text:
Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co./Dissent Andrews

Andrews, J. (dissenting).

Assisting a passenger to board a train, the defendant's servant negligently knocked a package from his arms. It fell between the platform and the cars. Of its contents the servant knew and could know nothing. A violent explosion followed. The concussion broke some scales [NE102]  standing a considerable distance away. In falling they injured the plaintiff, an intending passenger.

Upon these facts may she recover the damages she has suffered in an action brought against the master? The result we shall reach depends upon our theory as to the nature of negligence. Is it a relative concept -- the breach of some duty owing to a particular person or to particular persons? Or where there is an act which unreasonably threatens the safety of others, is the doer liable for all its proximate consequences, even where they result in injury to one who would generally be thought to be outside the radius of danger? This is not a mere dispute as to words. We might not believe that to the average mind the dropping of the bundle would seem to involve the probability of harm to the plaintiff standing many feet away whatever might be the case as to the owner or to one so near as to be likely to be struck by its fall. If, however, we adopt the second hypothesis [NY348]  we have to inquire only as to the relation between cause and effect. We deal in terms of proximate cause, not of negligence.

Negligence may be defined roughly as an act or omission which unreasonably does or may affect the rights of others, or which unreasonably fails to protect oneself from the dangers resulting from such acts. Here I confine myself to the first branch of the definition. Nor do I comment on the word "unreasonable." For present purposes it sufficiently describes that average of conduct that society requires of its members.

There must be both the act or the omission, and the right. It is the act itself, not the intent of the actor, that is important. ( Hover v. Barkhoof, 44 N.Y. 113; Mertz v. Connecticut Co., 217 N.Y. 475.) In criminal law both the intent and the result are to be considered. Intent again is material in tort actions, where punitive damages are sought, dependent on actual malice -- not on merely reckless conduct. But here neither insanity nor infancy lessens responsibility. (Williams v. Hays, 143 N.Y. 442.)

As has been said, except in cases of contributory negligence, there must be rights which are or may be affected. Often though injury has occurred, no rights of him who suffers have been touched. A licensee or trespasser upon my land has no claim to affirmative care on my part that the land be made safe. ( Meiers v. Koch Brewery, 229 N.Y. 10.) Where a railroad is required to fence its tracks against cattle, no man's rights are injured should he wander upon the road because such fence is absent. ( Di Caprio v. N. Y. C. R. R., 231 N.Y. 94.) An unborn child may not demand immunity from personal harm. ( Drobner v. Peters, 232 N.Y. 220.)

But we are told that "there is no negligence unless there is in the particular case a legal duty to take care, and this duty must be one which is owed to the plaintiff [NY349]  himself and not merely to others." (Salmond Torts [6th ed.], 24.) This, I think too narrow a conception. Where there is the unreasonable act, and some right that may be affected there is negligence whether damage does or does not result. That is immaterial. Should we drive down Broadway at a reckless speed, we are negligent whether we strike an approaching car or miss it by an inch. The act itself is wrongful. It is a wrong not only to those who happen to be within the radius of danger but to all who might have been there -- a wrong to the public at large. Such is the language of the street. Such the language of the courts when speaking of contributory negligence. Such again and again their language in speaking of the duty of some defendant and discussing proximate cause in cases where such a discussion is wholly irrelevant on any other theory. ( Perry v. Rochester Line Co., 219 N. Y. 60.) As was said by Mr. Justice Holmes many years ago, "the measure of the defendant's duty in determining whether a wrong has been committed is one thing, the measure of liability when a wrong has been committed is another." ( Spade v. Lynn & Boston R. R. Co., 172 Mass. 488.) Due care is a duty imposed on each one of us to protect society from unnecessary danger, not to protect A, B or C alone.

It may well be that there is no such thing as negligence in the abstract. "Proof of negligence in the air, so to speak, will not do." In an empty world negligence would not exist. It does involve a relationship between man and his fellows. But not merely a relationship between man and those whom he might reasonably expect his act would injure. Rather, a relationship between him and those whom he does in fact injure. If his act has a tendency to harm some one, it harms him a mile away as surely as it does those on the scene. We now permit children to recover for the negligent killing of the father. It was never prevented on the theory that no duty was owing to them. A husband may be compensated for [NY350]  the loss of his wife's services. To say that the wrongdoer was negligent as to the husband as well as to the wife is merely an attempt to fit facts to theory. An insurance company paying a fire loss recovers [NE103]  its payment of the negligent incendiary. We speak of subrogation -- of suing in the right of the insured. Behind the cloud of words is the fact they hide, that the act, wrongful as to the insured, has also injured the company. Even if it be true that the fault of father, wife or insured will prevent recovery, it is because we consider the original negligence not the proximate cause of the injury. (Pollock, Torts [12th ed.], 463.)

In the well-known Polemis Case (1921, 3 K. B. 560), Scrutton, L. J., said that the dropping of a plank was negligent for it might injure "workman or cargo or ship." Because of either possibility the owner of the vessel was to be made good for his loss. The act being wrongful the doer was liable for its proximate results. Criticized and explained as this statement may have been, I think it states the law as it should be and as it is. ( Smith v. London & Southwestern Ry. Co., [1870-71] 6 C. P. 14; Anthony v. Slaid, 52 Mass. 290; Wood v. Penn. R. R. Co., 177 Penn. St. 306; Trashansky v. Hershkovitz, 239 N.Y. 452.)

The proposition is this. Every one owes to the world at large the duty of refraining from those acts that may unreasonably threaten the safety of others. Such an act occurs. Not only is he wronged to whom harm might reasonably be expected to result, but he also who is in fact injured, even if he be outside what would generally be thought the danger zone. There needs be duty due the one complaining but this is not a duty to a particular individual because as to him harm might be expected. Harm to some one being the natural result of the act, not only that one alone, but all those in fact injured may complain. We have never, I think, held otherwise. Indeed in the Di Caprio case we said that a breach of a [NY351]  general ordinance defining the degree of care to be exercised in one's calling is evidence of negligence as to every one. We did not limit this statement to those who might be expected to be exposed to danger. Unreasonable risk being taken, its consequences are not confined to those who might probably be hurt.

If this be so, we do not have a plaintiff suing by "derivation or succession." Her action is original and primary. Her claim is for a breach of duty to herself -- not that she is subrogated to any right of action of the owner of the parcel or of a passenger standing at the scene of the explosion.

The right to recover damages rests on additional considerations. The plaintiff's rights must be injured, and this injury must be caused by the negligence. We build a dam, but are negligent as to its foundations. Breaking, it injures property down stream. We are not liable if all this happened because of some reason other than the insecure foundation. But when injuries do result from our unlawful act we are liable for the consequences. It does not matter that they are unusual, unexpected, unforeseen and unforseeable. But there is one limitation. The damages must be so connected with the negligence that the latter may be said to be the proximate cause of the former.

These two words have never been given an inclusive definition. What is a cause in a legal sense, still more what is a proximate cause, depend in each case upon many considerations, as does the existence of negligence itself. Any philosophical doctrine of causation does not help us. A boy throws a stone into a pond. The ripples spread. The water level rises. The history of that pond is altered to all eternity. It will be altered by other causes also. Yet it will be forever the resultant of all causes combined. Each one will have an influence. How great only omniscience can say. You may speak of a chain, or if you please, a net. An analogy is of little aid. [NY352] Each cause brings about future events. Without each the future would not be the same. Each is proximate in the sense it is essential. But that is not what we mean by the word. Nor on the other hand do we mean sole cause. There is no such thing.

Should analogy be thought helpful, however, I prefer that of a stream. The spring, starting on its journey, is joined by tributary after tributary. The river, reaching the ocean, comes from a hundred sources. No man may say whence any drop of water is derived. Yet for a time distinction may be possible. Into the clear creek, brown swamp water flows from the left. Later, from the right comes water stained by its clay bed. The three may remain for a space, sharply divided. But at last, inevitably no trace of separation remains. They are so commingled that all distinction is lost.

As we have said, we cannot trace the effect of an act to the end, if end there is. Again, however, we may trace it part of the way. A murder at Serajevo may be the necessary antecedent to an assassination in London twenty years hence. An overturned lantern may burn all Chicago. We may follow the fire from the shed to the last building. We rightly say the fire started by the lantern caused its destruction.

