carefully,” I told him, “and I have made
up my mind that I want to go into the law.”

“The law!” he exclaimed sharply.

“Why, yes, sir. I know that you were disappointed because I did not do
sufficiently well at school to go to college and study for the bar.”

I felt indeed a momentary pang, but I remembered that I was fighting for
my freedom.

“You seemed satisfied where you were,” he said in a puzzled voice, “and
your Cousin Robert gives a good account of you.”

“I've tried to do the work as well as I could, sir,” I replied. “But I
don't like the grocery business, or any other business. I have a feeling
that I'm not made for it.”

“And you think, now, that you are made for the law?” he asked, with the
faint hint of a smile.

“Yes, sir, I believe I could succeed at it. I'd like to try,” I replied
modestly.

“You've given up the idiotic notion of wishing to be an author?”

I implied that he himself had convinced me of the futility of such a
wish. I listened to his next words as in a dream.

“I must confess to you, Hugh, that there are times when I fail to
understand you. I hope it is as you say, that you have arrived at a
settled conviction as to your future, and that this is not another of
those caprices to which you have been subject, nor a desire to shirk
honest work. Mr. Wood has made out a strong case for you, and I have
therefore determined to give you a trial. If you pass the examinations
with credit, you may go to college, but if at any time you fail to
make good progress, you come home, and go into business again. Is that
thoroughly understood?”

I said it was, and thanked him effusively.... I had escaped,--the prison
doors had flown open. But it is written that every happiness has
its sting; and my joy, intense though it was, had in it a core of
remorse....

I went downstairs to my mother, who was sitting in the hall by the open
door.

“Father says I may go!” I said.

She got up and took me in her arms.

“My dear, I am so glad, although we shall miss you dreadfully.... Hugh?”

“Yes, mother.”

“Oh, Hugh, I so want you to be a good man!”

Her cry was a little incoherent, but fraught with a meaning that came
home to me, in spite of myself....

A while later I ran over to announce to the amazed Tom Peters that I
was actually going to Harvard with him. He stood in the half-lighted
hallway, his hands in his pockets, blinking at me.

“Hugh, you're a wonder!” he cried. “How in Jehoshaphat did you work
it?”...

I lay long awake that night thinking over the momentous change so soon
to come into my life, wondering exultantly what Nancy Willett would say
now. I was not one, at any rate, to be despised or neglected.




VI.

The following September Tom Peters and I went East together. In the
early morning Boston broke on us like a Mecca as we rolled out of the
old Albany station, joint lords of a “herdic.” How sharply the smell of
the salt-laden east wind and its penetrating coolness come back to me! I
seek in vain for words to express the exhilarating effect of that briny
coolness on my imagination, and of the visions it summoned up of the
newer, larger life into which I had marvellously been transported. We
alighted at the Parker House, full-fledged men of the world, and tried
to act as though the breakfast of which we partook were merely an
incident, not an Event; as though we were Seniors, and not freshmen,
assuming an indifference to the beings by whom we were surrounded and
who were breakfasting, too,--although the nice-looking ones with fresh
faces and trim clothes were all undoubtedly Olympians. The better
to proclaim our nonchalance, we seated ourselves on a lounge of the
marble-paved lobby and smoked cigarettes. This was liberty indeed! At
length we departed for Cambridge, in another herdic.

Boston! Could it be possible? Everything was so different here as to
give the place the aspect of a dream: the Bulfinch State House, the
decorous shops, the still more decorous dwellings with the purple-paned
windows facing the Common; Back Bay, still boarded up, ivy-spread,
suggestive of a mysterious and delectable existence. We crossed the
Charles River, blue-grey and still that morning; traversed a nondescript
district, and at last found ourselves gazing out of the windows at the
mellowed, plum-coloured bricks of the University buildings.... All
at once our exhilaration evaporated as the herdic rumbled into a
side street and backed up before the door of a not-too-inviting,
three-storied house with a queer extension on top. Its steps and
vestibule were, however, immaculate. The bell was answered by a plainly
overworked servant girl, of whom we inquired for Mrs. Bolton, our
landlady. There followed a period of waiting in a parlour from which the
light had been almost wholly banished, with slippery horsehair furniture
and a marble-topped table; and Mrs. Bolton, when she appeared, dressed
in rusty black, harmonized perfectly with the funereal gloom. She was a
tall, rawboned, severe lady with a peculiar red-mottled complexion that
somehow reminded one of the outcropping rocks of her native New England
soil.

“You want to see your rooms, I suppose,” she remarked impassively when
we had introduced ourselves, and as we mounted the stairs behind her
Tom, in a whisper, nicknamed her “Granite Face.” Presently she left us.

“Hospitable soul!” said Tom, who, with his hands in his pockets, was
gazing at the bare walls of our sitting-room. “We'll have to go into
the house-furnishing business, Hughie. I vote we don't linger here
to-day--we'll get melancholia.”

Outside, however, the sun was shining brightly, and we departed
immediately to explore Cambridge and announce our important presences
to the proper authorities.... We went into Boston to dine.... It was
not until nine o'clock in the evening that we returned and the bottom
suddenly dropped out of things. He who has tasted that first, acute
homesickness of college will know what I mean. It usually comes at the
opening of one's trunk. The sight of the top tray gave me a pang I shall
never forget. I would not have believed that I loved my mother so much!
These articles had been packed by her hands; and in one corner, among
the underclothes on which she had neatly sewed my initials, lay the new
Bible she had bought. “Hugh Moreton Paret, from his Mother. September,
1881.” I took it up (Tom was not looking) and tried to read a passage,
but my eyes were blurred. What was it within me that pressed and pressed
until I thought I could bear the pain of it no longer? I pictured the
sitting-room at home, and my father and mother there, thinking of me.
Yes, I must acknowledge it; in the bitterness of that moment I longed
to be back once more in the railed-off space on the floor of Breck and
Company, writing invoices....

