The Project Gutenberg eBook of Alexander’s Bridge, by Willa Cather

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Alexander’s Bridge

by Willa Cather

And
THE BARREL ORGAN by Alfred Noyes

CONTENTS

ALEXANDER’S BRIDGE by Willa Cather

CHAPTER I

Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head ofChestnut Street,action figures toys looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste whodoes not very often get to Boston. He had lived there as a student, but fortwenty years and more, since he had been Professor of Philosophy in a Westernuniversity, he had seldom come East except to take a steamer for some foreignport. Wilson was standing quite still, contemplating with a whimsical smile theslanting street, with its worn paving, its irregular, gravely colored houses,and the row of naked trees on which the thin sunlight was still shining. Thegleam of the river at the foot of the hill made him blink a little, not so muchbecause it was too bright as because he found it so pleasant. The fewpassers-by glanced at him unconcernedly, and even the children who hurriedalong with their school-bags under their arms seemed to find it perfectlynatural that a tall brown gentleman should be standing there, looking upthrough his glasses at the gray housetops.

The sun sank rapidly; the silvery light had faded from the bare boughs and thewatery twilight was setting in when Wilson at last walked down the hill,descending into cooler and cooler depths of grayish shadow. His nostril, longunused to it, was quick to detect the smell of wood smoke in the air, blendedwith the odor of moist spring earth and the saltiness that came up the riverwith the tide. He crossed Charles Street between jangling street cars andshelving lumber drays, and after a moment of uncertainty wound into BrimmerStreet. The street was quiet, deserted, and hung with a thin bluish haze. Hehad already fixed his sharp eye upon the house which he reasoned should be hisobjective point, when he noticed a woman approaching rapidly from the oppositedirection. Always an interested observer of women, Wilson would have slackenedhis pace anywhere to follow this one with his impersonal, appreciative glance.She was a person of distinction he saw at once, and, moreover, very handsome.She was tall, carried her beautiful head proudly, and moved with ease andcertainty. One immediately took for granted the costly privileges and finespaces that must lie in the background from which such a figure could emergewith this rapid and elegant gait. Wilson noted her dress, too,—for, inhis way, he had an eye for such things,—particularly her brown furs andher hat. He got a blurred impression of her fine color, the violets she wore,her white gloves, and, curiously enough, of her veil, as she turned up a flightof steps in front of him and disappeared.

Wilson was able to enjoy lovely things that passed him on the wing ascompletely and deliberately as if they had been dug-up marvels, longanticipated, and definitely fixed at the end of a railway journey. For a fewpleasurable seconds he quite forgot where he was going, and only after the doorhad closed behind her did he realize that the young woman had entered the houseto which he had directed his trunk from the South Station that morning. Hehesitated a moment before mounting the steps. “Can that,” hemurmured in amazement,—“can that possibly have been Mrs.Alexander?”

When the servant admitted him, Mrs. Alexander was still standing in thehallway. She heard him give his name, and came forward holding out her hand.

“Is it you, indeed, Professor Wilson? I was afraid that you might gethere before I did. I was detained at a concert, and Bartley telephoned that hewould be late. Thomas will show you your room. Had you rather have your teabrought to you there, or will you have it down here with me, while we wait forBartley?”

Wilson was pleased to find that he had been the cause of her rapid walk, andwith her he was even more vastly pleased than before. He followed her throughthe drawing-room into the library, where the wide back windows looked out uponthe garden and the sunset and a fine stretch of silver-colored river. Aharp-shaped elm stood stripped against the pale-colored evening sky, withragged last year’s birds’ nests in its forks, and through the barebranches the evening star quivered in the misty air. The long brown roombreathed the peace of a rich and amply guarded quiet. Tea was brought inimmediately and placed in front of the wood fire. Mrs. Alexander sat down in ahigh-backed chair and began to pour it, while Wilson sank into a low seatopposite her and took his cup with a great sense of ease and harmony andcomfort.

“You have had a long journey, haven’t you?” Mrs. Alexanderasked, after showing gracious concern about his tea. “And I am so sorryBartley is late. He’s often tired when he’s late. He flattershimself that it is a little on his account that you have come to this Congressof Psychologists.”

“It is,” Wilson assented, selecting his muffin carefully;“and I hope he won’t be tired tonight. But, on my own account,I’m glad to have a few moments alone with you, before Bartley comes. Iwas somehow afraid that my knowing him so well would not put me in the way ofgetting to know you.”

“That’s very nice of you.” She nodded at him above her cupand smiled, but there was a little formal tightness in her tone which had notbeen there when she greeted him in the hall.

Wilson leaned forward. “Have I said something awkward? I live very farout of the world, you know. But I didn’t mean that you would exactly fadedim, even if Bartley were here.”

Mrs. Alexander laughed relentingly. “Oh, I’m not so vain! Howterribly discerning you are.”

She looked straight at Wilson, and he felt that this quick, frank glancebrought about an understanding between them.

He liked everything about her, he told himself, but he particularly liked hereyes; when she looked at one directly for a moment they were like a glimpse offine windy sky that may bring all sorts of weather.

“Since you noticed something,” Mrs. Alexander went on, “itmust have been a flash of the distrust I have come to feel whenever I meet anyof the people who knew Bartley when he was a boy. It is always as if they weretalking of someone I had never met. Really, Professor Wilson, it would seemthat he grew up among the strangest people. They usually say that he has turnedout very well, or remark that he always was a fine fellow. I never know whatreply to make.”

Wilson chuckled and leaned back in his chair, shaking his left foot gently.“I expect the fact is that we none of us knew him very well, Mrs.Alexander. Though I will say for myself that I was always confident he’ddo something extraordinary.”

Mrs. Alexander’s shoulders gave a slight movement, suggestive ofimpatience. “Oh, I should think that might have been a safe prediction.Another cup, please?”

“Yes, thank you. But predicting, in the case of boys, is not so easy asyou might imagine, Mrs. Alexander. Some get a bad hurt early and lose theircourage; and some never get a fair wind. Bartley”—he dropped hischin on the back of his long hand and looked at heradmiringly—“Bartley caught the wind early, and it has sung in hissails ever since.”

Mrs. Alexander sat looking into the fire with intent preoccupation, and Wilsonstudied her half-averted face. He liked the suggestion of stormy possibilitiesin the proud curve of her lip and nostril. Without that, he reflected, shewould be too cold.

“I should like to know what he was really like when he was a boy. Idon’t believe he remembers,” she said suddenly. “Won’tyou smoke, Mr. Wilson?”

Wilson lit a cigarette. “No, I don’t suppose he does. He was neverintrospective. He was simply the most tremendous response to stimuli I haveever known. We didn’t know exactly what to do with him.”

A servant came in and noiselessly removed the tea-tray. Mrs. Alexander screenedher face from the firelight, which was beginning to throw wavering bright spotson her dress and hair as the dusk deepened.

“Of course,” she said, “I now and again hear stories aboutthings that happened when he was in college.”

“But that isn’t what you want.” Wilson wrinkled his brows andlooked at her with the smiling familiarity that had come about so quickly.“What you want is a picture of him, standing back there at the other endof twenty years. You want to look down through my memory.”

She dropped her hands in her lap. “Yes, yes; that’s exactly what Iwant.”

At this moment they heard the front door shut with a jar, and Wilson laughed asMrs. Alexander rose quickly. “There he is. Away with perspective! Nopast, no future for Bartley; just the fiery moment. The only moment that everwas or will be in the world!”

The door from the hall opened, a voice called “Winifred?”hurriedly, and a big man came through the drawing-room with a quick, heavytread, bringing with him a smell of cigar smoke and chill out-of-doors air.When Alexander reached the library door, he switched on the lights and stoodsix feet and more in the archway, glowing with strength and cordiality andrugged, blond good looks. There were other bridge-builders in the world,certainly, but it was always Alexander’s picture that the SundaySupplement men wanted, because he looked as a tamer of rivers ought to look.Under his tumbled sandy hair his head seemed as hard and powerful as acatapult, and his shoulders looked strong enough in themselves to support aspan of any one of his ten great bridges that cut the air above as many rivers.

After dinner Alexander took Wilson up to his study. It was a large room overthe library, and looked out upon the black river and the row of white lightsalong the Cambridge Embankment. The room was not at all what one might expectof an engineer’s study. Wilson felt at once the harmony of beautifulthings that have lived long together without obtrusions of ugliness or change.It was none of Alexander’s doing, of course; those warm consonances ofcolor had been blending and mellowing before he was born. But the wonder wasthat he was not out of place there,—that it all seemed to glow like theinevitable background for his vigor and vehemence. He sat before the fire, hisshoulders deep in the cushions of his chair, his powerful head upright, hishair rumpled above his broad forehead. He sat heavily, a cigar in his large,smooth hand, a flush of after-dinner color in his face, which wind and sun andexposure to all sorts of weather had left fair and clear-skinned.

“You are off for England on Saturday, Bartley, Mrs. Alexander tellsme.”

“Yes, for a few weeks only. There’s a meeting of British engineers,and I’m doing another bridge in Canada, you know.”

“Oh, every one knows about that. And it was in Canada that you met yourwife, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, at Allway. She was visiting her great-aunt there. A most remarkableold lady. I was working with MacKeller then, an old Scotch engineer who hadpicked me up in London and taken me back to Quebec with him. He had thecontract for the Allway Bridge, but before he began work on it he found outthat he was going to die, and he advised the committee to turn the job over tome. Otherwise I’d never have got anything good so early. MacKeller was anold friend of Mrs. Pemberton, Winifred’s aunt. He had mentioned me toher, so when I went to Allway she asked me to come to see her. She was awonderful old lady.”

“Like her niece?” Wilson queried.

Bartley laughed. “She had been very handsome, but not in Winifred’sway. When I knew her she was little and fragile, very pink and white, with asplendid head and a face like fine old lace, somehow,—but perhaps Ialways think of that because she wore a lace scarf on her hair. She had such aflavor of life about her. She had known Gordon and Livingstone and Beaconsfieldwhen she was young,—every one. She was the first woman of that sortI’d ever known. You know how it is in the West,—old people arepoked out of the way. Aunt Eleanor fascinated me as few young women have everdone. I used to go up from the works to have tea with her, and sit talking toher for hours. It was very stimulating, for she couldn’t toleratestupidity.”

“It must have been then that your luck began, Bartley,” saidWilson, flicking his cigar ash with his long finger. “It’s curious,watching boys,” he went on reflectively. “I’m sure I did youjustice in the matter of ability. Yet I always used to feel that there was aweak spot where some day strain would tell. Even after you began to climb, Istood down in the crowd and watched you with—well, not with confidence.The more dazzling the front you presented, the higher your facade rose, themore I expected to see a big crack zigzagging from top tobottom,”—he indicated its course in the air with hisforefinger,—“then a crash and clouds of dust. It was curious. I hadsuch a clear picture of it. And another curious thing, Bartley,” Wilsonspoke with deliberateness and settled deeper into his chair, “is that Idon’t feel it any longer. I am sure of you.”

Alexander laughed. “Nonsense! It’s not I you feel sure of;it’s Winifred. People often make that mistake.”

“No, I’m serious, Alexander. You’ve changed. You have decidedto leave some birds in the bushes. You used to want them all.”

Alexander’s chair creaked. “I still want a good many,” hesaid rather gloomily. “After all, life doesn’t offer a man much.You work like the devil and think you’re getting on, and suddenly youdiscover that you’ve only been getting yourself tied up. A milliondetails drink you dry. Your life keeps going for things you don’t want,and all the while you are being built alive into a social structure youdon’t care a rap about. I sometimes wonder what sort of chap I’dhave been if I hadn’t been this sort; I want to go and live out hispotentialities, too. I haven’t forgotten that there are birds in thebushes.”

Bartley stopped and sat frowning into the fire, his shoulders thrust forward asif he were about to spring at something. Wilson watched him, wondering. His oldpupil always stimulated him at first, and then vastly wearied him. Themachinery was always pounding away in this man, and Wilson preferred companionsof a more reflective habit of mind. He could not help feeling that there wereunreasoning and unreasonable activities going on in Alexander all the while;that even after dinner, when most men achieve a decent impersonality, Bartleyhad merely closed the door of the engine-room and come up for an airing. Themachinery itself was still pounding on.

Bartley’s abstraction and Wilson’s reflections were cut short by arustle at the door, and almost before they could rise Mrs. Alexander wasstanding by the hearth. Alexander brought a chair for her, but she shook herhead.

“No, dear, thank you. I only came in to see whether you and ProfessorWilson were quite comfortable. I am going down to the music-room.”

“Why not practice here? Wilson and I are growing very dull. We are tiredof talk.”

“Yes, I beg you, Mrs. Alexander,” Wilson began, but he got nofurther.

“Why, certainly, if you won’t find me too noisy. I am working onthe Schumann ‘Carnival,’ and, though I don’t practice a greatmany hours, I am very methodical,” Mrs. Alexander explained, as shecrossed to an upright piano that stood at the back of the room, near thewindows.

Wilson followed, and, having seen her seated, dropped into a chair behind her.She played brilliantly and with great musical feeling. Wilson could not imagineher permitting herself to do anything badly, but he was surprised at thecleanness of her execution. He wondered how a woman with so many duties hadmanaged to keep herself up to a standard really professional. It must take agreat deal of time, certainly, and Bartley must take a great deal of time.Wilson reflected that he had never before known a woman who had been able, forany considerable while, to support both a personal and an intellectual passion.Sitting behind her, he watched her with perplexed admiration, shading his eyeswith his hand. In her dinner dress she looked even younger than in streetclothes, and, for all her composure and self-sufficiency, she seemed to himstrangely alert and vibrating, as if in her, too, there were something neveraltogether at rest. He felt that he knew pretty much what she demanded inpeople and what she demanded from life, and he wondered how she squaredBartley. After ten years she must know him; and however one took him, howevermuch one admired him, one had to admit that he simply wouldn’t square. Hewas a natural force, certainly, but beyond that, Wilson felt, he was notanything very really or for very long at a time.

Wilson glanced toward the fire, where Bartley’s profile was stillwreathed in cigar smoke that curled up more and more slowly. His shoulders weresunk deep in the cushions and one hand hung large and passive over the arm ofhis chair. He had slipped on a purple velvet smoking-coat. His wife, Wilsonsurmised, had chosen it. She was clearly very proud of his good looks and hisfine color. But, with the glow of an immediate interest gone out of it, theengineer’s face looked tired, even a little haggard. The three lines inhis forehead, directly above the nose, deepened as he sat thinking, and hispowerful head drooped forward heavily. Although Alexander was only forty-three,Wilson thought that beneath his vigorous color he detected the dullingweariness of on-coming middle age.

The next afternoon, at the hour when the river was beginning to redden underthe declining sun, Wilson again found himself facing Mrs. Alexander at thetea-table in the library.

“Well,” he remarked, when he was bidden to give an account ofhimself, “there was a long morning with the psychologists, luncheon withBartley at his club, more psychologists, and here I am. I’ve lookedforward to this hour all day.”

Mrs. Alexander smiled at him across the vapor from the kettle. “And doyou remember where we stopped yesterday?”

“Perfectly. I was going to show you a picture. But I doubt whether I havecolor enough in me. Bartley makes me feel a faded monochrome. You can’tget at the young Bartley except by means of color.” Wilson paused anddeliberated. Suddenly he broke out: “He wasn’t a remarkablestudent, you know, though he was always strong in higher mathematics. His workin my own department was quite ordinary. It was as a powerfully equipped naturethat I found him interesting. That is the most interesting thing a teacher canfind. It has the fascination of a scientific discovery. We come across otherpleasing and endearing qualities so much oftener than we find force.”

“And, after all,” said Mrs. Alexander, “that is the thing weall live upon. It is the thing that takes us forward.”

Wilson thought she spoke a little wistfully. “Exactly,” he assentedwarmly. “It builds the bridges into the future, over which the feet ofevery one of us will go.”

“How interested I am to hear you put it in that way. The bridges into thefuture—I often say that to myself. Bartley’s bridges always seem tome like that. Have you ever seen his first suspension bridge in Canada, the onehe was doing when I first knew him? I hope you will see it sometime. We weremarried as soon as it was finished, and you will laugh when I tell you that italways has a rather bridal look to me. It is over the wildest river, with mistsand clouds always battling about it, and it is as delicate as a cobweb hangingin the sky. It really was a bridge into the future. You have only to look at itto feel that it meant the beginning of a great career. But I have a photographof it here.” She drew a portfolio from behind a bookcase. “Andthere, you see, on the hill, is my aunt’s house.”

