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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40027 ***
+
+                             THE SCARECROW
+
+                           AND OTHER STORIES
+
+                          BY G. RANGER WORMSER
+
+
+    NEW YORK
+    E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
+    681 FIFTH AVENUE
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1918,
+    BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
+
+    _All Rights Reserved_
+
+    Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                    PAGE
+
+    THE SCARECROW                                      1
+
+    MUTTER SCHWEGEL                                   21
+
+    HAUNTED                                           37
+
+    FLOWERS                                           61
+
+    THE SHADOW                                        81
+
+    THE EFFIGY                                       105
+
+    THE FAITH                                        125
+
+    YELLOW                                           147
+
+    CHINA-CHING                                      163
+
+    THE WOOD OF LIVING TREES                         187
+
+    BEFORE THE DAWN                                  211
+
+    THE STILLNESS                                    229
+
+
+
+
+THE SCARECROW AND
+
+OTHER STORIES
+
+
+
+
+THE SCARECROW
+
+
+"Ben--"
+
+The woman stood in the doorway of the ramshackle, tumble-down shanty.
+Her hands were cupped at her mouth. The wind blew loose, whitish blond
+wisps of hair around her face and slashed the faded blue dress into the
+uncorseted bulk of her body.
+
+"Benny--oh, Benny--"
+
+Her call echoed through the still evening.
+
+Her eyes staring straight before her down the slope in front of the
+house caught sight of something blue and antiquatedly military standing
+waist deep and rigid in the corn field.
+
+"That ole scarecrow," she muttered to herself, "that there old scarecrow
+with that there ole uniform onto him, too!"
+
+The sun was going slowly just beyond the farthest hill. The unreal light
+of the skies' reflected colors held over the yellow, waving tips of the
+corn field.
+
+"Benny--," she called again. "Oh--Benny!"
+
+And then she saw him coming toward her trudging up the hill.
+
+She waited until he stood in front of her.
+
+"Supper, Ben," she said. "Was you down in the south meadow where you
+couldn't hear me call?"
+
+"Naw."
+
+He was young and slight. He had thick hair and a thin face. His features
+were small. There was nothing unusual about them. His eyes were deep-set
+and long, with the lids that were heavily fringed.
+
+"You heard me calling you?"
+
+"Yes, maw."
+
+He stood there straight and still. His eyelids were lowered.
+
+"Why ain't you come along then? What ails you, Benny, letting me shout
+and shout that way?"
+
+"Nothing--maw."
+
+"Where was you?"
+
+He hesitated a second before answering her.
+
+"I was to the bottom of the hill."
+
+"And what was you doing down there to the bottom of the hill? What was
+you doing down there, Benny?"
+
+Her voice had a hushed tenseness to it.
+
+"I was watching, maw."
+
+"Watching, Benny?"
+
+"That's what I was doing."
+
+His tone held a guarded sullenness.
+
+"'Tain't no such a pretty sunset, Benny."
+
+"Warn't watching no sunset."
+
+"Benny--!"
+
+"Well." He spoke quickly. "What d'you want to put it there for? What
+d'you want to do that for in the first place?"
+
+"There was birds, Benny. You know there was birds."
+
+"That ain't what I mean. What for d'you put on that there uniform?"
+
+"I ain't had nothing else. There warn't nothing but your grand-dad's ole
+uniform. It's fair in rags, Benny. It's all I had to put on to it."
+
+"Well, you done it yourself."
+
+"Naw, Benny, naw! 'Tain't nothing but an ole uniform with a stick into
+it. Just to frighten off them birds. 'Tain't nothing else. Honest,
+'tain't, Benny."
+
+He looked up at her out of the corners of his eyes.
+
+"It was waving its arms."
+
+"That's the wind."
+
+"Naw, maw. Waving its arms before the wind it come up."
+
+"Sush, Benny! 'Tain't likely. 'Tain't."
+
+"I was watching, maw. I seen it wave and wave. S'pose it should
+beckon--; s'pose it should beckon to me. I'd be going, then, maw."
+
+"Sush, Benny."
+
+"I'd fair have to go, maw."
+
+"Leave your mammy? Naw, Ben; naw. You couldn't never go off and leave
+your mammy. Even if you ain't able to bear this here farm you couldn't
+go off from your mammy. You couldn't! Not--your--maw--Benny!"
+
+She could see his mouth twitch. She saw him catch his lower lip in under
+his teeth.
+
+"Aw--"
+
+"Say you couldn't leave, Benny; say it!"
+
+"I--I fair hate this here farm!" He mumbled. "Morning and night;--and
+morning and night. Nothing but chores and earth. And then some more of
+them chores. And always that there way. So it is! Always! And the
+stillness! Nothing alive, nothing! Sometimes I ain't able to stand it
+nohow. Sometimes--!"
+
+"You'll get to like it--; later, mebbe--"
+
+"Naw! naw, maw!"
+
+"You will, Benny. Sure you will."
+
+"I won't never. I ain't able to help fretting. It's all closed up tight
+inside of me. Eating and eating. It makes me feel sick."
+
+She put out a hand and laid it heavily on his shoulder.
+
+"Likely it's a touch of fever in the blood, Benny."
+
+"Aw--! I ain't got no fever!"
+
+"You'll be feeling better in the morning, Ben."
+
+"I'll be feeling the same, maw. That's just it. Always the same. Nothing
+but the stillness. Nothing alive. And down there in the corn field--"
+
+"That ain't alive, Benny!"
+
+"Ain't it, maw?"
+
+"Don't say that, Benny. Don't!"
+
+He shook her hand off of him.
+
+"I was watching," he said doggedly. "I seen it wave and wave."
+
+She turned into the house.
+
+"That ole scarecrow!" She muttered to herself. "That there ole
+scarecrow!"
+
+She led the way into the kitchen. The boy followed at her heels.
+
+A lamp was lighted on the center table. The one window was uncurtained.
+Through the naked spot of it the evening glow poured shimmeringly into
+the room.
+
+Inside the doorway they both paused.
+
+"You set down, Benny."
+
+He pulled a chair up to the table.
+
+She took a steaming pot from the stove and emptying it into a plate,
+placed the dish before him.
+
+He fell to eating silently.
+
+She came and sat opposite him. She watched him cautiously. She did not
+want him to know that she was watching him. Whenever he glanced up she
+hurried her eyes away from his face. In the stillness the only live
+things were those two pair of eyes darting away from each other.
+
+"Benny--!" She could not stand it any longer.
+"Benny--just--you--just--you--"
+
+He gulped down a mouthful of food.
+
+"Aw, maw--don't you start nothing. Not no more to-night, maw."
+
+She half rose from her chair. For a second she leaned stiffly against
+the table. Then she slipped back into her seat, her whole body limp and
+relaxed.
+
+"I ain't going to start nothing, Benny. I ain't even going to talk about
+this here farm. Honest--I ain't."
+
+"Aw--this--here--farm--!"
+
+"I've gave the best years of my life to it."
+
+She spoke the words defiantly.
+
+"You said that all afore, maw."
+
+"It's true," she murmured. "Terrible true. And I done it for you, Benny.
+I wanted to be giving you something. It's all I'd got to give you,
+Benny. There's many a man, Ben, that's glad of his farm. And grateful,
+too. There's many that makes it pay."
+
+"And what'll I do if it does pay, maw? What'll I do then?"
+
+"I--I--don't know, Benny. It's only just beginning, now."
+
+"But if it does pay, maw? What'll I do? Go away from here?"
+
+"Naw, Benny--. Not--away--. What'd you go away for, when it pays? After
+all them years I gave to it?"
+
+His spoon clattered noisily to his plate. He pushed his chair back from
+the table. The legs of it rasped loudly along the uncarpeted floor. He
+got to his feet.
+
+"Let's go on outside," he said. "There ain't no sense to this here
+talking--and talking."
+
+She glanced up at him. Her eyes were narrow and hard.
+
+"All right, Benny. I'll clear up. I'll be along in a minute. All right,
+Benny."
+
+He slouched heavily out of the room.
+
+She sat where she was, the set look pressed on her face. Automatically
+her hands reached out among the dishes, pulling them toward her.
+
+Outside the boy sank down on the step.
+
+It was getting dark. There were shadows along the ground. Blue shadows.
+In the graying skies one star shone brilliantly. Beyond the mist-slurred
+summit of a hill the full moon grew yellow.
+
+In front of him was the slope of wind-moved corn field, and in the
+center of it the dim, military figure standing waist deep in the corn.
+
+His eyes fixed themselves to it.
+
+"Ole--uniform--with--a--stick--into--it."
+
+He whispered the words very low.
+
+Still--standing there--still. The same wooden attitude of it. His same,
+cunning watching of it.
+
+There was a wind. He knew it was going over his face. He could feel the
+cool of the wind across his moistened lips.
+
+He took a deep breath.
+
+Down there in the shivering corn field, standing in the dark, blue
+shadows, the dim figure had quivered.
+
+An arm moved--swaying to and fro. The other arm began--swaying--swaying.
+A tremor ran through it. Once it pivoted. The head shook slowly from
+side to side. The arms rose and fell--and rose again. The head came up
+and down and rocked a bit to either side.
+
+"I'm here--" he muttered involuntarily. "Here."
+
+The arms were tossing and stretching.
+
+He thought the head faced in his direction.
+
+The wind had died out.
+
+The arms went down and came up and reached.
+
+"Benny--"
+
+The woman seated herself on the step at his side.
+
+"Look!" He mumbled. "Look!"
+
+He pointed his hand at the dim figure shifting restlessly in the quiet,
+shadow-saturated corn field.
+
+Her eyes followed after his.
+
+"Oh--Benny--"
+
+"Well--" His voice was hoarse. "It's moving, ain't it? You can see it
+moving for yourself, can't you? You ain't able to say you don't see it,
+are you?"
+
+"The--wind--" She stammered.
+
+"Where's the wind?"
+
+"Down--there."
+
+"D'you feel a wind? Say, d'you feel a wind?"
+
+"Mebbe--down--there."
+
+"There ain't no wind. Not now--there ain't! And it's moving, ain't it?
+Say, it's moving, ain't it?"
+
+"It looks like it was dancing. So it does. Like as if it
+was--making--itself--dance--"
+
+His eyes were still riveted on those arms that came up and down--; up
+and down--; and reached.
+
+"It'll stop soon--now." He stuttered it more to himself than to her.
+"Then--it'll be still. I've watched it mighty often. Mebbe it knows I
+watch it. Mebbe that's why--it--moves--"
+
+"Aw--Benny--"
+
+"Well, you see it, don't you? You thought there was something the matter
+with me when I come and told you how it waves--and waves. But you seen
+it waving, ain't you?"
+
+"It's nothing, Ben. Look, Benny. It's stopped!"
+
+The two of them stared down the slope at the dim, military figure
+standing rigid and waist deep in the corn field.
+
+The woman gave a quick sigh of relief.
+
+For several moments they were silent.
+
+From somewhere in the distance came the harsh, discordant sound of bull
+frogs croaking. Out in the night a dog bayed at the golden, full moon
+climbing up over the hills. A bird circled between sky and earth
+hovering above the corn field. They saw its slow descent, and then for a
+second they caught the startled whir of its wings, as it flew blindly
+into the night.
+
+"That ole scarecrow!" She muttered.
+
+"S'pose--" He whispered. "S'pose when it starts its moving like
+that;--s'pose some day it walks out of that there corn field! Just
+naturally walks out here to me. What then, if it walks out?"
+
+"Benny--!"
+
+"That's what I'm thinking of all the time. If it takes it into its head
+to just naturally walk out here. What's going to stop it, if it wants to
+walk out after me; once it starts moving that way? What?"
+
+"Benny--! It couldn't do that! It couldn't!"
+
+"Mebbe it won't. Mebbe it'll just beckon first. Mebbe it won't come
+after me. Not if I go when it beckons. I kind of figure it'll beckon
+when it wants me. I couldn't stand the other. I couldn't wait for it to
+come out here after me. I kind of feel it'll beckon. When it beckons,
+I'll be going."
+
+"Benny, there's sickness coming on you."
+
+"'Tain't no sickness."
+
+The woman's hands were clinched together in her lap.
+
+"I wish to Gawd--" She said--"I wish I ain't never seen the day when I
+put that there thing up in that there corn field. But I ain't thought
+nothing like this could never happen. I wish to Gawd I ain't never seen
+the day--"
+
+"'Tain't got nothing to do with you."
+
+His voice was very low.
+
+"It's got everything to do with me. So it has! You said that afore
+yourself; and you was right. Ain't I put it up? Ain't I looked high and
+low the house through? Ain't that ole uniform of your grand-dad's been
+the only rag I could lay my hands on? Was there anything else I could
+use? Was there?"
+
+"Aw--maw--!"
+
+"Ain't we needed a scarecrow down there? With them birds so awful bad?
+Pecking away at the corn; and pecking."
+
+"'Tain't your fault, maw."
+
+"There warn't nothing else but that there ole uniform. I wouldn't have
+took it, otherwise. Poor ole Pa so desperate proud of it as he was. Him
+fighting for his country in it. Always saying that he was. He couldn't
+be doing enough for his country. And that there ole uniform meaning so
+much to him. Like a part of him I used to think it,--and--. You wanting
+to say something, Ben?"
+
+"Naw--naw--!"
+
+"He wouldn't even let us be burying him in it. 'Put my country's flag
+next my skin'; he told us. 'When I die keep the ole uniform.' Just like
+a part of him, he thought it. Wouldn't I have kept it, falling to pieces
+as it is, if there'd have been anything else to put up there in that
+there corn field?"
+
+She felt the boy stiffen suddenly.
+
+"And with him a soldier--"
+
+He broke off abruptly.
+
+She sensed what he was about to say.
+
+"Aw, Benny--. That was different. Honest, it was. He warn't the only one
+in his family. There was two brothers."
+
+The boy got to his feet.
+
+"Why won't you let me go?" He asked it passionately. "Why d'you keep me
+here? You know I ain't happy! You know all the men've gone from these
+here parts. You know I ain't happy! Ain't you going to see how much I
+want to go? Ain't you able to know that I want to fight for my country?
+The way he did his fighting?"
+
+The boy jerked his head in the direction of the figure standing waist
+deep in the corn field; standing rigidly and faintly outlined beneath
+the haunting flood of moonlight.
+
+"Naw, Benny. You can't go. Naw--!"
+
+"Why, maw? Why d'you keep saying that and saying it?"
+
+"I'm all alone, Benny. I've gave all my best years to make the farm pay
+for you. You got to stay, Benny. You got to stay on here with me. You
+just plain got--to! You'll be glad some day, Benny. Later--on. You'll be
+right glad."
+
+She saw him thrust his hands hastily into his trouser pockets.
+
+"Glad?" His voice sounded tired. "I'll be shamed. That's what I'll be.
+Nothing, d'you hear, nothing--but shamed!"
+
+She started to her feet.
+
+"Benny--" A note of fear shook through the words. "You
+wouldn't--wouldn't--go?"
+
+He waited a moment before he answered her.
+
+"If you ain't wanting me to go--; I'll stay. Gawd! I guess I plain got
+to--stay."
+
+"That's a good boy, Benny. You won't never be sorry--nohow--I promise
+you!--I'll be making it up to you. Honest, I will!--There's lots of
+ways--I'll--!"
+
+He interrupted her.
+
+"Only, maw--; I won't let it come after me. If it beckons
+I--got--to--go--!"
+
+She gave a sudden laugh that trailed off uncertainly.
+
+"'Tain't going to beckon, Benny."
+
+"It if beckons, maw--"
+
+"'Tain't going to, Benny. 'Tain't nothing but the wind that moves it.
+It's just the wind, sure. Mebbe you got a touch of fever. Mebbe you
+better go on to bed. You'll be all right in the morning. Just you wait
+and see. You're a good boy, Benny. You'll never go off and leave your
+maw and the farm. You're a fine lad, Benny."
+
+"If--it--beckons--" He repeated in weary monotone.
+
+"'Tain't, Benny!"
+
+"I'll be going to bed," he said.
+
+"That's it, Benny. Good night."
+
+"Good night, maw."
+
+She stood there listening to his feet thudding up the stairs. She heard
+him knocking about in the room overhead. A door banged. She stood quite
+still. There were footsteps moving slowly. A window was thrown open.
+
+She looked up to see him leaning far out over the sill.
+
+Her eyes went down the slope of the moonlight-bathed corn field.
+
+Her right hand curled itself into a fist.
+
+"Ole--scarecrow--!"
+
+She half laughed.
+
+She waited there until she saw the boy draw away from the window. She
+went into the house and bolted the door behind her. Then she went up the
+narrow steps.
+
+That night she lay awake for a long time. The heat had grown intense.
+She found herself tossing from side to side of the small bed.
+
+The window shade had stuck at the top of the window.
+
+The moonlight trickled into the room. She could see the window-framed,
+star-specked patch of the skies. When she sat up she saw the round,
+reddish-yellow ball of the moon.
+
+She must have dozed, because she woke with a start. She felt that she
+had had a fearful, evil dream. The horror of it clung to her.
+
+The room was like an oven.
+
+She thought the walls were coming together and the ceiling pressing
+down.
+
+Her body was covered with sweat.
+
+She forced herself wide awake. She made herself get out of the bed. She
+stood for a second uncertain. Then she went to the window.
+
+Not a breath of air stirring.
+
+The moon was high in the sky.
+
+She looked out across the hills.
+
+Down there to the left the acres of potatoes. Potatoes were paying. She
+counted on a big harvest. To the right the wheat. Only the second year
+for those five fields. She knew that she had done well with them.
+
+She thought, with a smile running over her lips, back to the time when
+less than half of the place had been under cultivation. She remembered
+her dream of getting the whole of her farm in work. She and the boy had
+made good. She thought of that with savage complacency. It had been a
+struggle; a bitter, hard fight from the beginning. But she had made good
+with her farm.
+
+And there down the slope, just in front of the house, the corn field.
+And in the center of it, standing waist deep in the corn, the
+antiquated, military figure.
+
+The smile slid from her mouth.
+
+The suffocating heat was terrific.
+
+Not a breath of air.
+
+Suddenly she began to shake from head to foot.
+
+Her eyes wide and staring, were fixed on the moonlight-whitened corn
+field; her eyes were held to the moonlight-streaked figure standing in
+the ghostly corn.
+
+Moving--
+
+An arm swayed--swayed to and fro. Backwards and forwards--backwards--The
+other arm--swaying--A tremor ran through it. Once it pivoted. The head
+shook slowly from side to side. The arms rose and fell--; and rose
+again. The head came up and down, and rocked a bit to either side.
+
+"Dancing--" She whispered stupidly. "Dancing--"
+
+She thought she could not breathe.
+
+She had never felt such oppressive heat.
+
+The arms were tossing and stretching.
+
+She could not take her eyes from it.
+
+And then she saw both arms reach out, and slowly, very slowly, she saw
+the hands of them, beckoning.
+
+In the stillness of the room next to her she thought she heard a crash.
+
+She listened intently, her eyes stuck to those reaching arms, and the
+hands of them that beckoned and beckoned.
+
+"Benny--" She murmured--"Benny--!"
+
+Silence.
+
+She could not think.
+
+It was his talk that had done this--Benny's talk--He had said something
+about it--walking out--If it should come--out--! Moving all over like
+that--If its feet should start--! If they should of a sudden begin to
+shuffle--; shuffle out of the cornfield--!
+
+But Benny wasn't awake. He--couldn't--see--it. Thank Gawd! If only
+something--would--hold--it! If--only--it--would--stop--; Gawd!
+
+Nothing stirring out there in the haunting moon-lighted night. Nothing
+moving. Nothing but the figure standing waist deep in the corn field.
+And even as she looked, the rigid, military figure grew still. Still,
+now, but for those slow, beckoning hands.
+
+A tremendous dizziness came over her.
+
+She closed her eyes for a second and then she stumbled back to the bed.
+
+She lay there panting. She pulled the sheets up across her face; her
+shaking fingers working the tops of them into a hard ball. She stuffed
+it between her chattering teeth.
+
+Whatever happened, Benny mustn't hear her. She mustn't waken, Benny.
+Thank Heaven, Benny was asleep. Benny must never know how, out there in
+the whitened night, the hands of the figure slowly and unceasingly
+beckoned and beckoned.
+
+The sight of those reaching arms stayed before her. When, hours later,
+she fell asleep, she still saw the slow-moving, motioning hands.
+
+It was morning when she wakened.
+
+The sun streamed into the room.
+
+She went to the door and opened it.
+
+"Benny--" She called. "Oh, Benny."
+
+There was no answer.
+
+"Benny--" She called again. "Get on up. It's late, Benny!"
+
+The house was quiet.
+
+She half dressed herself and went into his room.
+
+The bed had been slept in. She saw that at a glance. His
+clothes were not there.
+Down--in--the--field--because--she'd--forgotten--to--wake--him--.
+
+In a sudden stunning flash she remembered the crash she had heard.
+
+It took her a long while to get to the little closet behind the bed.
+Before she opened it she knew it would be empty.
+
+The door creaked open.
+
+His one hat and coat were gone.
+
+She had known that.
+
+He had seen those two reaching arms! He had seen those two hands that
+had slowly, very slowly, beckoned!
+
+She went to the window.
+
+Her eyes staring straight before her, down the slope in front of the
+house, caught sight of something blue and antiquatedly military standing
+waist deep and rigid in the corn field.
+
+"You ole scarecrow--!" She whimpered. "Why're you standing there?" She
+sobbed. "What're you standing still for--_now_?"
+
+
+
+
+MUTTER SCHWEGEL
+
+
+He was tremendously disappointed. The house was empty. He had thought it
+looked uninhabited from the outside. It made him a bit dreary to have
+his people away like this. That uncertain feeling came over him again.
+The uncertain feeling never quite left him of late. He was conscious of
+it most of the time. It formed an intangible background to all his other
+thought.
+
+He decided he would go down to the lodge presently. He was certain to
+find Bennet at the lodge. And Bennet's wife; and Bennet's three
+children. He grinned as he thought of Bennet chasing his children out of
+his gardens. He could imagine the old gardener's gladness at his
+homecoming.
+
+Going quickly up the last flight of stairs, he could see that the door
+of his room stood ajar. He wondered at the yellow glow of light
+trickling in a long narrow stream out into the dark of the hall.
+
+He went rushing along the corridor.
+
+He pushed the door open.
+
+The same old room. The familiar, faded wall paper. The high, mahogany
+bed. The hunting print he had so cherished on the wall facing him. The
+table just as he had left it; the books piled in neat stacks on its
+polished surface. The lamp standing lighted among the books. The two
+big arm chairs.
+
+He took a deep breath of surprise.
+
+Some one was seated in the chair facing from him.
+
+He saw the top of a man's head. He had a dim recognition of feet
+sprawling from under the chair. On either arm of the chair rested a
+man's hand. There was something he knew about those hands; the prominent
+knuckles; the long, well made fingers. The heavy, silver signet ring on
+the smallest finger of the left hand was a ring he had often seen.
+
+He crossed the room.
+
+"Otto--!"
+
+Standing there in front of Kurz, he wondered at the change in him. He
+looked so much older. There was no trace left of the boyishness which he
+had always associated with Otto Kurz. There were gray streaks in Kurz's
+heavy hair; gray at the temples of the wide forehead; gray behind the
+ears. The mustache and beard were threaded with grayed hairs.
+
+He was astonished to find Otto Kurz in his room.
+
+"Otto--! I had no idea that you would be here--!"
+
+He could not understand the rigid attitude of the man's great body; the
+set mobility of the man's large hewn features.
+
+He moved a bit so as to stand directly in the line of those fixed
+staring eyes. He wanted to interrupt the wooden expression of those
+eyes.
+
+"Otto--It was good of you to come."
+
+Kurz's eyes raised themselves to meet his eyes. He quivered at the look
+in Kurz's eyes.
+
+"My God!--What is it--?"
+
+The glazed, deadened eyes with the live, dumbed suffering behind them
+widened.
+
+"Ach--Charlie--!"
+
+"What's happened, Otto?"
+
+"I--do--not--know. I was waiting, Charlie--for--you--to--come."
+
+"Good old Otto!"
+
+He saw Kurz's hand with the heavy, silver signet ring on the smallest
+finger go up trembling to his beard. It was the old familiar gesture.
+
+"Good?--Did you say good of me, Charlie?"
+
+"Yes, yes!" He insisted eagerly. "Of course it was good of you to come
+and meet me."
+
+"I--had--to--come."
+
+For he a second he wondered.
+
+"But how did you know?--Who told you?--I only just got here. No
+one--knew. How could you have known I was coming?"
+
+He heard Kurz sigh; a long sigh that quavered at the end.
+
+"I--? Ach!--how--I--hoped--!"
+
+"That I would come?"
+
+"That you would come, Charlie."
+
+He could not fathom the look in Kurz's eyes. He had never seen a look
+like that in those eyes. He thought that it was not a human look.
+
+"See here, Otto--What is it?"
+
+Kurz made a little, appealing gesture with his long, trembling hands.
+
+"Later--I--will--try--to--tell--you--"
+
+"Later?"
+
+Kurz nodded his great, shaggy head up and down.
+
+"How did you come in here, Charlie?"
+
+He was surprised at the question.
+
+"How? Why, with my latch key, of course!"
+
+He glanced over at the windows. The blinds were up. He could see the
+dark pressing against the glass; pressing tightly so that it spread. He
+started for the window. Kurz's voice stopped him.
+
+"And your family? You have then seen your family, Charlie?"
+
+He smiled.
+
+"No. Not yet. They weren't here when you came in, were they?"
+
+"No--no!--I--have--seen--no--one. I could not bring myself to go before
+any one. There was an old man. He was going down the hall. I waited till
+he passed. He must have come to light your lamp."
+
+"Well, old Otto--They're not here. I've hunted all through the house for
+them. I rather think they must have gone down to Surrey. They've taken
+the servants with them. After a bit we'll walk over to the lodge and ask
+Bennet where my people are. That must have been Bennet you saw up here."
+
+"Then you do not know?"
+
+"Know what?"
+
+"About your family?"
+
+"But I just told you, Otto; they must've run down to our place in
+Surrey. I only came up here to get a look at the old room. I'll go down
+and ask Bennet presently."
+
+A quick moan escaped through Kurz's set lips.
+
+A sudden thought flashed to him.
+
+"You, Otto--How did you get in here?--With them all away?--With the
+servants gone?"
+
+He saw the muscles of Kurz's face twitch horribly.
+
+"Ach--! You must not ask, Charlie. A little time, Charlie. There are
+things I do not myself know. Later--I--will--try--to--tell--you."
+
+"Things you do not know, Otto?"
+
+Kurz's mouth twisted itself into a distorted grin.
+
+"I do not blame you for ridiculing me, Charlie. I always thought I knew
+everything. Later--; you will see."
+
+"Why not tell me now?"
+
+"No--no--!" Kurz's voice whined frantically. "I do not know if you
+yourself understand."
+
+"I was only trying to help you, old chap."
+
+"Help--! It is that I want. It is that which brought me here. It is
+because I must have you help me."
+
+"You've only to say what you want."
+
+"Your help--"
+
+"You know I'll do whatever I can for you."
+
+"Yes--; I hoped that. I counted--on--your--help."
+
+He waited for Kurz to go on. Kurz sat there silent. The long, shaking
+fingers fumbled at each other.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Later."
+
+"All right--I don't know what you're driving at."
+
+"Are--you--sure--you--do--not--know--?"
+
+"But--If you don't want to tell me now; why, tell me in your own good
+time, old fellow."
+
+"Yes. You are not angry? You do not care if I say it later?"
+
+"Of course I don't care."
+
+"Not--care--If--you--knew--; if--it--is--true--; you will care!"
+
+He could not make out what Kurz meant.
+
+"It's mighty nice seeing you," he said after a second's silence. "It's
+been a long time. Years since I've seen you."
+
+"I came though, Charlie;--I had to come, Charlie."
+
+"I'm jolly well glad you did!"
+
+"You knew I would come."
+
+He drew his brows together in a perplexed frown.
+
+"I knew we would meet sometime."
+
+"Yes. Sometime."
+
+"And the sometime's now. Eh, Otto?"
+
+"Now?" Kurz's big body strained forward. "What--is--it, Charlie--;
+this--now--?"
+
+The frown stayed over his eyes.
+
+"We were bound to come together again, old Otto. You and I were pretty
+good pals back there at your university. What a time we two had
+together! And old Mutter Schwegel! How old Mutter Schwegel fussed over
+us! How she took care of us! It all seems like yesterday--!"
+
+Kurz got out of his chair.
+
+"Old Mutter Schwegel--;" he muttered.
+
+"Dear old Mutter Schwegel!"
+
+Kurz's eyes stole away from his face.
+
+"Later--I shall tell you of Mutter Schwegel too."
+
+"And the talks we used to have--! The nightlong talks. We settled the
+affairs of the world nicely in those days. Didn't we, old Otto?"
+
+"The--affairs--of--the--world--"
+
+"And old Mutter Schwegel coming in to put out the light. And then
+standing there to hear what we had to say of life and of death."
+
+"Of--life--and--of--death."
+
+"And not being able to tear herself away to go to bed. She thought we
+were wise, Otto. She used to drink in every word we said. And then she'd
+scold us for staying up all night. Old Mutter Schwegel. I've thought of
+her often--"
+
+Kurz made a movement toward him.
+
+"And of me, Charlie?--You had thought of me?"
+
+"I say, rather--! Many a time--when they called me back from the
+university--even after I went out to France--I thought of you."
+
+His mind was muddled a bit. He put it down to the excitement of his
+coming home. That uncertain feeling came over him again quite strongly.
+But he had thought of Otto. He remembered he had thought of Otto a lot.
+
+"And what was it you thought of me, Charlie?"
+
+It came back to him that there had been one time when he had thought of
+Otto particularly. That one time when something tremendous had happened
+to him. He could not quite think what. He knew he had been glad when he
+thought of Otto because he had been spared inflicting the thing on him.
+
+He could not get it clear.
+
+He avoided looking at Kurz.
+
+"Why--; why, I wondered what you were doing. All that sort of thing. You
+know what I mean."
+
+"Yes. I know. I did go into the army, Charlie. It was that sort of thing
+you meant, Charlie?"
+
+He felt himself start.
+
+"I was afraid you would do that;" he said involuntarily.
+
+"Yes. I, too, was afraid."
+
+Kurz's voice was low.
+
+"You? Afraid?"
+
+"Ach, Charlie!--You know it. The fear it was not for myself!"
+
+He walked over to the window. He stood there looking down at the huge
+boxwood hedges looming in thick gray bulks up from the smudging reach of
+the heavily matted shadows.
+
+He turned.
+
+"You funked meeting me--in--war?"
+
+"Ach!--God forbid!--That--I--should--meet--you--in--war--!"
+
+"I too;" he said it quickly. "I too was afraid that I should come upon
+you. It haunted me--; that fear I might harm you. It stayed with me--;
+day and night. I shouldn't want to hurt you, Otto. I--I prayed." It came
+back to him how often he had prayed it. "I always prayed that it might
+never be you!"
