text:
Ernest and the Social Game

AY, Ern!” It was Tug Warburton on the telephone. “Come into Boston on the one-five train, will you? Meet me at the Colonial Theatre. I've got tickets for Daisy Deene in 'On Again, Off Again.' Front row, aisle seats—pretty rotten, what? Say, and afterward I'll take you behind to meet her—she's a friend of mine, you know. And we'll go to the Touraine for tea. How about it?”

“Sure, I'll be there,” Ernest answered with alacrity. He hung up the receiver and raced to his room. He tumbled out of his old suit and into his best one with more than his usual speed; chiffonier drawers slammed open and closet doors slammed shut. This promised to be the most dazzling social event in which he had ever participated. For if there was anything Ernest Martin loved, it was the theatre. As a rule, however, the legitimate drama knew him not; vaudeville was his specialty. It was a great blow to him when the most important vaudeville-house in Boston sheared its program down from a three-session to a two-session affair. Until then, twice a month, it had been Ernest's habit to arrive promptly at opening time, Saturday mornings, to stay, with the assistance of a sandwich or two, until six. Once, with the connivance of his mother, he sat through an entire performance stretching from ten to ten. This was bliss; for he saw many turns three times and the “chasers” at least four.

But to meet a real star, to go “behind”—that took the curse off the stingy three hours of matinée measure. Indeed, the program spelled magic in every number—except that meeting Miss Deene involved talking to her. It was as if a fine ice-cold stream played suddenly over Ernest's mental exhilaration. For a moment he slackened his preparations, a frown playing between his thick brows. And then a new thought raised his spirits again. Why, Daisy Deene had always been on the stage. At least, Ernest could not remember when he had not heard of her. He had not seen her, but he could guess exactly what she would be like. Forty-five at the youngest—Ernest knew all about these stage-women and their meretricious effect of youth. If she was middle-aged—a smile took the place of the frown.

This woman-question was becoming a serious thing with Ernest. One way of describing his psychological condition is to say that he had reached the point where he made general statements about the sex. For years, he had summed up his opinion in the single pregnant sentence, “Girls are no fun.” But, latterly, he had gone far afield. Gems like the following adorned his speech:

“Girls are the greatest things for screaming at nothing. Look at the way they act when there's a mouse in the room.”

“Say, a girl can't throw a ball for sour apples, can she? Ever watch one?”

“Girls are the limit about what they think is pretty. Now, when my sister says a girl is good-looking, I know just what to expect.”

“Did you ever notice how a girl sharpens a pencil? Isn't it a scream?”

“Gee! Girls are something fierce when it comes to being stuck on themselves. If a girl happens to sit in front of a mirror, she looks at herself every other minute.”

Undoubtedly, if Ernest kept on the way he pointed, it was only a question of time before he would emit such brilliant aphorisms as “Women have no sense of humor” and “A woman's place is in the home.”

It looked on the face of it as if he threw off these remarks as he brushed past—the “Notes of an Unprejudiced Male, Traveling through an Unexplored Feminine World.” On the contrary the height of Ernest's scorn measured the depth of Ernest's interest. In short, Ernest was taking this method to square himself with himself. For he no longer looked on girls with indifference. Had he only known it in time, that indifference indicated safety—nay, sanctuary. The humiliating truth was that girls interested him. But he would not, could not, admit that.

Ernest had never stopped to consider how, when and where this condition manifested itself. Had he been capable of self-analysis, he would have seen that its inception trailed the arrival, two years before, of Fay Faxon in Maywood. The Fay Faxon incident was closed. Ernest himself sneered in self-disgust when he looked back upon it. But it had left a certain scar. He could never come upon a girl with black curly hair without experiencing a queer feeling at his heart—a sudden sense of suction, as if the blood had been pumped back from the arteries.

Fay Faxon was the entering wedge. But, thereafter, propinquity had done its fatal worst. Ernest had been driven to dancing-school. Dancing-school was flooded with girls. Phoebe was the kind of person that attracted her own sex. The rising tide of femininity actually invaded his home. Ernest stumbled over a girl in every corner. In the circumstances, he must make conversation. He had discovered all kinds of perturbing things about them.

For instance: Alike in that they were an accursed lot, they were unlike in everything else. ITEM, you could never tell whether they were serious or not. ITEM, they loved to “jolly.” ITEM, they were wizards at cornering you against your will and compelling you to a tête-à-tête. ITEM, they were capable of sustaining a conversation in which, perfectly amicable, they appeared to defer to your judgment with that humility which is the earmark of ideal womanhood. And then they would knock you to beat the cars to the next fellow they met.

All this allied itself to the major problem of Ernest Martin's existence, to wit: when was he ever going to learn the art of talking to girls?

“My goodness, Ern,” Phoebe remarked at intervals, “I'd like to know what you think you're doing! When you're alone with a girl, it's up to you to entertain her. You can't sit there like a bump on a log and let her do every bit of the work. You don't even try to talk.”

“You don't even try to talk.” That was the unkindest jab of all. Perhaps it was just as well for Ernest's peace of mind that Phoebe did not suspect the hideous truth.

For at present the effect of girl-proximity was disaster.

In the first place, his tongue began to swell. When he started to speak, it glued itself to the roof of his mouth. Nothing short of an athletic struggle, humiliatingly visible, would free it. The lingual rebellion over, he could not find a word anywhere. And when he overcame this difficulty, he had absolutely nothing to say. And all the time, there sat the girl—the evil spirit who had cast this malign spell—her mischievous blue eyes or her sarcastic gray eyes or her malicious brown eyes coining joy from his misery.

When treed, Ernest always fell back on two stock remarks.

NUMBER I: “Say, have you ever read 'Lorna Doone'? Crackerjack story, isn't it?”

NUMBER II: “Say, which would you rather do: go up in the air in a flying-machine or down under the sea in a submarine?”

These were invaluable social assets. They had never failed him. Once, at a dance, the Lorna Doone question proved good for a whole intermission. The summer before, his partner—a little, awkward, plain, sullen-looking girl—had made a trip through the Exmoor country. It set her going at once. Ernest did not have to open his mouth. How he loved that girl!

As to the second question, it all but saved his social neck the time Tug took him out to Wellesley Float. Tug introduced him to fifteen hundred girls in fifteen minutes. Blind, deaf, dumb, blankly despairing, Ernest put Question Number II to every one of them. Of course he never knew that under the sobriquets of “The Flying-Machine” or “The Submarine” he bobbed a merry part through the college chatter of that entire year.

Ever since the fatal moment when Ernest had discovered that girls were not alike, that, moreover, some of them actually evaded analysis, he had given a great deal of thought to the differences between them. In a vague, tentative way, he made a chart of the Maywood girls and their effect on him. Notes of his observations would have run something like this:

MOLLY TATE. A cinch! Bully girl. Bud Donovan thinks she's pretty, but I don't like a little turn-up nose like that. Plays a corking game of tennis. Feel as much at home with her as with Phoebe. Don't have to chew the rag unless I want to. Always talk about school and tennis. In fact, never think of her at all. Dance every dance I can get with her, you bet.

FLORENCE MARSH. A snap. Next easiest after Molly. Not pretty. Pie-face. Too fat. Don't chin with her much, for she never seems to want to. Would forget she was about, if she didn't look at me so much. Pretty good girl, though.

GOULD TWINS. Not so worse. Never can tell one from another. And they're always pretending they're the other one, which is a low-down trick to play on a fellow. Hot-air artists. Can always get them going because I always see them together. Besides they both want to talk all the time. Awful pretty.

GUSSIE PUGH. Nothing doing! Doesn't she give me a pain! Too darned fresh. Thinks she knows it all. Always putting on airs. Always quoting German. Homely as the deuce.

MRS. VENTRY. Something fierce! A pippin, though. Liked her and didn't like her. I always wiggled when she looked at me. Always joshing me—made me feel like a kid. Always nervous when she was about, except when she let me drive her automobile. The best sport for a woman I ever met.

SYLVIA GORDON. The limit! Can't make up my mind whether she's pretty or not. A whole lot of little curls hanging off her head—looks as if she never combed her hair. Eyes half-shut most of the time like a kitten. But when she opens them wide and looks at a fellow, whew! I feel like the way you do when you're drinking ginger ale and it backs up into your nose.

The extraordinary part of it all was that no other fellow whom Ernest knew seemed to experience embarrassed sensations in the presence of girls. Untold millions would not have tempted him to open the subject with his friends, yet carefully and furtively he studied their conversational methods. The result of this supplementary series of observations would have been embodied thus:

RED TATE. Red's system was simplicity itself. He walked through life in apparent oblivion to the alien sex. His manner with girls was the acme of indifference. He never saw them unless forced into their company. Then if there was any conversation, they made it. He responded in grunts or not at all.

BUD DONOVAN. Bud's method was a gentle translation of the game he employed with Ginnies, Swedes, Chinamen, muckers and pedlars. It was,in brief, to harry—to do anything, from the jerking of pigtails to the imposition of elaborate practical jokes, that would provoke remonstrance, contradiction, wrath. Ernest observed in dismay that Bud was a general favorite with the inconsistent sex.

SIGISMUND LATHROP. In private, Ernest knew Sig to be—well, Mrs. Flaherty, the Lathrop washerwoman, never called him anything but “that hellion.” Yet both Mrs. Martin and Phoebe looked upon him as a cross between an angel and a genius. And why? Simply because Sig played the piano. As far as that went, Sig had nobody but himself to blame. He would talk music with those two by the hour. Ernest came to the conclusion that if you were interested in some fool woman- thing like music or books or pictures, you had a natural pull with the sex. Ernest himself could depend on no such artificial prop.

TUG WARBURTON. Tug was a puzzle. He did not ignore females, like Red, nor tease them, like Bud, nor confide in them, like Sig. Or was it that he did all these things? It seemed to Ernest that he treated them exactly as if they were boys. Ernest had his private exasperations with a fellow who considered a girl a human being.

And what was the result? Of all the boys in Maywood, Tug was the most in social demand. Why, even human outcasts, like teachers, adored him. And yet Tug was far from handsome. His round, irregularly featured face began under a mat of brown curls, bowed out into full-moon curves, and ended in a chin so square that it looked as if it had been planed. His look seemed to be lighted equally by the gleam of his big, round, gold-rimmed spectacles and the grin of his big, square, flashing teeth. No, he was not beautiful. But he certainly had a way with him.

