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Under the Law

by Edwina Stanton Babcock · English · Gutenberg #48009 · 520,710 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Under the Law

Author: Edwina Stanton Babcock

Illustrator: Ralph P. Coleman


        
Release date: January 18, 2015 [eBook #48009]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER THE LAW ***

[Illustration: HE TURNED TOWARD HER AND LOOKED LONG UPON THE FACE THAT
HAD BECOME HIS STAR]

        UNDER THE
           LAW

           BY

    EDWINA STANTON BABCOCK

       Frontispiece by

       RALPH P. COLEMAN

     THE PENN PUBLISHING
    COMPANY PHILADELPHIA
           1923

         COPYRIGHT
         1922 BY
         THE PENN
         PUBLISHING
         COMPANY

       [Illustration]

       Under the Law

     Made in the U. S. A.

      _Inscribed to the
    Sards, Mingas and Dunstans
       of this age_

  "But if ye be led of the Spirit ye are not under the law."
                                          --GALATIANS 5:18.




Contents


          I. ACTION                          7

         II. UNDER THE LAW                  15

        III. BY-LAWS                        19

         IV. OTHER LAWS                     26

          V. FOR LIFE                       32

         VI. MINGA'S LAWS                   43

        VII. THE ORGAN BUILDER'S HOUSE      55

       VIII. TRAITS                         64

         IX. WHOOPING IT UP                 79

          X. THE EXPEDITION                 92

         XI. TERMS                         108

        XII. THE MAN ON THE PLACE          120

       XIII. PEARS AND POETRY              131

        XIV. PINK PEARLS                   147

         XV. REVELATIONS                   159

        XVI. SOPHISTICATION                175

       XVII. A GOOD NAME                   194

      XVIII. THE TAWNY TROOP METHOD        210

        XIX. OLD LETTERS                   233

         XX. EXPLOSIVE DUST                249

        XXI. AUTHORITY                     267

       XXII. SUSPICION                     285

      XXIII. THE PERCEPTIONS OF MINGA      305

       XXIV. "TERRY!"                      321

        XXV. THE MEDE AND THE PERSIAN      326

       XXVI. PENALTIES                     335

      XXVII. THE JUDGE IS IMPRESSED        347



Under the Law




CHAPTER I

ACTION


The streets between Willow Roads and the little town of Morris on the
Hudson were still corrugated with March thaw. But the sun shone warmly
and there was the wet smell of oncoming spring in the air. Women flung
open their coats at the neck; children skipped lightly to school. The
river took on an ethereal light that to the shadmen meant the time when
their soggy boats would be moored to the long lines of stakes near the
channel. The country highways were less hopeless with mud, and the
spring tramp began appearing at back doors.

A girl, driving her car rather absently through the unimaginative
streets of Morris, stopped suddenly at sight of a ring of loafers
gathered by the curb in a side street, jeering mildly and apparently
baiting a tumbled heap of something in the gutter. What was it? A dog?
A child? Sard Bogart, her brown eyes alert, sprang from her car and
went over to see.

As the girl approached the group, one or two of the older and better
dressed townspeople edged rather shamefacedly away. The village
postman, hailing the girl loquaciously, explained, "Just one of them
Gloomy Guses. They come out like turtles this time of the year. This
feller has likely stole a ride on a freight car and been dumped off at
West Morris. Seems he's trying to pertend he don't know who he is. That
ain't hard for a tramp; ain't nobody anyhow." The postman scratched his
head, wishing to cover all aspects of the matter. "Ef he's drunk, it's
a new kind of drunk. Vanilla extract, they tell me, is what this kind
boozes on nowadays." To the girl's indignant question, "Oh, they ain't
doing him no harm; just worrying him a little to see him act funny.
The authorities?" the postman looked a little vague. "Well, I should
say, it being about noon, that the authorities has gone home to their
dinners."

The young figure crossed the street and approached the jeering loafers
absorbed in prodding the helpless bundle of humanity in the gutter.
They shoved it from side to side as they demanded, "Say, where's yer
wife? Where'd ye come from? We'll tell yer where to get off! Say, Jack,
where do you keep the stuff? You tell me, I won't let anybody know."

More comments of a humorous nature were made for the benefit of the
girl approaching. "He ain't so handsome when ye come close up." One
wag hushed the others elaborately. "No, mebbe it's some friend of this
young lady's. Say, take him for a ride, Miss. I'll bet he ain't never
had one."

"Give him a shave first," urged one gum-chewing youth. There was
violent nudging from a rather stout woman in the group. "Shut up! Ain't
you got no sense? That's Judge Bogart's daughter." Then to railing
unbelief, "Sure it is. Ain't I washed down to her house a hundred
times? Hullo, Miss Bogart, ain't it terrible how these fellers is
treating that poor drunk?"

At the voice, the girl lifted her concerned gaze from the sight of
the wretched figure sitting now on the curbstone, both bleeding
shoe-wrecked feet in the gutter.

"Mrs. Croyder, this is pitiful. Why doesn't someone do something? Why
do the authorities permit people to be tormented like this?"

Mrs. Croyder, as one not accustomed to question the vagaries of the
authorities, was a little vague.

"Well, now, Mr. Snowgen, that's the policeman, wouldn't never hear to
anything like it, but he's gone home to his dinner."

"Then the traffic police?" The girl looked about her eagerly.

"They've gone home to their dinners,"

"But surely----" With an impatient exclamation the girl bent down
in the middle of the awed circle and looked keenly into the face of
the vagabond on the curb. She examined the bleeding feet and pale,
distraught face and spoke very gently. "Can I help you?"

The soft girlish tones seemed hardly to penetrate to the consciousness
of the tramp. He did not look up nor try to answer. At last, in
response to the prodding toe of a village gamin and his challenge,
"Say, ain't you got no manners? The lady is speakin' to yer," the
head, sunk between the shivering shoulders, was raised with a
sodden, uncomprehending look. Then the man, ragged, unshaven, with
an unspeakable look of abandoned misery, did a strange thing. He
struggled, shaking as with palsy, to his feet. There was a week's
reddish growth of beard on his white face; his voice, very feeble,
stammered and was lost in places, but he replied slowly, "Can--can you
read that name in my hat? Perhaps there is an address there, I don't
know. I can't remember." With a hand like a claw, the tramp pointed to
a wrinkled cap lying in the gutter.

Sard, seeing him sway as though he would pitch forward, put out an
arm to steady him. At this, a passer-by came up to her and, without a
word, supported the collapsing man on the other side. This youth smiled
sympathetically.

"Is there anything I can do, Miss Bogart?"

The girl turned sharply. "Mr. Lowden," then with a little air of
relief, "this man seems dazed, sick. Oughtn't we get help? Oughtn't we
to do something?"

"Wait till Snowgen gets back from his dinner," bawled the chorus of
loafers. A dozen voices advised, "Snowgen will put him in the lock-up,
and if he can't prove anything, they'll send him up for vagrancy.
Here's his hat. No, ma'am, I wouldn't touch it if I was you; that
ain't no hat fer a lady to hold." One of the group, with effects of
delicate shrinking, held the wretched headgear so that the girl could
read a name written with ink on a piece of tape stitched inside on the
lining. There were two initials smutted beyond recognition, but she
could distinguish the surname "Colter." With a curious little gesture
of courtesy, she bent to the pitiful figure she was helping support,
asking gravely and distinctly, "Mr. Colter, you are in trouble. Can we
help you? Is there anything we can do for you?"

This courtesy to the forlorn scarecrow the crowd found vastly amusing.
The thing brought laughter and the inevitable _double entente_ of
small-town comprehension. At last someone said wrathfully, "Shut up!
Don't you know nothing? That there's the Judge's daughter. She ain't no
fool!" The crowd, now avid for more sensation, watched to see how the
wastrel tottering there would take this thing.

The shaking hand was held out for the cap. Some bystander with rough
hand jammed it on the tumbled head of thick auburn hair, but the tramp
feebly removed it. He turned slowly, staring into the girl's face. His
eyes, of a very intense blue, were large and unnaturally bright, as
from fever.

"Thank you," he said weakly. Then with a swift glance full of
unnameable shame, "Please don't worry about me. I am only going to find
work--somewhere," The man closed his eyes, muttering,

"When I can forget--when I can remember----"

Sard Bogart turned to the youth who was helping her. "Will you come
with me?" she appealed. He nodded.

"I am going to drive this poor thing to that little boarding-house on
Norman Street. I know the woman who keeps it. It is quiet and clean."

The circle of loafers tittered. "Say, lady, wait till Snowgen gets
back from his dinner. Snowgen can take the feller to the right
boarding-house, all right."

The girl, for answer, smiled good-humoredly. "Mr. Snowgen can interview
this man after he has been fed and can speak for himself. Just at
present, Mr. Lowden and I will take charge."

Lowden, the young assistant of the Morris Bank, frowned on any more
suggestions, and together the man and girl supported the wretched
figure to the car. Together they somehow got it to a seat. Then the
young fellow watched Sard with admiration as she calmly drove with her
rather dubious-looking passenger through the staring streets of Morris.

The girl was silent, and the young banker made but one observation.
"Small town life breeds a thirst for sensation, doesn't it? It never
gets mentally to the economic questions lying back of the sensation."

"It is still the Binet Test, fourteen-year-old mind," laughed the girl.

As the car halted before the little boarding-house on Norman Street,
Lowden begged, "I wish you'd let me handle all the rest."

The girl turned her eyes on him. "You think I may meet with awkward
things?"

The young banker was evasive. "Let's remember we are rather a mean
little town," he said simply. "Please leave it all to me. I'll do
exactly as you say."

The girl's grave look rested on the wreck of a man sitting in a heap
beside her, his head sunk on his chest, his ragged coat open and
showing his bare, famished-looking chest, his white lips muttering
feebly.

"I want him put to bed and fed--very lightly at first. I want him
bathed and shaved, after a doctor has seen him. I want him either
sent to the hospital here at my expense or, when he is strong enough,
to come to my father for work. I want him to be sure, sure, he has
friends. I want him," the quick tears came into her young eyes, "to
feel that he has another chance."

The youth nodded, his eyes on hers. This was Sard Bogart, the Judge's
daughter, who had been back from college only a few months. It was
understood in the villages of Morris and Willow Roads that Miss Bogart
was a "queer," lonely girl, impatient of many things, apt to be
impulsive and to do impolitic and "unpopular" things. This was one of
the things--pulling a muddy gutter-snipe out of the gutter. Yet the
light in the girl's clear brown eyes was a new and grateful thing to
the young bank officer. Somehow he felt as if he had never looked into
a fine woman's eyes before. He took his orders gladly and with sober
admiration. "And keep me in touch, won't you?" The girl leaned from the
car, laying her commands on him. He lifted his hat gravely.

Lowden alighted and helped down the ragged vagrant. His gentleness was
like Sard's own. The girl, watching this gentleness, saw the broken
figure of the man try to turn once--try to look back at her. "Yes?"
said the girl "Yes?" Then her eyes, warm with pity, "Wait a moment,
please, Mr. Lowden. Yes, Colter, what is it you want to say?"

But she could not understand. She saw only a shaken, shivering man
muttering, "I can't remember," and again the stammering sentence, "I
can't remember."




CHAPTER II

UNDER THE LAW


The house faced on the river. The massive hills that turned bronze in
the setting sun were irregular background for the white castle-like
buildings on the eastern banks. But the western shore of the Hudson
had set between small mountains little, hilly-looking villages; among
them were the Dutch towns, Morris and Willow Roads, whose old roofs,
slowly giving way to factories and churches of one period, were at
last disappearing before the real estate man's idea of a suburban
development. At the edge of this development were the far-apart homes
of the well-to-do and the long lines of green lawns; the rich trees
and tinted shrubberies were illumined and laced with a thousand lovely
colors of massed iris and waving tulips set, like the gardens on the
river, against royal purple of opposite shores.

Sard's room was in the square tower of the house her father had
built in his more grandiloquent days. If the Judge's wife had lived,
they might have lengthened and strengthened the home into something
like a practical sunny house of our day, but as it was, the curious
construction of red sandstone and black and white Tudor retained its
perplexed conglomerate air, only saved from freakishness by the soft
mantle of vines that ruffled the chimney and girdled its windows.
All around to the sloping banks of the river were the trees that
the Judge's father had planted and tended into maturity. It was a
League of Nations in Trees! English maples, Norway spruces, lindens,
horse-chestnuts from Versailles, Japanese maples and Greek planes and
orange trees from along the Mediterranean. To Sard, since her very
first party dress, those trees had seemed a sort of litany; the noble
forms of every clime and country raised their mysterious crests, sought
with yearning roots, were full of the first murmur of June-bee days;
waved like women the soft undulations of their shapes, bathed in blue
morning or loomed in formless grandeur on the night.

It was a puzzle to Sard that these trees kept to the laws of their
growth in one soil.

The windows of Sard's room opened to the four winds and gave on
the tree-fringed expanse of water. At night those tower panes were
literally dashed with stars. As a little girl she had lain watching
their fairy dance like fire-flies; later her clear brown eyes became
fixed thoughtfully on what seemed strings of jasmine-like blossoms.
Coming home from boarding-school, the stars half thrilled her with
mystical trailing blossoms of a home-sky, but now of late, after
college and a new sense of values, these stars had suddenly ceased
throwing their soft lights across the panes. East, west, north and
south, they now stood in an awful order like knights leaning on spears.
They were challenging in their geometry, severe in their puzzling
fixity; they seemed to say--"Well, Sard, you are grown up now; you
make your own choices; what is your law? We have our law--have you
discovered yours?"

During two years at college Sard had thought little about "law." The
stars there had asked few questions. They had seemed companionable,
dashing confidently, shining over the campus with capricious groups of
girls; they had shone on bright camp-fires and twinkled at the saucy
songs shouted into their very eyes. The college stars had seemed to
vibrate like sleigh-bells to such defiant songs as "Where, oh death, is
thy stingalingaling?" and they thrilled to a thousand funny whistles
and calls of a rather self-consciously emphasized youth. But here they
were back with their spell and their question. Knights with spears,
they rode softly past the window-panes, keeping their geometric order,
saying, insistently--"This is our law; we obey always. What is your
law?"

At first the thing had awed Sard, then saddened her. So after all, the
world physical went on this grand orderly, terrible sort of way, and
so did the spiritual world seem to, no matter how much one wanted to
change things; but the world of people and purpose? how about that?

What should be the laws of one's life? The books on Sard's shelves
gleamed in the moonlight. Here and there they had helped and suggested
and one or two men or women Sard had met seemed to have an idea.
Then this thing they called "Love"--Sard, lying in bed, pondered;
did love do what people said it did, sweeten, make deeper, wiser?
Well, Sard had seen girls at college who became engaged, said they
were in love, certainly were changed and made queer by a force bigger
than themselves; and yet it all seemed to end trivially. One or two
children, a little house not very well kept, a tired husband, not
"enough" money ... and there were other girls who mocked at love and
played with it and coquetted until their faces became cynical, hard and
horrible.... If there were things that swept people so they rose bigger
and finer than they had ever dreamed themselves to be, that might
count some way, but how did they start becoming bigger and finer? One
couldn't go down-stairs and announce to one's family--"From now on I am
going to be bigger and finer." So, tossing away from the star inquiry,
turning penitently back to it, the young form fought out the thing. A
sense of awful loneliness and youth came to Sard, an awful sense of not
knowing herself, not working from the most inward of her. She stretched
out appealing arms--"What are my laws?" she asked softly. "Oh, what are
my laws?" For Sard knew, and knew with feelings of awe that for every
life that counted there must be laws.




CHAPTER III

BY-LAWS


The Judge opened the door and propelled himself into the room in a
finicking, faultfinding way, peculiarly inappropriate to his massive
shoulders and head. He grunted something to Sard's "Good-morning, Dad,"
picked up his paper and flapped it into a fold. His slow eyes, seeming
like ground glass set in front of the remorseless deliberations of his
mind, paused at the coffee-urn, as he made inquiry:

"Dunstan not down yet?"

For answer Dunstan Bogart shuffled down the broad stairs and, slipping
on a rug, entered the dining-room with an operatic air of being in
extreme haste. Half tumbling into the room, he halted, dramatically,
appearing to remind himself that the breakfast-room was holy ground.
"Greeting to thee, fellow sufferers," he announced cheerfully. He made
passes at his father's back, stared his aunt solemnly in the face,
ruffled Sard's hair and finally took his seat.

"Frogs in the finger-bowls again?" he questioned sepulchrally. "Else
why all this gloom?"

The Judge, unnoticing, motioned his finished grapefruit away. No one
appearing to effect this transfer, he indicated the butler's pantry
back of him and Sard felt anew for the electric bell.

"I wonder if this thing works--it doesn't seem to ring in the kitchen."

"It is at present ringing in the chicken-coop and the garage,"
announced Dunstan; "I heard it as I dressed--it is ringing in
the furnace and in the fountain; it is ringing in Heaven, it is
ringing--in--excuse me."

The Judge, twitching the paper, looked at his son. "She ought to hear
it," he growled; "ring it again."

Dunstan suddenly dived under the table, feeling for the button.

"Blame not the damsel," came the lad's voice, this time near Sard's
feet.

"Cuss the battery if you must cuss." He emerged from under the table
and catapulted into the kitchen, where he nearly upset the cook,
entering with a tray of smoking Sally Lunn. His father followed him
with a cold eye of disgust.

"Does he think that sort of thing amusing?" he inquired. The sacks
under the Judge's dull eyes had a slightly swelled, feverish look.
The eyes themselves were leaden gooseberry and boiled hard in the
pupil. The Judge's nose, aristocratic and sharp, held a fearful look
of pride, and the grizzled hair, scant on his head, was heavy on ears
and eyebrows. Sard had often thought that the men and women brought
before her father must have had dread long before the slightly nasal
voice deliberately twanged out the sentence. But as a little girl she
remembered her mother always said to her, "Baby, we love Foddie, don't
we? Foddie won't send _us_ with the naughty pwisoners to pwison.
Foddie won't take away all our nice toys and put us in dungeons." There
was invariably a smell of cologne and little soft tickles of curls that
went with this, and a rustle of spreading ruffled silks and laces.
With these things, part of their pretty feminine play, Sard could hear
the whisper, that strange mother whisper, the whisper which is back
of the building of the whole world, the whisper which is responsible
for the best men and the best women, for all greatness and heroism
and sometimes for the weakness and foolishness and decadence--The
Mother-whisper.

"We love Foddie, little Sard, don't we? We aren't afraid of him--he
won't send us to pwison." Then over their own clasping had come the
man's bear hug and little laughs and screams from her pretty mother.
Then Sard had always gone gravely and happily away to play.

Dunstan returned from the kitchen with the air of news. "Cook hath
secured the main part of the breakfast booty, but thy maiden hath
left--she answers not to her name in the scullery."

Miss Aurelia Bogart, the Judge's sister, sighed deeply. "Poor Dora, she
never came in at all last night--she--I--you--well, she is taking this
thing very hard--I suppose," with another sigh, "it is natural."

Dunstan grinned. "You are right, Aunt Reely; right, delicate nun! It is
not unnatural to be sad when your only brother is indicted for murder.
So the fair nymph never came in at all last night? Queer about these
women." Dunstan winked at his sister, then stared blankly into his
father's equally blank face.

"I say, Pop, are you really going to jug him for life, meaning the
tow-headed murderer brother of our esteemed waitress?"

The Judge turned. It might have been a veritable mask of implacability
that met the young brown faun-like gaze turned toward it, except that
plaster is tenderer and softer than the human face devoid of the
emotions of the human heart. A human face controlled by machine action
is a terrible thing to see. The Judge had for years been a machine.

Dunstan's own face reddened and turned away. Sticking out his cup in
the direction of the breakfast urn, the Judge remarked curtly, "More
sugar." Then to his son, "I rather fancy your sort of levity is not as
amusing as you seem to think. It is merely underbred and oafish, a sort
of nigger minstrel's buffoonery." The Judge paused a moment and then
added coolly, "As for what you wish to know, I am always ready to talk
with you on any subject that is not pure meddling on your part."

"Ah----" remarked Dunstan, with reverent aplomb. "I heard the kitchen
door bang; she's back. 'Tis well; ring for hot muffins." With a curious
glint of the brown eyes, Dunstan looked back into the cold gaze fixed
upon him. But pure animal joy cannot long survive the mortal ice of
the glacial human spirit. The dark eyes fell and the youth murmured
thoughtfully, _"and be hanged by the neck till you are dead"_.

Then the Judge rose and after they had heard the whine of his car
swinging out of the drive, Sard and her brother looked at each other.
Together they had noted the red eyes of the maid who, high-heeled of
shoe and extravagant of dark hair, had replenished the muffins and
brought back the coffee-urn.

"I don't envy you your job, Sard," Dunstan rose, went to the glass and
settled his tie. "You were a gump not to go on with college and get a
'kayrear' like the other flappers. 'Father needs you'--poof! He needs
nothing but that ice-box he calls himself. By heck!" Dunstan turned
suddenly. "Do you know I believe it is sentencing people to death and
the Can that makes him like that? It--it does something to him, don't
you see?" But from his interest in the idea Dunstan went to concern for
his sister. "Aunt Reely could run this joint. You go in for a career,
Sard, and get out from under."

His sister laughed. "After all, he's the only father we've got, Dunce.
Maybe after I've been around home a bit--it seemed dreadful when Father
wanted me here not to come--for him to have nothing that belonged to
him." Sard frowned a little. "Don't you think parents do an awful lot
for us, and what do we do for them? Look at poor little mother. I
used to visit for months at a time and leave her. She must have been
lonely--she never said so--and then those two years at college and
then--she went----" Sard's eyes widened with the sense of what those
lonely months had been--of the companionship she herself had lost.

