BLINDFOLD

BLINDFOLD

By
ORRICK JOHNS

NEW YORK
LIEBER & LEWIS
1923

Copyright, 1923
By Lieber & Lewis

Printed in the U.S.A.

TO MY
FATHER
George S. Johns,
IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT
OF UNFAILING SYMPATHY

BLINDFOLD

BLINDFOLD

I

Ellen Sydney’s first garden in the Meadowburn’s new American home had made a fair beginning. She was at work one afternoon bending over the bed of sweet peas, hooking the baby tendrils to the wire mesh of the frame, with an occasional pat of the soft dark earth beneath—the earth which Bennet, the youngest of the family, had brought by the basketful from a distance, to enrich the yellow clay that filled in the property.

School was just out and as she worked Bennet banged into the hall, threw down his books and rushed forth again with a shout to join his comrades up the street. They were building a “switch-back railway” from the second story rear window of a neighbour’s house. She could just glimpse the murderous rickety scaffolding of it through the small leaves of the alley poplars.

Fastening up the last of the tendrils to the wire, Ellen heard Mrs. Osprey’s shrill voice calling from quite half a block away to one of the Osprey boys. She could not restrain a smile at the familiar summons.

“Poor woman,” thought she, “they do worry her.” But she would no more have thought of pitying Mrs. Osprey actually, than of feeling sorry for Her Majesty Queen Alexandra, whom many years in Canada had taught her to believe next to the angels themselves.

As she turned from the garden she heard a still more familiar voice and Potter Osprey came through the gate.

“Hello, Ellen, mind my coming over?”

“Oh, no! I’ve got to go in, though. Come in the kitchen, I’m not very busy.” She had in fact three easy hours before her, with dinner practically prepared and a little ironing to do before she put the dishes in the stove. Ironing was quite pleasant if you had some one to talk to while you did it.

“Vacation’s only six weeks off now,” Potter said as they walked up to the house. “Ain’t that great! I hate school anyway.”

“Ah, Potter, when you are doing so well at it! Milly told me about the debates. She said you were fine in them.”

The monthly school debates were a point of pride with him, and he betrayed a momentary embarrassment. He had quite lost himself in the vainglory of winning two of them in succession, or of being on the winning side both times. He had regretted that while they were in progress, especially while he was on his feet, everybody he knew had not been in the audience. So many people were not. The thing that he feared in talking about them to Ellen was that he would reveal his satisfaction. So Milly had been gossiping about them outside? That pleased him. Milly was in the class below him, which sat in the same room.

He recovered his composure and spoke as though of an ordinary matter.

“Pshaw, the debates ain’t really school. They’re different.... But look, Ellen, all the lots around here are almost forests of weeds in the summer. It’s great! You can hide in them, and everything. They get over six feet high. And there’s woods only a mile out west there, to swim and camp in. If you have time we can walk there some day.”

Ellen’s face brightened at the prospect.

“But it gets hot here in the summer,” he went on, “awful hot—not like Winnipeg. You won’t like that.”

“Oh, I’ve lived in N’Orleans. It’s lots hotter there.”

“Yes, that’s so. That’s way down south, ain’t it? I always think of you coming from Winnipeg. Bennet talks about it all the time. He’s a Britisher all right.”

Ellen replied warmly.

“Well, he shouldn’t be, even if they were born in Canada. His father says he’s going to stand by this country now, because it gives them a good living and always has. He’s going to make them all citizens.”

Potter laughed. He was sitting perched up on the kitchen table, his small feet dangling beneath it and his cap in his hand.

“I told Bennet we licked England twice and he got hot under the collar. He’s funny. Did you like it better up north?”

“Yes, I guess I did. We used to have good times in Winnipeg. The fellows always in the house, my! It’ll be the same here after a while. Those two girls get a crowd coming pretty quick. Only we’ll never have snow like in Winnipeg. I did love the snow, such sledding and skating!”

“That’s the ticket!” agreed Potter, and added with some disgust, “We hardly had one good skate last winter—soon as it’d freeze it’d thaw! But you should have seen the first winter we were here. Almost two months of ice! This house wasn’t here then—hardly any in this row were, and gee, the way the wind used to blow! It changes around here fast. Kirk broke his arm falling through these joistses.”

Potter swung down from the table and stood in front of the ironing board, smiling up at the tall woman, his hands in his pockets.

“Say, Ellen, got something to eat? Just anything, you know—I’ll tell you why I want it.”

Ellen put down her iron on the metal guard and went into the pantry. She returned with three powdered doughnuts on a plate.

“Here,” she said laughing. “You’re always eating, Potter Osprey. Your mother told me I was spoiling your appetite for meals.”

“Thanks,” he said and went on between mouthfuls. “I’ve been smoking. I thought something to eat would take my breath away.”

“Well, if that’s what you came here for you can go right back home. You oughtn’t smoke—so there!”

Potter, however, did not stir; and for a time there was no sound except the thumping of Ellen’s iron on the thickly padded board. She was thumping harder than need be, because she was angry. She was often angry with him. Yet his prolonged visits with her in the kitchen or on the back stoop of a fine afternoon meant much to her. The family already teased her, calling young Osprey “Ellen’s pet.” Then Tom Meadowburn reminded them that “Ellen always had a pet. Remember Wolly Judson.” This sally caused an uproar. Wolly Judson had been a Winnipegian of sixty-eight, a town character, a tottering flirt, who had brought the current gossip regularly to Ellen’s door.

Potter heard none of this chaffing, yet in his talks with her he betrayed a small opinion of the Meadowburns, all except his friend Bennet, with whom he sang in the choir. Once he told her indignantly that she worked too hard, she was spoiling the whole family. Why didn’t the others do more? Ellen laughed heartily. She did not believe any such thing. It was her lot to work, and keep at it until things were done.

Ellen was neither by birth nor legal adoption a member of the Meadowburn household. She lived there, a fixture; and the principal advantages did accrue to the family. They obtained a willing, strong and tireless servant, modest and well-appearing enough to be treated as a distant relative (and consequently not paid except when chance generosity dictated). She had been with the Meadowburns since she was twelve, learning by heart their various needs so that she could have administered to them in her sleep. She was now twenty-seven, a gaunt figure, black-eyed and above the middle height. The face would have been attractive but for the toughened swarthiness it had acquired, and the cheeks perceptibly sunken by the absence of jaw teeth.

The Meadowburn children had grown up under her care, the two eldest girls being little more than babies at the time the orphan asylum in New Orleans yielded her young and frightened body into the hands of Mrs. Meadowburn. Ellen had found time for those fretful and ill-tempered midgets, in addition to keeping the house spotless, laundering for six and cooking the meals. Mrs. Meadowburn had been left free to nurse a collection of modern ills, and to dream of her youth as the dark beauty of a northwestern town. Since those days a morose gloom had settled upon her handsome, Indian-like face. Ellen had rarely known her to laugh at all. Even the smile with which she greeted her husband’s jokes was wan and half-hearted.

It was to Ellen that Tom Meadowburn looked for the fullest appreciation of his comic genius and his masculine importance. Few men were more conscious of both than he, and even in those moments when the comic mask fell away completely, there was something in the solemn air of pompous judgment and disciplinary wisdom which to any one but his adoring brood would have seemed most funny.

For Tom Meadowburn the world, whether of New Orleans or Winnipeg, or the new city that had lately taken them in, was a place where he and the wife and children were “getting on.” The Meadowburn household was, in his mind, something very much like heaven, himself presiding. For Ellen, as he often said, it was a refuge under his protecting arm, wherein she need never come to harm nor suffer want. And to her credit she believed him and worked all the harder to please him.

Physically Meadowburn was a tall stout man with a heavy, pink, unwhiskered face, the pale eyelashes and tow hair being lighter than his skin, and the small, quick eyes a transparent, hardly perceptible blue. As a humourist he was not one of your torrential and generous laughers. He was sly and dry, a wrinkle, the flicker of a smile, a knowing arch of the eyebrows being his favourite manner of accentuating his point. He was in the habit of twitting Ellen on the subject of marriage.

“Now then, my girl,” he would say, “what are you keeping from us? What have you got up your sleeve? Didn’t I hear you come in a little late last night? Walking, eh—of course, not alone? We wouldn’t permit you to walk alone.”

