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A Man's World

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Title: A Man's World

Creator: Albert Edwards


        
Release date: February 11, 2014 [eBook #44878]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44878

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MAN'S WORLD ***




Produced by Al Haines.





                             A MAN'S WORLD


                                   BY

                             ALBERT EDWARDS



                                New York
                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                                  1912

                         _All rights reserved_




                            COPYRIGHT, 1912
                        BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

            Set up and electrotyped.  Published July, 1912.
                   Reprinted October, November, 1912


                        PRESS OF T. MOREY & SON
                       GREENFIELD, MASS., U.S.A.




                            *A MAN'S WORLD*



                                *BOOK I*


                                  *I*


All books should have a preface, to tell what they are about and why
they were written.

This one is about myself--Arnold Whitman.

I have sought in vain for a title which would be truly descriptive of
the subject and form of my book.  It is not a "Journal" nor a "Diary"
for these words signify a daily noting down of events.  Neither
"Memoirs" nor "Recollections" meet the case, for much which I have
written might better be called "Meditations."  It certainly is not a
"Novel," for that term implies a traditional "literary form," a
beginning, development and end.  I am quite sure that my beginning goes
back to the primordial day when dead matter first organized itself--or
was organized--into a living cell.  And whether or not I will ever "end"
is an open question. There is no "unity" in the form of my narrative
except the frame of mind which led me to write it, which has held me to
task till now.

It is the story of how I, born at the close of The Great War, lived and
of the things--common-place and unusual--which happened to me, how they
felt at the time and how I feel about them now.

"Autobiography" is the term which most truly describes what I have tried
to do.  But that word is associated with the idea of great men.  The
fact that I am not "great" has been my main incentive in writing.  We
have text books a plenty on how to become Emperor, at least they tell
how a man named Napoleon did it.  There are endless volumes to which you
may refer if you wish to become President of these United States--or
rival the career of Captain Kidd.  But such ambitions are rare among
boys over eighteen.

Even before that age I began to wish for a book like the one I have
tried to write.  I wanted to know how ordinary people lived.  It was no
help in those days to read how this Caesar or that came and saw and
conquered.  I shared the ambitions of the boys about me. To be sure
there were day-dreaming moments when we planned to explore Central
Africa or found dynasties. But this was pure make-believe.  We knew that
not one man in thousands wins fame.  For each moment we dreamed of
greatness there were days on end when we looked out questioningly on the
real world. We got no answers from our teachers.  Most of the boys who
were in school with me are today running a store, practicing law or
medicine.  They were prepared for it by reading Plutarch in class and
Nick Carter on the sly.

As a youth I wanted of course to gain a comfortable living.  I wanted
mildly to win some measure of distinction, but all this was subordinate
to a more definite desire to be a man, and not to be ashamed.  A book
about the ordinary life I was to enter, would have been a God-send to
me.

This then is to be the story of my life as it appears to me now, and
how, in the face of the things which happened to me, I tried to be
decent.

I have only two apologies to offer.  All the rest of my writing has been
scientific--on the subject of criminology.  I am unpracticed in
narration.  And I have been enough in courts to realize the difference
between "evidence" and "truth."  At best I can only give "evidence."
Others who knew me would tell of my life differently, perhaps more
truly.  But it will be as near truth as I can make it.

And now to my story.



                                  *II*


My earliest distinct memory is of an undeserved flogging.  But from this
grew my conception of Justice. It was, I think, my first abstract idea.

My parents died long before I can remember and I was brought up in the
home of the Rev. Josiah Drake, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister of the
Tennessee Mountains.  He was my uncle, but I always called him "the
Father."  He was the big fact of my childhood and my memory holds a more
vivid picture of him than of any person I have known since.

He was very tall, but stooped heavily.  If he had shaved he would have
resembled Lincoln, and this, I suppose, is why he wore so long and full
a beard.  For he was a Southerner and hated the Northern leader with all
the bitterness of the defeated.  And yet he was a Christian.  I have
never known one who served his God more earnestly, more devotedly.  He
was a scholar of the old type.  He knew his Latin and Greek and Hebrew.
And as those were rare accomplishments among the mountain clergy of
Tennessee it gave him a great prestige.  In all but name he was the
Bishop of the country-side.  His faith was that of Pym and Knox and
Jonathan Edwards, a militant Puritan, fearless before the world, abject
in humility before his God.

Of his wife, my aunt Martha, I have scarcely a memory.  When I was very
young she must have been important to me, but as I grew to boyhood she
faded into indistinct haziness.  I recall most clearly how she looked at
church, not so much her face as her clothes. In all those years she must
have had some new ones, but if so, they were always of the same stuff
and pattern as the old.  Sharpest of all I remember the ridges the bones
of her corset made in the back of her dress as she leaned forward,
resting her forehead on the pew in front of us, during the "long
prayer."  There was always a flush on her face when it was over.  I
think her clothing cramped her somehow.

I have also a picture of her heated, flurried look over the kitchen
stove when she was engaged in the annual ordeal of "putting up"
preserves.  Even when making apple-butter she maintained a certain
formality. The one time when she would lapse from her dignity was when
one of the negroes would rush into the kitchen with the news that a
buggy was turning into our yard.  The sudden scurry, the dash into her
bedroom, the speed with which the hot faced woman of the kitchen would
transform herself into a composed minister's wife in black silk, was the
chief wonder of my childhood.  It was very rarely that the guests
reached the parlor before her.

All of her children had died in infancy except Oliver. As the Father's
religion frowned on earthly love, she idealized him in secret.  I think
she tried to do her Christian duty towards me, but it was decidedly
perfunctory.  She was very busy with the big house to keep in order,
endless church work and the burden of preserving the appearances her
husband's position demanded.

There was a large lawn before the house down to a picket fence.  Mowing
the grass and whitewashing that fence were the bitterest chores of my
childhood. The main street of the village was so little used for traffic
that once or twice every summer it was necessary to cut down the tall
grass and weeds.  Next to our house was the church, it was an
unattractive box. I remember that once in a long while it was painted,
but the spire was never completed above the belfry. There was a
straggling line of houses on each side of the street and two stores.
Beyond the Episcopal Church, the road turned sharply to the right and
slipped precipitously down into the valley.  Far below us was the county
seat.  About five hundred people lived there, and the place boasted of
six stores and a railroad station.

That was its greatest charm to my schoolmates. From any of the fields,
on the hill-side beyond the village, we could look down and watch the
two daily trains as they made a wide sweep up into this forgotten
country.  There was one lad whom I remember with envy.  His father was
carter for our community and sometimes he took his son down with him.
They slept in the great covered wagon in the square before the county
court house, and came back the next day. The boy's name was Stonewall
Jackson Clarke.  He lorded it over the rest of us because he had seen a
locomotive at close quarters.  And he used to tell us that the court
house was bigger than our two churches "with Blake's store on top."

I think that as a boy I knew the names of one or two stations on each
side of the county seat.  But it never occurred to me that the trains
down there could take you to the cities and countries I studied about in
my geography.  Beyond the valley were Missionary Ridge and Lookout
Mountain.  But none of the boys I played with realized that the world
beyond the mountains was anything like the country we could see. It
would have surprised us if the teacher had pointed out to us on the
school map the spot where our village stood.  The land over which
Cinderella's Prince ruled was just as real to us as New York State or
the countries of Europe, the names of whose capitals we learned by rote.

My cousin Oliver I disliked.  As a youngster I did not know why.  But
now I can see that he had a craven streak in him, a taint of sneakiness,
an inability to be bravely sincere.  It was through him that I got my
lesson in justice.

He was then about sixteen and I eight.  His hobby at the time was
carpentry and, as I was supposed to dull his tools if I touched them, I
was forbidden to play in the part of the barn where he had his bench.
He was going to make an overnight visit to some friends in a neighboring
township and at breakfast--he was to start about noon--he asked the
Father to reiterate the prohibition.  A few hours later I found Oliver
smoking a corn-silk cigarette behind the barn.  He begged me not "to
tell on him."  Nothing had been further from my mind.  As a bribe for my
silence he said I might play with his tools.  The spirit of his offer
angered me--but I accepted it.

After he had left the Father found me at his bench.

"Ollie said I could," I explained.

"At breakfast," the Father replied, "he distinctly said you could not."

But I stuck to it.  The Father had every reason to believe I was lying.
It was not in Oliver's nature to be kind to me without reason.  And I
could not, in honor, explain the reason.  The Father was not the kind to
spoil his children by sparing the rod, and there was no crime in his
code more heinous than falsehood. He tried to flog me into a confession.

There was nothing very tragic to me in being whipped. All the boys I
knew were punished so.  I had never given the matter any thought.  As I
would not admit that I had lied, this was the worst beating I ever
received.  He stopped at last from lack of breath and sent me to bed.

"Oliver will be back to-morrow," he said.  "It is no use persisting in
your lie.  You will be found out. And if you have not confessed...."
The threat was left open.

I remember tossing about in bed and wishing that I had lied and taken a
whipping for disobedience.  It would not have been so bad and would have
been over at once.  The next morning I sat sullenly in my room waiting
for Oliver's return, wondering if he would tell the truth.  I was not at
all confident.  Towards noon, the blackboard turned in at the gate, one
of the negroes took the horse and I heard the Father call Oliver into
his study.

Then suddenly a door slammed and I heard the Father's step on the stair.
He was running.  He burst into my room and before I knew what was
happening, he had picked me up in his arms.  And, wonder of wonders, he
was crying.  I had never before seen a grown man cry.  He was asking me,
I could not understand what he meant, but he was asking me to forgive
him.  Then I heard the Mother's voice at the door.

"What is the matter, Josiah?"

"Oh, Martha.  It's horrible!  I caned the lad for a lie and he was
telling the Truth!  Oh, my son, my son, forgive me."

At first all I realized was that I was not to be whipped any more.  But
all day long the Father kept me close to him and gradually from his talk
I began vaguely to understand that there was such a thing as justice. I
had always supposed that punishments were a matter of the parents' good
pleasure.  That it had any relation to cause and effect, that sometimes
a father might be right and sometimes wrong in beating a child, had
never occurred to me.

It is interesting how such things take form in a child's mind.  The
Father bought me a set of tools like Oliver's as a peace offering, and
of course I was much more interested in them than in any abstract
conception of justice.  Yet in some gradual, subconscious way, the idea
arranged itself in my mind. I began to judge everything by it.  I
suppose it marked the end of babyhood, the first faint beginning of
manhood.



                                 *III*


It Is not surprising that, in that austere home, my first fundamental
idea should have been of justice rather than of love.

There may have been a time when the affection between the Father and
Mother had an outward showing. I would like to think that they had
tasted gayer, honey-mooning days.  I doubt it.  They were helpmates
rather than lovers.  The Mother was well named Martha, busy with much
serving.  Her work had dovetailed into his.  It would be juster to say
her work was his.  Their all-absorbing business was the winning of souls
to Christ, and anything of only human interest seemed to them of the
earth, earthy.  I never saw anything like a quarrel between them, nor
any passage of affection--except that the Father kissed her when going
on a journey or returning.

It is hard for me to understand such people.  Everything which has given
me solace in life, all the pleasures of literature and art, all the real
as well as the written poems, they had rigorously cut off.

Oliver and I kissed the Mother when we went to bed. I never remember
kissing the Father.  Yet he loved me.  Sometimes I think he loved me
more than his own son.  I doubt if I was often separated from his
thoughts, ever from his prayers.

But all I knew as a boy about the affections, which expresses itself
openly, was from Mary Button, my Sunday school teacher.  She was
brimming over with the joy of living and in every way the opposite of
the austerity I knew at home.  She was altogether wonderful to me.  When
the Mother was away at Synodical meetings, Mary used often to come for a
whole day to keep the house in order.  It was strange and typical to
hear her sing rollicking college songs at our parlor organ--a wheezy
contraption which seemed entirely dedicated to Moody and Sankey.

All through my childhood Mary passed as a celestial dream, a princess
from some beautiful land of laughter and kisses.

When I was about nine, and she I suppose near nineteen, Prof. Everett,
who had been with her brother in college, began to visit the village.  I
disliked him at once with an instinctive jealousy.  He has since won a
large renown as a geologist, and was no doubt an estimable man, but if I
should meet him now, after all these years, I am sure the old grudge
would come to life and make me hate him.  After a few months he married
her and took her away to a nearby college town.

About a year later, when the ache of her absence was beginning to heal,
and, boy-like, I was in danger of forgetting her, a photograph came of
her and the baby. It was such a loving picture!  She looked so radiantly
happy!  It was set up on the mantel-piece in the parlor, and seemed to
illuminate that sombre room.  I remember exactly how it leaned up
against the bronze clock, between the plaster busts of Milton and Homer.
In those days I supposed one had to be blind to be a poet.  The picture
kept her memory alive for me.

Some months later Mary wrote that her husband was going away to attend a
convention and she asked that I might come to bear her company for the
week.

The excitement of that first sortie out into the world is the most vivid
thing which comes to me from my childhood.  The Father drove me down the
mountain-side to the county seat and so at last I saw a train at close
quarters.  Even when I had watched them through the Father's campaign
glasses I had not realized how large they were.  He gave me in charge of
the conductor, a man with an armless sleeve and drooping moustaches, who
had been a corporal in his regiment.

There was a rattle and jerk--we had no air-brakes on the Tennessee
trains in those days--and the railroad station and the Father slipped
out of sight.  Such an amazing number of things went by the car window!
I counted all the fields to the next station.  There were thirty-seven.
The conductor told me I was not to get off till the eighteenth stop.  I
started in valiantly to count them all, but my attention was distracted
by the fact that things near the track went by so much faster than
things far away.  In "physics A" at college I learned an explanation of
this phenomena which seemed all right on paper but even today it is
entirely inadequate when I am in a train and actually watching the earth
revolve about distant points in either horizon. Trying to find a reason
for it on that first railroad trip put me to sleep.  At last the
conductor woke me up and handed me over to Mary.

I can recall only vaguely the details of that delectable week, the
strangeness of the entire experience is what sticks in my memory.  There
was the baby, so soft and round and contented.  There was the German
nurse, the first white servant I had ever seen.  And there were the
armchairs in the living-room, curved and comfortable and very different
from the chairs in the parlor at home.  After supper, instead of sending
me off to bed, Mary read to me before the open fire, read me the
wonderful stories of King Arthur.  When at last I was sleepy, she came
with me to my room.  It embarrassed me to undress before her, but it was
very sweet to have her tuck me in and kiss me "goodnight."

Mary "spoiled" me, to use the Father's expression, systematically, she
let me eat between meals and gorged me with sweets.  One night it made
me sick. I have forgotten whether "dough-nuts" or "pop-overs" were to
blame.  When the doctor had gone away, laughing--for it was not
serious--Mary took me into her own bed.  I would gladly have suffered
ten times the pain for the warm comfort of her arms about me.

It was during this visit that all the side of life we call Art began to
appeal to me.  The King Arthur legends were my introduction to
literature, Malory and Tennyson's "Idylls" were the first written
stories or poems I ever enjoyed.  And I think my first impression of
Beauty, was the sight of Mary nursing the baby. I am sure she did not
realize with what wondering eyes I watched her.  I was only a little
shaver and she could not have guessed what a novel sight it was for me.
At home, everything human, which could not be suppressed, was studiously
hidden.  I think some of the old Madonnas in which the Mother is
suckling the Child would have seemed blasphemous to the Father. Art has
always seemed to me at its highest when occupied with some such simple
human thing.



                                  *IV*


I had two playmates in those days, Margaret and Albert Jennings.  Their
father had been on "Stonewall" Jackson's staff.  "Al" was my own age,
but seemed older and Margot was a year younger.  Until I went away to
school we were almost inseparable.  Only in affairs of the church were
we apart, for they were Episcopalians.

Our biggest common interest was a "Chicken Company."  We had built an
elaborate run in the back yard of the parsonage and sometimes had as
many as thirty hens.  This enterprise led us into the great sin of our
childhood--stealing.

Why I stole I cannot explain.  I never pretended to justify it.  We
would sell a dozen eggs to my household and then take as many out of the
pantry as were necessary to complete a dozen for Mrs. Jennings.  We did
this off and on for four or five years.  When the hens laid freely we
did not have to.  But if there were not eggs to satisfy the demands of
the two families, we stole.  I think we blamed it on the chickens.  Al
and I were always full of great projects for improving the stock or the
run and so needed money.  There was little danger of discovery, because
housekeeping was a very unexact science in our southern homes.  And just
because the chickens refused to lay as they should, seemed a very
trivial reason for sacrificing our plans. But we did not like to do it.
We always searched the nests two or three times in the hope of finding
the eggs we needed.

Al was a queer chap.  I remember one time we were two eggs short.

"We'll have to steal them from your mother," I said.

"You may be a thief," he retorted angrily, as we started after the
spoils.  "But I intend to pay it back. It's just a loan."

There was a weak subterfuge to the effect that Margot knew nothing of
our dishonesty.  The three of us had decided upon this in open council,
to protect her in case we were caught.  If there were to be any
whippings, it was for the masculine members of the firm to take them.
But Margot knew, just as well as we did, how many eggs were laid and how
far our sales exceeded that number.  But the candy she bought did not
seem to trouble her conscience any more than it did her digestion.  I
have met no end of older women, in perfectly good church standing, who
are no more squeamish about how their men folk gain their income.

There was another very feminine trait about Margot.  We divided our
profits equally, in three parts. Al and I always put most of our share
back into the business.  Margot spent hers on candy.  Al used to object
to this arrangement sometimes, but I always stood up for her.

This was because I expected to marry her.  I do not remember when it was
first suggested, but it was an accepted thing between us.  Col. Jennings
used laughingly to encourage us in it.  I spoke of it once at home, but
the Father shook his head and said it would grieve him if I married
outside of our denomination.  The Baptists were his special aversion,
but next to them he objected to Episcopalians, whom he felt to be
tainted with popery.

This led to a quarrel with Margot.  I told her flatly that I would not
marry her, unless she became a Presbyterian. She was a little snob and,
as the most considerable people of the county belonged to her church,
she preferred to give me up rather than slip down in the social scale.
For several days we did not speak to each other.  I refused to let any
misguided Episcopalians in my yard.  As the chicken run was in my
domain, Al, who was smaller than I, became an apostate.  But Margot held
out stubbornly, until her mother intervened and told us, with great good
sense, that we were much too young to know the difference between one
sect and another, that we had best suspend hostilities until we knew
what we were fighting about.  So peace was restored.

This calf-love of mine was strangely cold.  Some of the boys and girls
in school used to "spoon."  But "holding hands" and so forth seemed
utterly inane to me.  I do not know what Margot felt about it, but I no
more thought of kissing her than her brother. The best thing about her
was that she also loved King Arthur.  Mary had given me a copy of
Malory.  Up in our hay-loft, Margot and I used to take turns reading it
aloud and acting it.  Only once in a long while could we persuade Al to
join us in these childish dramatics.  I was generally Launcelot.
Sometimes she would be Elaine, but I think she loved best to be the
Queen.

At fourteen I discovered Froissart's Chronicles in the Father's library.
It had a forbidding cover and I might never have unearthed it, if he had
not set me to work dusting his books in punishment for some minor
delinquency.  On the bottom shelf there were three big lexicons, Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew.  Next to them was the great family Bible.  Then came
Cruden's Concordance, a geography of Palestine, "The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire," Motley's "Dutch Republic"--and Froissart!  As I was
dusting it gloomily, it slipped from my hands and fell open to an old
engraving of the Murder of Richard II.  There were twenty-four plates in
that volume.  Never did boy enter into such a paradise.

I can only guess what the Father would have thought of my filling my
mind with such lore.  I took no chances in the matter.  With great
pains, I arranged the books so that the absence of Froissart would not
be noticed. Until I went East to school at sixteen, it reposed in the
bottom of the bran bin in the loft, and when at last I went, I gave it
to Margot as my choicest treasure.

When I saw her ten years ago, she showed me the old book.  The sight of
it threw us both under constraint, bringing back those old days when we
had planned to marry.  The funeral of a dream always seem sadder to me
than the death of a person.

