Chapter I: HAD halted at Camp Five to catch my breath. This flying down a Sierran (3)

And she saw that her work was good. She had tested it by every method, held it up to her judgment in all positions and from all sides, and in her mind, so far as she could see, and she was a harsh critic for her own work, it stood the tests. Not the least of her joys was the pleasure that she knew Trevor would take in her success. She could foresee just the expression of his face when he would speak, could forecast just the tones of the voice, the twinkle of the kindly eyes behind the glasses.

When she entered the study, she found Trevor himself, as she had expected, waiting for her in slippers and worn velvet jacket, pipe in hand, and silk skullcap awry upon the silver-white hair. He extended an inky hand, and still holding it and talking, led her to an easy-chair near the hearth.

Even through the perturbation of her mind Rosella could not but wonder--for the hundredth time--at the apparent discrepancy between the great novelist and the nature of his books. These latter were, each and all of them, wonders of artistic composition, compared with the hordes of latter-day pictures. They were the aristocrats of their kind, full of reserved force, unimpeachable in dignity, stately even, at times veritably austere.

And Trevor himself was a short, rotund man, rubicund as to face, bourgeois as to clothes and surroundings (the bisque statuette of a fisher-boy obtruded the vulgarity of its gilding and tinting from the mantelpiece), jovial in manner, indulging even in slang. One might easily have set him down as a retired groceryman--wholesale perhaps, but none the less a groceryman. Yet touch him upon the subject of his profession, and the bonhomie lapsed away from him at once. Then he became serious. Literature was not a thing to be trifled with.

Thus it was tonight. For five minutes Trevor filled the room with the roaring of his own laughter and the echoes of his own vociferous voice. He was telling a story--a funny story, about what Rosella, with her thoughts on "Patroclus," could not for the life of her have said, and she must needs listen in patience and with perfunctory merriment while the narrative was conducted to its close with all the accompaniment of stamped feet and slapped knees.

"'Why, becoth, mithtah,' said that nigger. 'Dat dawg ain' good fo' nothin' ailse; so I jes rickon he 'th boun' to be a coon dawg;'" and the author of "Snow in April" pounded the arm of his chair and roared till the gas-fixtures vibrated.

Then at last, taking advantage of a lull in the talk, Rosella, unable to contain her patience longer, found breath to remark:

"And 'Patroclus'--my--my little book?"

"Ah--hum, yes. 'Patroclus,' your story. I've read it."

At once another man was before her, or rather the writer--the novelist--_in_ the man. Something of the dignity of his literary style immediately seemed to invest him with a new character. He fell quiet, grave, not a little abstracted, and Rosella felt her heart sink. Her little book (never had it seemed so insignificant, so presumptuous as now) had been on trial before a relentless tribunal, had indeed undergone the ordeal of fire. But the verdict, the verdict! Quietly, but with cold hands clasped tight together, she listened while the greatest novelist of America passed judgment upon her effort.

"Yes; I've read it," continued Trevor. "Read it carefully--carefully. You have worked hard upon it. I can see that. You have put your whole soul into it, put all of yourself into it. The narrative is all there, and I have nothing but good words to say to you about the construction, the mere mechanics of it. But----"

Would he never go on? What was this? What did that "But" mean? What else but disaster could it mean? Rosella shut her teeth.

"But, to speak frankly, my dear girl, there is something lacking. Oh, the idea, the motif--that----" he held up a hand. "That is as intact as when you read me the draft. The central theme, the approach, the grouping of the characters, the dialogue--all good--all good. The thing that is lacking I find very hard to define. But the _mood_ of the story, shall we say?--the mood of the story is----" he stopped, frowning in perplexity, hesitating. The great master of words for once found himself at a loss for expression. "The mood is somehow truculent, when it should be as suave, as quiet, as the very river you describe. Don't you see? Can't you understand what I mean? In this 'Patroclus' the atmosphere, the little, delicate, subtle sentiment, is everything--everything. What was the mere story? Nothing without the proper treatment. And it was just in this fine, intimate relationship between theme and treatment that the success of the book was to be looked for. I thought I could be sure of you there. I thought that you of all people could work out that motif adequately. But"--he waved a hand over the manuscript that lay at her elbow--"this--it is not the thing. This is a poor criticism, you will say, merely a marshaling of empty phrases, abstractions. Well, that may be; I repeat, it is very hard for me to define just what there is of failure in your 'Patroclus.' But it is empty, dry, hard, barren. Am I cruel to speak so frankly? If I were less frank, my dear girl, I would be less just, less kind. You have told merely the story, have narrated episodes in their sequence of time, and where the episodes have stopped there you have ended the book. The whole animus that should have put the life into it is gone, or, if it is not gone, it is so perverted that it is incorrigible. To _my_ mind the book is a failure."

Rosella did not answer when Trevor ceased speaking, and there was a long silence. Trevor looked at her anxiously. He had hated to hurt her. Rosella gazed vaguely at the fire. Then at last the tears filled her eyes.

"I am sorry, very, very sorry," said Trevor, kindly. "But to have told you anything but the truth would have done you a wrong--and, then, no earnest work is altogether wasted. Even though 'Patroclus' is--not what we expected of it, your effort over it will help you in something else. You did work hard at it. I saw that. You must have put your whole soul into it."

"That," said Rosella, speaking half to herself--"that was just the trouble."

