Chapter V

To us it was unforgettable. Otherwise we must have flitted long before we did to scenes where we needed to walk less softly. Yet just that necessity of walking softly was part of the lure. Like so much else of life, however, it was in great part a thing of atmosphere, of colour, of accent, of states of feeling, of moments so real to us but so impossible to capture in word or line that I oftenest think of Castello Montughi in terms of music. It was another similarity of that episode to a piece of music that while the successive phases of it could hardly be labelled as chapters or acts, the transitions between them were perfectly clear. We had begun with an _Andante_. We had gone on to an _Allegro ma non troppo_. The third movement--it had settled down into a _Scherzo_, of the mellower kind. And the final resolution?

That was a _Lamentoso_. And the transition, when at last it came, was so unnerving that I was thankful my wife was not with me. She had been having a touch of malaria--due, I am afraid, to the dampness of the place. I was not really uneasy about her, though, beyond asking myself whether it were time for us to make a move. After she dropped to sleep, late in the evening, I went out to stretch my legs and get a breath of air.

Without any definite intention, I found myself walking up the valley. That was the direction I always liked best after sundown. The mountains stood out so solemnly against the stars, and the river made such a sound in the dark. I can hear it now. And I can see how sombre the castle and its merloned tower loomed before me when I went back that night. It put me in mind of the first time I had seen them. As I drew near the gate, too, I heard the dog. But it was no bark that came from him. It was a howl, long drawn and mournful. In a moment, however, I discovered what pulled me up short. For there were lights in the little chapel.

My first thought was of fire--until I had time to note that the light was perfectly steady, and to reflect that there was probably nothing left in the chapel to burn. Whereupon, as I watched the glimmer of the dusty old leaded panes, I grew extremely uncomfortable. In fact the hour, the uncanny noise of the dog, the unaccustomed circumstance of the illuminated chapel, all the other circumstances of the place, combined to give me a sensation I have rarely experienced. There have been times when I would be ashamed to make such a confession. But years have emboldened me to think that fearlessness is an insensibility of the nerves which a man should pray to be delivered from. His affair is to be scared as often and as violently as he pleases, but to keep his head. Which, I presume, was the reason why it seemed to me worthy to investigate. I therefore tiptoed around to the other entrance, where I almost yielded to a temptation to wake up the peasants. Luckily Abracadabra saved me from it by bounding at me out of the dark with a growl. When he recognised me he trotted quietly along beside me. That growl, however, reminded me of another time when I had investigated, and had been sorry for it. I gave Abracadabra a good-night pat and went into the house.

I found my wife still asleep. I could make out her quiet breathing, and the soft curve of her arm across the pillow. As I bent over her I heard Abracadabra again. I went out to the loggia. It was too late for nightingales. There were cicadas, now, in the cypresses. The melancholy shrilling of them, out of the black shadow, affected me almost as much as the dog. He had stopped his noise, though. I could see the ghostly shape of him down on the terrace, waiting. I don’t know--I felt a sudden shame of my retreat. I tiptoed back to my room, picked up my revolver, touched the soft arm on the pillow with my lips, and stole down stairs.

The dog ran to meet me at the terrace door, wagging his tail and sticking his cold nose into my hand. We turned the corner, we passed the low arch leading into the kitchen. The two little windows beside it were dark. So were the loopholes of the tower. But, beyond that redoubtable angle, I found the light still burning in the chapel. I wished the door were open at least a crack. I also wished, in spite of Abracadabra’s company, that I had not undertaken to prove I was not a coward. I stood there looking, listening, seeing nothing but those faintly lighted panes, hearing nothing but the cicadas and the river. I wondered if it were the sound of my own blood, unwilling as I was to go forward or to go back.

