Chapter V: Part 5

I had a start as we passed through the big room, for the floor was covered with figures stretched out like corpses on the mats. “From the huts on the beach,” Simmons explained. “That’s what makes me think it’s going to be a bad storm.”

He braced himself to hold the door open for me, and added in a sudden shout as the roar of the storm came about us: “A little harder than last time, and the pavilion would go.”

The path to the pavilion ran just above the coral shingle along the foot of the ridge. Ordinarily it was ten feet above high tide, but as we struggled on, hugging the bank to keep from being blown flat by the wind, I could catch a glimpse of creaming, sullen-looking water not two yards away. Slipping up quietly it was, and the soundlessness of its rising was more uncanny than all the bustle and roar on the reefs outside.

We had a struggle to get on, and Simmons hung on to me to keep me from being blown into the lagoon. I began to wish I hadn’t come, and I thought of the peaceful mission house in Taku and of Molly.

“Mr. Cartwright’s there,” Simmons says suddenly in my ear. “I see his light. Hang tight. The wind’s worse out here.”

And it was. An awful clap came, driving us to our knees. I saw a huge bulk crash down between us and the pavilion. The light disappeared.

“The breadfruit tree,” said Simmons, in a hoarse voice. He clawed his way over the fallen branches and I managed to follow, shivering to think of what a misstep would do for me. At last we made out Cartwright struggling in the wreckage brought down by the fallen tree.

“You, Simmons?” he cried. “Quick! Give a hand with this piano. We must get it to higher ground.”

His voice sounded sane enough, but it was the speech of a crazy man. The only path up the ridge was a mere goat trail, fully exposed to the wind. And Cartwright was suggesting our carrying the piano up that! Simmons jerked his lantern up to Cartwright’s face. There was wildness with a vengeance. But my word! How beautiful he looked with his fair, tossed hair, and his eyes purple black with excitement.

“It’s you we’ve come for, sir,” Simmons says to him. “The water’s backing up fast. There’s no time to lose.”

“We must save the piano first,” Cartwright says insistently. A lull had fallen, and his voice sounded very clear. Simmons made a desperate gesture.

“It’s gathering for worse,” he muttered. I took a hand.

“If that wind comes up again we’ll have to scramble to save our skins,” I shouted. “It isn’t humanly possible for us to move the piano. Come, sir, while there’s time!”

“And desert it again?” he asks with a strange little smile. “You’re asking too much of me, old chap. What about Charlotte?”

“She won’t care a hang about the piano!” I could have stamped my foot at him. “It’s you she’ll be worrying about. Don’t be an ass.” That shows how beyond myself I was, that I could speak to him that way. A long, ominous roll shook the silence.

“It’s the surf coming over the reefs,” Simmons says in a hushed voice.

“By Jove, you’re right!” Cartwright exclaims, throwing back his head. His voice was boyish and energetic. “Come on, we must make a dash for it.” And jerking up the lantern he fairly herded us through the tangle to the cliff.

There the gale broke loose on us again. We lay flat on our faces, clinging for dear life to the stems of the stout little pandanus palms. It was like a beast, that wind. It sucked the breath from our mouths, it pounded us and shrieked at us and mocked us till we were half dead from the sheer, cruel force of it. We could scarcely think. Once I had a vision of those huddled figures on the mats, and wondered if the house was still standing, and once I thought of Molly, and hoped she was saying a prayer for me. Then all thought was wiped out as, with a shaking of the very cliff, the surf came racing into the lagoon, sending the spray up fifty feet, and drenching us where we lay.

“The piano!” Cartwright shouted, struggling to get up. Simmons hauled him down, crying to him that it was no use to think of the piano. Cartwright staved quiet a moment till another of those uncanny silences fell.

“Now we can go down,” Cartwright said pleadingly. “I can’t lose my chance of happiness again. The piano—”

The words died on his lips. Through the thunder of the surf came a single long-drawn note, clear and unearthly sweet.

“B flat,” I said, scarcely knowing that I spoke. Cartwright gave a wild laugh.

“You hear it? The voice from the reefs. Why doesn’t Lulukuila answer?”

Well, I can only tell you what happened next, and you may believe it or not. From below us there came another note, making a perfect octave. Never before or since have I heard anything so exquisite or so horrible. Then there was a hideous discord—and silence.

“Lulukuila!” Cartwright cried. “She is taking it from me—my only chance of happiness—”

And before we could stop him he was gone.

We tried to follow him, but the wind caught us again at the edge of the ridge. I’d have been over and lost if it hadn’t been for Simmons. I think I must have fainted from the shock of it. There’s a blank about there, though the rest of the night seemed centuries long.

The wind stopped at sunrise, and we made our way home along the ridge, looking down on a beach swept clean of every human mark, pavilion, grove, native huts and all. The house was still standing, but in a wreck of fallen branches and torn lianas. Scared servants and ashen-faced women and children came out to meet us, and began asking for their master. Simmons, granite faced as ever, did not answer them, but pushed on down to the beach.

Cartwright had come home ahead of us. He was lying on the shore, unscarred except for a faint streak of blue across one temple. He looked beautiful as some sleeping creature of the sea. The wreck of the piano was just above him. Simmons’ composure gave way when he saw that.

“You’ve broken the thing he loved, and you’ve killed him, too. I hope you’re satisfied at last!” he snarled, shaking his fist at the lagoon. I wondered if he was talking to Lulukuila. It was a terrifying outburst—from a man like Simmons.

