FOR LIFE
Thekitchen of the Bogart House was a pleasant room whose two doors opened out into a tidy latticed vegetable garden and whose outer arrangement of entry and drying yard were of the "save steps" description. Sard and her mother had worked these things out together, for at college, under one of the few strong souls and true brains that are still left unmartyred in American colleges, the girl had learned practical ideals of what should be the attitude of the employer to those who toil for his comfort. It was Sard who had the kitchen walls painted a sunshiny yellow, selected pretty rag rugs and placed bookshelves and good reading lights in the room; it was she who had insisted upon the lattices and ladyslippers and morning-glory vines. All with the sense of her own pleasure in them, though none of the people the Bogarts employed seemed to care much for these things. The young daughter of the house soon began to realize that any bright sport-hat she herself wore, the set of her skirts, the make of her shoes, interested Dora and Maggie better than the books she tried to discuss with them. The name of Edith Cavell did not thrill them as did the name of the most recent screen actress. They cared only, it seemed, to catch up with the joy and pleasure of the life ahead of them. They seemedalways to feel that the very stuff of life was arrayed against them—and sometimes they had reason.
Now as the girl pushed aside the swinging door of the old-fashioned "butler's pantry," she was half prepared for the interrupted Irish sentences, the hot questions and answers.
"Is it justice, I ask you; is it justice? To take him now—only nineteen. When he's sort of wild and notional by nature and traps set for him? Maybe he dunnit—maybe he dunnit, but he keeps saying he ain't done it. Oh, my God, my God, I don't know."
The girl stood before the two women in the kitchen, the cook who, like Sard, wiped her hands and silently handed her the ordering list.
"Thank you, Maggie," said Sard; then, her forehead drawing together, "Dora, is there anything new?"
The waitress with a gesture of dumb inability to answer, turned away, and Sard, no asperity in her voice, saw that it was to a resolutely turned back that she was speaking.
"She blames me, somehow," the girl sighed, "as if I could help it!"
"Please put the north room to air. Miss Gerould arrives late in the afternoon—I think there isn't a waste-paper basket in the room, so, Dora, will you hunt one up, and see to all the electric bulbs, won't you? And towels, the little embroidered ones——" Sard waited, half contemplating, thinking of reproof for the back turned so rudely and obstinately toward her direction, then she looked at the slight, slender figure in its gray gown, the apron tied so carefully and delicately, the capless, pretty hair, and was conscious suddenly of someone young like herself. Through this veil of youth she saw what kind of sorrow it was that bowed the head of the woman standing there; something that she did not know was the most glorious passion in the world beat up through Sard's heart into her brain; it was the passion for humanity, for justice and fairness for all. "Why should I be giving orders to her when she is suffering? Supposing Dunstan were in trouble and—and shame, and I had to take orders from the very people that——Dora—Dora," the girl persisted, "is there nothing I can do?"
There was no answer, only dry coughing sobs. The cook turned. "Ah, don't bother your head with it all, dear. It ain't nothing to you—only, Gawd help the poor thing! Er course," said the cook somewhat bitterly, "we're all under this law; the boy done wrong; he done awful, and they'll be able to prove it against him, and your papa—well," the cook sighed, "only he's young, a rill smart curly-headed young feller and his chanst is gorn."
Then cook, with a curious rising howl, turned away herself.
Wiping her eyes, the young waitress stonily piling up the silver on the tray, let drop a fork. The girl stood there looking at it. Sard tried to comfort her.
"It—it is Human Sorrow," she said awkwardly. "I think we—we don't understand sorrow as well as we ought to and I am quite powerless but Miss Aurelia and I care, Dora."
The girl said it tremulously; already she was feeling the awful gulf between a person who suffers tragedy and that other who stands by longing to help. Also Sard knew a kind of shame—for it seemed treachery to her father and the equity he maintained, to say more. What could words do? It was Sard's first experience of the great naked fact of human sorrow and shame; she knew that the only person who could help Dora would be someone who had been through a wave of tragedy like hers.
"Words," thought Sard hotly, "are disgusting. We bandy them about and pile them up like money. We exchange them like coin of the realm." The young girl, clean and defiant of emotion as a young animal, had no mature power, that amazing power borne through sorrow and sympathy, the strange power of the healing touch, else she would have touched Dora's bowed head, put a comforting hand on the heaving shoulder. She stood silent, then once more said, helplessly, "Dora, don't you believe me, that I do truly care?"
Suddenly there was a curious half shriek, the terrible leap of human emotion through the breaking discipline of lips and eyes—"Oh, I know you care——Oh, Miss Sard—but they'll jug him just the same—for life—forlife!His chanst is gorn."
