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Tales of Men and Ghosts

by Edith Wharton · English · Gutenberg #4514 · 554,593 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Tales of Men and Ghosts

Author: Edith Wharton


        
Release date: October 1, 2003 [eBook #4514]
                Most recently updated: October 4, 2016

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALES OF MEN AND GHOSTS ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo








TALES OF MEN AND GHOSTS

By Edith Wharton



London

1910



CONTENTS

     I     _The Bolted Door_
     II    _His Father’s Son_
     III   _The Daunt Diana_
     IV    _The Debt_
     V     _Full Circle_
     VI    _The Legend_
     VII   _The Eyes_
     VIII  _The Blond Beast_
     IX    _Afterward_
     X     _The Letters_




THE BOLTED DOOR


I


HUBERT GRANICE, pacing the length of his pleasant lamp-lit library,
paused to compare his watch with the clock on the chimney-piece.

Three minutes to eight.

In exactly three minutes Mr. Peter Ascham, of the eminent legal firm of
Ascham and Pettilow, would have his punctual hand on the door-bell of
the flat. It was a comfort to reflect that Ascham was so punctual--the
suspense was beginning to make his host nervous. And the sound of the
door-bell would be the beginning of the end--after that there’d be no
going back, by God--no going back!

Granice resumed his pacing. Each time he reached the end of the room
opposite the door he caught his reflection in the Florentine mirror
above the fine old walnut _credence_ he had picked up at Dijon--saw
himself spare, quick-moving, carefully brushed and dressed, but
furrowed, gray about the temples, with a stoop which he corrected by
a spasmodic straightening of the shoulders whenever a glass confronted
him: a tired middle-aged man, baffled, beaten, worn out.

As he summed himself up thus for the third or fourth time the door
opened and he turned with a thrill of relief to greet his guest. But it
was only the man-servant who entered, advancing silently over the mossy
surface of the old Turkey rug.

“Mr. Ascham telephones, sir, to say he’s unexpectedly detained and can’t
be here till eight-thirty.”

Granice made a curt gesture of annoyance. It was becoming harder and
harder for him to control these reflexes. He turned on his heel, tossing
to the servant over his shoulder: “Very good. Put off dinner.”

Down his spine he felt the man’s injured stare. Mr. Granice had always
been so mild-spoken to his people--no doubt the odd change in his manner
had already been noticed and discussed below stairs. And very likely
they suspected the cause. He stood drumming on the writing-table till he
heard the servant go out; then he threw himself into a chair, propping
his elbows on the table and resting his chin on his locked hands.

Another half hour alone with it!

He wondered irritably what could have detained his guest. Some
professional matter, no doubt--the punctilious lawyer would have allowed
nothing less to interfere with a dinner engagement, more especially
since Granice, in his note, had said: “I shall want a little business
chat afterward.”

But what professional matter could have come up at that unprofessional
hour? Perhaps some other soul in misery had called on the lawyer; and,
after all, Granice’s note had given no hint of his own need! No doubt
Ascham thought he merely wanted to make another change in his will.
Since he had come into his little property, ten years earlier, Granice
had been perpetually tinkering with his will.

Suddenly another thought pulled him up, sending a flush to his sallow
temples. He remembered a word he had tossed to the lawyer some six weeks
earlier, at the Century Club. “Yes--my play’s as good as taken. I shall
be calling on you soon to go over the contract. Those theatrical chaps
are so slippery--I won’t trust anybody but you to tie the knot for me!”
 That, of course, was what Ascham would think he was wanted for. Granice,
at the idea, broke into an audible laugh--a queer stage-laugh, like
the cackle of a baffled villain in a melodrama. The absurdity, the
unnaturalness of the sound abashed him, and he compressed his lips
angrily. Would he take to soliloquy next?

He lowered his arms and pulled open the upper drawer of the
writing-table. In the right-hand corner lay a thick manuscript, bound
in paper folders, and tied with a string beneath which a letter had been
slipped. Next to the manuscript was a small revolver. Granice stared a
moment at these oddly associated objects; then he took the letter from
under the string and slowly began to open it. He had known he should do
so from the moment his hand touched the drawer. Whenever his eye fell on
that letter some relentless force compelled him to re-read it.

It was dated about four weeks back, under the letter-head of

“The Diversity Theatre.”

“MY DEAR MR. GRANICE:

“I have given the matter my best consideration for the last month,
and it’s no use--the play won’t do. I have talked it over with Miss
Melrose--and you know there isn’t a gamer artist on our stage--and I
regret to tell you she feels just as I do about it. It isn’t the poetry
that scares her--or me either. We both want to do all we can to help
along the poetic drama--we believe the public’s ready for it, and we’re
willing to take a big financial risk in order to be the first to give
them what they want. _But we don’t believe they could be made to
want this._ The fact is, there isn’t enough drama in your play to the
allowance of poetry--the thing drags all through. You’ve got a big idea,
but it’s not out of swaddling clothes.

“If this was your first play I’d say: _Try again_. But it has been
just the same with all the others you’ve shown me. And you remember
the result of ‘The Lee Shore,’ where you carried all the expenses of
production yourself, and we couldn’t fill the theatre for a week. Yet
‘The Lee Shore’ was a modern problem play--much easier to swing than
blank verse. It isn’t as if you hadn’t tried all kinds--”

Granice folded the letter and put it carefully back into the envelope.
Why on earth was he re-reading it, when he knew every phrase in it by
heart, when for a month past he had seen it, night after night, stand
out in letters of flame against the darkness of his sleepless lids?

“_It has been just the same with all the others you’ve shown me._”

That was the way they dismissed ten years of passionate unremitting
work!

“_You remember the result of ‘The Lee Shore.’_”

Good God--as if he were likely to forget it! He re-lived it all now in a
drowning flash: the persistent rejection of the play, his sudden resolve
to put it on at his own cost, to spend ten thousand dollars of his
inheritance on testing his chance of success--the fever of preparation,
the dry-mouthed agony of the “first night,” the flat fall, the stupid
press, his secret rush to Europe to escape the condolence of his
friends!

“_It isn’t as if you hadn’t tried all kinds._”

No--he had tried all kinds: comedy, tragedy, prose and verse, the light
curtain-raiser, the short sharp drama, the bourgeois-realistic and the
lyrical-romantic--finally deciding that he would no longer “prostitute
his talent” to win popularity, but would impose on the public his own
theory of art in the form of five acts of blank verse. Yes, he had
offered them everything--and always with the same result.

Ten years of it--ten years of dogged work and unrelieved failure. The
ten years from forty to fifty--the best ten years of his life! And if
one counted the years before, the silent years of dreams, assimilation,
preparation--then call it half a man’s life-time: half a man’s life-time
thrown away!

And what was he to do with the remaining half? Well, he had settled
that, thank God! He turned and glanced anxiously at the clock. Ten
minutes past eight--only ten minutes had been consumed in that stormy
rush through his whole past! And he must wait another twenty minutes for
Ascham. It was one of the worst symptoms of his case that, in proportion
as he had grown to shrink from human company, he dreaded more and more
to be alone. ... But why the devil was he waiting for Ascham? Why didn’t
he cut the knot himself? Since he was so unutterably sick of the whole
business, why did he have to call in an outsider to rid him of this
nightmare of living?

He opened the drawer again and laid his hand on the revolver. It was a
small slim ivory toy--just the instrument for a tired sufferer to give
himself a “hypodermic” with. Granice raised it slowly in one hand, while
with the other he felt under the thin hair at the back of his head,
between the ear and the nape. He knew just where to place the muzzle: he
had once got a young surgeon to show him. And as he found the spot, and
lifted the revolver to it, the inevitable phenomenon occurred. The hand
that held the weapon began to shake, the tremor communicated itself
to his arm, his heart gave a wild leap which sent up a wave of deadly
nausea to his throat, he smelt the powder, he sickened at the crash of
the bullet through his skull, and a sweat of fear broke out over his
forehead and ran down his quivering face...

He laid away the revolver with an oath and, pulling out a
cologne-scented handkerchief, passed it tremulously over his brow and
temples. It was no use--he knew he could never do it in that way. His
attempts at self-destruction were as futile as his snatches at fame! He
couldn’t make himself a real life, and he couldn’t get rid of the life
he had. And that was why he had sent for Ascham to help him...

The lawyer, over the Camembert and Burgundy, began to excuse himself for
his delay.

“I didn’t like to say anything while your man was about--but the fact
is, I was sent for on a rather unusual matter--”

“Oh, it’s all right,” said Granice cheerfully. He was beginning to
feel the usual reaction that food and company produced. It was not any
recovered pleasure in life that he felt, but only a deeper withdrawal
into himself. It was easier to go on automatically with the social
gestures than to uncover to any human eye the abyss within him.

“My dear fellow, it’s sacrilege to keep a dinner waiting--especially
the production of an artist like yours.” Mr. Ascham sipped his Burgundy
luxuriously. “But the fact is, Mrs. Ashgrove sent for me.”

Granice raised his head with a quick movement of surprise. For a moment
he was shaken out of his self-absorption.

“_Mrs. Ashgrove?_”

Ascham smiled. “I thought you’d be interested; I know your passion for
_causes celebres_. And this promises to be one. Of course it’s out of
our line entirely--we never touch criminal cases. But she wanted to
consult me as a friend. Ashgrove was a distant connection of my wife’s.
And, by Jove, it _is_ a queer case!” The servant re-entered, and Ascham
snapped his lips shut.

Would the gentlemen have their coffee in the dining-room?

“No--serve it in the library,” said Granice, rising. He led the way back
to the curtained confidential room. He was really curious to hear what
Ascham had to tell him.

While the coffee and cigars were being served he fidgeted about the
library, glancing at his letters--the usual meaningless notes and
bills--and picking up the evening paper. As he unfolded it a headline
caught his eye.

“ROSE MELROSE WANTS TO PLAY POETRY.

“THINKS SHE HAS FOUND HER POET.”

He read on with a thumping heart--found the name of a young author he
had barely heard of, saw the title of a play, a “poetic drama,” dance
before his eyes, and dropped the paper, sick, disgusted. It was true,
then--she _was_ “game”--it was not the manner but the matter she
mistrusted!

Granice turned to the servant, who seemed to be purposely lingering. “I
shan’t need you this evening, Flint. I’ll lock up myself.”

He fancied the man’s acquiescence implied surprise. What was going on,
Flint seemed to wonder, that Mr. Granice should want him out of the
way? Probably he would find a pretext for coming back to see. Granice
suddenly felt himself enveloped in a network of espionage.

As the door closed he threw himself into an armchair and leaned forward
to take a light from Ascham’s cigar.

“Tell me about Mrs. Ashgrove,” he said, seeming to himself to speak
stiffly, as if his lips were cracked.

“Mrs. Ashgrove? Well, there’s not much to _tell_.”

“And you couldn’t if there were?” Granice smiled.

“Probably not. As a matter of fact, she wanted my advice about her
choice of counsel. There was nothing especially confidential in our
talk.”

“And what’s your impression, now you’ve seen her?”

“My impression is, very distinctly, _that nothing will ever be known._”

“Ah--?” Granice murmured, puffing at his cigar.

“I’m more and more convinced that whoever poisoned Ashgrove knew his
business, and will consequently never be found out. That’s a capital
cigar you’ve given me.”

“You like it? I get them over from Cuba.” Granice examined his own
reflectively. “Then you believe in the theory that the clever criminals
never _are_ caught?”

“Of course I do. Look about you--look back for the last dozen
years--none of the big murder problems are ever solved.” The lawyer
ruminated behind his blue cloud. “Why, take the instance in your own
family: I’d forgotten I had an illustration at hand! Take old Joseph
Lenman’s murder--do you suppose that will ever be explained?”

As the words dropped from Ascham’s lips his host looked slowly about
the library, and every object in it stared back at him with a stale
unescapable familiarity. How sick he was of looking at that room! It was
as dull as the face of a wife one has wearied of. He cleared his throat
slowly; then he turned his head to the lawyer and said: “I could explain
the Lenman murder myself.”

Ascham’s eye kindled: he shared Granice’s interest in criminal cases.

“By Jove! You’ve had a theory all this time? It’s odd you never
mentioned it. Go ahead and tell me. There are certain features in the
Lenman case not unlike this Ashgrove affair, and your idea may be a
help.”

Granice paused and his eye reverted instinctively to the table drawer in
which the revolver and the manuscript lay side by side. What if he were
to try another appeal to Rose Melrose? Then he looked at the notes
and bills on the table, and the horror of taking up again the lifeless
routine of life--of performing the same automatic gestures another
day--displaced his fleeting vision.

“I haven’t a theory. I _know_ who murdered Joseph Lenman.”

Ascham settled himself comfortably in his chair, prepared for enjoyment.

“You _know?_ Well, who did?” he laughed.

“I did,” said Granice, rising.

He stood before Ascham, and the lawyer lay back staring up at him. Then
he broke into another laugh.

“Why, this is glorious! You murdered him, did you? To inherit his money,
I suppose? Better and better! Go on, my boy! Unbosom yourself! Tell me
all about it! Confession is good for the soul.”

Granice waited till the lawyer had shaken the last peal of laughter from
his throat; then he repeated doggedly: “I murdered him.”

The two men looked at each other for a long moment, and this time Ascham
did not laugh.

“Granice!”

“I murdered him--to get his money, as you say.”

There was another pause, and Granice, with a vague underlying sense of
amusement, saw his guest’s look change from pleasantry to apprehension.

“What’s the joke, my dear fellow? I fail to see.”

“It’s not a joke. It’s the truth. I murdered him.” He had spoken
painfully at first, as if there were a knot in his throat; but each time
he repeated the words he found they were easier to say.

Ascham laid down his extinct cigar.

“What’s the matter? Aren’t you well? What on earth are you driving at?”

“I’m perfectly well. But I murdered my cousin, Joseph Lenman, and I want
it known that I murdered him.”

“_You want it known?_”

“Yes. That’s why I sent for you. I’m sick of living, and when I try to
kill myself I funk it.” He spoke quite naturally now, as if the knot in
his throat had been untied.

“Good Lord--good Lord,” the lawyer gasped.

“But I suppose,” Granice continued, “there’s no doubt this would be
murder in the first degree? I’m sure of the chair if I own up?”

Ascham drew a long breath; then he said slowly: “Sit down, Granice.
Let’s talk.”



II


GRANICE told his story simply, connectedly.

He began by a quick survey of his early years--the years of drudgery and
privation. His father, a charming man who could never say “no,” had so
signally failed to say it on certain essential occasions that when he
died he left an illegitimate family and a mortgaged estate. His lawful
kin found themselves hanging over a gulf of debt, and young Granice, to
support his mother and sister, had to leave Harvard and bury himself at
eighteen in a broker’s office. He loathed his work, and he was always
poor, always worried and in ill-health. A few years later his mother
died, but his sister, an ineffectual neurasthenic, remained on his
hands. His own health gave out, and he had to go away for six months,
and work harder than ever when he came back. He had no knack for
business, no head for figures, no dimmest insight into the mysteries of
commerce. He wanted to travel and write--those were his inmost longings.
And as the years dragged on, and he neared middle-age without making
any more money, or acquiring any firmer health, a sick despair possessed
him. He tried writing, but he always came home from the office so tired
that his brain could not work. For half the year he did not reach his
dim up-town flat till after dark, and could only “brush up” for dinner,
and afterward lie on the lounge with his pipe, while his sister droned
through the evening paper. Sometimes he spent an evening at the theatre;
or he dined out, or, more rarely, strayed off with an acquaintance or
two in quest of what is known as “pleasure.” And in summer, when he
and Kate went to the sea-side for a month, he dozed through the days in
utter weariness. Once he fell in love with a charming girl--but what had
he to offer her, in God’s name? She seemed to like him, and in common
decency he had to drop out of the running. Apparently no one
replaced him, for she never married, but grew stoutish, grayish,
philanthropic--yet how sweet she had been when he had first kissed her!
One more wasted life, he reflected...

But the stage had always been his master-passion. He would have sold his
soul for the time and freedom to write plays! It was _in him_--he could
not remember when it had not been his deepest-seated instinct. As the
years passed it became a morbid, a relentless obsession--yet with every
year the material conditions were more and more against it. He felt
himself growing middle-aged, and he watched the reflection of the
process in his sister’s wasted face. At eighteen she had been
pretty, and as full of enthusiasm as he. Now she was sour, trivial,
insignificant--she had missed her chance of life. And she had no
resources, poor creature, was fashioned simply for the primitive
functions she had been denied the chance to fulfil! It exasperated him
to think of it--and to reflect that even now a little travel, a
little health, a little money, might transform her, make her young and
desirable... The chief fruit of his experience was that there is no such
fixed state as age or youth--there is only health as against sickness,
wealth as against poverty; and age or youth as the outcome of the lot
one draws.

At this point in his narrative Granice stood up, and went to lean
against the mantel-piece, looking down at Ascham, who had not moved from
his seat, or changed his attitude of rigid fascinated attention.

“Then came the summer when we went to Wrenfield to be near old
Lenman--my mother’s cousin, as you know. Some of the family always
mounted guard over him--generally a niece or so. But that year they were
all scattered, and one of the nieces offered to lend us her cottage if
we’d relieve her of duty for two months. It was a nuisance for me, of
course, for Wrenfield is two hours from town; but my mother, who was a
slave to family observances, had always been good to the old man, so it
was natural we should be called on--and there was the saving of rent and
the good air for Kate. So we went.

“You never knew Joseph Lenman? Well, picture to yourself an amoeba or
some primitive organism of that sort, under a Titan’s microscope. He was
large, undifferentiated, inert--since I could remember him he had done
nothing but take his temperature and read the _Churchman_. Oh,
and cultivate melons--that was his hobby. Not vulgar, out-of-door
melons--his were grown under glass. He had miles of it at Wrenfield--his
big kitchen-garden was surrounded by blinking battalions of
green-houses. And in nearly all of them melons were grown--early melons
and late, French, English, domestic--dwarf melons and monsters: every
shape, colour and variety. They were petted and nursed like children--a
staff of trained attendants waited on them. I’m not sure they didn’t
have a doctor to take their temperature--at any rate the place was full
of thermometers. And they didn’t sprawl on the ground like ordinary
melons; they were trained against the glass like nectarines, and each
melon hung in a net which sustained its weight and left it free on all
sides to the sun and air...

“It used to strike me sometimes that old Lenman was just like one of
his own melons--the pale-fleshed English kind. His life, apathetic
and motionless, hung in a net of gold, in an equable warm ventilated
atmosphere, high above sordid earthly worries. The cardinal rule of
his existence was not to let himself be ‘worried.’ . . I remember his
advising me to try it myself, one day when I spoke to him about Kate’s
bad health, and her need of a change. ‘I never let myself worry,’ he
said complacently. ‘It’s the worst thing for the liver--and you look to
me as if you had a liver. Take my advice and be cheerful. You’ll make
yourself happier and others too.’ And all he had to do was to write a
cheque, and send the poor girl off for a holiday!

“The hardest part of it was that the money half-belonged to us already.
The old skin-flint only had it for life, in trust for us and the others.
But his life was a good deal sounder than mine or Kate’s--and one could
picture him taking extra care of it for the joke of keeping us waiting.
I always felt that the sight of our hungry eyes was a tonic to him.

“Well, I tried to see if I couldn’t reach him through his vanity. I
flattered him, feigned a passionate interest in his melons. And he was
taken in, and used to discourse on them by the hour. On fine days he was
driven to the green-houses in his pony-chair, and waddled through them,
prodding and leering at the fruit, like a fat Turk in his seraglio.
When he bragged to me of the expense of growing them I was reminded of
a hideous old Lothario bragging of what his pleasures cost. And the
resemblance was completed by the fact that he couldn’t eat as much as
a mouthful of his melons--had lived for years on buttermilk and toast.
‘But, after all, it’s my only hobby--why shouldn’t I indulge it?’ he
said sentimentally. As if I’d ever been able to indulge any of mine! On
the keep of those melons Kate and I could have lived like gods...

“One day toward the end of the summer, when Kate was too unwell to drag
herself up to the big house, she asked me to go and spend the afternoon
with cousin Joseph. It was a lovely soft September afternoon--a day to
lie under a Roman stone-pine, with one’s eyes on the sky, and let the
cosmic harmonies rush through one. Perhaps the vision was suggested
by the fact that, as I entered cousin Joseph’s hideous black walnut
library, I passed one of the under-gardeners, a handsome full-throated
Italian, who dashed out in such a hurry that he nearly knocked me down.
I remember thinking it queer that the fellow, whom I had often seen
about the melon-houses, did not bow to me, or even seem to see me.

“Cousin Joseph sat in his usual seat, behind the darkened windows, his
fat hands folded on his protuberant waistcoat, the last number of the
_Churchman_ at his elbow, and near it, on a huge dish, a fat melon--the
fattest melon I’d ever seen. As I looked at it I pictured the ecstasy
of contemplation from which I must have roused him, and congratulated
myself on finding him in such a mood, since I had made up my mind to ask
him a favour. Then I noticed that his face, instead of looking as calm
as an egg-shell, was distorted and whimpering--and without stopping to
greet me he pointed passionately to the melon.

“‘Look at it, look at it--did you ever see such a beauty? Such
firmness--roundness--such delicious smoothness to the touch?’ It was
as if he had said ‘she’ instead of ‘it,’ and when he put out his senile
hand and touched the melon I positively had to look the other way.

