Front matter (continued 3)

Then he continued, his eyes growing keener and his manner changing: "There is some interesting work to be done in that quarter by some one. You see, the Kalahari runs like this"—he drew the lines on the ground with his cane—"coming down in something like this shape from the Orange River to about the twentieth parallel south. The aneroid gives its average elevation about six hundred feet. I didn't cross it at the time, because we had sickness and the porters cut. But I made a lot of geological observations, and from these I have built up a theory that the Kalahari is no desert at all, but a big, well-watered plateau, with higher ground on the east and west. The tribes, too, thereabout call the place Linoka-Noka, and that's the Bantu for rivers upon rivers. They're nasty, though, these Bantu, and gave us a lot of trouble. They have a way of spitting little poisoned thorns into you unawares, and your tongue swells up and turns blue and your teeth fall out and—"

His wife Victoria came out to us in evening dress.

"Ah, Vic," said Toppan, jumping up, with a very sweet smile, "we were just talking about your paper-german next Tuesday, and I think we might have some very pretty favours made out of white tissue-paper—roses and butterflies, you know."

"This Animal of a Buldy Jones"

We could always look for fine fighting at Julien's of a Monday morning, because at that time the model was posed for the week and we picked out the places from which to work. Of course the first ten of the esquisse men had first choice. So, no matter how early you got up and how resolutely you held to your first row tabouret, chaps like Rounault, or Marioton, or the little Russian, whom we nicknamed "Choubersky," or Haushaulder, or the big American—"This Animal of a Buldy Jones"—all strong esquisse men, could always chuck you out when they came, which they did about ten o'clock, when everything had quieted down. When two particularly big, quick-tempered, obstinate, and combative men try to occupy, simultaneously, a space twelve inches square, it gives rise to complications. We used to watch and wait for these fights (after we had been chucked out ourselves), and make things worse, and hasten the crises by getting upon the outskirts of the crowd that thronged about the disputants and shoving with all our mights. Then one of the disputants would be jostled rudely against the other, who would hit him in the face, and then there would be a wild hooroosh and a clatter of overturned easels and the flashing of whitened knuckles and glimpses of two fierce red faces over the shoulders of the crowd, and everything would be pleasant. Then, perhaps, you would see an allusion in the Paris edition of the next morning's "Herald" to "the brutal and lawless students."

I remember particularly one fight—quite the best I ever saw at Julien's or elsewhere, for the matter of that. It was between Haushaulder and Gilet. Haushaulder was a Dane, and six feet two. Gilet was French, and had a waist like Virginie's. But Gilet had just come back from his three years' army service, and knew all about the savate. They squared off at each other, Gilet spitting like a cat, and Haushaulder grommelant under his mustache. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," the big American, bellowed to separate them, for it really looked like a massacre. And then, all at once, Gilet spun around, bent over till his finger-tips touched the floor, and balancing on the toe, lashed out backwards with his leg at Haushaulder, like any cayuse. The heel of his boot caught the Dane on the point of the chin. An hour and forty minutes later, when Haushaulder recovered consciousness and tried to speak, we found that the tip of his tongue had been sliced off between his teeth as if by a pair of scissors. It was a really unfortunate affair, and the government very nearly closed the atelier because of it. But "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" gave us all his opinion of the savate, and announced that the next man who savated from any cause whatever "aurait affaire avec lui, oui, avec lui, cre nom!"

Heavens! No one aimerait avoir affaire avec cette animal de Buldy Jones. He was from Chicago (but, of course, he couldn't help that!), and was taller than even Haushaulder, and much broader. The desire for art had come upon him all of a sudden while he was studying law at Columbia. For "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" had gone into law after leaving Yale. Here we touch his great weakness. He was a Yale man! Why, he was prouder of that fact than he was of being an American, or even a Chicagoan—and that is saying much. Why, he couldn't talk of Yale without his face flushing. Why, Yale was almost more to him than his mother. I remember, at the students' ball at Bulliers, he got the Americans together, and with infinite trouble taught us all the Yale "yell", which he swore was a transcript from Aristophanes, and for three hours he gravely headed a procession that went the rounds of a hall howling "Brek! Kek! Kek! Kek! Co-ex!" and all the rest of it.

More than that, "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" had pitched on his Varsity baseball nine. In his studio—quite the swellest in the Quarter, by the way—he had a collection of balls that he had pitched in match games at different times, and he used to show them to us reverently, and if we were his especial friends, would allow us to handle them. They were all written over with names and dates. He would explain them to us one by one.

"This one," he would say, "I pitched in the Princeton game, and here's two I pitched in the Harvard game—hard game that—our catcher gave out—guess he couldn't hold me" (with a grin of pride), "and Harvard made it interesting for me until the fifth inning; then I made two men fan out one after the other, and then, just to show 'em what I could do, filled the bases, got three balls called on me, and then pitched two inshoots and an outcurve, just as hard as I could deliver. Printz of Harvard was at the bat. He struck at every one of them—and fanned out. Here's the ball I did it with. Yes, sir. Oh, I can pitch a ball all right."

Now think of that! Here was this man, "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," a Beaux Arts man, one of the best colour and line men on our side, who had three esquisses and five figures "on the wall" at Julien's (any Paris art student will know what that means), and yet the one thing he was proud of, the one thing he cared to be admired for, the one thing he loved to talk about, was the fact that he had pitched for the Yale 'varsity baseball nine.

All this by way of introduction.

I wonder how many Julien men there are left who remember the affaire Camme? Plenty, I make no doubt, for the thing was a monumental character. I heard Roubault tell it at the "Dead Rat" just the other day. "Choubersky" wrote to "The Young Pretender" that he heard it away in the interior of Morocco, where he had gone to paint doorways, and Adler, who is now on the "Century" staff, says it's an old story among the illustrators. It has been bandied about so much that there is danger of its original form being lost. Wherefore it is time that it should be brought to print.

Now Camme, be it understood, was a filthy little beast—a thorough-paced, blown-in-the-bottle blackguard with not enough self-respect to keep him sweet through a summer's day—a rogue, a bug—anything you like that is sufficiently insulting; besides all this, and perhaps because of it, he was a duelist. He loved to have a man slap his face—some huge, big-boned, big-hearted man, who knew no other weapons but his knuckles. Camme would send him his card the next day, with a message to the effect that it would give him great pleasure to try and kill the gentleman in question at a certain time and place. Then there would be a lot of palaver, and somehow the duel would never come off, and Camme's reputation as a duelist would go up another peg, and the rest of us—beastly little rapins that we were—would hold him in increased fear and increased horror, just as if he were a rattler in coil.

Well, the row began one November morning—a Monday—and, of course, it was over the allotment of seats. Camme had calmly rubbed out the name of "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" from the floor, and had chalked his own in its place.

Now, Bouguereau had placed the esquisse of "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" fifth, the precedence over Camme.

But Camme invented reasons for a different opinion, and presented them to the whole three ateliers at the top of his voice and with unclean allusions. We were all climbing up on the taller stools by this time, and Virginie, who was the model of the week, was making furtive signs at us to give the crowd a push, as was our custom.

Camme was going on at a great rate.

"Ah, farceur! Ah, espece de volveur, crapaud, va; c'est a moi cette place la Saligaud va te prom'ner, va faire des copies au Louvre."

To be told to go and make copies in the Louvre was in our time the last insult. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," this sometime Yale pitcher, towering above the little frog-like Frenchman, turned to the crowd, and said, in grave concern, his forehead puckered in great deliberation:

"I do not know, precisely, that which it is necessary to do with this kind of a little toad of two legs. I do not know whether I should spank him or administer the good kick of the boot. I believe I shall give him the good kick of the boot. Hein!"

He turned Camme around, held him at arm's length, and kicked him twice severely. Next day, of course, Camme sent his card, and four of us Americans went around to the studio of "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" to have a smoke-talk over it. Robinson was of the opinion to ignore the matter.

"Now, we can't do that," said Adler; "these beastly continentals would misunderstand. Can you shoot, Buldy Jones?"

"Only deer."

"Fence?"

"Not a little bit. Oh, let's go and punch the wadding out of him, and be done with it!"

"No! No! He should be humiliated."

"I tell you what—let's guy the thing."

"Get up a fake duel and make him seem ridiculous."

"You've got the choice of weapons, Buldy Jones."

"Fight him with hat-pins."

"Oh, let's go punch the wadding out of him—he makes me tired."

"Horse" Wilson, who hadn't spoken, suddenly broke in with:

"Now, listen to me, you other fellows. Let me fix this thing. Buldy Jones, I must be one of your seconds."

"Soit!"

"I'm going to Camme, and say like this: 'This Animal of a Buldy Jones' has the naming of weapons. He comes from a strange country, near the Mississippi, from a place called Shee-ka-go, and there it is not considered etiquette to fight either with a sword or pistol; it is too common. However, when it is necessary that balls should be exchanged in order to satisfy honour, a curious custom is resorted to. Balls are exchanged, but not from pistols. They are very terrible balls, large as an apple, and of adamantine hardness. 'This Animal of a Buldy Jones,' even now has a collection. No American gentleman of honour travels without them. He would gladly have you come and make first choice of a ball while he will select one from among those you leave. Sur le terrain, you will deliver these balls simultaneously toward each other, repeating till one or the other adversary drops. Then honour can be declared satisfied."

