"A week? Oh, madam! But I assure you—"

"Don't talk to me any more! It's the last time I shall ever come to you, but I suppose I can't take the work away from you as it is. When shall I have it?"

"To-morrow. Yes, to-morrow noon. Sure!"

"Now you know you are always out at noon. I should think you would be ashamed."

"If it hadn't been for sickness in the family I would have finished your dress with my own hands. Sure I would. If you come here to-morrow noon you find your dress all ready for you."

"I know I won't, but I will come, and you'd better have it ready."

"Oh, sure."

The lady then added some generalities of opprobrium with some particular criticisms of the garments. Her voice sank into dispassionate murmurs in these, but it rose again in her renewed sense of the wrong done her, and when she came from the alcove she went out of the street door purple. She reopened it to say, "Now, remember!" before she definitely disappeared.

"Rather a stormy session, Mr. Morrison," the customer said.

"Something fierce," Mr. Morrison sighed. But he did not seem much troubled, and he had one way with all his victims, no matter what mood they came or went in.

One day the customer was by when a kind creature timidly upbraided him. "This is the third time you've disappointed me, Mr. Morrison. I really wish you wouldn't promise me unless you mean to do it. I don't think it's right for you."

"Oh, but sure, madam! The things will be done, sure. We had a strike on us."

"Well, I will trust you once more," the kind creature said.

"You can depend on me, madam, sure."

When she was gone the customer said: "I wonder you do that sort of thing, Mr. Morrison. You can't be surprised at their behaving rustily with you if you never keep your word."

"Why, I assure you there are times when I don't know where to look, the way they go on. It is something awful. You ought to hear them once. And now they want the wote." He rearranged some pieces of tumbled goods at the table where the customer sat, and put together the disheveled leaves of the fashion-papers which looked as if the ladies had scattered them in their rage.

One day the customer heard two ladies waiting for their disappointments in the outer room while the tailor in the alcove was trying to persuade a third lady that positively her things would be sent home the next day before dark. The customer had now formed the habit of having his own clothes made by the tailor, and his system in avoiding disappointment was very simple. In the early fall he ordered a spring suit, and in the late spring it was ready. He never had any difficulty, but he was curious to learn how the ladies managed, and he listened with all his might while these two talked.

"I always wonder we keep coming," one of them said.

"I'll tell you why," the other said. "Because he's cheap, and we get things from a fourth to a third less than we can get them anywhere else. The quality is first rate, and he's absolutely honest. And, besides, he's a genius. The wretch has touch. The things have a style, a look, a hang! Really it's something wonderful. Sure it iss," she ended in the tailor's accent, and then they both laughed and joined in a common sigh.

"Well, I don't believe he means to deceive any one."

"Oh, neither do I. I believe he expects to do everything he says. And one can't help liking him even when he doesn't."

"He's a good while getting through with her," the first lady said, meaning the unseen lady in the alcove.

"She'll be a good while longer getting through with him, if he hasn't them ready the next time," the second lady said.

But the lady in the alcove issued from it with an impredicable smile, and the tailor came up to the others, and deferred to their wishes with a sort of voiceless respect.

He gave the customer a glance of good-fellowship, and said to him, radiantly: "Your things all ready for you, this morning. As soon as I—"

"Oh, no hurry," the customer responded.

"I won't be a minute," the tailor said, pulling the curtain of the alcove aside, and then there began those sounds of objurgation and expostulation, although the ladies had seemed so amiable before.

The customer wondered if they did not all enjoy it; the ladies in their patience under long trial, and the tailor in the pleasure of practising upon it. But perhaps he did believe in the things he promised. He might be so much a genius as to have no grasp of facts; he might have thought that he could actually do what he said.

The customer's question on these points found answer when one day the tailor remarked, as it were out of a clear sky, that he had sold his business; sold it to the slippered journeyman who used to come in his shirt-sleeves, with his vest-front full of pins and needles, bringing the basted garments to be tried on the ladies who had been promised them perfectly finished.

"He will do your clothes all right," he explained to the customer. "He is a first-rate cutter and fitter; he knows the whole business."

"But why—why—" the customer began.

"I couldn't stand it. The way them ladies would talk to a person, when you done your best to please them; it's something fierce."

"Yes, I know. But I thought you liked it, from the way you always promised them and never kept your word."

"And if I hadn't promised them?" the tailor returned with some show of feeling. "They wanted me to promise them—they made me—they wouldn't have gone away without it. Sure. Every one wanted her things before every one. You had got to think of that."

"But you had to think of what they would say."

"Say? Sometimes I thought they would hit me. One lady said she had a notion to slap me once. It's no way to talk."

"But you didn't seem to mind it."

"I didn't mind it for a good while. Then I couldn't stand it. So I sold."

He shook his head sadly; but the customer had no comfort to offer him. He asked when his clothes would be done, and the tailor told him when, and then they were not. The new proprietor tried them on, but he would not say just when they would be finished.

"We have a good deal of work already for some ladies that been disappointed. Now we try a new way. We tell people exactly what we do."

"Well, that's right," the customer said, but in his heart he was not sure he liked the new way.

The day before his clothes were promised he dropped in. From the curtained alcove he heard low murmurs, the voice of the new proprietor and the voice of some lady trying on, and being severely bidden not to expect her things at a time she suggested. "No, madam. We got too much work on hand already. These things, they will not be done before next week."

"I told you to-morrow," the same voice said to another lady, and the new proprietor came out with an unfinished coat in his hand.

"I know you did, but I thought you would be better than your word, and so I came to-day. Well, then, to-morrow."

"Yes, to-morrow," the new proprietor said, but he did not seem to have liked the lady's joke. He did not look happy.

A few weeks after that the customer came for some little alterations in his new suit.

In the curtained alcove he heard the murmurs of trying on, much cheerfuller murmurs than before; the voice of a lady lifted in gladness, in gaiety, and an incredible voice replying, "Oh, sure, madam."

Then the old proprietor came out in his shirt-sleeves and slippers, with his waistcoat-front full of pins and needles, just like the new proprietor in former days.

"Why!" the customer exclaimed. "Have you bought back?"

"No. I'm just here like a journeyman already. The new man he want me to come. He don't get along very well with his way. He's all right; he's a good man and a first-class tailor. But," and the former proprietor looked down at the basted garment hanging over his arm, and picked off an irrelevant thread from it, "he thinks I get along better with the ladies."



V

SOMEBODY'S MOTHER

The figure of a woman sat crouched forward on one of the lowermost steps of the brownstone dwelling which was keeping a domestic tradition in a street mostly gone to shops and small restaurants and local express-offices. The house was black behind its closed shutters, and the woman remained sitting there because no one could have come out of its door for a year past to hunt her away. The neighborhood policeman faltered in going by, and then he kept on. The three people who came out of the large, old-fashioned hotel, half a block off, on their way for dinner to a French table d'hote which they had heard of, stopped and looked at the woman. They were a father and his son and daughter, and it was something like a family instinct that controlled them, in their pause before the woman crouching on the steps.

It was the early dusk of a December day, and the day was very chilly. "She seems to be sick or something," the father vaguely surmised. "Or asleep."

The three looked at the woman, but they did nothing for a moment. They would rather have gone on, but they waited to see if anything would happen to release them from the spell that they seemed to have laid upon themselves. They were conditional New-Yorkers of long sojourn, and it was from no apparent motive that the son wore evening dress, which his unbuttoned overcoat discovered, and an opera-hat. He would not have dressed so for that problematical French table d'hote; probably he was going on later to some society affair. He now put in effect the father's impulse to go closer and look at the woman.

"She seems to be asleep," he reported.

"Shouldn't you think she would take cold? She will get her death there. Oughtn't we to do something?" the daughter asked, but she left it to the father, and he said:

"Probably somebody will come by."

"That we could leave her to?" the daughter pursued.

"We could do that without waiting," the son commented.

"Well, yes," the father assented; but they did not go on. They waited, helplessly, and then somebody came by. It was a young girl, not very definite in the dusk, except that she was unmistakably of the working class; she was simply dressed, though with the New York instinct for clothes. Their having stopped there seemed to stay her involuntarily, and after a glance in the direction of their gaze she asked the daughter:

"Is she sick, do you think?"

"We don't know what's the matter. But she oughtn't to stay there."

