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Rough-Hewn

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher · English · Gutenberg #37451 · 975,777 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Rough-Hewn

Author: Dorothy Canfield Fisher


        
Release date: September 18, 2011 [eBook #37451]
                Most recently updated: August 22, 2012

Language: English

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Produced by Cathy Maxam, Suzanne Shell and the Online
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ROUGH-HEWN


_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

  THE SQUIRREL-CAGE
  A MONTESSORI MOTHER
  MOTHERS AND CHILDREN
  THE BENT TWIG
  THE REAL MOTIVE
  FELLOW CAPTAINS
    (With SARAH N. CLEGHORN)
  UNDERSTOOD BETSY
  HOME FIRES IN FRANCE
  THE DAY OF GLORY
  THE BRIMMING CUP




  ROUGH-HEWN

  BY
  DOROTHY CANFIELD

  "There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
  Rough-hew them how we will."

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY




  COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
  HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.




CONTENTS


                                                           PAGE

  ANY LITTLE BOY                                              1

  CULTURE IN THE AIR                                         29

  NEALE BEGINS TO BE NEALE                                   85

  "TO-DAY SHALL BE THE SAME AS YESTERDAY"                   129

  AN EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES AND THE LIBERAL ARTS       209

  BIRTHDAYS IN SEVERAL LANGUAGES                            317

  THE END OF ALL ROADS                                      379




_ANY LITTLE BOY_




CHAPTER I


In the spring of 1893 Strindberg had just published "A Fool's
Confession," D'Annunzio was employing all the multicolored glory of his
style to prove "The Triumph of Death"; Hardy was somberly mixing on his
palette the twilight grays and blacks and mourning purples of "Jude the
Obscure"; Nordau, gnashing his teeth, was bellowing "Decadent" at his
contemporaries who smirked a complacent acceptance of the epithet ...
and, all unconscious of the futility and sordidness of the world, Neale
Crittenden swaggered along Central Avenue, brandishing his shinny stick.

It was a new yellow shinny stick, broad and heavy and almost as long as
the boy who carried it. Ever since he had seen it in the window of
Schwartz's Bazar, his soul had yearned for it. For days he had hoarded
his pennies, foregoing ice-cream sodas, shutting his ears to the
seductive ding-dong of the waffle-man's cart, and this very afternoon
the immense sum of twenty-five cents had been completed and now he owned
a genuine boughten stick, varnished and shiny. What couldn't he do with
such a club! He beat it on the sidewalk till the flag-stones rang; he
swung it around his head. What stupendous long-distance goals he was
going to make! How he would dribble the ball through the enemy!

Spring had turned the vacant lots into sticky red mud, but Central
Avenue was hard if somewhat undulating macadam. It had stone curbs too,
that bounced the ball back as if specially designed for side-boundaries
by a philanthropic Board of Supervisors. Somewhere along it he was sure
to find a game in progress. Yes, there they were in front of Number Two
School. Neale broke into a run and coming up breathless plunged into the
scrimmage.

Shinny as played on Union Hill in the nineties had none of the
refinements of its dignified cousin, field-hockey. Roughly divided into
two sides, an indeterminate number of players tried with their sticks to
knock a hard rubber ball to opposite ends of a block. Team work was
elementary: the slowest runner on each side lay back to "tend gool"; the
rest, following the fortunes of the ball, pelted to and fro in a
seething melee of scuffling feet and clashing sticks. After each goal
the ball was brought to the middle of the block, the two captains took
their stand with sticks on either side of it. "One," they rapped their
sticks on the pavement; "two," they rapped them together; "one, two,
one, two." Then pandemonium broke out shrilly, sticks rapping against
each other or against opposing shins, yells of "shinny on your own
side," a welter of little boys battling around the ball as it shot up
and down, sometimes advancing rapidly, sometimes stationary among a
vortex of locked sticks until finally a lucky knock drove it past one or
the other side street.

Once as they were walking back after a goal, Fatty Schmidt noticed
Neale's new weapon. "Oh, you gotta new shinny. Where'd you get it?
Schwartz? Huh, them kind ain't no good; they split." Neale was silent as
an Iroquois, but he had already begun to doubt. The heavy new stick
didn't seem to be turning out what he had expected. It tripped him up
occasionally and he never got it on the ball as quickly as he had his
old home-made locust-shoot with the knob of root at the end. But he kept
his doubts to himself, let out another notch of speed, and tried harder.
It began to go better. He stopped a dangerous rush by hooking Franz
Uhler's stick just as he was about to shoot for goal. Another time
unaided he took the ball away from Don Roberts, lost it, but Marty Ryan
retrieved it, and Neale and Marty raced down almost on top of the
opposing goal keeper. Marty hit the ball a terrific crack. "Gool!" they
cried exultingly, then on another note, indignantly, "Hi there, drop
that!" For as the ball bounded along the street, a ragged little boy who
had sprung up from nowhere grabbed it and made off. The pack gave chase.
The little gamin had a good start but the bigger boys ahead of Neale
were gaining on him. He turned off eastward. As Neale tore along he saw
Marty and Franz catch up with the little kid, and then ... what was
this? Where did all those other boys come from?

With a whoop of joyous exultation he recognized the familiar ambush, the
welcome invitation to battle. "Come on, fellers!" he yelled back to his
own crowd. "Hoboken micks!" And with the rest of the Union Hill crowd
charged through a fire of stones at the invaders.

Then it was that the new shinny stick vindicated itself. Swinging it
like a crusader's two-handed sword, Neale hacked and hewed. He landed on
the funny-bone of a boy struggling with Marty for the ball. He landed on
another mick's ribs. He heaved the stick up and was going to smash a
hostile head when the enemy broke and ran. Triumphant, the Union Hill
boys chased them to the edge of the hill, and sent a volley of stones
after them as they scrambled down the steep path among the rocks, but
pursued them no further. Below was the enemy's country. The Union Hill
crowd never ventured down the rocks to the level cinder-filled flats
beside the railroad tracks. That was Hoboken and a foreign land.

It was supper time now. The victors said "So long" to each other and
dispersed. Neale, somewhat lame but elated, went up the wooden steps of
the porch. He stood his stick up in the umbrella-stand, went to the
bathroom, washed his hands, brushed his hair, at least the top layer of
it, and went quietly down to the dining-room. There he ate his buttered
toast and creamed potatoes and drank his cocoa silently, while his
father and mother talked. He paid no attention to what they said. He was
living over again the fight of the afternoon, and forecasting fresh
conquests for the future. His mother passed him a sauce-dish of
preserved cherries and a piece of cake. After he had eaten this, he got
up silently and went back to his room. His mother looked after him
tenderly. "Neale is a _good_ boy," she said. Although he was no longer
there, she still saw his honest round face, clear eyes, fresh color. She
smiled to herself lovingly.

Her husband nodded, "Yes, he's a good boy." After a thoughtful pause, he
added, "Seems an awfully _quiet_ kid, though. I mean he keeps things to
himself. You haven't any idea whether he's having a real boy's fun or
not. He makes so little noise about it."

As he passed through the hall Neale lingered a moment to handle the
shinny stick again. He looked at it carefully to see if perhaps there
was not a little blood on it.




CHAPTER II


Union Hill had been created by two very different classes of
home-makers, a fact which was obvious from its aspect. Its
undistinguished frame buildings for the most part sheltered families
who, having to live somewhere, had settled there where inadequate
communication with the rest of the world kept rents down. Side by side
with this drab majority, but mingling with it little, a few well-to-do
business men had built comfortable, roomy homes in an uninspired
compromise between their business connections in the city and their
preference for open-air life for their families. This narrow ridge of
trap rock continuing the Palisades southward between the partly
reclaimed back lots of Hoboken and the immense, irreclaimable salt
marshes of the Hackensack Valley, had a certain picturesqueness, had
seemed to promise freedom from malaria (supposed at that time to result
from the breathing the "miasma" hanging low about swamp land), and
certainly offered fresher air than a flat on a New York street or a town
beside a New Jersey marsh. It was a one-sided sort of compromise in
which the families came out rather badly. Whatever natural beauty might
be inherent in the site was largely nullified by the tawdry imaginings
of small architects and building contractors, and despite popular
medical theories, the malaria was about the same on the hill as on the
flats. But though the advance of the suburban idea was already
developing more attractive sites at no very great distance, few families
moved away. With the massive immobility characteristic of humanity, the
scattered well-to-do families of Union Hill stuck it out, grim and
disillusioned, taking the consequences of their error of judgment rather
than lose the sensation of stability, which means home.

Little Neale was quite unconscious of all this. To his ten-year-old
thoughts "the Hill" was home, and where could you live except at home?
It never occurred to him that there might be other or better homes--the
Hill was where he lived. He accepted it as uncritically as he accepted
life, school, his parents. Being, for that region where every one took
quinine as a matter of course, rather a healthy boy, he accepted the
initial facts of nature without criticism or much interest, working off
the surplus of his young energy in baseball, shinny and guerilla
skirmishes with the boys from other localities.

His unconcern with the world around him, except for the details of
boy-life, was complete. Home was warm and secure; he did not inquire
whether other homes might be less warm or more elegant. Food was good to
eat, though meals with adult conversation between his father and mother
were tedious and occupied far too much time that might have been spent
in play. His father was kind and remote. Neale thought very little about
his father. He went away in the morning after breakfast and came in just
before supper. He was in the lumber business, and when he went away, it
was to the "office." Neale never went to the office; but once in a
while, on Saturdays, Father took him walking down the long flight of
wooden steps, down to the enemy's country where, thanks to the size of
his father's protecting figure, never a Hoboken mick dared to throw a
mudball; across the railroad track and a long, long way on paved
sidewalks till they came out on a wide, noisy, muddy street filled with
trucks drawn by horses with gleaming round haunches. And on the other
side of the street there wasn't any more land, but long sheds that stuck
out into the oily, green Hudson River. These sheds had huge doors
through which the big, dappled horses kept hauling trucks, in and out.
Some of the wharves had ships tied beside them. Occasionally these were
sailing ships with bow-sprits slanting forward over the street, but more
often steamers, black except for a band of red down near the water. As
Neale walked along, although he never ventured to ask his busy father to
stop and let him stare his fill, he could catch glimpses through the
doorways of what went on inside the sheds. There were steep gang-ways,
sloping from the plank floor of the pier to the ships, and up and down
these, big men in blue jumpers wheeled hand-carts, always moving at a
dog-trot. Through other openings, bundles of boxes tied together with
rope slid down sloping boards, and other men with sharp hooks were
always loading them on trucks or unloading them from trucks; or huge
bales descended from the air, dangling at the end of a clinking chain.
This bustle and noise, the strange tarry smells and the clatter of steam
winches exhilarated Neale, excited him, made something quiver and glow
within him. He longed to go in and be part of it.

But Father never went inside, and it never occurred to Neale to explain
how he felt, and to ask Father please to take him in. Silent as an
Iroquois, he walked beside his father, who often glanced down, baffled,
at the healthy, personable little boy beside him, looking so exactly
like any other well-dressed, middle-class little boy.

And yet, often before he fell asleep at night, Neale heard again the
clanking clatter of the great unloading cranes, smelled again the
intoxicating tarry salty ocean smells and felt again something quiver
and glow within him.

There was neither quiver nor glow about the place where Father finally
stopped of his own accord. In a wide part of the street, huge piles of
lumber were stacked. Father would walk slowly along these, looking at
them very hard, and then he would go into a tiny, stuffy little wooden
clap-boarded house--just one room, with men in shirt sleeves writing at
desks--and there he would talk incomprehensible grown-up talk with one
of the men, and the man would write at his desk, and Father standing up,
would write in a note-book with a fountain pen ... and that was all the
fun there was to the lumber business!

Left to himself, Neale sat on the door-step and watched the fascinating
life on the docks. Once he slipped across the street and tried to follow
a truck in, but a big man with a red face yelled at him so loudly to
"get out of there" that Neale ran back again, furiously angry but not
knowing how to get around the big watchman. All he could do was to sit
just inside the door, hating the watchman, and stare at the tantalizing
activity so far away, and wish with all his heart that Father's business
were more romantic.

Mother meant more to Neale than Father did. He knew her better ... a
little better. He had even some abstract ideas about her, that she was
beautiful when she dressed up to go out in the afternoon. Mother fussed
about his clothes more than was convenient, and insisted on baths, and
washing hands before meals, but when he was sick, Mother read him
stories, and let him leave the gas turned on in his room when he went to
bed. Mother gave him pennies, too, and when Father was away on a
business trip, he and Mother would eat alone together, and she would
talk to him and ask him questions about school and play, and his boy
friends. Neale didn't mind telling her things ... he liked Mother ...
but he couldn't seem to manage to think of a great deal to tell her. It
sounded foolish to talk about games to grown-ups.

And games were really all that Neale cared about, almost all that he
ever thought about. As to telling Mother other things, the few other
things he did occasionally think about, why, there didn't seem to be
anywhere to start. He'd have to begin "way back at the beginning" and
now that Neale was ten years old, the beginning was too far back for him
to lay hold of.

As a matter of fact, she did not often ask about any of it, even in her
distant careful way of asking. She just took good care of him, and had
what he liked for supper, and put the kind of books he liked up in his
room, and kept his buttons sewed on, and every night, till he was a big,
big boy came into his room to kiss him good-night in his bed. She didn't
say anything much then; just, "Have you enough covers?" maybe; or, "I
believe I'd better open that window wider," and then, with the kiss,
"Good-night, Neale."

"Good-night, Mother."

Then he turned over and nearly always went instantly to sleep.

When Father was at home, mostly Father and Mother talked together at
table, and read together after supper in the sitting-room, while Neale
"did" his lessons upstairs. Or else Mother would dress up in one of her
pretty dresses and Father would put on a clean shirt and his dark suit
and they would go across the river to a theater in New York, leaving
Neale to Katie, the good-natured, middle-aged Irish cook who had been
with them since before Neale's birth. Or sometimes they had "company";
other ladies in pretty dresses and other husbands in clean shirts and
dark suits. Then they had a specially good supper, the sort of expensive
things that were usually reserved for Sunday dinner, planked shad and
roast chicken and ice-cream, and coffee in the little gold-lined cups
that Mother always washed herself. Neale didn't mind company since
nobody paid much attention to him, and he liked the extra Sunday
eatables on a week-day, but one of his few impressions about his father
and mother was that, although they always talked and laughed a great
deal more when there was company, and seemed to have a lively time, they
really liked it better when there were only the two of them talking over
Neale's head at the table, and settling down afterwards to read and talk
to one another around the drop-light.

Another of those impressions was the tone of his father's voice when
looking up from his book, he said, "Oh, Mary!" Neale always knew just
the look there would be in Mother's eyes as she laid down her own book
and asked, "Yes, what is it, dear?"




CHAPTER III


Among the many things which Neale never thought of questioning was the
fact that he did not go to a public school as all his play-mates did. If
he had asked, he would have found that his father and mother had an
answer all ready for him, the completeness and thoroughness of which
might have indicated that they had perhaps silenced some questionings of
their own with it. He would have heard that of course they approved of
public schools, and that if they had continued to live in Massachusetts,
even if they had gone to live in a nice part of New York City, they
would certainly have sent their son to a public school. But here at
Union Hill, with the public schools so thickly populated by foreign
children, the conditions were really different. What could a little
American boy learn in a class-room with forty foreign children, whose
constant study must needs be English?

There was no flaw in the reasoning they were prepared to present to
their son when he should ask the natural question about his schooling.
But Neale never asked it. By the time he was old enough to think of it,
habit had made him incapable of conceiving it. He no more wondered why
he went every morning to the Taylors' house on Bower Street, instead of
to Public School Number Two, than why he had two eyes instead of one.
That was the way things were. Neale was slow to question the way things
were.

Dr. Taylor was another transplanted New Englander like Neale's father,
with another college-graduate wife (rarer in those days than now), like
Neale's mother. His ideas on children and the public schools would have
been exactly like those of the Crittendens, even if they had not been
fortified by the lameness of his only son. Jimmy's crutches made Public
School definitely out of the question, and since Jimmy must have
instruction at home, why, his two sisters, Elsie and Myrtle, might as
well profit by it. Dr. Taylor was glad enough to have the expense of
paying Miss Vanderwater shared by Mr. Crittenden, and to let Neale share
in the benefits of Miss Vanderwater's instruction.

Hence it happened that every morning Neale rang at the Taylors' front
door, and when the maid let him in, went upstairs to the big front room
on the top floor and there did whatever Miss Vanderwater told him to do.
He was under her command from nine in the morning till noon, when he
went home and had lunch with Mother, who always asked how school had
gone, to which question Neale always made the same truthful answer that
he guessed it was all right. At one he returned for two more hours with
Miss Vanderwater. In this way he went through a series of Appleton's
Readers, filled copy-books with thin Spencerian script, copied maps in
colored ink with the coast-line shaded with scallops, did arithmetic on
a slate and made very fair progress in learning German. German was much
in the air in that locality.

Of course he did not spend all those years of his life, side by side
with three other children without becoming intimately acquainted with
them. But one of the instinctive watertight compartments in Neale's
Anglo-Saxon mind was the one in which he kept his school separate from
his life. He studied with the Taylor children, but he never dreamed of
staying after hours to play with them. And yet he knew them infinitely
better than any of the innumerable chance street-acquaintances with whom
he flew kites or played one-old-cat. He knew instinctively, knew without
thinking of it, knew to the marrow of his brutally normal bones that
Jimmy Taylor was lame not only in his legs but in his character. Jimmy's
delicacy, the great care taken of him, the fact that he always played in
the house or back-yard with his sisters, made a sissy of him. That was
the plain fact, and Neale was not one to refuse to admit plain facts. He
was always kind to Jimmy, at least not unkind, but he was always
secretly relieved when the front door shut behind him, hiding from him
Jimmy's too-white hands, thin neck and querulous invalid's voice.

Of the two girls, Elsie was only a little kid, so much younger than
Jimmy and Neale that they were barely aware of her existence. Myrtle, on
the contrary, was very much there, a little girl whose comments on
things never failed to arouse in Neale the profoundest astonishment. How
could anybody think of such dotty things to say? You never had the least
idea how anything was going to strike her, except that it was likely to
strike her so hard that she made an awful fuss about it.

Myrtle lived in mortal terror of any little dirt, it seemed to Neale.
One day in May, when they had had a picnic-lunch out in the back-yard of
the Taylors' house, Myrtle carried on perfectly wild about a little
flying white thing that had fallen into her glass of lemonade. Holy
smoke! thought Neale, if she was afraid to get it out, _he_ wasn't. So
he fished it out with a spoon, and handed her back the glass. And what
did she do? She made up an awful face and threw the lemonade on the
ground! Neale was horrified at the waste.

And the day when Miss Vanderwater in their "natural history lesson" told
them about angle-worms and how they keep the ground light and open,
didn't Myrtle go off in another fit, with her eyes goggling and her
fingers all stretched apart as though she felt angle-worms everywhere.
She insisted that Miss Vanderwater must be wrong, that such an awful
thing could not be true.

"Why, what do you mean?" asked Miss Vanderwater, for once, Neale noticed
with satisfaction, as much at a loss as he.

"Ugh! _Nasty!_" cried Myrtle. "So all we eat has grown out of what
angle-worms have vomited up! And so they're wriggling around,
_every_where, touching everything that grows! I never dreamed of such a
nasty thing! I'll never eat a radish again! It makes me sick to think of
it--to put my mouth where a horrible old angle-worm has been rubbing all
its slime off!"

"Now what do you think of that?" Neale asked himself.

Mostly, Myrtle was just the worst dead loss you ever saw; but once in a
while you got some good out of her foolishness, like the time when she
bit into a lovely-looking apple and laid it down, looking very white
and sick at her stomach. She had bitten into a rotten place, and
although Neale pointed out honestly to her that it was the only bad
spot, and that the rest of the apple was a corker, she refused to touch
it, or even to look at it. She said she never wanted to see another
apple again as long as she lived! So Neale ate it to save it, sinking
his strong teeth through the taut red skin, reveling in the craunchy,
juicy white flesh, chewing away on huge crisp delicious mouthfuls. It
was perhaps as well, too, that Myrtle hadn't tried to go on eating it,
for Neale found another rotten spot. But he spit out the
cottony-feeling, brown, bad-tasting stuff into the waste basket, and
having got rid of it, went on with the apple, his zest undiminished to
the last mouthful gnawed off the core. The idea of going back on apples
because you struck a rotten place! Nobody asked you to _eat_ the rotten
places! It was perfectly easy to spit them out, or, if you saw them
beforehand, to eat your way around them. He couldn't make anything out
of Myrtle, at all.