A cause, but not the proximate cause. What we do mean by the word "proximate" is, that because of convenience, of public policy, of a rough sense of justice, the law arbitrarily declines to trace a series of events beyond a certain point. This is not logic. It is practical politics. Take our rule as to fires. Sparks from my burning haystack set on fire [NE104]  my house and my neighbor's. I may recover from a negligent railroad. He may not. Yet the wrongful act as directly harmed the one as the other. We may regret that the line was drawn just where it was, but drawn somewhere it had to be. We said the act of the railroad was not the proximate cause of our neighbor's fire. Cause it surely was. The words we used were [NY353]  simply indicative of our notions of public policy. Other courts think differently. But somewhere they reach the point where they cannot say the stream comes from any one source.

Take the illustration given in an unpublished manuscript by a distinguished and helpful writer on the law of torts. A chauffeur negligently collides with another car which is filled with dynamite, although he could not know it. An explosion follows. A, walking on the sidewalk nearby, is killed. B, sitting in a window of a building opposite, is cut by flying glass. C, likewise sitting in a window a block away, is similarly injured. And a further illustration. A nursemaid, ten blocks away, startled by the noise, involuntarily drops a baby from her arms to the walk. We are told that C may not recover while A may. As to B it is a question for court or jury. We will all agree that the baby might not. Because, we are again told, the chauffeur had no reason to believe his conduct involved any risk of injuring either C or the baby. As to them he was not negligent.

But the chauffeur, being negligent in risking the collision, his belief that the scope of the harm he might do would be limited is immaterial. His act unreasonably jeopardized the safety of any one who might be affected by it. C's injury and that of the baby were directly traceable to the collision. Without that, the injury would not have happened. C had the right to sit in his office, secure from such dangers. The baby was entitled to use the sidewalk with reasonable safety.

The true theory is, it seems to me, that the injury to C, if in truth he is to be denied recovery, and the injury to the baby is that their several injuries were not the proximate result of the negligence. And here not what the chauffeur had reason to believe would be the result of his conduct, but what the prudent would foresee, may have a bearing. May have some bearing, for the problem [NY354]  of proximate cause is not to be solved by any one consideration.

It is all a question of expediency. There are no fixed rules to govern our judgment. There are simply matters of which we may take account. We have in a somewhat different connection spoken of "the stream of events." We have asked whether that stream was deflected -- whether it was forced into new and unexpected channels. ( Donnelly v. Piercy Contracting Co., 222 N.Y. 210). This is rather rhetoric than law. There is in truth little to guide us other than common sense.

There are some hints that may help us. The proximate cause, involved as it may be with many other causes, must be, at the least, something without which the event would not happen. The court must ask itself whether there was a natural and continuous sequence between cause and effect. Was the one a substantial factor in producing the other? Was there a direct connection between them, without too many intervening causes? Is the effect of cause on result not too attentuated? Is the cause likely, in the usual judgment of mankind, to produce the result? Or by the exercise of prudent foresight could the result be foreseen? Is the result too remote from the cause, and here we consider remoteness in time and space. ( Bird v. St. Paul F. & M. Ins. Co., 224 N.Y. 47, where we passed upon the construction of a contract -- but something was also said on this subject.) Clearly we must so consider, for the greater the distance either in time or space, the more surely do other causes intervene to affect the result. When a lantern is overturned the firing of a shed is a fairly direct consequence. Many things contribute to the spread of the conflagration -- the force of the wind, the direction and width of streets, the character of intervening structures, other factors. We draw an uncertain and wavering line, but draw it we must as best we can.

Once again, it is all a question of fair judgment, always [NY355]  keeping in mind the fact that we endeavor to make a rule in each case that will be practical and in keeping with the general understanding of mankind.

Here another question must be answered. In the case supposed it is said, and said correctly, that the chauffeur is liable for the direct effect of the explosion although he had no reason to suppose it would follow a collision. "The fact that the injury occurred in a different manner than that which might have been expected does not prevent the chauffeur's negligence from being in law the cause of the injury." But the natural results of a negligent act -- the results which a prudent man would or should foresee -- do have a bearing upon the decision as to proximate cause. We have said so repeatedly. What should be foreseen? No human foresight would suggest that a collision itself might injure one a block away. On the contrary, given an explosion, such a possibility might be reasonably expected. I think the direct connection, the foresight of which the courts [NE105]  speak, assumes prevision of the explosion, for the immediate results of which, at least, the chauffeur is responsible.

It may be said this is unjust. Why? In fairness he should make good every injury flowing from his negligence. Not because of tenderness toward him we say he need not answer for all that follows his wrong. We look back to the catastrophe, the fire kindled by the spark, or the explosion. We trace the consequences -- not indefinitely, but to a certain point. And to aid us in fixing that point we ask what might ordinarily be expected to follow the fire or the explosion.

This last suggestion is the factor which must determine the case before us. The act upon which defendant's liability rests is knocking an apparently harmless package onto the platform. The act was negligent. For its proximate consequences the defendant is liable. If its contents were broken, to the owner; if it fell upon and crushed a passenger's foot, then to him. If it exploded [NY356]  and injured one in the immediate vicinity, to him also as to A in the illustration. Mrs. Palsgraf was standing some distance away. How far cannot be told from the record -- apparently twenty-five or thirty feet. Perhaps less. Except for the explosion, she would not have been injured. We are told by the appellant in his brief "it cannot be denied that the explosion was the direct cause of the plaintiff's injuries." So it was a substantial factor in producing the result -- there was here a natural and continuous sequence -- direct connection. The only intervening cause was that instead of blowing her to the ground the concussion smashed the weighing machine which in turn fell upon her. There was no remoteness in time, little in space. And surely, given such an explosion as here it needed no great foresight to predict that the natural result would be to injure one on the platform at no greater distance from its scene than was the plaintiff. Just how no one might be able to predict. Whether by flying fragments, by broken glass, by wreckage of machines or structures no one could say. But injury in some form was most probable.

Under these circumstances I cannot say as a matter of law that the plaintiff's injuries were not the proximate result of the negligence. That is all we have before us. The court refused to so charge. No request was made to submit the matter to the jury as a question of fact, even would that have been proper upon the record before us.

The judgment appealed from should be affirmed, with costs.


text:
Category:1928 court decisions

zh:Category:1928年判例法

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Category:1928 court decisions


text: Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Keokuk


text:
Page:Cartoon portraits and biographical sketches of men of the day.djvu/99

 Doubtless, he owes no inconsiderable portion of his success to his hair, which he wears in a most melodramatic fashion.

He has distanced all his competitors in his own line—which is that of giving theatrical renderings of the best writers to a very worthy class of people, who would never think of entering the doors of a playhouse.

His best humorous readings—'Love in a Balloon' and 'The Charity Dinner' are published in 'Once a Week.' Years ago, Mr. Bellew proved himself to be a master of one of the three Rs—reading. His reputation has been fairly earned.


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Page:Cartoon portraits and biographical sketches of men of the day.djvu/100

'' was produced by Mr. Bateman on the 25th of November 1871, and the critics were unanimous in their praise of the acting of the principal character of the piece. Indeed, the play is essentially a one-part piece as completely so as 'Leah' is. It is founded on the story of 'The Polish Jew,' by those great novelists, MM. Erckmann-Chatrian—the twin brothers of modern French romance.

The play is adapted by Mr. Leopold Lewis, who seems to have performed the task of taking other men's ideas as well as adapters generally. His version of 'The Polish Jew' opens as 'The Corsican Brothers' does—with a narrative of the motive incident of the plot.

Mathias keeps an inn in Alsace. In the common room of this inn, Walter and Hans are talking of the murder of the Polish Jew, which happened fifteen years before; when Mathias, the rich innkeeper, returns from a visit to Paris. Mathias was the murderer. He is astonished and alarmed to find the crime still a topic of conversation. When he killed the Jew for the gold he carried in his belt, he was poor and embarrassed. Now he is wealthy and prosperous, and the chief man in the village. His daughter is to be married to Christian, and he can give her a dowry of thirty thousand francs.

In Paris he has seen a mesmerist put people into the mesmeric sleep, and make them disclose their thoughts. This has made a deep impression on his mind. He sups; drinks with Hans and Walter; and after they are gone, is alone with his disordered fancy. The sledge bells ring again in his ears; again he sees the face of the murdered Jew; the soughing wind blows back on him the Jew's blessing, 'God be with you!' Still the sledge bells ring, and Mathias sees his victim driving in the snow. With a wild and terrible cry, he faints and falls.

