Chapters 10
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1 2BR02B 19:15
To Be or Not To Be by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Read by Mark Nelson. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. To be or not to be.
Everything was perfectly swell. There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars. All diseases were conquered. So was old age. Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers. The population of the United States was stabilized at forty million souls. One bright morning, in the Chicago Lying-In Hospital, A man named Edward K. Wehling, Jr. waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only man waiting. Not many people were born a day any more. Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose average age was one hundred and twenty-nine. X-rays had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. The children would be his first. Young Wailing was hunched in his chair, his head in his hand.
He was so rumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible. His camouflage was perfect, since the waiting-room had a disorderly and demoralized air, too. Chairs and ashtrays had been moved away from the walls. The floor was paved with spattered drop-cloths. The room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as a memorial to a man who had volunteered to die. A sardonic old man, about two hundred years old, sat on a stepladder, painting a mural he did not like. Back in the days when people aged visibly, his age would have been guessed at thirty-five or so. Aging had touched him that much before the cure for aging was found. The mural he was working on depicted a very neat garden.
Men and women in white, doctors and nurses, turned the soil, planted seedlings, sprayed bugs, spread fertilizer. Men and women in purple uniforms pulled up weeds, cut down plants that were old and sickly, raked leaves, carried refuse to trash burners. Never, never, never! Not even in medieval Holland nor old Japan had a garden been more formal, been better tended. Every plant had all the loam, light, water, air, and nourishment it could use. A hospital orderly came down the corridor, singing under his breath a popular song.
"'If you don't like my kisses, honey, here's what I will do.' I'll go see a girl in purple, kiss the sad world toodle-oo. If you don't want my lovin', why should I take up all this space? I'll get off this old planet, let some sweet baby have my place. The orderly looked in at the mural and the muralist. Looks so real, he said. I can practically imagine I'm standing in the middle of it. "'What makes you think you're not in it?' said the painter. He gave a satiric smile. "'It's called the Happy Garden of Life, you know.' "'That's good of Dr. Hitz,' said the orderly. He was referring to one of the male figures in white, whose head was a portrait of Dr. Benjamin Hitz, the hospital's chief obstetrician.
Hitz was a blindingly handsome man. "'Lots of faces still to fill in,' said the orderly. He meant that the faces of many of the figures in the mural were still blank. All blanks were to be filled with portraits of important people, on either the hospital staff or from the Chicago office of the Federal Bureau of Termination. "'Must be nice to be able to make pictures that look like something,' said the orderly. The painter's face curdled with scorn. "'You think I'm proud of this daub?' he said. "'You think this is my idea of what life really looks like?' "'What's your idea of what life looks like?' said the orderly. The painter gestured at a foul drop-cloth. "'There's a good picture of it,' he said.
"'Frame that, and you'll have a picture a damn sight more honest than this one.' "'You're a gloomy old duck, aren't you?' said the orderly. Is that a crime?" said the painter. Automat. Birdland. Cannery. Catbox. D. Louser. Easy-go. Good-bye, mother. Happy hooligan. Kiss me quick. Lucky Pierre. Sheep dip. Wearing blender. Weep no more. And why worry? To be or not to be was the telephone number of the municipal gas chambers of the Federal Bureau of Termination. The painter thumbed his nose at the orderly. "'When I decide it's time to go,' he said, "'it won't be at the sheep dip.' "'Do it yourself, Ray,' said the orderly. "'Messy business, Grandpa. Why don't you have a little consideration for the people who have to clean up after you?' The painter expressed with an obscenity his lack of concern for the tribulations of his survivors.
"'The world could do with a good deal more mess, if you ask me,' he said. The orderly laughed and moved on. Wailing, the waiting father, mumbled something without raising his head, and then he fell silent again.
A coarse, formidable woman strode into the waiting room on spike heels. Her shoes, stockings, trench coat, bag, and overseas cap were all purple. The purple, the painter called, the color of grapes on judgment day. The medallion on her purple musette bag was the seal of the service division of the Federal Bureau of Termination. An eagle perched on a turnstile. The woman had a lot of facial hair—an unmistakable mustache, in fact. A curious thing about gas-chamber hostesses was that no matter how lovely and feminine they were when recruited, they all sprouted mustaches within five years or so. "'Is this where I'm supposed to come?' she said to the painter. "'A lot would depend on what your business was,' he said.
"'You aren't about to have a baby, are you?' "'They told me I was supposed to pose for some picture,' she said. "'My name's Leora Duncan.' She waited. "'And you dunk people,' he said. "'What?' she said. "'Skip it,' he said. "'That sure is a beautiful picture,' she said. "'Looks just like heaven or something.' "'Or something,' said the painter. He took a list of names from his smock pocket. "'Duncan, Duncan, Duncan,' he said, scanning the list. "'Yes, here you are. You're entitled to be immortalized. See any faceless body here you'd like me to stick your head on? We've got a few choice ones left.' She studied the mural bleakly. "'Gee,' she said, "'they're all the same to me. I don't know anything about art.' "'A body's a body, eh?' he said.
"'All righty. As a master of fine art, I recommend this body here.' He indicated a faceless figure of a woman who was carrying dried stalks to a trash-burner. "'Well,' said Leora Duncan, "'that's more of the disposal people, isn't it? I mean, I'm in service. I don't do any disposing.' The painter clapped his hands in mock delight. "'You say you don't know anything about art, and then you prove in the next breath that you know more about it than I do.' "'Of course the sheave-carrier is wrong for a hostess. A snipper, a pruner, that's more your line,' he pointed to a figure in purple, who was sawing a dead branch from an apple-tree. "'How about her?' he said. "'You like her at all?' "'Gosh!' she said, and she blushed and became humble.
"'That—that puts me right next to Dr. Hitz.' "'That upsets you?' he said. "'Good gravy, no,' she said. "'It's—it's just such an honor.' "'Ah, you admire him, eh?' he said. "'Who doesn't admire him?' she said, worshipping the portrait of Hitz. It was the portrait of a tanned, white-haired, omnipotent Zeus, two hundred and forty years old. "'Who doesn't admire him?' she said again. "'He was responsible for setting up the very first gas-chamber in Chicago.' "'Nothing would please me more,' said the painter, "'than to put you next to him for all time. "'Sawing off a limb. That strikes you as appropriate?' "'That is kind of like what I do,' she said. She was demure about what she did. What she did was make people comfortable while she killed them."
And while Leora Duncan was posing for her portrait, into the waiting-room bounded Dr. Hitz himself. He was seven feet tall, and he boomed with importance, accomplishments, and the joy of living. "'Well, Miss Duncan, Miss Duncan!' He said. And he made a joke. "'What are you doing here?' he said. "'This isn't where people leave. This is where they come in.' "'We're going to be in the same picture together,' she said shyly. "'Good,' said Dr. Hitz heartily. "'And say, isn't that some picture?' "'I sure am honoured to be in it with you,' she said. "'Let me tell you,' he said. I'm honored to be in it with you. Without women like you, this wonderful world we've got wouldn't be possible." He saluted her and moved toward the door that led to the delivery rooms.
"'Guess what was just born,' he said. "'I can't,' she said. "'Triplets,' he said. "'Triplets,' she said." She was exclaiming over the legal implications of triplets. The law said that no newborn child could survive unless the parents of the child could find someone who would volunteer to die. Triplets, if they were all to live, called for three volunteers. "'Do the parents have three volunteers?' said Leora Duncan. "'Last I heard,' said Dr. Hitz, "'they had one, and were trying to scrape another two up.' "'I don't think they made it,' she said. Nobody made three appointments with us. Nothing but singles going through to-day, unless somebody called in after I left. What's the name?" Wailing," said the waiting father, sitting up, red-eyed and frowsy.
Edward K. Wailing, Jr. is the name of the happy father-to-be. He raised his right hand, looked at a spot on the wall, gave a hoarsely wretched chuckle. "'Present,' he said. "'Oh, Mr. Wailing,' said Dr. Hitz, "'I didn't see you.' "'The Invisible Man,' said Wailing. "'They just phoned me that your triplets have been born,' said Dr. Hitz. "'They're all fine, and so is the mother. I'm on my way in to see them now.' "'Hooray,' said Wailing, emptily. "'You don't sound very happy.' said Dr. Hitz. "'What man in my shoes wouldn't be happy?' said Wailing. He gestured with his hands to symbolize carefree simplicity. "'All I have to do is pick out which one of the triplets is going to live, then deliver my maternal grandfather to the happy hooligan and come back here with a receipt.' Dr.
Hitz became rather severe with Wailing, towered over him. "'You don't believe in population control, Mr. Wehling,' he said. "'I think it's perfectly keen,' said Wehling tautly. "'Would you like to go back to the good old days, when the population of the earth was twenty billion, about to become forty billion, then eighty billion, then one hundred and sixty billion? Do you know what a druplet is, Mr. Wehling?' said Hitz. "'Nope.' said Whaling, sulkily. A druplet, Mr. Whaling, is one of the little knobs, one of the little pulpy grains of a blackberry, said Dr. Hitz. Without population control, human beings would now be packed on the surface of this old planet like druplets on a blackberry. Think of it!
Whaling continued to stare at the same spot on the wall. In the year 2000, said Dr. Hitz, Before scientists stepped in and laid down the law, there wasn't even enough drinking water to go around, and nothing to eat but seaweed. And still, people insisted on their right to reproduce like jack-rabbits. And their right, if possible, to live forever." "'I want those kids,' said Wehling quietly. "'I want all three of them.' "'Of course you do,' said Dr. Hitz. "'That's only human.' "'I don't want my grandfather to die, either,' said Wailing. "'Nobody's really happy about taking a close relative to the cat-box,' said Dr. Hitz, gently, sympathetically. "'I wish people wouldn't call it that,' said Leora Duncan.
"'What?' said Dr. Hitz. "'I wish people wouldn't call it the cat-box and things like that,' she said. "'It gives people the wrong impression.' "'You're absolutely right,' said Dr. Hitz. "'Forgive me.' He corrected himself, gave the municipal gas chambers their official title, a title no one ever used in conversation. "'I should have said Ethical Suicide Studios,' he said. "'That sounds so much better.' said Leora Duncan. "'This child of yours—whichever one you decide to keep, Mr. Wehling,' said Dr. Hitz, he or she is going to live on a happy, roomy, clean, rich planet, thanks to population control. "'In a garden, like that mural there—' he shook his head. "'Two centuries ago, when I was a young man, it was a hell, That nobody thought could last another twenty years.
Now centuries of peace and plenty stretch out before us as far as the imagination cares to travel." He smiled luminously. The smile faded as he saw that Whaling had just drawn a revolver. Whaling shot Dr. Hitz dead. "'There's room for one—a great big one,' he said. And then—' He shot Leora Duncan. "'It's only death,' he said to her as she fell. "'There! Room for two.' And then he shot himself, making room for all three of his children. Nobody came running. Nobody, seemingly, heard the shots. The painter sat on the top of his stepladder, looking down reflectively on the sorry scene. The painter pondered the mournful puzzle of life demanding to be born, and once born demanding to be fruitful, to multiply and to live as long as possible, to do all that on a very small planet that would have to last forever.
All the answers that the painter could think of were grim, even grimmer, surely, than a cat-box, a happy hooligan, and easy-go. He thought of war. He thought of plague. He thought of starvation. He knew that he would never paint again. He let his paintbrush fall to the drop-cloth below. And then he decided he had had about enough of life in the happy garden of life, too, and he came slowly down from the ladder. He took Weyling's pistol, really intending to shoot himself. He didn't have the nerve. And then he saw the telephone-booth in the corner of the room. He went to it, dialed the well-remembered number. To be our, not to be. "'Federal Bureau of Termination,' said the very warm voice of a hostess.
"'How soon could I get an appointment?' he asked, speaking very carefully. "'We could probably fit you in late this afternoon, sir.' she said. It might be even earlier, if we get a cancellation. All right," said the painter. Fit me in, if you please. And he gave her his name, spelling it out. Thank you, sir," said the hostess. Your city thanks you. Your country thanks you. Your planet thanks you. But the deepest thanks of all is from future generations. The End of To Be or Not To Be by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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2 The Artist of the Beautiful 55:23
The Artist of the Beautiful. Read by Brad Powers August, Two Thousand Seven.
An elderly man with his pretty daughter on his arm was passing along the street and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening into the light that fell across the pavement, from the window of a small shop. It was a projecting window, and on the inside were suspended a variety of watches, pinchbeck, silver, and one or two of gold, all with their faces turned from the streets, as if churlishly disinclined to inform the wayfarers what o'clock it was. Seated within the shop, sidelong to the window, with his pale face bent earnestly over some delicate piece of mechanism, on which was thrown the concentrated lustre of a shade lamp, appeared a young man. What can Owen Worland be about? muttered old Peter Huvenden, himself a retired watchmaker, and the former master of this same young man whose occupation he was now wondering at.
What can the fellow be about? These six months past I have never come by his shop without seeing him just as steadily at work as now. It would be a flight beyond his usual foolery to seek for the perpetual motion, and yet I know enough of my old business to be certain that what he is now so busy with is no part of the machinery of a watch. Perhaps, father, said Annie, without showing much interest in the question, Owen is inventing a new kind of time-keeper. I am sure he has ingenuity enough. Oh, child, he has not the sort of ingenuity to invent anything better than a Dutch toy, answered her father, who had formerly been put to much vexation by Owen Worland's irregular genius. A plague on such ingenuity!
All the effect that ever I knew of it was to spoil the accuracy of some of the best watches in my shop. He would turn the sun out of its orbit and derange the whole course of time if, as I said before, his ingenuity could grasp anything bigger than a child's toy. "'Hush, father, he hears you,' whispered Annie, pressing the old man's arm. "'His ears are as delicate as his feelings, and you know how easily disturbed they are. Do let us move on.' So Peter Huvenden and his daughter Annie plodded on without further conversation, until, in a by-street of the town, they found themselves passing the open door of a blacksmith's shop. Within was seen the forge, now blazing up and illuminating the high and dusky roof, and now confining its luster to a narrow precinct of the coal-strewn floor, according as the breath of the bellows was puffed forth, or again inhaled into its vast leathern lungs.
In the intervals of brightness, it was easy to distinguish objects in the remote corners of the shop and the horseshoes that hung upon the wall. In the momentary gloom, the fire seemed to be glimmering amidst the vagueness of unenclosed space. Moving about in this red glare and alternate dusk was the figure of the blacksmith, well worthy to be viewed in so picturesque an aspect of light and shade, where the bright blaze struggled with the black night, as if each would have snatched his comely strength from the other. Anon he drew a white-hot bar of iron from the coals, laid it on the anvil, uplifted his arm of might, and was soon enveloped in the myriads of sparks which the strokes of his hammer scattered into the surrounding gloom.
"'Now that is a pleasant sight,' said the old watchmaker. "'I know what it is to work in gold. But give me the worker an iron after all is said and done. He spends his labor upon a reality. What say you, daughter Annie?' "'Pray don't speak so loud, Father,' whispered Annie. "'Arbor Danforth will hear you.' "'And what if he should hear me?' said Peter Hovenden. "'I say again, it is a good and wholesome thing to depend upon main strength and reality, and to earn one's bread with the bare and brawny arm of a blacksmith. A watchmaker gets his brain puzzled by his wheels within a wheel, or loses his health or the nicety of his eyesight, as was my case, and finds himself at middle age, or little after, Past labor at his own trade, and fit for nothing else, yet too poor to live at his ease.
So I say once again, give me main strength for my money, and then, how it takes the nonsense out of a man. Did you ever hear of a blacksmith being such a fool as Owen Worland yonder? "'Well said, Uncle Huvenden,' shouted Robert Danforth from the forge in a full, deep, merry voice that made the roof re-echo. "'And what says Miss Annie to that doctrine?' She, I suppose, will think it a genteeler business to tinker up a lady's watch than to forge a horseshoe or make a gridiron. Annie drew her father onward without giving him time for reply.
But we must return to Owen Worland's shop, and spend more meditation upon his history and character than either Peter Huffenden, or probably his daughter Annie, or Owen's old schoolfellow Robert Danforth would have thought due to so slight a subject. From the time that his little fingers could grasp a penknife, Owen had been remarkable for a delicate ingenuity, which sometimes produced pretty shapes in wood, principally figures of flowers and birds, and sometimes seemed to aim at the hidden mysteries of mechanism. But it was always for purposes of grace, and never with any mockery of the useful. He did not, like the crowd of school-boy artisans, construct little windmills on the angle of a barn, or water-mills across the neighboring brook.
Those who discovered such peculiarity in the boy as to think it worth their while to observe him closely, sometimes saw reason to suppose that he was attempting to imitate the beautiful movements of nature, as exemplified in the flight of birds or the activity of little animals. It seemed, in fact, a new development of the love of the beautiful, such as might have made him a poet, A painter or a sculptor, and which was as completely refined from all utilitarian coarseness as it could have been in either of the fine arts. He looked with singular distaste at the stiff and regular processes of ordinary machinery. Being once carried to see a steam-engine, in the expectation that his intuitive comprehension of mechanical principles would be gratified, he turned pale and grew sick, as if something monstrous and unnatural had been presented to him.
This horror was partly owing to the size and terrible energy of the iron laborer, for the character of Owen's mind was microscopic, and tended naturally to the minute, in accordance with his diminutive frame and the marvelous smallness and delicate power of his fingers. Not that a sense of beauty was thereby diminished into a sense of prettiness. The beautiful idea has no relation to size, and may be as perfectly developed in a space too minute for any but microscopic investigation as within the ample verge that is measured by the arc of the rainbow. But at all events, this characteristic minuteness in his objects and accomplishments made the world even more incapable than it might otherwise have been of appreciating Owen Worland's genius.
The boy's relatives saw nothing better to be done. As perhaps there was not, than to bind him apprentice to a watchmaker, hoping that his strange ingenuity might thus be regulated and put to utilitarian purposes. Peter Hevenden's opinion of his apprentice has already been expressed. He could make nothing of the lad. Owen's apprehension of the professional mysteries, it is true, was inconceivably quick, But he altogether forgot or despised the grand object of a watchmaker's business, and cared no more for the measurement of time than if it had been merged into eternity. So long, however, as he remained under his old master's care, Owen's lack of sturdiness made it possible, by strict injunctions and sharp oversight, to restrain his creative eccentricity within bounds.
But when his apprenticeship was served out, and he had taken the little shop which Peter Huffington's failing eyesight compelled him to relinquish, then did people recognize how unfit a person was Owen Worland to lead old blind father time along his daily course. One of his most rational projects was to connect a musical operation with the machinery of his watches, so that all the harsh dissonances of life might be rendered tuneful, and each flitting moment fall into the abyss of the past in golden drops of harmony. If a family clock was entrusted to him for repair, one of those tall ancient clocks that have grown nearly allied to human nature by measuring out the lifetime of many generations, he would take it upon himself to arrange a dance or funeral procession of figures across its venerable face, representing twelve mirthful or melancholy hours.
Several freaks of this kind quite destroyed the young watchmaker's credit with that steady and matter-of-fact class of people who hold the opinion that time is not to be trifled with, whether considered as the medium of advancement and prosperity in this world, or preparation for the next. His custom rapidly diminished, A misfortune, however, that was probably reckoned among his better accidents by Owen Worland, who was becoming more and more absorbed in his secret occupation, which drew all his science and manual dexterity into itself, and likewise gave full employment to the characteristic tendencies of his genius. This pursuit had already consumed many months.
After the old watchmaker and his pretty daughter had gazed at him out of the obscurity of the street, Owen Worland was seized with a fluttering of the nerves, which made his hand tremble too violently to proceed with such delicate labor as he was now engaged upon. "'It was Annie herself,' murmured he. I should have known it, by this throbbing of my heart, before I heard her father's voice. Ah, how it throbs! I shall scarcely be able to work again on this exquisite mechanism to-night. Annie, dearest Annie, Thou shouldest give firmness to my heart and hand, and not shake them thus. For if I strive to put the very spirit of beauty into form, and give it motion, it is for thy sake alone. O throbbing heart, be quiet!
If my labor be thus thwarted, there will come vague and unsatisfied dreams which will leave me spiritless tomorrow. As he was endeavoring to settle himself again to his task, The shop-door opened, and gave admittance to no other than the stalwart figure which Peter Hummenden had paused to admire, as seen amid the light and shadow of the blacksmith's shop. Robert Danforth had brought a little anvil of his own manufacture, and peculiarly constructed, which the young artist had recently bespoken. Owen examined the article, and pronounced it fashioned according to his wish. Why, yes," said Robert Danforth, his strong voice filling the shop as with the sound of a bass viol. I consider myself equal to anything in the way of my own trade, though I should have made but a poor figure at yours with such a fist as this, added he, laughing, as he laid his vast hand beside the delicate one of Owen.
But what then? I put more main strength into one blow of my sledge-hammer than all that you have expended since you were apprentice. Is not that the truth? Very probably, answered the low and slender voice of Owen. Strength is an earthly monster. I make no pretensions to it. My force, whatever there may be of it, is altogether spiritual. Well, but Owen, what are you about? asked his old schoolfellow, still in such a hearty volume of tone that it made the artist shrink, especially as the question related to a subject so sacred as the absorbing dream of his imagination. "'Folks do say that you are trying to discover the perpetual motion.' "'The perpetual motion? Nonsense,' replied Owen Worland, with a movement of disgust, for he was full of little petulances.
"'It can never be discovered. It was a dream that may delude men whose brains are mystified with matter, but not me. Besides, if such a discovery were possible, it would not be worth my while to make it.' Only to have the secret turned to such purposes as are now affected by steam and water-power. I am not ambitious to be honored with the paternity of a new kind of cotton machine." "'That would be droll enough,' cried the blacksmith, breaking out into such an uproar of laughter that Owen himself and the bell-glasses on his workboard quivered in unison. "'No, no, Owen. No child of yours will have iron joints and sinews. Well, I won't hinder you any more.' Good night, Owen, and success, and if you need any assistance, so far as a downright blow of hammer upon anvil will answer the purpose, I'm your man.
And with another laugh, the man of main strength left the shop. How strange it is, whispered Owen Worland to himself, leaning his head upon his hand, that all my musings, my purposes, my passion for the beautiful, my consciousness of power to create it, A finer, more ethereal power, of which this earthly giant can have no conception. All, all look so vain and idle whenever my path is crossed by Robert Danforth. He would drive me mad were I to meet him often. His hard brute force darkens and confuses the spiritual element within me. But I, too, will be strong in my own way. I will not yield to him. He took from beneath the glass a piece of minute machinery, which he set in the condensed light of his lamp, and, looking intently at it through a magnifying glass, proceeded to operate with a delicate instrument of steel.
In an instant, however, he fell back in his chair and clasped his hands, with a look of horror on his face that made its small features as impressive as those of a giant would have been. "'Heaven, what have I done?' exclaimed he. The vapor, the influence of that brute force, it has bewildered me and obscured my perception. I have made the very stroke, the fatal stroke, that I have dreaded from the first. It is all over, the toil of months, the object of my life. I am ruined. And there he sat in strange despair, until his lamp flickered in the socket, and left the artist of the beautiful in darkness. Thus it is that ideas which grow up within the imagination, and appear so lovely to it, and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered, and annihilated by contact with the practical.
It is requisite for the ideal artist to possess a force of character that seems hardly compatible with its delicacy. He must keep his faith in himself, while the incredulous world assails him with its utter disbelief. He must stand up against mankind, and be his own sole disciple, both as respects his genius and the objects to which it is directed. For a time Owen Worland succumbed to this severe but inevitable test. He spent a few sluggish weeks with his head so continually resting in his hands that the townspeople had scarcely an opportunity to see his countenance. When at last it was again uplifted to the light of day, A cold, dull, nameless change was perceptible upon it. In the opinion of Peter Hovenden, however, and that order of sagacious understandings, who think that life should be regulated, like clockwork, with leaden weights, the alteration was entirely for the better.
Owen now, indeed, applied himself to business with dogged industry. It was marvelous to witness the obtuse gravity with which he would inspect the wheels of a great old silver watch, thereby delighting the owner, in whose fob it had been worn till he deemed it a portion of his own life, and was accordingly jealous of its treatment. In consequence of the good report thus acquired, Owen Worland was invited by the proper authorities to regulate the clock in the church steeple. He succeeded so admirably in this matter of public interest that the merchants gruffly acknowledged his merits on change. The nurse whispered his praises as she gave the potion in the sick chamber. The lover blessed him at the hour of appointed interview, and the town in general thanked Owen for the punctuality of dinner-time.
In a word, the heavy weight upon his spirits kept everything in order, not merely within his own system, but wheresoever the iron accents of the church clock were audible. It was a circumstance, though minute, yet characteristic of his present state, that—that When employed to engrave names or initials on silver spoons, he now wrote the requisite letters in the plainest possible style, omitting a variety of fanciful flourishes that had heretofore distinguished his work in this kind. One day, during the era of this happy transformation, old Peter Huffington came to visit his former apprentice. "'Well, Owen,' said he, I'm glad to hear such good accounts of you from all quarters, and especially from the town clock yonder, which speaks in your commendation every hour of the twenty-four.
Only get rid altogether of your nonsensical trash about the beautiful, which I, nor nobody else, nor yourself to boot, could ever understand. Only free yourself of that, and your success in life is as sure as daylight. Why, if you go on in this way, I should even venture to let you doctor this precious old watch of mine, though, except my daughter Annie, I have nothing else so valuable in the world. I should hardly dare to touch it, sir, replied Owen, in a depressed tone, for he was weighed down by his old master's presence. In time, said the latter, in time you will be capable of it. The old watchmaker, With the freedom naturally consequent on his former authority, went on inspecting the work which Owen had in hand at the moment, together with other matters that were in progress.