But he didn't allow himself to be bothered by her, any more than by
rotten spots in apples, and he escaped from her and from the whole
genteel atmosphere of the Taylor household, the moment three o'clock
came. The instant Miss Vanderwater said, "dismissed," he hurried home,
left his books and hurried out again to hang around Number Two School,
till four o'clock sent all its mingled conglomeration, ranging from
tattered ragamuffins to little boys in white sailor-suits, yelling and
whooping out to the vacant lots.

For, although the Crittendens' New England Americanism was not quite
resolute enough to make them send Neale to a public school full of
foreigners, it was more than enough to make them incapable of conceiving
so odious an act of tyranny as forbidding a little boy to play freely
with other little boys, whether any one knew their parents or not. They
would have detested the idea of keeping Neale alone in their safe,
sheltered back-yard, and would have been horrified to detect in him any
trace of feeling himself better than the public-school children--which
he certainly did not.

Sundays had a special color of their own, not at all the traditional
one. The Crittendens were Unitarians, not much given to church-going
anywhere, and the nearest Unitarian church was across the river in New
York. Mr. Crittenden had enough of New York on week-days. So they never
went. Few of the Union Hill families did. Union Hill was anything but a
stronghold of Sabbatarianism. It considered Sunday rather as a
heaven-sent opportunity for much comfortable beer-drinking, attendance
on a Turn-verein, and for enormous family gatherings around a big
dinner.

For Neale, with no other children in the family, the day was always
solitary; not unpleasantly so. It was a day for long imaginings,
stirring, warlike imaginings, realized through lead soldiers. Lead
soldiers were a passion of his little boyhood. He had two hundred and
ten, counting the ones with their legs broken, that he had mounted on
half corks. He did not move them around much. He did not knock them
down. When he got them set up in the order he wished, he fell into a
trance, imagining stories and incidents. It took a long time to get them
arranged to his satisfaction, with stiff marching columns, at
shoulder-arms in the middle, some Indian sharp-shooters prone or
kneeling behind painted lead shrubbery out in front, a squadron of
parade cavalry on one wing, a troop of galloping Arabs on the other.
Always he had a pile of blocks behind which a coal-black charger was
tethered, and on top, leaning against a spool of thread, stood the
general surveying his army. By uniform and whiskers the toymaker had
intended the figure for Kaiser Wilhelm I; but to the boy's eyes it was
no Prussian king, but Neale--Neale commanding his victorious troops. It
was all arranged with a careful hand and a loving heart, and it took a
long, long time.

Very often the dinner-bell rang before he had even finished setting them
up. At Sunday dinner there was generally "company," men friends of
Father's mostly, but sometimes husbands and wives. Neale knew all their
names, and shook hands without self-consciousness. He grinned silently
if they spoke to him, and retired to his shell, busying himself with his
own thoughts, all concentrated on the impending battle. He liked the
things you had to eat on Sunday and had found that on Sunday he could
eat the soft parts out of his bread and hide the crusts under the edge
of his plate. Mother always caught him if he tried that on week-days,
but on Sundays, with company there, she never said a word.

But no matter how slowly he ate, he was always through, wriggling
uncomfortably on his chair and horribly bored, while those tedious
grown-up people were still gabbling on. Mother always saw this, took
pity, and smiled a permission to him to be off. He slipped from his
chair and tip-toed silently into the kitchen where Katie was dressing
the salad. But she stopped long enough to open the pasteboard ice-cream
box from Schlauchter's candy-store and give him a saucer-full from the
soft part on top.

Then he hurried upstairs again to act out with his army the glorious
scenes he had been imagining during dinner. Sometimes it was a surprise
attack on the march, with cavalry sweeping down on limbered guns,
sometimes it was artillery formed in triangles, a muzzle at each apex,
blowing the advancing cavalry to flinders. Sometimes it was a
magnificent parade of triumph through a city gate with Kaiser Wilhelm
(Neale) at their head.

But at any moment, especially as he came on to be ten years old, quite
suddenly and inexplicably he grew tired of it. The illusion would
pass ... they would be just lifeless stupid dead soldiers, with broken
legs and rifles, and the paint flaking off ... impossible to imagine
anything with them. Also his arms and legs would feel numb with sitting
still on the floor so long. Then Neale would slide noiselessly down the
banisters, using his hands and legs as a brake to keep from crashing
into the newel-post, slip by the dining-room door with its clinking
coffee-cups and blue haze of cigar smoke, grab his cap and go quietly
outdoors.

Nobody would have stopped him, he knew that, but it was more fun to keep
it quiet. Free from the house he would act out his drama of escape by
running for a block or so, and then drop into the roaming boy's slow,
zig-zag ramble.

You can walk south or north on Union Hill for miles beyond a boy's
endurance, without finding a single feature to quicken the imagination;
but if you go east or west from anywhere on the Hill, you come at once
to a jumping-off place where below you stretches the flat, marshy river
or the flats. Neale preferred the western edge, even though it had no
steep rocks. He was far from having any conscious love for landscape,
but he found a certain satisfaction in looking over the yellow and brown
expanse of the marsh-grass and cat-tails, hazy in the afternoon sun, cut
with straight black lines of railroads (he named them over to himself,
identifying every one, the Jersey Central, Pennsylvania, Erie,
Lackawanna, and Jersey Northern), each with little toy-trains, each tiny
locomotive sending up little balls of cotton-wool to hang motionless in
the still afternoon air. To the southwest a hazy blur that was Newark,
and right in front, like a doomed mountain, bogged and sinking into the
marsh, the sinister bulk of Snake Hill. Neale used to stand and brood
over it, sometimes till the sun went down, all red and orange. He did
not stir till the cold roused him to think of home and supper.

But his feet did not always turn westward. Sometimes he walked to the
eastern edge. The rocks were steeper here, steep enough to be the
impregnable fortress he always imagined them. When he came here, after
reconnoitering the ground (for his tribal enemy did not observe the
Truce of God on Sundays), Neale would go out to the edge of the sheerest
promontory and dangle his legs down. Under his feet were railroad tracks
again, then a belt of vacant lots, some of them black with
cinder-filling, others green with the scum of stagnant water, then a
belt of frame houses where the enemy lived, then a zone of city brick
and flat tin roofs. Beyond it all was Castle Point, high and green
(healthy green this, not scum), jutting out into the Hudson.
Indistinctly he could make out the other side of the river, the line of
ships at the wharves and more city ... New York.

Occasionally Neale thought of New York, an almost mythical spot, though
he went there once in a while with Mother on tiresome quests for
clothes, as well as to matinees; sometimes he thought of the ships and
the wharves, and how much he wished he could see more of them. But
mostly he forgot the actual world. He was in command of the fort. All
around him his brave men were working the guns. Bang! Bang! The enemy
were marching along those straight paved streets. Their cannon balls
were bursting all around, but the garrison did not quail. Their
sharp-shooters were starting to climb the rocks. Ah, this was serious!
No time for delay. The commander seized the rifle from the hand of a
dying soldier ... how plainly Neale saw that dying soldier there at his
feet ... bang! bang! bang! ... with every shot one of the foremost
scalers dropped headlong.

The engagement was a decisive victory.




CHAPTER IV


Inevitably Saturdays were all devoted to play. Neither Neale's parents
nor he himself could have conceived of any other way of spending
Saturdays. What were Saturdays for?

It is true that in some of the more prosperous German-American families,
Saturday was music-lesson day, just as four o'clock instead of ushering
in roller-skating or marbles meant sitting in front of a piano, or
stooping over a 'cello. But Neale felt for play-mates thus victimized
the same slightly contemptuous pity he felt for Jimmy Taylor's lameness,
and the same unsurprised acceptance of his own good luck in being free
from such limitations.

Once in a while, too, Mother took him over to New York to a matinee, and
that was all right, too, if it didn't happen too often. Neale liked
going out with Mother pretty well, and if there was fighting in the play
he liked it fine. But all that was having something done to you, a
sensation of which school gave Neale more than enough, and which he
didn't like half so well--oh, not a quarter as well--oh, really not at
all, compared to the sensation of starting something and running it
yourself. If it really came right down to a comparison, there wasn't any
fun at all in seeing Irving pretend to be a crazy man, compared to the
fun of starting out Saturday morning, with no idea what you were going
to do, and rustling around till you got enough fellows together for the
game of the season.

To stand in your old play-clothes on your front-step, of a Saturday
morning, all the world before you, unfettered by obligations, a long,
long, rich day of play before you that was _yours_ ... how could anybody
be expected to prefer to dress up in things you had to try to keep
clean, sit in a dark, hot theater and watch painted-up men and women
carry on like all possessed about things that weren't really so. But
that was all right enough for a change, and was as good a way as any to
spend a rainy afternoon. Also, you could occasionally get ideas about
fights, out of a play.

But the real occupation of life was the playing of games. He nourished
his soul and grew strong on the emotional thrills of games. They were
the rich, fertile, substantial soil out of which he shot up into boyhood
from childhood. They were his religion, and his business-in-life, the
wide field where, unhampered, free as any naked savage, for all his
decent knickerbockers and sweater, he raced to and fro, elastic,
exultant, wild with the intoxication of the heady young strength poured
into him by every new day.

The astounding volume of sound, bursting up like flame and lava from a
volcano, which rose from every group of boys at play bore witness to the
extravagant and superabundant splendor of the intensity with which they
lived, a splendor not at all recognized by suffering householders near
whose decent and quiet homes a gang of boys settled down to play and
yell and shriek and quarrel and run and yell again.

It was the boys' world, not only untouched by grown-ups but blessedly
even unsuspected by parents. Since it was theirs, since they created it
anew every day, it exactly fitted their needs, and it grew and changed
with their inner growth as their school never did. They were far from
any self-conscious notion that they created it. Rather they seemed to
themselves to accept it from the outside, as they accepted the weather.
What had they to do with the succession of the seasons, either of games
or temperature? In the nature of things you could no more play marbles
in the autumn than pick wild strawberries in December.

In the autumn, they played football, a sort of association-football with
no limit to the number on each side, played with a heavy black rubber
ball, blown up with a brass tube. The tube always got lost, and the
valve always leaked. After a few games it became deflated, with the
resiliency of a soggy sponge. But it was kicked to and fro just the
same.

When snow came, there was snow-balling, with forts of a rich, chocolate
color, from the street-dirt mixed with the snow. About these raged
feudal chivalry, loyalty and pride of place, one street against another.
Sometimes all the district united against invading Huns from Hoboken or
Jersey City Heights. Only a few boys skated, and Neale was not one of
them, but everybody made slides in the slush.

With spring came roller-skates, marbles (utilizing the cracks between
sidewalk slabs), tops, kites, cat (a game for two), and, ah! baseball in
the vacant lots!

Neale was neither a star nor a dub at any game, but craving proficiency
more than anything else in the world, he learned to do pretty well at
all of them. At baseball, the major sport of the year, he toiled
incessantly, and when he was ten years old, he was pretty sure of his
job at second base on the Hancock Avenue Orioles. On ground balls he was
erratic, but so was everybody on those rough, vacant-lot diamonds, where
the ball ricocheted zig-zag from one stone to another. Long practice
catching fungoes gave him a death-like certainty on pop flies. His "wing
was poor," as he expressed it; strong enough in the arm, he had never
mastered the wrist snap that gives velocity. As a batsman he was
temperamental; one day he would feel right, and hit everything, another
day his batting eye would inexplicably be gone, and he would fan at the
widest dew-drops.

One Saturday afternoon they were playing the Crescent Juniors, a
glorious swat-fest of a game in which Neale had run wild all the
afternoon. It was in the ninth, the score was 17 to 15, with the
Crescents ahead. One was down, Neale at the bat, Marty Ryan, the
captain, was dancing on the base line, ready to dart in from third,
Franz Uhler was taking a dangerous lead off second. Neale rapped his bat
professionally on the plate and glared at the pitcher.

"Hit it out, Crit, old man!" yelled Fatty Schwartz, with a perfectly
unnecessary steam-calliope volume of tone, "Hit it out! Save me a lick!"

"Much good you'd do with a lick," thought Neale to himself. "You
couldn't hit a basket-ball with a telegraph pole." Yes, it was up to
him, to him alone. It was like a scene from one of his favorite stories
about himself, actually happening; and it went on actually happening. A
wide one, another wide. They didn't call balls in Neale's league. He
rapped the plate, "Aw! put it over if you know how!" he taunted. A foul
tip caught, another wide one haughtily ignored, a strike. The catcher
put on his mask and moved up close behind the bat. Neale felt himself
nerved to great things. He glued his eyes to the pitcher. By the motion
it should be a slow out. It wasn't breaking. Neale stabbed at it, sliced
it and landed a Texas leaguer back of short.

He didn't see what happened. He ran. He flew. As he rounded second he
caught a glimpse of the left fielder and short-stop falling over their
feet, both trying to pick up the ball. As he turned the corner at third
he saw the pitcher starting to run in to cover the plate and guessing
that the catcher was chasing a wild throw, Neale put his head down and
sprinted for dear life. Fifteen feet from the plate he dove, and shot
over in a cloud of dust.

Neale, the ball, and the pitcher all arrived there at the same moment,
but a partial umpire called it "safe." Don Roberts fouled to the
catcher, Fatty Schwartz fanned. But the game was won.

With his chest a couple of inches bigger than normal, Neale started for
home, and there on the sidewalk watching him, stood his father, looking
right at him, instead of over his head as Father was apt to do. Father
patted him on the shoulder. "That was a good swat, Neale," he said.

Neale wriggled. "Well, we had to have a hit," he explained, "and I knew
Don and Fatty wouldn't do much."

His father found no other comment to make. Neale had said his say.
Silent as Iroquois, they walked home to supper.

The next afternoon Father brought him a Louisville Slugger bat and Neale
was in the seventh heaven.

And yet, at the next game, he fanned the first three times up and Marty
waved him to the bench. This was terrible.

But the sting did not last because two days later Miss Vanderwater gave
each of them a present of a little book in German, and said auf
wiedersehn for the summer.




CHAPTER V


The end of school always meant the beginning of the yearly romance, the
beginning of the two months when Neale really lived all the time, not
just after four o'clock, and on Saturdays. And yet it was not all made
up of games! In fact there weren't any games at all. Queer!

Neale's life was largely made up of things that happened over and over
the same way, and so did this. The last day of school he always went
home and found the house smelling trunky and Mother with piles of
clothes folded on all the chairs, packing a Saratoga trunk. All the
afternoon she would pack it, putting things in and taking things out to
make room for other things, and when Father came home, things would be
all unfinished. It happened just that way, always. When Father came home
things _were_ all unfinished, and Father took out his watch, and said
the expressman had said he'd come at five-thirty, and Mother answered,
"You know they're always two hours late."

Nevertheless she stopped taking things out, and there was a scramble and
things put in any old way, with a good deal of laughing and funning from
Father and Mother, and finally with Mother and Neale sitting on the lid,
Father in his shirt sleeves strapped and locked it. Then while they were
eating supper, the expressman drove up (only an hour late, no, not even
quite an hour late, Neale thought), and took the trunk away, and now
Neale felt they were going.

He lay awake that night thinking of the coming adventure, his heart
beating faster, and then it was morning, and Mother was shaking him and
getting him into his clothes. A hurried breakfast on lukewarm oatmeal.
They went outside and got into a coupe standing there. Father and Mother
sat on the back seat, and Neale on the little front seat you had to
unfold. Then jog, jog, they went along Griffith Street down the
curlycue road, the horse's feet going clatter on the cobblestones. Then
jog, jog, jog again till at last they stopped and got out. They had come
to the ferry.

After they were on the ferry-boat, Father and Mother always waited so
that Neale could see the deck-hand pull down the gates that closed the
end of the boat and take out the iron hooks that held her fast to the
dock. Then the whistle blew, and the boat started, leaving the dock
looking as though a giant had bitten a half-circle out of it. Father
walked with him out to the front deck, where, holding to his
wide-brimmed sailor hat, Neale watched the waves and tug boats, and the
gulls flapping about. Father made him look at the city ahead, and
pointing out a building with a gold dome, told him that it was the World
Building, and the highest in the city. Neale looked, found it of no
interest and went back to his waves and gulls, which stirred something
of the quiver and wonder the wharves made him feel.

When the boat got across, it went smash into the piles and slid along
into the dock, where men hitched it fast with iron hooks and pulled the
hooks tight by turning a wheel around. Neale always noticed just how
such things were managed, and Father always gave him plenty of time to
look.

Then up went the gates and off went everybody. Outside they got into a
horse-car. After a while the horse-car began to run through a long,
white-washed cellar, and Father explained (just as he had last year and
the year before that), that _he_ could remember when the trains used to
be pulled through that tunnel by horses. At the other end of the tunnel
they all got out once more, and now, at last, you were really getting
quite "warm," for this was the railway station.

After Father had bought the tickets and checked the baggage, they got on
the train, and Father and Mother talked for a while, till Father said,
with a long breath, "Well, it might as well be soon as late," and kissed
Mother and she kissed him.

Until Neale was a pretty big boy, Father always stooped and kissed him
too. But Neale felt that this was quite a different sort of kiss, and he
noticed too, that after it, Father always kissed Mother again, and held
his cheek for an instant close to hers. But after this he always walked
right away, quietly, turning around once or twice to wave his hat at
them, his face as composed as that of any man in the crowd coming and
going beside the train.

Mother let Neale settle things in the train, making no comment as he
fussed over it, putting the satchel up in the rack, and then deciding
that it would be better to have it down where he could put his feet on
it, arranging his coat and her golf-cape over the back of the seat and
then remembering the hook between the windows. Then the train started. A
smoky tunnel, a scraggly belt of half-city--and then the real country.
Neale never called anything the real country unless there were cows in
the fields.

He was always astonishingly glad to see it, and stared and stared till
his eyes ached, and drooped shut, and he had a nap, hunched up with his
feet on the seat. When he woke up there was more real country, and
finally they got there.

There was Grandfather Crittenden waiting for them, with the team and the
three-seater, only the two back seats were out to make room for the big
trunk. This was something like living! Grandfather Crittenden let him
hold the lines. He remembered--_how_ he remembered--every step of the
eight miles, every hill, every house and barn and big rock, till finally
they drove into the yard, got out, were kissed, and went up to the same
room as last year, with its rag-carpet and painted yellow bed. Mother
washed his face very hard in the cold water from the big white pitcher,
there was supper of fried ham and scrambled eggs and _soft_ rolls, and
cherry pie--and that was all a tired little boy could remember that
night.

Next morning vacation really began with a rush outdoors to see the mill,
the saw-mill, the center of Neale's life in the country. There it was,
just as it ought to be, the big saw snarling its way through a pine log,
and old Silas with the lever in his hand, standing as though he hadn't
moved since the day Neale had gone away last September. Neale ran around
to the back, climbed on the carriage and rode back and forth as Silas
fed the log methodically down on the saw, and raced it back to set a
fresh cut. Silas only nodded without speaking. He didn't like wasting
words, and speaking was mostly wasted when the saw was screaming, the
belts slapping, and down below was the pound! pound! pound! of the
mill-wheel.

After a time Neale went down to the far end of the mill where the fresh
sawed boards fell off from the logs. A new lad he didn't know was
"taking away." He wasn't keeping up with the work very well, and to help
him Neale picked up a slab and started to cut it into stove lengths on
the cut-off saw.

"Hey there! Whacher doin'? You'll saw your arm off, boy!" yelled the
lad. But Silas, stopping the saw so that his voice could be heard, saved
Neale's face, "Let be, Nat. He won't get hurt. He knows more about the
mill now than you do, or ever will."

Neale felt his heart swell with pride. He sawed pine slabs till his back
ached from lifting and his shirt and hands were black from the dried
resin.

There were other things to do at Grandfather Crittenden's, all the other
things that boys do in the country, and Neale did them all. But none of
them came up to the mill. Day in and day out it was around the mill that
he spent his time, lying on the piles of fresh sawed boards in the
sunlight, watching teamsters roll huge logs on the skidway with
cant-hooks. Or he went below where you could look through the doorway at
the flapping belts, and watch the sawdust raining down and making a
great yellow pyramid. Even such an experienced millhand as Neale was not
allowed to go into the cellar while the mill was running, under pain of
all sorts of violent and disagreeable deaths. Getting your coat caught
by the shafting and being whirled round and round and beaten to a pulp
against the beams was one of the mildest.