+
+"Yes--; I know."
+
+He went and stood close beside Kurz. He found himself staring at Kurz
+intently.
+
+"But you're here;--in England. I say, did they make you a prisoner?
+Could my people get parole for you?"
+
+"No. I do not think they do that here in your country. I
+do--not--need--parole, Charlie."
+
+"I thought perhaps--"
+
+"No--!"
+
+"But how did you get here, then?"
+
+"Charlie--; Charlie!--ach!--will--you--not--then--wait?"
+
+"Come, come, old Otto. You've got something to tell me. If you don't
+want to say how you got here, why, all right. Only, you'd best get it
+off your mind. Whatever it is you'd better come out and say what you
+came to say."
+
+Kurz slid back into the chair again.
+
+The room was still. Heavy with silence.
+
+"Yes. I'll tell you--if I can. Charlie, it is hard to say."
+
+He tried to help Kurz.
+
+"It's about this war of ours; that's it, isn't it?"
+
+"About the war? Yes--!"
+
+"Then tell me."
+
+He saw Kurz's massive shoulders jerking.
+
+"How--can--I--tell--you--? I do not think you understand. I do not
+even know if it is what I think it is. I cannot reason it out to
+myself. The power of reasoning has left me. I had no other knowledge
+than my reasoning. I do not know. Now, I do not know where I
+am--or--what--I--am--"
+
+The maddened urge of Kurz's words struck him.
+
+"You're here, old Otto;" he said it reassuringly. "Here with me. In my
+room. In England. You're with me, Otto!"
+
+"Yes--with--you." And then beneath his breath he whispered:
+"Where--are--you--?"
+
+He caught the smothered insistence of that last sentence. He smiled,
+forcing his lips to smile.
+
+"Standing right in front of you, old man. Waiting for you to say what
+you came to--"
+
+Kurz interrupted him.
+
+"I--had--to come. I felt that I must come. I--came, Charlie. I got
+myself here, Charlie."
+
+"Quite right, Otto."
+
+"I want you to know first that I thought of you. That I was, as you say
+you were, afraid I might in some way injure you. I want to tell you that
+first."
+
+"Good old sentimental Otto!"
+
+"Sentimental?--Ach!--I am not sentimental. But I do not think you can
+understand how much you were to me back there at the university. I do
+not think you yourself knew how much you joyed in things. How happy your
+kind of thought made you."
+
+He laughed.
+
+"I always managed to have a rather corking time of it," he admitted.
+
+"You loved everything so," Kurz went on. "At night when we talked it was
+you who believed in what you said. It was you who saw so clearly how
+well all things of life were meant. It was always I who questioned."
+
+"But, I say, old Otto, your mind was so quick; so brilliant. You could
+pick flaws where I never knew they existed."
+
+"It was you who had so much of faith, Charlie."
+
+"How we did talk;" he said it to himself. "Talk and talk until old
+Mutter Schwegel, who was so keen for us, grew tired of listening and
+came and turned out the lamp."
+
+"And how you spoke ever of your beliefs," Kurz's voice was hoarse. "It
+was so easy for you to know. You never questioned. You believed. It
+ended there, with your belief. You were so near to what you thought. It
+was a part of you. I--I stood away from all things and from myself. I
+would tell you that the mind should reason. I stayed outside with my
+criticism, while you--ach, Charlie!--How you did know!"
+
+"And how you laughed at me for that!"
+
+"But now, I do not laugh!" Kurz protested with wearied eagerness. "Now I
+come to you. I ask you if you know those things--now?"
+
+"What things, Otto?"
+
+"The things of life. The things of death."
+
+"I know what I always knew," he said slowly. "I know that life is meant
+to live fully and understandingly and that death is meant to live on;
+fully and understandingly."
+
+"And--you--do--understand--_now_?"
+
+"I understand that always."
+
+"You would not be afraid?"
+
+"Of what?"
+
+"Of--death?"
+
+"No."
+
+He stared out of the window.
+
+The dense, opaque shadows pressing down on the garden. The shadows
+hanging loose and thick on the high, boxwood hedges. The dark, smooth,
+night sky.
+
+And suddenly a faint tremor ran through him from head to foot. He
+pressed his face close to the glass. His hands went up screening a small
+space for his eyes.
+
+In the still block of shadows, in the black mass of them, he had seen
+something; something had moved against the quiet clumping shadows.
+
+"I say," he whispered. "There's some one coming up through the garden."
+
+"Yes--yes."
+
+They were silent for a long time.
+
+Once he looked at Kurz huddled in the armchair; his face white and
+drawn; his eyes staring before him.
+
+He thought he heard footsteps coming softly up the stairs; footsteps
+that came lightly and hesitated and then came on again.
+
+"Charlie--!" Kurz stammered. "Charlie--!"
+
+He felt that some one was standing in the open doorway.
+
+He turned.
+
+His eyes took in the well known figure. The sweet face with its red
+cheeks and its framing white hair. The short body. The blue eyes that
+were fixed on him.
+
+"Mutter Schwegel!" He shouted.
+
+Kurz leaped to his feet.
+
+"What!"
+
+He started for the door.
+
+"Mutter Schwegel, who would have thought of your coming here. It has
+been a long time. I say!--But I am glad."
+
+"Stop--!" Kurz's voice thundered behind him.
+
+He wheeled to look at Kurz.
+
+Kurz's eyes were riveted on the woman standing in the doorway.
+
+"Aren't you glad to see Mutter Schwegel?" He asked. "When we've been
+talking of her all night?"
+
+Kurz was muttering to himself.
+
+"Mutter--Schwegel--;" Kurz mumbled. "Mutter Schwegel--!
+It--is--that--I--wanted--to--tell--you--about--Mutter Schwegel.
+It--is--as--I--thought.
+It--is--ach!--it--is--then--that--way--with--us--!"
+
+He felt that the woman was coming into the room.
+
+He turned and looked at her.
+
+"Mutter--Schwegel--is--dead;" Kurz stammered.
+
+He saw that the old woman smiled.
+
+"She--is--dead. Dead--!" Kurz mumbled.
+
+He smiled back at her.
+
+"Dead--;" Kurz's voice droned shaking.
+
+He saw the old woman go to the table.
+
+He and Kurz watched her take the lamp up in her hands. He and Kurz saw
+her fingers fumbling at the wick. Kurz's quivering face stood out in the
+lamplight. The old woman was smiling quietly.
+
+They saw her try to put out the light.
+
+The lamp still burned.
+
+"Mutter-Schwegel--is--dead--!" Kurz's voice quavered; and then it
+screamed. "Dead--," he shrieked; "we--are--all--of--us--dead--!"
+
+That uncertain feeling came over him. And suddenly it went quite from
+him.
+
+
+
+
+HAUNTED
+
+
+He lived quite alone in the stone built shanty perched on the highest
+pinnacle of the great sun bleached chalk cliffs. All about him, as far
+as the eye could reach, lay the flat, salt marshes with their dank,
+yellowed grasses. Against the inland horizon three, gaunt, thin-foliaged
+trees reared themselves from the monotonously even soil. Overhead the
+cloud splotched blue gray sky, and below him the changing, motion
+pulled, current swirling depths of the blue green sea. And at all times
+of the day and the night, the wild whirring of the sea gulls' wings and
+the uncanny inhuman piercing sound of their shrieking.
+
+He had lived there since that day when the fisherman had pulled him half
+drowned out of the sea. He could never remember where he had come from,
+or what had happened. All that he ever knew was that far out by the nets
+in the early morning they had come upon him and had brought him in to
+shore. Naturally, the fishermen had questioned him; but his vagueness,
+his absolute lack of belief that he had ever been anything before they
+had snatched him from the waters, had frightened them so that since that
+day they had left him severely alone. Fishing folk have strange,
+superstitious ideas about certain things. He had borne the full weight
+of their credulous awe. Perhaps because he, himself, thought as they
+thought. That he was something come from the sea, and of the sea, and
+always belonging to the sea.
+
+He had built himself the stone shanty upon the highest pinnacle of those
+waste grown chalk cliffs; and he had stayed on and on, year in and year
+out, close there to the sea.
+
+In winter for a livelihood he made baskets from the reeds he had picked
+in the swamps about him. In the summer he sold the vegetables he grew in
+the tiny truck garden behind his house. Somehow he managed to eke out a
+living.
+
+The fishing folk in the small village at the foot of the cliffs saw him
+come and go along their narrow streets, morose and taciturn. He never
+spoke to any of them unless he had to. They in their turn avoided him
+with their habitual superstitious uneasiness. He went to and fro between
+his shanty and the village store when the need arose. The rest of the
+time he sat in front of his iron bolted door staring and staring down at
+the sea.
+
+Daybreak and noon. Evening and night he sat there.
+
+When the sky above was tinged with the first streaking colors of the
+dawn he watched the ghostly gray expanse of the ocean. When the sun was
+high in the heavens he looked steadily at the light-flecked spotted
+swells of the waves. When the shadows began to creep up from the earth
+he stared at the greater blackness that swam in glistening undulating
+darkness to him from across the water. And at night his eyes strained
+through the fitful gloom at the pitchy, turbulent sea.
+
+It was like that in all kinds of weather. The spring tides, with their
+quick changes from calm to storm, and the slender silver crescent of the
+new moon hanging just above the horizon. The long summer laziness of the
+green ocean with its later gigantic flame-red moons and the wide yellow
+streak of phosphorescent light that streamed in moving ripples to him;
+the chill, lashing spray in autumn. The foam-covered seething breadth of
+it in winter when the blackness of the low night skies and the darkness
+of the high tides were as one menacing roaring turmoil churning itself
+into white spumed frenzy. It always held him.
+
+He was a man of one idea: The sea. He was a man who drew his life from
+one source: The sea. It had taken his body and had tried to drown it;
+the sea had for that short time caught and gripped his soul. The slimy,
+wet touch of it was seared into him.
+
+It fascinated him; it kept him near it so that he could not have gotten
+away from it, had he had the courage to want to get away. It kept him
+there as though he belonged to it; as though it knew he belonged to it;
+and knew that he knew it. And always and ever the sea haunted him.
+
+The fishing men coming home late at night across the water had grown
+used to steering their course by the unreal light that trickled out to
+them from the shanty on the top of the cliffs. And in the dawn when they
+pushed their smacks off from the long, hard beach to sail out to the
+nets, they knew that from the high precipices above them the man was
+watching.
+
+And outwardly they laughed at him; even when in their hearts they feared
+the thing they thought he was.
+
+They could not understand him. They, who made their living from the sea,
+could not understand how he could be content to live the way he was
+living. They could not have known that he would infinitely rather have
+died than to have taken one thing from out the sea from which he had
+already filched his soul.
+
+His enslavement by it had made him understand it a lot better than they
+understood it.
+
+And so he lived the stupid, hypnotized life of one who is held so
+enchained and cowed that he could not think for himself, or of himself.
+Until that day when he first met Sally.
+
+It was a sunny day late in the autumn that he stood in front of the
+weather beaten wooden hut of the village store, his arms filled with
+baskets. And as he stood there, Sally Walsh came from the store and out
+into the street.
+
+She had seen the man a hundred times but she had never seen him so
+close. She stopped short and stared quite frankly at the bigness of him;
+at the heavily matted hair clinging so damply to his forehead; and at
+the white face so strange to her beside the sun-burned faces she had
+always seen. It was when, quite suddenly, he looked at her and she saw
+the odd blue green sea colored eyes of him, that she started to hurry
+on.
+
+She had gotten half way down the street when he overtook her.
+
+"D'you want--anything of--me?" He asked it, his blue green eyes going
+quickly over her slight form, her small face, and resting for a second
+curiously upon her masses of coiled golden hair.
+
+"I--? why--no."
+
+"You sure?"
+
+"Sure."
+
+She went on her way again and he stood there watching her go; then he
+turned abruptly and walked slowly back to the store.
+
+It was not so long after that when he met her for the second time.
+
+She was on her knees in the yard in front of her father's house mending
+the tar-covered fishing nets with quick deft fingers. He stopped at the
+gate. Feeling the intensity of his blue green eyes upon her, she looked
+up and saw him.
+
+She got to her feet.
+
+"It's a nice morning."
+
+She spoke to him first.
+
+"Yes"; he said.
+
+"You live up there?" She pointed a bare browned arm up toward the sun
+bleached chalk cliffs. "By yourself?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You ain't got a boat?"
+
+"No."
+
+"They say you don't ever fish. Why don't you, Mister?"
+
+"I--I ain't the one to fish."
+
+"Want to help me with these here nets?"
+
+"I--I can't do--that."
+
+"It ain't hard, Mister."
+
+"I--can't--do--it."
+
+"Come on in; I'll show you how."
+
+He opened the gate and went into the yard and then he stood there just
+looking down at her.
+
+"I wouldn't touch--no--net--"
+
+Her brows drew together in a puzzled frown.
+
+"You mean you don't like fishing?"
+
+Somehow he did not want her to know.
+
+"I--ain't--the--one--to--take--no--sea-thing--away--from--the--sea."
+
+"Oh;" she said, not understanding.
+
+They were silent a moment.
+
+"You sell baskets?" She asked him.
+
+"D'you want one?"
+
+"Mebbe. Got a medium-sized one?"
+
+"Got a lot."
+
+"Mebbe--I--could--use--one."
+
+"I'd like mighty well to--to give you one, little girl."
+
+"Why, I ain't a little girl, Mister. I--I thought--I'd mebbe--buy--"
+
+He interrupted her.
+
+"You'll not buy one off of me. I'll bring you one--; if you like."
+
+"A medium-sized one."
+
+"I'll bring it to you--; to-morrow."
+
+"Thanks."
+
+"Good-by, little girl."
+
+"Good-by, Mister."
+
+At the end of the street he turned to look back.
+
+She was on her knees working at her mending of the nets again. She
+looked very small kneeling there on the hard brown earth with the
+straggling lines of squat weather darkened shanties trailing behind her
+out onto the edge of the yellow sanded beach, and the clear unbroken
+blue of the autumn skies above. She glanced up and then she waved her
+hand at him.
+
+He went slowly along the narrow pathway that wound through the sharp
+crevices of the chalk cliffs to the back of his own stone built shanty.
+
+That night he stood staring out at the sea. The moon was on the wane. It
+hung very low in the sky so that the red-gold streak of it seemed to dip
+into the water. A cold northeast wind lashed over the waves. Dark
+swollen purplish clouds raced together in an angry mass. The sea itself
+was black but for the tossing gigantic waves with their dead white
+crests of spraying foam. The pounding of them on the beach below him
+vibrated in his ears. The sea-gulls were flying heavily close to the
+earth; their inhuman, piercing shrieking filling the air.
+
+The little girl had spoken to him.
+
+He turned from the sea then. He went into his shanty. He bolted the
+great iron bolts of the door and braced himself against it as if he were
+shutting something out; something that he feared; something that was
+certain to come after him. He crouched there shivering and shuddering.
+The pounding of the sea was in his ears. The wind that came from the
+ocean whistled and wailed shrilly around and around the house. He leaned
+there; his back to the door; his hands pressing stiff fingered against
+it; his lips moving, mumbling dumbly. His eyes, the color of the sea,
+stared blindly before him. The rumbling roar of the rising tide; the
+thundering boom of it. And in the sudden lull of the wind the hiss of
+the seething spray.
+
+The sea was angry.
+
+He thought with a kind of paralyzing terror that it was angry with him.
+It was calling to him. The lashing of the big waves demanded him. The
+sonorous drumming of it. He had never before denied its call. The
+persistent thudding of it there at the base of the chalk cliffs. It was
+insisting that he belonged to it. The inhuman piercing shrieks of the
+circling sea-gulls mocked him. They knew that he belonged to the sea.
+How could he even think of that golden haired little girl who had spoken
+to him--
+
+The sea was angry.
+
+He tore at the iron bolts and flinging the door wide open he rushed out
+to the edge of the chalk cliffs. And as he stood there the clouds
+dwindled in a vaporous haze away from the skies. The thin red-gold line
+of the waning moon grew brighter. The sea lay foam flecked and calm
+beneath the dark heavens. And at the base of the chalk cliffs the water
+lapped and lapped with a strange insidious sound.
+
+And the next day he sat there in front of his shanty, his reeds in his
+hands, his fingers busy with his basket weaving; making big baskets and
+small baskets; and his eyes, blue green and strained, were fixed on the
+tranquil blue green of the water below him.
+
+For two days he sat there in front of his iron bolted door that now
+swung wide open on its rusty hinges.
+
+The third day he stood upon the edge of the precipice.
+
+It was a gray fog drenched day. The mist dripped all about him. The
+opaque veil of it shut out everything in wet obliteration. He stood
+quite still knowing that beneath its dank dribbling thickness, the sea
+churned wildly in its rising tide.
+
+And standing there motionless he heard a voice calling through the quiet
+denseness of the fog. A voice coming from a distance and muffled by the
+mist. He started. It was her voice calling to him from the narrow
+pathway that wound up the chalk cliffs to the back of his shanty.
+
+"Mister--oh, Mister."
+
+He reached his hand out in front of him trying to break the saturating
+cover of the fog. He went stumbling unseeingly toward the rear of the
+house.
+
+"Mister--oh, Mister."
+
+The rear of the shanty. His feet sank down into the turned soil of the
+truck garden. He stood still.
+
+"Here."
+
+"Mister;" the voice of her was nearer. "Where are--you--?"
+
+He could not see in front of him. He felt that she was close.
+
+"Here;--little girl."
+
+He saw the faint outline of her shadow then through the obliterating
+denseness of the mist.
+
+"Some fog; ain't it, Mister?"
+
+"Stay where--you are. There's the precipice."
+
+"I ain't afraid of no precipice."
+
+"Stay--where--you--are!"
+
+He could hear the dripping of the mist over the window ledges. And then
+he thought he heard, smothered by the weight of the fog, the pounding of
+the sea.
+
+"You surprised to see me? But you ain't able to see me. Are you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You ain't surprised?"
+
+Down there at the base of the chalk cliffs the sea was still; waiting.
+
+"You--shouldn't--have--come."
+
+"Why--you don't mean;--you ain't trying to tell
+me;--you--don't--want--me--here?"
+
+Great beads of moisture trickled down across his eyes.
+
+"Little girl--; I just said you shouldn't have come. Not up here in this
+kind of weather."
+
+"Oh, the weather!" She laughed. "I ain't the one to mind the weather,
+Mister."
+
+Again he reached his hand out in front of him in an effort to rend the
+suffocating thickness of the fog. His fingers touched her arm and closed
+over it. From below him came the repeated warning roar of the waves.
+
+"Can you find your way home--by yourself--little girl?"
+
+"I ain't going home, Mister;--not yet. I came up here to get that basket
+you said you had for me; you know, the medium sized one."
+
+"I'll give it to you--now."
+
+Her hand caught at his hand that lay on her arm. Her fingers fastened
+themselves around his and held tightly. He had never felt anything like
+that. The touch of them was cool and fresh, like sea weed that had just
+drifted in from the sea.
+
+And then from far off across the water came the shrill, piercing shriek
+of a gull.
+
+He felt her start.
+
+"That's only a sea-gull, little girl."
+
+"I know, Mister. But don't it sound strange; almost as if it were the
+sea itself; calling for something."
+
+For a second he could not speak.
+
+"Why--;" his voice was hoarse, "Why d'you say that?"
+
+"I don't know. Sometimes I get to feeling mighty queer about that water
+out there."
+
+"You mean--; why--you ain't afraid of it, little girl, are you?"
+
+"Afraid? There ain't nothing that I'm afraid of, Mister. Why, I'd go
+anywhere and not be afraid--"
+
+He repeated her words very slowly to himself.
+
+"You'd--go--anywhere--and--not--be--afraid--"
+
+He thought then that the fog was lifting. A sickly, yellowish glow
+filtered through the heavy grayness. He could see her more distinctly.
+
+"There's only one thing about the sea, Mister, that'd scare me, and
+that's--"
+
+She broke off abruptly.
+
+"What, little girl?"
+
+"Why, Mister; why, I can't hardly say it. But there's Pa and there's my
+brother, Will. If anything ever happened--; if the sea ever did anything
+to Pa or Will, why--I guess, Mister, I'd just die."
+
+"Don't!" He said quickly. "Don't you talk like that."
+
+For a second they were silent.
+
+The sun was breaking through the dwindling thickness of the mist. He
+could see it lifting in a faint gray line, uncovering the reach of the
+flat salt marshes with their dank yellowed grasses; a thin silver net of
+it hung for a second between the sky and the earth, and was gone.
+
+From the base of the chalk cliffs came the sound of the sea lapping and
+lapping with insistent cunning.
+
+She dropped his hand and she stood there looking up to him, scanning his
+white face with those childlike eyes of hers.
+
+"You live up here because of the sea, Mister?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You ever feel the sea's something--alive, like you and me?"
+
+"You--feel--that--too?"
+
+"Yes," she said slowly, "and I knew you felt it, because the first time
+I saw you--why--you're somehow--something like the sea."
+
+His hands clinched at his sides. His breath came in quick rasping gasps.
+
+"I'll get your basket," he muttered.
+
+He rushed into his one room shanty and caught up the basket nearest to
+him and went out again to her.
+
+She took the basket from him in silence. She slipped the handle of it on
+to her arm. Her hands rubbed against each other; the fingers of them
+twining and intertwining.
+
+"I'll be going now, Mister."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I've got to be getting home before Pa and Will go out to the nets."
+
+"Good-by, little girl."
+
+"Good-by, Mister; and--thanks."
+
+He stood there and watched her go from the back of his stone built
+shanty down the narrow winding path that lay along the sun bleached
+chalk cliffs. She went quickly and lightly down the steep incline, her
+small slender figure in its blue print dress, with the sun bringing out
+the burnished glints in her golden hair. His eyes strained after her. In
+a short while he lost her from sight.
+
+He went back to his basket making then.
+
+And as he sat there, his fingers weaving and bending the supple reeds,
+mechanically working them into shape, he tried to shut out all thought
+of her; to feel as though she had never come to him; to rivet his
+attention upon the insistent pounding of the sea that hurled itself
+again and again at the base of the chalk cliffs; calling and calling to
+him.
+
+After a while the early deep blue dusk of the twilight came.
+
+He got stiffly to his feet.
+
+The long moving shadows were quivering in fantastic purpled patterns on
+the ground about him. Great daubs of them clung in the crevices of the
+chalk cliffs. A mat of shadows crept over the flat salt marshes and
+through the dank yellowed grasses. There was a sudden chill in the wind
+that came to him from off the water. A flock of screeching sea-gulls
+wildly beating their wings, rose from the cliffs and whirred out toward
+the open sea, the uncanny piercing sound of their shrieking coming
+deafeningly back to him.
+
+He stood there staring at the ocean, his head well back; his nostrils
+dilated; his blue green eyes strangely wide.
+
+Far in the distance against the graying horizon he could see the choppy
+white capped waves racing over the smooth dark water. Even as he looked
+the sea began to rise in great swollen billows. The wind too was rising.
+He could hear the distant cry of it.
+
+His heart began to thump wildly. He knew what was going to happen; just
+as he always knew. He could feel what the sea was going to do.
+
+He stood there undecided.
+
+A quick picture came to him of the storm.
+
+He had seen it all before. He had stood there on the chalk cliffs and
+watched it all: Watched the shattered broken logs; the swirling sucking
+water. The sea had held him under its spell; had compelled him to
+witness its maddened, infuriated stalking of its prey.
+
+Her people were out there. Her Pa and her Will. Why had she told him
+that? Why had she said if anything ever happened to them she would die?
+Why?
+
+He could just make out the stiff sticks of the nets reaching thin and
+dark from the surface of the gray water against the lighter gray skies;
+and the boats rowing toward them. The boats with the fishermen. He could
+see the slender patches of them rising and falling with the waves, going
+slowly to the nets. He could distinguish the small, dark shadows of the
+men, rowing. They had pulled him out of the sea in that early morning;
+he who was something come from the sea, and of the sea; and always
+belonging to the sea.
+
+To--betray--the--sea--
+
+The waves were racing in to the shore. The thumping, deafening boom of
+them there at the base of the chalk cliffs below him.
+
+He tried to tear his eyes away from it. It held him as it ever held him.
+It kept him there as though he belonged to it. As though it knew he
+belonged to it; and knew that he knew it. A strange uneasiness arose
+within him. Even before he was conscious of it, he felt that the sea had
+sensed it. Its insistent angry pounding threatened him.
+
+She had said that she would die.
+
+Below him the swirling, churning sea.
+
+He turned then and went very slowly down the narrow, winding path that
+led along the sun bleached chalk cliffs. Through the deep blue dusk of
+the evening he went, and the gray blotched reach of the flat salt
+marshes with their dank yellowed grasses lay all about him; and overhead
+the cloud spotted, moving gray of the sky, and beneath him the raging
+sea that called to him; and called.
+
+He never stopped until he came to the weather darkened shanty where she
+lived.
+
+He paused then at the gate.
+
+A lighted lamp was in one of the windows on the ground floor. The soft
+glow of it streamed in a long ladder of light out to him in the
+darkness.
+
+He opened the gate and went haltingly across the yard, and after a
+moment's hesitation he knocked at the door.
+
+At the far end of the street the sea thudded over the yellow sanded
+beach; the pale stretch of it coming out of the grayness in a long white
+line.
+
+She answered his knock.
+
+The light from the lamp swept through the open doorway.
+
+Something in his face terrified her; something that she had never before
+seen in those blue green eyes, the color of the sea.
+
+"What is it? What's happened?"
+
+He stood there just looking down at her.
+
+"Oh, Mister, tell me; please--what is it?"
+
+Her two hands went up to her throat and caught tightly at her neck.
+
+"There's--a--storm--"
+
+She looked out into the quiet, darkening evening.
+
+"A storm?"
+
+"There's a bad storm--; coming."
+
+He could hardly say the words.
+
+She stared up at him; her childlike eyes were very wide.
+
+"Will it--be--soon--?"
+
+He never took his blue green eyes from off her face.
+
+"It's coming--quick."
+
+"They're out--Pa--and--Will."
+
+He said it very quietly then.
+
+"That's why I'm here."
+
+"How can we--get them--back?"
+
+"Oh, little girl;" he muttered. "Little girl--"
+
+"How, Mister; how?"
+
+"I'll get a boat."
+
+"There's Sam Wilkins' smack--down there at the wharf. We could take
+that."
+
+"Then--I'll go--after them."
+
+They went from the door together down the street and out onto the back
+patch of the wharf. Through the grayness they could see the boat rocking
+on the water at the farther end. The wail of the rising wind; the
+pounding of the sea; and close to them the muffled, bumping sound of the
+smack thrown again and again at the long wooden piles of the wharf.
+
+For a second they stood quite still.
+
+"I'm going," he said.
+
+Her arms went suddenly up around his neck. Her lips brushed across his.
+He felt her body shivering. He caught and held her to him; and then he
+let her go and went quickly to the end of the wharf and pulled the boat
+alongside and stepped into it.
+
+He looked up at her standing there against the gray sky. He could see
+the white patches of her face and her hands and the pale mass of her
+hair that the wind had loosened. And down through the draggling grayness
+he distinctly saw her childlike eyes searching for his.
+
+Before he could stop her she was in the boat.
+
+"Get--back."
+
+"I'm going."
+
+"Quick--get--back."
+
+"I'm going--with--you."
+
+"You can't--; you don't know."
+
+"I'm not afraid. Honest--I'm--not."
+
+"You don't know what it means!"
+
+"I'm--not--afraid."
+
+"Little girl--I ain't going--if you go."
+
+"You've got--to--go."
+
+He repeated her words.
+
+"I've--got--to--go."
+
+"If you don't take me with you;" he had never heard her voice like
+that--"I'll come out myself. You can't leave me--you can't!"
+
+The rain began then. Great drops of it fell into his face. The whining
+of the wind was terrific.
+
+"You--don't know what it--means."
+
+"I do know;--oh, God,--I do."
+
+He caught up his oars then.
+
+He rowed with all his strength. The whole thing was so strange to him.
+Her going. Their being out on the water. The rowing.
+
+The waves rose in tremendous black swells all about them. The rain and
+the spray drenched them. The wind rocked the small boat. The whistling
+wail of it; the lowering cloud sprawled pitchy sky.
+
+He pulled in silence until they came to the nets.
+
+She stood up in the boat and called; again and again her voice rose into
+the wind.
+
+"Sit down!" He told her.
+
+A distant shout answered her.
+
+He bent to his oars then till he came to the cluster of smacks on the
+other side of the nets.
+
+"Pa--;" she cried.
+
+"Sally--! What you doing here?"
+
+"Pa--; there's a storm."
+
+"I can see that."
+
+"Pa--come on back--to shore."
+
+"You get on back, Sally. It'll blow over."
+
+She turned to him then.
+
+"You tell him;" she said it desperately. "You--tell--him."
+
+He waited until he got just alongside of the fishing smack.
+
+"It's going to be--a--bad--one."
+
+He said it slowly.
+
+He thought then that the angry swirling of the sea became more
+infuriated; that the swell of the waves was greater. Far in the distance
+he heard the inhuman, piercing shriek of the sea-gulls.
+
+"Who's that there, Sally?"
+
+"It's--me."
+
+He saw that both of the men in the smack leaned toward him.
+
+"What?"
+
+"It's--it's--me."
+
+"You!"
+
+"Go on back, Pa;--Will, make him--go on back. Get the others to
+go;--please--Pa;--please."
+
+For answer he heard the man's shout to the other boats about the nets.
+
+"Storm--lads;--make--for--shore."
+
+He saw a moment's hesitation in that cluster of fishing smacks and then
+one by one he watched them pull away from the nets and row toward the
+beach.
+
+He reached out his hand and caught hold of the other boat's gunwale.
+
+"Make--the little girl--go--back with--you."
+
+"Come on, Sally. Hop across there. Pa'll help you."
+
+"We'll follow you, Pa."
+
+"All right."
+
+"Tell--the--little girl--to go with you!"
+
+"With--me?"
+
+"Tell--her!"
+
+"You go on, Pa. We'll come right after you."
+
+He felt the boat at his side give a quick lurch. His hand slipped into
+the water. He could feel the sea pulling at it. His own smack rocked
+perilously for a second. And then he saw the girl's father and brother
+rowing toward the beach.
+
+"What--what'd--you--do--that--for?"
+
+She did not answer him.
+
+A wave broke over the bow of his boat.
+
+In the darkness he could see her crawling on her hands and knees along
+the bottom of the smack to him. He reached down and caught her up in his
+arms.
+
+"Will they get back--safe?" She whispered it.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Sure?"
+
+"They're there--now."