Next morning they came over from Taku to look for us. The sea was smiling as ever, and the little launch came dancing over the rose and amethyst water as if there never had been a storm to ruffle it. I caught sight of Molly first, then I noticed another woman, sitting between her and Davidson. As she leaned forward to search the shore I was startled with the likeness of her face to Cartwright’s. Yet there was a difference. Her beauty was gracious and human, and—well, comfortable is the only word I can think of for it.

As they came near the beach she saw just Simmons and me and the staring natives. She cried out sharply and swayed a little. I saw Davidson put his arm out as if he would shield her from a blow. Faithful fellow, Davidson, and he got his reward at last.

It was Cartwright’s Charlotte, and Cartwright was not there to meet her. Lulukuila had seen to that.

_Margaret Adelaide Wilson_.

THE ARCHBISHOP OF RHEIMS

It was the Feast of the Assumption, and the archbishop, as he left his palace and stepped into the summer sunlight, breathed a prayer of thanksgiving for the brilliance that glowed about him. For, during the mass which was about to be celebrated in the great cathedral, the passion of his life, one of the most impressive moments occurred when the sun shot its rays with pure and dazzling radiance for the first time into the middle of the apse. With exact calculation the architect had arranged that this took place on the fête day of St. Remi, the patron saint of Rheims, and when the day was overcast or rain obscured the sun it seemed to the archbishop that the Almighty was expressing His displeasure of some negligence or wrongful act on the part of the guardian of this, to him, most precious and wonderful trust in the world.

But today the sun’s effulgence surpassed in warmth and splendor that of any August fifteenth in the archbishop’s memory, and brought into his heart an intense calm and peace which even the knowledge that German guns were despoiling Belgium, not many leagues away, could not entirely dispel. Nevertheless, the remembrance cast a shadow over the spirituality of his broad brow, and his lips moved in silent supplication for the suffering inhabitants, and that the onward march of the invaders would be stayed before their presence desecrated the sacred soil of France.

In rapt contemplation he stood, kindliness and benevolence radiating from his mild face, crowned with its silver halo of hair. His large, gentle eyes wandered over the massive pile raising its lofty steeples in eloquent testimony to the omnipotence of God; its slender spires, pointed portals, and lancet windows indicating the heights to which the thoughts and lives of men must reach before perfection can be attained.

When the archbishop emerged from the sacristy at the end of the long procession of choir, acolytes and coped priests, and entered the cathedral, the voice of the mighty organ was rolling through the edifice in rushing waves of melody, which ebbed and flowed in and out among the great columns in a wealth of harmonics, whose exquisite beauty, as they broke around him, caused a band to tighten about the old man’s throat.

The crossing was filled with a throng of devout worshippers whose faces wore a look of expectancy, for France, la belle France, was threatened by a danger greater than even the oldest among them could recall. War had always been a horror, but today it transcended, in the vague reports that reached them from stricken Belgium, the worst the most imaginative of them could conceive, and the thought haunted them, in spite of their faith that the Blessed Virgin would not permit such a calamity to befall France, that notwithstanding their entreaties, the hand of the Hun might descend on her as it had on her equally innocent and unprovoking neighbor.

The procession wound slowly to its place in the choir, and the organ broke into the great, swelling chords of Gounod’s mass, Mors et Vita. The music, inspired by the sublime grandeur of the sanctuary where it had partly been composed, proclaimed an unshakable faith in the majesty and power of the Almighty, whose protecting arm stands between His children and harm. Gradually the tense look of alarm on the faces of the congregation changed to the serenity of souls in the presence of God.

The organ’s voice subsided to a breath, wafted in and out among the incense-filled recesses of the cathedral like the rustling of angels’ wings, and the deep-toned peal of the great cathedral bell rang through the tense stillness. All at once a shaft of pure radiance shot into the center of the apse from the Angel’s Spire. Straight as a dart it descended until it found the jeweled arms of the cross. Here it rested, throwing out myriad rays of effulgence, as if through them the Spirit of the Founder of their faith was renewing His promises of salvation to His flock.

A breathless hush rested on the congregation until, in an ecstasy of triumph, the organ burst once more into a pæan of praise. The procession receded into the remote spaces of the cathedral, and the worshippers passed out into the sunlit square. As they walked by the statue of Joan of Arc, who sits on her charger before the cathedral, many paused and spoke in low, reverent tones of the sacrifice she had made for France, and wondered if the same spirit of loyalty would spring into life if the land of their adoration stood in need of defense.

Through the great western rose window of the cathedral the sun was casting quivering masses of rubies, topazes, emeralds, sapphires and amethysts to the floor below, where they lay in gorgeous profusion, melting one into the other in extravagant richness of beauty.

An old man stood in contemplation of the splendor of that mighty work of the ages which for a century and a half had been the especial care of his forefathers, and to which end, with reverent preparation, each succeeding generation of his family had been trained. To the old _vitrier_ the windows in the sacred structure were not only a holy trust, but a prized heritage, each separate particle to be watched and studied, as a mother guards its offspring from possible injury, and passed on to posterity in as perfect a condition as it was received.

So deep was his absorption in the magnificence of the spectacle before him that he did not notice the approaching step of the archbishop. The ecclesiastic laid his hand on Monneuze’s shoulder.

“Exquisite, is it not, _mon vieux_?” he asked in his resonant voice. “I have never seen the colors more superb than they are this afternoon.”