Wilson took up the photograph. “Bartley was telling me something aboutyour aunt last night. She must have been a delightful person.”

Winifred laughed. “The bridge, you see, was just at the foot of the hill,and the noise of the engines annoyed her very much at first. But after she metBartley she pretended to like it, and said it was a good thing to be remindedthat there were things going on in the world. She loved life, and Bartleybrought a great deal of it in to her when he came to the house. Aunt Eleanorwas very worldly in a frank, Early-Victorian manner. She liked men of action,and disliked young men who were careful of themselves and who, as she put it,were always trimming their wick as if they were afraid of their oil’sgiving out. MacKeller, Bartley’s first chief, was an old friend of myaunt, and he told her that Bartley was a wild, ill-governed youth, which reallypleased her very much. I remember we were sitting alone in the dusk afterBartley had been there for the first time. I knew that Aunt Eleanor had foundhim much to her taste, but she hadn’t said anything. Presently she cameout, with a chuckle: ‘MacKeller found him sowing wild oats in London, Ibelieve. I hope he didn’t stop him too soon. Life coquets with dashingfellows. The coming men are always like that. We must have him to dinner, mydear.’ And we did. She grew much fonder of Bartley than she was of me. Ihad been studying in Vienna, and she thought that absurd. She was interested inthe army and in politics, and she had a great contempt for music and art andphilosophy. She used to declare that the Prince Consort had brought all thatstuff over out of Germany. She always sniffed when Bartley asked me to play forhim. She considered that a newfangled way of making a match of it.”

When Alexander came in a few moments later, he found Wilson and his wife stillconfronting the photograph. “Oh, let us get that out of the way,”he said, laughing. “Winifred, Thomas can bring my trunk down. I’vedecided to go over to New York to-morrow night and take a fast boat. I shallsave two days.”

CHAPTER II

On the night of his arrival in London, Alexander went immediately to the hotelon the Embankment at which he always stopped, and in the lobby he was accostedby an old acquaintance, Maurice Mainhall, who fell upon him with effusivecordiality and indicated a willingness to dine with him. Bartley never dinedalone if he could help it, and Mainhall was a good gossip who always knew whathad been going on in town; especially, he knew everything that was not printedin the newspapers. The nephew of one of the standard Victorian novelists,Mainhall bobbed about among the various literary cliques of London and itsoutlying suburbs, careful to lose touch with none of them. He had written anumber of books himself; among them a “History of Dancing,” a“History of Costume,” a “Key to Shakespeare’sSonnets,” a study of “The Poetry of Ernest Dowson,” etc.Although Mainhall’s enthusiasm was often tiresome, and although he wasoften unable to distinguish between facts and vivid figments of hisimagination, his imperturbable good nature overcame even the people whom hebored most, so that they ended by becoming, in a reluctant manner, his friends.In appearance, Mainhall was astonishingly like the conventionalstage-Englishman of American drama: tall and thin, with high, hitchingshoulders and a small head glistening with closely brushed yellow hair. Hespoke with an extreme Oxford accent, and when he was talking well, his facesometimes wore the rapt expression of a very emotional man listening to music.Mainhall liked Alexander because he was an engineer. He had preconceived ideasabout everything, and his idea about Americans was that they should beengineers or mechanics. He hated them when they presumed to be anything else.

While they sat at dinner Mainhall acquainted Bartley with the fortunes of hisold friends in London, and as they left the table he proposed that they shouldgo to see Hugh MacConnell’s new comedy, “Bog Lights.”

“It’s really quite the best thing MacConnell’s done,”he explained as they got into a hansom. “It’s tremendously well puton, too. Florence Merrill and Cyril Henderson. But Hilda Burgoyne’s thehit of the piece. Hugh’s written a delightful part for her, andshe’s quite inexpressible. It’s been on only two weeks, andI’ve been half a dozen times already. I happen to have MacConnell’sbox for tonight or there’d be no chance of our getting places.There’s everything in seeing Hilda while she’s fresh in a part.She’s apt to grow a bit stale after a time. The ones who have anyimagination do.”

“Hilda Burgoyne!” Alexander exclaimed mildly. “Why, Ihaven’t heard of her for—years.”

Mainhall laughed. “Then you can’t have heard much at all, my dearAlexander. It’s only lately, since MacConnell and his set have got holdof her, that she’s come up. Myself, I always knew she had it in her. Ifwe had one real critic in London—but what can one expect? Do you know,Alexander,”—Mainhall looked with perplexity up into the top of thehansom and rubbed his pink cheek with his gloved finger,—“do youknow, I sometimes think of taking to criticism seriously myself. In a way, itwould be a sacrifice; but, dear me, we do need some one.”

Just then they drove up to the Duke of York’s, so Alexander did notcommit himself, but followed Mainhall into the theatre. When they entered thestage-box on the left the first act was well under way, the scene being theinterior of a cabin in the south of Ireland. As they sat down, a burst ofapplause drew Alexander’s attention to the stage. Miss Burgoyne and herdonkey were thrusting their heads in at the half door. “After all,”he reflected, “there’s small probability of her recognizing me. Shedoubtless hasn’t thought of me for years.” He felt the enthusiasmof the house at once, and in a few moments he was caught up by the current ofMacConnell’s irresistible comedy. The audience had come forewarned,evidently, and whenever the ragged slip of a donkey-girl ran upon the stagethere was a deep murmur of approbation, every one smiled and glowed, andMainhall hitched his heavy chair a little nearer the brass railing.

“You see,” he murmured in Alexander’s ear, as the curtainfell on the first act, “one almost never sees a part like that donewithout smartness or mawkishness. Of course, Hilda is Irish,—theBurgoynes have been stage people for generations,—and she has the Irishvoice. It’s delightful to hear it in a London theatre. That laugh, now,when she doubles over at the hips—who ever heard it out of Galway? Shesaves her hand, too. She’s at her best in the second act. She’sreally MacConnell’s poetic motif, you see; makes the whole thing a fairytale.”

The second act opened before Philly Doyle’s underground still, with Peggyand her battered donkey come in to smuggle a load of potheen across the bog,and to bring Philly word of what was doing in the world without, and of whatwas happening along the roadsides and ditches with the first gleam of fineweather. Alexander, annoyed by Mainhall’s sighs and exclamations, watchedher with keen, half-skeptical interest. As Mainhall had said, she was thesecond act; the plot and feeling alike depended upon her lightness of foot, herlightness of touch, upon the shrewdness and deft fancifulness that playedalternately, and sometimes together, in her mirthful brown eyes. When she beganto dance, by way of showing the gossoons what she had seen in the fairy ringsat night, the house broke into a prolonged uproar. After her dance she withdrewfrom the dialogue and retreated to the ditch wall back of Philly’sburrow, where she sat singing “The Rising of the Moon” and making awreath of primroses for her donkey.

When the act was over Alexander and Mainhall strolled out into the corridor.They met a good many acquaintances; Mainhall, indeed, knew almost every one,and he babbled on incontinently, screwing his small head about over his highcollar. Presently he hailed a tall, bearded man, grim-browed and ratherbattered-looking, who had his opera cloak on his arm and his hat in his hand,and who seemed to be on the point of leaving the theatre.

“MacConnell, let me introduce Mr. Bartley Alexander. I say! It’sgoing famously to-night, Mac. And what an audience! You’ll never doanything like this again, mark me. A man writes to the top of his bent onlyonce.”

The playwright gave Mainhall a curious look out of his deep-set faded eyes andmade a wry face. “And have I done anything so fool as that, now?”he asked.

“That’s what I was saying,” Mainhall lounged a little nearerand dropped into a tone even more conspicuously confidential. “Andyou’ll never bring Hilda out like this again. Dear me, Mac, the girlcouldn’t possibly be better, you know.”

MacConnell grunted. “She’ll do well enough if she keeps her paceand doesn’t go off on us in the middle of the season, as she’s morethan like to do.”

He nodded curtly and made for the door, dodging acquaintances as he went.

“Poor old Hugh,” Mainhall murmured. “He’s hit terriblyhard. He’s been wanting to marry Hilda these three years and more. Shedoesn’t take up with anybody, you know. Irene Burgoyne, one of herfamily, told me in confidence that there was a romance somewhere back in thebeginning. One of your countrymen, Alexander, by the way; an American studentwhom she met in Paris, I believe. I dare say it’s quite true thatthere’s never been any one else.” Mainhall vouched for herconstancy with a loftiness that made Alexander smile, even while a kind ofrapid excitement was tingling through him. Blinking up at the lights, Mainhalladded in his luxurious, worldly way: “She’s an elegant littleperson, and quite capable of an extravagant bit of sentiment like that. Herecomes Sir Harry Towne. He’s another who’s awfully keen about her.Let me introduce you. Sir Harry Towne, Mr. Bartley Alexander, the Americanengineer.”

Sir Harry Towne bowed and said that he had met Mr. Alexander and his wife inTokyo.

Mainhall cut in impatiently.

“I say, Sir Harry, the little girl’s going famously to-night,isn’t she?”

Sir Harry wrinkled his brows judiciously. “Do you know, I thought thedance a bit conscious to-night, for the first time. The fact is, she’sfeeling rather seedy, poor child. Westmere and I were back after the first act,and we thought she seemed quite uncertain of herself. A little attack ofnerves, possibly.”

He bowed as the warning bell rang, and Mainhall whispered: “You know LordWestmere, of course,—the stooped man with the long gray mustache, talkingto Lady Dowle. Lady Westmere is very fond of Hilda.”

When they reached their box the house was darkened and the orchestra wasplaying “The Cloak of Old Gaul.” In a moment Peggy was on the stageagain, and Alexander applauded vigorously with the rest. He even leaned forwardover the rail a little. For some reason he felt pleased and flattered by theenthusiasm of the audience. In the half-light he looked about at the stalls andboxes and smiled a little consciously, recalling with amusement SirHarry’s judicial frown. He was beginning to feel a keen interest in theslender, barefoot donkey-girl who slipped in and out of the play, singing, likesome one winding through a hilly field. He leaned forward and beamedfelicitations as warmly as Mainhall himself when, at the end of the play, shecame again and again before the curtain, panting a little and flushed, her eyesdancing and her eager, nervous little mouth tremulous with excitement.

When Alexander returned to his hotel—he shook Mainhall at the door of thetheatre—he had some supper brought up to his room, and it was late beforehe went to bed. He had not thought of Hilda Burgoyne for years; indeed, he hadalmost forgotten her. He had last written to her from Canada, after he firstmet Winifred, telling her that everything was changed with him—that hehad met a woman whom he would marry if he could; if he could not, then all themore was everything changed for him. Hilda had never replied to his letter. Hefelt guilty and unhappy about her for a time, but after Winifred promised tomarry him he really forgot Hilda altogether. When he wrote her that everythingwas changed for him, he was telling the truth. After he met Winifred Pembertonhe seemed to himself like a different man. One night when he and Winifred weresitting together on the bridge, he told her that things had happened while hewas studying abroad that he was sorry for,—one thing inparticular,—and he asked her whether she thought she ought to know aboutthem. She considered a moment and then said “No, I think not, though I amglad you ask me. You see, one can’t be jealous about things in general;but about particular, definite, personal things,”—here she hadthrown her hands up to his shoulders with a quick, impulsivegesture—“oh, about those I should be very jealous. I should torturemyself—I couldn’t help it.” After that it was easy to forget,actually to forget. He wondered to-night, as he poured his wine, how many timeshe had thought of Hilda in the last ten years. He had been in London more orless, but he had never happened to hear of her. “All the same,” helifted his glass, “here’s to you, little Hilda. You’ve madethings come your way, and I never thought you’d do it.

“Of course,” he reflected, “she always had that combinationof something homely and sensible, and something utterly wild and daft. But Inever thought she’d do anything. She hadn’t much ambition then, andshe was too fond of trifles. She must care about the theatre a great deal morethan she used to. Perhaps she has me to thank for something, after all.Sometimes a little jolt like that does one good. She was a daft, generouslittle thing. I’m glad she’s held her own since. After all, we wereawfully young. It was youth and poverty and proximity, and everything was youngand kindly. I shouldn’t wonder if she could laugh about it with me now. Ishouldn’t wonder— But they’ve probably spoiled her, so thatshe’d be tiresome if one met her again.”

Bartley smiled and yawned and went to bed.

CHAPTER III

The next evening Alexander dined alone at a club, and at about nineo’clock he dropped in at the Duke of York’s. The house was sold outand he stood through the second act. When he returned to his hotel he examinedthe new directory, and found Miss Burgoyne’s address still given as offBedford Square, though at a new number. He remembered that, in so far as shehad been brought up at all, she had been brought up in Bloomsbury. Her fatherand mother played in the provinces most of the year, and she was left a greatdeal in the care of an old aunt who was crippled by rheumatism and who had hadto leave the stage altogether. In the days when Alexander knew her, Hildaalways managed to have a lodging of some sort about Bedford Square, because sheclung tenaciously to such scraps and shreds of memories as were connected withit. The mummy room of the British Museum had been one of the chief delights ofher childhood. That forbidding pile was the goal of her truant fancy, and shewas sometimes taken there for a treat, as other children are taken to thetheatre. It was long since Alexander had thought of any of these things, butnow they came back to him quite fresh, and had a significance they did not havewhen they were first told him in his restless twenties. So she was still in theold neighborhood, near Bedford Square. The new number probably meant increasedprosperity. He hoped so. He would like to know that she was snugly settled. Helooked at his watch. It was a quarter past ten; she would not be home for agood two hours yet, and he might as well walk over and have a look at theplace. He remembered the shortest way.

It was a warm, smoky evening, and there was a grimy moon. He went throughCovent Garden to Oxford Street, and as he turned into Museum Street he walkedmore slowly, smiling at his own nervousness as he approached the sullen graymass at the end. He had not been inside the Museum, actually, since he andHilda used to meet there; sometimes to set out for gay adventures at Twickenhamor Richmond, sometimes to linger about the place for a while and to ponder byLord Elgin’s marbles upon the lastingness of some things, or, in themummy room, upon the awful brevity of others. Since then Bartley had alwaysthought of the British Museum as the ultimate repository of mortality, whereall the dead things in the world were assembled to make one’s hour ofyouth the more precious. One trembled lest before he got out it might somehowescape him, lest he might drop the glass from over-eagerness and see itshivered on the stone floor at his feet. How one hid his youth under his coatand hugged it! And how good it was to turn one’s back upon all thatvaulted cold, to take Hilda’s arm and hurry out of the great door anddown the steps into the sunlight among the pigeons—to know that the warmand vital thing within him was still there and had not been snatched away toflush Cæsar’s lean cheek or to feed the veins of some bearded Assyrianking. They in their day had carried the flaming liquor, but to-day was his! Sothe song used to run in his head those summer mornings a dozen years ago.Alexander walked by the place very quietly, as if he were afraid of waking someone.

He crossed Bedford Square and found the number he was looking for. The house, acomfortable, well-kept place enough, was dark except for the four front windowson the second floor, where a low, even light was burning behind the whitemuslin sash curtains. Outside there were window boxes, painted white and fullof flowers. Bartley was making a third round of the Square when he heard thefar-flung hoof-beats of a hansom-cab horse, driven rapidly. He looked at hiswatch, and was astonished to find that it was a few minutes after twelve. Heturned and walked back along the iron railing as the cab came up toHilda’s number and stopped. The hansom must have been one that sheemployed regularly, for she did not stop to pay the driver. She stepped outquickly and lightly. He heard her cheerful “Good-night, cabby,” asshe ran up the steps and opened the door with a latchkey. In a few moments thelights flared up brightly behind the white curtains, and as he walked away heheard a window raised. But he had gone too far to look up without turninground. He went back to his hotel, feeling that he had had a good evening, andhe slept well.