+
+And then the storm broke. The lightning flashed in zigzagging, blindly
+flares across the dark of the sky. The thunder rumbled in clattering
+crescendo. The sea tore and swirled and sucked. Wave after wave broke
+over the small boat. She rocked and pitched and swivelled. The oars were
+washed away. The rain and the wind stung them with their fury. The spray
+cut into their faces. From far off came the uncanny, inhuman, piercing
+sound of the sea-gulls' shrieking.
+
+He knew then that the time had come.
+
+He held her very close to him.
+
+He had filched his soul from the sea. He who was something come from the
+sea, and of the sea; and always belonging to the sea.
+
+He had betrayed the sea.
+
+"Little girl."
+
+"I'm not--afraid."
+
+"Little girl."
+
+"I couldn't stay on--without you. I always knew--always--that some time
+you'd--go--back."
+
+"You're not--scared?"
+
+"Just--hold--me--tight."
+
+The foam covered seething breadth of the water churning itself into
+white spumed frenzy. The dark, lowering skies. The black deep pull of
+the sea.
+
+"Tighter--"
+
+
+
+
+FLOWERS
+
+
+The night wind brought him the smell of flowers.
+
+For a moment he fought against the smothering oppression of the thing he
+hated; for a second the same struggle against its stifling weight.
+
+His eyes closed with the brows above them drawn and tight. His teeth
+caught savagely at his lower lip, gnawing at it until the blood came.
+His hands, the fingers wide spread, the veins purple and standing out,
+moved slowly and tensely to his throat.
+
+How he dreaded it! How he abominated the thing! How he loathed the
+subtle, insidious fragrance! How he abhorred flowers--flowers!
+
+With a tremendous, forcing effort he opened his eyes.
+
+The same garden. The same sweeping reach of flowers. Flowers as far as
+he could see. Gigantic blossoming clumps of rhododendron. Slender,
+fragile lilies of the valley showing white and faint on the deep green
+leaves. Violets somewhere. He got the sickeningly sweet scent of them.
+Early roses growing riotously. He detested the perfume of roses.
+
+Overhead the darkening sky that held in the west the thin gray crescent
+of the coming moon.
+
+And all through the garden the first dull blue shadows of evening.
+Shadows that blurred around the shapes of flowers; shadows that spread
+over the flowers, smearing out the spotting color of them until they
+were a gloom-splotched, ghostly mass. Shadows that brought out in all
+its pungent power the assailing, suffocating smell of the flowers.
+
+He stood there waiting.
+
+He could feel his heartbeats throbbing in his temples. His breath came
+in long racking gasps. His one thought was to breathe regularly.
+One--two--He tried to think of something other than his breathing. The
+intangible odor of the flowers choked him with their stealthy cunning.
+
+It was always like this at first. He had always to contend silently and
+with all his strength against this illusive, abominated thing poured out
+to him by the flowers.
+
+His strangling intaking of breath. One--two--
+
+Never in all his life had he been without his horror of flowers; never
+until now had he known why he hated them. Lately he had begun to wonder
+if they hated him.
+
+It would be better when she came.
+
+They were her flowers. Her flowers that took all her time; all her
+thoughts; all her caring and affection. Her flowers that grew all about
+her. Her flowers that held her away from him. He hated her flowers.
+
+One. Two.
+
+It would be quite all right when she was there.
+
+Her flowers would not harm her.
+
+And then he heard the soft, uneven rustling of her skirts.
+
+He looked up to see her walking toward him down the long lane of her
+flowers. Through the drenching grayness he could see that she wore the
+same light dress that made her tall and clung to her in folds so that
+her figure seemed to bend. He could distinguish the heavy shadowy mass
+of her uncovered hair. Her eyes, set far apart and dark, fixed
+themselves on him. A quick light flooded into them. In the dusk he saw
+that her hands were clasped together and that they were filled with
+lilies.
+
+"Throw them away," he said when she stood beside him.
+
+"They're so pretty," she told him, staring down at the lilies. "You'll
+let me keep these; just this once?"
+
+"Throw them away," he repeated. "I can't stand the sight of them. You
+know that. Why must you go on picking the things and picking them?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders. Her eyes left his face.
+
+"I love them," she said simply.
+
+"Love?" He laughed. "How can you love flowers?"
+
+"Oh, but I can."
+
+"Well, I can't!" He had been wanting her to know that for a long while.
+
+"Why not?" She asked him.
+
+He could not bring himself to tell her why not.
+
+"Throw them away!"
+
+She let the lilies sift through her fingers one by one. And then the
+last fell to the ground.
+
+"Are you satisfied?"
+
+"No," he said. "What good does it do, anyway? The next time it'll be the
+same again. It always is."
+
+She reached out a hand and touched his arm.
+
+"But I never know when you're coming. If I knew I wouldn't be picking
+flowers. I can't help having them in my hands when you come, if I don't
+know, can I?"
+
+"It isn't that."
+
+He covered her hand lying on his arm with his hand.
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+She pulled her fingers from under his and drew away a bit.
+
+He made up his mind to try and tell her.
+
+"It's the flowers. I should have told you long ago. Even at the
+beginning when we first--When I first came here, I--"
+
+She interrupted him.
+
+"When was that? How long ago?"
+
+"How can I tell? Ages ago."
+
+"It does seem;" she said it slowly. "It does seem as if you had always
+come here. I can't remember the time when you didn't come. It's strange,
+isn't it? Because, you know, there was a time when you weren't here.
+That was when I began with the flowers."
+
+"I wish you'd never begun," he muttered. "That's what I've got to say to
+you. I hate flowers. I've always hated them! I never quite knew why till
+I came here and found you loving them so much. You never think of
+anything, or talk of anything but your flowers. If you must know, that's
+why I hate them!"
+
+"How silly of you!"
+
+He thought she smiled.
+
+"It's not," he said. "There's nothing silly about it. I'd like to have
+you think of other things. There're plenty of other things. I want you
+to think of them. I--want--"
+
+He broke off abruptly.
+
+"What do you want?"
+
+"I--I--want--you--I can't say it!"
+
+For a little while they were silent. It grew darker. The shadows that
+lay along the ground moved upward through the bushes of rhododendron. He
+watched the fantastic mesh of them shifting there. The gray of the
+crescent moon grew faintly yellow. His eyes roved over the shadow
+splashed reach of flowers. The heavy odor of them sickened him.
+
+"If only you'd try to like them!" She said it wistfully.
+
+"It's no use. I couldn't."
+
+"If you worked among them the way I work, perhaps you could."
+
+"I tell you I couldn't!"
+
+"But they're so lovely." Her hand went out and touched a rose. "It's
+taken me years to perfect this one. You can't see in this light. But
+during the day--; why don't you ever come here during the day?"
+
+"I don't know," he told her quite truthfully.
+
+"During the day," she went on, "you ought to see it. It's yellow; almost
+gold. And its center--That's quite, quite pink with the very middle bit
+almost scarlet. I love this rose."
+
+He thought then that he could smell the particular fragrance of the one
+rose permeating subtly through the odor of all those other flowers. She
+loved that yellow and gold and scarlet rose.
+
+"Good heavens," he said, "do stop telling me how much you love your
+flowers!"
+
+"If you were with them all the time--"
+
+He did not let her finish.
+
+"That's all you do, isn't it? Just care for your flowers all day long?"
+
+"Why, yes." She was surprised. "Of course it's all I do. It's all I care
+about doing. It takes every minute of my time. You know that, don't
+you?"
+
+"Yes, I know it." His tone was gruff.
+
+"Then why do you always talk about it like this?" She asked him. "I've
+done it for years. Ever since I can remember. It's hard work, but I like
+doing it. I don't think you know how alone I've always been. I'm afraid
+you don't realize that. Not really, anyway. I've just never had anything
+to care about until I started in with the flowers. I don't know if I
+ought to tell you--"
+
+She stopped speaking quite suddenly.
+
+"What?"
+
+"I don't think you'd like to know what I was going to say."
+
+"Tell me," he insisted.
+
+"Well." She spoke slowly. "Sometimes I feel as though--It's so hard to
+say. But sometimes I feel as if the flowers know how much I care
+and--and as if they care too."
+
+"Why d'you say that?"
+
+"I don't quite know. Only they're living things; they are, aren't they?"
+
+"I suppose they are; but that's no reason for you to encourage yourself
+in all those queer ideas about them."
+
+"Queer ideas?"
+
+"You know the sort of thing I mean."
+
+"I don't. What sort?"
+
+He thought then that her voice had a hurt sound drifting through it.
+
+"Loving them. For one thing."
+
+"But what can I do? What else have I to love? I've just told you how
+much alone I am. All the time, really. The flowers are the only things I
+have. I've just told you that."
+
+He waited a second.
+
+"You have me," he said.
+
+"You? But you hardly ever come. I'm so lonesome. You can't know what
+that means. I am lonely. And you--Why, sometimes I think you're not
+real. Not--even--real--"
+
+"Don't! For God's sake don't say that!"
+
+"I can't help it! I tell you, I can't. It's all right now. It's always
+all right when you're here. But after you go--Nothing is real to me;
+nothing but the flowers. And you don't want me to care for them. You
+keep saying you hate them. They're all I've got. Won't you--can't you
+see that?"
+
+"But--if--I--come--here--to--stay?"
+
+"To--stay?"
+
+"Would you want me here?"
+
+He saw her hands move upward until they lay in two white spots on her
+breast.
+
+"Want you?--If--only--you--knew--"
+
+He waited a moment before he said it.
+
+"And you--could--love--me?"
+
+"I've always loved you."
+
+She spoke in a whisper.
+
+"I'll find a way." He told her. "There must be a way."
+
+"But how? How?"
+
+"I don't know. I never thought about it before. I never knew you cared.
+I thought it was just the flowers. Nothing but the flowers. I hate the
+flowers. The feel of them--the sight of them--the smell of them. I
+couldn't ever come here without being suffocated. I was jealous of them;
+fearfully jealous."
+
+"And--I--thought." Her voice was low.
+"I--thought--that--because--I--feel--they--love--me;--because--I
+love--them;--somehow--they--brought--you--here."
+
+"And when I come--"
+
+"When?"
+
+Her voice itself trailed to a whisper.
+
+"I will come to you! I--will!"
+
+"How--can--you--find--me?"
+
+"Somehow--I will!"
+
+"If--only--you--could. I am lonely. Terribly--lonely.
+If--it--would--be--soon."
+
+"It--must--be--soon."
+
+"I'll--wait--for you--always. But--if you are--real--you'll--come--soon.
+It's lonely--waiting. And--I--don't--even--know--if--you--are.
+I--don't--even--know."
+
+The Reverend William Cruthers started from his chair.
+
+Some one had banged the window closed. Some one had lit the lamp on the
+center table. Its yellow light trickled through the room and over the
+scant old fashioned furniture and crept upwards across the booklined
+walls.
+
+The room was stuffy and close. The smell of flowers had gone.
+
+"Billy!"
+
+He turned to see his sister rushing across the room to him. He stooped a
+bit and caught her in his arms.
+
+"Why, Gina. I didn't know. Why didn't you write and tell me? Who brought
+you up from the station?"
+
+The girl kissed him hastily and enthusiastically on either cheek.
+
+"A nice welcome home!" She laughed breathlessly. "I was just about to
+make a graceful and silent exit."
+
+"But, Gina, I didn't know."
+
+"Of course you didn't know. You couldn't. I wouldn't write. I wanted to
+surprise you. Aren't you surprised, Billy?"
+
+"Awfully," he conceded.
+
+"Awfully?"
+
+Her brows puckered.
+
+"Very much so, I mean."
+
+"You never do know just what you do mean. Do you, William?"
+
+"Naturally, I do."
+
+"It wouldn't be natural for you if you did."
+
+The girl slid away from him and went and perched herself comfortably on
+the arm of the chair in which he had been sitting. Her hands were busy
+with her hatpins and her eyes that peered up at him were filled with
+laughter.
+
+"How did you get up from the station, Gina?"
+
+"Oh, such a lovely way, Billy! And so very energetic for me. I walked.
+Now, what do you know about that?"
+
+He frowned a bit.
+
+"Very good for you, I don't doubt." He said it stiffly. "After all the
+motoring you must have done with those friends of yours!"
+
+She had gotten her hat off. She sat dangling it by the brim. The
+lamplight streaked over her hair.
+
+"Now, don't be nasty, William. And whatever you do, don't speak to me
+as if I were a congregation. The Trents are perfectly lovely people,
+even if they are terribly rich and not very Christian. And--and Georgie
+Trent is a sweet boy; and," she added it hastily. "Wood Mills is a duck
+of a place!"
+
+He thrust his hands into his coat pockets.
+
+"I never said it wasn't, Gina."
+
+She paid no attention to him. Her legs were crossed. Her one foot was
+swinging to and fro. Her eyes were fixed speculatively on the foot.
+
+"And you ought to be very glad to have me here again. Suppose I'd
+listened to Georgie and married him right off, instead of coming back
+here. A nice fix you'd have been in. You know perfectly well no one in
+all the world does for you as nicely as I do. You know that, don't you?"
+
+He smiled down at her.
+
+"To be sure I do."
+
+"As a matter of fact," she went on. "When I came in here you were half,
+if not altogether, asleep in this chair."
+
+"I wasn't asleep, Gina."
+
+"Oh, that's what you always say. But I banged in and you didn't hear me.
+I lighted the lamp and you didn't seem particularly conscious of it. And
+the window. The window was wide open. I closed that for you. The wind
+was bringing in just yards of those flower smells you hate so."
+
+"Was it, Gina?"
+
+"Huh--huh."
+
+"You smelled them, then?"
+
+His tone was strangely quiet.
+
+"Of course I did. Come and sit here, Billy." She wiggled herself into a
+more comfortable position on the arm of the chair. "And tell your
+onliest sister how much you love her."
+
+He went and sat beside her in the chair. He put his arm about her waist.
+
+"You're a dear child, Gina."
+
+"I know it!" She snuggled close to him. "And I've had the most divine
+time, Billy. Wood Mills is a glorious place. There wasn't an awful lot
+to do; but whatever we did was great fun."
+
+"You'd have a good time anywhere, little sister."
+
+"Would I?"
+
+Her eyes wavered about the room a bit hungrily.
+
+Something in her voice pulled his eyes up to her face.
+
+"Gina, what is it?"
+
+"Nothing, Billy."
+
+She felt his fingers tighten at her side.
+
+"Aren't you happy here, Gina?"
+
+"Of course I am, Billy!" Her head was thrown back so that the long line
+of her throat showed in its firm molded whiteness. "Only, Billy, I
+want--I don't think I even know what I want. Only just sometimes I feel
+it. A want--that--perhaps--isn't--even--mine. It's for something;--well,
+for something that doesn't feel here."
+
+He stroked her hand.
+
+"It's lonesome for you, Gina."
+
+"No, it isn't that. It's just; oh, I guess it's just that I worry about
+you."
+
+"Me, Gina?"
+
+"Yes, Billy. Sometimes you look so--so starved. That's what makes me
+think it's your want I feel--; yours that you want very
+much--and--and--Billy, that you can't get hold of."
+
+"No, Gina! No!"
+
+She pressed her cheek against his.
+
+"Oh, Billy." She spoke quickly. "There was one place out there at Wood
+Mills. You wouldn't have liked it. But it was too wonderful!"
+
+He drew a deep breath of relief at the sudden change in her voice.
+
+"What was it, Gina? Why wouldn't I have liked it?"
+
+She fidgeted a bit.
+
+"Why? Oh--because."
+
+"Because what, Gina?"
+
+"It was just one big estate, Billy. A girl owns it. She's an orphan.
+She's very beautiful. She lives there all by herself except for a couple
+of old servants. Claire Trent and I saw her once or twice when we rode
+through the place. Claire says she's sort of queer. She doesn't bother
+about people. She doesn't like them, Claire says. She spends all her
+time around the place."
+
+"That sounds very strenuous, Gina."
+
+"Oh, it isn't, Billy. It's lovely. The estate is."
+
+"I've heard the places there are pretty."
+
+"Pretty! But this one, Billy;" in her enthusiasm she leaned eagerly
+forward. "You couldn't imagine it! There are miles and miles. And the
+whole thing; Claire says the whole year round; it's just one big mass of
+flowers."
+
+In spite of himself he pulled his arm away from the girl's waist.
+
+"Oh, is it?"
+
+"Billy, I know you don't like flowers. But this! You've never seen
+anything like this!"
+
+"There're probably lots and lots of places like it, little sister."
+
+"Oh, no!" Her tone was vehement. "There couldn't be. Not such a garden!
+All rhododendrons and lilies of the valley--; is anything wrong, Billy?"
+
+"Nothing. Those flowers grow in all gardens at this time of the year."
+
+She stared into his blanched face and her brows drew together in a
+puzzled frown.
+
+"Not like this, Billy. Really. I've never seen such rhododendrons or
+such lilies. And the violets and roses!"
+
+He got to his feet suddenly.
+
+"What?" He asked hoarsely. "What flowers did you say?"
+
+"Why, rhododendrons--and lilies,--and--lilies. What is it, Billy?"
+
+"Go on, Gina. Go on!"
+
+"Billy!"
+
+"Lilies of the valley and violets, Gina--"
+
+"And roses;" she finished mechanically.
+
+"What kind of roses, Gina?"
+
+The puzzled frown left her face.
+
+"Glorious roses, Billy." She was enthusiastic again. "There've never
+been roses like these. Why, there's one kind of a rose. It's known all
+over now. It took her years and years to grow it."
+
+"What sort of a rose, Gina? What sort did you say?"
+
+"I didn't say, Billy. I don't even know the name of it. But it's a
+yellow rose; almost gold. And its center is pink and--and scarlet."
+
+For a moment they were silent.
+
+"Did you see this--this woman, Gina--often?"
+
+"Oh, once or twice, Billy."
+
+"When, Gina?"
+
+"In the evenings; each time."
+
+"Where was she, Gina?"
+
+"Why, how strange you are, Billy."
+
+"Where, Gina? Tell me, d'you hear--tell me--where?"
+
+"In her garden, Billy. What's there to get so excited about?"
+
+He fought for his control then.
+
+"I'd like to know, Gina--where you saw her and--and--"
+
+The girl interrupted him.
+
+"I saw her in the evenings--in her garden. She used to walk
+down--well--it looked like a long lane of flowers. To be exact, Billy,
+it was always in the evening and kind of gray. So I couldn't see very
+much except that she wore a light clingy sort of dress."
+
+She stopped for a second.
+
+"Yes, Gina?"
+
+His voice was more quiet now.
+
+"I told you she was a bit queer, didn't I?"
+
+"Queer? God! she--was--lonesome--Gina!"
+
+"Yes," the girl caught at his last words. "I'll bet she was lonesome.
+Any one would be, living like that. That's what makes her queer I guess.
+I saw her both times with my own eyes come down the garden with her
+hands full of flowers. Both times I saw her stand quite still. And then
+Claire and I would see her drop her flowers to the ground. That was the
+funny part. She didn't throw them away. It wasn't that, you know."
+
+"No, Gina."
+
+"She'd, well, she'd drop them. One by one. As if--"
+
+"As if what, Gina?"
+
+"Oh, as if she were being made to do it."
+
+He went to his knees then. He buried his head in the girl's lap.
+
+She leaned anxiously forward, her hand smoothing his hair.
+
+"Billy--Billy, dear--aren't you well? Billy, tell me."
+
+He could not bring himself to speak.
+
+"Billy, is this what you do when I come home to you? Shame on you,
+Billy! Why--why, Billy, aren't you glad to have me here? Say, aren't
+you?"
+
+"Thank God!" He whispered. "Thank God!"
+
+He got to his feet then.
+
+The girl rose from her chair and clung to him.
+
+"I've never seen you like this, Billy."
+
+"Listen, Gina;" his voice was low. "When you go upstairs to take off
+your things, pack my grip, little sister. I'm going away."
+
+"Away, Billy?"
+
+"Yes, Gina."
+
+"But where, Billy?"
+
+"To a place where I've wanted to go for a very long--long time, little
+sister."
+
+"But, Billy--"
+
+"Will you do that for me? Now, Gina? I--I--want to--leave."
+
+"When, Billy?"
+
+"As--soon--as--I can, Gina. It--must--be--soon."
+
+The girl went out of the room very quietly.
+
+He crossed over to the window and threw it open.
+
+Darkness as far as he could see. Darkness in which were smudged lighter
+things without shape. Somewhere in the distance the feathery ends of
+branches brushed their leaves to and fro against the sky.
+
+He knew that the wind was stirring.
+
+He looked up at the heavens. Gray and dark save where the thin crescent
+moon held its haunting yellow light that was slurred over by drifting
+clouds and then held again.
+
+He could see the wind driving the clouds.
+
+The swish of the wind out there going through those smudged lighter
+things without shape.
+
+He leaned far over the sill.
+
+And suddenly the night wind brought him the smell of flowers.
+
+Gradually the odor of the flowers blending subtly and faint at first,
+grew more distinct; heavier.
+
+He stood there smiling.
+
+Flowers--
+
+Her--flowers--
+
+"I'm coming;" he whispered. "I'm--coming--to--you--now--dear--"
+
+
+
+
+THE SHADOW
+
+
+He was colossally vain.
+
+He lived with his wife Ellen, in the small house on Peach Tree Road.
+
+There was nothing pretentious about the house; there were any number of
+similar houses along the line of Peach Tree Road. For that matter the
+house was the kind planted innumerable times in the numerous suburbs of
+the large city. Still, it was his house. His own. That meant a lot to
+him whenever he thought of it; and he thought of it often enough. He
+liked to feel the thing actually belonged to him. It emphasized his
+being to himself.
+
+The house was a two-storied affair built of wood and white washed. A
+green mansard roof came down over the small green shuttered upper
+windows. On the lower floor the windows were somewhat larger with the
+same solid wooden green shutters. A gravel path led up to the front
+door. Two drooping willow trees stood on either side of the wicker gate.
+
+Before the time when his aunt had died and had left him the house he had
+not been particularly successful. At the age of forty-one he had found
+himself a hard-working journalist and nothing more. He had had no
+ambition to ever be anything else. He was at all times so utterly
+confident that the work he was doing was quite right; chiefly because it
+was the work that he was doing. No man had a more unbounded faith in
+himself. At that time he had not been conscious of his lack of success.
+Now, of course, he looked back on it all as a period of development;
+something which had prepared him for this that was even then destined to
+come.
+
+He told himself that in this small house, away from the surrounding
+clatter and nuisances of the city, he had found time to write; to be
+himself; to really express what he knew himself to be.
+
+He had become tremendously well known in that space of six years. No one
+ever doubted the genius of Jasper Wald. He wrote as a man writes who is
+actually inspired. His books were read with interest and surprisingly
+favorable comment. There was something different; something singularly
+appealing in all of Jasper Wald's works.
+
+At that time his conceit was inordinate. It extended to a sort of
+personal, physical vanity. In itself that was grotesque. There was
+absolutely nothing attractive in the loosely jointed, stoop-shouldered
+body of him; or for that matter in the narrow head covered with sparse
+blond gray hair. The eyes of him were of rather a washed blue and bulged
+a bit from out their sockets; the nose was a singularly squat affair, at
+the same time too long. The mouth was unpleasantly small with lips so
+colorless and thin that the line of it was like some weird mark. Yet he
+was vain of his appearance. But then his egoism was the keynote of his
+entire being.
+
+Some people could not forgive it in him; even when they acknowledged him
+as a writer and praised his work. The man in literature was spoken of as
+a mystic, a poet, a possessor of subtlety that was close to genius. In
+actual life, Jasper Wald was an out and out materialist.
+
+As for his wife, Ellen:
+
+She was rather a tall woman; thin but not ungraceful. Her features were
+good, very regular, still somewhat nondescript. All but her eyes. Her
+eyes were strange; green in color, and so heavily lidded that one could
+rarely see the expression of them. Then, too, she had an odd manner of
+moving. There never seemed to be any effort or any abruptness in
+whatever she did. Even her walk was sinuous.
+
+He had married her when they both were young. Through his persistent
+habit of ignoring her she had been dwarfed into a nonentity. To have
+looked at the woman one would have said that hers was a distinctive
+personality unbelievably suppressed. It would not have been possible for
+any one living with Jasper Wald to have asserted himself. Perhaps she
+had learned that years before. Certainly his was the character which
+predominated; domineered through the encouragement of his own egoism.
+
+Her attitude toward him was perpetually one of self-effacement. She
+stood for his conceit in a peculiarly passive way. If it ever irritated
+her she gave no sign. And he kept right on with his semi-indulgent
+manner of patronizing her stupidity. That is, when he noticed her at
+all.
+
+She was essential to him in so far as she supplied all of his physical
+wants. Those in themselves were of great importance to Jasper Wald.
+There was no companionship between them. Jasper Wald could never have
+indulged in companionship of any kind. He had put himself far beyond
+that. To his way of thinking he was a super being who had no need
+whatever for the rest of man. He was all self-sufficient.
+
+If there had ever been love between them in those days when they had
+first come together they had both of them completely lost sight of it.
+He in his complacent conceit; she in her monotonous negation.
+
+And as time went on, and as his work became greater Jasper Wald grew
+even further away from the sort of thing he wrote; so that it was more
+than ever difficult for those who knew him to disassociate him from his
+writings. There was always the temptation to try to find some of his
+literary idealism in himself; to find some of his prosaic realism in his
+works.
+
+On one occasion Delafield, his publisher, came to him; to the house on
+Peach Tree Road. It was a peculiarity of Jasper Wald's to persistently
+refuse any request to leave his home. It was the one thing about which
+he was superstitious. He had never by word or thought attributed his
+success to anyone or anything outside of himself. He had made his name
+in this house and he would not leave it.
+
+Delafield's visit came at a time just after Jasper Wald's last book had
+been published.
+
+Sitting in the square, simply furnished living room, Delafield for all
+his enthusiasm for the author had felt a certain inexplicable disgust.
+
+"It's great, Wald; there's genius to it. We'll have it run through its
+second edition a week after we put it on the market."
+
+"I don't doubt that;" Jasper Wald's tone was matter-of-fact in his
+confidence. "Not for a moment."
+
+Delafield bit off the end of his cigar.
+
+"When will your next one be ready?"
+
+He asked it abruptly.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," Jasper Wald had pulled leisurely at his pipe.
+"Whenever I make up my mind to it, I suppose. It's going to be the
+biggest thing I've tackled yet, Delafield."
+
+"Well--" Delafield got up to go. "It can't be too soon. You'll have a
+barrel of money before you get done. Genius doesn't usually pay that
+way, either. But--;" he could not help himself. "You've got the knack of
+the thing. Heaven knows where you get it; but it's the knowledge we all
+need that comes from--"
+
+He broke off quite suddenly as Ellen Wald came into the room.
+
+"I didn't know;" she said uncertainly. "I thought you were alone."
+
+"My wife, Delafield." Jasper Wald made the introduction impatiently.
+"Ellen, this is Mr. Delafield, who publishes my books."
+
+She came toward them and held out her hand to Delafield. He could not
+help but noticing her odd manner of moving.
+
+"Good evening," she said.
+
+Delafield had not known that Jasper Wald was married. It was almost
+impossible for him to imagine anyone living with this man. He looked at
+the woman curiously. He had the feeling that her individuality had been
+stultified. It did not surprise him. Jasper Wald could have accomplished
+that. It would have been difficult to have matched him with as
+flagrantly material a person as he himself was. Only that sort of person
+would have stood a chance with him. Any other would have had to fall
+flat. She had fallen flat. Delafield knew that the moment he looked at
+her.
+
+"Why, I didn't know;" Delafield took her hand in his. "You never told
+me, Wald, that you were married."
+
+"Didn't I? No, of course not.--But, about the new book, Delafield."
+
+Delafield dropped her hand. He had never felt anything quite as inert as
+that hand. It impressed the nondescript quality of her upon him even
+more strongly than had her appearance.
+
+"Your husband has promised me another book, Mrs. Wald." He spoke slowly.
+He felt he had to speak that way or she would not understand him. "Your
+husband is a great author, Mrs. Wald."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why don't you say, genius, Delafield, and be done with it? Why don't
+you make a clean breast of it with--genius?"
+
+"I've got to be going."
+
+Delafield felt a strange irritation. The man was a fool. For what reason
+under the sun could this woman with those half closed eyes let herself
+be dominated by him? The two of them got on his nerves.
+
+"Won't you stay to dinner?"
+
+Jasper Wald was obviously anxious for a chance to speak of himself.
+
+"Sorry, Wald. I've got to be getting on."
+
+Delafield still watched the woman. She stood there quite silent.
+
+"I thought you might have something to say about that book of mine."
+
+"No--There's nothing more." Delafield started for the door. "I've just
+told you that it's full of the sort of knowledge all of us are in need
+of. I can't say more, you know. I suppose that knowledge is what
+constitutes genius; but--" He was staring now full into those bulging
+blue eyes--"Lord, man, where, where d'you get it from?"
+
+Glancing at the woman, Delafield saw that she was looking straight at
+him. Her eyes met his in a way which he was completely at a loss to
+explain. There was something eerie about it.
+
+"Where does he get it?"
+
+She repeated his question stupidly and once again the heavy lids came
+down over those strange green eyes, hiding all expression.
+
+Jasper Wald drew in his breath.
+
+"I write it," he said.
+
+After that Delafield left them both severely alone. The woman puzzled
+him. He could not tolerate the man, Jasper Wald, and he could not for
+worlds have the genius of Jasper Wald hurt or slighted in any way. He
+knew how big it was. It often left him breathless. But the man; he would
+have liked to have hit him that day in the living room in the house on
+Peach Tree Road; to have kicked him into some sort of a realization as
+to what an utter little rat he was.
+
+And so, because of his physical make-up, people stayed away from Jasper
+Wald. Not that he avoided people; not that he wanted to live the life of
+a recluse. He never made any attempt to conceal his living from the
+general public. He was too much of the egoist to attempt concealment of
+any kind. So his life was known to any man, woman or child who cared for
+the knowledge. His life of narrow selfishness, of tranquil complacency;
+of colossal conceit. And of genius.
+
+He always wrote in the evenings, did Jasper Wald. And often he would
+keep at his writing well on into the morning.
+
+He liked to sit there in the square, old-fashioned living room with its
+wide window that gave out upon Peach Tree Road.
+
+When he had first moved into the house as an obscure, hard-working
+journalist he had placed the desk against the window ledge so that he
+could look directly out of the window without moving. And he had kept
+the desk there. He was just a bit insistent about it. Then, too, he
+liked the blind up so that he could stare out into the evening and at
+the house opposite.
+
+For all his impossible vanity there must have been imbedded deep down in
+the small, hard soul of the man some excessive, frantic hunger of
+self-recognition by others. A potential desire to accomplish an
+assertion of self that could in no way be denied; a fundamental energy
+which had in some way made possible the work, but which he could never
+admit for fear that it might evade the importance of himself.
+
+The house opposite interested him tremendously. Sitting there in an
+abstract fit of musing, he watched it as one subconsciously watches a
+place that has one's attention.
