Transcriber’s note: Table of Contents added by Transcriber.

CONTENTS

THE WASTED GENERATION

By Owen Johnson

Lawrenceville Stories

The Prodigious Hickey
The Varmint
The Tennessee Shad

Stover at Yale
The Spirit of France
The Woman Gives
Virtuous Wives
The Wasted Generation
Making Money
The Sixty-first Second

THE
WASTED GENERATION

BY
OWEN JOHNSON

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1921

Copyright, 1921,
By Owen Johnson.
All rights reserved
Published September, 1921

TO
HUGH WALPOLE
IN FRIENDSHIP AND IN ADMIRATION

THE WASTED GENERATION

PART I

I

August, 1916

I am thirty this day, the twenty-ninth of August, 1916. The guns are roaring along the Somme front. Another great attack is on. The gray waves are passing over the top for the thousandth time and, for the thousandth time, hope is in the air once more. I feel it in the sudden optimism of the daily bulletin, in the groups in the market-place, in the little knot of evacués, here in a Savoyard courtyard, basking in the sun and studying the winding line of pins on the yellowed map of the front.

“Brigadier David Littledale, Légion Etrangère, Croix de Guerre, wounded at Verdun, March 5th, shell wound in the shoulder and the leg, shell-shock and gangrene. Entered Val de Grace, March 21st, evacuated on Chambèry, July 10th, 1916.”

The record used to hang at the foot of my bed beside the fever chart and the record of operations. From Chambèry, here into a rest area, to put on flesh again, to quiet my jumping nerves and to fatten up for the return to the front. To-day I have no desire to hasten that return. I write it down frankly,—as I intend to keep honesty with myself and my impressions. There are other times when I feel the tug and fret to be back. It is my mood to-day, as war is a succession of unrelated moods.

This morning I ask no more of life than to continue here at my open window in the buzzing month of August, looking down on a drowsy world in animal content. A pipe of tobacco and the noonday meal—Pinard, pommes de terre frites, and perhaps a ragout with a touch of onions—all these simple joys to my keen senses seem the limit of human desires.

There is a touch of ivy at my window; below, the courtyard is flagged and the red-tiled, shovel-hatted Savoyard roofs throw sharp blue shadows across the glowing yellow pavement. Bompard, an old territorial, is peeling potatoes in the door frame. Coustic and Valentin, of the Chasseurs Alpins, are quarreling good-humoredly over a game of Manille, and old Canache, of the Bat d’Af, is baking in the chaise-longue, kepi over his nose, and a thin stream of smoke twining upward like Jack’s beanstalk. A mottled setter is flat on his side; a kitten plays with its toes; over the pink roofs the Col du Chat strikes into the skies with its brass cross blazing in the sun, and I say to myself, incredulously, that on the Northern Front cannon are roaring, men pitting themselves against machines, as the long trains of wounded begin to move our way,—into one of which at some near day I shall step and return to the Legion.

A buxom, tow-headed girl comes clattering into the courtyard, draws a pail of water and moves sinuously out. An exchange of jests, and we watch her go. She is more than a woman. She is woman. She represents that incredible other life to us, the dream life that runs at night with the will-o’-the-wisps along the trenches; violins and dancing under southern harvests; wet beaches and a glowing Normandy hearth; lights on the boulevards; children’s voices; an old couple waiting on a doorstep,—many things to many men! To me it brings back a stranger of four years and some months ago,—David Littledale, of Littledale, Connecticut; an old, rambling, red-sided house under the elms; a household of young people, frolicking; a girl’s face,—a first love; Ben, Alan, and Rossie, and one tomboy, shock-haired sister, Molly, galloping up the avenue on Pinto, the cow pony.

* * * * *

Will I ever go back to it and, if I do, will all this pass away like the frantic shadow that blots out the valley when thunder clouds come stampeding down the Col du Chat? Will the old life come out again, as the countryside returns, brilliant and glistening, sunlight and shadow, balanced and friendly? Is war an incident, or an education that remains? To tell the truth, I have seldom thought on such things,—never in the line of duty.

In resigning my will I am conscious of having resigned my imagination. The future is so indecipherable that it is rather a relief to say to one’s self:

“Nothing that I can do, say or think, except obey orders, can have the slightest effect on what is fated to happen.”

After two years war ceases to be an experience: it becomes a journey to be traveled in the shafts of the inevitable. I have gone through it, inspired, thrilled, grumbling, skeptical, rebellious, joking mechanically, but always, at the last test, obedient to the hidden power in the machine that decides my every act.

* * * * *

Why have I fallen back on this introspective mood in these emerging days of convalescence? I think it is as a refuge from the cafard,—a feeling of after all being a stranger in a strange land. Perhaps it has a basis in physical weakness,—perhaps simply inaction: inaction which is so demoralizing. To-day I have a longing to be back—to rub elbows with my own people—to be no longer “l’Americain” but an American among Americans.

For there is always this difference between me and Coustic and Valentin, sons of the mountain side; Canache, Apache and filcher of the gutters; Bompard, tiller of Normand soil: they are fighting for something bigger than themselves that at times raises them to heights of heroic eloquence, that obliterates the present and joins them to their forbears of the brave days of old: Grognards, Sans Culottes, Chevaliers and bearded Gauls. While I, I am fighting alone, for love of a man’s adventure, in order to find myself. I am alone, for, much as I love their country, it is theirs,—not mine.

* * * * *

Yet, if I cannot entirely possess this deep spirit of nationalism, it has been the most satisfying experience of my haphazard, drifting life to live among those who did. You cannot understand the poilu with your ears alone.

Blagueur, critique, sceptique (bluffer, critic and skeptic)—I have lived two years with them, poilu myself by the grace of rags and dirt, by a thousand sworn oaths never to move a further inch. I have sung with them in the slimy trenches of the first winter. I have cursed their commanders and sat on their boards of strategy. I have doubted, rebelled, grumbled, and denied my leader and,—at the zero hour, surged up and gone over the top.

* * * * *

I went into the war, heaven knows, wearied of my kind and of myself, disillusioned with man, seeking men. I have found what I sought. I have found and I understand them,—men, the mass, the race, which moves on, slowly, irresistibly, without inner questionings, doing what must be done. Above all, I have known the love of the Fatherland, the faith of the humble, handed down at simple hearths,—the will to remain, whatever the cost, French. Well, if I am fated to lie in No-man’s-land, I am honestly thankful to have known life at its simplest, its keenest, and to have served some purpose.

* * * * *

Blagueur, critique, sceptique, but, at the call of duty,—ready. Often have I marveled at the soul of the poilu, the bit of sunlight that abides in it—the love of the beautiful—the answering thrill when a hero leads; that inexhaustible reserve, at the bottom of which miracles wait! Yesterday the answer came, and it illumined the dark places.

At lunch we were discussing the prospects of going back, that and the end of the war are, of course, the daily topics. Canache launched on his favorite tirade against the embusqués; Paris was full of them; the hospitals were full of them; twenty miles behind the front they were as thick as berries; before they sent back the older classes who had been shot to pieces once already, let them clean out the embusqués! As for him, Canache, he would refuse to go,—like that, flat! He’d demand justice; he’d tell a few names, and he ended by spitting contemptuously on the flagging, and exclaiming:

“Sale Gouvernement!”

