Front matter

BY

HENRY JAMES FORMAN

BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1922

Copyright, 1922, By LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

All rights reserved

Published September, 1922 Reprinted September, 1922 Reprinted October, 1922

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO MY WIFE

BOOK ONE

THE MAN WHO LIVED IN A SHOE

CHAPTER I

Are there any women today, I wonder, like the girl wife of Jacopone da Todi, who are found in the midst of worldly brilliance wearing the hair shirt of piety and devotion over their spotless hearts?

I doubt it.

It is no wonder that Jacopone, that "smart" thirteenth-century Italian lawyer, became a great saint when he made that discovery, after his beautiful young wife's accidental death. It would make a saint of anybody.

I am quite sure Gertrude is not like that. But then Gertrude is not my wife—as yet. Nor am I Jacopone. I am nothing more, I fear, than a contented voluptuary of a bookworm. Like King James, I feel that were it my fate to be a captive, I should wish to be shut up in a great library consuming my days among my fellow-prisoners, the blessed books.

To distil the reading of a lifetime into a little wisdom for my poor wits, that has been all my aim and my ambition, if by any name so dynamic as ambition I may call it. An old young man is what I have been called, and Gertrude seems propelled by some potent urge to change me—God knows why.

I have just been talking with—I mean listening to—Gertrude.

We are to be married, she says, in three weeks.

Time out of mind we have been friends, Gertrude and I, as our mothers had been before us. She, the highly modern spinster and I, such as I am, have been linked for years by an engagement which is not an engagement in the old sense at all. It is a sort of entente cordiale. An engagement in the conventional meaning of the word would be as abhorrent to Gertrude as the old-fashioned marriage. As soon would she think of "being given in marriage" with bell, book and orange blossoms as of calling herself "Mrs. Randolph Byrd"—or anything but Miss Bayard.

That is what we have been discussing this gloomy afternoon in my snug little apartment before a garrulous fire. For Gertrude is not so absurd as to hesitate to call on me at my apartment any more than I would hesitate to call on her in Gramercy Park.

"But won't it be awkward," I ventured in mild speculation, "if after we are married we have to stay at an hotel together, or share a cabin on a ship—to be Miss Bayard and Mr. Byrd?"

"Don't be absurd, Ranny," retorted Gertrude, with her usual introductory phrase. "Awkward or not, do you think I should give up my name that I have lived under all my life, fought for and established?"

"Of course not," I hastily apologized. "I hadn't thought of that." I could not help wondering what she meant by having established her name. Except as regards one or two committees and vacation funds Gertrude's name is unknown to celebrity.

"You with your H.H.," she ran on briskly, with the triumph of having scored. "Surely you don't want to cling to the musty old formulas?"

"No, certainly not," I answered her readily. I am no match for Gertrude in argument. Of a sudden I became aware that despite the hissing fire in the grate there was no sparkle in the air this chill November afternoon. The H.H. to which Gertrude had alluded was the only thing resembling an emotion that betrayed any sign of smoldering life within me in that discussion of ours touching matrimony.

The H.H., I would better explain, stands for Horror of Home—for my profound repugnance toward anything resembling the fettering bonds of domesticity. A man, I feel, should be as free to do what he pleases and to go where he likes when and if married as when single. Otherwise who would assume the chains and slavery of that shadowed prison-house? To-morrow, my heart suddenly tells me, I must be off upon a journey of unknown duration.

Once again I would see the estraded gardens of the Riviera, the olive groves of Italy, the sacred parchments and incunabula of the Laurentian Library in Florence. I would wander anew in the wilderness of the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris and on the left bank of the Seine, where once I collected the lore of Balzac and of Sainte-Beuve. And who dare prevent my setting off at a moment's notice for the ill-lighted rotunda of the British Museum or the cloister precincts of the Bodleian at Oxford? Even as Gertrude was speaking, I experienced an irresistible longing for all those places, for the turf walks and pleached alleys of Oxford and the beautiful "Backs" of the Cambridge Colleges. There is a manuscript at Trinity that I must see again, and I have long promised myself a month in Pepys's old library at Magdelene in Cambridge.

But Gertrude is not like other women.

"What I like about you, Ranny," she remarked, flicking the ash from her cigarette with unerring aim into the hearth, "is your reasonableness. You hate as I do to see two people handcuffed together like a pair of convicts for life. Might as well go back to the Stone Age or to the times of a dozen children in the house and the mother grilling herself all day before the kitchen fire. Ugh!" and she gave a shudder.

"No fear of that with you," I laughed.

"No, I should hope not," she puffed energetically.

"Well, anyway," I found myself reassuring her quickly, "even as it is, you have three weeks to think it over—to back out in. Three weeks is a good long time, Gertrude. Much can happen in three weeks."

On the table before me lay a new life of Leonardo da Vinci, just arrived from Paris that day. My fingers itched to open it and turn the pages. But that would have been rude, so I forebore.

"I am not like that," Gertrude murmured reflectively, "and you know it, Ranny."

"Of course not," I guiltily assented.

"I know," she tapped my cheek with a playful finger—Gertrude can be very charming if she thinks of it—"I know perfectly what I want to do. And when I make up my mind to do a thing I stick to it."

And so she does, the clever girl!

"I wish I were like you," I muttered. "I am a sort of drifter, I'm afraid."

"That's why you need a manager," laughed Gertrude. "Wait till you've got me. Then you won't be just running after books and telling yourself what you're going to do some day. You'll be doing, publishing, lecturing; you'll be known—famous."

"Oh my heavens!" I cried out in a terror, throwing up a defensive hand. "I think I'll run away."

"Too late," she smiled, with a cool archness. When Gertrude smiles she is exceedingly handsome. "I've ordered my trousseau. You wouldn't leave me waiting at the City Hall, would you?"

"I might," I answered, smiling back at her. "If there should happen to be a book auction that morning. And it's only a subway fare back to your flat."

"Now, this is the program," she announced, assuming her magisterial tone, which instantaneously reduces me to a spineless worm before her. "You will come to my flat on the twenty-fourth at ten o'clock. Then we shall drive down in a taxi to the City Hall and get the license—or whatever they call it—"

"Lucky you'll be there," I could not help murmuring. "I should probably get a dog license or a motor-car license instead of the correct one—"

"Then," went on Gertrude, very properly ignoring me, "we can have the alderman of the day sing the necessary song."

"He may want to sing an encore—or kiss the bride," I warned her.

"He won't want to kiss me when I look at him," answered Gertrude imperturbably. Nor will he! "Then," she added, "we can stop here at your place and pick up your hand luggage, and mine on the way to the Grand Central Station. You can send your trunk the day before and I'll send mine. No time lost, you see, no waste, no foolishness."

"Perfect efficiency, in short—"

"Yes," said Gertrude, "you'll probably forget some important detail in the arrangement, but there's time enough to drill you into it the next three weeks."

"Forget," I repeated, somewhat dazedly, I admit. "What is there to forget—except possibly my name, age or color?"

"You needn't worry," flashed Gertrude. "I'll remember those for you—when you need them. I meant," she explained, "about your trunk or railway tickets and so on. But anyway, it doesn't matter. I'll remind you of everything the day before."

I promised to tie a knot in my handkerchief.

"And may I ask," I ventured, "where we are going?"

"I haven't decided yet," Gertrude informed me. "I'll let you know later, Ranny dear."

There is something very wholesome and complete about Gertrude. That is the reason, I suppose, I have so long been fond of her. How she can put up with a dreamer like me is more than I can grasp. Without any picturesque or romantic significance to the phrase, I am a sort of beach comber, sunning myself in her cloudless energy on the indolent sands of life. Every one either tells me or implies that Gertrude is far too good for me. Nor do I doubt it. But I wish we could go on as we are without exposing her to the inconvenience of being married to me. But Gertrude knows best.

"Won't you stay and share my humble crust this evening?" I asked her as she rose to go.

"No, thanks, Ranny," she smiled, somewhat enigmatically, I thought. "We shall often dine together—afterwards."

"Of course," I agreed flippantly. "We may even meet at the races."

"I promised," said Gertrude, "to dine at the Club with Stella Blackwelder—to settle some committee matters before I go away. Shall you be alone, poor thing?"

"Yes—but that doesn't matter. I am often alone. I prop up a book against a glass candlestick and the dinner is gone before I am aware of it."

"It might as well be sawdust, for all you know," laughed Gertrude.

"So it might," I told her, "except that Griselda can do better than sawdust. I might, of course," I added, "call up Dibdin and have him feast with me."

"Your trampy friend," commented Gertrude. "Yes, better do it. I don't like to think of you so much alone."

"Now, that is very sweet of you, my dear. I'll do exactly that."

Her cool lips touched mine for an instant and she was gone.

CHAPTER II

To my shame I must record that, once I was alone, the appalling fact of marriage overwhelmed me like a landslide. With a sense of suffocation and wild struggle I longed to do in earnest what I had threatened to do in jest, to run away, blindly, madly, anywhere, to freedom, as far as ever I could go.

When I should have been rejoicing, I desired, in a manner, to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. I thought upon Lincoln, a brave man if ever one there was, who had paled before the thought of marriage and wrote consoling letters to another in similar case. When I ought to have been feeling at my most virile, I felt unmanned.