Dora's voice then sank to a kind of moaning soliloquy. "Oh, yes, that's what they all tell me; he's killed a man, or they say he has "—the woman shot a haggard look into the girl's face. "I've thought and thought and I know from reading the papers and allthat almost any rich man's son would get off," she said it bitterly, "but that isn't it—it's something else, it's that he's only done wrong once, and now he's got to live and die with the worst—oh," moaned Dora passionately, "they'd ought to be laws to save them that's got wrong into them, not to smash 'em. For life, forlife!"
No great poet could have crammed into one sentence the thing that the weeping girl crammed into these words—"for life." Gently Sard closed the door and, hardly knowing what she did, tiptoed back toward the front of the house. She looked out on the late spring foliage, on the tulips and Japanese maples a-quiver with June, on the purple fleur de lis and peonies, dewy with color against the long sparkling ribbon of the morning river ... against all that virginal clean growth with its rapturous aspiration toward the sky that feeds it, the girl heard the poor human cry, "Forlife—for life!"
So this was actually happening! Life, a smooth velvet delicious thing was going on in the front of Sard's home—music, pleasure, ease and beauty, while in the back part of it life was labor and anguish and shame! This was the law under which Sard's parents and their friends had lived contentedly, it was the law under which she was expected to live contentedly. "I never will," whispered the girl fiercely, "I never, never will; these are not my laws,Iam not 'under' the law."
Sard, slowly leaving the kitchen, came upon her aunt. Miss Aurelia, with the finest and lightest of dusters, was performing various rituals with the legsof table and chairs; now she moved one thin hand in swirls over the piano top. "A piano collects dust so strangely," she explained, as if the piano were a sentient thing that made dust-collecting its object. "I've always been so glad to do the dusting," remarked Miss Aurelia for the hundredth time, "he—your father, of course, never notices but she—we—not that I want to criticise your mother, that would be impossible, only she-we—at that time—that is to say—in any emergency I would naturally; of course, some servants were careful and others not. I had once," said Miss Aurelia, with the air of beginning a new subject, "I had an—an aunt," she whispered the thing mysteriously, "she—er—hated dust —— Sard, you're twisting your ring—you look—is anything wrong?"
Sard, motioning toward the kitchen, spoke in a low voice. "Aunt Reely, that boy, Terence O'Brien, is Dora's only brother; she helped educate him; there isn't anyone but those two —— Isn't it too terrible?"
Miss Aurelia lifted a lamp off the table, dusted where it had been and put it back again; in doing so the silk shade toppled and fell. Miss Aurelia, frowning and gasping, treated the incident like a catastrophe, something to be met with firmness and an intake of breath. When she had solemnly adjusted all as it had been again, she took up the subject of dust. "It's the open fires," she remarked gloomily; "sometimes I think we should never have—a land where there is no dust, that is how I always think of Heaven! Yes, Sard, I know that—er—she—he, ofcourse, it was a regular murder, such as you read about, he is, you see, a criminal, my dear, and that, of course, makes you—me—us feel a natural revulsion." Miss Aurelia stood up; the sunlight fell upon her gown of a rather sentimental blue with white ruffles, her fair white skin was noticeable even in the bald morning light, her rabbity mouth somehow too full of teeth, paused unctuously, with drama on the subject in hand.
Sard, strumming a few chords on the piano, looked thoughtfully at her aunt. "Shall I bring in some of those big Japanese iris?" she asked. "Minga's coming to-night, did I tell you? I want things to look jolly. The old dear hasn't been here since that holiday week before Mother" —Sard never could finish the sentence— "Mother died. Do you suppose Father will let us have the small sedan altogether? Minga is used to her own car; she fusses with any machine they've got."
Something that had been hanging on Miss Aurelia's mind hung there still; this slangy sort of talk, the planning for Minga Gerould's visit Aunt Aurelia hailed with delight. This was more as it should be, better than Sard's behavior since she had remained home from college after her mother's death. It was the kind of thing, some of it, that Miss Aurelia had grown to believe in while she deprecated it. American young girls, of course, came of a nobly material race, everyone avowed that America was very great and the fact of the young people having no manners and no respect for age and no morals and no loyaltyto life—well, Miss Aurelia thought it was only the other countries who were jealous who said such things. American young girls came of a nobly material race. Americans were so practical, so anxious to get ahead—everyone seemed so anxious that the young people shouldn't be high-brow. But then Sard had a queer, Miss Aurelia thought almost common, way of noticing servants and poor people, their troubles and all that. It wasn't good or even religious to think too much. For instance, the new man on the place. Miss Aurelia didn't think it quite nice or "young" to be interested in him. Miss Aurelia had often spoken to a fat, calm friend, Mrs. Spoyd, about these things, and Mrs. Spoyd had sighed, "I know what you mean, dear. Did you hear about the little Gringlon girl? Well, of course, it may not be true. I heard it from their dressmaker, but it seems she noticed everything and—er—was crazy for all kinds of information. No, dear, of course, Sard ought not to be noticing anything but a good time at her age. Girls should only be interested in a good time. They shouldn't be interested in—er—unpleasant things."