"Yes, and do you suppose that Camme will listen to such tommy rot as that?" remarked "This Animal of a Buldy Jones." "I think I'd better just punch his head."

"Listen to it? Of course he'll listen to it. You've no idea what curious ideas these continentals have of the American duel. You can't propose anything so absurd in the dueling line that they won't give it serious thought. And besides, if Camme won't fight this way we'll tell him that you will have a Mexican duel."

"What's that?"

"Tie your left wrists together, and fight with knives in your right hand. That'll scare the tar out of him."

And it did. The seconds had a meeting at the cafe of the Moulin Rouge, and gave Camme's seconds the choice of the duel Yale or the duel Mexico. Camme had no wish to tie himself to a man with a knife in his hand, and his seconds came the next day and solemnly chose a league ball—one that had been used against the Havard nine.

Will I—will any of us ever forget that duel? Camme and his people came upon the ground almost at the same time as we. It was behind the mill of Longchamps, of course. Roubault was one of Camme's seconds, and he carried the ball in a lacquered Japanese tobacco-jar—gingerly as if it were a bomb. We were quick getting to work. Camme and "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" were each to take his baseball in his hand, stand back to back, walk away from each other just the distance between the pitcher's box and the home plate (we had seen to that), turn on the word, and—deliver their balls.

"How do you feel?" I whispered to our principal, as I passed the ball into his hands.

"I feel just as if I was going into a match game, with the bleachers full to the top and the boys hitting her up for Yale. We ought to give the yell, y' know."

"How's the ball?"

"A bit soft and not quite round. Bernard of the Harvard nine hit the shape out of it in a drive over our left field, but it'll do all right."

"This Animal of a Buldy Jones" bent and gathered up a bit of dirt, rubbed the ball in it, and ground it between his palms. The man's arms were veritable connecting-rods, and were strung with tendons like particularly well-seasoned rubber. I remembered what he said about few catchers being able to hold him, and I recalled the pads and masks and wadded gloves of a baseball game, and I began to feel nervous. If Camme was hit on the temple or over the heart—

"Now, say, old man, go slow, you know. We don't want to fetch up in Mazas for this. By the way, what kind of ball are you going to give him? What's the curve?"

"I don't know yet. Maybe I'll let him have an up-shoot. Never make up my mind till the last moment."

"All ready, gentlemen!" said Roubault, coming up.

Camme had removed coat, vest, and cravat. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" stripped to a sleeveless undershirt. He spat on his hands, and rubbed a little more dirt on the ball.

"Play ball!" he muttered.

We set them back to back. On the word they paced from each other and paused. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" shifted his ball to his right hand, and, holding it between his fingers, slowly raised both his arms high above his head and a little over one shoulder. With his toe he made a little depression in the soil, while he slowly turned the ball between his fingers.

"Fire!" cried "Horse" Wilson.

On the word "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" turned abruptly about on one foot, one leg came high off the ground till the knee nearly touched the chest—you know the movement and position well—the uncanny contortions of a pitcher about to deliver.

Camme threw his ball overhand—bowled it as is done in cricket, and it went wide over our man's shoulder. Down came Buldy Jones' foot, and his arm shot forward with a tremendous jerk. Not till the very last moment did he glance at his adversary or measure the distance.

"It is an in-curve!" exclaimed "Horse" Wilson in my ear.

We could hear the ball whir as it left a grey blurred streak in the air. Camme made as if to dodge it with a short toss of head and neck—it was all he had time for—and the ball, faithful to the last twist of the pitcher's fingers, swerved sharply inward at the same moment and in the same direction.

When we got to Camme and gathered him up, I veritably believed that the fellow had been done for. For he lay as he had fallen, straight as a ramrod and quite as stiff, and his eyes were winking like the shutter of a kinetoscope. But "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," who had seen prize-fighters knocked out by a single blow, said it was all right. An hour later Camme woke up and began to mumble in pain through his clenched teeth, for the ball, hitting him on the point of the chin, had dislocated his jaw.

The heart-breaking part of the affair came afterward, when "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" kept us groping in the wet grass and underbrush until after dark looking for his confounded baseball, which had caromed off Camme's chin, and gone—no one knows where.

We never found it.

Dying Fires

Young Overbeck's father was editor and proprietor of the county paper in Colfax, California, and the son, so soon as his high-school days were over, made his appearance in the office as his father's assistant. So abrupt was the transition that his diploma, which was to hang over the editorial desk, had not yet returned from the framer's, while the first copy that he was called on to edit was his own commencement oration on the philosophy of Dante. He had worn a white pique cravat and a cutaway coat on the occasion of its delivery, and the county commissioner, who was the guest of honour on the platform, had congratulated him as he handed him his sheepskin. For Overbeck was the youngest and the brightest member of his class.

Colfax was a lively town in those days. The teaming from the valley over into the mining country on the other side of the Indian River was at its height then. Colfax was the headquarters of the business, and the teamsters—after the long pull up from the Indian River Cañon—showed interest in an environment made up chiefly of saloons.

Then there were the mining camps over by Iowa Hill, the Morning Star, the Big Dipper, and further on, up in the Gold Run country, the Little Providence. There was Dutch Flat, full of Mexican-Spanish girls and "breed" girls, where the dance-halls were of equal number with the bars. There was—a little way down the line—Clipper Gap, where the mountain ranches began, and where the mountain cow-boy lived up to the traditions of his kind.

And this life, tumultuous, headstrong, vivid in colour, vigorous in action, was bound together by the railroad, which not only made a single community out of all that part of the east slope of the Sierras' foothills, but contributed its own life as well—the life of oilers, engineers, switchmen, eating-house waitresses and cashiers, "lady" operators, conductors, and the like.

Of such a little world news-items are evolved—sometimes even scare-head, double-leaded descriptive articles—supplemented by interviews with sheriffs and ante-mortem statements. Good grist for a county paper; good opportunities for an unspoiled, observant, imaginative young fellow at the formative period of his life. Such was the time, such the environment, such the conditions that prevailed when young Overbeck, at the age of twenty-one, sat down to the writing of his first novel.

He completed it in five months, and, though he did not know the fact then, the novel was good. It was not great—far from it, but it was not merely clever. Somehow, by a miracle of good fortune, young Overbeck had got started right at the very beginning. He had not been influenced by a fetich of his choice till his work was a mere replica of some other writer's. He was not literary. He had not much time for books. He lived in the midst of a strenuous, eager life, a little primal even yet; a life of passions that were often elemental in their simplicity and directness. His schooling and his newspaper work—it was he who must find or ferret out the news all along the line, from Penrhyn to Emigrant Gap—had taught him observation without—here was the miracle—dulling the edge of his sensitiveness. He saw, as those few, few people see who live close to life at the beginning of an epoch. He saw into the life and the heart beneath the life; the life and the heart of Bunt McBride, as with eight horses and much abjuration he negotiated a load of steel "stamps" up the sheer leap of the Indian Cañon; he saw into the life and into the heart of Irma Tejada, who kept case for the faro players at Dutch Flat; he saw into the life and heart of Lizzie Toby, the biscuit-shooter in the railway eating-house, and into the life and heart of "Doc" Twitchel, who had degrees from Edinburgh and Leipsic, and who, for obscure reasons, chose to look after the measles, sprains and rheumatisms of the countryside.

And, besides, there were others and still others, whom young Overbeck learned to know to the very heart's heart of them: blacksmiths, traveling peddlers, section-bosses, miners, horse-wranglers, cow-punchers, the stage-drivers, the storekeeper, the hotel-keeper, the ditch-tender, the prospector, the seamstress of the town, the postmistress, the schoolmistress, the poetess. Into the lives of these and the hearts of these young Overbeck saw, and the wonder of that sight so overpowered him that he had no thought and no care for other people's books. And he was only twenty-one! Only twenty-one, and yet he saw clearly into the great, complicated, confused human machine that clashed and jarred around him. Only twenty-one, and yet he read the enigma that men of fifty may alone hope to solve! Once in a great while this thing may happen—in such out of the way places as that country around Colfax in Placer County, California, where no outside influences have play, where books are few and misprized and the reading circle a thing unknown. From time to time such men are born, especially along the line of cleavage where the furthest skirmish line of civilisation thrusts and girds at the wilderness. A very few find their true profession before the fire is stamped out of them; of these few, fewer still have the force to make themselves heard. Of these last the majority die before they attain the faculty of making their message intelligible. Those that remain are the world's great men.

At the time when his first little book was on its initial journey to the Eastern publishing houses, Overbeck was by no means a great man. The immaturity that was yet his, the lack of knowledge of his tools, clogged his work and befogged his vision. The smooth running of the cogs and the far-darting range of vision would come in the course of the next fifteen years of unrelenting persistence. The ordering and organising and controlling of his machine he could, with patience and by taking thought, accomplish for himself. The original impetus had come straight from the almighty gods. That impetus was young yet, feeble, yet, coming down from so far it was spent by the time it reached the earth—at Colfax, California. A touch now might divert it. Judge with what care such a thing should be nursed and watched; compared with the delicacy with which it unfolds, the opening of a rosebud is an abrupt explosion. Later on, such insight, such undeveloped genius may become a tremendous world-power, a thing to split a nation in twain as the axe cleaves the block. But at twenty-one, a whisper—and it takes flight; a touch—it withers; the lifting of a finger—it is gone.