Yet, was I a boy to be a prey to these emotions? At twenty-nine surely a man should know his own mind and be in possession of himself. Never before had I doubted my way in life. In a world where every one who has no money proceeds with energy to make it, and every one who has a little tirelessly labors to acquire more, I had wittingly and of full purpose turned my life away from the market place and toward a studious devotion to books. On my compact income of less than two hundred and fifty dollars monthly left me by generous parents, I was able to maintain my modest apartment in Twelfth Street and to live a life, purposeless in the eyes of some, no doubt, but which to me is priceless.

That slender income and the old Scotchwoman, Griselda Dow, with her Biblical austerity and North British economy, surround my existence with the comfort of a cushion. Because two sparrows sold for one farthing, was to Griselda a reason and an incentive for miracles of thrift. To change all this in three weeks—and I have not yet informed Griselda! In a welter of agitation I began to pace the room.

Perhaps I am a fool to harbor such emotions, but I confess that the sight of my pleasant study, covered to the ceiling with the books that I love, and so many of which I have gathered, fills me with a poignant melancholy. To uproot all this or to change it violently seems like a sin I cannot bring myself to commit. How had I come to think of committing it?

Gertrude is, of course, a splendid girl. With all her energy, she can yet sympathize with the mild successes of a poor bookworm and listen with patience to the tales of his triumphs as though he had captured an army corps. My first edition of the "Religio Medici" can mean nothing to her, who has never read it, but she seemed gladdened by my victory when I acquired it under the very nose of a wily bookseller.

When was it that I had first asked Gertrude to marry me? It is odd that I cannot remember, for our friendship could have continued on the same pleasant basis for the rest of our lives.

I was dining alone with her one evening at her apartment in Gramercy Park, I remember, and there was sparkling Moselle. I am not one of your experienced topers, and that sparkling Moselle entered my blood like a Caxton in a Zaehnsdorf binding or a First Folio of Shakespeare. A golden haze had seemed to emanate from every object in the region of that Moselle. Then, I recollect, Gertrude and I were on a new plane of being. We were speaking of marriage. Without being "engaged", we were, in Gertrude's phrase, talking of "marrying each other." It was on that evening I must have asked her, though, oddly enough, I have no recollection of the fact. And now, it seems, three pleasant years have passed and the time has come.

Again it occurred to me abruptly that I had not yet informed Griselda.

What if Gertrude should insist upon my removing myself to her apartment; would she accept Griselda? And how would my precious books be domiciled? How human they are, those books, even though silent! Always I have found them waiting whenever I returned from journeys, from summer visits, from the country, from anywhere. Their backs and bindings seem to shimmer and flash forth a stately greeting, to exhale that subtle fragrance of leather, ink, and paper that none but book-lovers know. They have developed a sense in me to perceive these things as no one else can perceive them. How delightful it has been to find them in their peaceful legions, arrayed and changeless, retaining the very marks and slips I have left in them, faithful servitors and friends!

I take down the "Antigone" in the Cambridge Sophocles that faces me as I stand and open at random to the chorus: "Love, invincible love! who makest havoc of wealth, who keepest vigil on the soft cheek of the maiden;—no immortal can escape thee, nor any among men whose life is for a day; and he to whom thou hast come is mad." It is clear that Sophocles was no modern.

Ah, me! I must tell Griselda at once, lest her Scotch probity should charge me with disingenuousness or evasion. I pressed a bell. I could not face Griselda in the kitchen which is her stronghold. I must summon her to mine.

Griselda, with a heather-blue cap awry on her coarse gray hair, appeared at the door.

"You called?" she demanded.

"Yes, Griselda, I called. Come in; I wish to speak to you."

Griselda has known me since I was seven and all my gravity counts for ever so little with her. So redolent is she of rich encrusted personality that she gives to my poor small apartment the air of an establishment.

"You always call me, Mr. Randolph," she somewhat testily informed me, "just when I have my hands in the dough pan or when the pot is boiling over."

"Which is it now?" I asked her, laughing somewhat ruefully.

"Both," was her laconic answer.

"Hurry back then," I told her. "What I wanted to say will keep."

"Just like a man," muttered Griselda and left me without ceremony.

The relief I felt was shameful. To face Griselda with news of a possible derangement of our lives required a courage, a girding up of one's resolution to which at the moment I felt myself woefully unequal.

There was Dibdin and his blessed archeological expedition. He had told me that there might be a berth for me as a sort of keeper of records and archives. If only he had started last week. In a mist of vision well known to daydreamers, I suddenly saw the trim shipshape steamer with holystoned decks, the glinting metal work, the opulent South-Pacific sun pouring down on lightly clad passengers lounging in deck chairs; girls in white lazily flirting with indolent men. What oceans of joy and ease were to be found in the world for those who knew how to take them!

Ah, well! Gertrude would make no opposition to my going, since absolute individual liberty is the very keystone in the arch of our coming marriage.

I decided to ring up Dibdin.

"Our line is out of order," the switchboard below informed me. "They'll have a man up here as soon as possible."

Frustration! I did not wish the colored door boy below to hear what I said. He has a notion of my dignity.

With a restless agitation new to me I again fell to pacing the room, a room not contrived for exercise. It occurred to me that I must go to see my sister, my only near relative. She was sure to be at home, for she, poor girl, is always at home,—what with her three children and her broken health.

If it were not that the damnable telephone is out of order, I would ring her up immediately. What with her three young children and an income the exact equivalent of my own, she has little diversion unless I take her to the theater or the opera. How does the poor girl manage, I wonder? I dread to ask her and she never complains. I ought to see her oftener; if only she lived nearer than the depths of Brooklyn.

There is the result of romantic marriage for you! Poor Laura committed the error of falling in love with a man on a steamer when she was barely nineteen and marrying him secretly; after seven years and three babies, the scoundrel Pendleton, with his smooth ways and unsteady eye, deserted her, disappeared into the blue. The poor girl's health has never been good since then.

It is irritating to think that I might have done more than an occasional gift for Laura and the children. But I am so wretchedly poor myself.

I still cannot comprehend how Laura could have been so inconceivably foolish as to marry that ruffian Pendleton before she had known him three months—and then to acquire three babies!

Gertrude, at all events, could not be guilty of anything so perverse.

Marriage—children—chains—slavery—how sordid it all is and how disturbing! Good enough perhaps for the hopeless middle class, semi-animal types, who have nothing else to expect of life, or to absorb them. But for folk with ambitions and ideals!

What are my ambitions and ideals, I cannot at times help wondering? Useless to analyze. Freedom to have them is the first of all.

How eager I used to be to discuss them with Laura during those long summers at our cottage in Westchester when life seemed endless and the future infinite. Between sets at tennis I poured out to her the things I was going to do in the world. Laura is only two years older than I, but how well she had understood and how sympathetic she was! It was the motherhood within her, I suppose, that drove her to the marriage and the kiddies.

The scent of those summers comes to my nostrils now, the fragrance of lilac and honeysuckle, that brought ideas to one's head, dreams of achievement, of perfection and happiness. Who has that cottage now, I wonder? Poor Laura's dreams have been distorted into a very dismal sort of reality. And what of my own? But here is Griselda and she is announcing Dibdin.

That grizzled priest of what he is pleased to call science growled in a way he meant to be pleasant as he shouldered into my comfortable study and sank sprawling into my best chair. He never seems quite at home in a civilized room.

"Couldn't get you on the telephone," he remarked. "Thought I'd drop over and see what iniquities you're up to."

"As you see," I told him, "I'm deep in crime."

"Will you feed me?" he demanded with a gruffness that is part of his charm.

"Certainly. What else can I do when you come at this hour?"

"All right; then I'll listen to you," he said.

"But how," I wondered, "do you know I want to say anything?"

"You look charged to the nozzle," he answered elegantly. "What is it—a rare edition of somebody or other?" Amazing devil, Dibdin. I always resent his ability to read me in this manner. But he tells me that in his archeological expeditions he has had so often to watch faces of Indians, Chinese, negroes, Turks and others whose language he did not speak, that to see the desires of men in their eyes amounts with him to an added sense.

"Well, if you must know," I sat down facing him, "I am nonplussed, baffled, perplexed, at sea, on the horns of a dilemma—all of those things. I am to be married in three weeks."

"Eager swain!" was his only comment.

"Is that all you can say?"

"Well, feeling about it the way you seem to feel, I might add that you're a damn fool."

"Tell me something novel!" I retorted irritably.

"Can't," he said. "That's the only thing I know."

"Comprehensive," I sneered.

"Complete," was his succinct rejoinder.

"What a comfort you are!" I cried with a harassed laugh.

"What the devil made you get into it?" he growled.

"Fate," I told him.

"It's a poor fate that doesn't work both ways," he observed.

"I suppose I sound to you like either a brute or a cad or both," I pursued. "But the fact is, Dibdin, I am not a marrying man. The girl in question has nothing to do with it. She's an admirable, a splendid girl, far too good for the likes of me. But I simply hate the thought of marriage—of owing duties to anybody. I want to be free to do absolutely as I please, to go off with you to the Solomon Islands, or China or Popocatepetl if I want to, or to run after some first edition if I feel inclined. In short, I don't want to bother about wives or children or whooping cough or measles, or have them bother about me. Would you call that selfish?"

"Damnably," said Dibdin without emotion.

"Well, then, that is what I am," I retorted warmly, "and it is no use trying to change. It takes myriad kinds to make a world. I am one kind—that kind."

"No," said Dibdin gravely, "no—I think you're some other kind."

"This eternal, beautiful, boundless freedom," I went on, ignoring him—"surely it is good that some mortals should have it, Dibdin—and I am losing it."