Something velvety in the girl's voice had made its racial quality sensible to the ear; as she went up to the crouching woman and bent forward over her and then turned to them, a street lamp threw its light on her face, and they saw that she was a light shade of colored girl.

"She seems to be sleeping."

"Perhaps," the son began, "she's not quite—" But he did not go on.

The girl looked round at the others and suggested, "She must be somebody's mother!"

The others all felt abashed in their several sorts and degrees, but in their several sorts and degrees they all decided that there was something romantic, sentimental, theatrical in the girl's words, like something out of some cheap story-paper story.

The father wondered if that kind of thing was current among that kind of people. He had a sort of esthetic pleasure in the character and condition expressed by the words.

"Well, yes," he said, "if she has children, or has had." The girl looked at him uncertainly, and then he added, "But, of course—"

The son went up to the woman again, and asked: "Aren't you well? Can we do anything for you? It won't do to stay here, you know." The woman only made a low murmur, and he said to his sister, "Suppose we get her up."

His sister did not come forward promptly, and the colored girl said, "I'll help you."

She took one arm of the woman and the son took the other, and they lifted her, without her connivance, to her feet and kept her on them. Then they walked her down the steps. On the level below she showed taller than either of them; she was bundled up in different incoherent wraps; her head was muffled, and she wore a battered bonnet at an involuntary slant.

"I don't know exactly what we shall do with her," the son said.

"We ought to get her home somehow," the daughter said.

The father proposed nothing, but the colored girl said, "If we keep walking her along, we'll come to a policeman and we can—"

A hoarse rumble of protest came from the muffled head of the woman, and the girl put her ear closer. "Want to go home? Well, the policeman will take you. We don't know where you live, and we haven't the time."

The woman seemed to have nothing to say further, and they began walking her westward; the colored girl supported her on one hand, and the son, in his evening dress and opera-hat, on the other.

The daughter followed in a vague anxiety, but the father went along, enjoying the anomaly, and happy in his relish of that phrase, "She must be somebody's mother." It now sounded to him like a catch from one of those New York songs, popular in the order of life where the mother represents what is best and holiest. He recalled a vaudeville ballad with the refrain of "A Boy's Best Friend is his Mother," which, when he heard it in a vaudeville theater, threatened the gallery floor under the applauding feet of the frenzied audience. Probably this colored girl belonged to that order of life; he wished he could know her social circumstance and what her outlook on the greater world might be. She seemed a kind creature, poor thing, and he respected her. "Somebody's mother"—he liked that.

They all walked westward, aimlessly, except that the table d'hote where they had meant to dine was in that direction; they had heard of it as an amusingly harmless French place, and they were fond of such mild adventures.

The old woman contributed nothing to the definition of their progress. She stumbled and mumbled along, but between Seventh Avenue and Eighth she stubbornly arrested her guardians. "She says"—the colored girl translated some obscure avowal across her back—"she says she wants to go home, and she lives up in Harlem."

"Oh, well, that's good," the father said, with an optimistic amiability. "We'd better help walk her across to Ninth Avenue and put her on a car, and tell the conductor where to let her off."

He was not helping walk her himself, but he enjoyed his son's doing it in evening dress and opera-hat, with that kind colored girl on the other side of the mother; the composition was agreeably droll. The daughter did not like it, and she cherished the ideal of a passing policeman to take the old woman in charge.

No policeman passed, though great numbers of other people met them without apparently finding anything noticeable in the spectacle which their group presented. Among the crowds going and coming on the avenues which they crossed scarcely any turned to look at them, or was moved by the sense of anything odd in them.

The old woman herself did nothing to attract public notice till they were midway between Seventh and Eighth avenues. She mumbled something from time to time which the colored girl interpreted to the rest as her continued wish to go home. She was now clearer about her street and number. The girl, as if after question of her own generous spirit, said she did not see how she could go with her; she was expected at home herself.

"Oh, you won't have to go with her; we'll just put her aboard the Ninth Avenue car," the father encouraged her. He would have encouraged any one; he was enjoying the whole affair.

At a certain moment, for no apparent reason, the mother decided to sit down on a door-step. It proved to be the door-step of a house where from time to time colored people—sometimes of one sex, sometimes of another—went in or came out. The door seemed to open directly into a large room where dancing and dining were going on concurrently. At a long table colored people sat eating, and behind their chairs on both sides of the room and at the ends of the table colored couples were waltzing.

The effect was the more curious because, except for some almost inaudible music, the scene passed in silence. Those who were eating were not visibly incommoded by those revolving at their backs; the waltzers turned softly around and around, untempted by the table now before them, now behind them. When some of the diners or dancers came out, they stumbled over the old woman on the door-step without minding or stopping to inquire. Those outside, when they went in, fell over her with like equanimity and joined the strange company within.

The father murmured to himself the lines,

"'Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody—'"

with a remote trouble of mind because the words were at once so graphic and yet so imperfectly applicable. The son and daughter exchanged a silent wonder as long as they could bear it; then the daughter asked the colored girl:

"What is it?"

"It's a boarding-house," the girl answered, simply.

"Oh," the daughter said.

Sounds of more decided character than before now came from the figure on the door-step.

"She seems to be saying something," the daughter suggested in general terms. "What is she saying?" she asked the colored girl.

The girl stooped over and listened. Then she answered, "She's swearing."

"Swearing? What about? Whom is she swearing at?"

"At me, I reckon. She says, why don't I take her home."

"Well, why doesn't she get up, then?"

"She says she won't."

"We can't carry her to the car," the daughter noted.

"Oh, why not?" the father merrily demanded.

The daughter turned to her brother. They were both very respectful to their father, but the son agreed with his sister when she said: "Papa would joke about anything. But this has passed a joke. We must get this old thing up and start her off."

Upon experiment they could not get the old thing up, even with the help of the kind colored girl. They had to let her be, and the colored girl reported, after stooping over her again, "She says she can't walk."

"She walked here well enough," the daughter said.

"Not very well," the father amended.

His daughter did not notice him. She said to her brother: "Well, now you must go and find a policeman. It's strange none has gone by."

It was also strange that still their group remained without attracting the notice of the passers. Nobody stopped to speak or even stare; perhaps the phenomena of that boarding-house had ceased to have surprises for the public of the neighborhood, and they in their momentary relation to it would naturally be without interest.

The brother went away, leaving his sister with their father and that kind colored creature in charge of the old woman, now more and more quiescent on the door-step; she had ceased to swear, or even to speak. The brother came back after a time that seemed long, and said that he could not find a policeman anywhere, and at the same moment, as if the officer had been following at his heels, a policeman crossed the street from just behind him.

The daughter ran after him, and asked if he would not come and look at the old woman who had so steadfastly remained in their charge, and she rapidly explained.

"Sure, lady," the policeman said, and he turned from crossing the street and went up to the old woman. He laid his hand on her shoulder, and his touch seemed magical. "What's the matter? Can't you stand up?" She stood up as if at something familiar in the voice of authority. "Where do you live?" She gave an address altogether different from that she had given before—a place on the next avenue, within a block or two. "You'd better go home. You can walk, can't you?"

"I can walk well enough," she answered in a tone of vexation, and she made her word good by walking quite actively away in the direction she had given.

The kind colored girl became a part of the prevalent dark after refusing the thanks of the others. The daughter then fervently offered them to the policeman.

"That's all right, lady," he said, and the incident had closed except for her emotion at seeing him enter a police-station precisely across the street, where they could have got a dozen policemen in a moment.

"Well," the father said, "we might as well go to our French table d'hote now."

"Oh," the son said, as if that reminded him, "the place seems to be shut."

"Well, then, we might as well go back to the hotel," the father decided. "I dare say we shall do quite as well there."

On the way the young people laughed over the affair and their escape from it, especially at the strange appearance and disappearance of the kind colored girl, with her tag of sentiment, and at the instant compliance of the old woman with the suggestion of the policeman.

