"'Oh iron nerve to true occasion true,... that tower of strengthWhich stood four-square to all the winds that blew!'
"'Oh iron nerve to true occasion true,... that tower of strengthWhich stood four-square to all the winds that blew!'
"'Oh iron nerve to true occasion true,
... that tower of strength
Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew!'
Try to understand your grandmother, my child," he wound up; "she is the Pallas Athene of our line."
Val did not know that an American is never so happy as when he is vaunting his womenkind. But in her estimation Pallas does better over your chamber door than in an arm-chair looking at you—through you—with a grandmother's spectacles. You forget what a heroine she is when she criticises the way you sit—"A lady never crosses her legs;" and the way you walk—"I used to swing my arms too—very bad habit; you should study repose." And when wrought upon by your too generous-judging father, or by some private discovery of her worth, you burst out: "Oh, Idolove you!" it chills you to get for all response: "Youdon'tlove me, or you'd behave differently. 'By their fruits ye shall know them.'"
It was no better later on, when, with growing freedom of speech and warmth of feeling, you would ask in an engaging way: "Why don't you love me?" and get for answer: "It's a mistake to think your relations owe you love; you have to earn it from them as you do in the world outside." Worst of all, and most humiliating to the eager spirit, was it to be "warded off" if you came to kiss her oftener than good-morning and good-night. "We are not a kissing family," she would say; and you cringed under the blow.
No; Pallas Athene was not an unqualified success—as a grandmother.
There were times, indeed, when her shortcomings nearly drove her granddaughter into considering an elopement with Harry Wilbur, the eighteen-year-old son of Judge Wilbur. With mental apologies to her ideal hero, Val had kept up a vigorous correspondence with Harry,pending the time when the superior suitor should carry her off, and save her the trouble and ungraciousness of breaking the pleasant chains that bade fair, as the days went on, to bind her to her gallant young Hercules. Harry Wilbur was captain of the base-ball team, and the darling hero of the entire New Plymouth Seminary. Most of these studious young ladies thought more of manly strength and of that particular grace that is born of bodily vigor than they did of the qualities of the mind. It was as if, all untutored, they had the improvement of the physique of the race at heart. Julia Otway, for instance, would descant almost daily upon Harry Wilbur's "splendid figure," and how he held his shoulders; how he walked from the hip, and howeasilyhe played the hottest game. She would give as adequate reason for despising some more wealthy or more intellectual citizen, that she hated men who did uninteresting things for a living or did nothing at all. Val shared this spirit of Julia's to an extent that gave her a pleasant sense of victory when young Wilbur showed her more attention at dances and archery tournaments than he showed the other girls. Besides, this open devotion made Ernest Halliwell sad, and Jerry Otway "mad," and that was highly agreeable. But Harry didn't "care a fip," as Jerusha said, about music, and music was the supreme affair of life until—until—
Every year saw the resources of the Ganos lessening, the problem of life more difficult to solve.
"You see," Val would say, radiant, "it just shows theneedfor me to study singing and make money."
"You? Ridiculous and most improper! No woman of your family has ever dreamed of taking money for anything she has done."
The following summer—or "on June 18," as he would have said, taking care to add the year, and even the hour—John Gano received a shock. A kindly letter had come to him from his old flame, Mrs. Otway, to say that, although he seemed to have forgotten her, still, for old friendship'ssake, and out of affection for Val, she felt it a neighborly duty to tell him in confidence that his eldest daughter was making preparations to run away and be a chorus-girl in New York. Mrs. Otway's own daughter had been so oppressed by the enormity of the secret, that she had told her mother. Julia had broken open her bank and given all her savings to "the cause." It was understood, too, that Val had other sources of revenue not revealed. However, merely to deprive her of the money might not be sufficient to head her off, as she had been heard to say she was going to New York, if she had to walk there.
John Gano did not break the awful news to his mother. He betrayed nothing unusual in his aspect, as he said to his daughter:
"It's a glorious afternoon! Shall we go for a walk?"
Val was not as enthusiastic as she had been wont to be, but after the fraction of a moment's preoccupied hesitation she answered, brightly:
"I should love it!"
"Come, then."
He caught up his blackthorn stick, and they set off. Val chatted about the school Commencement, about the new archery club, and how "horrid much" the bows and arrows cost.
"I dare say I could make you a set," said her father. "I always made my own cross-bows as a boy."
"I know. And when you were only eight you cut and carved and glued together a perfect model of a stage-coach. You are wonderful about making things; but these big bows have to be of orange-wood, tough and limber, you know."
"Hickory would do."
"No; theyhaveto be all alike. That's what parents never realize. Gran'ma was just so about my gymnasium dress. But Jerry Otway's going to bring a piece of orange-wood back. He traded with another boy at the Military Institute, swopped an old racket for it. He's going to see if he can't do a home-made bow, so's you can't tell the difference, varnish and all."
"When does Jerry get back?"
"A week from to-morrow, in time for Julie's birthday-party."
They had gone a mile or so along the old turnpike road. The sun was still very hot and the dust ankle-deep. Mr. Gano stopped meditatively, and struck his blackthorn into the gray "MacAdam" powder.
"Yet, in spite of all this to occupy and amuse you, you want to turn your back on it all."
"I—what?"
"I understand you are thinking of running away."
Val gave a little gasp, and prayed the dusty road might gape and swallow her.
"I—I—"
"Don't be frightened, and don't be sorry that I know," he said, gently. "I think you ought to have told me before."
She ventured to lift a pair of very anxious eyes.
"I don't blame you. You are an unfortunate child."
"Child? I am in my sixteenth year," she interposed, with dignity.
"You are an unfortunate child," he repeated, firmly, "with a great deal of surplus energy. It must go somewhere. It's a law of nature; only I hadn't quite realized how it was with you. You never seemed at a loss."
"You knew I was just dying for want of proper music-lessons."
She could not keep the excited tears out of her eyes.
"Well, well!" her father muttered, leaning with both hands on his stick and scrutinizing the dust. "I wonder if a few music-lessons couldn't be managed."
"A few? I don't want afew: I want months and years! I want to act and sing in grand opera, and—be famous," she said, to herself, but aloud—"make heaps of money."
Her father turned to walk back to the town, saying, calmly:
"Oh, as to acting and singing,thatof course—"
She opened her eyes wide. Did he understand? Was he going to relent?
"A young person's wanting to go on the stage and astonish the world with her genius—that's natural enough."
