Chapter IV: Introduction (3)

Advocate Dufayel sat down; Papa Chibou raised his eyes to the judges’ bench. Judge Perouse was ostentatiously blowing his beak of a nose. Judge Goblin, who wore a Sedan ribbon in his buttonhole, was sniffling into his inkwell. And Chief Judge Bertouf was openly blubbering.

“Jerome Chibou, stand up.” It was Chief Judge Bertouf who spoke, and his voice was thick with emotion.

Papa Chibou, quaking, stood up. A hand like a hand of pink bananas was thrust down at him.

“Jerome Chibou,” said Chief Judge Bertouf, “I find you guilty. Your crime is patriotism in the first degree. I sentence you to freedom. Let me have the honour of shaking the hand of a true Frenchman.”

“And I,” said Judge Goblin, thrusting out a hand as dry as autumn leaves.

“And I also,” said Judge Perouse, reaching out a hairy hand.

“And, furthermore,” said Chief Judge Bertouf, “you shall continue to protect the Napoleon you saved. I subscribe a hundred francs to buy him for you.”

“And I,” said Judge Goblin.

“And I also,” said Judge Perouse.

As they left the court room, Advocate Dufayel, Papa Chibou and Napoleon, Papa Chibou turned to his lawyer.

“I can never repay monsieur,” he began.

“Nonsense!” said the lawyer.

“And would Monsieur Dufayel mind telling me again the last name of Napoleon?”

“Why, Bonaparte, of course. Surely you knew----”

“Alas, no, Monsieur Dufayel. I am a man the most ignorant. I did not know that my friend had done such great things.”

“You didn’t? Then what in the name of heaven did you think Napoleon was?”

“A sort of murderer,” said Papa Chibou humbly.

* * * * *

Out beyond the walls of Paris in a garden stands the villa of Georges Dufayel, who has become, everyone says, the most eloquent and successful young lawyer in the Paris courts. He lives there with his wife, who has bright dark eyes. To get to his house one must pass a tiny gatehouse, where lives a small old man with a prodigious walrus moustache. Visitors who peer into the gatehouse as they pass sometimes get a shock, for standing in one corner of its only room they see another small man, in uniform and a big hat. He never moves, but stands there by the window all day, one hand in the bosom of his coat, the other at his side, while his eyes look out over the garden. He is waiting for Papa Chibou to come home after his work among the asparagus beds to tell him the jokes and the news of the day.

TOWERS OF FAME

BY ELIZABETH IRONS FOLSOM

From _McClure’s_

He raised his voice to bar interruption.

“You cannot tell anything about any one. Romance survives where you least expect it. Would you look for it in Eric Hall, for instance? Would you suspect him of Romance?”

“Well, hardly,” said one of the listeners. “Not that calculating, cold man--all indifference. Just to make your point, don’t try to prove that _he_ has known sentiment.”

“More than most men,” replied Kent. “I have a notion to tell you about him. I _will_ tell you. Come closer, Janet--all of you--to hear the unbelievable.”

“About Judge Eric Hall who knows only power--fame!” They laughed.

“Yes, about him.”

“How do _you_ happen to know?”

“He told me.”

“Did he expect you to tell?”

“Heaven knows what a man expects when he babbles.”

Dinner was over; coffee was being served in the big, candlelit drawing room. The guests had made little intimate groups; some one at the piano at the far end of the room touched half strains between talk and laughter. The group in the deep window drew closer to Kent, and made themselves comfortable.

“‘Babbles’ is what I said,” went on the speaker, rolling a cigarette with deliberation, “but that is the wrong word. We were old friends: in fact, I was responsible for the whole thing, for I had talked about the queer town in one of the Middle Western states. Eric is the kind who always wants to know, so when he happened to be in that part of the state, he hired a car and drove out to see for himself.”

“I’ve heard of that town,” declared Janet eagerly. “There is no other like it, is there?”

Kent passed over the question.

“I’ll tell it exactly as he told me. I’m sure I can. I could not forget it. He had driven ten miles through dust and wind with a thunderstorm rolling up ahead of him--purple storm with green fringe on it--the kind they have out there. He was whacking along when he caught sight of a sign by the roadside. He stopped and backed his car to read it. It said--I remember it exactly--it said:

SMOKING, DRINKING, PROFANITY, FORBIDDEN AS YOU PASS THROUGH THIS
TOWN.

YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO POLLUTE THE AIR.

MOST PEOPLE ARE BAD. MOST PEOPLE LIE, STEAL, AND DRINK.”

“Oh! Truly!” gasped Janet.

“It was what Eric was looking for--the entrance to the town of fanatics. There was a blank-looking group of houses marked at intervals by tall, white board signs--black letters on a white ground. He drove slowly. It was Sunday and the stillness was absolute. There was a building that might be a hotel--on the veranda were vacant chairs tilted against the rail; a few shops, gray with closed doors; houses gray, too, all with doors shut tight, curtains made to screen. The main street, three or four blocks long, was deserted. At a far corner a man appeared, took a look at the coming car, and stepped out of sight. A woman who came out on her porch, slipped back, and shut the door sharply. She was gray, too--clothes and hair; the distant man had seemed gray--a brown-gray, like the dust that whirled.