The father followed, turning the matter over in his mind. Did mere motherhood hallow that old thing to the colored girl and her sort and condition? Was there a superstition of motherhood among such people which would endear this disreputable old thing to their affection and reverence? Did such people hold mothers in tenderer regard than people of larger means? Would a mother in distress or merely embarrassment instantly appeal to their better nature as a case of want or sickness in the neighborhood always appealed to their compassion? Would her family now welcome the old thing home from her aberration more fondly than the friends of one who had arrived in a carriage among them in a good street? But, after all, how little one knew of other people! How little one knew of one self, for that matter! How next to nothing one knew of Somebody's Mother! It did not necessarily follow from anything they knew of her that she was a mother at all. Her motherhood might be the mere figment of that kind colored girl's emotional fancy. She might be Nobody's Mother.

When it came to this the father laughed, too. Why, anyhow, were mothers more sacred than fathers? If they had found an old man in that old woman's condition on those steps, would that kind colored girl have appealed to them in his behalf as Somebody's Father?



VI

THE FACE AT THE WINDOW

He had gone down at Christmas, where our host Had opened up his house on the Maine coast, For the week's holidays, and we were all, On Christmas night, sitting in the great hall, About the corner fireplace, while we told Stories like those that people, young and old, Have told at Christmas firesides from the first, Till one who crouched upon the hearth, and nursed His knees in his claspt arms, threw back his head, And fixed our host with laughing eyes, and said, "This is so good, here—with your hickory logs Blazing like natural-gas ones on the dogs, And sending out their flicker on the wall And rafters of your mock-baronial hall, All in fumed-oak, and on your polished floor, And the steel-studded panels of your door— I think you owe the general make-believe Some sort of story that will somehow give A more ideal completeness to our case, And make each several listener in his place— Or hers—sit up, with a real goose-flesh creeping All over him—or her—in proper keeping With the locality and hour and mood. Come!" And amid the cries of "Yes!" and "Good!" Our host laughed back; then, with a serious air, Looked around him on our hemicycle, where He sat midway of it. "Why," he began, But interrupted by the other man, He paused for him to say: "Nothing remote, But something with the actual Yankee note Of here and now in it!" "I'll do my best," Our host replied, "to satisfy a guest. What do you say to Barberry Cove? And would Five years be too long past?" "No, both are good. Go on!" "You noticed that big house to-day Close to the water, and the sloop that lay, Stripped for the winter, there, beside the pier? Well, there she has lain just so, year after year; And she will never leave her pier again; But once, each spring she sailed in sun or rain, For Bay Chaleur—or Bay Shaloor, as they Like better to pronounce it down this way."

"I like Shaloor myself rather the best. But go ahead," said the exacting guest. And with a glance around at us that said, "Don't let me bore you!" our host went ahead.

"Captain Gilroy built the big house, and he Still lives there with his aging family. He built the sloop, and when he used to come Back from the Banks he made her more his home, With his two boys, than the big house. The two Counted with him a good half of her crew, Until it happened, on the Banks, one day The oldest boy got in a steamer's way, And went down in his dory. In the fall The others came without him. That was all That showed in either one of them except That now the father and the brother slept Ashore, and not on board. When the spring came They sailed for the old fishing-ground the same As ever. Yet, not quite the same. The brother, If you believed what folks say, kissed his mother Good-by in going; and by general rumor, The father, so far yielding as to humor His daughters' weakness, rubbed his stubbly cheek Against their lips. Neither of them would speak, But the dumb passion of their love and grief In so much show at parting found relief.

"The weeks passed and the months. Sometimes they heard At home, by letter, from the sloop, or word Of hearsay from the fleet. But by and by Along about the middle of July, A time in which they had no news began, And holding unbrokenly through August, ran Into September. Then, one afternoon, While the world hung between the sun and moon, And while the mother and her girls were sitting Together with their sewing and their knitting,— Before the early-coming evening's gloom Had gathered round them in the living-room, Helplessly wondering to each other when They should hear something from their absent men,— They saw, all three, against the window-pane, A face that came and went, and came again, Three times, as though for each of them, about As high up from the porch's floor without As a man's head would be that stooped to stare Into the room on their own level there. Its eyes dwelt on them wistfully as if Longing to speak with the dumb lips some grief They could not speak. The women did not start Or scream, though each one of them, in her heart, Knew she was looking on no living face, But stared, as dumb as it did, in her place."

Here our host paused, and one sigh broke from all Our circle whom his tale had held in thrall. But he who had required it of him spoke In what we others felt an ill-timed joke: "Well, this is something like!" A girl said, "Don't!" As if it hurt, and he said, "Well, I won't. Go on!" And in a sort of muse our host Said: "I suppose we all expect a ghost Will sometimes come to us. But I doubt if we Are moved by its coming as we thought to be. At any rate, the women were not scared, But, as I said, they simply sat and stared Till the face vanished. Then the mother said, 'It was your father, girls, and he is dead.' But both had known him; and now all went on Much as before till three weeks more were gone, When, one night sitting as they sat before, Together with their mother, at the door They heard a fumbling hand, and on the walk Up from the pier, the tramp and muffled talk Of different wind-blown voices that they knew For the hoarse voices of their father's crew. Then the door opened, and their father stood Before them, palpably in flesh and blood. The mother spoke for all, her own misgiving: 'Father, is this your ghost? Or are you living?' 'I am alive!' 'But in this very place We saw your face look, like a spirit's face, There through that window, just three weeks ago, And now you are alive!' 'I did not know That I had come; all I know is that then I wanted to tell you folks here that our Ben Was dying of typhoid fever. He raved of you So that I could not think what else to do. He's there in Bay Shaloor!'

"Well, that's the end." And rising up to mend the fire our friend Seemed trying to shun comment; but in vain: The exacting guest came at him once again; "You must be going to fall down, I thought, There at the climax, when your story brought The skipper home alive and well. But no, You saved yourself with honor." The girl said, "Oh," Who spoke before, "it's wonderful! But you, How could you think of anything so true, So delicate, as the father's wistful face Coming there at the window in the place Of the dead son's! And then, that quaintest touch, Of half-apology—that he felt so much, He had to come! How perfectly New England! Well, I hope nobody will undertake to tell A common or garden ghost-story to-night."

Our host had turned again, and at her light And playful sympathy he said, "My dear, I hope that no one will imagine here I have been inventing in the tale that's done. My little story's charm if it has one Is from no skill of mine. One does not change The course of fable from its wonted range To such effect as I have seemed to do: Only the fact could make my story true."



VII

AN EXPERIENCE

For a long time after the event my mind dealt with the poor man in helpless conjecture, and it has now begun to do so again for no reason that I can assign. All that I ever heard about him was that he was some kind of insurance man. Whether life, fire, or marine insurance I never found out, and I am not sure that I tried to find out.

There was something in the event which discharged him of all obligation to define himself of this or that relation to life. He must have had some relation to it such as we all bear, and since the question of him has come up with me again I have tried him in several of those relations—father, son, brother, husband—without identifying him very satisfyingly in either.

As I say, he seemed by what happened to be liberated from the debt we owe in that kind to one another's curiosity, sympathy, or whatever. I cannot say what errand it was that brought him to the place, a strange, large, indeterminate open room, where several of us sat occupied with different sorts of business, but, as it seems to me now, by only a provisional right to the place. Certainly the corner allotted to my own editorial business was of temporary assignment; I was there until we could find a more permanent office. The man had nothing to do with me or with the publishers; he had no manuscript, or plan for an article which he wished to propose and to talk himself into writing, so that he might bring it with a claim to acceptance, as though he had been asked to write it. In fact, he did not even look of the writing sort; and his affair with some other occupant of that anomalous place could have been in no wise literary. Probably it was some kind of insurance business, and I have been left with the impression of fussiness in his conduct of it; he had to my involuntary attention an effect of conscious unwelcome with it.

After subjectively dealing with this impression, I ceased to notice him, without being able to give myself to my own work. The day was choking hot, of a damp that clung about one, and forbade one so much effort as was needed to relieve one of one's discomfort; to pull at one's wilted collar and loosen the linen about one's reeking neck meant exertion which one willingly forbore; it was less suffering to suffer passively than to suffer actively. The day was of the sort which begins with a brisk heat, and then, with a falling breeze, decays into mere swelter. To come indoors out of the sun was no escape from the heat; my window opened upon a shaded alley where the air was damper without being cooler than the air within.