The artist, meanwhile, could scarcely lift his head. There was nothing so antipodal to his nature as this man's cold, unimaginative sagacity, by contact with which everything was converted into a dream except the densest matter of the physical world. Owen groaned in spirit and prayed fervently to be delivered from him. But what is this? cried Peter Huvenden abruptly, taking up a dusty bell-glass, beneath which appeared a mechanical something as delicate and minute as the system of a butterfly's anatomy. What have we here? Owen, Owen! There is witchcraft in these little chains, and wheels and paddles. See? With one pinch of my finger and thumb I am going to deliver you from all future peril. For heaven's sake!
screamed Owen Worland, springing up with wonderful energy. As you would not drive me mad, do not touch it. The slightest pressure of your finger would ruin me forever. Aha, young man! And is it so? said the old watchmaker, looking at him with just enough penetration to torture Owen's soul with the bitterness of worldly criticism. Well, take your own course, but I warn you again that in this small piece of mechanism lives your evil spirit. Shall I exercise him? "'You are my evil spirit,' answered Owen, much excited. "'You and the hard, coarse world. The leaden thoughts and the despondency that you fling upon me are my clogs, else I should long ago have achieved the task that I was created for.' Peter Hevenden shook his head.
With the mixture of contempt and indignation which mankind, of whom he was partly a representative, deemed themselves entitled to feel towards all simpletons who seek other prizes than the dusty one along the highway. He then took his leave, with an uplifted finger and a sneer upon his face that haunted the artist's dreams for many a night afterwards. At the time of his old master's visit, Owen was probably on the point of taking up the relinquished task. By this sinister event, he was thrown back into the state whence he had been slowly emerging. But the innate tendency of his soul had only been accumulating fresh vigor during its apparent sluggishness. As the summer advanced, he almost totally relinquished his business, and permitted Father Time, so far as the old gentleman was represented by the clocks and watches under his control, to stray at random through human life, making infinite confusion among the train of bewildered hours.
He wasted the sunshine, as people said, in wandering through the woods and fields and along the banks of streams. There, like a child, he found amusement in chasing butterflies or watching the motions of water insects. There was something truly mysterious in the intentness with which he contemplated these living playthings as they sported on the breeze or examined the structure of an imperial insect whom he had imprisoned. The chase of butterflies was an apt emblem of the ideal pursuit in which he had spent so many golden hours. But would the beautiful idea ever be yielded to his hand like the butterfly that symbolized it? Sweet, doubtless, were these days, and congenial to the artist's soul.
They were full of bright conceptions, which gleamed through his intellectual world as the butterflies gleamed through the outward atmosphere, and were real to him, for the instant, without the toil and perplexity and many disappointments of attempting to make them visible to the sensual eye. Alas that the artist, whether in poetry or whatever other material, may not content himself with the inward enjoyment of the beautiful, but must chase the flitting mystery beyond the verge of his ethereal domain, and crush its frail being in seizing it with a material grasp. Owen Worland, felt the impulse to give external reality to his ideas as irresistibly as any of the poets or painters who have arrayed the world in a dimmer and fainter beauty, imperfectly copied from the richness of their visions.
The night was now his time for the slow progress of recreating the one idea to which all his intellectual activity referred itself, Always at the approach of dusk, he stole into the town, locked himself within his shop, and wrought with patient delicacy of touch for many hours. Sometimes he was startled by the rap of the watchman, who, when all the world should be asleep, had caught the gleam of lamplight through the crevices of Owen Worland's shutters. Daylight, to the morbid sensibility of his mind, seemed to have an intrusiveness that interfered with his pursuits. On cloudy and inclement days, therefore, he sat with his head upon his hands, muffling, as it were, his sensitive brain in a mist of indefinite musings, for it was a relief to escape from the sharp distinctness with which he was compelled to shape out his thoughts during his nightly toil.
From one of these fits of torpor he was aroused by the entrance of Annie Hovenden, who came into the shop with the freedom of a customer, and also with something of the familiarity of a childish friend. She had worn a hole through her silver thimble, and wanted Owen to repair it. "'But I don't know whether you will condescend to such a task,' said she, laughing, now that you are so taken up with notion of putting spirit into machinery. "'Where did you get that idea, Annie?' said Owen, starting in surprise. "'Oh, out of my own head,' answered she, "'and from something that I heard you say.' long ago, when you were but a boy and I a little child. But come, will you mend this poor thimble of mine?"
"'Anything for your sake, Annie,' said Owen Worland. "'Anything, even were it to work at Robert Danforth's forge.'" "'And that would be a pretty sight,' retorted Annie, glancing with imperceptible slightness at the artist's small and slender frame. "'Well, here's the thimble.'" "'But that is a strange idea of yours,' said Owen, about the spiritualization of matter." And then the thought stole into his mind that this young girl possessed the gift to comprehend him better than all the world besides. And what a help and strength would it be to him in his lonely toil if he could gain the sympathy of the only being whom he loved. To persons whose pursuits are insulated from the common business of life, who are either in advance of mankind or apart from it, There often comes a sensation of moral cold that makes the spirit shiver as if it had reached the frozen solitudes around the pole.
What the prophet, the poet, the reformer, the criminal, or any other man with human yearnings, but separated from the multitude by a peculiar lot, might feel, poor Owen felt. Annie, cried he, growing pale as death at the thought, how gladly would I tell you the secret of my pursuit! You, methinks, would estimate it rightly. You, I know, would hear it with a reverence that I must not expect from the harsh, material world. Would I not? To be sure, I would, replied Annie Hevenden, lightly laughing. Come, explain to me quickly what is the meaning of this little whirligig, so delicately wrought that it might be a plaything for Queen Mab. See, I will put it in motion. Hold! exclaimed Owen. Hold! Annie had but given the slightest possible touch, with the point of a needle, to the same minute portion of complicated machinery which has been more than once mentioned, when the artist seized her by the wrist with a force that made her scream aloud.
She was affrighted at the convulsion of intense rage and anguish that writhed across his features. The next instant he let his head sink upon his hands. "'Go, Annie,' murmured he. "'I have deceived myself, and must suffer for it.' I yearned for sympathy, and thought, and fancied, and dreamed that you might give it me. But you lack the talisman, Annie, that should admit you into my secrets. That touch has undone the toil of months and the thought of a lifetime. It was not your fault, Annie. But you have ruined me. Poor Owen Worland. He had indeed erred, yet pardonably, For if any human spirit could have sufficiently reverenced the processes so sacred in his eyes, it must have been a woman's. Even Annie Huffington possibly might not have disappointed him had she been enlightened by the deep intelligence of love.
The artist spent the ensuing winter in a way that satisfied any persons who had hitherto retained a hopeful opinion of him that he was, in truth, irrevocably doomed to inutility as regarded the world, and to an evil destiny on his own part. The decease of a relative had put him in possession of a small inheritance. Thus freed from the necessity of toil, and having lost the steadfast influence of a great purpose, great, at least, to him, he abandoned himself to habits from which it might have been supposed the mere delicacy of his organization would have availed to secure him. But when the ethereal portion of a man of genius is obscured, the earthly part assumes an influence the more uncontrollable.
Because the character is now thrown off the balance to which Providence had so nicely adjusted it, and which, in coarser natures, is adjusted by some other method. Owen Worland made proof of whatever show of bliss may be found in riot. He looked at the world through the golden medium of wine, and contemplated the visions that bubble up so gaily around the brim of the glass, and that people, the air, with shapes of pleasant madness, which so soon grow ghostly and forlorn. Even when this dismal and inevitable change had taken place, the young man might still have continued to quaff the cup of enchantments, though its vapor did but shroud life in gloom and fill the gloom with spectres that mocked at him.
There was a certain irksomeness of spirit, which, being real, and the deepest sensation of which the artist was now conscious, was more intolerable than any fantastic miseries and horrors that the abuse of wine could summon up. In the latter case, he could remember Even out of the midst of his trouble, that all was but a delusion. In the former, the heavy anguish was his actual life.
From this perilous state he was redeemed by an incident which more than one person witnessed, but of which the shrewdest could not explain or conjecture the operation on Owen Worland's mind. It was very simple. On a warm afternoon of spring, as the artist sat among his riotous companions with the glass of wine before him, A splendid butterfly flew in at the open window and fluttered about his head. "'Ah!' exclaimed Owen, who had drank freely. "'Are you alive again, child of the sun and playmate of the summer breeze, after your dismal winter's nap? "'Then it is time for me to be at work.' And leaving his empty glass upon the table, he departed, and was never known to sip another drop of wine. And now, again, he resumed his wanderings in the woods and fields.
It might be fancied that the bright butterfly, which had come so spirit-like into the window as Owen sat with the rude revellers, was indeed a spirit commissioned to recall him to the pure, ideal life that had so etherealized him among men. It might be fancied that he went forth to seek this spirit in its sunny haunts, for still, as in the summer-time gone by, he was seen to steal gently up wherever a butterfly had alighted, and lose himself in contemplation of it. When it took flight, his eyes followed the winged vision, as if its airy track would show the path to heaven. But what could be the purpose of the unseasonable toil which was again resumed, as the watchman knew, by the lines of lamplight, through the crevices of Owen Worland's shutters?
The townspeople had one comprehensive explanation of all these singularities. Owen Worland had gone mad. How universally efficacious, How satisfactory, too, and soothing to the injured sensibility of narrowness and dullness, is this easy method of accounting for whatever lies beyond the world's most ordinary scope. From St. Paul's days down to our poor little artist of the beautiful, the same talisman had been applied to the elucidation of all mysteries in the words or deeds of men who spoke or acted too wisely or too well. In Owen Worland's case, the judgment of his townspeople may have been correct. Perhaps he was mad. The lack of sympathy, that contrast between himself and his neighbors which took away the restraint of example, was enough to make him so.
Or possibly he had caught just so much of ethereal radiance as served to bewilder him, in an earthly sense, by its intermixture with the common daylight. One evening, When the artist had returned from a customary ramble, and had just thrown the luster of his lamp on the delicate piece of work so often interrupted, but still taken up again, as if his fate were embodied in its mechanism, he was surprised by the entrance of old Peter Tuffenden. Owen never met this man without a shrinking of the heart. Of all the world he was most terrible, by reason of a keen understanding which saw so distinctly what it did see, and disbelieved so uncompromisingly in what it could not see. On this occasion the old watchmaker had merely a gracious word or two to say.
"'Owen, my lad,' he said. "'We must see you at my house to-morrow night.' The artist began to mutter some excuse. "'Oh, but it must be so,' quoth Peter Huffenden, "'for the sake of the days when you were one of the household.' "'What, my boy? Don't you know that my daughter Annie is engaged to Robert Danforth? "'We are making an entertainment in our humble way to celebrate the event.' That little monosyllable was all he uttered. Its tone seemed cold and unconcerned to an ear like Peter Huffington's, and yet there was in it the stifled outcry of the poor artist's heart, which he compressed within him like a man holding down an evil spirit. One slight outbreak. However imperceptible to the old watchmaker, he allowed himself.
Raising the instrument with which he was about to begin his work, he let it fall upon the little system of machinery that had, anew, cost him months of thought and toil. It was shattered by the stroke. Bowen-Worland's story would have been no tolerable representation of the troubled life of those who strive to create the beautiful, if, amid all other thwarting influences, love had not interposed to steal the cunning from his hand. Outwardly, he had been no ardent or enterprising lover. The career of his passion had confined its tumults and vicissitudes so entirely within the artist's imagination that Annie herself had scarcely more than a woman's intuitive perception of it, but, in Owen's view, it covered the whole field of his life.
Forgetful of the time when she had shown herself incapable of any deep response, he had persisted in connecting all his dreams of artistical success with Annie's image. She was the visible shape in which the spiritual power that he worshipped and on whose altar he hoped to lay a not unworthy offering, was made manifest to him. Of course he had deceived himself. There were no such attributes in Annie Huffington as his imagination had endowed her with. She, in the aspect which she wore to his inward vision, was as much a creature of his own as the mysterious piece of mechanism would be were it ever realized. Had he become convinced of his mistake, through the medium of successful love, Had he won Annie to his bosom, and there beheld her fade from angel into ordinary woman, the disappointment might have driven him back, with concentrated energy upon his sole remaining object.
On the other hand, had he found Annie what he fancied, his lot would have been so rich in beauty that out of its mere redundancy he might have wrought the beautiful into many a worthier type than he had toiled for. But the guise in which his sorrow came to him, the sense that the angel of his life had been snatched away and given to a rude man of earth and iron, who could neither need nor appreciate her ministrations. This was the very perversity of fate that makes human existence appear too absurd and contradictory to be the scene of one other hope or one other of fear. There was nothing left for Owen Worland but to sit down like a man that had been stunned. He went through a fit of illness.
After his recovery, his small and slender frame assumed an obtuser garniture of flesh than it had ever before worn. His thin cheeks became round. His delicate little hand, so spiritually fashioned to achieve fairy task-work, grew plumper than the hand of a thriving infant. His aspect had a childishness such as might have induced a stranger to pat him on the head, pausing, however, in the act to wonder what manner of child was here. It was as if the spirit had gone out of him, leaving the body to flourish in a sort of vegetable existence. Not that Owen Worland was idiotic. He could talk, and not irrationally. Somewhat of a babbler, indeed, did people begin to think him, for he was apt to discourse at wearisome length of marvels of mechanism that he had read about in books, but which he had learned to consider as absolutely fabulous.
Among them he enumerated the Man of Brass, Constructed by Albertus Magnus, and the brazen head of Friar Bacon, and coming down to later times, the automata of a little coach and horses, which it was pretended had been manufactured for the Dauphin of France. Together with an insect that buzzed about the ear like a living fly, and yet was but a contrivance of minute steel springs. There was a story, too, of a duck that waddled, and quacked, and ate, and ate, Though, had any honest citizen purchased it for dinner, he would have found himself cheated with the mere mechanical apparition of a duck. But all these accounts, said Owen Worland, I am now satisfied, are mere impositions. Then, in a mysterious way, he would confess that he once thought differently.
In his ideal and dreamy days he had considered it impossible in a certain sense, to spiritualize machinery, and to combine with the new species of life and motion thus produced a beauty that should attain to the ideal which nature has proposed to herself in all her creatures, but has never taken pains to realize. He seemed, however, to retain no very distinct perception either of the process of achieving this object, or of the design itself. I have thrown it all aside now, he would say. It was a dream such as young men are always mystifying themselves with. Now that I have acquired a little common sense, it makes me laugh to think of it. Poor, poor and fallen Owen Worland! These were the symptoms, that he had ceased to be an inhabitant of the better sphere that lies unseen around us.
He had lost his faith in the invisible, and now prided himself, as such unfortunates invariably do, in the wisdom which rejected much that even his eye could see. and trusted confidently in nothing but what his hand could touch. This is the calamity of men whose spiritual part dies out of them and leaves the grosser understanding to assimilate them more and more to the things of which alone it can take cognisance. But in Owen Worland the spirit was not dead nor passed away. It only slept. How it awoke again is not recorded. Perhaps the torpid slumber was broken by a convulsive pain. Perhaps, as in a former instance, the butterfly came and hovered about his head and re-inspired him, as indeed this creature of the sunshine had always a mysterious mission for the artist, re-inspired him with the former purpose of his life.
Whether it were pain or happiness that thrilled through his veins, his first impulse was to thank heaven for rendering him again the being of thought, imagination, and keenest sensibility that he had long ceased to be. "'Now for my task,' said he, Never did I feel such strength for it as now. Yet, strong as he felt himself, he was incited to toil the more diligently by an anxiety lest death should surprise him in the midst of his labors. This anxiety, perhaps, is common to all men who set their hearts upon anything so high, in their own view of it, that life becomes of importance only as conditional to its accomplishment. So long as we love life for itself, we seldom dread the losing it. When we desire life for the attainment of an object, we recognize the frailty of its texture.
But, side by side with this sense of insecurity, there is a vital faith in our invulnerability to the shaft of death while engaged in any task that seems assigned by providence as our proper thing to do, and which the world would have cause to mourn for should we leave it unaccomplished. Can the philosopher, big with the inspiration of an idea that is to reform mankind, believe that he is to be beckoned from this sensible existence at the very instant when he is mustering his breath to speak the word of light? Should he perish so, the weary ages may pass away, the worlds whose life's sand may fall, drop by drop, before another intellect is prepared to develop the truth that might have been uttered then.
But history affords many an example where the most precious spirit At any particular epoch manifested in human shape, has gone hence untimely, without space allowed him, so far as mortal judgment could discern, to perform his mission on the earth. The prophet dies, and the man of torpid heart and sluggish brain lives on. The poet leaves his song half sung, or finishes it beyond the scope of mortal ears in a celestial choir. The painter, as Alston did, leaves half his conception on the canvas to sadden us with its imperfect beauty, and goes to picture forth the whole, if it be no irreverence to say so, in the hues of heaven. But rather such incomplete designs of this life will be perfected nowhere.
This so frequent abortion of man's dearest projects must be taken as proof that the deeds of earth, however etherealized by piety or genius, are without value, except as exercises and manifestations of the spirit. In heaven, all ordinary thought is higher and more melodious than Milton's song. Then, would he add another verse to any strain that he had left unfinished here? But to return to Owen Worland, it was his fortune, good or ill, to achieve the purpose of his life. Pass we over a long space of intense thought, yearning effort, minute toil, and wasting anxiety, succeeded by an instant of solitary triumph. Let all this be imagined, and then behold the artist, on a winter evening, seeking admittance to Robert Danforth's fireside circle.
There he found the man of iron, with his massive substance thoroughly warmed and attempered by domestic influences. And there was Annie, too, now transformed into a matron, with much of her husband's plain and sturdy nature, but imbued, as Owen Worland still believe, with a finer grace that might enable her to be the interpreter between strength and beauty. It happened, likewise, that old Peter Hovenden was a guest this evening at his daughter's fireside, and it was his well-remembered expression of keen, cold criticism that first encountered the artist's glance. "'My old friend Owen!' cried Robert Danforth, starting up and compressing the artist's delicate fingers within a hand that was accustomed to gripe bars of iron.
"'This is kind and neighborly to come to us at last.' I was afraid your perpetual emotion had bewitched you out of the remembrance of old times. "'We are glad to see you,' said Annie, while a blush reddened her matronly cheek. "'It was not like a friend to stay away from us so long.' "'Well, Owen,' inquired the old watchmaker, as his first greeting, "'how comes on the beautiful? Have you created it at last?' The artist did not immediately reply, being startled by the apparition of a young child of strength that was tumbling about on the carpet. A little personage who had come mysteriously out of the infinite, but with something so sturdy and real in his composition that he seemed molded out of the densest substance which earth could supply.
This hopeful infant crawled towards the newcomer and settled himself on end, as Robert Danforth expressed the posture, stared at Owen with a look of such sagacious observation that the mother could not help exchanging a proud glance with her husband. But the artist was disturbed by the child's look. as imagining a resemblance between it and Peter Huffington's habitual expression. He could have fancied that the old watchmaker was compressed into this baby shape, and looked out of those baby eyes, and repeating, as he did now, the malicious question, "'The beautiful, Owen, how comes on the beautiful? Have you succeeded in creating the beautiful?' "'I have succeeded,' replied the artist, with a momentary light of triumph in his eyes and a smile of sunshine, yet steeped in such depth of thought, that it was almost sadness.
Yes, my dear friends, it is the truth. I have succeeded. Indeed! cried Annie, a look of maiden mirthfulness peeping out of her face again. And is it lawful now to inquire what the secret is? Surely it is to disclose it that I have come, answered Owen Worland. You shall know, and see, and touch, and possess the secret. For Annie, if by that name I may still address the friend of my boyish years, Annie— It is for your bridal gift that I have wrought this spiritualized mechanism, this harmony of motion, this mystery of beauty. It comes late, indeed. But it is as we go onward in life, when objects begin to lose their freshness of hue, and our souls their delicacy of perception, that the spirit of beauty is most needed.
If—forgive me, Annie—if you know how to value this gift, it can never come too late. He produced, as he spoke, what seemed a jewel-box. It was carved richly out of ebony by his own hand, and inlaid with a fanciful tracery of pearl, representing a boy in pursuit of a butterfly, which, elsewhere, had become a winged spirit, and was flying heavenward, while the boy, or youth, had found such efficacy in his strong desire that he ascended from earth to cloud, and from cloud to celestial atmosphere, to win the beautiful. This case of ebony the artist opened, and bade Annie place her fingers on its edge. She did so. But almost screamed as a butterfly fluttered forth, and alighting on her finger's tip, sat waving the ample magnificence of its purple and gold-speckled wings, as if in prelude to a flight.
It is impossible to express by words the glory, the splendor, the delicate gorgeousness, which were softened into the beauty of this object. Nature's ideal butterfly was here realized in all its perfection. Not in the pattern of such faded insects as flit among earthly flowers, but of those which hover across the meads of paradise for child-angels and the spirits of departed infants to disport themselves with. The rich down was visible upon its wings. The lustre of its eyes seemed instinct with spirit. The firelight glimmered around this wonder. The candles gleamed upon it. But it glistened apparently by its own radiance, and illuminated the finger and outstretched hand on which it rested with a white gleam like that of precious stones.
In its perfect beauty, The consideration of size was entirely lost. Had its wings overreached the firmament, the mind could not have been more filled or satisfied. "'Beautiful! Beautiful!' exclaimed Annie. "'Is it alive? Is it alive?' "'Alive! To be sure it is,' answered her husband. "'Do you suppose any mortal has skill enough to make a butterfly, or would put himself to the trouble of making one, when any child may catch a score of them in a summer's afternoon?' "'Alive! Certainly!' But this pretty box is undoubtedly of our friend Owen's manufacture, and really it does in credit. At this moment the butterfly waved its wings anew with a motion so absolutely lifelike that Annie was startled, and even awe-stricken, for in spite of her husband's opinion she could not satisfy herself whether it was indeed a living creature or a piece of wondrous mechanism.
Is it alive? she repeated more earnestly than before. Judge for yourself. said Owen Worland, who stood gazing in her face with fixed attention. The butterfly now flung itself upon the air, fluttered round Annie's head, and soared into a distant region of the parlour, still making itself perceptible to sight by the starry gleam in which the motion of its wings enveloped it. The infant on the floor followed its course with his sagacious little eyes. After flying about the room, it returned in a spiral curve and settled again on Annie's finger. "'But is it alive?' exclaimed she again, and the finger on which the gorgeous mystery had alighted was so tremulous that the butterfly was forced to balance himself with his wings.
Tell me if it is alive, or whether you created it. "'Wherefore ask who created it, so it be beautiful,' replied Owen Worland. "'Alive?' "'Yes, Annie. It may well be said to possess life, for it has absorbed my own being into itself, and in the secret of that butterfly, and in its beauty, which is not merely outward, but deep as its whole system, as represented the intellect, the imagination, the sensibility, the soul of an artist of the beautiful. Yes, I created it. But—and here his countenance somewhat changed—this butterfly is now to me what it was when I beheld it afar off in the day-dreams of my youth. Be it what it made, it is a pretty thing, said the blacksmith, grinning with childish delight.
I wonder whether it would condescend to alight on such a great clumsy finger as mine. Hold it hither, Annie. By the artist's direction, Annie touched her finger's tip to that of her husband's, and after a momentary delay, the butterfly fluttered from one to the other. It preluded a second flight by a similar, yet not precisely the same, waving of wings as in the first experiment, Then, ascending from the blacksmith's stalwart finger, it rose in a gradually enlarging curve to the ceiling, made one wide sweep around the room, and returned with an undulating movement to the point whence it had started. "'Well, that does beat all nature,' cried Robert Danforth, bestowing the heartiest praise that he could find expression for.
And, indeed, had he paused there, a man of finer words and nicer perception could not easily have said more. "'That goes beyond me, I confess. But what then?' There is more real use in one downright blow of my sledge-hammer than in the whole five years' labor that our friend Owen has wasted on this butterfly. Here the child clapped his hands and made a great babble of indistinct utterance, apparently demanding that the butterfly should be given him for a plaything. Owen Worland, meanwhile, glanced sidelong at Annie, to discover whether she sympathized in her husband's estimate of the comparative value of the beautiful and the practical. There was amid all her kindness towards himself, Amid all the wonder and admiration with which she contemplated the marvelous work of his hands in incarnation of his idea, a secret scorn, too secret, perhaps, for her own consciousness, and percept only to such intuitive discernment as that of the artist.
But Owen, in the latter stages of his pursuit, had risen out of the region in which such a discovery might have been torture. He knew that the world, and Annie, as the representative of the world, whatever praise might be bestowed, Could never say the fitting word, nor feel the fitting sentiment, which should be the perfect recompense of an artist who, symbolizing a lofty moral by a material trifle, converting what was earthly to spiritual gold, had won the beautiful into his handiwork. Not at this latest moment was he to learn that the reward of all high performance must be sought within itself, or sought in vain. There was, however, a view of the matter which Annie and her husband, And even Peter Huvenden might fully have understood, and which would have satisfied them that the toil of years had here been worthily bestowed.
Owen Worland might have told them that this butterfly, this plaything, this bridal gift of a poor watchmaker to a blacksmith's wife, was, in truth, a gem of art that a monarch would have purchased with honors and abundant wealth, and have treasured it among the jewels of his kingdom as the most unique and wondrous of them all. But the artist smiled, and kept a secret to himself. Father," said Annie, thinking that a word of praise from the old watchmaker might gratify his former apprentice, do come and admire this pretty butterfly. Let us see," said Peter Hovenden, rising from his chair, with a sneer upon his face that always made people doubt, as he himself did in everything but a material existence.
Here is my finger for it to alight upon. I shall understand it better when once I have touched it. But, to the increased astonishment of Annie, when the tip of her father's finger was pressed against that of her husband, on which the butterfly still rested, the insect drooped its wings and seemed on the point of falling to the floor. Even the bright spots of gold upon its wings and body, unless her eyes deceived her, grew dim, and the glowing purple took a dusky hue, and the starry lustre that gleamed around the glass smith's hand became faint and vanished. "'It is dying! It is dying!' cried Annie, in alarm. It has been delicately wrought, said the artist calmly. As I told you, it has imbibed a spiritual essence—call it magnetism, or what you will.