“Then he told me what had happened. The Italian under-gardener, who had
been specially recommended for the melon-houses--though it was against
my cousin’s principles to employ a Papist--had been assigned to the care
of the monster: for it had revealed itself, early in its existence, as
destined to become a monster, to surpass its plumpest, pulpiest
sisters, carry off prizes at agricultural shows, and be photographed and
celebrated in every gardening paper in the land. The Italian had done
well--seemed to have a sense of responsibility. And that very morning
he had been ordered to pick the melon, which was to be shown next day at
the county fair, and to bring it in for Mr. Lenman to gaze on its blonde
virginity. But in picking it, what had the damned scoundrelly Jesuit
done but drop it--drop it crash on the sharp spout of a watering-pot,
so that it received a deep gash in its firm pale rotundity, and was
henceforth but a bruised, ruined, fallen melon?

“The old man’s rage was fearful in its impotence--he shook, spluttered
and strangled with it. He had just had the Italian up and had sacked
him on the spot, without wages or character--had threatened to have him
arrested if he was ever caught prowling about Wrenfield. ‘By God, and
I’ll do it--I’ll write to Washington--I’ll have the pauper scoundrel
deported! I’ll show him what money can do!’ As likely as not there was
some murderous Black-hand business under it--it would be found that the
fellow was a member of a ‘gang.’ Those Italians would murder you for a
quarter. He meant to have the police look into it... And then he grew
frightened at his own excitement. ‘But I must calm myself,’ he said. He
took his temperature, rang for his drops, and turned to the _Churchman_.
He had been reading an article on Nestorianism when the melon was
brought in. He asked me to go on with it, and I read to him for an
hour, in the dim close room, with a fat fly buzzing stealthily about the
fallen melon.

“All the while one phrase of the old man’s buzzed in my brain like the
fly about the melon. ‘_I’ll show him what money can do!_’ Good heaven!
If _I_ could but show the old man! If I could make him see his power of
giving happiness as a new outlet for his monstrous egotism! I tried
to tell him something about my situation and Kate’s--spoke of my
ill-health, my unsuccessful drudgery, my longing to write, to make
myself a name--I stammered out an entreaty for a loan. ‘I can guarantee
to repay you, sir--I’ve a half-written play as security...’

“I shall never forget his glassy stare. His face had grown as smooth as
an egg-shell again--his eyes peered over his fat cheeks like sentinels
over a slippery rampart.

“‘A half-written play--a play of _yours_ as security?’ He looked at me
almost fearfully, as if detecting the first symptoms of insanity. ‘Do
you understand anything of business?’ he enquired mildly. I laughed and
answered: ‘No, not much.’

“He leaned back with closed lids. ‘All this excitement has been too much
for me,’ he said. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll prepare for my nap.’ And I
stumbled out of the room, blindly, like the Italian.”

Granice moved away from the mantel-piece, and walked across to the tray
set out with decanters and soda-water. He poured himself a tall glass of
soda-water, emptied it, and glanced at Ascham’s dead cigar.

“Better light another,” he suggested.

The lawyer shook his head, and Granice went on with his tale. He told
of his mounting obsession--how the murderous impulse had waked in him on
the instant of his cousin’s refusal, and he had muttered to himself:
“By God, if you won’t, I’ll make you.” He spoke more tranquilly as the
narrative proceeded, as though his rage had died down once the resolve
to act on it was taken. He applied his whole mind to the question of how
the old man was to be “disposed of.” Suddenly he remembered the outcry:
“Those Italians will murder you for a quarter!” But no definite project
presented itself: he simply waited for an inspiration.

Granice and his sister moved to town a day or two after the incident of
the melon. But the cousins, who had returned, kept them informed of
the old man’s condition. One day, about three weeks later, Granice,
on getting home, found Kate excited over a report from Wrenfield. The
Italian had been there again--had somehow slipped into the house,
made his way up to the library, and “used threatening language.” The
house-keeper found cousin Joseph gasping, the whites of his eyes showing
“something awful.” The doctor was sent for, and the attack warded off;
and the police had ordered the Italian from the neighbourhood.

But cousin Joseph, thereafter, languished, had “nerves,” and lost his
taste for toast and butter-milk. The doctor called in a colleague, and
the consultation amused and excited the old man--he became once more
an important figure. The medical men reassured the family--too
completely!--and to the patient they recommended a more varied diet:
advised him to take whatever “tempted him.” And so one day, tremulously,
prayerfully, he decided on a tiny bit of melon. It was brought up
with ceremony, and consumed in the presence of the house-keeper and a
hovering cousin; and twenty minutes later he was dead...

“But you remember the circumstances,” Granice went on; “how suspicion
turned at once on the Italian? In spite of the hint the police had given
him he had been seen hanging about the house since ‘the scene.’ It was
said that he had tender relations with the kitchen-maid, and the rest
seemed easy to explain. But when they looked round to ask him for the
explanation he was gone--gone clean out of sight. He had been ‘warned’
to leave Wrenfield, and he had taken the warning so to heart that no one
ever laid eyes on him again.”

Granice paused. He had dropped into a chair opposite the lawyer’s, and
he sat for a moment, his head thrown back, looking about the familiar
room. Everything in it had grown grimacing and alien, and each strange
insistent object seemed craning forward from its place to hear him.

“It was I who put the stuff in the melon,” he said. “And I don’t want
you to think I’m sorry for it. This isn’t ‘remorse,’ understand. I’m
glad the old skin-flint is dead--I’m glad the others have their money.
But mine’s no use to me any more. My sister married miserably, and died.
And I’ve never had what I wanted.”

Ascham continued to stare; then he said: “What on earth was your object,
then?”

“Why, to _get_ what I wanted--what I fancied was in reach! I wanted
change, rest, _life_, for both of us--wanted, above all, for myself, the
chance to write! I travelled, got back my health, and came home to
tie myself up to my work. And I’ve slaved at it steadily for ten years
without reward--without the most distant hope of success! Nobody will
look at my stuff. And now I’m fifty, and I’m beaten, and I know it.”
 His chin dropped forward on his breast. “I want to chuck the whole
business,” he ended.



III


IT was after midnight when Ascham left.

His hand on Granice’s shoulder, as he turned to go--“District Attorney
be hanged; see a doctor, see a doctor!” he had cried; and so, with an
exaggerated laugh, had pulled on his coat and departed.

Granice turned back into the library. It had never occurred to him that
Ascham would not believe his story. For three hours he had explained,
elucidated, patiently and painfully gone over every detail--but without
once breaking down the iron incredulity of the lawyer’s eye.

At first Ascham had feigned to be convinced--but that, as Granice now
perceived, was simply to get him to expose himself, to entrap him into
contradictions. And when the attempt failed, when Granice triumphantly
met and refuted each disconcerting question, the lawyer dropped the mask
suddenly, and said with a good-humoured laugh: “By Jove, Granice you’ll
write a successful play yet. The way you’ve worked this all out is a
marvel.”

Granice swung about furiously--that last sneer about the play inflamed
him. Was all the world in a conspiracy to deride his failure?

“I did it, I did it,” he muttered sullenly, his rage spending itself
against the impenetrable surface of the other’s mockery; and Ascham
answered with a smile: “Ever read any of those books on hallucination?
I’ve got a fairly good medico-legal library. I could send you one or two
if you like...”

Left alone, Granice cowered down in the chair before his writing-table.
He understood that Ascham thought him off his head.

“Good God--what if they all think me crazy?”

The horror of it broke out over him in a cold sweat--he sat there and
shook, his eyes hidden in his icy hands. But gradually, as he began
to rehearse his story for the thousandth time, he saw again how
incontrovertible it was, and felt sure that any criminal lawyer would
believe him.

“That’s the trouble--Ascham’s not a criminal lawyer. And then he’s a
friend. What a fool I was to talk to a friend! Even if he did believe
me, he’d never let me see it--his instinct would be to cover the whole
thing up... But in that case--if he _did_ believe me--he might think it
a kindness to get me shut up in an asylum...” Granice began to tremble
again. “Good heaven! If he should bring in an expert--one of those
damned alienists! Ascham and Pettilow can do anything--their word always
goes. If Ascham drops a hint that I’d better be shut up, I’ll be in a
strait-jacket by to-morrow! And he’d do it from the kindest motives--be
quite right to do it if he thinks I’m a murderer!”

The vision froze him to his chair. He pressed his fists to his bursting
temples and tried to think. For the first time he hoped that Ascham had
not believed his story.

“But he did--he did! I can see it now--I noticed what a queer eye he
cocked at me. Good God, what shall I do--what shall I do?”

He started up and looked at the clock. Half-past one. What if Ascham
should think the case urgent, rout out an alienist, and come back with
him? Granice jumped to his feet, and his sudden gesture brushed the
morning paper from the table. Mechanically he stooped to pick it up, and
the movement started a new train of association.

He sat down again, and reached for the telephone book in the rack by his
chair.

“Give me three-o-ten ... yes.”

The new idea in his mind had revived his flagging energy. He would
act--act at once. It was only by thus planning ahead, committing himself
to some unavoidable line of conduct, that he could pull himself through
the meaningless days. Each time he reached a fresh decision it was like
coming out of a foggy weltering sea into a calm harbour with lights. One
of the queerest phases of his long agony was the intense relief produced
by these momentary lulls.

“That the office of the _Investigator?_ Yes? Give me Mr. Denver,
please... Hallo, Denver... Yes, Hubert Granice. ... Just caught you?
Going straight home? Can I come and see you ... yes, now ... have a
talk? It’s rather urgent ... yes, might give you some first-rate ‘copy.’
... All right!” He hung up the receiver with a laugh. It had been a
happy thought to call up the editor of the _Investigator_--Robert Denver
was the very man he needed...

Granice put out the lights in the library--it was odd how the automatic
gestures persisted!--went into the hall, put on his hat and overcoat,
and let himself out of the flat. In the hall, a sleepy elevator boy
blinked at him and then dropped his head on his folded arms. Granice
passed out into the street. At the corner of Fifth Avenue he hailed a
crawling cab, and called out an up-town address. The long thoroughfare
stretched before him, dim and deserted, like an ancient avenue of tombs.
But from Denver’s house a friendly beam fell on the pavement; and as
Granice sprang from his cab the editor’s electric turned the corner.

The two men grasped hands, and Denver, feeling for his latch-key,
ushered Granice into the brightly-lit hall.

“Disturb me? Not a bit. You might have, at ten to-morrow morning ... but
this is my liveliest hour ... you know my habits of old.”

Granice had known Robert Denver for fifteen years--watched his rise
through all the stages of journalism to the Olympian pinnacle of the
_Investigator’s_ editorial office. In the thick-set man with grizzling
hair there were few traces left of the hungry-eyed young reporter who,
on his way home in the small hours, used to “bob in” on Granice, while
the latter sat grinding at his plays. Denver had to pass Granice’s flat
on the way to his own, and it became a habit, if he saw a light in the
window, and Granice’s shadow against the blind, to go in, smoke a pipe,
and discuss the universe.

“Well--this is like old times--a good old habit reversed.” The editor
smote his visitor genially on the shoulder. “Reminds me of the nights
when I used to rout you out... How’s the play, by the way? There _is_
a play, I suppose? It’s as safe to ask you that as to say to some men:
‘How’s the baby?’”

Denver laughed good-naturedly, and Granice thought how thick and heavy
he had grown. It was evident, even to Granice’s tortured nerves, that
the words had not been uttered in malice--and the fact gave him a new
measure of his insignificance. Denver did not even know that he had been
a failure! The fact hurt more than Ascham’s irony.

“Come in--come in.” The editor led the way into a small cheerful room,
where there were cigars and decanters. He pushed an arm-chair toward his
visitor, and dropped into another with a comfortable groan.

“Now, then--help yourself. And let’s hear all about it.”

He beamed at Granice over his pipe-bowl, and the latter, lighting his
cigar, said to himself: “Success makes men comfortable, but it makes
them stupid.”

Then he turned, and began: “Denver, I want to tell you--”

The clock ticked rhythmically on the mantel-piece. The room was
gradually filled with drifting blue layers of smoke, and through them
the editor’s face came and went like the moon through a moving sky. Once
the hour struck--then the rhythmical ticking began again. The atmosphere
grew denser and heavier, and beads of perspiration began to roll from
Granice’s forehead.

“Do you mind if I open the window?”

“No. It _is_ stuffy in here. Wait--I’ll do it myself.” Denver pushed
down the upper sash, and returned to his chair. “Well--go on,” he said,
filling another pipe. His composure exasperated Granice.

“There’s no use in my going on if you don’t believe me.”

The editor remained unmoved. “Who says I don’t believe you? And how can
I tell till you’ve finished?”

Granice went on, ashamed of his outburst. “It was simple enough, as
you’ll see. From the day the old man said to me, ‘Those Italians would
murder you for a quarter,’ I dropped everything and just worked at
my scheme. It struck me at once that I must find a way of getting to
Wrenfield and back in a night--and that led to the idea of a motor. A
motor--that never occurred to you? You wonder where I got the money, I
suppose. Well, I had a thousand or so put by, and I nosed around till I
found what I wanted--a second-hand racer. I knew how to drive a car,
and I tried the thing and found it was all right. Times were bad, and I
bought it for my price, and stored it away. Where? Why, in one of those
no-questions-asked garages where they keep motors that are not for
family use. I had a lively cousin who had put me up to that dodge, and I
looked about till I found a queer hole where they took in my car like a
baby in a foundling asylum... Then I practiced running to Wrenfield and
back in a night. I knew the way pretty well, for I’d done it often with
the same lively cousin--and in the small hours, too. The distance is
over ninety miles, and on the third trial I did it under two hours. But
my arms were so lame that I could hardly get dressed the next morning...

“Well, then came the report about the Italian’s threats, and I saw I
must act at once... I meant to break into the old man’s room, shoot him,
and get away again. It was a big risk, but I thought I could manage it.
Then we heard that he was ill--that there’d been a consultation. Perhaps
the fates were going to do it for me! Good Lord, if that could only be!...”

Granice stopped and wiped his forehead: the open window did not seem to
have cooled the room.

“Then came word that he was better; and the day after, when I came up
from my office, I found Kate laughing over the news that he was to try
a bit of melon. The house-keeper had just telephoned her--all Wrenfield
was in a flutter. The doctor himself had picked out the melon, one of
the little French ones that are hardly bigger than a large tomato--and
the patient was to eat it at his breakfast the next morning.

“In a flash I saw my chance. It was a bare chance, no more. But I knew
the ways of the house--I was sure the melon would be brought in over
night and put in the pantry ice-box. If there were only one melon in the
ice-box I could be fairly sure it was the one I wanted. Melons
didn’t lie around loose in that house--every one was known, numbered,
catalogued. The old man was beset by the dread that the servants would
eat them, and he took a hundred mean precautions to prevent it. Yes,
I felt pretty sure of my melon ... and poisoning was much safer than
shooting. It would have been the devil and all to get into the old man’s
bedroom without his rousing the house; but I ought to be able to break
into the pantry without much trouble.

“It was a cloudy night, too--everything served me. I dined quietly, and
sat down at my desk. Kate had one of her usual headaches, and went to
bed early. As soon as she was gone I slipped out. I had got together a
sort of disguise--red beard and queer-looking ulster. I shoved them
into a bag, and went round to the garage. There was no one there but a
half-drunken machinist whom I’d never seen before. That served me, too.
They were always changing machinists, and this new fellow didn’t even
bother to ask if the car belonged to me. It was a very easy-going
place...

“Well, I jumped in, ran up Broadway, and let the car go as soon as I was
out of Harlem. Dark as it was, I could trust myself to strike a sharp
pace. In the shadow of a wood I stopped a second and got into the beard
and ulster. Then away again--it was just eleven-thirty when I got to
Wrenfield.

“I left the car in a dark lane behind the Lenman place, and slipped
through the kitchen-garden. The melon-houses winked at me through the
dark--I remember thinking that they knew what I wanted to know. ... By
the stable a dog came out growling--but he nosed me out, jumped on me,
and went back... The house was as dark as the grave. I knew everybody
went to bed by ten. But there might be a prowling servant--the
kitchen-maid might have come down to let in her Italian. I had to
risk that, of course. I crept around by the back door and hid in the
shrubbery. Then I listened. It was all as silent as death. I crossed
over to the house, pried open the pantry window and climbed in. I had a
little electric lamp in my pocket, and shielding it with my cap I groped
my way to the ice-box, opened it--and there was the little French
melon... only one.

“I stopped to listen--I was quite cool. Then I pulled out my bottle of
stuff and my syringe, and gave each section of the melon a hypodermic.
It was all done inside of three minutes--at ten minutes to twelve I was
back in the car. I got out of the lane as quietly as I could, struck a
back road that skirted the village, and let the car out as soon as I was
beyond the last houses. I only stopped once on the way in, to drop the
beard and ulster into a pond. I had a big stone ready to weight them
with and they went down plump, like a dead body--and at two o’clock I
was back at my desk.”

Granice stopped speaking and looked across the smoke-fumes at his
listener; but Denver’s face remained inscrutable.

At length he said: “Why did you want to tell me this?”

The question startled Granice. He was about to explain, as he had
explained to Ascham; but suddenly it occurred to him that if his motive
had not seemed convincing to the lawyer it would carry much less weight
with Denver. Both were successful men, and success does not understand
the subtle agony of failure. Granice cast about for another reason.

“Why, I--the thing haunts me ... remorse, I suppose you’d call it...”

Denver struck the ashes from his empty pipe.

“Remorse? Bosh!” he said energetically.

Granice’s heart sank. “You don’t believe in--_remorse?_”

“Not an atom: in the man of action. The mere fact of your talking of
remorse proves to me that you’re not the man to have planned and put
through such a job.”

Granice groaned. “Well--I lied to you about remorse. I’ve never felt
any.”

Denver’s lips tightened sceptically about his freshly-filled pipe. “What
was your motive, then? You must have had one.”

“I’ll tell you--” And Granice began again to rehearse the story of his
failure, of his loathing for life. “Don’t say you don’t believe me this
time ... that this isn’t a real reason!” he stammered out piteously as
he ended.

Denver meditated. “No, I won’t say that. I’ve seen too many queer
things. There’s always a reason for wanting to get out of life--the
wonder is that we find so many for staying in!”

Granice’s heart grew light. “Then you _do_ believe me?” he faltered.

“Believe that you’re sick of the job? Yes. And that you haven’t the
nerve to pull the trigger? Oh, yes--that’s easy enough, too. But all
that doesn’t make you a murderer--though I don’t say it proves you could
never have been one.”

“I _have_ been one, Denver--I swear to you.”

“Perhaps.” He meditated. “Just tell me one or two things.”

“Oh, go ahead. You won’t stump me!” Granice heard himself say with a
laugh.

“Well--how did you make all those trial trips without exciting your
sister’s curiosity? I knew your night habits pretty well at that time,
remember. You were very seldom out late. Didn’t the change in your ways
surprise her?”

“No; because she was away at the time. She went to pay several visits in
the country soon after we came back from Wrenfield, and was only in town
for a night or two before--before I did the job.”

“And that night she went to bed early with a headache?”

“Yes--blinding. She didn’t know anything when she had that kind. And her
room was at the back of the flat.”

Denver again meditated. “And when you got back--she didn’t hear you? You
got in without her knowing it?”

“Yes. I went straight to my work--took it up at the word where I’d left
off--_why, Denver, don’t you remember?_” Granice suddenly, passionately
interjected.

“Remember--?”

“Yes; how you found me--when you looked in that morning, between two and
three ... your usual hour ...?”

“Yes,” the editor nodded.

Granice gave a short laugh. “In my old coat--with my pipe: looked as if
I’d been working all night, didn’t I? Well, I hadn’t been in my chair
ten minutes!”

Denver uncrossed his legs and then crossed them again. “I didn’t know
whether _you_ remembered that.”

“What?”

“My coming in that particular night--or morning.”

Granice swung round in his chair. “Why, man alive! That’s why I’m here
now. Because it was you who spoke for me at the inquest, when they
looked round to see what all the old man’s heirs had been doing that
night--you who testified to having dropped in and found me at my desk as
usual. ... I thought _that_ would appeal to your journalistic sense if
nothing else would!”

Denver smiled. “Oh, my journalistic sense is still susceptible
enough--and the idea’s picturesque, I grant you: asking the man who
proved your alibi to establish your guilt.”

“That’s it--that’s it!” Granice’s laugh had a ring of triumph.

“Well, but how about the other chap’s testimony--I mean that young
doctor: what was his name? Ned Ranney. Don’t you remember my testifying
that I’d met him at the elevated station, and told him I was on my way
to smoke a pipe with you, and his saying: ‘All right; you’ll find him
in. I passed the house two hours ago, and saw his shadow against the
blind, as usual.’ And the lady with the toothache in the flat across the
way: she corroborated his statement, you remember.”

“Yes; I remember.”

“Well, then?”

“Simple enough. Before starting I rigged up a kind of mannikin with old
coats and a cushion--something to cast a shadow on the blind. All
you fellows were used to seeing my shadow there in the small hours--I
counted on that, and knew you’d take any vague outline as mine.”

“Simple enough, as you say. But the woman with the toothache saw the
shadow move--you remember she said she saw you sink forward, as if you’d
fallen asleep.”

“Yes; and she was right. It _did_ move. I suppose some extra-heavy dray
must have jolted by the flimsy building--at any rate, something gave my
mannikin a jar, and when I came back he had sunk forward, half over the
table.”

There was a long silence between the two men. Granice, with a throbbing
heart, watched Denver refill his pipe. The editor, at any rate, did not
sneer and flout him. After all, journalism gave a deeper insight than
the law into the fantastic possibilities of life, prepared one better to
allow for the incalculableness of human impulses.

