Chapter IV (1)

The brunt of battle fell next day on Guthrie. His eleven o’clock lecture was interrupted by a messenger with a note asking him to call at the President’s office at noon.

When he faced the Ruler in his swivel chair, that representative of things as they are was friendly of manner but meant business.

“I want to talk to you about you and Clark,” he said. “I have asked for Clark’s resignation, and I am extremely anxious not to have to ask for yours.”

“Clark dismissed!” exclaimed Guthrie. He realized that the President was striking too quickly for them, and groped for defence.

“I warn you fairly that the Regents are behind me,” said the President. “You have your choice of severing with that preposterous organization formed in Clark’s rooms last night or with the University.”

“You may not find it so simple a matter to dismiss teachers merely because they choose to form an organization,” said Guthrie, stiffening. “It is an open acknowledgment that freedom of action does not exist. Moreover, it is not two men you dismiss, if any, but—a considerable number.”

“I have reason to think not,” replied the President.

Guthrie was weakened by his lack of information, and by the fear that his colleagues had gone to pieces.

“Make no mistake,” said the President. “I am prepared to dismiss _seven_—if necessary. There are other reasons for your own dismissal. You supported Clark in his insubordination with regard to Vida Martin.”

“Since you did refuse to let her speak in the University what was there wrong in saying so?”

“Clark’s tone. And yesterday you came out astonishingly for sex-radicalism. The student president of the Y. W. C. A. came to me and protested, saying a professor in this institution had no right to corrupt the youth of the State with any such doctrine as unmarried motherhood.”

“Because I presented Shaw’s argument!” exclaimed Guthrie indignantly. “If you are going to adopt this girl’s point of view you will be compelled to maintain the position that the ideas of the most conspicuous living English writer shall not be mentioned to students of English in this University!”

“Well, Guthrie, you must know where the fathers and mothers of this State would stand in a fight about that. You cannot expect the University to rise higher than its source, and its source is the community.”

“The University has no reason for existence unless it rises higher than the rest of the community,” said Guthrie. “It is nothing if it is not able to lift itself out of the community’s inertia and maintain itself against the community’s prejudice. If you had not condemned without inquiry that organization formed last night, you might find that it contains the possibility of raising the faculty into precisely that commanding position.”

“I know the purpose of your organization, Professor Guthrie. Its success would mean the end of all directing authority. An executive could not discipline men upon whose votes he was dependent for continuance in his position.”

“That is absurd,” said Guthrie scornfully. “An English premier, dependent upon a parliamentary majority, possesses power enough to govern the British Empire. He is not able to dismiss members of Parliament. There’s no reason why the head of a university should have any such power. There is altogether too much disciplining of teachers for acting on their own honest convictions.”

“I won’t argue that matter of opinion,” said the President. “The fact is plain that you have placed yourself at the head of an organization directed squarely against the legally constituted authority of this University, and unless you drop it you go.”

Guthrie sat silent, facing what he felt must be a vain sacrifice of himself—and nothing gained for his cause. He heard the rushing click of typewriters through the closed door of an adjoining office. Their frequent tiny bells of warning gave him a sense of time moving too fast, events crowding too close.

The President rose and walked slowly up and down the room. “Can you afford it, Guthrie?” he said kindly. “How about your life insurance? Will it lapse if you stop payment? How about your house? Still paying for it?”

“You are remarkably well informed as to my private affairs,” said Guthrie coldly.

“You have given me reason to be. Your children are approaching their most expensive years. How about their education? Do you want Harold and Lucy Guthrie to sink back into the untrained, ignorant class?”

“That’s the fiendish cruelty of this!” cried Guthrie. He saw the eager face of Harold offering to sacrifice his little Indian suit. “That’s where you’ve got me,” he said despondently. “No wonder one of the Regents offered to double Clark’s salary if he would marry. There’s something hellish in a system that makes a slave of a man through the needs of his children!”

“It is doubtful if any other university will want you when it becomes known why you left here,” mused the President. “Don’t do it, Guthrie. You’ve been a living influence with our students. Many an old grad. is grateful to you for kindling in him here a life-long love of letters. You ought to go on doing that for twenty years.”

“It’s just because I do not want to stop being a living influence—— A man must grow or ossify. Yesterday a new world of thought, a new secret of living, a new sincerity, came to birth in my mind. You want me to kill it. That is not being a living influence. That is spiritual infanticide. It means my extinction as a free teacher. And deserting that organization I helped to form last night—that means dishonor!”

“No,” said the President emphatically. “You cannot be expected to sacrifice your career and your family because you happened to be carried away in a dramatic moment worked up by a professional agitator. You’ll see that within a month. This means your salvation from some wild ideas and wilder conduct.”

With an air of relaxing from strain the President dropped back easily in his chair. “That woman must be clever, Guthrie. Isn’t she?”

“She’s more than clever,” said Guthrie. “She’s a brave and skilful fighter for a great cause—a thing I cannot be. I cannot even face what every married button-cutter faces when he goes on strike!”

Partially realizing how low Guthrie was sinking in his own estimation, the President was not the man to let sympathy keep him from gaining his end. “Well, Guthrie,” he said, “I take it that chiefly on account of your children I may count on your withdrawing from the College Teachers’ Union.” He smiled. “I say nothing more about the sex-radicalism, for I feel sure you will yourself see the need of soft-pedalling that in the classroom and in public. I am heartily glad you are still going to be with us.”