Permanent camp meetings, the things which grew into the Chautauqua
movement, were just beginning their popularity.  One had been started a
few score miles from our village and the year I went away to school, the
Father had been made director.  We left home early in the summer, and I
was to go East without coming back.

On the eve of my departure, I went to see Margot. It was my first formal
call and, in my new long trousers, I was much embarrassed.  For an hour
or so we sat stiffly, repeating every ten minutes a promise to write to
each other.  I remember we figured out that it would take me ten years
to finish the Theological Seminary and be ready to marry her.  It was
ordained that I was to study for the ministry.  No other career had ever
been suggested to me.

The constraint wore off when I asked her for a photograph to take with
me to school.  From some instinct of coquetry she pretended not to want
me to have one. Boys at school, she said, had their walls covered with
pictures of girls, she would not think of letting hers be put up with a
hundred others.  When I solemnly promised not to have any picture but
hers, she said she had no good one.  There was one on the mantel, and I
grabbed it in spite of her protest.

She was a bit of a tomboy and a hoydenish scuffle followed.  In the
scramble my hand fell accidentally on her breast.  It sent a dazzling
thrill through me. The vision came to me of Mary nursing the baby and
the beauty of her white breast.  The idea connected itself with Margot,
struggling in my arms.  I knew nothing of the mystery of life.  I cannot
tell what I felt--it was very vague--but I knew some new thing had come
to me.

Margot noticed the change.  I suppose I stopped the struggle with her.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"Nothing."

But I went off and sat down apart.

"What's the matter?" she insisted, coming over and standing in front of
me.  "Did I hurt you?"

"No," I said.  "But we mustn't wrestle like that. We aren't children any
more."

She threw up her head and began to make fun of me and my new long
trousers.  But I interrupted her.

"Margot!  Margot!  Don't you understand?"

I took hold of her hands and pulled her down beside me and kissed her.
It was the first time.  I am sure she did not understand what I meant--I
was not clear about it myself.  But she fell suddenly silent.  And while
I sat there with my arm about her, I saw a vision of Mary's home and the
warm joy of it.  Margot and I would have a home like that; not like the
Father's.

I was under the spell of some dizzying emotion which none of our grown
up words will fit.  The emotion, I suppose, comes but once, and is too
fleeting to have won a place in adult dictionaries.  It was painful and
awesome, but as I walked home I was very happy.



                                  *V*


Of course I never questioned the Father's religious dogmas.  I did not
even know that they might be questioned.  But two things troubled me
persistently.

I had been taught that our Saviour was the Prince of Peace, that His
chief commandment was the law of love.  But when adults got together
there was always talk of the war.  I do not think there was any elder or
deacon in our church who had not served.  How often I listened to
stories of the wave of murder and rapine that had swept through our
mountains only a few years before!

I remember especially the placing of a battle monument just outside our
village and the horde of strangers who came from various parts of the
state for the ceremony.  The heroes were five men in gray uniforms, all
who were left of the company which had stood there and had been shot to
pieces.  One was an old man, three were middle aged, and one was so
young that he could not have been more than sixteen on the day of the
fight.  The man who had been their captain stayed at the parsonage.
After supper the principal men of the village gathered in our parlor.  I
stood by the Father's chair and listened wide-eyed as, in his cracked
voice, the Captain told us all the details of that slaughter.  I
remember that in the excitement of his story-telling the old soldier
became profane, and the Father did not rebuke him.

Somehow I could not feel any romance in modern warfare, there seemed no
similarity between these men and the chivalric heroes of The Round
Table.  Perhaps if Launcelot had been a real person, there in the
parsonage parlor, and had told me face to face and vividly how he had
slain the false knight Gawaine, had made me see the smear of blood on
his sword blade, the cloven headed corpse of his enemy, that also they
might have seemed abhorrent.

As a little boy I could not understand how a follower of Jesus could be
a soldier.  I did not know that grown men were also asking the same
question.  Years afterwards I remember coming across Rossetti's biting
sonnet--"Vox ecclesiae, vox Christi"--

      "O'er weapons blessed for carnage, to fierce youth
    From evil age, the word has hissed along:--
    Ye are the Lord's: go forth, destroy, be strong:
    Christ's Church absolves ye from Christ's law of ruth."

I do not know what the Father would have thought of those words, for,
like some of the Roundhead leaders of Cromwell's time, he had been
Chaplain as well as Captain of his company.  If the war had broken out
again, as the "Irreconcilables" believed it surely would, and if Oliver
had refused to enlist on the ground that he was studying for Christ's
ministry, I think the Father would have cursed him.

The other thing which worried me was a "gospel hymn," which we sang
almost every Sunday.  It had a swinging tune, but the words were
horrible.

    There is a fountain filled with blood,
      Drawn from Emanuel's veins;
    And sinners plunged beneath that flood
      Lose all their guilty stains.

Such a gory means of salvation seemed much more frightful to my childish
imagination than the most sulphurous hell.

These things I was told I would understand when I grew up.  This was the
answer to so many questions, that I got out of the habit of asking them.
I believed that the Father was very wise and was willing to take his
word for everything.

At eleven he persuaded me "to make a profession of faith" and join the
church.  It is only within these latter, mellower years that I can look
back on this incident without bitterness.  It was so utterly unfair. The
only thing I was made to understand was that I was taking very serious
and irrevocable vows.  This was impressed on me in every way.  I was
given a brand new outfit of clothes.  I had never had new underwear and
new shoes simultaneously with a new suit and hat before.  Such things
catch a child's imagination. I had to stand up before the whole
congregation and reply to un-understandable questions with answers I had
learned by rote.  Then for the first time I was given a share of the
communion bread and wine.  The solemnity of the occasion was emphasized.
But there was no effort--at least no successful one--to make me
understand what it was all about.  When I became old enough to begin to
think of such things, I found that I had already sworn to believe the
same things as long as I lived.  Try as hard as I can to remember the
many kindnesses of my adoptive parents, realizing, as I surely do, how
earnestly and prayerfully they strove to do the best for me, this folly
remains my sharpest recollection of them.  It was horribly unfair to a
youngster who took his word seriously.

But I never had what is called a "religious experience" until that
summer in camp meeting when I was sixteen.

In after years, I have learned that the older and richer sects have
developed more elaborate and artistic stage-settings for their
mysteries.  I cannot nowadays attend a service of the Paulist Fathers,
or at Saint Mary the Virgin's without feeling the intoxication of the
heavy incense and the wonderful beauty of the music.  But for a boy, and
for the simple mountain folk who gathered there, that camp was
sufficiently impressive.

It stood on the edge of a mirror lake, under the shadow of Lookout
Mountain, in one of the most beautiful corners of Tennessee.  Stately
pines crowded close about the clearing and beyond the lake the hill
dropped away, leaving a sweeping view out across the valley.  Man seemed
a very small creature beneath those giant trees, in the face of the
great distances to the range of mountains beyond the valley.  There was
nothing about the camp to recall one's daily life. The thousand and one
things which insistently distract one's attention from religion had been
excluded.

Every care had been taken to make the camp contrast with, and win people
from, "The Springs,"--a fashionable and worldly resort nearby.  There
was no card playing nor dancing, as such things were supposed to offend
the Deity.  The stage to the railroad station did not run on Sunday.

After breakfast every day the great family--a hundred people or
more--gathered by the lake-side and the Father led in prayer.  During
the morning there were study courses, most of which were Bible classes.
I only remember two which were secular.  One was on Literature and the
King James Version was taken as a model of English prose.  No mention
was made of the fact that much of the original had been poetry.  There
was also a course on "Science."  A professor of Exigesis from a
neighboring Theological Seminary delivered a venomous polemic against
Darwin.  The "Nebular Hypothesis" was demolished with many convincing
gestures.

My little love affair with Margot had put me in a state of exaltation.
Other things conspired to make me especially susceptible to religious
suggestion.  Oliver was back from his second year in the seminary.  My
dislike for him was forgotten.  He seemed very eloquent to me in the
young people's meetings, which he conducted.

Mary was there with her three children and had taken for the summer the
cottage at one end of the semi-circle overlooking the lake.  Her
husband, Prof. Everett, had been away for several months on the
geological expedition to Alaska, which was, I believe, the foundation of
the eminence he now holds in that science.  Mary also had been caught up
in the religious fervor of the place.  To me she seemed wonderfully
spiritualized and beautiful beyond words.  Oliver and I used often to
walk home with her after the evening meetings and, sitting out on her
porch over the water, talk of religion.

Sundays were continuous revival meetings.  Famous fishers-of-souls came
every week.  All methods from the most spiritual to the coarsest were
used to wean us from our sins.  It was "Salvation" Milton, who landed
me.

He was the star attraction of the summer's program. He stayed in the
camp two weeks, fourteen days of tense emotion, bordering on hysteria.
To many people "Salvation" Milton has seemed a very Apostle.  His
message has come to them as holy words from the oracle of the Most High.
To such it may, I fear, seem blasphemous for me--a criminologist--to
write of him as a specimen of pathology.  But I have met many who were
very like him in our criminal courts.

I have no doubt of his sincerity--up to the limit of his poor distorted
brain.  He had moments of exaltation when he thought that he talked face
to face with God.  He believed intensely in his mission.  He had lesser
moments, which he regretted as bitterly as did his friends who, like the
sons of Noah, covered him with a sheet that his drunken nakedness might
not be seen by men.  He was pitifully unbalanced. But I think that if he
had been given the strength of will to choose, he would have always been
the ardent servant of God we saw in him at the camp meeting.

He was a master of his craft.  By meditation and fasting and prayer he
could whip himself into an emotional state when passionate eloquence
flowed from his lips with almost irresistible conviction.  He was also
adept at the less venerable tricks of his trade.

It was his custom in the afternoon about four to walk apart in the woods
and spend an hour or more on his knees.  Once he took me with him.  I
remember the awe of sitting there on the pine needles, in the silence of
the forest and watching him "wrestle with the Spirit."  I tried to pray
also, but I could not keep my mind on it so long.  Suddenly he began to
speak, asking Christ's intercession on my behalf.  And walking home, he
talked to me about my soul.  For the first time I was "overtaken by a
conviction of sin."  That night he preached on the Wages of Sin.

I will never forget the horror of fear which held me through that
service.  Milton was in the habit of dealing with and overcoming men of
mature mind.  Such a lad as I was putty in his hands.  When, out of the
shivering terror of it, came the loud-shouted promise of salvation,
immunity from all he had made me feel my just deserts, I stumbled
abjectly up the aisle and took my place among the "Seekers."  I must say
he had comfort ready for us.  I remember he put his arm over my shoulder
and told me not to tremble, not to be afraid.  God was mighty to save.
Long before the world was made He had builded a mansion for me in the
skies.  He would wash away all my sins in the blood of the Lamb.  Milton
had scared me into a willingness to wade through an ocean filled with
blood if safety lay beyond.

The next morning brought me peace.  I suppose my overstrained nerves had
come to the limit of endurance. I thought it was the promised "peace
which passeth all understanding."  I was sure of my salvation. Several
weeks of spiritual exaltation followed.  I read the Bible passionately,
sometimes alone, more often with Oliver or Mary, for it was the fashion
to worship in common.  Whenever the opportunity offered in the meetings,
I made "public testimony."

But I would have found it hard to define my faith. I had been badly
frightened and had recovered.  This, I thought, came from God.  I had
only a crude idea of the Deity.  In general, I thought of Him as very
like the Father, with white hair and a great beard. I thought of Him as
intimately interested in all I did and thought, jotting it all down in
the tablets of judgment--a bookkeeper who never slumbered.  I was not at
all clear on the Trinity.  These mountain Presbyterians were Old
Testament Christians.  The Christ had a minor role in their Passion
Play.  They talked a good deal of the Holy Ghost, but God, the Father,
the King of Kings, the jealous Jehovah of Israel was their principal
deity.  We were supposed to love Him, but in reality we all feared Him.
However, I was very proud in the conviction that I was one of His elect.

Advancing years bring me a desire for a more subtle judgment on things
than the crude verdict of "right" or "wrong."  I look back on my
religious training, try to restrain the tears and sneers and think of it
calmly.  I doubt if any children are irreligious.  Some adults claim to
be, but I think it means that they are thoughtless--or woefully
discouraged.  We live in the midst of mystery.  We are born from it and
when we die we enter it again.  Anyone who thinks must have some
attitude towards the Un-understandable--must have a religion.  And
loving parents inevitably will try to help their children to a clean and
sweet emotional relation towards the unknown.  Evidently it is not an
easy undertaking.  For the adults who surrounded me in my childhood, in
spite of their earnest efforts, in spite of their prayers for guidance,
instead of developing my religious life, distorted it horribly.  They
were sincerely anxious to lead me towards Heaven.  I do not think it is
putting it too strongly to say they were hounding me down the road which
is paved with good intentions.

I can think of no more important task, than the development of a sane
and healthy "course of religious education for children."  The one
supplied in our Sunday schools seems to me very far below the mark.  It
is a work which will require not only piety, but a deep knowledge of
pedagogics.

Certainly the new and better regime will discourage precocious
"professions of faith."  I do not think it will insist that we are born
in sin and born sinful.  Above all it will take care not to make
religion appear ugly or fearsome to childish imagination.  Even the most
orthodox Calvinists will learn--let us hope--to reserve "the fountain
filled with blood" and the fires of Hell for adults.  The Sunday school
of the future will be held out in the fields, among the flowers, and the
wonder of the child before this marvelous universe of ours will be
cherished and led into devotion--into natural gratitude for the gift of
the earth and the fulness thereof.  Surely this is wiser than keeping
the children indoors to learn the catechism.  I can think of nothing
which seems to me less of a religious ceremony than those occasions,
when Bibles are given to all the Sunday school scholars who can recite
the entire catechism.  What have youngsters to do with such finespun
metaphysics?  Oh! the barren hours I wasted trying to get straight the
differences between "Justification," "Sanctification," and
"Adoption"--or was it "Redemption."  One would suppose that Jesus had
said "Suffer the little children, who know the catechism, to come unto
me."

But, of course, at sixteen, I had no such ideas as these.  I knew of no
religious life except such as I saw about me.  I had been carefully
taught to believe that a retentive memory and a glib tongue were
pleasing to the Most High.  I was very contemptuous towards the children
of my age who were less proficient.



                                  *VI*


In the midst of this peace a bolt fell which ended my religious life.
Its lurid flame momentarily illumined the great world beyond my knowing.
And the visioning of things for which I was unprepared was too much for
me.  I may not be scientifically correct, but it has always seemed to me
that what I saw that July night stunned the section of my brain which
has to do with "Acts of faith."  Never since have I been able to
believe, religiously, in anything.

It was a Sunday.  At the vesper service, all of us seated on the grass
at the edge of the lake, the Father had preached about our bodies being
the temples of God.  As usual, Oliver led the young people's meeting
after supper.  These more intimate gatherings meant more to me than the
larger assemblies.  Our text was "Blessed are the pure in heart."  I
remember clearly how Oliver looked, tall and stalwart and wonderful in
his young manhood.  He has a great metropolitan church now and he has
won his way by oratory.  The eloquence on which he was to build his
career had already begun to show itself.

Mary sang.  I have also a sharp picture of her.  She wore a light lawn
dress, which the brilliant moon-light turned almost white.  Her years
seemed to have fallen from her and she looked as she had done on her
wedding night.  In her rich, mellow contralto she sang the saddest of
all church music: "He was despised."

Something delayed me after the service and when I looked about for
Oliver and Mary they were gone.  I went to her house but the maid said
they had not come. The mystery of religious fervor and the glory of the
night kept me from waiting on the verandah, called me out to wander down
by the water's edge.  But I wearied quickly of walking and, coming back
towards the house, lay down on the grass under a great tree.  The full
moon splashed the country round with sketches of ghostly white and dense
black shadows.

Two ideas were struggling in my mind.  There was an insistent longing
that Margot might be with me to share this wonder of religious
experience.  Conflicting with this desire, compelled, I suppose, by the
evening's texts, was a strong push towards extreme asceticism. I was
impatient for Oliver's return.  I wanted to ask him why our church had
abandoned monasticism.

How long I pondered over this I do not know.  Perhaps I fell asleep, but
at last I heard them coming back through the woods.  There was something
in Oliver's voice, which checked my impulse to jump up and greet them.
It was something hot and hurried, something fierce and ominous.  But as
they came out into a patch of moonlight, although they fell suddenly
silent, I knew they were not quarreling.  Mary cautioned him with a
gesture and went into the house.  Through the open windows I heard her
tell the negro maid that she might go home.  I heard her say "Good
night" and lock the back door.  The girl hummed a lullaby as she walked
away.  All the while Oliver sat on the steps.

I do not know what held me silent, crouching there in the shadow.  I had
no idea of what was to come. But the paralyzing hand of premonition was
laid upon me.  I knew some evil was approaching, and I could not have
spoken or moved.

"Oliver," she said, in a voice I did not know, as she came out on the
porch, "you must go away.  It is wrong.  Dreadfully wrong."

But he jumped up and threw his arms about her.

"It's sin, Oliver," she said, "you're a minister."

"I'm a man," he said, fiercely.

Then they went into the house.  It was not till years afterwards, when I
read Ebber's book--"Homo Sum" that I realized, in the story of that
priest struggling with his manhood, what the moment must have meant to
Oliver.

I tiptoed across the grass to the shade of the house. A blind had been
hurriedly pulled down--too hurriedly. A thin ribbon of light streamed
out below it.

I could not now write down what I saw through that window, if I tried.
But in the frame of mind of those days, with my ignorance of life, it
meant the utter desecration of all holiness.  Oliver and Mary had stood
on my highest pedestal, a god and goddess.  I saw them in the dust.  No.
It seemed the veriest mire.

I turned away at last to drown myself.  It was near the water's edge
that they picked me up unconscious some hours later.  The doctors called
it brain fever. Almost a month passed before I became rational again. I
was amazed to find that in my delirium I had not babbled of what I had
seen.  Neither Oliver nor Mary suspected their part in my sickness.
More revolting to me than what they had done was the hypocrisy with
which they hid it.

Above all things I dreaded any kind of an explanation and I developed an
hypocrisy as gross as theirs.  I smothered my repugnance to Mary's
kisses and pretended to like to have Oliver read the Bible to me.  And
when I was able to get about again, I attended meetings as before.
There was black hatred in my heart and the communion bread nauseated me.
What was left of the summer was only a longing for the day when I should
leave for school.  Nothing mattered except to escape from these
associations.

I am not sure what caused it--the weeks of religious hysteria which
accompanied my conversion, what I saw through the crack below the window
curtain, or the fever--but some time between the coming of "Salvation"
Milton and my recovery, that little speck of gray matter, that minute
ganglia of nerve-cells, with which we _believe_, ceased to function.




                               *BOOK II*


                                  *I*


Early in September Oliver took me East to school. It was not one of our
widely advertised educational institutions.  The Father had chosen it, I
think, because it was called a Presbyterial Academy and the name assured
its orthodoxy.

I remember standing on the railroad platform, after Oliver had made all
the arrangements with the principal, waiting for the train to come which
was to carry him out of my sight.  How long the minutes lasted!  It is a
distressing thing for a boy of sixteen to hate anyone the way I hated my
cousin.  I was glad that he was not really my brother.

It is strange how life changes our standards.  Now, when I think back
over those days, I am profoundly sorry for him.  It was, I think, his
one love.  It could have brought him very little joy for it must have
seemed to him as heinous a sin as it did to me.

Five years later he married.  I am sure he has been scrupulously
faithful to his wife.  She is a woman to be respected and her ambition
has been a great stimulus to his upclimbing.  But I doubt if he has
really loved her as he must have loved Mary to break, as he did, all his
morality for her.  To him love must have seemed a thing of tragedy.  But
boyhood is stern. I had no pity for him.

His going lifted a great weight from me.  As I walked back alone to the
school, I wanted to shout.  I was beginning a new life--my own.  I had
no very clear idea of what I was going to do with this new freedom of
mine.  I can only recall one plank in my platform--I was going to fight.

The one time I can remember fighting at home, I had been thrashed by the
boy, caned by the school teacher and whipped by the Father, when he
noticed my black eye.  Fighting was strictly forbidden.  After this
triple beating I fell into the habit of being bullied. As even the
smallest boy in our village knew I was afraid to defend myself, I was
the victim of endless tyrannies.  The first use I wanted to make of my
new freedom was to change this.  I resolved to resent the first
encroachment.

