BOOK FOUR Canaan (continued 2)

“I wish you would not always be telling me that I am—” she began indignantly.

“But you are, you know,” he told her quietly. “Leopold is as old as I, but a man couldn’t possib—”

“Oh,” she laughed. “He couldn’t? Couldn’t he! He’s been dogging me for ever so long. You make a big mistake about years. Everybody does. At thirteen, when I first talked with you, I was as much a woman as I am now or ever will be. And I’ve been sitting back trying to behave myself like a doll. At fifteen I had my height and—everything; and now I’m eighteen. I can’t stay in the refrigerator any longer, I tell you.... Leopold? Child? Let me tell you something, Allen Blynn. Leopold and I had a fight that night. Not words, remember; but an ugly real fight, with fists and hands.... He knows I’m no child.... Now wait!” she held up her hand. “Leopold’s all right. He wants to marry me. He did just what he ought to have done. It was all right, absolutely right. It was my fault again. You went off and deserted me—and I just didn’t care what happened to me. Then I had to fight my way out. Nom d’une pipe! Nom du nom d’une pipe!... And that isn’t all. I must shock your old professorial head a little. There was another.... But I woke up and got out. Your letter did it—the one on morals and instincts, and that terrible story of the leper; don’t you remember?”

Yes, he remembered. The little woman before him was opening up astonishing vistas into her stirring life. But she was a child, he insisted. The general appearance was that of a woman; but that was a trick of hat and gown and hair, a disguise easily seen through. Her face was womanly, and her voice; but in both were cries of very young life. Her very wonderful health, the thing that gave her beauty—that was youth; and her frankness was the innocence of youth.

“Do you know what Bardek means by Saint Acetum?” she asked him suddenly. She had been studying his rather solemn-smiling face, delighting in its fine seriousness—made fine, she thought, by the light of a smile that hovered ever in the eyes and in and out the firm lips.

“What does Bardek mean by anything!” Allen chuckled contentedly, the solemnity quite fading from his face at the thought of the unfathomable Bardek. “Saint Acetum? I never heard of the person.”

“Oh!” Gorgas laughed in her impulsive way. “Saint Acetum is you!—The Vinegar Saint! Oh, Allen Blynn, that is too funny!...” Allen frowned at her inquiringly. “That’s just the way he would look, too—stern, and wise, and worried—”

“Worried?”

“For fear the roof would fall in, you know.”

“Roof?” he glanced apprehensively at the ceiling.

“Saint Acetum, you know—” she tried to explain. His serious face was delightfully comic; in a flash she saw how it would be immensely jolly, and assuring, to have him gazing at her forever as if she needed the firmest and sternest looking after.

“Saint Acetum?” he cogitated. “There ain’t no such animal.”

“Oh, yes,” she continued, “Bardek says—”

“Bardek invented him, then.”

“Of course, silly! That’s the fun of it. Saint Acetum is forever repairing ‘ze roof of ze Heaven’; and there he is up there all alone, patching and patching, and always looking for trouble; and he won’t ever come down and have a good time with the angels—not even once! It might rain, you see. And Bardek says, that’s just like you, Allen Blynn—”

“Isn’t Bardek a wonder!” His eyes glowed with delight in the Bohemian’s comic fantasy. “And isn’t that just like him!... The Vinegar Saint!... Well!...” A strong flash of determination came into his face suddenly. “And he is quite right!... Someone must keep watch lest the Heavens fall! And they might fall, you know,” he added whimsically. “You believe that God is good, and all-wise, and all-powerful, don’t you?”

She nodded. “One must,” she said. “It would be terrible not to.”

“He is good, and wise; but perhaps not all-wise. And sometimes I think He is not all-powerful. The Old One has won some of the battles—in Eden, for instance. Sometimes I fancy—it is an ancient belief—that the long battle between Good and Evil, begun aeons ago in chaos, is still at its height, and that the outcome might even be in doubt; and then I fancy that He needs us—some of us—on the firing line; or, like your Vinegar Saint, guarding the outposts. Perhaps we are sometimes a brake on progress, but often we are the ones who save liberty from liberty’s self. You know, we Allens were Tories in the Revolution; we were for the existing order then, and against the revolutionists. There must be a drop or two of reactionary blood still in me!... Vinegar Saint! Good! But don’t think that the poor old chap loves the endless patching, or that the songs of the angels don’t tempt him mightily to shirk his job.... And if he gets to looking too fierce and vinegary, it’s because—”

“It’s because he is a dear old honest capitaine,” she cried; “and I’d rather have him vinegary any day than—”

“Peppery?” he joked, determined not to be solemn.

