text:
Janey Takes Her Pen in Hand

SHADOW fell across Mr. Warriner's typewriter. He looked up startled. Janey had come silently to his side, was standing slimly there, her hands folded. That was a sign mutually agreed upon that Janey had a question important enough to warrant interruption. “What is it, Janey?” Mr. Warriner asked.

“Uncle Jim, how do people get to be authors? Did you go to a school and learn how, or did you just grow that way?”

The twinkles which always came into Uncle Jim's eyes when he conversed with Janey seemed to waken echoes, so to speak, in twitchings at his mouth-corners.

“I expect I just grew that way, Janey,” he answered. “Only one question a day, remember, when I'm working.”

“Uncle Jim, just let me say one thing. Is it right to take a story that somebody else has written and write it all over again?”

“Not exactly. That's an art not practised in our best literary circles,” Mr. Warriner explained. “That's what we call—plagiarism.” Uncle Jim's vocabulary never lowered a notch in deference to Janey's youth. Now, with his characteristic patience, he spelled the long word out for her and made her pronounce it. “If you were to do that, people would say you plagiarized.”

“Uncle Jim, did you ever plagiarize?”

“Not so the editors noticed it.”

“Uncle Jim, I suppose it's dreffle hard being an author. Are there any more in the United States besides you and Mr. Dix and Mr. O'Brien?”

“Janey, paint not Utopias for your poor old uncle. My child, the woods are full of them. When people have failed at everything else, they go in for writing. I don't think I know anybody who doesn't write—except Giovanni—and he probably has a play up his sleeve.”

Giovanni was the Italian who worked in the garden. Janey could not quite believe that.

“Now run away, Jane Elizabeth, and play,” Uncle Jim concluded.

Janey ran away. But she did not play. She fell into absorbed meditation. “Caroline,” she said finally to her small cousin, “I guess when I grow up I won't keep a candy-shop after all. I've just about made up my mind to be an author. I don't know just presackly what I'm going to write, but most likely it'll be fairy-tales like Andersen and Grimm and books like Miss Alcott's. I shall make them so long that they'll last forever, for I have always noticed that the nicer a book is the shorter it is. And Uncle Jim says he's noticed the very same thing. You see, Caroline”—never had Janey's manner been more patronizing—“it won't be so very hard for me to learn to be an author, because Uncle Jim is a writer and Mr. Dix and Mr. O'Brien. And I'm sure they'd help me when it gets hard. But I think it's prob'ly easier than pie, writing books. I've watched authors and they hardly ever work. I'm not going to tell you what my story's about, Caroline, until I begin to write it. But you can stay with me while I'm working, if you want to.”

Caroline asked nothing better of life than the chance to watch Janey. By some mysterious vagary of the artistic temperament, the first efforts of that freshly energized young person were with the scissors, not the pen. Indeed, for one whole afternoon she did nothing but cut pictures from the advertising sections of the magazines.

But this, it seems, was only jockeying for a start. “I shall begin my book to-day, Caroline,” she said, impressively, the following morning. “And I'll prob'ly finish it before night—that is if Uncle Jim will give me three sheets of type-writer paper.”

Receiving twenty instead of the modest three that she begged, the incipient author toiled with a stubby pencil for hours. It was not such discouraging work as it looked, for she read each page to awed little Caroline as fast as it was written, and the whole story as often as she hanged a word. But she did not finish her book at a sitting. Indeed, at the end of three days she still labored.

It was inevitable that Janey Blair should launch into authorship sooner or later. In the first place, she was naturally as busy as the busiest little bee. In the second place, she was as imitative as the most active magpie. And in the third place, she was surrounded on all sides, as far as the eye could reach, by authors.

Now, of all the people who came to Scarsett, Janey liked Uncle Jim's friends, the writer-folk, most. They had the most unexpected point of view for grown-ups. It amounted, in fact, to their being almost as good as children.

Whenever the authors visited the Warriners, the people whom Uncle Jim called interchangeably “the plutocrats” and “the bromides” always entertained them with dinners. Now, Janey knew for a fact that these events meant sitting beside pretty ladies who emerged marble-bare as to arm and shoulder and simply wonderful as to piled-up, puffed and bedecked hair—from long, rustly, shiny dresses, and yet, at the first sign of an invitation, Uncle Jim's friends always groaned.

“Isn't there any way out of it this year, Jim? Have we really got to climb into a claw-hammer? Couldn't we be sick, dead, turn anarchists, or develop leprosy?”

However, if the authors happened to be in Scarsett, they always came trooping up to the grammar school to hear Janey and her friends recite “pieces” at the Memorial Day exercises. Their applause, at these times, was almost deafening. And on Memorial Day, when the Scarsett nine played the Satuit nine, they always attended the ball game and cheered the players, although in terms that Janey did not consider quite respectful. Moreover, when midway in the game, the ball lost itself in Grandpa Wade's orchard, when both teams had to turn to and hunt it up—Janey, meantime, suffering the tortures of suspense—the writers only laughed and laughed and laughed. More than that, though this seems incredible, once when Janey had a party, they not only toiled like galley-slaves to help decorate the house, but they played every game that the ten-year-olds played. All this in the face of the fact that they had that very day given “work” as an excuse for keeping away from a tea.

Work! It was their excuse for doing everything. It was their excuse for doing nothing. Janey had never seen people who could present so convincingly the appearance of just going to work and yet never doing it. In fact, they baffled every conclusion in regard to grown-ups to which Janey had come. They stultified every general statement that she would have made. Of course, in ideal conditions, this was as it should be. But before the authors arrived, Janey had made up her mind that, with adults, things never were as they should be.

But even admitting that authors were only children grown tall, there were some things about them to which Janey had to get used. For, instance, the way they talked.

This was what happened the very day of their arrival. Uncle Jim was running the lawn-mower about the tennis-court. Sitting peaceably near, Janey entertained him with reading aloud. The authors, returning from the office, paused at the sight, and struck attitudes.

“Good work, Jim!” Timothy Dix cheered him on. “You blue-faced old mutt, you! You puffing old porpoise, you! It's time you reduced some of that—”

Whereupon, he received Janey, head-on, straight in the pit of his stomach.

“Don't you dare call my Uncle Jim such names.” she hissed, belaboring him with fists the size of hazel nuts. “If you do, I'll—”

Timothy allayed Janey with a finger. “I beg your pardon, Miss Blair,” he said contritely. “James, I beg yours. Your face is like the lily, James, your eye is heaven's own blue. You have a galumphing, gazelle-like grace, James. From every feature shines malevolence, maliganancy and maliciousness.”

Janey glared. This did not sound like reparation. Also she distrusted those long words at the end.

“If you think I don't know how to look words up in the dictionary!” she was threatening, when Richard O'Brien interrupted.

“Timothy, I blush for you,” he said in a shocked tone. “James has all the noblest qualities of mind and heart. He has the Adonis skun a nautical league. He makes the Apollo Belvedere look like a selling—”

“Well, if Janey hadn't spoken up when she did,” Uncle Jim said, drooping sadly over the lawn-mower, “I had made up my mind to go down to the mud-hole and end it all.”

“Now you see how you have hurt his feelings,” Janey said. “Uncle Jim, I think you're just as pretty as you can be. But I wish you wouldn't call the fairy-pond 'the mud-hole.'”

Gradually Janey learned that just as she and Uncle Jim had a special language, the authors talked in a speech all their own.

For instance, once when they all sat writing in the living-room, Janey loitered, passing through.

“Janey, do not feed or annoy the authors,” Warriner said.

Now Janey knew perfectly well that this, coming from Uncle Jim, meant that she was not to borrow pencils, paper or rubber, and that she was not to ask questions.

But her language and Uncle Jim's was gentle, whereas the authors— At first the things they said almost terrified her. During the mysterious process of collaboration, she was always glimpsing conversational rockets like the following:

“Gee, Timothy, but your style is putrid! Didn't they teach you anything at the Snub Factory?”

(The Snub Factory, it seems, was Harvard University. Richard was a Yale man.)

“Now see here, Richard, we can't let that go by. No decent female talks like that. Far be it from me to pry into your past, but what kind of girls have you associated with, anyway?”

“What this thing needs is uplift!”

“All right. Chuck in some uplift—if you can find a spot among the gang of grafters where it'll stick.”

“Timothy, I never hated any of God's creatures the way I hate our fair young heroine.”

“Say, that's all right, Richard! Put in all the goo about the baby you can. Vick's just had a baby, and he's strong for heart-interest. Can't we get in more he-and-she slush in chapter seven?”

“Timothy, what an ass you are!”

Janey heard her mother remark to Mrs. Morgan, “I never saw men so fond of each other. But if you could hear the abuse! I shudder to think what they call each other when I'm not about.”

But now that Janey had herself embarked on a literary career, she began to feel a great deal of sympathy with the authors.

“I know why more people aren't writers, Caroline,” she sighed once. “It's the 'he saids' and the 'she-saids.' You do get so sick of them.” And later, with a mournfulness even more pronounced, she remarked: “Caroline, I don't see how people get so many words. Sometimes I feel as if I didn't know enough words to write a whole book. I looked in the dictionary the other day, but I didn't seem to find any that went with my story.”

Perhaps the young genius—to indulge in mixed metaphor—hitting against this rock in the literary stream, would have been nipped untimely in the bud if Janey had not happened to overhear a remark of Uncle Jim's.

“If I didn't read Carlyle for another blessed thing,” he said to Timothy, “I'd read him for his words. I always accumulate a new vocabulary with each volume.”

So that was the way they did it! You would naturally conclude that for words you went to the dictionary, just as, for coal, you went to the coal-bin. But instead, you sopped them up out of your reading. Very well, then, Janey would read. But what? Not any more children's books. Her mind was firmly made up to that. She did not want teeney-weeny, foolish children's words. She wanted long, high-sounding grown-up words like “magnificent” and “notwithstanding” and—and—well, Uncle Jim was always using “connotative” and “subtle” and “sulphitic” and “gripping” and “atmospheric.” But somehow, although she had a nice ear for the sound of these exotics, Janey never could get the hang of them.