Val began to shrink. She hadn't mentioned genius.
"It's a very usual sentiment, I believe, among young people," he went on, in the same calm voice. "It's a ferment natural to their time of life—not very serious, any more than first love or measles."
Val grew stiffer and more dignified with each word he uttered.
"Anybody would think from whatyousay, father"—she was holding herself down with difficulty—"that people all gave up music when they arrived at years of discretion. Thereissuch a person as Patti after all, and there may be somebody somewherebetterthan Patti, just"—her voice began to shake—"just waiting for a little help."
"Ah, better than Patti!"
He smiled. The look of tender amusement fell like a lash upon the spirit of his child.
"Oh yes, it's all very well to laugh, father.Youdon't care. Nothing matters any more to you. I dare say, even when you were young, you didn't know what it was like to feel that you'd be chopped up into little fine pieces rather than go on in the old dull way that most people do."
A quick, dim look, like the ghost of an ancient pain, flitted over the worn face of the man; but he walked on, saying nothing.
"You don't know what it's like to look over there for years and years"—she flung out a hand to the horizon—"and say to yourself, day in and day out, 'Beyond that blue line is the world! Oh, when shall I be seeing the world?'" She stopped, and so did her father, turning now to look at the excited face. "Some peopleneverdo," she said, with a kind of incredulous horror. "I can't sleep sometimes for thinking of how, here in New Plymouth, there are all these people, with all their senses (so far as you can see), and arms, and legs, and money, andyetherethey sit, just where they happened to be dumped—sit and wait till they die! Oh, it's like a nightmare, thinking of them! I feel if I don't run away quick while I'm awake and able to move, I shall freeze fast in my hole, too, and never be able to reach all the beautiful things that are waiting—out there!" She nodded over to the encircling hills. "Thinkof it!" and the bright tears tumbled out of her shining eyes.
"I don't want my little girl to miss any good thing," he said, presently, as they were nearing the town.
"Then help me, father. Be kind to me."
She came closer, and touched his sleeve.
"But the things waiting for those who venture out there"—he turned a look full of foreboding on the blue horizon—"they aren't all, or even most of them, good things."
"No, no. I've heard that; but I'll make the best of them."
He shook his head.
"You haven't a notion what a hard world it is for women—and for men, my dear. I want to save my little girl from—"
"What does it matter if Idohave a hard time? I expect a hard time. Nobody could invent a time so hard that I couldn't bear it, and come out of it! Oh, you'll see—"
"Perhaps, when you are older—"
"Older!" Her face flashed quick alarm. "I'm dreadfully old already. I ought to have begun when I was twelve. There's little enough time to learn all I have to. If I don't run away quick—father, I feel it in my bones—something will happen; I shallnevergo, I shall stick here like the rest, till—till the end."
He glanced sideways at her. She met his eyes with a look he had never seen in them before.
"Val—" he cleared his throat as they neared the Fort.
"Father!" she interrupted quickly. "Don't ask me to say I won't run away. I couldn't keep such a promise."
"That was not what I was going to suggest," he answered, completing a sudden mental readjustment. "I have nothing more to say against your plan, only I think it must be rather dull to run away alone. Suppose we run away together?"
"Together, father?"
"Yes; I—I think I'm on the track of a valuable discovery, and I must follow it up."
"Oh—what?"
"Well, you needn't speak of it to—a—to any one, just yet."
"No, no, father." She was strung up to the great romantic revelation.
"Well, I believe—indeed, I am sure—that all the hot gas and blinding electric light in use in most houses are very injurious to eyesight."
She stopped and stared at him. Was he going mad? Had she heard aright? The great romantic revelation that wasn't to be spoken of to any one—
He struck his blackthorn energetically on the ground and went on:
"The increase of eye troubles is appalling. What the world wants"—he looked up suddenly with enthusiasm, and Val took heart—"what the world wants is—is a safe and soft-burning reading-lamp at a moderate price. A whole family shouldn't depend on one or two; every man his own lamp. I'm inventing it. I shall take out a patent next winter, and—well, it might make a fortune."
"How nice!" said his daughter, slowly.
John Gano seemed to hear no hint of disillusionment in the tone. He straightened himself up.
"I'm giving Black a share in it," he said, with a magnanimous air, "for a mere nominal sum, which I am spending in inspecting all the new burners and contrivances; they're all failures, not worth house-room. I've promised to see Black in New York next November, and he and I are going on to Washington for the patent. All anybody need know is that I'm taking you East with me on a little visit, and you can look over the field."
"Father!Father!" she felt for his hand. As they went up the tumble-down steps to the porch, two pairs of eyes were bent on the blue horizon.
What helped a little to reconcile Val to waiting till November was not only the simplification of the money question, but also the fact that it gave her time to carry out a daring scheme that had been suggested by the contents of the last foreign mail. No letters; but addressed in cousin Ethan's hand, a French magazine with a queer mystical kind of a story in it, marked, and a LondonPall Mall Gazettewith a poem signed "E. G." It was not the first time Mrs. Gano had received matters of this sort in lieu of a letter, and when she did she was always angrier, Val thought, than if she had got nothing at all.
But the poem in thePall Mallset Val thinking. It was no part of her scheme of life to have a pleasure trip to New York and return with a mere "look over the field." She must lay her plans carefully and not trust to luck. No stone should be left unturned in her endeavor to make the most of this glorious opportunity. Cousin Ethan! Could he, perhaps, be turned to account? If there were any influence or advice he could offer, of course he would be most happy. Val would be intensely grateful to him; but all the same, it would be the crowning pride of his life that he had helped to launch his cousin on the tide of fame.