Coustic, who wore the Military Medal and the Croix de Guerre, humored the old rogue, knowing well the heart of iron behind the froth. But, as a poilu, he would have been a traitor to his kind not to grumble. For the poilu has a fixed attitude: everything is wrong, from top to bottom: the government, the leaders; the commissariat, especially; the civilians, always. And, always, the poilu, despite injustice, favoritism, neglect and inefficiency, is there to save the day! Valentin wagged his head wisely and swore that every word was gospel. Bompard alone remained mute, buried in his bread and cheese.

“Well, old grunter, what do you say to all this?” I said, addressing him.

“Me?” Bompard’s face is the purple of the grape; he has a long sweeping moustache and his eyes disappear behind shaggy eyebrows.

“Yes, you. What’ll you do if you have to go back?”

“Bah! What’s the use of words,” he said contemptuously; “if we have to go back, we’ll go. If we’ve got to fight, we’ll fight. That’s all there is to it. We’ll do our duty—the same as the others—perhaps, the same, perhaps, a little better. Que diable! Nous avons du sang français dans nos artères, et le sang français ne ment pas!”

The revolt died. Canache’s eyes flashed. He was back at the front, spitting Boches and swearing horribly. Coustic and Valentin, ashamed to have been caught in a cheap insincerity, sat up under the reproof, the good red blood of France mounting to their cheeks. Bompard had found the phrase. At that moment, had the hated little town major stuck his head through the postern and cried, “Volunteers, to go immediately to the front!” we would have risen, as one man, and cried:

“Ready!”

* * * * *

So our leaders talk to us who understand us. A phrase—something to fire the imagination—something to exalt the heart—something to throw defiantly from the lips in the cauldron of battle—a phrase to the poilu is worth an army or ten thousand cannon!

It was with a phrase that we won at Verdun and rolled the Hun back from the Marne.

“Mourir sur place! Debout les morts! Ils ne passeront pas!” The whole war is there. And to me who heard it, the phrase which fell unconsciously from old Bompard’s lips,—“French blood never lies!” makes the rest comprehensible.

It is something to have the right to a phrase like that.

II

Yesterday, when I began these notes, it was more as a caprice than from any conviction that I would continue them. Yet to-day, I find myself to my surprise filled with a certain eagerness. During the night the thought came to me that it would be interesting to attempt an absolutely honest portrayal of myself, setting down everything, small and great, the good and the bad, as it occurred.

A classmate I met at Harvard (I cannot remember his name) once said to me, casually:

“The man who has the courage to write down day by day the true record of his life, concealing nothing, excusing nothing, without attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, putting down the sublime and the ridiculous, the mud that soils his feet as he contemplates the stars, the struggle, the inconsistencies, the little basenesses, the hypocrisies that make him virtuous—the man who will dare arraign himself before the pitiless bar of his own judgment—will leave an immortal book. But no one has ever confessed, and no one ever will.”

I never forgot this remark. It determined a whole course of mental speculation, fortunately or unfortunately, for it threw me into a period of introspection which at times verged perilously close to a melancholia, which might have been fatal had I not had in my sound body the corrective of an intense animal delight in life and an abounding curiosity for adventure. Since then, I have read copiously in the so-called confessions that line the shelves of intimate libraries, and I have recognized the essential truth of the dictum. Even Jacques Casanova who, in the effrontery of his brilliant record of a master-rogue, seems to have approached the stark verity of a confession, has moments of colossal vanity, in which he cannot resist the temptation to pose as an honest man. As for the famous confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, they confess nothing at all except perhaps the author’s desire to pass as a great man.

* * * * *

It may be that a sentiment of vanity alone is the impulse which has determined me to this attempt; yet I do not think it is entirely that,—except as vanity is a natural and healthy quality and is allied to ambition. What is ambition? Is it not an instinctive rebellion against the little term of existence which is accorded to us, the soul’s struggling against mortality,—the longing to leave something behind us so that we shall not be utterly snuffed out?

* * * * *

Of such ambition I am conscious. If two years voyaging over the stormy paths of war has left me with a new conception of the flotsam value of my life against the great currents of human destiny, it has robbed death of half its terrors. Death has seemed such a casual thing. Yet, at other times, there comes a swift, passionate revulsion towards living,—a need of not entirely passing out of the memory of those who have known us. This is the explanation, I believe, of the multitude of little diaries, often but a jumble of hasty notes jotted down on the eve of an attack; an impression of incredulous delight after deliverance out of the agony of battle; a last cry of the soul, scribbled in a shell hole under the flaming winds of a bombardment; a final struggling to leave something that will remain,—something tangible beyond a memory that recedes. It is this instinct, I think, which I obey. We are all more or less fatalists; and I, for my part, feel that my end will come in the moving ranks—some day—sooner or later—but inevitably. There were those who were certain they would pass unscathed out towards the unimaginable dawn, who died at my side, by a grim freak of fate that left me living. Yet my fatalism is unshaken. I am neither sadder nor happier for it: I accept it as the final explanation of my presence here.

* * * * *

Before estimating my past conduct or proceeding to a critical analysis of the future, I may as well take stock of Mr. David Littledale, as he stands to-day.

Physically the damage done is trifling and soon repaired. The shoulder is as good as new. The leg will carry a limp for some time to come. The effects of the gas are rapidly departing, and in another two months my nerves should come again under complete control.

Outwardly I am a typical Littledale, of a family of fighting men and militant preachers. There never was a Littledale who did not have three marked characteristics; the straight bushy line of the eyebrows, the low cropped hair over the forehead, and the mouth cut like an inverted sickle. The stark ruggedness of the jaws of our Puritan ancestry has been softened with easier generations but the faces run lean and brown and muscled. The ears are particularly my own and have a defiant way of leaving the head that has earned a score of insulting nicknames.

As a family we are not given to gayety, rather over-serious, I am afraid; tenacious, introspective, seldom shining in conversation, listeners rather than debaters, realists and traditionalists,—though occasionally a dreamer, like my brother Alan, comes into the family, rebels, breaks away, and disappears restlessly into the outer world.

* * * * *

To take stock of myself mentally is not so easy. I have received the deplorable education of the day. Everything that possibly could be done was done to make me hate the pursuit of knowledge. I am, indeed, an excellent example of the signal failure of American education,—the failure to provide for the utilization of a developed type. My father and my grandfather and his father before him were brought up to public service as the result of a system of society and education which demanded service of them. What, all at once, has happened to our generation? We had everything to make us leaders, family traditions, unlimited opportunity and undoubted energy; yet the only result that I can see of our education has been either to divert our unquestioned energy towards a heaping up of material comforts or to make of us triflers and dilettanti; in a word, parasites. It may have been our fault, but I think it was deeper,—the fault of national thinking. Undoubtedly, in the future, the irresistible forces which mold a nation will bring order into the multiplicity of confused movements which now dominate us. But as I look back, even from my short retrospective, and see myself and my brothers, I can give but one judgment. We are a generation wasted.