“Yes, or even sugary. Ugh!” she affected a delightful shudder. “How I hate the sweety ones!”

This was a pleasing savor to the Vinegar Saint, and for a moment or two he forgot his patchings, and reveled in the unsaintly joy of flattery; then he remembered abruptly.

“What are you going to do about Leopold?” he asked.

“It depends upon you, mon capitaine,” she replied calmly. “If you don’t want me, Allen Blynn—anybody can have me. There! It’s out! I’ve made up my mind to say this to you for almost a year. Let me—”

A preposterous waiter had to be dealt with. He was recommending some custard concoction with a dash of white wine, and inquiring about such irrelevant matters as demi-tasses or full cups. Gorgas had to be appealed to. She made selections deliberately, but her fingers were nervously restless.

“So you will take the wine-sauce?” the waiter was most interested.

“Yes,” said Blynn.

“Or would you prefer it with cream?”

“Yes,” said Blynn.

“Perhaps M’sieu’ would rather have the sliced oranges?”

“Yes, yes,” said Blynn in great distress, “Anything, old man. You fix it up. Anything. Just cut along like a good fellow, will you?”

“Don’t look so frowning, mon capitaine,” Gorgas smiled across the table, but her eyes belied that smile. “Don’t speak yet. Let me show you how I look at this thing. If I stop now, I’ll never begin again. And I just can’t stand keeping it inside.... When you came to me at the tennis-court five years ago and took me for a grown woman, the thing was done; right there. I’ve never got over it. I’ve tried; but it was no use; it got worse. I sent you to Holden to get rid of you.... You scared me.... You saw it, I guess. My eyes must have shown, for you got out of the way.... That’s why you suddenly fled to Holden; wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” dumbly.

“I knew.... It was beastly the way you cut me.... Don’t speak yet.... I don’t blame you.... Sometimes I’d catch you looking at me like a hungry dog, afraid to come near for fear I’d beat you or something. I know what was the matter. You were afraid of encouraging a child. Mercy! Encourage? That was just the way to make me rabid! Well, I resolved to grow up. I fought the family until I could dress the part, and I fooled everybody but you.... And now I am grown up.... It’s no fooling now.... And there you are, as far away as ever. So I said to myself, that man will have to be approached and stormed. He’ll never marry anybody, unless somebody asks him. No, you wouldn’t, Allen Blynn. You’re not a bit aggressive; you’re too courteous, too afraid of hurting folks’ feelings. Well, I want to be hurt.... So I’m coming right at you. Here’s your chance, Allen Blynn.... Wait!... I figured it this way. It’s all mere custom, this woman-sitting-back-and-waiting business. I’ve got the same desire for my man as any man has for his woman. I want him. Shall I let him slip by? Not I. I’m going right for him. He’ll be startled at first, just the way women are—oh! I’ve talked with a lot of ’em!—but keeping right at it brings everything. Half the women don’t want the men that come at them; but the thought gets into their brains and grows until it bubbles over and swamps ’em. Oh, I know. Neddie Morris nearly had me, and so did Leopold; if you hadn’t been in my head one of ’em would have got me; it was just a matter of sliding.... Now, Allen Blynn, you’re my man.” They were very close together at their diminutive little table. She could have touched his arms, almost without leaning forward. Her voice grew very soft and tender as she added, “Aren’t I the brazen one!”

“Little woman,” he spoke with the greatest kindness. “Will you let me think this out?”

She nodded. For a half-hour they watched the silly crowd and nibbled at sweetish frothy desserts and sipped at cold coffees. Overbibulous folks laughed in high keys, and the Hungarian orchestra, taking its cue from the diners, grew noisier and noisier. At this moment the bandsmen were working vigorously on the quietest of love themes; castanets and cymbals clashed and tanged and told all the world about “long years ago in old Madrid, where softly sighs of love the light guitar.” The song had taken the country only a few years before, and had now reached the stage of orchestral “variations.” The Hungarian leader was consumed with passion and beer; he gesticulated and shouted to his workers, and they bent to their task. Every child in America knew the absurd words. Even Allen Blynn knew them!

