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DREAM WITHOUT ENDING

They rode fast through the graying afternoon—Hilda, the German, and Kent—and the sense of impending disaster rode with them. The last village—a half-dozen thatched huts in a coconut grove—was as empty of life as the rest, barricaded closely against the expected hurricane. Even the poles on the beach in front, where the fishing nets were usually stretched in the sun to dry, were bare.

Hurrying past those, Kent remembered suddenly that they—Hilda and he—had stopped here once, and hoped she had forgotten. But she had not. She checked her horse. She said,

“It was here we stopped—on that first expedition—and I saw the purple fishes.”

Kent said cheerfully enough, “And drank your first coconut milk.”

She smiled at him slowly, remembering.

The German said hopefully: “Some coconut milk would be pleasant now. Most refreshing drink. Its chemical constituents more nearly approximate mother’s milk—”

Kent said: “We all know that. You’d stop to eat or drink if it were your last hour, Josef.”

Josef looked at him as if he had said something in extremely bad taste, and considering the fact that this ride was likely to be their last unless Langford could get them a boat, he probably had. Well, there was time for a drink.

Their bearers, who were almost as well mounted as they were—Kent had seen to that, himself—were coming up. He told one of the boys they wanted nuts. The boy climbed the nearest tree. On the way up he slipped once, and his three companions, watching him, laughed uproariously. They were all particularly cheerful at the moment, as always when some one gave them horses to ride.

He looked the four over, wondering whether they would stay with him until dark, or suddenly, along the side of some precipice, toss the baggage down into the valley for the fun of hearing it crash. He could not tell; no one could tell. They were built like any blacks that carry loads on the heads, tall, beautifully muscled, and their faces were as unrevealing, to an Aryan, as the faces of Africans or Chinese coolies. They looked happy today because they were riding horses. That was all he could tell. One looked French; two showed traces of Spanish. They were just average West Indian basket boys. They would take, they were taking, some slight risk in going on with him, because of the relatively enormous sum he had promised them. They would not go one step farther for any promised sum, when they felt the danger had grown too great.

The chief bearer, John, the only one Kent knew, smiled at him slowly and spoke softly so that no one else heard.

“I shall get them as far as Langford’s. But they know now. They found out at the village before this one.”

Kent said, “That was bound to happen, I suppose.”

“It does not matter,” John said. “I had to promise them twice the sum you mentioned—no, they speak no English at all” (as Kent looked to see whether one had not drawn near to listen). “You need not pay it, of course, when we get to Langford’s. By then, perhaps, you are safe, and the sum you settled on will keep them in rum for six months, as it is.”

His voice, when he spoke of the bearers, was a little contemptuous. Kent was amused, though it was odd, he thought, that in his rage and exasperation at the whole succession of misfortunes that had brought them to this catastrophe, he could find anything amusing. John, who was perhaps one-sixteenth or one-thirty-second English, being superior, was entertaining. This boy, who had been with him on the previous expedition to the island, would not follow him to hell precisely, but he would follow him at least a league or two farther than the others, out of sheer British stubbornness.

John said, watching them eat coconuts and talking in that patois that was neither French nor English, and sounded to Kent irritatingly like the chattering of monkeys,

“They have no guts.” This product of some British sailor gone buccaneer and gone native a couple of centuries ago, then said sharply in patois, “Boy, bring us coconuts, too.”

But Kent said: “I don’t want one. We should be pushing on. Do the best you can, John.”

The man called him back, dropped his voice still lower, spoke hesitantly, in that careful English that was his pride. “You will not be offended, Mr. Kent—I do not wish to presume. But if it grows dark before we reach the plantation, do not let Miss Hilda ride ten feet from you. It will be hard to hold these after dark.”

Kent nodded, said crisply, “Let ’em know we’re all armed,” and went ahead ten yards to where Hilda and the German were finishing their coconuts.

She was telling the German, gayly, of that other trip past this village. “I was dressed in the most absurd pink dress—we had no horses that trip, and my feet were blistered after the first two miles on the stones. Of course, I never dreamed there were no proper roads.”

Kent said to her gayly: “You learned, child. And your feet hardened. We should be getting on. We have a long enough start of them, but not too long.”

She smiled at him. The path narrowed here, swung sharply from the sea into the jungle, and began to climb immediately. Hilda, who had the best horse, rode first, then came the German, and then Kent.

He wondered, not for the first time that afternoon, if she fully realized their situation. She seemed quite calm, but she was almost invariably calm. He hoped she did not know.

Josef asked him then, in German, which she had never learned, “Does she understand?”

He said, “I think not.”

Josef said: “Just as well. How are you betting on our chances, Kent?”

“Perfectly even. If the hurricane holds off until we get to Langford’s, if Carlos has not sent men by the other road to commandeer Langford’s boat, we get the boat; if it is still safe to sail, we sail to St. Anne’s, and there we are.”

Josef said: “One chance in four or five. Too many ifs.”

“Well, it’s all we can do.”

Josef shrugged his shoulders. They had been over all that.

If Hilda did not know, why did she stop at the top of the first mountain that would hide the sea from them and look back at that green and gray coastline for a long space of seconds, as one looks carefully at a vista one expects never to see again. But her voice was gay when she called back to him. The path was moving down the mountain side through a forest of tree ferns. Across the valley, range and range of mountains rose, thickly forested, magnificent in all the shades of lush tropical greens.

“I remember every bit of this road,” she said. “We killed the boa just here.”

She had not been frightened at all, though she had certainly never seen a snake more than two feet long outside a zoo before. She had stood, in the absurd pink dress, already mud-stained, in thin silk stockings torn by brambles, and little tennis shoes that wore out the first day, and listened carefully while he explained the differences between boa constrictors and pythons, and admired the ten feet of gleaming, blue-black coils lying in the clay at their feet.

He called back: “It was a beautiful boa. I never would have got it if you hadn’t noticed it.”

She waved to him, smiling, and went on.

The German said: “She just told me this was the first trip she took with you. . . Curious how the Anglo-Saxon mind, faced with crisis, dwells on trivialities. That was manifested so often in the war. I have been thinking, since we started out today, how little she has changed since I met you both in Bangkok. That was seven—no, eight—years ago.”

Kent said: “Yes, that thing about trivialities is true. I’ve been thinking how a half-breed, such as our faithful John, illustrates how attenuated English blood can run and still show English traits—”

Josef said, “An empire that has seen its best days.”

They both laughed, at themselves and at each other.

Kent said, “We might better give each other last messages for friends, instead of discussing the future of the British Empire.”

The German was too literal for that. “None of us will have the chance to deliver them, unless we all do.”

Kent said, “Better dwell on the fact that Langford’s sloop may be available.”

Josef said: “No. I feel that we shall not escape. After all, it is of no ultimate importance. Only I would have liked to prove to James that his Antillean tree frogs do have a tadpole stage.”

“Just a zoologist to the end,” Kent said a little impatiently. “Ambitious for your paragraph in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

Josef laughed. “My friend, we shall achieve even the transient but more conspicuous fame of the front pages. They will hold a fine inquiry over us, some weeks or months from now.”

Kent said, “Not that it will do us any good.”

“I should like to see myself on the front pages just once, though,” said Josef. “I never went with a well-publicized expedition.”

Kent said with some bitterness, “I’ve been on the front pages—not as a scientist, though.”

The path was for a space too difficult for conversation. He watched Hilda climb, a little ahead of him. After all the years of tropic trails, something about her riding still suggested to him a young girl, carefully instructed, being very conscientious about “form” as she trotted around a park.

The German said heavily: “She is as beautiful as ever. . . Kent, don’t you think Langford can assure protection for her at least?”

Kent said: “For God’s sake, don’t let’s discuss that. You know better.” Then he regretted losing his temper. He went on more quietly, “This is all melodrama, and I hate melodrama.”

Josef was not offended. He said, “Yes, it is so unscientific.”

He began to sing, in that pleasant baritone that Kent had heard in half the jungles of the world. It was some sentimental German ballad that had for Josef perhaps some associations with youth, with mädchen long since matrons growing old.

As they rode, rapidly, Kent decided he was more disturbed, more exasperated by the melodrama of this ride through the hills and by the irony that here, where she and he had begun their long wandering, they were probably to end it than he was by their peril. He was as certain as Josef that things would begin to go wrong at Langford’s.

The horses ahead of him sent a little shower of stones rattling past his feet. Bamboo clumps, stirred by a faint breeze, cracked like distant pistol shots. Otherwise the forest was stiller than he had ever known it. The stillness heightened the sense of life in waiting—waiting for the hurricane—for a messenger who might appear around the next bend of the trail to tell them their journey was useless—for an inevitable conclusion to this ride through a dream.

Where the road turned sharply, it widened. Hilda waited there for the German and Kent. She said,

“Listen.”

Then Kent heard a mountain whistler singing all alone, a long, mournful trilling, and he thought how gay their music sounded when dozens of them, after a shower, came out in the green, dripping hillsides and saluted the setting sun.

She said, “Remember we stopped here to eat, and we heard the mountain whistlers after a shower?”

Kent said to Hilda, “I remember, darling.”

She was browner and leaner than the child who had started off light-heartedly on that other journey with some notion that a jungle resembled a neglected botanical garden; yet now, when she crinkled her nose at him, smiled, and asked for a cigarette, she looked so like that child that his heart ached suddenly.

He became aware that John had halted beside him.

“We should not wait, Mr. Kent,” John said.

Kent said: “Don’t get jittery, John. We have almost three hours’ start. That’s more than we need, if the boat is there.”

John agreed, but said: “If my boys see Carlos’ men behind us, they will leave. Otherwise they will come along, since we are nearer now to Langford’s than to go back. How long do you think before the storm?”

Kent shrugged. “Perhaps two hours, perhaps eight. Who knows? As for Carlos, we can’t see whether we’re followed until we get to the top of Souffrire. You can look back over almost the whole trail from there.”

John nodded. “You can see the roofs of Langford’s from there, too. Then I can get them all the way. They don’t want to camp in the jungle and have a mahogany tree fall on them when the storm comes.”

Kent said, “If you get us through, John, tell me anything you want sent from the States.”

John shook his head; said hesitantly: “Never mind that, Mr. Kent. But if you have time at Langford’s, if you would write me a letter to recommend me in case another expedition ever comes to the island . . .”

So John, too, thought they would not escape. He preferred a letter of reference here and now to his chances of getting a rifle or suit of clothes later, from New York.

Kent said, “I’ll write you a letter,” and started after Hilda and the German.

The bearers’ attitude made him reconsider, once more, whether there were any other way out than this attempt to get Langford’s boat. Once more he decided there was not. If Josef had not precipitated the situation between Carlos and himself—or if they had come down from the mountains early enough to get the weekly coast steamer connecting with the larger islands—if he himself had taken Carlos’ boasts more seriously—oh, if and if and if—

Behind him the bearers chattered in that incomprehensible patois, louder and merrier now under the evident influence of rum, while Hilda’s trim, straight figure and the German’s gray, muscular back moved constantly on before him to the click of the horses’ hoofs against the stones.

On the way home, after a year as members of an expedition to the headwaters of the Orinoco, they had made a detour to visit this island of St. Antonia, one of the West Indies where the tourist ships never touch. It was of no interest except to scientists, and to them it was a paradise of plant and animal life. Because of certain apparent identities in species discovered by the Orinoco expedition and previously observed only here, Kent had volunteered to stop off on his way north and bring new specimens for checking over. He alone of the members of the expedition was familiar with this island—he and Hilda, to be precise about it.

The German with whom he had been on two previous expeditions, one in Central Africa and the other on the fringes of the Gobi desert, volunteered to come along. He was curious to see St. Antonia. What they had to do was relatively easy—get specimens of certain humming birds, a giant beetle, a tree frog, and a parrot. Kent had anticipated that the work would occupy them no more than a fortnight.

They had come over on a sloop from St. Anne’s with a sense of holiday. They found the town restless, the president barricaded behind the doors of his palace, the inhabitants more drunken and more frightened than usual. But they were not interested in these aspects. South American and Central American politics and those of the independent West Indies had a sameness about them.

Kent got his old headboy, John, without much difficulty, and they started for the interior. When, at the first night’s camp, John told him that Carlos, the black plantation owner with whom he had had difficulty long before, was now the most powerful man on the island and planned a coup d’état within a fortnight, he found the news amusing.

So Carlos, too, was dreaming that endless dream of empire that was the only West Indian heritage from the conquistadores who followed Columbus. It was a dream grown thin and poor in the centuries since the plate ships vanished from the seas, but it was the same dream. It was shared by Hernando Cortez and later by the black Haitian Emperor Christophe, and many others whom God alone remembered through four hundred years of bloody sunsets over the Caribbean. In this island—that had known its century of glory under Spain and France, that had later been almost the last refuge of the buccaneers of all Europe and was now drifting back to jungle and to quietness—Carlos would play briefly the same old rôle.

He would make his coup; it would probably be successful, since the novelty of a new president-dictator would appeal to the natives for a while. He would live in the half-ruined marble palace and wear the gorgeous uniforms embroidered in the seventeenth-century symbols of two nations with a significance that few remembered now. Soon some one else would dream the same dream, make a coup d’état successfully sooner or later, and Carlos would go to join the ghosts of a thousand forgotten West Indian dictators. It all seemed thoroughly absurd to hear about.

When John told him, Kent had wondered briefly about the fate of Langford, his only friend on the island, whom he meant to visit if he had time when their work was done. John said Mr. Langford was well, still kept himself to his own village on the eastern coast, still ruled his own plantation, and stayed free of island politics.

To Kent it seemed that Carlos and Langford represented the whole problem of the breed cursed with a touch of northern blood, and so forever restless, forever prevented from sitting peacefully in the sunlight and waiting for life to pass as the years passed.

Carlos and Langford were the problem at its two poles. Carlos was restless and vicious, compound of the worst instincts of Spanish pirates, with a certain African ruthlessness to flavor. Kent had beaten him once for whipping a saddle-galled horse until it died—and Kent knew Carlos would have stabbed him then had he dared. That was when they were forced to stay at his plantation for a day of torrential rainstorms.

Langford was restless also. He worked hard. Though he knew more about his “French” ancestry than any other perhaps, he looked as British as a Sussex squire with a skin gone strangely dark. His story (or Carlos’ story for that matter, in a different blend) was, in pattern, the history of the island, where no whites lived now.

Some English planter became a realist in the eighteenth-century when empires were too occupied elsewhere to take thought for their colonials in already unprofitable St. Antonia. Though he saved the lessening profits from cane and cocoa all his life, they would scarcely amount to enough to achieve his dream of a return to England. So he made the best of it and married a girl allegedly Indian. His son married a girl politely described as French. His grandson married some one who pleased his fancy, and did not ask who her grandmother was. Generation by generation that fact became of less importance. “The climate,” as natives still explained to Kent, “turns every one’s skin dark in the end.”

Langford lived on the plantation that had come into the family with the “French” girl. Kent had visited him there, dined ceremoniously, drunk coffee in a courtyard where the black and white marble tiles lay solid as when a mason from France had set them two hundred years ago, and where a diverted mountain stream moved murmurously forever.

Langford imported magazines on agriculture, diversified his crops, planted and cultivated limes as cane grew profitless, sent his produce to St. Anne’s on his own sloop, made money through years when every one else on the island forgot how, married a girl from St. Anne’s, kept her creamy quadroon beauty dressed in frocks from Paris. He read history, newspapers, biographies, scientific articles, from that modern world that he would never see.

Kent asked him about that once. “Why don’t you travel? America might be difficult, but Southern France would be quite possible.”

He answered: “And come back more restless than I went? No . . . That was settled for me when my great-great-grandfather shrugged his shoulders. I stay where I belong. The climate, you must admit, is delightful, except in the rainy season. Let’s play tennis.”

So they played tennis, on the grass court he kept in the condition of those at Forest Hills. Afterward they talked about the younger American novelists.

Ahead, Hilda and the German stopped again.

Hilda said, “We saw the most beautiful python—there he goes.”

The German said, “Not a python, a boa constrictor, Hilda dear.”

She flushed and laughed.

Kent laughed then. After all these years, he was sure that she still did not know the difference. And though her complete inability to make scientific discriminations, her perennial embarrassed confusion among the names of species, had irritated him sometimes, it suddenly did not matter any more. She had learned to dress for the trail, to pack equipment better than he. She sensed the beauty of things. She was, she had been always, a marvelous comrade. She had not had to learn not to complain of hardships or danger, for from that first journey, to which she went equipped with two or three sports frocks from Paris, and shoes with only moderately high heels, she had never complained.

Suddenly he wanted acutely to kiss her. It seemed more important than it had seemed in years, to kiss her immediately. Actually, he rode close to her, and put his hand on her arm. How clear and gray her eyes were! What a little thing she was to have ridden so far, over so many frontiers.

Her eyes grew frightened as she looked at him. He cursed himself. Of course, any unaccustomed gesture, made now, would seem to be a farewell while there was time for one.

Her voice was very quiet when she spoke. She said: “So, dearest, you think the game’s up? I’ve been wondering.”

“Nonsense!” he said. “Of course, not! Don’t have nerves.” He was quite sharp. “Let’s get on, though.”

She said: “We should be there in an hour. This is the last mountain.”

She trotted her horse up the slope. At the top they would be able to look back over the route it had taken them three hours to traverse, and see how closely they were followed.

Kent blamed himself, as he had blamed himself all day for realizing the danger too late. On their arrival the restlessness of the town had seemed to him nothing more than annoying, because it might lessen the likelihood of securing sober bearers. John attended to that, though.

Later, when their specimens had been collected, and there had been some discussion of making a forced march to get them back in time for the weekly sloop to St. Anne’s, the decision had seemed inconsequential. Josef wanted to see the boiling lake, of which he had heard so much. So they stopped to see it, reached town one day too late for the boat, and settled themselves to arrange specimens, to rest and to put their notes in order.

Even when, that first day of their return, he encountered Carlos, very drunk, on the street, and Carlos said dramatically: “I remember you very well; I remember you beat me. No man in St. Antonia beats Carlos, nowadays,” Kent was undisturbed. He said,

“How nice for you, Carlos!” and was a little bored.

He did not even bother to tell Hilda of the encounter.

The day after their return to town, Carlos took over the palace and the citadel, and they waked to the sound of firing in the streets. Still Kent had no thought of any particular danger. There might have been time, even then, to hire a sloop in the harbor, to escape before orders went out against their escaping.

He told Hilda not to go out unless he or Josef were with her, and settled himself to reading a collection of month-old newspapers.

That noonday Josef went out to see the sights and met the new dictator reviewing his bodyguard in the plaza. The bodyguard was dressed in the uniforms the old palace guard had been ordered to remove before they were taken out to be shot against a wall. It appeared that Carlos had his adjutant order Josef off the street for failing to salute him, and Josef, completely unimpressed by this, made a speech in clear enough English about insolence to a European. After that, a soldier knocked off Josef’s spectacles (the cherished, tortoise-shell-rimmed ones he wore to town), and Carlos himself stopped his horse to tell Josef to deliver a message to Kent. They had more words, just what Kent had not bothered to inquire.

At some point Carlos dismounted, and, within a minute or so thereafter, Josef knocked him down. Probably for something he had said about Hilda—Josef would be careful not to mention that, but Kent and Hilda were in St. Antonia when their old story was new, and newspapers from the States drifted down there, even then.

They let Josef go home; they did not even send a guard with him. He arrived and finished his story only ten minutes before John appeared with the news, anticipated by that time by both. They were to be arrested at sunset. Because of various parades and celebrations scheduled for the afternoon, they were to have that much time.

Probably, Kent decided, Carlos planned a glorious evening setting the seal on his dictatorship by putting these three available members of the white race in their place—murdering them at such length and with such elaborateness as his imagination could devise. Thereafter, when the news drifted out (since Carlos would shortly have too many enemies), some warship would drift in to put the natives in their place. And so it would go on, a theme without novelty, without interest except for those who happen to be selected as one of its illustrations.

Hilda was not present when John came with the news. They made their plans without her. They sent John to see if by any bribery he could hire a sloop to go to St. Anne’s. He found the dictator had already given orders, and no one would dare rent them a sloop.

There was nothing left but to attempt to cross the island to Langford’s. It was necessary only to go through a rear window of the house into an alley where John had the horses waiting, avoid the main streets where the town people celebrated, to steal up behind a soldier guarding the empty road at the end of the town and knock him unconscious; in short, to proceed with all the trappings of tropic drama that Kent so despised, and to be on their way.

Kent told Hilda only that he felt, with the town so unsettled, they would be better off at Langford’s. As a matter of fact Langford expected them. They had sent a letter the previous day to say they would spend two or three of their remaining days with him. Moreover John sent a boy ahead, on the extra horse, to tell him they were starting immediately, while he made his fruitless effort to get a boat. Until, on the way out of town, Hilda witnessed them briefly disposing of the guard as in a comic opera, she had no intimation of the actual situation.

Kent’s horse was tiring fast, but they were within a mile now of the summit, and after that the going would be easier. He dismounted and led the animal for a while. Ahead Hilda and Josef had done the same thing, but behind him the bearers still rode. They would never walk if they could ride. It was scarcely worth while speaking to them now. It was better to leave them to John. The first order that he gave them, and that they disobeyed, would mean their departure. The safety of the kit—the parrots, humming birds, tree frogs, and beetles—made little difference in the greater catastrophe. Still one had the habit of being careful of a collection.

The wind was quickening a little. The sunless sky was grayer. The air felt heavy to breathe. The hurricane that had seemed probable this morning was certain now, and soon, though in this interior valley it was hard to tell how soon. When they reached the gap and saw the sea, they would know. How the storm would affect their chances, Kent could not decide. Their chances? They had only one chance—Langford’s sloop. He would let them have it—unless Carlos had sent men to commandeer it already. In that case they were done.

Strong as Langford might be on his own plantation, and even of influence in his own village, he could not stand against Carlos, who controlled the army for the time being. Nor could he risk disaster to his plantation and his family by sheltering them long. Of course, if the hurricane came and they could not sail, the hurricane would also hold up Carlos’ men. Langford could give them refuge for the duration of the storm. Thereafter it was all a matter of timing, whether or not they embarked before troops arrived to stop them. On the other hand, if the hurricane held off, they must sail into it and chance it, because Carlos’ men would follow until the storm was very close.

They had left the town at two, and had three hours’ start if Carlos’ men did not appear at the hotel until five, the hour John mentioned for their arrest. They were practically at the summit now. From there it was scarcely twenty minutes’ ride to Langford’s plantation. They would reach it before the short twilight faded. They had made good time.

Fresher air blew suddenly through the gap.

Around the last curve in the road, Hilda and Josef were waiting for Kent in the gap. As she turned her horse to look back over the way they had come, she was for an instant silhouetted against the patch of sky behind her. For that instant, he to whom she was the utterly familiar companion of all journeying, he who had spent months and years within sound of her voice, was granted detachment in which he looked at her as if he were seeing her for the first time.

She was a small, slender woman—with chestnut hair and enormous gray eyes that looked violet sometimes. She had beauty.

Looking at her now, he realized that she still had great beauty, though something was gone from her face since the year that beauty first stirred him. For that beauty he had wrecked his life—and hers—with greater thoroughness.

Looking at her whom he had seen against so many exotic backgrounds, silhouetted now against the strange gray light of the oncoming storm, looking at her and knowing that perhaps within a few hours’ time death might come upon them, he felt that he could not die without asking her one question. He had failed her sometimes, many times, over little things, and failed her completely in all her expectations of him. She had never reproached him for anything at all. The laughing girl who had climbed this peak once, with a man who had promised to shelter her from all sorrow forever, was as lost as that man with his high hopes of fame and honor. Both had vanished like the town that lay behind all the hills they’d ridden through that day. Now he felt that if he was to die, he could not die without asking this girl—for she looked like one—whether she could forgive him.

She said lightly: “Here we are finally. The last bit’s so easy. And this road’s popular today. Look.”

He looked back over range and range of curving hills, to the first mountain down which they had come. He could see the red-brown streak of the path, and something moving down it.

The German handed him his glasses, but he did not need them to make sure of what he saw. Still it might be useful to know how many followed. He adjusted them carefully. Twelve men were riding down that far hillside.

John came up. Kent passed the glasses to him and said:

“It took us three hours from there. It will take them nearly four.”

John said: “The boys will go on to Langford’s. I have persuaded them that they can lose themselves most easily on the other road back.”

The path widened as it dropped. Fifty feet beyond the gap it curved toward the ocean, and they could see below them the red roofs of Langford’s a long way off. Beyond them the steel-gray sea ran high against a shore with a curious yellow-gray light on it.

Josef, looking at the sea, shook his head. “You still can’t tell. Maybe in an hour, maybe not yet for four. How long did you say it will take to sail to St. Anne’s?”

Kent said, “Six hours, with the wind right.”

“We don’t get there tonight,” Josef’s voice was cheerful.

Kent said, “No.”

Hilda laughed, that clear laugh of hers. “I remember walking down here, that first afternoon—only by then I was walking only twenty steps at a time. Kent was carrying me the rest of it.” (How light her slim body had seemed!) “He had a dreadful time breaking the news to me that our host was a black. I didn’t mind at all, of course. I thought that would be thrilling. And Langford is a dear. You’ll see, Josef.”

She had had more black and yellow men than white as hosts, in the years since, Kent thought bitterly.

The path was wide enough now for two to go abreast. She rode on beside Josef. Kent did not wish to ride with her. He could not quite summon composure to talk about trivialities, not before he knew whether they were to chance that rising sea or wait at Langford’s for the end.

She was saying: “Below his house is the cove where he keeps the sloop. There’s a sand beach, and the swimming’s the best on the island. From here you can’t see the village at all, but you can see it from the terrace of Langford’s house. It’s along the next cove, beyond his.”

She had a way of talking about trivialities whenever confronted by something new and strange to her, such as a boa constrictor, a negro host, or, now, the nearness of death.

He wanted to say to her, “I love you—I love you terribly, as much, more than ever, even if we never talk about it any more.”

He was an obscure scientist grown middle-aged, probably to die that night, to be unremembered save briefly by certain colleagues, too busy to mourn him seriously, by certain brochures growing dusty in museum libraries, and he wanted to say to her, “No man ever loved a woman more, even if I’ve failed.” Yet—he could not be humorless enough now to say anything so extravagant. Extravagance of speech was burnt out of him by the suns of many tropics, as, he had thought, extravagance of feeling was burnt out, too.

The path widened again. They rode three abreast without talking. It was growing dusk. They passed the first huts of Langford’s plantation, where food was cooking on the glowing charcoal, and a woman sang to her child.

“Not closed yet against the wind,” Josef said.

Kent answered automatically: “They’re fairly sheltered here. They have time enough.”

Time enough—there seemed to be time enough for every one in the world save Hilda and Josef and Kent. He wanted time enough to tell her all the things he had not told her in the busy years—time enough to live those years over.

She said, “Odd that he hasn’t ridden out to meet us.”

They were at the entrance to Langford’s plantation, where two of his men waited, with their habitual cutlasses, and torches not yet needed.

The waiting man greeted him, “Hurricane weather, sir.”

He agreed.

The men escorted them up the long avenue, and there, finally, was Langford, looking not much changed. He was very cordial. He said to Hilda:

“I have Mrs. Langford’s bath ready for you. She is not home at present.”

He led Hilda away.

She called back over her shoulder: “Tell John to bring in the canvas case. I’m going to dress for dinner, darling.”

That settled it. She had dressed for dinner in many strange camps, for she managed to pack in one small canvas case the chiffon frocks, the slippers, even the light wraps, of formal attire in civilization. But she never dressed unless the occasion was a special one, and nothing about this was special unless that it was the last dinner for all three of them. So she must know.

John stood beside him, spoke briefly about the disposal of various pieces of equipment, took the canvas case on into Hilda’s room, came back. Langford had taken Josef to his room, saying,

“Wait there a moment, Kent.”

Kent counted out the money for John and the other bearers.

John took it; said, “My letter?” and Kent remembered.

There were quill pens and stationery on the battered Louis Quinze satinwood desk in the hall. He wrote quickly—that John was honest, capable, reliable, and so on. Signing, he wondered whether he would have occasion to write his name again. He shook hands with John, who stood briefly, hesitating for a phrase.

He managed it finally. It was simply: “Good-bye. I am sorry. Good-bye.”

He stood an instant longer in the doorway, a tall, lean figure with a face not quite savage, not quite civilized. They shook hands.

Then he went out of the door into the dusk, into the past, merging now, becoming confused almost instantly in Kent’s recollection with half a hundred headboys who had carried white men’s baggage along the back roads of the world. He would never see any of them again. Neither would he see John, whose voice, speaking to the boys who moved away slowly down the avenue of palms, laughing as they went, receded now to silence.

Langford came back. “I know everything you might tell me,” he said. “My own messenger left town today a half hour before your boy. This coup of Carlos’—with whom I’ve never wasted friendship—necessitates some change in my own plans. I knew, when my boy got here, you would come.”

Kent said: “We’ll chance the gale if you’ll risk the sloop. Naturally we’ll pay your boys anything in reason or out of it. I don’t want to involve you further than is necessary.”

“That’s of no consequence.” Langford’s voice sounded old. “You know, I hope, that I would do anything I could.” He corrected himself carefully. “I shall do whatever I can. But you had better see for yourself. Come out to the terrace.”

He led the way through the fantastically beautiful patio, where the diverted mountain brook trickled murmurously over the tiles and everything was precisely as it was on that long-past afternoon when Kent and Hilda first sat there among the fan palms.

The terrace overlooked the village. In that last, strange, yellow-gray light before the dark, a light that seemed to be rising from the sea rather than descending from the sky, Kent saw the bonfires of a soldiers’ camp in the market square, horses tethered along its four sides, tents rising. Beyond in the cove—not Langford’s private cove, but the larger—the sloop that was their only chance of escape to St. Anne’s moved slowly toward the shore.

“They will beach her before the storm, I suppose.” Langford’s voice was indifferent. “They seized her three hours ago and sailed her around the point. Carlos sent the troops this morning. He can’t afford to let a counter-revolution start in the back country, and this would be the logical point. I suppose he read something about protecting his flanks in a book about Napoleon. He’s been collecting them for years. When people of our race begin to collect Napoleana, time will provide the fighting in the streets, the rush for the citadel . . . He sent messengers this afternoon. They rode in with my boy. They were to warn his captain there of your coming.”

The campfires brightened as the dark came down.

Kent said, “Then that is all.” His voice sounded to him as if it were some one else’s.

Langford sounded actually grief-stricken. “I have so few friends in the world beyond this island that I cherish them more than they believe. Through ten years, my friend, I have consoled myself when I was lonely by recollections of a few pleasant evenings spent with you—and her. There is no use pretending, Kent. We shall begin to pretend when she comes in to dine. But now—for you the road ends here.”

Kent nodded, considering that. If they went forward, to the village, they met death at the hands of the soldiers in the square. If they went back across the mountains, the way they had come, they met death already riding toward them. If they attempted to cut through the bush where were no paths, they would die in the hurricane swiftly or, if they survived it, die as soon as soldiers followed the trail of their cutlasses through the jungle.

Langford said: “I have sent my family to my place in the town. My wife has a young child—you see, for us there is no escape from this place, forever and ever. I could not risk involving them with you, since Carlos’ orders were so clear.” His voice was apologetic.

Kent said quickly, “I understand all that, Langford.”

The dark voice went on. “I stayed to dine with you—it will seem to Miss Hilda more natural. Nothing will happen yet, for a long time. They are waiting for the men following you across the long path. Carlos would be reluctant to attack my house—he wants baksheesh, of course, and I shall have to pay it—one of the penalties of being a successful planter. That can’t interest you . . . The men following you have orders to call here and ask me, politely, to surrender you.”

Kent said, “Yes?”

Langford spoke more slowly. “My friend, I shall not be here then. I shall be in my warehouse in the town, with my family. It is, practically speaking, an arsenal . . . Kent, you will not be able to understand. . .

“We are all alike actually, that fool Carlos, myself, and your bearer John, who was fond of you. (I watched his face as he went down the road. He was weeping.) We play with our faded European dream of loyalty, of valor, of glory as the case may be, here where so many dreams are dust on jungle trails. And in the end—we do what we must, because we must live, or think we must.”

It seemed important to disabuse Langford of the idea that any more might be expected of him.

“What else could you do? Unless—unless you could take Hilda with you to your wife?”

Langford shook his head. “My friend, I thought of it. But just as if I stayed here and refused to surrender you, as I should refuse—as I think I should refuse—they would burn the house down about our ears to get you; so, if I take her, they will burn the warehouse. I am a fairly strong man. Carlos will let well enough alone where I myself am concerned. But you three—

“If it were a month from now or a week from now, there would be a chance. Not now. He is having his Napoleonic hour, and for that hour his men will follow him as if he were Napoleon. You beat him once. He has never forgotten. Now, while he’s newly drunk with power, nothing will satisfy him but to wipe out that memory.”

Kent said, “There will be an investigation, of course.”

Langford said, “He will think of that when he sees the warship in the harbor.”

Kent said, “How long do you think the storm will hold off?”

Langford regarded the sky, which was almost dark now, but starless. “It comes slowly, but it comes surely. Three hours, perhaps four.”

“They will be here before then.”

“I think so . . . After dinner, I shall stay as long as I can, and leave you weapons, of course. There is a poison used in my family occasionally for two hundred years—on the white side, of course—if you think it would be easier—for her?”

Kent shook his head. And suddenly he wanted to be alone, to be free of this discussion of details no longer consequential, to steel himself for the moment when he must face her whom he had brought to exile and at last to death.

Langford seemed to recognize that mood. He said, “I must go see that your German friend has everything he needs.”

He effaced himself. He walked lightly, like a black. He talked heavily, like a white. Poor devil. The best “breed” Kent had ever encountered. Going as far as he could for them, with nothing to gain from it.

The wind was rising fast now. The rustling in the palm trees quickened. It was to him, it had always been to him, the most stirring of tropic sounds—a high wind blowing through tall palms at night.

In a storm she had come to him long ago. In a storm she would go from him now.

And suddenly, in that clear wind blowing, he was freed from the exasperation and sense of futility that had held his mind throughout the day, suspended among trivialities. He was free at last to think of her whom he had taken for granted for years and years. He dared at last to look back along the way they had come, to find if therein lay some little comfort to offer her for the short way remaining to them—comfort, for her, and for himself.

He went slowly in to dress, reluctant to leave that empty terrace, that high wind blowing. Yet it pleased her if, when she dressed, he assumed the white linens that represented the utmost in formality his tropic wardrobe afforded.

Through the doorway of his room he saw her suddenly, walking past down the corridor toward the patio. She did not see him. She probably did not know where his room was. She walked lightly. Her silver sandals made almost no sound on the smooth tiles. She was wearing a beautiful lace frock of creamy white. He remembered she had shown it to him, when they packed for the Orinoco, told him it was her best, to be saved for a special occasion. Heretofore she had not worn it. Light from a wall sconce in the corridor fell across her face and the smoothness of her shoulders as she passed. She looked like a débutante grown just a little tired. He wanted to call to her as she passed, and then he decided to wait a little, until he knew more precisely what he wanted to say to her.

Dressed, he followed her down the corridor. The hurricane shutters in the empty patio were being fastened. A tall negro held a torch while two others clamped the heavy bolts across. This patio, seen thus for the last time in darkness lighted only by the uneven flaring of the torch that cast trembling shadows on the tiles and the black water—this courtyard designed by some forgotten French planter in the days of Louis the Golden—seemed no longer beautiful, but grotesque—as grotesque an attempt as civilization, in this country committed since the beginning to jungle violence.

He turned and went into the drawing-room where eighteenth-century satinwood bureaus from France stood incongruously beside crudely-made chairs of native teakwood and an enormous mahogany phonograph from New York.

Josef was describing to Langford the manifestations of spring in the Black Forest, and Langford, who had never seen the quickening rush of Northern springtime anywhere, was listening with every appearance of eager attention. Hilda was sitting silent, looking decorative, looking serene.

Langford poured for Kent a half-tumbler of the vin du pays, that mellow West Indian rum. Kent drank it, poured himself a little more, watching Hilda’s quiet face. Yes, that was what he wanted, to sit regarding her, thinking of nothing now at the end but of her beauty and her quietness, as he had thought of her at the beginning.

He had been an assistant professor then, at one of the smart Eastern colleges about which had grown up, within a radius of twenty miles, country places of the rich, who liked to vary the rigors of the hunting season with dinners to which the professorial set added a fillip of intellectuality. That was in the days immediately prewar, when people took culture a little more seriously. Kent was fortunate in that he had the glamour of two expeditions behind him, and the faculty of talking lightly, at not too great length, of continents still relatively unknown. In the years just preceding America’s entrance into the war, in a less sophisticated society, to be able to describe the cities of the China coast qualified one as an adventurer.

Kent taught biology and geology. He looked forward to a full professorship, to the well-ordered academic life, mitigated by occasional leaves of absence spent in field work abroad. He was sometimes bored by the routine of his days, bored by the wife who had been his classmate at a coeducational Western university, and to whom he had become engaged, somehow, at the end of a long evening spent discussing opportunities for women biologists, a wife who was as cool as a piece of quartz and rather less exciting; yet he felt that he was, if not content, at least reconciled with his compromises.

One night at a dinner party, he sat beside Hildegarde. Across all those years he remembered that he thought he had never seen any one so beautiful, nor any young beauty with a face so grave. He had heard of her, though he had never met her—wife to the heir of one of America’s most imposing fortunes.

In Langford’s drawing-room now she sat, slimly erect, in the cream-colored lace frock, and began to describe to her host the look of apple orchards in spring, and Kent remembered that she had once been a great lady. . .

She was, on that evening when he met her, no more than nineteen. Her husband, some fifteen years her senior, was, diagonally across the table, in a state of drunkenness more embarrassing to observers in 1917 than later. Hilda regarded him for an instant at the beginning of dinner; then turned to Kent and said in a voice as creamy as her shoulders:

“They tell me you have seen the Taj Mahal. Tell me about the Taj Mahal.”

He talked to her about the Taj Mahal and other things equally remote from that dinner party and was aware that he wanted to touch her hand. So began a friendship as innocent, at first, as her gray eyes.

They walked in blossoming apple orchards, they drove to the shore, and to the sound of gray waves beating on the empty sands of April he told her of hot countries, of shores where the jungle came down to touch the sea. . .

An aged, turbaned negress came in and announced Langford’s dinner. They moved out to the dining room. Hilda had stopped talking about apple blossoms, and Josef was beginning again on the Black Forest.

Kent said, “I remember your candelabra, Langford.” (They were English, eighteenth-century, very beautiful.)

Langford said, “They throw nice lights on the mahogany.”

Every one began to laugh, at the absurd inconsecutiveness of the conversation.

Langford said: “This effort to make civilized small talk is more of a strain on me than on the rest of you perhaps. I am less accustomed to it. Should we abandon it, and begin to wager on whether the storm breaks before we hear a pounding on the door, or not?”

Hilda said: “Let’s not do that, old dear. It’s too serious a wager. Josef, do go on about the Black Forest. I can’t talk. I want to sit and look at Kent and remember our ill-spent youth.”

Her tone was flippant, but the sentence distressed Kent. Did she at the end remember it as all ill-spent, all regrettable? Her smile was reassuring, though.

Said Langford, serving turtle soup from a tureen that was a museum piece, into plates that did not match: “Dinner, I hope, will be very good, though the cook and waitress may flee to the village before dessert time. However, I shall then serve you myself.”

Every one seemed to be hungry. They ate in a silence through which sounded clearer and clearer the rising of the wind outside the shuttered windows. . .

Before Kent knew he loved her, he knew that he was more sorry for her than for any one he had known. Her family had brought pressure on her to marry this fortune, when she was only eighteen. Her husband was drunken more often than not, he was conspicuously unfaithful to her, he was sometimes physically brutal to her. She never mentioned any of these things, but they were common gossip. She had wanted to leave him, had gone to her family for help, but they had received too many favors from her husband to wish to help her. So she was trapped, having no training, no friends, and a child born within a year of her marriage.

It seemed to make her happy to hear of exotic countries that it was scarcely probable that she would ever see, to discuss manners of tribes it was incredible that a smart American hostess should ever encounter. And though Kent found her voice, her loveliness, her straight glance of a child disturbing from the beginning, he told himself he was old enough and sane enough to keep his head. He knew she represented the romance he had discounted forever when he married the sensible girl who shared his science course, the wife who hated to hear him talk of his expeditions because she felt they diverted his attention from his secure professorial future. He meant to keep his head.

Then, one day, when he was lecturing to rows of polite, bored students, he looked through the campus window and saw Hildegarde walking across the lawn, lightly, smoothly.

He forgot his next sentence. He stopped talking. A tag line from some forgotten verse or play read in his own undergraduate days came to him suddenly, “Walk softly, for you are treading on my dreams.” Yes, he was a sensible man lecturing to a freshman class in biology, and outside, in a fluttering white frock, in a wide spring hat, his dreams passed by in the sunshine.

He was recalled to actuality by suppressed laughter from students in the rear row. The gaze of his class had followed his through the window.

He caught himself up sharply, went on with his lecture.

That day his wife said to him:

“Of course, this is a harmless flirtation of yours—I shan’t flatter you by thinking that you could give serious competition to her husband’s fortune—but do be a little discreet—” And so left for a week’s convention of the State Federation of Women’s Clubs.

On the third day of his wife’s absence he drove with Hilda to the shore, hurried home to escape a threatening thunderstorm, and was sitting in his study telling himself sensibly that this affair, innocent as it was, could not continue because he could not depend on himself to be sensible much longer—when the storm broke. He sat considering whether he should write to Hilda, or whether it would be kinder simply to avoid her, when above the sound of thunder, he heard some one pounding on his front door.

She stood there, her shining hair down about her face. She was so wet, so disheveled, that he did not notice for a moment that her face was bruised. She gasped out something about being frightened—came to him because he could tell her what to do, perhaps.

The storm had hastened the dark. He lighted lamps, built a fire for her, and then suddenly took her in his arms because he could not help it. She clung to him like a desperate child who had found refuge. It seemed so important to hold her in his arms that first time, that her story, when she told it, seemed inconsequential.

Her husband, at the club that was the clearing house for faculty and county gossip, had heard some story of the frequency of their meetings. He had come home more drunken than usual, accused her of indiscretion, reminded her that it was his fortune which supported her and her people, forbade her to leave the house without him thereafter, and then, when she made some protest of innocence, beat her. Apparently he left the house, after that. And she, when she could walk, had fled through the rain to Kent.

Kent comforted her. In that hour no thought of practical difficulties disturbed him. He assured her that he would take care of her—that she was now forever safe. She stayed at his house that night, since there was nowhere else for her to go. They postponed all thought of problems until the morning.

In the clear morning her husband came—with Kent’s wife, whom he had summoned from the Convention of Women’s Clubs. He said that he would divorce Hilda with every circumstance of disgrace, that he would never let her see her child again, that he would forever prevent Kent securing a place on an American college faculty. Kent’s wife said that she would never divorce him at all.

How inconsequential all their dramatic speeches sounded, when he looked at Hilda’s dewy face and knew that she was to be his forever!

Across Langford’s silent dinner table that serene face smiled remotely. But it was—it had been for some years—the face of a stranger, though he and she had seen the Taj Mahal together five times.

Hilda and he went to New York together at the end of that boring, melodramatic conference. He sent his resignation to the university from New York. Her husband and his wife did exactly as they promised. Hilda was divorced to the accompaniment of scandal. Her husband was awarded the custody of the child. Kent found all academic doors closed to him, but he was happy as he had never been happy in his life.

America entered the war in their first week in New York. Kent wanted to enlist, and Hilda urged him to do it, insisting that she could support herself somehow. She felt she could assist with the management of a tearoom. Kent was rejected for the army, however, because of some obscure heart trouble that was, he supposed, the aftermath of dengue fever. Then some friend offered him the chance to go to St. Antonia. He was grateful, for the problem of money began to be acute. (Fortunately, the wife whom he had left had an income of her own.)

So Hilda and he embarked on the first of their journeys, that led them through years completely golden in his recollection. They began with the confidence that he would become a great scientist, make some discovery that would rehabilitate them in the world’s eyes. Though, as he remembered it, she was chiefly interested in rehabilitating him, and his impelling desire was to return to her the pleasant accoutrements of civilization, of which he felt he had robbed her.

Years went past, against the most exotic backgrounds of the world. He was just good enough to be a “utility” man, sometimes biologist, sometimes geologist, on expeditions from which other people gained the glory. Because he was competent, the relationship with Hilda, so widely broadcast through the yellow journals of their first year, did not prevent his finding work to do, yet it stood in the way of his securing any credit. He came to accept that as reasonable. Any one financing an expedition wanted a name with no connotations of scandal to head it. But it was a reaction he had not anticipated. As time passed, as their story grew older, most people took it for granted that he and Hilda were married. But he was still married to a woman he had not seen for seventeen years.

Hilda, who looked almost as young as ever, although she sometimes looked tired, was thirty-seven.

No matter how eagerly they returned to civilized cities, they realized—on Fifth Avenue or Regent Street, or in the Bois—that they were away too much to have any contact with life of the world they had left. They talked, the first years, of what they would do, of where they would settle, when they retired from junketing. It was some time before they realized that they could never retire. For the early years, at least, they were happy. They felt that with each other life was complete, was full enough. He knew her grief was constant for that small daughter who would not remember her at all—but she spoke of her more and more rarely. He missed increasingly the stimulus of conversation with his academic confrères, but that usually seemed unimportant.

A hiatus in the progression of dinner brought Kent back to immediacy. He had eaten without noticing what he ate, as had the other three, each confined in a circle of his own thoughts. They sat now silent, among their separate dreams. The candlelight flickering on Hilda’s hand made it look as if it trembled. Or perhaps it did tremble. Poor child, she must be desperately frightened.

Kent moved his chair, drew up one beside hers, took her hand between his. She looked at him as if something were breaking in the calmness of her face.

Langford excused himself quickly, went out to the kitchen quarters. They heard some altercation. Then one of the waitresses came in, still in her spotless white turban and apron, with eyes grown terrified and rolling. She gathered up their plates without ceremony, piled them one on the other, hurried out.

Langford reappeared, carrying a silver bowl of fruit. Another waitress came with a tray on which was a coffee pot of very thin old silver, and cups. When she put the tray down on the table, her hands shook so that a cup dropped. The crash sounded curiously loud.

Langford himself brought another cup and spoke apologetically while he moved back and forth from the sideboard, fetching liqueur bottles and glasses.

“Will you pour, Miss Hilda?”

She slipped her hand out of Kent’s and set about pouring coffee.

Langford’s voice went on. “They have grown panicky, and I told them they could leave for the village.”

Kent said, though his voice was indifferent, “Why?”

“They saw torches coming down the mountainside.”

Josef said, “How far off?”

Langford said, “Still almost an hour’s ride distant. At night it takes twice as long, you see.”

They drank coffee, sipped liqueurs. Langford moved about, bringing in a bowl of ice—bottles of Scotch and cognac. He started to explain how he stored the ice he had shipped from St. Anne’s, realized the grotesque irrelevancy, and let his explanation drift into silence.

Kent thought: “The time grows short. I must speak to her—must manage to say at last that I am sorry. I must know, before I die, if she can forgive me.”

She sat motionless, except for her light breathing, staring into space, her hand in his, her thoughts fixed somewhere on the past.

Was she thinking of her child, grown now, in the surroundings from which he had taken her—or of the hurrying, golden years that seemed so distant—or of that scarlet-and-gilt painted café in Bangkok where he had failed her in the end?

They had been travelling seven years then, when his discontent, his realization that he would never become famous, never get back to the approbation of colleagues in the cities, never be able to secure for her the things he had taken from her, grew acute. He had been drinking more and more steadily for months, to dull that realization.

One day she protested gently, timidly even, about his drinking. And his anger at the limitations of their lives flamed up against her.

He said, “You think you own me because you’ve given up so much for me.” He said, “Let me alone. A man needs some freedom.”

She left him, quietly, in that garish café where they had quarreled.

He meant, immediately, to go and apologize. He was so ashamed of himself that he could not face her. So he sat drinking through the afternoon with a couple of newspaper men who turned up. He went with them to find some Cambodian dancing girls. And next morning, dreadfully sorry, completely disgusted with himself, he returned to the hotel, to learn that she had vanished into Asia.

He found her after a month’s frantic search. She had become a governess to the children of some English in Bombay. When she saw him, she looked so hurt, so unhappy, that he could have wept.

He persuaded her to come back to him. He persuaded her of what he recognized as truth, that he could not live without her. And for some weeks delight that he had found her blurred for him the fact that she no longer trusted him. She never protested again, no matter what he drank. She never spoke any more of the college town where they had met, or made any reference to a time when they might return to a place as tranquil. She lived from day to day and talked only of expeditions on which they had been or on which they might go. She had accepted their destiny. She was as kind, as generous of affection, as before. Only of her love, which had filled his life, he was no longer certain at all.