* * * * *

I am at that point in my life when traditions fall away; when a man, educated as I have been, suddenly finds himself alone, wandering through a vast valley of doubt, seeking, with the instinct that is in men for order, to recreate in stone the house of cards which has just fallen about him.

What do I really believe? What of my education remains after the test of experience? I was taught certain principles of morality, certain judgments on conduct, given certain standards of right and wrong. Virtue must bring its own reward and the wages of sin is death.

After a few years’ contact with the world, I find myself completely mystified. Perhaps I have been too often behind the scenes and must pay the penalty of disillusionment. I was given certain principles of common honesty,—and I have seen great criminals exalted because they either stole on a grandiose scale or procured others to steal for them. True, I have heard many unflattering judgments passed on these financiers, privately, but these criticisms seemed to proceed more from an instinctive envy, and I seldom found that they interfered in the least with the successful rogue’s power in the community. I was given certain sharp distinctions between good women and bad. In the cosmopolitan society which I knew in Paris, I saw those who were surest of their position flagrantly and insolently defying all public criticism. I have never found, in my occasional contact with women of the demimonde, the libertinage that I have met with in certain of the most exalted spheres of society.

My grandfather was Senator and a member of the National Cabinet. My great-grandfather was one of the founders of the nation. My father, as judge of the Circuit Court, has been in intimate touch with public men and party politics. The ideal of public leadership I have always regarded reverently and yet, on closer contact, I have discovered that the leaders who were like demigods to my young imagination were capable of underhand trafficking for office and midnight deals with repellant political tricksters that seemed to me to place them on a level with political fences,—receivers of stolen political goods. Puritan I am and shall always be, so long as the heart of a child, which abides in every man, remains open. Yet I have been wandering along pagan roads, seeking new readjustments, which do not satisfy me, as I at first believed.

* * * * *

There may be a deeper truth than I have uncovered below the shallow surface of my experience. There must be, though I have not yet had the vision to perceive it,—unless it be by renouncing the class into which I was born and seeking new elements of faith in closer contact with the great simple mass of humanity which remains vitally significant and predestined, through the saving grace of struggle.

* * * * *

Yet do I believe, whole-heartedly and without reservation, in Democracy? I am not sure. Certainly, not in the demoralization into which I see it now wandering. Not if it means Democracy at the price of inefficiency, rejection of self-discipline, and the negation of real leadership. The vital principle, to me, is the equalization of opportunity. Yet with it there must be an aristocracy of achievement and an ability to recognize the quality of leadership in exceptional men,—without which Democracy is no better than a rabble.

* * * * *

If I should announce such ideas in the rigid formalism of my Littledale home, I would be regarded, I know, as an intellectual pariah. But I am not seeking to impose my ideas on others. I am setting them down in a moment of intellectual luxury, for my own self-education; that is, as I perceive them through this vista of isolation, when old commonplaces come into a new significance.

* * * * *

To-day there is a great yearning inside me, allied with a new feeling of homesickness. I long to go to the home that is denied me. The air which I have breathed these long two years has been extraordinarily vital. I have lived with humanity at its keenest. With all the sodden realism of war, with all its inconsistencies of detail, its mingled brutality and heroism, it has been a privilege to have known its rare moments of exaltation. I have known my kind as they are, as my friends in the courtyard below are,—inconsistent and frail, selfish, avaricious, sunk in mere animal passions of living; but I have seen a sudden flaming vision of sacrifice exalt them above the brute, as I have known Christian and Pagan to offer themselves on the cross of their own suffering that their race might go on living.

III

September

Sunday evening.

This morning I attended Mass with Coustic and Valentin, who are very religious. (The others are not.) I like the solemnity and the calm of the old Cathedral, the footsteps that slip past lost in the obscurity, the candle-points that punctuate the darkness without illuminating it, the sense of repose, beauty, meditation. Yet, every time I enter a church now and see the cross, my memory returns to another crucifixion, to a man who was not divine, yet who never flinched in his sacrificial agony.

* * * * *

His name was Jules Fromentin, and a worse rascal did not exist in the company. He had been a deserter in the Argentine, but he had his code. And, somewhere in the bottom of his muddied philosophy was the love of France. He caught the first steamer, claimed foreign citizenship, and enlisted in the Legion. One night, in the spring of 1915, when we held the trenches at the foot of the Notre Dame de Lorette slopes, working towards Ablain St. Nazaire, a scouting detail was caught between the lines and wiped out. Fromentin, alone, wounded to the death, was left hanging on an advanced section of our barbed wire, to which he had struggled. To attempt a rescue was humanly impossible. We had made an advance the night before, and another was expected. The Boches, on the qui vive, kept the night luminous with rockets and drooping flares. No head could have appeared for an instant above the trench in the illuminated night. At that, only the authority of our commander held us in. I can remember still our feeling of horror and of rage as we crouched helplessly in the whipped-around trench and listened with the cold sweat starting up our backs. Fromentin was singing,—a ribald marching song, an unprintable thing, salacious and vilifying the Boches. From time to time a bullet reached home. Then the song ceased, and a defiant voice cried:

“Touché! Vive la France!”

He lay there, suffering untold tortures—a man, and not a god—without hope or faith, passing through the sacrificial agony, and yet, hour after hour:

“Touché! Sales Boches! Vive la France!”

Then, at dawn, a final bullet, more merciful than the rest.

“Touché! Ah—” And silence.

When we got to him, two days later, there were twenty-two bullet wounds in him.

* * * * *

I put it down reverently, and reverently I compare that crucifixion that is a symbol of mankind dying for an ideal with the divine agony on Calvary. The agony was equal but no certainty of Paradise opened before the man, unless there came a glorified vision we could not share. Often, in the drab weariness of war, the sodden fatigue, the brutalizing of the instincts and the weakening of the spirit, I go back to the lingering horror and sublimity of that night and cling to my symbol. For me every crude wooden cross that rises in the fields has this human replica of the Calvary.

* * * * *

The strange thing, or perhaps the natural thing, is that I have little inclination to write about the war. It is rather myself in its past progression and the self which has come out of the reaction of the war which interests me.

* * * * *

For the war is not a logical sequence in my memory. It is a jumble and confusion of reiterated notes, endless movement, hunger, drenching, cold. Only a few scenes detach themselves,—a very few. When I recall the mobilization, I hear only one voice in the surge and roar of hysterical multitudes crowding down to the departing trains at the Gare du Nord,—a child’s voice, saying:

“Non, non, mamma,—don’t cry. Be brave,—till he’s gone!”

* * * * *

I seldom remember definite details, any particular dawn breaking after the night of vigil, or the shrinking waiting of any one bombardment. It is all one stretching gray line of sky; a tireless to and fro of men and horses; the same broken line of trenches, a monotony of slime and sleety rain; and all this is confused, as though I were struggling upward through swirling, roaring bodies of water. Repetition has dulled the perceptions. I am conscious only of fatigue, of unending beating against the ears, of vigils under stars that never sink, of marching,—yes, here one vivid impression always returns. It is one of those memories that enter into the phantasmagoria of the night.

I am back again in the ranks, that have been marching for days. Some one—the comrade at my left—says:

“Mon vieux?”