At last I lost myself in my work with a kind of humid interest in the psychological inquiry of a contributor who was dealing with a matter rather beyond his power. I did not think that he was fortunate in having cast his inquiry in the form of a story; I did not think that his contrast of love and death as the supreme facts of life was what a subtler or stronger hand could have made it, or that the situation gained in effectiveness from having the hero die in the very moment of his acceptance. In his supposition that the reader would care more for his hero simply because he had undergone that tremendous catastrophe, the writer had omitted to make him interesting otherwise; perhaps he could not.

My mind began to wander from the story and not very relevantly to employ itself with the question of how far our experiences really affect our characters. I remembered having once classed certain temperaments as the stuff of tragedy, and others as the stuff of comedy, and of having found a greater cruelty in the sorrows which light natures undergo, as unfit and disproportionate for them. Disaster, I tacitly decided, was the fit lot of serious natures; when it befell the frivolous it was more than they ought to have been made to bear; it was not of their quality. Then by the mental zigzagging which all thinking is I thought of myself and whether I was of this make or that. If it was more creditable to be of serious stuff than frivolous, though I had no agency in choosing, I asked myself how I should be affected by the sight of certain things, like the common calamities reported every day in the papers which I had hitherto escaped seeing. By another zigzag I thought that I had never known a day so close and stifling and humid. I then reflected upon the comparative poverty of the French language, which I was told had only that one word for the condition we could call by half a dozen different names, as humid, moist, damp, sticky, reeking, sweltering, and so on. I supposed that a book of synonyms would give even more English adjectives; I thought of looking, but my book of synonyms was at the back of my table, and I would have to rise for it. Then I questioned whether the French language was so destitute of adjectives, after all; I preferred to doubt it rather than rise.

With no more logic than those other vagaries had, I realized that the person who had started me in them was no longer in the room. He must have gone outdoors, and I visualized him in the street pushing about, crowded hither and thither, and striking against other people as he went and came. I was glad I was not in his place; I believed I should have fallen in a faint from the heat, as I had once almost done in New York on a day like that. From this my mind jumped to the thought of sudden death in general. Was it such a happy thing as people pretended? For the person himself, yes, perhaps; but not for those whom he had left at home, say, in the morning, and who were expecting him at home in the evening. I granted that it was generally accepted as the happiest death, but no one that had tried it had said so. To be sure, one was spared a long sickness, with suffering from pain and from the fear of death. But one had no time for making one's peace with God, as it used to be said, and after all there might be something in death-bed repentance, although cultivated people no longer believed in it. Then I reverted to the family unprepared for the sudden death: the mother, the wife, the children. I struggled to get away from the question, but the vagaries which had lightly dispersed themselves before clung persistently to the theme now. I felt that it was like a bad dream. That was a promising diversion. Had one any sort of volition in the quick changes of dreams? One was aware of finding a certain nightmare insupportable, and of breaking from it as by main force, and then falling into a deep, sweet sleep. Was death something like waking from a dream such as that, which this life largely was, and then sinking into a long, restful slumber, and possibly never waking again?

Suddenly I perceived that the man had come back. He might have been there some time with his effect of fussing and his pathetic sense of unwelcome. I had not noticed; I only knew that he stood at the half-open door with the knob of it in his hand looking into the room blankly.

As he stood there he lifted his hand and rubbed it across his forehead as if in a sort of daze from the heat. I recognized the gesture as one very characteristic of myself; I had often rubbed my hand across my forehead on a close, hot day like that. Then the man suddenly vanished as if he had sunk through the floor.

People who had not noticed that he was there noticed now that he was not there. Some made a crooked rush toward the place where he had been, and one of those helpful fellow-men who are first in all needs lifted his head and mainly carried him into the wide space which the street stairs mounted to, and laid him on the floor. It was darker, if not cooler there, and we stood back to give him the air which he drew in with long, deep sighs. One of us ran down the stairs to the street for a doctor, wherever he might be found, and ran against a doctor at the last step.

The doctor came and knelt over the prostrate figure and felt its pulse, and put his ear down to its heart. It, which has already in my telling ceased to be he, drew its breath in those long suspirations which seemed to search each more profoundly than the last the lurking life, drawing it from the vital recesses and expelling it in those vast sighs.

They went on and on, and established in our consciousness the expectation of indefinite continuance. We knew that the figure there was without such consciousness as ours, unless it was something so remotely withdrawn that it could not manifest itself in any signal to our senses. There was nothing tragical in the affair, but it had a surpassing dignity. It was as if the figure was saying something to the life in each of us which none of us would have words to interpret, speaking some last message from the hither side of that bourne from which there is no returning.

There was a clutch upon my heart which tightened with the slower and slower succession of those awful breaths. Then one was drawn and expelled and then another was not drawn. I waited for the breathing to begin again, and it did not begin. The doctor rose from kneeling over the figure that had been a man, and uttered, with a kind of soundlessness, "Gone," and mechanically dusted his fingers with the thumbs of each hand from their contact with what had now become all dust forever.

That helpfulest one among us laid a cloth over the face, and the rest of us went away. It was finished. The man was done with the sorrow which, in our sad human order, must now begin for those he loved and who loved him. I tried vaguely to imagine their grief for not having been uselessly with him at the last, and I could not. The incident remained with me like an experience, something I had known rather than seen. I could not alienate it by my pity and make it another's. They whom it must bereave seemed for the time immeasurably removed from the fact.



VIII

THE BOARDERS

The boarder who had eloped was a student at the theological seminary, and he had really gone to visit his family, so that he had a fairly good conscience in giving this color to the fact that he was leaving the place permanently because he could not bear it any longer. It was a shade of deceit to connive with his room-mate for the custody of his carpet-bag and the few socks and collars and the one shirt and summer coat which did not visibly affect its lankness when gathered into it from his share of the bureau-drawers; but he did not know what else to do, and he trusted to a final forgiveness when all the facts were considered by a merciful providence. His board was fully paid, and he had suffered long. He argued with his room-mate that he could do no good by remaining, and that he would have stayed if he could have believed there was any use. Besides, the food was undermining his health, and the room with that broken window had given him a cold already. He had a right to go, and it was his duty to himself and the friends who were helping him through the seminary not to get sick.

He did not feel that he had convinced his room-mate, who took charge of his carpet-bag and now sat with it between his feet waiting the signal of the fugitive's surreptitious return for it. He was a vague-looking young man, presently in charge of the "Local and Literary" column of the one daily paper of the place, and he had just explained to the two other boarders who were watching with him for the event that he was not certain whether it was the supper, or the anxiety of the situation, or just what it was that was now affecting his digestion.

The fellow-boarders, who sat on the edge of the bed, in default of the one unbroken chair which their host kept for himself, as easier than a mattress to get up from suddenly, did not take sides for or against him in his theories of his discomfort. One of them glanced at the broken window.

"How do you glaze that in the daytime? You can't use the bolster then?"

"I'm not in, much, in the daytime."

It was a medical student who had spoken, but he was now silent, and the other said, after they had listened to the twitter of a piano in the parlor under the room, "That girl's playing will be the death of me."

"Not if her mother's cooking isn't," the medical student, whose name was Wallace, observed with a professional effect.

"Why don't you prescribe something for it?" the law student suggested.

"Which?" Wallace returned.

"I don't believe anything could cure the playing. I must have meant the cooking."

"You're a promising young jurist, Blakeley. What makes you think I could cure the cooking?"

"Oh, I just wondered. The sick one gets paler every day. I wonder what ails her."

"She's not my patient."

"Oh! Hippocratic oath. Rather fine of you, Wallace. But if she's not your patient—"

"Listen!" their host interrupted, sharply. After a joint silence he added: "No. It must have been the sleet."

"Well, Briggs," the law student said, "if it must have been the sleet, what mustn't it have been?"

"Oh!" Briggs explained, "I thought it was Phillips. He was to throw a handful of gravel at the window."

"And then you were to run down with his bag and help him to make his escape from a friendless widow. Well, I don't know that I blame him. If I didn't owe two weeks' board, I'd leave myself—though I hope I shouldn't sneak away. And if Mrs. Betterson didn't owe Wallace, here, two weeks' board, we'd walk off together arm-in-arm at high noon. I can't understand how he ever came to advance her the money."

Wallace rose from the bed, and kicked each leg out to dislodge the tight trousers of the middle eighteen-fifties which had caught on the tops of his high boots. "You're a tonguey fellow, Blakeley. But you'll find, as you live long, that there are several things you can't explain."