Presently, from inside the chapel, I heard a violin. Of that, this time, there could be no doubt. And in the stillness I recognised that sobbing theme from the Sixth Symphony of Chaikovsky, which everybody knows and sentimentalises over or laughs at. But nobody ever heard it as I heard it that night in the shadow of Castello Montughi, while cicadas chanted ethereally in the black cypresses and the Brenta muttered among its rocks. I didn’t laugh. I stood quivering. The theme swept on to its climax, returned, flowered magically, tragically, into developments I had never listened to or dreamed. If I can’t play a violin myself, I have sat in front of all the Russians and Jews and Gypsies who can. But no one of them ever let loose with his bow such pent-up passion and misery. Not one, ever. There was no mere poetry in that violin. There was heartbreak in it. There was damnation in it. There were wild tears, pleading, hunger, hopelessness, remorse. There was in it all of life that is unfulfilled and not to be assuaged and beyond utterance. And all poured out in a tone of gold, with the stroke of a god--or a demon.

No wonder that infernal dog started howling again. I could have howled myself. I’m not sure that I didn’t. However, before I could stop him the dog broke away from me. He leaped forward to the chapel door, scratched at it, finally threw his big body against it. The latch gave and the door flew open. The dog disappeared inside. As he did so I heard, instead of the music, a sort of crack and a brief whine. But what I saw, across the dark court, left me no time to think of that. For the moment I was too astonished even to be startled. Little as I had expected what lay behind the door, I expected nothing less than those two great candles and that statuesque profile upturned between them. The delicate line of the profile was incredibly white against the frescoed wall of the chapel. Then it came over me that she was not carved in marble, on a mediæval tomb, but that she was dead, lying there on her bier, in her _capella ardente_--that woman whose exquisitely cut features wore such an air of race.

For what I did afterward I don’t know whether I had an excuse or not. At first I was absurdly, horribly, shaken. I have a physical shrinking from death that is too much for me. I would rather have faced any marauder than that dead princess whom I had never seen, lying so white and silent between her candles, with her black hair sweeping down about her. Then the violin: there had been about it something unearthly. Could I have been imagining again? Could that have been a music of the supernatural? But as my senses grew calmer, as there came back to me the remembrance of all that had set this place so apart in my life, as I thought of the warm arm I had kissed a few minutes ago, watching that profile whose still beauty seemed the very image of a pure and noble pride, the mystery and awesomeness of it moved me less than a kind of passion of pity--that she should be lying alone there in the night, with no one but a dog beside her. And, yielding to a sudden impulse, I walked into the chapel.

Never, but never, did I regret an impulse more.

Principe Montughi was standing at the foot of the bier, his great head sunk between his powerful shoulders, his strange pale eyes on the white face between the candles. My own astounded eyes took him in, the two pieces of a violin bow in the hands clasped before him, the broken violin between the paws of the dog lying at his feet. My emotion flashed into an embarrassment so acute that I could neither speak nor move. But he did not break out on me as I expected--as I deserved. He did not even look at me, at first. And when he did it was as if I were not there.

“Too late,” he muttered. “Too late. She will not hear me, now. And when she could I would not play to her.”

His eyes were stranger and paler than ever. In the candle light they were like two spots of phosphorescence. Then they changed. I could see him slowly search my face, the revolver in my hand, the night behind me. Something of it was in his eyes when they came back to my face. Finally he spoke again.

“Is your wife honest?” he asked.

For very amazement I failed to realise the import of his question. The scene and the man appalled me. He had met me a few hours before, with the same self-possession. He could not long have put off that grotesque masquerade which secretly amused me. Yet the Princess must have been already dead, or dying. I began--I don’t know what I began to think. Then I suddenly recollected that in Italian the Prince’s adjective had a particular meaning, as applied to a woman.

“Is that why you shut her up here?” I burst out in indignation, in divination.

But I grew humble as he continued to stare at me. It was as if I could look through his blank eyes into a place of extremity which was not good to see.

“No,” he replied at last. “That is--she never would tell me.”