But Trevor did not understand.

HANTU

BY

HENRY MILNER RIDEOUT

Reprinted from _The Atlantic Monthly_ of May, 1906 by permission

THE SCHOONER _Fulmar_ lay in a cove on the coast of Banda. Her sails, half hoisted, dripped still from an equatorial shower, but, aloft, were already steaming in the afternoon glare. Dr. Forsythe, captain and owner, lay curled round his teacup on the cabin roof, watching the horizon thoughtfully, with eyes like points of glass set in the puckered bronze of his face. The "Seventh Officer," his only white companion, watched him respectfully. All the Malays were asleep, stretched prone or supine under the forward awning. Only Wing Kat stirred in the smother of his galley below, rattling tin dishes, and repeating, in endless falsetto sing-song, the Hankow ditty which begins,--

"'Yaou-yaou!' remarked the grasshoppers."

Ashore, the coolies on the nutmeg plantations had already brought out their mace to dry, and the baskets lay in vermilion patches on the sun-smitten green, like gouts of arterial blood. White vapors round the mountain peaks rose tortuously toward the blue; while seaward, rain still filled the air as with black sand drifting down aslant, through gaps in which we could descry far off a steel-bright strip of fair weather that joined sea and sky, cutting under a fairy island so that it seemed suspended in the air.

"That's a pretty bit of land," said the doctor lazily. "'_Jam medio apparet fluctu nemorosa Zacynthos_'. It might be, eh?--Humph!--Virgil and Shakespeare are the only ones who sometimes make poetry endurable. All the others are just little swollen Egos."

This was an unusual excursion, and he quickly returned to practical matters.

"There's a better anchorage over there," he drawled, waving the milk-tin toward Zacynthos. "And less danger of our being caught than here. But no use; we've got to humor the crew, of course. When they say '_pulo burrantu_,' that settles it. Haunted islands--ghosts--fatal to discipline. I used to have cruises spoiled by that sort of thing. We must stay here and chance being found."

He shot a stream of Java sugar into the tea, and, staring at the sleepers, rubbed his shaven head thoughtfully.

"Oh, yes, 'superstition,' all very easy to say," he muttered, half to himself. "But who _knows_, eh? Must be something in it, at times."

His mood this afternoon was new and surprising. Nor was it likely to occur often in such a man. He had brought the _Fulmar_ round the south of Celebes, making for Ceram; but as the Dutch had forbidden him to travel in the interior, saying that the natives were too dangerous just then; and as Sidin, the mate, had sighted the Dutch tricolor flying above drab hulls that came nosing southward from Amboina way, we had dodged behind the Bandas till nightfall. The crew laughed at the _babi blanda_--Dutch pigs; but every man of them would have fled ashore had they known that among the hampers and bundled spears in our hold lay the dried head of a little girl, a human sacrifice from Engano. If we got into Ceram (and got out again), the doctor would reduce the whole affair to a few tables of anthropological measurements, a few more hampers of birds, beasts, and native rubbish in the hold, and a score of paragraphs couched in the evaporated, millimetric terms of science. There would be a few duplicates for Raffles, some tin-lined cases, including the clotted head of the little girl, for the British Museum; the total upshot would attract much less public notice than the invention of a new "part" for a motor car; and the august structure of science, like a coral tree, would increase by another atom. In the meantime, we lay anchored, avoiding ironclads and ghosts.

Dinner we ate below, with seaward port-holes blinded, and sweat dripping from our chins. Then we lay on the cabin roof again, in breech-clouts, waiting for a breeze, and showing no light except the red coals of two Burmah cheroots.

For long spaces we said nothing. Trilling of crickets ashore, sleepy cooing of nutmeg-pigeons, chatter of monkeys, hiccough of tree lizards, were as nothing in the immense, starlit silence of the night, heavily sweet with cassia and mace. Forward, the Malays murmured now and then, in sentences of monotonous cadence.

"No, you can't blame them," said the captain abruptly, with decision. "Considering the unholy strangeness of the world we live in----" He puffed twice, the palm of his hand glowing. "Things you can't explain," he continued vaguely. "Now this--I thought of it today, speaking of _hantu_. Perhaps you can explain it, being a youngster without theories. The point is, of what follows, how much, if any, was a dream? Where were the partition lines between sleep and waking,--between what we call Certainty, and--the other thing? Or else, by a freak of nature, might a man live so long--Nonsense!--Never mind; here are the facts."

* * * * *

Eleven years ago, I had the _Fulmar_ a ten months' cruise out of Singapore, and was finally coming down along Celebes, intending to go over to Batavia. We anchored on just such a day as this has been, off a little old river-mouth, so badly silted that she had to lie well out. A chief in a _campong_ half a day inland had promised to send some specimens down that evening,--armor, harps, stone Priapuses, and birds of paradise. The men were to come overland, and would have no boats. So I went ashore with three or four Malays, and the Old Boy's time we had poking in and out over the silt to find fairway, even for the gig. At last we could make round toward a little clearing in the bamboos, with a big canary tree in the middle. All was going well, when suddenly the mate grunted, pointing dead ahead. That man Sidin has the most magnificent eyes: we were steering straight into a dazzling glare. I couldn't see anything, neither could the crew, for some time.

"_Tuggur_!" cried the mate. He was getting nervous. Then all of a sudden--"_Brenti_!"

