英语小说网

One day, when June was coming to its end, Laura James said to him:

"I shall have to go home next week." Then, seeing his stricken face, she added, "but only for a few days -- not more than a week."

"Yes. It's silly, I know. But my people expect me for the Fourth of July. You know, we have an enormous family -- hundred of aunts, cousins, and inlaws. We have a family reunion every year -- a great barbecue and picnic. I hate it. But they'd never forgive me if I didn't come."

Frightened, he looked at her for a moment.

"Yes, of course," she said. "Be quiet."

"Be quiet," she whispered, "quiet!" She put her arms around him.

He was trembling violently; he was afraid to question her more closely.

"Laura! You're coming back, aren't you?" he said quietly.

"But why? The summer's only started. You will burn up down there."

He went with her to the station on a hot mid-afternoon. There was a smell of melted tar in the streets. She held his hand beside her in the rattling trolley, squeezing his fingers to give him comfort, and whispering from time to time:

"I don't see the need," he muttered. "It's over 400 miles. Just for a few days."

"In a week! Only a week, dear."

He passed the old one-legged gateman on the station platform very easily, carrying her baggage. Then he sat beside her in the close green heat of the pullman until the train should go. A little electric fan droned uselessly above the aisle; a prim young lady whom he knew, arranged herself amid the bright new leather of her bags. She returned his greeting elegantly, with a shade of refined hauteur, then looked out the window again, grimacing eloquently at her parents who gazed at her raptly from the platform. Several prosperous merchants went down the aisle in expensive tan shoes that creaked under the fan's drone.

"Not going to leave us, are you, Mr. Morris?"

He got up trembling.

"Hello, Jim. No, I'm running up to Richmond for a few days." But even the gray weather of their lives could not deaden the excitement of that hot chariot to the East.

"'Board!"

"In a few days, dear." She looked up, taking his hand in her small gloved palms.

She turned her face away and wept bitterly. He sat beside her once more; she clasped him tightly as if he had been a child.

"Never. Come back. Come back."

Within three days he had his letter. On four sheets of paper, bordered with victorious little American flags, this:

"Yes. To-morrow -- at once."

"Come back again!"

The salt print of her kiss was on his mouth, his face, his eyes. It was, he knew, the guttering candle-end of time. The train was in motion. He leaped blindly up the passage with a cry in his throat.

"You will write as soon as you get there? Please!"

He bent down suddenly and whispered, "Laura -- you will come back. You will come back!"

"My dear, my dear! Don't forget me ever!"

"My dear: I got home at half-past one, just too tired to move. I couldn't sleep on the train at all last night, it seemed to get hotter all the way down. I was so blue when I got here, I almost cried. Little Richmond is too ghastly for words -- everything burned up and every one gone away to the mountains or the sea. How can I ever stand it even for a week!" (Good! he thought. If the weather holds, she will come back all the sooner.) "It would be heaven now to get one breath of mountain air. Could you find your way back to our place in the valley again?" (Yes, even if I were blind, he thought.) "Will you promise to look after your hand until it gets well? I worried so after you had gone, because I forgot to change the bandage yesterday. Daddy was glad to see me: he said he was not going to let me go again but, don't worry, I'll have my own way in the end. I always do. I don't know any one at home any more -- all of the boys have enlisted or gone to work in the shipyards at Norfolk. Most of the girls I know are getting married, or married already. That leaves only the kids." (He winced. As old as I am, maybe older.) "Give my love to Mrs. Barton, and tell your mother I said she must not work so hard in that hot kitchen. And all the little cross-marks at the bottom are for you. Try to guess what they are. LAURA."

But he knew. Her cry followed him, as if he had torn something from her grasp.

There was another page. Weakened and relaxed from his excitement, he looked at it. There he found, almost illegibly written, but at last in her own speech, as if leaping out from the careful aimlessness of her letter, this note:

He read her prosy letter with rigid face, devouring the words more hungrily than if they had been lyrical song. She would come back! She would come back! Soon.

"July 4.

"Richard came yesterday. He is twenty-five, works in Norfolk. I've been engaged to him almost a year. We're going off quietly to Norfolk tomorrow and get married. My dear! My dear! I couldn't tell you! I tried to, but couldn't. I didn't want to lie. Everything else was true. I meant all I said. If you hadn't been so young, but what's the use of saying that? Try to forgive me, but please don't forget me. Good-by and God bless you. Oh, my darling, it was heaven! I shall never forget you."

When he had finished the letter, he reread it, slowly and carefully. Then he folded it, put it in his inner breast-pocket, and leaving Dixieland, walked for forty minutes, until he came up in the gap over the town again. It was sunset. The sun's vast rim, blood-red, rested upon the western earth, in a great field of murky pollen. It sank beyond the western ranges. The clear sweet air was washed with gold and pearl. The vast hills melted into purple solitudes: they were like Canaan and rich grapes. The motors of cove people toiled up around the horse-shoe of the road. Dusk came. The bright winking lights in the town went up. Darkness melted over the town like dew: it washed out all the day's distress, the harsh confusions. Low wailing sounds came faintly up from Niggertown.