+
+To all outward appearances the house across the way was heavily boarded
+up and closed. It had always been closed since the time that Jasper Wald
+had come to live in Peach Tree Road. Yet every evening in the window
+directly facing his he had seen the shadow of a man moving to and fro;
+to and fro, beyond the drawn blind. He would sit there watching the
+dark, undefined shadow until he felt that he had to work, and then the
+whole thing would slip from his mind until the following evening when he
+would again be at his desk.
+
+Strangely enough he had never mentioned the presence of the shadow to
+anyone. There was about it a certain mysterious unreality. That much he,
+Jasper Wald, was capable of knowing. It was the one thing outside of
+himself that gripped at his intelligence.
+
+During all those six years he had waited at his desk each night for the
+coming of the shadow. And when it came he had started to work. He never
+explained the thing to himself. He never thought he had to explain
+anything to his own understanding. Had he tried, he would have been
+utterly at a loss for an explanation. So Jasper Wald had come to look
+upon the shadow as a sign of luck; a superstition-fostered thing that
+epitomized his genius to himself.
+
+Naturally it had not always been that way. The first time that Jasper
+Wald had felt the shadow he had experienced an uncanny sense of terror.
+That had been before he had really seen it.
+
+He had been standing there beside the window just after he and Ellen had
+moved into their home, looking out at the closed house opposite. He had
+felt a queer oppression which he readily interpreted as the vibration of
+his new environment. When the thing had persisted he had become a bit
+uneasy. The sense of oppression so utterly unknown to him had changed to
+one which grew upon him; as if he were being forced out of himself in
+some uncanny manner.
+
+There was about it all a curious sensation of remoteness of self and at
+the same time a weird consciousness of the haunting permeation of
+something invisible and dynamic.
+
+He never thought back to that evening without a positive horror. The
+whole thing was so completely alien to him.
+
+It had been with a great sense of relief that he had, finally, been able
+to see and to rivet his attention upon the shadow there against the
+blind of the house opposite. He had clinched his thought onto it. And
+the other thing had left him; had lessened in its maddening oppression.
+
+That evening he had started to write. He had felt that writing was a
+thing he had to do. It was entirely because of his first fear that he
+kept the knowledge of the shadow to himself.
+
+Cock sure as he was of himself, thoroughly certain of his genius, and
+inordinately vain of his success, there was one thing about it all that
+Jasper Wald could not quite make out. Not for worlds would he have
+admitted it. Still there was the one thing. And the one thing was that
+Jasper Wald could not understand the kind of thought behind what he
+himself wrote.
+
+It was late one summer evening that Jasper Wald sat at his desk in the
+square living room; his pen was in his hand; a pile of blank paper made
+a white patch on the dark wood before him. His blue eyes that bulged a
+bit looked out into the graying half light. The green of the lawn was
+matted with dark shadows. A mist of shadows were pressed into the faint
+lined leaves of the two drooping willow trees on either side of the
+wicker gate. An unreal light held in the sky.
+
+His eyes were fixed on the one window of the house opposite. With his
+pen in his hand, Jasper Wald waited.
+
+From somewhere in the house came the chimes of a clock striking the half
+hour.
+
+Starting from his chair, Jasper Wald went to the side of the desk and
+leaned far out of the window. A wave of heat came up to him from the
+earth. His eyes stared intently at the window opposite.
+
+The door behind him was thrown open. He turned to see Ellen's tall, not
+ungraceful, figure standing in the doorway. Her two hands grasped the
+bowl of a lighted lamp.
+
+"I don't need that."
+
+Jasper Wald told it to her impatiently.
+
+She came a step into the room.
+
+"It's dark in here, Jasper."
+
+"But I don't need any more light, Ellen. I don't need it, I tell you!"
+
+"It's dark in here, Jasper."
+
+"All right, then; put the thing down. I can't take up my time arguing
+with you. How can a man write in a place like this, anyway? Have you no
+consideration? Must I always be disturbed? Have you no respect for
+genius?"
+
+She came a step further toward the center of the room.
+
+"Genius,--Jasper?"
+
+"My genius, Ellen. Mine."
+
+He watched her cross the room with that odd, sinuous moving of hers and
+place the lamp in the center of his desk. And then he saw her go to a
+chair within its light and, sitting down, pick up some sewing which she
+had left there.
+
+He went back and sat at his desk.
+
+He had made up his mind that this new book of his would be something
+big; something bigger than he had ever done before. He wanted to write a
+stupendous thing.
+
+He caught up his pen and dipped it in the ink.
+
+She startled him with a quick cough.
+
+"Can't you be still?" He turned toward her. "You know I can't write if
+I'm bothered. You don't have to sit in here if you're going to cough
+your head off. There're plenty of other rooms in the house."
+
+She half rose from her chair.
+
+"D'you want me to go?"
+
+"Oh, sit there," he muttered irritably. "Only, for heaven's sake be
+still!"
+
+"Yes, Jasper."
+
+All of his books had brought him fame; but this one; this one would
+bring him fame with something else. This book would be the great work
+that would show to people the staggering power of one man's mind; his
+mind.
+
+His eyes that stared at the window of the house opposite came back to be
+pile of blank paper which made a white patch on the dark wood before
+him.
+
+Without any definite idea he began to write. A word. A sentence. A
+paragraph.
+
+He tore the thing up without stopping to read it.
+
+Ellen's dull-toned voice came to him through the stillness of the room.
+
+"Anything wrong, Jasper?"
+
+"Wrong? What should be wrong?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+He began to write again.
+
+He looked out of his window at the window of the house opposite.
+
+He went on with his writing till he had covered the whole page. Again he
+tore the paper up and threw it from him.
+
+"I'm going, Jasper."
+
+He turned to see her standing in the center of the room, her heavily
+lidded eyes fixed on the floor.
+
+"I told you you could stay here!"
+
+"I'd best be going, Jasper."
+
+"Sit down, over there; and do be still."
+
+"I seem to bother you. You haven't started to write. Is it because I'm
+here, Jasper?"
+
+"You!" He snorted contemptuously. "What've you got to do with it?"
+
+"I don't know," she said quietly, and she went back to her chair.
+
+Again his eyes were fixed on that one window. He leaned forward quickly.
+His hands gripped the chair's arms on either side of him. His brows drew
+down together above the bulging blue eyes.
+
+Thrown on the clear blank of the window blind, moving to and fro across
+it, went the shadow.
+
+With a sharp sigh of relief Jasper Wald began to write.
+
+It was not until he had gotten far down the page that he became suddenly
+conscious of Ellen standing directly behind him.
+
+He looked over at the window. The shadow was still there.
+
+"What is it? What d'you want?"
+
+The lamplight brought out her features, good and very regular and still
+somewhat nondescript. The lamplight showed her strange green eyes and
+beneath the heavy lids the lamplight brought out in a glinting streak
+the expression of the eyes themselves.
+
+"What made you do that, Jasper?"
+
+"I'm trying to write. You keep interrupting me. What are you talking
+about? Made me do what?"
+
+"Made you write, Jasper."
+
+"Don't I always write?"
+
+"Yes, Jasper. Always. All of a sudden--; like that."
+
+"Well, what of it?"
+
+"What makes you do it, Jasper?"
+
+"Oh, Lord, can't you leave me alone?"
+
+"D'you know what makes you do it, Jasper?"
+
+"Of course I know."
+
+"Well, what?"
+
+"My--it's my inspiration!"
+
+"That comes"; she spoke slowly. "Every night when you look out of the
+window. That's how it comes, Jasper."
+
+"Look out of the window? Why shouldn't I look out of the window?"
+
+"What is it you see? Over there; in that house; in that one window?"
+
+He looked across the way at the shadow moving to and fro against the
+window blind.
+
+He started to his feet so suddenly that his chair crashed to the floor
+behind him. He faced her angrily.
+
+"What under the sun's the matter with you?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Then why can't you leave me alone?"
+
+"I want to know, Jasper."
+
+"You don't know what you want."
+
+"Yes, Jasper; I--want--to--know--"
+
+"Leave the room," he said furiously. "Leave the room! I've got to
+write!"
+
+She started for the door.
+
+"You've got to write?" Her words came back to him across the length of
+the room with a curious insistence. "_You've_--got--to--write, Jasper?"
+
+He waited until the door closed behind her and then he went back to his
+desk.
+
+What had she meant by that last question of hers? Didn't she know that
+he had to write? Didn't she realize that he had to write?
+
+And this book of his; this book that was to be the biggest thing that he
+had yet done.
+
+"Ellen," he called. "Ellen!"
+
+He heard her feet coming toward him along the passageway.
+
+She came back into the room as though nothing had happened.
+
+"Yes, Jasper?"
+
+"What--what did you mean by that, Ellen? By what you just said?"
+
+She faced him in the center of the room.
+
+"I've been wanting to tell you, Jasper."
+
+"Well?"
+
+Her hands hung quite quietly at her sides.
+
+"I've put up with you for a long time, Jasper. I haven't said very much,
+you know."
+
+"What?" He stuttered.
+
+"Oh, yes," she went on evenly. "If it weren't for your vanity you'd have
+realized long ago what a contemptible little man you really are."
+
+He interrupted her.
+
+"Ellen!"
+
+His tone was astonished.
+
+"You're so full of yourself that you can't see anything else. You're so
+full of that genius--; of--yours--"
+
+"You don't have to speak of that--; you can leave that out of it--;
+you've nothing to do with it--; with my genius."
+
+"Your genius." She laughed then. "It's your genius, Jasper, that has
+nothing to do with you!"
+
+"Nothing--to--do--with--me?"
+
+"No, Jasper. I haven't been blind."
+
+"Blind?"
+
+"I've seen, Jasper; sitting here night after night in this room with
+you; I've seen."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Over there--; in the house opposite."
+
+"You mean--"
+
+"And you can't write without it, Jasper! You couldn't write before and
+you can't write now without it. It isn't you. It isn't you who writes.
+It's something--something working through you. And you call it your own.
+Jasper, you're a fool!"
+
+"Ellen, how dare you!"
+
+"Dare!"
+
+She spoke the word disdainfully. He had never in his whole life seen her
+this way; he had never thought to see her like this; but then, he had
+never given Ellen much thought of any kind.
+
+"It's you who're the fool." He was furious. "It's I who've always been
+the brains; if you could you'd have hampered me with your stupidity. But
+you couldn't. I shut you quite outside. I nurtured my own genius. If I'd
+have left things to you, I'd have been down and out by now; and that's
+all there is to it."
+
+"No!" Her voice rang through the room. "I won't let you say that,
+Jasper. I'll tell you the truth now. And take it or leave it as you
+will. You won't be able to get away from it. Not if I tell you the
+truth, Jasper. There'll be no getting away from it!"
+
+"Truth--; about what?"
+
+"You and your genius. I wouldn't have told you but it's no good going
+on like this. I thought there was some hope for you; I couldn't think
+any human being would be as self-satisfied, as disgustingly material as
+you are. Why, if you have a soul, but you haven't, and I thought--God,
+how I hoped!"
+
+He started to speak. He could not find his voice.
+
+She went on presently in that quiet, monotonous voice which had been
+hers for so many years.
+
+"You left me alone; I wouldn't have complained; I wouldn't complain now
+if you had some excuse for it. It all made me different. There's no use
+in telling you how; you couldn't understand. But I got to feeling things
+I'd never felt before; and then I saw things. And after a while I found
+I could bring those things to me. And that night, the first night we
+moved in here--"
+
+He interrupted her in spite of himself.
+
+"What of that night? What?"
+
+"That night when you were standing there at the window I got down on my
+knees and prayed. I brought something to you that night. And you called
+the genius yours." She broke off and was silent for a second. "I brought
+it to you because I wanted you to be great. I thought with all that
+energy of yours for writing that if it could work through you, you'd be
+big. But you were too small for it! You tried to make it a thing of your
+own. And I've held on to it. For six years I've kept it here with you;
+and now it's going. I'm letting it go back again. You're too small; you
+can't ever be anything but just--you!"
+
+He walked over to his desk, and sank down into the arm chair.
+
+"I don't--know--what--you're--talking--about."
+
+"You do! And if you don't, why do you look out of the window there every
+night? Why d'you wait for it to come, before you start to write?"
+
+His exclamation was involuntary.
+
+"The shadow!"
+
+"Yes. Its shadow--; from this room where I kept
+it--casting--over--there--its--shadow."
+
+So that was what she meant. The superstition-fostered thing that
+epitomized his genius to himself. The shadow that he had come to look
+upon as a sign of luck. But it was nonsense. It wasn't possible; not
+such rot as that. It was his mind; the big creative mind of him that
+wrote.
+
+"Have you said all you're going to say?"
+
+For a second her gaze met his and then the heavy lids came down again
+over those strange green eyes, hiding all expression.
+
+"Yes, Jasper."
+
+He looked out of the window. His eyes stared through the night beyond
+the two shadowy, drooping willow trees on either side of the wicker gate
+and over at the house opposite. He caught his breath. The yellow light
+from the lamp on his desk played across the clear blank of the window
+blind across the way. The shadow had gone.
+
+"Ellen--" His voice was hoarse. "Ellen!"
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"It's not there, Ellen--; six years; now--; why, Ellen--"
+
+She went and sat down in the chair beside the desk.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It isn't there! I tell you--"
+
+"I thought it could make no difference to you!"
+
+"It was--lucky--Ellen."
+
+"Oh, lucky, Jasper?"
+
+He made an effort to pull himself together.
+
+"It won't make any difference to me--not to my writing; not to my
+genius."
+
+After the silence of a moment her voice came to him in its low even
+measure.
+
+"Then--; write!"
+
+"Of course." His tone was high pitched, hysterical. "Naturally I'll
+write."
+
+"Write, Jasper."
+
+He caught up his pen and dipped it in the ink. He drew the white pile of
+paper nearer to him.
+
+"Jasper--"
+
+"How can I work if you don't stop talking? How can I do anything? How
+can I write?"
+
+"Are--you--writing--Jasper? Are--you--?"
+
+He did not answer her.
+
+"Because;" she went on very quietly. "It's gone back, Jasper.
+It's--gone--now--"
+
+His pen went to and fro; to and fro across the page. His figure was bent
+well over the desk. Every now and again, without moving, his bulging
+blue eyes would lift themselves to the clear blank blind of the window
+opposite and then they would come back and fix themselves intently upon
+the white page of paper which he was so busily covering with stupid,
+meaningless little drawings.
+
+
+
+
+THE EFFIGY
+
+
+"Mr. Evans is upstairs in the library, ma'am."
+
+Genevieve Evans hurried through the hall and up the steps. She pulled
+off her gloves as she went. She rolled them into a hard, small ball and
+tucked them automatically in her muff.
+
+She had hoped that she would get there before him. She had been thinking
+of that all during the quick rush home. She would have liked to have had
+a moment to pull herself together. After what she had been through she
+wondered if she could keep from going all to pieces. It could not be
+helped. She did not even know if she cared a lot about it. She was quite
+numbed. He was there ahead of her; there in the library. Of all the
+rooms in the house that he should have chosen the one so rarely used.
+The room she hated.
+
+At the door of the library she paused breathless.
+
+For a second she thought the long dark room empty.
+
+Then she saw Ernest.
+
+He was standing in one of the deep windows. A short squat figure black
+against the dim yellow of the velvet curtains. One hand held his
+cigarette; the fingers of the other hand tapped unevenly on the window
+glass.
+
+She knew then that he must have seen her come into the house.
+
+"Ernest."
+
+He turned.
+
+"I've been waiting for you," he told her with studied indifference.
+"Where've you been, Jenny?"
+
+She took a step into the room.
+
+"I'm sorry, Ernest. I didn't know you'd be home so early."
+
+"It's late. Where've you been?"
+
+She wondered why she should bother avoiding answering his question.
+
+"Oh--out."
+
+Her tone was vague.
+
+"No," he scoffed. "I wouldn't have guessed it. Really, I wouldn't!"
+
+She loosened the fur from her neck and tossed it onto the center table.
+
+"Don't, Ernest."
+
+"Don't what, Jenny?"
+
+She sank down into the depths of the nearest chair.
+
+"Oh--nothing." Her hands clinched themselves. "Nothing."
+
+He came and stood quite close to her. He glanced quickly at her, puffing
+the while at his cigarette. She thought he looked wicked and pagan;
+hideous and yellow behind the rising smoke. His narrow eyes peered at
+her.
+
+"Well, Jenny--out with it, my girl. Where've you been?"
+
+She looked away from him. Her face was pale. In the twilight shadowed
+room he had seen how wide and strange her eyes were.
+
+She made up her mind then that it was not worth bothering about. She
+would tell him the truth. She did not care how he took it.
+
+"I've been to see--; to--see--father--"
+
+She whispered the words. Her eyes wavered back to his face.
+
+"Good heavens!" He laughed harshly. "After all you said?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Rather a joke, that."
+
+"No. There wasn't anything funny about it."
+
+"Well. Was the old man surprised?"
+
+"No. He told me he knew I'd come--some time."
+
+"Wise old beggar, Daniel Drare!"
+
+Her breath came quickly; unevenly.
+
+"He's a devil, Ernest! That's what he is--; he's--"
+
+He interrupted her.
+
+"Not so fast, Jenny. You went there to see him, you know."
+
+"But, Ernest, I couldn't stand it any longer. I--simply--couldn't--"
+
+He walked deliberately over to the screened fireplace and tossed his
+cigarette into it.
+
+"Why d'you go to him?"
+
+"You know why I went."
+
+"Why!"
+
+She had felt right along that he must be made to understand it. She
+could not see why he had not known before.
+
+"Oh, don't pretend any more. I'm sick of it. You know I'm sick of it."
+
+His brows drew together in an angry frown.
+
+"Sick of what? Eh, Jenny?"
+
+Her eyes crept away from his and went miserably about the room. They
+took no note of the rare old furniture; of the dark paneled walls; of
+the color mellowed tapestries. She sat looking at it all blindly. Then
+her eyes raised themselves a bit. She found herself staring at the
+picture hung just above the wood carved mantel. The famous picture. The
+work of the great artist. The picture before which she had stood and
+hated; and hated. The picture which was the pride and portrait of her
+father, Daniel Drare.
+
+She got to her feet.
+
+"I'm sick of you--;" she said it quite calmly. "And--I'm sick--of--him."
+She nodded her head in the direction of the portrait. "I'd do anything
+to get away from both of you--anything!"
+
+He smiled.
+
+"You'll not get away from me," he told her.
+
+"You--!" The one word was contemptuous. "You don't really count."
+
+"What d'you mean?"
+
+He still smiled.
+
+"I mean what I say." Her voice was tired. "You're nothing--; nothing
+but--oh, a kind of a henchman to him. That's all you are. Not that he
+needs you. He doesn't need any one. He's too unscrupulously powerful for
+that. He's never needed any one. Not you. Nor--me. He didn't even need
+my mother. He broke her heart and let her die because he didn't need
+her. I think you know he's like that. You're no different where he's
+concerned than the others."
+
+"After all--I'm your husband!"
+
+"That's the ghastly part of it. You--my--husband. You're only my husband
+because of him. You knew that when I married you, didn't you? You knew
+the lies he told me when he wanted me to marry you. You never
+contradicted them. And I was too silly, too young to know. I wanted to
+get away from it all; and from him. I couldn't guess that you--d'you
+think, Ernest, if it hadn't been for those lies I'd have married you? Do
+you?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I usually get what I want, Jenny."
+
+"And why do you get it? Why?"
+
+"Perhaps because I want it."
+
+She laughed harshly.
+
+"Because Daniel Drare gets it for you. Because he's had everything all
+his life. Because he's behind you for the time being. That's why!"
+
+"And what if it is?"
+
+"My God!" She muttered. "I can't make you understand. I can't even talk
+to either of you."
+
+"You went to see him!"
+
+"I went to him to tell him I couldn't stand it any longer. I begged him
+to help me; just--this--once--I told him I couldn't go on this way. I
+told him I couldn't bear any more. I told him the truth; that I'd--I'd
+go mad."
+
+"What did he say? Eh, Jenny?"
+
+For a second her eyes closed.
+
+"He laughed. Laughed--"
+
+"Of course!"
+
+"There's no 'of course' about it. I'm serious. Deadly serious."
+
+"Don't be a fool, Jenny. If you ask me I'd say you were mighty well off.
+Your father gives you everything you want. Your husband gives you
+everything you want. There isn't a man in the whole city who has more
+power than Daniel Drare. Or more money for that matter. You ought to be
+jolly well satisfied."
+
+She waited a full moment before speaking.
+
+"Maybe I'm a fool, Ernest. Maybe I am. A weak, helpless kind of a fool.
+But I'm not happy, Ernest. I can't go this kind of a life any more. It's
+gotten unreal and horrible. And the kind of things you do to make money;
+the kind of things you're proud of. They prey on me, Ernest. There's
+nothing about all this that's clean. It's making me ill; the rottenness
+of this sort of living. I'm not happy. Doesn't that mean anything to
+you?"
+
+"Nonsense. You've no reason for not being happy. The trouble with you,
+Jenny, is that you've too lively an imagination."
+
+"Oh, no, Ernest. I've got to get away. Somewhere--anywhere. Just by
+myself. I don't love you, Ernest. You don't really love me. It's only
+because I'm Daniel Drare's daughter that you married me. It was just his
+wealth and his power and--and is unscrupulous self that fascinated you."
+
+"You don't know what you're saying."
+
+"I do, I do, Ernest! You'd like to be like him. But you can't. You are
+like him in a lot of ways. The little ways. But you're not big enough to
+be really like him. Let me go, Ernest. Before it's too late;--let me
+go!"
+
+He came and put a hand on her shoulder.
+
+"I'll never let you go," he said.
+
+"You must!" She whispered. "You've got to let me. Just to get away from
+all this. I've never been away in all my life. He'd never let me
+go--either."
+
+Unconsciously her eyes went up to the picture.
+
+The full, red face with the hard lines in it. The thick, sensual lips.
+The small, cunning eyes that laughed. The ponderous, heavy set of the
+figure. The big, powerful hands.
+
+His gaze followed after hers.
+
+And very suddenly he left her side. He walked over to the mantel.
+
+"Funny," he muttered to himself. "Jolly strange--that!"
+
+Her fingers clutched at her breast.
+
+"Ernest--! What're you doing?"
+
+"Can you see anything wrong here, Jenny?"
+
+He was looking up at the portrait.
+
+"Wrong?" She said it beneath her breath. "Wrong--"
+
+He reached up a hand. He drew his fingers across the canvas.
+
+"By Jove!" His voice was excited. "So it is. Thought I wasn't crazy.
+When could it have happened, eh? Ever notice this, Jenny?"
+
+She could not take her eyes from his hand that was going over and over
+the canvas along the arm of the painted figure.
+
+"Can't you see it, Jenny?"
+
+"I--I can't see anything."
+
+She whispered it.
+
+"Come over here--; where I am."
+
+She hesitated.
+
+"Ernest, what's the sense? How can you see in this light anyway, how--"
+
+He did not let her finish.
+
+"Come here!"
+
+Slowly she went toward him.
+
+"What is it, Ernest? What?"
+
+"A crack?" His hand still worked across it. "In the paint--here along
+the arm. Or a cut, or something. How under the sun could it have
+happened? We've got to have it fixed somehow. Never heard of such a
+thing before. Old Daniel Drare'll be as sore as a crab if ever he gets
+wind of this. It'd be like hurting him to touch this portrait. He
+certainly does think the world of it! How could it have
+happened;--that's what I'd like to know."
+
+"I--I don't know what you're talking about--I--!"
+
+"Here! Can't you see it? It's as plain as the nose on your face. Along
+the arm. It's a cut. Right into the canvas. You can run your finger in
+it. Give me your hand."
+
+She shrank back from him.
+
+"No--no, Ernest."
+
+He stared at her intently.
+
+"You do look seedy. You'd better go up and lie down. I've got to dress
+for dinner, anyway. We'll have to have this fixed."
+
+He started for the door.
+
+She blocked his way.
+
+"Will--you--let--me--go, Ernest?"
+
+"Don't start that again."
+
+"All right. I won't!"
+
+"That's a sensible girl, Jenny. Even your father had to laugh at you
+when you told him the way you feel. It isn't natural. It's just nerves,
+I guess. You could stick it out with Daniel Drare. You can stick it out
+with me. Look here, Daniel Drare's a great old fellow, but I'm not as
+crude in some things as he is; am I, Jenny?"
+
+"You would be if you could." Her voice was singsong. "You haven't his
+strength; that's all."
+
+"I'm not as crude as he is."
+
+"You haven't his strength," she droned.
+
+"I've enough strength to keep you here; if that's what you mean."
+
+"No, it's not what I mean." A puzzled look crept across her face. Her
+eyes were suddenly furtive. "Maybe I don't know what I mean. But I don't
+think it's you. I don't think you count. It's him. It's Daniel Drare!
+He's behind it all. I don't think I quite know what I'll do about it. I
+must do something! I mustn't be angry!"
+
+He stared at her.
+
+"You'd best come along if you're going to dress."
+
+"I'll be up in a moment," she said.
+
+When he was gone she went over to the window.
+
+She stood there gazing out into the darkened quiet side-street. She was
+trembling in every limb. Now and again she would half turn. Her eyes
+would go slowly, warily toward the portrait hanging there over the
+mantel and then they would hurry away again.
+
+She started nervously when the butler knocked at the door.
+
+"What is it, Williams?"
+
+"Mr. Drare's housekeeper, ma'am. She'd like to see you, ma'am. I said
+I'd ask."
+
+"Show her in here, Williams."
+
+The man left the room.
+
+She walked over to the farther corner of the room and switched on the
+lights.
+
+She heard footsteps in the hall.
+
+She stood quite still; waiting.
+
+Footsteps--Nearer--
+
+A middle-aged woman very plainly dressed was in the doorway.
+
+"Miss Genevieve--"
+
+"Nannie!"
+
+"Miss Genevieve. I wouldn't have come; only I've got to tell you."
+
+"What, Nannie? Come and sit down, Nannie."
+
+The woman came into the room. For a second she paused, and then
+hurriedly she closed the door behind her.
+
+"No, Miss Genevieve. I'll not sit down. Thank you. I can't be staying
+long. He might want me. I wouldn't like him to know I was here."
+
+The muscles on either side of Genevieve Evans' mouth pulled and
+twitched.
+
+"So? You're frightened too, Nannie!"
+
+She said the words to herself.
+
+The woman heard her.
+
+"That I am, Miss. And that I've got good reason to be; the same as you,
+my poor Miss Genevieve."
+
+"Yes, yes, Nannie. What was it you wanted?"
+
+The woman stood quite rigid.
+
+"You was there, Miss--this afternoon?"
+
+"Yes--"
+
+"Did you notice anything, Miss?"
+
+She drew a deep breath.
+
+"What d'you mean, Nannie? Nannie, what?"
+
+"It's him, Miss. It was last night--"
+
+The woman broke off.
+
+"Yes, Nannie;" Genevieve Evans urged.
+
+"I don't rightly know how to tell it to you, Miss. It's hard to find the
+words to say it in. He'd kill me if he knew I come here and told you.
+But you got to know. I can't keep it to myself. He's been fierce of
+late. What with making so much more money. And the drinking, Miss. And
+the women. The women, they're there all hours, now."
+
+"My mother's house!" Genevieve Evans said it uncertainly.
+
+"Yes, Miss," the woman went on. "And it was almost as bad when she
+lived."
+
+"I know, Nannie. I've always known!"
+
+"But last night, Miss; after they'd gone. I was asleep, Miss Genevieve.
+It woke me. It was awful. Plain horrid, Miss."
+
+"What--Nannie?"
+
+"The scream, Miss--A shriek of pain."
+
+"No,--no, Nannie!" Genevieve Evans interrupted wildly. "Don't say it!
+Don't!"
+
+The woman looked at her wonderingly.
+
+"Why, Miss Genevieve--Poor, little lamb."
+
+"Nannie, Nannie." She made a tremendous effort to control herself. "What
+was it you were going to say?"
+
+"The scream, Miss. In the night. I rushed down. I knocked at his door.
+He wouldn't let me in. He was moaning, Miss. And cursing. And moaning.
+He was swearing about a knife. I listened, Miss--at the keyhole. I was
+scared. He kept cursing and moaning about a knife; about his arm--"
+
+"Nannie--"
+
+She whispered the word beneath her breath. "Yes, Miss. Cut in the arm.
+He would have it that way. And he wouldn't let me in. I waited for
+hours. And this morning I went into his room myself. He was in his
+shirt-sleeves. I pretended I wanted the linen for the wash. I was
+looking for blood, Miss. Not a drop did I find. Not a pin prick stain.
+But I seen him bandaging his arm; right in front of me he did it. And
+then I seen him rip the bandage off."
+
+"Nannie--"
+
+"It's his reason I fear for, Miss. He turns to me and asks me if I can
+see the cut."
+
+"Yes? Yes, Nannie?"
+
+"He shows me his arm. And, Miss--"
+
+The woman stopped abruptly.
+
+"Nannie--what? What?"
+
+Genevieve Evans' hands had gone up to her throat.
+
+"There wasn't a scratch;--not--a--scratch!"
+
+"Oh--" She breathed.
+
+"And that's why I came here, Miss. To ask if he'd said anything of it to
+you. Or if--if you'd noticed anything, Miss."
+
+Genevieve Evans waited a full second before she answered:
+
+"No, Nannie. He wouldn't have told me. I didn't notice anything. I
+wasn't there very long. You see I only went to ask him to let me get
+away. Out in the country--by myself. I wanted the money to go. He
+and--and Mr. Evans never give me money, Nannie. Just things--all the
+things, I want. Only I'm tired of things. I don't quite know what to
+do. When--I think about it I get very angry. I was very angry. Last
+night I was very angry! I've such funny ideas when I'm angry, Nannie. I
+mustn't get angry again. But I've got--to--get--away."
+
+"I don't blame you, Miss Genevieve, for being angry. You've been an
+angel all your life; all your life pent up like--like a
+saint--with--with--devils."
+
+"You--don't--blame--me--Nannie?"
+
+"No, Lamb. Not your Nannie. Your Nannie knows what it's been like for
+you. I know him, Miss Genevieve. I know he didn't give you the money."
+
+"No, Nannie. He laughed at me. Laughed--"
+
+"He's a beast! That's what he is, Miss. He should have give it to you.
+And him going away himself. He was telling me only to-day. Into the
+country."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Oh, Miss. I hate to say such things to you. He's going with that
+black-haired woman;--the latest one, she is. He thinks she works too
+hard. He's taking her off for a rest. Is anything the matter? Aren't you
+well, darling?"
+
+Genevieve Evans swayed dizzily for a second her one hand reaching out
+blindly before her.
+
+The woman came quickly and took the hand between both of her hands and
+stroked it.
+
+"Nannie, I'm sick--sick!"
+
+"Nannie's darling--; Nannie's pet."
+
+From somewhere in the house came the silvery, tinkling sound of a clock
+striking seven times.
+
+"I've got to go, Miss Genevieve, dear."