In an atmosphere of doubt and mockery its exquisite susceptibility suffers torture, as does the soul of him who instilled his own life into it. It has already lost its beauty. In a few moments more its mechanism would be irreparably injured. "'Take away your hand, father,' entreated Annie, turning pale. Here is my child. Let it rest on his innocent hand. There, perhaps, its life will revive and its colors grow brighter than ever. Her father, with an acrid smile, withdrew his finger. The butterfly then appeared to recover the power of voluntary motion, while its hues assumed much of their original lustre, and the gleam of starlight, which was its most ethereal attribute, again formed a halo round about it.
At first, when transferred from Robert Danforth's hand to the small finger of the child, This radiance grew so powerful that it positively threw the little fellow's shadow back against the wall. He, meanwhile, extended his plump hand, as he had seen his father and mother do, and watched the waving of the insect's wings with infantine delight. Nevertheless, there was a certain odd expression of sagacity that made Owen Worland feel as if here were old Pete Hovenden partially, and but partially, redeemed from his hard skepticism into childish faith. "'How wise the little monkey looks!' whispered Robert Danforth to his wife. "'I never saw such a look on a child's face,' answered Annie, admiring her own infant, and with good reason, far more than the artistic butterfly.
"'The darling knows more of the mystery than we do.' As if the butterfly, like the artist, were conscious of something not entirely congenial in the child's nature, it alternately sparkled and grew dim. At length it arose from the small hand of the infant with an airy motion that seemed to bear it upward without an effort. As if the ethereal instincts with which its master's spirit had endowed it impelled this fair vision involuntarily to a higher sphere. Had there been no obstruction, it might have soared into the sky and grown immortal. But its luster gleamed upon the ceiling, the exquisite texture of its wings brushed against that earthly medium, and a sparkle or two, as of star-dust, floated downward and lay glimmering on the carpet.
Then the butterfly came fluttering down, and, instead of returning to the infant, was apparently attracted towards the artist's hand. "'Not so, not so,' murmured Owen Worland, as if his handiwork could have understood him. "'Thou hast gone forth out of thy master's heart. There is no return for thee.'" With a wavering movement, and emitting a tremulous radiance, the butterfly struggled, as it were, towards the infant, and was about to alight upon his finger. But while it still hovered in the air, The little child of strength, with his grandsire's sharp and shrewd expression in his face, made a snatch at the marvelous insect, and compressed it in his hand. Annie screamed. Old Peter Heventon burst into a cold and scornful laugh.
The blacksmith, by main force, unclosed the infant's hand, and found within the palm a small heap of glittering fragments whence the mystery of beauty had fled forever. And as for Owen Worland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality.
End of the Artist of the Beautiful by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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3 The Clicking of Cuthbert 34:20
The Clicking of Cuthbert, by P. G. Woodhouse. This reading by John Axe. The Clicking of Cuthbert by P. G. Woodhouse. The young man came into the smoking-room of the clubhouse, and flung his bag with a clatter on the floor. He sank moodily into an armchair and pressed the bell. "'Waiter!' "'Sir?' The young man pointed at the bag with every evidence of distaste. "'You may have these clubs,' he said. "'Take them away. If you don't want them yourself, give them to one of the caddies.' Across the room, the oldest member gazed at him with a grave sadness through the smoke of his pipe. His eye was deep and dreamy, the eye of a man who, as the poet says, has seen golf steadily, and seen it whole. "'You are giving up golf?' he said.
He was not altogether unprepared for such an attitude on the young man's part, for from his eyrie on the terrace above the ninth green he had observed him start out on the afternoon's round, and had seen him lose a couple of balls in the lake at the second hole after taking seven strokes at the first. "'Yes!' cried the young man fiercely. "'Forever, damn it! Footling game! Blank, infernal, fat-headed, silly ass of a game! Nothing but a waste of time!' The sage winced. "'Don't say that, my boy.' "'But I do say it. What earthly good is golf?' Life is stern, and life is earnest. We live in a practical age. All around us we see foreign competition making itself unpleasant, and we spend our time playing golf.
What do we get out of it? Is golf any—use? That's what I'm asking you. Can you name me a single case where devotion to this pestilential pastime has done a man any practical good? The sage smiled gently. I could name a thousand. One will do. I will select, said the sage, from the innumerable memories that rushed to my mind, the story of Cuthbert Banks. Never heard of him. Be of good cheer, said the oldest member. You're going to hear of him now. It was in the picturesque little settlement of Wood Hills, said the oldest member, that the incidents occurred which I am about to relate. Even if you have never been in Wood Hills, that suburban paradise is probably familiar to you by name. Situated at a convenient distance from the city, it combines in a notable manner the advantages of town life with the pleasant surroundings and healthful air of the country.
Its inhabitants live in commodious houses, standing in their own grounds, and enjoying so many luxuries, such as gravel soil, main drainage, electric light, telephone, Baths, and the company's own water, that you might be pardoned for imagining life to be so ideal for them that no possible improvement could be added to their lot. Mrs. Willoughby Smithhurst was under no such delusion. What Wood Hills needed to make it perfect, she realized, was culture. Material benefits are all very well, but if the summum bonum is to be achieved, The soul also demands a look in, and it was Mrs. Smethurst's unfaltering resolve that never while she had her strength should the soul be handed the loser's end. It was her intention to make Wood Hills a center of all that was most cultivated and refined.
And, golly, how she had succeeded! Under her presidency, the Wood Hills Literary and Debating Society had tripled its membership. But there was always a fly in the ointment, a caterpillar in the salad. The local golf club, an institution to which Mrs. Smithhurst strongly objected, had also tripled its membership, and the division of the community into two rival camps, the golfers and the cultured, had become more marked than ever. This division, always acute, had attained now the dimensions of a schism. The rival sects greeted one another with Cold hostility. Unfortunate episodes came to widen the breach. Mrs. Smithhurst's house adjoined the links, standing to the right of the fourth tee, and as the literary society was in the habit of entertaining visiting lecturers, many a golfer had foozled his drive owing to a sudden loud outburst of applause coinciding with his downswing.
And not long before this story opens, a sliced ball, whizzing in at the open window, had come within an ace of incapacitating Raymond Parslow Devine, the rising young novelist, who rose at that moment a clear foot and a half, from any further exercise of his art. Two inches, indeed, to the right, and Raymond would inevitably have handed in his dinner-pail. To make matters worse, a ring at the front door-bell followed Almost immediately, and the maid ushered in a young man of pleasing appearance in a sweater and baggy knickerbockers, who apologetically but firmly insisted on playing his ball where it lay, and, what with the shock of the lecturer's narrow escape and the spectacle of the intruder standing on the table and working away with a niblick, the afternoon session had to be classed as a complete frost.
Mr. Devine's determination, from which no argument could swerve him, to deliver the rest of his lecture in the coal-cellar gave the meeting a jolt from which it never recovered. I have dwelt upon this incident because it was the means of introducing Cuthbert Banks to Mrs. Smithhurst's niece, Adeline. As Cuthbert, for it was he who had so nearly reduced the muster-roll of rising novelists by one, Hopped down from the table after his stroke, he was suddenly aware that a beautiful girl was looking at him intently. As a matter of fact, everyone in the room was looking at him intently. None more so than Raymond Parslow Devine. But none of the others were beautiful girls. Long as the members of Woodhill's Literary Society were on brain, they were short on looks, and to Cuthbert's excited eye, Adeline Smithhurst, stood out like a jewel in a pile of coke.
He had never seen her before, for she had only arrived at her aunt's house on the previous day. But he was perfectly certain that life, even when lived in the midst of gravel soil, main drainage, and the company's own water, was going to be a pretty poor affair if he did not see her again. Yes, Cuthbert was in love. And it is interesting to record As showing the effects of the tender emotion on a man's game, that twenty minutes after he had met Adeline, he did the short eleventh in one, and was as near as a toucher to get a three on the four hundred yard twelfth. I skip lightly over the intermediate stages of Cuthbert's courtship, and come to the moment when, at the annual ball in aid of the local cottage hospital, The only occasion during the year on which the lion, so to speak, lay down with a lamb, and the golfers and the cultured met on terms of easy comradeship, their differences temporarily laid aside, he proposed to Adeline, and was badly stymied.
That fair, soulful girl could not see him with a spy-glass. "'Mr. Banks,' she said, "'I will speak frankly.' "'Charge right ahead,' assented Cuthbert. Deeply sensible as I am of—I know—of the honor and the compliment and all that—but passing lightly over all that guff, what seems to be the trouble? I love you to distraction. Love is not everything. You're wrong, said Cuthbert earnestly. You're right off it. Love—and he was about to dilate on the theme when she interrupted him. I am a girl of ambition. And very nice, too, said Cuthbert. "'I am a girl of ambition,' repeated Adeline, "'and I realize that the fulfillment of my ambitions must come through my husband. I am very ordinary myself.' "'What?' cried Cuthbert.
"'You ordinary? Why, you are a pearl among women, the queen of your sex. You can't have been looking in a mirror lately. You stand alone. Simply alone. You make the rest look like battered repaints.' "'Well,' said Adeline, Softening a trifle, I believe I am fairly good-looking. Anybody who is content to call you fairly good-looking would describe the Taj Mahal as a pretty nifty tomb. But that is not the point. What I mean is, if I marry a nonentity, I shall be a nonentity myself forever, and I would sooner die than be a nonentity. And, if I follow your reasoning, you think that lets me out? Well, really, Mr. Banks, have you done anything? Or are you ever likely to do anything worthwhile? Guthrie hesitated.
It's true, he said. I didn't finish in the first ten at the Open, and I was knocked out in the semi-finals of the Amateur, but I won the French Open last year. The—what? The French Open! Golf, you know! Golf! You waste your time playing golf! I admire a man who is more spiritual, more intellectual. A pang of jealousy rent Cuthbert's bosom. Like, what's its name, Devine? He said, sullenly. Mr. Devine, replied Adeline, blushing faintly, is going to be a great man. He has achieved much. The critics say he is more Russian than any other young English writer. And is that good? Of course that's good. I should have thought the wheeze would be to be more English than any other young English writer. "'Nonsense!
Who wants an English writer to be English? You've got to be Russian or Spanish or something to be a real success. The mantle of great Russians has descended on Mr. Devine.' "'From what I've heard of the Russians, I should hate to have that happen to me.' "'There is no danger of that,' said Adelaide scornfully. "'Oh!' Well, let me tell you that there is a lot more in me than you think. That might easily be so. You think I'm not spiritual and intellectual, said Cuthbert, deeply moved. Very well. Tomorrow I join the Literary Society. Even as he spoke the words, his leg was itching to kick himself for being such a chump, but the sudden expression of pleasure on Adeline's face soothed him. He went home that night with the feeling that he had taken on something rather attractive.
It was only in the cold gray light of the morning that he realized what he had let himself in for. I do not know if you have had any experience of suburban literary societies, but the one that flourished under the eye of Mrs. Willoughby Smithhurst at Wood Hills was rather more so than the average. With my feeble powers of narrative, I cannot hope to make clear to you all that Cuthbert Banks endured, in the next few weeks. And, even if I could, I doubt if I should do so. It is all very well to excite pity and terror, as Aristotle recommends, but there are limits. In the ancient Greek tragedies, it was an ironclad rule that all the real rough stuff should take place off stage, and I shall follow this admirable principle.
It will suffice if I say merely that J. Cuthbert Banks had a thin time. After attending eleven debates and fourteen lectures on Vers libre poetry, the seventeenth-century essayists, the neo-scandinavian movement in Portuguese literature, and other subjects of a similar nature, he grew so enfeebled that, on the rare occasions when he had the time for a visit to the links, he had to take a full iron for his mashy shots. It was not simply the oppressive nature of the debates and the lectures that sapped his vitality. What really got in amongst him was the torture of seeing Adeline's Adoration of Raymond Parslow Devine. The man seemed to have made the deepest possible impression on her plastic emotions.
When he spoke, she leaned forward with parted lips and looked at him. When he was not speaking, which was seldom, she leaned back and looked at him. And when he happened to take the next seat to her, she leaned sideways and looked at him. One glance at Mr. Devine would have been more than enough for Cuthbert, but Adeline found him a spectacle that never palled. She could not have gazed at him with a more rapturous intensity if she had been a small child, and he a saucer of ice-cream. All this Cuthbert had to witness While still endeavoring to retain possession of his faculties sufficiently to enable him to duck and back away if someone suddenly asked him what he thought of the somber realism of Vladimir Brusilov.
It is little wonder that he tossed in his bed, picking at the coverlet, through sleepless nights, and had to have all his waistcoats taken in three inches to keep them from sagging. This Vladimir Brusilov to whom I have referred was the famous Russian novelist. Owing to the fact of his being in the country on a lecturing tour at the moment, there had been something of a boom in his works. The Wood Hills Literary Society had been studying them for weeks, and never since his first entrance into the intellectual circles had Cuthbert Banks come nearer to throwing in the towel. Vladimir specialized in gray studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page 380, when the Mujic decided to commit suicide.
It was tough going for a man whose deepest reading hitherto had been Varden on the push-shot, and there can be no greater proof of the magic of love than the fact that Cuthbert stuck it without a cry. But the strain was terrible, and I am inclined to think that he must have cracked had it not been for the daily reports in the papers of the internecine strife that was proceeding so briskly in Russia. Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually give out. One morning, as he tottered down the road for a short walk, which was now almost the only exercise which he was equal, Cuthbert met Adeline.
A spasm of anguish flitted through all his nerve-centres, as he saw that she was accompanied by Raymond Parslow Devine. "'Good morning, Mr. Banks,' said Adeline. "'Good morning,' said Cuthbert hollowly. "'Such good news about Vladimir Brusiloff.' "'Dead?' said Cuthbert, with a touch of hope. "'Dead? Of course not. Why should he be? "'No, Aunt Emily met his manager after his lecture at Queen's Hall yesterday, "'and he has promised that Mr. Brusiloff shall come to her next Wednesday reception.' "'Oh, ah!' said Cuthbert Dolly. I don't know how she managed it. I think she must have told him that Mr. Devine would be there to meet him. But you said he was coming, argued Cuthbert. I shall be very glad, said Raymond Devine, of the opportunity of meeting Brusiloff.
I'm sure, Adeline said, he will be very glad of the opportunity of meeting you. Possibly, said Mr. Devine. Possibly. Competent critics have said that my work closely resembles that of the great Russian masters. Your psychology is so deep. Yes, yes. And your atmosphere. Yes, quite. Cuthbert, in a perfect agony of spirit, prepared to withdraw from this love-feast. The sun was shining brightly, but the world was black to him. Birds sang in the tree-tops, but he did not hear them. He might have been a for all the pleasure he found in life. "'You will be there, Mr. Banks?' said Adeline, as he turned away. "'Oh, all right,' said Cuthbert. When Cuthbert had entered the drawing-room on the following Wednesday, and had taken his usual place in a distant corner, where, while being able to feast his gaze on Adeline, he had a sporting chance of being overlooked or mistaken for a piece of furniture, he perceived the great Russian thinker, seated in the midst of a circle of admiring females.
Raymond Parsel Devine had not yet arrived. His first glance at the novelist surprised Cuthbert. Doubtless with the best motives, Vladimir Brusiloff had permitted his face to become almost entirely concealed behind a dense cereba of hair, but his eyes were visible through the undergrowth, and it seemed to Cuthbert that there was an expression in them not unlike that of a cat, in a strange backyard surrounded by small boys. The man looked forlorn and hopeless, and Cuthbert wondered whether he had had bad news from home. That was not the case. The latest news which Vladimir Brusiloff had had from Russia had been particularly cheering. Three of his principal creditors had perished in the last massacre of the bourgeoisie.
And a man whom he had owed for five years for a samovar and a pair of overshoes had fled the country, and had not been heard of since. No, it was not bad news from home that was depressing Vladimir. What was wrong with him was the fact that this was the eighty-second suburban literary reception he had been compelled to attend since he had landed in the country on his lecturing tour, and he was sick to death of it. When his agent had first suggested the trip, he had signed on the dotted line without instant's hesitation. Worked out in rubles, the fees offered seemed just about right. But now, as he peered through the brushwood at the faces around him, and realized that eight out of ten of those present had manuscripts of some sort concealed on their persons, and were only waiting for an opportunity to whip them out and start reading, he wished he had stayed in his quiet home in Nijni Novgorod, where the worst thing that could happen to a fellow was a brace of bombs coming in through the window and mixing themselves up with his breakfast egg.
At this point in his meditations he was aware that his hostess was looming up before him with a pale young man in horn-ridden spectacles at her side. There was in Mrs. Smithhurst's demeanor something of the unction of the master of ceremonies at the big fight, who introduces the earnest gentleman who wishes to challenge the winner. "'Oh, Mr. Brusiloff,' said Mrs. Smithhurst, "'I do so want you to meet Mr. Raymond Parslow Devine. Whose works I expect you know?' He is one of our younger novelists. The distinguished visitor peered in a wary and defensive manner through the shrubbery, but did not speak. Inwardly, he was thinking how exactly like Mr. Devine was to the eighty-one other young novelists to whom he had been introduced at various hamlets throughout the country.
Raymond Parslow Devine bowed courteously, while Cuthbert, wedged into his corner, glowered at him. The critics, said Mr. Devine, have been kind enough to say that my poor efforts contain a good deal of the Russian spirit. I owe much to the great Russians. I have been greatly influenced by Sovyetsky. Down in the forest, something stirred. It was Vladimir Brusilov's mouth opening, and he prepared to speak. He was not a man who prattled readily, especially in a foreign tongue. He gave the impression that each word was excavated from his interior by some up-to-date process of mining. He glared bleakly at Mr. Devine, and allowed three words to drop out of him. Sovyetsky, no good. He paused for a moment, set the machinery working again, and delivered five more at the pit-head.
I spit me of Sovyetsky. There was a painful sensation. The lot of a popular idol is in many ways an enviable one. But it has the drawback of uncertainty. Here today and gone tomorrow. Until this moment, Raymond Parslow Devine's stock had stood at something considerably over par in Wood Hill's intellectual circles. But now there was a rapid slump. Hitherto he had been greatly admired for being influenced by Sovetsky. But it appeared now that this was not a good thing to be. It was evidently a rotten thing to be. The law could not touch you for being influenced by Sovieffsky, but there is an ethical as well as a legal code, and this it was obvious that Raymond Parslow Devine had transgressed. Women drew away from him slightly, holding their skirts.
Men looked at him censurously. Adeline Smithhurst started violently, and dropped a teacup. And Cuthbert Banks, doing his popular imitation of a sardine in his corner, felt for the first time that life held something of sunshine. Raymond Parsleau-Divine was plainly shaken, but he made an adroit attempt to recover his lost prestige. When I say I have been influenced by Sovyetsky, I mean, of course, that I was once under his spell. A young writer commits many follies. I have long since passed through that phase. The false glamour of Sovyetsky has ceased to dazzle me. I now belong wholeheartedly to the school of Nastikoff. There was a reaction. After all, we cannot expect old heads on young shoulders, and a lapse at the outset of one's career should not be held against one who has eventually seen the light.
Nastikoff, no good, said Vladimir Brusilov coldly. He paused, listening to the machinery. Nastikoff worse than Sovetsky. He paused again. I spit me of Nastikoff. He said. This time there was no doubt about it. The bottom had dropped out of the market, and Raymond Parslow Devine Preferred were down in the cellar with no takers. It was clear to the entire assembled company that they had been all wrong about Raymond Parslow Devine. They had allowed him to play on their innocence and to sell them a pup. They had taken him at his own valuation, and had been cheated into admiring him as a man who amounted to something, And all the while he had belonged to the school of Nasticoff. You never can tell.
Mrs. Smithhurst's guests were well-bred, and there was consequently no violent demonstration. But you could see by their faces what they felt. Those nearest Raymond Parslow jostled to get further away. Mrs. Smithhurst eyed him stonily through a raised lornet. One or two low hisses were heard. and over at the other end of the room somebody opened the window in a marked manner. Raymond Parslow Devine hesitated for a moment, then, realizing his situation, turned and slunk to the door. There was an audible sigh of relief as it closed behind him. Vladimir Brusilov proceeded to sum up. No novelists any good except me. Sovyetsky, yah! Nastikov, bah! I smit me of them all! No novelist anywhere any good except me.
B. G. Woodhouse and Tolstoy. Not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelist any good except me. And, having uttered this dictum, he removed a slab of cake from a nearby plate, steered it through the jungle, and began to champ. It is too much to say that there was dead silence. There could never be that in any room in which Vladimir Brusilov was eating cake. But certainly, What you might call the general chit-chat was pretty well down and out. Nobody liked to be the first to speak. The members of the Wood Hills Literary Society looked at one another timidly. Cuthbert, for his part, gazed at Adeline, and Adeline gazed into space. It was plain that the girl was deeply stirred. Her eyes were open wide and a faint flush of crimson on her cheeks, and her breath was coming quickly.
Adeline's mind was in a whirl. She felt as if she had been walking gaily along a pleasant path, and had stopped suddenly on the very brink of a precipice. It would be idle to deny that Raymond Parsle Devine had attracted her extraordinarily. She had taken him, at his own valuation, as an extremely hot potato, and her hero-worship had gradually been turning into love. And now her hero had been shown to have feet of clay. It was hard, I consider, on Raymond Parslow Devine, but that is how it goes in the world. You get a following as a celebrity, and then you run up against another bigger celebrity, and your admirers desert you. One could moralize on this at considerable length, but better not, perhaps.
Enough to say that the glamour of Raymond Parsle Devine ceased abruptly at that moment for Adeline, and her most coherent thought at this juncture was the resolve, as soon as she got up to her room, to burn the three signed photographs he had sent her, and to give the autographed presentation set of his books to the grocer's boy. Mrs. Smithhurst, meanwhile, having rallied somewhat, was endeavoring to set the feast of reason and flow of soul going again. "'And how do you like England, Mr. Brusiloff?' She asked. The celebrity paused in the act of lowering another segment of cake. Damn good, he replied, cordially. I suppose you've traveled all over the country by this time? You said it, agreed the thinker.
Have you met many of our great public men? Yes, yes, quite a few of the Nibbs. Loyd Gorge, I meet him. But— Beneath the matting, a discontented expression came to his face, and his voice took on a peevish tone. "'But I not meet your real great men, your Arb Michel, your Arrivardon. "'I not meet them. That's what gives me the peoplevitch. "'Have you ever meet Arb Michel and Arrivardon?' A strained, anguished look came into Mrs. Smithhurst's face. and was reflected in the faces of the other members of the circle. The eminent Russian had sprung two entirely new ones on them, and they felt that their ignorance was about to be exposed. What would Vladimir Brusilov think of the Wood Hills Literary Society?
The reputation of the Wood Hills Literary Society was at stake, trembling in the balance, and coming up for the third time. In dumb agony, Mrs. Smithhurst rolled her eyes about the room, Searching for someone capable of coming to the rescue. She drew a blank. And then from a distant corner there sounded a deprecating cough, and those nearest Cuthbert Banks saw that he had stopped twisting his right foot around his left ankle and his left foot around his right ankle, and was sitting up with a light of almost human intelligence in his eyes. "'Hem,' said Cuthbert, Blushing as every eye in the room seemed to fix itself on him, I think he means Abe Mitchell and Harry Varden. Abe Mitchell and Harry Varden, repeated Mrs.
Smithhurst blankly. I never heard of—yes, yes, most very, shouted Vladimir Brusilov enthusiastically. Arb Michel and Harry Varden. You know them, yes? No? What? Perhaps? I've played with Abe Mitchell often, and I was parted with Harry Varden in last year's Open. The great Russian uttered a cry that shook the chandelier. You play the Open? Why, he demanded reproachfully of Mrs. Methurst, was I not interducted to this young man who play in the Opens? Well, the fact is, Mr. Brusiloff—she broke off. She was equal to the task of explaining, without hurting anyone's feelings, that she had always regarded Cuthbert as a piece of cheese and a blot on the landscape. "'Introduct me,' thundered the celebrity.
"'Why, certainly, certainly, of course. This is Mr.' She looked appealingly at Cuthbert. "'Banks,' prompted Cuthbert. "'Banks!' cried Vladimir Brusilov. "'Not Kootaboot, Banks!' "'Is your name Kootaboot?' Asked Mrs. Smithhurst faintly. Well, it's Cuthbert. Yes, yes, cootaboot! There was a rush and a whirl as the effervescent Muscovite burst his way through the throng and rushed to where Cuthbert sat. He stood for a moment, eyeing him excitedly, then, stooping swiftly, kissed him on both cheeks before Cuthbert could get his guard up. My dear young man, I saw you win ze French open. Great, great, superb hot stuff! And you can say I said so. Will you permit one who is but eighteen at Ningee Novgorod to salute you once more?
And he kissed Cuthbert again. Then, brushing aside one or two intellectuals who were in the way, he dragged up a chair and sat down. You are a great man, he said. Oh, no, said Cuthbert modestly. Yes, great, most very. The way you lay your approach putts dead from anywhere. Oh, I don't know. Mr. Brusilov drew his chair closer. Let me tell you one very funny story about putting. It was one day I play at Nindji Novgorod with a pro against Lennon and Trotsky, and Trotsky had a two-inch putt for the hole. But just as he addresses the ball, someone in the crowd, he tries to assassinate Lennon with a revolver. You know that is not a great national sport, trying to assassinate Lenin with we Wolvers. And the bank puts Trotsky off his stroke, and he goes five yards past the hole, and then Lenin, who is rather shaken, you understand, he misses again himself, and we win the hole in a match, and I clean up three hundred and ninety-six thousand rubles, or fifteen shillings in your money.