"Wh-a-a-a-t!" said Eliza banteringly, "has my boy been -- as the fellow says" (she sniggered behind her hand) "has my boy been a-courtin'?" She puckered her lips in playful reproach.

And above him the proud stars flashed into heaven: there was one, so rich and low, that he could have picked it, if he had climbed the hill beyond the Jew's great house. One, like a lamp, hung low above the heads of men returning home. (O Hesperus, you bring us all good things.) One had flashed out the light that winked on him the night that Ruth lay at the feet of Boaz; and one on Queen Isolt; and one on Corinth and on Troy. It was night, vast brooding night, the mother of loneliness, that washes our stains away. He was washed in the great river of night, in the Ganges tides of redemption. His bitter wound was for the moment healed in him: he turned his face upward to the proud and tender stars, which made him a god and a grain of dust, the brother of eternal beauty and the son of death -- alone, alone.

"Ha-ha-ha-ha!" Helen laughed huskily, prodding him in the ribs. "Your girl went and got married, didn't she? She fooled you. You got left."

His scowl broke into an angry grin as he caught his sister's eye. They laughed.

"Cheer up!" said Helen heartily. "Your time's coming. You'll forget her in a week. There are plenty more, you know. This is puppy love. Show her that you're a good sport. You ought to write her a letter of congratulation."

"Oh, for God's sake," he muttered angrily. "What fellow says!"

"Well, 'Gene," said the girl seriously, "forget about it. You're only a kid yet. Laura is a grown woman."

"Why, yes," said Eliza, "I'd make a big joke of it all. I wouldn't let on to her that it affected me. I'd write her just as big as you please and laugh about the whole thing. I'd show them! That's what I'd --"

"Oh, stop it, please."

He left the house.

"Why, son," said Eliza with a touch of malice, "that girl was fooling you all the time. She was just leading you on."

"Oh, for God's sake!" he groaned, starting up. "Leave me alone, won't you?"

But he wrote the letter. And the moment after the lid of the mailbox clanged over it, he was writhen by shame. For it was a proud and boastful letter, salted with scatterings of Greek, Latin, and English verse, quotable scraps, wrenched into the text without propriety, without accuracy, without anything but his pitiful and obvious desire to show her his weight in the point of his wit, the depth of his learning. She would be sorry when she knew her loss! But, for a moment at the end, his fiercely beating heart stormed through:

Upon the darkening porch, awaiting food, the boarders rocked, oh rocked with laughter.

"… and I hope he's worth having you -- he can't deserve you, Laura; no one can. But if he knows what he has, that's something. How lucky he is! You're right about me -- I'm too young. I'd cut off my hand now for eight or ten years more. God bless and keep you, my dear, dear Laura.

"Something in me wants to burst. It keeps trying to, but it won't, it never has. O God! If it only would! I shall never forget you. I'm lost now and I'll never find the way again. In God's name write me a line when you get this. Tell me what your name is now -- you never have. Tell me where you're going to live. Don't let me go entirely, I beg of you, don't leave me alone."

He sent the letter to the address she had given him -- to her father's house. Week melted into week: his life mounted day by day in a terrible tension to the delivery of the mail, morning and afternoon, fell then into a miasmic swamp when no word came, July ended. The summer waned. She did not write.

"Well, well! Did the Old Boy lose his girl?"

The fat little girl skipped back to her fat mother for approbation: they regarded each other with complacent smiles loosely netted in their full-meated mouths.

"Lost his girl! Lost his girl! Eugene, Eugene, has lost his girl."

"Don't let them kid you, big boy. What's the matter: did some one get your girl?" asked Mr. Hake, the flour salesman. He was a dapper young man of twenty-six years, who smoked large cigars; he had a tapering face, and a high domey head, bald on top, fringed sparsely with fine blond hair. His mother, a large grass-widow near fifty, with the powerful craggy face of an Indian, a large mass of dyed yellow hair, and a coarse smile, full of gold and heartiness, rocked mightily, laughing with hoarse compassion:

The little fat girl, the daughter of one of the two fat sisters whose husbands were hotel clerks in Charleston, skipped to and from him, in slow May dance, with fat calves twinkling brownly above her socks.

The boarders said: "Eugene's lost his girl. He doesn't know what to do, he's lost his girl."

"You should worry, boy. You should WORRY!" said Mr. Farrel, of Miami, the dancing instructor. "Women are like street-cars: if you miss one, there's another along in fifteen minutes. Ain't that right, lady?" he said pertly, turning to Miss Clark, of Valdosta, Georgia, for whom it had been uttered. She answered with a throaty confused twiddle-giggle of laughter. "Oh, aren't men the awfullest --"

"Git another girl, 'Gene. Why, law! I'd not let it bother me two minutes." He always expected her to spit, emphatically, with gusto, after speaking.