"I'll tell you what," Blakeley said. "We'll get Mrs. Betterson to take your loan for my debt, and we'll go at once."

"You can propose something like that before the justice of the peace in your first pettifogging case."

"I believe Wallace likes to stay. And yet he must know from his anatomical studies, better than the animals themselves, what cuts of meat the old lady gives us. I shouldn't be so fastidious about the cuts, if she didn't treat them all with pork gravy. Well, I mustn't be too hard on a lone widow that I owe board to. I don't suppose his diet had anything to do with the deep damnation of the late Betterson's taking off. Does that stove of yours smoke, Briggs?"

"Not when there isn't a fire in it."

"I just asked. Wallace's stove smokes, fire or no fire. It takes advantage of the old lady's indebtedness to him. There seem," he added, philosophically, "to be just two occupations open to widows who have to support themselves: millinery business for young ones, boarding-housing for old ones. It is rather restricted. What do you suppose she puts into the mince-pies? Mince-pies are rather a mystery at the best."

Wallace was walking up and down the room still in some difficulty with his trousers-legs, and kicking out from time to time to dislodge them. "How long should you say Blakeley had been going on?" he asked Briggs.

"You never can tell," Briggs responded. "I think he doesn't know himself."

"Well said, youthful scribe! With such listeners as you two, I could go on forever. Consider yourselves clapped jovially on the back, my gentle Briggs; I can't get up to do it from the hollow of your bed here. As you were saying, the wonder about these elderly widows who keep boarding-houses is the domestic dilapidation they fall into. If they've ever known how to cook a meal or sweep a room or make a bed, these arts desert them in the presence of their boarders. Their only aim in life seems to be preventing the escape of their victims, and they either let them get into debt for their board or borrow money from them. But why do they always have daughters, and just two of them: one beautiful, fashionable, and devoted to the piano; the other willing to work, but pale, pathetic, and incapable of the smallest achievement with the gridiron or the wash-board? It's a thing to make a person want to pay up and leave, even if he's reading law. If Wallace, here, had the spirit of a man, he would collect the money owing him, and—"

"Oh, stop it, Blakeley!" Wallace stormed. "I should think you'd get tired of your talk yourself."

"Well, as you insist—"

Blakeley began again, but Briggs jumped to his feet and caught up Phillips's carpet-bag, and looked wildly around. "It's gravel, this time."

"Well, take your hat, Briggs. It may be a prolonged struggle. But remember that Phillips's cause is just. He's paid his board, and he has a perfect right to leave. She has no right to prevent him. Think of that when the fray is at its worst. But try to get him off quietly, if you can. Deal gently with the erring, while you stand firm for boarders' rights. Remember that Phillips is sneaking off in order to spare her feelings and has come pretty near prevarication in the effort. Have you got your shoes off? No; it's your rubbers on. That's better."

Briggs faltered with the carpet-bag in his hand. "Boys, I don't like this. It feels—clandestine."

"It looks that way, too," Blakeley admitted. "It has an air of conspiracy."

"I've got half a mind to let Phillips come in and get his bag himself."

"It would serve him right, though I don't know why, exactly. He has a right to spare his own feelings if he's sparing hers at the same time. Of course he's afraid she'll plead with him to stay, and he'll have to be inexorable with her; and if I understand the yielding nature of Phillips he doesn't like to be inexorable."

There came another sharp rattle of small pebbles at the window.

"Oh, confound him!" Briggs cried under his breath, and he shuffled out of the room and crept noiselessly down the stairs to the front door. The door creaked a little in opening, and he left it ajar. The current of cold air that swept up to the companions he had left behind at his room door brought them the noise of his rush down the gravel walk to the gate and a noise there as of fugitive steps on the pavement outside.

A weak female tread made itself heard in the hallway, followed by a sharp voice from a door in the rear. "Was it the cat, Jenny?"

"No; the door just seems to have blown open. The catch is broken."

Swift, strong steps advanced with an effect of angry suspicion. "I don't believe it blew open. More likely the cat clawed it open."

The steps which the voice preceded seemed to halt at the open door, as if falling back from it, and Wallace and Blakeley, looking down, saw by the dim flare of the hall lamp the face of Briggs confronting the face of Mrs. Betterson from the outer darkness. They saw the sick girl, whose pallor they could not see, supporting herself by the stairs-post with one hand and pressing the other to her side.

"Oh! It's you, Mr. Briggs," the landlady said, with a note of inculpation. "What made you leave the door open?"

The spectators could not see the swift change in Briggs's face from terror to savage desperation, but they noted it in his voice. "Yes—yes! It's me. I just—I was just— No I won't, either! You'd better know the truth. I was taking Phillips's bag out to him. He was afraid to come in for it, because he didn't want to see you, the confounded coward! He's left."

"Left? And he said he would stay till spring! Didn't he, Jenny?"

"I don't remember—" the girl weakly gasped, but her mother did not heed her in her mounting wrath.

"A great preacher he'll make. What'd he say he left for?"

"He didn't say. Will you let me up-stairs?"

"No, I won't, till you tell me. You know well enough, between you."

"Yes, I do know," Briggs answered, savagely. "He left because he was tired of eating sole-leather for steak, and fire-salt pork, and tar for molasses, and butter strong enough to make your nose curl, and drinking burnt-rye slops for coffee and tea-grounds for tea. And so am I, and so are all of us, and—and— Will you let me go up-stairs now, Mrs. Betterson?"

His voice had risen, not so high but that another voice from the parlor could prevail over it: a false, silly, girl voice, with the twitter of piano-keys as from hands swept over the whole board to help drown the noise of the quarrel in the hall. "Oh yes, I'll sing it again, Mr. Saunders, if you sa-a-a-y."

Then this voice lifted itself in a silly song, and a silence followed the voices in the hall, except for the landlady's saying, brokenly: "Well, all right, Mr. Briggs. You can go up to your room for all me. I've tried to be a mother to you boys, but if this is what I get for it!"

The two at the threshold of Briggs's room retreated within, as he bounded furiously upon them and slammed the door after him. It started open again, from the chronic defect of the catch, but he did not care.

"Well, Briggs, I hope you feel better now," Blakeley began. "You certainly told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But I wonder you had the heart to do it before that sick girl."

"I didn't have the heart," Briggs shouted. "But I had the courage, and if you say one word more, Blakeley, I'll throw you out of the room. I'm going to leave! My board's paid if yours isn't."

He went wildly about, catching things down here and there from nails and out of drawers. The tears stood in his eyes. But suddenly he stopped and listened to the sounds from below—the sound of the silly singing in the parlor, and the sound of sobbing in the dining-room, and the sound of vain entreating between the sobs.

"Oh, I don't suppose I'm fit to keep a boarding-house. I never was a good manager; and everybody imposes on me, and everything is so dear, and I don't know what's good from what's bad. Your poor father used to look after all that."

"Well, don't you cry, now, mother! It'll all come right, you'll see. I'm getting so I can go and do the marketing now; and if Minervy would only help a little—"

"No, no!" the mother's voice came anxiously up. "We can get along without her; we always have. I know he likes her, and I want to give her every chance. We can get along. If she was on'y married, once, we could all live—" A note of self-comforting gradually stole into the mother's voice, and the sound of a nose violently blown seemed to note a period in her suffering.

"Oh, mother, I wish I was well!" The girl's voice came with a burst of wild lamenting.

"'Sh, 'sh, deary!" her mother entreated. "He'll hear you, and then—"

"'Hazel Dell'?" the silly voice came from the parlor, with a sound of fright in it. "I can sing it without the music." The piano keys twittered the prelude and the voice sang:

"In the Hazel Dell my Nelly's sleeping, Nelly loved so long!"

Wallace went forward and shut the door. "It's a shame to overhear them! What are you going to do, you fellows?"

"I'm going to stay," Briggs said, "if it kills me. At least I will till Minervy's married. I don't care what the grub's like. I can always get a bite at the restaurant."

"If anybody will pay up my back board, I'll stay, too," Blakeley followed. "I should like to make a virtue of it, and, as things stand, I can't."

"All right," Wallace said, and he went out and down the stairs. Then from the dining-room below his heavy voice offering encouragement came up, in terms which the others could not make out.

"I'll bet he's making her another advance," Blakeley whispered, as if he might be overheard by Wallace.