In the second act he is hurrying on the signing of the marriage contract.


text: The duties of masters and slaves respectively (1845)


text: The New International Encyclopædia/Delbrück, Berthold


text:
Page:U.S. Department of the Interior Annual Report 1877.djvu/7

Rh Sitting Bull and his followers in hostilities against the United States, surrendered to our military forces. This treatment, however, can be accorded only on condition that Sitting Bull and all the members of the Indian bands who take advantage of this offer of pardon and protection, when crossing the line from British territory to that of the United States, surrender to our military forces stationed at the frontier all their firearms and ammunition, as well as all their horses and ponies, the military commander permitting them the temporary use of such animals as may be necessary for the transportation of the aged and infirm among the Indians who may be unable to march on foot to the reservations. You will insist upon this condition to its full extent, and not make any promises beyond that of a pardon for the acts of hostility committed as stated above.

Should Sitting Bull and the other chiefs with him express their willingness to return to the United States on these terms, you will notify the commander of the United States forces at ——— of that fact, and instructions will be given for the reception of the Indians at the frontier. In case the Indians refuse to return to the United States upon such terms, you will then break off all communication with them, and the Government of Great Britain will no doubt take such measures as may be necessary to protect the territory of the United States against all hostile invasion.

The commissioners met Sitting Bull and other Sioux chiefs at Fort Walsh, on British territory, and communicated to them the conditions on which their return to the United States would be permitted. The Sioux chiefs refused to accept the terms offered, and declared their determination to remain on British soil, whereupon the commissioners, in pursuance of their instructions, withdrew. Immediately after their withdrawal the Canadian authorities had a conference with the same Sioux chiefs, the results of which were communicated to the commissioners by Colonel McLeod, commanding the Mounted Police, as follows:

The object of the commission, “to effect such arrangements as may be best calculated to avert the danger of hostile incursions on the part of Sitting Bull, and the bands under his command, upon the territory of the United States,” and to secure the peace of the border, has, therefore, been


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Page:U.S. Department of the Interior Annual Report 1877.djvu/9

Rh mander of Arizona requested to treat as hostile all Indians found in that locality.

Raids by the renegades became frequent; many lives were taken, much property stolen or destroyed, and by February, 1877, the old reign of terror seemed to have returned to the southeastern portion of Arizona.

In March last it was definitely ascertained that not only were the renegades re-enforced by Indians from the Hot Springs reserve, in New Mexico, but also that that reserve was being used as a harbor of refuge for the outlaws. Accordingly, Agent Olum, under instructions from this office, proceeded with 103 San Carlos Indian police to the Hot Springs reserve, and, with the vigorous cooperation of the military commander of New Mexico, succeeded in removing, on the 1st of May, to the San Carlos reservation, 453 disarmed and dismounted Indians who were located on the Gila River.

All other Indians who had belonged to the Hot Springs agency were declared renegades, and the reserve was restored to the public domain.

Although active scouting for renegades was carried on in Southeast Arizona and Southwest New Mexico, raiding to a greater or less extent did not cease throughout the summer.

On the 2d of September a majority of the Hot Springs Indians and a portion of the Chiricahuas, numbering in all about 300, suddenly left the San Carlos reserve and struck a settlement in New Mexico, killing 8 persons and stealing some horses. In two engagements with the San Carlos police, 12 of the fugitives were killed and 43 captured. All available troops in that Territory were promptly put into the field against them, and on the 13th of last month 3 chiefs with 187 Apaches surrendered at Port Wingate, finding themselves unable to successfully carry on war in a country thoroughly occupied by United States soldiers and Indian scouts. These, with 51 who have since surrendered, have been taken to the old Hot Springs reservation, where their final disposition will be decided upon.

THE PONCAS.

Congress at its last session made provision for the removal of the Poncas from their former reservation on the Missouri River to the Indian Territory, resolved upon for the reason that it seemed desirable to get them out of the way of the much more numerous and powerful Sioux, with whom their relations were unfriendly. That removal was accordingly commenced in the early summer. The opposition it met with among the Poncas themselves and the hardships encountered on the march are set forth at length in the report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. The Poncas, about 700 in number, were taken to the Quapaw reservation, in the northeastern corner of the Indian Territory, with a view to permanent settlement. But the reluctance with which they had left their old homes, the strange aspect of a new country, an unusually large number of cases of disease and death among them, and


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User talk:Mitchell B Powell

About
Feel free to discuss with me here. I am on-again, off-again with regards to Wikisource, so I am sorry if I do not answer rapidly. Do not take a lack of quick response as any sort of judgment regarding your message. Mitchell B Powell (talk) 01:30, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

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title: User talk:Mitchell B Powell


text:
User:Mitchell B Powell

My name is, as you may have suspected, Mitchell Powell. I was formerly here under the user name "fontwords." I am here primarily, at the moment, to work on wiki Bible, mostly, I anticipate, by adding notes on alternative translation choices. I will restrain my work on wikisource to things pertinent to the task at hand. If you want to engage in discussion of matters that would be rather off-topic, I suggest you do it through my website, fontwords.com.

Peace,

Mitchell.

title: User:Mitchell B Powell


text: The New International Encyclopædia/Delbrück, Hans


text:
Page:U.S. Department of the Interior Annual Report 1877.djvu/10

VIII the fact that they were greatly annoyed by white adventurers hovering around the reservation, who stole many of their cattle and ponies and smuggled whiskey into their encampments, engendered among them a spirit of discontent which threatened to become unmanageable. They urgently asked for permission to send a delegation of chiefs to Washington to bring their complaints in person before the President, and it was reported by their agent that unless this request be granted there was great danger that they would run away to their old reserve on the Missouri River. To avoid such trouble, the permission asked for was given, and the delegation arrived here on November 7. They expressed the desire to be taken back to their old reservation on the Missouri, a request which could not be acceded to. But permission was granted them to select for themselves, among the lands at the disposal of the government in the Indian Territory, a tract at least equal in size to their old reservation, and they also received the assurance that they would be fully compensated in kind for the log-houses, furniture, and agricultural implements which, in obedience to the behests of the government, they had left behind on the Missouri.

The case of the Poncas seems entitled to especial consideration at the hands of Congress. They have always been friendly to the whites. It is said, and as far as I have been able to learn, truthfully, that no Ponca ever killed a white man. The orders of the government always met with obedient compliance at their hands. Their removal from their old homes on the Missouri River was to them a great hardship. They had been born and raised there. They had houses there in which they lived according to their ideas of comfort. Many of them had engaged in agriculture, and possessed cattle and agricultural implements. They were very reluctant to leave all this, but when Congress had resolved upon their removal, they finally overcame that reluctance and obeyed. Considering their constant good conduct, their obedient spirit, and the sacrifices they have made, they are certainly entitled to more than ordinary care at the hands of the government, and I urgently recommend that liberal provision be made to aid them in their new settlement.

While thus some progress has been made in the adjustment of difficulties and the danger of disturbance on a large scale seems remote, it would be unwise to lose sight of the lesson taught by experience, that


text: 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Delbrück, Hans


text: 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Delbrück, Martin Friedrich Rudolf von


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Page:Cartoon portraits and biographical sketches of men of the day.djvu/103

 But as he writes his name to the parchment, the bells ring in his ears, each chime a fiendish voice to rack his soul.

The deed is signed, and witnessed by half the village. They dance a dance of joy. Mathias, leaping up, joins in it, and shouts and sings with a mad glee.

In the third act the guests depart, and Mathias resolves to sleep alone; for he talks in his sleep. He locks the door of his chamber, and retires to his bed—to dream; and, in his dream, to live again through all his night of crime. But with a new horror. A prisoner at the bar, he fancies the mesmerist makes him sleep, and tell his judges, with his own lips, the secret story of his guilt.

Day comes. His wife and Christian break open the door of his chamber. They lift Mathias from his bed of horrors, in a dying state. He breathes his last in their arms.

Such is the plot of 'The Bells.'

Of Mr. Irving's character of Mathias, it is impossible to speak too highly. It is the finest impersonation seen on the English stage for years. It is a work of the highest art. The actor is lost in his creation. You see only Mathias, the terror-stricken murderer. The acting in the dream scene can only be charged with one fault. It is too real, too terrible. And at the end, the presentment of death is perfect.