So Miss Aurelia overlooked the slang. It was all right for Sard to be a little slangy; so much better than sitting up in that tower room and thinking about murderers. It would make her more "popular" to have Minga Gerould go to dances and such things with her. "America is a wonderful country," said Miss Aurelia to herself, "and I think it is our 'popularity.' Have you ever noticed," to Mrs. Spoyd, "how awful it is for an American girl or man not tobe popular? Don't you think that our great men like Theodore Roosevelt and—er—Barnum, are just as popular in Heaven as here?
"I think God meant us to be—er—popular, don't you? Just see," added Miss Aurelia with a flash of insight, "how unpopular all of our statesmen have been who have been in any way unique or—er—unusual. Americans, the good, patriotic kind, have always been very popular."
"Yes, I always feel so sorry for a young girl who isn't popular," purred Mrs. Spoyd.
"I wouldn't worry about that boy, dear, now," advised Miss Aurelia, with all the mature effects of voice and manner of the person who is not truly grown up. "We do all we can to make the prisoners what they should be, and I have heard that many tramps—er—like to go to prison." She stood up, sighing. "There—this room at last looks respectable;" her narrow, rather smoky-dull eyes roved over Sard. "Why don't you put on your turquoise sweater and tam, the pretty one with the blue pompom? I will look after everything. No, dear, I don't think you'd better use the car without asking Brother."
"Will you ask him?" said Sard shyly.
"Iask?" Miss Aurelia said nervously. "Why—you—he—I—don't you think, Sard,"—with a kind of reproachful righteousness—"don't you think it ought to come from you, his daughter? Now I must see about the laundry."
Sard was accustomed to these cheerful little exits made with the bustling manner of one with much businesson hand. When Miss Aurelia wanted to evade anything——Suddenly it flashed over the girl, "Why, she's always like that, she—she—never meets anything; she wouldn't discuss it with me that morning I tried to talk with her about Colter. She has pretended all along she didn't know about Colter, and now, with Dora crying there, red-eyed while she serves the meals, she tried not to know that—why," Sard's eyes opened, "I'm old, she's young."
"I ought to be her aunt," said the young girl to herself. "I ought to be sending her in a picture hat with an organdy dress and blue sash to meet Minga."
The girl stood motionless in the center of the floor, thinking. When youth begins to think and to think clearly and hard with its brave young mind, it is time for the world to take notice—Sard frowning at the floor, spoke aloud:
"Yes—that's living Under the Law," she said slowly, "I see what Dora meant; we live under a made law, we don't build up on it, away from it, to a better law; we just live, cramped, confined, ignorant, stupid, under it—Under the Law, that's it!!!" Sard laughed a little wonderingly. "I shall meet Minga this afternoon and we will go motoring and laughing over the country roads and Dunce will come home and we'll all eat fudge and dance to the Victrola to-night, and one or two of the bunch will come in and we'll play Rookie and Cheat and Toddle Top, and then at nine o'clock Minga will want a nut sundae, and we'll all pile into a machine and slew around to Dingman's and eat sundaes and then hoot along theroads until a tire pops and we think it time to go to bed, because under the law that is our privilege.
"But in that little top room Dora will wake up and think about her brother, who, she says, is Under the Law——" Sard looked out of the open house door toward the fleur de lis and the peonies, massed purple and crimson against the silver sparkle of the river. She stood gazing at the wealth and the shimmer of spring leaves. "Why," said Sard slowly, "those laws were only made for people who haven't grown up; surely," said the girl to herself, "surely we were meant to bring out of them other, better laws; why," said Sard, a deep light came into her long eyes with their straight clear brown, "surely there are other Laws! We can build above the Law, we don't need to stay Under the Law."
MINGA'S LAWS
Mingaarrived in a spasm of long thin legs, short skimpy skirt, a fluff of bobbed curls, a rather unnatural whiteness of face, lugging a suitcase, golf sticks and tennis racket with the independent gestures of an experienced baggagesmasher. It was an effect calculated to impress a girl's camp or a parcel of immigrants, but as that of the arrival of a maiden of eighteen summers at a quiet house in the little center of Willow Roads, it was hardly distinguished.
The meeting of the two girls was a curious clinched clasp done technically and punctuated by gasps, long, over-emphasized kisses and such half-shrieked protests as: "Oh, you dear brute, you're squeezing the life out of me—You silly old darned duck—Oh, Honey, isn't this great?" Then they fell apart, and with mutual cool glance of appraisement took each other in. As they turned talking and went up the long stairs, Sard's look was laughingly interrogative.
"Minga, you've bobbed your hair."
"Yes, you like it? The Mede and Persian don't! I had an awful row with the Mede, meaning Dad, but he came around, of course."