Langford left the room; returned carrying four or five revolvers, some packages of cartridges. He tossed them on the table. They lay reflected incongruously on the shining mahogany.

Kent poured Hilda some brandy. She thanked him, sipped it slowly.

Langford said: “I must leave you now. If there are any messages . . .”

Hilda shook her head.

Kent said, “No.”

The German said, “I should like to write a letter—a most short letter.”

Langford said: “Certainly. I can wait ten minutes,” and led Josef into the hall.

Hilda said to Kent, “The storm sounds closer.”

He said, “I’ll have a look.”

He opened one of the hurricane shutters cautiously a few inches. The wind blew through the opening, and the candlelight on the table swayed wildly.

Langford, standing suddenly beside him, said, “It is near, but it still holds off.”

He helped Kent fasten the shutters again.

Then he regarded him, regarded Hilda, searching their faces not unsympathetically for something—some clue, perhaps, that would help him better to understand white living and white dying. He said simply:

“I must leave you now, my friends. No doubt you prefer to be alone.”

He shook hands with Hilda, with Kent. He said, “Good-bye.”

They watched his tall figure turn in the doorway as if there were something else he wanted to say.

He shook his head, he disappeared through the doorway, and they heard his voice in conversation with Josef in the hall. Then, in a moment, a door slammed violently, as he closed it behind him.

Josef came in, looked at them as if he knew them vaguely, said nothing. He poured himself a whiskey and soda and carried it back to the hall. They could see him through the half-open door. He seemed to be writing another letter, with dubious chances that it would be delivered. Or perhaps that was just an excuse, a manifestation of Teutonic delicacy. Perhaps he, also, felt they should be alone for their farewells.

Her arms went around Kent’s neck. She was kissing him with lips that felt young and warm. He held her off for an instant, said to her,

“Tell me you forgive me—for failing to be any of the things you expected me to be—for spoiling the dream we shared—for bringing you to this.”

Her laughter was as carefree as in the first year of their journey. She said: “You failed me in nothing—you gave me all the sunlit countries. You took me from a life as narrow as death, and showed me the width of the world.”

He held her close against him. Her eyes laughed up, her nose crinkled. He said:

“Do you mean it? Do you mean you don’t regret our years, now at the end . . .”

She said: “I have never been sorry. I have never wanted to go back, since that day I went to you in the storm, so long ago.”

He wondered at the excitement in her voice, but he believed her. Touching her hair, her cheek, her shoulders, he touched again the crest of his youth, that year when he began his journey to win back for her everything he had cost her, that spring when he and she had left the life to which they never found any way back.

The gray eyes fixed on something behind his shoulder were luminous.

He said, “I always meant to tell you—I was so sorry for that quarrel in Bangkok.”

She did not seem to be listening with any particular attention. Her voice hurried on, excitement rising in it. “Kent, that was unimportant—an irrelevant interlude in the dream—the dream we’ve shared—dream without ending.”

Her arms tightened round his neck. Her lips—soft, ardent, sweet—clung to his.

For she had seen, in the last minutes that she sat at that shining table, the bolted hurricane shutter opposite her move curiously, with no relation to the rising of the wind. She had known, for five minutes certainly, that they were forcing that window from the outside, that through that window, quickly now, death would come with the gale.

And she, who had travelled through dreary years after all her dreams were dead; she who had exchanged life with a brutal drunkard for life with a drunkard who was only weak and futile; who had exchanged all the material comforts of her life for hardship that seemed to her incredible to survive, waited that death more eagerly than she had waited for anything in years.

In a moment, now, she would be done with grief for her lost child; done with despair for her illusions of Kent, for her recognition of his limitations; done with the hope that somehow she would get back to the world she understood, where clean people with gentle voices dressed for decorous dinners; done with the hope that some day she could rest.

It was not his fault. She told herself that for the thousandth time, for the last time, as she put her arms around him. He was not what they had both believed he was. He would have been better off back behind the walls of security. They were, neither of them, adventurers, though they thought they were and so committed themselves to adventuring forever.

Still she told him her last lies in a warm, convincing voice. She held his head close to her breast, lest he should be dismayed when he must look at death. Because, for a springtime, walking through the fragrant apple orchards of her temperate North, she had believed she loved him.

There was a noise sharper than the noise of the rising wind. The gale blew straight upon them.

But in that last moment, before death came in with it, she, as well as he, was so absorbed in the recollection of a dream, vaguely to do with a country where there were apple blossoms, that neither noticed it.

A KING IN CARIBBEA

On the wide stone veranda of Horizons, Croo Langford finished a luncheon no different from thousands of luncheons he had eaten there overlooking the white terrace where his peacocks sunned themselves; the green slope dropping sharply beyond the terrace, the double row of palms which, bordering the road, carried the eye down, straight as an arrow’s flight, to a ribbon of beach that glittered, rose-gilt in the glare of noonday, to a semicircle of sea as bright blue as a picture postcard of that Mediterranean Croo Langford had not seen except in postcards.

There was the single little difference in this luncheon, that it was the last he would ever eat as master of Horizons, as ruler of the white stone mansion high on the hillside. So, recognizing that little difference, he rose, before Jose, his butler, brought him coffee, went to the veranda’s edge and regarded what he had owned as if, at last before he left it, he would like to know how greatly he valued it, or whether he valued it at all.

Straight down to the Caribbean’s edge, all that he saw was his. To his right, to the far green hilltop above the jungle, which was as far as he could see; to his left, the valley and the old lava mountain beyond it; even behind him—he turned very quickly and gracefully for a man so tall—even behind Horizons he was owner of those jungle-covered slopes stretching row on rising row, farther than he could see. He was ruler; would—after today—be ruler no longer.

Jose’s bare feet shuffled on the stones when he brought coffee. Langford, listening to that small sound drawing near, thought it sounded loud in the stillness of the day; or perhaps, he thought, even the sound of Jose’s footsteps acquired now that sudden significance which attaches itself to things long-familiar in the moment when one is aware they will be familiar no more.

Jose was a bent, grizzled negro. To Langford, looking at him now, for the first time in years, with detachment, it seemed strange that he was so bent and grizzled. He remembered him, suddenly, absurdly, as a straight, coal-black buck with flashing eyes, who served dinner once to a young Geoffrey Carew, who was newly arrived from England.

Jose said, “Will you have rum or cognac, sir? And Musgrave wants to know shall we have Quelquechose saddled? And do you want him to ride with you?”

Langford said, “Tell him to have Quelquechose saddled in fifteen minutes. No, I shan’t want him to ride with me. I’ll have rum—wait a minute, not the regular rum. Go bring me a bottle of the Rosalie.”

His thoughts, he reflected, would be sufficiently entertaining to absorb him, on this ride away from what Geoffrey Carew had called his “kingdom,” without listening to the monotone of his overseer’s voice, drawling on and on about the limes, and the bees, and the kitchen garden, and the experiments with cotton planting, matters with which Langford was determined to concern himself no more, ever.

Meanwhile, it would be pleasant to celebrate his resignation—or release, as he chose to label it—in that famous Rosalie rum on which his great-grandfather had made a fortune.

When Jose came back with the old bottle, poured the thick brown liquid which was as fragrant as a field of young cane after the rains, and, leaving the bottle on the table, shuffled away again, Langford took his glass and sat, sipping it, on the wide, low balustrade of the veranda, with his broad shoulders turned away from that too-long-known vista of hillside sloping to the sea, so that he faced a wide window of the drawing-room.

He happened to be sitting opposite a mirror on the inner wall of the room, so that he could see his tall, spare, white-clad figure reflected there, saw the reflection and turned his eyes away—a habit that was almost lifelong with him. Aware of that turning away, he was amused at himself, and so, on an impulse, crossed the veranda to the wide drawing-room window, which held no glass, and confronted that reflection of Croo Langford, richest and strongest man on the island of St. Antonia. The figure of a man tall, strongly built, but with the narrow waist and hips of the Britisher who keeps fit in the tropics. The immaculate white linens of the Britisher; riding boots, ordered in London, of a thin, pliable leather particularly adapted to use in hot countries. Straight brows, a straight nose, a hard mouth. There was nothing negroid in his face.

Not without humor, he laughed suddenly, loudly, at himself in his cool, high-ceilinged drawing-room. Laughed, for the hundreds of times Geoffrey Carew had said, kindly or derisively, “There’s nothing in the least negroid in your face, Croo, and you are no darker than many Spaniards.” It was a fact—he was almost white, a “sangmêlé” they called men like him in Martinique.

He strode up and down the long room once, his boots clicking sharply against the mahogany. He had disciplined himself now for almost his life long, in facing that fact, in being philosophical about that fact, in ignoring that fact. Face it, be philosophical about it, ignore it, turn and turn about, he had not found his life yet long enough to bring him to resignation.

He shrugged, a gesture more reminiscent of the French ancestors he ignored than the British ancestors who were his only vanity—but an enormous and absurd vanity. He said to himself quietly, in that empty drawing-room, “An enormous and absurd vanity.”

Jose shuffled in, said, “One of the men out fishing sighted the schooner. She will dock in an hour, or a little more.”

Langford said, “I’ll leave, then, in five minutes. Tell Musgrave.” But found himself reluctant to hurry.

The schooner was bringing his son, Geoffrey Langford, named, of course, for his friend, Geoffrey Carew, back from Martinique with a bride, a pleasant, innocent-faced girl with skin like cream in the shadow, a voice as warm, as gentle, as childlike as the voice of Langford’s own long-dead wife.

His son’s marriage, eminently suitable—the girl came from one of the best sangmêlé families—had crystallized in Croo Langford a resolution long considered. He would turn over the plantation, in its entirety, to the boy, and would go to live in the old fort by Roads End, the fort which he and Geoffrey Carew had remodeled one winter.

Managing Horizons, judging the most profitable diversification of crops, corresponding with agents in London and New York, governing the five hundred plantation hands, disciplining the hundreds of guards who were trained to serve the machine guns hidden in the two mountain passes, north and south, which were the only approaches to Horizons; studying foreign newspapers for understanding of conditions that might affect the market prices of West Indian produce, experimenting with live stock—was a full-time occupation. It interested Langford’s son, somewhat—not enough when he had no final authority. The authority being given, he would find the occupation an absorption.

To be gone before the boy returned, to avoid any emotional scene, any genuine or pretended reluctance on the part of Geoffrey Langford to accept his father’s withdrawal, seemed to Croo Langford much the simpler way for them both.

He said to himself, pacing his long drawing-room, as he had said to himself before, “Why should I care so much? What difference does it make whether the boy goes on with what I have begun, or not? It was never what I wanted.” But he knew the answer to that. His life, his possessions which he was handing on now, were not what he had wanted, but, since they were all he had ever had, he set a value on them, almost despite himself.

The boy was a good boy—but mixed blood was restless blood, and none knew that better than Croo Langford. That creamy-skinned Josephine his boy had just married (how many Martinique girls white and not had been named Josephine, Langford wondered, since that one of them became an empress long ago) would never hold him steady as the long, slow tropic years went by. And he recognized this as the last great desire of his life—that the boy should be held steady. Never to seek excitement in that devil’s brew of intrigue at the capital—where, under the rule of the half-mad emperor-president Carlos, plots and counterplots flourished to the usual accompaniment of assassinations; where the almost-white ignored the “almost,” and a hundred would-be Napoleons gambled for a worthless throne in a half-ruined palace. Never, either, to follow the sound of the drumbeats, into the native villages in the hills.

Well, power, responsibility, a certain pride in place, were helps to restless blood. “The richest, the most independent, the strongest man in St. Antonia,” the labels had served for Croo Langford. They would serve to steady Geoffrey Langford.

He thought, “It was Geoffrey Carew who kept me in the middle of the road, in the years I might have gone either way. Not the plantation—Geoffrey Carew.”

Geoffrey Carew was two months dead, and he, Croo Langford, was riding, in a moment or two, to Geoffrey Carew’s plantation, Roads End, to make an inventory of his dead friend’s possessions, against the imminent arrival from England of a niece and a nephew who were Carew’s heirs, his sister’s children.

This, almost certainly to be his last contact with the English race—and with a so much more recent vintage than that with which he was familiar—might be, he thought, an entertaining interlude between his old life and complete retirement.

The “children”—he used Geoffrey Carew’s word in referring to them—might just possibly want to live at Roads End permanently—might be to his son what Geoffrey Carew had been to him.

And, quite humbly, the richest, strongest man in St. Antonia thought that he had no right to hope for such singular good fortune for his son.

It was time to go. He looked around the great drawing-room, seeing it now, and not his thoughts. Bare floor of mahogany, furniture of mahogany, and French marquetry, the cherished treasures of all his adventurous, if ill-assorted, European ancestors, stood in somewhat incongruous array. There were the crystal candelabra a French planter, in the days when sugar made millionaires in a season or two, ordered copied from a pair in Versailles. Langford still had the yellowed correspondence concerning them. There was a Queen Anne secretary some British sea captain had carried on all his voyages.

Langford left that room, crossed the patio, where a diverted mountain stream slipped over the tiles and a chained parrakeet screamed in one of the fan palms, walked down the long hallway that led to his room. In the hallway, sunlight from a narrow aperture in the thick stone spilled across the only one of his possessions that he regretted leaving.

This was a painting—a Watteau, the figure of a young girl.

He had the impulse, not for the first time, to order the painting taken down, to carry it with him, but he shook his head; it belonged with Horizons. It had hung in that hallway a hundred and fifty years.

He touched the faded gilt of the frame with long, strong, dark fingers. For he, who had never loved quite whole-heartedly either the wife to whom he had been kind or the son to whom he was doing his duty as he saw it, had loved this picture. He remembered, as if it were a month past or a season past, that afternoon which was forty years gone by, when Geoffrey Carew, walking through the hallway of Horizons for the first time in his life, had stopped, startled, to examine the dim picture in the dim frame. Had gasped and said, “But it’s a Watteau!” and Langford, a strong, slim half-grown boy had said, “What is that?”

Years and years afterward he sent the picture to Geoffrey Carew in London for Geoffrey to have it cleaned. That was in the first year after he had inherited Horizons. When it came back by steamer to Martinique and his own schooner to St. Antonia, he was so eager to see it that he had the wrappings removed on the wharf, and the young girl’s face, dreamy, gay, but somehow wistful, smiled out at him clearly—a sophisticated figure from the great world that he would never see.

He bowed to her gravely. He would leave her to smile down on his son and his son’s wife and, in time, on their children, with that smile, ironic yet consoling, which had seemed to say to him, “Beauty is a dream, here or there, it makes no difference.”

Though sometimes he had wished that Geoffrey Carew had never come to look beneath the dinginess of an old picture which had hung in the hallway of an old plantation, to find the beauty there; had never come to tell a West Indian child of the beauty and excitement of a world that was not for him, today, at last, Langford shrugged his shoulders. If Geoffrey had never come! He might have lived and died, have drunk and gambled and been contented, and yet, that lifelong friendship with Geoffrey was the most golden recollection of his life. He turned from the picture and walked on.

Behind the mahogany doors lay treasures of furnishings and crystal and linen, the accumulated loot of his family over two centuries. Yet he did not bother to open any of the doors to look his last on these possessions. He passed on to the courtyard back of the house where a boy held his stallion and his overseer, Musgrave, waited.

Musgrave said, “All your luggage went by boat this morning. It should be at Roads End now.”

Langford nodded. Luggage imported from England to travel in a square-bottomed Carib boat back and forth, back and forth, ten sea leagues up and down the island between his plantation and Carew’s, through all the years he had spent week-ends with Carew and Carew had spent week-ends with him.

He said to Musgrave, “They will be here immediately, I expect,” meaning his son and his son’s new wife. “Mr. Geoffrey’ll take full charge of everything.”

Musgrave said, “But you will return?”

“I’ll visit them.” (He did not mean to, often.)

And then, because Musgrave had grown up with him and regretted, no doubt, more than any other among his servants the fact that he was leaving, he said, “Ride over to see me sometimes.”

Musgrave said, “I will, sir. Pleasant journey.”

The horse boy let go of the stallion’s head, and Langford rode out, over the cobblestones of the courtyard, where the horse’s hoofs rang sharply.

And so passed the cookhouse, passed the thatched huts where the house servants lived, down the road, passed the old forge and the pasture.

Passed the straight rows of lime trees, the cocoa trees—an older planting, and so in irregular rows—passed the sheepfold down the hillside to the first river. The field hands bareheaded, barefooted, said, “Good day, Massa,” in slow, melodious voices; indifferent to his passing, they would accept his son after him as they had accepted his father before him.

Beyond the river the road turned before it mounted into the jungle; and from the narrow bridge which blew down in each hurricane and was rebuilt in three days afterwards, so that it made no difference, was the last view of Horizons. He looked back. Shining in the sunlight on the hill, it stood—a wide, long, low stone house that had once been a fort, so strongly built it had survived two centuries of Caribbean hurricanes, though its pillared verandas and the huts of the servants behind it were replaced every decade. In front of it the avenue of palm trees leading to the sea and the wharf shone golden green in the sun.

Yes, it was beautiful, the jail in which he had spent his life. He pushed the horse forward into the hot, sweet scent of the jungle, pungent after the morning rain.

Only an hour and a half of easy riding between Horizons and Roads End, and he and Geoffrey had even made the distance in an hour when there was any necessity for haste. There was no necessity for haste today. He rode easily.

Around the bend of the first mountain a deer, startled by the sound of his horse’s hoofs, flashed across the path and was gone in the jungle to great crackling of branches as he passed. Descendant of one of the deer imported by his own grandfather. There were not many of them left. They suffered from the heat, the hurricanes. They were smaller and weaker than their ancestors, and their flesh had very little flavor. Nevertheless, Langford decided he would have one killed for Christmas entertainment of Geoffrey Carew’s niece and nephew, whose arrival from England was imminent.

The heat, where the jungle thickened, was oppressive, although it was mid-December, but he and his horse were used to it. He pressed on. On an impulse, where the road forked, he turned down toward the sea, the longer route.

On this day, on which so many things were ending for him, he recognized, was even amused at, his desire to look at that corner of the Caribbean where so many of them had begun.

Down through trees, ferns and scrub palm and wild banana and pineapple, the trail ran. So thick was the jungle on either side that the sound of the sea came ten minutes before sight of it, and then abruptly there was the cove, white beach, calm blue reef-locked water, the best swimming on the island.

To the left, at the tip of a green promontory, was the ruined fort on the line between Geoffrey’s property and his own. So thickly lianas covered it that, from where Langford was on the curve of the beach, he could see only a glimmer of white wall and a thin spiral of smoke from his caretaker’s fire. He dismounted and tied the stallion in the shade of the palms; turned right. There, hidden in the bush, had been, beyond his memory and his father’s, a ruined stone boathouse. It held now a boat which he supposed his son Geoffrey had not used in years. It had held, long ago, a boat in which he, himself, sailed in this lagoon. A square-bottomed, square-sailed Carib boat, the like of which had fished in these waters centuries and centuries before the conquistadores ever dropped anchor in them.

But he did not touch the boat; instead, he took out his cigarette case of silver, old-fashioned and heavy. Geoffrey Carew had sent it to him from England for his twenty-first birthday, thirty years ago.

He lighted one of the Turkish cigarettes for which he had acquired a taste from Geoffrey, and sat on the warm sand smoking, his long arms crossed. . .

On another sunny afternoon a boy had ridden down that path to that cove and encountered a great adventure there.

That boy, who was Croo Langford, was ten years old, riding on his new, fine horse imported for him from St. Kitts, where they raised the best horses on the islands. He was English, or so his father said indifferently when one day he asked him. His father was a great man. When they went to the capital his father dined with the president in the long, galleried palace. It was more beautiful than his house but not so clean.

Now that he had the new horse he had everything he wanted. He had always had everything he wanted, except it was boring sometimes to study arithmetic with that tutor from the United States. He did not like the tutor, who was a “black.” Not that that was anything against him, except that a black should take orders and not give them; besides, arithmetic, spelling, penmanship were dull. History might be better, but when the tutor started to teach him some history, something about some odd English called Pilgrim Fathers, his father walked lightly as a cat into the long drawing-room where he studied, and said, “No history, please. In the islands it’s too confused.”

That boy, who was Croo Langford, said, “But if I’m English, I should learn English history, should I not?”

The American tutor laughed, and stopped suddenly, watching his father’s face.

Across the span of forty years Langford could remember the expression on that face—mocking, angry, desperate—and his father’s voice was smooth. He said, “I, myself, shall teach you our history.”

But he had not yet, on that sunny day when the boy had ridden to the cove because it was as good a place to ride as any.

The tide he knew would have turned for the ebb, so that he could not go swimming; but he wanted to inspect his boat, for which Jose had made a new sail. This beach was his own; no one intruded on him there, and he had spent hundreds of long, hot afternoons sailing about the lagoon when the tide was right, pretending he was Ponce de Leon or Sir Francis Drake.

But on this particular afternoon there was an intruder. He heard a horse whicker to his horse before he came out from the path. So he tied his horse back along the path and went, walking silently (a trick he’d picked up from the basket boys), to investigate.

There on the beach sat a young man. He seemed to Croo a completely golden young man. His skin was golden tan, his hair was bright as the Spanish doubloons Croo carried because he liked their goldenness, though his father told him they were just souvenirs and had not been used for real money these three hundred years.

Croo wriggled through the bushes to get a closer look at the man. He was wearing a strange, short-trousered costume like nothing Croo had ever seen before, because he had never seen a bathing suit. Very curious, but very shy, he stared at the man a long time until he rose to go into the water.

He swam out with a long, strong stroke and Croo did not know what to do. Because there was a secret about that quiet lagoon.

On a rising tide or for the half hour the tide was at the flood there was no safer place to swim. The lagoon was clear and deep in the center, so that far down where the water looked green you could see the sand and purple fishes flashing across it. Farther out the water grew shallow. On the inner shelf of the reef it was only as high as a man’s waist at high tide, so that you could stand on the smooth lava rock, protected by a shelf of rocks in front of you, and look out at the jagged rocks beyond, with the surf pounding over them forever, and see in the eddies of the surf the whip of barracuda. Sometimes beyond the surf great sharks went sailing by. They never came in through the reefs. There was only one break, and that a narrow break just to the right of the shelf of rock on which Langford had stood so often.

But when the tide turned, as the ebb quickened, the water sucked through that break so fast that no man could stand on the reef. No boat could sail safely within fifty feet. Sometimes, for fun, Langford had sailed coconuts out through the break just as the tide started to turn. When the rip caught them they went faster and faster, pounding across the outer rocks and then slid out to sea. The fishermen said the water beyond was a half-mile deep.

On the beach the boy watched the man swimming and was too shy to call to him, but in his anxiety went to the water’s edge. For a while the man swam safely up and down, twenty feet out; that was not dangerous—but then suddenly he turned and started straight out the hundred yards to the reef. Langford stood on the beach and screamed at him, “Come back, come back!”

But whether or not the man heard, the child could not tell. His golden head grew smaller in the distance. The child stripped off his riding boots, then hesitated. He could not swim as fast as the man and he knew that water too well to risk swimming far. But he must do something. Sir Francis Drake, his hero for the moment, would have done something.

He ran back along the jungle path to where his horse was tied, slipped his riding boots in the saddlebag, and started him for home. If the horse went straight he would pass some fishermen’s hut in less than ten minutes. They would come to seek him when they saw the horse with an empty saddle.

He ran back to the beach to his boat. The whole process could not have taken him more than a minute. He could see the man’s golden head, halfway to the reef now. He dragged the boat down across the sand and set the sail. He steered with a paddle straight for the reef ahead of him. The first of the tide had caught the swimmer, but he did not yet realize it.

He told himself that what he planned to do was not impossible. There was a legend, indeed, that it had been done before by a Carib chieftain. But his heart was a lump in his throat. Then, watching what happened ahead of him for a breathless minute, he forgot himself.

The swimmer realized suddenly the pull of that water.

Langford saw him try to turn. He knew that no human being could swim back against that rushing water. He called to him, said, “Hold to the rock at the left!”

Then it was all a confusion of wild, rushing water. Croo heard himself shouting, “The pointed rock at the left—hold on to it,” and his head cleared, and he was calm for the minute that he needed to be calm.

The break in the reef was no more than a yard wide. If he flung his boat broadside against it, it would hold for a time—for how long a time before the water broke it in two and pulled the pieces through into the swirling water, the black rocks, and the sea beyond, he could not tell.

The man, ten yards ahead of him now, found a second’s foothold on the shelf of rock, clutched at the pointed rock breast-high beyond him—and held on.

Croo pulled the sail around; a last puff of wind caught it. There was a crack; the boat was hard against the rocks.

The man with golden hair said above that rushing water, “Oh, well done!”

The child said, “She can’t hold more than half an hour.”

He stepped carefully over the thwarts, said, “Don’t let go of that rock,” and then slipped himself over the stern into the water, finding foothold on the shelf no more than a yard from the stranger. The water came up to his shoulders.

Beyond the reef the noise of the water was so great it made him feel sick. But where he stood, with his shoulders supported against the boat’s stern, though the suck was terrific, though he could never have stood without that support, he could manage to stand and breathe. Two of the ribs of his boat were stove in. She was filling with water, but she would hold until the flow broke her.

The man was saying in a calm voice, “This rock cuts my arm. Do you suppose I could manage to get over where you are?”

Croo said, “No. If we both lean against the boat, she’ll break up faster.”

The man said, “Quite right.”

But Croo had nothing to say to him now at all. He had begun to think of how fragrant his mother was when she kissed him; of how he would never see that long, galleried palace at the capital and the president’s beautiful uniforms any more.

Across the swish of water the man spoke to him. He said, “What happens next?”

The boy answered him, “We die in a little while.”

To that the man seemed to find no answer immediately. Then he shouted, “Did you know about this?”

Croo Langford wished he wouldn’t talk. It interrupted thoughts of the band playing in the plaza when the soldiers marched across it. The man was saying something, the noise of water in Croo’s ears was so great that he could not hear at first. The man repeated it: “Why did you come?”

Across that little space black eyes stared at blue eyes. Croo hunted for an answer. He did not know. It had seemed the thing to do, to do what one could. He said, then, “It seemed the thing to do.” And the golden-haired man flung back his head and laughed in the face of death.

He said, “How British!”

Croo said impatiently, “Of course, I’m English.”

The boat was settling a little, the water was up to his chin now. He could not see the shore. His ears were ringing.

The man said, “Gad, I can’t hold on much longer.”

The child, who could not hold on at all except that the boat held him, said suddenly, “What does it matter?”

Something happened then. The man shifted his position, slid along the rock, put his arm around the child’s shoulders, held him up a little. That was a comfort.

The man said, “Steady!”

Then there was a confusion of shouts and noise of water, of which Croo remembered nothing at all, except once when he opened his eyes on Jose’s face almost white with fright.

When he next took any interest in his surroundings he was on shore, wrapped in a blanket; his father was there and at least a dozen of the fishermen. He was holding his father’s hand and he felt very sick. It was long afterward before he was interested in hearing what had happened.

When the riderless horse reached the fishing village, Jose, who was there taking his pick of the day’s catch, rode posthaste to the beach. Summoned every man in the village. They carried two boats through the woods over the promontory, then lashed the boats together. A dozen men went with ropes from the boats and pulled him and the stranger off.

He was riding, still blanket-wrapped, in front of his father through the dark woods. The young man with golden hair, who seemed to be able to ride his own horse, pushed alongside when the path widened.

He said, “Sitting up and taking notice now? That’s a good child.”

His father said, “This is Geoffrey Carew.”

Croo Langford went to sleep then and did not wake even when his mother put him to bed. But next morning, when old Angelo brought him coffee, he said:

“Mr. Croo, you are a hero.”

Croo felt very well. He dressed and went out on the wide veranda. And there was Geoffrey Carew talking to his father.

Geoffrey rose, bowed gravely, and said, “You saved my life, you know.”

And the child could find nothing to say except, “It is nothing.”

His father said, “Mr. Carew tore his shoulder badly, my son. He will remain with us ten days or so until it is better.”

Croo said, “Then I can show him the stables and the sheepfold.” And they were walking out together in the sunlight, with Croo’s father courteous—but was he a little mocking?—beside them.

“The cemetery is below, down the palm avenue,” his father was saying. “We’ll go there first if you like.”

Evidently Croo had interrupted a conversation. He could not understand why anyone wanted to visit a cemetery when there were so many more exciting things to see on the plantation.

Geoffrey Carew, regarding the child’s puzzled face, explained: “I was telling your father I came over here looking for a grave. I have a couple of ancestors supposed to be buried somewhere on this side of the island—I took the steamer up from Barbadoes, spent a day in the capital, then got a horse and rode over here alone.”

His father said, “Mr. Carew has been ill and took a trip to the island for his health. He thought it would be interesting to see the graves of two of his ancestors who were”—his father’s slow voice was definitely mocking now—“adventurers.”

Croo said, “But why should Mr. Carew’s ancestors be buried in our cemetery?”

His father said, “It happened so, Croo.”

Over Geoffrey Carew’s handsome face slid a surprised expression. He said, “What do you call the boy, Mr. Langford?”

His father said shortly, “ ‘Croo.’ It’s a contraction of ‘Carew,’ of course.”

Geoffrey Carew said, “But then you are in some sort my cousin.”

His father’s voice was silky: “In some sort, if you choose, Mr. Carew.”

Geoffrey turned to Croo. “An ancestor of mine came out from England along before 1700 with a friend whose name I’ve forgotten. They owned plantations here, neighboring plantations. Neither of them ever went home.”

Croo’s father said, as if he were talking to himself, “His friend’s name was John Langford, but this is the Carew plantation. The Langford plantation is ten leagues over the mountain. I’ll show you some day when you are well enough to ride that far, if it would interest you. It’s called Roads End; no one lives there now. We own it.”

Croo looked from one man to the other. The expressions on their faces did not seem to match the things they said, at all. Then Geoffrey stooped over a grave, tried to read the lettering on the stone.

His father said, “The tropical rains washed the letters smooth after a while, but I have the records. He died in 1722; that is his wife’s grave beside him. She was Carolyn de Chardon; French, of course.”

Geoffrey said, “Quite—how interesting.”

Croo stared at the stone and said, “Look, you can see ‘G-E-O’ ”—there was a letter or two missing, then a “Y.” He said, “Why, his name was ‘Geoffrey Carew.’ ”

His father said, “Yes, indeed.”

And in the branches of a mahogany tree an oriole sang, tremblingly, gloriously.

Geoffrey Carew stayed a fortnight. Fourteen days forever memorable to a boy to whom forever one day had been like another. The days were, for a young man fresh from Oxford, a fantastic and humorous episode. They were, for the child, a widening of life. Croo learned history finally, the history of the golden Victorian era now drifting to its end. He heard about Oxford “rags,” about the ambitions of Geoffrey for a parliamentary career.

One day—they were sitting after swimming on the beach where they had met, but the tide was rising now—Croo, who was losing his shyness, said, “I shall get my father to send me to Oxford, too, and then I shall go to Parliament myself, and you and I shall know each other always.”

Across Geoffrey’s lean, handsome face came a look that had in it more of pity than amusement. He said, “Perhaps, who can tell?” and began to talk to Croo of a walking trip he had taken in Sussex.

Croo did not dine usually with his father and his father’s guest. Croo and his mother had supper earlier; then he went to bed and his mother sang lullabies to him.

One night Croo said to his mother, “You and father like Geoffrey, don’t you?” for he was aware of an attitude in them that was curious. They seemed always courteous, yet he had caught strange glances between them.

His mother said, “Of course; he is a very pleasant young man.”

And the child said, “He is our cousin.”

Then his mother said presently, “Croo, my son, I wish you had never heard that.”

On the next evening he was let stay up for dinner in honor of his eleventh birthday. Geoffrey talked through dinner of the conquistadores, the buccaneers, the French and British and Spanish exiles who had come to the Indies. He said to Croo, “It’s an adventurous inheritance you have,” but Croo’s father interrupted suddenly:

“The adventure ended long before our time, Mr. Carew,” and said, almost sharply, “Go, child, get your mother and ask her to have a glass of wine with us.”

Croo went in search of his mother, but she was out on the plantation seeing to the wife of one of the overseers, who was ill. He came back to tell his father that. And, standing in the doorway of the long drawing-room, caught the tail end of a conversation, without any wish to eavesdrop. His father was striding up and down the room saying, “I have learned my place. In such rare dealings as I have had with the British planters on the English islands, I have been taught often enough to keep my place. Surely, we are your cousins, Mr. Carew, if you care to be so polite. We are descendants of the Carews, the Langfords, a Spanish grandee, a French marquis, a couple of pirates for good measure, the daughter of a Carib chieftain, and”—his voice was heavy—“certain unremembered African slaves. We are the descendants of those empire builders who never came home to see the Houses of Parliament, to walk again in London or in Paris or in Barcelona streets.”

He paused, but the boy standing in the doorway did not dare interrupt because of the agony in his father’s voice.

“For you, Mr. Carew, this adventure, this visit with us, will be something amusing to tell your young English friends when you go back to that full world with which neither I nor my son can ever have anything to do. I never wanted him to know the difference. He will live to be a power on this island, and this island is the only place in the world for him.

“Oh—” The man flung back his head and laughed, and the candlelight made black shadows across the olive skin of his throat. “I shall take him sailing north to St. Thomas, south to Trinidad; he’ll see the Danish sailors and walk through Queen’s Park watching the English soldiers parade some day, and come back to know his place. Once or twice before he’s grown my agent in New York will come down for a conference. Once in ten years or so my London agent will send out a clerk. So much and no more is necessary for him to touch of the world where you live. But, I beg you, do not fill his head with dreams. He will suffer too much when he wakes and finds them dreams.”

Geoffrey’s polite young English voice sounded disturbed. He said, “I am dreadfully sorry, sir; I’m afraid I’ve been tactless with the child.”

His father made a sound in his throat which was almost like a groan. So startling it was from a man who never showed much emotion that Croo went to make long conversation with Jose about a fishing expedition, aware in the back of his mind that he had heard something dreadful but not clear as to wherein the dreadfulness lay.

Next day the sense of disturbance was still with him and he felt he must know. He rode that day with Geoffrey far up into the hills to the limits of his father’s land.

He said, “The path ends here. No one can cross the middle of the island without half a dozen men with machetes to cut through the jungle. But there is a waterfall we can see if we tie the horses, and you can go just a little way on foot through the bush. You can hear the waterfall now. Listen!”

Through the stillness of the jungle they could hear the roar of falling water, a sound indescribably melancholy.

Geoffrey said, “It’s beautiful beyond this world.”

The child’s voice echoed his with a note of anxiety clear in it: “Beyond this world. But I shall see the world, too, shall see the British Empire and go be a member of Parliament.”

The question in his voice was plain, and Geoffrey answered it. He said, “You heard your father and me talking last night, didn’t you? I saw you standing in the doorway just before you went away.”

Croo nodded. “I heard but I did not quite understand.”

To Geoffrey the task of making Croo understand seemed too much.

Then the child did a startling thing. He put his hand, long-fingered, strong, against the much larger, long-fingered, strong hand of his friend.

Geoffrey said, “Our hands are very like, aren’t they? I noticed that before.”

Croo said, “Mine is a little darker, not very much darker.”

And Geoffrey said, “No,” drew a long breath, and said, “Croo, did you ever hear of a man called Julius Cæsar?”

Croo nodded. “My father has not had me study modern history yet, but he has read to me stories about Rome. Cæsar conquered Britain, didn’t he?”

Geoffrey said, “A good bit of the world besides.”

But the child interrupted and said, “There’s no country so important as Britain, that’s why it’s so important to be an Englishman like you—and me.”

Geoffrey began to talk hastily and desperately:

“I’m going to tell you a story about Julius Cæsar when he conquered Spain. Always remember this story, Croo, when you think about me. I mean, I have told you a lot of nonsense about the things we do in England—but there’s just as much fun to be had here.”

Croo listened and said nothing.

Geoffrey began again: “When Cæsar was camped one night in a little village in Spain, he met the chief of that place, a man who thought well of Cæsar, as you have been kind enough to think well of me. Cæsar told him stories of Rome, which he was not likely to see—I mean as you aren’t very likely to see London.” Geoffrey hurried over that.

“Then the chief, because he admired Cæsar, wanted to leave the village of which he was head, leave his family and everything he was used to, and follow Cæsar to Rome. It was very silly of him, wasn’t it?”

Croo said, “I don’t think it was silly of him.”

Geoffrey said, firmly, as if he were trying to make himself believe it, “Well, when you’re older you will think it was silly. Cæsar was a wise man, and Cæsar knew how big Rome was, how lonely and how difficult it was to get along there for a man who didn’t have many friends or relatives.”

Croo said, but rather hopelessly, “But I should have you.”

Geoffrey said, but obviously not to Croo—to the waterfall and the precipice and the intense blue of the sky—“Good heavens, what have I done?” He went on talking:

“Cæsar said to the Iberian chieftain, ‘I would rather be first man in a little Iberian village than second man in Rome.’ ” Geoffrey’s voice was very grave: “I tell you, Croo, I would rather be a king in Caribbea, as you may be to all intents and purposes, than be a failure in London.”

Croo said, “A king in Caribbea—it sounds more than it is. This is not a very big island, although I used to think it was, before you came and I learned better.”

Geoffrey said, “It’s big enough. You can make it do. Let’s ride home.” And they rode home silently.

After that day Geoffrey was as kind as ever, but seemed to avoid being alone with Croo. Very soon the morning came on which he was to ride back to the capital. Croo’s father permitted Croo to ride with them to the town, and that trip, which had always been the most exciting in Croo’s life, seemed today to be a dreadfully stupid journey. They started at dawn and reached the capital at noonday.

They went down to the wharf, where a schooner was sailing to Barbadoes. Croo’s father had to see his factor about a shipment going on the schooner; so Croo and Geoffrey were left alone for five minutes in the blazing sunlight on the dock, watching the negroes finish loading.

The child, for whom words were never easy, knew that he must find them now, or never find them. He seized Geoffrey’s arm. The man looked very nearly as unhappy as himself. Words tumbled from Croo, one after another:

“Do not forget me. Write to me sometimes. If I can never go to Oxford or to Parliament, you are my cousin—hearing about them from you will be almost like seeing them. I never had a friend before. Do not forget me.”

The man spoke quickly, seriously: “How could I forget you? Haven’t you saved my life? Some day I’ll come back to see you.”

He did not think he would ever come back, since he thought life was too short for all the places he wanted to see and for there to be time to repeat any adventure; but in that second, regarding that boy’s dark, beautiful face, he meant to try to come.

Croo’s father, walking down the dock, regarding the two standing there, was sharply aware of something that he had noticed before and refused to admit to himself; that was that the tall boy and the man standing there looked as alike as brothers. The shape of their heads, the way they carried their shoulders, their eyes, their chins. Only, there was one difference. They both stood in sunlight, but it looked as if the sun shone full on Geoffrey Carew and a dark shadow lay over the boy.

He drew near them, said, “They’re casting off, Mr. Carew; you’d better go.”

With a great clatter, the sails were rising. The boy clung to the man; his father laid a hand on his shoulder, and then Croo let go of Geoffrey’s arm. The two men shook hands.

Geoffrey looked at Croo, said very seriously, “I’ll write every month.” The boy’s eyes, long-lashed, dark, liquid, stared at him. Geoffrey put a hand lightly on the boy’s head.

Croo’s father said, “We must go now, Croo. I want to get home before dark.”

Croo said, “Yes,” and then to Geoffrey, “I shall wait always in the hope of your returning.”

Geoffrey said, “I shall come,” for there was nothing else to say.

Then his father took Croo’s hand as if he were a little boy and not almost grown to be a man, and they left the dock, walking with rapid steps.

At the head of the street, where the horses were, Croo turned for one last look at that golden figure. The ship was moving out slowly. Croo could not see Geoffrey aboard at all.

He began to sob wildly, uncontrollably. His father said only, “Mount, Croo.”

They rode out through the town, out to the hills. Croo’s sobs grew quieter. At the mountain’s top they could see, looking quite far away now, the sails of the vessel bound for Barbadoes.

Croo’s father spoke then: “Croo, I could send you to France or to South America—there’s a not bad school in Venezuela. I’ve been to all those places.”

Croo said, “You never told me.”

“No, because I did not plan to send you. When one comes back one is ever less content.”

Croo said, “Could you send me to England, to Oxford?”

Has father laughed but not unkindly. “No use, Croo. Face it. You would not belong anywhere afterward.”

Croo drew a long breath, and childhood dropped away from him there on the hillside.

He said, and his voice was as indifferent as his father’s, “What then?”

His father said, “Tomorrow I’ll begin to explain the management of the plantation to you.”

Croo turned on his horse. It was growing too dark to see his father’s face clearly. He said, “Will he come back?”

His father said, “I wonder!” and, as if he were talking to himself, “He drinks much too much, although he drinks well.”

But Croo did not understand the relevance of that.

“Push on,” Croo’s father said; “I want a drink myself. I’ll give you a drink, too, of the Rosalie. You have never tasted our famous rum, have you?”

And they rode on silently until, over the last hilltop, they could see the charcoal fires glowing in the quarters of the plantation hands. . .

The most surprising thing to Croo’s father was the regularity with which letters and books, etchings, hunting prints, came to Croo from England through months and years. He could not know that it sometimes surprised Geoffrey Carew himself—dancing, gambling his way through London season after London season, winning simultaneously a reputation as one of the most promising of the private secretaries of the Cabinet and a reputation as a man-about-town which was somewhat more exotic—how faithful he was in remembering that boy who lived beyond the farthest-flung limits of the Empire.

Sometimes it even annoyed him in the heat of a London ballroom, in the excitement of a flirtation, to remember that but for that child who was, in some sort, his kin, he would not be here to stir to the music and the warmth of women’s perfume.

Afraid of only two things, of which the first was failure and the second death, he dreamed sometimes, when he was tired, of the pull of that warm blue water, of the sound of an absurd, antiquated boat breaking up slowly against black rocks. Then, next day, he would buy for Croo an etching or a book that he wanted himself.

Croo was thirteen and sixteen and eighteen. A strong, quiet youth who puzzled his father sometimes in his complete immunity from temptation either by the somewhat tawdry gayeties of the capital or the simpler amusements that might be found at the dances in the hills.

Croo worked hard on the plantation, showed signs of being a shrewder planter than his father, but, for the rest, seemed to live his life inside the circumference of his very well-shaped head.

Whether that was wise or unwise his father could not tell; and so, for his own diversion, got himself involved in a revolution that lasted from a Saturday to Monday. On his way home from it he was shot in the back by an overseer he had discharged. He lingered a day or two in the great master’s bedroom of Horizons, a cool, ironic, tired yellow figure that looked a little shriveled on his great mahogany four-poster bed. His wife sat weeping and Croo sat quiet beside him.

Toward the end there seemed to be something he wanted to say to Croo.

He was not in much pain and his voice was tranquil: “And so, my son, you’ve become first man in the little Iberian village.”

Across Croo’s controlled face ran a little ripple of surprise. His father smiled.

“Geoffrey Carew told me he told you that story. I knew it long before—a king in Caribbea. There are worse destinies, Croo.”

Croo nodded. His father went on:

“Croo, life will come back to us, oil or metal—there’s gold on the slopes of Cap Mulatti that may be worth something some day; gold or sugar or rum. Some day, perhaps not in your life, as it was not in my life, we shall be important again—shall have our place in the sun—and we’ve always had too much sun.” He chuckled a little. “Marry—and wait. If time passes here infinitely slowly, it passes serenely.”

So Croo, more moved than he had been in years, for he had never understood so plainly his father’s awareness of the narrow limit in which his life moved, said, “I’ll carry on Horizons; I’ll be content.”

“Content? For our blood there’s no contentment this side of the hour that I have reached. I shall go with the sunset. The Negroes, to whose beliefs we are so carefully superior, know that Ashanti men die when the sun dies. English, French, Spanish, and just a dash of black Ashanti, you and I, Croo; bon voyage, my son.”

Thus Croo Langford, in his twenty-first year—Geoffrey Carew being then thirty and on his way back to England from the Boer War—came into his inheritance.

For Geoffrey, life speeded up. A new king, a new century, Victorianism was out and individualism was in—he had lost money during the war years and he felt, besides, that he had wasted time. To recoup the money, but, more than that, to give him the sense of being at once in the midst of things, he involved himself simultaneously with a notorious promoter and with the notorious daughter of a marquis. He got his seat in Parliament at a by-election in 1903—and resigned it three months later as a result of the most unpleasant scandal of the year; and so was finished at one time with his ambitions, his hopes, and the love of his life.

His party whip spoke to him briefly and compassionately: “We can give you a provincial judgeship in India, South Africa even, or the British Windward Islands.”

In the party leader’s quiet office Geoffrey flung back a head not quite so golden, forced laughter through lips less handsome than they used to be, and said, “Let it be the British Windward Islands, by all means. I have cousins in the West Indies.”

And so, going home to his flat, he told his man to pack hurriedly, and, making no good-byes, took the first steamer to Barbadoes, almost as hurriedly as that other Geoffrey Carew was reputed to have left England by sailing ship two hundred years gone by. . .

It was raining; one of those storms at the tail end of the hurricane season that made Croo restless. His mother, grown very old since his father’s death, sat in the drawing-room pouring tea for him—a British habit to which he had become devoted. She talked of the Vasquez family on the island of St. Anne’s. Croo had some trading connections with the family and they had a daughter whom his mother wanted him to marry. He agreed with her that it might be a wise thing to do. But marriage set such an irrevocable seal on the kind of life that he would live until he died, that his instinct was to postpone it.

There was some noise of an arrival, then, in the rear court. The sound of a man’s laughter; the sound of familiar laughter which brought Croo to his feet before Jose’s hurrying footsteps came down the corridor. Before Jose spoke, at his heels there stood in the doorway Geoffrey Carew.

He was very drunk. Croo saw that in the first second. Then he saw that the golden head was less golden, that the coin-sharp features were blurred. But Geoffrey was speaking:

“My dear cousin, you see I have returned.”

He stood swaying in the doorway; laughed and said, “Man, do you think you are seeing a ghost? Have you no welcome for me?”

Croo said, “Geoffrey, Geoffrey!” in a voice as surprised as a child’s.

“I’ve come to buy Roads End from you if you will sell it, Croo. I’ve left England for England’s good, like our common ancestors on the hillside.”

Such pain, such recklessness, such bitter gayety was in that golden voice, that Croo guessed in that moment almost as much as he was to learn through the years.

He said, “Won’t you have tea, Geoffrey?” and turned to his mother, but she had left the room.

Geoffrey roared with laughter. “ ‘Won’t you have tea, Geoffrey?’ ” he mocked. “Oh, my cousin, more British than myself, no intrusive questions, no surprise. I turn up at the world’s end after fifteen years and I might have come in from a ride up the hillside. Good form, Croo. A sense of what’s done and what isn’t; that’s what made the Empire—and ruined men like me, thank you. I won’t have tea. Your father used to have a superb rum, I believe it was called Rosalie.”

Croo said to Jose, “Take the tea things away and bring a bottle of the Rosalie.”

Geoffrey sat down then, his head in his hands, said, “Don’t you want to hear the news from England?”

Croo said, “It looks as if there was to be a general election, doesn’t it?”

Geoffrey lifted a haggard face and looked at him. “Be human, thou wooden image of myself. I never forgot you, Croo, did I? Curious that I could never manage to forget you in my most fantastic adventures. Remember, Croo, I confided to you my great secret—that I was going to end a Parliamentary career in the Prime Minister’s seat?”

Jose brought the rum, and Carew, looking at him, said, “He’s just the same. Everything here is just the same.”

Croo said, “Geoffrey, my cousin, so are you.”

Geoffrey grinned at him. “I am finished,” he said.

Croo said, “What does that mean? Out here we are all finished or else we never began.”

Geoffrey went on talking as if he had not heard that: “I involved myself simultaneously with a lovely and expensive lady and an ugly and expensive promoter. It went, in the end, to the point where I had nothing to sell to go on with but the very private information of my chief’s department—they have given me a judgeship on the island of St. Georges. I suppose they can trust me to decide who stole poultry from whom.”

Croo said, “Speaking of poultry, I’ve imported peafowl recently. They amuse my mother and they are very decorative on the terraces. They put a finish on the place.”

Geoffrey said, “You’ve read that in some book, I think—that peacocks put a finish on a place.”

For the first time in that meeting which seemed to him so incredible, Croo smiled. He said, “I shouldn’t wonder. Most of my ideas are out of books and letters you sent me.”

“I was full of advices as to how to live the full life, was I not?”

Croo said, “You’ve been very helpful.”

Geoffrey stared at him. “If you mock me,” he said, “I simply cannot bear it.”

“But I was not,” Croo said.

Geoffrey nodded. “No, you weren’t, but don’t be so humble, either. Why did you pull me off that reef, so long ago?”

Croo said, “I have never quite known.”

