Chapter XI: Book FOUR: Canaan (1)

“Speak when you’re spoken to!” the Queen sharply interrupted her.

“But if everybody obeyed that rule,” said Alice ... “and if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other person always waited for _you_ to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything....”

XXIII

MY LORD AND EKE MY MASTER

But Gorgas did not hear from Allen Blynn, nor did he send couriers. For nearly a week he permitted himself to be led about by Diccon in the rôle of a “candidate,” growing each day more rebellious, and finally he had decamped. There was one important luncheon “to meet Professor Allen Blynn” which had to get along without its chief guest. The professor had seized his grip and fled. Rumor had it that he had buried himself in the University library, but Gorgas soon discovered that he had been seen under his own shade trees with his young pupils; and there she found him.

He looked older, she noted as she peered cautiously at him through a hedge. And what was that on the end of his chin which waggled as he talked? Mercy! It was the beginnings of a beard! That tuft was certainly the sign of a man absorbed in his affairs or worried beyond peradventure.

For some time she watched him through the hedge--“Getting used to the chin-thing,” she told him later. Howard Croft, the cripple boy, was reading aloud from a portentous history of philosophy; the two seemed to be stopping at every sentence to talk it out. She had rarely seen Allen Blynn so terribly in earnest.

When she finally stepped through the hedge and came up to the studious pair, Allen gave her a nod, as much as to say, “Sit down and pretend to be busy or you’ll frighten this shy bird off.”

For an hour she sketched beards of all nations, from Belshazzarian curls to the latest French twist, adroitly arranging it so that the boy could not see her.

“You like to make folks suffer, Allen Blynn,” Gorgas scolded gently after the boy had gone. “How do you suppose the Leverings have stood all this waiting for you to come over and tell us the latest? I just couldn’t stand it any longer. If I don’t hear all about Holden and other things I’ll blow up. I’m to take you back with me for dinner. The old crowd--some of them--are to drop in. Oh, the papers have told everything, so you needn’t fear.”

And all the time her mirthful eyes were fastened on his chin.

“I cannot talk about it,” his lips closed firmly. “It makes me ill even to think of it. That’s why I have been working on the youngsters so solidly. It’s the only antidote.”

She broke into sudden laughter. “It waggles when you talk.” She imitated by thrusting her own chin up and down grotesquely. “Why--oh, why did you do it?”

“Oh!” he came out of his perplexity. “My Van Dyke? A barber persuaded me. My chin is all bristles, and it was too sensitive for shaving. He fixed it this way, and I have forgotten to remove it.”

“I thought maybe it was penance for sins,” she choked back her laughter.

“Don’t you like it?”

“Yes,” she steadied herself. “I like--anything that’s funny!... Wait.... I thought I was used to it, but I see it’ll take some time.... There! I’ll be good and won’t laugh at the big man. Come!” she tapped him cheerfully on the arm. “Come along with me. We’ve wasted loads of time already.... And trust that crowd for making you forget. When they see that--whisker! oh!” she held her handkerchief to her mouth. “You are _too_ funny, Allen Blynn! They’ll want you to talk all night--to see--it go up and down!”

As they walked along the shaded streets, she ceased joking him, except for an occasional mischievous peer around at the tufted chin. His good humor was equal to hers; but they soon settled into a more serious chat.

The dinner had some of its old-time gaiety and irresponsibility. Morris and Bea Wilcox were at the announcement stage and therefore open to persistent raillery. Diccon was there to keep the topic away from Holden, and Betty and Mary had brought their young husbands. Far in the background, seated like an accustomed idol, Leopold smiled wisely over the whole.

One may be sure that Blynn’s beard was greeted with excess of emotion. Beards were a rarity then; they were restricted by tacit law to dentists, young physicians, returning European tourists, and war veterans.

Almost the only difference between these dinner-parties and the others of five years ago was that they broke up earlier. There were trains to catch; there was the next day’s work; and in some cases there had begun to be babies to go back to. By ten o’clock Allen Blynn was alone with the Leverings.

