Vol. LXXXVIII No. 1

The
Yale Literary Magazine

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October, 1922.

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A Story of Progress

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THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

Contents

OCTOBER, 1922

The Yale Literary Magazine

EDITORS

BUSINESS MANAGERS

Leader

Every generation is a foible. It is born of whim, and educated on fantasy. In adulthood it is naturally a freak. This younger generation in this year of our Lord 1922 is no exception. We were born of respectability, educated on pedantry. In adulthood we are revolutionaries. Could anything be more natural, more un-Victorian?

We were born secretly. God knows how such things happened in that age. Perhaps the Stork brought us, nicely done up in—well—baby-clothes. We were brought up on platitudes. Most of them were dressed up as Christian. We hid our meanings in pretty words, and our sense in a blush. The word sex was unheard of. We didn’t talk much about anything dirty. We never swore. We said our prayers. With goodness we were replete; it made our lives hideous. Ultimately it was our virtue that drove us to sin. We were too good for this world. Forced to live in it by the tyranny of our parents—we adjusted ourselves, and became bad.

As soon as lies become platitudes they are doomed. The next passer-by will see through their disguise and expose them. You can fool yourself with your own lie; but if your neighbors catch the habit from you, and begin fooling themselves with the same lie, in no time that lie becomes a platitude. The Victorians fooled themselves into thinking that anything you could forget didn’t exist any more. So were we born into a Virgin world. Our beloved ancestry had forgotten there was any sin; for us then there would not be any. We were their realized dream.

But unfortunately these little cherubim, these little seraphim grew up into adolescence, learnt things about sex by groping in dark corners, learnt shocking social problems by looking up words in Dictionaries; learnt in so doing to disbelieve every word the Victorians uttered. They had put their faith in that sort of royalty once too often. Genuinely they became skeptics. Because they had been taught by liars they could not afford to believe anything—without testing its verity. They are generous in their estimate of the society into which they are born. Instead of saying, “We are born into a world of liars,” they restrain themselves, consider the question rationally and say, “No, only into a world of fools.” And out of these Fools’ Paradise the younger generation has toddled. To them it was a hell.

Their first independent action was to set up Truth as their God. They had had enough of lies. Truth was their panacea. Ignorance was the abiding sin of mortality. Their battle was for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, not for the beautiful garden of Eden—where nakedness did not prevail upon innocence and blushing was unknown.

Part of this knowledge surely was scientific. The health of the body was all important: Biology, Hygiene, sex education. For these they cried out. They talked eagerly of germ-plasm and genetics; defiantly of birth-control, the double-standard.

An equality between man and woman had suddenly been decreed politically; philanthropists were already talking about it morally; the younger generation carrying the movement one step further is experimenting with it intellectually. What they think, they say. Does it matter who is there? Bah! Victorian prudery. There are no secrets now between the sexes.

But part of this knowledge of good and evil was common sense—when once the Puritan and Victorian nonsense had been destroyed. It is only to a sex-maniac that the shortening of skirts can possibly do any harm. What, cries the younger generation, is the difference between showing one’s legs, and one’s arms; bobbing one’s hair is the same, or smoking, or drinking, or swearing. If they aren’t good for the physique—well and good, they are bad; but if they are only bad because our Puritan or Victorian ancestry say so—or because Moses fell down the mountain with some tombstones under his arm—what the hell?—they aren’t bad at all.

So the gentlemen and ladies of the past lift their monocles and their lorgnettes to watch these semi-nude girls, these godless men. “Dear, dear,” they say. “Gracious me. That’s not a nice young man.”

What really has happened, say the younger generation, is that America for some time has been living up to ideals which they have never expressed, and have expressed, in lieu of these, ideals which they have never lived down to. Silly little superficial rules, and some hideous inhibitions grew up out of these expressed ideals. Otherwise they have been like corpses rotting before the very eyes of those who created them. They were never alive at all, say the younger generation. So it considers itself a generation of building, not of destroying. With frankness a dominant characteristic it must express the futility of the old expressed, as well as the strength of the old unexpressed ideals. But it lays the emphasis on the old unexpressed. For instance, it is not proud that it has torn down the absurd anthropomorphic God of the literature of the Past, but it is proud, that, having gotten rid of that miasma, it has proceeded to the conclusion that God is but the vision of the potentiality of mankind realized. That with Thomas Hardy it can go forward

“with dependence placed

On the human heart’s resource alone,

In brotherhood bonded close, and graced

With loving kindness fully blown,

And visioned help unsought, unknown.”