“Ellen went to the drugstore for some medicine for me, last night, Tom,” interposed his wife.

“Well, well, Ellen,” he went on, “you must remember you’re perfectly free. We wouldn’t keep you from marrying when the right man comes along.”

“Yes, and maybe I will marry, sooner than you think! You watch out, Mr. Meadowburn!”

The pleasure of this stock joke lay in the fact that none of the Meadowburns believed there was danger of Ellen marrying, of any one caring to marry her, at least, whose social position would suit her. For she did not have kitchen-maid standards, as they knew. And she believed there was no danger either. She felt very old....

It was into this somewhat harsh and lonely existence that Potter had thrust his genial, boyish appearance, and by some strange affinity of comradeship, they had taken to each other at once. He too, as she was soon to learn, was lonely and cherished his dreams; and it comforted her to have a champion—even so young and small a champion as he. Was he so young and small? There were times when he frightened her with flashes of grown-up speech. It did not always seem quite nice, quite appropriate. For example, one evening when they were talking about perfectly ordinary matters, he burst out:

“You’re like Christ, Ellen. If He could be on earth He wouldn’t love Dr. Minor or any of those people in the church. He’d pick you.”

Her first thought about this was that it was deliberately bad, as bad as his smoking and his score of other boy tricks. It was blasphemous and wildly untrue. She sent him away in disgrace, much discomfited and hurt. Probably this rudeness of her own was what brought her so swiftly around to forgiveness, or it may be that she came to look kindly on his tribute. In any event, she gave Bennet a note for him, a queer, misspelled, dignified note....

When Potter returned she told him that he “must not think of Jesus as a person but as God, and that was the end of it.”

II

The next Spring, which followed on the heels of his fourteenth birthday, held a wonder for Potter Osprey such as he had not experienced before. Until now the green buds and soft winds had meant a time for the surreptitious stripping off of shoes and stockings after school (and out of sight of home), the agonizing anticipation of three long months of holidaying, and the making of limitless plans for outdoor fun. This year he welcomed the bright weeks not as a rowdy boy, but with a conscious relish that came from a deeper source within him.

The Spring itself, as if it also were filled with a sense of unusual importance, was precocious. When Potter, late every afternoon, ambled along the several blocks of blatantly new sidewalks that led to the church, the grass hid the softened brown earth with an abundance of delicate colour wherever feet had not trod, the robins and squirrels skipped perilously about the pavements and lawns oblivious of savage man, and exultant banks of snowballs escaping over the picturesque shingle- and iron-railed barriers of the old Clemons place, were just on the point of changing from their pale shade of willow bark into round fluffs of dazzling white as big as a boy’s head.

These Lenten afternoons were moments of solitary poetry in his days. The still church, the long slanting rays which came through the coloured glass windows to the west; the faint perfumes that rose into the ogival shadows above the nave, emanating from the hair and handkerchiefs and bodices of lady worshippers, who made up the majority (and the subtle pleasure with which he felt the eyes of these fine women on his broadening back as he walked down to the chancel carrying the offertory); the pervasive, vibrant drone of the organ, which had always been like a physical caress to him; and the saintly beaked profile of the rector, Dr. Minor, with its high, peeled brows, and black, unruly hair, dominating an almost chinless jaw; and, finally, between the breathing of the organ pipes, and the shrill singing of the feminine congregation, Dr. Minor’s broad Virginia accents and consoling overtones and melancholy quavers—all these sensations produced a mingling of peace and the awareness of sacrifice, which was like a bath of goodness.

The church itself was charming to look at, built in the late ’eighties of shingles now coloured a warm brown by many rains, and properly vine-hung. The little building with its limited open meadow and well-grown trees drew him at times when he had no particular business there. It was a favourite place to read. Often he would arrive an hour or more before the service and sit huddled up in one of the corners of the deep verandah, intent upon his pastime, until the brisk step of the rector sounded on the boards below; and if Dr. Minor happened to espy him he would be conducted cheerily into the study, while the lanky priest put on his vestments and asked him questions about his work at school and the health of his “dear mother,” who, much to the clergyman’s disappointment, came almost never to the services.

These innocent confidences sometimes went so far as a mild spiritual examination which had more significance than its casualness indicated. Minor regarded young Osprey as promising material for the ministry.

“The type for scholarship and consecration,” he told his wife. “A sensitive boy, thoughtful and retiring—Oh, manly, manly enough! A little conviction would turn that into spiritual leadership. His family could do nothing better than give him a seminary training. And a part of our duty, my dear, is to be fishers of men, to look out for new recruits to bring under His banner.”

Minor loved to roll forth militant symbols in his reflections upon the mission of the Church. His early gods had been the deeply pious heroes of the South. Stonewall Jackson and General Lee took rank with him very little below the Apostles.

There was one other who shared this secret ambition for Potter—Ellen Sydney—until a recent incident in which he had figured shook her faith.

This affair produced something of a scandal in the Osprey family. Searching one day through the shelves of an old closet for one of his brother Kirk’s discarded school books which it was now his turn to use, the boy had come across a half dozen large, handsomely bound portfolios. He had drawn one out and leaved it over, fascinated on the instant. The sheets were of lovely texture, beautifully printed, and the covers of a flexible, warm-toned, heavy parchment. He felt a sense of incomparable luxury in the very touch of the books.

The contents were no less absorbing. Between the pages of French text were reproductions of paintings hung in the Paris salons of the mid-’nineties, the majority of them nudes of that languishing and silken type beloved by the French school of that day, the studio renderings of a flock of anonymous Bouguereaus. Forgetting his search for the school books, Potter took the volumes to an attic room where he consulted them many times in the following weeks, and a collection of nude sketches came from his pencil, copied sometimes from the originals and sometimes attempted from memory.

The upshot of it was that his mother swooped upon him one day just as he was finishing a particularly elaborate drawing. It was taken from him and shown in excited secrecy to John Osprey.

Osprey was cut of a different cloth from Meadowburn. In a ruminant, half-serious talk (a ray of amusement flickered in his eye on actually facing the boy alone) he quoted the Scripture according to St. Paul, and enjoined him to resist putting away childish things until he was on the way to become a man. Then he dropped a sly hint that if the youthful artist really had to draw improper subjects it would be a good thing to keep them from his mother. There was other good advice to the effect that it was both harder and more practical to draw people the way they were usually seen in life, but this passed largely over Potter’s head.

He promptly diagnosed the interview as a vindication and he saw no harm in telling the adventure to Ellen, but to his utter surprise she was inexpressibly shocked; so much so that she left him on the Meadowburn steps without even a good-night.

As he had related the story, coolly, indeed boastfully to her, the feeling came over her that the next time she raised her eyes to observe him she would see a coarse, swarthy young man with stubble whiskers whom she ought to be afraid of. The contrast between this fancy and his actual appearance was a little laughable—yet the notion of his interest in a woman’s body, a thing he could not, as she reasoned, naturally have seen or even been strongly moved to see, was more than she could grasp.

For many days she watched him passing the house with other boys, his eyes casting furtive and unhappy glances at its windows, and hardened her heart. Then she could bear it no longer, and once more Potter received a scarcely legible, lady-like note of prim forgiveness.

To-night he was to see her for the first time since that event....

In Creve Cœur suburb a clear division existed between the old and the new, marked by a certain trolly line. Northward lay the flat, banal commons in which the Ospreys and the Meadowburns lived, but to the south were houses mellowed by long custom, set deep in cool lawns, and facing arched avenues of maples and elms under which one trod decaying and rickety pine-board walks or crossed the tremulous bridges spanning a serpentine creek that drained the valley.

The quaint modesty of Florissant lane, its uselessness and hidden charm—the thick maples and high shrubbery cutting off even the sight of neighbouring windows—made it a fairy road, a retreat in which Potter had already learned to spend fine mornings of October and May when his mother thought him safely at school. As for Ellen, her first autumn glimpse of it, nearly a year ago, had taken her back to greener memories in the north. She could never walk there too often; it was as near to complete demoralization and unbounded luxury as anything her starved imagination could picture.

Ordinarily they sat upon the steep terraced slope at the end of the lane, whence one could look down its leaf-fretted vista, or peer over one’s shoulder into the sombre depths of the rarely-visited Florissant place, but to-night he was more venturesome. He led her through the path behind the wall of Annunciation’s big enclosure, until they came to the end of the terrace. Beyond was an open field, once the pasture of the Florissants, and still a part of the property, empty and unused. In its centre through the dusk loomed a dark little hillock clustered with poplars and fir-trees.