"Well," Dunstan loomed over her gloomily, "you'll turn into an old
maid, a wall flower, a sort of solemn crow." He stood on his heels,
hands in his pockets, surveying her. "It's all of a piece," he said
fretfully. "You took down those bally chromos of Paw's and you got
pretty chintz for the chairs and put around bright candles--and he
hated it. You begged him to let you cut windows into the hall and he
squashed you. You can't get sun and joy into this house, and you can't
get sun and human warmth into that jellyfish." With a sudden squirm
Dunstan struck a match. "Oh, he's so plaguy sure," he growled. "Law?
law?--a lot of stuff in books brought down from the funny old bigwigs
in England--all scared of their king; all hanging on to rotten things
they called 'precedents' for fear somebody would get something away
from them; charters, burning of witches, dungeons, strait-jackets,
ducking-stools; Father belongs to those days! Well," the young fellow
turned upon his sister fiercely, "they know no better, but you and I do
know better. We belong to a different age, and we sit here comfortable
and happy while our smug parent does for a young fellow, a young
blood-and-bone man, full of grit and sap and dreams, a fellow that
could sail a boat and cut down a tree! We send him to a filthy, smelly
hell of a prison with a lot of awful men!" Dunstan stopped. "I went
through State prison once, and the smell of it alone would rot a man's
soul--keep him hating good forever--you realize it? A curly-headed
fellow, a man younger than I!"

The girl sitting soberly behind the silver coffee-urn looked wistfully
at her brother. Dunstan's brown face was long, and his ears just a
trifle pointed like a faun's; his voice was young and crackling, like
a tongue of young flame trying to push up through heaped-up brush. He
smoked silently, staring down at his sister. "It's good-bye for him,"
he said slowly, "good-bye to green trees and swimming in the pools and
climbing mountains and hearing a girl's voice. Oh! to just being a man!
Good-bye forever to everything but smells and rats and the minds of
decayed men and we--you, Sard, and my father are doing this thing."

Dunstan suddenly pushed back a chair. "Drat parents!" he said fiercely,
"drat law, drat the system," then he laughed. "Aunt Reely, don't
shudder; if a man on the stage talked that way, you'd think it was
lovely. Did you see my tennis racket?" demanded Dunstan in his usual
voice. "Oh, I guess I jammed it in the rack of the car. Well, so long;
don't grieve for me if I don't turn up for lunch. I guess I'll mess
with Prudy Anterp and her bunch."

Sard and her aunt watched the light reedy figure swing around the
little footpath to the garage, and in a few minutes Dunstan's car had
glided out of sight.




CHAPTER IV

OTHER LAWS


Two years of college had done little to affect Sard Bogart's life.
True, those two years she had trodden the athletic-social paths of the
American academic experience gaily, then the death of her mother called
her home. Her father's appeal made on the stark, lonely night after the
funeral had created circumstances she had met four-square. From that
time on, Sard, with youthful heroism, had seen her life cut out for
her. She was to run the home and "keep things bright" for her father.

There was also the Judge's sister, Miss Aurelia, of the age always in
conjecture, and of a curious beauty that made poetry of an otherwise
ineffective personality. Miss Aurelia's small head was covered with
swathes of vital auburn hair, her delicate skin had porcelain pinks and
whites, and her soft eyes and slim frame were of a curious suggestive
quality that only needed force and will to make her a vibrant,
seductive human creature. But this force and will were lacking. Miss
Aurelia had been reared altogether on the "ladylike" plan. So while
there was no look of wear and tear on her, no wrinkles on her face,
no gray in her hair, and while her teeth were even, with the effect
of crowding her pursy mouth, yet all these signs and colors of her
spoke of untried, untested things; there was an eternal insecurity
in her rabbity chin, her soft apologetic voice, the tentatives of her
conversational method.

It was said in the village that Miss Aurelia "presided" over her
brother's house, and that Sard "ran" it. However, there was no friction
between the two. Sard accepted Miss Aurelia with the same devotion that
she tended her mother's giant fuchsia, an unnecessary trellised crime
of thousands of purple and red flowers, and refrained from sending away
the chromos that her father loved.

"The--er--telephone, my dear," Miss Aurelia came softly up to
Sard's tower room, "sorry to call you but the--er--person--long
distance--don't you ever find it confusing?--I--they--she--the
operator."

"Did you get the name?" asked Sard. "Is it Minga Gerould?"

Miss Aurelia wondered if it was, paused, hesitated, then, "Your
curtains certainly do need freshening. I never noticed it before.
Yes, I think it may be Minga. She--it--sounded husky, long distance,
perhaps, I--they seldom speak distinctly; the--er--operator was
extraordinarily uncivil,"--Miss Reely pursed her rabbity mouth,
"She--I----"

"Thanks, Aunt Reely, yes, the curtains do need laundering." Sard was
out of the room and down the stairs, the receiver at her ear. "Minga!
you rascal! Well, I am glad! Why didn't you write me, you little
trimmer----No, ma'am, I did not--did you? Was it nice? No, but I saw
Cynthia and Gertrude, they're back, bobbed hair and golf-sticks, bloom
of youth is their line this year. What are you laughing at? No--is
he?--to Cora Bland? Wasn't that like Cora--she's going to finish? I
wish I were--why? Oh, that'll keep! Well, Cora is a good all 'round
sport, don't you think? She'll make Alpha, you see if she doesn't----
What? Oh, Minga, don't ring off! That's so, of course you have to pack;
all right then--see you to-night--so glad you are coming, don't forget
to sit on the right-hand side of the train coming up, the river's
wonderful as you come over the hill. Bye-bye."

Sard, smiling, hung up the receiver. Not until this, the first visit
of a college pal since her mother's death, had she felt her hunger for
real companionship. Now as she had done the first day she had left
off her simple mourning, she looked up at the portrait of her mother
hanging in the hall. She kissed her hand to that curly, ear-ringed
little lady. "Dear little dead Mother," said Sard tenderly. "Dear
little dead Mother!" Instinctively she thought about the mothers of the
other girls of the town. Mrs. Bradon, Cynthia's mother, fat, stupid and
conventional. Gertrude's mother, a hard practical woman with ambitions,
the other mothers as Sard knew them seemed too girlish, crude, trivial,
beside the little soft, curly, ear-ringed lady that Sard had only just
begun to look at with woman eyes. "Would we have gotten on, Mother
dear, would we?" whispered Sard, wistfully. "The other girls don't with
their mothers."

Often Sard had been troubled by the guilty feeling that had her mother
lived--well, there might not have been so much comradeship between
them. Sard, clad in her crisp, clean linen, with white low-cut shoes
and the plain little pin at her trim collar, remembered with a sense
of tender wonder all her mother's little fripperies and gewgaws, the
chains, the laces, and little sets of jewelry and pins and dewdabs--how
quickly two years of camp and college had taught one of how small
account were these things!

It needed tenderness and humor, even that of a very young girl, to
get any real human life into a home like the Bogart home. It had a
stodgy gloom of its own, a solemn, gloomy importance like the Judge's
step, his way of entering a room. The hall was dark, the wainscoting
was dark, the ceilings were gummy with queer medallions and heavy,
gemmy Georgian ornaments. Of late years there had been extra electric
lights put in the hall and a fireplace added to the living-room. These
things gave a little cheer, as did the brass candlesticks with the
soft tawny or mellow colored candles of Sard's own choosing. There was
distinguished silver in the dining-room and rows of heavenly blue and
pink willow plates in the cupboards, just as there were graceful pieces
of Majolica that burned their hot color into the dull respectability
of the living and tea rooms, but these didn't help much. Sard often
shook her head over it all. She would turn away from her mother's
portrait to that of her father when a young man. The then unbearded
face had a cold kind of virtue and strength, the uncovered mouth was
prim and uncompromising. Could it be that Sard's home had somehow
taken its color from that prim mouth, those hard gooseberry colored
eyes? The girl went slowly to a mirror over the large fireplace in the
living-room. She pushed into the sunlight a vase full of daffodils, the
better to see her own face.

"Funny! Where did you come from?" she asked the girl in the mirror,
then softly, as if it were almost shameful to ask this question, "What
are your laws?"

The dark brown eyes looked wistfully at Sard; the forehead, a little
high but square and harmonious, was swept with a wave of golden brown
hair that crisped with vitality. The face seemed not interesting to the
girl who questioned it. "If I had more of Mother I could do things with
Father," she thought; "if I had little curls and earrings that shook,
and dimples and queer little pudgy, patting hands. These do things to
men--and women, too. I've seen it happen."

Sard thought of girls she knew, girls grown up with the new law, girls
who finished at college, graduated into doctors, lawyers, landscape
gardeners, statisticians, economists. She looked at her own hands,
long, thin, strong in the wrists, broadened and browned from tennis,
boating and golf and driving of machines. Sard, however, did not see
in the mirror the thing that held the mystery of her life, the gift
that would bring all that was rightfully hers to her. Do people ever
think of this one gift of personality--for instance, the mouth that
your pirate uncle sent down to you, _that_ brought you the husband whom
you had to leave to save your children; there is the shrug of your
shoulders that came from your father's side--they did that, those
people back of your father, and thus were able to throw off whole loads
of care; that curved little finger goes with the sensitiveness of your
mother's family. You will be hurt and raw from things all your life
with that finger! Yes, but you will be also exultant, drunken, wild
with the quintessence of beauty, of the mystery and wonder that is all
through the dull, daily grind. Sard's unique gift was the poise of her
head. Here was an imperious quality like that of a princess, here a
curve of chin and backset of the shoulders which was at the same time
elastic and defiant and challenging. A girl like this, of indomitable
pride, curious nerve, wonders at some of the insults she receives from
the thing this pride and nerve bring to life in others; also she is
sometimes touched and wondering to find how others believe in and trust
her.

Oh! our ancestors!--brave, struggling, dreaming, pathetic ancestors!
How you struggled, how you prayed and agonized, or were wild and wanton
to send your strange gifts down to us! Here's to you, Ancestors, all of
you! May we send you the best and bravest of you on and as far as we
can, we will do the best we can with your gifts!




CHAPTER V

FOR LIFE


The kitchen of the Bogart House was a pleasant room whose two doors
opened out into a tidy latticed vegetable garden and whose outer
arrangement of entry and drying yard were of the "save steps"
description. Sard and her mother had worked these things out together,
for at college, under one of the few strong souls and true brains
that are still left unmartyred in American colleges, the girl had
learned practical ideals of what should be the attitude of the employer
to those who toil for his comfort. It was Sard who had the kitchen
walls painted a sunshiny yellow, selected pretty rag rugs and placed
bookshelves and good reading lights in the room; it was she who had
insisted upon the lattices and ladyslippers and morning-glory vines.
All with the sense of her own pleasure in them, though none of the
people the Bogarts employed seemed to care much for these things. The
young daughter of the house soon began to realize that any bright
sport-hat she herself wore, the set of her skirts, the make of her
shoes, interested Dora and Maggie better than the books she tried to
discuss with them. The name of Edith Cavell did not thrill them as did
the name of the most recent screen actress. They cared only, it seemed,
to catch up with the joy and pleasure of the life ahead of them. They
seemed always to feel that the very stuff of life was arrayed against
them--and sometimes they had reason.

Now as the girl pushed aside the swinging door of the old-fashioned
"butler's pantry," she was half prepared for the interrupted Irish
sentences, the hot questions and answers.

"Is it justice, I ask you; is it justice? To take him now--only
nineteen. When he's sort of wild and notional by nature and traps set
for him? Maybe he dunnit--maybe he dunnit, but he keeps saying he ain't
done it. Oh, my God, my God, I don't know."

The girl stood before the two women in the kitchen, the cook who, like
Sard, wiped her hands and silently handed her the ordering list.

"Thank you, Maggie," said Sard; then, her forehead drawing together,
"Dora, is there anything new?"

The waitress with a gesture of dumb inability to answer, turned away,
and Sard, no asperity in her voice, saw that it was to a resolutely
turned back that she was speaking.

"She blames me, somehow," the girl sighed, "as if I could help it!"

"Please put the north room to air. Miss Gerould arrives late in the
afternoon--I think there isn't a waste-paper basket in the room, so,
Dora, will you hunt one up, and see to all the electric bulbs, won't
you? And towels, the little embroidered ones----" Sard waited, half
contemplating, thinking of reproof for the back turned so rudely and
obstinately toward her direction, then she looked at the slight,
slender figure in its gray gown, the apron tied so carefully and
delicately, the capless, pretty hair, and was conscious suddenly of
someone young like herself. Through this veil of youth she saw what
kind of sorrow it was that bowed the head of the woman standing there;
something that she did not know was the most glorious passion in the
world beat up through Sard's heart into her brain; it was the passion
for humanity, for justice and fairness for all. "Why should I be
giving orders to her when she is suffering? Supposing Dunstan were in
trouble and--and shame, and I had to take orders from the very people
that----Dora--Dora," the girl persisted, "is there nothing I can do?"

There was no answer, only dry coughing sobs. The cook turned. "Ah,
don't bother your head with it all, dear. It ain't nothing to
you--only, Gawd help the poor thing! Er course," said the cook somewhat
bitterly, "we're all under this law; the boy done wrong; he done awful,
and they'll be able to prove it against him, and your papa--well," the
cook sighed, "only he's young, a rill smart curly-headed young feller
and his chanst is gorn."

Then cook, with a curious rising howl, turned away herself.

Wiping her eyes, the young waitress stonily piling up the silver on the
tray, let drop a fork. The girl stood there looking at it. Sard tried
to comfort her.

"It--it is Human Sorrow," she said awkwardly. "I think we--we don't
understand sorrow as well as we ought to and I am quite powerless but
Miss Aurelia and I care, Dora."

The girl said it tremulously; already she was feeling the awful
gulf between a person who suffers tragedy and that other who stands
by longing to help. Also Sard knew a kind of shame--for it seemed
treachery to her father and the equity he maintained, to say more. What
could words do? It was Sard's first experience of the great naked fact
of human sorrow and shame; she knew that the only person who could help
Dora would be someone who had been through a wave of tragedy like hers.

"Words," thought Sard hotly, "are disgusting. We bandy them about and
pile them up like money. We exchange them like coin of the realm." The
young girl, clean and defiant of emotion as a young animal, had no
mature power, that amazing power borne through sorrow and sympathy, the
strange power of the healing touch, else she would have touched Dora's
bowed head, put a comforting hand on the heaving shoulder. She stood
silent, then once more said, helplessly, "Dora, don't you believe me,
that I do truly care?"

Suddenly there was a curious half shriek, the terrible leap of human
emotion through the breaking discipline of lips and eyes--"Oh, I know
you care----Oh, Miss Sard--but they'll jug him just the same--for
life--for _life!_ His chanst is gorn."

Dora's voice then sank to a kind of moaning soliloquy. "Oh, yes, that's
what they all tell me; he's killed a man, or they say he has "--the
woman shot a haggard look into the girl's face. "I've thought and
thought and I know from reading the papers and all that almost any
rich man's son would get off," she said it bitterly, "but that isn't
it--it's something else, it's that he's only done wrong once, and now
he's got to live and die with the worst--oh," moaned Dora passionately,
"they'd ought to be laws to save them that's got wrong into them, not
to smash 'em. For life, for _life!"_

No great poet could have crammed into one sentence the thing that the
weeping girl crammed into these words--"for life." Gently Sard closed
the door and, hardly knowing what she did, tiptoed back toward the
front of the house. She looked out on the late spring foliage, on the
tulips and Japanese maples a-quiver with June, on the purple fleur de
lis and peonies, dewy with color against the long sparkling ribbon of
the morning river ... against all that virginal clean growth with its
rapturous aspiration toward the sky that feeds it, the girl heard the
poor human cry, "For _life_--for life!"

So this was actually happening! Life, a smooth velvet delicious thing
was going on in the front of Sard's home--music, pleasure, ease and
beauty, while in the back part of it life was labor and anguish and
shame! This was the law under which Sard's parents and their friends
had lived contentedly, it was the law under which she was expected
to live contentedly. "I never will," whispered the girl fiercely, "I
never, never will; these are not my laws, _I_ am not 'under' the law."

Sard, slowly leaving the kitchen, came upon her aunt. Miss Aurelia,
with the finest and lightest of dusters, was performing various
rituals with the legs of table and chairs; now she moved one
thin hand in swirls over the piano top. "A piano collects dust so
strangely," she explained, as if the piano were a sentient thing that
made dust-collecting its object. "I've always been so glad to do the
dusting," remarked Miss Aurelia for the hundredth time, "he--your
father, of course, never notices but she--we--not that I want to
criticise your mother, that would be impossible, only she-we--at that
time--that is to say--in any emergency I would naturally; of course,
some servants were careful and others not. I had once," said Miss
Aurelia, with the air of beginning a new subject, "I had an--an aunt,"
she whispered the thing mysteriously, "she--er--hated dust----Sard,
you're twisting your ring--you look--is anything wrong?"

Sard, motioning toward the kitchen, spoke in a low voice. "Aunt Reely,
that boy, Terence O'Brien, is Dora's only brother; she helped educate
him; there isn't anyone but those two----Isn't it too terrible?"

Miss Aurelia lifted a lamp off the table, dusted where it had been and
put it back again; in doing so the silk shade toppled and fell. Miss
Aurelia, frowning and gasping, treated the incident like a catastrophe,
something to be met with firmness and an intake of breath. When she had
solemnly adjusted all as it had been again, she took up the subject
of dust. "It's the open fires," she remarked gloomily; "sometimes I
think we should never have--a land where there is no dust, that is how
I always think of Heaven! Yes, Sard, I know that--er--she--he, of
course, it was a regular murder, such as you read about, he is, you
see, a criminal, my dear, and that, of course, makes you--me--us feel a
natural revulsion." Miss Aurelia stood up; the sunlight fell upon her
gown of a rather sentimental blue with white ruffles, her fair white
skin was noticeable even in the bald morning light, her rabbity mouth
somehow too full of teeth, paused unctuously, with drama on the subject
in hand.

Sard, strumming a few chords on the piano, looked thoughtfully at her
aunt. "Shall I bring in some of those big Japanese iris?" she asked.
"Minga's coming to-night, did I tell you? I want things to look jolly.
The old dear hasn't been here since that holiday week before Mother"
--Sard never could finish the sentence--"Mother died. Do you suppose
Father will let us have the small sedan altogether? Minga is used to
her own car; she fusses with any machine they've got."

Something that had been hanging on Miss Aurelia's mind hung there
still; this slangy sort of talk, the planning for Minga Gerould's visit
Aunt Aurelia hailed with delight. This was more as it should be, better
than Sard's behavior since she had remained home from college after her
mother's death. It was the kind of thing, some of it, that Miss Aurelia
had grown to believe in while she deprecated it. American young girls,
of course, came of a nobly material race, everyone avowed that America
was very great and the fact of the young people having no manners
and no respect for age and no morals and no loyalty to life--well,
Miss Aurelia thought it was only the other countries who were jealous
who said such things. American young girls came of a nobly material
race. Americans were so practical, so anxious to get ahead--everyone
seemed so anxious that the young people shouldn't be high-brow. But
then Sard had a queer, Miss Aurelia thought almost common, way of
noticing servants and poor people, their troubles and all that. It
wasn't good or even religious to think too much. For instance, the new
man on the place. Miss Aurelia didn't think it quite nice or "young"
to be interested in him. Miss Aurelia had often spoken to a fat, calm
friend, Mrs. Spoyd, about these things, and Mrs. Spoyd had sighed, "I
know what you mean, dear. Did you hear about the little Gringlon girl?
Well, of course, it may not be true. I heard it from their dressmaker,
but it seems she noticed everything and--er--was crazy for all kinds
of information. No, dear, of course, Sard ought not to be noticing
anything but a good time at her age. Girls should only be interested in
a good time. They shouldn't be interested in--er--unpleasant things."

So Miss Aurelia overlooked the slang. It was all right for Sard to be
a little slangy; so much better than sitting up in that tower room and
thinking about murderers. It would make her more "popular" to have
Minga Gerould go to dances and such things with her. "America is a
wonderful country," said Miss Aurelia to herself, "and I think it is
our 'popularity.' Have you ever noticed," to Mrs. Spoyd, "how awful
it is for an American girl or man not to be popular? Don't you think
that our great men like Theodore Roosevelt and--er--Barnum, are just as
popular in Heaven as here?

"I think God meant us to be--er--popular, don't you? Just see," added
Miss Aurelia with a flash of insight, "how unpopular all of our
statesmen have been who have been in any way unique or--er--unusual.
Americans, the good, patriotic kind, have always been very popular."

"Yes, I always feel so sorry for a young girl who isn't popular,"
purred Mrs. Spoyd.

"I wouldn't worry about that boy, dear, now," advised Miss Aurelia,
with all the mature effects of voice and manner of the person who
is not truly grown up. "We do all we can to make the prisoners what
they should be, and I have heard that many tramps--er--like to go
to prison." She stood up, sighing. "There--this room at last looks
respectable;" her narrow, rather smoky-dull eyes roved over Sard. "Why
don't you put on your turquoise sweater and tam, the pretty one with
the blue pompom? I will look after everything. No, dear, I don't think
you'd better use the car without asking Brother."

"Will you ask him?" said Sard shyly.

"_I_ ask?" Miss Aurelia said nervously. "Why--you--he--I--don't you
think, Sard,"--with a kind of reproachful righteousness--"don't you
think it ought to come from you, his daughter? Now I must see about the
laundry."