“Well?” Granice faltered out.

Denver stood up with a shrug. “Look here, man--what’s wrong with you?
Make a clean breast of it! Nerves gone to smash? I’d like to take you
to see a chap I know--an ex-prize-fighter--who’s a wonder at pulling
fellows in your state out of their hole--”

“Oh, oh--” Granice broke in. He stood up also, and the two men eyed each
other. “You don’t believe me, then?”

“This yarn--how can I? There wasn’t a flaw in your alibi.”

“But haven’t I filled it full of them now?”

Denver shook his head. “I might think so if I hadn’t happened to know
that you _wanted_ to. There’s the hitch, don’t you see?”

Granice groaned. “No, I didn’t. You mean my wanting to be found
guilty--?”

“Of course! If somebody else had accused you, the story might have been
worth looking into. As it is, a child could have invented it. It doesn’t
do much credit to your ingenuity.”

Granice turned sullenly toward the door. What was the use of arguing?
But on the threshold a sudden impulse drew him back. “Look here,
Denver--I daresay you’re right. But will you do just one thing to
prove it? Put my statement in the _Investigator_, just as I’ve made it.
Ridicule it as much as you like. Only give the other fellows a chance at
it--men who don’t know anything about me. Set them talking and looking
about. I don’t care a damn whether _you_ believe me--what I want is
to convince the Grand Jury! I oughtn’t to have come to a man who knows
me--your cursed incredulity is infectious. I don’t put my case well,
because I know in advance it’s discredited, and I almost end by not
believing it myself. That’s why I can’t convince _you_. It’s a vicious
circle.” He laid a hand on Denver’s arm. “Send a stenographer, and put
my statement in the paper.”

But Denver did not warm to the idea. “My dear fellow, you seem to forget
that all the evidence was pretty thoroughly sifted at the time, every
possible clue followed up. The public would have been ready enough then
to believe that you murdered old Lenman--you or anybody else. All they
wanted was a murderer--the most improbable would have served. But your
alibi was too confoundedly complete. And nothing you’ve told me has
shaken it.” Denver laid his cool hand over the other’s burning fingers.
“Look here, old fellow, go home and work up a better case--then come in
and submit it to the _Investigator_.”



IV


THE perspiration was rolling off Granice’s forehead. Every few minutes
he had to draw out his handkerchief and wipe the moisture from his
haggard face.

For an hour and a half he had been talking steadily, putting his case
to the District Attorney. Luckily he had a speaking acquaintance with
Allonby, and had obtained, without much difficulty, a private audience
on the very day after his talk with Robert Denver. In the interval
between he had hurried home, got out of his evening clothes, and gone
forth again at once into the dreary dawn. His fear of Ascham and the
alienist made it impossible for him to remain in his rooms. And it
seemed to him that the only way of averting that hideous peril was by
establishing, in some sane impartial mind, the proof of his guilt. Even
if he had not been so incurably sick of life, the electric chair seemed
now the only alternative to the strait-jacket.

As he paused to wipe his forehead he saw the District Attorney glance at
his watch. The gesture was significant, and Granice lifted an appealing
hand. “I don’t expect you to believe me now--but can’t you put me under
arrest, and have the thing looked into?”

Allonby smiled faintly under his heavy grayish moustache. He had a ruddy
face, full and jovial, in which his keen professional eyes seemed to
keep watch over impulses not strictly professional.

“Well, I don’t know that we need lock you up just yet. But of course I’m
bound to look into your statement--”

Granice rose with an exquisite sense of relief. Surely Allonby wouldn’t
have said that if he hadn’t believed him!

“That’s all right. Then I needn’t detain you. I can be found at any time
at my apartment.” He gave the address.

The District Attorney smiled again, more openly. “What do you say to
leaving it for an hour or two this evening? I’m giving a little supper
at Rector’s--quiet, little affair, you understand: just Miss Melrose--I
think you know her--and a friend or two; and if you’ll join us...”

Granice stumbled out of the office without knowing what reply he had
made.

He waited for four days--four days of concentrated horror. During the
first twenty-four hours the fear of Ascham’s alienist dogged him; and as
that subsided, it was replaced by the exasperating sense that his avowal
had made no impression on the District Attorney. Evidently, if he had
been going to look into the case, Allonby would have been heard from
before now. ... And that mocking invitation to supper showed clearly
enough how little the story had impressed him!

Granice was overcome by the futility of any farther attempt to inculpate
himself. He was chained to life--a “prisoner of consciousness.” Where
was it he had read the phrase? Well, he was learning what it meant. In
the glaring night-hours, when his brain seemed ablaze, he was visited
by a sense of his fixed identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable
_selfness_, keener, more insidious, more unescapable, than any sensation
he had ever known. He had not guessed that the mind was capable of such
intricacies of self-realization, of penetrating so deep into its own
dark windings. Often he woke from his brief snatches of sleep with the
feeling that something material was clinging to him, was on his hands
and face, and in his throat--and as his brain cleared he understood that
it was the sense of his own loathed personality that stuck to him like
some thick viscous substance.

Then, in the first morning hours, he would rise and look out of
his window at the awakening activities of the street--at the
street-cleaners, the ash-cart drivers, and the other dingy workers
flitting hurriedly by through the sallow winter light. Oh, to be one of
them--any of them--to take his chance in any of their skins! They were
the toilers--the men whose lot was pitied--the victims wept over and
ranted about by altruists and economists; and how gladly he would have
taken up the load of any one of them, if only he might have shaken off
his own! But, no--the iron circle of consciousness held them too: each
one was hand-cuffed to his own hideous ego. Why wish to be any one man
rather than another? The only absolute good was not to be ... And Flint,
coming in to draw his bath, would ask if he preferred his eggs scrambled
or poached that morning?

On the fifth day he wrote a long urgent letter to Allonby; and for the
succeeding two days he had the occupation of waiting for an answer. He
hardly stirred from his rooms, in his fear of missing the letter by a
moment; but would the District Attorney write, or send a representative:
a policeman, a “secret agent,” or some other mysterious emissary of the
law?

On the third morning Flint, stepping softly--as if, confound it! his
master were ill--entered the library where Granice sat behind an unread
newspaper, and proferred a card on a tray.

Granice read the name--J. B. Hewson--and underneath, in pencil, “From
the District Attorney’s office.” He started up with a thumping heart,
and signed an assent to the servant.

Mr. Hewson was a slight sallow nondescript man of about fifty--the kind
of man of whom one is sure to see a specimen in any crowd. “Just the
type of the successful detective,” Granice reflected as he shook hands
with his visitor.

And it was in that character that Mr. Hewson briefly introduced himself.
He had been sent by the District Attorney to have “a quiet talk” with
Mr. Granice--to ask him to repeat the statement he had made about the
Lenman murder.

His manner was so quiet, so reasonable and receptive, that Granice’s
self-confidence returned. Here was a sensible man--a man who knew
his business--it would be easy enough to make _him_ see through that
ridiculous alibi! Granice offered Mr. Hewson a cigar, and lighting one
himself--to prove his coolness--began again to tell his story.

He was conscious, as he proceeded, of telling it better than ever
before. Practice helped, no doubt; and his listener’s detached,
impartial attitude helped still more. He could see that Hewson, at
least, had not decided in advance to disbelieve him, and the sense of
being trusted made him more lucid and more consecutive. Yes, this time
his words would certainly carry conviction...



V


DESPAIRINGLY, Granice gazed up and down the shabby street. Beside him
stood a young man with bright prominent eyes, a smooth but not too
smoothly-shaven face, and an Irish smile. The young man’s nimble glance
followed Granice’s.

“Sure of the number, are you?” he asked briskly.

“Oh, yes--it was 104.”

“Well, then, the new building has swallowed it up--that’s certain.”

He tilted his head back and surveyed the half-finished front of a brick
and limestone flat-house that reared its flimsy elegance above a row of
tottering tenements and stables.

“Dead sure?” he repeated.

“Yes,” said Granice, discouraged. “And even if I hadn’t been, I know the
garage was just opposite Leffler’s over there.” He pointed across the
street to a tumble-down stable with a blotched sign on which the words
“Livery and Boarding” were still faintly discernible.

The young man dashed across to the opposite pavement. “Well, that’s
something--may get a clue there. Leffler’s--same name there, anyhow. You
remember that name?”

“Yes--distinctly.”

Granice had felt a return of confidence since he had enlisted the
interest of the _Explorer’s_ “smartest” reporter. If there were moments
when he hardly believed his own story, there were others when it
seemed impossible that every one should not believe it; and young Peter
McCarren, peering, listening, questioning, jotting down notes, inspired
him with an exquisite sense of security. McCarren had fastened on the
case at once, “like a leech,” as he phrased it--jumped at it, thrilled
to it, and settled down to “draw the last drop of fact from it, and
had not let go till he had.” No one else had treated Granice in that
way--even Allonby’s detective had not taken a single note. And though
a week had elapsed since the visit of that authorized official,
nothing had been heard from the District Attorney’s office: Allonby had
apparently dropped the matter again. But McCarren wasn’t going to drop
it--not he! He positively hung on Granice’s footsteps. They had spent
the greater part of the previous day together, and now they were off
again, running down clues.

But at Leffler’s they got none, after all. Leffler’s was no longer
a stable. It was condemned to demolition, and in the respite between
sentence and execution it had become a vague place of storage, a
hospital for broken-down carriages and carts, presided over by a
blear-eyed old woman who knew nothing of Flood’s garage across
the way--did not even remember what had stood there before the new
flat-house began to rise.

“Well--we may run Leffler down somewhere; I’ve seen harder jobs done,”
 said McCarren, cheerfully noting down the name.

As they walked back toward Sixth Avenue he added, in a less sanguine
tone: “I’d undertake now to put the thing through if you could only put
me on the track of that cyanide.”

Granice’s heart sank. Yes--there was the weak spot; he had felt it from
the first! But he still hoped to convince McCarren that his case was
strong enough without it; and he urged the reporter to come back to his
rooms and sum up the facts with him again.

“Sorry, Mr. Granice, but I’m due at the office now. Besides, it’d be
no use till I get some fresh stuff to work on. Suppose I call you up
tomorrow or next day?”

He plunged into a trolley and left Granice gazing desolately after him.

Two days later he reappeared at the apartment, a shade less jaunty in
demeanor.

“Well, Mr. Granice, the stars in their courses are against you, as the
bard says. Can’t get a trace of Flood, or of Leffler either. And you say
you bought the motor through Flood, and sold it through him, too?”

“Yes,” said Granice wearily.

“Who bought it, do you know?”

Granice wrinkled his brows. “Why, Flood--yes, Flood himself. I sold it
back to him three months later.”

“Flood? The devil! And I’ve ransacked the town for Flood. That kind of
business disappears as if the earth had swallowed it.”

Granice, discouraged, kept silence.

“That brings us back to the poison,” McCarren continued, his note-book
out. “Just go over that again, will you?”

And Granice went over it again. It had all been so simple at the
time--and he had been so clever in covering up his traces! As soon as he
decided on poison he looked about for an acquaintance who manufactured
chemicals; and there was Jim Dawes, a Harvard classmate, in the dyeing
business--just the man. But at the last moment it occurred to him that
suspicion might turn toward so obvious an opportunity, and he decided
on a more tortuous course. Another friend, Carrick Venn, a student of
medicine whom irremediable ill-health had kept from the practice of
his profession, amused his leisure with experiments in physics, for the
exercise of which he had set up a simple laboratory. Granice had the
habit of dropping in to smoke a cigar with him on Sunday afternoons, and
the friends generally sat in Venn’s work-shop, at the back of the old
family house in Stuyvesant Square. Off this work-shop was the cupboard
of supplies, with its row of deadly bottles. Carrick Venn was an
original, a man of restless curious tastes, and his place, on a Sunday,
was often full of visitors: a cheerful crowd of journalists, scribblers,
painters, experimenters in divers forms of expression. Coming and going
among so many, it was easy enough to pass unperceived; and one afternoon
Granice, arriving before Venn had returned home, found himself alone in
the work-shop, and quickly slipping into the cupboard, transferred the
drug to his pocket.

But that had happened ten years ago; and Venn, poor fellow, was long
since dead of his dragging ailment. His old father was dead, too, the
house in Stuyvesant Square had been turned into a boarding-house, and
the shifting life of New York had passed its rapid sponge over every
trace of their obscure little history. Even the optimistic McCarren
seemed to acknowledge the hopelessness of seeking for proof in that
direction.

“And there’s the third door slammed in our faces.” He shut his
note-book, and throwing back his head, rested his bright inquisitive
eyes on Granice’s furrowed face.

“Look here, Mr. Granice--you see the weak spot, don’t you?”

The other made a despairing motion. “I see so many!”

“Yes: but the one that weakens all the others. Why the deuce do you want
this thing known? Why do you want to put your head into the noose?”

Granice looked at him hopelessly, trying to take the measure of his
quick light irreverent mind. No one so full of a cheerful animal life
would believe in the craving for death as a sufficient motive; and
Granice racked his brain for one more convincing. But suddenly he saw
the reporter’s face soften, and melt to a naive sentimentalism.

“Mr. Granice--has the memory of it always haunted you?”

Granice stared a moment, and then leapt at the opening. “That’s it--the
memory of it ... always ...”

McCarren nodded vehemently. “Dogged your steps, eh? Wouldn’t let you
sleep? The time came when you _had_ to make a clean breast of it?”

“I had to. Can’t you understand?”

The reporter struck his fist on the table. “God, sir! I don’t suppose
there’s a human being with a drop of warm blood in him that can’t
picture the deadly horrors of remorse--”

The Celtic imagination was aflame, and Granice mutely thanked him for
the word. What neither Ascham nor Denver would accept as a conceivable
motive the Irish reporter seized on as the most adequate; and, as he
said, once one could find a convincing motive, the difficulties of the
case became so many incentives to effort.

“Remorse--_remorse_,” he repeated, rolling the word under his tongue
with an accent that was a clue to the psychology of the popular drama;
and Granice, perversely, said to himself: “If I could only have struck
that note I should have been running in six theatres at once.”

He saw that from that moment McCarren’s professional zeal would be
fanned by emotional curiosity; and he profited by the fact to propose
that they should dine together, and go on afterward to some music-hall
or theatre. It was becoming necessary to Granice to feel himself an
object of pre-occupation, to find himself in another mind. He took a
kind of gray penumbral pleasure in riveting McCarren’s attention on his
case; and to feign the grimaces of moral anguish became a passionately
engrossing game. He had not entered a theatre for months; but he sat out
the meaningless performance in rigid tolerance, sustained by the sense
of the reporter’s observation.

Between the acts, McCarren amused him with anecdotes about the audience:
he knew every one by sight, and could lift the curtain from every
physiognomy. Granice listened indulgently. He had lost all interest in
his kind, but he knew that he was himself the real centre of McCarren’s
attention, and that every word the latter spoke had an indirect bearing
on his own problem.

“See that fellow over there--the little dried-up man in the third
row, pulling his moustache? _His_ memoirs would be worth publishing,”
 McCarren said suddenly in the last _entr’acte_.

Granice, following his glance, recognized the detective from Allonby’s
office. For a moment he had the thrilling sense that he was being
shadowed.

“Caesar, if _he_ could talk--!” McCarren continued. “Know who he is, of
course? Dr. John B. Stell, the biggest alienist in the country--”

Granice, with a start, bent again between the heads in front of him.
“_That_ man--the fourth from the aisle? You’re mistaken. That’s not Dr.
Stell.”

McCarren laughed. “Well, I guess I’ve been in court enough to know Stell
when I see him. He testifies in nearly all the big cases where they
plead insanity.”

A cold shiver ran down Granice’s spine, but he repeated obstinately:
“That’s not Dr. Stell.”

“Not Stell? Why, man, I _know_ him. Look--here he comes. If it isn’t
Stell, he won’t speak to me.”

The little dried-up man was moving slowly up the aisle. As he neared
McCarren he made a slight gesture of recognition.

“How’do, Doctor Stell? Pretty slim show, ain’t it?” the reporter
cheerfully flung out at him. And Mr. J. B. Hewson, with a nod of
amicable assent, passed on.

Granice sat benumbed. He knew he had not been mistaken--the man who
had just passed was the same man whom Allonby had sent to see him:
a physician disguised as a detective. Allonby, then, had thought him
insane, like the others--had regarded his confession as the maundering
of a maniac. The discovery froze Granice with horror--he seemed to see
the mad-house gaping for him.

“Isn’t there a man a good deal like him--a detective named J. B.
Hewson?”

But he knew in advance what McCarren’s answer would be. “Hewson? J.
B. Hewson? Never heard of him. But that was J. B. Stell fast enough--I
guess he can be trusted to know himself, and you saw he answered to his
name.”



VI


SOME days passed before Granice could obtain a word with the District
Attorney: he began to think that Allonby avoided him.

But when they were face to face Allonby’s jovial countenance showed
no sign of embarrassment. He waved his visitor to a chair, and leaned
across his desk with the encouraging smile of a consulting physician.

Granice broke out at once: “That detective you sent me the other day--”

Allonby raised a deprecating hand.

“--I know: it was Stell the alienist. Why did you do that, Allonby?”

The other’s face did not lose its composure. “Because I looked up your
story first--and there’s nothing in it.”

“Nothing in it?” Granice furiously interposed.

“Absolutely nothing. If there is, why the deuce don’t you bring me
proofs? I know you’ve been talking to Peter Ascham, and to Denver, and
to that little ferret McCarren of the _Explorer_. Have any of them been
able to make out a case for you? No. Well, what am I to do?”

Granice’s lips began to tremble. “Why did you play me that trick?”

“About Stell? I had to, my dear fellow: it’s part of my business. Stell
_is_ a detective, if you come to that--every doctor is.”

The trembling of Granice’s lips increased, communicating itself in a
long quiver to his facial muscles. He forced a laugh through his dry
throat. “Well--and what did he detect?”

“In you? Oh, he thinks it’s overwork--overwork and too much smoking. If
you look in on him some day at his office he’ll show you the record of
hundreds of cases like yours, and advise you what treatment to follow.
It’s one of the commonest forms of hallucination. Have a cigar, all the
same.”

“But, Allonby, I killed that man!”

The District Attorney’s large hand, outstretched on his desk, had an
almost imperceptible gesture, and a moment later, as if an answer to the
call of an electric bell, a clerk looked in from the outer office.

“Sorry, my dear fellow--lot of people waiting. Drop in on Stell some
morning,” Allonby said, shaking hands.

McCarren had to own himself beaten: there was absolutely no flaw in the
alibi. And since his duty to his journal obviously forbade his wasting
time on insoluble mysteries, he ceased to frequent Granice, who dropped
back into a deeper isolation. For a day or two after his visit to
Allonby he continued to live in dread of Dr. Stell. Why might not
Allonby have deceived him as to the alienist’s diagnosis? What if he
were really being shadowed, not by a police agent but by a mad-doctor?
To have the truth out, he suddenly determined to call on Dr. Stell.

The physician received him kindly, and reverted without embarrassment
to the conditions of their previous meeting. “We have to do that
occasionally, Mr. Granice; it’s one of our methods. And you had given
Allonby a fright.”

Granice was silent. He would have liked to reaffirm his guilt, to
produce the fresh arguments which had occurred to him since his last
talk with the physician; but he feared his eagerness might be taken
for a symptom of derangement, and he affected to smile away Dr. Stell’s
allusion.

“You think, then, it’s a case of brain-fag--nothing more?”

“Nothing more. And I should advise you to knock off tobacco. You smoke a
good deal, don’t you?”

He developed his treatment, recommending massage, gymnastics, travel, or
any form of diversion that did not--that in short--

Granice interrupted him impatiently. “Oh, I loathe all that--and I’m
sick of travelling.”

“H’m. Then some larger interest--politics, reform, philanthropy?
Something to take you out of yourself.”

“Yes. I understand,” said Granice wearily.

“Above all, don’t lose heart. I see hundreds of cases like yours,” the
doctor added cheerfully from the threshold.

On the doorstep Granice stood still and laughed. Hundreds of cases like
his--the case of a man who had committed a murder, who confessed his
guilt, and whom no one would believe! Why, there had never been a case
like it in the world. What a good figure Stell would have made in a
play: the great alienist who couldn’t read a man’s mind any better than
that!

Granice saw huge comic opportunities in the type.

But as he walked away, his fears dispelled, the sense of listlessness
returned on him. For the first time since his avowal to Peter Ascham
he found himself without an occupation, and understood that he had been
carried through the past weeks only by the necessity of constant action.
Now his life had once more become a stagnant backwater, and as he stood
on the street corner watching the tides of traffic sweep by, he asked
himself despairingly how much longer he could endure to float about in
the sluggish circle of his consciousness.

The thought of self-destruction recurred to him; but again his flesh
recoiled. He yearned for death from other hands, but he could never take
it from his own. And, aside from his insuperable physical reluctance,
another motive restrained him. He was possessed by the dogged desire
to establish the truth of his story. He refused to be swept aside as
an irresponsible dreamer--even if he had to kill himself in the end,
he would not do so before proving to society that he had deserved death
from it.