Some game of itch. And now let me tell you one other very funny story. The desultory conversation had begun in murmurs over the rest of the room, as Woodhill's intellectuals politely endeavored to conceal the fact that they realized that they were about as much out of it at this reunion of twin souls as cats at a dog show. From time to time they started as Vladimir Brusilov's high laugh boomed out. Perhaps it was consolation to them to know that he was enjoying himself. As for Adeline, how shall I describe her emotions? She was stunned. Before her very eyes, the stone which the builders had rejected had become the main thing. The hundred-to-one shot had walked away with the race. A rush of tender admiration for Cuthbert Banks flooded her heart.
She saw that she had been all wrong. Cuthbert, whom she had always treated with patronizing superiority, was really a man to be looked up to and worshipped. A deep dreamy sigh shook Adeline's fragile form. Half an hour later, Vladimir and Cuthbert Banks rose. "'Gout-a-bye, Mrs. Smethurst,' said the celebrity. "'Zank you for a most charming visit. My friend Koot-a-boot and me we now go to shoot a few holes. You will end me club's friend Koot-a-boot. Any you want?' "'The Nibblisky is what I use most. Goet-a-bye, Mrs. Smethurst.' They were moving to the door when Cuthbert felt a light touch on his arm. Adeline was looking up at him tenderly. "'May I come to and walk round with you?' Cuthbert's bosom heaved.
"'Oh,' he said with a tremor in his voice, "'that you would walk round with me for life.' Her eyes met his. "'Perhaps,' she whispered softly, "'it could be arranged.' "'And so,' Concluded the oldest member. You see that golf can be of the greatest practical assistance to a man in life's struggles. Raymond Parslow Devine, who was no player, had to move out of the neighborhood immediately, and is now, I believe, writing scenarios out in California for the Flickr Film Company. Adeline is married to Cuthbert, and it was only his earnest pleadings which prevented her from having their eldest son christened Abe Mitchell, Ribbed Face, Mashie Banks, For she is now as keen a devotee of the great game as her husband.
Those who know them say that theirs is a union so devoted, so—the sage broke off abruptly, for the young man had rushed to the door and out into the passage. Through the open door he could hear him crying passionately to the waiter to bring back his clubs.
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4 A Cosmopolite in a CafÃÂÃÂÃÂé, 15:37
A Cosmopolite in a Café.
Narration by Ezwa. A Cosmopolite in a Café. By O. Henry.
At midnight, the cafe was crowded. By some chance, The little table at which I sat had escaped the eye of incomers, and two vacant chairs at it extended their arms with venal hospitality to the influx of patrons. And then, a cosmopolitan set in one of them, and I was glad, for I held a theory that since Adam, no true citizen of the world has existed. We hear of them, and we see foreign labels on much luggage, But we find travelers instead of cosmopolites. I invoke your consideration of the scene. The marble-topped tables, the range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the ladies dressed in demistrate toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible chorus of taste, economy, opulence, or art, the sedulous and largest loving garcon, The music wisely catering to all with its raids upon the composers.
The mélange of talk and laughter, and, if you will, the Vussburger in the tall glass cones that bend to your lips as a ripe cherry sways on its branch to the beak of a rubber jay. I was told by a sculptor from Mount Chunk that the scene was truly Parisian. My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coghlan. And he will be heard from next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a new attraction there, he informed me, offering kingly diversion. And then his conversation rang along parallels of latitude and longitude. He took the great round world in his hands, so to speak, familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a maraschino cherry in a table d'eau grapefruit. He spoke disrespectfully of the equator.
He skipped from continent to continent. He derided the zones. He mopped up the high seas with his napkin. With a wave of his hand, he would speak of a certain bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you on skis in Lapland. Zip! Now you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at Kalaika Hiki. Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas-Postock swamp, let you drive for a moment on the Alcali Plains of his Idaho ranch, then whirled you into the Society of Viennese Archdukes. Annan, he would be telling you of a cold he acquired in a Chicago lake breeze, and how old Escamilla cured it in Buenos Aires with a hot infusion of the chuchula weed. You would have addressed the letter to E. Rushmore Coghlan, Esquire, the Earth, Solar System, the Universe, and have mailed it, feeling confident that it would be delivered to him.
I was sure that I had at last found the one true cosmopolitan since Adam, and I listened to his worldwide discourse, fearful lest I should discover in it the local note of the mere globe-trotter. But his opinions never fluttered or drooped. He was as impartial to cities, countries, and continents as the winds or gravitation. And as E. Rushmore Coghlan prattled of this little planet, I thought with glee of a great almost cosmopolite who wrote for the whole world and dedicated himself to Bombay. In a poem, he has to say that there is pride and rivalry between the cities of the earth, and that the men that breed from them, they traffic up and down, but cling to their citizens as a child to the mother's gown.
And whenever they walk, by roaring streets unknown, they remember their native city, most faithful, foolish, fond, Making her mere breathed name their bond upon their bond. And my glee was roused because I had caught Mr. Kipling napping. Here I had found a man not made from dust, one who had no narrow boast of birthplace or country, one who, if he bragged at all, would brag of his whole round globe against the Martians and the inhabitants of the moon. Expression on these subjects was precipitated from Erasmus Coghlan by the third corner to our table. While Coghlan was describing to me the topography along the Siberian Railway, the orchestra glided into a medley. The concluding air was Dixie, and as the exhilarating notes tumbled forth, They were almost overpowered by a great clapping of hands from almost every table.
It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be witnessed every evening in numerous cafes in the city of New York. Tons of brew have been consumed over theories to account for it. Some have conjectured hastily that all Southerners in town hie themselves to cafes at nightfall. This applause of the rebel air in a northern city does puzzle a little, but it is not insolvable. The war with Spain, many years generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long-shot winners at the New Orleans race track, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society, have made the South rather a fad in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman's in Richmond, Virginia.
Oh, certainly. But many a lady has to work now. The war, you know. When Dixie was being played, a dark-haired young man sprang up from somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell, and waved frantically his soft-brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke, Dropped into the vacant chair at our table, and pulled out cigarettes. The evening was at the period when reserve is thawed. One of us mentioned three Wussburgers to the waiter. The dark-haired young man acknowledged his inclusion in the order by a smile and a nod. I hastened to ask him a question, because I wanted to try out a theory I had. Mr. Brown. Would you mind telling me? I began. Whether you are from— The fist of Yves Rushmore Coghlan banged the table as I was jarred into silence.
Excuse me, said he. But that's a question I never like to hear asked. What does it matter where a man is from? Is it fair to judge a man by his post-office address? Why, I've seen Kentuckians who hated whiskey, Virginians who weren't descended from Pocahontas. Indianians who hadn't written a novel. Mexicans who didn't wear velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the seams. Funny Englishmen. Spendthrift Yankees. Cold-blooded Southerners. Narrow-minded Westerners. And New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on the street to watch a one-armed grocer's clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man, and don't handicap him with the label of any section. Pardon me, I said, but my curiosity was not altogether an idle one.
I know the South, and when the band plays Dixie, I like to observe. I have formed the belief that the man who applauds that air with special violence and ostensible sectional loyalty is invariably a native of either Secaucus, New Jersey, or the district between Murray Hill Lyceum and the Harlem River, this city. I was about to put my opinion to the test by inquiring of this gentleman, when you interrupted with your own larger theory, I must confess. And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it became evident that his mind also moved along its own set of grooves. I should like to be—a periwinkle, said he mysteriously, on the top of a valley, and sing—tooralu-ralu. This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coughlin.
I've been around the world twelve times, said he. I know an Eskimo in Uparnavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties. And I saw a Goatherder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast-food puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another in Yokohama all year round. I've got slippers waiting for me in a tea-house in Shanghai, and I don't have to tell em how to cook my eggs in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. It's a mighty little old world. What's the use of bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the old manor-house in the Dale? Or Euclid Avenue, Cleveland. Or Pikes Peak. Or Fairfax County, Virginia. Or Hooligans Flats. Or any place. It'll be a better world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or ten acres of swampland, just because we happened to be born there.
You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite, I said admiringly. But it also seems that you would decry patriotism. "'A relic of the Stone Age,' declared Coghlan warmly. "'We are all brothers—chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians, and the people in the bend of the Kaa River. Some day all this petty pride in one's city or state or section or country will be wiped out, and we'll all be citizens of the world, as we ought to be.' But while you are wandering in foreign lands—I persisted. Do not your thoughts revert to some spot, some dear and—Nary a spot, interrupted E. R. Coghlan flippantly. The terrestrial, globular, planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened at the poles, and known as the Earth, is my abode.
I've met a good many object-bound citizens of this country abroad, and I've seen men from Chicago sit in a gondola in Venice on a moonlit night and brag about their drainage canal. I've seen a Southerner, on being introduced to the King of England, Hand that monarch, without batting his eyes, the information that his grand-aunt on his mother's side was related by marriage to the Perkinses of Charleston. I knew a New Yorker who was kidnapped for ransom by some Afghanistan bandits. His people sent over the money, and he came back to Kabul with the agent. "'Afghanistan,' the natives said to him through an interpreter, Well, not so slow, do you think? Oh, I don't know, says he, and he begins to tell them about a cab-driver at Sixth Avenue and Broadway.
Those ideas don't suit me. I'm not tied down to anything that isn't eight thousand miles in diameter. Just put me down as E. Rushmore Coughlin, citizen of the terrestrial sphere. My cosmopolite made a large adieu and left me, for he thought that he saw someone through the chattering smoke whom he knew. So I was left with the would-be periwinkle, who was reduced to Wussburger without further ability to voice his aspirations to perch Melodius upon the summit of a valley. I sat reflecting upon my evident cosmopolite, and wondering how the poet had managed to miss him. He was my discovery, And I believed in him. How was it? The men that breed from them, they traffic up and down, but cling to their citizen as a child to the mother's gown.
Not so, E. Rushmore Coughlan. With the whole world for his... My meditations were interrupted by a tremendous noise and conflict in another part of the cafe. I saw above the heads of the seated patrons, E. Rushmore Coughlan, And a stranger to me engaged in terrific battle. They fought between the tables like titans, and glasses crashed, and men caught their hats up and were knocked down, and a brunette screamed, and a blonde began to sing teasing. My cosmopolite was sustaining the pride and reputation of the earth when the waiters closed in on both combatants with their famous flying wedge formation and bore them outside, still resisting. I called MacCarthy, one of the French garcons, and asked him the cause of the conflict.
The man with the red tie. That was my cosmopolite, said he. Got hot on account of things said about the bum sidewalks and water supplies, the place he come from, by the other guy. Why, said I, bewildered. That man is a citizen of the world, a cosmopolite. He— Originally from Atahamkiagh, Maine, he said, continued MacCarthy. And he wouldn't stand for no knocking the place.
End of a Cosmopolitan Cafe by O. Henry. Narration by Ezra. Narrators Voice by Julian Jamieson. Eve Rushmore Coghlan, the Cosmopolitan by Michael Yard, Tucson, Arizona. Mysterious Dark-Head Young Man by Justin Barrett, Forney, Texas. French Waiter by Sure to go?
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5 The Dead Mother 2:40
The Dead Mother.
In a certain village there lived a husband and wife, lived happily, lovingly, peaceably. All their neighbors envied them. The sight of them gave pleasure to honest folks. Well, the mistress bore a son, but directly after it was born she died. The poor Mujik moaned and wept. Above all, he was in despair about the babe. How was he to nourish it now, how to bring it up without its mother? He did what was best, and hired an old woman to look after it. Only here was a wonder. All day long the babe would take no food, and did nothing but cry, and there was no soothing it anyhow. But during a great part of the night one could fancy it wasn't there at all. So silently and so peacefully did it sleep. "'What's the meaning of this?' thinks the old woman.
"'S'pose I keep awake to-night. Maybe I shall find out.' Well, just at midnight she heard someone quietly open the door and go up to the cradle. The babe became still, just as if it was being suckled. The next night the same thing took place, and the third night too. Then she told the Moodrick about this. He called his kinsfolk together, and held council with them. They determined on this to keep awake on a certain night, and to spy out who it was that came to suckle the babe. So at eventide they all lay down on the floor, and beside them they set a lighted taper, hidden in an earthen pot. At midnight the cottage door opened. Some one stepped up to the cradle. The babe became still. At that moment one of the kinsfolk suddenly brought out the light.
They looked, and saw the dead mother, in the very same clothes in which she had been buried, on her knees beside the cradle, over which she bent as she suckled the babe at her dead breast. The moment the light shone in the cottage, she stood up, gazed sadly on her little one. and then went out of the room without a sound, not saying a word to anyone. All those who saw her stood for a time terror-struck, and then they found the babe was dead.
End of The Dead Mother
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6 The Half Brothers 38:09
The Half Brothers. The Half-Brothers My mother was twice married. She never spoke of her first husband, and it is only from other people that I have learnt what little I know about him. I believe she was scarcely seventeen when she was married to him, and he was barely one-and-twenty. He rented a small farm up in Cumberland, somewhere towards the sea-coast, but he was perhaps too young and inexperienced to have the charge of land and cattle. Anyhow, His affairs did not prosper, and he fell into ill health, and died of consumption before they had been three years man and wife. Leaving my mother, a young widow of twenty, with a little child only just able to walk, and the farm on her hands for four years more by the lease, with half the stock on it dead, or sold off, One by one to pay the more pressing debts, and with no money to purchase more, or even to buy the provisions needed for the small consumption of every day.
There was another child coming too, and sad and sorry, I believe. She was to think of it. A dreary winter she must have had in her lonesome dwelling, with never another near it for miles around, Her sister came to bear her company, and they two planned and plotted how to make every penny they could raise go as far as possible. I can't tell you how it happened that my little sister, whom I never saw, came to sicken and die. But, as if my poor mother's cup was not full enough, only a fortnight before Gregory was born, the little girl took ill. of scarlet fever, and in a week she lay dead. My mother was, I believe, just stunned with this last glow. My aunt has told me that she did not cry. Aunt Fanny would have been thankful if she had.
But she sat holding the poor wee lassie's hand, and looking in her pretty, pale, dead face, without so much as shedding a tear. And it was all the same. When they had to take her away to be buried, she just kissed the child and sat her down in the window seat to watch the little black train of people, neighbors, my aunt and one far-off cousin, who were all the friends they could muster, go winding away amongst the snow, which had fallen thinly over the country the night before. When my aunt came back from the funeral, she found my mother in the same place, and as dry-eyed as ever. So she continued until after Gregory was born, and somehow his coming seemed to loosen the tears, and she cried day and night, till my aunt and the other watcher looked at each other in dismay, and would fain have stopped her if they had but known how.
But she bade them let her alone, and not be over-anxious, for every drop she shed eased her brain, which had been in a terrible state before for want of the power to cry. She seemed after that to think of nothing but her new little baby. She had hardly appeared to remember either her husband or her little daughter that lay dead in Brigham Churchyard. At least so Aunt Fanny said. But she was a great talker, and my mother was very silent by nature, and I think Aunt Fanny may have been mistaken in believing that my mother never thought of her husband and child, just because she never spoke about them. Aunt Fanny was older than my mother. and had a way of treating her like a child, but, for all that, she was a kind, warm-hearted creature, who thought more of her sister's welfare than she did of her own, and it was on her bit of money that they principally lived, and on what the two could earn by working for the great Glasgow Sowing Merchants.
But by and by my mother's eyesight began to fail. It was not that she was exactly blind, for she could see well enough to guide herself about the house, and to do a good deal of domestic work. But she could no longer do fine sewing and earn money. It must have been very heavy crying she had had in her day, for she was but a young creature at this time. And as pretty a young woman, I have heard people say, as any on the countryside. She took it sadly to heart that she could no longer gain anything towards the keep of herself and her child. My aunt Fanny would fain have persuaded her that she had enough to do in managing their cottage and minding Gregory, but my mother knew that they were pinched.
and that Aunt Fanny herself had not as much to eat, even on the commonest kind of food, as she could have done with. And as for Gregory, he was not a strong lad, and needed not more food, for he always had enough. Whoever went short but better nourishment and more flesh meat. One day it was Aunt Fanny who told me all this about my poor mother. long after her death, as the sisters were sitting together, Aunt Fanny working, and my mother hushing Gregory to sleep. William Preston, who was afterwards my father, came in. He was reckoned an old bachelor. I suppose he was long past forty, and he was one of the wealthiest farmers thereabouts, and had known my grandfather well. and my mother and my aunt in their more prosperous days.
He sat down and began to twirl his hat by way of being agreeable. My aunt Fanny talked, and he listened and looked at my mother. But he said very little, either on that visit or on many another that he paid before he spoke out what had been the real purpose of his calling so often all along. and from the very first time he came to their house. One Sunday, however, my Aunt Fanny stayed away from church, and took care of the child, and my mother went alone. When she came back, she ran straight upstairs, without going into the kitchen to look at Gregory or speak word to her sister, and Aunt Fanny heard her cry as if her heart was breaking. So she went up and scolded her right well through the bolted door, till at last she got her to open it.
And then she threw herself on my aunt's neck, and told her that William Preston had asked her to marry him, and had promised to take good charge of her boy, and to let him want for nothing, neither in the way of keep nor of education, and that she had consented. Aunt Fanny was a good deal shocked at this, for, as I have said, she had often thought that my mother had forgotten her first husband very quickly, and now here was proof positive of it, if she could so soon think of marrying again. Besides, as Aunt Fanny used to say, she herself would have been a far more suitable match. for a man of William Preston's age than Helen, who, though she was a widow, had not seen her four-and-twentieth summer.
However, as Aunt Fanny said, they had not asked her advice, and there was much to be said on the other side of the question. Helen's eyesight would never be good for much again, and as William Preston's wife, she would never need to do anything. if she chose to sit with her hands before her, and a boy was a great charge to her widowed mother, and now there would be a decent, steady man to see after him. So, by and by, Aunt Fanny seemed to take a brighter view of the marriage than did my mother herself, who hardly ever looked up, and never smiled after the day when she promised William Preston to be his wife. But much as she had loved Gregory before, she seemed to love him more now. She was continually talking to him when they were alone, though he was far too young to understand her moaning words, or give her any comfort, except by his caresses.
At last William Preston and she were wed, and she went to be mistress of a well-stocked house, not above half an hour's walk from where Aunt Fanny lived. I believe she did all that she could to please my father, and a more dutiful wife, I have heard him himself say, could never have been. But she did not love him, and he soon found it out. She loved Gregory, and she did not love him. Perhaps love would have come in time. If had been patient enough to wait, but it just turned him sour to see how her eye brightened and her colour came at the sight of that little child. While for him, who had given her so much, she had only gentle words as cold as ice. He got to taunt her with the difference in her manner, as if that would bring love, and he took a positive dislike to Gregory.
He was so jealous of the ready love that always gushed out like a spring of fresh water when he came near. He wanted her to love him more, and perhaps that was all well and good, but he wanted her to love her child less, and that was an evil wish. One day he gave way to his temper, and cursed and swore at Gregory. He had got into some mischief. As children will, my mother made some excuse for him. My father said it was hard enough to have to keep another man's child without having it perpetually held up in its naughtiness by his wife, who ought to be always in the same mind that he was, and so from little they got to more. And the end of it was that my mother took to her bed before her time, And I was born that very day.
My father was glad and proud and sorry, all in a breath, glad and proud that a son was born to him, and sorry for his poor wife's state, and to think how his angry words had brought it on. But he was a man who liked better to be angry than sorry, so he soon found out that it was all Gregory's fault, and owed him an additional grudge for having hastened my birth. He had another grudge against him before long. My mother began to sink the day after I was born. My father sent to Carlisle for doctors, and would have coined his heart's blood into gold to save her, if that could have been. But it could not. My Aunt Fanny used to say sometimes, that she thought that Helen did not wish to live, and so just let herself die away, without trying to take hold of life.
But when I questioned her, she owned that my mother did all the doctors bade her do, with the same sort of uncomplaining patience with which she had acted through life. One of her last requests was to have Gregory laid in her bed by my side, and then she made him take hold of my little hand. Her husband came in while she was looking at us so, and when he bent tenderly over her to ask her how she felt now, and seemed to gaze on us two little half-brothers with a grave sort of kindness, she looked up in his face and smiled, Almost her first smile at him, and such a sweet smile, as more besides Aunt Fanny have said. In an hour she was dead. Aunt Fanny came to live with us. It was the best thing that could be done.
My father would have been glad to return to his old mode of bachelor life. But what could he do with two little children? He needed A woman to take care of him, and who was so fitting as his wife's elder sister. So she had the charge of me from birth, and for a time I was weakly, as was but natural, and she was always beside me, night and day watching over me, and my father nearly as anxious as she, for his land had come down from father to son. for more than three hundred years, and he would have cared for me merely as his flesh and blood that was to inherit the land after him. But he needed something to love, for all that. To most people he was a stern, hard man, and he took to me as, I fancy, he had taken to no human being before, as he might have taken to my mother.
If she had no former life for him to be jealous of. I loved him back again right-heartedly. I loved all around me. I believe that everybody was kind to me. After a time I overcame my original weakness of constitution, and was just a bonny, strong-looking lad, whom every passer-by noticed, when my father took me with him. to the nearest town. At home I was the darling of my aunt, the tenderly beloved of my father, and pet and plaything of the old domestics, the young master of the farm labourers, before whom I played many a lordly antic, assuming a sort of authority which sat oddly enough, I doubt not, on such a baby as I was. Gregory was three years older than I. Aunt Fanny was always kind to him in deed and in action, but she did not often think about him.
She had fallen so completely into the habit of being engrossed by me, from the fact of my having come into her charge as a delicate baby. My father never got over his grudging dislike to his stepson. who had so innocently wrestled with him for the possession of my mother's heart. I mistrust me, too, that my father always considered him as the cause of my mother's death, and my early delicacy, and utterly unreasonable as this may seem, I believe my father rather cherished his feeling of alienation to my brother as a duty, than strove to repress it. Yet not for the world would my father have grudged him anything that money could purchase. That was, as it were, in the bond when he had wedded my mother.
Gregory was lumpish and loutish, awkward and ungainly, and many a hard word and sharp scolding did he get from the people about the farm, who hardly waited till my father's back was turned before they rated The stepson. I am ashamed, my heart is sore, to think how I fell into the fashion of the family, and slighted my poor orphan stepbrother. I don't think I ever scouted him, or was willfully ill-natured to him, but the habit of being considered in all things, and being treated as something uncommon and superior, made me insolent in my prosperity, and I exacted more than Gregory was always willing to grant, and then, irritated, I sometimes repeated the disparaging words I had heard others use with regard to him, without fully understanding their meaning.
Whether he did or not I cannot tell. I am afraid he did. He used to turn silent and quiet, sullen and sulky, My father thought it. Stupid. Aunt Fanny used to call it. But everyone said he was stupid and dull, and this stupidity and dullness grew upon him. He would sit without speaking a word, sometimes for hours. Then my father would bid him rise and do some piece of work, maybe about the farm. and he would take three or four tellings before he would go. When we were sent to school, it was all the same. He could never be made to remember his lessons. The schoolmaster grew weary of scolding and flogging, and at last advised my father just to take him away, and set him to some farm work that might not be above his comprehension.
I think he was more gloomy and stupid than ever after this. Yet he was not a cross lad. He was patient and good-natured, and would try to do a kind turn for anyone, even if they had been scolding or cupping him not a minute before. But very often his attempts at kindness ended in some mischief to the very people he was trying to serve, Owing to his awkward, ungainly ways. I suppose I was a clever lad, at any rate. I always got plenty of praise, and was, as we called it, the cock of the school. The schoolmaster said I could learn anything I chose, but my father, who had no great learning himself, saw little use in much for me, and took me away betimes. and kept me with him about the farm. Gregory was made into a kind of shepherd, receiving his training under old Adam, who was nearly past his work.
I think old Adam was almost the first person who had a good opinion of Gregory. He stood to it that my brother had good parts, though he did not rightly know how to bring them out, For knowing the bearings of the fowls, he said he had never seen a lad like him. My father would try to bring Adam round to speak of Gregory's faults and shortcomings, but, instead of that, he would praise him twice as much as soon as he found out what was my father's object. One winter time, when I was about sixteen and Gregory nineteen, I was sent by my father on an errand to a place about seven miles distant by the road, but only about four by the fowls. He bade me return by the road, whichever way I took in going, for the evenings closed in early, and were often thick and misty, besides which old Adam, now paralytic and bedridden, foretold a downfall of snow before long.
I soon got to my journey's end, and soon had done my business, earlier by an hour. I thought than my father had expected, so I took the decision of the way by which I would return into my own hands, and set off back again over the fells, just as the first shades of evening began to fall. It looked dark and gloomy enough, but everything was so still that I thought I should have plenty of time to get home before the snow came down. Off I stepped at a pretty quick pace, but night came on quicker. The right path was clear enough in the daytime, although at several points two or three exactly similar diverged from the same place. But when there was a good light, the traveller was guided by the sight of distant objects, a piece of rock, a fall in the ground, which were quite invisible to me now.
I plucked up a brave heart, however, and took what seemed to me the right road. It was wrong, nevertheless, and led me whither I knew not, but to some wild Boggy moor, where the solitude seemed painful, intense, as if never a footfall of man had come thither to break the silence. I tried to shout with the dimmest possible hope of being heard, rather to reassure myself by the sound of my own voice. But my voice came husky and short, and yet it dismayed me. It seemed so weird and strange, in that noiseless expanse of black darkness. Suddenly the air was filled thick with dusky flakes. My face and hands were wet with snow. It cut me off from the slightest knowledge of where I was, for I lost every idea of the direction from which I had come, so that I could not even retrace my steps.
