Front matter (continued 5)

"And now tourists unwrap the great kings, and hucksters chaffer where once the trains of the prince-merchants of Tyre passed, and we shall never see a Cleopatra any more.

"But I am not complaining. Men do not swim as well as in the elder days, nor handle a boat as surely."

"I know nothing of painted Pharaohs," said the great white bear, "nor anything of Indian queens. In the North are neither kings nor masons, but day and night and ice, and a little people. In summer is the great sun, white light, and grass that is green for a little, and the thunder of breaking bergs, and in winter no sun but the flaming aurora and the white illimitable miles!

"And the swarthy little people were happy then. In the long nights they sang, and they bowed to the gods in boulder and stream, and set out in the little kayaks on the Arctic seas to hunt the great solemn walrus, or they set off in sledges through the pathless wastes. They were a brave people, a healthy people.

"And came the boats hunting our sister the whale, and the whales taught the little swarthy people progress, and everywhere now they are cunning and degraded and crusted with sin, and a great plague makes them spit blood, and waste to nothingness, and die."

They all looked at the horse, but the horse was silent.

"Look back in the folds of your memory," the lion prompted. "Look back well! Can you not remember the great races in the Roman circus? Listen a little! Can you not hear the trumpets of Agincourt?"

"And you, little brother—" the bear swung his ponderous head toward the dog—"was there not a time when you lay before a fire in a rush-strewn hall? And now the houses are too little. They tell me—I do not know. And did you not once run barking joyously beside man on his horse? And now horses are out of fashion, are they not, little comrade? And the cars are too fast for your short legs."

There is another silence, and the angel looks at them piteously.

"I wish to my God I had some of them clever fellows here could argue with you. I never was much good in an argument, anyway, never having had the education. But let me tell you there 's angels could prove to you you 're all wrong. I wish they 'd come here and talk to you, but I don't suppose they 'd care much about us and our wee affairs. But—but how about music," he hazarded, "and poetry? Ay, and poetry."

"As to music—" the elephant threw up his trunk in a sneer—"what music can he make comparable to the birds of summer—the sun going down, and each bird with its separate song, blending into a gently-colored symphony, and the chime of the waves with it, and the rustle of the branches in the sundown breeze?"

"Ay, but poetry."

"It will need poetry," thundered the lion, "more poetry than can be ever written, to equalize the making ugly of earth. The great cliffs shamed by mean houses, and the splendid glades ruined that a train may pass. And the mouths of rivers spoiled by the slag of mills. And great noble trees hacked down. How many an epic to pay for a great forest dying, shepherd? How many a lyric for a tree where little trusting birds had their home?"

The angel throws out his hands abruptly.

"You have me," he says. "You have me!"

He braces with decision, rises to his full height, and suddenly there is nobleness.

"Well, which is it to be?" he asked. "Will you follow my plan, or do you insist I go immediately?"

"We insist."

He pauses an instant.

"Very well. I 'll go," he says. "I 'll go."

He looks all around the gathering. In spite of his decision, and his bracing, there is a great emotion brewing in him.

"Now, before I go, let me tell some of you something. Do you, Philip—" he turns to the bear—"be getting back North as fast as you can. You poor fellow, you must be murdered with the heat entirely, and you with the Arctic furs on. You 'll catch your death here. And as for you," he warns the crocodile, "don't be obstinate, there 's a good fellow! Keep to the water, and you 'll be all right. It's only when you get out, they can get after you. And my little friends the beavers—where are they? Childer, can you hear me?"

"But what's all this about?" asks the elephant.

"It's just for fear I 'm not coming back."

"But why aren't you coming back?" the lion growls.

"Och, it's just a notion. Are the beavers there at all, at all?"

"No, just a moment!" The tiger is on his feet. "I want to hear more of this. What do you mean by notion? You aren't thinking of leaving us?"

There is a quick commotion, a little shudder among all the animals in the background.

"Well, now—" the angel is embarrassed—"it's a hard errand I have before me, and what will be at the end of the chapter no one knows. I to be arguing with the Great Man, and demanding your rights, and He to be losing His temper with me—there 's no knowing. So to be on the safe side, I 'll just say good-by to you now. Many 's the pleasant hour we 've known and springtime coming, and many's the little day we 've spent together and winter roaring through the chilly air."

"But He never loses His temper, does he? He 's always mild."

"Oh, childer dear, ye little know! You all know the Black Man, and when you get the cold wind of his coming you scurry away. He was an angel once, the greatest of them all. Lucifer, they called him, so I 've heard old angels say, and the Hebrew or something for Him who does be bearing light, such a gorgeous angel he was. But one day he and some of his lads began to argue with the Great Man, and before the words were half out of their mouths they were tumbling through the blue spaces of the stars, condemned to eternal hell-fire. Sure, you see them yourselves on Hallowe'en, and them roaring up and down the world, and screeching fit to split the sky."

A moan of terror ran through the massed animals. The dog raised his head and howled.

"And the wee half-god we all know, him with the horns of the goat, that does the piping in the valleys of spring—sure, he was an angel once. But something went contrary on him, and now he dare n't show his face on heaven or earth, but hides in the branches as wild as a squirrel."

And a little shudder of pity arose.

"Ay, and there was others. There was a crowd of reckless fellows in the days before the flood—or after it; I don't know which—and they came from heaven to court the daughters of men, such grand women they had in those days. And the Lord God heard of it, and He stood up and looked at them, and he said just one word. They 've never been heard of since. One minute they were there, and the next was emptiness.

"Mind you, I 'm not saying anything like that will happen to me, for Himself has always been kindness to me. It's always 'How are you, Michael John?' and 'Don't you ever take a rest at all?' and 'Sometime I 'll have to take a day and come down and see yourself and the wee ones!' But just, if I don't come back, don't think I 've taken a better job. Sure, I 'd never desert you, my wee darlings. It's just maybe I 'm getting a wee bit of discipline."

"I think—" the elephant seemed husky in the throat—"your own plan might be best—to wait for an opportunity and just suggest."

"Better say nothing at all," growled the lion.

"No, childer dear; I 'd better just go ahead. I will confess it was timid of me not to go in the first place. It was thinking of my old skin I was, and I should be ashamed of myself. Sure, there 's no disgrace in asking for fair play, and you 've been sorely tried. I 'll go."

"No, no, no!" wailed the animals.

"No, your own plan was wise," the elephant insisted. "If anything happened to you, what would become of us?"

"Yes, what would become of us?" the little ones wailed.

"Do you honestly think my own plan's wiser? You 're not saying that to save me from trouble?"

"We're not," the lion said. And "Of course not," added the tiger.

"Just slip in a word when you can," from the elephant.

"Honestly, now, it would be best." The angel was relieved. "I can talk about your loyalty; and, sure, I can remind him of the kine that gave shelter to the Wee Relative in Bethlehem, and the donkey that was proud to carry His weight; and I 'll remind Him, too, that I 've never asked a favor yet, and if He could just see His way—"

"Well," the elephant thought aloud, "I 've got to be getting back to Burma."

"I 'm going your way," said the tiger.

"There 's nothing to keep me up further," said the lion.

"I 'm very much obliged to you all—" the angel was abashed with emotion—"for not insisting. And it's lucky I am," said he, "to have decent beasts to deal with and not man. For man would have insisted I 'd go, and not given a tinker's curse what would have happened me."

"Ay, man!" sneers the great white bear.

"For God's sake Philip, will you be getting home out of this, before I have you sick on my hands! And as for you, Go-by-the-Ground, get back to the river or I 'll sink my foot in your tail. Go on now! Be off with you!"

There is a shuff-shuff-shuff over the sand as the beasts scatter, going east, north, west, and south. The angel stands watching them as they go. Only the horse and the dog remain, the horse nudges him on the shoulder with its mouth, the dog puts a cold nose into his hand.

"Och, my darlings!"

DELILAH, NOW IT WAS DUSK

I

Beneath her balcony, in the delicate spring night, the life of Gaza flowed gently as a calm river. Eastward the green hills of Canaan were, Delilah knew, and in imagination she could see the soft blue down of the budding corn, the clouds of flowers, the piping green of the vines, the darkness of the olive-trees. And in the west a little moon was, while as yet the sun had not gone down, a little blade of silver, like one sweet note on a flute. It made one wish to be young again, to be a child....

The lamps of Gaza were not lighted. None was eager to go within, and below there was still the jingle of camel bells, the padding of donkeys, the nervous clatter of some horse's hoofs as a desert rider sought to guide his mount in the filled streets. Languid, supercilious Egyptians strolled in the provincial ways; desert men, their eyes suspicious as hawk's, moved warily hither and thither; her own countrymen, the squat, cheerful Philistines, half townsman and half mariner, walked briskly; mysterious, aloof Phoenicians; an occasional strange seaman from Gaul, come eastward with his ship for a cargo from Asia Minor; and now came the "Hough-hough! Hough-hough!" of herdsmen, and dappled kine went by, belabored with sticks, and as she looked, Delilah saw the group of Israelites who owned them.

From the street they saw her, and their eyes blazed fury. They pointed her out to one another, with quick, wide gestures, and she could hear the gutturals of their denunciation.... Oh, yes, they remembered Samson, after twenty years! Remembered him almost as well as she!