“What is it?”

“I want to sleep a little.”

“Pass over your rifle.”

Then he places his arm about my neck and the same to the comrade on the other side, and presently I hear him begin to snore; marching, and dead asleep,—until we wake him up and another takes his place.

* * * * *

What else comes out of the blur? The red smile of a comrade who lay grinning at me in a shell hole all one mortal day. I remember no one night, but I remember distinctly Night in the trenches,—the winging bullets, the occasional rocket, the rising, lumbering whirl of a trench mortar, the sudden digging in against the damp wall, a breathless wait, and then, somewhere up the line, an explosion, and a shriek:

“Ah, Jésu!”

* * * * *

But all this is the confusion of drifting fog. Out of the months in the Val de Grace I can see but two faces,—the provocative smile of a nurse, as a doctor whispered in her ear amid the groans and delirium of a Senegalese dying beside me, and another, the face of an old, ugly woman, strangely devoted and untiring,—an old woman on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floors for us, who, I was told, was a Princess of the House of Bourbon.

Only these details come back to me. The war is too near and too inevitable. I wish to escape it, if not entirely, for a brief period. For inaction is what is demoralizing now, inaction and the contemplation of the approaching fact. The moment convalescence ends and I step again into the ranks and feel the touch of a comrade’s shoulder, before that accomplished fact, all will seem obvious again,—but not now. All my instinct now is to put from me this thing that approaches so relentlessly.

* * * * *

Two periods of my life stand out; the calm of the early home days, and the disorder of two years in Paris; two utterly, inexplicably different David Littledales; on whom now I, a third personality, can look with some dispassionate estimate.

IV

October

A budget of letters with a touch of home has sent me back to my diary this morning, which, as I feared, I have neglected these last weeks. At the time these letters had been written no word had reached them of my having been wounded at Verdun, and as I sat recalling the thousand details of our daily life, I imagined how the family would receive the news.

Nothing could be more characteristic of the Littledale family than its departure to worship on Sunday morning. We are organized on the theory of absolute liberty of conscience in matters religious as well as political. My mother and Ben departed in one direction for the Unitarian Church, Aunt Janie to the Congregational, and my father, Molly and myself for the little Presbyterian chapel in the village square. Rossie, the privileged character of the family, remained in that state of suspended judgment which permitted him to lengthen the Sunday morning rest. No asperities, no dissensions resulted from this opposition of views. In fact, each Littledale was a little proud of the family’s individualism, regarding it as the inherited trait of a strong intellectual strain.

We were four brothers and a sister, and all as different as one day is from another. Because of my mother’s public interests and her theories on individualism, we were brought up with small restraint, along lines of our own choosing. Alan, the third of the line, was the rebel of the family. As I look back, I can see where the mistakes were all on the part of Ben and myself. Wild, impatient of restraint, Alan certainly was, yet the rough discipline which the older brother inflicted was the worst method of dealing with him. The two never understood each other. Every idea and every instinct was opposed and each in his way was remarkably unyielding in type.

While Rossie was alive, he and Molly, through their good humor and affection, were able to hold the insurgent in check, but after Rossie’s tragic drowning matters went from bad to worse. Alan quickly assumed the traditional rôle of the family black sheep.

In every respectable family of New England there is, I suppose, always that predestined place. It had been so in my father’s generation and in the generation before him. We all, with the exception of Molly, who was too young to have an opinion, expected that Alan would sooner or later disgrace the family, and as we did not conceal from him the state of our convictions he did his best to justify them. After being expelled from two schools and dragged into college by the application of every family influence, there came the final storm. In his sophomore year he became involved in a disgraceful row which reached the columns of the metropolitan press. Alan was permitted to resign, returned home, had a violent scene with Ben and my father, and departed, vowing never to set foot in the family home again. That we were all unjust to him admits of no doubt—I among the rest—but at that time I was completely under the influence of Ben, who was three years my senior.

* * * * *

I have left my brother Ben until the last: utterly different from me in temperament, impulse and character, he exercised over me the strongest domination. From boyhood we had been inseparable. Study came laboriously to him, to me naturally, so, despite the difference in age, we passed through school and college together. Mentally I was his superior but he exercised over me a moral supremacy by the direct and ruthless expression of his will. His strength lay in the fact that he was diverted by no complexities. He had little imagination, read little, and talked less. The two or three ideas which guided him were settled convictions. Nothing perplexed him. In all things he was a direct force.

I have noticed the same phenomenon in later life. Men of little imagination and small mental baggage often dominate men of superior imagination by the sheer tenacious simplicity of never being in doubt of what they want. As I see them now, Alan was revolt and Ben traditionalism in its most rigid New England form. He was born to maintain what was as it had been, a mid-Victorian in his tastes, a Bourbon in his ideas,—quite capable, in another era, of burning witches at the stake.

For better or for worse, our destinies have been tragically intertwined,—how tragically, I alone know. His code of morality would not have looked well in copy books but, such as it was, it did have the advantage of sincerity and a contempt for hypocrisy as he saw it in others.

To fight hard and fairly on any question; to do as he believed every man of breeding did in months of relaxation, but never to surrender the control of one’s self or to be moved out of one’s calm by any wind of passion; to take women as they came, lightly; but never to lie to them or descend to petty meanness, or to become involved in situations which compromised your dignity: this was a code which savored rather of the condottieri of the Middle Ages than of the Puritan traditions he represented. Yet he saw in it no inconsistencies and, as men go (and as I have known them), the code had certain qualities of noblesse oblige. I have since turned from this insolent egotism but for a long time it influenced my attitude towards life and brought me close to disaster. Yet, by establishing this moral tyranny, Ben saved me from what would have been the shipwreck of my life.

* * * * *

At the age of eighteen, in the summer of my Sophomore year, I fell madly, foolishly in love with the daughter of a farmer back of Littledale, Jenny Barnett, a handsome little country girl, red-cheeked, black-haired, and gray-eyed, the beauty of the county. Looking back now, I can understand many things,—particularly with the subsequent career of Jenny before me, but then I was an extremely innocent youngster, whose head turned at a look from the gray eyes in the warm odors of June, and it would never have entered my imagination to entertain the slightest suspicion of her. She, on her side, perceiving what a greenhorn she had to deal with, made up her shrewd little mind to set her cap for me. Before I knew it, I had lost so completely all perspective that I seriously considered a runaway match.

To-day it is all so incredible that I ask myself if I could have proceeded so far, if, in the last test, a saving grain of common sense would not have halted me, and I like to reason that I was but playing with an idea, deceiving myself as much as the girl. Yet I do not know that this is a fair estimate, for I have seen so much of what men do under the narcotic impulse of passion, even against their own will and intelligence, that I am not certain I might not have played the fool,—without the interception of my brother.

In my simplicity I had gone to him with my confidence. I can still see the shock of amazement on his face. Then he remained silent a long moment, his eyes on my face.

“Absolutely sure you want to marry?”

“Oh, absolutely,” I said, yet my heart sank as though I had pronounced my own sentence.

“And the girl,—Jenny? Absolutely sure she loves you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, you’re making a fool of yourself, but that’s your affair. I’ll see you through, that’s promised.”