She sat down and wrote to him surreptitiously, made a score of drafts, and finally evolved this copy:
"The Fort,June 20."My dear Cousin Ethan,—I have never written to you but once since I was a child. I have never told you anything except that I wished you 'A Merry Christmas,' or was glad you were coming—which you know you never did. I don't think you ever will, and, besides, I can't wait for you. It may seem funny that, not knowing you any better, I should write you now about a matter of the deepest importance, but you are my cousin, and, after my father, you are my nearest kinsman, and I am in need of help. I want to be a singer—not a mere parlor warbler, but a Great Singer. I have a tremendous voice.I am obliged to tell you this, since you can't hear it. I practise every day by myself, though I can't use the piano much on account of grandma. I have always led the singing at school; all the rest, nearly three hundred girls, follow. But I have never been able properly to study music. I was going to run away and be a chorus girl till I could earn enough to study for grand opera, but my father has induced me to wait—just a little. He is going to take me East in the fall, and says I may 'Look over the field.' He says, too, it will give me an opportunity of seeing how difficult it is to do what I mean to do. But I don't think it's a good plan to take all that trouble (his cough is very bad) just to show me the thing is difficult. What I want to be shown is the way—no matter how hard—that it may be done. The trouble is, that my dear father, who knows many great scientists, and a few politicians, doesn't know any famous singers, and nobody about here does, and nobody seems to know any one who everdidknow an opera-singer, much less a manager. My grandmother has often told me that you have artistic tastes, and now comes thePall Mallof London with your 'Song for Sylvia.' I've made up five tunes to it, and I think you would like them, since, unlike my family,youare artistic. I've been thinking a person like you must have great opportunities. You probably know singers, managers, musicians, and all sorts of delightful people. I wonder if you would help me to find out how a girl with a very exceptional voice can get it heard and get it trained? I know there are people who do these things, and when they discover a great voice they make their fortunes; so it is not a favor in the end on the part of the manager. But if you showed me the way, and could lend me five hundred dollars, it would always be a favor from you, and I would be grateful to you for ever and ever. If you will send me a letter of introduction to a manager, I think that would be best—that and five hundred dollars—and perhaps you would be so very kind as to send me the lives of Jenny Lind and Patti. It would help me to know what steps they took. I don't mind any hardship or any labor—I mindnothingbut not getting my chance. Don't be afraid of encouraging me to do something the family has not been accustomed to—my father is on my side; and, anyhow, they would have to kill me before they could keep me back now. So you will not feel any responsibility. I would rather be helped by you because you are my relation, but if you won't, I must find somebody else. I remain, your affectionate cousin,"Val Gano."P.S.—I am a good deal over fifteen; strangers all think I am twenty."P.S. No. 2.—Of course I will pay back the five hundred dollars, principal and interest. I will send you a promissory note, like the arithmetic says."
"The Fort,June 20.
"My dear Cousin Ethan,—I have never written to you but once since I was a child. I have never told you anything except that I wished you 'A Merry Christmas,' or was glad you were coming—which you know you never did. I don't think you ever will, and, besides, I can't wait for you. It may seem funny that, not knowing you any better, I should write you now about a matter of the deepest importance, but you are my cousin, and, after my father, you are my nearest kinsman, and I am in need of help. I want to be a singer—not a mere parlor warbler, but a Great Singer. I have a tremendous voice.I am obliged to tell you this, since you can't hear it. I practise every day by myself, though I can't use the piano much on account of grandma. I have always led the singing at school; all the rest, nearly three hundred girls, follow. But I have never been able properly to study music. I was going to run away and be a chorus girl till I could earn enough to study for grand opera, but my father has induced me to wait—just a little. He is going to take me East in the fall, and says I may 'Look over the field.' He says, too, it will give me an opportunity of seeing how difficult it is to do what I mean to do. But I don't think it's a good plan to take all that trouble (his cough is very bad) just to show me the thing is difficult. What I want to be shown is the way—no matter how hard—that it may be done. The trouble is, that my dear father, who knows many great scientists, and a few politicians, doesn't know any famous singers, and nobody about here does, and nobody seems to know any one who everdidknow an opera-singer, much less a manager. My grandmother has often told me that you have artistic tastes, and now comes thePall Mallof London with your 'Song for Sylvia.' I've made up five tunes to it, and I think you would like them, since, unlike my family,youare artistic. I've been thinking a person like you must have great opportunities. You probably know singers, managers, musicians, and all sorts of delightful people. I wonder if you would help me to find out how a girl with a very exceptional voice can get it heard and get it trained? I know there are people who do these things, and when they discover a great voice they make their fortunes; so it is not a favor in the end on the part of the manager. But if you showed me the way, and could lend me five hundred dollars, it would always be a favor from you, and I would be grateful to you for ever and ever. If you will send me a letter of introduction to a manager, I think that would be best—that and five hundred dollars—and perhaps you would be so very kind as to send me the lives of Jenny Lind and Patti. It would help me to know what steps they took. I don't mind any hardship or any labor—I mindnothingbut not getting my chance. Don't be afraid of encouraging me to do something the family has not been accustomed to—my father is on my side; and, anyhow, they would have to kill me before they could keep me back now. So you will not feel any responsibility. I would rather be helped by you because you are my relation, but if you won't, I must find somebody else. I remain, your affectionate cousin,
"Val Gano.
"P.S.—I am a good deal over fifteen; strangers all think I am twenty.
"P.S. No. 2.—Of course I will pay back the five hundred dollars, principal and interest. I will send you a promissory note, like the arithmetic says."
This document was conveyed to the mail with secrecy and despatch. The days went by like malicious snails; she had never known time drag before. The slow weeks gathered into monotonous months, and still no answer. Never mind, she would do everything just the same—better—without his help. Her future triumphs took on more the aspect of a judgment on cousin Ethan than a mere reward to Val. She made up scenes of the coming encounters, when, from the vantage-ground of being "better than Patti," she would overwhelm her cousin with scorn. She would meet him as a perfect stranger, declare her surprise at his claiming her for his cousin. He would find his chief distinction in this kinship. He would lay his millions at her feet. She would spurn them. "I have my own millions now. Had it been earlier, cousin, it had been kind."
September was drawing to a close. Everything was merging now in the excitement of the Eastern trip, fixed for the end of November.
Idling in the autumn sunshine at the front door after breakfast one morning, Val and Emmie had a friendly scuffle as to who should take the mail from the postman. The little heap of letters and papers was soon sown broadcast in the fray, and still no sign of either yielding, till Val was arrested on catching sight of the addressed side of one of the envelopes—"Mrs. Sarah C. Gano," in cousin Ethan's hand. But the real significance lay in the stamp. Not this time the scantily-clad gentleman and lady, clasping hands over a mauve world, of the République Française; no goggle-eyed, mustachioed Umberto, in blue, with his hair on end, andPoste Italiane Centesimi Venticinqueround him in an oval frame; it was not even the twopenny-half-penny indigo head of Queen Victoria; but their own rosy two-cent Washington, risking his health in a low-neck coat, but saving his dignity by the queue. This was the first letter from Ethan in five years that did not bear a foreign postmark. While Val stood staring, Emmie had whipped up the letters and carried them in to her grandmother.