He said it quite simply, gazing down at the proud white face on the bier with a hypnotic intensity of demand. It made my anger shrivel away into nothing. It made me shiver. I saw something dreadful in the smile just touching the dead woman’s lips--a smile of Leonardo that was what you chose. But to me it was less dreadful than the sighing admission of the man’s words. They somehow grew up monstrously before me in the candle-light of the little painted chapel. They painted for me a picture of pride more terrifying than anything I had conceived. Inscrutably they unlocked the tower into which I had never stepped, peopled the lonely castle, haunted that fairy aisle of cypresses. Inexorably they uncovered for me, behind the smiling mask of my own life, the ghosts of sorrow and defeat, forebodings blacker and more intolerable still.

The poignancy of that revelation choked me, blinded me. I staggered back into the dark, leaving Montughi to take what answer he could from the mute lips of his Princess.

THE BALD SPOT

“How’ll you have it, sir?” asked the barber: “Wet or dry?”

“It depends,” answered Jerry. “In politics I’m for the wet. In hair-cuts it’s dry for mine.”

He regarded the mirror not without complacency, studying the image which he there beheld of a young man about town and noting incidentally how much it improved the appearance of the same to be well cropped.

The barber, a cold man and an assured, met his eye in the glass:

“I’m with you in politics. But when it comes to hair-cuts I like a little brilliantine. Your hair seems to be getting a bit thin, too. How about an application of Pinaud?”

An application! Jerry shook a bored head. He knew them of old, these barbers, with their soaps, their singeings, their powders, their pastes, their variously perfumed waters, and their endless ingenuities for parting a customer and his money. The concluding rites of the occasion were conducted in a refined silence.

“Will that do, sir?” the barber inquired at length, throwing off the swathing cloths of his victim. “I’ll show you how it looks.” He produced a hand-glass which he manipulated in such a way as to reveal to Jerry the back of his own head.

Jerry saw how it looked. He never had seen it look that way before. And what he saw disturbingly diminished his complacency. He therefore distributed more lavish gratuities than was his wont. Then he fled, conscious but of two purposes. The first was to put forever behind him the discoverer of his shame. The second was to ascertain as quickly as possible the true facts of his case.

He was not a man, Jerry, greatly given to the mirror. Not that he was above criticising the effect of a tie or the cut of a coat. But there were studies which he pursued more assiduously than that of Narcissus. When, however, he at last locked himself into his own room it was with feverish haste that he seized his shaving-glass and made for the bureau. He then held the glass on high, tipped it this way and that, finally caught the right angle.

Yes--he met the cruel confirmation with as bold a front as he could--it was only too true. There it was, the Spot, inexorable, vivid, glaring at him like a malignant eye. There were things in that eye. There were things--The sensation it gave him was too absurd.

He tried to laugh it away.

“‘Out, damnëd spot!’” he exclaimed. And he put the glass down. It was idiotic to be prinking there like a girl in her first ball-dress. As he walked across the room, however, he could not resist a temptation to feel of the place. He began to rummage gingerly in his hair. The barber was right--he felt a sudden flash of fury at the fellow!--it was not so thick as it had been. Yet it felt as it did yesterday, the day before, the day before that. Could he not be mistaken? He must take one more look.

He did so, this time adjusting the complicated reflections more easily. But his adjuration had been of no avail. Nay, his own touch had deceived him. The Spot was not out. It was in--very much in. It was in to stay. It looked at him, whichever way he turned, like a horrid leering eye. It stared him out of countenance.

He threw the glass down again and once more tried persiflage.

“‘Go up, bald-head!’” he jeered at himself, aloud.

It sounded distinctly foolish in the empty room. The late sunshine pouring in through the windows made him feel as if someone had caught him making an ass of himself. He flung himself on the lounge and proceeded in a detached manner to study the beauties of the ceiling. As he tilted his head to do so, he scraped the wall paper. The sudden chill of it against his scalp made him jump up as if he had been branded. But the iron did not stop at his skull. It went on down through him. He could almost hear it sizzle in his soul.