II

She had been thinking of him only that minute, too. It was strange, but at this time, each year, his memory, his image came to her, so that she could say in winter, "On the second moon of spring there will be flowers, and an air like wine, and the Mediterranean fishers will overhaul their gear, and I shall think of Samson," and she was the only person in Philistia who could remember him clearly.

Some old magistrate perhaps, or captain of civic guard might, their memory jogged, recall the Hebrew rebel, and say: "Wasn't there a Samson once, a great red-bearded man, who was supposed to have killed a lion with his bare hands? Or perhaps I am thinking of some of the black African giants, wrestlers or circus men. I don't know. But I seem to recall the name."

And about him, among his own people, had arisen a great myth, as will arise among desert peoples and they telling stories by the fire. The old guerilla captain had become a national hero to them, and they had magnified his raids out of all proportion to reality.

And when they thought in the desert tents of the destiny of their people, and longed for the day when the then rich southwestern country would be theirs by either conquest or penetration, they said, "If Samson had lived... If Samson had n't gone wrong..."

And Delilah they cursed bitterly, even after twenty years, and they saw her not as Samson's wife, but as some strange perfumed woman who had enticed him and sold him to his enemies. Even the little children were taught to curse her. And all she had done was to adore him, and love him, and to care for and pity him when he had grown old and blind and astray in the head.

Oh well, what did it matter what they said!

Three men there had been in her life: her childhood's sweetheart in her native valley of Sorek, the slim lad who was to have married her and settled down in the valley to lead the idyllic life of country lovers. But he had gone to Egypt, and been infested with ambition, and they had grown apart and never married. And now in Egypt he was a suave administrator, very close to the Pharoah, a great man.

And there had been Samson.

And there was her present husband, small, hawk-eyed, taciturn, the greatest of the Oriental sea-captains, who knew the Mediterranean as other men knew the lake of Galilee, who had passed through the straits known to the Greeks as the pillars of Hercules, and been north to Ibernia, the land of forests and savage, hairy Celts, and bearded druid priests with sinister eyes, and to other lands where the Phoenicians had great tin mines. A quiet, efficient man, he!

To her husband she gave admiration and a fond devotion. To the boy of her youth she had given her heart in a burst of virginal music. But to the rough Hebrew rebel, a stranger to her race, in religion, in every mode of life, she had given an immensity of love....

III

In her face now, that once had a proud, singing beauty, were dignity and power and wisdom. Strands of gray in her hair and shadows near her eyes. In all Gaza, in all Philistia, there was not one to refuse her reverence, excepting, of course, the strange gipsy people who contended she had ruined their champion and lord.

A queer people, they! A strange, inimical folk, who had come into Canaan out of Egypt, headed by magicians who had cloven the Red Sea—so they claimed—and their hand was against the dwellers in Canaan. For centuries now they had been an irritating minor political problem, and when the question of relations with Egypt sagged, or there was a lull in the discussion of the great trade route to the East, the matter of the Israelites always arose. Here they had harried a town; there squatted on a public common. And war on a large scale was impossible against them. Send armies to subdue them, and they became separate desert units, like any other tribes. And before the armies had returned to their garrisons, the Israelites were back. The Philistines, with their suave Egyptian tolerance, could only smile. What could one do against a people of that kind?

For centuries now, they had remained turbulent, cunning, breakers of the peace, with Philistia rather contemptuous of them, rather proud, not unaffectionate. No nation in the world had a problem quite like them. And the more kindly, more tolerant Philistia became, the greater the hatred of the Israelites. For years they would dwell at peace in Philistine cities, then a strange national pique would come on them, and they would march out into the desert chanting to their harsh God, blaming themselves cruelly for having lived in comfort, and prophets would arise among them who said bitter things, lashing them with a white fury, and agitators would preach war, and it was then Philistia had to be careful and send troops out, for one never knew the moment that the young men would make a raid on a township or an estate of vineyards. A sharp clash, a little guerilla warfare, and all would be over. Wise old politicians claimed that every time the Israelites were defeated, they gained a little more ground, but politicians were always pessimists. And, also, what matter if they did?

Delilah remembered that as a child in her father's house in the valley Sorek she had been brought up to the belief that all Israelites were riotous, dissatisfied. They were splendid herdsmen, but beyond that they had no virtues. And the little Hebrew children were looked down upon, because they were so poor. Oh! the cruel snobbishness of little children! A race apart, an inferior race, Delilah thought in her youth, and had smiled at the thought of their crude, melodramatic god, of whom they walked in fear. Their god was so limited, so concrete. None of the symbolism of Daigon, half man and half fish, whom the Mediterranean sailors thanked when the great silver draughts weighed down their nets; none of Baal, god of the sun, the fecund divinity who increased the herds of kine, and whose rays nurtured the soil and brought forth the sweet blue grass; none of the grace of Ashtoreth, the goddess of the dusky night, the terror and the delight and the mystery, the goddess of the ripe breasts and great passionate eyes....

So Delilah viewed them with little interest and not a little contempt, a turbulent, annoying, ignorant, clever people; their quaint folk-songs and dances, their peculiar religious revivals, their passionate hatreds... Undependable—that is what they were.

Came her youth and her growing into womanhood.... She wondered sometimes if he of her young days, for all his closeness to the Pharaoh of Egypt, his Egyptian palace, his Egyptian wife, ever remembered the warm green days of Sorek, and how they had grown together from fifteen to twenty-three.

Nothing had ever been said between them of marriage, but it was accepted by them that they would marry, as it was accepted that the sun shines, and with night come the stars. They might have been two girls together, or they might have been two boys, so sweet was the friendship between them.

The adventure of life unclosing itself came to them together—all the beauty of the world, the wild smiling flowers, the sun dropping over the hills, the clamor of birds in spring as they raided the seeded fields, the little fish that jumped in the pools when the winds stilled and evening came—all that was a tremendous bond. Even now when she thought of places in the valley of her childhood she could picture them only as background for his calm young face. They seemed natural, the blossoming of apple-trees and her young lover's face.

And Delilah's dreams—five years of dreaming, of the governing of a house, and the regiment of maid-servants, of little children. Five years dreaming! And he had gone into Egypt and had never come back. Only stories returned, of his success, of his offices, of his wife....

She had thought, being a young woman then, that what was killed with such a tremendous shock was her love, but she knew now, now that she was nine-and-forty years, that what had died was a dream. She had been shocked, disoriented, and her life, which had been so carefully planned, suddenly had no more meaning.

It had made a woman of her, though, and made her proud. She must have something to do, to think about. Love and all thoughts of love she put aside. In order to escape from herself she began to study people, questions of the day, this, that. It was probably the woman loving the underdog that turned her eyes on the question of the poor Hebrew, rather than to the glory of Egypt, or the power of the merchant cities.

She became their friend, and they came to know her. Probably they robbed her a little, but the cost was so small compared to the luxury of escape.... All her friends smiled at her hobby and spoke of the Israelites as "Delilah's Hebrews," and they wondered how a woman of her looks and standing should bother with these things. Why did n't she get married, they asked? Or was she becoming queer? One of these strange women who took more interest in public affairs than a home. So many of them were becoming that way.

But Delilah only smiled. They were her anodyne. She liked their strange folk-dances; their wailing, nostalgic songs. And their legends—there was about them a quaintness and simplicity she loved—Adam and Eve in the garden; the story of Noah and his ark; the naïve legend of Babel; and the newer history of the leader who had been found by the Egyptian princess in the bulrushes—what was his name? Moses! That was it.... How simple they were, how refreshingly simple, the dear things!

IV

It had often seemed to her a strange thing, as she sat thinking, how all one labors to learn passes easily away, and what one feels remains, welcome or no. All the book-learning of her early years had gone, but there would never go the memory of her first blushing kiss, and though it was six-and-twenty years since he had gone from her life, yet the thought of the Philistine boy who was now a grandee of Egypt—that remained.

So, likewise, all she had learned of the Hebrews was gone; now a legend, now a saying would come back to her, some proverb or a piece of ritual, but like a bar from a tune one has forgotten. But everything she felt, everything she had known of great Samson remained with her. One learns things and one lives things. The things written in the head fade out and die, but the words on the heart bite deeper and deeper.... She could remember every kiss he had given, the immense madness he had evoked.... O God, was it possible that she, so calm now, so respected, so wise, had once shaken like a leaf at his voice? Her knees had trembled; her heart had fought in her breast like a caged bird; her throat had gone dry....

Before she met him, she knew him by repute, a huge, turbulent man of immense strength, who had often been in trouble with the Philistine authorities.... In the tribal troubles, some years before, his name had been very prominent. He had married a Philistine girl in Timnath, and there had been a riot at the wedding, over a question of dowry, or something of the kind, and some of the girl's Philistine relations had been killed. A sort of vendetta had arisen and Samson had declared war against the nation. He had proceeded to burn the corn stacked in the fields; there was a strange rumor that he had captured an immensity of foxes and, tying burning brands to their tails, had loosed them among the harvest.