The old glass-maker started, and turned toward him. The expression of ecstatic wonder still lingered on his lined face, from which, behind his heavy glasses, peered eyes round and childlike in their unquestioning trust.

“The beauty of it passes belief, Monseigneur,” he murmured fervently. “Oh, that I knew the art of reproducing those marvelous colors! It is the sorrow of my life that, try as I may, I can never duplicate the depth, the richness—” he shook his head dejectedly, and fixed his eyes once more on the flaming window.

“Ah, Jean,” answered the archbishop a little sadly. “So it is with all of us; no matter how hard we strive, we never reach the goal to which we are pressing. Our attainments are ever a disappointment to us. We can only labor on, and live in the hope that on the Last Day, when we see our endeavors through the eyes of the Blessed Redeemer, we may find that His estimate of them, graded on the knowledge of our limitations, will be higher than ours. It may be that our efforts and the sincerity of our motives will be judged instead of the results we were able to achieve. We must remember that no man can do bigger things than his capacity allows.”

The _vitrier_ did not reply. His eyes wavered from the magnificence above him to the spiritualized countenance at his side. It surprised him that the archbishop, renowned alike for his piety and good works, should speak so slightingly of his life.

The ecclesiastic had turned and was gazing at the representation of the Almighty on the great rose window of the south transept. Something of the sublimity of the conception and execution of the masterpiece was reflected on his face, over which still hovered an expression of humility. His eyes left the window and swept up the vast stretches of the cathedral, over mighty pillars, great misty aisles, glorious choir, its beauty half shrouded in the encroaching shadows, until they reached the very penetralia of the Lady Chapel.

“Ah, Jean,” he went on in a deep, vibrant voice, “great is God’s goodness that He has seen fit to confide this marvelous structure to our keeping. May we so live that, when we are called to give an accounting of our stewardship, we may hear the wondrous words: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant!’”

The lips of the aged _vitrier_ moved in a murmured “Amen,” and they watched in silence the sun, as it threw its dying rays through the window to their feet. They fell in a great splash of red, like blood, on the pavement, and a shudder shook the archbishop’s frame. He passed his hand over his forehead, and the shadow that had clouded his face in the morning settled once more on it. Bidding the old glass-painter good night, he moved up the dusky nave.

Days and weeks slipped by, and the gray waves of the invaders rolled nearer to Rheims. Notwithstanding the heroic, almost superhuman, efforts of her sons, the vandals swept across her borders into France, ravishing, desecrating, destroying in a frenzy of frightfulness so terrible that the world, shocked beyond belief, stood aghast and incredulous at the reports that reached it.

The archbishop of Rheims, with others who believed that there was good in the worst of men, at first resolutely declined to credit the rumors that reached him. But when, at last, driven before the attacking force, the refugees, with terror-stricken faces, came breathlessly into the city, the mothers clutching their babies to their breasts, with little tots scarce able to toddle clinging to their skirts and, throwing themselves on his mercy, recounted with white lips, in a dull monotone, the horrors that had befallen them and theirs, the hopeful trust in the old priest’s face turned into a crushed look of sadness as the knowledge came home to him that his faith in man was an illusion of which, at the end of his life, he was to be bereaved.

He lent such aid as lay in his power to the stricken peasants, and when the wounded, friend and foe, were brought in and, overflowing hospital and private dwelling, still clamored for succor, he threw open the great sanctuary to the Germans with the thought that here they would at least be safe from the shells that were beginning to fall on the outlying districts of the city.

Then one night, when the foreboding chill of autumn had replaced summer’s golden warmth, the archbishop was awakened by a noise, apparently in his bedroom, which shook the house to its foundations. He rose hurriedly and, going to the window, saw that the east was ablaze with light. Although the dawn was approaching, he realized that the refulgence that flared across the horizon was man-made, for the rumble of mighty guns which, when he had retired the night before, had been louder and more resonant than before, had risen to a threatening roar that forced a sickening sense of impotence upon him.

Startled by the sudden proximity of the enemy, the archbishop dressed hurriedly and made his way to the Square, already half filled with people. An old woman approached him and, with blanched face, asked whether he thought the city would be shelled and destroyed, as were the Belgian towns. He shook his head despairingly, and his lips framed the words:

“God forbid!”

As she turned away he prayed fervently that, even though the pillaging hordes might, in their fury against the inhabitants, devastate the city, the fact that they claimed the same God as their Savior to whose glory the cathedral had been erected would prove its safeguard and protection. But, even as he prayed, a great bomb blazed a trail through the gray light, and hurled itself on the roof of the sacred edifice. It exploded with concentrated fury, tearing off great pieces of the roof and casting them at his feet.

“They’ve found the range!” excitedly exclaimed a man who stood near the archbishop. “Can it be possible that they intend to destroy the cathedral?”

The archbishop was staring with incredulous eyes at the gaping wound the shot had made.

“No,” he declared firmly, without removing his eyes. “It is not possible. This injury is an unfortunate mistake. Sacred edifices are protected by human and moral laws, and, besides, the Cathedral of Rheims, because of its perfection, belongs to all time and all peoples. No one destroys his own heritage.”

Nevertheless, the remembrance of the destruction of Louvain and the desecration of many churches by the Germans since their treacherous entrance into Belgium, when they cast aside men’s faith in their honor, seared itself across his mind. Their acts had disproved their vaunted belief in God which, had it existed, would have shown itself in a reverent solicitude for His dwelling place.