"I wish I could have made to do it," Briggs whispered back. "I feel as mean as pursley. Would you like to kick me?"

"I don't see how that would do any good. I may want to borrow money of you, and you can't ask a loan from a man you've kicked. Besides, I think what you said may do her good."



IX

BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL

I

Breakfast is my best meal, and I reckon it's always been Ever since I was old enough to know what breakfast could mean. I mind when we lived in the cabin out on the Illinoy, Where father had took up a quarter-section when I was a boy, I used to go for the cows as soon as it was light; And when I started back home, before I come in sight, I come in smell of the cabin, where mother was frying the ham, And boiling the coffee, that reached through the air like a mile o' ba'm, 'N' I bet you I didn't wait to see what it was that the dog Thought he'd got under the stump or inside o' the hollow log! But I made the old cows canter till their hoof-joints cracked—you know That dry, funny kind of a noise that the cows make when they go— And I never stopped to wash when I got to the cabin door; I pulled up my chair and e't like I never had e't before. And mother she set there and watched me eat, and eat, and eat, Like as if she couldn't give her old eyes enough of the treat; And she split the shortened biscuit, and spread the butter between, And let it lay there and melt, and soak and soak itself in; And she piled up my plate with potato and ham and eggs, Till I couldn't hold any more, or hardly stand on my legs; And she filled me up with coffee that would float an iron wedge, And never give way a mite, or spill a drop at the edge.

II

What? Well, yes, this is good coffee, too. If they don't know much, They do know how to make coffee, I will say that for these Dutch. But my—oh, my! It ain't the kind of coffee my mother made, And the coffee my wife used to make would throw it clear in the shade; And the brand of sugar-cured, canvased ham that she always used— Well, this Westphalia stuff would simply have made her amused! That so, heigh? I saw that you was United States as soon As ever I heard you talk; I reckon I know the tune! Pick it out anywhere; and you understand how I feel About these here foreign breakfasts: breakfast is my best meal.

III

My! but my wife was a cook; and the breakfasts she used to get The first years we was married, I can smell 'em and taste 'em yet: Corn cake light as a feather, and buckwheat thin as lace And crisp as cracklin'; and steak that you couldn't have the face To compare any steak over here to; and chicken fried Maryland style—I couldn't get through the bill if I tried. And then, her waffles! My! She'd kind of slip in a few Between the ham and the chicken—you know how women'll do— For a sort of little surprise, and, if I was running light, To take my fancy and give an edge to my appetite. Done it all herself as long as we was poor, and I tell you She liked to see me eat as well as mother used to do; I reckon she went ahead of mother some, if the truth was known, And everything she touched she give a taste of her own.

IV

She was a cook, I can tell you! And after we got ahead, And she could 'a' had a girl to do the cookin' instead, I had the greatest time to get Momma to leave the work; She said it made her feel like a mis'able sneak and shirk. She didn't want daughter, though, when we did begin to keep girls, To come in the kitchen and cook, and smell up her clo'es and curls; But you couldn't have stopped the child, whatever you tried to do— I reckon the gift of the cookin' was born in Girly, too. Cook she would from the first, and we just had to let her alone; And after she got married, and had a house of her own, She tried to make me feel, when I come to live with her, Like it was my house, too; and I tell you she done it, sir! She remembered that breakfast was my best meal, and she tried To have all I used to have, and a good deal more beside; Grape-fruit to begin with, or melons or peaches, at least— Husband's business took him there, and they had went to live East— Then a Spanish macker'l, or a soft-shell crab on toast, Or a broiled live lobster! Well, sir, I don't want to seem to boast, But I don't believe you could have got in the whole of New York Any such an oyster fry or sausage of country pork.

V

Well, I don't know what-all it means; I always lived just so— Never drinked or smoked, and yet, here about two years ago, I begun to run down; I ain't as young as I used to be; And the doctors all said Carlsbad, and I reckon this is me. But it's more like some one I've dreamt of, with all three of 'em gone! Believe in ghosts? Well, I do. I know there are ghosts. I'm one. Maybe I mayn't look it—I was always inclined to fat; The doctors say that's the trouble, and very likely it's that. This is my little grandson, and this is the oldest one Of Girly's girls; and for all that the whole of us said and done, She must come with grandpa when the doctors sent me off here, To see that they didn't starve him. Ain't that about so, my dear? She can cook, I tell you; and when we get home again We're goin' to have something to eat; I'm just a-livin' till then. But when I set here of a morning, and think of them that's gone— Mother and Momma and Girly—well, I wouldn't like to let on Before the children, but I can almost seem to see All of 'em lookin' down, like as if they pitied me, After the breakfasts they give me, to have me have to put up With nothing but bread and butter, and a little mis'able cup Of this here weak-kneed coffee! I can't tell how you feel, But it fairly makes me sick! Breakfast is my best meal.



X

THE MOTHER-BIRD

She wore around the turned-up brim of her bolero-like toque a band of violets not so much in keeping with the gray of the austere November day as with the blue of her faded autumnal eyes. Her eyes were autumnal, but it was not from this, or from the lines of maturity graven on the passing prettiness of her little face, that the notion and the name of Mother-Bird suggested itself. She became known as the Mother-Bird to the tender ironic fancy of the earliest, if not the latest, of her friends, because she was slight and small, and like a bird in her eager movements, and because she spoke so instantly and so constantly of her children in Dresden: before you knew anything else of her you knew that she was going out to them.

She was quite alone, and she gave the sense of claiming their protection, and sheltering herself in the fact of them. When she mentioned her daughters she had the effect of feeling herself chaperoned by them. You could not go behind them and find her wanting in the social guarantees which women on steamers, if not men, exact of lonely birds of passage who are not mother-birds. One must respect the convention by which she safeguarded herself and tried to make good her standing; yet it did not lastingly avail her with other birds of passage, so far as they were themselves mother-birds, or sometimes only maiden-birds. The day had not ended before they began to hold her off by slight liftings of their wings and rufflings of their feathers, by quick, evasive flutterings, by subtle ignorances of her approach, which convinced no one but themselves that they had not seen her. She sailed with the sort of acquaintance-in-common which every one shares on a ship leaving port, when people are confused by the kindness of friends coming to see them off after sending baskets of fruit and sheaves of flowers, and scarcely know what they are doing or saying. But when the ship was abreast of Fire Island, and the pilot had gone over the side, these provisional intimacies of the parting hour began to restrict themselves. Then the Mother-Bird did not know half the women she had known at the pier, or quite all the men.

It was not that she did anything obvious to forfeit this knowledge. Her behavior was if anything too exemplary; it might be thought to form a reproach to others. Perhaps it was the unseasonable band of violets around her hat-brim; perhaps it was the vernal gaiety of her dress; perhaps it was the uncertainty of her anxious eyes, which presumed while they implored. A mother-bird must not hover too confidently, too appealingly, near coveys whose preoccupations she does not share. It might have been her looking and dressing younger than nature justified; at forty one must not look thirty; in November one must not, even involuntarily, wear the things of May if one would have others believe in one's devotion to one's children in Dresden; one alleges in vain one's impatience to join them as grounds for joining groups or detached persons who have begun to write home to their children in New York or Boston.

The very readiness of the Mother-Bird to give security by the mention of well-known names, to offer proof of her social solvency by the eager correctness of her behavior, created reluctance around her. Some would not have her at all from the first; others, who had partially or conditionally accepted her, returned her upon her hands and withdrew from the negotiation. More and more she found herself outside that hard woman-world, and trying less and less to beat her way into it.

The women may have known her better even than she knew herself, and it may have been through ignorance greater than her own that the men were more acquiescent. But the men too were not so acquiescent, or not at all, as time passed.

It would be hard to fix the day, the hour, far harder the moment, when the Mother-Bird began to disappear from the drawing-room and to appear in the smoking-room, or say whether she passed from the one to the other in a voluntary exile or by the rigor of the women's unwritten law. Still, from time to time she was seen in their part of the ship, after she was also seen where the band of violets showed strange and sad through veils of smoke that were not dense enough to hide her poor, pretty little face, with its faded blue eyes and wistful mouth. There she passed by quick transition from the conversation of the graver elderly smokers to the loud laughter of two birds of prey who became her comrades, or such friends as birds like them can be to birds like her.

