The Professor's House........................................................................................................................................1

Willa Cather .............................................................................................................................................1

The moving was over and done. Professor St. Peter was alone in the dismantled house where he had lived

ever since his marriage, where he had worked out his career and brought up his two daughters. It was almost

as ugly as it is possible for a house to be; square, three stories in height, painted the colour of ashes the

front porch just too narrow for comfort, with a slanting floor and sagging steps. As he walked slowly about

the empty, echoing rooms on that bright September morning, the Professor regarded thoughtfully the needless

inconveniences he had put up with for so long; the stairs that were too steep, the halls that were too cramped,

the awkward oak mantles with thick round posts crowned by bumptious wooden balls, over greentiled

Certain wobbly stair treads, certain creaky boards in the upstairs hall, had made him wince many times a day

for twentyodd years and they still creaked and wobbled. He had a deft hand with tools, he could easily

have fixed them, but there were always so many things to fix, and there was not time enough to go round. He

went into the kitchen, where he had carpentered under a succession of cooks, went up to the bathroom on

the second floor, where there was only a painted tin tub; the taps were so old that no plumber could ever

screw them tight enough to stop the drip, the window could only be coaxed up and down by wriggling, and

the doors of the linen closet didn't fit. He had sympathized with his daughters' dissatisfaction, though he

could never quite agree with them that the bath should be the most attractive room in the house. He had spent

the happiest years of his youth in a house at Versailles where it distinctly was not, and he had known many

charming people who had no bath at all. However, as his wife said: "If your country has contributed one

thing, at least, to civilization, why not have it?" Many a night, after blowing out his study lamp, he had leaped

into that tub, clad in his pyjamas, to give it another coat of some one of the many paints that were advertised

The Professor in pyjamas was not an unpleasant sight; for looks, the fewer clothes he had on, the better.

Anything that clung to his body showed it to be built upon extremely good bones, with the slender hips and

springy shoulders of a tireless swimmer. Though he was born on Lake Michigan, of mixed stock (Canadian

French on one side, and American farmers on the other), St. Peter was commonly said to look like a Spaniard.

That was possibly because he had been in Spain a good deal, and was an authority on certain phases of

Spanish history. He had a long brown face, with an oval chin over which he wore a close trimmed

VanDyke, like a tuft of shiny black fur. With this silky, very black hair, he had a tawny skin with gold lights

in it, a hawk nose, and hawklike eyes brown and gold and green. They were set in ample cavities, with

plenty of room to move about, under thick, curly, black eyebrows that turned up sharply at the outer ends,

like military moustaches. His wickedlooking eyebrows made his students call him Mephistopheles and

there was no evading the searching eyes underneath them; eyes that in a flash could pick out a friend or an

unusual stranger from a throng. They had lost none of their fire, though just now the man behind them was

His daughter Kathleen, who had done several successful studies of him in watercolour, had once said:

"The thing that really makes Papa handsome is the modelling of his head between the top of his ear and his

crown; it is quite the best thing about him." That part of his head was high, polished, hard as bronze, and the

closegrowing black hair threw off a streak of light along the rounded ridge where the skull was fullest. The

mould of his head on the side was so individual and definite, so far from casual, that it was more like a

statue's head than a man's. From one of the dismantled windows the Professor happened to look out into his

back garden, and at that cheerful sight he went quickly downstairs and escaped from the dusty air and brutal

His walledin garden had been the comfort of his life and it was the one thing his neighbours held against

him. He started to make it soon after the birth of his first daughter, when his wife began to be unreasonable

about his spending so much time at the lake and on the tennis court. In this undertaking he got help and

encouragement from his landlord, a retired German farmer,goodnatured and lenient about everything but

spending money. If the Professor happened to have a new baby at home, or a faculty dinner, or an illness in

the family, or any unusual expense, Appelhoff cheerfully waited for the rent; but pay for repairs he would

not. When it was a question of the garden, however, the old man sometimes stretched a point. He helped his

tenant with seeds and slips and sound advice, and with his twisted old back. He even spent a little money to

The Professor had succeeded in making a French garden in Hamilton. There was not a blade of grass; it was a

tidy halfacre of glistening gravel and glistening shrubs and bright flowers. There were trees, of course; a

spreading horsechestnut, a row of slender Lombardy poplars at the back, along the white wall, and in the

middle two symmetrical, roundtopped lindentrees. Masses of greenbrier grew in the corners, the prickly

stems interwoven and clipped until they were like great bushes. There was a bed for salad herbs.

Salmonpink geraniums dripped over the wall. The French marigolds and dahlias were just now at their best

such dahlias as no one else in Hamilton could grow. St. Peter had tended this bit of ground for over

twenty years, and had got the upper hand of it. In the spring, when homesickness for other lands and the fret

of things unaccomplished awoke, he worked off his discontent here. In the long hot summers, when he could

not go abroad, he stayed at home with his garden, sending his wife and daughters to Colorado to escape the

humid prairie heat, so nourishing to wheat and corn, so exhausting to human beings. In those months when he

was a bachelor again, he brought down his books and papers and worked in a deck chair under the

lindentrees; breakfasted and lunched and had his tea in the garden. And it was there he and Tom Outland

On this September morning, however, St. Peter knew that he could not evade the unpleasant effects of change

by tarrying among his autumn flowers. He must plunge in like a man, and get used to the feeling that under

his workroom there was a dead, empty house. He broke off a geranium blossom, and with it still in his hand

went resolutely up two flights of stairs to the third floor where, under the slope of the mansard roof, there was

The low ceiling sloped down on three sides, the slant being interrupted on the east by a single square window,

swinging outward on hinges and held ajar by a hook in the sill. This was the sole opening for light and air.

Walls and ceiling alike were covered with a yellow paper which had once been very ugly, but had faded into

inoffensive neutrality. The matting on the floor was worn and scratchy. Against the wall stood an old walnut

table, with one leaf up, holding piles of orderly papers. Before it was a canebacked office chair that turned

Downstairs, off the back parlour, he had a show study, with roomy shelves where his library was housed, and

a proper desk at which he wrote letters. But it was a sham. This was the place where he worked. And not he

alone. For three weeks in the fall, and again three in the spring, he shared his cuddy with Augusta, the

sewingwoman, niece of his old landlord, a reliable, methodical spinster, a German Catholic and very

Since Augusta finished her day's work at five o'clock, and the Professor, on weekdays, worked here only at

night, they did not elbow each other too much. Besides, neither was devoid of consideration. Every evening,

before she left, Augusta swept up the scraps from the floor, rolled her patterns, closed the sewingmachine,

and picked ravellings off the boxcouch, so that there would be no threads to stick to the Professor's old

St. Peter, in his turn, when he put out his lamp after midnight, was careful to brush away ashes and tobacco

crumbs smoking was very distasteful to Augusta and to open the hinged window back as far as it

would go, on the second hook, so that the night wind might carry away the smell of his pipe as much as

possible. The unfinished dresses which she left hanging on the forms, however, were often so saturated with

These "forms" were the subject of much banter between them. The one which Augusta called "the bust" stood

in the darkest corner of the room, upon a high wooden chest in which blankets and winter wraps were yearly

stored. It was a headless, armless female torso, covered with strong black cotton, and so richly developed in

the part for which it was named that the Professor once explained to Augusta how, in calling it so, she

followed a natural law of language, termed, for convenience, metonymy. Augusta enjoyed the Professor

when he was risque since she was sure of his ultimate delicacy. Though this figure looked so ample and

billowy (as if you might lay your head upon its deepbreathing softness and rest safe forever), if you touched

it you suffered a severe shock, no matter how many times you had touched it before. It presented the most

unsympathetic surface imaginable. Its hardness was not that of wood, which responds to concussion with

living vibration and is stimulating to the hand, nor that of felt, which drinks something from the fingers. It

was a dead, opaque, lumpy solidity, like chunks of putty, or tightly packed sawdust very disappointing to

the tactile sense, yet somehow always fooling you again. For no matter how often you had bumped up against

that torso, you could never believe that contact with it would be as bad as it was.

The second form was more selfrevelatory; a fulllength female figure in a smart wire skirt with a trim metal

waist line. It had no legs, as one could see all too well, no viscera behind its glistening ribs, and its bosom

resembled a strong wire birdcage. But St. Peter contended that it had a nervous system. When Augusta left

it clad for the night in a new party dress for Rosamond or Kathleen, it often took on a sprightly, tricky air, as

if it were going out for the evening to make a great show of being harumscarum, giddy, folle. It seemed just

on the point of tripping downstairs, or on tiptoe, waiting for the waltz to begin. At times the wire lady was

most convincing in her pose as a woman of light behaviour, but she never fooled St. Peter. He had his blind

Augusta had somehow got it into her head that these forms were unsuitable companions for one engaged in

scholarly pursuits, and she periodically apologized for their presence when she came to install herself and

"Not at all, Augusta," the Professor had often said. "If they were good enough for Monsieur Bergeret, they

This morning, as St. Peter was sitting in his desk chair, looking musingly at the pile of papers before him, the

door opened and there stood Augusta herself. How astonishing that he had not heard her heavy, deliberate

"Why, Professor St. Peter! I never thought of finding you here, or I'd have knocked. I guess we will have to

St. Peter had risen Augusta loved his manners but he offered her the sewingmachine chair and

"Sit down, Augusta, and we'll talk it over. I'm not moving just yet don't want to disturb all my papers. I'm

staying on until I finish a piece of writing. I've seen your uncle about it. I'll work here, and board at the new

house. But this is confidential. If it were noised about, people might begin to say that Mrs. St. Peter and I had

Augusta dropped her eyes in an indulgent smile. "I think people in your station would say separated."

"Exactly; a good scientific term, too. Well, we haven't, you know. But I'm going to write on here for a while."

"Very well, sir. And I won't always be getting in your way now. In the new house you have a beautiful study

"Oh, Professor, I never really minded!" Augusta spoke with feeling. She rose and took up the black bust in

She laughed. "Oh, I'm not going to carry them through the street, Professor! The grocery boy is downstairs

"Why, yes, to the new house, Professor. I've come a week before my regular time, to make curtains and hem

linen for Mrs. St. Peter. I'll take everything over this morning except the sewing machine that's too heavy

for the cart, so the boy will come back for it with the delivery wagon. Would you just open the door for me,

"No, I won't! Not at all. You don't need her to make curtains. I can't have this room changed if I'm going to

work here. He can take the sewing machine yes. But put her back on the chest where she belongs, please.

She does very well there." St. Peter had got to the door, and stood with his back against it.

"But next week I'll be working on Mrs. St. Peter's clothes, and I'll need the forms. As the boy's here, he'll just

"I'm damned if he will! They shan't be wheeled. They stay right there in their own place. You shan't take

Augusta was vexed with him now, and a little ashamed of him. "But, Professor, I can't work without my

forms. They've been in your way all these years, and you've always complained of them, so don't be contrary,

"I never complained, Augusta. Perhaps of certain disappointments they recalled, or of cruel biological

necessities they imply but of them individually, never! Go and buy some new ones for your airy atelier, as

many as you wish I'm said to be rich now, am I not? Go buy, but you can't have my women. That's

Augusta looked down her nose as she did at church when the dark sins were mentioned. "Professor," she said

severely, "I think this time you are carrying a joke too far. You never used to." From the tilt of her chin he

"No matter what you think, you can't have them." They considered, both were in earnest now. Augusta was

"Your patterns? Oh, yes, the cutout things you keep in the couch with my old notebooks? Certainly, you

can have them. Let me lift it for you." He raised the hinged top of the boxcouch that stood against the wall,

under the slope of the ceiling. At one end of the upholstered box were piles of notebooks and bundles of

manuscript tied up in square packages with mason's cord. At the other end were many little rolls of patterns,

cut out of newspapers and tied with bits of ribbon, gingham, silk, georgette; notched charts which followed

the changing stature and figures of the Misses St. Peter from early childhood to womanhood. In the middle of

"I see we shall have some difficulty in separating our life work, Augusta. We've kept our papers together a

"Yes, Professor. When I first came to sew for Mrs. St. Peter, I never thought I should grow grey in her

He started. What other future could Augusta possibly have expected? This disclosure amazed him.

"Well, well, we mustn't think mournfully of it, Augusta. Life doesn't turn out for any of us as we plan." He

stood and watched her large slow hands travel about among the little packets, as she put them into his

wastebasket to carry them down to the cart. He had often wondered how she managed to sew with hands

that folded and unfolded as rigidly as umbrellas no light French touch about Augusta; when she sewed on

a bow, it stayed there. She herself was tall, largeboned, flat and stiff, with a plain, solid face, and brown

eyes not destitute of fun. As she knelt by the couch, sorting her patterns, he stood beside her, his hand on the

lid, though it would have stayed up unsupported. Her last remark had troubled him.

"What a fine lot of hair you have, Augusta! You know I think it's rather nice, that grey wave on each side.

Gives it character. You'll never need any of this false hair that's in all the shop windows."

"There's altogether too much of that, Professor. So many of my customers are using it now ladies you

wouldn't expect would. They say most of it was cut off the heads of dead Chinamen. Really, it's got to be

"Well, he said it was getting to be a scandal in the Church, and a priest couldn't go to see a pious woman any

more without finding switches and rats and transformations lying about her room, and it was disgusting."

"Goodness gracious, Augusta! What business has a priest going to see a woman in the room where she takes

Augusta grew red, and tried to look angry, but her laugh narrowly missed being a giggle. "He goes to give

them the Sacrament, of course, Professor! You've made up your mind to be contrary today, haven't you?"

"You relieve me greatly. Yes, I suppose in cases of sudden illness the hair would be lying about where it was

lightly taken off. But as you first quoted the priest, Augusta, it was rather shocking. You'll never convert me

back to the religion of my fathers now, if you're going to sew in the new house and I'm going to work on

here. Who is ever to remind me when it's All Souls' day, or Ember day, or Maundy Thursday, or anything?"

Augusta said she must be leaving. St. Peter heard her wellknown tread as she descended the stairs. How

much she reminded him of, to be sure! She had been most at the house in the days when his daughters were

little girls and needed so many clean frocks. It was in those very years that he was beginning his great work;

when the desire to do it and the difficulties attending such a project strove together in his mind like Macbeth's

two spent swimmers years when he had the courage to say to himself: "I will do this dazzling, this

During the fifteen years he had been working on his Spanish Adventures in North America, this room had

been his centre of operations. There had been delightful excursions and digressions; the two Sabbatical years

when he was in Spain studying records, two summers in the Southwest on the trail of his adventurers, another

in Old Mexico, dashes to France to see his fosterbrothers. But the notes and the records and the ideas always

came back to this room. It was here they were digested and sorted, and woven into their proper place in his

Fairly considered, the sewingroom was the most inconvenient study a man could possibly have, but it was

the one place in the house where he could get isolation, insulation from the engaging drama of domestic life.

No one was tramping over him, and only a vague sense, generally pleasant, of what went on below came up

the narrow stairway. There were certainly no other advantages. The furnace heat did not reach the third floor.

There was no way to warm the sewingroom, except by a rusty, round gas stove with no flue a stove

which consumed gas imperfectly and contaminated the air. To remedy this, the window must be left open

otherwise, with the ceiling so low, the air would speedily become unfit to breathe. If the stove were turned

down, and the window left open a little way, a sudden gust of wind would blow the wretched thing out

altogether, and a deeply absorbed man might be asphyxiated before he knew it. The Professor had found that

the best method, in winter, was to turn the gas on full and keep the window wide on the hook, even if he had

to put on a leather jacket over his workingcoat. By that arrangement he had somehow managed to get air

He wondered now why he had never looked about for a better stove, a newer model; or why he had not at

least painted this one, flaky with rust. But he had been able to get on only by neglecting negative comforts.

He was by no means an ascetic. He knew that he was terribly selfish about personal pleasures, fought for

them. If a thing gave him delight, he got it, if he sold his shirt for it. By doing without many socalled

necessities he had managed to have his luxuries. He might, for instance, have had a convenient electric

droplight attached to the socket above his writing table. Preferably he wrote by a faithful kerosene lamp

which he filled and tended himself. But sometimes he found that the oilcan in the closet was empty; then, to

get more, he would have had to go down through the house to the cellar, and on his way he would almost

surely become interested in what the children were doing or in what his wife was doing or he would

notice that the kitchen linoleum was breaking under the sink where the maid kicked it up, and he would stop

to tack it down. On that perilous journey down through the human house he might lose his mood, his

enthusiasm, even his temper. So when the lamp was empty and that usually occurred when he was in the

middle of a most important passage he jammed an eyeshade on his forehead and worked by the glare of

that tormenting pearshaped bulb, sticking out of the wall on a short curved neck just about four feet above

his table. It was hard on eyes even as good as his. But once at his desk, he didn't dare quit it. He had found

that you can train the mind to be active at a fixed time, just as the stomach is trained to be hungry at certain

hours of the day. If someone in the family happened to be sick, he didn't go to his study at all. Two evenings

of the week he spent with his wife and daughters, and one evening he and his wife went out to dinner, or to

the theatre or a concert. That left him only four. He had Saturdays and Sundays, of course, and on those two

days he worked like a miner under a landslide. Augusta was not allowed to come on Saturday, though she

was paid for that day. All the while that he was working so fiercely by night, he was earning his living during

the day; carrying full university work and feeding himself out to hundreds of students in lectures and

St. Peter had managed for years to live two lives, both of them very intense. He would willingly have cut

down on his university work, would willingly have given his students chaff and sawdust many instructors

had nothing else to give them and got on very well but his misfortune was that he loved youth he was

weak to it, it kindled him. If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a

whole lectureroom full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant. That ardour could command

him. It hadn't worn out with years, this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it had

But he had burned his candle at both ends to some purpose he had got what he wanted. By many petty

economies of purse, he had managed to be extravagant with not a cent in the world but with his professor's

salary he didn't, of course, touch his wife's small income from her father. By eliminations and

combinations so many and subtle that it now made his head ache to think of them, he had done full justice to

his university lectures, and at the same time carried on an engrossing piece of creative work. A man can do

anything if he wishes to enough, St. Peter believed. Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process.

If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement. He had been able to

measure it, roughly, just once, in his student Tom Outland, and he had foretold.

There was one fine thing about this room that had been the scene of so many defeats and triumphs. From the

window he could see, far away, just on the horizon, a long, blue, hazy smear Lake Michigan, the inland

sea of his childhood. Whenever he was tired and dull, when the white pages before him remained blank or

were full of scratched out sentences, then he left his desk, took the train to a little station twelve miles away,

and spent a day on the lake with his sailboat; jumping out to swim, floating on his back alongside, then

When he remembered his childhood, he remembered blue water. There were certain human figures against it,

of course; his practical, strongwilled Methodist mother, his gentle, weanedaway Catholic father, the old

Kanuck grandfather, various brothers and sisters. But the great fact in life, the always possible escape from

dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could

shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you

knew you would soon be free. It was the first thing one saw in the morning, across the rugged cow pasture

studded with shaggy pines, and it ran through the days like the weather, not a thing thought about, but a part

of consciousness itself. When the ice chunks came in of a winter morning, crumbly and white, throwing off

gold and rose coloured reflections from a coppercoloured sun behind the grey clouds, he didn't observe the

detail or know what it was that made him happy; but now, forty years later, he could recall all its aspects

perfectly. They had made pictures in him when he was unwilling and unconscious, when his eyes were

When he was eight years old, his parents sold the lakeside farm and dragged him and his brothers and sisters

out to the wheat lands of central Kansas. St. Peter nearly died of it. Never could he forget the few moments

on the train when that sudden, innocent blue across the sand dunes was dying for ever from his sight. It was

like sinking for the third time. No later anguish, and he had had his share, went so deep or seemed so final.

Even in his long, happy student years with the Thierault family in France, that stretch of blue water was the

one thing he was homesick for. In the summer he used to go with the Thierault boys to Brittany or to the

Languedoc coast; but his lake was itself, as the Channel and the Mediterranean were themselves. "No," he

used to tell the boys, who were always asking him about le Michigan, "it is altogether different. It is a sea,

and yet it is not salt. It is blue, but quite another blue. Yes, there are clouds and mists and seagulls, butI

Afterward, when St. Peter was looking for a professorship, because he was very much in love and must marry

at once, out of the several positions offered him he took the one at Hamilton, not because it was the best, but

because it seemed to him that any place near the lake was a place where one could live. The sight of it from

his study window these many years had been of more assistance than all the convenient things he had done

Just in that corner, under Augusta's archaic "forms," he had always meant to put the filing cabinets he had

never spared the time or money to buy. They would have held all his notes and pamphlets, and the spasmodic

rough drafts of passages far ahead. But he never got them, and now he really didn't need them; it would be

like locking the stable after the horse is stolen. For the horse was gone that was the thing he was feeling

most just now. In spite of all he'd neglected, he had completed his Spanish Adventurers in eight volumes

without filing cabinets or money or a decent study or a decent stove and without encouragement, Heaven

knew! For all the interest the first three volumes awoke in the world, he might as well have dropped them into

Lake Michigan. They had been timidly reviewed by other professors of history, in technical and educational

journals. Nobody saw that he was trying to do something quite different they merely thought he was

trying to do the usual thing, and had not succeeded very well. They recommended to him the more even and

St. Peter hadn't, he could honestly say, cared a whoop not in those golden days. When the whole plan of

his narrative was coming clearer and clearer all the time, when he could feel his hand growing easier with his

material, when all the foolish conventions about that kind of writing were falling away and his relation with

his work was becoming every day more simple, natural, and happy , he cared as little as the Spanish

Adventurers themselves what Professor SoandSo thought about them. With the fourth volume he began to

be aware that a few young men, scattered about the United States and England, were intensely interested in

his experiment. With the fifth and sixth, they began to express their interest in lectures and in print. The two

last volumes brought him a certain international reputation and what were called rewards among them, the

Oxford prize for history, with its five thousand pounds, which had built him the new house into which he did

"Godfrey," his wife had gravely said one day, when she detected an ironical turn in some remark he made

about the new house, "is there something you would rather have done with that money than to have built a

"Nothing, my dear, nothing. If with that cheque I could have brought back the fun I had writing my history,

you'd never have got your house. But one couldn't get that for twenty thousand dollars. The great pleasures

That evening St. Peter was in the new house, dressing for dinner. His two daughters and their husbands were

dining with them, also an English visitor. Mrs. St. Peter heard the shower going as she passed his door. She

entered his room and waited until he came out in his bath robe, rubbing his wet, inkblack hair with a towel.

"Surely you'll admit that you like having your own bath," she said, looking past him into the glittering white

"Whoever said I didn't? But more than anything else, I like my closets. I like having room for all my clothes,

without hanging one coat on top of another, and not having to get down on my marrowbones and fumble in

"Of course you do. And it's much more dignified, at your age, to have a room of your own."

"It's convenient, certainly, though I hope I'm not so old as to be personally repulsive?" He glanced into the

Mrs. St. Peter laughed, a pleasant, easy laugh with genuine amusement in it. "No, you are very handsome,

my dear, especially in your bathrobe. You grow betterlooking and more intolerant all the time."

"Intolerant?" He put down his shoe and looked up at her. The thing that stuck in his mind constantly was that

she was growing more and more intolerant, about everything except her sonsinlaw; that she would

"I suppose it's a natural process," she went on, "but you ought to try, try seriously, I mean, to curb it where it

affects the happiness of your daughters. You are too severe with Scott and Louie. All young men have foolish

St. Peter sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward and playing absently with the tassels of his

bathrobe. "Why, Lillian, I have exercised the virtue of patience with those two young men more than with

all the thousands of young ruffians who have gone through my classrooms. My forbearance is overstrained,

"Oh, Godfrey, how can you be such a poor judge of your own behaviour? But we won't argue about it now.

You'll put on your dinner coat? And do try to be sympathetic and agreeable tonight."

Half an hour later Mr. and Mrs. Scott McGregor and Mr. and Mrs. Louie Marsellus arrived, and soon after

them the English scholar, Sir Edgar Spilling, so anxious to do the usual thing in America that he wore a

morning street suit. He was a gaunt, rugged, largeboned man of fifty, with long legs and arms, a

pearshaped face, and a drooping, prewar moustache. His specialty was Spanish history, and he had come

all the way to Hamilton, from his cousin's place in Saskatchewan, to enquire about some of Doctor St. Peter's

Introductions over, it was the Professor's son inlaw, Louie Marsellus, who took Sir Edgar in hand. He

remembered having met in China a Walter Spilling, who was, it turned out, a brother of Sir Edgar. Marsellus

had also a brother there, engaged in the silk trade. They exchanged opinions on conditions of the Orient,

while young McGregor put on his hornrimmed spectacles and roamed restlessly up and down the library.

Mrs. St. Peter was very fair, pink and gold, a pale gold, now that she was becoming a little grey. The tints

of her face and hair and lashes were so soft that one did not realize, on first meeting her, how very definitely

and decidedly her features were cut, under the smiling infusion of colour. When she was annoyed or tired, the

lines became severe. Rosamond, the elder daughter, resembled her mother in feature, though her face was

heavier. Her colouring was altogether different; dusky black hair, deep dark eyes, a soft white skin with rich

brunette red in her cheeks and lips. Nearly everyone considered Rosamond brilliantly beautiful. Her father,

though he was very proud of her, demurred from the general opinion. He thought her too tall, with a rather

awkward carriage. She stooped a trifle, and was wide in the hips and shoulders. She had, he sometimes

remarked to her mother, exactly the wide femur and flat shoulder blade of his old slabsided Kanuck

grandfather. For a treehewer they were an asset. But St. Peter was very critical. Most people saw only

Rosamond's smooth black head and white throat, and the red of her curved lips that was like the duskiness of

Kathleen, the younger daughter, looked even younger than she was had the slender, undeveloped figure

then very much in vogue. She was pale, with light hazel eyes, and her hair was hazelcoloured with distinctly

green glints to it. To her father there was something very charming in the curious shadows her wide

cheekbones cast over her cheeks, and in the spirited tilt of her head. Her figure in profile, he used to tell her,

Mrs. St. Peter frankly liked having a soninlaw who could tot up acquaintances with Sir Edgar from the

Soudan to Alaska. Scott, she saw, was going to be sulky because Sir Edgar and Marsellus were talking about

things beyond his little circle of interests. She made no effort to draw him into the conversation, but let him

prowl like a restless leopard among the books. The Professor was amiable, but quiet. When the second maid

came to the door and signalled that dinner was ready dinner was signalled, not announced Mrs. St.

Peter took Sir Edgar and guided him to his seat at her right, while the others found their usual places. After

they had finished the soup, she had some difficulty in summoning the little maid to take away the plates, and

explained to her guest that the electric bell, under the table, wasn't connected as yet they had been in the

"Oh? Then if I had happened along a fortnight ago I shouldn't have found you here? But it must be very

interesting, building you own house and arranging it as you like," he responded.

Marsellus, silenced during the soup, came in with a warm smile and a slight shrug of the shoulders. "Building

is the word with us, Sir Edgar, my oh, isn't it! My wife and I are in the throes of it. We are building a

country house, rather an ambitious affair, out on the wooded shores of Lake Michigan. Perhaps you would

like to run out in my car and see it? What are your engagements for tomorrow? I can take you out in half an

hour, and we can lunch at the Country Club. We have a magnificent site; primeval forest behind us and the

lake in front, with our own beach my fatherinlaw, you must know, is a formidable swimmer. We've

been singularly fortunate in architect, a young Norwegian, trained in Paris. He's doing us a Norwegian

manor house, very harmonious with its setting, just the right thing for rugged pine woods and high headlands.

Sir Edgar seemed most willing to make this excursion, and allowed Marsellus to fix an hour, greatly to the

surprise of McGregor, whose look at his wife implied that he entertained serious doubts whether this baronet

The engagement made, Louie turned to Mrs. St. Peter. "And won't you come too, Dearest? You haven't been

out since we got our wonderful wroughtiron door fittings from Chicago. We found just the right sort of

hinge and latch, Sir Edgar, and had all the others copied from it. None of your Colonial glass knobs for us!"

Mrs. St. Peter sighed. Scott and Kathleen had just glassknobbed their new bungalow throughout, yet she

knew Louie didn't mean to hurt their feelings it was his heedless enthusiasm that made him often say

"We've been extremely fortunate in getting all the little things right," Louie was gladly confiding to Sir

Edgar. "There's really not a flaw in the conception. I can say that, because I'm a mere on looker; the whole

thing's been done by the Norwegian and my wife and Mrs. St. Peter. And," he put his hand down

affectionately upon Mrs. St. Peter's bare arm, " and we've named our place! I've already ordered the house

stationary. No, Rosamond, I won't keep our little secret any longer. It will please your father, as well as your

He dropped the announcement and drew back. His motherinlaw rose to it Spilling could scarcely be

"Yes, isn't it? I knew that would go to your hearts." The Professor had expressed his emotion only by lifting

his heavy, sharply uptwisted eyebrow. "let me explain, Sir Edgar," Marsellus went on eagerly. "We have

named our place for Tom Outland, a brilliant young American scientist and inventor, who was killed in

Flanders, fighting with the Foreign Legion, the second year of the war, when he was barely thirty years of

age. Before he dashed off to the front, this youngster had discovered the principle of the Outland vacuum,

worked out the construction of the bulkheaded vacuum that is revolutionizing aviation. He had not only

invented it, but, curiously enough for such a hotheaded fellow, had taken pains to protect it. He had no time

to communicate his discovery or to commercialize it simply bolted to the front and left the most important

Sir Edgar, fork arrested, looked a trifle dazed. "Am I to understand that you are referring to the inventor of

Louie was delighted. "Exactly that! Of course you would know all about it. My wife was young Outland's

fianc e is virtually his widow. Before he went to France he made a will in her favour; he had no living

relatives, indeed. Toward the close of the war we began to sense the importance of what Outland had been

doing in his laboratory I am an electrical engineer by profession. We called in the assistance of experts

and got the idea over from the laboratory to the trade. The monetary returns have been and are, of course,

While Louie paused long enough to have some intercourse with the roast before it was taken away, Sir Edgar

remarked that he himself had been in the Air Service during the war, in the construction department, and that

it was most extraordinary to come thus by chance upon the genesis of the Outland vacuum.