It was not hard to believe oneself continents away from the noise of any familiar street or the lights of Creve Cœur houses. Directly fronting them lay the dim mass of Annunciation, its half dozen French turrets and many spires floating out of the treetops into crystalline starlight. Potter had often sat in that very spot and pondered on the mystery of this religious stillness, on the utter distance which separated its life from any he had known, its community of young and vital beauty sternly and perhaps rebelliously subordinated to withered holiness. By a paradox of the law of boyhood, the girls in the convent—boarders from comfortable families everywhere in the states—were the subject of vulgar joking among the youngsters thereabouts.

To Ellen the convent was not benign; it was a little terrifying and monstrous. All her life she had been awestruck by anything that suggested the gigantic and august power of Rome, and her head was full of legends concerning that religion and its devotees. Superstition had required of her that she regard them—not as individuals but in the mass—as a sinister species apart from ordinary people.

Potter remarked that when there was bright moonlight the steep slate pitches of the convent roof looked as though they were sheeted in snow.

“There’s lots more of those places in Canada than here,” said she. “They’re not all that they should be, either. Think of sending young girls there!”

“Why not?” he asked.

She now regretted her outburst and was annoyed at his question. She answered primly:

“Why, I wouldn’t tell you, of course.”

He laughed, unconcerned and superior.

“Pshaw, I know what you mean. I’ve heard those stories too—about nuns being in love with priests. But I don’t believe them.”

“Oh, you don’t?” inquired Ellen sarcastically. It was not that she did not think it admirable of him to dislike believing evil of people, but one need not go so far as to defend Catholics....

“No,” he said. “You know why?”

“Well, why, smarty?”

“Because even people outside of such places, convents and the like, even people who are grown up and free to do as they please—well, they never do anything they want to do. I mean things that just pop into their heads to do.”

“Ah, don’t they?” asked Ellen, by this time amused, “And how are you so sure they don’t?”

“I just know. They’re too dog-goned cowardly.”

“Well!” she exclaimed, “that’s a fine thing to be calling people who behave themselves!”

“Then they don’t think of anything bad that they want to do,” he persisted. “You wouldn’t call that being good, would you, Ellen? Pshaw, what’s the credit in that?”

“It’s well for them they don’t think of such things,” she declared. “To hear you, a person would believe you wanted to be tempted.”

“No, I hate it, honestly,” he replied, and she felt that he was trying to speak truly of himself. “I used to say that part of the Lord’s prayer, about ‘lead us not into temptation,’ over twice. I did, for a long time. Because, you see, I’m really tempted—always, every minute.”

He paused after this announcement, which, in spite of his sincerity, had a note of pride, and Ellen broke in, thinking that the moment had come to speak of what was most in her mind.

“Potter, you haven’t been making any more of those pictures, have you?”

She felt him shift quickly to the defensive.

“Yes, I have,” he said. “I’ve finished two more.”

“Well, I’m ashamed of you.”

“Why do you mind them so much, Ellen?”

“You don’t have to ask me why.”

“But I do, because my father didn’t think they were bad. He only lectured me for show!” He chuckled at the recollection.

“Ah, Potter, your father is a grown man! Men do lots of things that you shouldn’t think about. You’re just a child. Those pictures! What’s the good of them anyway? Nice people wouldn’t have them around.”

“Some people would!” he declared stoutly. “They’re beautiful, or my father wouldn’t have kept them ... and the one I’ve just finished is the best, oh, lots the best I’ve done!”

She sensed a strain of profound unhappiness in his voice, and all her instincts flew to soothe the hurt.

“I don’t mean to be hard on you, Potter,” she said. “You worry me, that’s all. I can’t see why you bother about these things that other people never think of.”

“Aw,” he said, “never mind, Ellen. I guess I don’t know what I want. It’s no fun being a boy when you’d like to be a man.”

They both fell silent, listening to the trees chattering overhead like live things. The breeze that stirred them was growing chill, and Potter, responding to the kindlier tone of his companion, moved closer to her. His last words and this unconscious movement of affection touched her. She put a rough, friendly hand on his arm, and they sat there in silence for a time. It was he who broke it....

Suddenly a strange plea came pouring from his lips in a torrent of eager words, a plea that she all at once realized she had many times before dreaded—and laughed at herself for dreading.... She sat, scarcely breathing, with averted face. He ended abruptly, frightened at the sound of his own voice. She said nothing. Surely she understood him. What was she thinking?

She turned toward him at last, and he found himself looking into her black eyes that glowed like coals despite the mantle of dusk. Her parted lips closed in a tight line.

“Well,” she said, with slow emphasis, “if that’s what you mean, I’ll tell you this. I will never do such a thing.”

She was on her feet in an instant, her tall body like a statue of rebuke crushing him in its shadow.

“Come,” she said coldly.

“Yes,” he replied. “I’m sorry, I’m awfully sorry, Ellen.”

At that moment, as they started homeward from Florissant’s field with the darkness between them, her swishing, angry stride filling him with a new knowledge of mystery and awe, there was no doubt that they both meant what they said. But in Ellen a certain helplessness and fear were born. Struggle as she might from now on his very presence would be a menace, and his presence was more than ever a necessity. For the cry that he was uttering was one that her own heart understood.

So it happened that a few months later when the Osprey family were at a country hotel for the summer, he and Ellen met in the empty house and walked hand in hand through the rooms—her sworn promise whirling in his brain. She was stiff and awkward, but he was in high spirits, perhaps a little hysterical, fondly imagining he was entering upon a new paradise of experience....

III

Emmet Roget, twenty, and Potter Osprey, nineteen, both juniors at the University, were sitting naked one afternoon on the long parapet which formed one of the banks of Milton’s abandoned quarry. Behind them the stone wall fell away a sheer twenty feet to the gulch below. In front, licking the tops of the three-foot barrier, lay the broad sheet of deep, clear water. Their white bodies dripped opaline flakes in the sunset. From time to time they shivered in the chilly late September wind.

A pale, luminous dory of a moon floated low in the delicately blue and pink expanse of sky that lay over the town. The surrounding flat country was infinitely still, infinitely peaceful.

Potter suddenly droned forth in the melancholy baritone the two affected when reading Swinburne and other modern poets:

“The wandering moon, an optimistic sprite

Etched a pale border ’round the face of night....”

Emmet was silent for a moment, and then as though the sound of the quotation had travelled to him from a distance, burst out:

“Gosh, man, where did you get that?”

The other reached over boisterously and clapped his friend’s shoulder.

“A trial of my own! All you need to be a poet is to suffer from insomnia, the way I did the other night.”

“Well, you can write.”

“Eh? But I’d so much rather paint.”

“Better look out. You may have more talent for writing than for painting.” Potter sensed a criticism in the remark, which he privately resented.

“No, the thing I’ll never be able to do is the thing I’m going to do.”

Emmet did not reply at once, and his sleepy blue eyes, long and narrow between the lids, rested upon an indefinable point of distance. The wind ruffled his dark curly hair that grew low on the brow and temples. He was the handsomer of the two.

“Damn specialists and specialism,” he said. “I keep thinking about a synthesis of the arts. Take the theatre, for example. Why not do something like Wagner did—in a lighter, more lyric vein? Bring all the arts together and create a new art? I hate this little business of one man with a pen, one man with a brush and another with a piano, none of them understanding each other.”

“A synthesis of the arts is contradictory,” said Osprey. “Only Nature can accomplish it, at any rate, and Nature and art are sworn enemies. Nature takes a tree and gives it form and colour; its leaves rustle and its branches are wood-winds. Then in certain lights the tree will have the elusive, the startling quality of poetry. There you have sculpture, painting, music and literature—but it isn’t art, and, thank God, art never will be such a pudding.”

“Nevertheless,” replied Roget, without controversy and as if to himself, “Nevertheless something can be done that way. What about the church in Renaissance Italy and elsewhere? That was a synthesis—a man didn’t paint just to be painting something of his own. He painted for God’s sake.”