Val, in an agony of suspense, remained in the hall. Presently Emmie came flying out, clapping her hands. Mrs. Gano followed briskly with the open letter.
"All those old Tallmadges are dead!" cried Emmie, jumping up and down behind her grandmother. "He's been back in America over two months, and he's coming here next week."
Mrs. Gano was hurrying up-stairs to tell her son the great news.
Despite the distractions of a host of wandering fancies, Ethan Gano had been kept fairly closely at his studies till he had passed his twentieth birthday. To be sure, there had been a threatened interruption the spring before, when he seemed suddenly to lose interest in his work, and went about with vacant looks and airs of profound preoccupation. Old Mr. Tallmadge, observing him narrowly, decided that his grandson had got into debt, and that he was nervous about confessing. Ethan had never shown a proper regard for money. This was one of the many un-Tallmadge-like qualities developed by the years. It was a matter of paramount importance to counteract this flaw in Aaron Tallmadge's sole surviving heir, since of late years the old man's affairs had prospered more than ever. About the time of his brother Elijah's death, he had financed a manufacturing enterprise which, starting on a modest scale, had turned out fabulously successful. He was one of the "moneyed men" of the State. In addition to this piece of shrewd speculation, he found the income from his newspaper doubled in the last few years. Ah, yes! nothing was of so much importance now as Ethan's fitness to gather in and husband the golden harvest. If he had been further exemplifying his unthrifty proclivities, if he needed to be told that borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry—Mr. Tallmadge, not trusting to any unperceived facilities for impromptu speech, rehearsed mentally the lecture he would administer. Ethan mustn't run away with the idea that the Tallmadge accumulations were only waiting for a lavish hand to redistribute. The first lesson a young man with his prospects must be made to learn was the value of adollar. But Ethan wore a gracious kind of reticence wrapped like a mantle round his young life. His grandfather knew very little about him, but the old man had himself belonged to the inarticulate ones of earth, and he never realized that, to this quiet, non-committal grandson of his expression of some sort was a master passion. How should Aaron Tallmadge have suspected such a thing? Some time before this Ethan quietly, alone, without making a sign, had gone through a religious crisis not uncommon to his age and era. "No use to upset the family," he said to himself when he found he had come out on the other side of Tallmadge-Presbyterianism; and he went regularly to church with his grandfather without comment and without misgiving. There were still grave problems to be faced—too grave, in fact, for him to be beguiled into fancying this was one.
Now, in the midst of a perturbation not greater, but less easily disguised, he held his peace as a matter of course. Some early developed quality of aloofness in him held inquiry at bay. Then suddenly the clouds lifted. He was radiant and full of covert smiling.
Mr. Tallmadge resented this phase more than the former gloom.
"He's paying heavy interest, the young fool! and can't realize that that way damnation lies."
But all the old man's clumsy efforts to bring about an explanation were unavailing. Ethan declared with some surprise that he was not in need of funds. Mr. Tallmadge began to scrutinize the letters that came. Three mornings in succession a business-like envelope addressed in the same clerkly hand! Alone, before the fire in the dining-room, waiting for breakfast that third morning, the old man solemnly deliberated, glanced at the clock, and grumbled to himself that Ethan would certainly be ten minutes late as usual these days. "Perhaps he doesn't sleep." He examined the suspicious envelope. The flap was not securely gummed down. Mr. Tallmadge glanced again at the clock. He had not the least doubt as to his right—"duty" he wouldhave said—to open the letter of this unconfiding minor, who was his ward and grandson—an unpractical youth, moreover, of absolutely no business capacity whatever. Still, although Mr. Tallmadge would never have admitted it, he was a little in awe of this grandson, with so little "Tallmadge" in him. It was essential to open the letter—no doubt about that; but it would be well to have the business over before Ethan appeared. Mr. Tallmadge's desire not to be interrupted in the act might have enlightened him as to its defensibility; but he was no casuist. He took up the letter, adjusted his spectacles, and walked to the window. Inserting a long finger-nail, he easily pried up the flap.
"My Darling Ethan,—Your last poem is the most beautiful thing I ever read in my life. It is far more wonderful than anything Shelley ever did. I shall be in the Beech Walk at five."Your wife,Almira."
"My Darling Ethan,—Your last poem is the most beautiful thing I ever read in my life. It is far more wonderful than anything Shelley ever did. I shall be in the Beech Walk at five.
"Your wife,Almira."
Aaron Tallmadge clutched the red damask curtains, with a stifled groan. The breakfast-bell clanged loudly. Its echoes had not time to die before Ethan appeared, with shining morning face.
"Good-morning," he said, lightly, looking down at his plate. "No letters?"
"Yes, sir." Mr. Tallmadge turned his ashen countenance round. "Thereisa letter."
Ethan stared at him and ran forward.
"What's the matter? Are you ill?"
Mr. Tallmadge warded him off with a shaking hand.
"You scoundrel!"
Ethan drew himself up arrow-straight, and his warm brown eyes grew cold.
"I knew there was some devilry afoot. I never dreamed it was as bad as this."
The old man flung the open letter down on the nearest chair.
Ethan colored, catching sight of the hand.
"So you've been reading my letters?"
"Yes; I only wish to the Lord I had exercised that right before. I might have saved you from this ruin!"
"You couldn't have saved me, sir, if that's any satisfaction."
"It's no use to think what might have been—" The old man sat down, almost fell into the chair by the window where he had thrown the letter. "Was she a decent woman?"
"Was she a—" Ethan repeated, bewildered.
"Who is she?" thundered old Tallmadge, with renewed rage.
"Almira Marlowe."
"Marlowe! Any relation to—"
"Daughter of the new Professor of Physics."
"Ha!mightbe worse, I suppose. But—Marlowe? Marlowe? He's the new man, isn't he?"
"Yes."
"Marlowe? Why, it isn't a month since he was installed."
"Six weeks."
"And all this happened in six weeks?"
"Yes."
Mr. Tallmadge's lean face worked, speechless; then, finding a fury-choked voice:
"Tell me the circumstances, and let me see if anything can be done."
"Nothing can be done. It's irrevocable."
"But it isn't legal. You haven't a penny. You're under age."
"We can wait."
"Just what you couldn't do, apparently. You—you—"
After he had worked off his fit of incoherency, he resumed:
"Well, you've succeeded in wrecking your life pretty thoroughly. And only nineteen! How old is the girl?"