"Three weeks off, did you say—the obsequies?" he queried.

"Yes," I answered sadly.

"Then maybe it won't happen," he remarked to the ceiling.

"What makes you say that?" I caught him up.

"Don't know," he replied in his carefully lazy tone that he assumed when he wished to sound oracular. "Just a feeling—that you deserve something, a good deal—worse than marriage." Then abruptly sitting up in his chair and pulling a thin volume out of his pocket, "Look at this," he muttered.

I took the vellum-bound book and opened it.

"An Elzevir 'Horace'!" I exclaimed. "Where did you get it?" All the rest of the world and all my cares thinned to insignificance before this treasure.

"A plutocratic book collector living in a mausoleum on Fifth Avenue has just given it to me," he replied. "It's a duplicate. He has another and a better one of the same date. D'you value it any at all?"

"Value it!" I cried, as my fingers caressed it. "Why, certainly I value it. It is a perfectly genuine Elzevir—the great Louis himself printed this at Leyden. It is not what you would call a tall copy, and binders have sacrilegiously spoiled an originally fine broad margin. It's not perfect. But it's a splendid specimen of early printing, with title page and colophon intact. It's a beauty!"

"You beat the devil," murmured Dibdin in his beard. "You can be enthusiastic about some things, that's clear. Anyway, the book is yours," he concluded. "I have no use for it."

"You don't mean it!" I exulted incredulously. "I am simply delighted, Dibdin, tickled pink, as you would say! I have long wanted the Elzevir 'Horace.' I haven't a single Elzevir to compare with this. Think of this coming out of the blue!" And in my foolish way I fell to gloating over the thin, musty little volume, examining the worm drills, holding it up to the light for watermarks in the gray paper and, in general, I suppose, behaving like an imbecile.

"Illustrates my point," muttered Dibdin, fumbling with a malodorous corn cob and a tobacco pouch.

"Point? What point?" I looked up at him abstractedly.

"Out of the blue—this book you say you yearned for—anything may happen."

"And you call yourself a scientist," I marveled, leaning back in the chair. "Things like this happen—yes. But in the serious business of life you're ground between the millstones of the gods—a victim of events you cannot control. Look at Rabelais and Montaigne, two free spirits if ever there were any. Yet one was a victim of priestcraft so that he cried out until he roared with orgiastic laughter, and the other a victim of property,—took a wife that disgusted him. (I have beautiful editions of both of them, by the way, which you ought to look at.) But each of them was a victim."

"A victim if you're victimized." Dibdin puffed at his foul pipe. (I cannot make him smoke a decent cigarette.) "But if you know how to play with circumstances, you use them as I saw a cowboy in Arizona ride a bucking broncho. You ride them till you break them. Look at me, my boy," he went on, with a grin of mingled modesty and bravado. "I knew I was a tramp at heart. But my people would have been broken with humiliation if I had turned out a 'hobo' on their hands. So I took to ruins and buried cities in out-of-the-way places, and politely speaking I'm an archeologist. But I tramp about the world to my heart's content."

That, I admit, presented Dibdin and the whole matter in a new light to me.

"Why," I finally asked, "didn't I do that?"

"Because you're not a tramp at heart," puffed Dibdin.

"Yes, I am!" I almost shouted at him. "That is exactly what I must be, since I have such a horror of home, of domesticity."

"You with all this comfort—a flat, a housekeeper, all the truck in this room? No, no, my boy! You're cast for something else. Hanged if I know for what, though. These things are too deep to generalize about. Time will tell."

I rose and circled the room, inanely surveying "this comfort" that seems to offend Dibdin, though he likes well enough to sprawl in my best arm-chair. The books, the rugs, the fire, the alluring chairs, the happy hours that I have spent here seemed to crowd about me like the ghosts of familiars, praying to be not driven from their haunts.

"Then why the devil," I demanded accusingly, pausing before him, "did you encourage me and praise my little papers and bits of work in college when you were teaching me?"

"Trying to teach you," he corrected placidly. "You've never been a teacher in a large fashionable college, my boy. When most of your so-called students are taking your course because it is reported to be a snap, so they can spend their evenings at billiards, musical comedies, or the like, any young devil with a ray of intellectual interest becomes the teacher's golden-haired boy. Even teachers are human. You'll admit you haven't set even so much as your own ink-well on fire as yet."

"All that is beside the point," I returned irritably. "Here I am in the devil of a fix and you are talking like Job's comforters."

"Yes," he agreed, "I suppose I am. But in the end it was not the comforters but events that pulled Job up. Await events with resignation and expectancy, Randolph, my lad, and play the game. Stake your coin and wait until the wheel stops and see what happens."

"A fine teacher you are!" I laughed at him, albeit mirthlessly.

"No good at all," he assented cheerfully, knocking his pipe against the ash tray and pocketing the noisome thing. "And didn't I chuck teaching the minute events made it possible? Events, my boy; they are the teacher and the deities to tie to. Set up a little altar to the great god Event—right here in your perfumed little temple. That's what I should do," he concluded, muttering into his beard.

"Incidentally," he added, "I'm getting extraordinarily hungry."

"Oh, sorry," I murmured. "Glad you're here to eat with me, anyway. It enables me to put off breaking the news of my coming marriage to Griselda."

"What—you haven't told her yet?" shouted Dibdin, sitting up in his chair. "That fine, upright Highland lassie? Then you're no disciple of mine! Face things with courage and face 'em fairly, Randolph. Go and tell her now! I'll wait here with my highly moral support."

"I—I can't," I blurted miserably.

"Yes, you can," he insisted with obstinacy. "Go and do it now."

With a gesture of desperation I pressed the bell.

"If I am going to tell her anything," I mumbled between my teeth, "I'll say it right here." Dibdin laughed ghoulishly.

"This cowardice—this shrinking from life," he philosophized detestably—"that's what our kind of education brings about."

Griselda appeared at the door.

"You rang, Mr. Randolph."

"Yes—er—yes, Griselda," and I felt myself idiotically hot and flushed. "I wanted to say—" and beads of perspiration prickled my forehead. Then in desperation, I stammered out,

"Mr. Dibdin, Griselda—he is dining here to-night—that's all, Griselda!"

Dibdin's laugh rattled throatily in the room. How I hated him at that moment! Griselda swept us with an impenetrable glance.

"There is a place laid for him," she uttered in the tone of one whose patience is a sternly acquired virtue. And she left us.

"Better strip, my lad," chuckled Dibdin, "and put on your wrestling trunks."

"What d'you mean?" I demanded sulkily.

"The tussle that life is going to give you will be a caution."

"A lot you know about life!"

"Not much, that's a fact," Dibdin observed more soberly. "But I've had to face some things, Randolph. I've had to grin at a lot of greasy Arabs in the desert who thought they would hold me for ransom. I've had to laugh out of their dull ambition a pack of villainous Chinese thugs in Gobi, who felt it would profit them to cut my throat. I've had to make my way alone through a jungle in Central America for days when the beastly natives absconded with the supplies and left me in the middle of a job of excavation. I've had other little episodes. But never, son, I may say truthfully, have I shown such blue funk as you did just then before the patient Griselda."

"Rot!" was my only answer. "Let's go in to dinner."

It is after ten. Old Dibdin is gone and I have been putting down these foolish notes.

It must be by some odd law of balance or compensation, I suppose, that those whose lives are least important keep the fullest record of them. It is a weakness of mine to wish to read in the future the things I failed to do in the past. It is really for you, O Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, that I am writing these notes.

If only Gertrude had made up her masterful mind to three months hence, instead of three weeks, I should have taken my last fling and gone by the next boat to Italy.

Biagi, that courteous scholar and humanist, writes me from the Laurentian at Florence that he has discovered some new material concerning Brunetto Latini—the teacher of Dante. Among the few ambitions that I dally with there has always been the one to write a life of Brunetto, who taught Dante how a man may become immortal. I have a fine copy of Ser Brunetto's works, the "Tesoro" and the "Tesoretto", and it seems a shabby enough little encyclopedia in verse of knowledge now somewhat out of date. There must have been, therefore, something in the man himself that enabled Dante to attribute his own greatness to the teacher.

But I cannot go to Florence and return in three weeks.

Gertrude, I know, will tell me I can do it after we're married. But she will expect me to "clean up the job" in two weeks.

There is nothing about Gertrude that terrifies me so much as her efficiency. I shall never dare to mention the subject to her, and so I shall never attempt it and never know the mystery of Dante's immortality. It is all one, however; what have I to do with greatness? No more than with marriage.

Bur-r-r! The room is cold. Sparge ligna super foco, as cheerful old Horace advises. I have just complied and put another log on the fire.

My nerves must be a shade off color to-night. I could have sworn a moment ago, as the room grew chilly, that my sister Laura was standing before me. It is my guilty conscience, I suppose. Too late to call her now. Besides, the telephone is no doubt still "out of order." Poor Laura! I saw her, white as death, with tears running down her drawn cheeks. What things are human nerves when a bit unstrung! I shall go and see Laura to-morrow.

I have had my conversation with Griselda and it came off not amiss.

"Griselda," I began carelessly, after Dibdin had gone, "did I mention to you that I am to be married in three weeks?"

Griselda is not one to waste breath in futile and flamboyant feminine exclamations. She turned somewhat pale, I thought.

"You know very well you did not," she answered in level tones, polishing a spoon the while.