“Well,” he remarked with forced philosophy, “it’s come.”

Just what had come, he did not for the moment specify. Perhaps he could not have done so. It was something very upsetting, though, even if it were ridiculous; and philosophy didn’t seem to help it any better than persiflage. And the more he considered it the nastier it grew. It gradually filled him with a curious cold pang. It filled the room. He could not bear it.

“All right,” he growled sardonically, looking for his hat. “If it won’t ‘out’ by itself, we’ll have to take it out. It’s too damned stuffy in here.”

He realised the importance of the occasion, as being his first public appearance in the character of a bald-headed man. It made him self-conscious and apologetic. It likewise made him welcome the opportunity of wearing a hat. For he felt that within-doors, hereafter, the eyes of men would mockingly follow him wherever he moved. At the very moment, however, of stepping into the air his attempted assurance failed him. An old gentleman happened to be passing--an old gentleman below the rear of whose hat brim projected into the light of day a ludicrous pink half moon. Jerry instinctively, albeit unobtrusively, sought the corresponding region of his own person.

“Huh!” he grunted in relief. “I guess we’re not quite so bad as that--yet a while.”

He resumed his progress a trifle more at ease. But fatalities beset him. Boys were playing ball in the street, under horses’ hoofs and in defiance of the police. Most of them were bare-headed. He believed they did it on purpose to show off their little polls, how absurdly uniform they were in colour. A sudden resentment boiled in him against them, as if he had been the Prophet Elisha; and he yearned to set bears on them. He would throw in the barber as the _pièce de résistance_. That barber! Jerry had half a mind to go back and--But he dismissed these low themes from his mind. As he turned the corner, though, the first thing he beheld was the portrait, on a bill-board, of a splendid gentleman with Jove-like locks, waving a majestic hand toward the name of the preparation which had performed so enviable a miracle.

“Really,” muttered Jerry to himself, “I must look those people up. I’m not so far gone, after all. And at my age--You never can tell.”

Then a motor car went by. There were four persons in it--two young men and two girls, hatless all. Jerry’s eyes followed them hopefully. If only they would justify him! But no Spot was there. The young people whirled gaily up the Avenue as if the world belonged to them. And Jerry knew it did. His heart sank again. The smartness of the car, the prettiness of the girls, the hilarity and unconcern of the whole business, smote him like a blow.

“Yes,” he thought, “it’s come. And why should it come to me rather than to them? Are they more virtuous than I? Are they more learned? Do they know Gothic architecture from Renaissance? Or a cosine from an ensign? No. But they have more hair. Therefore--Q. E. D.!”

This cryptic conclusion, with its somewhat mixed references, apparently had the effect of guiding Jerry’s thoughts into more definite channels. “They,” as he walked, became the burden of his meditations. They made for him a composite of eyes grey, blue, black, brown--even the modern hues of yellow and green; of auburn, chestnut, bronze, golden, raven, and every other shade of hair celebrated by poets; of aspects rosy or pale, grave or smiling, ingenuous or subtle. They were Venuses, Madonnas, Medeas, Giocondas--the whole gallery of types most provocative to man. He had always vaguely expected that one of them--perhaps all of them: such things were not unknown!--would some day appear, and--Well, he had never quite settled what was to happen next. It wouldn’t exactly do for them to fall on his neck at that stage of the game. That would cut out too many of the preliminary thrills incident to these adventures. Neither would he fall on their neck. It would be too public. They might not like it. They would probably run away if he tried. At all events, something very breathless was to take place. He was to pursue them over land and sea. He was to endure fire and sword for their sake. And in the end they were, so to speak, to fall into his mouth like ripe plums. Or perhaps it wouldn’t come to anything in the end. Things didn’t, nowadays. But at least it was going to be very ravaging for somebody. If it didn’t turn out a Browning business it might turn out a Tristan and Isolde affair. And Tristan and Isolde, as a domestic tableau, were almost more telling than the Brownings. Or the denouement was to be a noble renunciation, with moving scenes of parting; and he was to finish up grandly with an exploded volcano for a heart.