Presently, as we went on silently with our unpacking, we became aware of
someone in the doorway.

“Hello, you fellows!” he cried. “We're classmates, I guess.”

We turned to behold an ungainly young man in an ill-fitting blue suit.
His face was pimply, his eyes a Teutonic blue, his yellow hair rumpled,
his naturally large mouth was made larger by a friendly grin.

“I'm Hermann Krebs,” he announced simply. “Who are you?”

We replied, I regret to say, with a distinct coolness that did not seem
to bother him in the least. He advanced into the room, holding out a
large, red, and serviceable hand, evidently it had never dawned on him
that there was such a thing in the world as snobbery. But Tom and I
had been “coached” by Ralph Hambleton and Perry Blackwood, warned to be
careful of our friendships. There was a Reason! In any case Mr. Krebs
would not have appealed to us. In answer to a second question he was
informed what city we hailed from, and he proclaimed himself likewise a
native of our state.

“Why, I'm from Elkington!” he exclaimed, as though the fact sealed
our future relationships. He seated himself on Tom's trunk and added:
“Welcome to old Harvard!”

We felt that he was scarcely qualified to speak for “old Harvard,” but
we did not say so.

“You look as if you'd been pall-bearers for somebody,” was his next
observation.

To this there seemed no possible reply.

“You fellows are pretty well fixed here,” he went on, undismayed, gazing
about a room which had seemed to us the abomination of desolation. “Your
folks must be rich. I'm up under the skylight.”

Even this failed to touch us. His father--he told us with undiminished
candour--had been a German emigrant who had come over in '49, after the
cause of liberty had been lost in the old country, and made eye-glasses
and opera glasses. There hadn't been a fortune in it. He, Hermann,
had worked at various occupations in the summer time, from peddling to
farming, until he had saved enough to start him at Harvard. Tom, who had
been bending over his bureau drawer, straightened up.

“What did you want to come here for?” he demanded.

“Say, what did you?” Mr. Krebs retorted genially. “To get an education,
of course.”

“An education!” echoed Tom.

“Isn't Harvard the oldest and best seat of learning in America?” There
was an exaltation in Krebs's voice that arrested my attention, and made
me look at him again. A troubled chord had been struck within me.

“Sure,” said Tom.

“What did you come for?” Mr. Krebs persisted.

“To sow my wild oats,” said Tom. “I expect to have something of a crop,
too.”

For some reason I could not fathom, it suddenly seemed to dawn on Mr.
Krebs, as a result of this statement, that he wasn't wanted.

“Well, so long,” he said, with a new dignity that curiously belied the
informality of his farewell.

An interval of silence followed his departure.

“Well, he's got a crust!” said Tom, at last.

My own feeling about Mr. Krebs had become more complicated; but I took
my cue from Tom, who dealt with situations simply.

“He'll come in for a few knockouts,” he declared. “Here's to old
Harvard, the greatest institution of learning in America! Oh, gee!”

Our visitor, at least, made us temporarily forget our homesickness, but
it returned with redoubled intensity when we had put out the lights and
gone to bed.

Before we had left home it had been mildly hinted to us by Ralph and
Perry Blackwood that scholarly eminence was not absolutely necessary
to one's welfare and happiness at Cambridge. The hint had been somewhat
superfluous; but the question remained, what was necessary? With a view
of getting some light on this delicate subject we paid a visit the next
evening to our former friends and schoolmates, whose advice was conveyed
with a masterly circumlocution that impressed us both. There are some
things that may not be discussed directly, and the conduct of life at
a modern university--which is a reflection of life in the greater
world--is one of these. Perry Blackwood and Ham did most of the talking,
while Ralph, characteristically, lay at full length on the window-seat,
interrupting with an occasional terse and cynical remark very much to
the point. As a sophomore, he in particular seemed lifted immeasurably
above us, for he was--as might have been expected already a marked
man in his class. The rooms which he shared with his cousin made a
tremendous impression on Tom and me, and seemed palatial in comparison
to our quarters at Mrs. Bolton's, eloquent of the freedom and luxury
of undergraduate existence; their note, perhaps, was struck by the
profusion of gay sofa pillows, then something of an innovation. The
heavy, expensive furniture was of a pattern new to me; and on the mantel
were three or four photographs of ladies in the alluring costume of the
musical stage, in which Tom evinced a particular interest.

“Did grandfather send 'em?” he inquired.

“They're Ham's,” said Ralph, and he contrived somehow to get into those
two words an epitome of his cousin's character. Ham was stouter, and his
clothes were more striking, more obviously expensive than ever.... On
our way homeward, after we had walked a block or two in silence, Tom
exclaimed:--“Don't make friends with the friendless!--eh, Hughie? We
knew enough to begin all right, didn't we?”...

Have I made us out a pair of deliberate, calculating snobs? Well,
after all it must be remembered that our bringing up had not been of
sufficient liberality to include the Krebses of this world. We did not,
indeed, spend much time in choosing and weighing those whom we should
know and those whom we should avoid; and before the first term of that
Freshman year was over Tom had become a favourite. He had the gift of
making men feel that he delighted in their society, that he wished for
nothing better than to sit for hours in their company, content to listen
to the arguments that raged about him. Once in a while he would make a
droll observation that was greeted with fits of laughter. He was always
referred to as “old Tom,” or “good old Tom”; presently, when he began to
pick out chords on the banjo, it was discovered that he had a good tenor
voice, though he could not always be induced to sing.... Somewhat to the
jeopardy of the academic standard that my father expected me to sustain,
our rooms became a rendezvous for many clubable souls whose maudlin,
midnight attempts at harmony often set the cocks crowing.

       “Free from care and despair,
        What care we?
       'Tis wine, 'tis wine
        That makes the jollity.”