"Well, I meant to," I told her truthfully enough. "Didn't you expect it?"

"No, sir," was her blunt reply.

"Neither did I," I blurted out before I knew it.

A wry, unaccustomed smile for a moment illumined her dark, gypsy-like features.

"You needn't tell me that," she retorted, and I wonder what she meant by it. It is not like her to waste words. "Am I," she continued, "to take this as notice to find a new place?"

"God forbid!" I cried in horror. "Whatever happens, Griselda, you remain with me—let that be understood."

"And suppose Miss Bayard shouldn't want me?" she demanded with quiet intensity.

"Then she will probably not want me," I told her. "That question won't arise. Besides, Griselda," I went on, "we haven't decided yet how we are going to manage. Miss Bayard will probably want to keep her apartment and I mine. She would hardly wish to be bothered with me all the time."

"And you would call that marriage!" exclaimed Griselda aghast.

"Why not?" I queried mildly. "I don't know much about it, Griselda, but marriage is determined by the kind of license you get at the City Hall and what the alderman says to you. The leases of apartments have nothing to do with it, I'm quite sure—though I might inquire."

Griselda's face was blank for a moment. Then on a sudden she was bent double in a gale of wild, hysterical laughter. Never have I known her so shaken by meaningless cachinnation. Perhaps her own nerves are no better than mine. Even now I still hear her rattling deeply from time to time like muffled thunder. But I don't care now. What a relief to get it over!

It is nearly bedtime. Casting over the events of the day, I cannot but conclude that my own will has played too small a part in the whole matter.

I must see Gertrude to-morrow in good time and acquaint her with my desire to run over to Florence before we are married and look up Biagi's new material bearing upon the blessed old heathen, Brunetto Latini. Since Gertrude desires me to be great and famous, she cannot deny me the opportunity to discover how a great and famous man accomplished the trick. Besides, what has been delayed three years can surely support a further delay of three months.

But, good heavens! What is this? Voices—the scuffling of feet in the hallway—what army is invading me at this hour! I believe I hear children's voices—and a scream from Griselda, who has never screamed in her life!

CHAPTER III

Laura—my dear sister Laura—is dead! Her children are with me!

Without warning she dropped suddenly under her burdens and with her dying breath confided her children to me—me!

That one cataclysmic fact has taken its abode in my brain and numbed it as well as all my nerves to a chill and deadly paralysis that excludes everything else. It still seems wholly unbelievable—some nightmare from which I shall awake with a vast sickly sort of relief to the old custom of my tranquil life.

The turbulence and the pain of the last three days, however, are still lashing about me like the angry waves after a tempest, in a manner too realistic for any dream. I am broad awake now, I know, and for hours I have been blankly staring into a very abyss of darkness.

What will happen or what I shall do next, I haven't the shadow of an idea.

Laura is dead and her children are with me, and I am their guardian and sole reliance. Who could have forecast such a fate or such a rôle for me? Three days! It is incredible! Only three days ago, I was languidly protesting because I could not take ship forthwith for Italy to examine some manuscript at the Laurentian in Florence!

No, by heavens! It was not I. It was some one else—some one I knew vaguely, in a past age, a man to be envied, serene and cheerful, blest of life, whom I shall never meet again.

The last three days! I cannot banish them and yet I cannot meet the memory of them. Was it I who faced the tragedy, or was it some one else? Nothing surely is more tragic than a young mother's death—and that young mother my own sister! Who was it that stonily passed through the ordeal of the "arrangements" and the black pantomime of the sepulture? I cannot record it even for myself, for never, I know, shall I desire to be reminded of it. At the death of my mother, I still had Laura with her practical woman's sense. But now I was alone. I say now because however remote it seems, this tragedy will always be present. My life must forever remain under its stupefying spell.

It is not credible that only three days ago I sat here in my study revolving trifles, those many shining trifles that went to make up my former life.

Three days ago the silence of this house was disturbed by the voices of children, the clatter of their feet, and for the first time in my life I heard Griselda scream.

"Oh, Mr. Randolph," she rushed in, sobbing, with the dry tearless sobs of those much acquainted with grief, "Miss Laura—she—the children are here!"

I knew. Though inwardly I sank all but lifeless under the blow, I knew clearly that Laura was dead.

"Is she very ill?" I heard myself asking faintly, with a clutching desire to shrink still from the appalling truth.

"She—oh, Mr. Randolph,'" she lamented, "don't you understand—ye know very well!" she suddenly added with a harshness that surprised me. "We shall have to put the children to bed in your bedroom."

It was as though she had suddenly revolted at the softness of the atmosphere in my environment, at any artificiality or evasion. She seemed abruptly determined to face the stark facts in the open.

"The girl will sleep with me," she concluded tonelessly and turned to go.

"Which girl?" I queried dazedly.

"Her that brought the bairns," she replied and left me.

"Send her in here—I want to speak to her!" I shouted after Griselda. I could not face the thought of going out there. I was held to my chair by a sheer pitiful lack of courage to move into the dreadful gulf before me.

I closed my eyes and endeavored to still the tumult in my brain into silence. I wanted to think. But only those can achieve silence who do not need it. I could not. I opened my eyes.

A thin little girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen stood before me. This surely could not be the girl Griselda had referred to in charge of the children. She was herself a child. Were my disordered senses tricking me? I experienced the thrill Poe's hero must have felt at sight of the raven on the bust of Pallas.

"Who are you?" I whispered.

"I am Alicia, sir," she answered with large, frightened gray eyes fastened upon mine.

"What—what is it?" I stammered.

"The lady said you wanted to see me."

"Did you bring the children?" I breathed, incredulous.

"Yes, sir."

I was awestruck. Her eyes, were the eyes of a child yet they were filled with sorrow and a searching fear old as the world.

"How old are you?" I could not help asking, with an irrelevance foolish enough in the circumstances.

"Going on fourteen, sir."

"And you—you are the nurse?"

"I helped Mrs. Pendleton with the children before school and after school," she answered with more assurance now, but still uneasy. "I am a mother's helper, sir." There was no mirth in my soul, but the muscles contorted my features into a sickly grin.

"I see," I murmured mendaciously. But I saw only my own confused turpitude at my blindness and neglect in face of the shifts and needs poor Laura had been compelled to suffer.

"Where do you come from?" I inquired with a dry throat, ashamed to ask anything of importance.

"From—the Home for—Dependent Children—in Sullivan County," she murmured hesitatingly, with a tinge of color in her cheeks. On a sudden I saw her pale lips tremble and guiltily I realized that, thoughtless, after my wont, I was subjecting her to an ordeal merely because I was in torment.

"Sit down," I forced myself to speak evenly, "and tell me exactly what happened."

She sidled to the big chair, her gaze still fixed upon me, as though to watch me was henceforth her first anxiety. She gripped the arm of the chair and hung undecided for a moment as though fearful of making herself so much at home as to sit down in this room.

"Sit down," I reiterated more encouragingly, "and tell me what happened to my sister."

"Yes, sir," she murmured obediently, perching on the edge of the great chair. "Well," she began, "when I came home from school in the afternoon Mrs. Pendleton was lying down. The children were hanging about her bed and she looked very pale."

"Yes, yes," I urged her on impatiently.

"Then I took them downstairs and gave them their bread and milk and tried to read to them so as to keep them quiet. But only the littlest one, Jimmie, wanted to listen. Randolph and Laura wanted to play Kings and Queens." I realized that I must hear the story in the girl's own way.

"Then," she continued, with an effort at exactitude, "I thought that Jimmie and I had better join them, because then I could keep them from making so much noise. We played until supper time. But Mrs. Pendleton didn't feel well enough to come down. So the children and I had supper downstairs and Hattie—that's the cook—took Mrs. Pendleton's supper up on a tray."

That must have been while I was lamenting to Dibdin over the hardness of my lot.

"Then what happened?" I muttered, turning away from her gaze.

"I went up to see if Mrs. Pendleton wanted anything," she resumed nervously, frightened by my movement, "and she said no, but that she'd get up later when it was time for them to go to bed. So I helped them with their lessons until bedtime and Mrs. Pendleton came down. She said she felt a little better, but she looked very sad and white. And when she began to walk up the stairs—" her lips grew tremulous again and the tears dashed out of her eyes, but she finally controlled herself bravely.

"—She fell—and—" she began to weep bitterly, "she just said, 'The children—my brother—telephone—' and that was all—" and that piteous child who was no kindred to my poor sister sobbed convulsively.

That must have been about the time when I was at table with Dibdin and, over the sauterne, complaining to him of the narrowness of my income in view of the lacunæ and wants of my library.

"We couldn't—get you—on the telephone," she found breath to utter at last. "So I brought the children here—Hattie told me how to go—Hattie's over there alone."

Nothing in this world can ever stab me again as the poignancy of her recital stabbed me. My life seemed shattered, irreparable. All my dreams were at an end. Laura was gone and here were her children thrust by destiny upon my hands—unless their scoundrel of a father should ever return to relieve me of them. I had lived peacefully and harmlessly in my way, but for some inscrutable reason Fate had selected me for her heaviest blow.

"Very well," I told her as kindly as I could in the conditions, "now you go back to Griselda and go to bed. I'll have to think things out."

"Oh—but the house!" exclaimed the little girl—and never again do I wish to see such horror on a childish countenance as at that instant froze the features of little Alicia. "All alone," she added, her thin shoulders heaving. "Aren't you going over now, sir?"