“Such a mistake.” Geoffrey’s voice changed. “I’ll keep my judgeship in St. Georges five years or ten, I suppose, but I want to buy Roads End for when that’s over. . . Croo, why don’t you show some proper excitement? I have come back, I’m going to be here on these islands, a neighbor of yours, riding with you, dining with you, fishing with you, as long as we both shall live, God pity you!”

He poured himself a half-tumbler of the rum, gulped it down, and suddenly slouched asleep in the long chair. Croo stared at him sleeping. Something of the glow of his youth came back to that long figure.

It was growing dark outside. Croo picked up Geoffrey, carried him with some difficulty, for the man weighed as much as he did, to the long couch, made him comfortable there. Then Croo sat confronting that figure which had for fifteen years epitomized all his dreams. He sat there for two hours. It had stopped raining and the stars were thick outside the windows when Geoffrey stirred. He sat up. He was quite sober now. He said, “Sorry for turning up in such a state.”

Croo said, “That’s quite all right.”

Geoffrey said, “Where’s the Watteau? It cleaned up beautifully. I saw it before they shipped it back to you. Oh, that doesn’t hang here; that hangs in the hall, I remember.” He walked up and down, stretched himself, touched with a light finger the frame of the old mirror, regarded himself in it, said, “Lord, I look like a tramp. That mirror is Louis Quatorze.”

Croo said hesitantly, “Would you like to bathe before we dine? And I can lend you riding togs. We are something of a size.”

Geoffrey laughed then a laugh not quite so bitter. He said, “About the same size. It’s uncanny, and you know it. Come, stand beside me, Croo, and face it.”

Obligingly Croo went and stood beside Geoffrey at the mirror. There they stood, with not an inch of difference in height or width of shoulders or length of arm.

Geoffrey spoke softly, “Same forehead, same chin, eyes set the same way, same ears—”

Croo said, “Blond hair—black hair; blue eyes—black eyes; white skin—coffee-colored skin.”

Geoffrey said, flippantly, “Never mind, I’ll soon tan. That Geoffrey Carew you’ve got in the graveyard down there must have had very dominant bones.”

Croo said, “I found his portrait.”

Geoffrey said, “Where is it? I want to see it.”

Croo could be flippant then, too. “It’s in bad condition. Needs cleaning. But I never sent it to be cleaned. He’ll come out blond when he’s cleaned. He looks pretty dark now. Let’s go change for dinner.”

Geoffrey said, “We ought to dig up his skeleton, you know, and let it be present at all the feasts we’re going to share.”

Croo said, “Geoffrey, you are too morbid.”

Geoffrey’s voice was light, taking the edge off his speech. “What a lot of fine words I’ve taught a simple native.” But he put an arm through Croo’s and they went out to dine.

Croo went to make some explanation to his mother, but for once that amiable woman would not listen to him. She was in her room, where she had had a tray sent in, when he knocked.

She said, “Do not tell me; I know. He was so drunk he told the groom who rode with him from town that he was coming to see his cousin, to buy Roads End and live here forever. Croo, he will make you forever unhappy. He will keep you from being like other men. He is a curse laid on you.”

There were tears in her eyes, but Croo did not notice them and, for the first time in his life, spoke to her sharply:

“Don’t say ‘a curse laid on me.’ That’s the way the hands talk.”

She faced him, breathing hard. She said, “And what of that? You have cousins as near as he among the hands, too. I tell you if I were just a little less white than I am, if I could believe that a voodoo doctor’s charms could set you free from that man’s influence, I would go to a voodoo doctor.”

Then she sobbed: “Oh, Croo my son, your wife, when you have one, will never content you. Your children will never be a pride to you unless you give up that man and every notion he has brought you. I understand—I am only a stupid old woman, but I understand. Marry the Vasquez girl. Turn your back on what you cannot ever have.”

He said, “I’ll marry the Vasquez girl if it pleases you. What difference will it make?”

She looked at him hopelessly. “None, no difference. It was settled for you when you were ten years old. . .”

He married the Vasquez girl, though she was then twenty-two, an advanced age of spinsterhood in the islands. He married her in the seventh and last year of Geoffrey Carew’s judgeship, two months before Geoffrey resigned by request.

Croo was so occupied with the final putting in order of Roads End for Geoffrey’s permanent residence there that he had almost no time to put Horizons in order for his bride. He left all that to his mother.

He sailed to the Island of St. Anne’s for his marriage with emotions that he recognized were curiously mixed. It would be pleasant to have young laughter at Horizons. And he terribly wanted a son. He wanted, also—and this startled him—a certain buffer between himself and Geoffrey Carew, now that Geoffrey was to live permanently only a few leagues from him.

In the seven years since that afternoon when Geoffrey had staggered into Horizons certain things had crystallized in their relationship. They had spent days, weeks, months, together when Geoffrey’s official duties permitted. And always the worship that that boy Croo had had for that man Geoffrey remained, but changed now.

Geoffrey had shown Croo the width of the world, even if it was a world in which Croo had no place. Croo was aware, whenever he read a modern book with appreciation or with pleasure, that it was Geoffrey who had given him the capacity to understand it. Whatever the life of his mind outside the narrow absorptions of a West Indian planter, it was Geoffrey who had colored that mind. As a companion, Geoffrey was beyond any comparison that Croo could make, and yet, on that first afternoon of his return, Croo sensed the problem that later became so plain.

Croo had taught himself to live among the echoes, to be interested in all the actors on a stage on which he could not play. But Geoffrey had meant to be starred on that stage; could never learn to be content among the audience.

Sometimes Geoffrey drank rum and grew sullen, called Croo “My dear black cousin,” probed with skillful tongue for details of those whom he called “the African side of your family, my dear friend.”

The first time this happened, Croo felt slow, murderous rage creeping over him. He left Geoffrey, ordered his schooner off, and went visiting to St. Anne’s, to come back engaged. Yet when he came back, when Geoffrey’s white dissipated face looked at him reproachfully, when Geoffrey slipped an arm through his and said, “I’m a shocking cad when I’m drunk, but you shouldn’t take it seriously. We have no one but each other; we are fools to quarrel,” Croo’s heart went out to him. . .

He was married, took his bride for a trip in his schooner among the islands, gave her the string of matched pearls which represented the ultimate of her ambitions, and brought her home. She was as much a part of Horizons as his mother; indeed, sometimes he confused their two voices, by the time Geoffrey sailed in from St. Georges for the last time.

He rode over to Roads End then, bringing for Geoffrey the portrait of the original Geoffrey Carew, which he had sent to New York to be cleaned, after all. They hung it in the hall at Roads End and Croo stayed with his friend four days. On the fifth Croo remembered he had a wife, and went home to her with some feeling of remorse. But she was amiable. He listened to her colorless questions as to whether he had had a pleasant trip and when he planned to bring his friend to dine, and understood that she would never be enough trouble to him to hold him at all. She would not make undue inquiries as to what he did with his time when he was not with her, because she was trained in the out-dated Continental mode, to take it for granted that men had a life apart from women.

So his marriage made very little difference, except that when he and Geoffrey had one of their occasional dreadful quarrels, it was pleasant to come home to a gentle-voiced young girl whom he began to think of more and more as a child, even when she had a child of her own.

Geoffrey rode over to Horizons on the night after Croo’s son was born. One of the maids brought the child out for him to see. He looked at it a moment in silence, and Croo, watching him, reading his thoughts, waiting his sharp comments, wondered for the first time in his life whether he more loved or hated this dissipated man whose eyes stayed as shining blue as in his golden youth, when Croo saw them in water that had rushed by twenty years ago.

But for once there was nothing derisive in Geoffrey’s face. He smiled a smile that had got twisted over the years. He said, “Shall we have some Rosalie to celebrate the young man’s arrival? I had a letter from England today telling me that my sister had a son two months ago, so you become a father and I become an uncle, and the world goes on.”

When the maid took the child away and they sat in silence, Geoffrey said, “I’m sorry, old man, better luck next time, perhaps.” And Croo said, “Why chance it? There won’t be a next time.”

And that brief conversation was the only reference they ever made to each other to the fact that Croo’s son was half a dozen warm shades darker than either his mother or his father. After that, it was obvious that Geoffrey tried not to taunt Croo again about mixed blood. . .

Time went by, slow-paced as the music the natives played for the danzon. There was a revolution in the capital, in which Croo managed to persuade Geoffrey to take no part. Twice from New York, over a decade, Croo’s agent came to visit, bringing a wife who talked about “I always make a point of being democratic.”

Once in a decade Croo’s London agent sent his principal clerk, who talked patronizingly to Geoffrey about politics. Twice an explorer and his wife, interested in the rare botanical and zoölogical specimens the island offered, came to stay with Croo. Always Croo had Geoffrey stay at Horizons, and they played at formal entertaining for these visitors from cities that Geoffrey said were beginning to seem as remote as Mars.

More often than not Geoffrey seemed to enjoy these interludes, although afterwards he was usually more morose; still, in spite of that, Croo asked him as a house guest the next time. Because, for Geoffrey, there never came any visitors at all, and no correspondence except infrequent letters from the sister who had a son and had had, since then, a daughter.

There was a time in which Geoffrey stopped reading newspapers. There was a time when the World War began, when he read them again incessantly, when Croo, riding over to dine with him in the cool of the evening, would find him cursing, even weeping, over some name in a casualty list that was two months old.

There was the year when Geoffrey had fever and talked deliriously through the hot, breathless days and still nights, in a gay voice Croo had almost forgotten. Recovered from that fever, Geoffrey executed a will and, consulting Croo about it, said, “Do you want me to leave Roads End to you? It’s yours, really; you sold it to me for a song.”

Croo shook his head. “I have only one son, and Horizons is enough for him. You want to leave it to your nephew, don’t you?”

In that gesture which was habitual with him, Geoffrey flung back his head, almost all gray now, and laughed. “I’m absurd, I know,” he said, “but sometimes I think that if anything went wrong with the boy, this place might be a refuge for him, as it has been for me. Or for his sister. From everything I read, women are as likely to need escapes as men nowadays. It’s a beautiful place, really, though you, more than the place, have been my refuge. No man could be a better friend to a man than you have been to me, Croo.”

It was the only time he had ever said that. He went on:

“Then there’s a lot to do, really; hunting—the deer aren’t so good, but the jungle trails are so bad it makes it sporting—and sailing those beastly Carib boats. I’ll never manage one as well as you, Croo. And fishing.—There’s a lot to do, really. We’ve had some amazing good times.”

Croo did not answer, because he could not; because he thought, for the first time in his manhood, for the first time, in fact, since a young Englishman had left a boy in the sunlight on a dock half a lifetime ago, that he might weep. When he did manage speech, he said:

“Leave Roads End to your niece and nephew by all means. In their lifetime aviation may be so improved that the islands will be fashionable winter resorts.”

“Gad, what would the tourists do with the native residents like you and me?” Geoffrey said. “By the way, Croo, I’d like to be buried in the graveyard on the hillside alongside our common great-something grandparents. Would you mind?”

Croo shook his head.

And, when Geoffrey recovered, they quarreled and made friends again. . .

Croo’s mother and his wife were buried in the hillside cemetery long before Geoffrey died. Geoffrey read the burial service of the Church of England over Croo’s wife’s grave to an audience of weeping plantation hands who had been devoted to their mistress and who would, Croo knew, come secretly at night and tie voodoo charms on her tombstone for her spirit’s safe passage.

After the brief ceremony, sitting on the wide veranda overlooking the sea, Croo talked about her at greater length than he had ever talked to Geoffrey about her before. He said, “I scarcely knew her. She was a warm, friendly person whom I shall miss, completely content with her child and her beehives and her embroidery, and her occasional visits to her relatives on St. Anne’s. I wish that we could have been better friends. Somehow, she did not seem to feel neglected. But I never did find much to talk to her about.”

Geoffrey said, “My poor friend, sometimes I’m more troubled for what I destroyed for you than for what I destroyed for myself long since.”

Croo said sharply, “Nonsense!”

Geoffrey nodded. “Quite. Ride back with me to Roads End and stay a few days.”

On the ride back he said, “When you come to bury me, bury me at night, when the stars are thick. When the stars are thick and close and the moon is full, I can see the shadows of the galleons and the pirate ships slide across the cove—that is, at the end of the first jug of rum!”. . .

Geoffrey died suddenly after a night’s drinking. They had talked, Langford remembered, of the postwar generation, about which there began to be so much in the novels that were shipped to them from London and New York. Geoffrey was saying, “They are just as we were, I expect; the patterns underneath don’t alter.” He said, “Let’s go out and look at the morning,” and, staggering out in the cool freshness of the new dawn, stumbled across the threshold and died before the sun was fairly up.

Croo read the Church of England burial service for him by torchlight, late that evening under the thick stars. No one wept when they lowered the coffin. The only sounds were a little rustle of wind slipping through the palm trees and—far off in the quarters—the wailing of a Negro song. . .

The man on the beach had been sitting as still as the shadows of the palm trees that lengthened across the sand a very long time—moving only to open that cigarette case which was an old present from Geoffrey Carew, to light one of the Turkish cigarettes for which Geoffrey had taught him the taste; to smoke it, not tasting it; savoring, instead, years when time seemed motionless; disbelieving, on this beach where nothing at all was changed except the shadow of his own still figure, the incredible total of years that time had added. Across the amethyst sea far off he could see a dark line and a splash of foam where the water poured out through the cut in the reef.

Looking at that, his mind was suddenly empty of thought, empty of any sense of pain or loss. Here, where a man of fifty watched the sea, once a boy of ten watched it; that was all that had happened. The rest was a dream the boy had dreamed.

He rose, rode on, came before dark to Roads End, dined, was served the same sort of food at the same sort of table of San Domingo wood, by Geoffrey’s butler who was Jose’s cousin, as he would have been served at Horizons.

In the morning, when Jose’s cousin brought his coffee, he brought also a cablegram which the bearer had ridden over from the capital to deliver. It was forwarded from Barbadoes. It said that Geoffrey’s niece and nephew were leaving there by a schooner. Langford made calculations. They would arrive in a week’s time.

The Christmas celebration that he planned for this Richard and Catherine Adamson, who were Geoffrey Carew’s sister’s children, was a little complicated. He realized that he was drawing his ideas for the proper British Christmas from somewhat ill-assorted sources which ranged from Dickens’ Christmas Carol to “Suggestions for Yuletide Menus” found in various yellowed American periodicals his wife had read.

Some time since he had ordered from his agent in New York a Christmas tree and appropriate ornaments. (The agent used, over a long period of years, to odd commissions took it upon himself to ship the tree in cold storage so that the needles would not fall off in the heat.) That was due to arrive soon. A hunt for deer was to entertain his guests at any convenient time after their arrival. A Yule log, Croo felt, was beyond him. The one fireplace at Roads End had been used only twice within his memory, both times in the hurricane season. A fire on Christmas day, when the temperature in the sun was likely to range from ninety to a hundred and ten, was unthinkable.

In the few days that remained before the arrival of “the children” Croo imported extra servants from Horizons, received a formal visit from his son, and then rode in to the capital to wait for the steamer’s arrival.

Standing in the blazing sunlight on the dock, Croo’s mind was occupied with two irrelevant things: first, that this was the same dock on which he had clung to Geoffrey when Geoffrey sailed away to England forty years before, and, second, that it was absurd for him to feel that, at fifty, with the first arrival of Geoffrey’s kin, life began for him again. Watching the steamer draw close, Croo told himself carefully that these two young people could be no more to him than two strange English; that he had encountered, without much mutual liking, a number of strange English in his time. But he could not make himself believe that these were no different.

The “two young people,” watching the shore of St. Antonia grow clear before them, were in a state of acute boredom. They were the only white passengers aboard, and so were the recipients of stares and comments no less annoying because, being in native patois, they were incomprehensible.

They found the heat trying, the islands, so far, tawdry and dull; and, besides, though in London they got on unusually well for a brother and sister equally restless and willful because month in and month out they carefully avoided seeing too much of each other, they had, as they told each other frankly, enough of each other’s unmitigated company since four days out from England to last them years.

The trip out from England was the first time since either of them was adult that they had been compelled to find amusement solely in themselves and in each other. They were both popular at home—partly because they both had beauty, the fair English beauty which was traditional in their mother’s family, and partly for a certain caustic wit they had. They lived on the modern, rather limited, British principle that all is here today and gone tomorrow, or else income tax and death duties take it; but, meanwhile, the only sound principle in the world of shifting values is to amuse oneself.

The steamer was slow in docking; they had been standing by the rail a long time, speechless with ennui. When it was obvious that they would not tie up at the wharf for another quarter of an hour the boy said, “I’ll hunt up the steward and get another round of planters’ punches.” The girl said, “Yes, do;” and then, indifferently, “That cousin Uncle Geoffrey wrote mother about won’t be disconcerted, will he, if we go reeling off the ship?”

Richard said, “Doesn’t matter if he is.”

She said, “I suppose not,” and continued to regard the shore, the white dock, the shouting crowd of baffled negro dock hands as if they smelled a little bad, which they did not, for the wind was in the other direction.

Croo saw her first in the moment before Richard returned with the planters’ punch, and from the little distance of dockside and blue water that divided them he knew that he had never seen a British girl so beautiful. The oval of her face, flushed a little in the heat, shadowed a little by the brim of her wide hat, reminded him, not of Geoffrey’s face, but of something else with which he was familiar. The pose of her light figure in a simple, short-sleeved, rose-colored frock was reminiscent, too. The boy, he saw, was like Geoffrey in his youth.

He grew impatient for the steamer to dock. When she was tied up to the dock at last, it took Croo a moment to reach them through the crowd of Negroes shouting greetings to relatives aboard.

Richard and Catherine Adamson were standing looking completely uninterested in the noise and confusion around them on the dock near the foot of the gangplank.

Croo said, “You are Geoffrey Carew’s nephew and niece? I am Croo Langford.”

They stared at him. Through the perfection of their composure he could recognize but not yet understand the reason for their surprise.

The young man said, “You are Croo Langford?”

Croo said, “Yes.”

The girl said, “Our mother said her brother wrote her always of a cousin of ours whose name was Croo Langford. And the letter notifying us about Uncle Geoffrey’s death was signed ‘Croo Langford.’ You are that Croo Langford?”

Her voice was not suspicious, not particularly disturbed, not puzzled, and still Croo did not see. He said, “Yes, I am he.”

The boy flung back his head, with the gesture that seemed to be universal in the family. Then he seemed to pull himself together, seemed to find effort necessary to summon gravity to his face, said to his sister, “Well, that’s that, Catherine,” and to Croo, “Well, sir, is the plantation near the town?”

Croo said, “A half-day’s journey. Do you ride? Does Miss Adamson ride?”

The boy said, “Oh, yes, quite.”

Croo said, “I have rooms at the hotel for you to change into riding things. You won’t find the rooms very comfortable but it’s only for as long as it takes you to change. We should start within the hour if we’re to reach Roads End by dark.”

On the ride out from town, except for occasional comments on the scenery, they talked to each other about people of whom Croo had never heard and parties in England on which he could make no comment. He grew more and more uncomfortable.

Halfway to Roads End the girl said, “Are you the Croo Langford who owns Horizons?”

He nodded.

They were riding through deep jungle, but the path was wide enough for three to go abreast; behind them the bearers carrying the luggage began to sing in patois.

The girl said suddenly, “Make them stop. They sound too eerie.” There was sharp hysteria in her voice.

The man said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Catherine.”

She said to her brother, “Well, I’m frightened. We’re going farther and farther from civilization every minute—if you call that town civilization. I’m not going one step farther before you ask him to explain.”

Croo said, “Explain what, Miss Adamson?”

She was silent, waiting for her brother to speak. Behind them the bearers stopped, too. They were laughing together.

Croo called back to them, “Be silent!”

The boy said, “It’s so awfully embarrassing,” and Croo waited. Richard hurried into speech:

“You know, sir, it does seem a little odd. I mean—my sister and I were going to Switzerland for Christmas when we got the news that Uncle Geoffrey died and left us this plantation. We thought it would be a lark to come out here and have a look at it. But—I mean—mother used to read us Uncle Geoffrey’s letters. He said you were his best friend. He described you over and over, and you don’t exactly fit the description.”

And then Croo knew, and, knowing, wanted to weep for Geoffrey, who had written home—he saw it all now, such a romanticized version of his life. He said coolly enough, “You mean your uncle never wrote your mother that I am not white?”

The boy flushed, said, “I’m sorry, sir, he never did. And, after all, I’m in charge of my sister and we are very much at your mercy if there’s any mistake.”

Croo said, speaking aloud but not to them, “Poor Geoffrey, he did believe in keeping up appearances, even in correspondence. I should have guessed.”

And then his voice grew suddenly crisp. He said, “I am Croo Langford, but not your cousin in any sense that may disturb you. That was a jest of your uncle’s—a lifelong jest. It happens that he and I are both descended from a Geoffrey Carew who came out here about 1700, but the man’s dead two hundred years; whatever his errors or those of his descendants makes very little difference now. If you wish to turn back to the capital I can have the president identify me. Of course, his identification may not seem adequate. He is, in fact, a mulatto. But there’s a British vice-consul; he keeps a pet shop—parakeets and monkeys, you know—ships them to Trinidad and Barbadoes and Martinique to sell to the tourists on the cruise boats. He will identify me, too—if he is sober. He is seldom sober.”

But the boy’s mind was made up. He said, “I’m very sorry, sir. Let’s push on.”

They rode on in silence, which Croo made no effort to break, and reached Roads End as the dusk was coming down.

They said nothing as to the appearance of the plantation as they drew nearer. They looked, if you could interpret anything in the expression of their faces beyond sheer indifference, a trifle condescending, and Croo saw Roads End a little as they must see it, an old, shabby stone house on a hillside, smaller even than his own and with a less wide outlook. The girl shivered with nervousness when two of the grooms came up with torches to hold the horses and lead them away to the stables. And Croo realized for the first time in his life how savage the native servants looked. He ordered torches set at the four corners of the swimming pool which Geoffrey had spent two years building (cursing all the while at the stupidity of native labor) and left them to bathe, telling them that dinner would be ready in an hour.

He went, himself, to see that the torches burned evenly, and, staring at the cement basin, realized it was not a swimming pool at all, just an ugly hollowed-out oval filled by the icy water of a stream that came from higher up the hillside.

When he went to change for dinner there was a message for him from Horizons, a note from his son saying that an evergreen tree and some packages had come by schooner to Horizons’ wharf for him. And he thought, “Well, the Christmas tree arrived in plenty of time,” and so went in to dinner.

Both his guests waiting for him in Geoffrey’s little drawing-room seemed in better mood than on the ride over. That, perhaps, was the influence of the rum cocktails which the butler had served already.

The girl said, in a voice she obviously tried to make friendly, “Very romantic atmosphere, this; complete with tropic stars outside and a family portrait within.” She nodded toward the portrait of Geoffrey Carew which Croo had given his namesake a long time ago.

He said, regarding the portrait too, “His name was Geoffrey Carew. Same name as your uncle. I found it over at my place years ago, had it cleaned, and gave it to your uncle. He wanted it because of the name.”

The boy said, “This is superb rum. How did the portrait get over to your place?”

But his voice did not sound interested enough to require an answer. Croo made him none, sat and sipped his own cocktail appreciatively, remembering how many drinks he and Geoffrey had sampled while evolving the best formula of fruit juices to blend with the Rosalie rum, for use on the rare celebratory occasions when they bothered to bring ice over the hills from the capital.

There was silence in the room. The girl put down the drink, moved restlessly to a battered upright piano Geoffrey had brought out from England with him.

She would find it, Croo told her in a regretful voice, badly out of tune. She said, “Doesn’t matter,” and began to sing in a light, sweet, thin voice, some song which Croo had never heard.

Croo sat regarding her, a graceful, swaying figure in a turquoise blue frock that had no back at all and very little front. He was still disturbed by her resemblance to something. She finished the song as the butler announced dinner, and when she stood up, smiling a little—at him or at her own boredom, he could not tell which—he knew what the resemblance was. She was like the graceful figure of the girl in the Watteau picture.

They went in to dinner—a dinner on which Croo had spent infinite thought. It began with rum-flavored iced native grapefruit and proceeded through a soup, which Geoffrey had told him was a very good native version of bouillabaisse, to a wild turkey. With that, champagne was served, and with the champagne constraint lessened among them. The girl made some comment on the Georgian candlesticks, to which Croo said, “They are yours, you know. Everything in the place is yours.”

The boy, finishing his champagne in some haste, said, “Can we sell it?” and then, seeming to realize his own abruptness, said, “We are in rather a hurry to get back to London, of course. Things to do. We inquired; there’s a steamer back to Barbadoes day after Christmas. If we could get everything settled by then—”

The girl looked at her brother as if she thought his voice sounded too eager.

Croo said, “That’s four days from now.”

The boy nodded. Croo hesitated, then made up his mind:

“I should be willing to pay you two thousand pounds, British, for Roads End. If you care to make inquiries in the capital you may get an offer for two hundred pounds. The plantation has never made money and it’s too remote from the town to be desirable except, perhaps, to me. It adjoins my land. I thought perhaps you might want to keep it.”

Richard said, “Good heavens; what for?”

Croo had the irrelevant thought that the boy drank much less well than his uncle.

The girl said, “It’s too remote to be of any use to us, either, any more than you say it would be to anyone in the town.”

Suddenly Croo was impatient to be done with it. He said, “Well, then, I’ll give you a draft for two thousand pounds, and, so that you may be sure I am dealing fairly with you”—his voice sounded to him as contemptuous as Geoffrey Carew’s voice had sometimes sounded—“we’ll make a proviso that you may repurchase it at that price from me or from my son if you ever choose.”

Richard was finding the combination of champagne and rum too heavy to permit him to be dextrous. He said, “Gad, man, I’ve not seen half of two thousand pounds in cash since I came of age, and that’s three years.”

Croo said, “That’s that, then.”

After dinner Catherine sang for him, songs that did not interest him, for there was no sweetness in their melodies and very little that was romantic in their lyrics; in fact, they seemed to him surprisingly vulgar, but then, he told himself, he was not competent to judge, since he had never heard jazz before.

In the morning he rose before his guests. He made out an agreement for the purchase of Roads End. When Richard came in heavy-eyed saying, “That rum of yours gives a man a head,” Croo answered, “It depends on the amount you drink and the number of years you’ve been drinking it. Would you like to read over this agreement?”

Richard read it indifferently, and Croo wrote out for him a draft on his London agent. They both signed the agreement.

Catherine wandered out on the veranda, said, “Good morning,” in that clear, carrying British voice of hers.

After breakfast Richard said, “What do you do here all day?”

Croo said, “You can go swimming in the sea, or there’s a grass tennis court your uncle and I used to use. It’s not in very good condition. The court at my place is better kept. If you care to ride over there my son would be delighted.”

The girl said, “Riding is much too strenuous in this heat—so is tennis. Let’s swim. There aren’t any sharks, are there?”

He said, “I’ll go down to the cove with you and show you where it’s safe.”

So they went down to that cove where, a lifetime since, Croo had met Geoffrey Carew.

The tide was rising. It was possible to swim out to the reef, stand on the ledge of rock and look at the fish swimming in the pools, among the rocks beyond; pools that were whirls of white water when the tide was ebbing but now were as calm as the water in the cove.

All three swam out to the reef. Both the girl and her brother swam well, Croo noticed. A swift stroke he had not seen before. Swimming beside them powerfully, easily, he thought that probably in the great world even fashions in swimming changed, like fashions in everything else, including types of young Englishmen. Standing up on the ledge in the waist-deep water, he yielded to an impulse which he recognized as absurd. He began, “Your uncle and I met on this reef, in a manner of speaking.”

Richard said, “Yes?” incuriously.

Though Croo knew it was ridiculous to think that the story would interest them, to think that anything he might find to say about anything in the world would interest them, he told them the story. In spite of himself, some feeling crept into the voice he tried to keep as indifferently courteous as their own, some echo of a child’s terror and the lifelong love for that other fair young Englishman colored his voice, so that they were silent while they listened.

When he finished, Richard Adamson said, “Very romantic, at that.”

And his sister said, “Quite. Let’s swim back, shall we? I want a drink.”

They swam back.

On the way up to the house Croo said, “If you’ll excuse me this afternoon, I plan to ride to my own plantation. There is some business about which I must see my son.”

Richard Adamson nodded indifferently.

Croo had ordered his horse saddled and was ready to start for Horizons before his guests were dressed. He could hear them calling to each other from their rooms. Either they did not realize how their voices carried or—what he decided was more probable—they did not care.

He heard Richard say, “Are you nearly ready?”

And the girl, “Making up my face.”

Her brother said, “Who’s to look at it?”

She answered, “It’s my only moral strength. I’m just an English woman as would dress for dinner in the jungle for want of anything better to do.”

Richard said, “Thank goodness, there are only three days more of this. I hope his rum holds out.”

Catherine said, “You might try reading a good book. The library seems to be full of Victorian classics. Fantastic. . . Wasn’t that an amazing tale about the reef our brunet host told us?”

Her brother said, “You didn’t believe it, did you? Don’t you know that all blacks boast?”

The girl said, “He’s not so very black. The mixture makes him more imaginative, I suppose.”

The boy said, “Probably. I think he’s like a cartoon of the proper Britisher.”

His sister answered, “Well, you’ve got two thousand of the best away from him. We can manage to be polite to him three days for that, I suppose. I want a thousand, you know, for coming out here.”

Richard said, “Five hundred you’ll get and five hundred you’ll take. That will pay your dressmaker. I would have taken a thousand or five hundred myself when I saw this forsaken place.”

Croo wished only that the groom would hurry with his horse. As he was about to send a man out to the stables the stallion was brought around. He mounted. The horse turned, as a matter of course, down the familiar path to Horizons.

It was only when the heat of the jungle path enclosed him that Croo realized he had been feeling a little cold. Not wretchedly unhappy, not even seriously hurt—just a little cold. He had known that he had nothing to say to these two young English, that they had nothing to say to him, from the moment the girl had stopped her horse on the way to Roads End and insisted that he explain himself. Remembering that, he flung back his head and laughed in that gesture which seemed so universal among the men of Carew’s family. Those two. He was as contemptuous of them actually as he knew that their uncle Geoffrey Carew would have been. They had no substance.

He pushed his horse on. Almost at Horizons, it occurred to him that he must order a watchman to stay in the cove, when the tide was ebbing, for the duration of the Adamsons’ stay. Since they had not believed his story, it might occur to them to go swimming on an ebb tide.

On the long veranda of Horizons his son and his son’s wife were finishing luncheon when he rode up. They rose courteously. Croo thought, as he had thought when he went with the boy Geoffrey to meet her people at the time of the engagement, that his son’s wife was a very pretty child. Her warm voice addressed him, politely, respectfully. She regretted that they had not known he was honoring them with a visit, else they would have delayed luncheon. She spoke to Jose about that, ordering a place set for him.

His son said, “We were sending a messenger over to Roads End this afternoon to ask you to bring your guests and spend Christmas with us.”

Croo said, “Thank you, but you should spend your first Christmas by yourselves. Besides, they are sailing the day after Christmas, and Roads End is nearer town.”

He was thinking that, for all his darkness of skin, this son of his, Geoffrey Langford, was both handsome and intelligent-looking. There was nothing at all negroid in his face. Croo said it to himself in those words, and, remembering that those were the words Geoffrey had used to him, was amused at himself. Only amused; the power to suffer or to be glad was buried in Geoffrey Carew’s grave on the hillside, and he knew it now, knew it forever, since the arrival of those kin of Geoffrey Carew’s who were not (except in the mind of a man growing old and sentimental) very like him.

When his lunch was brought, his son’s wife said, “I shall leave you two. You must have business to discuss.”

But Croo said, “No. Before you go I have a present for you both. And then, when you do go, Josephine, will you order that tree and those packages brought up from the wharf? They are for you.”

He took the agreement for the purchase of Roads End out of his pocket and handed it to his son.

Geoffrey Langford said, “But you have done too much for us already, sir.”

Croo shook his head and spoke to Josephine: “It’s another plantation I have bought for you two. You must get Geoffrey to bring you over and see it. It’s not so large as this place, but it, also, has been in our family for centuries. I bought it back today. Run along, child, and get the men to open the packages at the wharf.”

She smiled at him—the warm, friendly smile of a child.

Croo went on talking to his son. He said, “It won’t be much good to you, but you may have more than one son and, in that case, it would be pleasant for you to have two plantation homes; besides, the world moves faster than it used to. You may see land down here worth something again in your lifetime.”

His son said, hesitantly, “So those two relatives of Geoffrey Carew did not want their inheritance?”

Croo shook his head. “Really, you have as much right to the land as they. I’m glad you are to have it. You can fortify the path in the hills beyond Roads End—move the guns over. That will protect both places in case there’s another revolution in the capital.”

His son said, “You will live at Roads End for the present, won’t you, sir? Unless you want to come back here.”

Croo said, “No,” very definitely. “No! I am finished with this place.”

The young man said, “But, Father, I know what this place has meant to you.” Croo shook his head. “You don’t. I don’t myself, except that now I’m glad to be done with it.” Then he said abruptly, “Are you content, Geoffrey?”

His son smiled at him, a curious, slow, comprehending smile. “Content! I’m neither white nor black. But this place interests me. It keeps a man busy, and times may change.”

His father nodded and then spoke slowly: “In time, your lifetime, your children’s lifetime, or their children’s lifetime, the islands will make history again. Meanwhile, it’s a beautiful place here and—”

Geoffrey Langford interrupted. “Meanwhile, sir, one carries on. You carried on. I shall carry on to the best of my ability.”

Croo said, “We’re like cartoons of the old-fashioned British, you know.”

His son said, “Why not, if it amuses us? We don’t have to confront the originals often enough for it to be disturbing.”

Josephine ran out on the veranda. She said, “The boxes are all full of gold and silver and blue and green ornaments; and long ribbons of some stuff that glitters.”

Croo said, “That’s tinsel. You hang all the ornaments on the evergreen tree. It’s a Christmas decoration. You can put it in the drawing-room. It’s an American custom that I thought would amuse you.”

The two men left her hanging the colored spheres on the branches of the spruce tree, from which a few needles had already started to fall because of the heat.

Geoffrey Langford had said, “I’ll ride back with you, sir,” and Croo found himself glad of his company, reluctant to meet his two guests again alone. He was as bored at the thought of making courteous, meaningless conversation with them as they were, he knew, at talking to him.

But it appeared he had not estimated accurately the effect of boredom and hours of drinking West Indian rum upon Europeans unaccustomed to either.

A quarter of an hour from Roads End, just before the intersection of the path that went down to the shore, Croo and Geoffrey heard the sound of a horse being ridden toward them at furious pace on the path ahead of them. They hurried their own horses.

It was Geoffrey Carew’s overseer. Man and horse were dripping with sweat; the man was so frightened he was almost inarticulate. He flung himself off his horse and said, “I was riding for you, sir. I did not know what else to do. I could not stop them. They were both drunk and said they were going to the cove to swim. I told them about the ebb. They laughed at me.”

Croo said, “How long ago did they start?”

The overseer gasped, “Ten minutes ago. They must have reached the cove.”

Geoffrey said, “If we take the shore path we’ll reach the fishing village. Jose will be there. He went to get fish.”

Croo said, “Yes, he has been riding down in the afternoons to get fish since long before you were born.”

They galloped down the shore path. At the village Croo said, “Geoffrey, get men to bring a boat along with them, and ropes. I’ll meet you at the cove.”

He shouted an afterthought over his shoulder: “My son, no matter what happens when we get there, I command you to stay ashore.”

Geoffrey stopped midway in shouting for men; he said (for, though he had heard many times the old story of his father’s rescue of Geoffrey Carew, he was not thinking of it), “But, of course, I wouldn’t risk that water for anyone.”

Croo galloped on. The overseer was behind him, but some distance behind him now, for the overseer’s horse was spent. The path went down and down. He could hear the sound of the sea before he could see it, because the jungle growth was so thick. He galloped on.

He came to where the path ended, came out on the ribbon of sand, and saw that his guests had hauled out the old, leaking Carib canoe, set its sail, and were halfway to the reef. Across fifty yards he could see the sun glint on a pair of golden heads. He shouted to them:

“Come back; come back before the ebb catches you!” Though whether they heard him or, hearing, understood, he could not tell. He was taking off his boots, was stripping fast, as he shouted to them. Far away, back on the path, he could hear voices. His son, no doubt, and the men whom he was bringing up.

The overseer ran out on the beach, said, “My horse dropped, back along the path. What shall we do, sir?”

Croo did not answer him.

The Carib canoe, its clumsy square sail filled now with a gust of wind, was sixty yards away, not fifty.

Then Croo said, “Wait for my son. He will know what to do. If he brings Jose, Jose will remember.”

He ran down into the water.

Before he was breast-high he saw that Richard tried to turn the canoe, swung the sail over clumsily, and overturned it. Then Croo was swimming straight out to the reef. As he swam toward the reef, toward that overturned canoe to which two figures were clinging, and as he planned clearly what he must do when he reached the boat before the boat reached the reef, he was not frightened at all.

The sea was clear and blue and sunlit. He swam fast.

Then it was all a rush of quickening water. . .

On the shore over the cove the swift tropic dark came down, and the golden stars blossomed by dozens and by hundreds. The night wind quickened in the fronds of the palm trees. The group of native fishermen were silent, except when one told a late arrival what had happened:

“He held them both inside the reef while we got men out, lashed with ropes to our boat. We kept our boat inshore from where the ebb could catch it. He had tried to push their canoe broadside against the cut in the reef but he could not push it broadside. It held but only a little. It went out through the cut just as the men lashed with ropes reached the reef. He made us take the two British first, but the water caught him. Mr. Geoffrey Langford stood on the reef, pulled his body out from the rocks but—what would you?—the rocks and the barracuda—”

To Croo Langford’s son, who stopped only with darkness in his frantic efforts to bring life back to that broken body which lay on the shore, as a little boy had once lain, blanket-wrapped, Richard Adamson came, offering words of comfort.

He said, “He died like a white.”

Geoffrey Langford did not answer. The expression on his dark face was as uninterested, almost, as the expression on the face of him who lay, forever composed now, in the starlight under the rustling of the palms.

SALUTE! THERE GOES ROMANCE

I saw a ghost once, in sunlight, at a wedding.

The wedding of Althea Arden was in June at Willow Valley, as everyone expected it would be. The ceremony was performed by a bishop, under the rose-hung pergola at the foot of the formal gardens, “where brides of the Arden family have plighted their troth for generations,” the newspapers would say, and actually they had, for two generations. Althea’s father and mother were married there in a June I well remembered. Even then, it was a long time since Grandfather Arden had got hold of all the patents on the best typewriter of his day, and the family had leisure to exhibit at flower shows.

Well, this June gave Althea a sunlit day with a breeze for coolness, and, beyond the rose gardens which were at their best, the famous Arden madonna lilies were white against the tall blue spikes of delphiniums. The wind in the pines that bordered the gardens was murmurous; the sky above was vivid blue, and ladies in the smartest possible flowered chiffons, said to each other, “Perfect day for a wedding.”

When Althea in white satin and a lace veil that was a family heirloom (her pretty, shy, mother’s face blurred before me in that mist of lace, curiously vivid after all the long time, when I first saw Althea), walked between the rows of guests, toward the pergola, they said, and meant, “She is lovely as a dream.”

Everything was just as it should be, even to the embarrassed smile on Jerry Carter’s round, honest face.

Only the year was wrong.

For this wedding in June of 1935 was originally scheduled for June of 1920. The invitations had in that year even been addressed, ready for mailing. Probably not many of the pleasant people assembled knew that, and those who did were certainly too polite to mention it, today.

Between those Junes lay the one significant story in the life of “the child of fortune,” whose glamorous life was a tabloid saga, but this story tabloid editors never knew.

Although I had been Althea’s guardian since she was ten, she never in twenty years lost the capacity to startle me.

Whatever idea her father, who had been my classmate, had in appointing me administrator of his great fortune and judge of the best way to bring up his little daughter, the “Titanic” disaster left neither him nor his wife time to tell me. I had always known that I was so appointed in his will, and had taken it as a compliment to my moderate legal ability and as a jest, since in our healthy thirties we looked forward to decades of continuance of a friendship never particularly colored by the fact that his means were enormous and mine ordinary. But when his road ended off the Newfoundland banks, the management of the Arden fortune became my principal preoccupation, and the management of the Arden heir an exasperation or a delight, contingent on her moods.

Between the one and the other, I was left little leisure to achieve wife or child of my own, though Althea, who came quickly to an age of positiveness in her opinions, maintained that I never would have done so anyway, being too lazy.

I had some notion, when I was first responsible for her, when she seemed a malleable lump of little girl, largely golden curls, wide gray eyes, starched ruffles and a smile that was devastating even then, of making her a sensible, thoughtful schoolgirl and afterward a responsible young woman, as well equipped as possible to manage her inheritance wisely.

Most of that was abandoned before she was twelve, because it was obvious so early, both that she was to be a great beauty, and to take life lightly. She was generous, she was kind, when anyone brought the need for kindness to her attention, and she was spoiled before her teens.

There was no way to prevent her schoolmates mentioning to her—good-naturedly enough—that she would some day inherit vast sums of money. The power of wealth can be obvious to a child of twelve. She came to believe there was nothing that she couldn’t buy. There was just enough truth in her belief so that it was impossible to impress upon her that she could buy everything except a few things, and that these few might some day prove to be all-important.

After our first conflict—when I wanted her to prepare for college, and she preferred to be tutored in college subjects at home, because it left her more time for riding and tennis—I generally conceded her her own way. She was, so often, right. She could learn as much from first-rate tutors, in a couple of years, as she would be likely to learn at college in four, and my theory that she would meet a variety of types of people at college fell down before her contention that she would embarrass them by being so rich, and they her, by being poor in comparison.

When she had completed her studies, she lived for a year in Paris and then returned full of plans for her début—and flowered into beauty.

The début was to be the high moment of Christmas week. She was discussing it with the Edwards twins, who were between them at least a third as wealthy as herself, one late summer day I went to visit her.

The English woman who was her companion and chaperon at Willow Farms, a lady selected for outstanding common sense in combination with a certain quiet humor, met me as I was going down the garden in search of Althea, and said, “You’ll find them under the elm tree. I had to leave. The prices they mention for flowers for the début are too much like the figures my father, the bishop, used to mention to Mother as adequate for his and her support and the support of their five children.”

The twins were sprawled on the grass. Althea was sitting on the marble bench. Evidently they’d got bored with discussing débutante parties, and had anticipated their careers a step farther. They were talking about proper husbands, and went on, after they’d greeted me.

Barbara Edwards said: “It doesn’t matter, when you’re lucky as we are, if the man you want to marry doesn’t have a dime—provided he has enough sense to accept an appropriate place in some relative’s firm, without being subservient or boastful about it. I shall marry the most amusing young man I find, good at games, so we’ll always be thin and healthy, and witty. If he’s penniless, Uncle Campion will just have to set him up.”

Althea said, “You’re perfectly right, Barbara. There’s no sense in having money, if things like that can’t be easily managed. I’ll marry a sailor, if he has an entertaining mind—and buy him a battleship for a wedding present, if he needs it to make him happy.”

I was shocked, but there was no use blaming them. How could they be otherwise than as they were?

Geraldine Edwards said, “Yes, you will. Here comes your destiny now, and not waddling much either.”

They all laughed, and Jerry Carter, in immaculate flannels, came down the path. I thought they were unfair—he did not waddle in the least, only he had, even then when he was twenty-three, a solidity about him that I thought was admirable.

I wondered a little how the Edwards girls had come to know the state of his heart, but he made it obvious in his first glance at Althea.

He was the only young man I knew who had as much money as she. His name had been in the papers the last year or two, for some very good work he was doing in model tenement planning. One day just before Althea sailed for France, he had called at my office.

He said, in substance, “You’re Althea’s guardian, Mr. Payson, and I thought perhaps I should talk to you. I’m in love with her, but she doesn’t love me, as far as I know. Just the same, I’m going to propose to her before she goes away, and every chance I get, next year and the year after and so on. Naturally, her money doesn’t interest me at all—I just want to take care of her.”

I said something about the amazing fortune they would have between them, if they married. He blushed, actually, and spoke, very simply and movingly, of the enormous power of money to do good. “I’m trying to make a little sense of a great fortune,” he said. “It keeps one from feeling a waster. Althea and I together could do so much. . .”

I thought, so he sees Althea as an angel of mercy, endowing model tenements. I don’t. . . I wish I had managed to bring her up more like him.

Somewhat to my surprise, Althea saw Jerry Carter a great deal on her return. She even showed some slight interest in model tenements occasionally. So I was hopeful, except when I remembered that her father and mother fell in love with a sudden blazing passion that warmed their whole lives, and she showed no sign of that, for Jerry Carter.

Her début, at the year’s end, was as successful as had been anticipated. Jerry seemed particularly cheerful that evening. He said to me, “Of course, she would have wanted this—but now she’s had it, she may be willing to make up her mind about what comes after.” Nothing came after for that winter, for him.

Althea would, I think, without her fortune, have been one of the outstanding débutantes of her year. As it was, she never danced more than eight feet with anyone.

Toward spring she tired. She seemed a little bored, too, with the repetitiveness of gayety. And suddenly, one rainy night when she stayed at home because she had a cold, she accepted Jerry. They both summoned me over to hear the news. He was ecstatic, but she was oddly matter-of-fact. She said she wanted to talk to me alone, and he went home—after she had said she didn’t want the engagement announced for a bit.

When he was gone, I told her that I had hoped for just this thing.

She said, “Yes, it’s wisdom. And I’m fond of Jerry. He has a nice sturdiness about him. We can devote our lives to good works, too.”

I said, “Why aren’t you happier about it? You’re not compelled to do it, you know.”

“What else is there to do? I’ve met a couple of fortune hunters this winter—oh, nothing serious, else I’d have told you, but it was a little disillusioning. With Jerry, at least there’s not that. And he really is an admirable person. Only I wanted to fall romantically, tearingly, unreasonably in love, like a character in a novel—and I haven’t.”

What was there to say? I thought this engagement was the most fortunate thing that could possibly have happened to her. As for the ardors of romantic love—I had felt them only once, very long ago, in a springtime before Mary Caldwell decided to marry my classmate, Lindley Arden—and I decided not to marry anyone. There was no use to tell Mary Caldwell’s daughter that.

The engagement was to be announced on a Monday. On the Friday before, Althea departed with the Edwards twins for a long-planned house party at West Point.

They were supposed to reach home early Monday. They arrived very late in the afternoon. I was at Althea’s house, summoned by Miss Dane to advise as to the handling of newspaper men. Her engagement was in all the Monday papers, and reporters were besieging the house.

Althea looked white and strained as I had never seen her. But her voice was calm. She said, “Hello, darling. Has Jerry been worrying about me?”

It seemed she’d broken a luncheon engagement with him. Miss Dane said a little sharply, “He said he’d call for you at seven. You’re dining with his aunt, you remember?”

Althea said vaguely, “Yes. I’ll dress right away,” and went out, followed by Miss Dane.

Barbara Edwards said then, to me, “You’re a good egg, aren’t you?”

Geraldine said firmly, “I still maintain there’s no need to bother him.”

“Bother me with what?”

“Something happened at the Point,” said Geraldine, “only don’t worry, it doesn’t mean anything.”

I was beginning to worry very much. I said, “Althea looks disturbed as I’ve never seen her.”

Barbara said, “Mr. Payson, Althea fell in love, or thinks she did.”

“Who is the man?”

“Perfectly charming, Southern boy, be a second lieutenant in the army. Not a penny. He kept asking her if she’d mind beginning on nothing. I went looking for her last night and heard that. He’s probably the only man in the world she’s met who never connected her with the Arden money, if he ever heard of that even. Southerners, the best Southerners, aren’t practical, you know. He’s Army people, too, only they used to be Confederates.”

Geraldine contributed: “He’s the best-looking thing I’ve ever seen.”

I must have groaned, because they said, in chorus, “It’ll all blow over, and we’ll never mention it.” And Barbara added, “Life owed Althea a minute’s madness. It’ll be pleasant for her to remember when she’s important in New York social service. But she can, and has to, go ahead with the social service and Jerry Carter. This other man is not the kind for whom you buy battleships.”

So she remembered that conversation, too.

As they rose to go, Geraldine said, “If she could really let it all go—all this,” waving her hand vaguely at the handsome drawing-room, “I’d say it would be marvelous. Some girls could—but not Althea.”

Althea’s marriage was scheduled for the end of June. In the months preceding, her manner was so much the normal manner of a young woman enjoying the fuss made over the approaching ceremonies that I was deceived into thinking the Edwards girls had exaggerated. Except that the very perfection of her behavior made it a little unreal. And there was one other thing that was strange. She developed a habit of vanishing for long days in her roadster, and reappearing with vague explanations that she’d felt in the mood to explore the countryside.