“He stopped the car again to read another sign, this one as large as a house front, full of preachments, repeating the words that he had first read:

MOST PEOPLE ARE BAD. THEY LIE, STEAL, AND DRINK.

NO OUTSIDE PEOPLE OR INSTITUTIONS WANTED HERE.

THE DANCE IS OF THE DEVIL, THE THEATRES ARE DEVIL-BEGOTTEN.

“And again:

MOST PEOPLE ARE BAD. THEY LIE, STEAL, AND DRINK.

“As he stood reading, he was conscious that men had appeared in the streets ahead and behind him. They fitted the houses--brown-gray, closed, shut tight. They walked slowly, eyes on the ground, but, as they passed him, he had a look from each. The looks were alike: ominous--hate snapped out at him from under briefly raised lids. Each face had a set mouth, with slashes down from its corners. Each head that turned slightly had--menace--hostile promises.

“The storm was breaking: a flash of lightning swept down the street; thunder crashed; for a moment the wind ceased--it hung aloof and the calm was thick with the brown-gray of the town--with deep silence. A desert plain, a skiff alone on the ocean, would have been more friendly, he said.”

“Where is the Romance?” some one asked, as Kent stopped.

“It’s at hand. It crossed the street in front of his car just as the wind came tearing like a railroad train. He saw her face for an instant before it caught her. Well, folks--I can’t tell you how Eric spoke of her face. He forgot that he had ever seen a court room or a law office, or had known indifference or ambition. He said to me--I can see him as he rapped the table and forgot he was speaking--‘The face of that girl, Kent!’ And--can you believe it of Eric?--he went on: ‘Do you remember Raphael’s peasant girl? The one with parted lips and queer, asking eyes? She was exactly like her. The wind took her sunbonnet away. She had two long braids of hair. She stopped and stared at me, her long, brown-gray skirt twisting about her little flat shoes. Then she ran on, clutching her braids, and a near door slammed after her.’

“The wind was on then; the few trees bent before it.

“The rain was close. There was no protection and, acting on impulse, he drove the car back of the huge sign. It was a shield from the wind and a slight protection against the slanting rain.

“Eric said it had been years since he had seen a Western storm, where it lets loose and whoops ’er up. He was half blinded with the lightning; he could hear the smash of small buildings; the rattling scurry of débris blown by the wind. His own shelter shivered, creaked. It was braced strongly from the back, but he thought it more than likely that it would go. Across the street he heard one go down with a splitting thud.

“But as he waited, he was conscious, he said, only of the girl who was somewhere in that strange town. I’d like to have had you--you people who think you know Eric--watch him as he told me this. There was not a drop of blood in his body, to judge from the colour of his face; his fingers twitched. He talked because he had to talk to some one, I guess. He was not self-sufficient just then.”

“Hm-m,” said some one. “I don’t get him in that rôle, and still I do, too, in a way: the force in him could be applied as well to an--er--infatuation as to anything else. I suppose it _was_ an infatuation, eh, Kent? They are strange things, but they wear off.”

“Go on,” said Janet.

“He said that he sat there in the car while the wind bent his board protection and the rain came in sheets. He was wet through from the spray where it struck the outer edge of the car. He sat and watched pictures of that girl’s face: they came through the rain; came into the lightning; came everywhere. He was half conscious, he said, absorbed in the new thing.

“Out of that state of mind--he told a lot about that; it seemed to puzzle him as it does us now--he was startled by a new gale of wind, a close splitting of boards, the shriek of wood parting from wood at his elbow; and then the whole great shield tottered, swayed, resisted, swayed again, and came down over him. He ducked his head. A moment later he discovered that, in falling, the sign had gone into some trees standing close and was held there, in half-tent fashion, so that it protected him from the rain. Then he saw, too, some one clinging to the slanting edge of the shield. He leaped from the car and caught her as she fell.

“Her clothes were dripping with water; there was a trickle of blood down one cheek. But she was not unconscious and she struggled in his arms. He made her sit down on the running board of the car. Then he asked if she was hurt and she shook her head. He asked her how she happened to be there back of the sign and she shook her head again. He sat down beside her and watched her. He spoke to me about ‘filling his eyes with her for the rest of his life’--and other things that Eric would not have said normally--or if he had not been--er--infatuated. That was the word, wasn’t it?

“They sat there a long time without speaking, and she kept her eyes closed. The wind died away, but the rain persisted--a steady downpour; the green-gray of the storm daylight changed into the black-gray of steady rain. He waited.

“When she opened her eyes, he asked again how she happened to be there. After much urging she answered him.

“‘They turned me out of the house,’ she said.

“‘Turned you out!’ he repeated, incredulously. ‘In this storm! From your home! Why? What had you done?’

“‘I had stopped and looked at you,’ she answered simply.

“‘What?’ Eric put force into the word when he spoke it.

“‘I had looked at you. Stopped and looked. It was a sin. After that, I could not be allowed to live with those who were not sinners,’ she explained.

“‘I never heard of such a thing!’ he told her. ‘Are they crazy?’

“‘The signs tell you. It is their belief. It was a sin to have looked at you--and remembered.’