Leaning upon the porch rail in the thickening dusk, Mr. Jake Clapp, a well-to-do widower from Old Hominy, pursued his stealthy courtship of Miss Florry Mangle, the trained nurse. Her limp face made a white blot in the darkness; she spoke in a tired whine:

"I thought she was too old for him when I saw her. 'Gene's only a kid. He's taken it hard, you can tell by looking at him how miserable he is. He's going to get sick if he keeps on at this rate. He's thin as a bone. He hardly eats a bite. People get run down like that and catch the first disease that comes along --"

"He'll git over it," said Jake Clapp, in a precise country drawl, streaked with a note of bawdry. "Every boy has got to go through the Calf-Love stage. When I was about 'Gene's age --" He pressed his hard thigh gently against Florry, grinning widely and thinly with a few gold teeth. He was a tall solid man, with a hard precise face, lewdly decorous, and slanting Mongol eyes. His head was bald and knobby.

Her melancholy whine continued as Jake's stealthy thigh fumbled against her. She kept her arms carefully folded across her sagging breasts.

In the gray darkness, the boy turned his starved face on them. His dirty clothes lapped round his scarecrow body: his eyes burned like a cat's in the dark, his hair fell over his forehead in a matted net.

Eugene rocked gently on his feet, staring at the boarders with a steady hate. Suddenly he snarled like a wild beast, and started down the porch, unable to speak, reeling, but snarling again and again his choking and insane fury.

"He'd better watch out," whined Florry sadly. "I know what I'm talking about. That boy's not strong -- he has no business to go prowling around to all hours the way he does. He's on the verge of --"

"Miss Brown" meanwhile sat primly at the end of the porch, a little apart from the others. From the dark sun-parlor at the side came swiftly the tall elegant figure of Miss Irene Mallard, twenty-eight, of Tampa, Florida. She caught him at the step edge, and pulled him round sharply, gripping his arms lightly with her cool long fingers.

"Leave me alone!" he muttered.

"Where are you going, 'Gene?" she said quietly. Her eyes of light violet were a little tired. There was a faint exquisite perfume of rosewater.

"Leave me alone!" he said furiously. "I know what I'm doing!" He wrenched away violently, and leaped down into the yard, plunging around the house in a staggering run.

"Ben!" said Irene Mallard sharply.

Ben rose from the dark porch-swing where he had been sitting with Mrs. Pert.

"See if you can't do something to stop him," said Irene Mallard.

"He's crazy," Ben muttered. "Which way did he go?"

"You can't go on like this," she said in a low tone. "She's not worth it -- none of them are. Pull yourself together."

Another convulsion of his shoulders brought down a sprinkling rain of dust and rubble.

Ben went swiftly down the shallow steps and loped back over the lawn. The yard sloped sharply down: the gaunt back of Dixieland was propped upon a dozen rotting columns of whitewashed brick, fourteen feet high. In the dim light, by one of these slender piers, already mined with crumbling ruins of wet brick, the scarecrow crouched, toiling with the thin grapevine of his arms against the temple.

"I will kill you, House," he gasped. "Vile and accursed House, I will tear you down. I will bring you down upon the whores and boarders. I will wreck you, House."

"By there -- around the house. Go quick!"

"Fool!" cried Ben, leaping upon him, "what are you trying to do?" He caught the boy's arms from behind and dragged him back. "Do you think you can bring her back to you by wrecking the house? Are there no other women in the world, that you should let one get the best of you like this?"

"I will make you fall down on all the people in you, House," he said.

"No. Go into the house and wash yourself. You ought to comb your hair once or twice a week, you know. You can't go around like a wild man. Get something to eat. Have you any money?"

"Don't think, fool, that I care," said Ben fiercely. "You're hurting no one but yourself. Do you think you'll hurt the boarders by pulling the house down on your own head? Do you think, idiot, that any one cares if you kill yourself?" He shook the boy. "No. No. I don't care what you do, you know. I simply want to save the family the trouble and expense of burying you."

"Let me go! Let me go!" said Eugene. "What does it matter to you?"

With a great cry of rage and bafflement Eugene tried to free himself. But the older brother held on as desperately as the Old Man of the Sea. Then, with a great effort of his hands and shoulders, the boy lifted his captor off the ground, and dashed him back against the white brick wall of the cellar. Ben collapsed, releasing him, with a fit of dry coughing, holding his hand against his thin breast.

"Don't be a fool," he gasped.

"Did I hurt you?" said Eugene dully.

"Are you all right now?"