It is not proud of having torn the veil off the carefully draped Victorian womanhood, but having done so it is proud of the constructive results, that no longer having ignorance, it can see the beauty and purity in the nakedness of the sex. It has torn down the ugly lies that covered the world with a respectable and morne garland of fig-leaves, but out of the ruins of this demolition it is creating a naked sanity, of which it is reasonably proud.

Thirty years ago “Jude the Obscure” was called “Jude the Obscene”. To-day Jude is considered a masterpiece, dealing in an intensely honest way with God and the divine right of the marriage service. Marriage has become a less eternal and a more kindly institution. Divorcees are considered less heinous people than before. For better or for worse is no longer a very powerful condemnation. In the Victorian era the sexual became an obsession because it was over-emphasized by being left unmentioned. In reaction, for a moment, under the Freudian influence it became an obsession from the exactly opposite reason. With the younger generation it is taking its place like hunger and thirst in the category of normal desires. The relations between girl and boy are more open, more real than in the past. There is no longer the hideous restraint before marriage, causing unhappy lives. It is an easier matter to know whom one is to marry among the younger generation. More and more they are being honest with one another. More and more they are coming to consider themselves rational, kind-hearted people.

I am not justified in defending or attacking the younger generation. I am doing my duty only in attempting to express the ideals we live by, the ideals they teach me. Too long has the ridiculous idea been current that they have no ideals. I have set myself to define them. Because they are different from the past, they are not non-existent. We are not, as a generation, more dishonest, more dishonorable than our predecessors. Yet we have no ideals? That is out of the mouths of fools only.

No, the Victorians thought that not knowing, or pretending not to know, about things unpleasant was the way to destroy them—by a slow process of forgetting. The younger generation thinks that knowing, and everyone knowing thoroughly about things unpleasant, will eventually arouse the race to do something about them; to clean energetically the Augean stables. You can see there is a fundamental difference in each generation’s idea of Humanity. The Victorians thought that knowledge of sin tainted the virtuous flower of innocence by rousing thoughts and passions for evil, which could only be killed by long disusage. Mankind fundamentally, said the Victorians to themselves, has a bad streak. We must carefully avoid mentioning things that would start that streak going. If man is not naturally bad, he naturally has some bad in him. We must starve the devil out of him. The younger generation denies this. Man is naturally good; anyway, fundamentally so. Evil is an outgrowth of our own civilization, and social scheme. Most, if not all, criminals are insane. Society is to blame for insanity. We must study the causes of the insanities; must publish them broadcast. People must know. If they know, they will improve. We must educate ourselves up to knowing what is good, what is bad. We must know the worst to do the best.

Consciously, the Victorians were living by the theories of church dogma, believing in original sin; unconsciously, the younger generation is living by the theories of the romantic spirit, believing in natural good. They are idealists beyond the common run of mankind; and they are ruthless in the following of their ideals.

MAXWELL E. FOSTER.

Truth

The Truth that lingers in the heart’s secret places,

The Truth that gleams of a sudden on Grail-faces,

The Truth that has run so many torch-lit races,

Shone suddenly on me,

And henceforth was to be

Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, soul of my soul, unto that last far dawn which is eternity.

Our souls were worn like a gaunt dungeon-keep

Washed by the sea; we sowed not, nor did reap;

Our Gods were on a journey or asleep;—

When like a surging fire

A spirit from earth’s ages did suspire,

And each soul’s tower put forth leaves and blossomed,

Like a young tree, and in our souls again there was desire.