It came that very day from one of the boys in the fourth class.  I
remember that his name was Blake. Just before supper we had it out on
the tennis-court. It was hardly fair to him.  He fought without much
enthusiasm.  It was to him part of the routine of keeping the new boys
in order.  To me it was the Great Emancipation.  I threw into it all the
bitterness of all the humiliations and indignities of my childhood.  The
ceremonial of "seconds" and "rounds" and "referee" was new to me.  At
home the boys just jumped at each other and punched and bit, and pulled
hair and kicked until one said he had enough.  As soon as they gave the
word to begin, I shut my eyes and hammered away.  We battered each other
for several rounds and then Blake was pronounced victor on account of
some technicality.

They told me, pityingly, that I did not know how to fight.  But all I
had wanted was to demonstrate that I was not afraid.  I had won that.
It was the only fight I had in school.  Even the bullies did not care to
try conclusions with me, and I had no desire to force trouble.  I had
won a respect in the little community which I had never enjoyed before.

In a way it was a small matter, but it was portentous for me.  It was
the first time I had done the forbidden thing and found it good.  The
Father had been wrong in prohibiting self-defense.  It was an entering
wedge to realize that his wisdom had been at fault here.  In time his
whole elaborate structure of morals fell to the ground.

The school was a religious one, of course.  But the teachers, with
eminent good sense, realized that other things were more important for
growing boys than professions of faith.  It seemed that, after my
illness, my mind woke up in sections.  The part which was to ponder over
Mary and Oliver, which was to think out my relation to God, for a long
time lay dormant.  I puttered along at my Latin and Greek and Algebra,
played football and skated and, with the warm weather, went in for
baseball.

In the spring a shadow came over me--the idea of returning home.  The
more I thought of another summer in the camp, the more fearsome it
seemed.  At last I went to the doctor.

He was the first, as he was one of the most important, of the many
people whose kindness and influence have illumined my life.  He was
physical director of the school and also had a small practice in the
village. There were rumors that he drank and he never came to church.
If there had been another doctor available, he would not have been
employed by the school.

I never knew a man of more variable moods.  Some days on the football
field he would throw himself into the sport with amazing vim for an
adult, would laugh and joke and call us by our first names.  Again he
would sit on the bench by the side-line scowling fiercely, taking no
interest in us, muttering incoherently to himself.  One day another boy
and I were far "out of bounds" looking for chestnuts.  We saw him coming
through the trees and hid under some brush-wood. He had a gun under one
arm, but was making too much noise for a hunter.  He gesticulated wildly
with his free arm and swore appallingly.  We were paralyzed with fear.
I do not think either of us told anyone about it.  For in spite of his
queer ways, all the boys, who were not sneaky nor boastful, liked him
immensely.

One Saturday afternoon I found courage to go to his office.  There were
several farmers ahead of me. I had a long wait, and when at last my turn
came I was mightily frightened.

"If I go home this summer," I blurted out, "I'll be sick again."

Oliver had told him about my illness.  At first he laughed at me, but I
insisted so doggedly that he began to take me seriously.  He tried to
make me tell him my troubles but I could not.  Then he examined me
carefully, tapping my knee for reflexes and doing other incomprehensible
things which are now commonplace psychological tests.  But for a country
doctor in those days they were very progressive.

"Why are you so excited?" he asked suddenly, "Are you afraid I'll hurt
you?"

"No," I said, "I'm afraid I'll have to go home."

"You're a rum chap."

He sat down and wrote to the Father.  I do not know what argument he
used, but it was successful.  A letter came in due course giving me
permission to accept an invitation to pass the summer with one of my
schoolmates.

It was a wonderful vacation for me--my first taste of the sea.  The
boy's family had a cottage on the south shore of Long Island.  The
father who was a lawyer went often to the city.  But the week ends he
spent with us were treats.  He played with us!  He really enjoyed
teaching me to swim and sail.  I remember my pride when he would trust
me with the main-sheet or the tiller.  The mother also loved sailing.
That she should enjoy playing with us was even a greater surprise to me
than that my friend's father should. Whatever their winter religion was,
they had none in the summer--unless being happy is a religion.  I
gathered some new ideals from that family for the home which Margot and
I were to build.

In the spring-term of my second and last year in the school, we were
given a course on the "Evidences of Christianity."  It was a formal
affair, administered by an old Congregationalist preacher from the
village, whom we called "Holy Sam."  He owed the nickname to his habit
of pronouncing "psalm" to rhyme with "jam."  He always opened the Sunday
Vesper service by saying: "We will begin our worship with a holy sam."
I think he took no more interest in the course than most of the boys
did.  It was assumed that we were all Christians and it was his rather
thankless task to give us "reasonable grounds" for what we already
believed.

It had the opposite effect on me.  The book we used for a text was
principally directed against atheists. I had never heard of an atheist
before, it was a great idea to me that there were people who did not
believe in God.  I had not doubted His existence.  I had hated Him.  The
faith and love I had given Mary and Oliver had turned to disgust and
loathing.  Their existence I could not doubt, and God was only the least
of this trinity.

It would be an immense relief if I could get rid of my belief in God.
The necessity of hate would be lifted from me.  And so--with my
eighteen-year-old intellect--I began to reason about Deity.

The pendulum of philosophy has swung a long way since I was a youth in
school.  To-day we are more interested in the subjective processes of
devotion--what Tolstoi called the kingdom of God within us--than in
definitions of an external, objective concept.  The fine spun scholastic
distinctions of the old denominational theologies are losing their
interest.  Almost all of us would with reverence agree with Rossetti:

    To God at best, to Chance at worst,
    Give thanks for good things last as first.
    But windstrown blossom is that good
    Whose apple is not gratitude.
    Even if no prayer uplift thy face
    Let the sweet right to render grace
    As thy soul's cherished child be nurs'd.

The Father's generation held that a belief in God, as defined by the
Westminster confession was more important than any amount of rendering
grace.  I thought I was at war with God.  Of course I was only fighting
against the Father's formal definition. Our text book, in replying to
them, quoted the arguments of Thomas Paine.  The logic employed against
him was weak and unconvincing.  It was wholly based on the Bible.  This
was manifestly begging the question for if God was a myth, the
scriptures were fiction. Nowadays, the tirades of Paine hold for me no
more than historic interest.  The final appeal in matters of religion is
not to pure reason.  The sanction for "faith" escapes the formalism of
logic.  But at eighteen the "Appeal to Reason" seemed unanswerable to
me.

I began to lose sleep.  As the spring advanced, I found my room too
small for my thoughts and I fell into the habit of slipping down the
fire-escape and walking through the night.  There was an old mill-race
near the school and I used to pace up and down the dyke for hours.  Just
as with egg-stealing something pushed me into this and I worried very
little about what would happen if I were found out.

After many nights of meditation I put my conclusions down on paper.  I
have kept the soiled and wrinkled sheet, written over in a scragly
boyish hand, ever since.  First of all there were the two propositions
"There is a God," "There is no God."  If there is a God, He might be
either a personal Jehovah, such as the Father believed in, or an
impersonal Deity like that of the theists.  These were all the
possibilities I could think of.  And in regard to these propositions, I
wrote the following:

"I cannot find any proof of a personal God.  It would take strong
evidence to make me believe in such a cruel being.  How could an
all-powerful God, who cared, leave His children in ignorance?  There are
many grown-up men who think they know what the Bible means.  They have
burned each other at the stake--Catholics and Protestants--they would
kill each other still, if there were not laws against it.  A personal
God would not let his followers fight about his meaning. He would speak
clearly.  If he could and did not, he would be a scoundrel.  I would
hate such a God.  But there are no good arguments for a personal God.

"An impersonal God would be no better than no God.  He would not care
about men.  Such a God could not give us any law.  Every person would
have to find out for himself what was right.

"If there is no God, it is the same as if there was an impersonal God.

"Therefore man has no divine rule about what is good and bad.  He must
find out for himself.  This experiment must be the aim of life--to find
out what is good.  I think that the best way to live would be so that
the biggest number of people would be glad you did live."

Such was my credo at eighteen.  It has changed very little.  I do not
believe--in many things.  My philosophy is still negative.  And life
seems to me now, as it did then, an experiment in ethics.

My midnight walks by the mill-race were brought to an abrupt end.  My
speculations were interrupted by the doctor's heavy hand falling on my
shoulder.

"What are you doing out of bed at this hour? Smoking?"

I was utterly confused, seeing no outlet but disgrace. My very fright
saved me.  I could not collect my wits to lie.

"Thinking about God," I said.

The doctor let out a long whistle and sat down beside me.

"Was that what gave you brain fever?"

"Yes."

"Well--tell me about it."

No good thing which has come to me since can compare with what the
doctor did for me that night.  For the first time in my life an adult
talked with me seriously, let me talk.  Grown-ups had talked to and at
me without end.  I had been told what I ought to believe. He was the
first to ask me what I believed.  It was perhaps the great love for him,
which sprang up in my heart that night, which has made me in later life
especially interested in such as he.

I began at the beginning, and when I got to "Salvation" Milton, he
interrupted me.

"We're smashing rules so badly to-night, we might as well do more.  I'm
going to smoke.  Want a cigar?"

I did not smoke in those days.  But the offer of that cigar, his
treating me like an adult and equal, gave me a new pride in life, gave
me courage to go through with my story, to tell about Oliver and Mary,
to tell him of my credo.  He sat there smoking silently and heard me
through.

"What do you think?" I asked at last, "Do you believe in God?"

"I don't know.  I never happened to meet him in any laboratory.  It
sounds to me like a fairy story."

"Then you're an atheist," I said eagerly.

"No.  A skeptic."  And he explained the difference.

"How do you know what's good and what's bad?"

"I don't know," he replied.  "I only know that some things are
comfortable and some aren't.  It is uncomfortable to have people think
you are a liar, especially so when you happen to be telling the truth.
It is uncomfortable to be caught stealing.  But I know some thieves who
are uncaught and who seem quite comfortable. Above all it's
uncomfortable to know you are a failure."

His voice trailed off wearily.  It was several minutes before he began
again.

"I couldn't tell you what's right and what's wrong--even if I knew.  You
don't believe in God, why should you believe in me?  If you don't
believe the Bible you mustn't believe any book.  No--that's not what I
mean.  A lot of the Bible is true.  Some of it we don't believe, you and
I.  So with the other books--part true, part false.  Don't trust all of
any book or any man."

"How can I know which part to believe?"

"You'd be the wisest man in all the world, my boy, if you knew that," he
laughed.

Then after a long silence, he spoke in a cold hard voice.

"Listen to me.  I'm not a good man to trust.  I'm a failure."

He told me the pitiful story of his life, told it in an even, impersonal
tone as though it were the history of someone else.  He had studied in
Germany, had come back to New York, a brilliant surgeon, the head of a
large hospital.

"I was close to the top.  There wasn't a man anywhere near my age above
me.  Then the smash.  It was a woman.  You can't tell what's right and
wrong in these things.  Don't blame that cousin of yours or the girl.
If anybody ought to know it's a doctor.  I didn't. It's the hardest
problem there is in ethics.  The theological seminaries don't help.
It's stupid just to tell men to keep away from it--sooner or later they
don't. And nobody can tell them what's right.  You wouldn't understand
my case if I told you about it.  It finished me.  I began to drink.
Watch out for the drink.  That's sure to be uncomfortable.  I was a
drunkard--on the bottom.  At last I heard about her again.  She was
coming down fast--towards the bottom.  Well, I knew what the bottom was
like--and I did not want her to know."

He smoked his cigar furiously for a moment before he went on.  He had
crawled out and sobered up.  This school work and the village practice
gave him enough to keep her in a private hospital.  She had consumption.

"And sometime--before very long," he ended, "she will die and--well--I
can go back to Forgetting-Land."

Of course I did not understand half what it meant. How I racked my heart
for some word of comfort! I wanted to ask him to stay in the school and
help other boys as he was helping me.  But I could not find phrases. At
last his cigar burned out and he snapped the stub into the mill-race.
There was a sharp hiss, which sounded like a protest, before it sank
under the water. He jumped up.

"You ought to be in bed.  A youngster needs sleep. Don't worry your head
about God.  It's more important for you to make the baseball team.  Run
along."

I had only gone a few steps when he called me back.

"You know--if you should tell anyone, I might lose my position.  I don't
care for myself--but be careful on her account.  Goodnight."

He turned away before I could protest.  His calling me back is the one
cloud on my memory of him.  His secret was safe.

For the rest of the school year I gave my undivided attention to
baseball.  The doctor was uniformly gruff to me.  We did not have
another talk.

Two weeks before the school closed he disappeared. I knew that she had
died, he would not have deserted his post while her need lasted.  On
Commencement Day, John, the apple-man, handed me a letter from him.  I
tore it up carefully after reading it, as he asked--threw the fragments
out of the window of the train which was carrying me homeward.  There
was much to help me to clear thinking in that letter, but the most
important part was advice about how to act towards the Father.  "Don't
tell him your doubts now.  It would only distress him.  Wait till you're
grown up before you quarrel with him."



                                  *II*


Nothing of moment happened in the weeks I spent in camp meeting that
summer.  Luckily Mary was not there and Oliver, having finished the
Seminary, was passing some months in Europe.  I bore in mind the
Doctor's advice, avoided all arguments and mechanically observed the
forms of that religious community. No one suspected my godlessness, but
I suspected everyone of hypocrisy.  It was a barren time of deceit.

Even my correspondence with Margot gave me no pleasure.  I could not
write to her about my doubts, but I wanted very much to talk them over
with her. While I could not put down on paper what was uppermost in my
heart, I found it very hard to fill letters with less important things.
Whenever I have been less than frank, I have always found it dolefully
unsatisfactory.

I imagine that most thoughtful boys of my generation were horribly
alone.  It is getting more the custom nowadays for adults to be friends
with children.  The Doctor at school was the only man in whom I had ever
confided.  And in my loneliness I looked forward eagerly to long talks
with Margot.  I supposed that love meant understanding.

The serious sickness of the Mother took us home before the summer was
ended.  I had not been especially unhappy there during my childhood, but
now that I had seen other pleasanter homes, my own seemed cruelly
cheerless.  Its gloom was intensified because the Mother was dying.  I
had had no special love for her but the thing was made harder for me by
my lack of sympathy with their religious conventions.  It was imperative
that they should not question God's will. The Mother did not want to
die.  The Father was, I am sure, broken-hearted at the thought of losing
her. They kept up a brave attitude--to me it seemed a hollow
pretense--that God was being very good to them, that he was releasing
her from the bondage of life, calling her to joy unspeakable.  However
much she was attached to things known--the Father, her absent son, the
graves of her other children, the homely things of the parsonage, the
few pieces of inherited silver, the familiar chairs--it was incumbent on
her to appear glad to go out into the unknown.

It was my first encounter with death.  How strange it is that the
greatest of all commonplaces should always surprise us!  What twist in
our brains is it, that makes us try so desperately to ignore death? The
doctors of philosophy juggle words over their _Erkenntnis
Theorie_--trying to discover the confines of human knowledge, trying to
decide for us what things are knowable and what we may not know--but
above all their prattle, the fact of death stands out as one thing we
all do know.  Whether our temperaments incline us to reverence pure
reason or to accept empirical knowledge, we know, beyond cavil, that we
must surely die.  Yet what an amazing amount of mental energy we expend
in trying to forget it. The result?  We are all surprised and unnerved
when this commonplace occurs.

Christianity claims to have conquered death.  For the elect, the Father
taught, it is a joyous awakening. The people of the church scrupulously
went through the forms which their creed imposed.  Who can tell the
reality of their thoughts?  There is some validity in the theory of
psychology which says that if you strike a man, you become angry; that
if you laugh, it makes you glad.  I would not now deny that they got
some comfort from their attitude.  But at the time, tossing about in my
stormy sea of doubts, it seemed to me that they were all afraid.  Just
as well disciplined troops will wheel and mark time and ground arms, go
through all the familiar manoeuvres of the parade ground, while the
shells of the enemy sweep their ranks with cold fear, so it seemed to me
that these soldiers of Christ were performing rites for which they had
lost all heart in an effort to convince themselves that they were not
afraid.

A great tenderness and pity came to me for the Mother.  As I have said
there had been little affection between us.  All her love had gone out
to Oliver.  Yet in those last days, when she was so helpless, it seemed
to comfort her if I sat by her bed-side and stroked her hand.  Some
mystic sympathy sprang up between us and she felt no need of pretense
before me.  I sat there and watched sorrow on her face, hopeless grief,
yes, and sometimes rebellion and fear.  But with brave loyalty she hid
it all when the Father came into the room, dried her tears and talked of
the joy that was set before her.

There was also a sorrow of my own.  Disillusionment had come to me from
Margot.  Why I had expected that she would sympathize with and
understand my doubts, I do not know.  It was a wild enough dream.

The first night at home I went to see her.  The family crowded about
with many questions.  Al was attending a southern military academy and
there were endless comparisons to be made between his school and mine.
But at last Margot and I got free of them and off by ourselves in an
arbor.  She seemed older than I, the maturity which had come to her in
these two years startled me.  But I blurted out my troubles without
preface.

"Margot," I said, "Do you believe everything in the Bible?"

I suppose she was expecting some word of love. Two years before, when I
had left her, I had kissed her.  And now----

"Of course," she said, in surprise.

If she had doubted one jot or tittle of it, I might have been content.
Her unthinking acceptation of it all angered me.

"I don't," I growled.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean what I say.  I don't believe in the Bible."

I remember so well how she looked--there in the arbor, where she had led
me--her eyes wide with surprise and fear.  I thought she looked stupid.

"I don't believe in God," I went on.

I expected her to take this announcement quietly. But two years before I
had never heard of men who doubted the existence of God, except, of
course, the benighted heathen.  Margot's hair is almost white now, but I
suppose that in all her life, I am the only person she has heard
question the teachings of the church.

Now I realize the extent of my folly in expecting that she would
understand.  The two years I had been away had changed everything for
me, even the meaning of the words I used.  I had been out in a wider
world than hers, had begun to meet the minds of men who thought.  In
that little mountain village, a second rate, rather mushy-brained rector
had been her intellectual guide.  It was insane for me to think she
would sympathize with me.  And yet, because I loved her, I did.  I was
only eighteen.

How the fright grew in her eyes as I went on declaiming my unbeliefs!

"It's wicked--what you are saying."

"It's true.  Is truth wicked?"

"I won't listen to you any more."

She got up.  Suddenly I realized that I was losing her.

"Margot," I pleaded, "you mustn't go.  We're going to get married.  I've
got to tell you what I think."

"I'll never marry a man who doesn't believe in God."

We were both very heroic.  There was no older, wiser person there to
laugh at us.  So we stood and glared at each other.  She waited some
minutes for me to recant.  I could not.  Then two tears started down her
cheeks.  I wanted desperately to say something, but there were tears in
my eyes also and no words would come.  She turned and walked away. I
could not believe it.  I do not know how long I waited for her to come
back.  At last I went home.

Sullen, bitter days followed.  I suppose she hoped, as I did, that some
way would be found to restore peace. But neither of us knew how.

If I might have my way, I would first of all arrange life so that boys
should escape such crises.  Sooner or later, I suppose, every human
being comes to a point where to compromise means utter damnation. But if
I could remould this "sorry scheme of things," I would see that this
portentous moment did not come till maturity.  A Frenchman has said that
after thirty we all become cynics.  It is a vicious saying, but holds a
tiny grain of truth.  As we get older we become indifferent, cynical, in
regard to phrases.  The tragedy of youth is that it rarely sees beyond
words.  And of all futilities, it seems to me that quarrels over the
terms with which we strive to express our mysticism--our religion, if
you will--are the most futile.  At eighteen I let a tangle of words
crash into, smash, my love. Youth is cruel--above all to itself.

The mother's funeral seemed to me strangely unreal. It was hard to find
the expected tears, and the black mourning clothes were abhorrent.  I
felt that I was imprisoned in some foul dungeon and was stifling for
lack of air.