“Eric’s blood was racing; she had remembered! Looked at him, and remembered.

“‘Don’t worry. Just tell me,’ he urged.

“She told him. He did not tell me just what she said, but I could guess as I watched the light back in his eyes. Her father had opened the door and put her out in the rain as a wanton. He was very strict--father. As soon as the rain was over she would go to the other end of town where she had a friend who would take her in. No, she did not believe as her father and the people of the town believed; her mother had taken her away and she had been brought up differently, but when the mother had died, he had brought her back.

“‘My mother could not bear it here,’ she said. ‘I am not so brave as she, or I would go.’”

“Go on,” said Janet again.

“It’s a good story, isn’t it? Especially since we have our own opinions concerning him. No king of lovers, no Romeo, no schoolboy, could have told such a tale of first love as Eric told me. Spilled it out. Words tumbling over each other.

“In one look, in one half hour, it seemed, he had turned over all the principles upon which we live here in New York. The primal had taken him--and her, too. She was not afraid; not frightened at what she must have seen in him.

“‘And why, when he turned you out, did you come in here?’ he asked finally.

“He had never before listened for an answer as he listened for that one.

“‘I came because you were here,’ she said.

“Well, people--I began to see then what he was up against in the way of intoxication. He had not touched her; it had been all very aloof, but when she told him why she had come, he said he would have been wooden if he had not gathered her close and held her tight.

“Then, through the slackening rainfall, he heard footsteps outside their shelter, heard them on the soft ground close by, saw a stooped figure straighten under their tipped roof. It was one of the all-alike, brown-gray men with jammed-shut mouth and slashes down from it; with hate-filled eyes.

“This man levelled his finger at Eric. ‘Now ye kin have her,’ he said harshly. ‘Ye kin take her along o’ ye. There’s no door open in this town for such as her. They’re shut against her for ever. This is no place for her ever again. We’re done. All o’ us.’

“She sprang forward. ‘Father!’ she cried.

“He struck her with his open hand straight across the mouth.

“‘Harlot! Plaything o’ strange men!’ he accused, scornfully.

“Eric said that he reached for the man, but that she spread her arms between them.

“‘No!’ she exclaimed. ‘He believes it! He cannot help it. No, no!’

“The man did not speak again. He stooped under the slanting boards and went away.

“And now comes what Eric says was the strangest part of it--the way he took it. Back of the glamour of the girl’s lovely face; back of the pull of her, standing there in the slackening rain holding her wet skirts about her, her neck bare; back of the wonder of her, there rose a bank of his sane self--that self indifferent to all else. There towered a steeple of his future as he had planned it; of his ambitions; of his wealth and fame which were just beginning and for which he had worked hard. They grew--these steeples--and pushed closer. The girl watched him.

“She had not spoken to him since her father had gone away; she had stood aside while Eric got the car out upon the road; she had followed him to it and stood there clasping her bare elbows--lips parted like the Raphael girl-child, he said. She was oblivious to watchers behind drawn curtains.

“‘Now what shall you do?’ he asked her. ‘Does he mean it?”

“‘Yes, he means it. I shall walk to the next town. There will be something for me to do there.’

“‘I’m sorry----’ he began, all the steeples crowding around him.

“‘Don’t be. I’m glad. It gives me a chance to be brave as she was.’

“She put up one hand to her mouth and pressed her lips tight with it.

“‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’ she asked.

“He says he did not need to ask what was odd. He knew. It was the sudden new thing which was his--and hers. But the steeples were nearer. And a free life was what he had planned; it alone could bring him what he wanted. But he asked:

“‘Will you come with me, as he said?’

“She shook her head.

“‘Oh, no. I am not your kind.’

“‘But I love you,’ he told her then. You should have heard him speak those three words, the day he told me the story. Another man surely--not the Eric we know. He said it twice: ‘I love you.’

“‘And I you,’ the girl replied.

“‘Then come with me,’ he pleaded.

“‘No. It will pass. It cannot be the real thing. It was too quick for that.’

“She smiled, and he tried to laugh and say, without too much earnestness:

“‘Shall I come back some day?’

“She shook her head again.

“‘Please don’t.’

“He climbed slowly into the car, legs weighted, he said. He looked back as he gathered speed on the hard road. She was walking too slowly it seemed to him--her head too low----

“But everywhere were the steeples of fame and fortune to come if he were unhampered; if he could be always indifferent. The west had red streaks---- He drove away.”

“Oh, I hate the man!” cried Janet, indignantly. “It’s just like him! What became of her?”

“There she is now, at the end of the room,” said Kent, smiling at the evident astonishment of the group around him.

Eric Hall’s wife was lifting her coffee cup and laughing. Her filmy sleeves fell away from perfect arms; a jewel flashed from a tiny silver band in her hair. She was clearly the loveliest, the most distinguished woman there.

They stared at her.

“But you just said that he drove away!” some one exclaimed in amazement. “That was the drama of your story!”

“He drove back and got her,” finished Kent sententiously.

PHANTOM ADVENTURE

BY FLOYD DELL

From _Century_

_I. A Secret._ He was not a banker by temperament. But nobody in New York, nobody east of the Rockies, knew that. It was his secret.