"Now!" I exclaimed, looking automatically at my watch. "Why—yes—in a few minutes, child."

"But—Hattie is there alone—" she stammered. "There's nobody else—then I'd better go back."

It was obvious, of course, that I must go at once. But why should a child see spontaneously that to which I am obtuse?

"Oh, well, you are right, of course—I must go immediately—I hadn't thought—I'll go over now"—and I turned away from her, lifted the curtain and gazed out into the wet, murky street below. Life had collapsed and the ruins of it were tumbled about my hot ears. I hardly know how long I stood there, completely oblivious of the girl Alicia.

"Please, Mr. Byrd," I was startled to hear a tearful, childish voice behind me—"won't you see the children before you go, sir?"

I wheeled about sharply.

"The children? Oh, yes—no!" The horror of the situation fell about me like an avalanche that had hung suspended for a moment and then crashed smotheringly over me. "No," I whispered huskily, "I can't—not now—not now!" A kind of chill darkness numbed my senses.

Like a pistol shot I suddenly heard the harsh voice of Griselda in the doorway.

"The cab is at the door, Mr. Randolph. Don't forget your rubbers."

And like an automaton galvanized into life I found myself whirling to the house of death.

CHAPTER IV

For a week the children have been with me and nothing has yet been done about them. Another week, I think, will drive me mad with indecision.

I seem unable to emerge from the shadow of mystery and terror into which my serene world has been so suddenly plunged. The book-lined study is my solitary refuge; and like a schoolgirl I can do no more than unpack my heart with words.

I have seen Gertrude.

It is astonishing how resourceless are even one's nearest and dearest friends in face of anything really capital.

"Poor Ranny! How ghastly!" Gertrude cried, when she first heard of it, wringing my hand. "But buck up, dear boy. You know how I feel. There is a way out for everything." She spoke, I thought, as though I were in need of ready money.

She was here this afternoon to see the children. Gertrude is no hand with children. They seemed strangely shy of her, a woman, though they literally fell upon the neck of growling, grizzled old Dibdin. They are still subdued by the suddenness of their tragedy, though real sorrow Gertrude tells me, is, thank Heaven, beyond them.

"We'll have to think up a way of disposing of the dear things," she remarked briskly. And though I am myself completely at a loss what to do with them, I cannot say I relished her way of putting it.

"What, for instance, could you suggest?" I inquired dully.

"Schools, Ranny dear, schools," she impatiently answered. "There are homelike places run by splendid women—just made for such cases. Why, even the little one—Jimmie, is it?—How old is he; four?—There are places even for kiddies as young as that."

A heavy confusion, the reverse of enthusiasm, oppressed me.

"You forget, Gertrude," I endeavored as gently as possible to remind her, "Laura confided those children to me with her dying breath—to me—her only relative. Do you think I ought to fling them out at once, God knows where!"

"Good Lord, Ranny!" she cried, flushing with a smile of anger peculiar to Gertrude when she is annoyed. "What a sentimentalist you are at bottom—after all!"

"A sentimentalist—I?" I felt hurt. "Just put yourself in my place, Gertrude, and see how easy such a decision would be for you."

"I do, Ranny; that is just what I am doing," she insisted impatiently. "But don't you see that if there is any one thing you cannot do, it is to keep them here—or in my apartment?"

"Yes," I said, "I see that. But I also see that I can't pitch them out among total strangers, a week after their mother's—" I could not trust my foolish voice to finish.

"Do you forget," demanded Gertrude with her smile that brands me imbecile, "do you forget, Ranny, that we are to be married in two weeks?"

"No, Gertrude—far from it. But that is why we are discussing this problem—because it is perplexing. Besides, schools of the right sort are bound to be pretty expensive things."

"Oh," said Gertrude, "of course. But poor Laura's income ought to be enough—"

"My dear Gertrude, that is what I don't know. Carmichael is to give me an accounting of it to-day or to-morrow. Laura never spoke of her money matters to me. But, as you say, there will probably be enough. Only, it isn't altogether that—you see, Gertrude—" I floundered.

"Yes, I see, Ranny, I see," she hammered at me in the maddening way women have. "You simply can't get up enough will power to do something. It's the old story. But you'll have to, my dear," and she smiled sweetly. "You have all my sympathy and all the coöperation you'll take. But the one thing we can't do is stand still. You understand that—don't you, Ranny?"

"Yes. I understand that. But my brain is as fertile of plans as a glass door knob."

"I'll tell you what I'll do, Ranny," Gertrude summarized. "I know all this has been a great shock to you. I'll let you alone for a couple of days to turn things over. And think of what I've said. But then we must come to some definite decision. I'd give anything if this terrible thing had not happened now—but it can't be helped, can it?"

Now, that was very sweet and reasonable of Gertrude. And it is a thousand pities that she feels distressed. But it would have been ten thousand more if poor Laura had died just after we had been married instead of before. As it is, the problem before me is largely mine. Were we now married, Gertrude must have had to bear an undue share of it.

Shall I ever win back to the old tranquillity and the peace that was mine? That was the first thought that came to me when I parted from Gertrude, a selfish thought as I immediately realized, in view of what is facing me. I can no longer think as I have thought and new feelings are struggling for birth within me, commensurate with the new responsibility. The world, as I walk through it, seems to present an aspect strangely different from what it did a week ago. It is so chill and alien and hollow!

As I was reëntering my study I heard a crash in the dining room, which is now the children's room, and when I glanced in upon them the girl Alicia was gathering up smithereens of glass and Ranny, the eldest boy, quietly announced, "It broke" in a manner that so obviously gave him away, all the others could not help laughing; and they laughed the louder when I joined them. Confused and angry, the boy ran out of the room.

It is a world apart, the world of children, into which parents, I suppose, grow gradually. Not being the parent of these children, I fear I shall never penetrate it.

Sooner or later they must be sent away, even as Gertrude maintains. And I must face that event forthwith.

I was interrupted at this point by the irruption into the room of Jimmie, the youngest, inimitably, grotesquely shapeless in his nightgear, pattering toward me and taking refuge between my knees. He was being pursued by the girl Alicia who stood shyly and distressfully smiling in the doorway, as though all explanation were futile.

"Well, old boy, what is it?" I demanded with mock severity, though in truth I was more afraid of him than he evidently was of me.

"Iwantsayprayerstoyoulikeamummy," he uttered in one excited breath, as though it were one single word.

"You want what?"

"He says he wants to say his prayers to you, sir," spoke up the girl clearly. "I am sorry—he broke away. Shall I take him away, sir?"

"Wanto say my prayers to you like to mummy," insisted Laura's child, scrambling upon my knees. And with a pang of sadness that set all my senses aching I saw the picture of the past—poor Laura with her sweet, resigned face, living when she lived only in her children, listening to the prayers of this sprite with the silken sunshine in his hair.

"All right, Jimmie," I murmured faintly, as he clung to me; "go ahead."

Tightly clutching me about the neck and nestling his face against mine, he brought forth with childish throaty sweetness the few words to the creative Spirit that mankind the world over, in one form or another, addresses as Our Father. "And God," he concluded with brilliant triumph in his eyes, "bless Mummy and Uncle Ranny."

Nothing that I can remember has ever moved me as that child moved me. Like St. Catherine of Genoa at her decisive confessional I seemed to receive a profound inner wound by that child's act, tender and bitter and sweet, that I never desire to heal. For the moment Laura and I were nearer to being one than ever we had been in her lifetime. Nevermore shall I forget the sweetness and fragrance of that little child and his warm nestling faith in me. And I am planning to cast him off.

"Come, now," interposed Alicia, as though breaking a spell.

"One more hug," cried Jimmie, with the arrogance of righteousness. And suiting his action to his words, he clambered down with engaging clumsiness from my knees and padded toward Alicia. Once more I was alone with my thoughts.

Can it be that some instinct in the child whose heart is still imbedded in his mother's had made him seek the one person who had been nearest his mother?

I cannot say, I cannot say.

Oh, God—and I must send him and the others, Laura's children, away, away among strangers!

There seems to be no other way out.

I have been turning idly the pages of books in a way bookish people have, seeking for inspiration, for some word of guidance. Brunetto tells me on the word of St. Bernard, that tarnished gold is better than shining copper; and that the wild ass brays once every hour and thus makes an excellent timepiece for his savage neighborhood. But nothing of this casts a glimmer of light upon my dilemma. Rabelais keeps shouting from his yellow page, "fais ce que vondras." But what is it that I desire to do?

Ah, I know what I desire to do! There is counsel in the old books, after all.

I will have in the girl Alicia, and see what I can glean. She was brought up without kith or kin of her own. And though an institution is more of a machine than a good school, still those who had the rearing of her were total strangers. There might be some gleam of suggestion in that.

Alicia has been here.

"Come, child, sit down," I invited her, observing that she still displayed a tendency to stand in awe of me. "I wish to ask you some questions." But her tense little face was still haunted by a vague fear. "It's about the children," I added, and she seemed somewhat more at ease on the edge of her chair.

"How long were you at that Home—in Sullivan County?" I began, grinning by way of ingratiating myself.

"Ever since I can remember, sir," she answered.

"Were they kind to you?"

"Oh, yes, sir."

"How kind?—What did they do for you?"

"They gave us food and—and medicine when we were sick. And on Christmas we had a tree. Only nobody ever came to see me. I always looked out of the window for somebody to come. But no one came."

"Yes, yes, I know," I pursued. "But did they show you affection—sympathy?"

Alicia was silent.