How was she to manage about this problem of vocabulary? If only you could take a basket and gather words like stones or seashells! It was forbidden that she read the grown-up books in Uncle Jim's library. Janey's eyes fell on a newspaper. Nothing had ever been said to her about newspapers—perhaps because it had never occurred. to her to touch one. Suddenly a great light dawned. Uncle Jim had worked on a newspaper before he became an author. So, singularly enough, had Timothy Dix and Richard O'Brien. They were always talking about their experiences when they were “cubs.” Evidently authorship was mixed in some mysterious way with the daily press. Every afternoon, thereafter, Janey furtively abstracted the newspaper from the basket. She bore it off to the “fairy pond.” Weddings, funerals, prize-fights, abductions, burglaries, accidents, suicides, murders—Janey read them all aloud to little Caroline, who, in consequence, quaked nightly in her bed. Janey congratulated herself on her acumen. The newspaper was simply full of words.

Things went better after this. “Caroline,” Janey said once in that exultation which comes from successful creation, “I find it partickly easy to be an author. You see, in the first place, I can write on a type-writer if Uncle Jim will fix the spaces after every line. Besides I know about so many things that authors know—collaborations and publishers and editors.”

Janey was not boasting.

She did know what a collaboration was. It was a fight.

She did know what a publisher was. He was a leader of a gang of pirates who first terrorized and then robbed poor defenseless authors.

She did know what an editor was. He was—but words failed her. Janey's mental picture was of a squat, black-bearded, lame old man who went about hitting sick babies on the head with a hammer.

“Editors are the most dreadful things that live, I guess,” she explained to Caroline.

“They're just like bad fairies in story-books, and wicked ogres and giants and genii. If you ever see an editor coming, Caroline Benton, you run home just as fast as you can.”

The very day that Janey made the foregoing remark, Uncle Jim said casually: “Oh, by the way, Miriam, Dan Vickery's coming down Saturday to stay a week or ten days. Mrs. Vick's away with the baby. You've heard me speak of Dan Vickery. He's editor of The Moment. Say, you-two—” “You-two” always meant Timothy Dix and Richard O'Brien who were writing a novel together—“why don't you try to get the first part of that gold-brick into shape to show Vick? He's been yelling for something from you all winter long.”

“Sure, we'll do that thing,” Timothy said. “Get Vick away from the office and he's quite human. Flash a manuscript in front of him and he always shows the cloven hoof.”

Janey's heart dropped with a great thump of terror. So their home was to be defiled by the presence of an editor. In addition to all the dreadful things she knew to be true of the species, they had hoofs—cloven at that.

“Mother,” she said later, emerging from a terrorful revery, “I should think you'd have a key to our room so that if we wanted to lock the door nights to keep out—anything—we could.”

But there 1s nothing more fascinating than terror, provided it is surrounded by a sense of personal safety. Besides—another great light dawned on Janey. The thorny way to publication must lie through an editor. And here, in a few days, they would have one, tamed and domesticated maybe, eating at their very board. Janey found herself actually longing for Saturday to come. She tried to help it along by steady work on her book. Saturday noon, Dan Vickery noticed, even in the midst of vociferous welcome, two silent children standing in the doorway of the Warriner house. One, roly-poly, brown, bright-eyed, studied him open-mouthed, a meditative finger at her lips. The other, tow-haired, freckled, stared at him with gray eves so dilated and wide-open that it seemed as if they must pop out of her head. They fell back to a normal size and position, however, as their look shifted to his feet.

“My prophetic soul tells me that this is Janey,” Mr. Vickery said, offering her his hand. “You don't know me, Janey, but I know you. Everybody in New York who knows Uncle Jim knows Janey. And pray who is this gigantic young person? Caroline? Oh, I see. My eye, what nice little girls!”

This sounded good. But Janey was not to be put off her guard.

Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Vickery begged the privilege of a salt-water dip before luncheon. Slipping with masculine dispatch into his bathing-suit, he descended to the living-room. Quick as he was, Janey was quicker. Seated upright in the melon-chair, a one-piece bathing-suit making innocent revelations of her charming little-girl slimness, she seemed to be waiting for something. Again Mr. Vickery got the impression that her eyes were going to pop out of her head. Again, leaving his face, their look riveted itself on his feet.

He swung her to his shoulder and in the midst of her unexpressed terror, bore her to the beach. Janey kept looking behind to see if the others were close. After a while, to her great relief, they caught up.

“Oh, say,” Mr. Vickery began, “maybe we aren't going to rip things up next winter. I stopped in Boston and had a talk with Martindale. And you listen to me, that little man's got it in him. He's just given us a series of articles that—”

“Oh, cut it out, Vick!” Timothy demanded. “Of course when we're in your office, we have to listen to your editorial piffle, but down here, you listen to us. We're going to make a man of you or die in the attempt. To-night, for instance, Richard and I, relieving each other at intervals, propose to read aloud to you the first fifty thousand words of our new serial. And you're going to print it. See?”

There the authors were again, Janey observed, with disapproval, at their old game of picking on people.

“Police!” Mr. Vickery called gaily. “When did you say the next train went out, Jim?”

Janey continued covertly to watch the editor. She continued, intently to listen to his words.

She was waiting.

He puzzled her more than anybody she had ever known. He was long, lean, dark, handsome. When he talked with her, his lips said one thing and his eyes said another. One eye-brow that flew up and down in the most distracting manner and at the most unexpected times added to this facial mystery. Janey made up her mind to pin her faith to his eyes. This decision simplified things enormously.

Mr. Vickery spent that afternoon on the tennis-court, beating the authors, as they admitted, with one hand tied behind him. Later, they walked over to the Post Office. He insisted that Janey should go too. He bought her a balloon. That evening, Mr. Morgan took them about in his auto. Mr. Vickery insisted that Janey should go, too. He bought her a bean-bag. Coming back, they bowled a string. Mr. Vickery insisted that Janey should bowl, too. Sunday, he wheeled over to the village for the newspapers. He insisted that Janey should wheel in front on the handle-bar. He bought her an ice cream soda.

It was the same with every member of the family. He inspected Mrs. Blair's rose-garden and gave her some advice for which she thanked him, almost with tears of gratitude. He talked with Mrs. Benton about her husband's engineering work in the West and he said that “Brother” was as husky a six-week-older as he ever saw. He even talked Italian with Giovanni. Of course, the fact remained that he was an editor. But Janey was beginning to wonder if even that grave social handicap compelled him to stand constant insult at the hands of the authors.

Sunday at dinner Mr. Vickery made caustic comments on the serial that, sometime and somehow, he had found leisure to read and, tentatively, to accept.

“You shut up, Vick,” Richard said, “haven't we put in a typical young magazine-cover female just to cater to your low-brow, bromidic editorial taste—”

“And didn't we throw in one perfectly good baby for full measure?” Timothy demanded. “If you say another word—”

Janey's wrath burst its dam at last. “I think you're perfectly dreadful to the editor-man. He's just as good as you are and a great deal better. Besides, that was a lie about his having a cloven hoof and you know it. I looked when he went in bathing.”

Janey could never get accustomed to the obtuseness of grown-ups. The more obvious the truth in the remarks she made, the greater the sensation they produced. Uproar greeted this.

“Janey,” Timothy assured her solemnly at last, “you haven't seen the brutish inner nature of the man yet. It's a peculiarity of the beast that it never shows the cloven hoof until you make a noise like a manuscript.”

But Janey had lost all faith in authors.

“I think Mr. Vickery is a very nice man,” she persisted firmly, “even if he is an editor. And to-morrow morning, I'm going to read him a story that I've just written myself.”

What had seemed uproar before faded to a mere patter.

Timothy pounded on the table with a spoon. “Stung again, Vick! That's right, go to it, Janey, while we've got him in our power. Vick, you're hoist with your own petard. Say, fellows, Vick's so got into the habit of conning authorines that he practises his nefarious arts on all females between nine and ninety. Balloons and bean-bags and bowling and bicycling—see how he wins their trusting young hearts. Vick, I entreat you to bear in mind that your position in this household is that of a guest.”

“Now don't get new, Tim,” Richard said. “It may be that Vick's got one of those long-distance editorial eyes. He can see it coming even in the cradle. Janey, if he accepts your manuscript, we'll make him give you a pink tea when you come to New York.”

But the author-ego still held Janey in its clutch. “I would read my story to-day,” she said in a coy tone, “but I'm not sure it's the kind of story to read on Sundays.”

Mr. Vickery looked shocked. “My dear Miss Blair,” he said solemnly.

Janey would have been quite frightened if she had not made that decision to go by his eyes, not by his words.

“We publish nothing in The Moment that cannot be read week-days, Sundays and Washington's Birthday,” Mr. Vickery continued.

“Well, Janey,” Uncle Jim said, “if you're really going in for authoring, my advice would be to marry an editor. That would be a good strategic move. You see, between us, we could train him the way he should go.”

It was finally decided—Mr. Vickery made a most impassioned and unselfish plea for his friends—that Janey should read her story to the whole family that afternoon.

“Now don't one of you crack a smile,” Uncle Jim warned them while the trembling young author went upstairs for her manuscript. “It'll be all off if you do. Janey won't stand being laughed at.”

When Janey reappeared, Mr. Vickery with great ceremony, placed a chair for her beside a table. With even greater ceremony, Mr. Dix brought her a glass of water on the Sheffield plate tray.

“Now, in the first place,” Janey explained, “when I made up my mind to be an author, I couldn't seem to think of anything to write about.”

“A mere bagatelle!” Timothy commented with an airy shrug of his shoulder. “That's the least of a real author's troubles.”

“And then I thought of a perfickly bee-you-tiful way to make stories. I cut a whole lot of pictures out of the magazines and pasted them in a blank book and wrote my story about the pictures.”

“Richard O'Brien,” Timothy said, “why didn't you—we—think of that first. Fellow-scribes, I have a moment of great illumination. Janey's methods explain perfectly the phenomenon of the lists of best-sellers. Richard, to-morrow we take our shears in hand.”

“It's called 'The Story of the Princess Elsie and the Peasant Stephen,'” Janey went on. “And I have dedicated it, just the way Uncle Jim does, 'To my oldest doll—black Dinah!”

Janey stopped and sipped importantly from the glass of water.

“'Once upon a time,' she began, 'there lived a beautiful princess by the name of Elsie in a faraway land and she lived in a palace that crowned a noble eminence beside a river.'”

“'Crowned a noble eminence!'” Timothy said admiringly. “'Good work, Janey! How you can turn a phrase!”

Janey blushed with delight.

“'The palace was surrounded by grass and trees and parks with deer in them and gardens with flowers and fountains, but most specially it was surrounded with atmosphere so that everybody who came there said how atmospheric it was, partickly writers who know better than anybody else what atmospheric meant.'”