Mischievously Gorgas accompanied with the words of the refrain, she pianissimo, the orchestra thundering double forte to its climax. They smiled guiltily as they thought of the smashing, gesticulating music and the personal significance of the libretto.

“Well,” he turned to her.

“Well?” she rested her arms on the little table so that her two hands almost touched him.

“This is the greatest experience of my life,” he said soberly, “absolutely the greatest and the finest.” His face shone with exultation. “It is the last thing I dreamed of. I thought it was Leopold. The fact is—well, I was mortally sure. We talked together just before I left. He didn’t tell me outright, but I knew, of course. Naturally I couldn’t guess the details.... That is a revelation!...”

Already she thought she had read his answer and withdrew her hands ever so slightly. Except for a deeply flushed face and sparkling eyes she gave no other sign; she was prepared for it to take time!

“Here alone I wait for thee!” the orchestra shouted.

“It’s hard to talk here. Come,” he looked earnestly at his watch as if he had never seen one before. “We’ll cab it for my hotel, where I must get your birthday gift—the manuscript book, you know.... Then I’ll see you to your train.... We have barely a half-hour.”

St. Acetum had not tumbled from the roof of the Heaven as Bardek had predicted; he seemed, rather, to be all too intent on his eternal patching and repairing. It was very assuring; one felt safe and protected; now, whatever else happened, the Heavens would not fall! For in spite of Bardek’s jests at the expense of the Saint, Gorgas knew that the good man would not so easily desert his high duties for anything merely personal. Still, she wished that he might at least just look down!

At her side of the cab she sat rigid; without a word she let him get out at the hotel and return with the gift; but as they drew near the railway terminal, she put a trembling hand on his shoulder.

“Won’t you even touch me?” she asked plaintively.

“Please! please!” he begged; and she withdrew to her place. Nom d’une pipe! Nom du nom d’une pipe!

“I’m not a bit sorry I came,” she said finally.

“Nor am I! Nor am I!” he replied fervently. “I feel—glorified!”

They walked slowly, like two tired persons, to her car. He saw about her tickets and bade her goodby at the steps.

“Is there—somebody else?” she asked quietly.

“Gracious, no!” he cried; but immediately he said, “Wait!” and looked worried. “Yes,” he corrected, “there is—and there isn’t at all!” His lips closed firmly, but his eyes seemed to be telling her not to believe a word of it.

“This little book,” he put the package into her hand hastily, as if he were eager to change the topic, “is five years of my life. It will explain what I have not been able to say to you tonight. But you are not to open it until your eighteenth birthday.”

“That is tomorrow—and tomorrow is almost here,” she told him. “In a few moments I’ll be eighteen.”

“Yes, I know!” he agreed. “So you will be! Well! well! On your ride home, then, you may read it. There is just one condition: you must begin at the beginning, and go straight through—‘Through hedge and over gate. Straight! straight! straight! straight!’” he quoted. “Promise!”

She promised.

The porters began to take on the appearance of getting under way; the Midnight Express was a punctual institution.

“All aboard!” someone called afar off. “Express for Philadelphia and Washington! All aboard!”

She leaned up to him with flaming invitation in her face.

“No one will know,” she said. “Quick! They’ll think we’re brother and sister!”

A big clock tolled the first stroke of twelve. He took her face in his hands so tempestuously as to startle and hurt, but she laughed.

“All aboard!”

“Go quick!” he cried.

The conductor was impatient. Boom! boom! the big clock finished out its twelve slow strokes.

“Many happy returns of the day,” he called after the moving train. She said nothing, but she waved until the darkness enveloped her.

XXIX “STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT!”

“I ’M not a bit sorry I came,” she said aloud as she fumbled around the zigzag corners of two Pullmans until she reached her own drawing-room. And she was not; she was most unreasonably elated; she had, she knew not why, all the humming sensations of victory. It was unaccountable. She sat on her couch and tried to fathom the meaning of her snug contentedness. She retold the full day together, the “window-cracking,” the luncheon in state, the jogs about strange streets, the applauding crowd at the lecture, the garish Hungarian café, the confession and its almost painful reception, and the tumultuous parting. She ought to have been depressed, but she was throbbing with joy. “It was good, every minute of it,” she said.