It hemmed me in. Thicker, thicker. with a darkness that might be felt. The boggy soil on which I stood quaked under me if I remained long in one place, and yet I dared not move far. All my youthful hardiness seemed to leave me at once. I was on the point of crying, and only very shame seemed to keep it down. To save myself from shedding tears, I shouted terrible. Wild shouts for bare life they were. I turned sick as I paused to listen. No answering sound came but the unfeeling echoes. Only the noiseless, pitiless snow kept falling thicker, thicker faster, faster. I was growing numb and sleepy. I tried to move about, but I dared not go far, for fear of the precipices which I knew abounded in certain places on the fells.
Now and then I stood still and shouted again, but my voice was getting choked with tears, as I thought of the desolate helpless death I was to die, and how little they at home, sitting round the warm red-bright fire, what had what become of me, and how my poor father would grieve for me. It would surely kill him. It would break his heart. Poor old man. Aunt Fanny, too. Was this to be the end of all her cares for me? I began to review my life in a strange kind of vivid dream, in which the various scenes of my few boyish years passed before me like visions. In a pang of agony caused by such remembrance of my short life, I gathered up my strength and called out once more a long, despairing, wailing cry, to which I had no hope of obtaining any answer, save from the echoes around, dulled as the sound might be by the thickened air.
To my surprise I heard a cry, almost as long, as wild as mine, so wild that it seemed unearthly, and I almost thought it must be the voice of some of the mocking spirits of the Fowls, about whom I had heard so many tales. My heart suddenly began to beat fast and loud. I could not reply for a minute or two. I nearly fancied I had lost the power of utterance. Just at this moment a dog barked. Was it Lassie's bark? My brother's collie. An ugly enough brute, with a white, ill-looking face, that my father always kicked whenever he saw it, partly for its own demerits, partly because it belonged to my brother. On such occasions, Gregory would whistle Lassie away, and go off and sit with her in some outhouse.
My father had once or twice been ashamed of himself, When the poor collie had yelled out with the suddenness of the pain, and had relieved himself of his self-reproach by blaming my brother, who, he said, had no notion of training a dog, and was enough to ruin any collie in Christendom with his stupid way of allowing them to lie by the kitchen fire, to all which Gregory would answer nothing. nor ever seemed to hear, but go on looking absent and moody. Yes, there again, it was Lassie's bark, now or never. I lifted up my voice and shouted, Lassie! Lassie! For God's sake, Lassie! Another moment, and the great white-faced Lassie was curving with delight round my feet and legs. Looking, however, up in my face with her intelligent, apprehensive eyes, as if fearing lest I might greet her with a blow, as I had done oftentimes before.
But I cried with gladness, as I stooped down and patted her. My mind was sharing in my body's weakness, and I could not reason, but I knew that help was at hand. A grey figure came more and more distinctly out of the thick, close-pressing darkness. It was Gregory wrapped in his maud. "'Oh, Gregory,' said I, and I fell upon his neck, unable to speak another word. He never spoke much, and made me no answer for some little time. Then he told me we must move, we must walk for the dear life.' We must find our road home, if possible, but we must move, or we should be frozen to death. "'Don't you know the way home?' asked I. "'I thought I did when I set out, but I am doubtful now. The snow blinds me, and I am feared that in moving about just now I have lost the right gate homewards.' He had his shepherd's staff with him.
and by dint of plunging it before us at every step we took, clinging close to each other, we went on safely enough, as far as not falling down any of the steep rocks. But it was slow, dreary work. My brother, I saw, was more guided by Lassie and the way she took than anything else, trusting to her instinct. It was too dark to see far before us, But he called her back continually, and noted from what corner she returned, and shaped our slow steps accordingly. But the tedious motion scarcely kept my very blood from freezing. Every bone, every fibre in my body seemed first to ache, and then to swell, and then to turn numb with the intense cold. My brother bore it better than I, from having been more out upon the hills.
He did not speak except to call Lassie. I strove to be brave and not complain, but now I felt the deadly fatal sleep stealing over me. "'I can go no further,' I said, in a drowsy tone. I remember I suddenly became dogged and resolved. Sleep I would, were it for only five minutes.' If death were to be the consequence, sleep I would. Gregory stood still. I suppose he recognized the peculiar phase of suffering to which I had been brought by the cold. "'It is of no use,' said he, as if to himself. "'We are no nearer home than we were when we started, as far as I can tell. Our only chance is in Lassie. Here.' Roll thee in my moor, lad, and lay thee down on this sheltered side of this bit of rock. Creep close under it, lad, and I'll lie by thee, and strive to keep the warmth in us.
Stay. Has got naught about thee. They'll know at home. I felt him unkind thus to keep me from slumber, but on his repeating the question I pulled out my pocket-handkerchief. of some showy pattern which Aunt Fanny had hemmed for mean. Gregory took it and tied it round Lassie's neck. "'Hi there, Lassie. Hi thee home.' And the white-faced, ill-favored brute was off like a shot in the darkness. Now I might lie down, now I might sleep. In my drowsy stupor I felt that I was being tenderly covered up by my brother. But what with eye neither knew nor cared. I was too dull, too selfish, too dumb to think and reason, or I might have known that in that bleak bare place there was naught to wrap me in, save what was taken off another.
I was glad enough when he ceased his cares and lay down by me. I took his hand. "'Thou canst not remember, lad, how we lay together.' Thus by our dying mother. She put thy small wee hand in mine. I reckon she sees us now, and belike we shall soon be with her. Anyhow, God's will be done. Dear Gregory, I muttered, and I crept nearer to him for warmth. He was talking still, and again about our mother, when I fell asleep. In an instant, or so it seemed, There were many voices about me, many faces hovering round me. The sweet luxury of warmth was stealing into every part of me. I was in my own little bed at home, and I am thankful to say my first word was Gregory. A look passed from one to another.
My father's sterned old face strove in vain to keep its sternness. His mouth quivered. His eyes filled slowly with unwanted tears. I would have given him half my land. I would have blessed him as my son, O God. I would have knelt at his feet and asked him to forgive my hardness of heart. I heard no more. A whirl came through my brain, catching me back to death. I came slowly to my consciousness weeks afterwards. My father's hair was white when I recovered, and his hands shook as he looked into my face. We spoke no more of Gregory. We could not speak of him, but he was strangely in our thoughts. Lassie came and went, with never a word of blame. Nay, my father would try to stroke her, but she shrunk away, and he, as if reproved by the poor dumb beast, would sigh and be silent and abstracted for a time.
Aunt Fanny, always a talker, told me all. How, on that fatal night, my father, irritated by my prolonged absence, and probably more anxious than he cared to show, had been fierce and imperious, even beyond his wont to Gregory, had upbraided him with his father's poverty, His own stupidity which made his services good for nothing, for so, in spite of the old shepherd, my father always chose to consider them. At last Gregory had risen up, and whistled Lassie out with him. Poor Lassie, crouching underneath his chair for fear of a kick or blow. Some time before, there had been some talk between my father and my aunt, respecting my return, and when Aunt Fanny told me all this, she said she fancied that Gregory might have noticed the coming storm, and gone out silently to meet me.
Three hours afterwards, when all were running about in wild alarm, not knowing whither to go in search of me, not even missing Gregory, or heeding his absence. Poor fellow, poor Poor fellow. Lassie came home, with my handkerchief tied round her neck. They knew and understood, and the whole strength of the farm was turned out to follow her, with wraps and blankets and brandy and everything that could be thought of. I lay in chilly sleep, but still alive, beneath the rock that Lassie guided them to. I was covered over with my brother's plaid, and his thick shepherd's coat was carefully wrapped round my feet. He was in his shirt sleeves, his arm thrown over me, a quiet smile. He had hardly ever smiled in life upon his still, cold face.
My father's last words were, God forgive me my hardness of heart towards the fatherless child. And what marked the depth of his feeling of repentance, perhaps more than all, considering the passionate love he bore my mother, was this. We found a paper of directions after his death, in which he desired that he might lie at the foot of the grave, in which, by his desire, poor Gregory had been laid with our mother.
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7 Head and Shoulders 53:25
Head and Shoulders by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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Head and Shoulders, read by Daniel Carlton in Seattle, Washington on August 20, 2007. In 1915, Horace Tarbox was 13 years old. In that year, he took the examinations for entrance to Princeton University and received the grade A, Excellent, in Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Zenophem, Homer, Algebra, Plane Geometry, Solid Geometry, and Chemistry. Two years later, while George M. Cohen was composing Over There, Horace was leading the sophomore class by several lengths, and digging out theses on the syllogism as an obsolete scholastic form. And during the battle of Chateau Thierry, he was sitting at his desk, deciding whether or not to wait until his seventeenth birthday before beginning his series of essays on the pragmatic bias of the new realists.
After a while, some newsboy told him that the war was over, and he was glad, because it meant that the Peete Brothers, publishers, would get out their new edition of Spinoza's improvement of the understanding. Wars were all very well in their way, made young men self-reliant or something, but Horst felt that he could never forgive the president for allowing a brass band to play under his window the night of the false armistice, causing him to leave three important sentences out of his thesis on German Idealism. The next year he went up to Yale to take his degree as Master of Arts.
He was seventeen then, Tall and slender, with near-sighted gray eyes, and an air of keeping himself utterly detached from the mere words he let drop. "'I never feel as though I'm talking to him,' expostulated Professor Dillinger to a sympathetic colleague. "'He makes me feel as though I were talking to his representative. I always expect him to say, "'Well, I'll ask myself and find out.'" And then, Just as nonchalantly as though Horace Tarbox had been Mr. Beef, the butcher, or Mr. Hat, the haberdasher. Life reached in, seized him, handled him, stretched him, and unrolled him like a piece of Irish lace on a Saturday afternoon bargain counter.
To move in the literary fashion, I should say that this was all because when way back in colonial days the Hardy pioneers had come to a bald place in Connecticut, and asked of each other, Now, what shall we build here? The hardiest among them had answered, "'Let's build a town where theatrical managers can try out musical comedies.' How afterward they founded Yale College there to try the musical comedies on is a story everyone knows. At any rate, one December, Home James opened at the Schubert, and all the students encored Marcia Meadow, who sang a song about the blundering blimp in the first and did a shaky, shivery, celebrated dance in the last. Marcia was nineteen. She didn't have wings, but audiences agreed generally that she didn't need them.
She was a blonde by natural pigment, and she wore no paint on the streets at high noon. Outside of that, she was no better than most women. It was Charlie Moon who promised her five thousand pall malls if she would pay a call on Horace Tarbox, prodigy extraordinary. Charlie was a senior in Sheffield, and he and Horace were first cousins. They liked and pitied each other. Horace had been particularly busy that night. The failure of the Frenchman Laurier to appreciate the significance of the new realists was preying on his mind. In fact, his only reaction to a low, clear-cut rap at his study was to make him speculate as to whether any rap would have actual existence without an ear there to hear it.
He fancied he was verging more and more on pragmatism. But at that moment, though he did not know it, he was verging with astounding rapidity towards something quite different. The rap sounded. Three seconds leaked by. The rap sounded. "'Come in,' muttered Horace automatically. He heard the door open and then close, but bent over his book in the big armchair before the fire. He did not look up. "'Leave it on the bed in the other room,' he said absently. Leave what on the bed in the other room? Marcia Meadow had to talk her songs, but her speaking voice was like by-play on a harp. The Laundry. I can't. Horace stirred impatiently in his chair. Why can't you? Why, because I haven't got it. Hmph, he replied testily.
Suppose you go back and get it. Across the fire from Horace was another easy chair. He was accustomed to change to it in the course of an evening by way of exercise and variety. One chair he called Berkeley, the other he called Hume. He suddenly heard a sound as of a rustling, diaphanous form sinking into hue. He glanced up. "'Well,' said Marcia, with a sweet smile she used in Act II, "'well, Omar Khayyam, here I am beside you, singing in the wilderness.'" Horace stared at her dazedly. The momentary suspicion came to him that she existed here only as a phantom of his imagination. Women didn't come into men's rooms and sink into men's Humes. Women brought laundry, and took your seat in the street-car, and married you later on, when you were old enough to know Fetters.
This woman had clearly materialized out of Hume. The very froth of her brown gauzy dress was art emanation from Hume's leather arm there, If he looked long enough, he would see Hume right through her, and then he would be alone again in the room.
He passed his fist across his eyes. He really must take up those trapeze exercises again. "'For Pete's sake, don't look so critical,' objected the emanation pleasantly. "'I feel as if you were going to wish me away with that patent dome of yours, and then there wouldn't be anything left of me except my shadow in your eyes.' Horace coughed. Coughing was one of his two gestures.
When he talked, he forgot he had a body at all. It was like hearing a phonograph record by a singer who had been dead a long time. "'What do you want?' he asked. "'I want them letters,' whined Marcia melodramatically. "'Them letters of mine you bought for my grandsire in 1881.' Horace considered. "'I haven't got your letters.' He said evenly. I am only seventeen years old. My father was not born until March 3, 1879. You evidently have me confused with someone else. You're only seventeen? repeated March, suspiciously. Only seventeen.
I knew a girl, said Marcia reminiscently, who went on the 10-20-30 when she was sixteen. She was so stuck on herself that she could never say, Sixteen, without putting the only before it. We got to calling her, Only Jesse. And she's just where she was when she started, only worse. Only is a bad habit, Omar. It sounds like an alibi. My name is not Omar. I know, agreed Marcia, nodding. Your name's Horace. I just call you Omar because you remind me of a smoked cigarette. And I haven't your letters. I doubt if I've ever met your grandfather. In fact, it's very improbable that you yourself were alive in 1881. Marcias stared at him in wonder. Me? 1881? Why, sure. I was second-line stuff when the Floridora sextet was still in the convent.
I was the original nurse to Miss Saul Smith's Juliet. Why, Omar, I was a canteen singer during the War of 1812. Horace's mind made a sudden, successful leap, and he grinned. Did Charlie Moon put you up to this? Marcia regarded him inscrutably. Who's Charlie Moon? Small, wide nostrils, big ears. She grew several inches and sniffed. I'm not in the habit of noticing my friend's nostrils. Then it was Charlie. Marcia bit her lip, and then yawned. Oh, let's change the subject, Omar. I'll pull a snore in this chair in a minute. Yes, replied Horace gravely. Hume has often been considered soporific. Who's your friend? And will he die?
Then of a sudden Horace Tarbox rose slenderly and began to pace the room with his hands in his pockets. This was his other gesture. "'I don't care for this,' he said, as if he were talking to himself. "'Not at all. Not that I mind your being here. I don't. You're quite a pretty little thing, but I don't like Charlie Moon's sending you here. Am I a laboratory experiment on which the janitors as well as the chemists can make experiments? Is my intellectual development humorous in any way? Do I look like the pictures of the little Boston boy in the comic magazines?' Has that callow ass, Moon, with his eternal tales about his week in Paris, any right to—no, interrupted Marcia emphatically. And you're a sweet boy.
Come here and kiss me. Horst stopped quickly in front of her.
Why do you want me to kiss you? he asked intently. Do you just go around kissing people? Why, yes, admitted Marcia, unruffled. That's all life is, just going around kissing people.
Well," replied Horace emphatically,,"I must say your ideas are horribly garbled. In the first place life isn't just that, and in the second place I won't kiss you. It might get to be a habit, and I can't get rid of habits. This year I've got in the habit of lolling in bed until seven-thirty." Marcia nodded understandingly. "'Do you ever have fun?' she asked. "'What do you mean, fun?' "'See here,' said Marcia sternly. I like you, Omar, but I wish you'd talk as if you had a line on what you were saying. You sound as if you were gargling a lot of words in your mouth and lost a bet every time a few spilled.
I asked if you ever had any fun. Horace shook his head. Later, perhaps, he answered. You see, I'm a plan. I'm an experiment. I don't say that I don't get tired of it sometimes. I do. Yes, oh, I can't explain. But what you and Charlie Moon call fun wouldn't be fun to me.
Please explain.
Horace stared at her, started to speak, and then, changing his mind, resumed his walk.
After an unsuccessful attempt to determine whether or not he was looking at her, Marcia smiled at him. Please explain. Horace turned. If I do, will you promise to tell Charlie Moon that I wasn't in? Uh-huh. Very well, then. Here's my history. I was a Y child. I wanted to see the wheels go round. My father was a young economics professor at Princeton. He brought me up on the system of answering every question I asked him to the best of his ability. My response to that gave him the idea of making an experiment in precocity. To aid in the massacre, I had an ear trouble. Seven operations between the age of nine and twelve. Of course, this kept me apart from other boys, and made me ripe for forcing.
Anyway, while my generation was laboring through Uncle Remus, I was honestly enjoying Catullus in the original. I passed off my college examination when I was thirteen because I couldn't help it. My chief associates were professors, and I took tremendous pride in knowing that I had a fine intelligence, for though I was unusually gifted, I was not abnormal in other ways.
When I was sixteen, I got tired of being a freak. I decided that someone had made a bad mistake. So as I had gone that far, I concluded to finish up by taking my degree as Master of Arts. My chief interest in life is the study of modern philosophy. I am a realist in the school of Anton Laurier, with Bergsonian trimmings, and I'll be eighteen years old in two months. That's all." "'Phew!' exclaimed Marcia. "'That's enough. You do a neat job with the parts of speech.' "'Satisfied?' "'No, you haven't kissed me.' "'It's not in my program,' demurred Horace. "'Understand that I don't pretend to be above physical things. They have their place, but—' "'Oh, don't be so darn reasonable!' I can't help it.
I hate these slot machine people. I assure you, I began hoarse. Oh, shut up! My own rationality, I didn't say anything about your rationality. You're American, aren't you? Yes. Well, that's okay with me. I got a notice I want to see you do something that isn't in your highbrow program. I want to see... If a whatchacallum with Brazilian trimmings, that thing you said you were, can be a little human. Horace shook his head again. I won't kiss you. My life is blighted, muttered Marcia tragically. I'm a beaten woman. I'll go through life without ever having a kiss with Brazilian trimmings. She sighed. Anyways, Omar, will you come see my show? What show? I'm a wicked actress from Home James. Light opera?
Yes, at a stretch. One of the characters is a Brazilian rice planter. That might interest you. I saw the Bohemian girl once, reflected Horace aloud. I enjoyed it, to some extent. Then you'll come? Well, I'm—I'm—oh, I know. You've got to run down to Brazil for the weekend. Not at all. I'd be delighted to come—but Marcia clapped her hands. Goodie for you. I'll mail you a ticket. Thursday night? Why, I—good. Thursday night it is. She stood up, walking close to him, and laid both hands on his shoulders. I like you, Omar. I'm sorry I tried to kid you. I thought you'd be sort of frozen, but you're a nice boy. He eyed her sardonically. I'm several thousand generations older than you are. You carry your age well.
They shook hands gravely. "'My name's Marcia Meadow,' she said emphatically. "'Member it, Marcia Meadow, and I won't tell Charlie Moon you are in.' An instant later, as she was skimming down the last flight of stairs, three at a time, she heard a voice call over the upper banister. "'Oh, say!' she stopped and looked up, made out of vague form, leaning over. "'Oh, say!' called the prodigy again. "'Can you hear me?' Here's your connection, Omar. I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational. Impression? Why, you didn't even give me a kiss. Never fret. So long.
Two doors near her opened curiously at the sound of a feminine voice. A tentative cough sounded from above. Gathering her skirts, Marcia dived wildly down the last flight, and was swallowed up in the murky Connecticut air outside. Upstairs, Horace paced the floor of his study. From time to time, he glanced down at Berkeley, waiting there in suave dark-red reputability, an open book lying suggestively on his cushions. Then he found that his circuit of the floor was bringing him each time nearer to Hume. There was something about Hume that was strangely and inexpressibly different. The diaphanous form still seemed hovering near, and had Horace sat there, He would have felt as if he were sitting on a lady's lap.
And though Horace couldn't have named the quality of difference, there was such a quality. Quite intangible to the speculative mind, but real, nevertheless. Hume is radiating something that in all the two hundred years of his influence he had never radiated before. Hume is radiating a tar of roses.
Part Two On Thursday night, Horace Tarbox sat in an aisle seat in the fifth row and witnessed home James. Oddly enough, he found that he was enjoying himself. The cynical students near him were annoyed at his audible appreciation of time-honored jokes in the Hammerstein tradition. But Horace was waiting with anxiety for Marcia Meadow to sing her song about a jazz-bound, blundering blimp. When she did appear, radiant under a floppity-flower face hat, A warm glow settled over him, and when the song was over, he did not join in the storm of applause. He felt somewhat numb. In the intermission after the second act, an usher materialized beside him, demanded to know if he were Mr. Tarbox, and then handed him a note in a round adolescent band.
Horace read it in some confusion, while the usher lingered with withering patience in the aisle. Dear Omar, After the show, I always grow an awful hunger. If you want to satisfy it with me in the Taft Grill, just communicate your answer to the Big Timber Guide that brought you this, and oblige. Your friend, Marcia Meadow. Tell her, he coughed. Tell her it will be quite all right. I'll meet her in front of the theater. The Big Timber Guide smiled arrogantly. I guess she meant for you to come round the stage door. Where is it? Outside. Turn to your left down the alley. What? Outside. Turn to your left down the alley. The arrogant person withdrew. A freshman behind Horace snickered. Then, half an hour later, sitting in the taft grill opposite the hair that was yellow by natural pigment, the prodigy was saying an odd thing.
Do you have to do that dance in the last act? he was asking, earnestly. I mean— Would they dismiss you if you refused to do it? Marcia grinned. It's fun to do it. I like to do it. And then Horace came out with a faux pas. I shouldn't think you'd detest it, he remarked succinctly. The people behind me were making remarks about your bosom. Marcia blushed fiery red. I can't help that, she said quickly. The dance to me is only a sort of acrobatic stunt. Lord, it's hard enough to do. I rub liniment into my shoulders for an hour every night. Do you have fun while you're on the stage? Uh-huh, sure. I got in the habit of having people look at me, Omar, and I like it. Hm. Horace sank into a brownish study.
How's the Brazilian trimmings? Hm, repeated Horace, and then after a pause, where does the play go from here? New York. For how long? All depends. Winter, maybe. Oh! Coming up to lay eyes on me, Omar. Or aren't you interested? Not as nice here, is it, as it was up in your room? I wish we was there now. I feel idiotic in this place, confessed Horace, looking around him nervously. Too bad! We got along pretty well.
At this he looked suddenly so melancholy that she changed her tone, and reaching over patted his hand. Ever take an actress out to supper before? No, said Horace miserably, and I never will again. I don't know why I came tonight. Here under all these lights and with all these people laughing and chattering, I feel completely out of my sphere. I don't know what to talk to you about. We'll talk about me. We talked about you last time. Very well. Well, my name is Meadow, but my first name isn't Marcia. It's Veronica. I'm nineteen. Question. How did the girl make her leap to the footlights? Answer. She was born in Passiac, New Jersey, and up to a year ago she got the right to breathe by pushing Nabisco's in Marcel's Tea Room in Trenton.
She started going with a guy named Robbins, a singer in the Trent House Cabaret, and he got her to try a song and dance with him one evening. In a month, we were filling the supper-room every night. Then we went to New York with Meet My Friend letters thick as a pile of napkins. In two days, we landed a job in Divinaries, and I learned to shimmy from a kid in the Palais Royale. We stayed at Divinaries six months until one night Peter Boyce Wendell, the columnist, ate his milk toast there. Next morning a poem about Marcia came out in the newspaper, and within two days I had three vaudeville offers and a chance at the midnight frolic. I wrote Wendell a thank-you letter, and he printed it in his column, so that the style weighed like Carlyle's, only more rugged, and that I ought to quit dancing and do North American literature.
This got me a couple more vaudeville offers, and a chance is an ingenue in a regular show. I took it, and here I am, Omar. When she finished, they sat for a moment in silence, she draping the last skeins of a Welsh rabbit on her fork and waiting for him to speak. "'Let's get out of here,' he said suddenly. Marcia's eyes hardened. "'What's the idea? Am I making you sick?' "'No, but I don't like it here. I don't like to be sitting here with you.' Without another word, Marcia signalled for the waiter. "'What's the check?' she demanded briskly. My part, but the rabbit and the ginger ale. Horace watched blankly as the waiter figured it. "'See here,' he began, "'I intended to pay for yours, too. You're my guest.' With a half sigh, Marcia rose from the table and walked from tile room.
Horace, his face a document in bewilderment, laid a bill down and followed her out, up the stairs and into the lobby. He overtook her in front of the elevator, and they faced each other. "'See,' he repeated, "'you're my guest. Have I said something to offend you?' After an instant of wonder, Marcia's eyes softened. "'You're a rude fellow,' she said slowly. "'Don't you know you're rude?' "'I can't help it,' said Horace, with a directness she found quite disarming. "'You know I like you. You said you didn't like being with me.' "'I didn't like it. Why not?' Fire blazed suddenly from the great forests of his eyes. Because I didn't. I've formed this habit of liking you. I've been thinking of nothing much else for two days.
Well, if you—wait a minute, he interrupted. I've got something to say. It's this. In six weeks I'll be eighteen years old. When I'm eighteen years old, I'm coming up to New York to see you. Is there some place in New York where we can go and not have a lot of people in the room? Sure, Marcia smiled. You can come up to my apartment, sleep on the couch if you want to. I can't sleep on couches, he said shortly, but I want to talk to you. Why, sure, repeated Marcia. In my apartment. In his excitement, Horace put his hands in his pockets. All right, just so I can see you alone, I want to talk to you as we talked up in my room. Honey boy, cried Marcia, laughing. Is it that you want... To kiss me? Yes, Horace almost shouted.
I'll kiss you if you want me to. The elevator man was looking at them reproachfully. Marcia edged towards the grated door. I'll drop you a postcard, she said. Horace's eyes were quite wild. Send me a postcard. I'll come up any time after January 1st. I'll be eighteen, then.