As a matter of truth, on these occasions it was more often beer; beer
transported thither in Tom's new valise,--given him by his mother,--and
stuffed with snow to keep the bottles cold. Sometimes Granite Face,
adorned in a sky-blue wrapper, would suddenly appear in the doorway to
declare that we were a disgrace to her respectable house: the university
authorities should be informed, etc., etc. Poor woman, we were
outrageously inconsiderate of her.... One evening as we came through
the hall we caught a glimpse in the dimly lighted parlour of a young
man holding a shy and pale little girl on his lap, Annie, Mrs. Bolton's
daughter: on the face of our landlady was an expression I had never seen
there, like a light. I should scarcely have known her. Tom and I paused
at the foot of the stairs. He clutched my arm.

“Darned if it wasn't our friend Krebs!” he whispered.

While I was by no means so popular as Tom, I got along fairly well.
I had escaped from provincialism, from the obscure purgatory of the
wholesale grocery business; new vistas, exciting and stimulating, had
been opened up; nor did I offend the sensibilities and prejudices of
the new friends I made, but gave a hearty consent to a code I found
congenial. I recognized in the social system of undergraduate life at
Harvard a reflection of that of a greater world where I hoped some
day to shine; yet my ambition did not prey upon me. Mere conformity,
however, would not have taken me very far in a sphere from which I, in
common with many others, desired not to be excluded.... One day, in an
idle but inspired moment, I paraphrased a song from “Pinafore,” applying
it to a college embroglio, and the brief and lively vogue it enjoyed was
sufficient to indicate a future usefulness. I had “found myself.” This
was in the last part of the freshman year, and later on I became a sort
of amateur, class poet-laureate. Many were the skits I composed, and Tom
sang them....

During that freshman year we often encountered Hermann Krebs, whistling
merrily, on the stairs.

“Got your themes done?” he would inquire cheerfully.

And Tom would always mutter, when he was out of earshot: “He has got a
crust!”

When I thought about Krebs at all,--and this was seldom indeed,--his
manifest happiness puzzled me. Our cool politeness did not seem to
bother him in the least; on the contrary, I got the impression that
it amused him. He seemed to have made no friends. And after that first
evening, memorable for its homesickness, he never ventured to repeat his
visit to us.

One windy November day I spied his somewhat ludicrous figure striding
ahead of me, his trousers above his ankles. I was bundled up in a new
ulster,--of which I was secretly quite proud,--but he wore no overcoat
at all.

“Well, how are you getting along?” I asked, as I overtook him.

He made clear, as he turned, his surprise that I should have addressed
him at all, but immediately recovered himself.

“Oh, fine,” he responded. “I've had better luck than I expected. I'm
correspondent for two or three newspapers. I began by washing windows,
and doing odd jobs for the professors' wives.” He laughed. “I guess that
doesn't strike you as good luck.”

He showed no resentment at my patronage, but a self-sufficiency that
made my sympathy seem superfluous, giving the impression of an inner
harmony and content that surprised me.

“I needn't ask how you're getting along,” he said....

At the end of the freshman year we abandoned Mrs. Bolton's for more
desirable quarters.

I shall not go deeply into my college career, recalling only such
incidents as, seen in the retrospect, appear to have had significance. I
have mentioned my knack for song-writing; but it was not, I think, until
my junior year there was startlingly renewed in me my youthful desire to
write, to create something worth while, that had so long been dormant.

The inspiration came from Alonzo Cheyne, instructor in English; a
remarkable teacher, in spite of the finicky mannerisms which Tom
imitated. And when, in reading aloud certain magnificent passages, he
forgot his affectations, he managed to arouse cravings I thought to have
deserted me forever. Was it possible, after all, that I had been right
and my father wrong? that I might yet be great in literature?

A mere hint from Alonzo Cheyne was more highly prized by the grinds
than fulsome praise from another teacher. And to his credit it should
be recorded that the grinds were the only ones he treated with any
seriousness; he took pains to answer their questions; but towards the
rest of us, the Chosen, he showed a thinly veiled contempt. None so
quick as he to detect a simulated interest, or a wily effort to make him
ridiculous; and few tried this a second time, for he had a rapier-like
gift of repartee that transfixed the offender like a moth on a pin. He
had a way of eyeing me at times, his glasses in his hand, a queer smile
on his lips, as much as to imply that there was one at least among the
lost who was made for better things. Not that my work was poor, but I
knew that it might have been better. Out of his classes, however, beyond
the immediate, disturbing influence of his personality I would relapse
into indifference....

Returning one evening to our quarters, which were now in the “Yard,”
 I found Tom seated with a blank sheet before him, thrusting his hand
through his hair and biting the end of his penholder to a pulp. In his
muttering, which was mixed with the curious, stingless profanity of
which he was master, I caught the name of Cheyne, and I knew that he
was facing the crisis of a fortnightly theme. The subject assigned was a
narrative of some personal experience, and it was to be handed in on the
morrow. My own theme was already, written.

“I've been holding down this chair for an hour, and I can't seem to
think of a thing.” He rose to fling himself down on the lounge. “I wish
I was in Canada.”

“Why Canada?”

“Trout fishing with Uncle Jake at that club of his where he took me last
summer.” Tom gazed dreamily at the ceiling. “Whenever I have some darned
foolish theme like this to write I want to go fishing, and I want to go
like the devil. I'll get Uncle Jake to take you, too, next summer.”

“I wish you would.”

“Say, that's living all right, Hughie, up there among the tamaracks and
balsams!” And he began, for something like the thirtieth time, to relate
the adventures of the trip.

As he talked, the idea presented itself to me with sudden fascination
to use this incident as the subject of Tom's theme; to write it for him,
from his point of view, imitating the droll style he would have had if
he had been able to write; for, when he was interested in any matter,
his oral narrative did not lack vividness. I began to ask him questions:
what were the trees like, for instance? How did the French-Canadian
guides talk? He had the gift of mimicry: aided by a partial knowledge of
French I wrote down a few sentences as they sounded. The canoe had upset
and he had come near drowning. I made him describe his sensations.