Release came with time for me to start to College. There was a lump in
my throat as I climbed into the buckboard, beside the negro boy who was
to drive me down to the county seat for the midnight train. The Father
reached up and shook my hand and hoped that the Lord would have me in
His keeping and then we turned out through the gate into the main
street. I saw the Father standing alone in the doorway and I knew he was
praying for me.  I felt that I would never come back.  I was sorry for
the Father in the big empty house, but I had no personal regret, except
Margot.  The memory of the former leave-taking, how with her I had found
the first realization of love, the first vague sensing of the mystic
forces of life, came back to me sharply.  All through the two years she
had been a constant point in my thinking.  I had not mooned about her
sentimentally, more often than not, in the rush of work or play, I had
not thought of her at all.  But the vision of her had always been there,
back in the holy of holies of my brain, a thing which was not to change
nor fade.

The Episcopal Church was lit up, as we drove by I could hear some
laughter.  I knew they were decorating it for a wedding.  Margot would
be there, for she was one of the bride's maids.  As soon as we were out
of the village I told the negro boy I had forgotten something and
jumping out, I walked back into the woods and circled round to the side
of the church.  I put a board up under a window and looked in.  There
were other people there, but I saw only Margot.  She was sitting apart
from the laughter, weaving a wreath of ground-pine for the lectern.  Her
face was very sad. Of course she knew I was going away, everyone knows
such things in a little village.  But she held her head high.  If I had
called her out onto the steps, she would have asked me once more to
recant.  I knew it was irrevocable.  The fates had made us too proud.

I slipped down from my perch and made my way back to the buckboard.
There was a wild west wind blowing, it howled and shrieked through the
pines and I caught some of its fierce exultation.  The summer had been
bitter beyond words.  The full life before me called, the life without
need of hypocrisy.

When at last I was on the train, and felt the jar as it started, I
walked forward into the smoking car.  As a symbol of my new liberty, as
reverently as if it had been a sacrament to the Goddess of Reason, I lit
a cigarette. The tears were very close to my eyes as I sat there and
smoked.  But the pride of martyrdom held them back. Was I not giving up
even Margot for the Cause of Truth?



                                 *III*


The College was set on a hill top, overlooking a broad fair valley.
There was none of the rugged grandeur of our Tennessee Mountains, it was
a softer landscape than my home country offered.  But the greatest
difference lay in the close packed, well tilled fields. Here and there
were patches of woods, but no forest. It was an agricultural country.

If I should set out to construct a heaven, I would build it on the lines
of that old campus.  Whenever nowadays I am utterly tired and long for
rest, the vision comes to me of those ivy grown buildings and the rows
of scrawny poplars.  It is my symbol for light-hearted joy and
contentment.  The doleful shadow of my home did not reach so far, and I
was more carefree there than I have ever been elsewhere.

I joined heartily in the student life, played a fair game of football
and excelled in the new game of tennis.  There is a period at the end of
adolescence when if ever, you feel an exuberance of animal well-being,
when it is a pride to be able to lift a heavier weight than your
neighbor, when it is a joy to feel your muscles ache with fatigue, when
your whole being is opening up to a new sensation for which you know no
name. I remember glorious tramps in the deep winter snow, as I look back
on them I know that the thrilling zest, which then seemed to me
intimately connected with the muscles of my thighs and back, was the
dawning realization of the sheer beauty of the world.  I spent this
period at college.  I suppose that is why I love the place.

From the first only one subject of study interested me.  It was not on
the freshman year's curriculum. By some twist of fate "Anglo-Saxon"
appealed to me vividly.  I suppose it was an outgrowth from my boyish
fondness for Malory's "Morte d'Arthur."  In the library I found many
books in the crabbed Old English of the earliest chronicles.  They still
seem to me the most fascinating which have ever been written.  I
deciphered some of them with ease.  Before I could get the meat out of
the others I had to master a grammar of Anglo-Saxon.  All my spare
moments were spent among the shelves.  My classroom work was poorly
done.  But among the books I came into close contact with Professor
Meer, the librarian and head of the English Literature Department.  His
specialty was Chaucer, but my interest ran back to an even earlier date.
He was my second adult friend and many an evening I spent in his home.
But our talk was always of literature rather than of life, of the very
early days, when there were no traditions nor conventions and each
writer was also a discoverer.

A phase of life which had never before troubled me began to occupy
considerable of my thought.  My attention was drawn to the women
question by the talk of the football men.  There were two very distinct
groups among the athletes; the Y.M.C.A. men and the others.  It was
inevitable that I should feel hostile to the former.  They used the
phrases, spoke the language of the Camp Meeting.  With great pain and
travail I had fought my way free from all that.  Many of them were
perhaps estimable fellows, I do not know. I did not get well acquainted
with any of them.  But I was surprised to find myself often ill at ease
with the others.  Their talk was full of vague hints which I seldom
understood.  They had come to college very much more sophisticated than
I.  In the quest for manly wisdom, I read a book on sex-matters, which I
found in my fraternity house.

It taught me very little.  I have seen dozens of such books since and I
cannot understand the spirit in which they are written.  In the effort
to be clean spirited and scientific the authors have fallen over
backwards and have told their readers almost nothing at all.  It was
like a book which described the mechanism of a printing press without
one word about its use or place in life.  A printing press is a very
lifeless thing unless one has some comprehension that not so much in
itself but in its vast utility it is the most wonderful thing which man
has made.  The book which fell into my hands, described in detail, in
cold blooded and rather revolting phraseology, the physiology of sex,
but it gave no hint of its psychologic or social significance, it did
not even remotely suggest that sooner or later everyone who read it
would have to deal with sex as a problem of personal ethics.  It was a
poor manual for one just entering manhood.

I had never been told anything about sex.  I judged from the witticisms
of the gymnasium that the others had discussed these matters a great
deal in their preparatory schools.  And with the added knowledge of
later years, I am persuaded that my school had been unusually clean
spirited.  I never heard the boys talking of such things, and if any of
them were getting into bad habits, they did it privately.

These college men boasted.  Of course I hid my ignorance with shame.  As
the football season wore on the talk became more explicit.  Some of the
team, after the Thanksgiving Day game, with our rival college, which
ended the season, were "going into town to raise hell."  The Y.M.C.A.
men expected to "come right home."  A week or so before the last game,
Bainbridge, our captain and a senior, showed some of us a letter which a
girl in town had written him.  The other fellows who saw the letter
thought it hilariously funny.  To me it seemed strange and curious.  A
woman, who could have written it was something entirely foreign to my
experience.

Thanksgiving night--we had won the game--all of us, but the Y.M.C.A.
men, went into town for a dinner and celebration.  I happened to be the
only man from my fraternity on the football team, and, when the dinner
broke up, I found myself alone.  My head was swimming a bit and I
remember walking down the main street, trying to recall whether or not I
had decided to launch out on this woman adventure.  I was sure I had not
expected to be left to my own resources.  I was making my way towards
the station to catch a train back to college, when I fell in with some
of the fellows.  They annexed me at once.  Down the street we went,
roaring out the Battle Cry of Freedom.  They had an objective but every
barroom we passed distracted their attention.  It was the first time I
had ever approached the frontier of sobriety--that night I went far over
the line.  Out of the muddle of it all, I remember being persuaded to
climb some dark stairs and being suddenly sobered by the sight of a
roomful of women.  I may have been so befuddled that I am doing them an
injustice, but no women ever seemed to me so nauseatingly ugly.  Despite
the protest of my friends, I bolted.

It is not a pleasant experience to relate, but it kept me from what
might easily have been worse.  I had missed the last train.  Not wanting
to spend the night in a hotel, nor to meet my fellows on the morning
train, I walked the ten miles out to college.  Somehow the sight of
those abhorrent women had driven all the fumes of alcohol from my brain.
In the cold, crisp night, under the low hanging lights of heaven, I felt
myself more clear minded than usual.  As sharply as the stars shone
overhead, I realized that I had no business with such debauch.  It was
not that I took any resolution, only I understood beyond question that
such things had no attraction to me.

It is something I do not understand.  The Father had taught me that many
things were sinful.  But I do not think there was anything in my
training to lead me to feel that drunkenness and debauch were any worse
than card-playing.  Yet I learned to play poker with a light heart.  It
was the same with theatre going and dancing.  He had very much oftener
warned me against these things than against drunkenness.  The best
explanation I can find, although it does not entirely satisfy me, is
that vulgar debauch shocked some aesthetic, rather than moral instinct.
It was not the thought of sin which had driven me to run away from those
women, but their appalling ugliness.

Towards the end of the spring term, the long-delayed quarrel with the
Father came to a head.  I forget the exact cause of the smash-up,
perhaps it was smoking.  I am sure it commenced over some such lesser
thing.  But once the breach was open there was no chance of patching it
up.  In the half dozen letters which passed between us, I professed my
heresies with voluminous underlinings.  I had only one idea, to finish
forever with pretense and hypocrisy.

I was foolish--and cruel.  I did not appreciate the Father's love for
me, nor realize his limitations. He was sure he was right.  His whole
intellectual system was based on an abiding faith.  From the viewpoint
of the new Pragmatic philosophy, he had tested his "truth" by a long
life and had found it good. Perhaps in his earlier days he had
encountered skepticism, but since early manhood, since he had taken up
his pastorate, all his association had been with people who were
mentally his inferiors.  He was more than a "parson," he was the
wise-man, not only of our little village, but of the country side.  All
through the mountains his word carried conclusive weight.  Inevitably he
had become cock-sure and dogmatic.  It was humanly impossible for him to
argue with a youth like me.

In my narrow, bitter youth, I could not see this.  I might have granted
his sincerity, if he had granted mine.  But for him to assume that I
loved vice because I doubted certain dogma, looked to me like cant.  But
the men he knew, who were not "professing Christians," were drunkards or
worse.  He really believed that Robert Ingersoll was a man of
unspeakable depravity. He could not conceive of a man leading an upright
life without the aid of Christ.  Peace between us was impossible.  His
ultimatum was an effort to starve me into repentance.  "My income," he
wrote, "comes from believers who contribute their mites for the carrying
on of the work of Christ.  It would be a sin to allow you to squander it
on riotous living."

So my college course came to an end.



                                  *IV*


In one regard the fairies who attended my christening were marvelously
kind to me.  They gave me the gift of friends.  It is the thing above
all others which makes me reverent, makes me wish for a god to thank.
There is no equity in the matter.  I am convinced that it is what the
Father would have called "an act of grace."  Always, in every crisis,
whenever the need has arisen, a friend has stepped beside me to help me
through.

So it was when the Father cut off my allowance. Utterly ignorant of the
life outside, I was not so frightened by my sudden pennilessness as I
should have been, as I would be to-day.  Work was found for me.  My
friend, Prof. Meers discovered that he needed an assistant to help him
on a bibliography which he was preparing.  He offered me a modest
salary--enough to live comfortably.  So I stayed on in the college town,
living in the fraternity house.

The library work interested me more than my study had done.  Even the
routine detail of it was not bad and I had much time to spend on the Old
English which fascinated me.  I was not ambitious and would have been
content to spend my life in that peaceful, pleasant town.  But Prof.
Meers had other plans for me.  Back of my indolent interest in old
books, he was optimistic enough to see a promise of great scholarship.
He was better as a critic of literature than as a judge of men.  He
continually made plans for me. I paid scant attention to them until
almost a year had passed and we were beginning to see the end of the
work he could offer me.  I began to speculate with more interest about
what I would do next.

Without telling me about it, Prof. Meers wrote to the head of a New York
Library, whom he knew and secured a position for me.  When he received
the news he came to me with a more definite plan than I would ever have
been able to work out for myself.  He knew that a certain publishing
house wanted to bring out a text book edition of "Ralph Roister
Doister."  He had given them my name and I was to prepare the manuscript
during my free hours.  This he told me would not bring me much money,
but some reputation and would make it easier for him to find other
openings for me, where I could develop my taste for Old English. I
caught some of his enthusiasm and set out for my new work with high
hopes.

Of my first weeks in the city there is little memory left except of a
disheartening search for a place to live. After much tramping about I
took a forlorn hall bedroom in a not over peaceful family.  The quest
for an eating place was equally unsatisfactory.

In the library I was put to uninteresting work in the Juvenile
Department.  But there, handling books in words of one syllable, I found
a new and disturbing outlook on life.  There was more jealousy than
friendship among my fellow employees.  The chances of advancement were
few, the competition keen--and new to me.  I did not understand the
hostility, which underlies the struggle for a living.  Once I remember I
found a carefully compiled sheet of figures, which I had prepared for my
monthly report, torn to bits in my waste paper basket.  Another time
some advice, which I afterwards discovered to have been intentionally
misleading, sent me off on a wild goose chase, wasted half a day and
brought me a reprimand from the chief.  Such things were
incomprehensible to me at first.  It took some time to realize that the
people about me were afraid of me, afraid that I might win favor and be
advanced over their heads.  I resented their attitude, but gradually, by
a word dropped here and there, I learned how a dollar a week more or
less was a very vital matter to most of them.  One girl in my department
had a mother to support and was trying desperately to keep a brother in
school.  There was a man whose wife was sick, the doctor's and
druggist's bills were a constant terror to him.  Very likely if I had
been in their place, I would have done the little, mean things they did.
Life began to wear a new aspect of sombreness to me.  I could not hope
for advancement without trampling on someone.

By temperament I was utterly unfitted for this struggle.  My desire for
life was so weak that such shameful, petty hostilities seemed an
exorbitant price to pay for it.  I would much rather not have been born
than struggle in this manner to live.  I began to look about eagerly for
some other employment.  But I could find none which did not bear the
same taint.

However it was there in that library that I encountered Norman Benson.
He was near ten years older than I, tall and loose jointed.  His face,
very heavily lined, reminded me of our Tennessee mountaineers.  But the
resemblance went no farther.  He was a city product, bred in luxury and
wealth.  He was variously described by the people of the library as "a
saint," "a freak," "a philanthropist," "a crank."  The chief called him
"a bore."  He was the idol of the small boys who ran errands for us and
put the books back on the shelves.  He gave them fat Egyptian cigarettes
out of his silver case, to their immense delight and to the immense
horror of Miss Dilly, who had the boys in charge.

His hobby, as he soon explained to me, was "a circulating library that
really circulates."  He had a strange language, a background of Harvard
English, a foreground of picturesque slang--all illumined by flashes of
weird profanity.  Of course I cannot recall his words, but his manner of
speaking I shall never forget.

"They call this a circulating library," he would shout.  "Hell!  It
never moves an inch.  It's stationary! Instead of going out around the
town, it sits here and waits for people to come.  And the people don't
come.  Not on your life!  Only a few have the nerve to face out all this
imposing architecture and red-tape.  If there is anything to discourage
readers, they don't do it because they've been too stupid to think of
it.  If a stranger comes in and asks for a book they treat him like a
crook.  Ask him impertinent questions about his father's occupation.
Won't let him take a book unless he can get some tax-payer to promise to
pay for it if he steals it!  What in thunder has that got to do with it?
Someone wants to read.  They ought to send up an Hosanna!  They ought to
go out like postmen, and leave a book at each door every morning.
Circulating?  Rot!"

He had given his time and money for a year or two to bring about this
reform.  At first he had met with cold indifference.  But he stuck to
his point.  He had put up his money as guarantees for any books which
might be lost.  He had persuaded half a dozen or more school teachers to
distribute books among their scholars and the parents, paying them out
of his own pocket for the extra work.  He had established branches in
several mission churches and in one or two saloons.

"That corpse of a librarian," he explained to me, "had the fool idea
that his job was to preserve books--to pickle them!  I've been trying to
show him that every book he has on his shelves gathering dust, is money
wasted, that his job is to keep them moving.  The city's books ought to
be in the homes of the tax-payers--not locked up in a library.  The very
idea horrified him at first.  He was afraid the books would get dirty.
Good Lord!  What's the best end that can come to a book, I'd like to
know?  It ought to fall to pieces from much reading.  For a book to be
eaten by worms is a sin.  I've been hammering at him, until he's
beginning to see the light.  He don't cry any more if a book has to be
rebound."

Indeed, the "hammering" process had been effective. That year the chief
read a paper at the National Congress on "Library Extension."  Of course
he took all the credit; boasted how the idea had come from his library
and so forth.  But Benson cared not at all for that.  His plan had been
accepted and he was content.

He interested me immensely.  Why did a man with a large income spend his
time, rushing about trying to make people read books they did not care
enough for to come after?  I could get no answer from him.  He would
switch away from the question into a panegyric on reading.  It was a
frequent expression of his that "reading is an invention of the last
half century."

"Of course," he would qualify, "the aristocracy has enjoyed reading much
longer.  But the people?  They've just learned how.  The democratization
of books is the most momentous social event in the history of the world.
Think of it!  More people read an editorial in the newspaper within
twenty-four hours than could possibly have read Shakespeare during his
entire life. There are dozens of single books which have had a larger
edition than all the imprints of Elizabethan literature put together.
Don't you see the immensity of it?  It means that people all over the
world will be able to think of the same thing at the same time.  It
means a social mind.  Plato lived in his little corner of the world and
his teachings lived by word of mouth and manuscripts.  Only a few people
could read them, fewer still could afford to buy them.  'Uncle Tom's
Cabin' swept across the country in a couple of years. Think how long it
took Christianity to spread--a couple of hundred miles a century.  And
then think of the theory of evolution!  It has captured the world in
less than a generation!  That's what books mean. We're just entering the
epoch of human knowledge as compared to the old learning of individuals.
It's gigantic!  Wonderful!"

Benson, like many another, took a liking to me.  I was lonely enough in
that library.  And finding no sympathy elsewhere, I improved every
opportunity to talk with him.

One evening he asked me to come home with him to dinner.  I accepted
gladly, being more than tired of my pallid little room, and the sloppy
restaurant where I ate.  An evening with this rich young man, seemed
attractive indeed.  To my surprise he led the way to a downtown Bowery
car.  I did not know the city well and I thought perhaps this dismal
street led to some fairer quarter.  But the further we went the grimmer
became the neighborhood.  It was my first visit to the slums.

We got off at Stanton Street.  It is so familiar to me now--with its
dingy unloveliness, the squalor of its tenements, its crowding humanity,
and the wonder that people can laugh in such a place--that it is hard to
recall how it looked that first time.  I think the thing which impressed
me most was the multitude of children.  Clearest of all I remember
stepping over a filthy baby.  It lay flat on its back, sucking an apple
core and stared up at me with a strange disinterestedness.  It did not
seem to be afraid I would step on it.  I wanted to stop and set the
youngster to one side, out of the way. But I felt that I would look
foolish.  I did not know where to take hold of it.  And Benson strode on
down the street without noticing it.

A couple of blocks further, we came to a dwelling house with flower
boxes in the windows.  A brass-plate on the door bore the inscription,
"The Children's House."  So I was introduced to the Social Settlement.
They were novelties in those days.

A tumult of youngsters swarmed about us as we entered.  A sweet faced
young woman was trying to drive them out, explaining with good natured
vexation that they had over-stayed their time and would not go. They
clambered all over Benson, but somehow he was more successful than the
young woman in persuading them to go home.  Her name, when Benson
introduced me, gave me a start.  It recalled a fantastic newspaper story
of a millionaire's daughter who had left her diamonds and yachts to live
among the poor.  I had supposed her some sallow-faced, nun-like
creature.  I found her to be vibrantly alive, not at all a recluse.

The Settlement consisted of a front and rear tenement.  The court
between had been turned into a pleasant garden.  With the hollyhocks
along the walls and the brilliant beds of geraniums it was a strangely
beautiful place for that crowded district.  The men's quarters were in
the back building.  Benson had two rooms on the top floor, a small
monastic bedroom and a larger study.  It surprised me more than the
courtyard. It was startling to find the atmosphere of a college
dormitory in the center of the slums.  The books, the fencing foils, the
sofa-pillows in the window-seat--after my months in a furnished
room--made me homesick for my fraternity house.

Downstairs in the cheery dining room, I met the staff of "Residents."
The Rev. James Dawn, an Englishman, was the Head Worker.  He was a
graduate of Oxford and had been associated with Arthur Toynbee in the
first London Settlement.  His wife, also English, sat at the foot of the
table.  Benson introduced me rapidly to the others.  "Miss
Blake--District Nurse," "Miss Thompson--Kindergartner," "Long,
Instructor in Sociology in the University," "Dr. Platt--of the Health
Department."  I did not begin to get the labels straight.

