text:
Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/150

 natural body on earth, so destruction can only be predicable of the spiritual body in hell; destruction meaning the deprivation of all heavenly life. So that the body which may be killed in the world is not the same body as that which may be destroyed in hell. In the one case it is the natural body, in the other it is the spiritual body.

Upon another occasion the Lord said, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live. Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation." If the Lord had intended by this to assert the resurrection of dead material bodies as some distant event, He certainly would not have said concerning it, The hour now is. But such bodies do not hear; the body which is dead in its natural grave cannot hear. It is the soul which hears: this cannot die, neither can it be buried. The passages say nothing about such bodies, nor is their resurrection referred to. That which is treated of is the revival into spiritual life of those who have been dead to the Divine purposes, and a deliverance of them from that grave of sensuality into which they had descended: and the hour for these results is not only coming, but it now is.

Jesus said, "This is the will of Him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on Him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day." Now the sight and the belief are here not spoken of the material body, and therefore it cannot be that body to which the promise, "I will raise him up," applies.


text:
Page:The Annals and Magazine of Natural History, vol. 16ss (1855).djvu/222

190 furnish a countless number of analogous examples;—the Goliathi of Africa; the Ornithopteræ of the Indian islands, the Heliconide of South America, the Danaidæ of the East, and in all, the most closely allied species found in geographical proximity. The question forces itself upon every thinking mind,—why are these things so? They could not be as they are, had no law, regulated their creation and dispersion. The law here enunciated not merely explains, but necessitates the facts we see to exist, while the vast and long-continued geological changes of the earth readily account for the exceptions, and apparent diserepancies that here and there occur. The writer’s object in putting forward his views in the present imperfect manner is to submit them to the test of other minds, and to be made aware of all the facts supposed to be inconsistent with them. As his hypothesis is one which claims acceptance solely as explaining and connecting facts which exist in nature, he expects facts alone to be brought to disprove it; not a à-priori arguments against its probabiliy.

The phænomena of geological distribution are exactly analogous to those of geography. Closely allied species are found associated in the same beds, and the change from. species) to species appears to have been as gradual in time as in space. Geology, however, furnishes us with positive proof of the extinction and production of species, though it does not inform us how either of it has taken place. The extinction of species, however, offers but little difficulty, and the modus operandi has been well illustrated by Sir C. Lyell in his admirable ‘ Principles.’ Geological changes, however gradual, must occasionally have modified external conditions to such an extent as to have rendered the existence of certain species impossible. The extinction would in most cases be affected by a gradual dying-out, but in some instances there might have been a sudden destruction of a species of limited range. To discover how the extinct species have from time to time been replaced by new ones down to the very latest geological period, is the most difficult, and, at the same time the most interesting problem in the natural history of the earth. The present inquiry, which seeks to eliminate from known facts a law which has determined, to a certain degree, what species could and did appear at a given epoch, may, it is hoped, be considered as one step in the the right direction towards a complete solution of it.

Much discussion has of late years taken place on the question, whether the succession of life upon the globe has been from a lower to a higher degree of organization? The admitted facts seem to show that there has been a general, but not a detailed progression. Mollusca and Radiata existed before Vertebrata,

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


text:
Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/205

In a session of the National Duma held March 3, 1916, M. Milyukov replied as follows to a criticism from the left: "I do not know for certain whether the government is leading us to defeat—but I do know that a revolution in Russia will unquestionably lead us to defeat, and our enemies, therefore, have good reason to thirst for it. If any one should say to me that to organize Russia for victory is equivalent to organizing her for revolution, I should answer: It is better, for the duration of the war, to leave her unorganized, as she is." This quotation is interesting in two ways. It is not only a proof that, as late as last year, M. Milyukov considered pro-German interests to be at work not in internationalism alone, but in any revolution at all; it is also a typical expression of Liberal sycophancy. Extremely interesting is M. Milyukov's prediction: "I know that revolution in Russia will unquestionably lead us to defeat." Why this certainty? As an historian, M. Milyukov must know that there have been revolutions that led to victory. But as an imperialistic statesman, M. Milyukov cannot help seeing that the idea of the conquest of Constantinople, Armenia and Galicia is not capable of arousing the spirit of the revolutionary masses. M. Milyukov felt, and even knew, that in his war, revolution could not bring victory with it.

To be sure, when the revolution broke out M. Milyukov at once attempted to harness it to the chariot of Allied Imperialism. That is the reason why he was greeted with delight by the sonorous, metallic reverberations of all the banking-vaults of London, Paris and New York. But this attempt met with the almost instinctive resistance of the workers and soldiers. M. Milyukov was thrown out of the ministry: the Revolution, evidently, did not mean victory for him.

Milyukov went, but the war stayed. A coalition government was formed, consisting of petit bourgeois democrats and those rep-


text:
Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/206

 resentatives of the bourgeoisie that bad hitherto concealed, for a time, their imperialistic claws. Perhaps nowhere did this combination display its counter-revolutionary character better than in the domain of international politics, that is, above all, in the war. The capitalistic bourgeoisie sent its representatives to the Cabinet in the name of "an offensive on the front and unalterable fidelity to our allies" (resolution of the Cadet Conference). The petit bourgeois democrats, who call themselves Socialists, entered the Cabinet in order, "without tearing themselves away" from the capitalistic bourgeoisie and their world allies, to conclude the war in the quickest possible manner and with the least possible offense to all the participants: without annexations, without indemnities and contributions, and even with a guarantee of national self-determination.

The capitalist ministers renounced annexations, until a more favorable time; in return for this purely verbal concession they received from their petit bourgeois democratic colleagues a binding promise not to desert the ranks of the Allies, to re-invigorate the army and make it capable of resuming the offensive. In renouncing Constantinople (for the moment) the imperialists were making a rather worthless sacrifice, for, in the course of three years of war, the road to Constantinople had become not shorter, but longer. But the democrats, to compensate the purely platonic renunciation of a very doubtful Constantinople by the liberals, took over the whole heritage of the Czarist government, recognized all the treaties which that government had concluded, and put all the authority and prestige of the Revolution in the service of discipline and the offensive. This bargain involved, first of all, a renunciation, on the part of the "leaders" of the Revolution, of any such thing as an independent international policy: this conclusion was only natural to the petty bourgeois party, which when it was in the majority, willingly surrendered all its power. Having handed over to Prince Lvov the duty of creating a revolutionary administration; to M. Shingariev the task of re-making the finances of the Revolution; to M. Konovalov, that of organizing industry; the petit bourgeois democracy could not help handing over to Messrs. Ribot, Lloyd George and Wilson the charge of the international interests of revolutionary Russia.

Even though the Revolution, in its present phase, has not therefore altered the character of the war, it has nevertheless exerted a profound influence on the living agent of the war, namely, the army. The soldier began asking himself what it was for which he was shedding his blood, upon which he now set a higher price that un-


text: The Proletarian Revolution in Russia/Part 3/Introduction


text: The Proletarian Revolution in Russia/Part 3/Chapter 1


text: The Proletarian Revolution in Russia/Part 3/Chapter 2


text:
Page:The Moon Maid.pdf/23

 "My theory of the matter is that I differ only from my fellows in that I can recall the events of many incarnations, while they can recall none of theirs other than a few important episodes of that particular one they are experiencing; but perhaps I am wrong. It is of no importance. I will tell you the story of Julian 5th who was born in the year 2000, and then, if we have time and you yet are interested, I will tell you of the torments during the harrowing days of the twenty-second century, following the birth of Julian 9th in 2100."

I will try to tell the story in his own words in so far as I can recall them, but for various reasons, not the least of which is that I am lazy, I shall omit superfluous quotation marks—that is, with your permission, of course.

My name is Julian. I am called Julian 5th. I come of an illustrious family—my great-great-grandfather, Julian 1st, a major at twenty-two, was killed in France early in The Great War. My great-grandfather, Julian 2nd, was killed in battle in Turkey in 1938. My grandfather, Julian 3rd, fought continuously from his sixteenth year until peace was declared in his thirtieth year. He died in 1992 and during the last twenty-five years of his life was an Admiral of the Air, being transferred at the close of the war to command of the International Peace Fleet, which patrolled and policed the world. He also was killed in line of duty, as was my father who succeeded him in the service.

At sixteen I graduated from the Air School and was detailed to the International Peace Fleet, being the fifth generation of my line to wear the uniform of my country. That was in 2016, and I recall that it was a matter of pride to me that it rounded out the full century since Julian 1st graduated from West Point, and that during that one hun-

title: Page:The Moon Maid.pdf/23


text: Index:Meanwhile (1927).pdf

title: Index:Meanwhile (1927).pdf


text:
Index:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/styles.css

.half { text-align: right; font-style: italic; text-decoration: underline; font-size: 120%; }

.poem { font-size: 92%; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 2em; }

.poem-italic { font-size: 92%; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 2em; font-style: italic; }

.title-header { text-align: center; font-size: 144%; margin-bottom: 1.5em; text-transform: uppercase; }

.wst-block-center { max-width: 25em; }

title: Index:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/styles.css


text: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/1

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/1


text: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/2

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/2


text: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/3

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/3


text: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/4

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/4


text: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/5

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/5


text: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/6

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/6


text: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/7

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/7


text:
Page:Sanzō Nosaka - A Brief Review of the Labour Movement in Japan (1921).pdf/48

Besides the previous figures, there are a considerable number of labourers toiling under the terrible conditions, employed in the household, handicraft, and other small industries. Here I quote some of their examples (1918).


text: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/8

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/8


text: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/9

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/9


text: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/10

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/10


text: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/11

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/11


text: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/12

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/12


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/13

was cutting an afternoon class in Dryden with scarcely a trace of the uprushing sense of guilt that would have suffused him as a Freshman. He was a little weighed down by all he had apprehended during the last four years at Harvard, and for that reason the new green of the trees on Boston Common, framing the gilt dome of the State House, merely saddened him. His shadow self was mitigating the sadness by reminding him that he wasn't, at any rate, reacting in the obvious fashion, which was a comfort. May stirred in him feelings for which no poet with whom he was familiar had found adequate expression. Poets yearned, as he was doing, but after holding out a promise of Truth, merely offered you a maiden. The eternal feminine, he reflected, is a lightning rod, forever diverting shafts of truth to the earth.