It was really cold by now, and a moment later they were hastily dressing. Roget murmured:

“‘The wandering moon, an optimistic sprite, etched a pale border ’round the face of night.’ Ce n’est pas mal. It’s pictorial and yet it’s literary too. Perhaps you will use words to fix your notions for painting. What’s that, in a sense, but synthesis, old-timer?” he finished jubilantly.

They went home in the dusk. These were the perfect hours college gave them....

The rural University town of the central states, in the period when electric lighting and telephones were young, when the automobile was as yet a rarity, and the popular senior took his best girl out riding Sundays behind a smart livery tandem, may have been hideous to modern eyes with its muddy streets, its wooden dwellings and its old-time murky brick and brownstone halls, but it had a mellow and quiet charm that comported well with the spirit of scholarship.

This charm we may assume has been swept away forever. Gasoline and commercial growth, endowments, tudorized architecture, prohibition, short-skirted and long-headed women, energetic chancellors, a wealthier class of students, up-to-date burgher emporiums, moving picture palazzos, Grecian banks, and other vanities of the wicked age have hidden that erstwhile scene, with its air of leisure and moderation, beneath a slick financial veneer that nothing but the fall of federal empire and the end of progress will ever wipe off.

When Potter Osprey arrived at the Athens of his native state it was still a function of one’s education to sit with the more or less elect twice a week in one of the three saloons and beer up, to the point where one navigated with difficulty the crossings of perilously high stepping stones and sometimes fell off into honest Athenian mud, which accumulated in viscid pools a foot deep.

If one was only a freshman one might have to be contented with the private room of the “Bucket of Blood”—in a small rear section of which negroes were allowed to drink. Later on, you aimed for the private room at Steve Ball’s. The Y.M.C.A. and the Cadet Corps, the latter also a moral training camp under the guise of military orders, throve, but only among the groundlings. Two obscure fraternities out of twelve admitted members who would stoop to either, unless they were recommended by extraordinary prowess in other and more popular directions.

In those days the dirt-stained farmers in jack-boots came to town Saturday morning with heavy carts of solid produce and departed at nightfall with almost equally heavy burdens of liquid joy. Afternoon strollers got their legs inextricably mixed with frantic, squealing hogs, and the smell of fresh manure rose to the fifth story of the Attic House, the tallest building on the local Broadway. Nowadays the farmers come snorting in in Cadillacs as often as they please and go home sober to tot up the double entry ledger with “mommer.” It is a changed world and undoubtedly a more leisurely one for college disciplinary committees.

Potter’s progress for a year had consisted in desperate efforts to escape his classes toward the end of the week, and to regain some hold on them at the beginning. As often happens, in spite of such practices, or perhaps because of the extra spurts of effort which they made necessary, he regularly stood well in his studies. His second year, however, from the standpoint of conduct, was an improvement over the first. Roget put in an appearance, and Osprey wearied somewhat of smutty anecdotes, at the telling of which he was never skilful, and found a genuine interest growing in him for his language classes, and even for mathematics.

In the entire town, beside the poet, there had been two people in whom he took an interest. One was a thin, rather angular but not uncomely instructress in the art classes, who had come from New York and the Art Students’ League. Potter never probed her jolly, untroubled character very deeply, but she had a firm pencil stroke that he admired, and after a few talks with her he discovered that she breathed a freer air than the folk at Athens. To his fraternity brothers she was a frump, socially impossible. The feminine ideal of the day was the type of Miss Carroll of Carrollton, or Miss Brown from Brownhaven, rich father, proud virtue, sentimental possibilities and skill in the small town graces.

His second admiration was a grey-haired, lean descendant of one of the oldest families in town, a certain Oliver Pruyd, whose hawk-beaked face habitually wore an ironic grin. He was supposed to correspond with the metropolitan newspapers, and his unofficial scholarship had achieved a certain subrosa reputation. But his gains in his vocation were obviously slender and it was not his scholarship that brought him distinction. Pruyd was the only known addict to the use of morphine of whom the community could boast.

Osprey’s acquaintance with him had been casual. There was something sinister in Pruyd’s mocking expression and wrinkled, flavescent skin. Once, however, the younger man had achieved the brilliance of seeking him out in his small den over the pool and billiard hall, an indescribably neat and carefully arranged place, walled with books and piles of periodicals. Pruyd proved stimulating through three drinks, introducing many hints of literary sources and art lore hitherto strange to his companion. In the days of his family’s wealth he had ruined his usefulness by overlong haunting of the byways of Europe.

Beginning with the fourth bourbon, however, the conversation descended to common levels, and the affair ended with their staggering down Broadway like any two other louts expelled from Steve Ball’s at the closing hour.

The only other consolation was the college library. In its actual precincts he was often uncomfortable because he was critically inspected by elderly persons at the desk for his curious taste in books. This alternately intimidated and enraged him—and almost barred him from the use of the library. But from it he obtained Pater’s “Marius” and “Renaissance,” prints of Hogarth and Daumier and Michelangelo, “Tom Jones” and Balzac, Rousseau and Voltaire, stray bits of Wilde and Beardsley, and sprinklings of the French symbolists—shuddersome bombs in those days.

The art class, one of the main objectives of his course (and the sop which his father had thrown him in urging him to take a well-rounded education before he settled down to his choice) was a puerile and primary bore after the first day, a repetition of the drawing of casts in charcoal, to which he had devoted two years at high school—with a prim sketch hour thrown in twice a week in the evening, the members of the class serving as models for fifteen minute studies.

A few weeks after the conversation with Emmet Roget at Milton’s Pond, Potter was sitting with a full assemblage of his fraternity brothers at a breakfast of oatmeal swimming in blue milk, biscuits and rancid butter—which was all the country town could furnish for some curious reason—and pork chops well immersed in grease. The house manager that season was an economist, loudly cursed at every meal, but immensely appreciated at the end of the month when the pro-rated statements came around.

They were not a well-to-do nor a polished crowd. Raw-boned, plebeian, familiar—tobacco-chewers from the agricultural towns getting their first taste of a dress suit—they nevertheless had their pride and social standards. Potter, for example, though he liked them well enough—indeed had been dazzled by several of their more suave and persuasive members during the first few weeks after his matriculation—was now, on account of those standards, nursing a private feud against the whole organization. The cause of this feud was their refusal to invite Emmet Roget to join, a man, thought he, better bred than any of them. They had taken in two gawky, mannerless Freshmen that year, sons of zinc barons from the mining counties, but they would not have Roget.

Potter understood the reason well enough, but his resentment was all the more keen on that account. Roget was rejected for personal characteristics which he himself would like to have exhibited oftener. He, also, did not quite belong in the group, and his influence, which for some reason was not inconsiderable, would have waned quickly had he been more frank about his own tastes. Roget did not lack that frankness. He was poor, but poverty was no bar in that fraternity. The trouble was that he was not ashamed of having won the Whittier prize for verse in his freshman year. He had needed the money. He pronounced his name in the French manner and sat in a corner quietly cynical at dances. He was pretty generally admired by girls, but that could be a fault in a person you instinctively disliked; and he turned up one evening at a smoker wearing a wrist watch. In the first administration of Roosevelt, a man was either a “good scout” or a “crumb,” and the best looking and brainiest chap on earth, if he did these things, was a crumb.

The crowd was beginning to leave the breakfast table, some of them rushing off to eight o’clock classes and others moiling onto the porch for the first Bull Durham “drag” of the day, and bawling a good-natured “hello, men” to students hurrying past from other houses.

Potter had an eight o’clock class and was late. As he started off, however, he took up a letter addressed to him, from the table in the hall, and stopped in his tracks. He stared again at the superscription and the eight o’clock class dropped completely from his mind. The letter was in a hand that he knew well, and the sight of it instantly smote him with fear. He looked about to see if any one was watching and turned to flee to the bathroom upstairs, the only place in the house where privacy was possible. On second thought he walked quietly by the group on the porch and went up the street. A ten minute lope brought him to the deserted little nine-hole golf course outside of town. He could not help thinking how benign, how untroubled the fields were in the brisk, delicious morning. They calmed his pounding blood and sent a wave of optimism through him.

“What a fool I was to miss my class,” he muttered aloud. “It may not be anything at all.” He sat down on a sandbox and hurriedly opened the letter.