Sard was accustomed to these cheerful little exits made with the
bustling manner of one with much business on hand. When Miss Aurelia
wanted to evade anything----Suddenly it flashed over the girl, "Why,
she's always like that, she--she--never meets anything; she wouldn't
discuss it with me that morning I tried to talk with her about Colter.
She has pretended all along she didn't know about Colter, and now, with
Dora crying there, red-eyed while she serves the meals, she tried not
to know that--why," Sard's eyes opened, "I'm old, she's young."

"I ought to be her aunt," said the young girl to herself. "I ought to
be sending her in a picture hat with an organdy dress and blue sash to
meet Minga."

The girl stood motionless in the center of the floor, thinking. When
youth begins to think and to think clearly and hard with its brave
young mind, it is time for the world to take notice--Sard frowning at
the floor, spoke aloud:

"Yes--that's living Under the Law," she said slowly, "I see what
Dora meant; we live under a made law, we don't build up on it, away
from it, to a better law; we just live, cramped, confined, ignorant,
stupid, under it--Under the Law, that's it!!!" Sard laughed a little
wonderingly. "I shall meet Minga this afternoon and we will go motoring
and laughing over the country roads and Dunce will come home and we'll
all eat fudge and dance to the Victrola to-night, and one or two of the
bunch will come in and we'll play Rookie and Cheat and Toddle Top, and
then at nine o'clock Minga will want a nut sundae, and we'll all pile
into a machine and slew around to Dingman's and eat sundaes and then
hoot along the roads until a tire pops and we think it time to go to
bed, because under the law that is our privilege.

"But in that little top room Dora will wake up and think about her
brother, who, she says, is Under the Law----" Sard looked out of the
open house door toward the fleur de lis and the peonies, massed purple
and crimson against the silver sparkle of the river. She stood gazing
at the wealth and the shimmer of spring leaves. "Why," said Sard
slowly, "those laws were only made for people who haven't grown up;
surely," said the girl to herself, "surely we were meant to bring out
of them other, better laws; why," said Sard, a deep light came into
her long eyes with their straight clear brown, "surely there are other
Laws! We can build above the Law, we don't need to stay Under the Law."




CHAPTER VI

MINGA'S LAWS


Minga arrived in a spasm of long thin legs, short skimpy skirt, a
fluff of bobbed curls, a rather unnatural whiteness of face, lugging a
suitcase, golf sticks and tennis racket with the independent gestures
of an experienced baggagesmasher. It was an effect calculated to
impress a girl's camp or a parcel of immigrants, but as that of the
arrival of a maiden of eighteen summers at a quiet house in the little
center of Willow Roads, it was hardly distinguished.

The meeting of the two girls was a curious clinched clasp done
technically and punctuated by gasps, long, over-emphasized kisses and
such half-shrieked protests as: "Oh, you dear brute, you're squeezing
the life out of me--You silly old darned duck--Oh, Honey, isn't
this great?" Then they fell apart, and with mutual cool glance of
appraisement took each other in. As they turned talking and went up the
long stairs, Sard's look was laughingly interrogative.

"Minga, you've bobbed your hair."

"Yes, you like it? The Mede and Persian don't! I had an awful row with
the Mede, meaning Dad, but he came around, of course."

Sard looked lovingly at the little curly head; she felt of the thick
knot at the back of her own young head and felt somehow old; she
tossed it like an impatient colt.

"It must feel nice."

"It feels like October wind blowing over the pink heather," Minga
laughed; she passed an arm around the older girl. "Let's go up town and
get yours done right away. What do you want with hammocks of long hair?
Why, if Absalom had only had his hair bobbed, the whole Bible would
have been changed."

The voices of the girls had a curious cadence of indolence, also a
rising sense of potential shriek, yet they were not raucous.

This was, however, merely cultivation that was unconscious; other
girls of their age who copied their ways of wearing their sport-hats
and "rolled" stockings had not attained to the cool middle register
of these young tones, the pleasantly insistent quality of the aimless
dialogue. Yet all their movements, restless and ungainly with
curiously athletic emphasis, seemed to correspond to their sentences,
over-stressed yet indifferent, while their young eyes, particularly
Minga's, under long-lashed, artificially penciled brows, had hardness
and clearness under which lay an everlasting watchfulness.

It is with this watchfulness that the youth of to-day betrays itself.
Free from restrictions, from cares and responsibilities, it yet has
within it the potentialities of these things. It unconsciously needs
standards, longs for them and has them not; therefore, it unconsciously
is seeking these standards, if only in the wearing of clothes, in the
foot work of a tennis match, in new swimming strokes, in the use of
new words. Poor little youth of to-day longing for values, saying
with its strange wistful little face: "Does she bob her hair?--then,
I'll bob my hair. Does she drink?--well then, I'll drink; does she
sprawl over and maul her young men friends?--well, then I'll sprawl
and maul."--Poor babies, not one of them strong enough to carve a path
of his or her own, all led by the nose, trotting around after each
other, all with hats, neckties, turned-down stockings, bathing suits,
conventional stencils, voices and ignorance exactly alike. Pathetic,
wistful, funny, hungry little American youth.

At the head of the stairs stood Miss Bogart. "My dear!" she held out
two hands to Minga, who resolutely seized them and with calm effect of
masculinity, gripped them until the lady's mouth twitched with pain.

"This is nice," almost shrieked Miss Reely--she also tried to put
her arms around the young form, but she might as well have tried to
embrace the string of a toy balloon. Minga, wafting along, recited some
sentences, with the rather easy-going cadence which for a better name
might be called "the chewing-gum accent."

"Awfully nice to see you, Miss Bogart; Mother and Father sent love.
Isn't this great, though? You and Sard were ducks to ask me. My faith,
what a jolly room." Minga peered into the adjacent bathroom. "Swell
mirror, _some_ towels; do I use these embroidered ones for cold cream?"

"Did you notice the view, dear, coming over the hill--the river--the
dogwoods?" asked Sard's aunt complacently.

"The--er--view----? Oh, yes, I remember now, Sard said something; was
it where they built that new garage? Say, Sard, did you know that
garage is a big thing, the nippiest thing along the Hudson River--this
shore anyway? A lot of money went into it. I know, because Father
coughed up a few shekels, to help the man out, you know, and he says
they are piling up coin already. He'll realize, all right!"

Miss Reely, rather ignored by the two girls, fussed about the room,
settling a pillow sham, plumping up a cushion. She turned back to
the new arrival, who, tossing her small provocative hat on the bed,
turned with an anxious frown to the mirror. "Girls," announced Minga,
unfastening her wrist-watch, "I'm pale." From a small leather case
in her pocketbook she produced a tiny golden box of color, dabbed a
bit of it on each young cheek and as she stood talking to her hostess
calmly smoothed it in. Minga's eyes, wide open, cool as purple
morning-glories, surveyed them. She stood, a trim, insignificant little
figure of modernity, suggesting nothing, giving promise of nothing,
dreaming of nothing, but curiously capable of anything and everything.

Miss Aurelia, primming her mouth, turned to the door; she paused with
the immemorial formula of the hostess,

"Dinner is announced at a quarter of seven, dear; will you let us know
if you want anything?" Irresolutely she drifted away; they heard the
soft pat of her low-heeled slippers, the swish of her starched skirt,
looked at each other and smiled.

"Exactly the same! What?" Minga giggled. "Does she still think it's
awful to say 'Darn'?" Then, conscious of Sard's restraint, "Well,
she's a sweet old sport. I'd like to take her up in an airplane. Now,"
apologetically, "you know very well I think she's a perfect dearrrrrr,
so sort of picturesque and everything--where do you keep your hairpins?"

It was part of the enigmatic expression of Minga that with bobbed hair
she should demand hairpins with as anguished an intonation as a woman
with long tresses. When Sard produced the box, she deftly pinned a
pretty lock nearer to her cool deep-set eyes. "It's this rotten high
forehead of mine," she explained to her friend now perched in the
window-seat watching her. "I'm determined I won't be high-brow if I
have to cut my head off to avoid it. Don't you dread, somehow, becoming
high-brow? It's so unpopular--the men have always hated it, and now the
women do. Do you remember Sara Findlay at college?"

"Sara Findlay," they breathed the name through gusts of laughter--"Sara
Findlay; do you remember her room, books everywhere, and her awful
spectacles, and the way she haunted the library and the solemn look she
turned on you when you asked her anything? I remember one question we
doped out, 'Sara, how do you define the infinite?'"

"Sara's engaged," said Sard, "married, for all I know; did you hear
about it?"

Minga turned a face of incredulous horror. Marriage as she viewed it
was the device of screen actresses and various feature fans to change
horizons; when things got a little monotonous or there was a chance of
improving finance, one married. "That high-brow wench, not a bit of
pep, not a rag of style--to who?"

"To whom, did you say?" said Sard mischievously. The other girl,
falling heavily upon the divan, now buried her curly head in Sard's lap.

"To _who_," she repeated carelessly--"I won't say it right; why should
I? If the Prince of Wales or Charlie Chaplin said 'to who' for a few
weeks, we'd all follow suit. Who invented grammar, anyway?" Minga
stretched herself, laughing up into her friend's face.

"Ouf! Isn't this like the old times? You, the stuck-up grammarian--me,
the gypsy vagabond. Woof, what an awful thing it must be to be 'the
Judge's daughter' in a little place like 'Willows-on-the-Hudson'."

Sard laughed a little; her face grew grave. "It's lots of troublous
things to be the Judge's daughter, I know that," then swiftly, as if
something occurred to her, "Minga, will you do something for me?"

"Yep," yawned the recumbent Minga; "all right; anything that doesn't
interfere with my present position. Sard, do you think my nails are
nicer this year?" she held up a very delicately tinted row of little
curved shelly fingers. "In spite of golf," said Minga, "I think that's
a sweet attractive little hand, don't you?" The fact that Sard had
asked her to do something seemed to her unimportant, and she went
on--"Notice anything?" She waved a very pretty ring on the slender
finger.

"Minga--you're not," now it was Sard who was really breathless, her
brown eyes shimmered with light.

"Engaged, darrrrrling," drawled Minga. "Yep, to the most idiotic little
Willy you can imagine. A perfect lady, Tawny Troop, you know Troop,
the big moving-picture man? We're all crazy about Tawny, he's such a
fool--and dance--he dances like a bubble on the fountain. Papa Troop is
worth oodles, so they say. Mother, the Persian, doesn't know it--yet;
Father, the Mede--well, I guess we'd better postpone that!"

Something careless and contemptuous in Minga's voice kept Sard from
asking any of the questions that flew to her lips. She caught the
little hand and examined the ring. "Why, it's exquisite," she breathed.
"These are brown diamonds, aren't they, and pearls? Oh!" The fairy
beauty of the thing moved her.

"You see, Ducky, another girl picked it out--my predecessor." Minga
threw out the word with a curiously mature drawl. She yawned, raised
up her head, reached out for a handglass and examined her pretty teeth
in the mirror. Suddenly she rose, her figure, slender and reedy, bent
backward and did a few striding, strutting steps of a modern dance,
humming the while with curious catlike nasal tremolo a popular air.

"Do you know this step--to the Paradise whistle and ukulele and that
new instrument, the Shiverskin, it's just great." Around the room
strode Minga, solemnly expounding the simple steps. "You like my ring,"
hummed Minga, "well, Tawny's first girl picked it out. I saw it on her
aristocratic hand and I had to have it; also, you see, I needed Tawny
to dance with--he goes my gait--she hated to let him go; Sard, that
girl is a Moth, she eats men, eats 'em alive, but I snitched this one,"
Minga giggled. "Tawny's coming out for your first spring dance at the
Club while I'm here, but it's not announced," warned Minga, "so don't
talk bassinets."

It was the old Minga, only, Sard could not keep herself from admitting
this; more so, and well, there really need not have been any more of
the original Minga. Sard, who was exactly a year older than her friend,
felt somehow centuries older. Also she had to confess again as she had
confessed to herself before, there was something in Minga that both
shamed and hurt, while it fascinated. However, with all the hunger
of a lonely girl for a chum, Sard readily overlooked jarring things.
She reached out and drew Minga to her, hanging an arm over the thin
little shoulder. Minga took it all coolly. "Are you letting yourself
get fat, Sard?" she criticised. Then added caressingly, "Poor solemn
Sard, we've got to whoop things up for you now I'm here. What? I mean
it! Can't we run up a few men and some jazz and stuff on the telephone
for to-night? Would Judgie and Aunt Reely care? Who does your jazz this
year? We've got an angel band home, three cornets, a paradise whistle
and a drum, it's divine--well? Wait till I get hold of that old Dunce,"
said Minga, "I'll choke all the news out of him. My hat--there comes
your father's car around the drive, and I haven't got on evening duds!
What do you wear for night-eats? Will Judgie care if I go down as I am?"

This was Sard's chance. She kept her arm around the restless, pacing
little figure. "Minga, will you do something for me? Put on your
prettiest dress, that rose-colored one, talk music to Father, let
him play his new records for you." Minga made a face, but Sard was
insistent. "Get him to tell you about Terence O'Brien--only don't you
start the subject, Minga--and--and--and ask him if he is pleased with
the new man on the place."

Then Sard, at a loss just how to drill her impulsive guest, stared at
Minga thoughtfully, frowning. "No, don't ask him that," she said. "I've
changed my mind, don't ask him that."

Then said Minga, "I'm to ask him about Terence O'Brien without his
knowing it?"

"Yes, his sister works here."

"Terence O'Brien," repeated Minga, "who--oh, yes, that fellow that
killed the old man, ran away with the money, did it all just like a
movie--awfully exciting! My gracious!" Minga was awed.

Sard nodded. "Hush, his sister is our waitress, and she--oh, it's
pretty dreadful to see her. Father thinks he's just a criminal, but
don't you see, Minga, he's only a boy, only eighteen."

Minga looked very cold and decided. The two spots of color stood out
high on her little sobered face.

"But a murderer," said she solemnly. "He must pay the penalty." Minga
pronounced the word "peenulty," but her dignity was superb. She was
very sure about justice as she was very sure about patriotism. If you
did wrong you must not be found out, if you cared for your country
you must say so very loudly with strong dramatic effects; the idea of
caring for one's country to the extent of having a better kind of women
and men live in it had not occurred to Minga. It does not occur to the
men and women Mingas of this world. But they are very sure of their
"patriotism." They have quite a little patriotic strut and they imagine
patriotism to consist in a long hate of some other nation. And that it
is based forever and ever on the machinery of killing.

"Minga," said Sard passionately, "do you and I always do right? Isn't
it our ease and good fortune that keep continually pulling us back from
very wrong things? How about that time on the bacon-bat up at Divens
Lake when we stole the firewood and the corn, did we pay any fines--did
the county follow us up? Just a private letter to the faculty and
old Pressy and the Dean talking to us and that was all--yet," Sard
looked thoughtfully out of the window, "that was crime, stealing and
trespassing, but we are so pampered and petted and taken care of that
we--well, we don't need to murder."

"Oh, don't we need to murder? Well, I can tell you, Sard Bogart, that
I need to murder Marjorie Atboon every time I look at her." Minga's
face was injured. "Her father gave her a new car if she'd stop smoking.
Well, Marjorie has the car." Minga paused and remarked drily, "Her
bedroom smells queerly--she says she likes lots of air, she burns a
good deal of incense, but you ought to see the car, lovely long thing,
eight-cylinder, blue, cooooooooly--oilllly--olly. Oh! how a good
machine turns your dark little world to white velvet!"

Sard giggled. "Minga, you always make me laugh," she protested,
"when I'm most in earnest you're crazy and dreadful, but you're an
everlasting dear."

Minga whirled them both about the pretty cretonned room.

"You know you love it," she chanted, "you know you love it, you've been
having too much Aunt Aurelley." Minga putting her arms akimbo swayed
neatly pumped feet back and forth. "Did you see Auntie stare at my
rouge?" she whispered. "She knows the worst now, doesn't she, Sard? She
knows I know there ain't no Santa Claus." With a burst of laughter,
Minga released her friend. "Wait till I get a bath." She ripped off her
little frilled blouse, her short skirt fell to the floor. Minga stood
a pretty figure in dark knickers and white chemise. "For the tub!" she
chanted, and dove into the bathroom.

Amid the gushing of the faucet, Sard saw the little figure stripped and
dancing in the white porcelain bath.

"Stop in on your way to the dining-car," called Minga.




CHAPTER VII

THE ORGAN BUILDER'S HOUSE


The Hudson River has not only the opulence that Washington Irving
portrayed, not only the swelling of soft hills and majesty of toppling
mountains and slopes that spell fecundity of farmland but it has,
along palisade and headland, another opulence. Under those mountains
that throw down thunder-storms, and along the rocky walls climbed by
winding roads magnificent homes testify to the imperialism that has
not yet been cleansed from the heart of man. The instinct for choosing
imposing sites for impressive homes would be difficult to trace to its
beginning. Robber barons built their castles inaccessibly for very good
reasons; the prelates' palaces were on the hills that all might see
and be reminded of Mother Church. The Roman Roads, unlike the furtive
sunken roads of the cavemen, were built high because of fearlessness
and pride. But the American who builds his home, or one of his homes,
on the Hudson does not do so just because he longs to feast his eyes
on sumptuous natural terrace and broad natural waterway; he does so
because in his instinctive choice of surroundings, he selects an
expressive background for his own dignity and his own importance.

All night long the great steamers of the Hudson River glide
majestically up and down, the long white fingers of their
search-lights pointing to this and that lordly residence. The Oil King,
the Copper King, the Pill King, and the Shoe King, whose white palaces
and miles of stocked and fruited domain are gated and avenued away from
the public, are silently indicated to such humble travelers as care
to look. One can hardly travel the Hudson River nowadays and worship
the great Creator, for the great Creator is a little overshadowed by
the aforesaid King of Commerce, the great Producer. But in spite of
the sleepiness and lethargic atmosphere that the Dutch traditions have
strangely imparted to the strings of villages, there are in certain
moods superb freedoms and freshnesses along the Hudson. There are still
spiritual emphasis and quests along red sandstone shores, where the
green hemlocks gather. The sunrises in the Westchester Hills are like
black tents with banners streaming. The waters of the Tappan Zee are
then a great glittering field of cloth of gold, and at sunset when the
houses on the Irvington Hills are all ablaze with sunstruck window
glass, the bold, black breasts of Palisades and Hook Mountain front the
river like African slaves guarding some inner mystery of valley, some
clean, unspoiled fastness of forest and field and stream.

To a man who sat at his table in a bleak old wooden house high up on
the western range, these night and morning scenes spelled only two
things, the Human Will, as yet absorbed only in the passions of an
aggressive aggrandizement, and the proud subservience of nature to
the little schemes of men. Nature, lying down like a great beast of
destiny, to let the little shapes and enterprises swarm and crowd
over her! "Only," thought Watts Shipman, "only when the great beast
starts to rise and take new positions, look out then, little shapes.
Either you will be raised on some great mountain of Nature's mysterious
changes or you will slip into some new uncharted sea or who knows, you
may spill altogether out of the world!"

It was this wistful attitude toward nature, the great mystery, the
great Book of Worship and Wonder that had taken Watts Shipman from his
clubs and cliques and corporations, away from success and "putting it
over" and their accompanying shiftiness and meanness, and had taken him
for the season of a summer into the country, to think.

Yes, just that--"to think," was what he replied to complaining letters
and telegrams--"Watts, what are you doing, stuck up there on the rim
of nowhere?" His confrères laughed at the curt answer "Thinking." For
a lawyer so able, so successful, there could be no comment of "queer"
or "crazy"; Watts' partners shrugged their shoulders and went on with
the business which, as he had denied them telephone access, they had
sometimes to refer to him by long night letters. "Drat your thinking,"
writes the senior partner, "don't I think?" To which came the teasing
telegram by code, "You don't think, you calculate."

Watts' house, planted high on the spur of the mountain a few miles
above Willow Roads, the little Dutch village where Sard lived, had
been owned by an organ builder about whom the Willow Roaders liked
to say "nobody knew anything." The Willow Roaders, complacent in the
usual village life where everyone thinks he knows "everything about
everyone" disdained knowing anything about a mere organ builder. The
house, surrounded as it was by hanging boulders and pine trees, looked
gravely down on the big field of river and on all the little steeples
and turrets and gingerbread conservativeness of Willow Roads. Watts
liked to commune with the spirit of the man who had once lived here.

"I'll bet he stole some notes out of the Dawn," the man thought, "and
think of nights here--like last evening, with the hermit thrush and the
sky gold through the trees. 'The Organ Builder'--I can just see him, a
seedy chap, possibly with too many children, probably half starving,
working up here with the village below curious and gossiping, thinking
maybe an organ builder was immoral."

It was a soft yet cool spring night. The little frogs in mountain rain
pools kept up a croaking like rusty wheels; the pungent smells of earth
and leaf mould came through the window. Fire burned quietly and soft
lamplight fell on books and rugs and flickered over the cast of the
Winged Victory, over the dingy chimneypiece. Watts' eyes, through the
smoke of his pipe, went to this. "Nice girl," he grunted in approval,
"nice girl--afraid of nothing--ready for anything, yet somehow all
woman, true to type but not crystallized by type." The man, rising,
walked up and down the rather bare room where one or two fine rugs
caught the warm fire colors. "I can say this for the Greeks, they,
themselves, fastened nothing upon civilization but healthy ideals for
men and women; harvest making, home keeping, child bearing, strong
bodies, imaginative minds, it wasn't until their æsthetics and the
Roman plutocrats got hold of all they gave the world that their
philosophies were debased." The lawyer's eyes, sombre in strength and
depth, looked fixedly at the gracious woman figure; he compared it
with the figures on Fifth Avenue, tripping in affected coquettishness
or striding in callous mannishness. "Not clever of you, ladies, to
find no middle path," he considered. "Who made you as you are to-day,
Paris--the war? That's what you and the newspapers and magazines say,
but come now, didn't you make yourselves? You wanted to be 'popular,'
you want to be 'in' things, behold the result." Watts' mouth curled
with slow mockery on his pipe.