"Yes," said Eugene wearily, "let it go. It's all right now. I'm too tired. When you get tired you don't care, do you? I'm too tired to care. I'll never care any more. I'm too tired. The men in France get tired and don't care. If a man came and pointed a gun at me now, I wouldn't be scared. I'm too tired." He began to laugh, loosely, with a sense of delicious relief. "I don't care for any one or anything. I've always been afraid of everything, but when I got tired I didn't care. That's how I shall get over everything. I shall get tired."

"Yes -- I have enough."

"Yes -- don't talk about it, please."

"I don't want to talk about it, fool. I want you to learn a little sense," said Ben. He straightened, brushing his whitened coat. In a moment, he went on quietly: "To hell with them, 'Gene. To hell with them all. Don't let them worry you. Get all that you can. Don't give a damn for anything. Nothing gives a damn for you. To hell with it all! To hell with it! There are a lot of bad days. There are a lot of good ones. You'll forget. There are a lot of days. Let it go."

"That's better," he said. "Let's get something to eat." He smiled thinly. "Come along, Samson."

They walked out slowly around the house.

He washed himself, and ate a hearty meal. The boarders finished, and wandered off into the darkness variously -- some to the band-concert on the Square, some to the moving-pictures, some for walks through the town. When he had fed he went out on the porch. It was dark and almost empty save where, at the side, Mrs. Selborne sat in the swing with a wealthy lumber man from Tennessee. Her low rich laughter bubbled up softly from the vat of the dark. "Miss Brown" rocked quietly and decorously by herself. She was a heavily built and quietly dressed woman of thirty-nine years, touched with that slightly comic primness -- that careful gentility -- that marks the conduct of the prostitute incognito. She was being very refined. She was a perfect lady and would, if aroused, assert the fact.

Ben lighted a cigarette.

"Miss Brown" lived, she said, in Indianapolis. She was not ugly: her face was simply permeated with the implacable dullness of the Mid-Westerner. In spite of the lewdness of her wide thin mouth, her look was smug. She had a fair mass of indifferent brown hair, rather small brown eyes, and a smooth russet skin.

"Yes, it was hot," he said. "I hate hot weather."

"Indianapolis."

"I don't know exactly -- over three hundred thousand with the suburbs."

"I can't stand it either," she said. "That's why I go away every summer. Out my way we catch it. You folks here don't know what hot weather is."

"You're from Milwaukee, aren't you?"

There had been rain. The night was cool and black; the flower-bed before the house was wet, with a smell of geraniums and drenched pansies. He lighted a cigarette, sitting upon the rail. "Miss Brown" rocked.

"How big is it?" he said eagerly. "How many people have you there?"

"I knew it was somewhere out there. Is it a big place?" he asked curiously.

"Yes. You could put Altamont in one corner of it and never miss it."

"Pshaw!" said Eliza. "I don't believe her name's 'Miss Brown' any more than mine is."

"It's turned off cool," she said. "That little bit of rain has done a lot of good, hasn't it?"

He reflected with greedy satisfaction.

"Is it pretty? Are there a lot of pretty houses and fine buildings?"

"Yes -- I think so," she said reflectively. "It's a nice homelike place."

She laughed awkwardly, puzzled and confused.

"Yes. A lot of good shows come to Indianapolis. All the big hits in New York and Chicago."

"Why -- yes. It's a business and manufacturing place. There are a lot of rich people."

"Yes. We have a nice library."

"And a library -- you have a big one, eh?"

"And what about the theatres and libraries? You have lots of shows, don't you?"

"Yes." She laughed, with a voluptuous note in her voice. "I believe you're a bad boy, Eugene."

"I suppose they live in big houses and ride around in big cars, eh?" he demanded. Then, without waiting for a reply, he went on: "Do they have good things to eat? What?"

"What are the people like? What do they do? Are they rich?"

"Oh, I can't say as to that. But it's a good big library."

"Over 100,000 books, do you suppose? They wouldn't have half a million, would they?" He did not wait for an answer, he was talking to himself. "No, of course not. How many books can you take out at a time? What?"

"Beer!" he muttered lusciously. "Beer -- eh? You make it out there?"

"Why, yes. There's a great deal of German cooking. Do you like German cooking?"

"How many books has it?"

"I believe I will," she whispered. "Have you got a cigarette?"

He gave her his package; she stood up to receive the flame he nursed in his cupped hands. She leaned her heavy body against him as, with puckered face and closed eyes, she held her cigarette to the fire. She grasped his shaking hands to steady the light, holding them for a moment after.

"What are the girls like? Are they blonde or brunette? What?"

"Are they pretty?"

"Why not?" he said impatiently. "There's no one to see you. It's dark. What does it matter anyway?"

Little electric currents of excitement played up his spine.

He lighted another cigarette feverishly.

"I'd give anything for a smoke," muttered "Miss Brown." "I don't suppose I could here?" She looked round her.

"Why, we have both kinds -- more dark than fair, I should say." She looked through the darkness at him, grinning.