Mr. Irving appeared first on the London stage, nearly six years ago, in a play called 'The Belles' Stratagem,' at the Theatre Royal, St. James's.


text: Romance of History, Mexico

title: Romance of History, Mexico


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text: Romance of History, Mexico/Preface

title: Romance of History, Mexico/Preface


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text:
The Transgression of Andrew Vane

Contents

 * Verse
 * Prologue
 * Chapter I. Mr. Carnby Receives a Letter
 * Chapter II. New Friends and Old
 * Chapter III. The Girl in Red
 * Chapter IV. Mother and Daughter
 * Chapter V. The Good and Faithful Servant
 * Chapter VI. A Revolt Suppressed
 * Chapter VII. A Pledge of Friendship
 * Chapter VIII. A Parley and a Prayer
 * Chapter IX. The Woman in the Case
 * Chapter X. The Fairy Godmother
 * Chapter XI. Some After-dinner Conversation
 * Chapter XII. Reaction
 * Chapter XIII. Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2
 * Chapter XIV. Fate is Hard—Cash!
 * Chapter XV. “As it was in the Beginnning, is now, and ever shall be”
 * Chapter XVI. A Declaration of Independence
 * Chapter XVII. A Dog and His Master
 * Chapter XVIII. Fair Exchange is No Robbery
 * Chapter XIX. Redemption
 * Chapter XX. The Shadow

title: The Transgression of Andrew Vane


text:
The Transgression of Andrew Vane/Verse

For the things ye do, when your life is new, And your sin is sinned with a smile, Ye shall pay full sore, ye men, though the score The Fates hold back for a while; Ye shall pay, at the end, for your frauded friend, For the secret your lips betray, For the lust and the lie, to the Gods on High Ye shall pay — ye shall pay — ye shall pay!

Ye shall pay ten-fold, with your heart’s best gold, Ah, tempted women and true! Ye shall render account, to the full amount, For each beautiful thing ye do. For the youth ye yield, for the soul ye shield, For the pitiful prayers ye pray, ’Tis the fancy of Fate that, soon or late, Ye shall pay — ye shall pay — ye shall pay!

title: The Transgression of Andrew Vane/Verse


text: Romance of History, Mexico/Contents

title: Romance of History, Mexico/Contents


text:
The Transgression of Andrew Vane/Prologue

For months past, she had felt that she was weakening, that the crescent wretchedness of five long years — an uninterrupted descent from level to level, on each of which the thorns of disillusion caught at, and tore from her, some shred of hope or self-respect — had done its work at last. Her courage and her faith, inherited, the one from the mental, the other from the moral, vigour of a rigid and uncompromising Puritan ancestry, were slipping from her. What the end was to be, she did not dare to ask; but it lay there ahead, grim and ominous, gradually taking form, through the mist of the immediate future. Its very suggestion of divergence from all that was familiar to her, of being even a degree more monstrous than what she had already suffered, sickened and appalled her, who had never known a dread of mere death, but drew back with unspeakable fear before the looming of this unknown, ultimate degradation.

John Vane had wooed his wife with the easy confidence born of adequate position, adequate means, and more than adequate ability. Four years of Harvard had taught him to believe life in the little Western town which had been his birthplace, to be, for a man of literary bent, a practical impossibility; and when he stepped easily from the halls of his Alma Mater into the offices of a Boston magazine, it was a practical renunciation of his early environment, and an expression of his resolve to follow in the actual as well as the metaphorical footprints of some of the greatest figures in American literature.

Six months later, he announced his engagement to Helen Sterling, the only daughter of a pioneer in copper, whose character had long since built him up a reputation to which, later, the five figures of his income lent an added lustre. From first to last, from the occasion of the young collegian’s presentation to the reigning belle of her season to the moment when she said, “I, Helen, do take thee, John” — and the rest of it — there was, by way of proving the rule, never a stumbling-block in the exceptionally smooth course of their love. They were made for each other, people said, and no one subscribed more confidently to this opinion than themselves.

But — and does ever a honeymoon pass without the uneasy awakening of that latent ‘But’? — Helen was not a month older before she was forced to the unwilling conclusion that there was a singular, intangible something lacking in her husband’s character. It was not that he was not gifted; for that, his most casual acquaintance knew him to be; — or in love with her; for of that he gave evidence almost as conclusive as would have been furnished by the ceaseless reiteration of that spoken devotion which a woman craves, without hope of receiving, from the man she loves. But things had come to him so easily, so independent of any effort of his own, that he was become the chief of optimists, imbued with the serene and confident laisser aller of the clan; and, now that association was making her intimate with his methods of work, she found them to be wholly haphazard, inspired merely by the whim of the moment, unregulated by any remotest evidence of system. His performances were the meaningless flashes and snaps of Chinese crackers, not the steady and purposeful, if less imposing, fire of a skilfully laid fuse, leading on to great results. His confidence in his own ability, in the certainty of his ultimate triumph, was so absolute that he was content with the minimum of endeavor, oblivious to the fact that only statues can remain thus passive with the assurance that laurel wreaths will be laid before them. He did not realize that the living must pluck their laurels for themselves.

Lacking the initiative which is its indispensable ally, Vane nevertheless possessed all the impatience of restraint or routine characteristic of the creative faculty. A year of editorial work was sufficient to convince him that it was not possible for such a temperament as his to be trammelled by fixed hours, and strait-jacketed by observance of detail. He resigned his position, on the plea of devoting himself entirely to writing, and there ensued a period during which he sunned himself in society’s favour, and received his share of flattery in return for several trifles contributed to the magazines, but created nothing worthy even of the infinitesimal effort which he made. A man had to think, to arrange, to compose, he told his wife. Rome was not built in a day, and the mere manual act of transferring his thoughts to paper was a trifle, when contrasted with the process of incubation. So month after month dragged by, and little by little, as his novelty wore off, John Vane dropped out of society’s consideration as a literary potentiality, and came to be regarded as nothing more than one of many good-looking, agreeable men-about-town, to whom, in the matter of his wife and his worldly weal, the Fates had been generous beyond the ordinary.

One of the first unmistakable signs of degeneration was his now constant complaint that he was unappreciated. The average man’s share of applause is in strict proportion to his deserts. In Vane’s case the allowance had been appreciably in excess of his due, but it was exhausted at last, and flattery is a drug which, with indulgence, becomes, a necessity. Deprived of it, he grew fretful and impatient, made occasional abortive efforts at performance of the great things formerly expected of him, and talked savagely of prejudice when his manuscripts came back from the editors, accompanied by polite notes wherein the pill of non-availability was sugar-coated with reference to the pleasure of examining his work, and the regret with which it was returned.

For a time he had his wife’s most loyal support and sympathy. She liked to believe that what he said was true, that literary excellence counted for nothing in a commercial age, and that a man who would not conform to silly superficial standards had no chance of recognition. But Helen was a woman to whom a goose was a goose, and a swan a swan, at all times, and regardless of ownership. Moreover, she had been a lover of the best in literature since first she had been given the run of her father’s library, and sat for entire afternoons curled into a big arm-chair, skipping the long words of Thackeray or Charles Lamb. Her critical sense, thus perfected, was now too alert to allow of any treachery to standard. Intensely loyal she was, but intensely just, as well; and all her eagerness to believe her husband what he claimed to be could not blind her to the mediocrity, often the utter worthlessness, of his later work. With revelation arose, naturally, an ardent desire to aid him, and strict sincerity, which was her most admirable quality, pointed to candour as the only adequate means. With his resentment of her counsel came her first disheartening insight into the shallowness and perversity of his nature. That he could accuse her of attempting to belittle him, rank her as at one with those who misunderstood him, hurt her more keenly than if he had turned and cursed her. It was the parting of their ways, the first decisive step on the road which she was to follow wearily for five years of discouragement and disillusion.

With the waning of his popularity Vane renounced Boston, as he had renounced his birthplace, and they moved to New York. Here, for a time, he contributed listlessly to the humorous weeklies and the less pretentious magazines; but reputation of the kind he sought was not to be won by mere facility in rhyming or in writing around a dozen illustrations; and, presently, he reverted to his old complaint of prejudice and non-appreciation. Then a chance acquaintance led him into speculation. Where abler men failed, John Vane was swept into complete disaster. In a transient panic, he was caught long of a big line of stocks, tried to average too soon, and was finally forced to let go his holdings at about the bottom of the market.

It was ruin, absolute and utter; but Helen almost welcomed it, in the belief that the spur of a necessity he had never known before would goad him to the achievement of better things. But the character of John Vane was not the stuff whereof is made the moral phœnix. He shrivelled before the fire of defeat, and sank hopelessly into the ashes of surrender.