For the next few days Alexander was very busy. He took a desk in the office ofa Scotch engineering firm on Henrietta Street, and was at work almostconstantly. He avoided the clubs and usually dined alone at his hotel. Oneafternoon, after he had tea, he started for a walk down the Embankment towardWestminster, intending to end his stroll at Bedford Square and to ask whetherMiss Burgoyne would let him take her to the theatre. But he did not go so far.When he reached the Abbey, he turned back and crossed Westminster Bridge andsat down to watch the trails of smoke behind the Houses of Parliament catchfire with the sunset. The slender towers were washed by a rain of golden lightand licked by little flickering flames; Somerset House and the bleached graypinnacles about Whitehall were floated in a luminous haze. The yellow lightpoured through the trees and the leaves seemed to burn with soft fires. Therewas a smell of acacias in the air everywhere, and the laburnums were drippinggold over the walls of the gardens. It was a sweet, lonely kind of summerevening. Remembering Hilda as she used to be, was doubtless more satisfactorythan seeing her as she must be now—and, after all, Alexander askedhimself, what was it but his own young years that he was remembering?

He crossed back to Westminster, went up to the Temple, and sat down to smoke inthe Middle Temple gardens, listening to the thin voice of the fountain andsmelling the spice of the sycamores that came out heavily in the damp eveningair. He thought, as he sat there, about a great many things: about his ownyouth and Hilda’s; above all, he thought of how glorious it had been, andhow quickly it had passed; and, when it had passed, how little worth whileanything was. None of the things he had gained in the least compensated. In thelast six years his reputation had become, as the saying is, popular. Four yearsago he had been called to Japan to deliver, at the Emperor’s request, acourse of lectures at the Imperial University, and had instituted reformsthroughout the islands, not only in the practice of bridge-building but indrainage and road-making. On his return he had undertaken the bridge atMoorlock, in Canada, the most important piece of bridge-building going on inthe world,—a test, indeed, of how far the latest practice in bridgestructure could be carried. It was a spectacular undertaking by reason of itsvery size, and Bartley realized that, whatever else he might do, he wouldprobably always be known as the engineer who designed the great MoorlockBridge, the longest cantilever in existence. Yet it was to him the leastsatisfactory thing he had ever done. He was cramped in every way by a niggardlycommission, and was using lighter structural material than he thought proper.He had vexations enough, too, with his work at home. He had several bridgesunder way in the United States, and they were always being held up by strikesand delays resulting from a general industrial unrest.

Though Alexander often told himself he had never put more into his work than hehad done in the last few years, he had to admit that he had never got so littleout of it. He was paying for success, too, in the demands made on his time byboards of civic enterprise and committees of public welfare. The obligationsimposed by his wife’s fortune and position were sometimes distracting toa man who followed his profession, and he was expected to be interested in agreat many worthy endeavors on her account as well as on his own. His existencewas becoming a network of great and little details. He had expected thatsuccess would bring him freedom and power; but it had brought only power thatwas in itself another kind of restraint. He had always meant to keep hispersonal liberty at all costs, as old MacKeller, his first chief, had done, andnot, like so many American engineers, to become a part of a professionalmovement, a cautious board member, a Nestor de pontibus. He happened tobe engaged in work of public utility, but he was not willing to become what iscalled a public man. He found himself living exactly the kind of life he haddetermined to escape. What, he asked himself, did he want with these genialhonors and substantial comforts? Hardships and difficulties he had carriedlightly; overwork had not exhausted him; but this dead calm of middle lifewhich confronted him,—of that he was afraid. He was not ready for it. Itwas like being buried alive. In his youth he would not have believed such athing possible. The one thing he had really wanted all his life was to be free;and there was still something unconquered in him, something besides the strongwork-horse that his profession had made of him. He felt rich to-night in thepossession of that unstultified survival; in the light of his experience, itwas more precious than honors or achievement. In all those busy, successfulyears there had been nothing so good as this hour of wild light-heartedness.This feeling was the only happiness that was real to him, and such hours werethe only ones in which he could feel his own continuous identity—feel theboy he had been in the rough days of the old West, feel the youth who hadworked his way across the ocean on a cattle-ship and gone to study in Pariswithout a dollar in his pocket. The man who sat in his offices in Boston wasonly a powerful machine. Under the activities of that machine the person who,in such moments as this, he felt to be himself, was fading and dying. Heremembered how, when he was a little boy and his father called him in themorning, he used to leap from his bed into the full consciousness of himself.That consciousness was Life itself. Whatever took its place, action,reflection, the power of concentrated thought, were only functions of amechanism useful to society; things that could be bought in the market. Therewas only one thing that had an absolute value for each individual, and it wasjust that original impulse, that internal heat, that feeling of one’sself in one’s own breast.

When Alexander walked back to his hotel, the red and green lights were blinkingalong the docks on the farther shore, and the soft white stars were shining inthe wide sky above the river.

The next night, and the next, Alexander repeated this same foolish performance.It was always Miss Burgoyne whom he started out to find, and he got no fartherthan the Temple gardens and the Embankment. It was a pleasant kind ofloneliness. To a man who was so little given to reflection, whose dreams alwaystook the form of definite ideas, reaching into the future, there was aseductive excitement in renewing old experiences in imagination. He started outupon these walks half guiltily, with a curious longing and expectancy whichwere wholly gratified by solitude. Solitude, but not solitariness; for hewalked shoulder to shoulder with a shadowy companion—not little HildaBurgoyne, by any means, but some one vastly dearer to him than she had everbeen—his own young self, the youth who had waited for him upon the stepsof the British Museum that night, and who, though he had tried to pass soquietly, had known him and come down and linked an arm in his.

It was not until long afterward that Alexander learned that for him this youthwas the most dangerous of companions.

One Sunday evening, at Lady Walford’s, Alexander did at last meet HildaBurgoyne. Mainhall had told him that she would probably be there. He lookedabout for her rather nervously, and finally found her at the farther end of thelarge drawing-room, the centre of a circle of men, young and old. She wasapparently telling them a story. They were all laughing and bending toward her.When she saw Alexander, she rose quickly and put out her hand. The other mendrew back a little to let him approach.

“Mr. Alexander! I am delighted. Have you been in London long?”

Bartley bowed, somewhat laboriously, over her hand. “Long enough to haveseen you more than once. How fine it all is!”

She laughed as if she were pleased. “I’m glad you think so. I likeit. Won’t you join us here?”

“Miss Burgoyne was just telling us about a donkey-boy she had in Galwaylast summer,” Sir Harry Towne explained as the circle closed up again.Lord Westmere stroked his long white mustache with his bloodless hand andlooked at Alexander blankly. Hilda was a good story-teller. She was sitting onthe edge of her chair, as if she had alighted there for a moment only. Herprimrose satin gown seemed like a soft sheath for her slender, supple figure,and its delicate color suited her white Irish skin and brown hair. Whatever shewore, people felt the charm of her active, girlish body with its slender hipsand quick, eager shoulders. Alexander heard little of the story, but he watchedHilda intently. She must certainly, he reflected, be thirty, and he washonestly delighted to see that the years had treated her so indulgently. If herface had changed at all, it was in a slight hardening of the mouth—stilleager enough to be very disconcerting at times, he felt—and in an addedair of self-possession and self-reliance. She carried her head, too, a littlemore resolutely.

When the story was finished, Miss Burgoyne turned pointedly to Alexander, andthe other men drifted away.

“I thought I saw you in MacConnell’s box with Mainhall one evening,but I supposed you had left town before this.”

She looked at him frankly and cordially, as if he were indeed merely an oldfriend whom she was glad to meet again.

“No, I’ve been mooning about here.”

Hilda laughed gayly. “Mooning! I see you mooning! You must be the busiestman in the world. Time and success have done well by you, you know.You’re handsomer than ever and you’ve gained a grand manner.”

Alexander blushed and bowed. “Time and success have been good friends toboth of us. Aren’t you tremendously pleased with yourself?”

She laughed again and shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, so-so. But I want tohear about you. Several years ago I read such a lot in the papers about thewonderful things you did in Japan, and how the Emperor decorated you. What wasit, Commander of the Order of the Rising Sun? That sounds like ‘TheMikado.’ And what about your new bridge—in Canada, isn’t it,and it’s to be the longest one in the world and has some queer name Ican’t remember.”

Bartley shook his head and smiled drolly. “Since when have you beeninterested in bridges? Or have you learned to be interested in everything? Andis that a part of success?”

“Why, how absurd! As if I were not always interested!” Hildaexclaimed.

“Well, I think we won’t talk about bridges here, at anyrate.” Bartley looked down at the toe of her yellow slipper which wastapping the rug impatiently under the hem of her gown. “But I wonderwhether you’d think me impertinent if I asked you to let me come to seeyou sometime and tell you about them?”

“Why should I? Ever so many people come on Sunday afternoons.”

“I know. Mainhall offered to take me. But you must know that I’vebeen in London several times within the last few years, and you might very wellthink that just now is a rather inopportune time—”

She cut him short. “Nonsense. One of the pleasantest things about successis that it makes people want to look one up, if that’s what you mean.I’m like every one else—more agreeable to meet when things aregoing well with me. Don’t you suppose it gives me any pleasure to dosomething that people like?”

“Does it? Oh, how fine it all is, your coming on like this! But Ididn’t want you to think it was because of that I wanted to seeyou.” He spoke very seriously and looked down at the floor.

Hilda studied him in wide-eyed astonishment for a moment, and then broke into alow, amused laugh. “My dear Mr. Alexander, you have strange delicacies.If you please, that is exactly why you wish to see me. We understand that, dowe not?”

Bartley looked ruffled and turned the seal ring on his little finger aboutawkwardly.

Hilda leaned back in her chair, watching him indulgently out of her shrewdeyes. “Come, don’t be angry, but don’t try to pose for me, orto be anything but what you are. If you care to come, it’s yourselfI’ll be glad to see, and you thinking well of yourself. Don’t tryto wear a cloak of humility; it doesn’t become you. Stalk in as you areand don’t make excuses. I’m not accustomed to inquiring into themotives of my guests. That would hardly be safe, even for Lady Walford, in agreat house like this.”

“Sunday afternoon, then,” said Alexander, as she rose to join herhostess. “How early may I come?”

She gave him her hand and flushed and laughed. He bent over it a littlestiffly. She went away on Lady Walford’s arm, and as he stood watchingher yellow train glide down the long floor he looked rather sullen. He feltthat he had not come out of it very brilliantly.

CHAPTER IV

On Sunday afternoon Alexander remembered Miss Burgoyne’s invitation andcalled at her apartment. He found it a delightful little place and he metcharming people there. Hilda lived alone, attended by a very pretty andcompetent French servant who answered the door and brought in the tea.Alexander arrived early, and some twenty-odd people dropped in during thecourse of the afternoon. Hugh MacConnell came with his sister, and stood about,managing his tea-cup awkwardly and watching every one out of his deep-set,faded eyes. He seemed to have made a resolute effort at tidiness of attire, andhis sister, a robust, florid woman with a splendid joviality about her, kepteyeing his freshly creased clothes apprehensively. It was not very long,indeed, before his coat hung with a discouraged sag from his gaunt shouldersand his hair and beard were rumpled as if he had been out in a gale. His dryhumor went under a cloud of absent-minded kindliness which, Mainhall explained,always overtook him here. He was never so witty or so sharp here as elsewhere,and Alexander thought he behaved as if he were an elderly relative come in to ayoung girl’s party.

The editor of a monthly review came with his wife, and Lady Kildare, the Irishphilanthropist, brought her young nephew, Robert Owen, who had come up fromOxford, and who was visibly excited and gratified by his first introduction toMiss Burgoyne. Hilda was very nice to him, and he sat on the edge of his chair,flushed with his conversational efforts and moving his chin about nervouslyover his high collar. Sarah Frost, the novelist, came with her husband, a verygenial and placid old scholar who had become slightly deranged upon the subjectof the fourth dimension. On other matters he was perfectly rational and he waseasy and pleasing in conversation. He looked very much like Agassiz, and hiswife, in her old-fashioned black silk dress, overskirted and tight-sleeved,reminded Alexander of the early pictures of Mrs. Browning. Hilda seemedparticularly fond of this quaint couple, and Bartley himself was so pleasedwith their mild and thoughtful converse that he took his leave when they did,and walked with them over to Oxford Street, where they waited for their‘bus. They asked him to come to see them in Chelsea, and they spoke verytenderly of Hilda. “She’s a dear, unworldly little thing,”said the philosopher absently; “more like the stage people of my youngdays—folk of simple manners. There aren’t many such left. Americantours have spoiled them, I’m afraid. They have all grown very smart. Lambwouldn’t care a great deal about many of them, I fancy.”

Alexander went back to Bedford Square a second Sunday afternoon. He had a longtalk with MacConnell, but he got no word with Hilda alone, and he left in adiscontented state of mind. For the rest of the week he was nervous andunsettled, and kept rushing his work as if he were preparing for immediatedeparture. On Thursday afternoon he cut short a committee meeting, jumped intoa hansom, and drove to Bedford Square. He sent up his card, but it came back tohim with a message scribbled across the front.

So sorry I can’t see you. Will you come and dine with me Sunday eveningat half-past seven?

H.B.

When Bartley arrived at Bedford Square on Sunday evening, Marie, the prettylittle French girl, met him at the door and conducted him upstairs. Hilda waswriting in her living-room, under the light of a tall desk lamp. Bartleyrecognized the primrose satin gown she had worn that first evening at LadyWalford’s.

“I’m so pleased that you think me worth that yellow dress, youknow,” he said, taking her hand and looking her over admiringly from thetoes of her canary slippers to her smoothly parted brown hair. “Yes,it’s very, very pretty. Every one at Lady Walford’s was looking atit.”

Hilda curtsied. “Is that why you think it pretty? I’ve no need forfine clothes in Mac’s play this time, so I can afford a few duddies formyself. It’s owing to that same chance, by the way, that I am able to askyou to dinner. I don’t need Marie to dress me this season, so she keepshouse for me, and my little Galway girl has gone home for a visit. I shouldnever have asked you if Molly had been here, for I remember you don’tlike English cookery.”

Alexander walked about the room, looking at everything.

“I haven’t had a chance yet to tell you what a jolly little place Ithink this is. Where did you get those etchings? They’re quite unusual,aren’t they?”

“Lady Westmere sent them to me from Rome last Christmas. She is very muchinterested in the American artist who did them. They are all sketches madeabout the Villa d’Este, you see. He painted that group of cypresses forthe Salon, and it was bought for the Luxembourg.”

Alexander walked over to the bookcases. “It’s the air of the wholeplace here that I like. You haven’t got anything that doesn’tbelong. Seems to me it looks particularly well to-night. And you have so manyflowers. I like these little yellow irises.”

“Rooms always look better by lamplight—in London, at least. ThoughMarie is clean—really clean, as the French are. Why do you look at theflowers so critically? Marie got them all fresh in Covent Garden marketyesterday morning.”

“I’m glad,” said Alexander simply. “I can’t tellyou how glad I am to have you so pretty and comfortable here, and to hear everyone saying such nice things about you. You’ve got awfully nicefriends,” he added humbly, picking up a little jade elephant from herdesk. “Those fellows are all very loyal, even Mainhall. They don’ttalk of any one else as they do of you.”

Hilda sat down on the couch and said seriously: “I’ve a neat littlesum in the bank, too, now, and I own a mite of a hut in Galway. It’s notworth much, but I love it. I’ve managed to save something every year, andthat with helping my three sisters now and then, and tiding poor Cousin Mikeover bad seasons. He’s that gifted, you know, but he will drink and losesmore good engagements than other fellows ever get. And I’ve traveled abit, too.”

Marie opened the door and smilingly announced that dinner was served.

“My dining-room,” Hilda explained, as she led the way, “isthe tiniest place you have ever seen.”

It was a tiny room, hung all round with French prints, above which ran a shelffull of china. Hilda saw Alexander look up at it.

“It’s not particularly rare,” she said, “but some of itwas my mother’s. Heaven knows how she managed to keep it whole, throughall our wanderings, or in what baskets and bundles and theatre trunks ithasn’t been stowed away. We always had our tea out of those blue cupswhen I was a little girl, sometimes in the queerest lodgings, and sometimes ona trunk at the theatre—queer theatres, for that matter.”

It was a wonderful little dinner. There was watercress soup, and sole, and adelightful omelette stuffed with mushrooms and truffles, and two small rareducklings, and artichokes, and a dry yellow Rhone wine of which Bartley hadalways been very fond. He drank it appreciatively and remarked that there wasstill no other he liked so well.

“I have some champagne for you, too. I don’t drink it myself, but Ilike to see it behave when it’s poured. There is nothing else that looksso jolly.”