The sentence practically exhausted the author's wind. She paused to breathe. By a curious coincidence, the authors all sat in the same position, their hands to their faces.

“'There was an island in the silvery stream beside the palace that crowned the noble eminence and on the island there was an enchanted castle. One day, the Princess Elsie decided that she would go over to the island all by herself and have a picnic. Elsie had golden hair, blue eyes, cherry lips, pearly teeth and dimples. She looked perfectly beautiful when she was dressed. She wore a blue satin dress and a blue plush coat, a blue merry widow hat, blue silk drawn-thread stockings, blue satin slippers and blue kid gloves. She wore a golden round-comb with turquoises in it and a gold watch with turquoises in it and on her arm a gold bracelet with turquoises in it and on her fingers three rings with turquoises in them and in her hand she held a blue canton flannel bag, lined with rubber that she carried her lunch in.'”

Here Janey paused and looked furtively about, for she was very proud of that description. By another curious coincidence, none of the authors was looking at her or at the others. They all gazed straight ahead, their eyes positively glassy.

“When Elsie stepped out of her little shallop a beautiful peasant named Stephen came forward to meet her. Stephen had black eyes, black hair, red lips, white teeth and a long flowing black beard. “Where are you going, my pretty maid?” he asked. “To yon castle, sir,” she said. “May I go with you, my pretty maid?” he asked. “A burly negro guards the door.”

“'Burly negro'!” Richard commented admiringly. But at the same time he shook his head. “Janey, I'm afraid you're an iconoclast. I fear the language won't stand the strain you're putting it to.”

“'Stephen politely led Elsie to the enchanted castle. Stephen knew how to be polite because he was a prominent clubman in the village where he lived and he occupied a palatial residence in the suburbs and—'”

But now the authors were struggling with handkerchiefs—you would have thought they all had the nose-bleed.

“'As they approached the front yard of the castle, the janitor came out. “Get off the grass,” he said, “for I'll call a policeman.”

“'How dare you insult the Princess Elsie!” said Stephen, for this made him awful mad. He hit the janitor with a left-hook and killed him. The body fell—'” Janey paused as one about to emit a masterpiece of phraseology, “'with a dull sickening thud, and—'”

Timothy rolled from the couch to the floor. “'Dull sickening thud'! O, friend of my cub-days—welcome to our fair city!”

It is not our intention to quote the whole of this early masterpiece of Jane Elizabeth Blair. Suffice it to say—as she would herself have remarked—that there was not a slow moment in it anywhere.

“'And so, the Princess Elsie and the Peasant Stephen were married and lived happily ever afterwards,'” Janey concluded. “And I thought it would be nice to end it with some poetry, so I put in a piece I learned at school:

She ended in the midst of a whirlwind of applause.

“Miss Blair,” Mr. Vickery said, “we accept your manuscript for our children's page. Under ordinary circumstances, we should feel that we could not offer you more than an eighth of a cent a word. But your story shows such originality of plot and such hair-raising originality of diction that we have decided to start you at a quarter of a cent. I calculate that your manuscript is about six hundred words—”

“I shall count the words myself,” Janey said, setting her lips.

“Roughly speaking, that means two dollars. Check follows immediately on acceptance. But” Mr. Vickery raised a warning hand, “considering that we have offered you such liberal terms, we feel that that ought to entitle us to the first look at your next book.”

“Oh, of course!” Janey said, “I wouldn't think of sending it anywhere else.”

The world was swimming in a rosy haze to Janey. Surely the hardships of the literary career had been exaggerated. As for editors, in her opinion they stood lower only than angels. It was almost a half-minute before she spoke. Then, “When will I get the money?” she asked.

At this, Uncle Jim, who hitherto had only twinkled, collapsed. “She's an author all right. No further proof is needed.”

And now, quite as if the authors had been released from some invisible strain, they laughed very hard and very long at nothing in particular.

But gradually all the joy went out of Janey's face. Janey's conscience—and it was the biggest organ Janey had—was hectoring—was stinging—was lashing her to the heights of renunciation. A moment she struggled. But it had to be done, and she knew it. She sighed heavily.

“Mr. Vickery,” she said, “maybe you won't want to publish my story when I tell you something. I didn't make up every bit of it myself. I copied some things in it out of the newspapers.”

Would she ever understand grown-ups! What booted it, as far as they were concerned, her moral conflict, her spiritual victory? They kept right on laughing.

title: Janey Takes Her Pen in Hand


text: Talk:Janey Takes Her Pen in Hand

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

title: Talk:Janey Takes Her Pen in Hand


text:
The Red Book Magazine/Volume 28/Number 5/The Mirror of Nature

NSTINCTIVELY the man drew back, and the taxicab, unconscious of his escape, cut experimentally through the thick, yellow fog that had settled over London.

The man gave a sort of laugh as he felt his way across the wide street to the embankment of the silent Thames. The instinct of self-preservation in one who was on his way to commit suicide seemed almost comic in its irony.

He put a cold hand on the slimy stone-work and turned away from the slow, thick water in which he had at last made up his mind to bring failure to an end. He faced the city over whose hard pavements he had trod hungrily and shabbily in search of bread for many humiliating weeks, and waved his hat. The fog blotted its all-too-familiar features from his sight, but there it lay behind the temporary yellow curtain like a great octopus in uneasy sleep.

Big Ben struck twelve, and its muffled reverberations seemed to the intending suicide like the voice of a chaplain to a man beneath the gallows. They were the last sounds he would hear this side of the grave.

He threw his hat away, faced the water that he could not see and put both his hands on the stone-work, to vault into—peace. He fetched his hands back with a jerk. One of them had pressed down something that was small and warm and soft. A frightened and petulant voice came quickly.

“What is it? What do you want?”

“N-nothing,” he answered, stammering a little. “I beg pardon.”

“Then go away and leave me alone.”

He was too accustomed to be ordered to move on, to refuse to obey. But he turned back quickly, a sudden curiosity all alert, and tiptoed to his old place. He could just see the blurred outline of a woman attempting to climb the embankment. “Good God,” he said, before he was aware that the words were in his brain, “don't do that!”

There was no anger in the voice this time—only weariness and a sort of appeal. “Oh, do go away. I'm not interfering with you.”

“Yes, you are!”

“How am I?” And then after a pause, a quick, interested query: “Were you going to—”

“Yes.”

It was not so much a laugh as a sneer. “I beg your pardon,” she said.

“Oh, well, it can't be helped. It's a bit difficult to work oneself up to the necessary pitch again—that's all.”

“I sha'n't find it difficult.”

“It's taken me a week. I've looked—over there—for hours, every night.”

“I made up my mind half an hour ago and came straight here.”

“Well, you've got more pluck than I have.”

“Pluck? To me it requires more pluck to live than to die.”

“Does it? I'd give five years of my life to be able to live.”

SILENCE followed these strange confidences—a little silence broken only by the throb of the city's sleeping heart.

And then this man and woman who had met for the first time by accident on the very edge of life stood facing, mutually curious to see what manner of person the other was, each filled with a kind of morbid desire to know the reason that had sent the other to this place. But the fog hung like a pall between and over them, and from below came the soft lap of the outgoing water as it fingered the shiny wall.

The woman moved very close to the man and peered into his face. “Are you—afraid?” she asked.

“Afraid of what?”

“Oh, you know what they say about taking one's life.”

“Yes. Well—I've been too long up against actual things to put much store by what people say.”

“But—don't you believe in God?”

“Implicitly; but I've been so much punished for living that God can't have any left for me.”

“And yet you'd give five years for life?”

“Yes—seven, ten!”

“And I've never been really punished and have enough to make most women happy, and death's the only thing I need... Come with me,” she added, seized by a new idea.

“Where?”

“To my rooms.”

“Why?”

She gave an ironical laugh. “We may be able to shed a little mutual philosophy upon the question of life and death.”

“Wait a second.”

The man groped his way to the gutter. Crouching in a monkeyish attitude, he searched there for something. It was his hat. If he was to return to life, convention demanded that his head should be covered, even when fog made it impossible to see whether he was hatted or not. He told the woman why he had kept her waiting.

“Anyone would think you had been a gentleman,” she said, scoffingly.

“I am still,” he answered.

O Adam Street,” she said.

He took her arm to cross the road. “Forgive me, but this is necessary.”

In this familiar manner these strangers adventured through the fog. It had made a thick pattern of beads on the fur round the woman's neck, and on the hair over her ears. It seemed to have drilled its insidious way into the very marrow of the waistcoatless man.

They found the railings of the Temple Gardens. At regular intervals the bleary glance of a lamp fell distantly upon them, and from time to time a taxi-cab insinuated itself along with frequent warnings. One of them seemed to the man, whose imagination was as keenly alive as that of a child in a new place, to make sounds like a lonely cow from which her calf had strayed.

The man and the woman hugged the wall until they came to one of the insalubrious turnings that lead to the somber streets that lie behind the Strand. The woman found herself peculiarly amused at her eagerness to see the face and eyes of the man whose unexpected pleading had arrested her. The man plodded stiffly on, hoping there might be something to eat at the end of the journey.

With heavy tread a policeman passed them by, with a husky “Good night.” Not for months had the man heard such words from such a mouth. He had grown used to “Now then, you there, pass along, pass along,” and he had mechanically passed along to the only possible terminus.

Adam Street was well enough known to him, even though the fog had rubbed out its familiar lines. He had often stolen a little sleep crouched chin-to-knees in the porticoes of its houses, and snatched at crusts from the nightly offal-bins on its curbstones.

“Here,” said the woman, drawing away her arm.

He followed her up the worn stone steps of one of the bigger houses which he knew to be divided into offices. His hungry eyes had often rested sulkily on the brass plate on the door, “Society for the Supply of Clothing to the Natives of West Africa.” He heard the key turn in the lock, and he blinked as a stream of light from an electric lamp in the wide, dignified hall met his eyes.

“Follow me up. I'm on the third floor.”

He followed. The staircase was oak, and the wall was paneled. The fog had crept in and hung batlike in the corners. The offices on the first floor belonged to a Bible society and on the second to the monthly organ of the Christian Scientists. On the large door of the third floor the words Miss Sylvia MacDonald were painted in black letters. The room was large and lofty. Its furniture was sparse but good. An open typewriter with a sheet of paper upon its roller sat rather harshly on an oak table. It was surrounded by wicker baskets bulging with papers. Several straight-backed chairs stood coldly against the walls, which were undecorated by three calendars advertising life-insurance offices. A bunch of electric lights glared from the ceiling, and a coal fire was flickering to its death upon the hearth. Brown linoleum covered the floor, and the man noticed two large wastebaskets which stood in dignified aloofness.