"Well! I can't say. You'll have to draw your own conclusions, Eugene. I'm one of them, you know." She looked at him with demure lewdness, offering herself for inspection. Then, with a laugh of teasing reproof, she said: "I believe you're a bad boy, Eugene. I believe you're a bad boy."

The great shadow of his hunger bent over her; he rushed out of himself, devouring her with his questions.

"Where is your room?" he said.

"Who's there? Who's there?" she said, peering into the gloom suspiciously. "Huh? Hah? Where's Eugene? Has any one seen Eugene?" She knew very well he was there.

"Yes, here I am," he said. "What do you want?"

"Yes," said "Miss Brown," "I believe in being broad-minded about these things, too."

Later, Eliza came suddenly and silently out upon them, on one of her swift raids from the kitchen.

"Eugene! Eugene!" she said in mocking reproof.

"She'll not see us," he said. "Besides," he added generously, "why shouldn't women smoke the same as men? There's no harm in it."

She told him.

"Oh! Who's that with you? Hah?"

But he grinned in the dark, because the woman had revealed herself with a cigarette. It was a sign -- the sign of the province, the sign unmistakable of debauchery.

Then, when he laid his hands upon her, she came very passively into his embrace as he sat before her on the rail.

"What," said "Miss Brown," with a cunning smile, "what if your mother should see us? You'd catch it!"

"Oh!" said Eliza awkwardly, "is that you, 'Miss Brown'? I couldn't see who it was." She switched on the dim porch light. "It's mighty dark out here. Some one coming up those steps might fall and break a leg. I tell you what," she continued conversationally, "this air feels good. I wish I could let everything go and just enjoy myself."

"'Miss Brown' is with me."

She continued in amiable monologue for another half hour, her eyes probing about swiftly all the time at the two dark figures before her. Then hesitantly, by awkward talkative stages, she went into the house again.

"I'm going now. I feel tired. Good-night, all."

"Won't you come out and sit down, Mrs. Gant?" said "Miss Brown." "You must be tired and hot."

"Miss Brown" assented gracefully and moved toward the door.

"Son," she said before she went, troubled, "it's getting late. You'd better go to bed. That's where we all ought to be."

He sat quietly on the rail, smoking, listening to the noises in the house. It went to sleep. He went back and found Eliza preparing to retire to her little cell.

"Well, good-night, mama," he said, ashamed and hurt. "Let's forget about them for a while. What does it matter?"

"She's YOUR boarder, isn't she?" he said roughly, "not mine. I didn't bring her here."

"Son!" she said, in a low voice, after shaking her puckered face reproachfully for a moment, "I tell you what -- I don't like it. It doesn't look right -- your sitting out alone with that woman. She's old enough to be your mother."

"Be a good boy," said Eliza timidly. "I want you to be a good boy, son."

There was a sense of guilt in her manner, a note of regret and contrition.

"There's one thing sure," said Eliza, wounded. "You don't catch me associating with them. I hold up my head as high as any one." She smiled at him bitterly.

"Don't worry!" he said, turning away suddenly, wrenched bitterly, as he always was, by a sense of the child-like innocence and steadfastness that lay at the bottom of her life. "It's not your fault if I'm not. I shan't blame you. Goodnight."

The kitchen-light went out; he heard his mother's door click gently. Through the dark house a shaft of air blew coolly. Slowly, with thudding heart, he began to mount the stairs.

He groped softly back along the dark corridor until he came to the door of "Miss Brown's" room. It was slightly ajar. He went in.

So they paused there, holding each other, breast to breast, the only time that they had ever touched. Then, with their dark wisdom of each other confirmed, they parted, each a sharer in the other's life, to meet thereafter before the world with calm untelling eyes.

"Hush-h!" she whispered.

But on that dark stair, his foot-falls numbed in the heavy carpet, he came squarely upon a woman's body that, by its fragrance, like magnolia, he knew was that of Mrs. Selborne. They held each other sharply by the arms, discovered, with caught breath. She bent toward him: a few strands of her blonde hair brushed his face, leaving it aflame.

She took all his medals, all that he had won at Leonard's school -- the one for debating, the one for declaiming, the one in bronze for William Shakespeare. W. S. 1616-1916 -- Done for a Ducat!

He had no money to give her: she did not want much -- a coin or two at a time. It was, she said, not the money: it was the principle of the thing. He saw the justice of her argument.

"For," said she, "if I wanted money, I wouldn't fool with you. Somebody tries to get me to go out every day. One of the richest men in this town (old man Tyson) has been after me ever since I came. He's offered me ten dollars if I'll go out in his car with him. I don't need your money. But you've got to give me something. I don't care how little it is. I wouldn't feel decent unless you did. I'm not one of your little Society Chippies that you see every day uptown. I've too much self-respect for that."