The same destiny that had allowed Overbeck to be born, and that thus far had watched over his course, must have inspired his choice, his very first choice, of a publisher, for the manuscript of "The Vision of Bunt McBride" went straight as a home-bound bird to the one man of all others who could understand the beginnings of genius and recognise the golden grain of truth in the chaff of unessentials. His name was Conant, and he accepted the manuscript by telegram.

He did more than this, and one evening Overbeck stood on the steps of the post-office and opened a letter in his hand, and, looking up and off, saw the world transfigured. His chance had come. In half a year of time he had accomplished what other men—other young writers—strive for throughout the best years of their youth. He had been called to New York. Conant had offered him a minor place on his editorial staff.

Overbeck reached the great city a fortnight later, and the cutaway coat and pique cravat—unworn since Commencement—served to fortify his courage at the first interview with the man who was to make him—so he believed—famous.

Ah, the delights, the excitement, the inspiration of that day! Let those judge who have striven toward the Great City through years of deferred hope and heart-sinkings and sacrifice daily renewed. Overbeck's feet were set in those streets whose names had become legendary to his imagination. Public buildings and public squares familiar only through the weekly prints defiled before him like a pageant, but friendly for all that, inviting, even. But the vast conglomerate life that roared by his ears, like the systole and diastole of an almighty heart, was for a moment disquieting. Soon the human resemblance faded. It became as a machine infinitely huge, infinitely formidable. It challenged him with superb condescension.

"I must down you," he muttered, as he made his way toward Conant's, "or you will down me." He saw it clearly. There was no other alternative. The young boy in his foolish finery of a Colfax tailor's make, with no weapons but such wits as the gods had given him, was pitted against the leviathan.

There was no friend nearer than his native state on the other fringe of the continent. He was fearfully alone.

But he was twenty-one. The wits that the gods had given him were good, and the fine fire that was within him, the radiant freshness of his nature, stirred and leaped to life at the challenge. Ah, he would win, he would win! And in his exuberance, the first dim consciousness of his power came to him. He could win, he had it in him; he began to see that now. That nameless power was his which would enable him to grip this monstrous life by the very throat, and bring it down on its knee before him to listen respectfully to what he had to say.

The interview with Conant was no less exhilarating. It was in the reception-room of the great house that it took place, and while waiting for Conant to come in, Overbeck, his heart in his mouth, recognised, in the original drawings on the walls, picture after picture, signed by famous illustrators, that he had seen reproduced in Conant's magazine.

Then Conant himself had appeared and shaken the young author's hand a long time, and had talked to him with the utmost kindness of his book, of his plans for the immediate future, of the work he would do in the editorial office and of the next novel he wished him to write.

"We'll only need you here in the mornings," said the editor, "and you can put in your afternoons on your novel. Have you anything in mind as good as 'Bunt McBride'?"

"I have a sort of notion for one," hazarded the young man; and Conant had demanded to hear it.

Stammering, embarrassed, Overbeck outlined it.

"I see, I see!" Conant commented. "Yes, there is a good story in that. Maybe Hastings will want to use it in the monthly. But we'll make a book of it, anyway, if you work it up as well as the McBride story."

And so the young fellow made his first step in New York. The very next day he began his second novel.

In the editorial office, where he spent his mornings reading proof and making up "front matter," he made the acquaintance of a middle-aged lady, named Miss Patten, who asked him to call on her, and later on introduced him into the "set" wherein she herself moved. The set called itself the "New Bohemians," and once a week met at Miss Patten's apartment up-town. In a month's time Overbeck was a fixture in "New Bohemia."

It was made up of minor poets whose opportunity in life was the blank space on a magazine page below the end of an article; of men past their prime, who, because of an occasional story in a second-rate monthly, were considered to have "arrived"; of women who translated novels from the Italian and Hungarian; of decayed dramatists who could advance unimpeachable reasons for the non-production of their plays; of novelists whose books were declined by publishers because of professional jealousy on the part of the "readers," or whose ideas, stolen by false friends, had appeared in books that sold by the hundreds of thousands. In public the New Bohemians were fulsome in the praise of one another's productions. Did a sonnet called, perhaps, "A Cryptogram is Stella's Soul" appear in a current issue, they fell on it with eager eyes, learned it by heart and recited lines of it aloud; the conceit of the lover translating the cipher by the key of love was welcomed with transports of delight.

"Ah, one of the most exquisitely delicate allegories I've ever heard, and so true—so 'in the tone'!"

Did a certain one of the third-rate novelists, reading aloud from his unpublished manuscript, say of his heroine: "It was the native catholicity of his temperament that lent strength and depth to her innate womanliness," the phrase was snapped up on the instant.

"How he understands women!"

"Such finesse! More subtle than Henry James."

"Paul Bourget has gone no further," said one of the critics of New Bohemia; "our limitations are determined less by our renunciations than by our sense of proportion in our conception of ethical standards."

The set abased itself. "Wonderful, ah, how pitilessly you fathom our poor human nature!" New Bohemia saw colour in word effects. A poet read aloud:

The stalwart rain!

Ah, the rush of down-toppling waters;

The torrent!

Merge of mist and musky air;

The current

Sweeps thwart my blinded sight again.

"Ah!" exclaimed one of the audience, "see, see that bright green flash!"

Thus in public. In private all was different. Walking home with one or another of the set, young Overbeck heard their confidences.

"Keppler is a good fellow right enough, but, my goodness, he can't write verse!"

"That thing of Miss Patten's to-night! Did you ever hear anything so unconvincing, so obvious? Poor old woman!"

"I'm really sorry for Martens; awfully decent sort, but he never should try to write novels."

By rapid degrees young Overbeck caught the lingo of the third-raters. He could talk about "tendencies" and the "influence of reactions." Such and such a writer had a "sense of form," another a "feeling for word effects." He knew all about "tones" and "notes" and "philistinisms." He could tell the difference between an allegory and a simile as far as he could see them. An anticlimax was the one unforgivable sin under heaven. A mixed metaphor made him wince, and a split infinitive hurt him like a blow.

But the great word was "convincing." To say a book was convincing was to give positively the last verdict. To be "unconvincing" was to be shut out from the elect. If the New Bohemian decided that the last popular book was unconvincing, there was no appeal. The book was not to be mentioned in polite conversation.

And the author of "The Vision of Bunt McBride," as yet new to the world as the day he was born, with all his eager ambition and quick sensitiveness, thought that all this was the real thing. He had never so much as seen literary people before. How could he know the difference? He honestly believed that New Bohemia was the true literary force of New York. He wrote home that the association with such people, thinkers, poets, philosophers, was an inspiration; that he had learned more in one week in their company than he had learned in Colfax in a whole year.

Perhaps, too, it was the flattery he received that helped to carry Overbeck off his feet. The New Bohemians made a little lion of him when "Bunt McBride" reached its modest pinnacle of popularity. They kotowed to him, and toadied to him, and fagged and tooted for him, and spoke of his book as a masterpiece. They said he had succeeded where Kipling had ignominiously failed. They said there was more harmony of prose effects in one chapter of "Bunt McBride" than in everything that Bret Harte ever wrote. They told him he was a second Stevenson—only with more refinement.

Then the women of the set, who were of those who did not write, who called themselves "mere dilettantes," but who "took an interest in young writers" and liked to influence their lives and works, began to flutter and buzz around him. They told him that they understood him; that they under stood his temperament; that they could see where his forte lay; and they undertook his education.

There was in "The Vision of Bunt McBride" a certain sane and healthy animalism that hurt nobody, and that, no doubt, Overbeck, in later books, would modify. He had taken life as he found it to make his book; it was not his fault that the teamsters, biscuit-shooters and "breed" girls of the foothills were coarse in fibre. In his sincerity he could not do otherwise in his novel than paint life as he saw it. He had dealt with it honestly; he did not dab at the edge of the business; he had sent his fist straight through it.

But the New Bohemians could not abide this.

"Not so much faroucherie, you dear young Lochinvar!" they said. "Art must uplift. 'Look thou not down, but up toward uses of a cup';" and they supplemented the quotation by lines from Walter Peter, and read to him from Ruskin and Matthew Arnold.

Ah, the spiritual was the great thing. We were here to make the world brighter and better for having lived in it. The passions of a waitress in a railway eating-house—how sordid the subject! Dear boy, look for the soul, strive to rise to higher planes! Tread upward; every book should leave a clean taste in the mouth, should tend to make one happier, should elevate, not debase.

So by degrees Overbeck began to see his future in a different light. He began to think that he really had succeeded where Kipling had failed; that he really was Stevenson with more refinement, and that the one and only thing lacking in his work was soul. He believed that he must strive for the spiritual, and "let the ape and tiger die." The originality and unconventionally of his little book he came to regard as crudities.

"Yes," he said one day to Miss Patten and a couple of his friends, "I have been re-reading my book of late. I can see its limitations—now. It has a lack of form; the tonality is a little false. It fails somehow to convince."