His words brought me no joy. A cloud settled before my eyes. At the end of half an hour, as though his mind had been made up, he questioned me adroitly as to our relations, our place of meeting, our next rendezvous. All of which information I gave him, without mistrust. The second day he came to me and said:

“What are you doing this afternoon? Nothing? Wait for me in Talbot’s wood, by the old spring. I’ve got a line on a honey tree. Meet me at four.”

“At four. I’ll be there,” I answered, not without surprise.

I installed myself in the wood at the appointed time and shortly afterward, hearing familiar voices, I sprang up and perceived Jenny on the arm of my brother. My first thought was that he was bringing her to me in sign of allegiance. The next moment, to my astonishment, I saw her fling her arms about his neck and kiss him passionately, very differently from the furtive embraces she had vouchsafed me.

The next moment I was before them, with murder in my heart. The girl sprang back with a cry. My hands reached Ben’s throat and we went to the ground. In my rage I understood but one thing,—that what he had done he had done deliberately, after having put to sleep my suspicions by an attitude of false acquiescence. My next impulse was the most tragic and instinctive hatred which can blind the reason of a human being,—the wild jealousy of brother against brother. At the thought that the girl could so easily have preferred him after all that had been between us, all the love that I had for him turned to the blackest fury, and I believe that for a short moment if I could have killed him I would have done so. The minx stood by, no longer frightened, but delighted in her vanity at the sight of our struggling over her.

At first Ben had burst out laughing, defending himself from my frantic rage but, little by little, under the sting of my blows, he too lost his head. We rolled over and over, clawing at each other frantically, striking out blindly. I was no match for him then in strength, and at the end I found myself on my back, my arms pinned under his knees, looking up into his bruised face.

Suddenly he bent down and cried angrily:

“You little fool! Is that the sort of wife you want to bring home!”

“You made her do it!” I cried, and in my rage I almost succeeded in freeing myself. He exerted all his strength and brought me back to earth.

“Made her do it! A girl that’s engaged to you? Do you want to be the laughingstock of the country?”

My brain cleared and a great thankfulness came over me. I began to laugh uproariously.

This was too much for Jenny. With a swish of her skirts, she went flying through the woods.

I continued to laugh, with a sudden detention of all my nerves, cut by sudden involuntary sobs, but the laugh was not honest and something bitter and contemptuous descended into my heart, there to remain.

“Let me up,” I said, at the end.

“All right?”

“Quite.”

We arose and surveyed the wreck we had made of each other.

“I had to do it, Davy.”

“You did right.”

We shook hands and went home, his arm over my shoulder, a rare demonstration of affection for him. Had I only been present to render him a like service when the rôles were reversed, years later!

* * * * *

There was no need of admonition and it was characteristic of him that he never once referred to the episode. All my anger turned on myself. I saw the fool I had played and I swore that I would never be caught again. From that time on vulgarity played no part in my life. Milestone Number 1.

Unquestionably the thing that saved me was the blow to my vanity. Even to this day I cannot recall the incident without resentment and, though it is quite illogical, I believe of all the episodes of my life this will always be the one I shall think on with keenest humiliation. Even between Ben and myself the memory has always remained a secret irritation. For despite all my efforts to fight down the feeling, I still retain a little resentment at the superiority he had shown,—a primitive instinct of the male, I suppose, particularly when a woman is involved.

V

A revulsion was imperative, and the revulsion sent me back to my own kind. There is, I suppose, in every man’s life the figure of some woman who represents what might have been; some turning point at which he looks back and perceives where the direct road abruptly diverged. My intimacy with Anne Brinsmade was not the usual boy and girl romance but was something quite genuine and loyal and, though in the end the inevitable complications brought their misunderstandings, I look back on this natural comradeship, which extended over two years, with real affection. For this, strangely enough, I had Jenny Barnett to thank. The anger in me against my credulity and weak sentimentality was so insistent that to recover some self-respect I felt the need of asserting my ascendancy over some worthier one of her sex, if but to prove to myself that I had the qualities of reticence, authority and self-control I admired in my brother. It was not premeditated or conscious, yet if it had been skillfully calculated, nothing could have served me better.

Stephen Brinsmade was a lawyer of large political and business activities, a man of considerable fortune, and Anne was surrounded with every luxury and attention which he could shower on her. They had a big place at Taunton, about fifteen miles from our home at Littledale, and the friendship of the families was traditional. In my case there was a deeper reason. At school I had roomed with young Stephen and when he had died as the result of an accident on the polo field, the memory of his friendship brought me close to the father and sister.

Anne, even as a young girl, was a problem. She was all impulse, and no one knew where impulse might lead her. I was approaching twenty and she was scarcely sixteen at this time, and my air of determined impersonality successfully piqued her curiosity, roused her resentment, and finally drew her to me in impulsive trust. Her brother had been my dearest chum. For his young sister I could have only the most exact loyalty. I became her confidant, assuming the rôle of mentor, and occasionally delivered moral precepts with a gravity that was so natural that it even eluded my sense of humor. Different beings, I suppose, appeal to different qualities in us, according to their needs, and there was something in the wayward, lovable, undirected charm of the young girl which aroused the chivalry in me. My attitude, so different from that of the men who surrounded her, naturally had two results. It brought a delightful companionship, utterly free from mawkishness, or the simulated coquetries and aped sentimentality which too often, in the freedom of our American intercourse, leave the regret in man and woman of having failed in reverence before the things that count. Unconsciously, however, as this intimacy continued, the feminine temptation was hard to resist. Once or twice she tried to provoke my jealousy. I do not think it was consciously done, but I recognized it and my studied indifference undoubtedly gave me an increasing value in her eyes.

The influence I exerted over her was, I know, the strongest in her life. I saw that she idealized me and though the incongruity of making a hero of me struck me, a certain strength came from the realization. I never fully believed in her and frequently told her so,—much to her annoyance. I saw her as a young girl, too easily influenced, with natural instinct towards the good, yet with dangerous cravings for excitement and pleasure. I knew as a woman she would be the creature of circumstances and, foreseeing the flattery and adoration that would be hers on her entrance into the world, I doubted the stability of her best motives. On these subjects we talked frankly, and once, with suddenly clouded face, listening to me intently, she confessed in a burst of feeling that my fears were justified and, genuinely moved, placing her hand in mine, said:

“When I’m with you, Davy, I don’t want to be just selfish and superficial. I do want other things in life; but I know myself so well that—I’m afraid.”

* * * * *

It was in the summer after my graduation that I first became aware that my own feelings were undergoing a change. In the beginning I was master enough of myself to control them, even when in daily contact with her implicit trust and her too frankly shown desire for my company. My reason warned me that my strength was in her ignorance of my true state of mind but, at twenty-two, with a young girl on the brink of a radiant and lovely womanhood, the reason is but an intermittent refuge, and propinquity and the moment, decisive. One night in mid-summer, after a long and intimate discussion, when least I expected it, at her hand freely and impulsively placed in mine, every inhibition in me stopped. I raised her fingers suddenly to my lips, drew a long breath and held them there until, troubled, she sought to withdraw them.

“Why—David!”