“Thank you. But I don’t like it so well as this.” Bartleyheld the yellow wine against the light and squinted into it as he turned theglass slowly about. “You have traveled, you say. Have you been in Parismuch these late years?”

Hilda lowered one of the candle-shades carefully. “Oh, yes, I go over toParis often. There are few changes in the old Quarter. Dear old Madame Anger isdead—but perhaps you don’t remember her?”

“Don’t I, though! I’m so sorry to hear it. How did her sonturn out? I remember how she saved and scraped for him, and how he always layabed till ten o’clock. He was the laziest fellow at the Beaux Arts; andthat’s saying a good deal.”

“Well, he is still clever and lazy. They say he is a good architect whenhe will work. He’s a big, handsome creature, and he hates Americans asmuch as ever. But Angel—do you remember Angel?”

“Perfectly. Did she ever get back to Brittany and her bains demer?”

“Ah, no. Poor Angel! She got tired of cooking and scouring the coppers inMadame Anger’s little kitchen, so she ran away with a soldier, and thenwith another soldier. Too bad! She still lives about the Quarter, and, thoughthere is always a soldat, she has become a blanchisseuse de fin.She did my blouses beautifully the last time I was there, and was so delightedto see me again. I gave her all my old clothes, even my old hats, though shealways wears her Breton headdress. Her hair is still like flax, and her blueeyes are just like a baby’s, and she has the same three freckles on herlittle nose, and talks about going back to her bains de mer.”

Bartley looked at Hilda across the yellow light of the candles and broke into alow, happy laugh. “How jolly it was being young, Hilda! Do you rememberthat first walk we took together in Paris? We walked down to the PlaceSaint-Michel to buy some lilacs. Do you remember how sweet they smelled?”

“Indeed I do. Come, we’ll have our coffee in the other room, andyou can smoke.”

Hilda rose quickly, as if she wished to change the drift of their talk, butBartley found it pleasant to continue it.

“What a warm, soft spring evening that was,” he went on, as theysat down in the study with the coffee on a little table between them;“and the sky, over the bridges, was just the color of the lilacs. Wewalked on down by the river, didn’t we?”

Hilda laughed and looked at him questioningly. He saw a gleam in her eyes thathe remembered even better than the episode he was recalling.

“I think we did,” she answered demurely. “It was on the Quaiwe met that woman who was crying so bitterly. I gave her a spray of lilac, Iremember, and you gave her a franc. I was frightened at yourprodigality.”

“I expect it was the last franc I had. What a strong brown face she had,and very tragic. She looked at us with such despair and longing, out from underher black shawl. What she wanted from us was neither our flowers nor ourfrancs, but just our youth. I remember it touched me so. I would have given hersome of mine off my back, if I could. I had enough and to spare then,”Bartley mused, and looked thoughtfully at his cigar.

They were both remembering what the woman had said when she took the money:“God give you a happy love!” It was not in the ingratiating tone ofthe habitual beggar: it had come out of the depths of the poor creature’ssorrow, vibrating with pity for their youth and despair at the terribleness ofhuman life; it had the anguish of a voice of prophecy. Until she spoke, Bartleyhad not realized that he was in love. The strange woman, and her passionatesentence that rang out so sharply, had frightened them both. They went homesadly with the lilacs, back to the Rue Saint-Jacques, walking very slowly, armin arm. When they reached the house where Hilda lodged, Bartley went across thecourt with her, and up the dark old stairs to the third landing; and there hehad kissed her for the first time. He had shut his eyes to give him thecourage, he remembered, and she had trembled so—

Bartley started when Hilda rang the little bell beside her. “Dear me, whydid you do that? I had quite forgotten—I was back there. It was veryjolly,” he murmured lazily, as Marie came in to take away the coffee.

Hilda laughed and went over to the piano. “Well, we are neither of ustwenty now, you know. Have I told you about my new play? Mac is writing one;really for me this time. You see, I’m coming on.”

“I’ve seen nothing else. What kind of a part is it? Shall you wearyellow gowns? I hope so.”

He was looking at her round slender figure, as she stood by the piano, turningover a pile of music, and he felt the energy in every line of it.

“No, it isn’t a dress-up part. He doesn’t seem to fancy me infine feathers. He says I ought to be minding the pigs at home, and I suppose Iought. But he’s given me some good Irish songs. Listen.”

She sat down at the piano and sang. When she finished, Alexander shook himselfout of a reverie.

“Sing ‘The Harp That Once,’ Hilda. You used to sing it sowell.”

“Nonsense. Of course I can’t really sing, except the way my motherand grandmother did before me. Most actresses nowadays learn to sing properly,so I tried a master; but he confused me, just!”

Alexander laughed. “All the same, sing it, Hilda.”

Hilda started up from the stool and moved restlessly toward the window.“It’s really too warm in this room to sing. Don’t you feelit?”

Alexander went over and opened the window for her. “Aren’t youafraid to let the wind low like that on your neck? Can’t I get a scarf orsomething?”

“Ask a theatre lady if she’s afraid of drafts!” Hildalaughed. “But perhaps, as I’m so warm—give me yourhandkerchief. There, just in front.” He slipped the corners carefullyunder her shoulder-straps. “There, that will do. It looks like abib.” She pushed his hand away quickly and stood looking out into thedeserted square. “Isn’t London a tomb on Sunday night?”

Alexander caught the agitation in her voice. He stood a little behind her, andtried to steady himself as he said: “It’s soft and misty. See howwhite the stars are.”

For a long time neither Hilda nor Bartley spoke. They stood close together,looking out into the wan, watery sky, breathing always more quickly andlightly, and it seemed as if all the clocks in the world had stopped. Suddenlyhe moved the clenched hand he held behind him and dropped it violently at hisside. He felt a tremor run through the slender yellow figure in front of him.

She caught his handkerchief from her throat and thrust it at him withoutturning round. “Here, take it. You must go now, Bartley.Good-night.”

Bartley leaned over her shoulder, without touching her, and whispered in herear: “You are giving me a chance?”

“Yes. Take it and go. This isn’t fair, you know. Good-night.”

Alexander unclenched the two hands at his sides. With one he threw down thewindow and with the other—still standing behind her—he drew herback against him.

She uttered a little cry, threw her arms over her head, and drew his face downto hers. “Are you going to let me love you a little, Bartley?” shewhispered.

CHAPTER V

It was the afternoon of the day before Christmas. Mrs. Alexander had beendriving about all the morning, leaving presents at the houses of her friends.She lunched alone, and as she rose from the table she spoke to the butler:“Thomas, I am going down to the kitchen now to see Norah. In half an houryou are to bring the greens up from the cellar and put them in the library. Mr.Alexander will be home at three to hang them himself. Don’t forget thestepladder, and plenty of tacks and string. You may bring the azaleas upstairs.Take the white one to Mr. Alexander’s study. Put the two pink ones inthis room, and the red one in the drawing-room.”

A little before three o’clock Mrs. Alexander went into the library to seethat everything was ready. She pulled the window shades high, for the weatherwas dark and stormy, and there was little light, even in the streets. A foot ofsnow had fallen during the morning, and the wide space over the river was thickwith flying flakes that fell and wreathed the masses of floating ice. Winifredwas standing by the window when she heard the front door open. She hurried tothe hall as Alexander came stamping in, covered with snow. He kissed herjoyfully and brushed away the snow that fell on her hair.

“I wish I had asked you to meet me at the office and walk home with me,Winifred. The Common is beautiful. The boys have swept the snow off the pondand are skating furiously. Did the cyclamens come?”

“An hour ago. What splendid ones! But aren’t you frightfullyextravagant?”

“Not for Christmas-time. I’ll go upstairs and change my coat. Ishall be down in a moment. Tell Thomas to get everything ready.”

When Alexander reappeared, he took his wife’s arm and went with her intothe library. “When did the azaleas get here? Thomas has got the white onein my room.”

“I told him to put it there.”

“But, I say, it’s much the finest of the lot!”

“That’s why I had it put there. There is too much color in thatroom for a red one, you know.”

Bartley began to sort the greens. “It looks very splendid there, but Ifeel piggish to have it. However, we really spend more time there than anywhereelse in the house. Will you hand me the holly?”

He climbed up the stepladder, which creaked under his weight, and began totwist the tough stems of the holly into the frame-work of the chandelier.

“I forgot to tell you that I had a letter from Wilson, this morning,explaining his telegram. He is coming on because an old uncle up in Vermont hasconveniently died and left Wilson a little money—something like tenthousand. He’s coming on to settle up the estate. Won’t it be jollyto have him?”

“And how fine that he’s come into a little money. I can see himposting down State Street to the steamship offices. He will get a good manytrips out of that ten thousand. What can have detained him? I expected him herefor luncheon.”

“Those trains from Albany are always late. He’ll be along sometimethis afternoon. And now, don’t you want to go upstairs and lie down foran hour? You’ve had a busy morning and I don’t want you to be tiredto-night.”

After his wife went upstairs Alexander worked energetically at the greens for afew moments. Then, as he was cutting off a length of string, he sighed suddenlyand sat down, staring out of the window at the snow. The animation died out ofhis face, but in his eyes there was a restless light, a look of apprehensionand suspense. He kept clasping and unclasping his big hands as if he weretrying to realize something. The clock ticked through the minutes of ahalf-hour and the afternoon outside began to thicken and darken turbidly.Alexander, since he first sat down, had not changed his position. He leanedforward, his hands between his knees, scarcely breathing, as if he were holdinghimself away from his surroundings, from the room, and from the very chair inwhich he sat, from everything except the wild eddies of snow above the river onwhich his eyes were fixed with feverish intentness, as if he were trying toproject himself thither. When at last Lucius Wilson was announced, Alexandersprang eagerly to his feet and hurried to meet his old instructor.

“Hello, Wilson. What luck! Come into the library. We are to have a lot ofpeople to dinner to-night, and Winifred’s lying down. You will excuseher, won’t you? And now what about yourself? Sit down and tell meeverything.”

“I think I’d rather move about, if you don’t mind. I’vebeen sitting in the train for a week, it seems to me.” Wilson stoodbefore the fire with his hands behind him and looked about the room. “Youhavebeen busy. Bartley, if I’d had my choice of all possibleplaces in which to spend Christmas, your house would certainly be the placeI’d have chosen. Happy people do a great deal for their friends. A houselike this throws its warmth out. I felt it distinctly as I was coming throughthe Berkshires. I could scarcely believe that I was to see Mrs. Bartley againso soon.”

“Thank you, Wilson. She’ll be as glad to see you. Shall we have teanow? I’ll ring for Thomas to clear away this litter. Winifred says Ialways wreck the house when I try to do anything. Do you know, I am quitetired. Looks as if I were not used to work, doesn’t it?” Alexanderlaughed and dropped into a chair. “You know, I’m sailing the dayafter New Year’s.”

“Again? Why, you’ve been over twice since I was here in the spring,haven’t you?”

“Oh, I was in London about ten days in the summer. Went to escape the hotweather more than anything else. I shan’t be gone more than a month thistime. Winifred and I have been up in Canada for most of the autumn. ThatMoorlock Bridge is on my back all the time. I never had so much trouble with ajob before.” Alexander moved about restlessly and fell to poking thefire.

“Haven’t I seen in the papers that there is some trouble about atidewater bridge of yours in New Jersey?”

“Oh, that doesn’t amount to anything. It’s held up by a steelstrike. A bother, of course, but the sort of thing one is always having to putup with. But the Moorlock Bridge is a continual anxiety. You see, the truth is,we are having to build pretty well to the strain limit up there. They’vecrowded me too much on the cost. It’s all very well if everything goeswell, but these estimates have never been used for anything of such lengthbefore. However, there’s nothing to be done. They hold me to the scaleI’ve used in shorter bridges. The last thing a bridge commission caresabout is the kind of bridge you build.”

When Bartley had finished dressing for dinner he went into his study, where hefound his wife arranging flowers on his writing-table.

“These pink roses just came from Mrs. Hastings,” she said, smiling,“and I am sure she meant them for you.”

Bartley looked about with an air of satisfaction at the greens and the wreathsin the windows. “Have you a moment, Winifred? I have just now beenthinking that this is our twelfth Christmas. Can you realize it?” He wentup to the table and took her hands away from the flowers, drying them with hispocket handkerchief. “They’ve been awfully happy ones, all of them,haven’t they?” He took her in his arms and bent back, lifting her alittle and giving her a long kiss. “You are happy, aren’t youWinifred? More than anything else in the world, I want you to be happy.Sometimes, of late, I’ve thought you looked as if you weretroubled.”

“No; it’s only when you are troubled and harassed that I feelworried, Bartley. I wish you always seemed as you do to-night. But youdon’t, always.” She looked earnestly and inquiringly into his eyes.

Alexander took her two hands from his shoulders and swung them back and forthin his own, laughing his big blond laugh.

“I’m growing older, my dear; that’s what you feel. Now, may Ishow you something? I meant to save them until to-morrow, but I want you towear them to-night.” He took a little leather box out of his pocket andopened it. On the white velvet lay two long pendants of curiously worked gold,set with pearls. Winifred looked from the box to Bartley and exclaimed:—

“Where did you ever find such gold work, Bartley?”

“It’s old Flemish. Isn’t it fine?”

“They are the most beautiful things, dear. But, you know, I never wearearrings.”

“Yes, yes, I know. But I want you to wear them. I have always wanted youto. So few women can. There must be a good ear, to begin with, and anose”—he waved his hand—“above reproach. Most womenlook silly in them. They go only with faces like yours—very, very proud,and just a little hard.”

Winifred laughed as she went over to the mirror and fitted the delicate springsto the lobes of her ears. “Oh, Bartley, that old foolishness about mybeing hard. It really hurts my feelings. But I must go down now. People arebeginning to come.”

Bartley drew her arm about his neck and went to the door with her. “Nothard to me, Winifred,” he whispered. “Never, never hard tome.”

Left alone, he paced up and down his study. He was at home again, among all thedear familiar things that spoke to him of so many happy years. His houseto-night would be full of charming people, who liked and admired him. Yet allthe time, underneath his pleasure and hopefulness and satisfaction, he wasconscious of the vibration of an unnatural excitement. Amid this light andwarmth and friendliness, he sometimes started and shuddered, as if some one hadstepped on his grave. Something had broken loose in him of which he knewnothing except that it was sullen and powerful, and that it wrung and torturedhim. Sometimes it came upon him softly, in enervating reveries. Sometimes itbattered him like the cannon rolling in the hold of the vessel. Always, now, itbrought with it a sense of quickened life, of stimulating danger. To-night itcame upon him suddenly, as he was walking the floor, after his wife left him.It seemed impossible; he could not believe it. He glanced entreatingly at thedoor, as if to call her back. He heard voices in the hall below, and knew thathe must go down. Going over to the window, he looked out at the lights acrossthe river. How could this happen here, in his own house, among the things heloved? What was it that reached in out of the darkness and thrilled him? As hestood there he had a feeling that he would never escape. He shut his eyes andpressed his forehead against the cold window glass, breathing in the chill thatcame through it. “That this,” he groaned, “that this shouldhave happened to me!”

On New Year’s day a thaw set in, and during the night torrents of rainfell. In the morning, the morning of Alexander’s departure for England,the river was streaked with fog and the rain drove hard against the windows ofthe breakfast-room. Alexander had finished his coffee and was pacing up anddown. His wife sat at the table, watching him. She was pale and unnaturallycalm. When Thomas brought the letters, Bartley sank into his chair and ran themover rapidly.

“Here’s a note from old Wilson. He’s safe back at his grind,and says he had a bully time. ‘The memory of Mrs. Bartley will make mywhole winter fragrant.’ Just like him. He will go on getting measurelesssatisfaction out of you by his study fire. What a man he is for looking on atlife!” Bartley sighed, pushed the letters back impatiently, and went overto the window. “This is a nasty sort of day to sail. I’ve a notionto call it off. Next week would be time enough.”

“That would only mean starting twice. It wouldn’t really help youout at all,” Mrs. Alexander spoke soothingly. “And you’d comeback late for all your engagements.”

Bartley began jingling some loose coins in his pocket. “I wish thingswould let me rest. I’m tired of work, tired of people, tired of trailingabout.” He looked out at the storm-beaten river.

Winifred came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. “That’swhat you always say, poor Bartley! At bottom you really like all these things.Can’t you remember that?”