“I'll write your theme for you,” I exclaimed, when he had finished.

“Gee, not about that!”

“Why not? It's a personal experience.”

His gratitude was pathetic.... By this time I was so full of the subject
that it fairly clamoured for expression, and as I wrote the hours flew.
Once in a while I paused to ask him a question as he sat with his chair
tilted back and his feet on the table, reading a detective story. I
sketched in the scene with bold strokes; the desolate bois brule on the
mountain side, the polished crystal surface of the pool broken here
and there with the circles left by rising fish; I pictured Armand,
the guide, his pipe between his teeth, holding the canoe against the
current; and I seemed to smell the sharp tang of the balsams, to hear
the roar of the rapids below. Then came the sudden hooking of the big
trout, habitant oaths from Armand, bouleversement, wetness, darkness,
confusion; a half-strangled feeling, a brief glimpse of green things and
sunlight, and then strangulation, or what seemed like it; strangulation,
the sense of being picked up and hurled by a terrific force whither? a
blinding whiteness, in which it was impossible to breathe, one sharp,
almost unbearable pain, then another, then oblivion.... Finally,
awakening, to be confronted by a much worried Uncle Jake.

By this time the detective story had fallen to the floor, and Tom was
huddled up in his chair, asleep. He arose obediently and wrapped a wet
towel around his head, and began to write. Once he paused long enough to
mutter:--“Yes, that's about it,--that's the way I felt!” and set to work
again, mechanically,--all the praise I got for what I deemed a literary
achievement of the highest order! At three o'clock, a.m., he finished,
pulled off his clothes automatically and tumbled into bed. I had no
desire for sleep. My brain was racing madly, like an engine without a
governor. I could write! I could write! I repeated the words over and
over to myself. All the complexities of my present life were blotted
out, and I beheld only the long, sweet vista of the career for which
I was now convinced that nature had intended me. My immediate fortunes
became unimportant, immaterial. No juice of the grape I had ever
tasted made me half so drunk.... With the morning, of course, came the
reaction, and I suffered the after sensations of an orgie, awaking to a
world of necessity, cold and grey and slushy, and necessity alone made
me rise from my bed. My experience of the night before might have taught
me that happiness lies in the trick of transforming necessity, but it
did not. The vision had faded,--temporarily, at least; and such was the
distraction of the succeeding days that the subject of the theme passed
from my mind....

One morning Tom was later than usual in getting home. I was writing a
letter when he came in, and did not notice him, yet I was vaguely aware
of his standing over me. When at last I looked up I gathered from his
expression that something serious had happened, so mournful was his
face, and yet so utterly ludicrous.

“Say, Hugh, I'm in the deuce of a mess,” he announced.

“What's the matter?” I inquired.

He sank down on the table with a groan.

“It's Alonzo,” he said.

Then I remembered the theme.

“What--what's he done?” I demanded.

“He says I must become a writer. Think of it, me a writer! He says I'm a
young Shakespeare, that I've been lazy and hid my light under a bushel!
He says he knows now what I can do, and if I don't keep up the quality,
he'll know the reason why, and write a personal letter to my father. Oh,
hell!”

In spite of his evident anguish, I was seized with a convulsive
laughter. Tom stood staring at me moodily.

“You think it's funny,--don't you? I guess it is, but what's going to
become of me? That's what I want to know. I've been in trouble before,
but never in any like this. And who got me into it? You!”

Here was gratitude!

“You've got to go on writing 'em, now.” His voice became desperately
pleading. “Say, Hugh, old man, you can temper 'em down--temper 'em
down gradually. And by the end of the year, let's say, they'll be about
normal again.”

He seemed actually shivering.

“The end of the year!” I cried, the predicament striking me for the
first time in its fulness. “Say, you've got a crust!”

“You'll do it, if I have to hold a gun over you,” he announced grimly.

Mingled with my anxiety, which was real, was an exultation that
would not down. Nevertheless, the idea of developing Tom into a
Shakespeare,--Tom, who had not the slightest desire to be one I was
appalling, besides having in it an element of useless self-sacrifice
from which I recoiled. On the other hand, if Alonzo should discover that
I had written his theme, there were penalties I did not care to dwell
upon.... With such a cloud hanging over me I passed a restless night.

As luck would have it the very next evening in the level light under the
elms of the Square I beheld sauntering towards me a dapper figure which
I recognized as that of Mr. Cheyne himself. As I saluted him he gave me
an amused and most disconcerting glance; and when I was congratulating
myself that he had passed me he stopped.

“Fine weather for March, Paret,” he observed.

“Yes, sir,” I agreed in a strange voice.

“By the way,” he remarked, contemplating the bare branches above our
heads, “that was an excellent theme your roommate handed in. I had no
idea that he possessed such--such genius. Did you, by any chance, happen
to read it?”

“Yes, sir,--I read it.”

“Weren't you surprised?” inquired Mr. Cheyne.

“Well, yes, sir--that is--I mean to say he talks just like that,
sometimes--that is, when it's anything he cares about.”

“Indeed!” said Mr. Cheyne. “That's interesting, most interesting. In
all my experience, I do not remember a case in which a gift has been
developed so rapidly. I don't want to give the impression--ah that there
is no room for improvement, but the thing was very well done, for
an undergraduate. I must confess I never should have suspected it in
Peters, and it's most interesting what you say about his cleverness
in conversation.” He twirled the head of his stick, apparently lost in
reflection. “I may be wrong,” he went on presently, “I have an idea
it is you--” I must literally have jumped away from him. He paused a
moment, without apparently noticing my panic, “that it is you who have
influenced Peters.”

“Sir?”

“I am wrong, then. Or is this merely commendable modesty on your part?”