“Dear Potter,” it ran, “It’s happened as I was afraid. I’m nearly three months gone. Dr. Schottman won’t help me. He says he never does that. I haven’t got much money, and don’t know what I’m to do.

“Yours truly,
“Ellen.”

IV

The blow, which he had many times dreaded, but which for two long years he had thought of as blissfully escaped, had fallen. Until the summer just passed, that length of time had elapsed—the first two years of his University life—during which the affair with Ellen had reverted to its original innocence. Before that they had drifted on, taking what opportunities they could find. Potter, sometimes conscious that the thing was an ordinary slavery, had struggled against it from time to time, but half-heartedly. Habit and gratification were too strong. Then, in a blinding flash of awakened responsibility, he realized that physical consequences followed such relations, and under the guise of moral repentance, he went to her and told her he wished to end it.

Ellen acquiesced simply enough in this, as she acquiesced, perforce, in everything that concerned her. She dumbly worshipped him, but she knew how much that mattered.

Then had come the summer of this year. It was accident that threw them together one night, one very magical night, as Potter recalled. Both were lonely; the Meadowburn family were all away on an August journey. Their old intimacy, which in reality had been sordid and furtive, took on a certain beauty—the sentiment of past things. Under that momentary glamour forgetfulness took possession of them.

“She said,” recalled Potter, “that was the first time she had been thoroughly happy and secure.”

He ruminated on, connecting this sudden, vivid pleasure of hers, this mood of safety and surrender, with the deadening outcome they now faced. His own fear had never left him since that night—that one night, for it had had no sequel. Now he interpreted the event fatalistically. Nature had waited for that happy mood of Ellen’s before making her a mother. Nature was a subtle monster, a thing of scheming purposes. She let you go on and on with impunity and then tripped you when you weren’t thinking, when you felt particularly strong because you had put up a long fight against her. She could even, in this awful moment, make him thrill with the knowledge of having created life....

Potter had never had a confidant in the affair with Ellen. So far as he knew the secret was her own and his, and had been from the beginning. And it was something of a miracle, considering their narrow escapes from detection.

But now that he needed support there was no one to turn to. Roget was the last person in the world to whom he could take such a tale. He had an idea that Roget would laugh him to scorn or question his taste in becoming the victim of such an intimacy. Roget had been raised among women and had acquired a knowledge of them that made his relations toward them seem little short of uncanny to Potter. He gave the impression of being successful with many and quite uninvolved with all. To Potter women were the paralyzing mystery. It was one of the subjects on which he and Roget did not meet.

Had there been an older man in town with whom he had developed any sympathy, a faculty member or a person in authority of any kind, he would have gone to him. There were many questions; there was money to be got; there was common-sense guidance needed as to doctors and other such matters, instinctively repugnant and dreadful to him.

Marriage! Sometimes in the dead of night, lying awake with his fears, anticipating just this predicament, he had experienced exaltations, mystic desires for sacrifice and immolation and simple, laborious living; it was a surviving remnant of his intense religious life as a very young boy. In such moments his mind had admitted the idea of marriage. In broad day, the thought became abhorrent. And in all the broad days that had preceded this one, his fears also had melted with the sun; but now they would not melt.... He knew perfectly well that he would urge marriage upon Ellen, sincerely in a fashion. He knew also that she would flatly refuse, and that he would accept her refusal with relief.

Yet what was she to do? He counted on no sympathy from the prudish Meadowburns. They would loudly invoke the names of their young daughters and fly from the scene. The family physician, Schottman, a tolerant German-born physician of real ability, had taken an odd sort of liking to Ellen and never visited the house without having a talk with her wherever he happened to find her at work. He had been their hope in earlier discussions. With him, there would be no danger, while with others—Potter writhed before the spectres of horrible little operating rooms, of death in agony, of murder and police and squint-eyed judges with nose-glasses. But Ellen’s letter had settled Schottman.

It was past noon before he realized it, and the golf links were becoming populated by a few straggling faculty men with clubs. He aimed for an outlying street which led into town and the act of motion toward a definite objective revived his spirits, which had been sinking hopelessly into the quicksand of despair. He went to the bank and drew out all of his small balance but a dollar. The previous day his check had come and he had paid his scot for October at the fraternity house. It was rare that his remittances from home exceeded forty dollars a month. He converted the larger part of the sum he withdrew into a money order at the Post Office and mailed it to Ellen, with a short note in which he told her he would see her somehow before long, and if possible to do nothing until then.

“Money,” he thought, as he stepped out of the Post Office, “if one just had enough money one could fix up anything!”—an idea that had come to him before in many a tight place and morning after. He fell to day-dreaming about what he would do for Ellen if he had money, money in his hand, money in plenty.

The mailing of the letter had brought a sudden release to his feelings. It would cheer her up to hear from him.

In this state he responded more willingly to passing acquaintances, did not avoid the livery stable man and the candy man, and the dozen other town bodies who were always about. Catastrophes, he reflected, had their good points. They furnished a reason for cutting classes and loafing on a beautiful Fall day. He was tempted for a moment to call on Roget, who lived, as no one but he would have lived, on the native side of Broadway, a short distance off. But he decided against it. He would be pressed to talk about his trouble and that he had resolved not to do except in the worst extremity, and certainly not to Roget.

The decision to avoid Emmet left him no alternative, and he drifted into Steve Ball’s bar. Those dark, quiet, wet-smelling precincts were deserted at that hour, so far as his familiars were concerned. He was glad they were. It would not have been easy to conceal the turmoil within him, if forced into an extended conversation. He would take a drink or two, slowly, he concluded, go home and try to forget the whole thing, and to-morrow with a hard head, he would work out a plan of action.

Frank, the experienced bar man, wiped up the much scarred and initialled table of the private room, and hovered in the doorway with a friendly smile.

“This is the sort of companionship a fellow needs in my fix,” thought Potter. “Nothing like it. A good barkeep.”

Frank, however, soon proved too busy to talk, and Potter was left to his own thoughts. The effect which liquor usually had on him was to produce three distinct stages. It plunged him first into a dreamy and altogether pleasant condition, in which his lot appeared the rosiest in the world, and he radiated good will on all sides. This led to melancholy and a gradual feeling of boredom with everything, aggravated by a tendency to analyze his wrongs and conduct long, unspoken conversations about them with the persons presumed to be responsible for wronging him. Then followed a feverish desire for physical motion, and the making of quick decisions, obeyed on the instant, however ill-advised.

The first state of high spirits brought him agreeably to six o’clock when he left Steve Ball’s for fear of encountering early drinkers from the Campus. He was hungry and bolted sandwiches and coffee in a nameless lunch-wagon around the corner. He found himself after that in the “Bucket of Blood.” Night had fallen; the place was unspeakably sordid with its dim lamps and shuffling bums, and his problem once more assumed proportions that harried him. He began to assail Ellen for ever having permitted the intimacy to start. Then he quickly reacted from that attack. A profound, overwhelming wave of self-abasement engulfed him. If there was suffering to be done poor Ellen would endure all of it. She had been his victim and had given him what she had to give, in all things. Had their ages been precisely reversed, he could not have been more responsible.

As he ordered another bottle of beer, he became acutely conscious that his money was disappearing. There was no more to be had, certainly for several days. Mails had to take their time, even if there was anything to hope for from them. This sense of impecuniousness made his mind veer to another complicated grievance. In one of the banks at home, held for his use at majority, lay what now seemed an incredible sum of money, from his grandmother’s estate. He had twice entreated his father to allow him to draw modestly on it. His father had not refused in either case, but had probed good-naturedly into his reasons for desiring it. But why, thought the boy, should his father have to know his private business? How could his father understand his peculiar needs? These questions had rankled time and again.

And now, he reflected bitterly, now that the trust fund might be the means of lightening a burden that would follow him all his life, it would be the same old story with his father. He would have to make a full confession of the case. But he could not do this. How could he tell his father such a yarn? Weren’t his whole family concerned as much as he? Was there not a question of blood relationship involving them? Common delicacy and loyal feeling toward them demanded that he conceal the truth, unless he took the burden upon himself and parted with them completely. He had thought all this out before and settled it. There was nothing he could say to his father.

These reflections, repeated over and over again, embroidered upon, attacked at every angle, adorned with many duplications of the same phrases, led nowhere. The bill at the “Bucket of Blood” had to be paid, and nothing was left to do but to get up and go. Well, well, he felt like moving anyhow. If only there were anything he could do now, right now, it would be a relief. He started walking rapidly uptown toward the fraternity house. Then at the corner where Broadway turned into his own street he stopped abruptly.