Her trousseau was ready. Miss Dane had finished addressing wedding invitations, and the date, a family secret, was June thirtieth. Althea said that she wanted no announcement in newspapers of the precise wedding date, because she was sick of publicity. But it seemed, though I didn’t know it until afterward, that she had a scene with Miss Dane when the date came for the invitations to be mailed. Miss Dane saw no reason why they should not be sent on the correct day—a little more than three weeks preceding the ceremony. But Althea had her way. They lay in Miss Dane’s study when the wedding day was not more than a fortnight off.

I hadn’t seen Althea then, for a week. We were both busy, so that I did not realize she had been avoiding me, until Miss Dane telephoned me with such disturbance in her even voice that I was frightened. She had something to tell me that should not be told by telephone. Could I come to Willow Valley immediately? I arrived there in a June dusk so tranquil it made me feel that any emotional disturbance Althea might be having was probably pretty trivial.

But Althea was not there. In fact, she had not been there since the day preceding. When she left, she said she would spend the night at the Edwards estate ten miles up the island. Jerry had gone to a class reunion at Harvard. Althea left a letter, for the butler to deliver to Miss Dane at five o’clock. When she had read it Miss Dane called me up.

Althea’s letter said: “Get in touch with James Payson immediately, and give him the enclosure, Danie darling. He’ll know how to arrange everything. Don’t be any more upset than you can help. You used to lecture me, when I was growing up, on preserving one’s personal integrity. I am certain that I preserve mine better this way than the other.”

There was a long enclosure for me in another envelope. We knew before we opened it what would be in it. Miss Dane said: “Ran away with that young officer. I am so sorry for Jerry Carter.”

I said, “No doubt that’s it. I don’t even know his name.”

“John de Launes. She has a photograph of him in her top bureau drawer. It’s signed.”

I opened my letter.

The butler came in, said to Miss Dane, “Mr. Carter telephoned from Bridgeport and left a message for Miss Arden that he was driving down and would call this evening.”

She managed to say, “Thank you, Stevens,” in her usual voice. But when Stevens left she said, “That makes it even more impossible.”

I disagreed with her. “He has to be told quickly—and if he encounters Althea and this Lieutenant de Launes, it just can’t be helped. . .”

We had finished dinner and were having coffee on the terrace when Jerry’s car came up the drive. After we had told him, he said simply, “Tell Althea, of course, that I wish her all the best. I’ll run along now. It might embarrass her to see me.”

Just then we heard a car come into the driveway and stop.

Jerry hesitated. Miss Dane said, “You can’t go now. You’d all encounter in the drawing-room. And perhaps it’s just as well.”

Althea came out onto the terrace, with two young men in flannels. I knew which was her husband, because Miss Dane had shown me the photograph before dinner. He was a slim, dark young man, with clear hazel eyes, the compact graceful carriage West Point gives, and a face charming in its sensitiveness, but with strength in the mouth and chin. The other young man was red-haired, pleasantly homely—and somewhat pugnacious looking. Althea, beautiful as usual, was very pink-cheeked with excitement. But all three looked as if they had been quarreling.

Althea said, “Hello, Jerry. Sorry,” and I made introductions all round, matter-of-factly. When I inquired the other young man’s name, Althea said, “Lieutenant Fairchild, my husband’s dearest friend,” and she and Lieutenant Fairchild exchanged looks as if they hated each other.

Everyone stood regarding everyone else, uncomfortably, except Jerry who sat on the terrace balustrade and stared at the fireflies.

Then Lieutenant de Launes turned to his wife. “Well, Althea, would you rather I began, or will you?”

She straightened her white shoulders, and spoke to me. “It’s this. I never dreamed he’d want to stay in the Army. We never discussed it. All we talked about was how much we loved each other—and all I thought of was what was more honest, since I didn’t love Jerry—”

Miss Dane interrupted, angry as I had never seen her. “Will you stop talking about Mr. Carter as if he had neither ears to hear you nor feelings to wound?”

Althea grinned, actually, a gaminesque grin that was oddly unhappy, said, “Good for you, Danie. The reason I have such respect for you is that you always speak your mind. . . To get on with it, though. John wants me to go spend a summer in Texas, sharing a second lieutenant’s pay—and it’s sweet of him, but a bit absurd when we could go around the world, just as well.”

Lieutenant de Launes’ voice was dramatic, only in its extreme quietness. “Mr. Payson, I have, of course, apologies to offer for not coming to you long ago. Only I did not quite understand. . .”

She interrupted, “He means that I never told him I was the Althea Arden, the newspaper ‘child of fortune.’ In fact, I told him she was my cousin, with the same name.”

I said, “For Heaven’s sake, why?”

“Because everything in my whole life has been colored by my tremendous fortune, and I didn’t want this to be. Everything else—”

There were limits even to Jerry’s self-control. He spoke so brokenly that she noticed him really at last. “Not my affection for you, Althea, that was never colored by anything—but you. . .” He stopped, said, “I’m going, Mr. Payson. You will excuse me.”

Althea put her hand on his arm. “No, not your love for me, Jerry, that I never valued because it was always mine for nothing. . . You should hate me, and you won’t. So stay—I want you to see how I get what is coming to me.”

Lieutenant Fairchild spoke for the first time. “Mr. Payson, I was witness at their wedding yesterday, because John and I have known each other always. John phoned me today, to meet them, to try to make something clear to this young woman.”

John de Launes stopped him. “Althea told me who she was this morning at breakfast. She assumed apparently that I would instantly resign from the Army, and live here until we decided where to go, and when. I haven’t been able to make it clear that I wouldn’t resign from the Army any more than—”

“Than you’d live on a woman’s money,” Lieutenant Fairchild said. “Truly, she’s a little unreal.”

Althea’s husband regarded her almost with detachment. “I have no money,” he said. “My people have a plantation up the river from New Orleans. It doesn’t lose money, in years that cotton’s high. I’m the fifth generation at the Point. She said that she wouldn’t mind being poor.”

She said now, “I wanted to surprise you. I didn’t think you’d mean we had to live on your Army pay. Why, it isn’t as much a month as I spend on shoes—”

Lieutenant Fairchild said savagely, “Be still,” not looking at her, looking at his friend’s face.

I spoke then. “She is at her worst. You are right, Lieutenant Fairchild, in saying that she is unreal. But twenty million dollars has stood between her and reality since she was born, and she can’t help it, perhaps.”

She looked at me almost gratefully for that last, but I could not be gentle with her while two men to whom she had represented perfection looked at her with agony in their eyes.

“What do you expect me to do, Althea?” her husband asked.

She said, “I don’t know. . .”

Lieutenant de Launes’ voice sounded tired, then. “My furlough’s practically up, and I should visit my people before I go to my post. I’m to be stationed in Texas. . . I love Althea, and want her to come with me, naturally. But since she’s so uncertain it seemed best to bring her here and put her in your charge.”

Lieutenant Fairchild glanced at his watch. “Your train for New Orleans leaves in two hours. If we may borrow Mrs. de Launes’ car, I’ll return it, after I’ve put you on the train.”

Suddenly it was as though John de Launes and Althea were alone on that wide terrace.

He said, “Are you coming with me, Althea dear?”

In the second’s silence, far off, the whistle of a steamer in the Sound blew, a melancholy eerie noise.

She heard it, spoke of it, in a voice quiet as his, “Some ship we won’t be sailing on. . .” And then, “I shan’t lie to you, any more, John. I’m sorry I did, before. So I can’t go with you, because I’m not sure yet that I can live on your terms.”

He bowed. But she moved toward him, flung her arms around his neck. He kissed her and released himself.

Lieutenant Fairchild said, “We should go now, John.”

Jerry said, “I’ll give you a lift into town. My car’s outside.”

They thanked him. All three said “good nights” formally and moved off toward the house.

Only Althea’s husband turned, said simply, “You’ll come when you’re sure? I’ll always wait, of course.”

She nodded and did not speak. It was clear she could not. He walked on then, after the others.

She was to see him only five times again in all her life; yet she was to remain his altogether faithful wife nearly twelve years.

She clenched her hands against the balustrade now, and said angrily, “I shan’t cry. Tears aren’t any use.”

I was remembering that I’d tried to let her know there were things she could not buy with the Arden fortune, but that wasn’t any use, either.

Miss Dane saw that too, and in a minute she said, “I’m going inside to get you some hot milk. You had better go to bed, my dear.”

The nineteen-twenties, now we’re so long done with them, seem increasingly fantastic in retrospect. The dinner table conversations about Coolidge-world-without-end prosperity, and good and bad bootleggers, and market profits are as remote, almost, as the War—as remote as the things Althea Arden, aged twenty, and John de Launes, aged twenty-two, fought over.

She truly believed that she wanted to take him from a narrow world to a wide one, that it was some odd blindness in him that kept him from yielding. She talked about “the desirability of the full life,” “the provinciality of feeling the necessity of work, if fortune had set one free from work.”

He believed, as firmly, that a man’s wife followed a man’s career, and that a gentleman provided for his wife, and did not under any circumstances live on his wife’s money.

Never could he understand why Althea could not count the world beside their love well lost; any more than she ever glimpsed what held him to shabby army posts in cold climates and hot climates, to dusty airports.

Oh, yes, he went into aviation. They weren’t encouraging married officers for it, but then he was not officially a married officer. In Braeburn the officials had been acquiescent, for a price, and there was no record of Althea Arden’s marriage in the files. I did that more for Jerry Carter’s sake than hers, at the beginning—in that first week when Miss Dane was dealing with “The engagement between Miss Arden and Mr. Carter has been terminated by mutual consent” sort of thing.

For I sensed somehow that in that charming Southern boy Althea had met a will as unbending as her own. Behind her was all the strength, the enormous assurance, of a great fortune. And behind him a certain tradition about which he was too well-mannered to be explicit.

She joined him briefly, later that summer. They had some discussion of their future in a dreadful little Texas town (at least, it seemed very dreadful to her), in an August heat wave. They settled nothing. She came home white and worn, and said there was nothing to do but wait and see.

So she waited, and she saw—Jerry Carter. She was his destiny, whether or not he turned out to be hers, and he recognized that too well to quarrel with it long. He was for her the use and habit and easy wont of things, he was rest when she grew tired. But if that was his strength, it was also his limitation. She was not always tired or discouraged. And when her restlessness beset her, she would turn from him to any excitement that offered.

So they alternated between months when he interested her in tenements and settlement work, and she slaved at it—and was good at it, surprisingly—and months when she abandoned all that, and went to be photographed along the Riviera.

And, by letter, cable, telegraph and long distance telephone, she carried on her long debate with John de Launes. I don’t think she ever realized how important to him was the fact that she was his wife, that it was to that she owed his enormous patience. He had loved her, married her, would be always faithful to her, always courteous to her, and never led by her from his beliefs. But his complete courteousness she mistook, when she was being optimistic, for a sign of yielding.

I understood that on the one occasion I ever heard her discuss him with Jerry. He had been telling her about certain housing projects he’d been investigating, and she listened with a medium amount of interest.

But presently she began to pace up and down. “I had a letter from John de Launes today,” she said.

If she had expected to produce any change in Jerry’s expression, she did not succeed.

“He’s a pleasant person, Althea. You really should let him go, not for my sake—I accept the fact that’s finished, but for his, and your own.”

She said, “Except that I am fond of you, and wouldn’t know how to get on without you,” her voice trembled a little as she went on, “I could hate you, Jerry, for being so reasonable, so absolutely right. . . But his letter sounds promising. He wrote from Panama that a painting in a Spanish church reminded him of me. He does love me, you know.”

“Why don’t you go to Panama, and set up housekeeping?”

“Because I’d stay a week and quarrel, and say bitter things about being uncomfortable—because I’m Althea Arden, born with diamond bracelets round my wrists and emeralds round my neck—and not any good, at all. But I know it.”

“Let him go, then.”

There was despair in her warm voice. “I cannot. I must fight for it, because I care so, and because I cannot help fighting for what I want, on my terms. I can’t let him go.”

Jerry’s voice was calm and kind as ever. “It’s the only thing you’ll ever be able to do for him. Meanwhile come into town and do some work on the campaign. I can use a speechmaker with your looks.”

He’d gone into reform politics, as she did, eventually. So she went to town, and helped him with the campaign. After that, she went with friends to Panama for Christmas.

Panama in a hot Christmas; Bennington, Vermont, one February when he was stationed there; a spring week in New York on a brief furlough of his—in New York, but not at her house, because he would not stay there—that and the time in Texas, almost at the beginning, was all they ever had of their marriage.

Once or twice in New York I saw the red-haired Lieutenant Fairchild when he came to New York on leave. He called on Althea, actually. Once, in a mood of confidence, he told me, “I used to hate her. I still do, in a way, for what she’s done to him. But, as it turned out, she’s made him a first-rate officer because she’s left him with nothing but his work to devote himself to. He’ll be a major long before me.” He paused then. “One has to admire any one who makes the fight she’s made for life on her own terms. . . She’s faithful to him, I suppose?” There was no offensiveness in his voice.

I said, “Without doubt, in spite of all her follies.”

Fairchild nodded. “So is he. It can’t be much of a life for either of them.”

Yet, incredibly, it went on. It went on for a decade. It went on twelve years. She was thirty-one then. If she had been beautiful as a flower is beautiful, when she was nineteen, she was beautiful as a jewel is beautiful at thirty-one. Only the patina of her looks was different, harder, a little colder. Something was gone from her face, a certain wide-eyed expectancy.

Which I remembered one day when she told me that she planned to sail to Hawaii, where John de Launes was stationed, because a little of the glow seemed to have come back to her, that day.

“Don’t tell me not to go,” she said. “I haven’t seen John for more than two years.”

“It’s a long time since I stopped telling you not to do things,” I said.

Her face lost its smooth composure, and for a moment she looked absurdly young. “This time will be different,” she said. “I’ll tell him that I’ll go his road. We’ve let first youth go. The rest has to be saved.”

“I wish you luck.” There was nothing more to say.

She sailed in an incognito rather more carefully maintained than usual. What happened then I heard in a letter from Stephen Fairchild, who, after years at practically opposite ends of the earth from John, was at last stationed with him.

The letter came air mail from the Coast, so that it preceded Althea’s return by a day. It said in part:

“Even if she thinks this time she meant to go his way, she probably could not have done it. At least—I hope in time that’s what she makes herself believe. Well then, she took a suite under the name of Smith, made discreet inquiries, and found he was at this dance.

“At the dance she sent her chauffeur in to ask Major de Launes to come outside for a moment. I was there. The place was complete with a string orchestra and palms in the patio and a moon—all just like a tourist circular. I heard the man ask, heard someone tell him that Major de Launes had gone walking down to the sea. It wasn’t immediately that I thought it might be Althea asking for him, but after the man had gone this possibility came to me.

“So I followed him. There’s a path to the sea, very tropical and beautiful. Althea was walking ahead of me, near the shore. I hurried, but I didn’t come up with her until we were both in bright moonlight on the beach, with the Pacific thundering along so that I could not call her.

“And there in bright moonlight were John and Colonel Terrett’s daughter, with the girl’s arms round John’s neck, and John kissing her not without enthusiasm. They did not see us, and Althea came back past me so fast she never looked at me. I couldn’t follow her immediately, because abruptly John left the Terrett girl, and went striding away down the shore, and the girl sat down in the sand and began to sob.

“She’s a nice child and I couldn’t very well leave her without attempting something about it. It appeared—she was disturbed enough not to be able to help talking—that she’s been in love with John ever since he came here, but tonight was the first time he ever seemed to respond. And then, after what we saw, he said to her, ‘You’re sweet and pretty and young, so go fall in love with a contemporary, my dear, because I’m in love with a golden ghost, and much good that does me.’ And left her, as I saw.

“Well, I got her back to the dance telling her something about a young lost love of John’s, but assuring her that it would all come out right somehow—because she’s a nice little girl and was really badly upset. Then I went looking for Althea. I knew at what hotel she’d probably stay, and the Miss A. Smith, New York City, was no impenetrable disguise. She was packing to go home on next morning’s steamer.

“Payson, I swear I tried to make her understand the triviality of what had happened. In spite of the way I used to feel about her, I tried, because he’s been her whole life though he’s been none of it. That’s confused, but you see what I mean. She was dreadfully calm. Because she was seeing all at once everything she’s never seen heretofore—that she must have condemned him to dreadful loneliness, years of it.

“I talked until sunrise, but though I did convince her that the incident itself was nothing—I even told her what the poor Terrett child had said—she was still determined to go home without seeing John.

“We had breakfast on the hotel gallery, and saw, by bad luck, John walking across the plaza. Before that she’d insisted on being casual, and had told me amusing enough stories of acquaintances of mine in the States. But when she saw John she stopped talking and looked at him as though she saw her hope of heaven walking past, going farther and farther away.

“I couldn’t stand it. I said, ‘Don’t be a fool, Althea. I’ll go get him.’

“She said, in a voice hard as steel, ‘No, you won’t. You took him away from me once, twelve years ago. You were right then. Now you’ll be consistent and put me on a steamer to keep me away from him. That’ll be right too.’ So I sat still.

“In a minute she said, in a different voice, very softly, ‘Thank you, Stephen. Once it was said to me that the only thing in the world I could ever do for John was to let him go. So, at last, I’ve managed it.’

“She excused herself then, saying she had to dress. And presently I took her to the steamer. I left her staring out a porthole, looking completely composed, naturally. She’ll look composed the rest of her life. Only look after her, because she’ll never let you know, but her ship’s gone down. . .”

She never let me know. She was composed as I had never seen her when she came to me on her return and told me she wanted the quickest kind of a quiet divorce that was obtainable. We got it for her. I managed all the correspondence with John—who had retreated in his letters into impersonality. He wrote her once, after the divorce had been granted, in the manner of an old friend who thought she might be interested, to tell her that he was marrying a girl named Constance Terrett. She sent them a wedding present, something correctly impersonal. And looked at Jerry Carter with no more love than usual.

The next year, Stephen Fairchild, back from Hawaii, came to call, at Willow Valley. We all had tea, on the marble seat under the great elms.

After we’d talked of this and that, Stephen told her, rather too casually, that John was back from Hawaii, stationed on the West Coast, and that he and his wife had a son. Something moved suddenly in Althea’s quiet face, and was again, quiet. But I knew, in that dreadful instant, that she was not “over him”; that she would never get over him. She said, lightly enough, “Has he had enough of the Army yet?”

Stephen Fairchild shook his head, and Jerry brought the conversation back to the depression, which had not hurt him or Althea, actually, since both their fortunes could stand shrinkage, but had made them serious, as it had made other people.

Stephen came to see us once more, this time in town. He flew from the Mid-West to spare Althea one thing—to spare her from reading, as millions of people would read in some hours, that John de Launes was dead, that he’d crashed against a mountainside in a blizzard over Colorado.

Stephen telephoned me on his way to her house, so that I could be there with her when he came. He told her in that lovely quiet Georgian drawing-room where once the Edwards twins had told me that Althea’d fallen in love with a penniless lieutenant—and where John de Launes had never been at all.

He told her quickly. When he had finished, she stood, a slim figure with golden hair, very still. Suddenly she swayed a very little. But when I would have held her to steady her, she moved her hands in a small helpless gesture of protest. And she spoke, then, dully, in monotone.

“I should never have let him go. I should have fought on. Let him go, to the life he wanted, and in the end to let him die alone in the cold, broken, against a mountainside. . .”

Stephen Fairchild’s voice was hard. “You let him go to the life he chose and the death he chose, Althea. You let him go free.”

She looked at him wildly. “Is that supposed to be comfort?”

He nodded. “It was all that Althea Arden, born to what she was born, was able to do for John de Launes, who was born to something different—to love him enough to let him go. . . That’ll be the only comfort there’ll be for you, Althea, but I think in time it can be made to do.”

She steadied, spoke in a voice as firm as Stephen Fairchild’s. “So, I’m going to thank you both for coming, and ask you both to leave me—to whatever—”

We didn’t ask her what “whatever” was. Whatever she chose to find among her memories of him, or whatever strength she could find in herself alone, it did not greatly matter. She was an unbelievably lovely figure, in an almost incredibly perfect room, warm and secure, and it was scarcely likely that any storm outside could touch her any more.

One March day, in my presence, she asked Jerry Carter whether he still thought that it might be pleasant to be married to her—and the look on his face stilled all flippancy in her voice, then and thereafter. She said, watching him, “Because I do love you, Jerry.”

She made her wedding plans as she had made them all those Junes before, even to the wearing of white satin and a lace veil. She apologized to me for that breach of convention.

“He’s always seen me coming to him veiled and in white, to be married by a bishop, under the rose pergola.” She was right. That was how he had wanted it.

She sent Stephen Fairchild an invitation. He came, but did not sit among the guests in chiffons and in morning coats. I saw him before the ceremony—a little apart on the marble bench under the elm above the pergola.

After Althea and Jerry were married, as they walked past the rows of guests who whispered to each other that she was lovely as ever, she looked up and saw Stephen. She smiled straight at him. He stood and saluted her.

I was just behind her. . . It was some shadow of elm leaves that the breeze swayed across the marble of the bench, it was some shifting pattern of sunlight through the branches—it was an illusion such as come to men growing old, but I could swear, that in that moment of her passing, beside his friend Stephen Fairchild, John de Launes stood and saluted her too.

REMEMBER ME

Mrs. Sullivan’s heavy feet came clumping as usual up the dark stairs as Susie Harris was fixing the coffee on the gas burner—wrapped in the old woolen bathrobe that was as much too large for her as it was too small for Mrs. Sullivan, with whom she shared it, turn and turn about.

Mrs. Sullivan came in panting and sat heavily in the only chair. “It’s spring, Susie. Here, I’ll finish breakfast. You’d better be getting your clothes on. It’s near half-past three.”

“Is it warm enough for me to wear my suit and my fur piece?” Susie asked.

“Sure,” said Mrs. Sullivan. “The men on the benches are sleeping almost comfortable.”

From behind a ragged curtain in the corner of the bedroom Susie was getting out the suit, saying, “It will be nice to get into something clean instead of that dirty old coat.”

Mrs. Sullivan agreed: “It makes it nice for the men that it’s warm enough to sleep in the parks. They can spend the lodging-house money on food.”

She poured the coffee from the ten-cent-store pot; took a loaf of bread out of the bottom drawer of the bureau; reached out on the window sill for some butter; buttered Susie’s bread as well as her own.

Susie, dressed now, regarded herself in the cracked mirror over the bureau.

Mrs. Sullivan said, “Sit down and drink your coffee.”

But Susie said: “I have to run. I promised Mr. Meyer I’d wax his desk this morning after I got through scrubbing.”

Mrs. Sullivan said, “He’ll give you a tip for that, like as not.”

Susie nodded. “I was thinking he might, then we could get some French pastry.”

Mrs. Sullivan laughed her amiable, big laugh. She said: “You don’t have to be spending your money buying pastry for me, Susie; I’m fat enough. Scrubbing floors from ten at night until three in the morning doesn’t seem to make me a pound thinner.” Then she added wistfully, “I wish I had your hours.”

“They are nice,” Susie said. “Pretty soon it’ll be almost quite light when I start to work.”

Mrs. Sullivan laughed again. “Go on with you,” she said. “I’ve told you time and again nobody’ll hold up the likes of you and me on a dark street.”

Susie, wrapping around her the fur piece worn almost to the skin, that now was hard to recognize as mink, said, “I know, but it’s more cheerful-like when it’s not real dark going to work.”

Mrs. Sullivan said: “It’s very cheerful-like just getting through when your boss arrives, if he arrives early. It makes him think of giving you tips or asking for your help. I never know who I work for; just the superintendent saying: ‘Mrs. Sullivan, do the 17th floor tonight.’ ‘Mrs. Sullivan, the lady who does the 12th had a baby yesterday and won’t be in; can you manage to do half the 12th besides your own?’ ”

“I know, my job’s more friendly,” Susie agreed. “I’d better be going.”

Mrs. Sullivan suggested, “Have another slice of bread,” but Susie shook her head.

The worried expression that Mrs. Sullivan knew so well was coming over her face.

Mrs. Sullivan said, “I’ll hold the lamp at the head of the stairs so you can see your way down.”

She wrapped herself in the wool bathrobe, for the halls were cold, and held it while Susie hurried down the stairs.

Out on the street, where the elevated pillars cast blacker shadows across the dark, she walked as fast as she could. She knew what Mrs. Sullivan meant when she said it was getting to be spring; the wind from the Hudson, smelling of oil and salt, smelled somehow a little warm, too; but she would be glad when it got lighter.

Although for years and years now she had started out to work daily at half-past three, she had never got to like it. She scurried like a small frightened animal through the steel jungle of the skyscrapers. Three blocks east with fine big arc lights at all the cross streets, then City Hall Park, which wasn’t so very dark really, and not lonely at all because of all the men sleeping on the benches. She looked at them as she hurried by. On “her” bench—the one where she always sat to rest on her way home from work if it was a sunny day and to watch all the young girls, that were so pretty and so bright-looking, on their way to their offices—there was a man sleeping now. She could not see his face. It was turned inward to the back of the bench, away from the glare of the light overhead. He slept as one completely exhausted. She could see that the soles of his shoes had big holes in them, and he had no overcoat.

She thought: “He must be very tired to be able to sleep like that, outdoors. It’s not really warm yet. I wonder, do the police drive the men off very early? They say the police are kinder than they used to be before times got so hard.”

She hurried on across Park Row into the comforting warmth and lights of “her” building where she was not just “the lady that scrubs the fourteenth,” but personal scrub woman to the firm of Meyer & Son.

She inquired politely of Jake, who ran the elevator, as to the health of his youngest, who was just recovering from whooping cough. He took her up to the fourteenth. He was whistling a tune of which she had heard him sing the words, “Give me something to remember you by.” It was a sad tune; it made Susie Harris ache. People were always having songs about “something to remember you by,” only when she was young it went “Then You’ll Remember Me.”

She got out, got her pail and brushes and soap, filled the pail with water from the hall tap, and began to scrub the back office. She always started there because it was the hardest, and saved Mr. Meyer’s front room with its handsome rug, for which he had a vacuum cleaner, for the last.

Someone had left a window open; a little warm spring breeze came in through it. It made it cheerful somehow, she thought, and wrapped in the bright-lighted security of these familiar offices in which she felt more at home than in the little, dark room she shared with Mrs. Sullivan, she began to sing over her scrubbing pail in an old, cracked voice:

She pushed her mop back and forth in time with the singing. She thought, “Jerry used to like that song.”

She scrubbed on cheerfully. It was long and long since any thought of Jerry had had power to hurt—not since she had grown old, and she had been old what seemed a long time. Fifty was very old if a woman had always worked hard.

Now it was just nice to think of Jerry who, no doubt, was a dignified, middle-aged man in a handsome office something like Mr. Meyer’s. Often and often now she told herself over the story of Jerry and herself as she worked. It seemed to make the work go faster. It was just like remembering the bright pictures in a gallery where Jerry once had taken her; or remembering the flowers in the garden of that inn up the Hudson where they had been for dinner. Strange, she thought, that she remembered him best when she sang that song, and that she remembered all the words of the song after such a long time.

She sang again:

She could see Jerry’s bright head; his mouth smiling, his eyes, that had such long lashes for a man’s eyes, half-closed, listening to her sing. She could even remember the first night that she saw him.

They called her Suzette then. She was singing at O’Hara’s Restaurant, which was not just the most fashionable but one of the most popular of Manhattan dining places. She was a new girl at O’Hara’s. Only a month before, she had been a saleslady in a big Brooklyn department store, and only two months before that she had been at school. She might have been a saleslady all her life if one of the other salesladies had not asked her to a birthday party where a gentleman whose brother was in the orchestra at O’Hara’s had heard her sing. He insisted that she come over and meet Mr. O’Hara; and when Mr. O’Hara heard her, he gave her a job right away, at four times the money she was earning as a saleslady.

She was glad of the extra money, because the aunt with whom she lived was ill and needed lots of special food and medicine. To be sure, it seemed funny staying up half the night singing, and her aunt worried at the hour she got home to Brooklyn; but after all, as her aunt said, a girl could be as ladylike at midnight as at noonday if she made up her mind to it. And Susie, who became Suzette at Mr. O’Hara’s suggestion, had made up her mind to it.

Other gentlemen before Jerry had asked to meet her; to have her sit at their table between the times she had to sing; had said flattering things about how pretty her dark hair was and how big her eyes. But Susie knew gentlemen got a bit above themselves when they had been drinking the champagne which she did not like because it went up her nose and made her want to sneeze. Sometimes she wanted to tell the gentlemen that they would show more sense if they went home to their wives and slept it off instead of talking nonsense to a girl who knew they were older than her own father had been, but, of course, Mr. O’Hara wouldn’t like it if she were rude to a customer; it would not be good for business. So she was polite and when they offered to drive her home in a victoria or one of the noisy motor cars that were newer, she said: “Thank you, no. I promised my aunt I would go home in the elevated,” and she always did.

But Jerry was different. In the first place he was not old enough but to be her brother. In the second, he was not drinking. He offered to buy champagne for her, but explained that in his work he could not afford to drink.

She said, “Thank you, I would rather have French pastry.”

For the famous French pastries at O’Hara’s—he had a chef from Paris who made them and nothing else—were the nicest things she had ever eaten. Besides Susie felt she would look prettier if she gained a few pounds from eating sweets.

Jerry thought she was beautiful just as she was. When he told her so in a sober voice that somehow sounded warm, it used to make her feel shy. He asked to take her home in a victoria that first night. But when she’d explained that her aunt liked her to go home in the elevated, he understood. He suggested he go home in the elevated with her. None of the other gentlemen had ever suggested that. Susie did not know what to say, because her aunt had never told her what to do if a gentleman wanted to bring her home in the elevated. But she decided it would be all right because Jerry was so sober and handsome and did not have a wife anywhere. She thought it only right to ask him that, because, of course, it would be wrong to accept attentions from a man if he were married.

Jerry came out the next Sunday to call, and he and her aunt, who was able to sit up that day, and Susie had tea in the little sitting room of the Brooklyn house. Susie was so glad that the landlady let roomers use the sitting room when they had company, because otherwise she could not have entertained him. Her aunt thought he was a very nice young man, though she could not understand exactly what his work was. He said it was “investments.” Susie explained that she had heard lots of the gentlemen at O’Hara’s talk about their investments. It was some important kind of business.

She could not go out with him every day because in the evenings she had to work, and in the afternoons she had to rehearse; but he came almost every night to O’Hara’s to hear her sing, and he took her to luncheon before rehearsals. Alternate Sundays she had the day off, because Sunday nights they shortened the show and called it a Sacred Concert, though they did not have hymn singing, just “classical” songs.

Mr. O’Hara had given her a song called “Then You’ll Remember Me.” He said it suited her voice. Jerry said it was a beautiful song, but very sad.

One day Mr. O’Hara spoke to her about Jerry. She had come in flushed and smiling from lunching with him. She was wearing some violets he had bought for her. He always said violets were her flower.

Mr. O’Hara said, “Miss Harris, you’re seeing a good deal of that young man, aren’t you?”

She nodded, a little startled by something in his tone more than by the words.

He said, “How old are you?”

She said, “Nineteen, sir.”

He said, “You live at home with your aunt, don’t you?”

She said, “Yes.”

He lighted a cigar and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. Then he made what was, for him who was a silent man, a long speech: “In a way, it’s none of my business what the girls at my place do outside working hours. But I’ve also made it a boast that no girl ever went wrong in my place unless she wanted to. Talk with the customers, yes; drink with them even, if she’s fool enough. I never ordered a girl to buy wine and run up a customer’s check, or accept any more attentions than she wanted.”

Susie did not understand him. She said:

“But I don’t drink, Mr. O’Hara, and Jerry doesn’t drink either. He says he can’t afford to in his work.”

Mr. O’Hara laughed a loud laugh. “He’s right,” he said. “A card sharp needs steady hands, and a confidence man needs a clear head. Do you know he’s both of those things?”

She said: “Oh, Mr. O’Hara, he can’t be. He told my aunt he was in the investment business.”

O’Hara shrugged his shoulders, then said: “I’ll speak to him. You run along.”

And that night she saw Mr. O’Hara talking to Jerry while she was singing. But when she came back to his table, Jerry didn’t say anything about what Mr. O’Hara had said, and she didn’t like to mention it. Instead Jerry said,

“Tomorrow is your day off, isn’t it?”

She nodded.

He said: “Let’s spend it in the country. I know an inn up near Newburgh where there is a rose garden. It will be at its best now. Roses are at their best in the middle of June.”

Susie said, “You know a lot about flowers.”

She thought his voice odd when he answered. He said:

“I was brought up in the country. I was brought up to be a gardener.”

He regarded his smooth, strong, white hands, their well-kept nails, as if he were amused.

She said, a little uncertainly, “And then you went into the investment business instead?”

He laughed a laugh that somehow did not sound cheerful; said, “Tomorrow I’ll tell you all about the investment business, maybe.”

Later that evening, when she was singing again, she noticed a man who one of the girls said was a police captain, talking to Jerry. And Jerry was looking at him in the funniest way. He did not look cheerful and kind at all. It was as if something had slid over his face, making it all hard and angry and sort of terrifying. But when she came back to the table, the police captain was gone, and Jerry seemed as cheerful as ever.

It was a beautiful ride on the boat up the Hudson the next day. The woods on the Palisades were such a fresh shade of green, and the water was so blue and shining. Jerry was very quiet though. When they left the boat and drove through country lanes where the trees almost touched the top of the carriage, she said:

“I am having the nicest time I ever had, Jerry. I never was in real country before.”

He said: “You belong in it. It suits you.”

And later, in the rose garden of the inn, while they were waiting for their dinner, he said, “You are like a rose yourself.”

She was glad that her aunt had had time to make her a new white ruffled dress and to trim her wide hat with new black velvet ribbon.

They had a beautiful dinner. Jerry ordered wine, because he said he was celebrating something, but that she was not to have any unless she wanted. She sipped a little to be polite. It tasted rather nice.

After dinner, when they were in the garden again, Jerry said: “I have to go to Europe tomorrow on business. I shan’t be gone long.”

She said, “Oh,” softly, not doubting him exactly, but puzzled about what Mr. O’Hara had said and about the police captain. She said rather wistfully, “Jerry, I wish I understood better about your business.”

He said: “It’s nothing that would interest a woman. My dear, before I go away, I want you to know that I love you. Remember that, will you?”

She said, “I love you, too.”

She had not been sure before that she did, but now in that sunlit garden, watching his handsome, unhappy face, she was sure. She said suddenly, with a sort of desperate eagerness: “Jerry, I know I am not very clever, but if anything troubles you, I want to understand. I’ll try so hard to, if you will tell me.”

He looked at her a long moment. Through all the years she was to live she remembered that strange straight glance of his.

He said: “Do you know, I believe you would. Would you miss the afternoon boat if I wanted you to and stay here until tomorrow?”

She hesitated. She had been working at O’Hara’s a whole season, and if, three months ago, she would not have understood him, she understood him now. She said:

“Oh, Jerry, you don’t mean it. You aren’t like the other gentlemen that come to O’Hara’s; besides, my aunt would be so worried.”

Afterward, she, who was not specially analytical, wondered about that last. She wondered whether she had really wanted to stay, whether it was only thought of her aunt that kept her. But Jerry was laughing gently.

He said: “Of course, I didn’t mean it. We’ll have to start for the boat in a quarter of an hour. Sing for me before we go, Suzette. Stand against the rose arbor and sing ‘Then You’ll Remember Me.’ I want to remember you singing it here.”

She stood up very simply and sang to him.

The landlord and landlady of the inn came out into the garden to listen, but she did not notice them; she saw only Jerry.

When she came to the second stanza, that always seemed to her the saddest part, the part that went:

Jerry did look so strange. Those long eyes of his looked so bright. Something shone on his eyelashes, almost—almost like tears.

When she had finished singing, he walked over to her, put his arms hard around her, kissed her suddenly, once. He had never kissed her before. And, though she did not understand why, herself, she clung to him. She put her arms around his neck just as boldly as if he had asked her to marry him and they were engaged, although he had not said anything about marriage.

Afterward, after the landlord and his wife had interrupted, told her she had such a pretty voice (and the landlord had told Jerry they made a handsome couple—but Jerry just laughed), when they were driving back to the boat through leafy lanes fragrant of early summer, as it grew dark and the fireflies blossomed like stars, Suzette thought she had been very bold to put her arms round Jerry’s neck like that. But at the time she had wanted to so badly.

All the way, driving back, Jerry did not talk at all, just held her hand tight, as if he were clinging to something. But on the boat, when the band was playing on deck, and the lights of little towns along the Hudson were so bright and pretty, he talked a great deal.

He said: “You are so young—so sweet. Tomorrow, before I go, I want to get you a present—something so you will remember me.”

She said, “But you won’t be gone so long—you said you would not be gone so long.”

He said sharply: “I lied maybe. Or maybe I can’t come back so soon as I should like, even if I did not lie. When I come back, you may be married and happy—to some one—some one in a safer kind of business. I hope you marry and are happy.”

His voice did not sound as if he hoped it. Suzette was so dismayed she could not speak.

He went on: “It ought to bring a man luck, though God knows that’s not why I do it—let you alone, I mean.” He said, “You are too young, too sweet,” again. And then, almost solemnly for Jerry who was always gay: “When you remember me, remember that I loved you more than I loved anybody—as much sometimes as I loved myself who’s the only person I’ve loved except you. Let’s forget all this and dance, Suzette.”

So they danced on the deck where the moonlight got mixed up with the light from the colored lanterns that were strung about. But Suzette was too unhappy to dance long. They stood instead by the rail, and she had a thought she knew was too silly to tell Jerry.

It was that the lights of little towns along the river, slipping past, slipping past so quickly, blurred, and confused her so that it seemed as if the lights were the warm, happy feelings, the laughter, that Jerry had brought into her life—and that that was what was slipping past, going away very fast now, lost somewhere in the dark hills or the dark water behind them.

Jerry took her home to Brooklyn in a carriage, and kissed her once more outside the door of the house where she lived. But now he was cheerful—or was he pretending? He said:

“I’ll call for you tomorrow at noon. We’ll have the gayest luncheon any two people ever had. Everything will be all right tomorrow, maybe.”

There was a restaurant Jerry liked around the corner from City Hall Park. Susie Harris did not know if the restaurant was still there any more, after so long a time. It was not far from Mr. Meyer’s office. She could find out by walking around three corners, but somehow she did not ever want to walk down that street. It was silly of her, she knew, not to want to.

That Monday they lunched at that restaurant, and then they walked out into the sunshine and sat for a little while on a bench in City Hall Park, where they often sat, spending a few minutes talking before she had to go to rehearsal and Jerry had to go somewhere—downtown she thought—to the investment business. There was a bench under a tree they called “their” bench.

Jerry had been gay all through luncheon, had made jokes about the fine, rich husband Suzette would find, forgetting Jerry in finding him. But though she usually laughed at all Jerry’s jokes (he said she had a laugh like silver bells), she could not manage to laugh today. And sitting in the sunlight on the bench, she could only think:

“I must find something to say to tell him—that I know he is in some trouble, but that men often get in some trouble, and it does not matter to a woman if she cares. She just wants to share it.”

But she did not know how to begin and could only think unhappily that she would be very late for rehearsal, and that Mr. O’Hara would be angry, but that for once she did not care, although it was an important rehearsal. They were trying out some new songs. She was not to sing “Then You’ll Remember Me” any more. She was glad, rather, that she was not to have to sing it to strange gentlemen after Jerry was gone and would not hear her.

Jerry said suddenly—in a hard voice, but she knew the harshness was not meant for her; she knew as well as if she were clever that Jerry did not want to go away any more than she wanted him to—

“We’d better say good-bye. My boat sails at four, and I have things to do before that.”

He was, she saw through eyes so filled with tears that even his bright hair was a little dimmed, handing her an envelope. He said:

“I could not decide what to give you. Take this—and buy something for yourself. Don’t spend it all on your aunt; buy something to wear—so that when you wear it, you’ll remember me. It’s five hundred dollars.”

He was trying to keep his thin, handsome, young face cheerful. He said, “Tell me what you will buy with it.”

She said, because she could not think of anything else she might buy: “One of the girls told me they were having a wonderful sale of fur pieces—marked down, you know, because it’s summer—at one of the big stores. For next year and other years.”

That seemed to amuse him. He said: “That would be perfect. Buy yourself a fur piece to keep your pretty neck warm, through all the winters we shall not be together.” Then he repeated himself, in a different voice, a voice that was shaky: “Through all the years we shall not meet again—promise me you will buy the fur piece.”

She promised him. He was standing up to leave her. He had already told the carriage driver, who was waiting, to take her to O’Hara’s. He was standing tall and handsome and young in the bright sunlight. Yet she could not see him clearly at all. He caught at her hand, released it, and turned without another word. He was a slim, tall young man in a blue suit that fitted so nicely across his shoulders, striding away from her, across the park, under the trees that shimmered so in the sunlight. She had wanted to ask him not to go. She could not think what she had wanted to ask him. She could only think that he always wore beautiful clothes that fitted him nicely across the shoulders.

She closed her eyes to keep the tears back, and when she opened them, he was gone. She told the carriage driver to go to the store. Because she had promised Jerry to buy a fur piece, she bought a mink tippet, thought it was becoming, wondered if Jerry would admire it, then realized that she might not ever know.

Though she was dreadfully late at rehearsal, Mr. O’Hara did not say anything.

The heavy, tiring New York summer went by. She sang at O’Hara’s, rehearsed at O’Hara’s, spent all the rest of her time in the little room in the Brooklyn rooming house with her aunt, who was very ill now. She heard no word at all from Jerry. Sometimes, in the hot nights, when the wind carried the sound of harbor whistles to her little Brooklyn room, she wondered if any of the whistles blowing were on a boat that was bringing him home. Then she would go tiptoeing carefully in the dark, so as not to wake her aunt, to the bureau drawer where she kept the fur piece carefully wrapped in tissue paper and camphor balls. She would take it out, stroke the shiny skins. Besides the fur piece there was in the drawer the rest of the money Jerry had given her. She had some vague notion that she should keep that money for him. But in the fall, when her aunt died, she had to spend it on the funeral.

She did not wear mourning for her aunt. Mr. O’Hara liked his girls to look smart and cheerful, even when they were going to and coming from work. So she could wear the mink tippet. The girls admired it. She told Sally, one of the girls she liked best, that Jerry had given it to her. She wanted to speak of him to some one. It was getting to be so long since she had spoken of him, or heard any one speak of him, that it seemed sometimes as though he had never happened at all. Though, right after he had gone away, when her aunt first got so sick, she had heard two of the girls talking about him. One was saying that he fled to England to escape arrest in New York. But Mr. O’Hara had come in that day and stopped the girls talking, and she did not ever question them because she felt if Jerry had wanted her to know his troubles with the investment business, he would have told her himself.

That day in the fall, when she spoke of him to Sally, Sally looked at her queerly, was silent a minute, then said,

“Well, at least he gave you something to remember him by.”

But Suzette did not think that that was what Sally had started to say.

After a minute Sally asked: “Why don’t you come and live in my boarding house on Forty-seventh street. It must be very lonely for you out there in Brooklyn, now you are alone.”

It was lonely for her, so in a little while she followed Sally’s suggestion. But through days and evenings that added up frighteningly quickly into months and almost to a year now since Jerry was gone, she did not go out with any of the endless procession of gentlemen who came to O’Hara’s.

In the end, of course, she did go out with one of them—with several of them; because she was alone. Because now it would not worry her aunt, because now it seemed not so important. But when springtime came again, her heart ached horribly for that other lost springtime; for that bright-haired young man who, she was sure, would have come back if he could.

So she learned to drink champagne even if she did not like the fizziness. It stopped all aching, all wishing that things were different, that the gentlemen at O’Hara’s were less red-faced and moist-eyed. The days added up to another year.

When it was spring again and time to put the fur piece carefully away in camphor, she was pleased to see that it still showed no signs of wear.

In the autumn of that year she was ill. She had a cold and fever, then pneumonia. Sally was kind, but Suzette went to the hospital because it was not fair to Sally to keep her up all night and day taking care of her, since Sally had to work. Mr. O’Hara was kind, too. He sent her a basket of fruit and kept her place open for a long time. Then, when he could not keep it open longer, he sent her a check to the hospital.

Trying her voice once in the days of her slow recovery, she knew that she could not sing any more, so she went back only once to the room she had shared with Sally, to get her things. She moved to a cheaper rooming house, farther uptown, for she had very little money and did not want to be a burden to Sally, who had very little more.

When she felt strong enough, she answered an advertisement in the paper for a lady’s maid. She thought that she could be a lady’s maid because her aunt used to say she was very neat, and she could sew pretty well. She did not yet feel strong enough to try to be a saleslady and stand on her feet all day. She told the lady her name was Susie Harris, because it seemed silly to call herself Suzette now that she was not singing any more.

The lady was quite kind to her, and for a little while she felt safe and content. When the lady’s husband came home from a business trip, she recognized him as one of the gentlemen who often spent evenings at O’Hara’s. At O’Hara’s, though, he gave a different name. When he recognized her, she was discharged. She never knew what reason he gave his wife.

Then she tried to get work in a store, but times were hard, and they were not hiring salesladies. She got work finally as a general servant in a house where the lady expected her to do extra hard work because she had taken her without references. But Susie did not mind. There was a child in the house, a boy with bright hair for whom she used to make cookies. When he came home from school, he would sit in her neat kitchen eating them, telling all the adventures of his day, in a gay voice that reminded her of Jerry.

Susie was sorry to leave that place. They discharged her because the gentleman made more money, and they wanted a smarter servant. She understood that. She knew she was not smart-looking. She looked always tired, and hers was the kind of dark hair that was graying young.

On some impulse of kindliness, or perhaps because she was conscience-stricken at the end for the years she had overworked Susie and underpaid her, her mistress gave her, when she left, a suit that was almost brand-new but not becoming to her. Susie was grateful for it. When she wore the suit and the fur piece, hunting for work, she felt she looked so neat and respectable, though the mink did not shine quite as it used to, being a little rubbed away with long wearing.

The suit, the fur piece, saw her through the slow progression of time. She wore them all spring and all autumn in these years. She had managed to buy a heavy coat for the winters.

They saw her through the years when the last of her youth slipped away behind her as the lights of the little river towns had slipped away behind the boat that long ago summer night when Jerry last brought her home.

Far and far was the strange, mixed fragrance of tobacco and wine and shaving soap and perfume that was special to O’Hara’s. Receding quickly, too, a long succession of mistresses for whom she had worked hard, who let her go when they found younger servants who could work harder. There was a year when she was dreadfully ill again; there was the year after that when she worked at home—home then being an attic room far over near the river, with no heat and not much light—making beaded bags. There was a year after that when her eyes could no longer stand the closeness of that work, and so at last she came to the gray time when she was one of a long line of women who stood in rain or sunshine or in snow outside the agencies where they hired women for “cleaning by the hour,” “higher pay for night work”; and so she was scrubbing floors at night in enormous, frightening, echoing office buildings.

One night the lady scrubbing next to her was Mrs. Sullivan, a big, strong Irishwoman with a warm laugh.

They talked, at first, about the weather and their work. Then Mrs. Sullivan talked one night about her life. The husband whom she seemed to remember pleasantly, though she stated with matter-of-factness that he was never sober one Saturday night in thirty years, and that he was often “in trouble with the police.” She talked, too, of her children long dead. And to Susie came an impulse to talk of things so far away that it almost seemed they had never happened, of O’Hara’s and, after a time, of Jerry.

By the time she spoke of Jerry the two old women had taken a room together because “it made it nice to have company.” Mrs. Sullivan found the room in what, someone had told her, had been a fine house once—a hundred years before, long before they ever built the elevated.

It was some little time after they had been living together that Susie had a piece of luck. She was working overtime, cleaning the offices of the company called Meyer & Son. They were so short-handed in the building that night that she worked till it was bright day outside, and was hurrying through with the last fine office, so as to be done before people started coming to business, when a gentleman came in and found her there.

He said, “Good morning.”

Susie said, “I’ll be through very quick now, sir.”

He regarded her—a decent little woman with faded blue eyes and a sort of bewildered but uncomplaining expression.

He said: “Are you strong enough to do such hard cleaning? You don’t look big enough.”

She said, “But, sir, I am very strong.”

There was panic in her voice. So many times through so many years the question of her strength had preceded loss of work.

He said: “You know best about that, I suppose. I’ve been meaning to speak to the superintendent. I want someone to take care of the cleaning of my own offices—not leave it to the general night staff. They’re very careless. Would you like to take care of just my offices?”

She nodded, and after a few questions it was arranged. It meant a little more money and better hours, for Mr. Meyer wanted her to do the cleaning at the end of the night, finishing at eight in the morning so that his office manager would find her there if there were any instructions he wanted to give her. It meant besides to Susie a comfort she could not quite explain to herself—the feeling of being wanted somewhere.