Guthrie went out of the President’s office like a man who has been drugged. With an instinct to hide from every eye, he sought the noonday solitude of his seminar room, let the door lock behind him, and at the head of the long green table sank into that chair they called the chair of English.

There, in the hour of his degradation, he felt prophetically the ennui of the next twenty years—the dead thoughts he would there utter and reiterate—the bored young faces——

What had become of the interestingness of ideas? Where was that passion for the hard and glorious quest of the true truth within? Why had he been so fiercely bent on shaping new channels for his energy? He had no energy. His thwarted force flowed away from his will where it meant health and conquest into a morbid intensity of emotion—the road to melancholia.

He stiffened up. There was one pain he must meet now. There was that desire to hide to overcome—a self-revelation harder than any he had ever thought to make. There was shame to endure. “I have to tell her,” he said.

He rose and left his solitude, went down the deserted central walk, and over to the drab-colored hotel. He looked between the open double doors into the dining room. There were a dozen people. At the table by the window in the corner where he had sat with them two days before were Kenton Clark and Vida. They beckoned eagerly to Guthrie.

He found himself strangely unwilling to cross alone the moderately large square room. Its floor of alternate light and dark wooden strips seemed like a great open space in which something evil must happen. He yielded to the irrational fear which impelled him to slip around close to the wall.

Without waiting for him to take off his overcoat or sit down, Clark flashed news of his own dismissal—too much aglow with the war they were going to wage to perceive anything wrong with Guthrie.

“Searles wanted all six to resign!” said Clark in a low, eager voice. “Corking spirit, but we decided not. Six is too few. With six more—! If we’d only had a little more time! Never mind. The idea is sound. We’ll put it through. We’re going to raise a fund. I’ll give my whole time to it as organizer. Sit down, man, sit down!”

Guthrie shook his head.

Vida rose with sudden solicitude, came close and laid her hand on his arm. “What has happened to you, Mr. Guthrie?” she asked, so low that Clark barely heard.

“You are happy people,” said Guthrie, for a moment permitting her searching eyes to fathom his. “You will fight beautifully. I have failed you. The children were too much for me. I have caved in. I keep my job. I’m done for.”

He turned away, unable to endure their eyes. “Good-bye,” he said, and started back along the wall.

Clark sprang up, napkin in hand, knocking a knife to the floor. “Oh, here!” he protested.

Vida, with compassionate eyes on the retreating figure of Guthrie, stopped Clark with a gesture.

“That’s final,” she said. “He’s crushed. There’s no use torturing him.”

THE CARDINAL’S GARDEN

_Villa Albani_

WITTER BYNNER

Here in this place which I myself did plan,
With poplars, oaks and fountains,—and with sculpture,
The rounded body of the soul of beauty—
Here in this garden, by my own command
I sit alone under the freshening twilight.
Not to my eyes shall be made visible
Ever again morning or noon or twilight,—
Not to my eyes—which are my servants now
No longer, save as servants in the grave.
But to my forehead and my finger-tips
The days give touch of bud and opening
And of their bloom and of their hovering fall.
The morrow shall be born with sighs and rain,
But this is peace, this twilight, this is pause
Between the sunny and the rainy day,
Pause for the elements, and pause for me,
As though it were a silver brook that ran
Between a blinded day and blinded night,—
Between the dust of life and the dust of death.
Why shall I sit here? Why are colonnades
And paths and pagan statuaries more
Adroitly dear to my unseeing eyes
Than all the beaded letters of the Books
And colorings of all the bended Saints?
Because I hear the stealing feet of peace
Among these marbles more than anywhere,
Than in that cell itself where I have been
True Christian and exemplar of the Creed
To my own heart. There, not a Cardinal
In a red pageantry of holiness
Before all comers, but a penitent
In humble nakedness before my God,
I found the potency of Jesus Christ….
And yet it is not there but here that I
Find peace. Sometimes I think that Hell hath set
An outer court for me within my garden,
That it may mock me better in its own!
But whether Hell or rank mortality,
This garden which I builded for my body
Is the one garden now wherein my soul
Finds comfort, benediction of the twilight.
There in my cell, drawn on the walls, arise
Old memories of craft and violence,
Of lust for carven images of beauty:
How in the night I sent my men to take
That obelisk which I had offered twice
Its value for and been refused,—to bring
That obelisk and set it in my garden.
The Prince of Palestrina never dared
(Such has my might been) to recover it!
Still I can see him gaping at the trick
And wishing he might strangle me, the trickster!
And though these eyes that cannot see would make
Me now no quick report if that same obelisk
Should be abstracted on a newer night,
Yet how these fingers and this heart would know!
Why shall my tears fall, as I sit among
My oaks and poplars, fountains and my sculptures,
Before my cypresses and Sabine hills?
Have I not seen them all a thousand times?
Are they not vanity? Would I behold
Them more? Life, to an aged Cardinal,
Blind and enfeebled, should but celebrate
The Sacrifice of Jesus Christ who died.
Time should grow short for prayer and preparation.
Why is it then that life has seemed to pace
More than enough its little path of vigil,
But not to know the endless path of beauty
Beyond the entrance and the mere beginning!
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour
Of death!… And, even while thou prayest, I,
Who should incessantly be praying also,
I who am Cardinal and might be Pope,
Sit with my blind eyes full of Pagan glory!—
Sappho, Apollo and Antinous,
And Orpheus parting from Eurydice!
First falls the breath before the drop of rain.
Before the rain shall follow, I have strength,
Praise God, still to support myself among
These marble temples, columns and museums,
These deities of beauty and of time.
Hail, Mary full of grace, the Lord is with Thee!
The obelisk is here. It has not been
Retaken. Pray for us now and at the hour
Of death! And I shall enter at my door
And seek the chimney-piece and stand before
My young Antinous from Tivoli,
With lotos in his hair and hands, who once
Belonged to Hadrian. And I shall touch
Again the garment of Eurydice,—
And wonder—when that final mortal touch
Summons Eurydice, summons my soul,
And when she turns and enters and is dark—
If Christ shall follow her and sing to her.