Now, in Ernest's case, only girls of his own age gummed his game, as he expressed it. That was the curious fact. Only when he went up against the dimple and the twinkle did he court certain failure. With children and with women of his mother's age he was triumphantly successful.

Of all these things Ernest thought as he boarded the train for Boston. Indeed, his peace of mind was constantly riddled by such thoughts nowadays. For something was always happening to dash him to social shipwreck on the rocks of conversation. It happened that day.

He had just seated himself when he felt a touch on his shoulder. He turned. It was the majestic Mrs. Marsh, mother of Florence.

“Oh, Mr. Martin,” she intoned in her presiding-office accents, “I am indeed glad to see you. Come over and sit with us. I have the sweetest girl with me—Fonnie's friend, Matty Jerrold, a Bryn Mahr girl. You two will prove congenial spirits, I know. She's a perfect beauty and such correct manners.”

Ernest arose. Ernest followed her. It was to his doom, and he knew it. “Let me introduce you to Miss Jerrold, Mr. Martin,” said his executioner. “Mr. Martin, Miss Jerrold.”

Ernest saw in the first sickened glance that Miss Jerrold was the type which most easily terrorized him. Tall, tailored, statuesquely blonde, glacially beautiful, she was the kind of girl who expected a fellow to do all the talking. Ernest dropped into the turned-over seat which faced the ladies. The symptoms started in full force. Then suddenly they stopped. Ernest realized with paeans of praise to the unknown god who manages such things that nobody else could talk in Mrs. Marsh's presence. He listened with an interest, little short of rapture, to a prolix account of a recent difficulty with a chauffeur. Listened—but one alert sense was counting the stations which separated him from Boston—and escape. One, two, three, four—and still, stately, solemn, formal, Mrs. Marsh rippled on. The Argyle station, only two more now! And then, like a bolt from the blue, ruin fell upon him.

“Why, there's Mrs. Wilmot,” Mrs. Marsh exclaimed. “You two young people must excuse me for a few minutes. There's some Club business I've got to talk over with her.” She rose, sailed majestically down the aisle, and disappeared in the scarlet mist which rapidly obscured Ernest's vision.

Between Argyle and Boston there were strung ten minutes according to the time-table. Ernest had never before realized the elastic quality of time. The ten minutes of his tête-à-tête with Miss Jerrold were each an hour long.

He had read his companion aright—she undoubtedly expected a fellow to do the entertaining. Calmly receptive, unresponsive, she looked straight ahead for the first three minutes which followed the exodus of Mrs. Marsh. Then, as the oppressive silence continued to maintain itself, she transferred her frigid, long-lashed gaze to the whirling landscape. She might have been a piece of marble sculpture in the process of transportation for all the notice she took of Ernest. Five minutes, six minutes, seven minutes went by. And still Ernest was searching his soul for words. The Boston station gloomed above them. Ernest roused himself with a Titanic effort. “Say, Miss Jerrold,” he stammered, “which would you rather do, go up in the air in a submarine”—Ernest felt that something had tangled here, but he floundered on—“or down under the ocean in a flying-machine?”

In the theatre the cloud lifted immediately. No mental fog could resist the effect of “On Again, Off Again.” It packed the stage to the bursting-point with pretty girls. It crammed three acts to the exploding-point with hummable songs. It charged the dialogue to the cracking-point with jokes. It permitted two Dutch comedians, who had evidently swallowed a bushel of assorted syllables, to take their own method of putting them together. Last of all, it gave Daisy Deene a wonderful entrance in a flower-filled automobile. It afforded her plenty of chance to talk in her childish treble, to sing in her astounding contralto, to change her costume in season and out, to display, in the most twinkling of dances, the tiniest feet on the American stage.

Miss Deene discovered Tug on her first entrance. Occasionally thereafter she passed him a surreptitious signal—to the public embarrassment and secret elation of the two lads. At the close of the first act, an usher brought a note to Tug which requested him to come “behind” at the close of the performance and to bring his friend. Ernest enjoyed the show enormously. And yet he half wanted it to end. The desire ached in the back of his head to wipe out the Matty Jerrold episode. He wanted to prove again to himself what conversational miracles he could work with forty-and-over. The curtain went down finally in a whirlwind of dance and song, of showered confetti and thrown paper streamers.

Eagerly, Ernest followed Tug's lordly, accustomed stride through a door at the right of the lower box. On the stage, the substantial château and garden set of the last act, broken into many flat painted surfaces, was running smoothly off into the wings. At one side, a flight of shaky wooden stairs ran upward. At the top—a wonderful doll which sparkled and shimmered and moved and talked—stood Daisy Deene.

Tug ran, three steps at a time, up to her side. Ernest knew that Tug said things. He knew that he himself said things. But all he heard were the pretty intonations of Miss Deene's charming speaking-voice.

“Hullo, Tug. If you aren't the candy kid! Some class to this show! S. R. O.—nothing but! Oh, how do you do, Mr. Martin. Why, of course, Ernest Martin. I've always heard of Ern. Harvard? Yes? Ah, I see, Prep. No? Oh, High School. Say, he looks older'n you, Tug. You're just what I need in that football scene, Mr. Martin. I'd like to be able to look at somebody with shoulders on him. Did you notice Furniss in that sweater? Isn't he gentle-looking? Say, those sloping shoulders of his get on my nerves so I can't see straight. Don't want a job, do you, Mr. Martin?”

Could he talk to forty-and-over? Conversation came with a rush. “Sure!” Ernest said. “I'd take any job to be with you. You ought to hear me sing—I've got a voice like carriage-wheels going over snow. And as for buck and wing—the Maywood Hospital does a rushing business on the cripples I send there after every dance.”

Miss Deene laughed. “He qualifies all right, Tug, doesn't he? What is your batting-average, Mr. Martin?”

“Sure! I don't introduce anything but the Ancient and Honorable Order of True Peruvians to you, Daisy,” Tug responded.

Obedient to command, Ernest sat down. In the mental whirl, inevitable to so gala an event, he was conscious superficially of a blur of detail, the disorder of the tiny slit of a room, the rouge-and-powder messiness of the make-up table, the mirror set in electric bulbs, the moving figure of a gaunt, black maid, the owl-like bigness of Miss Deene's eyes, like blue diamonds, sunk in a pit of paint, the terrifying liquid bloom of her lips, the ghastly whiteness of her neck and arms. But he was more conscious of his inner sense of triumph. What mattered the episode of Matty Jerrold now?

“Say, Daisy,” Tug was saying, “I'd have got you a bunch of blooms, if I'd had the price. But can't you come to the Touraine with us and have some tea?”

“Touraine?” Miss Deene responded blithely. “Surest thing you know. Tea? Easiest thing I do. I guess I'll have to make it dinner. I don't have so very much time between the two shows. Only a bite for me, though. And say, Tug, I know what a college man is like. All this expensiveness can't be off you. I've got a bean or two in my clothes. What? All right. Ruin yourself, if you will, muh lad, but never say that Daisy Deene, your childhood's friend, did not try to help you. Hurry up there, Cold Molasses. Put out the best wad of clothes I've got. And now, angel-boys, I prithee, beat it! Daisy Deene begs to have her boudoir to herself. I'll be dressed in one jiff.”

Ernest followed Tug to the dark and dismantled stage.

“Isn't she a grand piece of work?” Tug demanded enthusiastically.

“She's the goods,” Ernest agreed warmly. The excitement which brought the smile to his lips and the sparkle to his eyes did not arise from this romantic situation. Rather it was part of that sense of a large social freedom which always came when he talked easily and well. While he waited, the trains of thought, started by the vivacious Miss Deene, continued to run; he composed what he characterized to himself as a “nifty bunch of hot air.”

“Say, Miss Deene,” he said, when she emerged from the dressing-room, “how'd you ever get by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children?”

Ernest could ask that question with a clear conscience. For if Miss Deene looked not more than fifteen on the stage, she looked only twelve off it. She had removed every atom of make-up. Her blue eyes shone as if they had been polished, her cheeks had the tint of wild roses and the texture of velvet from their recent rubbing. Her little mice teeth seemed to have almost an electric sparkle in the midst of this color.

She grew serious immediately. “Oh, don't speak of it,” she said with what Ernest considered an admirable bit of acting. “They made my life a perfect misery. As for the Gerry Society—they nearly put me out of business. They simply would not believe mommer when she told them my age. I guess nobody in the profession ever prayed so hard for Father Time to get a move on as I did.”

She would, would she? “Me,” Ernest told himself, he could “josh back until the cows came home.” “I don't blame them at all,” he asserted audaciously. “If I'd been a member of that society I'd have tied you up in a kindergarten where you belong. I bet you dollars to doughnuts that fifteen years ago you were saying, 'Thumbs and fingers say, “Good morning.”'”

“That's what I was,” Miss Deene responded. And immediately she squeaked in a high, baby voice, “First and middle, ring-receiver, least of all, “Good morning.”'” She pattered about the stage in a child's gait, crooning, “'Good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning.'” She shook hands with both boys. “Good morning to all.” She concluded with a wonderful curtsy.

Ernest was enchanted. Why could not real girls be like this? All the way to the Touraine, he laughed and joked with the lady about her foolish youthfulness.

In the dining-room, they were the target for all glances. Everybody recognized Daisy Deene at once—how, Ernest privately wondered. For, until she took it off, her long sealskin coat made Stygian darkness of her from chin to toe. And her hat scooped all about her, leaving only one section of her profile open to observation. But, apparently, one section of her profile was all that was necessary. Everybody except Daisy Deene herself continued to be very conscious of her presence. You would have thought Tug the most popular man in college. A party of Harvard men at a big table in the corner went out of their way to bestow the most punctilious of salutes upon him. At intervals, one or more of their number filed past on perfectly transparent errands to the cigar-counter. Even a middle-aged man in the corner, whom Ernest recognized as a broker-friend of Tug's father, smiled with almost a cloying sweetness every time he met Tug's eye.

Their trio grew gayer and gayer. Ernest was absolutely happy. It came to him that if he had not found the ideal combination—the girl with the middle-aged point of view—he had come across the next best thing, middle age that could look like a girl. He could have larked with Daisy Deene until the sun rose. After a while, he cut Tug quite out of the conversation. That young gentleman pretended alternately to gleam and gloom. One moment, he beamed because he had brought together two who were manifestly made for each other; the next, he sulked morosely because, as he expressed it, he had been fool enough “to introduce his Dinah to a pal.”