He began to write long letters to the papers; but after the first had
been published and commented on, public curiosity was quelled by a
brief statement from the District Attorney’s office, and the rest of his
communications remained unprinted. Ascham came to see him, and begged
him to travel. Robert Denver dropped in, and tried to joke him out of
his delusion; till Granice, mistrustful of their motives, began to dread
the reappearance of Dr. Stell, and set a guard on his lips. But the
words he kept back engendered others and still others in his brain.
His inner self became a humming factory of arguments, and he spent long
hours reciting and writing down elaborate statements of his crime,
which he constantly retouched and developed. Then gradually his activity
languished under the lack of an audience, the sense of being buried
beneath deepening drifts of indifference. In a passion of resentment he
swore that he would prove himself a murderer, even if he had to commit
another crime to do it; and for a sleepless night or two the thought
flamed red on his darkness. But daylight dispelled it. The determining
impulse was lacking and he hated too promiscuously to choose his
victim... So he was thrown back on the unavailing struggle to impose
the truth of his story. As fast as one channel closed on him he tried to
pierce another through the sliding sands of incredulity. But every issue
seemed blocked, and the whole human race leagued together to cheat one
man of the right to die.

Thus viewed, the situation became so monstrous that he lost his last
shred of self-restraint in contemplating it. What if he were really
the victim of some mocking experiment, the centre of a ring of
holiday-makers jeering at a poor creature in its blind dashes against
the solid walls of consciousness? But, no--men were not so uniformly
cruel: there were flaws in the close surface of their indifference,
cracks of weakness and pity here and there...

Granice began to think that his mistake lay in having appealed to
persons more or less familiar with his past, and to whom the visible
conformities of his life seemed a final disproof of its one fierce
secret deviation. The general tendency was to take for the whole of life
the slit seen between the blinders of habit: and in his walk down that
narrow vista Granice cut a correct enough figure. To a vision free to
follow his whole orbit his story would be more intelligible: it would
be easier to convince a chance idler in the street than the trained
intelligence hampered by a sense of his antecedents. This idea shot up
in him with the tropic luxuriance of each new seed of thought, and he
began to walk the streets, and to frequent out-of-the-way chop-houses
and bars in his search for the impartial stranger to whom he should
disclose himself.

At first every face looked encouragement; but at the crucial moment he
always held back. So much was at stake, and it was so essential that
his first choice should be decisive. He dreaded stupidity, timidity,
intolerance. The imaginative eye, the furrowed brow, were what he
sought. He must reveal himself only to a heart versed in the tortuous
motions of the human will; and he began to hate the dull benevolence
of the average face. Once or twice, obscurely, allusively, he made a
beginning--once sitting down at a man’s side in a basement chop-house,
another day approaching a lounger on an east-side wharf. But in both
cases the premonition of failure checked him on the brink of avowal. His
dread of being taken for a man in the clutch of a fixed idea gave him an
unnatural keenness in reading the expression of his interlocutors, and
he had provided himself in advance with a series of verbal alternatives,
trap-doors of evasion from the first dart of ridicule or suspicion.

He passed the greater part of the day in the streets, coming home at
irregular hours, dreading the silence and orderliness of his apartment,
and the critical scrutiny of Flint. His real life was spent in a
world so remote from this familiar setting that he sometimes had the
mysterious sense of a living metempsychosis, a furtive passage from one
identity to another--yet the other as unescapably himself!

One humiliation he was spared: the desire to live never revived in
him. Not for a moment was he tempted to a shabby pact with existing
conditions. He wanted to die, wanted it with the fixed unwavering desire
which alone attains its end. And still the end eluded him! It would not
always, of course--he had full faith in the dark star of his destiny.
And he could prove it best by repeating his story, persistently and
indefatigably, pouring it into indifferent ears, hammering it into dull
brains, till at last it kindled a spark, and some one of the careless
millions paused, listened, believed...

It was a mild March day, and he had been loitering on the west-side
docks, looking at faces. He was becoming an expert in physiognomies: his
eagerness no longer made rash darts and awkward recoils. He knew now the
face he needed, as clearly as if it had come to him in a vision; and
not till he found it would he speak. As he walked eastward through the
shabby reeking streets he had a premonition that he should find it that
morning. Perhaps it was the promise of spring in the air--certainly he
felt calmer than for many days...

He turned into Washington Square, struck across it obliquely, and walked
up University Place. Its heterogeneous passers always allured him--they
were less hurried than in Broadway, less enclosed and classified than in
Fifth Avenue. He walked slowly, watching for his face.

At Union Square he felt a sudden relapse into discouragement, like a
votary who has watched too long for a sign from the altar. Perhaps,
after all, he should never find his face... The air was languid, and
he felt tired. He walked between the bald grass-plots and the twisted
trees, making for an empty seat. Presently he passed a bench on which a
girl sat alone, and something as definite as the twitch of a cord made
him stop before her. He had never dreamed of telling his story to a
girl, had hardly looked at the women’s faces as they passed. His case
was man’s work: how could a woman help him? But this girl’s face was
extraordinary--quiet and wide as a clear evening sky. It suggested a
hundred images of space, distance, mystery, like ships he had seen, as
a boy, quietly berthed by a familiar wharf, but with the breath of far
seas and strange harbours in their shrouds... Certainly this girl would
understand. He went up to her quietly, lifting his hat, observing the
forms--wishing her to see at once that he was “a gentleman.”

“I am a stranger to you,” he began, sitting down beside her, “but your
face is so extremely intelligent that I feel... I feel it is the face
I’ve waited for ... looked for everywhere; and I want to tell you--”

The girl’s eyes widened: she rose to her feet. She was escaping him!

In his dismay he ran a few steps after her, and caught her roughly by
the arm.

“Here--wait--listen! Oh, don’t scream, you fool!” he shouted out.

He felt a hand on his own arm; turned and confronted a policeman.
Instantly he understood that he was being arrested, and something hard
within him was loosened and ran to tears.

“Ah, you know--you _know_ I’m guilty!”

He was conscious that a crowd was forming, and that the girl’s
frightened face had disappeared. But what did he care about her face? It
was the policeman who had really understood him. He turned and followed,
the crowd at his heels...



VII


IN the charming place in which he found himself there were so many
sympathetic faces that he felt more than ever convinced of the certainty
of making himself heard.

It was a bad blow, at first, to find that he had not been arrested
for murder; but Ascham, who had come to him at once, explained that he
needed rest, and the time to “review” his statements; it appeared that
reiteration had made them a little confused and contradictory. To
this end he had willingly acquiesced in his removal to a large quiet
establishment, with an open space and trees about it, where he had
found a number of intelligent companions, some, like himself, engaged
in preparing or reviewing statements of their cases, and others ready to
lend an interested ear to his own recital.

For a time he was content to let himself go on the tranquil current of
this existence; but although his auditors gave him for the most part
an encouraging attention, which, in some, went the length of really
brilliant and helpful suggestion, he gradually felt a recurrence of his
old doubts. Either his hearers were not sincere, or else they had
less power to aid him than they boasted. His interminable conferences
resulted in nothing, and as the benefit of the long rest made itself
felt, it produced an increased mental lucidity which rendered inaction
more and more unbearable. At length he discovered that on certain days
visitors from the outer world were admitted to his retreat; and he wrote
out long and logically constructed relations of his crime, and furtively
slipped them into the hands of these messengers of hope.

This occupation gave him a fresh lease of patience, and he now lived
only to watch for the visitors’ days, and scan the faces that swept by
him like stars seen and lost in the rifts of a hurrying sky.

Mostly, these faces were strange and less intelligent than those of his
companions. But they represented his last means of access to the world,
a kind of subterranean channel on which he could set his “statements”
 afloat, like paper boats which the mysterious current might sweep out
into the open seas of life.

One day, however, his attention was arrested by a familiar contour,
a pair of bright prominent eyes, and a chin insufficiently shaved. He
sprang up and stood in the path of Peter McCarren.

The journalist looked at him doubtfully, then held out his hand with a
startled deprecating, “_Why--?_”

“You didn’t know me? I’m so changed?” Granice faltered, feeling the
rebound of the other’s wonder.

“Why, no; but you’re looking quieter--smoothed out,” McCarren smiled.

“Yes: that’s what I’m here for--to rest. And I’ve taken the opportunity
to write out a clearer statement--”

Granice’s hand shook so that he could hardly draw the folded paper from
his pocket. As he did so he noticed that the reporter was accompanied by
a tall man with grave compassionate eyes. It came to Granice in a wild
thrill of conviction that this was the face he had waited for...

“Perhaps your friend--he _is_ your friend?--would glance over it--or
I could put the case in a few words if you have time?” Granice’s voice
shook like his hand. If this chance escaped him he felt that his last
hope was gone. McCarren and the stranger looked at each other, and the
former glanced at his watch.

“I’m sorry we can’t stay and talk it over now, Mr. Granice; but my
friend has an engagement, and we’re rather pressed--”

Granice continued to proffer the paper. “I’m sorry--I think I could have
explained. But you’ll take this, at any rate?”

The stranger looked at him gently. “Certainly--I’ll take it.” He had his
hand out. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” Granice echoed.

He stood watching the two men move away from him through the long light
hall; and as he watched them a tear ran down his face. But as soon as
they were out of sight he turned and walked hastily toward his room,
beginning to hope again, already planning a new statement.

Outside the building the two men stood still, and the journalist’s
companion looked up curiously at the long monotonous rows of barred
windows.

“So that was Granice?”

“Yes--that was Granice, poor devil,” said McCarren.

“Strange case! I suppose there’s never been one just like it? He’s still
absolutely convinced that he committed that murder?”

“Absolutely. Yes.”

The stranger reflected. “And there was no conceivable ground for the
idea? No one could make out how it started? A quiet conventional sort of
fellow like that--where do you suppose he got such a delusion? Did you
ever get the least clue to it?”

McCarren stood still, his hands in his pockets, his head cocked up in
contemplation of the barred windows. Then he turned his bright hard gaze
on his companion.

“That was the queer part of it. I’ve never spoken of it--but I _did_ get
a clue.”

“By Jove! That’s interesting. What was it?”

McCarren formed his red lips into a whistle. “Why--that it wasn’t a
delusion.”

He produced his effect--the other turned on him with a pallid stare.

“He murdered the man all right. I tumbled on the truth by the merest
accident, when I’d pretty nearly chucked the whole job.”

“He murdered him--murdered his cousin?”

“Sure as you live. Only don’t split on me. It’s about the queerest
business I ever ran into... _Do about it?_ Why, what was I to do? I
couldn’t hang the poor devil, could I? Lord, but I was glad when they
collared him, and had him stowed away safe in there!”

The tall man listened with a grave face, grasping Granice’s statement in
his hand.

“Here--take this; it makes me sick,” he said abruptly, thrusting the
paper at the reporter; and the two men turned and walked in silence to
the gates.




HIS FATHER’S SON

I


AFTER his wife’s death Mason Grew took the momentous step of selling out
his business and moving from Wingfield, Connecticut, to Brooklyn.

For years he had secretly nursed the hope of such a change, but had
never dared to suggest it to Mrs. Grew, a woman of immutable habits.
Mr. Grew himself was attached to Wingfield, where he had grown up,
prospered, and become what the local press described as “prominent.”
 He was attached to his ugly brick house with sandstone trimmings and
a cast-iron area-railing neatly sanded to match; to the similar row of
houses across the street, the “trolley” wires forming a kind of aerial
pathway between, and the sprawling vista closed by the steeple of the
church which he and his wife had always attended, and where their only
child had been baptized.

It was hard to snap all these threads of association, visual and
sentimental; yet still harder, now that he was alone, to live so far
from his boy. Ronald Grew was practising law in New York, and there
was no more chance of returning to live at Wingfield than of a river’s
flowing inland from the sea. Therefore to be near him his father must
move; and it was characteristic of Mr. Grew, and of the situation
generally, that the translation, when it took place, was to Brooklyn,
and not to New York.

“Why you bury yourself in that hole I can’t think,” had been Ronald’s
comment; and Mr. Grew simply replied that rents were lower in Brooklyn,
and that he had heard of a house that would suit him. In reality he had
said to himself--being the only recipient of his own confidences--that
if he went to New York he might be on the boy’s mind; whereas, if
he lived in Brooklyn, Ronald would always have a good excuse for not
popping over to see him every other day. The sociological isolation of
Brooklyn, combined with its geographical nearness, presented in fact the
precise conditions for Mr. Grew’s case. He wanted to be near enough to
New York to go there often, to feel under his feet the same pavement
that Ronald trod, to sit now and then in the same theatres, and find
on his breakfast-table the journals which, with increasing frequency,
inserted Ronald’s name in the sacred bounds of the society column. It
had always been a trial to Mr. Grew to have to wait twenty-four hours to
read that “among those present was Mr. Ronald Grew.” Now he had it
with his coffee, and left it on the breakfast-table to the perusal of a
“hired girl” cosmopolitan enough to do it justice. In such ways Brooklyn
attested the advantages of its propinquity to New York, while remaining,
as regards Ronald’s duty to his father, as remote and inaccessible as
Wingfield.

It was not that Ronald shirked his filial obligations, but rather
because of his heavy sense of them, that Mr. Grew so persistently sought
to minimize and lighten them. It was he who insisted, to Ronald, on the
immense difficulty of getting from New York to Brooklyn.

“Any way you look at it, it makes a big hole in the day; and there’s not
much use in the ragged rim left. You say you’re dining out next Sunday?
Then I forbid you to come over here for lunch. Do you understand me,
sir? You disobey at the risk of your father’s malediction! Where did you
say you were dining? With the Waltham Bankshires again? Why, that’s
the second time in three weeks, ain’t it? Big blow-out, I suppose? Gold
plate and orchids--opera singers in afterward? Well, you’d be in a nice
box if there was a fog on the river, and you got hung up half-way over.
That’d be a handsome return for the attention Mrs. Bankshire has shown
you--singling out a whipper-snapper like you twice in three weeks!
(What’s the daughter’s name--Daisy?) No, _sir_--don’t you come fooling
round here next Sunday, or I’ll set the dogs on you. And you wouldn’t
find me in anyhow, come to think of it. I’m lunching out myself, as it
happens--yes sir, _lunching out_. Is there anything especially comic in
my lunching out? I don’t often do it, you say? Well, that’s no reason
why I never should. Who with? Why, with--with old Dr. Bleaker: Dr.
Eliphalet Bleaker. No, you wouldn’t know about him--he’s only an old
friend of your mother’s and mine.”

Gradually Ronald’s insistence became less difficult to overcome. With
his customary sweetness and tact (as Mr. Grew put it) he began to
“take the hint,” to give in to “the old gentleman’s” growing desire for
solitude.

“I’m set in my ways, Ronny, that’s about the size of it; I like to
go tick-ticking along like a clock. I always did. And when you come
bouncing in I never feel sure there’s enough for dinner--or that I
haven’t sent Maria out for the evening. And I don’t want the neighbors
to see me opening my own door to my son. That’s the kind of cringing
snob I am. Don’t give me away, will you? I want ‘em to think I keep four
or five powdered flunkeys in the hall day and night--same as the lobby
of one of those Fifth Avenue hotels. And if you pop over when you’re not
expected, how am I going to keep up the bluff?”

Ronald yielded after the proper amount of resistance--his intuitive
sense, in every social transaction, of the proper amount of force to be
expended, was one of the qualities his father most admired in him. Mr.
Grew’s perceptions in this line were probably more acute than his son
suspected. The souls of short thick-set men, with chubby features,
mutton-chop whiskers, and pale eyes peering between folds of fat like
almond kernels in half-split shells--souls thus encased do not reveal
themselves to the casual scrutiny as delicate emotional instruments.
But in spite of the dense disguise in which he walked Mr. Grew vibrated
exquisitely in response to every imaginative appeal; and his son Ronald
was perpetually stimulating and feeding his imagination.

Ronald in fact constituted his father’s one escape from the impenetrable
element of mediocrity which had always hemmed him in. To a man so
enamoured of beauty, and so little qualified to add to its sum total,
it was a wonderful privilege to have bestowed on the world such a being.
Ronald’s resemblance to Mr. Grew’s early conception of what he himself
would have liked to look might have put new life into the discredited
theory of pre-natal influences. At any rate, if the young man owed his
beauty, his distinction and his winning manner to the dreams of one of
his parents, it was certainly to those of Mr. Grew, who, while outwardly
devoting his life to the manufacture and dissemination of Grew’s Secure
Suspender Buckle, moved in an enchanted inward world peopled with all
the figures of romance. In this high company Mr. Grew cut as brilliant
a figure as any of its noble phantoms; and to see his vision of himself
suddenly projected on the outer world in the shape of a brilliant
popular conquering son, seemed, in retrospect, to give to that image a
belated objective reality. There were even moments when, forgetting his
physiognomy, Mr. Grew said to himself that if he’d had “half a chance”
 he might have done as well as Ronald; but this only fortified his
resolve that Ronald should do infinitely better.

Ronald’s ability to do well almost equalled his gift of looking well.
Mr. Grew constantly affirmed to himself that the boy was “not a genius”;
but, barring this slight deficiency, he was almost everything that
a parent could wish. Even at Harvard he had managed to be several
desirable things at once--writing poetry in the college magazine,
playing delightfully “by ear,” acquitting himself honorably in his
studies, and yet holding his own in the fashionable sporting set that
formed, as it were, the gateway of the temple of Society. Mr. Grew’s
idealism did not preclude the frank desire that his son should pass
through that gateway; but the wish was not prompted by material
considerations. It was Mr. Grew’s notion that, in the rough and hurrying
current of a new civilization, the little pools of leisure and enjoyment
must nurture delicate growths, material graces as well as moral
refinements, likely to be uprooted and swept away by the rush of the
main torrent. He based his theory on the fact that he had liked the
few “society” people he had met--had found their manners simpler, their
voices more agreeable, their views more consonant with his own, than
those of the leading citizens of Wingfield. But then he had met very
few.

Ronald’s sympathies needed no urging in the same direction. He took
naturally, dauntlessly, to all the high and exceptional things about
which his father’s imagination had so long sheepishly and ineffectually
hovered--from the start he _was_ what Mr. Grew had dreamed of being.
And so precise, so detailed, was Mr. Grew’s vision of his own imaginary
career, that as Ronald grew up, and began to travel in a widening orbit,
his father had an almost uncanny sense of the extent to which that
career was enacting itself before him. At Harvard, Ronald had done
exactly what the hypothetical Mason Grew would have done, had not his
actual self, at the same age, been working his way up in old Slagden’s
button factory--the institution which was later to acquire fame, and
even notoriety, as the birthplace of Grew’s Secure Suspender Buckle.
Afterward, at a period when the actual Grew had passed from the factory
to the bookkeeper’s desk, his invisible double had been reading law at
Columbia--precisely again what Ronald did! But it was when the young man
left the paths laid out for him by the parental hand, and cast himself
boldly on the world, that his adventures began to bear the most
astonishing resemblance to those of the unrealized Mason Grew. It was in
New York that the scene of this hypothetical being’s first exploits had
always been laid; and it was in New York that Ronald was to achieve
his first triumph. There was nothing small or timid about Mr. Grew’s
imagination; it had never stopped at anything between Wingfield and
the metropolis. And the real Ronald had the same cosmic vision as his
parent. He brushed aside with a contemptuous laugh his mother’s tearful
entreaty that he should stay at Wingfield and continue the dynasty of
the Grew Suspender Buckle. Mr. Grew knew that in reality Ronald winced
at the Buckle, loathed it, blushed for his connection with it. Yet it
was the Buckle that had seen him through Groton, Harvard and the Law
School, and had permitted him to enter the office of a distinguished
corporation lawyer, instead of being enslaved to some sordid business
with quick returns. The Buckle had been Ronald’s fairy godmother--yet
his father did not blame him for abhorring and disowning it. Mr. Grew
himself often bitterly regretted having bestowed his own name on the
instrument of his material success, though, at the time, his doing so
had been the natural expression of his romanticism. When he invented
the Buckle, and took out his patent, he and his wife both felt that to
bestow their name on it was like naming a battle-ship or a peak of the
Andes.

Mrs. Grew had never learned to know better; but Mr. Grew had discovered
his error before Ronald was out of school. He read it first in a black
eye of his boy’s. Ronald’s symmetry had been marred by the insolent fist
of a fourth former whom he had chastised for alluding to his father as
“Old Buckles;” and when Mr. Grew heard the epithet he understood in a
flash that the Buckle was a thing to blush for. It was too late then
to dissociate his name from it, or to efface from the hoardings of the
entire continent the picture of two gentlemen, one contorting himself in
the abject effort to repair a broken brace, while the careless ease
of the other’s attitude proclaimed his trust in the Secure Suspender
Buckle. These records were indelible, but Ronald could at least be
spared all direct connection with them; and from that day Mr. Grew
resolved that the boy should not return to Wingfield.

“You’ll see,” he had said to Mrs. Grew, “he’ll take right hold in New
York. Ronald’s got my knack for taking hold,” he added, throwing out his
chest.

“But the way you took hold was in business,” objected Mrs. Grew, who was
large and literal.

Mr. Grew’s chest collapsed, and he became suddenly conscious of his
comic face in its rim of sandy whiskers. “That’s not the only way,” he
said, with a touch of wistfulness which escaped his wife’s analysis.

“Well, of course you could have written beautifully,” she rejoined with
admiring eyes.

“_ Written?_ Me!” Mr. Grew became sardonic.

“Why, those letters--weren’t _they_ beautiful, I’d like to know?”

The couple exchanged a glance, innocently allusive and amused on the
wife’s part, and charged with a sudden tragic significance on the
husband’s.

“Well, I’ve got to be going along to the office now,” he merely said,
dragging himself out of his rocking-chair.