LADY ANOPHELES

E. DOUGLAS HUME

I hold no brief for the mosquito. She has always treated me as a mere restaurant, and I have provided her with so many meals that I feel all obligations to be already on her side. Also, her extreme talkativeness is almost as objectionable as her voracious appetite. Any one who has been kept awake by her buzz-z-z, buzz-z-z, buzz-z-z, on a tropical night must have come to the conclusion that “good will to all men” can never be strained to include good will to all insects. Moreover, the fact that the lady of the species alone feasts upon blood seems a reflection on the female sex. Yet, so it is: her husband is a harmless vegetarian.

All the same, when a sense of justice is strong, one does resent the misdemeanors of man being laid at the door of even the most exasperating insect. Certainly the sturdiest viewpoint of disease is to regard it as the outcome of inattention, personal or general, to one or other of nature’s observances. Instead, nowadays, parasitic organisms are blamed for most of the aches and pains of humanity, while their distributors are searched for in the realm of insects and animals. The mosquito has, perhaps, fallen a prey to her own weakness. Had she talked less, it is possible that she might have evaded her doubtful celebrity. As it is, she stands accused of being concerned with a no less formidable array of maladies than elephantiasis, yellow fever, dengue, and malaria.

Let us here concern ourselves with the last-mentioned, and the hungry suspect, whose name has been coupled with the disease, her Ladyship Anopheles.

She may at once be singled out from her fellows by her habit of discreet silence and her odd proclivity for standing on her head when resting and feeding. Other mosquitoes remain on all fours, or rather, all sixes, when dining. This acrobatic insect is, as everyone knows, accused of inoculating her human prey with a protozoon, or microscopic animal organism, which in its turn is held responsible for the heats and chills, the aches, the pains, the languor, all the miseries of malaria. The idea is a simple one, requiring little intelligence to be understood. Is it rude to ask, what wonder that it has become popular? Less marvel, too, when one reflects that the theory is safeguarded by dividing Anophelines into a variety of groups, and claiming that the guilty must be the right sort, and yet further, the right sort duly infected.

Now, the means of infection must come about through the insect having feasted on a malarial subject. That its subsequent bite might poison the healthy sounds a contingent by no means unlikely. The drawback to this probability is that the mosquito possesses the feminine characteristic of fastidiousness. Malarial subjects are the very ones avoided by her hungry Ladyship. Here I may interject that I am not writing of insects under control. What a famished mosquito may or may not eat during the course of an experiment, I am not concerned with. I refer to mosquitoes in a natural state, and personal experience has made me observe that the one benefit of malaria consists in the freedom it confers from mosquito bites. Though these insects are in the habit of treating me as a very Ritz or a Carlton among restaurants, periods of malaria always freed me from their ravages. They like their food to be of the best, and the blood freest from fever is the provender for their delectation. During nineteen years of tropical life, my mother never experienced a single attack of malaria; yet she was always the chief _pièce de résistance_ for every mosquito within her vicinity. It may be noticed that the individuals least susceptible to malaria are those most feasted upon by mosquitoes, including the suspects, though whether these be _Anopheles Umbrosus_, _Anopheles Maculatus_, _Anopheles Christophersi_, _Anopheles Albimanus_, _Anopheles Argyritarsis_, or any others of high-sounding title, I should certainly not presume to discriminate.

Why should this general evidence count for less than the few experimental cases upon which the mosquito theory is built up? These latter are mostly conspicuous by their weakness. Take, for example, the mosquito-proof hut placed at Ostia, and inhabited for three months by Dr. Sambon, Dr. Low, Mr. Terzi, and their servants. What analogy does this well-ventilated erection, raised above the soil, bear to many of the insanitary homesteads of the Campagna? What analogy is there between its healthy inhabitants, further fortified by zest for a theory in dire need of proof, and the permanent dwellers in those unpropitious surroundings? If we admit strength in the case of the infected mosquitoes sent to the London Tropical School, whose stings are said to have produced attacks of fever in the late Dr. Thurburn Manson and Mr. George Warren, we must also remember that Abele Sola in the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome, according to the account quoted by Herms in his _Malaria: Cause and Control_, is claimed to have fallen a victim to this disease from the bites of mosquitoes that had developed from larvæ in his own room, and therefore could not be reckoned as infected. Moreover, they numbered hardly any Anophelines, and of the very few present, it was not known whether any stung the patient. Yet, according to the modern theory, Anophelines alone could have been responsible for the mischief. The proverbial grain of salt seems a necessary condiment for the cases of experimenters.