"If you don't redeem them," said "Miss Brown," "I'll give them to my own son when I go home."

"Have you a son?"

He turned his head away sharply, whitening with a sense of nausea and horror, feeling in him an incestuous pollution.

"Yes. He's eighteen years old. He's almost as tall as you are and twice as broad. All the girls are mad about him."

So, in lieu of money, he gave her his medals as pledges.

"That's enough, now," said "Miss Brown" with authority. "Go to your room and get some sleep."

But, unlike the first one in the tobacco town, she never called him "son."

Miss Irene Mallard changed the needle of the little phonograph in the sun-parlor, and reversed the well-worn record. Then as with stately emphasis, the opening measure of "Katinka" paced out, she waited for him, erect, smiling, slender, beautiful, with long lovely hands held up like wings to his embrace. She was teaching him to dance. Laura James had danced beautifully: it had maddened him to see her poised in the arms of a young man dancing. Now, clumsily, he moved off on a conscientious left foot, counting to himself. One, two, three, four! Irene Mallard slipped and veered to his awkward pressure, as bodiless as a fume of smoke. Her left hand rested on his bony shoulder lightly as a bird: her cool fingers were threaded into his hot sawing palm.

Poor Butterfly, for she loved him so-o --"

She had thick hair of an oaken color, evenly parted in the middle; her skin was pearl-pale, and transparently delicate; her jaw was long, full, and sensuous -- her face was like that of one of the preRaphaelite women. She carried her tall graceful body with beautiful erectness, but with the slightly worn sensuousness of fragility and weariness: her lovely eyes were violet, always a little tired, but full of slow surprise and tenderness. She was like a Luini madonna, mixed of holiness and seduction, the world and heaven. He held her with reverent care, as one who would not come too near, who would not break a sacred image. Her exquisite and subtle perfume stole through him like a strange whisper, pagan and divine. He was afraid to touch her -- and his hot palm sweated to her fingers.

"Poor Butterfly, for her heart was break-king,

Sometimes she coughed gently, smiling, holding a small crumpled handkerchief, edged with blue, before her mouth.

She had come to the hills not because of her own health, but because of her mother's, a woman of sixty-five, rustily dressed, with the petulant hang-dog face of age and sickness. The old woman suffered from asthma and heart-disease. They had come from Florida. Irene Mallard was a very capable business woman; she was the chief bookkeeper of one of the Altamont banks. Every evening Randolph Gudger, the bank president, telephoned her.

Irene Mallard pressed her palm across the mouthpiece of the telephone, smiling at Eugene ironically, and rolling her eyes entreatingly aloft.

"He's old enough to be your grandfather," said Eugene. "He has no hair on the top of his head; his teeth are false, and I don't know what-all!" he said resentfully.

"He wants me to marry him, 'Gene," said Irene Mallard. "What am I going to do?"

Sometimes Randolph Gudger drove by and asked her to go with him. The boy went sulkily away until the rich man should leave: the banker looked bitterly after him.

"He's a rich man, 'Gene," said Irene, smiling. "Don't forget that."

"Go on, then! Go on!" he cried furiously. "Yes -- go ahead. Marry him. It's the right thing for you. Sell yourself. He's an old man!" he said melodramatically. Randolph Gudger was almost forty-five.

But they danced there slowly in a gray light of dusk that was like pain and beauty; like the lost light undersea, in which his life, a lost merman, swam, remembering exile. And as they danced she, whom he dared not touch, yielded her body unto him, whispering softly to his ear, pressing with slender fingers his hot hand. And she, whom he would not touch, lay there, like a sheaf of grain, in the crook of his arm, token of the world's remedy -- the refuge from the one lost face out of all the faces, the anodyne against the wound named Laura -- a thousand flitting shapes of beauty to bring him comfort and delight. The great pageantry of pain and pride and death hung through the dusk its awful vision, touching his sorrow with a lonely joy. He had lost; but all pilgrimage across the world was loss: a moment of cleaving, a moment of taking away, the thousand phantom shapes that beaconed, and the high impassionate grief of stars.

"I've been watching you these last few days," said Irene Mallard. "I know what's been going on."

"What do you mean?" he said thickly, with thudding pulses.

"You know what I mean," said Irene Mallard sternly. "Now you're too fine a boy, 'Gene, to waste yourself on that Woman. Any one can see what she is. Mother and I have both talked about it. A woman like that can ruin a young boy like you. You've got to stop it."

It was dark. Irene Mallard took him by the hand and led him out on the porch.

"Sit down here a moment, 'Gene. I want to talk to you." Her voice was serious, low-pitched. He sat beside her in the swing, obediently, with the sense of an impending lecture.

"How did you know about it?" he muttered. He was frightened and ashamed. She took his trembling hand and held it between her cool palms until he grew quieter. But he drew no closer to her: he halted, afraid, before her loveliness. As with Laura James, she seemed too high for his passion. He was afraid of her flesh; he was not afraid of "Miss Brown's." But now he was tired of the woman and didn't know how he could pay her. She had all his medals.