They moved from their luxurious apartment to a cheap hotel, thence to a cheaper one, thence to a boarding-house. The backward path was strewn with unsettled bills, and loans never to be repaid. Vane wrote spasmodically for the daily papers, and for such of the magazines as would still accept his work, and, on the pittance thus earned, and the generosity of Helen’s father, they contrived to exist, in a fashion, for something over two years.

But, given the temperament of John Vane, the next development was inevitable. At first Helen sturdily refused to believe that a new demon had entered the hell which he was making of her life. She met him, at night, with an attempt at a smile, deliberately ignoring his unsteady gait, his sodden face, his hot, rank breath. But the evidence was plain, constant, incontestable. Drink had gripped him, and she knew too well that whatever of weakness laid hand upon her husband never relinquished hold.

So another year went by, the gulf between them widening and widening. Finally, he struck her —and then, or the first time, that final degradation, that ominous, unknowable end of hope and self-respect, loomed, hideous and shadowy, through the fog before her. Unable to interpret its significance, she told herself, nevertheless, that it was very near.

They were living in Kingsbridge, in a little frame house into which a man who had known her husband in his Wall Street days had come, in settlement of a bad debt, and which he had offered them, for charity’s sake, at a paltry annual rental. The same Samaritan had given Vane a small position in his office, and the latter now went to and fro, between the city and its gruesome little neighbour on the Harlem, taking leave of his wife with a curt, contemptuous nod, and returning, bloated and foul-breathed, to pass the evenings in a semi-stupor.

The chance had been too good to be disregarded, but life under such conditions was no better than sheer existence. The cottage was one of a squat, ill-favoured row on a side street, within a stone’s throw of the railway station. They had found it equipped, in a way, with cheap, yellowish furniture, worn and faded carpets, and kitchen utensils distinguished by the grime of many meals and the musty inheritance of insufficient washings. About the house there was a stale, moist smell of plaster, and the plot of turf in the little front yard was dry and discoloured, like the mats of imitation grass in the establishment of a country photographer. Helen had striven to redeem the desolation of the tiny living-room with the few pictures and articles of furniture which she had contrived to save from the wreck of their former fortunes; but the attempt was not successful. The rare prints were out of place against the tawdry wall-paper, and the few pieces of Sheraton and Chippendale to which she had clung took on, in such surroundings, the shabbiness of what was already there.

She was obliged to do her own marketing and cooking and housework, since a servant, in their straitened circumstances, was out of the question: and not the least part of her martyrdom was the purchase of scrawny yellow fowls, and vegetables of a freshness past, and their preparation in the dingy little kitchen, which left an odour of frying lard on the very clothes she wore.

Vane had left her, an hour before, on his way to the city; and now, as the weight of depression became intolerable, she took her hat, locked the door behind her, and started for a long walk over the hill-roads back of the town. This had lately come to be her habit. It was something to escape, even for half a day, from the dispirited little suburb, with its sallow frame houses, its patched fences, and its cinder-strewn roadways, along which lean cats slunk guiltily, and dishevelled fowls picked their way in search of food. Up on the hills, the air of late November was keen and chill, and grayed with a drifting smoke-mist from distant fires of dried leaves. The brown grass was veiled here and there with thin patches of snow, stippled with faint shadows, cast by the filial oak-leaves, which cling longer than any other to the maternal bough. As Helen passed, squirrels darted nimbly away to a safe distance, and then sat up to watch her, with their fore paws held coquettishly against their breasts. It was all very sane and healthy, all in wonderful contrast to her morbid life in the shadow of John Vane’s personality.

There had been no children — a fact which, in happier hours, she had deplored, but for which she was now profoundly grateful. There are things which it is easier to bear alone. To share with another — and that other her child — the humiliation of her ill-starred association with her husband, would but have been to double the burden’s weight. In her own case the period of martyrdom was well-nigh done. For his son and hers it would simply be at its beginning, tragic in its boundless possibilities of shame.

As the thought came of the motherhood thus denied her, she wondered why she had been faithful to John Vane. Once she had believed in him, and so strong had been this faith that some shreds of it yet remained, to bind her to him through all the unspeakably humiliating days of his gradual but inevitable degradation. Nor was her fidelity of the negative, meaningless kind which is strong simply because unassailed. As a woman of the world, she had, more than once, been brought into contact with men lax in their scrupulosity, but scrupulous in their laxity. She had had her temptations, her chances of escape; and the price to be paid was not exorbitant, in view of the relief to be obtained. But upon these she had resolutely turned her back, hoping against hope for the miracle which never came. Even now, her father’s door stood wide to her, and every instinct of reason impelled her to a separation. But Vane had not only killed her love for him; he had destroyed her very taste for life itself, under any circumstances whatever. She clung to him now, not because she loved him, not because it was impossible to do without him, but because he had sapped her youth, her faith, her craving for anything short of oblivion.

She stood for a long time, motionless, at a point where a little stream tinkled pleasantly over the stones beneath its first thin sheathing of ice. The trees, saving only the oaks, were bare, and stood stiffly, in close proximity, in the weird, white brilliance of contre-lumière; and for a few moments the barren tranquillity of the scene was indescribably restful. Then the light changed, as a slow cloud crept across the sun, and, with the coming of the resultant shadow, Helen, always exquisitely sensible to the moods of nature, returned suddenly to a consciousness of her extremity. It was not real, then, this negative beauty, this serene simplicity of nun-like, early winter; it was not real, her own unwonted calm! What was actual, material, inevitable, was the personality of the man who dominated her life like an evil spirit, using her as his chattel, abusing her as his slave. Abruptly, the whole course of their association spread itself before her, up to her last glimpse of him, that morning, shambling on his way to the miserable daily duty to which he had sunk. And this was the life which she had been so eager to share with him, the life which, in those early days, his promises had made to seem so fair! Together, they were to have seen the world — the wonderful, great world, that had shone in the distance, like a Promised Land, from the Pisgah of her girlish imaginings: London, Paris, Rome, the Nile, Greece, India, and Japan. They were to have seen them all — drunk, in company, of the wine of beauty and inspiration, doubling their individual pleasures with the magic wand of mutual comprehension, as he should turn the treasures found along their enchanted way into such words as men preserve to praise, and she stand at his side, the first to read and reverence. And now? For the first time, the full splendour of the dream, the full squalor of the reality, swept down upon her. She saw him, diverted from his own ideals, and ignorant of hers, taking the initial step upon his downward way, no foot of which was ever to be retraced: drunken, debauched, impotent to write one worthy word, skulking, shamefaced and sodden, through a world of sunlight and manly endeavour, like some noisome prowler of the night, surprised, far from its lair, by the dawn of sweet young day. She was no more than a girl, and already it was too late. The blitheness of life was gone, never to return. For a moment she stood with her worn hands crushed against her face, and then she stretched her arms upward to their full length, and cried aloud, “Ah, God! Ah, God!” to the chill, clear sky of the November day.

A voice at her side aroused her before she realized that she was not alone. At the sound she turned guiltily, and found herself face to face with a man she had never seen. He stood quite near, hat in hand, surveying her with cool, steel-blue eyes. In that first instant, with a perception sharpened by her mental anguish, she became suddenly as familiar with every detail of his appearance as if they had been intimates for years. He was tall and slender, and unmistakably young; and, in singular contrast to his pallid complexion, his lips, under the thin mustache, were full and red, with a strange, sensual crookedness that was half a smile and half a sneer. There was about him a curious, compellant air of mastery and self-possession, as of one sure of himself, and accustomed to control; and his first words, under their veneer of polite solicitude, were, in their total lack of surprise or idle curiosity, significant of the trained man of the world, while the quaint, foreign flavour of the title by which he addressed her was equally suggestive of the cosmopolite.

“You are in distress, madame?”

Helen paused before replying. With the instinctive delicacy of her sex, she realized that in the approach of a stranger who had surprised her in a betrayal of extreme emotion there was something which she would do well to resent; and yet she was come to one of those crises which every woman knows; when the need of sympathy, even the most casual, was imperative — when, albeit at the sacrifice of conventionality, she was fain to seek support, to grasp a firm hand, to hear a friendly, though an unknown, voice. Pride, her stanch ally through all the bitter hours of her despair, had weakened at this the most crucial point, and, like a frightened child, she would have run for reassurance into the arms of the veriest passer-by.

“Perhaps,” she answered presently. “But, believe me, the expression of my feeling was purely involuntary. I thought myself alone. There are, ordinarily, few passers by this road.”