Then, of course, from a family quarrel it had become a national affair and Samson was proscribed. Prodigious stories were told of his strength and valor, of his defeating patrols single-handed, and refuging on the rocks of Etom. The Hebrews were asked to give him up to authority, and brought him to Lehi bound. But there he burst his cords, such immense strength had he, and escaped after slaying twenty men in a hand-to-hand fight. Then he had become a bandit of the hills on whose head a price was set.

Around him a romance grew, as will about all mountain chiefs, to which Samson lived up most gallantly. Careless of disguise, careless of danger, he had come, with his great red beard and his hair floating to his hips, into Gaza itself once, to see a woman. The watchmen were told, and the city gates were locked while they searched for him, but he crashed through the gates with his terrific shoulders and made his way to Hebron. It was said he carried parts of the ironwork with him to make weapons.

All this had happened years before, and all the border warfare was over, and Samson was no longer a proscribed bandit but a great man of the Hebrews, leaping suddenly into fame and holding fame and power as such men will. He no longer raided harvests and kine, nor came to Gaza secretly, but now he walked like a conqueror. It was said that it irked him that everything was so peaceful and quiet, and he regretted the old roaming days. To the Hebrews he was a great figure, a champion.

Delilah had never understood how they made a champion out of this guerilla fighter, but when she saw him for the first time she understood. He came to thank her for the interest she had taken in his race.

"You have been good to my people," his voice thundered. "I thank you."

Herself, a tall woman, had to look up like a child to him, and herself, no small woman, felt a reed beside that vast muscular bulk. She had two impressions of him, his immense masculine quality, and his tremendously arrogant manner. For everything Philistine he seemed to hold a tremendous contempt. He had beaten the Philistines, and physically he thought little enough of them.

It seemed a little flaunting to her, at first, that great cape of red hair, of which he was so very proud, so very careful. In a smaller man it would have been effeminate, but in him it was a trait of virility, like a lion's mane. Beside him his followers, his clansmen, seemed so frail, so puny. No wonder they watched him with those adoring eyes. No wonder they exhibited him, so proud they were.

To Delilah, it was a wonder and an irritation that she should be so moved, so thrown off her axis mentally and emotionally by the presence of this great hairy man. All her senses were jangled suddenly. One part of her, the Philistine lady, smiled in a little patronizing contempt for the unconcealed boastfulness of his words, for his insulting glance at the passers-by.

But another, a strange Delilah clamored:

"No matter what he says, let him speak on. My heart opens at his voice.... Let him contemn all men with his arrogant eye, but let him not contemn me!"

The Philistine lady had a little disgust for the way he laid his hand on the heads and the shoulders of his followers, pawing them clumsily. But the new Delilah clamored:

"If he lays his hand on me, I shall faint to the ground and die!" And a burning shame rose in her, and her face reddened. And she said to herself, "God! God! I have suddenly gone mad!"

All her culture, her tradition, all the fine conventions of her life, seemed suddenly to vanish, become nothing, before this immense male. All the men of her life, friends, her young false lover, relatives seemed like puppets beside him—their shaven faces, their polished speech, their carefulness of dress and demeanor. The rufous giant had appeared, and "Away," he seemed to have cried, and they had whirled off, like blown feathers.

If she were troubled, he was troubled too. The directness of him read her perturbation. A great desire rose in the turbulent hillsman to be near her, to know her body and soul. He was accustomed to women, to love women, but never had he known a woman such as this—a beautiful groomed lady who possessed all that was a wonder to him, riches and foreign breeding and a strange, sweet culture. His wife of Timneth had been only a country girl, and his sweethearts of the hills had been tribeswomen, agile, angry as cats, like some hard, harsh fruit, and the women he had known in Gaza were venal women, for every man. But this was a great lady—and she loved him. A great pride, and a great wonder, and desire rose in him. He was stupefied as she.

They looked at each other, each reading the other's thought, until their throats became dry, and all words were just trivial sounds, meaning nothing. Dumb and wondrous he was, and she dumb and bowing with shame. How they parted was to her a mystery, but that their hands touched, and at the touch all her bone and flesh seemed to go liquid, and her knees trembled as with an immensity of fear. And nothing seemed stable in the world but his great hot hand, that trembled too....

Bowed with shame she was, troubled, blind in purpose, all the familiar things of her house and lands were now unfamiliar, unimportant. The long day dragged, and in her heart was a storm, like a hot wind from the desert. She refuged in her inner rooms, in the coolness of her inner rooms, but that brought no relief, and restlessly she must come out again. The Asian sun crept slowly from east to west, but Delilah remained in a dull maze. "Am I ill?" she asked. "Am I stricken with some strange disease?" But no. "I am insane," she thought. "I must put it out of my head. I must n't think." Slowly, slowly the day wheeled by; but out of her head it would not go. And her face went white and slowly she whispered to herself: "I am a bad woman. I never knew before. Oh, shame, shame and woe! I am an evil woman!"

The Asian sun dropped into the hissing sea, and came the soft Syrian dusk, and the swift coolth of the night. The heat of mind and body went with the heat of the day. There remained only a deep longing, that seemed to be a nostalgia of the infinite. Without, the night was blue, there was only a little wind among the apple-trees, and all the flowers had closed until dawn should come, but the birds were unsilent and the earth itself was restless, now spring was here.

The night wind cooled her sweet brow and ruffled the dark perfumed hair at her temples. The cool night wind, like cool water. Then arose in Delilah a desire for it, and she wandered out among the vines and apple-trees, touching them, as she passed, in sympathy, for it seemed to her that they must share her yearning. Though all was darkness, yet all was not rest. Somewhere the sheep were grazing, and she could imagine the gods of the nearer East walking the earth, the passionate, seeking gods, the ever-young ones; they walked beside her, their slim, brown, beautiful bodies, their liquid eyes. All the longing of the night came to her lips in a little song—an air, and faltering, unthought words.

"O Spring, which begins now," went the throbbing contralto.

There was a rustle among the trees. Her heart stopped beating.

"Is some one there? Who is there? Who?" But she knew well who was there.

"Who is it? Who is it?"

She saw the great bulk in the blue night, like a giant, like some great giant of the earth.

"It is I—Samson."

"What—how—" Words would not come to her. Nor would words mean anything. "Why—"

She put out her hands—she knew not for what reason, perhaps to thrust him away—her slim white hands in the dusk. He seized them. Once again she throbbed from head to foot, and her knees became weak, and all of her melted. And she fell forward, will having left her, on the great bearded chest.

"I am dying," she murmured. "O my God, I die!"

V

Now they were married; and he had come to live in her house, the low, pleasant house in the valley of Sorek, the white and cool house.... Without, the Syrian flowers grew in the garden, the white and blue and little red flowers, the bees droned.... Cool dairies and enclosures with great stacks of corn; and in the meadows the dappled kine grazed, and on the hillsides the heavy-fleeced sheep. Within, her hand maidens tended the whirring spinning-wheels, and all the graciousness of a great house was there, cool water-jars that Persian potters had made, and stuffs from Damascus, and rugs on the walls from cunning Eastern looms, and furniture fashioned by the proud Syrian craftsmen. Her house had been a house loved by all, the young Philistine poets and elder statesmen and calm, subtle priests. And the strain and weariness of affairs had come on them, they would say: "Let us go out to Delilah's house at Sorek, and rest in the orchard of the bees." ... But now, now Samson was there, and things were different.

Through all Philistia the news had gone, that Delilah had become infatuated with and married the guerilla leader, and the young men stormed. Was she mad? Or what had he done to her? And an immense disgust arose in them. Delilah, to marry that! Delilah, of all women! Delilah, beautiful, gifted, with all her tradition, to be bound to this ragamuffin warrior! This fatuous boaster, with his red hair of comedy, and yokel whiskers! How disgusting, how degrading! And they had offered her all their hearts and poetry, and she had chosen this. O Delilah! Delilah!

Older men and women said nothing. Some of them understood. The freakish and terrible lightning that passion is, and how it strikes. In some women that is what strong drink is to men, a mocker and a raging thing. A pity, though, Delilah... And the priests shook their heads. It will not last, they said, and her heart will be broken.

Though it was pain to them, still they came to see her, to let her know that nothing mattered, she was their friend always.... They had to suffer seeing the great red one at the head of the table, hearing his jokes and reminiscences. And solemnly he would speak of his birth, and claim supernatural happenings at it, angels appearing and going up in pillars of fire.... And the company made awkward comments, and Delilah lowered her eyes....

Sometimes a great rage against the Philistines would take him, and he would give vent to it by telling at the table of his fight at Ramath-leki when he had annihilated the Philistine patrol with the first weapon to hand, a great bone he had found in the desert sands. After many years and much telling he had exaggerated the deed out of all proportion, until from ten it had become a thousand men.

"And do you know what that bone was?" He would put his immense hands on the table and lean forward.

"The jawbone of an ass," he roared with the thunderous laughter. "Ho! ho! The jawbone of an ass. With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men."