And as she stepped into the elevator, he coughed enigmatically, yet with a vague challenge at the calling. and walked quickly away. Part III. He was there again. She saw him when she took her first glance at the restless Manhattan audience, down in the front row, with his head bent a bit forward and his gray eyes fixed on her. And she knew that to him they were alone together, in a world where the high-rouged row of ballet faces and the massed whines of the violins were as imperceivable as a powder on a marble Venus. An indistinct defiance rose in her. Silly boy, she said to herself hurriedly, and she didn't take her encore.
What do they expect for a hundred a week? Perpetual motion, she grumbled to herself in the wings. What's the trouble? Marcia? Guy I don't like down in front. During the last act, as she waited for her specialty, she had an odd attack of stage fright. She had never sent Horace the promised postcard. Last night she had pretended not to see him, had hurried from the theatre immediately after her dance to pass a sleepless night in her apartment, thinking, as she had so often in the last month, of his pale, rather intent face, his slim, boyish fore, his merciless, unworldly abstraction that made him charming to her. And now that he had come she felt vaguely sorry, as though an unwanted responsibility was being forced on her.
Infant prodigy, she said aloud. What? demanded the negro comedian standing beside her. Nothing. Just talking about myself.
On the stage she felt better. This was her dance, and she always felt that the way she did it wasn't suggestive any more than, to some men, every pretty girl is suggestive. She made it a stunt. Up town, down town, jelly on a spoon, after sundown, shiver by the moon. He was not watching her now. She saw that clearly. He was looking very deliberately at a castle in the backdrop, wearing that expression he had worn in the Taft grill. A wave of exasperation swept over her. He was criticizing her. That's the vibration that thrills me. Funny how affection fills me. Up-town, down-town. Unconquerable revulsion seized her. She was suddenly and horribly conscious of her audience as she had never been since her first appearance.
Was that a leer on a pallid face in the front row? A droop of disgust on one young girl's mouth? These shoulders of hers, these shoulders shaking. Were they hers? Were they real? Surely shoulders weren't made for this. Then, you'll see at a glance. I'll need some funeral ushers. With St. Vitus dance, at the end of the world aisle, the bassoon and two cellos crashed into a final chord. She paused and poised a moment on her toes, with every muscle tense, her young face looking out dully at the audience, and what one young girl afterward called such a curious, puzzled look, and then without bowing rushed from the stage into the dressing room she sped, kicked out of one dress and into another, and caught a taxi outside.
Her apartment was very warm. Small, it was, with a row of professional pictures and sets of Kipling and O. Henry, which he had bought once from a blue-eyed agent and read occasionally. And there were several chairs which matched, but were none of them comfortable, and a pink-shaded lamp with blackbirds painted on it, and an atmosphere of other stifled pink throughout. There were nice things in it, nice things unrelentingly hostile to each other, offspring of a vicarious, impatient taste in stray moments. The worst was typified by a great picture fumed in oak bark of a Passaic as seen from the Erie Railroad, altogether a frantic, oddly extravagant, oddly penurious attempt to make a cheerful room.
Marcia knew it was a failure. In this room came the prodigy, and took her two hands awkwardly. "'Followed you this time,' he said. "'Oh!' "'I want you to marry me,' he said. Her arms went out to him. She kissed his mouth with a sort of passionate wholesomeness. There. I love you, too, he said. She kissed him again, and then with a little sigh flung herself into an armchair and lay there, shaken with absurd laughter. Why, you infant prodigy, she cried. Very well. Call me that if you want to. I once told you that I was ten thousand years older than you. I am. She laughed again. I don't like to be disapproved of. No one's ever going to disapprove of you again. Omar, she asked, why do you want to marry me?
The prodigy rose and put his hands in his pockets. Because I love you, Marcia Meadow. And then she stopped calling him Omar. Dear boy, she said, you know I sort of love you. There's something about you, I can't tell what, that just puts my heart through the wringer every time I'm round you. But, honey, She paused. But what? But lots of things. You're only eighteen, and I'm nearly twenty. Nonsense, he interrupted. Put it this way. I'm in my nineteenth year, and you're nineteen. That makes us pretty close, without counting that other ten thousand years I mentioned. Marcia laughed. But there's some more buts. Your people, my people, explained the prodigy ferociously. My people tried to make a monstrosity out of me.
His face grew quite crimson at the enormity of what he was going to say. My people can go way back and sit down. My heavens! cried Marcia in alarm. All that? On tax, I suppose. Tax, yes, he agreed wildly. On anything. The more I think of how they allowed me to become a little dried-up mummy... What makes you think you're that? asked Marcia quietly. Me? Yes. Every person I've met on the street since I met you has made me jealous, because they knew what love was before I did. I used to call it the sex impulse. Heavens! There's more buts, said Marcia. What are they? How could we live? I'll make a living. You're in college. Do you think I care anything about taking a Master of Arts degree? You want to be a master of me, hey?
Yes! What? I mean, no! Marcia laughed, and crossing swiftly over, sat in his lap. He put his arm round her wildly, and implanted the vestige of a kiss somewhere near her neck. "'There's something white about you,' mused Marcia. "'But it doesn't sound very logical.' "'Oh, don't be so darn reasonable.' "'I can't help it,' said Marcia. "'I hate these slot-machine people. But we—' Oh, shut up!' And as Marcia couldn't talk through her ears, she had to. Part Four. Horace and Marcia were married early in February. The sensation in academic circles, both at Yale and Princeton, was tremendous. Horace Tarbox, at 14, been played up in the Sunday Magazine sections of Metropolitan Newspapers, was throwing over his career, his chance of being a world authority in American philosophy, by marrying a chorus girl.
They made Marcia a chorus girl. But like all modern stories, it was a four-and-a-half-day wonder. They took a flat in Harlem. After two weeks' search, during which his idea of the value of academic knowledge faded unmercifully, Horace took a position as a clerk with the South American Export Company. Someone had told him that exporting was the coming thing. Marcia was to stay in her show for a few months, anyway until he got on his feet. He was getting a hundred and twenty-five to start with, and though of course they told him it was only a question of months until he would be earning double that, Marcy refused even to consider giving up the hundred and fifty a week that she was getting at the time.
"'We'll call ourselves Head and Shoulders, dear,' she said softly. "'And the shoulders will have to keep shaking a little longer till the old head gets started.' "'I hate it,' he objected gloomily. "'Well,' she replied emphatically, "'your salary wouldn't keep us in a tenement.' "'Don't think I want to be public. I don't. I want to be yours.' But I'd be a half-wit to sit in one room and count the sunflowers on the wallpaper while I waited for you. When you pull down three hundred a month, I'll quit. And much as it hurt his pride, Horace had to admit that hers was the wiser course.
March mellowed into April. May read a gorgeous riot act to the parks and waters of Manhattan, and they were very happy. Horace, who had no habits whatsoever, he had never had any time to form any. Proved the most adaptable of husbands, and as Marcia entirely lacked opinions on the subjects that engrossed him, there were very few jottings and bumping. Their minds moved in different spheres. Marcia acted as a practical factotum, and Horace lived either in his old world of abstract ideas, or in a sort of triumphantly earthly worship and adoration of his wife.
She was a continual source of astonishment to him. The freshness and originality of her mind, her dynamic, clear-headed energy, and her unfailing good humor. And Marcia's co-workers in the Nine O'clock show, whether she had transferred her talents, were impressed with her tremendous pride in her husband's mental powers. Horace they knew only as a very slim, tight-lipped, and immature-looking young man, who waited every night to take her home. Horace, said Marcia one evening, when she met him as usual at eleven, "'You look like a ghost standing there against the streetlights. You losing weight?' He shook his head vaguely. "'I don't know. They raised me to a hundred and thirty-five dollars to-day, and—' "'I don't care,' said Marcia severely.
"'You're killing yourself working at night. You read those big books on economy—'economics,' corrected Horace. "'Well, you read them every night, long after I'm asleep, and you're getting all stooped over like you were before we married.' But, Marcia, I've got to—no, you haven't, dear. I guess I'm running this shop for the present, and I won't let my fellow ruin his health and eyes. You've got to get some exercise. I do. Every morning, I—oh, I know. Those dumbbells of yours wouldn't give a consumptive two degrees of fever. I mean real exercise. You've got to join a gymnasium. Remember you told me you were such a trick gymnast? That they tried to get you out for the team in college, and they couldn't because you had a standing date with Herb Spencer?
I used to enjoy it, mused Horace, but it would take up too much time now. All right, said Marcia. I'll make a bargain with you. You join a gym, and I'll read one of those books from the brown row of them. Pepys' Diary? Why, that ought to be enjoyable. He's very light. Not for me, he isn't. It'd be like digesting plate glass. But you've been telling me how much it'd brought my look out. Well, you go to the gym three nights a week, and I'll take one big dose of Sammy.
Horace hesitated. Well, come on now. You do some giant swings for me, and I'll chase some culture for you. So Horace finally consented, and all through a baking summer he spent three and sometimes Four evenings a week, experimenting on the trapeze and Skipper's gymnasium. And in August he admitted to Marcia that it made him capable of more mental work during the day. "'Mens sana incorpore sano,' he said. "'Don't believe in it,' replied Marcia. "'I tried one of those patent medicines once, and they're all bunk. You stick to gymnastics.' One night in early September, while he was going through one of his contortions on the rings in the nearly deserted room, he was addressed by a meditated fat man, who he had noticed, watching him for several nights.
"'Say, lad, do that stunt you were doing last night.' Horace grinned at him from his perch. "'I invented it,' he said. "'I got the idea from the fourth proposition of Euclid.' "'What circus is he with?' "'He's dead.' Well, he must have broke his neck doing that stunt. I sit here last night thinking sure you was going to break yours.
Like this? said Horace, and swinging on to the trapeze, he did his stunt. Don't it kill your neck and shoulder muscles? It did at first, but inside of a week I wrote the Quod Errat Demonstratum on it. Hmm? Horace swung idly on the trapeze. Ever think of taking it up professionally? asked the fat man. Not I. Good money in it if you're willing to do stunts like that and can get away with it. Here's another, chirped Horace eagerly, and the fat man's mouth dropped suddenly agape as he watched his pink-jerseyed Prometheus again defy the gods and Isaac Newton. The night following his encounter, Horace got home from work to find a rather pale Marcius stretched out on the sofa, waiting for him. "'I fainted twice today,' she began without preliminaries.
"'What? Yep. You see, baby's due in four months now. Doctor says I ought to quit dancing two weeks ago.' Horace sat down and thought it over. "'I'm glad, of course,' he said pensively. "'I mean, that we're going to have a baby. But this means a lot of expense.' "'I've got two hundred and fifty in the bank,' said Marcia hopefully, "'and two weeks' pay coming.' Horace computed quickly.
Including my salary, that'll give us nearly fourteen hundred for the next six months. Marcia looked blue. That all? Of course I can get a job singing somewhere this month, and I can go to work again in March. Of course nothing, said Horace gruffly. You'll stay right here. Let's see now. There'll be doctor's bills and a nurse. Besides the maid, we've got to have some more money. "'Well,' said Marcia wearily, "'I don't know where it's going to come from. "'It's up to the old head now. Shoulders is out of business.' Horace rose and pulled on his coat. "'Where are you going?' "'I've got an idea,' he answered. "'I'll be right back.' Ten minutes later, as he headed down the street toward Skipper's Gymnasium, he felt a plaid wonder, quite unmixed with humor, in what he was going to do.
How he would have gaped at himself a year before. How everyone would have gaped. But when you opened your door at the wrap of life, you let many things in. The gymnasium was brightly lit, and when his eyes became accustomed to the glare, he found the meditative fat man seated on a pile of canvas mats and smoking a big cigar.
Say, began Horace directly, were you in earnest last night when you said I could make more money? When I can make money on my trapeze stunts? Why, yes," said the fat man in surprise. Well, I've been thinking it over, and I believe I'd like to try it. I could work at night and on Saturday afternoons, and regularly if the pay is high enough. The fat man looked at his watch. Well, he said, Charlie Paulson's the man to see. He'll book you inside of four days, once he sees you work out. He won't be in now, but I'll get a hold of him for tomorrow night. The fat man was as good as his word. Charlie Paulson arrived next night, and put in a wondrous hour watching the prodigy swap through the air in amazing parabolas, and on the night following he brought two aged men with him who looked as though they had been born smoking black cigars and talking about money in low, passionate voices.
Then on the succeeding Saturday Horace Tarbach's torso made its first professional appearance in a gymnastic exhibition, at the Coleman Street Gardens. But though the audience numbered nearly fifty thousand people, Horace felt no nervousness. From his childhood he had read papers to audiences. Learned that trick of detaching himself. Marcia, he said cheerfully later that night, I think we're out of the woods. Paulson thinks he can get me an opening at the Hippodrome, and that means an all-winter engagement. The Hippodrome, you know, it's a big... Yes, I believe I've heard of it. interrupted Marcia. And I want to know about this stunt you're doing. It isn't any spectacular suicide, is it? It's nothing, said Horace quietly.
But if you can think of a nicer way of a man killing himself and taking a risk for you, why, that's the way I want to die. Marcia reached up and wound both arms tightly around his neck. Kiss me, she whispered, and call me Dear Heart. I love to hear you say Dear Heart. And bring me a book to read tomorrow. No more Sam Pepys, but something trick and trashy. I've been wild for something to do all day. I felt like writing letters, but I didn't have anybody to write to. Write to me," said Horace. I'll read them. I wish I could, breathed Marcia. If I knew words enough, I could write you the longest love letter in the world, and never get tired. But after two more months, Marcia grew very tired indeed.
And for a row of nights, It was a very anxious, weary-looking young athlete who walked out before the Hippodrome crowd. Then there were two days when his place was taken by a young man, who wore pale blue instead of white, and got very little applause. But after the two days horse appeared again, and those who sat close to the stage remarked an expression of beatific happiness on the young acrobat's face, even when he was twisting breathlessly in the air, in the middle of his amazing and original shoulder swing. After that performance, he laughed at the elevator man and dashed up the stairs to the flat five steps at a time, and then tiptoed very carefully into a quiet room. Marcia, he whispered.
Hello, she smiled up at him wanly. Horace, there's something I want you to do. Look in my top-year-old drawer, and you'll find a big stack of paper. It's a book, sort of, Horace. I wrote it down in these last three months while I've been laid up. I wish you'd take it to that Peter Boyce Wendell, who put my letter in his paper. He could tell you whether it'd be a good book. I wrote it just the way I talk, just the way I wrote that letter to him. It's just a story about a lot of things that happened to me. Will you take it to him, Horace? Yes, darling." He leaned over the bed until his head was beside her on the pillow. and began stroking back her yellow hair. Dearest Marcia, he said softly. No, she murmured.
Call me what I told you to call me. Dear heart, he whispered passionately. Dearest heart, what'll we call her? They rested a minute, unhappy, drowsy content, while Horace considered. We'll call her Marcia Hume Tarbox. he said at length. "'Why the Hume?' "'Because he's the fellow who first introduced us.' "'That's so,' she murmured, sleepily surprised. "'I thought his name was Moon.' Her eyes dozed, and after a moment this low-lengthening surge of the bedclothes over her breast showed that she was asleep. Horace tiptoed over to the bureau, And opening the top drawer found a heap of closely scrawled, lead-smeared pages. He looked at the first sheet. Sandra Pepys, Syncopated, by Marcia Tarbox. He smiled.
So Samuel Pepys had made an impression on her after all. He turned a page and began to read. His smile deepened. He read on. Half an hour passed and he became aware that Marcia had waked and was watching him from the bed. Honey," came in a whisper, "'What, Marcia? Do you like it?' Horace coughed. "'I seem to be reading on. It's bright. Take it to Peter Boy Swendell. Tell him you got the highest marks in Princeton once, and that you ought to know when a book's good. Tell him this one's a world-beater.' "'All right, Marcia,' Horace said gently. Her eyes closed again. and Horace, crossing over, kissed her forehead, stood there for a moment with a look of tender pity. Then he left the room. All that night the sprawly writing on the pages, the consistent mistakes in spelling and grammar, and the weird punctuation danced before his eyes.
He woke several times in the night, each time full of a wailing chaotic sympathy for this desire of Marcia's soul to express itself in words. To him there was something infinitely pathetic about it. And for the first time in months, he began to turn over in his mind his own half-forgotten dreams. He had meant to write a series of books, to popularize the new realism, as Schopenhauer had popularized pessimism and William James' pragmatism. But life hadn't come that way. Life took hold of people and forced them into flying rings. He laughed to think of that rap at his door, the diaphanous shadow in Hume, Marcia's threat. And it's still me, he said aloud in wonder as he lay awake in the darkness.
I'm the man who sat in Berkeley with temerity to wonder if that rap would have had actual existence had my ear not been there to hear it. I'm still that man. I could be electrocuted for the crimes he committed. Poor Ghazi souls trying to express ourselves in something tangible. Marcia with her written book. I with my unwritten ones. Trying to choose our mediums, and then taking what we get. And being glad. V.
Sandra Pepys, syncopated, with an introduction by Peter Boyce Wendell, the columnist, appeared serially in Jordan's magazine, and came out in book form in March. From its first published installment, it attracted attention far and wide. A trite enough subject, A girl from a small New Jersey town coming to New York to go on the stage. Treated simply, with a peculiar vividness of phrasing, and a haunting undertone of sadness in the very inadequacy of its vocabulary, it made an irresistible appeal. Peter Boyce Wendell, who happened at that time to be advocating the enrichment of the American language by the immediate adoption of expressive vernacular words, stood as its sponsor and thundered his endorsement over the placid bromides of the conventional reviewers.
Marcia received three hundred dollars in installment for the serial publication, which came at an opportune time, for though Horace's monthly salary at the Hippodrome was now more than Marcia's had ever been, young Marcia was emitting shrill cries, which they integrated as a demand for country air. So early April found them installed in a bungalow in Westchester County, with a place for a lawn, and a place for a garage, and a place for everything, including a soundproof impregnable study, in which Marcia faithfully promised Mr. Jordan she would shut herself up when her daughter's demands began to be abated, and compose immortally illiterate literature. It's not half bad, thought Horace one night, as he was on his way from the station to his house.
He was considering several prospects that had opened up. A four-months vaudeville offer, and five figures, A chance to go back to Princeton in charge of all gymnasium work. Odd. He had once intended to go back there in charge of all philosophic work, and now he had not even been stirred by the arrival in New York of Anton Laurier, his old idol. The gravel crunched raucously under his heel. He saw the lights of his sitting-room gleaming, and noticed a big car standing in the drive. Probably Mr. Jordan again, come to persuade Marcia to settle down to work. She had heard the sound of his approach, and her form was silhouetted against the lighted door as she came out to meet him. "'There's some Frenchman here,' she whispered nervously.
"'I can't pronounce his name, but he sounds awful deep. You'll leave to jaw with him.' "'What Frenchman?' "'You can't prove it by me. He drove up an hour ago with Mr. Jordan, and said he wanted to meet Sandra Pepys, and all that sort of thing.' Two men rose from chairs as they went inside. "'Hello, Tarbox,' said Jordan. "'I've just been bringing together two celebrities. "'I brought Monsieur Laurier with me. "'Monsieur Laurier, let me present Mr. Tarbox, Mrs. Tarbox's husband.' "'Not Anton Laurier,' exclaimed Horace. "'But yes. I must come. I have to come. "'I have read the book of Madame, and I have been charmed.' He fumbled in his pocket. "'Ah, I have read of you too, in this newspaper.' which I read to-day.
It has your name. He finally produced a clipping from a magazine. Read it, he said eagerly. It is about you. Horace's eyes skipped down the page. A distinct contribution to American dialect literature, it said. No attempt at literary tone. This book derives its very quality from this fact, as did Huckleberry Finn. Horace's eyes caught a passage lower down. He became suddenly aghast, read on hurriedly, Marcia Tarbox's connection with the stage is not only as a spectator, but as the wife of a performer. She was married last year to Horace Tarbox, who every evening delights the children at the Hippodrome with this wondrous flying performance. It is said that the young couple have dubbed themselves Head and Shoulders, referring doubtless to the fact that Miss Tarbox supplies the literary and mental qualities, while the supple and agile shoulder of her husband contribute their share to the family fortunes.
This tarbox seems to merit that much-abused title, Prodigy. Only twenty—Horse stopped reading, and with a very odd expression in his eyes, gazed intently at Anton Laurier. I want to advise you, he began hoarsely. What? About raps. Don't answer them. Let them alone. Have a padded door. This concludes— Head and Shoulders by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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8 The Tales of Peter Rabbit 5:52
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter.
Once upon a time there were four little rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter. They lived with their mother in a sandbank underneath the root of a very big fir-tree. Now, my dears, said Old Mrs. Rabbit one morning. You may go into the fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. MacGregor's garden. Your father had an accident there. He was put in a pie by Mrs. MacGregor.
Now run along and don't get into mischief. I'm going out. Then Old Mrs. Rabbit took a basket and an umbrella and went through the wood to the baker's. She bought a loaf of brown bread and five currant buns. Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail, who were good little bunnies, went down the lane together to gather blackberries. But Peter, who was very naughty, ran straightway to Mr. MacGregor's garden and squeezed under the gate. First he ate some lettuces and some French beans, and then he ate some radishes, and then, feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley. But round the end of a cucumber frame, Whom should he meet but Mr. McGregor? Mr. McGregor was on his hands and knees planting out young cabbages, but he jumped up and ran after Peter, waving a rake and calling out, Stop!
Thief! Peter was most dreadfully frightened. He rushed all over the garden, for he had forgotten the way back to the gate. He lost one shoe among the cabbages and the other amongst the potatoes. After losing them, he ran on four legs and went faster. so that I think he might have got away altogether if he had not unfortunately run into a gooseberry net, and got caught by the large buttons on his jacket. It was a blue jacket with brass buttons, quite new. Peter gave himself up for lost and shed big tears, but his sobs were overheard by some friendly sparrows, who flew to him in great excitement and implored him to exert himself. Mr. MacGregor came up with a sieve which he intended to pop on top of Peter, but Peter wriggled out just in time, leaving his jacket behind him.
He rushed into the tool-shed and jumped into a can. It would have been a beautiful thing to hide in, if it had not had so much water in it. Mr. MacGregor was quite sure that Peter was somewhere in the tool-shed, perhaps hidden underneath a flower-pot. He began to turn them over carefully, looking under each. Presently Peter sneezed. "'Carty-choo!' Mr. MacGregor was after him in no time, and tried to put his foot upon Peter, who jumped out of a window, upsetting three plants. Peter sat down to rest. He was out of breath and trembling with fright, and he had not the least idea which way to go. Also, he was very damp with sitting in that can. After a time he began to wander about, going lippity, lippity.
Not very fast, and looking all around. He found a door in a wall, but it was locked and there was no room for a fat little rabbit to squeeze underneath. An old mouse was running in and out over the stone doorstep carrying peas and beans to her family in the woods. Peter asked her to wait to the gate, but she had such a large pea in her mouth that she could not answer. She only shook her head at him.
Peter began to cry. Then he tried to find his way straight across the garden, but he became more and more puzzled. Presently he came to a pond where Mr. MacGregor filled his water cans. A white cat was staring at some goldfish. She sat very, very still, but now and then the tip of her tail twitched as if it were alive. Peter thought it best to go away without speaking to her. He had heard about cats from his cousin, little Benjamin Bunny.
He went back toward the tool shed, but suddenly, quite close to him, he heard the noise of a hoe. Scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch. Peter scuttered underneath the bushes, but presently, as nothing happened, he came out and climbed upon a wheelbarrow and peeped over. The first thing he saw was Mr. MacGregor hoeing onions. His bag was turned toward Peter, and beyond him was the gate. Peter got down very quietly off the wheelbarrow, had started running as fast as he could along a straight walk behind some blackcurrant bushes. Mr. MacGregor caught sight of him at the corner, but Peter did not care. He slipped underneath the gate and was safe at last in the woods outside the garden. Mr. MacGregor hung up the little jacket and the shoes for a scarecrow to frighten the blackbirds.
Peter never stopped running or looked behind him until he got home to the big fir-tree. He was so tired that he flopped down upon the nice soft sand on the floor of the rabbit hole and shut his eyes. His mother was busy cooking. She wondered what he had done with his clothes. It was the second little jacket and pair of shoes that Peter had lost in that fortnight. I am sorry to say that Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed and made some caramel tea, and she gave a dose of it to Peter. One teaspoonful to be taken at bedtime, but Flopsy-Mopsy and Cottontail had bread, milk, and blackberries for supper. End of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter.
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9 The Street That Wasn't There 36:00
The Street That Wasn't There by Clifford D. Simak and Carl Jacoby.
Mr. Jonathan Chambers left his house on Maple Street at exactly seven o'clock in the evening. and set out on the daily walk he had taken at the same time, come rain or snow, for twenty solid years. The walk never varied. He paced two blocks down Maple Street, stopped at the Red Star Confectionary to buy a Rose Trofero Perfecto, then walked to the end of the fourth block on Maple. There he turned right on Lexington, followed Lexington to Oak, down Oak, and so by way of Lincoln back to Maple again and to his home. He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his front door at exactly seven-forty-five. No one ever stopped to talk with him. Even the man at the Red Star Confectionary, where he bought his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made.
Mr. Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a coin. The man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr. Chambers took his cigar. That was all. For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for it. The oldsters remembered that this queer-looking individual with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane, and bowler hat, once had been a professor at State University. A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such outlandish subject. At any rate, a furore of some sort was connected with his name, at the time an academic scandal. He had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that volume to his classes.
What that subject matter was had long been forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the University.
A silver moon shone over the chimney-tops, and a chill, impish October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers started out at seven o'clock. It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp air of autumn, and the faint pungence of distant wood-smoke. He walked unhurriedly, swinging his cane a bit less jauntily than twenty years ago. He tucked the muffler more securely under the rusty old top-coat, and pulled his bowler hat more firmly on his head. He noticed that the street light at the corner of Maple and Jefferson was out, and he grumbled a little to himself when he was forced to step off the walk to circle a boarded-off section of newly-laid concrete work before the driveway of Eight One Six.