In the short space at our disposal, we are not concerning ourselves with the micro-organism, first discovered in Algiers by Dr. Laveran, and considered to be the parasite of malaria. Without in the least committing oneself to a general belief in the germ-theory of disease, there may, here and there, be maladies produced by parasites. Yet, apparently, fever, bearing all the clinical symptoms of malaria, may occur without the presence in the blood of such organisms, no matter whether parasitic or inbred. On page 8 of the Medical Report of the Federated Malay States’ Government reference is made to an unusual swarm of sandflies, and the following commentary is given. “Whether sandfly fever exists we are not prepared to say, but many cases _with all the clinical symptoms_ were noted and _no malarial parasite was detected_ on blood examination.” Hence the sandflies come under suspicion! Might not another moral be drawn, and that is that fever may be due to causes less crude than the inoculation of parasites by objectionable insects?

The conditions that produce mosquitoes seem to be the same as the conditions that produce malaria, and, in any case, it is these that must be attacked, no matter whether Lady Anopheles be proved innocent or in any measure guilty. The mysteries that surround the subject, the occasional outbursts of disease when areas have been drained, the usual method of improvement, the occasional betterment of health when the reverse process of flooding has taken place, may possibly be explained by the law of subsoil water. Dr. Charles Creighton writes in his _History of Epidemics in Britain_ (p. 278): “According to that law, the dangerous products of fermentation arise from the soil when the pores of the ground are either getting filled with water after having been long filled with air, or are getting filled with air after having been long filled with water. It is the range of the fluctuation in the ground-water, either downwards or upwards, that determines the risk to health.”

However, far be it from me to descant upon the mysterious causes of malaria. My object is only to try to prove the unwisdom of rivetting attention upon the anopheline mosquito. Deductions as to her innocence may be drawn from the accusations endeavoring to prove her guilty. We are told how noticeable among troops the difference in fever rate has been between those that slept on shore and those that remained on board ship in malarious districts. But as the mosquito is free to come aboard too, how does that statement tell against her? I remember a host of such insect invaders on the _Sydney_, the French mail boat, when anchored at feverish Saigon. We carried a shipload away with us, and when out at sea they feasted on me to such an extent that I arrived at Singapore looking as though stricken with a rash, but otherwise none the worse for their greediness.

Again I was scarred for a long period after the venomous attacks of mosquitoes and sandflies combined at Kuala Klang, on the Malay coast, in its old days of fever, before it started a new sanitary career under the name of Port Swettenham. Yet these myriad bites produced fever of no sort, although I was at that time pronounced a malarial subject. I did not remain in Kuala Klang long enough to be affected by its unhealthiness; but, had Lady Anopheles been justly blamed, the terrible biting I underwent should have taken effect, irrespective of my removal. On the contrary, my own experience of fever was connected entirely with locality and never with mosquitoes. Intermittent fever, the genuine article, with its burnings, its icings, its whole programme of miseries, had me constantly in its grip during residence at a particular house in Kuala Lumpur, the Capital of the Federated Malay States. My one compensation was freedom from mosquito bites. When I left that abode, fever left me, and soon after mosquitoes began to feed on me again with infinite relish. What matter? It was a proof of sound blood, freedom from that worse scourge, malaria!

To turn from the personal to what is far more important, the general, let us consider the Medical Reports from that haunt of malaria, the Malay Peninsula.

The year 1911 in the Federated Malay States held the unpleasant distinction of being particularly malarious. The mosquito theorists explained as cause a great influx of, often, unhealthy coolies from India, and much clearing of land, which distributed the mosquitoes, and drove them into the houses and among the inhabitants. But, if mosquitoes be culpable, why should this same year have also been particularly unhealthy in regard to most diseases, phthisis excepted? Yet the Medical Report for 1912 shows that, concomitantly with a fall in malaria, 1,010 fewer cases of dysentery were this year treated in hospital. There were 77 notified cases of smallpox, as against 286 in 1911; 29 cases of cholera, as against 620; and 5,676 cases of beri-beri, as against 6,402. The greater prevalence of disease in general in 1911 surely shows that the causes for its specific forms must be deeper seated than mere insect bites. Yet so dominating is the fashion to rivet attention on such factors as these that fundamental troubles, even when known, appear often to be unheeded.

The F. M. S. Medical Report for 1912 provides a good instance, taken from the portion dealing with the Institute for Medical Research, Kuala Lumpur.