All through the waning summer he walked with Irene Mallard. They walked at night through the cool streets filled with the rustle of tired leaves. They went together to the hotel roof and danced; later "Pap" Rheinhart, kind and awkward and shy, and smelling of his horse, came to their little table, sitting and drinking with them. He had spent the years since Leonard's at a military school, trying to straighten the wry twist of his neck. But he remained the same as ever -- quizzical, dry, and humorous. Eugene looked at that good shy face, remembering the lost years, the lost faces. And there was sorrow in his heart for what would come no more. August ended.

September came, full of departing wings. The world was full of departures. It had heard the drums. The young men were going to the war. Ben had been rejected again in the draft. Now he was preparing to drift off in search of employment in other towns. Luke had given up his employment in a war-munitions factory at Dayton, Ohio, and had enlisted in the Navy. He had come home on a short leave before his departure for the training-school at Newport, Rhode Island. The street roared as he came down at his vulgar wide-legged stride, in flapping blues, his face all on the grin, thick curls of his unruly hair coiling below the band of his hat. He was the cartoon of a gob.

"Luke!" shouted Mr. Fawcett, the land-auctioneer, pulling him in from the street to Wood's pharmacy, "by God, son, you've done your bit. I'm going to set you up. What are you going to have?"

"Make it a dope," said Luke. "Colonel, yours truly!" He lifted the frosty glass in a violently palsied hand, and stood posed before the grinning counter. "F-f-f-forty years ago," he began, in a hoarse voice, "I might have refused, but now I can't, G-G-G-God help me! I c-c-c-c-can't!"

Gant's sickness had returned on him with increased virulence. His face was haggard and yellow: a tottering weakness crept into his limbs. It was decided that he must go again to Baltimore. Helen would go with him.

"Mr. Gant," said Eliza persuasively, "why don't you just give up everything and settle down to take things easy the rest of your days? You don't feel good enough to tend to business any more; if I were you, I'd retire. We could get $20,000 for your shop without any trouble -- If I had that much money to work with, I'd show them a thing or two." She nodded pertly with a smart wink. "I could turn it over two or three times within two years' time. You've got to trade quick to keep the ball a-rolling. That's the way it's done."

Summer died upon the hills. There was a hue, barely guessed, upon the foliage, of red rust. The streets at night were filled with sad lispings: all through the night, upon his porch, as in a coma, he heard the strange noise of autumn. And all the people who had given the town its light thronging gaiety were vanished strangely overnight. They had gone back into the vast South again. The solemn tension of the war gathered about the nation. A twilight of grim effort hovered around him, above him. He felt the death of joy; but the groping within him of wonder, of glory. Out of the huge sprawl of its first delirium, the nation was beginning to articulate the engines of war -- engines to mill and print out hatred and falsehood, engines to pump up glory, engines to manacle and crush opposition, engines to drill and regiment men.

He groaned, turning his head away.

"Merciful God," he groaned. "That's my last refuge on earth. Woman, have you no mercy? I beg of you, leave me to die in peace: it won't be long now. You can do what you please with it after I'm gone, but give me a little peace now. In the name of Jesus, I ask it!" He sniffled affectedly.

"Pshaw!" said Eliza, thinking no doubt to encourage him. "There's nothing wrong with you. Half of it's only imagination."

But something of true wonder had come upon the land -- the flares and rockets of the battle-fields cast their light across the plains as well. Young men from Kansas were going to die in Picardy. In some foreign earth lay the iron, as yet unmoulded, that was to slay them. The strangeness of death and destiny was legible upon lives and faces which held no strangeness of their own. For, it is the union of the ordinary and the miraculous that makes wonder.

Luke had gone away to the training-school at Newport. Ben went to Baltimore with Helen and Gant, who, before entering the hospital again for radium treatment, had gone on a violent and unruly spree which had compelled their rapid transference from one hotel to another and had finally brought Gant moaning to his bed, hurling against God the anathemas that should have been saved for huge riotings in raw oysters washed down chaotically with beer and whisky. They all drank a great deal: Gant's excesses, however, reduced the girl to a state of angry frenzy, and Ben to one of scowling and cursing disgust.

"Don't 'baby' me!" she cried.

"You damned old man!" cried Helen, seizing and shaking his passive shoulders as he lay reeking and sodden on an untidy bed. "I could wear you out! You're not sick; I've wasted my life nursing you, and you're not as sick as I am! You'll be here long after I'm gone, you selfish old man! It makes me furious!"

"Why, baby!" he roared, with a vast gesture of his arms, "God bless you, I couldn't do without you."

"I was a boy here," he muttered.

But she held his hand next day as they rode out to the hospital, held it as, quaking, he turned for an instant and looked sadly at the city stretched behind and below him.