The crew stopped like a shot. Then they saw, too, and began to back water and turn, all pulling different ways and yelling: "_Prau hantu!... sampar_! _...Sakit lepra! Kolera!... hantu!_"

As we swung, I saw what it was,--a little carved prau like a child's toy boat, perhaps four feet long, with red fiber sails and red and gilt flags from stem to stern. It was rocking there in our swell, innocently, but the crew were pulling for the schooner like crazy men.

I was griffin enough at the time, but I knew what it meant, of course,--it was an enchanted boat, that the priests in some village--perhaps clear over in New Guinea--had charmed the cholera or the plague on board of. Same idea as the Hebrew scapegoat.

"_Brenti_!" I shouted. The Malays stopped rowing, but let her run. Nothing would have tempted them within oar's-length of that prau.

"See here, Sidin," I protested, "I go ashore to meet the _kapala's_ men."

"We do not go," the fellow said. "If you go, Tuan, you die: the priest has laid the cholera on board that prau. It has come to this shore. Do not go, Tuan."

"She hasn't touched the land yet," I said.

This seemed to have effect.

"Row me round to that point and land me," I ordered. "_Hantu_ does not come to white men. You go out to the ship; when I have met the soldier-messengers, row back, and take me on board with the gifts."

The mate persuaded them, and they landed me on the point, half a mile away, with a box of cheroots, and a roll of matting to take my nap on. I walked round to the clearing, and spread my mat under the canary tree, close to the shore. All that blessed afternoon I waited, and smoked, and killed a snake, and made notes in a pocket Virgil, and slept, and smoked again; but no sign of the bearers from the _campong_. I made signals to the schooner,--she was too far out to hail,--but the crew took no notice. It was plain they meant to wait and see whether the _hantu_ prau went out with the ebb or not; and as it was then flood, and dusk, they couldn't see before morning. So I picked some bananas and chicos, and made a dinner of them; then I lighted a fire under the tree, to smoke and read Virgil by,--in fact, spent the evening over my notes. That editor was a _pukkah_ ass! It must have been pretty late before I stretched out on my matting.

I was a long time going to sleep,--if I went to sleep at all. I lay and watched the firelight and shadows in the _lianas_, the bats fluttering in and out across my patch of stars, and an ape that stole down from time to time and peered at me, sticking his blue face out from among the creepers. At one time a shower fell in the clearing, but only pattered on my ceiling of broad leaves.

After a period of drowsiness, something moved and glittered on the water, close to the bank; and there bobbed the ghost prau, the gilt and vermilion flags shining in the firelight. She had come clear in on the flood,--a piece of luck. I got up, cut a withe of bamboo, and made her fast to a root. Then I fed the fire, lay down again, and watched her back and fill on her tether,--all clear and ruddy in the flame, even the carvings, and the little wooden figures of wizards on her deck. And while I looked, I grew drowsier and drowsier; my eyes would close, then half open, and there would be the _hantu_ sails and the fire for company, growing more and more indistinct.

So much for Certainty; now begins the Other. Did I fall asleep at all? If so, was my first waking a dream-waking, and the real one only when the thing was gone? I'm not an imaginative man; my mind, at home, usually worked with some precision; but this,--there seems to be, you might say, a blur, a--film over my mental retina. You see, I'm not a psychologist, and therefore can't use the big, foggy terms of man's conceit to explain what he never can explain,--himself, and Life.

* * * * *

The captain tossed his cheroot overboard, and was silent for a space.

"The psychologists forget Æsop's frog story," he said at last. "Little swollen Egos, again."

Then his voice flowed on, slowly, in the dark.

* * * * *

I ask you just to believe this much: that I for my part feel sure (except sometimes by daylight) that I was not more than half asleep when a footfall seemed to come in the path, and waked me entirely. It didn't sound,--only seemed to come. I believe, then, that I woke, roused up on my elbow, and stared over at the opening among the bamboos where the path came into the clearing. Some one moved down the bank, and drew slowly forward to the edge of the firelight. A strange, whispering, uncertain kind of voice said something,--something in Dutch.

I didn't catch the words, and it spoke again:--

"What night of the month is this night?"

If awake, I was just enough so to think this a natural question to be asked first off, out here in the wilds.

"It's the 6th," I answered in Dutch. "Come down to the fire, Mynheer."

You know how bleary and sightless your eyes are for a moment, waking, after the glare of these days. The figure seemed to come a little nearer, but I could only see that it was a man dressed in black. Even that didn't seem odd.

"Of what month?" the stranger said. The voice was what the French call "veiled."

"June," I answered.

"And what year?" he asked.

I told him--or It.

"He is very late," said the voice, like a sigh. "He should have sent long ago."

Only at this point did the whole thing begin to seem queer. As evidence that I must have been awake, I recalled afterwards that my arm had been made numb by the pressure of my head upon it while lying down, and now began to tingle.

"It is very late," the voice repeated. "Perhaps too late----"

The fire settled, flared up fresh, and lighted the man's face dimly,--a long, pale face with gray mustache and pointed beard. He was all in black, so that his outline was lost in darkness; but I saw that round his neck was a short white ruff, and that heavy leather boots hung in folds, cavalier-fashion, from his knees. He wavered there in the dark, against the flicker of the bamboo shadows, like a picture by that Dutch fellow--What's-his-name-again--a very dim, shaky, misty Rembrandt.