"Twenty-one."
"I see," muttered the old man. "Well, I suppose now that it's 'irrevocable,' as you say, you'd better take me into your confidence."
"I don't see that you've left me much choice."
"Where is she living now?"
"In Cambridge," said Ethan, with some surprise.
"With her father still?"
"Yes."
"You saw her there?"
"Yes."
"When?"
Ethan grew scarlet, and then, frowning doggedly:
"I saw her first in her garden one morning as I was going to Hall."
"Well?"
"I've answered your question."
"No, you haven't. I must know the facts of the case before I can— You made acquaintance with her that first day?"
"I didn'tspeakto her."
The old man stared with mystified little eyes at his grandson's flushed face.
"She was there every day when you passed by?"
"Yes."
"H'm! Of course she would be there. When did you speak to her?"
"Not for three weeks."
He half turned away.
"Good Lord! Barely a fortnight ago!"
Ethan didn't deny it.
"How did you come to know her?"
The young face grew dark. He was writhing under the catechism.
"Charlie Hammond showed her a poem I had written for theHarvard Oracle. She sent me a message about it."
"Well?"
"Then I went to call with Hammond."
"Well?"
"Then—then I met her in the Beech Walk."
"Ah! The Beech Walk."
"Yes; twice."
"And then?"
"That's all."
"Don't tell me lies, sir!"
Ethan stood before him cold and rigid on a sudden. No flush now on the clear-cut features.
"You've no right to speak to me as you're doing, not if you were fifty grandfathers."
"Where did these other meetings take place, sir? Did old Marlowe countenance them?"
"There were no other meetings."
Ethan turned away.
"Now, look here!"—the old man arraigned him with a shaking hand—"you can't undo the bitter disappointment you are to me, but you can and you owe it to me to tell me fairly and squarely the details of this wretched business. I can't proceed in the matter if I'm in the dark."
"Youproceed in the matter?"
Ethan wheeled about and faced him.
"It's quite plain that you were merely a yielding fool in the matter—girl older, and you—"
"Grandfather!"
"—and you easy to convince that you ought to make reparation."
Ethan seemed to have ears only for the first part of this accusation. He spoke through Mr. Tallmadge's last words with a passionate shake in his voice.
"It's quite plain, at all events, grandfather, that I love her, and that nothing in heaven or on earth can part us."
"Of course—of course. A fortnight—a girl you barely knew by sight!"
"I know her absolutely. There isn't another like her on this earth."
"And you want me to believe you've spoken to her only three or four times in your life?"
"I don't speciallywantyou to believe it, but it's true."
"Who could you find to marry you?"
"Who could I—to marry me?" He looked as if he hadbegun to doubt the old man's sanity. "Why, I've never asked anybody but Almira."
"Yes, yes, yes. Who could you find to overlook the age question? Who performed the ceremony?"
"Ceremony?"
"Oh, ho! Registry-office performance, eh? and perjury! Monstrous irreligion!Mygrandson!"
"Whatdoyou mean?" But a light was beginning to dawn.
"Who were your witnesses?"
Ethan laughed and flushed, and then grew serious again.
"Of course, it's exactly the same as if weweremarried,exactly the same." He flashed a broadside of defiance out of shining eyes. "But we know we can't well be married while I'm a minor, and—"
"Youaren'tmarried?"
"Oh no. But—"
"Then, what in the name of Jehoshaphat is all this damned—what's all this disturbance about?"
"I'm sure I don't know."
Mr. Tallmadge mopped his brow, and looked about distractedly, like one who has lost his thread in a labyrinth.
"However, it's exactly the same as if we were—"
"Exactly tomfool!"
The old man got up and walked a few shaky paces back and forth. Turning, he caught sight of the letter he'd been sitting upon.
"Wife!" he exclaimed. "What the d—— What does she mean by calling herself your—" and he stopped suddenly with a look of contemptuous comprehension.
"Does she?"
Ethan, with a start forward, had clutched the letter greedily. He couldn't, perhaps he didn't even try to keep the great gladness out of his face as he read. Mr. Tallmadge watched him with equivocal eyes. Then, dryly:
"If I were in your shoes that signature would alarm me."
"I think it very beautiful of her," said Ethan, softly.
"And not alarming?"
"Alarming?" He knitted puzzled brows. "I begged her to think of me as—like this."
There was a pause.
"It's notherdoing," he resumed, hastily, striking out at some indistinct enemy lurking behind the old man's looks. "No ceremony could make us surer of each other. That's why we're not unhappy. It's exactly the same as if we were married."
"Exactly?" He eyed the young face shrewdly, and then, a little baffled by its mixture of sensitive shrinking and frank defiance: "You will oblige me by not keeping this appointment"—he motioned to the letter.
"I'm sorry I can't oblige you, sir."
"Reflect a moment."
"I can't even reflect about it. She's going away to-morrow to spend several months with her sister. After that she goes back to Vassar. I may not see her again till next summer."
"You don't mean she's going back to school this fall?"
"Yes. She lost a year. They couldn't afford— But now she's going to finish her course."
"Good Lord!"
"I beg your pardon."
"There's no reason why she shouldn't go back to school?"
"Reason why—? No."
A light broke, or rather a darkness spread, over the young man's face, wiping out the grace, stamping it fiercely with detestation of him who had dared think insulting thoughts of Almira. But the old man was smiling and rubbing his parchment hands.
"Tempest in a teacup! Come and have breakfast," he said, walking to the table; "everything's getting cold."
But Ethan put the letter of the clerkly hand into his breast-pocket, and went towering out of the room.
Aaron Tallmadge chuckled genially as he rang for hot buckwheat cakes.
"Romantic! absurd! Great baby!" he muttered, and opened the morning paper—his paper—Ethan's by-and-by.
Ethan had not needed his grandfather's recommendation to abstain from mentioning in any letter to Mrs. Gano that her more and more irregular correspondent had been ill that last severe winter before he came of age, or that he considered himself engaged to be married to a girl older than himself and penniless. Mr. Tallmadge persistently affected to put this last achievement aside as sheer youthful nonsense. But those letters in the misleading hand came to Ashburton Place with irritating regularity. He began secretly to await with no small anxiety Ethan's view of the moral as well as legal liberty conferred by the distinction of being twenty-one. Before that moment arrived, the doctors were agreeing that the young man must not, till his health should be established, spend another Christmas in New England.
"At the end of the Indian summer away with him."