“Oh, I'm having such a nice time!” Miss Deene sighed once. “You know I'm pretty hard-working and I'm on the job most of the time.” She stopped for an instant and some of her radiant child-quality seemed to melt away. When she spoke again, it was in a diction quite clear of slang. Ernest liked that. Not that she was not perfect. Only he was glad to know that she had another vocabulary. To be ideal, a woman should.

“You see, I started at the bottom of the ladder—in Shakespeare. Then I arose to the dizzy heights of musical comedy. The natural development of my career would be the high-brow realms of vaudeville next. Yet, goose that I am, I'm working and reading and studying and nearly killing myself generally to get back into the legitimate. I'll do it yet.” She stopped, brooded, sighed, smiled. “I don't have a lark like this once in a blue moon.”

It was dark when they left the Touraine. The lady decided to walk to her hotel for the nap which she always took between afternoon and evening performances. Impelled by his sense of triumph, Ernest drew her arm through his. They walked, hooked thus, across the Common, the Public Garden and up Commonwealth Avenue. When they left her, she lifted her face to Tug's kiss as naturally as if he had been her brother.

“You, too,” she said frankly, turning to Ernest. “I'm going to adopt you for a brother.” And Ernest kissed her with the fraternal nonchalance which he would have exercised in the case of Phoebe.

“Isn't she a wonder?” Tug reiterated proudly as they made toward Boylston Street, the point of separation.

“She sure is,” Ernest responded warmly.

“And say,” Tug went on, “you were good! You were great! Gee, I didn't know you were such a jollier, Ern. That's the way to do it every time. Rush them. Beat them to it. They all fall for it. They eat it up. I could see you made all kinds of a hit with her. And I'm glad of it. For Daisy Deene is pure gold beside being a comer all right. I've known her all my life. Her mother and my mother went to boarding-school together. That wasn't press about her age either. It's all on the level. She went on first at fifteen—the youngest Juliet in America. She's twenty now. I know because she's always been two years younger than me. Well, there's a Harvard Square. Over the hot sands!”

Mechanically, Ernest climbed into his car. Mechanically, he sat down. Mechanically, he paid his fare. Those were the only three motions he made until he reached the South Station. But, inside, he was an embodied anarchy. First the blood congealed in his veins. Then it melted and burst spontaneously into flame. Memories of the last two hours recurred and scorched. Coming out, he had calmly linked her arm to his—his gaze took on a glassy fixity. On the walk, he had patted the tiny white-gloved hand that lay on his sleeve—retrospective shivers ran down his spine. At parting he had kissed her—an icy perspiration jetted from every pore.

The change from the Elevated to the railroad broke off these meditations. Then as if his consciousness, unwitting, had caught and held Tug's last words, it now rehearsed them.

“That's the way to do it every time,” it repeated. “Rush them. Beat them to it. They all fall for it. They eat it up.”

Ernest came out of his reverie and glanced about the car.

His eyes fell on a girl sitting alone, a little ahead of him. Her back was toward him, but he would have known Miss Jerrold anywhere by the haughty pose of her head, by the great rolls of hair of a coldly sparkling gold. For a moment, Ernest sat perfectly still, staring. It seemed a long time since the morning train when he had tried to talk with her.

Suddenly he squared his shoulders with a vigorous jerk of his body. He shut his mouth to lines, iron-stiff with decision. His eyes sparkled. He arose and swung leisurely down the aisle until he stood at her side.

Miss Jerrold looked up. “Oh, how do you do, Mr. Martin,” she said in the uncordial tones of her faultless breeding.

“I've just been to see Daisy Deene in 'On Again, Off Again,'” Ernest began easily, sitting down. “Say, you don't want to miss that show whatever you do. It's a peacherine. Afterward, I went behind to Miss Deene's dressing-room and was introduced. Oh, but she's a pippin! Cutest little thing you ever saw in your life. At fifteen, she went on the stage, the youngest Juliet in America. Now she's only twenty. Afterwards we went to the Touraine together. She's really prettier and younger off the stage than on. And how she can dance! I don't see how she can give two performances in one day—she's on almost every moment.”

The bell rang—the train started. The whistle blew—the train stopped. People got off—people got on. The bell rang—the train started. Miss Jerrold had made some futile gasps, preliminary to a self-defensive interruption. They reached the Argyle Station. But Ernest Martin was still talking.

title: Ernest and the Social Game


text:
Phoebe Among the Thespians

N Volume V (“Storm and Stress”) of Phoebe Martin's diary will be found a description of what Phoebe called her “ideal.”

“I care not,” she says with a freedom from prejudice splendid in one so young, “whether he be light or dark. I care not whether he be tall or short. I care not whether he be rich Or poor. Two things only I stipulate. One is that he shall not be handsome, for if there is any thing I loathe, abominate and despise, it is a handsome man. The other is that he shall be over forty, for young men are so frivolous and brainless that I avoid their society wherever it is possible. What I am most particular about is his eyes. They must be mysterious and disillusioned and sad and cynical and bitter, all at once, if you know what I mean. And those eyes must be the keynote of his whole soul. For he must have seen everything, done everything, been through everything—blasé, in fact, just ready for some pure young girl to restore his faith in the Good and the True and the Beautiful. He must be able not only to interest but to command me. He must be possessed of such subtlety that I shall never be able to penetrate to the deepest depths of his unfathomable nature. He must be clean-shaven and iron-gray. From his lower lip, his chin must curve way in before it comes to a point. Other than this I ask nothing. Only he CANNOT have an Adam's apple. And I hope the sleeves of his coat will not be short, that his collar comes together in the middle and he does not wear his hat on one side.”

With this picture graven on her mind, it is not surprising that she recognized it the moment she saw it embodied. The occasion was the matinée of the play of a brilliant young Irish dramatist. The embodied ideal was no other than Mr. Willis Raikes, the most able and eccentric of theatrical meteors.

But in the meantime Phoebe's diary had gone to the limbo of outgrown things—had gone as irrevocably as Phoebe's dolls, Phoebe's baby picture-books, Phoebe's home-made “The Flora of Maywood.” And in its place—for Phoebe's nature was one that demanded expression—sprang up a correspondence with Sylvia Gordon. To this correspondence, so furious of pace, so thick of volume, so written over, so scrawled across, so underscored, so single, double, triple and quadruple postscripted, so revised and addendumed, mere type, short of facsimile, never can do justice.

“Gee, girls are the limit,” Ernest said, “the way they write letters. You can't fool me—they like it.”

But the proof of the correspondence is in the quotation. Vide:

If you haven't seen Willis Raikes in “The Woman Soul Leadeth Us—Where?” do for goodness' sake buy a ticket for the next performance if you have to stand up. Of course the play itself is too lovely for words, but I won't go into that now, for you know just what a treat is before you when you go to see anything by Glaive. It's not the play I'm so crazy about, but Willis Raikes himself. Oh, Sylvia, he is really marvelous. When he first came on the stage, I had the queerest sensation—I can't describe it—I simply can't—but it was something weird. You know those feelings that you have sometimes that you've been in a place before and done exactly the same thing although you know as well as you know anything that you have never been there or done those things in this life. Oh, Sylvia, do you know, more and more, I'm growing to believe in reincarnation? Well, it was a good deal like that only so much more creepy. Sylvia, I couldn't take my eyes off of him. He is certainly the most stunning-looking man I ever saw—he's handsomer than father. He wears a corking green uniform trimmed with bushels of gold braid and one of those little jackets hanging from his shoulders that foreign soldiers wear. It was green, too, trimmed with fur and lined with red. On his head was one of those tall fur hats. He has the dearest Irish accent. You know, Sylvia, how you and I love clean-shaven men. Well, he wasn't that exactly. He wore just a little smudge of mustache on his upper lip and just a dab beneath his lower one. And his eyes—Sylvia, you never saw such eyes. I was in the front row, and I may be mistaken, but I thought he looked at me once or twice. Sylvia, they went right through me. Sylvia, I beg and entreat and implore and beseech you to go. I am simply crazy to hear what you will say about him. You always have such original ideas on things. Yours frantically,.

P. S.—Be sure to notice his chin in profile and see if you ever in your life saw anything so adorable. .

2d P.S.—Notice particularly and tell me what you think his attitude toward his leading woman is —I should say cold contempt. 2em

3d P.S.—Try to find out whether that is a wig or his own hair. I think it's a wig. P. M.

4th P. S.—Don't forget to tell me in your next how old you think he is.

The Raikes engagement lasted a month. Phoebe attended as many matinées as her allowance would permit. After the first performance, a picture of the star in the costume of Terence O'Toole, appeared on her dressing-table. Later, she placed before it a little Chinese affair made of an Oriental metal, pierced like a salt-cellar at the top with many holes. Every night before going to bed Phoebe burnt a pair of joss-sticks at this shrine of dramatic art. The picture changed every week, for every week Phoebe bought a new one. But the Chinese affair never budged.

After the Raikes company left Boston, Phoebe started a Raikes album. In it she pasted magazine and newspaper pictures of Mr. Raikes, interviews with Mr. Raikes, announcements of the plans of Mr. Raikes, stray personal data about Mr. Raikes. These last came rarely, and Phoebe's biography of her hero was, in consequence, a patched-up thing. Mr. Raikes was a reticent being. If he had a press agent, that gentleman must have labored under perpetual blight. Mr. Raikes seemed to entertain the idea that there was a definite line where the curiosity of the public must stop and the privacy of even an actor may begin. He refused to make capital out of his personal history. And as for his experiences of the heart, he might have lived in an Eveless Eden. The divorce court knew him not. It was whispered that even the letters from unknown women which his mail constantly brought him fluttered in tiny unread pieces to his waste basket.

Going through the paper one evening, shears in hand, Phoebe came across that which elicited the following:

Have you seen the papers? If you have, you know how crazy I am. But of course you haven't. Willis Raikes has been asked to act in the production of an Elizabethan play at Harvard this June. Things have happened to bring his season to an early close and he will come on a month ahead of the date in order to see that everything is all right. Of course, I shall go if I have to pay twenty dollars for my ticket. But it won't be anything like so expensive as that. Do save your pennies so that we can go together. Yours, walking-on-air,.