“Oh, no, sir.”

“Then my hypothesis falls to the ground. I had greatly hoped,” he added
meaningly, “that you might be able to throw some light on this mystery.”

I was dumb.

“Paret,” he asked, “have you time to come over to my rooms for a few
minutes this evening?”

“Certainly, sir.”

He gave me his number in Brattle Street....

Like one running in a nightmare and making no progress I made my way
home, only to learn from Hallam,--who lived on the same floor,--that
Tom had inconsiderately gone to Boston for the evening, with four other
weary spirits in search of relaxation! Avoiding our club table, I took
what little nourishment I could at a modest restaurant, and restlessly
paced the moonlit streets until eight o'clock, when I found myself
in front of one of those low-gabled colonial houses which, on less
soul-shaking occasions, had exercised a great charm on my imagination.
My hand hung for an instant over the bell.... I must have rung it
violently, for there appeared almost immediately an old lady in a lace
cap, who greeted me with gentle courtesy, and knocked at a little door
with glistening panels. The latch was lifted by Mr. Cheyne himself.

“Come in, Paret,” he said, in a tone that was unexpectedly hospitable.

I have rarely seen a more inviting room. A wood fire burned brightly
on the brass andirons, flinging its glare on the big, white beam that
crossed the ceiling, and reddening the square panes of the windows in
their panelled recesses. Between these were rows of books,--attractive
books in chased bindings, red and blue; books that appealed to be taken
down and read. There was a table covered with reviews and magazines in
neat piles, and a lamp so shaded as to throw its light only on the white
blotter of the pad. Two easy chairs, covered with flowered chintz, were
ranged before the fire, in one of which I sank, much bewildered, upon
being urged to do so.

I utterly failed to recognize “Alonzo” in this new atmosphere. And
he had, moreover, dropped the subtly sarcastic manner I was wont to
associate with him.

“Jolly old house, isn't it?” he observed, as though I had casually
dropped in on him for a chat; and he stood, with his hands behind him
stretched to the blaze, looking down at me. “It was built by a certain
Colonel Draper, who fought at Louisburg, and afterwards fled to England
at the time of the Revolution. He couldn't stand the patriots, I'm not
so sure that I blame him, either. Are you interested in colonial things,
Mr. Paret?”

I said I was. If the question had concerned Aztec relics my answer would
undoubtedly have been the same. And I watched him, dazedly, while he
took down a silver porringer from the shallow mantel shelf.

“It's not a Revere,” he said, in a slightly apologetic tone as though to
forestall a comment, “but it's rather good, I think. I picked it up at
a sale in Dorchester. But I have never been able to identify the coat of
arms.”

He showed me a ladle, with the names of “Patience and William Simpson”
 engraved quaintly thereon, and took down other articles in which I
managed to feign an interest. Finally he seated himself in the chair
opposite, crossed his feet, putting the tips of his fingers together and
gazing into the fire.

“So you thought you could fool me,” he said, at length.

I became aware of the ticking of a great clock in the corner. My mouth
was dry.

“I am going to forgive you,” he went on, more gravely, “for several
reasons. I don't flatter, as you know. It's because you carried out the
thing so perfectly that I am led to think you have a gift that may be
cultivated, Paret. You wrote that theme in the way Peters would
have written it if he had not been--what shall I say?--scripturally
inarticulate. And I trust it may do you some good if I say it was
something of a literary achievement, if not a moral one.”

“Thank you, sir,” I faltered.

“Have you ever,” he inquired, lapsing a little into his lecture-room
manner, “seriously thought of literature as a career? Have you ever
thought of any career seriously?”

“I once wished to be a writer, sir,” I replied tremulously, but
refrained from telling him of my father's opinion of the profession.
Ambition--a purer ambition than I had known for years--leaped within me
at his words. He, Alonzo Cheyne, had detected in me the Promethean fire!

I sat there until ten o'clock talking to the real Mr. Cheyne, a human
Mr. Cheyne unknown in the lecture-room. Nor had I suspected one in
whom cynicism and distrust of undergraduates (of my sort) seemed so
ingrained, of such idealism. He did not pour it out in preaching;
delicately, unobtrusively and on the whole rather humorously he managed
to present to me in a most disillusionizing light that conception of the
university held by me and my intimate associates. After I had left him
I walked the quiet streets to behold as through dissolving mists another
Harvard, and there trembled in my soul like the birth-struggle of a
flame something of the vision later to be immortalized by St. Gaudens,
the spirit of Harvard responding to the spirit of the Republic--to the
call of Lincoln, who voiced it. The place of that bronze at the corner
of Boston Common was as yet empty, but I have since stood before it to
gaze in wonder at the light shining in darkness on mute, uplifted faces,
black faces! at Harvard's son leading them on that the light might live
and prevail.

I, too, longed for a Cause into which I might fling myself, in which
I might lose myself... I halted on the sidewalk to find myself staring
from the opposite side of the street at a familiar house, my old
landlady's, Mrs. Bolton's, and summoned up before me was the tired,
smiling face of Hermann Krebs. Was it because when he had once spoken so
crudely of the University I had seen the reflection of her spirit in his
eyes? A light still burned in the extension roof--Krebs's light; another
shone dimly through the ground glass of the front door. Obeying a sudden
impulse, I crossed the street.

Mrs. Bolton, in the sky-blue wrapper, and looking more forbidding
than ever, answered the bell. Life had taught her to be indifferent to
surprises, and it was I who became abruptly embarrassed.

“Oh, it's you, Mr. Paret,” she said, as though I had been a frequent
caller. I had never once darkened her threshold since I had left her
house.

“Yes,” I answered, and hesitated.... “Is Mr. Krebs in?”

“Well,” she replied in a lifeless tone, which nevertheless had in it a
touch of bitterness, “I guess there's no reason why you and your friends
should have known he was sick.”