"Don't you know what I mean?" I pressed.

"Yes, sir, I think I do."

"Then why don't you answer?"

"I—it's hard to explain," and she laughed a frightened little laugh. "There is no one there to—to do those things you said. There were five hundred of us there. If you're not sick you just go on like all the rest. If you're sick they give you oil or something. Sometimes a child pretends it's sick just so the matron or a nurse might take it in her lap and make a fuss over it. And some are naughty—for the same reason."

I nodded gravely, but my heart was gripped by a poignant aching. I saw Laura's children compelled to feign illness or delinquency in order to receive a touch of individual attention which, I suppose, every child spontaneously craves.

"Were you glad to leave there?" I asked.

"Oh, yes, sir!" she answered eagerly.

"Tragic, my poor sister dying," I said, half to myself. "She was an ideal mother. Now—I hardly know what to do."

Alicia leaped from her chair and came yearning toward me. Her little face tremulous and working, she cried out:

"Oh, Mr. Byrd, you won't send us away—to a Home—will you?"

"No, no!—Not to a Home," I replied defensively. "But schools—there must be good places for children—"

"They'd feel terribly," she stifled a sob. "They love it so here—Even here Laura cries for her mother every night—and little Jimmie—"

"Never mind," I took her up hastily, "nothing is decided yet, my dear child. I'm glad I spoke to you. You see," I ran on, "there's so little room here, and I—I know nothing about children—"

"But there's nothing to do," she protested, sobbing.

"Nothing?" I smiled vaguely in an effort to cheer her and laid my hand upon her thin shoulder.

"Nothing except just love them," she said. "I'll take care of them—all I can." How simple!

"Well, well, we shall see," I aimed to be reassuring.

"Do I have to go—back to the Home?" she asked brokenly, with an arm hiding her face.

"Oh, no, certainly not," I answered hastily. "We'll find a better way than that. Now," I added, "be a good girl, dry your eyes; run along and don't say a word about—our conversation."

"No, sir," she murmured obediently. And still gulping, she left me.

It is obvious that the girl Alicia has been of decisive help to me!

Yet it is equally obvious that I cannot keep the children here.

Dibdin has been here and he has left me in a state of distraction, worse if possible than that I had been in before.

The good fellow endeavored to be vastly and solidly cheering.

"All nonsense," he growled, "about children being hostages to fortune. They are the only contribution a human being really makes to the world. All the digging that burrowing animals such as I do in the four corners of the earth, all the fuss that fellows in laboratories make over test tubes and microscopes and metals and germs, all the stuff that people sat up nights to put into those damned books of yours—all of that is done for them—for the next generation and the generations they will beget."

"Eloquent!" I flippantly mocked him; "but how is it you've elected to be what you call a tramp?"

"Elected?" he grunted disdainfully. "I didn't elect. It elected me. Besides," he continued, lowering his voice, "I would have given it up like a shot—given up anything, changed my life inside out, done anything if I had been able to marry the one woman I wanted. I'm one of those strange beasts for whom there is only one woman in the world—no other:

'If heaven would make me such another world

Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,

I'd not have sold her for it,'

he quoted, and added with a hoarse laugh, "you ought to know your Othello."

"Then why on earth didn't you marry her?" I could not help marveling.

"Too late," he murmured, with a whimsical smiling twitch to his head, that is very engaging. "She was already married to somebody else when I first saw her. Too late," he repeated with ruminative sadness. "But don't let us talk about that," he broke off abruptly. "Have the kids begun to go to school yet?"

"What is the use?" I answered him gloomily. "I haven't formed any plans for them yet."

"Plans? What do you mean?" he inquired, puzzled. Like the girl Alicia he seemed to think there was nothing to do that required any thought. And I wondered if the simple souls in life are only the improvident or the very young.

"Do you see this place," I demanded irritably, "as a home for a family with three children, to say nothing of a fourth in attendance upon them?"

"Have to have a larger place—farther out—of course," he answered glibly, puffing at his pipe.

"And am I a person to take care of and bring up three or four children?"

"Why the devil not?" he demanded.

"Why the devil yes?" I retorted fiercely. "What do I know about children? What experience have I had? Do you see me as a wet nurse to a lot of babies?"

"Wet nurse be hanged," he responded gruffly. "Here's your first chance to be of use in the world and—you talk like that—"

"Easy to talk," ruefully from me.

"Well, what the blazes do you mean to do?"

"That is what I am trying to work out," I fell upon him bitterly. "D'you think it's easy? I've got to work out some plan—find homes for them—the right kind of schools—with a home environment. Oh, it's easy, I assure you! Besides," I ran on savagely, "you seem to forget I'm to be married in two weeks."

"I did forget that," growled Dibdin, with a semblance of contrition. "What does the lady say?"

"Well, what should she say? Could you expect a girl on her wedding day to become the harassed mother of three children not her own?"

Dibdin jumped from his chair, ground an oath between his teeth and his forehead was a file of wrinkles.

"Listen, Randolph," he began in another voice. "It's damnably tough, and I know it. But you can't, you simply can't disperse your sister's children to God knows where. You are the only relation they've got. Put yourself in their place. It would be damnation. If you need—more money," he stammered in confusion, "why, dash it—I'm an old enough friend of yours to—to advance you some, eh?"

And he laughed raucously, wiping the perspiration from his forehead.

"You are a good sort—of tramp," I grinned sheepishly, seizing his hand. "But it isn't that. I don't know as yet what Laura left them. But it isn't that. I feel like—like hell about it—but what can I do—what with Gertrude and—and everything else. Oh, it's the easiest thing in the world, I assure you.—But I wish to God I could see my way to keeping them!"

"Easy or not," said Dibdin huskily, "if you send those children away, I'll break every bone in your body."

I laughed almost hysterically. I know Dibdin. When he is most moved and most sympathetic, he is at his most violent.

"Don't go," I clung to him as with sunken head he shouldered toward the door.

"Must," he growled. "I've got to think, too."

"I wish you had married, Dibdin, and had children of your own," I all but whispered with my hand on his shoulder. "And I'm sorry for the woman. You're a good devil, Dibdin. I wish I knew who the woman is."

"I'll tell you," murmured Dibdin, with a queer throatiness of tone. "I'll tell you who she was. It can't matter now. She was—No, by God! I can't—not now!"

And he shuffled out, leaving me gazing after him speechless and open-mouthed.

CHAPTER V

The girl Alicia keeps watching me like some bewildered household animal dimly aware of the breaking up of its household. Always I am conscious of her great eyes upon me. To her, I presume, I am a Setebos who can inflict pain and torture, like Death himself; who can disrupt her little world of clinging affections by the merest movement of my hand.

I am in that process of turning things over to which Gertrude has indulgently consigned me and I am if anything farther away from a decision than I was twenty-four hours ago. I finger my books and open at random a volume of Florio's "Montaigne" in an edition that is as fragrant of good ink and paper as the Tudor English is rich, and the first line that falls under my eye is that of Seneca, "He that lives not somewhat to others, liveth little to himself." Does this mean that my long absorption in my own small concerns has made me incapable of decision in anything of importance—that I live too little?

I stole into the bedroom last night where the children were sleeping, while Griselda was making up my couch in the study.

With their flushed faces they lay there almost visibly glowing before my eyes with that perfect faith that children seem to have in the grown-up world about them. Heine somewhere speaks of angels guarding the child's couch, and it is not sheer poetry. Their faith and trust, still illusioned, brevets, I suppose, to angelic rank every one about them. Randolph, with a slight frown and moving lips, dreaming seemingly of something active and strenuous, as befits his ripe age of eleven; Laura, serene with her mother's countenance and straying curls, and little Jimmie with his tumbled hair like that of some child by Praxiteles or Phidias—they slept—secure in their trust, despite their recent shattering bereavement.

No one can really know anything about children until he has seen them sleeping. Like fortune, they are always trustfully in the lap of the gods. Never before had they touched me as they seemed to touch the hidden springs in me at that moment. It was so, I pictured, that Laura was wont to steal into their dormitory of nights before going to bed; and that vision, no doubt, was a potent help to her courage to continue uncomplainingly and brave in the face of sorrow, humiliation and her self-effacing loneliness. Would I had been able to picture such things more clearly while she was living.

Griselda surprised me emerging from the room and she smiled, the austere, inscrutable Griselda, with such a smile as Michelangelo might have depicted on the face of one of his Sistine Sybils, those weird sisters who seem to know all things because they have suffered all.

I muttered a casual good night to Griselda and brushed by her nonchalantly, as a boy whistles with apparent carelessness when he feels most awkward or uneasy.

I slept upon my problem in the way old wives advise you, but to-day I am no nearer the solution.

I keep trying coolly to imagine them in appropriately chosen schools and homes, and yet some tugging at my heart strings, some strange alchemy of the brain, wipes out those images before they are formed and replaces them with the vision I saw last night in my invaded bedroom.

Who is to help me make a choice? And before I have put down these words I realize that no one will help me. My dining room is at this moment vocal with their laughter—but something within me is more loudly clamorous yet against the treachery I am planning them. Treachery! That is nonsense, of course. I have a perfect right to decide what I choose. But already that word keeps recurring in my brain whenever I envisage their dispersal.

My decision is taken.

I can hardly say who made it. In reality, I suppose it has made itself. But however it came about, there—heaven help me!—it is.

Gertrude telephoned that she was coming this afternoon. I offered to go to her, but she would drop in, she graciously insisted, now that I was a family man, after lunching with a friend at the Brevoort.