Sard looked lovingly at the little curly head; she felt of the thick knot at the back of her own younghead and felt somehow old; she tossed it like an impatient colt.
"It must feel nice."
"It feels like October wind blowing over the pink heather," Minga laughed; she passed an arm around the older girl. "Let's go up town and get yours done right away. What do you want with hammocks of long hair? Why, if Absalom had only had his hair bobbed, the whole Bible would have been changed."
The voices of the girls had a curious cadence of indolence, also a rising sense of potential shriek, yet they were not raucous.
This was, however, merely cultivation that was unconscious; other girls of their age who copied their ways of wearing their sport-hats and "rolled" stockings had not attained to the cool middle register of these young tones, the pleasantly insistent quality of the aimless dialogue. Yet all their movements, restless and ungainly with curiously athletic emphasis, seemed to correspond to their sentences, over-stressed yet indifferent, while their young eyes, particularly Minga's, under long-lashed, artificially penciled brows, had hardness and clearness under which lay an everlasting watchfulness.
It is with this watchfulness that the youth of to-day betrays itself. Free from restrictions, from cares and responsibilities, it yet has within it the potentialities of these things. It unconsciously needs standards, longs for them and has them not; therefore, it unconsciously is seeking these standards, if only in the wearing of clothes, in the foot work ofa tennis match, in new swimming strokes, in the use of new words. Poor little youth of to-day longing for values, saying with its strange wistful little face: "Does she bob her hair?—then, I'll bob my hair. Does she drink?—well then, I'll drink; does she sprawl over and maul her young men friends?—well, then I'll sprawl and maul."—Poor babies, not one of them strong enough to carve a path of his or her own, all led by the nose, trotting around after each other, all with hats, neckties, turned-down stockings, bathing suits, conventional stencils, voices and ignorance exactly alike. Pathetic, wistful, funny, hungry little American youth.
At the head of the stairs stood Miss Bogart. "My dear!" she held out two hands to Minga, who resolutely seized them and with calm effect of masculinity, gripped them until the lady's mouth twitched with pain.
"This is nice," almost shrieked Miss Reely—she also tried to put her arms around the young form, but she might as well have tried to embrace the string of a toy balloon. Minga, wafting along, recited some sentences, with the rather easy-going cadence which for a better name might be called "the chewing-gum accent."
"Awfully nice to see you, Miss Bogart; Mother and Father sent love. Isn't this great, though? You and Sard were ducks to ask me. My faith, what a jolly room." Minga peered into the adjacent bathroom. "Swell mirror,sometowels; do I use these embroidered ones for cold cream?"
"Did you notice the view, dear, coming over the hill—the river—the dogwoods?" asked Sard's aunt complacently.
"The—er—view——? Oh, yes, I remember now, Sard said something; was it where they built that new garage? Say, Sard, did you know that garage is a big thing, the nippiest thing along the Hudson River—this shore anyway? A lot of money went into it. I know, because Father coughed up a few shekels, to help the man out, you know, and he says they are piling up coin already. He'll realize, all right!"
Miss Reely, rather ignored by the two girls, fussed about the room, settling a pillow sham, plumping up a cushion. She turned back to the new arrival, who, tossing her small provocative hat on the bed, turned with an anxious frown to the mirror. "Girls," announced Minga, unfastening her wrist-watch, "I'm pale." From a small leather case in her pocketbook she produced a tiny golden box of color, dabbed a bit of it on each young cheek and as she stood talking to her hostess calmly smoothed it in. Minga's eyes, wide open, cool as purple morning-glories, surveyed them. She stood, a trim, insignificant little figure of modernity, suggesting nothing, giving promise of nothing, dreaming of nothing, but curiously capable of anything and everything.
Miss Aurelia, primming her mouth, turned to the door; she paused with the immemorial formula of the hostess,
"Dinner is announced at a quarter of seven, dear;will you let us know if you want anything?" Irresolutely she drifted away; they heard the soft pat of her low-heeled slippers, the swish of her starched skirt, looked at each other and smiled.
"Exactly the same! What?" Minga giggled. "Does she still think it's awful to say 'Darn'?" Then, conscious of Sard's restraint, "Well, she's a sweet old sport. I'd like to take her up in an airplane. Now," apologetically, "you know very well I think she's a perfect dearrrrrr, so sort of picturesque and everything—where do you keep your hairpins?"
It was part of the enigmatic expression of Minga that with bobbed hair she should demand hairpins with as anguished an intonation as a woman with long tresses. When Sard produced the box, she deftly pinned a pretty lock nearer to her cool deep-set eyes. "It's this rotten high forehead of mine," she explained to her friend now perched in the window-seat watching her. "I'm determined I won't be high-brow if I have to cut my head off to avoid it. Don't you dread, somehow, becoming high-brow? It's so unpopular—the men have always hated it, and now the women do. Do you remember Sara Findlay at college?"