“Now look at me,” said the woman, planting herself deliberately under the lights.

When the man looked, his curiosity was further stimulated by the sight of a tall, well-dressed woman about whom there was an unmistakable air of breeding, independence and intellect. Her face was still beautiful, although it was now lined by hard work, middle age and discontent. He thought that she looked like a thrush which had been trapped in its youth and hung in a too-small cage in a house in a city. How many years must have passed over her head since she had sung under the free sky!

“I would rather you didn't look at me,” said the man. He put up a thin hand and held his worn and shiny coat together to hide the fact that he was minus waistcoat, and he tried to place his feet so that his gaping boots would escape her examining eyes. His black hair, streaked with white, had not been cut for weeks. It was plain that he had slept and tramped. wet and fine, and sat about for months and months in that once respectable suit; and it was plainer still that he had mended and brushed and turned that suit until it was beyond all hope. But in the eyes that looked almost doglike from above a straggling Oberamergau beard, there was such a flame of optimism and love of life that something rose in the woman's throat and almost choked her.

“Come in here, brother,” she said.

With ready obedience he followed her into another room—and drew up short with a little cry.

T was years since he had stood in a place so warm and companionable and welcoming. It was, indeed, the very image of the room of which he had dreamed as he lay in dark archways and disused pits. There were the wide fireplace with its burning logs and the deep armchairs within a long arm's-reach of closely lined bookshelves. There were the etchings and engravings and the nice pieces of old oak, black with age, and the settee, long and wide and cushion-stacked, on which to stretch and read. A reading-lamp, closely shaded, lighted the room softly.

With wistful friendliness and admiration the piece of superfluous human flotsam gazed about him. His thin hands, with their long, unpractical fingers, went out to touch things; his sensitive, helpless nostrils quivered; and his weak, idealistic mouth took on a little smile as he looked and looked. Everything around him had belonged to him in his dreams. It was like coming home again.

“And yet you could go down to the river!” he said reproachfully.

Miss Sylvia MacDonald went to a cupboard. “I am thirty-six,” she said. “For sixteen years I have been working for this—alone.”

She held out a box of cigarettes. “Will you smoke?”

He did not take one—he pounced upon it, and lighted it eagerly. She had not seen anyone eating smoke before.

“Sit near the fire,” she said, and pointed to a chair; and when he took it and sat in a rather nervous attitude with his pathetic boots tucked under him, she opened another of her wonderful cupboards and produced a tin of biscuits. The man trembled at the sight of them, and moved uneasily.

A wave of pity ran over the woman. This poor starved optimist, to whom, even in his present condition of utter down-and-out-ness, life was good, twitched her away from her morbid and dangerous self-analysis and the selfish disillusion which had developed into hysteria. The sudden intimate contact with a state of mental starvation and physical need into which she had never been driven, made her human and reawaked her sense of perspective. Her own loneliness and isolation from love could not be compared with the hideous loneliness and lovelessness of this creature of the crowded streets.

“I'm sorry they're all I have in my rooms,” she said softly.

He did not wait to thank her. He ate like a starved animal, coughing and spluttering a little in his haste. She watched him, fascinated. She had been hungry, in such a way, for love and companionship. She would have fallen as pathetically upon an outstretched hand.

At last, with a shamefaced apology, he pushed the half-emptied tin away and with dreadful humility set about picking up the crumbs on the rug at his feet.

HEN the woman spoke again, there was less of the bitter antagonism against fate than there had been, in her clear voice.

“I'm thirty-six,” she repeated. “For sixteen years I have worked for this—alone.”

“How splendid to have had the work.”

“Splendid? At the age of twenty I came from the country, where all my blood had danced from exercise, and all my dreams were filled with romance and idealism and the sound of children's voices.”

“So did I.”

“My father died and left us penniless—my mother and me.”

“Mine died when I was at Oxford, and I walked to London. I had the vast fortune of a hundred pounds and the infinite capacity for doing nothing.”

“I,” went on the woman, apparently not heeding him, “got a place in the office of an old cousin who did research work in the British Museum, and every day since then, for sixteen years, I've kept hunger from my door by poring over old volumes in that detestable mausoleum of dead things.”

He was about to speak again in this queer contest of misfortune. She waved him down.

“For sixteen years I have been digging into dead heaps for the worms of information. For sixteen years I have bent over a metaphorical spade for the benefit of other people and have dug in, one by one, my youth, my good looks, my health, my ideals and my hopes of motherhood. All these have fallen into the little holes I have never been able to stop making in that vast pile of matter. From my rooms to the Museum, from the Museum to my rooms—that has been my daily journey alone, always alone. From one street into another street and back again, for sixteen years, with lonely, working nights in two small, shabby rooms—that is the story of a life that might have been blessed with love and laughter and clinging hands..... And when, a week ago, I woke from the state of coma in which monotony had put me, to find that my business had grown large enough to enable me to take these rooms and furnish them as you see, and that I had an income large enough to permit me to employ an assistant to relieve me of the drudgery, what do you think happened?”

Without an instant's pause, the man's answer came quietly.

“You went into the nearest church and thanked God on your knees.”

YLVIA MACDONALD got up. Her face was as white as the half-finished sheet of paper that remained on the roll of her machine in the other room. She gave an hysterical gesture as though flinging all her years of dingdong toil into the fire.

“I was like the man who had spent his youth and strength in climbing an apparently unassailable mountain to feast his eyes on the view, only to be struck blind at the top.”

“I don't understand,” said the optimist.

“Don't you? Then I'll tell you the truth in words that are dreadfully simple: For sixteen years I have plodded and plodded, day and night, to reach the goal of my ambition—these rooms, a good income and an assistant; and having arrived, I found this evening, half an hour before you touched my hand in the dark, that it was all Dead Sea fruit. It is tasteless. I am too old to enjoy it. My sense of joy has been eaten by those museum-worms.”

She sat down again, heavily, and covered her face with her delicate, capable hands.

The man bent forward and watched her intently for several moments. On his rough way through life he had been able to help several brother-wanderers, although he had never been able to help himself. For a brief period the woman opposite had led him into the room of his dreams and put food into his hand. He saw that there was something that he might do before he fumbled his way back to the riverside whose waters called him against his will: He could put sanity back into this brave woman's tired mind. He could leave her, perhaps, with the seed of renewed hope and content and gratitude in her overworked brain. At any rate, he would do his best.

So, very quietly and simply, he began to draw a relentless picture of his own life and to paint into its dark corners the amazing sunniness that the buffets of life had never been able to hit out of his childlike character. If his last act on earth were to enable this poor woman to adjust herself to fate without casting away her whole preceding life, how fortunate he would be! The momentary hole that he must make in the unconscious water might then be marked by the silver reflection of a star.

He said: “When my hundred pounds had been eaten up and I found to my astonishment that I was penniless and without a job, I left the hard streets of this cruel city for the country roads, with a song on my lips. I carried all my possessions in a bundle over my shoulder. My only check-book was my joy in living, and my only bank was my heart. I made hay for honest farmers, and picked hops and dug potatoes and chopped wood and broke stones. I walked the river towpath and pulled boats along and opened lock-gates. So long as summer lasted, I ate my bread and cheese to the orchestra of the birds and was sent to sleep under haystacks by the quiet song of the stars. The beauty of the trees and sky, the intimate friendship of birds and beasts, the rough charity of men and women, made the wet nights less wet, and hunger less intense.

“In the winter I tramped back to the city to sell papers, and carry and run for cabs. When luck was in, I dossed beneath a roof. Do you know the word doss? You buy it for threepence and lie on a mattress among the brothers of your kind. You may wonder why, as a gentleman, duly educated, these were the only things that I could find to do for bread? I had been educated not to work, you see, and dropped back to the land and streets.

“All my summers have found me in the lanes and all my winters in the gutters. In the country I have moved from place to place as freely as a stray dog. In the cities I have been moved on and swept up with the garbage. But now the time has come when exposure has made me delicate. One lung has gone, and one foot's in the grave. The end of my way of life is suicide. Somehow a gentleman does not care to die in a pauper's hospital and be flung into a nameless hole. If I could, I would gladly go on living, for the world is very beautiful and there are others who need a hand. There are always others.”

He stopped and got up slowly, coughing badly. He saw that the woman's eyes were on him wonderingly, admiringly, pityingly.

“I am going back alone,” he added, holding out his hand. “Wait until the summer comes, and go into the country. The birds will sing for you, and the stars send their messages; and all young growing things will hold up the. mirror of nature to you, and you will begin again. Good-by.”

“No,” said Miss MacDonald, “you're too valuable to die. I'll only say good night.”

The man began to tremble a little.

“I told you I can afford an assistant. Do you want me to see the country again? Then continue to assist. Take your place in my office. I engage you from to-night. It was God who placed your hand on mine out there just now in the dark. Try and help me to lift the fog. In return for your life, I will take five and even ten of your years. Is that a bargain?”

The man bowed, and his tears fell upon the floor among the other crumbs.

The woman pointed to the settee, which bulged with cushions. “Doss there,” she said. “Good night.

And when the man was alone, he stood up with his eyes alight in the room of his dreams. The unsatisfied river moved on to the sea.


text: Talk:The Red Book Magazine/Volume 28/Number 5/The Mirror of Nature


text:
A Renegade Mother

T WAS a summer morning such as only Scarsett might know, breeze-swept, dew-moistened, sun-drenched,, flower-scented. The scene oozed domesticity at every pore.

Nobody would have suspected that it was forerunner to anarchy in the life of Jane Elizabeth Blair.

Mrs. Blair and Mrs. Benton sat at one end of the piazza, sewing. The new Benton baby napped in a blue bassinet at his mother's side. George Meredith, a big white English bulldog, snored apoplectically in the shade of Mrs. Blair's skirts. In a glaring patch of sunlight not, far off, Henry James, a monster Maltese cat, luxuriously sharpened his claws. At the other end of the piazza, Caroline Benton, a mouse-like chunk of five-year-old girl, sang as she rocked her doll to sleep. And in the roomy canvas hammock Janey swung and meditated and meditated and swung.