"And you, Mynheer," he went on, in the same toneless voice, "from where do you come to this shore?"

"From Singapore," I managed to reply.

"From Singapura," he murmured. "And so white men live there now?--_Ja, ja_, time has passed."

Up till now I may have only been startled, but this set me in a blue funk. It struck me all at once that this shaky old whisper of a voice was not speaking the Dutch of nowadays. I never before knew the depths, the essence, of that uncertainty which we call fear. In the silence, I thought a drum was beating,--it was the pulse in my ears. The fire close by was suddenly cold.

"And now you go whither?" it said.

"To Batavia," I must have answered, for it went on:--

"Then you may do a great service to me and to another. Go to Jacatra in Batavia, and ask for Pieter Erberveld. Hendrik van der Have tells him to cease--before it is too late, before the thing becomes accursed. Tell him this. You will have done well, and I--shall sleep again. Give him the message----"

The voice did not stop, so much as fade away unfinished. And the man, the appearance, the eyes, moved away further into the dark, dissolving, retreating. A shock like waking came over me--a rush of clear consciousness----

Humph! Yes, been too long away from home; for I know (mind you, _know_) that I saw the white of that ruff, the shadowy sweep of a cloak, as something turned its back and moved up the path under the pointed arch of bamboos, and was gone slowly in the blackness. I'm as sure of this as I am that the fire gave no heat. But whether the time of it all had been seconds or hours, I can't tell you.

What? Yes, naturally. I jumped and ran up the path after it. Nothing there but starlight. I must have gone on for half a mile. Nothing: only ahead of me, along the path, the monkeys would chatter and break into an uproar, and then stop short--every treetop silent, as they do when a python comes along. I went back to the clearing, sat down on the mat, stayed there by clinching my will power, so to speak,--and watched myself for other symptoms, till morning. None came. The fire, when I heaped it, was as hot as any could be. By dawn I had persuaded myself that it was a dream. No footprints in the path, though I mentioned a shower before.

At sunrise, the _kapala's_ men came down the path, little chaps in black mediæval armor made of petroleum tins, and coolies carrying piculs of stuff that I wanted. So I was busy,--but managed to dismast the _hantu_ prau and wrap it up in matting, so that it went aboard with the plunder.

Yet this other thing bothered me so that I held the schooner over, and made pretexts to stay ashore two more nights. Nothing happened. Then I called myself a grandmother, and sailed for Batavia.

Two nights later, a very singular thing happened. The mate--this one with the sharp eyes--is a quiet chap; seldom speaks to me except on business. He was standing aft that evening, and suddenly, without any preliminaries, said:

"Tuan was not alone the other night."

"What's that, Sidin?" I spoke sharply, for it made me feel quite angry and upset, of a sudden. He laughed a little, softly.

"I saw that the fire was a cold fire," he said. That was all he would say, and we've never referred to it again.

You may guess the rest, if you know your history of Java. I didn't then, and didn't even know Batavia,--had been ashore often, but only for a _toelatingskaart_ and some good Dutch chow. Well, one afternoon, I was loafing down a street, and suddenly noticed that the sign-board said, "Jacatra-weg." The word made me jump, and brought the whole affair on Celebes back like a shot,--and not as a dream. It became a live question; I determined to treat it as one, and settle it.

I stopped a fat Dutchman who was paddling down the middle of the street in his pyjamas, smoking a cigar.

"Pardon, Mynheer," I said. "Does a man live here in Jacatra-weg named Erberveld?"

"_Nej_," he shook his big shaved head. "_Nej_, Mynheer, I do not know."

"Pieter Erberveld," I suggested.

The man broke into a horse-laugh.

"_Ja, ja_," he said, and laughed still. "I did not think of him. _Ja_, on this way, opposite the timber yard, you will find his house." And he went off, bowing and grinning hugely.

The nature of the joke appeared later, but I wasn't inclined to laugh. You've seen the place. No? Right opposite a timber yard in a cocoanut grove: it was a heavy, whitewashed wall, as high as a man, and perhaps two perches long. Where the gate should have been, a big tablet was set in, and over that, on a spike, a skull, grinning through a coat of cement. The tablet ran in eighteenth-century Dutch, about like this:--

BY REASON OF THE DETESTABLE MEMORY OF THE CONVICTED TRAITOR, PIETER
ERBERVELD, NO ONE SHALL BE PERMITTED TO BUILD IN WOOD OR STONE OR
TO PLANT ANYTHING UPON THIS GROUND, FROM NOW TILL JUDGMENT DAY.
BATAVIA, APRIL 14, ANNO 1772.

You'll find the story in any book: the chap was a half-caste Guy Fawkes who conspired to deliver Batavia to the King of Bantam, was caught, tried, and torn asunder by horses. I nosed about and went through a hole in a side wall: nothing in the compound but green mould, dried stalks, dead leaves, and blighted banana trees. The inside of the gate was blocked with five to eight feet of cement. The Dutch hate solidly.

But Hendrik van der Have? No, I never found the name in any of the books. So there you are. Well? Can a man dream of a thing before he knows that thing, or----

* * * * *

The captain's voice, which had flowed on in slow and dispassionate soliloquy, became half audible, and ceased. As we gave ear to the silence, we became aware that a cool stir in the darkness was growing into a breeze. After a time, the thin crowing of game-cocks in distant villages, the first twitter of birds among the highest branches, told us that night had turned to morning. A soft patter of bare feet came along the deck, a shadow stood above us, and the low voice of the mate said:

"_Ada kapal api disitu, Tuan_--_saiah kirah_--_ada kapal prrang_."

"Gunboat, eh?" Captain Forsythe was on his feet, and speaking briskly. "_Bai, tarek jangcar_. Breeze comes just in time."

We peered seaward from the rail; far out, two pale lights, between a red coal and a green, shone against the long, glimmering strip of dawn.

"Heading this way, but there's plenty of time," the captain said cheerfully. "Take the wheel a minute, youngster--that's it,--keep her in,--they can't see us against shore where it's still night."

As the schooner swung slowly under way, his voice rose, gay as a boy's:--

"Come on, you rice-fed admirals!" He made an improper gesture, his profile and outspread fingers showing in the glow-worm light of the binnacle. "If they follow us through by the Verdronken Rozengain, we'll show them one piece 'e navigation. Can do, eh? These old iron-clad junks are something a man knows how to deal with."

MISS JUNO

BY

CHARLES WARREN STODDARD

_Copyright_, 1903, by A. M. Robertson Reprinted from FOR THE PLEASURE OF HIS COMPANY

I

THERE was an episode in the life of Paul Clitheroe that may possibly throw some little light upon the mystery of his taking off; and in connection with this matter it is perhaps worth detailing.

One morning Paul found a drop-letter in the mail which greeted him daily. It ran as follows:

DEAR OLD BOY:

Don't forget the reception tomorrow. Some one will be here whom I
wish you to know.

Most affectionately,

HARRY ENGLISH.

The "tomorrow" referred to was the very day on which Paul received the sweet reminder. The reception of the message somewhat disturbed his customary routine. To be sure, he glanced through the morning journal as usual; repaired to the Greek chop-house with the dingy green walls, the smoked ceiling, the glass partition that separated the guests from a kitchen lined with shining copper pans, where a cook in a white paper cap wafted himself about in clouds of vapor, lit by occasional flashes of light and ever curling flames, like a soul expiating its sins in a prescribed but savory purgatory. He sat in his chosen seat, ignored his neighbors with his customary nonchalance, and returned to his room, as if nothing were about to happen. But he accomplished little, for he felt that the day was not wholly his; so slight a cause seemed to change the whole current of his life from hour to hour.

In due season Paul entered a street car which ran to the extreme limit of San Francisco. Harry English lived not far from the terminus, and to the cozy home of this most genial and hospitable gentleman the youth wended his way. The house stood upon the steep slope of a hill; the parlor was upon a level with the street,--a basement dining-room below it,--but the rear of the house was quite in the air and all of the rear windows commanded a magnificent view of the North Bay with its islands and the opposite mountainous shore.

"Infinite riches in a little room," was the expression which came involuntarily to Paul's lips the first time he crossed the threshold of Thespian Lodge. He might have said it of the Lodge any day in the week; the atmosphere was always balmy and soothing; one could sit there without talking or caring to talk; even without realizing that one was not talking and not being talked to; the silence was never ominous; it was a wholesome and restful home, where Paul was ever welcome and whither he often fled for refreshment.

The walls of the whole house were crowded with pictures, framed photographs and autographs, chiefly of theatrical celebrities; both "Harry," as the world familiarly called him, and his wife, were members of the dramatic profession and in their time had played many parts in almost as many lands and latitudes.

There was one chamber in this delightful home devoted exclusively to the pleasures of entomology, and there the head of the house passed most of the hours which he was free to spend apart from the duties of his profession. He was a man of inexhaustible resources, consummate energy, and unflagging industry, yet one who was never in the least hurried or flurried; and he was Paul's truest and most judicious friend.

The small parlor at the Englishes was nearly filled with guests when Paul Clitheroe arrived upon the scene. These guests were not sitting against the wall talking at each other; the room looked as if it were set for a scene in a modern society comedy. In the bay window, a bower of verdure, an extremely slender and diminutive lady was discoursing eloquently with the superabundant gesticulation of the successful society amateur; she was dilating upon the latest production of a minor poet whose bubble reputation was at that moment resplendent with local rainbows. Her chief listener was a languid beauty of literary aspirations, who, in a striking pose, was fit audience for the little lady as she frothed over with delightful, if not contagious, enthusiasm.

Mrs. English, who had been a famous belle--no one who knew her now would for a moment question the fact--devoted herself to the entertainment of a group of silent people, people of the sort that are not only colorless, but seem to dissipate the color in their immediate vicinity. The world is full of such; they spring up, unaccountably, in locations where they appear to the least advantage. Many a clever person who would delight to adorn a circle he longs to enter, and where he would be hailed with joy, through modesty, hesitates to enter it; while others, who are of no avail in any wise whatever, walk bravely in and find themselves secure through a quiet system of polite insistence. Among the latter, the kind of people to be merely tolerated, we find, also, the large majority.

Two children remarkably self-possessed seized upon Paul the moment he entered the room: a beautiful lad as gentle and as graceful as a girl, and his tiny sister, who bore herself with the dignity of a little lady of Lilliput. He was happy with them, quite as happy as if they were as old and experienced as their elders and as well entertained by them, likewise. He never in his life made the mistake that is, alas, made by most parents and guardians, of treating children as if they were little simpletons who can be easily deceived. How often they look with scorn upon their elders who are playing the hypocrite to eyes which are, for the most part, singularly critical! Having paid his respects to those present--he was known to all--Paul was led a willing captive into the chamber where Harry English and a brother professional, an eccentric comedian, who apparently never uttered a line which he had not learned out of a play-book, were examining with genuine enthusiasm certain cases of brilliantly tinted butterflies.

The children were quite at their ease in this house, and no wonder; California children are born philosophers; to them the marvels of the somewhat celebrated entomological collection were quite familiar; again and again they had studied the peculiarities of the most rare and beautiful specimens of insect life under the loving tutelage of their friend, who had spent his life and a small fortune in gathering together his treasures, and they were even able to explain in the prettiest fashion the origin and use of the many curious objects that were distributed about the rooms.

Meanwhile Mme. Lillian, the dramatic one, had left her bower in the bay window and was flitting to and fro in nervous delight; she had much to say and it was always worth listening to. With available opportunities she would have long since become famous and probably a leader of her sex; but it was her fate to coach those of meaner capacities who were ultimately to win fame and fortune while she toiled on, in genteel poverty, to the end of her weary days.

No two women could be more unlike than this many-summered butterfly, as she hovered among her friends, and a certain comedy queen who was posing and making a picture of herself; the latter was regarded by the society-privates, who haunted with fearful delight the receptions at Thespian Lodge, with the awe that inspired so many inexperienced people who look upon members of the dramatic profession as creatures of another and not a better world, and considerably lower than the angels.

Two hours passed swiftly by; nothing ever jarred upon the guests in this house; the perfect suavity of the host and hostess forbade anything like antagonism among their friends; and though such dissimilar elements might never again harmonize, they were tranquil for the time at least.

The adieus were being said in the chamber of entomology, which was somewhat overcrowded and faintly impregnated with the odor of _corrosive sublimate_. From the windows overlooking the bay there was visible the expanse of purple water and the tawny, sunburnt hills beyond, while pale-blue misty mountains marked the horizon with an undulating outline. A ship under full sail--a glorious and inspiring sight--was bearing down before the stiff westerly breeze.

Mme. Lillian made an apt quotation which terminated with a Delsartean gesture and a rising inflection that seemed to exact something from somebody; the comedienne struck one of her property attitudes, so irresistibly comic that every one applauded, and Mme. Lillian laughed herself to tears; then they all drifted toward the door. As mankind in general has much of the sheep in him, one guest having got as far as the threshold, the others followed; Paul was left alone with the Englishes and those clever youngsters, whose coachman, accustomed to waiting indefinitely at the Lodge, was dutifully dozing on the box seat. The children began to romp immediately upon the departure of the last guest, and during the riotous half-hour that succeeded, there was a fresh arrival. The door-bell rang; Mrs. English, who was close at hand, turned to answer it and at once bubbled over with unaffected delight. Harry, still having his defunct legions in solemn review, recognized a cheery, un-American voice, and cried, "There she is at last!" as he hastened to meet the newcomer.

Paul was called to the parlor where a young lady of the ultra-blonde type stood with a faultlessly gloved hand in the hand of each of her friends; she was radiant with life and health. Of all the young ladies Paul could at that moment remember having seen, she was the most exquisitely clad; the folds of her gown fell about her form like the drapery of a statue; he was fascinated from the first moment of their meeting. He noticed that nothing about her was ever disarranged; neither was there anything superfluous or artificial, in manner or dress. She was in his opinion an entirely artistic creation. She met him with a perfectly frank smile, as if she were an old friend suddenly discovering herself to him, and when Harry English had placed the hand of this delightful person in one of Paul's she at once withdrew the other, which Mrs. English fondly held, and struck it in a hearty half-boyish manner upon their clasped hands, saying, "Awfully glad to see you, Paul!" and she evidently meant it.

This was Miss. Juno, an American girl bred in Europe, now, after years of absence, passing a season in her native land. Her parents, who had taken a country home in one of the California valleys, found in their only child all that was desirable in life. This was not to be wondered at; it may be said of her in the theatrical parlance that she "filled the stage." When Miss. Juno dawned upon the scene the children grew grave, and, after a little delay, having taken formal leave of the company, they entered their carriage and were rapidly driven homeward.

If Paul and Miss. Juno had been formed for one another and were now, at the right moment and under the most favorable auspices, brought together for the first time, they could not have mated more naturally. If Miss. Juno had been a young man, instead of a very charming woman, she would of course have been Paul's chum. If Paul had been a young woman--some of his friends thought he had narrowly escaped it and did not hesitate to say so--he would instinctively have become her confidante. As it was, they promptly entered into a sympathetic friendship which seemed to have been without beginning and was apparently to be without end.

They began to talk of the same things at the same moment, often uttering the very same words and then turned to one another with little shouts of unembarrassed laughter. They agreed upon all points, and aroused each other to a ridiculous pitch of enthusiasm over nothing in particular.

Harry English beamed; there was evidently nothing wanted to complete his happiness. Mrs. English, her eyes fairly dancing with delight, could only exclaim at intervals, "Bless the boy!" or, "What a pair of children!" then fondly pass her arm about the waist of Miss. Juno--which was not waspish in girth--or rest her hand upon Paul's shoulder with a show of maternal affection peculiarly grateful to him. It was with difficulty the half-dazed young fellow could keep apart from Miss. Juno. If he found she had wandered into the next room, while he was engaged for a moment, he followed at his earliest convenience, and when their eyes met they smiled responsively without knowing why, and indeed not caring in the least to know.