But after supper, when the mill was shut down, he used to saunter out to
it, in the long soft twilight, and then tip-toe down into the cellar and
play uneasily in the sawdust, casting scared looks now and then at the
shining semi-circle of the saw, with its wicked hooked teeth just over
his head.

One day, as he played thus about the mill, his destiny came and tapped
him on the shoulder, and he knew not that day from any other day.

As he was watching Silas take up the slack in a belt, a strange man, an
elderly, powerful, bent, old countryman came into the mill, and asked,
without salutations to any one, "Where's Jo?"

"Gone to town for feed," said Silas. He added with a grin, "Mr. Burton,
make you acquainted with a relation of yours, Dan'el's boy." He jerked
his head at Neale.

The stranger looked hard at the boy, out of sharp gray eyes, and the
harder he looked the sharper grew his eyes.

"What's he doin' here?" he asked Silas.

"Oh, he's always hangin' round. He knows the trade as well as some folks
twice his size," said Silas.

"Well, what do you think of the sawyer's trade?" asked the old man
suddenly of Neale.

Neale could not think of anything to answer except that he guessed he
liked it all right.

The stranger seemed to dismiss him from his mind, fingered his gray
goatee, and looked all around as if seeing the establishment for the
first time. "Mebbe. Mebbe. All right for Massachusetts pine and saft
maple. But if you want to see a real mill, that'll handle tough Vermont
yellow birch and rock-maple, you come back to Ashley with me."

The stranger stayed to supper, and Neale learned that he was his
great-uncle Burton Crittenden. He asked many sharp-sounding questions
that made his brother, Neale's grandfather, snort and say hotly, "Oh, we
all know there ain't any proper mill practice outside Vermont, but the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts is managing to worry along somehow, in her
shiftless fashion."

But when the old man spoke to Neale there was a gentler note in his
voice. He talked of sugaring-off, and twenty-two-foot snowdrifts, and
asked Neale's mother if she wouldn't send the boy to Ashley some time,
to visit his great-uncle.

His mother agreed to do it--"some time."




_CULTURE IN THE AIR_




CHAPTER VI


April 10, 1898.

Old Jeanne Amigorena was on her way to Bayonne to complain to her niece
of her rheumatism and her daughter-in-law. She detested the railroad, as
she did everything new and not Basque, but at her age it was not easy to
foot it along the fourteen kilometres of white road between Midassoa and
Bayonne. So, grimly disapproving, she hoisted her square, stalwart,
black-clad body into the third-class compartment of the slow way-train
which comes shuffling up from the Spanish frontier about noon.

Even for a Basque of the oldest rock, there is one satisfaction to be
had out of the forty-minute trip by rail to Bayonne. This is at the
station of La Negresse where your way-train meets the down express from
Paris. The chic people from the first-class compartments are there
summoned to get out and change to the little local line which jolts them
the three kilometres to Biarritz. This change of cars is never announced
at Paris, it is always furiously exasperating to tourists, and in
consequence they afford an entertaining spectacle to any one with a low
opinion of human nature. Jeanne, who had less than no regard for any
human nature outside the Basque race, always enjoyed the contempt she
felt for these fashionably-dressed, ineffectual French weaklings. She
took advantage of the leisurely wait at La Negresse, while the luggage
was noisily transferred from one train to the other, to lean her head
and shoulders out of the window, and to indulge herself in a hearty bout
of derision for the uncomely fashionable Parisians, city-pale and
flabby. She drew a long breath of satisfaction in her own untrammeled
ribs, to see their rigid bodies like badly carved pieces of wood in the
steel armor of their corsets, their shoulders grotesquely widened by
their high puffed sleeves. Used to stepping out for a daily ten-mile
walk over mountain paths, free and rhythmic in her flexible
cord-and-canvas sandals, she laughed inwardly at these fine ladies,
tottering on their high-heeled leather shoes.

Some of them were dragging along tired, over-dressed, pasty-faced
children. Jeanne had a passion for children, and she now cried to
herself, for the thousandth time, "What can the Blessed Virgin be
thinking of, to trust babies to such creatures!" Straight as a lance,
with more vigor in her body at seventy than any of them at twenty, with
more glistening black hair of her own under her close black coif than
any of them could afford to buy, Jeanne who never altered her costume by
a hair or a line from one year's end to another, who looked forward
confidently to fifteen or twenty years of iron health, felt a cheerful
glow of contempt as she watched them, running here and there, screaming
nervously that one of their innumerable bags or valises was lost, their
faces distorted with apprehension for some part of their superfluities.

She did not altogether approve of the hatted, conventionally dressed
women she passed half an hour later in the sunny streets of the little
city on her way to the home of Anna Etchergary. Anna was concierge of
one of the apartment houses on the Rue Thiers, opposite the Old Castle,
and to reach it, Jeanne had to pass through the new quarter of Bayonne,
the big open square where the fine shops are and the Frenchified madames
walking about. Bayonne was a poor enough apology for a Basque city,
thought Jeanne, but its somewhat backsliding and partly Gascon and
Spanish inhabitants were at least not such grimacing monkeys as those
Parisians.

She strode along with the swift, sure, poised gait of sandal-wearing
people, her mind full of the grievances she wanted to pour out to Anna;
the disrespect of her son's wife, and the scandalous extravagances of
her expenditures. "Consider, Anna," she rehearsed her story beforehand.
"She uses the eggs herself, instead of sending them to market. She
serves _omelettes_, as though Michel's house were a hotel! And she will
not spin! She uses Michel's money to _buy yarn_! To think that money
from the Amigorena farm should go to buy yarn, with a distaff hanging on
the wall and ten idle, good-for-nothing fingers at the end of her arms."

On the terrible subject of lack of children in that house Jeanne could
not trust herself to speak. It was too sore a spot that with all
Jeanne's five grown sons, she had not a grandchild to hold in her arms.
The two, Americans now, who were in the Argentine making their fortunes,
were married and had families, but what were grandchildren on the other
side of the globe to Jeanne? The two younger ones, who were sailors,
were not married, and Michel, who had promised to be the mainstay of her
life and had stayed at home to run the farm, here he had been caught by
that impudent little French girl, one of the chambermaids in a Biarritz
hotel, a girl who did not know how to spin, who laughed at the decent
Basque ways, and who had no shame for her sterility, refusing to go to
Lourdes to pray for children.

Jeanne had never had any romantic feeling for her shiftless,
hard-drinking husband, whose irregular earnings as a fisher she had been
forced to piece out with much domestic service in the houses of others;
and now he was dead, she never thought of him. She had never been to a
theater in her life, nor read a novel, for she could not read at all.
None of her native capacity for emotion had been used in her youth, nor
frittered away later in the second-hand make-believes of modern life. It
had all been poured out upon children; on her five sons, and on the one
little dark-eyed, black-haired daughter, the little Marie--who had died
at eleven, so many years ago, just after her first communion--the
blessed saint Marise had looked, slim and straight in her white dress!
The Blessed Virgin had found her namesake too sweet to wait for, and had
taken her at once.

And now those strong, yearning old arms were empty of young life, and
Jeanne's heart was bitter. She might scold her loudest over the waste of
butter and eggs at the farm, she might gossip her head off about the
faults of the neighbors, and shriek out maledictions on the stingy
bourgeoise who wanted to buy her vegetables for nothing, she could not
drown out the forlorn echo of emptiness and loneliness within.

She turned up the Rue Thiers, glanced frowningly at the Paris-like
department store on the other side of the street with its gaudy
plate-glass show-windows, the pride of the younger generation in
Bayonne, and looked up with approval at the huge, thick, battlemented
walls of the Old Castle, substantial enough that, and plain enough and
old enough to please even a Basque.

As she turned in at the door of Anna's apartment house, her mouth was
open to begin her litany of grievances; but when she entered Anna's
one-room, brick-paved lodging, she found her niece with a budget of
exciting news of her own, "Oh, Tante Jeanne, what do you think...." she
burst out as the old woman swung lightly in; but before she would go on,
she went to close the door, bearing herself so secretly, with such
self-importance that Jeanne was between exasperation and greediness to
hear. Like all illiterates who cannot glut on the newspapers their
appetite for gossip, she was insatiable for it in talk. She sat down on
the front of her chair, her ear cocked eagerly. Anna drew her own chair
up close and began to speak in Basque very rapidly. "I'm so glad you've
come, Tante Jeanne, you've had so much experience in working out in
families, you know about things. You know about those American farm
machines, that they're beginning to use on the big farms, painted red,
you know. Well, the American agent for that company, he has come here to
live, here in this house, the grand second-floor apartments, the ones
old Pere Lapagorry rents furnished, on _both_ sides of the landing, yes,
the two of them, because his wife, a very chic madame, didn't think one
was big enough, and what can one family do with two kitchens, tell me
that, and they with only one child to their name, a little girl, who
doesn't take up any more room than a flea, so to speak, and the lady has
asked me to find her a cook and a maid, and listen, Tante, she says she
will pay sixty francs a month _each_, and fed and lodged!"

She paused to underline this and looked triumphantly at her aunt, who
for years had worked as cook in families for forty francs a month and
lodged herself. Jeanne looked back at her hard, a new possibility
lifting a corner of its veil in her mind.

"What are they like, these Americans?" she asked, "Spanish-Basque or
French-Basque?" (To a Basque, the term "_American_" means one of his own
race who has emigrated to South America, made his pile, and returned to
his own country to spend it.)

"They're not Basques at all," said Anna.

"What, French?" said Jeanne instantly incredulous of Anna's story. There
was no use trying to tell _her_ that any French family was willing to
pay twice the usual wage for servants.

"No, they don't even understand French, but the madame can read it a
little."

"Oh, Spanish, then."

"No, I had Pedro Gallon go up to see them and they don't speak a word of
Spanish. They're not even Catholics!"

The two women stared at each other. What could people be who were not
Spanish or French or Basque, or even Catholics?

Anna went on, "Tante Jeanne, come upstairs and see for yourself what
they are like. You have seen so many bourgeois families, you can tell
better than I. I'll only say you have come to help me find servants for
them."

Anna followed her aunt out into the hall and locked the door behind her.
The key to the door hung with a dozen others, large and clanking at the
belt of her blue jeans apron. Anna's philosophy of life consisted in
having plenty of keys and keeping them in constant use. The only things
you could be sure of were the things you yourself had locked up.

They climbed the shining, well-waxed, oaken stairway, Anna's special
care and pride, turning itself around and around in the circular
white-washed well, lighted by small pointed windows, which showed the
three-foot thickness of the stone walls. They stood before the dark
paneled door, its highly polished brass knob in the middle, and pulled
hard at the thick, tasseled bell-rope. A bell jangled nervously, light
uneven footsteps sounded on the bare floor inside, and a small, pretty,
fair-haired woman stood before them, dressed in a pale blue house-gown
elaborately trimmed with white silk. She smiled a pleasant recognition
at Anna, and gave a friendly nod to the older woman.... Jeanne disliked
her on sight.

The old peasant assumed a respectful, decorous, submissive attitude as
became her social position, and made a quick estimate at the age of the
other woman. She made it thirty-six at a guess although she reflected
that probably any man would guess not more than twenty-eight. Jeanne
knew by the sixth sense which comes from many years of unbiased
observation of life, that the other woman was the sort who looks much
younger than she is. She also was aware as by an emanation, that the
other woman was not French. That was apparent from every inch of her,
the way she stood and smiled and wore her gown; and yet she was dressed
like any French lady, with a high, boned collar up to her ears, sleeves
with a stiff puff at the shoulders, and a full, long, heavy skirt that
hung in ripples and lay on the floor behind. Also her fair hair was
tousled up into a pompadour, with a big, shining knot on top. Jeanne,
her head a little to one side and bent forward in a patient pose of
silent respect, wondered if that fair hair were her own or were false,
and made a guess that a good deal of it was false.

All this Jeanne took in and pondered while Anna was trying to explain by
dumb-show who her aunt was and why she had come. The foreign lady
listened intently, but it was evident that she did not understand at
all.

Jeanne took advantage of her absorption with Anna to look at her
intently, with the ruthless peasant scrutiny, going straight through all
the finer distinctions of character, deep down to the one fundamental,
the one question essential to the peasant mind in all human
relationships, "Is she stronger than I?"

Jeanne saw at once that the lady before her was not stronger than she,
was not indeed strong at all, although she looked as though she might
have an irritable temper. She was one you could always get around,
thought Jeanne, her strong hands folded meekly before her, her powerful
body a little stooped to make herself look politely mild. She was one
who didn't know what she wanted enough to go after it and get it,
thought Jeanne, casting her black eyes down, the picture of a
well-trained, European servant, with a proper respect for the upper
classes she served.

The lady, laughing and fluttering, now motioned them into the salon.
Some of the furnishings had been taken away, thought Jeanne, looking
about out of the corner of her eye--no lace over the windows! In this
room sat the monsieur of the family, a large man, smoking a large cigar,
and reading an enormous newspaper.

On encountering a new member of the male sex, Jeanne, although she had
long passed the age when she needed personally to make the distinction,
always made a first, sweeping division of them into two classes: those
who were dangerous to women and those who were not. She instantly put
down the monsieur of the new family among those who were not, although
he was not bad looking, not more than forty-five, with all his teeth
still in his mouth and all his thick, dark hair still on his head. But a
woman of Jeanne's disillusioned experience of human nature knew from the
expression of his listless brown eyes, from his careless attitude in his
chair, from the indifferent way he looked at the three women before him,
from the roughness of his hair, evidently combed but once a day, with no
perfumed dressing on it, that he was not now and never had been a man
who cared for conquests among women, or who had had many. She
immediately felt for him a slight contempt as for somebody not all there
mentally, and wondered if his wife were not occasionally unfaithful to
him. She looked as though she might be that kind, a rattling,
bird-headed little thing like that, reflected Jeanne behind her downcast
eyes, changing imperceptibly from one humble, self-effacing pose to
another.

Anna now turned to her aunt with a long breath, "I cannot make her
understand," she said in Basque. "Think of a nice, pretty-looking lady
like that not being able to talk! I cannot make her think anything but
that you have come to be the cook yourself."

"Well, I might do worse," said Jeanne unexpectedly, her mouth watering
at the chance for pickings. She spoke in Basque. Her face remained as
unmoved as though it were the wood-carving it seemed.

Her niece stared for a moment, horizons opening before her. "Oh, Tante
Jeanne, if you only would! With you here and me in the concierge's loge,
what a chance for commissions off everybody from the grocer to the
wash-woman!"

Jeanne agreed although with no enthusiasm. "But I'm not young. I don't
need the money, if only Michel's wife would...." She gave a quick look
at the man and woman before her, who were now exchanging some words in
their queer-sounding tongue. "They seem such odd people. Who knows what
they are like? Their not being able to talk, and all--and not even
Catholics!" She hesitated, feeling a distaste for their foreignness, and
for the fussy, effusive smilingness of the madame. Jeanne always
distrusted ladies who smiled at their servants. There could only be war
to the knife between servants and their employer. Why pretend anything
else?

A little girl in a white dress came swiftly into the room now, a
long-legged, slim child of eleven. She darted in as though she was
looking for something, and in a hurry to find it. When she saw the two
Basque women, she paused, suddenly motionless, and gave them a steady
inquiring gaze out of clear dark eyes.

Jeanne stared at her, startled. The child had thick black hair, glossy
and straight, a cream-like skin, and long eyes with arching eyebrows as
black as her hair, which made a finely-drawn curving line on her
forehead and ran back at the sides upon her temples.

Anna noticed the older woman's surprise and said casually, "Yes, isn't
it queer how the little girl looks like one of us, a real little Basque?
She seems nice enough, only with no manners. See how she comes bursting
into a room and then only stares; but none of the family have any
manners, if it comes to that."

The child made a quick move now and still moving swiftly stepped to
Jeanne's side. To Jeanne's astonishment she put out her small white
fingers and took Jeanne's gnarly old hand in a firm grip. "Bonjour,
Madame," she said, smiling faintly at her attempt to speak the foreign
language, although her eyes were grave.

Jeanne had for an instant a strange impression that the child seemed to
think that she had found what she was looking for. At the sight of the
little girl, at the living touch of that small, warm hand, Jeanne forgot
the chic madame with the shallow eyes, and the dull monsieur with the
tired eyes. She looked down at the child who had eyes that were looking
for something. The old woman and the little girl exchanged a long
serious gaze, one of those deep, inarticulate contacts of human souls
which come and go like a breath taken, and leave human lives altered for
always.

Jeanne drew a long breath. She said in a low tone to the child,
forgetting that she could not understand, "What do you call yourself,
dear?"

The child answered in French haltingly, but with a pure accent, "I call
myself Mary."

"Oh, yes," explained Anna, "the little girl is picking up French fast. I
can make her mother understand now, through her. She does the ordering
for them at the Bouyenval pension already. They are taking their meals
there, till they get servants to begin housekeeping. Madame Bouyenval
was telling me this morning...."

Jeanne interrupted her niece, speaking in Basque, "Well, if you think
you can make that featherhead of her mother understand anything, you can
tell them that I'll come to-morrow to stay, and I'll bring a
chamber-maid with me."

To the foreign lady she said respectfully in French, with a deferential
inclination of her tall strong body, "A votre service, Madame."




CHAPTER VII


May 10, 1898.

Marise sat in her room, in front of her table, a copy-book opening blank
pages of coarse paper before her, a thin, mean-looking, pale-blue book
marked "Mots Usuels" on her lap. It was her own impression that she had
stopped for a minute's rest from study (although she had not yet begun),
and that she was thinking hard. But she was not thinking. She was
feeling.

She sat with her elbows on the table, her chin in her two hands, braced
so that she was quite motionless. Her eyes were fixed on the candle
flame, burning bright, fluttering and throbbing in the draughts which
came into the old room, around the decrepit window-casing, under the
door, through the worm-eaten base-board. There seemed to be a thousand
wandering puffs from every direction. What Marise called her "thoughts"
were burning bright, fluttering and throbbing like the tiny flame at
which she stared. They too were blown upon by a thousand breaths from
every direction. If they would only hold still for a moment, Marise
thought, and give out a steady light that she could see something by! If
she only had some shade to put around those flickering thoughts so they
wouldn't quiver so! It upset her, jerking around so, from one way of
seeing things to another. What she wanted to know was, how did things
_really_ look?

Of course it was worse here in France, where everything was so
uncertain, but it had started back home in America, it had always been
going on ever since she could remember. It had always made her feel
queer, as though she were holding an envelope up to a mirror to read the
address and saw it wrong end to, the way everything looked different at
Ashley the moment Maman came up to Vermont to take her home after
vacations with Cousin Hetty. Marise loved it so there at Ashley, the
dear darling old house in the mountains, with its nice atticky smell
that no other house in the world had! It just fitted all around you,
when you went in the door, the way Cousin Hetty's arms fitted around
you, when she took you up on her lap, and rocked and sang, "We hunted
and we hallooed."

At the memory, Marise's heart gave a great homesick throb. How far away
she was from Cousin Hetty and Ashley now! How long since she had sat on
anybody's lap.

And yet when Maman came to take you away, from the first minute she went
in and looked around her, you could see right through her eyes and what
you saw was something different. After all it was just a homely old
house with ugly crocheted tidies on the chairs, and splashers done in
outline stitch back of the wash-stands, and old red figured carpets on
the floors, the way _no_body did at home in Belton. And Cousin Hetty
talking so queer and Vermonty, her white hair smoothed down flat over
her ears instead of all roughed up, fluffy, over a rat the pretty way
other ladies did, with her funny clothes, her big cameo pin holding down
her little flat round collar, and all other ladies so stylish with high
collars under their ears. Yes, of course, the minute Maman looked at
her, you saw how ashamed you'd be of Cousin Hetty if she came to visit
your school at Belton. And yet there _was_ the other Cousin Hetty you'd
been having such a good time with. You just flickered away from Maman's
way of seeing it to yours and never could make up your mind which was
the real way.

Marise shook her head, drew a long breath and looked down again at her
spelling lesson. It was a list of the names of furniture and household
utensils, all very familiar to her from old Jeanne's thinking them so
terribly important. My! How much more Jeanne cared about her work than
any girl they'd ever had in Belton.

