Chapter XIII: Book THREE: Note I (2)

But ah, that master, that man who had written the scene I was reading! Faith came back and I ran to pick up the book and read on and on. Oh, the delicate wonder of it, the joy of it! At the moment I could have crawled across the floor of my room and bathed with my happy tears the feet of the man who in another room long before had held his pen firmly, had spread upon a sheet of white paper, with such true and vital an economy of ink, the complete sense of his scene.

* * * * *

Utter obscurity, the joy of obscurity. Why had I not been content with it? In the nights alone in my room I had realized fully the danger of coming out of my obscurity and yet never did I write a tale, at all approaching good handling, but that I must need run down out of my room and go eagerly from one person to another asking praise. Time and again I said to myself: “You are an ignorant man. Every artist who goes to pieces and takes the joy of complete abandonment from his task, and the joy from his own life too, does so because he lets some outside impulse, want of fame, want of money, want of praise, come between him and his materials. The white surfaces before him become muddy and dirty, the scene before his mind’s eye fades or becomes dim and blurred.”

These things I had a thousand times said to myself and had made a dream of a life I was to live. I was to keep in obscurity, work in obscurity. When I had left the life of a manufacturer I would get, in Chicago or some other city, a clerkship or some other minor job that would just provide me with a living and would give me as much leisure as possible. Well, I would live somewhere in a cheap room on a street of laborers’ houses. Clothes would not matter to me. I would live wholly for something outside myself, for the white clean surfaces on which, if the gods were good, I might some day have the joy of writing at least one finely drawn and delicately wrought tale.

As I had walked away from my factory on a certain day these had been the thoughts in my mind and now, after two years and after a few of my tales had been printed and I had been a little praised I was going to New York for the obvious purpose of doing everything possible to make myself better known, to strut before the very people I was trying to understand so that I could write of them fully and truly. What a tangle!

It was a dramatic moment in my own life and if, on that particular evening as I walked alone in the streets of the Ohio town, I achieved a certain victory over myself, it was not to be a lasting one. The kind of workman I had wanted to be I could not be but I did not know it at the moment. It was not until long afterward I came to the conclusion that I, at least, could only give myself with complete abandonment to the surfaces and materials before me at rare moments, sandwiched in between long periods of failure. It was only at the rare moment I could give myself, my thoughts and emotions, to work and sometimes, at rarer moments, to the love of a friend or a woman.

I went from the railroad station along a street and onto a bridge where I stood leaning over and looking at the water below. How black the water in the dim light! From where I stood I could look along the river bottom to the factory district where my own factory had stood. The bridge led into a street that was in the fashionable residence district of the town and presently a fat gray-haired old man, accompanied by a friend, walked past. They were smoking expensive cigars and the fragrance hung heavy on the air so that I also wanted tobacco and lit a cigarette. The fat man had formerly been my banker and no doubt had he recognized me might have told me a tale of money lost through me, of promises unfulfilled. The deuce! I smiled at the thought of how glad I was he had not recognized me. Would he have been nasty about the matter or would he and I have laughed together over the thought of the foolish impulse in himself that had led him to conclude I was a man to be trusted and one likely to succeed in affairs--a good banker’s risk?

“Hello,” I said to myself, “I’d better get out of here.” Some of the men of the town I had succeeded in getting worked up to the point of investing in the wild business scheme I had formerly had in my head might at any moment pass along the bridge and recognize me. That might bring on an embarrassing moment. They might want their money back and I had no money to give. In fancy I began to see myself as a desperado revisiting the scene of some former crime. What had I done? Had I robbed a bank, held up a train, or killed someone? It might well be that at some time in the future I would want to write a tale of some desperate fellow’s having got into a tight hole. Now he had to pass, say in a park, the wife of a man he had murdered. I slunk away off the bridge, throwing my cigarette into the river and pulling my hat down over my eyes, becoming in fancy as I passed a man accompanied by a woman and a child the murderer my own fancy had created. When I had got to them my heart stopped beating and quite automatically I put my hand to my hip pocket as though there had been a pistol there. “Well, I was an enemy to society and if the worst came to the worst would sell my life as dearly as possible.”