He had replaced his hat now, and was no longer looking at her, but down across the shelving slope of hillside, spiked with slender trees, as close-set as the bristles of a giant brush. When he spoke again, his tone had curiously assumed the existence of a relation between them, as if, instead of total strangers, they had been old acquaintances, come together at this spot, and exchanging impressions of the scene before them.

“Strange,” he said slowly, “that you should be in distress, when Nature, which always seems to me the most sympathetic of companions, is wrapped in so great repose. In my dealings with humanity, I’ve frequently met with misunderstanding; but never, in the attitude of Nature, a lack of what I felt to be completest comprehension of my mood. She always seems to divine our difficulties, and to have some little helpful hint, some small parable, which, if we read it aright, will point out the solution of our problem, or at least serve to soothe the momentary pang. This little stream at our feet, for example: how it preaches the lesson that while we must meet with days that are cold, unsympathetic, drear, it’s not only possible, but best, to preserve, under the ice in which adversity wraps our hearts, the life and laughter which friendlier suns have taught us! I wonder if that is not the secret of all human contentment — to resign oneself to the chilling touch of the wintry days of life, secure in the knowledge that summer will return, the compensation be made manifest, and the wrong turned to right.”

The rebuff which was on Helen’s lips an instant before was never spoken. It was one of those moments when the intuitive assertion of dignity and self-reliance lays down its arms before the need of comfort and companionship. She did not look at him, but in her silence there was that which encouraged him to continue.

“You don’t resent my speaking to you in this way?” he asked. “After all, why should you? You are a bubble on this strange, erratic stream of life, and I another. Bubble does not ask bubble the reason of their meeting, at some predestined spot between source and sea. Instead, they touch, perhaps to drift apart again after a moment; perhaps, as one often sees them, to unite in one larger, better, brighter bubble than either had been before. Neither cares a tittle for its chance companion’s previous history, or for what the other bubbles say. Curiosity as to another’s past is the prerogative of small-spirited man, as is also the dread of adverse criticism. Now the commingling bubbles are one of Nature’s little parables, and my conception of ideal sympathy.”

His eyes were upon her now, and, strangely impelled, her own came round to meet them.

“I’m not wholly sure that I get your meaning,” she said, feeling that he exacted a reply. “Is it that association and sympathy are merely the result of chance?”

“Chance is only a word that we use to express the workings of a force beyond our understanding.” He stooped and picked up a little stone, weighed it momentarily in his palm, and then, reversing his hand, let it fall. “One would hardly be apt to call it chance,” he added, “that, after leaving my hand, that pebble reached the ground. If we understood destiny as we understand gravitation, we should not say that our present meeting was due to chance, but rather that it was the logical outcome of a natural law.”

There was a long pause, during which he glanced at her more than once, with the seemingly careless but actually keenly observant air of a skilled physician studying a nervous patient. She was a little frightened, she confessed to herself, as she gathered her wits, staring at the bit of river which was visible from where they stood, and the slopes beyond. For weeks she had been prey to an apathy which was only broken, at intervals, by an outburst of passionate revolt. Now, in some inexplicable fashion, the burden seemed to have slipped from her shoulders, and the feeling of depression was replaced by one of uplifting, of unreasonable exhilaration. The sensation was vaguely familiar to her, and, groping for a clue, she found its parallel in the preliminary action of ether, which she had taken a year or so before. Through the growing, not unpleasurable, dizziness which came upon her thus, the man’s voice made its way.

“Let me try to explain myself more clearly,” he was saying. “Something — God, or chance, or destiny, or whatever you choose to call it — led me around that last turn of the road at a moment when, if I’m not mistaken, a fellow being came to the snapping-point of self-control. I can’t think our meeting without significance. I believe I was sent to help you. The question is, whether you’re broad and generous and courageous enough to take for granted a formal introduction, and the gradual evolution of acquaintance into intimacy, up to the moment when you would naturally turn to me, as your most loyal friend, for sympathy. And I think you will do that.”

Once more Helen looked at him. Her mind was curiously clouded, but the sensation gave her no uneasiness. Instead, she felt that she was smiling.

“I think you will do it,” he repeated.

He was holding out his hand with the confidence of one who knows it will be accepted, and, after a moment, she laid her own within it. His fingers closed firmly on hers, and, of a sudden, the world drew in about her, graying, as under the touch of fog. Her last perception was of his eyes fixed full on hers with an expression of quiet amusement.

“I’m faint,” she murmured, “I am — faint—”

When she came to herself, his eyes still held her.

“In the strange, unknowable book of Fate,” he said, “it was written, from the beginning of time, that you and I should meet upon a dull hillside in late November, and — and that all that has been should be!”

Before she had time to answer, he had left her.

Briefly she stood, dizzy and perplexed, and then, after one great leap, her heart seemed to shudder and stand still. She was in the sordid little living-room of the Kingsbridge cottage, and outside the day was glooming into twilight!

Without power to move, she watched from the window the man who had just gone, pass down the path and through the gate, and, turning, wave a farewell, before he hurried away in the direction of the station. Then she was fully aroused by the entrance of the postman, and went slowly to meet him at the door. There was only one letter, but this was directed in her husband’s unsteady hand, and, as she opened it, the contents leapt at her like a blow:

“:

“Let me be as brief as you will think me brutal. When this reaches you I shall already be far at sea — with another woman. I have seen how you despised me, and I think that you know this, and that I hate you for it. I shall not ask you to forgive me, for I, too, have many things to forgive. If you had understood me, much that has happened might never have been. But what is past is past. Let us bury it and have done.

For minutes, which seemed an eternity, Helen stood, fingering the wretched sheet, and gazing straight before her with blank, unwinking eyes. Then, with a rush, came remembrance, and with it a great wave of relief. Before she fully comprehended her intention, she was at the gate of the cottage. But there she halted, with a nameless sense of loss and desperation. From the distance had come the yelp of a signalled locomotive, and then a dozen short, choking pants, as it dragged the reluctant train into motion. He had gone!

“But he will come back!” she murmured, “and, that he may come sooner, I will write.”

It was only towards the end of her black, sleepless night that she remembered that she did not even know his name.

Late autumn slid gloomily into winter, and winter into spring, before she realized that he would never come. To her father she had written nothing of Vane’s desertion. For a year past, his name had not been mentioned in their letters, so the omission was no longer noted, and Mr. Sterling’s remittances enabled her to live in material comfort. She clung to the forlorn little cottage with a vague feeling that by it alone could she be traced when He should come back for her; but took a servant, a slovenly little wench, who moved in a circumambient odour of carbolic acid, and amassed dust under beds and sofas as a miser hoards his gold.

Helen herself saw nothing, heeded nothing. Save in the impulse which followed her reading of Vane’s letter, her mind was never wholly clear from the shadow which had descended upon it at the moment of that hand-grip on the hillside. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, she sat at the window, motionless, listening for the creak of the gate, the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path, which would tell her that He had returned.

With spring the disillusion came, and she crept back to the shelter of her father’s house, but to no change, save slow and listless surrender to the inevitable. Sometimes they heard her whispering to herself, as she sat, with some book which they had brought her, unopened on her knee — odd scraps of sentences, and broken phrases, without apparent relevancy or connection. The family physician, a friend from boyhood of Andrew Sterling, tapped his forehead significantly at such times as these, and the hands of the two men would meet in a grasp of mutual understanding.

One night in late August her child was born, and the west wind that brought a new soul to the Sterling door, pausing an instant in its passing, gathered up, and in its kind arms bore away, on its pathless flight into the Great Unknown, the tired spirit of Helen Vane.


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Page:Best Russian Short Stories.djvu/167

T was a dark autumn night. The old banker was pacing from corner to corner of his study, recalling to his mind the party he gave in the autumn fifteen years before. There were many clever people at the party and much interesting conversation. They talked among other things of capital punishment. The guests, among them not a few scholars and journalists, for the most part disapproved of capital punishment. They found it obsolete as a means of punishment, unfitted to a Christian State and immoral. Some of them thought that capital punishment should be replaced universally by life-imprisonment.

"I don't agree with you," said the host. "I myself have experienced neither capital punishment nor life-imprisonment, but if one may judge a priori, then in my opinion capital punishment is more moral and more humane than imprisonment. Execution kills instantly, life-imprisonment kills by degrees. Who is the more humane executioner, one who kills you in a few seconds or one who draws the life out of you incessantly, for years?"