From the big square white house the Blair place sloped down the side of a cliff. Beyond, between yellow. beach-road and gray main-traveled road, lay marsh lands. Here the Scarsett River coiled and looped like a great silver serpent crawling over.a green velvet carpet. Beyond this, distances melted, colors fused; the landscape hung flat like a back-drop. In the south rose the Bigelow hills, tenderly curved, treeless, mottled with bayberry. In the north spread the Scarsett Harbor, a luminous blue streaked with pearl. Pointed by its three trim steeples and pricked out with flashes of white clapboarding and green blinds, the village hid in a smother of trees, directly west. Nothing moved but a load of hay crawling into the leafy tunnel of the great elms on the cross-road. Nothing sounded but the town-clock striking eight.

In a pause in which she left off meditating in order to resume swinging, Janey caught her name drifting through the conversation of the two mothers.

“Yes,” Mrs. Blair was saying, “Janey hasn't developed one bit since last summer. All the other children have begun to grow up. At least Elsa Morgan has, and Pink and Colette. Isn't it amusing to see them beginning to take notice of boys? Oh, how delighted I shall be when Janey is old enough to go to dances and have pretty clothes! Mrs. Morgan feels quite differently about it. She's heart-broken because Elsa has stopped playing with dolls. But it's a curious thing about Janey: the older she gets, the more she clings to her dolls—even old black Dinah, that she's had ever since she was born.”

Mrs. Benton's gentle voice broke in here. “Yes, but Miriam, I'd prefer that if she were my child. She's so precocious in some ways that she really frightens me. But you've only to see her with dolls to realize what a baby she is. With a mind like hers, I'd keep her down as long as I could.”

“Keep her down with Jim Warriner always talking to her exactly as if she were grown up!” Mrs. Blair protested. “Well, I must confess I'll be glad when she is out of her doll period. 1 never cared for dolls myself. It bores me so to have to make clothes for them.”

The talk passed from one tiresome grown-up subject to another. Janey ceased to listen. Much of what the two ladies said had passed over her head. But she caught the drift. It left her in the grip of an acute mortification. For it made perfectly clear to her a situation which had puzzled her now for many days.

In previous summers, all the little girls of Scarsett had played together in a group of which Janey, although the youngest, was an honored member. They had been bound to her and she to them by a common passion for dolls. When Janey parted with them the previous fall everything had been all right. When they met this spring everything was all wrong. Something strange had happened during the interval, for now they were no longer contemporaries. Mrs. Blair's words cleared up the mystery. The answer was—dolls and boys. The other girls had discarded dolls. They had taken up boys.

Dolls!

Why, Janey could not exist without dolls. She and Caroline had always taken their maternal duties very seriously, and the recent arrival of the Benton baby had fired both young mothers with a fresh enthusiasm. In the care of their numerous progeny they aped sedulously Mrs. Benton's system with Brother.

Immediately after breakfast, all the dolls were bathed and dressed. Then came an airing on the piazza, broken by pauses for rest and refreshment. All the morning, in fact, the dolls were trained according to the latest and most scientific methods of baby-culture. The afternoons were filled with gory adventures both by sea and land. At night the dolls were undressed again, made to say their prayers, and stowed away in a line of tiny couches which extended along one whole side of the nursery. In order to grow up, then, you must give up dolls. Janey's heart sank. If she and Caroline were to do that, what in the world would they do with themselves all day long!

“Janey! Janey!” a boy's voice called suddenly.

Janey sat upright. Kim Morgan was passing.

“The Tillinghasts are coming back,” Kim yelled. “They're coming down by the nine train this morning—they'll be here at half-past ten.'

“Oh, goody!”” Janey exclaimed. She forgot her own problem in the rapture with which children always welcome the prospect of more children. But Kim, passing on, seemed to take her new joy with him. What booted it, after all, that there were to be two more grown-up girls and two more mere babies in their midst?

Every child in the summer colony in Scarsett pitied the Tillinghast children profoundly. They of the summer colony managed to exist through long, dull, cruel winters for the sake of the short, glorious, exciting summers. It is true that relentless parents sometimes dragged them elsewhere for brief August visits, but furious picture post-card correspondence kept them in constant touch with the real center of civilization. With the Tillinghast children, whose wretched parents were painters, Scarsett was often an impossibility. In consequence, Ida and Faith and Freddie and Sammy-Boy dragged out a chain-gang existence, oscillating between London and Paris, the Grecian archipelago and the Nile.

“Ida'll be almost a young lady in long dresses—she can't play with me,” thought Janey, considering the news, as females will, entirely in relation to herself, “And Faith'll be almost fourteen—she won't play with me. Ida and Faith will play with Elsa Morgan's crowd. And Freddie and Sammy-Boy are babies. Why—why—they won't be babies any longer. Freddie'll be ten and Sammy-Boy'll be almost six!”

And then it was that a big idea came to Janey—came to her in a blinding flash. An instant she sat silent, tense, her eyes fixed, her hands clenched. Social schemes of a dynasty-making quality sizzled in her head. Then she leaped out of the hammock, ran the length of the piazza and plumped down at her cousin's side.

“Caroline Benton!” She apostrophised her cousin so explosively that Caroline nearly jumped out of her skin. “Do you know what I've been thinking?”

Caroline shook her head. This was Janey's most frequent mode of address. But Caroline had never yet succeeded in reading Janey's active mind.

“I've been thinking it was time we got over being such teeny-weeny little bits of girls and grew up and became young ladies—well, sorter young ladies, you understand. Like Elsa Morgan and Pink Hollis and Colette Kingdon. How would you like that?”

“I'd like it,” Caroline said without excitement. “You understand, Caroline Benton,” Janey said in an ominous tone, “what being sorter a young lady means. It means that we can't do a whole lot of things that we do now. We can't play floating-out-to-sea-on-a-raft or shipwrecked-on-a-deserrt-island or being-rescued-from-the-top-window-in-a-fire. And we must give up—” Janey paused dramatically. She regarded Caroline with the austere air of one who puts a comrade to the final test. Caroline's eyes grew bright with a half-frightened anticipation.

“—dolls!” The word popped from Janey's mouth like a bean from a bean-blower.

Caroline clutched her doll tight, so tight that nothing. but rubber would have survived the pressure. Her face shadowed; then it lightened. You could always depend on Janey. If she repudiated dolls, it would be only for the sake of something else quite as marvelous.

“We must put them all away up-attic and never look at them again as long as we live,” Janey continued relentlessly.

By this time, Caroline was beaming over the tragic splendors of this new game. She went Janey one better, so to speak. “Leth's put them up-achick now,” she suggested.

Janey caught her breath. Perhaps she had thought the final sacrifice would not come so soon. Then her eyes caught fire from Caroline's. “Let's,” she agreed. With one impulse the two little girls tore into the house and scrambled up-stairs to the nursery.

“Find every doll you own, Caroline Benton,” Janey commanded, “and bring them all to my room.”

Ensued fifteen minutes of feverish activity—then a cone-like heap of rejected offsprings on the bed. One in rag, two in rubber, three in celluloid, four in wood, five in china, six in bisque and seven thousand in paper, they, their wardrobes, their household goods, their personal appurtenances were carted up-stairs. Janey laid them out carefully on a shadowy shelf close to the eaves, old, black, rag-doll Dinah heading the row.

“I don't mind putting Dinah away at all,” Janey said in the height of her self-scorn. “I should have given her up long ago. Nobody but little girls play with rag-babies. But when it comes to Elinor—” Janey lifted a golden-haired bisque she-giant on to her lap and fondled her passionately. “She's my latest one and I 'spect I love her most. Uncle Jim gave her to me. He and I picked her out together. We got the biggest one we could find. She's most as big as me. Now Caroline, kiss all your children good-by for I don't suppose we'll ever see them agan until we have children of our own.”

That ceremony performed, “Good-by, babies,” Janey murmured, and “Good-by babieth,” Caroline echoed.

“You think that's all we're going to do to get grown up,” Janey informed her small sycophant in a tone blended in equal parts of mystery and triumph, “but it's only a part of it. You wait, Caroline Benton, and see.”

The Tillinghasts arrived at ten-thirty. At ten-thirty-five Janey called.

Mr. Tillinghast, a tall blond giant in knickerbockers, was removing the storm shutters from the lower windows.

“Well, Janey Blair,” he remarked, seizing her and performing Indian club exercises in mid-air with her small body, “Sure and certain I'm glad to see you. What ever put it into your head to grow up into the Velasquez Infanta?”

This was enigmatic. But, as was her habit, when grown-up language was incomprehensible, Janey dismissed the allusion with a Mona Lisa smile as one who intimates, “I could say much on this subject an' I would,” and came at once to terms. “Where's Freddie?”

“My spirit-control tells me he's having his face washed.”

There was nothing in the least clairvoyant about Mr. Tillinghast's conclusions. Sounds, all too audible and unmistakable in their import, floated down from the bath-room, ending with the martyr-cry:

“Well, mother, if you were going to wash me after we got here, why did you wash me just before we started?”

Janey recognized the justice of this. She had made similiar [sic] complaints against the perverted adult idea of cleanliness which washed her face just before she went to bed and then wastefully repeated the process the moment she got up. Her heart warmed to the victim of a foolish tradition. But when, all rosy from the irritations of the towel, the hero of the occasion appeared, she was conscious of a vague feeling of disappointment.

Freddie was a stocky, dark, pop-eyed lad with a supercilious eyelid, a contumacious nostril and a perpetual look of baffled curiosity. The carriage of his body radiated self-importance.

“Hullo, Freddie.” Thus Janey bridged the chasm of their two years' separation.

And, “Hullo, Janey,” Freddie answered.

“Come over to my house to play and bring Sammy-Boy?” Janey asked.

Freddie was nothing if not literal. “How long are we to stay?” he asked.

“All day. My little cousin Caroline Benton's there. She's five. I've something very particklar I want to talk with you about.”

Obviously, the suggestion of mystery got Freddie. Without any warning, he raised his voice to an altitude salutatory of the furthest star. “Marmar, can I go over to Janey Blair's house and take Sammy-Boy to stay all day and play with her and her little cousin Caroline Benton, who's five, because she's got something very particular she wants to talk over with me?”

Answer came at once. “Stop that yelling, Freddie. Sam Tillinghast, can you stand there and let that boy bellow so?' A pretty brunette face, tied up in a white towel, and a triangle of olive throat bounded by a blue kimono, appeared at an upper window. “Oh, Janey Blair, what a darling you are. If I don't do you before the summer is through!”

Janey's heart sank. There was only one of God's creatures whom she really hated and that was a painter. And she would not have minded them, if they had not always insisted on “doing” her. She strove to smile.