More absurdity in myself, endless absurdities. My own childishness sometimes amused me. Would it amuse others? Were others like myself, hopelessly childish? Many men and women seemed, in outward appearance at least, to comport themselves in life with a certain dignity. All history was filled with the stories of men who had managed to get through life with at least an outward dignity. Was all history a lie? There was a man who owned a bank or an automobile factory or who was a college professor or a judge. He rode about through the streets of a city in an automobile, was called a great man. How did that affect him inside, how did it make him feel? I began now wondering about myself. Suppose someone were suddenly to call me a great man. I imagined a tall serious-looking man with whiskers saying it. “He writes novels and tales. He is a great man.”

And now as there was no one else to say the words set down above I said them myself and at first I liked the sound of them and then a desire to laugh took possession of me and I not only wanted to laugh at myself but I wanted everyone in America to laugh with me, at myself and at themselves too.

Oh, glorious moment! No more great men again ever, no more bad men or good men, everyone on to everyone else. Was there a sense of something, I at that moment felt, in all American people everywhere? In the old days we Americans had been proud of what we thought of as our distinctive American humor but lately our humor had pretty much settled itself down into the universal dullness of the newspaper funny strip. A really great humorist like Mr. Ring Lardner had come to that. Would it not be a joke on us all if we were all, already, and in reality, pretty far beyond any outward expression of ourselves we were getting?

And now I was stumbling about in the dark streets of an Ohio manufacturing town poking sharp sticks into the tender flesh of myself and others. There was no one to refute any smart thing I thought and so I had a good time. Like everyone else I would so love to go through life criticizing everyone else and withholding from others any right to criticize me. Oh, the joy of being a king a pope or an emperor!

“Suppose,” I now thought, “everyone in America really hungers for a more direct and subtle expression of our common lives than we have ever yet had and that we are all only terribly afraid we won’t get it.”

The notion seemed good. It would explain so much. For one thing it would explain the common boredom with life and with work characteristic of so many so-called successful men I had met. Whether he was a successful railroad-builder or a successful writer of magazine short stories, the brighter man always seemed bored. Also it would explain beautifully our American fear of the highbrow. Suppose the brighter men were really having a good time--on the sly as it were--well, laughing up their sleeves. And suppose some fellow were to come along who was really on to the entire emptiness of the whole success theory of life, the whole absurd business of building bigger and bigger towns, bigger and bigger factories, bigger and bigger houses, but had decided not to be a reformer and scold about it. I fancied such a one going blandly about and really laughing, not fake laughing as in the newspaper funny strips, made by poor driven slaves who think they must be rich or silly to get fun out of life, getting the old American laugh back again, the laugh that came from far down inside, an American Falstaff kind of a laugh.

Well, now I had got myself into deep water. I had fancied into existence a man I had not nerve or brains enough to be myself and one never likes that. The figure my fancy had made annoyed me as I am sure he would everyone else.

I had gone in the darkness down along a spur of a railroad track to where my factory had formerly stood and there it was, much as I had left it except that my name had been taken off the front. There was a wall of the building that looked up toward the railroad station and there I had once put a big sign on which was my name in letters three feet high. How proud I had been when the sign was first put up. “Oh, glorious day! I a manufacturer!” To be sure I did not own the building but strangers would think I did.

And now my name was gone and another man’s name, in letters as large as I had once used, was in its place. I went near the building trying to spell out the new name in the darkness, hating the name with instinctive jealousy, and a man came out at a door of the factory and walked toward me. Oh Lord, it was the former school-teacher, the man who had once been my night watchman and who was now evidently night watchman for my successor. Would he recognize me, lurking about the place of my former grandeur?