The only trouble was that he had never yet encountered “them.” Julia Jenkins, hitherto, had been his sole approach to them; and whatever else Julia might be, she certainly was no Venus. Least of all was she a Madonna, a Medea, or a Gioconda. And now they, the others, had maddeningly flashed past him at the one moment in life when he found himself least disposed to speed after them. For a bald spot, somehow or other, did not harmonise with the order of experiences he had been considering. He inwardly contemplated the spectacle of a gentleman so afflicted pursuing Beauty o’er moor and fen, his Spot gleaming pale behind him as he sped; and Jerry laughed grimly to himself. But there was more in it than a laugh. Was not Beauty the portion of every man? And if Fate were so ironical as to withhold her until Time had shown his tooth, must she then forever be foresworn? It was too ignoble--the way tragedy and comedy ran together in the world. He tried to console himself, for this chaotic state of affairs, with the volcano: by fancying that he was already dead to the world. But even that failed--unless extinct volcanoes felt as uncomfortable inside as he did.

“My good fellow,” he admonished himself with some heat, “you started out to take a walk as a bald-headed man, and you’d better finish it in that character. You mistook your rôle; that’s all. Some people are born to autos and ambrosial locks. Other people are born to a bald spot and the L. You imagined you belonged to the former class, but it turns out you don’t. So the sooner you stop trying to cover your nakedness with a hat, and the sooner you take to your predestined conveyance, the less will you be like a whited sepulchre full of dead men’s bones.”

In accordance with which principle he removed his last year’s Panama and made for the nearest Elevated station. The next instant he realised that only on impulse could his courage have risen to such a pitch. He expected that boys would follow him, hooting; that a mob would collect to point at him the finger of scorn. But no: the public took it quite as a matter of course that a young man of his age and talents should begin to look a little the worse for wear and should patronise such rapid transit facilities as were within the means of the proletariat. They took it so much as a matter of course that Jerry began to forget his agitation in chagrin. He even mounted the steps of a station and boarded the first train without asking himself where he was going.

It was with some surprise that he presently discovered himself to be jolting northward, on a level with third and fourth storey windows. He found a certain distraction in glancing into these as he passed. It appeared to him that on every other sill leaned a bald-headed man, who gave him a pointed look--as who should say: “Don’t take it so hard, my poor young man. You will have company.” They got on his nerves, those bald-headed apes. Most of them were in shirt-sleeves, too. He was ready to bestow the most extravagant admiration upon the Park, when the train rounded the great curve at 110th Street. And the arch of the unfinished Cathedral had a romantically ruinous effect against the incandescent sky. These things, however, for some reason reminded him of the young people in the car. “They’re probably visiting the châteaux of the Loire by this time,” he reflected. “I wonder how they like it. This is the kind of travelling we do--we bald-headed people.” And he relapsed into the volcanic mood....

“One hundred and fifty-fifth Street! All out!” bawled an unsympathetic conductor.

Jerry got up from his revery with the idea of taking the next train back. There seemed nothing else to do--for one born to the L. But when he emerged into the maze of platforms and tracks and stairways, he found them so vividly intershot by red rays from another level of existence that he was moved to mount to the viaduct. As he did so he mounted into the climax of a sunset. The glamour of it glorified his squalid surroundings. It touched the confusion of traffic with a glint of romance. It turned the Harlem into a river of enchantment. Jerry glanced but coldly about him, however. He thought of the valley of the Loire. And the sight of an Amsterdam Avenue trolley running black against the west made him bend his steps toward that end of the viaduct.

“That’s what we bald-headed people do,” he said to himself: “We go to Fort George. We then mount Ferris Wheels and view the landscape o’er. Thus do we visit the valley of the Loire.” And with that idea he boarded the next car. But at 181st Street he changed his mind. The sight of Washington Bridge suddenly drew him. “Go to,” he thought: “Why shouldn’t we take in our Loire here and now?” To which end he sauntered easterly across the little plaza.