This had happened while Ronald was still at school; and now Mrs. Grew
slept in the Wingfield cemetery, under a life-size theological virtue of
her own choosing, and Mr. Grew’s prognostications as to Ronald’s ability
to “take right hold” in New York were being more and more brilliantly
fulfilled.



II


RONALD obeyed his father’s injunction not to come to luncheon on the day
of the Bankshires’ dinner; but in the middle of the following week Mr.
Grew was surprised by a telegram from his son.

“Want to see you important matter. Expect me to-morrow afternoon.”

Mr. Grew received the telegram after breakfast. To peruse it he had
lifted his eye from a paragraph of the morning paper describing a
fancy-dress dinner which had taken place the night before at the
Hamilton Gliddens’ for the house-warming of their new Fifth Avenue
palace.

“Among the couples who afterward danced in the Poets’ Quadrille were
Miss Daisy Bankshire, looking more than usually lovely as Laura, and Mr.
Ronald Grew as the young Petrarch.”

Petrarch and Laura! Well--if _anything_ meant anything, Mr. Grew
supposed he knew what that meant. For weeks past he had noticed how
constantly the names of the young people appeared together in the
society notes he so insatiably devoured. Even the soulless reporter was
getting into the habit of coupling them in his lists. And this Laura and
Petrarch business was almost an announcement...

Mr. Grew dropped the telegram, wiped his eye-glasses, and re-read the
paragraph. “Miss Daisy Bankshire ... more than usually lovely...” Yes;
she _was_ lovely. He had often seen her photograph in the papers--seen
her represented in every conceivable attitude of the mundane game:
fondling her prize bull-dog, taking a fence on her thoroughbred, dancing
a _gavotte_, all patches and plumes, or fingering a guitar, all tulle
and lilies; and once he had caught a glimpse of her at the theatre.
Hearing that Ronald was going to a fashionable first-night with the
Bankshires, Mr. Grew had for once overcome his repugnance to following
his son’s movements, and had secured for himself, under the shadow of
the balcony, a stall whence he could observe the Bankshire box without
fear of detection. Ronald had never known of his father’s presence at
the play; and for three blessed hours Mr. Grew had watched his boy’s
handsome dark head bent above the dense fair hair and white averted
shoulder that were all he could catch of Miss Bankshire’s beauties.

He recalled the vision now; and with it came, as usual, its ghostly
double: the vision of his young self bending above such a white shoulder
and such shining hair. Needless to say that the real Mason Grew had
never found himself in so enviable a situation. The late Mrs. Grew had
no more resembled Miss Daisy Bankshire than he had looked like the happy
victorious Ronald. And the mystery was that from their dull faces,
their dull endearments, the miracle of Ronald should have sprung. It was
almost--fantastically--as if the boy had been a changeling, child of a
Latmian night, whom the divine companion of Mr. Grew’s early reveries
had secretly laid in the cradle of the Wingfield bedroom while Mr. And
Mrs. Grew slept the deep sleep of conjugal indifference.

The young Mason Grew had not at first accepted this astral episode as
the complete cancelling of his claims on romance. He too had grasped at
the high-hung glory; and, with his fatal tendency to reach too far when
he reached at all, had singled out the prettiest girl in Wingfield.
When he recalled his stammered confession of love his face still tingled
under her cool bright stare. The wonder of his audacity had struck her
dumb; and when she recovered her voice it was to fling a taunt at him.

“Don’t be too discouraged, you know--have you ever thought of trying
Addie Wicks?”

All Wingfield would have understood the gibe: Addie Wicks was the
dullest girl in town. And a year later he had married Addie Wicks...

He looked up from the perusal of Ronald’s telegram with this memory in
his mind. Now at last his dream was coming true! His boy would taste
of the joys that had mocked his thwarted youth and his dull gray
middle-age. And it was fitting that they should be realized in Ronald’s
destiny. Ronald was made to take happiness boldly by the hand and lead
it home like a bridegroom. He had the carriage, the confidence, the high
faith in his fortune, that compel the wilful stars. And, thanks to
the Buckle, he would have the exceptional setting, the background of
material elegance, that became his conquering person. Since Mr. Grew
had retired from business his investments had prospered, and he had been
saving up his income for just such a contingency. His own wants were
few: he had transferred the Wingfield furniture to Brooklyn, and his
sitting-room was a replica of that in which the long years of his
married life had been spent. Even the florid carpet on which Ronald’s
tottering footsteps had been taken was carefully matched when it
became too threadbare. And on the marble centre-table, with its
chenille-fringed cover and bunch of dyed pampas grass, lay the
illustrated Longfellow and the copy of Ingersoll’s lectures which
represented literature to Mr. Grew when he had led home his bride. In
the light of Ronald’s romance, Mr. Grew found himself re-living, with
a strange tremor of mingled pain and tenderness, all the poor prosaic
incidents of his own personal history. Curiously enough, with this new
splendor on them they began to emit a small faint ray of their own. His
wife’s armchair, in its usual place by the fire, recalled her placid
unperceiving presence, seated opposite to him during the long drowsy
years; and he felt her kindness, her equanimity, where formerly he had
only ached at her obtuseness. And from the chair he glanced up at the
large discolored photograph on the wall above, with a brittle brown
wreath suspended on a corner of the frame. The photograph represented
a young man with a poetic necktie and untrammelled hair, leaning
negligently against a Gothic chair-back, a roll of music in his hand;
and beneath was scrawled a bar of Chopin, with the words: “_ Adieu,
Adele_.”

The portrait was that of the great pianist, Fortune Dolbrowski; and its
presence on the wall of Mr. Grew’s sitting-room commemorated the only
exquisite hour of his life save that of Ronald’s birth. It was some time
before the latter memorable event, a few months only after Mr. Grew’s
marriage, that he had taken his wife to New York to hear the great
Dolbrowski. Their evening had been magically beautiful, and even Addie,
roused from her habitual inexpressiveness, had quivered into a momentary
semblance of life. “I never--I never--” she gasped out helplessly when
they had regained their hotel bedroom, and sat staring back entranced
at the evening’s evocations. Her large immovable face was pink and
tremulous, and she sat with her hands on her knees, forgetting to roll
up her bonnet-strings and prepare her curl-papers.

“I’d like to _write_ him just how I felt--I wisht I knew how!” she burst
out suddenly in a final effervescence of emotion.

Her husband lifted his head and looked at her.

“Would you? I feel that way too,” he said with a sheepish laugh. And
they continued to stare at each other shyly through a transfiguring mist
of sound.

Mr. Grew recalled the scene as he gazed up at the pianist’s faded
photograph. “Well, I owe her that anyhow--poor Addie!” he said, with a
smile at the inconsequences of fate. With Ronald’s telegram in his hand
he was in a mood to count his mercies.



III


“A CLEAR twenty-five thousand a year: that’s what you can tell ‘em
with my compliments,” said Mr. Grew, glancing complacently across the
centre-table at his boy’s charming face.

It struck him that Ronald’s gift for looking his part in life had never
so romantically expressed itself. Other young men, at such a moment,
would have been red, damp, tight about the collar; but Ronald’s cheek
was only a shade paler, and the contrast made his dark eyes more
expressive.

“A clear twenty-five thousand; yes, sir--that’s what I always meant you
to have.”

Mr. Grew leaned back, his hands thrust carelessly in his pockets, as
though to divert attention from the agitation of his features. He had
often pictured himself rolling out that phrase to Ronald, and now that
it was actually on his lips he could not control their tremor.

Ronald listened in silence, lifting a nervous hand to his slight dark
moustache, as though he, too, wished to hide some involuntary betrayal
of emotion. At first Mr. Grew took his silence for an expression of
gratified surprise; but as it prolonged itself it became less easy to
interpret.

“I--see here, my boy; did you expect more? Isn’t it enough?” Mr. Grew
cleared his throat. “Do _they_ expect more?” he asked nervously. He was
hardly able to face the pain of inflicting a disappointment on Ronald
at the very moment when he had counted on putting the final touch to his
felicity.

Ronald moved uneasily in his chair and his eyes wandered upward to the
laurel-wreathed photograph of the pianist above his father’s head.

“_ Is_ it that, Ronald? Speak out, my boy. We’ll see, we’ll look
round--I’ll manage somehow.”

“No, no,” the young man interrupted, abruptly raising his hand as though
to silence his father.

Mr. Grew recovered his cheerfulness. “Well, what’s the matter than, if
_she’s_ willing?”

Ronald shifted his position again, and finally rose from his seat.

“Father--I--there’s something I’ve got to tell you. I can’t take your
money.”

Mr. Grew sat speechless a moment, staring blankly at his son; then he
emitted a puzzled laugh. “My money? What are you talking about? What’s
this about my money? Why, it ain’t _mine_, Ronny; it’s all yours--every
cent of it!” he cried.

The young man met his tender look with a gaze of tragic rejection.

“No, no, it’s not mine--not even in the sense you mean. Not in any
sense. Can’t you understand my feeling so?”

“Feeling so? I don’t know how you’re feeling. I don’t know what you’re
talking about. Are you too proud to touch any money you haven’t earned?
Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“No. It’s not that. You must know--”

Mr. Grew flushed to the rim of his bristling whiskers. “Know? Know
_what?_ Can’t you speak?”

Ronald hesitated, and the two men faced each other for a long strained
moment, during which Mr. Grew’s congested countenance grew gradually
pale again.

“What’s the meaning of this? Is it because you’ve done something ...
something you’re ashamed of ... ashamed to tell me?” he suddenly
gasped out; and walking around the table he laid his hand on his son’s
shoulder. “There’s nothing you can’t tell me, my boy.”

“It’s not that. Why do you make it so hard for me?” Ronald broke out
with passion. “You must have known this was sure to happen sooner or
later.”

“Happen? What was sure to hap--?” Mr. Grew’s question wavered on his lip
and passed into a tremulous laugh. “Is it something _I’ve_ done that you
don’t approve of? Is it--is it _the Buckle_ you’re ashamed of, Ronald
Grew?”

Ronald laughed too, impatiently. “The Buckle? No, I’m not ashamed of
the Buckle; not any more than you are,” he returned with a sudden
bright flush. “But I’m ashamed of all I owe to it--all I owe to
you--when--when--” He broke off and took a few distracted steps across
the room. “You might make this easier for me,” he protested, turning
back to his father.

“Make what easier? I know less and less what you’re driving at,” Mr.
Grew groaned.

Ronald’s walk had once more brought him beneath the photograph on the
wall. He lifted his head for a moment and looked at it; then he looked
again at Mr. Grew.

“Do you suppose I haven’t always known?”

“Known--?”

“Even before you gave me those letters--after my mother’s death--even
before that, I suspected. I don’t know how it began ... perhaps from
little things you let drop ... you and she ... and resemblances that I
couldn’t help seeing ... in myself ... How on earth could you suppose
I shouldn’t guess? I always thought you gave me the letters as a way of
telling me--”

Mr. Grew rose slowly from his chair. “The letters? Dolbrowski’s
letters?”

Ronald nodded with white lips. “You must remember giving them to me the
day after the funeral.”

Mr. Grew nodded back. “Of course. I wanted you to have everything your
mother valued.”

“Well--how could I help knowing after that?”

“Knowing _what?_” Mr. Grew stood staring helplessly at his son. Suddenly
his look caught at a clue that seemed to confront it with a deeper
bewilderment. “You thought--you thought those letters ... Dolbrowski’s
letters ... you thought they meant ...”

“Oh, it wasn’t only the letters. There were so many other signs. My love
of music--my--all my feelings about life ... and art... And when you
gave me the letters I thought you must mean me to know.”

Mr. Grew had grown quiet. His lips were firm, and his small eyes looked
out steadily from their creased lids.

“To know that you were Fortune Dolbrowski’s son?”

Ronald made a mute sign of assent.

“I see. And what did you mean to do?”

“I meant to wait till I could earn my living, and then repay you ...
as far as I can ever repay you... But now that there’s a chance of
my marrying ... and your generosity overwhelms me ... I’m obliged to
speak.”

“I see,” said Mr. Grew again. He let himself down into his chair,
looking steadily and not unkindly at the young man. “Sit down, Ronald.
Let’s talk.”

Ronald made a protesting movement. “Is anything to be gained by it?
You can’t change me--change what I feel. The reading of those letters
transformed my whole life--I was a boy till then: they made a man of me.
From that moment I understood myself.” He paused, and then looked up at
Mr. Grew’s face. “Don’t imagine I don’t appreciate your kindness--your
extraordinary generosity. But I can’t go through life in disguise. And I
want you to know that I have not won Daisy under false pretences--”

Mr. Grew started up with the first expletive Ronald had ever heard on
his lips.

“You damned young fool, you, you haven’t _told_ her--?”

Ronald raised his head quickly. “Oh, you don’t know her, sir! She thinks
no worse of me for knowing my secret. She is above and beyond all
such conventional prejudices. She’s _proud_ of my parentage--” he
straightened his slim young shoulders--“as I’m proud of it ... yes, sir,
proud of it...”

Mr. Grew sank back into his seat with a dry laugh. “Well, you ought to
be. You come of good stock. And you’re father’s son, every inch of you!”
 He laughed again, as though the humor of the situation grew on him with
its closer contemplation.

“Yes, I’ve always felt that,” Ronald murmured, flushing.

“Your father’s son, and no mistake.” Mr. Grew leaned forward. “You’re
the son of as big a fool as yourself. And here he sits, Ronald Grew.”

The young man’s flush deepened to crimson; but Mr. Grew checked his
reply with a decisive gesture. “Here he sits, with all your young
nonsense still alive in him. Don’t you see the likeness? If you don’t,
I’ll tell you the story of those letters.”

Ronald stared. “What do you mean? Don’t they tell their own story?”

“I supposed they did when I gave them to you; but you’ve given it a
twist that needs straightening out.” Mr. Grew squared his elbows on the
table, and looked at the young man across the gift-books and the dyed
pampas grass. “I wrote all the letters that Dolbrowski answered.”

Ronald gave back his look in frowning perplexity. “You wrote them? I
don’t understand. His letters are all addressed to my mother.”

“Yes. And he thought he was corresponding with her.”

“But my mother--what did she think?”

Mr. Grew hesitated, puckering his thick lids. “Well, I guess she kinder
thought it was a joke. Your mother didn’t think about things much.”

Ronald continued to bend a puzzled frown on the question. “I don’t
understand,” he reiterated.

Mr. Grew cleared his throat with a nervous laugh. “Well, I don’t know
as you ever will--_quite_. But this is the way it came about. I had a
toughish time of it when I was young. Oh, I don’t mean so much the fight
I had to put up to make my way--there was always plenty of fight in
me. But inside of myself it was kinder lonesome. And the outside didn’t
attract callers.” He laughed again, with an apologetic gesture toward
his broad blinking face. “When I went round with the other young fellows
I was always the forlorn hope--the one that had to eat the drumsticks
and dance with the left-overs. As sure as there was a blighter at a
picnic I had to swing her, and feed her, and drive her home. And all the
time I was mad after all the things you’ve got--poetry and music and all
the joy-forever business. So there were the pair of us--my face and my
imagination--chained together, and fighting, and hating each other like
poison.

“Then your mother came along and took pity on me. It sets up a gawky
fellow to find a girl who ain’t ashamed to be seen walking with him
Sundays. And I was grateful to your mother, and we got along first-rate.
Only I couldn’t say things to her--and she couldn’t answer. Well--one
day, a few months after we were married, Dolbrowski came to New York,
and the whole place went wild about him. I’d never heard any good music,
but I’d always had an inkling of what it must be like, though I couldn’t
tell you to this day how I knew. Well, your mother read about him in the
papers too, and she thought it’d be the swagger thing to go to New York
and hear him play--so we went... I’ll never forget that evening. Your
mother wasn’t easily stirred up--she never seemed to need to let off
steam. But that night she seemed to understand the way I felt. And when
we got back to the hotel she said suddenly: ‘I’d like to tell him how I
feel. I’d like to sit right down and write to him.’

“‘Would you?’ I said. ‘So would I.’

“There was paper and pens there before us, and I pulled a sheet toward
me, and began to write. ‘Is this what you’d like to say to him?’ I
asked her when the letter was done. And she got pink and said: ‘I don’t
understand it, but it’s lovely.’ And she copied it out and signed her
name to it, and sent it.”

Mr. Grew paused, and Ronald sat silent, with lowered eyes.

“That’s how it began; and that’s where I thought it would end. But it
didn’t, because Dolbrowski answered. His first letter was dated January
10, 1872. I guess you’ll find I’m correct. Well, I went back to hear him
again, and I wrote him after the performance, and he answered again. And
after that we kept it up for six months. Your mother always copied the
letters and signed them. She seemed to think it was a kinder joke, and
she was proud of his answering my letters. But she never went back to
New York to hear him, though I saved up enough to give her the treat
again. She was too lazy, and she let me go without her. I heard him
three times in New York; and in the spring he came to Wingfield and
played once at the Academy. Your mother was sick and couldn’t go; so I
went alone. After the performance I meant to get one of the directors to
take me in to see him; but when the time came, I just went back home
and wrote to him instead. And the month after, before he went back to
Europe, he sent your mother a last little note, and that picture hanging
up there...”

Mr. Grew paused again, and both men lifted their eyes to the photograph.

“Is that all?” Ronald slowly asked.

“That’s all--every bit of it,” said Mr. Grew.

“And my mother--my mother never even spoke to Dolbrowski?”

“Never. She never even saw him but that once in New York at his
concert.”

The blood crept again to Ronald’s face. “Are you sure of that, sir?” he
asked in a trembling voice.

“Sure as I am that I’m sitting here. Why, she was too lazy to look at
his letters after the first novelty wore off. She copied the answers
just to humor me--but she always said she couldn’t understand what we
wrote.”

“But how could you go on with such a correspondence? It’s incredible!”

Mr. Grew looked at his son thoughtfully. “I suppose it is, to you.
You’ve only had to put out your hand and get the things I was starving
for--music, and good talk, and ideas. Those letters gave me all that.
You’ve read them, and you know that Dolbrowski was not only a great
musician but a great man. There was nothing beautiful he didn’t see,
nothing fine he didn’t feel. For six months I breathed his air, and I’ve
lived on it ever since. Do you begin to understand a little now?”

“Yes--a little. But why write in my mother’s name? Why make it a
sentimental correspondence?”

Mr. Grew reddened to his bald temples. “Why, I tell you it began that
way, as a kinder joke. And when I saw that the first letter pleased and
interested him, I was afraid to tell him--_I couldn’t_ tell him. Do you
suppose he’d gone on writing if he’d ever seen me, Ronny?”

Ronald suddenly looked at him with new eyes. “But he must have thought
your letters very beautiful--to go on as he did,” he broke out.

“Well--I did my best,” said Mr. Grew modestly.

Ronald pursued his idea. “Where _are_ all your letters, I wonder?
Weren’t they returned to you at his death?”

Mr. Grew laughed. “Lord, no. I guess he had trunks and trunks full of
better ones. I guess Queens and Empresses wrote to him.”

“I should have liked to see your letters,” the young man insisted.

“Well, they weren’t bad,” said Mr. Grew drily. “But I’ll tell you one
thing, Ronny,” he added suddenly. Ronald raised his head with a quick
glance, and Mr. Grew continued: “I’ll tell you where the best of those
letters is--it’s in _you_. If it hadn’t been for that one look at life I
couldn’t have made you what you are. Oh, I know you’ve done a good deal
of your own making--but I’ve been there behind you all the time. And
you’ll never know the work I’ve spared you and the time I’ve saved you.
Fortune Dolbrowski helped me do that. I never saw things in little again
after I’d looked at ‘em with him. And I tried to give you the big view
from the stars... So that’s what became of my letters.”

Mr. Grew paused, and for a long time Ronald sat motionless, his elbows
on the table, his face dropped on his hands.

Suddenly Mr. Grew’s touch fell on his shoulder.

“Look at here, Ronald Grew--do you want me to tell you how you’re
feeling at this minute? Just a mite let down, after all, at the idea
that you ain’t the romantic figure you’d got to think yourself... Well,
that’s natural enough, too; but I’ll tell you what it proves. It proves
you’re my son right enough, if any more proof was needed. For it’s just
the kind of fool nonsense I used to feel at your age--and if there’s
anybody here to laugh at it’s myself, and not you. And you can laugh at
me just as much as you like...”




THE DAUNT DIANA


I


“WHAT’S become of the Daunt Diana? You mean to say you never heard the
sequel?”

Ringham Finney threw himself back into his chair with the smile of the
collector who has a good thing to show. He knew he had a good listener,
at any rate. I don’t think much of Ringham’s snuff-boxes, but his
anecdotes are usually worth while. He’s a psychologist astray among
_bibelots_, and the best bits he brings back from his raids on
Christie’s and the Hotel Drouot are the fragments of human nature he
picks up on those historic battle-fields. If his _flair_ in enamel had
been half as good we should have heard of the Finney collection by this
time.

He really has--queer fatuous investigator!--an unusually sensitive touch
for the human texture, and the specimens he gathers into his museum
of heterogeneous memories have almost always some mark of the rare and
chosen. I felt, therefore, that I was really to be congratulated on
the fact that I didn’t know what had become of the Daunt Diana, and on
having before me a long evening in which to learn. I had just led
my friend back, after an excellent dinner at Foyot’s, to the shabby
pleasant sitting-room of my _rive-gauche_ hotel; and I knew that, once
I had settled him in a good arm-chair, and put a box of cigars at his
elbow, I could trust him not to budge till I had the story.