"They're both equally immoral," remarked one of the guests, "because their purpose is the same, to take away life. The State is not God. It has no right to take away that which it cannot give back, if it should so desire."

Among the company was a lawyer, a young man of about twenty-five. On being asked his opinion, he said:

"Capital punishment and life-imprisonment are equally immoral; but if I were offered the choice between them, I would certainly choose the second. It's better to live somehow than not to live at all."

There ensued a lively discussion. The banker who was


text: The New International Encyclopædia/Delbrück, Martin Friedrich Rudolf von


text:
The Transgression of Andrew Vane/Chapter I

Mr. and Mrs. Jeremy Carnby furnished to the reflective observer a striking illustration of the circumstance that extremes not only meet, but, not infrequently, marry. Mrs. Carnby confessed to fifty, and was in reality forty-seven. As, in any event, incredulity answers “Never!” when a woman makes mention of her age, she preferred that the adverb should be voiced with flattering emphasis and in her presence, rather than sarcastically and behind her back. She was nothing if not original.
 * Chapter I. Mr. Carnby Receives a Letter.

Mrs. Carnby was distinctly plain, a fact which five minutes of her company effectually deprived of all significance: her power of attraction being as forceful as that of a magnet, and similar to a magnet’s in its absence of outward evidence. She was a woman of temperate but kaleidoscopic enthusiasms, who had retained enough of the atmosphere of each to render her interesting to a variety of persons. Prolonged experience of the world had invested her with an admirable broad-mindedness, which caused her to tread the notoriously dangerous paths of the American Colony, in which she was a constant and conspicuous figure, with the assurance of an Indian fakir walking on broken glass — pleasurably appreciative of the risk, that is, while assured by consummate savoir faire against cutting her feet. Her fort was tact. She had at one and the same time a faculty for forgetting confidences which commended her to women, and a knack of remembering them which endeared her to men. It was with the latter that she was preëminently successful. What might have been termed her masculine method was based on the broad, general principle that the adult male is most interested in the persons most interested in him, and it never failed, in its many modifications, of effect. Men told her of their love-affairs, for example, with the same unquestioning assurance wherewith they intrusted their funds to a reputable banker; and were apt to remember the manner in which their confidences were received, longer than the details of the confidences themselves. And when you can listen for an hour, with every evidence of extreme interest, to a man’s rhapsodies about another woman, and, at the end, send him away with a distinct recollection of the gown you wore, or the perfume on the handkerchief he picked up for you, then, dear lady, there is nothing more to be said.

Mr. Jeremy Carnby infrequently accompanied his wife to a reception or a musicale, somewhat as Chinese idols and emperors are occasionally produced in public — as an assurance of good faith, that is, and in proof of actual existence. As it is not good form to flaunt one’s marriage certificate in the faces of society, an undeniable, flesh-and-blood husband is, perhaps, the next best thing — when exhibited, of course, with that golden mean of frequency which lies between a hint of henpeck on the one side and a suggestion of neglect upon the other. Mrs. Carnby blazed in the social firmament of the American Colony with the unwavering fixity of the Polar Star: Jeremy appeared rarely, but with extreme regularity, like a comet of wide orbit, as evidence that the marital solar system was working smoothly and well.

Mrs. Carnby was, and not unreasonably, proud of Jeremy. They had lived twenty-five years in Paris, and, to the best of her knowledge and belief, he was as yet unaware, at least in a sentimental sense, that other women so much as existed. Since one cannot own the Obélisque or the Vénus de Milo, it is assuredly something to have a husband who never turns his head on the Avenue du Bois, or finds a use for an opera-glass at the Folies-Bergère. Jeremy was not amusing, still less brilliant, least of all popular; but he was preeminently loyal and unfeignedly affectionate — qualities sufficiently rare in the world in which Mrs. Carnby lived, and moved, and had the greater portion of her being, to recommend themselves strongly to her shrewd, uncompromising mind. In her somewhat over-furnished life he occupied a distinct niche, which one else could have filled; and in this, to her way of thinking, he was unique — as a husband. After foie gras and champagne, Mrs. Carnby always breakfasted on American hominy, a mealy red apple, and a glass of milk. She was equally careful, however, to take the meal in company with Jeremy. He was part of the treatment.

The Carnby hôtel was one of the number in the Villa Dupont. One turned in through a narrow gateway, from the sordid dinginess of the Rue Pergolèse, and, at a stone’s throw from the latter’s pungent cheese and butter shops, and grimy charbonneries, came delightfully into the shade of chestnuts greener than those exposed to the dust of the great avenues, and to the sound of fountains plashing into basins buried in fresh turf. It was very quiet, like some charming little back street at St. Germain or Versailles, and the houses, with their white walls and green shutters and glass-enclosed porticos, were more like country villas than Parisian hôtels. The gay stir of the boulevards and the Avenue du Bois might, to all seeming, have been a hundred kilometres distant, so still and simple was this little corner of the capital. Jeremy frankly adored it. He had a great office looking out upon the Place de l’Opéra, and when he rose from his desk, his head aching with the reports and accounts of the mighty insurance company of which he was the European manager, and went to the window in search of distraction, it was only to have his eyes met by a dizzier hodge-podge than that of the figures he had left — the moil of camions, omnibuses, and cabs, threading in and out at the intersection of the six wide driveways, first up and down, and then across, as the brigadier in charge regulated the traffic with sharp trills of his whistle, which jerked up the right arms of the policemen at the crossings, as if some one had pulled the strings of so many marionettes with white batons in their hands. All this was not irritating, or even displeasing, to Jeremy. He was too thorough an American, despite his long residence in Paris, and too keen a business man, notwithstanding his wife’s fortune, not to derive satisfaction from every evidence of human energy. The Place de l’Opéra appealed to the same instincts in his temperament that would have been gratified by the sight of a stop-cylinder printing-machine in action. But, not the less for that, his heart was domiciled in the hôtel in the Villa Dupont.

On a certain evening in mid-April, Jeremy had elaborated his customary half-hour walk homeward with a detour by way of the Boulevard Malesherbes, the Parc Monceau, and the Avenue Hoche, and it was close upon six when he let himself in at his front door, and laid his derby among the shining top-hats of his wife’s callers, on the table in the antichambre. Through the half-parted curtains at the salon door came scraps of conversation, both in French and English, and the pleasant tinkle of cups and saucers; and, as he passed, he had a glimpse of several well-groomed men, in white waistcoats and gaiters, sitting on the extreme edges of their chairs, with their toes turned in, their elbows on their knees, and tea-cups in their hands; and smartly-dressed women, with big hats, and their veils tucked up across their noses, nibbling at petits fours. He turned into his study with a feeling of satisfaction. It was incomprehensible to his mind, this seemingly universal passion for tea and sweet cakes; but if the institution was to exist under his roof at all, it was gratifying to know that, albeit the tea was the finest Indian overland, and the sweet cakes from the Maison Gagé, it was not for these reasons alone that the 16th Arrondissement was eager, and the 7th not loath, to be received at the hôtel in the Villa Dupont. Jeremy knew that his wife was the most popular woman in the Colony, as to him she was the best and most beautiful in the world. Before he touched the Temps or the half-dozen letters which lay upon his table, he leaned forward, with his elbows on the silver-mounted blotter, and his temples in his hands, and looked long at her photograph smiling at him out of its Russian enamel frame. If the world, which laughed at him for his prim black neckties and his common-sense shoes, even while it respected him for his business ability, had seen him thus, it would have shared his wife’s knowledge that Jeremy Carnby was an uncommonly good sort.

He opened his letters carefully, slitting the envelopes with a slender paper-knife, and endorsing each one methodically with the date of receipt before passing on to the next. All were private and personal, his voluminous business mail being handled at his office by a secretary and two stenographers. With characteristic loyalty, Jeremy wrote regularly to a score of old acquaintances and poor relations in the States, most of whom he had seen but once or twice in the twenty-five years of his exile, and read their replies with interest, often with emotion: and his own left hand knew not how many cheques had been signed, and cheering words written, by his unassuming right, in reply to the plaints and appeals of his intimates of former years. For the steady, white light of Jeremy Carnby’s kindliness let never a glint of its brightness pass through the closely-woven bushel of his modesty.

He hesitated with the last letter in his hand, reread it slowly, and then lit a cigar and sat looking fixedly at his inkstand, blowing out thin coils of smoke. So Mrs. Carnby found him, as she swept in, dropped into a big red-leather arm-chair, and slid smoothly into an especial variety of small talk, wherewith she was wont to smooth the business wrinkles from his forehead, and bring him into a frame of mind proper to an appreciation of the efforts of their chef.