"You see," Louie told him, "Outland got nothing out of it but death and glory. Naturally, we feel terribly

indebted. We feel it's our first duty in life to use that money as he would have wished we've endowed

scholarships in his own university here, and that sort of thing. But our house we want to have as a sort of

memorial to him. We are going to transfer his laboratory there, if the university will permit, all the

apparatus he worked with. We have a room for his library and pictures. When his brother scientists come to

Hamilton to look him up, to get information about him, as they are doing now already, at Outland they will

"Even Rosamond," murmured McGregor, his eyes upon his cool green salad. He was struggling with a desire

to shout to the Britisher that Marsellus had never so much as seen Tom Outland, while he, McGregor, had

Sir Edgar was as much interested as he was mystified. He had come here to talk about manuscripts shut up in

certain mouldering monasteries in Spain, but he had almost forgotten them in the turn the conversation had

taken. He was genuinely interested in aviation and all its problems. He asked few questions, and his

comments were almost entirely limited to the single exclamation, "Oh!" But this, from his lips, could mean a

great many things; indifference, sharp interrogation, sympathetic interest, the nervousness of a modest man

on hearing disclosures of a delicately personal nature. McGregor, before the others had finished dessert, drew

a big cigar from his pocket and lit it at one of the table candles, as the horridest thing he could think of to do.

When they left the diningroom, St. Peter, who had scarcely spoken during dinner, took Sir Edgar's arm and

said to his wife: "If you will excuse us, my dear, we have some technical matters to discuss." Leading his

Marsellus looked distinctly disappointed. He stood gazing wistfully after them, like a little boy told to go to

bed. Louie's eyes were vividly blue, like hot sapphires, but the rest of his face had little colour he was a

rather mackereltinted man. Only his eyes, and his quick, impetuous movements, gave out the zest for life

with which he was always bubbling. There was nothing Semitic about his countenance except his nose

that took the lead. It was not at all an unpleasing feature, but it grew out of his face with masterful strength,

Mrs. St. Peter, always concerned for Louie, asked him to come and look at the new rug in her bedroom. This

McGregor was left with the two sisters. "Outland, outlandish!" he muttered, while he fumbled about for an

ashtray. Rosamond pretended not to hear him, but the dusky red on her cheeks crept a little farther toward her

ears. "Remember, we are leaving early, Scott," said Kathleen. "You have to finish your editorial tonight."

"Surely you don't make him work at night, too?" Rosamond asked. "Doesn't he have to rest his brain

"Oh, that's the trouble with me," Scott assured her. "Unless I keep my nose to the grindstone, I'm too damned

spontaneous and tell the truth, and the public won't stand for it. It's not an editorial I have to finish, it's the

daily prose poem I do for the syndicate, for which I get twentyfive beans. This is the motif:

He threw his cigarend savagely into the fireplace. He knew that Rosamond detested his editorials and his

jingles. She had fastidious taste in literature, like her mother though he didn't think she had half the

general intelligence of his wife. She also, now that she was Tom Outland's heir, detested to hear sums of

After the goodnights were said, and they were outside the front door, McGregor seized his wife's elbow and

rushed her down the walk to the gate where his Ford was parked, breaking out in her ear as they ran: "Now

what the hell is a virtual widow? Does he mean a virtuous widow, or the reverseous? Bang, bang!"

St. Peter awoke the next morning with the wish that he could be transported on his mattress from the new

house to the old. But it was Sunday, and on that day his wife always breakfasted with him. There was no way

When he reached the diningroom Lillian was already at the table, behind the percolator. "Good morning,

Godfrey. I hope you had a good night." Her tone just faintly implied that he hadn't deserved one.

"I had a good conscience." She smiled ruefully at him. "How can you let yourself be ungracious in your own

"Oh, dear! And I went to sleep happy in the belief that I hadn't said anything amiss the whole evening."

"Nor anything aright, that I heard. Your disapproving silence can kill the life of any company."

"It didn't seem to last night. You're entirely wrong about Marsellus. He doesn't notice."

"He's too polite to take notice, but he feels it. He's very sensitive, under a wellschooled impersonal manner."

St. Peter laughed. "Nonsense, Lillian!" If he were, he couldn't pick up a dinner party and walk off with it, as

he almost always does. I don't mind when it's our dinner, but I hate seeing him do it in other people's houses."

"Be fair, Godfrey. You know that if you'd once begun to talk about your work in Spain, Louie would have

"There you are; the dog in the manger! You won't let him discuss your affairs, and you are annoyed when he

"I admit I can't bear it when he talks about Outland as his affair. (I mean Tom, of course, not their

confounded place!) This calling it after him passes my comprehension. And Rosamond's standing for it! It's

Mrs. St. Peter frowned pensively. "I knew you wouldn't like it, but they were so pleased about it, and their

"Hang it, Outland doesn't need their generosity! They've got everything he ought to have had, and the least

they can do is to be quiet about it, and not convert his very bones into a personal asset. It all comes down to

this, my dear: one likes the florid style, or one doesn't. You yourself used not to like it. And will you give me

She refilled his cup and handed it across the table. "Nice hands," he murmured, looking critically at them as

"Thank you. I dislike floridity when it is beaten up to cover the lack of something, to take the place of

something. I never disliked it when it came from exuberance. Then it isn't floridness, it's merely strong

"Very well; some people don't care for strong colour. It fatigues them." He folded his napkin. "Now I must be

"Not quite yet. You never have time to talk to me. Just when did it begin, Godfrey, in the history of manners

that convention that if a man were pleased with his wife or his house or his success, he shouldn't say so,

frankly?" Mrs. St. Peter spoke thoughtfully, as if she had considered this matter before.

"Oh, it goes back a long way. I rather think it began in the Age of Chivalry King Arthur's knights.

Whoever it was lived in that time, some feeling grew up that a man should do fine deeds and not speak of

them, and that he shouldn't speak the name of his lady, but sing of her as a Phyllis or a Nicolette. It's a nice

idea, reserve about one's deepest feelings: keeps them fresh." "The Oriental peoples didn't have an Age of

Chivalry. They didn't need one," Lillian observed. "And this reserve it becomes in itself ostentatious, a

"Oh, my dear, all is vanity! I don't dispute that. Now I must really go, and I wish I could play the game as

well as you do. I have no enthusiasm for being a fatherinlaw. It's you who keep the ball rolling. I fully

"Perhaps," mused his wife, as he rose, "it's because you didn't get the soninlaw you wanted. And yet he

The Professor made no reply to this. Lillian had been fiercely jealous of Tom Outland. As he left the house,

he was reflecting that people who are intensely in love when they marry, and who go on being in love, always

meet with something which suddenly or gradually makes a difference. Sometimes it is the children, or the

grubbiness of being poor, sometimes a second infatuation. In their own case it had been, curiously enough,

St. Peter had met his wife in Paris, when he was but twentyfour, and studying for his doctorate. She too was

studying there. French people thought her an English girl because of her gold hair and fair complexion. With

her really radiant charm, she had a very interesting mind but it was quite wrong to call it mind, the

connotation was false. What she had was a richly endowed nature that responded strongly to life and art, and

very vehement likes and dislikes which were often quite out of all proportion to the trivial object or person

that aroused them. Before his marriage, and for years afterward, Lillian's prejudices, her divinations about

people and art (always instinctive and unexplained, but nearly always right), were the most interesting things

in St. Peters life. When he accepted almost the first position offered him, in order to marry at once, and came

to take the chair of European history at Hamilton, he was thrown upon his wife for mental companionship.

Most of his colleagues were much older than he, but they were not his equals either in scholarship or in

experience of the world. The only other man in the faculty who was carrying on important research work was

Doctor Crane, the professor of physics. St. Peter saw a good deal of him, though outside his specialty he was

uninteresting a narrowminded man, and painfully unattractive. Years ago Crane had begun to suffer

from a malady which in time proved incurable, and which now sent him up for an operation periodically. St.

Peter had had no friend in Hamilton of whom Lillian could possibly be jealous until Tom Outland came

along, so well fitted by nature and early environment to help him with his work on the Spanish Adventurers.

When he had almost reached his old house and his study, the Professor remembered that he really must have

an understanding with his landlord, or the place would be rented over his head. He turned and went down into

another part of the city, by the car shops, where only workmen lived, and found his landlord's little toy house,

set on a hillside, over a basement faced up with red brick and covered with hop vines. Old Appelhoff was

sitting on a bench before his door, making a broom. Raising broom corn was one of his economies. Beside

St. Peter explained that he wanted to stay on in the empty house, and would pay the full rent each month. So

irregular a project annoyed Appelhoff. "I like fine to oblige you, Professor, but dey is several parties looking

at de house already, an' I don't like to lose a year's rent for maybe a few months."

"Oh, that's all right, Fred. I'll take it for the year, to simplify matters. I want to finish my new book before I

Fred still looked uneasy. "I better see de insurance man, eh? It says for purposes of domestic dwelling."

"He won't object. Let's have a look at your garden. What a fine crop of apples and sickle pears you have!"

"I don't like dem trees what don't bear not'ing," said the old man with sly humour, remembering the

Professor's glistening, barren shrubs and the good ground wasted behind his stucco wall.

"I miss her, Professor, but I ain't just lonesome." The old man rubbed his bristly chin. "My Minna here is

"Well, all kinds. When I was young, in de old country, I had it hard to git my wife at all, an' I never had time

to t'ink. When I come to dis country I had to work so turrible hard on dat farm to make crops an' pay debts,

dat I was like a horse. Now I have it easy, an' I take time to t'ink about all dem t'ings."

St. Peter laughed. "We all come to it, Applehoff. That's one thing I'm renting your house for, to have room to

Crossing the public park, on his way back to the old house, he espied his professional rival and enemy,

Professor Horace Langtry, taking a Sunday morning stroll very well got up in English clothes he had

brought back from his customary summer in London, with a bowler hat of unusual block and a hornhandled

walkingstick. In twenty years the two men had scarcely had speech with each other beyond a stiff "good

morning." When Langtry first came to the university he looked hardly more than a boy, with curly brown hair

and such a fresh complexion that the students called him Lily Langtry. His round pink cheeks and round eyes

and round chin made him look rather like a baby grown big. All these years had made little difference, except

that his curls were now quite grey, his rosy cheeks even rosier, and his mouth dropped a little at the corners,

Seeing St. Peter, the younger man turned abruptly into a side alley, but the Professor overtook him.

"Good morning, Langtry. These elms are becoming real trees at last. They've changed a good deal since we

Doctor Langtry moved his rosy chin sidewise over his high double collar. "Good morning, Doctor St. Peter. I

St. Peter stepped abreast of him. "There have been many changes, Langtry, and not all of them are good.

Don't you notice a great difference in the student body as a whole, in the new crop that comes along every

The smooth chin turned again, and the other professor of European history blinked. "In just what respect?"

"Oh, in the allembracing respect of quality! We have hosts of students, but they're a common sort."

"Perhaps. I can't say I've noticed it." The air between the two colleagues was not thawing out any. A

churchbell rang. Langtry started hopefully. "You must excuse me, Doctor St. Peter, I am on my way to

The Professor gave it up with a shrug. "All right, all right, Langtry, as you will. Quelle folie!"

Langtry half turned back, hesitated on the ball of his suddenly speeding foot, and said with faultless

St. Peter waved his hand with a gesture of negation, and detained the churchgoer no longer. He sauntered

along slackly through the hot September sunshine, wondering why Langtry didn't see the absurdity of their

long grudge. They had always been directly opposed in matters of university policy, until it had almost

When young Langtry first came there, his specialty was supposed to be American history. His uncle was

president of the board of regents, and very influential in State politics; the institution had to look to him,

indeed, to get its financial appropriations passed by the Legislature. Langtry was a Tory in his point of view,

and was considered very English in his tone and manner. His lectures were dull, and the students didn't like

him. Every inducement was offered to make his courses popular. Liberal credits were given for collateral

reading. A student could read almost anything that had ever been written in the United States and get credit

for it in American history. He could charge up the time spent in perusing "The Scarlet Letter" to Colonial

history, and "Tom Sawyer" to the Missouri Compromise, it was said. St. Peter openly criticized these lax

methods, both to the faculty and to the regents. Naturally, "Madame Langtry" paid him out. During the

Professor's second Sabbatical year in Spain, Horace and his uncle together very nearly got his department

away from him. They worked so quietly that it was only at the eleventh hour that St. Peter's old students

throughout the State got wind of what was going on, dropped their various businesses and professions for a

few days, and came up to the capital in dozens and saved his place for him. The opposition had been so

formidable that when it came time for his third year away, the Professor had not dared ask for it, but had

taken an extension of his summer vacation instead. The fact that he was carrying on another line of work than

his lectures, and was publishing books that weren't strictly textbooks, had been used against him by

As Langtry felt that the unpopularity of his course was due to his subject, a new chair was created for him.

There couldn't be two heads in European history, so the board of regents made for him a chair of Renaissance

history, or, as St. Peter said, a Renaissance chair of history. Of late years, for reasons that had not much to do

with his lectures, Langtry had prospered better. To the new generations of country and village boys now

pouring into the university in such large numbers, Langtry had become, in a curious way, an instructor in

manners, what is called an "influence." To the football playing farmer boy who had a good allowance

but didn't know how to dress or what to say, Langtry looked like a short cut. He had several times taken

parties of undergraduates to London for the summer, and they had come back wonderfully brushed up. He

introduced a very popular fraternity into the university, and its members looked after his interests, as did its

affiliated sorority. His standing on the faculty was now quite as good as St. Peter's own, and the Professor

wondered what Langtry still had to be sore about. What was the use of keeping up the feud? They had both

come there young men, fighting for their places and their lives; now they were not very young any more; they

would neither of them, probably, ever hold a better position. Couldn't Langtry see it was a draw, that they had

On Monday afternoon St. Peter mounted to his study and lay down on the boxcouch, tired out with his day

at the university. The first few weeks of the year were very fatiguing for him; there were so many exhausting

things besides his lectures and all the new students; long faculty meetings in which almost no one was ever

frank, and always the old fight to keep up the standard of scholarship, to prevent the younger professors, who

had a sharp eye to their own interests, from farming the whole institution out to athletics, and to the

agricultural and commercial schools favoured and fostered by the State Legislature.

The September heat, too, was hard on him. He wanted to be out at the lake every day it was never so fine

as in late September. He was lying with closed eyes, resting his mind on the picture of intense autumnblue

water, when he heard a tap at the door and his daughter Rosamond entered, very handsome in a silk suit of a

vivid shade of lilac, admirably suited to her complexion and showing that in the colour of her cheeks there

was actually a tone of warm lavender. In that low room she seemed very tall indeed, a little out of drawing,

as, to her father's eye, she so often did. Usually, however, people were aware only of her rich complexion, her

curving, unresisting mouth and mysterious eyes. Tom Outland had seen nothing else, and he was a young

On his writingtable she caught a glimpse of pages in a handwriting not his a script she knew very well.

"Not much choice of chairs, is there?" she smiled. "Papa, I don't like to have you working in a place like this.

"Much easier than to break in a new room, Rosie. A workroom should be like an old shoe; no matter how

"That's really what I came to see you about." Rosamond traced the edge of a hole in the matting with the tip

of her lilac sunshade. "Won't you let me build you a little study in the back yard of the new house? I have

"Oh, thank you, Rosamond. It's most awfully nice of you to think of it. But keep it just an idea it's better

so. Lots of things are. For the present I'll plod on here. It's absurd, but it suits me. Habit is such a big part of

"With Augusta's old things lying about, and those dusty old forms? Why didn't she at least get those out of

your way?" "Oh, they have a right here, by long tenure. It's their room, too. I don't want to come upon them

lying in some dumpheap on the road to the lake. They remind me of the times when you were little girls,

Rosamond smiled, unconvinced. "Papa, don't joke with me. I've come to talk about something serious, and

it's very difficult. You know I'm a little afraid of you." She dropped her shadowy, bewitching eyes.

"Oh, yes, I am when you're sarcastic. You mustn't be today, please. Louie and I have often talked this over.

We feel strongly about it. He's often been on the point of blurting out with it, but I've curbed him. You don't

always approve of Louie and me. Of course it was only Louie's energy and technical knowledge that ever

made Tom's discovery succeed commercially, but we don't feel that we ought to have all the returns from it.

We think you ought to let us settle an income on you, so that you could give up your university work and

devote all your time to writing and research. That is what Tom would have wanted."

St. Peter rose quickly, with the light, supple spring he had when he was very nervous, crossed to the window,

wide on its hook, and half closed it. "My dear daughter," he said decisively, when he had turned round to her,

"But why not? You were the best friend he had in the world, he owed more to you than to anyone else, and he

hated having you hampered by teaching. He admired your mind, and nothing would have pleased him more

than helping you to do the work you do better than anyone else. If he were alive, that would be one of the first

"But he is not alive, and there was no word about me in his will, and so there is nothing to build your pretty

theory upon. It's wonderfully nice of you and Louie, and I'm very pleased, you know."

"But Tom was so impractical, Father. He never thought it would mean more than a liberal dress allowance for

St. Peter smiled quizzically. "I'm not so sure about his impracticalness. When he was working on that gas, he

once remarked to me that there might be a fortune in it. To be sure he didn't wait to find out whether there

was a fortune, but that had to do with quite another side of him. Yes, I think he knew his idea would make

money and he wanted you to have it, with him or without him." The young woman's face grew troubled.

She sighed luxuriously. "Louie has done that. The only thing that troubles me is, I feel you ought to have

some of this money, that he would wish it. He was so full of gratitude, felt that he owed you so much."

Her father again rose, with that guarded, nervous movement. "Once and for all, Rosamond, understand that

he owed me no more than I owed him. Nothing hurts me so much as to have any member of my family talk

as if we had done something fine for that young man, brought him out, produced him. In a lifetime of

teaching, I've encountered just one remarkable mind; but for that, I'd consider my good years largely wasted.

And there can be no question of money between me and Tom Outland. I can't explain just how I feel about it,

but it would somehow damage my recollections of him, would make that episode in my life commonplace

like everything else. And that would be a great loss to me. I'm purely selfish in refusing your offer; my

friendship with Outland is the one thing I will not have translated into the vulgar tongue."

His daughter looked perplexed and a little resentful. "Sometimes," she murmured, "I think you feel I oughtn't

"You had no choice. For you it was settled by his own hand. Your bond with him was social, and it follows

the laws of society, and they are based on property. Mine wasn't, and there was no material clause in it. He

empowered you to carry out all his wishes, and I realize that you have responsibilities but none toward

me. There is Rodney Blake, of course, if he should ever turn up. You keep up some search for him?"

Rosamond's face grew hard. "I won't bother you about the Cranes, Papa. We will attend to them. Mrs. Crane

is a common creature, and she is advised by that dreadful shyster brother of hers, Homer Bright. You know

Rosamond had risen to go. "I want you to be awfully happy, daughter," St. Peter went on, "and Tom did. It's

only young people like you and Louie who can get any fun out of money. And there is enough to cover the

fine, the almost imaginary obligations. You won't be sorry if you are generous with people like the Cranes."

"Thank you, Papa. I shan't forget." Rosamond went down the narrow stairway, leaving behind her a faint,

fresh odour of lavender and orrisroot, and her father lay down again on the box couch. "A hint about the

He didn't in the least understand his older daughter. Not that he pretended to understand Kathleen, either; but

he usually knew how she would feel about things, and she had always seemed to need his protection more

than Rosamond. When she was a student at the university, he used sometimes to see her crossing the campus

alone, her head and shoulders lowered against the wind, her muff beside her face, her narrow skirt clinging

close. There was something too plucky, too "I can goitalone," about her quick step and jaunty little head;

he didn't like it, it gave him a sudden pang. He would always call to her and catch up with her, and make her

She had been much quicker at her lessons than Rosie, and very clever at watercolour portrait sketches. She

had done several really good likenesses of her father one, at least, was the man himself. With her mother

she had no luck. She tried again and again, but the face was always hard, the upper lip longer than it seemed

in life, the nose long and severed, and she made something cold and plasterlike of Lillian's beautiful

complexion. "No, I don't see Mamma like that," she used to say, throwing out her chin. "Of course I don't! It

just comes like that." She had done many heads of her sister, all very sentimental and curiously false, though

Louie Marsellus protested to them. Her drawingteacher at the university had urged Kathleen to go to

Chicago and study in the life classes at the Art Institute, but she said resolutely: "No, I can't really do

"The only unusual thing about Kitty," her father used to tell his friends, "is that she doesn't think herself a bit

unusual. Nowdays the girls in my classes who have a spark of aptitude for anything seem to think themselves

Though wilfulness was implied in the line of her figure, in the way she sometimes threw out her chin,

Kathleen had never been deaf to reasoning, deaf to her father, but once; and that was when, shortly after

Rosamond's engagement to Tom, she announced that she was going to marry Scott McGregor. Scott was

young, was just getting a start as a journalist, and his salary was not large enough for two people to live upon.

That fact, the St. Peters thought, would act as a brake upon the impetuous young couple. But soon after they

were engaged Scott began to do his daily prose poem for a newspaper syndicate. It was a success from the

start, and increased his earnings enough to enable him to marry. The Professor had expected a better match

for Kitty. He was no snob, and he liked Scott and trusted him; but he knew that Scott had a usual sort of

mind, and Kitty had flashes of something quite different. Her father thought a more interesting man would

make her happier. There was no holding her back, however, and the curious part of it was that, after the very

first, her mother supported her. St. Peter had a vague suspicion that this was somehow on Rosamond's

account more than on Kathleen's; Lillian always worked things out for Rosamond. Yet at the time he couldn't

see how Kathleen's marriage would benefit Rosie. "Rosie is like your second self," he once declared to his

It was an intense September noon warm, windy, golden, with the smell of ripe grapes and drying vines in

the air, and the lake rolling blue on the horizon. Scott McGregor, going into the west corner of the university

campus, caught sight of Mrs. St. Peter, just ahead of him, walking in the same direction. He ran and caught

"Hello, Lillian! Going in to see the Professor? So am I. I want him to go swimming with me I'm cutting

work. Shall we drop in and hear the end of his lecture, or sit down here on the bench in the sun?"

"We can go quietly to the door and listen. If it's not interesting, we can come back and sit down for a chat."

"Good! I came early to overhear a bit. This is the hour he's with his seniors, isn't it?"

They entered and went along the hall until they came to number 17; the door was afar, and at the moment one

of the students was speaking. When he finished, they heard the Professor reply to him. "No, Miller, I don't

myself think much of science as a phase of human development. It has given us a lot of ingenious toys; they

take our attention away from the real problems, of course, and since the problems are insoluble, I suppose we

ought to be grateful for distraction. But the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been

made more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them. Science hasn't given

us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and

sleightofhand. It hasn't given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new sins not one!

Indeed, it takes our old ones away. It's the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the

world. You'll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better off when even the

prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin. I don't think you help people by

making their conduct of no importance you impoverish them. As long as every man and woman who

crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels

on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing. The king and the

beggar had the same chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations. And that's what makes men

happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives. It makes us happy to surround

our creature needs and bodily instincts with as much pomp and circumstance as possible. Art and religion

(they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

"Moses learned the importance of that in the Egyptian court, and when he wanted to make a population of

slaves into an independent people in the shortest possible time, he invented elaborate ceremonials to give

them a feeling of dignity and purpose. Every act had some imaginative end. The cutting of the finger nails

was a religious observance. The Christian theologians went over the books of the Law, like great artists,

getting splendid effects by excision. They reset the stage with more space and mystery, throwing all the light

upon a few sins of great dramatic value only seven, you remember, and of those only three that are

perpetually enthralling. With the theologians came the cathedralbuilders; the sculptors and glass workers

and painters. They might, without sacrilege, have changed the prayer a little and said, Thy will be done in art,

as it is in heaven. How can it be done anywhere else as it is in heaven? But I think the hour is up. You might

tell me next week, Miller, what you think science has done for us, besides making us very comfortable."

As the young men filed out of the room, Mrs. St. Peter and McGregor went in. "I came over to get you to go

to the electrician's with me, Godfrey, but I won't make you. Scott wants you to run out to the lake, and it's

"Car's outside. We'll just drop Lillian at the house, Doctor, and you can pick up your bathing suit. We heard

part of your lecture, by the way. How you get by the Methodists is still a mystery to me."

"I wish he would get into trouble, Scott," said Lillian as they left the building. "I wish he wouldn't talk to

those fatfaced boys as if they were intelligent beings. You cheapen yourself, Godfrey. It makes me a little

"I was rather rambling on today. I'm sorry you happened along. There's a fellow in that lot, Tod Miller, who

"All the same," murmured his wife, "it's hardly dignified to think aloud in such company. It's in rather bad

It took Scott only twenty minutes to get out to the lake. He drew up at the bit of beach of St. Peter had bought

for himself years before; a little triangle of sand running out into the water, with a bathhouse and seven

shaggy pinetrees on it. Scott had to fuss with the car, and the Professor was undressed and in the water

When McGregor was ready to go in, his father inlaw was some distance out, swimming with an overarm

stroke, his head and shoulders well out of the water. He wore on his head a rubber visor of a kind he always

brought home from France in great numbers. This one was vermilion, and was like a continuation of his flesh

his arms and back were burned a deep terracotta from a summer in the lake. His head and powerful

reaching arms made a strong red pattern against the purple blue of the water. The visor was picturesque

his head looked sheathed and small and intensely alive, like the heads of the warriors on the Parthenon frieze

By five o'clock St. Peter and McGregor were dressed and lying on the sand, their overcoats wrapped about

"Oh, Professor, you know your English friend, Sir Edgar Spilling? The day after I met him at your house, he

came up to my office at the Herald to get some facts you'd been too modest to give him. When he was

leaving he stood and looked at one of these motto cards I have over my desk, DON'T KNOCK, and said:

'May I ask why you don't have that notice on the outside of your door? I didn't observe any other way of

getting in.' They never get wise, do they? He really went out to see Marsellus' place seemed interested.

The Professor lit another cigarette and was a long while about it. When he had got it going, he turned on his

elbow and looked at McGregor. "Scott, you must see that I can't make suggestions to Louie. He's perfectly

consistent. He's a great deal more generous and publicspirited than I am, and my preferences would be

enigmatical to him. I can't, either, very gracefully express myself to you about his affairs."

"I get you. Sorry he riles me so. I always say it shan't occur next time, but it does." Scott took out his pipe and

lay silent for a time, looking at the gold glow burning on the water and on the wings of the gulls as they flew

by. His expression was wistful, rather mournful. He was a goodlooking fellow, with sunburned blond hair,

splendid teeth, attractive eyes that usually frowned a little unless he was laughing outright, a small, prettily

cut mouth, restless at the corners. There was something moody and discontented about his face. The

Professor had a great deal of sympathy for him; Scott was too good for his work. He had been delighted when

his daily poem and his "uplift" editorials first proved successful, because that enabled him to marry. Now he

could sell as many goodcheer articles as he had time to write, on any subject, and he loathed doing them.

Scott had early picked himself out to do something very fine, and he felt that the was wasting his life and his

talents. The new group of poets made him angry. When a new novel was discussed seriously by his friends,

he was perfectly miserable. St. Peter knew that the poor boy had seasons of desperate unhappiness. His

disappointed vanity ate away at his vitals like the Spartan boy's wolf, and only the deep lines in his young

Not long ago, when the students were giving an historical pageant to commemorate the deeds of an early

French explorer among the Great Lakes, they asked St. Peter to do a picture for them, and he had arranged

one which amused him very much, though it had nothing to do with the subject. He posed his two

sonsinlaw in a tapestryhung tent, for a conference between Richard Plantagenet and the Saladin, before

the walls of Jerusalem. Marsellus, in a green dressinggown and turban, was seated at a table with a chart, his

hands extended in reasonable, patient argument. The Plantagenet was standing, his plumed helmet is his

hand, his square yellow head haughtily erect, his unthoughtful brows fiercely frowning, his lips curled and his

fresh face full of arrogance. The tableau had received no special notice, and Mrs. St. Peter had said dryly that

she was afraid nobody saw his little joke. But the Professor liked his picture, and he thought it quite fair to

The Professor happened to come home earlier than usual one bright October afternoon. He left the walk and

cut across the turf, intending to enter by the open French window, but he paused a moment outside to admire

the scene within. The drawingroom was full of autumn flowers, dahlias and wild asters and goldenrod. The

redgold sunlight lay in bright puddles on the thick blue carpet, made hazy aureoles about the stuffed blue

chairs. There was, in the room, as he looked through the window, a rich, intense effect of autumn, something

that presented October much more sharply and sweetly to him than the coloured maples and the

asterbordered paths by which he had come home. It struck him that the seasons sometimes gain by being

brought into the house, just as they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry. The hand, fastidious

and bold, which selected and placed it was that which made the difference. In Nature there is no selection.

In a corner, beside the steaming brass teakettle, sat Lillian and Louie, a little lacquer table between them,

bending, it seemed, over a casket of jewels. Lillian held up lovingly in her fingers a greengold necklace,

evidently an old one, without stones. "Of course emeralds would be beautiful, Louie, but they seem a little

out of scale to belong to a different scheme of life than any you and Rosamond can live here. You aren't,

"At home, Dearest, with me, at our own dinner table at Outland! I like the idea of their being out of scale.

I've never given her any jewels. I've waited all this time to give her these. To me, her name spells emeralds."

Mrs. St. Peter smiled, easily persuaded. "You'll never be able to keep them. You'll show them to her."

"Oh, no, I won't! They are to stay at the jeweller's, in Chicago, until we all go down for the birthday party.

That's another secret we have to keep. We have such lots of them!" He bent over her hand and kissed it with

St. Peter swung in over the window rail. "That is always the cue for the husband to enter, isn't it? What's this

He sat down, and Marsellus brought him some tea, lingering beside his chair. "It must be a secret from Rosie,

but you see it happens that the date of your lecture engagement at the University of Chicago is coincident

with her birthday, so I have planned that we shall all go down together. And among other diversions, we shall

"But not for me. Remember, I wasn't in your classes, like Scott and Outland. I'd give a good deal if I'd had the

"Not to me. With a wink of encouragement I'll go on to Boston with you next winter, when you give the

"Would you, really? Next year's a long way off. Now I must get clean. I've been working in my otherhouse

garden, and I'm scarcely fit to have tea with a beautiful lady and a smartly dressed gentleman. What am I to

do about that garden in the end, Lillian? Destroy it? Or leave it to the mercy of the next tenants?"