He put his arm about her. “All the same, life runs smoothly enough withsome people, and with me it’s always a messy sort of patchwork.It’s like the song; peace is where I am not. How can you face it all withso much fortitude?”

She looked at him with that clear gaze which Wilson had so much admired, whichhe had felt implied such high confidence and fearless pride. “Oh, I facedthat long ago, when you were on your first bridge, up at old Allway. I knewthen that your paths were not to be paths of peace, but I decided that I wantedto follow them.”

Bartley and his wife stood silent for a long time; the fire crackled in thegrate, the rain beat insistently upon the windows, and the sleepy Angora lookedup at them curiously.

Presently Thomas made a discreet sound at the door. “Shall Edward bringdown your trunks, sir?”

“Yes; they are ready. Tell him not to forget the big portfolio on thestudy table.”

Thomas withdrew, closing the door softly. Bartley turned away from his wife,still holding her hand. “It never gets any easier, Winifred.”

They both started at the sound of the carriage on the pavement outside.Alexander sat down and leaned his head on his hand. His wife bent over him.“Courage,” she said gayly. Bartley rose and rang the bell. Thomasbrought him his hat and stick and ulster. At the sight of these, thesupercilious Angora moved restlessly, quitted her red cushion by the fire, andcame up, waving her tail in vexation at these ominous indications of change.Alexander stooped to stroke her, and then plunged into his coat and drew on hisgloves. His wife held his stick, smiling. Bartley smiled too, and his eyescleared. “I’ll work like the devil, Winifred, and be home againbefore you realize I’ve gone.” He kissed her quickly several times,hurried out of the front door into the rain, and waved to her from the carriagewindow as the driver was starting his melancholy, dripping black horses.Alexander sat with his hands clenched on his knees. As the carriage turned upthe hill, he lifted one hand and brought it down violently. “Thistime”—he spoke aloud and through his set teeth—“thistime I’m going to end it!”

On the afternoon of the third day out, Alexander was sitting well to the stern,on the windward side where the chairs were few, his rugs over him and thecollar of his fur-lined coat turned up about his ears. The weather had so farbeen dark and raw. For two hours he had been watching the low, dirty sky andthe beating of the heavy rain upon the iron-colored sea. There was a long, oilyswell that made exercise laborious. The decks smelled of damp woolens, and theair was so humid that drops of moisture kept gathering upon his hair andmustache. He seldom moved except to brush them away. The great open spaces madehim passive and the restlessness of the water quieted him. He intended duringthe voyage to decide upon a course of action, but he held all this away fromhim for the present and lay in a blessed gray oblivion. Deep down in himsomewhere his resolution was weakening and strengthening, ebbing and flowing.The thing that perturbed him went on as steadily as his pulse, but he wasalmost unconscious of it. He was submerged in the vast impersonal graynessabout him, and at intervals the sidelong roll of the boat measured off timelike the ticking of a clock. He felt released from everything that troubled andperplexed him. It was as if he had tricked and outwitted torturing memories,had actually managed to get on board without them. He thought of nothing atall. If his mind now and again picked a face out of the grayness, it was LuciusWilson’s, or the face of an old schoolmate, forgotten for years; or itwas the slim outline of a favorite greyhound he used to hunt jack-rabbits withwhen he was a boy.

Toward six o’clock the wind rose and tugged at the tarpaulin and broughtthe swell higher. After dinner Alexander came back to the wet deck, piled hisdamp rugs over him again, and sat smoking, losing himself in the obliteratingblackness and drowsing in the rush of the gale. Before he went below a fewbright stars were pricked off between heavily moving masses of cloud.

The next morning was bright and mild, with a fresh breeze. Alexander felt theneed of exercise even before he came out of his cabin. When he went on deck thesky was blue and blinding, with heavy whiffs of white cloud, smoke-colored atthe edges, moving rapidly across it. The water was roughish, a cold, clearindigo breaking into whitecaps. Bartley walked for two hours, and thenstretched himself in the sun until lunch-time.

In the afternoon he wrote a long letter to Winifred. Later, as he walked thedeck through a splendid golden sunset, his spirits rose continually. It wasagreeable to come to himself again after several days of numbness and torpor.He stayed out until the last tinge of violet had faded from the water. Therewas literally a taste of life on his lips as he sat down to dinner and ordereda bottle of champagne. He was late in finishing his dinner, and drank rathermore wine than he had meant to. When he went above, the wind had risen and thedeck was almost deserted. As he stepped out of the door a gale lifted his heavyfur coat about his shoulders. He fought his way up the deck with keenexhilaration. The moment he stepped, almost out of breath, behind the shelterof the stern, the wind was cut off, and he felt, like a rush of warm air, asense of close and intimate companionship. He started back and tore his coatopen as if something warm were actually clinging to him beneath it. He hurriedup the deck and went into the saloon parlor, full of women who had retreatedthither from the sharp wind. He threw himself upon them. He talked delightfullyto the older ones and played accompaniments for the younger ones until the lastsleepy girl had followed her mother below. Then he went into the smoking-room.He played bridge until two o’clock in the morning, and managed to lose aconsiderable sum of money without really noticing that he was doing so.

After the break of one fine day the weather was pretty consistently dull. Whenthe low sky thinned a trifle, the pale white spot of a sun did no more thanthrow a bluish lustre on the water, giving it the dark brightness of newly cutlead. Through one after another of those gray days Alexander drowsed and mused,drinking in the grateful moisture. But the complete peace of the first part ofthe voyage was over. Sometimes he rose suddenly from his chair as if drivenout, and paced the deck for hours. People noticed his propensity for walking inrough weather, and watched him curiously as he did his rounds. From hisabstraction and the determined set of his jaw, they fancied he must be thinkingabout his bridge. Every one had heard of the new cantilever bridge in Canada.

But Alexander was not thinking about his work. After the fourth night out, whenhis will suddenly softened under his hands, he had been continually hammeringaway at himself. More and more often, when he first wakened in the morning orwhen he stepped into a warm place after being chilled on the deck, he felt asudden painful delight at being nearer another shore. Sometimes when he wasmost despondent, when he thought himself worn out with this struggle, in aflash he was free of it and leaped into an overwhelming consciousness ofhimself. On the instant he felt that marvelous return of the impetuousness, theintense excitement, the increasing expectancy of youth.

CHAPTER VI

The last two days of the voyage Bartley found almost intolerable. The stop atQueenstown, the tedious passage up the Mersey, were things that he noted dimlythrough his growing impatience. He had planned to stop in Liverpool; but,instead, he took the boat train for London.

Emerging at Euston at half-past three o’clock in the afternoon, Alexanderhad his luggage sent to the Savoy and drove at once to Bedford Square. WhenMarie met him at the door, even her strong sense of the proprieties could notrestrain her surprise and delight. She blushed and smiled and fumbled his cardin her confusion before she ran upstairs. Alexander paced up and down thehallway, buttoning and unbuttoning his overcoat, until she returned and tookhim up to Hilda’s living-room. The room was empty when he entered. A coalfire was crackling in the grate and the lamps were lit, for it was alreadybeginning to grow dark outside. Alexander did not sit down. He stood his groundover by the windows until Hilda came in. She called his name on the threshold,but in her swift flight across the room she felt a change in him and caughtherself up so deftly that he could not tell just when she did it. She merelybrushed his cheek with her lips and put a hand lightly and joyously on eithershoulder. “Oh, what a grand thing to happen on a raw day! I felt it in mybones when I woke this morning that something splendid was going to turn up. Ithought it might be Sister Kate or Cousin Mike would be happening along. Inever dreamed it would be you, Bartley. But why do you let me chatter on likethis? Come over to the fire; you’re chilled through.”

She pushed him toward the big chair by the fire, and sat down on a stool at theopposite side of the hearth, her knees drawn up to her chin, laughing like ahappy little girl.

“When did you come, Bartley, and how did it happen? You haven’tspoken a word.”

“I got in about ten minutes ago. I landed at Liverpool this morning andcame down on the boat train.”

Alexander leaned forward and warmed his hands before the blaze. Hilda watchedhim with perplexity.

“There’s something troubling you, Bartley. What is it?”

Bartley bent lower over the fire. “It’s the whole thing thattroubles me, Hilda. You and I.”

Hilda took a quick, soft breath. She looked at his heavy shoulders and big,determined head, thrust forward like a catapult in leash.

“What about us, Bartley?” she asked in a thin voice.

He locked and unlocked his hands over the grate and spread his fingers close tothe bluish flame, while the coals crackled and the clock ticked and a streetvendor began to call under the window. At last Alexander brought out oneword:—

“Everything!”

Hilda was pale by this time, and her eyes were wide with fright. She lookedabout desperately from Bartley to the door, then to the windows, and back againto Bartley. She rose uncertainly, touched his hair with her hand, then sankback upon her stool.

“I’ll do anything you wish me to, Bartley,” she saidtremulously. “I can’t stand seeing you miserable.”

“I can’t live with myself any longer,” he answered roughly.

He rose and pushed the chair behind him and began to walk miserably about theroom, seeming to find it too small for him. He pulled up a window as if the airwere heavy.

Hilda watched him from her corner, trembling and scarcely breathing, darkshadows growing about her eyes.

“It . . . it hasn’t always made you miserable, has it?” Hereyelids fell and her lips quivered.

“Always. But it’s worse now. It’s unbearable. It tortures meevery minute.”

“But why now?” she asked piteously, wringing her hands.

He ignored her question. “I am not a man who can live two lives,”he went on feverishly. “Each life spoils the other. I get nothing butmisery out of either. The world is all there, just as it used to be, but Ican’t get at it any more. There is this deception between me andeverything.”

At that word “deception,” spoken with such self-contempt, the colorflashed back into Hilda’s face as suddenly as if she had been struck by awhiplash. She bit her lip and looked down at her hands, which were claspedtightly in front of her.

“Could you—could you sit down and talk about it quietly, Bartley,as if I were a friend, and not some one who had to be defied?”

He dropped back heavily into his chair by the fire. “It was myself I wasdefying, Hilda. I have thought about it until I am worn out.”

He looked at her and his haggard face softened. He put out his hand toward heras he looked away again into the fire.

She crept across to him, drawing her stool after her. “When did you firstbegin to feel like this, Bartley?”

“After the very first. The first was—sort of in play, wasn’tit?”

Hilda’s face quivered, but she whispered: “Yes, I think it musthave been. But why didn’t you tell me when you were here in thesummer?”

Alexander groaned. “I meant to, but somehow I couldn’t. We had onlya few days, and your new play was just on, and you were so happy.”

“Yes, I was happy, wasn’t I?” She pressed his hand gently ingratitude. “Weren’t you happy then, at all?”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as if to draw in again thefragrance of those days. Something of their troubling sweetness came back toAlexander, too. He moved uneasily and his chair creaked.

“Yes, I was then. You know. But afterward. . .”

“Yes, yes,” she hurried, pulling her hand gently away from him.Presently it stole back to his coat sleeve. “Please tell me one thing,Bartley. At least, tell me that you believe I thought I was making youhappy.”

His hand shut down quickly over the questioning fingers on his sleeves.“Yes, Hilda; I know that,” he said simply.

She leaned her head against his arm and spoke softly:—

“You see, my mistake was in wanting you to have everything. I wanted youto eat all the cakes and have them, too. I somehow believed that I could takeall the bad consequences for you. I wanted you always to be happy and handsomeand successful—to have all the things that a great man ought to have,and, once in a way, the careless holidays that great men are notpermitted.”

Bartley gave a bitter little laugh, and Hilda looked up and read in thedeepening lines of his face that youth and Bartley would not much longerstruggle together.

“I understand, Bartley. I was wrong. But I didn’t know.You’ve only to tell me now. What must I do that I’ve not done, orwhat must I not do?” She listened intently, but she heard nothing but thecreaking of his chair. “You want me to say it?” she whispered.“You want to tell me that you can only see me like this, as old friendsdo, or out in the world among people? I can do that.”

“I can’t,” he said heavily.

Hilda shivered and sat still. Bartley leaned his head in his hands and spokethrough his teeth. “It’s got to be a clean break, Hilda. Ican’t see you at all, anywhere. What I mean is that I want you to promisenever to see me again, no matter how often I come, no matter how hard Ibeg.”

Hilda sprang up like a flame. She stood over him with her hands clenched at herside, her body rigid.

“No!” she gasped. “It’s too late to ask that. Do youhear me, Bartley? It’s too late. I won’t promise. It’sabominable of you to ask me. Keep away if you wish; when have I ever followedyou? But, if you come to me, I’ll do as I see fit. The shamefulness ofyour asking me to do that! If you come to me, I’ll do as I see fit. Doyou understand? Bartley, you’re cowardly!”

Alexander rose and shook himself angrily. “Yes, I know I’mcowardly. I’m afraid of myself. I don’t trust myself any more. Icarried it all lightly enough at first, but now I don’t dare trifle withit. It’s getting the better of me. It’s different now. I’mgrowing older, and you’ve got my young self here with you. It’sthrough him that I’ve come to wish for you all and all the time.”He took her roughly in his arms. “Do you know what I mean?”

Hilda held her face back from him and began to cry bitterly. “Oh,Bartley, what am I to do? Why didn’t you let me be angry with you? Youask me to stay away from you because you want me! And I’ve got nobody butyou. I will do anything you say—but that! I will ask the leastimaginable, but I must have something!”

Bartley turned away and sank down in his chair again. Hilda sat on the arm ofit and put her hands lightly on his shoulders.

“Just something Bartley. I must have you to think of through the monthsand months of loneliness. I must see you. I must know about you. The sight ofyou, Bartley, to see you living and happy and successful—can I never makeyou understand what that means to me?” She pressed his shoulders gently.“You see, loving some one as I love you makes the whole world different.If I’d met you later, if I hadn’t loved you so well—butthat’s all over, long ago. Then came all those years without you, lonelyand hurt and discouraged; those decent young fellows and poor Mac, and me neverheeding—hard as a steel spring. And then you came back, not caring verymuch, but it made no difference.”

She slid to the floor beside him, as if she were too tired to sit up anylonger. Bartley bent over and took her in his arms, kissing her mouth and herwet, tired eyes.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” he whispered.“We’ve tortured each other enough for tonight. Forget everythingexcept that I am here.”

“I think I have forgotten everything but that already,” shemurmured. “Ah, your dear arms!”

CHAPTER VII

During the fortnight that Alexander was in London he drove himself hard. He gotthrough a great deal of personal business and saw a great many men who weredoing interesting things in his own profession. He disliked to think of hisvisits to London as holidays, and when he was there he worked even harder thanhe did at home.

The day before his departure for Liverpool was a singularly fine one. The thickair had cleared overnight in a strong wind which brought in a golden dawn andthen fell off to a fresh breeze. When Bartley looked out of his windows fromthe Savoy, the river was flashing silver and the gray stone along theEmbankment was bathed in bright, clear sunshine. London had wakened to lifeafter three weeks of cold and sodden rain. Bartley breakfasted hurriedly andwent over his mail while the hotel valet packed his trunks. Then he paid hisaccount and walked rapidly down the Strand past Charing Cross Station. Hisspirits rose with every step, and when he reached Trafalgar Square, blazing inthe sun, with its fountains playing and its column reaching up into the brightair, he signaled to a hansom, and, before he knew what he was about, told thedriver to go to Bedford Square by way of the British Museum.

When he reached Hilda’s apartment she met him, fresh as the morningitself. Her rooms were flooded with sunshine and full of the flowers he hadbeen sending her. She would never let him give her anything else.

“Are you busy this morning, Hilda?” he asked as he sat down, hishat and gloves in his hand.

“Very. I’ve been up and about three hours, working at my part. Weopen in February, you know.”

“Well, then you’ve worked enough. And so have I. I’ve seenall my men, my packing is done, and I go up to Liverpool this evening. But thismorning we are going to have a holiday. What do you say to a drive out to Kewand Richmond? You may not get another day like this all winter. It’s likea fine April day at home. May I use your telephone? I want to order thecarriage.”

“Oh, how jolly! There, sit down at the desk. And while you aretelephoning I’ll change my dress. I shan’t be long. All the morningpapers are on the table.”

Hilda was back in a few moments wearing a long gray squirrel coat and a broadfur hat.

Bartley rose and inspected her. “Why don’t you wear some of thosepink roses?” he asked.