Thus the first Winter passed. In the mornings Overbeck assiduously edited copy and made up front matter on the top floor of the Conant building. In the evenings he called on Miss Patten, or some other member of the set. Once a week, up-town, he fed fat on the literary delicatessen that New Bohemia provided. In the meantime, every afternoon, from luncheon-time till dark, he toiled on his second novel, "Renunciations." The environment of "Renunciations" was a far cry from Colfax, California. It was a city-bred story, with no fresher atmosphere than that of bought flowers. Its dramatis personae were all of the leisure class, opera-goers, intriguers, riders of blood horses, certainly more refined than Lizzie Toby, biscuit-shooter, certainly more spirituelle than Irma Tejada, case-keeper in Dog Omahone's faro joint, certainly more elegant than Bunt McBride, teamster of the Colfax Iowa Hill Freight Transportation Company.

From time to time, as the novel progressed, he read it to the dilettante women whom he knew best among the New Bohemians. They advised him as to its development, and "influenced" its outcome and dénouement.

"I think you have found your métier, dear boy," said one of them, when "Renunciations" was nearly completed. "To portray the concrete—is it not a small achievement, sublimated journalese, nothing more? But to grasp abstractions, to analyse a woman's soul, to evoke the spiritual essence in humanity, as you have done in your ninth chapter of 'Renunciations'—that is the true function of art. Je vous fais mes compliments. 'Renunciations' is a chef-d'oeuvre. Can't you see yourself what a stride you have made, how much broader your outlook has become, how much more catholic, since the days of 'Bunt McBride'?"

To be sure, Overbeck could see it. Ah, he was growing, he was expanding. He was mounting higher planes. He was more—catholic. That, of all words, was the one to express his mood. Catholic, ah, yes, he was catholic!

When "Renunciations" was finished he took the manuscript to Conant and waited a fortnight in an agony of suspense and repressed jubilation for the great man's verdict. He was all the more anxious to hear it because, every now and then, while writing the story, doubts—distressing, perplexing—had intruded. At times and all of a sudden, after days of the steadiest footing, the surest progress, the story—the whole set and trend of the affair—would seem, as it were, to escape from his control. Where once, in "Bunt McBride," he had gripped, he must now grope. What was it? He had been so sure of himself, with all the stimulus of new surroundings, the work in this second novel should have been all the easier. But the doubt would fade, and for weeks he would plough on, till again, and all unexpectedly, he would find himself in an agony of indecision as to the outcome of some vital pivotal episode of the story. Of two methods of treatment, both equally plausible, he could not say which was the true, which the false; and he must needs take, as it were, a leap in the dark—it was either that or abandoning the story, trusting to mere luck that he would, somehow, be carried through.

A fortnight after he had delivered the manuscript to Conant he presented himself in the publisher's office.

"I was just about to send for you," said Conant. "I finished your story last week."

There was a pause. Overbeck settled himself comfortably in his chair, but his nails were cutting his palms.

"Hastings has read it, too—and—well, frankly, Overbeck, we were disappointed."

"Yes?" inquired Overbeck, calmly. "H'm—that's too b-bad."

He could not hear, or at least could not understand, just what the publisher said next. Then, after a time that seemed immeasurably long, he caught the words:

"It would not do you a bit of good, my boy, to have us publish it—it would harm you. There are a good many things I would lie about, but books are not included. This 'Renunciations' of yours is—is, why, confound it, Overbeck, it's foolishness."

Overbeck went out and sat on a bench in a square near by, looking vacantly at a fountain as it rose and fell and rose again with an incessant cadenced splashing. Then he took himself home to his hall bedroom. He had brought the manuscript of his novel with him, and for a long time he sat at his table listlessly turning the leaves, confused, stupid, all but inert. The end, however, did not come suddenly. A few weeks later "Renunciations" was published, but not by Conant. It bore the imprint of an obscure firm in Boston. The covers were of limp dressed leather, olive green, and could be tied together by thongs, like a portfolio. The sale stopped after five hundred copies had been ordered, and the real critics, those who did not belong to New Bohemia, hardly so much as noticed the book.

In the Autumn, when the third-raters had come back from their vacations, the "evenings" at Miss Patten's were resumed, and Overbeck hurried to the very first meeting. He wanted to talk it all over with them. In his chagrin and cruel disappointment he was hungry for some word of praise, of condolement. He wanted to be told again, even though he had begun to suspect many things, that he had succeeded where Kipling had failed, that he was Stevenson with more refinement.

But the New Bohemians, the same women and fakirs and half-baked minor poets who had "influenced" him and had ruined him, could hardly find time to notice him now. The guest of the evening was a new little lion who had joined the set. A symbolist versifier who wrote over the pseudonym of de la Houssaye, with black, oily hair and long white hands; him the Bohemians thronged about in crowds as before they had thronged about Overbeck. Only once did any one of them pay attention to the latter. This was the woman who had nicknamed him "Young Lochinvar." Yes, she had read "Renunciations," a capital little thing, a little thin in parts, lacking in finesse. He must strive for his true medium of expression, his true note. Ah, art was long! Study of the new symbolists would help him. She would beg him to read Monsieur de la Houssaye's "The Monoliths." Such subtlety, such delicious word-chords! It could not fail to inspire him.

Shouldered off, forgotten, the young fellow crept back to his little hall bedroom and sat down to think it over. There in the dark of the night his eyes were opened, and he saw, at last, what these people had done to him; saw the Great Mistake, and that he had wasted his substance.

The golden apples, that had been his for the stretching of the hand, he had flung from him. Tricked, trapped, exploited, he had prostituted the great good thing that had been his by right divine, for the privilege of eating husks with swine. Now was the day of the mighty famine, and the starved and broken heart of him, crying out for help, found only a farrago of empty phrases.

He tried to go back; he did in very fact go back to the mountains and the cañons of the great Sierras. "He arose and went to his father," and, with such sapped and broken strength as New Bohemia had left him, strove to wrest some wreckage from the dying fire.

But the ashes were cold by now. The fire that the gods had allowed him to snatch, because he was humble and pure and clean and brave, had been stamped out beneath the feet of minor and dilettante poets, and now the gods guarded close the brands that yet remained on the altars.

They may not be violated twice, those sacred fires. Once in a lifetime the very young and the pure in heart may see the shine of them and pluck a brand from the altar's edge. But, once possessed, it must be watched with a greater vigilance than even that of the gods, for its light will live only for him who snatched it first. Only for him that shields it, even with his life, from the contact of the world does it burst into a burning and a shining light. Let once the touch of alien fingers disturb it, and there remains only a little heap of bitter ashes.

Grettir at Drangey

I

HOW GRETTIR CAME TO THE ISLAND

A long slant of rain came from out the northwest, and much fog; and the sea, still swollen by the last of the winter gales—now two days gone—raced by the bows of their boat in great swells, quiet, huge.

It was cold, and the wind, like a hound at fault, hunted along through the gorges between the wave heads, casting back and forth swiftly in bulging, sounding blasts that made an echo between the walls of water. At times the wind discovered the boat and leaped upon it suddenly with a gush of fierce noise, clutching at the sail and bearing it down as the dog bears down the young elk.

The sky, a vast reach of broken grey, slid along close overhead, sometimes even dropping flat upon the sea, blotting the horizon and whirling about like geyser mist or the reek and smoke from the mouth of jokuls. Then, perhaps, out of the fog and out of the rain, suddenly great and fearful came towering and dipping a mighty berg, the waves breaking like surf about its base, spires of grey ice lifting skywards, all dripping and gashed and jagged; knobs and sharp ridges thrusting from under beneath the water, full of danger to ships. At such moments they must put the helm over quickly, sheering off from the colossus before it caught and trampled them.

But no living thing did they see through all the day. Sea birds there were none; no porpoises played about the boat, no seals barked from surge to surge. There was nothing but the silent gallop of the waves, the flitting of the leaden sky, the uneven panting of the wind, and the rattle of the rain on the half-frozen sail. The sea was very lonely, barren, empty of all life.

Towards the middle of the day, when Iceland lay far behind them,—a bar of black on the ocean's edge,—they were little by little aware of the roll and thunder of breakers, and the cries and calls of very many sea birds and—very faint—the bleating of sheep. The fog and the scud of rain and the spindrift that the wind whipped from off the wavetops shut out all sight beyond the cast of a spear. But they knew that they must be driving hard upon the island, and Grettir, from his place at the helm, bent himself to look under the curve of the sail. He called to Illugi, his brother, and to Noise, the thrall, who stood peering at the bows of the boat (their eyes made small to pierce the mist), to know if they saw aught of the island.

"I see," answered Illugi, "only wrack and drift of wreck and streamers of kelp, but we are close upon it."

Then all at once Grettir threw the boat up into the wind, and shouted aloud:

"Look overhead! Quick! Above there! We are indeed close."

And for all that the foot and mid-most part of the island were unseen because of the mist, there, far above them, between sea and sky, looming, as it were, out of heaven, rose suddenly the front of the cliff, rearing the forehead of it, high from out all that din of surf and swirl of mist and rain, bare to the buffet of storms, iron-strong, everlasting, a mighty rock.