P. S.—Do you happen to have a copy of the play, “Epicene or The Silent Woman,” by Ben Jonson. a

For a while the correspondence whirled at lightning velocity. Then it settled down to its normal pace, which was only a gallop. One day Sylvia received an envelope directed in Phoebe's hand. Inside was only a newspaper clipping:

Mrs. Willis Raikes, who accompanies her husband everywhere, will take a house near Boston for the two months preceding the production of “Epicene” by Mr. Raikes.

The italics were Phoebe's.

A month later, after a period of silence, painfully suggestive of dumb agony, came a second clipping:

Mr. and Mrs. Willis Raikes have engaged a house in Maywood for May and June. They will occupy it during the rehearsals of the Ben Jonson production at Harvard.

It is fate.

Both comment and italics were Phoebe's.

For an interval after this, a series of daily epistles beat on Sylvia like a fall of autumn leaves. Notes, not letters, they trembled indiscriminately with anxieties, doubts, misgivings, anticipations. Then came the following:

He is here. I have seen him once. I am going to see him again. I should have said they are here, for of course Mrs. Raikes is with him. I had quite a time getting mother to go and call—not that she has any prejudice against actors, but because she thought they wouldn't be interested probably to see her. Interested! I wish you could have seen the hit she made. Well, I might as well start in the beginning and tell you all about it. We called a little after four. I wore my taupe and mother wore her brown. I had my hair done the new way and I wore a gardenia for which I squandered a dollar. You know where they are staying—in that funny barn-like place near the pond on the Gorham road. It seems that Mr. Raikes went crazy about the view. Old Mr. Gorham built it for his daughter, who was a painter. There was no means of heating it and Mr. Raikes had a fireplace put in at his own expense.

But I won't anticipate. A Chinese servant opened the door. He disappeared with our cards, but came back in no time and asked us to come into the studio. Well, if that studio wasn't a shock! I don't know exactly what I expected—something like the Marblehead places I guess, or rich Eastern draperies, armor, tiger skins and artistic things like that. For I do love an artistic atmosphere, don't you, Sylvia?

Well, it was far from artistic and it was all cluttered up—not untidy, but a kind of orderly disorder, if you understand me. Of course I didn't like to seem to rubber and yet you know how I can't help taking things in. The walls were simply covered—not with pictures, although there were a few sketches in black and white (I'll tell you more about those later). On one wall was a map of London—old London, I guess, because it was queer-looking—and, on another, a map of Paris. Pinned up everywhere were blue prints of machinery things—I recognized some of them to be locomotives from my course in physics in High, and others were undoubtedly flying-machines. On the table also, if you please, was what looked like a home-made model of a flying-machine, the wings of paper and the whole business held together with matches and sealing-wax.

On the table in the window was—what do you suppose? A fern, a rubber-plant, a bust of Shakespeare? Far from it. A typewriter! At one side was a carpenter's bench just like the Sloyd benches in school. In the middle of the room was the biggest table I ever saw in my life, made of common wood, just like a kitchen table. And, Sylvia, the things that were on that table! Papers and magazines—but not magazines that anybody would ever read—T-squares and triangles like what we used to have in drawing at High, scales—a funny kind such as I have never seen before—a whole set of files, triangular and square and flat and sort of half-round, and what looked like the inside of a clock, scattered over everything—bouncy springs that squirmed every time anybody touched the table. And right in the center of all this, the darlingest thing, Sylvia Gordon, that you ever saw in your life—a little doll's theatre. The baby stage was set with the cunningest scenery and furniture—well, it just made me want to sit down and play dolls again. There wasn't a picture of an actor or actress in the place—not even of Mr. Raikes. It would have been kind of homesick-feeling if it hadn't been for the big fire; and later they served tea. But I'm getting ahead.

Mrs. Raikes came forward to meet us. She was very cordial and mother thinks she's lovely. I took an immediate dislike to her because I saw that she was cold and practical. And all the time I was talking to her about Mr. Raikes' work there was a little smile in her eyes—sort of patronizing—as if she didn't think what I said was important. She wore a Chinese mandarin's coat—prune-color with blue embroidery on it. She told mother that she wore Chinese clothes almost always in the house because they were beautiful and comfortable. Doesn't that sound awfully queer to you? It sounds posey to me. Now, if it had been one of those wonderful Japanese kimonos, black satin, lined with scarlet and trimmed with gold and wistaria—'made in Weehawken' she said when I spoke of them—I could understand. I could not seem to talk with her, although I tried my best. Every time I said anything about Mr. Raikes' work, she changed the subject. And then, right in the midst of it, the door opened—and there he stood!

Sylvia, I knew him at once, though he was different—oh, so different.

In the first place he was shorter than he looks on the stage. And in the second place, he must always wear a wig. His skin is no particular color. Neither is his hair, because it is quite gray. But his chin was all I expected—his hands are simply lovely. And his eyes! Sylvia, I never saw such eyes. When they met mine, I felt as if a pair of revolvers were pointed at me.

I cannot describe to you how different it was after he came into the room. You felt all trembly inside like when there's an automobile starting up under your window. He seemed to be in a very gracious mood. He talked and talked—mostly to mother. Then Mrs. Raikes took mother out into her kitchen and Mr. Raikes began to show me things. The sketches on the wall were all of Mrs. Raikes and by such expensive artists—Sargent and Zorn and Sorolla. Mr. Raikes said that artists found her very paintable, and of course she is very beautiful, he added. She may be paintable, although I can't imagine Christy or Fisher or Hutt putting her on a magazine cover. But she certainly is not beautiful. She's tall and flat and sort of loosely-woven, if you see what I mean. Her hair's a kind of pale green gold and her eyes are hazelly-green—like the inside of a grape. And, Sylvia, she's thirty-five if she's a day. He said that people compared his wife to Sarah Bernhardt and George Eliot and Botticelli's “Spring.” Well, you know Bernhardt. She is certainly far from beautiful. And as for George Eliot—why, she looks like a horse. I have never seen Botticelli's “Spring,” but Mr. Raikes showed me a photograph and—well, if she wants to look like that it's all right, but I wouldn't be flattered.

I couldn't seem to get him started on his work—he changed the subject every time I brought it up. And presently the Chinese servant came wheeling in the most wonderful tea-table I ever saw. It was mahogany, inlaid, and covered with the quaintest-looking silver. They served the darlingest cakes! Oh, I wish you could have seen him drink his tea—the way he held his cup was the most graceful thing I have ever witnessed.

Well, during tea, he talked with mother again and I talked with Mrs. Raikes. I hardly remember whas [sic] she said, for of course I had eyes only for him.

Oh, Sylvia, I am so excited and happy. .

P. S.—He wore the most worn-looking clothes, but, oh, such a dandy cut! I wonder if he has his things made in London.

2d P. S.—On his third finger, he wore a ring—not a seal—a perfectly plain one like a wedding-ring.

3d P. S.—When he speaks his voice is—well, it makes you feel like you've put your hand on the cat's throat when it's purring.

4th P. S.—I am perfectly sure that she does not understand him. And think what a privilege to be the wife of a man like that!

5th P. S.—I would give the world to hear what he said after we went out.

But if Phoebe had heard what Mr. Raikes said, this story would never have been written.

“Well,” Mrs. Raikes commented, settling herself beside her husband on the couch, “did you ever see a more perfect 'case'? Delicious little thing, isn't she?”

Her husband did not reply for a moment, but that interval was visibly given over to exasperation. Then he said in a burst both choleric and petulant: “Susan, is there anything wrong with me! Why is it I hate a young girl so? Take that one. Of course she's as pretty as paint, but, oh Lord, how she bored me! Now, the mother was nice—I liked her. What a Constance she would make, by the way!”

“Yes,” Mrs. Raikes agreed absently. “But don't make the mistake, Will, of thinking that child's only ingénue. She hasn't come to any sense of values yet, but she's just spilling over with suppressed character.”

Mr. Raikes was not interested. “I had a really charming talk with Mrs. Martin. She had seen dad in everything he played at the old Boston Museum. She even saw him the one time he went with Booth. Her comments were naïve, of course, and yet, somehow, she did get to the bottom of things. Curious about dad! You know, Susan, he was too damn good for his time. I mean he was simple and natural and realistic in a period when every play that was not farce was bombast. Deuce take it all, he'd be starred nowadays! Have the books come?”

“Everything from North and Paynter to Besant and Baedeker. I've been looking through the “English Garner”—it's fascinating. Professor Titheredge called this afternoon. He's a wonderful person—not dry-as-dust at all. A fine type—scholar and soldier. If he'd have worn a helmet, he'd be the ghost in “Hamlet” He was delighted with my model. He's going to send us some of his own books, obsolete things with rare old maps and pictures. He said he'd get us some things from the Harvard Library when we came to his house. He talked about Elizabethan London exactly as we'd talk about New York.”

“That's good.” Raikes' voice had kindled a little enthusiasm, but still his interest seemed detached. He lounged on the couch, his fine hands clasped over his head.

“Oh, I forgot,” his wife said. She reached to the table back of her and seized a pile of magazines. “For a good boy! 'The American Inventor, ' 'Steel,' 'The Machinist's Monthly,' 'The Universal Amateur,' 'The American Journal of Technology.'”

Raikes straightened up, and all the listlessness seemed to go out of him with the movement. His whole manner was electric as he seized the bundle of magazines.

Mr. and Mrs. Raikes returned the Martin call in a few days. And gradually Willis Raikes, who ignored utterly the overtures of the Maywood Women's Club and who responded with a dampening chill to the beckonings of Maywood's social leaders, became an intimate of sorts in the Martin household. Mrs. Raikes alone knew that he went there because he could go and come as he pleased without making a ripple on the domestic tide.

Mr. Raikes and Mr. Martin recognized each other at once as two real human beings. But they had to signal across a wide gulf of conflicting interests, habits, points of view.

Mr. Raikes and Ernest talked exactly the same language. That is to say, the larger vocabulary of the actor included the lesser one of the boy. Foot-ball, base-ball, basket-ball, automobile, a prospective prize-fight—they ran the gamut together. In point of fact, in Ernest's company, Mr. Raikes performed an admirable bit of juvenile acting.

Mr. Raikes and Mrs. Martin—but that is almost a story by itself.