The words had hardly left his lips when a shower of explosives fell on and about the massive structure, hewing out huge lumps of the masonry, which descended in a deluge of stone on the roofs of the adjacent houses.

A glare of light flared behind the great rose-window, throwing for the last time a blaze of glory into the horror-stricken faces below; then it burst into a thousand fragments that shivered to pieces on the pavement of the Square.

Surrounded by the gleaming bits of imprisoned sunshine, Jean Monneuze gazed with wide, unbelieving eyes at the yawning space in the façade. The thought took shape in his mind that this act of profanation could not be true, that it must be some hideous nightmare at which he would scoff in the morning, and he prayed aloud that the awakening would be soon, that he might be relieved of the torture he was undergoing. A voice at his elbow roused him.

“May God curse the Kaiser, and the rest of his breed, for this sacrilege!”

The old _vitrier_ turned quickly, the fury of a mother for her ravished young in his working face. “Amen!” he exclaimed harshly.

A group of people near him parted, and out of it Jean saw the archbishop slowly advance. The look of intense suffering on his face had driven away the peace that formerly rested there, but his countenance was untinged by venom or desire for revenge. His sunken eyes met the glass-maker’s, and Jean, a sob clutching at his throat, fell on his knees and began gathering up the gems of shattered glass that lay at his feet. He rose as the archbishop reached him, and held out the fragments to him. For a moment they gazed into each other’s eyes without speaking, then a wistful little smile flitted across the archbishop’s face.

“The Lord hath given—the Lord hath taken away.” There was a pause while he waited for the response; but the old _vitrier’s_ chin had sunk on his breast, and his eyes, swimming with tears, were fastened on the gleaming bits of glass. Once more the archbishop’s voice fell on his ears:

“Blessed be the name of the Lord.” There was an accent of surprised reproach in the patient tones, but only pity shone on the gentle countenance as he noted the quivering face of the old man who, turning abruptly away, disappeared into the crowd.

A chorus of voices rose shrilly above the shrieking of the shells:

“The roof is on fire! It’s burning!”

The words galvanized the archbishop into action.

“The wounded!” he exclaimed. “They will perish if they remain where they are!”

“Let ’em!” retorted a thick-set _ouvrier_. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers. “They deserve to die, and they’re not fit to live!” He turned brusquely away, and stared with sullen eyes at the smoking roof from which jets of flame were spurting.

A look of anguish crept over the archbishop’s face. Could it be that his flock had caught so little of the spirit of his teaching that, when it was put to the test, it collapsed as the mighty edifice was crumbling under the demolishing shells? If this were so, it explained the destruction of the cathedral as the retribution for the failure of his ministry. His life work, as well as his life trust, was disintegrating before his eyes. Even Jean Monneuze, the spirituality of whose life, in daily contact with the inspiring sanctuary they both adored, had faltered under the supreme test, and if Jean, for whom he would have vouched under all circumstances, would succumb, how could he expect that the others, with so incomparably less sustaining spiritual strength in their lives, would respond to the call. The bitterness of Gethsemane fell on him, and his face, lighted by the glare from the burning structure, was drawn with pain.

A shell hurtled through the air, and fell against the portal. Rending from its place the head of the Angel with the Smile, it flung it into the Square. Angry mutterings rose from the crowd as the _ouvrier_ picked up the head and held it aloft for every one to see.

The archbishop stepped up on the base of the pedestal of the statue to the Maid of Orleans. He raised his hand impressively.

“My children,” he began in a voice tremulous with emotion. “The Master admonishes us to love our enemies, to do good to them that hate us, to pray for them that despitefully use us and persecute us. If we do good only to those who love us, how much better are we than the heathen? Did you not see that, despite its destruction, the Angel of Rheims smiled on?” He spread out his arms in an agony of entreaty. “Oh my children,” he pleaded, “do not fail me now!”

The rays of the rising sun shone on his face and illumined it with unearthly radiance. The people stood spellbound before him.

Once more he raised his hand and, pointing to the burning cathedral, cried in a resonant voice that rang like a clarion:

“The wounded! Who helps me rescue them?”

Still that tense silence hung over the motionless throng which the crackling of the flames, and the moaning and singing of death as it whistled through the air, only served to accentuate.

The old _vitrier_ elbowed his way through the crowd and, laying his hand on the base of the statue, said in a clear, loud voice:

“Monseigneur, I will assist.”

In the uncertain light the two old men stood scanning the quivering, upturned faces. Then a sudden change swept over the mass.

“_Au secours_! _Au secours_!” The voice of the crowd rose as from one man in a cry, increasing in volume with each repetition until, in the archbishop’s ears, it sounded like a shout of victory. The men turned, and surged toward the entrance of the cathedral.

The archbishop’s face went white, and he grasped the spurred foot of the Maid for support. He closed his eyes, and his lips moved spasmodically. Then they parted in a smile of such celestial beauty that the old _vitrier_, standing at his feet, averted his eye as though unable to bear the sight.

The large central door of the cathedral swung open, and four men, carrying a litter on which lay a gray, motionless form, emerged. They were followed by others in what seemed an endless procession, gently bearing their burdens through the showers of flying pieces of granite statuary and structure stone which the shells were cleaving from the façade.