+
+"All right, Nannie."
+
+The woman drew a chair up and pushed her gently into it.
+
+"You'll not be telling him, Miss?"
+
+"No, Nannie--; no--"
+
+The woman started for the door.
+
+"Thank you, Miss Genevieve."
+
+"Nannie--; you said he was taking her--; the black-haired one--; away
+for a--a rest? Away into the country?"
+
+With her hand on the door-knob the woman turned.
+
+"Yes. Why--lamb!"
+
+"Into the country." Genevieve Evans' voice was lifeless. "Into the
+country where everything is quiet and big--; and clean. You said that,
+Nannie?"
+
+"I said the country, Miss Genevieve, dearie."
+
+"Nannie--Nannie--;" her eyes were staring straight before her.
+"I--want--to--go!"
+
+"Lamb--darling."
+
+The woman stood undecided.
+
+"But he wouldn't let me. He laughed at me. Nannie, he laughed."
+
+The woman made up her mind.
+
+"Will Nannie stop with you a bit, Miss Genevieve, dearie?"
+
+"You said;" Genevieve Evans' lifeless, monotonous voice went on; "you
+said you wouldn't blame me for being angry. I get very angry, Nannie.
+Very angry. It brings all kinds of things to me when I get angry. His
+kind of things. Rotten things. And he's going to take her into the
+country; where everything's clean; and he won't let me--go. God!"
+
+"Will I stay, Miss Genevieve?"
+
+"No, Nannie--go! Go quickly! Go--now!"
+
+"Yes, Miss Genevieve. He'll be wanting to know where I am."
+
+"Go, Nannie!" She half rose from her chair. The door closed quietly
+behind the woman. "Go!" Genevieve Evans whispered. "He's going--into the
+country--; he's taking that woman. He wouldn't let me. He wants to keep
+me here. Just to feel his power--; his filthy power. He's not the only
+one." She was muttering now. "He's not the only one who can do things.
+Rotten--dirty things! His kind of things!"
+
+She swayed to her feet. Her steps were short and uncertain. Her whole
+body reeled. Her face was blanched; drained of all color. Her fingers
+trembled wide spread at her sides. She was quivering from head to foot.
+
+Only her eyes were steady; her eyes wide and dilated that were riveted
+on the portrait hanging there above the wood carved mantel.
+
+She backed toward the door, her eyes glued to the picture.
+
+Her shaking fingers, fumbling behind her, found the key and turned it.
+
+Feeling her way with her hands, her distended eyes still fixed on that
+one thing, she got to the center table.
+
+It took her a while to pull open the drawer.
+
+Her breath came raspingly; as if she had been running.
+
+The old Venetian dagger with the cracked jeweled handle was between her
+fingers.
+
+Very slowly now she went toward the fireplace.
+
+The electric light flared over the colored gems that studded the handle
+of the dagger, giving out small quick rays of blue and red and green.
+
+"I'm angry;" she whispered hoarsely. "I--I'm very angry--with--you.
+You've no right--; no right--to--ruin--my--life--and laugh! You
+did--laugh--at--me!"
+
+Her eyes stared up at the full, red face with the hard lines in it. Up
+at the thick, sensual lips. Up at the cunning eyes. At the ponderous,
+heavy-set figure. The powerful hands.
+
+"Why--don't--you--laugh--now? You aren't afraid--are--you?
+You--aren't--afraid of--anything? Not of--me--are--you--Daniel Drare--?
+You've--done--your--best--to--keep--me--under--your--power--;
+you--stood--behind--Ernest--to keep--me under--your--power.
+You're--not--afraid--of--me? Why--don't--you--laugh--Daniel--Drare?"
+
+Her right hand that held the dagger raised itself.
+
+"Laugh, Daniel Drare! Laugh!"
+
+She stood there under the portrait. Her left hand went stiffly out
+feeling over the long cut in the painted arm.
+
+"Angry--last--night." She whispered. "And--it--hurt--you. Daniel
+Drare--I--could-hurt--you!"
+
+For a second her eyes went up to the dagger held there above her head;
+the dagger with the thousand colored gleams pointing from it.
+
+She gave a quick choking laugh.
+
+"I laugh--at--you--Daniel--Drare."
+
+With all her strength she drove the dagger into the heart of the canvas.
+
+She staggered back to the center of the room.
+
+There was a gaping rent in the portrait.
+
+She laughed again; stupidly. Her laughter trailed off and stopped.
+
+She stood there waiting.
+
+Once she thought some one paused outside the door.
+
+Her hands were up across her eyes.
+
+Motionless she waited.
+
+Suddenly she gave a quick start.
+
+Out there in the hall a telephone had rung.
+
+She heard her husband answer it.
+
+Her one distinct thought was that he must have been on his way out for
+dinner.
+
+His unbelieving cry came to her.
+
+"My God! it can't--"
+
+Her fingers were pressed into her ears. She did not want to hear the
+rest. She knew it.
+
+
+
+
+THE FAITH
+
+
+The great lady fingered the pearls that circled her throat.
+
+"Quite true," she murmured, and a smile crept up about the corners of
+her lips and lingered there. "Really, surprisingly true."
+
+The woman with the white hair and the heavily lidded eyes bent a bit
+lower over her charts of stars and constellations.
+
+"This year"--she went on in that low, undecided voice of hers--"this
+year Madame has had a big sorrow. It was the loss to Madame of a young
+man. He was tall and fair like Madame, but he had not Madame's eyes. He
+had courage, Madame, and a soft voice; always a soft voice. He went on,
+this young one, with his courage. The son of Madame died in the early
+Spring."
+
+The great lady's hands dropped into her lap and clinched there: the
+knuckles showing white and round as her fingers strained against each
+other. Her eyes stared hard at the cracked walls; up over the low
+ceiling, toward the back of the small room that was divided off from the
+kitchen by a loose-hung plush curtain; out through the one window which
+gave on to the street. She could just see the heads of people who were
+passing and the faint, gray shadows of the late evening that were
+reaching in dark spots up along the rough, white walls of the house
+opposite. Her eyes came dazedly back to the room and the chairs and the
+table before which she sat. Two giant tears trickled down her cheeks.
+The smile was wiped from off her mouth.
+
+The woman with the white hair had waited.
+
+"There is another here. He is perhaps a little older than the one who
+died. He has not that one's courage. He is very careful of all the small
+things; like his clothes and his cigarettes and his affections. The big
+things he has never known. His eyes are like the eyes of Madame. Madame
+has this son in the war now."
+
+"No--no!" The great lady leaned across the table. "Don't tell me--not
+that he--I couldn't bear it! Not--both--of--them!"
+
+The woman with the white hair looked up quite suddenly from her charts
+of stars and constellations. A pitying quiver shook over her face.
+
+"You need have no fear, Madame. He is not ready. It is a wound. It is
+not a wound that gives death."
+
+The great lady fingered her pearls again.
+
+"You--you quite carried me away. For a moment you startled me."
+
+"I regret it, Madame. Perhaps I should not have said anything."
+
+"Of course you should have. I told you that when I came in, didn't I? I
+said I wanted to hear everything. Everything you could tell me."
+
+"Ah--yes, Madame."
+
+"Is that all, now? You're certain that you've not forgotten anything?"
+And she pulled at her gold mesh bag, which was studded with sapphires.
+
+"It is everything, Madame. Unless, perhaps, Madame has some question she
+would like to ask of me?"
+
+The great lady drew her money out and tossed it on the table.
+
+The woman with the white hair and those heavily lidded eyes did not
+touch it. The great lady got to her feet and started to the door. Quite
+suddenly she stopped.
+
+"When--" She made an effort to steady her voice. "When will this
+thing--; this wound--come--?"
+
+The woman with the white hair bent over the charts again. And then she
+caught up a pencil and made little signs on the yellow paper and drew a
+triangle through them and across them at the points.
+
+"The fourth day of the second month from now, Madame."
+
+The great lady came back to the table and stood there looking down.
+
+"How do you do it?"
+
+The woman with the white hair stared up in astonishment.
+
+"Madame?"
+
+The great lady's ringed fingers spread out, pale and taut at her sides.
+The jewels of the rings showed in dark, glistening stains against the
+white of her skin.
+
+"What you've just told me--all of it. I don't see how you know--how you
+can know. It's true. I can't understand how it can be true. But it is.
+Every word of it."
+
+The woman with the white hair fingered her pencil a bit wearily.
+
+"But--of course, Madame."
+
+"I came here;" the great lady spoke hurriedly. "I don't know why I came.
+Only I didn't think: I wouldn't have believed it possible. I couldn't
+tell you now why I came."
+
+"There are many who come--these days."
+
+"These days?"
+
+"People would know more than they know of things they never thought of
+before, Madame--these days. They would follow a bit further after the
+lives that have been broken off so suddenly. They are impatient because
+they cannot see where they have never before looked and so they come to
+me because I have sat, staring into those places. They will see--all of
+them--soon. They are going on, further, because they must know. These
+days they must--know!"
+
+The great lady stood quite still.
+
+"You have a wonderful gift--wonderful."
+
+"It is not mine, Madame."
+
+The great lady's eyes went about the room.
+
+"I'll be going," she said. "It's quite late."
+
+Her eyes took in the cheap poverty of the mended carpet and the
+paint-scratched walls and the dingy-threaded, plush-covered chairs.
+
+The woman with the white hair got to her feet.
+
+"I know what you are thinking." Her voice was low. "If I can do this for
+others, you think, why should I not be able to do everything for myself?
+If I can tell to others, what may I not tell to myself? If I can give
+help to others, why can I not give help to myself?"
+
+The silk of the great lady's dress gave out a faint rustle as she took a
+step back.
+
+"No--" She murmured uncertainly.
+
+"It is not 'No.'" The woman's voice trembled. "It is 'Yes.' It is what
+was going through your head--going around and around and fearing to be
+asked. But I will answer you. I will say that the power is not mine. It
+is the power that is given to me. It is not for myself. I do not want it
+for myself. I shall never touch it for myself, because it is meant for
+others. To help others and that is all."
+
+"D'you mean you can't see things for yourself?"
+
+The great lady was curious.
+
+"But of course I can see. It is that which, sometimes--" The woman with
+the white hair broke off abruptly. "Do you know what it is to see and
+then to be able to do nothing--nothing? Not--one--thing--!"
+
+"How can you?"
+
+"I can, Madame, because that is what I am here for. It is by being
+nothing myself that this thing comes through me so that I can feel what
+other people are; what they are going to be. If I thought only of me, I
+would be so full of myself I could not think of anything else. It is
+from thinking a little bit beyond that the power first came. And now
+that I keep on thinking away from the nearest layer of thought, it works
+through me. And I can help. It is the wish of my life to help. It is
+what I am here for. Placed in the field. They told it to me--the voices.
+Put in the field,--by them."
+
+The great lady shrugged her shoulders.
+
+The woman with the white hair pulled herself up very suddenly. There was
+a quick, convulsive movement of her hands and for a short second her
+eyes closed. She went to the table and caught the money between her
+fingers and dragged it across the red cover to her.
+
+"I thank Madame."
+
+The great lady walked slowly to the door.
+
+"Good-by. Perhaps some day I'll be back."
+
+"Perhaps--Madame. Good-by."
+
+The great lady went out of the room and closed the door behind her. The
+sound of her high-heeled footsteps tapped in sharp staccato down the
+uncarpeted stairs, and died away into the stillness. The long-drawn
+creak of rusty hinges and then the muffled thud of the front door
+swinging to. In the street the soft diminishing whirr of a motor grew
+fainter and was gone.
+
+Silence.
+
+The woman sank into a chair and buried her face between her two shaking
+hands.
+
+Shadows crept up against the uncurtained window and pressed, quivering,
+against the pane. Shadows came into the room and stretched themselves
+along the floor. Shadows reached up across the wall and over the chairs
+and the table. Shadows spread in a gray, moving mass over the still
+figure of the woman.
+
+A young girl came quickly and silently through the curtain that
+partitioned the room off from the kitchen.
+
+"Maman--"
+
+The woman did not move.
+
+"I had not thought, Maman, that you were alone."
+
+The woman slowly drew her face from out between her hands. She looked up
+uncertainly, her eyes only half open.
+
+"Leave me, Angele."
+
+"But, Maman, supper is ready."
+
+"Let it wait, Angele."
+
+The girl came over to the table and put her hand on the woman's
+shoulder.
+
+"Was she then horrid, Maman?"
+
+The woman sighed softly.
+
+"It is not that, Angele. She was like the others. They come because they
+are curious. Something, perhaps, brings them here, but they do not know
+that. They are only curious. They do not believe. I tell them the truth.
+They are shocked for a little moment. They do not believe, Angele."
+
+"Pauvre petite Maman, you are tired."
+
+"Non, non, Angele."
+
+"Will you have Jean see you tired, Maman?"
+
+The woman stared up into the girl's small, white face that was dimmed
+with shifting shadows. The woman's heavily lidded eyes met the girl's
+wide, dark eyes.
+
+"Jean--"
+
+"He will be home to eat, Maman. Soon, now, he will be home."
+
+The woman passed her hands again and again over her forehead and then
+she held them with the tips of her fingers pressed tight to her temples.
+
+"He is such a child, Angele."
+
+"Shall we have supper now?"
+
+"Angele--"
+
+"I will bring a light in here, Maman, and then when Jean is back we will
+go in to supper."
+
+"He--is--such--a--child,--Angele."
+
+"And never on time, Maman!"
+
+The woman caught the girl's fingers between her own.
+
+"Answer me, Angele. Answer me!"
+
+The girl looked down in surprise.
+
+"But what, Maman?"
+
+The woman's breath came quickly.
+
+"He is a child. Say that he is a baby. He is all that I have. You and he
+are all--everything! Say, Angele, that he is a child! Only yesterday,
+you remember--the long curls? The velvet suit? Surely it was yesterday.
+Say, Angele, that he--is--still--a--little--one."
+
+The girl threw back her head and laughed. The shadows lay like long,
+dark fingers on the white of her throat.
+
+"Of course. He is young--too young even now when they take the young.
+You have no need to worry, Maman. Maman--what is it?"
+
+She had seen the sudden, far-away look in the woman's eyes.
+
+She had seen her head stretch forward, the chin pointing, the mouth a
+little open.
+
+"Maman--"
+
+The woman's hand reached out in a gesture commanding silence.
+
+"The voices," the woman whispered. "They have been after me the whole
+day. The voices. They--keep--coming--and--coming--to--me--I have not
+been able to think--for the voices--"
+
+"Maman--"
+
+"You say 'yes.' You are coming--nearer--nearer. No--I cannot see. But
+hear--Mais, it is good now! You speak distinctly. Of course I thank you
+for speaking so beautifully. You--say--you--want--want--"
+
+"Petite Maman, you will make yourself ill with those old horoscopes and
+these voices. Petite Maman, have you not done enough for one day?"
+
+The woman paid no attention to her. She did not seem to hear the girl.
+Her face was pale; there were faint, bluish smudges about her mouth and
+nostrils.
+
+"You want--I cannot--cannot understand what you want. I'm trying to
+understand. I'm trying hard! If you will tell it to me again.
+And--slowly. With patience. It is better now. So that is it? More
+slowly,--if you can. Of course. Is it that you wish to know?
+Of--course--I--shall--give--you--what--you--want. I always give you
+what--you want. I do my best for that. You--want--"
+
+The woman's eyes were closed. She was breathing deeply. Her whole figure
+was tense. The girl stood beside her, a puzzled, half incredulous look
+coming into her face.
+
+"I--should--look. It does no--good--to--look. I can never see--Beyond
+the wood--I should look beyond.--What wood? Now? Is it perhaps
+that--you--mean--gate? Swings to and fro? Now--you--want--;
+this--moment--"
+
+The door was flung wide open.
+
+At the noise the woman slowly opened her eyes, staring blindly before
+her.
+
+"You--want--" She murmured.
+
+A boy stood in the doorway. He was slight and young. His face was small
+and rather like the girl's face, and his dark eyes were set far apart
+like her eyes. Through the gray of the massing shadows gleamed the brass
+buttons of his uniform.
+
+The girl sprang forward.
+
+"Jean--!"
+
+"Maman." The boy came a step into the room. "See, Maman!"
+
+"Hush, Jean." The girl turned to gaze at the woman sitting there with
+that stony, frozen stare, staying in her eyes.
+
+"Maman, they have taken me at last!"
+
+"Oh," for a second the girl forgot the woman. "But I am proud of you!"
+
+"Maman, I wear the uniform. They will let me go now. I knew they would
+take me. Sooner or later; I knew they would have to! Aren't you glad?"
+
+The girl remembered and interrupted him.
+
+"Be still, Jean!"
+
+The boy stood looking from one to the other, his eyes straining through
+the gloom.
+
+"Maman," he whispered.
+
+The woman's voice came trailing softly to them.
+
+"They--want--"
+
+"Maman;" the girl threw her arm protectingly over the woman's shoulders.
+"Jean is here. See, petite Maman; it is Jean. Your Jean."
+
+The woman repeated the words in that gentle, plaintive singsong.
+
+"They want--" and then she got to her feet. "Jean!--" Her voice rose
+shrilly crescendo. "It was that! My--Jean--"
+
+"Maman;" the boy came and stood beside her. "You would not have me stay
+behind when they need me? You will be glad to have me go. Come, Maman,
+you must say that you are glad!"
+
+"My little one--"
+
+"Say, Maman, that you are glad."
+
+"So young, Jean."
+
+"But old enough to fight when they need me. Old enough to fight for
+France!"
+
+"My baby--"
+
+"You will not grieve, Maman."
+
+She reached up and caught his face between her two hands and drew it
+down and kissed him on the mouth.
+
+"Ah, Jean!"
+
+"And say, how do I look?" He turned around and around in front of them.
+"But, Angele, fetch the lamp quickly. You cannot see in this dark. You
+cannot see me."
+
+The girl laughed a bit uncertainly, and then she went quickly, rushing
+into the next room.
+
+The woman gripped hold of the boy's hand. His fingers grasped hers.
+
+"Petite Maman."
+
+"Mon Jean--just--a--moment--still--so."
+
+They stood there silent and very close to each other, in the room
+crowded with moving, splotching shadows. The girl came back through the
+curtain, a lighted lamp between her two hands. The flicker of it spread
+broadly into her eager, anxious face. The glow of it trickled before her
+and widened through the room. The shadows stuck to the walls in the
+corners and rocked up against the ceiling, black among the uneven
+streaks of yellow light.
+
+"Now, Angele. Now, Maman. Put it there on the table, Angele. No, hold it
+higher. Like that. Keep your hands steady, Angele, or how can Maman see?
+Such a miserable lamp! Does not my uniform look magnificent? I am the
+real poilu, hein? Something to be proud of, Maman?"
+
+"The real poilu?" The girl questioned softly. "The grandchild of the
+real poilu, maybe."
+
+"She mocks me, Maman."
+
+"Be quiet, Angele."
+
+"I do not mock, Maman; but I will not have his head turned. The poor
+little cabbage!"
+
+"See, Maman. She will not stop. Tell her that I fight for France."
+
+For a moment the woman hesitated. They could hear the deep breath she
+took.
+
+"For France. And for something else, my little son."
+
+With great care the girl placed the lamp on the table.
+
+"Something else, Maman?"
+
+"The thing for which France stands--; and conquers."
+
+He seized at her last word.
+
+"Conquers? Of course she conquers. And I will help! I will kill the
+Boches. Right and left. I shall fight until France will win!"
+
+A strange light had filtered into the woman's heavily lidded eyes.
+
+"Bravo!" The girl clapped her hands together. "And shall we have our
+supper now, petite Maman, and my little rabbit?"
+
+"Maman--when I have this uniform--"
+
+"Go, children. In a moment I will be with you."
+
+"Come, my cauliflower. Maman would be alone."
+
+"Maman--"
+
+"Jean--I do not mean to tease. Let us go in to supper. If I do not try
+to be pleasant I shall weep. You would not have me weep, brother Jean? I
+would wet the pretty shoulder of your uniform with my tears. That would
+be a tragedy. So come along to supper, my rascal."
+
+Hand in hand the boy and the girl went through the loose-hung, plush
+curtain into the kitchen.
+
+The woman stood rigid beside the table.
+
+"Help me," she whispered beneath her breath. "You--"
+
+She stumbled to her knees. Her head was pressed against the edge of the
+table. Her hands fumbled over the top of it, the fingers widespread and
+catching; clutching at whatever they touched.
+
+From the kitchen came the sound of low voices. A knife rattled
+clatteringly against a plate. Once the girl laughed and her laughter
+snapped off in a half-smothered sob.
+
+The woman moaned a little.
+
+"Just to watch over him. That's all I ask.--You--across there,
+just--to--protect--him--"
+
+Her hands went to her throat, the fingers tightening.
+
+"A sign," she implored. "Dieu--that--you--hear--me!"
+
+Her eyes stared about the room, peering frantically from under their
+heavy lids.
+
+"Will you not help me?" She pleaded. "Dieu! mon Dieu,--will you
+not--help--me--?"
+
+Her kneeling figure swayed a bit.
+
+"You will not hear," she whimpered. "You will--not--hear--"
+
+For a moment longer she waited in the tense silence. And then she rose
+stiffly to her feet. Her eyes riveted themselves upon a little pool of
+yellow light that lay in the center of the table under the lamp. The
+palms of her hands struck noiselessly together.
+
+Very slowly, she went through the curtain and into the kitchen.
+
+It was a scrupulously clean room. A stove stood in one corner. Against
+the wall hung a row of pots and pans that caught the light from the
+swinging lamp in brilliant, burnished patches.
+
+Angele and Jean sat near to each other at the center table. Their heads
+were close. Their cautious whispering stopped abruptly as she came
+toward them.
+
+The woman sat down with the girl on one side of her and the boy on the
+other. She was very silent. There was only one thing she could have
+said. She did not want to say it.
+
+Mechanically she tried to eat. She watched her hands moving upward from
+her plate with a sort of dazed interest. It was only when she tried to
+swallow that she realized how each mouthful of food choked her.
+
+The one question came to her lips again and again.
+
+At last she asked it.
+
+"When do you go--mon Jean?"
+
+The boy gave a quick glance at his sister and his eyes fixed themselves
+upon the table before him and stayed there. She knew then what they had
+been speaking of when she came into the room.
+
+"What difference does it make, petite Maman, when I go?"
+
+"But when, my son?"
+
+"See, Angele, she is anxious to be rid of me! She cannot wait until I
+go. She insists upon knowing even before we have finished this supper of
+ours."
+
+"Maman;"--the girl spoke hurriedly. "Let us talk of that later."
+
+"When?" She insisted.
+
+"But, Maman, you have not touched your food. Was it not good? And I
+thought you would so like the p'tit marmite."
+
+"It is excellent, Angele."
+
+"Then eat, Maman."
+
+"It is that I am not hungry, Angele."
+
+"So, the p'tit marmite is not good, petite Maman. If it were excellent,
+even though you have no hunger, you would eat and eat until there was
+not one little bit left."
+
+The woman took another spoonful.
+
+"When?" She repeated.
+
+The boy's dark eyes lifted and looked into hers.
+
+"To-night,--Maman."
+
+Her figure straightened itself with a quick jerk.
+
+"To-night?"
+
+"And what does it matter, petite Maman, when I go? Surely to-night is as
+nice a time as any."
+
+"As nice a time as any;" she echoed his words.
+
+The three of them sat there silently.
+
+The girl was the first to move.
+
+"Ah, but it is hot in here." She pushed her chair back from the table.
+"It is uncomfortable!"
+
+The boy and the woman got to their feet.
+
+"I'll pack, Maman. Not much, you know. Just my shaving things and soap,
+and some underwear. Angele will help me. I won't be long."
+
+He went out of the kitchen door and down the narrow passage way to his
+room. The girl hesitated for a moment. Without a word she hurried after
+him.
+
+The woman crossed slowly into the next room. For a second she stood
+beside the table, and then she walked over to the window.
+
+Outside the street was dark. No light trickled through the blinds of the
+house opposite. No light reached its brilliant electric flare into the
+sky. No light from the tall lamp-post specked through the gloom. In the
+dim shadow of the silent street she could see the vague forms of people
+going to and fro. Blurred figures moving in the darkness with the echo
+of their footsteps trailing sharply behind them.
+
+She stood quite still. Once her hands crept up to her mouth, the backs
+of them pressing against her teeth.
+
+"Maman."
+
+She wheeled about at the sound of Jean's voice.
+
+He was standing just within the doorway, the girl at his side. The woman
+stood there staring. The girl crossed the room quickly and put her arm
+about the woman's waist, drawing her close.
+
+"Petite Maman--"
+
+"You--go--now--Jean?"
+
+She said the words carefully and precisely with a tremendous effort for
+control.
+
+"But, yes, Maman!"
+
+She leaned a little against the girl.
+
+"Mon Jean, you will have courage--; great--courage--my little one, you
+will be protected. You--will--be--protected!" She had said that in spite
+of herself.
+
+He came to her then and flung his arms about her and kissed her on
+either cheek, and held her tightly to him.
+
+"Good-by, petite Maman."
+
+"Good--" She could not say it.
+
+"Good-by, Angele."
+
+"My little rabbit--I wish you luck. My cabbage--au revoir--;" and her
+lips brushed across his mouth.
+
+For a second he did not move. Then he went across the room and out
+through the door.
+
+He was gone.
+
+The woman's eyes went to the window. The silent, darkened street. The
+people there below her. The somber, black lack of light.
+
+"Maman;" the girl whispered.
+
+"They will watch over him," the woman muttered. "They must
+watch--out--there. They do come back into the world again to protect.
+They cannot--cannot leave them in all that horror--alone."
+
+"See, Maman." The girl's quivering face was against the window-pane.
+"Maman, Jean waves to you!"
+
+Her eyes followed the pointing of the girl's finger.
+
+"They--must--be--here--," she murmured.
+
+"Maman,--wave to Jean!"
+
+Her gaze rested on the dim, undefined figure of the boy standing in the
+street with his hat in the hand that was reached toward them above his
+head. Mechanically she waved back.
+
+The woman and the girl stood close.
+
+"Oh--petite maman;" she whispered piteously.
+
+The woman's eyes dilated.
+
+There, following after Jean; going through the shadow-saturated street;
+moving unheeded among the vague figures of the people going to and fro.
+Something was there. Some scant movement like a current too quiet to
+see. A shadow in the shadows that her sight could not hold to. In the
+dark, gloom-soaked street, staying close to her Jean, she could feel
+something. Some one was there.
+
+Her eyes strained with desperate intentness. Her hands went up slowly
+across her heart.
+
+The words that came to her lips were whispered:
+
+"Dieu! Give me faith;--faith--not--to--disbelieve--"
+
+
+
+
+YELLOW
+
+
+He walked along the pavement with the long, swinging stride he had so
+successfully aped from the men about him. It had been one of the first
+things upon which he had dwelt with the greatest patience; one of the
+first upon which he had centered his stolid concentration. He had
+carried his persistency to such a degree that he had even been known to
+follow other men about measuring their step to a nicety with those long,
+narrow eyes of his, that seemed to see nothing, and yet penetrated into
+the very soul of everything.
+
+His classmates at the big college had at the beginning laughed at him;
+scoffing readily because of the dogged manner in which he had persevered
+at his desire to become thoroughly American. Now after all his laborious
+painstaking, now that he had carefully studied all their ways of
+talking, all their distinctive mannerisms; now that he had gone even
+beyond that with true Oriental perception, reaching out with the cunning
+tentacles of his brain into the minds of those about him, he knew they
+had begun to treat him with the comradeship, the unthinking
+fellow-feeling which they accorded each other.
+
+He thoroughly realized that had they paused to consider, had they in any
+way been made to feel that he, a Chinaman, had consciously made up his
+mind to become one of them, consistently mimicking them day after day,
+that they would have resented him. He knew that they could not have
+helped but think it all hypocrisy. And yet he actually felt that it was
+the one big thing of his life; that desire of his to cast aside the
+benightment of dying China, for what he considered the enlightment and
+virility of America.
+
+To be sure he recognized there was still a great number of the men who
+distrusted him because of his yellow face. He had made up his mind with
+the slow deliberation that always characterized his unswerving
+determination to win every one of them before the end of his last year.
+He would show them one and all that he was as good as they were; that
+the traditions of the Chinaman which they so looked down upon, upon
+which he himself looked down upon, were not his traditions.
+
+As he walked along he thought of these things; thought of them carefully
+and concisely in English. His narrow eyes became a trifle more narrow,
+and a smile that held something of triumph in it came and played about
+his flat, mobile mouth.
+
+It had been raining hard. The wet streets stretched in dark, reflecting
+coils under the corner lamps. Overhead a black sky lowered
+threateningly; pressing down upon the crouching, gray masses of the
+close-built houses in sullen menace. Now and again a swift moving train
+flung itself in thundering derision across the elevated tracks; a long
+brightly lit line streaking through the encircling gloom.
+
+He could feel the mysterious throb of life all about him. The unfathomed
+lure of the night, of the few people that at so late an hour crept past
+him, looming for a second in sudden distinctness at his side, then
+fading phantom-like into the deep engulfing shadows of the dim street.
+
+He was at a complete loss how to express to himself the feeling of
+dread; a subtle feeling that somehow refused to be translated into the
+carefully acquired English of which he was so proud.
+
+For a moment he doubted himself. Doubted that, were he so thoroughly
+American, he could feel the Oriental's subconscious recognition of the
+purposeful, sinister intent in the huddled mass of darkened shop windows
+with their rain-dripping signs; in the shining reptile scales of the
+asphalt underfoot; in the pulsing intensity of the hot, torpid July
+atmosphere.
+
+A street lamp flickered its uncertain light sluggishly over the
+carefully groomed figure and across the placid breath of the yellow
+face.
+
+He paused a second as he saw a form come lurching unsteadily out of the
+gloom ahead of him. It came nearer and he could see that what had at
+first appeared to be a dark, undefinable mass, pushed here and there by
+unseen hands, was in reality a man swaying drunkenly out of the shadows.
+
+He watched the man curiously, with a little of that contemptuous feeling
+an Oriental always holds for any expression of excess. As the man stood
+before him in the darkness, as he stumbled and seemed about to fall, he
+put out his hand and caught him by the elbow.
+
+"Thank 'e;" the drunken eyes blinked blearily up into his stolid
+impassive face. "It's fine to be saved on a stormy night like this. It
+is--"
+
+"Don't mention it."
+
+"It's a powerful dark night;--it is."
+
+"Les. That is so."
+
+"And it's a damn long way home. Ain't it?"
+
+"I do not know."
+
+"By the saints! And no more do I. Ain't you got a dime on you, mister?
+You could be giving it to me for car fare--; couldn't you now, mister?"
+
+"Velee glad to let you have it."
+
+He fished in his pocket. He drew out the coin and placed it in the man's
+outstretched hand. He watched the dirty fingers close eagerly over it.