It seemed that he reached the corner of Lexington and Maple just a bit too quickly, but he told himself that this couldn't be, for he never did that. For twenty years, since the year following his expulsion from the university, he had lived by the clock. The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed existence had grown on him gradually. So he turned on Lexington, and back on Oak, The dog at the corner of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again, and came out snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers pretended not to notice, and the beast gave up the chase.
A radio was blaring down the street, and faint wisps of what it was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers. "'Still taking place! Empire State Building disappeared. Thin Air!' Famed scientist Dr. Edmund Harcourt. The wind whipped the muted words away, and Mr. Chambers grumbled to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas, probably. He remembered one from many years before, something about the Martians. And Harcourt, what did Harcourt have to do with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book Mr. Chambers had written. But he pushed speculation away. Sniffed the clean, crisp air again. Looked but the familiar things that materialised out of the late autumn darkness as he walked along.
For there was nothing, absolutely nothing, in the world that he would let upset him. That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago. There was a crowd of men in front of the drug store at the corner of Oak and Lincoln, and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers caught some excited words. "'It's happening everywhere!' What do you think it is? The scientists can't explain. But as Mr. Chambers neared them, they fell into what seemed an abashed silence, and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not wish to talk. One of the men half started forward, as if to speak to him, but then stepped back, and Mr.
Chambers continued on his walk. Back at his own front door he stopped, and as he had done a thousand times before, drew forth the heavy gold watch from his pocket. He started violently. It was only seven-thirty! For long minutes he stood there, staring at the watch in accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked audibly. But fifteen minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he had started out at seven, and returned at a quarter of eight. Now? It wasn't until then that he realized something else was wrong. He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase his evening smoke. Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his house and locked the door behind him.
He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall, and walked slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favourite chair, he shook his head in bewilderment. Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the ticking of the old-fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece. But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had loved music, the kind of music he could get by tuning in symphonic orchestras on the radio, but the radio stood silent in the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash, He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines, too, had exiled himself to a few city blocks.
And as the years flowed by, that self-exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall, bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter, unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went. But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets. Things the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see him coming. And so he knew that this was the year, and that the wars in Europe and Asia had flamed to an end, to be followed by a terrible plague. A plague that even now was sweeping through country after country like wildfire, decimating populations. A plague undoubtedly induced by hunger and privation and the miseries of war.
But these things he put away as items far removed from his own small world. He disregarded them. He pretended he had never heard of them. Others might discuss and worry over them if they wished. To him, they simply did not matter. But there were two things tonight that did matter, two curious, incredible events. He had arrived home fifteen minutes early. He had forgotten his cigar. Huddled in the chair, he frowned slowly. It was disquieting to have something like that happen. There must be something wrong. Had his long exile finally turned his mind, perhaps just a very little, enough to make him queer? Had he lost his sense of proportion, of perspective? No, he hadn't. Take this room, for example.
After twenty years, it had come to be as much a part of him as the clothes he wore. Every detail of the room was engraved in his mind with clarity. The old centre-leg table with its green covering and stained glass lamp, the mantelpiece with the dusty bric-a-brac, the pendulum clock that told the time of day as well as the day of the week and month, the elephant ash-tray on the tabouret, and most important of all, the marine print. Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It showed an old sailing-ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague outline of a larger vessel. There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the courier and Ives above the radio.
But the ship print was directly in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head. He had put it there because he liked it best. Further reverie became an effort, as Mr. Chambers felt himself succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither define nor understand. When finally he dozed off, it was to lose himself in a series of horrific dreams. He dreamed first that he was a castaway on a tiny islet in mid-ocean, that the waters around the island teemed with huge poisonous sea-snakes, hydrophinae, and that steadily those serpents were devouring the island. In another dream he was pursued by a horror which he could neither see nor hear, but only could imagine, and as he sought to flee he stayed in the one place.
His legs worked frantically, pumping like pistons, but he could make no progress. It was as if he ran upon a treadway. Then again a terror descended on him, A black, unimagined thing, and he tried to scream and couldn't. He opened his mouth and strained his vocal cords and filled his lungs to bursting with the urge to shriek, but not a sound came from his lips.
All next day he was uneasy, and as he left the house that evening at precisely seven o'clock, he kept saying to himself, "'You must not forget tonight. You must remember to stop and get your cigar.' The streetlight at the corner of Jefferson was still out, and in front of eight one six the cemented driveway was still boarded off. Everything was the same as the night before. And now, he told himself, the Red Star Confectionery is in the next block. I must not forget tonight. To forget twice in a row would be just too much. He grasped the thought firmly in his mind, strode just a bit more rapidly down the street. But at the corner he stopped in consternation. Bewildered, he stared down the next block.
There was no neon sign, no splash of friendly light upon the sidewalk to mark the little store tucked away in this residential section. He stared at the street marker, and read the word slowly, Grant. He read it again, unbelieving, for this shouldn't be Grant Street, but Marshall. He had walked two blocks, and the confectionery was between Marshall and Grant. He hadn't come to Marshall yet. And here was Grant. Or had he absentmindedly come one block farther than he thought, past the store as on the night before? For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around, and went back to Grant again, and on to Lexington, then back to Grant again, where he stood astounded while a single incredible fact grew slowly in his brain, There wasn't any confectionery.
The block from Marshall to Grant had disappeared. Now he understood why he had missed the store on the night before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early. On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He slammed and locked the door behind him, and made his way unsteadily to his chair in the corner. What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable necromancy could a paved street, with houses, trees, and buildings, be spirited away, and the space it had occupied be closed up? Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded life, knew nothing about? Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat, then stopped as he realized the room must be warm.
A fire blazed merrily in the grate. The cold, he felt, came from something somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half-whispered thought. A deadly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the pendulum clock, and yet a silence that held a different tenor than he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence, but a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness. There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself. Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of talk he had heard on the drugstore corner. Bits of news broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street.
The shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself. He brought them back to mind now, and lingered over the one central theme of the talk he had overheard. The wars and plagues. Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America, of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread into that nation's boundaries. Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South America, billions, perhaps. And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own experience, something Somewhere, some part of his earlier life, seemed to hold an explanation, but try as he would, his befuddled brain failed to find the answer.
The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime, as usual, setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood upon the mantle. Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it, and looked out. Moonlight tessellated the street in black and silver. etching the chimneys and trees against a silvered sky. But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was strangely lopsided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a house that suddenly had gone mad. He stared at it in amazement, trying to determine what was wrong with it. He recalled how it had always stood, four square, a solid piece of mid-Victorian architecture. Then, before his eyes, The house righted itself again.
Slowly it drew together, ironed out its queer angles, readjusted its dimensions, became once again the stodgy house he knew it had to be. With a sigh of relief, Mr. Chambers turned back into the hall. But before he closed the door, he looked again. The house was lopsided. As bad, perhaps worse than before. Gulping in fright, Mr. Chambers slammed the door shut, locked it, and double-bolted it. Then he went to his bedroom. and took two sleeping-powders. His dreams that night were the same as on the night before. Again there was the islet in mid-ocean. Again he was alone upon it. Again the squirming hydrophony were eating his foothold piece by piece. He awoke, body drenched with perspiration. Vague light of early dawn filtered through the window.
The clock on the bedside table showed seven-thirty. For a long time he lay there motionless. Again, the fantastic happenings of the night before came back to haunt him, and as he lay there staring at the windows, he remembered them one by one. But his mind, still fogged by sleep and astonishment, took the happenings in its stride, mulled over them, lost the keen edge of fantastic terror that had lurked around them. The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window. The cold of the floor biting into his bare feet, he forced himself to look out. There was nothing outside the window, no shadows, as if there might be a fog, but no fog, however thick, could hide the apple-tree that grew close against the house.
But the tree was there, shadowy, indistinct in the grey, with a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few shrivelled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch. The tree was there now, but it hadn't been when he first had looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that. And now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbour's house. But those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together. They were out of plum, as if some giant hand had grasped the house and wrenched it out of true, like the house he had seen across the street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself when he thought of how it should look. Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbour's house should look, it too might right itself.
But Mr. Chambers was very weary, too weary to think about the house. He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room he slumped into his chair, put his feet up on the old cracked ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think. And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through him. Rigid he sat there, Limp inside at the thought. Minutes later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany bookcase that stood against the wall. There were many volumes in the case, his beloved classics on the first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The second shelf contained but one book, and it was around this book that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centred.
Twenty years ago he had written it. and foolishly attempted to teach its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the school. It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind. Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover, and began thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of happier days swept over him. Then his eyes focused on the paragraph, a paragraph written so long ago the very words seemed strange and unreal.
Man himself, by the power of mass suggestion, Holds the physical fate of this earth, yes, even the universe. Billions of minds seeing trees as trees, houses as houses, streets as streets, and not as something else. Minds that see things as they are and have kept things as they were. Destroy those minds, and the entire foundation of matter, robbed of its regenerative power, will crumple and slip away like a column of sand. His eyes followed down the page. Yet this would have nothing to do with matter itself, but only with matter's form. For while the mind of man through long ages may have molded an imagery of that space in which he lives, mind would have little conceivable influence upon the existence of that matter.
What exists in our known universe shall exist always and can never be destroyed, only altered or transformed. But in modern astrophysics and mathematics we gain an insight into the possibility Yes, probability, that there are other dimensions, other brackets of time and space impinging on the one we occupy. If a pin is thrust into a shadow, would that shadow have any knowledge of the pin? It would not, for in this case the shadow is two-dimensional, the pin three-dimensional, yet both occupy the same space. Granting then that the power of men's minds alone holds this universe, Or at least this world in its present form, may we not go farther, and envision other minds in some other plane watching us, waiting, waiting craftily for the time they can take over the domination of matter?
Such a concept is not impossible. It is a natural conclusion if we accept the double hypothesis that mind does control the formation of all matter, and that other worlds lie in juxtaposition with ours. Perhaps We shall come upon a day far distant, when our plane, our world, will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes, as some stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the very space we live in, and wrests from us the matter which we know to be our own. He stood astounded beside the bookcase, his eyes staring unseeing into the fire upon the hearth. He had written that. And because of those words he had been called a heretic, had been compelled to resign his position at the university, had been forced into this hermit life.
A tumultuous idea hammered at him. Men had died by the millions all over the world. Where there had been thousands of minds, there were now one or two, a feeble force to hold the form of matter intact. The plague had swept Europe and Asia almost clean of life. Had blighted Africa. Had reached South America. Might even have come to the United States. He remembered the whispers he had heard, the words of the men at the drugstore corner, the buildings disappearing. Something scientists could not explain. But those were merely scraps of information. He did not know the whole story. He could not know. He never listened to the radio, never read a newspaper. But abruptly the whole thing fitted together in his brain like the missing piece of a puzzle into its slot.
The significance of it all gripped him with damning clarity. There were not sufficient minds in existence to retain the material world in its mundane form. Some other power from another dimension was fighting to supersede man's control and take his universe into its own plane. Abruptly, Mr. Chambers closed the book, shoved it back in the case, and picked up his hat and coat. He had to know more. He had to find someone who could tell him. He moved through the hall to the door. emerged into the street. On the walk he looked skyward, trying to make out the sun. But there wasn't any sun, only an all-pervading greyness that shrouded everything, not a grey fog, but a grey emptiness that seemed devoid of life, of any movement.
The walk led to his gate, and there it ended. But as he moved forward, the sidewalk came into view, and the house ahead loomed out of the grey, but a house with differences. He moved forward rapidly. Visibility extended only a few feet, and as he approached them the houses materialized like two-dimensional pictures without perspective, like twisted cardboard soldiers lining up for review on a misty morning. Once he stopped and looked back and saw that the grayness had closed in behind him. The houses were wiped out. The sidewalk faded into nothing. He shouted, hoping to attract attention, but his voice frightened him. It seemed to ricochet up and into the higher levels of the sky, as if a giant's door had been opened to a mighty room high above him.
He went on. Until he came to the corner of Lexington, there on the curb he stopped and stared. The grey wall was thicker there, but he did not realise how close it was until he glanced down at his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the curbstone, no dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and Lexington. With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat bouncing on his head. Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful that it was still there. On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He gazed back over his shoulder, and a queer feeling of inner numbness seemed to well over him.
At that moment the grey nothingness appeared to Thin, The enveloping curtain fell away, and he saw, vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a gigantic city was lined up against the darkling sky. It was a city fantastic with cubed domes, spires and aerial bridges and flying buttresses, tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the vanishing point. Great shafts of multi-coloured light probed huge streamers and ellipses above the higher levels, and beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was from that wall, from its crenellated parapets and battlements, that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him, thousands of eyes glaring down with but a single purpose.
And as he continued to look, something else seemed to take form above that wall. A design this time that swirled and writhed in the ribbons of radiance, and rapidly coalesced into strange geometric features, without definite line or detail. A colossal face, a face of indescribable power and evil it was, staring down with malevolent composure. Then the city and the face slid out of focus, the vision faded like a darkened magic lantern, and the greyness moved in again. Mr. Chambers pushed open the door of his house, but he did not lock it. There was no need of locks, not any more. A few coals of fire still smouldered in the grate, and going there he stirred them up, raked away the ash, piled on more wood.
The flames leapt merrily, dancing in the chimney's throat. Without removing his hat and coat, he sank exhausted in his favourite chair, closed his eyes, then opened them again. He sighed with relief as he saw the room was unchanged. Everything in its accustomed place—the clock, the lamp, the elephant ash-tray, the marine print on the wall. Everything was as it should be. The clock measured the silence with its measured ticking. It chimed abruptly, and the vase sent up its usual sympathetic vibration. This was his room, he thought. Rooms acquire the personality of the person who lives in them, become a part of him. This was his world, his own private world—the And as such, it would be the last to go.
But how long could he, his brain, maintain its existence? Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print, and for a moment a little breath of reassurance returned to him. They couldn't take this away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form, but this Room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since he had first planned the house's building, had lived here. This room would stay. It must stay on. It must. He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the bookcase, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume. His eyes shifted to the top shelf, and swift terror gripped him, for all the books weren't there.
A lot of books weren't there. Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones. So the change had already started here. The unfamiliar books were gone, and that fitted in the pattern, for it would be the least familiar things that would go first. Wheeling, he stared across the room. Was it his imagination, or did the lamp on the table blur and begin to fade away? But as he stared at it, it became clear again, a solid, substantial thing. For a moment real fear reached out and touched him with chilly fingers. For he knew that this room no longer was proof against the thing that had happened out there on the street. Or had it really happened? Might not all this exist within his own mind? Might not the street be as it always was, with laughing children and barking dogs?
Might not the Red Star Confectionary still exist, splashing the street with the red of its neon sign? Could it be that he was going mad? He had heard whispers when he had passed, whispers the gossiping housewives had not intended him to hear. And he had heard the shouting of boys when he walked by. They thought him mad. Could he be really mad? But he knew he wasn't mad. He knew that he, perhaps, was the sanest of all men who walked the earth, for he and he alone had foreseen this very thing, and the others had scoffed at him for it. Somewhere else the children might be playing on a street, but it would be a different street, and the children undoubtedly would be different too. For the matter of which the street and everything upon it had been formed would now be cast in a different mould, stolen by different minds in a different dimension.
Perhaps we shall come upon a day far distant, when our plane, our world, will dissolve beneath our feet and before our eyes, as some stronger intelligence reaches out from the dimensional shadows of the very space we live in, and wrests from us the matter which we know to be our own. But there had been no need to wait for that distant day. Scant years after he had written those prophetic words, the thing was happening. Man had played unwittingly into the hands of those other minds in the other dimension. Man had waged a war, and war had bred a pestilence, and the whole vast cycle of events was but a detail of a cyclopean plan. He could see it all now, by an insidious mass hypnosis, minions from that other dimension, or was it—or was it—or One supreme intelligence, had deliberately sown the seeds of dissension.
The reduction of the world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic premeditation. On impulse, he suddenly turned, crossed the room, and opened the connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold, and a sob forced its way to his lips. There was no bedroom. Where his solid four-poster and dresser had been, there was grayish nothingness. Like an automaton, he turned again and paced to the hall door. Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no familiar hat-rack and umbrella stand. Nothing. Weakly, Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner. "'So, here I am,' he said, half aloud. So there he was, embattled in the last corner of the world that was left to him.
Perhaps there were other men like him. He thought, men who stood at bay against the emptiness that marked the transition from one dimension to another, men who had lived close to the things they loved, who had endowed those things with such substantial form by power of mind alone, that they now stood out alone against the power of some greater mind. The street was gone. The rest of his house was gone. This room still retained its form. This room, he knew, would stay the longest, and when the rest of the room was gone, this corner, with his favorite chair would remain, for this was the spot where he had lived for twenty years. The bedroom was for sleeping, the kitchen for eating. This room was for living.
This was his last stand. These were the walls and floors, and prints and lamps that had soaked up his will to make them walls and prints and lamps. He looked out the window into a blank world. His neighbors' houses already were gone. They had not lived with them as he had lived with this room. Their interests had been divided, thinly spread. Their thoughts had not been concentrated as his upon an area four blocks by three, or a room fourteen by twelve. Staring through the window, he saw it again, the same vision he had looked upon before, and yet different in an indescribable way. There was the city illumined in the sky. There were the elliptical towers and turrets, the cube-shaped domes and battlements, He could see with stereoscopic clarity the aerial bridges, the gleaming avenues sweeping on into infinitude.
The vision was nearer this time, but the depth and proportion had changed, as if he were viewing it from two concentric angles at the same time. And the face, the face of magnitude, of power, of cosmic craft and evil. Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the room. The table and the radio were the first to go. They simply faded away, and with them went one corner of the room, and then the elephant ash-tray. "'Oh, well,' said Mr. Chambers, "'I never did like that very well.' Now, as he sat there, it didn't seem queer to be without the table or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal, something one could expect to happen.
Perhaps if he thought hard enough he could bring them back. But—' After all, what was the use? One man alone could not stand off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man all alone simply couldn't do it. He wondered what the elephant ash-tray looked like in that other dimension. It certainly wouldn't be an elephant ash-tray, nor would the radio be a radio, for perhaps they didn't have ash-trays or radios or elephants in the invading dimension. He wondered, as a matter of fact, what he himself would look like when he finally slipped into the unknown. For he was matter, too, just as the ashtray and the radio were matter. He wondered if he would retain his individuality, if he still would be a person, or would he merely be a thing?
There was one answer to all of that. He simply didn't know. Nothingness advanced upon him, ate its way across the room, stalking him as he sat in the chair underneath the lamp, and he waited for it. The room, or what was left of it, plunged into dreadful silence. Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny, the first time, in twenty years. He leapt from his chair, and then sat down again. The clock hadn't stopped. It wasn't there. There was a tingling sensation in his feet.
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10 What Men Live By 56:47
What Men Live By, by Leo Tolstoy.
Chapter One.
We know that we have passed out of death into life. Because we love the brethren. He that loveth not abideth in death. First John 3, 14. Whoso hath the world's goods, and beholdeth his brother in need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how doth the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and truth. Verses 17 and 18. Love is of God, and every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.
No man hath beheld God at any time. If we love one another, God abideth in us.
God is love, and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him. First, 16. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar. For he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?
First, 20. A shoemaker named Simon, who had neither house nor land of his own, lived with his wife and children in a peasant's hut, and earned his living by his work.
Work was cheap, but bread was dear, and what he earned he spent for food. The man and his wife had but one sheepskin coat between them for winter wear, and even that was torn to tatters. And this was the second year he had been wanting to buy sheepskins for a new coat. Before winter, Simon saved up a little money. A three-rouple note lay hidden in his wife's box. And five rubles and twenty kopecks were owed him by customers in the village.
So one morning he prepared to go to the village to buy the sheepskins. He put on over his shirt his wife's wadden Nanking jacket, and over that he put his own cloth coat.
He took three rubles and started off after breakfast. "'I'll collect the five rubles that are due me,' thought he. Add the three I've got, and that will be enough to buy sheepskins for the winter coat.
He came to the village and called at a peasant's hut, but the man was not home. The peasant's wife promised that the money should be paid next week, but she would not pay it herself. Then Simon called on another peasant, but this one swore he had no money and would only pay twenty kopecks, which he owed for a pair of boots Simon had mended. Simon then tried to buy the sheepskins on credit, but the dealer would not trust him. "'Bring your money,' he said. "'Then you may have the pick of the skins. We know what debt-collecting is like.' So all the business the shoemaker did was get the twenty kopecks for boots he had mended, and to take a pair of felt boots a peasant gave him to sole with leather.
Simon felt downhearted. He spent the twenty kopecks on vodka, and started homewards without having bought any skins.
In the morning he felt the frost, but now after drinking the vodka he felt warm, even without a sheepskin coat. He trudged along, striking his stick on the frozen earth with one hand, swinging the felt boots with the other, and talking to himself.
I'm quite warm, said he, though I have no sheepskin coat. I've had a drop, and it runs through all my veins. I need no sheepskins.
I go along and don't worry about anything. That's the sort of man I am. What do I care? I can live without sheepskins. I don't need them. My wife will fret, to be sure. And true enough, it is a shame one works all day long and then does not get paid. Stop a bit.
If you don't bring that money along, sure enough I'll skin you. Blessed if I don't. How's that? He pays twenty kopecks at a time. What can I do with twenty kopecks? Drink it. That's all one can do. Hard up, he says he is. So he may be. But what about me? You have a house and cattle and everything. I've only got what I stand up in. You've got corn of your own growing. I have to buy every grain. Do what I will, I must spend three roubles every week for bread alone. I come home and find the bread all used up, and I have to fork out another rouble and a half. So just pay up what you owe, and no nonsense about it. By this time he had nearly reached the shrine at the bend of the road. Looking up, he saw something whitish behind the shrine.
The daylight was fading, and the shoemaker peered at the thing without being able to make out what it was. There was no white stone there before. Can it be an ox? It's not like an ox. It has a head like a man. But it's too white. And what could a man be doing there? He came closer so that it was clearly visible. To his surprise, it really was a man, alive or dead, sitting naked, leaning motionless against the shrine. Terror seized the shoemaker, and he thought, Someone has killed him, stripped him, and left him there. If I meddle, I shall surely get into trouble. So the shoemaker went on. He passed in front of the shrine so that he could not see the man. When he had gone some way, he looked back and saw that the man was no longer leaning against the shrine, but was moving as if looking toward him.
The shoemaker felt more frightened than before, and thought, Shall I go back to him, or shall I go on? If I go near him, something dreadful may happen. Who knows who the fellow is? He has not come here for any good. If I go near him, he may jump up and throttle me, and there will be no getting away. Or if not, he'd still be a burden on one's hands. What could I do with a naked man? I couldn't give him my last clothes. Heaven only help me to get away. So the shoemaker hurried on, leaving the shrine behind him, when suddenly his conscience smote him and stopped him in the road. "'What are you doing, Simon?' said he to himself. The man may be dying of want, and you slip past afraid. Have you grown so rich as to be afraid of robbers?
Ah, Simon, shame on you. So he turned, went back, and went up to the man.
Simon approached the stranger, looked at him, and saw that he was a young man, fit with no bruises on his body. Only evidently freezing and frightened. And he sat there, leaning back without looking up at Simon, as if too faint to lift his eyes. Simon went close to him, and the man seemed to wake up. Turning his head, he opened his eyes and looked into Simon's face. That one look was enough to make Simon fond of the man. He threw the felt boots on the ground, undid his sash, and laid it on the boots. and took off his cloth coat. "'It's not a time for talking,' said he. "'Come, put this coat on at once.' And Simon took the man by the elbows and helped him to rise. As he stood there, Simon saw that his body was clean and in good condition, his hands and feet shapely, his face good and kind.
He threw his coat over the man's shoulders, but the latter could not find the sleeves, Simon guided his arms into them, and, drawing the coat well on, wrapped it closely about him, tying the sash around the man's waist. Simon even took off his torn cap and put it on the man's head. But then his own head felt cold, and he thought, I'm quite bald, while he has long curly hair. So he put his cap on his own head again. It will be better to give him something for his feet, thought he. And he made the man sit down and helped him to put on the felt boots, saying, "'There, friend, now move about and warm yourself. Other matters can be settled later on. Can you walk?' The man stood up and looked kindly at Simon, but could not say a word.
"'Why don't you speak?' said Simon. "'It's too cold to stay here.' We must be getting home. There now, take my stick, and if you're feeling weak, lean on that. Now step out. The man started walking, and moving easily, not lagging behind. As they went along, Simon asked him, And where do you belong to? I'm not from these parts. I thought as much. I know the folks hereabouts. But how did you come to be there in the shrine?
I cannot tell.
Has someone been ill-treating you? No one has ill-treated me. God has punished me. Of course God rules all. Still, you'll have to find food and shelter somewhere. Where do you want to go? It is all the same to me. Simon was amazed. The man did not look like a rogue. And he spoke gently.
But yet he gave no account of himself. Still, Simon thought, who knows what may have happened. And he said to the stranger, Well, then, come home with me, and at least warm yourself a while. So Simon walked toward his home, and the stranger kept up with him, walking at his side. The wind had risen, and Simon felt it cold under his shirt. He was getting over his tippiness now, and began to feel the frost.
He went along, sniffling and wrapping his wife's coat around him, and he thought to himself, There, now, talk about sheepskins. I went out for sheepskins, and came home without even a coat on my back. And what is more, I'm bringing a naked man along with me. Matrona won't be pleased. And when he thought of his wife he felt sad. But when he looked at the stranger and remembered how he had looked up at him at the shrine, his heart was glad.