The Spring lay luxuriantly the earth over,

White roses broke like foam, and the hot clover

Seemed heavy with spent passion like a lover

Languorous, till the night

And the swift breezes white

Came like a cooling bell and rain, and our eyes grew brighter

With the new gleam of that celestial light.

Suddenly there was Romance laughing again,

And poetry in the strange ancient ways of men,

We were as ones on peaks in Darien,

And Love with a new glory

Opened in song and story,

Like a flower in a wan waste by the sea,

And we with our wide eyes looked forward from our star-touched promontory.

The hands that moulded dust out of the dust,

Scorching the sky with the iron that turns to rust,

Fashioning brazen Gods to feed their lust,

These with their feet of clay,

In the slow alchemy of a timeless day,

Caught like the hunter of the east new beauty

And were like figures of the dawn and spray.

Time has not memory enough for these.

De Gustibus through shadowy autumn trees,

Drinking life fully to its twisted lees,

Nor Time, nor drear regret

Holds enough memory ever to forget,

These that are metaphors of immortality,

Enduring beyond the finality of any long and last sunset.

The Truth that lingers in the heart’s secret places,

For this is there an hour glass that effaces,

Or waves to wash away to sunless spaces

Truth that is more than Time,

More than the mere infernal and sublime,

Truth that is strong as Death, and light as Life,

And passionate as the last great poet’s last rhyme?

MAXWELL E. FOSTER.

Poem

“The sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.”

Goddess, the rocks are crumbling into sand;

The moonlight trembles hesitant, as though

Winter with all his winds and hoary snow

Were gathering. Goddess, thy hand,

Which has created shore and rock and ocean

Within my heart, seems cold;

I fear lest thou art growing old

With me—the shattered wreck of my devotion.

Goddess, there is no love in heaven or earth

Without thee, and the stars grow dim with age

When thine eyes are averted, and the rage

Of winter winds turns luxury to dearth.

What will it profit if we love no more

(For I know thou hast loved in thine own way)?

What will it profit, if for yesterday

We substitute to-morrow, with its store

Of sorrow?

What is a dream for goddess?—not to be

Immortal once is to be dead forever!

And shall our eyes go blind and our lips never

Meet? What is eternity,

If not that moment of a wild embrace,

When two souls recognize

Their first bewildered contact, and two eyes

Drink the white radiance of a lover’s face?

Oh, ere the evening lights go gathering like fire

Across the western portals—ere the sun

Proclaims that life and life’s short tasks are done—

Be thou the mistress of my pure desire,

Be thou the goddess of my heart!

A man cannot forget a woman’s eyes,

If he has kissed them (as I have thine own

In dreams). Love is an art

Which men do not forget, when they have known

The way a woman takes toward paradise.

What weary fools we are! Dust is the same,

Whether alive, or whether dead and rotten;

And love is love, remembered or forgotten;

And life is life, although it be a name.

Let sorrow come, with many tears; or shame

Alight upon my brow; or age deny

What fiery youth would fain assert or die;

Let even death wash all my dreams away

Like sand—still I am I,

To-morrow and to-day, and yesterday.

Therefore I am immortal; and thy face

Which I have called mine own, must live, must be

Immortal with the very heart of me.

On whatsoever shore, or in what place,

Whether among the gods, or on the earth,

Wherever man finds truth, or woman grace,

Or Sorrow tears, or Laughter tears of mirth;

Wherever love is, goddess, I shall be;

Wherever I am, thou—the heart of me!

Ah, we are weary fools—

We men who talk of love and sorrow,

And build philosophy upon old schools,

And yearn for paradise to-morrow.

We are insane! Creation dimly flows

About us, yet like children do we play

With our uncomprehended toys;

And no one knows

Wherefore in love these weary fools rejoice,

And grasp at stars in their uncertain way.

Yet I would rather be a fool, and love,

Than drink of wisdom, and forget the stars;

I’d rather tear life from Time’s calendars

Than lose thy face, which I am dreaming of.

Thus have I given all to be thy slave,

And now I ask that thou remember this:

’Tis better to be mortal in a kiss,

Than to be called immortal in a grave.

RUSSELL W. DAVENPORT.