On page 25 it states that the occurrence of several cases of bubonic plague in and near Kuala Lumpur rendered it advisable to consider the possibility of the disease appearing as an epidemic and measures to avert such a calamity. A short paragraph refers to reported cases of plague, and then follow nearly four pages devoted to rats. Toward the bottom of the fourth page come the pregnant words: “Nearly 50 per cent. of the plague-infected rats came from the small stretch of Ampang Street, about 150 yards long.” The short description of this small area surely reveals a source of danger. “At the back of most of the houses there is a kitchen or bathing-place from which an open brick drain, covered with planks, runs through the house to the front of the shop and under the pavement of the five-foot way into one open drain at the side of the street. The plank covering of the house-drain is usually buried beneath sacks of grain or other heavy articles, so that the drain is not often cleaned. The open cement street-drain forms a convenient highway for rats, which can readily gain access to the house by the unprotected house-drains leading into it. Some eighty yards away the main drain empties into the Klang River, here a shallow and muddy stream with irregular, foul banks covered with reeds, rank grass and collections of garbage.” Now, who could expect rats to keep well in the vicinity of such a drain “not often cleaned,” and such a river, “shallow and muddy,” with “foul banks covered with collections of garbage”? Surely gratitude is due to the rodents, who, being nearer the level of the bad conditions, get ill first, and thus give human beings a fair warning of the sickness likely also to be their due, unless surroundings are made healthy for all animals, four-legged and two-legged. Yet, actually the Report has not a commentary upon these palpable ills, and, though it has by no means exhausted itself on the subject of rats, proceeds to vary the topic with fleas, the meteorological conditions that affect these high-jumpers, and the uses of guinea-pigs as flea-traps. The results of searching questions to medical men on the subject of flea bites are even given. “Of eighteen who replied one stated that he had never been bitten by a flea in his life” (p. 31). Most people must wish they were equally lucky. But not a single mention again of the uncleaned drains and the river choked with garbage during the course of pages all the more diverting because intended so seriously.

When such open evils can be so ignored, what wonder that the more occult sources of malaria should not be arrived at? And when will they be understood while accusations against particular insects require to be held in reverence as dogmas? In the F. M. S. Report for 1911 Dr. Sansom allows (p. 3) “there exists in the minds of a great many people a doubt whether the mosquito carries malaria or any other disease”; and proceeds to add “until this heresy has been corrected.” Heresy indeed! Is not free thought the first fundamental of science? Having thus labelled disbelief in his theory, Dr. Sansom in his next Report for 1912 has to admit (p. 5), “I have visited many (rubber) estates where anti-malarial work has not been completed _or even begun_, so that infection remains as bad or nearly as bad as ever, yet, from the time the laborers have been fed, down has come the death-rate.” If food has so much to do with the trouble, why lay all the blame on Lady Anopheles?

And just as too little food helped to make the coolies ill, is it not likely, if it be not rude to ask, that too much food was part cause for the malaria that troubled the prosperous members of the community of Kuala Lumpur, the Federal Capital, so long as a need of drainage left much to be desired in their surroundings? Who acquainted with the Far East does not recall the many courses of the Chinese cook, and the constant refilling of the champagne glass at dinner parties? There seems small wonder that the carnivorous feeder and spirituous drinker from a chilly latitude should fall a victim in the East to malarial and other fevers: and this without any assistance from Lady Anopheles or her sister mosquitoes. To her a meed of praise would seem due, for where the mosquito exists there is proof of a need of drainage, clearance, and general sanitary attention. But man, who has stoned the prophets throughout the ages, equally execrates the insects that come as warnings.

That non-proven is the verdict upon Lady Anopheles’ guilt seems well shown by Dr. Fraser’s Report, incorporated with the general Medical Report for the Federated Malay States for the year 1911.

After rather shakily chanting the orthodox creed of the mosquito theory, Dr. Fraser negatives faith by fact in the most heretical manner. “It appears to have been assumed on inadequate grounds,” he writes, “that a small number of malaria-carrying species in an area is necessarily associated with a low incidence of the disease. Certain observations made in the course of the present inquiry would appear to controvert this view. On some estates where the maximum spleen and parasite rates prevailed few anophelines of any sort were to be found, while in other areas, where malaria-carrying anophelines were numerous, these rates were low. Also it was noted that where different classes of laborers were under identical conditions so far as the mosquito factor is concerned, such as free and indentured laborers on the same estate, the parasite rates varied widely in the two groups. It is clear that factors affecting the general well-being of laborers, such as the quality of the food supply, housing, etc., are by no means negligible in the prevention of malaria, as they are equally not negligible in the prevention of other diseases. To these factors attention must be directed as well as to measures which aim at the reduction of mosquitoes, if the disease is to be combated successfully in the conditions which obtain in this country.”

Precisely! We must attend to general sanitation and personal hygiene, and then, having removed the beam from our own eye, we may be able to see clearly to cast out the mote in the eye of the Lady Anopheles.

SUMMONS

MARY LERNER

With the velvet springiness of turf under his feet, the sense of urge and strain, as of something inexorably drawing him, relaxed at last; the blind hurry slackened. Out of the whirl came quiet and ordered perception, out of the breathless confusion, peace. And the years which his journey seemed to have consumed ran together and were as a single night. Between white cloud-fleets, the Irish sky began to show blue as Mary’s cloak, and the soft May morning was sweet with dripping green things,—thorn and gorse and heather. Christopher knew from the well-remembered “feel” of the air that the west wind was due to resume its hearty music. Almost out of sight above, a lark sang, and he could see innumerable swallows diving and skimming. At once, the old rhyme of _The Seven Sleepers_, forgotten these thirty years, rose to his lips like a bubble to the surface of a stream;—

“The corncrake and the watersnake,
The cuckoo and the swallow,
The bee, the bat, the butterfly—”

All these tiny sleepers were awake to-day; himself awake, too, and aware, with some super-awareness, of the last stages of his oft-promised journey home, achieved at length after the long, oppressive interval of weariness and restraint. This interval was fast receding now, and he made no effort to recall it, for he was eager to slough off all memory of that heavy weakness as well as all shackles of solicitous and hampering devotion. He’d had his will at last, however, though how he could not well imagine; and here he was, free of them all,—comely, stylish wife; modern, masterful daughters. They could spare themselves the pain of drawing long faces over him; he’d no mind to give up with his visit home unpaid.