She was looking at me, wide-eyed and wondering.

I tried to repair my blunder, hastily and awkwardly.

“You’re such a good sort, I was thinking—well, I’d hate to have anything but the best come to you, later—”

She was still looking at me as I stopped, floundering. I drew a long breath and said:

“It’s chilly here. Let’s go in.”

She slipped her arm from mine and led the way back. She said no word for the rest of the evening, while I exerted myself to talk to her father, and left as soon as I could make the opportunity. But I knew that she was not deceived, then or later, by my new, almost hostile attitude of aloofness.

* * * * *

The damage was done. From that day we never really talked to each other. And here a curious thing happened. Until then there had been no mistaking her preference for me. It was so open that every one saw it,—her father, my brothers, everybody. In fact, it was rather looked upon as a matter of course that eventually we should marry. I knew this. There are things which do not deceive us and in the attitude of Mr. Brinsmade there was even more than consent, though on the part of the mother I felt an increasing antagonism.

Now, over night, all was changed. We avoided the moments of intimacy which had come so naturally. Her attitude became the extreme of capriciousness. I knew I had blundered and believed that the blunder was irreparable, but when I would deliberately refrain from seeing her, she was certain to call me up and insist upon my coming to dinner. Yet the moment I was in her presence she was so silent and so moody that I always returned with a feeling of hopelessness and disillusionment. Hurt and miserable, my pride drove me to assume an attitude of raillery, which crystallized in a studious assumption of tolerant amusement and an apparent refusal to see in her anything but a wayward child. She resented this and never let pass an occasion to rouse my jealousy. I was, in turn, mortified, proud, and angry.

My old doubts returned and, forgetting how much my own attitude could excite irritation; forgetting how young she was in the knowledge of her own needs; forgetting all that we had built upon together, I saw her only as an inconscient child, disdaining the toy which she had finally acquired. As her mother was, so I felt she would inevitably become, and I ceased to believe that the memory of our talks and the natural, kindly impulses in her would ever be strong enough to counteract the craving for the baubles of vanities which to-morrow would be thrown into her lap.

What hurt me most was the seeming ungenerosity of her attitude,—that after the years of unswerving loyalty and protection I had given her she should now adopt towards me the methods of a coquette. It ended on a trifle. There was a scene of petty jealousy—I cannot recall it now without astonishment—a dance accorded and withdrawn,—nothing more. And yet for that, the course of two lives was irretrievably affected. Perhaps this was but the pretext. We were both high-spirited, both too young to understand life’s values or the emotions which swayed us, and both too proud to yield the first. For a moment’s pique, we parted in anger,—I have never seen her since. A month later I left for Paris, to take up the study of architecture. Milestone Number 2.

The memory quickly receded. I was, of course, too young myself to have been truly capable of love. Yet to-day, as I look back, but for that one instant’s wavering, I can see how my whole life would have run. From time to time I followed her career, saw her photograph in the public fashion show blazoned forth in newspaper and periodical; read occasional news of her reported engagements, and then, lost in the maelstrom of a malevolent infatuation, I put her finally from my mind, as at that time I put from me all memories of a life where quiet, order and simple ideals dominated.

I cabled home my decision to enlist. A month later, among the frantic letters from the family, I found one from her.

Dear old Davy:

Molly has just told me and I can’t help writing to you. We are no longer children, are we? And the old misunderstanding was of a boy and a girl. I have always bitterly regretted it. I don’t know whose fault it was,—perhaps both. If I was to blame I am truly sorry. I have never forgotten the old days or how fine you were with me. In all my life there has been nothing more honest. I cannot bear to have you go without knowing it. If you will let me, it will mean a great deal to me if I could help just a little,—keep you in touch with things at home, and let you know how many, many of your friends are keeping you in their thoughts. May I,—please, Davy—for old times.

Just as I used to be,
Anne.

I have the letter in my hand and to-day the memory hurts. The cafard is strong on me, and the futility of my drifting existence. There are other letters, chatty, carefully restrained letters, matching the tone of my answers,—but this one I keep, for sometimes, in moments of depression, in the passionate revulsion to living, I turn to what might have been.

* * * * *

At this point, Coustic came in with my orders. To-morrow I am to set out for Paris, there to report before an examining board. He stared at my long face and the open diary.

“What’s wrong, youngster?”

“Thinking of home, mon vieux.”

“What are you writing there,—a romance?”

“It passes the time.”

“Literature? Bad for the nerves. Don’t do it. You can’t change anything—can you?”

“Evidently not.”

“Come with me. We’ll dine at La Mère Argentine’s,—a couple of red bottles and—to hell with the rest! Moi, je suis philosophre.”

Which, after all, was the best thing I could do. And so, out for a last dinner with Coustic and Valentin and then no more. Quick friends and open hearts,—but when you haven’t the time, as Coustic says, to smell a man over, it must be open-handed and open-hearted at once. Besides, one man is as good as another, to smoke with, to dine with, and to damn the politicians.—I drank my two bottles and sang with the loudest, but it cured nothing. To-night I feel the dead weight of homesickness as never before. The prospect of Paris brings no pleasure.

VI

Paris

At the Quai d’Orsay, where I debarked three nights ago, the old days came back to me with a vividness of pain which I had not expected; the old careless days of another world which has been snuffed out. I walked out alone, being en permission, feeling my way along the black banks of the hidden Seine. The street where she had lived was close at hand and habit was so strong that despite my reason I felt the tug of old instinct. Where was now that light, reckless crowd, so indefatigable in the scampering pursuit of pleasure? Scattered to the four winds of heaven. Most of the women have drifted away,—some to London, some to America; one, a fortune’s favorite, died in an air raid; another, a suicide after her lover’s death, one whom I had not thought capable of a real passion. The test of war has redeemed some of the men—there were the good with the bad—by some spark of a saving ancestry, perhaps simply from a gambler’s love of a new hazard. Those who were born to fight have found a purpose; the rest,—well, it does not much matter what has become of the froth: all that matters is that a man or two, whom once we despised, has redeemed himself with an heroic death. All these memories are inseparably bound up with the experience which, I suppose, was bound to come into my life,—that I believed erased from my memory, but which to-day remains a haunting, ominous specter which sooner or later must be faced.

The memory that obtrudes is of a clouded page in my life—a chapter which I fatuously hoped had been closed and laid aside forever—something to be regretted, to stand as a warning in the future, and yet inclining me to a greater charity. This I know is the experience of many men. That in my case, by some malignant turn of the fates, it should remain in tragic permanence, is something against which I rebel.

* * * * *

I think that I can now look back dispassionately upon the David Littledale of 1913 and recognize the impulses which led me into an infatuation which, without the outbreak of the great war, would in all probability have left me a moral wreck.

Even as I write this severe judgment, I react against it. Perhaps I am too harsh upon myself. It may be that of my own will I would have found the strength to free myself of the humiliating bondage—perhaps—but I am not sure.

Yet I am quite certain that not for a moment was I in love with Madame de Tinquerville. Curiosity, vanity, habit, idleness; the pride of a young man still a boy in the ways of the world; a fancied domination over a woman accomplished in artifice; an unsated appetite for pleasure; susceptibility to flattery; the old Littledale failing of intense exaggeration in all things; all these motives I clearly see. And then,—I was playing at love, which often is more dangerous than love itself.