He had not gone far on the bridge before he stopped. At last he was really caught. The splendour had died out of the air--the barbaric and obvious splendour which had failed to move him before. There was now a warm twilight in which the stream running deep between its banks, the wooded slopes, the arches of High Bridge, the slim water-tower, took on an aspect almost of antiquity. But that and the mysterious vista beyond--the turn of the river, the fading haze of roofs, out of which myriads of lights began to flicker with a brassy pallor--needed no antiquity to make them extraordinarily picturesque.

Jerry leaned on the parapet and took it in. The view might have been one he never had seen. This wonderful valley led to a city he knew naught of. The strange impression, and the surprise of discovering a real beauty, led him back in thought to the city to which he had come from college--how curiously long ago! He recalled that other impression of strangeness. Threading in imagination the long streets that somewhere ran there in the dusk, he remembered how they looked to him when first he wandered through them--in search of something to do. How vast and forbidding their towers had loomed above him! Would any of them give entrance to him when he knocked? And which would be the one? He had knocked at a good many, too. An amazing number had been oblivious to the honour of harbouring him. Huge as they were, they were all jammed to the roof with cheerful busy superior persons, who naturally had no mind to jam themselves still tighter at a mere knock from without. But one of the towers did take him in at last--the one in Park Row which made an end to his wanderings, only to send him out on wanderings more painful still.

He thought of them, looking back into the twilight that deepened above their sky, as of things almost impersonal. He thought, too, how different it had come to seem--being a cheerful busy superior person in one of the towers! For he had lived through a reporter’s probation days, had climbed at last to a desk high above the city, where the city noises came to him rather musically in their mingling. But, listening to them year after year, he had never heard what he always expected he would hear at last--the sound of his own fame. So many names came up from the newsboys’ throats, those criers of immortality: should not his own one day be borne to him? And for better reasons than gave men the notoriety of an hour--like falling into a man-hole or finding a lost jewel? Well, there was no reason--except that he had never done anything....

“Doing things!” That was another piece of youth, like the young ladies of his more romantic moments. He had never been able very narrowly to define them, the things. In that case he probably would have done them. But they were of a highly decorative order. They were also to prove of inestimable benefit to the World at large--with a large W. And the World’s gratitude, incidentally, would enable him to retire to private life on the proceeds. After which there would be an appropriate tablet up there in the Hall of Fame, and a column or two in future encyclopædias. Whereas now--

With the very impulse to smile indulgently at himself, there flashed on Jerry for the first time in his life the full sense of what it meant. For if he could smile at his youth and the vanities of his youth, it was because his youth was gone. And that was no smiling matter. That was what had hung over him all the afternoon. That was what he had been trying to get away from. But now he had to face it. It was all very well to tell himself that he was a fool to get into such a state for so preposterous a reason; that his calamity was by no means unique in the world; that he was not so old after all. The fact remained that his youth, his _première jeunesse_, his golden hour, was done for.

The sudden realisation of it filled him with a passionate bitterness. What under the sun had he been thinking of, that he had not seen that priceless thing slipping through his fingers? Where had it gone? What had he done with it? What had he to show for it? It seemed to him that the darkness which fell while his thoughts were turning in this hopeless round was symbolic of an obscurity that for him had crept into the sunlight of the earth. And the things he had lost were as fairylike and unattainable as the magic city glittering there in the distance, above those shadowy arches printed against a river of gold.