"Sara Findlay," they breathed the name through gusts of laughter—"Sara Findlay; do you remember her room, books everywhere, and her awful spectacles, and the way she haunted the library and the solemn look she turned on you when you asked her anything? I remember one question we doped out, 'Sara, how do you define the infinite?'"
"Sara's engaged," said Sard, "married, for all I know; did you hear about it?"
Minga turned a face of incredulous horror. Marriage as she viewed it was the device of screen actresses and various feature fans to change horizons; when things got a little monotonous or there was a chance of improving finance, one married. "That high-brow wench, not a bit of pep, not a rag of style—to who?"
"To whom, did you say?" said Sard mischievously. The other girl, falling heavily upon the divan, now buried her curly head in Sard's lap.
"Towho," she repeated carelessly—"I won't say it right; why should I? If the Prince of Wales or Charlie Chaplin said 'to who' for a few weeks, we'd all follow suit. Who invented grammar, anyway?" Minga stretched herself, laughing up into her friend's face.
"Ouf! Isn't this like the old times? You, the stuck-up grammarian—me, the gypsy vagabond. Woof, what an awful thing it must be to be 'the Judge's daughter' in a little place like 'Willows-on-the-Hudson'."
Sard laughed a little; her face grew grave. "It's lots of troublous things to be the Judge's daughter, I know that," then swiftly, as if something occurred to her, "Minga, will you do something for me?"
"Yep," yawned the recumbent Minga; "all right; anything that doesn't interfere with my present position. Sard, do you think my nails are nicer this year?" she held up a very delicately tinted row oflittle curved shelly fingers. "In spite of golf," said Minga, "I think that's a sweet attractive little hand, don't you?" The fact that Sard had asked her to do something seemed to her unimportant, and she went on—"Notice anything?" She waved a very pretty ring on the slender finger.
"Minga—you're not," now it was Sard who was really breathless, her brown eyes shimmered with light.
"Engaged, darrrrrling," drawled Minga. "Yep, to the most idiotic little Willy you can imagine. A perfect lady, Tawny Troop, you know Troop, the big moving-picture man? We're all crazy about Tawny, he's such a fool—and dance—he dances like a bubble on the fountain. Papa Troop is worth oodles, so they say. Mother, the Persian, doesn't know it—yet; Father, the Mede—well, I guess we'd better postpone that!"
Something careless and contemptuous in Minga's voice kept Sard from asking any of the questions that flew to her lips. She caught the little hand and examined the ring. "Why, it's exquisite," she breathed. "These are brown diamonds, aren't they, and pearls? Oh!" The fairy beauty of the thing moved her.
"You see, Ducky, another girl picked it out—my predecessor." Minga threw out the word with a curiously mature drawl. She yawned, raised up her head, reached out for a handglass and examined her pretty teeth in the mirror. Suddenly she rose, her figure, slender and reedy, bent backward and did a few striding, strutting steps of a modern dance, hummingthe while with curious catlike nasal tremolo a popular air.
"Do you know this step—to the Paradise whistle and ukulele and that new instrument, the Shiverskin, it's just great." Around the room strode Minga, solemnly expounding the simple steps. "You like my ring," hummed Minga, "well, Tawny's first girl picked it out. I saw it on her aristocratic hand and I had to have it; also, you see, I needed Tawny to dance with—he goes my gait—she hated to let him go; Sard, that girl is a Moth, she eats men, eats 'em alive, but I snitched this one," Minga giggled. "Tawny's coming out for your first spring dance at the Club while I'm here, but it's not announced," warned Minga, "so don't talk bassinets."
It was the old Minga, only, Sard could not keep herself from admitting this; more so, and well, there really need not have been any more of the original Minga. Sard, who was exactly a year older than her friend, felt somehow centuries older. Also she had to confess again as she had confessed to herself before, there was something in Minga that both shamed and hurt, while it fascinated. However, with all the hunger of a lonely girl for a chum, Sard readily overlooked jarring things. She reached out and drew Minga to her, hanging an arm over the thin little shoulder. Minga took it all coolly. "Are you letting yourself get fat, Sard?" she criticised. Then added caressingly, "Poor solemn Sard, we've got to whoop things up for you now I'm here. What? I mean it! Can't we run up a few men and some jazz and stuffon the telephone for to-night? Would Judgie and Aunt Reely care? Who does your jazz this year? We've got an angel band home, three cornets, a paradise whistle and a drum, it's divine—well? Wait till I get hold of that old Dunce," said Minga, "I'll choke all the news out of him. My hat—there comes your father's car around the drive, and I haven't got on evening duds! What do you wear for night-eats? Will Judgie care if I go down as I am?"