They lowered the sail and ran out the sweeps, and for an hour skirted the edge of the island searching for the landing-place, where the rope-ladder hung from the cliff's edge. When they had found it, they turned the nose of the boat landward, and, caught by the set of the surf, were drawn inwards, and at last flung up on the beaches. Waist-deep in the icy undertow, they ran the boat up and made her fast, rejoicing that they had won to land without ill-fortune.

The wind for an instant tore in twain the veils of fog, and they saw the black cliff towering above them, as well as the ladder that hung from its summit clattering against the rock as the wind dashed it to and fro, and as they turned from the boat to look about them, lo, at their feet, stranded at make of the ebb, a great walrus, crushed between two ice-floes, lay dead, the rime of the frost encrusting its barbels.

So Grettir Asmundson, called The Strong, outlawed throughout Iceland, came with his brother Illugi, and the thrall Noise, to live on the Island of Drangey.

II

HOW GRETTIR AND ILLUGI HIS BROTHER KEPT THE ISLAND

On top of the cliff (to be reached only by climbing the rope-ladder) were sheep-walks, where the shepherds from the mainland kept their flocks. Grettir and Illugi took over these, for food and for the sake of their pelts which were to make them coverings. They built themselves a house out of the driftwood that came ashore at the foot of the cliff with every tide, and throughout the rest of the winter days lived in peace.

But in the early spring a fisherman carried the news to the mainland that he had seen men on the top of Drangey, and that the ladder was up.

Forthwith came the farmers and shepherds in their boats to know if such were the truth. They found, indeed, the ladder up, and after calling and shouting a long time time, brought the hero and his brother to the cliff's edge.

"What now?" they cried. "Give a reckoning of our sheep. Is it peace or war between you and us? Why have you come to our island? Answer, Grettir—outlaw."

"What I have, I hold," called Grettir. "Outlawed I am, indeed, and no man is there in all Iceland that dare help me to home or hiding. Mine is the Island of Drangey, and mine are the sheep and the goats."

"Robber!" shouted the shepherds, "since when have you bought the island? Show the title."

For answer Grettir drew his sword from its sheath, and held it high.

"That is my title," he cried. "When that you shall take from me, the Island of Drangey is yours again."

"At least render up our sheep," answered the shepherds.

"What I have said, I have said!" cried Grettir, and with that he and Illugi drew back from the cliff's edge and were no more seen.

The shepherds sailed back to the mainland, and could think of no way of ridding the island of Grettir and his brother.

The summer waned, and finding themselves no further along than at the beginning, they struck hands with a certain Thorbjorn, called The Hook, and sold him their several claims.

So it came about that Thorbjorn the Hook was also an enemy of Grettir, for he swore that foul or fair, ill or well, he would have the head of the hero, and the price that was upon it, as well as the sheepwalks and herds of Drangey.

This Thorbjorn had an old foster-mother named Thurid, who, although the law of Christ had long since prevailed through all the country, still made witchcraft, and by this means promised The Hook that he should have the island, and with it the heads of Illugi and Grettir. She herself was a mumbling, fumbling carline of a sour spirit and fierce temper. Once when The Hook and his brother were at tail-game, she, looking over his shoulder, taunted him because he had made a bad move. On his answering in surly fashion, she caught up one of the pieces, and drove the tail of it so fiercely against his eye that the ball had started from the socket. He had sprung up with a mighty oath, and dealt her so strong a blow that she had taken to her bed a month, and thereafterward must walk with a stick. There was no love lost between the two.

Meanwhile, Grettir and Illugi lived in peace upon the top of Drangey. Illugi was younger than the hero; a fine lad with yellow hair and blue eyes. The brothers loved each other, and could not walk or sit together, but that the arm of one was about the shoulder of the other. The lad knew very well that neither he nor Grettir would ever leave Drangey alive; but in spite of that he abode on the island, and was happy in the love and comradeship of his older brother. As for Grettir, hunted and hustled from Norway to Skaptar Jokul, he could trust Illugi only. The thrall Noise was meet for little but to gather driftwood to feed the fire. But Illugi, of all men in the world, Grettir had chosen to stay at his side in this, the last stand of his life, and to bear him company in the night when he waked and was afraid.

For the weird that the Vampire had laid upon Grettir, when he had fought with him through the night at Thorhall-stead, lay heavy upon him. As the Vampire had said, his strength was never greater than at the moment when, spent and weary with the grapple, he had turned the monster under him; and, moreover, as the dead man had foretold, the eyes of him—the sightless, lightless dead eyes of him—grew out of the darkness in the late watches of the night, and stared at Grettir whichever way he turned.

For a long time all went well with the two. Bleak though it was, the brothers grew to love the Island of Drangey. Not all the days were so bitter as the one that witnessed their arrival. Throughout the summer—when the daylight lengthened and lengthened, till at last the sun never set at all—the weather held fair. The crust of soil on the top of the great rock grew green and brilliant with gorse and moss and manzel-wursel. Blackberries flourished on southern exposures and in crevices between the bowlders, and wild thyme and heather bloomed and billowed in the sea wind.

Day after day the brothers walked the edge of the cliff, making the rounds of the snares they had set for sea fowl. Day after day, descending to the beaches, they fished in the offing or with ready spears crept from rock to rock, stalking the great bull-walruses that made the land to sun themselves. Day after day in a cloudless sky the sun shone; day after day the sea, deep blue, coruscated and flashed in his light; day after day the wind blew free, the flowers spread, and the surf shouted hoarsely on the beaches, and the sea fowl clamoured, cried, and rose and fell in glinting hordes. The air was full of the fine, clean aroma of the ocean, even the perfume of the flowers was crossed with a tang of salt, and the seaweed at low tide threw off, under the heat of the sun, a warm, sweet redolence of its own.

It was a brave life. They were no man's men. The lonely, rock-ribbed island, the grass, the growths of green, the blue sea, and the blessed sunlight were their friends, their helpers; they held what of the world they saw in fief. They made songs to the morning, and sang them on the cliff's edge, looking off over the sea beneath, standing on a point of rock, the wind in their faces, the taste of salt in their mouths, their long braids of yellow hair streaming from their foreheads.

They made songs to their swords, and swung the ponderous blades in cadence as they sang—wild, unrhymed, metrical chants, monotonous, turning upon but few notes; savage songs, full of man-slayings and death-fights against great odds, shouted out in deep-toned, male voices, there, far above the world, on that airy, wind-swept, lonely rock. A brave life!

The end they knew must come betimes. They were in nowise afraid. They made a song to their death—the song they would sing when they had turned Berserk in the crash of swords, when the great grey blades were rising and falling, death, like lightning, leaping from their edges; when shield rasped shield, and the spears sank home and wrenched out the life in a spurt of scarlet, and the massive axes rang upon helmet and hauberk, and men, heroes all, met death with a cheer, and went out into the Dark with a shout. A brave life!

III

OF THE WEIRD OF THURID, FOSTER-MOTHER TO THORBJORN HOOK

Twice during that summer The Hook made attempts to secure the island. Once he sailed over to Drangey, and standing up in the prow of his boat near the beach, close by where the ladder hung, talked long with Grettir, who came to the rim of the cliff in answer to his shouts. He promised the Outlaw (so only that he would yield up the island) full possession of half the sheep that yet remained and a free passage in one of his ships to any port within fifty leagues. But the hero had but one answer to all persuadings.

"Drangey is mine," he said. "There is no rede whereby you can get me hence. Here do I bide, whatso may come to hand, to the day of my death and my undoing," and The Hook must sail home in evil mind, gnawing his nails in his fury, and vowing that he would yet gain the island and lay Grettir to earth, and get the best out of the bad bargain he had made.

Another time The Hook hired a man named Hœring, a great climber, to try, by night, to scale the hinder side of Drangey where the cliff was not so bold. But halfway up the man lost either his wits or his footing, for he fell dreadfully upon the rocks far below, and brake the neck of him, so that the spine drave through the skin.

And after that, certainly Grettir and Illugi were let alone. The fame of them and of their seizure of Drangey and the blood feud between them and Thorbjorn, called The Hook, went wide through all that part of Iceland, and many the man that put off from the mainland and sailed to the island, just to hail the Outlaw, at the head of the ladder, and wish him well. Thus the summer and the next winter passed.

At about the break-up of the winter night, The Hook began to importune his foster-mother, Thurid, that she should make good her promise as to the winning of Grettir. At last she said: "If you are to have my rede, I must have my will. Strike hands with my hand then, and swear to me to do those things that I shall say." And The Hook struck hands and sware the oath.

Then, though he was loath to visit the island again, she bade him man an eight-oared boat and flit her out to Drangey.

When they had reached the island, and after much shouting had brought Grettir and Illugi to the edge of the rock, Thorbjorn again renewed his offer, saying further that if there were now but few sheep left upon the island, he would add a bag of silver pennies to make the difference good.

"Bootless be your quest," answered Grettir. "Wot this well. What I have said, I have said. My bones shall rot upon Drangey ere I set foot on other soil."

But at his words the carline, who till now had sat huddled in rags and warps in the bow of the boat, stirred herself and screamed out:

"An ill word for a fair offer. The wits are out of these men that they may not know the face of their good fortune, and upon an evil time have they put their weal from them. Now this I cast over thee, Grettir; that thou be left of all health and good-hap, all good heed and wisdom, and that the longer ye live the less shall be thy luck. Good hope have I, Grettir, that thy days of gladness shall be fewer in time to come than in time gone by."