But worse than his rage and boasting was his good humor. When they spoke to Delilah of some new poet in Tyre, or of some subtle new writings of the Egyptians he would break in with his terrible question: "Did they know any riddles?" And without waiting for an answer he would tell them of the sinister conundrum he had propounded on the occasion of his first marriage. It seems, as he told it, that when he was courting his first wife, who they all knew "had turned out no good," he explained as he patted Delilah's hand, he met a young lion at Timnath, and it roared at him, and he caught it up and rent it, "and I had nothing but my two hands." He transacted his business, and went home, and when he was coming for the wedding, he looked to see if the lion's carcass was there where he had thrown it, and it was still there, and a swarm of bees and honey were in it, and the honey was good. "Fine eating," he told them.

At the marriage feast he proposed a riddle, wagering thirty fine linen sheets and thirty changes of garments that the guests would not answer in seven days. "And if you can't find it out, you pay me thirty sheets and thirty changes of garments," he laughed. "They were all Philistines, and all thought themselves clever fellows.

"So I said: 'Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. Expound me that,' said I, 'or pay up. Or pay up,' said I."

And he looked around the table, silent, a great grin under his red beard.

"And did they expound it?" Some one asked at length.

"They did. 'What is sweeter than honey?' they answered, with a smile on their faces, 'and what is stronger than a lion?' They got around the wife, do you see, and she gave them the answer.' I told them that, too. 'If you had not plowed with my heifer,' said I, 'you had not found out my riddle.' So I lost the wager."

"And did you pay up?"

"I did. And that's funnier than the riddle. I went down to Ashkelon, and killed thirty men there, and took their belongings, and gave the thirty changes of garments to them that found out the riddle. So it cost me nothing, do you see, and I kept my word.

"But I never looked at the wife after. I could n't. I took a kind of hate against her. She married another fellow."

A great embarrassment arose among all the company, so full of shame were they for their hostess; but over her fine, sweet face no shadow passed. She might have been married to a king, so calm and dignified she was. A great lady, she!

She understood now, looking back, how pathetic a figure the red giant was, had she only had the eyes, the wisdom to see then. He was so lost among the suave, sophisticated Philistines, who could hurt more with a word than he could with his great brawny hands. Beneath his swelling thews he was only a child. He wanted to be as important as the guests in her house. Feeling they despised him for his origin, and his manners, his boastfulness and his arrogance were only a defense.

Little by little now Delilah's friends disappeared, and she was glad of it, for she hated to see Samson despised, disliked and their pitying looks for her hurt her terribly. And the days of peace were dreadful to him; his, too, the tragedy of the soldier now that war was over, and no more exhilaration, keenness, importance. The tolerance of his old enemies was an insult to him. On their hatred he had thriven. Their hatred made him important. If their hatred went, he would no longer be the great Samson, he would only be a giant of the hills.

He could n't believe they did n't hate him—how could they do otherwise, he having killed so many?—and a great suspicion arose in him. They were a noted race for stratagems, these Philistines, and might they not now be planning something against him? Delilah, for instance! It was strange, he thought, how a woman of her standing should marry him like that. He could n't understand. He must watch her.

He was forever, also, meeting his old tribesmen, seeing them more now than ever, for he would run to them when oppressed by the Philistine atmosphere. And the Philistines as a whole they regarded as deadly enemies. They never believed in their peaceful intentions. Though they were in a way proud of Samson's great marriage, yet they distrusted it. And by hint and innuendo they sought to put him on his guard. He nodded importantly. He did n't need to be told about the Philistines, he said; he'd keep his eye on them. "Had anything...?" they crowded around him. Well, he wasn't saying, but he was watching; he smiled. His wife? Let them not worry; he did n't trust women very far.

And relieved, and once more raised in importance and self-esteem, he would swagger back to the house.

Sometimes, too, in Delilah's place, he would be seized with a great desire to make friends with the young Philistines; and when Delilah wasn't there, he would show off his immense strength, felling an ox with one blow of his fist. Once he had himself bound with seven green withes, stouter than rope, stronger than chains, and with a cruel burst of strength stood free, snapping them as though they were threads. And once he had his arms bound with new rope, breaking the bond without any effort. But his greatest triumph was having his hair woven into a great spinning-wheel and fastened to the pin, and walking away took with him the pin of the beam, and the web. But the Philistines had seen more intricate and showy feats of strength by the Egyptians' black slaves. And it did not impress them over-much. No matter what he did, he could not get into sympathy with them. He was a stranger in his wife's house. Also he could not understand why she should seem humiliated by these displays. Did not a woman love a strong man? Shouldn't she be proud? Well, why was n't she?

Somehow the story of these trials of strength reached the Hebrew settlements, and they construed it that the Philistines were seeking to take him. When he came among them, magniloquent, magnificent, they questioned him and he gave no answer, letting them believe that his old enemies were spreading nets for him. A great terror arose in them. And they tried to persuade him to come back to them. But he would n't. He was equal to all their stratagems, he hinted. "But the women!" they said, "nothing passes the cunning of a woman. Better leave her, Samson; better leave her now."

"The woman pleases me well." And he would n't be moved.

The woman pleased him, but he did n't love her; and he displeased her, but she loved him. In Delilah's heart was so much aching love for him, such depth of passion, that at times she was ashamed. It seemed to her that she had given everything in her to this man. No matter how displeased she was, no matter how humiliated by his boastings, by his circus tricks, when night came, and he put out his hand to her, all the irritation of the day passed, and her being sang.

She had chosen her husband, and what she had chosen was her own business. No matter how queer he was, she could n't have him laughed at.... So they stayed away, and she was glad of it and little by little the great wonder of her marriage provoked no more passion, no more discussion. Only when a stranger appeared, or some old friend, and asked in the public assemblies of Delilah, and the incongruous marriage was once more brought up and discussed. Shoulders shrugged.

"And is she happy?"

"We don't know. We don't see much of her any more."

A new strange element came up in this isolation: Samson did n't like being left alone by the Philistines. Somewhere in his mind arose the theory that it was a new insult, a new harm. He grew short with his wife; became irritable; nothing pleased him. He was not a farmer, a warrior he! he complained. He was entitled to relaxation, amusement, conversation. He was no vegetable—

"Then, Samson, you would like people here?"

He did n't like to be left alone, as though he had the plague, or treated as though he were nobody, by God!

"Then they shall come, Samson."

But ah! there was something, he objected. He did n't like this damned superciliousness, this accursed Philistine superiority—

"You imagine it, Samson. You are too sensitive, my big lover."

"Then they are not superior? are not better than I?"

"Of course not, great Samson. In every way you are as good as they, the same as they. You would look the same as they, only better-looking, more magnificent, if only—"

"If only what?"

"Oh, don't be angry with me, lover, if I tell you. There is only one thing remarkable about you; one thing they can criticize. If only your hair—"

"Ha! my hair!"

"O Lover, without it, you would look so great and splendid, and dignified. There would be nothing to criticize."

"But Delilah, my strength is in my hair."

"O lover, lover, don't be silly!"

"Also, my parents took a vow—"

"But darling, your parents never knew you were to be such a great man, and that you would have to command respect from the nation—"

"Of course, of course. But, Delilah, if my strength goes—"

"Dearest, it won't go. How could it?"

"And they won't have anything to criticize then! Ha! Then off it comes!"

She was so happy, the tears came into her eyes. This strange desire to wear his hair long as a woman's had been a bugbear to her. This foppishness, freakishness, superstition, whatever it was, it made him remarkable. She could n't suffer to have men smile at him.

"If you only knew how happy you make me!"

He was ludicrously nervous as she shore off the great red braids. He was more, he was frightened. The burden gone, he strolled casually around, picked up a little bar of iron at the fireplace, twisted it to form a loop, was satisfied. Glanced at himself in the long metal mirror, smiled.

"I think it suits me well."

A thrill of delight came to Delilah, a new, a younger Samson had appeared. Her heart went pit-a-pat.... A great dignity sat on him now, and he weighed his words at the table. Gone with his hair was his old arrogance, and seemingly his race hatred.... The Philistines spoke among themselves, wondering how she had done it. This quiet, well-groomed man, remarkable only for his size and height, could this be the same red rebel whom they had known a few short months ago? A wonderful woman.

But when the Hebrews heard of it, a great chill fell on their hearts, and they wrung their hands. "They have cut off our Samson's hair. Oh, woe!" they cried. "The woman enticed him, and he a Nazarite unto God from his mother's womb. Oh, woe! Oh, woe! Gone is his strength now, and gone is glory!" But the red one, all agog with his new worldliness, paid no heed to them, went never near them.

For some brief weeks Delilah knew happiness such as she never believed possible in earth or heaven.... So fine, so strong he looked, so greatly he acted, so—so fully he loved.... Of course it could n't have lasted, she knew now. How fast catastrophe!

Quietly he said one day: "How soon it gets dark! Night falls faster than it used. An hour ago the sun was shining, and now it is dark."

She felt as if some cruel fingers had seized her heart, her throat. She froze to the ground.

"What did you say?"

"I say, why don't the maidens bring lights?"

"Not yet, dear heart.... Let us stay in the warm dusk. Wait, I take your hand."

A few days later he stumbled and all but fell, was clumsy. She flew to his side.

"My eyes," he said, "a touch of sun. Nothing particular." But she sent for a physician.

"It's nothing," Samson said. "Something I 've eaten. I 'll go to sleep."