"The Winged Victory didn't want to be popular," he decided. "She didn't
want to be in things.

"She wanted to live. Who fastened the modern woman on us, anyway?"
Watts demanded sternly of his dog. "Why have we got to stand for her?"
The silken-haired, electric-muscled beast came over to him softly.
Friar Tuck, with tail tossing, laid a devoted head on the brown
golf-trousered knee. Watts tousled the long ears. "Always the henchman,
aren't you, you old brute--why do you play that game?" The lawyer
looked long and questioningly into his dog's eyes. "Why don't you get
up and give me an order; how do you know I'm superior to you? You are
probably equal to me."

He considered the bowl of his pipe then rubbed it on Friar Tuck's head.

"Just as I suppose, if men only knew it, they could be equal to Christ
and the angels. Say, look here." Watts lifted the dog by his forefeet.
He put the two forepaws against his breast. "How do you know I'm
superior to you? Why do you play this game--do you just want to be
'popular' with me?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Not to accept dogma--to be ready for the new light, to trim one's
mental sails for the breeze from a fresh quarter, it had given the
great criminal lawyer a profound insight into the human heart, an
almost awful power over the souls of men. Wastrel after wastrel had
tried to look Watts Shipman in the eye, and had known that some strange
God of Equity sat watchful in this man--that only in proportion to
their actual guilt would they be dealt with. Men and women had broken
down and told him all, only because of the unendurable patience and
remorseless gravity of his uncondemning gaze. He had fathered many a
boy and stood many a woman on her own feet, and yet Life, the Great
Mother, had held back from him what he, as human, knew must be the
ultimate and only gift. Women had angled for Watts Shipman because of
his fame; they had tried to use him politically; they had trusted him,
feared him and been penitent before him. No woman had ever loved him.

Staring at the Victory, the man smoked silently. Half ruefully he
passed his hand over the russet head on his knee, he threw back his own
great black-haired head with its dapple of white spots; he stretched
his long limbs and his deep-lined humorous face saddened. "Women want
to play," he said softly, "uncertain, funny little things, they want
to play"--tenderly, "and, not necessarily, to play fair--and I'm no
plaything, although," he waved his pipe toward the bas-relief over the
fire piece, "I could play with you, Miss Victory."

The word play made him think of something; pushing away the dog, Watts
rose and went to a table drawer, taking out, with a smile, a little
envelope with "Pudge" scrawled on it. The lawyer, still smiling, slid
out the contents, two Indian arrow-heads, one white, the other gray
flint. Thoughtfully he turned them over in his large palm. "Poor good
little Indians," he murmured, "we're still teaching our children that
you were devils, aren't we? Aren't we funny? We rather owe you an
apology, you strange, mysterious men who never knew fulfilment--who
ranged these Hudson River shores and thronged New Jersey and New
England and were mighty hunters and happy until you came up against the
white man and gunpowder and tobacco and whiskey! Well"--Watts chuckled,
"Pudgy shan't be prejudiced. I'll write you a good character for him."

Knocking his pipe out, laying it tenderly on the mantel, the big man
sprawled like a schoolboy over the table writing in long hand the
letter that was to accompany the arrow-heads.

"Dear Pudge--How are you? What are you doing, helping Mother or raising
the roof with noise and destruction. How are the guinea pigs? I often
think of them. Well, Pudge, I rather hope you are helping Mother a
lot, because she's such a good friend of yours and mine and she looks
so pretty and seems so wise, though perhaps you and I are sometimes
wiser. I'm sending you two arrow-heads I found in a field up North in
Rockland County. I was fishing up near the Ramapo Mountains where the
stone walls run like great serpents up and down the hills. There's a
lot of history lying around loose near here, Major André and Washington
and the Dutch and the Indians. I'll show you these places some day. The
Indians, to my way of thinking, were fine fellows. They took long steps
when they walked and knew how to set traps and hunt and fish, and they
were for the most part real religious men. But men who knew how to make
war just to get more money, came and took their land away from them,
and then the Indians turned naughty the way you and I do sometimes,
Pudge. My! my! how they tore around and howled and took scalps, which
were not nice to keep. No gentleman would ever scalp a lady, it is so
uncomfortable, and yet these Indians scalped many ladies!

"It's a pity the Indians were bad and forgot their manners, for if they
could have remembered to be polite and gentlemanly they could have
stayed here and they would have been the real Americans and you and I
would have probably tried to imitate them and never used anything but
wampum, which means shells; same as money to buy ice-cream cones with.
I think it would have been a heap more sensible if the white man had
made lasting friends of the Indians and learned a lot of things that
the Indians knew but which the white men have since been too stupid to
learn. But you see, the white men had a new machine called a 'gun,'
and there was nothing to do with it but shoot it at somebody, and
that made trouble. And the Indians, eager to learn, got guns too, and
thought it was funny to point them at people. And their guns went off
all right and there was the dickens to pay. Machines are nice things,
Pudgy, but the men who make the machines must be sure to have their
minds go ahead of the machines, or some day the machines will just get
up and smash the world.

"Good-night, Pudgy, old chap--I wish you could hear all the funny
sounds up on this mountain. Friar Tuck smells, besides hearing; he
reads the night with his nose, the same way we would read a book--and
he smells out such stories! Here are the arrow-heads; I'm sending them
to you as if you were my own little boy, for see, Pudge--big man as I
am, I have no little boy of my own--and that sometimes happens to big
men ..."

       *       *       *       *       *

Suddenly the man's head dropped. The pen rolled to the floor, and Friar
Tuck nosed at it a moment then tucked his head into his folded paws.
Watts Shipman sat at the table, his own face buried in his arms.




CHAPTER VIII

TRAITS


The first evening at the Bogarts' was a trying one for Minga. Her life,
the restless, high-strung, half-bred and wholly careless life of her
age, had kept her taut as a little bowstring for sensation. It was
a life formed, not so much on its own desires, as on highly colored
superficial presentments in the moving pictures and theatre posters,
also on those remarkably insinuating sheets, the "Society" Fashion
Magazines, where the cut of one's coat and the number of one's pockets
are prophesied between photographs of the important Mrs. So-and-So, or
the gossiping and not too scrupulous Madame X.

The rather uninspired family dinner ended amid the soft perfunctory
observances of Miss Aurelia, punctuating the indifferent curt
ejaculations of the young people and the moody silence of the Judge;
then Minga took a hand. She sat at the table humming a little air.
"Know that?" she inquired of Dunstan; "that's 'Don't take off another
thing, Polly, my dear.' Piggy Purse-proud sings it in 'The Other Pair
of Stockings.'"

These statements were received in silence. Sard and Dunstan, mindful
of the Judge's preferences in dinner conversation, looked askance at
each other, but Minga glanced brightly around the table. To this young
person there were no inhibitions, no reserves; above all, she was no
respecter of persons. A man who had just completed a new up-to-date
garage or aeroplane would win her casual interest, but a mere upholder
of the laws of the country seemed to her hardly to have outline.
Curiously enough, however, her insouciance and matter-of-fact pertness
sometimes reached to that buried stream of human sensation that
underlay the granite of Bogart's surface. As he looked at the little
figure, now rising from the table, he noted the color of her dress and
spoke of it.

"Let me see, that's rose color, isn't it?" remarked the Judge, stiffly.
His wrinkled square-nailed hand was on the back of the chair, and his
eyes, gooseberry and hard, yet had the sort of deference a man gives
some charming face and figure that refreshes him. Minga's head, bent
back, looked coolly up into his face.

"That color, Judgie"--it was her absurd intimate title for him--"that
color is called 'Sauce Box.'"

"Well named." The Judge had for a second a glint in his eyes.

"Isn't it?" asked Minga. She turned her bobbed head with the lively
shake of a young animal and asked suavely: "Now what, for instance, is
the name of the cloth of your coat?"

"Ha!" ... Dunstan, prowling about, looking for cigarettes, upset a pile
of books and arrested a plundering hand. He winked at Sard over Minga's
unconscious head, saying meanwhile plaintively, "Why can't I find any
matches? This family sinks lower every day!" Dunstan watched to see
how his father was taking Minga's innocent question.

"What kind of cloth does a Chief Justice wear, anyhow; something
impenetrable, I suppose, calculated to endure, impervious to shouts and
howls and woman's tears," he ventured.

Miss Aurelia, waving the maid with the coffee service out on the
western veranda, looked at her nephew approvingly. "That's a very
interesting idea of yours, Dunstan." The timid lady, intent on keeping
the conversation in a calm backwater, went on to supply that as nearly
as she could remember there was no mention of "the cloth" judicially,
but only for the clergy, and when one thought of it, went on the rising
muffled voice, serenely unconscious--"The coats of the clergy were
blacker and smoother and--er--more dignified than anyone's else--I've
often been struck by it at weddings--and--er--funerals," said Miss
Aurelia.

"I shall look for it at the next--er--execution," said Dunstan as he
rolled his eyes at Minga.

"Now Bishop Cravanette while dining here wore a velvet Oxford
coat, I remember," Miss Aurelia thrilled to her topic, "he dined
here--it was at the time of the laying of the corner-stone of
the--er--church--they--he----"

Dunstan, winding a long arm around Sard's neck, another around Minga's
shoulders, reeled the two girls out of the room. "She's off, Bishop
Cravanette!" he murmured. "That means the rest of the evening; all on
your account, Minga, unless somebody chokes her. Bishop Cravanette,"
Dunstan's mouth modeled on Miss Aurelia's pursy one, too full of its
white teeth. "Seems to me the most ideal man for his--er--very high
calling. His wife less so. The qualifications of a bishop's wife should
be--er--she--he, I remember they--er--I had an aunt----"

Sard put her hand over his mouth, but the boy murmured through his
sister's punishing fingers, "Minga, get Aunt Reely to tell the story of
Sard's name to-night. Then that will be over!"

Sard took his cigarette case out of his pocket. "That will do for you,"
she lovingly tweaked his ear; "now light up, put up, shut up; you're
getting facetious at your own vulgarity, as Father says."

But Dunstan, imitating Miss Aurelia's fussy ways, was dusting off his
chair preparatory to sitting down. In spite of his long, awkward,
muscular form this imitation of soft settling and sighing was
ludicrously exact. Dora, bringing in the coffee tray, put an end to it,
however, and the Judge and Miss Reely joined the young people. Sard
rose till her aunt and father were seated, but Minga and Dunstan coolly
sat, the former smoking until the waitress disappeared. Then Minga,
behind her curved hand, grew confidential. She leaned toward Judge
Bogart like a woman of the world.

"Tell me about that new murderer of yours," she begged. She had
forgotten Sard's instructions "don't you start the subject."

Miss Aurelia interrupted nervously. She waved the sugar tongs.

"Two lumps, Minga, dear?"

"I don't take coffee, thank you," returned Minga imperturbably. She put
her hand on the august knee of Sard's father. "Tell me all about that
murderer, Dora's brother."

It was an unwritten law in the Bogarts' household that the affairs of
his judicial calling should never be mentioned to the Judge. He took
his cigar from his mouth and slowly turned his head; the hard old eyes,
the mouth set in two gray lines under the crisply trimmed mustache,
revealed the iron rigors of the human face set to the inexorable, for
it was through the inexorable power of decision that the Judge had
risen to his fame locally and abroad. These things suddenly confronted
with that most amazing audacity, that marvelous magnet, the unwitting
bold, clear-eyed face of woman-youth, softened perceptibly. The two
gray lines of lip moved slightly. Minga's little pink cheeks, curly
hair, her rosy dress, the little inconsequent hand on the Judge's knee,
these things had a flavor and power, the depth of which the girl could
not possibly guess. Yet Minga did most things very deliberately. Now
she naughtily twisted her mouth at Sard.

"Ah, come on now, Judgie," turning her quizzical head to one side.
"You can't have all the fun of jugging bad boys. After all, you only
represent the people--that's us--let us in on it!"

Dunstan, blowing smoke in the air, almost held his breath. Sard,
staring, put down her coffee cup. They both saw the queer gleam come
into the concentrated eyes. A big hand steely with golf came down
hard on Minga's indolent little fist. "Young lady!" said Judge Bogart,
slowly and decisively, "you ought to be spanked."

"Oh, brother," purred Miss Reely, "I don't think--it doesn't seem----"
Then to Minga, "Why, I am sure you didn't mean--why, George--I
don't think you ever said a thing like that. I feel that Minga was
only asking for information." Sard and Dunstan quivered with silent
laughter; but the Judge rose in quick displeasure. Minga passed her
hand slowly down his sleeve. "Ah, Judgie, dear," she pouted, "I didn't
mean anything. I didn't know that judges took the Hippocratic oath and
everything." One would have thought that there were tears of vexation
and embarrassment in the girl's voice, but she turned a naughty stare
on Dunstan. "Well, your father is a crab, a perfect crab!" Minga's tone
somehow had nothing that could be modernly recognized as rudeness. It
was merely spoiled privilege that made her snap her fingers decisively
and look revengefully at the retreating judicial back--perhaps Judge
Bogart felt what is true of the Mingas of this world, that they have
an amazing power of removing the solemn humbug of prestige from its
intrenchment and are therefore dangerous. The Judge heard the petulant,
"I'll get even with you," but he did not smile or turn the disapproving
back, so the little guest turned rather drearily to Miss Aurelia. This
sort of evening for Minga was incredibly dull; it must be enlivened in
some way. Stifling a yawn, not too cleverly, Minga remarked: "Dunstan
says maybe you'll tell us how Sard got her queer name."

Sard, herself, had followed her father into the library to put records
on his talking machine. The Judge's favorite way of spending a spring
evening was to deny all callers and to sit by the window in front of
the square refrigerator-looking instrument while Sard, like a slave,
drew forth and deposited the records of his choice. Through the windows
of the unlighted room showed squares of black sky with one or two stars
hanging. A young vine tapped against the wire netting or beckoned with
leaf fingers. The Judge never looked at his daughter standing straight
and ready for his signal of approval or displeasure. She chose the
more sentimental and romantic of airs and sometimes when they pleased
him, he softened; his eyes closed at the finale of _La Sonnambula_ or
_Donna e Mobile_; he would sometimes snort, clear his throat and say,
"Very pretty, very pretty." Sard would smile a little, looking rather
wistfully at him. Perhaps when her father heard this music he wandered
down the paths of youth, paths of wistfulness and wanting to do right,
paths such as hers must be: what had been his laws? What had at last
made him this curt, severe, unapproachable man? "What were your laws,
Father?" the girl almost whispered. "Did you always live under the law?"

"Very pretty--very pretty," snapped the Judge. "The best machines are
accurate, that's the idea, accurate; no banging, tinpanning; accuracy,
that's the test of music."

The girl, gravely obedient to him, listened to those comments. At
college Sard had heard all the New Testament in modern music, the
superb ranges, the exquisite far countries of sound and rhythm. For
her the Russian compositions had spelled the awful darkness of a dark
land, through which in splendid bursts came the hope of full golden
wheat fields, the piteous tragic faces of a people longing to rise and
walk from the shackles of years into their own souls' birthright. The
Spanish gravity and witchery as of dancing lights in the mountains,
the French stringing of water pearls and culling of moonlit flowers;
the exquisite question of modern unresolved chords, or the striding
rhythms and deep chests of the masculine Bach fugues. Frolicking rural
joy of the old gigues and morrices and the sombre human pathos of old
folk songs--the girl harking back over those rich immemorial afternoons
and evenings of the music at college, wondered at herself, putting on
the records, setting the needles, half shrinking from the automatic
preliminary whir. "The heart bowed down with weight of woe," she looked
at the grizzled head of the man whose name she bore. Was his heart
"bowed down with weight of woe," was there some sore spot in his heart
where, if she might win, she might see him as he was in the old days
of youth and his love; had he ever agonized, cared about the tragic
injustices of life? Or, did he just coddle a sense of personal loss and
woe?

"WE LOVE FODDIE, DON'T WE, LITTLE SARD, WE AREN'T AFRAID OF HIM? HE
WON'T PUT US IN PRISON," the curious little sweet-smelling whispers
came back to Sard; she felt the soft touch of curls on her face, all
the flummery and subtle trappings of the lacy little mother. These
people were Sard's parents and yet they were lost to her, as remote as
if they had both died! Over and over the longing had come to Sard to
put her arms around her father's neck and say, "Are you thinking of her
too--these days?" but she could as soon have put her arms around the
kitchen chimney.

On the east veranda as the moon rose the soft voice of Miss Aurelia was
placidly relating:

"Yes, Sard's name is strange. Her father, however, has allowed her to
keep it--we--your mother, Dunstan--they, well, it was thought that your
father preferred a boy, but afterward you--er--came, Dunstan, and that,
of course----"

"Yes, of course," drawled Minga. "You--er--came, Dunstan." The girl was
delicately smoking, enjoying Miss Aurelia's horror and considering the
diamond on her engagement finger. It flickered in the moonlight like a
wicked eye. Miss Aurelia somewhat stiffly continued:

"Sardonyx was your mother's favorite stone--she--er--wore the Sardonyx
signet ring of an ancestor."

"By Jove! you don't say," ejaculated Dunstan. He stuck his heels higher
on the rail and struck a match; he leaned over the terrace to flick
some ashes into a jardinière. "And so I suppose--at that time--because
of that--she--he--I--er----"

"Stop it, you demon, stop it," murmured Minga; "you'll spoil the whole
thing; it's wonderful, it's like knitting, knit two, purl two, turn----"

"So that Mrs. Bogart," recommenced Miss Aurelia with dignity,
but being plunged into the enormous detail of her story, she
floundered, helpless. "So that after little Sard, the--er--baby, you
know--er--came--Mrs. Bogart believing--that is--or rather having
been told--er--no--well, having expected a boy--got the idea of
not being able to choose an appropriate name for a girl--and in
consequence--afterward you understand."

Dunstan and Minga helpfully nodded--"afterward" they prompted!

"That is, when Sard was three days old, Mrs. Bogart suddenly said,
that is, I have always understood that she said it suddenly--my
brother would know accurately--she said, 'She's to be called
Sardonyx'--'Sardonyx' like that."

"Really," drawled Minga.

"But Sardonyx was--er--quite masculine, as you see," continued Miss
Aurelia with zest; the narrator turned her face somewhat eagerly and
the pursy mouth, too full of teeth, continued: "This feminization
of it was Mrs. Bogart's own--quite original, we thought. She made
it Sardonice, very clever, everyone said--there was no opposition.
I remember," added Miss Aurelia, "that at that time, for certain
reasons, they were anxious not to have the--er--brain--too active--and
we--er--tried in every way to distract her thought--but that is how
Sard got her name 'Sardonice'--most unusual," concluded Miss Aurelia a
trifle apologetically.

"Why, she could have been named Jezebel, under the circumstances,"
remarked Dunstan. "But--er--as it is--we--er--call her 'Sardine' for
short." The lad, lazily smoking, rolled one eye 'round on Minga.

"Dunstan----" reproved Miss Aurelia.

"Really?" Minga drawled the easy little word again, then with some
recollection of the archaic thing called "manners," "Thanks ever so
much, Miss Aurelia--I'm sure it was awfully clever of Mrs. Bogart; I
always wondered how Sard got her name. Wouldn't it be fun to have a
lot of girls with names like that--Emerald, Diamond, Sapphire, Jade--I
could have been the Jade," remarked Minga with a demure chuckle.

"You've got your wish," observed Dunstan with emphasis. "A little red
Jade, what?" He finished his cigarette, lingeringly pinned down the
butt, extinguished it, then rose, stretching. "Well," with a look of
sweet seriousness, "I'm off to have a whack at those old conditions."

"You mean you're off to bed because you're bored," said Minga
scornfully. "You mean you're going to work out poker hands."

"Good-night, Polly Prunella," the lad bent over and kissed the top
fluff of curls. The girl reached out a punishing hand and he drew back,
chuckling. "You used to let me last year," he explained.

"Say," Minga demanded, boyishly, "what do you think I am? You do that
again and see what will happen." "Bing" with a heavy slap, the little
rose-frocked figure pushed him backward. "My jiu jitsu," explained
Minga modestly to the horrified Miss Aurelia. "I took Self-Defense
all last year--I could tackle any New York gunman with that special
undercut."

"Dunstan!" said Miss Aurelia, severely, to her nephew--"how
ungentlemanly. Never--never let me see you do such a thing again."

"I won't," said Dunstan, penitently. He was looking at Minga with
liking, friendly boyish eyes. "I shan't want to do it again, not just
there. Hey, Minga, I'll kiss you better next time, what?"

"Go to bed, you big Swede," retorted that lady, but the little figure
in rose-color now leaned over and patted Miss Aurelia's hand. "Do I
seem awful?" she asked anxiously. "Mother says I do; I don't want you
to dislike me--you don't like my smoking? The Persian hates it!"

"Oh, my dear," breathed kind Miss Aurelia, "I dislike you? But aren't
the girls nowadays very lacking in manners, smoking and all?"

Minga consoled her. "We have to act like this nowadays, you know;
that's why we don't need chaperones but, of course, there is a good
deal of rough stuff if a boy doesn't know you're nice, and of course
some girls aren't. Now you take any stag line at any dance; sometimes
the fellows get silly and, well, they drink sometimes and, believe me,
that needs some handling." Minga, head down, considered her slippers
gravely.