“What a fool!” he muttered aloud. “What a triple-plated iron-head! Why did I send that money to Ellen? Why didn’t I go myself?” He stopped and began to curse his idiocy with all the eloquence and thoroughness of which he was capable.

Then he reflected, again aloud: “But is it too late? The jerk-water goes over to Jamestown in half an hour. I could make it to Jamestown. But I haven’t enough money to go all the way. Well, I’ve got enough to go to Jamestown.”

The thought of bluffing his way on the through train with a promise to pay at the other end rushed into his mind. His name, his identification by letters in his pocket, his father’s acquaintance with railroad officials, these might carry him through. He turned and started toward the station.

“If I can get home I can raise that money. I can raise it on a note. I can get some Jew like Stern to shave the note. Or maybe I can get it from Colonel Cobb. I’ll bet Colonel Cobb would let me have it.”

This line of reasoning had to be exhausted with the usual number of variations and redundancies as he sat in the little branch train of two cars, with its dusty, worn plush seats, its threadbare blue trainmen ambling back and forth, and its scattering of anonymous, unimportant-looking passengers. Fortunately nobody was leaving town that he knew. That was to be expected six weeks after the opening of term. For the first time, the thought struck him that he himself was bolting, perhaps for several days, without the formality of an excuse from the Dean, without even notifying the men at the house. Ordinarily this would have been a serious infraction of the rules, punishable by suspension.

“I can’t help it,” he thought, “I’ve got to go. If they knew why I guess they’d think so.”

This, however, upon reflection, sounded illogical and inadequate. The danger of trouble with the authorities would not down so easily. There’d be mystery in his disappearance, a search would be made for him in the morning, and a wire probably sent to his folks. A moment later he had the solution. How easy! He could fix that up by telephoning the fraternity from Jamestown. It would cost him a quarter and he’d still have more than a dollar left. He would get old Ed Taylor to see the Dean to-morrow. Some lie would do. Ed could turn the Dean around his finger. Maybe he could keep the whole thing from his father. He could, if he slipped back to town on the next night’s train. If his father got hold of it, he’d be puzzled, want to know things, and this was no time to be submitted to questioning of any kind.

“At the same time,” he pursued, “I’d better not try the through train. Fellows have been pinched for it. They might take me off the train at Fayette, and then, oh, my God....”

A picture rose before him of a night in the county jail, of wiring home for money to pay his fine, of his father coming to Fayette, of scandal untold and unending, and no help to Ellen whatever. Rather the reverse, because he would be in disgrace and his hands, therefore, completely tied for some time to come.

“No, I can’t try the through train. Too big a chance. I wonder how about the freight. Hell, plenty of other fellows have done that, with no worse results than a swipe on the ear or a bawling out. Besides I’ve got a little money. Brakies are all right.”

The wind at that moment coming through the leaky train was devilishly sharp, and he had no overcoat, nothing but his fall-weight suit. It would be still colder later, especially on an unprotected freight car roof, which was the only place he could think of to ride.

“Can’t help it,” he concluded. “It’s got to be the freight. I can get a half pint of rot gut at Jamestown. Keep me warm enough. It’s just a nice little ride in the open air.”

An hour later, with his hat pulled down over his eyes, and his bottle in his breast pocket, Potter stepped from the smoke-draped, kerosene-smelling barroom of the little junction town. By buying a round of beer for two loafers he had obtained the advice and information he wanted. The freight train now resting on tracks just back of those on which the through train was soon expected would pull out for his destination about ten-thirty. He crept down perhaps a half a dozen cars from the station and found himself practically in open country. An overgrown fence lay twenty feet to the side of one of the big, dirty-looking red cars. He sat down in the shadow of the fence to wait, listening to the frogs in the dim, unwelcoming marshes behind him.

Once as he sat there a man ran along the top of the train from the caboose far off at the end of the line of cars and came back. Once just a little before the scheduled hour, he heard cinders being crunched under foot in the direction of the engine. The flashing rays of a lantern, swung from an invisible shoulder, played under the cars and the figure carrying it passed by hurriedly on the other side. At every coupling the lantern was swung up between the cars. Osprey knew now why the roustabouts had told him to lie low and keep away from the train while it was still.

“Wait ’til she gives her first jerk, then grab her and climb like yer momma was after you.”

Whistles shrieked and soon a long, noisy shiver travelled down the length of the cars. Potter jumped for the iron treads closest to him. The train was moving off and he with it. Once on top of the car, he laid full length, making himself as small as possible on the side of the roof farthest from the station, until it should be passed. Beyond the little town he breathed freely, took a comfortable seat on the flat boardway in the centre with his legs dangling over the car’s end, and gripped the rusty steel shaft of the brake.

V

At first he did not mind the bumping, nor the penetrating wind, nor the coldness of the metal on his palms. The occasional showers of cinders were annoying, and this grew worse as the train increased its speed. Nevertheless, he was exhilarated; the motionless friendly stars overhead, the sense of succeeding in a wild and unreasonable adventure gave him courage and high spirits. He only had to stand it for a few hours and a few hours of discomfort never had killed anybody.

Misgivings crept over him gradually. His seat was being severely lambasted by the bumping. It seemed incredible, in a way, how it kept up and the violence of it. The steel bar to which he held grew increasingly cold, yet he realized that come what may he would have to cling to it or stand a chance of falling. The wind became more biting and between it and the bar his fingers were stiffening fast. The cinders, stinging his face with only brief cessations, might soon be unendurable.

However, he argued, he could bear all these for some time, and when he couldn’t bear them any longer, he could do something else, shift his position. He deliberately decided to stand his present one as long as he could, then change and stand the next one as long as he could. In that way each new position would be so much the greater relief. He would see the night through. A long pull at the flask revived him.

“I’ll get my second wind pretty soon,” he thought, “and it won’t be so bad. That flask was an inspiration.”

The night wore on and Potter resorted to first one expedient and then another. He put his right side to the wind and then his left, thus partly protecting his face from the cinders. He wrapped handkerchiefs—fortunately he had two—around his hands. It was no good trying to get a decent hold of his board seat. He didn’t feel secure that way. These makeshifts did not help his sore buttocks, which were being hammered to insensibility, nor keep off the cold which was creeping over his whole body, but they lessened the number of his pains.

Finally he could endure sitting no longer. He laid down first on one side, then on the other, on his belly, and even for a while on his back. He threw his arms around the brake shaft and doubled his body into a bouncing, shaken ball, in order to keep the cold out of his vitals. At the moment when he thought he was beginning to see the end of his endurance the train ambled benevolently to a stop. He breathed a sigh of thanks and drank.

They were on a siding. As the train continued still, for five minutes, for ten minutes, a fresh fear assailed him. He had forgotten about the train crew. The fellow at Jamestown had told him to get off and hide whenever the train stopped.

“You got to do that if yer ridin’ in sight,” he said. Indeed, had the man been a professional tramp instead of a village lounger, he would have scouted the whole idea of riding on top.

But by this time Potter was so stiff and sore in every muscle that he feared being unable to climb back while the train was in motion. The relief from the rushing wind and bumping and cinders was too much. It was too sweet to sit there and recover some use of his limbs, to feel the warm blood in him once more for a brief spell. If he could only smoke or get up and walk about—but that would be dangerously courting attention. He had gone this far, and he would finish it; there was no sense in taking more chances than were necessary.

It was unearthly still. Not a living thing seemed to stir for miles about, over the uninterrupted fields of stubble just visible in the starlight. Even the frogs were silent. Against the sky far off he saw the silhouette of a group of buildings and trees, but they seemed like apparitions in a dream. On the train he was in a separate world, cut off from the other, a lonely world consisting of himself and his thoughts. The long, tapering string of dark cars ahead struck him like a procession of elephants asleep. They were impersonal and cruel, but alive; and presently would begin to sway and lumber frightfully through the murk. With their stopping his life, it seemed, had stopped.