So after so long she had a sort of haven and was content. All there was left of youth in her was the melody of an old song, a stirring in her heart when spring warmed it, and a childish fondness for French pastries she had first eaten at O’Hara’s. Whenever Mr. Meyer gave her a dollar or two extra, she and Mrs. Sullivan shared a feast of French pastries. For Mrs. Sullivan, too, acquired this liking out of Susie’s far youth.

By eight o’clock Susie had waxed Mr. Meyer’s desk and vacuum-cleaned his oriental rug and was ready to go home. She waited a few minutes in the hope that the office manager or Mr. Meyer would be early so that she might get her dollar. She stood looking about Mr. Meyer’s shining, clean office with some honest pride in its appearance.

Sometimes, in this room which she always saved for the last, she remembered Jerry almost vividly. Surely somewhere he lived in the world, maybe now grown a little gray-haired, but tall and straight, in beautiful suits that still fitted him across the shoulders; in the investment business with a shining office and an oriental rug and a mahogany desk, something like this one. She had never believed the rumors she heard about him. Over the years she had almost forgotten hearing them.

Neither the office manager nor Mr. Meyer came, so she went home, disappointed of her pastries for the moment, but she knew that Mr. Meyer would notice how well his desk looked and would leave her something for the extra trouble so she could buy the pastries next day.

The early morning sun was warm in the park, and the little, new leaves on the trees were golden green. She sat feeling peaceful in the sunshine on “her” bench, that bench in the place where in another lifetime she had said good-bye to Jerry. She did not believe any more that she would ever see Jerry again, but in time she had got used even to knowing that.

She rose to go home, walking a little stiffly and being very careful of the frightening rush of daytime traffic at the street corners.

It was the next morning after Mrs. Sullivan had announced the near arrival of spring. Susie was fixing coffee as Mrs. Sullivan’s heavy feet clumped up the dark stairway.

Mrs. Sullivan said, “It’s going to be another nice day,” and went on finishing breakfast while Susie dressed, held the lamp for Susie as she scurried down the stairs.

Out into the street, where the pillars of the elevated made frightening, black shadows in the darkness, Susie walked as fast as she could. She hurried so that she was breathless when she reached City Hill Park, and there she dared to walk slowly because the men sleeping on the benches kept the park from seeming lonely. On “her” bench a man in a wrinkled, ragged suit was sleeping.

Susie recognized by the holes in the soles of his shoes that it was the same man who had slept there the night before, with his face turned away from her. Tonight the glare from the arc light fell full across his face, and seeing him the shabby little woman made a sound in her throat that would have been a scream except that her breath seemed to stop, so she could not scream out loud. She stood staring at him.

Yes, she was sure. She thought: “Maybe God is kinder to men than to women in having time change them less, so that no matter how old they get or what happens to them you can still recognize their faces from the way they looked when they were young. Or maybe it isn’t so kind.”

She stood still, staring at him. In that lost, dissipated, sleeping face, under that thin, white hair, was still the look of Jerry.

She did not know what to do, standing there. She was long resigned to the dealings of time with herself. It had not seemed to matter what happened to her, while she kept the faith that somewhere in the world Jerry was successful and gay and important. But if time had brought Jerry to broken shoes and ragged suit—it didn’t seem right. She wanted to wake him. She changed her mind. If he remembered the face, the figure, the name even, of that Suzette he had known for one spring, still he would not want a shabby old woman waking him to talk of her and himself when they were young.

She made herself walk on. She was swaying almost as if she were drunk, but she made herself put one foot ahead of the other across the park, across Park Row, to enter “her” office building.

Jake, who ran the night elevator, said to her anxiously:

“What’s the matter, Miss Harris? You look sick this morning.”

She said, “No, I’m not sick.”

She hurried away from his stare. She cleaned the offices of Meyer & Son automatically. Some part of her mind went through the familiar order of things. As usual she saved Mr. Meyer’s office for the last. When she went in there, she saw he had left her a note. She opened it with fingers that were shaking horribly. He thanked her for waxing his desk and enclosed two dollars.

Automatically her first thought was that you could buy a whole dozen of pastries for her and Mrs. Sullivan, and then she wept, a frail, shaking old woman, an incongruous figure in the room she had so carefully put in order.

She did not know why she wept, but she knew that she did not want any French pastries—now or ever any more. Then she was afraid it was late and some one might be coming down early to work. It would not do for Mr. Meyer or the office manager to see her crying there, so she took off her working dress, put on the suit and fur piece, and went out into the sunshine.

Her heart was beating terribly fast as she crossed the park. She did not know whether she hoped he would be gone or still on “their” bench.

Yes, he was sitting there. In the bright daylight she could not bear to look at his face, because by daylight the things that made it different from the face of young Jerry showed so much more plainly than the things that made it the same.

Because her knees felt weak, rather than because she had anything to say to this shabby old man who looked feeble, she sat down at the other end of the bench. He did not notice her. He was staring straight ahead of him, not seeing the bright, smart-looking young girls and young men hurrying across the park to work.

She glanced at him once or twice, and it seemed to her that she must speak; must not leave this poor old man sitting staring into space.

She said, “It’s a nice, bright morning, isn’t it?”

He turned his head slowly, said, “Thank God, winter is gone.”

Susie said, “Yes, it does make it nicer.”

He said, “Do you know the nearest place they give away coffee?”

She shook her head. She knew there were such places, but she had never been to one. She said very timidly, “Are you hungry?”

He laughed. In spite of the bitterness, in spite of the age in that laughter, it was so dreadfully like the laughter of the Jerry that she had known that she wanted to scream. She said, moving closer to him not to embarrass him,

“I had some money come in unexpected.” She was hunting in the pocket of her suit. She had kept Mr. Meyer’s two dollars in the envelope. She handed the envelope to him. She said apologetically, “It’s only two dollars.”

He looked at her. He said: “Good God. You don’t look as if you had two dollars to give away.”

She said: “It’s all right. I’m fixed very comfortable, thank you.”

Jerry said, “If you’re sure you can spare it—thank you very much.”

He seemed to be trying to keep his voice from being so harsh; to make it polite as it used to be.

She said, “You’d better go get yourself a good breakfast.”

He said: “I’m too tired to hurry. This is a funny thing.”

He had stopped looking at her and was looking off into space again. She noticed—it seemed such a silly thing to notice—that he was wearing a heavy sweater under his coat, and she was glad that the sweater looked warm.

He repeated himself: “A very funny thing. Once on this bench—or a bench in the same place—I gave five hundred dollars to a girl to buy herself something to remember me by.” He laughed again. “You won’t believe that; you’ll think it one of the stories tramps make up.”

She said, “No, I believe you,” and shivered a little, afraid that he would recognize the fur piece.

Then she knew how foolish that was. He had never seen it, not even when it was new and silky. Now that it was shabby and old, and not so warm as it used to be, why would he notice it at all?

He said, talking to himself still: “She used to sing a song about ‘Then You’ll Remember Me.’ I bet she forgot me twenty-five years ago.”

The little old woman on the bench said, “No. I’m sure she did not forget.”

The man did not seem to have heard her.

“I’ve been in jail and out of it a lot of times since then,” he said.

He roused himself as if to go. He said: “Well, thank you, ma’am, for the money. It’s enough for breakfast and a railroad ticket for Stamford. Last spring about this time I got a job as a gardener in Stamford. I think I can get it again. I used to be a good gardener once, a long time ago. Before all the other things began.”

He stood up slowly. He said, “Ma’am, I’m very grateful.”

She said, “That’s all right.”

Then he was walking away from her, a bent, old man in a wrinkled, nondescript suit and a thick sweater that showed at the back of the neck—he was walking away slowly, stiffly.

She could not bear to see him walk away from her, so she did not watch him out of sight. She rose and went stumbling home.

Mrs. Sullivan was still asleep. Susie was glad of that; glad that Mrs. Sullivan could not see her face. She would be sure to notice something. And for all the things she had told Mrs. Sullivan about her life, she knew that she would never tell her this thing. She tried to sleep, herself, but she could not for a long time.

Finally she did sleep, the deep sleep of the old and exhausted, so that Mrs. Sullivan had to wake her when it was time for their dinner.

Mrs. Sullivan asked if Mr. Meyer had remembered to leave a tip, but Susie told her he had forgotten it. They had their dinner in the late afternoon; then, as usual, Mrs. Sullivan cleaned the room, while Susie did some mending for Mrs. Sullivan because she was much the better seamstress.

They talked the meaningless talk of old people about the weather, and about Mrs. Sullivan’s rheumatism, and about what would be nice for dinner next day. Susie was glad when it was eight o’clock and time for Mrs. Sullivan to go to work.

The night was long, but at last Susie heard the familiar, heavy steps of Mrs. Sullivan coming home.

Mrs. Sullivan said, “It’s another nice day.”

Susie was hurrying into her suit, hooking her fur piece around her. She was afraid that she would be late.

Mrs. Sullivan said, “The coffee’s ready.”

They shared coffee. Mrs. Sullivan held the lamp for Susie to see her way down the dark stairs. She scurried through the darkness across the quiet, cool, empty street where the river breeze blew sweet, to the park. When she got near “her” bench, she was trembling. Somehow she did not want to look at it. But it was empty when she looked.

In “her” office building she spoke to the elevator boy, got into her working clothes, started cleaning with the rear office, worked hard and fast as she could. She did not feel like singing.

It was bright morning when she finished Mr. Meyer’s office at last. She vacuum-cleaned the rug carefully. She dusted; she thought the desk looked very nice—all newly polished.

When she was through work, she sat at the desk a minute. She was thinking that she did not like this room any more since she could not tell herself that somewhere in the world Jerry had a fine office like this with an oriental rug and mahogany desk. She thought:

“Men mind so much not having things turn out just as they expected when they were young. They mind more than women.”

She dressed and went out in the bright, clear morning. “Her” bench was empty still. She sat there because she had sat there so often. She knew somehow that Jerry would never sit there again. He was gone, to be a gardener.

And then, as the sunlight warmed her old body, she remembered a garden with a rose arbor, sweet with the scents of June, the garden where she had once sung to Jerry. Serenity returned to her again.

With just one little change, the story which had sustained her for a quarter of a century began to be a comfort again. Not in an office with a fine carved desk and a bright rug, but where the kind winds of summer blew down petals on green grass, Jerry would remember her—in an unusually fine garden.

DEATH IS A DREAM

She walked along the strip of sand stretching between the rising cliffs where the seagulls nested, and the sea where the white-crested waves roared in with the warm sunlight flickering through the foam.

If it had taken three hundred years that included an ancestor who came to the wilderness in search of he knew not quite what, two major American wars, and a finishing school a long way remote from the “Academy for Daughters of Gentlemen,” which it was in the beginning, to produce her as she walked in full sunlight, she looked worth it. The sea breeze blew hair that was the color of new honey back from wide blue eyes that examined the shore, the sea, the sky, with a certain sense of anticipation that was in her smile, too. It was a smile and a soft, red mouth that time might mold to smugness, to sullenness, to thin resignation, but now was only young in its defiance of time and the scarring of the years.

She walked lightly over the sand and the smooth, warm pebbles, pleased as a child, with the breeze across her face, with the vista ahead of sand dunes and sea and marshes. She was reconciled briefly with that strange illness which, interrupting the summer’s calculated gayeties, had brought her for this interval to a dull section of Cape Cod. Usually, because she was eighteen, she felt that she had no time to waste, that a fortnight’s withdrawal from activity in her set was an irreparable loss of living. Still it was a break in the routine she sometimes resented.

She walked south from the brief sector of ocean front which was the exclusive possession, under the will of God and deeds of ownership several generations old, of her Aunt Lucille and certain other Bostonians of her aunt’s post-dated vintage. Farther south was the noisy, gay colony of Boston Irish whom one did not know if one was a young woman in the last summer before a carefully planned Boston début.

But between the summering Bostonians and the summering Boston-Irish lay a stretch of green marshland and a slow-moving salt river, where the wind in the reeds murmured forever. She had a fancy, left over from her childhood, that the reeds whispered very exciting things, beyond the succession of events likely to occur to a Boston débutante. She went along the shore by the marsh’s edge, toward the river. The wind blew more strongly there. It made her catch her breath sometimes oddly. She wondered a little why, since that sudden attack of weariness at Bar Harbor, she so often caught her breath.

The river could be crossed by stepping-stones now that the tide was low. She crossed it, walking carefully. Beyond was the cliff that seemed high only in relation to the marshland and the little cliffs northward and the low dunes south. She climbed it and was then so tired that she sat very still, watching the sun, setting behind the western hill, spill flames across the water that began to grow darker now.

He walked north. The Irish-American colony was gay and cheerfully noisy. He was born to its gayeties and its noise and enjoyed them usually. He might well have been content to marry in course of time (when his law practice was a little better established) and spend summers in one of those sprawling, comfortable houses in that colony.

But the war, going on almost since he was grown up, beyond that dark blue sea he always loved, the war to which he was so recently committed that the ink was not yet black on the signature of his Second Lieutenant’s commission, had made him restless. There were worlds beyond that comfortable, prosperous world of Boston Irish that he had not seen. And though now he was certain to see war, might, if necessary, blithely meet finality come springtime, three thousand miles distant from the vistas and the laughter that he knew, he had moments of being a trifle impatient with finality. There were vistas close to home, and yet remote enough to be provocative, that he had meant to explore some day. Now time, which had stretched ahead to such infinite distances, had telescoped. What he did not manage in the immediate tomorrow he might never manage at all.

For instance, he had never investigated that austere colony of Bostonians that was no more than three miles north of the much be-cupolaed house of his father, where he had spent all the summers he could remember.

So today, as he walked northward, he was impelled by some mood in which definite excitement, because he was going to the war, mingled with a certain vague regret that he was leaving all his pleasant life behind him, and a shrewd suspicion that though he could die well enough if he must, he did not want to die without having lived a great deal more.

He walked fast. The sea breeze blew his hair into his eyes. He pushed it back impatiently. The brightness of the slanting sunlight made blue shadows across its blackness before he reached the marshes, where there was a cliff scarcely high enough to be worthy of the name, he thought. He climbed it lightly. At its top, sitting on a rock with the August sun setting in a red blaze behind her, was a girl with honey-colored hair, who regarded the darkening sea, the far, faint light on the horizon over which and beyond which he was to journey.

Her immediate thought, when she looked up, was that there stood one of the handsomest young men she had ever seen.

He spoke hesitantly, very politely. “I hope I did not startle you coming up the hill so suddenly.”

She shook her head and then, because during her two weeks’ visit with her aunt she had spoken to no one nearly as young as herself, acted on impulse, did what she had never done in her carefully-supervised life before, began a conversation with a young man she did not know.

She said, “The view is charming from here, isn’t it? I’ve never been as far south along the shore before.”

He said, “I’ve never been so far north.”

She said, “Oh,” and he said nothing, while he placed her as belonging to the colony of Bostonians to the north, and she, as much by the hint of accent in his warm voice, as by what he said, decided he was from the Irish-American colony to the south. Not at all a person for a Boston débutante who was scheduled by her family to marry quickly for money and position—and who meant to do it too, to get away from her family—to know.

Nevertheless, she spoke first after a little silence, spoke sincerely from her thoughts, because he was someone she would not see again and it did not matter what she said to him. She said, “I’ve been sitting here rather a long time, because it’s pleasanter than going home to dress for a dinner party where eleven of the middle-aged will contradict one another’s opinions as to the prospects of the war.”

He said, “I walked up here because I’d never seen just this piece of coastline before except from a sailing boat, and I’ve got the idea in my head that I want to see everything I can in the next week or two, because I am going to the war after that and won’t be able to see any of it for a while. I like this country. I’ve lived down there summers ever since I was born.”

She, who had never lived anywhere with such regularity, being the rather unwanted reminder to her grandparents who brought her up, of their dead daughter’s unfortunate marriage, found no answer to that. She had been dragged through childhood in two dozen different “select” but inexpensive European pensions and nearly half as many schools with the same qualifications. Until at sixteen, when her promise of beauty became a certainty, she was brought back to Boston winters and Bar Harbor summers which were, she knew, an enormous drain on her grandfather’s shrunken capital, but were also, she was explicitly told, to give her the opportunity to reward her grandparents for all their care by achieving a brilliant marriage.

Recently, even, a most suitable candidate for her hand had been named to her—Jonathan Haines, younger partner in the firm which had been her family’s solicitors for generations. He was extremely wealthy in his own right, of excellent family and no more than forty-five years old. She knew herself that he was enormously attracted to her at the time of their meeting in June, on the most recent occasion when her grandfather arranged to put new mortgages on old property. She sighed, shrugging her shoulders just a little.

The man, sitting a little apart from her, thought that he had never seen a girl’s face so beautiful, so somehow peaceful.

She said to him, “I hope you have the best of luck in the war, Mr.—”

He said, “My name’s Terence Donoghue.”

So she answered that, “I’m Rosamond Parker.” And then she said abruptly, “What is it like down there where you live? I’ve heard you Irish have lots of fun.”

There was nothing in the least offensive in her voice or in her manner of asking. He understood completely that she only wanted to know of a kind of life that was probably somewhat different than her own, and so interested her.

He told her, speaking seriously, with a sort of pride in his voice, that his father was a brick-layer when he first came to America, but now had a big contracting business. That his mother used to be “musical” until the cares of a growing family gave her too little time to practise, but still had a lovely voice when she sang for them in the evenings, Irish songs his father liked. He told her of his sister at Sacred Heart Convent and his brother just starting at Boston College. He told her of the great gathering of all his cousins on St. Patrick’s Day to watch the parade from the balcony of his father’s house in South Boston.

The warmth in his voice moved her a little. She could not quite understand just why. Perhaps it was because he was stirred himself, because in trying to describe to this strange girl all the things dear and familiar to him, he himself savored them with a certain poignancy because he was so soon leaving them behind.

When he was silent she tried to tell him a little of her own life; of the father and mother she vaguely remembered; of her years in Europe afterward with her grandparents; of sailing home from Le Havre so hurriedly in 1914, and seeing the lines of French soldiers marching northward and some of the Belgian refugees struggling into town. She tried even solemnly to describe to him her feelings about becoming a débutante in a few months, how she felt it would be “nice” to be grown up, to be a little freer than she had been.

She did not notice on his face, in the growing dusk neither of them noticed, a sort of pity. For he did not envy her her position at all. He thought, “A poor child without father or mother of her own and no home, dragged all around Europe by those grandparents, who had brought her back, no doubt, to make a rich marriage for them.”

She said, “And so I got a little over-tired in Bar Harbor—trying to go to too many parties, I expect—and they sent me down here to have a rest with my Aunt Lucille. She is a darling to me, but of course very old.”

She stopped talking, regarded the sea and the sky and said, surprisedly, “I didn’t realize how dark it was getting. I’ll have to hurry to get home for dinner.”

He stood up, said, “If you don’t mind I’d like to walk as far as your house with you. It will be a little dark before you reach home by the shore path, which is quicker, but it’s lonely.”

She thought, “Well, if Aunt Lucille fusses, she’ll just have to fuss. I will say, though, that she seldom fusses at all compared to grandmother, who always must know all about the father and mother of anyone with whom I go for a stroll.” She said, “Yes, come along, if it won’t make you get home to your own dinner too late.”

But Terence Donoghue, who had fallen in love abruptly between the setting of the sun and the coming of the dusk with a girl with golden hair and grave, blue eyes and a soft way of speaking, would not have minded if he missed dinner altogether for the sake of an extra half hour with her.

When they came down the cliff to the river bank the tide had risen a great deal so that the stepping-stones were almost all hidden, but the long August twilight gave enough light still for them to see where the stones were in the swirling water.

But Terence insisted that she must not get her feet wet walking across them herself and so he carried her across, holding her lightly. He was sometimes halfway to his knees in water, but he never noticed.

When they were walking under the shadow of the little cliffs, laughing together over the exciting crossing of the river, she said suddenly, “Sing me one of the Irish songs you told me your mother sings to your father.”

He hesitated, then he began to sing without any self-consciousness at all, a song about someone called “Macushla.” Rosamond was so surprised at first by the power and the sweetness of his voice that she did not notice the words he sang.

Above, the first stars were glittering in the half-dark sky. She listened to the song. Terence was singing softly now so that his voice came under the steady beat of the waves.

“Macushla, Macushla, your white arms are reaching; I feel them enfolding, caressing me still.”

A sea-bird, late on its homeward flight, swung down before them—a swift, dark shadow between them and the little glittering stars. Rosamond’s arm was close to Terence’s. His voice crescendoed. “Fling them out from the darkness, my lost love, Macushla. Let them find me and bind me again if they will—” He paused and then his voice went on softly—

“Macushla, Macushla, your red lips are saying, that death is a dream, and love is for aye. Then awaken, Macushla, awake from your dreaming— My blue-eyed Macushla, awaken to stay.”

She was silent when he finished, and he asked a little anxiously, “Did you like the song?”

She said, “It was a beautiful song.”

Then they turned away from the sea, up the path to the road.

He said, “I don’t suppose you would be free tomorrow, Miss Parker, to go for a sail in my boat?” And when she did not answer immediately, said hopefully, “There’s a little cove this side of the river, where I could bring the boat so you would not have to walk far.”

She said gayly, “But I thought you wanted to see as much of the country about here as you could before you go away.”

He recognized the gayety and answered it. “You can see a great deal of the sea from a sailboat.”

She laughed. It was the first time he had heard her laugh, and he thought it the prettiest sound he had ever heard. She said, “We lunch rather late. I couldn’t meet you until three.”

His voice was delighted. He said, “At three, then,” and they were in front of her aunt’s house.

He was conscious of much shrubbery and the gleam of white pillars of the house behind it. In the second that they stood at the gate he was also aware that Rosamond wanted to ask him in for politeness’ sake, but he knew that it might well be embarrassing for her to do so. So he said very quickly, “I must hurry home for dinner now.”

She held out her hand to him. It felt little and cool and very soft.

She said, “Thank you for the song.” But he could not find anything to say, for his heart was pounding so, except, “Good night, Miss Parker. It will make me happy to see you tomorrow.”

Then he was gone, his quick footsteps a sharp sound in the quietness of the street.

Rosamond turned and went into the house where her Aunt Lucille did not fuss at all, and said only, “You must try to get home before dusk, child. There’s a chill in the air at dusk and you have been ill.”

But Rosamond, dressing for dinner, thought that it was a long time since she had felt so warm and gay.

It was one of those gray summer days with brightness in it. The hidden sun flung an odd, clear light on the sea and the coastline.

They had been sailing a long time and were in sight of the cove on their way home, when that rare moment that comes only to people who achieve instant intimacy, that sense of having known each other forever, came to them. Then, though they had talked easily all afternoon about themselves and each other, they fell silent, smiling at each other and listening to the little “thump-thump” of waves against the boat.

When they were landed, when he kissed her, all her carefully planned life was carried far from her on that steady wind blowing. It seemed fantastic that she had ever contemplated marrying Jonathan Haines with his hawk’s face and his heavy, scornful voice, out of some vague sense of duty to her grandparents.

She looked up at him with the wind in her hair and her red lips smiling. She said, as if she had just discovered a profound truth, “One has to marry for love.”

And he, not understanding the reasons back of the surprise in her voice, said, “But of course. Why else?”

And they walked home along the shore, hand in hand.

Afterward in her life she was sometimes to wonder why her Aunt Lucille seemed so curiously blind to her comings and goings in the next hurried days. But, at the time, she and Terence were so absorbed in each other that they never noticed.

The day after they became engaged Terence received notification to report to a division in Camden, New Jersey, a division supposed to be on the verge of receiving sailing orders. He was to report in a week’s time. That hurried them.

They wanted desperately to be married before he sailed. Through some political acquaintance of his father he obtained a special license. It happened conveniently that Rosamond’s aunt was called to Boston for a day on business. Before she left Rosamond told her about a visit she proposed to pay to an entirely fictitious boarding-school friend who was supposed to live in a resort farther down the Cape.

So, on a hot, sunny August afternoon she waited in her room, wearing a white organdy frock that she hoped the butler would not think a notably unsuitable costume for travelling. And when she heard the horn of Terence’s roadster, she went downstairs, outwardly calm, but with wild excitement in her heart. She stopped matter-of-factly to adjust her leghorn hat before the old mirror in the wide hall and made herself walk sedately, with the butler behind her carrying her bag, out the side door.

She went through what her aunt called the sea garden, which was crowded with old-fashioned flowers. In the still heat all her senses seemed sharpened and she was aware of the most absurd, irrelevant things. The blaze of color that a clump of scarlet zinnias made against the old wall, and the scent of marigolds, faint and pungent—she never forgot, all her life long, that splash of scarlet against gray, that fragrance oddly sweet.

The butler put her bags in the car and she said gravely, “Good-bye, John,” startled to realize that this old servant was the only person to whom she was saying good-bye. Startled and, for the moment, frightened. But when she turned as the car started and looked at Terence’s handsome face, a face so ardent and so kind, she was not frightened any more. She was again very sure.

They had not told their people. She, because she was so new in defiance that the inevitable family row seemed impossible to bear. She thought that it might make her lose the sense of ecstasy that had filled all the four days that she knew him. He had not told his father nor his mother because he felt sure that they would better understand when he could bring Rosamond to them as his wife and they could see for themselves how lovely she was. Besides, he didn’t want to disturb Rosamond by telling her that because she was not either Irish or Catholic, his people would object to the marriage as much as hers would because he was both those things.

They were married by a priest of some poor parish far down on the Cape, because Terence thought it was important for him to be married in the Catholic Church and it did not matter very much to her. When she signed an agreement promising to bring up her children in the Catholic faith, she felt solemnly calm about it. It would probably be a very good thing for children to have a definite religion. Her grandparents had never given her any.

They had then five days in an unfashionable, quiet summer resort near Provincetown, five days that passed swift-paced as a dream, in which they were so happy that no sense of their separate tomorrows came to trouble them, until the last night that they were to have together.

They were sitting on the beach a little way up from their hotel. Heaven had provided a moon for them these nights and in its blue shadows the sea and the sand and the cliffs were beautiful. They had walked there every night and, hitherto, had talked of their little plans for the next day. But, since now next day they were to be separated—they were to go to Boston, where he had some small affairs to transact before he took an afternoon train for New York, having invented complicated reasons why his family should meet him in New York for their good-byes—they found conversation, for the first time in their acquaintance, very difficult. There were so many things they did not want to admit: that he was going far away, and for a long time, and into danger; that these five days that were just a prelude to all the years they hoped to spend together might be all the time they ever had. So they were silent, sitting very close to each other.

She was the first to admit what they both were thinking. She said suddenly, desperately, “But Terence, you could die.”

He tried to laugh. He said, “I could, but I probably sha’n’t.”

She said, “Never to see you again— Oh, Terence, I could not bear it.”

He answered as simply as though she had asked him some question concerning the management of the sailboat. He said, “But even if I die, we should see each other again.”

Out of her young skepticism she said to him, “How do you know? How can you be so sure?”

And out of a simplicity of faith that was as much a part of him as the color of his hair and eyes, he tried to tell her. He talked about God and heaven, she thought, as simply and as confidently as he talked of his love for her. And while the sound of his voice was in her ears, she could believe him and be comforted.

When he was silent she said abruptly, “Sing to me that song you sang the evening we met. It was about someone called ‘Macushla.’ ”

He sang in the moonlight and the quiet: “Macushla, Macushla, your red lips are saying, that death is a dream and love is for aye.”

She put her head against his shoulder, not wanting to question any more, only to cherish the hour.

Remembrance of that hour, that conversation and that song, was vivid in her at the dreadful moment, next afternoon, when they were saying “good-bye.”

Terence, in uniform, seemed so much older, so preoccupied with affairs of importance. Though he laughed, though he made gay plans for all of their future life, the kind of house they would take in the suburbs, the kind of dinner parties she would give to the mythical great clients he would achieve in the law business, in just a little while, when he came back to stay. He talked about things like that until the very last minute, the last horrible moment when the conductor called, “All aboard!” Then he didn’t seem to be able to talk at all. So she talked. She did not cry, she was calm, she even managed to smile. She said, “I shall love you for ever and ever.”

His strong, young, hard arms were around her for a second, and his face was close against hers. Then his face was a blur at the parlor-car window. The train wheels started turning.

The train wheels turned faster and faster. They began to click, “A-wa-ken, Ma-cush-la, a-wake and re-member, that death is a dream, and that love is for aye,” like the Latin verses she used to scan at school.

She would have to hurry to get the afternoon train to the Cape, back to her aunt’s house. The last coach of the train went past. It seemed to go very fast. The clicking of the wheels diminished, ceased. There was only the dull, silver track curving away into the trainyard, the shining track on which he was travelling faster and faster to whatever his future was. Staring at the track she realized that whatever his future was, it was already separate from hers.

The train wheels taking her home, to the only place she had that she might call home—thank heaven for the foresight of Aunt Lucille, who had bequeathed her house on the Cape to Rosamond with a note that said only, “I think that perhaps sometime you would like to live in it,”—began to click more and more slowly. They were coming to a station, not her station, the station before hers. They clicked, “That love is for aye and—that love is for aye.”

Curious, she thought, that so much could be awakened by a trivial sound. She had heard so many train wheels clicking, seen so many people who had, at one time or another, been important in her life, off to so many destinations. But always, travelling herself or meeting or parting from others on railway station platforms, the train wheels clicked out only one melody for her. That alone remained, from the time she was very young, the echo of a song, the look of moonlight silver on dark water.

And remembrance of the faint, pungent scent of marigolds. When she smelt the golden chrysanthemums tied on the pew ends as she walked on her grandfather’s arm, clad most inappropriately—though no one ever knew it—in white satin, walking steadily between the rows of proper Bostonians to her marriage with Jonathan Haines, she had thought of marigolds and zinnias against a gray wall—and of a girl who walked there once on the way to a different sort of wedding.

It had hurt horribly, remembrance of that fragrance in a sea garden. But, of course, that was only the year after she had walked through it to where a gray roadster waited. But some months after the day when she had picked up a newspaper and seen a face, more blurred in the newspaper reproduction than it had been even in the window of the train moving away from her. His picture was in the newspaper because he was a Lieutenant killed in action. That was the last time she saw his face or any reminder of it. Her life had gone on as though he had never been in it, except for a certain agony of the heart that dwindled a little in time.

“An agony of the heart”—she had served five years as mistress of Jonathan Haines’ cold house—five years in which there was never a week or a month that he didn’t remind her of what he called her shameful folly. For she had told him of that young marriage. It was, she felt, the only dignified gesture she had made in those years, to tell him when he proposed marriage to her. He had not let her tell her grandparents, had married her anyway—and made her pay for it after his own fashion.

Then in five years, he was dead—of pneumonia. He had no chance from the beginning of his illness, because most quietly, most discreetly, he had been a drunkard many years.

She was not glad or sorry that he was dead—she was used to him by then. Her only celebration of her freedom, actually, was to go to a new doctor, to find out the reason for those occasional sharp attacks which her husband called “nerves.”

The train had stopped at the station and started again. She slipped on her coat, and began to assemble her purse and dressing case.

The passengers stared at her a little, as she was used to having people stare at her all her life, because she had always been beautiful.

They saw a thin woman in very beautiful, dull-green summer tweeds. A woman with honey-colored hair that lay in smooth ringlets beneath her little hat, and great blue eyes, and a red mouth that time had hardened a little, but that was smiling. It was almost invariably smiling.

She looked at her watch. There were still ten minutes left before the train reached her station. She sat very quiet, having for a long time now the habit of sitting quiet, and saving her strength.

That doctor’s voice that was regretful—and his words that were so clear, were vivid in her memory, across the length of the years that she had made crowded since.

“Angina pectoris”—and his gray face staring at her as though, for all of his tenderness, he had passed sentence of death on so many that he could not help a certain professional curiosity as to the ways in which each met the sentence.

She had maintained composure. She had summoned laughter. She said: “Angina pectoris—an agony of the heart. That’s an old-fashioned ailment from which I suffered only once, and that was a long time ago.”

And she was out of his dreadful, great office and walking fast—which was careless of her—along the Charles River Esplanade, where the sun shone on blue water and a spring breeze was blowing warm.

That boy, her long-lost young love, had said that death was a dream. But he was gone then nearly six years to its reality, and she could not remember his face exactly, only his smile, and his warm, sure voice.

She did not want to die. She had not lived except for ten days in the summer of the war. And existed ever since in the house of a husband who admired her beauty, but disliked her otherwise.

She lived to marry Mark Lippincott, who devoted himself to living amusingly. She married him when the shock of her knowledge of the possible imminence of death was old—when through months she had disciplined herself to take that knowledge matter-of-factly.

He was a good sort, Mark. They shared some pleasant years, living fast and hard from Palm Beach to Cannes—a meaningless sort of life, but she had stopped asking for meaning in things after she looked at a blurred newspaper picture once, and read a caption that said, “Killed in Action.”

Only the life had been a little too fast and hard for her. And then, when she and Mark had grown poor like the rest of the world, and he was sobered, like the rest of the world, too, he had grown tired of living with an invalid. He told her, honestly, that he wanted to settle down, to have children—with a nice girl some seven years younger than herself.

She made no trouble about the divorce, nor about the settlement. She knew how little money Mark had left from the golden years, and she had never bothered to tell him how little she had left of her inheritance from Jonathan Haines. She had her Aunt Lucille’s house and enough money to last her time, which, they said, grew short.

The train slowed for the station. The wheels clicked, but she shrugged her shoulders and refused to listen. They clicked a meaningless old tune.

There was John waiting for her—John, who used to be butler, and was nowadays general factotum. He was grown old since the day, the last summer she saw him, when he put a girl’s luggage into a gray roadster.

The air that smelt of sunshine and sea and sand came in through the open window. She closed her eyes. The smell of that air was troubling, and they had begun to pass landmarks that were disturbingly familiar. Across a stretch of meadow she caught a glimpse of a cove where a sailboat could wait for someone walking along the shore.

So she did not open her eyes again. She sat quiet, resting, and spoke only once to John. “Go to the side entrance. I want to look at the sea garden, if it’s still there.”

He said, “Oh yes, madam, I haven’t had much to do but garden. I hope you won’t find much changed.”

Then they were stopped at the side entrance and, in the moment that she walked through the gate, it seemed to her that nothing was changed, except herself. It was eighteen years since that August afternoon when a girl hurried through that garden on her way to what she thought was her destiny—and was not. Was only a meaningless week out of living.

She was a tired woman, with her youth gone, and her beauty dwindled. She was soon to die. But the zinnias John had planted carefully were a splash of scarlet against the gray wall and the orange and lemon marigolds cast their strange scent on the warm sunny air.

So, she had come home. She had come home, she knew, to die. Time, for her, that had once stretched ahead in unnumbered years, was measured in months or weeks, now.

But, meanwhile, she could sit in the cool high-shadowed rooms of her house or walk in her sunny garden. Her neighbors, Aunt Lucille’s friends, came to call. They talked to her of the small, amusing news of the summer colony.

That Peter Anderson’s débutante daughter had opened a successful photographer shop in the village.

That Judith Carteret was causing her parents much worry, having fallen in love with an Irish boy in the summer colony to the south, and maintaining that she was going to marry him and go to Russia in September. Russia, of all places. It appeared that was the only place in the world, however, where the young man could get work as a civil engineer.

The stories interested her somewhat. But her callers interested her more. Pleasant, frankly gray-haired men and women, the latter faintly redolent of old-fashioned eau de cologne and rice talcum powder, the men genial in a quiet sort of way, but graver than she remembered others of their type as being, when she had encountered them here or there in her years with Mark. They had, all her guests, travelled a road longer than her own, and perhaps travelled it to more purpose. At least, they seemed to have achieved along the way some philosophy—or perhaps it was just a complete serenity—that made them strange to her on days when she was unhappy.

She lived, savoring the summer. John and his wife looked after her adequately. Once or twice she gave small dinner parties. Almost every day, John took her driving.

There came one day, at the turn of September, when a chill lay in the air under the mellow warmth, though there was no frost that touched the garden. She dreaded, in the lingering summer, any frost. She told herself she was greedy, that because she could scarcely hope to see them bloom again, she wanted the zinnias to stand scarlet against the wall forever, and these golden marigolds to fling scent to the sea wind eternally.

She lunched alone on the veranda, where the sun made dancing patterns of elm leaves across the table.

She felt warm and well and rested. It was some days since she had felt one of the attacks of pain that recently were so violent. So she decided suddenly upon an expedition she had contemplated for a month. She decided to walk all the way down the shore past the dunes, to the river cliff where she first met Terence in just such late summer sunshine.

She went through the garden to the meadow, a slender figure in white, walking very gracefully along the path between high meadow grass that still was sweet with clover scent. She went down to the shore, far beyond the bathing beach, where the sand dunes began.

And the sea breeze blew hair that was the color of pale honey back from deep blue eyes that regarded the shore, the sea, the sky serenely. She walked lightly over the sand and the smooth warm pebbles, not tired, and refusing to think of things that might make her tired, but pleased, as a child, with the breeze across her face, with the vista ahead of sand dunes and sea and far marshes where the reeds grew tall. The oddest sense of anticipation walked with her.

She came to the marsh and crossed it, to the edge of the slow-moving salt river. The tide was at ebb, and the stepping-stones bare and dry. But she felt daring crossing them. She climbed, going very slowly and carefully, the little cliff beyond the river, and sat down, watching the smooth sea.

And suddenly she was horribly unhappy. What she had expected to find beyond this view of empty sea and empty marshes, she did not know. Only she had been sure, childishly, that if she managed this walk that seemed such a great expedition nowadays, she would find something, some comfort or some reassurance to take back with her.

There was nothing at all. She sat very still, trying to gather strength for the walk home, and stared at that horizon, beyond which the only person she had ever loved with a whole heart had journeyed to his destiny, half her life time ago.

The sun, beginning to set beyond the western hills, was spilling flames across the darkening water, when she heard footsteps and turned her head. A red-haired girl in a white frock and a tall young man in flannels were coming up the cliff path toward her, coming from the south, where the Boston Irish summered.

She knew the girl by sight—Judith Carteret, who was in love with an Irish boy and planned to marry him and go to Russia. Behind her, evidently, was “the Irish boy,” tall, handsome, broad-shouldered, with black hair that had blue shadows, and such an ardent face. Rosamond’s heart slipped a little sideways in her chest.

But her voice was even. She said, as the path brought them close to her, “How do you do, Miss Carteret? The view’s pleasant here, isn’t it?”

The girl looked a little sulky, as though she resented sharing it with anybody but her young man, but she answered courteously enough, “Yes, we walk here often.” She looked up then at the man, her young face happy again—and so confident.

She said abruptly, “Mrs. Lippincott, this is the man I’m going to marry.”

So absurd, Rosamond thought, the defiance in her voice. But, of course, the girl classed her with the disapproving older generation. She said, “I know, and you plan to go to Russia with him. Russia must be a very interesting place nowadays.”

He was smiling down at her. For all of the rising pain in her heart, Rosamond was conscious only of amazement. That smile, that face, brought back to vividness from all the blurring of the years, another face. Yes, for one minute after the endless years he had been gone, Terence smiled down at her again.

She commanded her heart to be quiet, because there was something she must know quickly. It obeyed her. But she hesitated, then. That pretty child, Judith Carteret, making her introduction of “The Man I Am Going To Marry,” as though he had no other name, was waiting politely.

And Rosamond Lippincott, who had once, though no one alive in the world now knew it, married a boy with a face and a smile like that, decided that she did not want to know his name after all. Much younger brother, or cousin, or nephew, what did it matter? She asked him something else, instead.

“You look as if you should know a song, about a girl called Macushla. It goes, ‘Awaken, Macushla.’ ”

Both he and Judith looked at her as though she were quite mad, but the man answered, “Macushla isn’t a girl’s name, it means ‘my dear one,’ more or less.”

She thought, “Odd, never to have known that all my life.” But she insisted, “Do you know it?”

He said, “The tune, not all the words. And I haven’t much of a voice. But it is a lovely old song, Judith. I must ask my mother to sing it to you some time.”

Looking at the woman sitting there, he was as well aware that he had not answered some exigency in her face as he was aware of her worn golden beauty.

So he began hesitantly, stumbling over some of the words. But his voice was sweet. “Awaken, Macushla, awake and remember,” and went on to “your red lips are saying, that death is a dream and that love is for aye.”

A little motion of her hand stopped him. He wondered why on earth there were tears shining in those blue eyes.

She said simply, “Thank you.”

Judith Carteret hesitated a little. Then she said, “Don’t you want to walk home with us? The tide will be rising in the river soon.”

Rosamond shook her head, said, because it was the obvious thing to say, “I’m going to be met here, shortly.” She did not want to walk with them, only to sit quietly and let remembrance, so long kept down, have its way with her finally.

They said, “Good-bye.” She watched their figures lessening in the distance along the path beyond the river.

She said to the unregarding sea and sky, “Yes, of course, it’s true. They have it as we had it. . . They may not keep it forever, as we could not. . . But it goes on. Along this shore they walk as we walked, completely happy and absolutely sure, as other lovers will be in the time after them.”

Her heart, she thought, was making as much noise as train wheels clicking. It was beating out the words of a song—words that were true. She stood up to go home with that surety.

Dusk had scarcely touched the curve of the hills she faced as she stood up. But, suddenly, whirling darkness rushed over her, darkness in which the hills, the sky, the look on that girl’s and that boy’s faces, a confusion of memories—scent of a sea garden, shimmer of moonlight across dark water, dull silver of railroad tracks curving away into fog—swept past her. There was a noise in her ears like the sound of marsh reeds blowing in a wind that rose and rose.

All her life was forgotten, all but ten days in a far summer, days shared with a boy whose face was vivid in her memory again.

And she thought, before the thundering darkness swept all thought from her, completely, “Perhaps, after all, I am to be met.”

FOREVER, PERHAPS!

They were the generation which, coming to maturity under the pressure of the war, developed too surely the conviction that life was brief. So they discounted all their tomorrows for their todays, and found the tomorrows, when they arrived, at least disconcerting. They were the generation which did all the commonplace things so badly and the unusual things so well. Born of the war, they died as an entity of the great depression, having taken nothing seriously in the interval but themselves, and themselves not always.

Some of them live on, parents of children nearly grown. Some of them, holding their chins higher than in the arrogance of their youth, but now to hide throat muscles not as firm as they used to be, repeat old moods, seek new adventures like the old, with less and less fire or meaning about them now. But they face emptiness, futility with as much grace, as much easy laughter, as they gave to the fullness of life and the sense of importance they had when they were young.

A few of them are dead.

There were, among my generation, Muriel, Jeffrey, and Helena.

The story of Muriel, Jeffrey, and Helena is as much mine as theirs. At moments when I have been in despair about them I have resented that—resented being compelled willy-nilly to play forever the Greek chorus, to which none of the principals paid any particular attention, in a drama that seemed imminently about to become tragedy. Then, when I was simply acutely exasperated with them, I decided that my rôle was no more than one of Shakespeare’s comic gravediggers. But sometimes, when I admitted to myself that they, or at least Muriel and Jeffrey, were the most exciting people I knew, and that only through their lives was I to comprehend at all that romantic love about which so many words good and bad have been written, I was content—was even grateful for my rôle as taken-for-granted old friend.

The conclusion for them was definitive, was absolute. As to the beginning I have never been quite so sure. Perhaps the beginning was as long ago as that raw April morning when I was flung out of my generation.

It was April and the year was 1917. Muriel and my sister Helena were home for Easter vacation from school; Jeffrey and I from Harvard. We had all already known each other forever, had grown up within a hundred yards of one another in that north Westchester town which was not then yet as fashionable as it became postwar, nor nearly, generally speaking, in as great need of fresh paint and new money as it has become recently.

We, or at least Muriel, Jeffrey, and I, were exercising Stephen Mills’s horses in the old hill pasture which he planned to make into a polo field. At that time he had progressed only as far as removing half the stones, being principally involved in consolidating his new fortune.

My sister Helena sat on a stone wall and cheered us, being then at sixteen, as always, a blonde so decorative she was well designed to ornament cheering sections for all of her life, and to have blankets wrapped round her to shelter her from the least unfriendly breeze. She sat on a stone wall, in a green coat trimmed with dark fur, and a green turban over her yellow curls, and applauded impartially when either Jeffrey or Muriel jumped well.

There was no reason why she should applaud me. Riding was not, in fact, my sport. Tennis, yes. I had a small choice collection of trophies which represented in my secret heart the beginning of a road which was to lead to the shining glory of the Davis Cup. In time, I said to myself—in two years or three or four.

Oh, well, it was a raw April morning, gray, with a belated March wind blowing shreds of mist across the pasture, and robins saluting the spring prematurely in the old gnarled apple trees. Helena sat warmly wrapped on the wall, and Jeffrey and Muriel dared each other into fantastic performances on their horses, and I followed them when I could.

It was becoming obvious to me, in that spring of my senior year at Harvard, that I would follow Muriel’s tawny head, when I could, always, and that perhaps so would Jeffrey. But that then did not particularly trouble me. In that infinitely remote prewar springtime there was no exigency about any of us. We had the feeling, which shortly our generation lost forever, that there was time enough; that, in fact, we were all a little too young to take ourselves or one another with any desperate seriousness.

Helena was sixteen, Muriel a year older. I was twenty-two, and that April morning was Jeffrey’s twentieth birthday. My seniority made me patronize him somewhat—though he was a good man at Harvard, crew in his sophomore year, and, it was thought, destined to be editor in chief of the Crimson. He never was, of course. We none of us were any of the things that we thought we were going to be then.

I was not having a particularly good time. The Jenningses and the Warrens were born on horses, as they said in our town then, and long before then, so Jeffrey and Muriel were perfectly content. But to ride half broken hunters breakneck over a half smoothed field, and jump five-barred gates and three-foot-wide stone walls right and left as occurred to one, was not my idea of pleasure. Besides, I acutely disliked Stephen Mills, who owned the horses and suggested to Muriel that she amuse herself by bringing her friends to exercise them.

It was obvious to me, or to anyone, why he had asked Muriel to exercise his horses. She was, though orphaned and living under the casual chaperonage of a lawyer-guardian, the only remaining member of the Warren family which had been principal citizens of our town for two hundred years. Stephen Mills was arrived in it less than two. Even so, he would scarcely have paid marked attention to her had she not, the previous winter, achieved that amazing beauty sometimes quietly implicit in sixteen-year-old girls.

She did not flower—she flamed. Her brown hair blazed with copper lights. Her figure, always small and slight, curved. Under a skin like new cream, the pink came and went as she regarded a world that promised to be exciting, from the most beautiful eyes I ever saw. Fringed with long almost black lashes, they were enormous wide hazel eyes that shone with merriment, with exhilaration, that danced or were grave and deep as still water.

Curious that across the space of all the time since I can remember the smile, the laugh, that she had that gray morning. Smile and laughter of a confident little girl wholly untouched by life and eager to begin it. She was wearing fawn breeches, boots that even then were unusually well made—she was born probably with her flair for clothes—and, absurdly, Jeffrey’s crew sweater, twice too big for her.

She rode simply like a dream. She was mounted on a black gelding that, I knew, was one of the most erratic horses in the county. She rode him as if he and she spoke the same language. She led—and Jeffrey followed—up and down the meadow, across the fences and the walls and the brush jumps. I was mounted on a hard-mouthed bay horse who recognized in our first ten minutes together that my seat was not completely certain and my hand rather less so. But I stayed with him, more by good fortune and a certain stubborn pride than by innate skill.

Until eventually I followed them—her bright hair, her bright laughter blowing back against the wind, Jeffrey by her side, his black head leaning close to her—at full gallop down the meadow to the wall that led to the path through the pine woods. I remember now the scent of pine needles with the rain new fallen on them, the brown path rising between the rows of blue-green on the far side of the jump, and the look of a patch of rocky ground just this side of it.

Jeffrey and Muriel went over like birds flying. I followed.

They told me afterward that my horse slipped on the wet stones on the near side, started to refuse the jump, changed his mind, went over and went down. I have a vague recollection of the sound of my sister Helena’s voice screaming. But when, among my bandages in the town hospital several days later, I took any consecutive interest in life, it was to learn that the United States had the day previously declared war on Germany. And every one, including Jeffrey and Muriel, who came to see me, after minimizing the extent of my injuries in the proper fashion, turned immediately to discussion of the war.

We had anticipated it more or less for some time, so that we had almost taken it for granted. But now it was arrived. It made a difference. Jeffrey and Muriel talked very excitedly about the possibility of his joining the Flying Corps. Stephen Mills was going to the first Plattsburg camp. “To become,” I said bitterly, “an officer if not a gentleman.”

That was on one of Jeffrey’s and Muriel’s later visits. They looked at me in what amounted to mildly shocked surprise, and I realized that my generation was moving on without me. That hard-mouthed bay had flung me rather far from any of the glamorous roads they were beginning to travel. My contemporaries were to be invariably kind to me, when they could take time from their own swift-moving lives—as, when they had time, they were to be kind to the aged.