“That's right, bear up, Janey!” were Mr. Tillinghast's cruel words of encouragement. “There's plenty coming to you. For just as soon as the Missus gets through, I'm going to take a hack at you myself.”

“Yes, you may go,” Mrs. Tillinghast was saying to Freddie. “Give Mrs. Blair my love and tell her to send you home the moment you're bad, which will be the instant you get there, to judge from the way you've acted this morning.”

“Yes, marmar,” Freddie answered in the dulled accents which soothe mothers. “Sammy-Boy!” he screeched suddenly, having paid his toll of consideration to adult ears.

Sammy-Boy appeared. He was very different from Freddie. He was little. He was slender. He was angelic. Flaxen curls blew off his forehead. Big blue eyes fixed themselves in serious examination on Janey's face.

Janey immediately recognized the only masculine type she could endure. Gentle, tender, innocent—Sammy-Boy could be led about by the nose.

“Hullo, Sammy-Boy,” she said in the saccharin tones which she reserved for the really young. “What a nice little boy you've grown to be! I remember perfickly, Sammy-Boy, when you were nothing but a baby. Take my hand, dear, and we'll go over to the house now.”

Rarely had Sammy-Boy been so skilfully patronized. He fairly clung to the hand Janey held out. And until that day's sun set, he hardly removed his awed blue eyes from Janey's face.

Caroline descried the procession from the piazza and raced to join it.

“I have something to tell you, children, that's a secret,” Janey announced in tones of honey. “Let's go to the fairy pond where we won't be interruckted.”

The “fairy pond” was a mud-hole, surrounded by big rocks and high bushes, ornamenting one corner of the Blair place.

“Sit down!” Janey ordered. The children dropped as if props had suddenly been knocked from under them. Janey ensconced herself where she could look into their faces.

“Now, children,” she began dulcetly, “what I'm going to tell you is very important and you must listen hard. In the first place we're going to start right this minute to stop being children and get grown-up. We're going to be a crowd. Do you understand? Freddie is the crowd and I'm the crowd, and Caroline, you and Sammy-Boy are the crowd. Whenever anybody asks you where you're going, you must say: 'I'm going off with the crowd.' Do you understand?”

The “'crowd” nodded. Freddie, lolling against a rock, curled a patronizing lip. “I've belonged to many a crowd,” he averred.

“But you must understand one thing,” Janey went on, ignoring Freddie's claim to omniscience. “It's all a secret—I mean what we do or say. You mustn't tell anybody. You mustn't tell—” She paused and fluttered visibly for a stronger phrase. Losing her grammatical bearings, she clinched her ukase in the easiest way possible. “You mustn't tell nobody.”

Again the crowd” nodded. But a look of alarm was growing in Sammy-Boy's angelic eyes. “Can't I tell marmar?” he asked.

Janey's teeth came together in an exasperating click. This was what came of association with minors—they would drag mothers in. But she managed to suppress all oral signs of irritation. “If she asks you,” she said, employing strategy. “Now there's another crowd in Scarsett. Elsa Morgan's in it and Cordy West and Pink Hollis and Edward Hollis and a whole lot more boys and girls. But we are to have nothing to do with them—do you understand?”

“I wouldn't belong to their old crowd,” Freddie said scornfully. He arched still further his contumacious nostril. “Not if they paid me.”

“When you're a crowd, you act very different.” Janey's air was that of one who having talked theory for a while, comes gratefully down to hard facts. “And you don't believe in foolish things any longer like fairies and Santa Claus and putting salt on birds' tails.”

“But we must believe in Jonah and things in Sunday-school, mustn't we?” Freddie said, putting obstacles in the way of iconoclasm, after the fashion of the unoriginal.

“Oh, of course!” Janey's tone was shocked “We must believe everything in Sunday-school. Why, we can't be—be—be—” Janey cast unavailingly about in her vocabulary for a fearful term of aspersion. In despair, she borrowed, but without comprehension, from Uncle Jim. “We can't be bromides,” she ended.

The “crowd” looked horrified. Undoubtedly, to turn bromide was to go beyond the pale.

“Now, besides being a crowd,” Janey hurried past what had nearly been her Waterloo, “we must be beaux and girls. Caroline, you are to be Sammy-Boy's girl and Freddie, I'm going to be your girl.” She paused to note the effect of this edict.

Caroline received it with the docility with which she received all Janey-made mandates.

Sammy-Boy's angelic eyes grew round, as though life had suddenly unloosed heavy responsibilities.

Freddie seemed only a little more visibly to swell with importance. “I've got a girl in London,” he said, “and another in Paris. I don't know as I ought to have one in Scarsett.”

Janey's look discovered no rancor, but her small face froze to its steeliest look of determination. “You've got to have me for your girl or leave the crowd, Freddie,” she remarked.

Freddie back-pedalled hastily. “All right. I don't know that I've got to tell them,” he said, reverting to his private perplexities.

Apparently, there was no sting for Janey even in this. Perhaps hers was an engagement of convenience.

“Now the first thing we have to do,” she went smoothly on, “is to give each other something. Sammy-Boy, what can you give Caroline?”

Sammy-Boy considered this problem with the encouraging earnestness with which he had taken the whole situation. “A boxth of A-B-Thee blockths,” he said at last.

“I shall give Janey a ring that I got in a box of candy in Rome,” remarked the Don Juan of the crowd.

“That's fine, Freddie.” For the first time Janey approved her fiancé. “A ring's the best thing, I think. I shall give you a tie that Uncle Jim gave me for my dolls.” She addressed herself to the “crowd” again. “After this, we must walk everywhere together and we must laugh and talk all the time. We must have secrets. That's the most troublesome thing. I shall have to think up a whole lot of secrets. Elsa Morgan's crowd all wear blue ribbons about their ankles when they go in bathing. Of course we don't want to do just what they do, but, maybe, we can draw something on our arms with colored chalk and p'tend it's been tattooed. And then, Caroline, you and I must make something for the boys. Elsa Morgan's crowd made ties, but mother says I'm too little to crochet, so I say we make daisy chains. Let's go and pick the daisies now.”

At the prospect of action at last, the “crowd” leaped to its feet.

“Remember, Freddie and Sammy-Boy,” Janey said as they entered the daisy-field, “that you must always walk and talk with your girl and help her over fences. And remember,” she added, as they emerged at sunset after an afternoon of exhausting floral occupation, “the crowd meets right after breakfast to-morrow at my house.”

“I may be a little late,” Freddie said, resorting to male coquetry. “I promised my girl in London that I'd write to her as soon as I got to Scarsett.”

But even this did not draw blood. In fact, Janey brightened perceptibly, for among her other accomplishments was the art of ready letter-writing. “Do it over to my house,” she said; “if you can't think of anything, I'll tell you what to say. If she's a nice little girl, Ill write too.”

Unquestionably, Janey's was an engagement of convenience.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday went by. The “crowd,” in good running order now, was a model machine. Each day it followed a program which deviated not a hair's breadth from that of the day before.

In the morning it went to the post-office. It marched two by two, Janey and Freddie in the front, Caroline and Sammy-Boy in the rear.

On the road it always met Elsa Morgan and her crowd. Janey's “Hullo!” thrown at random into it was a marvel of nonchalant triumph, on which the indifference of their answering “Hullo, kids!” made not even a scratch.

Every morning or every afternoon, according as the tide served, they went in bathing. And bathing was a gracefully managed affair nowadays, patterned closely—except for deep-sea swimming—on that of Elsa Morgan's crowd. They lay about on the hot sands in their bathing suits, interrupting their talk to take an occasional dip and interrupting their bathing to take up their conversation exactly where they had left it. In the time between they took long, sedate walks up the road and across the cliffs, or Janey read aloud, or they sat about the fairy pond and indulged in instructive causerie.

Janey sustained a high order of conversation, to which it must be confessed that Freddie, trained cosmopolite that he was, was a little inadequate. But what Freddie lacked in psychological insight and in philosophic depth, he made up in foreign allusion. Caroline and Sammy-Boy, trotting to keep up, drank avidly from these Olympian springs.

“Caroline, dear, you should talk to Sammy-Boy,” Janey remonstrated once.

“But, Janey, I want to hear what you're thaying,” Caroline said naively.

“And tho do I,” added Sammy-Boy.

By the end of two days Sammy-Boy and Caroline had quite accepted this smooth, suave existence. Freddie was in his element. He had actually begun to dress the part. On a previous Christmas somebody had given him a little cane. He carried it always now and swung it in perfect imitation of his father, who never walked without a stick. Janey, herself, conscientiously went over every day with colored chalks the tattoo marks which, on wrist and ankle, constituted the secret insignia of the “crowd.” She conscientiously wore Freddie's ring. Every two days she conscientiously hunted up something to give Freddie. Every third day Freddie responded in kind.

Life was perfect.

And yet—

“Caroline Benton,” Janey said one day, “don't you miss your dollies?”

“No,” Caroline said placidly, “I don't. I love the 'crowd' better than anything I ever played. Don't you, Janey?”

“Oh, of course,” Janey said with a suspicious surplusage of emphasis. “But do you mean to tell me, Caroline Benton, that you don't ever think of your babies all alone up in that hot attic?”

“No,” Caroline said, “I don't. How soon will the 'crowd' meet again, Janey?”

Ah, yes, life was perfect.

But—

“Child High-Brow,” said Uncle Jim, “will you tell your poor old purblind, doting Uncle Jim what it is that you find so fascinating about that slick, pompous, self-adoring, insufferable little donkey of a Fred Tillinghast? It's all I can do to keep rude hands off him when he's about.”

Uncle Jim wrote novels and was, of course, a person not at all to be taken seriously. And so Janey, who knew exactly what he meant, and knew, moreover, that he knew that she knew exactly what he meant—their understanding of each other being fairly hypnotic—answered:

“Uncle Jim, I think you're horrid. Freddie is a very nice little boy and I like him.”

And again Uncle Jim, three mornings hand-running: “Child High-Brow, why grouchest thou?”

Whereupon Janey: “Uncle Jim, I'm perfickly happy. I never had such a good time in my life.'

At which Uncle Jim shook his head and said, “It is interesting to observe that the tendency toward self-deception in females is congenital.”

Janey's state of mind was more accurately described by Caroline, who, in the process of being put to bed, discoursed thus to her mother.

“Muvver, Janey was dreffle naughty to-day. She thaid she hated everybody in the world. She thaid she hated God.”

“Mercy, Caroline,” Mrs. Benton said absently, “what are you talking about? Don't leave your shoes and stockings in that heap.”