As he went upstairs he turned at the bend of the staircase and looked back at them, again bending over their

little box. Mrs. St. Peter was wearing the white silk cr pe that had been the most successful of her summer

dresses, and an orchid velvet ribbon about her shining hair. She wouldn't have made herself look quite so well

if Louie hadn't been coming, he reflected. Or was it that he wouldn't have noticed it if Louie hadn't been

there? A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular

gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.

Lillian's coquetry with her sonsinlaw amused him. He hadn't foreseen it, and he found it rather the most

piquant and interesting thing about having married daughters. It had begun with Scott the younger sister

was married before the elder. St. Peter had thought that Scott McGregor was the sort of fellow Lillian always

found tiresome. But no; within a few weeks after Kathleen's marriage, arch and confidential relations began

to be evident between them. Even now, when Louie was so much in the foreground, and Scott was touchy

With Louie, Lillian seemed to be launching into a new career, and Godfrey began to think that he understood

his own wife very little. He would have said that she would feel about Louie just as he did; would have

cultivated him as a stranger in the town, because he was so unusual and exotic, but without in the least

wishing to adopt anyone so foreign into the family circle. She had always been fastidious to an unreasonable

degree about small niceties of deportment. She could never forgive poor Tom Outland for the angle at which

he sometimes held a cigar in his mouth, or for the fact that he never learned to eat salad with ease. At the

dinnertable, if Tom, forgetting himself in talk, sometimes dropped back into railroad lunch counter ways

and pushed his plate away from him when he had finished a course, Lillian's face would become positively

cruel in its contempt. Irregularities of that sort put her all on edge. But Louie could hurry audibly through his

soup, or kiss her resoundingly on the cheek at a faculty reception, and she seemed to like it.

Yes, with her sonsinlaw she had begun the game of being a woman all over again. She dressed for them,

planned for them, schemed in their interests. She had begun to entertain more than for years past the new

house made a plausible pretext and to use her influence and charm in the little anxious social world of

Hamilton. She was intensely interested in the success and happiness of these two young men, lived in their

careers as she had once done in his. It was splendid, St. Peter told himself. She wasn't going to have to face a

stretch of boredom between being a young woman and being a young grandmother. She was less intelligent

When Godfrey came down stairs ready for dinner, Louie was gone. He walked up to the chair where his wife

"My dear, " he said quite delicately, "I wish you could keep Louie from letting his name go up for the Arts

and Letters. It's not safe yet. He's not been here long enough. They're a fussy little bunch, and he ought to

"You mean someone will blackball him? Do you really think so? But the Country Club "

"Yes, Lillian; the Country Club is a big affair, and needs money. The Arts and Letters is a little group of

"No, he didn't , and I shall not tell you who did. But if you're tactful, you can save Louie's feelings."

Mrs. St. Peter closed her book without glancing down at it. A new interest shone in her eyes and made them

look quite through and beyond her husband. "I must see what I can do with Scott," she murmured.

St. Peter turned away to hide a smile. An old student of his, a friend who belonged to "the Outland period,"

had told him laughingly that he was sure Scott would blackball Marsellus if his name ever came to the vote.

"You know Scott is a kid in some things," the friend had said. "He's a little sore at Marsellus, and says a

secret ballot is the only way he can ever get him where it wouldn't hurt Mrs. St. Peter."

While the Professor was eating his soup, he studied his wife's face in the candlelight. It had changed so much

since he found her laughing with Louie, and especially since he had dropped the hint about the Arts and

Letters. It had become, he thought, too hard for the orchid velvet in her hair. Her upper lip had grown longer,

"Well," he reflected, "it will be interesting to see what she can do with Scott. That will make rather a test

Early in November there was a picturesque snowstorm, and that day Kathleen telephoned her father at the

university, asking him to stop on his way home in the afternoon and help her to decide upon some new furs.

As he approached McGregor's spickandspan bungalow at four o'clock, he saw Louie's PierceArrow

standing in front, with Ned, the chauffeur and gardener, in the driver's seat. Just then Rosamond came out of

the bungalow alone, and down the path to the sidewalk, without seeing her father. He noticed a singularly

haughty expression on her face; her brows drawn together over her nose. The curl of her lips was handsome,

but terrifying. He observed also something he had not seen before a coat of soft, purplegrey fur, that

quite disguised the wide, slightly stooping shoulders he regretted in his truly beautiful daughter. He called to

her, very much interested. "Wait a minute, Rosie. I've not seen that before. It's extraordinarily becoming." He

stroked his daughter's sleeve with evident pleasure. "You know , these things with a kind of lurking purple

and lavender in them are splendid for you. They make your colour prettier than ever. It's only lately you've

"Well, he does a good job. He knows what's right for you." St. Peter continued to look her up and down with

"No? And what do you call this, what beast?" he asked ingenuously, again stroking the fur with his bare

"Oh, moleskin!" He drew back a little. "Couldn't be better for your complexion. And is it warm?"

"I see, I see!" He took Rosamond's arm and escorted her to her car. "Give Louie my compliments on his

choice." The motor glided away he wished he could escape as quickly and noiselessly, for he was a

coward. But he had a feeling that Kathleen was watching him from behind the sash curtains. He went up to

the door and made a long and thorough use of the footscraper before he tapped on the glass. Kathleen let

him in. She was very pale; even her lips, which were always pink, like the inside of a white shell, were

"Have you been out in the park, Kitty? This is a pretty little storm. Perhaps you'll walk over to the old house

with me presently." He talked soothingly while he took off his coat and rubbers. "And now for the furs!"

Kathleen went slowly into her bedroom. She was gone a great while perhaps ten actual minutes. When she

came back, the rims of her eyes were red. She carried four large pasteboard boxes, tied together with twine.

St. Peter sprang up, took the parcel, and began untying the string. He opened the first and pulled out a brown

"Very pretty." He put the collar round her neck and drew back to look at it. But after a sharp struggle

Kathleen broke down. She threw off the fur and buried her face in a fresh handkerchief.

"I'm so sorry, Daddy, but it's no use today. I don't want any furs, really. She spoils everything for me."

"Oh, my dear, my dear, you hurt me terribly!" St. Peter put his hands tenderly on her soft hazel coloured

hair. "Face it squarely, Kitty; you must not, you cannot, be envious. It's selfdestruction."

"I can't help it, Father. I am envious. I don't think I would be if she let me alone, but she comes here with her

magnificence and takes the life out of all our poor little things. Everybody knows she's rich, why does she

"But, Kitty dear, you wouldn't have her go home and change her coat before coming to see you?"

"Oh, it's not that, Father, it's everything! You know we were never jealous of each other at home. I was

always proud of her good looks and good taste. It's not her clothes, it's a feeling she has inside her. When she

St. Peter wiped his moist forehead. He was suffering with her, as if she had been in physical anguish. "We

can't, dear, we can't, in this world, let ourselves think of things of comparisons like that. We are all too

susceptible to ugly suggestions. If Rosamond has a grievance, it's because you've been untactful about

"Even if I have, why should she be so revengeful? Does she think nobody else calls him a Jew? Does she

"It's all in the way it's done, you know, Kitty. And you've shown that you were a little bored with all their

"I've shown that I don't like the way she overdresses, I suppose. I would never have believed that Rosie could

do anything in such bad taste. While she is here among her old friends, she ought to dress like the rest of us."

"Oh, Father, you're so simple! And Mother is very careful not to enlighten you. We go to the Guild to sew for

the Mission fund, and Rosie comes in in a handmade French frock that cost more than all our dresses put

"But if hers are no prettier, what does it matter how much they cost?" He was watching Kathleen fearfully.

Her pale skin had taken on a greenish tinge there was no doubt about it. He had never happened to see that

change occur in a face before, and he had never realized to what an ugly, painful transformation the common

"Oh, foolish, they are prettier, though you may not see it. It's not just the clothes" she looked at him

intently, and her eyes, in their reddened rims, expanded and cleared. "It's everything. When we were at home,

Rosamond was a kind of ideal to me. What she thought about anything decided it for me. But she's entirely

changed. She's become Louie. Indeed, she's worse than Louie. He and all this money have ruined her. Oh,

Daddy, why didn't you and Professor Crane get to work and stop all this before it began? You were to blame.

You knew that Tom had left something that was worth a lot, both of you. Why didn't you do something? You

let it lie there in Crane's laboratory for this this Marsellus to come along and exploit, until he almost

"Things might have turned out the same, anyway, " her father protested. "Whatever the process earned was

Rosamond's. I wasn't in the mood to struggle with manufacturers, I know nothing of such things. And Crane

needs every ounce of his strength for his own experiments. He doesn't care anything but the extent of space."

"He'd better have taken a few days off and saved his friend's reputation. Tom trusted him with everything. It's

too foolish; that poor man being cut to pieces by surgeons all the time, and picking up the little that's left of

St. Peter rose, took both of his daughter's hands and stood laughing at her. "Come now! You have more

brains than that, Kitty. It happens you do understand that whatever poor Crane can find out about space is

more good to him than all the money the Marselluses will ever have. But are you implying that if Crane and I

had developed Tom's discovery, we might have kept Rosie and her money in the family, for ourselves?"

"Exactly; nor do I. And we mustn't behave as if we did want it. If you permit yourself to be envious of Rosie,

The Professor walked away across the snowy park with a tired step. He was heavyhearted. For Kathleen he

had a special kind of affection. Perhaps it was because he had had to take care of her for one whole summer

when she was little. Just as Mrs. St. Peter was ready to start for Colorado with the children, the younger one

developed whoopingcough and had to be left at home with her father. He had opportunity to observe all her

ways. She was only six, but he found her a square dealing, dependable little creature. They worked out a

satisfactory plan of life together. She was to play in the garden all morning, and was not on any account to

disturb him in his study. After lunch he would take her to the lake or the woods, or he would read to her at

home. She took pride in keeping her part of the contract. One day when he came out of his study at noon, he

found her sitting on the third floor stairs, just outside his door, with the arnica bottle in one hand and the

fingers of the other puffed up like wee pink sausages. A bee had stung her in the garden, and she had waited

half the morning for sympathy. She was very independent, and would tug at her leggings or overshoes a great

When they were little girls, Kathleen adored her older sister and liked to wait on her, was always more

excited about Rosie's new dresses and winter coat than about her own. This attachment had lasted even after

they were grown. St. Peter had never seen any change in it until Rosamond announced her engagement to

Louie Marsellus. Then, all at once, Kathleen seemed to be done with her sister. Her father believed she

It was dark when the Professor got back to the old house and sat down at his writingtable. He would have an

hour on his notes, he told himself, in spite of families and fortunes. And he had it. But when he looked up

from his writing as the Angelus was ringing, two faces at once rose in the shadows outside the yellow circle

of his lamp: the handsome face of his older daughter, surrounded by violetdappled fur, with a cruel upper lip

and scornful halfclosed eyes, as she had approached her car that afternoon before she saw him; and

Kathleen, her square little chin set so fiercely, her white cheeks actually becoming green under her swollen

eyes. He couldn't believe it. He rose quickly and went to his one window, opened it wider, and stood looking

at the dark clump of pine trees that told where the Physics building stood. A sharp pain clutched his heart.

Was it for this the light in Outland's laboratory used to burn so far into the night!

The following week St. Peter went to Chicago to give his lectures. He had engaged rooms for himself and

Lillian at a quiet hotel near the university. The Marselluses went down by the same train, and they all alighted

at the station together, in a raging snowstorm. The St. Peters were to have tea with Louie at the Blackstone,

Tea was served in Louie's suite on the lake front, with a fine view of the falling snow from the windows. The

Professor was in a genial mood; he was glad to be in a big city again, in a luxurious hotel, and especially

"How snug you are here, Louie! This is really very nice," he said, turning back from the window when

Louie came and put both hands on St. Peter's shoulders, exclaiming delightedly: "And do you like these

rooms, sir? Well, I'm glad, for they're yours! Rosie and I are farther down the corridor. Not a word! It's all

arranged. You are our guests for this engagement. We won't have our great scholar staying off in some grimy

Louie was so warm with his plan that the Professor could only express satisfaction. "And our luggage?"

"It's on the way. I cancelled your reservations and did everything in order. Now have your tea, but not too

much. You dine early; you have an engagement for tonight. You and Dearest are going to the opera

"It will. I always had abonnement at the Op ra Comique, and Mignon came round frequently. It's one of my

"I thought so!" Louie kissed both the ladies, to express his satisfaction. The Professor had forgotten his

scruples about accepting lavish hospitalities. He was really very glad to have windows on the lake, and not to

have to go away to another hotel. After the Marselluses went to their own apartment, he remarked to his wife,

while he unpacked his bag, that it was much more convenient to be on the same floor with Louie and

Rosamond. "Much better than cabbing across Chicago to meet them all the time, isn't it?"

At eight o'clock he and his wife were in their places in the Auditorium. The overture brought a smile to his

lips and a gracious mood to his heart. The music seemed extraordinarily fresh and genuine still. It might grow

oldfashioned, he told himself, but never old, surely, while there was any youth left in men. It was an

expression of youth, that, and no more; with the sweetness and foolishness, the lingering accent, the heavy

stresses the delicacy, too belonging to that time. After the entrance of the hero, Lillian leaned toward

him and whispered: "Am I overcredulous? He looks to me exactly like the pictures of Goethe in his youth."

"So he does to me. He is certainly as tall as Goethe. I didn't know tenors were ever so tall. The Mignon seems

She was slender, at any rate, and very fragile beside the courtly Wilhelm. When she began her immortal song,

one felt that she was right for the part, the pure lyric soprano that suits it best, and in her voice there was

something fresh and delicate, like deep wood flowers. " Connaistu le pays" it stirred one like the

When the curtain fell on the first act, St. Peter turned to his wife. "A fine cast, don't you think? And the harps

are very good. Except for the woodwinds, I should say it was as good as any performance I ever heard at the

"How it does make one think of Paris, and of so many halfforgotten things!" his wife murmured. It had been

Through the next act he often glanced at her. Curious, how a young mood could return and soften a face.

More than once he saw a starry moisture shine in her eyes. If she only knew how much more lovely she was

"My dear," he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, "it's been a mistake, our

having a family and writing histories and getting middleaged. We should have been picturesquely

"You? But you're so occupied with the future, you adapt yourself so readily," he murmured in astonishment.

"One must go on living, Godfrey. But it wasn't the children who came between us." There was something

lonely and forgiving in her voice, something that spoke of an old wound, healed and hardened and hopeless.

"You, you too?" he breathed in amazement. He took up one of her gloves and began drawing it out through

his fingers. She said nothing, but he saw her lip quiver, and she turned away and began looking at the house

through the glasses. He likewise began to examine the audience. He wished he knew just how it seemed to

her. He had been mistaken, he felt. The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has

been to one's own. Presently the melting music of the tenor's last aria brought their eyes together in a smile

That night, after he was in bed, among unaccustomed surroundings and a little wakeful, St. Peter still played

with his idea of a picturesque shipwreck, and he cast about for the particular occasion he would have chosen

for such a finale. Before he went to sleep he found the very day, but his wife was not in it. Indeed, nobody

was in it but himself, and a weatherdried little sea captain from the HautesPyr n es, half a dozen spry

seamen, and a line of gleaming snow peaks, agonizingly high and sharp, along the southern coast of Spain.

Louie arranged the birthday dinner in the public diningroom of the hotel, and three of the Professor's

colleagues dined with them on that occasion. Louie had gone out to the university to hear St. Peter lecture,

had met some of the faculty, and immediately invited them to dinner. They accepted when was a professor

known to refuse a good dinner? Rosamond was presented with her emeralds, and, as St. Peter afterward

observed to his wife, practically all the guests in the diningroom were participants in the happy event.

Lillian was doubtless right when she told him that, all the same, his fellow professors went away from the

Blackstone that night respecting Godfrey St. Peter more than they had ever done before, and if they had

"That," her husband replied, "is my chief objection to public magnificence; it seems to show everybody up in

the worst possible light. I'm not finding fault with anyone but myself, understand. When I consented to

occupy an apartment I couldn't afford, I let myself in for whatever might follow."

They got back to Hamilton in bitter weather. The lake winds were scourging the town, and Scott had

laryngitis and was writing prose poems about the pleasures of tending your own furnace when the

"Godfrey," said Mrs. St. Peter when he set off for his classroom on the morning after their return, "surely

you're not going to the old house this afternoon. It will be like a refrigeratingplant. There's no way of

heating your study except by that miserable little stove." "There never was, my dear. I got along a good many

"It was very different when the house below was heated. That stove isn't safe when you keep the window

open. A gust of wind might blow it out at any moment, and if you were at work you'd never notice until you

"How can you be so perverse? You know things are different now, and you ought to take more care of your

His wife disregarded this. "And don't you think it's foolish extravagance to go on paying the rent of an entire

house, in order to spend a few hours a day in one very uncomfortable room of it?"

The Professor's dark skin reddened, and the ends of his formidable eyebrows ascended toward his black hair.

"How irritable and unreasonable he is becoming!" his wife reflected, as she heard him putting on his

For Christmas day the weather turned mild again. There would be a family dinner in the evening, but St.

Peter was going to have the whole day to himself, in the old house. He asked his wife to put him up some

sandwiches, so that he needn't come back for lunch. He kept a few bottles of sherry in his study, in the old

chest under the forms. Fortunately he had brought back a great deal of it from his last trip to Spain. It wasn't

foresight Prohibition was then unthinkable but a lucky accident. He had gone with his innkeeper to an

auction, and bought in a dozen dozens of a sherry that went very cheap. He came home by the City of Mexico

As he was crossing the park with his sandwiches, he met Augusta coming back from Mass. "Are you still

going to the old house, Professor?" she asked reproachfully, her face smiling at him between her stiff black

"Oh, yes Augusta, but it's not the same. I miss you. There are never any new dresses on my ladies in the

evening now. Won't you come in sometime and deck them out, as a surprise for me? I like to see them

Augusta laughed. "You are a funny man, Doctor St. Peter. If anyone else said the things you do to your

classes, I'd be scandalized. But I always tell people you don't mean half you say."

"Why, of course, they go out and talk about it when you say slighting things about the Church," she said

"Well, they take it that way. They are not as smart as you, and you ought to be careful."

"It doesn't matter. What they think today, they'll forget tomorrow." He was walking beside Augusta, with a

slack, indifferent stride, very unlike the step he had when he was full of something. "That reminds me: I've

been wanting to ask you a question. That passage in the service about the Mystical Rose, Lily of Zion, Tower

Augusta stopped and looked at him. "Why, Professor! Did you receive no religious instruction at all?"

"How could I, Augusta? My mother was a Methodist, there was no Catholic church in our town in Kansas,

Augusta spoke gently, as if she were prompting him and did not wish to rebuke his ignorance too sharply.

"Why, yes, just as soon as the angel had announced to her that she would be the mother of our Lord, the

Blessed Virgin composed the Magnificat. I always think of you as knowing everything, Doctor St. Peter!"

"And you're always finding out how little I know. Well, you don't give me away. You are very discreet."

Their ways parted, and both went on more cheerful than when they met. The Professor climbed to his study

feeling quite as though Augusta had been there and brightened it up for him. (Surely she had said that the

Blessed Virgin sat down and composed the Magnificat!) Augusta had been with them often in the holiday

season, back in the years when holidays were holidays indeed. He had grown to like the reminders of herself

that she left in his workroom especially the toilettes upon the figures. Sometimes she made those terrible

In the early years, no matter how hard he was working, he had always felt the sense of holiday, of a special

warmth and fragrance in the air, steal up to his study from the house below. When he was writing his best, he

was conscious of pretty little girls in fresh dresses of flowers and greens in the comfortable, shabby

sittingroom of his wife's good looks and good taste even of a better dinner than usual under

preparation downstairs. All the while he had been working so fiercely at his eight big volumes, he was not

insensible to the domestic drama that went on beneath him. His mind had played delightedly with all those

incidents. Just as, when Queen Mathilde was doing the long tapestry now shown at Bayeux, working her

chronicle of the deeds of knights and heroes, alongside the big pattern of dramatic action she and her

women carried the little playful pattern of birds and beasts that are a story in themselves; so, to him, the most

On this Christmas morning, with that sense of the past in his mind, the Professor went mechanically to work,

and the morning disappeared. Before he knew it was passing, the bells from Augusta's church across the park

rang out and told him it was gone. He pushed back his papers and arranged his writingtable for lunch.

He had been working hard, he judged, because he was so hungry. He peered with interest into the basket his

wife had given him a wicker bag, it was, really, that he had once bought full of strawberries at Gibraltar.

Chicken sandwiches with lettuce leaves, red California grapes, and two shapely, longnecked russet pears.

That would do very well; and Lillian had thoughtfully put in one of her best dinner napkins, knowing he

hated ugly linen. From the chest he took out a round of cheese, and a bottle of his wine, and began to polish a

While he was enjoying his lunch, he was thinking of certain holidays he had spent alone in Paris, when he

was living at Versailles, with the Thieraults, as tutor to their boys. There was one All Souls' Day when he had

gone into Paris by an early train and had a magnificent breakfast on the Rue de Vaugirard not at Foyot's,

he hadn't money enough in those days to put his nose inside the place. After breakfast he went out to walk in

the soft rainfall. The sky was of such an intense silvery grey that all the grey stone buildings along the Rue

St. Jacques and the Rue Sufflot came out in that silver shine stronger than in sunlight. The shop windows

were shut; on the bleak ascent to the Pantheon there was not a spot of colour, nothing but wet, shiny, quick

silvery grey, accented by black crevices, and weatherworn bosses white as woodash. All at once, from

somewhere behind the Pantheon itself, a man and woman, pushing a handcart, came into the empty street.

The cart was full of pink dahlias, all exactly the same colour. The young man was fair and slight, with a pale

face; the woman carried a baby. Both they and the heels of their barrow were splashed with mud. They must

have come from a good way in the country, and were a weary, anxious looking pair. They stopped at a

corner before the Pantheon and fearfully scanned the bleak, silvery, deserted streets. The man went into a

bakery, and his wife began to spread out the flowers, which were done up in large bouquets with fresh green

He took a bunch and handed her a fivefranc note. She had no change. Her husband, watching from the

" Deux francs cinquante," she called to him as he came up. He put his hand into his pocket and fumbled.

" Deux francs cinquante," she repeated with painful tension. The price agreed upon had probably been a franc

or a franc fifty. The man counted out the change to the student and looked at his wife with admiration. St.

Peter was so pleased with his flowers that it hadn't occurred to him to get more; but all his life he had

regretted that he didn't buy two bunches, and push their fortunes a little further. He had never again found

dahlias of such a beautiful colour, or so charmingly arranged with bright chestnutleaves.

A moment later he was strolling down the hill, wondering to whom he could give his bouquet, when a

pathetic procession filed past him through the rain. The girls of a charity school came walking two and two,

in hideous dark uniforms and round felt hats without ribbon or bow, marshalled by four black bonneted

nuns. They were all looking down, all but one the pretty one, naturally and she was looking sidewise,

directly at the student and his flowers. Their eyes met, she smiled, and just as he put out his hand with the

bouquet, one of the sisters flapped up like a black crow and shut the girl's pretty face from him. she would

have to pay for that smile, he was afraid. Godfrey spent his day in the Luxembourg Gardens and walked back

to the Gare St. Lazare at evening with nothing but his return ticket in his pocket, very glad to get home to

When he first went to live with the Thieraults, he had found Madame Thierault severe and exacting, stingy

about his laundry and grudging about the cheese and fruit he ate for dinner. But in the end she was very kind

to him; she never pampered him, but he could depend upon her. Her three sons had always been his dearest

friends. Gaston, the one he loved best, was dead killed in the Boxer uprising in China. But Pierre still

lived at Versailles, and Charles had a business in Marseilles. When he was in France their homes were his.

They were much closer to him than his own brothers. It was one summer when he was in France, with Lillian

and the two little girls, that the idea of writing a work upon the early Spanish explorers first occurred to him,

and he had turned at once to the Thieraults. After giving his wife enough money to finish the summer and get

home, he took the little that was left and went down to Marseilles to talk over his project with Charles

Thierault fils, whose mercantile house did a business with Spain in cork. Clearly St. Peter would have to be in

Spain as much as possible for the next few years, and he would have to live there very cheaply. The

Thieraults were always glad of a chance to help him. Not with money, they were too French and too

logical for that. But they would go to any amount of trouble and no inconsiderable expense to save him a few

That summer Charles kept him for three weeks in his oleanderburied house in the Prado, until his little brig,

L'Espoir, sailed out of the new port with a cargo for Algeciras. The captain was from the HautesPyr n es,

and his spare crew were all Proven als, seamen trained in that hard school of the Gulf of Lyons. On the

voyage everything seemed to feed the plan of the work that was forming in St. Peter's mind; the skipper, the

old Catalan second mate, the sea itself. One day stood out above the others. All day long they were skirting

the south coast of Spain; from the rose of dawn to the gold of sunset the ranges of the Sierra Nevadas towered

on their right, snow peak after snow peak, high beyond the flight of fancy, gleaming like crystal and topaz.

St. Peter lay looking up at them from a little boat riding low in the purple water, and the design of his book

unfolded in the air above him, just as definitely as the mountain ranges themselves. And the design was

sound. He had accepted it as inevitable, had never meddled with it, and it had seen him through.

It was late on Christmas afternoon when the Professor got back to the new house, but he was in such a happy

frame of mind that he feared nothing, not even a family dinner. He quite looked forward to it, on the contrary.

His wife heard him humming his favorite air from Matrimonio Segreto while he was dressing.

That evening the two daughters of the house arrived almost at the same moment. When Rosamond threw off

her cloak in the hall, her father noticed that she was wearing her new necklace. Kathleen stood looking at it,

and was evidently trying to find courage to say something about it, when Louie helped her by breaking in.

"It's very old, you see, the gold. What a work I had finding it! She doesn't like anything showy, you know,

and she doesn't care about intrinsic values. It must be beautiful, first of all."

Louie walked up and down, admiring his wife. "She carries off things like that, doesn't she? And yet, you

know, I like her in simple things, too." He dropped into reflection, just as if her were alone and talking to

himself. "I always remember a little bracelet she wore the night I first met her. A turquoise set in silver,

"I think so." There was a shade of displeasure in Rosamond's voice, and she turned back into the hall to look

Mrs. St. Peter came in, followed by the maid and the cocktails. Scott began the usual Prohibition lament.

"Why don't you journalists tell the truth about it in print?" Louie asked him. "It's a case where you could do

"And lose my job? Not much! This country's split in two, socially, and I don't know if it's ever coming

together. It's not so hard on me, I can drink hard liquor. But you and the Professor like wine and fancy stuff."

"Oh, it's nothing to us! We're going to France for the summer," Louie put his arm round his wife and rubbed

his cheek against hers, saying caressingly, "and drink Burgundy, Burgundy, Burgundy!"

"Please take me with you, Louie," Mrs. St. Peter pleaded, to distract him from his wife. Nothing made the

McGregors so uncomfortable and so wrathful as the tender moments which sometimes overtook the

"We are going to take you, and Papa too. That's our plan. I take him for safety. If I travelled on the Continent

alone with two such handsome women, it wouldn't be tolerated. There would be a trumpedup quarrel, and a

"Come here, Louie." Mrs. St. Peter beckoned him. "I have a confession to make. I'm afraid there's no dinner

"No. There's nothing either you or Godfrey will like. It's Scott's dinner tonight. Your tastes are so different, I

"But who said I didn't like cream soup and frozen pudding?" Louie held out his hands to show their

guiltlessness. "And are there haricots verts in the cream sauce? I thought so! And I like those, too. The truth

is, Dearest," he stood before her and tapped her chin with his finger, "the truth is that I like all Scott's dinners,

"Kitty," said Scott as they were driving home that night, Kathleen in the drivers seat beside him, "that silver

bracelet Louie spoke of was one of Tom's trinkets, wasn't it? Do you suppose she has some feeling for him

"I don't know, and I don't care. But, oh, Scott, I do love you very much!" she cried vehemently.

He pinched off his drivingglove between his knees and snuggled his hand over hers, inside her muff.

"Yes, I do!" she said fiercely, squeezing his knuckles together with all her might.

"Awful nice of you to have told me all about it at the start, Kitty. Most girls wouldn't have thought it

"I don't know. I suppose even then I must have had a feeling that you were the real one." Her head dropped

That winter there was a meeting of an Association of Electrical Engineers in Hamilton. Louie Marsellus, who

was a member, gave a luncheon for the visiting engineers at the Country Club, and then motored them to

Outland. Scott McGregor was at the lunch, with the other newspaper men. On his return he stopped at the

"I'll run you over home. Which house, the old? How did you get out of Louie's party?"

"It was some lunch! Louie's a good host. Firstrate cigars, and plenty of them," Scott tapped his breast

pocket. "We had poor Tom served up again. It was all right, of course the scientific men were interested,

didn't know much about him. Louie called on me for personal recollections; he was very polite about it. I

didn't express myself very well. I'm not much of a speaker, anyhow, and this time I seemed to be talking

uphill. You know, Tom isn't very real to me any more. Sometimes I think he was just a a glittering idea.

Here we are, Doctor." Scott's remark rather troubled the Professor. He went up the two flights of stairs and

sat down in his shadowy crypt at the top of the house. With his right elbow on the table, his eyes on the floor,

he began recalling as clearly and definitely as he could every incident of that bright, windy spring day when

He was working in his garden one Saturday morning, when a young man in a heavy winter suit and a Stetson

hat, carrying a grey canvas telescope, came in at the green door that led from the street.