And at the words behold, Grettir the Strong, whose might no two men could master, staggered as though struck, and then a rage came upon him, and plucking up a stone from the earth, he flung it at the heap of rags in the boat, so that it fell upon the hag's leg and brake it.

"An evil deed, brother," said Illugi. "Surely no good will come of that."

"Nor none from the words of that hell-cat yonder," answered Grettir. "Not over-much were-gild were paid for us, though the price should be one carline's life."

The Hook sailed back to the mainland after this, and sat at home while the leg of his foster-mother mended. But when she was able to walk again, she bade him lead her forth upon the shore. For a time she hobbled up and down till she had found a piece of driftwood to her liking. She turned over, now upon this side, now upon that, mumbling to herself the while, till The Hook, puzzled, said:

"What work ye there, foster-mother?"

"The bane of Grettir," answered the witch, and with that she crouched herself down by the log and cut runes upon it. Then she stood upright and walked backwards about the log, and went widdershins around it, and then, after carving more runes, bade Thorbjorn cast it into the sea.

The Hook scoffed and jeered, but, mindful of his oath, set the log adrift. Now the flood tide made strongly at the time, and the wind set from off the ocean.

"It will come to shore," he said.

"Ay, that I hope," said the witch; "to the shore of Drangey."

On the beaches, where the torn scum and froth of the waves shuddered and tumbled to and fro in the wind, The Hook and the old witch stood watching. Thrice the surf flung the log landward, thrice the undertow sucked it back. It was carried under the curve of a great hissing comber, disappeared, then rose dripping on the far side. The hag, bent upon her crutch, her toothless jaws fumbling and working, her gray hair streaming in the wind, fixed a glittering eye, malevolent, iniquitous, far out to sea where Drangey showed itself, a block of misty blue over the horizon's edge.

"A strong spell for a strong man," she muttered, "and an ill curse for an evil deed. Blighted be the breasts that sucked ye, and black and bitter the bread ye cat. Look thou now, foster-son," she cried, raising her voice.

The Hook crossed himself, and his head crouched fearfully between his shoulders. Under his bent brows the glance of him shot uneasily from side to side.

"A bad business," he whispered, and he trembled as he spoke. For the log was riding the waves like a skiff, headed seawards, making way against tide and wind, veering now east, now west, but in the main working steadily toward Drangey. "A bad business, and peril of thy life is toward if the deed thou hast done this day be told of at Thingvalla."

IV

THE NIGHT-FLITTING OF THORBJORN HOOK

By candle-lighting time that day the storm had reached such a pitch and so mighty was the fury and noise raging across the top of Drangey, that Grettir and Illugi must needs put their lips to one another's ears when they spoke. There was no rain as yet, and the wind that held straight as an arrow's flight over the ocean, had blown away all mists and clouds, so that the atmosphere was of an ominous clearness, and the coasts of Iceland showed livid white against the purple black of the sky.

There were strange sounds about: the prolonged alarums of the gale; blast trumpeting to blast all through the hollow upper spaces of the air; the metallic slithering of the frozen grasses, writhing and tormented; the minute whistle of driving sand; the majestic diapason of the breakers, and the wild piping of bewildered sea-mews and black swans, as, helpless in the sudden gusts, they drove past, close overhead with slanted wings stretched tense and taut.

Towards evening Grettir and Illugi regained the hut, their bodies bent and inclined against the wind. They bore between them the carcass of a slaughtered sheep, the last on the island, for by now they had killed and eaten all of the herd, with the exception of one old ram, whom they had spared because of his tameness. This one followed the brothers about like a dog, and each night came to the door of the hut and butted against it till he was allowed to come in.

Earlier in the day Grettir, foreseeing that the weather would be hard, had sent Noise, the servant, to gather in a greater supply of drift. The thrall now met the brothers at the door of the hut, staggering under the weight of a great log. He threw his burden down at Grettir's feet and spoke surlily, for he was but little pleased with his lot:

"There be that which I hold will warm you enough. Hew it now yourself, for I am spent with the toil of getting it in on such a night as this."

But as Grettir heaved up the axe, Illugi sprang forward with a hand outstretched and a warning cry. He had glanced at the balk of drift, and had seen it to be one that Grettir had twice discarded, suspicious of the runes that he saw were cut into it. Even Noise had been warned and forbidden to bring it to the hut. Doubtless on this day the thrall had found it close by the foot of the ladder, and being too slothful and too ill-tempered to seek farther, had fetched it in despite of Grettir's commands.

"Brother," cried Illugi, "have a heed what ye do!"

But he spoke too late. Grettir hewed strong upon the balk, and the axe flipped from it and drave into his leg below the knee, so that the blade hung in the bone. Grettir flung down the axe, and staggered into the hut and sank upon the bed.

"Ill-luck is to us-ward," he cried, "and now wot I well that my death is upon me. For no good thing was this drift-timber sent thrice to us. Noise, evilly hast thou done, and ill hast thou served us. Go now and draw the ladder, and let thy faithful service henceforth make good the ill-turn thou hast done me to-day." And with the words the brothers drove him out into the night.

Grumbling, the thrall made his way to the ladder-head, and sat down cursing.

"A fine life," he muttered, "hounded like a house-carle from dawn to dark. Because the son of Asmund swings awkwardly his axe and notches the skin of him, I must be driven from house and hearthstone on so hard a night as this. Draw the ladder! Ay, draw the ladder, says he. By God! it were no man's deed to risk whether he could win to the island in such a storm as this."

For all that, he made at least one attempt to draw the ladder up. But it was heavy, and the wind, thrashing it to and fro, made it hard to manage. Noise soon gave over, and, out of spite refusing to return to the hut, drew his cloak over his head, and crawling in behind a bowlder addressed himself to sleep. He was awakened by a blow.

He sprang up. The night was overcast; it had been raining; his cloak was drenched. Men were there; dark figures crowding together, whispering. There was a click and clash of steel, and against the pale blur of the sky, he saw, silhouetted, the moving head of a spear. Again some one struck him. He wrenched about terrified, and a score of hands gripped him close, while at his throat sprang the clutch of fingers iron-strong. Then a voice:

"Fool, and son of a fool, and worse than a fool! It is I, Thorbjorn, called The Hook. Speak as he should speak who is nigh to death, true words and few words. What of Grettir?"

"Sore bestead," Noise made shift to answer, through the grip upon his throat. "Crippled with his own axe as he hewed upon a log of firewood but this very day. Down upon his back he is, and none to stand at his side, when the need is on him, but the boy Illugi."

"A log, say you?" whispered The Hook. Then turning to a comrade: "Mark you that, Hialfi Thinbeard."

"A log cut with runes," insisted Noise.

"Ay, with runes," repeated The Hook. "With runes, I say, Hialfi Thinbeard. My mind misgave me when the carline urged this flitting to-night, and only for my oath's sake I would have foregone it. But an old she-goat knows the shortest path to the byre. As for you"—he turned to Noise: "Grettir is mine enemy, and the feud of blood lies between us, but he deserves a better thrall than so foul a bird as thou."

Thereat he gave the word, and his carles set upon Noise and beat him till no breath was left in his body. Then they bound him hand and foot, and dragged him behind a rock, and left him.

Noise watched them as they drew to one side and whispered together. There were at least twenty of them. For a long moment they conferred together in low voices, while the wind shrilled fiercely in the cluster of their spear-blades. Then there was a movement. The group broke up. Silently and with cautious steps the dark figures of the men moved off in the direction of the hut. Twice, as The Hook gave the word, they halted to listen. Then they moved on again. They disappeared. A pebble clicked under foot, a sword struck faintly against a rock.

There was no more sound. The rain urged by the wind held steadily across the top of the Island of Drangey. It wanted about three hours till dawn.

V

OF THE MAN-SLAYING ON DRANGEY

In the hut, his head upon his brother's lap, Grettir lay tossing with pain. From the thigh down the leg was useless, and from the thigh down it throbbed with anguish, yet the Outlaw gave no sign of his sufferings, and even to speed the slow passing of the night had sung aloud.

It was a song of the old days, when all men were friendly to him, when he was known as Grettir Asmundson and not Grettir the Outlaw; and as he sang, his mind went back through the years of all that wild, troubled life of his, and he remembered many things. Back again in the old home at Biarg, free and happy once more he saw himself as he should have been, head of his mother's household, his foot upon his own hearthstone, his head under his own rooftree. And there should be no more foes to fight, and no more hiding and night-riding; no noontime danger to be faced down; no enemies that struck in the dark to be baffled. And he would be free again; he would be among his fellows; he would touch the hand of friends, would know the companionship of brave and honest men and the love of good and honest women. Would it all be his again some day? Would the old, old times come back again? Would there ever be a home-coming for him? Fighter though he was, a hero and a warrior, and though battles and man-slayings more than he could count had been his portion, even though the shock of swords was music to him, there were other things that made life glad. The hand the sword-hilt had calloused could yet remember the touch of a maiden's fingers, and at times, such as this, strange thoughts grew with a strange murmuring in his brain. He was a young man yet; could he but make head against his enemies and his untoward fortune till the sentence of outlawry was overpassed, he might yet begin his life all new again. A wife should be his, and a son should be born to him—a little son to watch at play, to love, to cherish, to boast of, to be proud of, to laugh over, to weep over, to be held against that mighty breast of his, to be enfolded ever so gently in those mighty sword-scarred arms of his. Strange thoughts; strange, indeed, for a wounded outlaw, on that storm-swept, barren rock in the dark, dark hours before the dawn.