Here was Nature creeping into town over the brick and asphalt, rejuvenating in the langorous sunlight; and here was he, in plain prose a year older than he had been last spring. His fancy turning, not lightly to thoughts of love, but gravely to thoughts of man's mortality and such, a state of mind which, according to poetical convention, should not occur till around

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/13


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/14

 October. For Grover October was a more stimulating month than May, his nature being one that responded more gladly to the prospect of resurrection than to the process itself. For him, what had already happened was more exciting than what was happening; and most exciting of all were the lovely vague things that might happen. Never had he gone to bed without the feeling that perhaps It,—the important and determining event, the key experience,—would occur on the morrow. He was twenty-two, and no It worthy the name had yet occurred. Three-score-and-ten minus twenty-two. You couldn't do it in your head.

His companion wasn't saddened by May, not she! in her straight blue suit and trim shoes and jaunty hat. No hypocritical fur neck-piece; no handbag,—good old Rhoda, she used her pockets. "It ought to be warm enough to swim by next week." That expressed the effect upon sensible Miss Marple of the weather's melancholy benevolence.

In Grover's ears sad but sprightly tunes were running: bits for the cello from Debussy's Rondes de Printemps. He kept wishing that Boston were Paris. In two months time, D. V., it would be.

As they crossed Beacon Street he reached back into his mind for the subject they had been discussing. Ah yes, old maids. Rhoda had informed him that her Aunty Pearn was a stuffy one, and as he had rather a penchant for them, even when stuffy, he felt quite kindly disposed towards the present expedition to

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/14


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/15

 Chestnut Street. Rhoda's visits to Boston were infrequent,—she preferred the dogs and speed-boat at Aldergrove,—and Grover, being a tractable young man, as well as fond of Rhoda, occasionally shared her duty calls, having none of his own. His fondness for Rhoda was like a fondness for cinnamon buns: unconscious, profound, prosaic, and old as memory. Rhoda and his mother: they were lenses through which he had seen a very considerable proportion of the little he had seen of life.

"They're vague and sympathetic, maiden aunts," he defended. "One can tell them the first convenient fib that comes into one's head and they swallow it gratefully. What I draw the line at is your maiden uncles. They pretend to know better. And ask you how old you are and what you're going to do for a living."

"Well, what are you?"

"How should I know!"

"For goodness sake don't keep crossing over whenever we change sidewalks, it drives me nutty; nobody is so pedantic any more but you . . . For my part I'd rather be asked all that by a fatherly old bachelor who'll remember my birthday than be asked my mother's middle name by an old maid who won't,—or if she does, send you a present of a hunk of moth-eaten lace your great grandmother who's been dead for centuries wore sewed on to her panties. If they're your relation they object to the way you dress; if

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/15


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/16

 they're mere acquaintances they try to trap you into letting out of the bag that your mother wasn't one of the Scantleberries that produced an ambassador but one of the ones that made condensed milk. . . Which reminds me that Sophie Scantleberry is back from India and you'll have to come and call on her, too. She has a husband that smells of Scotch and has to be gone away from quite often, for months at a time. . . Whenever I cross Sophie's path, once every three years, she puts on a look which says, 'Another New England in-law; God give me strength to be sweet!' They used to live in Paris and entertain all the international riff-raff, but she gave it up suddenly and went to some sort of a Hindu convent where they teach you a fancy kind of Christian Science, only harder to learn and not so common. You see ghosts, if you're good at it, and have to breathe a special way. Then she gave up that, and I imagine she's looking around for something new."

"Truth being so elusive," Grover commented, absent-mindedly. "It's no sooner crushed to earth than—"

"Sophie'd be good for you, my boy, because what you need is to have a woman who owns up to thirty-five put some wind in your sails and take it all out again. 'And I learned about women from 'er!'—that sort of thing. I know if I were middle-aged and at a loose end I'd be crazy about the way your cheek goes from the outside corner of your eye to your

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/16


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/17

 chin, especially when you're looking away from a poor wench!"

"Taking it by and large, you're hard on the King's English."

"Taking it by and large, as you really don't, mine's better than yours. I never pretended it was the King's anyhow; didn't we revolt for the privilege of talking as we damn pleased! Besides, I am the canned milk Scantleberries, not to mention the rubber roofing Marples, and it's an age of commerce which the poor old aesthetic Thanets couldn't buck the tide of, and all died out bar you, and sometimes I think you're dying out, and I'll use any grammar I like, even in Back Bay,—in fact, especially in Back Bay. If Dad leaves me his rubber when he dies I'm going to buy up the whole Subjunctive Mood and put it in the British Museum where you can't do a thing but look at it. . . That's what's the matter with you: instead of saying frankly, 'I'll take beer,' you say, 'Oh, to be a lily-pad!' You're a prisstail."

"A what!"

"Prisstail. It's a word I'm making up to describe you, since no word that exists, will."

"You've wandered from the point, which was old maids."

"Prisstail's not so far! . . . If old maids are vague and sweet to boys whose cheek goes from their eye to their chin as nicely as yours does, it's for reasons that would shock the daylights out of them if they

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/17


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/18

 but knew their Freud. . . For that matter male old maids are quite as sympathetic—"

"How about their Freud?"

"They should worry! Though I'm sure Uncle Mortimer would come out of a psycho-analysis test quite intacto. He's three times as old as us, and all he has to show for it is a lot of holes he dug in Babylonia. With his income he could have kept a yacht and a prima donna and sowed bushels of oats. . . Can't you see poor Morty sowing!"

If one of Grover's classmates had conjured up the picture it would have led to enjoyable ribaldries; Rhoda conjuring it up horrified him a little.

"Don't be coarse," he said.

She turned a tender smile on him, which for worlds he wouldn't have acknowledged.

"I don't see why you can't stay home this summer," she protested, after a moment's silence. "Nobody nice goes abroad any more. It's only one of your romantic notions."

Romantic notions, he was superiorishly thinking, make the world go round. And it was beside the point to class him with the people who went abroad, for what had their expensive jaunts in common with his exotic thirst? "Before I'm too old to appreciate the flavor," he said, "I want to go to places like Cracow and Belgrade."

"They have narrow little streets that smell to heaven."

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/18


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/19

 "Can't you understand that that's exactly why I want to go there!"

Rhoda could understand it quite well, and relented. "But why this summer?"

"What summer, then?"

She was chastened. "Of course, it's pure selfishness, old top. I'm scared stiff at the thought of losing you forever, that's all."

"Who's romantic now!"

"Not I," she exclaimed with precocious bitterness. "I'm facing a fact which is so plain you can't even see it. You never do see them when they're plain,—only," she smiled indulgently, "when they're pretty. Mere man!"

"You envy me."

"You needn't rub it in."

They had arrived at the door of an ineffably decent little brick house with white pillars and clean, clean windows which gave a shine to the dark interior. "Tell my aunt it's me and Mr. Thanet," said Rhoda to the discreetly cheerful person who let them in.

"I," corrected Grover under his breath.

"You say me—often."

"Not to maids, in the Brothers Adam houses."

Miss Pearn was sitting up as precisely as a folding pocket-rule, regulating the flame under a silver kettle. She rustled when she moved, and peered above two pair of pince-nez, for she had been reading from a book called. The Threefold Discipline—as if she

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/19


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/20

 would ever get out of bounds! A mere half sister of Rhoda's mother, thereby a descendant of Colonial Governors and unscathed by roofing, she was, as one could see at a glance, all for the Pluperfect Subjunctive. The very chairs in her front parlor were placed where they ought to be, not at all where one would by nature have sat, unless one were really a prisstail. The only solecism was a half consumed loaf of sugar on the floor, let fall by Judy, an obese spaniel.

Rhoda returned her aunt's kiss deferentially and sat down by the fire which even on this May afternoon was not ungrammatical. Grover was reflecting that the landscape on the wall, full of waterfalls, would be a Thomas Moran if he, Grover Thanet, were only a little surer of art, which, again God Willing, he soon would be. He also reflected that the gift volume of Goldoni had never been perused, and that the little Diana with a hare-lip and a suggestion of corsets might have been done by Queen Victoria herself, had that lady gone in for sculpture.

"How is your dear mother, Mr. Thanet?" asked Miss Pearn. Grover hadn't even known that his mother was acquainted with Miss Pearn, much less dear to her. He was sorry to say she had been ill. For that matter had he ever been able to say that his mother was well, in the sense that other people's mothers were?

"And what are you planning to make of yourself?"

He supposed Miss Pearn's warm little smile, thor-

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/20


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/21

 oughly Indicative and not half as Subjunctive as her talk, was a reflex from the way his cheek went. If only the mirror were further to the right, so he could see how it really did go—

Rhoda had all but dropped an irreplaceable cup at the question, and here was Miss Pearn waiting for an answer: almost any would satisfy her. Oh, to be able to reply, Plumber!

He gave her the self-deprecatory smile that was his chief social accomplishment, though he was not yet aware of it. The smile redeemed a certain sententiousness that had formed this year as a crust over his style. "One of the more futile vocations, no doubt," he said. "For instance, teaching."