Time went on. They had been there on the siding for fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes. Suddenly he was conscious of a low, blurred humming which rose from the main tracks alongside, and a succession of whistle blasts at a great distance broke the monotony. The buzz of the rails grew louder and the whistles shrieked again. His tussle with discomfort was about to begin once more, but he felt infinitely rested and refreshed. He sat up straight and peered down the tracks for the sight of a headlight.

“Hullo!”

The head and shoulders of a man appeared over the top of the car, followed by a short, wiry body.

“What the hell’s this? How’d you get here?”

“I’ve got to get to Mississippi City, to-night. I’m from the University up at Athens.”

“Don’t care where yer from. This here ain’t no place fer you.”

“Say, old man, you’re not goin’ to put me off now, are you?”

“H’m.” The man leaned over and inspected him familiarly.

“Yeh, you don’t look much like a bum. University up at Athens, eh? I’ve heard some about you God damn loafers, raisin’ hell on trains. Why the Christ can’t you ride in the cars where you belong?”

“Didn’t have the price.”

“No. An’ you think this railroad’s a charity institootion?”

“Say,” pleaded Potter, “honest, this is a life and death matter. It’d be a dirty trick to put a fellow off. Le’ me go the rest of the way, go on.”

The brakeman was obviously relenting. He gazed at Potter’s huddled, unhappy looking figure while the passenger train, like a streak of exploding lights on a whirling black band, shot deafeningly by.

“How far are we, anyway?” asked Potter. “Must be more than half way.”

The brakeman chuckled.

“We ain’t even a third of the way yet. Guess you’ve been plenty cold up here.”

The first sentence fell heavily upon Potter’s spirits.

“Gee, seems longer’n that,” he said, as casually as he could manage.

“Got on at Jamestown, did you?”

“Yes.”

“You got any money?”

“A little,” said Potter eagerly. “I’ll give you all I’ve got.”

He thrust his hand into his pocket and drew it forth with a collection of small change.

“There,” he said, counting it over. “It’s seventy-five cents.”

The brakeman took it.

“That all you got, honest to God?”

“Every cent. I can get more at Mississippi City, though. You going to be there a few hours?”

“Huh,” replied the other, “guess you’ll need breakfast by the time you get in. Ain’t much used to this kind o’ business, eh? Well, here’s coffee money.” He handed back a dime.

“Have a drink, old man?” asked Potter, almost jovially, pulling out his bottle with a distinct feeling of pride.

“Sure.”

The man took a long pull at the depleted flask and returned it almost empty.

“Ach,” he grunted appreciatively. “That’s red eye! Bet you were drunk, boy, an’ thought ridin’ free was a picnic. Well, better come out o’ this and hustle up the track. They’s an empty box car about halfway up. You’ll see it ’cause one door’s open. An’ you’re God damn lucky, son. You’d just naturally a froze a lung off up here an’ maybe fell off an’ got winged. Shake a leg. Just time to make it. An’ hop off well outside the yards when we get to town in the mornin’. Understand? If you don’t you may see the judge.”

Before he had finished speaking Potter was stumbling frantically along the cinder track-side. In one end of the empty car was a little dirty straw and excelsior. Two minutes later he was asleep, jolting happily along the streets of paradise in a royal coach. An old man in a brakeman’s cap whom he took to be the king of the country sat beside him....

A sudden, wrenching jolt and the screaming of brakes woke him. Daylight filled the car, and in a moment he was out on his feet, recognizing the familiar outskirts of his native city. He plunged into the park, striding vigorously along over new-fallen crisp leaves, warming his body, which had been chilled through during his sleep, even in that protected corner. The woods were gay with the last of the autumn colour; the morning was dewy and mysterious under long corridors of trees. His day’s job seemed easy before him, such as it was, and beyond that he was too happy and thankful to speculate. Quite a trip, he thought, thoroughly surprised that he had attempted it and come through all right.

“If I hadn’t got potty, I wouldn’t be here,” he told himself, justifying thereby volumes of alcoholic adventures past and to come.

He looked down at his hands, his trousers, his shirt. He was filthy. It would never do to appear before Colonel Cobb with the grime of a hundred and forty miles of rough travel clinging to him. But this was the home town, good old home town! and he could get breakfast, new linen and a good wash without the outlay of a cent. He took the car downtown and went first to a store, then to a hotel. By ten o’clock he was breakfasting sumptuously and appeared fairly respectable.

Heretofore, Colonel Cobb had seemed in Potter’s mind a sort of complete symbol of good fellowship. The all-weather friend of his father for thirty years, Potter had heard everything there was to know about him that could with discretion be told. He was the old-fashioned type of publicity man, doing business largely through the medium of champagne and dinners. Open-handedness and good nature were traits which a half century of tradition had associated with his name.

A much older man than Potter’s father, Cobb wore a beard which was nearly white, but he was one of those veterans to whom a beard imparted an air of boldness and adventure rather than of piety or age. His costume was youngish, smart-looking, but deeply wrinkled by lounging ease. He greeted the young man cordially in his somewhat unpretentious and disorderly office and indicated an upholstered arm chair to him. Potter sank into it and the old man leaned back in his own to survey him.

“Well,” he said, “Johnny’s boys are growing up. Let’s see, are you the second or the third?”

“Third, Colonel.”

“I know your brother Kirk better’n I do the rest of you. I see a good deal of him up at the Mercantile Club. Kirk’s a good boy and looks to me like he’s goin’ to make his Dad proud. You ain’t old enough to drink whiskey, are you? I guess not this time of the morning, anyway. Well, have a cigar.”

He thrust out a spacious box.

“Colonel,” said Potter, “you may be surprised at what I’m here for. I’m in a kind of a fix, a bad fix, to tell the truth, and I need money. I’ve got twenty-eight hundred in the National Trust but I can’t draw on it for two years, without my father’s consent. I want to get two hundred and fifty dollars on a note for that length of time.”

As he mentioned the amount it seemed so enormous to Potter that he felt a little absurd. He had never handled more than fifty dollars at a time in his life.

“I see. H’m.”

The older man was smoking a well-used meerschaum and took a few puffs on it in silence, looking at Potter quickly once or twice with a more penetrating and appraising glance than at first. The latter noticed, in spite of the Colonel’s genial expression, that his eyes, in reflection, became a very cold and impersonal grey.

“H’m, that’s bad,” said the Colonel. “You see, your pa and me are old pals. Now, why don’t you go over and tell him what the trouble is? There’s nothin’ in the world you could tell John Osprey that he wouldn’t understand. There ain’t a thing, son.”

“I think there is, Colonel,” said Potter gravely.

“Some girl trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Now, I’d say you’re wrong. I’d say he’d be just the kind of man to take that kind of a story to. Your old man has got nothing to learn about human nature, son.”

Potter felt the moment had come for fuller confidence if he hoped to succeed. He had anticipated this objection and intended to combat it by laying stress on his own reasons for not wishing to tell his father. These he felt would make a good impression upon any man. He launched into the broad outlines of his story. Colonel Cobb listened with seriousness and attention until he had finished. When Potter mentioned the manner in which he had come to town that morning his eye lighted up with a spark of the warmth that had marked his first reception.

“H’m,” he chuckled. “I like that. Yep, I used to hop those blamed things myself. Then they got me to workin’ for ’em, and since then I’ve had to ride in style—but I don’t enjoy it as much.”

He ruminated on in silence, puffing at the pipe held in one hand and combing his beard downward with the other, at every stroke or so stopping to scratch the tip of his thrust out chin, and drawing down his lower lip somewhat in the manner of a bitted horse. Potter noticed the long, blackened roots of his teeth, his puffy, reddish skin, and the tiny network of blood vessels and wrinkles that crisscrossed his cheeks around the eyes and nose. He felt a sudden disgust for life, for the rotten universe and for his own silly predicament. He grew restless, wishing for a decision one way or the other, scarcely caring which it should be.

“You’re at college, you said?” asked the Colonel.

“Yes, State University. Two years.”

“How are you doin’ up there in your studies?”

“Well, a little better than the average, Colonel, right along,” said Potter, smiling. It was somewhat less than the truth, yet he regretted the words immediately, as a boast. But the Colonel did not mind.

“That’s good,” he said, heartily.

He lurched forward in his big leather swivel chair and laid down his pipe.