I started walking away along the tracks singing the words of an old ditty my father had been fond of singing in his liquor when I was a boy and that had at that moment popped into my head, and at the same time staggering about as though I were drunk. It was my purpose to make the night watchman think me a drunken workman homeward bound and I succeeded. As I went away from him, staggering along the track, singing and not answering when he demanded to know who I was and what I was doing there, he grew angry, ran quickly up behind and kicked at me. Fortunately he missed and fortunately I remembered that his eyes had gone back on him long since. He now grabbed at me but I eluded his grasp, singing my ditty as I half ran, half staggered away:

“’Twas a summer’s day and the sea was rippled
By the softest, gentlest breeze,
When a ship set sail with her cargo laden
For a land beyond the seas.

Did she never come back? No, she never came back,
And her fate is yet unlearned.
Though for years and years sad hearts have been waiting
Yet the ship she never returned.”

NOTE V

I HAD become a writer, a word fellow. That was my craft. Flinging aside the fake devotion that must always be characteristic of all such jobs as the advertising writing I had been doing for several years I had accepted my passion for scribbling as one accepts the fact that the central interest of one’s whole being lies in carving stone, spreading paint upon canvas, digging in the earth for gold, working the soil, working in wood or in iron. The arts are after all but the old crafts intensified, followed with religious fervor and determination by men who love them and deep down within him perhaps every man wants more than anything else to be a good craftsman. Surely nothing in the modern world has been more destructive than the idea that man can live without the joy of hands and mind combined in craftsmanship, that men can live by the accumulation of monies, by trickery. In the crafts only one may exercise all one’s functions. The body comes in, the mind comes in, all the sensual faculties become alive. When one writes one deals with a thousand influences that motivate his own and other lives. There is, first of all, the respect for what has gone before, for the work of the older craftsmen. One who has written as much as I have written--and for every word printed there are hundreds I have scrawled experimentally that will never be printed--has also read much and often with great joy.

In Russia England France Germany a writer sat writing. Oh, how well he did his job, and how close I feel to him as I read! What a sharp sense he gives of the life about him! With him one enters into that life, feels the hidden passions of peoples, their little household traits, their loves and hates. There are sentences written by all writers of note in all countries that have their roots deep down in the life about them. The sentences are like windows looking into houses. Something is suddenly torn aside, all lies, all trickery about life gone for the moment. It is what one wants, what one seeks constantly in one’s own craftsmanship, and how seldom it comes. The little faky tricks are always so ready to help over the hard places and when one has used them there is the little flush of triumph followed by--bah! followed always by the sick awakening.

One need not go too far afield to find sentences and paragraphs that stir deeply. No doubt they were in the Indian language before white men came and the first whites on our shores brought the sense of them. There was that Fredis, sister of that Norseman Eric, who had come to America long before Columbus came and had built him a house in Vinland. The sister was a strong-willed woman who bullied her husband and was avaricious for wealth. Came sailing to Greenland the brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi, with a strong ship, and she induces them to go adventuring with her to Vinland but at the very beginning tricks them. She in her ship is to have thirty men and they are to have thirty but unknown to them she conceals an extra five in her own vessel so that in the far land, where are no white men and white men’s laws are unknown, she shall have the upper hand. They get to Vinland and she will not let them stay in the house, built there by her brother Eric, and they go patiently away and build a hut of their own.

Still she schemes. See now with what truth, what fidelity and clearness some old writer tells of what happened. Well, the brothers had the larger and better ship and she wanted that too.