+Suddenly the bloodshot eyes wavered suspiciously across his face. He saw
+the red flushed features twitch convulsively.
+
+"Holy Mother!" The drunkard muttered thickly. "It's a heathen."
+
+The dime slipped from between the inert fingers. It tinkled down onto
+the pavement, rolling with a little splash into a pool of water that lay
+a deep stain in the crevice of the broken asphalt.
+
+For a moment he wondered placidly at the injustice of it; wondered that
+he should be made to feel the disgust of so revolting a thing as this
+drunkard.
+
+He saw that the man had crossed himself with sudden fervor; he saw him
+shuffle uncertainly this way and that, as though the feet refused to
+carry the huge, bloated body. He stood watching the reeling figure until
+its dark outline was absorbed into the intenser darkness of a side
+street. The expression on his face never changing, he walked on.
+
+He knew he had no right to be out at that time of the night; he knew he
+ought to be sitting at his desk in his comfortable little room, working
+out the studies which he had set himself. And yet he could not make up
+his mind to turn back.
+
+Something drew him on into the blackness of the night; pulling him into
+it like a fated thing.
+
+Now and then he found that the stride he had acquired from such grinding
+observation tired him. Not for worlds would he have shortened his step
+to that padding, sinuous motion so distinctly Chinese.
+
+He had grown to hate all things Chinese. In the short time in which he
+had been in New York he had discarded with the utmost patience the
+traits which are so persistently associated with the Chinaman. To be
+thought American; to have the freedom, the quick appreciation of life
+that belongs to the Occident, that had been the goal toward which he had
+striven; the goal he prided himself he had almost reached.
+
+Suddenly he became aware of a hand on his arm.
+
+In the dark he felt the pressure of bony fingers against his flesh.
+
+Looking down he saw that a woman had crept up from behind him; that she
+had put out her hand in an effort to detain him.
+
+It was in the center of a block. The thick blackness that hung loosely,
+an opaque veil all about him, was almost impenetrable. Yet as he looked
+at her with his small, piercing eyes, he thought he saw her lips moving
+in crimsoned stains splashed against the whiteness of her face.
+
+"What is it?" He asked.
+
+He saw her raise her eyelids at his question. He found himself gazing
+into her eyes; eyes that were twin balls of fire left to burn in a place
+that had been devastated by flames.
+
+"It's hot;--ain't it?"
+
+He stood silent for a moment trying to realize that the woman had every
+right to be there; trying to understand with an even greater endeavor
+that she was in reality a flesh and blood woman, and not some
+mysteriously incarnate soul crawling to his side out of the sinister
+night.
+
+"Les,--it's velee hot."
+
+Something in his tone caused her to start; caused her to look around her
+as though she were afraid.
+
+"I wouldn't have spoke," she stammered. "I wouldn't have spoke only it's
+such a fierce night." Then as he did not answer her immediately, her
+voice rose querulously. "It's a fierce night; ain't it, now?"
+
+That was the word for which he had so vainly searched throughout the
+vocabulary of his carefully acquired English. The word the woman had
+given him, that expressed the sullen menace of the night about him.
+
+"It is--fie--" He made an effort to accomplish the refractory "r." "It
+is fierce."
+
+The hand she had withdrawn from his arm was reached out again. He could
+feel her fingers scrape like the talons of a frightened bird around his
+wrist.
+
+"You get it too, mister?"
+
+"Get what?"
+
+"The kind of feeling that makes you think something is going to happen?"
+She drew the back of her free hand across her mouth. "Ain't it making
+you afraid?"
+
+Somehow the woman's words aroused within him a dread that was a
+prophecy. He made one attempt at holding to his acquired Americanism.
+The Americanism which was slowly receding before the stifled waves of
+Oriental foreboding, like a weak, protesting thing that fears a hidden
+strength. For he knew the foreboding was fate; and he knew too that when
+fulfilled, it would be met with all the stoicism of a Chinaman.
+
+"You feel aflaid?"
+
+The fingers about his wrist clattered bonily together; then clinched
+themselves anew.
+
+"Yes," she whispered. "I guess that's it. I guess I'm afraid."
+
+For a moment he thought of the lateness of the hour.
+
+"I'm velee solee," he said. "I'm solee, but I must be going."
+
+"You can't leave me;" she stuttered behind her shut teeth. "You ain't
+got the heart to leave me all alone on a night like this."
+
+"You can go to your home;" and he thought of the drunkard who had gone
+to his home. Surely the night sheltered strange creatures. "Les, you
+better go on to your home."
+
+She laughed.
+
+He had never thought of one of his little Chinese gods with their
+crooked faces laughing; but as he heard her he knew that their mirth
+would sound like that. Sound as though all the gladness had been killed;
+choked out of it, leaving only the harsh echoes that mocked and mocked.
+
+"Gee, mister--; I ain't got no place to go."
+
+"I'm velee solee."
+
+He said it again, not knowing what else to say.
+
+Something in his evident sincerity aroused her to protest.
+
+"Oh, I know you thinks it queer for me to be talking this way," she
+said. "I know you thinks it funny for me to say I'm afraid. And I ain't,
+excepting--" she added hastily, "on a night like this. It kinder makes
+everything alive; everything that's rotten bad. I ain't ashamed of the
+things I've done. I ain't scared of the dead things. It's the live ones
+I'm afraid of--; the dirty live things. They kinder come at you in the
+dark." For an instant her body trembled against his. "Then they
+goes past you all creepy-like. Creeping on their bellies--;
+sliding,--like--like--slime."
+
+"You don't know what you are saying," he interrupted.
+
+"I know," she insisted. "I know! Some night like this I'll be doing
+something awful;--and they'll be there." She pointed a shaking hand
+towards the shadows. "They'll be there, wriggling to me--quiet--!"
+
+"Imagination," he said, and he smiled. In the dark she could not have
+seen the smile, nor could she have known that the lightness of his tone
+covered a deep, malignant dread. "It is all imagination!"
+
+"It ain't!" She spoke sullenly. "I tell you, it's real. It's horrible
+real!"
+
+Her voice was frantic.
+
+"Maybe it is," he conceded, and then, as she made no answer, he asked:
+"You like to walk with me a little?"
+
+"Yes." Her head drooped as though she were utterly discouraged. "It
+wouldn't be so bad as sticking it out here--alone."
+
+He could not help but notice that she hesitated a bit before the word
+alone. Undoubtedly she could not get the thought of those things--those
+live things she so feared, out of her head. The things that waited for
+her in the shadows.
+
+They walked along the wet pavements together.
+
+An engine shrieked weirdly above them, like something neither bird nor
+beast; like something inhuman.
+
+Under a street lamp she glanced up at him curiously.
+
+He heard her gasp. He looked down at her. He saw her eyes widen in
+terror; he saw her pale, bare hands creep uncertain, stumbling to her
+neck, as if she were choking. He heard her voice rattling in her throat.
+
+"What is it?" He asked. "You are ill?"
+
+He put his hand on her shoulder. He could feel her shudder, as she
+writhed and twisted under his touch.
+
+"Let go of me." Her voice was hoarse. "Let go of me, I say!"
+
+For some unaccountable reason his fingers closed all the more tightly on
+her shrinking flesh.
+
+"Let me go;--you--damned--Chink!"
+
+She muttered the words under her breath.
+
+He heard her.
+
+He thought of the drunkard and he thought of her.
+
+Suddenly he felt quite furious; stilly, sinisterly furious.
+
+"I'm 'Melican."
+
+He said it stolidly. His narrow, black eyes were unwavering on her.
+
+She began to cry.
+
+"Let me go," she whimpered. "I ain't done nothing to you. I couldn't
+have got on to your being--a--Chink."
+
+"What diffelence does that make?" He asked. And then he reiterated with
+careful precision: "I tell you I'm a 'Melican."
+
+Her words came to him in a gurgle of terror.
+
+"I hate you. I hate all of your yellow faces--and them eyes! I hate them
+horrid, nasty--eyes!"
+
+He bent his head until his face almost touched hers. His strong, angry
+fingers held her firmly by either arm.
+
+"It is not pletty, this face?"
+
+She struggled, inane with fear. She fought, trying to free herself, to
+tear away from the vise-like grip of those awful hands; swaying like a
+tortured, trapped creature against his strength. She could feel the
+intensity, the calm scrutiny of his long, narrow eyes upon her.
+
+Suddenly something in his brain snapped.
+
+He pushed her roughly from him.
+
+He saw her fall to the pavement; he saw her head strike the curb.
+
+He stood there watching her as she lay, outlined by the light colored
+material of her dress against the wet blackness of the asphalt.
+
+"What diffelence does it make if I am a Chinaman?"
+
+He asked it as he bent over her. But she did not answer. The question
+went out into the heavy stillness, hanging there to be echoed
+deafeningly by a thousand silent tongues.
+
+Something in the sudden quiet of the way she lay filled him with a
+tranquil joy. He knelt beside her, He reached his hand over her heart.
+
+He got up slowly, deliberately.
+
+He moved silently away, going with that padded, sinuous motion, so
+distinctly Chinese.
+
+With cunning stealth he went back the way he had come, treading lightly;
+cautiously seeking the darkest shadows.
+
+He had gone some little distance when he heard the regular beat of
+hurrying footsteps following him.
+
+He stood stolidly, still, awaiting whatever might happen.
+
+Overhead he saw a cluster of heavy, black clouds sweeping across the
+sky, like eager, reaching hands against a somber background.
+
+It had begun to rain again. He could feel the raindrops trickling gently
+down his upturned face.
+
+He wondered, as the footsteps halted beside him, if he should have run.
+His mind, working rapidly, decided that any other man would have gotten
+away; any other man but not a Chinaman.
+
+A heavy hand fell across his shoulder.
+
+"I've got you, my boy!" A voice shouted in his ear. "I seen you kneeling
+there beside her. You'll be coming along with me!"
+
+He turned to face the voice.
+
+The wind that heralded the coming storm rustled through the street,
+carrying with it a litter of filthy castaway newspapers. Flurries of
+stinging sand-sharp dust swirled above the pavement. A low rumble of
+thunder bellowed overhead. Then the rain came down in sudden lashing
+fury.
+
+He had to raise his voice to make himself heard.
+
+"I'm velee glad," he said.
+
+The bull's eye was flashed into his placid, narrow eyes.
+
+He could see the policeman's face behind the light; see the surprise
+quivering on the red features.
+
+In the darkness above the racket of the storm, he heard the man's
+gasping mutter:
+
+"Yellow--by God!--Yellow!"
+
+
+
+
+CHINA-CHING[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Published originally in _The All Story Magazine_.]
+
+
+The racket was terrific. The yelping, the shrill prolonged whines, the
+quick incessant barking; and running in growling under-current, the
+throaty, infuriated snarling.
+
+The woman stood at the window gazing out into the gathering twilight.
+Before her eyes stretched the drab, flat fields; here and there a
+shadowy mass of trees reached their feathery tips that were etched in
+darkly against the graying skies. Directly before her, beyond the unkept
+waste that might at one time have been a garden, reared the high, wire
+walls of the kennels. She could just make out the dim, undefined forms
+of the dogs running to and fro within the narrow, confining space.
+
+The swift, persistent movement of them fascinated her. The ghostly
+shapes of them pattering sinuously and silently along the ground; the
+dull scratching thud of the claws and bodies that hurled themselves
+again and again into the strong wire netting. The impossibility of their
+escape throttled her. Their futile attempts at freedom caused a powerful
+nausea to creep over her. And there in the center of the run she could
+distinguish, chained to the dog-house,--a pale blur in the fading
+light,--the motionless yellow mass of the chow, China-Ching.
+
+The shrill, prolonged whines, the quick, incessant barking:--
+
+"Oh, my Gawd;" she muttered involuntarily. "Oh, my Gawd!"
+
+The man sitting in the middle of the room pulled his pipe out of his
+mouth.
+
+"What's that you say?"
+
+She stood at the window, her eyes fixed steadfastly on that one dumb dog
+among all those yelping, snarling other dogs.
+
+The man got up from his chair and came and stood beside her.
+Unconsciously she shrank away from his nearness.
+
+"Ain't you used to that by now;--ain't you?"
+
+She turned toward him;--all but her eyes. Her eyes were still riveted
+out there upon the motionless chow chained in the center of the run.
+
+"It ain't the noise; that,--that don't mean so much, James. It ain't the
+noise."
+
+"Then what's the matter,--huh?"
+
+She pointed a trembling forefinger at that yellow mass tied to the
+dog-house.
+
+"Him," she whispered. "He don't make no racket, James."
+
+The man peered over her shoulder.
+
+"The chow?"
+
+"Yes;" her voice was still. "China-Ching. He don't make no racket,
+James."
+
+"I'd like to hear him," the man blustered. "I'd just like to hear one
+peep out of him;--that's all."
+
+She saw his coarse, hairy hand go to his hip pocket. She smiled
+bitterly. She knew the confidence he felt when he touched the
+mother-of-pearl handle of his pistol.
+
+"You don't need that on him," she said. "He just sits there and don't
+never move. He don't hardly eat when you feeds him. He don't seem to
+have no heart left for nothing. He ain't like the terrier what had the
+distemper;--he ain't like the greyhound what had the hydrophobia,--so
+awful bad."
+
+"What d'you mean?" The man muttered angrily. "Ain't they had the
+hydrophobia;--ain't they had the distemper;--ain't they?"
+
+"You says they did, James."
+
+"Ain't I the one to know? If I ain't been born with dog-sense, would
+folks be giving me their muts to care for?"
+
+"You shot them pups, James."
+
+"And what if I did?" He stormed. "They was dangerous--they was a menace
+to the community,--so they was. And see, here,--you take it from me,
+there ain't nothing more dangerous as a dog when he gets took that there
+way. Why, I've heard tell of dogs what have torn men limb from limb."
+And then he added in afterthought: "Men that've been kind to 'em, too."
+
+Her laughter rang out shrilly, piercingly.
+
+"Aw, James," she giggled hysterically. "Aw, now, James--
+
+"What's that?" His hand was on her hand. "See here, you, ain't I kind to
+'em?"
+
+His touch sobered her quite suddenly.
+
+"Kind to 'em--?"
+
+She repeated his words vaguely as though not fully conscious of their
+actual meaning.
+
+The grip of his fingers tightened cruelly about her arm.
+
+"Ain't I--kind--to--'em?"
+
+"Oh, my Gawd," she whimpered. "Oh, my Gawd,--yes."
+
+He went back to the center of the room and lighted the lamp on the
+bare-boarded, pine-wood table. Its light flickered in a sickly, yellow
+glow over the straight-backed chairs, across the unpapered walls, and
+dribbled feebly upwards to where the heavy rafters of the ceiling were
+obliterated in a smothering thickness of shadows.
+
+"What're you standing there for? Pull down that blind! Come here, I
+say!"
+
+The faint, motionless form there beside the dog-house. The wooden,
+stiffened attitude of it. The great mass of the chow's rigid body that
+was gradually becoming absorbed into the gray shadow; that was slowly
+losing its faint outline in the saturating, blurring darkness.
+
+She did as she was told; hastily, nervously. And then she came and stood
+beside the table. Try as she would to prevent it her eyes kept on
+staring through the curtained window.
+
+Again she became conscious of the yelping, the prolonged whines, the
+quick, incessant barking; and running in growling under-current, the
+throaty, infuriated snarling.
+
+"I can't stand it no more!" she shrieked. "It's too much,--so it is! I
+just--can't--stand--it--no--more!"
+
+He looked up at her, startled.
+
+"What under the canopy's eating you?"
+
+She sank into a chair. The palms of her hands pounded against each
+other. In the lamplight her face showed itself pale and drawn with the
+eyes pulling out of its deadened setness in live despair.
+
+"You got to do something for me, James." Her voice shook. "You simply
+got to do it. I ain't never asked nothing from you before this. I've
+been a good wife to you. I've stood for a lot,--Gawd knows I have. I
+ain't never made no complaint. You got to do this for me, James."
+
+"Got to,--huh? Them's high words, my lady. There ain't nothing what I
+got to do. You ain't gone plum crazy, have you?"
+
+"Crazy?" She muttered. "No, I ain't gone crazy;--not yet, I ain't. Only
+you got to do this for me, James."
+
+"What're you driving at,--huh?"
+
+She rose to her feet then. When she spoke her tone was quite controlled.
+
+"You got to let that chow-dog go."
+
+The man sprang erect.
+
+"What d'you mean?"
+
+"You--got--to--let--China-Ching--go! You got to let him get away. You
+got to make that China-Ching--free."
+
+He laughed. The laugh had no sound of mirth in it. The laugh was long
+and loud; but its loudness could not cover the insidious evil of it.
+
+"That's a good one," he shouted. "Let a dog go of his own sweet will
+when some day I'll be getting my price for him. That's the funniest
+thing I've heard in many a long day. Land's sakes! You're just full of
+wit,--ain't you?"
+
+"I ain't," she retorted sullenly.
+
+But he paid no attention to her.
+
+"I never would have thought it--that's a cinch! Say,--it do seem I'm
+learning all the time."
+
+Her teeth came together with a sharp snap.
+
+"Better be careful you don't learn too much,--about me."
+
+She whispered it beneath her breath.
+
+"Muttering,--huh?" He leaned toward her over the table. "I don't like no
+muttering. I ain't the one to allow no muttering around me. Speak
+out--if you got something to say;--and if you ain't,--why, then,--shut
+up!"
+
+The lamp threw its full light up into his face. Not one muscle, not one
+wrinkle, but stood out harshly above its crude flame. She drew back a
+step.
+
+"All right." She had been goaded into it. "I'll speak up--All right.
+That's what you wants, ain't it? I've stood for enough. I reckon I've
+stood for too much. You knows that. But you ain't thought that maybe I
+knows it,--have you? That makes a difference,--don't it? You knows the
+way you treats me,--only you ain't thought that I ever gives it no
+thought;--and I ain't,--no,--I ain't; not till you brought that there
+China-Ching here. Not--till--you--brought--China-Ching."
+
+"What's that mut got to do between you and me?"
+
+His eyes refused to meet her eyes that were ablaze with a strange,
+inspired light.
+
+"Everything. From the day I seen you bring him here--; from the day I
+seen you beating him because he snapped at you--; from the day you
+chained him up to that dog-house to break his spirit--; from that day it
+come over me what you done to me."
+
+"You're crazy;--plum crazy!"
+
+"Oh, no, I ain't;" she went on in suppressed fury. "I've slaved for you
+when you was sober, and when you was drunk. I've stood your kicks and
+I've stood your dirty talk, and I've stood for the way you treats them
+there dogs. And d'you know why I've stood for it,--say, do you?"
+
+His hands clenched at his sides. Their knuckles showed white against the
+soiled dark skin.
+
+"No--and what's more--"
+
+She interrupted him.
+
+"I've stood for it all because I knowed that any time--Any time, mind
+you,--I could clear out. Whenever I likes I can get up and,--go!"
+
+"You wouldn't dare;--you ain't got the nerve!"
+
+"I have--; I have,--too."
+
+"Where'd you go,--huh?"
+
+"I'd get away from you,--all right."
+
+"What'd you do?"
+
+"That ain't of no account to you!"
+
+He watched her for a second between half-closed lids. A cunning smile
+spread itself over his thick lips. He walked to the door and threw it
+wide open.
+
+"You can go--if you likes;--you can go--now!"
+
+Her hand went to her heart. The scant color in her face left it. She
+took one hesitating step forward and then she stood quite still.
+
+"If you lets the dog go--I stays."
+
+Her words sounded muffled.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"The dog's my dog. I ain't able to see where he comes in on all this."
+
+"You can't see nothing;--you don't want to see! It's knowing too well
+what that pup's up against that makes me want you to let him go. It's
+that I don't want to have the heart took out of him;--the way you took
+the heart out of me,--that makes me want to have him set free."
+
+He gave a noiseless chuckle.
+
+"So I took the heart out of you,--did I?"
+
+She glared at him savagely.
+
+"You knows you did!"
+
+For a moment they were silent.
+
+"Well?" He asked.
+
+She saw him wave a hand toward the door.
+
+"Aw, James, you can't be so cruel bad--You can't. The other dogs don't
+mind it--; they makes a noise and they tears around. And then they eats
+and drinks and late at nights they lies down and sleeps;--if there ain't
+no moon. But that China-Ching he ain't like them. Maybe--he is
+savage;--maybe you're right to be afraid of him."
+
+His whole figure was suddenly taut. His head shrank into his shoulders.
+
+"There ain't nothing I'm afraid of;--get that into your head--I ain't
+afraid of nothing--And if you wants to go,--why, all I got to say is,
+you can--git!"
+
+A stillness came between them, broken only by the sounds from the
+kennels. The yelping, the shrill prolonged whines, the quick, incessant
+barking; and running in growling under-current, the throaty, infuriated
+snarling.
+
+He went to the table and took the lamp up in one hand. He went over to
+the door and closed it with a loud bang. Then he started toward the
+stairs.
+
+"If you ain't able to bring yourself to leave me," the words came to her
+over his shoulder, "you can come on up to bed."
+
+Mechanically she followed him up the steps. Mechanically she went
+through the process of undressing and washing. Long after he had fallen
+asleep she lay there wide awake watching the moonlight trickle in
+quivering, golden spots across the floor; lay wide awake listening to
+the eerie baying of the dogs.
+
+She had had her chance of freedom and at the last moment her courage had
+failed her. What she had told him had been the absolute truth. She had
+never realized what had happened to her, what a stifled, smothered thing
+she had become, until that day when he had brought the chow-dog home to
+the kennels.
+
+She had married James when she was very young. Their fathers' farms
+adjoined. It had been the expected thing and she had gone through with
+it quite as a matter of course. In those days he had been somewhat
+ambitious. The country-folk around admitted grudgingly that James
+Conover was a born farmer. Then the old people, both their fathers and
+his mother, had grown a bit older, and one by one they had died. There
+had been nothing violent in their deaths. Silent, narrow-minded, like
+most country persons they had grown a trifle more silent, a trifle more
+bigoted, and then they were dead. It had seemed to her that way at any
+rate. She had become conscious all of a sudden that she was alone with
+James. Strange that the consciousness should have come to her after she
+had been alone with him for three years; and then that she should only
+realize she was alone in the world with him the first time he came home
+drunk. After that he took to drinking more and more, and finally he gave
+up farming. It had been quite by accident that he took to boarding dogs;
+now and then buying one for a quick turn. He liked the job. As far as
+she could see it gave him more time to spend in the village saloon.
+
+One thing she had never been able to understand. In her heart she was
+certain that James was terrified of the animals. She had seen him shoot
+a dog at the slightest provocation. But until she had seen the chow she
+had never bothered with the beasts. She had cooked their meals but she
+had not been allowed to feed them. She had watched them from the outside
+of the kennels but she had never gone in to them. She had tolerated
+their racket because she had never fully understood what lay in back of
+it all. And then the chow came.
+
+James had brought China-Ching home in the old runabout; brought him to
+the kennels tied down in a great basket. She had not paid much attention
+to either man or dog. The first sight that she had of the chow had been
+because of James. She had heard his cursing and the crack of his huge
+whip. She had gone out on the porch then and had seen the man beating
+the dog with all his strength; the man swearing loudly and furiously and
+the chow silent. She had never gotten over that spectacle. It was the
+first time she had ever seen a dog maintain silence.
+
+And then day after day she had watched China-Ching, chained there and so
+strangely silent. Among all those yapping, yipping dogs he alone had
+remained quiet. And the other animals had paid scant attention to him
+after the first short while. Even in their wild racing about the
+enclosure they had given him a wide berth. There was something
+magnificent, something almost majestic in the chow's aloofness. If it
+had not been for the dog's eyes she would have thought him dumb;--a
+fool. But the eyes haunted her. Great liquid brown eyes, that met hers
+with unutterable sadness; eyes that clutched and held on to her with the
+depths of their sorrow.
+
+She made up her mind after the first month that she must free the dog;
+that she must get him out of the kennels somehow or other. She had never
+thought of a direct appeal to James. If it had not been for the way he
+had goaded her this evening she would never have spoken as she did. Only
+she had always known that it would not be in her power to let the dog
+escape from the kennels without his finding who had done it; without
+bearing the brunt of his inevitable rage.
+
+And after the first month she began almost unconsciously to associate
+herself with the chow, to put herself in his place. As she commenced to
+understand what his desires for freedom must be so she first realized
+that those same desires were hers. Only, as she phrased it to herself,
+she could stand it a lot better than the chow. Dogs could not reason.
+She could go on existing this way till the end of her days; but she felt
+that if China-Ching could not be freed that he would die. She could not
+bear the thought of that. Whatever happened to the dog would happen to
+that part of her which had come into being when the dog had come.
+
+The moonlight trickled further and further into the room. The stream of
+it spilled itself wider and wider along the shadow-specked floor.
+
+She could hear the man's deep breathing, now and then punctuated by a
+guttural snore. The eerie baying of the dogs; and out there the one
+silent dog chained to the dog-house.
+
+Not one moment longer could she endure it.
+
+Very stealthily she got up and slipped on her skirt. Shoeless and
+stockingless she crept out into the hall and down the stairs. Unbolting
+the front door, she paused an instant to hear if she had been detected.
+With strained ears she listened for those harsh, long-drawn snores. But
+the house was very still. She could not hear his breathing from where
+she was. If only he would snore. She waited. The sound came to her at
+last. She hurried out on to the porch.
+
+The dampness of the summer night was all about her. Overhead the pale
+flecks of innumerable stars, and the far, cold light of the waning moon.
+From somewheres in the distance came the monotonous droning of locusts.
+Against the dark clump of bushes darted the quick, illusive glimmer of a
+will-o'-the-wisp.
+
+She shivered as her feet struck the chill, wet grass. And then very
+slowly she went toward the kennels.
+
+Her eyes took no note of the dogs that lay on the ground; of the little
+fox-terrier sniffing here and there along the wall for rats; of the big
+police-dog, and the massive English bull, reared on their haunches,
+their muzzles lifted to the moon. She only saw, chained to the
+dog-house,--a pale blur in the haunting, whitened light,--the silent,
+yellow mass of the chow,--China-Ching. She knew that the great, liquid
+brown eyes were fixed upon her; she could feel them drawing her on. She
+went toward him.
+
+Very silently she went. And as she went she mumbled.
+
+"If they start a rumpus,--the same racket,--maybe,--if he wakes he won't
+think nothing of it;--that is, if he ain't enough awake to know I ain't
+there besides him. Maybe though, he won't wake;--maybe they won't make
+no noise;--maybe he won't--please, Gawd--! only to get China-Ching,--so
+that he can feel free--please, Gawd!--so's China-Ching don't have to
+stay--so that I--please Gawd!--so's I can set something--free."
+
+She suddenly became afraid to approach too silently. Afraid of the
+deafening uproar of a dog's warning. Already the police-dog had stopped
+his regular baying; already the little fox-terrier sniffed the air
+through the wire netting, sensing some one coming. If only she had
+thought to get them some bones; if only she had a piece of meat; a
+dog-biscuit,--anything to throw to them to keep them quiet. But she had
+not had time to think of that.
+
+She began to whistle softly, and then a bit louder as she realized that
+she had whistled the call of the whip-poor-will. The police-dog got to
+his feet. She could hear the sinister rumbling of his throaty snarling.
+She saw the bull-dog waddling clumsily after him. They stood there,
+their coats bristling, their ears erect, their muzzles poked into the
+wire netting. And then a quick bark from quite the other side of the
+kennels.
+
+She felt that numberless small eyes were peering out at her with
+betraying cunning. It seemed to her that innumerable dogs were rising
+from the ground; were rushing to the walls; were tearing out of their
+separate kennels.
+
+She called then; called very low, in the hope that they might know her
+voice.
+
+"China-Ching;--oh, China-Ching."
+
+She was face to face with it now. All through the day she managed
+somehow to bear with it. Hideous as it was, deafening so that she could
+not hear, hated so that it made her physically ill. And now in the dead
+of night it was let loose; with the unlimited stillness of the night
+vibrating in grotesque, yapping echo, with the cold light of the moon
+spotting uncanny over the kennels, she had it. The yelping, the shrill,
+prolonged whines, the quick incessant barking; and running in growling
+under-current, the throaty, infuriated snarling.
+
+She knew then that it was quite beyond hope that James should not hear
+them. She had to hurry. She began to run; and all the while she called
+in the same low voice:
+
+"China-Ching;--I'm coming to you. Oh China-Ching--"
+
+She pulled back the stiff, iron bolts. It took all her strength to do
+that. She opened the gate a bit, and slipped in, pushing it to, behind
+her.
+
+And then she was among them. Their noise increased in volume,--pitched
+in a shriller note. The sudden rush of them threw her off her feet. Some
+of them leaped on her. She felt a sharp, stinging nip in her wrist. In a
+second she was up again.
+
+"Down!" She commanded. "Down!"
+
+She went toward the chow, pushing the other dogs out of her way with
+both hands; stumbling, stepping over them as they crowded about her
+feet.
+
+"Down!" She murmured breathless.
+
+It was not until she got well within a couple of strides of the chow
+that the other dogs dropped away from her. It was the same thing that
+she had witnessed a hundred times from her window. The animals had
+always given China-Ching a wide berth; had always respected his
+magnificent, majestic aloofness. And as she reached him she fell to her
+knees.
+
+"China-Ching;" she whispered brokenly. "China-Ching!"
+
+Her arms went around the dog's neck. Her hands stroked the thick ruff at
+his throat. She felt a cold nose on her cheek. A slow, deep sniffing; a
+second later two heavy paws were on her shoulder, and a warm, moist
+tongue curled again and again about her ear.
+
+In the moonlight she looked into his eyes. The great, liquid brown eyes
+met hers with all their unutterable sadness.
+
+"D'you want to go, China-Ching?" She murmured; "d'you want to go and be
+free?"
+
+Her fingers were working swiftly at his collar. As it clanked to the
+ground she felt him stiffen rigidly beneath her touch. She saw his ears
+go back flat against his head; she saw his upper lip pulled so that the
+long, sharp teeth showed glisteningly in the huckle-berry, blue gums.
+She followed the set stare of his eyes, and what she saw sent a shiver
+down her spine.
+
+Coming across the waste that had once been a garden, running stumblingly
+in the full path of the moonlight, came James. And the other dogs had
+seen him. She realized that when she heard the growling, the snarling,
+the low, infuriated snorts.
+
+She rushed back to the gate.
+
+James saw her then.
+
+"Get away," he shouted. "Get away from there!"
+
+She threw the gate open and stood leaning against it to keep it wide.
+
+"China-Ching," she called; "come on,--China-Ching!"
+
+But it was the other dogs that tore past her. First one, then another,
+then two together, and then the whole wild, panting pack of them.
+
+"For Gawd's sake;" the man shrieked. "Get--get--" The words were lost in
+his breathless choking.
+
+The chow-dog was the last to go. For a second he stood beside her. She
+bent over him. She was afraid to touch him; afraid that at that moment
+her hands might involuntarily hold him.