"_Lit ... sommier ... traversin ..._" all the names of the complicated
parts of a bed, a sacred French bed. As Marise looked at them on the
page she could see Jeanne in the mornings, taking poor stupid little
Isabelle's head right off because she didn't make the bed up smoothly
enough; and all the time it was about a million times smoother than any
bed ever was in America! Marise didn't believe the President of the
United States had his bed-clothes pulled so tight and smooth. And she
wondered if Jeanne worked in the White House, if she would let even the
President's little girl sit down on the bed in the daytime. How
_particular_ they were about things in France! About everything. When
you bought anything in a store how they did drive you wild with their
slowness in getting it put up in the package just _so_, as if it
mattered, when you were going to take it out of the package three
minutes later, as soon as you got home. And at school how they did fuss
about neatness! The lessons were easy enough to learn. Marise never had
any trouble with lessons, but how could anybody ever do things as neatly
as they wanted you to. And how the teacher jumped on you if you didn't,
ever so much worse than if you got the answer to an arithmetic problem
wrong. Mercy! How she did scold! There wasn't anybody in America knew
_how_ to scold like that even if they wanted to, and they didn't. It had
scared Marise at first, and made her feel like crying, and she never had
got entirely used to it although she saw how all the other girls did,
just took it and didn't care and did whatever they liked behind her
back.

Marise couldn't get used to Jeanne that way either, to her yelling so
when she scolded. Marise hated to have people get mad and excited. And
how Jeanne did carry on about the house being neat, the part that is,
where company could come; (under her kitchen sink it smelled awfully and
was full of greasy rags) and yet she'd shine up the salon floor over and
over when it was already shiny, and never think of those rags. The least
little bit of clutter left around in the dining-room, or even your own
room, and how she would scold! And yet she was so awfully good to you,
and was always giving you big, smacking kisses, and hugging you, and she
always saved over the best things to eat when Maman had a lunch party,
and you were at school. Even when Maman had said you couldn't have any
of something Jeanne always brought it to your room, under her apron,
after you'd gone to bed. It wasn't very nice to do things behind Maman's
back, but everybody seemed to be doing things behind everybody else's
back. Maman did behind Father's, lots of times, and it was perfectly
understood between them that Marise was never to tell Father on her. And
it would be telling on Jeanne if you told Mother. And anyhow Marise
didn't see Maman so very much any more, to tell her things; it was
mostly Jeanne who did things for her.

Marise laid down her book again, lost in one of her recurrent attacks of
amazement at there being so many different Jeannes inside that one
leathery skin. There was the Jeanne who came every morning to take
orders, and folded her hands on her apron, and sort of stooped herself
over and said, "Oui, Madame," to everything Maman said. You'd think she
was scared to death of Maman, and yet she went away to the kitchen on
the other side of the landing and became another Jeanne who never paid
the least attention to what Maman had said, but ran the house just the
way she thought it ought to be.

There were two Jeannes right there, and there was another one, the
outdoor Jeanne, who took her to school every morning--how funny that in
France a great girl of eleven had to have somebody tagging along every
time she stepped outside the house! This was the most interesting Jeanne
of all. She told stories every single minute. Lots of them were about
when she had been a little girl--gracious! think of Jeanne ever having
been a little girl! That was ever so long ago, before the Emperor and
the Empress had made Biarritz the fashion. Jeanne said those were the
good days, when the Basques had their country to themselves, and you
never saw a hat on any woman's head; they all wore the black kerchief
for everyday and mantillas on Sunday for Mass, and lived like
Christians. Jeanne could remember when Biarritz was just a little
fishing village, a decent place, and _now_ look at it! She could
remember just as well when Napoleon and his Spanish wife first began to
come down there so the Empress could get as near to Spain as possible.
Many and many's the time Jeanne had seen them in their springy
barouche, driving right along this very street, he with his eyes as dead
as a three-days-caught fish's, and she as handsome as any Basque girl!

They weren't all stories of Jeanne when she was a little girl. Lots of
them were of what had happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago around
here. There were ever so many stories of witches and ghosts and
sorcerers. There were plenty of those still in the Basque country. There
was a sorcerer living in that little tumble-down house near the river on
the road to St. Barthelemy. Why, Jeanne's own mother, years ago, one day
looked up from her spinning and saw a monstrous pig, big and black. She
jumped up and ran out to try to catch it. Her grandmother went out too,
and there were a lot of the neighbors who were trying to drive the pig
away. But it didn't pay a bit of attention, butted at them so fierce
when they came near they were afraid, for he was as tall as a calf, and
whoever saw a pig as big as that? And then the grandmother made the sign
of the cross, Spanish fashion ... and like snapping your fingers, didn't
the pig change, right before their eyes, into a little wee woman they'd
never seen, and she went up in the air as thin and light as a loose
spider's thread, and drifted away and there was nothing there.

The little American girl knew enough to know that this story couldn't be
true, of course. And yet Jeanne's mother and all those people had seen
it. They saw a pig and it turned into a wee witch woman.

Marise stopped thinking about that, leaned forward and began kneading
the softened tallow at the upper end of the candle. Father could say all
he liked about candles being a bother, they were lots of fun. This part
up next the flame got just right so you could poke it and it stayed put,
any way you wanted it. And it was fun to lean the candle over and drop
the melted tallow on your hands in little drops that got hard and you
could peel them off.

As she poked at it, a dozen pictures flickered through her mind; the
bridge over the Adour with the river flowing yellow and strong under
it, and the bright painted vessels loading and unloading; the Sister who
opened the door at school, always so calm and silent; the playground at
school with the black-aproned girls, their faces twisted up with running
and screaming and catching each other; and the same girls at their
desks, with their faces all smoothed and empty, looking up at
Mademoiselle as though they had never thought of doing anything she told
them not to; the school-room itself, battered and gray with age, the old
black desks with the slant lids that lifted up; Reverend Mother stopping
in to hear a lesson, with her old, old quiet face; Maman so pretty and
stylish, looking so sweet when she made mistakes in French that nobody
minded, or thought of laughing at her.

Marise tipped the candle over carefully and let some melted tallow fall
on the back of her hand. As she set it back and waited for the tallow to
harden, she was thinking how very different from home Bayonne was; the
Basque fish-women, with the shiny fish in the round flat baskets on
their heads; the white oxen with the sheep-skin on their horns, and
their red-striped white canvas covering, pulling those two-wheeled
carts; everybody streaking it along in canvas sandals and berets,
talking French and Basque and Spanish and never a word of English. And
yet, Marise reflected as she slowly peeled off the hardened tallow
drops, none of that was the _real_ difference. And there was a real
difference. The real difference was something inside you. You felt
different, as if you'd looked in the glass and seen somebody not quite
you. It was....

Somebody was walking slowly down the brick-floored hall to her room. It
was Father's heavy step. That was nice! She hadn't thought she would see
either Father or Maman, because there had been company to dinner again.
She gathered the tallow drops together and dropped them in the base of
the brass candle-stick. Then she remembered that Jeanne would scold if
she did that. These candle-sticks like everything else in the house had
to be just _so_, or everybody caught it. She swept them out again with
her fingers, and stood holding them in her hand, looking around her for
some place to put them. The waste-paper basket was too open, they would
fall right through on the floor, and what a fuss there would be over
that! Oh, there was the fireplace, if you put things way back of the
sticks, Jeanne didn't see them.

She was just straightening up from reaching back of the wood, when
Father came in. He said, "Hello, kid," and she answered, "Hello, Poppa."
They did this for a kind of a joke, to be extra American when Maman
couldn't hear them.

Father sat down on the edge of the bed, making a big dent in the
fluffed-up crimson, eider-down quilt, which Jeanne rounded so carefully
each morning, and which she never let anybody disturb. Not, of course,
that Jeanne would dare to say anything to Father, le patron. She would
only grumble in Basque, under her breath, and Marise would feel her
opinion of Americans going down even lower than it was. Marise could
always feel everybody's opinions as they went up and down. And how she
did hate to feel them going down, anybody's about anything! She always
tried to fix it so they would go up. She now planned to fluff the
edredon to a puff again, after Father had gone back. She didn't say
anything about it to Father. You never did, about that sort of thing,
even Maman didn't, although it made her awfully provoked not to have
Father care, and she always said a lot afterwards. Marise didn't even
say anything to him about the white down that would be sure to work
through the cover of the edredon and get on his clothes. Father wouldn't
care if it did. There were such lots of things Father didn't care about.
But Maman would. She must remember to brush him off before he went to
the salon.

"Having a good time?" asked Father slowly, the way he did, that let you
see how he knew perfectly well you weren't.

"Not so very," she answered.

"Neither am I," he returned, "though you needn't mention it to Momma."
There were always a great many things that were not to be mentioned to
Maman, and a lot of quite other things that were not to be mentioned to
Father, and Isabelle told her things she didn't want Jeanne to know, and
_everything_ that Jeanne said was not to be mentioned either to Father
or Maman. Marise, coming back from school, used to feel when she opened
the door of the apartment, as though she were walking into cobwebs
spread around in the dark, and you mustn't on any account brush into any
one of them.

Father now went on, "What are you doing with yourself?"

Marise looked down at the cahier, its pages as blank as when she had sat
down. Her father looked with her. "That's lovely paper, I must say," he
commented, always with his way of showing that he meant just the
opposite. "Are you supposed to write on it in ink?"

"Oh, yes," cried Marise, flashing up to seize the chance of sympathy for
one of her grievances, "they _never_ let you use lead-pencils because in
lead-pencil there's a chance to rub out your mistakes. You're not
supposed to _make_ any mistakes."

"Doesn't your pen get stuck in it--it must be like writing on
mosquito-netting," said Father.

"Yes, it does," complained Marise, "and you spatter the ink all over and
break off the tips of the pen, and everything. And the teachers just
kill you if it's not perfectly neat."

Father took up the cahier and looked at the paper hard, scratching it a
little with his finger-nail. "Well, there's culture in the air, anyhow,"
he said without smiling, although Marise knew he was quoting Maman. He
looked around the room now without saying anything more. Marise followed
his eyes and saw with him the dingy, high-ceilinged room, dimly lighted
by the one weak candle-flame, the heavy, figured tapestry curtains drawn
over the window, the draught, although the window was closed, making
them suck in and out; the ugly, ugly wall-paper, dark and scriggly; the
stuffed red chair, the only comfortable one, where Jeanne would never
let her curl up with her feet under her, because she said the place for
shoes was on the floor; the marble-topped wash-stand with its little
chipped white earthen-ware basin and pitcher like the old things at
Cousin Hetty's; the clock on the chimney-piece that looked as though it
were carved out of greasy, dark-green soap with a greasy dark-green man
in a Roman toga on top of it; the shabby, dingy, red-and-white checked
curtains hanging over the hooks where Marise hung up her dresses, the
tall dark armoire whose slightly greenish mirror reflected all these
things as if you were looking at them through water; and finally over
the bed, the big, shiny lithograph of Our Lady of Lourdes in her bright
blue cloak, standing in front of her grotto.

"Well, maybe it's in the _air_," said Father. He spoke in his usual
tired, slow voice, sagging down on the bed the way he always sat.

But then he surprised Marise very much and said something she never
forgot. It gave her such a jump of astonishment to have Father say
something as though he really meant it, that she sat up straight at his
first words, staring at him. He said in a strong voice, "But look here,
Molly, there _is_ something in the air here, by heck, and I wish you'd
get it. I mean the way every one of them in this country keeps right
after what he's doing, till he's got it just right. That's the way to
do, and we're all off the track with our 'that'll do,' the way we say
back in America. It's the only thing in their whole darned country _I_
can see, that don't make you sick. Now, look here, kid, you go after it
and get it. Start right in now. Learn how to make that infernal
note-book perfectly all right in spite of the bad paper. I wish to the
Lord _I_ had been taught that."

And then, while Marise was still staring, the words echoing loudly in
her ears because of the strangeness of hearing them from Father, he went
on in his usual voice, "It might be _something_ to hold on to, and I
don't see much else."

Marise had never before known Father in any way to try to "bring her
up!" He made Maman so much provoked because he always said that he
didn't know, any more than Marise, how she ought to be brought up, and
he didn't see that it made so much difference what you did, everything
turned out about the same in the long run. Now her little room seemed
full of the oddness of his thinking that something did matter, of his
telling her so hard that he wished she'd do something. In the loud
silence which followed, she could hear his voice and what it said,
sinking deeper and deeper into her mind.

After a while Father yawned very wide and rubbed his hair forward and
back so that it was all rumpled up the way Maman didn't like to see it.
"What did you say you were doing?" he asked again.

"I'm writing down my lecon d'orthographe," said Marise.

"Your _what_!" said Father.

"My spelling lesson," Marise corrected herself with a jerk. She knew how
Father hated to have people mix up their languages.

"Well, I don't know that you're any worse off at that than we are in the
sitting-room," said Father. He always called the _salon_ the
sitting-room. He added, glancing at her blank note-book, "You haven't
got very far, I see." He paused, and smiled a little with one corner of
his mouth, "But then neither have we in the sitting-room."

It came into Marise's mind that perhaps Father, seeing he was so
specially serious to-night, might tell her some way to keep her thoughts
from jiggling around so, from one way of feeling to another, according
to what other people thought of things, instead of knowing what she
thought of things. But she had no chance to ask him, for when she began,
"Well, I sort of forgot about my spelling. I got to thinking," Father
broke in, as he got up heavily to go, "I wouldn't advise you to do
_that_, either. It never gets anybody anywhere."

Marise forgot till after he had got clear back to the salon that she had
not brushed off the down from the edredon. Maman wouldn't like that a
bit, to have him look untidy when company was there! Oh, dear!

But she forgot this as she thought again about the queerness of Father's
seeming to care so much about her doing one thing rather than another.
It was still there, this wonder at him, when she turned to her book
finally to study that spelling lesson. "Lit ... sommier ...
traversin...." She wrote the words down on the coarse paper, with
infinite care, drawing on some deep, unfamiliar store of patience when
the pen sputtered and caught its point and stuck. She was going to try
to do as Father said. She would take as much trouble with writing those
words about a bed, as old Jeanne took in making the bed every morning;
and that was more trouble than anybody in America ever took about
anything.

Her dark, shining hair fell forward about her cheeks as she leaned over
the copy-book, writing slowly, chewing her tongue, frowning in her
concentration on the formation of those letters.

She forgot all about her uncertainties as to how things really were; she
forgot her loneliness. All her flickering thoughts steadied themselves
and grew quiet as she worked. A stillness came over her. She felt
happier than she had since they came to France to live.

Later, ever so much later, after she had undressed, washed in the cold
water in the little earthen-ware basin, gone to bed and to sleep, the
night-time Jeanne tip-toed in to see that she was all right. This Jeanne
was very different from all the others, because she was so quiet. Marise
half-waked up when she felt the energetic French kiss on her cheek
(Jeanne always kissed you so hard), and as she dozed off again, she
heard Jeanne saying a prayer over her, half in Basque and half in Latin.
Marise couldn't understand either Latin or Basque, but she understood
the intention of that nightly prayer at her bed, and she caught sleepily
at old Jeanne to return her kiss. It wasn't as good as Cousin Hetty's
taking you on her lap and putting her arms around you, but it was enough
sight better than nothing. Also she heard Jeanne carefully close the
window. Jeanne always did this every night, although Maman said to leave
it open. Jeanne was the last one in there always so she had it her way.
She didn't think it healthy to let night air into rooms. Marise was too
sleepy to get up and open it again. Anyhow Jeanne often told her about
the evil spirits, that come in through open bedroom windows, and sit on
your chest and suck your life into their black bodies, as you sleep.
Marise did not believe this, in the least, of course, and yet....




CHAPTER VIII


I

May 12, 1898.

Two plump ladies with large busts and very small waists were sitting in
the salon of the Allen apartment, waiting for the mistress of the house.
They wore very tight-fitting dresses of excellent silk, obviously not
new, obviously made by the sort of "little dressmaker" who goes from
house to house. Their shoes were stout and clumsy, their hats somewhat
heavy in line, their gloves exquisitely fitting, perfectly fresh, made
of the finest-grained leather. Although the sky was blue, each lady
carried a small silk umbrella of the very best quality, tightly rolled
with a masterly smoothness, as smoothly tubular as the day it was
bought.

The two women held their cruelly corseted bodies very erect, and sat
squarely on their chairs, both feet on the floor, their knees close
together, their backbones very straight. Under the brims of their heavy,
much-ornamented hats, their fresh, healthy faces wore an expression of
perfect stability. They knew that they produced exactly the impression
they meant to produce, and that they looked exactly like what they were.
From every inch of them was proclaimed the fact that they were fine
housekeepers and economical managers of their husbands' incomes, that
they were of the well-to-do bourgeoisie and proud of it, as of
everything else they were and did. They looked out on their lives and
found them good in every detail, from their slightly and purposely
behind-the-fashion dresses to their stout shoes, evidence of their
respectability; from their fixed ideas to their excellent gloves.

They glanced about them now, keenly, with the penetrating survey of the
professional good housekeeper, and found much to comment on.

"How strange to have no lace curtains over the windows, only the heavy
ones at the side. Why, people outside must be able to _look right in_!
Do you suppose they have taken them out to be washed? Or don't they know
about curtains in America?"

They murmured their remarks in a low tone, keeping a weather-ear cocked
to the hall.

"That wall-paper is disgraceful. It was on when the Charpentiers lived
here."

"M. Lapagorry had expected, you know, of course, to do this apartment
over after the Charpentiers moved out. But these new people never made a
single comment, or complaint. Just accepted it."

"I daresay they are used to log-cabins at home, with Indians at the
door."

"Oh, no, Madame Garnier, my Henri says that the Indians are quite
civilized in America now."

Madame Garnier frowned slightly at the mention of Henri.

The other woman went on, "Apparently they thought it was all right to
have faded paper and those awful old curtains. M. Lapagorry was so
astonished he almost fell over backward. And when he saw they didn't
find fault with anything, he asked a higher rent, ever so much higher
than the Charpentiers had paid, and they took _that_ too without a word.
People say M. Lapagorry can't sleep nights now because he didn't ask
more."

Madame Garnier observed, as one mentioning an obvious fact, "Oh, well,
Madame Fortier, he will, of course, next time."

Madame Fortier saw nothing to smile at in this. "Yes, of course," she
said seriously.

Madame Garnier now said, "They must be _very_ rich. Where is it they are
from, Buenos Aires?"

"Oh, no, Madame Garnier. I think it is somewhere in North America. My
Henri says that...."

Madame Garnier broke in, irritated, to say with suppressed heat, "Oh,
North America or South America, what's the difference? They are all
foreigners, and who knows what strange, immoral ideas they have? They
don't come to Mass, you know. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the
man is a Free-Mason. I wish M. Garnier had not asked me to call on
them."

The other shrugged her shoulders resignedly, "Yes, it's a very strange
thing to do, make the first call, and on people you know nothing about.
But M. Fortier says the man, M. Allen, is very important in a business
way, and he specially asked all the business men to have their wives
call on his wife. He almost seemed to make it a sort of condition, so M.
Fortier said, almost made them promise before he would talk business
with them. It may be in America, they do. And of course anything M.
Fortier thinks may be good for his business...."

Madame Garnier's nod signified that of course that principle went
without saying for any good wife; the expression of her face adding that
this was an application of it which might count as one of a good wife's
sacrifices. But she said hopefully, "Well, they won't stay very long,
foreigners never do."

Madame Fortier now murmured, "They say she's very free with the
gentlemen. M. Fortier and his friends are laughing about her. They say
they really don't know how much of what she says is due to her bad
French; or how far she really does expect them to go."

This did not surprise Madame Garnier. "What can you expect? I shall see
to it that our Jean-Pierre has nothing to do with them."

This apparently started a new train of thought for Madame Fortier, for
she now said with the cheery warmth of one who brings out something
which will be a bitter pill to her interlocutor. "It seems the American,
M. Allen, has taken quite a fancy to our Henri. We think we can get a
position for Henri, through him, in America, where Henri can learn
English, and study the American market. It would be a great help in the
business if Henri knew English and all about American imports. And of
course the salaries paid in America are enormous."

Madame Garnier's eyes opened wide. She fell into a trance-like
meditation, and presently murmured, "Our Jean-Pierre made quite a
specialty of English in the lycee. I should think...."

The mother of Henri shook her head decidedly, "I don't think America
would suit your Jean-Pierre's temperament," she said. "He's not at all
practical. And you get skinned alive by American business men if you're
not as sharp as they. No, you'd better keep Jean-Pierre away from them."