Mr. Raikes spent most of his morning working in Cambridge on the Harvard production. He spent all his evenings reading, studying, planning. In between, his life seemed to be cut, by furious horseback gallops through the surrounding country, into periods of complete idleness. One afternoon, Phoebe, coming into the living-room, found him established in front of the fire, talking. Opposite, her mother occupied herself quietly with darning and listening. After that, Phoebe left the house in the afternoon as rarely as possible. Three times a week at least, the sound of pounding hoofs outside would send her heart fluttering into her throat. The knock on the door of a crop-butt—for Mr. Raikes scorned the convenience of the bell—would echo through her palpitation. Forestalling Julia, Phoebe would fly into the hall, opening the door to romance.

And yet, seemingly, those afternoons were the very antithesis of romance as nineteen sees it. Mrs. Martin had never before served afternoon tea. But when Mr. Raikes was there, Julia appeared with the tray promptly at four. Their guest ate Mrs. Martin's gingerbread not by the piece, but by the foot.

“He's as bad about eating as Ern,” was Phoebe's single criticism of perfection.

Often Mr. Raikes would sit a whole quarter of an hour without speaking, his head on his hand, his absent gaze on the fire. But this was at his worst. At his best, he talked. And when one of his rare garrulous moods fell on Willis Raikes, his entire world stopped to listen. He talked about anything or everything. He assumed extraordinary sapience in his listeners and his very confidence seemed to create that. Once, to prove a theory about literary atmosphere, he reached into the book-case and read them the opening scene from “Hamlet.” Once, to prove a theory about Latin vowel-sounds as opposed to Anglo-Saxon consonants, he recited, “The Lord is My Shepherd,” first in English and then in Italian. Curiously enough at this, Mrs. Martin, who had listened to the Shakespeare without comment, dropped her work to the floor.

“Oh, I would like to see you act!” she exclaimed. “You're so like your father.”

Mr. Raikes' only answer was his smile. And his smile—the least-used of all his expressions—made such havoc of the sardonic choler of his look, brought out such gentleness of mouth and eye, that even Phoebe disbelieved what she saw.

Thereafter Mrs. Martin occasionally asked him to read to her: “Thanatopsis,” Gray's “Elegy,” “The Burial of Sir John Moore,”—these selections not because she was naturally melancholy, but because she remembered them from her reader. Mr. Raikes' deep-voiced sincerity made such marvel of the swelling rhythms that Mrs. Martin often could not see her sewing for the mists that swam between her and it. On the other hand, Mr. Raikes rendered the poems of Phoebe's choice, selections from “Lucille,” Tennyson's “Maud” and “Aurora Leigh,” as briskly as if they were weather reports.

“Will Raikes, you must stop fascinating that little Martin girl,” his wife remonstrated with him one day. “She gets worse and worse. She bored me this whole afternoon with her talk about you. She hates me, of course, for she sees only too plainly that I do not understand your sensitive nature. But I really like her.”

“Stop fascinating her! Susan, I never speak to her if I can help it. Well, you can imagine. If I am forced into a tête-à-tête with her, the conversation is always what you would call 'literary.' You know, light of my existence, how that invariably brings out all my natural cussedness. Something like this:

 * I love Shakespeare, don't you, Mr. Raikes?

 * As an actor, I approve of Shakespeare, although, as a man,I prefer Ben Jonson. But if I were a dramatist, I would be quite of the opinion of Mr. G. Bernard Shaw, who thinks he's over-rated.

 * Oh, Mr. Raikes, surely you want to make Shakespearian productions—Hamlet, 'Othello' and 'Macbeth'?

(sheer perversity): No; you see I'm always more interested in the parts that aren't star parts—Polonius, for instance.

 * Don't you think 'Romeo and Juliet' is a perfectly charming play? I should think you'd make a splendid Romeo.

 * No; I passed up Romeo with my salad days.

 * Would you like to play Orlando, then?

 * No; I hate a lover. I can't make love. I don't know how to. I always manage to have my love-making off the stage. When I fell in love with Mrs. Raikes, I told her in the beginning that I would agree to marry her only on the condition that she did the wooing.

 * But think of your Terence O'Toole!

 * That proves how young you are, to cite Terence as a model love-maker.

(in a chilling voice and looking eatably pretty): Mr. Raikes, I am not as young as you think, I shall be twenty my next birthday.

 * I beg your pardon.”

It had been a matter of comment among his friends that Mr. Raikes' superb powers of creation included none of mimicry. During this quoted dialogue, he had not moved from his chair, he had not gestured. Yet anybody who had once seen Phoebe would have known that her spiritual counterpart sat in the room.

The twinkle in Mrs. Raikes' eyes exploded in a laugh. “Oh, Willis,” she said, “you must do something—if it's only one of your exquisite rudenesses. I like Miss Martin too much.”

“Well, I'll try to think up some gentlemanly Nance Oldfield stunt.” For a moment the problem seemed to interest him. His eyes drew to a point of concentrated thought. “How about treating you brutally, Susan?”

“That would never do. She knows too well that I deserve it.”

He dismissed the problem. “Susan, nobody will convince me that you were ever a young girl. If you were, thank God I never saw you!”

I see them all the time now. He is just as wonderful as ever. But, oh, how he puzzles me. Sylvia, you never heard a man talk of his art the way he does. You would hardly believe he took it seriously the way he goes on sometimes. Why, the other day he gave me the longest lecture about the hardships and disagreeableness of stage life. He said that often he'd give anything in the world if he could chuck the whole business and go to selling carpets or anything that was self-respecting. I hate to hear him talk that way. If I had not seen him act, I would never think that his art was sacred to him or that he realized what his responsibility to his generation was.

But as much as he puzzles me, she puzzles me more. I go there a great deal and, in a way, she is much easier to talk with than him. She listens beautifully. It is the funniest thing how she does look like Botticelli's “Spring”—the Primavera, they call it. That picture has sort of haunted me, and the other day when I was in town I bought a photograph of it and pinned it upon my wall. It's the queerest thing about it—Sylvia, you can't call her pretty and yet you can't help looking at her. You simply can't forget her. She looks at you with such a bold air and yet she is not the least bit ashamed of being bold, which is certainly Mrs. Raikes to at. Another thing that's funny. When I look at the picture, I'm always thinking of Mrs. Raikes. When I look at Mrs. Raikes, I'm always thinking of the picture.

But though I like her a little better, I don't approve of her any more than I did. I mean she is not my idea of a loyal wife, especially when it is her privilege to be married to a great genius. For instance, Sylvia, if you were the wife of a man like that, wouldn't you consider it your duty—to say nothing of an inestimable privilege—to stand in the wings ready to give him a cooling draught when he came off? Why, Sylvia, I should just dog his footsteps, trying to save that great mind the wear and tear of daily existence. But she doesn't do anything for him. She doesn't even go to the theatre with him. All she does is read and paint. Just as if it were not her duty to lose any thought of personal ambition and pour it all into him. That's what I'd do, Sylvia.

He gave me another long talk the other day. And I certainly never heard a human being knock himself as Willis Raikes did. He said that he had such a temper that he really ought not to be at large. He said that he was so fussy rehearsing that it was only one in ten actors would stay with him. He said he'd got such a reputation as a slave-driver that there were only two professional people in the whole United States who wouldn't poison him if they got the chance. But I guess I understand the artistic temperament as well as anybody. I guess there never was a genius who wasn't just like that. Think of Carlyle and Napoleon! And I guess if I was his wife, I'd just fix it so that there wouldn't be a living thing to ruffle him. I can see that Mrs. Raikes is really rather attractive in certain lights. Somehow her eyes and her skin and her hair all melt in together. And, Sylvia, she is certainly the most graceful person I ever saw. She just glides.

It is late—very late, but I cannot go to bed until I have taken back certain things that I have said about Mrs. Raikes. This evening Mr. Raikes got to talking about his wife, and it seems that, all along, I've been mistaken about her. You see, she's such a quiet thing and talks so little about herself that you only learn about her gradually. And a whole lot of conclusions that I jumped to are all dead wrong.

It seems that all her reading is in the line of Mr. Raikes' work. All her painting is of costumes and settings for his various productions. She's an authority on a whole lot of things. And, my dear, if you'll believe it, she made with her own hands that wonderful tiny theatre that I told you about. She makes a model of every scene of every play that he produces. Did you ever hear anything like it? As far as I can see all he has to do is to learn his part, and, of course, if you've got a good memory, that won't kill you. One thing, he does seem to appreciate all she does for him.

But of course, there are other things that a man of genius may demand of his wife. And honestly, Sylvia, she is not a woman that I could imagine him talking about his deals with—I mean all those sacred things that you cannot discuss with anybody but a kindred soul.

Sylvia, he is a very great genius. Every day of my life, I think how lucky I am to know him.

“By the way, Will, how about that little Martin girl?” Mrs. Raikes asked a little later. “She still seems to think of you as a cross between a Greek god and a medieval knight with a little of cher maître thrown in.”

“How can I help it?” her husband humorously retorted. “You know perfectly well, woman, that I'm all those critters. But one thing I will say to the credit of the little wretch—she is not stage-struck. I guess you're right, Susan, there must be something to her.”

One day late in June Phoebe came home from a call on Florence Marsh through the Maywood woods. Suddenly swift footsteps came up behind and Willis Raikes greeted her with a “How now, proud Maisie in the woods?”

“I've walked from Rosedale,” Phoebe said, “I simply could not resist these trees.”

“Ive walked from Seriph,” Raikes said. His brow was overcast and he seemed at once to fall into one of his dark meditations. For an instant, Phoebe had the feeling that it was one thing to talk with a great genius in the presence of his wife or your mother and quite another to sustain a téte-à-téte. She experienced the discomfort, rare with her, of trying to find something to say.

But before she could speak, they came out of one section of the woods onto a railroad crossing. The gates were down, and a locomotive was slowly moving down on the track. Phoebe saw Raikes' eyes narrow to a look of intense observation as he watched. The engine stopped, and suddenly, without a word, Mr. Raikes darted under the gates.

“Seems to me that's a new kind of link-motion,” Phoebe heard him call to the engineer.

“Yes,” the man drawled. “It's a freak patent thing being tried out. Inventor claims great flexibility. Works badly, though, seems to me.” He leaned out of the cab-window and they entered into a discussion which involved the use of terms inexplicably technical.