II


YOU remember old Neave, of course? Little Humphrey Neave, I mean. We
used to see him pottering about Rome years ago. He lived in two tiny
rooms over a wine shop, on polenta and lentils, and prowled among the
refuse of the Ripetta whenever he had a few _soldi_ to spend. But you’ve
been out of the collector’s world for so long that you may not know what
happened to him afterward...

He was always a queer chap, Neave; years older than you and me, of
course--and even when I first knew him, in my raw Roman days, he gave
me an extraordinary sense of age and experience. I don’t think I’ve ever
known any one who was at once so intelligent and so simple. It’s the
precise combination that results in romance; and poor little Neave was
romantic.

He told me once how he’d come to Rome. He was _originaire_ of Mystic,
Connecticut--and he wanted to get as far away from it as possible. Rome
seemed as far as anything on the same planet could be; and after he’d
worried his way through Harvard--with shifts and shavings that you and
I can’t imagine--he contrived to get sent to Switzerland as tutor to a
chap who’d failed in his examinations. With only the Alps between, he
wasn’t likely to turn back; and he got another fellow to take his pupil
home, and struck out on foot for the seven hills.

I’m telling you these early details merely to give you a notion of the
man’s idealism. There was a cool persistency and a headlong courage in
his dash for Rome that one wouldn’t have guessed in the little pottering
chap we used to know. Once on the spot, he got more tutoring, managed to
make himself a name for coaxing balky youths to take their fences, and
was finally able to take up the more congenial task of expounding “the
antiquities” to cultured travellers. I call it more congenial--but how
it must have seared his soul! Fancy unveiling the sacred scars of Time
to ladies who murmur: “Was this _actually_ the spot--?” while they
absently feel for their hatpins! He used to say that nothing kept him
at it but the exquisite thought of accumulating the _lire_ for his
collection. For the Neave collection, my dear fellow, began early, began
almost with his Roman life, began in a series of little nameless odds
and ends, broken trinkets, torn embroideries, the amputated extremities
of maimed marbles: things that even the rag-picker had pitched away when
he sifted his haul. But they weren’t nameless or meaningless to Neave;
his strength lay in his instinct for identifying, putting together,
seeing significant relations. He was a regular Cuvier of bric-a-brac.
And during those early years, when he had time to brood over trifles and
note imperceptible differences, he gradually sharpened his instinct, and
made it into the delicate and redoubtable instrument it is. Before he
had a thousand francs’ worth of _anticaglie_ to his name he began to be
known as an expert, and the big dealers were glad to consult him. But
we’re getting no nearer the Daunt Diana...

Well, some fifteen years ago, in London, I ran across Neave at
Christie’s. He was the same little man we’d known, effaced, bleached,
indistinct, like a poor “impression”--as unnoticeable as one of his own
early finds, yet, like them, with a _quality_, if one had an eye for
it. He told me he still lived in Rome, and had contrived, by fierce
self-denial, to get a few decent bits together--“piecemeal, little by
little, with fasting and prayer; and I mean the fasting literally!” he
said.

He had run over to London for his annual “look-round”--I fancy one or
another of the big collectors usually paid his journey--and when we met
he was on his way to see the Daunt collection. You know old Daunt was a
surly brute, and the things weren’t easily seen; but he had heard Neave
was in London, and had sent--yes, actually sent!--for him to come and
give his opinion on a few bits, including the Diana. The little man bore
himself discreetly, but you can imagine his pride. In his exultation he
asked me to come with him--“Oh, I’ve the _grandes et petites entrees_,
my dear fellow: I’ve made my conditions--” and so it happened that I saw
the first meeting between Humphrey Neave and his fate.

For that collection _was_ his fate: or, one may say, it was embodied in
the Diana who was queen and goddess of the realm. Yes--I shall always be
glad I was with Neave when he had his first look at the Diana. I see him
now, blinking at her through his white lashes, and stroking his seedy
wisp of a moustache to hide a twitch of the muscles. It was all very
quiet, but it was the _coup de foudre_. I could see that by the way
his hands trembled when he turned away and began to examine the other
things. You remember Neave’s hands--thin, sallow, dry, with long
inquisitive fingers thrown out like antennae? Whatever they hold--bronze
or lace, hard enamel or brittle glass--they have an air of conforming
themselves to the texture of the thing, and sucking out of it, by every
finger-tip, the mysterious essence it has secreted. Well, that day,
as he moved about among Daunt’s treasures, the Diana followed him
everywhere. He didn’t look back at her--he gave himself to the business
he was there for--but whatever he touched, he felt her. And on the
threshold he turned and gave her his first free look--the kind of look
that says: _“You’re mine.”_

It amused me at the time--the idea of little Neave making eyes at any of
Daunt’s belongings. He might as well have coquetted with the Kohinoor.
And the same idea seemed to strike him; for as we turned away from the
big house in Belgravia he glanced up at it and said, with a bitterness
I’d never heard in him: “Good Lord! To think of that lumpy fool having
those things to handle! Did you notice his stupid stumps of fingers? I
suppose he blunted them gouging nuggets out of the gold fields. And in
exchange for the nuggets he gets all that in a year--only has to hold
out his callous palm to have that great ripe sphere of beauty drop into
it! That’s my idea of heaven--to have a great collection drop into
one’s hand, as success, or love, or any of the big shining things,
drop suddenly on some men. And I’ve had to worry along for nearly fifty
years, saving and paring, and haggling and intriguing, to get here a
bit and there a bit--and not one perfection in the lot! It’s enough to
poison a man’s life.”

The outbreak was so unlike Neave that I remember every word of it:
remember, too, saying in answer: “But, look here, Neave, you wouldn’t
take Daunt’s hands for yours, I imagine?”

He stared a moment and smiled. “Have all that, and grope my way through
it like a blind cave fish? What a question! But the sense that it’s
always the blind fish that live in that kind of aquarium is what makes
anarchists, sir!” He looked back from the corner of the square, where we
had paused while he delivered himself of this remarkable metaphor. “God,
I’d like to throw a bomb at that place, and be in at the looting!”

And with that, on the way home, he unpacked his grievance--pulled the
bandage off the wound, and showed me the ugly mark it had made on his
little white soul.

It wasn’t the struggling, stinting, self-denying that galled him--it was
the inadequacy of the result. It was, in short, the old tragedy of the
discrepancy between a man’s wants and his power to gratify them. Neave’s
taste was too exquisite for his means--was like some strange, delicate,
capricious animal, that he cherished and pampered and couldn’t satisfy.

“Don’t you know those little glittering lizards that die if they’re not
fed on some wonderful tropical fly? Well, my taste’s like that, with
one important difference--if it doesn’t get its fly, it simply turns and
feeds on me. Oh, it doesn’t die, my taste--worse luck! It gets larger
and stronger and more fastidious, and takes a bigger bite of me--that’s
all.”

That was all. Year by year, day by day, he had made himself into this
delicate register of perceptions and sensations--as far above the
ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific registering
instrument is beyond the rough human senses--only to find that the
beauty which alone could satisfy him was unattainable--that he was never
to know the last deep identification which only possession can give. He
had trained himself in short, to feel, in the rare great thing--such
an utterance of beauty as the Daunt Diana, say--a hundred elements of
perfection, a hundred _reasons why_, imperceptible, inexplicable even,
to the average “artistic” sense; he had reached this point by a long
austere process of discrimination and rejection, the renewed great
refusals of the intelligence which perpetually asks more, which will
make no pact with its self of yesterday, and is never to be beguiled
from its purpose by the wiles of the next-best-thing. Oh, it’s a
poignant case, but not a common one; for the next-best-thing usually
wins...

You see, the worst of Neave’s state was the fact of his not being a mere
collector, even the collector raised to his highest pitch of efficiency.
The whole thing was blent in him with poetry--his imagination had
romanticized the acquisitive instinct, as the religious feeling of the
Middle Ages turned passion into love. And yet his could never be the
abstract enjoyment of the philosopher who says: “This or that object is
really mine because I’m capable of appreciating it.” Neave _wanted_ what
he appreciated--wanted it with his touch and his sight as well as with
his imagination.

It was hardly a year afterward that, coming back from a long tour in
India, I picked up a London paper and read the amazing headline: “Mr.
Humphrey Neave buys the Daunt collection”... I rubbed my eyes and read
again. Yes, it could only be our old friend Humphrey. “An American
living in Rome ... one of our most discerning collectors”; there was no
mistaking the description. I clapped on my hat and bolted out to see the
first dealer I could find; and there I had the incredible details. Neave
had come into a fortune--two or three million dollars, amassed by an
uncle who had a corset-factory, and who had attained wealth as the
creator of the Mystic Super-straight. (Corset-factory sounds odd, by
the way, doesn’t it? One had fancied that the corset was a personal, a
highly specialized garment, more or less shaped on the form it was to
modify; but, after all, the Tanagras were all made from two or
three moulds--and so, I suppose, are the ladies who wear the Mystic
Super-straight.)

The uncle had a son, and Neave had never dreamed of seeing a penny of
the money; but the son died suddenly, and the father followed, leaving
a codicil that gave everything to our friend. Humphrey had to go out to
“realize” on the corset-factory; and his description of _that_ ... Well,
he came back with his money in his pocket, and the day he landed old
Daunt went to smash. It all fitted in like a Chinese puzzle. I believe
Neave drove straight from Euston to Daunt House: at any rate, within two
months the collection was his, and at a price that made the trade sit
up. Trust old Daunt for that!

I was in Rome the following spring, and you’d better believe I looked
him up. A big porter glared at me from the door of the Palazzo Neave:
I had almost to produce my passport to get in. But that wasn’t Neave’s
fault--the poor fellow was so beset by people clamouring to see his
collection that he had to barricade himself, literally. When I had
mounted the state _Scalone_, and come on him, at the end of half a dozen
echoing saloons, in the farthest, smallest _reduit_ of the vast suite, I
received the same welcome that he used to give us in his little den over
the wine shop.

“Well--so you’ve got her?” I said. For I’d caught sight of the Diana
in passing, against the bluish blur of an old _verdure_--just the
background for her poised loveliness. Only I rather wondered why she
wasn’t in the room where he sat.

He smiled. “Yes, I’ve got her,” he returned, more calmly than I had
expected.

“And all the rest of the loot?”

“Yes. I had to buy the lump.”

“Had to? But you wanted to, didn’t you? You used to say it was your
idea of heaven--to stretch out your hand and have a great ripe sphere of
beauty drop into it. I’m quoting your own words, by the way.”

Neave blinked and stroked his seedy moustache. “Oh, yes. I remember the
phrase. It’s true--it _is_ the last luxury.” He paused, as if seeking a
pretext for his lack of warmth. “The thing that bothered me was having
to move. I couldn’t cram all the stuff into my old quarters.”

“Well, I should say not! This is rather a better setting.”

He got up. “Come and take a look round. I want to show you two or three
things--new attributions I’ve made. I’m doing the catalogue over.”

The interest of showing me the things seemed to dispel the vague apathy
I had felt in him. He grew keen again in detailing his redistribution of
values, and above all in convicting old Daunt and his advisers of their
repeated aberrations of judgment. “The miracle is that he should have
got such things, knowing as little as he did what he was getting. And
the egregious asses who bought for him were no better, were worse in
fact, since they had all sorts of humbugging wrong reasons for admiring
what old Daunt simply coveted because it belonged to some other rich
man.”

Never had Neave had so wondrous a field for the exercise of his
perfected faculty; and I saw then how in the real, the great collector’s
appreciations the keenest scientific perception is suffused with
imaginative sensibility, and how it’s to the latter undefinable quality
that in the last resort he trusts himself.

Nevertheless, I still felt the shadow of that hovering apathy, and he
knew I felt it, and was always breaking off to give me reasons for it.
For one thing, he wasn’t used to his new quarters--hated their bigness
and formality; then the requests to show his things drove him mad. “The
women--oh, the women!” he wailed, and interrupted himself to describe
a heavy-footed German Princess who had marched past his treasures as
if she were inspecting a cavalry regiment, applying an unmodulated
_Mugneeficent_ to everything from the engraved gems to the Hercules
torso.

“Not that she was half as bad as the other kind,” he added, as if with
a last effort at optimism. “The kind who discriminate and say: ‘I’m not
sure if it’s Botticelli or Cellini I mean, but _one of that school_, at
any rate.’ And the worst of all are the ones who know--up to a certain
point: have the schools, and the dates and the jargon pat, and yet
wouldn’t know a Phidias if it stood where they hadn’t expected it.”

He had all my sympathy, poor Neave; yet these were trials inseparable
from the collector’s lot, and not always without their secret
compensations. Certainly they did not wholly explain my friend’s
attitude; and for a moment I wondered if it were due to some strange
disillusionment as to the quality of his treasures. But no! the Daunt
collection was almost above criticism; and as we passed from one object
to another I saw there was no mistaking the genuineness of Neave’s pride
in his possessions. The ripe sphere of beauty was his, and he had found
no flaw in it as yet...

A year later came the amazing announcement--the Daunt collection was for
sale. At first we all supposed it was a case of weeding out (though how
old Daunt would have raged at the thought of anybody’s weeding _his_
collection!) But no--the catalogue corrected that idea. Every stick and
stone was to go under the hammer. The news ran like wildfire from Rome
to Berlin, from Paris to London and New York. Was Neave ruined, then?
Wrong again--the dealers nosed that out in no time. He was simply
selling because he chose to sell; and in due time the things came up at
Christie’s.

But you may be sure the trade had found an answer to the riddle; and
the answer was that, on close inspection, Neave had found the collection
less impeccable than he had supposed. It was a preposterous answer--but
then there was no other. Neave, by this time, was pretty generally
recognized as having the subtlest _flair_ of any collector in Europe,
and if he didn’t choose to keep the Daunt collection it could be only
because he had reason to think he could do better.

In a flash this report had gone the rounds and the buyers were on their
guard. I had run over to London to see the thing through, and it was the
queerest sale I ever was at. Some of the things held their own, but a
lot--and a few of the best among them--went for half their value. You
see, they’d been locked up in old Daunt’s house for nearly twenty years,
and hardly shown to any one, so that the whole younger generation of
dealers and collectors knew of them only by hearsay. Then you know
the effect of suggestion in such cases. The undefinable sense we were
speaking of is a ticklish instrument, easily thrown out of gear by
a sudden fall of temperature; and the sharpest experts grow shy and
self-distrustful when the cold current of depreciation touches them. The
sale was a slaughter--and when I saw the Daunt Diana fall at the wink of
a little third-rate _brocanteur_ from Vienna I turned sick at the folly
of my kind.

For my part, I had never believed that Neave had sold the collection
because he’d “found it out”; and within a year my incredulity was
justified. As soon as the things were put in circulation they were known
for the marvels they are. There was hardly a poor bit in the lot; and
my wonder grew at Neave’s madness. All over Europe, dealers began to be
fighting for the spoils; and all kinds of stuff were palmed off on the
unsuspecting as fragments of the Daunt collection!

Meanwhile, what was Neave doing? For a long time I didn’t hear, and
chance kept me from returning to Rome. But one day, in Paris, I ran
across a dealer who had captured for a song one of the best Florentine
bronzes in the Daunt collection--a marvellous _plaquette_ of
Donatello’s. I asked him what had become of it, and he said with a grin:
“I sold it the other day,” naming a price that staggered me.

“Ye gods! Who paid you that for it?”

His grin broadened, and he answered: “Neave.”

“_ Neave?_ Humphrey Neave?”

“Didn’t you know he was buying back his things?”

“Nonsense!”

“He is, though. Not in his own name--but he’s doing it.”

And he _was_, do you know--and at prices that would have made a sane man
shudder! A few weeks later I ran across his tracks in London, where he
was trying to get hold of a Penicaud enamel--another of his scattered
treasures. Then I hunted him down at his hotel, and had it out with him.

“Look here, Neave, what are you up to?”

He wouldn’t tell me at first: stared and laughed and denied. But I
took him off to dine, and after dinner, while we smoked, I happened
to mention casually that I had a pull over the man who had the
Penicaud--and at that he broke down and confessed.

“Yes, I’m buying them back, Finney--it’s true.” He laughed nervously,
twitching his moustache. And then he let me have the story.

“You know how I’d hungered and thirsted for the _real thing_--you quoted
my own phrase to me once, about the ‘ripe sphere of beauty.’ So when I
got my money, and Daunt lost his, almost at the same moment, I saw the
hand of Providence in it. I knew that, even if I’d been younger, and had
more time, I could never hope, nowadays, to form such a collection as
_that_. There was the ripe sphere, within reach; and I took it. But when
I got it, and began to live with it, I found out my mistake. It was a
_mariage de convenance_--there’d been no wooing, no winning. Each of
my little old bits--the rubbish I chucked out to make room for Daunt’s
glories--had its own personal history, the drama of my relation to it,
of the discovery, the struggle, the capture, the first divine moment
of possession. There was a romantic secret between us. And then I
had absorbed its beauties one by one, they had become a part of
my imagination, they held me by a hundred threads of far-reaching
association. And suddenly I had expected to create this kind of
intense personal tie between myself and a roomful of new cold alien
presences--things staring at me vacantly from the depths of unknown
pasts! Can you fancy a more preposterous hope? Why, my other things, my
_own_ things, had wooed me as passionately as I wooed them: there was a
certain little bronze, a little Venus Callipyge, who had drawn me,
drawn me, drawn me, imploring me to rescue her from her unspeakable
surroundings in a vulgar bric-a-brac shop at Biarritz, where she shrank
out of sight among sham Sevres and Dutch silver, as one has seen
certain women--rare, shy, exquisite--made almost invisible by the vulgar
splendours surrounding them. Well! that little Venus, who was just
a specious seventeenth century attempt at the ‘antique,’ but who had
penetrated me with her pleading grace, touched me by the easily
guessed story of her obscure, anonymous origin, was more to me
imaginatively--yes! more than the cold bought beauty of the Daunt
Diana...”

“The Daunt Diana!” I broke in. “Hold up, Neave--_the Daunt Diana?_”

He smiled contemptuously. “A professional beauty, my dear
fellow--expected every head to be turned when she came into a room.”

“Oh, Neave,” I groaned.

“Yes, I know. You’re thinking of what we felt that day we first saw her
in London. Many a poor devil has sold his soul as the result of such
a first sight! Well, I sold _her_ instead. Do you want the truth about
her? _Elle etait bete a pleurer._”

He laughed, and stood up with a little shrug of disenchantment.

“And so you’re impenitent?” I paused. “And yet you’re buying some of the
things back?”

Neave laughed again, ironically. “I knew you’d find me out and call
me to account. Well, yes: I’m buying back.” He stood before me half
sheepish, half defiant. “I’m buying back because there’s nothing else
as good in the market. And because I’ve a queer feeling that, this time,
they’ll be _mine_. But I’m ruining myself at the game!” he confessed.

It was true: Neave was ruining himself. And he’s gone on ruining himself
ever since, till now the job’s nearly done. Bit by bit, year by year,
he has gathered in his scattered treasures, at higher prices than the
dealers ever dreamed of getting. There are fabulous details in the story
of his quest. Now and then I ran across him, and was able to help him
recover a fragment; and it was wonderful to see his delight in the
moment of reunion. Finally, about two years ago, we met in Paris, and he
told me he had got back all the important pieces except the Diana.

“The Diana? But you told me you didn’t care for her.”

“Didn’t care?” He leaned across the restaurant table that divided us.
“Well, no, in a sense I didn’t. I wanted her to want me, you see; and
she didn’t then! Whereas now she’s crying to me to come to her. You know
where she is?” he broke off.

Yes, I knew: in the centre of Mrs. Willy P. Goldmark’s yellow and gold
drawing-room, under a thousand-candle-power chandelier, with reflectors
aimed at her from every point of the compass. I had seen her wincing and
shivering there in her outraged nudity at one of the Goldmark “crushes.”

“But you can’t get her, Neave,” I objected.

“No, I can’t get her,” he said.

Well, last month I was in Rome, for the first time in six or seven
years, and of course I looked about for Neave. The Palazzo Neave was let
to some rich Russians, and the splendid new porter didn’t know where the
proprietor lived. But I got on his trail easily enough, and it led me to
a strange old place in the Trastevere, an ancient crevassed black palace
turned tenement house, and fluttering with pauper clothes-lines. I found
Neave under the leads, in two or three cold rooms that smelt of the
_cuisine_ of all his neighbours: a poor shrunken little figure, seedier
and shabbier than ever, yet more alive than when we had made the tour of
his collection in the Palazzo Neave.

The collection was around him again, not displayed in tall cabinets and
on marble tables, but huddled on shelves, perched on chairs, crammed in
corners, putting the gleam of bronze, the opalescence of old glass, the
pale lustre of marble, into all the angles of his low dim rooms. There
they were, the proud presences that had stared at him down the vistas of
Daunt House, and shone in cold transplanted beauty under his own painted
cornices: there they were, gathered in humble promiscuity about his bent
shabby figure, like superb wild creatures tamed to become the familiars
of some harmless old wizard.

As we went from bit to bit, as he lifted one piece after another, and
held it to the light of his low windows, I saw in his hands the same
tremor of sensation that I had noticed when he first examined the same
objects at Daunt House. All his life was in his finger-tips, and it
seemed to communicate life to the exquisite things he touched. But
you’ll think me infected by his mysticism if I tell you they gained new
beauty while he held them...

We went the rounds slowly and reverently; and then, when I supposed our
inspection was over, and was turning to take my leave, he opened a door
I had not noticed, and showed me into a slit of a room beyond. It was
a mere monastic cell, scarcely large enough for his narrow iron bed and
the chest which probably held his few clothes; but there, in a niche of
the bare wall, facing the foot of the bed--there stood the Daunt Diana.