My life was to be a succession of nice and pretty girls who paused on their way to flirtations, to matrimony, to security, on country-club verandas, to say, “Peter darling, you are simply horrid not to ask me to dance—to make me ask you.” And I was to rise and dance with them stiffly, so that, in the dressing room, they might say in kind warm young voices, “Take five minutes to ask old Peter to dance. He must feel out of it, you know.”

I can dance, for a few minutes at a time. My limp is not noticeable at fifty yards’ distance, and my tailor has done extraordinarily well in disguising my twisted arm.

Well, by June of ’17 I was, if not reconciled, matter-of-fact. The kindness of young women in asking me to dance was still ahead of me, because I still used crutches; but I went to the big country-club dance in honor of the first visiting British officer. Time was to bring me detachment and even humor. But that scented night, after a half hour of watching my friends moving rapturously to the strains of Poor Butterfly on their ways to glory—or the grave perhaps, but it seemed very distant—I could bear no more.

I crept down the long veranda, on my crutches, to a seat under the elm by the swimming pool, where the strains of dance music came down too distantly to be stirring or poignant. I sat there, completely hidden from passers-by, and wished more or less that I were dead. The visiting Britisher came by with my sister Helena on his arm.

A little later I heard Muriel’s laughter, and saw her walking toward me with Jeffrey, newly arrived on a week-end leave from the Naval Aviation Service. The moonlight was dim, so that against his well cut green uniform her rose frock bloomed very palely. They were walking slowly. I started to call to them, but felt completely unfit to exchange jests with them, so I sat silent. They did not see me. I expected that they would walk on past the pool, but they stopped and sat on the ledge overlooking it.

Then it was immediately too late for me to intrude with any conversation about the beauty of the moonlight or the excellence of the music, because Jeffrey’s first words were, “We can be married next year, when I’m twenty-one. Or, if I go to France first, we’ll lie about our ages and get married anyway.”

She said to him in that grave child’s voice of hers, “I love you. I will do what you say. It frightens me, because I know somehow that we are both too young—that everything has speeded up so, in the last weeks we are forced to hurry something that should have been gradual. I mean, if it hadn’t been for the war you might have proposed to me in 1920 and we would have discussed being married in the June of 1921. I’m seventeen and you are twenty.”

He interrupted her. He said, “I know, dearest dearest, but I don’t want to wait now. I want to be sure of you.”

She said, “You don’t have to wait. I will be engaged to you now, and marry you when you say. Jeffrey, I expect that I’m going to love you forever, and that’s a frightening long time when one’s seventeen.”

His voice was tender. He had been a completely unmelodramatic young man, but the times had forced a little melodrama upon him. Besides, I suppose he sensed vaguely that there was truth in what she said—that they were both too young to be so sure. Jeffrey said, “Promise to love me until I go away, and after that forever perhaps.”

She said “Forever perhaps” after him in a sad little steady voice. And I know that they were both thinking that forever, to many of the men among their contemporaries dancing, might resolve itself into no more than months. We have forgotten almost all about that—but that sense of uncertainty was clear among us in that first spring of the war. It gave significance to the smallest happenings, and with it mounted the sense of snatching at things before they went past forever.

Well, there was nothing for me to snatch at any more. And I sat under that great elm by the swimming pool, envying them and hating them both. It passed. I was to envy and hate them, almost, again, but never for long, never seriously.

I was used to my permanent rôle as looker-on by that autumn, when they quarreled. At twenty-two, five months spent largely in contemplation of the fact that all one’s life is to be spent largely in contemplation of the lives of others is a very long time. Such easy problems as remained for me were quickly settled while my contemporaries settled on the army or the navy. It was arranged between my mother and me that I should take an extra term at Harvard to get the degree I had missed by my accident in April. That then I should study law because my father had been a lawyer. I had planned—Heaven help the very young—to combine a tennis career with membership in one of the expeditions being organized to explore, in China or Mesopotamia, missing chapters in the history of mankind. I thought I was going to be a quite good archæologist.

Everyone told me how fortunate I was that the problem of money was not acute. There was enough for my mother, Helena, and me to live comfortably in our pleasant elm-shaded house—that began to be a little dwarfed by the wings and terraces Stephen Mills was adding to his place next door.

He entertained a good deal that late summer and fall. He had come out of Plattsburg with a captaincy, was stationed at a camp some twenty miles upstate, was immediately to sail for France, but seemed meanwhile able to wangle an extraordinary number of leaves, which he spent entertaining an amusing diversity of people.

It was he who imported Mrs. Lela Patterson to our town. Not deliberately—I mean not with foresight of the consequences—though at the time I misjudged that. She was one of the prewar crop of divorcees who had achieved money, a smattering of acquaintance in the patter about European gambling resorts, “the dear Princess,” “the Grand Duke, so daring”—that sort of thing, which was as cheap as it is nowadays, but had more flavor of novelty about it in a town like ours in 1917.

Besides, the woman’s looks were lovely, more exotic than whatever they had been at twenty. Probably she had not even been blonde then. But she had grace, and a way of walking as if she had learned to walk on curving marble staircases, instead of twenty miles out of Wichita, Kansas, as was the fact.

She went head over about Jeffrey’s black-headed clear-skinned looks, and he was young enough to be excited about that. Not that he ever took her seriously. But the “Take another drink now—tomorrow you may not be drinking,” “Dance this dance closely—tomorrow you may be through with dances” era was well on its way. He loved Muriel; he wanted to marry Muriel before he went to France.

But here was an odd flavor, the woman of the world of thirty, labeled more or less definitely “experience,” and he wanted to taste that taste too. I think, besides, he was a little restless because some of his friends were practically in sight of France and his course in naval aviation was not half finished.

I am sure, knowing Jeffrey, that their affaire progressed no farther than a couple of tea engagements at the Plaza, with Lela ordering the cocktails because Jeffrey was in uniform and there was a regulation against serving men in uniform.

Until the night of the last war party Stephen Mills gave. His outfit was under more or less definite sailing orders, so he gave a final evening garden party, with dancing on the upper two terraces, and Japanese lanterns on all five, and the two fountains playing. His landscape architect was a good man. The place that night had the effect more or less of a minor Versailles.

That night Jeffrey kissed Lela Patterson on the third terrace by the bad statue of Diana, and Muriel saw him. I was walking, leaning rather heavily on my stick, under the birches massed at the terrace end. As I say, five months had brought me a certain steadiness, but I still was in the stage where I could stand so much and no more of being led to a comfortable chair, brought wine, cigarettes, and matches, and surrounded by light-footed girls who jested with me. Of course, plunging about in the darkness, I was likely to intrude occasionally on acquaintances who walked in the darkness two by two, holding hands and arranging lives without many words. But already they had begun to pay as little attention to me as to the iron animals which still guarded some of our older lawns.

That night I had watched the dancers—watched Muriel dancing—until I had had enough of it. She always smiled when she danced past the corner of the terrace where I sat. I was used to that smile of hers now, kind, gentle, commiserating. She had taken all summer a good deal of trouble about me, had shown her genuine fondness for me so unmistakably that I knew she had completely forgotten that once or twice, in that winter of 1916-17 that already seemed so distant, she had found me an exciting person to know.

Her engagement with Jeffrey was not announced, was simply an “understanding” to obviate objections from his family and her guardian based on their extreme youth. So she danced through that first war summer, a noteworthy success among a generation of them, exchanging laughter and aphorisms with an assortment of young men who would not have seemed so glamorous minus their uniforms and the fact that they were on their way to be heroes.

She was breathlessly in love with Jeffrey, and he with her. I think that breathlessness made them both seek escape—since his family laughed at the notion of a serious commitment before he was of age. She sought it in keeping herself surrounded, whenever she could not be with Jeffrey, with half a dozen men. He sought it in his flirtation with Lela Patterson.

And they liked each other so well they could probably have explained that to each other, given time. But there was not time for any one to stop to explain anything that summer and autumn.

It was too late for explanations the moment after Lela turned in the moonlight, lifted her face to Jeffrey, and he bent and kissed it. Muriel, on Stephen Mills’s arm, was on the terrace steps twenty feet behind them. And whether Stephen Mills had arranged that with Lela Patterson—who was supposed vaguely to be rather more than a pretty good friend of his—no one ever knew.

All summer Stephen had taken what he could get of Muriel’s spare time—had managed cleverly to make himself seem much more of a man of the world than most of the other people she knew, had avoided making love to her directly, knowing that that would awaken her loyalty to Jeffrey. He was just there when Jeffrey was not available, which was often, for Jeffrey only managed one week-end leave a month.

As now, Jeffrey being otherwise occupied, he was there beside Muriel, and the moonlight was bright enough to see that he was smiling.

Life gave Muriel poise, whatever else it withheld from her. In fact, I think that evening may well have been the last time she ever lost poise in front of spectators for an instant.

She said in the hurt voice of a little girl, “Jeffrey—” And then she caught herself.

I walked out into the light, with some impulse to say to her, “It was just a silly gesture. Don’t be disturbed by it.” But she did not look at me. She looked at Jeffrey, who looked at her. Stephen tightened his hand on her arm, and Lela regarded the three of them as if they were actors who had stupidly enough simultaneously forgotten their lines.

Jeffrey said slowly, “Sorry, Muriel dear,” and Lela’s laughter tinkled out then. She said, “Jeff dearest, what a rude thing to say in my presence—after all the pretty things you have said to me, too.”

Muriel’s voice was quite slow and steady when she spoke. I knew by its steadiness that there was no use now to intervene. She said, “Sorry I interrupted. Stephen, take me back to the house. I’d like to dance some more with you.”

They went up the terrace steps together. Some tulle drapery on Muriel’s skirt caught in a branch of shrubbery. Stephen stopped and disentangled it, and then they went on.

Jeffrey and Lela stared after them. There was something a little hard, a little amused about the corners of Lela’s mouth. But Jeffrey looked completely dismayed. He had started, in fact, two or three steps after them, but Lela had put a hand on his shoulder. And he was only twenty and had been having a man-of-the-world flirtation with her. He could not well have left her standing alone in the garden while he ran after his own true love. Or I don’t suppose that it seemed to him he could do that.

I walked over to him and asked him for a cigarette. He left Lela and me together then, after a few moments, and went on toward the house. I remember she talked to me about an effect of terraces like this in the garden of some château in Normandy.

When we went back, she walking a little impatiently beside me because of my slowness, we found Jeffrey drinking champagne. Muriel wasn’t on the dance floor. After a while someone said Stephen had taken her home.

Next morning Jeff called in to see me on his way back to his station. He said, “I know you saw that thing last night. So look at this—and straighten it out for me, for God’s sake! I shan’t get home for fifteen days at best, and when I called at Muriel’s house that lawyer cousin of hers told me she was gone away for the day.”

“This” was a note from Muriel. It said:

I said, “I’ll straighten it out if I can. But it isn’t as if she were one of the girls who have been taking their kisses by battalions. She’s only seventeen and you are undoubtedly the first and only person she ever kissed, so what happened no doubt seems incredibly important to her. You and I know it wasn’t, but just the same you were a fool, Jeff.”

He said, “Don’t I know it! I’ll call her long distance myself tonight, but try to see her before then—try to make her understand that it was just what it was.”

I said, “You might tell me what that was.”

He said, “You don’t need to be as disagreeable as that, Peter. You know well enough—I wanted not to miss any of the show in case it should all stop together.”

I went to see her that evening. She was waiting on the veranda of her shabby old house—but not waiting, I sensed instantly, for me. Light from a yellow lamp inside the drawing-room window spilled out across her face; and something in it was changed, was remote, as if she were regarding me, that familiar vista of shrubbery and lawn that ran below the porch, herself even, from a viewpoint different than she had possessed before. She, five years younger, who had always seemed so young to me, seemed curiously now mature, and I thought, “Even she goes on to outstrip me in loving!”

Then I laughed at myself and told her she was looking very beautiful. She was. She was wearing some sort of gold-lace frock. Against its décolletage her fair skin glowed.

She said, with no preface, but in a strange warm quiet voice that was different too, “Jeffrey sent you, of course. I knew he would. But there’s no use trying to explain that it meant nothing. There’s no use in any of the things you planned to say, because I’m marrying Stephen Mills on Saturday, and my guardian’s very pleased.”

I asked her with some violence what that had to do with anything. I told her that Stephen Mills was nouveau riche, was too old for her, was marrying her for her family and her beauty, as he would acquire a horse for its pedigree and looks. I used a good many words. She heard them through quietly. And when I was done she said, “What you are trying to tell me I know. That that woman is no more than an experiment of Jeffrey’s on the way to growing up—a quite natural experiment. That if he and I were not hurried by the war—if we were waiting three years to announce our engagement, and four or so to marry—he might make half a dozen experiments like that, and I might make the equivalent of them. Only, you see, we haven’t the time as it is. We can’t look forward, as we did last year and the year before, to football games with fur coats and chrysanthemums, pleasant summers with parties at the yacht club and sailing trips and tennis. Next week, next month or the month after, he leaves me to go out of the life we both knew, we both anticipated.”

I said, stupidly enough, “He will come back to you.”

She nodded, said, “They write songs about that phrase, don’t they? There are a couple of new ones. But they miss the point. Jeffrey will come back probably; so will almost every one—but not as they went away.”

I was silent, not seeing quite where her thoughts were going. She said suddenly, desperately, “I can’t wait, I tell you! Because I am no good to him—we are no good to each other. This wouldn’t have happened if we had been. I’m too young to help him grow up. He’s too young to help me.”

I was aware that I was uttering aphorisms, and uttered another. “Time,” I said, “will cure that.”

She laughed a little mockingly, said, “The thing we have not got,” and I saw her eyes watching a man’s figure walking up from the lower end of the lawn. It was Stephen Mills, of course. She stood up quickly. She was then as remote as if she were made of painted porcelain, and her hand when she held it out to me was as cool. She said, “Good-bye, Peter. I don’t mean literally. Stephen will want us all to have a drink together. But good-bye to this and that. I’m right, you know. Jeffrey needs the compleat woman, or several of them, more than me. And I—I need a compleat man, to bear it.”

The last words quivered, and I understood that underneath the sophisticated gold-lace dress and the cool manner she was a shocked and wounded child.

But her voice steadied. She called out, “ ’Lo, Stephen darling. I’ve told Peter we’re to be married.”

I said the proper things. We all had a drink together. Watching Stephen’s face light when he looked at her, I wondered why I disliked him so much. He had strength, certainly, under his hardness. He would take care of her. And perhaps that was the best destiny to be achieved by an exotically beautiful and emotional young woman in the summer of 1917.

Stephen’s confident voice boomed out, “We’ll have to be married almost immediately because of my embarkation orders,” and I heard a telephone bell ring in the hall, and a maid came out and said, “Miss Warren, it’s Mr. Jennings calling long distance.”

Muriel stood up, smiling very serenely at Stephen, and walked smoothly, a froth of gold and lace drifting, the few steps into the hall. She made no effort to make her voice either low or more distinct than usual. But we sat quiet, as people sit despite themselves when someone is talking near by on a telephone, and her voice came out to us clearly enough.

She said immediately, “I’m glad you telephoned. Be the second to wish me felicity—Peter’s been the first. Stephen and I are to be married Saturday or thereabouts.” There was a little pause, and then her voice quickened as if she were not answering whatever he had said, but summoning that flippancy her contemporaries were beginning to use instead of courage—or alongside courage possibly. She said, “I hope you have a lovely time, Jeffrey darling. Come back with seventeen medals and a Russian princess, and we’ll laugh about the children we were. Good-bye.” There was a little click as she dropped the receiver.

I knew that she had done it then—that she had roused his pride against her now—and that they were lost to each other except for a miracle. Yet I knew also that in a normal course of events three months would have reconciled them, since they were as completely, as irrevocably as any two people I ever knew, in love. But then they had only moment to moment.

Stephen said when she came back, “You are right, my dear. Saturday is a better day for guests than Friday. Do you want a noon wedding?”

I did not wait for her to decide that with him. I went home.

She was married at noon Saturday, at one of those big impromptu war weddings where the sense of excitement combined with the champagne to produce an effect of its making no difference who married whom, because it was all transient and amusing and gay enough.

Helena was maid of honor. I did not expect to see Jeffrey among the guests, but he came—too late for the ceremony and a trifle drunk. Helena, after Stephen and Muriel had left for some brief complicated wedding journey that had to be confined to within twenty-five miles of Stephen’s camp, took charge of Jeffrey. I realized when I noticed them walking up and down, by something in the very smoothness of my sister’s manner, that she was well content. She had always been fond of him; but at that wedding, or very shortly after, I knew she meant to marry him.

She married him in the spring of 1918, before he went to France. Muriel was not present at their wedding. Indeed, since her own we had scarcely seen her. She stayed in New York that winter, after her husband sailed, partly because it was more amusing and partly because, in the prompt patriotic manner of the time, she was having a baby and her doctor was a New York man.

But Muriel and Jeffrey met once, before he went to the war.

It was May, a year and a month from that remote gray morning when Muriel and Jeff and I had exercised Stephen Mills’s horses while Helena cheered us. It was full springtime. Helena and Jeffrey were some weeks married. She was the conventional but much prettier than the usual ecstatically happy, “wonderfully brave” war bride, and Jeffrey played the rôle of completely fortunate bridegroom well.

But concerning him I was never sure any more. We were as good friends as ever, but we carefully avoided occasions of intimacy. Since he could not well say to me, “Yes, I married your sister on a rebound, and I know as well as you she’s just a charming blonde, but she’ll keep me steady and I want that,” nor I to him, “Would you have ever noticed even that about her if you could have had Muriel?”

His orders for France were so imminent that we knew it was probably his last week-end until the war ended, and preceded meals with extra cocktails and enlivened them with artificially bright conversation. After Sunday dinner he and I had some business to transact. An uncle had left him recently a small estate and he wanted me to take charge of it while he was in France. While we discussed various necessary details Helena and my mother went for a walk.

The telegram recalling Jeffrey to camp that evening for immediate departure came while they were gone; but we did not have an opportunity to tell them about it at once when they came back, for they had news themselves.

Helena said, “My dears, Muriel’s home. Came with a nurse and all sorts of things to arrange the baby’s nursery. She expects it in two or three weeks now, and plans to have the house opened while she’s in the hospital, and bring it right out here.”

There was nothing the least strained in Helena’s gentle pretty voice. She knew, as she probably would have phrased it, that Muriel and her husband were once “very fond” of each other. But Helena had the gift of accepting facts as they stood. Muriel was married; Jeffrey and she were married. That was that. Not that Helena was either a stupid or a dull woman. She was an entertaining person; she had a quiet gift of humor. Only there was a certain childlike matter-of-factness, a simplicity about her. She made for Jeffrey a good wife, but she never recognized the complexity of his or any one’s nature. Probably that made her fortunate.

When she said, “I told Muriel we’d both come over for a visit with her,” the most curious expression slid across Jeffrey’s face. He looked almost frightened. But he said quietly enough, “I’d love to see her for a few minutes—but I got this wire, and I don’t want to take time from you to go calling on any one now.”

She said “Oh!” in a frightened little voice when she read the telegram. It was the usual form that, we knew, meant sailing orders. We had seen others like it before.

Jeffrey was to leave for his train immediately after dinner. Mother and I left Helena and him to themselves for the balance of the afternoon, but we all met for cocktails about seven. The drawing-room curtains were not closed, and through the half dusk, across the lawn and Stephen Mills’s terraces, we could see lights on in the Mills drawing-room.

I didn’t notice them until I saw that Jeffrey was staring at something across the lawn. He said rather abruptly, “We’ve ten minutes before dinner, haven’t we, Helena? I’ve been thinking that perhaps I should just go say ‘how do you do’ to Muriel. She might think I’d meant to be rude if she heard afterward that I’d been next door, my last leave, and didn’t bother to try to see her.”

Helena said, “Yes, she might. You have time if you hurry.”

Jeffrey nodded, hesitated, then responded to the complete trustfulness of his wife’s voice by turning to me. “Come along, Peter,” he said. “I don’t want to go alone.”

He walked very slowly, accommodating himself to my inability to walk fast. We did not go across the lawn and terraces. We went by the road. We did not talk to each other, but I remember that I thought, “Honeysuckle has begun to bloom somewhere. It’s a fragrant evening.” And that I wondered how this pleasant long-familiar street, in the dusk of a spring evening, with the faint scent of tulips in the air, with plum blossoms drifting across the walks and a warm breeze stirring the young leaves of the elms, must seem to Jeffrey who was walking down it for perhaps the last time. And I wondered, not for the first time or the last, what it would feel like to live, as most of my classmates and intimate friends were living, with the certainty that all the familiar things were receding quickly. For me they would remain; they would remain always. I had been given security within narrow bounds.

A caretaker opened the door for us. Did not seem to understand precisely what we wanted, but brought us down the hall with him. It was obvious that the house was no more than half open. He did not announce us, but brought us straight into the long drawing-room, where Muriel lay, staring into the fire. She did not turn her head for a second’s space, until the caretaker muttered something about “Some one to see you, ma’am.” Then she looked at us.

She did not attempt to rise. She looked at us as if it were necessary to pull her thoughts a long way back to focus on us, to recognize us even. The beauty of her face, that strange glowing beauty that she kept her whole life through, was undimmed, but she looked older. Until she smiled. Then quickly she was just the girl Muriel whom we had both known all our lives, and both had loved, smiling at us, wearing a gold negligee very like the color of the gold-lace frock she had worn the night she said she must marry Stephen.

She said nothing at all significant. Her first words actually were, “How nice of you both to come to see me!” But her voice was warm, as if she meant it, as if she was pleased to see us both.

But her enormous eyes went, after a moment, from my face to Jeffrey’s and rested there—rested there as if they had sought him a long time. And he looked as if he had been thirsty for the sight of her.

I think I knew then again, though very briefly, that they were inescapable each to the other. And even though he was my sister’s husband, and Muriel was the girl I had loved futilely, in that quiet moment I had no personal emotion about either, only pity for them both.

Nothing at all happened. They regarded each other as if it were some private reassurance to each of them to know that the other was still in the world and now in the same room. They talked utter conventionalities. She read him, in fact, part of an amusing letter from Stephen describing the front. He was doing well enough in the war, it appeared.

Neither of them made any reference to the fact that she was so soon to have a child. I had the conviction that they had both forgotten about that, and told myself with exasperation that I was developing all the traditional warped notions of a cripple, and the only person having odd emotions in that room was myself. I said impatiently:

“They’ll be waiting dinner for us, I’m afraid, Jeffrey.”

He and Muriel looked at me with some slight surprise, but he rose to go immediately. She lay still. He took her hand. She looked up at him with a still smile that was so wistful it wrenched at my heart. I saw that his hand, holding her steady one, was shaking, and despised myself somehow for noticing it.

They must have been thinking of it, because the memory of two children that they no longer were, two children walking in a garden in the moonlight of a finished June, and promising to love each other forever, perhaps, came back to me so suddenly and sharply. Now that they were saying good-bye to each other forever probably, I felt horribly like an intruder, felt that they should have that moment certainly alone.

There was no way of leaving them, but something in my face must have showed what I felt, or I must have made some clumsy movement, because Muriel glanced at me quickly and said very gravely, though it sounded so irrelevant, “It’s quite all right, Peter dear, really.”

Her voice, as she turned her face back to Jeffrey’s, was almost gay. “The phrase,” she said, “my dear, is, I believe—take care of yourself.” But she repeated it. She said, “Oh, Jeffrey, my darling, take care of yourself always, please.”

His voice was stiff with anguish. He said, “Do the same thing for yourself—Mur-mur.” That was a pet name he had for her when they were children.

She nodded. She said, “Good-bye,” and Jeffrey walked out of the room without turning his head. I turned, at the doorway, because I could not help it. But she did not notice me. She was staring after him with her heart in those great eyes of hers. And there were tears on her cheeks.

They did not see each other again for five years.

By 1923 life had speeded up. We had most of us become more or less what we were to be, though few of us were what we had thought we should be before the war. That war, which seemed very far off, which it was unfashionable to mention, had nevertheless cut across the lives of most of my contemporaries so sharply that it separated them permanently from first youth.

The horse which had separated me from my own youth was grown very old and was pastured permanently in Stephen Mills’s hill field—which had never got made into a polo field after all. I used to look at him with a certain ironic amusement when I passed on one of my daily short walks. It made so little difference, after six years. People who met me since the war assumed that I was crippled in it, so they carefully avoided questioning me.

My mother was dead. I lived alone in my old house. But Jeffrey and Helena, in the remodeled Jennings house, were only five minutes’ walk distant. The governess brought their little daughter to see me every afternoon at the hour I usually returned from a law practice more diverting than important. That was a happy enough marriage, judged by the uncritical standards of 1923. Jeffrey drank a little too much, and Helena was becoming, a trifle too young, the completely complacent suburban matron.

The Mills place, next to mine, was empty and neglected. Muriel had not returned to it since Stephen’s death. He did not die in the war, but in the influenza epidemic in 1920. He died in the best hotel in Paris, which was probably some comfort to a man who came so far so quickly from the equivalent of a log cabin in Kansas.

They mentioned in his obituary, along with his famous raid on Genesee common, his decent war record, and his couple of decorations, that he was self-made. They did not mention, but it was whispered in our town, that he was born five miles from the village where Lela Patterson was born, and that she was his first wife. They had divorced, to progress their separate ways more quickly than would have been possible for them together. The obituary said: “He married Muriel Warren in 1917, and is survived by her and one son, Stephen Mills Jr.” But obituaries, in the Times columns anyway, if not in the less formal but more amusing passages of the tabloids, proceed on the de mortuis nihil nisi bonum principle, so there was no mention of the fact that he had made his wife horribly unhappy. That too, though, was known in our town, told by people returning from Paris in 1919 and 1920.

They said she was more beautiful than ever, but more scornful; that he, having acquired her, ceased to find her provocative; that she, instead of consoling herself with the practically endless opportunities open to beautiful and restless young women in Paris of the postwar years, studied dancing under an excellent ballerina and singing under the former teacher of the Grand Duchesses, and considered a stage career. We did not know directly. She never wrote—except, when he was dead, to send formal notes of acknowledgment to our letters.

Yet I never quite forgot her; nor, I am sure, did Jeffrey. Sometimes on summer evenings when I sat on the country-club terrace—enlarged and redecorated and with a better orchestra since the influx of new money after the war, watching the long-skirted graceful girls, who had succeeded the short-skirted amusing flappers, dancing languorously to tunes the underlying restlessness of which never changed from year to year, I found myself searching for one bright tawny head.

And here, as well as anywhere, I should endeavor to explain what became, in the light of things that happened afterward, a curious inconsistency in my comfortable conventional standards. Jeffrey was my sister’s husband. I liked my sister, thought her a charming innocent helpless woman, hoped that she would always be well looked after and happy. Jeffrey looked after her well, and made her happy to all appearances: though some of the fire that flamed in him in his youth was dwindled now, as all things were dwindled a little, as the generation which had been forced in ’17 and ’18 to regard the ultimate significances of living and dying talked now of comparative golf scores and winnings in the market.

Nevertheless, I who by accident in my twenty-third year was removed from the love of women understood that Jeffrey had loved Muriel Warren as he could never love my sister.

We—Helena, Jeffrey, and I—were having coffee after dinner on my veranda when we got the news that Muriel was coming home. We had been talking about her rather indirectly. We had been looking at the rise of ground leading to the Mills place, where the caretaker mowed the grass on the terraces not more than two or three times a summer, and where six years had contributed a certain congruity, a certain disorderly charm, to Stephen Mills’s conventional landscaping. We had wondered idly whether she would keep the place much longer. It was known that his fortune was too new, too uncertainly established, without his steady gambler’s hand to manage it, to have weathered the flurries of 1920 and ’21.

A telegraph boy, who had probably been dawdling for an hour on the two-mile way from the village center, came up my flagged pathway, between the rows of blossoming iris, with steps conscientiously rapid. I signed for the message, asked him to wait to see whether there was an answer, and opened it. Jeffrey and Helena watched me without much interest. The message read:

I looked at them both. After a couple of thousand days spent in the realization that I could only approach dramatic moments via the faces of my friends I was grown hard-boiled about looking at them. But this time both Jeffrey and my sister disappointed me. He put his hand across his mouth and yawned a little, the complete picture of the contented American husband after having dined well and preceded dinner by two too many cocktails.

And she—well, the child had a very kind heart. If six years past she had come as close to envy and acute dislike of Muriel as she was likely to arrive ever, she had nevertheless forgotten that. She had married the husband she wanted; had a daughter whom, no doubt, she preferred to a son, being that kind of woman.

And Muriel had become, in Helena’s mind nowadays, a sort of lame duck: a lovely young unfortunate friend who had not achieved the faithful good-looking husband with the dependable income and the promising future. Muriel’s life might have been infinitely more exciting than her own; but Helena would never be jealous of that.

Muriel was probably much more vivid in her memory as the little girl who had gone to school with her than as the disturbing young woman who had made insecure and uncertain, for a season, all our comfortable permanent relationships.

Helena said, “We must do a lot of entertaining for her. She must have recovered from any grief she had for that man, if she really ever had much after the way he treated her, from all accounts. It would be nice if we found some one suitable for her—” She hesitated, obviously going over in her mind the relative matrimonial qualifications of Jeffrey’s golf partners, and was surprised but not in the least disconcerted by a joint burst of laughter from Jeffrey and myself.

She said to us calmly, “Well, I am a happily married woman, and I know it’s the best destiny for any one born female.”

That silenced me. Jeffrey stopped laughing too, and patted her golden head very tenderly.

She was changed and not changed. Paris, Continental society, or just six years perhaps, had put a lacquer on her beauty, on her manner.

Time, which had taken a little of her fire, had added a little to her grace. She was quieter and her eyes were cool; but her smile somehow, when she greeted me, was as young and friendly as ever.

Her child was not with her. She explained that he was coming in a day or two, with his governess. That was at dinner, to which she had invited me to go over her affairs, which were involved but not hopeless. She had, in fact, enough money to run the Mills place modestly—not with the fountains playing. She had also an offer to appear in a new comedy with music. She said of that:

“I’ll never be more than a second-rate actress, because I began a little late, and also probably because I can’t take a career”—she put emphasis on that word career by her tone—“with any desperate seriousness. For that matter, I don’t think I’m capable of taking anything with desperate seriousness, after the war. That’s happened to ever so many of us, hasn’t it? How are Jeffrey and Helena?”

I said, “Well. Reasonably happy. A little bored, but they don’t know it yet.”

She laughed that warm laugh of hers, said, “Peter, time gave you complete detachment, didn’t it? That’s the best gift, too. I’m never going to be sorry for you any more.”

I said, “Don’t be. You’re bored too, aren’t you? Well, you’re young and more beautiful than ever. You will fall in love.”

She gave me then a very straight look. She said, “Only once—sometime since.”

I said, “I know.”

Her voice was crisp: “I know you do; that’s why I mentioned it.”

“Helena and Jeffrey want you to dine with them tomorrow,” I said. “Helena will telephone you in the morning.”

She nodded. “That will be nice. They have a daughter, haven’t they, a bit younger than my son Stephen?”

I didn’t suppose she had kept sufficiently in touch with us to know that, even, but I said, “Yes.” And because I was thinking, very stupidly, of how much she and Jeffrey had loved each other, and how long ago that was, I said, “The children can play together.”

She flung back her head and laughed and laughed, the smooth clean line of her throat as lovely as ever.

The children did play together. They grew very fond of each other, Helena’s blonde daughter and Muriel’s handsome dark son. Helena and Muriel got on beautifully too, as they had when they were young girls.

Muriel was in New York a good deal for rehearsals of her play. Then it opened, had a moderately good run. She got moderately good notices. In fact her type of beauty and charm did not come at full strength across the footlights. She was an adequate enough ingénue, and that was all. She knew it and was not particularly disturbed by the knowledge. Aside from the fact that it was desirable to supplement her limited income, she found work in the theater an absorption which she felt she needed.

She had been living as our neighbor a whole year. We all dropped into one another’s houses at cocktail time, dined together two or three times a week. She and Helena went shopping together. The children played together. Jeffrey and Muriel and Helena played golf. He escorted both of them, with a sort of family joke grown already old about “his blonde and his brunette,” to the theater and to country-club dances. He and Helena had fifth-row center seats for Muriel’s openings. It was all as undramatic, as safe, as commonplace as possible. The four of us actually won a local bridge championship.

The only times that even I remembered that Muriel and Jeffrey had loved each other in a summer when they were very young was when rarely, across a room, with some dull jest exchanged perhaps at which they both laughed dutifully, they regarded each other with a certain look of surprise, as two old friends meeting in a far country stare at each other, wondering how they happened to arrive at that odd rendezvous.

And then, one summer night, the storm broke. The storm broke literally. There was thunder in the air all that heavy June afternoon. In Muriel’s garden, where some of Stephen Mills’s carefully thought out plantings still blossomed luxuriously—about the only relics of his accomplishments still growing in the world, except that son of his, who was Muriel’s son much more than his father’s—no breeze stirred the tall stalks of delphinium and the late peonies drooped a little in the heat.

I was occupied with some work, and sat on my veranda, that faced Muriel’s garden, most of the afternoon, because it was cooler there. Once or twice I saw her white frock in the distance on the upper terrace.

With dusk the storm came suddenly with such violence that it wrenched a great branch from the old elm beside my veranda. Between lightning flashes I thought I saw Jeffrey’s car going up Muriel’s driveway, although I was not sure. I was glad if he had gone to call on her, remembering that when she was a little girl she was terrified of lightning. I should have gone to stay with her myself, but I expected a client for dinner.

When he came, although we had a great deal of business to discuss, conversation was practically impossible for an hour because of the noise of the storm. The electricity went off for a half hour or so. My man fetched candles and we dined by their swaying lights.

The storm was still violent, though it had lessened somewhat, when the telephone rang. It was my sister Helena—in New York, as I knew, for some dinner with an old school friend. She said that the storm was less there, but rather severe; that she had tried to call her own house, but that either Jeffrey was not at home or the wires were down—and would I please tell him that she would stay in New York overnight? I said rather abruptly, for recurrent lightning flashes swept the room, that I would do so, and hung up.

I telephoned Jeffrey’s house much later, when my guest had left. He was not at home. I gave the message to a maid. I had some thought then of calling on Muriel; but it was nearly midnight, and I was tired. When I walked up and down on my veranda for five minutes before I went to bed, I saw that the lights were still burning in her drawing-room, and thought, not for the first time, that her life was curiously lonely. There she sat evening after evening, after she came home from the trivial and innocuous dinner parties and bridge parties and country-club dances that made up her amusements when she was not working in the theater. She read widely, I knew, sitting by the fire in that great room where the purchases of Stephen Mills grew slowly a little shabby and outmoded.

Next morning she telephoned me very early, with exigency in her voice, and asked me please to come to her house immediately. I dressed hurriedly and walked through her garden, where the storm had beaten down leaves and flower petals across the flagged paths, but where the air was fragrant and clear and rain-washed.

She was on the terrace waiting for me. So was Jeffrey. He spoke before she could begin:

“Muriel wants you to persuade me that I’m quite mad. I’m not, for the first time in years. I’m wholly sane, I think.”

He paused, and I looked at him. I looked from one to the other of them.

They sat in the clear cool early morning sunlight, looking like two people newly come alive. She glowed as the little girl she used to be once glowed with happiness, with excitement, over something in her young day that seemed important. Jeffrey, who through the years had grown a little heavy, a little dull—had become not quite the person we were so sure, in college long before, that he would be—looked younger than since the war.

Though it was Muriel who had sent for me, now that I was there she seemed to have nothing to say to me at all, but regarded me, her eyes shadowed a little by her long lashes, as if she were looking at me from very far away. But she was smiling, and he was smiling.

I spoke heavily: “You don’t have to tell me, either of you.”

Jeffrey’s voice was even: “I suppose not. And I suppose this must come as a great shock to you. You are Helena’s brother, and this that happened in the storm—but that was bound to happen some day, first or last—will hurt her. Do remember though, Peter, in judging us—Muriel and me—that we have loved each other, under all the trivial things with which we’ve occupied our lives, for seven years.”

I said, “I remember. I’m not judging you. Only don’t talk for a minute. I’m trying to think.”

Yet thought was profitless. I remembered a boy and a girl who had said that they would love each other forever, perhaps, and I saw a handsome man with something restless in his face, and a woman who was beautiful, and I felt that there was no hope for them.

Oh, mechanically the situation presented no insurmountable obstacles. Dozens of couples in the easy gay postwar society in which they moved changed partners to the accompaniment of the rather creaking and unwieldy machinery of the divorce courts, and moved on again lightly enough. But the emotion blazing in the morning sunlight there between these two was at once too deep and too fragile for such a practical solution.

It was clear to me, looking at them, that they had forgotten for that hour any considerations usually called reasonable, but that recollection, when it came, would break them. They were not insensitive enough to walk over Helena’s happy and gentle heart easily.

Muriel spoke for the first time, not to me but to Jeffrey: “I’m yours, darling, and I’m glad.” Her voice sounded glad. “I suppose I’ve always been yours, really, since the day we rode half-broken hunters over all the highest fences we could find. But”—she turned to me—“this is why I telephoned you. You’ve got to help me persuade him. We must not disrupt Helena’s life over something that was settled for us, really, seven years ago.”

Jeffrey said, “I tell you, I cannot live without you now, Muriel! Peter had better come with me while I tell Helena so.”

I interrupted. First and last, I knew I was just good old Peter saying something sensible when someone should. I said, “Don’t hurry; she isn’t at home,” and explained to them about her telephone message.

It was clear from Jeffrey’s face that the information was of no significance to him—was so trivial that he wondered I mentioned it. But Muriel saw its import clearly, although I could not tell at all whether the expression that crossed her face was disappointed or relieved.

She began to talk rapidly, almost impersonally, as if her secret thoughts through years of living alone were tumbling out at last, in any order that happened:

“The trouble with all of us—all the people like you and me, Jeffrey—is that we tried to settle our lives in fifteen minutes, more or less, in 1917, on the basis that they wouldn’t last more than an hour and a half anyway. So we did all sorts of absurd things that weren’t absurd then because the whole show was moving by so fast it was worth while clutching at anything.”

He said, “Well, what then? It’s important to me to get married to you fast now, and to have you always.”

She smiled at him; said quite dispassionately, “I love you so much. I’ve always loved you so much.”

He walked across the terrace to her, stood staring down at her, said, “Well, why all the long sentences about us, then? We’ll have years to talk. I’ll go home now, and wait for Helena to come, to tell her.”

She said suddenly, sharply, “You will never tell Helena, because I shan’t let you. Wait, Jeffrey—let me talk, please! It’s seven years too late to be what we might have been. We are as we are. You drive a car too fast all the time, because you were a flyer once and liked the sense of escaping everything by moving fast away from it in a plane. And you drink too much. So do I.”

He said, “What is the point of all this? I drive well, if I do drive fast. I drink quite well, if I do drink.”

She said, “The point is, there isn’t much substance to our lives, or us, any more.”

He said, “Oh, God, don’t I know it? But it would all come back if you and I were married, my dear.”

She looked at him through her long lashes, and her smile twisted a little. “Would you write the great novel you were going to write in college?”

Jeffrey said, “You don’t need to be so unkind.”

“I’m not, Jeffrey dear,” Muriel replied; “I’m being realistic. You occupy yourself with a minor Wall Street job that supplements pleasantly and not too arduously the money your grandfather left you—as my work in the theater supplements the money Stephen Mills left me. You play first-rate golf and third-rate tennis. You have a pretty daughter, and a charming wife who loves you as much as I could possibly love you, because she loves you, I’m sure, as much as a woman can love a man. I’m not going to wreck her for the sake of two people who don’t exist any more—the you and I who were children sure of ourselves and of love.”

He said, “I can only tell you now that I am more sure than ever of my love for you—more sure that you are the only person I have ever known that I have really loved.”

She said, “I know. I grant you that. It is true for me too. But it is irrelevant. I mean, we are not important enough any more to be justified in taking what we want at anyone else’s expense.”

He looked at her. She had hurt him then. He said, “If, after last night, you still feel that I am not important to you, there is no more to be said. You are quite right.”

There was a little silence. I broke it. They had obviously forgotten my presence. I said, “I want you both to come home with me and have breakfast with me now. If Helena takes an early train from town, she will be arriving almost immediately. It will be much better for you to be at my house than here, if Helena does arrive. I shall say simply that Jeffrey called on me late, during the storm, and spent the night at my house, and that I telephoned you to come to breakfast with us.”

We ate on my veranda, where the morning shadows lay cool across the trellises. Before we were finished with our first cups of coffee Helena arrived.

It was a gay Helena, full of conversation about the school friend with whom she had dined, and the school friend’s marriage, and philosophical (more or less) as to the change life in the Middle West had effected in the school friend.

Helena was pretty and cool and composed. We were all, I think, grateful that she felt talkative.

She had coffee with us. I said, somewhere between two of her sentences, that Jeffrey had spent the night with me because of the storm. He started to interrupt me in my carefully slow-spoken sentence then.

But Muriel spoke quickly to Helena, asking her some inane question about the severity of the storm in New York. Its very inanity, and Helena’s indifferent answer, lessened the tension there, and after Helena answered there was a second’s silence. An oriole in the branches of a great maple sang to the morning, and we heard the voices of the children drawing nearer across the lawn. They came in, Stephen and Dorothea, talking very fast and happily of some children’s party to be given on Saturday at a house down the road. Helena stooped to kiss her own pretty daughter, and then gave Muriel’s son a casual friendly kiss too as he passed her chair.

In that second also I thought that Jeffrey would speak—in the second when Helena’s face bent close to the face of the little boy, who had his mother’s glowing eyes. But Muriel in that instant stood up, moved close to Jeffrey, and looked at him imploringly.

Jeffrey and Muriel looked at Helena. And I, who was separated from the complexities of modern living by accident, as Helena was separated by a temperament that ignored them, watched them look at her. I knew then that they might have been each other’s salvation—that something burning between them was strong enough to burn away all the trivialities that cumbered their days, but that their strength itself would keep them from trampling on her weakness—that in her confident helplessness she would always be victorious over them.

From the decision they made that sunlit cool morning they never wavered at all. Jeffrey was Helena’s good husband, Muriel was Helena’s best friend. And they were lovers in secret. Not happily, lovers. Any indictments that could be made against them they made against themselves, but never against each other. And never, to my knowledge—and I was thrown in daily contact with them all—did they snatch an hour together at Helena’s expense at first. I mean just this. They never told her lies, to escape her. They saw each other alone when they could—when she chose to visit some friend or to spend a day shopping in town.

The friendship between Helena and Muriel deepened and widened, but it was one of those women’s intimacies which no man could estimate truly.

The summer passed. The year passed. Jeffrey, amazingly enough, wrote a book. It was a fairly good book about the effect of the war on a little American town, on the changes made in its young men who returned. The book was sufficiently successful so that Jeffrey gave up his Wall Street job, which was more or less a sinecure anyway, and wrote a series of short stories of small-town life.

He did not become famous. He did not become even an author potentially of first importance. But, in Helena’s eyes, he who had always fulfilled superbly the functions of amiable husband and excellent provider became now a great man.

I have seen Jeffrey and Muriel being gentle with her, being genuinely touched by the simplicity which was a quality they both had lost, and being driven quite mad by her innocent admiration of him. She was honest enough and intelligent enough to recognize and to say that, but for Muriel’s friendship, Muriel’s encouragement, Jeffrey would never have written his novel. She said to me, not once but twenty times through a year, “You know, Peter, Muriel has a flair for recognizing talent. It’s so unfortunate that she married someone stupid, like Stephen Mills, and that he made her so unhappy she’s lost interest in marriage. She would make a wonderful wife for a man of talent.” I used to agree with her always.

But it happened that Jeffrey’s minor career—which was an enormous comfort to him, though he never took it too seriously—brought about a long severance between Muriel and Jeffrey.

It came about like this. Helena’s travel experience consisted of a summer trip to Europe and various visits with school friends through the eastern United States, besides the usual winter cruises to Bermuda and Havana that were common with the moderately well-to-do in the postwar years. But, it appeared, she had a secret ambition to spend a winter in the south of France.

Jeffrey now was a writer, and by Heaven’s grace a writer with an adequate private income (a fact for which Helena never gave sufficient thanks to destiny). Therefore, as she saw it, Jeffrey should have a year in the south of France, to talk about literature with other writers.

She began admitting her ambition for a season in the south of France along about February, toward the end of the first winter Jeffrey and Muriel were lovers. Destiny helped her in that she was ill that springtime with an influenza that verged on pneumonia, and that she did not recover quickly.

I remember that summer, a year from the night of the great storm—how fragilely lovely Helena was, how completely happy with her newly famous husband and her trusted best friend. I remember the three of them embarked on gay casual trips through the countryside fragrant of June.

That was the year Jeffrey bought his first de luxe car and developed his passion for driving, alone or sometimes with me or more rarely with Muriel (Helena did not like fast night driving), along the scented roadways late at night, driving superbly, sending the twelve cylinders roaring through the darkness.

Once only I drove with him and Muriel. I liked the sensation of speed myself. It was the only release possible for a man whose life was as completely sedentary as mine. But that night I drove with them I was almost frightened once or twice. At them rather than at the speed. They laughed together as I had not heard them laugh since they rode wild horses nearly a decade before.

They were, too clearly, trying to ride away from themselves.

Sometime toward that summer’s end a crisis came between them. I never knew precisely what it was, but it was clear enough from scraps of conversation they exchanged in front of me—me whom they burdened with no more precise confidences but from whom they never troubled to conceal their affection for each other either—that the petty deceits they had to practice, the sense of guilt and shameful intrigue with which they often had to live, brought them momentarily to the point of wishing to escape from each other.

In any event, they came back from one of their long swift drives through the summer night so silent, so strained that a less innocent woman than Helena would have guessed the truth instantly. But she told them that they both were tired, and scolded Jeffrey gently for taking Muriel for so long a drive so late at night.

Jeffrey had, up to that evening, given twenty more or less bad reasons for his reluctance to go to France. Now suddenly he said, “I’ve thought over your idea for a winter on the Riviera, Helena. You are right. It would be good for me. Let’s make plans to sail in October.”

She was as pleased as a little girl newly in receipt of everything she has wanted for Christmas. She made plans, talking happily, for the sort of villa she would rent, the arrangements she would make to secure certified milk from Paris for little Helena, the clothes she would buy in New York, the clothes she would buy in Paris.

Muriel and Jeffrey sat, almost completely silent, watching her. There was a shadow over Jeffrey’s dark looks. I thought, regarding him, that there was a curious desperateness in the very steadiness of his composure, the deliberateness of his smile. I looked at Muriel. She was, as always latterly, secret, composed, lovely. But that evening, for the first time, I knew how she would look when she was old.

Her face was drawn, so that her features looked thinner than usual.

She came with me to see them sail. She kissed them both good-bye—the correct casual kiss of an old friend wishing old friends bon voyage.

She waved with the proper enthusiasm to Helena’s excited orchid-decorated figure. But when they had sailed, when she was walking down the dock with me, where a bleak wind off the North River blew in through all the apertures, something slipped in her face.

She clung to my arm as if for once really in her life she wanted my support. And her light quick step faltered for a minute.

She said very quietly, “Peter, he is all that ever happened to me that was significant; all that ever will.”

I said, “I know.”

She smiled with some effort. “We’ve given each other up, you know. We couldn’t— Too many stupid little lies. It got all sordid.”

I said, “You and I are going to the smartest speakeasy I know—and it’s quite smart: it’s the one to which my clients take me when they want to persuade me that right is on their side and it obviously isn’t. We are going to have too many cocktails, and champagne, and I am going to tell you all the sorrows of my life. It will distract you.”

She said, “Let’s do that.”

Muriel was rather hard up that winter and went to work as the second lead in an unimportant comedy that achieved a three or four months’ run, so that I saw very little of her. Occasionally we dined together and she read me her letters from Helena or I read her mine. They were charming letters full of descriptions of shops and scenery, with occasional quotations of passages from Jeffrey’s new book, which, judging from the quotations, did not seem to me to be likely to be anywhere nearly as good as his first one.

Muriel and Jeffrey had meant, I am sure, to make their separation a permanent severance. But whether they recognized their need for each other, or whether it was just that the passing of months blurred their recollection of the subterfuges and deceits that had brought them to the point of antagonism, and left clear only their knowledge that they loved and wanted each other, I am not certain. They were in correspondence again by New Year’s.

Muriel spent Sundays always with her son, who lived for the rest of the week in a small boys’ school that was much more tranquil and orderly than any life his mother might have evolved with him.

One rainy Sunday in January she telephoned me and asked me over for tea. Her show was just closing, she said. I knew that, having read the notices. And I knew it was not to tell me that that she had summoned me. She was curiously excited. She said finally, with no introduction, “Well, I’m sailing for London in ten days. I have a chance to do twelve weeks with the English company of Strangers. My part isn’t more than a bit.”

I said, “I take it that you’re accepting it, then, because London is much nearer the Riviera than New York.”