When he graduated from college, instead of preparing himself seriously for life by cleaning the inkwells in some Wall Street institution, as an ambitious young man should, he got a job on a Western ranch. He did this for no better reason than that he had been fond of reading about cowboys. He learned many things about horses and cattle, and made friends with every cowboy within a hundred miles. Nevertheless, he was not satisfied; for cowboy life, while interesting enough in fact, is less romantically adventurous than in fiction. Yet he stayed there for five years, dreaming now of the sea and reading stories of sailor adventures.

Then an uncle died, leaving him a legacy of a little more than five thousand dollars. With five thousand dollars a young man could get started in business, and it was high time for him to do so. He went to San Francisco and looked about for an opening.

In a café he met a man who had just come back from incredible adventures in the South Seas. To this man’s tales he listened all evening, and then went back to his lodging, where he could not sleep, but walked back and forth for hours in a little garden, dreaming, awake, of strange birds and strange trees and slim, brown, laughing girls with flowers in their hair.

Next morning he went down to the waterfront, and looked out thoughtfully in the direction of the South Seas. With his five thousand dollars he could buy or build a little boat and, with some congenial companion, set sail for those islands of incredible adventure. But he knew that this was mere romantic folly, more worthy of a boy than of a man. He must begin to take life seriously. He shook his head and frowned, and went on to the café.

Every morning--sometimes it was noon--for a whole year he went down to the waterfront and looked out over the bay. And every afternoon and evening he sat in some café. At the end of the year he had made many friends and heard many curious tales, and his money was all gone.

He began to look for a job. He had an extensive convivial acquaintance among the business men of the town; but they did not seem to have any job for him, though they were willing to lend him a few dollars.

So he borrowed a little money and came to New York, where no one knew, as he expressed it, what a damn fool he was.

He took care that no one should know. He got a job in a Fifth Avenue bank, and when he was barely forty he was one of its vice-presidents. He had an apartment in town and a house in the country and a car and a wife and four lovely children, and he was proud of them all.

He was proud of being a sober and responsible citizen--proud of having conquered his romantic propensities. Perhaps his children knew, from the wild, half-true and half-imagined tales he told them at their bedtime hours, that he was still at heart a romantic adventurer. But nobody else, and least of all his sweet and sensible wife, suspected his secret.

_II. A Conversation._ In the summer of his fortieth year the town apartment had been closed, and his wife and children were in the country. He himself was going to the country in a day or two, as soon as he had cleared up those matters, whatever they are, that keep bankers in town in August. He stayed at his club until one evening on an impulse he went down to an out-of-the-way little street near Washington Square, in the hope of hearing some talk from a man who lived there, and whom he had been thinking of at intervals all day.

He was thinking of this man because he had read the night before, at the club, a story of his in a magazine. This man was a writer of stories and lived in what was called Greenwich Village; and this particular story was one of romantic adventure in the South Seas. The story-writer’s wife and the banker’s wife had been friends from girlhood, and the story-writer and the banker were acquaintances of a sort. The banker was always a little aware in the other’s presence of his own secret and foolish past. He was embarrassed when he talked of financial conditions by a fear and perhaps also a hope that the other would somehow see through him. Also he kept wondering if a writer imagined all his romantic adventures or if some of them had really happened. He particularly wondered this about the story he had read the night before at the club, for it gave such a vivid description of a South Sea island that it seemed as though it could only have been written by one who had lived there.

The story-writer was at home. His wife, he explained, was at the seashore with the children, and he was staying in town to do a story or two to pay their summer bills. He sat down again in his study, cocking up his feet on the typewriter desk and lighting a fresh cigarette.

“No, you’re not interrupting me,” he said. “Don’t worry about that. I never get started to work till after midnight, and I want somebody to talk to while this new South Sea yarn ferments in my head. Have a cigarette.” He started to talk. Again the banker had the feeling of guarding a secret.

It was nearly midnight when the conversation took a turn that promised to satisfy the banker’s curiosities.

“It’s odd,” said the story-writer, and paused. “It’s very odd. I’m supposed to be a respectable citizen. But consider these stories of mine. The hero, who is me, meets a beautiful girl and falls in love with her. Sometimes she is a princess, sometimes a chorus girl; just now she is usually a dusky maiden with flowers in her hair. I suppose I’ve met and made love to more than a hundred girls in the course of my literary career. To be sure, I always ask them to marry me; but I never tell them of all the other beautiful heroines I have loved and left behind me. And yet nobody thinks I’m a scoundrel. Not even my wife!”

“Of course not,” said the banker. “That would be absurd.”

“Yes, it would be unthinkable,” said the story-writer. “For when I have finished one of my adventures, I mail it to an editor and get a check for it. And that’s exactly why my wife doesn’t object. It pays the rent; and so it’s perfectly all right for me to spend my life in extra-matrimonial love scenes. But why do I get paid for these adventures?” he went on meditatively. “Because people want adventures. When a man reads one of my romantic yarns, _he_ becomes the hero, _he_ makes love to beautiful, strange girls. And yet no one has thought of proposing laws to forbid married men to read love stories.”