It was an admission he was always a little ashamed of, even though people quite often replied, "Oh to be sure, you're the son of the Professor Thanet." Yet not even to Rhoda, and not even to his mother, just barely to himself had he affirmed that indeed he was not going to sink into an academic bog, of all possible bogs! Furtively, on odd bits of paper, and on the margins of notebooks that ought to have been devoted to learned jottings, he had been drawing pictures that had given him a little thrill up his spine. He couldn't remember a time when he hadn't been drawing pictures. What did that mean? And what did it mean that he had never read the biography of a genius without recognizing moods of his own upon every page? Benvenuto Cellini, Rousseau, even, God

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/21


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/22

 help him, Marie Bashkirtseff,—he knew just what they had been through. He often wished to ask other young men if they had similar sensations on reading similar books, but he refrained, for they might say Yes, which would make him feel silly and spoil it all; or they might say No, which would make him look silly and lay him open to the suspicion of harboring a superiority complex. As to that, he knew the perils of reasoning from false analogy, for he had read, not entirely in vain, the Professor Thanet's classic work on Logic. And yet—

He saw the last patch of golden light vanish from the clean street outside Miss Pearn's windows; the Debussy tune, sad but sprightly, came scampering back into his brain. If Boston were only Paris! And if there had never been a Dryden or a Shakespeare or a Holy Roman Empire to cumber the ages and bring examinations down upon the heads of an educable posterity! He recklessly decided to spend the evening with Rhoda. They would have dinner at the Tuscany and order a bottle of chianti. Quite as if there were no new suits to pay for.

Mortimer Pearn didn't drink tea, but his sister's guests were allowed to look in on him before departing. He spent most of his life upstairs in the library, a room that fitted him like an old garment with generous pockets for prehistoric statuettes and heavy-looking volumes on what Rhoda called "nothing at all." Rhoda wasn't sure which of the ologies her uncle

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/22


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/23

 went in for, but she suspected him of affairs with ge-, arche-, and the-, and mild flirtations with flighty young modern ones, such as paleont- and anthrop-. His windows overlooked a rock garden as lacking in flora as, according to his candid niece, his life was lacking in the flowers and fruits of sin.

Rhoda introduced her companion, whom Mr. Pearn seemed to remember from a visit to Aldergrove fifteen years previously. "During the Christmas holidays it was," he reminisced. "Just after my return from Babylon. You were coasting down a hill."

The return from Babylon, Grover reflected, sounded like a title, and his incorrigibly irrelevant mind sketched in a picture of Mortimer's flaccid form encased in breastplate and shin guards, Mortimer poring over Persian hieroglyphics while Alexander the Great sowed oats for him and all the Pearns to come.

"Half the hill belongs to the Thanets," Rhoda threw in, "and the other half to us."

"Mother and I own the half you have to walk up," mused Grover aloud, then was afraid Mr. Pearn might not see any sense in the remark. Almost none of the things I say, he was thinking, make sense per se—only per me.

"And what are you studying for?" inquired Mr. Pearn a little later, as though he felt it incumbent upon him to show an interest, and as though he had hit on an original topic of conversation. It means

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/23


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/24

 nothing to them, Grover was savagely reflecting, nothing at all, so why the hell do they keep asking?

Rhoda came to his rescue. "He's going to Paris and see Life for a living," she said, then turned the tables. "I'll bet you didn't know what you were going to make of yourself when you were a Harvard Senior. At any rate you didn't make it, whatever it was. 'You did hot and dusty excavations instead, and got elected a member of societies where they meet in cutaways and listen to papers written by old men with beards about languages nobody can translate, and a fat lot of good it would do them if they could, didn't you!"

"Ah well," Mr. Pearn apologized, "the world wouldn't be so much fun for the rest, without a few old fogeys for contrast. Though don't you ever go and be one, my dear. . . You're not still determined to remain single, I trust?"

"Why should I change my mind?" Rhoda challenged.

Her uncle smiled with the archness that Grover begrudged to fatherly old bachelors. "For the very best of reasons." He turned to Grover. "You agree with me, I'm sure. Thanet."

"Oh," said Grover, "I've always thought Rhoda would make somebody a perfect husband! . . . She proposes to me now and then, but I'd rather keep her for a brother."

"What relation does that make us, I wonder," said

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/24


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/25

 a clear little voice that startled Grover and Mr. Pearn into a standing posture. The voice, thought Grover, was almost too consciously pitched; the intonation rather deliberately non-American. The intruder had held out a hand to Mr. Pearn, who was kissing it; it was as though one saw Anatole France paying homage to one of his own heroines,—say Mme. Nanteuil. A small white face delicately freckled was puckered into a smile of mild amusement, the kind of amusement, thought Grover, that worldly women are forever deriving from situations that to everyone else are a little embarrassing. This particular example was petite and ultra-smart, and she seemed as odd in Miss Pearn's house as a yellow and brown orchid would seem in a bed of mignonette. She looked, too, as though she might once have been through something: an illness or a calamity. By some strange logic uncatalogued, God knew, by the Professor Thanet, she produced the effect a beautiful woman might have produced. On trying to account for it later, Grover decided that the effect was due to a coordination of manner and garb achieved by a perfect understanding of her limits: she was so odd in dimensions, yet so utterly in scale! The dead white skin, the amber eyes, tired eyes, the artificially scarlet lips, the little hat and a glimpse of dry, snuff-colored hair, the narrow brown cape and bizarre chain,—each contributed an exact quota to an entity that no other person could, with the same simple ingredients, have

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/25


text:
Page:Zangwill-King of schnorrers.djvu/69

Rh

Besides, consider his occupation ! You vould not advise dat I marry into such a low family ! Be you not my bene- factor?"

"Well, but I cannot think of any good-looking girl that would be suitable."

Yankele looked at him with a roguish, insinuating smile. " Say not dat ! Have you not told Grobstock you be de first of marriage-brokers?"

But Manasseh shook his head.

" No, you be quite right," said Yankele humbly ; " I could not get a really beaudiful girl unless I married your Deborah herself."

"No, I am afraid not," said Manasseh sympathetically.

Yankele took the plunge.

"Ah, vy can I not hope to call you fader-in-law?"

Manasseh's face was contorted by a spasm of astonish- ment and indignation. He came to a standstill.

"Dat must be a fine piece," said Yankele quickly, indi- cating a flamboyant picture of a fearsome phantom hovering over a sombre moat.

They had arrived at Leman Street, and had stopped be- fore Goodman's Fields Theatre. Manasseh's brow cleared.

"It is The Castle Spectre" he said graciously. "Would you like to see it?"

"But it is half over — "

"Oh, no," said da Costa, scanning the play bill. "There was a farce by O'Keefe to start with. The night is yet young. The drama will be just beginning."

"But it is de Sabbath — ve must not pay."

Manasseh's brow clouded again in wrathful righteous sur- prise. "Did you think I was going to pay?" he gasped.

"N-n-no," stammered the Pole, abashed. "But you haven't got no orders?"


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/26

 achieved. Rhoda, coming up to stand beside her, Rhoda who was always neat, compact, fresh, and pretty, by contrast seemed gauche and raw.

Thinking back to the remark which had prompted the stranger's question, Grover was rather pleased with it,—pleased, that is, to have said something sufficiently clever, or for that matter inane, to cause this being to look at him in such an odd quizzical manner. He felt subtly flattered, and that rendered him nimble and bold, with the surprising boldness of a shy man. He also thought of the contour; on the way upstairs he had caught a glimpse of it in a mirror. Poor Rhoda!

"Intimate, I hope," he replied.

"This rude young man," Rhoda explained, "goes by the name of Grover Thanet. I don't have to tell him who you are, for I've already done so. I said you'd be good for him."

"For goodness sake don't explain what you meant by the remark," said Mrs. Scantleberry. "It sounds fraught with implications."

"It was!" Rhoda retorted. "As fraught as it could be."

"Never mind," Grover counselled. "Be it anyway."

"Be what, rude young man whose name sounds like a rather pleasant island or estate?"

"Why good for me, of course," said Grover.

Mrs. Scantleberry appealed to her cousin Mortimer,

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/26


text:
Page:Zangwill-King of schnorrers.djvu/70

56 "Orders? Me? Will you do me the pleasure of accepting a seat in my box?"

"In your box?"

"Yes, there is plenty of room. Come this way," said Manasseh. "I haven't been to the play myself for over a year. I am too busy always. It will be an agreeable change."


text:
Page:Zangwill-King of schnorrers.djvu/71

57 THE KING OF SCHNORRERS. 57

Yanked hung back, bewildered.

"Through this door," said Manasseh encouragingly. "Come — you shall lead the way."

"But dey vill not admit me ! "

"Will not admit you ! When I give you a seat in my box! Are you mad? Now you shall just go in without me — I insist upon it. I will show you Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa is a man whose word is the Law of Moses ; true as the Talmud. Walk straight through the portico, and, if the attendant endeavours to stop you, simply tell him Mr. da Costa has given you a seat in his box."

Not daring to exhibit scepticism — nay, almost confident in the powers of his extraordinary protector, Yankele put his foot on the threshold of the lobby.

"But you be coming, too?" he said, turning back.

"Oh, yes, I don't intend to miss the performance. Have no fear."

Yankele" walked boldly ahead, and brushed by the door- keeper of the little theatre without appearing conscious of him ; indeed, the official was almost impressed into letting the Schnorrer pass unquestioned as one who had gone out between the acts. But the visitor was too dingy for any- thing but the stage-door — he had the air of those non- descript beings who hang mysteriously about the hinder recesses of playhouses. Recovering himself just in time, the functionary (a meek little Cockney) hailed the intruder with a backward-drawing " Hi ! "

" Vat you vant? " said Yankele, turning his head.

"Vhere's your ticket?"

" Don't vant no ticket."

"Don't you? I does," rejoined the little man, who was a humorist.

" Mr. da Costa has given me a seat in his box."


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/27

 as Nanteuil might have appealed to her creator. "This strange talk, I suppose, is just Younger Generation."

"I rather fancy so," said Mr. Pearn.

"What does one do with it?"

"One humors it. At least I do—if I do anything. But when it comes to that, Sophie dear, you yourself look almost Younger Generation!"

Sophie smiled wanly. "Oh those little almosts that life is so desperately full of! . . . Can anybody tell me the time? I stopped in a moment to see Cousin Betty and, so to speak, Cousin Judy, but I suspect I've been due home for at least half an hour."