The flames that were devouring the roof rose in a dull roar; a great bomb crashed through the hallowed walls, and fell on the palace, where it exploded with terrific force.

The archbishop looked silently at the ruin of his home, then he concentrated his attention on the stream of wounded still flowing from the mutilated pile, and directed and guided the movements of the rescuers. When the last of the sufferers had been removed to a place of safety, he stepped down from the pedestal and, entering a little house on the other side of the Square, mounted the stairs until he reached a small room which faced the east.

He entered and, softly closing the door, walked to the window, from which the glass had fallen. Kneeling down in the chill morning air he gazed out at the blackened, smoking husk, his soul in his eyes, as one kneels by the bedside of all that life holds dear, waiting with bated breath for the final dissolution of soul from body with the dull knowledge that, with the passing of that spirit, the light of the world is extinguished.

Still he watches, noting day by day the destruction by wanton shells of one of man’s most glorious tributes to God, ever with the patient look of suffering on his face, as though the prayer from ceaseless repetition had crystallized on his brain:

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”

_Emily W. Scott_.

THE TRAWNBEIGHS

The Trawnbeighs were the sort of people who “dressed for dinner” even when, as sometimes happened, they had no dinner in the house to dress for. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that the Trawnbeighs were English. Indeed, on looking back, I often feel that to my first apparently flippant statement it is unnecessary to add anything. For to one who knew Mr. and Mrs. Trawnbeigh, Edwina, Violet, Maud and Cyril, it was the first and last word on them; their alpha and omega, together with all that went between. Not that the statement is flippant, far from it. There is in it a seriousness, a profundity, an immense philosophic import. At times it has almost moved me to lift my hat, very much as one does for reason of state, or religion, or death.

This, let me hasten to explain, is not at all the way I feel when I put on evening clothes myself, which I do at least twice out of my every three hundred and sixty-five opportunities. No born American could feel that way about his own dress coat. He sometimes thinks he does; he often—and isn’t it boresome?—pretends he does. But he really doesn’t. As a matter of unimportant fact, the born American may have “dressed” every evening of his grown up life. But if he found himself on an isolated, played out Mexican coffee and vanilla _finca_, with a wife, four children, a tiled roof that leaked whenever there was a norther, an unveiled _sala_, through the bamboo partitions of which a cold, wet wind howled sometimes for a week at a time, with no money, no capacity for making any, no prospects and no cook—under these depressing circumstances it is impossible to conceive of an American dressing for dinner every night at a quarter before seven in any spirit but one of ghastly humor.

With the Trawnbeighs’ performance of this sacred rite, however, irony and humor had nothing to do. The Trawnbeighs had a robust sense of fun (so, I feel sure, have pumpkins and turnips and the larger varieties of the nutritious potato family), but humor, when they didn’t recognize it, bewildered them, and it always struck them as just a trifle underbred, when they did.

Trawnbeigh had come over to Mexico—“come out from England,” he would have expressed it—as a kind of secretary to his cousin, Sir Somebody Something, who was building a harbor or a railway or a canal (I don’t believe Trawnbeigh himself ever knew just what it was) for a British company down in the hot country.

Mrs. Trawnbeigh, with her young, was to follow on the next steamer a month later; and as she was in mid-ocean when Sir Somebody suddenly died of yellow fever, she did not learn of this inopportune event until it was too late to turn back. Still, I doubt whether she would have turned back if she could. For, as Trawnbeigh once explained to me, at a time when they literally hadn’t enough to eat (a hailstorm had not only destroyed his coffee crop but had frozen the roots of most of his trees, and the price of vanilla had fallen from ten cents a bean to three and a half), leaving England at all had necessitated “burning their bridges behind them.” He did not tell me the nature of their bridges nor whether they had made much of a blaze. In fact, that one, vague, inflammatory allusion was the nearest approach to a personal confidence Trawnbeigh was ever known to make in all his fifteen years of Mexican life.

The situation, when he met Mrs. Trawnbeigh and the children on the dock at Vera Cruz, was extremely dreary, and at the end of a month it had grown much worse, although the Trawnbeighs apparently didn’t think so. They even spoke and wrote as if their affairs were looking up a bit. For, after a few weeks of visiting among kindly compatriots at Vera Cruz and Rebozo, Mrs. Trawnbeigh became cook for some English engineers (there were seven of them) in a sizzling, mosquitoey, feverish mudhole on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

The Trawnbeighs didn’t call it cook! Neither did the seven engineers. I don’t believe the engineers even thought of it as cook. What Mrs. Trawnbeigh thought of it will never be known. How could they, when that lady, after feeding the four little Trawnbeighs (or rather the four young Trawnbeighs; they had never been little) a meal I think they called “the nursery tea,” managed every afternoon, within the next two hours, first, to create out of nothing a perfectly edible dinner for nine persons, and, secondly, to receive them all at seven forty-five, in a red-striped, lemon satin ball gown (it looked like poisonous wall paper), eleven silver bangles, a cameo necklace, with an ostrich tip sprouting from the top of her head?

Trawnbeigh, too, was in evening clothes; and they didn’t call it cooking; they spoke of it as “looking after the mess” or “keeping an eye on the young chaps’ livers.” Nevertheless, Mrs. Trawnbeigh, daughter of the late, the Honorable Cyril Cosby Godolphin Dundas and the late Clare Walpurga Emmeline Moate, cooked—and cooked hard—for almost a year; at the end of which time she was stricken with what she was pleased to refer to as “a bad go of fevah.”