About It and About

What made you speak so, Youth, just now before

These elders, men much nearer to the thing

You touch on?

Ah, but no. They claim it so

Yet I deny, for Graybeards grudge to have

Youth whisper, “Death” ... because they feel it close?

And Youth’s poor boldness makes it still more close?

Youth always speaks on death by proper right;

He has but left it when he enters life

While Graybeard’s years have dulled the sense that knew

Prenatal death, and now its imminence

Stifles his speech.... While Youth, Youth only dares!

So I ... hearing such bootless thoughts on death,

Oblivion, rest, eternal pain, reward....

Somehow they think death lasts, and seek to lie

Disposed at ease through aeons, or perhaps

Send on their proper sandal-size ahead

To heaven’s commissary. Thus Graybeards.

And yet, Youth also misconstrues its sort,

Makes it a vale deep-shadowed, where within

Ghosts glide ’neath cloistering cypress trees and sup

Of honey cakes in tombs wisteria-hung:

Cloaked lovers stroll through hazel groves and come

To Lethe’s bank ... or in another mood,

Visioning death as ugly, conjures up

A creatured sprite bent on a tarnished scythe.

But death, and such my death will be, is naught

To stop a soul’s drive nor to even check

Its impetus. Death is transition, well,

Transition’s but a word ... or say it thus,

It simply lies, a gap between two rails

The drive wheel rushes over unaware.

K. A. CAMPBELL, JR.

The Meditations of a Non-Thinker

Look at your nose. It is smooth and round, and red and shiny. Possibly ’tis flat, obtuse, snub, Roman, or Jew. Or in case you happen to think of some other qualification, it is that. So with your eyes—if only you will apply suitable adjectives. And also with your chin, mouth, hair, ears, jowls, or whatever. The reason I suggest this, is in order to add the insinuation that, if you regard any of these members in a mirror for some length of time, their aspect changes. For instance—you, my kind sir of the snub nose, affirm that your nose did not appear beautiful at first? But you will as well admit that its grossness lessened in accordance with the time spent in contemplating it. You got to know it just a little better than you knew it before. Or you who wear the slight scraggly beard—no, not you, madam—, will you kindly step forward to the glass and observe how your impression of that fringe changeth from the disgust of a reformed highwayman to the pride of a father? If we but had the time, we should spend a delightful afternoon, dear reader, watching such profitable changes in expression. Human nature is fascinating, is it not? But verily all of this—for I shall leave aside even the proposition of how such an outward change affects the spiritual grace—is merely to remark that by taking thought on any part of your person, no matter how small, you become acquainted correspondingly with such a part.

This is indeed great. For the action pleases the gazer supremely with his personality. Yet I hasten to assure you, my dear reader, that such a phenomenon is quite natural—because after all, we are all of us pretty much fools, and generally when a fool becomes better acquainted with himself, he becomes more endeared to himself. As to the question of the right or wrong of this human attribute, I make no advances, for it is aside from my position as recorder. But from what I have heard wise men say, I should judge it to be a lamentable weakness, especially lamentable since the whole evil appears to issue from a person’s having thought too much. As a child I was taught to respect thought. And actually I once believed this to be a worthy hypothesis. But now, as I linger on the verge of a dreary grave, my old head is fearsomely shaken with doubt. Ah yes, to think that—but I had better not think!

When we think, we do not observe the golden mean. We rush in where angels fear to tread. We are not humble, as Christians. We are exalted, as fools—and as such we love ourselves. So when we are in the act of thinking, we will not leave off with any sane or wholesome solution. We believe such a conclusion not good enough for us. We call it barren. We must needs explore further. After finding a cliff at the edge of a rational plane of thought, we urge on and grope into the outer darkness. For the little time that faith supports we continue safely—and blindly—enough, and then—fall down on the rocks, where we proceed lame and disorderly—or like Peter, sink absolutely into an offended sea—and are not saved.