Upon being assured, he set down his bag on the gravel, took out a blue cotton handkerchief, and wiped his

face, which was covered with beads of moisture. The first thing the Professor noticed about the visitor was

his manly, mature voice low, calm, experienced, very different from the thin ring or the hoarse shouts of

boyish voices about the campus. The next thing he observed was the strong line of contrast below the young

man's sandy hair the very fair forehead which had been protected by his hat, and the reddish brown of his

face, which had evidently been exposed to a stronger sun than the spring sun of Hamilton. The boy was

finelooking, he saw tall and presumably well built, though the shoulders of his stiff, heavy coat were so

"I want to go to school here, Professor St. Peter, and I've come to ask you advice. I don't know anybody in the

"New Mexico. I haven't been to school, but I've studied. I read Latin with a priest down there."

"We went right through." He met the Professor's questions squarely, his eyes were resolute, like his voice.

"Oh, you did." St. Peter stood his spade against the wall. He had been digging around his red fruited

The boy began: Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem and steadily continued for fifty lines or more, until

"Excellent. Your priest was a thorough Latinist. You have a good pronunciation and good intonation. Was the

The Professor tried him out in Spanish and told him he thought he knew enough to get credit for a modern

"That's not unusual," St. Peter told him. "But, by the way, how did you happen to come to me instead of the

"I just got in this morning, and your name was the only one here I knew. I read an article by you in a

magazine, about Fray Marcos. Father Duchene said it was the only thing with any truth in it he'd read about

The Professor had noticed before that whenever he wrote for popular periodicals it got him into trouble.

The Professor repeated it. It seemed to suit the boy exactly. "How old are you?"

"I'm twenty." He blushed, and St. Peter supposed he was dropping off a few years, but he found afterward

that the boy didn't know exactly how old he was. "I thought I might get a tutor and make up my mathematics

Outland's face grew grave. "I'm rather awkwardly fixed. If you were to write to Tarpin, New Mexico, to

inquire about me, you'd find I have money in the bank there, and you'd think I had been deceiving you. But

it's money I can't touch while I'm ablebodied. It's in trust for someone else. But I've got three hundred

dollars without any string on it, and I'm hoping to get work here. I've been bossing a section gang all winter,

and I'm in good condition. I'll do anything but wait table. I won't do that." On this point he seemed to feel

The Professor learned some of his story that morning. His parents, he said, were "mover people," and both

died when they were crossing southern Kansas in a prairie schooner. He was a baby and had been informally

adopted by some kind people who took care of his mother in her last hours, a locomotive engineer named

O'Brien, and his wife. This engineer was transferred to New Mexico and took the foundling boy along with

his own children. As soon as Tom was old enough to work, he got a job as call boy and did his share toward

"No, sir. It's a more responsible position. Our town was an important freight division on the Santa F , and a

lot of train men live there. The freight schedule is always changing because it's a single track road and the

dispatcher has to get the freights through when he can. Suppose you're a brakeman, and your train is due out

at two A.M.; well, like as not, it will be changed to midnight, or to four in the morning. You go to bed as if

you were going to sleep all night, with nothing on your mind. The call boy watches the schedule board, and

half an hour before your train goes out, he comes and taps on your window and gets you up in time to make

it. The call boy has to be on to things in the town. He must know when there's a poker game on, and how to

slip in easy. You can't tell when there's a spotter about, and if a man's reported for gambling, he's fired.

Sometimes you have to get a man when he isn't where he ought to be. I found there was usually a reason at

home for that." The boy spoke with gravity, as if he had reflected deeply upon irregular behaviour.

Just then Mrs. St. Peter came out into the garden and asked her husband if he wouldn't bring his young friend

in to lunch. Outland started and looked with panic toward the door by which he had come in; but the

Professor wouldn't hear of his going, and picked up his telescope to prevent his escape. As he carried it into

the house and put it down in the hall, he noticed that it was strangely light for its bulk. Mrs. St. Peter

introduced the guest to her two little girls, and asked him if he didn't want to go upstairs to wash his hands.

He disappeared; as he came back something disconcerting happened. The front hall and the front staircase

were the only hard wood in the house, but as Tom came down the waxed steps, his heavy new shoes shot out

from under him, and he sat down on the end of his spine with a thump. Little Kathleen burst into a giggle,

and her elder sister looked at her reprovingly; Mrs. St. Peter apologized for the stairs.

"I'm not much used to stairs, living mostly in 'dobe houses," Tom explained, as he picked himself up.

At luncheon the boy was very silent at first. He sat looking admiringly at Mrs. St. Peter and the little girls.

The day had grown warm, and the Professor thought this was the hottest boy he had ever seen. His stiff white

collar began to melt, and his handkerchief, as he kept wiping his face with it, became a rag. "I didn't know it

would be so warm up here, or I'd have picked a lighter suit," he said, embarrassed by the activity of his skin.

"We would like to hear more about your life in the Southwest," said his host. "How long were you a call

"Two years. Then I had pneumonia, and the doctor said I ought to go on the range, so I went to work for a big

Mrs. St. Peter began to question him about the Indian pueblos. He was reticent at first, but he presently

warmed up in defence of Indian housewifery. He forgot his shyness so far, indeed, that having made a neat

heap of mashed potato beside his chop, he conveyed it to his mouth on the blade of his knife, at which sight

the little girls were not able to conceal their astonishment. Mrs. St. Peter went on quietly talking about Indian

"I think the very best is the old, the cliffdweller pottery," he said. "Do you take an interest in pottery,

Ma'am? Maybe you'd like to see some I have brought along." As they rose from the table he went to his

telescope underneath the hatrack, knelt beside it, and undid the straps. When he lifted the cover, it seemed

full of bulky objects wrapped in newspapers. After feeling among them, he unwrapped one and displayed an

earthen water jar, shaped like those common in Greek sculpture, and ornamented with a geometrical pattern

"That's one of the real old ones. I know, for I got it out myself. I don't know just how old, but there's pin>on

trees three hundred years old by their rings, growing up in the stone trail that leads to the ruins where I got it."

"Yes, deep, narrow trails in white rock, worn by their moccasin feet coming and going for generations. And

these old pion trees have come up in the trails since the race died off. You can tell something about how

long ago it was by them." He showed her a coating of black on the under side of the jar.

"That's not from the firing. See, I can scratch it off. It's soot, from when it was on the cookfire last and

that was before Columbus landed, I guess. Nothing makes those people seem so real to me as their old pots,

with the fireblack on them." As she gave it back to him, he shook his head. "That one's for you, Ma'am, if

"Oh, I couldn't think of letting you give it to me! You must keep it for yourself, or put it in a museum." But

"Museums," he said bitterly, "they don't care about our things. The want something that came from Crete or

Egypt. I'd break my jars sooner than they should get them. But I'd like this one to have a good home, among

your nice things" he looked about appreciatively. "I've no place to keep them. They're in my way,

especially that big one. My trunk is at the station, but I was afraid to leave the pottery. You don't get them out

"Maybe some day, Ma'am, I can tell you," he said, wiping his sooty fingers on his handkerchief. His reply

was courteous but final. He strapped his bag and picked up his hat, then hesitated and smiled. Taking a

buckskin bag from his pocket, he walked over to the windowseat where the children were, and held out his

hand to them, saying: "These I would like to give to the little girls." In his palm lay two lumps of soft blue

"Turquoises, just the way they come out of the mine, before the jewellers have tampered with them and made

Again Mrs. St. Peter demurred. She told him very kindly that she couldn't let him give his stones to the

"I'd never sell them. They were given to me by a friend. I have a lot, and they're no use to me, but they'll

make pretty playthings for little girls." His voice was so wistful and winning that there was nothing to do.

"Hold them still a moment," said the Professor, looking down, not at the turquoises, but at the hand that held

them: the muscular, manylined palm, the long, strong fingers with soft ends, the straight little finger, the

flexible,beautifully shaped thumb that curved back from the rest of the hand as if it were its own master.

In a moment the stranger was gone, and the St. Peter family sat down and looked at one another. He

"Well, this is something new in students, Godfrey. We ask a poor perspiring tramp boy to lunch, to save his

Yes, the Professor reflected, after all these years, that was still true. Fellows like Outland don't carry much

luggage, yet one of the things you know them by is their sumptuous generosity and when they are gone,

With a good tutor, young Outland had no difficulty in making up three years' mathematics in four months.

Latin, he owned, had been hard for him. But in mathematics, he didn't have to work, he had merely to give

his attention. His tutor had never known anything like it. But St. Peter held the boy at arm's length. As a

young teacher full of zeal, he had been fooled more than once. He knew that the wonderful seldom holds

water, that brilliancy has no staying power, and the unusual becomes commonplace by a natural law.

In those first months Mrs. St. Peter saw more of their prot g than her husband did. She found him a good

boardingplace, took care that he had proper summer clothes and that he no longer addressed her as "Ma'am."

He came often to the house that summer, to play with the little girls. He would spend hours with them in the

garden, making Hopi villages with sand and pebbles, drawing maps of the Painted Desert and the Rio Grande

country in the gravel, telling them stories, when there was no one by to listen, about the adventures he had

"Mother," Kathleen broke out one evening at dinner, "what do you think! Tom hasn't any birthday."

"When his mother died in the mover wagon, and Tom was a baby, she forgot to tell the O'Briens when his

birthday was. She even forgot to tell them how old he was. They thought he must be a year and a half,

because he was so big, but Mrs. O'Brien always said he didn't have enough teeth for that."

St. Peter asked her whether Tom had ever said how it happened that his mother died in a wagon. "Well, you

see, she was very sick, and they were going West for her health. And one day, when they were camped beside

a river, Tom's father went in to swim, and had a cramp or something, and was drowned. Tom's mother saw it,

and it made her worse. She was there all alone, till some people found her and drove her on to the next town

to a doctor. But when they got her there, she was too sick to leave the wagon. They drove her into the

O'Briens' yard, because that was nearest the doctor's and Mrs. O'Brien was a kind woman. And she died in a

"Nothing except that he was a schoolteacher in Missouri. His mother told the O'Briens that much. But the

St. Peter had noticed that in the stories Tom told the children there were no shadows. Kathleen and

Rosamond regarded his freelance childhood as a gay adventure they would gladly have shared. They loved

to play at being Tom and Roddy. Roddy was the remarkable friend, ten years older than Tom, who knew

everything about snakes and panthers and deserts and Indians. "And he gave up a fine job firing on the Santa

F , and went off with Tom to ride after cattle for hardly any wages, just to be with Tom and take care of him

"That wasn't the only reason," Rosamond added dreamily. "Roddy was proud. He didn't like taking orders

and living on pay cheques. He liked to be free, and to sit in his saddle all day and use it for a pillow at night.

"Anyhow, he was noble. He was always noble, noble Roddy!" Kathleen finished it off.

After the first day, when he had walked into the garden and introduced himself, Tom never took up the story

of his own life again, either with the Professor or Mrs. St. Peter, though he was often encouraged to do so. He

would talk about the New Mexico country when questioned, about Father Duchene, the missionary priest

who had been his teacher, about the Indians; but only with the two little girls did he ever speak freely and

confidentially about himself. St. Peter used to wonder how the boy could afford to spend so much time with

the children. All through that summer and fall he used to come in the afternoon and join them in the garden.

In the winter he dropped in two or three evenings a week to play Five Hundred or to take a dancinglesson.

There was evidently something enchanting about the atmosphere of the house to a boy who had always lived

a rough life. He enjoyed the prettiness and freshness and gaiety of the little girls as if they were flowers.

Probably, too, he liked being so attractive to them. A flush of pleasure would come over Tom's face so

much fairer now than when he first arrived in Hamilton if Kathleen caught his hand and tried to squeeze it

hard enough to hurt, crying: "Oh, Tom, tell us about the time you and Roddy found the water hole dry, and

then afterward tell us about when the rattlesnake bit Henry!" He would whisper: "Pretty soon," and after a

while, through the open windows, the Professor would hear them in the garden: the laughter and

exclamations of the little girls, and that singularly individual voice of Tom's mature, confident, seldom

He couldn't have wished for a better companion for his daughters, and they were teaching Tom things that he

Sitting thus in his study, long afterward, St. Peter reflected that those first years, before Outland had done

anything remarkable, were really the best of all. He liked to remember the charming groups of three he was

always coming upon, in the hammock swung between the lindentrees, in the windowseat, or before the

diningroom fire. Oh, there had been fine times in this old house then: family festivals and hospitalities, little

girls dancing in and out, Augusta coming and going, gay dresses hanging in his study at night, Christmas

shopping and secrets and smothered laughter on the stairs. When a man had lovely children in his house,

fragrant and happy, full of pretty fancies and generous impulses, why couldn't he keep them? Was there no

St. Peter had come in late from an afternoon lecture, and had just lighted his kerosene lamp to go to work,

when he heard a light foot ascending the stairs. In a moment Kathleen's voice called: "May I interrupt for a

"Kitty, do you remember the time you sat out there with your beesting and your bottle? Nobody ever

Kathleen threw her hat and jacket into the sewingchair and walked about, touching things to see how dusty

they were. "I've been wondering if you didn't need me to come in and clean house for you, but it's not so bad

as they report it. This is the first time I've called on you since you've been here alone. I've turned in from the

walk more than once, but I've always run away again." She paused to warm her hands at the little stove. "I'm

silly, you know; such queer things make me blue. And you still have Augusta's old forms. I don't think

anything ever happened to her that amused her so much. And now, you know, she's quite sentimental about

their being here. It's about Agusta sic that I came, Papa. Did you know that she had lost some of her savings

"Yes. She was sewing for me last week. I noticed that she seemed depressed and hadn't much appetite for

lunch which, you know, is unusual for Augusta. She was ashamed to tell any of us about it, because it

seems she'd asked Louie's advice, and he told her to invest in that company. But a lot of the people in her

church were putting money into it, and of course that made it seem all right to her. She lost five hundred

"Five hundred dollars," murmured St. Peter. "Let me see, at three dollars a day that means one hundred and

"You needn't, dear." Kathleen tossed her head. "I have been to her. She refuses."

"Refuses? She can't refuse, my dear. I'll have a word to say." The firmness of his tone, and the quick rush of

"She says that Louie took the trouble to speak to his banker and to several copper men before he advised

Augusta; and that if she doesn't learn her lesson this time, she will do the same thing over again. Rosamond

"Even if you can do anything with her, she's determined to make Augusta admit her folly, and it can't be done

that way. Augusta is terribly proud. When I told her her customers ought to make it up to her, she was very

haughty and said she wasn't that kind of a sewingwoman; that she gave her ladies good measure for their

money. Scott thought we could buy stock in some good company and tell her we had used our influence and

got an exchange, but that she must keep quiet about it. We could manage some such little fib, she knows so

little about business. I know I can get the Dudleys and the Browns to help. We needn't go to the Marselluses."

"Wait a few days. It's a disgrace to us as a family not to make it up ourselves. On her own account, we

oughtn't to let Rosamond out. She's altogether too blind to responsibilities of that kind. In a world full of

blunders, why should Augusta have to pay scrupulously for her mistakes? It's very petty of Rosie, really!"

Kathleen started to speak, stopped and turned away. "Scott will give a hundred dollars," she said a moment

"That's very generous of him. I'll give another, and Rosie shall make up the rest. If she doesn't, I'll speak to

Louie. He's an absolutely generous chap. I've never known him to refuse to give either time or money."

Kathleen's eyes suddenly brightened. "Why, Daddy, you have Tom's Mexican blanket! I never knew he gave

it to you. I've often wondered what became of it." She picked up from the foot of the boxcouch a purple

"Oh, yes, I often get chilly when I lie down, especially if I turn the stove out, which your mother says I ought

"He wouldn't have given it to anybody but you. It was like his skin. Do you remember how horsey it smelled

"Just like a livery stable! It had been strapped behind the saddle on so many sweating cowponies. In damp

Kathleen stroked it thoughtfully. "Roddy brought it up from Old Mexico, you know. He gave it to Tom that

winter he had pneumonia. Tom ought to have taken it to France with him. He used to say that Rodney Blake

might turn up in the Foreign Legion. If he had taken this, it might have been like the wooden cups that were

St. Peter smiled and patted her hand on the blanket. "Do you know, Kitty, I sometimes think I ought to go out

and look for Blake myself. He's on my conscience. If that country down there weren't so everlastingly big

"Oh, Father! That was my romantic dream when I was little, finding Roddy! I used to think about it for hours

when I was supposed to be taking my nap. I used to swim rivers and climb mountains and wander about with

Navajos, and rescue Roddy at the most critical moments, when he was being stabbed in the back, or drugged

in a gambling house, and bring him back to Tom. You know Tom told us about him long before he ever told

"You children used to live in his stories. You cared more about them than about all your adventure books."

"I still do," said Kathleen, rising. "Now that Rosamond has Outland, I consider Tom's mesa entirely my

St. Peter put down the cigarette he had just lighted with anticipation. "Can't you stay awhile, Kitty? I almost

never see anyone who remembers that side of Tom. It was nice, all those years when he was in and out of the

house like an older brother. Always very different from the other college boys, wasn't he? Always had

something in his voice, in his eyes . . . One seemed to catch glimpses of an unusual background behind his

Kathleen smiled wanly. "Yes, and now he's all turned out chemicals and dollars and cents, hasn't he? But not

for you and me! Our Tom is much nicer than theirs." She put on her jacket and went out of the study and

quickly down the stairs. Her father, on the landing, looked after until she disappeared. When she was gone he

still stood there, motionless, as if her were listening intently, or trying to fasten upon some fugitive idea.

St. Peter was breakfasting at sixthirty, alone, reading last night's letters while he waited for the coffee to

percolate. It had been long since he had had an eight o'clock class, but this year the schedule committee had

slyly put him down for one. "He can afford to take a taxi over now," the Dean remarked.

After breakfast he went upstairs and into his wife's room. "I have a rendezvous with a lady," he said, tossing

an envelope upon her counterpane. She read a note from Mrs. Crane, the least attractive of the faculty ladies,

requesting an interview with the professor at his earliest convenience: as she wished to see him quite alone,

might she come to his study in the old house, where she understood he still worked?

"One ought not to joke about it " St. Peter went into his room to get a handkerchief and came back,

taking up his suspended sentence. "I'm afraid it means poor Crane is coming up for another operation. Or,

worse still, that the surgeons tell her another would be useless. It's like The Pit and

Page 134 the Pendulum. I feel as if the poor fellow were strapped down on a revolving disk that comes

Mrs. St. Peter looked judicially at the letter, then at her husband's back. She didn't believe that surgery would

be the subject of discussion when they met. Mrs. Crane had been behaving very strangely of late.

Doctor Crane had married a girl whom no other man ever thought of courting, a girl of whom people always

said: "Oh, she's so good!" chiefly because she was so homely. They had three very plain daughters, and only

St. Peter kissed his wife and went forth quite unconscious of what was going on in her mind. During the

morning he telephoned Mrs. Crane, and arranged a meeting with her at five o'clock. As the bell in the old

house didn't work now, he waited downstairs on the front porch, to receive his visitor and conduct her up to

his study. It was raining drearily, and Mrs. Crane arrived in a rubber coat, and a knitted sport hat belonging to

one of her daughters. St. Peter took her wet umbrella and led her up the two flights of stairs.

"I'm not very well appointed to receive ladies, Mrs. Crane. This was the sewingroom, you know. There's

Augusta's chair, which she insisted was comfortable." "Thank you." Mrs. Crane sat down, took off her

gloves, and tucked wisps of damp hair up under her crocheted hat. Her bleak, plain face wore an expression

"I've come without my husband's knowledge, Doctor St. Peter, to ask you what you think can be done about

our rights in the Outland patent. You know how my husband's health has crippled us financially, and we

never know when his trouble may come on worse again. Myself, I've never doubted that you would see it is

St. Peter looked at her in amazement. "But, my dear Mrs. Crane, how can I share with you what I haven't got?

Tom willed his estate and royalties in a perfectly regular way. The fact that he named my daughter as his sole

beneficiary doesn't affect me, any more than if he had named some relative of his own. I tell you frankly, I

"It's all the same if it goes to your family, Doctor St. Peter. My husband must be considered in this matter. He

spent days and nights working with Outland. Tom never could have worked his theory out without Robert's

help. He said so, more than once, in my presence and in the presence of others."

"Oh, I believe that, Mrs. Crane. But the difficulty is that Tom didn't make any recognition of that assistance

Mrs. Crane had set her head and advanced her long chin with meek determination. "Well, this is how it was,

Professor. Mr. Marsellus came here a stranger, to put in the Edison power plant, just at the time the city was

stirred up about Outland's being killed at the front. Everybody was wanting to do something in recognition of

the young man. You brought Mr. Marsellus to our house and introduced him. After that he came alone, again

and again, and he got round my husband. Robert thought he was disinterested, and was only taking a

scientific interest, and he told him a great deal about what he and Outland had been working on. Then

Rosamond's lawyers came for the papers. Tom Outland had no laboratory of his own. He was allowed the use

of a room in the physics building, at my husband's request. He wanted to be there, because he constantly

needed Robert's help. The first thing we knew, your daughter's engagement to Marsellus was announced, and

Here St. Peter anticipated her. "But, Mrs. Crane, your husband couldn't, and wouldn't, have kept Tom's

papers. They had to be given over to his executor, who was my daughter's attorney."

"Well, I could have kept them, if he couldn't!" Mrs. Crane threw up her head as if to show that the worm

had turned at last "kept them until justice was done us, and some recognition had been made of my

husband's part in all that research work. If he had taken the papers to court then, with all the evidence we

have, we could easily have got an equity. But Mr. Marsellus is very smooth. He flattered Robert and got

"But he didn't get anything from your husband. Outland's papers and apparatus were delivered to his

"That was poor subterfuge," said Mrs. Crane, with deep meaning. "You know how unworldly Robert is, and

"Why, that Marsellus saw there was a fortune in the gas my husband and his pupil had made, and we could

have asked for our equity before we gave your soninlaw a free hand with everything."

St. Peter felt very unhappy. He began walking up and down the little room. "Heaven knows I'd like to see

Crane get something out of it, but how? How? I've thought a great deal about this matter, and I've blamed

Tom for making that kind of will. I don't think it occurred to the boy that the will would ever be probated. He

expected to come back from the war and develop the thing himself. I doubt whether Robert, with all his

superior knowledge, would have known the twists and turns by which the patent could be commercialized. It

took a great deal of work and a special kind of ability to do that." "A salesman's ability!" Mrs. Crane was

"If you like; but certainly Robert would have been no man to convince manufacturers and machinists, any

more than I would. A great deal of money was put into it, too, before any came back; every cent Marsellus

had, and all he could borrow. He took heavy chances. Crane and I together could never have raised a

hundredth part of the capital that was necessary to get the thing started. Without capital to make it go, Tom's

idea was merely a formula written out on paper. It had lain for two years in your husband's laboratory, and

would have lain there for years more before he or I would have done anything about it."

Mrs. Crane's dreary face took on more animation than he had supposed it capable of. "It had lain there

because it belonged there, and was made there! My husband was done out of it by an adventurer, and his

friendship for you tied his hands. I must say you've shown very little consideration for him. You might have

warned us never to let those papers go. You see Robert getting weaker all the time and having those terrible

operations, and our girls going shabby and teaching in the ward schools, and Rosamond riding about in a

limousine and building country houses, and you do nothing about it. You take your honours you've

deserved them, we never forget that and move into your new house, and you don't remember what it is to

St. Peter drew his chair nearer to Mrs. Crane, and addressed her patiently. "Mrs. Crane, if you had any legal

rights in the patent, I'd defend them against Rosamond as soon as against anyone else. I think she ought to

recognize Dr. Crane's long friendship and helpfulness to Tom in some way. I don't see just how it can be

done, but I feel it should be. And if you wish I'll tell Rosamond how I feel. Why don't you put this matter

"I don't care to ask anything of Mrs. Marsellus. I wrote her some time ago, and she replied to me through her

lawyer, saying that all claims against the Outland patent would be considered in due order. It's not worthy of

a man in Robert's position to accept hush money from the Marselluses. We want justice, and my brother is

"Well, I suppose Bright knows more about what the courts will do than I. But if you've decided to go to law

"There are some things the law don't cover," said Mrs. Crane mysteriously, as she rose and put on her gloves.

St. Peter followed her downstairs and put up her umbrella for her, and then went back to his study to think it

over. His friendship with Crane had been a strange one. Out in the world they would almost certainly have

kept clear of each other; but in the university they fought together in a common cause. Both, with all their

might, had resisted the new commercialism, the aim to "show results" that was undermining and vulgarizing

education. The State Legislature and the board of regents seemed determined to make a trade school of the

university. Candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts were allowed credits for commercial studies;

courses in bookkeeping, experimental farming, domestic science, dressmaking, and what not. Every year the

regents tried to diminish the number of credits required in science and the humanities. The liberal

appropriations, the promotions and increases in salary, all went to the professors who worked with the regents

to abolish the purely cultural studies. Out of a faculty of sixty, there were perhaps twenty men who made any

serious stand for scholarship, and Robert Crane was one of the staunchest. He had lost the Deanship of the

College of Science because of his uncompromising opposition to the degrading influence of politicians in

university affairs. The honour went, instead, to a much younger man, head of the department of chemistry,

The struggle to preserve the dignity of the university, and their own, had brought St. Peter and Dr. Crane

much together. They were, moreover, the only two men on the faculty who were doing research work of an

uncommercial nature, and they occasionally dropped in on one another to exchange ideas. But that was as far

as it went. St. Peter couldn't ask Crane to dinner; the presence of a bottle of claret on the table would have

made him uncomfortable. Dr. Crane had all the prejudices of the Baptist community in which he grew up. He

carried them with him when he went to study at a German university, and brought them back. But Crane

knew that none of his colleagues followed his work so closely, and rejoiced at his little triumphs so heartily,

St. Peter couldn't help admiring the man's courage; poor, ill, overworked, held by his conscience to a

generous discharge of his duties as a teacher, he was all the while carrying on these tedious and delicate

experiments that had to do with determining the extent of space. Fortunately, Crane seemed to have no social

needs or impulses. He never went anywhere, except, once or twice a year, to a dinner at the President's house.

Music disturbed him too much, dancing shocked him he couldn't see why it was permitted among the

students. Once, after Mrs. St. Peter had set next to him at the President's dinnertable, she said to her

husband: "The man is too dreary! All evening his heavy underwear kept coming down below his cuffs, and

he kept poking it back with his forefinger. I believe he thinks it's wicked to live with even so plain a woman

After Tom Outland graduated from the university, he and Dr. Crane worked side by side in the Physics

building for several years. The older man had been of great assistance to the younger, without doubt. Though

that kind of help, the result of criticism and suggestion, is not easily reckoned in percentages, still St. Peter

thought Crane ought to get something out of the patent. He resolved to see Louie about it. But first he had

better talk with Crane himself, and try to dissuade him from going to law. His brotherinlaw, Homer Bright,

would be tempted by the publicity which an action involving the Outland patent would certainly bring him.

But he would lose the case, and Crane would get nothing. Whereas Louie, if he were properly approached,

St. Peter looked at his watch. He would go home now, and after dinner he would walk over to the Physics

building, where his colleague worked every night. He never went to see Crane at his house if he could help it.

At dinner Lillian asked him no questions about his interview with Mrs. Crane, and he volunteered no

information. She was not surprised, however, when he said he would not stop for a cigar, as he was going

He walked through the park, past the old house and across the north end of the campus, to a building that

stood off by itself in a grove of pinetrees. It was constructed of red brick, after an English model. The

architect had had a good idea, and he very nearly succeeded in making a good thing, something like the old

Smithsonian building in Washington. But after it was begun, the State Legislature had defeated him by

grinding down the contractor to cheap execution, and had spoiled everything, outside and in. Ever since it

was finished, plumbers and masons and carpenters had been kept busy patching and repairing it. Crane and

St. Peter, both young men then, had wasted weeks of time with the contractors, and had finally gone before

the Legislative committee in person to plead for the integrity of that building. But nothing came of all their

pains. It was one of many lost causes. St. Peter entered the building and went upstairs to a small room at the

end of a chain of laboratories. After knocking, he heard the familiar shuffle of Crane's carpet slippers, and the

Crane was wearing a grey cotton coat, shrunk to a rag by washing, though he wasn't working with fluids or

batteries tonight, but at a rolltop desk littered with papers. The room was like any study behind a lecture

room; dusty books, dusty files, but no apparatus except a spiritlamp and a little saucepan in which the

physicist heated water for his cocoa at regular intervals. He was working by the glare of an unshaded electric

bulb of high power the man seemed to have no feeling for comfort of any kind. He asked his visitor to sit

down, and to excuse him for a moment while he copied some entries into a notebook.

St. Peter watched him scribbling with his fountain pen. The hands that were so deft in delicate manipulations

were white and softlooking; the fingers long and loosely hung, stained with chemicals, and blunted at the

tips like a violinist's. His head was square, and the lower part of his face was covered by a reddish, matted

beard. His pale eyes and fawncoloured eyebrows were outbalanced by his mouth, his most conspicuous

feature. One always remembered about Crane that unexpected, startling red mouth in a setting of kinky beard.

The lips had no modelling, they were as thick at the corners as in the middle, and he spoke through them

St. Peter saw no use in beating about the bush. As soon as Crane put down his pen, he remarked that Mrs.

Crane had been to see him that afternoon. His colleague flushed, took up a large celluloid paperknife, and

"I want to know exactly how you feel about this, and what the facts are," St. Peter began. "We've never

discussed it before, and there may be things I know nothing about. Did Tom ever say that he meant you to

"No, not exactly. Not exactly that." Dr. Crane moved his shoulders about in his tight coat and looked

embarrassed and unhappy. "More than once he said, in a general way, that he hoped it would go, on my

account as well as on his own, and that we would use the income for further experiments."

"Did he talk much about the possible commercial value of the gas while he was trying to make it?"

"Not much. No, very seldom. Perhaps not more than half a dozen times in the three years he was working in

my laboratory. But whenever he did, he spoke as if there would be something in it for both of us if our gas

"Just how much was it 'our gas,' Crane?" "Strictly speaking, of course, it wasn't. The idea was Outland's. He

benefited by my criticism, and I often helped him with his experiments. He never acquired a nice laboratory

technic. He would fail repeatedly in some perfectly sound experiment because of careless procedure."