“After all,” said the banker, ironically, “there is a slight difference between reading a love adventure and going out and having one.”

“No,” said the story-writer; “the difference is not slight; it is considerable. But just what is that difference? A love adventure in story form is guaranteed to be complete in itself, to be over when it is finished, and to leave behind it nothing but a pleasant memory in the reader’s mind. In all these ways it differs from a love adventure in reality concerning which no such safe guarantees can be offered. We try to live orderly lives, and while the love adventures of reality may upset the well considered plans of a lifetime, the other kind leave everything exactly as it was. The heroine may swoon with ecstasy in your arms to-night; but she will not call you up on the telephone in the morning or write you passionate and compromising letters.”

“Poor girl--she can’t!” said the banker.

“She doesn’t want to. It is only women of the real world who want love to be a part of life. She belongs to the world of romance, which has laws of its own.”

“The world of fancy,” said the banker.

“Don’t pretend to despise the world of fancy,” said the story-writer. “Fond as we are of the real world, it is far from satisfying all our demands. It is too inexorable. The phantom world of fancy is in many respects a more agreeable place. And everybody goes to it for solace. The sober triumphs of reality are never able for long to satisfy us; always we turn from those four-square actualities to live for a delightful hour in that extravagant land where our most impossible wishes can come true. It is a need of our human nature.”

“Oh, no doubt,” said the banker. “But nevertheless----”

The story-teller interrupted him.

“Have you thought of this? That the self which goes out adventuring in the land of fancy is not a part of this real life of ours, at all? It is a kind of phantom, existing joyously and irresponsibly in a phantom world.”

“I hadn’t thought of it just like that,” said the banker, reflectively.

“But here is the real question. These adventurers in the phantom realm of fancy, _why do they never meet_?”

The banker stared.

“I’m not sure that I understand you.”

“Suppose a man and a girl, unknown to each other, reading the same story at the same time; their phantom selves are sharing the same adventure, one that some writer has created for them. But suppose they dispense with the writer’s assistance. Suppose these phantom selves should meet and create their own adventure. Why not?”

The banker stirred uneasily in his chair.

The story-writer laughed.

“It might happen.”

“It might,” said the banker.

“I wonder,” said the story-writer, “what my wife would say if I told her of such an adventure. It would be like all my other adventures, more beautiful, perhaps, than any of the others. And yet----”

“I hope,” said the banker, frowning, “that you----”

“Go to bed,” said the story-writer, suddenly. “You’ll find the guest room on the top floor. I’m going to get to work on my South Sea story. I’ll call you up for coffee in the morning.”

He took his feet down from the typewriter desk and threw away his cigarette. His hands hovered over the keyboard and already he had forgotten the outer world, including his guest, who rose and wandered uncertainly from the room.

_III. The Ivory Gate._ He found the guest room upstairs. But whether it was the faint clicking of the typewriter below that disturbed him, or his own thoughts, he was disinclined to sleep.

There was a pile of magazines on the table, and he began to read a story. It was the kind of story he had been fond of all his life, an adventure and a strange meeting with a beautiful girl.

But he let the magazine slip to the floor. He was thinking of old times in San Francisco. He remembered that he had wanted to build a boat and sail to the South Seas.

“But I didn’t!” he said to himself triumphantly.

No--a mocking thought came to remind him--he had stayed on shore and listened to café yarns.

But since then he had been sensible. He had been sensible for twelve years. Twelve years! In a sudden panic he wondered if his youth had slipped by and vanished with those years. He went over and gazed at himself in the mirror. He saw a man in the prime of life, strong and clear-eyed.

He did not want to go to bed; but perhaps a walk to the club would make him sleepy. He debated whether to disturb the man at work below to tell him, and decided he would not. He went downstairs quietly.

On the second floor he looked out to reassure himself as to the weather. The sky was a little cloudy, that was all. And then, as he stood there looking out of the hall window, he saw below him a little garden in the moonlight. He looked away quickly, but not in time, for he remembered a moonlit garden perched on one of the hills of San Francisco, where as a young man he had walked night after night dreaming impossible things. That memory was painful, and he hurried downstairs and took his hat to leave the house. But the pain of that memory was strangely sweet and afflicted him with a kind of nostalgia. He wanted to go out into this garden and be again the young fool he had been. He walked up and down the hall with his hat in his hand, wanting to go away and wanting to stay and dream in this garden. It was a queer thing. He had stopped drinking, and he had stopped dreaming, years ago; the desire for drink had never come back, but the desire for dreaming was upon him again. He felt that his whole life of triumphant common sense was at stake. But no, it couldn’t be. An hour in a moonlit garden could not undo the solid achievement of twelve years. He put his hat back on the stand. With a guilty feeling of having yielded to a weakness, he went quietly out, past the door from behind which came the inspired click of typewriter keys fashioning some strange adventure.

In the garden he stood and looked about. There was a full moon above, dimmed with clouds and casting that half-light which transforms the accustomed world into the realm of fancy. _On such a night as this_--Odd bits of poetry, remembered from his youth, came into his mind.