"Dear Samson, to please me." The physician examined his eyes.

"Well?" Delilah drew him aside.

"The early days in the desert.... He is going blind."

"Is there no hope, no cure?"

"None."

A little laugh of agony came from her. Great Samson blind! The little lover blind!... Oh, God!...

"Shall we tell him?"

"No, no!" she burst out. Maybe there was some mistake! "No. We sha'n't tell him."

A few days later came a great bellow from the garden!

"The sun has gone out of the sky," she heard him exalt. "The day of wrath is on us. The God of the Hebrews will judge the just and the unjust. O Philistines, your day has come. The sun has gone out of the sky."

She flew to him, her feet hardly touching the grass.

"The sun has gone out of the sky," he chanted; "now is silence, but soon the mountains will rend, the cliffs fall, and the Lord God of Hosts will appear in thunder!"

"Oh, Samson, Samson!" Her face was a wet mask of tears. Her arms went quickly about him. "Listen, Samson!"

"Delilah, the sun has gone out of the sky!"

"Samson, Samson, you are great, you are big, you are brave. Be brave now, heart of hearts—"

"The Day of Days is here. The sun has gone out of the sky."

"Worse, my darling, worse. Worse than that the sun should be gone from the sky. The sun, Samson, the sun—the sun has gone out of your eyes!"

VI

"Then I am blind," he said quietly, after a little while.

"Dearest, I shall be eyes for you, watching, wary. Oh, poor, poor Samson, put your head on my shoulder, your eyes close to my heart. You shall see with my heart. I give it to you to see with.... Cry, Samson, if you must, cry on my shoulder." She sought to draw him closer to the haven of her breast. But he had stiffened, and his great hand and arm had stiffened. He just moved her ponderously aside.... He raised his head to the autumn sky, and a great bellow came from his chest.

"The Philistines are upon me. They have put out my eyes."

"Samson! Dear heart, listen—"

"They have shaven the seven locks of my head. They have taken my strength from me. They have put out my eyes."

"Samson, Samson, listen. It is I, Delilah. Don't you know me?"

His great roar had brought out the household, and men from the hillside, and stopped folk on the road. And they all came running now thinking some murder was being done.

"I know you, Delilah. I know you well. The Lords of the Philistines gave you silver to entice me. I knew you, and the Lord departed from me."

"Samson, don't! Don't, Samson!"

"Away, harlot!" And he struck at her blindly. Only the tips of his fingers touched her shoulder, but the force of them sent her to the ground. Her household crouched to spring.

"For God's sake, no!" she almost screamed at them.

"The Philistines are upon me. They have put out my eyes!" he roared. He went stumbling piteously through the orchard, the trunks of the trees hurtling him, the branches striking his defenseless face. Somehow he gained the road: "Delilah, the great whore, enticed me, and the Lords of the Philistines put out my eyes—" his piteous bellow was like the crying of some stricken animal. Delilah called a serving-lad.

"Go after my lord Samson," she said, "and lead him whithersoever he wishes."

All afternoon and evening, and late into the night she sat white and stricken, waiting for his step, waiting for news of him. In the darkness a horse galloped up. An officer of the Philistines sought her.

"Have you news of Samson?"

"Yes, Delilah. He is in Gaza, in the prison-house."

"In the prison-house! What has he done?"

"He has done nothing, Delilah, he is—he is mad and blind, and would come in. We tried to send him home to you, but he wouldn't come. And he would n't go to the Hebrews. We were afraid of something happening to him, so we took him in.... What shall we do, Delilah?"

"Would you—would you let him stay?"

"If you wish it, Delilah."

"He will be least unhappy there."

She knew somehow, in her heart, that never again would she lie in his arms, never again be wife to the husband in him. She would take him back, take him back gladly. Though no longer had she great passion for him—that had died when he struck and insulted her before her servants. She had a great pity and affection for the poor driven man. She was the only one who understood him. "Ah, poor man! poor man!" she cried. And in some ways he was only a child.

In a few days she went down to the prison house. The officials brought her to where he was grinding corn in the yard.

"We put him at it, Delilah, to keep his mind off his trouble." She nodded.

"Samson," she called. He moved his head slightly.

"Don't you know me, Samson?"

"I know you. You are the harlot Delilah, who enticed me, and gave me into the hands of the Lords of the Philistines. Delilah, I know you well."

"Samson, will you come home to my house? Let me make you comfortable there."

"You would put out my tongue, Delilah, and burn off my hands, as you put out my eyes. I know you, Delilah!"

"Then will you go to the Hebrews?"

"No!" he replied sullenly.

A sudden rush of tears to her eyes made her go out. She could no longer bear to look upon him. He had been so strong once, so courageous. He had looked in the sun's eye. And now, blind and broken—oh, poor dear! ... She stumbled as she went.

At the door of the prison house the governor shuffled uncomfortably: "We shall be very good to him, Delilah, as kind as we know how," he uttered.

There was a great lump in her throat, so she could say nothing. But he got his thanks from her twisted smile, her wet eyes....

VII

And now she was alone in her house, and to her mute surprise, everything went on: grasses grew, cows lowed at the milking hour, the fleece grew on sheep and had to be sheared, the grapes ripened on the vines. And she lived, still. Her hair did not become gray, nor her face take on any mark of tragedy, only a new sweetness, and strength. And her love and her marriage was now nothing but a strange story of a strange woman and a strange man. Not quite a story, even, but a collection of incidents that might be important and again might not. And the great love she had experienced had become nebulous, was drifting away, so that she could hardly believe she had not seen it in others, but for its intimacy, its great intimacy.... And he was more nebulous to her than if he were dead....

She heard of him. She heard that from the prison walls he harangued his white-faced, scared tribesmen, reviling his hosts, and above all reviling her, telling the secrets of her love as the machinations of some evil woman, and referring to her visit, saying that her heart was merry and that she had come to have him make her sport.... But after a little while none paid attention to him, so stale become miracles, except his own tribesmen. It was only the chatter of some crazed religious patriot; people shrugged their shoulders, and forgot soon who Delilah was, never imagining the great lady of Sorek as having been wife and lover to this poor crazed giant, though they had known it to be true. Everything strange grows commonplace with days, and with more days grows negligible.

So passed a year....

Just when she had become reconciled to this strange situation, herself honored and in luxury, her husband mad and blind and insisting on being a prisoner of the Philistines, just when she had striven to make and succeeded in making this seem a normal, a usual thing, a courier from Gaza came.... What his business was she never imagined.

"Delilah, Samson is dead!"

"Samson!" It never even chilled her, so ridiculous did such a statement seem. "Samson is in Gaza."

"I come from Gaza, Delilah, and Samson is dead."

"Samson dead?" That turbulent temperament, that immense vitality, that gigantic frame,—surely there was one whom Death could not touch, at least for nearly a century, when he would be old and weak and tired. But not now! No! "What do you mean?"

"Delilah, Samson was wandering through the town. He had asked the master of the prison-house if he might go to see the new temple of Daigon. Though he could n't see, he wanted to feel it, its pillars and stone. A little lad brought him. And there was a scaffolding in front on which three men were working, and he knocked against it, and felt the pillars, and stopped....

"And he put his hands on two of the pillars of the scaffolding, and listened to the workmen above, and then called out: 'O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my eyes.'

"And he took hold of the two middle pillars of the scaffolding—"

"Oh!" Delilah's voice came in a long moan. "Oh! my poor love! my poor lord! oh! ... The workmen," she asked, "were they—killed?"

"One was lamed and one bruised and one had a shoulder smashed, but only Samson, Delilah, is dead."

"Samson is dead!" she said dully. And then she quickened. "Are you sure that he isn't only stunned?"

"No, Delilah; Samson is dead."

"I shall go with you...."

They had taken him into a cool corner of the temple, and when she saw him there was no longer doubt in her, or—or hope. He lay there with a great dignity, a new majesty, all the pain and baffledness had gone from his face and the poor empty eyes were closed....

And she sank to her knees, and took his head on them, she saw with a little glad wringing of the heart that once more the great golden cloak of hair had grown ...

"Delilah, where is he to—stay?" The captain of the guards leaned toward her.

"Not with us, kinsman. He might n't rest. He will sleep with his own."

"Then shall I tell his brethren, and the house of his father to come?"

"Do, kinsman," she said. She turned her head to the shadows. "Tell them to come and take him," she said.

She was like a woman in stone but for her strained voice, and for the fingers twisting, twisting, twisting under the red-gold cloak of hair. "Go now and tell them," she said. "Tell them, but don't let them come," she said, "for—for just a little while...."

And now night had come, and the little lamps of Gaza burned clear in the blue softness. The sun had gone down in the west, and the silver blade of the moon had all but followed. Delilah felt cold and stiff, and there were tears in her heart that would not come to her eyes for relief. The heaviness of an old sorrow, it never went, and she did n't know if she wanted it to go.... She rose to go within.

"Delilah, the great harlot," a raucous voice accused her from the blackness of the street. "She enticed our lord Samson and made him sleep on her knees—and she pressed him daily with her words and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death—"

She stopped and listened. Venom was sprayed against her from the street. Hatred arose like a pillar. Suddenly the tears came, the welcome tears, and gratitude went in a white shaft from her to the bitter men in the streets, for this: that after so many years great Samson was not forgotten, that he lived in their mind and hearts still, as in hers.