Dr. Crane was clenching the paperknife with both hands. "That I cannot say. He was impatient. He might

have got discouraged and turned to something else. He would have been much slower in getting his results, at

any rate. 'His conception was right, but very delicate manipulation was necessary, and he was a careless

St. Peter felt that this was becoming nothing less than crossexamination. He tried to change the tone of it.

"I want to see you get recognition and compensation for whatever part you had in his experiments, if there's

any way to get it. But you've been neglectful, Crane. You haven't taken the proper steps. Why in the world

didn't you have some understanding with Tom when he was getting his patent? You knew all about it."

"It didn't occur to me then. We'd finished the experiments, and I put them out of my mind. I was trying to

concentrate on my own work. His results weren't as interesting scientifically as I'd expected them to be."

"While his manuscripts and formul were lying here those two years, did you ever make the gas, or give any

"Then it's only since this patent has begun to make money that it does interest you?"

"Heaven knows I'd like to see you get some of it. But why did you put it off so long? Why didn't you make

some claim when you delivered the papers to his executor, since you hadn't done so before? Why didn't you

bring the matter up to me then, and let me make a claim against the estate for you?"

Dr. Crane could endure his chair no longer. He began to walk softly about in his slippers, looking at nothing,

but, as he talked, picking up objects here and there, drawingtools, his cocoacup, a china creampitcher,

turning them round and carefully putting them down again, just as he often absently handled pieces of

"I know," he said, "appearances are against me. But you must understand my negligence. You know how

little opportunity a man has to carry on his own line of investigation here. You know how much time I give to

any of my students who are doing honest work. Outland was, of course, the most brilliant pupil I ever had,

and I gave him time and thought without stint. Gladly, of course. If he were reaping the rewards of his

discovery himself, I'd have nothing to say though I've not the least doubt he would compensate me

liberally. But it does not seem right that a stranger should profit, and not those who helped him. You, of

course, do profit indirectly, if not directly. You cannot shut your eyes to the fact that this money, coming

into your family, has strengthened your credit and your general security. That's as it should be. But your

claim was less definite than mine. I spent time and strength I could ill afford to spare on the very series of

experiments that led to this result. Marsellus gets the benefit of my work as well as Outland's. I have certainly

been illused and, as you say, it's difficult to get recompense when I ask for it so late. It's not to my

discredit, certainly, that I didn't take measures to protect my interests. I never thought of my student's work in

terms of money. There were others who did, and I was not considered," he concluded bitterly.

"Why don't you put in a claim to Marsellus, for your time and expert advice? I think he'd honour it. He is

going to live here. He probably doesn't wish to be more unpopular than a suddenly prosperous man is bound

to be, and you have many friends. I believe I can convince him that it would be poor policy to disregard any

"Ah, yes. Mrs. Crane said something of that sort. Well, Crane, if you're going to law about it, I hope you'll

consult a sound lawyer, and you know as well as I that Homer Bright is not one."

Dr. Crane coloured and bridled. "I'm sure you are disinterested, St. Peter, but, frankly, I think your judgment

has been warped by events. You don't realize how clear the matter is to unprejudiced minds. Though I'm such

"The more the better, if you are going to depend on such a windbag as Bright. If you go to law, I'd like to see

St. Peter said goodnight, went down the stairs, and out through the dark pinetrees. Evidence, Crane said;

probably letters Tom had written him during the winter he was working at Johns Hopkins. Well, there was

nothing to be done, unless he could get old Dr. Hutchins to persuade Crane to employ an intelligent lawyer.

Homer Bright's rhetoric might influence a jury in a rape or bigamy case, but it would antagonize a judge in an

The Professor took a turn in the park before going home. The interview had depressed him, and he was afraid

he might be wakeful. He had never seen his colleague in such an unbecoming light before. Crane was narrow,

but he was straight; a man you could count on in the shifty game of college politics. He had never been out to

get anything for himself. St. Peter would have said that nothing about the vulgar success of Outland's idea

could possibly matter to Crane, beyond gratifying his pride as a teacher and friend.

The park was deserted. The arclights were turned off. The leafless trees stood quite motionless in the light

of the clear stars. The world was sad to St. Peter as he looked about him; the lakeshore country flat and

heavy, Hamilton small and tight and airless. The university, his new house, his old house, everything around

him, seemed insupportable, as the boat on which he is imprisoned seems to a seasick man. Yes, it was

possible that the little world, on its voyage among all the stars, might become like that; a boat on which one

could travel no longer, from which one could no longer look up and confront those bright rings or revolution.

He brought himself back with a jerk. Ah, yes, Crane; that was the trouble. If Outland were here tonight, he

At the end of the semester, St. Peter went to Chicago with Rosamond to help her buy things for her country

house. He had very much wanted to stay at home and rest the university work seemed to take it out of him

that winter more than ever before; but Rosamond had set her mind on his going, and Mrs. St. Peter told him

he couldn't refuse. A Chicago merchant had brought over a lot of old Spanish furniture, and on this nobody's

judgement would be better than St. Peter's. He was supposed to know a good deal about rugs, too. When his

wife said a thing must be done, the Professor usually did it, from long established habit. Her instincts about

Louie accompanied them to Chicago, where he was to join his brother, the one who was in the silk trade in

China, and go on to New York with him for a family reunion. St. Peter was amused, and pleased, to see that

Louie sincerely hated to leave them with very little encouragement he would have sent his brother on

alone and remained in Chicago with his wife and fatherinlaw. They all lunched together, after which the

Professor and Rosamond took the Marsellus brothers to the LaSalle Street station. When Louie had again and

again kissed his hand to them from the rear platform of the Twentieth Century observation car, and was rolled

away in the very act of shouting something to his wife, St. Peter, who had so often complained that there was

He took Rosamond's arm, and they turned away from the shining rails. "We must be diligent, Rosie. He

Scott McGregor got on the Blue Bird Express one afternoon, returning from a business trip for his paper. On

entering the smokingcar, he came upon his fatherinlaw lying back in a leather chair, his clothes covered

with dust, his eyes closed, a dead cigar hanging between the relaxed fingers of his dark, muscular hand. It

"Hello, Doctor! What are you doing here? Oh, yes! the shopping expedition. Where's Rosamond?"

"That's it." The Professor smiled apologetically, as if he were ashamed to admit it. Scott sat down beside him

and tried to interest him in one subject after another, without success. It occurred to him that he had never

before seen the Professor when he seemed absolutely flattened out and listless. That was a bad sign; he was

glad they were only half an hour from Hamilton. "The old chap needs rest," he reflected. "Rosamond's run

him to death in Chicago. He oughtn't to be used as a courier, anyhow! I'm going to tell Kitty that we must

look out for her father a little. The Marselluses have no mercy, and Lillian has always taken it for granted that

That evening Mrs. St. Peter was standing by the French windows in the drawingroom, watching somewhat

anxiously for her husband. The Chicago train was usually punctual, and surely he would have taken a cab

from the station, for it was a raw February night with a freezing wind blowing off the lake. St. Peter arrived

on foot, however. As he came through the gate, she could see by his walk and the set of his shoulders that he

was very tired. She hurried to open the front door, and asked him why he hadn't come up in a taxi.

"Didn't think of it, really. I'm a creature of habit, and that's one of the things I never used to do." "And in you

lightest overcoat! I thought you only wore this one because you were going to buy a new fur coat in

"Well, I didn't," he said rather shortly. "Let's omit the verb 'to buy' in all forms for a time. Keep dinner back a

little, will you, Lillian? I want to take a warm bath and dress. I did get rather chilled coming up.

Mrs. St. Peter went to the kitchen, and, after a discreet interval, followed her husband upstairs and into his

"I know you're tired, but tell me one thing: did you find the painted Spanish bedroom set?"

"Very. At least, I think I'd have found them so if I'd come upon them without so many other things. Too

much is certainly worse than too little of any thing. It turned out to be rather an orgy of acquisition."

"Oh, no! Perfectly cool. I should say she had a faultless purchasing manner. Wonder where a girl who grew

up in that old house of ours ever got it. She was like Napoleon looting the Italian palaces."

"Don't be harsh. You had a nice little vacation, at any rate." "A very expensive one, for a poor professor. And

A look of sharp anxiety came into Mrs. St. Peter's face. "You mean," she breathed in a hushed voice, "that

He cut in sharply. "I mean that I paid my way, as I hope always to be able to do. Any suggestion to the

contrary might have been very graceful, but it would have been rejected. I am quite ready to permit myself a

little extravagance to be of service to the women of my family. Any other arrangement is humiliating."

Mrs. St. Peter went swiftly downstairs to make him a cocktail. She sensed an unusual weariness in him, and

felt, as it were, the bitter taste on his tongue. A man, she knew, could get from his daughter a peculiar kind of

When the Professor had been warmed and comforted by a good dinner, he lit a cigar and sat down before the

hearth to read. After a while his wife saw that the book had slid to his knee, and he was looking into the fire.

Studying his dark profile, she noticed that the corners of his funny eyebrows rose, as if he were amused by

something. "What are you thinking about, Godfrey?" she said presently. "Just then you were smiling quite

"I was thinking," he answered absently, "about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived

in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer, at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to

him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life."

The month of March was the dreariest and bleakest of the year in Hamilton, and Louie strove to brighten it by

opening a discussion of plans for the summer. He had been hinting for some time that he had a very attractive

project up his sleeve, and though he had not succeeded in keeping it from Mrs. St. Peter, he said nothing to

the Professor until one night when they were dining at the Marselluses'. All through dinner Louie kept

reminding them of the specialties of this and that Paris restaurant, so that St. Peter was not altogether

As they left the diningroom, Louie burst out with it. He and Rosamond were to take Doctor and Mrs. St.

Peter to France for the summer. Louie had decided upon the dates, the boat, the itinerary; he was intoxicated

"Understand," he said, "it is to be our excursion, from Hamilton back to Hamilton. We'll travel in the most

ample comfort, but not in magnificence. We'll go down to Biarritz for a little fashionable life, and stop at

Marseilles to see your foster brother, Charles Thierault. The rest of the summer we'll lead a scholarly life in

Paris. I have my own reasons for wishing you to go along, Professor. The pleasure of your company would be

quite enough, but I have also other reasons. I want to see the intellectual side of Paris, and to meet some of

the savants and men of letters whom you know. What a shame Gaston Paris is not living! We could very

Mrs. St. Peter developed the argument. "Yes, Louie, you and Godfrey can lunch with the scholars while

Marsellus looked alarmed. "Not at all, Dearest! It's to be understood that I always shop with you. I adore the

shops in Paris. Besides, we shall want you with us when we lunch with celebrities. When was a savant, and a

Frenchman, not eager for the company of two charming ladies at d jeuner? And you may have too much of

the society of your sposi; very nice for you to have variety. You must keep a little engagement book: Lundi,

St. Peter chuckled. "I'm afraid you exaggerate the circumference of my social circle, Louie. I haven't the

"You can help us, too, about finding things for the house, Papa," said Rosamond. "We expect to pick up a

good many things. The Thieraults ought to know good shops down in the South, where prices have not gone

"I'm afraid the antiquaries are centralized in Paris. I never saw anything very interesting in Lyons or the Midi.

"Charles Thierault is still interested in a shipping line that runs to the City of Mexico for us. They would go

in without duty, and Louie thinks he can get them across the border as household goods."

Marsellus laughed and patted his wife's hand. "Ohho, cher Papa, you haven't begun to find how practical we

"Well, Louie, it's a tempting idea, and I'll think it over. I'll see whether I can arrange my work. St. Peter knew

at that moment that he would never be one of this lighthearted expedition, and he hated himself for the

The family discussed their summer plans all evening. Louie wanted to write at once for rooms at the Meurice,

That night, after he was in bed, St. Peter tried in vain to justify himself in his inevitable refusal. He liked

Paris, and he liked Louie. But one couldn't do one's own things in another person's way; selfish or not, that

was the truth. Besides, he would not be needed. He could trust Louie to take every care of Lillian, and

nobody could please her more than her soninlaw. Beauxfils, apparently, were meant by Providence to

take the husband's place when husbands had ceased to be lovers. Marsellus never forgot one of the hundred

foolish little attentions that Lillian loved. Best of all, he admired her extravagantly, her distinction was

priceless to him. Many people admired her, but Louie more than most. That worldliness, that willingness to

get the most out of occasions and people, which had developed so strongly in Lillian in the last few years,

seemed to Louie as natural and proper as it seemed unnatural to Godfrey. It was an element that had always

been in Lillian, and as long as it resulted in mere fastidiousness, was not a means to an end, St. Peter liked it,

too. He knew it was due to this worldliness, even more than to the fact that his wife had a little money of her

own, that she and his daughters had never been drab and a little pathetic, like some of the faculty women.

They hadn't much, but they were never absurd. They never made shabby compromises. If they couldn't get

the right thing, they went without. Usually they had the right thing, and it got paid for, somehow. He couldn't

say they were extravagant; the old house had been funny and bare enough, but there were no ugly things in it.

Since Rosamond's marriage to Marsellus, both she and her mother had changed bewilderingly in some

respects changed and hardened. But Louie, who had done the damage, had not damaged himself. It was to

him that one appealed, for Augusta, for Professor Crane, for the bruised feelings of people less fortunate.

It was less because of Louie than for any other reason that he would refuse this princely invitation.

He could get out of it without hurting anybody though he knew Louie would be sorry. He could simply

insist that he must work, and that he couldn't work away from his old study. There were some advantages

about being a writer of histories. The desk was a shelter one could hide behind, it was a hole one could creep

When St. Peter told his family of his decision, Louie was disappointed; but he was respectful, and readily

conceded that the Professor's first duty was to his work. Rosamond was incredulous and piqued; she didn't

see how he could be so ungenerous as to spoil an arrangement which would give pleasure to everyone

When they were alone together, she approached the matter more directly than was her wont nowadays.

"Godfrey," she said slowly and sadly, "I wonder what it is that makes you draw away from your family. Or

"I wish I were going to be. I'd much rather see you foolish about some woman than becoming lonely and

"Well, the habit of living with ideas grows on one, I suppose, just as inevitably as the more cheerful habit of

St. Peter sighed. "I can't contradict you there. But I must go on as I can. It is not always May."

"You are not old enough for the pose you take. That's what puzzles me. For so many years you never seemed

to grow at all older, though I did. Two years ago you were an impetuous young man. Now you save yourself

in everything. You're naturally warm and affectionate; all at once you begin shutting yourself away from

everybody. I don't think you'll be happier for it." Up to this point she had been lecturing him. Now she

suddenly crossed the room and sat down on the arm of his chair, looking into his face and twisting up the

ends of his military eyebrows with her thumb and middle finger. "Why is it, Godfrey? I can't see any change

in your face, though I watch you so closely. It's in your mind, in your mood. Something has come over you.

Is it merely that you know too much, I wonder? Too much to be happy? You were always the wisest person

"I can't altogether tell myself, Lillian. It's not wholly a matter of the calendar. It's the feeling that I've put a

great deal behind me, where I can't go back to it again and I don't really wish to go back. The way would

be too long and too fatiguing. Perhaps, for a homestaying man, I've lived pretty hard. I wasn't willing to

slight anything you, or my desk, or my students. And now I seem to be tremendously tired. One pays,

coming or going. A man has got only just so much in him; when it's gone he slumps. Even the first Napoleon

did." They both laughed. That was an old joke the Professor's darkest secret. At the font he had been

christened Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter. There had always been a Napoleon in the family, since a remote

grandfather got his discharge from the Grande Arm e. Godfrey had abbreviated his name in Kansas, and

"I think, you know," he told his wife as he rose to go to bed, "that I'll get my second wind. But for the present

I don't want anything very stimulating. Paris is too beautiful, and too full of memories."

One Saturday morning in the spring, when the Professor was at work in the old house, he heard energetic

St. Peter rose and opened to him. Louie was wearing his golf stockings, and a purple jacket with a fur collar.

"No, I'm not going golfing. I changed my mind, but didn't have time to change my clothes. I want you to take

a run out along the lakeshore with us. Rosie is going to lunch with some friends at the Country Club. We'll

have a drive with her, and then drop her there. It's a glorious day." Louie's keen, interested eye ran about the

shabby little room. He chuckled. "The old bear, he just likes his old den, doesn't he? I can readily understand.

Your children were born here. Not your daughters your sons, your splendid Spanishadventurer sons! I'm

proud to be related to them, even by marriage. And your blanket, surely that's a Spanish touch!" Louie

pounced upon the purple blanket, threw it across his chest, and, moving aside the wire lady, studied himself

in Augusta's glass. "And a very proper dressinggown it would make for Louie, wouldn't it?"

"It was Outland's a precious possession. His lost chum brought it up from Mexico."

"Was it Outland's, indeed? Louie stroked it and regarded it in the glass with increased admiration. "I can

The Professor's eyebrows rose in puzzled interrogation. "It might have been awkward about Rosie, you

"I never think of him as a rival," said Louie, throwing back the blanket with a wide gesture. "I think of him as

Half an hour later they were spinning along through the country, just coming green, Rosamond and her father

on the back seat, Louie facing them. It struck the Professor that Louie had something on his mind; his restless

"You know, Doctor," he said presently, "we've decided to give up our house before we go abroad, and cut off

the rent. We'll move the books and pictures up to Outland (and our wedding presents, of course), and the

silver we'll put in the bank. There won't be much of our present furniture that we'll need. I wonder if you

could use any of it? And it has just occurred to me, Rosie," here he leaned forward and tapped her knee, "that

we might ask Scott and Kathleen to come round and select anything they like. No use bothering to sell it,

Rosamond looked at him in astonishment. It was very evident they had not discussed anything of this sort

before. "Don't be foolish, Louie," she said quietly. "They wouldn't want your things."

"But why not?" he persisted playfully. "They are very nice things. Not right for Outland, but perfectly right

for a little house. We chose them with care, and we don't want them going into some dirty secondhand

"They won't have to. We can store them in the attic at Outland, Heaven knows it's big enough! You don't

"It seems a pity, when somebody might be getting the good of them. I know Scott could do very well with

that chiffonier of mine. He admired it greatly, I remember, and said he'd never had one with proper drawers

"Don't look like that, Rosie! It's naughty. Stop it!" Louie reached forward and shook her gently by the

elbows. "And how can you be sure the McGregors wouldn't like our things, when you've never asked them?

"They wouldn't want them because they are ours, yours and mine, if you will have it," she said coldly,

Louie sank back into his seat and gave it up. "Why do you think such naughty things? I don't believe it, you

know! You are so touchy. Scott and Kitty may be a little standoffish, but it might very possibly make them

feel better if you went at them nicely about this." He rallied and began to coax again. "She's got it into her

Rosamond had grown quite pale. Her upper lip, that was so like her mother's when she was affable, so much

harder when she was not, came down like a steel curtain. "I happen to know, Louie, that Scott blackballed

you for the Arts and Letters. You can call that a grudge or not, as you please."

Marsellus was visibly shaken. He looked sad. "Well, if he did, it wasn't very nice of him, certainly. But are

you sure, Rosie? Rumours do go about, and people like to stir up family differences."

"It isn't people, and it's not rumour. I know it positively. Kathleen's best friend told me."

Louie lay back and shook with laughter. "Oh, the ladies, the ladies! What they do to each other, Professor!"

St. Peter was very uncomfortable. "I don't think I'd accept such evidence, Rosamond. I don't believe it of

Scott, and I think Louie has the right idea. People are like children, and Scott's poor and proud. I think Louie's

chiffonier would go to his heart, if Louie offered it to him. I'm afraid you wouldn't do it very graciously."

"Professor, I'll go to McGregor's office and put it up to him. If he scorns it, so much the worse for him. He'll

Rosamond's paleness changed to red. Fortunately they were spinning over the gravel loops that led through

shaven turf to the Country Club. "You can do as you like with your own things, Louie. But I don't want any

of mine in the McGregors' bungalow. I know Scott's brand of humour too well, and the kind of jokes that

The car stopped. Louie sprang out and gave his arm to his wife. He walked up the steps to the door with her,

and his back expressed such patient, protecting kindness that the Professor bit his lower lip with indignation.

Louie came back looking quite grey and tired, and sank into the seat beside the Professor with a

"Louie," St. Peter spoke with deep feeling, "do you happen to have read a novel of Henry James, The

American? There's rather a nice scene in it, in which a young Frenchman, hurt in a duel, apologizes for the

behaviour of his family. I'd like to do something of the sort. I apologize to you for Rosamond, and for Scott,

Louie's downcast face brightened at once. He squeezed the Professor's arm warmly. "Oh, that's all right, sir!

As for Scott, I can understand. He was the first son of the family, and he was the whole thing. Then I came

along, a stranger, and carried off Rosie, and this patent began to pay so well it's enough to make any man

jealous, and he a Scotchman! But I think Scott will come around in the end; people usually do, if you treat

them well, and I mean to. I like the fellow. As for Rosamond, you mustn't give that a thought. I love her when

she's naughty. She's a bit unreasonable sometimes, but I'm always hoping for a period of utter, of fantastic

"Louie, you are magnanimous and magnificent!" murmured his vanquished fatherinlaw.

Lillian and the Marselluses sailed for France early in May. The Professor, left alone, had plenty of time to

spray his rose vines, and his garden had never been so beautiful as it was that June. After his university

duties were over, he smuggled his bed and clothing back to the old house and settled down to a leisurely

bachelor life. He realized that he ought to be getting to work. The garden, in which he sat all day, was no

longer a valid excuse to keep him from his study. But the task that awaited him up there was difficult. It was

a little thing, but one of those little things at which the hand becomes self conscious, feels itself stiff and

It was his plan to give part of this summer to Tom Outland's diary to edit and annotate it for publication.

The bother was that he must write an introduction. The diary covered only about six months of the boy's life,

a summer he spent on the Blue Mesa, and in it there was almost nothing about Tom himself. To mean

anything, it must be prefaced by a sketch of Outland, and some account of his later life and achievements. To

write of his scientific work would be comparatively easy. But that was not all the story; his was a

Of course Mrs. St. Peter had insisted that he was not altogether straightforward; but that was merely because

he was not altogether consistent. As an investigator he was clearsighted and hardheaded; but in personal

relations he was apt to be exaggerated and quixotic. He idealized the people he loved and paid his devoir to

the ideal rather than to the individual, so that his behaviour was sometimes a little too exalted for the

circumstances "chivalry of the cinema," Lillian used to say. One of his sentimental superstitions was that

he must never on any account owe any material advantage to his friends, that he must keep affection and

advancement far apart, as if they were chemicals that would disintegrate each other. St. Peter thought this the

logical result of Tom's strange bringingup and his early associations. There is, he knew, this dream of

selfsacrificing friendship and disinterested love down among the daylabourers, the men who run the

railroad trains and boats and reapers and thrashers and minedrills of the world. And Tom had brought it

along to the university, where advancement through personal influence was considered honourable.

It was not until Outland was a senior that Lillian began to be jealous of him. He had been almost a member of

the family for two years, and she had never found fault with the boy. But after the Professor began to take

Tom up to the study and talk over his work with him, began to make a companion of him, then Mrs. St. Peter

withdrew her favour. She could change like that; friendship was not a matter of habit with her. And when she

was through with anyone, she of course found reasons for her fickleness. Tom, she reminded her husband,

was far from frank, though he had such an open manner. He had been consistently reserved about his own

affairs, and she could not believe the facts he withheld were altogether creditable. They had always known he

had a secret, something to do with the mysterious Rodney Blake and the bank account in New Mexico upon

which he was not at liberty to draw. The young man must have felt the change in her, for he began that winter

to make his work a pretext for coming to the house less often. He and St. Peter now met in the alcove behind

One Sunday, shortly before Tom's Commencement, he came to the house to ask Rosamond to go to the senior

dance with him. The family were having tea in the garden; a few days of intensely warm weather had come

on and hurried the roses into bloom. Rosamond happened to ask Tom, who sat in his white flannels, fanning

"Oh, no," he replied. "May is usually chilly down there bright sun, but a kind of edge in the wind,and cool

Mrs. St. Peter glanced up. "You mean Washington City? I didn't know you had ever been so far east."

There was no denying that the young man looked uncomfortable. He frowned and said in a low voice: "Yes,

I've been there. I suppose I don't speak of it because I haven't very pleasant recollections of it."

"A winter and spring, more than six months. Long enough to get very homesick." He went away almost at

The subject came up again a few weeks later, however. After Tom's graduation, two courses were open to

him. He was offered an instructor ship, with a small salary, in the Physics department under Dr. Crane, and

a graduate scholarship at Johns Hopkins University. St. Peter strongly urged him to accept the latter. One

evening when the family were discussing Tom's prospects, the Professor summed up all the reasons why he

ought to go to Baltimore and work in the laboratory made famous by Dr. Rowland. He assured him,

"Yes, I know something about the atmosphere," Tom broke out at last. "It is delightful, but it's all wrong for

me. It discourages me dreadfully. I used to go over there when I was in Washington, and it always made me

"But can you trust a child's impression to guide you now, in such an important decision?" asked Mrs. St.

"I wasn't a child, Mrs. St. Peter. I was as much grown up as I am now older, in some ways. It was only

"But, Tom, you were on the section gang that year! Why do you mix us all` up?" Kathleen caught his hand

"Well, maybe it was two years before. It doesn't matter. It was long enough to count for two ordinary years,"

Again he went away abruptly, and a few days later he told St. Peter that he had definitely accepted the

During that summer after Outland's graduation, St. Peter got to know all there was behind his reserve. Mrs.

St. Peter and the two girls were in Colorado, and the Professor was alone in the house, writing on volumes

three and four of his history. Tom was carrying on some experiments of his own, over in the Physics

laboratory. He and St. Peter were often together in the evening, and on fine afternoons they went swimming.

Every Saturday the Professor turned his house over to the cleaning woman, and he and Tom went to the lake

It was just the sort of summer St. Peter liked, if he had to be in Hamilton at all. He was his own cook, and had

laid in a choice assortment of cheeses and light Italian wines from a discriminating importer in Chicago.

Every morning before he sat down at his desk he took a walk to the market and had his pick of the fruits and

salads. He dined at eight o'clock. When he cooked a fine leg of lamb, saignant, well rubbed with garlic before

it went into the pan, then he asked Outland to dinner. Over a dish of steaming asparagus, swathed in a napkin

to keep it hot, and a bottle of sparkling Asti, they talked and watched night fall in the garden. If the evening

It was on one of those rainy nights, before the fire in the diningroom, that Tom at last told the story he had

always kept back. It was nothing very incriminating, nothing very remarkable; a story of youthful defeat, the

The thing that sidetracked me and made me so late coming to college was a somewhat unusual accident, or

string of accidents. It began with a poker game, when I was a call boy in Pardee, New Mexico.

One cold, clear night in the fall I started out to hunt up a freight crew that was to go out soon after midnight.

It was just after pay day, and one of the fellows had tipped me off that there would be a poker game going on

in the cardroom behind the Ruby Light saloon. I knew most of my crew would be there, except Conductor

Willis, who had a sick baby at home. The front windows were dark, of course. I went up the back alley,

through a tumbledown ice house and a court, into a 'dobe room that didn't open into the saloon proper at all.

It was crowded, and hot and stuffy enough. There were six or seven in the game, and a crowd of fellows were

standing about the walls, rubbing the white wash off on to their coat shoulders. There was a birdcage

hanging in one window, covered with an old flannel shirt, but the canary had wakened up and was singing

away for dear life. He was a beautiful singer an old Mexican had trained him and he was one of the

I happened along when a jackpot was running. Two of the fellows I'd come for were in it, and they naturally

wanted to finish the hand. I stood by the door with my watch, keeping time for them. Among the players I

saw two sheep men who always liked a lively game, and one of the bystanders told me you had to buy a

hundred dollars' worth of chips to get in that night. The crowd was fussing about one fellow, Rodney Blake,

who had come in from his engine without cleaning up. That wasn't customary; the minute a man got in from

his run, he took a bath, put on citizen's clothes, and went to the barber. This Blake was a new fireman on our

division. He'd come up town in his greasy overalls and sweaty blue shirt, with his face streaked up with

smoke. He'd been drinking; he smelled of it, and his eyes were out of focus. All the other men were clean and

freshly shaved, and they were sore at Blake said his hands were so greasy they marked the cards. Some of

them wanted to put him out of the game, but he was a big, heavybuilt fellow, and nobody wanted to be the

I got my two men and hurried them out, and two others from the row along the wall took their places. One of

the chaps who left with me asked me to go up to his house and get his grip with his work clothes. He's lost

every cent of his pay cheque and didn't want to face his wife. I asked him who was winning.

"Blake. The dirty boomer's been taking everything. But the fellows will clean him out before morning."

About two o'clock, when my work for that night was over and I was going home to sleep, I just dropped in at

the cardroom to see how things had come out. The game was breaking up. Since I left them at midnight,

they had changed to stud poker, and Blake, the fireman, had cleaned everybody out. He was cashing in his

chips when I came in. The bank was a little short, but Blake made no fuss about it. He had something over

sixteen hundred dollars lying on the table before him in bank notes and gold. Some of the crowd were

insulting him, trying to get him into a fight and loot him. He paid no attention and began to put the money

away, not looking at anybody. The bills he folded and put inside the band of his hat. He filled his overall

I'd been interested in this fellow ever since he came on our division; he was closemouthed and unfriendly.