“Too complicated, anyway,” the engineer said finally. He opened the throttle and backed. Raikes joined Phoebe, the gates went up, they plunged into the Maywood woods again.

“Its a marvelous day,” Raikes said.

Phoebe heard in his voice and saw in his aspect that his mood had changed. Vaguely it came to her, as he stood for an instant smiling at the universe, that it would be hard to say which radiated the most warmth or light. For an instant, Phoebe entertained the preposterous idea that his talk with the locomotive engineer had unloosed all these spirits.

The footpath narrowed often so that they had to go in single file. But always on both sides the trees, blazing with a delicate green fire, screened them filmily from the rest of the world. Again and again, Mr. Raikes' swift glance stabbed through this living veil. As often, it came back to Phoebe's face.

It was one of those days when all that was girl in her seemed to have run to the surface, seemed to tint her shiningly with the iridescence of youth. Her hair cascaded in mutinous ringlets over her ears and onto her neck. The wistful look which often characterized her seemed to deepen the misty gray of her eyes, seemed to droop her lips to their sweetest look of innocence. And her chatter, full of its violent girl-vocabulary—all italics and superlatives—seemed the fitting song of so birdlike a creature. With her hero in the heaven of a happy mood, all was well with Phoebe's world. She talked as she had never talked before. She unburdened her mind of dozens of girlish ambitions, scores of girlish hopes, hundreds of girlish deals. Raikes listened with his lips curved to the smile that took ten years off his age. Was it the spring in the liquid air, the spring in the green earth, the spring in the creature at his side? Suddenly he, too, began to talk as, twenty-four hours before, he would never have fancied himself talking to Phoebe.

“It is curious,” he said apropos of Phoebe's complaint in vocal italics of the disillusions of life, “how few of us are captains of our fate. Once I tried to count up the people I know who are doing what they started out to do. I don't know more than three. Take my own case! I am successful. I have achieved more fame than I deserve. I have acquired more money than I've earned. I've reached the point where I can do what I want, when I want and how I want. And still I haven't yet done the thing I most want to do.”

He stopped and looked reflectively at Phoebe. Phoebe did not speak. But she turned upon him eyes that were those of the fawn the first time she is startled.

“You see I was pitchforked into this acting business. My father and mother acted before me and their mother and father before them. Oh, well, you know it all. I went on when I was a baby in arms and I've kept going on ever since. It never occurred to me to do anything else. As far as my personal tastes and ambitions are concerned, I've been brought up in captivity. You know some of the lions in the Bronx Zoo know nothing about the forest—they've never seen it. I've never seen it either. Why I never had a chance to find out whether there was anything else in me until I was a grown man—until I was established in my profession and no other trade open to me. And yet I should have known—if there'd been anybody to tell me. What do you suppose my terrible secret ambition is?”

Phoebe's “What?” barely lifted above a whisper. But so might they speak for whom the veil over the holy of holies is about to be rent.

“It's to own a machine-shop—to have a place where I can work and experiment and invent. I shall retire from the stage in five years and then I shall have one. You see, when I was a child,” his manner took a leap further into confidence, “I picked up somewhere a book called 'Ure's Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences.' I read it out of its covers. How I used to pore over the accounts of colliery-engines and ore-crushers! Then, as I grew older, I studied machinery whenever and wherever I could. It was fascinating to me to work on the pitch of cog-wheels. I used to make little Howe trusses with matches and sealing-wax and thread. I'd buy the rough-cast parts of little model horizontal engines and finish them up myself, filing them smooth, drilling holes, cutting threads. I carried a little soldering outfit about with me in a box. I tried once to melt a five-dollar gold-piece to make a ring for Susan with a blow-pipe and a piece of hollowed charcoal. Even the faucet of my sink would have a little turbine water-motor attached to it. It was an awful inconvenience.” He laughed a little. “I always had to unscrew it to wash. I used it to polish castings, drill holes, almost to brush my teeth.”

He stopped for an absent-minded, retrospective moment. Phoebe's eyes had gone from his face. She was looking straight ahead. Her under lip drooped, but her eyes were very wide.

“As I began to produce plays, I invented things for them. That interested me more than anything connected with the production. I invented an automatic galloper—you know what that is—something to produce the effect of galloping off-stage. I invented an echoing-device. The play required a clear, audible echo and I practised for months with all sorts of tin sounding-boards and reflectors. For a long time I've been working on reversible scenery to save expressage and a new way of presenting cloud-effects when there isn't room behind the flat for the moving-picture machine. When I get a chance to go to the theatre on the road what do you suppose I do?”

Phoebe did not answer. Her tooth gnawed her lip.

Raikes went on with the pleased chuckle of a small boy who appreciates his own naughtiness. “Not for me Bernhardt or Coquelin, Irving or Hare, Rejane or Terry. But if there is a magician show, I'm there in the front row. In fact, the 'Magician's Monthly' and 'Parlor Tricks' are as good reading as I know.”

“Thank goodness,” Mr. Martin said, a few days later, “Phoebe has stopped talking about Raikes. Mother, to tell you the truth, I was beginning to get a little worried— If Raikes wasn't such a gentleman— It didn't seem to bother you any, though.”

 * No,” Mrs. Martin said evenly, “you see, when I was eighteen, I fell in love with his father.”

“You did!” Mr. Martin stared at the woman who, after twenty-odd years of wifehood, could flash a new aspect. “You never told me that.”

“No,” Mrs. Martin said dryly. “Phoebe won't tell her husband until she's gray-headed.”

“Oh, Will,” Mrs. Raikes said about the same time, “I had a call from Phoebe Martin this afternoon. She was really very interesting. And pretty, too. But you certainly have disillusioned her. She said she'd come to make an explanation and an apology. She said that at first she had an idea that I was a selfish, idle woman who really stood in the way of her husband's career. But things had happened to make her see it all in a different light. She knew now that I was the most devoted wife in the world. About fifteen minutes of this. Then to my intense surprise she walked over to me, gave me a little hug and said, 'You're perfectly beautiful, too, and I just love to look at you. I didn't see it at first, but you are!' and marched out. Now what in the world did you do to her? And was it very violent? And will it last?”

Mr. Raikes reached for the “Patent Office Report for the Year 1907.” He smiled, but his smile was a little acerb.

“It will last,” he said. “It was not violent. I only bared my secret soul to her.”

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

title: Phoebe Among the Thespians


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17.—As a natural consequence of the alleviation of our thirst, the pangs of hunger returned more violently than ever. Although we had no bait, and even if we had we could not use it for want of a whirl, we could not help asking whether no possible means could be devised for securing one out of the many sharks that were still perpetually swarming about the raft. Armed with knives, like the Indians in the pearl fisheries, was it not practicable to attack the monsters in their own element? Curtis expressed his willingness personally to make the attempt, but so numerous were the sharks that we would not for one moment hear of his risking his life in a venture of which the danger was as great as the success was doubtful.

By plunging into the sea, or by gnawing at a piece of metal, we could always, or at least often, do something that cheated us into believing that we were mitigating the pains of thirst; but with hunger it was different. The prospect, too, of rain seemed hopeful, while for getting food there appeared no chance; and, as we knew that nothing could compensate for the lack of nutritive matter, we were soon all cast down again. Shocking to confess, it would be untrue to deny that we surveyed each other with the eye of an eager longing; and I need hardly explain to what a degree of savageness the one idea that haunted us had reduced our feelings.

Ever since the storm-cloud brought us the too transient shower the sky has been tolerably clear, and although at that time the wind had slightly freshened, it has since dropped, and the sail hangs idly against our mast. Except for the trifling relief it brings by modifying the temperature, we care little now for any breeze. Ignorant as we are as to what quarter of the Atlantic we have been carried by the currents, it matters very little to us from what direction the wind may blow if only it would bring, in rain or dew, the moisture of which we are so dreadfully in need.

My brain is haunted by most horrible nightmares; not that I suppose I am in anyway more distressed than my companions, who are lying in their usual places, vainly endeavoring to forget their sufferings in sleep.

After a time I fell into a restless, dreamy doze. I was


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 neither asleep nor awake. How long I remained in that state of stupor I could hardly say, but at length a strange sensation brought me to myself. Was I dreaming, or was there not really some unaccustomed odor floating in the air? My nostrils became distended, and I could scarcely suppress a cry of astonishment; but some instinct kept me quiet, and I laid myself down again with the puzzled sensation sometimes experienced when we have forgotten a word or name. Only a few minutes, however, had elapsed before another still more savory puff induced me to take several long inhalations. Suddenly, the truth seemed to flash across my mind. "Surely," I muttered to myself, "this must be cooked meat that I can smell."

Again and again I sniffed, and became more convinced than ever that my senses were not deceiving me. But from what part of the raft could the smell proceed? I rose to my knees, and having satisfied myself that the odor came from the front, I crept stealthily as a cat under the sails and between the spars in that direction. Following the promptings of my scent, rather than my vision, like a blood-hound in track of his prey. I searched everywhere I could, now finding, now losing, the smell according to my change of position, or the dropping of the wind. At length I get the true scent, once for all, so that I could go straight to the object for which I was in search.

Approaching the starboard angle of the raft, I came to the conclusion that the smell that had thus keenly excited my cravings was the smell of smoked bacon; the membranes of my tongue almost bristled with the intenseness of my longing.

Crawling along a little farther, under a thick roll of sail-cloth, I was not long in securing my prize. Forcing my arm below the roll, I felt my hand in contact with something wrapped up in paper. I clutched it up, and carried it off to a place where I could examine it by the help of the light of the moon that had now made its appearance above the horizon. I almost shrieked for joy. It was a piece of bacon. True, it did not weigh many ounces, but small as it was it would suffice to alleviate the pangs of hunger for one day at least. I was just on the point of raising it to my mouth, when a hand was laid upon my arm. It was only by a most determined effort that I kept


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 myself from screaming out One instant more, and I found myself face to face with Hobart.

In a moment I understood all. Plainly this rascal Hobart had saved some provisions from the wreck, upon which he had been subsisting ever since. The steward had provided for himself, while all around him were dying of starvation. Detestable wretch! This accounts for the inconsistency of his well-to-do looks and his pitiable groans. Vile hypocrite!

Yet why, it struck me, should I complain? Was not I reaping the benefit of that secret store that he, for himself, had saved?