Miss Aurelia stared.... "The--er--stag line--why, Sard never----"

"Oh--well," Minga leaned her head back against the wall, her little
feet beating time to the music within, "Sard doesn't go in so much for
that kind of thing, all the boys really want to dance with her and she
knows it and doesn't hit it up and she won't allow cut-ins and that
kind of thing--but most of us like the excitement, the being grabbed,
you know, and so the boys like to show each other what cavemen they
are, and, well, they do get silly and rough-house and you have to
handle them like a mother--I've grown old," said Minga, in a burst of
confidence, "I've grown old just keeping some of these lads where they
belong." The girl rose and pecked at Miss Aurelia's sagging cheek.
"Isn't your hair lovely," she observed, "and what pretty feet you've
got. Why don't you get married?"

"My--dear"--Miss Aurelia kept hold of the little brown hand and gasped,
her eyes were wide with astonishment--"at--er--my age?"

"Sure," said Minga with conviction--"you're feminine and all that, you
know--a lot of men stand for that still--take some old blasé clubman
and stuff him into a husband."

Miss Aurelia, stunned, let go of the hand; she was as one paralyzed.

"Nighty night," said Minga lightly. "Do you care if I steal an orange?
I shan't say good-night to Judgie, I've committed him to bread and
water for three days." The girl laughed. "What's that thing they're
playing?" She hesitated, nodding her head toward the music-room.

Miss Aurelia thought it must be Dvorak's "New World. The Largo...."

Minga, curly head to one side, listened a moment, then she shivered.
"A little too weird and woozy for me," she announced. "I hate Sard's
taste in music; I want everything calcium-colored--Fizz," said
Minga explanatorily, "and jazz and dizz!" She stood there, a little
undetermined, listening and staring at the white moonlight on the water
of the river stretched far out below the terrace.

Then Minga looked solemnly at Miss Aurelia. "Do you believe that love
is divine?" she asked casually.

"Why," said Miss Aurelia, "why, my dear child, of course I do--it's--I
always thought--I--we--sometimes--it is said to be."

But Minga, with a queer little self-conscious laugh, broke away from
the gentle detaining hand. She walked up-stairs, whistling; as she
passed Dunstan's door, she gave it a decided thump.

Later Sard slowly climbed the stairs to the tower room. The moonlight
shone in patches and blocks of shimmering glamor on the floor and
across the white bed. The girl stood looking out. She stared strangely
with a look of concealed curiosity out to the seat under the enormous
shadow of the great flowering horse-chestnut outside of the room where
the music had been. All that evening Sard, soberly putting on records,
had been conscious of a tall gaunt figure sitting on the rustic seat
under the horse-chestnut, its head buried in its arms. Now the seat was
empty, but Sard could see a man standing out on the lawn amid a ring of
Norway spruce spreading on the sky. It was Colter.




CHAPTER IX

WHOOPING IT UP


Life these days expressed itself in a ring of automobiles around the
drive of Sard's home. Minga's coming stimulated the activities of a
certain set known as the "Bunch," and the various hulking sedans or
little roadsters lurching in the gutters were like so many beads on the
rosary of her "popularity." In the village the prestige of the maidens
was read by these signs. "Peggy Martin can't be very popular. I never
see but one car in front of her house." "The Fairs must be very dull
people. One never sees any parking on their driveway."

These machines, groomed and glossy, or in some cases dilapidated and
frankly dirty, driven by a youth never contented to stay long in one
place, had their own individual swan-songs and Iliads, their maladies,
their insides, their prowess in speed and climbing, and furnished food
for much of the conversation of Minga's associates. A tall, red-headed
lad would inquire of his feminine neighbor, lolling in the canvas
hammocks on the Judge's terrace of an evening, "Did you see her buck
coming over the hill? The old maid! Didn't want to do the stunt on
first, so I kicked her into second and she climbed it, the old girl,
spitting and blowing. Well, I thought the cranky thing would bust a
valve or something."

Then would follow serious dissertation on spark plugs and gas tanks,
the new fuels, graded lubricating oils and service fuses.

"Where do you garage now, Dave?" inquired one tan-shirted hedonist.

"Oh, I garage on the front lawn," replied the careless Dave. "Mother
hates it, says it spoils the grass, you know, but why bother about
grass? Grass isn't fashionable any more--out of date, I tell her, to
have grass and flowers and things. Cut all that out, I say, old stuff!"

Another youth, dapper, with the long-boned face of the manipulator of
social things, deftly drew attention to his own brand new roadster.
"Got Mother to jog the old gentleman some. Went out and played golf
with him a couple of times. Result!" With negligent cigarette he
indicated the graceful powerful shape. "Like that color? Not too loud,
what?" The youth appealed to the girls sitting on the stone coping that
swept the river-ward side of the house. "I don't want 'em to think I'm
Mary Pickford or anything," was his modest suggestion.

The girls, swinging their feet encased in the flat, practical tennis
shoes of the period, looked their usual momentary cold interest. Their
heads, impertinently bobbed, or spectacularly "bunned," had abundant
hair that covered bright enough little brains, but their mouths,
trained into machine talk, dealt machine-like with little well-worn
screws and cogs and belts of words, so that what they turned out was
machine like; not related thought or challenging conversation, but
trite sentences and inferences and ejaculations that made small circles
of thought.

Gertrude, the leader of the village girls, smiled dreamily at the car
in question. "It's a good make, isn't it?" she said, then--"That firm's
worth millions of dollars, they say, even in these after-the-war days."
Minga nodded authoritatively, as one who knew. They all looked at her
respectfully.

"The Mede says that to drive that car is to drive molten gold," said
Minga--it was understood that Minga spoke of her father as the Mede. No
one knew exactly what the allusion meant, but it showed somehow that
Minga was no slave to parental authority and that she "knew" history.

"I want Dad to get a new car instead of a new piano," said Cynthia.
"With the talking machine and George's cornet we don't really need a
piano--but I do need a good roadster to--to get to the library and--and
church," Cynthia inclined her head demurely.

"Yah--Yah!" they all jeered. "To get to the library and church! Some
getting, I'll say!"

Dunstan looked up. "Whew!" he whistled, "to get to the beauty parlor,
to the hashish joint, to the ice-cream palace, to the hooch chapel."

"Yah!" they all laughed, Gertrude a little more spitefully than the
others. Cynthia Bradon, a lithe, ripe blonde of sixteen, had had
experiences with many things. It was known that she had had a few
"shots" of morphine and would swallow, for a wager, many hectic and
sulphuric beverages. She had run away and been unaccounted for for a
week, she had been photographed in a bathing suit by a moving picture
man. Cynthia was not sensitive, and her beauty, peach-like and of a
glowing dewiness, seemed about the most harmless beauty in the world,
because it covered so empty and so trivial a soul. Among the elders,
she was considered a lost character. Among those who knew her she was
known to be merely silly, lazy and untidy.

Cynthia's own group accepted her without enthusiasm or criticism.
She was regarded as one who was no obstructionist and who by sheer
triviality added much to the gayety of nations. Her "line" was
silliness. Long education by the sensational type of moving picture had
removed from these young people any morbid sensitiveness. "Cinny," and
"Cinema" as they called her, wanted to find out about morphine--let
her. "Fancy," so named from Frances, was a fine swimmer, always diving
against her mother's command. She had saved a child once--moral--if
Fancy hadn't disobeyed her mother she couldn't have saved the child!
Marjorie, who was fat and too evidently made up, was a good sport and
awfully nice at picnics and sailed a boat well and was jolly and fair
in all games. Gertrude, dubbed facetiously "the road-hog," had nearly
killed an old man by running over him in breaking speed laws; but this
fact instead of making her in any way taboo, only served to add to
her interest as a rather tragic saturnine young person in extremely
abbreviated skirts.

They were all far away from the tradition and early training of the
parents who had borne them, spent incalculable money on them, scoured
the realm for the best food for them; added to their youthful desires,
their green sloths, given them leisure and opportunity and crammed
them with diversion but neglected to set them an unswerving example of
strong, frank, fearless, reverent and purposeful life. The young people
of to-day analyzed like a sort of mischievous ivy or burdock burr,
growing rank in the pure garden of our purpose, have become what they
are merely by feeding on the soil around them. They are the curious
sports of a few rather shameful vines and fruits of our own negligence.

When they speak flippantly of love and marriage, they do so with a
very accurate knowledge of the percentage of divorces and the reasons
for these divorces. When they reveal all that is legally possible
of their fine young bodies, they do so after a war which placed the
highest percentage on physical superiority and challenged the needs for
privacy, and they do so impelled by frankness and a healthy Narcissism
that is much better than our old time reticence, our concealment of
deformity and weakness, our æsthetic half-revealing and suggesting that
made so strong a desire for full revelation.

It would be rather a joke to find that in these ways youth may surpass
us one day in virtue and purity. It is quite possible that Don Juan,
about whom we whispered so much behind our hands, would make no
impression at all upon the young men and women of Minga's group. Walt
Whitman's great biologic, physiologic roaring they would frown over,
puzzled. That one man, old, too, with a white beard, should speak
familiarly of prostitutes and be so anxious to specify and catalogue
arms and legs and thighs and bones and blood and bone-sockets, they
would think "queer." But if one were to step out and say to a group
like that on the Judge's loggia, "Don Juan was over-sexed. His amours
were silly and maudlin because his great creator was an embittered and
sensitive and suffering man" there would be a low understanding comment
of "Uh, huh?--that so?" and a general cold-blooded note-taking as to
Don Juan.

To go on about Whitman and suggest that Walt was a great human comrade
who at a time when there were no "legs" and no "spades" spoken of in
the world believed in men and women recognizing the glory of sex and
helping each other; believed in something divine inside of each that
works its way through, no matter how low we sink; believed that we must
struggle and overcome, yet be honest while conquering, sincere about
life while controlled with it, that would be to receive the casual
answer, "Say, that's some little Walt. Where did he tend bar?" But
these things would strike little fire. There would be no real interest
until one mentioned a new machine, a scientific discovery, a sporting
champion or a unique crime. Then keen faces would be bent upon you,
keen eyes would interrogate--Facts, facts, facts! So youth pushes
by all your dreams, all your virtues, all your sentimentalities and
theories for its true meat--facts!

The light, the casual, the cynical, the flippant, the pondering
of rather gross realities and in the cases of the girls a very
destructive, squalid and ignorant playing with the great laws of life
as given into the hands of men and women is the expression of America
to-day. To deplore is futile, to try to train any group of children
away from these general lines of license and freedom, impossible. It
belongs to the age; that age is the aftermath of crazy luxury and
wealth. There is some great biologic secret behind it all, and this
biologic secret may be that such wealth, such leisure, such exhibition,
as opposed to inhibition, as we once deemed desirable is undesirable,
unendurable, in that it affects life with a kind of sponginess, a sort
of quicksand whereon nothing may grow or be built. It may be that such
surroundings as we have tried to give our children have made their
bodies fine, but have shrunken and vitiated their souls, that their use
of our hard-earned materialism has been to deny all our insistence upon
worth and solidity and virtue but it bears one sure portent. To the
observer of the "Minga group" all over America to-day it is apparent
that this Youth will some day take itself in hand, that it will create
a new ethic of worth and virtue that will bear more acute scanning
than does ours. That, though they must stop and go back to hard things
and solemn things, above all to recreate the things they have wasted;
they are preparing for some enormous new Scheme, some great rational
universalism; they will perform that duty ultimately, with a greater
measure of understanding than our precepts could have given them. They
will be free of all tangle and rot of the Seeming, they will know!
They will go forward, keen, fearless, open-eyed, fit to help carry on
the destiny of the whole world.

Soon the general restlessness on the terrace communicated itself in
expression. "Where do we go from here?" asked one chap--he rose and did
a short shuffling step, the others clapping their hands and whistling
an air which ended with the plaintive refrain: "And the reason he
didn't marry me, was his four merry wives across the sea." Minga
stepped inside and slipped on the phonograph a record of Honolulu Jazz
and to this brassy whistling clangor the couples clinched, and young,
long, canvas-shoed, thin legs stepped about in one of the curious
walking dances of the time. This over, they stopped and dawdled,
staring at each other. There were a few personal sallies, one or two
lazy whoops, and then the old thirst for sensation: "Where do we go
from here?"

"I know," suggested the youth with the new car--"Dunce, listen to my
hunch, love me for my bright ideas. All hike out to Lovejoy's for
hot dogs and then back to Billy's for sundaes. Come on, be a sport,
everybody, what matter if you've got no coin? I'm cahoots with you,
I'll stand the multitude. Got me gold mine with me."

"I can't go," complained Dunstan moodily, "got a quizz coming at
eight-thirty, the infernal Latin rooster. I'd like to choke him."

"Cut it out, cut it out!" came a chorus of stern voices.... "Say,
Dunce, what's the matter with yah, gettin' queer? Hey? They only put
Latin in the cirickulum to please the wives of the trustees. Yah!
cut it out, man--say, if yuh don't have any fun, you'll go batty;
the doctors all say so. Sure they do! Everybody does go batty that's
high-brow and studies and all that drool. Say, cut it out, whoop it up
if yuh want to keep from suicide. By heck! you'll do sumpin desperate
if you keep up with this Latin, like that feller your old man is going
to put in the Can. How about that trial; when is it coming off?"

"Chuck that," muttered Dunstan, a grave significant look in the
direction of the house--"Governor is inside. Sard's coming out----"

"Sard's coming out," they chanted gibingly.

  "Oh, the Mermaid Lady came out, you bet,
  She was not fully dressed:
  The pretty curls of her hair were wet
  I leave you to guess the rest."

This gem started by the young chap with the new car was taken up and
chanted by his associates, all beating time and clapping in imitation
of negro minstrels. It was done by way of changing an unwelcome subject
and Sard, appearing at the door, put her finger on her lips. "If you
want to sing," she said laughingly, "you'll have to go in swimming or
something; Father's in his den and I'm sworn to keep things quiet."

"Getting up the data for the great day?" asked one boy saucily.

Sard shook her head at him, but Minga giggled. "Wouldn't it be fun to
go right in now, stand in a row in front of Judgie and say, 'We, the
under-signed, beg for the freedom of Terence O'Brien, given into our
hands,' you know the way they used to do in--in Bret Harte and places,"
finished Minga a little vaguely. "Get him out from under the law."

The group brightened; here was something to do, something unusual and
racy and like the movies; they saw the drama of it.

"You'd have to have a writ of habeas corpus," said one young fellow.
He wore large round glasses and looked solemn. "Who's his counsel?" he
demanded of Sard, professionally.

She gave the name of a village lawyer--"I'm afraid it's only a form,
though poor Dora's wages go for it, for I--I don't believe there is
much defense," Sard bent her brows. "It's all wrong, you know; one of
us would have the best counsel money could buy; if our own families
couldn't afford it, some rich relative would come forward to save the
name."

"That's right, she's dead right." The young faces ranged along
the terrace wall looked solemnly on Sard; from trifling, aimless
pleasure-seekers they became suddenly sober, filled with the sense of
human tragedy of inequality and unfairness.

"Well, then, come on." Minga stood on audacious toes; she bowed like a
preening butterfly. "Who'll follow? I'll lead!"

Lounging to their feet they made ready to follow her but Sard, older
and steadier, restrained them. "That's idiotic," the girl said
abruptly--"you don't know what a rage it would put Dad in, Minga!
You've never seen him when he's really angry."

"Does he carry on some?" asked one of the boys.

Sard was silent for a moment, then, "He is quite terrible," she
said quietly; "it would make things worse in every way to go to Dad
now--besides you know as well as I do that he could officially do
nothing, but," Sard, looking at them all, spoke low, "I have an idea,
I've been thinking."

They always listened respectfully to Sard. She was the stuff of which
leaders are made. Indifferent to popularity, caring only for the
enterprise in which she was engaged, cool, controlled, just as she was
in card games or swimming and tennis, now she took charge of the group
as she had done a hundred times before.

"There's that famous lawyer who is spending the summer in the organ
builder's house on the mountain; you know about him."

"Don't I," spoke up Minga, eagerly. "He's a great friend of my Cousin
Eleanor Ledyard and her little Pudge; he writes Pudge the funniest
letters.... My!" sighed Minga. "He's frightfully important; he's been
counsel for all the millionaires and magnates, he has eyes like X-rays,
they look you through and through. Wow! I'm afraid of him."

The other girl hesitated. "He's famous and all that," she said slowly.
"Father knows him well, but I've read things he has written in the
magazines and--and--he isn't--well, you know how things are done?" The
group, curiously enough, in spite of no reading at all, did know how
things are done. How fatally the lies, the subsidizing, the political
trickery and chicanery persist in spite of the smug assumptions of
virtues; the falsity of the effort to push the world back to an age
where just the title of "Christian" would suffice instead of the more
recent challenge which insists that the Christian be like Christ. They
knew, these little sated, over-indulged, inexperienced sprouts of
materialism, somehow or other, they knew.

"The loss of innocence" which their elders so much deplored has given
them a cool fatal knowledge of the rottenness hitherto hidden from
them; they know the failures and compromises upon which that æsthetic
dream of "innocence" has been dreamed. They will have none of it.

Minga chasséd to the terrace steps; she pinned a scarf around her
head turban-fashion and her eyes shone with adventurous gleam. "Say,
listen," she said in the vernacular--"Say--listen--let's all pile in
the machines and go up there on the mountain and stand in a row before
Watts Shipman. Let's ask him to take Terence's case; let's ask him if
he could get Terry off from a life's sentence. All of us--Yes. What?
Serve Judgie right," added Minga, indignantly, "for not being willing
to talk to me about it."

"Whew!" breathed a young chap in white flannels. The youth, in large
horn-rimmed spectacles, went solemnly over to Sard and held out his
hand, "I'm with you. It will make a sensation, anyway; maybe we
couldn't get much out of Shipman but I'm with you, only what will Papa
say?"

Sard had been thinking about that; a curious look in her eyes, she
faced the boy. "Father's law is one thing," the girl said it without
a trace of disrespect or rebellion, "but mine is another and I want
to be true to mine! I don't know how you feel," she looked soberly at
the owlish one, "but I can't be happy and know that there is so much
tragedy in the world. I can't live under that law."

It was the old sad cry of youth, "Must my happiness, then, be bought
at the expense of so much human frustration and misery?" But the
owlish-eyed one repudiated this notion.

"You'll have to," he said oracularly--"somebody's always hurting
somebody--someone is always getting happiness out of someone's else
misery." The horn-rimmed eyes looked very mature and bitter.

But several of the group jumped down from the terrace and were now
tinkering with the machines in the drive. Jeering cries came from
one to another as the engines started up. "Minga goes with me!"
"Aw! go on, you animal, she does not; she goes with me; right here,
Minga, where there's a looking-glass and rouge and sachet powder and
everything--Sard goes with Thorny Croft. Hey, Nonny, Nonny, the two
nuts, the two high-brows! Cinny'll catch cold; she hasn't got enough
clothes on; Cinny never has enough clothes on. How about the dance
the other night? Well--well--well, we saw a good deal of Cinny!" Not
delicate, not pretty, not dignified, not inspiring. But it belongs to
the age, Messieur et Mesdames; what part have you had in making the age
what it is?




CHAPTER X

THE EXPEDITION


 DEAR WATTS:

 Pudge wants me to write and thank you for your letter. He was
 fascinated with the arrow-heads and listened with his accustomed
 solemnity to your remarks about "minding mother." An hour afterward
 I found him putting cold cream, which I have expressly forbidden him
 to touch, all over the kitten. Upon remonstrance he said blandly,
 "You didn't tell me not to put cold cream on the kitten, Mother, and
 she didn't say anything." It was all so funny and he was so naughty
 afterward! It opened up strange thoughts of all the responsibilities I
 shall have with him. I wondered if when Pudge grows up the first thing
 he will hear will be all the sad and ugly stories that are told of his
 father and if he will believe that they cast an irrevocable shadow on
 his own life. I have known young fellows who went steadily to the bad
 because their fathers were weak in some way. They thought they were
 foredoomed!

 I don't even know whether to go on letting him have his own name, his
 father's name, now disgraced and tragic, but how can I stop things?
 He is his father, he has his mouth, the beautiful, fateful mouth that
 always made me feel as if I were a ship, wrecked on it, and he has his
 hair and his voice and his reckless and beseeching ways. Oh, Watts,
 you saved my husband, all there was to save, brought him back home;
 though you couldn't save him from himself.

 Thanks for the arrow-heads, Watts, and please write me when you like.
 You seem to think I might not care to hear. I have known why it was
 always Pudge you wrote to, but I have grown a little stronger, a
 little less like a wounded animal that wants to bite the hand held out
 to it. I hope your mountain top still holds the peace you first found
 there.

It was this letter that Watts Shipman saved until after his dinner,
cooked by himself on a camp-fire out under the trees and served deftly
and frugally with a sort of hermit cleanliness and economy. His pipe
lit, the russet head of Friar Tuck on his knee, the man read and reread
the pages. The deep eyes with their curiously grave and faithful look
were puzzled, the long hands gripped once or twice on the paper, and
the mouth curled down on the pipe-stem with a look of bafflement and
grim disappointment.