One morning early Fredis arose from her bed and dressed herself, but did not put on her shoes and stockings. A heavy dew had fallen, and she took her husband’s cloak, and wrapped it about her, and then walked to the brothers’ house and up to the door, which had been only partly closed by one of the men, who had gone out but a short time before. She pushed the door open and stood silently in the doorway for a time. Finnbogi, who was lying on the innermost side of the room, awoke. “What dost thou wish here, Fredis?” She answers: “I wish thee to rise and go out with me, for I would speak with thee.” He did so; and they walked to a tree, which lay close by the wall of the house, and seated themselves upon it. “How art thou pleased here?” says she. He answers “I am well pleased with the fruitfulness of the land, but I am ill content with the breach that has come between us, for methinks there has been no cause for it.” “It is even as thou sayest,” says she, “and so it seems to me; but my errand to thee is that I wish to exchange ships with you brothers, for ye have a larger ship than I, and I wish to depart from here.” “To this I must accede,” says he, “if it is thy pleasure.” Therewith they parted, and she returned home and Finnbogi to his bed. She climbed up into the bed and awakened Thorvard (her husband) with her cold feet; and he asked her why she was so cold and wet. She answered with great passion. “I have been to the brothers’,” says she, “to try to buy their ship, for I wish to have a larger vessel; but they received my overtures so ill that they struck me and handled me very roughly; that time thou, poor wretch, will neither avenge my shame nor thy own; and I find, perforce, that I am no longer in Greenland. Moreover I shall part from thee unless thou makest vengeance for this.” And now he could stand her taunts no longer, and ordered the men to rise at once and take their weapons; and they then proceeded directly to the house of the brothers, and entered it while the folk were asleep, and seized and bound them, and led each one out when he was bound; and, as they came out, Fredis caused each to be slain.

Since I had been a boy it had been such passages as the one above that had moved me most strangely. There was a man, perhaps one of Fredis’ men, who had seen a part of what had happened on that dreadful morning in the far western world and had sensed the rest. For such a one there would perhaps have been no thought of interference. One can think of him, the unknown writer of the memorable passage above, as even helping in the dreadful slaying there in the field at the edge of the wood and near the sea, not because he wanted to but because he would have been afraid. He would have done that and later perhaps have gone off alone into the woods and cried a little and prayed a little, as I can imagine myself doing after such an affair. The woman Fredis, after she had got what she wanted, swore all her men to secrecy. “I will devise the means of your death if there is any word of this when we have returned to Greenland,” she said, and after she had gone home with the two vessels loaded and had made up her own lie to tell her brother Eric of what had happened to the brothers and their men in the far place, she made all of her own men handsome presents.

But there was that scribbler. He would put it down. Fear might have made him take part in the murder but no fear could now keep his hand from the pen. Do I not know the wretch? Have I not got his own blood in me? He would have walked about for days, re-living all of that dreadful morning scene in Vinland and then when he was one day walking he would have thought of something. Well, he would have thought suddenly of just that bit about Fredis crawling back into her husband’s bed, after the talk with Finnbogi, and how her cold wet feet awoke the man. He would have been alone in the wood, back there in Greenland, when that bit came to him, but at once he hurried to his own house. Perhaps his wife was getting dinner and wanted him to go to the store but he would have brushed her aside, and sitting down with ink and paper--perhaps in her angry presence--he wrote all out, just as it is put down above. Not only did he write, but he read his piece to others. “You will get yourself into trouble,” said his wife, and he knew what she said was true but that could not stop him. Do I not know the soul of him? He would have gone about boasting a little, strutting a little. “I say now, Leif, that bit, where Fredis gets into the bed and with her cold feet awakens Thorvard--not bad, eh? I rather nailed her there, now didn’t I old man?” “But you yourself helped to do the murder, you know.” “Oh, the deuce now! Never mind that. But I say now, you’ll have to admit it, I did rather put a spike into my scene. I nailed it down, now didn’t I, Leify old chap?”

NOTE VI

WELL, there was my father, there was myself. If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me. I would tell if I could get at the heart of it--as the fellow who went off to Vinland with Fredis told--and for just the reasons that made him tell. And like that fellow, after he returned to Greenland, I would have to walk alone in the woods or in city streets thinking, trying to think, trying to get all in accord, seeking always just that illuminating touch the Norse story-teller had found when he thought up the bit about Fredis--that about her getting into bed and touching the back of her sleeping husband with the cold feet. The foxy devil! Do I not know what happened after that? First he thought of the two in the warm bed--the determined woman and the startled weak man--with a little jump of delight and then he went back over his story and put that in about her having got up in the first place without putting on shoes and stockings and the cold wet dew on the grass and the log against the wall of the house on which they sat. Now he had got going just right and he knew he had got going just right. What a splendid feeling! It was like a dance. How neatly everything fitted in! Words came--ah--just the right words.