Mechanically she undid the wrappings from Allen’s birthday gift, arranged the pillows and the light, and prepared to read. The outside of the book was the simple adjustable cover of a college note-book, but a gold-leafed title had been printed across the front:

Unclaimed Letters

She turned to the first page carefully, remembering,

Through hedge, over gate Straight! straight! straight! straight!

There she found a subtitle: Letters to Gorgas Levering; to be delivered into her hands on the twentieth anniversary of her birth; dictated from time to time by the heart of an old comrade and withheld from the post by his conscience. (Later note: “twentieth” amended to “eighteenth” but under stern protest of said conscience.)

The first letter was dated June 17, 1888. It was a date she knew by heart. Every year she had celebrated secretly the anniversary of the meeting at the tennis-court. She read:

“Dear Gorgas Levering: You have given me a psychological shock: you have unhinged my reason, let loose my emotions, and upset my moral apple cart! You did all that, and you know nothing about it. When you grow up—say, at twenty or twenty-one—I shall present you with this document of evidence, and if you have any sense of decency at that age you will be shocked too. No little girl of thirteen with a face like a madonna should be allowed to tuck her legs under her pinafore and impose upon a grown up man what shaves every day. (The seeming irrelevancy of these remarks is not due to lunacy—although it is yet disputed if the moon does not have something to do with it—but to a fine scientific ardor. All the facts must be recorded and in this case concealed legs is facts.)

“All my life I have stopped in the middle of experience and recorded my feelings. I say, ‘Allen Blynn, you feel this way or that way.’ This helps me to remember later; for all our lives we are stuffing and changing and forgetting our former selves. Hence I hereby solemnly affirm that if I had the courage to smash all the conventions of my civilization and put a good-sized gash into the moral code of my contemporaries, I, Allen Blynn, male, white, and a voter, would have picked you up in my arms today at the tennis-courts, hugged the daylight out of you, tossed you across my shoulders, made straight for the nearest clergyman and married you—with one hand across your mouth to prevent your squealing and the other firmly grasping your struggling legs.

“That would be kidnapping—punishable by life imprisonment. I know it. And also grand larceny. Of course it is. And something like piracy. Right! Yet, I did none of these things; sheer cowardice held my hands; but if to have murder in the heart is to be murderer, as I believe, then I stand here convicted of the desire to own you, bag and baggage, legs, and all.

“And you are thirteen years old, and I am twenty-three!

“It is shameful, isn’t it? But I am brazenly unashamed. That is the Lord’s own psychological truth!

“Your kidnapper at heart, “Allen Blynn.”

“And I wouldn’t have squealed a bit,” Gorgas crooned. “I’d have trotted right along—in the lead, too. I bet he doesn’t know the shortest cut to the parsonage.”

“June 21,” the next letter began.

“That was the Wednesday afternoon he first came to the house,” she commented.

“Dear Gorgas Levering: Psychological facts are accumulating.

“Fact No. 1: I am still a criminal-at-large and more dangerous than ever.

“Fact No. 2: I slipped back five years this afternoon and became eighteen. The proof is we both had a gallumptious time mimicking the neighborhood and acted like a pair of school children. Further proof is that you continually did make eyes at me, and, in spite of all the roaring protestations of something that’s left of my conscience, my own did slip several times. They really did slip: they slid nearer and nearer; from your chin they drew up to the tip of your nose; clambered up, up, slowly, overran the mark, and perched perilously on the right eyebrow; leaned over for a dizzy second and—slipped into untold brown fathoms. Once I was nearly drowned. It was the most terrifying sensation of my young manhood.

“Fact No. 3: I was mortally ashamed—put that down to my credit (you were not, you rogue!) and resolved never to do it again. The Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law.

“Fact No. 4: That gypsy scamp scares me into trembles. When you told me of him I had murder in my heart, then and there; all the fierce primitive desire to meet that beast and beat him into pulp. My voice shook so when I asked you about him that I was certain you noticed it. My nesting instincts are coming with a rush—and they are most terrifying.

“Fact No. 5: In daylight I admit none of these things. I am very moral and civilized in daylight. Only at night when I sit before this white paper does my inward, honest self come to the fore and disport his naked savagery.

“Fact No. 6: The two ‘me’s’ are fighting each other; daylight against darkness. Daylight is going to win, or it’s all over with Allen Blynn (see the state your rhyming’s put me in!)

“Still criminal, “Allen Blynn.”