I gasped at the sight and turned to him; and he looked back at me
without speaking.

“In the name of magic, Neave, how did you do it?”

He smiled as if from the depths of some secret rapture. “Call it magic,
if you like; but I ruined myself doing it,” he said.

I stared at him in silence, breathless with the madness and the
wonder of it; and suddenly, red to the ears, he flung out his boyish
confession. “I lied to you that day in London--the day I said I didn’t
care for her. I always cared--always worshipped--always wanted her. But
she wasn’t mine then, and I knew it, and she knew it ... and now at last
we understand each other.” He looked at me shyly, and then glanced about
the bare cold cell. “The setting isn’t worthy of her, I know; she
was meant for glories I can’t give her; but beautiful things, my dear
Finney, like beautiful spirits, live in houses not made with hands...”

His face shone with extraordinary sweetness as he spoke; and I saw he’d
got hold of the secret we’re all after. No, the setting isn’t worthy of
her, if you like. The rooms are as shabby and mean as those we used
to see him in years ago over the wine shop. I’m not sure they’re not
shabbier and meaner. But she rules there at last, she shines and hovers
there above him, and there at night, I doubt not, steals down from her
cloud to give him the Latmian kiss.




THE DEBT


I


YOU remember--it’s not so long ago--the talk there was about Dredge’s
“Arrival of the Fittest”? The talk has subsided, but the book of
course remains: stands up, in fact, as the tallest thing of its kind
since--well, I’d almost said since “The Origin of Species.”

I’m not wrong, at any rate, in calling it the most important
contribution yet made to the development of the Darwinian theory, or
rather to the solution of the awkward problem about which that theory
has had to make such a circuit. Dredge’s hypothesis will be contested,
may one day be disproved; but at least it has swept out of the way all
previous conjectures, including of course Lanfear’s magnificent attempt;
and for our generation of scientific investigators it will serve as the
first safe bridge across a murderous black whirlpool.

It’s all very interesting--there are few things more stirring to the
imagination than that sudden projection of the new hypothesis, light as
a cobweb and strong as steel, across the intellectual abyss; but, for
an idle observer of human motives, the other, the personal, side of
Dredge’s case is even more interesting and arresting.

Personal side? You didn’t know there was one? Pictured him simply as
a thinking machine, a highly specialized instrument of precision, the
result of a long series of “adaptations,” as his own jargon would put
it? Well, I don’t wonder--if you’ve met him. He does give the impression
of being something out of his own laboratory: a delicate scientific
instrument that reveals wonders to the initiated, and is absolutely
useless in an ordinary hand.

In his youth it was just the other way. I knew him twenty years ago, as
an awkward lout whom young Archie Lanfear had picked up at college, and
brought home for a visit. I happened to be staying at the Lanfears’ when
the boys arrived, and I shall never forget Dredge’s first appearance on
the scene. You know the Lanfears always lived very simply. That summer
they had gone to Buzzard’s Bay, in order that Professor Lanfear might be
near the Biological Station at Wood’s Holl, and they were picnicking in
a kind of sketchy bungalow without any attempt at elegance. But Galen
Dredge couldn’t have been more awe-struck if he’d been suddenly plunged
into a Fifth Avenue ball-room. He nearly knocked his shock head against
the low doorway, and in dodging this peril trod heavily on Mabel
Lanfear’s foot, and became hopelessly entangled in her mother’s
draperies--though how he managed it I never knew, for Mrs. Lanfear’s
dowdy muslins ran to no excess of train.

When the Professor himself came in it was ten times worse, and I saw
then that Dredge’s emotion was a tribute to the great man’s proximity.
That made the boy interesting, and I began to watch. Archie, always
enthusiastic but vague, had said: “Oh, he’s a tremendous chap--you’ll
see--” but I hadn’t expected to see quite so clearly. Lanfear’s vision,
of course, was sharper than mine; and the next morning he had carried
Dredge off to the Biological Station. And that was the way it began.

Dredge is the son of a Baptist minister. He comes from East Lethe, New
York State, and was working his way through college--waiting at White
Mountain hotels in summer--when Archie Lanfear ran across him. There
were eight children in the family, and the mother was an invalid. Dredge
never had a penny from his father after he was fourteen; but his mother
wanted him to be a scholar, and “kept at him,” as he put it, in the hope
of his going back to “teach school” at East Lethe. He developed slowly,
as the scientific mind generally does, and was still adrift about
himself and his tendencies when Archie took him down to Buzzard’s Bay.
But he had read Lanfear’s “Utility and Variation,” and had always been
a patient and curious observer of nature. And his first meeting with
Lanfear explained him to himself. It didn’t, however, enable him to
explain himself to others, and for a long time he remained, to all but
Lanfear, an object of incredulity and conjecture.

“_ Why_ my husband wants him about--” poor Mrs. Lanfear, the kindest of
women, privately lamented to her friends; for Dredge, at that time--they
kept him all summer at the bungalow--had one of the most encumbering
personalities you can imagine. He was as inexpressive as he is to-day,
and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable presences whose
silence is an interruption.

The poor Lanfears almost died of him that summer, and the pity of it
was that he never suspected it, but continued to lavish on them a
floundering devotion as uncomfortable as the endearments of a dripping
dog--all out of gratitude for the Professor’s kindness! He was full,
in those days, of raw enthusiasms, which he forced on any one who
would listen when his first shyness had worn off. You can’t picture him
spouting sentimental poetry, can you? Yet I’ve seen him petrify a whole
group of Mrs. Lanfear’s callers by suddenly discharging on them, in the
strident drawl of Western New York, “Barbara Frietchie” or “The Queen of
the May.” His taste in literature was uniformly bad, but very definite,
and far more assertive than his views on biological questions. In his
scientific judgments he showed, even then, a remarkable temperance, a
precocious openness to the opposite view; but in literature he was a
furious propagandist, aggressive, disputatious, and extremely sensitive
to adverse opinion.

Lanfear, of course, had been struck from the first by his gift of
accurate observation, and by the fact that his eagerness to learn was
offset by his reluctance to conclude. I remember Lanfear’s telling me
that he had never known a lad of Dredge’s age who gave such promise of
uniting an aptitude for general ideas with the plodding patience of the
accumulator of facts. Of course when Lanfear talked like that of a young
biologist his fate was sealed. There could be no question of Dredge’s
going back to “teach school” at East Lethe. He must take a course in
biology at Columbia, spend his vacations at the Wood’s Holl laboratory,
and then, if possible, go to Germany for a year or two.

All this meant his virtual adoption by the Lanfears. Most of Lanfear’s
fortune went in helping young students to a start, and he devoted his
heaviest subsidies to Dredge.

“Dredge will be my biggest dividend--you’ll see!” he used to say, in the
chrysalis days when poor Galen was known to the world of science only
as a perpetual slouching presence in Mrs. Lanfear’s drawing-room. And
Dredge, it must be said, took his obligations simply, with that kind of
personal dignity, and quiet sense of his own worth, which in such cases
saves the beneficiary from abjectness. He seemed to trust himself as
fully as Lanfear trusted him.

The comic part of it was that his only idea of making what is known as
“a return” was to devote himself to the Professor’s family. When I hear
pretty women lamenting that they can’t coax Professor Dredge out of his
laboratory I remember Mabel Lanfear’s cry to me: “If Galen would only
keep away!” When Mabel fell on the ice and broke her leg, Galen walked
seven miles in a blizzard to get a surgeon; but if he did her this
service one day in the year, he bored her by being in the way for the
other three hundred and sixty-four. One would have imagined at that
time that he thought his perpetual presence the greatest gift he could
bestow; for, except on the occasion of his fetching the surgeon, I don’t
remember his taking any other way of expressing his gratitude.

In love with Mabel? Not a bit! But the queer thing was that he _did_
have a passion in those days--a blind, hopeless passion for Mrs.
Lanfear! Yes: I know what I’m saying. I mean Mrs. Lanfear, the
Professor’s wife, poor Mrs. Lanfear, with her tight hair and her loose
figure, her blameless brow and earnest eye-glasses, and her perpetual
attitude of mild misapprehension. I can see Dredge cowering, long and
many-jointed, in a diminutive drawing-room chair, one square-toed
shoe coiled round an exposed ankle, his knees clasped in a knot of
red knuckles, and his spectacles perpetually seeking Mrs. Lanfear’s
eye-glasses. I never knew if the poor lady was aware of the sentiment
she inspired, but her children observed it, and it provoked them to
irreverent mirth. Galen was the predestined butt of Mabel and
Archie; and secure in their mother’s virtuous obtuseness, and in her
worshipper’s timidity, they allowed themselves a latitude of banter
that sometimes turned their audience cold. Dredge meanwhile was going on
obstinately with his work. Now and then he had queer fits of idleness,
when he lapsed into a state of sulky inertia from which even Lanfear’s
admonitions could not rouse him. Once, just before an examination,
he suddenly went off to the Maine woods for two weeks, came back, and
failed to pass. I don’t know if his benefactor ever lost hope; but at
times his confidence must have been sorely strained. The queer part of
it was that when Dredge emerged from these eclipses he seemed keener and
more active than ever. His slowly growing intelligence probably needed
its periodical pauses of assimilation; and Lanfear was marvellously
patient.

At last Dredge finished his course and went to Germany; and when he came
back he was a new man--was, in fact, the Dredge we all know. He seemed
to have shed his blundering, encumbering personality, and come to
life as a disembodied intelligence. His fidelity to the Lanfears
was unchanged; but he showed it negatively, by his discretions and
abstentions. I have an idea that Mabel was less disposed to deride him,
might even have been induced to softer sentiments; but I doubt if Dredge
even noticed the change. As for his ex-goddess, he seemed to regard her
as a motherly household divinity, the guardian genius of the darning
needle; but on Professor Lanfear he looked with a deepening reverence.
If the rest of the family had diminished in his eyes, its head had grown
even greater.



II


FROM that day Dredge’s progress continued steadily. If not always
perceptible to the untrained eye, in Lanfear’s sight it never deviated,
and the great man began to associate Dredge with his work, and to lean
on him more and more. Lanfear’s health was already failing, and in my
confidential talks with him I saw how he counted on Galen Dredge to
continue and amplify his doctrine. If he did not describe the young man
as his predestined Huxley, it was because any such comparison between
himself and his great predecessors would have been repugnant to his
taste; but he evidently felt that it would be Dredge’s role to reveal
him to posterity. And the young man seemed at that time to take the same
view of his calling. When he was not busy about Lanfear’s work he was
recording their conversations with the diligence of a biographer and the
accuracy of a naturalist. Any attempt to question or minimize Lanfear’s
theories roused in his disciple the only flashes of wrath I have ever
seen a scientific discussion provoke in him. In defending his master
he became almost as intemperate as in the early period of his literary
passions.

Such filial dedication must have been all the more precious to Lanfear
because, about that time, it became evident that Archie would never
carry on his father’s work. He had begun brilliantly, you may remember,
by a little paper on _Limulus Polyphemus_ that attracted a good deal
of notice when it appeared in the _Central Blatt_; but gradually his
zoological ardour yielded to an absorbing passion for the violin,
which was followed by a sudden plunge into physics. At present, after a
side-glance at the drama, I understand he’s devoting what is left of his
father’s money to archaeological explorations in Asia Minor.

“Archie’s got a delightful little mind,” Lanfear used to say to me,
rather wistfully, “but it’s just a highly polished surface held up to
the show as it passes. Dredge’s mind takes in only a bit at a time,
but the bit stays, and other bits are joined to it, in a hard mosaic of
fact, of which imagination weaves the pattern. I saw just how it would
be years ago, when my boy used to take my meaning in a flash, and answer
me with clever objections, while Galen disappeared into one of his
fathomless silences, and then came to the surface like a dripping
retriever, a long way beyond Archie’s objections, and with an answer to
them in his mouth.”

It was about this time that the crowning satisfaction of Lanfear’s
career came to him: I mean, of course, John Weyman’s gift to Columbia
of the Lanfear Laboratory, and the founding, in connection with it, of a
chair of Experimental Evolution. Weyman had always taken an interest in
Lanfear’s work, but no one had supposed that his interest would express
itself so magnificently. The honour came to Lanfear at a time when he
was fighting an accumulation of troubles: failing health, the
money difficulties resulting from his irrepressible generosity, his
disappointment about Archie’s career, and perhaps also the persistent
attacks of the new school of German zoologists.

“If I hadn’t Galen I should feel the game was up,” he said to me once,
in a fit of half-real, half-mocking despondency. “But he’ll do what I
haven’t time to do myself, and what my boy can’t do for me.”

That meant that he would answer the critics, and triumphantly affirm
Lanfear’s theory, which had been rudely shaken, but not displaced.

“A scientific hypothesis lasts till there’s something else to put in
its place. People who want to get across a river will use the old bridge
till the new one’s built. And I don’t see any one who’s particularly
anxious, in this case, to take a contract for the new one,” Lanfear
ended; and I remember answering with a laugh: “Not while Horatius Dredge
holds the other.”

It was generally known that Lanfear had not long to live, and the
Laboratory was hardly opened before the question of his successor in
the chair of Experimental Evolution began to be a matter of public
discussion. It was conceded that whoever followed him ought to be a
man of achieved reputation, some one carrying, as the French say, a
considerable “baggage.” At the same time, even Lanfear’s critics felt
that he should be succeeded by a man who held his views and would
continue his teaching. This was not in itself a difficulty, for German
criticism had so far been mainly negative, and there were plenty of
good men who, while they questioned the permanent validity of Lanfear’s
conclusions, were yet ready to accept them for their provisional
usefulness. And then there was the added inducement of the Laboratory!
The Columbia Professor of Experimental Evolution has at his disposal the
most complete instrument of biological research that modern ingenuity
has yet produced; and it’s not only in theology or politics _que Paris
vaut bien une messe!_ There was no trouble about finding a candidate;
but the whole thing turned on Lanfear’s decision, since it was tacitly
understood that, by Weyman’s wish, he was to select his successor. And
what a cry there was when he selected Galen Dredge!

Not in the scientific world, though. The specialists were beginning to
know about Dredge. His remarkable paper on Sexual Dimorphism had been
translated into several languages, and a furious polemic had broken out
over it. When a young fellow can get the big men fighting over him his
future is pretty well assured. But Dredge was only thirty-four, and some
people seemed to feel that there was a kind of deflected nepotism in
Lanfear’s choice.

“If he could choose Dredge he might as well have chosen his own son,”
 I’ve heard it said; and the irony was that Archie--will you believe
it?--actually thought so himself! But Lanfear had Weyman behind him,
and when the end came the Faculty at once appointed Galen Dredge to the
chair of Experimental Evolution.

For the first two years things went quietly, along accustomed
lines. Dredge simply continued the course which Lanfear’s death had
interrupted. He lectured well even then, with a persuasive simplicity
surprising in the slow, inarticulate creature one knew him for. But
haven’t you noticed that certain personalities reveal themselves only
in the more impersonal relations of life? It’s as if they woke only
to collective contacts, and the single consciousness were an unmeaning
fragment to them.

If there was anything to criticize in that first part of the course,
it was the avoidance of general ideas, of those brilliant rockets of
conjecture that Lanfear’s students were used to seeing him fling
across the darkness. I remember once saying this to Archie, who, having
recovered from his absurd disappointment, had returned to his old
allegiance to Dredge.

“Oh, that’s Galen all over. He doesn’t want to jump into the ring till
he has a big swishing knock-down argument in his fist. He’ll wait twenty
years if he has to. That’s his strength: he’s never afraid to wait.”

I thought this shrewd of Archie, as well as generous; and I saw the
wisdom of Dredge’s course. As Lanfear himself had said, his theory was
safe enough till somebody found a more attractive one; and before
that day Dredge would probably have accumulated sufficient proof to
crystallize the fluid hypothesis.



III


THE third winter I was off collecting in Central America, and didn’t
get back till Dredge’s course had been going for a couple of months.
The very day I turned up in town Archie Lanfear descended on me with a
summons from his mother. I was wanted at once at a family council.

I found the Lanfear ladies in a state of incoherent distress, which
Archie’s own indignation hardly made more intelligible. But gradually
I put together their fragmentary charges, and learned that Dredge’s
lectures were turning into an organized assault on his master’s
doctrine.

“It amounts to just this,” Archie said, controlling his women with the
masterful gesture of the weak man. “Galen has simply turned round and
betrayed my father.”

“Just for a handful of silver he left us,” Mabel sobbed in parenthesis,
while Mrs. Lanfear tearfully cited Hamlet.

Archie silenced them again. “The ugly part of it is that he must have
had this up his sleeve for years. He must have known when he was asked
to succeed my father what use he meant to make of his opportunity. What
he’s doing isn’t the result of a hasty conclusion: it means years of
work and preparation.”

Archie broke off to explain himself. He had returned from Europe the
week before, and had learned on arriving that Dredge’s lectures were
stirring the world of science as nothing had stirred it since Lanfear’s
“Utility and Variation.” And the incredible outrage was that they owed
their sensational effect to the fact of being an attempted refutation of
Lanfear’s great work.

I own that I was staggered: the case looked ugly, as Archie said. And
there was a veil of reticence, of secrecy, about Dredge, that always
kept his conduct in a half-light of uncertainty. Of some men one would
have said off-hand: “It’s impossible!” But one couldn’t affirm it of
him.

Archie hadn’t seen him as yet; and Mrs. Lanfear had sent for me because
she wished me to be present at the interview between the two men. The
Lanfear ladies had a touching belief in Archie’s violence: they thought
him as terrible as a natural force. My own idea was that if there were
any broken bones they wouldn’t be Dredge’s; but I was too curious as to
the outcome not to be glad to offer my services as moderator.

First, however, I wanted to hear one of the lectures; and I went the
next afternoon. The hall was jammed, and I saw, as soon as Dredge
appeared, what increased security and ease the interest of his public
had given him. He had been clear the year before, now he was also
eloquent. The lecture was a remarkable effort: you’ll find the gist of
it in Chapter VII of “The Arrival of the Fittest.” Archie sat at my
side in a white rage; he was too clever not to measure the extent of the
disaster. And I was almost as indignant as he when we went to see Dredge
the next day.

I saw at a glance that the latter suspected nothing; and it was
characteristic of him that he began by questioning me about my finds,
and only afterward turned to reproach Archie for having been back a week
without notifying him.

“You know I’m up to my neck in this job. Why in the world didn’t you
hunt me up before this?”

The question was exasperating, and I could understand Archie’s stammer
of wrath.

“Hunt you up? Hunt you up? What the deuce are you made of, to ask me
such a question instead of wondering why I’m here now?”

Dredge bent his slow calm scrutiny on his friend’s quivering face; then
he turned to me.

“What’s the matter?” he said simply.

“The matter?” shrieked Archie, his clenched fist hovering excitedly
above the desk by which he stood; but Dredge, with unwonted quickness,
caught the fist as it descended.

“Careful--I’ve got a _Kallima_ in that jar there.” He pushed a chair
forward, and added quietly: “Sit down.”

Archie, ignoring the gesture, towered pale and avenging in his place;
and Dredge, after a moment, took the chair himself.

“The matter?” Archie reiterated with rising passion. “Are you so lost to
all sense of decency and honour that you can put that question in good
faith? Don’t you really _know_ what’s the matter?”

Dredge smiled slowly. “There are so few things one _really knows_.”

“Oh, damn your scientific hair-splitting! Don’t you know you’re
insulting my father’s memory?”

Dredge stared again, turning his spectacles thoughtfully from one of us
to the other.

“Oh, that’s it, is it? Then you’d better sit down. If you don’t see at
once it’ll take some time to make you.”

Archie burst into an ironic laugh.

“I rather think it will!” he conceded.

“Sit down, Archie,” I said, setting the example; and he obeyed, with a
gesture that made his consent a protest.

Dredge seemed to notice nothing beyond the fact that his visitors were
seated. He reached for his pipe, and filled it with the care which the
habit of delicate manipulations gave to all the motions of his long,
knotty hands.

“It’s about the lectures?” he said.

Archie’s answer was a deep scornful breath.

“You’ve only been back a week, so you’ve only heard one, I suppose?”

“It was not necessary to hear even that one. You must know the talk
they’re making. If notoriety is what you’re after--”

“Well, I’m not sorry to make a noise,” said Dredge, putting a match to
his pipe.

Archie bounded in his chair. “There’s no easier way of doing it than to
attack a man who can’t answer you!”

Dredge raised a sobering hand. “Hold on. Perhaps you and I don’t mean
the same thing. Tell me first what’s in your mind.”

The request steadied Archie, who turned on Dredge a countenance really
eloquent with filial indignation.

“It’s an odd question for you to ask; it makes me wonder what’s in
yours. Not much thought of my father, at any rate, or you couldn’t stand
in his place and use the chance he’s given you to push yourself at his
expense.”

Dredge received this in silence, puffing slowly at his pipe.

“Is that the way it strikes you?” he asked at length.

“God! It’s the way it would strike most men.”

He turned to me. “You too?”

“I can see how Archie feels,” I said.

“That I’m attacking his father’s memory to glorify myself?”

“Well, not precisely: I think what he really feels is that, if your
convictions didn’t permit you to continue his father’s teaching, you
might perhaps have done better to sever your connection with the Lanfear
lectureship.”

“Then you and he regard the Lanfear lectureship as having been founded
to perpetuate a dogma, not to try and get at the truth?”