* * * * *

I have frequently heard women of the demimonde referred to as dangerous women. There is nothing dangerous in such women except to a young and inexperienced man, with quick sympathies and a conscience. They carry their warning on their faces. The woman who is truly dangerous is the unsuspected woman who waits behind the mask of a Madonna. Since my arrival, twenty instances have reminded me of the woman I knew as Letty, Madame de Tinquerville.

I do not know that I can be entirely dispassionate as I look back over this incident in my life. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner: to understand everything is to forgive everything. There may have been in her life, in her inheritance, or in her tradition—perhaps in her earlier contact with men—things which would make her comprehensible. I do not know them. There is a mystery of evil and good in us that defies analysis. It is so in my case; it must be so in hers. And yet,—she is the only human being in my experience who did evil from the sheer delight of doing it. She did it as a child plays with some defenceless animal. Yet there was nothing obvious about her, and in all the different societies through which she moved I doubt if more than five men ever suspected what lay behind her quiet, strictly conventional attitude toward life.

* * * * *

I met her first at the studio of a fashionable artist, Enrico Gonzalez, in the midst of a Goya fête, to which the fashionable, slightly déclassée society of cosmopolitan Paris had come, eager for a new sensation.

I saw her directly I had passed under the swinging lanterns and entered the glowing studio. Amid the gay confusion of reds and yellows, greens and purples of gala Spain, she stood out, slight and dark in the black velvet serenity of her costume,—an infanta with a certain intuitive dignity of childish astonishment.

She saw my persisting look, studied me a moment, and asked a friend to present me. The next moment I was at her side, flattered, inviting her to dance.

She shook her head with a smile.

“What—not dance?”

“Never, in public.”

She motioned me to a seat and, looking at me intently, said:

“Tell me, where have we met before?”

“I am certain that I have never seen you.” I was on the point of adding, “For I could not have forgotten it,” but instinctively feeling how banal the answer would seem to her satiated ears, I refrained.

She looked at me, unconvinced.

“You are quite certain?”

“Yes, quite.”

“As children, perhaps?”

“No.”

My manner seemed to amuse her. She studied my face a moment, and then said:

“You are from the South; from Virginia, perhaps?”

“Not even that. A Yankee from Connecticut.”

“Strange! I shouldn’t have thought it.”

After a moment, as if her interest in me had ceased, she asked:

“You like to dance, of course?”

I bowed my assent.

“There is a little girl from the Opéra over there who dances beautifully. Ask her to dance.” Then, as I rose, perplexed, not quite certain whether to be angry or not,—“and later, come back and talk to me.”

The conversation had been in French and, though I was certain she was not of that nationality, I was unable to place her. I know that my first movement was one of mistrust, for my answers had been unnecessarily brusque. For no reason whatsoever I was conscious of an instinctive antagonism and yet I obeyed her suggestion and began a tango. From time to time I glanced in the direction of Madame de Tinquerville but, though I was certain she was observing me, each time I sought her glance I found her in languid conversation with the group of young men who surrounded her.

The dance ended. With a growing antagonism, I asked myself why I had so docilely followed her request. With a resentment that was like a child’s, I avoided her and did not speak to her again that night. This was the instinctive revulsion of our first meeting.

* * * * *

Yet from the crowd I watched her. Very small, she seemed slighter for the prevailing note of black. The only note of color was the natural brilliance of her lips,—extraordinary lips, full and, the lower one, sensuously so, lips that had just been plunged into strawberries; eyebrows like the flight of ravens’ wings; a nose that might have been Cleopatra’s, thin-bridged and slightly irregular; eyes black as Africa, not nervously alert like the glance of the city woman, which is crowded with shifting details, but with the fixed contemplation of one accustomed to gaze steadily towards far horizons and clear spaces.

Her manner? At first contact utterly impersonal, interested only in herself, in her pretty poses, her transparent fingers and her dainty feet. I remember thinking that one might live with such a woman a lifetime and never know her inmost thoughts,—if thoughts there were behind the mask. She had two characteristic smiles which I learned to know; one for the public,—the smile that she wore like a necklace. Occasionally, when something stirred a slumbering spark in her, a smile all excitement and vibration suffused her face like the flash of footlights: it was then that mischief was brewing. My first impression was of distrust: of a woman all instinct, tyrannous, jealous, adroit, feline, languid, brooding, voluptuous, hidden and, above all, without sense of pain, either for herself or for others.

* * * * *

I retained only a troubling memory of this pungent, irritating impression when, a few days later, I received a formal note inviting me to call. I was flattered. I went.

She was alone. She made no reference to my avoiding her, led me to talk with intelligence, turned any approach to intimacy, and was so natural and gracious that I asked myself in astonishment why I should have felt such a sudden antagonism. In a short time, without my being able to distinguish the gradual progression, I was enveloped in the insidious charm of her personality as completely as though she had bound me hand and foot. For six months I forgot everything else in the world and followed where she led, allowing her slender fingers to turn my destiny according to their malicious fancy.

How did she do it? As skilfully as one plays a trout. Indifference—with a sudden touch of simulated interest, immediately withdrawn as soon as offered—a little opening of the doors to intimacy and, once I had learned to expect it, an abrupt refusal; the power to read me and to rouse my appetites and my vanities: in a word, the ability to create the illusion of being pursued and of waking in me the instinct of the pursuer.

* * * * *

I learned of her life only by hearsay, never from her own lips. Paris is full of just such women; the drift of strange currents, out of mysterious beginnings. Her father was an Irish adventurer, John Finucane, who by devious and clouded ways had amassed some fortune in Egypt and the Orient. Her mother, according to one story, was the daughter of an Arab sheik; according to another, a gypsy; others ascribed to her the rôle of a woman of the circus, a wandering mountebank. I saw her once and, allowing for all exaggerations, she was undoubtedly of some Eastern strain,—an inheritance apparent in Letty. Madame de Tinquerville had married early an old roué of that well-known family, impoverished and exiled to a minor diplomatic position, and who, shortly after bringing his bride and her fortune back to Paris, left her a widow.

She was, I am certain, thoroughly conscient in everything she did. The corruption she exerted over me was both mental and moral. I had come back to Paris filled with enthusiasm and ambition. My self-discipline disappeared. I threw myself into a life of pleasure and dissipation. My days were disorganized and I obeyed only the craving for excitement, movement, and rapidly succeeding sensations. My old philosophy, simple and proud, yielded to the worldly wisdom of the facile luxury which surrounded me. I saw how easy it was to achieve by social trafficking what men spent lifetimes laboriously to acquire.

* * * * *

Not that I yielded without a struggle. At times, scenes of extreme violence broke out between us; scenes I realize now it was her delight to provoke. Though of strong and violent passions, I had always held myself in firm control. What had been an orderly, measured mode of life, contemplative, tolerant, and good-humored, now became a tumultuous succession of days and nights, when every nerve was raw to the exposure. I found myself irritable, suspicious, passing from sudden depressions to feverish flights of gayety; quick at offence and wincing under the new tortures which she invented each day for the perverse delight of proving to herself how completely she held me in subjection. Why I did not strangle her in some blind moment of rage, I do not know.