You must allow that when you work yourself into such a state, the effect on your feelings is far from pleasant, far from elegant even. I should imagine that one in the grip of mental excesses is not unlike the habitual user of drugs—the morphinomaniac, opium-eater, or alcoholic. The mood is surely delirious, grotesquely fanciful, spirit-ridden. Possibly you believe it is pitiful to see a strong and normal man slowly gathered in by some subtle influence to become a slave grovelling bestially before a false and gilded—but an all-compelling—idol. Aye! this is pitiful. But the pity of it is not the greatest part. Here are you, possessed of abilities, ambitions, loving friends, philanthropy of the highest kind, delighted with this world, and enchanted with the prospect of the next. You hope everything and you fear nothing. By some insidious trick of fate—a fate that preys upon an insignificant weakness of yours—you feel yourself subdued slightly by the nod of some dim gigantic animal. But you are not afraid. For your interests are so worthily turned elsewhere that you know the Thing to have little power compared to your own—and you do not care. Oh, therein lives the fearful irony! You may indulge in your morphine, your opium, or your thinking largely to aid your powers and your works. The undermining influence is not felt—until too late. Yes, too late.... The degraded wretch moaning and whimpering, and shivering all over spasmodically as he tries to get up on his feet, and his rotted nerves will not respond—can you imagine the inner state of such a fellow? Do you not conceive that one day he may have been as fine—or a far finer—person than you? Imagine, then, the turbulence in his heart! He dreams back to old days, perceiving the former integrity of his character, the power of his mind and body—and compares all with the present. Maybe he fashions images of what to-day he might have been—beautiful glowing things, full of the light of heaven and of loveliness! He starts from his vile gutter, repelled by horror, and is about to rise magnificently—when a fit of the passion seizes him, and you watch him grovel in the nauseous mire. Happy beast he is—now. But the torture of his mind will return.

The agony which thinking induces by such means as I have outlined above leads me to consider for a trice its alternative, because it is joyous and fruitful. Can you imagine a green and yellow countryside, with a little white farmhouse amidst a cluster of dark oaks? Willows are near a cove in the stream below, which ripples its way coolly through the hot day. Do you hear the dry voice of a locust, or a cricket? Perhaps the bird in that isolated pine tree will be singing soon. Breathe deeply, for the sun is low over the hill and a colder, fairer wind blows from the dark woodland. You sense its fragrance, feel a thrill, and are deeply delighted with the whole atmosphere. But stay, I hear a slow cowbell and the barking of a collie.... The colors of the sunset are delicate and marvelously blended.—And winding down the path comes a small boy, with pails to fill at the brook for his mother. So it goes on. However clumsy the little picture, I have tried to indicate slightly the pleasure met with when you feel. These emotions of yours are sacred because they are unfathomable. And they are more beautiful than anything else you will ever know. As for the fruitfulness of imagination, I must let you judge more for yourself: I will only say that, when people are wearied out, the beauty of nature has ever been found more of a balm to their spirits than the futility of overheated thought. Thought and emotion are living in eternal conflict within you. As one fills your life you have less room for the other. Any choosing....

The psychologist, that enigmatic rabbit born recently amid a litter of new ideas, maintains thought to be the only respect in which we differ from animals. Now in the light of this last word I had better not have used the term “rabbit”; but, however.... I should like to suggest (though I am not sure whether you will call me a squirrel or a guinea-pig) that we differ still more from animals in our power of imagination. You certainly have seen cartoons entitled “Wonder what a lobster thinks about,” but it is always you who do the wondering and not the lobster (no inference that you are one, sir). And you never see “Think what a jellyfish wonders about”! Furthermore, if the psychologist is entirely right, you who have followed so assiduously this essay—which is largely devoid of thought—are at least for the time being largely an animal. Are you?

L. HYDE.

Selima

There was a mystery about Captain Knox’s wife. Of course, everyone in Gull Harbor knew there had been a Mrs. Knox, but according to the best accounts no one had ever seen her. There were a few facts, however, upon which one could rely. Some thirty or forty years before, the captain, returning after a long voyage to the East, had announced himself a widower of recent bereavement. The existence of the captain’s spouse in Gull Harbor had begun, therefore, simultaneously with the knowledge of her decease.