A good, dutiful family, no doubt, God have them in his care; but this was a time when a man must cut free of all bonds of maturer years and turn to the land that gave him birth,—and to his mother, long unvisited, but by no means forgotten. Many a money-order had crossed the counter at the country post-office, and of late, many a cheque. But the first years had been bitterly hard, and all the years breathlessly busy. That land over-seas took you and drove you whether or no; but its rewards were adequate.

Foot-loose on the old sod now, no longer earthbound but light with a marvellous buoyancy, the reek of peat in his nostrils, the corncrake’s homely tune in his ears. His eyes strained forward for familiar landmarks, carrying always before them the expectant image of a white cot in a green hollow. Uplifted by an exhilaration that seemed stranger to any possible fatigue, he pressed on again, this time with a pleasant sense of anticipation in place of the former gnawing avidity, keenly alive to the delights of this long-desired green world, brilliant with sunshine yet fresh from frequent rains, and rocked with the rising wind.

At last the silver stretches of the Shannon appeared, and a certain well-known white ribbon of road, winding among farms. As he went, the trees began to take on the look of friendly faces;—tall beeches, whispering limes, blackthorn bushes, white with blossom. A field of gorse, ablaze with yellow spikes of bloom, sent out its heavy bitter-sweet perfume. Grassy hills, lined with grey stone walls, beckoned him, each with its happy memory.—The brook! where trout hung under the bank and water-cress wove its green mazes. The sight of its pebbly bed recalled the chilly prickle of gooseflesh on adventurous legs. He leaned over the rude railing to watch its spring rush, giving himself to its cool voice, its freshness on his face. He felt clean now at last of the dusty breath of cities.—Here, too, were the elder bushes, all abloom. To think of the “scouting guns” he’d hollowed out of their pithy stalks, filling them with water by means of a piston-like wadded stick to discharge on good-natured passersby!

The happy sense of expectancy quickened. He topped a sudden rise, and there, secure between two steep hillsides, drowsed the object of his quest; a low, stone cot, whitewashed, with thatched roof and overhanging eaves. What beds under that cosy roof!—of live-plucked goose feathers (well he remembered grappling the kicking bird between his knees!), mounted on heavily “platted” straw, and yielding such sleep as no bed in the new world could afford. As he looked, the high wind seemed suddenly stilled, and everything appeared to wait breathlessly. From the chimney, a thread of smoke crept up, straight as a string in the quiet air.

Then, along the lane, he suddenly descried a group of children, whom he knew at once for his youngest sister’s. Impatient of this reminder of a new day and a new generation, he drew aside till they should have passed, for he was passionately desirous that, for to-day at least, everything should seem as it had been. The children charged past, laughing and calling, fair heads and dark, apple cheeks and clear eyes, as if there were no stranger within miles of them. And their heedless youth and vivid life made him all at once an alien and unreal creature.

Thrusting aside this unwelcome impression, Christopher pressed on to the house. A little old man with a black cutty between his lips was taking the sun in the garden, his narrow shoulders humped under a shiny coat. Christopher cast a careless glance at him; _his_ father, though not tall, was a personable man, a man of thews and solidity. This old one would be some charity guest of his mother’s.—“Ye’ll have us eaten out of house and home with your beggars,” his father used to protest. “Every tramp between here and Gingleticooch has you covered with blessings. I wonder we don’t be rolling in gold, the good wishes we do be enj’ying.”

At the gate, Christopher caught the scent of wild hedge-roses, of sweet-briar and hawthorn, spilling a fragrance as of honeysuckle. At once the years rolled back, the old boyish yearnings kindled. His mother!—her arms would be open to him still, despite all delays and neglect. She was never the one to “fault” him, whatever the blame. As he neared the low doorway, he glimpsed the blue ware on the dark oak dresser, the black, shining kettle on the hob, the long table spread with homespun white linen. On the trimly swept hearth, turf glowed, and beside it, his mother sat in her high-backed chair, bending over her heavy prayer-book.

Through all the years he had thought of her as a tall woman still in the prime of her days, though he knew well she was long past seventy, and though she had reported herself in laborious letters as “growing down like a cow’s tail.” All images of her had flaunted a blue and yellow print, French calico, which had delighted his childhood; blue as cornflowers and hung with golden chains. To her years he had conceded grey hair, softly waving under a lacy cap above a face still fresh and pink.

She wore to-day no chain-decked gown of cornflower blue, no roses in her withered cheeks. A cap, indeed, did crown her, coarse, but lily-white, and it shook ceaselessly with the trembling of her head. Yet, though her face was seamed beyond recognition and her full grey eyes sunken under lids plucked into innumerable tiny wrinkles, he knew at once that it was she; and the sight of her shrivelled body caused a contraction to close about his own frame. Her hands, twisted, spidery, and corded with blue veins, clutched at his heart. Where were the strong, firm hands that had so often lifted and soothed him,—dragged him home howling, too, and soundly smacked him?—He found himself longing for that heavy hand on his shoulder as for the kiss of his beloved.

He crossed the flags and spoke her name, holding out eager arms. Just then, the house-door blew back with a clap and she turned her head and looked past him unseeingly, shivering a little as at the sharp mountain wind.