“Sick!” I repeated. “Is he very sick?”

“I calculate he'll pull through,” she said. “Sunday the doctor gave him
up. And no wonder! He hasn't had any proper food since he's be'n here!”
 She paused, eyeing me. “If you'll excuse me, Mr. Paret, I was just going
up to him when you rang.”

“Certainly,” I replied awkwardly. “Would you be so kind as to tell
him--when he's well enough--that I came to see him, and that I'm sorry?”

There was another pause, and she stood with a hand defensively clutching
the knob.

“Yes, I'll tell him,” she said.

With a sense of having been baffled, I turned away.

Walking back toward the Yard my attention was attracted by a slowly
approaching cab whose occupants were disturbing the quiet of the night
with song.

“Shollity--'tis wine, 'tis wine, that makesh--shollity.”

The vehicle drew up in front of a new and commodious building,--I
believe the first of those designed to house undergraduates who were
willing to pay for private bathrooms and other modern luxuries; out
of one window of the cab protruded a pair of shoeless feet, out of the
other a hatless head I recognized as belonging to Tom Peters; hence I
surmised that the feet were his also. The driver got down from the
box, and a lively argument was begun inside--for there were other
occupants--as to how Mr. Peters was to be disembarked; and I gathered
from his frequent references to the “Shgyptian obelisk” that the
engineering problem presented struck him as similar to the unloading of
Cleopatra's Needle.

“Careful, careful!” he cautioned, as certain expelling movements began
from within, “Easy, Ham, you jam-fool, keep the door shut, y'll break
me.”

“Now, Jerry, all heave sh'gether!” exclaimed a voice from the blackness
of the interior.

“Will ye wait a minute, Mr. Durrett, sir?” implored the cabdriver.
“You'll be after ruining me cab entirely.” (Loud roars and vigorous
resistance from the obelisk, the cab rocking violently.) “This
gintleman” (meaning me) “will have him by the head, and I'll get hold of
his feet, sir.” Which he did, after a severe kick in the stomach.

“Head'sh all right, Martin.”

“To be sure it is, Mr. Peters. Now will ye rest aisy awhile, sir?”

“I'm axphyxiated,” cried another voice from the darkness, the mined
voice of Jerome Kyme, our classmate.

“Get the tackles under him!” came forth in commanding tones from
Conybear.

In the meantime many windows had been raised and much gratuitous
advice was being given. The three occupants of the cab's seat who
had previously clamoured for Mr. Peters' removal, now inconsistently
resisted it; suddenly he came out with a jerk, and we had him fairly
upright on the pavement minus a collar and tie and the buttons of his
evening waistcoat. Those who remained in the cab engaged in a riotous
game of hunt the slipper, while Tom peered into the dark interior,
observing gravely the progress of the sport. First flew out an overcoat
and a much-battered hat, finally the pumps, all of which in due time
were adjusted to his person, and I started home with him, with much
parting counsel from the other three.

“Whereinell were you, Hughie?” he inquired. “Hunted all over for you.
Had a sousin' good time. Went to Babcock's--had champagne--then to see
Babesh in--th'--Woods. Ham knows one of the Babesh had supper with four
of 'em. Nice Babesh!”

“For heaven's sake don't step on me again!” I cried.

“Sh'poloshize, old man. But y'know I'm William Shakespheare. C'n do
what I damplease.” He halted in the middle of the street and recited
dramatically:--

    “'Not marble, nor th' gilded monuments
     Of prinches sh'll outlive m' powerful rhyme.'”

“How's that, Alonzho, b'gosh?”

“Where did you learn it?” I demanded, momentarily forgetting his
condition.

“Fr'm Ralph,” he replied, “says I wrote it. Can't remember....”

After I had got him to bed,--a service I had learned to perform with
more or less proficiency,--I sat down to consider the events of the
evening, to attempt to get a proportional view. The intensity of my
disgust was not hypocritical as I gazed through the open door into the
bedroom and recalled the times when I, too, had been in that condition.
Tom Peters drunk, and sleeping it off, was deplorable, without doubt;
but Hugh Paret drunk was detestable, and had no excuse whatever. Nor
did I mean by this to set myself on a higher ethical plane, for I
felt nothing but despair and humility. In my state of clairvoyance
I perceived that he was a better man, than I, and that his lapses
proceeded from a love of liquor and the transcendent sense of
good-fellowship that liquor brings.




VII.

The crisis through which I passed at Cambridge, inaugurated by the
events I have just related, I find very difficult to portray. It was a
religious crisis, of course, and my most pathetic memory concerning it
is of the vain attempts to connect my yearnings and discontents with
the theology I had been taught; I began in secret to read my Bible, yet
nothing I hit upon seemed to point a way out of my present predicament,
to give any definite clew to the solution of my life. I was not mature
enough to reflect that orthodoxy was a Sunday religion unrelated to a
world whose wheels were turned by the motives of self-interest; that it
consisted of ideals not deemed practical, since no attempt was made
to put them into practice in the only logical manner,--by reorganizing
civilization to conform with them. The implication was that the
Christ who had preached these ideals was not practical.... There were
undoubtedly men in the faculty of the University who might have helped
me had I known of them; who might have given me, even at that time,
a clew to the modern, logical explanation of the Bible as an immortal
record of the thoughts and acts of men who had sought to do just what
I was seeking to do,--connect the religious impulse to life and make
it fruitful in life: an explanation, by the way, a thousand-fold more
spiritual than the old. But I was hopelessly entangled in the meshes
of the mystic, the miraculous and supernatural. If I had analyzed my
yearnings, I might have realized that I wanted to renounce the life I
had been leading, not because it was sinful, but because it was aimless.
I had not learned that the Greek word for sin is “a missing of the
mark.” Just aimlessness! I had been stirred with the desire to perform
some service for which the world would be grateful: to write great
literature, perchance. But it had never been suggested to me that such
swellings of the soul are religious, that religion is that kind of
feeling, of motive power that drives the writer and the scientist, the
statesman and the sculptor as well as the priest and the Prophet to
serve mankind for the joy of serving: that religion is creative, or
it is nothing: not mechanical, not a force imposed from without, but a
driving power within. The “religion” I had learned was salvation from
sin by miracle: sin a deliberate rebellion, not a pathetic missing of
the mark of life; useful service of man, not the wandering of untutored
souls who had not been shown the way. I felt religious. I wanted to go
to church, I wanted to maintain, when it was on me, that exaltation I
dimly felt as communion with a higher power, with God, and which also
was identical with my desire to write, to create....