A short time after the captain’s return, a neat gravestone was erected on the Knox farm, in the old burial lot, in which had already been laid to rest the bodies of the captain’s parents, two brothers, and an uncle. Upon the stone, by the captain’s order, was carved in plain lettering, “In memory of Selima, my beloved wife.”

The captain himself would often refer to her. “She was a pretty cretur, she was.” Beyond this, however, discussion of her was not tolerated in his presence.

By the time I came to know Gull Harbor, the captain’s seafaring career was over. The people of the village had long since recovered from the first excitement caused by the mystery of the captain and his wife, and conversation had drifted back into familiar channels of interest as to why Mel Hibbard’s sister had given up her flock of Plymouth Rocks, or speculations as to the color Mrs. Lovell, wife of the minister of the Adventist Church, would choose for her new front room carpet.

I had always felt a prejudice for the Maine coast and from the moment the Portland boat rounded the big rocky cove, I knew I should like Gull Harbor. There was a restful peace about the place peculiar to the seaboard of New England. The smell of low tide and drying codfish hung about the wharf. Almost immediately one felt at home.

I had not been two weeks in the town before I knew all that Gull Harbor had to tell about their distinguished captain. Didn’t I know Captain ’Thiel Knox, the man who commanded the first seven-masted schooner to sail the sea? Why, he had been to “Chiny” half a dozen times, and the Lord knows how many he has crossed the ocean. As a further mark of distinction he was the proud possessor of two long-haired cats which he had brought with him from Persia.

One day I happened to ask my landlady, Mrs. Simmons, an old resident and a noted gossip, if the captain was a widower, and then I learned of the mystery. “For it’s my opinion,” she added, after telling me the story, “that she was a Chiny woman, or mebbe a princess from Persy, though nobody’ll ever know. The captain he would never say a word; quiet’s a mouse on the subject. You oughter see him, Mr. Fitch. He’s real nice, and a great hand for company; all kinds, it don’t matter to him,” she finished in a tone which meant to include even the summer people.

A “fortnit” later (one can see how easily I slipped into the vernacular of the place), I was out sailing in a borrowed dory. It was a clear August morning; the sky, a healthy blue and cloudless; the tall spruce trees, interspersed here and there by a monumental pine, guarded the water’s edge.

By the time I had rounded the long point that lay between the harbor and the back bay beyond, a stiff breeze had sprung up. The churning blue stretched oceanward for miles, blotched by myriads of foamy white caps. The little dory rocked and twisted in the choppy waves. The sail, which was home-made, proved an easy victim of the wind, and I soon found to my dismay that I was drifting helplessly down the bay toward a stretch of shore that I had not yet visited. The boat moved rapidly. The trees along the shore were soon followed by a broad green field, which stretched up from a tiny harbor almost surrounded by a protecting arm of the sea toward which I was being driven. Gradually the water became shallower, and the wind reluctantly let me slip from its grasp. I was able to look about me. It was a very beautiful harbor.

Suddenly I was conscious of an old man in a dory, rowing towards me. He might have been Father Neptune risen from the depths of the ocean for all I knew. Without a word he pulled my dilapidated boat ashore. Safely landed, I thanked him. He was an old man with a long white beard. He had on a tarpaulin and looked like a sailor.

“Ay-es,” he said pleasantly, when he had moored the two boats to the wharf (he gave me no opportunity to assist him). “I thought you was a landlubber, the moment I set eyes on you. Ye can’t tack without a center-board,” he added with a smile, the first he had given me. I blushed feebly at my hopeless mistake.

“I thought,” I began weakly, but he didn’t wait for me to finish.

“Won’t you come into the house for a bit?” he asked kindly. “You’re wet through, ain’t ye?” And he led the way to the little low shingled structure, fronted by a long porch upon which sat a large Persian cat, the handsomest I had ever seen.

“Thar, thar, Daisy bird, you’ve had enough pettin’ for one day,” as he brushed her gently aside, adding, as he noticed my admiration, “Got another, better lookin’ of the two, in the kitching. Won’t ye come in?”