Everyone had avoided the topic of Holden with obvious premeditation. Diccon had passed the word along to “drop it,” but in the more intimate situation with the Leverings questions were bound to arise.

“Diccon will have to do without me,” Allen spoke up with sudden firmness. “I am a candidate, I suppose; but I refuse to campaign.”

Diccon had managed things with distressing brilliancy. Doubting members of the trustees had to be dined and talked into reason. And they had to be paid.

“Paid?” Kate and Gorgas asked together. Mrs. Levering had elected to keep out of the conversation; her instinctive interest was to pilot the boat, not to take part in the ship’s concert.

“Yes, paid,” nodded Blynn grimly. “Paid in blood.”

“Oh,” the girls gasped in relief. Blood was permitted; money, never.

“Yes,” he explained; “I had to entertain, tell sprightly stories, plunge into theories of education, and act all the while with sweeping smile and glittering eye--and voluble! as Tutivillus himself. And not just to one person or to one group of persons, mind you; but to every Tom, Dick and Harry whom Diccon sicked on me. If they had come in battalions I could have done it, but they came in single file. When Diccon finally started to use me, we had dinners every night and luncheons every day, except one day, when we had two luncheons. Diccon said there was no other way out of it.”

“I wouldn’t have done that for a peck of presidents,” said Gorgas firmly. “I’d have been myself.”

“Myself!” echoed Allen. “Bless my soul! Myself during that whole trip was a silent, sullen, nasty-tongued person. If I had ever let myself out of the box he would have first lambasted the whole crew and then sunk back into a silent scowl. You know how it is. Haven’t you done the same thing when you were the charming hostess?” Blynn appealed to them.

“Oh, yes, indeed,” everyone chorused, including Mrs. Levering.

“There are times,” Kate remembered, “when I am strongly tempted to have fake hysterics in the middle of the dinner, just to drive them home.”

“Exactly!” he nodded firmly. “So I avoided a scene and drove myself home.” And therefore, one day he did not “meet” one fussy little member.

“I just couldn’t stand that fellow,” Blynn grew rigid. “He is a puffy-looking, self-assertive sort of nobody. Everybody knows that he was appointed on the board because he is a relative of a man who has a friend who was able to influence somebody who knew somebody who could get him the appointment--one of those absurd selections that happen every now and then in America, due to the hysteric ambition of some small person, helped out by the easy-going American character. Well, this Nobody presumes to busy himself with the affairs of Holden, talks about it, bothers everybody as if he really had judgment. I couldn’t trust myself near him. If he had got off any of those loud-mouthed advices of his, before others, too, I’d have shut him up with his own history. So I concluded that the best thing I could do for Diccon was to vanish. I came home and locked myself up in the University library and hit on a fine trail--I analyzed pretty much all the ways in which the Elizabethan courtier complimented his lady. There’s little in it for subtle minds, but it will make a splendid popular lecture.”

Then, to avoid what was obviously to him a distressing remembrance, he dropped Holden and its affairs and told them about the gallant Elizabethan gentlemen.

“I wonder what the Elizabethan women thought about all that stuff,” the practical Gorgas summed up.

“It isn’t all stuff,” protested the professor.

“Didn’t the ladies ever reply?” questioned Kate.

“Not a word,” said Allen. “Their silence is profound. Every mother’s son was busy writing sonnets to his mistress’ eyebrow, but the ladies stood pat. The secret of high diplomacy is, Never divulge; keep ’em guessing. And they did!”

“I wish they had written,” Gorgas was thoughtful.

“No doubt they felt things as keenly as the men.... All the men wore beards, I suppose?” she continued irrelevantly.