A QUATRAIN OF LING TAI FU'S

Because of his perfect, or nearly perfect, English there were many who believed that Li Sin was only masquerading as a Chinaman. Because of the slightly slit Mongol eyes, and the swarthy color of his skin, there were others who explained his enigma by guessing he was a half-breed. It never occurred to either party that Li Sin had been sent to Eton, in England, at the age of thirteen, and that from Eton he had gone to Oxford. They would not have believed it if you told them. There is a dogma abroad to the effect that every Chinaman must of necessity speak English like a Cantonese laundryman or like an attendant at a chop-suey restaurant.

It never occurred to them, either, that Li Sin was a Manchu duke, with a genealogy that extended back to the days of Tang. It never occurred to them that the slant-eyed Manchu was as big a physician as any of the high-priced practitioners on the Avenue. To the descendants of fur-peddlers and deck-scrubbers who graced the Social Register, or to the millionaires of Long Island who had soared into the financial heavens on an accidental oil-spout or who had amassed their fortunes by the less reputable forms of mine-grabbing—to these, and to their wives and daughters, Li Sin was merely a tradesman or shopkeeper. It did not particularly matter to them that his shop on Fifth Avenue was filled with little gold Buddhas whose eyes were fine emeralds, with pieces of lacquer which it had taken an artist his lifetime to do, with peachblow vases transparent as a hand against the sun, with porcelains sheer as fine silks, with cloisonne jars that made staid experts rave like men in liquor. But the strictures of the ignorant did not worry Li Sin in the least. He would only raise his eyebrows and smile his bland, inscrutable smile.

Li Sin has left Fifth Avenue now, and in his store, which was in those days a temple of truth as well as a temple of beauty, a very lying and exceedingly dishonest Armenian reigns. In his own city of Tientsin the Manchu lives in stately leisure. He has reverted to his own name, Hsien Po, which is great in Manchu annals. He has reverted to his Manchu dress of brocaded blouse and silken trousers, to his mandarin's cap with its mandarin's button. He is very proud of his pear gardens, and he divides his time between walking in them, reading the analects of Confucius, and giving the benefit of his marvelous medical knowledge gratuitously to the poor. He is happy, I hope, for if ever a man deserved to be happy, it is he.

He is gone now, is Li Sin, but I can see him as plainly as though he were standing beside me. A rather squat sort of man, with a squarish face and high cheek-bones. His shining black hair was parted smoothly at the side, and there was a look of health in the transparent quality of his brown skin and in the whites of his slanting eyes. There was always a quiet smile on his lips, and he wore the tweed and broadcloth of America with as much ease as the blouse and silken trousers of his own land. The only Oriental hint in his clothes was the suppressed gorgeousness of his neckties. He roamed about the great store, passing an occasional word with the attendants or stopping to greet a favorite customer, which was an honor. The customers were much in awe of Li Sin. There were incidents that had taught them to respect him.

There was the incident of the amateur pottery expert who happened to be also a millionaire. He noticed a vase of delicate blue jade.

"Oh, Li Sin," he said, "I want that. That's a wonderful piece of Ming."

"It's not Ming," the Manchu told him.

"I tell you it is Ming!" the young millionaire insisted. "I 'll buy it."

"I 'm afraid you won't, Mr. Rensselaer," the Manchu answered blandly. "I won't sell it to you."

"Then you 'll sell me nothing, ever again," Rensselaer decreed in a passion.

"Oh, very well," Li Sin smiled.

To Morganstern, the munitions magnate, he was much shorter. The bulky financier rushed into the store rolling a cigar about his fat lips. He wanted a rug, he said, an expensive one, the best in the store. Li Sin smiled a trifle cynically and pointed out something on the wall.

"A Persian thirteenth-century," he explained curtly. "Used to belong to a shah of Persia. It costs seventeen thousand dollars."

"I 'll take it," Morganstern nodded. "I want something for the bedroom floor."

"But, dear sir," Li Sin expostulated, "one does n't put that on the floor. One hangs it on a wall."

"I don't care a damn." The munitions man drew out his check-book. "Anything good enough for the shah of Persia's wall is good enough for my feet."

"My good sir—" Li Sin's voice was as bland as ever—"you are making a mistake. There are several grass-rug emporiums on Second Avenue. Go into the next drug store and look one up in a telephone-book. Take a trolley across Fifty-ninth Street. They 'll sell you one, and you can carry it home beneath your arm." And abruptly he left Morganstern.

These things created a legend about Li Sin that will never die on the Avenue. Cynics say that it was good advertising, and brought people who liked to be insulted. But we, who knew the Manchu, were certain that was the last thing he had in mind. Peculiar as Li Sin's business habits were, more peculiar still were his friends. Among them might be counted a European ambassador in Washington, a great heavy-weight wrestler, a little Roman Catholic priest, a head waiter in a restaurant. All of these people he liked for some quality that his shrewd eyes had discovered. And last but not least was Irene Johns.

She had come into the store one soft spring morning, looking for a birthday present for her mother, something inexpensive, she said, about two dollars, all—she laughed merrily—she could afford. Perhaps it was that gurgling laugh of hers, that limpid, hurried, harmonious scale, that drew Li Sin's attention. But he came forward with a suggestion when she and the salesman became nonplused at the problem of finding something pretty, good and worth two dollars.

"Perhaps I can help," he smiled.

She impressed him with her appearance as much as with her laugh. There was something so ethereal about her that she seemed less a being of flesh and blood than the disembodied spirit of spring. Her fair hair, her starlit purple eyes, her eager, half-closed small mouth with its glint of little teeth, her slim neck stood out against her heather costume and black, sweeping hat like a softly modulated light. She was so little, so slender, that she seemed as delicate as a snowflake. She moved with the lightness of a feather stirring along the ground. And yet, Li Sin saw with his physician's eye, she was not fragile. She was as healthy as an athlete.

"I think I can find you something," he said.

He did. In the rear of the store he discovered a roughly hammered silver brooch from Bokhara, a marvel of intricacy and sweeping lines; he had bought it in Bokhara himself for two rubles. The thing had interested him.

"But this must be more than two dollars!" She spoke in wonder.

"I paid one dollar for it in Bokhara, and I am exacting a dollar profit for it, which is not too little," the Manchu answered gravely.

By what peculiar, invisible steps their friendship ripened it would be impossible to detail; but ripen it did. The fresh, fair American beauty, slim and beautiful as a Tanagra figurine, and the squat, middle-aged Mongol liked each other, came to appreciate each other. She had an inborn love for beautiful things, and he was never weary of showing her the treasures of his store. He showed her strange, exotic jewels, collected by dead kings and queens—chrysoberyls that were at times the strange green of olives and at other times red like a setting sun, topazes with the yellow of aged wine, sunstones that glowed with a tremulous golden red, carbuncles that flashed into explosive stars of scarlet, peridots and milky moonstones, a ruby that the King of Ceylon had owned, and an emerald that had once belonged to the unhappy Queen of Scots. Irene Johns would gasp at the sight of these things.

"They 're so beautiful!" she would say. "They make the tears come to my eyes!"

That was enough for Li Sin, that gasp of appreciation. He loved the things so much himself. He had hunted his treasures up and down the earth and to and fro in it, and he wanted them to be gazed on with the appreciative eye rather than with the cold look of barter and exchange. He liked this little twenty-year-old woman, because she had the spirit of beauty within her, and because she seemed so fair and fresh and unprotected. And she liked the swarthy Mongol, not for his strange, exotic setting, but for the sheer kindliness of him, the great, expansive benevolence and his consummate courtesy, which after all was nothing but the birthright of a Manchu prince.

There could be no question of love between them, for many reasons, and never a thought of it passed their minds. She might have been something like a niece to him, and he her benevolent uncle. They never met outside his store.

He drew from her the story of what of life she had known, carefully, gently, like the skilled surgeon extracting a splinter from flesh. The daughter of a naval surgeon who had died while she was still young,—and who, Li Sin shrewdly guessed, had been somewhat of a blackguard,—she lived poorly with her mother, on a meager pension. She had been brought up decently, educated well, at what must have been a terrible expense to the mother. She had not been married, beautiful as she was, because she had not mixed with people who were to be regarded as beneath her in social rank. The people of her own station were too poor to marry offhand—but there was a young ensign she mentioned as having met once or twice, and there was a faint blush on her cheeks as she spoke of it. For the illustrious and the moneyed she had either too little fortune or too little lineage. And that was all.

"Too bad!" Li Sin murmured to himself, and his thoughts would have done credit to the most adroit of schatchen. "Too bad!"

She would breeze in, if such a word may be used of her who was as gentle as a zephyr, bringing always with her the sweetness of spring.

"Good morning!" she would greet him eagerly. "I wonder if we could find something—I want a clasp for my hair, for evening wear—something frightfully inexpensive."

"I think we might find it." Li Sin would smile, and he would find it. He took her money, and gave her the article at a just profit on what he had paid for it. The only thing gratuitous he gave her was the travel and the adventure necessary to pick his wonderful trifles up. Of this he said nothing, and she was none the wiser.