"By all means," said Mr. Tallmadge. "Why wait even for the summer? All he needs is a thorough change."
The old man was thinking—thinking not alone of the health, but ambitiously of the future, of his grandson.
"Where shall I send him?" asked Mr. Tallmadge.
"It doesn't much matter where he is in the summer," the doctors agreed; "but get him south of Mason and Dixon's line next winter."
These insensatemedicoshad no bowels of political compassion. They must have known well enough that the region indicated was not a part of the world lightly to be recommended to Aaron Tallmadge.
"I'll go and visit my Gano relations," Ethan had said, promptly.
"You'll do nothing of the kind," returned his grandfather. "It's no reason, because you feel the cold here, that I should send you where you'd catch yellow fever and malaria."
From the Tallmadge point of view, Mason and Dixon's line did no less than divide habitable from uninhabitableAmerica. Voluntarily to cross the kindly boundary was contrary to reason. There was no difficulty in deciding that Italy or the South of France would be more advantageous for the young man's conversance with modern languages, as well as farther away from Almira Marlowe, and more tolerable to his grandfather and guardian than Virginia or Florida.
Mr. Tallmadge's capable junior partner was able to relieve his chief of all active concern in the conduct of business till Ethan should be ready to assume command. To this latter end, a few years' foreign travel, and a thorough re-establishment of the young man's health, were next in order. The plan worked well on the health score. A summer in England and a winter on the Riviera seemed to have set Ethan free from the family infirmity, but also to have whetted his appetite for foreign life, and increased his indifference to the proud post of chief proprietor of the greatest Republican organ in New England. But this might be merely the first effects of Miss Almira's having thrown over her first love and married a lawyer in Poughkeepsie, New York.
After all, Mr. Tallmadge reflected, his grandson was still very young, and intimate knowledge of life in other lands might not come amiss. So the energetic old man went to and fro, joining Ethan, now in Paris, now in London, travelling about with him during the summer, and returning alone to "the great Republican organ" in the autumn, leaving his grandson to new friends, new pursuits, and warmer winter haunts.
The young man was not all this time merely seeing life, he was recording it in desultory fashion. Some of his verses appearing in English periodicals raised a little dust of praise among a set in London calling itself critical. But it was the French point of view that most appealed to him.
He was under that spell which France knows so well how to cast round the young man of artistic instinct. Her tongue was the peerless language of letters. Through no medium less supple, less subtle, could the complexities ofmodern life and thought hope for adequate literary expression.
And so the pleasant facile days went by in idly roving, idly writing, meeting interrogatively his predestinate experience and setting the more presentable answers down. Where answer there was none, he aped the older men, whom he called "Masters," and made shift with more or less cynical guesses. It was these last that brought him his little meed of precocious success. He had not originality enough to see that the cynicism was not his own. He was not, and seemingly was not to be, of the stature that can wear simple sincerity in the grand manner. That writer, young or old, must have something of true greatness in him who can hold out long in these days against the flattering temptation of hinting that he is laughing in his sleeve at all solemn persons. And yet no doubt seriousness was the dominant note in the young American's character, a seriousness that still looked askance at itself, and smiled oftener at its own gravity than at any other wrinkle in the tragi-comic mask of humanity.
He had seen something of what people in London and Paris called "society," had been very well amused, but not enamoured of it. When men who made letters a profession—perhaps one should say trade—admonished him: "Never refuse a swagger invitation. Your opportunities, considering you're a foreigner, are simply unheard of. Go everywhere, see everything. You must know life before you can write about it," Ethan would say, half impatiently: "As if you could escape from life! As if art kept her treasures in the jewel-cases of the aristocracy, and never displayed them except at social functions!"
Even in indulgent Paris he was a good deal chaffed about his success with the fair. It is a thing other men reconcile themselves to with difficulty. Some one said once to Ethan's old school friend, De Poincy:
"No one but a woman has any business to be as good-looking as that fellow Gano. I couldn't trust a man with a face like that."
"Oh, you may trust him right enough," De Poincy answered. "And as to his face—look at that jaw of his."
"Anything the matter with his jaw?"
"There's 'man' enough in that to relieve your mind. Oh, he's a stubborn brute, Gano is; but you can trust him." And people did trust him.
But not only did he tire presently of the gay and flaunting aspect of social life, his fastidiousness by-and-by turned aside as well from those less presentable experiences that dog the rich and idle youth of capitals.
At first with a dull old tutor, and presently without him, he had for headquarters a tinyappartementin Paris. It was there, or with the De Poincys in Nice, that he felt most at home. Something over two years had gone by in this agreeable fashion when his grandfather addressed to him a temperate but very serious letter inviting him to return, either to complete his interrupted studies "on American lines," or to enter at once on his initiation into the practical duties of editorship. Ethan at first temporized, and then, being pressed, declined to pursue either course. He "liked living abroad." This fact, thus stated, greatly irritated old Tallmadge. He ordered his grandson home. Ethan wrote, still very politely, but quite definitely, refusing to come just then. Mr. Tallmadge, angrier than ever, cabled, "Is it on account of health? Are you afraid of climate?" Ethan cabled back: "Perfectly well. Prefer Paris."
This lack of patriotism on the part of a grandson of his seemed to Aaron Tallmadge nothing short of revolutionary. It was no use Ethan's quoting to him,Tout homme a deux pays, le sien et puis la France. The more Mr. Tallmadge pondered the matter, the more he felt convinced that this incredible preference for Paris was the shameful mask of some other preference. "Some woman's got hold of him again," he decided. "I'll soon settle that." Whereupon he wired: "Come right home, or I stop allowance."
Then was his grandson most unreasonably angry. He sent back, in a blank sheet of writing-paper, the recentlyreceived check for the next quarter, which he had neglected to cash, and he looked about for employment. Henri de Poincy, who had recently passed into the diplomatic service, was now in Russia; but young Gano started out on his quest of a living with no foreboding. He went to see various men of affairs, firm friends of his, he felt convinced, and stated the case; in fact, a cooler head than Ethan's might have suspected he overstated it. It was true he had received a "final" letter, which he thought most insulting, full of a crudely expressed conviction that Ethan was in the toils of some foreign woman, and saying that unless he returned instantly his grandfather would know this suspicion was well founded, in which case the young man had nothing to expect from him in the future.