How many times, in these modern days when I have seen how story-tellers and painters have got themselves so often all balled-up with the question of style I have wondered whether the story-tellers among the old Norse and those most marvelous story-tellers of the older Testaments, whether they also did not have their periods of escaping out into words because they had grown weary of seeking after the heart of their stories.

I dare say they stole when they could without being detected as I have so often done. Well, there was the heart of the tale itself. That had first to be got at and then one had to find the words wherewith to clothe it. One got a bit feverish at times and used feverish words, made his telling too turgid or too wordy. One was like a runner who has a long race to run but who is feverishly forcing the pace. How many times I have sat writing, hoping I had got at the heart of the tale I was trying to put down on the paper when inside myself I knew I had not. I have tried to bluff myself. Often I have gone to others, hoping they would say words that would quiet the voices within. “You have not got it and you know you have not got it. Tear all up. Well, then, be a fool and go on trying to bluff yourself. Perhaps you can get some critic to say you have got what you know well enough you have not got, the very heart, the very music of your tale.”

NOTE VII

IN Chicago I had ruined my chances of becoming a successful man of affairs because I could not take affairs seriously but that had not bothered me. Often enough, to be sure, I dodged the fact that, after having started on the scent of some tale I turned aside because I could not follow the scent and consoled myself by saying that the need of money had been the cause of my defeat or that the need of leisure had upset me but it was always a lie.

I was an advertising man in Chicago and sat in a room with some half a dozen others. We had met to discuss some matter of grave importance to say a maker of plows or automobile tires. The matter was really of no importance to me. The man had come to Chicago with three or four others and we were to discuss methods of increasing his sales. So many thousands of tires made, so many thousands of plows. There were other makers of tires, other makers of plows too. Could we be more persuasive than they, more bold and daring in statement, more foxy and clever perhaps?

We sat in a room to talk it over and near me sat a large man with a beard. Someone had told me that he was the treasurer of the plow company but that had meant little. Now, as he sat there smoking a cigarette and gazing out at a window I saw, just when his head was slightly turned, that he had a long scar on his cheek, that he had grown the beard to conceal the scar. The talk went on but I sat fascinated. “We must develop the trade in the southwest, that’s what we must do,” said a voice from some far-distant place. Pictures had begun to form in my fancy. Beside the voices in the room, other voices were making themselves heard. Old memories had begun to stir.

There was something, a story within me that had been there a long time but had never been told and that the scar under the beard had brought to life. What an unfortunate time for the story to begin asserting itself at just that moment. Now I was to think of the promotion of the sale of plows in the newly opened State of Oklahoma and in Texas.

I sat with some six or eight men by a large table in a room and some man was talking. He had been to Texas and knew things I would later have to know when I wrote advertisements for the plow company. I tried to appear attentive. There was a trick I had cultivated for just such occasions. I leaned a little forward and put my head in my hands, as though lost in deep thought. Some of the men in the room had heard that I wrote stories and had therefore concluded that I had a good brain. Americans have always a kind of tenderness for such cheats as I was being at the moment. Now they gave me credit for thinking deeply on the subject of plows, which was what I wanted. One of my employers--he was president of our company and his name was Barton--tried to cover up my obvious inattention. Already he had decided I would have to write the plow company’s advertisements but later he would tell me of all that had been said in the room. He would take me into his office and scold me gently, like a mother speaking to a badly behaved child. “Of course you didn’t hear a blamed word they said but here is the gist of it. I had to tell that big man with a beard that you were a genius. My God, what lies do I not tell on your account? When the little man with the glasses was speaking of agricultural conditions in Texas I was afraid that at any moment you might begin to whistle or sing.”

Voices inside the room and voices inside myself too. Was something coming a bit clear at last?

Now my fancy had taken me quite out of the room where the others talked of plows. One night, years before, when I was a young laborer and was beating my way westward on a freight train, a brakeman had succeeded in throwing me off the train in an Indiana town. I had remembered the place long afterward because of my embarrassment--walking about among people in my dirty torn clothes and with my dirty hands and face. However, I had a little money and after I had walked through the town to a country road I found a creek and bathed. Then I went back to town to a restaurant and bought food.