But Hobart had no idea of allowing me the peaceable possession of what he held to be his own. He made a dash at the fragment of bacon, and seemed determined to wrest it from my grasp. We struggled with each other, but although our wrestling was very violent, it was very noiseless.

We were both of us aware that it was absolutely necessary that not one of those on board should know anything at all about the prize for which we were contending. Nor was my own determination lessened by hearing him groan out that it was his last, his only morsel. "His!" I thought; "it shall be mine now!"

And still careful that no noise of commotion should arise, I threw him on his back, and grasping his throat so that he gurgled again, I held him down until, in rapid mouthfuls, I had swallowed the last scrap of the food for which we had fought so hard.

I released my prisoner, and quietly crept back to my own quarters.

And not a soul is aware that I have broken my fast!

18.—After this excitement I awaited the approach of day with a strange anxiety. My conscience told me that Hobart had the right to denounce me in the presence of all my fellow-passengers; yet my alarm was vain. The idea of my proceedings being exposed by him was


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 quite absurd; in a moment he would himself be murdered without pity by the crew, if it should be revealed that, unknown to them, he had been living on some private store which, by clandestine cunning, he had reserved. But, in spite of my anxiety, I had a longing for day to come.

The bit of food that I had thus stolen was very small; but small as it was it had alleviated my hunger; and I was now tortured with remorse, because I had not shared the meager morsel with my fellow-sufferers. Miss Herbey, Andre, his father, all had been forgotten, and from the bottom of my heart I repented of my cruel selfishness.

Meantime the moon rose high in the heavens, and the first streaks of dawn appeared. There is no twilight in these low latitudes, and the full daylight came well nigh at once. I had not closed my eyes since my encounter with the steward, and ever since the first blush of day I had labored under the impression that I could see some unusual dark mass half way up the mast. But although it again and again caught my eye, it hardly roused my curiosity, and I did not rise from the bundle of sails on which I was lying to ascertain what it really was. But no sooner did the rays of the sun fall upon it than I saw at once that it was the body of a man, attached to a rope, and swinging to and fro with the motion of the raft.

A horrible presentiment carried me to the foot of the mast, and, just as I had guessed, Hobart had hanged himself. I could not for a moment doubt that it was I myself that had impelled him to the suicide. A cry of horror had scarcely escaped my lips, when my fellow-passengers were at my side, and the rope was cut. Then came the sailors. And what was it that made the group gather so eagerly around the body? Was it a humane desire to see whether any sparks of life remained? No, indeed; the corpse was cold, and the limbs were rigid; there was no chance that animation should be restored. What then was it that kept them lingering so close around? It was only too apparent what they were about to do.

But I did not, could not, look. I refused to take part in the horrible repast that was proposed. Neither would Miss Herbey, Andre, nor his father, consent to alleviate their pangs of hunger by such revolting means. I know nothing for certain as to what Curtis did, and I did not


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 venture to inquire; but of the others, Falsten, Dowlas, the boatswain, and all the rest, I know that, to assuage their cravings, they consented to reduce themselves to the level of beasts of prey; they were transformed from human beings into ravenous brutes.

The four of us who sickened at the idea of partaking of the horrid meal withdrew to the seclusion of our tent; it was bad enough to hear, without witnessing the appalling operation. But, in truth, I had the greatest difficulty in the world in preventing Andre from rushing out upon the cannibals, and snatching the odious food from their clutches. I represented to him the hopelessness of his attempt, and tried to reconcile him by telling him that if they liked the food they had a right to it. Hobart had not been murdered; he had died by his own hand; and, after all, as the boatswain had once remarked to me, "It was better to eat a dead man than a live one."

Do what I would, however, I could not quiet Andre's feeling of abhorrence; in his disgust and loathing he seemed for the time to have quite forgotten his own sufferings.

Meanwhile, there was no concealing the truth that we were ourselves dying of starvation, while our eight companions would probably, by their loathsome diet, escape that frightful destiny. Owing to his secret hoard of provisions Hobart had been by far the strongest among us; he had been supported, so that no organic disease had affected his tissues, and really might be said to be in good health when his chagrin drove him to his desperate suicide. But what was I thinking of! whither were my meditations carrying me away? was it not coming to pass that the cannibals were rousing my envy instead of exciting my horror?

Very shortly after this I heard Dowlas talking about the possibility of obtaining salt by evaporating sea water in the sun; "and then," he added, "we can salt down the rest."

The boatswain assented to what the carpenter had said, and probably the suggestion was adopted.

Silence, the most profound, now reigns upon the raft. I presume that nearly all have gone to sleep. One thing I do know, that they are no longer hungry.


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346 a certain extent, open to all respectable classes of native society. Castes, inferior to the Brahmanical, may study the more secular branches, such as “grammar and lexicology, poetical and dramatical literature, rhetoric, astrology and medicine;” but the higher and more sacred branches, such as “law, the writings of the six schools of philosophy, and the sacred mythological poems are the peculiar inheritance of the Brahman caste.” Such, in theory, is “the distinction recognised in the legal and religious economy of Hinduism; but, practically, Brahmans monopolize not only a part, but nearly the whole of Sanskrit learning.” In the Behar districts, visited by Mr. Adam, both teachers and students, without a single exception, belonged to that caste; and the exceptions in the Bengal districts were comparatively few. Indeed, the only exceptions to the Brahmanical monopoly of Sanskrit teaching were a few Vaidyas or native physicians.

In some instances, the schools are endowed; but, for the most part, they owe their origin to the voluntary efforts of single individuals. There is no combination or co-operation. Each pandit sets up a school for himself, in which he “teaches separately the branch or branches of learning which he has studied most, or for which there is the greatest demand; and the students make their selections and remove from one to another at their pleasure.” The students again are “divided into two classes, one of which consists of those who are natives of the villages in which the schools are situated, and the other of natives of the other villages—the former called natives, and the latter foreigners, corresponding respectively with the externes and internes of the Royal Colleges of France. The students of a school or college who are natives of the village, are the externes, attending it daily for the purpose of receiving instruction, and daily returning home to their parents, relatives, or friends with whom they board and lodge, while the students who are natives of other villages than that in which the school is situated are the internes, residing in the house of the teacher and receiving from him not only instruction but also lodging and food.” The majority of the teachers have separate school-houses, “either built at their own charge or at the expense of patrons and friends, or by the subscriptions of the most respectable inhabitants of the village where the school is situated. In those instances in which there is no regular school-house, the Baithakhana or Chandi-mandap of the pandit or of some wealthy friend answers the purpose.” The school-house is also frequently used as a place of accommodation for the students who have no house in the village; or these may be accommodated in separate lodging apartments attached to the school-room—apartments of the humblest


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19.—All through the day the sky remained unclouded and the heat intense; and night came on without bringing much sensible moderation in the temperature. I was unable to get any sleep, and, toward morning, was disturbed by hearing an angry clamor going on outside the tent; it aroused M. Letourneur, Andre, and Miss Herbey, as much as myself, and we were anxious to ascertain the cause of the tumult.

The boatswain, Dowlas, and all the sailors were storming at each other in frightful rage; and Curtis, who had come forward from the stern, was endeavoring to pacify them.

"But who has done it? we must know who has done it," said Dowlas, scowling with vindictive passion on the group around him.

"There's a thief," howled out the boatswain, "and he shall be found! Let's know who has taken it."

"I haven't taken it!" "Nor I! Nor I!" cried the sailors one after another.

And then they set to work again to ransack every quarter of the raft; they rolled every spar aside, they overturned everything on board, and only grew more and more incensed with anger as their search proved fruitless.

"Can you tell us," said the boatswain, coming up to me, "who is the thief?"

"Thief!" I replied. "I don't know what you mean."

And while we were speaking the others all came up together, and told me that they had looked everywhere else, and that they were going now to search the tent.

"Shame!" I said. " You ought to allow those whom you know to be dying of hunger at least to die in peace. There is not one of us who has left the tent all night Why suspect us?"

"Now just look here, Mr. Kazallon," said the boatswain, in a voice which he was endeavoring to calm down into moderation, "we are not accusing you of anything; we know well enough you, and all the rest of you, had a right to your shares as much as anybody; but that isn't it. It's all gone somewhere, every bit."

"Yes," said Sandon gruffly; "it's all gone somewheres, and we are going to search the tent."


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 Resistance was useless, and Miss Herbey, M. Letourneur, and Andre were all turned out.

I confess I was very fearful. I had a strong suspicion that for the sake of his son, for whom he was ready to venture anything, M. Letourneur had committed the theft; in that case I knew that nothing would have prevented the infuriated men from tearing the devoted father to pieces. I beckoned to Curtis for protection, and he came and stood beside me. He said nothing, but waited with his hands in his pockets, and I think I am not mistaken in my belief that there was some sort of a weapon in each.

To my great relief the search was ineffectual. There was no doubt that the carcass of the suicide had been thrown overboard, and the rage of the disappointed cannibals knew no bounds.

Yet who had ventured to do the deed? I looked at M. Letourneur and Miss Herbey; but their countenances at once betrayed their ignorance. Andre turned his face away, and his eyes did not meet my own. Probably it is he; but, if it be, I wonder whether he has reckoned up the consequences of so rash an act.

20 to 22.—For the day or two after the horrible repast of the 18th those who had partaken of it appeared to suffer comparatively little either from hunger or thirst; but for the four of us who had tasted nothing, the agony of suffering grew more and more intense. It was enough to make us repine over the loss of the provision that had so mysteriously gone; and if any one of us should die, I doubt whether the survivors would a second time resist the temptation to assuage their pangs by tasting human flesh.

Before long, all the cravings of hunger began to return to the sailors, and I could see their eyes greedily glancing upon us, starved as they knew us to be, as though they were reckoning our hours, and already were preparing to consume us as their prey.

As is always the case with shipwrecked men, we were tormented by thirst far more than by hunger; and if, in the


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 height of our sufferings, we had been offered our choice between a few drops of water and a few crumbs of biscuit, I do not doubt that we should, without exception, have preferred to take the water.

And what a mockery to our condition did it seem that all this while there was water, water, nothing but water, everywhere around us! Again and again, incapable of comprehending how powerless it was to relieve me, I put a few drops within my lips, but only with the invariable result of bringing on a most trying nausea, and rendering my thirst more unendurable than before.