Across from where he stood was a high board fence, and in it a gate, painted ivory-white. He had an impulse to go over and open it. But instead he stood still, mockingly analysing that impulse. “In a story,” he said to himself, “there would be an adventure waiting in the next garden. But in real life, as I well know, there is only another garden, like this, with no one there. People do not moon about in gardens.”

But then he reflected, “I am mooning about in a garden.” Realizing that bankers do not do such things, it seemed to him that he was not a banker, but, as his friend had said, a phantom in a phantom world where impossible things come true.

He surrendered himself for a moment to this feeling, and began to think foolish thoughts, such as he had not thought for twelve years.

“What if there should be an adventure waiting for me on the other side of that gate? What if there were a girl in that garden, waiting?” These thoughts were frightening, and nevertheless they made him happy.

Then his common sense reasserted itself. There was nothing in that other garden, and he was being a damn fool. He reflected gratefully that no one would ever know what a damn fool he was. The depositors at the bank could never guess, nor could his wife. And since there was nothing on the other side of the gate, he might as well go and open it and look into the garden, and then go back to bed.

He walked over to the gate, and there he paused. Why trouble himself to prove what he already knew? Why not keep intact the memory of this absurd fancy and have the pleasure of thinking that perhaps, after all, there had been an adventure waiting beyond that gate?

He realized that if he opened the gate and nothing happened, it would hurt. He put his hand on the latch in a mood curiously like the mood of prayer. If he had had a God to whom such a prayer could be addressed, he might have prayed, that just this once---- But his was no pagan deity, and so he did not pray. Lacking the courage that prayer sometimes gives, he took his hand from the latch.

Then he remembered how he had gone down to the waterfront every morning and looked out over the bay and never set sail for the islands of romance; and he felt that this was a test. It didn’t make any difference what happened: he couldn’t turn back.

He pushed open the gate softly.

Seated on a little wooden bench was a girl; her face was turned away from him, but he could see the languid sweep of a slender arm, bare and beautiful.

One last reminder of his ordinary self intruded into his mind, the façade of the bank on Fifth Avenue, symbol of twelve years of sturdy effort in the realm of common sense. But it seemed to have no relation whatever to this moment, and it faded and was gone.

He stood looking at the girl for the space of a breath; then he walked over to her through a tangle of moonlight that broke through the branches of an elm.

_IV. Afterward._ The milk wagons were rattling over the streets when he went back through the ivory gate, and he could hear the typewriter still clattering within the house. He went silently to the guest room. The adventure was over, and now he had to think about its relation to actuality. But he did not think; he fell asleep.

At the bank there were other matters to occupy his mind. On the train to the country that afternoon there was a neighbour who talked about financial conditions. At the end of the ride there was his wife’s welcome and the children climbing into his arms. It wasn’t until after dinner that he had any time to think.

He was rather surprised at his thoughts. They were, first of all, thoughts of relief at being back at home. It was as if he had strayed for a few hours out of time and space, and was happy to find himself again safely within the cosy contours of the familiar. He was glad to be back in a world that had a meaning beyond the moment, a world that reached back in memory and forward in hope, the world of reality.

As a happy citizen of this comfortable world, he was naturally concerned with the inquiry whether his position in it had been endangered by last night’s adventure. And it seemed to him that he need have no fear. That adventure was a thing utterly apart from all the rest of his life--a thing complete and perfect in itself, with no sequel to be feared or hoped for; they did not even know each other’s names. She herself had preferred that it should be so.

“And,” she had said, “you needn’t fear that it will ever be made commonplace by our meeting at a tea somewhere; you will never see me again.” And he had said, laughing:

“You speak as though you were going to die or going on a very long journey!”

“Yes,” she said; “something like that. You mustn’t ask me about it, only take my word for it.”

And he believed her. Why, he did not know. But to-day he was glad to be so sure that their adventure was ended and that no one but themselves could ever know about it.... He had asked his friend the story-writer over their morning coffee:

“Who lives in that little white house next door, a writer?” and was told, “A school-teacher, I believe.” Evidently his friend did not know of the school-teacher’s guest. No; so far as all the world was concerned, there had been no midnight adventure. It was as detached from reality, as immaterial from any common-sense point of view, as if it had been merely a story he had read in a magazine that night. He might, if he wished, think of it as that.

He was a little startled, as by an odd coincidence, when his wife asked: “Shall I read you a story? The new magazines have come.” But really it was no coincidence at all, for she knew that he liked magazine stories and enjoyed being read to in the evenings. The thing had happened many times before; nevertheless, it was a little strange to be listening to such a story, while in and out of his mind there flashed bright memories of another story.

“Why always the South Seas, I wonder?” his wife paused to remark, looking up from the big chair where she sat with the magazine in her lap. “I suppose it _is_ a more romantic place.”

“Yes, perhaps,” he said.

He had talked to that girl last night about the South Seas; he had said he would like to take her there to see the strange birds and flowers. And she had told him about Venice. And while they talked of sailboats and gondolas, they were sitting on a garden bench.

“He gets the romantic atmosphere rather well, doesn’t he?” said his wife. “I think I can guess which one of the girls he is going to fall in love with, the one with the red hibiscus flower in her hair. What do you think?”

“Very likely,” he agreed.