Grover glanced at his watch. Sophie, he was thinking, could appreciate the fat, somnolent Judy. Rhoda's dogs were the kind that went bounding over landscapes and upset lamps when they came in for tea. "It's almost," he said with reluctant honesty, "a quite unkind little almost, half-past six. But not quite—really."

For the first time Sophie's lips parted in a smile that transfigured her peaked and puckered face into something beautiful,—not almost, but really quite. And a few moments later she was gone.

Grover had chambers on the first floor of a dormitory well outside the gates and well beyond his means. For the red walls and the scratched furniture he was indebted to a former occupant; his own con-

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/27


text:
Page:Zangwill-King of schnorrers.djvu/72

58 58 THE KING OF SCHNORRERS.

" Oh, indeed ! You'd swear to that in the box? "

" By my head. He gave it me."

" A seat in his box?"

" Yes."

"Mr. da Costa, you vos a-sayin', I think?"

"The same." •

" Ah ! this vay, then ! "

And the humorist pointed to the street.

Yankele did not budge.

"This vay, my lud ! " cried the little humorist peremptorily.

" I tells you I'm going into Mr. da Costa's box ! "

"And I tells you you're a-goin' into the gutter." And the official seized him by the scruff of the neck and began pushing him forwards with his knee.

" Now then ! what's this? "

A stern, angry voice broke like a thunderclap upon the humorist's ears. He released his hold of the Schnorrer and looked up, to behold a strange, shabby, stalwart figure towering over him in censorious majesty.

"Why are you hustling this poor man?" demanded Manasseh.

"He wanted to sneak in," the little Cockney replied, half apologetically, half resentfully. "Expect 'e 'ails from Saffron Til, and 'as 'is eye on the vipes. Told me some gammon — a cock-and-bull story about having a seat in a box."

"In Mr. da Costa's box, I suppose?" said Manasseh, ominously calm, with a menacing glitter in his eye.

"Ye-es," said the humorist, astonished and vaguely alarmed. Then the storm burst.

"You impertinent scoundrel! You jackanapes! You low, beggarly rapscallion ! And so you refused to show my guest into my box ! "


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/28

 tributions were an aspect of tidy chaos, an odor of cigarette smoke, a rented piano, a host of books that were overdue at the library, a bunch of pink daisies, and a terra cotta head of Voltaire who was mistaken for Mozart and Wagner. On the work table reposed a typewriter whose carriage moved neither to the right nor to the left, also a bag of apples and two photographs: one of the Professor Thanet, in a gentle bowler and fierce mustachios, and one of his widow, in bangs and leg of mutton sleeves, looking sad, Grover had reflected, even twenty-odd years ago. He would confront her with the photograph the next time she said, "Darling, do you want to break your mother's heart?" She had been born with such a breakable one.

The work table bore that title only as a matter of courtesy: Grover preferred his knees. With slippered feet braced against the and a textbook balanced on his thighs, he spent hours in sharpening pencils, peeling apples, and drawing pictures of knights-at-arms and highborn ladies leaning out of bowers. A somewhat higher degree of concentration produced long letters to Geoffrey Saint, former tutor and perennial mentor. Occasionally he read a prescribed chapter in history or wrote a prescribed theme, and quite often he had spent a whole night absorbed in irrelevant mental exploration in smuggled volumes of Casanova or Krafft-Ebbing.

Today his heart was heavy and his conscience importunate. He had let more than a month go by with-

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/28


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/29

 out a visit home, having alleged the claims of study; and this morning a characteristically trustful letter from his mother had shadowed forth Omens. She had spoken again of "getting on;" and as fifty-four wasn't so very on, he couldn't shake off the thought that something more serious than she had ever admitted must be—pushing it. Furthermore there was the phrase "what little we have left." Which seemed to imply that one day there mightn't be any.

He knew that if he threw down his books and took the next train out from the North Station to Aldergrove his mother would meet him with the same old flush of pleasure on her faded cheeks, the same girlish smile, the spontaneous, whimsical baby-talk phrases that she kept inventing with incredible resourcefulness. They would play the Egmont and Coriolanus overtures, four-hand; the chords in the base would tire her at the same old spots, and she would have to stop and make a cup of tea which would turn into at least four, very weak. Her quiet gaieties would reassure him as ever, but beneath them, as ever, he would catch glimpses of the tragic figure she essentially was: a little New England Duse. That divine credulity, that eternal defencelessness, that deep pathetic faith in—God save the mark—him!

For the time being whatever signals his ears were attuned to catch were muffled by the louder protests of his own endangered plans. He was in the grip of a sense of frustration which he had been unable to for-

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/29


text: Page:Zangwill-King of schnorrers.djvu/73


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/30

 mulate even in the garrulous letter to Geoffrey which lay unfinished on his knees. "I wouldn't put it past Fate," he scribbled, "to do me out of my year in Europe, just when the prospect of it is beginning to appeal to me as my one hope of salvation—

Salvation? Of what?

Postponing the Insoluble, he took refuge at the piano. A certain dozen of Scriabin preludes were still new enough to serve both as a stimulant and an anaesthetic.

As he played his lips went into an affectionate smile at the postscript of his mother's letter: a warning not to overtire his poor dear eyes but to go to see Dr. Tinley at once. "Emma Sipe went to him when she was studying at Radcliffe," his mother added, "and they (presumably the good doctor's reading glasses) did her so much good." Grover questioned whether society was much the gainer for the fact that that fright, meaning Emma, could read fifty more pages of John Stuart Mill at a stretch than formerly; but in any case one thing was certain, and that was that his poor dear eyes would never be ruined by the Holy Roman Empire, nor Dryden, nor The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

What countless bundles of assorted information had arrived at his mind's door these last four years! What capricious showers of ideas had drenched him—only to evaporate and leave him with a mental cold. Today it seemed that all the mental energyzing of recent

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/30


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/31

 months had been as pointless as the capering of the wind across the surface of a deep lake. He had been ready to learn that intellect fed the lake; now he suspected that intellect merely rippled it. He was beginning to guess,—and it was discomfiting, for he had heatedly argued to the contrary,—that life was fed by little streams of feeling, and, perhaps, by a good broad river whose existence had been quite unknown to him. This afternoon he was aware of a trickle, a definite current; he could almost hear the murmur of cascades which must be pouring their contents into him! The murmur of cascades, the sound of a small white hand punching a velvet cushion. It was not only a beneficent sensation, it was a little vertiginous. It quickened his instinct and dyed his fancy; by the same token it tripled his contempt for mere wind, of the sort that blew gustily around the ears of student groups and stirred up silly clouds of dust. It was shocking to think that so far he had contributed nothing to life but a capacity to absorb written ideas and give them back in impassioned arguments that weren't even right! It was time to do something.

Scriabin was becoming easier, and making more sense.

But do what—what! Why didn't people's bachelor uncles tell you what you were going to make of yourself, instead of asking you!

June, and the much-touted young man's fancy,—where, if any, was his? Or in the heart or in the

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/31


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/32

 head? Here he was twenty-two, and intacto, and it wasn't as though he wouldn't enjoy sowing wild oats, for he most certainly would. It was discouraging to be so chaste; artistically speaking, it was immoral.

From Scriabin he drifted backward to Debussy, which was like sailing into a calm cove after making headway against choppy seas. The Debussy prelude, an old favorite, had long since ceased to be exciting: it was pleasantly narcotic, and his mind was drowsing off when a faint warm whiff of an unknown flower came in through the open window.

In his eagerness to capture it he found himself involuntarily subduing the volume of tone, pressing down the soft pedal, and this struck him as being such a strange thing, psychologically, to be doing that he was oblivious for the moment to the fact that there wasn't a flower within a stone's throw of his windows—except for pink daisies, which were odorless. . ..

The music had restored his spirits and co-ordinated his nerves. He felt even equal to an attack upon Chopin etudes which had always been his despair, and launched into a sea of mutinous chords.

"Don't you ever play anything a fellow can whistle?"

He looked up to see Eric Peperell, smooth, pink, tan, and gold, provokingly healthy, dressed with careful carelessness. With a self-conscious lurch Eric straddled a chair, his arms resting on the back, a newly bound golf club dangling to the floor. When you shoot up to six foot two without warning, Grover

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/32


text:
Page:The Moon Maid.pdf/24

 dred years no adult male of my line had ever owned or worn civilian clothes.

Of course there were no more wars, but there still was fighting. We had the pirates of the air to contend with and occasionally some of the uncivilized tribes of Russia, Africa and central Asia required the attention of a punitive expedition. However, life seemed tame and monotonous to us when we read of the heroic deeds of our ancestors from 1914 to 1967, yet none of us wanted war. It had been too well schooled into us that we must not think of war, and the International Peace Fleet so effectively prevented all preparation for war that we all knew there could never be another. There wasn't a firearm in the world other than those with which we were armed, and a few of ancient design that were kept as heirlooms, or in museums, or that were owned by savage tribes who could procure no ammunition for them, since we permitted none to be manufactured. There was not a gas shell nor a radio bomb, nor any engine to discharge or project one; and there wasn't a big gun of any calibre in the world. I veritably believed that a thousand men equipped with the various engines of destruction that had reached their highest efficiency at the close of the war in 1967 could have conquered the world; but there were not a thousand men so armed—there never could be a thousand men so equipped anywhere upon the face of the Earth. The International Peace Fleet was equipped and manned to prevent just such a calamity.

But it seems that Providence never intended that the world should be without calamities. If man prevented those of possible internal origin there still remained undreamed of external sources over which he had no control. It was one of these which was to prove our undoing. Its seed was sown thirty-three years before I was born, upon that

title: Page:The Moon Maid.pdf/24


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/33

 was thinking, it makes your ideas look short in the sleeves and tight across the chest. Nevertheless he envied Eric for having shot, knowing by now that he himself would stick at a mere five foot eight. In the days when they were at St. Basil's together, and approximately the same height, in body if not in mind; Eric's influence over him, the feeling of worship he had inspired, had been all the more potent for being inexplicable. This afternoon, his intuition freshened by a musical bath, Grover felt he could localize Eric's might in the elusive curves at the corners of his mouth. Eric's curly lips, Samson's locks,—c'était quasiment, as Claudine would say. Smiling curves indicative of emotional possibilities which would, no doubt, remain forever undeveloped, so strong were the agencies directing and repressing Eric's actions: the well-bred young American, magnificently equipped for adventures that would never occur to him!