“The way I figure it out is this,” he said. “If you know that there’s two of us to get into trouble over this money, instead of one, you maybe will be more careful not to do the wrong thing with it, so it will get out. As for what’s the wrong thing I leave that to you. I’m goin’ to take a chance on John Osprey’s skinnin’ me alive if he hears about this transaction, and I guess there ain’t much likelihood of his hearin’ about it from you or me, is there?”

He ponderously drew out a long black check-book, inked the pen and looked at it, inked it again and wrote. Potter received the slip of paper with its figures written in a big, round buccaneer’s Spencerian. His fingers trembled in spite of himself.

“But, Colonel,” he began, suddenly feeling a sense of guilt.

“I don’t want a note,” interrupted Cobb, lifting his rotund body by the arms of his chair. “The check’s enough. If you don’t pay me, I’ll send it around to you some day, when you’re rich, and you can light your cigar with it or pay, just the way you please. It’s made out to cash, so’s you won’t have any trouble gettin’ the money, but you just write your name along the back when you get to the bank. Good luck, son.”

With the money actually in his pocket, Potter’s despondency abruptly returned. After all, what had he accomplished? The money was useless so far as restoring Ellen to her normal self was concerned. Much more—a simply unrealizable sum—would be needed to enable her to go away in peace and have her child with dignity and comfort. At best, this would only pay the price of a crime....

He found her in much the same mood as his own, tired and resigned. She did not complain or accuse any one at all. But she seemed aching with dull resentment at the inevitable, friendless future, hating it and fearing it. She told him directly that she was not to have an operation. Dr. Schottman had warned that in her case it meant an exceptional risk. Her health was not good and having the baby would put her in fine shape.... Potter felt the sting of a lash in every word she uttered. He burst out at last.

“Ellen, you must marry me. You must. There’s no other way out.”

She did not laugh at him, but she simply refused to heed him. If she had consented he would have felt in that moment infinitely happier; and for even a ray of light in his present darkness, he would have abandoned a great many of the future’s promises.

“But what will you do?”

“Dr. Schottman has arranged everything for me. He’s to take me to a hospital in a few weeks. I could wait a month or two longer, I suppose, without their knowing it, but I might as well go. At the hospital I’ll have to work, until my time. Then he’s fixed it with some people for me to stay. They won’t mind anything. He’s told them all about me. They’re patients of his, nice people and well off. The Meadowburns will never know anything, they’ll never see me again. Not even the doctor knows about you and nobody will if you keep still. I’m just to walk out and disappear.”

Potter stumbled down the stairway of the pretentious new Meadowburn house in a daze of misery and meanness. Nightfall found him lying face downward in the dried leaves of the park where the woods were thickest. He might have built his house there and never have been discovered for a generation. He might have become like “Clothes-pole Tom,” a hermit hero of his childhood, and sold gopher skins for a living. Some such method of losing himself would have been sweet....

But youth walks forward even though it harbours corroding secrets. He could not escape the vision of Ellen in a hospital uniform, worn and broken-spirited, carrying heavy buckets of dirty water and swabbing down floors with a mop. He went back to college, lifeless and desperate, whipping himself into work with torturing thoughts. By January even his family saw something was wrong, and his father, who saw farthest, told him to make his own plans, to leave school and go where he liked. After a week of dismal idleness at home there followed a telegraphic correspondence with Roget. The two started off together to New York. Three years later, crossing the Atlantic to Paris, Osprey still had not returned to his native city, and he repeated his oath never to go back there again if it could be avoided.

VI

What Ellen Sydney had expected to be her trial by fire proved quite the opposite. It was the beginning of a new and kinder life. For if she had been unhappy at the Meadowburns’ it was because of a deep-seated difference between her own native impulses and those of her keepers. Long habit in a narrow rut, listening daily to a cautious and inglorious philosophy, had fostered in her the belief that the great world outside was monstrous and cruel; but she did not find it so. On the contrary, there were many to appreciate her cheerful courage and ready laugh, and return it with affection. Life at the hospital was novel and filled with congenial activity. Behind its unmoral walls was an anonymous and practical community in which her shame quickly melted from her daily thoughts. After the first few days of strangeness and mutual curiosity she saw that none cared how she had come by her situation. Nor were her duties burdensome; without the normal occupation they gave her she would have been ill at ease.

The picture of a drab and bitter Ellen, clattering about a sordid environment with pail and mop—which gave Potter so many secret twinges in his New York room—never came true.

She interested herself in the patients, most of whom she discovered to her surprise were even less able to cope with misfortune than she; the small purse which Dr. Schottman allowed her from the funds Potter had given her was always half open. The many varieties of mothers, and the innumerable enchanting babies fascinated her; but no more so than the coming of her own. As the weeks went by her condition, the manifestations of life within her, gave her increasing importance. It made her for the first time interesting to herself. She thought that she grew more attractive. Her body, long attenuated, took on softer contours under the wholesome diet and freedom from responsibility; her breasts were her particular pride. They changed magically; from stubby protrusions without any character at all, they grew round and firm as they had not been since girlhood.

Then there were the visits of Dr. Schottman. His humorous sallies dispelled in a moment the few worries that came with the long days of waiting. He brought scant news of the Meadowburns, not seeming to care to talk of them. They had been very eager to find her at first, had made a great stir and called upon the police. Then, as suddenly as they took up the search, they had dropped it.

“Ah, they didn’t care much, you may be sure,” laughed Ellen. It was far from displeasing to her to know that she need not depend upon them. But immediately she remembered that it was the doctor to whom she owed her present good fortune, not herself; and she felt remorseful.

To Schottman, the hospital seemed to be something of a continuous comedy, and all these mothers, many of them abandoned, caught unwillingly in the grip of natural force, were the victims of a mild practical joke. How much of this was a pose which he found useful in dealing with them, and how much of it a mask to hide a disillusioning experience nobody knew, but it never gave offence. His homely grin and bracing philosophy made him a favourite everywhere.

When she held her child in her arms for the first time a momentary grief oppressed her that it should be fatherless. But the child grew far more pleasing to look at than she had hoped it would be. Its dark hair and unexpected blue eyes made it look unlike either herself or Potter at first. Then a vague resemblance asserted itself, and more strongly on the mother’s side. This seemed right to Ellen. The less her daughter resembled the father she was never to see, the better.

Before long she was allowed to take it out in the perambulator Schottman had bought for her. The hospital was located in a bleak, northern section of town, a region long associated in Ellen’s mind with the foreign population, principally German, and much sniffed at by people of the West End where she had lived. She remembered how depressing that day had been when they first drove to the hospital, through wintry streets between endless rows of low-roofed, packed-in brick houses and frame cottages. They had a humbler and more domestic air than she was used to, and gave forth odors of strong cookery, stale lager and of musty parlours seldom opened to the air. But the four months of hospital life in their midst had accustomed her to these exotic touches, and when the people began to overflow into the streets at the first hint of warm weather and to take a kindly interest in her child, she felt drawn to them. It amused her to have them think, as they sometimes did, that she was the nurse or governess.

It was a mistake, perhaps natural, that Dr. Schottman at least viewed with satisfaction. The little girl’s charm would serve his purpose with the Blaydons to whom he was taking them. He had never entertained any doubt that Ellen would win them in her own way. Her willingness and modesty, a form of rough good breeding, would recommend her well. But if the child should be really attractive, so much the better for everybody.

“Come now,” he teased Ellen, “this little chick has a high tone about her. What you think? Better let me hunt up the young scapegrace and show him what a handsome little rascal he’s responsible for.”

“How do you know he’s young?” laughed Ellen. He had never pressed the question of fatherhood, and she was not afraid that he would ever try to.

“And what will you name it? For it’s mother, eh?”

Ellen had settled that matter. She had decided long before on the name of Moira, for Moira McCoy, the pretty, laughing, assistant head nurse, who had been the first to befriend her. But concerning this she also chose to keep her counsel for the present. Another thing troubled her mightily.

“Are these—these people I’m going to live with Episcopalians?”

He laughed.

“I believe there’s a division in the family. Ach, these Christian distinctions! They split God up into small pieces like a pie, and each one takes a different slice. They are afraid to get indigestion from too much goodness, eh? But ‘Aunt Mathilda’—that is the sister-in-law—is Episcopalian. High church they call it. Oh, very high! It will suit you that way, I guess. And she is the boss. You’ll find that out.”

High church. That would do very well. It was the serious question of her daughter’s christening that disturbed her.