He scrambled to the parapet and sat staring down into the underlying chasm. The twinkle of the Speedway and the jewelry of the opposite switches just made visible the water between. How black it was, and how noiseless--like another Lethe! The word hung in his mind as it came back to him how casually one step had followed another this afternoon, yet how irresistibly, as if foreordained. And one step more would take him into oblivion.... After all, why not? Wouldn’t it be logical? Had he any real reason for turning around and going back to life--save sheer cowardice? The accepted reasons had always struck him as being childish attempts to decorate a raw animal impulse. If you faced the thing honestly, what was life, anyway, after the climacteric of youth? Nothing but a long drawn out decay of the body, a gradual dulling of the senses, an imperceptible slackening of the will--a slower and more humiliating death. For a man with someone to live for or something to create, it might be different. But for him--

“Well, Buddy,” uttered a cheerful voice behind him: “Thinkin’ o’ jumpin’ overboard?”

Jerry did jump, but not in the direction indicated; and his fingers caught instinctively at the inner edge of the parapet. In the dim light he discovered his interlocutor to be a policeman, built in the generous proportions of his kind and of the age that has yielded to the elderly spread.

“You don’t seem to be doing very much to stop it,” Jerry replied without hauteur.

“Looks that way, don’t it?” returned the guardian of the law genially, leaning with elbows on the parapet. “But you see if you really want to go, you’ll go; an’ if you don’t there ain’t no reason in natur’ why you shouldn’t enjoy yourself kickin’ your heels over Harlem Speedway. That’s how it strikes me. Only if you do go over, just do me the favour not to pick the road. You’d be surprised to see what a mess you’d make.”

Jerry, considering this view of his liberty, gave his attention to a train which swept in a blur of light down the opposite bank. As for the policeman, he gave his attention to Jerry:

“What’s the matter? Has she given you the go-by?”

“No” declared Jerry, with a shade of emphasis.

“Been fired from your job then, I s’pose,” pursued he of the helmet, in the accent of one acquainted with disasters more calamitous than those of the heart.

“Not that I’ve heard of,” rejoined Jerry.

The policeman took off his helmet and laid it on the parapet beside him.

“Pleasant way to spend an evenin’, ain’t it?” he said. “You make up your mind just how you’ll go, when you get good and ready. An’ then you wonder who’ll find you first, an’ whether they’ll take you to the hospital or the morgue, an’ what a time they’ll have figurin’ out who the devil you are, an’ how blue your folks’ll be, an’ how they’ll wish they’d given you that horse-shoe stickpin for Christmas, an’ how your girl’ll go on, an’ all. O there ain’t nothin’ like it for passin’ the time.”

“Say” demanded Jerry, turning upon his companion with some loftiness, “where do you get that stuff?”

“Why? Do you smell it?” asked the policeman. He ran the powerful hand of the law through a grizzled pompadour.

“N-no,” returned Jerry slowly, eyeing this operation not without interest. “You don’t mean to say that any of your hair ever came out, do you?”

“Huh-huh.” The policeman’s singsong betrayed no surprise at this abrupt turn of the conversation. “It started droppin’ like leaves in the fall o’ the year, when I was about as young as you.”

“What did you do?” inquired Jerry, not displeased, a little incredulous, and now unfeignedly interested.

“Why I used oil, if you want a straight tip--just plain castor oil. It’s twice as good as them high-falutin fixin’s they soak you for in barber shops. It don’t spoil your pillow, neither. But the missus,” he added on reflection, “she says a bald spot’s worse inside the bean than out, an’ there ain’t no oil’ll help it.”

“That’s quite an idea,” commented Jerry elusively. He leaned back, as if to reconnoitre the field of ideas.

The policeman accepted this tribute of respect. Then he replaced his helmet on his well-covered crown and stuck his billy under his arm.

“Listen, Bud,” he announced confidentially: “I got another idea. Do you happen to have as much as a dollar or so about you?”

“I do,” admitted Jerry.

“That’s fine,” continued the policeman. “Now what do you say we go over to a place I know an’ let me treat you to a shot o’ somethin’ wet? My old woman gives me hell if I hold anythin’ out on her, an’----”

“Sure!” said Jerry.

THE EMPEROR OF ELAM

_I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all._

Ecclesiastes: ix, 11.