The two looked at each other hard. A brilliant light of rivalry came
into their eyes. It brought an animation, a zest into their faces, which
made them look years younger. A main-spring had been touched, and all
their wheels began visibly to turn.

Steps were heard in the hall.

They composed their faces, and turned towards the door. The American
lady now came in, and they rose to greet her. They were extremely
cordial, a competitive friendliness in their manner.

       *       *       *       *       *

They went down the well-polished oaken stairs in silence, each holding
up her long heavy skirt with one gloved hand and letting the other rest
on the railing. At the bottom, each with an automatic gesture like a
reflex action, looked at the palm of her glove to see if it had been
soiled by the railing, and with a similar mechanical action, shook their
heads disapprovingly, although there was not a grain of dust on the
smooth, tightly-stretched, pale kid.

They shook out the trains of their skirts and swept into the street,
conscious of the pouncing inspection of Anna Etchergary, gazing at them
from the loge of the concierge, and proudly aware that there was nothing
to criticize in any detail of their backs or anywhere else about them.
They turned to the left and began to climb the steep street which led
towards the Cathedral. Madame Fortier remarked presently, "Very bad
taste, that dress, like an actress. All that white silk and lace. And
slippers like a dancing girl's. It must be she never puts her hand to
anything in the house."

"No, she doesn't," returned the other disapprovingly. "My Marguerite
meets her Jeanne every morning at market. She says that Jeanne says the
American lady never does anything about the house, and doesn't even
verify her accounts. You can just imagine what Jeanne is getting out of
it. It quite upsets Marguerite, and I have to be specially careful with
my own accounts. Everybody near them is getting a rake-off on
everything." She made these revelations with a satisfied look as though
the words had a pleasant taste in her mouth.

Madame Fortier's comment was made with the accent of mature, worldly
experience, "Mark my words, money spent in a loose careless way like
that _must have been ill come by_. That's the way disreputable women
spend money."

"It's very hard on the rest of us, at any rate. And Jeanne tells our
Margot that she is a very poor housekeeper, as heedless as a child,
wears her best tailored street dress in the house as like as not, lies
down on the bed when she is not sick at all, and doesn't do a thing but
read novels all the time; or fool away a whole afternoon in the Museum.
Very suspicious, that, too. Why should anybody go to the Museum so much?
I'd just like to know whom she meets there. A regular place of
rendezvous, the Museum. I wonder if her husband knows."

They were enjoying the conversation so much that their faces looked
quite sunny and bright. The other shook her head forebodingly. There was
a silence as they climbed steadily up the steep, narrow, stone-flagged
street.

Then Madame Garnier remarked, "The little girl is quite pretty, though
so mannerless."

"Her dress was covered with grease spots, and had a hook off the back,"
reported Madame Fortier.

"I didn't see but _three_ grease spots," demurred Madame Garnier, "and
she really has lovely eyes and hair."

"How badly that woman speaks French. Without the little girl to
interpret, it would actually have been hard to know what she was saying.
Strange they don't know French better. But perhaps they don't have
regular schools like ours."

Madame Garnier made no answer to this conjecture, but asked, looking
sideways at her neighbor, "Shall you ask them to dinner?"

Madame Fortier all but groaned, and said in a martyr's tone, "Oh, I
suppose so, for Henri's sake."

The other digested this thrust in silence, and then changed the subject.
"What was that she was saying about De Maupassant? Was she quoting him,
to _us_? What did she take us for?"

"Yes, she didn't realize what we might think of her. It was that
indecent Boule-de-Suif, too. But she knows so little French most likely
she didn't understand what it was all about."

"Have you read that?" asked Madame Garnier.

"Yes, I thought it my duty to, as a mother, to know what it is. But I
burned the book, and you may be sure _I_ don't go around letting
everybody know I've read it. Did you find her pretty?"

Madame Garnier answered obliquely, but quite understandably. "I daresay
a man would think so. I couldn't think of anything but her manners. How
she lolled in her chair, and crossed her legs. I wouldn't want my
Gabrielle to see her. And to my eyes she had a faded look. Queer, her
being so fair. I don't see any trace of Indian blood. I thought all
Americans had Indian blood."

"Oh, no, Madame Garnier, my Henri says that...."

Madame Garnier made a gesture of one thoroughly out of patience with
Henri, and ended the conversation abruptly, "Oh, here we are at the
corner. I must turn down here. Good-day, Madame Fortier."


II

May 15, 1898.

The rosy, wrinkled face of the Sister of Charity shone out from the
white quilled band over which the black veil was draped. Beside her the
distinguished old lady showed, under her long crape veil, a face as
quiet as that of the nun. The two elderly women sat at ease, their hands
folded in their laps, chatting in a pleasant low tone.

"Yes, so every one says, a great deal of money, Madame la Marquise,"
said the nun in her murmuring monotone, "as all Americans have."

The other breathed out with a great wistful sigh, "Oh, Soeur Ste. Lucie,
if only the good God has sent us at last the opportunity to get our
chapel."

"Yes, yes indeed," assented the nun, drawing in her breath sharply
between her teeth. She raised her eyes, singularly bright and personal
in her professionally passive face. "They say there is a child, too.
Perhaps a soul to save. Our Mother Superior always so zealous for the
honor of our Order has asked us specially, specially ... the Bishop has
so much to say about one of the Sisters of the St. Francis Order because
of the conversion of a Swedish sailor, whom she nursed in their
hospital. The Mother Superior hopes very much that some one in _our_
Order...."

"Yes, yes, I understand," said the great lady, nodding.

The nun went on, deferentially, "Madame la Marquise is so good to be
willing to come to call on the foreign lady! I shall see to it that the
foreign lady understands the honor done her."

The other made a graceful deprecatory gesture with a shapely
black-gloved hand, and explained with great simplicity and gentleness,
"Oh, no, ma soeur, it is nothing, nothing to praise. I would make a far
greater sacrifice for the sake of our beloved work. But in this case,
there is no risk of being misunderstood. It is not as though they were
French bourgeois, who might have their heads turned. There can be no
question of social equality with transient foreigners." She smiled,
bowed her head with humility and said, "So you see, dear Soeur Ste.
Lucie, that I deserve no praise for making a sacrifice."

The nun nodded her understanding. It was evident that they understood
each other to perfection. "Yes, yes, of course, I see. No social
equality possible," she murmured, drawing in a sharply taken breath
again.

They looked about them in silence now, the restrained calm of their
faces uncolored by their thoughts. Hearing steps in the hall, Soeur
Ste. Lucie shook out her long black sleeves to cover her hands more
completely, and cast down her eyes so that her sweet, rosy, wrinkled old
face was once more blank and impassive.

       *       *       *       *       *

Anna Etchergary was waiting at the door of her loge as they descended
the stairs, and she ran before them out to the old closed carriage,
which stood at the curb. Bowing deferentially and murmuring under her
breath, "... Madame la Marquise...." she held the door open for them.
The lady smiled her thanks at her, a pre-occupied, well-modulated smile
which took for granted the deference and the service.

As the nun stepped into the carriage she said with unction, "Now I see
how lives in the world can be as useful to Our Lady as those of the
convent. No one could have resisted Madame this afternoon. To have a
great name and all worldly graces, and to use them only for the greater
glory of Our Lady!"

The other sighed and said sadly, "Dear Ste. Lucie, since the death of my
dear one, there is nothing for me in the life of the world, except an
opportunity to serve our good work." She went on more cheerfully, with a
little animation, "Yes, I must say, it seemed like fruitful ground this
afternoon, fruitful ground. I think we may say we made a good
beginning."

The old coachman came to the door for his orders. "To 4 rue Marengo, in
the Petit Bayonne," said his mistress, and as he stepped to his seat,
she explained to the nun, "I feel so much encouraged that I am going
straight to an architect to have him make an estimate of what the chapel
would cost."

The carriage proceeded very slowly and rackingly over the rounded
boulders of the pavement. Inside it, the two women, accustomed to such
joltings, thrust their arms through the broad, hanging loops, and went
on talking.

"Not a disagreeable person," said the great lady in a kind tone of
tolerance. "A very middle-class little woman, but no harm in her, I
should say. I was afraid to find some one not quite--not quite--you know
it is said that American women are not very moral--so many divorces in
America."

"And still you went...!" breathed the nun, lost in admiration of the
other's heroic devotion, "when you ran the risk of meeting a _divorced_
woman!"

The Marquise made another gentle, fatigued gesture of warding off
praise. It was a practised gesture as though she had occasion to make it
often.

After a time she said, "Odd she should be so interested in the Cathedral
here, and yet a free-thinker. What made her talk so much about the South
Portal? I never heard of anything unusual about it, did you? Except that
that disagreeable, anti-clerical fountain is somewhere near there, to
the memory of those wicked revolutionists."

The nun shook her head, indifferently. "I always enter by the North
Portal," she said. "I don't believe I ever happened to see the south
one."

After reflection, the marquise said, "I don't believe I ever saw it
either. Why should any one? You never enter from that side. Nobody lives
on the rue d'Espagne, that anybody would ever have occasion to visit."


III

May 20, 1898.

Anna Etchergary measured accurately the social status of the two ladies
who asked for Madame Allen's apartment, and without getting up, or
stopping her sewing, she answered in the careless tone suitable for
people who wore home-made hats and cotton gloves, that Madame Allen was
at the top of the first flight. After they had passed, she thought to
herself that she believed she knew them, Mlle. Hasparren, the
school-teacher and her married sister. They were Basques, like Anna, but
of the small government employee class, who put on airs of gentility,
and wore hats and leather shoes. Mlle. Hasparren gave music lessons, as
well as teaching school. Probably she had come to try to be taken on as
Marise's music-teacher.

The two ladies were mounting the stairs in silence and very slowly,
because the school-teacher had taken off her cotton gloves and was
putting on a pair of kid ones, which she had pulled from her hand-bag.
She explained half-apologetically, to her sister, who had only cotton
gloves, "It's to do honor to America!" and then with a long breath, "The
first American I ever saw."

"What do you care if it is, Rachel?" asked her sister languidly. She
added with more animation, "Your hat is over one ear again."

The other stopped short on a stair. "America! ... free America!" she
said passionately, "don't you remember what Voltaire said, 'Europe can
never be wholly a prison so long as it has America for open window?'"
She knocked her hat back into place with the effect of using the gesture
to emphasize violently what she said.

"I wouldn't quote Voltaire, if I were you," advised her sister mildly.
"You never know who may be listening. People think badly enough of you
for being a school-teacher in a lay-school as it is."

"There you are!" Rachel caught this up as a point for her side. "There
it is, our airless, stagnant European prison-house of prejudice!" She
struck a hand, gloved in kid now, on her breast, with the gesture of one
suffocating.

Her sister shrugged her shoulders resignedly and said, "Which door do
you suppose it is? We forgot to ask which side."

They were now on the landing, hesitating between the two exactly similar
doors. Rachel made a quick decision at random, crossed to the right-hand
side, and pulled the bell-rope.

The door opened, and showed the upright frame of Jeanne Amigorena. There
was a moment of mutual surprise, and exclamations of greeting and
inquiry. "Why, Jeanne, you here? I thought you were on the farm at
Midassoa!"

Jeanne broke out upon them with a great rush of Basque, enchanted to see
familiar faces, enchanted to have a new audience. "Oh, good-day, Madame
Hardoye. Good-day, Mlle. Hasparren. Who ever would think to see you
here? Yes, here I am in a family of the queerest foreigners you ever
saw. But they pay very well. They have both apartments on this floor.
Yes, they must be _made_ of money, and I have little Isabelle from
Midassoa with me, as femme de chambre, and what do you think, we have
each a room, a real furnished bedroom, just as though we were guests.
The madame took one look at the maids' rooms, under the roof, on the
fifth floor, you know, and when she saw they are all dark except that
little sky-light, with no furniture to speak of, she said she wouldn't
let a dog sleep there. The idea! It would have been plenty good enough
for Isabelle and enough sight better than what she ever had at home. She
is getting beyond herself all the time, Isabelle is. I have an awful
time keeping her in her place. The lady hasn't the least idea of doing
it. They are such queer people, I can't tell you! She knows no more
about taking care of a child, our madame! She started to let our little
mademoiselle go _alone_ to school, through the _streets_! And the poor
child was so disgraceful with spots and dirt on her dresses that I was
ashamed to have people see her and had Madame buy her some aprons and
now I keep her in order myself. She is a sweet child, only brought up
the way you'd expect a little savage to be, puts her _feet_ on the
_chairs_! Or else sits on the _floor_! And _runs_ on the street, or else
loiters along looking at shop-windows. But she is learning fast. I don't
complain, oh, no. I know well enough that when you are a servant, you
must take what comes to you, and make the best of it. But I never
thought I would work in a family of free-thinkers! Still, they sleep
over there on that side of the landing, and Isabelle and I sleep here. I
keep the holy-water shell well filled, and we brought the branch of box
from home that had been blessed last Palm Sunday, and we sprinkle a few
drops of Lourdes water on the table before we eat. I hope we are safe.
M. le Cure says that is enough. I often think that...."

Madame Hardoye had been listening to this flood of talk, her lively
interest in the matter struggling with her distaste for Jeanne's
familiar manner.

She now broke in with an accent which she meant to express, "There
you've talked quite enough. After all, though my sister has queer ideas,
we are not in your class. We are not peasants. And it's high time you
remembered that." What she actually said in a curt tone was, "Where do
we ring to make a call on your mistress?"

Jeanne understood the implication perfectly. It was one quite familiar
to her. With a change of manner she motioned them silently across the
hall. "There," she said laconically, her face suddenly hard and somber.

Rachel Hasparren also understood the implication and flushed an even
more vivid color than that habitually on her dark cheeks. She held out
her hand, her kid-gloved hand, to Jeanne, with a defiant gesture of
equality, "Good-by, Jeanne. I'm glad we had a glimpse of you."

Jeanne took the hand awkwardly, with a sort of rancorous reluctance to
have her grievance appeased, and turning back, shut the door behind her.

"Now, Rachel!" expostulated her sister.

Rachel breathed ragingly and stared at her sister in an old resentment,
which the other took calmly, looking inside her card-case.

Rachel advanced provocatively, "Did you hear what old Jeanne said, how
the American lady would not put a dog to sleep in lodgings in which we
French expect to house our servants?"

The married sister resented this spiritedly. "Spoiling servants for the
rest of us, that's what it is!" she said impatiently. "And what good
does it do? You saw how old Jeanne only thinks the less of her for it.
The more you try to do for that class, the less they think of you."

"That's because Jeanne's whole nature has been degraded by our caste
ideals!" shouted Rachel. "She's a poor, superstitious, medieval old
thing, incapable of ordinary decent human relations. If she'd lived in
America...!"

Angele pulled the other bell-cord here with an air of cutting short
another out-burst, and they both stood silently looking at the closed
door, which presently was opened by little Isabelle.

As they went down the stairs, Angele remarked, "Well, she seems to be
all right. Like everybody else, as far as I can see. I expected to see
her with a Liberty cap on her head and swinging a lighted bomb, to hear
you going on."

Rachel was taking off her kid gloves and putting on cotton ones. She
said dreamily, her black eyes deep and glowing, "When I asked her how
the peasants lived in America, she said ... the dear American ... 'there
aren't any peasants in America.'"

Her dark flushed face was shining as they came out on the rue Thiers and
stood for an instant, glancing up at the battlemented walls of the dark
old Castle.

Rachel suddenly shook her fist at it, her cotton-gloved fist, and cried
out, "You needn't glower down like that, you hideous old relic of an
evil past! There's a great, wide, rich country across the seas, that
never heard of such as you, that never had a feudal castle in it, that
isn't darkened by a single hateful shadow such as you still throw down
on us here."

"Hush, Rachel," said her sister, patiently attempting to quiet her,
"Anna Etchergary is looking out of the window at us."

Rachel instantly lowered her voice, with an instinctive response of
caution to this warning, but she was furious that she had done so.
"That's Europe, that's Europe for you!" she said hotly, under her
breath. "Spied upon every minute by suspicious, mean, malicious eyes."

Angele broke in on her to say reasonably, "Well, anyhow, your hat is on
one side again."




CHAPTER IX

_Round-robin Letter to Mrs. Horace Allen's Neighbors and Friends in
Belton, New Jersey_


Bayonne, France, May 25, 1898.

MES CHERE AMIES:

Je vous demande pardon for being so late with this letter, I know I
promised to write just as soon as we got here. But, chere amies, I know
you would forgive me if you knew how _marvelous_ our new life is here in
this old, beautiful, _civilized_ world. I have just been letting myself
go in it, just _grabbing_ at its charm and wonder, and all I can tell
you is that Europe is even more _wonderful_ than I thought. I just wish
every one of you could persuade your husbands, as I did, to take a
position that will bring you across the seas to this "fabled old land of
story and art." _You owe it to your children_ to give them the culture
which they would get here.

But let me begin first with the material things. Mr. Allen, you know,
felt sort of badly because the position here didn't seem to be as
important and have as big a salary as the job the Company offered him in
Chicago--_Chicago_! Well, you cannot imagine anything like the cheapness
of the life here. We have two flats of six rooms each, on the same
floor, just the landing between them, twelve rooms in all, furnished
elaborately down to the last little things in the kitchen even, and we
pay about half the rent we paid in Belton for our unfurnished house.
There is perhaps a little old-world dinginess about the wall-paper and
the curtains and things, but that only adds to the delightful
_atmosphere_ and makes you realize that you are really in old Europe and
not raw young America.

We have two maids for _less than three dollars a week_ each, and such
maids! In America we haven't any idea what it is to have good servants.
I am not expected to lift my hand or think about the housekeeping. My
old cook, the most _fas_cinating creature, in a quaint peasant's
costume, takes _all_ the responsibility on her own shoulders. She gets
up frightfully early in the morning, and goes off to market with a big,
flat basket, and comes bringing it in _on her head_ all filled with the
loveliest things to eat you ever saw, and bought for almost nothing! But
she buys just as closely for me as she would for herself. Servants
identify themselves with the family of their masters here, and are glad
to! I know the word "masters" sounds very un-American; but one so soon
gets used to the vocabulary of the country. Pardonnez moi!

Jeanne--that is our cook--brings our breakfast to us _in bed_, all
except of course for Mr. Allen, who can't seem to adapt himself to other
ways of living. The first morning when she started to, he just jumped
out of bed as though the house were on fire, and slammed the door shut
in her face. He can't get over his Anglo-Saxon prudishness. But we have
separate rooms now, and I have my tray in bed, and read my mail there,
and between you and me, it makes me feel just like a heroine in a novel,
to lie there in my pretty negligee--you know in America we don't realize
what negligees are for. When do you ever have a chance to wear one
except when you are sick? And then you don't care. Marise has hers--her
breakfast I mean--in her room, too, as she dresses, and Jeanne always
expects to help her dress, so I don't have to think at all about getting
her off to school! Oh, mes amies, _what_ a rest to one's nerves that is!
Not to have that horrid, hurried hour trying to find clothes and books
and get Marise off in time. I just lie in bed reading the mail or a book
and Marise comes in, all fresh and combed (Jeanne is wonderful with her
hair), and kisses me and says, "Au revoir, Maman." We always try to
speak French together for the practice.

Then, as I am getting dressed, Jeanne comes in, with a clean apron to
"take her orders," in the good old European way. And from that minute
on, I have no more bother about it. Everything is set on the table at
the right time, beautifully cooked, the house is kept clean and in the
most _perfect_ order.

Perhaps you are wondering why I call Mary, "Marise?" It is a quaint
nickname for her that the servants have, and I have picked it up from
them. Isn't it delightful? I never liked Mary, and I detest "Molly."
Both the maids are devoted to Marise, and it is the European custom for
the servants to do a great deal more for the children of the house than
our girls ever dream of doing. Without a word, Jeanne has simply taken
over the care of Marise's clothes as a part of her regular work, and she
is always ready to go out with her, for it seems that no nice children
go alone on the streets here. Every morning, Jeanne takes Marise to her
school, and goes for her in the afternoon and brings her back. Marise is
perfectly happy here, in a splendid school, and having wonderful
opportunities. I am so happy about her advantages. It is not a public
school (the "lay" schools as they say, because all the others are run by
Catholic nuns). It seems the public schools are something quite new in
France, and nobody sends children to them except the poor, or people who
are queer in some way, with unbalanced ideas. I can easily believe this,
since I had a call the other day from a school-teacher in the public
schools, who also gives music lessons. She is a very queer and dowdy
person, with the most awful hat you ever saw. Didn't you think that all
Frenchwomen wore pretty, stylish hats? Not in the least. Quite the
contrary. Her sister was with her, quite middle-class, both of them, and
not at all like the other ladies who have called on me.