I bought books, sets of Wordsworth and Keats, of Milton and Shelley
and Shakespeare, and hid them away in my bureau drawers lest Tom and my
friends should see them. These too I read secretly, making excuses for
not joining in the usual amusements. Once I walked to Mrs. Bolton's and
inquired rather shamefacedly for Hermann Krebs, only to be informed that
he had gone out.... There were lapses, of course, when I went off on
the old excursions,--for the most part the usual undergraduate follies,
though some were of a more serious nature; on these I do not care to
dwell. Sex was still a mystery.... Always I awoke afterwards to bitter
self-hatred and despair.... But my work in English improved, and I
earned the commendation and friendship of Mr. Cheyne. With a wisdom
for which I was grateful he was careful not to give much sign of it
in classes, but the fact that he was “getting soft on me” was evident
enough to be regarded with suspicion. Indeed the state into which I had
fallen became a matter of increasing concern to my companions, who tried
every means from ridicule to sympathy, to discover its cause and shake
me out of it. The theory most accepted was that I was in love.

“Come on now, Hughie--tell me who she is. I won't give you away,” Tom
would beg. Once or twice, indeed, I had imagined I was in love with the
sisters of Boston classmates whose dances I attended; to these parties
Tom, not having overcome his diffidence in respect to what he called
“social life,” never could be induced to go.

It was Ralph who detected the true cause of my discontent. Typical as no
other man I can recall of the code to which we had dedicated ourselves,
the code that moulded the important part of the undergraduate world
and defied authority, he regarded any defection from it in the light of
treason. An instructor, in a fit of impatience, had once referred to
him as the Mephistopheles of his class; he had fatal attractions, and a
remarkable influence. His favourite pastime was the capricious exercise
of his will on weaker characters, such as his cousin, Ham Durrett; if
they “swore off,” Ralph made it his business to get them drunk again,
and having accomplished this would proceed himself to administer a new
oath and see that it was kept. Alcohol seemed to have no effect whatever
on him. Though he was in the class above me, I met him frequently at a
club to which I had the honour to belong, then a suite of rooms over a
shop furnished with a pool and a billiard table, easy-chairs and a bar.
It has since achieved the dignity of a house of its own.

We were having, one evening, a “religious” argument, Cinibar, Laurens
and myself and some others. I can't recall how it began; I think
Cinibar had attacked the institution of compulsory chapel, which nobody
defended; there was something inherently wrong, he maintained, with a
religion to which men had to be driven against their wills. Somewhat to
my surprise I found myself defending a Christianity out of which I had
been able to extract but little comfort and solace. Neither Laurens
nor Conybear, however, were for annihilating it: although they took
the other side of the discussion of a subject of which none of us knew
anything, their attacks were but half-hearted; like me, they were still
under the spell exerted by a youthful training.

We were all of us aware of Ralph, who sat at some distance looking over
the pages of an English sporting weekly. Presently he flung it down.

“Haven't you found out yet that man created God, Hughie?” he inquired.
“And even if there were a personal God, what reason have you to think
that man would be his especial concern, or any concern of his whatever?
The discovery of evolution has knocked your Christianity into a cocked
hat.”

I don't remember how I answered him. In spite of the superficiality
of his own arguments, which I was not learned enough to detect, I was
ingloriously routed. Darwin had kicked over the bucket, and that was all
there was to it.... After we had left the club both Conybear and Laurens
admitted they were somewhat disturbed, declaring that Ralph had gone too
far. I spent a miserable night, recalling the naturalistic assertions
he had made so glibly, asking myself again and again how it was that the
religion to which I so vainly clung had no greater effect on my actions
and on my will, had not prevented me from lapses into degradation. And
I hated myself for having argued upon a subject that was still sacred.
I believed in Christ, which is to say that I believed that in some
inscrutable manner he existed, continued to dominate the world and had
suffered on my account.

To whom should I go now for a confirmation of my wavering beliefs? One
of the results--it will be remembered of religion as I was taught it
was a pernicious shyness, and even though I had found a mentor and
confessor, I might have hesitated to unburden myself. This would be
different from arguing with Ralph Hambleton. In my predicament, as I was
wandering through the yard, I came across a notice of an evening talk
to students in Holder Chapel, by a clergyman named Phillips Brooks. This
was before the time, let me say in passing, when his sermons at Harvard
were attended by crowds of undergraduates. Well, I stood staring at the
notice, debating whether I should go, trying to screw up my courage; for
I recognized clearly that such a step, if it were to be of any value,
must mean a distinct departure from my present mode of life; and I
recall thinking with a certain revulsion that I should have to “turn
good.” My presence at the meeting would be known the next day to all my
friends, for the idea of attending a religious gathering when one was
not forced to do so by the authorities was unheard of in our set. I
should be classed with the despised “pious ones” who did such things
regularly. I shrank from the ridicule. I had, however, heard of Mr.
Brooks from Ned Symonds, who was by no means of the pious type, and
whose parents attended Mr. Brooks's church in Boston.... I left my
decision in abeyance. But when evening came I stole away from the club
table, on the plea of an engagement, and made my way rapidly toward
Holder Chapel. I had almost reached it--when I caught a glimpse of
Symonds and of some others approaching,--and I went on, to turn again.
By this time the meeting, which was in a room on the second floor, had
already begun. Palpitating, I climbed the steps; the door of the
room was slightly ajar; I looked in; I recall a distinct sensation of
surprise,--the atmosphere of that meeting was so different from what
I had expected. Not a “pious” atmosphere at all! I saw a very tall
and heavy gentleman, dressed in black, who sat, wholly at ease, on the
table! One hand was in his pocket, one foot swung clear of the ground;
and he was not preaching, but talking in an easy, conversational tone to
some forty young men who sat intent on his words. I was too excited to
listen to what he was saying, I was making a vain attempt to classify
him. But I remember the thought, for it struck me with force,--that
if Christianity were so thoroughly discredited by evolution, as Ralph
Hambleton and other agnostics would have one believe, why should this
remarkably sane and able-looking person be standing up for it as though
it were still an established and incontrovertible fact?