“She does not know me,” he thought, conscience-stricken. “My fault!—how could she? I’ll not be alarming her with a stranger’s face.” Then, as she dropped her dim eyes to her book again: “She cannot see far. ’Tis old and weak her eyes are—she thinks it’s himself. I’ll go see can I find and prepare him; ’twill be best for him to break the news.”

So great was the comfort the place bestowed, however, that he must watch her a few minutes, drawing near behind her chair. The years fell away and he felt as if he had recovered the very heart of his lost youth. A little four-legged stool stood close beside her skirts, and he longed to sit at her knee as he used, leaning his head against her and staring into the dull glow of the peat. The old ballads she used to sing to him there!—fresh conned from sheets bought at the fair and set to tunes of her own adaptation; the stories of “the people” who steal and change children; the saucer of cream you must set out All Hallows’ Eve for the fairies; the long Christmas candle of welcome, which burned before the open door against the coming of the Infant Saviour. What prayers grew on that hearth-stone!—rosaries for May nights, litanies. The rigors of fasting and abstinence he had known; black fasts, too, cheerfully kept. There had been then no timorous seeking of dispensation.—A question of health? Nonsense; a question of backsliders and turncoats! Men lived not by bread alone in those days, but by “the faith,” valiantly.

Drawn to her irresistibly, he looked over her shoulder at the swaying book, eager to mark her special May devotion to Our Lady.—Would she be saying, “Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Grace,” or reiterating, “Morning Star, Pray for us; Health of the Weak, Pray for us; Comforter of the Afflicted——”? He bent his head to the black-marged page. She was tracing with tremulous finger, “Prayers for the Dead.”

A chill breath touched him and he drew back a little. For whom did her old eyes read the prayer? Eager to share her mourning, he gently laid hand on her bony shoulder, but she did not turn at his touch; only bent her head the lower over her book and let a little rising murmur escape her moving lips.

At her failure to respond, he shuddered with a sudden uncanny sense of remoteness. Then a terrible desolation seized him. “She’s not herself any more, that’s it; childish, and they never told me. I’m too late, then. She’ll never see me more. And I meant to come, always; God knows, I meant to come.”

Fearing to alarm the quiet figure with an outburst of the grief that choked him, he slipped out and sought the old bench under the hedge. Here the tranquillity of the little farm laid a soothing hand on him,—the sight of the speckledy hens pecking in the long grass; the white goats tethered at a safe distance from sheltered heaps of potatoes; a red cow, deep in the lush grass of the meadow, who swung her head threateningly at a decrepit setter that limped across her path. For a moment, looking at the old dog, he thought: “That’ll be Sojer; he’ll know me.” But at once, with newly swelling heart, he realized that many springs had drifted the white blossom of the thorn across old Sojer’s grave. A friendly yearning made him rise and seek this other dog, so like the companion of barefoot jaunts; a descendant of the old fellow’s, no doubt,—a bond across the hostile years.

At the touch of his hand, the setter cowered away, shivering in every limb, his dark soft eyes full of anguished terror. When Christopher tried to speak reassuringly, the dog set up a sobbing whine, and, struggling to uncertain feet, hobbled for the house with his red-feathered tail between his legs.

On Christopher, as he stood there in the sunny morning, a chill dark descended, and he felt isolated beyond the farthest star. Foreboding shuddered through him, but he cried obstinately, “No, I’ll not accept it! It can’t have come to me yet.” But, in spite of his gallant refusal, he turned, like a child from the night, to his mother, as if that little, age-worn woman could soothe his terror as of old.

From the door, he saw her still seated on the hearth, which looked ominously black now and desolate. Her bent finger held the dread place in her book, and, with her right hand, she caressed the head of the old setter, who was crowding to her knees and whining woefully. For the first time, Christopher heard the broken quaver of her voice.

“Eh, Princie, what ails you, doggie?—Are you feeling it, too? There’s a power of terrible things about, the day. Waking up of me I mistrusted it sore, and now I’m certain sure, for three times the kettle’s after dancing on the hearth, and I’ve seen a tall shadow cast in the full sun.—’Tis our boy, Christy, I’m thinking. He’s gone. A young man yet, and I to be left sitting here alone. My grief! that I’ll never see the lad more.—Christy, Christy, the best son!—but there, every crow thinks her own bird the white one.—Whisht, Princie; be quiet, let you. I must be reading the prayers for my son.”

And standing there in the sunlit doorway, Christopher knew indeed that, by this time, it was, as she said, too late. He would never see her more, as men see one another. Yet no sudden terror, no dread of things unknown could wholly rob him of the consolation of her presence, and, even as he felt this dream-scene, too, relentlessly slip from him, he was able to savor the exquisite satisfaction of fulfilment, the transcendent solace of release. Rest! and he had been so harried; completion, and life had been so long! Green hills to blot out remembrance of dusty cities, fresh winds after the smother of narrow streets. “I’ll come back one day, be sure of that,” he’d told her, and through all warring circumstances, he had stood committed to that promise. Now, freely, triumphantly, he had made good his word.

FASHION AND FEMINISM

NINA WILCOX PUTNAM

Hitherto, dress reform has always proved a failure. And this is because dress reform has usually been only the effort of a few scattered individuals to force their personal taste upon the world. And while social consciousness is often awakened by the daring examples of such pioneers, all real social growth comes from a collective consciousness, which is born in a body of people, by reason of some economic or moral pressure which affects them all. When such a body begins to murmur of a reform, that reform is almost certain of accomplishment. And such a murmur, concerning dress, can be heard to-day among those women who are banded together by the fight they are making for freedom.