+
+"Go on, China-Ching;" she urged frantically; "go on!"
+
+"Hey, you--!" The man stormed at the dogs. "Here--, here--!" He
+whistled; "here, boy,--here, old fellow,--come on;--"
+
+He suddenly stood still. He tried to make his whistling persuasive. He
+was out of breath. When he saw that they would not come to him he ran
+after them. They scattered pellmell before him. She saw them
+disappearing in every direction. Some of them slinking away with their
+tails between their legs; some of them crawling into the bushes on their
+bellies; some of them rushing head-long, racing madly into the night.
+Only the yellow mass of the chow-dog went in even padded patter out
+toward the road.
+
+She waited there for James. She could not think. She only waited.
+
+And at last he came back.
+
+"You--" His voice was low; "you--!"
+
+The words were smothered in his anger.
+
+She smiled then. She thought that she still could hear the even, padded
+patter of the dog jogging to his freedom.
+
+"So you turned on me;--you--! D'you know what's going to happen to
+you;--d'you dare to think?"
+
+Her voice was filled with a strange calm.
+
+"I don't care, James;--I don't care--none. I set China-Ching loose."
+
+His face leered at her evilly in the moonlight.
+
+"You ain't got no excuses;--you don't even make no excuses to me;--huh?"
+
+"No, James;--no!"
+
+Her tone was exultant.
+
+The even, padded patter was still in her ears. It seemed so near. She
+saw the man's raised fist. The coarse, bulging hammer of it. She felt
+that something was behind her. She turned.
+
+The chow stood there--His ears back; his coat bristling, the hairs
+standing on end in tremendous bushiness; his fangs laid bare. There he
+crouched, drawn together, ready to spring.
+
+The man took a step toward her. Out of the corner of her eyes she could
+see the huge taut fist.
+
+"I wouldn't do that, James;" she said quietly. "I just--wouldn't!"
+
+"You'll live to rue the day." The words came hoarsely, gutturally. "I'm
+going to beat you, woman. I'm going to beat you,--damn good!"
+
+"You ain't;" she said. "Look, James!"
+
+She pointed to the chow.
+
+"Call him off;" the man shrieked. "D'you want him to kill me?"
+
+She saw him trembling with fear, paralyzed with terror so that his
+clenched hand still reached above his head,--shaking. She thought then
+of the pistol he always carried with him. For the second time she
+smiled. She saw him try to take a step backwards. His knees almost gave
+way under him. The chow wormed a bit nearer.
+
+"Call him off;--take him away. Damn you, speak to him--! For Gawd's
+sake,--do something;--" he whined.
+
+She looked at the man, cowed; abjectly afraid. She had nothing more to
+fear from him. He was beaten. Her hand went out until it rested on the
+dog's head.
+
+"It's all right, China-Ching. It's all right,--now." She felt the chow's
+great eyes fixed on her face; she felt that he was waiting. "You can go
+on, James;--go on into the house!"
+
+"What--what d'you mean?"
+
+He stuttered.
+
+"I'm going," she said. "Me, and China-Ching. I told you I'd go when I
+was ready;--but I wasn't going alone. That's what you ain't understood,
+James. Now we're both going. And you better be meandering up to your
+house, or maybe China-Ching he'll be getting tired of waiting."
+
+Slowly the man turned; ponderously, his figure huddled together, he
+started back stumbling along in the full path of the moonlight.
+
+She thought she saw his fingers fumbling to his hip-pocket.
+
+"Stop!" She called. "None of that, James. This here's one time when that
+there gun don't work."
+
+"I ain't got no gun." The mumbled words came back to her indistinctly.
+"D'you think if I'd have had--"
+
+"Stand where you are. And don't you make no move from there. We'll be on
+our way,--now."
+
+He stood still.
+
+"Come on, China-Ching."
+
+She started toward the road, the dog at her heels. Once as she went she
+turned to look at the emptied, quiet kennels, at the moonlight drenched
+waste that had once been a garden; at the huddled figure of the man
+standing there so silently.
+
+"Good-by, James," she called.
+
+Out in the road she paused to look up and down the long, white stretch
+of it. The chow stopped at her side. His great, liquid brown eyes were
+raised to hers. She could feel his impatience to be off. Suddenly he
+started.
+
+Her feet followed those padded, pattering feet.
+
+"Aw, China-Ching," she whispered, "aw, China-Ching--"
+
+
+
+
+THE WOOD OF LIVING TREES
+
+
+_And I do hereby swear and take unto myself right solemnly and in most
+sacred oath before the Lord God to prove myself innocent of this most
+awful and hideous crime, for the which, in the morning, I do swing by
+the neck. I, Cedric of Hampden, do swear to show with the righteous help
+of most high God, that it is not I who beareth the blood guilt of the
+murther of the Lady Beatrix._
+
+_There is in this world a certain devilish influence that worketh most
+evilly against the high Heavens and the good in man, and the which doeth
+foully with the flesh of man and bringeth the soul of him unto the
+stinking depths of hell. I, Cedric of Hampden, having scant knowledge of
+the meanings of witchcraft, or of magic, either black or white, have
+many times and oft felt the spell which lyeth so infernally o'er the
+Wood of Living Trees. I, who loveth the Lady Beatrix, who did meet her
+death the while she wandered within the confines of the Wood of Living
+Trees, searching therein for the Crucifix which she did lose from off
+her neck, do accuse no one of the killing of her whom I loved. Yet unto
+myself I do confess the knowledge of this evil thing, the which I have
+assured myself hath the power at all times to become incarnate._
+
+_This will I prove. At some unknown time will I show that in this world
+a certain devilish influence worketh most evilly against the high
+Heavens and the good in man. I do confess the knowing of this to be
+true, and many times and oft have I convinced myself that this Satanic
+thing hath the power to become incarnate._
+
+_In the morning I hang. God, the Father, Christ, the Son, come unto me
+in purgatory that I may fulfill my sacred oath and that the soul of her
+I love may find peace within the seven golden gates of Heaven._
+
+At first there was not one of them who noticed it. Strange that people
+who are forever entertaining are so very apt to disregard the
+congeniality of their guests. Perhaps they become calloused; probably
+they grow tired of a ceaseless picking and choosing.
+
+After a while they caught on to it. It was one of those things that
+could not be avoided. Gregory Manners never was the sort of chap to
+conceal his feelings, and very evidently he had most decided ones in
+regard to the Russian, Stephanof Andreyvitch.
+
+He was much in vogue, was Andreyvitch. It was considered rather a stunt
+to get him to come to one of your dinners. He was tremendously in
+demand. Not that Andreyvitch had ever done anything to make himself
+famous. It was just the personality of the man. Women would tell you
+that he was fascinating, different. Of course there were some of them,
+the stupid, fastidious ones, who took offense at his looks. No one
+could ever say they were in any way prepossessing. He was fairly well
+built, extremely sinewy. His arms were noticeably long and he had an odd
+fashion of always walking on the balls of his feet. Add to that a rather
+narrow face, a heavy nose, deep-set eyes, a bit too close together, and
+a shock of reddish-brown hair, which grew over his head and face in
+great abundance. Most men would not pretend to understand him. He was at
+all times courteous. Perhaps even too suavely polite for the Anglo-Saxon
+temperament. He aired his views with a wonderful assurance; views that
+had to do chiefly with æstheticism and a violent disregard of all
+conventional thought. When Andreyvitch spoke, one had the feeling that
+he feared to express himself too well; that after all his wicked
+disbelief in the things in which most men placed their entire faith was
+something actually a part of him; something which might even cause the
+amazing heathenism of his talk to be somewhat subdued. And when
+Stephanof Andreyvitch spoke, one could not help but notice his teeth.
+Yellow, horridly decayed things they were, with the two eye-teeth on
+either side surprisingly pointed, like fangs.
+
+Of course, in his way Gregory Manners was a bit of a lion. It was that
+which undoubtedly made them attribute his dislike of the Russian to
+jealousy. At least at first. Afterwards they found plenty of other
+reasons. Naturally one of them was Kathleen. But that came much later
+on.
+
+He had traveled all over the world, had Manners, and he wrote
+charmingly vague bits that one read and then forgot. He took himself
+very seriously. He was one of those men who believe firmly and basically
+that they are sent into this world with a mission to perform. One could
+not actually tell whether Manners really thought his writing to be his
+life work. His best friends maintained that he had not as yet found
+himself. But no one bothered to ask him the question. His work was good;
+he was a distinctly decent sort of chap, utterly British, and he was
+above all else exceedingly interesting. For the most part, people were
+really fond of Manners, and he fond of them.
+
+The first time Andreyvitch and Manners were introduced, Manners had the
+feeling that they had met at some time before. He even asked the Russian
+if it had not been in Moscow. When Andreyvitch told him that he had
+never in his whole life seen him, and that he positively regretted not
+having done so, Manners' attitude underwent a sudden and unexpected
+change. He became silent, almost morose. He kept away from Andreyvitch
+all evening, and yet he stayed near enough to him to watch his every
+move.
+
+After that night Manners decided he hated Andreyvitch; that he knew the
+man was a liar, an impostor. Not at the time that he was in any way
+jealous of the Russian; still there was a strange familiar feeling there
+that he had felt at some other time, and in connection with the same
+man. He could have sworn he had known him before. It was the only way
+then in which he could explain the thing to himself with any degree of
+coherence.
+
+It was never difficult to get Gregory Manners to speak of the first
+evening he met Andreyvitch. It was almost as if he were tremendously
+puzzled, as if he thought speaking of it, even to a casual acquaintance,
+might clear things up to himself. He never varied the thing. At first,
+at any rate. Later on he became strangely, uncannily secretive about it
+all. That must have been when he began to suspect there was a great deal
+more to it than had appeared upon the surface.
+
+"D'you know?" His words always came slowly. "Deuce take it! I thought I
+was going to like the fellow. I'd heard so much about him, too. Why, old
+chap, I was anxious; positively keen, to know him. And then--Why, when I
+stood face to face with him, I couldn't think of anything but that I had
+known him, or did know him, or something. First glance and I saw he was
+one of those poseurs. One of those rummy fellows who affect poses
+because they're always consciously trying to imitate the people about
+them. That's it, you know. They can't be themselves because of some
+queer kink they funk expressing. So they fake other people and quite
+naturally they overdo it."
+
+He would usually get worked up about this time; and then he would go on
+a lot more quickly:
+
+"I've seen them the world over. There was one chap--but--well--I thought
+this--this fellow who calls himself Andreyvitch, was just going to be
+one of them--poseurs, you know. He looked harmless enough to be sure.
+Of course there were his eyes--and the way he walks--but then--I
+couldn't help feeling he wasn't quite--quite cricket. That came over me
+confoundedly strongly at the very first minute. And when he smiled--I
+say, man, d'you ever see such damnably wicked teeth?"
+
+And the man to whom he spoke always had to admit that he had never seen
+such teeth.
+
+Later on Manners never worked himself up as much.
+
+"That fellow who calls himself Andreyvitch--I've met him before. Don't
+know where; and at that I've a pretty fair head for names and places.
+But I know him. He may have looked differently, and it probably was in
+some of those out-of-the-way holes; but I know him. I don't say he was
+the Russian Andreyvitch when I knew him--but--Well, old chap, we'll
+see."
+
+They stopped asking Andreyvitch and Manners around together after a
+while. But that never kept Manners from speaking of the Russian.
+
+"Was Andreyvitch there?"
+
+"They don't ask us together, eh?"
+
+"No fear, old chap, of my insulting him; I couldn't, you know!"
+
+"Rather a filthy sort of beggar, that Russian; makes the gooseflesh come
+over me. Happened before. Deuce take the thing!--If I could only think
+when!"
+
+And then after Manners had dropped out of sight for a fortnight or
+more, he suddenly made his appearance at the club.
+
+They were all of them unspeakably shocked by his looks. He never carried
+much weight, but in those two weeks he had gotten down to little else
+than skin and bones. His color was ghastly. His cheekbones were
+appallingly prominent and his eyes looked as if they were sunken back
+into his skull.
+
+To all their questions he gave the same answer:
+
+"No, he wasn't ill. No, he hadn't been ill. There was nothing the matter
+with him. He'd felt a bit seedy and he'd run down to his place for a
+fortnight. It was good of them to bother. He was quite, quite all
+right."
+
+They saw he wanted to be left alone and they let him go over to the
+window and sit there, his great, loose frame huddled together in the
+leather arm chair.
+
+There could not have been more than three or four of them sitting near
+him. It was only those three or four who saw him stagger to his feet,
+swaying there dizzily for a second. Only those three or four who could
+distinguish the words spoken in that low, half strangled whisper.
+
+"That's it--I've got it now--Something rotten; always living--Always
+waiting the chance to do its filthy harm! The power to incarnate--in any
+form. The greater its loathsomeness, the greater that incarnating stuff!
+Probably at most times more beast than human--but it could take on human
+guise--that's it--that's--"
+
+And those three or four men saw him rush out of the reading-room, his
+head thrown well back, his eyes ablaze with a great light.
+
+And then Mrs. Broughton-Hollins gave the famous house-party. The
+house-party of which every member, although not fully understanding,
+tried to forget. The house-party which drove Gregory Manners and
+Kathleen Bennet out of England.
+
+Mrs. Broughton-Hollins was a charming little American widow, with untold
+wealth and a desire to do everything, everywhere, with every one. Of
+course she always managed to get a lot of nice people together, and of
+course she picked the very nicest ones for her house-party. Then because
+she had set her heart on having the Russian, Stephanof Andreyvitch, she
+naturally got him to come, and because she had Kathleen Bennet, she had
+to ask Gregory. Kathleen and Gregory were engaged to be married.
+
+She was a dear, was Kathleen. As pretty as a picture and delightfully
+simple-minded. Her father belonged to the clergy, and her family
+consisted of innumerable brothers and sisters. Gregory Manners, who had
+traveled the world over, fell quite completely in love with her. And
+she--She worshiped the ground he walked on.
+
+No one ever quite knew whether or not Manners heard that Andreyvitch was
+to be of the house-party. Perhaps he had; probably he had not. If
+Kathleen were to be there, that would have been all-sufficient, as far
+as Manners was concerned.
+
+By that time Manners had worked himself out of his frenzy of hatred
+against the Russian. They had been able to explain it to themselves by
+saying that he had talked himself into it. As a matter of fact, the
+whole thing was totally subconscious. Whenever he had become conscious
+the man was anywhere near him, he had begun to realize his hatred of
+him. But now it had gone infinitely further than just that.
+
+Manners had become uncannily quiet and uncannily knowing.
+
+They were all together in the hall when Manners, as usual, came in late.
+Mrs. Broughton-Hollins and an anæmic looking youth, who always lounged
+about in her wake; a man named Galvin, an oldish chap, who had seen
+service in India, and his pretty, young wife. The Dowager of Endon and
+her middle-aged son, the Duke, and Stephanof Andreyvitch, holding the
+center of the floor with little Kathleen Bennet sitting close to where
+he stood, her eyes fixed in awed surprise upon his face; her white
+fingers toying nervously with a small silver crucifix which hung about
+her neck.
+
+Whether or not Andreyvitch heard the man announce Gregory Manners,
+whether or not he saw him standing there in the doorway, whether or not
+he purposely went on with what he was then saying was a subject for
+debate the rest of the evening.
+
+"Faith?" Andreyvitch's low, insidious voice carried well. "But there's
+no such thing. Can't you realize that all this sickly sentimentality is
+nothing but dogmatic idiocy on your parts? Must you all drivel your
+catechism at every turn of the road? Must you close your eyes to filth,
+to vice, to everything you think outside of your smug English minds?
+Don't you know you're a part of it? That each one of you is part of the
+lowest, rottenest--"
+
+It was then that, unable to stand it a second longer, Gregory Manners
+came into the room.
+
+"I--I most sincerely hope I'm not interrupting, Andreyvitch--but--are
+you speaking of those things--again?"
+
+The quiet, polite tone was full of subtle significance. And although
+they could not have known what Manners actually meant, they all of them
+recognized an emphatic significance. And not one of those people present
+could overlook the peculiar stress which he had laid upon that
+slow-drawled "again."
+
+Andreyvitch turned sharply; his face for a second drawn into a hideous,
+ghastly grimace.
+
+"It is no interruption, Mr. Manners." He was trying hard to resume his
+habitual insouciance. "But what do you mean, eh? What is this?"
+
+He stood where he was, did Manners. His face was almost expressionless.
+
+"I think you know what I mean. But see here. I'll repeat
+it for you, if you like. Listen this time.
+Are--you--speaking--of--those--things--_again_?"
+
+The Russian was livid.
+
+And for an infinitesimal fraction of time it seemed to those watching
+him that he was cowed; terrifyingly cowed.
+
+"Your humor," he shrugged his shoulders, endeavoring to pass the thing
+off as flippantly as possible; "your humor is bizarre, Mr. Manners. I
+spoke but of that which we all know exists. Surely there is no harm in
+speaking of what we all recognize!"
+
+Manners' voice rang out clearly, in surprising sternness.
+
+"We all know what exists in this world. We know that greater than all
+else is faith. As long as you speak before those who know what real
+goodness is, who believe in it, there is no harm done! I hardly think
+this is the first time you've tried to impress evil on people--The
+reason for that's easily understood. But, thank God." His tone vibrated
+with earnestness. "Thank God, you can do nothing here!"
+
+The Russian turned on him. His usual suave manner had left him. His
+words were little else than an angry snarl.
+
+"You know me well--very well, indeed, my English friend. You who have
+met me--is it not once--perhaps, eh, twice?"
+
+Manners laughed. A laugh that had no sound of mirth in it.
+
+"I've met you again and again. And you know it! And there's something
+else we have to settle for--And you know that, too--Mr.--Mr.
+Andreyvitch!"
+
+And then Gregory Manners turned to Mrs. Broughton-Hollins.
+
+"Good afternoon," he said, quietly.
+
+A bit flustered, the hostess got hastily to her feet.
+
+"So good of you to come--You know every one, don't you, Gregory? You'll
+have your tea here with us?" And below her breath, she added: "You
+mustn't be too hard on Andreyvitch, Gregory. These Russians--well,
+they're all a bit primitive."
+
+He went from one to the other of the men. He kissed Kathleen's hand and
+told her how pretty she looked. He let Mrs. Broughton-Hollins pour his
+tea, and he ignored the Russian completely, the while he watched
+Kathleen with a strange foreboding, as her eyes flickered again and
+again over Andreyvitch's face.
+
+Things did not go very smoothly during the next two days. Naturally they
+all did the usual. Golf and riding, bridge and dancing in the evenings,
+and shooting. Andreyvitch was passionately fond of shooting. Manners had
+never so much as killed a sparrow in all his life.
+
+There was an undercurrent of uneasiness which permeated the entire
+household. It was not particularly because of Andreyvitch and Manners.
+It was something that not one of them could have explained if they had
+been put to it.
+
+The first day Mrs. Galvin told her husband that she would be glad when
+it was all over. And although unexpressed that was the general
+sentiment.
+
+Not that Andreyvitch or Manners made the others uncomfortable. After
+Gregory's first outburst, and now that they were under the same roof, it
+rather seemed that the Russian avoided Manners. And Manners--He watched
+carefully every movement, every little turn or twist of Andreyvitch's.
+At that time it was as if he were trying to substantiate some memory of
+his; to substantiate it deliberately and positively.
+
+And then because of Andreyvitch's unceasing attentions to Kathleen
+Bennet, word went round among the various members of the house-party
+that Gregory and Kathleen had quarreled.
+
+It was Sunday afternoon when Manners came upon Kathleen walking alone in
+the rose-garden.
+
+"I'll be jolly well glad," he told her, "when we get back to town
+again."
+
+"Aren't you having a good time, Greg?"
+
+"How can I?"
+
+"But you really needed the rest--You haven't been looking any too fit,
+you know. I thought this would be quite nice for you, Greg."
+
+He let loose at that.
+
+"If you must have it, Kathleen. I can't stand you and that bounder in
+the same house. That's the truth of it, old girl!"
+
+She avoided answering him directly.
+
+"It's such a ripping place here, Gregory. All--that is, all but those
+forests over there. The gardener told me his grandfather used to call
+them the Wood of Living Trees. He couldn't tell me why--only--Isn't it a
+strange name, Greg?"
+
+She wound up lamely. Evidently she had not said what she started out to
+say.
+
+"Not so awfully," he answered absent-mindedly. "It's probably an old,
+old name. They stick to places, you know."
+
+"But the woods," she went on slowly, "they're so dark and mysterious and
+all that sort of thing. I've wanted to explore them ever since I've been
+here--that is--that's not altogether true, Gregory. They frighten me a
+good bit--especially at night. I get into quite a funk about it--at
+night. I say, you wouldn't call me a coward, would you, Gregory?"
+
+"Of course not, Kathleen. What utter nonsense!"
+
+"But if I weren't afraid," she continued half to herself. "If I weren't
+really terrified, I'd go into the woods and show myself there's nothing
+to be frightened of, wouldn't I?"
+
+"You most certainly would not!" He said. "If you did, you'd be sure to
+lose your way, old girl."
+
+For a second they walked in silence.
+
+"D'you ever feel"--she turned to face him--"d'you ever feel you'd been
+in a place before--and yet you knew you'd never been there at all?"
+
+"No," he told her a bit too abruptly.
+
+"You needn't be so stuffy, Gregory," she murmured.
+
+"Oh, my dear!" He caught her and held her in his arms. "Can't you see
+that it's all like a horrible nightmare? Can't you see that I'm not able
+to know positively until it's actually happened--and then--oh, my
+God!--If it should be too late!"
+
+Her hands clenched rigidly on his shoulders.
+
+"Gregory," she whispered, "tell me, dear--you've been so strange of
+late--so terribly unlike yourself. Tell me, dear, what is it?"
+
+"Nothing, dearest girl--nothing."
+
+"Oh, but there is something!" She exclaimed passionately. "I've known it
+right along. I haven't asked because I thought you'd tell me. Why--one
+must be blind not to see how you've changed! You're--you're just a
+skeleton of yourself, Gregory." She paused for breath. "Can't you bring
+yourself to tell me--can't you, dear?"
+
+"If I only knew," he muttered, "if I only knew--for certain."
+
+Her eyes were lifted to his. The brows met in a puckering frown above
+them.
+
+"Gregory--that time you were away--for a whole fortnight--did anything
+happen, then--Gregory?"
+
+"Did anything happen?" She had surprised him into it. "Good God, did
+anything happen? Why, you don't know what it was like--You couldn't
+know! If they'd told me such a thing were possible--I shouldn't have
+believed it! I wanted to think--I wanted to work the thing out for
+myself--so I went down there for a rest. Rest--"
+
+He broke off then, but she stood very silently beside him and presently
+he went on again.
+
+"Have you ever felt you were going mad, Kathleen? Raving, tearing--mad?
+That's how I felt for two weeks. I thought it would never end. And all
+the time--why, I couldn't think! I couldn't do anything but feel that
+something was driving me to do something--something tremendous, as if
+the very force of my own life were making me do this thing that I had
+been sent into life to do. And, Kathleen," his voice sank to a hoarse
+whisper, "I couldn't understand--what--it--was!"
+
+She put her arm about his neck and drew his head down until her cheek
+rested on his.
+
+"I couldn't think a thought," he muttered. "I'd laid myself open to the
+thing. It just swept over me and through me. It saturated me with the
+impulse to do the thing I had come into the world to do! The one thing
+that stood out--was--the feeling that it would have to be done--soon."
+He paused for a moment. "And then one afternoon at the club--when I'd
+been back a day or two--something came to me-a sudden knowledge
+of--well, of rottenness--that--that might have to be done away with--as
+if that had something to do with it. Only I don't know,
+Kathleen--not--as yet."
+
+He looked at her then and he saw her eyes were filled with tears. He
+thought he had frightened her. He waited until he had himself well in
+hand before he spoke again.
+
+"Kathleen, always believe in the good of things, dearest girl. And,
+Kathleen," the words that came to him were almost as great a surprise to
+him as they were to her. "Never leave that crucifix off your neck.
+Promise me, dear?"
+
+"I promise."
+
+A little later they went in to tea.
+
+He got to bed that night with a great feeling of relief that in the
+morning they would all be back in town. He had thought something would
+happen. He had not known what, but the feeling had been there. He did
+not mind admitting it to himself now, and he did not mind acknowledging
+that he could not understand how the thing, whatever it was, had been
+avoided. Unformed, undefinable, it had been powerfully imminent. He fell
+asleep wondering what it was that he had expected.
+
+The full moon was streaming into the room when he awoke.
+
+He was on his feet in the middle of the floor in a flash.
+
+He could have sworn a cry had awakened him. A woman's voice calling for
+help--A woman's voice that had been strangely like Kathleen's.
+
+He went to the window and looked out. A cloud had drifted across the
+surface of the full moon. The whole garden lay blotched with shadows.
+And there beyond the garden was the forest. Black, sinister, mysterious.
+The dark depth of it sickened him. Kathleen had spoken only that
+afternoon of the forest. The Wood of Living Trees. She had told him it
+was called The Wood of Living Trees.
+
+In Heaven's name, where did the horrible, appalling significance of the
+Wood of Living Trees come from? What was this ghastly knowledge that
+sought for recognition in his own mind? What did the Wood of Living
+Trees mean to him?
+
+And then he heard the faint, far cry--
+
+His shoes--his trousers--hatless and coatless he was out in the garden.
+
+The cloud had passed from off the face of the moon. The garden lay in
+the bright moonlight; even the separate flowers were visible. Beyond was
+the sinister depth of that black forest.
+
+He felt it then. Sensed the insidious evil of something that emanated
+from the wood. Something which lurked there beneath the trees--something
+which clung to the tall trunks of them--something which rose and
+expanded among the leaves and reached out to him in evil menace. And at
+some time he had felt it all before.
+
+He ran quickly through the garden; over the rosebeds; crashing through
+the high boxwood hedge at the farther end; and then into the forest.
+
+His feet sank into the moss-covered slime. The trees were gigantic. He
+felt as if they were closing in on him. Their branches stretched out
+like living arms, hindering his progress. Thorns caught at his clothing,
+at his hands, his face. He had a vague, half-formed thought that the
+forest was advancing to achieve his destruction. His only clear
+determination was to protect his eyes.
+
+He knew then, he had always known, that the wood was some live, evil
+thing--the Wood of Living Trees; and that it hid the presence of
+something infinitely more foul.
+
+A queer odor assailed his nostrils. An odor that was not only of the
+damp, dank underbrush; an odor that, in its putridness, almost
+suffocated him.
+
+Breathless and half crazed with an unexplainable dread, he fought the
+forest, beating his way with his naked hands through the dense bushes.
+
+And then he heard a sound. The first sound he had heard since entering
+the forest. It was quite distinct. Vibrating loudly through the deadly
+stillness of the wood, came the steady patter of a four-footed thing.
+
+The next instant something leaped out of the darkness--something huge
+and strong that tried to catch at his neck. He fought for his life then.
+Fought this horrible thing that had been concealed by the forest. Fought
+with the darkness shutting down on him and that putrid odor smothering
+his breathing. Panting and blinded, he and the thing swayed to and fro,
+crashing against the tree-trunks, springing again and again at each
+other from the tangled underbrush. He never knew how long he struggled
+there in the blackness of the wood. It might have been hours; it might
+have been minutes. And then he had the beast by its great, hairy throat.
+The infuriated snarling grew weaker--
+
+He felt the body become rigid.
+
+Silence.
+
+He threw the thing from him.
+
+He staggered farther into the wood.
+
+He had not gone far when he came upon Kathleen.
+
+She was walking uncertainly toward him.
+
+The moonlight trickled clear and yellow through the branches now.
+
+He could see her lips moving--moving--He knew that she was praying. Her
+eyes looked out at him dazed and unseeing; and in her right hand that
+was reached before her he saw the little, silver crucifix.
+
+He did not dare speak to her. He was afraid. He sank back against the
+bushes and let her pass. The moonlight flooded the place with its
+haunting golden light. A strange feeling of relief came over him and
+with it a vast calm. And very quietly he followed her.
+
+She went a bit further. And she came to that spot where he had killed
+the thing. He heard her shriek. The wild cry that had awakened him.
+
+"The wolf--Gregory--the wolf!"
+
+He caught her in his arms as she fainted. Then he looked down.
+
+There at his feet lay the body of the Russian, Stephanof Andreyvitch.
+
+_This will I prove. At some unknown time will I show that in this world
+a certain devilish influence worketh most evilly against the high
+Heavens and the good in man. I do confess the knowing of this to be
+true, and many times and oft have I convinced myself that this Satanic
+thing hath the power to become incarnate._
+
+_In the morning I hang. God, the Father, Christ, the Son, come unto me
+in purgatory that I may fulfill my sacred oath and that the soul of her
+I love may find peace within the seven golden gates of Heaven._
+
+
+
+
+BEFORE THE DAWN
+
+
+He had gotten as far as the cross-roads. He could not go on. His feet
+ached; his eyes hurt with the incessant effort of trying to penetrate
+the obliterating dark. Where the three roads met he stopped.
+
+Above him the black, unlighted skies. Before him mile upon mile of deep,
+shadow-stained plain. Somewhere beyond the plain, at the foot of the
+hills, lay Charvel. Jans was waiting for him at Charvel. His orders to
+meet Jans were urgent; but now he could not go further. Jans would have
+to wait until morning, when, by the light of day, he could again find
+the way which he had so completely lost in the night.
+
+He sank down at the base of the crucifix. It loomed in a ghostly, gray
+mass against the muddy white of the wind-driven clouds. He pulled his
+coat collar up about his ears. His eyes were raised to where he thought
+to see the dimly defined Christ figure; but the pitch black gloom
+drenched opaquely over everything. There was something mysterious;
+something remote, about the cross. He imagined peasants kneeling before
+it in awed reverence, gabbling their prayers. The ignorance of such
+idolatry! Their prayers had not been proof against the enemies'
+bullets; and still they prayed. Tired as he was, he laughed aloud.
+
+"Why do you laugh?"
+
+He started to his feet. The voice, quiet and deep, came from directly
+behind him. He had not conceived the possibility of any human thing
+lurking so dangerously near. He peered blindly through the obscuring
+dark.
+
+"Who's there?" He questioned, his fingers involuntarily closing tautly
+about the butt of the revolver at his belt.
+
+"You, too, ask questions, eh?" The voice went on. "I can almost make out
+the shape of you. Do you see me?"
+
+It seemed to him then that by carefully tracing the sound of the voice
+he could dimly define the outline of a man's form lying close within the
+murked, smudging shadow of the crucifix.
+
+"Yes, I think now I almost see you." His tone was anything but assured.
+"What are you doing here?"
+
+"What is there to do but sleep?" The muttered words were half defiant.
+"Name of a dog! it was your laughter that woke me. Why did you laugh?"
+
+"If I weren't so tired, I might explain it to you." He hesitated a
+second, playing for time. "I was thinking--drawing up a mental picture
+of the ignorant peasant praying here before your back-rest."