He had not, certainly, the air of a dupe or a sentimentalist, but
inspired confidence by his very personality. Youthlike, I watched him
narrowly for flaws, for oratorical tricks, for all kinds of histrionic
symptoms. Again I was near the secret; again it escaped me. The argument
for Christianity lay not in assertions about it, but in being it. This
man was Christianity.... I must have felt something of this, even though
I failed to formulate it. And unconsciously I contrasted his strength,
which reinforced the atmosphere of the room, with that of Ralph
Hambleton, who was, a greater influence over me than I have recorded,
and had come to sway me more and more, as he had swayed others. The
strength of each was impressive, yet this Mr. Brooks seemed to me the
bodily presentment of a set of values which I would have kept constantly
before my eyes.... I felt him drawing me, overcoming my hesitation,
belittling my fear of ridicule. I began gently to open the door--when
something happened,--one of those little things that may change the
course of a life. The door made little noise, yet one of the men sitting
in the back of the room chanced to look around, and I recognized Hermann
Krebs. His face was still sunken from his recent illness. Into his eyes
seemed to leap a sudden appeal, an appeal to which my soul responded yet
I hurried down the stairs and into the street. Instantly I regretted my
retreat, I would have gone back, but lacked the courage; and I strayed
unhappily for hours, now haunted by that look of Krebs, now wondering
what the remarkably sane-looking and informal clergyman whose presence
dominated the little room had been talking about. I never learned, but
I did live to read his biography, to discover what he might have talked
about,--for he if any man believed that life and religion are one, and
preached consecration to life's task.

Of little use to speculate whether the message, had I learned it then,
would have fortified and transformed me!

In spite of the fact that I was unable to relate to a satisfying
conception of religion my new-born determination, I made up my mind, at
least, to renounce my tortuous ways. I had promised my father to be
a lawyer; I would keep my promise, I would give the law a fair trial;
later on, perhaps, I might demonstrate an ability to write. All very
praiseworthy! The season was Lent, a fitting time for renunciations and
resolves. Although I had more than once fallen from grace, I believed
myself at last to have settled down on my true course--when something
happened. The devil interfered subtly, as usual--now in the person of
Jerry Kyme. It should be said in justice to Jerry that he did not look
the part. He had sunny-red, curly hair, mischievous blue eyes with
long lashes, and he harboured no respect whatever for any individual or
institution, sacred or profane; he possessed, however, a shrewd sense
of his own value, as many innocent and unsuspecting souls discovered
as early as our freshman year, and his method of putting down the
presumptuous was both effective and unique. If he liked you, there could
be no mistake about it.

One evening when I was engaged in composing a theme for Mr. Cheyne on
no less a subject than the interpretation of the work of William
Wordsworth, I found myself unexpectedly sprawling on the floor, in my
descent kicking the table so vigorously as to send the ink-well a foot
or two toward the ceiling. This, be it known, was a typical proof of
Jerry's esteem. For he had entered noiselessly, jerking the back of
my chair, which chanced to be tilted, and stood with his hands in his
pockets, surveying the ruin he had wrought, watching the ink as it
trickled on the carpet. Then he picked up the book.

“Poetry, you darned old grind!” he exclaimed disgustedly. “Say, Parry, I
don't know what's got into you, but I want you to come home with me
for the Easter holidays. It'll do you good. We'll be on the Hudson, you
know, and we'll manage to make life bearable somehow.”

I forgot my irritation, in sheer surprise.

“Why, that's mighty good of you, Jerry--” I began, struggling to my
feet.

“Oh, rot!” he exclaimed. “I shouldn't ask you if I didn't want you.”

There was no denying the truth of this, and after he had gone I sat for
a long time with my pen in my mouth, reflecting as to whether or not
I should go. For I had the instinct that here was another cross-roads,
that more depended on my decision than I cared to admit. But even then
I knew what I should do. Ridiculous not to--I told myself. How could a
week or ten days with Jerry possibly affect my newborn, resolve?

Yet the prospect, now, of a visit to the Kymes' was by no means so
glowing as it once would have been. For I had seen visions, I had
dreamed dreams, beheld a delectable country of my very own. A
year ago--nay, even a month ago--how such an invitation would have
glittered!... I returned at length to my theme, over which, before
Jerry's arrival, I had been working feverishly. But now the glamour had
gone from it.

Presently Tom came in.

“Anyone been here?” he demanded.

“Jerry,” I told him.

“What did he want?”

“He wanted me to go home with him at Easter.”

“You're going, of course.”

“I don't know. I haven't decided.”

“You'd be a fool not to,” was Tom's comment. It voiced, succinctly, a
prevailing opinion.

It was the conclusion I arrived at in my own mind. But just why I had
been chosen for the honour, especially at such a time, was a riddle.
Jerry's invitations were charily given, and valued accordingly; and more
than once, at our table, I had felt a twinge of envy when Conybear or
someone else had remarked, with the proper nonchalance, in answer to

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