This I will say: she did not lack courage. It never failed her in the dangerous excesses of jealousy she provoked in me, for, even as my fingers itched to close over her delicate throat, at a sudden smile, at a look in the shadowy eyes, at a caress from her fingers, the heat would vanish from my brain and I would be pliant in her hands. Perhaps it was this constant revolt—the rough, untamed animal in me—that interested her. Did she care for me, or not? At this moment, despite the tragic sequence of events, I am not certain but that at bottom, despite all her malignant appetites, her joy in destruction, her catlike love of cruelty, for some unknown reason, she genuinely loved me,—so far as she could comprehend love. Sometimes I believe that the secret of her attachment to me was in my resemblance to some one whom she had known and loved—as a young girl loves—before the flood of corruption had contaminated her. It may be that I recalled this other by some trick of look or manner. I do not know. I know very little of her past life.

VII

As I try to reconstruct this episode, much of it remains blurred,—a confused repetition of fatiguing emotions; scenes of jealousy no sooner ended than begun again: revulsions in me away from her, weak returns: the obsession of her presence; her caprices and her demands disorganizing all the routine of a once methodical existence. Only a few scenes come back to me vividly. Of her life I know as little as of the motives which ran in her agile mind. I am beginning to see her now with a colder point of view; then I did not understand her at all. We never discussed her life or mine,—that is, what had happened before our meeting.

I do not know her age exactly (perhaps twenty-five, perhaps thirty) yet she seemed always of another generation, and old in the wisdom of experience. I had often the curious feeling of not looking at her but at the mirror of a woman, and of never being able to progress beyond the pale reflection.

As I try to analyze her now, her salient quality was an utter inability to feel pain. Nor do I believe she could understand it in others, even when for her own enjoyment she was its cause. She was, of course, one of those women of over-refined temperament who simulate sensations they no longer can feel, seeking mentally what is no longer a natural impulse. Her curiosity in inflicting pain was of this nature.

* * * * *

Occasionally, however, she was capable of an amazing frankness, whether by cunning or from the inconsistency of her woman’s nature. Once, when I sought to penetrate beyond her reserve—the occasion was after an accidental meeting with her mother as we were driving in the Bois—she said something to me in such prophetic artlessness that to this day I wonder if for one moment this was not the true Letty.

Our carriages had met and passed and for an instant I had felt her suddenly rigid at my side. I looked over and saw something out of Letty’s past,—a thin, crooked old lady, very black, bejeweled and grotesquely dressed, who was agitating a pink parasol as though it were a bell-rope, to attract our attention. The next second, and we had passed.

“Your mother?”

“Yes.”

She had been too startled to deny it.

“Letty,” I said eagerly, for the tone of her voice threw an air of romantic mystery about her figure to me, “don’t you want to,—can’t you tell me something of your life?”

She shook her head.

“To you, if to any one. Don’t ask me. It is too painful!”

She added, and at such moments I felt twenty years rushing in between us:

“Life is only a succession of doors to be closed and never reopened. I never do.”

Something made me reply:

“Not very flattering to me.”

She looked at me, and answered:

“Oh, you! How you will hate me, some day!”

It was by such unexpected remarks, by the very seeming frankness of an abrupt confession, that she knew how to rouse my curiosity and to surround herself with a glamor of mystery. I believed in her sorrows until the day came when I was shocked out of my fatuity and saw the feline delight in playing with a wounded animal which alone was insatiable in her character.

I have often wondered over that speech and why she had made it. A sense of the dramatic, a moment’s indulgence in absolute truth, a sure sense of the effect on my tempestuous imagination, to be warned of danger? Perhaps, all three.

“Life is only a succession of doors to be closed and never reopened.”

It is strange how a phrase remains when a memory has been conquered. This phrase, which summed up all her defiant, selfish, worldly wisdom, has come back to me again and again and, though I am freed of the tyranny of her malicious personality, the poison of her philosophy still lurks in my memory.

* * * * *

There are moments when we look back in cold memory and cannot comprehend the whence and the wherefore of the hot fever that once dominated every sense and drove us through the hallucination of a passion. So with me, to-day.

When I think of Jenny Barnett, I seem to remember a confidence told me by a friend of college days: when I recall Letty, I seem to recall a chapter in some unhealthy romance. It is impossible that I and that David Littledale are one and the same person!

* * * * *

The heart of a man is like running water,—the years in their course purify the moral contagion. I do not know that this is true of all men. Perhaps those who remain in the stagnant pools of little existence never free themselves of the scum of the past; yet it is true of those who venture out into the traveling current. In a large sense, it is true of the generations, that move as great rivers move,—and in this running purification is the hope of all society.

* * * * *

Why, at this period of my life, should I have fallen so completely under the spell of such a woman as Madame de Tinquerville? It was not genuine love that caused it, for as I conceive love it is the calm of a great certainty,—and with Letty it was never anything but a ceaseless conflict. If not Letty, would it have been some one else? Was it an experience which I was to undergo,—an impulse that came from within me, rather than from outside? Perhaps I understand better to-day the springs of my impulses.

There are in most men two strong and opposite impulses towards women which, at first sight, appear contradictory but are easily reconcilable, as they spring from the two linked needs of their natures and are the key to the many seeming inconsistencies, infidelities, abrupt passions and incomprehensible tyrannies into which their sentimental cravings lead them. A man seeks in woman saint and sinner, calm and tempest, salvation and demoralization.

As architects of life our instincts are towards order and discipline, yet we are eternally seeking the thing that will upset our self-control. We are irresistibly attracted by what threatens our equanimity, enslaves our senses, imprisons our will,—for that brief, fleeting ecstasy which we feel at its fullness only when we are aware that we have cast aside the reins of our government. But, as the abiding instinct of our nature is order, there remains always the ideal of woman, which represents the revulsion to sanity, calm and serenity,—back to which we grope with reverence and to which we fasten with the instinct of self-preservation. I know this is true, though to-day this woman, the woman who is serenity and order, has not come into my life.

So intimately entwined are these two natures, these twin struggling impulses, that they often remain confused and inseparable. This is the explanation of the two tragedies of society, each proceeding from the same complex source: the phenomenon of a man’s marrying his mistress and that darker mystery which remains behind the curtain of marriage, the debasing of an ideal once raised in reverence.

* * * * *

The ease with which I yielded to her dominance, the disorganization into which I plunged, and the violent revulsion which came in the end are explainable, I believe, by this conflict in our nature. But then I did not reason thus, I did not reason at all, and therein lay the danger,—a danger that I shudder now to contemplate.

What was the essence of this corruption which she exercised over me,—that was more moral and mental than physical? It was in the stifling of all the youth and ambition of my nature by the baleful weight of her age-old weariness of intellect. She took a keen delight in seeking out my illusions, one by one; of slowly destroying them before my eyes under her malicious wit. She taught me that all striving was futile, that youth was a season of riotous enjoyment for the wise, and that only fools sacrificed it in a groaning pursuit of an ambition which could never be attained.