Who was she, the girl of last night’s story? He couldn’t guess. She wasn’t young, as girls in stories are; there were even tragic lines marring the beauty of what had been a lovely face. But her eyes were incredibly young--the eyes of a child, full of wild dreams. Perhaps, in her ordinary life, she was some one quite different from what she had been that night--as different as he had been from his ordinary self. None of his friends would have recognized _him_ as the romantic wanderer whom she had held for a moment in her arms. He had even quoted poetry to her. _On such a night as this_--Well, he didn’t care; it had not been sham. It was another part of himself. And she? It did not matter what she was to her friends. Last night she had been his strange and lovely playmate.

His wife looked up from the magazine.

“A little improbable, don’t you think?”

Many things were improbable, he reflected. That room last night, with its flowers and tall candles.

“This isn’t my place, you know,” she had said. “Shall I tell you the story? It belongs to a school-teacher, a queer little old-maidish person one would have thought if one had seen her in her schoolroom, no doubt. She invested all her savings in oil stock; and contrary to what you might expect, she made a fortune,--oh, just a little fortune, but enough to last _her_ for the rest of her life. And she bought this house in Greenwich Village, and fitted up this room as a place for romantic things to happen in. But nothing romantic happened. So yesterday, when we met--she was going away on a visit, and I was in town for a day and a night, on my way somewhere else--well, we became very quickly acquainted, and she wanted me to stay here. I was thinking of her when you walked into her garden to-night. Shall I tell you? I think that she believed _I_ was the sort of person to whom romantic things do happen, and that if I were here this room of hers would fulfil its destiny. Is it shameless of me to tell you that?”

“It’s beautiful of you to tell me that,” and he took her in his arms, no longer wondering how this adventure would end.

“I don’t like her.” It was his wife, speaking of the heroine of the story she was reading.

“Why not?”

“She isn’t real.”

He looked at his wife. She was real. And that was better than being the phantom creature of a lovely moment. Why should she begrudge the other kind of girl her moment?

It was odd; he wasn’t in the least ashamed. Men, he remembered, sometimes had bad consciences over things like this, they were driven to confession by remorse. But he had nothing to be sorry for. Why should he confess?

His wife laid the magazine aside a little petulantly.

“Oh, well,” she said, “it’s just a story.”

“Yes,” he said absently, “just a story.”

_V. The Face._ It was a fortnight before he went back to town. That evening he invited his friend the story-writer to dinner, and they talked. And, as it seemed, by accident, their talk touched upon the subject of neighbours.

“Is Greenwich Village any different in that way from uptown? Do you know your school-teacher neighbour in the little white house next door, for instance?” Surely, he thought, it could not be rash to ask that. Certainly his friend would not suspect him of a personal interest in an old-maid school-teacher. So he was thinking when he heard, “She died there to-day.”

Afterward he could hardly believe what had happened except that a wild conviction came into his mind, whirling him out of his chair, out of the restaurant. He wandered somewhere, with one thought in his mind:

_He must see that dead face._

Then he found himself in a house, in that house, among a fluttered group of school-teachers, who talked to him about the woman who had died. They took him for one of her family. He did not talk to them. He went up a stairway and into a room with faded flowers and tall candles ranged about a high bed like an altar. A dead woman lay there, with a sheet drawn over her face. He lifted the cloth and looked at her face and went away silently.

_VI. The Confession._ It was queer, he knew, this impulse to confess that haunted him day and night. When she had been alive he had never wished to speak the words that might set him free to seek again the strange solace of her lips and arms. But now that she was for ever out of reach, he felt this mad compulsion to make known their shadowy love.

To speak now would be to risk losing all the happiness he had built up for himself in the real world, out of an inexplicable loyalty to the memory of his dead playmate. But he could not think of such things now. He could think only of the dreamer who had decked a room for a beautiful adventure that did not come, and who sat in a garden waiting, wondering whether death would come before the adventure; and of a gate that swung open one moonlit night to make her dream come true, and of two adventurers happy for an uncalendared hour in the phantom world of fancy. The time would come, his reason urged, when this memory would be a thing remote and forgotten, when it would no longer hold for him even the ache of regret, when its pathos even would be faded, as its bright joys were already fading in his thoughts. He would be sorry to have spoken. He would know that he had been a fool to speak. But now, though he lost everything that would one day be dear to him again, he did not care.

He fought against that mad impulse while he could. Then, lest he blurt the thing out suddenly, he began to plan the manner of his confession.

He remembered a fantastic idea uttered that night by the story-writer and he thought, “It will be easier to tell it to her first as a story.”

And one evening he told her the story.

He began haltingly enough, constrained as he was to present to her imagination these two nameless figures of a man and a woman who had wished rashly for a happiness not to be had within the solid confines of reality; but as he talked, he forgot all else, and his confession became a passionate vindication of the rights of that phantom self for which the workaday world has so little use, and which can achieve only a pitiful and momentary freedom in what the world calls folly. Then, for he had come to the end of his tale, in that picture of a room with its faded flowers and spent candles and a face whose eyes were no longer bright with wild dreams, abruptly he ceased speaking. And it seemed to him that even without as yet naming himself, he had confessed his crime of secret rebellion against the wisdom of the world.