It was a Saturday evening and the streets were filled with people. After it grew dark my torn clothes were not so much in evidence and by a street light near a church on a side street a girl smiled at me. Half undecided as to whether or not I had better try to follow and pick up an acquaintance, I stood for some moments by a tree staring after her. Then I bethought me that when she had seen me more closely and had seen the condition of my clothes she would in any event have nothing to do with me.

As is natural to man, under such circumstances, I told myself I did not want her anyway and went off down another street.

I came to a bridge and stood for a time looking down into the water and then went on across the bridge along a road and into a field where long grass grew. It was a summer night and I was sleepy but after I had slept, perhaps for several hours, I was awakened by something going on in the field and within a few feet of me.

The field was small and two houses stood facing it, the one near where I lay in a fence corner and the other a few hundred yards away. When I had come into the field lights were lighted in both houses but now they were both dark and before me--some ten paces away--three men were struggling silently while near them stood a woman who held her hands over her face and who sobbed, not loudly but with a kind of low wailing cry. There was something, dimly seen, something white, lying on the ground near the woman and suddenly by a kind of flash of intuition I understood what had happened. The white thing on the ground was a woman’s garment.

The three men were struggling desperately and even in the dim light it was evident that two of them were trying to overcome the third. He was the woman’s lover and lived in the house at the end of the path that crossed the field and the two others were her brothers. They had gone into the town for the evening and had come home late and as they were walking silently across the grass in the field they had stumbled upon the love-makers and in a flash there was the impulse to kill their sister’s lover. Perhaps they felt the honor of their house had been destroyed.

And now one of them had got a knife out of his pocket and had slashed at the lover, laying his cheek open, and they might have killed the man as the woman and I watched trembling but at that moment he got away and ran across the field toward his own house followed by the others.

I was left alone in the field with the woman--we were within a few feet of each other--and for a long time she did not move. “After all I am not a man of action. I am a recorder of things, a teller of tales.” It was somewhat thus I excused myself for not coming to the lover’s aid, as I lay perfectly still in the fence corner, looking and listening. The woman continued to sob and now, from across the dark field, there was a shout. The lover had not succeeded in getting into his own house, was really but a step ahead of his pursuers, and perhaps did not dare risk trying to open a door. He ran back across the field, dodging here and there, and passing near us crossed the bridge into the road that led to town. The woman in the field began calling, evidently to her two brothers, but they paid no attention. “John. Fred!” she called between her sobs. “Stop! Stop!”

And now again all was silent in the field and I could hear the rapid steps of the three running men in the dusty road in the distance.

Then lights appeared in both the houses facing the field and the woman went into the house near me, still sobbing bitterly, and presently there were voices to be heard. Then the woman--now fully clad--came out and went across the field to the second house and presently came back with another woman. Their skirts almost brushed my face as they passed me.

The three sat on the steps of the house on my side of the field, all crying, and above the sound of their crying I could still hear, far off, the sound of running feet. The lover had got into the town, which was but half a mile away, and was evidently dodging through streets. Was the town aroused? Now and then shouts came from the distance. I had no watch and did not know how long I had slept in the field.

Now all became silent again and there were just the four people, myself lying trembling in the grass and the three women on the steps of the house near me, and all three crying softly. Time passed. What had happened? What would happen? In fancy I saw the running man caught and perhaps killed in some dark little side street of an Indiana farming town into which I had been thrown by the accident that a railroad brakeman had seen me standing on the bumpers between two cars of his train and had ordered me off. “Well, get off or give me a dollar,” he had said, and I had not wanted to give him a dollar. I had only had three dollars in my pocket. Why should I give one to him? “There will be other freight trains,” I had said to myself, “and perhaps I shall see something of interest here in this town.”

Interest indeed! Now I lay in the grass trembling with fear. In fancy I had become the lover of the younger of the three women sitting on the steps of the house and my sweetheart’s brothers with open knives in their hands were pursuing me in a dark street. I felt the knives slashing my body and knew that what I felt the three women also felt. Every few minutes the younger of the three cried out. It was as though a knife had gone into her body. All four of us trembled with fear.