“If it isn’t smoking a cigar at fifteen minutes before the dinner-hour!” she began, with an assumption of indignation. “Really, Jeremy, you’re getting quite revolutionary in your ways. I think I shall tell Armand that hereafter we shall begin dinner with coffee, have salad with the Rüdesheimer, and take our soup in the conservatory.”

Mr. Carnby laid down his cigar.

“I lit it absent-mindedly,” he answered. “Have they gone?”

“No, of course not, stupid!” retorted his wife. “They’re all out there. I told them to wait until we’d finished dinner. Now, Jeremy! why will you ask such questions?”

“It was stupid of me,” he admitted.

“And to punish you, I shall tell you who they were,” announced Mrs. Carnby. “I might do worse and tell you all they said. You’re so — so comfortable, Jeremy. When I’m on the point of boiling over because of the inanities of society I can always come in here and open my safety-valve, and you don’t care a particle, do you, if I fill your study full of conversational steam?”

Jeremy smiled pleasantly.

“You nice person!” added his wife. “Well, here goes. First, there was that stupid Mrs. Maitland. She told me all about her portrait. It seems Benjamin-Constant is painting it — and I thought the others would never come. Finally, however, they did — the Villemot girls and Mrs. Sidney Kane, and a few men — Daulas and De Bousac and Gerald Kennedy and that insufferable little Lister man. Then Madame Palffy. It makes me furious every time I hear her called ‘madame.’ The creature was born in Worcester — and do you know, Jeremy, I’m positive she buys her gowns at an upholsterer’s? No mere dressmaker could lend her that striking resemblance to a sofa, which is growing stronger every day! Her French is too impossible. She was telling Daulas about something that never happened to her on her way out to their country place, and I heard her say ‘compartiment de dames soûles’ quite distinctly. I can’t imagine how she contrives to know so many things that aren’t so. One would suppose she’d stumble over a real, live fact now and again, if only by accident. And her husband’s no better. Trying to find the truth in one of his stories severely taxes one’s aptitude in long division. I saw him at the Hatzfeldts’ musicale night before last. Pazzini was playing, and Palffy was sound asleep in a corner, after three glasses of punch. I really felt sorry that a man with such a wife should be missing something attractive, and I was going to poke him surreptitiously with my fan, but Tom Radwalader said, ‘Better let the lying dog sleep!’ He positively is amusing, that Radwalader man!”

Mrs. Carnby looked up at her husband for the admiring smile which was the usual guarantee that she had amused him, but only to find Jeremy’s eyes once more riveted upon the inkstand, and the cigar between his thin lips again.

“My dear Jeremy,” she said, “I’m convinced that you’ve not heard one syllable of my carefully prepared discourse.”

“My dear Louisa,” responded Mr. Carnby with unwonted readiness, “I’m convinced that I have not. The truth of the matter is,” he added apologetically, “that I’ve received an unusual letter.”

“It must indeed be unusual if it can cause you to ignore my conversation,” said Louisa Carnby.

“That is perfectly true,” said Jeremy with conviction.

His wife rose, came over to his side, and kissed him on the tip of his nose.

“Good my lord,” she said, “I think I like your tranquil endorsement of the compliments I make for myself better than those which other men invent out of their own silly heads! Am I to know what is in your unusual letter?”

“Why not?” asked Jeremy seriously.

“Why not, indeed?” said Mrs. Carnby. “I have taken you for better or worse. There’s so little ‘worse’ about the contract, Jeremy, that I stand ready to accept such as there is in a willing spirit, even when it comes in the form of a dull letter.”

Jeremy looked up at her with his familiar smile.

“Louisa,” he said, “if I were twenty years of age, I should ask nothing better than the chance to marry you again.”

“Man! but thou’rt the cozener!” exclaimed Mrs. Carnby. “Thou’dst fair turn the head of a puir lassis. There — that’ll do. Go on with your letter!”

“It’s from Andrew Sterling,” said Jeremy. “You’ll remember him, I think, in Boston. He was a friend of my father’s, and kept a friendly eye on me after the old gentleman’s death. We’ve alway corresponded, more or less regularly, and now he writes to say — but perhaps I’d best read you that part of his letter.”

“Undoubtedly,” put in his wife. “That is, if you can. People write so badly, nowadays.”

“Um — um—” mumbled Jeremy, skipping the introductory sentences. “Ah! Here we have it. Mr. Sterling says: ‘Now for the main purpose of this letter. My poor daughter’s only son, Andrew Sterling Vane, is sailing to-day on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. He has been obliged to leave Harvard, as his health is not robust, and I have thought that perhaps the sea-voyage and some months in Paris might put him in shape—”

“Good Lord!” broke in Mrs. Carnby. “Imagine some months in Paris by way of rest-cure!”

“‘And so,” continued Jeremy, “I’m sending him over, in hopes that the change may be of benefit. He is a singular lad — sensitive in the extreme, and utterly inexperienced — and I am going to ask if, “for auld lang syne,” you will be so good as to make him welcome. I don’t mean, of course, that I expect you to exercise any sort of supervision. The boy must take care of himself, like all of us, but I would like to feel that, in a strange city, there is one place where he may find a hint of home.”

Jeremy paused.

“Go on!” observed Mrs. Carnby.

“There is really nothing more of importance,” said her husband, “except that I’ve also received a note from young Vane. He’s at the Ritz.”

“Of course!” ejaculated Mrs. Carnby. “Paying two louis per diem for his room, and making semi-daily trips to Morgan, Harjes’. They’re wonderful, these tourist bank-accounts. Their progress from a respectable amount to absolute zero is as inevitable as the recession of the sea from high-water mark to dead low tide — a steady withdrawal from the bank, my dear Jeremy! How old might the young gentlemen be?”

Mr. Carnby made a mental calculation.

“His mother was about my own age,” he said presently. “I know she and I used to go to dancing-school together. And she died in childbirth, if I remember rightly. Her husband was a scamp — ran off with another woman. I never saw him. That would make the boy about twenty or twenty-one.”

“He will be rather good-looking,” said Mrs. Carnby reflectively, “with a general suggestion of soap and cold water about him. He will wear preposterously heavy boots with the soles projecting all around like little piazzas, and a straw hat, and dog-skin gloves with seams like small hedges, and turned back at the wrists. They’re all exactly alike, the young Americans one sees over here. One would think they came by the dozen, in a box. And when he is sitting down he will be hitching at his trousers all the time, so that the only thing one remembers about him afterwards is the pattern of his stockings.”

“We ought to invite him to dinner,” suggested Jeremy.

“Without doubt,” agreed his wife; “but to breakfast first, I think — and on Sunday. One can judge a man’s character so well by the way he behaves at Sunday breakfast. If he fidgets, and drinks quantities of water, then he’s dissipated! I don’t know why Saturday night is always fatal to dissipated men, but it is. If his top hat looks as if it had been brushed the wrong way, then he’s religious, and has been to church. I shall go out and inspect it while you’re smoking. If he does all the talking, he’s an ass; and if I do it all, he’s a fool.”

“You’re a difficult critic, my dear,” said Jeremy. “You must remember he is only twenty or so.”

“To be twenty or so in appearance is a man’s misfortune,” replied Mrs. Carnby. “To be twenty or so in behaviour is his fault. I’ll write to him to-night, and ask him to breakfast on Sunday, tout à fait en famille, and we’ll try him on a — you don’t mind my calling you a dog, Jeremy?”

“Not in the least,” said Mr. Carnby.

“Eh bien!” said his wife. “We’ll have him to breakfast on Sunday, and try him on a dog! If he’s presentable and amusing, I shall make him my exclusive property. If he’s dull, I shall tell him Madame Palffy is a woman he should cultivate assiduously. I send her all the people who don’t pass muster at my dinners. She has them next day, like warmed-over vol-au-vents. My funeral baked meats do coldly furnish forth her breakfast-table.”

“When you wish to appear most unmerciful, my dear,” said Jeremy, “you always pick out Madame Palffy; and whenever you do, I spoil the effect of what you say by thinking of—”

“Margery?” put in Mrs. Carnby. “Yes, of course, that’s my soft spot, Jeremy. There’s only one thing which Margery Palffy ought to be that she isn’t, and that’s — ahem! — an orphan.”