There came the day when she entered a little excited, a little afraid, a little nervous. She wanted something more expensive than usual. She was going out that night, she explained, with somebody.

"I am going to be married soon," she blurted out. "I am engaged."

"To whom?" Li Sin asked quietly.

"A friend of my father's," she answered blushingly. "Roderick Dreghorn, the ivory-hunter."

"I wonder if I might ask you to do something," Li Sin said slowly, "and that is: will you bring your fiancé here some day so that I may congratulate him?"

"I should love to," she said; and she left him, excitedly happy, Li Sin saw; but he also noticed that she seemed a little terrified, a little aghast.

I have told the story of Li Sin to many people, now that he is gone to his own home and is happy there with his poor and his pear-trees, and some of them have believed me because they know China and the manner of man Li Sin is, and some of them have believed me because they know I abhor lies as I abhor the devil. But many cannot understand it. They cannot see why a Manchu duke should become a merchant on Fifth Avenue.

"And if he is as great a doctor as you say—" they object.

There is a passage in Isaiah, I believe, which speaks of Tyre, "whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth." Marco Polo, that ancient Venetian, says of Cathay, that there, of all professions the most esteemed is that of merchant. It is above arms, he says, above learning. And what obtained in the Yellow Empire when Hoang-ti led his people across the desert in the misty dawn of time obtains to-day, from the outer sea to the confines of Mongolia. An ancient and honorable thing it is, a fit profession for princes, a thing pregnant with ideals of honesty and fair dealing, a clean thing. There is nothing anomalous to the eye in Li Sin, a Manchu duke, unearthing the treasures of forgotten days for the New World, and exacting a just profit for the work.

As for the medicine, that was another matter. I could no more imagine Li Sin accepting money for his healing art than I can imagine him stealing alms from a blind beggar. The thing was far too holy for him. There in that glass-topped studio in his house on Fifth Avenue, above the great treasure-store, he studied his science with the enthusiasm of an amateur pursuing a hobby. A queer place it was, with its retorts and vials, its glinting instruments, its Rontgen-ray apparatus, its tubes of deadly serum and of healing drugs. And beside these were the quaint adjuncts of Oriental healing: the twisted tubes of herbs, instruments that seemed like an alchemist's dream, medicines of black, occult art as well as of benevolence, secret, untraceable poisons, liquids which, it is whispered, would bring the dead to life for minutes, which would drive men mad.

Ask the taciturn Lee Fong, on Mott Street, that slant-eyed millionaire. Ask the leaders of the Hip Sing. At the Five Companies of San Francisco, inquire. They will speak of Li Sin as a demigod of medicine.

One has n't to go as far as that to find out. There is a tenement-house on Hudson Street, where the Bracalellos live. There is a romping child there called Beata. For years she was an object of research to physicians in hospitals, because of her twisted spine. Nothing could be done, they decided. They were wrong. Li Sin saw the white-cheeked child carried in the subway on a horrible metal stretcher, strapped to it. It hurt him—the illnesses of children always hurt him. He took charge of her. She romps about now as other children do. There are many cases of that kind.

But above all in my mind there is the tragic case of Mrs. Madge Eaton, who is now happy as a woman farmer on Long Island. Li Sin discovered her creeping up an alleyway to die from hunger, shame, and heartbreak. Against all protestation he took her home. Her story was tragic and very sordid. She had married John Eaton, a man who had come up to Maine for a holiday. He had brought her to New York. In a month he had sent her out to work. She fell ill. Eaton deserted her, taking with him all her jewelry, all her money, all her clothes. When she was discovered, she was sent to a hospital, and when she emerged from there, she found herself without courage to kill herself and without the wherewithal to live. The police sent her to jail two weeks later. When she came out, Li Sin found her, broken, hungry, terrified, wanting to die and yet without courage to face the river.

He cured her. He brought her back to life and hope and strength. By some means he instilled into that frail and timid heart the courage of a lioness. But he did one thing, unknown to her, of which she might not have approved.

There was a tripartite function of Li Sin's: Firstly there was that of the merchant, whose duty it was to discover and barter rare and costly things. Secondly came the physician's, to heal body and mind. Thirdly came that of the Manchu prince, to dispense justice.

He called Hong Kop, his body-servant, to him—that subtle and inscrutable Cantonese. He looked at the card on which he had scribbled an address, an address he had extracted from Mrs. Eaton.

"Hong Kop, you will go at once to Colon, in Panama," he announced.

The Cantonese nodded.

"You will go to this address—a gambling-house—and there you will pick up the trail of John Eaton. You will pick up the trail and follow it until you find him. And when you do find him—"

He paused for an instant. Again the Cantonese bowed.

"You will kill him, Hong Kop."

Six feet tall, spare as a lance, tanned to a deep brown, hatchet-faced and yet handsome in some daredevil, hypnotic way, with eyes that glinted with the vindictive sheen of a rifle-barrel, mouth twisted slightly,—enough to show the cruelty hidden within—Roderick Dreghorn lounged into the store with Irene Johns. There was an amused smile on his powerful face, as though it pleased him whimsically to accompany his fiancée on a shopping expedition, to meet her queer friends.

"Li Sin," she said, "this is the man I am going to marry."

The Manchu smiled gravely. Dreghorn watched him with an amused, contemptuous glance.

"There is no need to wish felicity," said Li Sin, courteously, "to the future husband of Miss Johns." And Dreghorn nodded in an offhand way. The hunter turned to the girl.

"Didn't you want to get something here?" he asked, "some silk or something?" Li Sin noted beneath the man's soft tones the concealed edge that could cut on occasion like a rawhide whip. Rapidly Li Sin was summing the man up in his mind: forty-five, he decided, a man of the world, a gentleman born, an utter blackguard, a man who had done and seen evil things. He had money, too—witness the plain but expensive cut of his brown tweeds. Li Sin noted quickly a faint scar on the temple that he knew to be an old bullet-wound, and a weal across the fingers of the right hand that only a long knife could have made.

"Would you care to come and help Miss Johns select the silk?" Li Sin asked. Dreghorn smiled, and there was a lift to the left corner of his mouth that showed the teeth. It was like a dog's threatening snarl.

"I don't think so," he drawled. "I am not interested in any products of the yellow or black countries."

"Indeed!" Li Sin murmured.

Excitedly, at the end of the store, Irene Johns told her story. Dreghorn—in a moment of boredom, Li Sin judged—had dropped in to see the family of the man he had known fifteen years before in Hongkong. He had heard of Mrs. Johns and her daughter from some casual acquaintance. Li Sin smiled; the casual acquaintance had spoken of the daughter's beauty, most probably. Mr. Dreghorn had been so kind to all of them! He had taken them out, had showered presents on them, had in the end asked her to marry him.

"Indeed!" Li Sin thought, and he encouraged her to go on.

He was so big, so powerful, she hinted. He had done big things, had had great adventures. She seemed a little aghast as she mentioned that. He was so compelling, she said.

"She is not in love," thought Li Sin. "She is hypnotized."

He was going on one more expedition, she told the Manchu. After that, he was coming home to settle down. They would have a house in the country, a farm.

"Agh!" Li Sin exclaimed to himself. So that was it. The old, old story, as old as Cain: the rake, the scoundrel, after sucking the world dry of wickedness, wanted a wife, home, and children. Li Sin could understand how the girl's purity, her lightness, her youth, had appealed to the world-worn rascal. He could understand the visions the man had—the sweet, hawthorn-scented dreams. It was like a murderer seeking to wash the blood from his hands with God's pure water.

They left. Li Sin escorted them courteously to the door.

"Good-by!" he wished them.

"Good-by, my yellow friend," Dreghorn answered contemptuously. Irene Johns did not hear it.

Li Sin went above to his apartment. He clapped his hands for Hong Kop.

"You will go down to where you know, Hong Kop, to the house of Ling Wah Lee—"

The Cantonese made his eternal bow.

"And you will have him find out for me, Hong Kop, all there is to be known about Roderick Dreghorn, hunter of ivory, with a bullet-mark on the forehead and a weal on the right hand, the weal of a Burmese knife."

There is a doctrine in one of the faiths that man is born in original sin, and that unless he is cleansed by sacrament he is until the end of time the property of the evil one. There is an article of dogma in the same faith that one may become possessed of demons. If this is true, then never a sacrament was said over Dreghorn, nor ever was he confronted with the exorcist's mystic and terrible formula. Hell seemed to have employed him all his life and to have made him its brain and hand. The first of the story was bad enough, with its record of treachery, of gainful crimes in the dark lands, of murders concealed and never explained. Even Li Sin's worldly-wise mind was shocked by Hong Kop's report. There was the incident in the Belgian Congo when Dreghorn, allied with a corrupt Belgian official, burned a village with all the inhabitants, shooting down those who tried to escape from the flames. They had not produced enough ivory.

"Even madness will not explain that!" Li Sin shook his head.

There was the incident during the period of the Boxer chaos in Yuen-Lau, when Dreghorn and an associate had tortured an old mandarin, hoping to make him unearth treasure. They had given him the torture of the bowstring, and the water torture, and the torture of red metal at his feet.