"Pshaw!" Watts kicked away a twig. He changed his position on the log
upon which he sat. Putting the letter safely in an inside pocket,
he got out his knife and cut rather restlessly into a long smear of
yellow lichen on a tree. "It's rather queer that a woman can talk like
that, hold out her signal of distress and then not tell you she needs
you--it's a queer thing," said Watts solemnly to his dog. "It's a queer
thing, only a good woman can withhold her _self_; a bad woman can be
subtle and elusive, a funny little beast, plotting, dreaming greedy,
little clawing dreams and setting out her little poison traps for you,
but a good woman merely draws the veil and you--well, Tuck, all you can
do is to go home!"

Watts spoke the last words so loudly that Friar Tuck rose once. "Woof,
woof," he barked loudly into his master's face. Watts laughed. "Hush,
you baby, I know I said 'go home,' but I'm not going home, Tuck, no
sir, not to those comfortable, luxurious bachelor apartments, not until
I've roughed it a little longer and get the wisdom and rightness of the
woods into me. For we can't take another whole summer off like this,
boy, for a long time. We've got to make it last, you old blasé clubman."

The evening grew late. A very light breeze moved the tops of the
hemlocks and their pointed heads moved darkly like nodding cowls,
their brooding spell took the restlessness out of Shipman and he gazed
lovingly up into their fronded gloom. "Thank God for trees, the great
brotherhood of the woodland priests," he murmured. Watts filled his
pipe, gazing affectionately at those dark brothers, saying softly, "The
Greeks got you better than we do, the souls and conscience of you; they
trained their minds to regard you as some great principle connected
with man and woman and so it was easy for them to imagine you as gods
and goddesses. But we," grumbled the lawyer, "we with our superb logic
and 'practical' minds have crystallized you into just 'trees,' things
that we plant for our shade and cut down for our fuel and on which we
grow fruit. Friends," said the man softly, as he went to one tree trunk
and laid his arm around it, "walk with us like teachers; be one with
us, take us farther and farther into your counsels and your mysteries
and your reticences." Watts Shipman laughed a little, then a guttural
sound from Friar Tuck roused him from his revery.

"You did that before," pointing his pipe at the russet head and solemn
eyes. "You," accusingly, "did that before." Friar Tuck groveled and
whined. Watts, leaning over to pat him, laughed.

"Tuck, old chap, why do you cringe so? I've never hit you, nor as far
as I know has any other man. Why do you act so humbly? You know as much
as I do, the only difference is that you don't know you know, and I do;
but, after all, I only think I know, and that doesn't prove anything,
so cheer up, _mon vieux_;" but at a distinctly menacing growl from
the dog, Watts walked to the edge of the cliff to where his lamp was
placed, and stared into the darkness.

"Shut up, you old barometer, no one can be coming up the mountain
road at this hour, anyway not on this spur." The man peered at his
leather-cased wrist-watch. "After eleven o'clock, and no one uses that
mountain road at night; the driving's rotten and the walking's too
craggy and storm-bitten for anything but snakes and foxes. Unless----"
Watts thought of the mysterious ways of moving-picture campers. Going
to the edge of the height on which the organ builder's house stood,
he peered down to the road curving far underneath. "By all that's
American!" he breathed; "by the Great Original Flapper!"

For a long line of cars was ascending the steep mountain road, winding
in and out of the turns. The young drivers, leaning out, cheered to
each other, calling challenges, experimenting with different gears,
and bawling advice and congratulations on the climbing power of their
machines. The lateness of the hour seemed no curb to their haste
or their assurance, nor did the impassable road rouse a feeling of
insecurity. They were merely interested in the one car that should
reach the top first.

In Dunstan's roadster Minga was advocating a swift rush that should
pass the car ahead and gain the summit speedily. Sard and the young
lawyer tried by their own prudence to communicate that saving quality
to the others; here a driver shook his fist at some dare-devil
brother, who passed him close to the ledge, thereby badly crowding his
neighbors, who in turn swished into the road gutter until passed by one
or two speed cranks trying to beat each other.

When at last every car had reached the summit there were confident
giggles, little gasps from the girls and a catcall of triumph, a
harassed ejaculation from the masculine drivers.

As they parked the machines in an orderly row on the mountain top, the
great lights glared and the black forms crouched in powerful bulk on
the uneven roadway, while the short-skirted, jaunty figures alighted
with mingled sighs and stretches of relief.

"Moon's doing pretty well to-night," said Dunstan. He kissed his hand
to it, calling up to the sky, "All right, Mr. God, we like your little
old scout moon. Some sky-dynamo, what? Savez? We like it!"

They moved about, pawing with their feet, seeking out the path over the
mountain top. Their shadows were elongated in the moonlight, for them
there were adventure and mystery in the bushes all about; scents of
spearmints and bay and the curious smell of rocky plants came to them.

One lad sniffed the air. "I smell chewing-gum," he announced.

"I smell home brew stills," shouted another youth, as he leaped up
and grasped a branch like a young monkey. "Right-o, lead on to your
treasure cave and your fair women slaves."

"We got the fair women slaves right here," insisted another cub person;
"all we need now is a cave and the cavemen will proceed to register.
Look your prettiest, maidens. Put on your skins, your other skins, and
your necklaces."

The hilarity, rather artificial, was the organized hilarity of the
"young" groups of the day; like the cheers of the colleges, the
competitive "rah-rahs" of directed "sides," the "fun" was stimulated by
rather jaded fun-leaders; so, as they entered the wooded plateau where
the organ builder's house stood, they were fairly howling and bawling
with self-conscious youth and the sense of "whooping it up."

"Oh, Watts Shipman," shouted a Yale sophomore. "Oh, Watts Shipman, put
out your head."

"Oh, you criminal lawyer," howled another boy, "free the slaves, burn
the Bastille, burn the pastilles--Rah--Rah--Rah! We want Terence,
the great cut-throat of the Hudson," and so in the pale sanctity of
the moonlight the group stumbled on, plunging, exhilarated, a little
uncertain and undecided and becoming increasingly silly. At some not
very emphatic shrieks, giggles and rather over-done kissing sounds,
Sard turned sharply. The girl, hatless, a little glint in her eyes,
faced them. "I don't like this; you know it's--it's not sensible."

"Ah," they said, "ah, the lady doesn't like it."

"I think we ought to take this thing more seriously," Sard continued
with a little short breath of indignation, adding more gently, "We
don't really know what we're up against. I've heard that Watts Shipman
is terribly reserved. We don't want to antagonize him."

"I shan't antagonize him," came a fresh high voice. "I shall vamp him.
I shall twine around him like the ivy in the snow."

They all chuckled. Minga, clad in scarlet sweater and skirt, with the
orange silk handkerchief bound around her curls, suddenly slid into
a bright patch of moonlight where the trees were thinnest, making a
natural stage setting.

"I am terribly reserved," shrieked Minga in high falsetto. "I am the
primmest little prune in the county. But I am some little dancer and
don't you forget it, and I will dance his eyes out of his head. Ladies
and gents," announced Minga, "the Pocahontas Pep. Watch me!"

They stood there watching her prowling paces and archly bold postures.
The slender form bent almost backward, the eyes filled with imaginary
passion and adventure and fear. When she ended with a lovely fantastic
rush and stampede, it is quite certain that that grave Indian maiden,
the estimable Pocahontas, would have been as much fascinated as anyone
else. At the catcalls and whoops of applause, Sard again held up her
hand.

"Minga," she pleaded, "Dunce, please, all of you." Sard was very
positive.

The solemn lawyer youth in the background, silently adoring her,
brightened as her voice took on asperity and decision.

"This is really silly," she scolded; "it's--it's not the way to do
things. Didn't we come up here to try to save Terence O'Brien?" she
demanded.

"Sure," soothed one of the boys. "Right-o!" added one or two more.

"Well then," said Sard, "if I know a thing of Watts Shipman from what
I've heard Father say," she dropped her voice to persuasive entreaty.
"No, really, Minga! Dunce! we won't get a thing out of that man if we
act like this; he's very hard to deal with; he's cold and aloof and----"

"An altogether haughty and disagreeable person," said a deep voice.

The group turned quickly, and there in the moonlight, his hand on the
suspicious Friar Tuck's collar, stood the lawyer.

There was a moment's silence; a sort of shiver ran through the young
people. It was a sensation they quickly recognized, but to which they
could give no name; the voice and presence of spiritual poise, the
calm, inexorable deliberation of assured authority.

"How do you do, everybody?" said Watts quietly, as quietly as he stood
there waiting.

That "everybody," grave as it was, contained an informal welcome
that Minga was quick to recognize. She, who took hurdles as soon as
they were presented, now tried to jump the barrier of this stranger's
powerful personality. She stepped forward, a funny little figure in
scarlet, opposite to the tall khaki-clad repose of the man.

"How do you do, Mr. Shipman?" came the little voice in the moonlight.

Minga was glib at these numbers. "I've--we've heard so much about you,
awfully glad to meet you; you know my cousin, Mrs. Ledyard, she's told
me just lots about you."

Watts swept a swift glance at the girl.... "Yes," he took Minga in and
smiled, not unsympathetically, "I know Mrs. Ledyard well; I am glad to
meet a cousin of hers. It's Miss Gerould, isn't it? I am so glad to see
you."

"Well," Minga, even before his indulgence, felt an unaccountable
awkwardness; the erstwhile Pocahontas shifted from one foot to another
while she dug both hands in the patch pockets of her tennis skirt.
"I--we--er--just came up," she began; "we all sort of--thought we'd
like to know you."

Now the owl-eyed youth stepped forward with the grand manner of the
college debater.

"We come on behalf of Terence O'Brien," he began. At the superior
manner and the name, the great lawyer stiffened ever so imperceptibly,
but suddenly the owl-eyed also lost courage, so that it was Sard who
was forced to lucidify things.

"We hope we aren't intruding." The girl's voice was even and poised.
Watts looked at her with interest.

"We are in great distress and trouble about something and we believed
that you could--that you would help us."

"This is Judge Bogart's daughter," announced one of the boys with the
society drawl of the "important" introduction.

The lawyer, standing there, bowed. The moonlight disguised the look of
curiosity, of humor, in his eyes; he scanned this awed group in rather
fantastic outdoor get-up.

"It's a little late for calling, isn't it?" he suggested; then, seeing
a slight resentment on the part of the owl-eyed, whom he instantly
recognized as a struggler along his own difficult path of the law, he
relented.

"But delightful of you to climb way up here. Rather wicked roads, I'm
afraid; some able driving." With a hospitable gesture he led the way to
the clearing in front of his house. Few of the young people had been
up here before; there were looks of frank curiosity and expressions
of wonder that a modern clubman should choose to live in the organ
builder's old rookery.

"Well, it has its charm," explained Watts, his grim mouth was humorous,
"but I shan't ask you in; not while the moon's like this! Now, if you
fellows will drag out rugs and some cushions for the girls----" He was
busy receiving his midnight guests, as if all were quite usual.

And quite usual it seemed to the young night hawks. The boys, sitting
on stumps, rolled cigarettes or filled pipes; Minga and Gertrude also
lit cigarettes, but the former, at Sard's amused glance, tossed hers
away; the thing, still smouldering, dropped on some dried pine needles.
Shipman slowly turned from the owl-eyed and his look went directly to
the little wisp of smoke.

"Your cigarette is still burning," he gestured toward it, then
courteously, "I am fire warden here; won't you please put it out?"

It was as if he assumed that a modern girl would prefer to do this
herself, but Minga wilfully misunderstood him. The little scarlet
figure seated on the log resented the authority back of the deep kind
gaze bent upon her. It was a stinging new experience for Minga to be
reminded of a duty, an experience like a smart blow on the lithe little
body, only it had none of the brutality a blow must have; perhaps that
was why it stung. Minga hunched one shoulder; her eyes snapped as she
turned away.

"You can put it out yourself," was her pert remark.

There was a nervous giggle, then a sudden silence. The scene in the
moonlight was significant. The loafing, negligent forms of the smoking
youths, Sard standing vibrant, clear, but irresolute and waiting.
Dunstan, the charmed faun look in his eyes, prone at Minga's feet.
The culprit flushed and annoyed, the girls frankly open-mouthed and
uncomprehending. Again the owlish-eyed tried to take command.

"Allow me," with opera bouffe effect. He started toward the smoking
cigarette, but, bowing very slightly with an almost curt gesture of
refusal, Watts prevented him.

"I am sorry, but in the capacity of fire warden, it is my duty to see
that an ordinary camp regulation is obeyed." He turned to the provoked
girl and, with very slight but intentional irony, asked, "Do you know
the meaning of that word 'obey,' Miss Minga?"

Slowly the girl rose and stared into his face. Deciding to say
nothing, she gradually stiffened and a hard look came into her eyes.
"I--refuse--to--I," she tried for a lofty tone, but her voice was flat
and childish, "I--I am not accustomed----"

"Exactly," said Watts quietly. "The Mede and the Persian haven't been
successful with you in that, have they?--though they've let you become
so charming. You see," he smiled, "I've heard of you, Miss Minga."

At this the group writhed; one or two giggled a little uncertainly.

"Insulting," breathed one lad dramatically. He put his hand first into
one pocket and then the other; another cub person solemnly took out and
considered a revolver but their host took little notice.

"You see," said Watts, with an air of imparting information, "I believe
in obedience--of course, I shan't order you to put out the cigarette,
Miss Gerould, but obliged as I am to you all for this--er--interest,
yet after all you are my guest and, well, guests, even in America,
still like to consider the preferences of the host and my preference is
to observe forest laws."

There was an indeterminate silence. Loyalty to Minga, and their quick
moving picture sense of outrage, made them wish to murder this man,
who was so quiet and so direct. "Who," thought the owl-eyed, "was this
stranger to command them all, order them around?" Yet the thought
Watts had just expressed seemed to them rather obvious; they had come
uninvited into this man's camp. It seemed only decency to observe the
rules. As they stood uncomfortably irresolute, they saw with wide-open
eyes a strange thing happen.

Watts Shipman stood in front of their little friend in scarlet, not
touching her, only looking at her. Very slowly and calmly the man
motioned toward the cigarette smouldering on the turf; very quietly,
almost imperceptibly, he motioned the girl toward it. Minga rose like
one in a trance, her eyes fixed unwillingly on those of the lawyer.
Putting out one little canvas-shod foot, at first irresolutely, then
with sudden vehemence she rubbed the burning cigarette into the ground
till all saw that it was extinguished. The girl turned her face in the
moonlight. It was broken with rage. "_I hate you. I hate you_," she
breathed. Her teeth seemed to chatter with her sudden fury.

Watts held out both hands. "I'm sorry," he said simply, "but I think
you know that I have done right."

The group of youngsters stood silent and amazed in the moonlight. They
had beheld a thing as rare in America as lions and tigers; they had
witnessed the power of just, quiet and inexorable spiritual authority,
compelling obedience. Minga, looking around for sympathy, read no
answering rebellion in their eyes. With a strange, an almost animal
cry, the girl darted over to Dunstan Bogart. "Oh, Dunce," she choked,
almost screaming, "get me away from here--get me away, I tell you!"

She turned and dashed out of the circle into the rough mountain road,
where they saw her stumbling like a driven thing; Dunstan Bogart,
without an instant's hesitation, following her. The boy's eyes were
glittering, his head held high in a sort of pride of championship. In
a moment their car, tightly braked, was edging cautiously down the
rock-hewn road.

When at last they reached the levels, the boy suddenly reaching over,
put his hand on his companion's, who sat rigid, immovable beside him.
Minga looked at him fiercely a second time, with eyes that were hot
with tears; she sobbed, "Oh, I'm _wild_." When they pulled up at the
Bogarts' garage she drew a long, shuddering breath, and her champion,
staring amazedly at her, saw her face drenched with angry crying.

"Pshaw!" said Dunstan. "What do you care--that old granny on the
mountain top! Why should you care?"

"I wish I was home," said Minga, fiercely. "Oh, I wish I was home."
The sheltering tenderness of the Mede and Persian would have been very
grateful just then to their little daughter.

"Minga," said Dunce earnestly, "I could have brained that brute; so
could the other chaps. What business had he to--- He'll get his yet."

"I hate him, I hate him," repeated the girl viciously. She twisted her
handkerchief in her hands and her eyes grew wide with something now
unaccountable. While she fought for self-possession, the boy beside
her, with a tenderness he hardly understood, stroked the soft, curly
head; he uttered clumsy words of comfort.

"Any man," said Dunstan, "any man who would do such a thing is a pretty
low sort of cur."

"He isn't just a cur," objected Minga miserably; "a cur could--couldn't
make me f-feel like this."

"Well, he's a comic supplement,"--Dunce snapped his teeth viciously,
"he's a--an Egyptian obelisk," raged the boy, "and I'd like to cut some
more hieroglyphics on him."

So the two sat in the little roadster, arrested in their impulsive
pampered lives by one of the greatest laws that has ever been laid on
humanity, the Law of Obedience, incoherent in their inner warrings of
hurt pride, they tried to sustain each other. Dunstan's awkward arm
went once around Minga's little red-clad figure; he strove in a callow
way to be tender, but only for a moment.

For a tempestuous Minga stood up straight in the car.

"For Heaven's sa-sake," she demanded with a slight sob, "For Heaven's
sake,"--gulp--"what do you think this is, Dunce Bogart, one of
those petting parties? Do you think I'm a park lady or one of those
Sunday-school picnic vamps?"

Dunce looked sheepishly determined. "You remember what I said that
first night," he said solemnly, "that I'd kiss you again--and
better--that's what you'll--you'll feel, some day."

To her disdainful silence he went on, "Well, I haven't yet, but I'm
going to; you wait." He wagged his head.

But there was a little distressed quiver in her voice, and the
essential manhood in Dunstan answered it with gentleness. He himself
rose and the two climbed soberly down out of the car. Through the great
trees they saw the cathedral moonlight still silvering all the world
and the sleep and quiet, the majesty of the night, touched them. They
saw depths of life that they had never fathomed; depths that saddened
and frightened them. Together they softly closed the garage doors,
together they entered the dark house and crept slowly up-stairs.

"Good-night, Minga," said Dunstan softly. "Do you care that--that I was
there----" The boy looked solemnly at her.

The girl, pausing at the door of her room, lifted her head and looked
at him. "You were the only decent person on the whole trip," she said
softly. She put her hand in his; it was cold and little. Dunstan,
wondering, felt it tremble.

When a boy goes to bed remembering a girl's trembling hand does he ever
ask himself who made that hand tremble, or does he always feel sure
that it was he who stirred the young life to quivering?




CHAPTER XI

TERMS


The sudden abandonment of the Terence O'Brien crusade by Minga and
Dunstan cast a chill over the other plotters and a sort of obstinate
silence settled down on the young intruders on Watts Shipman's privacy.
One of the boys got up, put his hands in his pockets and walked
aimlessly about, kicking at pebbles and whistling; the girls' voices
took on drawling inflections of careless indifference. The young lawyer
tried some professional small talk that sounded oddly in the poetic
surroundings of forest moonlight to which the senior listened without
much interest. Shipman, with an amused sense of liking to see these
calm young persons at a disadvantage, wondered if they would not under
the awkward stress of the thing develop a few sensibilities, but he
allowed the moment to remain as clumsy as it might be.

The only one who realized the man's inner comment was Sard; she it was
who had fretted helplessly at the inopportune behavior of her girl
friend; nettled, she now resolved that the meeting should be opened and
she moved a little on the log where she sat.

Watts rose and gravely motioned her to take his abandoned seat. "You
see the river better from there," he urged. "Rather nice in the
moonlight, don't you think? You know Drake's 'Culprit Fay'? Of course,
such a delicate poem, made of shells and straws and fairies' wings with
this monster stream for background"--he shrugged, scanning the girl's
face, saying lightly,--"Do you suppose all this beauty really got
through the Dutchman's skin, or did it lie dormant till Irving brought
it to life? A pity, after those 'historic fires of liberty,' and a
young woman's college adorning it, and all the tremendous striking
events of its history, that this river's chief ornaments should be a
prison, a military academy and a lot of rich men's homes! Have you ever
thought," went on Shipman purposefully, "what a marvelous thing it
would be if we could have heroic statuary all along our river banks,
really heroic statuary, sculpture of the great deeds of discovery, the
statues of men who invented things for human good, great inventors,
great mothers, great scientists, great writers, great explorers; not a
single statue that should spell wars or the glory of wars, but all the
superb names that bear witness to the everlasting wonder and glory and
forward looking of Human Life."

Of course, this exhortation was to put her at her ease. The girl
recognized this, and while she hardly heard the words of the man
standing there, she thanked him mentally. As Sard met Shipman's eyes
she tried to look as if she, at least, had completely forgotten the
Minga incident. Anyway, Sard had seen things like that happen to Minga
before. Only, in all those two years at college, reflected the girl,
Minga had never been so completely, so lamentably driven from her
accustomed aplomb. The thing did not make Sard like the great man any
too well, but the memory of the figure of poor Dora at her work, the
sense of a boy of Dunce's age going to prison "for life," these things
spurred her on to what she had to say.

"Perhaps we ought to apologize for coming up here like this," began the
girl tentatively, "but," she laughed a little, "I don't think we will."

"I cannot imagine your having ever to apologize." Watts' eyes were
upon her, the expression in them very different from that with which
he had subdued Minga. He looked a sort of wondering admiration, as a
man may at the young face and figure so exquisitely balanced in so
complete a dignity. To Watts' keen knowledge of human personality, Sard
spelled clarity, essential purity; but it was not ignorant purity nor
insulated clarity. It was the healthy nerve and sparkle of an original
daring nature, something direct and vigorous that went straight to its
interests and issues in a direct, fresh way, that looked things in the
face and tackled them in front.

"We,"--Sard looked around at her rather ineffectual supporters,--"we
believe that you can help us about something--someone--Terence
O'Brien," the girl blurted it out to the famous lawyer with a little
catch of the breath. Her voice, naturally liquid, was a little husky,
but she held herself admirably.