They were as ingenuous as two children in their liking for one another; their trust in each other would have done credit to the Babes in the Wood. What Paul realized, without any preliminary analysis of his mind or heart, was that he wanted to be near her, very near her; and that he was miserable when this was not the case. If she was out of his sight for a moment the virtue seemed to have gone from him and he fell into the pathetic melancholy which he enjoyed in the days when he wrote a great deal of indifferent verse, and was burdened with the conviction that his mission in life was to make rhymes without end.

In those days, he had acquired the habit of pitying himself. The emotional middle-aged woman is apt to encourage the romantic young man in pitying himself; it is a grewsome habit, and stands sturdily in the way of all manly effort. Paul had outgrown it to a degree, but there is nothing easier in life than a relapse--perhaps nothing so natural, yet often so unexpected.

Too soon the friends who had driven Miss. Juno to Thespian Lodge and passed on--being unacquainted with the Englishes--called to carry her away with them. She was shortly--in a day or two in fact--to rejoin her parents, and she did not hesitate to invite Paul to pay them a visit. This he assured her he would do with pleasure, and secretly vowed that nothing on earth should prevent him. They shook hands cordially at parting, and were still smiling their baby smiles in each other's faces when they did it. Paul leaned against the door-jamb, while the genial Harry and his wife followed his new-found friend to the carriage, where they were duly presented to its occupants--said occupants promising to place Thespian Lodge upon their list. As the carriage whirled away, Miss. Juno waved that exquisitely gloved hand from the window and Paul's heart beat high; somehow he felt as if he had never been quite so happy. And this going away struck him as being a rather cruel piece of business. To tell the whole truth, he couldn't understand why she should go at all.

He felt it more and more, as he sat at dinner with his old friends, the Englishes, and ate with less relish than common the delicious Yorkshire pudding and drank the musty ale. He felt it as he accompanied his friends to the theater, where he sat with Mrs. English, while she watched with pride the husband whose impersonations she was never weary of witnessing; but Paul seemed to see him without recognizing him, and even the familiar voice sounded unfamiliar, or like a voice in a dream. He felt it more and more when good Mrs. English gave him a nudge toward the end of the evening and called him "a stupid," half in sport and half in earnest; and when he had delivered that excellent woman into the care of her liege lord and had seen them securely packed into the horse-car that was to drag them tediously homeward in company with a great multitude of suffocating fellow-sufferers, he felt it; and all the way out the dark street and up the hill that ran, or seemed to run, into outer darkness--where his home was--he felt as if he had never been the man he was until now, and that it was all for _her_ sake and through _her_ influence that this sudden and unexpected transformation had come to pass. And it seemed to him that if he were not to see her again, very soon, his life would be rendered valueless; and that only to see her were worth all the honor and glory that he had ever aspired to in his wildest dreams; and that to be near her always and to feel that he were much--nay, everything--to her, as before God he felt that at that moment she was to him, would make his life one long Elysium, and to death would add a thousand stings.

II

Saadi had no hand in it, yet all Persia could not outdo it. The whole valley ran to roses. They covered the earth; they fell from lofty trellises in fragrant cataracts; they played over the rustic arbors like fountains of color and perfume; they clambered to the cottage roof and scattered their bright petals in showers upon the grass. They were of every tint and texture; of high and low degree, modest or haughty as the case might be--but roses all of them, and such roses as California alone can boast. And some were fat or _passé_, and more's the pity, but all were fragrant, and the name of that sweet vale was Santa Rosa.

Paul was in the garden with Miss. Juno. He had followed her thither with what speed he dared. She had expected him; there was not breathing-space for conventionality between these two. In one part of the garden sat an artist at his easel; by his side a lady somewhat his senior, but of the type of face and figure that never really grows old, or looks it. She was embroidering flowers from nature, tinting them to the life, and rivaling her companion in artistic effects. These were the parents of Miss. Juno--or rather not quite that. Her mother had been twice married; first, a marriage of convenience darkened the earlier years of her life; Miss. Juno was the only reward for an age of domestic misery. A clergyman joined these parties--God had nothing to do with the compact; it would seem that he seldom has. A separation very naturally and very properly followed in the course of time; a young child was the only possible excuse for the delay of the divorce. Thus are the sins of the fathers visited upon the grandchildren. Then came a marriage of love. The artist who having found his ideal had never known a moment's weariness, save when he was parted from her side. Their union was perfect; God had joined them. The stepfather to Miss. Juno had always been like a big brother to her--even as her mother had always seemed like an elder sister.

Oh, what a trio was that, my countrymen, where liberty, fraternity and equality joined hands without howling about it and making themselves a nuisance in the nostrils of their neighbors!

Miss. Juno stood in a rose-arbor and pointed to the artists at their work.

"Did you ever see anything like that, Paul?"

"Like what?"

"Like those sweet simpletons yonder. They have for years been quite oblivious of the world about them. Thrones might topple, empires rise and fall, it would matter nothing to them so long as their garden bloomed, and the birds nested and sung, and he sold a picture once in an age that the larder might not go bare."

"I've seen something like it, Miss. Juno. I've seen fellows who never bothered themselves about the affairs of others,--who, in short, minded their own business strictly--and they got credit for being selfish."