"And he an old man," Li Sin thought, "four-score and five!"

There was the incident in Mombasaland when the fiendish natives had captured a lone hunter of ivory, had crucified him on the ground, smeared with honey for the ants, delirious under the smashing sun. Dreghorn could have rescued him, for he was well armed and had a large party of natives. But he contented himself with stealing the man's ivory and leaving him there to die.

"That is one thing for which there is no punishment," Li Sin thought. "No punishment is equal in horror."

Li Sin read another incident, and he read no farther. It was the story of Marie Tirlemont, called Flancs-de-neige, whom Dreghorn had brought with him from Maxim's in Paris, down to the Congo. She had ceased to amuse Dreghorn a hundred miles south of Leopoldville, and he had abandoned her alone, in a village of black beasts.

And now Dreghorn, Li Sin mused, wanted to marry. He wanted to marry this fair little American girl, pure and delicate as the petal of a primrose, light and shimmering and gay as iridescence on water—to make a home with her, to have her bear children.

He called for Hong Kop.

"What is the profit of crime, Hong Kop?" he asked.

The Cantonese thought for a moment.

"The profit of crime is death," he answered.

"Death is a sweet and gentle thing, Hong Kop," his master mused. "It comes to the old like a gentle and sweet-scented sleep. It comes to the suffering like a grateful anodyne. On others it falls so quickly and surely that there is no pain. It is not the profit of crime, Hong Kop, except for those who wish much to live."

He mused again, joining his finger-tips together and knitting his brows.

"Unless, instead of being a sweet sleep, it is a nightmare, Hong Kop! Unless, instead of being an anodyne, it is a horror! Unless it comes accompanied by a huge and monstrous fear, a terror that clutches the heartstrings, a fear that kills!"

He was going away on the morrow, Dreghorn said. He would be away for six months, and then he would return, and they would be married. He wanted to buy her something before he left, a ring or a bracelet.

"But she wanted to buy it here," he sneered at Li Sin.

"I wanted to buy it here," she replied warmly, "because here I can get the most beautiful things in the world."

"If you care for that yellow junk," Dreghorn laughed shortly.

"Roderick!" she protested quickly. She was pained through and through. Li Sin smiled reassuringly at her. But Dreghorn wandered on.

"Anything you want," he told Irene; "anything that pleases you."

As he watched him, Li Sin became convinced that the man was in love, head over heels in, as a boy might be. The hunter became garrulous, under his feelings, as under the influence of a drug.

"She spoke of getting the house at Huntingdon decorated in some Oriental style," Dreghorn laughed. "She can have it if she wants it. But I don't see why she could n't have it done in honest white style."

Li Sin smiled blandly as ever. He might have been receiving a compliment.

"You don't seem to have a high opinion of Asia or Africa," he remarked casually.

"I have no use for any color except white," Dreghorn answered brutally. "Black, yellow, brown, or red."

"It is a harsh thing," Li Sin reproved him. Irene Johns stood by, pale, nervous, and hurt. "It is a grievous thing to wound the body, but it is a more grievous thing to wound the soul. And to wound it unjustly is more grievous still."

"I deal in facts," Dreghorn laughed.

"May I show you a fact?" Li Sin went on. "You have been in China, and if I mistake not, you read Chinese."

"Among my many accomplishments," Dreghorn sneered, "is the reading of Chinese."

Irene looked at him with a sort of fearful agony in her eyes. She had never seen his brutality creep out before, and she was shocked at the sight of him lolling across the counter and striving his utmost to hurt the smiling Manchu. Li Sin took up a book from behind him, a broad, thin book, the stiff parchment pages of which were edged with gold. He opened it carefully. The leaves had the stiffness of steel.

"These are the verses of Ling Tai Fu, of Tientsin," the Manchu said, "a poet of the last century who had traveled into Russia. He complains bitterly of the same prejudice, and he deals with facts, which you deal with. Here is his poem 'The Return.' Perhaps you will translate it."

Dreghorn looked down the page smilingly.

Dreghorn laughed easily. Irene shivered with a shock of horror. Li Sin smiled.

"Those are facts," the Manchu said.

"Is there any more of this?" the hunter asked. He turned over the leaf.

"No more," Li Sin answered. "I should have warned you about those leaves. You have cut your hand."

Dreghorn looked at his left thumb. The edge of the book-leaf had sheared into it as sharp and as painlessly as the edge of a razor. A few minute drops of blood showed on the skin.

"You had better have a little peroxide," Li Sin suggested.

"I 'm not a child," Dreghorn laughed. "It is n't anything. Come on, Irene."

They left the store together, and, as was his wont with favored customers, Li Sin saw them to the door. The girl was flushed deep with mortification, and she shot the Manchu a mute appeal of apology. Dreghorn smiled again.

"Au revoir, my poetical friend," he laughed.

"Good-by!" answered Li Sin, gravely.

Li Sin saw little of Irene Johns for the next six weeks. Once she came into the store, but she was nervous and flushed, as though she thought the Manchu would hold against her the insults Dreghorn had offered him. But he took pains to show her that he and she were as close friends as ever. She was silently grateful, but still nervous.

"Mr. Dreghorn will be back in six months?" the Manchu said.

"In six months," she answered listlessly. "He is gone to Abyssinia."

"And you will be married soon after?"

"Immediately he comes back, he insists," she said.

The glamour and hypnotism and force of the man's presence no longer enthralled her, Li Sin could see. She was fearful of the step she was taking. But she was certain it was going to take place. Once Dreghorn returned, the quality of his masterfulness would grind down all opposition, even were she to show any.

"I want you to come in soon," Li Sin told her. "I have some things coming from Peking that I want you to see."

But she did not come in. In place of her there entered the store, six weeks after Dreghorn had sailed, a tall, heavily built young man with a tanned face, heavy jaw, and gray eyes. He asked for Mr. Sin.

"I am Li Sin," the Manchu told him.

"My name is Gray, surgeon on the Cunarder Hibernia, between New York and Algiers. Miss Johns asked me to tell you something, and she would like to see you, if it is not asking too much. She is prostrated at home. Her fiancé is dead."

"Mr. Dreghorn is dead!" Li Sin commented simply. "How?"

"He came out of the smoking-room one night, after talking to me about his intended," the surgeon went on glibly. He seemed to be repeating something he had rehearsed. "We were off Algiers, and though the night was fine, a cross-sea was running. He said he would not turn in for a half-hour yet, and the last I saw of him he was leaning against the starboard rail of the boat-deck. We never saw anything more of him. There can be no doubt that he fell overboard."

Li Sin studied him for a few minutes silently.

"Dr. Gray," he said simply, "you will pardon a man who is twenty years older than you, and who has seen much of the world and much of life, but—that is not what happened. Dr. Gray, how did Dreghorn die?"

He continued looking at the young surgeon. The man was evidently under a great strain.

"I know Miss Johns," Li Sin went on, "and I knew Dreghorn."

"If you know Miss Johns," the young surgeon blurted out suddenly, "you know the best and most beautiful woman I have ever seen; and if you knew Dreghorn, you knew the damnedest scoundrel unhanged."

"That, too, I know," said Li Sin.

He waited an instant. The surgeon was uncomfortably silent.

"Dr. Gray," the Manchu insisted, "of what did Dreghorn die?"

"If you want to know, and have the right to know," Gray burst out savagely, "the man died because he had contracted the most virulent case of leprosy I have ever seen in the tropics. How he did it, God only knows. He was quite well when he left New York except for a rash on his left hand. He must have been impregnated with some horrible virus. In a few days I had to manacle him in his cabin. For a week the man was a shrieking maniac. I thought something might be done when we got to port. There was no chance. In Algiers they would have put him in the leper colony. So one night I took him up to the boat-deck and let him go overboard."

There was an instant's silence.

"I knew of the man," the doctor said bitterly, "and I can't even pray to God for his soul!"

"But I must!" said Li Sin.

"You will go up and see Miss Johns," the surgeon reminded him. "She will get over it."

"She will get over it, and be happy, and marry a good man," the Manchu told him. "I will go to see her." And they parted.

He went upstairs to his apartment, very slowly, very calmly. He sat down and thought for a while. Softly he clapped his hands. The silent Cantonese came.

"Hong Kop," he asked, "tell me, Hong Kop, you who are young, how does love come?"

In fluting, sibilant Cantonese the servant answered:

"There is beauty," he said, "and it calls to manliness with the call of cymbals. They meet and wing upward, as Chung Tzu wrote, 'like a hymn recited softly at the death of day.'"

"There is beauty, and there is manliness!" the Manchu mused. "There is Irene Johns, and there is—" He smiled an instant, and became as grave as ever again. "You will go to Brooklyn, to the Navy Yard, Hong Kop, and you will find for me an ensign called Nelson. You will find where he is, Hong Kop....

"I am getting old, Hong Kop, I am getting old. The pear gardens of Tientsin are bursting into silver and mauve. Birds from the outer sea are winging northward. Again with the spring the musicians tune their lutes of jade. The throbbing chords do not awaken me, Hong Kop. Hong Kop, I am old."