Poor foolish mortals, he was thinking, how pathetic that we must be forever attributing magic prestige to the things we are fond of. Realizing for the first time that Eric was, like himself, merely a combination of slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails, Grover was abruptly released from a thrall that had held him six or seven years, and though it was disheartening to be thus bereft of a good illusion, he smiled with a secret sense of advantage. For his own ideas weren't short in the sleeve and tight across the chest: if anything they were a size too big for him, a better fault.

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/33


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/34

 Having awakened to Eric's limitations, knowing intuitively more about Eric than Eric would ever know about anybody, his own peculiar superiority disentangled itself and floated up serene. Forevermore he would be proof against the kind of prestige enjoyed by solid people like Eric, for now he knew that their solidity was part and parcel of their immovability, and in the long run immovability was damn stupid. It wasn't out of principle that the Peperells of the world were orthodox and decorous; it was because they hadn't sufficient imagination to gamble with their funds; they stuck to hopelessly safe bonds.

This triumphant conclusion had got into the bass of the Chopin etude, and, for all his carefully cultivated low-brow taste, Eric was paying attention. There was a deferential look in his clear eyes, and from it Grover made two pleasant deductions: one, Eric, today more than ever, leaned upon him for some intangible support, an idea, a clever tag, a flavor that no other personality could supply, though Eric had all Harvard to choose from; two, Eric's particular kind of superiority, so dependent on the accidental glory of youth, was at its zenith and must henceforth wane, whereas his own kind, less accidental than painfully evolved, had barely commenced to manifest itself and would augment from year to year. Never before lmd he negotiated that cascade of chromatic thirds so neatly!

"It's a pity you don't like these, Pep," he said, turn-

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/34


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/35

 ing to an even less tuney etude, "for they happen to be good; in fact the very best there is."

Eric came lounging over and sat beside him. The bench creaked, and Grover recalled the days when Eric, like a tawny lion cub, would sidle up to him in study periods to copy sentences in a Latin exercise, instinctively knowing that his mere proximity was enough to wheedle anything out of anybody. Dutifully Eric looked at a page of the music as if willing to verify its goodness, though he didn't know bass from treble. Then he rested a warm heavy arm on Grover's shoulder and got up.

"You'll always be the same funny kid," he remarked. "Won't you."

"Not exactly," Grover replied, "for I'm getting samer and samer."

"I don't follow you."

Grover smiled with a trace of malice. "You're not even headed the same way!"

"Where the heck you headed?"

"I don't know—possibly toward Parnassus."

"If you mean I'm dumb," Eric cheerfully acknowledged, "that's nothing to write home about." He had gone to swing his club over an imaginary tee, as if proving to himself that he had not remained at a standstill; hadn't he added golf to his accomplishments?

"Speaking of home, what are you doing this week-end?"

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/35


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/36

 "If I'm in my right mind I'll be swatting."

"Like to have you come home with me; I'm driving up Friday night."

After all these years! How often Grover had dreamt of coming down broad slippery stairs to breakfast at Eric's; of riding Eric's horse; of borrowing his blue sweater after a game of tennis! He had even imagined the haunting smell of the soap in Eric's bathroom. Scales fell from his eyes and he saw why invitations had been rare in his life; he saw why he had never been "popular,"—it was because he didn't do things you could whistle, because he couldn't take casually what to others was casual, nor seriously what to them was serious. To him friendship was precious and exclusive; to them it was cheap and gregarious. They, feeling themselves drawn, went forward; he drew back, or ran a mile, awed by the depth and intimacy of his feelings. And it dawned on him that many people, even Pep, might have been glad of a sign now and then, from him! It would never have occurred to him to invite Eric home with him, yet how often had he not imagined Eric in the little house in Aldergrove, driving from the station in the old-fashioned car that had to be cranked, waiting his turn at the one and only bath!

"Thanks awfully," he said. "I'd like to, but I have to work. And even if I didn't, I'm due home myself." And even if he didn't have to go home, he was think-

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/36


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/37

 ing, to accept now would be an ; he had far too thoroughly imagined it.

He saw how simple it would have been to fit Eric into the modest Thanet scheme. Any nice person would see the humor of his cat-boat bobbing beneath the Aldergrove Yacht Club; any nice person would appreciate the black Artelia's muffins and loquacity, and the lame collie and his mother's old-fashioned notions; any nice person would sense in the Thanet menage something whimsical, something touching, something fragile, something which, though forlorn and rococo, was yet profoundly real. And Eric was, for all the tightness of his mental garb, a nice person.

"Has Rhoda Marple told you," said Eric, "she's coming to the Commencement dance with my mother and sister?"

Grover had a moment of jealousy,—but only a moment, for there was no mistaking the good faith of the hand that was now shaking his shoulder. Moreover he was reminded of a telephone call he had neglected to make this afternoon. Having flatly refused to take part in the Commencement rites and festivities himself, he could not blame Rhoda for accepting another man's invitation, especially a man whom he had made a point of introducing to her. In an unanalyzable sense he was pleased, yet he also felt, however irrationally, that he had been badly used.

As Eric went on talking, Grover pictured the garden parties and the dances, the Chinese lanterns, the straw-

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/37


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/38

 berries and ices, Eric and Rhoda threading their way through it all, handsome, besieged, their laughter blending with the music and the chatter, conforming uncritically to the endless formalities. Often while ridiculing the conventions he had caught himself envying youths who ran arm-in-arm up the steps of exclusive club houses,—men like Dick Briarcliffe, the crack oarsman, and Garfield Pearn, who knew a lot about Confucius and Lao-Tse and certainly couldn't be charged with lack of brains. The envy was never of long duration, for he could reassure himself with the thought that within his breast burned something that all the Peperells and Briarcliffes and Pearns were devoid of, something too nearly divine in quality to be compatible with Conformity, something—well, what? There was the rub.

He would try to analyze and formulate the something in his letter to Geoffrey,—it was all bound up with salvation, and Europe. Meanwhile there was Pep leaning out the window and gurgling at the refrain of a ditty that came floating up:

"It's that wild ass Bruff," said Eric, making a thumbs-down sign to the serenader.

"Is young Thanet up there?" came the voice.

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/38


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/39

 "Who wants to know?" growled Eric, protectively belligerent.

The voice trailed off and a moment later there was a thunderous noise on the stairway. Max Bruff flung himself into the room, tripping over Eric's golf club. As the owner plunged to its rescue there was a heroic clash, and Grover saw his tranquil premises transformed into an arena for the rough and tumble of two titans. One chair had already toppled over, and a table was threatened.

"De grâce, messieurs, respectez mes fleurs!" he cried, leaping up in time to save the daisies.

Bruff, seeing the piano bench free, disengaged himself and sat down, puffing,—not, however, deigning to reinstate his necktie, which he was now wearing hindside-to.

"I needed a bit of hexercise," he said in an accent which he had recently appropriated, as he appropriated anything that appealed to him.

"Lose your next pound at the gym," suggested Grover. "I'll have enough junk to pack up next week without your excess weight!"

Bruff was turning the pages before him. "Fancy a mild young daisy-collector with the nerve to play Revolutionary etudes!" He attacked the study Grover had abandoned, and was playing it in a manner that

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/39


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/40

 made Grover suddenly feel, in relation to Bruff, as hopelessly Philistine as he had regarded Eric, in relation to himself. "Mild" had hurt. Of course Max was an exception to all rules; a genius to everybody but the uncle who, instead of sending him to Leipzic to study composition, was keeping him at a university greatly embarrassed by his presence. From time to time Max dropped in to play upon a piano worthy of his mettle. As he explained it, "Me hown is bysey at the bottom and trebley at the top, and has between a hay sharp and a hay flat there's little to choose; in fact the flats is sharp and the sharps is flat; ours is a nice 'ouse ours is."

"Do your worst," Eric advised somewhat savagely, preparing to leave. "You'd better get as much as you can out of life before they hang you."

"When they hang me it will be for slaying thee, oh thou superfluous pursuer of balls,—golf, tennis, foot, medicine, basket, and for all one knows, moth!"

Max's advent had brought Grover sharply to a sense of the immediate. He was debating a number of alternatives. Study was out of the question; so was the unfinished letter to Geoffrey; likewise tea with Rhoda's smart friends. He was merely temporizing in stopping to weigh them, for he knew quite well what he would end by doing. With a thrill he came at last face to face with one particular cascade that had been flowing more rapidly than he knew; his lake was getting full. Again he heard the delicious

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/40


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/41

 thud of a small white hand punching a velvet cushion.

He caught Eric's coat at the door. "Will you save my life, Pep? Call up Rhoda at Alcie Pender's and tell her I can't possibly get away this afternoon." He had an impulse partly jealous, partly sporting, partly malicious, partly self-castigatory. "Substitute for me, if you like. It's a tea dance."

"Who's Alcie Pender?"

"A tall thin blonde, looks like macaroni—with hair au gratin. She's in the telephone book—I mean her mother is—"

"And the social register," sang out Max, "and the book of etiquette—ho hit's the rich wot 'as the pleasures—"

Grover went into the bedroom and took down his new gray flannel suit, then rummaged for a cravat and handkerchief of the right shades of blue, his private code being quite as inexorable as any devised by society at large. Eric was whistling his way down stairs to the telephone, and Max broke into outlandish harmonies of his own. Grover felt a new prestige taking form within him,—for he had quite casually given Eric a command which Eric had quite submissively gone off to obey; moreover he was breaking an appointment with Rhoda in favor of something actually, thank heaven, dangerous.