He was one of those fellows with a settled, mature body and a young face, such as you often see among

workingmen. There was something calm, and sarcastic, and mocking about his expression that, too, you

often see among workingmen. When he had put all his money away, he got up and walked toward the door

"Manners of a hog, and a dirty hog!" little Barney Shea yelled after him. Blake's back was just in the

I slipped out after him and followed him down the street. His walk was unsteady, and the gold in his baggy

overalls pockets clinked with every step he took. I ran a little way and caught up with him. "What are you

I thought I'd better follow him home. I knew he lodged with an old Mexican woman, in the yellow quarter,

behind the roundhouse. His room opened on to the street, by a skyblue door. He went in, didn't strike a

light or make a stab at undressing, but threw himself just as he was on the bed and went to sleep. His hat

stuck between the iron rods of the bedhead, the gold ran out of his pockets and rolled over the bare floor in

I struck a match and lit a candle. The bed took up half the room; on the dresser was a grip with his clean

clothes in it, just as he'd brought it in from his run. I took out the clothes and began picking up the money; got

the bills out of his hat, emptied his pockets, and collected the coins that lay in the hollow of the bed about his

hips, and put it all into the grip. Then I blew out the light and sat down to listen. I trusted all the boys who

were at the Ruby Light that night, except Barney Shea. He might try to pull something off on a stranger,

down in Mexican town. We had a quiet night, however, and a cold one. I found Blake's winter overcoat

hanging on the wall and wrapped up in it. I wasn't a bit sorry when the roosters began to crow and the dogs

began barking all over Mexican town. At last the sun came up and turned the desert and the 'dobe town red in

a minute. I began to shake the man on the bed. Waking men who didn't want to get up was part of my job,

I told him I'd come to call him to a Harvey House breakfast. "You owe me a good one. I brought you home

"Sure, I'm glad to have company. Wait till I wash up a bit." He took his soap and towel and comb and went

out into the patio, a neat little sanded square with flowers and vines all around, and washed at the trough

under the pump. Then he called me to come and pump water on his head. After he'd stood the gush of cold

"That ought to get the whisky out of a fellow's head, oughtn't it? Felt good, Tom." Presently he began feeling

his side pockets. "Was I dreaming something, or did I take a string of jackpots last night?"

"The money's in your grip," I told him. "You don't deserve it, for you were too drunk to take care of it. I had

I told him I didn't want anything off him but breakfast, and I wanted that pretty soon.

"It's worse than wet. You oughtn't to go up town without changing. You're a stranger here, and it makes a bad

He shrugged his shoulders and looked superior. He had a squarebuilt, honest face and steady eyes that didn't

carry a cynical expression very well. I knew he was a decent chap, though he'd been drinking and acting ugly

After breakfast we went out and sat in the sun at a place where the wooden sidewalk ran over a sand gully

and made a sort of bridge. I had a long talk with him. I was carrying the grip with his winnings in it, and I

finally persuaded him to go with me to the bank. We put every cent of it into a savings account that he

From that night Blake and I were fast friends. He was the sort of fellow who can do anything for somebody

else, and nothing for himself. There are lots like that among workingmen. They aren't trained by success to

a sort of systematic selfishness. Rodney had been unlucky in personal relations. He'd run away from home

when he was a kid because his mother married again a man who had been paying attention to her while

his father was still alive. He got engaged to a girl down on the Southern Pacific, and she doublecrossed him,

as he said. He went to Old Mexico and let his friends put all his savings into an oil well, and they skinned

him. What he needed was a pal, a straight fellow to give an account to. I was ten years younger, and that was

an advantage. He liked to be an older brother. I suppose the fact that I was a kind of stray and had no family,

made it easier for him to unbend to me. He surely got to think a lot of me, and I did of him. It was that winter

I had pneumonia. Mrs. O'Brien couldn't do much for me; she was overworked, poor woman, with a houseful

of children. Blake took me down to his room, and he and the old Mexican woman nursed me. He ought to

have had boys of his own to look after. Nature's full of such substitutions, but they always seem to me sad,

I wasn't able to be about until spring, and then the doctor and Father Duchene said I must give up night work

and live in the open all summer. Before I knew anything about it, Blake had thrown up his job on the Santa

F , and got a berth for him and me with the Sitwell Cattle Company. Jonas Sitwell was one of the biggest

cattle men in our part of New Mexico. Roddy and I were to ride the range with a bunch of grass cattle all

summer, then take them down to a winter camp on the Cruzados river and keep them on pasture until spring.

We went out about the first of May, and joined our cattle twenty miles south of Pardee, down toward the Blue

Mesa. The Blue Mesa was one of the landmarks we always saw from Pardee landmarks mean so much in

a flat country. To the northwest, over toward Utah, we had the Mormon Buttes, three sharp blue peaks that

always sat there. The Blue Mesa was south of us, and was much stronger in colour, almost purple. People

said the rock itself had a deep purplish cast. It looked, from our town, like a naked blue rock set down alone

in the plain, almost square, except that the top was higher at one end. The old settlers said nobody had ever

climbed it, because the sides were so steep and the Cruzados river wound round it at one end and undercut

Blake and I knew that the Sitwell winter camp was down on the Cruzados river, directly under the mesa, and

all summer long, while we drifted about with our cattle from one waterhole to another, we planned how we

were going to climb the mesa and be the first men up there. After supper, when we lit our pipes and watched

the sunset, climbing the mesa was our staple topic of conversation. Our job was a cinch; the actual work

wouldn't have kept one man busy. The Sitwell people were good to their hands. John Rapp, the foreman,

came along once a month in his springwagon, to see how the cattle were doing and to bring us supplies and

Blake was conscientious reader of newspapers. He always wanted to know what was going on in the world,

though most of it displeased him. He brooded on the great injustices of his time; the hanging of the

Anarchists in Chicago, which he could just remember, and the Dreyfus case. We had long arguments about

what we read in the papers, but we never quarrelled. The only trouble I had with Blake was in getting to do

my share of the work. He made my health a pretext for taking all the heavy chores, long after I was as well as

he was. I'd brought my Caesar along, and had promised Father Duchene to read a hundred lines a day. Blake

saw that I did it made me translate the dull stuff aloud to him. He said if I once knew Latin, I wouldn't

have to work with my back all my life like a burro. He had great respect for education, but he believed it was

some kind of hocus pocus that enabled a man to live without work. We had Robinson Crusoe with us, and

Late in October, Rapp, the foreman, came along to accompany us down to the winter camp. Blake stayed

with the cattle about fifteen miles to the east, where the grass was still good, and Rapp and I went down to air

The cabin stood in a little grove of pions, about thirty yards back from the Cruzados river, facing south and

sheltered on the north by a low hill. The grama grass grew right up to the doorstep, and the rabbits were

running about and the grasshoppers hitting the door when we pulled up and looked at the place. There was no

litter around, it was as clean as a prairiedog's house. No outbuildings, except a shed for our horses. The

hillside behind was sandy and covered with tall clumps of deerhorn cactus, but there was nothing but grass

to the south, with streaks of bright yellow rabbitbrush. Along the river the cottonwoods and quaking asps

had already turned gold. Just across from us, overhanging us, indeed, stood the mesa, a pile of purple rock, all

broken out with red sumach and yellow aspens up in the high crevices of the cliffs. From the cabin, night and

day, you could hear the river, where it made a bend round the foot of the mesa and churned over the rocks. It

I helped Rapp open the wooden shutters and sweep out the cabin. We put clean blankets on the bunks, and

stowed away bacon and coffee and canned stuff on the shelves behind the cookstove. I confess I looked

forward to cooking on an iron stove with four holes. Rapp explained to me that Blake and I wouldn't be able

to enjoy all this luxury together for a time. He wanted the herd kept some distance to the north as long as the

grass held out up there, and Roddy and I could take turn about, one camping near the cattle and one sleeping

"There's not pasture enough down here to take them through a long winter, " he said, "and it's safest to keep

them grazing up north while you can. Besides, if you bring them down here while the weather's so warm,

they get skittish, and that mesa over there makes trouble. The swim the river and bolt into the mesa, and that's

the last you ever see of them. We've lost a lot of critters that way. The mesa has been populated by

runaways from our herd, till now there's a fine bunch of wild cattle up there. When the wind's right, our

cows over here get the scent of them and make a break for the river. You'll have to watch 'em close when you

Rapp glared at me. "Out of that mesa? Nobody has ever got into it yet. The cliffs are like the base of a

monument, all the way round. The only way in is through that deep canyon that opens on the water level, just

where the river makes the bend. You can't get in by that, because the river's too deep to ford and too swift to

swim. Oh, I suppose a horse could swim it, if cattle can, but I don't want to be the man to try."

"Not while you're working for the Sitwell Company, you don't! If you boys try any nonsense of that sort, I'll

fire you quick. You'd break your bones and lose the herd for us. You have to watch them close to keep them

from going over, I tell you. If it wasn't for that mesa, this would be the best winter range in all New Mexico."

After the foreman left us, we settled down to easy living and fine weather; blue and gold days, and clear,

frosty nights. We kept the cattle off to the north and east and alternated in taking charge of them. One man

was with the herd while the other got his sleep and did the cooking at the cabin. The mesa was our only

neighbour, and the closer we got to it, the more tantalizing it was. It was no longer a blue, featureless lump,

as it had been from a distance. Its skyline was like the profile of a big beast lying down; the head to the

north, higher than the flanks around which the river curved. The north end we could easily believe impassable

sheer cliffs that fell from the summit to the plain, more than a thousand feet. But the south flank, just

across the river from us, looked accessible by way of the deep canyon that split the bulk in two, from the top

rim to the river, then wound back into the solid cube so that it was invisible at a distance, like a mouse track

winding into a big cheese. This canyon didn't break the solid outline of the mesa, and you had to be close to

see that it was there at all. We faced the mesa on its shortest side; it was only about three miles long from

north to south, but east and west it measured nearly twice that distance. Whether the top was wooded we

couldn't see it was too high above us; but the cliffs and canyon on the river side were fringed with

beautiful growth, groves of quaking asps and pions and a few dark cedars, perched up in the air like the

hanging gardens of Babylon. At certain hours of the day, those cedars, growing so far up on the rocks, took

It was light up there long before it was with us. When I got up at daybreak and went down to the river to get

water, our camp would be cold and grey, but the mesa top would be red with sunrise, and all the slim cedars

along the rocks would be gold metallic, like tarnished goldfoil. Some mornings it would loom up above

the dark river like a blazing volcanic mountain. It shortened our days, too, considerably. The sun got behind it

early in the afternoon, and then our camp would lie in its shadow. After a while the sunset colour would

begin to stream up from behind it. Then the mesa was like one great inkblack rock against a sky on fire.

No wonder the thing bothered us and tempted us; it was always before us, and was always changing. Black

thunderstorms used to roll up from behind it and pounce on us like a panther without warning. The lightning

would play round it and jab into it so that we were always expecting it would fire the brush. I've never heard

thunder so loud as it was there. The cliffs threw it back at us, and we thought the mesa itself, though it

seemed so solid, must be full of deep canyons and caverns, to account for the prolonged growl and rumble

that followed every crash of thunder. After the burst in the sky was over, the mesa went on sounding like a

One afternoon I was out hunting turkeys. Just as the sun was getting low, I came through a sea of

rabbitbrush, still yellow, and the horizontal rays of light, playing into it, brought out the contour of the

ground with great distinctness. I noticed a number of straight mounds, like plough furrows, running from the

river inland. It was too late to examine them. I cut a scrub willow and stuck a stake into one of the ridges, to

mark it. The next day I took a spade down to the plantation of rabbitbrush and dug around the sandy soil. I

came upon an old irrigation main, unmistakable, lined with hard smooth cobbles and 'dobe cement, with

sluices where the water had been let out into the trenches. Along these ditches I turned up some pieces of

pottery, all of it broken, and arrowheads, and a very neat, wellfinished stone pickax.

That night I didn't go back to the cabin, but took my specimens out to Blake, who was still north with the

cattle. Of course, we both knew there had been Indians all over this country, but we felt sure that Indians

hadn't used stone tools for a long while back. There must have been a colony of pueblo Indians here in

ancient time: fixed residents, like the Taos Indians and the Hopis, not wanderers like the Navajos.

To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and

care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about

the ground you walk over every day. I liked the winter range better than any place I'd ever been in. I never

came out of the cabin door in the morning to go after water that I didn't feel fresh delight in our snug quarters

and the river and the old mesa up there, with its top burning like a bonfire. I wanted to see what it was like on

the other side, and very soon I took a day off and forded the river where it was wide and shallow, north of our

camp. I rode clear around the mesa, until I met the river again where it flowed under the south flank.

On that ride I got a better idea of its actual structure. All the way round were the same precipitous cliffs of

hard blue rock, but in places it was mixed with a much softer stone. In these soft streaks there were deep dry

watercourses which could certainly be climbed as far as they went, but nowhere did they reach to the top of

the mesa. The top seemed to be one great slab of very hard rock, lying on the mixed mass of the base like the

top of an oldfashioned marble table. The channels worn out by water ran for hundreds of feet up the cliffs,

but always stopped under this great rim rock, which projected out over the erosions like a granite shelf.

Evidently, it was because of this unbroken top layer that the butte was inaccessible. I rode back to camp that

night, convinced that if we ever climbed it, we must take the route the cattle took, through the river and up

We brought the bunch of cattle down to the winter range in the latter part of November. Early in December

the foreman came along with generous provisions for Christmas. This time he brought with him a super

cargo, a pitiful wreck of an old man he had picked up at Tarpin,the railroad town thirty miles northeast of us,

where the Sitwells bought their supplies. This old man was a castaway Englishman, Henry Atkins by name.

He had been a valet, and a hospital orderly, and a cook, and for many years was a table steward on the

Anchor Line. Lately he had been cooking for a sheep outfit that were grazing in the cattle country, were they

weren't wanted. They had done something shady and had to get out in a hurry. They dropped old Henry at

Tarpin, where he soon drank up all his wages. When Rapp picked him up there, he was living on handouts.

"I've told him we can't pay him anything," Rapp explained. "But if he wants to stay here and cook for you

boys till I make my next trip, he'll have plenty to eat and a roof over him. He was sleeping in the livery stable

in Tarpin. He says he's a good cook, and I thought he might liven things up for you at Christmas time. He

won't bother you, he's not got any of the mean ways of a bum I know a bum when I see one. Next time I

come down I'll bring him some old clothes from the ranch, and you can fire him if you want to. All his

baggage is that newspaper bundle, and there's nothing in it but shoes a pair of patent leathers and a pair of

sneakers. The important thing is, never, on any account, go off skylarking, you two, and leave him with the

cattle. Not for an hour, mind you. He ain't strong enough, and he's got no head."

Life was a holiday for Blake and me after we got old Henry. He was a wonderful cook and a good

housekeeper. He kept that cabin shining like a playhouse; used to dress it all out with pion boughs, and

trimmed the kitchen shelves with newspapers cut in fancy patterns. He had learned to make up cots when he

was a hospital orderly, and he made our bunks feel like a Harvey House bed. To this day that's the best I can

say for any bed. And he was such a polite, mannerly old boy; simple and kind as a child. I used to wonder

how anybody so innocent and defenceless had managed to get along at all, to keep alive for nearly seventy

years in as hard a world as this. Anybody could take advantage of him. He held no grudge against any of the

people who had misused him. He loved to tell about the celebrated people he'd been steward to, and the

liberal tips they had given him. There with us, where he couldn't get at whisky, he was a model of good

behaviour. "Drink is me weakness, you might say," he occasionally remarked apologetically. He shaved

every morning and was as clean as a pin. We got to be downright fond of him, and the three of us made a

Ever since we'd brought our herd down to the winter camp, the wild cattle on the mesa were more in

evidence. They came down to the river to drink oftener, and loitered about, grazing in that low canyon so

much that we began to call it Cow Canyon. They were finelooking beasts, too. One could see they had good

pasture up there. Henry had a theory that we ought to be able to entice them over to our side with salt. He

wanted to kill one for beef steaks. Soon after he joined us we lost two cows. Without warning they bolted

into the mesa, as the foreman had said. After that we watched the herd closer; but a few days before

Christmas, when Blake was off hunting and I was on duty, four fine young steers sneaked down to the water's

edge through the brush, and before I knew it they were swimming the river seemed to do it with no

trouble at all. They frisked out on the other side, ambled up the canyon, and disappeared. I was furious to

have them steal a march on me, and I swore to myself I'd follow them over and drive them back.

The next morning we took the herd a few miles east, to keep them out of mischief. I made some excuse to

Blake, cut back to the cabin, and asked Henry to put me up a lunch. I told him my plan, but warned him not

to bear tales. If I wasn't home when Blake came in at night, then he could tell him where I'd gone.

Henry went down to the river with me to watch me across. It had grown colder since morning, and looked

like snow. The old man was afraid of a storm; said I might get snowed in. But I'd got my nerve up, and I

didn't want to put off making a try at it. I strapped my blanket and my lunch on my shoulders, hung my boots

around my neck to keep them dry, stuffed my socks inside my hat, and we waded in. My horse took the water

without any fuss, though he shivered a good deal. He stepped out very carefully, and when it got too deep for

him, he swam without panic. We were carried downstream a little by the current, but I didn't have to slide

off his back. He found bottom after a while, and we easily made a landing. I waved goodbye to Henry on

The canyon was wide at the water's edge, and though it corkscrewed back into the mesa by abrupt turns, it

preserved this open, roomy character. It was, indeed, a very deep valley with gently sloping sides, rugged and

rocky, but well grassed. There was a clear trail. Horses have no sense about making a trail, but you can trust

cattle to find the easiest possible path and to take the lowest grades. The bluish rock and the suntanned

grass, under the unusual purplegrey of the sky, gave the whole valley a very soft colour, lavender and pale

gold, so that the occasional cedars growing beside the boulders looked black that morning. It may have been

the hint of snow in the air, but it seemed to me that I had never breathed in anything that tasted so pure as the

air in that valley. It made my mouth and nostrils smart like charged water, seemed to go to my head a little

and produce a kind of exaltation I kept telling myself that it was very different from the air on the other side

When I had gone up this canyon for a mile or so, I came upon another, opening out to the north a box

canyon, very different in character. No gentle slope there. The walls were perpendicular, where they weren't

actually overhanging, and they were anywhere from eight hundred to a thousand feet high, as we afterward

found by measurement. The floor of it was a mass of huge boulders, great pieces of rock that had fallen from

above ages back, and had been worn round and smooth as pebbles by the long action of water. Many of them

were as big as haystacks, yet they lay piled on one another like a load of gravel. There was no footing for my

horse among those smooth stones, so I hobbled him and went on alone a little way, just to see what it was

like. My eyes were steadily on the ground a slip of the foot there might cripple one.

It was such rough scrambling that I was soon in a warm sweat under my damp clothes. In stopping to take

breath, I happened to glance up at the canyon wall. I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it, on

that first morning, through a veil of lightly falling snow. Far up above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great

cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was as still as sculpture and something

like that. It all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses of stone nestling close

to one another, perched on top of each other, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the

It was beautifully proportioned, that tower, swelling out to a larger girth a little above the base, then growing

slender again. There was something symmetrical and powerful about the swell of the masonry. The tower

was the fine thing that held all the jumble of houses together and made them mean something. It was red in

colour, even on that grey day. In sunlight it was the colour of winter oakleaves. A fringe of cedars grew

along the edge of the cavern, like a garden. They were the only living things. Such silence and stillness and

repose immortal repose. That village sat looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity. The

falling snowflakes, sprinkling the pions, gave it a special kind of solemnity. I can't describe it. It was more

like sculpture than anything else. I knew at once that I had come upon the city of some extinct civilization,

hidden away in this inaccessible mesa for centuries, preserved in the dry air and almost perpetual sunlight

As I stood looking up at it, I wondered whether I ought to tell even Blake about it; whether I ought not to go

back across the river and keep that secret as the mesa had kept it. When I at last turned away, I saw still

another canyon branching out of this one, and in its was still another arch, with another group of buildings.

The notion struck me like a rifle ball that this mesa had once been like a beehive; it was full of little

cliffhung villages, it had been the home of a powerful tribe, a particular civilization.

That night when I got home Blake was on the riverbank waiting for me. I told him I'd rather not talk about

my trip until after supper, that I was beat out. I think he'd meant to upbraid me for sneaking off, but he

didn't. He seemed to realize from the first that this was a serious matter to me, and he accepted it in that way.

After supper, when we had lit our pipes, I told Blake and Henry as clearly as I could what it was like over

there, and we talked it over. The town in the cliffs explained the irrigation ditches. Like all pueblo Indians,

these people had had their farms away from their dwellings. For a stronghold they needed rock, and for

"And this proves," said Roddy, "that there must have been a trail into the mesa at the north end, and that they

carried their harvest over by the ford. If this Cow Canyon was the only entrance, they could never have

farmed down here." We agreed that he should go over on the first warm day, and try to find a trail up to the

We talked and speculated until after midnight. It was Christmas eve, and Henry said it was but right we

should do something out of the ordinary. But after we went to bed, tired as I was, I was unable to sleep. I got

up and dressed and put on my overcoat and slipped outside to get sight of the mesa. The wind had come up

and was blowing the squall clouds across the sky. The moon was almost full, hanging directly over the mesa,

which had never looked so solemn and silent to me before. I wondered how many Christmases had come and

gone since that round tower was built. I had been to Acoma and the Hopi villages, but I'd never seen a tower

like that one. It seemed to me to mark a difference. I felt that only a strong and aspiring people would have

built it, and a people with a feeling for design. That cluster of buildings, in its arch, with the dizzy drop into

empty air from its doorways and the wall of cliff above, was as clear in my mind as a picture. By closing my

Blake got over the river before New Year's day, but he didn't find any way of getting from the bottom of the

box canyon up into the Cliff City. He felt sure that the inhabitants of that sky village had reached it by a trail

from the top of the mesa down, not from the bottom of the canyon up. He explored the branch canyons a

little, and found four other villages, smaller than the first, placed in similar arches.

These arches we had often seen in other canyons. You can find them in the Grand Canyon, and all along the

Rio Grande. Whenever the surface rock is much harder than the rock beneath it, the softer stone begins to

crack and crumble with weather just at the line where it meets the hard rim rock. It goes on crumbling and

falling away, and in time this washout grows to be a spacious cavern. The Cliff City sat in an unusually

large cavern. We afterward found that it was three hundred and sixty feet long, and seventy feet high in the

Blake and I began to make plans. Our engagement with the Sitwell Company terminated in May. When we

turned our cattle over to the foreman, we would go into the mesa with what food and tools we could carry,

and try to find a trail down the north end, where we were sure there must once have been one. If we could

find an easier way to get in and out of the mesa, we would devote the summer, and our winter's wages, to

exploring it. From Tarpin, the nearest railroad, we could get supplies and tools, and help if we needed it. We

thought we could manage to do the work ourselves if old Henry would stay with us. We didn't want to make

our discovery any more public than necessary. We were reluctant to expose those silent and beautiful places

to vulgar curiosity. Finally we outlined our plan to Henry, telling him we couldn't promise him regular wages.

"We won't mention it," he said, waving his hand. "I'd ask nothing better than to share your fortunes. In me

"You may get a bad cold going over the river, Henry," Blake warned him. "It's a bad crossing makes you

"I was never seasick in me life," he declared, "and at that, I've helped in the cook's galley on the Anchor Line

when she was fair standing on her head. You'll find me strong and active when I'm once broke into the work.

I come of an enduring family, though, to be sure, I've abused me constitution somewhat."

Henry liked to talk about his family, and the work they'd done, and the great age to which they lived, and the

brandy puddings his mother made. "Eighteen we was in all, when we sat down at table," he would often say

with his thin, apologetic smile. "Mother and father, and ten living, and four dead, and two stillborn." Roddy

and I used to strain our imagination trying to visualize such a family dinner party.

Everything worked out well for us. The foreman showed so much interest in our plans that we told him

everything. He insisted that we should stay on at the winter camp as long as we needed a home base, and use

up whatever supplies were left. When he paid us off, he sold us our two horses at a very reasonable figure.

Blake and I got over to the mesa together for the first time early in May. We carried with us all the food we

could, and an ax and spade. It took us several days to find a trail leading from the bottom of the box canyon

up to the Cliff City. There were gaps in it; it was broken by ledges too steep for a man to climb. Lying beside

one of these, we found an old dried cedar trunk, with toenotches cut in it. That was a plain suggestion. We

felled some trees and threw them up over the gaps in the path. Toward the end of the week, when our

provisions were getting low, we made the last lap in our climb, and stepped upon the ledge that was the floor

In front of the cluster of buildings, there was an open space, like a courtyard. Along the outer edge of this

yard ran a low stone wall. In some places the wall had fallen away from the weather, but the buildings

themselves sat so far back under the rim rock that the rain had never beat on them. In thunderstorms I've

seen the water come down in sheets over the face of that cavern without a drop touching the village. The

courtyard was not choked by vegetation, for there was no soil. It was bare rock, with a few old, flattopped

cedars growing out of the cracks, and a little pale grass. But everything seemed open and clean, and the

The outer walls of the houses were intact, except where sometimes an outjutting corner had crumbled. They

were made of dressed stones, plastered inside and out with 'dobe, and were tinted in light colours, pink and

pale yellow and tan. Here and there a cedar log in the ceiling had given way and let the secondstory

chamber down into the first; except for that, there was little rubbish or disorder. As Blake remarked, wind and

This village had never been sacked by an enemy, certainly. Inside the little rooms water jars and bowls stood

We could give only a hurried look over the place, as our food was exhausted, and we had to get back over the

river before dark. We went about softly, tried not to disturb anything even the silence. Besides the tower,

there seemed to be about thirty little separate dwellings. Behind the cluster of houses was a kind of back

courtyard, running from end to end of the cavern; a long, low, twilit space that got gradually lower toward

the back until the rim rock met the floor of the cavern, exactly like the sloping roof of an attic. There was

perpetual twilight back there, cool, shadowy, very grateful after the blazing sun in the front courtyard. When

we entered it we heard a soft trickling sound, and we came upon a spring that welled out of the rock into a

stone basin and then ran off through a cobblelined gutter and dripped down the cliffs. I've never anywhere

tasted water like it; as cold as ice, and so pure. Long afterward Father Duchene came out to spend a week

with us on the mesa; he always carried a small drinkingglass with him, and he used to fill it at the spring and

take it out into the sunlight. The water looked like liquid crystal, absolutely colourless, without the slight

brownish or greenish tint that water nearly always has. It threw off the sunlight like a diamond.

Beside this spring stood some of the most beautifully shaped water jars we ever found I gave Mrs. St.

Peter one of them standing there just as if they'd been left yesterday. In the back court we found a great

many things besides jars and bowls: a row of grinding stones, and several clay ovens, very much like those

the Mexicans use today. There were charred bones and charcoal, and the roof was thick with soot all the

way along. It was evidently a kind of common kitchen, where they roasted and baked and probably gossiped.

There were corncobs everywhere, and ears of corn with the kernels still on them little, like popcorn. We

found dried beans, too, and strings of pumpkin seeds, and plum seeds, and a cupboard full of little

Late that afternoon Roddy and I crossed the river and got back to our cabin to rest for a few days.

The second time we went over, we found a long winding trail leading from the Cliff City up to the top of the

mesa a narrow path worn deep into the stone ledges that overhung the village, then running back into the

wood of stunted pions on the summit. Following this to the north end of the mesa, we found what was left

of an old road down to the plain. But making this road passable was a matter of weeks, and we had to get

workmen and tools from Tarpin. It was a narrow footpath, barely wide enough for a surefooted mule, and

it wound down through Black Canyon, dropping in loops along the face of terrifying cliffs. About a hundred

feet above the river, it ended broke right off into the air. A wall of rock had fallen away there, probably

from a landslide. That last piece of road cost us three weeks' hard work, and most of our winter's wages. We

kept the workmen on long enough to build us a tight log cabin on the mesa top, a little way back from the

While we were engaged in roadbuilding, we made a short cut from our cabin down to the Cliff City and

Cow Canyon. Just over the Cliff City, there was a crack in the ledge, a sort of manhole, and in this we hung a

ladder of pinetrunks spliced together with light chains, leaving the branch forks for foot holds. By

climbing down this ladder we saved about two miles of winding trails, and dropped almost directly into Cow

Canyon, where we meant always to leave one of the horses grazing. Taking this route, we could at any time

make a quick exit from the mesa we were used to swimming the river now, and in summer our wet clothes

Bill Hook, the liveryman at Tarpin, who'd sheltered old Henry when he was down and out, proved a good

friend to us. He got our workmen back and forth for us, brought our supplies up on to the mesa on his

packmules, and when one of us had to stay in town overnight he let us sleep in his hay barn to save a hotel

bill. He knew our expenses were heavy, and did everything for us at bottom price.

By the first of July our money was nearly gone, but we had our road made, and our cabin built on top of the

mesa. We brought old Henry up by the new horsetrail and began housekeeping. We were now ready for

what we called excavating. We built wide shelves all around our sleepingroom, and there we put the smaller

articles we found in the Cliff City. We numbered each specimen, and in my daybook I wrote down just

where and in what condition we had found it, and what we thought it had been used for. I'd got a merchant's

ledger in Tarpin, and every night after supper, while Roddy read the newspapers, I sat down at the kitchen

Henry, besides doing the housekeeping, was very eager to help us in the "rewins," as he called them. He was

more patient than we, and would dig with his fingers half a day to get a pot out of a rubbish pile without

breaking it. After all, the old man had a wider knowledge of the world than either of us, and it often came in

handy. When we were working in a pale pink house, with two stories, and a sort of balcony before the upper

windows, we came on a closet in the wall of the upstairs room; in this were a number of curious thing, among

them a deerskin bag full of little tools. Henry said at once they were surgical instruments; a stone lancet, a

One thing we knew about these people; they hadn't built their town in a hurry. Everything proved their

patience and deliberation. The cedar joists had been felled with stone axes and rubbed smooth with sand. The

little poles that lay across them and held up the clay floor of the chamber above, were smoothly polished. The

door lintels were carefully fitted (the doors were stone slabs held in place by wooden bars fitted into hasps).

The clay dressing that covered the stone walls was tinted, and some of the chambers were frescoed in

geometrical patterns, on colour laid on another. In one room was a painted border, little tents, like Indian

But the really splendid thing about our city, the thing that made it delightful to work there, and must have

made it delightful to live there, was the setting. The town hung like a bird's nest in the cliff, looking off into

the box canyon below, and beyond into the wide valley we called Cow Canyon, facing an ocean of clear air.

A people who had the hardihood to build there, and who lived day after day looking down upon such

grandeur, who came and went by those hazardous trails, must have been, as we often told each other, a fine

They hadn't moved away, for they had taken none of their belongings, not even their clothes. Oh, yes, we

found clothes; yucca moccasins, and what seemed like cotton cloth, woven in black and white. Never any

wool, but sheepskins tanned with the fleece on them. They may have been mountain sheep; the mesa was full

of them. We talked of shooting one for meat, but we never did. When a mountain sheep comes out on a ledge

hundreds of feet above you, with his trumpet horns, there's something noble about him he looks like a

priest. We didn't want to shoot at them and make them shy. We liked to see them. We shot a wild cow when

At last we came upon one of the original inhabitants not a skeleton, but a dried human body, a woman.