Those persons of influence whom young Gano had consulted in his dilemma all promised to keep him in mind and see what they could do, and most of them thereafter forgot even to invite him to dinner. He began to realize that being a young American of leisure, with no axe to grind, with an absurdly large income for a man of his years, and known to be sole heir to one of the big fortunes "in the States," was an altogether different matter from being a person suddenly bereft of these advantages. He gave up his charmingappartementin the Champs-Elysées, and presently found that he couldn't keep even the single room he had taken in the Rue de Miroménil. He moved to the Rue de Provence.
He was in low water—very low water, indeed—before he got the post of Parisian correspondent on a London paper. With this diminutive buoy he managed to keep afloat; but his former position as an independent young gentleman with large expectations was blown upon, and no one more hypersensitive than he to the outward and visible signs of people's appreciation of his altered circumstances. He withdrew more and more from the swim. Smart Parisian society and the rich American colony knew him no more. After a while his English editor complained that his news was becoming too exclusively "literary and artistic; weexpected something about the races last week. Give us more society."
To this the Parisian correspondent replied: "I never yet wrote about society unless indirectly, and I do not propose to begin."
"There was formerly," persisted the editor, who knew quite well what he wanted, "a flavor of the fashionable world about your Parisian notes, which our readers miss. French art and Bohemia are overdone."
Gano sold some valuable books, and went over to London with the proceeds to have it out with the editor. The upshot of the interview was that he declined to furnish any more "Notes." The editor seemed perfectly resigned. However, after the struggle in Paris, Gano was convinced that London was the likelier place for him to find a footing. In the background of his mind he had already, when he sold his books, foreseen and accepted the result of the further discussion of his "Notes." He would at all events be on the spot in London, and would quickly find some opening. Talent was not the drug in the market here, he told himself, that it was in France.
And day after day, week after week, while he sought an opening, he very nearly starved. In a couple of months he had arrived at the conclusion that the fight in London was more sordid and more dispiriting than the direst poverty in Paris. About this time he came in for a distasteful piece of hack journalism, that brought him a disproportionate loathing and an inadequate reward of five pounds. He was strongly tempted to invest a part of this sole capital in returning to France. A couple of days later a letter arrived through the London branch of the Paris bankers from Henri de Poincy, back in the South of France on a holiday. He asked for Ethan's private address, and said if he did not hear something satisfactory by return he would conclude the beastly English climate had made him ill; in which case he was straightway coming over to look Ethan up, and persuade him to return to his friends in Nice. If he did not hear by wire or letter in three days, De Poincy would come to London and see what was the matter. They were all anxious at his silence.
This determined the matter. Gano was not going to have his old friend find him in his present plight. Besides, he already owed him money, and had sworn to himself that he would not meet De Poincy again till he could go to him with the sum in his hands. Henri was far from well off, and, since his father's death the year before, had helped to support his sisters. Ethan wired: "Leaving London; quite well; remembrance to all; writing," and took the night-boat to Dieppe. He delayed further communication till he knew Henri would be back in Petersburg, and by that time he was able, by living on next tonothing, to return a part of the loan, and to represent himself as intensely glad to be in his old haunts again. These haunts were in reality very new, albeit in Paris; but he did not enter into details further than to say he was rediscovering the fact that he could write French much more easily and much better than he could English, and was doing some book-reviewing for theLendemain.
He might have added, but did not, that he was getting at first-hand a very considerable knowledge of the darker side of life, but had no impulse to make artistic use of it. It did not stimulate, it did not even interest—it paralyzed him. "If I'd had the makings of a genuine poet in me," he admitted to Henri de Poincy afterwards, "those years might have buffeted some good work out of me. Butmymuse was a miserable time-server, like the rest of my fine acquaintance. She left me when I wanted bread. The fact was, I wasfeelinglife too keenly to write about it. Poetizing in the face of such suffering as I saw and shared seemed a drivelling impertinence. Life was more terrible, more tremendous than anything any poet had said about it, orcouldsay."
Gano was unconsciously making of himself an obscure example of the fact that a man's temperament will find him out upon the removal of the artificial ballast. This removal so seldom takes place that the vaguest notions abound as to any given person's specific gravity. We go through life unconsciously floated, balanced, by family, by inherited friends, inherited pursuits, inherited opinions, inherited money—by a thousand conditions not made by ourselves, but found ready-made to our hands, an expression of other people's energy, supporting or neutralizing our own. Gano's inclinations, not being volcanic or epoch-making, had been, up to the time of the break with his grandfather, dutifully filtered through environing circumstance. Even so, Mr. Tallmadge had had occasion to condemn his grandson's "queer tastes," his "visionary notions," his girlish compassion for suffering, his hypersensitiveness to blame, his even greater shrinking fromhurting the feelings of others. The tough old New Englander's contempt for "sensitiveness" had at least done Ethan the service of giving him an exterior self-control, which seemed so far to deny the feelings it only masked, that he was able to pass comfortably in the crowd as a person more impassive, if anything, than the majority. But as soon as he was left to himself, and followed no longer by critical eyes, his natural bias announced itself. He felt less and less drawn to the insouciant artist life of the town; the happy-go-lucky ways lost their first fresh savor; the suppers, the orgies, the endless comment, quite as eager as any of the work and often more brilliant; the short, merry life of the happy little flies that buzz so busily about the flower-garden of art, and that vanish with the vanishing of day—they all ended by striking some note of discord in him, and making him feel out of place there. "Was he getting too old for this kind of thing?" he asked himself, with modern youth's morbid consciousness of the value certain people set upon one time of life to the exclusion of any other, forgetting that "to travel deliberately through one's ages is to get the heart out of a liberal education," and the heart out of enlightened satisfaction as well.
But Gano was, perhaps, only following the unwritten law that rules such haunts and their frequenters, for these gay Bohemians are all young—and very young indeed. No one knows where they go when their short hour is done. Their laughter lags a little behind the rest one day, and the next they are not there. A new face is in the old place, a younger voice is screaming theories and outlaughing the laughers who are left.
Gano knew whither one of these superannuated revellers of twenty-five or so had retired. This was a great good-looking Irishman, with an unaccountable French tongue in his rough, tawny head, the hardest worker, deepest drinker, and wildest theorist in the particular little circle that Gano had of late frequented. Dick Driscoll and he had got into the habit of coming away together from the modest café where the circle met. Now and then theolder man would drag Gano off on some wild adventure, or they would scour Paris with no definite end in view, arguing, disputing, catching effects, till midnight met the dawn. From living in the same quarter they came by-and-by to live under the same roof, as a direct result of the Irishman's being as ready to discuss theories of life in general, or even Gano's work in particular, as he had been to harangue "the painter fellows" about brushwork and values.