"Were they happy?"

"Yes, in their way. Probably their way wasn't my way, and their kind of happiness would bore me to death. You know happiness really can't be passed around, like bon-bons or sherbet, for every one to taste. I hate bon-bons: do you like them?"

"That depends upon the quality and flavor--and--perhaps somewhat upon who offers them. I never buy bon-bons for my private and personal pleasure. Do any of you fellows really care for bon-bons?"

"That depends upon the kind of happiness we are in quest of; I mean the quality and flavor of the girl we are going to give them to."

"Have girls a flavor?"

"Some of them have--perhaps most of them haven't; neither have they form nor feature, nor tint nor texture, nor anything that appeals to a fellow of taste and sentiment."

"I'm sorry for these girls of yours----"

"You needn't be sorry for the girls; they are not my girls, and not one of them ever will be mine if I can help it----"

"Oh, indeed!"

"They are nothing to me, and I'm nothing to them; but they are just--they are just the formless sort of thing that a formless sort of fellow always marries; they help to fill up the world, you know."

"Yes, they help to fill a world that is overfull already. Poor Mama and Eugene don't know how full it is. When Gene wants to sell a picture and can't, he thinks it's a desert island."

"Probably they could live on a desert island and be perfectly happy and content," said Paul.

"Of course they could; the only trouble would be that unless some one called them at the proper hours they'd forget to eat--and some day they'd be found dead locked in their last embrace."

"How jolly!"

"Oh, very jolly for very young lovers; they are usually such fools!"

"And yet, I believe I'd like to be a fool for love's sake, Miss. Juno."

"Oh, Paul, you are one for your own,--at least I'll think so, if you work yourself into this silly vein!"

Paul was silent and thoughtful. After a pause she continued.

"The trouble with you is, you fancy yourself in love with every new girl you meet--at least with the latest one, if she is at all out of the ordinary line."

"The trouble with me is that I don't keep on loving the same girl long enough to come to the happy climax--if the climax _is_ to be a happy one; of course it doesn't follow that it is to be anything of the sort. I've been brought up in the bosom of too many families to believe in the lasting quality of love. Yet they are happy, you say, those two gentle people perpetuating spring on canvas and cambric. See, there is a small cloud of butterflies hovering about them--one of them is panting in fairy-like ecstasy on the poppy that decorates your Mama's hat!"

Paul rolled a cigarette and offered it to Miss. Juno, in a mild spirit of bravado. To his delight she accepted it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a girl to do. He rolled another and they sat down together in the arbor full of contentment.

"Have you never been in love?" asked Paul suddenly.

"Yes, I suppose so. I was engaged once; you know girls instinctively engage themselves to some one whom they fancy; they imagine themselves in love, and it is a pleasant fallacy. My engagement might have gone on forever, if he had contented himself with a mere engagement. He was a young army officer stationed miles and miles away. We wrote volumes of letters to each other--and they were clever letters; it was rather like a seaside novelette, our love affair. He was lonely, or restless, or something, and pressed his case. Then Mama and Gene--those ideal lovers--put their feet down and would none of it."

"And you?"

"Of course I felt perfectly wretched for a whole week, and imagined myself cruelly abused. You see he was a foreigner, without money; he was heir to a title, but that would have brought him no advantages in the household."

"You recovered. What became of him?"

"I never learned. He seemed to fade away into thin air. I fear I was not very much in love."

"I wonder if all girls are like you--if they forget so easily?"

"You have yourself declared that the majority have neither form nor feature; perhaps they have no feeling. How do men feel about a broken engagement?"

"I can only speak for myself. There was a time when I felt that marriage was the inevitable fate of all respectable people. Some one wanted me to marry a certain some one else. I didn't seem to care much about it; but my friend was one of those natural-born match-makers; she talked the young lady up to me in such a shape that I almost fancied myself in love and actually began to feel that I'd be doing her an injustice if I permitted her to go on loving and longing for the rest of her days. So one day I wrote her a proposal; it was the kind of proposal one might decline without injuring a fellow's feelings in the least--and she did it!" After a thoughtful pause he continued:

"By Jove! But wasn't I immensely relieved when her letter came; such a nice, dear, good letter it was, too, in which she assured me there had evidently been a mistake somewhere, and nothing had been further from her thoughts than the hope of marrying me. So she let me down most beautifully----"

"And offered to be a sister to you?"

"Perhaps; I don't remember now; I always felt embarrassed after that when her name was mentioned. I couldn't help thinking what an infernal ass I'd made of myself."

"It was all the fault of your friend."

"Of course it was; I'd never have dreamed of proposing to her if I hadn't been put up to it by the match-maker. Oh, what a lot of miserable marriages are brought on in just this way! You see when I like a girl ever so much, I seem to like her too well to marry her. I think it would be mean of me to marry her."

"Why?"

"Because--because I'd get tired after a while; everybody does, sooner or later,--everybody save your Mama and Eugene,--and then I'd say something or do something I ought not to say or do, and I'd hate myself for it; or she'd say something or do something that would make me hate her. We might, of course, get over it and be very nice to one another; but we could never be quite the same again. Wounds leave scars, and you can't forget a scar--can you?"

"You may scar too easily!"

"I suppose I do, and that is the very best reason why I should avoid the occasion of one."

"So you have resolved never to marry?"