“Certainly not,” Archie broke in. “But there’s a question of taste,
of delicacy, involved in the case that can’t be decided on abstract
principles. We know as well as you that my father meant the laboratory
and the lectureship to serve the ends of science, at whatever cost to
his own special convictions; what we feel--and you don’t seem to--is
that you’re the last man to put them to that use; and I don’t want to
remind you why.”

A slight redness rose through Dredge’s sallow skin. “You needn’t,” he
said. “It’s because he pulled me out of my hole, woke me up, made me,
shoved me off from the shore. Because he saved me ten or twenty years
of muddled effort, and put me where I am at an age when my best working
years are still ahead of me. Every one knows that’s what your father did
for me, but I’m the only person who knows the time and trouble that it
took.”

It was well said, and I glanced quickly at Archie, who was never closed
to generous emotions.

“Well, then--?” he said, flushing also.

“Well, then,” Dredge continued, his voice deepening and losing its nasal
edge, “I had to pay him back, didn’t I?”

The sudden drop flung Archie back on his prepared attitude of irony. “It
would be the natural inference--with most men.”

“Just so. And I’m not so very different. I knew your father wanted a
successor--some one who’d try and tie up the loose ends. And I took the
lectureship with that object.”

“And you’re using it to tear the whole fabric to pieces!”

Dredge paused to re-light his pipe. “Looks that way,” he conceded. “This
year anyhow.”

“_ This year_--?” Archie gasped at him.

“Yes. When I took up the job I saw it just as your father left it. Or
rather, I didn’t see any other way of going on with it. The change came
gradually, as I worked.”

“Gradually? So that you had time to look round you, to know where you
were, to see you were fatally committed to undoing the work he had
done?”

“Oh, yes--I had time,” Dredge conceded.

“And yet you kept the chair and went on with the course?”

Dredge refilled his pipe, and then turned in his seat so that he looked
squarely at Archie.

“What would your father have done in my place?” he asked.

“In your place--?”

“Yes: supposing he’d found out the things I’ve found out in the last
year or two. You’ll see what they are, and how much they count, if
you’ll run over the report of the lectures. If your father’d been alive
he might have come across the same facts just as easily.”

There was a silence which Archie at last broke by saying: “But he
didn’t, and you did. There’s the difference.”

“The difference? What difference? Would your father have suppressed the
facts if he’d found them? It’s _you_ who insult his memory by implying
it! And if I’d brought them to him, would he have used his hold over me
to get me to suppress them?”

“Certainly not. But can’t you see it’s his death that makes the
difference? He’s not here to defend his case.”

Dredge laughed, but not unkindly. “My dear Archie, your father wasn’t
one of the kind who bother to defend their case. Men like him are the
masters, not the servants, of their theories. They respect an idea only
as long as it’s of use to them; when it’s usefulness ends they chuck it
out. And that’s what your father would have done.”

Archie reddened. “Don’t you assume a good deal in taking it for granted
that he would have had to in this particular case?”

Dredge reflected. “Yes: I was going too far. Each of us can only answer
for himself. But to my mind your father’s theory is refuted.”

“And you don’t hesitate to be the man to do it?”

“Should I have been of any use if I had? And did your father ever ask
anything of me but to be of as much use as I could?”

It was Archie’s turn to reflect. “No. That was what he always wanted, of
course.”

“That’s the way I’ve always felt. The first day he took me away from
East Lethe I knew the debt I was piling up against him, and I never had
any doubt as to how I’d pay it, or how he’d want it paid. He didn’t pick
me out and train me for any object but to carry on the light. Do you
suppose he’d have wanted me to snuff it out because it happened to light
up a fact he didn’t fancy? I’m using _his_ oil to feed my torch with:
yes, but it isn’t really his torch or mine, or his oil or mine: they
belong to each of us till we drop and hand them on.”

Archie turned a sobered glance on him. “I see your point. But if the job
had to be done I don’t see that you need have done it from his chair.”

“There’s where we differ. If I did it at all I had to do it in the
best way, and with all the authority his backing gave me. If I owe your
father anything, I owe him that. It would have made him sick to see the
job badly done. And don’t you see that the way to honour him, and show
what he’s done for science, was to spare no advantage in my attack on
him--that I’m proving the strength of his position by the desperateness
of my assault?” Dredge paused and squared his lounging shoulders. “After
all,” he added, “he’s not down yet, and if I leave him standing I guess
it’ll be some time before anybody else cares to tackle him.”

There was a silence between the two men; then Dredge continued in a
lighter tone: “There’s one thing, though, that we’re both in danger
of forgetting: and that is how little, in the long run, it all counts
either way.” He smiled a little at Archie’s outraged gesture. “The
most we can any of us do--even by such a magnificent effort as your
father’s--is to turn the great marching army a hair’s breadth nearer
what seems to us the right direction; if one of us drops out, here and
there, the loss of headway’s hardly perceptible. And that’s what I’m
coming to now.”

He rose from his seat, and walked across to the hearth; then, cautiously
resting his shoulder-blades against the mantel-shelf jammed with
miscellaneous specimens, he bent his musing spectacles on Archie.

“Your father would have understood why I’ve done, what I’m doing; but
that’s no reason why the rest of you should. And I rather think it’s
the rest of you who’ve suffered most from me. He always knew what I was
_there for_, and that must have been some comfort even when I was most
in the way; but I was just an ordinary nuisance to you and your mother
and Mabel. You were all too kind to let me see it at the time, but I’ve
seen it since, and it makes me feel that, after all, the settling of
this matter lies with you. If it hurts you to have me go on with my
examination of your father’s theory, I’m ready to drop the lectures
to-morrow, and trust to the Lanfear Laboratory to breed up a young chap
who’ll knock us both out in time. You’ve only got to say the word.”

There was a pause while Dredge turned and laid his extinguished
pipe carefully between a jar of embryo sea-urchins and a colony of
regenerating planarians.

Then Archie rose and held out his hand.

“No,” he said simply; “go on.”




FULL CIRCLE


I


GEOFFREY BETTON woke rather late--so late that the winter sunlight
sliding across his warm red carpet struck his eyes as he turned on the
pillow.

Strett, the valet, had been in, drawn the bath in the adjoining
dressing-room, placed the crystal and silver cigarette-box at his side,
put a match to the fire, and thrown open the windows to the bright
morning air. It brought in, on the glitter of sun, all the shrill crisp
morning noises--those piercing notes of the American thoroughfare
that seem to take a sharper vibration from the clearness of the medium
through which they pass.

Betton raised himself languidly. That was the voice of Fifth Avenue
below his windows. He remembered that when he moved into his rooms
eighteen months before, the sound had been like music to him: the
complex orchestration to which the tune of his new life was set. Now it
filled him with horror and weariness, since it had become the symbol of
the hurry and noise of that new life. He had been far less hurried in
the old days when he had to be up by seven, and down at the office sharp
at nine. Now that he got up when he chose, and his life had no fixed
framework of duties, the hours hunted him like a pack of blood-hounds.

He dropped back on his pillows with a groan. Yes--not a year ago there
had been a positively sensuous joy in getting out of bed, feeling
under his bare feet the softness of the sunlit carpet, and entering the
shining tiled sanctuary where his great porcelain bath proffered its
renovating flood. But then a year ago he could still call up the horror
of the communal plunge at his earlier lodgings: the listening for other
bathers, the dodging of shrouded ladies in “crimping”-pins, the cold
wait on the landing, the reluctant descent into a blotchy tin bath, and
the effort to identify one’s soap and nail-brush among the promiscuous
implements of ablution. That memory had faded now, and Betton saw only
the dark hours to which his blue and white temple of refreshment formed
a kind of glittering antechamber. For after his bath came his breakfast,
and on the breakfast-tray his letters. His letters!

He remembered--and _that_ memory had not faded!--the thrill with which
he had opened the first missive in a strange feminine hand: the letter
beginning: “I wonder if you’ll mind an unknown reader’s telling you all
that your book has been to her?”

_ Mind?_ Ye gods, he minded now! For more than a year after
the publication of “Diadems and Faggots” the letters, the inane
indiscriminate letters of condemnation, of criticism, of interrogation,
had poured in on him by every post. Hundreds of unknown readers had told
him with unsparing detail all that his book had been to them. And the
wonder of it was, when all was said and done, that it had really been so
little--that when their thick broth of praise was strained through the
author’s anxious vanity there remained to him so small a sediment of
definite specific understanding! No--it was always the same thing, over
and over and over again--the same vague gush of adjectives, the same
incorrigible tendency to estimate his effort according to each writer’s
personal preferences, instead of regarding it as a work of art, a thing
to be measured by objective standards!

He smiled to think how little, at first, he had felt the vanity of it
all. He had found a savour even in the grosser evidences of popularity:
the advertisements of his book, the daily shower of “clippings,” the
sense that, when he entered a restaurant or a theatre, people nudged
each other and said “That’s Betton.” Yes, the publicity had been sweet
to him--at first. He had been touched by the sympathy of his fellow-men:
had thought indulgently of the world, as a better place than the
failures and the dyspeptics would acknowledge. And then his success
began to submerge him: he gasped under the thickening shower of letters.
His admirers were really unappeasable. And they wanted him to do such
preposterous things--to give lectures, to head movements, to be tendered
receptions, to speak at banquets, to address mothers, to plead for
orphans, to go up in balloons, to lead the struggle for sterilized milk.
They wanted his photograph for literary supplements, his autograph for
charity bazaars, his name on committees, literary, educational,
and social; above all, they wanted his opinion on everything: on
Christianity, Buddhism, tight lacing, the drug-habit, democratic
government, female suffrage and love. Perhaps the chief benefit of this
demand was his incidentally learning from it how few opinions he really
had: the only one that remained with him was a rooted horror of all
forms of correspondence. He had been unutterably thankful when the
letters began to fall off.

“Diadems and Faggots” was now two years old, and the moment was at hand
when its author might have counted on regaining the blessed shelter of
oblivion--if only he had not written another book! For it was the
worst part of his plight that his first success had goaded him to
the perpetration of this particular folly--that one of the incentives
(hideous thought!) to his new work had been the desire to extend and
perpetuate his popularity. And this very week the book was to come out,
and the letters, the cursed letters, would begin again!

Wistfully, almost plaintively, he contemplated the breakfast-tray with
which Strett presently appeared. It bore only two notes and the morning
journals, but he knew that within the week it would groan under its
epistolary burden. The very newspapers flung the fact at him as he
opened them.

READY ON MONDAY.

GEOFFREY BETTON’S NEW NOVEL

ABUNDANCE.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “DIADEMS AND FAGGOTS.”

FIRST EDITION OF ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND ALREADY SOLD OUT.

ORDER NOW.

A hundred and fifty thousand volumes! And an average of three readers to
each! Half a million of people would be reading him within a week, and
every one of them would write to him, and their friends and relations
would write too. He laid down the paper with a shudder.

The two notes looked harmless enough, and the calligraphy of one was
vaguely familiar. He opened the envelope and looked at the signature:
_Duncan Vyse_. He had not seen the name in years--what on earth could
Duncan Vyse have to say? He ran over the page and dropped it with a
wondering exclamation, which the watchful Strett, re-entering, met by a
tentative “Yes, sir?”

“Nothing. Yes--that is--” Betton picked up the note. “There’s a
gentleman, a Mr. Vyse, coming to see me at ten.”

Strett glanced at the clock. “Yes, sir. You’ll remember that ten was the
hour you appointed for the secretaries to call, sir.”

Betton nodded. “I’ll see Mr. Vyse first. My clothes, please.”

As he got into them, in the state of irritable hurry that had become
almost chronic with him, he continued to think about Duncan Vyse. They
had seen a lot of each other for the few years after both had left
Harvard: the hard happy years when Betton had been grinding at his
business and Vyse--poor devil!--trying to write. The novelist recalled
his friend’s attempts with a smile; then the memory of one small volume
came back to him. It was a novel: “The Lifted Lamp.” There was stuff in
that, certainly. He remembered Vyse’s tossing it down on his table with
a gesture of despair when it came back from the last publisher. Betton,
taking it up indifferently, had sat riveted till daylight. When he
ended, the impression was so strong that he said to himself: “I’ll
tell Apthorn about it--I’ll go and see him to-morrow.” His own secret
literary yearnings gave him a passionate desire to champion Vyse, to see
him triumph over the ignorance and timidity of the publishers. Apthorn
was the youngest of the guild, still capable of opinions and the courage
of them, a personal friend of Betton’s, and, as it happened, the man
afterward to become known as the privileged publisher of “Diadems and
Faggots.” Unluckily the next day something unexpected turned up, and
Betton forgot about Vyse and his manuscript. He continued to forget for
a month, and then came a note from Vyse, who was ill, and wrote to
ask what his friend had done. Betton did not like to say “I’ve done
nothing,” so he left the note unanswered, and vowed again: “I’ll see
Apthorn.”

The following day he was called to the West on business, and was gone
a month. When he came back, there was another note from Vyse, who was
still ill, and desperately hard up. “I’ll take anything for the book,
if they’ll advance me two hundred dollars.” Betton, full of compunction,
would gladly have advanced the sum himself; but he was hard up too,
and could only swear inwardly: “I’ll write to Apthorn.” Then he glanced
again at the manuscript, and reflected: “No--there are things in it that
need explaining. I’d better see him.”

Once he went so far as to telephone Apthorn, but the publisher was out.
Then he finally and completely forgot.

One Sunday he went out of town, and on his return, rummaging among
the papers on his desk, he missed “The Lifted Lamp,” which had been
gathering dust there for half a year. What the deuce could have become
of it? Betton spent a feverish hour in vainly increasing the disorder of
his documents, and then bethought himself of calling the maid-servant,
who first indignantly denied having touched anything (“I can see that’s
true from the dust,” Betton scathingly interjected), and then mentioned
with hauteur that a young lady had called in his absence and asked to be
allowed to get a book.

“A lady? Did you let her come up?”

“She said somebody’d sent her.”

Vyse, of course--Vyse had sent her for his manuscript! He was always
mixed up with some woman, and it was just like him to send the girl of
the moment to Betton’s lodgings, with instructions to force the door
in his absence. Vyse had never been remarkable for delicacy. Betton,
furious, glanced over his table to see if any of his own effects were
missing--one couldn’t tell, with the company Vyse kept!--and then
dismissed the matter from his mind, with a vague sense of magnanimity in
doing so. He felt himself exonerated by Vyse’s conduct.

The sense of magnanimity was still uppermost when the valet opened the
door to announce “Mr. Vyse,” and Betton, a moment later, crossed the
threshold of his pleasant library.

His first thought was that the man facing him from the hearth-rug was
the very Duncan Vyse of old: small, starved, bleached-looking, with the
same sidelong movements, the same queer air of anaemic truculence. Only
he had grown shabbier, and bald.

Betton held out a hospitable hand.

“This is a good surprise! Glad you looked me up, my dear fellow.”

Vyse’s palm was damp and bony: he had always had a disagreeable hand.

“You got my note? You know what I’ve come for?” he said.

“About the secretaryship? (Sit down.) Is that really serious?”

Betton lowered himself luxuriously into one of his vast Maple
arm-chairs. He had grown stouter in the last year, and the cushion
behind him fitted comfortably into the crease of his nape. As he leaned
back he caught sight of his image in the mirror between the windows, and
reflected uneasily that Vyse would not find _him_ unchanged.

“Serious?” Vyse rejoined. “Why not? Aren’t _you?_”

“Oh, perfectly.” Betton laughed apologetically. “Only--well, the fact
is, you may not understand what rubbish a secretary of mine would have
to deal with. In advertising for one I never imagined--I didn’t aspire
to any one above the ordinary hack.”

“I’m the ordinary hack,” said Vyse drily.

Betton’s affable gesture protested. “My dear fellow--. You see it’s not
business--what I’m in now,” he continued with a laugh.

Vyse’s thin lips seemed to form a noiseless “_ Isn’t_ it?” which they
instantly transposed into the audibly reply: “I inferred from your
advertisement that you want some one to relieve you in your literary
work. Dictation, short-hand--that kind of thing?”

“Well, no: not that either. I type my own things. What I’m looking for
is somebody who won’t be above tackling my correspondence.”

Vyse looked slightly surprised. “I should be glad of the job,” he then
said.

Betton began to feel a vague embarrassment. He had supposed that such a
proposal would be instantly rejected. “It would be only for an hour
or two a day--if you’re doing any writing of your own?” he threw out
interrogatively.

“No. I’ve given all that up. I’m in an office now--business. But it
doesn’t take all my time, or pay enough to keep me alive.”

“In that case, my dear fellow--if you could come every morning; but
it’s mostly awful bosh, you know,” Betton again broke off, with growing
awkwardness.

Vyse glanced at him humorously. “What you want me to write?”

“Well, that depends--” Betton sketched the obligatory smile. “But I was
thinking of the letters you’ll have to answer. Letters about my books,
you know--I’ve another one appearing next week. And I want to be
beforehand now--dam the flood before it swamps me. Have you any idea of
the deluge of stuff that people write to a successful novelist?”

As Betton spoke, he saw a tinge of red on Vyse’s thin cheek, and his own
reflected it in a richer glow of shame. “I mean--I mean--” he stammered
helplessly.

“No, I haven’t,” said Vyse; “but it will be awfully jolly finding out.”

There was a pause, groping and desperate on Betton’s part, sardonically
calm on his visitor’s.

“You--you’ve given up writing altogether?” Betton continued.

“Yes; we’ve changed places, as it were.” Vyse paused. “But about these
letters--you dictate the answers?”

“Lord, no! That’s the reason why I said I wanted somebody--er--well used
to writing. I don’t want to have anything to do with them--not a thing!
You’ll have to answer them as if they were written to _you_--” Betton
pulled himself up again, and rising in confusion jerked open one of the
drawers of his writing-table.

“Here--this kind of rubbish,” he said, tossing a packet of letters onto
Vyse’s knee.

“Oh--you keep them, do you?” said Vyse simply.

“I--well--some of them; a few of the funniest only.”

Vyse slipped off the band and began to open the letters. While he was
glancing over them Betton again caught his own reflection in the
glass, and asked himself what impression he had made on his visitor.
It occurred to him for the first time that his high-coloured well-fed
person presented the image of commercial rather than of intellectual
achievement. He did not look like his own idea of the author of “Diadems
and Faggots”--and he wondered why.

Vyse laid the letters aside. “I think I can do it--if you’ll give me a
notion of the tone I’m to take.”

“The tone?”

“Yes--that is, if I’m to sign your name.”

“Oh, of course: I expect you to sign for me. As for the tone, say just
what you’d--well, say all you can without encouraging them to answer.”

Vyse rose from his seat. “I could submit a few specimens,” he suggested.

“Oh, as to that--you always wrote better than I do,” said Betton
handsomely.

“I’ve never had this kind of thing to write. When do you wish me to
begin?” Vyse enquired, ignoring the tribute.

“The book’s out on Monday. The deluge will begin about three days after.
Will you turn up on Thursday at this hour?” Betton held his hand out
with real heartiness. “It was great luck for me, your striking that
advertisement. Don’t be too harsh with my correspondents--I owe them
something for having brought us together.”



II


THE deluge began punctually on the Thursday, and Vyse, arriving as
punctually, had an impressive pile of letters to attack. Betton, on his
way to the Park for a ride, came into the library, smoking the cigarette
of indolence, to look over his secretary’s shoulder.

“How many of ‘em? Twenty? Good Lord! It’s going to be worse than
‘Diadems.’ I’ve just had my first quiet breakfast in two years--time
to read the papers and loaf. How I used to dread the sight of my
letter-box! Now I sha’n’t know I have one.”

He leaned over Vyse’s chair, and the secretary handed him a letter.

“Here’s rather an exceptional one--lady, evidently. I thought you might
want to answer it yourself--”

“Exceptional?” Betton ran over the mauve pages and tossed them down.
“Why, my dear man, I get hundreds like that. You’ll have to be pretty
short with her, or she’ll send her photograph.”

He clapped Vyse on the shoulder and turned away, humming a tune. “Stay
to luncheon,” he called back gaily from the threshold.

After luncheon Vyse insisted on showing a few of his answers to the
first batch of letters. “If I’ve struck the note I won’t bother you
again,” he urged; and Betton groaningly consented.

“My dear fellow, they’re beautiful--too beautiful. I’ll be let in for a
correspondence with every one of these people.”

Vyse, at this, meditated for a while above a blank sheet. “All
right--how’s this?” he said, after another interval of rapid writing.

Betton glanced over the page. “By George--by George! Won’t she _see_
it?” he exulted, between fear and rapture.

“It’s wonderful how little people see,” said Vyse reassuringly.

The letters continued to pour in for several weeks after the appearance
of “Abundance.” For five or six blissful days Betton did not even have
his mail brought to him, trusting to Vyse to single out his personal
correspondence, and to deal with the rest according to their agreement.
During those days he luxuriated in a sense of wild and lawless freedom;
then, gradually, he began to feel the need of fresh restraints to break,
and learned that the zest of liberty lies in the escape from specific
obligations. At first he was conscious only of a vague hunger, but in
time the craving resolved into a shame-faced desire to see his letters.

“After all, I hated them only because I had to answer them”; and he told
Vyse carelessly that he wished all his letters submitted to him before
the secretary answered them.

At first he pushed aside those beginning: “I have just laid down
‘Abundance’ after a third reading,” or: “Every day for the last month
I have been telephoning my bookseller to know when your novel would be
out.” But little by little the freshness of his interest revived, and
even this stereotyped homage began to arrest his eye. At 

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