For they _have_ called! Do you remember that little old French teacher
who came to see me about getting a job in our High School, how
discouraging she was about our coming to live in France, and how she
said nobody would come to see me, at all? Well, if you ever see her,
just tell her she is _entirely mistaken_. People are just as cordial as
_they can be_, with the most beautiful manners you ever saw.

Do you wonder how I manage about the language? It is _much_ easier to
get along than I expected. Of course my thorough reading and writing
knowledge of the language is a great help. And I have been making
_won_derful progress in speaking it. Being right in the midst of the
language all the time it just soaks into you. No one here speaks any
English; not from provincial ignorance, the sort we have in America, but
from choice, because of their concentration on their own perfect
language. They are all deeply cultured. It is _won_derful to be in the
midst of cultured people, to be able in casual afternoon calls to
discuss De Maupassant with one lady and Gothic architecture with
another.

For we have here in Bayonne--you notice that I already say "We,"--a
simply splendid Gothic cathedral, the first one of my life. It is right
up the street from where we live, and it is _won_derful. Chere amies,
think what it means for a town to have in its midst such a marvelous
thing! Think what people must be like who live right close to it, go in
and out of it every day, and feel its "beauty and puissant power" (as
Matthew Arnold says). The South Portal is especially fine, _starred by
Baedeker_, which means a great deal, as you know. I make a pilgrimage
there every day, to just _gaze_ at that South Portal. _I_ have a
life-time of arrears to make up, not having lived with it from
childhood, as these fortunate people have. It is no wonder that you meet
here people absolutely _won_derful in their polish, like a lady who
called on me the other day, the Marquise de Charmieres. Her husband's
family dates back to the days of Louis XII. I am ashamed to say I had to
go and look up who Louis XII was, after she had gone. She had with her a
nun, who lives with her, by special permission, the dearest old thing
with her sweeping black robes and the quaint, quilled, picturesque
head-dress. I suppose they used, in the old days, the Charmieres did, to
live in the _won_derful old castle, just across the street from us,
which is another of my great admirations. Think of living across the
street from a real castle! It was constructed in 1100, on the remains of
the _old Roman wall_, if you please, for Bayonne is very, very old. And
it is right there, just the way it always was, with battlements and a
real drawbridge and everything, just as it was in feudal times. Many
famous people have lived there, Richard Coeur de Lion, Louis Quatorze,
and others. It was there that Catherine de Medicis planned the St.
Bartholomew massacre, and in a house on this very street that Napoleon
took the Spanish crown away from the King, and gave it to his brother.
Isn't it marvelous to think of?

I have had some of the curtains taken down in our _salon_ (the French
simply swathe their windows in curtains, simply _swathe_ them!) and I
often stand at the window and just gaze out at those old castle walls
and try to imagine the splendid life that went on here then, the streets
full of people in costumes and knights in armor and everything. I see
the modern crowds coming and going under those massive walls, and I keep
thinking how proud they must be of such an inheritance from the past,
and how they must often wish the good old feudal days back again, when
"life had color," as a writer said in a book I was reading the other
day. No such inspiriting reminders of past glories in America! No such
past glories! Nothing but what Ruskin calls the drab, dead level of
democracy.

There is a fine Museum here too, with perfectly splendid works of art in
it, pictures by Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Raphael, Rubens, Ribera, Murillo,
Poussin, Delacroix, Ingres, Troyon, Meissonier, Corot, Isabey, Bonnat,
Bouguereau, Gervex, and many others. I am simply _studying_ them,
absorbing them, I go every day with a handbook on art which I bought
here (in French, of course), and just gaze at them till their very
spirit enters into me. I must tell you that Bouguereau is considered
very much out of fashion here, and not at all admired any more. The
Meissonier are simply _mar_velous. You could take a microscope to them,
and still not see any brush-marks. Indeed it is said that he painted
with a microscope. There is a _perfect_ copy here of the Mona Lisa,
which people who know say is just as good as the original. Mes chere
amies, think what a privilege it is to sit there, right before her, with
the book in my hand, looking up into that mysterious face, and reading
those wonderful words of Pater's, which I have studied with you so
often. "Here is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come,
and the eyelids are a little weary. She is older than the rocks among
which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and
learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and
keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with
Eastern merchants; and as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as
Ste. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the
sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it
has molded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the
hands."

Mes amies, we have often read and studied this marvelous passage
together, and now I can only say to you _that it is true_! But every bit
of culture means so much more to me than it ever did before and now that
I know what European life is, I can understand why they are more
cultured than we are. It is because they have _leisure_. Here the
working classes _expect to work_, as our American working class does
not. And the material cares are just taken right off the shoulders of
the upper classes. _We_ are _expected_ to occupy ourselves with higher
things. I am reading, reading, reading as never before, and getting a
closer knowledge of French literature, even than our studies together
gave me. It all _means_ so much more to me, now that I am right among
the very people who are described in it. Think of looking up from a
volume of Zola, and having a caller come in, who might be a character
right out of the book. I often tell Mr. Allen, that the life around me
illustrates and explains the literature, and the literature illustrates
and explains the life. It is a wonderful, _won_derful experience!

I have just finished De Maupassant's "Notre Coeur," and I am not
surprised that we found it impossible to get hold of the French edition
in America. Our strait-laced, old-fashioned, Puritanic America doesn't
know enough to appreciate such a picture of this _free_ European world,
where relations between men and women are different from those between
high school boys and girls. At home the girls rule the roost, if you
will excuse a vulgar expression. But not here. Here they are put off in
a corner, till they get a husband, and _then_ they are allowed to
blossom out. A woman of my age, so a French gentleman told me the other
day, is considered _just at the right age_ for being fascinating. And he
assured me he didn't say that because it might apply to me, but _because
it is so_. The men have temperament here. They really look at you, and
are just as different as can be from the American business-man who never
thinks of any woman but his wife, and never pays any attention to _her_!
Here the men positively sparkle in conversation, and they all say they
would hardly know I am an American, I have acquired the French manner so
entirely. Here a woman is not expected to have become a mummy, because
she puts on a wedding-ring. _Quite the contrary_, I assure you!

But this is a terribly long letter. I have poured out my heart to you in
untrammeled spontaneity, such as comes to you in the free
intellectuality of this finished civilization.

May you all be able some day to enjoy it!

Your devouee friend,

FLORA ALLEN.

P.S.--Mr. Allen says the business part seems to be all right.




CHAPTER X


As happens to us all, there were certain moments which stayed alive in
Marise's memory for years; and as is always the case, those moments did
not at all correspond with apparently important events. Such events
come, seem of great consequence, happen, and therewith sink down into
the featureless mass of things which happen only once and then are in
the past forever. The other moments, those queerly, heterogeneously
tumbled-together impressions, are the things which happen over again
every time one thinks of them.

One of Marise's fantastic notions was that the things which had happened
were piled up in a big junk-heap in your memory in front of a great
black curtain. But there were pinholes in the curtain, and if you put
your eye to one, there, right before you, one of the things that had
happened was alive again, and your heart knocked and your throat felt
queer just as it did the first time. This notion may have come to her in
this form because it was generally in the night that she experienced the
vivid living-over of some long past moment. Wakened from a sound sleep
by the hoarse whistle of one of the steamers in the Adour, taking
advantage of a favorable tide to weigh anchor and be off, she saw in the
instant while she drew a long breath and turned over in bed, one of
those living scenes again, as actual, as piercingly real to her as
though it were happening for the first time. Some of these she greatly
dreaded, some set her to ringing all through with happiness, others she
never understood at all.


I

One of the very happy ones was the moment when she had first really
heard music. She had been "taking lessons" of Mlle. Hasparren for weeks
and months. Mlle. Hasparren taught as Marise thought all the teachers
in France taught, the hardest possible way; scales, scales, scales and
then thumping, monotonous exercises, played over forty, fifty, sixty
times, till Marise felt as though there wasn't anything left of her
except that exercise, pound, pound, pound all over her. Marise saw
nothing in music except hatefully numerous little black dots on white
paper, and heard nothing in it beyond a combination of sounds as
interesting to hear as a problem in arithmetic is to look at.

She rather liked Mlle. Hasparren, although Maman thought she didn't have
a bit of style; but she certainly did hate the three-times-a-week music
lesson. She never could have kept on with it in America, but here
everything was hard work, and if you weren't working at your music
lesson, they'd expect you to be working at something else. And then,
too, there was what Father had said about keeping at what you were doing
until you got it just right. Marise's bed-room seemed to have taken up
the sound of Father's voice as he said that, so that many times, as she
sat there doing her lessons and not thinking of it, all of a sudden, the
very curtains and walls and chairs seemed to be reminding her of it.
That was really what kept her going, as day by day she sat down heavily
before the piano, prodding her mind up to keep it fixed on the little
black dots.

That at least was what had kept her at it till the evening which came
back to Marise so clearly. Father and Maman had gone out to dinner; she
had eaten alone, with Jeanne's chatter for company, and then on her way
back to her room, had wandered into the salon, candle-stick in hand,
sort of hoping she could think of something nice to do before she
settled down to study.

But there was certainly nothing nice to do in the salon. It was awfully
lonely in there, the chairs all empty and stiff, standing around
heavily, the thick curtains drawn close over the tall windows, and in
front of the alcove where Maman's writing-desk stood, the polished floor
shining hard and bright, the stands, the table with one of Maman's
yellow-covered books on it, the dark little cave of a fireplace. Marise
set her candle down on a stand, and herself sank down on the piano
stool, her back towards the keys, staring at the lonesome looking room.
How perfectly dead it did look. Marise could hear faintly in the
distance an echo of the brisk voice of Jeanne and Isabelle, laughing and
carrying on over the dishes. But in here, in the empty salon, there
wasn't a sound. Her ears fairly rang with the nothingness all around
her. Her heart was big and heavy.

At school that day, the girls had started up a new fad, the "wishbook."
You got a little blank book, and then went around asking everybody to
write down in it what she most wished to be. Marise was astonished at
what the other girls wrote; one, "I wish I could be a great actress,"
another, "I wish I could marry a millionaire," another, "I wish I could
be a great and holy saint." Marise had not been able to understand why
everybody did not write what she did, instantly, instantly, something
she had always known she wanted. What she had written in everybody's
book was, "I wish I could be happy." She thought of this now, and in the
empty, cold, echoing room cried it aloud, "I wish I could be happy."

There was no answer from the stiff stuffed chairs, from the
well-polished tables, from the black hole of the fireplace. Marise had
expected no answer, would not have expected one if her parents had been
there, never expected one. What answer could Father give, Father who
apparently never thought of such a thing as being happy, and never hoped
for anything more than to be a little less tired and bored. And if Maman
had been there, she wouldn't even have heard what Marise said, busy as
she always was with thinking something of her own. Maman wasn't nearly
so cheerful as she had been. What _was_ it Maman was thinking about when
she sat so still and her face got dark and drawn? Certainly not about
Marise.

The little girl sat on the piano stool, dangling her long legs and
looking straight ahead into the empty room, which looked back at her,
she thought, as though it had a low opinion of her and a very high
opinion of its own importance and elegance. She knew she ought to get up
and go into her own room and study a very long lesson on the reign of
Henri IV. But she couldn't seem to get up the strength to do this,
sitting fallen together on the piano stool, her heart heavier and
heavier.

She looked hard at the empty chairs, and thought to herself that it
wasn't any worse to see them empty, than to see the people that usually
sat on them--not one who could help a little girl to be more happy.
There wasn't a single person she knew, whom she'd wish sitting there
now, unless it might be Cousin Hetty! Marise felt a knot come in her
throat, and the corners of her mouth began to tremble. She would _like_
to get up in Cousin Hetty's lap again.

But Cousin Hetty was not there. There was nothing there but the circle
of unfriendly chairs and tables and the empty, silent room. The
trembling of her lips got worse; Marise was afraid she was going to cry.
She turned round on the piano stool, put one bent arm up on the music
which stood there, and hid her face in it. She was not crying; though
she wished she could, because the ache in her heart and the knot in her
throat hurt too much.

The silent, motionless room stood aloof and meaningless about the
silent, motionless child. Marise pressed her face closer against her
arm. She was trembling now, all over her body.

The silence was intense.

And then it seemed to her that the silence had been broken by a voice, a
beautiful, quivering voice, deep and true, which went straight to her
heart, as though some one had spoken a strong, loving word. At the sound
she stopped trembling and sat motionless.

Before she could draw her breath in wonder, she knew what it had
been ... only a note of music. Her own hand falling on a key of the
piano had struck a note, which was even then echoing in her ears.

But the first impression was ineffaceable. That, too, rang in her ears.
It seemed as though it was the first time she had ever heard a note of
music. Really, really that was so. She had never been _still_ enough
before to hear how a note sounded. How it rang and rang in the
stillness, its deep vibration stirring echoes deep within Marise's
heart! She had thought it was a voice. Why, it was like a voice, a
voice speaking to her, just when she had been so sure that there wasn't
any voice she could possibly expect to hear.

She sat up marveling, and struck another note. Into the dead, stagnant
air of the room, and into her loneliness, it sang out bravely, the same
living voice, thrilling and speaking to her. She struck a chord,
astonished at what she heard in it--all those separate voices, each one
rich and true and strong and different from the others, and all shouting
together in glorious friendliness. "That's the way things _ought_ to
be," thought Marise, "that's the way _people_ ought to be." But, oh, how
little they were like that! But here was a world where she could always
make it come true, where she could have that singing-together any time
she wished to make it for herself.

She struck more chords, her fingers finding the keys with the
second-nature sureness, learned in her months of dreary practice.

She listened to the sounds, shaken and transported to hear how they
flooded the barren emptiness of the room with glory, how they filled her
heart full, full of happiness ... only if she were happy, why was she
crying, the tears running as fast as they could down her cheeks?

This was one of the remembered moments which brought nothing but a pang
of joy to Marise. When it came, the world about her brightened.


II

There was another, one of those which came very seldom, which brought
something deeper than pain or joy. This was the recollection of an
instant, just one instant, of the day when Maman let Soeur Ste. Lucie
take her to Lourdes. It was the feast of St. Louis, and Soeur Ste. Lucie
always went every year then. She had been awfully nice and jolly, the
way she always was with Marise, and it was fun to start off with her
early in the morning, at dawn, in the special excursion train. At
Lourdes it was fun, too, really exciting to be in such a monstrously
big crowd, oh, _what_ a crowd! She heard somebody tell Soeur Ste. Lucie
that there were thirty thousand pilgrims there that day. It amused
Marise very much to hear them called pilgrims and to think that she and
Soeur Ste. Lucie were counted as pilgrims, too. She had always thought
of "pilgrims" as people who landed on a stern and rock-bound coast and
began to fight with Indians; and nothing could be more unlike that than
the crowd at Lourdes, swimming in the dusty, yellow sunshine, everybody
dressed up in his best, walking around in groups, talking and singing.
Marise held on to the Sister's nice, soft, old hand and followed her
around from one thing to another, taking a good big drink of the water,
and kneeling down whenever Soeur Ste. Lucie stopped to pray before a
shrine. Marise didn't pray much, but watched the crowd, the endless
crowd shuffling slowly past. She was proud to be kneeling there beside a
Sister, who had the right of entrance everywhere, who opened any gate in
any railing she liked, and walked right in to say a prayer where the
common run of people didn't dare go.

At noon, after three hours of this, Soeur Ste. Lucie took her charge off
up along the bright, quick-flowing stream, off into the real country,
till finally they came to a field that wasn't too thick with people.
There they sat down on the grass, under a tree. Soeur Ste. Lucie got out
the pasteboard shoe-box they had taken turns carrying around all the
morning and they ate their lunch. Marise was simply starving by that
time and anything would have tasted good. But that lunch would have made
a stone statue eat, it was so good. Cold roast chicken, plenty of it,
big slices cut recklessly right off the breast, tender and juicy and
_flavored_; and crispy, crunchy rolls and fresh butter; and little
radishes and green onions and salt, and a half bottle of the best white
wine, which they watered down in their cups with Lourdes water. Soeur
Ste. Lucie laughed over this as she poured it out and said they ought to
be saints at least for a day or so, after drinking Lourdes water with
their lunch, oughtn't they? She was as jolly as could be, anyhow, and
was enjoying herself so much that she kept Marise laughing at her jokes
all the time. One of those numerous friends of hers turned up here too,
a stout, red-faced farmer's wife, who shouted with pleasure at seeing
Soeur Ste. Lucie, and came over from the other side of the field to
bring her lunch and eat with them. She and Soeur Ste. Lucie got into
gales of laughter in which Marise joined with all her heart although she
didn't always quite see what the joke was. Then they had their dessert,
a triangle of creamy Camembert cheese, spread on the crust end of their
roll, and after this a great golden pear apiece, so full of sweet juice
that you couldn't take a bite of it without its running down your chin,
so you had to lean way forward, to the tune of everybody laughing at
you, and doing the same thing themselves.

After they had packed up what was left, and the farmer woman had gone
back to her family, Soeur Ste. Lucie got very quiet and still, pulled
out her rosary and began to murmur her prayers in a very fast, low tone,
her eyes almost shut up. Marise sat beside her in the grass, watched the
crowds beginning to turn back towards the Basilica, and a couple of
little gnats dancing round and round each other in the air. The murmur
of the prayers was like a bee-hum in her ears. She leaned back against
the tree and drew a long breath, and the next thing she knew it was
hours later, and Soeur Ste. Lucie was shaking her gently and saying
she'd better wake up because it was time to go back if they were going
to get a place to see the blessing of the sick.

After that ceremony was over, everybody was perfectly worn out and
almost starved. Soeur Ste. Lucie went to one of the convents for supper,
where the good Sisters took care of hundreds of the pilgrims, and looked
as tired as Marise felt, and walked as though their feet hurt as hers
did. But there was still one more Lourdes sight to see, the procession
of the lights in the evening. When they came out of the convent, they
found the weather changed, the wind blowing hard and a light rain
falling and not a bit of light coming from the black, black sky. The
damp was bad for rheumatism, and Soeur Ste. Lucie's knee began to pain
her, so that she said they would not march in the procession but go up
along the side of the high horse-shoe staircase, where they could see on
both sides and along the esplanade. How black and empty that looked,
that enormous stretch of pavement, like a great empty hole, outlined by
the street lights on all four sides of it. Back of it, down towards the
Grotto, there seemed to be millions of people, judging by the lights
which danced around, every way at once; and through the wind and the
rain and the darkness, Marise and Soeur Ste. Lucie could hear snatches
of singing, the chant which fairly rings from the stones and walls of
Lourdes.

[Music: A-ve! A-ve! A-ve Ma-ri-a! A-ve! A-ve! A-ve Ma-ri-a!]

Then as Marise stuck her head through the railing to watch what went on
there, far, far below them, she saw the lights begin to straighten out
into two long lines and start streaming up the lower part of the
horse-shoe staircase where she and Soeur Ste. Lucie stood. The
procession had started; two by two they were marching up towards the
blaze of light at the top where the door of the upper church stood open.
The sound of their voices grew louder and louder and there they were!
The first ones were a mother and her little girl; after them a couple of
working men; after them a man and his wife; after them a priest and a
soldier; after them--after them--Marise lost count, she felt her head
whirl, she couldn't see the people any more, only the little dancing,
quivering lights they were carrying, candle-flames, scarcely at all
protected from the wind by a bit of card-board, or a hand curved about
them.

They kept going by and going by, those little flames, until Marise's
eyes ached. And yet she couldn't look at anything else, she couldn't
stop staring at those flickering, swaying little flames.

After a long time she was able to pull her eyes away from them, to look
past them down at the great esplanade--and oh! now it was not a black
and empty hole; it was all full, full of lights, a million little
marching and singing flames, in endless lines, ordered, purposeful,
marching to and fro. So small, so tiny and feeble each one, but enough
all together to make a great light in the blackness, to fill all the
emptiness with glory.

It was then that the terrible great moment came to Marise, something
that she could never think about long enough to try to understand,
because when she tried to think about it, she began to shake all over
just as she had then, when, across the line of chanting pilgrims, she
looked down at all those little, marching, singing flames. What was it
that came to her then? The most aching sorrow; and yet an exaltation as
though broad wings were lifting her up in a solemn beat of power.