"I think," said Grettir after a while, "that now I may sleep a little."

Illugi made him comfortable upon the sheep-pelts, and put his rolled-up cloak under his head; then, when Grettir had closed his eyes, put a new log upon the fire and sat down nigh at hand.

Long time the lad sat thus watching his brother's face as sleep smoothed from it the lines of pain; as the lips under the long, blond mustaches relaxed a little, and the frown went from the forehead.

It was a kindly face, after all; none of the harshness in it, none of the fierceness in it that so bitter a life as his should have stamped it with—a kindly face, serious, grave even, the face of a big-hearted, generous fellow who bore no malice, who feared no evil, who uttered no complaint, and who looked fate fearless between the eyes.

Something shocked heavily at the door of the hut, and the Outlaw stirred uneasily, and his blue eyes opened a little.

"It is only the old ram, brother," said Illugi. "He butts hard to get in."

"Hard and over hard," muttered Grettir, and as he spoke the door split in twain, and the firelight flashed upon the face of Thorbjorn Hook.

Instantly Illugi was on his feet, his spear in hand. It had come at last, the end of everything. Fate at last was knocking at the door. Grettir was to fight the Last Fight there in that narrow hut, there on that night of storm, in the rain and under the scudding clouds.

Behind him, as he stood facing the riven door and the men that were crowding into the doorway, he heard Grettir struggling to his feet. The fire flared and smoked in the wind, and the rain, as it swept in from without, hissed as it fell among the hot embers. From far down on the beaches came the booming of the surf.

The onset hung poised. After that first splintering of the door The Hook and his men made no move. No man spoke. Illugi, his spear held ready, was a statue in the midst of the hut; Grettir, upon one knee, with his great sword in his fist, one hand holding by Illugi's belt, did not move. His eyes, steady, earnest, were upon those of The Hook, and the two men held each other's glances for a moment that seemed immeasurably long. Then at last:

"Who showed thee the way hither?" said Grettir quietly.

"God showed us the way," The Hook made answer.

"Nay, nay, it was the hag, thy foster-mother."

But the sound of voices broke the spell. In an instant the great fight—the fight that would be told of in Iceland for hundreds of years to come—burst suddenly forth like the bursting of a dyke. Illugi had leaped forward, and through the smoke of the weltering fire his spear-blade flashed, curving like the curving leap of a salmon in the rapids of the Jokulsa. There was a cry, a rush of many feet, a parting of the group in the doorway, and Hialti Thinbeard's hands shut their death-grip upon the shaft of Illugi's spear as the blade of it tore out between his shoulders.

But now men were upon the roof—Karr, son of Karr, thrall of Tongue-stone, Vikaar and Haldarr of the household of Eirik of Good-dale, Hafr of Meadness in the Fleets and Thorwald of Hegra-ness—tearing away the thatch and thrusting madly downward with sword and spear. Illugi dropped the haft of the weapon that had slain Hialfi, and catching up another one, made as if to drive it through the hatch. But even as he did so the whole roof cracked and sagged; then it gave way at one corner, and Karr, son of Karr, fell headlong from above. Grettir caught him on his sword-point as he fell, and at the same moment The Hook drave a small boar-spear clean through Illugi's head.

And from that moment all semblance of consecutive action was lost. Yelling, shouting, groaning, cursing, the men rushed together in one blurred and furious grapple. The wrecked hut collapsed, crashing upon their heads; the fire, kicked and trampled as the fight raged back and forth, caught the thatch and sheep-pelts, and flamed up fiercely in and around the combat. They fought literally in fire—in fire and thick smoke and driving rain. The arms that thrust with spear or hewed with sword rose and fell all ablaze. Those who fell, fell among hot coals and fought their fellows—their own friends—to make way that they might escape the torment.

Twice Grettir, dying though he was, flung the fight from him and rose to his full height, a dreadful figure, alone for an instant, bloody, dripping, charred with ashes, half naked, his clothes all burning; and twice again they flung themselves upon him, and bore him down, so that he disappeared beneath their mass. And ever and again from out the swirl of the onset, from that unspeakable jam of men, mad with the battle-madness that was upon them, crawled out some horrid figure, staggering, gashed, and maimed, or even dying, done to death by the great Outlaw in the last fight of his life. Thorfin, Gamli's man, had both arms broken at the very shoulders; Krolf of Drontheim reeled back from the battle with a sword-thrust through his hip that made him go on crutches the rest of his life; Kolbein, churl of Svein, died two days later of a spear-thrust through the bowels; Ognund, Hakon's son, never was able to use his right arm after that night.

Hardly a man of all the twenty that did not for all the rest of his life bear upon his body the marks of Grettir's death-fight. Still Grettir bore up. He had with one arm caught Thorir, The Hook's stoutest house-carle, around the throat, while his other arm, that wielded his sword, hewed and hewed and smote and thrust as though it would never tire. Even above the din of the others rose the clamour of Thorir's agony. Once again Grettir cleared a space around him, and stood with dripping sword, his left arm still crushing Thorir in that awful embrace. Thorir was weaponless, his face purple. No thought of battle was left in him, and frantic, he stretched out a hand to his fellows, his voice a wail:

"Help me, Thorbjorn. He is killing me. For Christ's sake——"

And Grettir's blade nailed the words within his throat. The wretch slid to the ground doubled in a heap, the blood gushing from his mouth.

Then those that yet remained alive, drawn off a little, panting, spent, saw a terrible sight—the death of Grettir.

For a moment in that flicker of fire he seemed to grow larger. Alone, unassailable, erect among those heaps of dead and dying enemies, his stature seemed as it were suddenly to increase. He towered above them, his head in swirls of smoke, the great bare shoulders gleaming with his blood, the long braids of yellow hair soaked with it. Awful, gigantic, suddenly a demi-god, he stood colossal, a man made more than human. The eyes of him fixed, wide open, looked out into the darkness above their heads, unwinking, unafraid—looked into the darkness and into the eyes of Death, unafraid, unshaken.

There he stood already dead, yet still upon his feet, rigid as iron, his back unbent, his neck proud; while they cowered before him holding their breaths waiting, watching. Then, like a mighty pine tree, stiff, unbending, he swayed slowly forward. Stiff as a sword-blade the great body leaned over farther and farther; slowly at first, then with increased momentum inclined swiftly earthward. He fell, and they could believe that the crash of that fall shook the earth beneath their feet. He died as he would have wished to die, in battle, his harness on, his sword in his grip. He lay face downward amid the dead ashes of the trampled fire and moved no more.

The Guest of Honour

PART ONE

The doctor shut and locked his desk drawer upon his memorandum book with his right hand, and extended the left to his friend Manning Verrill, with the remark:

"Well, Manning, how are you?"

"If I were well, Henry," answered Verrill gravely, "I would not be here."

The doctor leaned back in his deep leather chair, and having carefully adjusted his glasses, tilted back his head, and looked at Verrill from beneath them. He waited for him to continue.

"It's my nerves—I suppose," began Verrill. "Henry," he declared suddenly leaning forward, "Henry, I'm scared; that's what's the matter with me—I'm scared."

"Scared," echoed the doctor, "What nonsense! What of?"

"Scared of death, Henry," broke out Verrill, "scared blue!"

"It is your nerves," murmured the doctor. "You need travel and a bromide, my boy. There's nothing the matter with you. Why, you're good for another forty years,—yes, or even for another fifty years. You're sound as a nut. You, to talk about death!"

"I've seen thirty—twenty-nine I should say, twenty-nine of my best friends go."

The doctor looked puzzled a moment; then—"Oh! you mean that club of yours," said he.

"Yes," said Verrill, "Great heavens! to think that I should be the last man after all—well, one of us had to be the last. And that's where the trouble is, Henry. It's been growing on me for the last two years—ever since Curtice died. He was the twenty-sixth. And he died only a month before the Annual Dinner. Arnold, Brill, Steve—Steve Sharrett, you know, and I—just the four,—were left then; and we sat down to that big table alone; and when we came to the toast of 'The Absent Ones' ... Well, Henry, we were pretty solemn before we got through. And we knew that the choice of the last man,—who would face those thirty-one empty covers and open the bottle of wine that we all set aside at our first dinner, and drink 'The Absent Ones,'—was narrowing down pretty fine.

"Next year there were only Arnold and Steve, and myself left. Brill—well you know all about his death. The three of us got through dinner somehow. The year after that we were still three, and even the year after that. Then poor old Steve went down with the Dreibund in the bay of Biscay, and four months afterward Arnold and I sat down to the table at the Annual, alone. I'm not going to forget that evening in a hurry. Why, Henry—oh! never mind. Then—"

"Well," prompted the doctor as his friend paused:

"Arnold died three months ago. And the day of our Annual—I mean my—the club's," Verrill changed his position. "The date of the dinner, the Annual Dinner, is next month, and I'm the only one left."