And then, as we waited and shook with dread, there was a stir in the silence. Feet, not running but walking steadily, were heard on the bridge that led into the road that passed the field and four men appeared. Somewhere in the town, in the dark night streets of the town, the two brothers had caught the lover but it was evident there had been an explanation. The three had gone together to a doctor, the cut cheek had been patched, they had got a marriage license and a preacher and were now coming home for a marriage.

The marriage took place at once, there before me on the steps of the house, and after the marriage, and after some sort of heavy joke on the part of the preacher, a joke at which no one laughed, the lover with his sweetheart, accompanied by the third woman, the one from the house across the field and who was evidently the lover’s mother, went off across the field. Presently the field where I lay was all dark and silent again.

* * * * *

And that had been the scene playing itself out in my fancy as I sat in the advertising office in Chicago, pretending to listen to the man who spoke of agricultural conditions in Texas and looking at the man with the scar on his cheek, the scar that had been partly hidden from the sight of others by growing the beard. I remembered that the plow company, now wanting to sell its plows in greater numbers in the southwest, was located in an Indiana town. How fine it would be if I could speak to the man of the beard and ask him if by any chance he was the lover of the field. In fancy I saw all the men in the room suddenly talking with the greatest intimacy. Experiences in life were exchanged, everyone laughed. There had been something in the air of the room. The men who had come to us were from a small city in Indiana while we all lived in the great city. They were somewhat suspicious of us while we were compelled to try to allay their suspicions. After the conference there would be a dinner, perhaps at some club, and afterward drinks--but there would still be suspicion. I fancied a scene in which no man suspected another. What tales might then be told! How much we might find out of each other!

And now in fancy the bearded man and I were walking and talking together and I was telling him of the scene in the field and of what I had seen and he had told me of what I had not seen. He told me of how during the running he had become exhausted and had stopped in a dark little alleyway behind stores in the town and of how the brothers had found him there. One of them came toward him threateningly but he began to talk and an explanation followed. Then they had gone to arouse a doctor and a small official who gave them the marriage license.

“Do you know,” he said, “neither her mother nor my own knew just what had happened and didn’t dare ask. Her mother never asked her and my mother never asked me. We went along later as though nothing had happened at all except that with all of us, her brothers and myself, and even our two mothers, there was a kind of formality. They did not come to our house without being invited and we did not go freely to their house as we always had done before the brothers saw us together in the field that night.”

“It was all a little strange and as soon as I could I grew the beard to hide the scar on my face that I thought embarrassed all the others.

“As for Molly and myself--well, you see it was somewhat strange to find ourselves suddenly man and wife but she has been a good wife to me. After the ceremony that night on the porch of the house and after the preacher went away we all stood for a little time together, saying nothing, then my mother started for our house across the field and I took my wife’s arm and followed. When we got to our house I took my Molly into my bedroom and we sat on the edge of the bed. There was a window that looked over across the field to the house where she had always lived and after a while the lights went out over there. My own mother kept moving about in our house and, although she made no noise, I knew she was crying. Was she crying because she was glad or sad? Had Molly and I married in the regular way I suppose there would have been rejoicing in both houses and I think there is no doubt we would inevitably have married. Anyway, my mother did things about the house she had already done once that night, opened the door to let out the cat that was already out, tried to wind the clock that was already wound. Then she went off upstairs and our house was dark and silent too.

“We just sat like that, on the edge of the bed, Molly and me, I don’t know for how long. Then she did something. The doctor in town had sewed up the wound in my cheek and had covered the place with a soft cloth held in place by pieces of tape. What she did was to reach up and touch the end of the wound, timidly, with the tips of her fingers. She did it several times, and each time a soft little moan came from her lips.

“She did that, as I say six or eight times and then we both lay down on the bed and took each other’s hands. We didn’t undress. What we did was to lie there, all night, just as I have described, with our clothes on and holding fast to each other’s hands.”