Simon's wife had everything ready early that day. She had cut wood, brought water, fed the children, eaten her own meal, And now she sat thinking. She wondered if she ought to make bread, now or tomorrow. There was still a large piece left. If Simon had some dinner in town, she thought, and does not eat much for supper, the bread will last out another day. She weighed the piece of bread in her hand again and again, and thought, I won't make any more today. We have only enough flour left to bake one batch. We can manage to make this last out till Friday. So Matrona put away the bread, and sat down at the table to patch her husband's shirt. While she worked, she thought how her husband was buying skins for a winter coat.
If only the dealer doesn't cheat him. My good man is much too simple. He cheats nobody, but any child can take him in. Eight roubles is a lot of money. He should get a good coat for that price. Not tanned skins, but still a proper winter coat. How difficult it was last winter to get on without a warm coat! I could neither get down to the river nor go out anywhere. When he went out, he put on all we had, and there was nothing left for me. He did not start very early to-day, but still it is time he was back. I only hope he's not gone out on a spree.
Hardly had Matrona thought this when steps were heard on the threshold and some one entered. Matrona stuck her needle into her work and went out on to the passage. There she saw two men. Simon, and with him a man without a hat and wearing felt boots. Matrona noticed at once that her husband smelt of spirits. There now, he has been drinking, she thought. And when she saw that he was coatless, had only her jacket on, brought no parcel, stood there silent, and seemed ashamed, her heart was ready to break with disappointment. He has drunk the money, she thought, and has been on a spree with some good-for-nothing fellow, whom he has brought home with him. Matrona let them pass into the hut. followed them in, and saw that the stranger was a young, slight man wearing her husband's coat.
There was no shirt to be seen under it, and he had no hat. Having entered, he stood, neither moving nor raising his eyes, and Matrona thought, "'He must be a bad man. He's afraid.' Matrona frowned, and stood beside the oven looking to see what they would do. Simon took off his cap, and sit down on the bench as if things were all right. Come, Matrona. If supper is ready, let us have some. Matrona muttered something to herself and did not move, but stayed where she was by the oven. She looked first at the one and then at the other at them, and only shook her head. Simon saw that his wife was annoyed, but tried to pass it off, pretending not to notice anything, He took the stranger by the arm. "'Sit down, friend,' said he, "'and let us have some supper.' The stranger sat down on the bench.
"'Haven't you cooked anything for us?' said Simon. Matrona's anger boiled over. "'I've cooked, but not for you. It seems to me you have drunk your wits away. You went to buy a sheepskin coat, But come home without so much as the coat you had on, and bring a naked vagabond home with you. I have no supper for drunkards like you. That's enough, Matrona. Don't wag your tongue without reason. You'd better ask what sort of man. And you tell me what you've done with the money. Simon found the pocket of the jacket, drew out the three-rouble note, and unfolded it. Here is the money. Tryphanoff did not pay, but promised to pay soon. Matrona got still more angry. He had brought no sheepskins, but had put his only coat on some naked fellow and had even brought him into their house.
She snatched up the note from the table, took it to put it away in safety, and said, "'I have no supper for you. We can't feed all the naked drunkards in the world.' There now, Matrona, Hold your tongue a bit. First hear what a man has to say. Much wisdom I shall hear from a drunken fool. I was right not wanting to marry you, a drunkard. The linen my mother gave me, you drank, and now you've been to buy a coat and have drunk it too. Simon tried to explain to his wife that he had only spent twenty kopecks. Try to tell how he had found the man. But Matrona would not let him get a word in. She talked nineteen to the dozen and dragged in things that had happened ten years before. Matrona talked and talked, and at last she flew at Simon and seized him by the sleeve.
Give me my jacket. It's the only one I have, and you must needs take it from me and wear it yourself. Give it here, you mangy dog, and may the devil take you. Simon began to pull off the jacket and turned a sleeve of it inside out. Matrona seized the jacket and it burst, it seems. She snatched it up, threw it over her head, and went to the door. She meant to go out, but stopped undecided. She wanted to work off her anchor, but she also wanted to learn what sort of a man The stranger was.
End of chapter 3 Matronus stopped and said, If he were a good man, he would not be naked. Why hasn't he even a shirt on him? If he were all right, you would say where you came across the fellow. That's just what I'm trying to tell you, said Simon. As I came to the shrine, I saw him sitting all naked and frozen. It isn't quite the weather to sit about naked. God sent me to him, or he would have perished. What was I to do? How do we know what may have happened to him? So I took him, clothed him, and brought him along. Don't be angry, Matrona. It is a sin. Remember, we all must die one day. Angry words rose to Matrona's lips, but she looked at the stranger and was silent. He sat on the edge of the bench, motionless, his hands folded on his knees, his head drooping on his breast, his eyes closed, his brows knit as if in pain.
Matrona was silent, and Simon said, Matrona, Have you no love of God? Matrona heard these words, and as she looked at the stranger, suddenly her heart softened toward him. She came back from the door, and going to the oven, she got out the supper. Sitting a cup on the table, she poured out some kavas. Then she brought out the last piece of bread, and set out a knife and spoons. Eat! "'Take your place, young man,' said he. Simon cut the bread, crumbled into the broth, and they began to eat. Matrona sat at the corner of the table, resting her head on her hand and looking at the stranger. And Matrona was touched with pity for the stranger, and began to feel fond of him. And at once the stranger's face lit up, his brows were no longer bent, and he raised his eyes and smiled at Matrona.
When they had finished supper, the woman cleared away the things and began questioning the stranger. "'Where are you from?' said she. "'I'm not from these parts.' "'But how did you come to be on the road?' "'I may not tell.' "'Did someone rob you?' "'God punished me.' And you were lying there naked? Yes, naked and freezing. Simon saw me and had pity on me. He took off his coat, put it on me and brought me here. And you have fed me, given me drink, and shown pity on me. God will reward you.
Matrona rose. took from the window Simon's old shirt she had been patching, and gave it to the stranger. She also brought out a pair of trousers for him. There, said she, I see you have no shirt. Put this on, and lie down where you please, in the loft or on the oven. The stranger took off the coat, put on the shirt, and lay down in the loft. Matrona put out the candle, took the coat, and climbed to where her husband lay. Matrona drew the skirts of the coat over her and lay down, but could not sleep. She could not get the stranger out of her mind. When she remembered that he had eaten their last piece of bread, and that there was no more for tomorrow, and thought of the shirt and trousers she had given away, she felt grieved.
But when she remembered how he had smiled, her heart Was glad.
Long did Matrona lie awake, and she noticed that Simon also was awake. He drew the coat toward him. Simon! Well? You have had the last piece of bread, and I have not put any to rise. I don't know what we shall do to-morrow. Perhaps I can borrow some of neighbor Martha. If we're alive, we shall find something to eat. The woman lay still a while, and then said, "'He seems a good man, but why does he not tell us who he is? I suppose he has his reasons.' "'Simon!' "'Well?' "'We give, but why does nobody give us anything?' Simon did not know what to say, so he only said, "'Let us stop talking,' and turned over. and went to sleep.
In the morning, Simon awoke. The children were still asleep. His wife had gone to the neighbors to borrow some bread. The stranger alone was sitting on the bench, dressed in the old shirt and trousers, and looking upwards. His face was brighter than it had been the day before. Simon said to him, Well, friend, the belly wants bread. and the naked body-clothes. One has to work for a living. What work do you know? I do not know any. This surprised Simon. But he said, Men who want to learn can learn anything. Men work, and I will work also. What is your name? Michael. Well, Michael, If you don't wish to talk about yourself, that is your own affair, but you'll have to earn a living for yourself. If you will work, as I tell you, I will give you food and shelter.
May God reward you. I will learn. Show me what to do. Simon took yarn, put it around his thumb, and began to twist it.
It is easy enough. See?
Michael watched him, put some yarn around his own thumb in the same way, caught the knack, and twisted the yarn also. Then Simon showed him how to wax the thread. This also Michael mastered. Next, Simon showed him how to twist the bristle in, and how to sew. And this, too, Michael learned at once. Whatever Simon showed him he understood at once, and after three days he worked as if he had sewn boots all his life. He worked without stopping and ate little. When work was over, he sat silently, looking upwards. He hardly went into the street, spoke only when necessary, and neither joked nor laughed. They never saw him smile, except that first evening, when Matrona gave them supper.
Day by day and week by week the year went round. Michael lived and worked with Simon. His fame spread until people said, that no one sewed boots so neatly and strongly as Simon's workman, Michael. And from all the district round people came to Simon for their boots, and he began to be well off. One winter day, as Simon and Michael sat working, a carriage on sledge-runners with three horses and with bells drove up to the hut. They looked out of the window. The carriage stopped at their door. A fine servant jumped down from the box and opened the door. A gentleman in a fur coat got out and walked up to Simon's hut. Up jumped Matrona and opened the door wide. The gentleman stooped to enter the hut, and when he drew himself up again his head nearly reached the ceiling, and he seemed quite to feel his end of the room.
Simon rose, bowed, and looked at the gentleman with astonishment. He had never seen anyone like him. Simon himself was lean, Michael was thin, and Matrona was dry as a bone. that this man was like someone from another world, red-faced, burly, with a neck like a bull's, and looking altogether as if he were cast in iron. The gentleman puffed, threw off his fur coat, and sat down on the bench and said, "'Which of you is the master bootmaker?' "'I am your Excellency,' said Simon, coming forward. Then the gentleman shouted to his lad, Hey, Fedka, bring the leather. The servant ran in, bringing a parcel. The gentleman took the parcel and put it on the table. Untie it, said he. The lad untied it. The gentleman pointed to the leather.
Look here, shoemaker, said he. Do you see this leather? Yes, your honor. Do you know what sort of leather it is? Simon felt the leather and said, It is good leather.
Good indeed! Why, you fool! You never saw such leather before in your life. It's German and costs twenty roubles. Simon was frightened and said, Where should I ever see leather like that? Just so. Now, can you make it into boots for me? Yes, your Excellency. I can. Then the gentleman shouted at him. You can, can you? Well, remember whom you are to make them for, and what the leather is. You must make me boots that will wear for a year, neither losing shape nor coming unsewn. If you can do it, take the leather and cut it up. But if you can't, say so. I warn you now, if your boots become unsewn or lose shape within a year, I will have you put in prison. If they don't burst or lose shape for a year, I will pay you ten rubles for your work.
Simon was frightened, and did not know what to say. He glanced at Michael, nudging him with his elbow, whispered, Shall I take the work? Michael nodded his head as if to say, Yes, take it. Simon did as Michael advised, and undertook to make boots that would not lose shape or split for a whole year. Calling his servant, the gentleman told him to pull the boot off his left leg, which was stretched out. Take my measure, said he. Simon stitched a paper measure seventeen inches long, smoothed it out, knelt down, wiped his hand well on his apron. so as not to soil the gentleman's sock, and began to measure.
He measured the sole and around the instep, and began to measure the calf of the leg, but the paper was too short. The calf of the leg was as thick as a beam. Mind you don't make it too tight in the leg. Simon stitched on another strip of paper. The gentleman twitched his toes about in his sock. looking around at those in the hut, and as he did, he noticed Michael. "'Whom have you there?' asked he. "'That is my workman. He will sew the boots.' "'Mind,' said the gentleman to Michael, "'remember to make them so they will last me a year.' Simon also looked at Michael. and saw that Michael was not looking at the gentleman, but was gazing into the corner behind the gentleman, as if he saw someone there.
Michael looked and looked, and suddenly he smiled, and his face became brighter. "'What are you grinning at, you fool?' thundered the gentleman. "'You'd better look to it that the boots are ready in time.' "'They shall be ready in time,' said Michael. "'Mind it is so.' said the gentleman, and he put on his boots and his fur coat, wrapped the ladder around him, and went to the door. But he forgot to stoop, and struck his head against the lintel. He swore and rubbed his head. Then he took his seat in the carriage and drove away. When he had gone, Simon said, "'There's a figure of a man for you. You could not kill him with a mallet. He almost knocked out the lintel.' But little harm it did him. And Matrona said, Living as he does, how should he not grow strong?
Death itself can't touch such a rock as that.
Then Simon said to Michael, Well, we have taken the work. But we must see we don't get into trouble over it. The leather is dear, and the gentleman hot-tempered. We must make no mistakes. Come. Your eye is truer, and your hands have become nimbler than mine. So you take this measure and cut out the boots. I will finish off the sewing of the vamps. Michael did as he was told. He took the leather, spread it out on the table, folded it in two, took a knife, and began to cut out.
Matrona came and watched him cutting. and was surprised to see how he was doing it. Matrona was accustomed to seeing boots made, and she looked and saw that Michael was not cutting the leather for boots, but was cutting it round. She wished to say something, but she thought to herself, perhaps I do not understand how gentlemen's boots should be made. I suppose Michael knows more about it, and I won't interfere. When Michael had cut up the leather, He took a thread and began to sew not with two ends as boots are sewn, but with a single end as for soft slippers. Again Matrona wondered, but again she did not interfere. Michael sewed on steadily till noon. Then Simon rose for dinner, looked around, and saw that Michael had made slippers out of the gentleman's leather.
"'Ah!' groaned Simon, and he thought. How is it that Michael, who has been with me a whole year and never made a mistake before, should do such a dreadful thing? The gentleman ordered high boots, welted with whole fronts, and Michael has made soft slippers with single soles and has wasted the leather. What am I to say to the gentleman? I can never replace leather such as this. And he said to Michael, What are you doing, friend? You have ruined me. You know the gentleman ordered high boots. But see what you have made. Hardly had he begun to rebuke Michael when Rat-Tat went the iron ring that hung on the door. Someone was knocking. They looked out of the window. A man had come on horseback and was fastening his horse.
They opened the door, and the servant who had been with the gentleman came in. "'Good-day,' said he. "'Good-day,' replied Simon. "'What can we do for you?' "'My mistress has sent me about the boots.' "'What about the boots?' "'Why, my master no longer needs them. He is dead.' "'Is it possible?' He did not live to get home after leaving you, but died in the carriage. When we reached home and the servants came to help him alight, he rolled over like a sack. He was dead already, and so stiff he could hardly be got out of the carriage. My mistress sent me here, saying, Tell the bootmaker that the gentleman who ordered boots of him and left the leather for them no longer needs the boots. But that he must quickly make soft slippers for the corpse.
Wait till they are ready, and bring them back with you. That is why I have come. Michael gathered up the remnants of the leather, rolled them up, took the soft slippers he had made, slapped them together, wiped them down with his apron, and handed them, and the roll of leather, to the servant, who took them and said, Good-bye. Master, and good day to you.
Another year passed, and another, and Michael was now living his sixth year with Simon. He lived as before. He went nowhere, only spoke when necessary, and had only smiled twice in those years. Once when Matrona gave him food, and a second time when the gentlemen was in their hut. Simon was more than pleased with his workmen. He never now asked him where he came from, and only feared lest Michael should go away. They were all at home one day. Matrona was putting iron pots in the oven. The children were running along the benches and looking out of the window. Simon was sewing at one window, and Michael was fastening on a heel at the other. One of the boys ran along the bench to Michael. leaned on his shoulder and looked out of the window.
Look, Uncle Michael, there is a lady with little girls. She seems to be coming here, and one of the little girls is lame. When the boys said that, Michael dropped his work, turned to the window, and looked out into the street. Simon was surprised. Michael never used to look into the street. But now he pressed against the window, staring at something. Simon also looked out, and saw that a well-dressed woman was really coming to his hut, leading by the hand two little girls in fur coats and woolen shawls. The girls could hardly be told one from the other, except that one of them was crippled in her left leg and walked with a limp. The woman stepped into the porch and entered the passage. Feeling about for the entrance, she found the latch, which she lifted, and opened the door.
She let the two girls in first and followed them into the hut. "'Good day, good folk.' "'Pray come in,' said Simon. "'What can we do for you?' The woman sat down at the table, the two little girls pressed close to her knees, afraid of the people in the hut. I want leather shoes made for these two little girls for spring. We can do that. We never have made such small shoes, but we can make them. Either welted or turnover shoes. Linen lined. My man, Michael, is a master at the work. Simon glanced at Michael and saw that he had left his work and was sitting with his eyes fixed on the little girls. Simon was surprised. It was true the girls were pretty, with black eyes, plump and rosy-cheeked, and they wore nice kerchiefs and fur coats.
But still Simon could not understand why Michael should look at them like that, just as if he had known them before. He was puzzled, but went on talking with the woman and arranging the price. Having fixed it, he prepared the measure. The woman lifted the lame girl on her lap and said, Take two measures from this little girl, make one shoe for the lame foot and three for the sound one. They both have the same size feet. They are twins. Simon took the measure. Speaking of the lame girl, said, How did it happen to her? She's such a pretty girl. Was she born so? No. Her mother crushed her leg. Then Matrona joined in. She wondered who this woman was, and whose the children were, and so she said, Are not you their mother, then?
No, my good woman. I am neither their mother, nor any relation to them. They were quite strangers to me, but I adopted them. They are not your children, and yet you are so fond of them. How can I help being fond of them? I fed them both at my own breasts. I had a child of my own, but God took him. I was not so fond of him as I now am of them. Then whose children are they? The woman, having begun talking, told them the whole story. It is about six years since their parents died, both in one week. Their father was buried on the Tuesday, and their mother died on the Friday. These orphans were born three days after their father's death, and their mother did not live another day. My husband and I were then living as peasants in the village.
We were neighbors of theirs, our yard being next to theirs. Their father was a lonely man, a woodcutter in the forest. When fell in trees one day, they let one fall on him. It fell across his body and crushed his bowels out. They hardly got him home before his soul went to God. And that same week his wife gave birth to twins, these little girls. She was poor and alone. She had no one, young or old, with her. Alone she gave them birth, and alone she met her death. The next morning I went to see her, But when I entered the hut, she—poor thing—was already stark and cold. In dying, she had rolled onto this child and crushed her leg. The village folk came to the hut, washed her body, laid her out, made a coffin, and buried her.
They were good folk. The babies were left alone. What was to be done with them? I was the only woman there who had a baby at the time. I was nursing my firstborn, eight weeks old, so I took them for a time. The peasants came together and thought and thought what to do with them, and at last they said to me, For the present, Mary, you had better keep the girls, and later on we will arrange what to do for them. So I nursed the sound one at my breast, but at first I did not feed this crippled one. I did not suppose she would live. But then I thought to myself, Why should the poor innocent suffer? I pitied her, and began to feed her. And so I fed my own boy and these two, the three of them, at my own breast.
I was young and strong, and had good food, and God gave me so much milk, that at times it even overflowed. I used sometimes to feed two at a time, while the third was waiting. When one had enough, I nursed the third, and God so ordered it that these grew up while my own was buried before he was two years old. And I had no more children, though we prospered. Now my husband is working for the corn merchant at the mill. The pay is good, and we are well off. But I have no children of my own, and how lonely I should be without these little girls! How can I help loving them? They are the joy of my life. She pressed the lame little girl to her with one hand, while with the other she wiped the tears from her cheeks.
And Matrona sighed and said, The proverb is true that says, One may live without father or mother, but one cannot live without God. So they talked together. When suddenly the whole hut was lighted up as though by summer lightning from the corner where Michael sat. They all looked toward him and saw him sitting, his hands folded on his knees, gazing upward and smiling.
The woman went away with the girls. Michael rose from the bench, put down his work, and took off his apron. Then... Bowing low to Simon and his wife, he said, Farewell, masters. God has forgiven me. I ask your forgiveness, too, for anything done amiss. And they saw that a light shone from Michael, and Simon rose, bowed down to Michael, and said, I see, Michael, that you are no common man, and I can neither keep you nor question you. Only tell me this. How is it that when I found you and brought you home, you were gloomy? And when my wife gave you food, you smiled at her and became brighter. Then, when the gentlemen came to order the boots, you smiled again and became brighter still. And now, when this woman brought the little girls, You smiled a third time, and have become as bright as day.
Tell me, Michael, why does your face shine so? And why did you smile those three times? And Michael answered, Light shines for me because I've been punished. But now God has pardoned me, and I smiled three times because God sent me to learn three truths, And I have learned them. One, I learned when your wife pitied me, and that is why I smiled the first time. The second, I learned when the rich man ordered the boots. And then I smiled again. And now I saw those three little girls. I learned the third and last truth, and I smiled the third time.
And Simon said, Tell me, Michael. What did God punish you for? And what were the three truths, that I, too, may know them? And Michael answered, God punished me for disobeying him. I was an angel in heaven, and disobeyed God. God sent me to fetch a woman's soul. I flew to earth and saw the sick woman lying alone, who had just given birth to twin girls. They moved feebly at their mother's side, but she could not lift them to her breast. When she saw me, she understood that God had sent me for her soul, and she wept and said, Angel of God, my husband has just been buried, killed by a falling tree. I have neither sister, nor aunt, nor mother, no one to care for my orphans. Do not take my soul. Let me nurse my babes.
Feed them, and set them on their feet before I die. Children cannot live without father or mother. And I hearkened to her. I placed one child at her breast, and gave the other into her arms. I returned to the Lord in heaven. I flew to the Lord and said, I cannot take the soul of the mother. Her husband was just killed by a tree. The woman has twins, and prays that her soul may not be taken. She says, Let me nurse and feed my children, and set them on their feet. Children cannot live without father and mother. I have not taken her soul. And God said, Go, take the mother's soul, and learn three truths. Learn what dwells in men, what is not given to men, and what men live by. When thou hast learned these three things, Thou shalt return to heaven.
So I flew again to earth and took the mother's soul, the babe's drop from her breast. Her body rolled over on the bed and crushed one babe, twisting its leg. I rose above the village, wishing to take her soul to God. But the wind seized me, and my wings drooped and dropped off. Her soul rose to God alone, while I fell to earth. And Simon and Matrona understood who it was that had lived with them, and whom they had clothed and fed. And they wept with awe and with joy. And the angel said, I was alone in the field, naked. I had never known human needs, cold and hunger, till I became a man. I was famished, frozen, and did not know what to do. I saw, near the field I was in, a shrine built for God, and I went to it, hoping to find shelter.
But the shrine was locked, and I could not enter. So I sat down beside the shrine to shelter myself at least from the wind. Evening drew on. I was hungry, frozen, and in pain. Suddenly I heard a man coming along the road. He carried a pair of boots, and was talking to himself. For the first time since I became a man, I saw the mortal face of a man, and his face seemed terrible to me, and I turned from it. And I heard the man talking to himself of how to cover his body from the cold in winter, and how to feed wife and children, and I thought. I am perishing of cold and hunger, and here is a man thinking only about how to clothe himself and his wife, and how to get bread for themselves. He cannot help me.
When the man saw me, he frowned and became still more terrible, and passed me by on the other side. I despaired, but suddenly I heard him coming back. I looked up, and did not recognize the same man. Before I had seen death in his face, but now he was alive, and I recognized in him The presence of God. He came up to me, clothed me, took me with him, and brought me to his home. I entered the house, and a woman came to meet us, and began to speak. The woman was still more terrible than the man had been. The spirit of death came from her mouth. I could not breathe for the stench of death that spread around her. She wished to drive me out into the cold, and I knew that if she did so, she would die.
Suddenly, her husband spoke to her of God, and the woman changed at once. And when she brought me food and looked at me, I glanced at her, and saw that death no longer dwelt in her. She had become alive, and in her, too. I saw God. When I remembered the first lesson God had set me, learn what dwells in man, and I understood that in man dwells love. I was glad that God had already begun to show me what He had promised, and I smiled for the first time. But I had not yet learnt all. I did not know what is not given man, and what men live by. I lived with you, and a year passed. A man came to order boots that should wear for a year without losing shape or cracking. I looked at him, and suddenly, behind his shoulder, I saw my comrade, the Angel of Death.
None but me saw that angel, but I knew him, and I knew that before the sun set he would take that rich man's soul. And I thought to myself, The man is making preparations for a year, and does not know that he will die before evening. And I remembered God's second saying, Learn what is not given to man. What dwells in man, I already knew. Now I learnt what is not given man. It is not given to man to know his own needs. And I smiled for the second time. I was glad to have seen my comrade Angel, glad also that God had revealed to me the second saying. But still I did not know all. I did not know what men live by. And I lived on, waiting till God should reveal to me the last lesson. In the sixth year came the girl twins with the woman, and I recognized the girls, and heard how they had been kept alive.
Having heard the story, I thought, their mother besought me for the children's sake, and I believed her when she said that children cannot live without father or mother, but a stranger has nursed them, and has brought them up. And when the woman showed her love for the children that were not her own, and wept over them, I saw in her the living God, and I understood what men live by. And I knew that God had revealed to me the last lesson, and had forgiven my sin. And then I smiled for the third time.
And the angel's body was bared, and he was clothed in light, so that the eye could not look upon him. And his voice grew louder, as though it came not from him, but from heaven above. And the angel said, I have learnt that all men live not by care for themselves, but by love. It was not given to the mother to know what her children needed for their life, nor was it given to the rich man to know what he himself needed. Nor is it given to any man to know whether, when evening comes, he will need boots for his body or slippers for his corpse. I remained alive when I was a man, not by care of myself, but because love was present in a passer-by, and because he and his wife pitied and loved me. The orphans remained alive not because of their mother's care, but because there was love in the heart of a woman, a stranger to them, who pitied and loved them.
And all men live not by the thought they spend on their own welfare, but because love exists in man. I knew that God gave life to men and desires that they should live. Now I understood more than that. I understood that God does not wish men to live apart, and therefore he does not reveal to them what each one needs for himself, but he wishes them to live United, and therefore reveals to each of them what is necessary for all. I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love is in God, and God is in him, for God is love. And the angel sang praise to God, so that the hut trembled at his voice.
The roof opened, and a column of fire rose from earth to heaven. Simon and his wife and children fell to the ground. Wings appeared on the angel's shoulders, and he rose into the heavens. And when Simon came to himself, the hut stood as before, and there was no one in it. But his own family.
End of What Men Live By by Leo Tolstoy