The next letters were full of vindictive hatred of Bardek. Allen had gone to the old mill and found it deserted. He told how all his talk on Elizabethan love with Kate as they drove along the Wissahickon was only the outward voice speaking; within were throbbing anxious cries for a little child off in the woods with—what sort of a man? The Lord only knew. Elizabethan love—contagion, infection, plague and what not—he had them all, a virulent case. With wide eyes Gorgas read of his tramp back into the dark of Cresheim Valley and how he had seen her forlorn little figure pacing thoughtfully beside “Gyp.” Only vigorous conscience withheld his hands from touching her as she passed by.

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty—terrible! a life-time of exile. Perhaps one might make it nineteen—No! said Conscience, roaring outrageously. Well, twenty, then.

The “German days,” “French days,” and “Italian days” followed in review, while Gorgas passed from thirteen to fourteen. His joy at the discovery of the simple sincerity of Bardek flowed through the pages, with just a hint of watchfulness. “He is a man, a free-thinker, a free-lover, too, I suspect,” he warned her. “Look out for him, child; but you need not do that. I am on eternal guard, now. He has no conscience, that is certain; but in some matters neither have I. If he makes a step toward you ‘I would eat his heart out in the market-place!’ But I have faith in Bardek, an unreasoned thing, but clear enough. Time will tell.

“And I’m watching you, too, Golden Child. Your brown eyes do not behave themselves. They explore, explore, explore, until I am ready to reach out my hand and close them against myself. And you continually do pluck at my sleeve and touch my wrist nervously with the tips of your hot fingers and send my blood slamming and jamming and ramming and cramming like the waters go down at Lodore. You have no conscience, either; that’s plain. Well, here’s where I begin my long vigil. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty—it is life imprisonment. I’ll be an old man! Shall we say nineteen then? Golly! What a racket Conscience sets up!”

At another time he wrote briefly. “You stood in the narrow path today, when we found that Bardek had gone, and reached out your arms to me. By the Great Horn Spoon! By the Dipper and the Little Bear! And the Pole Star! And the Pleiades! Don’t ever do that again! Zounds! Flesh and blood, that’s all I’m made of! Fra Lippo Lippi said that. Fortunately for you and me I’m flesh and blood plus a Conscience.”

“And I never guessed it!” Gorgas communed with herself. “If I had—” The first touch of remorse seized her for the lost chances of life, and a little anger at the laws of polite society, and a pang of jealousy for that “other” whom he had so dubiously confessed.

“Why does he torture me with this book of letters?” she marvelled. A few leaves slipped through her fingers; she turned impatiently toward the concluding pages, but stopped. “I’ll play fair,” she said. “Straight! straight! straight! straight!”

Morris came into the letters. Allen had noticed greedily their intimacy and lamented the early bookishness that had prevented his ever being more than a spectator at athletics. Some of the fierce passions of envy seized him. He was gloriously frank. “I’m a half-man,” he exclaimed. “They let me sit and spell out books and praised me until my vanity led me further and further away from real life. Why couldn’t they have driven me off to baseball and football and all that! The world praises the pedant, but the young woman goes straight to a man. I have had the education of a woman—and even women are repudiating it, nowadays.”

He was very unfair to himself in these despondent pages. Gorgas quarreled with every line. She scolded him; told him what his real qualities were and advised him to have more sense or she would skip. It was the “Sorrows of Allen Blynn,” the aching of strong youth before he has found his place, when he cries out upon his own unfitness for any place at all. “These are just my growing pains, child,” he was wise enough to write. “Don’t bother your little head about them; it’ll come out all right eventually.” But it made her uncomfortable and weepy.

At the top of the next page a street address gave her a sudden pleasurable thrill:

18/a Fürstenstrasse, München, Deutschland.

“Oh!” Gorgas gasped in delight. “He really did write from Germany, after all.”

“Mein Kindschen,” it began. “Frau Schloss talked of your letter even before she would arrange the price of breakfasts and bed. There has been a great to do over your letter. It came several days before I arrived. And it was a bulky document—thick, extravagant American letter-paper is to the German mind like feeding lamb chops to stray dogs. And it lacked stamps mightily.