Gertrude's entry is always breezy and cheerful.

"Hello, Ranny," she murmured lightly, sinking on the sofa and holding out both hands. I took them, kissed them and held them in mine. I was well aware that for her these were days of tension.

"That's nice," said Gertrude with a laugh. "But what I want is a cigarette, a match and an ash tray."

"Of course, how stupid of me!" I mumbled and supplied her with her wants.

"Those books, Ranny," she puffed, scanning my laden shelves, "they terrify me afresh every time I see them—when I think you've read them all."

"They needn't alarm you," I deprecated quite sincerely. "The more I read them the less I seem to know—as you will agree." And I sat facing her.

"No room for the brains to turn round in?" she laughed. "Oh, come, dear boy, it's not so bad as that. I really think," she added more soberly, "you have a very wise old bean on your shoulders."

"What sudden and startling discovery leads you to words so rash?" I inquired.

"I've made the discovery all right," she nodded with emphasis. "Anybody who can handle a situation like this the way you're handling it is no piker."

Gertrude often affects the slang of the day as a humorous protest against what she terms my purism. But the truth is, I like the vernacular myself.

"Impart it," I urged her, whereat she smiled.

"Regular street Arab you are," she declared with arch satire, "but what I mean is this. I am always one for quick action—and I don't know much about children. I urged you to send them away at once. But I realize now that so soon after poor Laura's passing away that would have been cruel—and it wouldn't have looked well, besides. Now I see it more your way, Ranny."

"You do!" I could not help exclaiming.

"Yes," she continued firmly. "I see your way is best. I see that we can be quietly married and have our little trip just the same. Then, when we come back, in the natural course of events and rearrangement, we can look up places for them and settle it all right as rain. That's what you had in your clever old head, Ranny, I'm quite sure—and I admire you for it."

"I see," I gasped, wondering what words or acts of mine had conveyed this elaborate strategy to Gertrude. For the space of a minute perhaps I was sunk in thought. The vision of the children asleep in their innocent faith in me suddenly arose vividly and smote me to the heart. The nestling image of Jimmie—the girl Alicia with her great, wistful eyes telling me that there was nothing to do "but just love them"—all this was throbbing in my brain with every heartbeat. And had I in reality schemed out the intricate design with which Gertrude now credited me? By no cudgeling of my poor brains could I recall any such devising. It was impossible. It was new to me. Then something in me that is either better or worse than myself took the reins of the occasion and, like the auditor of another's speech, I heard myself saying with solemn firmness:

"No, Gertrude—you must have mistaken me. I had no such plan. We shall be married, of course, but our marriage can make no difference. I cannot turn these children, Laura's children, out of the house. Not now, at all events, not until they're older. They have no one in the world but me and I mean to keep them."

"Mean to keep them! You mean that?" she gasped. And it pained me to be the cause of a deep flush on Gertrude's face and neck.

"I've never meant anything more certainly in my life," I told her.

"Then we can't marry," said Gertrude in a low tone, still scrutinizing me as though she were wondering whether she had ever met me before.

"Why not?" I cried. "Why should they make so great a difference? In any case, didn't you have an idea that we would each keep our separate flats?"

"Don't talk rot," flared Gertrude in an exasperation which I still deplore, for the steely glitter in her eyes was not pleasant. "I am not going to make myself ridiculous by marrying a houseful of kids for whom my husband is the nurse. Do you really stick to that, Ranny?"

"Yes, Gertrude," I nodded. "I must."

Gertrude gazed at me searchingly for a moment, then to my amazement she laughed in my face, a trifle louder than her wont. Laughter was at that instant far from my thoughts.

"Oh, well," she resumed her earlier lightness of tone, "then we'll simply postpone our marriage a while. You'll get tired of this maternity game, Ranny, depend on it. We've postponed it three years—a few months more can't make much difference, can it?"

Then she approached me and took my hand.

"Little boy's tender conscience must be given its fling, mustn't it?" she began mockingly, in imitation of a child's speech, in which she does not excel. "Never mind, give its little whim its head."

A remarkable woman, is Gertrude.

"Perhaps it's only proper," she concluded more seriously, "that we should postpone it, since you are just now in mourning."

"Nonsense," I answered her. "Laura would certainly never have desired any such thing. Our marriage will not be a thing of pomp and orange blossoms. We could just as well get married now as any other time."

"No, Ranny," she replied decisively. "Now it's my turn to be firm. I think I am right."

I should honestly have preferred, in spite of the conditions that surrounded me, to have married Gertrude then and there without further delay. We are neither of us young things full of ineffable inanities on the subject of romance and I experienced a sober desire for all possible finality in the midst of the jumbled and painful confusion into which Fate had seen fit to cast me. But Gertrude was obdurate.

Just as she was about to go there was a gentle tap on the door. Gertrude, whose hand was already on the knob, opened it. It was the girl Alicia.

With a downward quizzical glance Gertrude fixed the girl so that for a moment she stood fascinated, unable to detach her eyes from Gertrude's. She turned them in my direction finally and they were troubled and imploring.

"Please, Mr. Byrd," she said, "the children want to go for a walk now, instead of lessons. The sun is out. Can I take them?"

"Yes, yes," I said hastily. "By all means."

"Wait a minute," commanded Gertrude, smiling mechanically. "What is your name, child?"

"Alicia, ma'am."

"Alicia what?"

"Alicia Palmer," and the child's voice was tremulous with trepidation.

"And do you give the children lessons?"

"Yes, ma'am," she answered, lowering her eyes as though a crime had found her out.

"And how old are you?" asked Gertrude not unkindly.

"Going on fourteen, ma'am." The girl looked up at once, responsive to the gentler tone. But wishing to relieve her of the interrogatory, I lamely put in a word urging that she take the children out at once before the sun had disappeared. The girl glided away like a shadow.

"Why, she's quite attractive—the little thing," murmured Gertrude. "You'll have quite a menagerie." Then, laughingly turning to me, she cried, "Oh, Ranny, Efficiency ought to be your middle name."

"Perhaps I'd better adopt it?" I murmured.

"Do," said Gertrude. "Well, so long, old boy, I must be running." And in her haste she even forgot to let me kiss her good-by.

So after all the alderman at the City Hall was not to sing his song over us yet. For no reason that I can help I seem to be in disgrace with fortune, Gertrude and aldermen's eyes.

A nameless melancholy, a kind of humorous sadness, has taken possession of me.

It is not my lost tranquillity that I regret now, nor does Gertrude's taunt of inefficiency disturb me. But at bottom I have always realized the type of man that I am not. The type of man who stands four-square in face of all the shocks and emergencies of life, who can meet all changes and events with equal courage, who can take any situation smilingly by the hand as though he were its indisputable and indulgent master, that is the sort of man I should wish to be. But all my own defects clamorously accuse me of embodying the exact opposite of such an ideal. I have shrunk away from life until it fits me like a coarse ill-cut garment rather than a glove. It takes a vast deal of living to be alive, and the dread obsession haunts me that I have become as one mummified in this dim catacomb of books.

I have been to Carmichael's office at his request and the blow that he has dealt me is heavier than any since Laura's death.

Laura, it appears, in her desperate desire to increase her income, had been speculating in the lying promises of oil and mining stocks which offered fabulous returns. One after another her substantial railway and steel bonds went to her brokers for "margins" and some were sold for current livelihood. No wonder she was compelled to resort to an orphanage for a "mother's helper", who is herself a child. The result is that something less than two thousand dollars of Laura's capital remains for her three motherless and fatherless children, the oldest of whom is eleven.

I have no doubt but that her tortured and silent anxiety on this score hastened my poor sister's death. Carmichael himself, her lawyer and adviser, was ignorant of her acts until it was too late. The dread goddess Fortune plainly does nothing by halves. If it were not for my grief over the suffering that poor Laura must have endured so uncomplainingly, I should be moved to uproarious laughter. Job, I feel sure, must have had his moments when the comforters were not there, when he laughed until the tears bedewed his dejected old beard.

And I, incompetent recluse that I am, have undertaken the care and the rearing of three children! I should at least admire the completeness with which Fate plays her hands or produces her situations, were I not at this moment utterly and stonily impervious to all thought and all emotion—unless an inert and deadly sense of disaster be an emotion.

No, that was not enough. What a glutton is that same Fate! Dibdin has been here to say a hasty good-by.

He has heard of a ship that sails from San Francisco in a week and that will touch at his particular group of islands, so that he will not have to trans-ship at Papeete, as had been his earlier plan. I have never before in my life felt so utterly alone!

He laughed a curious laugh, that seemed foolish yet exulting, when I told him I had decided to keep the children. His eyes glittered and he turned away for an instant to hide them.

"Look here," he muttered hoarsely, with the assumption of his most matter-of-fact manner, "let me advance you a thousand dollars or so—in case you should have a use for it. Be an investment for me," he added, with a short laugh. "What use is it to me in the Marquesas or Solomon Islands, eh?"

"No, thanks, Dibdin," I told him. "I can mention one or two good banks on the Island of Manhattan—if you don't know of any."

"Don't be an ass, Randolph," he came back with severity. "I'll write you a cheque."

"No, you won't," I replied with equal obstinacy. "I won't take it. If I need it, I'll cable you."

"Devil you will," he growled irritably. "Cables don't run where I'll be. You're an ass, after all."

"Thanks. Would you like to see the children before you go?"