+
+"My back-rest?" The man's voice was sleepily puzzled. "It's this cross
+you mean, eh? Well, never mind, my fine fellow. It has comfort--And
+that's something to be grateful for."
+
+"Not the sort of splintery comfort I'd choose."
+
+He wondered what sort of a man this was. He was used to judging men at
+sight. He cursed inwardly the unlighted night.
+
+"I'm not spending my time out here from choice--I can tell you that!
+This does for me well enough. I told you, didn't I, that I was asleep
+until your stupid laughing woke me? Sacré, why did you have to laugh?
+What's the joke, eh?"
+
+"Perhaps it's my natural humor; even when I'm dead tired." He grinned to
+himself. He had reached his decision. This sleepy fool sounded safe
+enough; besides the question itself was non-committal. He asked it:
+"Say, do you know the way to Charvel?"
+
+"You're miles from Charvel, my friend. You've surely lost all sense of
+direction."
+
+"Right. I don't know where I'm at. It's this damned blackness. Never saw
+such an infernal night. Started to walk from Chalet Corneille this
+afternoon. Didn't count on its getting dark so early. Then I lost my
+way. Been wandering about for hours. Probably in a circle. And now I'm
+half dead. God! I'm all in!"
+
+"It's almost morning. If you wait for the light, you'll not miss your
+road again; but I shouldn't counsel you to try to find it till dawn."
+
+He wondered if he dared to go to sleep with this man beside him. There
+were the papers carefully concealed in his right boot-leg; the papers
+Jans was waiting for. The man sounded plain-spoken and courteous
+enough, considering he had been aroused from supposedly sound slumber.
+He felt he wasn't a soldier. That is, he couldn't be one of Their men.
+He knew what Their men were like. Despite Their world reputation he had
+heard they were anything but courteous. But then one never knew. And
+anyway hadn't this man spoken to him in irreproachable French? Still,
+French was the language of the country and his own gift of languages was
+rather pronounced. Of course it tended to make him a bit suspicious; but
+logically he couldn't lay much stress on it. If only he had gotten
+beyond Their lines before night, everything would have been all right.
+As it was he must have been wandering round and round, covering the
+self-same ground and getting no nearer to Charvel, where Jans was
+waiting for him and the papers.
+
+Taking all in all into consideration, he decided it best not to let
+himself sleep; even if the staying awake was not an easy plan for a man
+utterly tired. He would have to do it somehow or other.
+
+"You're a native of these parts?" He asked, trying to keep any trace of
+speculation as to what the man really was out of his voice.
+
+"Sacré, but I thought you were about to sleep." The tone sounded as if
+it might be angry. "I assure you it will soon be morning."
+
+"Don't feel like sleeping. If you don't want to talk I can easily be
+quiet."
+
+"No--no! It makes no difference to me. I've had my forty winks. We'll
+talk, if you want. Not that I was ever one for doing much talking. I'm
+too little of a fool for that--still--Why don't you lean back here
+beside me against this beam?"
+
+He wriggled backwards and propped his drooping head stiffly against the
+wood of the cross.
+
+"I can't see you at all." He closed his eyes; it wasn't worth the
+throbbing strain of it to try to penetrate the obliterating, dripping
+darkness. He couldn't do it. "I'd like to see you."
+
+"I'd like to see you, my friend. But what good are wishes, eh? Do you
+say you live at Chalet Corneille?"
+
+On the instant he was alert.
+
+"Why do you ask?"
+
+"Curiosity, my friend. I know of some good people there by name of
+Fornier. Perhaps they might be friends of yours."
+
+"Don't think I know them." He paused to collect his wits. He had been
+startled by the man's suave question. He wondered if he was going to try
+to trap him. He thought he couldn't have done it more neatly himself.
+This job of stalling when he was almost too tired to think wasn't an
+easy thing to do. He called upon his imagination. "I'm an artist," he
+lied smoothly. "Sent over here to paint war scenes. I couldn't miss the
+chance of a ransacked village. Its picturesque value is tremendous. I've
+just finished my painting of Chalet Corneille."
+
+He waited tentatively. Surely if the man were just some simple, sleepy
+fool he'd say something now to give an inkling of what he was.
+
+"One week ago it was splashed in blood--Soldiers too, in their way, are
+artists," was all he said.
+
+"Then you're not a soldier?"
+
+"What made you think I was?"
+
+"I don't know what you are," he answered truthfully; and then quite
+frankly he came back with the man's own question. "Did you say _you_
+lived in Chalet Corneille?"
+
+"No--I asked if you knew people there by name of Fornier?"
+
+"Mighty few folk left there now." The picture of the razed town came
+before him. "Some old men waiting for the lost ones to come back to
+them; some young children and three or four sisters of charity. And then
+this morning I saw a woman--she wasn't much more than a girl--she had a
+face you couldn't forget. They told me about her at the inn, where I
+breakfasted."
+
+"Tell me," the man suggested grudgingly; "we're comfortable enough.
+Dawn's a long way off, and I suppose you want to talk."
+
+"There isn't much to tell. She left the town; was driven out of it with
+the others. Unlike them, she came back. God knows what she wanted to do
+that for! They told me of her goodness; and her beauty and her kindness.
+They dwelt on it at great length. Don't know as I blame them for harping
+on all that. And now it seems the spirit of the war has lit upon even
+her. She's changed--they say she's absolutely no good these days.
+Steals--lies--has done everything, as near as I can make out, excepting
+commit murder. But you ought to have seen her face. I'll wager that
+once seen, it would rise to haunt any one. I don't care who it'd be. It
+was beautiful--but--"
+
+He felt the man look up at the sky and the ghostly, gray mass of the
+crucifix stretching across it.
+
+"Strange creatures, these peasant people." The man's words were
+speculative. "Dumb kind of beasts--these soil-tillers--the best of them.
+Got nothing in their lives but work and religion. Don't know as I blame
+you for laughing when you looked up there. Sacré, but there is nothing
+real about religion to me!"
+
+"You're right." He stifled a yawn. "All that sort of thing went out of
+the world years ago. Thinking people aren't religious nowadays. It
+doesn't give them enough food for logical thought. It's all too palpably
+obvious and absurd for an intelligent person to bother with."
+
+"Rather a strange view for an artist, my friend, is it not?"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Thought you fellows traded on the beauty of faith, the talk of priests,
+and all that sort of thing."
+
+"Good Lord, no." His voice was energetic enough now. He was becoming
+interested. "All this belief in God and man and the innate good, and the
+rest of it, is tommyrot--That's what it is! And the soul within you--and
+the teachings of Christ"--he paused to regain his breath. "We'd know
+those things all right enough, if they were real. We'd see them,
+wouldn't we, if they were real? They'd happen--They couldn't help but
+happen--every day. But they don't, and so they're just talked about. I
+tell you if there were such things, we'd know it!"
+
+"Yes--yes--Surely we would see it--some time."
+
+"I haven't had more than the average University education," he went on.
+"But I've seen men and women, and I know that some of them are bad, and
+some of them are good, and that's all there is to it. If a man wants to
+be a liar--he'll lie. What's going to make him tell the truth, I'd like
+to know?"
+
+"It doesn't sound like artistic idealism, this talk of yours."
+
+"What do I care for any kind of idealism? There's too much of the
+poppycock--too many of those long-haired, long-winded donkeys playing
+the miniature creator for my taste. Lord, but I'd like to see an army of
+them in the field!"
+
+"You speak like a soldier, my friend."
+
+"I'm proud, sir, of being a soldier!"
+
+In a flash he realized what he had said. Beneath his breath he cursed
+furiously. Never before had he been guilty of such blatant stupidity. A
+sudden anger welled within him against this man who had caught him in
+his lie. Yet the man seemed harmless and indifferent enough. Perhaps he
+could still get out of it. What in the name of heaven had drawn the
+truth from him? He glanced up at the crucifix and his cursing abruptly
+stopped. He fell to wondering if he had better strike out again in the
+dark. He couldn't tell who the man was, and he had the papers to guard.
+Dawn wasn't a long way off. He wondered if he ought to chance it.
+
+"See here"--the man's voice caught in on his train of thought. "I know
+what's going through your head. You didn't want me to know that you were
+a soldier. I wasn't going to tell you, either. But I'm one, too. Only
+I'm not one of Them; not one of that blood-thirsty, blood-drunk
+canaille. You're not either. I knew the minute I heard you speak. And
+see here, I pretended at first that I didn't want to talk. But it wasn't
+true. I was starving for a word with one of my own kind. I told you I
+was comfortable, didn't I? I told you I was asleep? Well--I lied. I've
+been writhing here for hours. I'm in agony. My leg's shot off--that's
+what They did to me. I've been lying in this place for a day and a half.
+A peasant stopped to pray here to-night. He gave me some water; but he
+was afraid to touch me." A sob vibrated hoarsely in the man's throat.
+"My brother, I want your hand."
+
+Without hesitation he put out his hand, his fingers fumbling over the
+hard earth, until at last they found and grasped the man's hand.
+
+"Is there anything I can do?" He asked.
+
+"No, it's too dark. We must wait for the dawn. Then if you'll help me
+along the road a bit"--His voice trailed off into silence.
+
+So they sat there.
+
+"There's some one coming," he said.
+
+He felt the man try to struggle to a sitting position.
+
+"No use," he moaned. "I couldn't see through the dark, anyway. Sacré,
+didn't I try it before, when you came along?"
+
+Breathlessly they waited. There was nothing pleasant about this meeting
+people one couldn't see. It was just luck that the man beside him hadn't
+been one of Them. He wondered if the approaching person would stop
+before the crucifix or would go on.
+
+The footsteps came nearer and nearer. Louder and louder they grew until
+the sound of them echoed clatteringly through the silence of the night.
+Then sudden deafening stillness.
+
+As yet he could make out no form. He wondered what was happening. Slowly
+he realized that the gloom-merged mass of the crucifix had been seen and
+that the feet were coming toward it. A long half minute and then
+something soft and cold brushed his cheek. A quick, half-smothered cry.
+A woman had reached him with her outstretched hands. Her fingers had
+touched his face.
+
+"Mon Dieu!" She whispered. "Then I am not alone? Mon Dieu! Who are you?"
+
+He answered her.
+
+"I've lost my way. I'm waiting for the dawn."
+
+"You will not hurt me?" Her whimpered words betrayed her fear. "You will
+let me stay to wait the daylight with you?"
+
+"That makes three of us," he said, "waiting for morning."
+
+"Non--non; how is it then three?"
+
+"My brother here--you--and--I."
+
+"Mon Dieu! Such a darkness. Tell me, it is a sign of luck, is it not, to
+meet with two brothers?"
+
+"Well," his tone was apologetic. "We're not blood-brothers--just--" He
+hesitated.
+
+"Ah!" She breathed softly. "Is it, as the curé says, 'a Brotherhood of
+man'?"
+
+He could not explain to himself why he should so resent her comparing
+him to her priest.
+
+"It is a brotherhood of understanding," he said. "It is because we are
+friends."
+
+"Friends?" She questioned.
+
+"Of course," he stated emphatically. And at the same time he wondered at
+his own vehemence. Why should he call this man, whom he could not even
+see, his friend? "Surely you do not think that I could sit here in the
+dark, holding my enemy by the hand?"
+
+"But no," she muttered as though to herself. "No hands are given in this
+time of war. No hands but the hands of hate."
+
+For the first time the man spoke.
+
+"Hate has made men of us. Sacré, but is there anything greater than
+hate?"
+
+"Mon Dieu! It is all so cruel--this hate that has crippled our men. Look
+you, you two brothers--I would avenge them as you avenge them, but
+voilà--there is so little--so pitifully little that I can do!"
+
+"Will you sit beside me?" The man asked gently. "I'd move, if I could,
+but They've shot off my leg, and moving isn't easy."
+
+"The barbarians have caught you too?" She sank to her knees beside
+them. "How I loathe Them! Ah, how I detest Them! They burned my
+home--They drove me out of Chalet Corneille--my father and my mother and
+I. We fled by the light of our flaming farm-houses. I thought that bad,
+but it wasn't the worst. That came when They took me away with them.
+What I have been through! It is as if I had suffered and suffered; and
+now there is nothing left me to feel but hatred. And I've been back
+there, thinking my people might come for me. Mais, they never came, and
+so I must go on. I've an aunt in Charvel. There's just a chance--But
+even if I do find a home, I'll still hate those soldiers. I'd kill Them
+if I could. I pray to Christ that some day I may kill to avenge."
+
+"Is that what you're here for?"
+
+"I'm here to await the dawn."
+
+"Madame is religious?"
+
+"The sisters and the curé were my only teachers."
+
+"And now before the crucifix, Madame prays Christ for the power to
+kill?"
+
+"Non--non," her voice rose shrilly. "There is no Christ here on this
+cross. The canaille pulled him down and dragged him away in the dirt
+when They passed. There were peasants who begged Them to leave the
+figure, but They left only the cross--and once--three days after They
+had defiled it--I saw a spy crucified there. I helped cut him down. Now
+it's empty!"
+
+"Sacré, it is like Them," the man said. "I'd wondered why the cross was
+bare. I'm not one of your believers, but I can see how it would hurt a
+good woman like you."
+
+"A good woman?" She questioned vaguely, as if in her innocence all were
+good. "Mon Dieu, I only know that it hurt."
+
+He looked up at the crucifix. The sky was slowly, very slowly,
+lightening.
+
+"It will soon be day," he said.
+
+They were silent. And in the stillness they could feel the expectancy of
+dawn; the terse waiting for the light. The eager, anticipating stare of
+each was fixed upon the other's face.
+
+The black of the sky merged very gradually into a pale, sickly gray. Far
+to the east quivered a thin streak of yellow light.
+
+The three drab shadows of them cowered beneath the cross.
+
+Mauve and pink and golden light spread slowly over the firmament.
+
+"No, it can't be!" He muttered, his eyes upon the man's face--this man
+whom he had sat with those long hours before the dawn, whose hand he
+still held in his. He thought he caught the man's whispered "sacré!"
+
+The woman was the first to speak.
+
+"Voilà!" She taunted. "But it is--oh, so pretty! A French soldier with a
+leg shot off and a German officer to nurse him. You two--you who spoke
+of hate, do you still sit hand in hand?"
+
+"The girl from Chalet Corneille!" He had known he would not forget her
+face.
+
+"The dark has made cowards of you," she mocked. "Before the morning you
+clung together. But now it is dawn!" Her voice rang out bitterly,
+brutally clear. "Did not one of you ask, 'Is there anything greater than
+hate'?"
+
+"Sacré! What you say is just." The wounded man's eyes were raised to
+glance at the light-quivering firmament. Slowly the eyes caught the
+sight of something else. Very gradually they took in that
+unexpected thing. Mechanically the words were jerked out:
+"It--was--I--who--asked--" A sudden pause--a quick gasp--"God forgive
+me--it--was--I!"
+
+The uncanniness of the words shocked him. In spite of himself, his own
+eyes followed the man's wide stare; followed it from the eastern
+horizon, over the shimmering sky; followed it until he reached the
+crucifix. The hand, which, at the girl's words, had half-heartedly
+sought his pistol, shook now as he crossed himself.
+
+Was it the smudging shadows, the still unlighted mass of them up there
+on the arms of the crucifix? Would shadows take on so the semblance of
+the human body?
+
+"If there were such things--we'd know it--" Fragments of their talk in
+the night came vividly back to him. "If these things were
+real--sometimes--we'd see it!"
+
+The girl dropped to her knees. Her hands were clinched over her heaving
+breast; her gaze riveted itself upon that mass of shadows, high up on
+the cross; that mass of shadows so mysteriously like the dimly defined
+Christ figure.
+
+With a hoarse, racking sob that shook his whole frame, the wounded
+soldier fell upon his face. Quickly the officer bent over him, his hand
+on the shaking shoulder, his breath coming and going in short, rasping
+gasps. Motionless he stood there, moving only to catch hold of the
+girl's fingers, that reached up and clung to his.
+
+The faint, cold light of early morning tinged across the gray-white of
+the sky. Daybreak lighted the three grouped figures huddled so close
+together beneath the crucifix. Dawn showed clearly the brown wooden
+cross and the great half-ripped out nails that had once held the
+Christ.
+
+
+
+
+THE STILLNESS
+
+
+He cringed in shuddering awe beneath the stillness. He could not stand
+the heavy, deep silence of it; the muffled, sucking thickness absorbing
+so completely all sound into its deadening mat. He had gotten so that he
+had to be perpetually stopping himself from screaming. He had to keep
+watch on himself always. He was terrified that he might go mad. He
+feared the oppression of the awful quiet would craftily draw his reason
+away from him. He did not want to scream. He did not want to attempt to
+defy the harrowing, rending silence. He was afraid of the blanketing,
+saturating weight of the stillness.
+
+Sometimes when he could bring himself to think he thought that he might
+after all like to go about shouting at the top of his lungs. His mind
+kept on surreptitiously toying with the thought of the relief from the
+thing. He thought of it a lot. He knew that shouting about his own farm
+would not do him any good. He was too far away from everything and
+everyone in the strip of valley hemmed in between the rolling hills. Of
+course there was old man Efferts. Old man Efferts did not live so very
+far away. He knew he could not count on Efferts. Efferts had lived there
+too long in the stillness that rolled down to him from the hills and
+came together to lie flat and sluggish, thudding down on the valley
+land. If he could bring himself to walk into the ten-mile-off town
+shouting so that other people would follow after him shouting; so that
+there would be some kind of continuous, human noise for a while. It was
+that he wanted more than anything else; human noise.
+
+At night he would wake suddenly from his heavy, quiet slumber; from the
+dreamless, ponderous pit of it and listen to the stillness.
+
+When he first went to bed it would take him hours before he could get
+himself off to sleep. He dreaded the muted, frantic struggle of those
+dragging, pulling hours in which he would try to shut his ears to the
+soundless, deafening silence that throbbed noiselessly from a great
+distance and was noiseless in the room all about him; and pressed
+noiselessly against his blood filled ear-drums. He had the feeling at
+night that the stillness became more real sweeping in a greater rush
+down the hills; that it had an heightened, insidious power to get inside
+of him.
+
+He would toss about on his narrow wooden bed for hours; moving
+cautiously and carefully so as not to do anything that would offend the
+drugged burden of the silence. He would move a leg or an arm slyly and
+then he would lie quite quiet for a time holding his breath until the
+cracking pain came plunging again and again into his chest. He could
+feel the stillness filling in all the spaces and crevices around him,
+so that he thought it rose and swelled hideously.
+
+He was afraid of those hours before he went to sleep; before he could
+drop off with that overwhelming sense that in losing consciousness he
+was consciously letting himself drown in a tremendous, swollen wave of
+silence.
+
+And then toward morning that sudden, inevitable awakening. His rousing
+himself to listen. His whole body becoming rigid; tautly holding itself
+with straining, shaking muscles to the position in which he lay. The
+sweat breaking out all over him and trickling coldly down from his
+armpits along his sides. His cunning shifting of his head so that he
+could clear his ears to hear better. His futile harkening for the sound
+that never came. His intensive shivering waiting for it. And nothing but
+the stillness. He could never make himself move. The thing was so
+actual; suffocatingly potent; malignant. He had grown terrified of
+attempting to disrupt it in any of those little ways at his command. He
+had begun to think that the noise he would make would not be a noise. He
+could not have stood the shock of making a noise that would be quite
+vacantly without sound.
+
+All day long, working in his fields, he used to wonder at it. In the
+sunlight it was with him still and bated. It rose up to him from the
+ground at his feet, from the soil it had wormed itself into. It crushed
+down on him from the clear, blue sweep of the sky. It spread unseen
+toward him down the long, uncertain slopes of the hills coming on
+always from all sides and staying.
+
+It had become so that nothing was real to him; nothing but the stillness
+that drenched everything; stifling and choking.
+
+The old mare working her way in front of the plow along the narrowed,
+deepening furrows, was a ghost creature to him. The grayness of her
+blurred ahead of him in the brightest stream of sunlight. Her foolish,
+stilly gliding played horridly on his raw nerves. At all times she was a
+phantom animal, stirring with the intangible motion of the silence. He
+felt that she did not belong to him; that she was a thing of the
+stillness.
+
+He would trail after her, his quivering, thin hands on the plow handles,
+his eyes riveted on her bony withers. He would try to concentrate his
+thoughts on the way she moved and then overcome quite suddenly with the
+quiet, insidious stealth of her ambling, he would pull her up and stop
+to mop his forehead, his eyes going slowly around him as if he almost
+expected to see the thing that had lain that smothering, strangling hold
+on to him.
+
+His one and only companion was a yellow mongrel that had come slinking
+in at the farm gate, its tail drooping between its legs. He had been
+glad at first of having the dog with him. And then gradually he had come
+to feel the oddness of the animal. If he could have done so he would
+have turned the dog out again into the stillness from which it had come
+to him. He was sure that the mongrel must be old; unnaturally old. He
+could not understand the dog's awful quiet. In his heart he was scared
+of the dog. The mongrel followed incessantly at his heels, always with
+dragging tail. Whenever his eyes turned behind him they met the
+mongrel's eyes that were fixed on him; the eyes that were filled with
+that uncanny, beaten look as if it had been horridly cowed. There was an
+age of agony in the dog's eyes. As the days went on he became more and
+more afraid of the mongrel's eyes.
+
+He had come out to the farm to start with because of the silence. He had
+felt that he would have to get away from the noise and the tumultuous
+uproar of the city. After what he had done he could not stand it. He had
+gotten away. He thought now that his mind would snap; that it would
+break from under the lull which had come into it--The lull which
+devastated him with its hushed brutality.
+
+He had never been fond of people. Even in those days back there in the
+city before he had done the thing that was wrong he had mistrusted them.
+And after it he had run from them. Run wildly and unthinkingly to cover
+with the fear of them coming on behind him. The deathly, lonely farm was
+to him at that time a haven of rest.
+
+He had made up his mind to live on the farm until the end of his life.
+He used to think bitterly of his waiting so patiently for his death.
+When he could think of anything other than the silence he thought of his
+dying; of life being squeezed out of him by the shrouded quiet.
+Sometimes he would wonder if it were death that ominously waited for
+him in that appalling, threatening stillness.
+
+There had been days when he had tried to recall the sound of voices he
+had known. He had spent long hours in awakening in his memory those
+voices. He had wanted particularly to think of people laughing. He used
+to want to get the pitch of their laughing; to surround himself with the
+vibration of reiterated laughter. And then when he had gotten it so that
+he almost heard it, so that he felt that with concentrated attention he
+might hear the laughing, he would find himself listening to the
+frightful, numbing stillness.
+
+He had not the courage to go on trying that.
+
+Following the plow and the old gray mare through the fields with the dog
+skulking abjectly at his heels, he would think of that thing which he
+had done that had ostracized him from the rest of humanity. He never
+thought of the possibility of making his life over again. He could not
+have thought of it if he had wanted to. It was all too hopeless; too
+impossible to think about. The deadening quiet in which he had been
+steeped had drained him; sapped from him all initiative.
+
+When evening came he would go into his shack and close the door. He
+would light the oil lamp on the old table that stood in the center of
+the room and he would go about getting supper for himself and the
+mongrel. He took great care always to move his pots and pans gently. If
+he picked up a plate he did it slowly, softly. When he put his bowl of
+food on the table he slid it consciously onto the surface without noise.
+And going to and fro not oftener than he had to, his feet in their
+padded moccasins lifted him to his toes.
+
+He ate quietly and quickly, swallowing his food without chewing, feeding
+himself and the dog with his fingers. And all the while feeling that the
+stillness was rushing down from the hills and gathering to greater force
+about him.
+
+And when he was quite finished with the clearing away of his dishes he
+would sit beside the table, the mongrel in front of him, and he would
+think frantically of the relief of talking. His lips would begin to
+quiver hideously; to move. That hoarse, inhuman muttering that had no
+sound of voice in it would start. And then he would see the dog's eyes,
+filled with that horrid, beaten look, fixed on his mouth and he would
+stop, gasping.
+
+Once every little while old man Efferts would come down to the shack in
+the valley.
+
+He knew nothing of old man Efferts other than that ever since he had
+come to live at the farm Efferts had stopped in for an evening now and
+again.
+
+At first he had resented old man Efferts' coming. Later when he had seen
+that Efferts would not interfere with him he had not minded so much. He
+had become quite used to seeing the bent, huddled figure of the man
+trailing down the hillside and shambling into the room to sit there
+opposite to him quite silent. Of late he had gone about fetching the old
+man a glass of cider and a piece of bread. And they had sat facing each
+other, never talking; just sitting rigidly with the dog on the floor
+between them and the silence spilling itself in gigantic floods all
+around them. And then old Efferts would light his pipe and when he had
+finished it he would get up and go out of the door. And after he had
+watched old man Efferts go, with the feeling that he might not be real,
+he would stumble up to his room to lie in the narrow wooden bed trying
+to shut his ears to the deafening silence about him; cringing between
+his blankets as the swell of it heightened insidiously.
+
+He knew that the stillness had swamped itself into old man Efferts. He
+could see the stamp of it in the uncertain, stupefied face; in the
+bewildered eyes that had behind them something of the look that stayed
+on in the dog's eyes; in the thin-lipped mouth that drooled at the
+corners; in the old man's still, quiet way of moving, the unreal,
+phantom way in which the gray mare moved. He did not know why the old
+man should come to him to sit so dumbly opposite him for a whole
+evening. He did not care. He was long past caring.
+
+There were times when he thought he might tell old man Efferts of that
+thing which he had done years ago and which had isolated him from his
+fellows. Not that he thought so much of it. He had almost forgotten it.
+The stillness had made him forget everything but itself; had pushed
+everything out of his mind before its own spreading weight. But he kept
+the thought of speaking to Efferts of what he had done in the back of
+his head. He knew how his telling it to Efferts could not fail to act.
+He knew that something would infallibly happen; that the surprise of it
+could not help but penetrate the thickness of Efferts' silence. He
+always felt, soothing himself with the thought of relief, that when the
+power of the stillness became unbearable he would shock old Efferts into
+talk. There were moments when he hungered savagely to force old Efferts
+out of his walling quiet. Moments when he was starving for the comfort
+of human sound. His voice and Efferts' voice. Voices that would rise
+above the stillness; voices that would penetrate cunningly through the
+quiet; voices that would speak and answer each other.
+
+He was sitting in the center of his lamp lit room. He had had his supper
+and had cleared away the dishes with his usual crafty carefulness. He
+had lighted his pipe. He sat in the chair beside the table; his body
+quite rigid; his arms and legs stiffened to a torturing quiet. The
+mongrel crouched at his feet. There was something strange in the way the
+animal lay; in its tightened muscles that pulled and twitched as it
+breathed. Whenever he looked down his eyes met the dog's eyes.
+
+Outside the heavy shadows of the night crept along the ground, pushed on
+by the rushing, rising silence behind them. He knew that the stillness
+was rolling down the slope of those long hills. He knew that its awful
+quiet was gathering in the valley. He knew that it was trickling
+horridly still into the low ceilinged room. He had the feeling for the
+thousandth time that the most minute noise was swallowed up in the
+stillness before it came into being.
+
+He looked up then to see the door shoved warily ajar. A wrinkled, ugly
+hand showed against the dark wood in a lighter patch of brown. A coarse
+booted foot came behind the swing of the door. Standing against the
+black of the night he saw old man Efferts.
+
+He watched the old man come into the room.
+
+He saw him pull up a chair, lifting it from off the floor and setting it
+down opposite to him within the pooling space of the yellow lamplight.
+He stared at Efferts as he sank into the chair.
+
+Old man Efferts took out his pipe and lit it.
+
+He kept his eyes on Efferts as he had so often done; on the uncertain,
+stupefied face that was turned to him; on the bewildered eyes that had
+something behind them of the look that stayed on in the dog's eyes; on
+the thin-lipped mouth that drooled at the corners.
+
+He got up then and went on his toes to the door and closed it softly. He
+felt that Efferts' eyes were on him; and the mongrel's eyes. He came
+back and sat down in his chair.
+
+They both smoked quietly.
+
+He remembered the glass of cider and the piece of bread.
+
+He could not bring himself to move to-night.
+
+He felt the suffocating weight of the stillness crowding past him. It
+was expanding menacingly throughout the small room. It filled in all
+about him.
+
+Presently old man Efferts would finish his pipe and would get up and
+shamble out of the door. He would sit there and watch him go as he
+always watched, wondering if perhaps old man Efferts was not real. And
+then he would stumble up to bed and lie awake and listen to the
+stillness that grew greater and greater.
+
+He wanted the relief from that silence; wanted it desperately;
+passionately.
+
+He remembered that if he told Efferts of that thing that he had come so
+near forgetting in the smothering quiet that he would have what he so
+frantically wanted. Some human speech. Human talk that would break the
+silence even for a little while; the sound of human voices that would
+rise and answer each other.
+
+He glanced at the old man surreptitiously. He tried to think what
+expression would come into that stupid face with the bewildered eyes; he
+tried to see the thin-lipped drooling mouth as it would look with the
+lips of it startled into moving.
+
+He sat very still.
+
+Words formed themselves; lagging into his mind.
+
+"I--am--going--to--tell--"
+
+He would start to say it to old man Efferts that way.
+
+He could not stand the stillness any longer.
+
+Anything was better than the appalling agony of the quiet.
+
+He made a little tentative movement with his thin, shaking hands.
+
+He felt that Efferts was staring at him.
+
+The mongrel crouching at his feet moved stealthily. He heard no sound
+from the animal's moving. He knew it had gotten to its feet. He saw it
+standing there between where he sat and where Efferts sat.
+
+He felt his lips begin to quiver.
+
+"I--am--going--to--"
+
+He got the words into his head again through the menacing, waiting
+stillness.
+
+He muttered something.
+
+Old man Efferts leaned forward, his hand behind his ear.
+
+In a sudden blinding flash of knowledge he realized that old man Efferts
+was deaf.
+
+He felt his mouth twisting around his face.
+
+He tried then to shout.
+
+His eyes avoided the mongrel's eyes that he knew were filled with that
+uncanny, beaten look and were fixed on his jerking, grimacing mouth.
+
+All about him the ominous, malignant silence.
+
+He tried again and again to speak. He could not talk. Sweat stood out in
+great, glistening beads on his forehead and dribbled blindingly into his
+wide, distended eyes. His body shook with the stupendous effort he was
+making. His tongue was swollen. He could feel his throat tightening so
+that it hurt. He could not get his words into that hoarse, inhuman
+muttering that had no sound of voice in it.
+
+He kept on trying and trying to speak----
+
+He saw that old man Efferts had finished his pipe. He watched him get
+out of his chair and go shambling across the room and through the door.
+
+He sat there.
+
+His hands went up to his working mouth. He wanted to hide the hideous
+jerking of it.
+
+His eyes met the mongrel's eyes.
+
+The stillness grew appalling.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Scarecrow and Other Stories, by 
+G. Ranger Wormser
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40027 ***