It was a very much better dinner than I could get in any restaurant,
better than the food I had had at College and school.  But the thing
which impressed me most was the whizz of sharp, intellectual--often
witty--conversation.  The discussion centered on one of the innumerable
municipal problems.  I was ashamed of my inability to contribute to it.

It was to me a wonderfully attractive group of people.  They enjoyed all
which seemed most desirable in college life and added to this was a
strange magnetic earnestness, I did not understand.  I saw them relaxed.
But even in their after-dinner conversation, over their coffee cups and
cigarettes, there was an undercurrent of seriousness which hinted at
some vital contact with an unknown reality.  I was like an Eskimo
looking at a watch, I could not comprehend what made the hands go round.
I could see their actions, but not the stimuli from which they reacted.
I knew nothing of misery.

That evening set my mind in a whirl.  It was an utterly new world I had
seen.  I had never thought of the slums except as a distressful place to
live.  Stanton Street was revolting.  I did not want to see it again.
And yet I could not shake myself free from the thought of it--of it and
of the strange group I had met in the Children's House.  There seemed to
be something fateful about it, something I must look at without
flinching and try to understand.

On the other hand some self-defensive instinct made me try to forget it.
The distaste for the struggle for life which had come to me from
experiencing the petty jealousies of the library was turned into a dumb,
vague fear by the sight of the slum.  I turned to "Ralph Roister
Doister"--on which I had made only listless progress--with a new ardor.
The only escape which I could see from perplexing problems of life lay
in a career of scholarship.

The Old English which had formerly been an amusement for me, now seemed
a means of salvation.  When Benson next suggested that I spend the
evening with him, I excused myself on the ground of work.

But very often as I sat at my table, burning the midnight oil over that
century old farce, the vision of that baby of Stanton Street, sucking
the piece of garbage, came between me and my page.  And I felt some
shame in trying to drive him away.  It was as though a challenging
gauntlet had been thrown at my feet which I must needs pick up and face
out the fight, or commit some gross surrender.  I tried to escape the
issue, with books.




                               *BOOK III*


                                  *I*


Not long after this visit to the slums, when I had been in the city a
little more than a year, I received a new offer of employment, through
the kindness of Professor Meer.  The work was to catalogue, and edit a
descriptive bibliography of a large collection of early English
manuscripts and pamphlets.  A rich manufacturer of tin cans had bought
them and intended to give them to some college library.

It offered just the escape I was looking for.  I wrote at once, in high
spirits, to accept it.  However some cold water was thrown on my glee by
Norman Benson. He was my one friend in the library and I hastened to
tell him the good news.  But when he read the letter he was far from
enthusiastic.

"Are you going to accept it?" he asked coldly.

"Of course," I replied, surprised at his tone.  "I hardly hoped for such
luck, at least not for many years.  It's a great chance."

"This really interests me," he said, laying down the books he was
carrying and sitting on my desk. "What earthly good," he went on, "do
you think it's going to do anyone to have you diddle about with these
old parchments?"

"Why.  It----" I began glibly enough, but I was not prepared for the
question.  And, realizing suddenly that I had not considered this aspect
of the case, I left my response unfinished.

"I haven't a bit of the scholastic temperament," he said, after having
waited long enough to let me try to find an answer.  "It's just one of
the many things I don't understand.  I wouldn't deny that any bit of
scholarship, however 'dry-as-dust,' may be of some use. I don't doubt
that a good case of this kind could be made for the study of medieval
literature.  I don't say it's _absolutely_ useless.  But _relatively_ it
seems--well--uninteresting to me.  It's in the same class as astronomy.
You could study the stars till you were black in the face and you
wouldn't find anything wrong with them, and if you did you couldn't make
it right. Astronomy has been of some practical use to us, at least it
helps us regulate our watches.  But how in the devil do you expect to
wring any usefulness out of Anglo-Saxon?  Don't you want to be useful?"

His scorn for my specialty ruffled my temper.

"What would you suggest for me to do? Social-Settlement-ology?" I
replied with elaborate irony.

But if he caught the note of anger in my retort, he was too busy with
his own ideas to pay any attention to it.  He got off the table and
paced up and down like a caged beast, as he always did when he was
wrestling with a problem.  In a moment he came back and sat down.

"You don't answer my question," he said sharply. "You can stand on your
dignity and say I have no right to ask it.  But that's rot!  I'm serious
and I give you the credit of thinking you are.  Now you propose to turn
your back on the world and go into a sort of monastery.  This job is
just a beginning.  You're making your choice between men and books,
between human thought that is alive and the kind that's been preserved
like mummies.  Why? I ask.  What is there in these old books which can
compare in interest to the life about us.  Truth is not only stranger
than fiction, it is more dramatic, more comic, more tragic, more
beautiful.  Even Shelley never wrote a lyric like some you can see with
your own eyes, perhaps feel. I like to know what makes people do things.
I'd like to know what makes you accept this offer.  I assume that you
want to be useful to your day and generation. What utility do you hope
to serve in tabulating these old books, which nobody but a few savants
will ever read?"

I was entirely unprepared to answer his question. And I felt myself sink
in his estimation.  Why was I reaching out for the life of a bookworm
with such eagerness?  I understand now.  I was a coward.  I was still
sore from the wounds of my childish endeavor to comprehend God.  I was
afraid of life.  I was afraid of the little child sucking the apple core
on Stanton Street. The life about me, of which Benson spoke so
enthusiastically, seemed to me threatening.  It evidently laid an
obligation of warfare on the people who entered it actively.  I wanted
peace.  Books seemed to me a sort of city of refuge.

My new employer, Mr. Perry, the tin-can man, was a strange type.  He had
grown up in a fruit preserving industry and at thirty-odd he had
invented a method of crimping the tops onto cans, without the use of
solder. Good luck had given him an honest business partner and the
patent had made a fortune for both of them. When the first instalment of
royalties had come in, Perry had stopped stirring the kettle of
raspberry preserves and had not done a stroke of work since. At forty he
had built a "mansion" in the city and had gone in for politics.  He
bought his way to a seat in the State Senate, only to find that it bored
him to extinction.  After several other fads had proved uninteresting,
he had set his heart on a LL.D.  A friend had advised him to donate a
valuable collection of books to some college.

He had sent a large check to a London dealer and this heterogeneous mass
had been the result.  As his interest in the matter had been only
momentary he was decidedly penurious about it after the first outlay.
That, I suppose, is why I, instead of a recognized authority, was chosen
for the work.  He had no idea what the catalogue should be like, and his
one instruction to me, was to make it "something scholarly."

There was in his monstrous mansion an apartment originally designed for
the children's tutor.  But there had never been any children.  These
quarters were given to me.  There was a private entrance, a bedroom,
bath and study, where my meals were served, and there was a stairway
down to the library.

In the three years I worked for him I did not see him ten times.  His
wife was dead, he lived away a good deal and, to my great satisfaction,
he never invited me to his bachelor parties--the reverberations of which
sometimes shook me out of sleep.  Once every six months or so he would
bring an expert to look over my work.  As they found no fault and he
could not understand it, he was convinced that it was scholarly.

It was a period of great content for me.  The rut into which I fell was
deep indeed.  I saw no one. Almost my only contact with others was by
mail.  And my letters all related to my specialty.  Eight full hours I
worked in the library.  The architect had not expected Mr. Perry to do
much reading and, the windows being few, the room was gloomy.  I had
often to use artificial light.  At five I went for an hour's walk in the
park. At least this was my theory.  But the least inclemency was an
excuse to take some manuscript up to my room, to my shaded lamp and open
fire.  The daily eight hours on the catalogue was only a beginning.  As
soon as I had finished my edition of "Ralph Roister-Doister," I began a
monograph on Anglo-Saxon Roots.  My ambition was to win a fellowship in
an English University.  By the time my catalogue was finished, I would
have enough money put by for a year or more of study in Oxford.  My life
was mapped out.



                                  *II*


The darkness came unexpectedly.

Sometimes my eyes had been tired, but I had not taken it seriously.  One
afternoon, as I laid out a sheet of paper on the desk, the page was
suddenly obscured by a dancing spider-web--a dizzying contortion of
black and white--growing denser and denser. I clapped my hands over my
eyes and felt so sudden a relief I was afraid to take them away again.

I got up slowly and felt my way with my foot to an easy chair.  How long
I sat there, my hands pressed hard against my eyes, I do not know.  I
had read somewhere of a man going blind with just such symptoms.  It was
fear unspeakable, fear that made me laugh.  When one feels that the gods
are witty it is a bad sign.

I was suddenly calm.  It was accepted.  I thought for a few minutes, my
eyes still shut, and then felt my way to the telephone.

"Central," I said, and I remember that my voice was calm and
commonplace.  "Will you give me the Eye and Ear Hospital?  I can't look
up the number. I'm blind."

"Sure," came back the answer.  "It must be hard to be blind."

A clutch came to my throat.  It comes to me now as I write about it,
comes every time I hear people complaining that modern industry has
robbed our life of all humanity, has turned us into mechanisms.  Such
talk makes me think of the sudden sympathy which came to me out of the
machine.  Whenever I am utterly blue and discouraged, I go into a
telephone booth.

"Hello, Central," I say, "tell me something cheerful. I'm down on my
luck."

It has never failed.  Always some joking sympathy has come out of the
machine and helped me to get right again.

When the doctor came, he looked a minute at my desk, at the whole
eye-straining mass of faded print and notes.  He snapped on the electric
light.

"I suppose you work a lot in this fiendish glare?"

"I need a strong light," I said.

He grunted in disgust.

"This will hurt," he said, as he made me sit down near the electric
light, "but you've got to bear it."

He fixed a little mirror on his forehead and flashed the cruel ray into
my eye.  Back somewhere in the brain it focussed and burned.  The sweat
broke out all over me.

"Now the other eye."

I flinched for a moment, holding my hand before it.

"Come, come," he said gruffly, and I took my hand away.

When the ordeal was over, he tied a black bandage over my eyes, laid me
down on the lounge and lectured me.  When he stopped for breath, I
interrupted.

"What hope is there?"

He hesitated.

"Oh!  Tell me the truth."

"Well--I guess the chances are even--of your seeing enough for ordinary
work.  But they will never be strong.  You'll have to give up books.
You must keep your eyes bandaged--complete rest--six weeks--then we can
tell how much damage you've done.  It is only a guess now."

We talked business.  I had enough money saved for a private room and
good treatment, so he put me into a cab and told the driver to deliver
me at the hospital.

It was an appalling experience, that ride.  Try it yourself.  Ride
through the streets with your eyes darkened: you will hear a thousand
sounds you never heard before, even familiar sounds will be fearsome.
Every jolt, every stoppage will seem momentous.  I was glad the doctor
did not come with me, glad that no one saw me so afraid.

At last we stopped and I heard the cabby call.

"Hey! there.  Come out and take this man."

I revolted at my helplessness, pushed the door open and stumbled as I
stepped out.  I would have fallen heavily, if an orderly had not been
there to catch me.

"You must be careful at first, Mister," he said. "You'll get used to it
in time."

That was just what I was afraid of--getting used to the darkness!

However, his words jogged my pride.  The ways of the gods seemed funny
to me again, and I joked with him as he led me up some stairs and into a
receiving room.  The house surgeon, to me only a voice, was nervously
cheerful.  He kept saying, "It'll be all right." "It'll be all right."
He seemed to be dancing about in all directions.  My ears had not become
accustomed to locating sounds.  I suppose he moved about normally, but
he seemed to talk from a different angle every time.

"This is Miss Barton," he said at last.  "She is day nurse in your ward.
She'll make you comfortable."

Mechanically I thrust my hand out into the darkness. It was met and
grasped by something I knew to be a hand, but it did not feel like any
hand I had ever seen.

"I'm glad to meet you," I said.

With some jest about people not usually being glad to meet nurses, she
led me off to the elevator and my room.

"You've quite a job before you--exploring this place," she said with
real cheer in her voice.  "There are all sorts of adventures in this
_terra incognita_.  Everything is cushioned so you can't bang your
shins, but watch out for your toes.  At first you'd better stay in bed
for a few days and rest.  Have you all you need in your valise?"

"I don't know.  A servant packed it."

"Well then.  That's the first bit of exploring to do. I'll help you."

Her voice also jumped about surprisingly.  There was something weird in
being in a room with an utter stranger whose existence was only
manifested by this apparently erratic voice and by hands which unsnarled
my shoe laces, handed me my pajamas, and put me to bed.

"I must run off now and attend to Mrs. Stickney, next door--she is very
fussy.  The night nurse, Miss Wright, comes on pretty soon, at six.
She'll bring you your supper.  When you wake up in the morning, ring the
bell, here over your head, and I'll bring you breakfast.  Good night."

It was when she had gone and I alone there in the strange bed, that I
first felt the awful void of the darkness.  I do not like to think of it
now.

It was probably not many minutes, but it seemed hours on end, before
Miss Wright brought me my supper.  She sat on the edge of my bed and
helped me find the way to my mouth.  She was considerate, and tried to
be cheering.  But I did not like her.  Always her very efficiency
reminded me of my helplessness.  And her voice seemed too large for a
woman.  It gave me the impression that she was talking to someone
several feet behind me.

They had, I think, mercifully drugged my food, for I fell asleep at
once.  When I woke I had no idea of the hour.  For some time I lay there
in the darkness wondering about it.  I did not want to wake anybody up.
But at last I decided that I would not be so hungry before breakfast
time.  After much futile fumbling I found the bell above my bed.  In a
few minutes Miss Barton's voice--even after all these years, I think of
it as the type of sunny cheerfulness--announced that it was near eleven.
When the breakfast was finished, with joking cautions against setting
the bed on fire, she filled my pipe and taught my hands the way to the
matchbox.

In the weeks which followed, I lost all track of the sun's time.  I came
to figure my days in relation to her. During the "nights," when she was
off duty, the darkness was very black.

It would be impossible for me to give in detail the evolution by which
Miss Barton, my nurse, changed into my friend, Ann.  It began I think
when she discovered how utterly alone I was.  The second day in the
hospital I was given permission to have visitors, and I sent for my
employer's man of law.

"Whom do you want to have come to see you to-morrow?" Miss Barton asked
when he had gone.

I could think of no one.

"Do you want me to write some letters to your relatives?"

"No.  I haven't any near kin."

"Well.  Haven't you some friends to write to?"

In the three years I had lived at Mr. Perry's I had severed all social
connections.  I had not kept up my college friendships.  Benson had been
so opposed to my leaving what he called active life that I had lost all
touch with him.  My only relations with people had been technical, by
correspondence.  I did not want to trouble even Prof. Meer with my
purely personal misfortunes.  This seemed utterly impious to Miss
Barton. What?  I had lived several years in the city and had no friends?
It was unbelievable!  Unfortunately it was true.  I could think of no
one to ask in to relieve my loneliness.  And there is no loneliness like
the darkness.

The next week was the worst, for the nurses changed and Miss Wright, who
was on day duty, was not companionable.  However, Miss Barton, taking
compassion on me, used often to sit with me by the hour at night. How
fragmentary was my contact with her!  No one who has not been deprived
of sight can realize how large a part it plays in the relationships of
life.  I could only hear.  There was always the creak of the rocking
chair beside my bed and her voice, sometimes placid, sometimes tense,
swinging back and forth in the darkness. It did not seem to have any
body to it.  Whenever her hands touched me, it startled me.

But from her talk I learned something of the person who owned the voice.
She had been born in a Vermont village, where no one had ever heard of a
professional woman, but as far back as she could remember, she had set
her heart on medicine.  Her father she had never known.  Her mother, a
fine needlewoman and embroidery designer had brought up the children.  A
brother was an engineer and the older sister a school teacher.  But
there had not been enough money to send Ann to medical college.  Nursing
was as near as she had been able to get towards her ambition.  But what
could not be given her she intended to win for herself.  She had taken
this position because the night duty was very light and every other week
she could give almost the entire day to study.  Her interest had turned
to the new science of bacteriology.  Her vague ambition to be a doctor
had changed to the definite ideal of research work.

Somehow the voice, so calmly certain when it dealt of this, gave me an
impression of integrity of purpose, of invincible determination, such as
sight has never given me of anyone.  I did not, any more than she, know
how she was to get her research laboratory.  But I could not doubt that
she would.  She had unquestioning faith in her destiny.  I find myself
emphasizing this phase of her.  It impressed me most at the time.

But her conversation was by no means limited to her ambition.  She had
read a thousand things besides her medicine, and spoke of them more
frequently.  She was constantly referring to books, to facts of history
and science, of which I was ignorant.  She talked seriously of ethics
and the deeper things of life.  It woke again in me all the old
questionings and aspirations of prep. school days--the things I had
hidden away from in my book-filled library.  She was the first person I
had met since the doctor at school who showed me what she thought of
these things.  Benson had talked copiously about the objective side of
life, but he had never referred to his inner life.  The people I had
known wanted to make this world a prayer meeting, a counting house or a
playground.  Ann was no more interested in such ideals than I was.

She used a phraseology which was new to me: "Individualism,"
"self-expression," "expansion of personality."  She spoke of life as a
crusade against the tyrannies of prejudice and conventions.  Her
viewpoint was biologic.  All evolutionary progress was based on
variations from the type.  Efforts to sustain or conserve the type she
called "reactionary" and "invasive."  She insisted on the desirability
of "absolute freedom to vary from the norm."  The authority she quoted
with greatest reverence was Spencer.  This conversation, much of which I
did not understand, showed me clearly one thing--a soul seeking
passionately for truth.  That she told me was her ideal as it had been
the war-cry of Bakounine.  "_Je suis un chercheur passionne de la
Verite_."

When any reference was made to my manner of life, she flared up.  It
was--and this was her worst denunciation--unnatural.

"I believe in individualism, egoism," she said.  "But not in isolation.
Man is naturally as gregarious as the ant.  An ant that lived alone
would be a non-ant. You've been a non-man.  It's good your eyes went
back on you--if it teaches you sense.  Intercourse with one's kind is a
necessary food of human life."

And while it was a God-send for me to find someone to talk to, it must
have been also a pleasure for her.  The stories she told me about the
other patients showed that their relations to nurses were barren
enough--when not actually insulting.  After listening by the hour to
Mrs. Stickney's endless little troubles, it was a relief for her, I
think, to come to my room and talk of the things which interested her
violently.  She gave more and more time to me.  During the third week,
when she was again on day duty, she read me Lecky's "History of European
Morals."



                                 *III*


It is hard to write about the next week.  I can no longer see it as it
must have looked in those days.  I cannot tell the "why" of it.  It was.

There was immense loneliness--and fear.  The few hundred dollars I had
saved for studying in Oxford would pay the doctor's bill and keep me for
some months.  But what was there beyond, if my eyes did not come back?
At best the chances were only even.  In any case the one trade I knew
was gone.  A bookworm with weak eyes is a sorry thing.  Of course I
might have gone home.  But I have never had much respect for the
Prodigal Son.  He must have been a poor spirited chap.

Well, in my utmost misery, Ann comforted me--as women have comforted men
since the world began. In some inexplicable way, for some inexplicable
causes, she loved me.

I try to arrange my memories of those days in orderly sequence.  But it
is all a blur.  Day by day my need grew and day by day she met the need.
The patients in that hospital did not require much attention, except in
the day.  Most of them slept well.  They rarely rang for her after
midnight.  She gave me more and more of her time.

The stress between us grew rapidly, but by gradual steps, almost
imperceptibly.  Her hand rested in mine a trifle longer.  The hand clasp
became a caress--then a kiss.  The kiss lingered....

So the voice took on a body.  Touch came to the aid of hearing as a
means of contact with this dear person of the darkness.  It is strange
in what a fragmentary way she took shape in my consciousness as
something more than a paid nurse, more close and intimate than any
friend I had known in the light.

In the darkness every other thing seemed strange. What I discovered by
touch to be a table, did not fit into the old category of "tables."
Even the pipe which I had smoked since college seemed to have undergone
some fundamental change in its nature.  Ann was the only thing which
seemed natural.  I had had no intimacy with woman of the light by which
I could judge this experience.  Coming to me as it did, it did not seem
strange--it made subsequent things seem strange. When at last my eyes
were opened, I blushed before Ann as before a stranger.