“Undoubtedly,” Blynn’s mind was rarely personal. The merry face of Gorgas, he did not note at all; nor her attempts, with hand at mouth, to hold back a volume of laughter; nor Kate’s furtive, elderly signal of rebuke to the grinning sister. With eye mostly upon Kate, who was presenting a polite face of assumed interest, the young professor poured forth a dissertation on Elizabethan tonsorial fashions. He was summing up his conclusions when his attention was attracted by a badly suppressed squeak of laughter from Gorgas. “The beard,” he was saying, “was the sign of the gentleman, and the sign of the man. Of course they--what are you grinning at, you Cheshire kitten? Oh! see here, I’ll pluck this thing off tomorrow. I didn’t mean to wear it, anyway. It was forced on me by a villainous barber.”

Everyone protested except Gorgas.

“I think you had better take it off,” she shook her head. “I’ve been bubbling with shut-in laughter all evening. I like fun, but this--is--carrying things a little--too far.” She pushed her laughter back with her handkerchief. “I don’t wonder the Elizabethan ladies didn’t reply. Poems praising men’s eyes and noses and beards! Là! là! _là!_ là! That would be _too_ funny!”

It was a relief to get away from Holden and its small politics. Elizabethan lyrics were such a remove. So he left them in a cheerful mood and promised to come back soon, with his notes, and let them have his amorous studies, that substitute for fussy little trustees.

The next morning his mail brought him an unsigned communication in the sprawling hand of Gorgas Levering. Evidently she had penned it after he had gone the night before. It read:

To My Lord and Eke My Master

Thy beard is waggling in my thoughts, I find,
Oh, lord and master, chosen of my heart;
Thy loving prattle have I heard but part,
The waggling beard distracted all my mind.
And those gray eyes--or are they slightly green?--
I did not see, nor either freckled cheek,
Nor teeth, nor ear, nor bald spot on the peak:
The waggle, waggle, waggle held the scene.

I like thee, master, for thy forehead seared
By crash of pewters foaming to the brink;
I like thee, master, for thy fingers pink
That never once hath honest labor smeared;
I like thee for thy nose’s Roman kink,
But Zooks! I _love_ that waggle, waggle beard.

To which was added,

P.S. But I don’t. I hate it.

XXIV

THE HOLD-UP

Allen Blynn’s smile at breakfast that morning was quite Pestalozzian. The mother looked across at him with much the same seraphic glow, simply reflected.

“Just listen to this from Gorgas, mother. It’s a perfect little bit of satire. Oh, this is rich!” He read with outright joy.

“I like thee, master, for thy fingers pink
That never once hath honest labor smeared;
I like thee for thy nose’s Roman kink,
But Zooks! I _love_ that waggle, waggle beard!”

The mother was keen enough to see the cleverness and as well the poet’s criticism of her son’s tuft of beard.

“It is rather rough, my dear,” she looked over mildly.

“Do you think so?” he was surprised. “That’s remarkably smooth verse, mother. It just flows straight to the point. And the sonnet structure! It’s perfect. I don’t think it a bit rough, mother.”

“I was not considering the verse, my dear,” she managed to say. “Motherlike, I was thinking only of my son’s ornamented chin. It _is_ rather rough and bristly--the chin, not the sonnet. And it does--uh--waggle when you talk, my dear.”

“It goes today, mother,” he eyed the postscript carefully. “I’ve pledged my word.” But his mind went out to the little girl who was ever tossing odd rhymes at him. “I didn’t suspect she could put anything into such shape as this. We’ve been reading a lot of verse together; it has counted; no doubt, it has counted.” The Pestalozzian smile of triumph was still on his face.

“What wonders you have done with Gorgas,” the mother shared his pride.

That brought him down like a shot.

“Nonsense!” he exploded. “She’s the only one of all my children who has baffled me. Everything she has is her own. I try to teach her one thing, she comes forth with something different and unexpected--like this,” flourishing the sonnet. “She picks her own way about. Some children will bloom in spite of teachers; but we teachers have a habit of taking credit for all our smart ones. Did you ever try to stop a dandelion from thriving?”

Another letter of his small packet was not so consoling.

“Schmuhl is in town!” he ejaculated. “Diccon says I must have luncheon with him at the Union League.”