It was all over in an instant. Whenever it came after that, it always
came and went between heart-beats. But after it had come and gone,
everything looked different. It was as though, plodding along on foot, a
great wind had snatched her up, and blowing mightily for an instant so
that all the world was filled with it, had set her down, ever so much
farther along the road she had to go. And always after this moment, she
had an hour or so when she liked people better, everybody, the dirty old
flower-vendor, the street-sweeper, Jeanne, the teachers at school,
Father and Maman. It was as though she saw them all in a procession,
each trying to keep alive a precious, flickering flame.


III

There was another, a horrid one from which Marise always looked away the
instant she knew it was coming because she couldn't bear it. And yet she
never could be quick enough. She always saw it, as though in her, as in
a camera, a lens had whirringly clicked open and shut.

And yet there was nothing to it. She had come from school with Jeanne,
who had gone to the kitchen. Marise had crossed the landing and started
to pull the bell-rope, and then noticed that the door happened to be a
little ajar. So she pushed it open and walked in. As she walked past the
salon door she had glanced in, and saw M. Fortier there, just going
away from making a call, the father of Elise Fortier, her classmate at
school. He had his broad, fat back turned to her and was stooping to
kiss Maman's hand. There was nothing surprising in this; everybody knew
that gentlemen who kept on with the old ways of doing things, always
kissed ladies' hands. She had seen the father of one of the girls kiss
the bony hand of Mlle. Ballot, the head teacher at school. What was
registered indelibly on Marise's mind was the expression on Maman's
face. Maman was looking--oh, it was horrid to think such a thing, to say
such a thing, to have looked at her and seen such a thing.... Maman was
looking sort of.... Marise could never, try as she might, shut down on
this moment quickly enough to shut out the ugly thought she hated so....
Maman was looking sort of foolish and silly, as though, as though....
But here Marise was always able to snap the shutter shut and put it all
out of her mind, except the dull heaviness it left.


IV

But the worst, the very worst and most awful of all those remembered
parts of the past, was what happened about the gray cat. No, that
wasn't the way to put it, because you couldn't say that anything had
_happened_ ... and yet how sick it had made Marise, and did every time
something reminded her of it!

One day when Marise came home from school, Jeanne gave her a big,
pretty, gray, yellow-eyed cat and said she thought it might be company
for her. Marise was awfully pleased, took the cat in her arms, bending
her cheek down to rest it against the soft fur, and carried her off to
her room to try to get acquainted with her.

But there seemed to be something the matter. She didn't act like Cousin
Hetty's Tommy, up in Ashley, nice and cuddlesome; she seemed to have
something on her mind. She wouldn't sit still on Marise's lap and be
petted, she wouldn't play with a string nor drink the milk Marise put in
a saucer for her, nor lie down and go to sleep the cozy way cats usually
do. She tramped around and around the room, and every once in a while
she'd give a loud miauw, in an anxious voice.

Marise thought it was because she was with strangers in a strange place,
and that as she grew wonted, she would be happier. But she kept this up
all that day, and at night when Marise shut her up in the extra kitchen
they didn't use, she yowled so that Maman complained. And the next day
she was even worse, acting so queer, doing such funny things, stooping
her front paws down, and tramping hard with her back paws. And as she
did this, she would look up at Marise and miauw in a loud, anxious way
as though she were asking Marise to do something for her. At the end of
that second day, Marise was too worried to keep it to herself, although
she had resolved not to bother either Maman or Jeanne because they
didn't like cats. She went across the landing to ask Jeanne to come.
Jeanne came and Isabelle too, instantly sure of the worst as usual, and
declaring that the man who had sold them the cat was a thief and a
robber and had palmed off on them a sick cat that nobody wanted. They
added emphatic precautions to Marise about not touching her if she was
sick, because a sick cat's bite meant poison.

They went into the room. The cat got up and came towards them that same
queer way, stooping and treading and switching her tail. And she gave
again that strange, anxious cry.

"There, that's the way she does all the time," said Marise, troubled and
concerned. She came round in front of the two women, so that she could
look full up into their two faces, to see what they thought.

Not a turn, or color, or tone, or line of what they looked and said and
did ever faded from her mind. Her first feeling as she looked up into
their faces was of utter amazement; and after this an instant cold
premonition of something evil. She stood perfectly still gazing at
them.... What could it mean?... What made them look so...?

Jeanne and Isabelle looked down at the cat; the anger went out of
their faces, and in its place came a singular, secret expression, half
amused ... half _horrid_.... Marise could never think of any other
name for it.

Then they looked at each other, their eyes meeting, their eyebrows
arched high, and they laughed.

At the sort of laugh they gave, Marise burned hot all over, although she
had no idea of what there could be to laugh at. But every line of the
two women's bodies and faces, the tone of their laugh, the look of their
glistening, amused eyes told her that it was something they thought
shameful. And she was ashamed.

Then, as she stood there, cold and burning hot, they had both as by a
common impulse glanced at her as if something about her also seemed very
funny to them. That glance was the worst of all--like a smear she could
never wipe off.

She felt very sick, her knees shook under her. But something furious and
strong inside her told her that whatever else she did, she must not let
them see how sick they made her. She stood her ground, her eyes burning,
utterly at a loss. What could it be? What was this awful joke they
laughed at and she couldn't see?

Jeanne said, as they looked at the cat with a greedy amusement in their
eyes, "Oh, she's not _sick_. She's looking for a husband, that's all."

Isabelle laughed again at this, and said something to Jeanne in Basque.
Marise could not understand a word of this, but her hot, straining eyes,
fixed on their two faces, with a helpless fascination, received another
deep and indelible impression of conscious shamefulness.

Jeanne nodded and said to Marise, "I'll take her back to M. Bergeret's
brother-in-law for a few days, where there are other cats, and then
she'll be all right again."

She picked the cat up by the middle and held her so, while she listened
to Isabelle, who now said something else in Basque, half-grinning, her
lips curled in an embarrassed, half-pleased way. Jeanne glanced sharply
at Marise, as if to see whether she had understood this, in spite of its
being said in Basque.

Then they both went out of the room, Jeanne carrying the cat by a hard,
careless grasp about her middle. Outside the door they both burst into
giggles, as though they had been restraining themselves before Marise.
The little girl heard them giggling all the way down the hall, the
sound broken once by the loud anxious miauw of the cat.

Marise stood perfectly still till she heard the outer door open and
close. Then she looked about her wildly. She wanted to run somewhere and
hide her face. She wanted to sink down on the floor; she wanted somebody
to help her, to make it up to her, some one to wipe it away and put her
back where she had been three minutes before, when Jeanne and Isabelle
had come in the door. She _couldn't_ go on, living the way she felt now,
as though she were dirty inside and couldn't wash herself clean. What
was it all about? What had it meant? What was there about having a
husband that people thought was so...?

At this it came over her in a wave again, so that she started as though
she had been struck a slashing blow, and ran, ran breathlessly out to
get help.

In the dark hall she stood still, the thump, thump of her heart loud in
her ears. A murmur of voices came from the salon. Maman had callers....
But even if she hadn't, Marise now knew she could not have spoken to
Maman about it. Something came and stood between her and Maman so that
she knew she could not tell her. She had a horrible fear that Maman
would look that way, too, perhaps she might laugh that way ... perhaps
everybody would. Perhaps that was one of the things they _did_. Not
Father, either ... no, she'd be ashamed of ... not ... why, there was
_nobody_ she could tell; there was nowhere to run for help.

She went slowly back to her room. The sight of it brought up before her
again the glistening eyes of the two women as they had looked at the cat
and laughed. A terrible burning came up all over her so that she was
almost suffocated. She wanted to hide her face. She found herself
leaning against the dingy, checked red-and-white curtains. They smelled
of dust as she buried her face in them, burrowing deeper and deeper
among them as though she must hide herself, hide herself from ... but
she couldn't hide herself from what was inside her own mind.

She stood there a long time, her face pressed into the dusty curtains,
her body buried in them. She was sick, sick from head to foot.

And then ... nobody came to help her, since there was nobody to come;
nothing happened ... nothing could happen. She had thought she
_couldn't_ live, feeling like this. But she would have to, since there
wasn't anything else to do.

       *       *       *       *       *

This came to her slowly, and slowly sank into her, like still, deep
cold.

Two days after this, as Jeanne was brushing her hair, she said to
Marise, "Our cat will be brought back to us to-morrow. She is all right
now, M. Bergeret says."

Marise waited until the wave of sickness passed and she felt she could
make her voice sound as usual. Then she said casually, "I've changed my
mind. I don't want a cat now. It would bother Maman too much."

Jeanne was relieved. "Oh, very well. I don't ask anything better. I hate
cats around the house anyhow." She went on brushing Marise's hair, with
careful, loving skill, proud of its thickness, its sheen, its silky
blackness. She thought to herself, "What a beautiful child our Marise
is. And how I love her! There isn't anything I wouldn't do for her! May
the Holy Virgin guard her and keep her safe always, Amen." She never
thought again of the cat.




_NEALE BEGINS TO BE NEALE_




CHAPTER XI


On Neale's thirteenth birthday, his mother gave him a little silver
watch and his father, a bicycle. In addition to the excitement of
getting into his teens and of owning these visible and outward symbols
of advancement, he was told that he would now be sent to a real school,
with no girls in the classes, where he would really learn something;
that is to say where he would be prepared for college.

Hadley Prep. was an excellent school, a sort of model school, an
information factory. You fed a small boy into it and at the end of four
years the school turned him out completely filled with classified
information. Boys entered with all sorts of hazy disorders of learning;
they were ground out, possessed of a chain of facts, every link shining,
polished and joined by flawless welding to the preceding and consequent
facts. The curriculum took no count of modern educational fads;
"spiritual awakening, character building, intellectual growth" had no
place there. What would you have? Four years is a short enough time to
prepare boys for their college entrance examinations. The non-essentials
had to be cut out. The great point was that when the Principal signed a
certificate of graduation he knew that the boy in question could produce
any piece of information required of him, from the preterit of recevoir
to the formula for accelerated motion of falling bodies, at any college
entrance examination in the United States.

Into the hopper of this mental polishing-machine, Neale was poured with
fifty other little boys and began painfully to adapt himself to its
rigorous codes. It was a process trying to the most robust among them,
and devastating to the weaker ones. The devastating quality was not only
recognized and admitted but sedulously fostered by the faculty and
Principal. It was part of their business to see that the weaklings fell
by the wayside long before the flock was led up to the narrow gate of
the college entrance examinations. And as some hospitals achieve a
miraculously low death-rate by the simple process of never admitting a
patient whom they are not sure they can cure, so Hadley Prep. achieved
the miraculously low rate of examination mortality for which it was
famous the country over, by the simple process of knocking on the head
and throwing out on the scrap-heap any boy whose brains seemed reluctant
to admit college-entrance examination facts.

Those whose heads were hard enough to resist the knocking, found
themselves completely absorbed by the mental gymnastics which filled
their days. The first two years of his life at Hadley Prep. had almost
nothing in them for Neale except his over-time struggle to make up for
the omissions of Miss Vanderwater's haphazard tuition. Everything else,
even the assuming of long trousers, even the summers in the country,
_even games_, were banished to the fringe of consciousness, like things
seen out of the corner of your eye while you are gazing with all your
might at something else. The life of his personality, his inner self,
during those two years, realized the ideal of the eighteenth century
educator who felt that the only safe up-bringing for boys would be to
shut them up in a barrel, between the ages of twelve and eighteen, and
feed them through the bung-hole. The record of what was fed through the
Hadley bung-hole was set down on Neale's report cards, which he
dutifully brought home to his parents. They glanced up from their
absorption in each other, read, and smiled over the mathematical
accuracy of the Hadley information about the state of Neale's mind (the
Hadley professor often marked a boy as 87.75 proficient in American
history, or 90.3 learned in German). At times they wondered if Hadley
were the best place for him. But they were exactly like all other
parents: they really had no idea what else to do with Neale. His health
continued good and he did not seem rebellious, so they confined their
supervision of his education to paying his rather expensive tuition,
signing his report cards, and handing them back to him.

Towards the end of the second year Neale began to master the new
technique. He memorized the magic pass-words which are accepted as a
proof of understanding many subjects. He began to draw breath, to tread
water less frantically and still not to fear the closing over his head
of smothering floods. The third year he felt earth beneath his feet
again, and relaxed enough from his mental concentration to spend
occasionally an hour or two on the school athletic field. He was fifteen
years old now, wore long trousers and suits with vests, a stand-up
collar, ties he tied himself, and carried a fountain pen. Underneath all
this grown-up bravery of exterior, there was a brain that had learned to
acquire and pigeon-hole information, and a perfectly dormant
personality.

Life at the Crittenden home was, as far as he was concerned, exactly the
same life he had always known, except that instead of playing on the
streets, he went out on the school athletic-field, and instead of
playing with his tin soldiers, he usually went up to his room to grind
over his lessons. At breakfast and supper his father and mother talked
peaceably to one another just as they always had, and although Neale was
able now to understand the subjects of their chat, their talk was, as a
matter of fact, often quite as incomprehensible to him as it had been
when he was a small boy. They had grown so much together, had so shared
life with each other and no one else, that they possessed almost a
language of their own, made up of references, only half-expressed, to
things they had said long ago, or to experiences they had had together,
or to opinions they both knew so well there was no need to formulate
them in words. Neale was not surprised at this, nor yet resentful. On
his side he was absorbed in his studies and the life at school. It was
true that every once in a while they talked directly to Neale; asked him
questions--what studies he liked best--how the teachers treated
him--what he had to eat at lunch. Whatever they asked Neale always tried
to answer in accordance with the facts; that he was getting along all
right he guessed, that everything was satisfactory as far as he could
see, that he hadn't any idea what he should like to do later on to earn
his living.

Occasionally, instead of taking the trolley cars, Father and Neale
walked together down the long steps to Hoboken and along 6th Street to
Hudson, where his father turned south and Neale went to the school. Then
talk was harder to dodge--not that Neale ever consciously dodged. They
would walk a dozen blocks. Father would ask a question, Neale would
answer it. Another dozen blocks, and another question. Once Father asked
if Neale wasn't sticking indoors too much. Couldn't he manage to get a
little more exercise? Neale explained the seriousness of his studies and
pointed out that he still rode his wheel on Saturdays. But the
suggestion took root. Neale bought a pair of Indian clubs and an
instruction book, and took to swinging the clubs fifteen minutes night
and morning with the windows open.

Another time Father said, "Look here, Neale, haven't you any friends?"

Neale was astonished, "Why, yes, I'm friends with the whole class."

"Yes, I suppose so, but you never seem to be with them outside of
school. When I went to school we were always playing around in each
other's yards and barns."

"You went to school in the country," Neale reminded him. "We haven't any
yards or barns here. We have the athletic field at school."

"Yes, that's so," his father admitted. After a time he made a further
admission, "Athletics are all right, too." But something in his tone
intimated that he was baffled rather than convinced. Since Neale
considered that athletics were not only all right, but all there was to
life, he found no comment to make.

A moment later, "But, great Scott," began his father with some heat as
though struck afresh with some aspect of Neale's life. He seemed to hear
the too-great vivacity of his accent and to wait until he could ask
quite casually, "Aren't there any of your school-mates you'd like to
have visit you?"

Neale considered. It hadn't struck him before, but it was a fact that
after school and athletic practice, all the boys vanished to their
various homes. Never having known any other than this city relation with
school-mates it seemed to him obvious and natural. "Visit me?" he said,
trying to imagine one of his classmates sitting at the Crittenden
dinner-table, and then, "No, I don't believe I do. There wouldn't be
anything special to do at home, would there?"

His father drew on his cigar thoughtfully, and walked on in silence.

But he had a long talk with Neale's mother that evening, the two country
and village-bred parents putting their heads together, earnestly though
helplessly. The only course which occurred to them was proposed to
Neale, a week later, when Mother asked him if he would do something to
please her. Incautiously Neale said, of course, yes, he would. He was
always willing enough to please Mother, and he had never made the
slightest objection to anything his parents planned for him. But this
plan turned out to be something very alarming. It was all arranged,
Mother told him, that he was to go to dancing-school in the Germania
Club ball-room on Tuesday afternoons. Mother pointed out that, now he
was fifteen years old, and half-way through prep.-school, he ought to
learn to dance. Neale had no theoretic objections to offer and had given
his word that he would not object. So hiding, except for his first wild
look of dismay, the terror and repugnance which filled him, he wrapped
up the newly bought patent-leather oxfords and started. There were
limits even to the Iroquois stoicism of his acceptance of what Fate
brought him. No power on earth could have made him walk through the
streets in those patent-leather shoes. But Mother never pushed him
anywhere near one of those limits. She did not even suggest that he wear
his dancing shoes. She helped him find the paper and string to wrap them
up. Also she did not fuss over him ... not much. She looked at him hard,
picked a thread off the sleeve of the blue serge which was his dress-up
costume, and called his attention to the fact that a button of his vest
was unbuttoned. She did not offer to button it herself, or handle him in
any way. Mother was all right, if she did want him to go to
dancing-school.

So he went. And it was not so bad, not nearly so bad as he feared, the
reassuring factor being that everybody else there was in the same boat.
You could see how they all despised it. Except, of course, the girls.
While he was changing his shoes in silent alarm and disgust in the
cloak-room, who should come in but Jenkins, a "Lower Middle" at school.
Neale didn't know Jenkins except by name, but at least he was some one
to lean on. Neale was at once very cordial and Jenkins, surprised and
flattered by this attention from an upper-class man, promised to show
him how everything was done. They went into the ball-room, Neale
clinging morally for dear life to Jenkins. A number of other young men
of fifteen and sixteen, and girls who looked almost like young ladies,
were sitting on opposite sides of the room. A bald-headed man to whom
Jenkins referred as "One Lung" sat at the piano. The dancing master was
young, German, energetic and thorough. He called the class to their
feet, explained and illustrated the step and made them all practice it
en masse, "_One_ and _two_! _One_ and _two_!" Then after a few minutes
the music struck up and he left them to choose partners and dance.
Neale, of course, did nothing of the kind, but pretended he couldn't
find a partner (there were twice as many girls as boys), and went back
to his seat. This was a tactical error. The Master spotted him at once.
"Couldn't find a partner? Oh, dance with me, then." He whirled Neale
about the room till his soul sickened, led him up to the other side of
the room and sent him off with a bony, red-haired girl with freckles.
Neale was caught that way twice, but no more after that. He had at least
ordinary sense, he told himself. Next time the music started, he gulped
down his objections to the whole proceeding and bowed to the prettiest
girl in the room.

The course was very thorough, covering much that was obsolescent, and a
good deal that was definitely dead. In that and succeeding lessons Neale
received instruction in the steps of the Polka, the Schottische, the
Varsovienne. The two-step he really learned, managing to "Yale" down the
length of the hall without stepping on his partner's feet; and although
he hated the waltz, he was forced by infinite repetition into mastering
it. Oh, the misery of the hour-long waltz-lesson, with the Master's
constant exhortation, "Don't hop! _Slide!_"

Neale carried into his dancing the same minute earnestness that won him
success at his games and studies. He did not see the use of dancing, any
more than he saw the use of learning German. But as the jobs seemed to
have to be done, he tackled both of them conscientiously. He remembered
to reverse in waltzing just as he remembered to put the auxiliary at the
end of a sentence after "als." He came to be considered a good dancer.
The girls did not claim to be tired when he asked them to dance with
him. But he went no further. Even after he had mastered the steps and
"leading," he did not talk as he spun methodically around. What was
there to say? And even when he waltzed with Flossie Winters, the
admitted belle, his heart beat no faster. It was nothing to him to put
his arm around her waist. In spite of his long trousers and stick-up
collar, the spirit of the thing escaped him; his time had not come.

After some months (they seemed very long months to Neale), the
conscientious and thorough instructor gave him a printed testimonial of
efficiency; there was no more he could teach Neale.

Over this his mother looked at him, "Wouldn't you like to go on, for the
fun of it, Neale?" she asked him rather urgently. Neale's father took
his cigar out of his mouth to hear Neale's answer.

"For the _fun_ of it!" said Neale, stupefied at the idea. His parents
exchanged glances and shook their heads, beaten.

"Oh, of course you don't _have_ to!" his mother assured him hastily. His
father put his cigar back in his mouth.