She did not answer directly. She sat smoking, staring into the fire. Then she said, “The salary’s almost enough to pay my hotel bill. You know, Peter, we weren’t all born weak. We are capable, some of us, of extreme strength. But something keeps us wavering.”

I said, “Who’s to define strength and weakness? I’m going on a Mediterranean cruise myself.”

I had just then made up my mind. The winter had been unpleasant. There was nothing of particular importance imminent in my law practice, and time had sufficiently reconciled me to my deformities so that I no longer minded meeting strangers—had, in fact, some mild curiosity to see as much of the world as might be comfortably managed from a boat deck.

I thought also that I might stop over and spend some days with Helena and Jeffrey.

She sailed, and I sailed some weeks later. I sent from Marseilles a last-minute wire to Helena and Jeffrey warning them of my arrival. I had not written because I thought it would be rather amusing to descend on my little sister with no special warning, and see what sort of ménage she ran, in soft-voiced bad French no doubt, without letting her make long preparations in honor of my arrival.

I left the ship then—I was to rejoin it at Naples—and went by car to their villa, which was perched on a cliff overlooking a Mediterranean perhaps not as blue as Helena’s expectations of it.

She looked very well and as serene as ever, and the child had grown enormously. But Jeffrey looked simply dreadful.

Helena was a good hostess. I was in flannels, comfortable with a cool drink, on the terrace that overlooked the sea, admiring Helena’s early roses and the warmth of the afternoon sunlight, concerning which she was a little proprietary too, before she told me that my unexpected arrival had postponed for her a long-planned trip to Paris.

“My dear, I don’t mind at all,” she said. “I’ll go next week, after you’ve left. But it is fortunate that your telegram came when it did. I should have left for my train within another ten minutes.”

Jeffrey looked at me suddenly as if I were the person he disliked most in the world. And I began to guess the truth. I did not have long in which to remain at all uncertain. The sun had not slipped from the terrace before the telephone rang. Jeffrey started to answer it, but Helena said, “Never mind, darling,” and reached it first.

I missed two or three of Helena’s enthusiastic sentences. Then she hung up the receiver and came running out to us, her face pink with excitement. She said, “Darlings, it’s Muriel! Muriel at the station. She’ll be here in ten minutes. Imagine that! Her English play closed earlier than she expected, and she thought she’d come down and surprise us for a few days before she went home.”

She excused herself and went to make some arrangements about Muriel’s room. Jeffrey did not speak at all, but stood smoking, staring at his pleasant vista of shore and sea, not looking at me.

I said, “I’m frightfully sorry, Jeff. It’s the most unfortunate coincidence.”

He tried to make his voice cordial. He said, “Not your fault. You couldn’t know.”

Then we heard Muriel’s taxi coming up the drive, and we were all, he and I and Helena, telling her how glad we were to see her.

She was very white, but she had had time, in her ten minutes’ taxi journey, to estimate what had happened, and she was as composed as Jeffrey.

What lies they had finally brought themselves to tell, what weeks they had spent writing and planning, in the hope of achieving four or five days together, Heaven knows. The accident of my telegram had postponed Helena’s long-arranged journey, and that was that.

We all spent four days together in which Helena and Jeffrey showed us conscientiously as much of the Riviera as possible. Then I had to leave for Naples, and Muriel for Paris. Her sailing was booked from Cherbourg. She and Helena went to Paris on the same train. Jeffrey, it appeared, could not take the time off from his book to go with them. So he had explained to Helena for weeks.

That was their last meeting in almost two years.

Helena and Jeffrey stayed an extra year in France for such divergent reasons as that his second book was a failure and he disliked coming home to face it; living was cheap and pleasant; and Helena persuaded him that she wanted another child.

That last was an unfortunate adventure. The child, a boy who might have brought them closer, lived only a month or two, and its loss made them both a little embittered and restless.

Muriel, at about the time we had the news that the child was expected, got herself engaged to a correct and very dull architect who was old enough to be her father. But the engagement dwindled through a season and came to nothing in the end. I never expected that it would come to anything.

After that was ended she began to take a mild interest in politics. Her affairs were now in fairly good order and she seemed tired of the theater. So politics interested her for the duration of a campaign.

It was in the early summer, when Helena and Jeffrey had been gone almost two years, that Helena wrote to say they were coming home. She wrote warmly that she had missed me, that it would be pleasant to live close by a dependable brother the rest of her life. There was something a little old, a little beaten in the tone of her letter, and I wondered briefly if she had any special worry about Jeffrey that she did not mention.

Then I read on through her meticulous directions for the opening of her house, and decided that I was mistaken, that she was not changed at all.

The day her letter came, Muriel was dining with me. I said, after we were through discussing the future of the Democratic Party, “Jeffrey and Helena will be home in three weeks.” But I could tell by her face, as I said it, that she knew already.

She did not try to conceal that. She said indifferently, “Jeff wrote me. I don’t know whether I’m glad or not.”

I said, with as much impatience as I ever showed her, “It’s an obsession, Muriel. Not that that matters. What does matter is that you are wasting all your youth over it.”

She traced the shadow a candlestick flung across the tablecloth with a long finger on which for some fancy she had worn that evening the great sapphire Stephen Mills gave her. The candlelight shadowed her eyes and warmed her shoulders. She looked very beautiful sitting there, though her beauty was not as vivid as it used to be. She sipped her coffee, said slowly, “I’ve never found anything I prefer to do than to waste what’s left of my youth over Jeffrey. I’ve tried hard enough to find something, from time to time.”

I poured her some cognac. She sat warming the glass between her hands, staring at the candles. She always dressed very carefully to dine with me, because she knew it pleased me.

She said suddenly, “You’ve been in love with me ten years, Peter. Yet you’ve never asked me to marry you. I’ve wondered about that.”

Some echo of old bitterness—bitterness I thought I was finished with, as finished as with the hopes that died before it—caught at me so sharply, so suddenly that for a moment I could not speak. I said then, “You’ve had moods, no doubt, when you would have married me out of pity.”

She looked at me. She said, “It’s a better reason than many for marrying. I am sorry, Peter; I did not mean to hurt you. And you are right, of course.”

But she put one of her hands, very sweetly, very gently, against mine on the table. I said, “I don’t care what you do.”

She laughed a little ruefully. “That’s my trouble, too—that I don’t care what I do either, Peter. So let’s talk about Jeffrey. I want you to, and you don’t mind really. He and I interest you from your perfectly detached viewpoint.”

It was my turn to laugh without much mirth at that. There was a good deal of truth in it.

She said, “His second book was awfully bad. I doubt if he could be a first-rate novelist anyway. But he has to go on trying at that, because he hasn’t found anything else. It is really important.” She hesitated, and then went on. “Whatever he might have been that was first-rate got lost in the well known smoke of battle, to be as absurd as possible about it. And in that marriage of his to your charming sister” (it was the first time I ever heard exasperation in her voice about Helena), “who just is plain no good for him. Because she is too good to him, perhaps.”

I said, “That’s true enough. He would have been better off with you, if only because you would have had imagination enough to spend always a little more than he made, and so keep him working hard.”

She said, “Precisely. And I’ll keep him working hard at a third novel. It’s pretty clear to me that he’s been drinking his head off these last months. I’ll stop that to a degree.”

I said, “And then what?”

She said, “And then—nothing. I’ll come as near as I ever reach to feeling I’m useful and necessary during the months that we manage our stupid trivial cheap affair and I manage to make him do some good work. He’ll come as near as he ever does come, poor Jeff, to thinking that he’s a really important person, because I love him enough to die for him and can’t take him for granted, as Helena always does. After his book comes out Helena will decide, for reasons that are sound for her, to go see the south of Spain or the south of Africa or something. And that will be that, again.”

“It just isn’t good enough,” I said very lamely.

She said, “Give me some more cognac and tell me something better. We all grow old without growing up. I am so breathless, really, at the thought of seeing him that I shall walk up and down my bedroom all night until dawn because I can’t sleep. So I plan to stay very late at your house and make the time before dawn seem a little shorter.”

I laughed and said, “I’ll make you play cribbage. It’s the best game for a restless mood.”

So we played cribbage.

But Muriel never quite managed to get Jeffrey to finish his third book. I have what exists of the manuscript in my desk now, and sometimes, when I blame Jeffrey for the waste he made of his life, and of hers that I valued more, I take it out and read the pages in Helena’s careful typing that has begun to fade a very little. It was in France, I believe, that she learned to type, after her second child died—to be, as she said, useful to Jeffrey in his work.

He touched in that uncompleted manuscript heights of understanding of the chaotic pattern of his days, and of himself who was so molded by them, that he never touched before. It is the story of the life of a man who was ambitious and was restless, impatient but not unscrupulous; a man hard bitten by the absurd desire to make some logical sense of the web of irrelevant incidents, of inconsistent emotions that enveloped him.

A man who could never decide what among the things he could have was the thing he wanted most.

When I have finished rereading the pages I cannot blame him any more. I do not know what solution he had evolved for the hero of his book. As I say, he did not finish it. I was at his house the night he stopped working on it. He was then two months home from France, and somewhat leaner and soberer than when he arrived. He had been working constantly for some weeks. At the end of one of them he came to a break in his manuscript and said he wanted to celebrate. So Helena telephoned me and Muriel and gave a very good impromptu dinner party.

It was an October Saturday, a day of violent rain, with a high wind blowing cold with the promise of winter. But the rain had stopped, briefly, when I went to call for Muriel. So she said she wanted to walk the little distance between her house and Helena’s. We walked through the windy dusk, the wet red leaves blown heavy against our feet, in silence for most of the way.

But when we turned the bend of the street, where we could see through the trees the lights in Helena’s drawing-room, she spoke quickly: “Do something for me, Peter. The book’s so amazingly good it frightens me—because—because if it is as good as it promises to be it’s a sort of justification for Jeffrey and me—” She changed that quickly: “For me, at least. Men don’t need justifications so much.”

I said, “My dear, you are doing this very badly. Tell me what you want me to do for you. I can’t decide at all, not from those rapid sentences.”

She stood still and took my arm. “It’s this. Get Helena to stop explaining to Jeffrey her philosophy of life—at least until he’s done with the book.”

I laughed out loud. I said, “I thought from your tone of voice it was something of ghastly importance.”

She laughed too, but she said, “It might be, pretty nearly. You know, she gets him to read aloud what he’s done each day. It pleases her, and why not?”

I knew that. I knew also that a complete carbon, what Helena called “Jeffrey’s private carbon,” was locked in Muriel’s writing desk; and what shifts he was forced to make to get her the new chapters promptly, because he wanted to discuss them with her, I could imagine well enough.

Muriel went on talking: “But he’s writing of a person with very complex motives and impulses. And when Helena cuts in with a simple childlike observation as to why the man should not have felt that way—I sometimes think Jeffrey will throw a lamp at her.”

“All right,” I said; “I’ll give her a brotherly lecture on the nuances of the artistic temperament. That ought to impress her. You know, Muriel, we all, myself included, are shockingly patronizing about my well meaning if somewhat stupid sister.”

She answered that thoughtfully: “I know we are, and she is in fact better than any of us. She is not stupid at all, just fortunate in that she was born believing in black and white, right and wrong, fidelity, loyalty, and a lot of other pretty words, and nothing has ever happened to make her doubt.”

I said, “You and Jeffrey could have made her doubt, if you’d chosen, several years since.”

She shrugged her shoulders and pulled her evening wrap closer round her. She said, “Will it be put to our credit as generosity or debited us as weakness? Let’s not stand under an oak tree that’s growing barer by the minute, talking about what we did with our lives or might have done differently, Peter darling. I want a nice strong cocktail.”

I said, to tease her, “You began the conversation about life.”

She laughed, but she wasn’t paying particular attention to me any more. As always within two minutes of seeing Jeffrey, her step quickened and her head went up. She said vaguely, “Oh, I’ve started a lot of things in my time,” and we walked up the steps of Jeffrey’s house.

After dinner the rain came down heavily again, and the wind rose, whipping branches of the stripped trees against the house. But, by a great blazing fire, we were warm and comfortable. The two children came in to make their good nights as we were having coffee. Stephen, as often, was spending the night at Helena’s house. She had arranged some sort of party supper for them in the breakfast room, and we had heard, through dinner, occasional shouts of laughter. They got on extremely well for a boy and a girl.

When they left, we sat, not talking much, listening to the sound of the storm, and Helena spoke innocently of other storms that she remembered. “There was the great one in the spring, long ago before we went to France, remember, Jeff?” she said. “It was so bad that I stayed in town and came back in the morning. We all had breakfast at Peter’s.”

I thought with some exasperation that she was impelled by nothing less than malevolent destiny, to remember that in a pleasant hour we were sharing. But Jeffrey began to talk of some storm they had seen in the Mediterranean, and Muriel never turned her head from the fire. After all, in the years those two had been obliged to get used to and ignore worse moments.

Helena suggested bridge and we played two or three desultory rubbers. Jeffrey had begun to drink one rapid highball after another. But we all by tacit consent ignored that. He had been working hard and this was an evening of relaxation for him. If his habitual relaxation in the last year or two had been to get himself moderately drunk with increasing rapidity—and we all knew that was so—still there was no special point in mentioning it even to each other. I had noticed recently that he always drank, if it was possible to drink, when he was obliged to confront Helena and Muriel together for any length of time.

When we were tired of bridge, his mood, which had been restless and a trifle sullen, shifted suddenly. He entertained us with a long but very well told, very diverting story of something that had happened to him in the war he so rarely mentioned. He finished. Our laughter finished. We sat relaxed, and in the silence noticed that the rain had stopped.

Helena said, “Jeffrey dear, do you feel like reading us the chapter you finished today, or are you too tired?”

He said no, that he was not tired, and brought the pages from where they lay on his desk over to the fireside, sat in one of the chairs that flanked the fireplace, and began to read quietly.

The chapter dealt with a reëncounter of the man with the woman who was his first love, his resentment at the changes time had made in her, and his ache withal to reachieve something they had shared which he had never quite attained again. It was well written but, I thought, not as moving as some passages of the book I had heard read before, perhaps because I was seeing Jeffrey too clearly in the story and knew how differently he had felt toward and dealt with his own first love.

I listened with half of my attention, and watched Helena’s golden head resting against the back of a high green chair, watched her rosy face, her expression of a confident and interested child; was aware of Muriel’s tense composure, of Jeffrey’s occasional obvious effort not to stumble over words.

And though I knew that the elements of catastrophe lay in that pleasant room, it seemed to me, for brief moments, that we who had lived through so much since that April morning when we rode in Stephen Mills’s hill pasture, and accident brought the first determining change into our lives, might well survive to the calm supposed to arrive with middle age.

It seemed to me that so we might have sat, very old friends, very secure with one another, had Muriel married me a decade and more ago, and Jeffrey consoled himself with Helena after all.

He finished reading. Helena said simply, “It’s beautiful, Jeffrey, and some of it makes me want to cry. But, in life, things would not be so mixed up for the man. Things don’t get mixed up in life—with people who are like the people we know, at least.”

He said, “You think not?”

But she was being serious. She said, “Don’t laugh at me, or at least not for a moment. I’ve never been clever, like you and Muriel and Peter, but I want to try to say what I mean.”

We waited. In the consciousness of all of us, I am sure, was the certainty that we liked her so very much. I know that they both liked her, for all the travail her helpless confidence brought into their lives.

She smiled at us rather hopelessly, after a moment, and said, “I can’t manage words. I mean perhaps just this. That if one tries to do the best one can, and not hurt people, life is very simple, after all. Of course, Jeffrey darling, I don’t mean that as criticism of your book. I realize that complications are necessary for literature. Now you can laugh at me. Even I know that sounds funny.”

But we did not feel like laughing. Only Jeffrey said, “My dearest, how old are you? I always forget.”

She smiled up at him. She said, “It’s so polite of you, because I was three my last birthday.”

He said, “We’re all along in our thirties, aren’t we? Rather appalling that.” He poured himself a long highball, drank it swiftly, shrugged.

Then he said, “Come for a drive with me, Muriel. Just a short drive. The rain’s stopped and I want some fresh air to clear my head. I’m planning a long day’s work tomorrow.”

She said, “Very well—will you come, Peter?” It was understood among us, now for a long time, that Helena acutely disliked driving with Jeffrey at night, so we never asked her any more.

I shook my head, said, “I’ll stay with Helena,” and Jeffrey got his coat and Muriel’s. After he brought the car round, they both stood in the doorway for a moment while Muriel made her good nights and told Helena she had had a pleasant evening.

Light from the hall light behind them shone on Muriel’s tawny head, that was no higher than Jeffrey’s shoulder, and across his dark handsome curiously dissipated face. I noticed for the first time, with a little sharp surprise, that his hair was growing very thin.

He said to Helena, “Don’t sit up for me, darling, if you get tired.” She kissed him, said lightly, “I shan’t. I’ll talk to my old brother for a while, and then send him home.”

He said, “I want to drive round the mountain road. That will take an hour, but it’s a pleasant drive.”

I said, “Watch the corners. It will be slippery after the storm.”

He flung back his head and laughed, said, “I could drive that road in my sleep, old Peter.”

Probably he could, near enough. He had driven it half asleep and half drunk scores of times before. I didn’t suppose he was driving it at all that night, actually. I was used to the elaborate explanations to which they were forced, to account for the length of their absences.

Muriel wrapped her tawny velvet coat close round her, picked up the skirt of the current version of the golden frocks she loved all her life, and they went out arm in arm. They were laughing as the car started.

I stayed with Helena only a little while. She was frankly sleepy.

I was asleep myself, deeply, with the curious fatigue we recognize in ourselves sometimes after a day and night of storm, when the ringing of my telephone waked me. I had the sensation that it had been ringing a rather long time.

They did not tell me by telephone the seriousness of the accident. The chief of police of our town knew that Jeffrey was my brother-in-law and that Muriel was one of my oldest friends. They told me as we drove toward the mountain road through the rain that had commenced to fall heavily again.

Half a dozen cars were stopped near the broken fence rail. But no one spoke when I got out of the car. It was so quiet that through the sound of the rain falling I could hear the rush of the river on the rocks far below.

The lights of the cars gathered there were concentrated on a space of feet where the white fence was down. I could see very clearly where the wheels of Jeffrey’s last fast car had slipped, held for a moment, slipped again, held even for a space of seconds beyond the fence rail, in the earth and leaves and brambles before the place where the cliff dropped sharply.

Yes, they must have had at least one long moment, in the end, in which they knew that, after the few things they had done well and the many things they had done badly, what remained was for them together, forever, certainly.

WHENEVER SPRING

Every morning she came at eight, a little breathless from walking fast through the crowded Moscow streets, opened the familiar door with a worn key, choked back the feeling that came to her always when she opened that door—that it was surprising the house was so still. The one-time town residence of a prince and a princess, now for some long years a Children’s House of Rest and Culture. The children who went to afternoon sessions in school arrived here at nine in the morning to study, to read, to have music lessons or lessons in manual training. The children who went to school mornings spent their afternoons here.

Naturally, so early, the house seemed empty without the noise the children made. So Natalya had told herself hundreds of times, not admitting that in the stillness she remembered sounds that would scarcely recur in that house at nine of any morning. . . The smart menservants jesting with the maids, as the men washed down the marble steps and the hall, and the maids dusted. A woman’s light laughter tinkling, a man’s, deeper, answering hers. A boy’s merry voice. Echoes very far away, but how loud they sounded sometimes, to a woman growing old.

But she straightened her shoulders. It was a better world she was living in now, better for the poor, better for the children. Some of the children who came to the house nowadays were such dear children. It was a pleasure to watch them so well-fed and strong, and to listen to them so confident that they lived in the best of all possible worlds.

She put her warm, thick, ugly coat neatly on a hanger in the cubbyhole where she would spend all day checking the children’s coats, took her broom and dustpan from the closet behind the rows of coat racks, and walked fast down the corridor trying to think of cheerful things. Telling herself that soon spring would be far enough advanced for her to leave her heavy coat at home, and that she would be glad, for its weight tired her sometimes. That she shouldn’t mind being tired sometimes—it was natural, now that she was an old woman practically, being forty-two this springtime. Princess Olga was forty-two when she died in 1916, and she had looked like a girl. Well, it was God’s will—only they didn’t say that any more—that the Princess had an easy life, and she, Natalya Markofska, a hard one.

The corridor had two faint smells, one of old wood needing paint, and another of a passageway used by many people. Clean people, Natalya told herself sturdily; people grew cleaner year by year since she was young. So she was at the foot of the wide curving marble staircase, built decoratively for the descent of princesses on the way to greet honored guests in the hall below. Light poured down the stairs from the great window at the landing. It used to pour across the great hall. But there was no hall any more. It had long been partitioned off roughly for the manager’s offices. The staircase led only to the narrow corridor now.

She climbed the stairs quickly. No reason to feel sad. Boris Litinroff had been very kind to remember her, and give her this easy work. Nothing to do but sweep down the stairs in the morning and look after the children’s coats and berets. What would she have done had he not remembered that day when he kissed her on both cheeks in that house outside battle-scarred Kief, and said, “Natalya Markofska, you are a good Communist. Besides, you have saved my life,” laughing like the boy he’d been then.

He was a great man in the Soviet now, and he had remembered. There’d been a speech of his in the morning paper. She had not read it all through, because, as she grew older, all speeches seemed more and more alike. She’d been more interested in the scientists who discovered gold up near the Arctic Circle. Great mines that would produce enough to buy many machines abroad that the people needed. They would take it out by dog-sled and by airplane. And there was another wonderful thing in the morning paper, of the scientist who had finally found a way to melt rock into something to pave streets with.

She began to sweep down the stairs where the marble used to be so smooth, but was chipped now on the edges of the steps, from many hurrying footsteps passing over years.

The first step and the second step. When she was young they would have called it a miracle, to bring gold from the Arctic by airplane for the country’s needs, or to melt stone to make fine streets for the people to walk on. They didn’t call anything a miracle now, only an advance in science. To her it seemed more or less the same thing, as she tried to tell the children once, when they were mocking about miracles. But the head of the house spoke to her gently, and said that she might be misunderstood, and that since the children were scientifically taught, it was better not to confuse them. Everyone spoke to her gently, for she was under the great Boris Litinroff’s protection, and it was known that she had saved his life once when he was hiding from Denikin’s men in the South.

Three steps, four steps, five steps down to the wide landing. She looked out the window into the garden where spring was newly come, and caught her breath and forgot the great Soviet advances in science, what the head of the house said yesterday, what the children might tease her about good-naturedly today.

Moss was thick grown on Princess Olga’s neglected tomb, where she slept among her husband’s ancestors in an abandoned cemetery a dozen kilos from Moscow, but the city garden she had loved looked in spring sunlight as though she had left it yesterday. It was a beautiful place for children to play, so the government had kept it as it was. Still the daffodils blossomed among the clump of silver birches, and the cherry tree pink was bright against the black firs.

Natalya Markofska opened one section of the window and stood looking out. Probably violets still flowered under the shelter of the wall, as they used to flower when two children played there. A girl and a boy two years older. The girl was herself, the boy Prince Mikhail Mikhailoff, only child of Prince Dmitri and Princess Olga. A girl with chestnut hair, a boy with golden. Princess Olga on the marble bench by the fountain in sheer white frocks with pearls around her throat, laughing with those two children. The children and the Princess were more vivid to Natalya than her present self looking across a deserted garden.

She was gay and young, the Princess, and liked society, so she always persuaded her husband to stay in Moscow late each year, instead of moving to their great lonely country place. So every springtime the children picked violets in the Moscow garden, Prince Mikhail Mikhailoff and Natalya Markofska, who was a peasant’s child. Probably. They had never told her exactly, and it made no difference now, had made no difference for years. The Princess’ voice was always just as gentle speaking to her as to her own son, and she was brought up to be much more a companion than a maid. After Prince Dmitri died, the Princess put a bed for her in her own great Louis Quinze bedroom, because she said she was less lonely with her there. Her principal duties after that were to bring Princess Olga her morning chocolate and read her letters to her. So many of them were merry letters from Mikhail, who was away at the Cadet’s School.

During those years he was away Princess Olga taught her to speak English, because she said it was useful to have a language in which they could speak privately, and too many people knew French for it to be at all private. They were long years when Mikhail was gone, but pleasant, with the occasional great adventure of going to St. Petersburg, and visiting in palaces that seemed forever snowbound.

Of course, though Natalya shared a room with Princess Olga, even in Petersburg, she never went downstairs to the great dinners or out to the endless succession of parties. But there was enough gayety without that for a girl who was just an anomalous dependent of a great family, to dress her Princess in velvet and jewels for festivity, and to hear about it afterward. There were the sounds of the sleigh bells in the streets, and the church bells ringing, when the Princess took her driving. And sometimes there were ecstatic days when Mikhail came to visit, and spend half hours with her in his mother’s sitting room, a resplendent Mikhail, completely a man, and soon to be an officer in the army. But he still called Natalya “little sister.”

There was the day when some lady visiting the Princess said that she, Natalya Markofska, was a great beauty. She was so excited that she could scarcely wait until she was alone to examine herself in a mirror and see whether it was true. Which was sinful vanity, of course. Besides, when she looked in the mirror, she couldn’t tell for sure.

That night she asked the Princess, who said, “What a child you are. Of course, you are lovely. It troubles me sometimes, because it may make life difficult for a girl of no family. Still, you are content enough to stay with me always, aren’t you?”

She nodded, and kissed her Princess’ hand. She was content. She had a new cherry-red dress. It was soon to be Christmas. Everyone was good to her. What more was there to want?

That was the winter before General Raduna was summoned by the Princess, who was distressed by stories of Mikhail’s wildness as a young officer in Petersburg, to advise her.

Natalya sat in the little room next the Princess’ boudoir, as she had been told, and did her embroidery. But the General didn’t close the other door, and when his voice grew loud and angry she couldn’t help hearing. He didn’t seem angry at the Princess, but at something Natalya didn’t understand. He kept saying, “What chance is there for standards? An irresponsible aristocracy, a debauched court—Rasputin.” She had heard that name before. People said it frighteningly, but whether the threat was in the name or their thought about it, she couldn’t tell.

After a little the General said, “God save Mother Russia,” and strode out past her without speaking, although usually he was very polite. When she went inside the Princess was crying.

That year they did not go to Petersburg. When they were just packed and ready, Princess Olga was taken ill, and they summoned Mikhail. It was a dreadful Christmas, with the Princess between life and death, but she was better before the New Year. And then everything was almost as it used to be before Mikhail ever went away. Almost, not quite. He sometimes looked at Natalya oddly, from under his long eyelashes that were dark and thick. Her heart used to beat faster whenever he came into the room, so she knew that she loved him.

Nothing was the same after that. Because she knew he was a prince of an old and famous house and must marry someone as well-born and charming as his mother. Tell herself as she might that it was wrong to love him, that she should only be grateful for the many benefits he and his mother had shared with her, she could not keep her heart from aching as she lay awake hours in the dark, on her little bed opposite the Princess’ great bed.

Then there was the afternoon that the Princess gave Mikhail the Mikhailoff sapphire. It was set in a ring, in a great cluster of blue diamonds, and it had always seemed to Natalya Markofska the most beautiful of all the Princess’ rings.

Mikhail had got leave from the army to stay with his mother. They were all to be together until spring.

So that February day they were settled down contentedly by the porcelain stove in the Princess’ boudoir, drinking tea and watching the snow blowing outside. The Princess, who had not yet recovered her strength, was lying on a couch, wrapped in a velvet and sable negligee and looking, Natalya thought, as beautiful as a princess in a legend. She and Mikhail were sitting a little stiffly in opposite chairs. Surely there was no reason that she and Mikhail should be uncomfortable in each other’s presence, she told herself; it was just her own unruly imagination.

The Princess said, out of a little silence, “Natalya, will you bring my jewel case, please? There’s something I want to give Mikhail.”

She brought the silver box and the key.

When she came into the room, Princess Olga was saying, “I wanted to tell you that I am pleased, if it’s over. I suppose a boy must sow his wild oats, but while he does, it’s hard on a mother, particularly if she’s been the wife of a man as devoted as your father was.”

Natalya hesitated in the door, but Mikhail looked up at her smiling, said, “Come in, Natalya,” and went on talking. “Down here with you, all that Petersburg set and its amusements seem quite mad. I’m sorry I worried you.”

His mother said, “You’re going back to it, though.”

He didn’t answer. She took the jewel box from Natalya and from its velvet-lined compartments spilt diamonds and rubies, emeralds and strings of pearls across the couch. She stared at them for an instant, and said in an odd voice, “I suppose any one of these would support one of our peasants and his family in what he’d think was luxury for all of his life.”

Mikhail’s laugh wasn’t at all merry. “That’s very strange, Mother. I was thinking precisely the same thing. It’s very unfashionable of us.”

She spoke a little wearily, “One’s born to what one’s born to, I suppose. At least, our family try to leave them a decent share of their harvest, and don’t use the knout. Is there any improvement in things at court?”

Mikhail said, “Rasputin’s still a rising star.”

“And after that?”

His voice was grim. “Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.”

But his mother said, “We’ve waited the whirlwind all my life. I’ve almost stopped believing in it. Here’s what I wanted to give you. As you know, it’s really yours. It really always belongs to the son of the house, to give to his betrothed. It may help you to remember that it’s not nice to come to your betrothed with just bits and pieces.”

She held out the great sapphire on a slim finger tip.

It was the sapphire’s brilliance that hurt her eyes, Natalya thought. There was no reason why the words “your betrothed” should hurt her. Of course Mikhail would have a beautiful betrothed, one day now.

Mikhail said the words over. “My betrothed.” Then he did the strangest thing. He looked straight at Natalya. It was as though he knew what she was thinking, it was—as though he too cared. She made an excuse to go out of the room quickly. She could not bear to have Mikhail look at her like that under his mother’s trusting eyes.

The week after that Princess Olga had a slight relapse. The doctor said she must go to the Crimea for the winter. It was originally planned that Natalya go with her, but the housekeeper was taken ill suddenly, and there was no one with whom to trust things in Moscow. Besides, Princess Olga was to travel with and visit friends who had a rather small house. She wanted Mikhail to see how the peasants were getting on at the country place where, because of the severity of the winter, there was some shortage of grain. So he went off, a day or two before his mother, and Natalya was left in full charge.

February went by drearily, and half of March. The Princess’ letters said that her health was much improved, but that she would not risk returning before May. The house wasn’t much care, really, because the butler, old Anatole, showed Natalya how to manage about everything. She had embroidered handkerchiefs to last herself and the Princess a lifetime, she had read novels until all the characters marched in processions round her head at night. Then one day the doorbell rang violently, and she heard Mikhail’s steps running so quickly and so lightly up the great staircase.

He caught both her hands. He said, “I’ve seen that all our peasants are so stuffed with grain they can scarcely waddle. I had to see how you were getting on before I go south to Mother or north to Petersburg or anywhere. Tell me you’re glad to see me. I tried not to come, but I had to.” He said all that in one breath and stood smiling down at her.

She could only manage to say, “You must want tea, Mikhail.”

Right by the landing on the stairs she met him, and he talked so breathlessly, and she could only ask him to have tea.

The spring air came in warmly across the face of Natalya Markofska, who was growing old. The birches were grown heavy. It was twenty years since Mikhail had said, “I had to see you.”

She went on sweeping down the stairs.

Was it wrong, was it wicked, that love of his and hers in that lost springtime? Ah, so many things once right had been called wrong, and things once wrong had been called right, in the time since, that she could not tell. It was beauty and ecstasy and tenderness. It seemed as right as the daffodils flowering. It seemed she had been his since time began and would be his until time ended, by the time the cherry tree bloomed, and his mother came home. . .

Eight steps, nine steps, ten steps, eleven steps. . .

The Princess was as well as she was ever again to be. But her eyes were a little remote, as though it were too much trouble to regard with any attention the affairs of the world that had once so diverted her.

For all that Natalya’s heart grieved for the change in her Princess, she was so happy that she couldn’t grieve consistently. Mikhail arranged to extend his leave again. The Princess seemed glad of that, content with her house and garden, with the companionship of her son and Natalya.

Mikhail behaved to her and to Natalya as though there were no tomorrow in which they would ever be separated. Natalya began to dare to believe there would not be any, at least not until autumn. And summer would be long. . .

Mikhail was ordered back to his command on twenty-four hours’ notice at the end of June. The war came like a great wave breaking over all the pleasant, accustomed things.

Mikhail said to Natalya, “I’ll come back before I really go to the war. I’ll just have to report and come back. I promise I’ll come.”

She heard him tell his mother the same thing. Princess Olga looked up from among her pillows, smiling. “Is this the whirlwind, Mikhail?”

He shook his golden head. “I’ll know better in a month, in two weeks, I mean, when I come back.”

He had no good-bye with Natalya on the morning that he left, only on the night before. Natalya stayed with his mother when he went away, listening to his footsteps lessening down the stairs.

The old woman she had grown to be could remember how frozen her girl’s heart had felt on that bright morning. . .

He came back, not in two weeks but in eight weeks. He had been at the front.

While he was gone it became clearer to those who loved her that the Princess Olga might live five years, or might live one, but that she was slipping out of life. So the household settled down in those weeks to the way it was to go until the end came for its mistress in 1916. No plans were made for anything beyond the next week, except plans for the war work, the rolling of bandages, and the knitting in which the Princess took as much interest as she took in anything, except the hope of her son’s return.

He came without warning at the end of August, walked into his mother’s bedroom in the early evening, as Natalya sat reading to her in the last of the long day’s light. He said, “I’ve got just twelve hours, shouldn’t have taken that much.” Natalya cried out suddenly, looking at him. For he was grown five years older in those few weeks. His handsome face was thin and his eyes looked as though they had seen dreadful things. But when he smiled at her so gently she was ashamed that she had cried out, and startled his mother.

But his mother didn’t seem to notice. She said, as though it were of no importance, “The whirlwind?”

He nodded. “The indubitable whirlwind.”

Princess Olga touched Natalya’s hand. “Go now, my dear. I want to talk to my son of things about which there’s no need to trouble you.”

Mikhail’s eyes said, “I will see you, dearest, in a little while.”

He saw her that night, but only for a snatched hour. Because she knew the Princess Olga would want her. An hour in which he told her to kiss him for all the weeks he’d missed her, but she kissed him recklessly for all the years she might miss him.

He said one thing before she went to his mother, “I have something important to ask you in the morning.” She thought he’d ask her again if she loved him.

In the morning, she went to get the Princess’ chocolate, as she had done for so many years. . .

She had come to the end of the stairs, to the corridor that used to lead off from the great hall.

An inlaid French table used to stand in the corner by the corridor. She had seen the table in a museum a year or two ago, in a very beautiful museum that showed how life used to be for the rich and for the poor. Stupid of her never to be able to go back to that museum, after she saw the table there. . .

She was carrying the little silver chocolate pot and the china cup up the corridor, when she saw Mikhail coming down the stairs. He was in full dress uniform, blue and scarlet and gold. All the light from the great window shone down on him, on his bright hair, on the shining plumed helmet he carried, so that she thought, without any idea of irreverence, that he shone like a figure in an ikon.

Anatole carried his luggage.

He said to Anatole, “Wait for me outside.”

He said to Natalya, “I’ve said good-bye to my mother and was on my way to find you.”

He took the tray from her and set it on the inlaid table. He said, “Just for one morning of all the years, Natalya dearest, let my mother wait for her chocolate. Because I have so little time to say . . .”

She looked at him. For a minute he said nothing, and put his hands on her shoulders, gently. When he spoke, it was in a voice she’d never heard, a quiet voice, but very sure.

“You—my feeling for you has been the single pure emotion of my life. Whether I would have recognized that in time, if the war had not forced me to recognize it, I don’t know. The life of my class and time—yesterday, two months ago, that begins to be as remote as twenty years—was a life in which it was easy to ignore realities. Natalya, we are going to lose this war. We can’t survive—my class, I mean—losing it. So I’m not offering you much when I ask you to marry me. We’ll probably have to eke out life on Mother’s pearls, unless I get a job. At what, I don’t know. But I’m asking you to marry me because I love you so.”

She said, “I love you beyond this world. I’ll marry you whenever you say, if it won’t make your mother unhappy.”

He sounded sure about that, too. “Leave it to me to tell her. She’ll probably be delighted. I’ll get a leave in the winter. We’ll be married then.” His voice was gay again. “Meanwhile I’ll miss my train, dearest, dearest, and be court-martialed for desertion. The dress clothes were just to impress Mother and you. Lord knows when I’ll wear them again. Give me your hand, quickly.”

He put on her hand the Mikhailoff sapphire, kissed her fingertips, started to go and hesitated.

He said very gravely, “I know you’ll stay with Mother, but after that. . . If anything should happen that I could not come to you, try and remember this—after the war there’ll be some sort of new world. Probably better—ours was so far from perfect. Go on in it happily, Natalya. I want you always to be happy. . .”

He put his arms round her. She could tell now that he was just making his voice light again. “That’s all nonsense, the part about not being able to come to you. We’ll be married by Christmas.”

He went across the hall quickly, turned at the door to bow, and then closed the door.

She put her hand against the wall, where there had been no inlaid table for more than fifteen years, to steady herself. It seemed such a long distance down the corridor.

Long enough to remember that the Mikhailoff sapphire had been sold years and years ago. She would have starved before she sold it, but when she fled to the south with Anatole and his wife and their children, after the house was confiscated, she could not let those people starve who helped her escape.

Long enough to remember that when she prayed for the killing to stop, no matter who won, after she had seen Denikin’s men and the Reds fight back and forth through Kief, there came to the poor basement where she lived with Anatole’s children, after Anatole was killed and his wife died, a young man fleeing from death. He had blood on his forehead. He had terror in his eyes. Red or White, she no longer cared. She hid him in a cupboard while the White soldiers searched for him. She told them convincingly, she who was so unaccustomed to lies, that he had gone another way. So she saved Boris Litinroff to be a great man. Because he was too young to die, and because someone had said to her, once, “It may be the making of a better world. Promise me to believe that.”

She would remember to her last breath when that was said to her.

Princess Olga was more than a whole year dead. She died peacefully, not even very troubled because there had been no word from Mikhail for months. Kerensky had come and gone by the time there was word for Natalya. A man brought a letter to the house where she and Anatole and one or two servants lived like ghosts, eating almost as little.

Mikhail had been in a German prison camp, but had come back to Russia after the Revolution. He said he had thought of her every hour. He said he was coming in disguise to see her and take her away, and signed himself “yours forever.”

She had never lost hope that a letter would come. But now that the Terror had started, she prayed that Mikhail would not risk coming to Moscow. Though her heart thumped every time the bell jangled, she hoped he had not come to danger. Inconsistently, she and Anatole made absurd futile plans to hide him if he should manage to get through to them.

On a stormy day the bell rang with particular violence. She and Anatole went together to the door. A file of Red soldiers stood outside in the blowing rain. It did not frighten her any more. They had come so many times. There was nothing else to confiscate that mattered.

The sergeant said, “You two were servants in the house of Prince Mikhail Mikhailoff, wanted as an aristocrat and a counter-revolutionary.”

She said simply, “Yes.” She was his servant and his own dear love. The sapphire she had long worn round her neck on a ribbon was his pledge. What did it matter if they called her his servant?

The sergeant said, “We think we’ve got him at headquarters. He denies that’s his name, of course, and there’s no one down there who’s seen him, but the description fits. Put on your wraps and come and identify him.”

She was going to refuse when Anatole touched her arm. In the minute they were getting their wraps he said, “Swear it isn’t he, that you never saw the man at headquarters before. That’s wiser than seeming unwilling.”

She could see that. But terror rode with her across the city, as she sat between two Red soldiers. If it were Mikhail, if she were to see his face again, how could she school her own to show no recognition?

She had no need to trouble herself. They brought her and Anatole out of the rain into a room where a half dozen men sat. Strange, she thought, they did not look like cruel men, only busy and so tired that they were somehow indifferent.

Someone said, “Bring Mikhailoff in.”

In the second that he spoke, shots sounded underneath her feet.

Then she heard Anatole gasp, “The cellar.”

One of them said, “Don’t be disturbed, Comrade, at one counter-revolutionary less in the world. We’re in a hurry today.”

Then there were footsteps along the corridor, footsteps she would have recognized though it were twenty years, though it were fifty years.

She looked up. He was coming through the doorway with soldiers behind him. He was in a ragged uniform with no insignia. There was a streak of dirt across his face. But when he looked and saw her, his smile was suddenly bright as when they were children playing together in a garden. He strode into the room. He spoke very quickly.

“There is no need to have these people identify me. I’m bored with all this nonsense. Naturally, I am Prince Mikhail Mikhailoff, gentlemen, come home to Moscow because I wanted to see what it was like.”

One of the men behind the table said, “You’ve found out.”

Someone else laughed.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to scream and scream. But Mikhail’s eyes held hers steadily. No, she could not help him by protests, or anguish. She could not help him at all. Except perhaps a little.

She was surprised at the evenness of her own voice. “Comrades, it happens that I was employed by this man’s mother, and was with her when she died. Would it be permitted for me to speak with him a moment or two, about that?”

Someone said, “Five minutes. The bench in the hall there.”

They went out together, with soldiers behind them and in front of them. The bench stood horribly near a narrow stairway that went down to where the shots had sounded. The nearest soldier stood a little way from them, so that they could talk in very low voices.

He was still smiling at her. She said, brokenly, “She died very peacefully. I wrote you that.”

“I got your letter, Natalya.”

“Oh, my dearest, why did you come?” Little, futile words.

“On my word, Natalya, I think I would have come even if there had not been you, my sweet. I was on my way to join the Whites.”

She interrupted. “Isn’t there something to be done? Someone to telephone, something. . .”

He shook his head. “There’s no one with any more power in Moscow than those five men in the next room. Darling Natalya, we’re wasting time. Remember when you were a child, we read Carlyle’s French Revolution together? You used to weep over the victims. But great good came out of that. As perhaps great good will come out of this. What happens to the individual isn’t very important. The war taught me that. Oh, my dearest, I want to tell you you’re more beautiful even than my memory of you, and to sit close to you like this is greater happiness than I’ve had in years, and I seem compelled to make sweeping generalities about the fate of man. . .”

Then the nearest soldier said, not roughly, but rather as though he were sorry, “Come now, Mikhailoff.”

Prince Mikhail Mikhailoff kissed her once on the lips, stood up, and said again, “It may be the making of a better world. Promise me to believe that.”

She said, “I promise. And I promise to love you forever.”

He was walking down the corridor, with soldiers behind him. At the narrow stair he turned for just one second, and bowed, just as long before, when he wore blue and scarlet and gold, and carried a plumed helmet, he had turned to bow to her.

She never heard the shots that killed him. Because she had slid to the floor in a merciful unconsciousness that lasted until Anatole had got her home again. . .

She put away her broom and dustpan and sat down in the chair by the checkroom window. The children would be coming in a few minutes. Confident children, who thought an old woman who spoke of God sometimes was very funny. Still, that was natural. There had been much evil and corruption in the old church. It was understandable that it would be swept away for the new beginning.

The better world. Yes, she had seen evidences of it. Well-fed, eager children, young people with hope in their eyes.

She smoothed the pages of her newspaper. Gold for machinery for the country, melted stone for fine streets for the people to walk on. Certainly, one of the clever young scientists would soon discover that there was a God, and a heaven wide enough for honest revolutionaries and honest counter-revolutionaries—a heaven where, after one had lived life out, one met one’s love again.

He would be smiling. His fair hair would be shining in the sunlight.

A PRINCESS GOES HOME

Some hours east of Warsaw, with the train moving slowly through the long afternoon, and vistas of the Polish plains sliding in endless repetitive succession past her compartment window, a kind of loneliness assailed her. But whether it was loneliness for the long past, for things she might not find again in any return to Russia, or for a certain lack in her present glamorous existence—and that lack this journey might resolve—she did not know.

And she wondered a little, sitting very quiet in that dull red travelling costume that had been extremely smart in Paris, two days’ journey behind her, and was become, every hundred kilos east of Berlin, more conspicuously distinguished. So that now, she felt with a certain regret, it shrieked that here was something rather special on the Moscow express.

The regret was far more than that she did not court notice usually—more than was compelled by the exigencies of that career in which in fairly bright spotlight she had spent her adult life. She would have liked to have Mary Peters travel back to Russia attracting no notice at all, because of her remembrance of the child who had made the journey out of Russia, the child who had been called Princess Marya Petrova, with half a dozen middle names never used since. That child had clung to her father’s hand, wildly stirred by the suddenly manifest width of the world, yet distressed, a little, by the rapidity with which all the things familiar in it were receding.

She had been so young that things familiar seemed eternal—the apple cheeks of her bonne Suzy, the garden path up from the lily pool in the Moscow house, its drawing-rooms with floors so polished one slid precariously between the cases of bibelots and the carefully placed damask chairs. When leagues upon leagues of birch and pine forests separated the child from Moscow, terror had overwhelmed her suddenly lest she and her father had travelled so far from home they might never find their way back. As indeed they never did.

Across the space of nearly twenty years, Mary Peters remembered with sudden vividness, her father’s face as it looked making that westward journey, even how something unhappy, ironic, controlled in his look had stilled a child’s questions.

The train moved slowly and more slowly. Mary Peters ran white fingers through fashionably-coiffed honey-colored hair, looked up at the sky with those odd provocative dark amber eyes that were, like her hair, such helpful decorations to her career, and smiled like a child. For the sky since the last time she’d looked had become the sky of Eastern Europe that she remembered, softer, nearer, a more velvety blue than Western skies.

Its clouds looked so feather light, so close, a child would want to stretch on tiptoe to try to touch an edge of that trailing white softness.

A child used to stretch her arms up, used to say, “One day I shall be tall and touch a cloud.”

The laughter of her bonne Suzy echoed faint and clear. “Wait to touch that world until you’ve been through this one.”

Mary Peters was long grown tall, she had been through a good deal of the world, under the hard clear vivid Western skies, but the bonne’s voice echoed still. Like her father’s voice saying, “Now my dear we shall never speak Russian any more, and you shall have a new name. Won’t that be amusing? A simple name, I think, like Mary Peters.”

The shining floors of home, the cases of bibelots, the shape of the lily pond, Suzy’s smiling face, spun round in the child’s head. She had known then she would never get back to them. All the familiar shapes and colors of things in that diffuse world of childhood whose edges blur so easily between dream and reality, blurred forever then.

Except afterward in England, and on the ship going to America, and even long settled in the Massachusetts town where he who called himself Carol Peters bought a house, his daughter Mary used to count up to ten in Russian, over and over, to herself. Through years when she never heard one Russian word, so that she forgot exactly how the words from one to ten were pronounced, she still counted them over, to remind herself that the house, the garden, were not just a dream.

Mary Peters smiled at the dull Polish landscape on which the sunlight was fading. She could count up to ten in Russian yet, perhaps even well enough to call Noel Hall’s telephone number in Moscow. “Odin, dva, tres, chitiri, piat, shayst, seim, voisim, davit, dacit.” She’d long forgotten the Russian characters, and had to translate them to English letters after a fashion when she’d learned English letters.

She had been seven years old when last her father bowed himself out of the court of Nikolai the doomed, because he who became Carol Peters, obscure citizen of a Massachusetts town, detested Rasputin and said so boldly. They embarked then on that journey Prince Karyl Petrovitch had so long, so carefully planned, that diplomatic passports took them straight through Germany in war time.

Prince Karyl Petrovitch slept peacefully enough in a wooded cemetery on a Massachusetts hillside. The name on his tombstone was Carol Peters and only poor old Natasha, one time star of the Czar’s opera and one time love of Prince Karyl’s life, spoke out his titles and his Russian names when she went to see his grave.

But she Mary Peters, who had forgotten almost all the other names she had been christened, names that might be written in the records of a Moscow cathedral still, though perhaps those records were long dust down the years—was going home to Russia at last.

She had ten Russian words to her name. She had exquisite French clothes to her back. She had an American accent to her English speech, and a passport that gave her a United States birthplace, so thoroughgoing had Carol Peters been, nearly twenty years ago.

Wild excitement was mounting in her heart. Because in Moscow, tomorrow, she would see Noel Hall, would break through the tangle of misunderstanding in which they had got separated, would make it clear to him at last that they never must be separated again.

Though she told herself carefully, “It’s outrageous to descend on him with no warning, to be so sure of him, after so long,” the sentence meant nothing. She was sure of Noel Hall, as he had been sure of her, as they had been the two halves that made life whole for each other, through almost five years they had squandered, certain that time would provide plenty of years.

They had thought there would be time enough to conclude differences that were just amusing, when two people were so much in love. At least they had been generally just amusing to her though Noel had always taken them more seriously.

There was of course her own fantastic income, for which she had her father’s wisdom to thank.

That day in which there had been implicit the beginnings of that fantastic income intruded on the scenery of Poland.

Natasha, even then a gaunt old woman, with only bright eyes and lovely ankles to bear testimony to her young beauty, was visiting them in Massachusetts.