“The question that confronted the Frau Schloss, the Herr Schloss, the Gemüse Frau, who keeps a green-grocery below stairs, and the Herr Postman—the question that has stirred them for the past fortnight is whether it is a safe investment to pay the overdue postage, trusting that the Herr Professor would later make restitution plus trinkgeld; or deny all knowledge of the Herr Professor and throw the responsibility upon the efficient German postal service. Well! They decided that the Herr Professor would be an easy American mark, as he had been on former visits; so they paid out real money, received the letter, and took the big risk that I might not have recovered from the American madness of paying large sums with a smile.

“As I arrived in the Fürstenstrasse, Frau Schloss saw me from the window above the green-grocery and hastened down the dark stair and through the darker alley of a vestibule (where the Gemüse Frau keeps her push-cart) to meet me breathless in front of the Vegetable Lady’s display.

“‘I suppose I may have my old rooms?’ I asked, after the first formal greetings.

“‘Oh, the letter, my honored Herr Professor!’ she began tragically.

“‘Ah!’ I caught her up. ‘I cannot have the rooms then? I’m sorry.’

“‘Yes! yes!’ she assured me, ‘Yes, honored Herr Professor. The rooms are ready. And the letter is ready, too! It came a week ago. We have kept it for you—’

“‘We have kept it,’ said Herr Schloss, emerging from the dark hall.

“‘—and have paid,’ beamed Frau Schloss anxiously.

“‘We have indeed paid,’ helped Herr Schloss.

“‘I have seen them pay,’ corroborated the Gemüse Frau, looming from the dark doorway.

“Oh, they held me with a glittering eye, Frau Schloss, Herr Schloss, and the Gemüse Frau, as I listened to their tale, awaited the bringing forth of the letter and stood silent and noncommittal throughout the profuse explanation of each glaring governmental mark that announced money due.

“‘Bless my soul!’ I cried in English; ‘it’s from Gorgas.’ And I ripped it open right before them, ejaculated my joy in their very faces—we were still on the sidewalk in front of the house—thanked them in flowery German and passed rapidly by to my old rooms without so much as a hint of payment.

“They followed me.

“‘Is it then an important letter?’ anxiously inquired the Frau Schloss.

“‘Important?’ I echoed. ‘It is worth a million Dutch thalers.’

“Then I saw their faces. ‘Oh’ I sensed their trouble. ‘My best thanks for your thoughtfulness; pray, accept this little token,’ and I passed the lady the sum of twelve cents—a silver fifty-pfennig piece—a Bavarian ransom. As the postage amounted to only twenty-five pfennig, this gave the family a clear rake-off of six American cents. Ah! there was joy in the Schloss family that night, and for days the Gemüse Frau shone by reflected glory. Thrift! What would we Americans in Germany do without thrift in the Germans!

“I am purposely keeping away from your letter. All this introductory setting is to tantalize myself, to force myself to be calm and see things straight. At the slightest excuse I could gush forth on these pages a quantity and quality of sentiment that would make your six-page outcry seem quite sensible and respectable. (And it is neither, you know, mein Kindschen.) You tell me things here that I know only too well. Maybe that’s why I am in Germany. You hint that I could marry you by crooking my little finger. Down here in Bavaria they often do that sort of thing at exactly your age—fifteen and one-half. But if I should do it, or encourage you to think that I might even want to do it—well! I have read enough Italian literature to know that there is a particularly private pit in Hell reserved for those chaps. So I am going to perform a bit of moral cruelty which makes me ill to think of—and is bound to make me iller as the days and nights go by—I am going to ignore your truthful little confession; act brutally as if you had never penned it; pretend that I never could guess how you would count the days it takes for a letter to cross the ocean, arrive at Hamburg, drift down to Munich; how you would count again the days it takes a reply to come up to Hamburg and sail to New York; how for days and days and months and months you would watch for the postman, trying all the while to look unconcerned, and find each day—silence. You are not the kind of child to grow busy with your playthings and forget. I know how you will suffer—worse now, perhaps, than if you were older. And I make you suffer because there is no other way.

“There is no other way; I may make no explanation. If I told you the truth you would probably take the next steamer for Europe; and if I acted the way I feel, I’d probably meet you half way over. And I can’t write you a lame acknowledgment that I have received your letter, have it on file and will attend to your order in due course. The coldest thing I wrote would burn with the lie that it carried and you would guess and be tempted by me. No. I am like a man in love with his friend’s wife. There is nothing to do. I must keep the faith—which means, in this case, silence.