From anything she had said or done there was no reason for her lapse from the women and the better men to such men; for her transition from the better sort of women there was no reason except that it happened. Whether she attached herself to the birds of prey, or they to her, by that instinct which enables birds of all kinds to know themselves of a feather remained a touching question.

There remained to the end the question whether she was of a feather with them, or whether it was by some mischance, or by some such stress of the elements as drives birds of any feather to flock with birds of any other. To the end there remained a distracted and forsaken innocence in her looks. It was imaginable that she had made overtures to the birds of prey because she had made overtures to every one else; she was always seeking rather than sought, and her acceptance with them was as deplorable as her refusal by better birds. Often they were seen without her, when they had that look of having escaped, which others wore; but she was not often seen without them.

There is not much walking-weather on a November passage, and she was seen less with them in the early dark outdoors than in the late light within, by which she wavered a small form through the haze of their cigars in the smoking-room, or in the grill-room, where she showed in faint eclipse through the fumes of the broiling and frying, or through the vapors of the hot whiskies. The birds of prey were then heard laughing, but whether at her or with her it must have been equally sorrowful to learn.

Perhaps they were laughing at the maternal fondness which she had used for introduction to the general acquaintance lost almost in the moment of winning it. She seemed not to resent their laughter, though she seemed not to join in it. The worst of her was the company she kept; but since no better would allow her to keep it, you could not confidently say she would not have liked the best company on board. At the same time you could not have said she would; you could not have been sure it would not have bored her. Doubtless these results are not solely the sport of chance; they must be somewhat the event of choice if not of desert.

For anything you could have sworn, the Mother-Bird would have liked to be as good as the best. But since it was not possible for her to be good in the society of the best, she could only be good in that of the worst. It was to be hoped that the birds of prey were not cruel to her; that their mockery was never unkind if ever it was mockery. The cruelty which must come came when they began to be seen less and less with her, even at the late suppers, through the haze of their cigars and the smoke of the broiling and frying, and the vapors of the hot whiskies. Then it was the sharpest pang of all to meet her wandering up and down the ship's promenades, or leaning on the rail and looking dimly out over the foam-whitened black sea. It is the necessity of birds of prey to get rid of other birds when they are tired of them, and it had doubtless come to that.

One night, the night before getting into port, when the curiosity which always followed her with grief failed of her in the heightened hilarity of the smoking-room, where the last bets on the ship's run were making, it found her alone beside a little iron table, of those set in certain nooks outside the grill-room. There she sat with no one near, where the light from within fell palely upon her. The boon birds of prey, with whom she had been supping, had abandoned her, and she was supporting her cheek on the small hand of the arm that rested on the table. She leaned forward, and swayed with the swaying ship; the violets in her bolero-toque quivered with the vibrations of the machinery. She was asleep, poor Mother-Bird, and it would have been impossible not to wish her dreams were kind.



XI

THE AMIGO

His name was really Perez Armando Aldeano, but in the end everybody called him the amigo, because that was the endearing term by which he saluted all the world. There was a time when the children called him "Span-yard" in their games, for he spoke no tongue but Spanish, and though he came from Ecuador, and was no more a Spaniard than they were English, he answered to the call of "Span-yard!" whenever he heard it. He came eagerly in the hope of fun, and all the more eagerly if there was a hope of mischief in the fun. Still, to discerning spirits, he was always the amigo, for, when he hailed you so, you could not help hailing him so again, and whatever mock he put upon you afterward, you were his secret and inalienable friend.

The moment of my own acceptance in this quality came in the first hours of expansion following our getting to sea after long detention in the dock by fog. A small figure came flying down the dock with outspread arms, and a joyful cry of "Ah, amigo!" as if we were now meeting unexpectedly after a former intimacy in Bogota; and the amigo clasped me round the middle to his bosom, or more strictly speaking, his brow, which he plunged into my waistcoat. He was clad in a long black overcoat, and a boy's knee-pants, and under the peak of his cap twinkled the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was more and more, with the thinness of his small black legs, and his habit of hopping up and down, and dancing threateningly about, with mischief latent in every motion, like a crow which in being tamed has acquired one of the worst traits of civilization. He began babbling and gurgling in Spanish, and took my hand for a stroll about the ship, and from that time we were, with certain crises of disaffection, firm allies.

There were others whom he hailed and adopted his friends, whose legs he clung about and impeded in their walks, or whom he required to toss him into the air as they passed, but I flattered myself that he had a peculiar, because a primary, esteem for myself. I have thought it might be that, Bogota being said to be a very literary capital, as those things go in South America, he was mystically aware of a common ground between us, wider and deeper than that of his other friendships. But it may have been somewhat owing to my inviting him to my cabin to choose such portion as he would of a lady-cake sent us on shipboard at the last hour. He prattled and chuckled over it in the soft gutturals of his parrot-like Spanish, and rushed up on deck to eat the frosting off in the presence of his small companions, and to exult before them in the exploitation of a novel pleasure. Yet it could not have been the lady-cake which lastingly endeared me to him, for by the next day he had learned prudence and refused it without withdrawing his amity.

This, indeed, was always tempered by what seemed a constitutional irony, and he did not impart it to any one without some time making his friend feel the edge of his practical humor. It was not long before the children whom he gathered to his heart had each and all suffered some fall or bump or bruise which, if not of his intention, was of his infliction, and which was regretted with such winning archness that the very mothers of them could not resist him, and his victims dried their tears to follow him with glad cries of "Span-yard, Span-yard!" Injury at his hands was a favor; neglect was the only real grievance. He went about rolling his small black head, and darting roguish lightnings from under his thick-fringed eyes, and making more trouble with a more enticing gaiety than all the other people on the ship put together.

The truth must be owned that the time came, long before the end of the voyage, when it was felt that in the interest of the common welfare, something must be done about the amigo. At the conversational end of the doctor's table, where he was discussed whenever the racks were not on, and the talk might have languished without their inspiration, his badness was debated at every meal. Some declared him the worst boy in the world, and held against his half-hearted defenders that something ought to be done about him; and one was left to imagine all the darker fate for him because there was nothing specific in these convictions. He could not be thrown overboard, and if he had been put in irons probably his worst enemies at the conversational end of the table would have been the first to intercede for him. It is not certain, however, that their prayers would have been effective with the captain, if that officer, framed for comfort as well as command, could have known how accurately the amigo had dramatized his personal presence by throwing himself back, and clasping his hands a foot in front of his small stomach, and making a few tilting paces forward.

The amigo had a mimic gift which he liked to exercise when he could find no intelligible language for the expression of his ironic spirit. Being forbidden visits in and out of season to certain staterooms whose inmates feigned a wish to sleep, he represented in what grotesque attitudes of sonorous slumber they passed their day, and he spared neither age nor sex in these graphic shows. When age refused one day to go up on deck with him and pleaded in such Spanish as it could pluck up from its past studies that it was too old, he laughed it to scorn. "You are not old," he said. "Why?" the flattered dotard inquired. "Because you smile," and that seemed reason enough for one's continued youth. It was then that the amigo gave his own age, carefully telling the Spanish numerals over, and explaining further by holding up both hands with one finger shut in. But he had the subtlety of centuries in his nine years, and he penetrated the ship everywhere with his arch spirit of mischief. It was mischief always in the interest of the good-fellowship which he offered impartially to old and young; and if it were mere frolic, with no ulterior object, he did not care at all how old or young his playmate was. This endeared him naturally to every age; and the little blond German-American boy dried his tears from the last accident inflicted on him by the amigo to recall him by tender entreaties of "Span-yard, Span-yard!" while the eldest of his friends could not hold out against him more than two days in the strained relations following upon the amigo's sweeping him down the back with a toy broom employed by the German-American boy to scrub the scuppers. This was not so much an injury as an indignity, but it was resented as an indignity, in spite of many demure glances of propitiation from the amigo's ironical eyes and murmurs of inarticulate apology as he passed.

He was, up to a certain point, the kindest and truest of amigos; then his weird seizure came, and the baby was spilled out of the carriage he had been so benevolently pushing up and down; or the second officer's legs, as he walked past with the prettiest girl on board, were hit with the stick that the amigo had been innocently playing shuffle-board with; or some passenger was taken unawares in his vanity or infirmity and made to contribute to the amigo's passion for active amusement.