He looked up and saw that there were tears in his wife’s eyes.

“It’s true,” she said. “Women do feel like that.”

He was bewildered.

“All women,” she went on. “But I didn’t think men knew. How _did_ you know?”

He was about to tell her how he knew, when she spoke again, softly.

“I’m glad she found so beautiful a lover.”

Then he was ashamed, of what, he hardly knew, unless it was of what he seemed to his wife. He realized that he was to her merely what he had laboured for twelve years to seem to all the world. Not the foolish adventurer of his tale; no, she could never believe that. He imagined how it would sound to her if he pretended to be that man in the story. It would be the strangest argument in the annals of marriage. He could prove nothing; his secret was fatally secure. She would say, “You have dreamed it, dear.”

And seeing himself with her eyes, he was shaken by a doubt. Perhaps it _had_ been just a dream.

_VII. Catharsis._ But presently a thought of bitter comfort came; he would tell his friend the story-writer, who would do what was after all the only sensible thing to do with a dream in this world, sell it to other dreamers.

And after a time that was what happened.

THE DISTANT STREET

BY FRANCIS EDWARDS FARAGOH

From _The New Pearson’s_

(Pearson’s Magazine, 157 E. Ohio St., Chicago, Ill.)

On the sidewalk pools of yellow light. Stretches of evening-tinted pavement between them, around them. Gray pavement, with touches of black. To Emmanuel, as he stood in the uncertainly lighted doorway of the college building, the street called out. The yellow pools leaped out of their own flatness; they sang and touched his hands.

Still, he dared not leave the doorway. Every evening it was the same. The street was not for him. The yellow bits of sidewalk, stealing their gold from the lights of the soft-curtained doors, low windows along the street, were not his. He was an outsider. For three years, ever since he had started going to the college, he had known that. And now, again, he felt that he would always remain an outsider.

Sometimes, during the day, Emmanuel would look out of the window of one of the classrooms and try to understand the street. But while daylight was on the pavements, the street was very much like other streets. It was only in the evening that it became alluring, that it became forbidding, throwing light-kisses that were not for him.

No, it would not be wise to go into the street, thought Emmanuel. But he knew that, although impotent rage was causing his legs to tremble, he loved all the hasty-gabled houses and arched doorways, the lawns with their now dusky smiles. This street had a song about it. His own street--that other one, downtown, under the humpbacked shadow of the Williamsburg bridge--had no song. It had only butcher shops and fruit stands and grimy children and smells. Garbage cans and stoops that were unswept and slouching houses which pushed their bellies out into the evening and grinned.

Emmanuel waited in the doorway. Someone would come out. Someone always did. Then, together, it would be easier to face the street, talking in fast, loud sentences to shut out the song. He peered into the building. Yes, someone was approaching. Luck! He knew the man, one of his classmates. He knew, also, that he would not be considered welcome by the other. But that didn’t matter. Anything rather than walk alone....

“Are you going to the Subway?” He tried to conceal his anxiety, desperately forcing the question to be casual.

“Why ... yes!” Not cordial, just as Emmanuel had expected. They thought him queer.... Well.... The main thing was that he’d not have to walk to the subway alone. Blocks and blocks.

“Anything happen in the psychiatry class? I cut it, you know.” Had to make conversation! Oh, anything.... The street....

“No. Nothing much. Old man Hedley gassed some more about maniac-depressives. Usual stuff.”

Hedley ... that was the professor ... maniac-depressives ... oh, yes, maniac-depressives.... (Was that somebody laughing up in that window, behind those flowers? A girl) ... maniac....

“He ... he didn’t.... (A girl! Her body can’t be seen, but she must have white shoulders, smiling through the transparent crimson shawl!) ... let me see ... oh, yes ... he didn’t say when those paranoia reports are due?”

“No.”

“He didn’t! That’s funny!” Emmanuel began to laugh softly. He could feel, without actually seeing it, that the other threw him a questioning troubled glance from the corner of his eye. That made him laugh more. The fool! He didn’t know that the laughter belonged to the girl behind the flowers, to the girl who must have silken eyes and a soft throat. “Well, I guess I’ll cut to-morrow again.”

“Yes?” Without interest.

“Yes!” A warmth came over Emmanuel. He felt himself getting angry, at what he didn’t know. “Yes! I’ll cut it as many times as I damn feel like it. See?” He realized that this required an explanation. “I’m no good at the stuff. I don’t want to be good at it. I’ll never be a doctor. I hate the thought of ever being a doctor.”

“Then why did you come to the school?” In spite of himself the man was compelled to ask. He was amazed at the fury in Emmanuel’s words. “Why did you take up medicine?”

“Why? What the hell do you ask me that for? Don’t you know?” Emmanuel wasn’t listening to himself. The questions had come out of his mouth almost automatically. This was not his only conversation of the kind. Just now he was paying attention to the piano that was being played in a house up the street. “No, I guess you can’t know,” his mouth continued. “You’re not a Jew.”

“What has that to do with it?”

A wailing chord ... was there some regret in that music? Who played it? Another girl? One with seeking eyes?