“It is so horrible, the thing I must do, that I almost forget how you have paid in advance for my necessary brutality. This fragile, badly-spelled, pink-rose-leaf confession of yours, so delicately real, like a half-opened cherry-bud, warm, fragrant, potent with all that is to be! I could send it back to you, mein Kindschen, and say, ‘All that you own here, I confess again to you. Speak; and whatever you say, that will be but the echo of myself.’

“And I shall say nothing. But my heart is full of pity, mein Kindschen.”

They were crossing the river above New York city before she had been able to finish three-quarters of the book; the cars were shifted carefully and tenderly to a flat-bottomed ferry; in a few moments they were being towed down the river to Jersey City. She could look out of her window and see the lights of the river and hear the water lapping the sides of the boat. Much meditation had gone with each page; and she was reluctant to come to the impending end.

Leopold appeared in the letters. “I am playing a losing game, I know,” he wrote. “While I wait and look fatherly (and get called mon père—ugh!) someone else, less scrupulous—and a blamed sight more natural!—will reach out and take you.... Nom d’une pipe!... My word is given, however, and I will not break it. Hier stehe ich, Gott mir helfen, ich kann nicht anders; so said Luther, or something like that, on a matter that seems to me less important!”

Almost immediately after this he was rowing most gloriously with Conscience and bringing the years down to eighteen. “Something ought to be knocked off for good behavior,” he argued; “every decent prison allows that. But there’s the final stand. One step this side—one minute even, and I’d never forgive myself. Seventeen, eighteen! Two years of acting-grandfather, playing the wise old professor, so interested in education! Rats!”

Now he was leaving abruptly for Holden, decamping in the night, fleeing before the attack of the tempter. The devil had got into him; the Old One needed vigorous exorcising.

The Old One came in for a long essay. The devil was God’s ally, he found out; Lucifer tried men out, tested them, showed up the flaws, taught them exactly what to amend, reject or add. Spiritual perfection was not possible without a healthy, vigorous tussle with the Old One.

“I know when he is coming,” he claimed; “first, I hear the cries of the old mystery-play devils, ‘Out haro! Out haro! Out! out! out!’ just like a pack of yelping dogs on a hot scent. Then I find my heart, blood, lungs, vertebræ, stomach, legs, and sympathetic nervous system all going back on me. The flesh and the devils are old cronies, you know. ‘Out! out! Out haro! Out! out!’ he howls, nearer and nearer; my whole physical ‘me’ tugs and yowls and bites at the leash.

“Then the real ‘me’ takes a fresh grip and holds fast. I slip and slide a little, but dig my feet in the stones, and pray—”

“I know. I know,” nodded Gorgas.

“—Then I throw the thong over my shoulders,” Allen went on, “turn my back on the fiend and drag that other part of ‘me,’ heart, stomach, and all, straight up on firm ground. Every step’s a better one.”

“My legs get away from me,” Gorgas commented ruefully. “They just took me off to Boston. And I’m not a bit sorry—and that’s funny, too.”

Seventeen was the hardest year. The grown-up gowns were not lost on him. “Attire of the devil’s making,” he wrote. “A snare of the Old One,—Retro, Sathanas! Get thee behind me. Not a minute before the hour set, or all my life I shall feel depraved.”

The Old One argued with him. He gave a part of the debate:

“Old One: Why grow solemn-faced over so simple a matter! She’s a woman and you’re a man.

“Allen B.: She’s a child and I am a man, thank the Lord, full-grown and in control of himself.

“Old One: (sneering) Are you a man? Oh, no, you’re not. You’re neither male nor female. You’re a pedagogue.

“A. B.: (wincing) Touchez bien! A hit! Whatever I am, I am going to be decent.

“Old One: (artfully) All the unnatural things and all the disagreeable ones are decent. In Constantinople it isn’t decent for a woman to show her lips. Man invented that word, ‘decent.’ With God there is no decent or indecent. He made ’em all, the good and the bad. Don’t you know your Browning? He made you, Allen Blynn, what you are.

“A. B.: And he made you, you canker! And he made me strong to fight you. Retro! Imp of Darkness! ’Raus!

“Old One: Are you so strong?

“A. B.: No!... Get out!

“Old One: Neither is Leopold—Leopold, your bosom-friend—

“A. B.: (smiting him) Back to hell, you miserable liar! Back! Back!

“Old One: (retreating) Ho! ho! ho! ho! Out haro! out haro! ho! ho! Neither is Leopold!... Leopold!... Leopold!”