He emerged with one arm in his coat, and left Bruff in charge. He was in nervous haste, as if rapidity would enable him to escape a host of dim troubles

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/41


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/42

 that were gaining on him. Running down the steps into the golden green light of the street, stumbling over the humpy brick pavement on which a net of shadows was cast by the elms, he had a longing to hold tight to the present, and to include in it some nice bits of the past. For whatever the future might have to commend it, it would be at the expense of so much that he knew to be good,—it would be like selling keepsakes for mere money. What a pity, for instance, to exchange the Eric who had copied his Latin exercises for an Eric who was taking up golf and, apparently, Rhoda.

As he turned into Massachusetts Avenue Max's strange music clanged in his ears. For all his madness Max could wring more anguish out of ten bars of a hackneyed etude than he, Grover Thanet, could ever hope to wring out of ten whole opuses; and that was a source of refined misery to him. Art made way for the Bruffs; society made way for the Peperells; what under the sun ever made way for the Thanets? Rhoda had brutally put her finger on it when she said the Thanets weren't able to buck the tide. He smiled suddenly at the thought that if Rhoda had said opuses for opera he would have rebuked her, hypocrite and tyrant that he was, too, like everybody else!

A taxicab strayed his way and without giving his conscience time to protest he got in. For the moment his conscience was twitting him about the cavalier

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/42


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/43

 treatment accorded to Rhoda's party. Why must he be the victim of such qualms when people like Max could be as rude as they chose and not even be aware of it, much less remorseful! In the end, however, his conscience took up the matter of the taxicab. Pep, it told him, would have ridden in the subway on principle. Max would have walked, and sung hearty ribaldries en route, and flung stones into the Charles. Even Max flinging stones was a picture of well-directed energy. While mild young Thanets stood on the river bank sedately meditating the futility of shying pebbles at bottles, men of genius busily and thoughtlessly shied, and, glorying in the final lusty crash, cried out, "Hit it, be God!" And that was, somehow, constructive.

The cab joggled through narrow streets and emerged upon the expanse of Commonwealth Avenue, passing a line of pompous cocoa-colored houses with which Grover was by now so familiar that he could direct the driver, "The fourth from the corner."

As he was paying the fare a startlingly familiar shout smote his ears, Looking quickly up he was horrified to see Rhoda, Alcie, Dick Briarcliffe, and Eric Peperell darting by. They waved to him gayly, mockingly, as though they read Meanings into his errand. Eric doffed his hat with a courtly sweep.

Grover swung about and walked up the steps with as nonchalant an air as he could command.

The cool shiny hall that lay beyond the grille had never seemed such a welcome haven from all that

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/43


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/44

 made life trying. A moment's wait and he was shown into an even safer haven, dangerously safe,—a library of mulberry and silver, brightened by flowers and hushed by silky rugs. Sophie Scantleberry held out a white arm to him and cleared a place at her side on a big sofa in which she was buried to the eyes, her high-arched slippers tucked under her.

"How nice of you to drop in! I passed your Hall this morning—light me one too—and almost sent a note in, asking you to come to lunch with me, but I was afraid of interrupting your solemn labors and knew you would be far too polite to send back word that I was to go to the devil, as you should have done if I had—do have some tea. See where I burned myself on that wretched spirit lamp because nobody was here to squunch it for me—"

Grover was tongue-tied, for as he leaned timidly forward to examine the pink mark on Sophie's finger, his nostrils were filled with the faint perfume he had smelt earlier in the afternoon,—the fragrance of an unknown flower which had had no locus, except, apparently, in memory!

A velvety breeze seemed to blow the sunlight into the classroom where sixty or eighty young men in bent damp and anxious brows over an examination on Shakespeare's plays: sixty or eighty potential voters and patres familiarum, thought Grover,

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/44


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/45

 being schoolboys for the last day in their lives. And answering such silly questions, scratch, scratch, scratch,—inky fingers, leaking brains. Above the scratching he heard summer playing with the shiny Japanese ivy at the windows: summer came right in and molested the printed paper before him; wraith-like melodies echoed in his ears—the Rondes de Printemps—Paris!

"Explain the use of the phrase, 'Saint Nicholas be thy speed!"

The others were explaining it for all they were worth; Grover never would. The English Department, he was thinking, is far more interested in the bard's obsolete suits and trappings than in the part of him that was alleged to be for all time. Why compel the Two Gentlemen of Verona to be for all time? Shakespeare would have been the last to expect it,—with the possible exception of the ditty about Sylvia, which Schubert had rescued. The heavens such grace did le-hend her. Sylvia—Sophie.

All this was even more dismal than the seventeenth century essayists which he had also left to an eleventh hour, and, he felt reasonably sure, flunked. In former years he had been able to drift idyllically within a few days of examinations, then by dint of prodigious cramming, come through creditably, sometimes brilliantly—depending on the professor. He had counted upon being able to get under the skin of the Two Gentlemen and King Lear during the four-day interval between

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/45


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/46

 the Holy Roman Empire and today, but the time had glided away while he drank tea with Sophie, or sat in his rooms thinking about past teas with Sophie and teas to come. It had been like bailing out a boat that leaked faster than one could empty, so why bail? And he was drowning academically,—a novel sensation, lugubriously pleasant. Some drowning people were able to see their whole past in vivid detail. Not he; he saw his future, and as he saw it he did a problem in subtraction on the back of his examination paper: three score and ten minus twenty-two,—forty-eight whole years in which to look backward at the days when he was too young to be a failure.

The breeze rustled the paper mockingly: he wished it would blow it on the floor. The sun gilded the down on his arm: such a harmless arm compared with the hirsute limb across the aisle driving answers into its notebook before they could escape. 'Armless harm, Max would have said. What good was it going to do them all, knowing what Shakespeare had meant by "Saint Nicholas be thy speed." Or were they merely guessing? Might it not be wise to guess too, and say something about Santa Claus and his reindeer? On the whole no, for if it were wrong, it would be such palpable fraud, and it wasn't, after all, an examination in Ingenuity,—if it only were! That was what was wrong with education. Would that be a Mantegna print on the wall, if one were a little surer about art?

If one were going to fail, wasn't it more sublime to

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/46


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/47

 fail utterly than by a niggardly margin! All things considered, one's chances of becoming a Bachelor of Arts were, not to put too fine a point on it, bloody,—and he leaned back and surveyed the toiling shoulders of sixty or eighty scholars in the throes of mnemonic travail. His gaze strayed beyond them to the window which framed an ancient building, scene of a thousand futile recitations. The hard brick outlines were tenderly blurred by the ivy, just as the institution itself, for all its impersonality, was mitigated by the tendrilly sentiments of three thousand youths who, clinging to it of necessity, were bound to love it. The institution had tortured him, but in its clumsy way it had revealed his individuality to him. It knew nothing about him, but it had been the fortuitous means of his finding out something about himself; of his finding out, chiefly, that he had nothing to do with it, any more than ivy had to do with brick. In what way he was unlike its other products, Harvard couldn't reveal to him: life alone would be able to do that. Or would it? It must.

In a few minutes he would walk out the door, never to come back. By ten o'clock—strange thought!—he would have been a student—of been, as Rhoda still wrote it. And not one human being here, not even the two or three monitors whose disillusioned eyes from time to time had wandered his way, lit by a faint spark of friendliness, really knew or cared what he was, or what was going to happen to him.

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/47


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/48

 When he arose and handed in his empty book there was a stir of surprise in the room. A few serious pairs of eyes turned on him in awed surmise followed by faint contempt at the swift surrender and by impatience at the interruption,—mere schoolboys still, he was thinking, shocked at his casual acceptance of his fate. They were, however, less shocked than he had hoped; moreover his acceptance of his fate was less casual than it seemed, for his knees were trembley when he found himself irrevocably outside the building, sagging down the steps towards the deserted yard, a gentleman at large, or whatever you were when you left off being a schoolboy. He sighed, and the sigh came out of him bumpily, like a sob. Why did he die? Why did he die?

That phrase, half intelligible, half abracadabra, often came into his head in moments of stress; he had no clue to its origin, but he could not remember a time when he hadn't been saying it to himself. As a child, when performing tragedies before the mirror shrouded in a brocaded table-cloth, he had declaimed it in mournful cadences. And one day at St. Basil's, when he had fallen from a nightmarish trapeze and stunned himself, he had come to murmuring it cryptically,—why did he die? Why did he die? Whereupon a shout of relief had gone up from his scared mates, the unexpected and unconscious friendliness of which had turned his bump into a blessing, for it had been the sign of his belated acceptance as one of them.

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/48


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/49

 He was now out in the world with a vengeance, and instead of being filled with zest for life's battles, he had a desire to walk on and on, out through the gates, down the narrow streets, past his dormitory, past all the houses, Longfellow's and Lowell's and President Eliot's, past everything historical and exemplary, till he came to fields of grass into which he could fling himself and forget the doubts and dreads that were in the back of his mind, waiting for a chance to pounce upon him. But one never seemed to get beyond the historical and the exemplary; the green fields were indeed, as the old hymn expressed it, "far away."

In the world he was so desperately out in, was one person and one alone who ignored the tiresome orthodoxies that had just beaten him. In a few more days Sophie's house, his haven, would be closed, and Sophie would have departed. His passion for oblivion transmogrified itself into a passion for Sophie's presence, Sophie's coolness and heretical naturalness and strange, soothing fragrance, her tacit, all-enveloping comprehension. He swung on his heel and set out for town,—wondering, in the subway, if he still looked like a student.

Graduation from youth to manhood under Sophie's tutelage was so much more significant than academic graduation. He was tired of thinking, tired of talking and reading; he wanted to listen and listen and listen to Sophie's unexpected views, her unexpected sentences, long, crisp, and curly, like the smoke that

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/49


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/50

 ascended from her cigarette when she leaned back and held it at arm's length,—rose-gray smoke, lilac smoke, smoke from the ashes of the unknown flower whose spirit clung to her. His head was full of iridiscent, forbidden fancies, a spectrum in pastels. Some mysterious fusion could deepen the colors, blur them ecstatically together, cause him to forget everything he had ever diligently learned for something worth it all, something blinding and deafening ending in a blissful hush.