This was Sard's chance. She kept her arm around the restless, pacing little figure. "Minga, will you do something for me? Put on your prettiest dress, that rose-colored one, talk music to Father, let him play his new records for you." Minga made a face, but Sard was insistent. "Get him to tell you about Terence O'Brien—only don't you start the subject, Minga—and—and—and ask him if he is pleased with the new man on the place."
Then Sard, at a loss just how to drill her impulsive guest, stared at Minga thoughtfully, frowning. "No, don't ask him that," she said. "I've changed my mind, don't ask him that."
Then said Minga, "I'm to ask him about Terence O'Brien without his knowing it?"
"Yes, his sister works here."
"Terence O'Brien," repeated Minga, "who—oh, yes, that fellow that killed the old man, ran away with the money, did it all just like a movie—awfully exciting! My gracious!" Minga was awed.
Sard nodded. "Hush, his sister is our waitress, and she—oh, it's pretty dreadful to see her. Fatherthinks he's just a criminal, but don't you see, Minga, he's only a boy, only eighteen."
Minga looked very cold and decided. The two spots of color stood out high on her little sobered face.
"But a murderer," said she solemnly. "He must pay the penalty." Minga pronounced the word "peenulty," but her dignity was superb. She was very sure about justice as she was very sure about patriotism. If you did wrong you must not be found out, if you cared for your country you must say so very loudly with strong dramatic effects; the idea of caring for one's country to the extent of having a better kind of women and men live in it had not occurred to Minga. It does not occur to the men and women Mingas of this world. But they are very sure of their "patriotism." They have quite a little patriotic strut and they imagine patriotism to consist in a long hate of some other nation. And that it is based forever and ever on the machinery of killing.
"Minga," said Sard passionately, "do you and I always do right? Isn't it our ease and good fortune that keep continually pulling us back from very wrong things? How about that time on the bacon-bat up at Divens Lake when we stole the firewood and the corn, did we pay any fines—did the county follow us up? Just a private letter to the faculty and old Pressy and the Dean talking to us and that was all—yet," Sard looked thoughtfully out of the window, "that was crime, stealing and trespassing, but we are sopampered and petted and taken care of that we—well, we don't need to murder."
"Oh, don't we need to murder? Well, I can tell you, Sard Bogart, that I need to murder Marjorie Atboon every time I look at her." Minga's face was injured. "Her father gave her a new car if she'd stop smoking. Well, Marjorie has the car." Minga paused and remarked drily, "Her bedroom smells queerly—she says she likes lots of air, she burns a good deal of incense, but you ought to see the car, lovely long thing, eight-cylinder, blue, cooooooooly—oilllly—olly. Oh! how a good machine turns your dark little world to white velvet!"
Sard giggled. "Minga, you always make me laugh," she protested, "when I'm most in earnest you're crazy and dreadful, but you're an everlasting dear."
Minga whirled them both about the pretty cretonned room.
"You know you love it," she chanted, "you know you love it, you've been having too much Aunt Aurelley." Minga putting her arms akimbo swayed neatly pumped feet back and forth. "Did you see Auntie stare at my rouge?" she whispered. "She knows the worst now, doesn't she, Sard? She knows I know there ain't no Santa Claus." With a burst of laughter, Minga released her friend. "Wait till I get a bath." She ripped off her little frilled blouse, her short skirt fell to the floor. Minga stood a pretty figure in dark knickers and white chemise. "For the tub!" she chanted, and dove into the bathroom.
Amid the gushing of the faucet, Sard saw the little figure stripped and dancing in the white porcelain bath.
"Stop in on your way to the dining-car," called Minga.
THE ORGAN BUILDER'S HOUSE
TheHudson River has not only the opulence that Washington Irving portrayed, not only the swelling of soft hills and majesty of toppling mountains and slopes that spell fecundity of farmland but it has, along palisade and headland, another opulence. Under those mountains that throw down thunder-storms, and along the rocky walls climbed by winding roads magnificent homes testify to the imperialism that has not yet been cleansed from the heart of man. The instinct for choosing imposing sites for impressive homes would be difficult to trace to its beginning. Robber barons built their castles inaccessibly for very good reasons; the prelates' palaces were on the hills that all might see and be reminded of Mother Church. The Roman Roads, unlike the furtive sunken roads of the cavemen, were built high because of fearlessness and pride. But the American who builds his home, or one of his homes, on the Hudson does not do so just because he longs to feast his eyes on sumptuous natural terrace and broad natural waterway; he does so because in his instinctive choice of surroundings, he selects an expressive background for his own dignity and his own importance.