She was not in the Cliff City; we found her in a little group of houses stuck up in a high arch we called the

Eagle's Nest. She was lying on a yucca mat, partly covered with rags, and she had dried into a mummy in that

waterdrinking air. We thought she had been murdered; there was a great wound in her side, the ribs stuck

out through the dried flesh. Her mouth was open as if she were screaming, and her face, through all those

years, had kept a look of terrible agony. Part of the nose was gone, but she had plenty of teeth, not one

missing, and a great deal of coarse black hair. Her teeth were even and white, and so little worn that we

thought she must have been a young woman. Henry named her Mother Eve, and we called her that. We put

her in a blanket and let her down with great care, and kept her in a chamber in the Cliff City.

Yes, we found three other bodies, but afterward. One day, working in the Cliff City, we came upon a stone

slab at one end of the cavern, that seemed to lead straight into the rock. It was set in cement, and when we

loosened it we found it opened into a small, dark chamber. In this there had been a platform, of fine cedar

poles laid side by side, but it had crumbled. In the wreckage were three bodies, one man and two women,

wrapped in yuccafibre, all in the same posture and apparently prepared for burial. They were the bodies of

old people. We believed when the tribe went down to live on their farms in the summer season; that they had

died in the absence of the villages, and were put into this mortuary chamber to await the return of the tribe,

when they would have their funeral rites. Probably these people burned their dead. Of course an archaeologist

could have told a great deal about that civilization from those bodies. But they never got to an archaeologist

The first of August came, and everything was going well with us. We hadn't met with any bad luck, and

though we had very little money left, there was Blake's untouched savings account in the bank at Pardee, and

we had plenty of credit in Tarpin. The merchants there took an interest and were friendly. But the little new

moon, that looked so innocent, brought us trouble. We lost old Henry, and in a terrible way. From the first

we'd been a little bothered by rattlesnakes you generally find them about old stone quarries and old

masonry. We had got them pretty well cleared out of the Cliff City, hadn't seen one there for weeks. But one

Sunday we took Henry and went on an exploring expedition at the north end of the mesa, along Black

Canyon. We caught sight of a little bunch of ruins we'd never noticed before, and made a foolhardy scramble

to get up to them. We almost made it, and then there was a stretch of rock wall so smooth we couldn't climb it

without a ladder. I was the tallest of the three, and Henry was the lightest; he thought he could get up there if

he stood on my shoulders. He was standing on my back, his head just above the floor of the cavern, groping

for something to hoist himself by, when a snake struck him from the ledge struck him square in the

forehead. It happened in a flash. He came down and brought the snake with him. By the time we picked him

up and turned him over, his face had begun to swell. In ten minutes it was purple, and he was so crazy it took

the two of us to hold him and keep him from jumping down the chasm. He was struck so near the brain that

there was nothing to do. It lasted nearly two hours. Then we carried him home. Roddy dropped down the

ladder into Cow Canyon, caught his horse, and rode into Tarpin for the coroner. Father Duchene was

We buried Henry on the mesa. Father Duchene stayed on with us a week to keep us company. We were so cut

up that we were almost ready to quit. But he had been planning to come out to see our find for a long while,

and he got our minds off our trouble. He worked hard every day. He went over everything we'd done, and

examined everything minutely: the pottery, cloth, stone implements, and the remains of food. He measured

the heads of the mummies and declared they had good skulls. He cut down one of the old cedars that grew

exactly in the middle of the deep trail worn in the stone, and counted the rings under his pocket microscope.

You couldn't count them with the unassisted eye, for growing out of a tiny crevice in the rock as that tree did,

the increase of each year was so scant that the rings were invisible except with a glass. The tree he cut down

registered three hundred and thirty six years' growth, and it could have begun to grow in that wellworn

Why had they ceased? That question puzzled him, too. Smallpox, any epidemic, would have left unburied

bodies. Father Duchene suggested what Dr. Ripley, in Washington, afterward surmised: that the tribe had

been exterminated, not here in their stronghold, but in their summer camp, down among the farms across the

river. Father Duchene had been among the Indians nearly twenty years then, he had seventeen Indian pueblos

in his parish, and he spoke several Indian dialects. He was able to explain the use of many of the implements

we found, especially those used in religious ceremonies. The night before he left us, he summed up the results

"The two square towers on the mesa top, to which you have given little attention, were unquestionably

granaries. Under the stones and earth fallen from the walls, there is a quantity of dried corn on the ear. Not a

great harvest, for life must have come to an end here in the summer, when the new crop was not yet garnered

and the last year's grain was getting low. The semicircular ridge on the mesa top, which you can see distinctly

among the pions when the sun is low and brings it into high relief, is the buried wall of an amphitheatre,

where probably religious exercises and games took place. I advise you not to dig into it. It is probably the

"The tower you so much admire in the cliff village may have been a watch tower, as you think, but from the

curious placing of those narrow slits, like windows, I believe it was used for astronomical observations. I am

inclined to think that you tribe were a superior people. Perhaps they were not so when they first came upon

this mesa, but in an orderly and secure life they developed considerably the arts of peace. There is evidence

on every hand that they lived for something more than food and shelter. They had an appreciation of comfort,

and went even further than that. Their life, compared to that of our roving Navajos, must have been quite

complex. There is unquestionably a distinct feeling for design in what you call the Cliff City. Buildings are

not grouped like that by pure accident, though convenience probably had much to do with it. Convenience

"The workmanship on both the wood and stone of the dwellings is good. The shapes and decoration of the

water jars and food bowls is better than in any of the existing pueblos I know, better even than the pottery

made at Acoma. I have seen a collection of early pottery from the island of Crete. Many of the geometrical

decorations on these jars are not only similar, but, if my memory is trustworthy, identical.

"I see your tribe as a provident, rather thoughtful people, who made their livelihood secure by raising crops

and fowl the great number of turkey bones and feathers are evidence that they had domesticated the wild

turkey. With grain in their storerooms, and mountain sheep and deer for their quarry, they rose gradually

from the condition of savagery. With the proper variation of meat and vegetable diet, they developed

physically and improved in the primitive arts. They had looms and mills, and experimented with dyes. At the

same time, they possibly declined in the arts of war, in brute strength and ferocity.

"I see them here, isolated, cut off from other tribes, working out their destiny, making their mesa more and

more worthy to be a home for man, purifying life by religious ceremonies and observances, caring

respectfully for their dead, protecting the children, doubtless entertaining some feelings of affection and

sentiment for this stronghold where they were at once so safe and so comfortable, where they had practically

overcome the worst hardships that primitive man had to fear. They were, perhaps, too far advanced for their

"They were probably wiped out, utterly exterminated, by some roving Indian tribe without culture or

domestic virtues, some horde that fell upon them in their summer camp and destroyed them for their hides

and clothing and weapons, or from mere love of slaughter. I feel sure that these brutal invaders never even

learned of the existence of this mesa, honeycombed with habitations. If they had come here, they would have

"What I cannot understand is why you have not found more human remains. The three bodies you found in

the mortuary chamber were prepared for burial by the old people who were left behind. But what of the last

survivors? It is possible that when autumn wore on, and no one returned from the farms, the aged banded

"Like you, I feel reverence for this place. Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted

itself out of mere brutality, is a sacred spot. Your people were cut off here without the influence of example

or emulation, with no incentive but some natural yearning for order and security. They built themselves into

this mesa and humanized it." Father Duchene warmly agreed with Blake that I ought to go to Washington and

make some report to the Government, so that the proper specialists would be sent out to study the remains we

"You must go to the Director of the Smithsonian Institution," he said. "He will send us an archaeologist who

will interpret all that is obscure to us. He will revive this civilization in a scholarly work. It may be that you

will have thrown light on some important points in the history of your country."

After he left us, Blake and I began to make definite plans for my trip to Washington. Blake was to work on

the railroad that winter and save as much money as possible. The expense of my journey would be paid out of

what we called the jack pot account, in the bank at Pardee. All our further expenses on the mesa would be

paid by the Government. Roddy often hinted that we would get a substantial reward of some kind. When we

broke or lost anything at our work, he used to smile and say: "Never mind. I guess our Uncle Sam will make

We had a beautiful autumn that year, soft, sunny, like a dream. Even up there in the air we had so little wind

that the gold hung on the poplars and quaking aspens late in November. We stayed out on the mesa until after

Christmas. We wanted our archaeologist, when he came, to find everything in good order. We cleared up any

litter we'd made in digging things out, stored all the specimens, even the mummies, in our cabin, and

padlocked the doors and windows before we left it. I had written up my daybook carefully to the very end,

had even written out some of Father Duchene's deductions. This book I left in concealment on the mesa. I

climbed up to the Eagle's Nest in which we had found the mummy of the murdered woman we called Mother

Eve, where I had noticed a particularly neat little cupboard in the wall. I put my book in this niche and sealed

it up with cement. Mother Eve had greatly interested Father Duchene, by the way. He laughed and said she

was well named. He didn't believe her death could throw any light on the destruction of her people. "I seem

to smell," he said slyly, "a personal tragedy. Perhaps when the tribe went down to the summer camp, our lady

was sick and would not go. Perhaps her husband thought it worth while to return unannounced from the farms

some night, and found her in improper company. The young man may have escaped. In primitive society the

When the first snow began to fly, we said goodbye to our mesa and rode into Tarpin. It took several days to

outfit me for my journey to Washington. We bought a trunk (I'd never owned one in my life), and a supply

off white shirts, an overcoat that was as heavy as lead and just about as cold, and two suits of clothes. That

conscienceless trader worked off on me a clawhammer coat he must have had in stock for twenty years. He

easily persuaded Roddy that it was the proper thing for dress occasions. I think Roddy expected that I would

Roddy drew me six hundred dollars out of the bank to stake me, and bought my ticket and Pullman through

to Washington. He went to the station with me the morning I left, and a hard handshake was goodbye.

For a long while after my train pulled out, I could see our mesa bulking up blue on the skyline. I hated to

leave it, but I reflected that it had taken care of itself without me for a good many hundred years. When I saw

it again, I told myself, I would have done my duty by it; I would bring back with me men who would

I got off the train, just behind the Capitol building, one cold bright January morning. I stood for a long while

watching the white dome against a flashing blue sky, with a very religious feeling. After I had walked about a

little and seen the parks, so green though it was winter, and the Treasury building, and the War and Navy, I

decided to put off my business for a little and give myself a week to enjoy the city. That was the most

My sightseeing over, I got to work. First I went to see the Representative from our district, to ask for letters

of introduction. He was cordial enough, but he gave me bad advice. He was very positive that I ought to

report to the Indian Commission, and gave me a letter to the Commissioner. The Commissioner was out of

town, and I wasted three days waiting about his office, being questioned by clerks and secretaries. They were

not very busy, and seemed to find me entertaining. I thought they were interested in my mission, and interest

was what I wanted to arouse. I didn't know how influential these people might be they talked as if they

had great authority. I had brought along in my telescope bag some good pieces of pottery not the best, I

was afraid of accident, but some that were representative and all the photographs Blake and I had taken.

We had only a small kodak, and these pictures didn't make much show, looked, indeed, like grubby little

'dobe ruins such as one can find almost anywhere. They gave no idea of the beauty and vastness of the

setting. The clerks at the Indian Commission seemed very curious about everything and made me talk a lot. I

was green and didn't know any better. But when one of the fellows there tried to get me to give him my best

At last the Commissioner returned, but he had pressing engagements, and I hung around several days more

before he would see me. After questioning me for about half an hour, he told me that his business was with

living Indians, not dead ones, and that his office should have informed me of that in the beginning. He

advised me to go back to our Congressman and get a letter to the Smithsonian Institution. I packed up my

pottery and got out of the place, feeling pretty sore. The head clerk followed me down the corridor and asked

me what I'd take for that little bowl he'd taken a fancy to. He said it had no market value, I'd find Washington

full of such things; there were cases of them in the cellar at the Smithsonian that they'd never taken the

I went back to my Congressman. This time he wasn't so friendly as before, but he gave me a letter to the

Smithsonian. There I went through the same experience. The director couldn't be seen except by appointment,

and his secretary had to be convinced that your business was important before he would give you an

appointment with his chief. After the first morning I found it difficult to see even the secretary. He was

always engaged. I was told to take a seat and wait, but when he was disengaged he was hurrying off to

luncheon. I would sit there all morning with a group of unfortunate people: girls who wanted to get

typewriting to do, nice polite old men who wanted to be taken out on surveys and expeditions next summer.

The secretary would at last come out with his overcoat on, and would hurry through the waitingroom

The office assistants cheered me along, and I kept this up for some days, sitting all morning in that room,

studying the patterns of the rugs, and the shoes of the patient waiters who came as regularly as I. One day

after the secretary had gone out, his stenographer, a nice little Virginia girl, came and sat down in an empty

chair next to mine and began talking to me. She wasn't pretty, but her kind eyes and soft Southern voice took

hold of me at once. She wanted to know what I had in my telescope, and why I was there, and where I came

from, and all about it. Nearly everyone else had gone out to lunch that seemed to be the one thing they did

regularly in Washington and we had the waitingroom to ourselves. I talked to her a good deal. Her name

was Virginia Ward. She was a tiny little thing, but she had lovely eyes and such gentle ways. She seemed

"Now you just let me fix it up for you," she said at last. "Mr. Wagner is bothered by a great many foolish

people who waste his time, and he is suspicious. The best way will be for you to invite him to lunch with you.

I'll arrange it. I keep a list of his appointments, and I know he is not engaged for luncheon tomorrow. I'll tell

him that he is to lunch with a nice boy who has come all the way from New Mexico to inform the Department

about an important discovery. I'll tell him to meet you at the Shoreham, at one. That's expensive, but it would

do no good to invite him to a cheap place. And, remember, you must ask him to order the luncheon. It will

I felt grateful to the nice little thing, she wasn't older than I. I begged her wouldn't she please come to

I told her I didn't think anything but how nice she was to me, and how lonesome I was. She went with me, but

"If you want to get attention from anybody in Washin'ton," she said, "ask them to lunch. People here will do

"But the Director of the Smithsonian, for instance, " I said, "surely you don't mean that the highup ones like

that ? Why would he want to bother with a cowpuncher from New Mexico, when he can lunch with

She had a pretty little fluttery Southern laugh. "You just name a hotel like the Shoreham to the Director, and

try it! There has to be somebody to pay for a lunch, and the scientists and ambassadors don't do that when

they can avoid it. He'd accept your invitation, and the next time he went to dine with the Secretary of State

he'd make a nice little story of it, and paint you up so pretty you'd hardly know yourself."

When I asked her whether I'd better take my pottery it was there under the table between us to the

Shoreham to show Mr. Wagner, she tittered again. "I wouldn't bother. If you show him enough of the

The next morning, when the secretary arrived at his office, he stopped by my chair and said he understood he

had an engagement with me for one o'clock. That was a good idea, he added: his mind was freer when he was

I had been in Washington twentytwo days when I took the secretary out to lunch. It was an excellent lunch.

We had a bottle of Ch�teau d'Yquem. I'd never heard of such a wine before, but I remember it because it

cost five dollars. I drank only one glass, and that pleased him too, for he drank the rest. Though he was

friendly and talked a great deal, my heart sank lower, for he wouldn't let me explain my mission to him at all.

He kept telling me that he knew all about the South west. He had been sent by the Smithsonian to conduct

parties of European archaeologists through all the show places, Frijoles and Canyon de Chelly, and Taos, and

the Hopi pueblos. When some Austrian Archduke had gone to hunt in the Pecos range, he had been sent by

his chief and the German ambassador to manage the tour, and he had done it with such success that both he

and the Director were given decorations from the Austrian Crown, in recognition of his services. Then I had

to listen to a long story about how well he was treated by the Archduke when he went to Vienna with his

chief the following summer. I had to hear about the balls and receptions, and the names and titles of all the

people he had met at the Duke's country estate. I was amazed and ashamed that a man of fifty, a man of the

world, a scholar with ever so many degrees, should find it worth his while to show off before a boy, and a

boy of such humble pretensions, who didn't know how to eat the hors d'vres any more than if an assortment

Imagine my astonishment when, as he was drinking his liqueur, he said carelessly: "By the way, I was

successful in arranging an interview with the Director for you. He will see you at four o'clock on Monday."

That was Thursday. I spent the time between then and Monday trying to find out something more about the

kind of people I had come among. I persuaded Virginia Ward to go to the theatre with me, and she told me

that it always took a long while to get anything through with the Director, that I mustn't lose heart, and she

would always be glad to cheer me up. She lived with her mother, a widow lady, and they had me come to

All this time I was living with a young married couple who interested me very much, for they were unlike

any people I had ever known. The husband was "in office," as they say there, he had some position in the

War Department. How it did use to depress me to see all the hundreds of clerks come pouring out of that big

building at sunset! Their lives seemed to me so petty, so slavish. The couple I lived with gave me a prejudice

against that kind of life. I couldn't help knowing a good deal about their affairs. They had only a small rented

flat, and rented me one room of it, so I was very much in their confidence and couldn't help overhearing.

They asked me not to mention the fact that I paid rent, as they had told their friends I was making them a

visit. It was like that in everything; they spent their lives trying to keep up appearances, and to make his

salary do more than it could. When they weren't discussing where she should go in the summer, they talked

about the promotions in his department; how much the other clerks got and how they spent it, how many new

dresses their wives had. And there was always a struggle going on for an invitation to a dinner or a reception,

or even a teaparty. When once they got the invitation they had been scheming for, then came the terrible

The Secretary of War gave a reception; there was to be dancing and a great showing of foreign uniforms. The

Bixbys were in painful suspense until they got a card. Then for a week they talked about nothing but what

Mrs. Bixby was going to wear. They decided that for such an occasion she must have a new dress. Bixby

borrowed twenty five dollars from me, and took his lunch hour to go shopping with his wife and choose the

satin. That seemed to me very strange. In New Mexico the Indian boys sometime went to trader's with their

wives and bought shawls or calico, and we thought it rather contemptible. On the night of the reception the

Bixbys set off gaily in a cab; the dress they considered a great success. But they had bad luck. Somebody

spilt claretcup on Mrs. Bixby's skirt before the evening was half over, and when they got home that night I

heard her weeping and reproaching him for having been so upset about it, and looking at nothing but her

ruined dress all evening. She said he cried out when it happened. I don't doubt it.

Every cab, every party, was more than they could afford. If he lost an umbrella, it was a real misfortune. He

wasn't lazy, he wasn't a fool, and he meant to be honest; but he was intimidated by that miserable sort of

departmental life. He didn't know anything else. He thought working in a store or a bank not respectable.

Living with the Bixbys gave me a kind of lowspiritedness I had never known before. During my days of

waiting for appointments, I used to walk for hours around the fence that shuts in the White House grounds,

and watch the Washington monument colour with those beautiful sunsets, until the time when all the clerks

streamed out of the treasury building and the War and Navy. Thousands of them, all more or less like the

couple I lived with. They seemed to me like people in slavery, who ought to be free. I remember the city

chiefly by those beautiful, hazy, sad sunsets, white columns and green shrubbery, and the monument shaft

I got my interview with the Director of the Smithsonian at last. He gave me his attention, he was interested.

He told me to come again in three days and meet Dr. Ripley, who was the authority on prehistoric Indian

remains and had excavated a lot of them. Then came an exciting and rather encouraging time for me. Dr.

Ripley asked the right sort of questions, and evidently knew his business. He said he'd like to take the first

train down to my mesa. But it required money to excavate, and he had none. There was a bill up before

Congress for an appropriation. We'd have to wait. I must use my influence with my Representative. He took

my pottery to study it. (I never got it back, by the way.) There was a Dr. Fox, connected with the

Smithsonian, who was also interested. They told me a good many things I wanted to know, and kept me

dangling about the office. Of course they were very kind to take so much trouble with a green boy. But I soon

found that the Director and all his staff had one interest which dwarfed every other. There was to be an

International Exposition of some sort in Europe the following summer, and they were all pulling strings to get

appointed on juries or sent to international congresses appointments that would pay their expenses abroad,

and give them a salary in addition. There was, indeed, a bill before Congress for appropriations for the

Smithsonian; but there was also a bill for Exposition appropriations, and that was the one they were really

pushing. They kept me hanging on through March and April, but in the end it came to nothing. Dr. Ripley

told me he was sorry, but the sum Congress had allowed the Smithsonian wouldn't cover an expedition to the

Virginia Ward, who had been so kind to me, went out to lunch with me that day, and admitted I had been let

down. She was almost as much disappointed as I. She said the only thing Dr. Ripley really cared about was

getting a free trip to Europe and acting on a jury, and maybe getting a decoration. "And that's what the

Director wants, too," she said. "They don't care much about dead and gone Indians. What they do care about

The only other person besides Virginia who was genuinely concerned about my affair was a young

Frenchman, a lieutenant attached to the French Embassy, who came to the Smithsonian often on business

connected with this same International Exposition. He was nice and polite to Virginia, and she introduced

him to me. We used to walk down along the Potomac together. He studied my photographs and asked me

such intelligent questions about everything that it was a pleasure to talk to him. He had a fine attitude about it

all; he was thoughtful, critical, and respectful. I feel sure he'd have gone back to New Mexico with me if he'd

I was utterly ashamed to go home to Roddy, dead broke after all the money I'd spent, and without a thing to

show for it. I hung on in Washington through May, trying to get a job of some sort, to at least earn my fare

home. My letters to Blake had been pretty blue for some time back. If I'd been sensible, I'd have kept my

troubles to myself. He was easily discouraged, and I knew that. At last I had to write him for money to go

home. It was slow in coming, and I began to telegraph. I left Washington at last, wiser than I came. I had no

plans, I wanted nothing but to get back to the mesa and live a free life and breathe free air, and never, never

again to see hundreds of little black coated men pouring out of white buildings. Queer, how much more

depressing they are than workmen coming out of a factory. I was terribly disappointed when I got off the

train at Tarpin and Roddy wasn't at the station to meet me. It was late in the afternoon, almost dark, and I

went straight to the livery stable to talk Bill Hook for news of Blake. Hook, you remember, had done all our

hauling for us, and had been a good friend. He gave me a glad hand and said Blake was out on the mesa.

"I expect maybe he's had his feelings hurt here. He's been shy of this town lately. You see, Tom, folks weren't

bothered none about that mesa so long as you fellows were playing Robinson Crusoe out there, digging up

curios. But when it leaked out that Blake had got a lot of money for your stuff, then they begun to feel jealous

said them ruins didn't belong to Blake any more than anybody else. It'll blow over in time; people are

always like that when money changes hands. But right now there's a good deal of bad feeling."

"You mean you ain't heard about the German, Fechtig? Well, Rodney's got some surprise waiting for you!

Why, he's had the damnedest luck! He's cleaned up a neat little pile on your stuff."

"Why, your curios. This German, Fechtig, come along; he'd been buying up a lot of Indian things out here,

and he bought you whole outfit and paid four thousand dollars down for it. The transaction made quite a stir

here in Tarpin. I'm not kicking. I made a good thing out of it. My mules were busy three weeks packing the

stuff out of there on their backs, and I held the Dutchman up for a fancy price. He had packing cases made at

the wagon shop and took 'em up to the mesa full of straw and sawdust, and packed the curios out there. I lost

one of my mules, too. You remember Jenny? Well, they were leading her down with a big box on her, and

right there where the trail runs so narrow around a bump in the cliff above Black Canyon, she lost her balance

and fell clean to the bottom, her load on her. Pretty near a thousand feet, I guess. We never went down to

I remember I sat down on the sofa in Hook's office because I couldn't stand up any longer, and the smell of

the horse blankets began to make me deathly sick. In a minute I went over, like a girl in a novel. Hook pulled

When I felt better I asked him how long this German had been gone, and what he had done with the things.

"Oh, he cleared out three weeks ago. He didn't waste no time. He treated everybody well, though; nobody's

sore at him. It's your partner they're turned against. Fechtig took the stuff right along with him, chartered a

freight car, and travelled in the car with it. I reckon it's on the water by now. He took it straight through into

Old Mexico, and was to load it on a French boat. Seems he was afraid of having trouble getting curiosities

out of the United States ports. You know you can take anything out of the City of Mexico."

I had heard all I wanted to hear. I went to the hotel, got a room, and lay down without undressing to wait for

daylight. Hook was to drive me and my trunk out to the mesa early the next morning. All I'd been through in

Washington was nothing to what I went through that night. I thought Blake must have lost his mind. I didn't

for a minute believe he'd meant to sell me out, but I cursed his stupidity and presumption. I had never told

him just how I felt about those things we'd dug out together, it was the kind of thing one doesn't talk about

directly. But he must have known; he couldn't have lived with me all summer and fall without knowing. And

yet, until that night, I had never known myself that I cared more about them than about anything else in the

At the first blink of daylight I jumped up from my damnable bed and went round to the stable to rout Hook

out of his bunk. We had breakfast and got out of town with his best team. On the way to the mesa we had a

breakdown, one of the old dry wheels smashed to splinters. Hook had to unhitch and ride back to Tarpin and

get another. Everything took an unreasonably long time, and the afternoon was half gone when he put me and

my trunk down at the foot of the Black Canyon trail. Every inch of that trail was dear to me, every delicate

curve about the old pion roots, every chancy track along the face of the cliffs, and the deep windings back

into shrubbery and safety. The wildcurrant bushes were in bloom, and where the path climbed the side of a

narrow ravine, the scent of them in the sun was so heavy that it made me soft, made me want to lie down and

sleep. I wanted to see and touch everything, like homesick children when they come home.

When I pulled out on top of the mesa, the rays of sunlight fell slantingly through the little twisted pions,

the light was all in between them, as red as a daylight fire, they fairly swam in it. Once again I had that

glorious feeling that I've never had anywhere else, the feeling of being on the mesa, in a world above the

world. And the air, my God, what air! Soft, tingling, gold, hot with an edge of chill on it, full of the smell

of pions it was like breathing the sun, breathing the colour of the sky. Down there behind me was the

plain, already streaked with shadow, violet and purple and burnt orange until it met the horizon. Before me

was the flat mesa top, thinly sprinkled with old cedars that were not much taller than I, though their twisted

trunks were almost as thick as my body. I struck off across it, my long black shadow going ahead.

I made straight for the cabin, it was about three miles from the spot where the trail emerged at the top. I saw

smoke rising before I could see the hut itself. Blake was in the doorway when I got there. I didn't look at his

"Don't say anything, Tom. Don't rip me up until you hear all about it," he said as I came toward him.

"I've heard enough to about do for me," I blurted out. "What made you do it, Blake? What made you do it?"

"It was a chance in a million, boy. There wasn't any time to consult you. There's only one man in thousands

that wants to buy relics and pay real money for them. I could see how your Washington campaign was

coming out. I know you'd thought about big figures, so had I. But that was all a pipe dream. Four thousand's

not so bad, you don't pick it up every day. And he bore all the expenses. Why, it was a terrible expensive job,

getting all that frail stuff out of here. Who else would have bought it, I want to know? We'd have had to pack

it around at Harvey Houses, selling it at a dollar a bowl, like the poor Indians do. I took the best chance

I didn't say anything, because there was too much to say. I stood outside the cabin until the gold light went

blue and a few stars came out, hardly brighter than the bright sky they twinkled in, and the swallows came

flying over us, on their way to their nests in the cliffs. It was the time of day when everything goes home.

From habit and from weariness I went in through the door. The kitchen table was spread for supper, I could

smell a rabbit stew cooking on the stove. Blake lit the lantern and begged me to eat my supper. I didn't go

into the bunkroom, for I knew the shelves in there were empty. I heard Blake talking to me as you hear

"Who else would have bought them?" he kept saying. "Folks make a lot of fuss over such things, but they

When I at last told him that such a thing as selling them had never entered my head, I'm sure he thought I was

lying. He reminded me about how we used to talk of getting big money from the Government.

I admitted I'd hoped we'd be paid for our work, and maybe get a bonus of some kind, for our discovery. "But

I never thought of selling them, because they weren't mine to sell nor yours! They belonged to this

country, to the State, and to all the people. They belonged to boys like you and me, that have no other

ancestors to inherit from. You've gone and sold them to a country that's got plenty of relics of its own. You've

"That man was innocent. It was a frameup," Blake murmured. It was a point he would never pass up.

"Whether he's guilty or not, you are! If there was only anybody in Washington I could telegraph to, and have

"That's just it. If there was anybody in Washington that cared a damn, I wouldn't have sold 'em. But you

"We could have kept them, then," I told him. "I've got a strong back. I'm not so poor that I have to sell the

pots and pans that belonged to my poor grandmothers a thousand years ago. I made all my plans on the train,

coming back." (It was a lie, I hadn't.) "I meant to get a job on the railroad and keep our find right here, and

come back to it when I had a layoff. I think a lot more of it now than before I went to Washington. And after

a while, when that Exposition is over and the Smithsonian people get home, they would come out here all

Blake reminded me that I had my way to make in the world, and that I wanted to go to school. "That money's

in the bank this minute, in your name, and you're going to college on it. You're not going to be a

daylabourer like me. After you've got your sheepskin, then you can divide with me."

"You think I'd touch that money?" I looked squarely at him for the first time. "No more than if you'd stolen it.

You made the sale. Get what you can out of it. I want to ask you one question: did you ever think I was

Rodney explained that he knew I cared about the things, and was proud of them, but he'd always supposed I

meant to "realize" on them, just as he did, and that it would come to money in the end. "Everything does," he

"If that nice young Frenchman I met had come down here with me, and offered me four million instead of

four thousand, I'd have refused him. There never was any question of money with me, where this mesa and its

people were concerned. They were something that had been preserved through the ages by a miracle, and

handed on to you and me, two poor cowpunchers, rough and ignorant, but I thought we were men enough to

keep a trust. I'd as soon have sold my own grandmother as Mother Eve I'd have sold any living woman

"Save your tears," said Roddy grimly.. "She refused to leave us. She went to the bottom of Black Canyon and

carried Hook's best mule along with her. They had to make her box extra wide, and she crowded out an inch

This painful interview went on for hours. I walked up and down the kitchen trying to make Blake understand

the kind of value those objects had had for me. Unfortunately, I succeeded. He sat slumping on the bench, his

"There's no need to keep this up," he said at last. "You're away out of my depth, but I think I get you. You

might have given me some of this Fourth of July talk a little earlier in the game. I didn't know you valued that

stuff any different than anything else a fellow might run on to: a gold mine or a pocket of turquoise."