Dress seems, at first glance, to be one of the least important of the questions which modern women are taking up: but the smallest examination into its practical aspects reveals the fact that it affects all their other interests—not as a mere expression of vanity, but as a serious economic factor.

When we women first entered factories and workshops in numbers, we met unfair conditions on every side. This was particularly true of the garment trades, which were among the first to employ a great many women. And when we met this unfair treatment, women dreamed of legislating virtue into manufacturers. But it can’t be done! And now it is dawning upon the consciousness of a number of women that the way to reform clothing manufacturers, textile manufacturers, etc., the way to cut down insane speeding, overwork, underpay, is to change our insane conception of clothing—to strive to make it a normal, useful thing, instead of a hampering, exotic, extravagant thing, which works one group of women to death at a miserable wage, because a far smaller group of parasitic women wish to be arrayed like peacocks! Knowing this to be true, one naturally turns to the fundamental question, and asks—what _is_ dress—what is fashion? And what, indeed, is dress? Is it simply a means of protection from cold? A concession to so-called modesty, a means of displaying wealth, and advertising leisure? Of attracting the opposite sex? It has been all of these in the past, and many of the same factors are still apparent in our present-day use of garments: but a new interpretation of the word has come in with our new industrial conditions. Dress is an enormous economic factor the world over, and nowhere more so than in America, where it is an over-exploited industry, whose markets have been stretched abnormally, not only by the increasing production of inferior articles, but by a psychological factor, far more potent even than the law of normal supply and demand; and that factor is Fashion: a purely hypothetical need of change in order to meet a purely hypothetical standard, which is entirely ephemeral and continually altered, artificially.

Year after year, we are made to put the money we begrudge, that we can ill afford, money we would honestly rather put into other things; money, often, _that we have not got_, into that particular twist to skirt or coat or hat which will keep us as ridiculous-looking as our neighbor, while, at the same time, safe from his ridicule; in other words, to save ourselves the discomforts of being out of style. And yet, detesting fashion, as I think the majority of us do in our most secret hearts, we are often hypnotized by it to such an extent that free action is prevented.

If the number and character could be estimated of those people who have stayed away from entertainments for lack of a new gown, or dress suit, or some accessory thereof, almost every human being who has ever received an invitation would probably be included in the list. That people stay away from church for the same reason is traditional, and a favorite method of imprisonment has always been to take away formal clothing, and substitute loose garments. This trick has been successful in the instance of white slavery, for it is found that the girls are unwilling to go out into the street in the brilliant “parlor clothes” furnished to them.

So deeply rooted is this fear of being wrongly dressed, and so serious may its consequences become, that it is high time that an examination into the forces behind the accepted forms of fashions be made, and our slavish adherence, not only to fashion, but often to discomfort, be shown for what it is, _a chimera which_ _we ourselves protect_, and which gives a lot of more or less unscrupulous business men their opportunity.

Most people believe that fashion is a matter of our own free choice and approval; but this is not actually the case. For there is in existence to-day such a thorough understanding between the big combine of designers, department stores, wholesalers, manufacturers, textile-mill owners, etc., that our pocket-books are drained by them as systematically and coöperatively as though they belonged to a single corporation: and their profits actually and directly depend upon the extent to which they can play upon our hysterical fear of not being dressed “correctly.” Of course, the first principle of playing their game is to get control of fashion itself, to be able to swing the public taste by forcing constantly changing styles upon it: in other words, garments must _not be permitted to continue in use until they wear out_. Before a garment has come to a state of disuse, a radically new model must be presented which will make the old one look ridiculous by comparison. In the cheapest grades of manufactured garments, whose purchasers, it is safe to suppose, would keep a garment until it was worn out, by reason of poverty, the desired change is accomplished through the use of shoddy and inferior stuff.

The dress of the rich woman will be discarded at the slightest hint of a change in style, while its cheaper imitations, worn by the poor, _are made of stuff deliberately calculated to last only for a season of three months_! Needless to say, the fact is not advertised to the working-woman who spends her savings on a suit at a price varying from five to eighteen dollars!

But, to a certain extent, this scheme of constant changing has reacted against the manufacturers, especially those engaged in articles pertaining to dress, rather than the garment makers. These former are completely at the mercy of the most apparently insignificant change in fashion. As a natural result, there is a tremendous lot of bribery coming the way of the designer and the retailer. “Swing the fashion my way!” is the constant cry of those who make trimmings, such as buttons, braids, fringes, laces, etc., and it makes all the difference between success, and, sometimes, bankruptcy, to the manufacturer, whether or not dozens of little silk buttons are being used on women’s tailored suits, or if there are two bone buttons less on men’s coat sleeves. And the same thing is true of the fringe maker or lace factory. For instance, since the introduction of the narrow skirts which women have been wearing for the past three years, the lace business has been nearly ruined. The close-fitting dress permits of no lace-trimmed lingerie: the ruffled petticoat is a thing of the past, and it was to the white goods manufacturers that the imitation lace man sold his wares. On the other hand, the introduction of pleated chiffon, as a substitute, has raised the occupation of side-pleating from a scattered, ill-paid basis, comparable to that of a cobbler, to the status of a real business.