At this point I ought to explain that the amigo was not traveling alone from Ecuador to Paris, where it was said he was to rejoin his father. At meal-times, and at other rare intervals, he was seen to be in the charge of a very dark and very silent little man, with intensely black eyes and mustache, clad in raven hues from his head to the delicate feet on which he wore patent-leather shoes. With him the amigo walked gravely up and down the deck, and behaved decorously at table; and we could not reconcile the apparent affection between the two with a theory we had that the amigo had been found impossible in his own country, and had been sent out of Ecuador by a decree of the government, or perhaps a vote of the whole people. The little, dark, silent man, in his patent-leather boots, had not the air of conveying a state prisoner into exile, and we wondered in vain what the tie between him and the amigo was. He might have been his tutor, or his uncle. He exercised a quite mystical control over the amigo, who was exactly obedient to him in everything, and would not look aside at you when in his keeping. We reflected with awe and pathos that, as they roomed together, it was his privilege to see the amigo asleep, when that little, very kissable black head rested innocently on the pillow, and the busy brain within it was at peace with the world which formed its pleasure and its prey in waking.

It would be idle to represent that the amigo played his pranks upon that shipload of long-suffering people with final impunity. The time came when they not only said something must be done, but actually did something. It was by the hand of one of the amigo's sweetest and kindest friends, namely, that elderly captain, off duty, who was going out to be assigned his ship in Hamburg. From the first he had shown the affectionate tenderness for the amigo which was felt by all except some obdurate hearts at the conversational end of the table; and it must have been with a loving interest in the amigo's ultimate well-being that, taking him in an ecstasy of mischief, he drew the amigo face downward across his knees, and bestowed the chastisement which was morally a caress. He dismissed him with a smile in which the amigo read the good understanding that existed unimpaired between them, and accepted his correction with the same affection as that which had given it. He shook himself and ran off with an enjoyment of the joke as great as that of any of the spectators and far more generous.

In fact there was nothing mean in the amigo. Impish he was, or might be, but only in the sort of the crow or the parrot; there was no malevolence in his fine malice. One fancied him in his adolescence taking part in one of the frequent revolutions of his continent, but humorously, not homicidally. He would like to alarm the other faction, and perhaps drive it from power, or overset it from its official place, but if he had the say there would be no bringing the vanquished out into the plaza to be shot. He may now have been on his way to France ultimately to study medicine, which seems to be preliminary to a high political career in South America; but in the mean time we feared for him in that republic of severely regulated subordinations.

We thought with pathos of our early parting with him, as we approached Plymouth and tried to be kodaked with him, considering it an honor and pleasure. He so far shared our feeling as to consent, but he insisted on wearing a pair of glasses which had large eyes painted on them, and on being taken in the act of inflating a toy balloon. Probably, therefore, the likeness would not be recognized in Bogota, but it will always be endeared to us by the memory of the many mockeries suffered from him. There were other friends whom we left on the ship, notably those of the conversational end of the table, who thought him simply a bad boy; but there were none of such peculiar appeal as he, when he stood by the guard, opening and shutting his hand in ironical adieu, and looking smaller and smaller as our tender drifted away and the vast liner loomed immense before us. He may have contributed to its effect of immensity by the smallness of his presence, or it may have dwarfed him. No matter; he filled no slight space in our lives while he lasted. Now that he is no longer there, was he really a bad little boy, merely and simply? Heaven knows, which alone knows good boys from bad.



XII

BLACK CROSS FARM

(To F. S.)

After full many a mutual delay My friend and I at last fixed on a day For seeing Black Cross Farm, which he had long Boasted the fittest theme for tale or song In all that charming region round about: Something that must not really be left out Of the account of things to do for me. It was a teasing bit of mystery, He said, which he and his had tried in vain, Ever since they had found it, to explain. The right way was to happen, as they did, Upon it in the hills where it was hid; But chance could not be always trusted, quite, You might not happen on it, though you might; Encores were usually objected to By chance. The next best thing that we could do Was in his carryall, to start together, And trust that somehow favoring wind and weather, With the eccentric progress of his horse, Would so far drift us from our settled course That we at least could lose ourselves, if not Find the mysterious object that we sought. So one blithe morning of the ripe July We fared, by easy stages, toward the sky That rested one rim of its turquoise cup Low on the distant sea, and, tilted up, The other on the irregular hilltops. Sweet The sun and wind that joined to cool and heat The air to one delicious temperature; And over the smooth-cropt mowing-pieces pure The pine-breath, borrowing their spicy scent In barter for the balsam that it lent! And when my friend handed the reins to me, And drew a fuming match along his knee, And, lighting his cigar, began to talk, I let the old horse lapse into a walk From his perfunctory trot, content to listen, Amid that leafy rustle and that glisten Of field, and wood, and ocean, rapt afar, From every trouble of our anxious star. From time to time, between effect and cause In this or that, making a questioning pause, My friend peered round him while he feigned a gay Hope that we might have taken the wrong way At the last turn, and then let me push on, Or the old horse rather, slanting hither and yon, And never in the middle of the track, Except when slanting off or slanting back. He talked, I listened, while we wandered by The scanty fields of wheat and oats and rye, With patches of potatoes and of corn, And now and then a garden spot forlorn, Run wild where once a house had stood, or where An empty house yet stood, and seemed to stare Upon us blindly from the twisted glass Of windows that once let no wayfarer pass Unseen of children dancing at the pane, And vanishing to reappear again, Pulling their mother with them to the sight. Still we kept on, with turnings left and right, Past farmsteads grouped in cheerful neighborhoods, Or solitary; then through shadowy woods Of pine or birch, until the road, grass-grown, Had given back to Nature all her own Save a faint wheel-trace, that along the slope, Rain-gullied, seemed to stop and doubt and grope, And then quite ceased, as if 't had turned and fled Out of the forest into which it led, And left us at the gate whose every bar Was nailed against us. But, "Oh, here we are!" My friend cried joyously. "At last, at last!" And making our horse superfluously fast, He led the way onward by what had been A lane, now hid by weeds and briers between Meadows scarce worth the mowing, to a space Shaped as by Nature for the dwelling-place Of kindly human life: a small plateau Open to the heaven that seemed bending low In liking for it. There beneath a roof Still against winter and summer weather-proof, With walls and doors and windows perfect yet, Between its garden and its graveyard set, Stood the old homestead, out of which had perished The home whose memory it dumbly cherished, And which, when at our push the door swung wide, We might have well imagined to have died And had its funeral the day before: So clean and cold it was from floor to floor, So lifelike and so deathlike, with the thrill Of hours when life and death encountered still Passionate in it. They that lay below The tangled grasses or the drifted snow, Husband and wife, mother and little one, From that sad house less utterly were gone Than they that living had abandoned it. In moonless nights their Absences might flit, Homesick, from room to room, or dimly sit Around its fireless hearths, or haunt the rose And lily in the neglected garden close; But they whose feet had borne them from the door Would pass the footworn threshold nevermore. We read the moss-grown names upon the tombs, With lighter melancholy than the glooms Of the dead house shadowed us with, and thence Turning, my heart was pierced with more intense Suggestion of a mystical dismay, As in the brilliance of the summer day We faced the vast gray barn. The house was old, Though so well kept, as age by years is told In our young land; but the barn, gray and vast, Stood new and straight and strong—all battened fast At every opening; and where once the mow Had yawned wide-windowed, on the sheathing now A Cross was nailed, the bigness of a man, Aslant from left to right, athwart the span, And painted black as paint could make it. Hushed, I stood, while manifold conjecture rushed To this point and to that point, and then burst In the impotent questionings rejected first. What did it mean? Ah, that no one could tell. Who put it there? That was unknown as well. Was there no legend? My friend knew of none. No neighborhood story? He had sought for one In vain. Did he imagine it accident, With nothing really implied or meant By the boards set in that way? It might be, But I could answer that as well as he. Then (desperately) what did he guess it was: Something of purpose, or without a cause Other than chance? He slowly shook his head, And with his gaze fixed on the symbol said: "We have quite ceased from guessing or surmising, For all our several and joint devising Has left us finally where I must leave you. But now I think it is your part to do Yourself some guessing. I hoped you might bring A fresh mind to the riddle's unraveling. Come!"