“But they came only this morning, and they have not even begun to open. Iwas saving them. I am so unconsciously thrifty!” She laughed as shelooked about the room. “You’ve been sending me far too manyflowers, Bartley. New ones every day. That’s too often; though I do loveto open the boxes, and I take good care of them.”

“Why won’t you let me send you any of those jade or ivory thingsyou are so fond of? Or pictures? I know a good deal about pictures.”

Hilda shook her large hat as she drew the roses out of the tall glass.“No, there are some things you can’t do. There’s thecarriage. Will you button my gloves for me?”

Bartley took her wrist and began to button the long gray suede glove.“How gay your eyes are this morning, Hilda.”

“That’s because I’ve been studying. It always stirs me up alittle.”

He pushed the top of the glove up slowly. “When did you learn to takehold of your parts like that?”

“When I had nothing else to think of. Come, the carriage is waiting. Whata shocking while you take.”

“I’m in no hurry. We’ve plenty of time.”

They found all London abroad. Piccadilly was a stream of rapidly movingcarriages, from which flashed furs and flowers and bright winter costumes. Themetal trappings of the harnesses shone dazzlingly, and the wheels wererevolving disks that threw off rays of light. The parks were full of childrenand nursemaids and joyful dogs that leaped and yelped and scratched up thebrown earth with their paws.

“I’m not going until to-morrow, you know,” Bartley announcedsuddenly. “I’ll cut off a day in Liverpool. I haven’t felt sojolly this long while.”

Hilda looked up with a smile which she tried not to make too glad. “Ithink people were meant to be happy, a little,” she said.

They had lunch at Richmond and then walked to Twickenham, where they had sentthe carriage. They drove back, with a glorious sunset behind them, toward thedistant gold-washed city. It was one of those rare afternoons when all thethickness and shadow of London are changed to a kind of shining, pulsing,special atmosphere; when the smoky vapors become fluttering golden clouds,nacreous veils of pink and amber; when all that bleakness of gray stone anddullness of dirty brick trembles in aureate light, and all the roofs andspires, and one great dome, are floated in golden haze. On such rare afternoonsthe ugliest of cities becomes the most poetic, and months of sodden days areoffset by a moment of miracle.

“It’s like that with us Londoners, too,” Hilda was saying.“Everything is awfully grim and cheerless, our weather and our houses andour ways of amusing ourselves. But we can be happier than anybody. We can gomad with joy, as the people do out in the fields on a fine Whitsunday. We makethe most of our moment.”

She thrust her little chin out defiantly over her gray fur collar, and Bartleylooked down at her and laughed.

“You are a plucky one, you.” He patted her glove with his hand.“Yes, you are a plucky one.”

Hilda sighed. “No, I’m not. Not about some things, at any rate. Itdoesn’t take pluck to fight for one’s moment, but it takes pluck togo without—a lot. More than I have. I can’t help it,” sheadded fiercely.

After miles of outlying streets and little gloomy houses, they reached Londonitself, red and roaring and murky, with a thick dampness coming up from theriver, that betokened fog again to-morrow. The streets were full of people whohad worked indoors all through the priceless day and had now come hungrily outto drink the muddy lees of it. They stood in long black lines, waiting beforethe pit entrances of the theatres—short-coated boys, and girls in sailorhats, all shivering and chatting gayly. There was a blurred rhythm in all thedull city noises—in the clatter of the cab horses and the rumbling of thebusses, in the street calls, and in the undulating tramp, tramp of the crowd.It was like the deep vibration of some vast underground machinery, and like themuffled pulsations of millions of human hearts.

[See “The Barrel Organ by Alfred Noyes. Ed.] [I have placed it at the endfor your convenience]

“Seems good to get back, doesn’t it?” Bartley whispered, asthey drove from Bayswater Road into Oxford Street. “London always makesme want to live more than any other city in the world. You remember ourpriestess mummy over in the mummy-room, and how we used to long to go and bringher out on nights like this? Three thousand years! Ugh!”

“All the same, I believe she used to feel it when we stood there andwatched her and wished her well. I believe she used to remember,” Hildasaid thoughtfully.

“I hope so. Now let’s go to some awfully jolly place for dinnerbefore we go home. I could eat all the dinners there are in London to-night.Where shall I tell the driver? The Piccadilly Restaurant? The music’sgood there.”

“There are too many people there whom one knows. Why not that littleFrench place in Soho, where we went so often when you were here in the summer?I love it, and I’ve never been there with any one but you. Sometimes I goby myself, when I am particularly lonely.”

“Very well, the sole’s good there. How many street pianos there areabout to-night! The fine weather must have thawed them out. We’ve hadfive miles of ‘Il Trovatore’ now. They always make me feel jaunty.Are you comfy, and not too tired?”

“I’m not tired at all. I was just wondering how people can everdie. Why did you remind me of the mummy? Life seems the strongest and mostindestructible thing in the world. Do you really believe that all those peoplerushing about down there, going to good dinners and clubs and theatres, will bedead some day, and not care about anything? I don’t believe it, and Iknow I shan’t die, ever! You see, I feel too—too powerful!”

The carriage stopped. Bartley sprang out and swung her quickly to the pavement.As he lifted her in his two hands he whispered: “Youare—powerful!”

CHAPTER VIII

The last rehearsal was over, a tedious dress rehearsal which had lasted all dayand exhausted the patience of every one who had to do with it. When Hilda haddressed for the street and came out of her dressing-room, she found HughMacConnell waiting for her in the corridor.

“The fog’s thicker than ever, Hilda. There have been a great manyaccidents to-day. It’s positively unsafe for you to be out alone. Willyou let me take you home?”

“How good of you, Mac. If you are going with me, I think I’d ratherwalk. I’ve had no exercise to-day, and all this has made menervous.”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said MacConnell dryly. Hilda pulleddown her veil and they stepped out into the thick brown wash that submerged St.Martin’s Lane. MacConnell took her hand and tucked it snugly under hisarm. “I’m sorry I was such a savage. I hope you didn’t thinkI made an ass of myself.”

“Not a bit of it. I don’t wonder you were peppery. Those things areawfully trying. How do you think it’s going?”

“Magnificently. That’s why I got so stirred up. We are going tohear from this, both of us. And that reminds me; I’ve got news for you.They are going to begin repairs on the theatre about the middle of March, andwe are to run over to New York for six weeks. Bennett told me yesterday that itwas decided.”

Hilda looked up delightedly at the tall gray figure beside her. He was the onlything she could see, for they were moving through a dense opaqueness, as ifthey were walking at the bottom of the ocean.

“Oh, Mac, how glad I am! And they love your things over there,don’t they?”

“Shall you be glad for—any other reason, Hilda?”

MacConnell put his hand in front of her to ward off some dark object. It provedto be only a lamp-post, and they beat in farther from the edge of the pavement.

“What do you mean, Mac?” Hilda asked nervously.

“I was just thinking there might be people over there you’d be gladto see,” he brought out awkwardly. Hilda said nothing, and as they walkedon MacConnell spoke again, apologetically: “I hope you don’t mindmy knowing about it, Hilda. Don’t stiffen up like that. No one elseknows, and I didn’t try to find out anything. I felt it, even before Iknew who he was. I knew there was somebody, and that it wasn’t I.”

They crossed Oxford Street in silence, feeling their way. The busses hadstopped running and the cab-drivers were leading their horses. When theyreached the other side, MacConnell said suddenly, “I hope you arehappy.”

“Terribly, dangerously happy, Mac,”—Hilda spoke quietly,pressing the rough sleeve of his greatcoat with her gloved hand.

“You’ve always thought me too old for you, Hilda,—oh, ofcourse you’ve never said just that,—and here this fellow is notmore than eight years younger than I. I’ve always felt that if I couldget out of my old case I might win you yet. It’s a fine, brave youth Icarry inside me, only he’ll never be seen.”

“Nonsense, Mac. That has nothing to do with it. It’s because youseem too close to me, too much my own kind. It would be like marrying CousinMike, almost. I really tried to care as you wanted me to, away back in thebeginning.”

“Well, here we are, turning out of the Square. You are not angry with me,Hilda? Thank you for this walk, my dear. Go in and get dry things on at once.You’ll be having a great night to-morrow.”

She put out her hand. “Thank you, Mac, for everything. Good-night.”

MacConnell trudged off through the fog, and she went slowly upstairs. Herslippers and dressing gown were waiting for her before the fire. “I shallcertainly see him in New York. He will see by the papers that we are coming.Perhaps he knows it already,” Hilda kept thinking as she undressed.“Perhaps he will be at the dock. No, scarcely that; but I may meet him inthe street even before he comes to see me.” Marie placed the tea-table bythe fire and brought Hilda her letters. She looked them over, and started asshe came to one in a handwriting that she did not often see; Alexander hadwritten to her only twice before, and he did not allow her to write to him atall. “Thank you, Marie. You may go now.”

Hilda sat down by the table with the letter in her hand, still unopened. Shelooked at it intently, turned it over, and felt its thickness with her fingers.She believed that she sometimes had a kind of second-sight about letters, andcould tell before she read them whether they brought good or evil tidings. Sheput this one down on the table in front of her while she poured her tea. Atlast, with a little shiver of expectancy, she tore open the envelope andread:—

BOSTON, February —

MY DEARHILDA:—

It is after twelve o’clock. Every one else is in bed and I am sittingalone in my study. I have been happier in this room than anywhere else in theworld. Happiness like that makes one insolent. I used to think these four wallscould stand against anything. And now I scarcely know myself here. Now I knowthat no one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Twopeople, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits andpride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that cantingexpression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the nobleone noble, to the end.

The last week has been a bad one; I have been realizing how things used to bewith me. Sometimes I get used to being dead inside, but lately it has been asif a window beside me had suddenly opened, and as if all the smells of springblew in to me. There is a garden out there, with stars overhead, where I usedto walk at night when I had a single purpose and a single heart. I can rememberhow I used to feel there, how beautiful everything about me was, and what lifeand power and freedom I felt in myself. When the window opens I know exactlyhow it would feel to be out there. But that garden is closed to me. How is it,I ask myself, that everything can be so different with me when nothing here haschanged? I am in my own house, in my own study, in the midst of all these quietstreets where my friends live. They are all safe and at peace with themselves.But I am never at peace. I feel always on the edge of danger and change.

I keep remembering locoed horses I used to see on the range when I was a boy.They changed like that. We used to catch them and put them up in the corral,and they developed great cunning. They would pretend to eat their oats like theother horses, but we knew they were always scheming to get back at the loco.

It seems that a man is meant to live only one life in this world. When he triesto live a second, he develops another nature. I feel as if a second man hadbeen grafted into me. At first he seemed only a pleasure-loving simpleton, ofwhose company I was rather ashamed, and whom I used to hide under my coat whenI walked the Embankment, in London. But now he is strong and sullen, and he isfighting for his life at the cost of mine. That is his one activity: to growstrong. No creature ever wanted so much to live. Eventually, I suppose, he willabsorb me altogether. Believe me, you will hate me then.

And what have you to do, Hilda, with this ugly story? Nothing at all. Thelittle boy drank of the prettiest brook in the forest and he became a stag. Iwrite all this because I can never tell it to you, and because it seems as if Icould not keep silent any longer. And because I suffer, Hilda. If any one Iloved suffered like this, I’d want to know it. Help me, Hilda!

B.A.

CHAPTER IX

On the last Saturday in April, the New York “Times” published anaccount of the strike complications which were delaying Alexander’s NewJersey bridge, and stated that the engineer himself was in town and at hisoffice on West Tenth Street.

On Sunday, the day after this notice appeared, Alexander worked all day at hisTenth Street rooms. His business often called him to New York, and he had keptan apartment there for years, subletting it when he went abroad for any lengthof time. Besides his sleeping-room and bath, there was a large room, formerly apainter’s studio, which he used as a study and office. It was furnishedwith the cast-off possessions of his bachelor days and with odd things which hesheltered for friends of his who followed itinerant and more or less artisticcallings. Over the fireplace there was a large old-fashioned gilt mirror.Alexander’s big work-table stood in front of one of the three windows,and above the couch hung the one picture in the room, a big canvas of charmingcolor and spirit, a study of the Luxembourg Gardens in early spring, painted inhis youth by a man who had since become a portrait-painter of internationalrenown. He had done it for Alexander when they were students together in Paris.

Sunday was a cold, raw day and a fine rain fell continuously. When Alexandercame back from dinner he put more wood on his fire, made himself comfortable,and settled down at his desk, where he began checking over estimate sheets. Itwas after nine o’clock and he was lighting a second pipe, when he thoughthe heard a sound at his door. He started and listened, holding the burningmatch in his hand; again he heard the same sound, like a firm, light tap. Herose and crossed the room quickly. When he threw open the door he recognizedthe figure that shrank back into the bare, dimly lit hallway. He stood for amoment in awkward constraint, his pipe in his hand.

“Come in,” he said to Hilda at last, and closed the door behindher. He pointed to a chair by the fire and went back to his worktable.“Won’t you sit down?”

He was standing behind the table, turning over a pile of blueprints nervously.The yellow light from the student’s lamp fell on his hands and the purplesleeves of his velvet smoking-jacket, but his flushed face and big, hard headwere in the shadow. There was something about him that made Hilda wish herselfat her hotel again, in the street below, anywhere but where she was.

“Of course I know, Bartley,” she said at last, “that afterthis you won’t owe me the least consideration. But we sail on Tuesday. Isaw that interview in the paper yesterday, telling where you were, and Ithought I had to see you. That’s all. Good-night; I’m goingnow.” She turned and her hand closed on the door-knob.

Alexander hurried toward her and took her gently by the arm. “Sit down,Hilda; you’re wet through. Let me take off your coat—and yourboots; they’re oozing water.” He knelt down and began to unlace hershoes, while Hilda shrank into the chair. “Here, put your feet on thisstool. You don’t mean to say you walked down—and withoutovershoes!”

Hilda hid her face in her hands. “I was afraid to take a cab. Can’tyou see, Bartley, that I’m terribly frightened? I’ve been throughthis a hundred times to-day. Don’t be any more angry than you can help. Iwas all right until I knew you were in town. If you’d sent me a note, ortelephoned me, or anything! But you won’t let me write to you, and I hadto see you after that letter, that terrible letter you wrote me when you gothome.”

Alexander faced her, resting his arm on the mantel behind him, and began tobrush the sleeve of his jacket. “Is this the way you mean to answer it,Hilda?” he asked unsteadily.

She was afraid to look up at him. “Didn’t—didn’t youmean even to say goodby to me, Bartley? Did you mean just to—quitme?” she asked. “I came to tell you that I’m willing to do asyou asked me. But it’s no use talking about that now. Give me my things,please.” She put her hand out toward the fender.

Alexander sat down on the arm of her chair. “Did you think I hadforgotten you were in town, Hilda? Do you think I kept away by accident? Didyou suppose I didn’t know you were sailing on Tuesday? There is a letterfor you there, in my desk drawer. It was to have reached you on the steamer. Iwas all the morning writing it. I told myself that if I were really thinking ofyou, and not of myself, a letter would be better than nothing. Marks on papermean something to you.” He paused. “They never did to me.”

Hilda smiled up at him beautifully and put her hand on his sleeve. “Oh,Bartley! Did you write to me? Why didn’t you telephone me to let me knowthat you had? Then I wouldn’t have come.”

Alexander slipped his arm about her. “I didn’t know it before,Hilda, on my honor I didn’t, but I believe it was because, deep down inme somewhere, I was hoping I might drive you to do just this. I’vewatched that door all day. I’ve jumped up if the fire crackled. I think Ihave felt that you were coming.” He bent his face over her hair.

“And I,” she whispered,—“I felt that you were feelingthat. But when I came, I thought I had been mistaken.”

Alexander started up and began to walk up and down the room.

“No, you weren’t mistaken. I’ve been up in Canada with mybridge, and I arranged not to come to New York until after you had gone. Then,when your manager added two more weeks, I was already committed.” Hedropped upon the stool in front of her and sat with his hands hanging betweenhis knees. “What am I to do, Hilda?”

“That’s what I wanted to see you about, Bartley. I’m going todo what you asked me to do when you were in London. Only I’ll do it morecompletely. I’m going to marry.”

“Who?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter much! One of them. Only not Mac. I’mtoo fond of him.”

Alexander moved restlessly. “Are you joking, Hilda?”

“Indeed I’m not.”