Fortunately they were spared having to pass around the hat, although it would have amounted to that if Trawnbeigh hadn’t, after the pleasant English fashion, “come into some money.” In the United States, people know to a cent what they may expect to inherit; and then they sometimes don’t get it. But in England there seems to be an endless succession of retired and unmarried army officers who die every little while in Jermyn Street and leave two thousand pounds to a distant relative they have never met. Something like this happened to Trawnbeigh, and on the prospect of his legacy he was able to pull out of the Tehuantepec mudhole and restore his wife to her usual state of health in the pure and bracing air of Rebozo.

Various things can be done with two thousand pounds, but just what shall be done ought to depend very largely on whether they happen to be one’s first two thousand or one’s last. Trawnbeigh, however, invested his (“interred” would be a more accurate term) quite as if they never would be missed. The disposition to be a country gentleman was in Trawnbeigh’s blood. Indeed, the first impression one received from the family was that everything they did was in their blood. It never seemed to me that Trawnbeigh had immediately sunk the whole of his little fortune in the old, small, and dilapidated coffee _finca_ so much because he was dazzled by the glittering financial future the shameless owner (another Englishman, by the way) predicted for him, as because to own an estate and live on it was, so to speak, his natural element.

He had tried, while Mrs. Trawnbeigh was cooking on the Isthmus, to get something to do. But there was really nothing in Mexico he could do. He was splendidly strong, and, in the United States, he very cheerfully and with no loss of self-respect or point of view would have temporarily shoveled wheat or coal, or driven a team, or worked on the street force, as many another Englishman of noble lineage has done before and since, but in the tropics an Anglo-Saxon cannot be a day laborer. He can’t because he can’t.

There was in Mexico no clerical position open to Trawnbeigh, because he did not know Spanish. It is significant that after fifteen consecutive years of residence in the country none of the Trawnbeighs knew Spanish. To be, somehow and somewhere, an English country gentleman of a well-known, slightly old-fashioned type was as much Trawnbeigh’s destiny as it is the destiny of, say, a polar bear to be a polar bear, or a camel to be a camel. As soon as he got his two thousand pounds he became one.

When I first met them all he had been one for about ten years. I had recently settled in Trawnbeigh’s neighborhood, which in Mexico means that my ranch was a hard day-and-a-half ride from his, over roads that are not roads but merely ditches full of liquefied mud on the level stretches, and ditches full of assorted bowlders on the ascents. So, although we looked neighborly on a small map, I might not have had the joy of meeting the Trawnbeighs for years if my mule hadn’t gone lame one day when I was making the interminable trip to Rebozo.

Trawnbeigh’s place was seven miles from the main road, and as I happened to be near the parting of the ways when the off hind leg of Catalina began to limp, I decided to leave her with my _mozo_ at an Indian village until a pack train should pass by (there is always some one in a pack train who can remove a bad shoe), while I proceeded on the _mozo’s_ mule to the Trawnbeighs’. My usual stopping place for the night was five miles farther on, and the Indian village was—well, it was an Indian village.

He put me up not only that night, but as my _mozo_ didn’t appear until late the next afternoon, a second night as well. And when I at last rode away, it was with the feeling of having learned from the Trawnbeighs a great lesson.

In the first place they couldn’t have expected me; they couldn’t possibly have expected any one. And it was a hot afternoon. But as it was the hour at which people at “home” dropped in for tea, Mrs. Trawnbeigh and her three plain, heavy looking daughters were perfectly prepared to dispense hospitality to any number of mythical friends.

They had on hideous, but distinctly “dressy” dresses of amazingly stamped materials known, I believe, as “summer silks,” and they were all four tightly laced. Current fashion in Paris, London and New York by no means insisted on small, smooth, round waists, but the Trawnbeigh women had them, because (as it gradually dawned on me) to have had any other kind would have been a concession to anatomy and the weather. To anything so compressible as one’s anatomy, or as vulgarly impartial as the weather, the Trawnbeighs simply did not concede. I never could get over the feeling that they all secretly regarded weather in general as a kind of popular institution, of vital importance only to the middle class.

Cyril, an extremely beautiful young person of twenty-two, who had been playing tennis (by himself) on the _asoleadero_, was in “flannels,” and Trawnbeigh admirably looked the part in gray, middle-aged riding things, although, as I discovered before leaving, their stable at the time consisted of one senile burro with ingrowing hoofs.

From the first, it all seemed too flawless to be true. I had never visited in England, but I doubt if there is another country whose literature gives one as definite and lasting an impression of its home life. Perhaps this is because the life of families of the class to which the Trawnbeighs belonged proceeds in England by such a series of definite and traditional episodes.

In a household like theirs, the unexpected must have a devil of a time in finding a chance to happen. For, during my visit, absolutely nothing happened that I hadn’t long since chuckled over when making the acquaintance of Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope; not to mention Ouida (it was Cyril, of course, who from time to time struck the Ouida note), and the more laborious performances of Mrs. Humphry Ward. They all of them did at every tick of the clock precisely what they ought to have done. They were a page, the least bit crumpled, torn from “Half Hours With the Best Authors,” and cast, dear Heaven! upon a hillside in darkest Mexico.