All night long the great steamers of the Hudson River glide majestically up and down, the long whitefingers of their search-lights pointing to this and that lordly residence. The Oil King, the Copper King, the Pill King, and the Shoe King, whose white palaces and miles of stocked and fruited domain are gated and avenued away from the public, are silently indicated to such humble travelers as care to look. One can hardly travel the Hudson River nowadays and worship the great Creator, for the great Creator is a little overshadowed by the aforesaid King of Commerce, the great Producer. But in spite of the sleepiness and lethargic atmosphere that the Dutch traditions have strangely imparted to the strings of villages, there are in certain moods superb freedoms and freshnesses along the Hudson. There are still spiritual emphasis and quests along red sandstone shores, where the green hemlocks gather. The sunrises in the Westchester Hills are like black tents with banners streaming. The waters of the Tappan Zee are then a great glittering field of cloth of gold, and at sunset when the houses on the Irvington Hills are all ablaze with sunstruck window glass, the bold, black breasts of Palisades and Hook Mountain front the river like African slaves guarding some inner mystery of valley, some clean, unspoiled fastness of forest and field and stream.
To a man who sat at his table in a bleak old wooden house high up on the western range, these night and morning scenes spelled only two things, the Human Will, as yet absorbed only in the passions of an aggressive aggrandizement, and the proud subservience of nature to the little schemes of men. Nature, lying down like a great beast of destiny, to let the little shapes and enterprises swarm and crowd over her! "Only," thought Watts Shipman, "only when the great beast starts to rise and take new positions, look out then, little shapes. Either you will be raised on some great mountain of Nature's mysterious changes or you will slip into some new uncharted sea or who knows, you may spill altogether out of the world!"
It was this wistful attitude toward nature, the great mystery, the great Book of Worship and Wonder that had taken Watts Shipman from his clubs and cliques and corporations, away from success and "putting it over" and their accompanying shiftiness and meanness, and had taken him for the season of a summer into the country, to think.
Yes, just that—"to think," was what he replied to complaining letters and telegrams—"Watts, what are you doing, stuck up there on the rim of nowhere?" His confrères laughed at the curt answer "Thinking." For a lawyer so able, so successful, there could be no comment of "queer" or "crazy"; Watts' partners shrugged their shoulders and went on with the business which, as he had denied them telephone access, they had sometimes to refer to him by long night letters. "Drat your thinking," writes the senior partner, "don't I think?" To which came the teasing telegram by code, "You don't think, you calculate."
Watts' house, planted high on the spur of the mountain a few miles above Willow Roads, the little Dutch village where Sard lived, had been owned by an organ builder about whom the Willow Roaders liked to say "nobody knew anything." The Willow Roaders, complacent in the usual village life where everyone thinks he knows "everything about everyone" disdained knowing anything about a mere organ builder. The house, surrounded as it was by hanging boulders and pine trees, looked gravely down on the big field of river and on all the little steeples and turrets and gingerbread conservativeness of Willow Roads. Watts liked to commune with the spirit of the man who had once lived here.
"I'll bet he stole some notes out of the Dawn," the man thought, "and think of nights here—like last evening, with the hermit thrush and the sky gold through the trees. 'The Organ Builder'—I can just see him, a seedy chap, possibly with too many children, probably half starving, working up here with the village below curious and gossiping, thinking maybe an organ builder was immoral."
It was a soft yet cool spring night. The little frogs in mountain rain pools kept up a croaking like rusty wheels; the pungent smells of earth and leaf mould came through the window. Fire burned quietly and soft lamplight fell on books and rugs and flickered over the cast of the Winged Victory, over the dingy chimneypiece. Watts' eyes, through the smoke of his pipe, went to this. "Nice girl," he grunted in approval, "nice girl—afraid of nothing—ready for anything, yet somehow all woman, true to type but not crystallized by type." The man, rising, walked up and down the rather bare room where one or two finerugs caught the warm fire colors. "I can say this for the Greeks, they, themselves, fastened nothing upon civilization but healthy ideals for men and women; harvest making, home keeping, child bearing, strong bodies, imaginative minds, it wasn't until their æsthetics and the Roman plutocrats got hold of all they gave the world that their philosophies were debased." The lawyer's eyes, sombre in strength and depth, looked fixedly at the gracious woman figure; he compared it with the figures on Fifth Avenue, tripping in affected coquettishness or striding in callous mannishness. "Not clever of you, ladies, to find no middle path," he considered. "Who made you as you are to-day, Paris—the war? That's what you and the newspapers and magazines say, but come now, didn't you make yourselves? You wanted to be 'popular,' you want to be 'in' things, behold the result." Watts' mouth curled with slow mockery on his pipe.
"The Winged Victory didn't want to be popular," he decided. "She didn't want to be in things.
"She wanted to live. Who fastened the modern woman on us, anyway?" Watts demanded sternly of his dog. "Why have we got to stand for her?" The silken-haired, electric-muscled beast came over to him softly. Friar Tuck, with tail tossing, laid a devoted head on the brown golf-trousered knee. Watts tousled the long ears. "Always the henchman, aren't you, you old brute—why do you play that game?" The lawyer looked long and questioningly into his dog's eyes. "Why don't you get up and give me anorder; how do you know I'm superior to you? You are probably equal to me."