“Then you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, I know very well. I’ve thought about it a great deal, andI’ve quite decided. I never used to understand how women did things likethat, but I know now. It’s because they can’t be at the mercy ofthe man they love any longer.”

Alexander flushed angrily. “So it’s better to be at the mercy of aman you don’t love?”

“Under such circumstances, infinitely!”

There was a flash in her eyes that made Alexander’s fall. He got up andwent over to the window, threw it open, and leaned out. He heard Hilda movingabout behind him. When he looked over his shoulder she was lacing her boots. Hewent back and stood over her.

“Hilda you’d better think a while longer before you do that. Idon’t know what I ought to say, but I don’t believe you’d behappy; truly I don’t. Aren’t you trying to frighten me?”

She tied the knot of the last lacing and put her boot-heel down firmly.“No; I’m telling you what I’ve made up my mind to do. Isuppose I would better do it without telling you. But afterward I shan’thave an opportunity to explain, for I shan’t be seeing you again.”

Alexander started to speak, but caught himself. When Hilda rose he sat down onthe arm of her chair and drew her back into it.

“I wouldn’t be so much alarmed if I didn’t know how utterlyreckless you canbe. Don’t do anything like that rashly.”His face grew troubled. “You wouldn’t be happy. You are not thatkind of woman. I’d never have another hour’s peace if I helped tomake you do a thing like that.” He took her face between his hands andlooked down into it. “You see, you are different, Hilda. Don’t youknow you are?” His voice grew softer, his touch more and more tender.“Some women can do that sort of thing, but you—you can love asqueens did, in the old time.”

Hilda had heard that soft, deep tone in his voice only once before. She closedher eyes; her lips and eyelids trembled. “Only one, Bartley. Only one.And he threw it back at me a second time.”

She felt the strength leap in the arms that held her so lightly.

“Try him again, Hilda. Try him once again.”

She looked up into his eyes, and hid her face in her hands.

CHAPTER X

On Tuesday afternoon a Boston lawyer, who had been trying a case in Vermont,was standing on the siding at White River Junction when the Canadian Expresspulled by on its northward journey. As the day-coaches at the rear end of thelong train swept by him, the lawyer noticed at one of the windows a man’shead, with thick rumpled hair. “Curious,” he thought; “thatlooked like Alexander, but what would he be doing back there in thedaycoaches?”

It was, indeed, Alexander.

That morning a telegram from Moorlock had reached him, telling him that therewas serious trouble with the bridge and that he was needed there at once, so hehad caught the first train out of New York. He had taken a seat in a day-coachto avoid the risk of meeting any one he knew, and because he did not wish to becomfortable. When the telegram arrived, Alexander was at his rooms on TenthStreet, packing his bag to go to Boston. On Monday night he had written a longletter to his wife, but when morning came he was afraid to send it, and theletter was still in his pocket. Winifred was not a woman who could beardisappointment. She demanded a great deal of herself and of the people sheloved; and she never failed herself. If he told her now, he knew, it would beirretrievable. There would be no going back. He would lose the thing he valuedmost in the world; he would be destroying himself and his own happiness. Therewould be nothing for him afterward. He seemed to see himself dragging out arestless existence on the Continent—Cannes, Hyères, Algiers,Cairo—among smartly dressed, disabled men of every nationality; forevergoing on journeys that led nowhere; hurrying to catch trains that he might justas well miss; getting up in the morning with a great bustle and splashing ofwater, to begin a day that had no purpose and no meaning; dining late toshorten the night, sleeping late to shorten the day.

And for what? For a mere folly, a masquerade, a little thing that he could notlet go. And he could even let it go, he told himself. But he hadpromised to be in London at mid-summer, and he knew that he would go. . . . Itwas impossible to live like this any longer.

And this, then, was to be the disaster that his old professor had foreseen forhim: the crack in the wall, the crash, the cloud of dust. And he could notunderstand how it had come about. He felt that he himself was unchanged, thathe was still there, the same man he had been five years ago, and that he wassitting stupidly by and letting some resolute offshoot of himself spoil hislife for him. This new force was not he, it was but a part of him. He would noteven admit that it was stronger than he; but it was more active. It was by itsenergy that this new feeling got the better of him. His wife was the woman whohad made his life, gratified his pride, given direction to his tastes andhabits. The life they led together seemed to him beautiful. Winifred still was,as she had always been, Romance for him, and whenever he was deeply stirred heturned to her. When the grandeur and beauty of the world challengedhim—as it challenges even the most self-absorbed people—he alwaysanswered with her name. That was his reply to the question put by the mountainsand the stars; to all the spiritual aspects of life. In his feeling for hiswife there was all the tenderness, all the pride, all the devotion of which hewas capable. There was everything but energy; the energy of youth which mustregister itself and cut its name before it passes. This new feeling was sofresh, so unsatisfied and light of foot. It ran and was not wearied,anticipated him everywhere. It put a girdle round the earth while he was goingfrom New York to Moorlock. At this moment, it was tingling through him,exultant, and live as quicksilver, whispering, “In July you will be inEngland.”

Already he dreaded the long, empty days at sea, the monotonous Irish coast, thesluggish passage up the Mersey, the flash of the boat train through the summercountry. He closed his eyes and gave himself up to the feeling of rapid motionand to swift, terrifying thoughts. He was sitting so, his face shaded by hishand, when the Boston lawyer saw him from the siding at White River Junction.

When at last Alexander roused himself, the afternoon had waned to sunset. Thetrain was passing through a gray country and the sky overhead was flushed witha wide flood of clear color. There was a rose-colored light over the gray rocksand hills and meadows. Off to the left, under the approach of a weather-stainedwooden bridge, a group of boys were sitting around a little fire. The smell ofthe wood smoke blew in at the window. Except for an old farmer, jogging alongthe highroad in his box-wagon, there was not another living creature to beseen. Alexander looked back wistfully at the boys, camped on the edge of alittle marsh, crouching under their shelter and looking gravely at their fire.They took his mind back a long way, to a campfire on a sandbar in a Westernriver, and he wished he could go back and sit down with them. He could rememberexactly how the world had looked then.

It was quite dark and Alexander was still thinking of the boys, when itoccurred to him that the train must be nearing Allway. In going to his newbridge at Moorlock he had always to pass through Allway. The train stopped atAllway Mills, then wound two miles up the river, and then the hollow soundunder his feet told Bartley that he was on his first bridge again. The bridgeseemed longer than it had ever seemed before, and he was glad when he felt thebeat of the wheels on the solid roadbed again. He did not like coming and goingacross that bridge, or remembering the man who built it. And was he, indeed,the same man who used to walk that bridge at night, promising such things tohimself and to the stars? And yet, he could remember it all so well: the quiethills sleeping in the moonlight, the slender skeleton of the bridge reachingout into the river, and up yonder, alone on the hill, the big white house;upstairs, in Winifred’s window, the light that told him she was stillawake and still thinking of him. And after the light went out he walked alone,taking the heavens into his confidence, unable to tear himself away from thewhite magic of the night, unwilling to sleep because longing was so sweet tohim, and because, for the first time since first the hills were hung withmoonlight, there was a lover in the world. And always there was the sound ofthe rushing water underneath, the sound which, more than anything else, meantdeath; the wearing away of things under the impact of physical forces which mencould direct but never circumvent or diminish. Then, in the exaltation of love,more than ever it seemed to him to mean death, the only other thing as strongas love. Under the moon, under the cold, splendid stars, there were only thosetwo things awake and sleepless; death and love, the rushing river and hisburning heart.

Alexander sat up and looked about him. The train was tearing on through thedarkness. All his companions in the day-coach were either dozing or sleepingheavily, and the murky lamps were turned low. How came he here among all thesedirty people? Why was he going to London? What did it mean—what was theanswer? How could this happen to a man who had lived through that magicalspring and summer, and who had felt that the stars themselves were but flamingparticles in the far-away infinitudes of his love?

What had he done to lose it? How could he endure the baseness of life withoutit? And with every revolution of the wheels beneath him, the unquietquicksilver in his breast told him that at midsummer he would be in London. Heremembered his last night there: the red foggy darkness, the hungry crowdsbefore the theatres, the hand-organs, the feverish rhythm of the blurred,crowded streets, and the feeling of letting himself go with the crowd. Heshuddered and looked about him at the poor unconscious companions of hisjourney, unkempt and travel-stained, now doubled in unlovely attitudes, who hadcome to stand to him for the ugliness he had brought into the world.

And those boys back there, beginning it all just as he had begun it; he wishedhe could promise them better luck. Ah, if one could promise any one betterluck, if one could assure a single human being of happiness! He had thought hecould do so, once; and it was thinking of that that he at last fell asleep. Inhis sleep, as if it had nothing fresher to work upon, his mind went back andtortured itself with something years and years away, an old, long-forgottensorrow of his childhood.

When Alexander awoke in the morning, the sun was just rising through palegolden ripples of cloud, and the fresh yellow light was vibrating through thepine woods. The white birches, with their little unfolding leaves, gleamed inthe lowlands, and the marsh meadows were already coming to life with theirfirst green, a thin, bright color which had run over them like fire. As thetrain rushed along the trestles, thousands of wild birds rose screaming intothe light. The sky was already a pale blue and of the clearness of crystal.Bartley caught up his bag and hurried through the Pullman coaches until hefound the conductor. There was a stateroom unoccupied, and he took it and setabout changing his clothes. Last night he would not have believed that anythingcould be so pleasant as the cold water he dashed over his head and shouldersand the freshness of clean linen on his body.

After he had dressed, Alexander sat down at the window and drew into his lungsdeep breaths of the pine-scented air. He had awakened with all his old sense ofpower. He could not believe that things were as bad with him as they had seemedlast night, that there was no way to set them entirely right. Even if he wentto London at midsummer, what would that mean except that he was a fool? And hehad been a fool before. That was not the reality of his life. Yet he knew thathe would go to London.

Half an hour later the train stopped at Moorlock. Alexander sprang to theplatform and hurried up the siding, waving to Philip Horton, one of hisassistants, who was anxiously looking up at the windows of the coaches. Bartleytook his arm and they went together into the station buffet.

“I’ll have my coffee first, Philip. Have you had yours? And now,what seems to be the matter up here?”

The young man, in a hurried, nervous way, began his explanation.

But Alexander cut him short. “When did you stop work?” he askedsharply.

The young engineer looked confused. “I haven’t stopped work yet,Mr. Alexander. I didn’t feel that I could go so far without definiteauthorization from you.”

“Then why didn’t you say in your telegram exactly what you thought,and ask for your authorization? You’d have got it quick enough.”

“Well, really, Mr. Alexander, I couldn’t be absolutely sure, youknow, and I didn’t like to take the responsibility of making itpublic.”

Alexander pushed back his chair and rose. “Anything I do can be madepublic, Phil. You say that you believe the lower chords are showing strain, andthat even the workmen have been talking about it, and yet you’ve gone onadding weight.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Alexander, but I had counted on your getting hereyesterday. My first telegram missed you somehow. I sent one Sunday evening, tothe same address, but it was returned to me.”

“Have you a carriage out there? I must stop to send a wire.”

Alexander went up to the telegraph-desk and penciled the following message tohis wife:—

I may have to be here for some time. Can you come up at once? Urgent.

BARTLEY.

The Moorlock Bridge lay three miles above the town. When they were seated inthe carriage, Alexander began to question his assistant further. If it weretrue that the compression members showed strain, with the bridge only twothirds done, then there was nothing to do but pull the whole structure down andbegin over again. Horton kept repeating that he was sure there could be nothingwrong with the estimates.

Alexander grew impatient. “That’s all true, Phil, but we never werejustified in assuming that a scale that was perfectly safe for an ordinarybridge would work with anything of such length. It’s all very well onpaper, but it remains to be seen whether it can be done in practice. I shouldhave thrown up the job when they crowded me. It’s all nonsense to try todo what other engineers are doing when you know they’re not sound.”

“But just now, when there is such competition,” the younger mandemurred. “And certainly that’s the new line of development.”

Alexander shrugged his shoulders and made no reply.

When they reached the bridge works, Alexander began his examinationimmediately. An hour later he sent for the superintendent. “I think youhad better stop work out there at once, Dan. I should say that the lower chordhere might buckle at any moment. I told the Commission that we were usinghigher unit stresses than any practice has established, and we’ve put thedead load at a low estimate. Theoretically it worked out well enough, but ithad never actually been tried.” Alexander put on his overcoat and tookthe superintendent by the arm. “Don’t look so chopfallen, Dan.It’s a jolt, but we’ve got to face it. It isn’t the end ofthe world, you know. Now we’ll go out and call the men off quietly.They’re already nervous, Horton tells me, and there’s no usealarming them. I’ll go with you, and we’ll send the end riveters infirst.”

Alexander and the superintendent picked their way out slowly over the longspan. They went deliberately, stopping to see what each gang was doing, as ifthey were on an ordinary round of inspection. When they reached the end of theriver span, Alexander nodded to the superintendent, who quietly gave an orderto the foreman. The men in the end gang picked up their tools and, glancingcuriously at each other, started back across the bridge toward the river-bank.Alexander himself remained standing where they had been working, looking abouthim. It was hard to believe, as he looked back over it, that the whole greatspan was incurably disabled, was already as good as condemned, becausesomething was out of line in the lower chord of the cantilever arm.

The end riveters had reached the bank and were dispersing among thetool-houses, and the second gang had picked up their tools and were startingtoward the shore. Alexander, still standing at the end of the river span, sawthe lower chord of the cantilever arm give a little, like an elbow bending. Heshouted and ran after the second gang, but by this time every one knew that thebig river span was slowly settling. There was a burst of shouting that wasimmediately drowned by the scream and cracking of tearing iron, as all thetension work began to pull asunder. Once the chords began to buckle, there werethousands of tons of ironwork, all riveted together and lying in midair withoutsupport. It tore itself to pieces with roaring and grinding and noises thatwere like the shrieks of a steam whistle. There was no shock of any kind; thebridge had no impetus except from its own weight. It lurched neither to rightnor left, but sank almost in a vertical line, snapping and breaking and tearingas it went, because no integral part could bear for an instant the enormousstrain loosed upon it. Some of the men jumped and some ran, trying to make theshore.

At the first shriek of the tearing iron, Alexander jumped from the downstreamside of the bridge. He struck the water without injury and disappeared. He wasunder the river a long time and had great difficulty in holding his breath.When it seemed impossible, and his chest was about to heave, he thought heheard his wife telling him that he could hold out a little longer. An instantlater his face cleared the water. For a moment, in the depths of the river, hehad realized what it would mean to die a hypocrite, and to lie dead under thelast abandonment of her tenderness. But once in the light and air, he knew heshould live to tell her and to recover all he had lost. Now, at last, he feltsure of himself. He was not startled. It seemed to him that he had been throughsomething of this sort before. There was nothing horrible about it. This, too,was life, and life was activity, just as it was in Boston or in London. He washimself, and there was something to be done; everything seemed perfectlynatural. Alexander was a strong swimmer, but he had gone scarcely a dozenstrokes when the bridge itself, which had been settling faster and faster,crashed into the water behind him. Immediately the river was full of drowningmen. A gang of French Canadians fell almost on top of him. He thought he hadcleared them, when they began coming up all around him, clutching at him and ateach other. Some of them could swim, but they were either hurt or crazed withfright. Alexander tried to beat them off, but there were too many of them. Onecaught him about the neck, another gripped him about the middle, and they wentdown together. When he sank, his wife seemed to be there in the water besidehim, telling him to keep his head, that if he could hold out the men woulddrown and release him. There was something he wanted to tell his wife, but hecould not think clearly for the roaring in his ears. Suddenly he rememberedwhat it was. He caught his breath, and then she let him go.

The work of recovering the dead went on all day and all the following night. Bythe next morning forty-eight bodies had been taken out of the river, but therewere still twenty missing. Many of the men had fallen with the bridge and wereheld down under the debris. Early on the morning of the second day a closedcarriage was driven slowly along the river-bank and stopped a little below theworks, where the river boiled and churned about the great iron carcass whichlay in a straight line two thirds across it. The carriage stood there hourafter hour, and word soon spread among the crowds on the shore that itsoccupant was the wife of the Chief Engineer; his body had not yet been found.The widows of the lost workmen, moving up and down the bank with shawls overtheir heads, some of them carrying babies, looked at the rusty hired hack manytimes that morning. They drew near it and walked about it, but none of themventured to peer within. Even half-indifferent sightseers dropped their voicesas they told a newcomer: “You see that carriage over there? That’sMrs. Alexander. They haven’t found him yet. She got off the train thismorning. Horton met her. She heard it in Boston yesterday—heard thenewsboys crying it in the street.”