CHAPTER XII


In June 1899 when Hadley Prep. unlocked its grim doors and spewed forth
the fifteen-year-old Neale for his third vacation, he did not as he had
always done before, go at once with Mother to West Adams and the
saw-mill. The invariable program of his journey there, Mother's two
weeks' stay with him to get him settled, her going on to visit vague
relatives of her own elsewhere in Massachusetts, and her return to spend
the rest of the summer with Father, was upset by the news from the West
Adams Crittendens. Jenny, the hired girl, had been to visit friends in
Troy, and had fallen ill on her return. The doctor thought it might be
typhoid. Certainly they did not want a boy visitor bothering around,
until the matter was settled and they knew whether they were in for a
long siege.

The Crittendens like all methodical people were quite at a loss when
circumstances interfered with their routine. If there was one part of
Neale's year the rightness of which they did not doubt, it was the
summer spent in the country where his father had grown up. Now they were
confronted with a perfectly new aspect of the problem of what to do with
him. They solved it by not doing anything for the present. Mrs.
Crittenden went off to visit the usual relatives in Massachusetts,
delicate old ladies, whose nerves could not hold out against the idea of
a great ramping boy; and Neale was left temporarily with his father to
wait developments in West Adams.

The first days of liberty were sweet enough, after the strain of
examinations. Neale loafed or rode his wheel (he had a new 24-inch frame
bicycle now) at random up to Hudson Heights, and beyond on the
Palisades. But less than a week of this was enough. He tried to amuse
himself with baseball again, but it was not as he remembered it. The
three years he had been at Hadley Prep. had separated him from his old
friends. They were no longer to be found. Some were at work, some had
moved away. The boys playing ball seemed absurdly young. The vacant lots
themselves were absurdly small and rough. How could he have played
there? He gave the thing up and moped.

What was there to do? He got on his wheel again and went out over the
Plank Road as far as Passaic, swung left through Montclair, the Oranges,
out to Elizabeth and home through Newark. Home was just as dull as he
had left it. Neale was bored to desperation, and on a chance went into
the parlor and opened the book-case. He was no great reader. In his own
room there was a fair collection of Henty, G. Manville Fenn and Harry
Castleman, but none of these seemed worth re-reading. He didn't suppose
these grown-up books in the library could be worth anything, but he took
down a volume to see.

"Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within twenty miles of
the sea. My first most vivid impression of the identity of things seems
to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening.
At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place over-grown
with nettles was the churchyard ... and that the dark flat wilderness
beyond the churchyard intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with
scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden
line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which
the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers
growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

"'Hold your noise!' cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from
among the graves at the side of the church porch. 'Keep still, you
little devil, or I'll cut your throat!'"

Half an hour later Neale was still standing by the book-case, the book
in his hand, his mouth hanging open, shivering in the clammy mist
together with Pip and the man with the iron chain. An hour later he was
tucked into the Morris chair, among the cushions of which he hid the
book when the dinner bell made him reluctantly lay it aside.

What made him hide it? An invincible sense of moral decency made him
hide it. He would have shuddered and cowered like a modest girl whose
bed-room door is opened inadvertently by a stranger, at the very idea of
carrying the book to the table and pouring out to his father what it
made him feel. With a shy, virginal delicacy he stood guard,
half-frightened, half-enchanted, over the first warm gush from the
unexpected well-springs of emotion in his heart. If his father had come
into the room, had seen what he was reading and asked him how he liked
it, he would have answered briefly, "Oh, all right."

But for the next three days he did nothing but live with Pip, and feel
intolerable sympathy, far deeper than anything he had ever felt in his
own healthy life, for the convict victim of society. On the afternoon of
the third day, his heart pounding hard with hope, he was in the
row-boat, in the track of the steamer. The Morris-chair in which he sat,
swayed up and down to the ocean rhythm of the great deeps which bore him
along. He peered forward. There was the steamer at last, coming head on.
He called to Provis to sit still, "she was nearing us very fast," ...
"her shadow on us," ... and then, oh, _gosh_! ... the police-boat, the
betrayal, the summons to surrender!

Neale's soul recoiled upon itself in a shudder of horrified revolt. He
recognized the traitor, a white terror on his face. Grinding his teeth,
Neale leaped at his throat. With a roar the water closed over their
heads ... he would never let him go, never, never.... Down they went to
the depths, to the black depths, fiercely locked in each other's arms.
Neale smothered and strangled there ... and came up into another world,
the world of books.

At the table that night, his father looked at him and asked, "You're not
getting a cold, are you, Neale?"

"No, I guess not," said Neale, blinking his reddened eyelids, and eating
with a ravenous appetite his large slice of rare roast beef.

After that, time did not hang heavy on his hands. The days were not long
enough. The volume which stood next to "Great Expectations" was called
"The Tale of Two Cities." "Which two cities?" Neale wondered. He opened
it and began to read. In a moment, wrapped in a caped great-coat, shod
with muddy jack-boots, he was plodding up-hill beside the Dover Mail,
his hand on his horse-pistol. The panting rider on his blown horse--the
message, "Wait at Dover for Mam'selle,"--the answer in capital letters,
"RECALLED TO LIFE!" With a long quivering breath Neale slid back a
century and a quarter, into a world vibrating with sorrow, hope,
indignation, hatred, love.

He dipped his handkerchief in the muddy wine spilled in the street; he
looked up, not surprised to see the squalid joker scrawl "BLOOD," on the
wall; he climbed the filthy staircase, and averted his eyes in horrified
sympathy from the ruin of humanity who sat in the dark, cobbling shoes.

And then, brushed in with great colorful strokes, the causes and authors
of the filthy stairway, the squalid joker, the ruined man, the endless
misery. With the four serving-men pouring out the chocolate of
Monseigneur, Neale began to burn, like a carefully constructed bon-fire,
alight at last. He had never in his life before, given a conscious
thought to social injustice or the poor, but every instinct for fair
play, sound and intact in his heart, flared up hotly and honestly, as he
gave himself naively to the spell of the magnetic exaggeration and
over-emphasis of the story. He had "had" the French Revolution in his
history at Hadley Prep. and could have recited correctly almost any date
in it. But, quite literally, he had no idea until after he had finished
the story, that this panting, bleeding, weeping, thundering book had any
connection with what he had learned at school.

"David Copperfield" was good, not so terribly exciting as the others,
but solid food on which Neale, aware for the first time of his hunger,
feasted with a deep content--all except the parts about Dora, who made
him tired. After this for a change, he reached up to a shelf above and
took down at random one of the set in green and gold binding. This was
"Kidnapped." Thereafter he read nothing but green and gold, till his
eyes gave out and his father drove him out to spend a whole afternoon on
his wheel.




CHAPTER XIII


Although he had gone reluctantly, once he was out it seemed fine to be
on his bicycle again. His forgotten body reacted with a rush to exercise
and fresh air. Generally he expected to make at least fifty miles in a
half-day but to-day was hot. Pedaling easily through Nutley he caught
sight of a young man playing tennis against two girls and stopped in the
shade of a maple to watch the game, still sitting on his wheel, his
right pedal locked over the curb-stone. Tennis was not so universal then
as now: Neale knew little about the game.

Presently a chance stroke sent the ball into the street. "Out!"
announced the young man, and turning ran back to retrieve it. As any
American would do anywhere in the world when a ball is in question,
Neale stooped, picked it up and was just going to toss it back when
amazement paralyzed his arm. Could this slim youth in immaculate
flannels possibly be Don Roberts? Don, the big boy who had played shinny
and vacant-lot baseball with him, whom he had never seen but with a
dirty shirt and unkempt hair! The elegant youth cried out, "Neale
Crittenden! I'll be blessed if it isn't old man Crit! That's luck! Come
on and meet my friends and we'll have a set of doubles."

He ushered Neale up to the net, where laying a patronizing hand on his
friend's shoulder, he presented him. "Ladies, my old friend, Crittenden.
We used to be boys together long ago. Neale, the Misses Underhill,
Nutley's peerless blondine duet, Polly and Natalie. Now, how about some
doubles? Neale can use my old racket."

"But I don't play," said Neale, alarmed at the idea. "No, I honestly
don't. I've never had a racket in my hand. I'll watch."

"Oh, fudge! That's all right. You'll learn. Nat and Neale, that's your
team. Polly, my dear, come over to this court and back up your Uncle
Don. No fair banging everything at Polly."

The essential rudiments were explained. Neale gripped the racket and the
game began. At first his partner politely kept her own court but as the
completeness of his ineptness became awfully apparent, she began
covering more and more territory, running across and snatching the ball
from in front of his hesitating racket. In vain, for Don continually
placed his return down her undefended alley. The set was soon over,
6--love.

"Now, Crit," said Don, jumping over the net, "we'll have sex against
sex."

The second set went better. Now that he was playing on Don's side, Don
gave him a little coaching. Neale learned to run in to the net and found
volleying much simpler than playing ground strokes. Natalie's low
returns often went through him and he did nothing with her service, but
not infrequently he managed to pat back Polly's gentle offerings. When
points were needed Don monopolized the court. The boys won,--a love set.

Don lit a cigarette and pretended to fan himself with his racket. "How
about lemonade for the victors?" he cried, but the girls demurred. It
was five o'clock, they had to go home and dress. They laughed over
nothing at all, shook hands with Neale, told a few friendly lies about
his progress, and walked off laughing over nothing at all, swinging
their rackets; white-shod, yellow-haired, pink-skinned.

"Dear little sweethearts, aren't they?" commented Don. "A little insipid
like most nice girls, but you have to take what you can get. Polly's a
dub at tennis, of course, uses her racket like a snow-shovel, but she's
not such a worse little flirt. Look here, Crit, old boy. I've got to
stay in this stinking hole all summer, cramming for deficient exams. The
old man won't let me go to the Water Gap till I can answer those damn
questions. And there isn't a soul to play with but those girls. It's
rotten for my game. Why don't you come out here? Come to-morrow. Of
course you can't play, but I'll teach you. I can teach anybody."

Neale blushed and accepted the magnificent offer.

"Well, ta, ta, old man, sorry you can't stay to supper."

Neale mounted his wheel with a very high heart. This was something like.
Something was beginning to happen in his life. Wasn't Don great? As he
rode home he decided that he would ask his father to let him go to
Princeton. Don was at Princeton.

But he didn't. Father read him Mother's latest letter, all about the
particular great-aunt she was visiting in Cambridge, and after they had
commented on this, Father looked at his evening paper sideways as he
ate, and Neale went over in his mind the events of the afternoon, and
the wonder of Don Roberts turning out such a splendid fellow, such a
good sport, such clothes, such a way with him. Neale thought about him a
great deal more than about the girls, and with vastly more admiration.
He was sure that David Copperfield's Steerforth was nothing to Don
Roberts. Once when he glanced up, he saw Father looking at him instead
of his newspaper.

"Well, Neale," he asked, "what are you up to these days?"

This was his opportunity, Neale knew it was, to introduce the subject of
Princeton, but he could not think of any way to do it. Instead he said
vaguely, "Oh, nothing much. Sort of hanging around." And then with a
great effort, he brought out, for once, a vital piece of news, "I'm
learning to play tennis."

"That's _good_," said Father. "It's a great game."

This seemed to be final. He looked back at his newspaper. But after a
while, as though something had occurred to him he asked, "Who's teaching
you? Where do you play?"

"I ran across Don Roberts, over in Nutley. They used to live here, on
Central Avenue. He used to go to Number Two School." He wanted to go on
and tell about Don's being in Princeton, but could not propel himself
past the full-stop, where an inadvertent cadence of his voice had
dropped him.

Next morning he found Don with a whitewash brush touching up the marking
of the court. For three hours they practised--a most exhausting three
hours! He thought he began to make a little progress. He knew he was
almost all in, when noon came, worn out far more by the mental strain of
struggling his way into a new technique, than by the physical effort,
although that had been enough to leave him blown and panting, as they
went into the house to have lunch.

The two boys were alone at the table. Don swaggered a little as he
served his guest. "No one at home," he explained. "Mother and the girls
are down at Asbury. The old man doesn't get back from the office till
the 5.45. I can hear his train whistle from here. He finds his loving
son deep in his books, you bet."

Through luncheon Don fired Neale's enthusiasm with stories of Big Bill
Edwards, Arthur Poe, Lady Jayne and other heroes of his Alma Mater.
Afterwards he strolled to the living-room, sat down at the piano, and
sang "The Orange and the Black,"--"There's a college we call Princeton."
Then lowering his voice, with many nods and knowing winks, he sang a
long song with the refrain, "Keep your eye on tricky little Sarah."

Neale's play on the streets and in vacant lots with perfectly
heterogeneous and casual little boys had given him quite enough of a
vocabulary to understand the words of this song; and odds and ends of
the older boys' talk overheard in the locker-room at Hadley made the
spirit of it by no means unfamiliar. But this was the first time that
either words or spirit had ever been more than one of the casual
by-products of boy-life. What put it in the center of his attention now
was his admiration of Don as the model of colorful, sophisticated life.
Evidently this was a part of such life. Neale applied his mind therefore
to the words and the spirit and learned to hum the air.

That evening Father read another uneventful letter from Mother; then
they sat in silence till, as father was filling his pipe, he remarked,
as if it had just come into his mind, "Oh, I thought you ought to have a
racket of your own, Neale. I got one. It's in the hall on the
coat-rack."

Neale bounded upstairs and carried his prize to his room. There was not
only a Sears racket, but three Wright and Ditson balls, Spalding's
"Tennis Guide," and a little pamphlet on "How to Play Lawn Tennis."
Neale dropped into his Morris chair and devoured both books before going
to bed.

The hard protective husk of his little boyhood was so newly sloughed
off, that his adolescence had as yet received scarcely a mark upon its
new freshness to impression. Ready now, responsive with an inward quiver
to a whole range of experience to which he had been blind and deaf
before, he was catching up from the chance materials about him, the
stuff with which to construct his new world. And here was material ready
to his hand. The editor, an enthusiast, an idealist of sportsmanship had
put a great deal in his little treatise beside his copious advice as to
the proper grip on the racket and the laying out of a court. Without the
slightest self-consciousness (because he had the not-to-be-imitated
single-heartedness of the sincere devotee) he had charged every section
of his treatise with the spirit of the game, the spirit of sport, not of
border warfare. So matter-of-factly was this message conveyed that even
the adolescent soul, half-crusader, half-Hun, did not guess that it was
being preached to. The word "honor" was never mentioned, yet Neale
understood perfectly the significance of what he read, under the caption
"Tournaments:" "The committee should provide adequate linesmen, for
while the contestants themselves can generally tell whether a ball is
good or not, yet close decisions occur in every match and it is
obviously unfair to force a player to penalize himself (as he naturally
would feel bound to do) by giving his opponent the benefit of the doubt
on all uncertain cases." He nodded approvingly over the phrase, "as he
naturally would feel bound to do." It did not strike him as a new idea,
but merely a clearer statement of something he had always felt was in
the air about sports. Yes, that was how a college man would act, how Don
would act.

Again, among the illustrations he was struck by a photograph of the
winner and runner-up shaking hands after the Newport tournament. Neale
looked long at the expression of cordial congratulation and admiration
on the loser's face. He moved uneasily in his chair at the recollection
of a nine of disgruntled urchins muttering after a defeat, "Aw, you
bunch of stiffs, wait till we get you on our own diamond." Neale had
been one of those who muttered, one of those so stung by defeat that the
idea of admiring the better playing which had beaten them would have
been inconceivable to him. Neale knew himself well enough to know the
fierceness of his lust for victory. He knew it was going to be a job to
tame that lust to this civilized code. But he would try. Morally on
tip-toe, he resolved to be worthy of Don's friendship.

When he turned the last page, relaxed the intense concentration with
which he had been absorbing the essence and spirit of the book, and
stood up to stretch and yawn before going to bed, he felt that he had
learned a lot. And he had. Silently, with the incalculable silence of
natural processes, an ideal had crystallized in his heart around a
standard of conduct.

And yet this was all under the surface. As he dropped off to sleep, his
mind retained as the chief lesson of the book a mass of stimulating
suggestions about rolling strokes, the reverse twist service, and the
advice for a solitary beginner to practise against a brick wall.

He knew where such a wall could be found; in a vacant lot on Poplar
Street, just off Summit Avenue. He often had played hand-ball there in
the old days. Next morning he went there after breakfast, postponing his
ride to Nutley till after lunch. The result was so good that thereafter
he spent every morning there.

The summer days went by. Neale progressed far in his imitation of Don
and Don's manner and standards. He learned after practising with a box
of his own, to accept the cigarettes Don constantly offered him. To be
like Don, he learned to call the girls by their first names without
choking, although he never could bring himself to squeeze their hands or
pat their shoulders or stroke their hair as Don did so casually; and he
did manage to pick up a fair game of tennis.

When he challenged Natalie to singles and beat her 7-5, Don looked at
him with a new expression, and a few days later announced great news.
"It's all arranged. Tournament here next Saturday, lemonade, lawn party,
picnic-supper, dance. The old man's agreed not to butt in and spoil
things. I've got four fellows from here, Peterson, and a friend of his
from Montclair. You and I make eight. Just right for a day's tournament
on one court."

"But I don't play well enough," protested Neale.

"You'll be put out in the first round of course," Don admitted, "but I
need you to make the even eight, and you can chase balls and make
yourself useful. Entry fee's a dollar. That'll buy a Pim racket as a
prize. I _need_ a new racket."

The great day came and Neale, flustered and tense, was put out in the
first round according to schedule. It didn't surprise him, although deep
in his heart he had had a fluttering hope--but no matter. What happened
to him was of no consequence. Don came through easily, of course. After
lunch Neale sat with Natalie and together they gasped and clapped and
cried, "played!" as Don captured his match in the semi-finals.

"Isn't he splendid?" said Natalie. Neale nodded, too much moved to
speak.

The finals were called. Neale focussed himself on the game, blind to
anything else. Don was matched against the Peterson boy, a high-school
lad from Montclair. Don got the first set. Good. The second set
unexpectedly went to deuce. What had happened! Neale leaned forward, his
eyes hot from staring, and tried to make out the meaning of what he saw.
Peterson didn't hit the ball as hard as Don did, but his long, bony arm
pulled off the most impossible of "gets." Deuce, vantage, deuce,
vantage. Don put on more steam, served doubles, lost his service.
Peterson won his own service, and the sets were even. Don's face was a
blank. He walked to his place, hitched up his trousers, pulled the brim
of his white felt sports-hat low over his eyes, set his jaw and faced
his opponent. Neale's anxious eyes had not left him for a second.

The last set was astounding, paralyzing to the spectators. Don had gone
to pieces and the high-school boy had pulled himself together. His
gawky, graceless body and long arms seemed to cover the whole court. Don
served with murderous force, his rising fury burning with a sensible
heat all around him as he raced and plunged and stroked the ball.
Peterson broke through his service again--four-two. Don struck out
dazzling drives, but many of them landed in the net. He got by Peterson
with wily stroke after stroke--only so many of them landed in the
alleys; four-three; five-three. Peterson kept on steadily, with his
stiff, mechanical, chopped returns, his intent eyes gleaming in his
impassive face. He had Don forty-love. Neale's heart was bursting. Don
rushed to the net. Peterson lobbed to the base-line, and it was all
over. Don was beaten.

       *       *       *       *       *

In a flash Neale found an excuse for his hero, "Every one has his
off-days ... but...."

Though half-forewarned by the look on Don's face, he could not turn his
eyes away from the dashing figure in white flannels, which stood there
frozen in mid-flight as the fatal ball fell inside the back-line. Then
with a furious swing of his arm Don flung his racket from him as if he
wished to break it into a thousand pieces. By good luck it did not hit
one of the girl spectators, but fell with a little crash of broken twigs
into the midst of a lilac bush. He took a step or two after this, as if
he meant to leave the court at once. With an effort, he turned about,
walked up to the net where the Peterson boy stood panting, and gave him
in silence, a limp hand-shake.

Then he pushed through the spectators, and went into the house calling
over his shoulder that Polly was to award the prize. Neale did not dare
to look at Natalie; the moment was too awful.

The Peterson boy did not stay to flaunt his triumph. Pleading an
impending thunder-storm as an excuse (the sky was as a matter of fact
very black and lowering), he scorched off on his wheel back to Montclair
with the spoils of victory bound to his handle-bars. With his departure,
the atmosphere of gloom among Don's friends began to lift. When the
storm broke, as it did shortly, they all hurried indoors. The girls set
about getting supper with a great clatter of chafing-dishes, and much
screaming, with each clap of thunder. By the time the cheese was melted,
Don reappeared in blue serge and negligee silk shirt. Coming down stairs
he passed Nea

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