On other pages he was full of hope. The dream had come true. He was planning out his life with her. “We must make this go right,” he said. “The world is writing its books against us. Every little novelist and every little playwright is hinting dark things against marriage. They sneer at all the habits of the race and cry, ‘Liberty for the emotions.’ ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they tempt, ‘and also thy neighbor’s wife. Marriage is servitude and a restriction; let’s wallow and be natural.’ Liars and servants of the Old One, every mother’s son. But we must watch carefully. Marriage is like any other attempt at living; it must be tended and watched and fed, not squandered or tossed about. We’ll spend our store of affection like other gifts, not lavishly all at once in one mad spree, but with rare economy; and we’ll keep adding new funds to the old by sharing associations together. We must not begin to have separate interests or even different friends. Marriage is a wonderful art; the ideal is ever beyond achievement, but it is worth striving for.... Did you say, ‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus’?

“I have two complete and separate lives,” he wrote further; “the one I live in the day-time, serious, mature, full of windy arguments of state, books, religion, literature, education; the one I live at night when the hurlyburly of the day is done and I travel these pages with you. My very style is different in these two personalities. In the broad light of day I am somewhat stilted and over-oldish for one so young; here with you sitting sleepy-eyed in the chair before me, I am lithe and bold and gay and boyish. There are no sweethearts in the day-time for Allen Blynn. And that’s a good thing, too; or he couldn’t do a proper day’s work. Sometimes you do bob in, but I rise politely, put on my spectacles, usher you firmly to the door and bid you a pleasant but peremptory ‘good morning.’ Sometimes you slip in by the window, and then I am done for.”

The “Lady of the Interruption” came in for a comment or two. “You have a wrong notion of that Lady; and I have encouraged it; you ask such persistent questions about her eyes and her hair and her dresses—about all of which I know nothing. She is at least fifty, but I have carefully concealed that from you. Your wide-open eyes see a life-partner there and I affect to wonder if it might not be. That’s playing the game square—a little too square, perhaps. At any rate it is right penance for all my sins of desire; and it pleases Conscience mightily and makes the Old One howl.”

Those dictated letters to the family! Great Scott! How self-conscious and bookish they were. Daylight wrote every line of them, affirmed Allen Blynn.

Dawn was slowly touching the edge of a New Jersey pine wood; but Gorgas was not at all aware of that. Never had sleep seemed so foreign to her needs.

Breathlessly she read on until within a page or two of the end.

“What does he mean? What does he mean?” she fingered the scant leaves that remained. “He said there was another—‘There is—and there isn’t at all,’ he said.”

The end came abruptly. It was dated only a few weeks ago. Before he had left for his lecture trip he had had a casual talk with Leopold, he wrote. What Leopold really said is not recorded—Leopold was too honest a man to have lied—but, nevertheless, Allen Blynn came away with the certain impression that the long vigil had come to naught. Poets, lovers and madmen have such seething brains!

“I have climbed to my ‘Top-o’-the-hill,’” wrote Allen; “beyond is Canaan, but it is not for me.”

“How could he? How could he?” Gorgas whispered. “This is terrible, Allen Blynn.” Solicitude for her man quite outweighed her own loss.

She read on: “Within sight of the promised land I must die and be buried in the Valley of Moab,” he wrote on the final page. “What sin I have committed I know not.... And now you will never find me out, my child. Your birthday gift—this book of absurd confessions—must be buried with me.

“‘And Jehovah showed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan and all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, and the South, and the Plain of the Valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar.... And He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab; but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’”

“Finis” was written in deliberate ink; but a white space below had left room for a scrawl in pencil: “You are out there in the cab, little woman, and Canaan is around and about me; yet I must not speak. When you read these pages you will know and understand. The Old One is fighting hard with me to break the faith; but I cannot, now. Our life together must not begin this way. You must go home, and I must not have it on my soul that I even so much as touched you. There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. In my stupid, iron-set, prejudiced, superstitious brain you are a child until tomorrow. Tomorrow you will be something other, my right woman. That other I will claim, but—tomorrow. Tomorrow!

“Your ecstatic, maybe-foolish, and altogether glorified,

“Vinegar Saint.”

“Oh, Allen Blynn! Allen Blynn!” the tearful little woman laughed in her joy. “You are too funny! You are too, too funny!”

THE END