"The man who is held for murder?" the lawyer's voice was grave.

"The boy,"--with ever so slight an insistence on "the boy,"--"who
killed that old cobbler." Sard glanced eagerly into Watts' face.
"We have been talking about it, all of us, a great deal; all Willow
Roads is excited over it because he is so young." The girl hesitated a
moment, then she said simply, "I haven't been able to discuss it with
my father but----" Sard paused; something she had not reckoned with of
embarrassment seemed to thicken her throat, but she plunged bravely on.
"Life sentence is what everyone thinks he will get, life sentence." Her
hand went out with a curious despairing little gesture that Watts noted
with concern. She turned on him dark eyes, womanly, tragic. "Life! Have
we--has anyone the right to take from anyone so young the chance to try
again?"

The lawyer instinctively admired the girl for her directness, and he
met her with equal directness. "No," he said, "we haven't, no one has,
under any circumstances, the right to take life but in such cases
we choose a lesser evil instead of a perfect good. Here the problem
is that this boy, for a small amount of money, wantonly killed an
old man, who had befriended him, trusted him; 'murder,'" said Watts
emphatically, "is on his soul--do you think he would have strength to
live again?"

It was stated very simply, but with such unadorned clearness that Sard
shivered. Shipman, without speaking, got up and went into the house,
presently emerging with some light steamer rugs and Italian blankets,
one of which he drew around Sard's shoulders. He motioned in a big
brotherly way to the somewhat subdued girls of the party, "I'm afraid
you're all cold. Shall we go in? Haven't you sweaters or something?"

But something stiff in this little party made them refuse to enter the
house; it might almost have been that this strange man who lived in
the organ builder's house had so impressed them by a sense of inherent
personal power that they felt actually safer outdoors. Anyway, Minga,
the little scarlet leader of all their pranks and escapades, their
rather elaborately planned defiances and simulated viciousness, had
been shamed by this man. Sard, it seemed, also remembered it; however,
she did not refuse the Italian blanket, though she let it slip to
her knees. The lawyer noted this, and the corners of his mouth moved
slightly.

He turned to the younger practitioner of his profession. "It is an ugly
case," he remarked gravely. "The way it was done," he made a gesture of
disgust, "the boy must have something essentially sneaky and cold in
him. There are natures like that," he turned to Sard, "natures that you
could hardly, with all your imagination, realize or comprehend."

So the group sat in the moonlight discussing the thing. One by one the
lawyer drew the young philanthropists out. Under the rather marked
paucity of expression he found the same impulse, the broad human wish
to give this boy, caught like a fly in the net of the law, "another
chance." Watts quietly relaxed, sat there in the moonlight, studying
the sober young faces. Finally he spoke the thing that had first of all
come into his mind.

"Perhaps I ought not to ask this," turning to Sard, "but your father,
in this county, is the Law and Prophets. The country people dote on
his judgments; they trust him; somehow I should think no lawyer would
influence his decision, no jury's verdict interfere with his sentence.
He, I should think in talking with you, would be able to make you feel
the essential inevitability of the thing."

There was silence as the group faced him, such deep solemnity on the
young faces that Shipman all but laughed; the lawyer, accustomed as he
was to studying all phases of human conduct, found himself amazed at
the unanimity of serious purposes underlying this group that he knew to
be the most unruly, unpromising of all unpromising small-town groups.

"Judge Bogart is an infallible man," he repeated softly. "His
suggestions----" It was evident that the lawyer expected a "suggestion"
from Judge Bogart's daughter.

But it was as if Sard had hardly heard him. At last: "My father
prefers not to discuss these things with us." The girl said it very
quietly and there was no hint of criticism of her father, but she
went on thoughtfully, "Perhaps, though, he belongs to something that
is becoming worn out," again she made the curious despairing little
gesture, "mightn't it be possible that some day all these things will
be changed, that there will be no more 'life sentences,' that we who
come after will see the way to make things better, fairer?"

Shipman laughed a little ironically; he turned to the young lawyer.
"How would Miss Bogart like it if she had to give the life sentences?"
he asked lightly, but the girl had her answer ready and she gave it
with a powerful conviction that arrested him.

"I should not want to live myself," she said in low, distinct tones.
"I should not want to live if I thought we should always have to
have crime in the world." Sard faced him a little defiantly; she was
remembering the voice of poor Dora in the kitchen. "Is it justice," I
ask you, "is it justice to take a young boy like that, take him for
life, never give him another chance?"

Another of the group now spoke up. "Lots of men and women are at large
who ought to be in prison."

Watts smiled. "Lots of boats do sink on the sea, but that is no reason
why we should build our boats so that they will sink. Law, you see,
is society's effort to protect its best from its worst." He looked
interestedly at the young speaker. "You couldn't marry and have a home
without law," curiously studying the boy.

"And I couldn't get a divorce without law, some kinds," grinned the
cub. It was a technical retort, the typical "smart" answer of the
up-to-date youngster. It gave his group courage; there were various
asides among the members of the circle, a few titters and smothered
witticisms.

Shipman rather enjoyed the little drama being enacted before him; he
smoked imperturbably while he appeared to give this answer thought. "I
suppose we ought to remember that the law that makes divorce possible
rose first in the minds of men and women," he said evenly. "But we
must ask ourselves how well those minds are instructed. In any case,
I take it, the law, no matter how badly interpreted, is society's
weapon against itself! New laws put upon paper and framed by act of
Legislature or of Congress are to counteract certain old laws which
were inadequate. When I insisted that your little friend extinguish
her cigarette," the lawyer gravely searched the darkening faces in the
moonlight, "it was merely to enforce a law which makes forest fires
less probable. When I enact a law that separates a good woman from a
bad man or vice versa, I protect the weaker against the stronger; when
I support a law that insists that a boy's liberty be taken from him,
after a dastardly murder, I make it possible for people to move about
with varying degrees of safety from like murder. It is not my affair if
these laws are not modified. It is for you and people like you to keep
laws and by keeping them gain the power to make better ones."

The circle, a little daunted by his calm willingness to discuss, were
disposed to receive this without comment. The little lawyer in the owl
glasses kicked rather disconsolately at a bunch of turf, the other
lads fidgeted. Somehow the crusade to intercede on behalf of Terence
O'Brien had lost its moving-picture sensationalism. They realized that
they had run up against a quiet man of steel and iron, who was more
or less amused and not very impressed by them; there were murmurings
and half-formed suggestions that they should leave until Sard, with a
kind of resolution, rose suddenly from her seat and stood in front of
Shipman. She looked directly into his face and he saw determination in
her; the sort that does and dies, but does not abandon its object.

"I--I believe you are kind," said the girl, in a low questioning tone.

The man, a little surprised, waited gravely.

Sard spoke rather timidly. "I understand how you and other lawyers look
at these things, by rote, sort of, isn't it? And you forget it is men
and women you deal with; only 'cases' and knotty 'points,' isn't that
true?"

Watts, rather piqued, bowed in answer.

"And I know," said Sard quickly--"it seems queer to ask it, but you, a
man of your power, could influence a country jury, couldn't you, from
your way of putting a thing, from your knowledge of how to speak to the
point? Would you," the girl looked eagerly into the half-shadowed face,
"would you be willing to appear for Terry's defense if--we--we paid you
any fee you asked? I think we could get the money some way." The girl
was clearly nervous now; her breath came a little quicker as she stood
her ground, saying simply, helplessly, "Would you?"

Watts marveled at her. This man knew the way a person with a deep
conviction always acted, and no one more solemnly respected conviction.
It was the steady return to the subject in hand, the resolute
persistence, in spite of every objection and obstacle, that won the
great lawyer's respect and admiration. Suddenly a gleam came over his
face and he rose, standing as Sard stood, answering her as simply.
"You have interested me," he said quietly; "it is true that I am
here for a season of rest, but if the trial comes off, as I think you
said, in the early fall, I believe it will be held in your father's
jurisdiction."

Sard nodded, her eyes fixed upon him.

The lawyer stood, his hands in his coat pockets, his eyes on the
ground, considering. Suddenly he looked up and addressed the wide-eyed
circle. "I should ask one sort of fee only."

This consent of itself was so sudden, so unhoped for, that a thrill
went around the group; someone in the circle fairly gasped. Casual,
indulged, the young people had hardly tackled the question of a
great lawyer's fee; the youngsters waited, jaws dropping to hear the
spokesman's answer.

"From you," Shipman turned to Sard, "I should only ask coöperation
along lines which we will work out together; from you," turning to the
little lawyer, "I must beg the privilege of an occasional conference."

The little owl-eyed bowed a solemn and somewhat puffed-up
acknowledgment. But Shipman, with eyes enigmatic, turned upon the
rest of the group, "I feel that to obtain a--er--certain solidarity,
that my fee should come from all of you. Taxing each one of you a
certain percentage per month would, of course, make a hole in your
allowances----"

Instantly the curious derisive protest went up. The group had grown
gradually less in awe of the great man. Now they openly rebelled
while they were half agreed. Those whose murmurings were in earnest
were smothered by their companions who bade them be "sports." At last
someone stepped forward gracefully, offering his hand. It was the
youth with the new blue car. Watts gripped his young paw with liking.
The others then followed in rapid succession. "Good-bye, chocolate
sundaes," said somebody with a groan. "Where do we get off, at the
poorhouse?" asked another cub. "Farewell, my wrist-watch, good-bye,
golf caddies; me for the lessening waistband," they giggled and
shuffled and hooted their dismay, knowing well that what the man
before them asked was no real hardship, yet making their reluctance
very evident. Watts noted with wonder, however, that in this, as in
everything else, they kept to their squad formation, one man having
agreed, all agreed. Someone then suggested gruffly that it was time
to depart. With awkward leave-taking and self-conscious thanks they
finally took themselves away.

All but Sard, who hesitated in the lull occasioned by the departing
group, again callow, vociferous, with a sense of restraint removed.

Shipman, an enigmatic expression on his face, turned to her and held
out his hand. "Will you forgive me?"

The girl, wondering, hesitated, but Shipman, the fine cool hand once in
his, did not let it go too quickly. "I have treated your friends pretty
meanly," he said, "but I wanted to see if they really mean anything."

The girl returned his gaze; for the first time he saw challenge in the
fine young eyes, and his own leaped to their full power.

"You saw?" asked Sard coolly.

Shipman threw back his head, but his laugh was not quite as assured as
usual.

"You haven't forgiven me!" He pretended amusement.

"Perhaps," said the girl, a little bitterly, remembering his earlier
remarks, "I have to protect society from you." The lawyer winced; his
hand quickly relinquished hers and dropped to his side.

"You mean?" he said quickly; the man took a step forward, staring into
her face--"I wonder what you do mean."

"Good-night," said Sard, her voice quivered a little, but she made
the effort to be businesslike, "you will let me know what you can in
connection with the case, with Terence," then a sudden little impulsive
softening, "I do thank you. I know that you have been kind and patient
with us." She motioned to the solemn-eyed one waiting at a little
distance for her. "I must hurry. Good-night!"

They shook hands again, this time a something of liking between them,
and Shipman watched the girl step confidently out of his wondering
observation.

Car after car curved away down the steep road, young voice after young
voice died on the midnight mountain echoes, but until very late indeed
a man stood looking out upon the moonlit Hudson, and it seemed to Watts
Shipman that the whole mountain said, that all the trees and rocks and
stars and ripples said to each other one significant word and that word
was "Youth."




CHAPTER XII

THE MAN ON THE PLACE


"Will you do something for me?" Sard had asked Minga on the day of
her friend's arrival. Later she had made the request that Minga lead
up to the subject of Terence O'Brien; only because she had lost the
courage to speak of the thing that those days was continually in her
mind; namely, the mystery of the new man Colter. He, who busied himself
quietly all day about the drives and shrubberies and caring for the
cars, and who, at night, she saw strolling around to the garden seat
to listen to the music of the Judge's pet records. But now, after a
comradeship of two weeks, much of Sard's restraint had vanished, so
that as the two girls glided in the little roadster out of Bogart's
drive one morning and Minga asked curiously, "What was that thing,
Sardy, that you were going to tell me?" her friend's answering laugh
was less conscious than it might have been.

"Oh, I want you to pass on a discovery of mine; something I've got out
in the garage."

"A pup?" Minga was politely interrogative.

Sard bent to shift gears; she smiled cryptically. "No, no, not a dog;
but I picked it up and brought it home the way one would a badly used
dog. It's partly Aunt Reely's pet, too," added Sard gravely; "she gives
him advice, but I found him."

"A turtle," guessed Minga idly; "one doesn't give a turtle advice,
though, does one? Oh," she turned an accusing face on her friend, "I'll
bet it is just that horrid old man, a plain, dirty tramp." Immediately
the little figure in scarlet lost interest, and as the car glided
softly along the river road and up toward the little valley village of
Morris, Sard frowned thoughtfully. "Just the same, I want you to pass
on him," said the older girl; "he's rather a strange specimen, Minga."
Asked her friend abruptly, "Have you ever seen a case of amnesia?"

Minga, wrinkling her brows, remembered that there was a girl who
studied too hard at college and she had amnesia and couldn't remember
to put her clothes on properly. "That," said Minga, with emphasis,
"made me decide right then that I would never study too hard. But I
never saw any amnesia," added Minga. "Is it anything like asthma?"

"It's like the light going out of your head, I guess," said Sard,
"and the paths of your mind don't lead home; don't lead to the You
that knows you; and it will make all the yous suddenly run into each
other, and you are suddenly lost. For instance, I could have amnesia
so that I could see you, but there wouldn't be any me. You know, the
recognition part of me would be all thin air, and objects stuck in it
like houses and men and women that meant nothing. I've been reading it
up," explained Sard.

Minga shivered. "Don't describe such awful things," she begged.

"But it's interesting." There was a reflective light in the other's
eyes. "I was born to be a psychologist, I guess, because such things
interest me. Think, for instance, of not knowing who one is, or one's
own people! Or perhaps standing right in front of one's home and not
recognizing it! Such things happen. Like doors closing on the room
where the mind used to live, and turning the mind out into a cold new
world where it can't take hold, where it has words and intelligence,
but no recognitions."

"Wow!" Minga twisted an unwilling shoulder. "Stop talking about it.
Shut up!"

"Well," argued Sard, "that's what I think is the matter with that man
we've got right before our eyes. Dad and Aunt Reely say it isn't so, of
course; they say I imagine too much." A very slight irritation crept
into the sober young face that scanned the road ahead. "Older people go
in for peace and comfort more than anything else, don't they?"

"I think maybe it's more just public opinion," said Minga, rather
penetratingly for her rattle brain. "Older people get used to what
their set says and does, and it just becomes sort of home life for them
and they don't want anything else. They refuse to get out and think
outside of what that set thinks and does, because it wouldn't be cosy;
it's like going out on a winter trail when everybody is home sitting by
the fire. They want to sit by the fire. They don't want to progress."

"It wouldn't be 'popular,' I suppose." Sard avoided a bump. "It's
funny, but I keep thinking that if any good things are to be
accomplished we'll have to get rid of popularity."

"Well, I shan't," said Minga. "Popularity? You can't get anywhere in
America unless you are popular; but," the little philosopher added
solemnly, "isn't it queer, Sard, that--that we all, you and I and all
of us, have got to run the world some day whether we want to or not?
Everybody else will be dead--all the aunts and fathers and mothers,"
Minga shivered a little--"and we, we shall have to sign the bills and
give the sentences and be responsible." Minga looked dreamingly at the
wind-shield and at the cars flashing by them. She clearly did not like
the prospect.

The older girl nodded. Sard guided her car up to the curb in front of
the little Morris bank.

"What are you going in for?"

Sard flashed a smile. "Well, I--I am going in to pay Mr. Lowden, that's
the cashier, some money I borrowed the day I found this man Colter. You
see," added Sard casually, "I found him in the gutter up here in Morris
and I had no place to take him to nor any money and Mr. Lowden managed
for me. He seemed to know what to do." Sard got out and leaned against
the car. Her straight, slim personality in its turquoise blue cap
and scarf was a lively bit of poised youth; she stood twinkling into
Minga's perturbed eyes as she said:

"Oh, you'll have to get used to my queer people that I try to rescue,"
then, "when we go back I'm going to take you to the garage and show
Colter to you and then you've got to put on your thinking cap and tell
me what has happened to him and what he is!"

"Of all things," breathed little Minga with disgust, "and there's a rip
in your sleeve, too," she added in tones of injury. "Sard, don't go and
get queer and interested in things that awful way that some girls do."
Minga was clearly aggrieved.

But Sard had run up the bank steps and turned in the direction of
the cashier's office. Through the plate glass window she bowed to
the president; his massive head and broad low brow and deep-set eyes
emphasized a rather unusual type of the quiet country gentleman.
Stepping into the partitioned consulting-room the girl found someone
already in conference with the cashier. It was Watts Shipman. Sard drew
back. "Oh, I'm intruding." She was hesitant.

"No, indeed;" both men rose with cordial insistence. "I was just
going," said Shipman reassuringly.

The girl flushed. "I can come back again," then something steadying
her, to the cashier, "I wanted to settle with you, Mr. Lowden,
about our man Colter. You were so kind that day, you helped me so
wonderfully." She smiled a little shyly. "For a moment I didn't know
what to do."

The man made courteous deprecation. "I was so glad to be of service."
Anticipating the girl's wish, he put a slip of paper into her hand, and
Sard read it interestedly, her brows raised.

"This can't be all. He was two nights at that boarding-house, I think,
and his clothes were pressed and laundered--and--someone got him
shoes----"

"Just the same," the young fellow laughed, "that's all it is. I
strongly suspect, Miss Bogart, that the village philanthropists were
as much interested in your case as you were, only," he sighed a
little, "you took the lead. You were the real Samaritan; the rest of
us might--well, it is just possible we could have passed that man day
after day until he dropped dead from neglect and exhaustion. The doctor
said it was only a question of a few hours more without food."

"You would have believed he was a tramp," excused Sard. Though she knew
it was no excuse.

"But you knew that he was not a tramp," said the man quietly. Then as
he gravely acknowledged the sum Sard laid on the desk, "Does he grow
more coherent?"

Sard looked grateful for this intelligent interest, so different from
the sensational kind manifested by other acquaintances. "He just
works," she said thoughtfully, "works and reads and says very little.
He almost never goes to the kitchen as the other men we employ do, and
he reads a great deal and takes long walks. He knows the countryside
thoroughly and if you ask him questions about flowers, he tells you
queer scientific things, and--and----" she hesitated.

The look of interest on the face of the lawyer sitting here made
the girl pause; an inherent reticence in Sard was a noticeable
characteristic. Before Shipman she was on her guard; with a little nod
she turned and was gone.

The two men, admiring, noted the quick decision, the arrest of
confidence, and smiled at each other.

"It was Miss Bogart who headed my cavalcade last night," said Shipman,
"and she was spokeswoman for the O'Brien matter. Has she, do you think,
much influence with her father?"

The young cashier put his finger-tips together. "With Bogart? Did you
ever know anyone who ever had any influence with Bogart? You don't
know the man; he's not modern in any sense. He has the hard and fixed
ideas of crime and punishment. He believes in the Example. Punishment
is his fetich. From his point of view, if he gives this young chap a
life sentence, fewer old men will get shot in the back. That's Bogart's
point of view." The cashier ruminated for a few moments, then added,
"any jury knows it and plays upon it."

His visitor nodded, then smiled a rather dry smile. "It might, however,
eventually mean more old men shot in the back," he said. Then rising,
"Well, I've enjoyed our talk and thanks for helping me out with this
scheme of the ransoming of Terence, by that young crowd. It is funny,
but it is significant, and they mean business. They will pay a certain
sum per head into your hands Saturday nights, and it goes into the
O'Brien fund." The lawyer hesitated, adding in a low voice, "I need not
tell you that I cannot save the chap. I know that he did the thing, but
I mean to try and get a shorter sentence, twenty years perhaps," he
shrugged his shoulders, adding, "and you and I know precisely what a
man's life is worth after twenty years in prison."

"How about a game of golf on the Wedgewood course to-morrow? You want
to get your revenge?"

They shook hands on it; the younger man looked into the dark eyes, so
full of human kindness, yet so austere and lonely.

"Watts Shipman," the young cashier said slowly, "what are you doing up
there on that mountain? Anything you shouldn't--home brew,--sirens?"

The lawyer laughed; he caught up his riding crop. "Come up and see;
walk up, do you good to climb that far; no wine, no women, not even
some of our best suppressed literature. I'm--I'm just trying," the
lawyer threw back his head and drew a deep breath, "to get hold of
life, real life, the kind of thing that eludes men until too late they
turn and clutch for it."

The other laughed. "And so you saw wood and wash your own dishes?
Wonderful realization of life!"

Shipman's mouth twisted into appreciation of the thing. "I've got a
vegetable garden--raise nearly all my own produce. I've planted it in
terraces half down the mountainside the way the Greeks do in Thessaly.
That's a wonderful scheme for natural irrigation. Anyway," the lawyer
squared away and delivered a teasing punch on his friend's chest,
"I've got back a good digestion and can stretch like a tiger and feel
the morning sun along my bare flanks and--and I can laugh heartily,
and I've forgotten the smell of money and I've gone back to a boyish
repugnance for dirty things and lying things and under-handed things."
The older man cast a penetrating look into the very stuff of his
friend. "Isn't it up to us to create new standards?" he asked squarely;
"are you satisfied with the old? I'm not! I want clean standards, but I
want 'em built on facts, not on calendar mottoes."