Of course we had tea in the garden. There wasn’t any garden, but we nevertheless had tea in it. The house would have been cooler, less glaring, and free from the venomous little _rodadoras_ that stung the backs of my hands full of microscopic polka dots; but we all strolled out to a spot some fifty yards away where a bench, half a dozen shaky, home made chairs and a rustic table were most imperfectly shaded by three tattered banana trees.

“We love to drink tea in the dingle-dangle,” Mrs. Trawnbeigh explained. How the tea tray itself got to the dingle-dangle I have only a general suspicion, for when we arrived it was already there, equipped with caddy, cozy, a plate of buttered toast, a pot of strawberry jam and all the rest of it. But, try as I might, I simply could not rid myself of the feeling that at least two footmen had arranged it all and then discreetly retired; a feeling that also sought to account for the tray’s subsequent removal, which took place while Trawnbeigh, Cyril, Edwina and I walked over to inspect the _asoleadero_ and washing tanks. I wanted to look back; but something (the fear, perhaps, of being turned into a pillar of salt) restrained me.

With most English speaking persons in that part of the world, conversation has to do with coffee, coffee and—coffee. The Trawnbeighs, however, scarcely touched on the insistent topic. While we sat on the low wall of the dilapidated little _asoleadero_, we discussed pheasant shooting, and the best places for haberdashery and “Gladstone Bags.” Cyril, as if it were but a matter of inclination, said he thought he might go over for the shooting that year; a cousin had asked him “to make a seventh.” I never found out what this meant, and didn’t have the nerve to ask.

“Bertie shoots the twelfth, doesn’t he?” Edwina here inquired.

To which her brother replied, as if she had shown a distressing ignorance of some fundamental date in history, like 1066 or 1215: “Bertie always shoots the twelfth.”

The best place for haberdashery, in Mr. Trawnbeigh’s opinion, was “the Stores.” But Cyril preferred a small shop in Bond Street, maintaining firmly, but with good humor, that it was not merely, as “the pater” insisted, because the fellow charged more, but because one didn’t “run the risk of seeing some beastly bounder in a cravat uncommonly like one’s own.” Trawnbeigh, as a sedate parent bordering on middle age, felt obliged to stand up for the more economical “Stores,” but it was evident that he really admired Cyril’s exclusive principles and approved of them. Edwina cut short the argument with an abrupt question.

“I say,” she inquired anxiously, “has the dressing bell gone yet?” The dressing bell hadn’t gone, but it soon went, for Mr. Trawnbeigh, after looking at his watch, bustled off to the house and rang it himself. Then we withdrew to our respective apartments to dress for dinner.

“I’ve put you in the north wing, old man; there’s always a breeze in the wing,” my host declared as he ushered me into a bamboo shed they used apparently for storing corn and iron implements of an agricultural nature. But there was also in the room a recently made up cot with real sheets, a tin bath tub, hot and cold water in two earthenware jars, and an empty packing case upholstered in oilcloth. When Trawnbeigh spoke of this last as a “wash-hand-stand,” I knew I had indeed strayed from life into the realms of mid-Victorian romance.

The breeze Trawnbeigh had referred to developed in the violent Mexican way, while I was enjoying the bath tub, into an unmistakable norther. Water fell on the roof like so much lead, and then sprang off (some of it did) in thick, round streams from the tin spouts; the wind screamed in and out of the tiles overhead, and through the north wing’s blurred window the writhing banana trees of the dingle-dangle looked like strange things one sees in an aquarium.

As soon as I could get into my clothes again—a bath was as far as I was able to live up to the Trawnbeigh ideal—I went into the _sala_, where the dinner table was already set with a really heartrending attempt at splendor. I have said that nothing happened with which I had not a sort of literary acquaintance; but I was wrong. While I was standing there wondering how the Trawnbeighs had been able all those years to “keep it up,” a window in the next room blew open with a bang. I ran in to shut it; but before I reached it, I stopped short and, as hastily and quietly as I could, tiptoed back to the “wing.” For the next room was the kitchen, and at one end of it Trawnbeigh, in a shabby but perfectly fitting dress coat, his trousers rolled up half way to his knees, was patiently holding an umbrella over his wife’s sacred dinner gown, while she—be-bangled, be-cameoed, be-plumed, and stripped to the buff—masterfully cooked our dinner on the _brassero_.

To me it was all extremely wonderful, and the wonder of it did not lessen during the five years in which, on my way to and from Rebozo, I stopped over at the Trawnbeighs’ several times a year. For, although I knew that they were often financially all but down and out, the endless red tape of their daily life never struck me as being merely a pathetic bluff. Their rising bells and dressing bells, their apparent dependence on all sorts of pleasant accessories that simply did not exist, their occupations (I mean those on which I did not have to turn a tactful back, such as botanizing, crewel work, painting horrible water colors and composing long lists of British sounding things to be “sent out from the Stores”), the informality with which we waited on ourselves at luncheon and the stately, punctilious manner in which we did precisely the same thing at dinner, the preordained hour at which Mrs. Trawnbeigh and the girls each took a bedroom candle and said good night, leaving Trawnbeigh, Cyril and me to smoke a pipe and “do a whisky peg” (Trawnbeigh had spent some years in India), the whole inflexibly insular scheme of their existence was more, infinitely more, than a bluff. It was a placid, tenacious clinging to the straw of their ideal in a great, deep sea of poverty, discomfort and desolation.