"H'm, yes," he answered meditatively. "No, by gosh!" he added in sudden confusion. "No, I can't. Got to run. Slews of things still to do."

Inscrutable devil, Dibdin! Who would have supposed him such a bundle of oddly-assorted emotions?

"By the way," he said abruptly, as he was starting, "Carmichael—heard from him—everything all right?"

Inwardly I felt a tug as though some one had pulled violently upon some cord inside me.

"Oh, yes," I lied as urbanely as I was able, "everything quite all right. You'll keep me in addresses, I suppose?"

He scrutinized me for an instant so searchingly that with a tremor I feared he would see through me.

"Oh, yes, of course," he finally answered. "The Hotel de France, Papeete, is a good address until you hear of another. They know me there."

"Good," I tapped him on the back. "Write a fellow a word whenever you can. Pretty lonely here after you're gone."

"Lonely!" he repeated. "And you—oh, by George, and I'd almost forgotten—and you to be married in a few days—lonely!"

"That's—off," I faltered—"for the present."

"Off!" he exclaimed aghast. "Did she break it off?"

"Put it off," I corrected.

"When you told her of keeping the kids?"

I nodded my head slowly, watching the odd play of his features.

He opened his arms quickly as though he were about to hug me like some grizzly old bear—then as quickly he dropped them, shamefaced.

"By God!" he uttered solemnly. "This—this gets me—the way things came about. You—you are a man, Randolph, my lad. Courage—that wins everything in the end. Even when it loses, it wins. Yes, sir."

I have not the remotest idea what he meant by those words.

"Broken up about it?" he demanded abruptly.

What my gesture proclaimed to Dibdin I don't know. For me it expressed all that I had passed through during the last ten days.

"No, you're right. No use," he said, clapping me on the shoulder. "Sit tight, my boy. Courage—the only thing! Now, good-by," he wrung my hand, "and God bless you."

"Same to you, old boy, and best of luck."

And now the only intimate friend I possess has gone and left a hole in the atmosphere as large as Central Park.

CHAPTER VI

An odd look of overt approval I have surprised of late in Griselda's eyes causes me a peculiar twinge of regret. It shows that new conditions have overwhelmingly ousted the old. Griselda never troubled to approve of me before. I have no desire for any change in Griselda, even for the better.

I have been successful, however, I am bound to record. I have found an outdoor school for Ranny and Laura in Macdougal Street near Washington Square, and a nearby kindergarten for Jimmie. The girl Alicia is able to take Ranny and Laura to Macdougal Street on the way to her own public school. Jimmie, who does not go until later in the morning, is a problem. Thus far I have been conducting him to his kindergarten myself. But obviously that cannot continue, despite the fact that Jimmie, seeing his elder brother depart with two girls, turns to me with a look of inimitable superiority and observes:

"We men must stick together, mustn't we, Uncle Ranny."

I gravely agree with him on the general policy, though I aim to forestall future trouble by indicating that expediency often governs these things.

The term bills paid in advance to the schools have left a gap in my exchequer. For the first time I have been compelled to decline a genuine bargain. Andrews, the bookseller, called me up with the announcement that he had something I could not resist. Laughing, I asked him to name it.

"It is nothing less than Boswell's 'Johnson'," he told me with particular solemnity, "first edition, with the misprint on page 135—a beautiful copy."

"Dated April 10, 1791?"

"Dated April 10, 1791," he repeated with impressive triumph. My heart sank, though it was beating loudly. For many years I have had an order for that Boswell.

"And the price?" I murmured faintly.

"For you," he said, "four hundred dollars."

Griselda would approve of me blatantly did she know the courage it required to answer Andrews.

"No, friend, I am sorry but I cannot afford it at present."

Andrews was incredulous. "Do I hear you correctly?" he queried.

"Accurately," I told him, "if you hear that I can't take it."

"Then I refuse to accept the evidence of my ears," he retorted with spirit. "I shall send it down to you." I told him it was useless. "Oh, you needn't buy it," he shouted. "But I insist on giving an old customer the pleasure of seeing it at his leisure, in his own library."

A shrewd, good devil is Andrews, even though he is a good salesman. I have been feasting my senses on the Boswell, but it will have to go back.

Dibdin's going so abruptly has left me very heavy at times upon my own hands. He had a way of dropping in unannounced when you least expected him, so that I came to count upon him at unexpected moments. There is no one to take his place. Now on clear evenings I ramble aimlessly northward and often turn in at the club, though so little have I been a frequenter of it I hardly know a soul in the place. Last night I ran into my classmate, Fred Salmon, for the first time in months.

Fred is, I should say, my exact antithesis. He is full of laughter and noise and exuberance. Riches are his goal in life, and if he expended one half the vitality on the acquisition of riches that he devotes to the collection of humorous anecdotes, he would be a wealthy man to-day.

"Hello, Ranny," he shouted when he saw me, "you're just in time to join me in a little refreshment. What you doing now?" Luckily he seldom waits for an answer. With trained rapidity he gave his order to a waiter and continued, "Come across any rare editions lately, any fine copies, such as 'Skeezicks' or 'Toodlums' by Gazook?"

"No," I told him, "my collection is lacking in those masterpieces."

"Tell you what you ought to be, Ranny," he boomed, as the waiter put down the glasses. "You ought to be (here's how!)—a bond salesman!" he decided after a pause and gulped down his liquor;—"or else a dog fancier."

"Why those exalted callings?" I asked with only the mildest curiosity.

"You are such a simp and you look so damn honest," he elucidated, "that anybody would believe anything you say."

"Then will you believe me if I say I don't want to be either of those things—or anything else?"

"Oh, sure!" he responded heartily. "I know that all right. You haven't got anything on me. I'd rather own a few good horses and follow the races round the tracks of the world, if I had my choice. Instead of which I've got to separate the world from enough dollars to keep me going. If ever you get hard up, Ran," he concluded reflectively, "let me know. I'll set you up in the right game. Never make a mistake. I took a course in character reading for five dollars—by correspondence—that's how I know so much."

Dollars! Dollars! Dollars! Must every one then become merely a dollar-amassing machine? I remember Fred in college, ruddy with the freshness of youth, when he was making jokes for the Lampoon and, so abundant was his energy, everybody expected him to do Great Things. And now he can talk of nothing but dollars—and he doesn't seem to be oversupplied with those. I am nothing myself, but at least no one expected anything of me.

Fred proposed that we play a game of poker, bridge, checkers or cribbage. But as none of those manly sports tempted me at the moment we parted and he cordially informed me that he would look me up one day.

Nevertheless, with all his noise and emptiness, Fred was glowing, or seemed to be glowing to me. His ideas are puerile. His talk is cast in one mold, upon one design, that of evoking laughter. But he is alive. He is not apathetic. That is what I deplore in myself, the apathy that has saturated me after the recent events, that are like a dark liquid which has entered my mind at one point and then by natural action unchecked has stained every fiber of my being. It is not thus I shall acquit myself of the task I have assumed. I must become alive!

The children, I am beginning to think, are the only creatures really alive in this world. They don't hanker after musty-smelling first editions, after knowledge of bygone old worthies like Ser Brunetto some seven centuries dead, nor yet after the eternal conversion of life into dollars.

To-day I witnessed a curious excrescence of their bubbling imaginations. My door standing open, I was able to observe a ceremony that transformed my dining room into a church and the four infants with solemn faces into the vivid celebrants of the sacrament of marriage. They are evidently ignorant of the "alderman" method. To the delight of Jimmie and Laura, Ranny, my oldest nephew, with hieratic pomp, was being married to the girl Alicia. Even she knew better than to laugh as the boy was slipping a ring upon her finger, murmuring some gibberish which he had either learned or invented, and endowing her with all his worldly goods. The goods consisted first of all in the number of a hundred kisses, which the boy proceeded to administer with savage realism to the crowing delight of Jimmie and the uncontrollable giggling of Laura. This part of the endowment being finally completed, he brought forth from his pocket a small toy pistol and gravely placed it in her hand. I nearly jumped from my chair when I saw that. A pistol of all things! What could have made the little apes think of that? What a text for a cynic! Perhaps every bride ought to receive a pistol as part of her wedding dower? They then proceeded merrily to eat bits of cake and to laugh and chatter like any other wedding guests. I closed my door softly and for a space I was lost in reflection. For it suddenly came to me that to approach life with anything less than the playful zest of children was a grim, a fatal error.

It was odd that Gertrude should have chosen that hour to evince the only sign since her decision that she had any memory of me. When she came in, preceded by the knock and laconic announcement of Griselda, the first words she spoke were:

"Well, Ranny, and how is domesticity?"

"Highly educative," I told her, as I ministered to her usual wants. "I have just learned the proper way of marrying a woman."

"Indeed?" murmured Gertrude, somewhat sourly, I thought, "and how is that?"

"It's not the alderman that is important," I informed her. "It's done with a hundred kisses and a pistol." In reply to her look of incomprehension, I described to her the episode of the dining room. To my surprise Gertrude could see no humor in that.

"What a child you are, Ranny," she shook her head sadly. "And I thought that with all your faults you were a serious person."

"That must have been your fundamental mistake about me," I answered somewhat sheepishly and yet nettled. "I fear I am not half as serious as the children are."

"No," said Gertrude. Then after a brief pause,

"Have you decided yet that the children ought to be sent away to schools?"

"Why, no, Gertrude! Such a thing has not entered my head since—since we talked of it," I told her.