"Don't worry," she said, "we're going to make you well again. Why! You'll be a boy again!"

Hand in hand they entered the lobby where, flanked with death and terror and the busy matter-of-factness of the nurses and the hundred flitting shapes of the quiet men with the gray faces and gimlet eyes who walk so surely in among the broken lives -- with arms proposed in an attitude of enormous mercy -- many times bigger than Gant's largest angel -- is an image of gentle Jesus.

Eugene went to see the Leonards several times. Margaret looked thin and ill, but the great light in her seemed on this account to burn more brightly. Never before had he been so aware of her enormous tranquil patience, the great health of her spirit. All of his sin, all of his pain, all the vexed weariness of his soul were washed away in that deep radiance: the tumult and evil of life dropped from him its foul and ragged cloak. He seemed to be clothed anew in garments of seamless light.

But he could confess little that lay on his heart: he talked freely of his work at the university, he talked of little else. His heart was packed with its burden for confessional, but he knew he could not speak, that she would not understand. She was too wise for anything but faith. Once, desperately, he tried to tell her of Laura: he blurted out a confession awkwardly in a few words. Before he had finished she began to laugh.

"Mr. Leonard!" she called. "Imagine this rascal with a girl! Pshaw, boy! You don't know what love is. Get along with you. There'll be time enough to think of that ten years from now." She laughed tenderly to herself, with absent misty gaze.

"Old 'Gene with a girl! Pity the poor girl! Ah, Lord, Boy! That's a long way off for you. Thank your stars!"

He walked through the streets at night with Irene Mallard; the town was thinned and saddened by departures. A few people hurried past, as if driven along by the brief pouncing gusts of wind. He was held in the lure of her subtle weariness: she gave him comfort and he never touched her. But he unpacked the burden of his heart, trembling and passionate. She sat beside him and stroked his hand. It seemed to him that he never knew her until he remembered her years later.

He bent his head sharply, and closed his eyes. O My lovely Saint! he thought. How close you have been to me, if any one. How I have cut my brain open for you to see, and would my heart, if I had dared, and how alone I am, and always have been.

The house was almost empty. At night Eliza packed his trunk carefully, counting the ironed shirts and mended socks with satisfaction.

"Now, you have plenty of good warm clothes, son. Try to take care of them." She put Gant's check in his inner pocket and fastened it with a safety-pin.

He dawdled nervously toward the door, wishing to melt away, not end in leave-taking.

"Keep a sharp eye on your money, boy. You never know who you'll run up with on a train."

"It does seem you might spend one night at home with your mother," she said querulously. Her eyes grew misty at once, her lips began to work tremulously in a bitter self-pitying smile. "I tell you what! It looks mighty funny, doesn't it? You can't stay with me five minutes any more without wanting to be up and off with the first woman that comes along. It's all right! It's all right. I'm not complaining. It seems as if all I was fit for is to cook and sew and get you ready to go off." She burst volubly into tears. "It seems that that's the only use you have for me. I've hardly laid eyes on you all summer."

"No," he said bitterly, "you've been too busy looking after the boarders. Don't think, mama, that you can work on my feelings here at the last minute," he cried, already deeply worked-on. "It's easy to cry. But I was here all the time if you had had time for me. Oh, for God's sake! Let's make an end to this! Aren't things bad enough without it? Why must you act this way whenever I go off? Do you want to make me as miserable as you can?"

"Well, I tell you," said Eliza hopefully, becoming dry-eyed at once, "if I make a couple of deals and everything goes well, you may find me waiting for you in a big fine house when you come back next Spring. I've got the lot picked out. I was thinking about it the other day," she went on, giving him a bright and knowing nod.

"Ah-h!" he made a strangling noise in his throat and tore at his collar. "In God's name! Please!" There was a silence.

Again silence fell. She had said her say; she had come as close as she could, but suddenly she felt speechless, shut out, barred from the bitter and lonely secrecy of his life.

"Well," said Eliza gravely, plucking at her chin, "I want you to be a good boy and study hard, son. Take care of your money -- I want you to have plenty of good food and warm clothes -- but you mustn't be extravagant, boy. This sickness of your papa's has cost a lot of money. Everything is going out and nothing's coming in. Nobody knows where the next dollar's coming from. So you've got to watch out."

He cast his arms up suddenly in a tortured incomplete gesture.

"I hate to see you go, son," she said quietly, with a deep and indefinable sadness.

Eliza's eyes filled with tears of real pain. She grasped his hand and held it.

"What does it matter! Oh God, what does it matter!"

"Try to be happy, son," she wept, "try to be a little more happy. Poor child! Poor child! Nobody ever knew you. Before you were born," she shook her head slowly, speaking in a voice that was drowned and husky with her tears. Then, huskily, clearing her throat, she repeated, "Before you were born --"