"And, of course, you'll not go," declared the doctor.

"Oh, yes," said Verrill. "Yes, I will go, of course. But—" He shook his head with a long sigh. "When the Last Man Club was organised," he went on, "in '68, we were all more or less young. It was a great idea, at least I felt that way about it, but I didn't believe that thirty young men would persist in anything—of that sort very long. But no member of the club died for the first five years, and the club met every year and had its dinner without much thought of—of consequences, and of the inevitable. We met just to be sociable."

"Hold on," interrupted the doctor, "you are speaking now of thirty. A while ago you said thirty-one."

"Yes, I know," assented Verrill, "There were thirty in the club, but we always placed an extra cover—for—for the Guest of Honour."

The doctor made a movement of impatience. Then in a moment, "Well," he said, resignedly, "go on."

"That's about the essentials," answered Verrill. "The first death was in '73. And from that year on the vacant places at the table have steadily increased. Little by little the original bravado of the thing dropped out of it all for me; and of late years—well I have told you how it is. I've seen so many of them die, and die so fast, so regularly—one a year you might say,—that I've kept saying 'who next, who next, who's to go this year?' ... And as they went, one by one, and still I was left ... I tell you, Henry, the suspense was, ... the suspense is ... You see I'm the last now, and ever since Curtice died, I've felt this thing weighing on me. By God, Henry, I'm afraid; I'm afraid of Death! It's horrible! It's as though I were on the list of 'condemned' and were listening to hear my name called every minute."

"Well, so are all of us, if you come to that," observed the doctor.

"Oh, I know, I know," cried Verrill, "it is morbid and all that. But that don't help me any. Can you imagine me one month from to-morrow night. Think now. I'm alone, absolutely, and there is the long empty table, with the thirty places set, and the extra place, and those places are where all my old friends used to sit. And at twelve I get up and give first 'The Absent Ones,' and then 'The Guest of the Evening.' I gave those toasts last year, but there were two of us, then, and the year before there were three. But ever since Curtice died and we were narrowed down to four, this thing has been weighing on me—this idea of death, and I've conceived a horror of it—a—a dread. And now I am the last. I had no idea this would ever happen to me; or if it did, that it would be like this. I'm shaken, Henry, shaken. I've not slept for three nights. So I've come to you. You must help me."

"So I will, by advising you. You give up the idiocy. Cut out the dinner this year; yes, and for always."

"You don't understand," replied Verrill, calmly. "It is impossible. I could not keep away. I must be there."

"But it's simple lunacy," expostulated the doctor. "Man, you've worked upon your nerves over this fool club and dinner, till I won't be responsible for you if you carry out this notion. Come, promise me you will take the train for, say Florida, tomorrow, and I'll give you stuff that will make you sleep. St. Augustine is heaven at this time of year, and I hear the tarpon have come in. Shall—"

Verrill shook his head.

"You don't understand," he repeated. "You simply don't understand. No, I shall go to the dinner. But of course I'm—I'm nervous—a little. Did I say I was scared? I didn't mean that. Oh, I'm all right; I just want you to prescribe for me, something for the nerves. Henry, death is a terrible thing,—to see 'em all struck down, twenty-nine of 'em—splendid boys. Henry, I'm not a coward. There's a difference between cowardice and fear. For hours last night I was trying to work it out. Cowardice—that's just turning tail and running; but I shall go through that Annual Dinner, and that's ordeal enough, believe me. But fear,—it's just death in the abstract that unmans me. That's the thing to fear. To think that we all go along living and working and fussing from day to day, when we know that this great Monster, this Horror, is walking up and down the streets, and that sooner or later he'll catch us,—that we can't escape. Isn't it the greatest curse in the world! We're so used to it we don't realise the Thing. But suppose one could eliminate the Monster altogether. Then we'd realise how sweet life was, and we'd look back at the old days with horror—just as I do now."

"Oh, but this is rubbish," cried the doctor, "simple drivel. Manning, I'm ashamed of you. I'll prescribe for you, I suppose I've got to. But a good rough fishing-and-hunting-trip would do more for you than a gallon of drugs. If you won't go to Florida, get out of town, if it's only over Sunday. Here's your prescription, and do take a Friday-to-Monday trip. Tramp in the woods, get tired, and don't go to that dinner!"

"You don't understand," repeated Verrill, as the two stood up. He put the prescription into his pocket-book. "You don't understand. I couldn't keep away. It's a duty, and besides—well I couldn't make you see. Good-by. This stuff will make me sleep, eh? And do my nerves good, too, you say? I see. I'll come back to you if it don't work. Good-by again. This door, is it? Not through the waiting-room, eh? Yes, I remember.... Henry, did you ever—did you ever face death yourself—I mean—"

"Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense," cried the doctor. But Verrill persisted. His back to the closed door, he continued:

"I did. I faced death once,—so you see I should know. It was when I was a lad of twenty. My father had a line of New Orleans packets and I often used to make the trip as super-cargo. One October day we were caught in the equinox off Hatteras, and before we knew it we were wondering if she would last another half-hour. Along in the afternoon there came a sea aboard, and caught me unawares. I lost my hold and felt myself going, going.... I was sure for ten seconds that it was the end,—and I saw death then, face to face!

"And I've never forgotten it. I've only to shut my eyes to see it all, hear it all—the naked spars rocking against the grey-blue of the sky, the wrench and creak of the ship, the threshing of rope ends, the wilderness of pale-green water, the sound of rain and scud.... No, no, I'll not forget it. And death was a horrid specter in that glimpse I got of him. I—I don't care to see him again. Well, good-by once more."

"Good-by, Manning, and believe me, this is all hypochondria. Go and catch fish. Go shoot something, and in twenty-four hours you'll believe there's no such thing as death."

The door closed. Verrill was gone.

PART TWO

The banquet hall was in the top story of one of the loftiest sky-scrapers of the city. Along the eastern wall was a row of windows reaching from ceiling to floor, and as the extreme height of the building made it unnecessary to draw the curtains whoever was at the table could look out and over the entire city in that direction. Thus it was that Manning Verrill, on a certain night some four weeks after his interview with the doctor, sat there at his walnuts and black coffee and, absorbed, abstracted, looked out over the panorama beneath him, where the Life of a great nation centered and throbbed.

To the unenlightened the hall would have presented a strange spectacle. Down its center extended the long table. The chairs were drawn up, the covers laid. But the chairs were empty, the covers untouched; and but for the presence of the one man the hall was empty, deserted.

At the head of the table Verrill, in evening dress, a gardenia in his lapel, his napkin across his lap, an unlighted cigar in his fingers, sat motionless, looking out over the city with unseeing eyes. Of thirty places around the table, none was distinctive, none varied. But at Verrill's right hand the thirty-first place, the place of honour, differed from all the rest. The chair was large, massive. The oak of which it was made was black, while instead of the usual array of silver and porcelain, one saw but two vessels,—an unopened bottle of wine and a large silver cup heavily chased.

From far below in the city's streets eleven o'clock struck. The sounds broke in upon Verrill's reverie and he stirred, glanced about the room and then, rising, went to the window and stood there for some time looking out.

At his feet, far beneath lay the city, twinkling with lights. In the business quarter all was dark, but from the district of theatres and restaurants there arose a glare into the night, ruddy, vibrating, with here and there a ganglion of electric bulbs upon a "fire sign" emphasising itself in a whiter radiance. Cable-cars and cabs threaded the streets with little starring eyes of coloured lights, while underneath all this blur of illumination, the people, debouching from the theatres, filled the sidewalks with tiny ant-like swarms, minute, bustling.

Farther on in the residence district, occasional lighted windows watched with the street-lamps gazing blankly into the darkness. In particular one house was all ablaze. Every window glowed. No doubt a great festivity was in progress and Verrill could almost fancy that he heard the strains of the music, the rustle of the silks.

Then nearer at hand, but more to the eastward, where the office buildings rose in tower-like clusters and somber groups, Verrill could see a vista of open water—the harbour. Lights were moving here, green and red, as the great hoarse-voiced freighters stood out with the tide.

And beyond this was the sea itself, and more lights, very, very faint where the ships rolled leisurely in the ground swells; ships bound to and from all ports of the earth,—ships that united the nations, that brought the whole world of living men under the view of the lonely watcher in the empty Banquet Hall.

Verrill raised the window. At once a subdued murmur, prolonged, monotonous,—the same murmur as that which disengages itself from forests, from the sea, and from sleeping armies,—rose to meet him. It was the mingling of all the night noises into one great note that came simultaneously from all quarters of the horizon, infinitely vast, infinitely deep,—a steady diapason strain like the undermost bourdon of a great organ as the wind begins to thrill the pipes.

It was the stir of life, the breathing of the Colossus, the push of the nethermost basic force, old as the world, wide as the world, the murmur of the primeval energy, coeval with the centuries, blood-brother to that spirit which in the brooding darkness before creation, moved upon the face of the waters.

And besides this, as Verrill stood there looking out, the night wind brought to him, along with the taint of the sea, the odour of the heaped-up fruit in the city's markets and even the suggestion of the vegetable gardens in the suburbs.