She was at home, writing letters at her desk. Looking up as he entered, she laid down her pen with a strange little expectant finality. He hesitated a moment, then as she stood up, he came forward precipitately, as though he had an important message, then stopped short, realizing he had none. Sophie raised her arms as naturally as his mother might have done, and as naturally he found himself in them, found Sophie pressed against him, then fitting him, as though he were a mould she had been poured into. Even in disorderly flights of imagination he had never realized that an embrace could be such a from-head-to-foot experience. His whole body had become sensitive; it was like catching sight of one's emotional contours in a mirror. The surprise of it brought him to himself, made him draw away and look at Sophie. Her eyes showed nothing of his own astonishment; they were seeing farther ahead, and swimming a little.

Dazed, he surged forward again, closing his eyes,

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/50


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/51

 letting his hands see for him, every vestige of consciousness directed to his mouth, to Sophie's mouth—he scarcely knew which. Wild new unmannerly instincts invaded and conquered him: famished instincts, greedy and cruel. Feelings suddenly blossomed where before had only been bulbs buried deep in his soil.

A smothered cry checked him, and, without knowing how he had got there, he found himself sitting shyly on the sofa beside Sophie, his hand in one of hers, while she, with her free hand, restored the havoc he had wrought with her coiffure,—he who had hitherto been almost apologetic about helping her into a car!

They had spoken no word since his abrupt entrance, and he could think of nothing to say now. He would rather have died than translate into words his new feelings. Sophie too seemed transformed, as though the revelation of what was in him—or her!—had drained her. She looked like the sort of little girl one calls old-fashioned: grave, precocious, incongruous. And even as he watched her she turned again into a woman of the world, unsurprisable: a woman of the world who looked as though the worst, thank God, had come to the worst and what a pity! He was both thrilled and abashed by the changes in her. He felt suddenly young and empty and schoolboyish; what reserve of experience had he with which to meet the half humorous light that was creeping into Sophie's eyes! In a minute she might make fun of him.

Instead she pressed his hand against her forehead,

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/51


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/52

 and bowed her head against his breast with a lovely, reassuring tenderness. "Why, oh why did you do it?" she whispered.

He was too astonished to reply. For he had thought she had done it! He hadn't even known that there were kisses as utter as that; he hadn't dreamt that really nice people took such dizzy liberties with each other; even had he known, he wouldn't have dared. Swiftly his shadow-self prompted him. Women, it explained, were not supposed to take the initiative, consequently had to pretend they hadn't; the pretence was a mere convention, to be respected. Perhaps they weren't actually aware that they were taking the initiative. It was gentlemanly to give them the benefit of the doubt. He felt older again.

"How could I help it?" he said ambiguously, but with a clear conscience.

Sophie lifted her head and looked into his eyes. "What must you think of me?"

This inconsistency made him laugh, and with a sudden new sense of his authority and the license it implied, he gathered her up beside him. It was far less embarrassing to have her pressed close to him than to sit facing her. For as long as she remained in his arms, clinging, confirming his right to molest, there was no need to answer the insistent little questions that were beating against his brain: what next? what next?

There was a sound of footsteps in the hall, menial

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/52


text:
Page:Sanzō Nosaka - A Brief Review of the Labour Movement in Japan (1921).pdf/49

 {|
 * ||Industries. || Men. || Women. || Total.
 * 1. || Silk & Cotton weaving || 30,800 || 654,800 || 685,600
 * 2. || Plaits of Straw, Wood shaving & Hemp || 69,000 || 165,800 || 234,800
 * 3. || Mats & Mattings || 60,900 || 129,100 || 190,000
 * 4. || Wood, Bamboo & Vine || 138,400 || 13,300 || 151,700
 * 5. || Japanese Paper || 56,500 || 81,000 || 137,500
 * 6. || Earthen-Wares || 24,000 || 10,200 || 34,200
 * 7. || Oil & Waxes || 10,500 || 18,400 || 28,900
 * 8. || Lacqueue-wares || 18,600 || 3,400 || 22,000
 * 9. || Drawn work & Batten burg ||700 || 16,100 || 16,800
 * }
 * 6. || Earthen-Wares || 24,000 || 10,200 || 34,200
 * 7. || Oil & Waxes || 10,500 || 18,400 || 28,900
 * 8. || Lacqueue-wares || 18,600 || 3,400 || 22,000
 * 9. || Drawn work & Batten burg ||700 || 16,100 || 16,800
 * }
 * 8. || Lacqueue-wares || 18,600 || 3,400 || 22,000
 * 9. || Drawn work & Batten burg ||700 || 16,100 || 16,800
 * }
 * }


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/53

 footsteps, and Sophie drew away. "Mercy!" she exclaimed. "What would Matthew say!—not a word of course, but what he wouldn't say! . . . What time is it, dear?"

Trying not to exult at the new tone of endearment,—had things got as far as that!—Grover looked at his watch, as he had done on the memorable evening when Sophie had walked straight into him, to stay. "It's eleven-twenty," he said, and added, "Or the beginning of forever." It sounded like a title.

"Dear me!" said Sophie. "If that's what time it is, we'll need lunch. Wouldn't you like to drive far away, to Concord for instance, have lunch at an inn, then walk in the woods and contemplate Nature?"

"The farther the better," said Grover, "though I don't feel-exactly Emersonian."

Sophie got up to fetch cigarettes. "Non, je n'irai pas au bois, non! Non, je n'irai pas seulette," she sang, in muted tones.

Grover lit a match and completed the quatrain. "Tu connais trop le danger, où l'amour pourrait t'engager."

"Isn't French convenient, so sparing to one's pride," said Sophie, her face puckered into the composed smile that made her momentarily beautiful. If there were enough Sophies in the world, Grover was thinking, the standard of feminine beauty would be quite a different one, and pretty girls would be ugly. She was her old self again, as though nothing had happened, as though nothing ever could happen. "Do you know

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/53


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/54

 that we're a pair of silly children?" she was saying. "I don't know which is sillier; probably I, for I'm old enough to know better."

"There isn't any better," said Grover, then blushed. "Besides," he plunged on, to hide his thought, "you promised once never to talk like that."

"Like what?"

"About ages."

Sophie was standing before the mirror, tucking in her hair, examining the reflection of her face in various poses. Finally, as though she had just remembered that he was still in the room, her eyes peered at him from the glass, testingly. He got up quickly and stood beside her, feeling six feet tall and twenty-five years old at least, then he bent down and kissed the place behind her ear. "Grandmother, what tiny ears you have!" he remarked. There was a faintly brownish smell to her hair; but it blended with the mysterious odor of the unknown flower, might even have been a part of it—crazy thought!

"Go get your hat," he commanded. "We're going far away."

Half an hour later they were seated in Sophie's car, fleeing the noise and dust of the city. In the narrow mirror Grover caught a glimpse of their two faces and, in this bright sunlight, it flashed upon him what it must mean to a woman to be "at least thirty-five." For there was a noticeable contrast in the texture and lustre of Sophie's cheeks and his own, and

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/54


text:
Page:Zangwill-King of schnorrers.djvu/76

62 new-comer, whose head appeared to be that of a foreigner of distinction, joined in it. The contagion spread, and in a minute Manasseh was the cynosure of all eyes and the unmistakable recipient of ovation." He bowed twice or thrice in unruffled dignity.

There were some who recognised him, but they joined in the reception with wondering amusement. Not a few, indeed, of the audience were Jews, for Goodman's Fields was the Ghetto Theatre, and the Sabbath was not a sufficient deterrent to a lax generation. The audiences — mainly German and Poles — came to the little unfashionable


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/55

 the contrast,—how beastly unfair,—was in his favor. It made him suddenly very, very fond of Sophie,—fond over and above the delirious assurance of being in love, that state so long held in prospect, that had nothing really to do with fondness.

"A penny for them," said Sophie.

He was startled. How strange to be as intimate as this, and yet to be obliged to be careful, more careful than before. Was it ever humanly possible to know anybody well enough to say everything? He gave her a smile to put her off. "I wasn't thinking at all, Sophie dear. I'm never going to think at all again; I finished school today. That's what we're celebrating."

"Oh!"

He hated himself for his amateurishness, and he was dismayed at the implication of what he had said, for in a psychology course he had learned that Truth often chooses an inadvertent moment, indeed prefers them. Here he was, steeping and cooking in the heat of passion, fairly living in terms of Sophie Scantleberry, yet he could speak of this excursion as the celebration of something that did not include her. Was this intoxicating adventure, after all, merely his old egoism in a new guise?

"Let's not pay any attention to words today," he pleaded. "They're so hopelessly in the habit of saying what isn't meant. Let's just be—I be and you be. That's enough, isn't it?"

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/55


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/56

 "Be—good for you?" she teased him.

"Aren't I being good for you—a tiny bit?"

He could hold Sophie's hand, but not her thoughts, which were obviously roaming. There was a droop in her lips. He took advantage of the open road and the chauffeur's back to kiss her, deftly. What a lot, he was thinking, one can learn about the language of caresses in one brief hour!

"Tit for tat—a penny for yours," he said finally, concealing a trace of anxiety. Why should her thoughts go so far away?

"Oh mine! There's no charge for them, though if all were known they've cost me enough. . . I was merely thinking, and it's a discouraging sort of thought, that after you've waded through all their systems and philosophies, and tried all their synthetic substitutes, you come back to what you originally suspected; and that is, that it all boils down to—"

"I know—this!" And he kissed her again, gently, ironically, triumphantly, while a lady of Arlington looked on aghast. "I for one don't think it's a bit discouraging."

"That's the discouraging thing about it," said Sophie simply, looking at him wistfully, compassionately, almost the way his mother might have looked. His remark echoed rather emptily in his ears. He felt bumptious and chastened.

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/56


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/57

 The nicest thing about Concord, Grover decided, was not the faint aroma of Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Louisa Alcott, but the way the Chinese went behind Sophie's brown and amber silhouette, as she sat with her elbows on the table at the inn.