And it had its reward, for after fourteen years of Mexican life, Cyril was almost exactly what he would have been had he never seen the place; and Cyril was the Trawnbeighs’ one asset of immense value. He was most agreeable to look at, he was both related to and connected with many of the most historical sounding ladies and gentlemen in England, and he had just the limited, selfish, amiable outlook on the world in general that was sure (granting the other things) to impress Miss Irene Slapp, of Pittsburgh, as the height of both breeding and distinction.

Irene Slapp had beauty and distinction of her own. Somehow, although they all needed the money, I don’t believe Cyril would have married her if she hadn’t. Anyhow, one evening in the City of Mexico he took her in to dinner at the British Legation, where he had been asked to dine as a matter of course, and before the second entrée Miss Slapp was slightly in love with him and very deeply in love with the scheme of life, the standard, the ideal, or whatever you choose to call it, he had inherited and had been brought up, under staggering difficulties, to represent.

“The young beggar has made a pot of money in the States,” Trawnbeigh gravely informed me after Cyril had spent seven weeks in Pittsburgh—whither he had been persuaded to journey on the Slapps’s private train.

“And, you know, I’ve decided to sell the old place,” he casually remarked a month or so later. “Yes, yes,” he went on, “the young people are beginning to leave us” (I hadn’t noticed any signs of impending flight on the part of Edwina, Violet and Maud). “Mrs. Trawnbeigh and I want to end our days at home. Slapp believes there’s gold on the place—or would it be petroleum? He’s welcome to it. After all, I’ve never been fearfully keen on business.”

And I rode away pondering, as I always did, on the great lesson of the Trawnbeighs.

_Charles Macomb Flandrau_.

THE LIFE BELT

Out of doors, darkness and sleet; within the cottage parlor, a grand fire and a good supper, the latter, however, no longer in evidence.

Four people sat round the hearth: a woman not so old in years as aged in looks by what the war had done to her; a burly, bearded, middle-aged man, her brother; a young, rather stern-visaged fellow, the last of her sons; and a girl of twenty or so, with a sedate mouth and bright eyes, her daughter-in-law to be. The two men were obviously seafarers. As a matter of fact, the uncle was skipper of an ancient tramp which had somehow survived those three years of perilous passages; the nephew, a fisherman before war, afterwards and until recently in the patrol service, was now mate on the same old ship, though he had still to make his first trip on her.

Said Mrs. Cathles, breaking silence, to her brother: “Did ye see any U-boats comin’ home, Alick?” Possibly she spoke then just to interrupt her own thoughts, for it was not like her to introduce such a subject.

The skipper was busy charging his pipe. “Is it U-boats ye’re askin’ about, Maggie?” he said slowly, in his loud voice. “I’m tellin’ ye, on that last home’ard trip, the peeriscopes was like a forest!”

David Cathles winked to his sweetheart; then perceiving that the answer had scared his mother, he said:

“Come, come, Uncle! Surely ’twasn’t quite so bad as that. ‘A forest’ is a bit thick, isn’t it?”

“Well, there was room for the Hesperus to get through, I’ll allow,” the skipper said, striking a match extracted from his vest pocket, “otherwise I wouldn’t be settin’ here tellin’ the blessed truth every time.” He lay back and puffed complacently, staring at the fire.

“Never you mind him, Mother,” said the young man. “’Tis me he’s seekin’ to terrify: he’d just as soon I didn’t sail wi’ him, after all; ’fraid o’ me learnin’ what a poor skipper he is!”

Now David ought to have known better. People who are good at giving chaff are seldom good at taking it. The girl, however, was quick to note the stiffening of the burly figure.

“Captain Whinn,” she remarked promptly, but without haste, “ye must be a terrible brave man to ha’ come through all ye ha’ come through, since the war started.”

“Not at all, my dear,” was the modest reply; “I’m no braver’n several cases I’ve heard on.”

David, who had seen his own blunder, was grateful to Esther for the diversion, and sought to carry it further.

“Well, Uncle Whinn,” he said respectfully, “I think we’d all like to hear what yourself considers the pluckiest bit o’ work done by a chap in the Merchant Service durin’ the—”

“Haven’t done it yet.” With a wooden expression of countenance, the skipper continued to stare at the fire.

Mrs. Cathles spoke. “Ah, David, ’tis little use tryin’ to pick the bravest when all is so brave. But I do think none will ever do braver’n what that fishin’ skipper did—him we was hearin’ about yesterday.”

“Ay, that was a man!” her son agreed.

“What was it?” the girl inquired, with a veiled glance of indignation at Captain Whinn, who appeared quite uninterested, if not actually bored.

“You tell it, David,” said the mother. “Big moniments ha’ been put up for less.”

“Go on, David,” murmured Esther.

“’Twas something like this,” he began. “They had hauled the nets and was makin’ for port in the early mornin’, in hazy weather, when a U-boat comes up almost alongside. I reckon they was scared, for at that time fishin’ boats was bein’ sunk right and left. Then the commander comes on deck and asks, in first-class English, which o’ the seven was skipper. And the skipper he holds up his hand like as if he was a little boy in the school. ‘All right,’ says the ’Un, ‘I guess you can navigate hereabouts—eh?’ The skipper answers slow that he has been navigatin’ thereabouts ’most all his life. ‘Very well,’ says the ’Un, ‘there’s a way you can save your boat, and the lives o’ them six fine men, and your own.’ He waits for a little while; then he says: ‘This is the way. You come on board here, and take this ship past the defenses and into —. That’s all. I give you three minutes to make up your mind.’