ROUGH-HEWN

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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

ROUGH-HEWN

BY
DOROTHY CANFIELD

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

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

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

CONTENTS

ANY LITTLE BOY

CHAPTER I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Good-night, Mother."

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

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

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

CHAPTER III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The engagement was a decisive victory.

CHAPTER IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CULTURE IN THE AIR

CHAPTER VI

April 10, 1898.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, Spanish, then."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VII

May 10, 1898.

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

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

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

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

And yet when Maman came to take you away, from the first minute she went in and looked around her, you could see right through her eyes and what you saw was something different. After all it was just a homely old house with ugly crocheted tidies on the chairs, and splashers done in outline stitch back of the wash-stands, and old red figured carpets on the floors, the way nobody did at home in Belton. And Cousin Hetty talking so queer and Vermonty, her white hair smoothed down flat over her ears instead of all roughed up, fluffy, over a rat the pretty way other ladies did, with her funny clothes, her big cameo pin holding down her little flat round collar, and all other ladies so stylish with high collars under their ears. Yes, of course, the minute Maman looked at her, you saw how ashamed you'd be of Cousin Hetty if she came to visit your school at Belton. And yet there was the other Cousin Hetty you'd been having such a good time with. You just flickered away from Maman's way of seeing it to yours and never could make up your mind which was the real way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not so very," she answered.

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

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

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

"Oh, yes," cried Marise, flashing up to seize the chance of sympathy for one of her grievances, "they never let you use lead-pencils because in lead-pencil there's a chance to rub out your mistakes. You're not supposed to make any mistakes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Your what!" said Father.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VIII

I

May 12, 1898.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madame Garnier frowned slightly at the mention of Henri.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steps were heard in the hall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Have you read that?" asked Madame Garnier.

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

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

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

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

II

May 15, 1898.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

May 20, 1898.

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

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

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

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