"You were Chinese in a former reincarnation if there would have been any, Sophie," he declared. "You have their serenity, and their kind of translucent teeth, and their kind of puckery smile, as though the things that made you laugh were a trifle tart to the taste."

"But I laugh at you," protested Sophie, "and you're no quince. You're very sweet."

"Perhaps I am, but with your private thoughts sprinkled on me I'm puckery, ever so slightly. Pure sweetness would bore you."

Sophie's eyes softened. She patted his hand. "You're a strange boy; you've seen so little, but you see so well."

After lunch they walked through the village, passing at intervals historic houses, till they reached the open countryside. Intimidated by a troop of turkeys on the edge of the road, they joined hands, and proceeded in that fashion toward fields and groves where they imagined Thoreau had roamed and meditated.

"Do you like Walden?" asked Sophie.

"Never read it. Do you?"

"Neither have I."

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/57


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/58

 "Have you read all the books we've discussed these last few weeks?" he asked, suddenly suspicious.

"Mercy no! Have you?"

Grover shook his head.

"Naughty child!"

They swung arms in contentment, and wandered away from the road across the fields.

"Have you read Emerson, on Love?" asked Sophie.

"Only in school. . . He made love sound like a Christian duty."

"Whereas it's a pagan prerogative."

"It's the fault of these placid fields and respectable trees. With Nature setting such an orderly example what could you expect? The only people who've understood love are those for whom Nature has manifested herself in terrific superlatives."

"How do you know?"

"I don't. I'm only—sort of quoting myself. . . Of course if this were Aldergrove we could sit on that fallen tree over there on the edge of the woods and revel in the countryside. For in Aldergrove we'd be in the sort of clothes you sit on fallen trees in."

"Let's try and see what it's like."

The fallen tree was in a little depression. "I thought of course there'd be a babbling brook down there," Grover remarked. "But apparently there's only an unused river-bed—rivulet-bed." He felt himself blushing again, which was positively crass.

"One does feel rather citified," Sophie admitted,

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/58


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/59

 accepting a cigarette and surveying her narrow shoes. "Something's wrong; here's Nature, and here are we."

"I know!"

A different kind of man, Grover was desperately reflecting, would soon make right whatever was wrong—but what was wrong? Why should he feel shy again—now! Shyer than he had ever felt in all his shy life! He sat on the new grass at Sophie's feet, flung away the citified hat he had been carrying in his hand, and blew smoke in nervous gusts towards the silent trees.

"Insects make such foolish noises," he remarked.

How grotesque to be in the fields, the very fields he had been thirsting for only a few hours since, and, after all, not to feel at home in them! How grotesque to be in the country with the person you were in love with, the person who was having a positively chemical effect upon you, and not to feel romantic. "Has it ever struck you?" he asked in a tone of discovery, "that people who may know each other awfully well in a city sometimes almost have to begin at a new beginning with each other in the country?"

Sophie didn't reply, but after a few moments she got up and threw away her cigarette.

"I think you do feel a little Emersonian, after all. This air inspires you with Immortal Thoughts. Grover Thanet on Friendship! Let's go find the car. I can't bear New England—never could. Little Women, Little Men—Jesus!"

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/59


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/60

 All the way back to Boston Grover was hurt and shocked and unhappy. This morning he had been so thrillingly on the scent of something that "made way for the Thanets,"—and now, like everything else in life that had fired his hopes and desires, it seemed to be jeopardized for some impenetrable reason. If this happiness too were going to elude him "for no reason at all," as Rhoda would have put it, it would be a sort of death-blow to his self-confidence; it would mean that he had flunked his examination for manhood. So keen was the dread of it that he sat back rigid and silent, his feet pressing hard against the floor of the car. He wondered whether Sophie was regretting what had happened this morning, whether she expected him to go back to the house with her, whether it was his cue to ask her to drop him in Cambridge. If he suggested it out of politeness, would she mistake his motive and believe that he didn't want to accompany her? If he only knew whether she did or not! If he only knew how to let her know how much he did want to! What a hellish maze of unnecessary wonderings! By what magic had old John Scantleberry brought it off! . . . Why couldn't they be frank? How had this abyss opened between them—or was it pure imagination on his part? Above all, why couldn't he reach out and take Sophie's hand in his? Was she paralyzed too? Was this the catastrophe whose shadow had been creeping up on him for weeks! Sophie was tapping on the window.

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/60


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/61

 "Stop at the next corner," she cried.

Grover's blood ran cold. Had it come to—ejection! Then his heart gave a leap.

"It's a shop I discovered a few days ago," she explained. "They make the most heavenly cakes. I'm going to get myriads of them for tea. You'd better come in and choose your own. I like the ones that look like Mohammedan mosques all out of drawing and I don't care who knows it."

Now he could take her hand, to help her down, and he squeezed it, which brought back her city smile, and he laughed to think how near he was to the verge of tears—ass! Ass!

He chose cinnamon buns.

We won't go to the country again, he was thinking, till after.

Nothing, thought Grover, could be more hopelessly innocent than sitting before all this silver, eating cinnamon buns and,—now that you knew Sophie well enough,—licking the sugar off your fingers. He remembered a passage in the Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle that was as unlike the present impasse as anything could be, particularly the behavior of the lady. Sophie wasn't flirting at all; if anything she looked as though she had had a mild headache but was now feeling better, thanks. Over his cup he watched for some sign in her of his own subcutaneous restlessness.

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/61


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/62

 "What celestial tea," she said.

Grover put down his cup. "In all my life put together," he blurted out, "I haven't drunk as much tea as I've guzzled in this room. What do women see in it?"

Sophie gasped. "Why, you poor child, you could have had whiskey. It never occurred to me."

Grover lit a cigarette in exasperation and got up to move about. It wasn't reassuring, at this juncture, to be taken so completely for a poor child. His only consolation was that John Scantleberry was so obnoxiously alcoholic. At this very moment he was doubtless absorbing rye in some country club near Chicago and negotiating for the purchase of more polo ponies. Sophie drew the line at Chicago. "Jack has things called interests there, but I haven't," she had once briefly explained.

"There's a bottle in that cabinet. Ring the bell if you want ice and a siphon."

Grover didn't want them at all; but he rang, imperiously. And when they came he poured himself a liberal measure of Scotch, in secret trepidation, and though he wasn't used to it, drank a good deal at one gulp, as if it were wine.

Sophie was gently punching a cushion, but instead of going to sit on the sofa he carried his glass and his gloom to the empty fireplace and leaned against the mantle, vaguely recalling a moving picture he had once seen. Already the whiskey was blurring the edge of

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/62


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/63

 his restlessness, transforming it to a faint glow of hope. Perhaps the future would after all make way for him; perhaps, indeed very likely, it was merely a question of learning a few ropes.

"Have you decided where you're going to spend the summer?" he asked finally. The question had been on his mind for days, but it took whiskey to bring it to his tongue. The Rondes de Printemps was stealing back into his head. Did he really want to go to Paris?

Suddenly it seemed to him absurd to be standing so far away from her. He finished his drink and came to her side. Instantly he rejoiced that he had done so, for Sophie greeted his move, oh so casually, by taking his hand and twisting his fingers in a way that sent warm shivers up his spine.

"What nice nails you have!" she remarked.

He wanted to lean forward on her shoulder and be stroked,—but he was afraid that would be out of character. Men who tossed down glasses of fearfully strong spirits didn't lean forward to be stroked.

"The agent says I can still have that gingerbready house at Pride's Crossing," said Sophie, "the one I looked at. But it's so big and foolish. . . Sometimes I wonder what on earth I came home for. It's all very pointless. I really don't care how many teeth my cousins' babies have cut. And the only alternative to relations is to make new friends, and one's already had so many, and it's so fatiguing to try people out,

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/63


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/64

 and end by accepting two or three who are at best only pis aller's."

"Sophie dear, was I a pis aller?"

Their fingers were now quietly interlaced, palm against palm.

"You," she said, "are the Good the ill wind blew me."

"And not one of those little almosts—that life is so desperately full of?"

She patted his hand. "You're almost a quite!" Turning grave again, she rested her head against the back of the sofa. "In fact you're the Element,—and it's rare enough,—that saves one's native land from being a howling wilderness. . . For two pins I'd clear out, and find myself a houselet somewhere on the Bay of Biscay."

Grover's thoughts plunged ahead. He was not only committed and resigned to the future now, but impatient for it. "Would the Element be allowed to run down from Paris once in a while and—walk on your beach?"

"Has it never occurred to you," she said, "that people who may know each other fairly well in cities have to start at new beginnings—on beaches?"

He buried his head on her shoulder.

"Aside from that," she went on, "the Element, if it's worth its salt, will be absorbed in its painting,—perhaps in its models, who knows?"

"You needn't be horrid," he said, drawing away.

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/64


text:
Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/65

 "Besides, what about my solemn promise to my husband to try America for a year?"

Grover got up and boldly poured himself another drink. He felt that if he remained on the sofa he would say something impolite about an exacter of promises who had not been notable for the keeping of his own. Under his breath he was saying, "Que le diable l'extermine!"

Over the cabinet that contained the precious whiskey,—why had he waited so long to learn its benign anaesthetic properties!—there hung a portrait of Sophie that had been painted in Paris ten or fifteen years ago, judging from the sleeves. Grover stood before it, glass in hand. He had always admired it reluctantly, for while it was clever, it was clever at Sophie's expense. The painter had let his own personality obtrude, and his personality was out of tune with Sophie's.

"The man who painted that," said Grover, "was a boor. For instead of paying homage to your nice little turn-up nose and summery dress, he fairly taunts you with them. Painting a study of honnêteté, he was badly handicapped by a preference for everything in life that is malhonnête. He was odiously clever; but if he had been one degree more clever, he wouldn't have!" Does Scotch, Grover was wondering, make one clearheaded or merely glib?

On turning to compare Sophie with her portrait, he saw in her face something dark, faintly bitter, and

title: Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/65