It all seemed so inevitable.

"It's late," she said one night, "I must go.  If you want me, ring."

"Of course I want you."

"But you ought to sleep.  I mean, ring if anything happens."

"It don't matter whether anything happens or not.  I----"

"Don't ring unless you need me."

The door closed behind her.  I lay there debating with myself whether or
not I needed her.  The bell was in reach of my hand.  I got out of bed
to be further from temptation.  With awkward trembling hands, I filled
and lit my pipe and sat down by the open window.  My head ached with
loneliness and desolation. Off somewhere in the night a church bell
struck two, some belated footsteps rang sharp and clear on the sidewalk
below me.  I tried to interest myself in speculating whither or to whom
the person was hurrying.  But my thoughts swung back to my own
loneliness.  In all the world there was no one who knew of my blindness
and cared except the tin-can merchant who was cursing that he must have
the trouble to find someone to finish my work.  No.  There was Ann.

Quite suddenly a vision of my childhood came back to me, of the time I
had been sick at Mary Dutton's, when she had taken me into the warm
comfort of her bed. The vision brought quick resolution.  I rang the
bell. I stood up against the wall and waited--breathless. The door
opened and from the darkness came her voice.

"Do you really want me?"

I do not think I spoke, but I remember reaching out my hands to her.  My
strained ears caught a faint rustle--then came touch--and my arms were
about her.

So I was comforted.



                                  *IV*


For the night there was rich forgetfulness.  But the new day called me
back from the Elysian Fields to the cold reality of this ordinary world
of ours.

My familiarity with the frank openness of my good friend Chaucer and the
early English writers had cleansed my mind of much nastiness.  I never
had any feeling of Biblical sin in regard to my sudden passion for Ann.
It was too entirely sweet and natural to be anything so wrong.  But
conflicting with this early Renaissance attitude was a modern sense of
personal responsibility.  The implications of the thing troubled me
desperately.

As I sat there in the darkness, thinking it out--with now and then Miss
Wright coming in on the routine business of the day--I realized for the
first time the difference between love and passion.  There was no doubt
that Ann loved me.  But I did not love her.

She was as far removed from cheap sentimentality as any woman I have
known.  She was strangely unromantic. There was an impressive
definiteness about everything she did.  I knew from the first that the
love she gave me was for always.  It was to be the big human factor of
her life, but it was not to be mutual.  In my misery I wanted her
comfort, in my loneliness I had need of her affection.  I had grown
greatly fond of her, dependent on her, but I knew from the first that
she was not to be the center of my life.

Nevertheless my course seemed very clear.  "The Woman Who Did" had not
been written in those days. The idea, now so commonly expressed in
literature, that sex life outside of marriage might be beautiful and
dignified, was not familiar.  Although I had no longing for a perpetual
mating, no desire to marry her, my conscience told me very clearly that
I ought to. I did not think that I could, with anything like decency, do
less.

Since Margot had receded, I had not been given to romantic dreams.  I
was not counting on the grand passion, as a necessary part of life, so
there was no especial self-sacrifice in closing the door on that
possibility by marrying a woman I did not wholly love. Yet, threatened
with blindness without money or a trade, what had I to offer her?  The
more I thought of these things the more humble I became.  However her
"fair name" seemed more important to me than any of these
considerations.  It was regrettable that I could not assure her ease and
comfort.  It was regrettable that I could not give her the love which
should be the kernel of marriage, but all this seemed no reason not to
offer her the husk.

When at last Ann came, she laughed at me.  What? Get married?  Nothing
was further from her mind. She had her own work mapped out for her.  Set
up a home?  Why as soon as she had saved a hundred and fifty dollars
more she was going to Paris to study with Pasteur.  People might laugh
at his germs and cultures and serums.  Let them laugh!  The future was
to bacteriology.  Marry?  Of course she loved me, but where did I get
those two ideas mixed up?

She gave me a lecture on free love.  It is hard to write about a theory
to which I am so strongly opposed. Yet Ann's attitude in this matter is
an integral part of my story.

The longer I live the more remarkable it seems to me, how limited is the
field in which any of us does original thinking.  One of my friends is
an exceedingly able physician.  Within his specialty he has been
startlingly radical.  His cures, however, are so amazing that his
colleagues are accepting his methods.  But in all other departments of
thought he is hopelessly conservative.  Another acquaintance, a painter,
is a daring innovator in his use of colors, but has unquestioningly
accepted all those beliefs which Max Nordau has called "The Conventional
Lies of our Civilization."  To one subject we seem to give all our
mental energy, all our powers of original thinking, in other matters we
believe what we are taught.  It was so with Ann. Her specialty was
bacteriology, her ideas on marriage she had inherited.

Her mother, whom I afterwards came to know and respect, was a remarkable
woman.  Mr. Barton, after a fairly upright younger life, had deserted
her at thirty-five.  Although neither Ann nor Mrs. Barton, ever spoke
much of him, I learned that he had died, a hopeless drunkard.  At first
the mother had supported the children by nursing and sewing among the
families of her Vermont neighbors.  And everywhere, once she had entered
the privacy of a household, she found the same repellent pretense, a
carefully preserved outward show of harmony and affection, an inside
reality of petty quarrels and discord.  Often she found situations of
more abhorrent tragedy, jealousy, hatred and strange passions, women
heartbroken for lack of love, bodily broken from an excess of
child-bearing.  From considering her own misfortunes a horrible
exception, she came to believe such sorrows were pitifully common. And
everywhere women seemed to be the victims. However unhappy a man's
married life might be, he found release in his work.  To the woman, home
was everything, if it went wrong, all life was awry.

By chance apparently, but I suppose inevitably, she had come in contact
with some of the leaders of the early "Woman's Rights Movement."  She
corresponded with them ardently and at length came west to Cincinnati,
having decided that she needed education. She supported herself and her
children by needle-work and spent half the nights, after they were abed,
over schoolbooks.  She had to begin at the beginning.  By herself, in
her garret, she followed the grammar school course, crowding the work
which takes a child two or three years, into the half nights of one.
Gradually she worked her way up to the position of forewoman in a large
embroidery establishment and so was able to send her children through
high school, the older ones to college.  But her health had given out
before Ann's turn came.

Her interest in the Woman's Movement had brought her into touch with all
sorts of radicals and shortly after her arrival in Cincinnati she had
met Herr Grun, a German Anarchist refugee.  The friendship had grown
into a beautiful love relationship which had lasted until his death.

Ann had accepted all the libertarian dogmas of her foster father.  It
seemed very wonderful to me to hear her speak about her "home."  It was
a barren enough word to me.  But to her it meant a wealth of affection,
a place of sure sympathy.  I listened with sad and bitter envy to her
stories of childhood.  The loving kindness, the happy harmony which she
had known at home, she had been taught to believe resulted from the free
relationship between her mother and her lover. Ann had grown up in an
atmosphere where free love was the conventional thing.

Persecution is the surest way of convincing a heretic that he is right.
I have known a good many Anarchists and the most striking thing about
them is their community interest.  Whether or not they are seriously
offensive towards society, they are all in a close defensive alliance
against it.  The hostility they meet on every hand forces them to
associate with their own kind.  Ann had grown up among the children of
comrades.

To them love is an entirely personal, individual matter.  The
interference of the Church or State they regard as impertinent and
indecent.  They take this whole business of sex more seriously, and in
some respects more sanely, than most of us.  Their households, as far as
I have seen them, are very little different, no better nor worse than
the average home.  Their advantage lies in the fact that most Anarchists
are of kindly nature and that they are seldom cursed with money grubbing
materialism.  But this is a difference in the people, not in their
institutions.

Marriage, for Ann, would have been a repudiation of her up-bringing and
the people she loved, comparable to that of a daughter of a Baptist
minister who became a Catholic nun or the third wife of a Mormon Elder.
But Protestant women sometimes do marry Mormons or take the veil.  And
Anarchists are no wiser in bending the twig so it will stay bent than
Baptists.  If Ann had been this type of a woman, she might have kicked
over the traces, and have left her people to marry me, as carefully
reared daughters have done in similar crises since the world was young.

But she had a very definite theory that love should not be allowed to
interfere with life.  Each of us, she held, has been given a distinct
personality, a special job to do in the world, and the development of
this personality, the performance of this individual task, is the great
aim of life.  Love should not distract one from the race to the
appointed goal.  Love is an adornment of life.  She spoke with biting
scorn of a man she knew who "wore too many rings on his fingers."  His
taste was bad, he tried to over-decorate his life and so missed the
reality of life.  The goal she had set before her was bacteriology and
she had not the faintest doubt that she had chosen it rightly.  This was
to be her life.  If the fates granted her such joys as she called her
love for me, it was something to be thankful for.  But it must be
subservient to--never allowed to interfere with--her career.

Certainly this is not the ordinary attitude of women towards love.  But
Ann was an exceptional woman, one of those unaccountable exceptions,
which we label with the vague word "Genius."

A few months ago I picked up an illustrated French paper and opening it
at random came upon a page containing photographs of half a dozen
celebrated women.  Ann's face was among them.  There was an article by
an eminent psychologist on "Women of Genius."  His conclusions did not
especially interest me, but I had never before seen so concise a
statement of Ann's accomplishments, the learned societies to which she
belongs, the scientific reviews she helps to edit, the brochures she has
written, the noted discoveries she had made.  It startled me to see on
half a page so impressive a record of achievement.

It helps me now to a better understanding of the young woman, who
puzzled me sorely twenty odd years ago.  In those days I saw no special
promise of distinction.  I smile with a wry twist to my mouth when I
recall my presumption in thinking that it was necessary for her to hide
herself under the shadow of my name. I suppose that if she had consented
to marry me, we would have somehow found a way to gain a livelihood. In
my crippled condition I could not have done much--I have no knack for
money making.  The burden of supporting the home would have fallen
considerably on her.  Perhaps it would have been "better" for both of
us, if her strange upbringing had not made marriage distasteful to her.
She and I might possibly have been "happier" if she had not been filled
by the consuming ambition which drove her to put love in a lesser place.
Perhaps.  But the race would have been poorer, would have lost her very
real contributions to the elimination of disease.

I could not argue with her then about these things. My knowledge was so
much less than hers.  But although it was a relief to find that she
would not marry me, there was still a feeling of deep injustice.  There
seemed a despicable cheat in taking from her so much more than I could
give.  It seemed ultimately unfair to accept a love I could not wholly
return.  But she brushed aside any efforts to explain.  She ran to her
room, and bringing a copy of the Rubaiyat, preached me quite a sermon on
the quatrain about Omar's astronomy, how he had revised the calendar,
struck off dead yesterday and the unborn tomorrow.  Love, she said, was
subjective, its joy came from loving, rather than from being loved.
Then suddenly she became timorous.  Perhaps she was being "invasive,"
perhaps I did not want her to love me....

My scruples went by the board with a rush.  I surely did want her.  And
I was able to convince her of it.



                                  *V*


Our relations having been for the time determined, Ann set about to
reform me.  She was really horrified at the isolated life I had been
leading.  That I took little interest in humanity, none at all in public
life and only by chance knew who was mayor of the city, shocked her.
Every evening, after her other patients had been settled for the night,
she brought me the papers.  There was no love-making--only one
kiss--until she had read to me for half an hour.  It bored me to
extinction, but she insisted that it was good for me.  I had to listen,
because each evening she examined me on what she had read the night
before.  So I acquired a certain amount of unrelated information about
millionaire divorces, murders and municipal politics.

Her next step was to make me associate with the other patients.

"Bored?" she scolded.  "It's a sin to be bored. They're people--human
beings--just as good as you are.  You're not interested in Mrs.
Stickney's husband? You're not interested in Mr. Blake's business
worries? Those are the two great facts of life.  The woman half of the
world is thinking about men.  The man half is thinking about business.
They are the two things which are really most interesting."

She took my reformation so much to heart that I began to be interested
in it myself.  I familiarized myself with all the symptoms of a
husband's dyspepsia. Mrs. Stickney's eye trouble seemed to have been
caused by a too close application to cook books--in search for a dish
her husband could digest.  From Mr. Blake's peevish discourse I got a
new insight into business and the big and little dishonesties which go
to make it up. I sometimes wonder if he really was robbed during his
illness as much as he expected to be.  He was convinced that his chief
competitor would buy his trade secrets from his head book-keeper.  He
did not seem angry at his rival nor at his employee for seizing this
opportunity to cheat him, but at the fates which, by his sickness,
offered them so great a temptation.  He complained bitterly because no
such lucky chances had ever come to him.

But it was through the newspapers that I gained most.

"Want to hear about a millionaire socialist, who says that all judges
and policemen ought to serve a year in jail before being eligible for
office?"

"It sounds more hopeful than campaign speeches," I said submissively.

It was Norman Benson.  I recognized his quaint way of expressing things,
before she came to his name.

"I know him," I laughed.

I had to tell her all about our short acquaintance.

"Why don't you ask him to come up and see you?"

I did not feel that I knew him well enough to bother him.  I had not
seen him nor heard from him for three years.

The first thing in the morning, without letting me know, she telephoned
him of my plight.  About eleven o'clock, to my immense surprise, Miss
Wright brought him to my room.

Benson was the busiest man I have ever known.  In later years when I
roomed with him and was his most intimate friend, I could never keep
track of half his activities.  He was a sort of "consulting engineer" in
advertising.  Big concerns all over the country would send for him and
pay well to have him attract the attention of the public to some new
product.  He could write the Spotless Town kind of verses while eating
breakfast, and although he did not take art seriously, he drew some of
the most successful advertisements of his time.  One year he earned
about thirty thousand dollars, above his inherited income of ten
thousand. He did not spend more than five thousand a year on himself,
but he was always hard up.

He was director of half a hundred philanthropies--settlements,
day-nurseries, immigrant homes, children's societies, and so forth.  His
pet hobby was the "Arbeiter Studenten Verein."  When he did not entirely
support these enterprises, he paid the yearly deficit.  It was such
expenses which pushed him into the advertising work he detested.

It was a wonder to me how, in spite of these manifold activities, he
found time for the thousand and one little kindnesses, the varied
personal relations he maintained with all sorts and conditions of men.
Once a week or so he dined at the University Club, more often at the
settlement, and the other nights he took pot-luck on the top floor of
some tenement with one of his Arbeiter Studenten.  In the same way he
found time to remember me and bring cheer into the hospital.

That first morning, in speaking of the newspaper story, I asked him if
he was a socialist.

"Hanged if I know," he said.  "I never joined any socialist
organization.  I don't care much for these soap-box people.  They talk
about reconstructing our industrial institutions, and most of them don't
know how to make change for a dollar.  They talk about overthrowing Wall
Street, and they don't know railroad-stock from live-stock.  They don't
begin to realize what a big thing it is--nor how unjust and crazy and
top-heavy.  But sometimes I think I must be a socialist. I can't open my
mouth and say anything serious without everybody calling me a socialist.
I don't know."

The remaining weeks in the hospital gave me a great fund of things to
ponder over.  My mind works retrospectively.  I have always sympathized
with the cud-chewing habit of the cow.  The impressions of the hour are
never clear-cut with me.  For an experience to become real, I must mull
over it a long time; gradually it sinks into my consciousness and
becomes a vital possession.

Benson's sort of kindness was absolutely new to me. No one had ever done
things for me as he did.  And as it surprised me to have him take the
trouble to send me a can of my favorite tobacco, so the affection, the
intimate revelations of love, which Ann gave me, was a thing undreamed
of.  "Come with me, up on to a high mountain, and I will show you all
the wonder of the world"--such was Ann's gift to me.  Out of the horror
of darkness, from the very bottom of the slough of despond, she led me
up into the white light of the summit peaks of life.

As I read back over these pages, I find that I have described Ann as a
voice, as a person who thought and talked of serious things, who seemed
principally absorbed in an ambition, which up to that time had borne no
fruit.  I would like to picture the woman who came to me in the darkness
with a wealth of cheer and tenderness and love.

Some day I hope our literature and our minds will be purified so that
such things can be dealt with sanely and sweetly.  But that time has not
yet come and I must be content with the tools at hand.  Ann brought to
me in those desolate days all the wondrous womanly things--the quaint
and gentle jests of love, the senseless sweet words and names which are
caresses, the sudden gusts of self revelation, the strange and
unexpected restraints--of which I may not write.

I was not lonely any more--not even when Miss Wright was on duty--there
was so much to ponder over.



                                  *VI*


At last the bandages were taken off.  I recall the sudden painful glare
of the darkened room, the three doctors in hospital costumes, who were
consulting on different forms of torture.  Especially I remember the
mole on the forehead of the chief, a gray haired, spectacled man.  It
was the first things my eyes, startled out of their long sleep, fixed
upon.  The ordeal dragged along tragically.  It seemed that they were
intentionally slow.  But the verdict when it came was acquittal.  I was
lucky.  With care I might regain almost normal vision.  But for months I
must not try to read.  Always, all my life, I must stop at the first
hint of fatigue.

So, having adjusted some smoked glasses, they sent me back to my room,
to pack and go out into a new life.  As I entered the corridor, I saw
two nurses at the other end.  My heart stopped with a jump and I was
suddenly dizzy.  Somehow I had not thought of Ann in terms of sight.
She had come to me out of the darkness, revealed herself as a sound and
a touch.  I had no idea how she would look.  They both came towards me.
I could see very little through my dark glasses. I could not guess which
was which.

"So.  They've taken off the bandages?  I'm very glad."  It was Miss
Wright's strenuous voice.

"I'm glad, too," Ann said.

I tried to see her, but my eyes were full of tears.

"I'll show him his room," Ann said.

When the door was closed on us, she threw her arms about my neck and
cried as I had never seen a woman cry.

"Oh! beloved," she sobbed.  "I'm so glad.  I was afraid--afraid you were
going to be blind."

She had always been so cheerful, so professional, about my case--of
course it would turn out all right--that I had not seen it from her
point of view.  It was a revelation to me that her bravery had been a
sham.

"Oh.  I was afraid--afraid!"

I tried to comfort her but all the pent-up worry and fear of weeks had
broken out.  And I had not realized that her love had made my risk a
personal tragedy for her.

When she had quieted a little, I wanted her to stand away so that I
might look at her.  But no--she said--she did not want me to see her
first when her eyes were swollen with tears.  She clung to me tightly
and would not show me her face.

There was a knock at the door.  I had not lived long enough to realize
the seriousness of a woman's wet eyes, and, without thought of this, I
said, "Come in."  It was Benson.

"Miss Wright tells me--"

He hesitated.  He was looking at Ann.  I turned too. She was making a
brave effort to appear unconcerned, but her eyes were red past all
hiding.

"Yes," she said, in her professional tone.  "The news is very good.
Better than we hoped."

"Fine.  I dropped in," Benson said, as though there was nothing to be
embarrassed about, "to see how you came out and get you to spend the
week-end with me if they let you go.  I've got to visit my uncle and
aunt--stupid old people--hypochondriacs.  But they are going to Europe
next week and I really must see them. I'll die of boredom if there isn't
someone to talk to. Better come along--the sailing's good.  I've got to
run over to the club for a few minutes.  Can you get your grip packed in
half an hour?  All right.  So long."

Ann was as nearly angry as I have ever seen her.

"At least you might have given me time to dry my eyes."

"I don't believe he noticed anything.  Men never see things like that,"
I said.

But Ann laughed at this and so her good temper was restored.

Her face, now that I saw it, was not at all what I had expected.  It was
serious, meagre, a bit severe. I had thought of her as blonde, but her
hair was a rich, deep brown.  Of course I am no judge of her looks. She
had brought joy into my darkness.  She could not but be beautiful for
me.

The expression is what counts most.  About her face, emphasized by her
nurse's uniform, was a definite air of sensibleness, of New England
reliability. Perhaps under other circumstances she would not have
attracted me.  Her face in repose might not have inspired more than
confidence.  But when she put her hands on my shoulders and looked up
into my face, with the light of love in her eyes, it seemed to me that a
mystic halo of beauty shone about her.  No other woman has ever looked
to me as Ann did.  And yet I know that most people would call her
"plain."