“You’re not Captain Knox, are you?” I asked.

“Right you be! Salathiel Knox, captain, retired you call it, don’t ye?” and he smiled again.

While my clothes were drying, we sat around the fire and talked, the captain still in his tarpaulin, while I languished in a richly figured rug which he had produced from a locked cupboard in the kitchen. “Bought it in Singapore twenty-four years ago,” he added by way of dismissal of my compunction at wearing so valuable a possession. The captain smoked mildly while I told him who I was, making few comments, but when I tried to lead the conversation around to his own life he proved a poor subject for questioning. As Mrs. Simmons said to me afterwards, “The captain can talk when he’s a mind to, but land sakes, when he ain’t, it’s no use.”

The captain did remark, as I was leaving, that although he lived alone he wasn’t a bachelor; his wife, he said, was dead. “She was a pretty creatur, she was,” he added, half regretfully, as he laid down his pipe.

On my way home, my path led not far from the burial lot. I found the stone without difficulty and read the inscription.

The following summer, soon after we arrived, I paid my second visit to the Knox farm. I found the captain sitting on his porch, smoking. He didn’t remember me at first; but suddenly he burst out with, “Wall, I swan! You’re the young man that was tryin’ to tack in a dory without a center-board. I remember you, o’ course. Pretty good stuff, eh,” he added, “to tackle such a wind when you knew next to nothin’ o’ the sea. You’d make a good one, I’ll warrant.”

After that I often went to see him. He became quite loquacious at times and recounted some of his adventures. Always I expected he would run up against the mystery, but he never did. Few women were to be found in his stories.

One day I was surprised to see the captain at my door, seated in a new motor car. He had come to take me for a drive. I looked the machine over carefully.

“How does she go?” I asked.

“She sets all right,” he replied, cheerfully, “but she’s a bit wide in the stern.”

As we drove off together, he seemed in the best of spirits, although he admitted he was a “little nervous navigatin’ the new craft.”

On the way back, the captain became confidential. His story this time was concerned chiefly with a long sickness he had had in the Far East, and his romantic experience with a Malay girl. “She was a ripper, she was,” he added by way of comment.

“What was her name?” I inquired, with suppressed excitement, but he was intent upon turning a corner and did not answer. The next moment we were at the door of my house. He waved me good-bye as he disappeared around a bend in the road.

“Another opportunity lost,” I thought, as I walked up the path.

“It’s the Malay girl, Selima, I’ll be bound. That’s the mystery, Mr. Fitch. Didn’t he tell you she was a great beauty, all done up in rings and jewels?”

“Yes,” I answered absently.

This conversation took place about a week after my drive with the captain, while Mrs. Simmons was removing the breakfast dishes. I was reading the paper in the next room and did not like to be interrupted.

“I never heard him tell that story,” she continued, raising her voice above the clatter of the dishes. “He has taken you into his confidence, Mr. Fitch.”

“Then I fear I have more woefully betrayed it,” I replied without looking up.

Later I took a walk to the post office. The thought of the mystery, although I would have hesitated to acknowledge it even to myself, was making me positively uncomfortable.

“Was she really the Malay girl, after all?” I pictured the captain, young and handsome, walking up to the altar of a Buddhist temple with a Malay princess, dazzling with rings and jewels, leaning on his arm, her pale skin—no, the Malays were brown. I cursed my superior knowledge. Perhaps their princesses were not so dark. But my vision had faded; I was gazing at the floor of the Gull Harbor post office.

I took the road back which led by the captain’s. There was no sign of anyone as I passed. I wandered up by the burial lot. I wondered if Malay princesses were ever named Selima. On the way home I passed the captain. He waved to me pleasantly, as he rattled by.

“I will go to see him to-night,” I said to myself. It was after nine when I reached his house. The captain was still up. He was sitting in front of the kitchen fire, a long-haired cat on either side. He seemed glad to see me. We sat and smoked. The logs crackled cheerfully. They reminded me somehow of my host. An hour flew by; conversation was gradually relaxing into silent contemplation. Suddenly I burst forth:

“Captain,” I said, desperately, “you remember the Malay woman you told me of the other day. Was her name Selima?”