“That wasthn't all, muvver,” Caroline said in a hushed tone. “She thaid she hated her muvver.”

“That was very, very naughty, Caroline.” Mrs. Benton tried to make up in emphasis by a very perceptible preoccupation with the top drawer of her bureau. “Don't ever let me hear you say anything like that.”

“No, muvver. But that wasthn't all, muvver.” Caroline had the air of an accomplice freeing her mind by confession of unbearable mental anguish. “She thaid”—Caroline's voice dropped to tones of horror—“she thaid she hated George Washington!”

Once, coming up-stairs after the children had been put to bed, Uncle Jim came across Janey in her long white night-gown, candle in hand, trailing down the steep stairs from the attic.

“Well, Janey Blair, what do you mean by doing a Lady Macbeth act this rainy night?” he inquired. He scooped her up on one bear-paw palm to the level of his chest and carried her thus to bed.

“I was afraid the rain might come through the cracks on my dollies,” Janey explained. “I go up-attic every rainy night and cover them up and I go up every hot night and uncover them. You know, Uncle Jim, I've given up playing with dolls for good, but I still take an interest in them.”

Friday, Saturday, Sunday went by. The “crowd” met regularly morning and afternoon. Janey began to wear the look of the hunted. It might have been observed that she averted her eyes when Mrs. Benton bathed or fed Brother.

Sunday night, Janey lay awake what seemed to her a long, long time thinking of the morrow. It would bring little Caroline's parrot-cry: “What is the 'crowd' going to do to-day, Janey?” It would twice bring Freddie—a Freddie swinging his little cane—a Freddie bursting with smug pomposity—a Freddie of whose conversation she knew the whole unillumined round.

Monday morning when Mrs. Blair called Janey, that young person said composedly, “Mother, I feel sick this morning. I don't think I'll get up.”

Mrs. Blair studied her daughter's appearance anxiously. Color fine, eyes bright, pulse normal, tongue pink as a rose-leaf, Janey could not produce a visible symptom. But she described minutely excruciating pains which seemed to tear like a whirlwind through all her small body. Mrs. Blair called her brother in. After many pointed questions, that gentleman left the sickroom with twinkling eyes and a farewell, “Goodby, Madamoiselle Malingerer.”

Janey stuck to her bed. Propped up by pillows, a pile of books at either elbow, she read aloud to Caroline the whole forenoon.

In the afternoon, Mrs. Blair consulted tearfully with Mrs. Benton just back from a trip to town. “I don't care what you say, Jim,” the children heard her say, “I'll wait one hour more and then I'll send for Dr. Bigelow.”

Whereupon Caroline had an inspiration. “Can't I go over and get Freddie and Sammy-Boy,” she piped up, “I think Janey'd like to see the 'crowd.'”

“No, Caroline,” Mrs. Blair said with firmness. She paused and then continued more gently. “Children I've something to tell you that will make you feel unhappy, I'm afraid, but you must be good children and try to make the best of it. Mr. and Mrs. Tillinghast have received orders to do so much work in Magnolia that they've decided suddenly to go down there. I don't know when you'll see Freddie and Sammy-Boy again. Now Janey, I'm going to take Caroline down-stairs and you must try to go to sleep.”

Sleep!

Uncle Jim, working in a back chamber, sensed the sound of a small body leaping from bed to floor, sensed a white flitter silently passing his door, sensed a pitter-patter, softly-joyful, on the attic stairs. The pitter-patter stopped after a long moment and changed into a prolonged murmur. In some alarm, he arose and noiselessly followed the sound.

In the middle of the attic floor sat Janey. Radiating from her in all directions lay dolls and dolls and dolls. Furthest away, face-down, neglected, sprawled Elinor, the bisque she-giant. Janey was rocking back and forth, her old black rag-doll in her arms.

“The 'crowd's busted for good, Dinah, darling,” she said, “And I'll never belong to another one again. Never, never, never! I'm going to bring you and all your little brothers and sisters down-stairs and take care of you just as long as I live.”

Something dropped from Janey's eyelashes, ran glittering down her cheek and splashed on Dinah's woolly head.

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How even a “psychologised baby” like Colonel Olcott came to succumb to a movement for ousting him from office, backed by such methods as we have examined, is to me a mystery. No doubt he had his own reasons for avoiding a contest in disclosures with his old colleague Mr. Judge, who knows so much about Theosophy ever since the days of its foundation. At any rate, succumb he did. On receiving an emissary from Avenue-road, early in 1892, he threw up the cards in the unequal game with the Mahatma, and formally resigned his presidency.

Then was seen a touching sight. Cæsar pushed away the crown. Mr. Judge was loth to succeed. Who could doubt it? Why, he got a “message” countermanding the resignation, and forwarded it to the Colonel (March, 1892), just too late to be acted on before the American Convention in April, which, with decent reluctance, acclaimed Mr. Judge for the vacant office.

But now came a hitch. Colonel Olcott took the anti-resignation message au grand sérieux. He forgot all his doubts about Mr. Judge’s Mahatma missives in his simple joy at the tenor of this last one. It was but a typed copy which Mr. Judge sent him. Never mind, it was a declaration of peace; and if ever there was a man of peace it is the Colonel, despite his American brevet. He could not


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56 disobey the Master; he did withdraw his resignation. Such was his answer to Mr. Judge.

Mr. Judge expressed his delight. But in absence of mind—possibly excess of joy—he quite forgot to mention either the Master’s message or the Colonel’s consent at Avenue-road when, in the following July, the time came to make his succession to the Colonel’s office definite.

The result was that Mr. Judge was then and there elected president for life. Some voices were for a term; but Mrs. Besant arose in her eloquence and “swept up the floor” (in the phrase of one Theosophic enthusiast), and the election was “for life.” Alas! Contracts entered into for that period are notoriously apt to give out at an earlier date.

Perhaps one thing which explains the Colonel’s small show of fight is the fact that he was to be consoled with an “Olcott Pension Fund.” Unhappily the treasurer defalcated some eight or nine thousand rupees, and then committed suicide. Ill-luck seemed to dog the vanquished president.

But now came the turn of the tide.

On the announcement of Judge’s election, Colonel Olcott indignantly wrote to Avenue-road to point out that there was no vacancy. And he printed in the Theosophist the Master’s message which had led him to withdraw his resignation.

He did more. The Theosophist, the official journal of the Indian section, has come to be Colonel Olcott’s private property, just as Lucifer is Mrs. Besant’s, and The Path Mr. William Q. Judge’s—an illustration of the odd mixture of private and official capacities in this society. And now the Colonel plucked up heart to publish in his paper the first note publicly heard of criticism—yes, actual criticism—of Mr. Judge’s Mahatma.

Privately, there had been some troubled bleatings heard already among some of the less docile of the Theosophic sheep. Mr. Judge had been obliged to toke up the cudgels for the merits of some of his Mahatma missives as philosophic compositions. I find him claiming (in the true oracular spirit) that:—


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A sentiment printed with approbation in Mrs. Besant’s paper. Again, he is parrying inquisitive questions about the Master’s seal. He “does not know” what they mean. An inquirer sends him a sample letter with a good impression to look at—one which had come from Mr. Judge himself, I presume—and gets it back with the impression rubbed out (“it fades out often,” as we have seen above), and the puzzled remark from Mr. Judge, “Where is your seal? I don’t see one.” Finally, pressed, Mr. Judge declares that “Whether He” (the Master) “has a seal, or uses one, is something on which I am ignorant.”

It was on this statement—which involves a total lapse of memory on Mr. Judge’s part of events narrated in —that he was challenged in the Theosophist of April, 1893, in an article signed by Messrs. W. R. Old and S. V. Edge, both T.S. officials (secretaries, Indian section). The article is hardly what would be called trenchant by non-Theosophical standards. But it just pointed out that little discrepancy in a polite foot-note; and that was enough.

If there is one thing more than another which is deemed to be bad form in circles Theosophical, it is to corner a Theosophist on a definite matter of fact. Anything undraped in verbiage is considered nude, even to indecency. The voice of questioning has to be stifled at once.

By virtue of their joint position as Outer Heads of the Esoteric section, to which they were elected under warrant of the very seal in question, Mrs. Besant and Mr. Judge promptly “suspended” Messrs. Old and Edge from their Esoteric membership.

In December, Mrs. Besant went to India. She had, therefore, thrown over the Mahatma’s warning. But she had not thrown over the Mahatma—not a bit. She declared that nothing on earth would induce her to give up believing that the missives were indeed


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208 white man came with those and his other appliances of civilization, it is quite probable that there was never a day in his history when he could muster 100,000 of his race in all Australia. He diligently and deliberately kept population down by infanticide—largely; but mainly by

certain other methods. He did not need to practise these artificialities any more after the white man came. The white man knew ways of keeping down population which were worth several of his. The white man knew ways of reducing a native population 80 per cent. in 20 years. The native had never seen anything as fine as that before.

For example, there is the case of the country now called Victoria—a country eighty times as large as Rhode Island, as I have already said. By the best official guess there were 4,500 aboriginals in it when the whites came along in the middle of the 'Thirties. Of these, 1,000 lived in Gippsland, a patch of territory the size of fifteen or sixteen Rhode Islands: they did not diminish as fast as some of the other communities; indeed, at the end of forty years there were still 200 of them left. The Geelong tribe diminished more satisfactorily: from 173 persons it faded to 34 in twenty years; at the end of another twenty the tribe numbered one person altogether. The two Melbourne tribes could muster almost 300 when the white man came; they could muster but twenty, thirty-seven years later, in 1875. In that year there were still odds and ends of tribes scattered about the colony of Victoria, but I


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210 blossom, shows patches of feathery gold, or a belt of scrub lies green, glossy, and impenetrable as Indian jungle.

"The solitude seems intensified by the strange sounds of reptiles, birds, and insects, and by the absence of larger creatures; of which in the day-time, the only audible signs are the stampede of a herd of kangaroo, or the rustle of a wallabi, or a dingo stirring the grass as it creeps to its lair. But there are the whirring of locusts, the demoniac chuckle of the laughing jack-ass, the screeching of cockatoos and parrots, the hissing of the frilled lizard, and the buzzing of innumerable insects hidden under the dense undergrowth. And then at night, the melancholy wailing of the curlews, the dismal howling of dingoes, the discordant croaking of tree-frogs, might well shake the nerves of the solitary watcher."