The hardest thing for me to accept about her was her height.  I had
thought her considerably shorter than Miss Wright.  I had been misled of
course by the relative size of their voices.  Ann was above average
height and Miss Wright hardly five feet.

In the half hour before Benson returned, we had not discussed anything
more concrete than opportunities to meet outside the hospital.  She was
free on alternate Saturdays from supper time till midnight.  I was
rather afraid that Benson, when we were alone, might ask some questions
or make some joke about her, but he talked busily of other things.

His uncle and aunt were a lonely old couple.  Their children were
established and they had little left to interest them except their
illnesses, some of which, Benson said, were real.  It was a beautiful
house just out of Stamford on the Sound--rather dolefully empty now that
the children had gone.  I had never seen such luxury, such heavy silver,
such ubiquitous servants.

They were planning to live in Paris, near a daughter who had married a
Frenchman.  Their arrangements had been all made.  But at the last
moment their trained nurse had thrown them into confusion by deciding
suddenly that she did not want to leave America. The aunt told us about
it, querulously, at dinner. Ann's desire came to mind.

"How much free time would the nurse have?" I asked.  "I know one who is
anxious to live in Paris and study with Pasteur.  She is very capable.
Your nephew has seen her--Miss Barton--she was at the hospital. I liked
her immensely."

Benson shot a quick glance at me.  It was the only sign he ever gave of
having noticed any intimacy between us.

"My aunt expects to live permanently in Paris," he said.  "She would not
want to take any one who was not willing to stay indefinitely."

"That, I think, would suit Miss Barton exactly."

Benson immediately fell in with my suggestion and recommended Ann
enthusiastically.  I had to answer a string of questions.  The aunt was
one of those undecided persons who hate to make up their mind, but the
uncle wanted to get started.  We talked about it continually during the
three Sunday meals, and on Monday morning they went in to see her, with
a note of introduction from me.

Ann, as I had foreseen, was delighted with the opportunity.  She pleased
them, and as soon as she could find a substitute, an easy matter, as her
position was desirable, the arrangements were made.



                                 *VII*


Ann and I spent together the day before they sailed. We had planned an
excursion to the sea-side, but it rained desperately and we found refuge
in an hotel. We were too much interested in each other to care much
about the weather or our surroundings.  Any beauties of nature which
might have distracted our attention would have seemed an impertinence.

It was a day of never-to-be-forgotten delight.  And yet it was not
without a subtle alloy.  By an unexpressed agreement, we lived up to
Omar's philosophy, we discussed neither the past nor the future.  I was
afraid to stop and think, for fear it might seem wrong....

Once she brought a cloud by some expressions of gratitude for my having,
as she put it, given her this great opportunity to realize her dream of
studying with Pasteur.  And all the while, I knew it was not solely for
her sake that I had picked up this chance, which the fates had thrown
me.  Despite the joy of her love there was this under-current of
incertitude.  I wanted to get far enough away from it, to judge it.  It
is hard to express what I mean, but I was happier, more light-hearted,
that day, because I knew she was leaving the next.

But these blurred moments were--only moments. We were young.  It was the
spring of life as it was of the year.  The spirit of poesy, of the great
Lyrics, was there in that tawdry hotel room....

In the early morning, through the wet glistening streets we made our way
across town towards the river.  Of course I knew just where we were
going, but somehow the entrance to the dock found me surprised and
unprepared.  For a moment we stood there, shaking hands as formally as
might be.  Suddenly tears sparkled in her eyes, she reached up and
kissed me.  Then she turned abruptly and walked into the bare, shadowy
building.  She had a firm step, she was sallying out to meet her
destiny.

I watched until she was out of sight.  And then I surprised myself by a
sigh of strange relief.



                                 *VIII*


Later in the day I lunched with Benson at the University Club.

"What are your plans now?" he asked as we settled down to coffee and
cigarettes.

"Find a job, I suppose."

"You're in no condition to work nor to look for work--just out of the
hospital."

"But I've got to eat."

"That's a fool superstition!" he exploded.  "You don't have to work in
order to eat.  None of 'the best people' do.  Half the trouble with the
world is that so many idiots will sweat--just to eat.  If they'd refuse
to work for tripe-stews and demand box seats at the opera, it would do
wonders.  Why people will slave all their lives long for a chance to die
in a tenement is beyond me.  What kind of work do you want?"

My ideas on that point were vague.

"How much money have you?"

That I had figured out.

"One hundred and eighty-five dollars and ninety-three cents.  And then
my books--perhaps I could get a hundred more for them."

"Of course if you are sufficiently unscrupulous that's a good start for
a fortune.  Lots of men have done it on less.  But it's a bore to sit
back and watch money grow.  Did you ever see a hunk of shad-roe--all
eggs? Money's a darn sight more prolific than fish.  Impregnate a silver
dollar with enough cynicism and you can't keep your expenses up with
your income.  Look how wealth has grown in this country in spite of all
our thievery and waste!  In the Civil War we burned money--threw
millions after millions into the flames--we never noticed it.  The
nation was richer in '65 than in '60.

"But making money is a fool's ambition.  Just think how many dubs
succeed in earning a living.  Anybody can do that.  It isn't original.
Look round for interesting work.  Something that's worth doing aside
from the wages.  Take things easy.  If you begin worrying, you'll grab
the first job that offers and think you're lucky.  Come down to the
settlement--the board's seven a week.  You can live three months on half
your money.  In that time you'll see a dozen openings. You'll be able to
take your choice instead of snatching the first job you see."

This conversation was typical of Benson.  He nearly always started off
with some generalized talk, but just when you began to think he had
forgotten you and the issue, he would end up sharp, with a definite
proposition.  I accepted his advice and moved to the "Children's House."

So my temporary blindness brought me into contact with two great facts
of life I had hitherto ignored, women and want--the beauty of sex and
the horror of misery.  And these two things occupied my whole mind.

One by one I picked out my memories of Ann and pondered them in all
their implications.  I tried to arrange them like beads on a thread, in
some ordered unified design.  Day by day she became a more real and
concise personality.

The effect of my encounter with Ann, I could then have found no word to
describe.  But a very modern term would explain my meaning to some.  She
opened my spirit to the "over-tones" of life.  Last year I heard
"Pelleas and Melisande."  I sat through the first half hour unstirred.
There was much sensuous appeal to the eyes, but the music seemed
unsatisfactory. Suddenly appreciation came.  Suddenly I understood with
a rush what he was meaning to say.  All the mystic harmony, the
unwritten, unwritable wonder of it swept over me.  And now Debussy seems
to me the greatest of them all.  "The Afternoon of the Faun" moves me
more deeply than any other music.  In fact, I think, we must invent some
newer name than "music," for this more subtle perfume of sound.

In a similar way Ann showed me the "over-tones" of life.  Deeper
significance, mystic meanings, I found in many things I had hardly
noticed before.  The sunsets held a richer wealth of colors.  I had
known Chaucer and his predecessors intimately, somewhat less thoroughly
all the world's great poetry.  It had interested me not only as a study
of comparative philology, not only as a delicate game of prosody--of
rhythm and rhyme and refrain.  It had held for me a deeper charm than
these mechanical elements--fascinating as they are.  But somehow it all
became new to me.  I discovered in the old familiar lines things, which,
alone in my study, I had never dreamed of.  I began to see in all
poetry--in all art--an effort to express these "overtones."

On the other hand, my active life was spent in the appalling misery of
the slums--a thing equally new to me.  In those days the majority of our
neighbors were Irish and German.  Decade after decade the nationality of
Stanton Street has changed.  First the Germans disappeared, then the
Russian and Hungarian Jews pushed out the Irish, now one hears as much
Italian as Yiddish.  The heart-rending poverty, the degradation of filth
and drunkenness is not a matter of race. Wave after wave of immigration
finds its native customs and morality insufficient to protect it from
the contagion of the slum.  And so it will be until we have the wisdom
to blot out the crime of congestion and give our newcomers a decent
chance.

I try to force my mind back to its attitude in those first weeks in the
"Children's House" and try to explain to myself how I became part of
"The Settlement Movement."  I fail.  I think very few of the really
important things in life are susceptible to a logical explanation.

I have met some people, who from books alone have been impressed with
the injustices of our social organization, and have left the seclusion
of their studies to throw their lives into the active campaign for
justice. Such mental processes are, I think, rare.  Certainly it came
about differently in my case.

When Benson proposed that I should come to live in the settlement, I
felt no "call" to social service. I was lonely, out of work, utterly
adrift.  The memory of the evening I had spent with him in the
Children's House and the interesting people I had met was very pleasant.
I had no suspicions that I was going there to stay.  It appealed to me
as sort of convalescent home, where I could rest up until I was able to
go out and cope with the ordinary life of the world.

At first the little circle of workers seemed incoherent. Here were half
a dozen highly educated men and women, most of whom had left pleasant
homes, living in the most abject neighborhood of the city.  Why?  What
good were they doing?  Around us roared the great fire of poverty.  Here
and there they were plucking out a brand, to be sure.  But the fire was
beyond their control.  They did not even think they could stop it.

I remember one night at dinner we had for guest, a professor of
economics from one of the big universities. He prided himself on his
cold scientific view-point, he regarded the settlement movement as
sentimental, almost hysterical, and he had the ill-breeding to forget
that what he scoffed at was a desperately serious thing to his hosts.

"This settlement movement reminds me of a story," he said.  "Once upon a
time a kind hearted old gentleman was walking down the street and found
a man--drunk--in the gutter.  He tried vainly to pull the unfortunate
one up on the sidewalk and then losing courage, he said, 'My poor man, I
can't help you, but I'll get down in the gutter beside you.'"

He laughed heartily, but no one else did.  The story fell decidedly
flat.  It was several minutes before anyone took up the challenge.  At
last, Rev. Mr. Dawn, the head worker, coughed slightly and replied.  He
had turned quite red and I saw that the joke had stung him.

"That is a very old story," he said, "it was current in Jerusalem a good
many centuries ago.  It was told with great _eclat_ by a scribe and a
pharisee who 'passed by on the other side.'"

"Oh, come, now!" our guest protested.  "That's hardly a fair comparison.
The Samaritan we are told really did some good to the poor devil.  And
besides the victim in that case was not a drunkard, but a person who had
'fallen among thieves.'"

"Thieves?" Benson asked, with a ring of anger in his voice.  "Do you
think there are no thieves but highway robbers?"--and then apparently
realizing the uselessness of arguing with such a man, he smiled blandly
and in a softer tone went on.  "Besides some of us are foolish enough to
imagine that we also can do some good.  Let's not discuss that, we'd
rather keep our illusions.  Won't you tell us what you are teaching your
classes about Marx's theory of surplus value?  Of course I know that
phrase is taboo.  But what terms do you use to describe the proceeds of
industrial robbery?"

I could not make up my mind whether the professor realized that Benson
was trying to insult him or whether he was afraid to tackle the
question.  At all events he turned to Mrs. Dawn and changed the
conversation.

This little tilt gave me a great deal to think of.  I did not like the
professor's attitude towards life.  But after all, what good were these
settlement workers doing? Again and again this question demanded an
answer. Sometimes I went out with Mr. Dawn to help in burying the dead.
I could see no adequate connection between his kindly words to the
bereaved and the hideous dragon of tuberculosis which stalked through
the crowded district.  What good did Dawn's ministrations do?  Sometimes
I went out with Miss Bronson, the kindergartner and listened to her talk
to uncomprehending mothers about their duties to their children. What
could Miss Bronson accomplish by playing a few hours a day with the
youngsters who had to go to filthy homes?  They were given a wholesome
lunch at the settlement.  But the two other meals a day they must eat
poorly cooked, adulterated food.  Sometimes I went out with Miss Cole,
the nurse, to visit her cases. It was hard for me to imagine anything
more futile than her single-handed struggle against unsanitary tenements
and unsanitary shops.

I remember especially one visit I made with her.  It was the crisis for
me.  The case was a child-birth.  There were six other children, all in
one unventilated room, its single window looked out on a dark, choked
airshaft, and the father was a drunkard.  I remember sitting there,
after the doctor had gone, holding the next youngest baby on my knee,
while Miss Cole was bathing the puny newcomer.

"Can't you make him stop crying for a minute?" Miss Cole asked
nervously.

"No," I said with sudden rage.  "I can't.  I wouldn't if I could.  Why
shouldn't he cry?  Why don't the other little fools cry!  Do you want
them to laugh?"

She stopped working with the baby and offered me a flask of brandy from
her bag.  But brandy was not what I wanted.  Of course I knew men sank
to the very dregs.  But I had never realized that some are born there.

When she had done all she could for the mother and child, Miss Cole put
her things back in the bag and we started home.  It was long after
midnight but the streets were still alive.

"What good does it do?" I demanded vehemently. "Oh, I know--you and the
doctor saved the mother's life--brought a new one into the world and all
that. But what good does it do?  The child will die--it was a
girl--let's get down on our knees right here and pray the gods that it
may die soon--not grow up to want and fear--and shame."  Then I laughed.
"No, there's no use praying.  She'll die all right!  They'll begin
feeding her beer out of a can before she's weaned. No.  Not that.  I
don't believe the mother will be able to nurse her.  She'll die of
skimmed milk.  And if that don't do the trick there's T.B. and several
other things for her to catch.  Oh, she'll die all right.  And next year
there'll be another.  For God's sake, what's the use?  What good does it
do?"  Abruptly I began to swear.

"You mustn't talk like that," Miss Cole said in a strained voice.

"Why shouldn't I curse?" I said fiercely, turning on her challengingly,
trying to think of some greater blasphemy to hurl at the muddle of life.
But the sight of her face, livid with weariness, her lips twisting
spasmodically from nervous exhaustion, showed me one reason not to.  The
realization that I had been so brutal to her shocked me horribly.

"Oh, I beg your pardon," I cried.

She stumbled slightly.  I thought she was going to faint and I put my
arm about her to steady her.  She was almost old enough to be my mother,
but she put her head on my shoulder and cried like a little child. We
stood there on the sidewalk--in the glare of a noisy, loathsome
saloon--like two frightened children.  I don't think either of us saw
any reason to go anywhere. But we dried our eyes at last and from mere
force of habit walked blindly back to the children's house.  On the
steps she broke the long silence.

"I know how you feel--everyone's like that at first, but you'll get used
to it.  I can't tell 'why.'  I can't see that it does much good.  But
it's got to be done. You mustn't think about it.  There are things to
do, today, tomorrow, all the time.  Things that must be done.  That's
how we live.  So many things to do, we can't think.  It would kill you
if you had time to think. You've got to work--work.

"You'll stay too.  I know.  You won't be able to go away.  You've been
here too long.  You won't ever know 'why.'  You'll stop asking if it
does any good. And I tell you if you stop to think about it, it will
kill you.  You must work."

She went to her room and I across the deserted courtyard and up to mine.
But there was no sleep.  It was that night that I first realized that I
also must. I had seen so much I could never forget.  It was something
from which there was no escape.  No matter how glorious the open fields,
there would always be the remembered stink of the tenements in my
nostrils. The vision of a sunken cheeked, tuberculosis ridden pauper
would always rise between me and the beauty of the sunset.  A crowd of
hurrying ghosts--the ghosts of the slaughtered babies--would follow me
everywhere, crying, "Coward," if I ran away.  The slums had taken me
captive.

As I sat there alone with my pipe, the groans of the district's uneasy
sleep in my ears, I realized more strongly than I can write it now the
appalling unity of life.  I sensed the myriad intricate filaments which
bind us into an indivisible whole.  I saw the bloody rack-rents of the
tenements circulating through all business--tainting it--going even into
the collection plates of our churches.  I saw the pay drawn by the lyric
poet, trailing back through the editorial bank account to the pockets of
various subscribers who speculated in the necessities of life, who waxed
fat off the hunger of the multitude.  My own clothes were sweat-shop
made.

I could not put out the great fire of injustice.  I could at least bind
up the sores of some of my brothers who had fallen in--who were less
lucky than I.  My old prep. school ethics came back to me.  "I want to
live so that when I die, the greatest number of people will be glad I
did live."  In a way it did not seem to matter so much whether I could
accomplish any lasting good.  I must do what I could.  Such effort
seemed to me the only escape from the awful shame of complaisancy.

Wandering in and out of the lives of the people of our neighborhood, I
looked about for a field of activity. There were so many things to be
done.  I sought for the place where the need was greatest.  It did not
take me long to decide--a conclusion I have not changed--that the worst
evils of our civilization come to a head in "The Tombs."

The official name for that pile of stone and brick is "The Criminal
Courts Building."  But the people persist in calling it "The Tombs."
The prison dated from the middle of the century and a hodge-podge of
official architecture had been added, decade by decade, as the political
bosses needed money.  It housed the district attorney's office, the
"police court," "special sessions" for misdemeanants, and "general
sessions" for felons.  One could study our whole penal practice in that
building.

I was first led into its grim shadow by a woman who came to the
settlement.  Her son, a boy of sixteen, had been arrested two months
before and had been waiting trial in an unventilated cell, originally
designed for a single occupant, with two others.  His cell-mates had
changed a dozen times.  I recall that one had been an old forger, who
was waiting an appeal, another was the keeper of a disorderly house and
a third had been a high church curate, who had embezzled the foreign
mission fund to buy flowers for a chorus girl.  The lad was patently
innocent.  And this was the very reason he was held so long.  The
district attorney was anxious to make a high record of convictions.  His
term was just expiring and he was not calling to trial the men he
thought innocent, these "technically" bad cases he was shoving over on
his successor.  At last, with the help of a charitable lawyer, named
Maynard, of whom I will write more later, we forced the case on the
calendar and the boy was promptly acquitted.

In talking over this case with Benson, I found that he was already
interested in the problems of Criminology. He was one of the trustees of
"The Prisoner's Aid Society."  The interview in the newspaper, which Ann
had read to me at the hospital, had been an effort of his to draw
attention to the subject and to infuse some life into the society.

"They're a bunch of fossils," he said.  "Think they're a '_societe
savante_.'  They read books by foreign penologists and couldn't tell a
crook from a carpet sweeper. We need somebody to study American crime.
Not a dilettante--someone who will go into it solid."

I told him I had thought a good deal about it and was ready to tackle
the job if the ways and means could be arranged.

"I imagine I could get the society to pay you a living salary.  But they
are dead ones.  If you did anything that wasn't in the books, it would
scare them.  I'll think it over."

About a week later, I received a letter from the recently elected, not
yet installed district attorney asking me to call on him.  His name was
Brace, his letter the result of Benson's thinking.  I found him a
typical young reform politician.  A man of good family, he was filled
with enthusiasm, and confidently expected to set several rivers on fire.
There was going to be absolute, abstract justice under his regime.
Benson had told him how the actual district attorney was shoving off the
"bad cases" on him and he was righteously indignant.  He wanted someone
whose fidelity he could trust, who would keep an eye on the prison side
of the Tombs.  He was sure there were many abuses there to stop, and he
was the man to do it.  The only position he could offer me under the law
was that of special county detective.  The pay would be eighteen hundred
a year.

"It is not exactly a dignified position," he said. "The county
detectives are a low class,--but of course you won't have to associate
with them."

I was more than ready to take the place.  With the rest of the new
administration I was sworn in, and so entered on my life work.  It was a
far cry from my earlier ambition to be a Fellow at Oxford.




                               *BOOK IV*


                                  *I*


"Literary unity" can be secured in an autobiography only at the expense
of all sense of reality.  The simplest of us is a multiple personality,
can be described only partially from any one point of view.  The text
book on physiology which I studied in school contained three
illustrations.  One of them pictured a human being as a structure of
bones, a skeleton; another showed man as a system of veins and arteries;
the third as a mass of interwoven muscles.  None of them looked like any
man I have ever seen.  It is the same with most autobiographies, the
writers, in order to center attention on one phase of their activities,
have cut away everything which would make their stories seem life-like.

"The Memoirs" of Cassanova give us the picture of a lover.  But he must
have been something more than a _roue_.  "The Personal Recollections" of
General Grant portray the career of a soldier.  But after all he was a
man first, it was more or less by chance that he became a
victory-machine.  How fragmentary is the picture of his life, which
Benvenuto Cellini gives us!