Forty-two days had passed since we quitted the sinking Chancellor. There could be hope now; all of us must die, and by the most deplorable of deaths. I was quite conscious that a mist was gathering over my brain; I felt my senses sinking into a condition of torpor; I made an effort, but all in vain, to master the delirium that I was aware was taking possession of my reason. It is out of my power to decide for how long I lost my consciousness; but when I came to myself I found that Miss Herbey had folded some wet bandages around my forehead. I am somewhat better; but I am weakened, mind and body, and I am conscious that I have not long to live.

A frightful fatality occurred to-day. The scene was terrible. Jynxstrop the negro went raving mad. Curtis and several of the men tried their utmost to control him, but in spite of everything he broke loose, and tore up and down the raft, uttering fearful yells. He had gained possession of a handspike, and rushed upon us all with the ferocity of an infuriated tiger; how we contrived to escape mischief from his attacks, I know not. All at once, by one of those unaccountable impulses of madness, his rage turned against himself. With his teeth and nails he gnawed and tore away at his own flesh; dashing the blood into our faces, he shrieked out with a demoniacal grin, "Drink, drink!" and flinging us gory morsels, kept saying "Eat, eat!" In the midst of his insane shrieks he made a sudden pause, then dashing back again from the stern to the front, he made a bound and disappeared beneath the waves.

Falsten, Dowlas, and the boatswain, made a rush that at least they might secure the body; but it was too late; all that they could see was a crimson circle in the water, and some huge sharks disporting themselves around the spot.


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23.—Only eleven of us now remain; and the probability is very great that every day must now carry off at least its one victim, and perhaps more. The end of the tragedy is rapidly approaching, and save for the chance, which is next to an impossibility, of our sighting land, or being picked up by a passing vessel, ere another week has elapsed not a single survivor of the Chancellor will remain.

The wind freshened considerably in the night, and it is now blowing pretty briskly from the northeast. It has filled our sail, and the white foam in our wake is an indication that we are making some progress. The captain reckons that we must be advancing at the rate of about three miles an hour.

Curtis and Falsten are certainly in the best condition among us, and in spite of their extreme emaciation they bear up wonderfully under the protracted hardships we have all endured. Words cannot describe the melancholy state to which poor Miss Herbey bodily is reduced; her whole being seems absorbed into her soul, but that soul is brave and resolute as ever, living in heaven rather than on earth. The boatswain, strong, energetic man that he was, has shrunk into a mere shadow of his former self, and I doubt whether anyone would recognize him to be the same man. He keeps perpetually to one corner of the raft, his head dropped upon his chest, and his long, bony hands lying upon knees that project sharply from his worn-out trowsers. Unlike Miss Herbey, his spirit seems to have sunk into apathy, and it is at times difficult to believe that he is living at all, so motionless and statue-like does he sit.

Silence continues to reign upon the raft. Not a sound, not even a groan, escapes our lips. We do not exchange ten words in the course of the day, and the few syllables that our parched tongues and swollen lips can pronounce are almost unintelligible. Wasted and bloodless, we are no longer human beings; we are specters.


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24.—I have inquired more than once of Curtis if he has the faintest idea to what quarter of the Atlantic we have drifted, and each time he has been unable to give me a decided answer, though from his general observation of the direction of the wind and currents he imagines that we have been carried westward, that is to say, toward the land.

To-day the breeze has dropped entirely, but the heavy swell is still upon the sea, and is an unquestionable sign that a tempest has been raging at no great distance. The raft labors hard against the waves, and Curtis, Falsten, and the boatswain, employ the little energy that remains to them in strengthening the joints. Why do they give themselves such trouble? Why not let the few frail planks part asunder, and allow the ocean to terminate our miserable existence? Certain it seems that our sufferings must have reached their utmost limit, and nothing could exceed the torture that we are enduring. The sky pours down upon us a heat like that of molten lead, and the sweat that saturates the tattered clothes that hang about our bodies goes far to aggravate the agonies of our thirst. No words of mine can describe this dire distress; these sufferings are beyond human estimate.

Even bathing, the only means of refreshment that we possessed, has now become impossible, for ever since Jynxstrop's death the sharks have hung about the raft in shoals.

To-day I tried to gain a few drops of fresh water by evaporation, but even with the exercise of the greatest patience, it was with the utmost difficulty that I obtained enough to moisten a little scrap of linen; and the only kettle that we had was so old and battered, that it would not bear the fire, so that I was obliged to give up the attempt in despair.

Falsten is now almost exhausted, and if he survives us at all, it can only be for a few days. Whenever I raised my head I always failed to see him, but he was probably lying sheltered somewhere beneath the sails. Curtis was the only man who remained on his feet, but with indomitable pluck he continued to stand on the front of the raft, waiting, watching, hoping. To look at him, with his unflagging


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Hydra, the Water-snake, first rears a venomous head above the eastern horizon on January 5th about 9 P. M. He slowly squirms along the southern horizon, his length being so appalling that it takes him four months to completely pass any one point in the sky.

Along the body of this Water-snake are scattered a few 4th magnitude stars. The twinkling lights of these stars may be followed far to the south and then east, almost to the boundary of Scorpio. Indeed, when the Water-snake is completely above the horizon, as he is in April, these stars show that his long length stretches over nearly a quarter of the sky! Some poets state that this creature had one hundred heads, others claim that he had only nine. However this may be, there is only one that is easily traced and this lies, triangle-shaped, just below Leo, the Lion.

The only noticeably bright marking on the Water-snake is the orange-hued star of the second magnitude which lies upon the reptile's heart. This star is called Cor Hydræ after its location, but it also has the name of Alphard, the Solitary. Since the naming of the star, science has discovered the latter name to be rather a misnomer for it has a telescopic companion of a pale shade of green. Cor Hydræ rises in the early evening on the 21st of February, and passes the meridian about 9 o'clock during the middle of March.

The northernmost star of the group that marks the head is also a double. This double consists of two stars of the 4th and 8th magnitudes, the larger one being yellow and the smaller purple.

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 energy, almost tempted me to imagine that he did well to hope, but I dared not entertain one sanguine thought, and there I lay, waiting, nay, longing for death.

How many hours passed away thus I cannot tell, but after a time a loud peal of laughter burst upon my ear. Someone else, then, was going mad, I thought; but the idea did not rouse me in the least. The laughter was repeated with greater vehemence, but I never raised my head. Presently I caught a few incoherent words.

"Fields, fields, gardens and trees! Look, there's an inn under the trees! Quick, quick! brandy, gin, water! a guinea a drop! I'll pay for it! I've lots of money! lots! lots!"

Poor deluded wretch! I thought again; the wealth of a nation could not buy a drop of water here. There was silence for a minute, when all of a sudden I heard the shout of "Land! land!"

The words acted upon me like an electric shock, and, with a frantic effort, I started to my feet. No land, indeed, was visible, but Flaypole, laughing, singing, and gesticulating, was raging up and down the raft. Sight, taste, and hearing—all were gone; but the cerebral derangement supplied their place, and in imagination the maniac was conversing with absent friends, inviting them into the George Inn at Cardiff, offering them gin, whiskey, and, above all, water! Stumbling at every step, and singing in a cracked, discordant voice, he staggered about among us like an intoxicated man. With the loss of his senses all his sufferings had vanished, and his thirst was appeased. It was hard not to wish to be a partaker of his hallucination.

Dowlas, Falsten, and the boatswain, seemed to think that the unfortunate wretch would, like Jynxstrop, put an end to himself by leaping into the sea; but, determined this time to preserve the body, that it might serve a better purpose than merely feeding the sharks, they rose and followed the madman everywhere he went, keeping a strict eye upon his every movement.

But the matter did not end as they expected. As though he were really intoxicated by the stimulants of which he had been raving, Flaypole at last sank down in a heap in a corner of the raft, where he lay lost in a heavy slumber.


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25.—Last night was very misty, and for some unaccountable reason, one of the hottest that can be imagined. The atmosphere was really so stifling, that it seemed as if it only required a spark to set it alight. The raft was not only quite stationary, but did not even rise and fall with any motion of the waves.

During the night I tried to count how many there were now on board, but I was utterly unable to collect my ideas sufficiently to make the enumeration. Sometimes I counted ten, sometimes twelve, and although I knew that eleven, since Jynxstrop was dead, was the correct number, I could never bring my reckoning right. Of one thing I felt quite sure, and that was that the number would very soon be ten. I was convinced that I could myself last but very little longer. All the events and associations of my life passed rapidly through my brain. My country, my friends, and my family all appeared as it were in a vision, and seemed as though they had come to bid me a last farewell.

Toward morning I woke from my sleep, if the languid stupor into which I had fallen was worthy of that name. One fixed idea had taken possession of my brain—I would put an end to myself; and I felt a sort of pleasure as I gloated over the power that I had to terminate my sufferings. I told Curtis, with the utmost composure, of my intention, and he received the intelligence as calmly as it was delivered.

"Of course you will do as you please," he said; "for my own part, I shall not abandon my post. It is my duty to remain here; and unless death comes to carry me away, I shall stay where I am to the very last."

The dull gray fog still hung heavily over the ocean, but the sun was evidently shining above the mist, and would, in course of time, dispel the vapor. Toward seven o'clock I fancied I heard the cries of birds above my head. The sound was repeated three times, and as I went up to the captain to ask him about it, I heard him mutter to himself:

"Birds! Why, that looks as if land were not far off."

But although Curtis might still cling to the hope of reaching land, I knew not what it was to have one sanguine thought. For me there was neither continent nor island;


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 Two geometrical figures called Corvus, the Crow, and Crater, the Cup, rest on the back of this Lernean Hydra. These two small constellations are easily traced, one having the form of a quadrilateral figure and the other a section of a circle. Kippax says that Crater has been variously called the Cup of Hercules, the Cup of Achilles, the Cup of Medea and the Wine Cup of Noah. The Greeks called Crater the "Goblet of Apollo" but according to Manilius it was the "generous Bowl of Bacchus," God of Wine.

Although this Water-snake is generally represented as the one connected with the Labors of Hercules, there is also another legend which combines the Crow, the Cup and the Snake in one tale. The crow was at one time Apollo's favorite bird until one day, in anger at its tale bearing, the Sun-god turned its color from

title: Page:The Music of the Spheres.djvu/150