They sat in the small carpeted drawing-room, and Natasha warmed her old hands by the fire. Carol Peters said, “You will live to see that I was right. This will remain the only country for princesses, and they will be self-made to a degree, like the business men. She will have beauty, and though she’s young to be sure, she seems to have inherited her mother’s voice. . .”

Natasha looked suddenly angry, and Mary hoped that she would burst into Russian as she did, very occasionally when she was excited, in spite of Carol Peters’ orders. But she answered in an English stiffer than his.

“You flatter your duchess’ voice in memory, my dear Carol, though I grant you any child of hers would have beauty. I hear her still singing thin and sweet at parties at court. . .”

Carol Peters’ laughter boomed through the little room. “Perhaps Mary’s voice is more like mine then, Natasha. You liked that well enough for duets, and you know you forgave me for not marrying you, a long time ago.”

There were times when those two forgot Mary’s presence, when they talked to each other. Then, she always sat still as possible because sometimes she caught in their old voices echoes of a far gay bright shining life they’d had. She knew this was one of the times they’d forgotten.

But Natasha’s voice was not remembering anything gay, now. “I forgave you very soon, even before your young duchess died. . .”

How quiet his voice was, answering. “We had our twenty years Natasha before I decided the title should have an heir. Well, the title has no heir. There is no title any more. Time has revenged you well for my reactionary tendencies—not that you were ever much interested in time’s revenges, thinking justly that you had wit enough to evolve your own. We are past bitterness. . .”

Natasha had said slowly, “Past bitterness as well as the rest. . .”

“Yes. So, will you teach my duchess’ daughter to sing, a little as you sang?”

Natasha had taught her to sing, and to dance, for in her tireless youth that old woman had managed the almost impossible feat of being a minor star in ballet as well as a major star in opera. When Mary was eighteen, though Natasha said her voice was not quite of the first operatic quality, and her dancing far beneath the best traditions, she took her to meet a director of America’s most famous opera house, to whom Natasha talked Russian at great length. But by then Mary Peters could no longer understand Russian at all.

Her voice, which did have certain limitations, was in combination with her looks, sufficient. Before Mary Peters’ twenty-first birthday coincided with the new importance of talking pictures, she was famous in the dozen significant cities between New York and San Francisco. Before her twenty-second birthday she had been the singing star of a Hollywood success, and was for the first and only time in her life, in love. . .

Dusk thickened over Poland, and the dim lights of the villages came out like low-lying inconsequential stars. Mary Peters said, “Noel, Noel,” but she could not visualize very clearly his eager, restless face. Instead, she saw more vividly than in half a dozen years, Natasha’s eyes, through which gleamed to the end of her life, that flame so long quenched in her old body. Always watching her eyes, one knew that she had seen very much, had had very much, had loved very much.

Natasha came to California the winter after Carol Peters died. “To warm my old bones,” she said to his daughter. “The Riviera’s suns were less warm when I was young, but the air was more exciting. You had better get done with singing Carmen in pictures as quickly as possible, because you’ll never be a great Carmen and go back East and sing Marguerite again, quickly. You may conceivably be a great Marguerite, some day. How do you like success, my little one?”

That winter Mary Peters had met Noel Hall, and for all her grief at her father’s death, the world was bounded by Noel’s voice and Noel’s laughter. Success was a decoration, just a decoration for love.

The newspapers had been writing variants on “American Small Town Girl Makes Good” for nearly four years now, every time she had sung a new rôle in a new city. They never once said anything about “Former Russian Princess”—so successfully had Carol Peters buried his yesterdays.

But Noel Hall had been saying, for no more than four weeks, “You are as lovely as a princess in a fairy tale.”

Mary Peters said to Natasha, “When you were young, did you ever know anyone who threw success away because she fell in love?”

“Not ever anyone who did not live to regret it,” Natasha said with a certain violence. “I must meet the young man.”

But when she met him, her eyes were only mocking. When she had said nothing to the point of exasperating Mary beyond discretion Mary said, “I love him so much that if he asks me, I will marry him and settle down in a San Francisco apartment and cook meals for him all my life long.”

Natasha refused to be excited. “He will not let you. Partly because he has too much sense, and partly because he has ambitions that have very little to do with beautiful young prima donnas.”

The village lights outside the compartment window were small and far apart. In the first darkness that lay between them there was nothing to intrude on a remembered view of a garden on a hill above Hollywood where an old woman long past love or longing sat passing sentence on something too new and beautiful to end.

Mary Peters who had had so far almost everything in the world she wanted, spoke into the sunlit quiet of that garden. “Natasha, I tell you, if ever he doesn’t want me, I shan’t be able to go on.”

Natasha yawned. “You will go on, and be only slightly older. I shan’t live to see.”

That slightly regretful “I shan’t live to see,” stopped Mary’s protests. They talked no more of Noel Hall.

Natasha hadn’t lived to see that she was right, insofar as Noel never let her throw her gaudy career away for him, but wrong in implying that he would ever stop wanting her.

She smiled, the smile of a woman beloved, into the darkness. Tomorrow. They would both be so delighted with each other’s presence, that they would not be able to talk. They would silently regard each other, as always after separation, as if they were newly invented, just that minute, for each other’s special delight.

Abruptly, she could remember his face altogether; his eyes that were bright blue, like a child’s but cooler, his skin very white under his dark hair, his mouth that was mobile and sensitive even when he was angry and it tightened.

He would not be angry tomorrow, nor at all in this interlude. In Russia, far removed from her success and its intrusive perquisites of publicity and of being sought after, he and she could be just simple and candid with each other, as they had sometimes been before at their best.

She sighed, and her thick lashes met over her eyes. She had come a long journey to prove to Noel Hall that she loved him, and details of the proof could wait another day. And she slept, while the train moved on to the border of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.

The border was a good-tempered confusion of baggage being opened, and Intourist interpreters firmly refusing tips while they explained the exact amount to pay the porters. The Russian sleeping car was wider, dustier, more ornate in an older fashion. The wheels clicked off “Moscow tomorrow morning; Moscow tomorrow morning,” and she had expected to be too excited to sleep, but she slept well.

Moscow was a great confusion of torn-up streets through which an Intourist guide took her in an excellent American car toward the National hotel. The crowds on the streets were fantastic. She thought it was a holiday. But the guide said “No.” Moscow streets were always crowded because the city had grown so. The streets were torn up to build the subway. There was nothing that she remembered in the crowds, in the rows of new apartment buildings. . . The curve of the street by the Metropole was reminiscent, but they went past so fast she was not sure. The crowds were eager-faced, and gave an effect of being dun-colored.

The guide, a most polite girl who looked a little dun-colored herself said, “Sometimes Americans’ first impression is that we are not very well-dressed. That is because it was necessary to organize thoroughly the heavy industries before developing light industries such as clothes manufacturing. What will you be interested in particularly, during your stay? I shall look after you throughout. It is the custom to give each tourist one guide—insofar as is practical. . .”

Mary Peters said vaguely, “Oh, I’m just generally interested.” And then firmly, “I have a friend, an American, whom I want to see at once.”

“This is the National hotel where you are staying.”

The car stopped before a hotel that looked like a not very new hotel in a small American city. Mary Peters had the oddest thought. She thought, “I could be very lost here.”

The girl said, “We shall find out at the bureau where to telephone your friend.”

Beyond a little lobby a sign said “Intourist.”

She spoke Noel Hall’s name, softly, to her guide, who had some conversation in Russian with a pretty girl at a desk. The woman said “Gorod,” into a telephone. Then she said, “Dvatsit dva shayst seim.”

So Mary Peters learned Noel’s telephone number in Moscow. “Gorod” whatever that was. (She found out afterward it meant “city”) two two six seven.

The woman was handing her the receiver.

Her hand shook, taking it.

“Noel, I’m in Moscow.”

Arrogant, to think he’d know her voice. But he did, he did.

There was surprise in his voice and delight and hurry. “Metropole or National, Mary, darling.”

“National.”

“I’ll be there, in ten minutes.”

In a beautiful dull-red travelling costume, her face under smooth honey-colored hair, flushed like a very young girl’s face, her great eyes bright as a child’s, she smiled at the pretty girl behind the desk, who didn’t look amused at all, and went upstairs.

Her square high-ceilinged room was furnished in the oddest assortment of handsome unmatched pieces. One interested in the footnotes of history might have speculated a little as to the series of Revolutionary incidents which assembled them at last in a bedroom of a hotel for foreigners. Even Mary Peters might have speculated at another time.

Now she did not notice the furniture. She dressed as quickly as years of training in dressing quickly between acts had taught her, and was ready in something less than seven minutes.

She waited for her room telephone to ring, with happy nonsense dancing through her mind. That Noel liked her best in green, that neither he nor any man would guess how extravagant a purchase her green frock and coat with the amber fur had been. She wished she had a more private place than the crowded small lobby downstairs, in which to see Noel. As if that mattered! As if she were a girl seventeen trying to arrange an entrance!

There was a knock at her room door. She blessed the lack of convention of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. Noel came into the room, and she had just time to see that he looked very pleased, before his arms went round her and his face was too close to see it precisely.

In some fifteen months in the Soviet Union, Noel Hall had acquired various things. A smattering of Russian concerning which, he knew, people were very polite; two small rooms full of large pieces of pre-Revolutionary furniture, and various less specific possessions, such as the capacity for endurance common to Western Europeans and Americans who have weathered a Russian winter, a certain philosophy, and a definite enlargement of his self-respect. But that last had been at vanishing point just before his sailing from America.

He was spending the late morning in his apartment writing a monthly report, in which he was attempting to make clear to the heads of his American corporation the exact conditions under which the new mining towns in the Urals must be constructed.

America seemed latterly about as remote as the moon; he’d long ago decided it was impossible to make Russian conditions clear to anyone who had not seen them, or to make believable the potential enormous richness of the undeveloped mines. So, he was more matter of fact about his monthly report than he used to be.

From time to time his old cook put her shaggy head in at the door, stared at him as if he were some specially wonderful kind of monkey, said “More coffee now?” in a dreadfully accented English—that was, no doubt, much better than his Russian, and departed again.

For what comfort it might be to him in a lonely life, he could take for granted the admiration of his cook. She was candid to him at length concerning his looks, dwelling particularly on the regrettable lack of a young woman in his life to appreciate them, and she praised his ability as a mining engineer to the heavens. Personally, he thought she hadn’t the slightest idea what a mining engineer was, but as long as she conducted her eulogies in Russian, he supposed listening to them did improve his vocabulary.

The lack of a woman to make his crowded rooms more crowded was, in the Soviet Union, entirely a matter of choice. He disliked the matter of factness of the Russian approach to what it was unfashionable to call love as extremely as toward the end of his American career, he had disliked the many pretenses built up around the same set of emotions. Not by nature in the least monastic, he lived monastically in memory of a fact he sometimes stated to himself as having been a complete fool, and sometimes, just as having loved a prima donna.

There was one girl, a clerk at Intourist, whom he liked to talk to sometimes recently. She had warm honey-colored hair vaguely like Mary Peters. It was odd how many girls in Russia had hair rather like hers. The little clerk had a sort of wistfulness too, as if in the great wide free spaces of the new world, she looked for some small warmth that was not there.

Thinking of that, he thought automatically that he hated Russia, in many ways, and also that he meant to stay there. He went on interpreting statistics of ore samples until his telephone rang.

There was a warm rich voice, there were five ecstatic exigent lost years of his life singing in his ears. There was Mary. Fifteen months of self-persuasion that he was finished with her and she—for her own good though he never expected a thank you note—finally well rid of him, were water over a dam.

He got his car. He got his driver. Nowadays American money bought roubles on the Black Bourse in adequate numbers for him to have a car and driver of his own. He no longer was obliged to ride in cars of Mary Peters. With that stupidly irrelevant thought troubling him for an instant, he went to meet her.

Now as before in their first hours together after separation, an old magic compound perhaps of memory of how much they had once loved each other as much as of present emotion, held them, so that their special smiles for each other, the touch of each other’s lips was more than sensation, was a kind of defiance of the things that had separated them. She was his, and he was hers, and once upon a time, that had been enough. Though later it had not been.

At the end of the afternoon he told her that he had to go to a meeting at the office of the Commissar for Heavy Industries, and asked her to dine with him at his apartment later. She noticed then one thing different than it had ever been. Noel was making all their plans.

He was saying, “Tomorrow we’ll get special passes, and go through the Kremlin. That’s the first thing anyone does in Moscow, and you may as well be a proper tourist, and do it yourself— It’s really worth while. The loot of all the Czars—barbaric . . . The next days we’ll do Revolutionary museums, and a Park of Culture and Rest, that will amuse you. After that there’s a place I’ve found that’s a nice drive out into the country—the old summer palace of Catherine the Great. There’s a lovely old park, where three rivers meet . . .”

At which point Mary Peters heard her own voice saying with some violence, “Stop it, Noel.”

He stopped, said, “But why particularly?” in an old casual manner of his she had good reason to dislike.

“Because, you were making little plans for the next few days.”

“Still I don’t see.”

“When I made plans, they used to be great ones, for the years.”

His surprise was so genuine that it frightened her, “But that was all done with, when I sailed.”

She was frightened, and she was a little angry, but the anger steadied her, and she asked her question as if she were just amused. “Why do you suppose I came?”

His eyes were laughing at her. “I was so pleased to see you, I forgot to ask.”

“Never mind, I’ll tell you at dinner. Run along to the meeting, else you’ll be late.”

So she had dismissed him dozens of times, to work of some importance to him, and—she’d made clear since first she knew it could stand between him and her—utterly uninteresting to her.

“I’ll send my car for you, Mary, when I’m through.” He said that, and he left. Well, time owed him that exit line. She’d said, often enough, “I’ll send my car for you, when you are through.”

She remembered that, and knew he did, knew too that their old antagonism was risen between them again. She was sorry, because that so confused their love. But, she had faced the existence of that antagonism, when she decided to make this journey and she would not permit it to disconcert her now, because she truly believed their love was more important.

She dressed slowly, planning very carefully how best to say what she had come to say. Which was simply, that she was prepared to throw her world away, and stay with him in his. Unless she could persuade him, in a last effort, that her world was more desirable, which of course—a year’s loneliness had made her much more candid with herself than she used to be—was what she would prefer.

In a cream lace frock that was absurdly elaborate, she knew, for any Moscow dinner, (but she wanted to be at her most decorative,) she sighed a little. It was a dreary business to have to scheme for one’s love, so dreary she had sometimes tried to convince herself it was better to do without. But in that effort she had failed.

The telephone jangled to announce in stiff English that the car of Mr. Hall waited. She confronted for a moment her own swaying grace in the dim gold-framed mirror. The mirror reflected herself, and the long window behind her, so that she could see in it faintly outlined, as the half-light of the street was lessened in the old mirror, the Kremlin towers and domes with the old double eagles of the Czars at the top.

She had noticed, all day, that her window faced the Kremlin, and had consciously avoided looking at the blue and golden domes, or the brick towers of the old gates, because she remembered them. She definitely remembered, as a child in Moscow sunshine, telling her nurse the light on the domes dazzled her eyes.

They weren’t very shining now—she supposed the Soviet state had had more important uses for its money than to replace gold leaf and bronze paint. Still she disliked looking at them, all day, because she disliked remembering in this strange crowded hurrying city, anything that had the eternal sunlight of childhood upon it.

But, in the mirror the towers were remote as the towers of a city in fairyland, and so beautiful they comforted the heart.

Downstairs, she was slightly dismayed to find that Noel had not come himself, he had only sent his chauffeur. That was unnecessarily pointed!

The fact was that dinner for a prima donna presented something of a problem to Noel, when, his work done, he had leisure to consider it.

Caviar, naturally, the best caviar he had ever eaten, though latterly he was dreadfully tired of it. It would be served by his cook in the manner that roast beef hash is served in America, great heaping tablespoonsfuls piled on a plate, without lemon or egg, and large slices of black bread accompanying it.

A kind of composite of excellent dinners he and Mary had eaten slid through his head on his way home to do what could be done about this one. But at home, putting on a dinner jacket because he knew Mary would dress for no sensible reason, his mood changed. There had been enough pretense between them in time past. Let there be no more, even in trivialities. Let them share whatever his cook decided to provide for a lady in evening clothes, while they conducted their most recent chapter of a debate that would never be settled.

He had a small fireplace in his study, for which it was unheard of to waste fuel in the slight coolness of an early Autumn evening, but he flung birch logs in it, tonight.

The cook set the table before it. It was easy to tell she was a-twitter with interest, since the moment he had told her an American lady was coming to dinner.

He heard his car stop, saw through the dusty window his chauffeur conducting a slim figure over the torn-up ground, in front, where the excavations for the new subway looked, in the gathering dust, more like shell-torn earth than usual, and went to open his door.

Something was wrong with his Mary’s lovely face. It showed traces of great emotional disturbance as plainly as it showed she was trying to hide them.

He said quickly, “I would have come to meet you myself, darling, but I had to order dinner. Domestic arrangements here are slightly complicated with food cards.”

“It wasn’t that.”

He took her wrap. The cream lace dress sat itself in a golden Louis Quinze chair—which he’d acquired in a junk shop—that was really beautiful enough for it.

“Did I tell you often enough, Mary, that in spite of our difficulties, I always adored you and probably always shall?”

Her dark amber eyes, so long-lashed, regarded him as if he were at the moment rather far off. But her voice was gentle. “I know, Noel. Sometimes it’s been enough, hasn’t it? Like today, even.”

“You aren’t thinking of me at all at this instant. That’s really odd.”

She laughed, low in her throat. “It is odd. I’m usually so completely focussed on you. But it’s not serious. I saw something that startled me—the house next door—”

The cook brought vodka in little glasses.

“You’re supposed to drink it in a gulp—that’s traditional, but I don’t myself. I sip it, believing that it takes the Russian constitution to gulp successfully. Tell me about the house next door.”

She hesitated—she had been so long committed to her father’s policy of silence—that the words were surprisingly hard. Besides, she had meant to begin this interview skilfully, persuading him that he was wasting his life, and also hers. Only she had forgotten about him and her, as she turned in his driveway, when she saw a white stone house.

The story of Carol Peters, born Prince Karyl Petrovitch, and of the child Marya, started tumbling from her lips.

He interrupted once. He said, “That explains the hair. I never saw anyone else with just that shade, until I came here. Did you notice the pretty little girl who sits at the desk at Intourist. . . Never mind, go on.”

She hadn’t noticed the girl, she scarcely noticed his interruption, though she remembered it afterward. The past flowed round her, a child was saying over and over “odin, dva, tres, chitiri, piat” as if it would bring back the river flowing beneath the Kremlin turrets, and the shining shops of the Merchants Row, and the great white stone houses with their gardens very formal, in the French fashion.

She interrupted herself. “I didn’t see anything I remembered very well in the city, except the Kremlin towers. They’ve grown shabby. But the house next door—they’ve changed the name of the street, Noel; why did they change the name of the street? It’s our house. Only there were gardens and marble steps, where it’s all torn up. There was a lily pond down—why it must be where this little row of flats is. I learned to skate on the lily pond in winter. It was very small and safe.”

Something in her beautiful voice shook, as if the child who had been Princess Marya had not found much in the wide world afterward that was small and safe.

Noel went to his window, stood looking out, to give Mary Peters time to steady herself, because she would not be grateful to him for thinking she needed steadying. The years had determined her, as he believed they determined most people. She was grande dame, in a most modern version. She would be that again, in a few minutes or an hour or two, arrogant, spoiled, tender when she had time, or it was not too inconvenient. How wise Prince Karyl must have been, to find for his daughter the nearest equivalent to the life she would have had if the world had not moved on.

She was saying, “Noel, I even remember the iron fence.” To the left of the wide strip of torn up ground, where there would be a subway station, some months after the too-optimistic Soviet press promised its completion, the high windows of the white stone house were oblongs of golden light that shone out across a broken rusted fence he’d noticed, because of the exquisite light tracery of the wrought iron, that was delicate as lace.

The fence bounded nothing. One end of it had been uprooted, in the first subway excavation. The rest dangled down at an angle. At a lower level, a wooden boarding, hastily built at some time to protect something years since not there to protect, shot off at a different angle, so that the lighted windows, the remnant of wrought iron fence, the wooden palings, looked like a bad futurist painting of tomorrow’s world.

Her voice was soft, as if she were telling an important secret, “The floors inside were the most shining floors I ever saw. Do you suppose they still are?”

He happened to know that the white stone house was used as a workers’ club. He’d never been inside, but could judge well enough what fifteen years tramping of poorly made heavy boots, must have done to the shining floors.

He said, matter-of-factly, to steady her, “They must have taken the lower end of the gardens first, to build this row of cheap flats. These were one of the first blocks built. I’m lucky to have two rooms, even in one of these. The ground’s torn up for the subway station, which will be between here and the street.”

But she came over to the window, slipped her cool bare arm through his, put her cheek against his shoulder. “Noel, you don’t have to make conversation about weather in effect. I’m not very disturbed. Only, it would have been nice to have you for a neighbor here, when I was a child, wouldn’t it?”

He jested, not very gaily, “I’d have been forever swimming round the lily pond if I’d lived just here, wouldn’t I have been?”

The cook behind them said “Dinner,” in an interested voice.

Mary Peters sat opposite him, with the consciousness of loveliness armoring her, as her superb clothes, as perhaps even the echoes of applause in the crowded concert halls of twenty cities armored her. Mary Peters smiled her ravishing smile, said, “I never saw so much caviar at once in all my life, Noel—and I love black bread.”

Then she stopped smiling, and looked at him straightly. “No, I cannot, or at least I shall not, play a hand any more, or act any more with you. Perhaps because I have come home to where I was a child in a world that seemed beautiful and simple. Or perhaps just that I am always home, when I am in your arms, or even in a room with you.

“So then, I made this long journey, to ask you whether there is not, after all, some hope for us. Two things I know—that I love you as I shall never love any other person—and that you love me, almost as much as I you.”

“I think just as much, Mary.”

“Isn’t that enough then? Must it all be wasted?”

He answered reluctantly, “I thought so, until today.”

“Well then. . .”

But he interrupted her. “No darling, just for once, don’t hurry me.”

He could tell that she was hurt, and went on quickly. “I would never have wanted you different than you were, Mary. I loved you so that these long months without you I’ve thought that I was mad to give you up, that any terms on which I could have kept you were terms good enough. I’ve thought that more often probably than I’ve thought I was right to leave you, to try to save whatever passes for one’s soul nowadays.”

Bright color stained her cheeks and her eyes were very angry. “No need to make me out a complete monster, Noel.”

He looked impatient then. “I’m not. You know I’m not doing anything of the sort. If we must have it out—I was a mining engineer graduated with honors into the depression, and frightfully glad of thirty dollars a week in an office job, with the promise of a chance at field work when there was any field work. You were a young prima donna averaging, between opera concert works and singing in pictures, something like a thousand a week. That was our first year. Our second was somewhat like it, except, because you stayed a summer in California to be with me, I didn’t feel justified in taking an offer to go to Peru, and so be separated from you. I told you a hundred times that only in the very odd corners of the earth was there any work for men in my profession . . .”

She interrupted. “This conversation follows an old pattern, I can see. This is the point at which I’m supposed to remind you that I offered to go with you. . .”

“With your ermine coat, your mink coat, your thirty pairs of high-heeled slippers, to waste your lovely voice singing for Salvation Army meetings at mining camps, I suppose. . .”

But she caught herself then. She spoke very gently. “No need of all this, Noel. I didn’t go. You didn’t take me.”

He looked at her, his blue eyes searching her face. “Don’t doubt that I wanted to, Mary. I loved you enough to stay at home five years, and you know there was more than that. You wanted me to be your only escort. You wanted naturally to go about to the sort of places a lovely young opera singer goes. I loved you enough to understand, enough—it’s too much to love a woman—to let you give me money to pay the checks. . .”

“And you won’t ever quite forgive me, Noel, but you are wrong. Money is too trivial to make it a cause. . .”

“Trivial enough when you have it—practically the most important thing on earth when you have not. Mary, you got me my New York job. You sat at a dinner party beside the head of the firm—I never accused you of that before . . .”

She was grown weary now. The edge was gone from memory of ecstasy and hope. Her voice was as matter of fact as his. “It’s quite true. I was obliged to be in the East for two years. I loved you and didn’t want to be separated from you.”

He laughed then a little. “You should have explained to Mr. James Thornton, president of the great American firm, that he was to engage me for office work only, not make me an offer to go to Russia, at a time when the office boys were making jests because your superb car was waiting so often in the street to bring me home from work. . .”

“Bitter sentences, in an impersonal voice. We’re both so good at them, Noel. I sometimes think we could have found a better answer than we found, if we had not so confused it with thousands of words, through hundreds of days. . .”

“You’re right, Mary. Only a few of the words are significant for either of us. Mine are, that I loved you and had to be separated from you, else I was lost. Gigolo is such an ugly word. . .”

“It never fitted you, so why do you care?”

“Because a man does care.”

She looked at him, at his dark grace, at his smile that always had the power to turn her heart over, even now when it was only a small bitter smile, older than it used to be.

She spoke steadily. “Let’s say something new. I’ll begin. The James Thorntons have become very good friends of mine. I haven’t been above cultivating them. So, the minor reason I came to Russia to see you was to tell you that James Thornton will make you assistant to the president, if you want to come home with me. . .”

He laughed with genuine amusement. “I should have guessed you were a princess in Muscovy, when I was a child in grade school. You’re the most naturally arrogant person I ever met.”

She ignored that completely. “The other new thing I have to say to you is that if for some masculine notion of honor, you won’t come home, marry me, and I’ll stay here with you, world without end.”

He put his hand on her shoulder, a hand that was shaking a little, and when he spoke, all the anger, all the mockery had left his voice. “You know without my telling you that I was as happy with you today as I have ever been. When I ask you not to hurry me, all I’m asking is for you to let me fill some days with little things, Kremlin tours and museums and tourist sightseeing. So that, in the first delight of seeing you, I don’t tell you I’ll do anything you want, and hate you afterward for rushing me off my not very steady way.”

“I shan’t hurry you, Noel. . . By way of changing the subject, you might begin telling me what you really think of the Soviet State. You maintained, in letters and in things you said today even, that you hate it. But your voice changes, sometimes when you talk about it, and sounds as if you were talking about a woman you loved and sometimes disliked, sounds rather precisely as if you were talking about me, in fact.”

He grinned, and slid his hand from her shoulder round her waist. The oblong golden squares of light in the windows of the workers’ club went out. It was too dark, in the moonless night, to see more than a glimmer of white that was a stone house, to the left of the subway excavation, where there used to be a garden.

It was some days later before they managed to get to the Kremlin. Noel had been rather rushed with work, and their sightseeing had consisted principally of the opera in the evening, and drives about the city, in late afternoons.

They walked through the paved courtyards of the Kremlin, and Red soldiers and Red officials walked with the confident tread of those in command of tomorrow to the office buildings where the work of today went on. They had seen part of the old palace. They had seen the iron crown of Peter the Great who turned a country Westward that now turned East again. They had seen the turquoise thrones that the Shahs of Persia sent to the Czars as tribute, and the emerald-studded golden Bibles of the Grand Dukes, and the bridles, heavy with rubies and pearls, that the imperial horses wore.

They were a little tired, and their own footsteps in the empty cathedrals on either side of the palace had sounded like the hollow faint echoing footsteps of the multitudes of the yesterdays who had crowded the cathedrals.

They stopped by the parapet of the wall, and looked down over the crowded houses of the city, to the smooth river flowing past, with yellow birch leaves swirling down toward it in an Autumn breeze that was growing cold.

He said, “You asked me, the first night that you were here, why I spoke of this city as if it were a woman I loved and disliked sometimes. That’s because, while I hate many small things here, like the dull sameness of food, the crowded housing, the censorship of news, the way people do things in herds, and hate a few important things too, like the arrogance of viewpoint, the complete intolerance of criticism (unless it’s criticism from within) and the standardization, I love the strength and certainty of Communism. The people march on, the country marches on, so sure that the end will not be disappointing, that no ambition if it serves the State is too great to be realized, that no ambition that does not serve it is too great to be crushed.”

She said, “Ruthless.” But she was, she knew, more sentimental than he, and more troubled by their hour or two with old Russia. She could remember, not these cathedrals precisely—for most of the great church festivals, like New Year’s, they had spent in St. Petersburg—but cathedrals very like these, with the scent of incense sweet in her nostrils, and the chant of the priests rising as if it would reach surely, to Heaven. Yesterday’s echoes were louder in her ears than his.

“Yes, ruthless, like a great sea rising. But the sea washes the land clean.”

She did not answer, and, because they were grown so close again in these few days, he understood her silence. “We’ll go to Catherine’s summer palace tomorrow, Mary. There are ghosts there too, but gentler ghosts, not so illustrative of the power and the pomp passing by as that room full of shining crowns with no wearers.”

“All right, whatever you like.”

“You don’t care at all, really, do you, about all this. I mean about where they’re going, and what happens to the next generation of them. You live such a personal life, darling.”

Her wide eyes looked up at him. “I could care, if my life should be here, with you.”

He laughed very gently. “That proves completely what I last said.”

But she was thinking of something he’d said before.

“Why, I wonder, does the sheer force and drive of Communism fascinate you?”

His vivid face, so gay these last days, as of a man released after long confinement, was immediately serious. “I’m in a mood for giving you the truthful answer, to remember me by, if we should decide in the end that you go home and I stay here with Socialism for my only solace. . . The truth is that I’m not fundamentally a strong character at all. . . So, like most weak people, I should like a cause to live for and die for. This is the first one I’ve seen for which people live and die as a matter of course, for some hope of a better world, not on a farther star, nor yet for themselves tomorrow, just a better world for the generations who’ll be here in a century or so.”

“You are not a weak person.”

“Mary, you are in love with me.”

“Yes, and I can stay here with you, ten more days! Or forever. But, if not forever, I should keep my engagements in Paris and London.”

“Ten days are long. Fairly certainly at the end—some evening at eleven forty-five when the Berlin express pulls out, I’ll be trotting along beside you carrying your dressing case, having sent a cable to Thornton that I accept his kind offer. He confirmed it in a letter I got today. To put that more accurately, he made the offer, with no mention of you in connection with it. Tactful old man.”

“You think you’ll come home, really?” She could not keep delight out of her voice, for any silly reason of discretion.

His smile was curiously old. “I think so, because I love you. Someday you’ll despise me though, I promise you.”

“Noel, I have no answer.”

“Don’t try for one. Look at the far blue river. This place is as peaceful as most old places where blood’s been spilt on practically every stone, at one time or another. Let’s walk home through the Red Square, and go in and look at Lenin, who in his very brief time with eternity, has already taken on the inscrutable expression of an Egyptian mummy.”

“Thanks no, darling. Let the dead past bury its dead, is the way I feel after the museum. I couldn’t stand one single tomb in the balance of the afternoon.”

“Well then, I’ll buy you a rapid cup of tea at the Metropole, leave you at the door of the National, and go about my work, to which your beautiful presence does no good.”

At the door of the National, he kissed her for the delectation of a carful of German tourists, disembarking in front of the Hotel. It was for him an unusually demonstrative public gesture, but she didn’t mind, since it was obvious his mood had changed, and was very cheerful again.

“We’ll start for Catherine’s palace at nine in the morning, Mary. My cook, who maintains that you are most beautiful—and therefore very appropriate for me. . .” he laughed and she laughed with him, both remembering years in America when Noel’s noticeable looks had been mentioned chiefly in connection with the contrast they afforded to Mary’s.

“Noel, sometimes here, all America,—its sets of values, and its taken for granted luxuries, and its beautiful crazy newspapers full of causes célèbres that no one remembers two weeks later, seems completely unreal. I keep saying to myself ‘If this place is real, New York and Hollywood can’t be. If they’re real, this place isn’t.’ ”

He looked surprised. “That’s the typical first sign of taking an interest in what all this is about. I didn’t expect it from you. You’re usually only interested in environments as they personally affect you, or people—individuals not groups—because they could be important to you, or could just bore you.”

She was hurt, though his tone was completely friendly, and she granted, what he said was true. Causes, political philosophies, theories of government, were to her what one read in the newspaper that arrived with one’s breakfast tray, so that one could be reasonably sensible when they appeared in conversations at dinner.

She said, “If I lived on here, this environment and the way these people think could be important to me.”

But he refused to answer that. “I was telling you, Mary, about my cook. She’ll make us a picnic lunch for tomorrow. Mostly caviar sandwiches, I suppose. Can you still eat caviar?”

“I still can, but it’s beginning to be an effort.”

“Good-bye till tomorrow, darling.”

“Will you have to work frightfully late?” She bit her lip, and wished she hadn’t asked. Dozens and hundred of times when she had wanted Noel’s company to amuse her, she had asked in just that half resentful voice, “Will you have to work late?”

He remembered—she knew from his expression. “I can’t tell, Mary.”

They regarded each other, in the small busy badly-lighted lobby where incurious people hurried through on affairs important to them or asked lengthy questions to which the desk clerk gave them short uninterested answers in four languages.

To both of them, twenty places where they had loved and interfered with each other were more actual in their minds than that lobby. The drawing-room of a New York penthouse she had sublet for a season, where the tall windows framed a fantastic skyline. . . He used to stand there, ready to leave, sometimes reluctant, sometimes impatient to leave. She used to sit in a deep window seat looking at him impatiently. The office of his firm in San Francisco—where she used to stand beside his desk, waiting for him to finish—a lovely graceful figure incongruous in that place—filled with complicated blue prints, models of machinery, and samples of copper ores.

She sighed. If time had taught her nothing else, it had taught her it was useless to attempt instant repair of words that had ruined a mood. Tomorrow was another day. She nodded to him, and walked up the curved stairs, stopping a few minutes at the Intourist shop on the second floor, as she often stopped to look for possible souvenirs for friends at home. If she went home. But uncertainty lay so heavy on her heart she could not make herself take much interest in ornate service plates, French china of old fashions, or in ikons good or bad.

Tomorrow began badly. Noel was extremely late. When she’d waited nearly an hour, she telephoned him, her ten words of Russian combined with patience, having proved sufficient to cope with the Moscow telephone system.

He was not at home. His maid said something incomprehensible about crisis.

After waiting another half hour, she went downstairs to the Intourist reception room, because she was bored by the outlook from her own windows. The last of the day’s quota of tourists was being sent out to inspect museums, hospitals, reform schools or day nurseries as suited their fancy. They were a queer conglomerate, so late in the season, of earnest British and disapproving Germans. She passed them in the hall being herded by their guides toward the automobiles.

The large square Intourist reception room was practically empty. Only the little girl of whom Noel had spoken, the girl with hair as honey-colored as her own sat at her desk, and beside her, Noel stood talking in Russian, looking very interested.

His smile to Mary was pale but somehow luminous. “We were just telephoning your room. You two know each other of course.”

“We always say ‘good morning’ to each other.” Mary’s voice was too cordial but Noel didn’t notice.

“Lyda here is, I sometimes think, my only friend in the Soviet Union.”

She looked, Mary thought, as if she would be very pleased to be his “only friend” almost anywhere. Undisguised liking in her eyes, and her smile.

She said, “I sometimes think it is a little difficult for Westerners to absorb our point of view quickly, and so they are lonely.”

“But about what are you specially lonely at the moment, Noel?” Mary didn’t make any attempt to hide the exasperation in her voice. Noel ignored it though. It was plain to see that she was not very real to him this morning. There’d been so many times, when work preoccupied him, when she had dwindled in importance to something just slightly more than a familiar chair.

“I’m not lonely. I just haven’t slept. We had an all-night meeting. There’s a minor crisis of sabotage in the coal mines, and the usual general execution of everyone suspected of counter-revolutionary activity, in the neighborhood of the sabotage. I was maintaining to Lyda that the execution of persons whose only counter-revolutionary activity is to want to stick to land that’s been their only security for generations, disturbs me sometimes. . .”

The girl said, as if she were speaking to two children, “Even if there are isolated cases of individual injustice, those do not matter. For the good of the state. . .”

Like a child, repeating parrot-like copy book maxims, Mary thought, and did not listen to the rest of her sentence. But she looked at her shabby shiny blue serge dress, her lovely skin, her small hands that looked as if at some time or another they’d done hard work.

Her fresh confident voice stopped. Noel looked as if he wanted to argue. Mary said, “Noel, if you had to work all night, we’d better postpone our picnic.” Then she was acting and knew it, measuring carefully the amount of disappointment to let show.

That got him to his feet. “I’m not too tired. And, here’s the luncheon.” He had it in a basket, under the pretty Communist girl’s desk. “Good-bye, Lyda. I’ll see you very soon.”

Mary’s conscience smote her. He did look so very tired. She said over her shoulder, to the girl, who was looking at them with a definitely disapproving expression, “Thank you so much for telling us your point of view. It was extremely interesting.” Only, she hadn’t heard it.

In the car, Noel said, “Darling, you shouldn’t have patronized her so. She’s real, little Lyda.”

“She’s pretty, too.”

“Extremely. Let’s not quarrel.”

Over the cobblestones, between the rows of new ugly apartments and old neglected houses, the pale autumn sunlight brightened suddenly. Noel took her hand. “Let’s have a nice day.”

As if—as if they might not have many more.

She held his hand tight, and he slept, suddenly, against her shoulder. How that used to irritate her, his habit of sleeping abruptly when exigencies of work had kept him involved late one evening, and she had made him take her about on the evening following. She kept hold of his hand. They drove on through dusty suburbs, and dustier open country afterward. She was not irritated now.

Because, when she stole glances at his sleeping face, something occurred to her that she had never thought before. It was an older face than the face of the boy Noel who had fallen so recklessly in love with a young singer. If that boy had sometimes hurt her, sometimes failed her, she knew, she admitted in this quiet hour when his dear head was still against her shoulder, she had sometimes hurt and failed him.

He waked, laughing, when his driver stopped the car outside the palace grounds, in a scrap of a village, with a tiny blue domed church. “There is a museum of the old days in this village, before one enters the palace,” the driver said.

“We shan’t go to it, Mary. I’ve been. Full of fancy clocks to show how the rich told time, and fancy chairs to show how comfortably they sat through the years.”

“No, let’s not go. We’ve been to enough of those.”

The driver locked the car, and followed them with the lunch basket. In front of them and above through a long driveway, the ruined palace stood on a hill top, roofless, its thousand windows open to the winds of heaven. It stood among great trees above the river. There was no guard at the open gate. There was no one at all in the park, where their feet rustled the first fallen leaves.

But, there was nothing to guard any more, where once, by the meeting place of three clear streams, an autocratic empress considered building a summer palace, changed her plans before it was half done, remodelled, and never quite finished it at all. Unless the statues she had set about two hundred years before, in the manner of the gardens at Versailles, needed guarding. There were no gardens here now, only wide untended lawns stretching to the woods, and to the river.

They walked through silence, through mellow sunlit air, hand in hand.

“There are ghosts here, Noel.”

“Yes, plainer than in the Kremlin or any formal place. I knew you’d hear them. She, Catherine, used to picnic here more or less, give fêtes to the villagers, and open air dances in the beech groves, for the ladies and gentlemen of her court. Probably your great great grandparents came to them, Princess Marya.”

She glanced at him, but his eyes were loving her, not mocking her.

“We shan’t go into the palace. It’s just a shell, damp, and inhabited by rats. Makes one think how too dismally the glories do depart. It’s better from a distance. We’ll go down to the river. There’s a summer house.”

Time had dealt gently with the marble summer house. Its scrolled colonnades were straight as ever. And time had even improved the view that Catherine the Great had chosen. For two hundred years had much improved the woods she had set out. Where the little marble summer house overlooked the junction of three clear streams, the pines that bordered them were now tall dark spires against the sky and the great birches set among them were splashes of yellow shimmering light where the sun struck their leaves. Sometimes, as they watched, the autumn wind flung birch leaves down on the shining water. They fell like a scattered handful of gold pieces.

They picnicked on the steps. Already in her few days grown somewhat acquainted with the limitation of food in Moscow, Mary realized that Noel must have gone to enormous trouble to arrange this meal of fresh chicken, buttered white bread, olives and cold white wine.

When they were done with luncheon, they heard music in the woods, a thin reedy piping, faint and sweet.

“Ghosts of Catherine’s musicians,” his voice was believing. She smiled at him, and they sat quiet, listening. But the musician, after a little while, appeared, a small ragged boy, playing on a kind of shepherd’s pipe. He begged from them, cheerfully enough. When Noel had given him money, and he had danced off, grinning back at them, like a friendly gnome with a smudged face, Noel explained it was probably one of the wandering children, of whom there were very few left, around Moscow. “The Soviet’s done a beautiful job, rehabilitating most of those wild children,” he said.

“It’s important to you, what the Soviet does, isn’t it?” She was thinking of the pretty girl at the Intourist reception room in the National.

“Occasionally it has been.” He put his arm around her. “Not any more. Because I’m going home, to be one of Thornton’s responsible executives, and husband to a lovely singer. We’ll share a penthouse and give musical parties with a flavor of big business, and big business parties with a flavor of music; that is, when you’re not on tour. Kiss me, Marya Petrova, whom I’ll introduce as Miss Peters, in that world far from this. Where we’ll talk about Russia at dinner parties, when we’re not talking about the stage, the opera, the news stories of the moment. Kiss me quite seriously, Miss Mary Peters. I mean all I’m saying.”

She kissed him. Then she held herself away from him. She sat and looked at the river, not at him, and listened for his answers very carefully. “Why did you decide my way, Noel?”

“Principally because I do love you, have loved you, will probably continue to love you more than any other woman in the world.”

“Principally.” She repeated the word, then let that go. “I suppose, Noel, if I hadn’t turned up, sooner or later you’d have been in love with the Intourist girl, someone like her.”

“Sooner or later. Probably with Lyda. Not the way I’ve loved you. Time goes on. If I were dead, you’d probably marry your manager in the end. It’s about equally irrelevant. I’m not dead, and you did turn up. I’m glad you did, by the way.”

She thought of her manager, of whom she’d only thought when she looked at silver cigarette cases for souvenirs. Safe in his sensible forties, with a sense of humor that included herself, Noel and, more remarkably, himself; a passion for football and good music, a sense of business so shrewd that, by his management of her affairs, nothing but a Revolution could make her poor when she was old.

Noel said, “Why analyze reasons. Tell me politely, my sweet, that you’re glad I’ll marry you. . .”

She looked at him then, said, “Heaven knows I’ve wanted nothing else for years, since we’re being modern and candid. Only, go back to what you said first, that your principal reason for deciding my way was that you loved me so and so. What are the other reasons?”

His handsome face looked hesitant. Then he shrugged. “You’d guess, when you thought it over. The only one that counts is that I have taken a great deal of your time.”

“Yes, I’d have guessed, I suppose, Noel, one trouble with modernity is that it limits the vocabulary extremely. I mean, it implies a kind of decent reticence, so that I can’t fling my arms around you and say I love you, I love you, I love you at any length.”

“You used to, once, darling, and I liked it.”

“When I was one and twenty— You don’t have to marry me, because I made a final grand gesture and followed you to the ends of the earth or near enough as measured from Broadway or Hollywood Boulevard.”

“I know I don’t have to. I want to. Think of your usual sensible arguments. Think of how I’m wasting my time here, of how I’m getting forgotten by the people who count.”

“Don’t be disagreeable, dearest.”

“All right, don’t be wistful and fair and noble. Just be your charming and fairly ruthless self.”

“What a loverlike conversation!”

“All right. Stop it, and kiss me some more. Because I am a lonely foreigner, incapable of understanding Russian temperament, as your fairly inconsequential rival Lyda Radova would have it.”

She was able in an hour or two, to talk plausibly, as if she cared, about the fine lives they would have at home. She was able to talk as if she believed in them. Before they left the summer house, when the rays of the sun were nearly level on the river, and the pine trees were long long shadows across it, she was able almost to still that odd doubt in her heart that this ending of conflict which she had so long, so desperately wanted, was in fact their happy ending.

They stood on the summer house steps. They watched the three small rivers’ meeting, they watched the birch leaves scattering down.

Noel said, in an odd voice. “We’ll never see this place again, Mary. Next year, they’re turning it into a Park of Culture and Rest. It will be crowded with young Communists boating on the rivers and older Communists drinking tea under the pines. But the ghosts will be gone. Well, after dinner you can help me frame my cable to Thornton, first of your wifely duties, that’ll be.”

In the quiet of two hundred years, how many lovers had walked hand in hand beside the ancient trees, in the ancient grass-grown paths, had had their little minute of decision and of confidence, she wondered. And walked quietly along beside Noel, not turning to look at the last sunlight on the shining water. But had that little minute of decision passed for herself and him, long ago, on some unremembered occasion years past, in a Western city?

Her heart said, “You must not doubt now. You have doubted so long. Life and marriage and commonplaces will carry the two of you along, now. You will never be separated again.”

But, commonplaces had so little to do with their reckless beginning. Oh, be done with questioning herself. If what she wanted, now offered, did not seem so complete a solution as once it would have seemed, that was because she was older.

“Noel, I’ll dance for you, all across the park.” So she had danced for him, on California beaches, on New York terrace gardens. She flung him her hat, her coat. The last sunlight flamed in her bright hair. Her green dress swung round her like a hamadryad’s cloak. And sometimes when she turned, she could see his face, that was eager again. Yes, always or almost always she could compel him to love her for beauty and grace.

A small voice said within her, “I wish he had never said, never never said he was fundamentally weak, fundamentally easily diverted from his purpose.” Her dancing steps beat out that wish, over and over, to the gate of the park, where Noel’s chauffeur regarded her with some slight surprise. And on the way home she sang to him softly.

They dined gaily. Noel’s cook had evidently made her efforts for the day over luncheon. Dinner was as usual, good caviar and bad stew. But they did not care. They remembered old jests they’d shared, awaked for each other echoes of laughter between them when they were both very young and love was not a problem just an exuberance.

When the maid slowly cleared the table, and they waited for her to bring coffee, there came a little lull in their laughter and talk of nothing controversial. She sat by the fire in the half-dark room. Its light made odd charming shadows on her face. Noel flung himself on a couch and lay watching her, his eyes half-shut.

She was lovely. She was worth giving up—nothing special something glimpsed occasionally in a man’s life, a notion of a life that could be independent, content, with its own small triumphs and inconsequential failures, content with watching the parade of people pass.

He slept, and when the maid brought in coffee Mary Peters did not wake him, though after a little while, when she had drunk her coffee, she turned on one light, to see his sleeping face. The sounds of the Moscow night came in faintly through the closed window, sounds of loud friendly argumentative voices in the workers’ club next door, that had been once, a house where she had lived. Sounds of drilling. That was the night shift working in the subway, a block or so farther up the street. Distant sounds of automobiles passing.

He was a little removed from her in sleep, so that she could regard him with detachment, almost, as if he were someone she did not know. She was to marry him, she was to spend her life with him. She told herself that, several times. The words in that small cluttered room had no meaning at all. He was a man still young, with a restless handsome face. He was the person she had loved and wanted—as ruthlessly as he had said—all her youth. She would have said, if she had been one to use extravagant phrases, if they had been the fashion of her day, that she had loved him enough to die for him.

It occurred to her, very suddenly, that if she loved him at all, there was only one thing left for her to do for him.

She stood up, and got her wrap. The door of his apartment closed with a click too small to wake him. She went out through the narrow dark hallway.

Princess Marya Petrova stood in high-heeled slippers, an evening dress she’d made Noel wait outside the National while she put on, a velvet cloak furred with sable, in a muddy courtyard by the excavations for the new subway. She stood where once a flagged garden path had led to a lily pond. Light from the windows of what had been her family’s Moscow house streamed upon her, and through scrap of wrought iron balustrade delicate almost as lace.

She did not look at her family’s house. She did not see the balustrade again, nor notice the mud on her golden slippers. She looked back through an unshuttered window at a room where a man lay sleeping tranquilly. She thought very quickly; that her visas were properly in order, that—if she knew anything about women, in the Soviet state or anywhere, Lyda Radova would do quickly whatever was necessary so that she could get on the eleven forty-five express for Berlin.

But the Moscow street noises confused her thoughts a little. By their difference they reminded her of American streets, well-swept, smooth. The shining steel ribbons of roads where the laughing crowds drove singing to the football games. The streets of shops that were polished as jewels. The country houses where she visited, with lovely formal gardens fine as well-kept palace gardens. The opera houses and the concert halls where, at her entrance, the applause rose and beat against the walls, loud, loud enough to drown out echoes of one man’s voice, where the lights were very bright, brighter much than sunlight on three rivers, more golden than birch leaves drifting down. America where Mary Peters would live a princess’s life.

She put her hand out in an odd gesture. She touched the dusty window pane of the room where Noel was asleep. And turned then, to walk to the National, that first stage of the journey that would take her home from Russia.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

A cover which is placed in the public domain was created for this ebook.

Some pages of advertising from the publisher were excluded from the ebook edition.

[The end of Dream Without Ending, by Ursula Parrott]