"No," said Blake, his voice growing gloomier and darker, "that's in the Eagle's Nest, where you hid it. That's

your private property. I supposed I had some share in the relics we dug up you always spoke of it that

way. But I see now I was working for you like a hired man, and while you were away I sold your property."

I said again it wasn't mine or his. He took something out of the pocket of his flannel shirt and laid it on the

"You may as well keep it," I said. "I'll never touch it. You had no right to deposit it in my name. The

"I don't know what I can trust you with, Blake. I don't know where I'm at with you," I said.

He got up and began putting on his coat. "Motives don't count, eh?" he said, his face turned away, as he put

"They would in anything of our own, between you and me," I told him. "If it was my money you'd lost

gambling, or my girl you'd made free with, we could fight it out, and maybe be friends again. But this is

"I see. You make it clear." He was quietly stirring around as he spoke. He got his old knapsack off its nail on

the wall, opened his trunk and took out some underwear and socks and a couple of shirts. After he had put

these into the bag, he slung it over one shoulder, and his canvas waterbag over the other. I let these

preparations go on without a word. He went to the cupboard over the stove and put some sticks of chocolate

into his pocket, then his pipe and a bag of tobacco. Presently I said he'd break his neck if he tried riding down

"I'm not riding the trail," he replied curtly. "I'm going down the quick way. My horse is grazing in Cow

"I got over that way a few days ago. I'm surprised at you, using such common expressions!" he said

sarcastically. " Dangerous crossing; it's painted on signboards all over the world!" He walked out of the cabin

without looking back. I followed him to the Vshaped break in the rim rock, hardly larger than a man's body,

where the spliced treetrunks made a swinging ladder down the face of the cliff. I wanted to protest, but only

By this time my eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and I could see Blake quite clearly the

stubborn, crouching set of his shoulders that I used to notice when he first came to Pardee and was drinking

all the time. There was an ache in my arms to reach out and detain him, but there was something else that

made me absolutely powerless to do so. He stepped down and settled his foot into the first fork. Then he

stopped a moment and straightened his pack, buttoned his coat up to the chin, and pulled his hat on tighter.

There was always a night draught in the canyon. He gripped the trunk with his hands. "Well," he said with

grim cheerfulness, "here's luck! And I'm glad it's you that's doing this to me, Tom; not me that's doing it to

His head disappeared below the rim. I could hear the trees creak under his heavy body, and the chains rattle a

little at the splicings. I lay down on the ledge and listened. I could hear him for a long way down, and the

sounds were comforting to me, though I didn't realize it. Then the silence closed in. I went to sleep that night

The next morning the whinnying of my saddlehorse in the shed roused me. I took him down to the foot of

the trail where I'd left my trunk, and packed my things up to the cabin on his back. I sat up late that night,

waiting for Blake, though I knew he wouldn't come. A few days later I rode into Tarpin for news of him. Bill

Hook showed me Roddy's horse. He had sold him to the barn for sixty dollars. The station master told me

Blake had bought a ticket to Winslow, Arizona. I wired the stationmaster and the dispatcher at Winslow, but

they could give me no information. Father Duchene came along, on his rounds, and I told him the whole

He thought Blake would come back sometime, that I'd only miss him if I went out to look for him. He

advised me to stay on the mesa that summer and get ahead with my studies, work up my Spanish grammar

and my Latin. He had friends all along the Santa F , and he was sure we could catch Blake by advertising in

the local papers along the road; Albuquerque, Winslow, Flagstaff, Williams, Los Angeles. After a few days

with him, I went back to the mesa to wait. I'll never forget the night I got back. I crossed the river an hour

before sunset and hobbled my horse in the wide bottom of Cow Canyon. The moon was up, though the sun

hadn't set, and it had that glittering silveriness the early stars have in high altitudes. The heavenly bodies look

so much more remote from the bottom of a deep canyon than they do from the level. The climb of the walls

helps out the eye, somehow. I lay down on a solitary rock that was like an island in the bottom of the valley,

and looked up. The grey sagebrush and the blue grey rock around me were already in shadow, but high

above me the canyon walls were dyed flame colour with the sunset, and the Cliff City lay in a gold haze

against its dark cavern. In a few minutes it, too, was grey, and only the rim rock at the top held the red light.

When that was gone, I could still see the copper glow in the pions along the edge of the top ledges. The arc

of sky over the canyon was silvery blue, with its pale yellow moon, and presently stars shivered into it, like

I remember these things, because, in a sense, that was the first night I was ever really on the mesa at all

the first night that all of me was there. This was the first time I ever saw it as a whole. It all came together in

my understanding, as a series of experiments do when you begin to see where they are leading. Something

had happened in me that made it possible for me to coordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in

my mind, brought with it great happiness. It was possession. The excitement of my first discovery was a very

pale feeling compared to this one. For me the mesa was no longer an adventure, but a religious emotion. I had

read of filial piety in the Latin poets, and I knew that was what I felt for this place. It had formerly been

mixed up with other motives; but now that they were gone, I had my happiness unalloyed.

What that night began lasted all summer. I stayed on the mesa until November. It was the first time I'd ever

studied methodically, or intelligently. I got the better of the Spanish grammar and read the twelve books of

the AEneid. I studied in the morning, and in the afternoon I worked at clearing away the mess the German

had made in packing tidying up the ruins to wait another hundred years, maybe, for the right explorer. I

can scarcely hope that life will give me another summer like that one. It was my high tide. Every morning,

when the sun's rays first hit the mesa top, while the rest of the world was in shadow, I wakened with the

feeling that I had found everything, instead of having lost everything. Nothing tired me. Up there alone, a

close neighbour to the sun, I seemed to get the solar energy in some direct way. And at night, when I watched

it drop down behind the edge of the plain below me, I used to feel that I couldn't have borne another hour of

All that summer, I never went up to the Eagle's Nest to get my diary indeed, it's probably there yet. I

didn't feel the need of that record. It would have been going backward. I didn't want to go back and unravel

things step by step. Perhaps I was afraid that I would lose the whole in the parts. At any rate, I didn't go for

During those months I didn't worry much about poor Roddy. I told myself the advertisements would surely

get him I knew his habit of reading newspapers. There are times when one's vitality is too high to be

clouded, too elastic to stay down. Hurrying in from my cabin in the morning to the spot in the Cliff City

where I studied under a cedar, I used to be frightened at my own heartlessness. But the feel of the narrow

moccasinworn trail in the flat rock made my feet glad, like a good taste in the mouth, and I'd forget all about

Blake without knowing it. I found I was reading too fast; so I began to commit long passages of Vergil to

memory if it hadn't been for that, I might have forgotten how to use my voice, or gone to talking to

myself. When I look into the AEneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another

behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellowgreen pions with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging

together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage behind

Happiness is something one can't explain. You must take my word for it. Troubles enough came afterward,

Next winter I went back to Pardee and stayed with the O'Briens again, working on the section and studying

with Father Duchene and trying to get some word of Blake. Now that I was back on the railroad, I thought I

couldn't fail to find him. I went out to Winslow and to Williams, and I questioned the railroad men. We

advertised for him in every possible way, had all the Santa F operatives and the police and the Catholic

missionaries on the watch for him, offered a thousand dollars reward for whoever found him. But it came to

nothing. Father Duchene and our friends down there are still looking. But the older I grow, the more I

understand what it was I did that night on the mesa. Anyone who requites faith and friendship as I did, will

have to pay for it. I'm not very sanguine about good fortune myself. I'll be called to account when I least

In the spring, just a year after I quarrelled with Roddy, I landed here and walked into your garden, and the

All the most important things in his life, St. Peter sometimes reflected, had been determined by chance. His

education in France had been an accident. His married life had been happy largely through a circumstance

with which neither he nor his wife had anything to do. They had been young people with good qualities, and

very much in love, but they could not have been happy if Lillian had not inherited a small income from her

father only about sixteen hundred a year, but it had made all the difference in the world. A few memorable

interregnums between servants had let him know that Lillian couldn't pinch and be shabby and do housework,

as the wives of some of his colleagues did. Under such conditions she became another person, and a bitter

Tom Outland had been a stroke of chance he couldn't possibly have imagined; his strange coming, his strange

story, his devotion, his early death and posthumous fame it was all fantastic. Fantastic, too, that this tramp

boy should amass a fortune for someone whose name he had never heard, for "an extravagant and wheeling

stranger." The Professor often thought of that curiously bitter burst from the barytone in Brahms' Requiem,

attending the words, "He heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall scatter them!" The vehemence of this

passage had seemed to him uncalled for until he read it by the light of the history of his own family.

St. Peter thought he had fared well with fate. He wouldn't choose to live his life over he might not have

such good luck again. He had had two romances: one of the heart, which had filled his life for many years,

and a second of the mind of the imagination. Just when the morning brightness of the world was wearing

Through Outland's studies, long after they had ceased to be pupil and master, he had been able to experience

afresh things that had grown dull with use. The boy's mind had the superabundance of heat which is always

present where there is rich germination. To share his thoughts was to see old perspectives transformed by

If the last four volumes of "The Spanish Adventurers" were more simple and inevitable than those that went

before, it was largely because of Outland. When St. Peter first began his work, he realized that his great

drawback was the lack of early association, the fact that he had not spent his youth in the great dazzling

Southwest country which was the scene of his explorers' adventures. By the time he had got as far as the

third volume, into his house walked a boy who had grown up there, a boy with imagination, with the training

and insight resulting from a very curious experience; who had in his pocket the secrets which old trails and

Two years after Tom's graduation they took the copy of Fray Garces' manuscript that the Professor had made

from the original in Spain, and went down into the Southwest together. By autumn they had been over every

mile of his trail on horseback. Tom could take a sentence from Garces' diary and find the exact spot at which

the missionary crossed the Rio Colorado on a certain Sunday in 1775. Given one pueblo, he could always

It was on that trip that they went to Tom's Blue Mesa, climbed the ladder of spliced pinetrees to the Cliff

City, and up to the Eagle's Nest. There they took Tom's diary from the stone cupboard where he had sealed it

The next summer Tom went with the Professor to Old Mexico. They had planned a third summer together, in

Paris, but it never came off. Outland was delayed by the formalities of securing his patent, and then came

August, 1914. Father Duchene, the missionary priest who had been Tom's teacher, stopped in Hamilton on

his way back to Belgium, hurrying home to serve in any capacity he might. The rugged old man stayed in

Hamilton only four days, but in that time Outland made up his mind, had a will drawn, packed, and said

To this day St. Peter regretted that he had never got that vacation in Paris with Tom Outland. He had wanted

to revisit certain spots with him: to go with him some autumn morning to the Luxembourg Gardens, when the

yellow horsechestnuts were bright and bitter after the rain; to stand with him before the monument to

Delacroix and watch the sun gleam on the bronze figures Time, bearing away the youth who was

struggling to snatch his palm or was it to lay a palm? Not that it mattered. It might have mattered to Tom,

had not chance, in one great catastrophe, swept away all youth and all palms, and almost Time itself.

And suppose Tom had been more prudent, and had not gone away with his old teacher? St. Peter sometimes

wondered what would have happened to him, once the trap of worldly success had been sprung on him. He

couldn't see Tom building "Outland," or becoming a publicspirited citizen of Hamilton. What change would

have come in his blue eye, in his fine long hand with the backspringing thumb, which had never handled

things that were not the symbols of ideas? A hand like that, had he lived, must have been put to other uses.

His fellow scientists, his wife, the town and State, would have required many duties of it. It would have had

to write thousands of useless letters, frame thousands of false excuses. It would have had to "manage" a great

deal of money, to be the instrument of a woman who would grow always more exacting. He had escaped all

that. He had made something new in the world and the rewards, the meaningless conventional gestures, he

All those summer days, while the Professor was sending cheerful accounts of his activities to his family in

France, he was really doing very little. He had begun, in a desultory way, to annotate the diary that Tom had

kept on the mesa, in which he had noted down the details of each day's work among the ruins, along with the

weather and anything unusual in the routine of their life. There was a minute description of each tool they

found, of every piece of cloth and pottery, frequently accompanied by a very suggestive pencil sketch of the

object and a surmise as to its use and the kind of life in which it had played a part. To St. Peter this plain

account was almost beautiful, because of the stupidities it avoided and the things it did not say. If words had

cost money, Tom couldn't have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to

form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer's emotions.

Yet through this austerity one felt the kindling imagination, the ardour and excitement of the boy, like the

vibration in a voice when the speaker strives to conceal his emotion by using only conventional phrases.

When the first of August came round, the Professor realized that he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two

months at a task which should have taken little more than a week. But he had been doing a good deal besides

St. Peter had always laughed at people who talked about "daydreams," just as he laughed at people who

naively confessed that they had "an imagination." All his life his mind had behaved in a positive fashion.

When he was not at work, or being actively amused, he went to sleep. He had no twilight stage. But now he

enjoyed this halfawake loafing with his brain as if it were a new sense, arriving late, like wisdom teeth. He

found he could lie on his sandspit by the lake for hours and watch the seven motionless pines drink up the

sun. In the evening, after dinner, he could sit idle and watch the stars, with the same immobility. he was

cultivating a novel mental dissipation and enjoying a new friendship. Tom Outland had not come back

again through the garden door (as he had so often done in dreams!), but another boy had: the boy the

Professor had long ago left behind him in Kansas, in the Solomon Valley the original, unmodified

This boy and he had meant, back in those faraway days, to live some sort of life together and to share good

and bad fortune. They had not shared together, for the reason that they were unevenly matched. The young

St. Peter who went to France to try his luck, had a more active mind than the twin he left behind in the

Solomon Valley. After his adoption into the Thierault household, he remembered that other boy very rarely,

in moments of homesickness. After he met Lillian Ornsley, St. Peter forgot that boy had ever lived.

But now that the vivid consciousness of an earlier state had come back to him, the Professor felt that life with

this Kansas boy, little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all the years between had

been accidental and ordered from the outside. His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a

chain of events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do with the person he was in the

The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow strong during adolescence, during

the years when he was always consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb "to love" in society and

solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets.

When he met Lillian, it reached its maturity. From that time to this, existence had been a catching at

handholds. One thing led to another and one development brought on another, and the design of his life had

been the work of this secondary social man, the lover. It had been shaped by all the penalties and

responsibilities of being and having been a lover. Because there was Lillian, there must be marriage and a

salary. Because there was marriage, there were children. Because there were children, and fervour in the

blood and brain, books were born as well as daughters. His histories, he was convinced, had no more to do

with his original ego than his daughters had; they were a result of the high pressure of young manhood.

The Kansas boy who had come back to St. Peter this summer was not a scholar. He was a primitive. He was

only interested in earth and woods and water. Wherever sun sunned and rain rained and snow snowed,

wherever life sprouted and decayed, places were alike to him. He was not nearly so cultivated as Tom's old

cliffdwellers must have been and yet he was terribly wise. He seemed to be at the root of the matter;

Desire under all desires, Truth under all truths. He seemed to know, among other things, that he was solitary

and must always be so; he had never married, never been a father. He was earth, and would return to earth.

When white clouds blew over the lake like bellying sails, when the seven pinetrees turned red in the

declining sum, he felt satisfaction and said to himself merely: "That is right." Coming upon a curly root that

thrust itself across his path, he said: "That is it." When the mapleleaves along the street began to turn yellow

and waxy, and were soft to the touch, like the skin on old faces, he said: "That is true; it is time." All

When he was not dumbly, deeply recognizing, he was bringing up out of himself longforgotten, unimportant

memories of his early childhood, of his mother, his father, his grandfather. His grandfather, old Napoleon

Godfrey, used to go about lost in profound, continuous meditation, sometimes chuckling to himself.

Occasionally, at the family dinnertable, the old man would try to rouse himself, from motives of politeness,

and would ask some kindly question nearly always absurd and often the same one he had asked yesterday.

The boys used to shout with laughter and wonder what profound matters could require such deep meditation,

and make a man speak so foolishly about what was going on under his very eyes. St. Peter thought he was

beginning to understand what the old man had been thinking about, though he himself was but fiftytwo, and

Napoleon had been well on in his eighties. There are only a few years, at the last, in which man can consider

his estate, and he thought he might be quite as near the end of his road as his grandfather had been in those

The Professor knew, of course, that adolescence grafted a new creature into the original one, and that the

complexion of a man's life was largely determined by how well or ill his original self and his nature as

What he had not known was that, at a given time, that first nature could return to a man, unchanged by all the

pursuits ad passions and experiences of his life; untouched even by the tastes and intellectual activities which

have been strong enough to give him distinction among his fellows and to have made for him, as they say, a

name in the world. Perhaps this reversion did not often occur, but he knew it had happened to him, and he

suspected it had happened to his grandfather. He did not regret his life, but he was indifferent to it. It seemed

Along with other states of mind which attended his realization of the boy Godfrey, came a conviction (he did

not see it coming, it was there before he was aware of its approach) that he as nearing the end of his life. This

conviction took its place so quietly, seemed so matteroffact, that he gave it little thought. But one day,

when he realized that all the while he was preparing for the fall term he didn't in the least believe he would be

The family doctor knew all about St. Peter. It was summer, moreover, and he had plenty of time. He devoted

several mornings to the Professor and made tests of the most searching kind. In the end he of course told St.

"Always a gourmet, and never anything wrong with your digestive tract! I wish you'd ask me to dine with

"I'll bet you do! But why did you think there was something wrong with you? Low in your mind?" "No,

St. Peter went home well satisfied. He did not mention to Dr. Dudley the real reason for his asking for a

medical examination. One doesn't mention such things. The feeling that he was near the conclusion of his life

was an instinctive conviction, such as we have when we waken in the dark and know at once that it is near

morning; or when we are walking across the country and suddenly know that we are near the sea.

Letters came every week from France. Lillian and Louie alternated, so that one or the other got off a letter to

him on every fast boat.. Louie told him that wherever they went, when they had an especially delightful day,

they bought him a present. At Trouville, for instance, they had laid in dozens of the brilliant rubber casquettes

he liked to wear when he went swimming. At AixlesBains they found a gorgeous dressinggown for him

in a Chinese shop. St. Peter was happy in his mind about them all. He was glad they were there, and that he

was here. Their generous letters, written when there were so many pleasant things to do, certainly deserved

more than one reading. He used to carry them out to the lake to read them over again. After coming out of the

water he would lie on the sand, holding them in his hand, but somehow never taking his eyes off the

pinetrees, appliqu ed against the blue water, and their ripe yellow cones, dripping with gum and clustering

on the pointed tips like a mass of golden bees in swarming time. Usually he carried his letters home unread.

His family wrote constantly about their plans for next summer, when they were going to take him over with

them. Next summer? The Professor wondered. . . . Sometimes he thought he would like to drive up in front of

Notre Dame, in Paris, again, and see it standing there like the Rock of Ages, with the frail generation

But if he went anywhere next summer, he thought it would be down into Outland's country, to watch the

sunrise break on sculptured peaks and impassable mountain passes to look off at those long, rugged,

untamed vistas dear to the American heart. Dear to all hearts, probably at least, calling to all. Else why

had his grandfather's grandfather, who had tramped so many miles across Europe into Russia with the Grande

Arm e, come out to the Canadian wilderness to forget the chagrin of his Emperor's defeat?

The fall term of the university opened, and now the Professor went to his lectures instead of to the lake. He

supposed he did his work, he heard no complaints from his assistants, and the students seemed interested. He

found, however, that he wasn't willing to take the trouble to learn the names of several hundred new students.

It wasn't worth while. He felt that his relations with them would be of short duration.

The McGregors got home from their vacation in Oregon, and Scott was much amused to find the Professor so

"It never struck me, Doctor, that you were a man who would be keeping up two establishments. They'll be

coming home pretty soon, and then you'll have to decide where you are going to live."

This encounter took place on the street in front of the house. The Professor went wearily upstairs and lay

down on the couch, his refuge from this everincreasing fatigue. He really didn't see what he was going to do

about the matter of domicile. He couldn't make himself believe that he was ever going to live in the new

house again. He didn't belong there. He remembered some lines of a translation from the Norse he used to

read long ago in one of his mother's few books, a little twovolume Ticknor and Fields edition of

For thee a house was built Ere thou was born; For thee a mould was made Ere thou of woman camest.

Lying on his old couch, he could almost believe himself in that house already. The sagging springs were like

the sham upholstery that is put in coffins. Just the equivocal American way of dealing with serious facts, he

He could remember a time when the loneliness of death had terrified him, when the idea of it was

insupportable. He used to feel that if his wife could but lie in the same coffin with him, his body would not be

so insensible that the nearness of hers would not give it comfort. But now he thought of eternal solitude with

gratefulness; as a release from every obligation, from every form of effort. It was the Truth. One morning,

just as St. Peter was leaving the house to go to his classroom, the postman handed him two letters, one

addressed in Lillian's hand and one in Louie's. He put them into his pocket. The feel of them disturbed him.

They were of a suspicious thinness as if they didn't contain amusing gossip, but announced sudden

decisions. He set off down the street, sniffing the lakecooled morning air and trying to overcome a feeling

All the morning those two letters lay in his breast pocket. Though they were so light, their effect was to make

him drop his shoulders and look woefully tired. The weather, too, had changed, come on suddenly hot and

sultry at noon, as if getting ready for a storm. When his classes were over and he was back in his study again,

St. Peter felt no interest in lunch. He took out the two letters and ripped them open with his forefinger to have

it over. Yes, all plans were changed, and by the happiest of expectations. The family were hurrying home to

prepare for the advent of a young Marsellus. They would sail on the sixteenth, on the Berengaria.

Lillian added a postscript to the effect that by this same mail she was getting off a letter to Augusta, who

would come to him for the keys of the new house. She would be the best person to open the house and

arrange to have the cleaning done. She would take it entirely off his shoulders and see that everything was

They were sailing on the sixteenth, and this was the seventeenth; they were already on the water. The

Berengaria was a fiveday boat. St. Peter caught up his hat and light overcoat and started down the stairs.

Halfway down, he stopped short, went back to his study, and softly shut the door behind him. He sat down,

forgetting to take off his overcoat, though the afternoon was so hot and his face was damp with perspiration.

He sat motionless, breathing unevenly, one dark hand lying clenched on his writingtable. There must, he

was repeating to himself, there must be some way in which a man who had always tried to live up to his

responsibilities could, when the hour of desperation came, avoid meeting his own family.

He loved his family, he would make any sacrifice for them, but just now he couldn't live with them. He must

be alone. That was more necessary, even, than his marriage had been in his vehement youth. He could not

live with his family again not even with Lillian. Especially not with Lillian! Her nature was intense and

positive; it was like a chiselled surface, a die, a stamp upon which he could not be beaten out any longer. If

her character were reduced to an heraldic device, it would be a hand (a beautiful hand) holding flaming

"In great misfortunes," he told himself, "people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the

misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love

Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the

St. Peter did not go out of the house that afternoon. He did not leave his study. He sat at his desk with bent

head, reviewing his life, trying to see where he had made his mistake, to account for the fact that he now

Late in the afternoon the heaviness of the air in the room drove him to the window. He saw that a storm was

coming on. Great orange and purple clouds were blowing up from the lake, and the pinetrees over about the

Physics laboratory were blacker than cypresses and looked contracted, as if they were awaiting something.

The rainstorm was over in half and hour, but a heavy blow had set in for the night. The wind would be a

protection, he thought. Even Augusta would hardly come plodding up the stairs tonight. It seemed strange to

be dreading Augusta, but just now he did dread her. He believed he was safe, for tonight. Though it was

only five o'clock, the sky was black, and the room was dusky and chilly. He lit the stove and lay down on the

couch. The fire made a flickering pattern of light on the wall. He lay watching it, vacantly; without meaning

to, he fell asleep. For a long while he slept deeply and peacefully. Then the wind, increasing in violence,

disturbed him. He began to be aware of noises things banging and slamming about. He turned over on his

When St. Peter at last awoke, the room was pitchblack and full of gas. He was cold and numb, felt sick and

rather dazed. The longanticipated coincidence had happened, he realized. The storm had blown the stove out

and the window shut. The thing to do was to get up and open the window. But suppose he did not get up

? How far was a man required to exert himself against accident? How would such a case be decided under

English law? He hadn't lifted his hand against himself was he required to lift it for himself?

At midnight St. Peter was lying in his study, on his boxcouch, covered up with blankets, a hot water bottle

at his feet; he knew it was midnight, for the clock of Augusta's church across the park was ringing the hour.

Augusta herself was there in the room, sitting in her old sewing chair by the kerosene lamp, wrapped up in a

shawl. She was reading a little muchworn religious book that she always carried in her handbag. Presently

"Not any too soon, sir," she said gravely, with a touch of reproof. "You never would take my cautions about

that old stove, and it very nearly asphyxiated you. I was barely in time to pull you out."

"Into the hall. I came over in the storm to ask you for the keys of the new house I didn't get Mrs. St.

Peter's letter until I got home from work this evening, and I came right over. When I opened the front door I

smelled gas, and I knew that stove had been up to its old tricks. I supposed you'd gone out and forgot to turn

it off. When I got to the second floor I heard a fall overhead, and it flashed across me that you were up here

and had been overcome. I ran up and opened the two windows at the head of the stairs and dragged you out

into the wind. You were lying on the floor." She lowered her voice. "It was perfectly frightful in here."

"Yes, after I'd turned off the stove and opened everything up, I went next door and telephoned for Doctor

Dudley. I thought I'd better not say what the trouble was, but I asked him to come at once, as you'd been

taken ill. You soon came round, but you were flighty." Augusta hurried over her recital. She was evidently

embarrassed by the behaviour of the stove and the condition in which she had found him. It was an ugly

"You must have great presence of mind, Augusta, and a strong arm as well. You say you found me on the

floor? I thought I was lying here on the couch. I remember waking up and smelling gas." "You were

stupefied, but you must have got up and tried to get to the door before you were overcome. I was on the

second floor when I heard you fall. I'd never heard anyone fall before, that I can remember, but I seemed to

"I'm sorry to have given you a fright. I hope the gas hasn't made your head ache."

"All's well that ends well, as they say. But I doubt if you ought to be talking, sir. Could you go to sleep again?

"I'd be greatly obliged if you would stay the night with me, Augusta. It would be a comfort. I seem to feel

"You do a good deal of this sort of thing watching and sitting up with people, don't you?"

"Well, when happen to be sewing in a house where there's sickness, I am sometimes called upon."

Augusta sat down by the table and again took up little religious book. St. Peter, with half closed eyes, lay

watching her regarding in her humankind, as if after a definite absence from the world of men and

women. If he had thought of Augusta sooner, he would have got up from the couch sooner. Her image would

Augusta, he reflected, had always been a corrective, a remedial influence. When she sewed for them, she

breakfasted at the house that was part of the arrangement. She came early, often directly from church, and

had her breakfast with the Professor, before the rest of the family were up. Very often she gave him some

wise observation or discreet comment to begin the day with. She wasn't at all afraid to say things that were

heavily, drearily true, and though he used to wince under them, he hurried off with the feeling that they were

good for him, that he didn't have to hear such sayings half often enough. Augusta was like the taste of bitter

herbs; she was the bloomless side of life that he had always run away from, yet when he had to face it, he

found that it wasn't altogether repugnant. Sometimes she used to telephone Mrs. St. Peter that she would be a

day late, because there had been a death in the family where she was sewing just then, and she was "needed."

When she met him at the table the next morning, she would look just a little more grave than usual. While she

ate a generous breakfast, she would reply to his polite questions about the illness or funeral with befitting

solemnity, and then go readily to another topic, not holding the dolorous note. He used to say that he didn't

mind hearing Augusta announce these deaths which seemed to happen so frequently along her way, because

her manner of speaking about it made death seem less uncomfortable. She hadn't any of the sentimentality

that comes from a fear of dying. She talked about death as she spoke of a hard winter or a rainy March, or any

It occurred to St. Peter, as he lay warm and relaxed but undesirous of sleep, that he would rather have

Augusta with him just now than anyone he could think of. Seasoned and sound and on the solid earth she

surely was, and, for all her matter offactness and hardhandedness, kind and loyal. He even felt a sense of

obligation toward her, instinctive, escaping definition, but real. And when you admitted that a thing was real,

He didn't, on being quite honest with himself, feel any obligations toward his family. Lillian had had the best

years of his life, nearly thirty, and joyful years they had been, nothing could ever change that. But they were

gone. His daughters had outgrown any great need of him. In certain wayward moods Kitty would always

come to him. But Rosamond, on that shopping expedition in Chicago had shown him how painful the

paternal relation could be. There was still Augusta, however; a world full of Augustas, with whom one was

outward bound. All the afternoon he had sat there at the table where now Augusta was reading, thinking over

his life, trying to see where had made his mistake. Perhaps the mistake was merely in an attitude of mind. He

had never learned to live without delight. And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he

supposed he would have to learn to live without sherry. Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may be

even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to

Though he had been lowspirited all summer, he told the truth when he told Dr. Dudley that he had not been

melancholy. He had no more thought of suicide than he had thought of embezzling. He had always regarded

it as a grave social misdemeanour except when it occurred in very evil times, as a form of protest. Yet

when he was confronted by accidental extinction, he had felt no will to resist, but had let chance take its way,

as it had done with him so often. He did not remember springing up from the couch, though he did remember

His temporary release from consciousness seemed to have been beneficial. He had let something go and it

was gone: something very precious, that he could not consciously have relinquished, probably. He doubted

whether his family would ever realize that he was not the same man they had said goodbye to; they would

be too happily preoccupied with their own affairs. If his apathy hurt them, they could not possibly be so much

hurt as he had been already. At least, he felt the ground under his feet. He thought he knew where he was, and