For a moment I was afraid I had offended him. All of a sudden he began to laugh. Little by little his merriment increased, until his whole powerful frame was shaking. He trembled so that his glasses bobbed up and down on his nose like a cork. His chair creaked. Even his beard looked merry.

“Selima! Selima!” and he went off into another gale. Then, seeing my doubtful expression, he tried to pull himself together. “Selima! Selima! She was a pretty creetur’, she was,” and he laughed again. I was forced to join with him; his humor was catching.

“I know what’s a-worrying you,” he said. “It’s the mystery. There never was a boarder within twelve miles of this town whom they haven’t filled up with the story of my mysterious weddin’. They’re half curious themselves, though the Lord knows they’d oughter have more sense. Selima!” He laughed, the tears filling his eyes as he began again. “Selima! There never was any sech person! To think I have fooled this town for fifty years! It’s too much. I laugh about it nights.” Again catching my strained face, “Still curious?” he inquired with a twinkle.

“I’ll tell ye, but you mustn’t spoil my joke. D’ye understand? I guess I can trust ye,” he added confidentially, and settling himself in his chair he began.

“It’s not a long story,” he said, glancing at his watch. “About forty years ago, or mebbe more, when I was perhaps half as old as I am now, I lived here alone, when I warn’t on the water, which warn’t very much. It was close on to September, only a day or two or mebbe three before I was to sail from ‘Porchmouth’. She was a five-master, a beauty ef there ever was a handsome vessel.” The captain paused as if to recall her more vividly. “Gullnair was her name, brand new that year. Wall, it was a day or two before I was to sail, as I was tellin’ ye. I was out here in the pasture right over yonder by the old spring”—he pointed with a sailor’s thumb—“I had been gatherin’ berries and after a bit I lay down under a tree. I had been lobsterin’ all mornin’ and was tired. When I woke up I heard two women talkin’. They’re both dead now, but in their day they wuz the gol-durndest busybodies that ever I heard tell on. They was berryin’ and talkin’—about me, would you believe it? Speculatin’ as to why a nice lookin’ man (I hadn’t sech a bad complexion in those days,” added the captain reflectively as he rubbed his hand over his rough face)—“they was a wonderin’ why I didn’t get married. Was it because I had a hidden life? Did the girls object to my swearin’? Was I—the Lord preserve us, what didn’t they say? They came to the conclusion that I didn’t marry because no one would have me. I could have strangled them both at that. I was hot headed in those days.” All the fun had faded from the captain’s face.

“After they went away,” he continued, “I began to think it over. At first I cal’lated I had better get married right away. There were a dozen of ’em hereabouts that very minute who would have taken me with a whoop. I had always tried to steer clear of the women heretofore. Second thoughts, thinks I, why not let the matter go driftin’ for awhile, anyway? So I did. But all the time that I was at sea it bothered me. On the home’ard voyage we struck a bad storm and the Gullnair went to the bottom after a brave fight, sir, after a brave fight! Most of the crew was drownded. I was saved by a miracle. Never mind about that now! Wall, sir, after I was picked up—she was a freighter bound for New York, as luck would have it—there come to me a big idea.

“When I got home I let them know I was a widower, married while I was away. Of course they understood she had been drownded on the ship. I wore a black band on my arm for a time. Seein’ as there as warn’t no suspicions in the wind, ‘I’ll make a full job of it,’ I says to myself. ‘I’ll set up a stone in the burial lot to her memory’. And that’s what I did. Wall, they come to write the inscription; I told them the words, but when they asked me for the name, I said kind o’ flustered like, ‘Selima’. It was the first one that popped into my head. That’s all.” The captain smiled, turning his gaze into the fire.

“Then you weren’t ever in love?” I said, with the faintest inflection in my voice.

The captain blew out a great puff of smoke, looked at me over the top of his glasses, and smiled.

MYLES WHITING.

Portfolio

Beauty

I.

Beauty! thy name were counted less than dust

That warriors’ tombs with sullen grace enfold,