At noon Philip Horton made his way through the crowd with a tray and a tincoffee-pot from the camp kitchen. When he reached the carriage he found Mrs.Alexander just as he had left her in the early morning, leaning forward alittle, with her hand on the lowered window, looking at the river. Hour afterhour she had been watching the water, the lonely, useless stone towers, and theconvulsed mass of iron wreckage over which the angry river continually spat upits yellow foam.

“Those poor women out there, do they blame him very much?” sheasked, as she handed the coffee-cup back to Horton.

“Nobody blames him, Mrs. Alexander. If any one is to blame, I’mafraid it’s I. I should have stopped work before he came. He said so assoon as I met him. I tried to get him here a day earlier, but my telegrammissed him, somehow. He didn’t have time really to explain to me. Ifhe’d got here Monday, he’d have had all the men off at once. But,you see, Mrs. Alexander, such a thing never happened before. According to allhuman calculations, it simply couldn’t happen.”

Horton leaned wearily against the front wheel of the cab. He had not had hisclothes off for thirty hours, and the stimulus of violent excitement wasbeginning to wear off.

“Don’t be afraid to tell me the worst, Mr. Horton. Don’tleave me to the dread of finding out things that people may be saying. If he isblamed, if he needs any one to speak for him,”—for the first timeher voice broke and a flush of life, tearful, painful, and confused, swept overher rigid pallor,—“if he needs any one, tell me, show me what todo.” She began to sob, and Horton hurried away.

When he came back at four o’clock in the afternoon he was carrying hishat in his hand, and Winifred knew as soon as she saw him that they had foundBartley. She opened the carriage door before he reached her and stepped to theground.

Horton put out his hand as if to hold her back and spoke pleadingly:“Won’t you drive up to my house, Mrs. Alexander? They will take himup there.”

“Take me to him now, please. I shall not make any trouble.”

The group of men down under the riverbank fell back when they saw a womancoming, and one of them threw a tarpaulin over the stretcher. They took offtheir hats and caps as Winifred approached, and although she had pulled herveil down over her face they did not look up at her. She was taller thanHorton, and some of the men thought she was the tallest woman they had everseen. “As tall as himself,” some one whispered. Horton motioned tothe men, and six of them lifted the stretcher and began to carry it up theembankment. Winifred followed them the half-mile to Horton’s house. Shewalked quietly, without once breaking or stumbling. When the bearers put thestretcher down in Horton’s spare bedroom, she thanked them and gave herhand to each in turn. The men went out of the house and through the yard withtheir caps in their hands. They were too much confused to say anything as theywent down the hill.

Horton himself was almost as deeply perplexed. “Mamie,” he said tohis wife, when he came out of the spare room half an hour later, “willyou take Mrs. Alexander the things she needs? She is going to do everythingherself. Just stay about where you can hear her and go in if she wantsyou.”

Everything happened as Alexander had foreseen in that moment of prescienceunder the river. With her own hands she washed him clean of every mark ofdisaster. All night he was alone with her in the still house, his great headlying deep in the pillow. In the pocket of his coat Winifred found the letterthat he had written her the night before he left New York, water-soaked andillegible, but because of its length, she knew it had been meant for her.

For Alexander death was an easy creditor. Fortune, which had smiled upon himconsistently all his life, did not desert him in the end. His harshest criticsdid not doubt that, had he lived, he would have retrieved himself. Even LuciusWilson did not see in this accident the disaster he had once foretold.

When a great man dies in his prime there is no surgeon who can say whether hedid well; whether or not the future was his, as it seemed to be. The mind thatsociety had come to regard as a powerful and reliable machine, dedicated to itsservice, may for a long time have been sick within itself and bent upon its owndestruction.

EPILOGUE

Professor Wilson had been living in London for six years and he was just backfrom a visit to America. One afternoon, soon after his return, he put on hisfrock-coat and drove in a hansom to pay a call upon Hilda Burgoyne, who stilllived at her old number, off Bedford Square. He and Miss Burgoyne had been fastfriends for a long time. He had first noticed her about the corridors of theBritish Museum, where he read constantly. Her being there so often had made himfeel that he would like to know her, and as she was not an inaccessible person,an introduction was not difficult. The preliminaries once over, they came todepend a great deal upon each other, and Wilson, after his day’s reading,often went round to Bedford Square for his tea. They had much more in commonthan their memories of a common friend. Indeed, they seldom spoke of him. Theysaved that for the deep moments which do not come often, and then their talk ofhim was mostly silence. Wilson knew that Hilda had loved him; more than this hehad not tried to know.

It was late when Wilson reached Hilda’s apartment on this particularDecember afternoon, and he found her alone. She sent for fresh tea and made himcomfortable, as she had such a knack of making people comfortable.

“How good you were to come back before Christmas! I quite dreaded theHolidays without you. You’ve helped me over a good manyChristmases.” She smiled at him gayly.

“As if you needed me for that! But, at any rate, I needed you. Howwell you are looking, my dear, and how rested.”

He peered up at her from his low chair, balancing the tips of his long fingerstogether in a judicial manner which had grown on him with years.

Hilda laughed as she carefully poured his cream. “That means that I waslooking very seedy at the end of the season, doesn’t it? Well, we mustshow wear at last, you know.”

Wilson took the cup gratefully. “Ah, no need to remind a man of seventy,who has just been home to find that he has survived all his contemporaries. Iwas most gently treated—as a sort of precious relic. But, do you know, itmade me feel awkward to be hanging about still.”

“Seventy? Never mention it to me.” Hilda looked appreciatively atthe Professor’s alert face, with so many kindly lines about the mouth andso many quizzical ones about the eyes. “You’ve got to hang aboutfor me, you know. I can’t even let you go home again. You must stay put,now that I have you back. You’re the realest thing I have.”

Wilson chuckled. “Dear me, am I? Out of so many conquests and the spoilsof conquered cities! You’ve really missed me? Well, then, I shall hang.Even if you have at last to put ME in the mummy-room with the others.You’ll visit me often, won’t you?”

“Every day in the calendar. Here, your cigarettes are in this drawer,where you left them.” She struck a match and lit one for him. “Butyou did, after all, enjoy being at home again?”

“Oh, yes. I found the long railway journeys trying. People live athousand miles apart. But I did it thoroughly; I was all over the place. It wasin Boston I lingered longest.”

“Ah, you saw Mrs. Alexander?”

“Often. I dined with her, and had tea there a dozen different times, Ishould think. Indeed, it was to see her that I lingered on and on. I found thatI still loved to go to the house. It always seemed as if Bartley were there,somehow, and that at any moment one might hear his heavy tramp on the stairs.Do you know, I kept feeling that he must be up in his study.” TheProfessor looked reflectively into the grate. “I should really have likedto go up there. That was where I had my last long talk with him. But Mrs.Alexander never suggested it.”

“Why?”

Wilson was a little startled by her tone, and he turned his head so quicklythat his cuff-link caught the string of his nose-glasses and pulled them awry.“Why? Why, dear me, I don’t know. She probably never thought ofit.”

Hilda bit her lip. “I don’t know what made me say that. Ididn’t mean to interrupt. Go on please, and tell me how it was.”

“Well, it was like that. Almost as if he were there. In a way, he reallyis there. She never lets him go. It’s the most beautiful and dignifiedsorrow I’ve ever known. It’s so beautiful that it has itscompensations, I should think. Its very completeness is a compensation. Itgives her a fixed star to steer by. She doesn’t drift. We sat thereevening after evening in the quiet of that magically haunted room, and watchedthe sunset burn on the river, and felt him. Felt him with a difference, ofcourse.”

Hilda leaned forward, her elbow on her knee, her chin on her hand. “Witha difference? Because of her, you mean?”

Wilson’s brow wrinkled. “Something like that, yes. Of course, astime goes on, to her he becomes more and more their simple personalrelation.”

Hilda studied the droop of the Professor’s head intently. “Youdidn’t altogether like that? You felt it wasn’t wholly fair tohim?”

Wilson shook himself and readjusted his glasses. “Oh, fair enough. Morethan fair. Of course, I always felt that my image of him was just a littledifferent from hers. No relation is so complete that it can hold absolutely allof a person. And I liked him just as he was; his deviations, too; the placeswhere he didn’t square.”

Hilda considered vaguely. “Has she grown much older?” she asked atlast.

“Yes, and no. In a tragic way she is even handsomer. But colder. Cold foreverything but him. ‘Forget thyself to marble’; I kept thinking ofthat. Her happiness was a happiness à deux, not apart from the world,but actually against it. And now her grief is like that. She saves herself forit and doesn’t even go through the form of seeing people much. I’msorry. It would be better for her, and might be so good for them, if she couldlet other people in.”

“Perhaps she’s afraid of letting him out a little, of sharing himwith somebody.”

Wilson put down his cup and looked up with vague alarm. “Dear me, ittakes a woman to think of that, now! I don’t, you know, think we ought tobe hard on her. More, even, than the rest of us she didn’t choose herdestiny. She underwent it. And it has left her chilled. As to her not wishingto take the world into her confidence—well, it is a pretty brutal andstupid world, after all, you know.”

Hilda leaned forward. “Yes, I know, I know. Only I can’t help beingglad that there was something for him even in stupid and vulgar people. Mylittle Marie worshiped him. When she is dusting I always know when she has cometo his picture.”

Wilson nodded. “Oh, yes! He left an echo. The ripples go on in all of us.He belonged to the people who make the play, and most of us are only onlookersat the best. We shouldn’t wonder too much at Mrs. Alexander. She mustfeel how useless it would be to stir about, that she may as well sit still;that nothing can happen to her after Bartley.”

“Yes,” said Hilda softly, “nothing can happen to one afterBartley.”

They both sat looking into the fire.

THE BARREL ORGAN by Alfred Noyes

    There’s a barrel-organ caroling across a golden street,
    In the City as the sun sinks low;
And the music’s not immortal; but the world has made it sweet
    And fulfilled it with the sunset glow;
And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain
    That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light;
And they’ve given it a glory and a part to play again
    In the Symphony that rules the day and the night.

And now it’s marching onward through the realms of old romance,
    And trolling out a fond familiar tune,
And now it’s roaring cannon down to fight the King of France,
    And now it’s prattling softly to the moon,
And all around the organ there’s a sea without a shore
    Of human joys and wonders and regrets;
To remember and to recompense the music evermore
    For what the cold machinery forgets. . . .

Yes; as the music changes,
    Like a prismatic glass,
It takes the light and ranges
    Through all the moods that pass;
Dissects the common carnival
    Of passions and regrets,
And gives the world a glimpse of all
    The colors it forgets.

And there La Traviatasights
    Another sadder song;
And there Il Trovatorecries
    A tale of deeper wrong;
And bolder knights to battle go
    With sword and shield and lance,
Than ever here on earth below
    Have whirled into—a dance!—

Go down to Kew in lilac time; in lilac time; in lilac time;
Go down to Kew in lilac time; (it isn’t far from London!)
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland;
Go down to Kew in lilac time; (it isn’t far from London!)

The cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume,
The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!)
And there they say, when dawn is high and all the world’s a blaze ofsky
The cuckoo, though he’s very shy, will sing a song for London.

The nightingale is rather rare and yet they say you’ll hear himthere
At Kew, at Kew in lilac time (and oh, so near to London!)
The linnet and the throstle, too, and after dark the long halloo
And golden-eyed tu-whit, tu whooof owls that ogle London.

For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn’t heard
At Kew, at Kew in lilac time (and oh, so near to London!)
And when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut spires are out
You’ll hear the rest without a doubt, all chorusing forLondon:—

Come down to Kew in lilac time; in lilac time; in lilac time;
    Come down to Kew in lilac time;(it isn’t far from London!)
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland;
    Come down to Kew in lilac time;(it isn’t far from London!)

And then the troubadour begins to thrill the golden street,
    In the City as the sun sinks low;
And in all the gaudy busses there are scores of weary feet
Marking time, sweet time, with a dull mechanic beat,
And a thousand hearts are plunging to a love they’ll never meet,
Through the meadows of the sunset, through the poppies and the wheat,
    In the land where the dead dreams go.

Verdi, Verdi, when you wrote Il Trovatoredid you dream
    Of the City when the sun sinks low
Of the organ and the monkey and the many-colored stream
On the Piccadilly pavement, of the myriad eyes that seem
To be litten for a moment with a wild Italian gleam
As A che la morteparodies the world’s eternal theme
    And pulses with the sunset glow?

There’s a thief, perhaps, that listens with a face of frozen stone
    In the City as the sun sinks low;
There’s a portly man of business with a balance of his own,
There’s a clerk and there’s a butcher of a soft reposefultone,
And they’re all them returning to the heavens they have known:
They are crammed and jammed in busses and—they’re each of themalone
    In the land where the dead dreams go.

There’s a very modish woman and her smile is very bland
    In the City as the sun sinks low;
And her hansom jingles onward, but her little jeweled hand
Is clenched a little tighter and she cannot understand
What she wants or why she wanders to that undiscovered land,
For the parties there are not at all the sort of thing she planned,
    In the land where the dead dreams go.

There’s an Oxford man that listens and his heart is crying out
    In the City as the sun sinks low;
For the barge the eight, the Isis, and the coach’s whoop and shout,
For the minute gun, the counting and the long disheveled rout,
For the howl along the tow-path and a fate that’s still in doubt,
For a roughened oar to handle and a race to think about
    In the land where the dead dreams go.

There’s a laborer that listen to the voices of the dead
    In the City as the sun sinks low;
And his hand begins to tremble and his face is rather red
As he sees a loafer watching him and—there he turns his head
And stares into the sunset where his April love is fled,
For he hears her softly singing and his lonely soul is led
    Through the land where the dead dreams go.

There’s and old and hardened demi-rep, it’s ringing in herears,
    In the City as the sun sinks low;
With the wild and empty sorrow of the love that blights and sears,
Oh, and if she hurries onward, then be sure, be sure she hears,
Hears and bears the bitter burden of the unforgotten years,
And her laugh’s a little harsher and her eyes are brimmed with tears
    For the land where the dead dreams go.

There’s a barrel-organ caroling across a golden street,
    In the City as the sun sinks low;
Though the music’s only Verdi there’s a world to make it sweet
Just as yonder yellow sunset where the earth and heaven meet
Mellows all the sooty City! Hark, a hundred thousand feet
Are marching on to glory through the poppies and the wheat
    In the land where the dead dreams go.

        So it’s Jeremiah, Jeremiah,
            What have you to say
        When you meet the garland girls
            Tripping on their way?

        All around my gala hat
            I wear a wreath of roses
        (A long and lonely year it is
            I’ve waited for the May!)

        If any one should ask you,
            The reason why I wear it is,
        My own love, my true love, is coming home to-day.

It’s buy a bunch of violets for the lady
    (It’s lilac time in London; it’s lilac time in London!)
Buy a bunch of violets for the lady;
    While the sky burns blue above:

On the other side of the street you’ll find it shady
    (It’s lilac time in London; it’s lilac time in London!)
But buy a bunch of violets for the lady;
    And tell her she’s your own true love.

There’s a barrel-organ caroling across a golden street,
    In the City as the sun sinks glittering and slow;
And the music’s not immortal, but the world has made it sweet
And enriched it with the harmonies that make a song complete
In the deeper heavens of music where the night and morning meet,
    As it dies into the sunset glow;

And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain
    That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light,
And they’ve given it a glory and a part of play again
    In the Symphony that rules the day and night.

        And there, as the music changes,
            The song runs round again;
        Once more it turns and ranges
            Through all its joy and pain:
        Dissects the common carnival
            Of passions and regrets;
        And the wheeling world remembers all
            The wheeling song forgets.

        Once more La Traviatasighs
            Another sadder song:
        Once more Il Trovatorecries
            A tale of deeper wrong;
        Once more the knights to battle go
            With sword and shield and lance,
        Till once, once more, the shattered foe
            Has whirled into—a dance!—

Come down to Kew in lilac time; in lilac time; in lilac time;
    Come down to Kew in lilac time;(it isn’t far from London!)
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland;
    Come down to Kew in lilac time;(it isn’t far from London!)

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