That is the theater for the drama. When you comprehend one or two other details, you will perceive how well suited for trouble it was, and how loudly it invited it. The cattlemen's stations were scattered over that profound wilderness miles and miles apart—at each station half a dozen persons. There was a plenty of cattle, the black natives were always ill-nourished and hungry. The land belonged to them. The whites had not bought it, and couldn't buy it; for the tribes had no chiefs, nobody in authority, nobody competent to sell and convey; and the tribes themselves had no comprehension of the idea of transferable ownership of land. The ousted owners were despised by the white interlopers, and this opinion was not hidden under a bushel. More promising materials for a tragedy could not have been collated. Let Mrs. Praed speak:

One could guess the whole drama from that little text. The curtain was up. It would not fall until the mastership of one party or the other was determined—and permanently:

"There was treachery on both sides. The Blacks killed the Whites when they found them defenseless, and the Whites slew the Blacks in a wholesale and promiscuous fashion which offended against my childish sense of justice. They were regarded as little above the level of brutes, and in some cases were destroyed like vermin.


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212 no such effect because usage has made those methods familiar to us and innocent. In many countries we have chained the savage and starved him to death; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death by poison is lovingkindness to it. In many countries we have burned the savage at the stake; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death is lovingkindness to it. In more than one country we have hunted the savage and his little children and their mother with dogs and guns through the woods and swamps for an afternoon's sport, and filled the region with happy laughter over their sprawling and stumbling flight, and their wild supplications for mercy; but this method we do not mind, because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death by poison is lovingkindness to it. In many countries we have taken the savage's land from him, and made him our slave, and lashed him every day, and broken his pride, and made death his only friend, and overworked him till he dropped in his tracks; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death by poison is lovingkindness to it. In the Matabeleland to-day—why, there we are confining ourselves to sanctified custom, we Rhodes-Beit millionaires in South Africa and Dukes in London; and nobody cares, because we are used to the old holy customs, and all we ask is that no notice-inviting new ones shall be intruded upon the attention of our comfortable consciences. Mrs. Praed says of the poisoner, "That squatter deserves to have his name handed down to the contempt of posterity."

I am sorry to hear her say that. I myself blame him for one thing, and severely, but I stop there. I blame him for the indiscretion of introducing a novelty which was calculated to attract attention to our civilization. There was no occasion to do that. It was his duty, and it is every loyal man's duty


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58 “precipitated” by Mahatma M, unless Mahatma M in person appeared and repudiated them. If a person who had been told that the Man in the Moon daily “precipitated” the Times leading articles should decline to be convinced of the contrary till he heard it from the lips of the Man in the Moon himself he would probably be “of the same opinion still” for some considerable time.

In India, Mrs. Besant suddenly changed her mind. Had the Master indeed appeared and fulfilled her conditions? She does not say so. Yet it can scarcely have been on any mere, dull ground of fact and argument. She was presented with a set of depositions establishing all of the substantial facts of this narrative, given under the names of those personally cognisant of them, with Colonel Olcott at their head, and summed up in the form of certain definite charges against William Q. Judge. But many of these facts she already knew herself, as well as anybody, and made naught of.

What did work the miracle, then?—As far as I can make out, it was this. Mrs. Besant sat at the feet of G. N. ChakravatiChakravarti [sic]. And G. N. ChakravatiChakravarti [sic] just mentioned that he did not believe in Judge.

This is the Hindu gentleman who was sent to represent the Theosophical Society at the Chicago Parliament of Religions, at an expense of £500. This is the teacher who has made “Annabai” so far a Hindu that she now protests against harsh mention even of the child-widow horrors, the 12,000 temple prostitutes of Madras, and the other religious indecencies of Hinduism. As Mr. Bradlaugh led Mrs. Besant from the Church to Materialism, as Mr. Herbert Burrows went hand-in-hand with her from Materialism to Madame Blavatsky, as Judge made her believe in Judge, so she could only abandon Judge with the aid of G. N. ChakravatiChakravarti [sic]. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that, blessed by this worthy pundit, the case formulated against Mr. Judge became strong—convincing—irresistible. Mrs. Besant’s mind blossomed in a day into the full-blown view that she had been deluded, that Judge had himself written the missives to which she had pinned her faith—written them all with his own hand.


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216 dead—in the body; but he has features that will live in literature.

Mr. Philip Chauncy, an officer of the Victorian Government, contributed to its archives a report of his personal observations of the aboriginals which has in it some things which I wish to condense slightly and insert here. He speaks of the quickness of their eyes and the accuracy of their judgment of the direction of approaching missiles as being quite extraordinary, and of the answering suppleness and accuracy of limb and muscle in avoiding the missile as being extraordinary also. He has seen an aboriginal stand as a target for cricket-balls thrown with great force ten or fifteen yards, by professional bowlers, and successfully dodge them or parry them with his shield during about half an hour. One of those balls, properly placed, could have killed him; "Yet he depended, with the utmost self-possession, on the quickness of his eye and his agility."

The shield was the customary war-shield of his race, and would not be a protection to you or to me. It is no broader than a stovepipe, and is about as long as a man's arm. The opposing surface is not flat, but slopes away from the center-line like a boat's bow. The difficulty about a cricket-ball that has been thrown with a scientific "twist" is, that it suddenly changes it course when it is close to its target and comes straight for the mark when apparently it was going overhead or to one side. I should not be able to protect myself from such balls for half-an-hour, or less.

Mr. Chauncy once saw "a little native man" throw a cricketball 119 yards. This is said to beat the English professional record by thirteen yards.

We have all seen the circus-man bound into the air from a spring-board and make a somersault over eight horses standing side by side. Mr. Chauncy saw an aboriginal do it over eleven;


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218 trunk of a tree which may be nearly covered with the scratches of opossums ascending and descending is sufficient to inform him whether one went up the night before without coming down again or not."

Fennimore Cooper lost his chance. He would have known how to value these people. He wouldn't have traded the dullest of them for the brightest Mohawk he ever invented.

All savages draw outline pictures upon bark; but the resemblances are not close, and expression is usually lacking. But the Australian aboriginal's pictures of animals were nicely accurate in form, attitude, carriage; and he put spirit into them, and expression. And his pictures of white people and natives were pretty nearly as good as his pictures of the other animals. He dressed his whites in the fashion of their day, both the ladies and the gentlemen. As an untaught wielder of the pencil it is not likely that he has had his equal among savage people.

His place in art—as to drawing, not color-work—is well up, all things considered. His art is not to be classified with savage art at all, but on a plane two degrees above it and one degree above the lowest plane of civilized art. To be exact, his place in art is between Botticelli and De Maurier. That is to say, he could not draw as well as De Maurier but better than Boticelli. In feeling, he resembles both; also in grouping and in his preferences in the matter of subjects. His "corrobboree" of the Australian wilds reappears in De Mau-


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220 the maceration to which it had been exposed during its four months' journey through the body. The wound made by the spear had long since healed, leaving only a small cicatrix; and after the operation, which the native bore without flinching, he appeared to suffer no pain. Indeed, judging from his good state of health, the presence of the foreign matter did not materially annoy him. He was perfectly well in a few days."

But No. 3 is my favorite. Whenever I read it I seem to enjoy all that the patient enjoyed—whatever it was:

3. "Once at King George's Sound a native presented himself to me with one leg only, and requested me to supply him with a wooden leg. He had traveled in this maimed state about ninety-six miles, for this purpose. I examined the limb, which had been severed just below the knee, and found that it had been charred by fire, while about two inches of the partially calcined

bone protruded through the flesh. I at once removed this with the saw; and having made as presentable a stump of it as I could, covered the amputated end of the bone with a surrounding of muscle, and kept the patient a few days under my care to allow the wound to heal. On inquiring, the native told me that in a fight with other blackfellows a spear had struck his leg and penetrated the bone below the knee. Finding it was serious, he had recourse to the following crude and barbarous operation, which it appears is not uncommon among these people in their native state. He made a fire, and dug a hole in the earth only sufficiently large to admit his leg, and deep enough to allow the wounded part to be on a level with the surface of the ground. He then surrounded the limb with the live coals or charcoal, which was replenished until the leg was literally burnt off. The cauterization thus applied completely checked the hemorrhage, and he was able in a day or two to hobble down to the Sound, with the aid of a long stout stick, although he was more than a week on the road."


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Rh Appalling bathos!—and one which an Enquiry must needs result in publishing to all the world. Yet an enquiry there must be. The Indian section was threatening to secede from the society if Mr. Judge’s presidency were confirmed with the scandal unsifted. Judge himself, offered the alternative by cablegram of resigning all his offices quietly or facing a “full publication of the facts,” replied in a defiant sense which showed his conviction that there were others to whom “full publication of the facts” (which it was easy to threaten, but which it has been left for an outsider to carry out) would be more ungrateful even than to himself. What was Mrs. Besant to do?

A happy thought struck her. She offered to adopt the charges, turn prosecutor, and conduct the case against Mr. Judge herself.

The signatories of the evidence were delighted—especially Colonel Olcott, who got behind Mrs. Besant now with the same alacrity as previously behind Messrs. Old and Edge.

By this bold, yet simple stroke, the evidence, documents, and whole control of the case passed into Mrs. Besant’s hands, where they, as she fondly hopes, or hoped, now remain.

Not altogether!


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Author:Gyanandra Nath Chakravarti

Works

 * “The Influence of Theosophy on the Life and Teachings of Modern India” (1906)
 * “Spirituality and Psychism” (1914)

title: Author:Gyanandra Nath Chakravarti


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Page:Following the Equator (Mark Twain).djvu/236

228 The Stawell region is not productive of gold only; it has great vineyards, and produces exceptionally fine wines. One of these vineyards—the Great Western, owned by Mr. Irving—is regarded as a model. Its product has reputation abroad. It yields a choice champagne and a fine claret, and its hock took a prize in France two or three years ago. The champagne is kept in a maze of passages under ground, cut in the rock, to secure it an even temperature during the three-year term required to perfect it. In those vaults I saw 120,000 bottles of champagne. The colony of Victoria has a population of 1,000,000, and those people are said to drink 25,000,000 bottles of

champagne per year. The dryest community on the earth. The government has lately reduced the duty upon foreign wines. That is one of the unkindnesses of Protection. A man invests years of work and a vast sum of money in a worthy enterprise, upon the faith of existing laws; then the law is changed, and the man is robbed by his own government.

On the way back to Stawell we had a chance to see a group of boulders called the Three Sisters—a curiosity oddly located; for it was upon high ground, with the land sloping away from