He pronounced those early poems "most awfully good, you know," and prophesied great things for the future. But for all this, deeper and deeper the conviction cut into Gano that he was not of the stuff that "makes its way in the world." This without any of the feeling that usually accompanies it—of contempt for those who were differently constituted. He sometimes soothed his harassed spirit, and consoled himself for his failures, by an odd inversion of common hopes. He bade himself realize that success would not bring him happiness, so why join the thoughtless chorus condemning poverty, obscurity, and hard work? These last were not the heads of his indictment against life. At other times he would shut his eyes to this revelation of himself to himself. "Skin-deep! skin-deep, like yours!" he burst out at Driscoll's observation on his friend's growing dissatisfaction with the scheme of things.
The Irishman was rather proud of his Schopenhauerism. It represented to him a mere mental gymnastic. This, too, although hard work, hard living, and hard drinking had injured his health, and the fact was more and more apparent. However, it is something behind experience that determines whether a man shall be an optimist or not. Gano shrank from an imputation of pessimism, as people do in whom the tendency is inborn and inveterate. "I tell you, Driscoll, if we weren't sharing it, we would think there was some good served by the ugliness and pain in the world, just as our betters do. If we took our place again in the holiday-making class, we should be as diverted as the rest, with all the games and make-believes. We, too,should forget the essential cruelty of things." But behind the boast was a heart-sinking, and a sense that it was a lie.
He would try again: "Because life has treated me cavalierly I think I have little zest for it. If I weren't bruised from crown to toe, I'd think the world a bed of roses." And then he would remember that that was far from being the account he would ever have given of his consciousness of things.
Before he betook himself to Bohemia, Gano had spent no small portion of his time in the brilliant circle Madame Astier's grace and wit had gathered round her. The young American not only cherished an enthusiasm for his middle-aged hostess, but he discovered a deep admiration as well for the lady's husband, a distinguished advocate, whom she obviously adored. Gano's sensibilities did, it is true, shrink at first before the man's pitiless cynicism, which spared few persons and fewer ideals. But although merely dazzled at the beginning by his brilliancy, Gano came in time to be proud of his friendship, and to recognize in his point of view a wholesome, bitter tonic, a corrective to certain ills that young flesh is heir to. This man of fifty-four, who would have shrugged derisively at the notion of "teaching" anybody anything, was still in many young eyes the very type of the modern philosopher: believing blandly in the scientific point of view, unmoved by sentimentalities, unblinded by enthusiasms, keen-witted, farsighted, practising with eminent success, in the most highly civilized society in the world, the most difficult of the arts—the art of living.
Gano was very much shaken by the terrible story of the double suicide of this brilliant pair, whose marriage had been so romantic, whose life together had seemed the one ideal of the old kind that they admitted into their smiling existence.
M. Astier, as all the world was being told, had returned home as usual on this particular afternoon from the Palais de Justice. His wife had been holding a reception. One lady remained after the other visitors had gone. When atlast the door closed upon her, too, Madame Astier went to her husband's library and told him that the last visitor had outstayed the others to say that her husband was going to fight a duel on her account the next day with M. Astier, with whom she (the visitor) had an intrigue of three years' standing. She had come to Madame Astier to prevent the men's meeting.
A violent scene between husband and wife.
"The end has come!'" exclaims Astier.
"Yes, yes; we can't go on living after this!" cries the distracted wife.
She flies to her dressing-room and attempts to swallow poison. Astier's secretary rushes after her. While he is wrenching the poison away, the report of fire-arms. Both rush back to the library, where they find M. Astier bathed in blood, dying. The wife, before she can be hindered, puts the smoking pistol to her head, fires another fatal shot, and the tragedy is done.
Gano had talked to Driscoll from time to time of the Astiers, of Clémenceau, and the other habitués of those delightful soirées, and of the regret he sometimes felt that he had not told his friends frankly of the change in his fortunes, and the reason he did not any longer frequent the Faubourg St. Honoré.
"But I couldn't, somehow, talk to them of a thing we couldn't either laugh at or satirize. Still, they'd be among the first people that I'd go to if I had a stroke of luck."
And now, out of that atmosphere of gayety andblague, this! No sky apparently so cloudless but from its blue a bolt may fall. Ethan had rushed out and bought theJustice. He read Clémenceau's article aloud, translating hurriedly as he went on for a compatriot of Driscoll's, who had happened to drop in for a pipe and a crack:
"'This pitiless scoffer, Astier, this despairing sceptic, who spoke so slightingly of women and love, is now discovered to have been a man of soft and sentimental nature, without any reserve of appliances against woman's wiles orsurging passion. The so-called libertine, cauterized by Paris against Paris, was upset by an event which could have been easily foreseen. In a situation of the most commonplace kind, he so thoroughly lost all self-control that he could hit upon no other remedy than self-destruction.' How contemptuously he writes of his old friend's 'losing self-control' and the rest of it," said Gano, angrily, "as if the double death was the real tragedy!"
"What then?"
"Why, the moment when that nice woman discovered that the husband she had married so romantically, and who had been so devoted to her all those years, had turned round and betrayed her in the last chapter. I agree with them both: it wasn't much use to go on living after that."
"Oh, as to going on living," observed Driscoll, shortly, "it would puzzle most people to tell why they think that much use."
"Butthesepeople—" began Gano.
"More like the rest of the world than they pretended, that's all," the visitor summed up, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "I've once or twice come near to some tragedy, as Gano has to this. It does feel a bit odd to realize we're all living our peaceful lives on the edge of a volcano. But, bless you!"—he clapped on his hat with a rakish air—"we get so used to it we forget all about it till our turn comes."
"Meanwhile, we're all in the conspiracy to pretend that tragedy is dead and buried in the works of the great dramatists," said Driscoll.
"Good job, too," commented the departing visitor, nodding to the two friends as he went off.
"Your cheerful compatriot is right," said Ethan, shaken suddenly out of his rôle as Nature's apologist. "Life simply doesn't bear being thought about."
Whereupon they proceeded to talk about it for hours on end. They uttered a deal of raw philosophy in those days, often with passion, sometimes with hope. Driscoll, for allhis profession of pessimism, had moments of splendid confidence that he had stumbled upon the Perfect Way. Gano would shake his head, repeating: