Chapter XXXI

When she was alone Joan sat and gazed not at her wall but at the pictures that came back to her out of a part of her life which seemed to have been lived centuries ago. They were the pictures that came back continually without being called, the clearness of which always startled her afresh. Sometimes she thought they sprang up to add to her torment, but sometimes it seemed as if they came to save her from herself--her mad, wicked self. After all, there were moments when to know that she _had_ been the girl whose eighteen-year-old heart had leaped so when she turned and met Jem’s eyes, as he stood gazing at her under the beech-tree, was something to cling to. She had been that girl and Jem had been--Jem. Her throat strained itself because sobs rose in it, and her eyes were hot with the swell of tears.

She could hear voices and laughter and the click of balls from the billiard-room. Her mother and Palliser laughed the most, but she knew the sound of her mother’s voice would cease soon, because she would come back to her. She knew the kind of scene they would pass through together when she returned. The old things would be said, the old arguments used, but a new one would be added. It was at once horrible and ridiculous that she must sit and listen--and stare at the growing wall. It was as she caught her breath against the choking swell of tears that she heard Lady Mallowe returning. She came in with an actual sweep across the room. Her society air had fled, and she was unadornedly furious when she stopped before Joan’s chair. For a few seconds she actually glared; then she broke forth in a suppressed undertone.

“Come into the billiard-room. I command it!”

Joan lifted her eyes from her book. Her voice was as low as her mother’s, but steadier.

“No,” she answered.

“Is this conduct to continue? Is it?” Lady Mallowe panted.

“Yes,” said Joan, and laid her book on the table near her. There was nothing else to say. Words made things worse.

Lady Mallowe had lost her head, but she still spoke in the suppressed voice.

“You _shall_ behave yourself!” she cried, under her breath, and actually made a passionate half-start toward her.

“Wouldn’t it be wise to remember that you cannot make the kind of scene here that you can in your own house?” said Joan. “We are a bad-tempered pair. But when we are guests in other people’s houses--”

“You think you can take advantage of that!” she said. “Don’t trust yourself too far. Do you imagine that just when all might go well for me I will allow you to spoil everything?”

“How can I spoil everything?”

“By behaving as you have been behaving since we came here--refusing to make a home for yourself; by hanging round my neck so that it will appear that any one who takes me must take you also. I came in here to tell you,” she went on, “that this is your last chance. I shall never give you another.”

Joan remained silent, and her silence added to her mother’s helpless rage. She moved a step nearer to her and flung the javelin which she always knew would strike deep.

“You have made yourself a laughing-stock for all London for years. You are mad about a man who disgraced and ruined himself.”

She saw the javelin quiver as it struck; but Joan’s voice as it answered her had a quality of low and deadly steadiness.

“You have said that a thousand times, and you will say it another thousand--though you know the story was a lie and was proved to be one.”

Lady Mallowe knew her way thoroughly.

“Who remembers the denials? What the world remembers is that Jem Temple Barholm was stamped as a cheat and a trickster. No one has time to remember the other thing. He is dead--_dead_! When a man’s dead it’s too late.”

She was desperate enough to drive her javelin home deeper than she had ever chanced to drive it before. The truth--the awful truth she uttered shook Joan from head to foot. She sprang up and stood before her in heart-wrung fury.

“Oh! You are a hideously cruel woman!” she cried. “They say even tigers care for their young! But you--you can say that to _me_. ‘When a man’s dead, it’s too late.’”

“It _is_ too late--it _is_ too late!” Lady Mallowe persisted. Why had not she struck this note before? It was breaking Joan’s will: “I would say anything to bring you to your senses. I came here because it _is_ your last chance. Palliser knew what he was saying when he made a joke of it just now. He knew it wasn’t a joke. You might have been the Duchess of Merthshire; you might have been Lady St. Maur, with a husband with millions. And here you are. You know what’s before you--when I am out of the trap.”

Joan laughed. It was a wild little laugh, and she felt there was no sense in it.

“I might apply for a place in Miss Alicia’s Home for Decayed Gentlewomen,” she said.

Lady Mallowe nodded her head fiercely.

“Apply, then. There will be no place for you in the home I am going to live in,” she retorted.

Joan ceased moving about. She was about to hear the one argument that was new.

“You may as well tell me,” she said wearily.

“I have had a letter from Sir Moses Monaldini. He is to be at Broome Haughton. He is going there purposely to meet me. What he writes can mean only one thing. He means to ask me to marry him. I’m your mother, and I’m nearly twenty years older than you; but you see that I’m out of the trap first.”

“I knew you would be,” answered Joan.

“He detests you,” Lady Mallowe went on. “He will not hear of your living with us--or even near us. He says you are old enough to take care of yourself. Take my advice. I am doing you a good turn in giving it. This New York newsboy is mad over you. If he hadn’t been we should have been bundled out of the house before this. He never has spoken to a lady before in his life, and he feels as if you were a goddess. Go into the billiard-room this instant, and do all a woman can. Go!” And she actually stamped her foot on the carpet. “You might live in the very house you would have lived in with Jem Temple Barholm, on the income he could have given you.”

She saw the crassness of her blunder the next moment. If she had had an advantage, she had lost it.

Wickedly, without a touch of mirth, Joan laughed in her face.

“Jem’s house and Jem’s money--and the New York newsboy in his shoes,” she flung at her. “T. Tembarom to live with until one’s death-bed. T. Tembarom!”

Suddenly, something _was_ giving way in her, Lady Mallowe thought again. Joan slipped into a chair and dropped her head and hidden face on the table.

“Oh! Mother! Mother!” she ended. “Oh! Jem! Jem!”

Was she sobbing or trying to choke sobbing back? There was no time to be lost. Her mother had never known a scene to end in this way before.

“Crying!” There was absolute spite in her voice. “That shows you know what you are in for, at all events. But I’ve said my last word. What does it matter to me, after all? You’re in the trap. I’m not. Get out as best you can.”

She turned her back and went out of the room--as she had come into it--with a sweep Joan would have smiled at as rather vulgar if she had seen it. As a child in the nursery, she had often seen that her ladyship was vulgar.

But she did not see the sweep because her face was hidden. Something in her had broken this time, as her mother had felt. That bitter, sordid truth, driven home as it had been, had done it. Who had time to remember denials, or lies proved to be lies? Nobody in the world. Who had time to give to the defense of a dead man? There was not time enough to give to living ones. It was true--true! When a man is dead, it is too late. The wall had built itself until it reached her sky; but it was not the wall she bent her head and sobbed over. It was that suddenly she had seen again Jem’s face as he had stood with slow-growing pallor, and looked round at the ring of eyes which stared at him; Jem’s face as he strode by her without a glance and went out of the room. She forgot everything else on earth. She forgot where she was. She was eighteen again, and she sobbed in her arms as eighteen sobs when its heart is torn from it.

“Oh, Jem! Jem!” she cried. “If you were only in the same _world_ with me! If you were just in the same _world_!”

She had forgotten all else, indeed. She forgot too long. She did not know how long. It seemed that no more than a few minutes had passed before she was without warning struck with the shock of feeling that some one was in the room with her, standing near her, looking at her. She had been mad not to remember that exactly this thing would be sure to happen, by some abominable chance. Her movement as she rose was almost violent, she could not hold herself still, and her face was horribly wet with shameless, unconcealable tears. Shameless she felt them--indecent--a sort of nudity of the soul. If it had been a servant who had intruded, or if it had been Palliser it would have been intolerable enough. But it was T. Tembarom who confronted her with his common face, moved mysteriously by some feeling she resented even more than she resented his presence. He was too grossly ignorant to know that a man of breeding, having entered by chance, would have turned and gone away, professing not to have seen. He seemed to think--the dolt!--that he must make some apology.

“Say! Lady Joan!” he began. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to butt in.”

“Then go away,” she commanded. “Instantly--instantly!”

She knew he must see that she spoke almost through her teeth in her effort to control her sobbing breath. But he made no move toward leaving her. He even drew nearer, looking at her in a sort of meditative, obstinate way.

“N-no,” he replied deliberately. “I guess--I won’t.”

“You won’t?” Lady Joan repeated after him. “Then I will.”

He made a stride forward and laid his hand on her arm.

“No. Not on your life. You won’t, either--if I can help it. And you’re going to _let_ me help it.”

Almost any one but herself--any one, at least, who did not resent his very existence--would have felt the drop in his voice which suddenly struck the note of boyish, friendly appeal in the last sentence. “You’re going to _let_ me,” he repeated.

She stood looking down at the daring, unconscious hand on her arm.

“I suppose,” she said, with cutting slowness, “that you do not even _know_ that you are insolent. Take your hand away,” in arrogant command.

He removed it with an unabashed half-smile.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I didn’t even know I’d put it there. It was a break--but I wanted to keep you.”

That he not only wanted to keep her, but intended to do so, was apparent. His air was neither rough nor brutal, but he had ingeniously placed himself in the outlet between the big table and the way to the door, He put his hands in his pockets in his vulgar, unconscious way, and watched her.

“Say, Lady Joan!” he broke forth, in the frank outburst of a man who wants to get something over. “I should be a fool if I didn’t see that you’re up against it--hard! What’s the matter?” His voice dropped again.

There was something in the drop this time which--perhaps because of her recent emotion--sounded to her almost as if he were asking the question with the protecting sympathy of the tone one would use in speaking to a child. How dare he! But it came home to her that Jem had once said “What’s the matter?” to her in the same way.

“Do you think it likely that I should confide in you?” she said, and inwardly quaked at the memory as she said it.

“No,” he answered, considering the matter gravely. “It’s not _likely_--the way things look to you now. But if you knew me better perhaps it would be likely.”

“I once explained to you that I do not _intend_ to know you better,” she gave answer.

He nodded acquiescently.

“Yes. I got on to that. And it’s because it’s up to me that I came out here to tell you something I want you to know before you go away. I’m going to confide in _you_.”

“Cannot even _you_ see that I am not in the mood to accept confidences?” she exclaimed.

“Yes, I can. But you’re going to accept this one,” steadily. “No,” as she made a swift movement, “I’m not going to clear the way till I’ve done.”

“I insist!” she cried. “If you were--” He put out his hand, but not to touch her.

“I know what you’re going to say. If I were a gentleman--Well, I’m not laying any claims to anything--but I’m a sort of a man, anyhow, though you mayn’t think it. And you’re going to listen.”

(To be continued)

RITUAL

BY WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT

Lord God, what may we think of Thee,
Save that in stars we drink of Thee,
Save that in the abundance of Thy sunlight we have seen
Thine excellent intention;
And Thy marvelous invention
In great and little living things and all the grades between?

Lord God, what may we say to Thee
Who know our hearts give way to Thee
Surely at last in secret depths, though protest long denies,
And that to live is wonder
With worlds above and under
Unreached of any mortal heart, blurred to all mortal eyes?

Lord God, the fitting praise to Thee
Rather would seem to raise to Thee
Only pure honesty of mind, waiting Thy stalwart will;
Like as the hills believe Thee,
Like as the seas receive Thee,
Like as the trees whose rustlings cease,--who hear Thee and are still!

THE SPIRIT OF THE CENTURY

“The magazine needs no other aim than to be worthy of the name it bears.”

Thus wrote ~The Century’s~ first editor, Dr. J. G. Holland, in the first number of this magazine nearly forty-three years ago. He referred, of course, to the magazine’s original title, which was “Scribner’s Monthly”; but ~The Century’s~ earnest ambition to realize the full meaning of its present significant title can find no fitter expression. It continues to believe that success will be attained only as it becomes really the representative magazine of this new and spectacular century of American life.

For the information of many inquiring friends, it seems wise at this time to say that there will be no “new” ~Century~ in the sense of a changed ~Century~. There can be none. In remaining the “old” ~Century~, merely growing with the times, merely holding fast to its historic place in the front of progress, this magazine, in these richer days of hard thinking and prompt acting and strenuous living, these tumultuous days of changing eras, remains by mere definition the organ of what is noblest and forwardest in American life. The first editor of this magazine stated editorially that it was conducted in “the free spirit of modern progress and the broadest literary catholicity.” The fourth editor joyfully reaffirms this creed. There can be no simpler and more comprehensive statement of this magazine’s present spirit and purposes.

In the twentieth-anniversary number, Richard Watson Gilder, who, on Dr. Holland’s death in 1881, succeeded to the editorship, reaffirmed the creed in these words:

If there is any one dominant sentiment which an unprejudiced
reviewer would recognize as pervading these forty half-yearly
volumes, it is, we think, a sane and earnest Americanism. Along
with and part of the American spirit has been the earnest endeavor
to do all that such a publication might do to increase the
sentiment of union throughout our diverse sisterhood of States--the
sentiment of American nationality. It has always been the aim of
~The Century~ not only to be a force in literature and art, but to
take a wholesome part in the discussion of great questions; not
only to promote good literature and art, but good citizenship.

Allowing for different conditions, Mr. Gilder might have written this for to-day.

In the same editorial utterance Mr. Gilder dwelt strongly upon “the spirit of experiment” which, he said, had always inspired the magazine’s policy. This we take to be merely another phrase for Dr. Holland’s “free spirit of modern progress.”

Five years later, on the occasion of our twenty-fifth anniversary, Mr. Gilder wrote in these pages:

During the next ten years there should be in America especially
a revival of creative literature. If there is, or should be at
any particular time, a lack of energy, or a lack of quantity
or quality, in the American literary output, it can be merely
temporary; for our condition is full of social, political, and
industrial problems; life in the New World is replete with
strenuous exertion of every kind, of picturesque contrasts, and of
innumerable themes fit to inspire literary art. American life is
rich in feeling and action and meaning.

American life is richer many times over in feeling and action, and especially in meaning, than when Mr. Gilder penned these words. The intervening years have brought to the surface a myriad of surging currents of human desire and necessity and passion, then concealed, almost unsuspected, below the surface.

It cannot have escaped any reader of ~The Century~ that we are living in a period of amazing achievement as well as of portentous social development. Yet any worker in the furrows of life may well be pardoned for failure to realize the detail and immensity of our achievement. Could one devote himself wholly to discovering the facts of modern accomplishment, it would take a busy life to get abreast of the mere news of it, and to keep there. Ours are times of such variety and complexity that none can be expected to grasp much more than the technicalities of his own work-bench.

Like most prophesies, Mr. Gilder’s has been only partly fulfilled. Yet the eighteen years since he uttered it have proved at least that it was true, though its realization has been delayed by the extraordinary activity of these later years. The history of all human progress shows that the art of any period is, so to speak, the flowering of that period. The bloom appears only after stem and stalk have shot to their full growth, and leaves have expanded and darkened to their maturity. The bubbling sap of Mr. Gilder’s time is showing now in new and surprising growth, and our problem to-day is not so much to enjoy the flowering literature which he promised as to study and to measure and to comprehend as nearly as possible the wealth of scientific and social and political and industrial achievement which has amazingly developed.

There is no escaping the fact that civilization, like the river tumbling and swirling between two lakes, is passing turbulently from the old convention of the last several generations to the unknown, almost unguessable convention of the not distant future. The feminist movement, the uprising of labor, the surging of innumerable socialistic currents, can mean nothing else than the certain readjustment of social levels. The demand of the people for the heritage of the bosses is not short of revolution. The rebellious din of frantic impressionistic groups is nothing if not strenuous protest against a frozen art. The changed Sabbath and the tempered sermon mark the coldly critical appraisement of religious creeds. And science, meantime, straining and sweating under the lash of progress, is passing from wonder unto wonder.

Perhaps Mr. Gilder’s period of literary flowering, though surely coming, must be postponed another decade. The need of the moment is to discover where we are, what is accomplishing about us. Where have all these struggling activities brought us? What have they really done? What do they mean? Whither do they tend?

It is time we look this question of the present squarely in the eye, in order, if for no other reason, that we may intelligently face the future. It is time that, in business phrase, we take account of stock. It is time that the chemist, for example, trembling over the revelations of his amazing combinations, know that the psychologist, too, is excited about the astonishing developments of his own laboratory; that the elated conquerors of the air realize the achievement of those who plod in the groaning shops of town; that the biologist, amazed at his artificial propagation of life, appreciate the telegraphic annihilation of space.

Thus only may we wisely choose our steps in these uncertain times, remembering that change is not always degeneration; oftener it is progress. There are periods when men live literature, not write it, and consequently literary barrenness may mean merely lying fallow, and still be progress. Especially must we not be too hasty of judgment, for while there are times to preach and times to act and times to pronounce judgment, there are at long intervals also times, between the passings out and the comings in, when it behooves all men to watch and to wait and to study the signs. There are abundant reasons to believe that such a time is at hand, and ~The Century~, now, as in the past, stands by to help.

During the months, perhaps the years, to come, in Dr. Holland’s “free spirit of modern progress,” in Mr. Gilder’s “spirit of experiment,” and in Mr. Johnson’s spirit of public helpfulness, ~The Century~ will offer to its readers a summing-up of the results of this wonderful period, and a fair presentation of the changes attendant upon the passing of our present order and the establishment of the new.

Not as an advocate shall we present these causes, nor again in protest; but in the fair, free, unbiased spirit of investigation. Facts must precede opinions. It is poor rowing against the rapids between the lakes. Let us study these manifestations fairly and sympathetically before we draw conclusions. It will be ~The Century’s~ pleasure and public duty to enlist the services of able authorities in every cause, and to present each justly from its own point of view.

Such a program will, we feel sure, help materially the cause of human progress, because it will help men and women to comprehend life as it passes.

As for the rest, we shall conserve the best that ~The Century~ has stood for in the past. We shall offer a larger proportion of fiction than formerly, and shall bring it as near to truth, and make it as interpretative of life, as conditions allow. We shall maintain illustration at the highest point modern method will permit. We shall cultivate history and poetry and the essay. We shall explore conditions at home and abroad. We shall make this magazine, fearlessly and in the white light of to-day, as nearly the magazine of the century as courage and devotion and eyes that see and minds that shrink not can do.

In Lighter Vein

WORLD REFORMERS--AND DUSTERS

Though often entranced by that brilliant group of cosmic problem-solvers--Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Chesterton, and others--I insist on my personal irresponsibility for the state of Mankind as a whole. These men are always nursing civilization. They regard it as a sort of potted plant which they fear to find frost-bitten of a morning. This is especially clear in the latest writings of Mr. H. G. Wells, who would tidy up the whole world at once. At one swoop he would remove the shirts from our clothes-lines and the errors from our minds. The world is too large for his feather duster; he had thought to find it a smaller planet that he might have kept at least half-way clean. Now see what he has on his hands--everything in a mess, Africa backward, China careless, the sex relation by no means straightened out, socialism, imperialism, industrialism, planless progressivism littering up things, and nobody caring a rap--at times it seems to the good housewifely soul almost too much for one person to manage. And then that infernal human diversity--slow minds, stupid minds, minds made up too soon, or not at all, closed minds, tough minds, tender minds--what’s to be done with them? He burns to do _something_. At least he says he does.

In one of his books he describes himself in fancy as going about the country and, with the keenest joy, spearing Anglican bishops. Though I am myself a stranger to the sport, I believe the pleasure of spearing bishops is exaggerated. For once begun it must lead logically to a daily drudgery of slaughter among the great crowds of folks who are not intellectually independent or morally daring--lead, in short, to the massacre of those who are not particularly exciting, a large task and tedious.

I wonder if we commonplace persons are not right after all in a certain instinct of distrust toward these gifted writers. We believe implicitly in their fancies and not at all in their facts. We believe in the world they have invented and not in the world they have observed; and we distrust them utterly as world-pushers. The signs are plain--terribly plain sometimes--that it is when they have the smallest notions that they say their largest things.

_The Senior Wrangler._

LADY CLARA VERE DE VERE: _NEW STYLE_

(REFORMER, UPLIFTER, SOCIAL SERVICER AND BELIEVER IN BETTERMENT)

BY ANNE O’HAGAN

WITH A PICTURE BY E. L. BLUMENSCHEIN

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,
Though, ’neath the Tennysonian frown,
You’ve ceased to play at hearts, what need
For throwing _all_ the graces down?
The quip, the wile, the wingèd smile,
Must these in truth be quite retired,
Reformer of a thousand ills,
O lady with a mission fired?

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,
You cause a tumult in my head.
I do not know how many quarts
Of coal-tar every year are fed
In store-made pies, or what dread dyes
Give that bright emerald to canned peas.
I do not know the cure for graft,
Or juvenile delinquencies;
And, oh, my very soul is sick
Of these and topics like to these!

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,
On suffragism you’ve a view.
You have one on the cost of war,
And what the working-girl should do.
Your uplift crusade comprehends
The stage, the mart, the funeral bier;
Your dinner-table talk has grown
Statistical and very drear.

Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere,
By yon blue heavens above us bent,
The gardener Adam and his wife
Yawn at your plans for betterment.
We never see such sad ennui
Among our hapless human brood
As when the ladies’ motto runs:
“’Tis fashionable to do good.”

* * * * *

Clara, Clara Vere de Vere,
If time hangs heavy on your hands,
Are there no suitors at your gates,
No squires of dames about your lands?
Go, play the game of hearts again,
Coquette, and sparkle, languish, glow;
Ask pardon of the folk you’ve bored,
And let the thousand causes go!

“THE PET HAS BECOME OF MATERIAL AID TO HIM IN HIS WALL STREET WORK”]

THE NEWS IN WALL STREET

BY JAMES L. FORD

Author of “The Literary Shop”

WITH PICTURES BY REGINALD BIRCH AND MAY WILSON PRESTON

~Algy Bond~ is one of the brokers who is doing remarkably well in Wall Street now. He is widely known as a cotillion leader, as vice-president of the Westminster Kennel Club, and as a member of the MacDowell Musical Union. He has lately trained Grassmere Dolly--his intelligent French poodle--so that the pet has become of material aid to him in his Wall Street work.

~Money~ has been easier in Wall Street since the sale of many gilt-edged mining and industrial securities brought a number of eager home-builders into the market. The new fashion of papering the walls of country homes with these beautiful and durable specimens of steel-engraving has created a lively demand for the stocks in question.

~The~ opening of the new station of the Herald Ice Fund at the corner of Wall and Broad streets created a profound sensation in the financial district. The Stock-Exchange closed during the distribution of the ice, and many pitiful scenes were enacted as the members of the great banking-houses crowded about the wagon and fought for the chilly cubes that were handed out to them. An office boy generously shared his piece with a bank president. The magnate burst into tears, and promised that he would make his benefactor rich by never giving him a tip on the stock-market.

~Yeggmen~ entered the office of Bilkheimer Brothers, Bankers and Brokers, last Saturday night, and blew open the safe with dynamite. When Mr. Abie Bilkheimer, the popular bond specialist, and the head of the firm, reached his office on Monday morning, he found a ten-dollar bill and a card on which were inscribed a few words of heartfelt sympathy from the yeggmen.

~That~ a cat cannot live in a vacuum has been proved by a series of recent experiments carried on by the Wall Street Class for Scientific Study to which many of the younger brokers belong. It was found that the quickest method of killing a cat is to lock it in the vaults of that trust company which claims the largest capital and surplus.

~Many~ charitable persons have been in the habit of scattering pennies from the gallery of the Stock-Exchange, but this practice has been forbidden since Looey Pinchenstein (the organizer of the pool in Rio and Hernandez copper) fractured his nose in the scramble. Pennies will hereafter be left with the doorman to distribute at the close of the day.

~The~ Tribune Fresh Air Fund has received a touching letter from little Willie Noodle, inclosing thirty-eight cents--which he had saved in a toy bank from his candy money--and expressing the hope that it would help to send a poor ticker-tied broker on an outing to the sea-shore.

“A POOR TICKER-TIED BROKER”

Drawn by
May Wilson Preston
]

~The~ other day a gentleman of provincial aspect was found wandering on Wall Street in a dazed and feeble condition. Upon being questioned as to the nature of his errand there, he announced his intention of opening an account with a Wall Street brokerage firm.... When the police finally rescued him from the surging mob of brokers, it was found that he had suffered severe contusions about the hips and breasts. He is at present confined in one of the private wards of the observation pavilion.

CONTINUED IN THE ADS

A DIRGE INSPIRED BY A REGRETTABLE TENDENCY IN THE PERIODICALS OF OUR DAY

BY SARAH REDINGTON

(With the usual apologies to Swinburne)

If I wrote sonnets soulful
And you wrote ads for beans,
And I got in your section
’Twould cause me deep dejection.
(My Muse would be so doleful
In such unwonted scenes.)
If I wrote sonnets soulful,
And you wrote ads for beans.

If you had sung the praises
Of soap or safety-pin,
And found some high-brow lyric
Beside your panegyric,
You’d be as mad as blazes
To see bards butting in.
If you had sung the praises
Of soap or safety-pin.

When, on page eight, perusing
“The Baby and the Cop,”
Its dénouement I’m bidden
To seek, ’mid ads half hidden,
I find it hanged confusing
And let the Baby drop.
When, on page eight perusing
“The Baby and the Cop.”

When one is just deciding
To buy a fountain-pen,
And in the ads one’s seeking
For “Notablot Non-Leaking,”
_Who_ wants to be colliding
With “Wives of Famous Men”?
When one is just deciding
To buy a fountain-pen.

Oh, magazines suggesting
A boarding-house ragout,
_Why_ mix your tales and ballads
With ads of soups and salads?
It’s hard enough digesting
The awful stuff we do.
Oh, magazines suggesting
A boarding-house ragout.

JUMBLE MRS. RYMBEL MR. RYMBEL SYMBOL RAMBLE RONDEAU AND RHYME
(THE BABY) (THE TWINS)

THE RYMBEL FAMILY. FROM A RECENT PORTRAIT BY OLIVER HERFORD]

HOW THE RYMBELS BROKE INTO VERSE

The above portrait is the first authentic likeness of the eccentric Rymbels. It portrays them rymbling, _chez eux_. It is, in particular, a speaking, not to say a _shouting_, likeness of Mr. Rymbel.

This interesting, demented, and extremely misunderstood verse family was first discovered and laid bare to the public by Mr. Herford in the August issue of ~The Century~. As a result of his happy discovery, and because of his two remarkable rymbels in that issue, he has lately been appointed Rymbel Laureate of America. Since their successful début, public interest in the Rymbels has increased amazingly. In New York the fever is now at its height. Everybody’s rymbling it. Rude, ridiculous, and ribald rymbels are arriving by every post.

For those who are not already confirmed rymbelists it may be merciful to explain that, roughly speaking, a rymbel is any poem of two, four, or six stanzas, preferably of five lines each, in which the ultimate word in one verse must inevitably be a miscue for the subject-matter of the next. This miscue is due to three things: eccentricity, deafness, and dementia, all of them pronounced Rymbel family characteristics.

Whenever Mr. Rymbel embarks on the first verse, Mrs. Rymbel, because of her deafness and lightness of mind, seizes on the most unexpected meaning embodied in the last word of her husband’s verse, and proceeds properly to mangle it in the second, after which the children take up the tangled skein, and do a little mangling on their own.

In the masterly canvas at the head of this page, Mr. R. is seen inflated with an afflatus and embarking on his first verse. Mrs. R., with a tight hold on the baby, is feverishly awaiting her all important cue. Symbol, their beautiful daughter, is the seated lady shown at the right of Mr. R. The astute reader will already have guessed, because of the prevalence of flowering hay in her hair, that, mentally, Symbol is, to put it charitably, only sparking on one cylinder. Ramble, the eldest son, has, it will be seen, just rebuked Rondeau and Rhyme, the twins, who, after hearing parts of their father’s verse, have turned to their mother to mutter: “What’s the matter with his metre-motor, mater?”

Miss Carolyn Wells, who has for years been on the most intimate terms with the Rymbels, and who might almost be called a member of the family, has preserved, as souvenirs of a boy-and-girl affair with Master Ramble, two noteworthy examples of rymbelican verse. In the first of these the Rymbels have touchingly voiced their preferences for the nobler and loftier bards of our day. It is entitled:

A RYMBEL OF RHYMERS

Dear Edith Thomas! Oft do I
Feel in my heart the call of her.
Swift to my book-shelf then I fly,
And, hovering ’twixt a laugh and cry,
I read and re-read all of her.

Oliver Herford! How can praise
Add aught to his renown?
His comic kits, his fetching fays,
His books and works and healthful plays,
Are known all over town.

Charles Hanson Towne! his lyrics flow
Soft as the dews of Harmon;
His tastes are musical, and so
To please them he will often go
To “Lohengrin” or “Carmen.”

Bliss Carman all our hearts must win;
To higher thought he’d urge us;
Divinely tall, divinely thin,
Austere of mien, he should have been
A beadle or a burgess.

G. Burgess, Super-Sulphide! yet
Perhaps more saint than sinner.
His rhymes cavort and pirouette,
And as for that mad thing, Vivette,
I almost wish I’d been her.

Oh, Witter Bynner, oftener sound
Your note of lyric joys!
Come, poets, let us gather round,
Lest our brave pipings yet be drowned
By some strange foreign Noyes!

* * * * *

~Mr. L. Frank Tooker~ of Callao, Peru, insists that the rymbel is didactic, and that its highest form is found in Spanish South America, where it is used to inculcate the prudence and self-restraint for which that region is preëminent. In illustration of this contention, he sends this from Callao:

THE PRUDENT LOVER

I think when I behold her face,
It is so varee fair,
’Tis best to get acquaint’, you know,
And so I gaze _simpatico_:
That’s how you call to stare.

Ah, she was pausing on that stair
So timid like the fawn;
And fawn-like were her eyes, her lips
Were like the flowers the slow bee sips
Upon the dewy lawn.

But, _hola! she_ was not in lawn;
For as she turned to go,
I saw the pearls glow at her throat,
The satin gown about her float,
Though timid like the doe.

_Caramba!_ I have not the dough
For such expensiveness.
The eyes, the lips, the timid air,
That’s varee nice; but, oh, beware
That C. O. D. express!

* * * * *

Again the low rymbling sound of Miss Carolyn Wells!! This time ART is her impassioned theme. She writes from Hansontown, Herfordshire.

ON A PORTRAIT OF NANCY

Full winsome was her bonny face,
And eke her golden hair.
Her gown was weft of rarest lace;
And high aloft, with gentle grace,
A sunshade pink she bare.

The She Bear from the forest came,
Just why, I cannot state.
The creature seemed to be quite tame;
Methought, would I her favor claim,
I must ingratiate.

In gray she ate! The lunch was fair,--
We had a window-seat.
Her gray gown meek, yet debonair;--
Demure,--yet with a regal air,--
She looked imperial,--sweet.

“Imperial suite? Yes,--I dare say
’T would make our voyage gladder.”
My wife is mad about display--
(But when I mentioned what we’d pay,
It only made Rose madder!)

Rose madder,--’tis the tint I’d use
To paint my brain’s fair figment;
A shape, half goddess and half muse,
And all in misty, pinkish hues,
The color scheme,--the pigment.

The color scheme the pig meant? Ma’am,
That _was_ a subtle fancy!
In tints of dawning gooseb’ry jam,
And those soft pinks of early ham,
We painted little Nancy!

THE “ELITE” BATHING DRESS

_Now so much in vogue at Newport_]

We have been distressed to learn, from our great Metropolitan dailies, that the ladies of assured and ultramundane position at Newport have recently suffered severely from the unwarrantable intrusion on Bailey’s Beach of certain Sunday Supplement sketch artists, society editors, female policemen, independent kodakers, and foreign noblemen. As an indirect result of these intrusions the “Elite” bathing dress has been designed to assuage the sensibilities of the more modest and fastidious among the hostesses of Newport. Our illustration shows Mrs. Reginald Ochrepoint and Wu, her clever pet, ready for their morning dip.

FROM GRAVE TO GAY

~The Freshman~: “Oh--er--might I be excused from my lectures for a
few days? The truth is--er--I want very much to attend the funeral
of an old and trusted friend.”

~The Dean~: “Well, really, Robinson,--I wonder if that is quite
necessary?--Now, if it were your father or your mother, I should,
of course, be only _too_ delighted.”
]

THE WISE SAINT

(A FABLE FOR ANYBODY)

BY HERMAN DA COSTA

PICTURE BY W. T. BENDA

De debble see St. Peter sneak into heaben’s gate;
He holler: “What’s yo’ hurry? Wait dar, Peter! Wait!”

De saint pull in de latch-string, an’ holler: “Now, you go!
I’ll sic de houn’ dawg on you de fustest t’ing you know.”

“I speaks you like a ge’man,” de debble up an’ say,
“And yere you shets me out, sah! Fer shame! to ack dat way!”

“Don’ argify,” say Peter. “You leads fo’ks into sin.
Ain’t shettin’ you out, nohow; I’s shettin’ mahse’f in.”

LIMERICKS

TEXT AND PICTURES BY OLIVER HERFORD

THE CONSERVATIVE OWL

A Canary, its woe to assuage,
Once invented a wireless cage.
The owl shook his head,
“It’s a Great Thought,” he said,
“But it’s far in advance of the age.”

THE OMNIVOROUS BOOK-WORM

Quoth the book-worm, “I don’t care one bit
If writers have wisdom or wit;
A volume must be
Pretty dull to bore me
As completely as I can bore it.”

THE DE VINNE PRESS, NEW YORK