I might accept these classic models and tell directly the story of my
work in the Tombs.  I might limit my narrative to that part of myself
which was involved in friendship with Norman Benson.  Or again, I might
strip off everything else, ignore the flesh and bones and blood vessels,
and write of myself as an "emotional system."  In one of these ways I
might more nearly approach a literary production.  But certainly it
would be at a sacrifice of verisimilitude.  Perhaps some great writer
will come who will unite the artistic form with an impression of
actuality.  But until genius has taught us the method we must choose
between the two ideals. My choice is for reality rather than art.

And life, as it has appeared to me, is episodal in form, unified only in
the continual climaxes of the present moment.  It is a string of
incidents threaded on to the uninterrupted breathing of the same person.
The facts of any life are related only _de post facto_, in that they
influence the future course of the individual to whom they happen.  The
farther back we strive to trace these influences, which have formed us,
the greater complexity we find.  It is not only our bodies which have
"family trees," that show the number of our ancestors, generation by
generation, increasing with dizzy rapidity.  It is the same with our
thoughts and tastes.  From an immensely diffuse luminosity the lens of
life has focused the concentrated rays of light which are you and I.

So--in telling of my life, as I see it--my narrative must break up into
fragments.  Unartistic as such a form may be, it seems to me the only
one possible for autobiography.  Incidents must be given, which, however
unrelated they appear, seem to me to have been caught by the great lens
and to have formed an integral part of the focal point, which sits
here--trying to describe itself.



                                  *II*


For some years I have been continually writing on the subject of
criminology.  I could not give, here in this narrative, a complete
picture of the Tombs and its people, nor show in orderly sequence how
one incident after another forced me into a definite attitude towards
our penal system, without repeating what I have published elsewhere.
But the atmosphere in which I have spent my working life has so
definitely influenced me, has been so important a force in my experiment
in ethics, that I must give it some space.  I must try, at least, to
give some illuminating examples of the sort of thing which did influence
me and a brief statement of the attitude which has resulted from my
work, for without this background the rest of my story would be
meaningless.

At first I found myself the object of universal hostility.  The Tombs
was a feudal domain of Tammany Hall.  I was regarded as an enemy.

The "spoils system" had given place to the evils of civil service.
Municipal employees could not be displaced unless "charges" had been
proven against them. The people of the Tombs did not worry much about
the reform administration.  They regarded it as an interruption in the
even tenor of their ways, which happily would not last long.  They were
used to such moral spasms on the part of the electorate and knew how
little they were worth.  Some of the "Reform" officials tried earnestly
to clean up their departments.  Their efforts were defeated by unruly
subordinates, men trained by and loyal to the machine.

The way things went in the Tombs was typical. Brace had a conference
with the new commissioner of correction and as a result some
"Instructions for the guidance of prison keepers" were pasted up on the
walls.  But district attorneys change with every election, while the
warden--protected by civil service--goes on forever.  The sale of "dope"
to the prisoners, forbidden by the "instructions" in capital letters,
was not interrupted for a day.  Within a week the screws had forgotten
to make jokes about it.

Having been appointed by the reformer Brace, I was naturally supposed to
be his personal spy.  I was saved from falling into so fatal a mistake
by a queer old prison missionary called "General Jerry."  He had lost an
arm at Three Oaks, in the hospital at Andersonville he had found
"religion."  And as the Lord had visited him in prison, he had devoted
what was left of his life to similar work.  I think he had no income
beyond his pension--he was always shabby.  He had very little learning,
but an immense amount of homely wisdom.  If ever a man has won a right
to a starry crown it was Jerry.  He and the Father--each in his
different way--were the most wholesouled Christians I have ever
encountered.  Such a noble dignity shone from the eyes of this humble
old man that I felt it ever a privilege to sit at his feet and learn of
him.

First of all, from watching him, I found that a man who was sincere and
honest could win the respect of the Tombs, in spite of such handicaps.
Before long we became friends, and he gave me much shrewd advice.

"I come here to save souls," he said.  "That's all I come for.  I don't
let nothin' else interest me.  I ain't no district attorney.  Sure, I
see graft.  Can't help it.  Every year--onct--I talk to each one of the
screws about his soul.  'Big Jim,' I says, 'you ain't right wid God.  I
ain't the only one as seed you take money from the mother of that dago
what was hanged. I ain't the only one as heard you lie to that Jew
woman, telling her how you'd help her husband out.  I ain't the only one
as knows the hotel you took her to.  God sees!  God hears!  He knows!
You'd better square it wid Him!'  That's all I says.  They knows I don't
go round tellin' it.  And they helps me wid my work. Just yesterday Big
Jim comes to me.  'General,' he says, 'there's a guy up in 431 what's
crying.  I guess you'd better hand him a bit of Gospel.'

"What do you come down here to the Tombs for? To help out the poor guys
what they've got wrong. Well.  Don't do nothin' else.  The screws all
think you're gum-shoein' for Brace.  'Jerry,' they says to me, 'who's
the new guy?  What's he nosin' around here for?'  'Don't know,' I says.
'Better keep your eye on him--same as I'm doin',' I says.  'After a
while we'll know.'"

I felt their eyes on me all the time.  A couple of months later I sat
down beside Jerry in the courtyard; he had a Bible on his knees and a
cheese sandwich in his hand.

"I ain't no good sayin' Grace," he explained, "so I always reads a Psalm
when I eat," .... "Say, young man," he went on, "I got a word to say to
you. The screws ain't got you quite sized up yet--but most of 'em agrees
you ain't nobody's damn fool.  Now I just want to tell you something.
You take this here Tombs all together--warden, screws, cops and lawyers,
district attorneys and jedges--you can't never be friends wid all of
'em.  They's too many what's hatin' each other.  So you got to pick.
You say you're going to stay by this job.  Well, you just better figure
out who's goin' to stick wid you.  The jedges stay and the screws stay.
But the district attorneys don't never stay more'n two years.  Figure it
out.  That's what the good book means by 'Be ye wise as sarpents.'"

Jerry's advice was good.  I had already "figured out" that the favor of
the judges was more important for me than that of the district attorney.
I had to choose whom I would serve, and it was very evident that it was
expedient--if I wished to accomplish anything--to make friends with the
mammon of political unrighteousness.  The reformers were not only
pitifully weak, few of them commanded confidence.  They had not been in
office six weeks before it was evident that their reelection was
impossible.  The best of them were rank amateurs in the business of
politics and government.  Much of their disaster was due no doubt to
well intentioned ignorance.  But very few of them stuck to the ship when
it began to sink.  It would furnish some sombre amusement to publish the
figure about how many loud-mouthed reformers went into office again two
years later--under the machine banner.

Brace, my chief, as soon as he discovered that the walls of Tammany
would not fall down at the sound of newspaper trumpets, lost heart.  He
had no further interest except to keep himself in the lime-light.  Just
like all his predecessors, he neglected the routine work of his office
and gave all his attention to sensational trials which added to his
newspaper notoriety.

One of the big scandals of the preceding administration, which as much
as anything else had stirred public indignation against ring politics,
had centered about a man named Bateson.  He called himself a
"contractor" and got most of the work in grading the city streets.
There was conclusive evidence to show that almost all the work he did
was along the routes of the street car lines.  The scandal had been
discovered and worked up by one of the newspapers in a most exhaustive
manner.  The facts were clear.  The engineer of the street car company
would report to his superiors that such and such a street was too steep
for the profitable operation of their cars.  One of the directors would
call in Bateson.  Bateson would take up the matter with the mysterious
powers on Fourteenth Street, the aldermen would vote an appropriation to
grade the street; Bateson would get the contract and after being well
paid by the city would get a tangible expression of appreciation from
the street car company.  The newspapers had already collected the
evidence.  The fraud was patent.  Everyone expected Brace to call
Bateson to trial at once.  And it seemed inevitable that from the
evidence given in this case, indictments could be drawn against both the
"Old Man" on Fourteenth Street and the bribe giving directors of the
street car company.

Brace began on this case with a great flourish of trumpets.  But one
adjournment after another was granted by the Tammany judges.  It trailed
along for months.  And when at last it was called, the bottom had, in
some mysterious manner, dropped out of the prosecution.  Bateson was
acquitted.  A few months later Brace resigned and became counsel for the
notorious traction reorganization.  Some recent magazine articles have
exposed the kind of reform he stood for.

"Politics" has always seemed to me a very sorry sort of business.  I
found plenty of non-partisan misery to occupy all my time.  Gradually I
fitted myself into the life of the Tombs and became a fixture.  When the
new elections brought Tammany back to power, "civil service" protected
me from the grafters, just as it had protected them from their enemies.
And so--in that ill-smelling place--I have passed my life.

To one who is unfamiliar with our juggernaut of justice it is surprising
to find how much work there is which a person in my position can do, how
many victims can be pulled from under the merciless wheels. First of all
there are the poor, who have no money to employ an able lawyer, no means
to secure the evidence of their innocence.  Then there are the
"greenhorn" immigrants who do not know the language and laws of this new
country, who do not know enough to notify their consuls.  Saddest of
all--and most easily helped--are the youngsters.  We did not have a
children's court in those days.  But most of my time, I think, has gone
in trying to ease the lot of the innocent wives and children of the
prisoners.  Whether the man is guilty or not it is always the family
which suffers most.  And if there had been none of these things, I would
have had my hands more than full with trying to help the men who were
acquitted.  Look over the report of the criminal court in your county
and see what the average length of imprisonment while _waiting trial_
is.  It varies from place to place.  It is seldom less than three weeks.
And three weeks is a serious matter to the ordinary mechanic.  About a
third of all the people arrested are acquitted.  They get no
compensation for their footless imprisonment.  Besides the loss of
wages, it generally means a lost job.

Two stories, which have been told elsewhere, are worth retelling, as
examples of the varied work I found to do.

It was in the summer of my first year in the Tombs that I got interested
in the case of a redhaired Italian boy named Pietro Sippio.  He was only
fourteen years old and he had been indicted for premeditated murder.

The prosecution fell to the lot of the most brilliant young lawyer on
the district attorney's staff.  The Sippio family was too poor to employ
counsel and Judge Ryan, before whom the case was tried, had assigned to
the defense a famous criminal lawyer.  The trial became at once a
tourney of wit between these two men. Little Pietro and his fate was a
small matter in the duel for newspaper advertising.

The principal witness for the state was Mrs. Casey, the mother of the
little boy who had been killed.  She was a widow, a simple, uneducated
Irishwoman, who earned her living by washing.  She told her story with
every appearance of truthfulness.  During the morning of the tragic day,
she had had a quarrel with Pietro in the backyard of the tenement, where
both families lived.  Pietro had thrown some dirt on her washing and she
had slapped him.  Instead of crying as she thought an ordinary boy would
have done, he had said he would "get even" with her.

When she heard the noon whistles blow in the neighboring factories, she
had gone out on the front sidewalk to get her baby for dinner.  The
youngster was sitting on the curbstone and as she stood in the doorway
calling him, a brick, coming from the roof of the tenement, struck the
baby on the head, killing him instantly. She rushed out and--she swore
very solemnly--looked up and saw "the little divil's red head, jest as
plain as I sees yer honor."

The counsel for the defense was unable to shake her testimony in the
least.

Other witnesses swore that, on hearing Mrs. Casey's cry for help, they
had rushed up to the roof and had met Mrs. Sippio coming down through
the skylight with her two younger children, Felicia a girl of eight and
Angelo, who was five.  When they had asked her where Pietro was she said
she had not seen him.  But these witnesses were Irish and sided with
Mrs. Casey.  They testified that it was easy to pass from one roof to
another.  And it was evidently their theory that Pietro had escaped in
this manner.

A few minutes after the tragedy, Pietro had come whistling up the street
and had walked into the arms of the police, who were just starting out
to search for him.

In his own defense Pietro testified that after quarreling with Mrs.
Casey he had played about in the street for some time and then had gone
down to the river with a crowd of boys for a swim.  They had not left
the water until the noon whistles had warned them of dinner time.  They
had all hurried into their clothes and gone home.  He swore positively
that he had not been on the roof during the morning.  He evidently did
not realize the seriousness of his position and was rather swaggeringly
proud of being the center of so much attention.

Two or three other boys testified that Pietro had been swimming with
them and had not left the water until after the whistles blew.  This was
an important point as the baby had been killed a very few minutes after
noon.  But the district attorney, in a brutal, bullying
cross-examination, succeeded in rattling one of the boys--a youngster of
eleven--until he did not know his right hand from his left.  He broke
down entirely, and sobbingly admitted that perhaps Pietro had left
before the whistles blew.

Mrs. Sippio testified that she had not seen Pietro after breakfast.  She
had gone upon the roof about half past eleven to beat out some rugs.
She had taken the two younger children with her.  But Pietro had not
been on the roof.  She was a very timid woman, so frightened that she
forgot most of her scant English. But she seemed to be telling the
truth.

After the testimony was in the counsel for the defense made an eloquent,
if rather bombastic plea. He turned more often to the desk of the
reporters than to the panel of jurymen.  No one, he said, had given any
testimony which even remotely implicated Pietro, except the
grief-stricken and enraged Mrs. Casey. He made a peroration on the
vengeful traits of the Irish. He almost wept over the prospect of
eternal damnation which awaited Mrs. Casey's soul on account of her
perjury.  No reasonable man, he concluded, would condemn a fly on such
unreliable testimony.

The prosecutor commenced his summing up by referring to his position as
attorney for the people of the state of New York.  He said that his able
opponent was technically called "The counsel for the defense," but that
in reality he himself more truly deserved that title.  He was engaged
not in the defense of an individual offender, but in that of the whole
community of law abiding citizens.  And in the pursuance of this most
serious function he could not allow his personal pity for the youthful
murderer to deflect him from his public duty.

He then gave a picturesque and blood curdling account of the Vendetta
and Mafia.  He called the jury's attention to the well known traditions
of vengeance and murder among the Italians.

As for Mrs. Sippio's testimony--despite his high regard for the sanctity
of an oath--he could not find it in his heart to blame this mother who
by perjury was endangering bar own soul to save her son.  He was more
stern in regard to the evidence of the boys.  Their only excuse for
perjury was their youth.  They were members of a desperate gang, of
which Pietro was the chief.  They were corrupted by the false standards
of loyalty to their leader, so common among boys of the street.

The only testimony which deserved the serious attention of the jury was
that of Mrs. Casey--the estimable woman, who had seen her babe foully
murdered before her eyes.  Her identification of Pietro had been
absolute.

"I am sorry," he ended, "for this boy, who, by so hideous a crime, has
ruined his life at the very outset. But you and I, gentlemen of the
jury, are bound by oath to consider only the cold facts.  The judge may,
if he thinks it wise, be merciful in imposing sentence. But your sole
function is to discover truth.  Here is a boy of fiery disposition and
revengeful race.  He vowed vengeance.  Some one must have thrown the
brick.  No one else had the motive.  Either the defendant is guilty as
charged in the indictment or the brick fell from heaven."

The law explicitly states that a person charged with crime, must be
given the benefit of any "reasonable doubt."  In the face of the
manifestly conflicting testimony, I think every one in court was
surprised when the jury returned a verdict of "guilty."

I had not then been long enough in the Tombs to get used to it.  I had
not become hardened.  The tragedy of this case amazed me.  A little boy
of fourteen condemned of deliberate murder!  But the thing which
impressed me most was the way the lawyers in the court room rushed up to
congratulate the prosecutor for having won so doubtful a case.  It would
be revolting enough to me if any one should congratulate me on having
sent an adult to the gallows.  But this little boy of fourteen....

I went over the Bridge of Sighs and talked to Pietro in his cell.  If
ever a boy impressed me as telling a straightforward story he did.  I
was convinced that he had been at the riverside when the Casey baby was
killed.

After lunch I went up to the scene of the tragedy and my faith in
Pietro's innocence was considerably shaken although not overthrown by my
talk with Mrs. Casey. She was angry, of course, but she did not seem
malicious or vindictive.  As I talked with her in her squalid basement
room, full of steam from the tubs of soiled clothing, I could not doubt
her sincerity.  She really believed that Pietro had killed her child.
Wiping the suds from her powerful arms, she led me out on the sidewalk
and showed me the place where the baby had been sitting and pointed out
where she had seen the devilish red head above the coping.

The idea flashed into my mind that a boy would have to be surprisingly
clever to throw a brick from that height and hit a baby.  With Mrs.
Casey following me, I went upon the roof.  The chimneys were in a
dilapidated condition and a number of loose brick lay about.  I was a
fairly good ball player at college, but when I tried to hit a water plug
on the curb stone, six stories below, I over shot at least eight feet.
I asked Mrs. Casey to try and her brick lit in the middle of the street.
I called up some of the boys, who were watching my operations from the
street, and offered them a quarter if they could hit the water plug.
Their attempts were no better than mine.

A little further along the low coping some bricks were piled where
children had evidently been building houses with them.  I asked Mrs.
Casey to push one of them over, easily as if by accident.  It fell out a
little way from the wall and crashed down fair on the curbing.

"Mrs. Casey," I said, "I don't think Pietro threw that brick.  He
couldn't have hit the baby if he had tried.  Somebody pushed it over by
accident."

She stood for some seconds looking down over the wall, shaking her head
uncertainly.

"Faith, and I'd think ye were right, sir," she said at last, "If I
hadn't seen his red head, sir, jest as plain as I sees yours."

And as we went down stairs, she kept repeating "I sure seen his red
head."  She was evidently convinced of it.

I went to see Mrs. Sippio.  She had moved to another tenement, because
of the hostility of the Irish neighbors. I found Mr. Sippio at home
taking care of his wife, she was half hysterical from the shame and her
grief over Pietro's fate.  But she told me her story just as simply and
convincingly as had Mrs. Casey.  Pietro had not been on the roof.  There
had been only Felicia and Angelo.  I was on the point of leaving in
discouragement. Apparently one of the women was lying.  I could not
guess which.  I had gained nothing but a conviction that the brick could
not have been thrown with an intent to kill.  And that would be a very
weak plea against the verdict of a jury.  Just as I was getting up,
there was a patter of feet in the hall-way.  Mrs. Sippio's face lit up.
"It is the children," she said.  As they rushed noisily into the room
the whole mystery was cleared up.  It had not occurred to me--nor to any
one--that there might be two redheaded boys in the same Italian family.
But Angelo's hair was even more flaming than Pietro's.

I took him up in my lap and amused him until I had won his confidence.
And when he was thinking about other things, I suddenly asked him.

"Angelo, when that brick fell off the roof the other day, why didn't you
tell your mother?"

For a moment he was confused and then began to whimper.  He had been
afraid of being whipped.  I gave a whoop and reassuring the family, I
rushed down town and caught Judge Ryan, just as he was leaving his
chambers.  He listened to me eagerly, for he was as tenderhearted a man
as I have ever known and he had been deeply horrified at the idea of
having to sentence such a youngster for premeditated murder.

The attorneys were summoned to the judge's chambers, and--I guess that
the "pathos" writers of the newspapers were notified.  For the next
morning they attended court in force.  The district attorney made a
touching speech.  He was grandiloquently glad to announce that new
evidence had been discovered which cleared the defendant from all
suspicion.  The judge set aside the verdict of the jury.  The district
attorney said that Mrs. Casey had so evidently mistaken Angelo for his
older brother that there was no use having a new trial and Pietro was
discharged.  In making a few remarks on the case, Judge Ryan mentioned
my name and thanked me personally for my part in the matter. With
increasing frequency he began to call on me for assistance in other
cases and in time the other judges took notice of my existence.  I found
my hands more than full.

Very often I was able in a similar manner to unearth evidence, which the
defendants were too poor and ignorant or the lawyers too lazy to obtain.

But it was in another class of cases that I proved of greatest utility
to the judges.  A large proportion of the prisoners plead guilty,
without demanding a trial. If the whole matter is thrashed out before a
jury, the trial judge hears all the evidence and so gets some idea of
the motives of the crime, of the personality and environment of the
accused.  But when a prisoner pleads guilty, practically no details come
out in court and unless the judge has some special investigation made he
must impose sentence at haphazard.  Ryan, almost always asked me to look
into such cases.  The other judges--with the exception of O'Neil--did so
frequently.  I would visit the prisoner in his cell and get his story,
lis

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