The other shook his head. "So do I," he said in a low tone, "but,"
he waved his hand to the street outside, "do you see much out there
that looks like new standards? It's the calendar motto still." For a
moment the two men stood in the window reading the street like a book
on which figures of men and women like words told the story of the
vicinity. Morris's mild, plainly-dressed women doing the morning's
marketing, face, features and walk betokening a certain niggardliness
with life; a complacent adjustment to the best that has been instead
of an insistence upon the best that shall be. Occasional handsome cars
holding peevish city faces come to the country for a great poison herb,
Novelty. Young people flitting about in droves driven by insatiability
and their peculiar disease, leisure and unapplied brains. One or two
old forms tottering in the sunshine, pleased, interested with little
trivial occurrences, yet powerful, holding the power of prestige.
The usual village types, the static parson, the elastic politician,
the loafers on the corner, the nameless village woman, the scoundrel
village man, the sanctimonious gossips, the schools at twelve pouring
out of their hoppers the little victims of all whatever good or ill
might be; up and down the streets, these forms, symbols of life, moved
and went about their business. But no matter what they spelled in
between they wrote irrevocably on the pavements, Greed, and also Fear,
and Popularity. They did not write Progress.

Watts, his dark face turned on the others, looked inquiringly. "The
same as Athens under Pericles, I suppose?" he questioned. "The great
souls come and go and agonize and cry in the wilderness, and the little
souls determine what shall be." He held out his hand once more and the
other gripped it.

"You talk like a man-Cassandra," the cashier grumbled, "but I'm coming
up on your old mountain top to hear some more of your wild stuff."

As Shipman passed down the bank steps he saw the Bogart car sail by
and the two tams, the red and the blue, bobbed gaily at him. "See you
at the dance next Saturday." It was Minga who called this carelessly.
It was the same Minga who a few nights ago on the mountain top had
told Watts Shipman she hated him. Now her vivid face framed in its
blowing curls looked calm appreciation. The Bunch were "for" Watts;
also the big club dance was in the air; her instinct for collecting
partners bade her forget the cigarette episode. Watts, while he raised
his eyebrows, gestured enthusiastically. Sard also waved her hand,
and the flash of her deep eyes got to the man in a way she might not
have intended. For a moment he stood and looked after them down the
principal little street of Morris. It was the blue tam-o'-shanter that
still filled his vision.

"Blue ran the flash across," he quoted thoughtfully. But it was not of
blue violets that the great lawyer was thinking; it was of personality,
of personality that was like a flame, flashing across dullness and
smugness and cheap pride, to what cost? Watts Shipman, climbing to his
mountain top, questioned, for no man knew better than he the painful
cost of honest personality.




CHAPTER XIII

PEARS AND POETRY


Out toward the rear of the Judge's place there were garden paths set
about with horny fruit trees. A small plot of low-growing vegetables;
a strip of turf and a square of bean poles, made a jungle of kitchen
produce. As the season advanced, early summer pears of a soft yellow,
rosy-cheeked sort, began to hang in globules on the gray-flaked trees.
Here Colter sometimes worked under the Judge's snapped comments, or sat
at luncheon hour, preferring to eat here rather than in the comfortable
kitchen; and here, because of its almost jungle-like inaccessibility,
Sard, wandering from the house, would sometimes sit in the long
slumberous grasses and read. No one else cared much for the vegetable
plot nor for the yellow pears. Miss Aurelia stayed away on the ground
of wasps; the Judge found that the grass ruined his highly polished
boots; the cook and the waitresses had prejudices connected with
snakes, but Sard wondered if the "man on the place" ever saw, as she,
lying on her back, sometimes saw, the romance of this nook. The tent of
the blue sky, the silken whir of birds winging through, the syncopatic
throb of life in the grass all around, the Dervish-like attitude of the
old trees holding in faithful remembrance of youth and blossoms their
honey-filled pots of gold.

It was at the noon hour that the two girls came to pick up windfalls.
They waded through the long grass lamenting the great dark bruises on
the soft pear shapes.

"One smashing fall, and a whole lovely pear is spoiled," complained
Minga.

"Something like people," Sard thought; "one bruise makes us say a pear
is 'spoiled.' A person does some one thing that isn't right, and then
as it has with Terence, it spreads out and out and we think of him not
as having his other good qualities, but of just that one thing. Terence
might have been a good horse trainer or a good pianist or a ship's
captain or anything that needs recklessness and short swift purpose,
but he has done the one great awful thing that blots out all those
other qualities and that makes him for all time just a murderer."

The girl thoughtfully stood, her head drooping and her face deep with
a curious shadow of tragedy that was partly inherited. Sard felt sure
that somewhere in her ancestry were people who cared in some deep
way for humanity, who agonized and were sorry as she was for all the
sadness and madness of the world. The thought comforted her. Now, as
she picked up pear after pear and caught sight of Colter kneeling, busy
putting ashes around the roots of blackberry vines, she called to him.

"Are the blackberries ripening?"

Colter slowly rose. Minga, standing lost in a stare of curiosity,
saw the tall, straight, loosely-built figure and finely modeled face
with its thin and curiously yearning line from cheek to jaw. The eyes
of a hot blue were very intense, and the curious backward swath of
deep chestnut hair made an unusual setting for the chiseling of a face
that, while it was still young, was curiously marred with suffering,
yet had something of debonair quality that the girl was too immature
to analyze. Minga, hardly knowing why she did so, looked at the hands
closed easily on the garden rake. Even to her crude perception they
were disciplined hands with the signs of other than coarse toil upon
them.

Colter, in answering the question, advanced toward them. Both girls
were conscious of the clean, trim set effect of the working shirt
on his well-built frame; the tie was exact under his soft collar.
His voice when he spoke was low, with a weak, shaky emphasis, but he
answered Sard's question interestedly, "I think these berries could be
greatly improved. The vines have grown full of dead wood. I've done a
little cutting away, and perhaps with better soil treatment," he nodded
to the pears, "they're very fine just now. Judge Bogart wants me to
take a basket of them up to Mrs. Ralling. She lives on the upper road,
I think."

Perhaps there is nothing so surely indicative of certain training and
breeding as the pronunciation of proper names, particularly names that
have R and L in them. The foreigner in our country slurs these letters
with childlike confidence. The badly-bred person, ear untrained to
niceties of speech, furs the R and gobbles the L and chews his vowels.
These are the curious unconscious ways by which the American shows
his contempt of all distinguished nuances. Colter, so the two young
girls observed, did none of these things. Neither did he employ the
over-stressed nicety, the too careful method of the person who has
not always spoken correctly. What he had to say he said gently, half
thoughtfully. He stood looking at the girls without familiarity, but he
showed no constraint.

"I found your book, Miss Bogart." Colter drew the volume out of his
coat hanging on a pear tree.

Sard reached eagerly for it. "Then I did leave it out here!"

She turned to Minga. "I was reading it here the day before you
came--all this time in the grass, my 'Oxford Book of Verse,'" Sard, a
true book-lover, examined the little volume affectionately. "The leaves
don't seem to be hurt, and yet it rained two nights ago." She looked at
Colter. "You took care of it?"

He smiled in a pleased sort of way. "It was pretty well dampened, but
I found a way to dry it without streaking. I," he hesitated, "I know a
little about the treatment of wet paper." Colter looked off, knitting
his brows thoughtfully.

Minga, uninterested, was turning away, but the gardener nodded at the
book. "I've been reading some things in there I like. I wonder if you
would let me have it a little longer?"

There was dignity in the man's voice, yet a curious pleading note as if
he asked to be allowed to hold on to something very necessary to him.

"I--I once owned this book," he explained, then stood seemingly plunged
in thought, hardly noticing the two girls who stared at him.

"Surely." Sard made her free gesture as she handed him back the little
volume. "Keep it as long as you like," said the girl in friendly
fashion, "and, Colter----"

The man paused, respectfully attentive.

"Don't you want some other things to read?" Sard's eyes, friendly with
interest, were upon him. She was unconscious, sympathetic. "I know
Father would let you have anything in his library."

"I'll bet anything Judgie would not," was Minga's inner comment.

A curious look came over the man's face. As he stood there, the
sunlight on the russet hair, there came into his eyes a quality of
pleasure and bright response, of good will and courteous deference that
was the unmistakable look of personality. But it was momentary. The two
girls, young, not very well versed in subtle shades of breeding, stood
staring curiously at him. Then suddenly they saw the look transform; a
dull expression, a sort of hunted suspicion settled on the sensitive
features; and it was only a garden hand in baggy trousers and sun-faded
gray shirt that stood before them; something had faded out of the man.

Faltering at the mystery of it, Sard tried to repeat her offer. "I
meant," she said awkwardly, "you seemed to care so for books."

"Thank you," said Colter quietly. "I will leave your book in the
kitchen."

It was done with so final an air that there was nothing for the girl to
do but follow Minga out of the orchard, but before she left the garden
she raised her eyes with a swift inquiring look into the strong blue
ones fixed upon her. What she saw there puzzled and dismayed her. A
sudden thought set her heart to beating quickly. "Minga," called Sard
suddenly, "Minga, wait for me!" Startled like a bird, the girl sped out
of the little garden patch. The two hurried toward the house.

Minga put her hand on Sard's shoulder; a look of frank curiosity and
inquiry was on her face. "Where did he get that name Colter?" she
demanded.

"It was printed in the old wreck of a cap he wore, but he says it
is not his name. But he can't remember his name. Well," asked Sard
breathlessly, "well, what do you think?"

Minga faced the older girl solemnly. "Look here," she demanded, "what
is that creature--who is it--where did you pick it up?"

"Then you felt it, too," Sard demanded triumphantly. "You know he isn't
a common person?"

Minga shook her head solemnly. "I don't know what I know," obstinately,
"only it can't be the President of the United States, you know, and it
isn't any kind of foreigner and yet--yet he seems to feel as if he were
some punkins."

"Then you do see it, too?" Sard was exultant. She grasped the arm of
the other girl. "Come on up to my room in the tower and we can talk.
Don't let Aunt Reely join us."

"Are you girls making any arrangements for the Saturday night club
dance?" demanded that lady. Miss Aurelia was fresh in a white dress
with cuffs and collar of intricate embroidery. She wore a chain of
colorless coral beads. "This dance will not be like the others 'in
sweaters and tennis shoes,'" she warned them. "Mrs. Spoyd has been
working very hard to get the young people to appear well at the dances.
Now your frock, Sard, needs certain things done to it. Mrs. Spoyd
thinks you dress too old."

"Oh, gracious!" Sard threw out her hands in impatience. "My yellow
frock is good for a year yet. Don't bother, dear," she begged.

"Now, Sard, I'm not sure," Miss Aurelia demurred. "Last time you
wore it I thought--they wear them so short now. Shouldn't you
take it up a little? But I don't know. Of course, Mrs. Spoyd
thinks--I--she--you----" Minga interfered.

"Come in and look at my pretty little robe," she invited sweetly. "Such
a jazzy little affair! Straight off the Avenue."

Minga held up a small bunch of color. "Perky, isn't it?" she wanted to
know. "A little daring, as the lady said, but of course, if that's what
people are wearing----" Minga made a face of sweet inquiry.

The twin-petaled blue tunic with its girdle and shoulder straps of
flame color had two jeweled butterflies, one planted below Minga's
little thin chest, the other at the base of her supple back. This
confection could have been blown away with a sigh. Miss Aurelia heaved
that sigh.

"Of course, nowadays that cut under the arm is what they all wear--very
popular. Dearest," asked Miss Aurelia plaintively, "if it should grow
cold and you wanted an--er--under body or guimpe of any kind, I'm sure
I could lend you one. And you wear so little underneath----"

Minga, holding the dress close up to her, hung her dark curly head on
one side. "Rather nippy," she remarked with satisfaction. "You think it
shows too much of me? Oh, no," comforted Minga, "there's really quite
a good deal of me that doesn't show, but don't worry, Miss Aurelia,
nobody will be thinking about that. People aren't as curious about how
we're made as they used to be. We all know that we've got arms and legs
and chests and shoulders and ribs and things. It isn't interesting any
more!"

Saying this Minga unwittingly put her finger on what is half truth,
that is, that it is the Puritanical people of the world who emphasize
the harm that is done by vulgar thinking and dressing. The prudish
people think more about vulgarity than the vulgar themselves. The way
to kill such things is to ignore. The fashion, when it has become a
fashion, ceases to be notable, or even challenging. But its dubious
life is prolonged by those who seek to curb it.

Miss Aurelia, with many murmured doubts and misgivings, now took
Sard's frock out of its tissue paper and pasteboard box. With it
went a violet sash and violet slippers that Minga scrutinized rather
disparagingly. "She ought to have scarlet slippers and scarlet
stockings with that yellow."

"It wouldn't be good taste," said Sard shortly.

"But it would be noticed," replied her friend archly, "and you have
nice legs, Sard. Now, Aunt Reely," Minga held up an accusing finger,
"don't pretend you don't know that. You do know that Sard has nice
legs; so does Judgie, so does Dunstan. Why shouldn't the world know?"

So the conference on evening dress broke up amid Miss Aurelia's doubts
and fears and distressed sense of legs. Minga leading, the girls
climbed the tower room stairs, half restraining their giggles.

"If I come down to dinner in that frock Judgie will send me to bed
without my supper," Minga prophesied; "just the same, he will take
several long looks to be sure he is right." The restless tongue wagged
on until Minga became conscious that her comrade was not listening to
her. She glanced at Sard staring out of the window and remembered what
they had climbed up here for. "Now tell me about this queer critter
you've got out there. You call him Colter. I'd have been willing to bet
my engagement ring that was not his real name. His real name," said
Minga, "is Lancelot Humbug."

Sard, twisting the shade cord, slowly shook her head. "How do we know?"
she murmured. "He isn't anything we think he is. I mean what he's
supposed to be, but," she looked quickly at Minga, then away, "I've
come to the point where I'd rather not know anything. There might be
something awful." The girl shivered slightly. "How do I know?" she
repeated.

Sard turned eagerly to her friend. "Minga, do you get things, have them
come to you, without thinking? Do you ever just know things through and
through without being told, you know, sort of sense a thing?"

Minga, going to the dressing-table and taking the ivory-backed nail
buffer, searched about for some polishing powder. "When you start off
like that," the girl remarked, "I always find some light hand labor. Go
on, Sard, honey; I can get my nails beautifully done while you give me
the last Sard-slush."

"Oh, you fuss so over your nails," said the other girl irritably.
"I think it's bad taste, somehow. I can't bear these women who take
every moment they get to compare their hair and teeth and nails and
fingers; there's something monkey-like about it, sort of like savages.
I suppose," Sard laughed a little ironically, "if I had nothing else to
do but sit on the sand and smear oil on my skin I'd be interested in
such things, too."

"Whew!" whistled Minga imperturbably, "you are all rubbed up! You foam,
you fairly sizzle!" She went over to her friend and archly explained.

"It's only my sweet womanly concern for my lover--dearrrest--Tawny has
telephoned; only engaged six dances. I think he's slipping away from
me, and I don't want to lose him, not when they're doing that queer
'bubble and squeak step' and he's the only man who can do it. Tawny,"
explained Minga, "must see his ring glittering upon the most feminine
little hand in the world. You see I have a feeling that he wants to
pass me up for Cynthia or Gertrude; these two have been corresponding
with him, and he sent them candy last week--_Blaaaaaa!_"

Minga, with a gesture of disgust, dropped her eyes. She waved her
buffer in the air, fastening her eyes on her friend. "Does he think
he can fool me that way? Ahem, I'm talking." The other girl's head
was turned away, the eyes staring in troubled fixity at the river.
"If anyone were to fall out of the hearse and ask me," said Minga
with tender solemnity, "I should reply that I did not think you were
interested."

It was the quality of essential good nature in this girl that made her
loved. All Minga's idle words, her flippancies and inconsistencies
seemed to conceal some sound core of being that made her not willing to
wound. Now, she went over and brought her hand down on Sard's back.

"Minga!" The other started irritably and edged away.

"Oh, pshaw!" said the little person with bobbed hair. "Sard, don't be
silly; you act like Mannikin Maude, the Temperamental Tempest. Now in
good, plain American what's the matter?" Minga, turning her friend's
head to meet her eyes, pronounced her verdict.

"Say, look here, you've--you've been no good since that night on the
mountain with Watts Shipman; he snubbed you, I suppose, the way he
snubbed us all. Well, what do you care? He's only a silly old bachelor.
Pooh!" Minga addressed her finger nails, "I could eat into his heart
like a maggot if I only wanted to----" She slapped Sard on the back
again. "Ooooo--but you're gloomy. Brace up, cheer up, swell up, the
worst is yet to come!"

No one could withstand this absurd rallying. The girl at the window
smiled in spite of herself, but she shook her head.

"Minga," in a low voice, "that man out there is somebody!"

"Bllllaaaaa." Minga rolled in despairing disapprobation on the couch.
"I know it, but it's not my affair. I knew that was what was going on
in your head. Lawrence Multimillionaire, the missing heir of Deepcroft
Manor--Oh!" Minga wailed, "to think of you, Sard, the steady, the
highbrow, the blessed Damosel, to come to a thing like this! Honest,
I do think the movies turn our heads when--when we least expect it.
I thought I noticed that the garbage man wore a fraternity pin," she
jeered, "and surely the iceman quoted from the 'Rubaiyat' yesterday
morning."

But Sard would not catch at this mood, she only put aside the teasing
hand that tweaked her hair and fussed over her belt buckle. At last,
she said half under her breath, "If it is amnesia, if he himself
doesn't know who he is, where he belongs, think of the horror of that!"

There was a whir and chug of an arrested car on the drive under the
window. Dunstan with klaxon and voice hailed them. "Oh, you Minga,
put out your head. Say, goils, we've got a notion. The Gertrude bunch
is going to pull off that canoe trip up the Hackensack River this
afternoon--supper and a few ghost stories, toasted marshmallows, wit,
laughter, and moonlight. Want to go?"

Minga looked out, eyeing him critically. "Dunce, why do you wear a
sweater that color? It's awful for you; you should wear nothing but
soft tans and yellow to go with your doggy eyes."

"Humph!" said Dunstan, "that'll do for my doggy eyes." He got out and
went around to the back of the car and took out a kit of tools. "Now
I don't want to be bothered with the drool of an engaged flapper," he
declared; "but I say, do you want to go on this joy jump? I mean it."

The girls leaning out consulted each other with their eyes. "We were
going to wash our hair," demurred Sard, "and then we promised to make
fudge for Aunt Reely, and then," said Minga solemnly, "I promised to
show Aunt Reely a knitting stitch."

"Ha," the youth below looked up and grinned--"in other words you
don't want to go, or in still other words you don't like the Gertrude
and Cin combination. Oh, Sard, you're so noble and literary," the
brother said in mock admiration, "you express things so well.
You--she--I--they--it--he--she," Dunstan dropped the rôle of Aunt
Aurelia and concluded shortly, "Well, why should you go? Who wants a
couple of old hens washing their hair? The road-hog Gert and Cin'll do
all right."

Minga thought the thing over. "There's nothing to see on the
Hackensack," she misdoubted, "just old water and moss and trees and
things."

"Oh, ain't there?" said Dunstan, airily. "Well, I don't tell everything
to ladies who don't care for my society or my friends. I don't speak of
pink pearls, and here I raced all the way home and punctured a tire to
get you two old crones because I thought you'd like to go."

The two crones, slightly crestfallen, once more surveyed each other.

"Which men did you pick out for us?" at last inquired Sard.

Dunstan pushed back his cap; his brow was hot with his philanthropic
offer to promote a picnic.

"Well," he divulged, a little unwillingly, "of course, Gertrude wanted
me, and Cinny had a chap coming out on an afternoon train, dunno who,
and then we thought, well, the girls thought, that Sperry, the owl-eyed
lawyer, would do for you, Sard, and Minga, well, Balky Popham sort of
butted in and chose Minga."

"That settles it, you see." Minga grinned politely with all her little
teeth. "We're going to wash our hair!"

"Oh, my faith!" groaned the youth below. "Say, you two are a couple of
Convent Coolies." Looking up wrath fully he tried to face them down
with this epithet, but to face a person down while looking upward
is difficult: at last he gave it up. "Right-o!" he said bitterly.
"Right-o! Then I get the fair Cynthia with her little bag of dope and
Gertrude with her gloomy gaze, and we side-track the others and pass on
to our own private funeral."

There was something in the young fellow's tone as he said this
that roused both girls; half protesting, half laughing, they
leaned out. "No, wait, Dunce!" they pleaded, "let's talk it over.
Perhaps--wait--Dunce--Dunce----" but there was the angry whir of the
car and Dunce was gone.

Minga's face was scarlet, her eyes gleamed. She turned to Sard.
"Well, now you see what we've done. We were idiots. He was asking us
because--because----Sard, you know what those girls are!"

Sard, brows knitted, was self-conscious. "I ought to have realized,"
she said slowly, "but perhaps it's just----Oh, dear, Minga, what were
we thinking of? Dunstan has done his best to sort of good-naturedly
keep away from Cinny and Gertrude! My, she's horrible for a nice boy."

"And they'll work up a stag line with him for to-morrow night," said
Minga. "Oh, oh, oh!" she stamped her foot. "They'll have the pick of
the dances and all the extras. You know how they'll work it, Sard. Why
didn't you think quickly?"

The other girl ran her hand lovingly over the curly head. "Such a
little pepper-pot; why didn't you think? I thought you didn't want to
go, Minga; you're so funny, nobody will ever know what you want."

"Well, I will," asserted Minga vehemently, "that is, I'll

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