He considered the bowl of his pipe then rubbed it on Friar Tuck's head.
"Just as I suppose, if men only knew it, they could be equal to Christ and the angels. Say, look here." Watts lifted the dog by his forefeet. He put the two forepaws against his breast. "How do you know I'm superior to you? Why do you play this game—do you just want to be 'popular' with me?"
Not to accept dogma—to be ready for the new light, to trim one's mental sails for the breeze from a fresh quarter, it had given the great criminal lawyer a profound insight into the human heart, an almost awful power over the souls of men. Wastrel after wastrel had tried to look Watts Shipman in the eye, and had known that some strange God of Equity sat watchful in this man—that only in proportion to their actual guilt would they be dealt with. Men and women had broken down and told him all, only because of the unendurable patience and remorseless gravity of his uncondemning gaze. He had fathered many a boy and stood many a woman on her own feet, and yet Life, the Great Mother, had held back from him what he, as human, knew must be the ultimate and only gift. Women had angled for Watts Shipman because of his fame; they had tried to use him politically; they had trusted him, feared him and been penitent before him. No woman had ever loved him.
Staring at the Victory, the man smoked silently.Half ruefully he passed his hand over the russet head on his knee, he threw back his own great black-haired head with its dapple of white spots; he stretched his long limbs and his deep-lined humorous face saddened. "Women want to play," he said softly, "uncertain, funny little things, they want to play"—tenderly, "and, not necessarily, to play fair—and I'm no plaything, although," he waved his pipe toward the bas-relief over the fire piece, "I could play with you, Miss Victory."
The word play made him think of something; pushing away the dog, Watts rose and went to a table drawer, taking out, with a smile, a little envelope with "Pudge" scrawled on it. The lawyer, still smiling, slid out the contents, two Indian arrow-heads, one white, the other gray flint. Thoughtfully he turned them over in his large palm. "Poor good little Indians," he murmured, "we're still teaching our children that you were devils, aren't we? Aren't we funny? We rather owe you an apology, you strange, mysterious men who never knew fulfilment—who ranged these Hudson River shores and thronged New Jersey and New England and were mighty hunters and happy until you came up against the white man and gunpowder and tobacco and whiskey! Well"—Watts chuckled, "Pudgy shan't be prejudiced. I'll write you a good character for him."
Knocking his pipe out, laying it tenderly on the mantel, the big man sprawled like a schoolboy over the table writing in long hand the letter that was to accompany the arrow-heads.
"Dear Pudge—How are you? What are you doing, helping Mother or raising the roof with noise and destruction. How are the guinea pigs? I often think of them. Well, Pudge, I rather hope you are helping Mother a lot, because she's such a good friend of yours and mine and she looks so pretty and seems so wise, though perhaps you and I are sometimes wiser. I'm sending you two arrow-heads I found in a field up North in Rockland County. I was fishing up near the Ramapo Mountains where the stone walls run like great serpents up and down the hills. There's a lot of history lying around loose near here, Major André and Washington and the Dutch and the Indians. I'll show you these places some day. The Indians, to my way of thinking, were fine fellows. They took long steps when they walked and knew how to set traps and hunt and fish, and they were for the most part real religious men. But men who knew how to make war just to get more money, came and took their land away from them, and then the Indians turned naughty the way you and I do sometimes, Pudge. My! my! how they tore around and howled and took scalps, which were not nice to keep. No gentleman would ever scalp a lady, it is so uncomfortable, and yet these Indians scalped many ladies!
"It's a pity the Indians were bad and forgot their manners, for if they could have remembered to be polite and gentlemanly they could have stayed here and they would have been the real Americans and you and I would have probably tried to imitate them and never used anything but wampum, which means shells; same as money to buy ice-cream cones with. I think it would have been a heap more sensible if the white man had made lasting friends of the Indians and learned a lot of things that the Indians knew but which the white men have since been too stupid to learn. But you see, the white men had a new machinecalled a 'gun,' and there was nothing to do with it but shoot it at somebody, and that made trouble. And the Indians, eager to learn, got guns too, and thought it was funny to point them at people. And their guns went off all right and there was the dickens to pay. Machines are nice things, Pudgy, but the men who make the machines must be sure to have their minds go ahead of the machines, or some day the machines will just get up and smash the world.
"Good-night, Pudgy, old chap—I wish you could hear all the funny sounds up on this mountain. Friar Tuck smells, besides hearing; he reads the night with his nose, the same way we would read a book—and he smells out such stories! Here are the arrow-heads; I'm sending them to you as if you were my own little boy, for see, Pudge—big man as I am, I have no little boy of my own—and that sometimes happens to big men ..."
Suddenly the man's head dropped. The pen rolled to the floor, and Friar Tuck nosed at it a moment then tucked his head into his folded paws. Watts Shipman sat at the table, his own face buried in his arms.