“And pray, who is Schmuhl?”

“A trustee and a big wig,” he explained, but without enthusiasm. “He’s a corporation lawyer; never seems to work; but he does work, like a rat, in the dark. He’s the ‘legislative man’ at Holden. He can do anything with law-makers. He seems thoroughly gentle and harmless. But ... I will not meet him.”

“Why, my dear?” the mother asked.

“I shall resign from Holden College and demand that my name shall not be considered for the presidency,” he went on sternly.

“If it worries you, my dear,” the mother spoke complacently; she had enormous confidence that anything her boy should decide to do would be therefore exactly right.

“Without an atom of proof I sense this Schmuhl. He makes laws--how, I do not know, but I strongly suspect the method. Laws are essential to colleges that depend partly on state appropriations. Therefore I would need Schmuhl. And I decline to need him! It would be a continuous ‘hold-up’ and I decline to be ‘held up’ by the Schmuhls of this world. They call him respectable; I call him infamous, and I refuse to link my life with his!”

Almost abruptly he left for his writing desk. In a short while he was trudging down the street with letters in his hand. He strode forward indignantly, and he dropped the letters in the corner mail box with something of the thrust of a righteous man spurning evil. “Top-o’-the Hill” began to loom up as a blessed certainty.

He strode into a barbershop and had the offending beard removed; and still striding, he went on to the Leverings. On the lawn he met Bardek, Kate, and Gorgas; they had not ceased discussing the fortunes of Allen. “I have resigned from Holden; I will not be a candidate,” he announced bluntly. Briefly he sketched his reasons.

Gorgas and Kate received the news with amazement. Already they had begun to feel some of the pride of their friend’s success. As Bardek had hinted, the “little place” was being called a big name by the world; some of the world’s valuation was slowly changing their own. It would seem almost like a defeat to back out now. They even forgot to notice the absence of the beard.

“It would mean machination and continual intrigue,” Blynn shook his head firmly. “And I’m not the man for that. Good old Galt. Somehow I begin to see his side of the thing. A fine, old sport he was, too; he never ‘peached.’ No matter how hard they ran him he never whimpered. I wonder what he thought of me--a tricky politician, I guess, shouting for ‘the youth of America’ and secretly pulling wires for the presidency. Ugh! What a job!”

“My dear good friend,” Bardek interposed. “This President Galt, I know him; he is good sport, yes; and he twist about and turn and you cannot catch him--yes; I know him. But also! He know you. That is the business of wise old Galts to know peoples. Oh, he know you. From the day he first see you he know you. Your face, it is all on the outside--”

“Gracious! I hope so,” he stroked his face thoughtfully.

“Yes,” Bardek continued. “You will always be that way. You let your thinkings grow right up, so they show in your eyes and around the corners of your mouth. You would never make little diplomat--great statesman? Yes? Perhaps; for you would fool all the little liars and gamblers--they would look on your face and see what is to them an unknown t’ing, the truth. It is vairy confusing to little statesmen--the truth, m’sieu’. When the big Bismarck was in corner he quick tell the truth so’s nobody would believe and all go the wrong way. Sometime, I, too, have tol’ t’ truth.”

“Well, I hope so!” laughed Blynn. “But we’re all forgetting the main business in hand. Top-o’-the-Hill is emerging out of dreamland into reality. Come, Miss Manager, let’s discuss plans. Holden will find my resignation in tomorrow’s mail.”

The plans were even better matured than Blynn had hoped for. Kate had kept at work--“To keep my mind off Petruchio”--she had told him. Mac had already cleaned paths and had made a rough estimate of the building needs. There was much to be done there; but with some outside hired help, and everybody joining in, September should see a school-house prepared for those parents who had courage to trust their children to the experimenters. Blynn’s work was already mapped out on a card. First was the writing of the “prospectus.” He could do that “trick” with the proper sense and style. It wasn’t to be a pedagogical document, but a thriller to win parents over.

Blynn agreed, but insisted upon one further condition. The property must be assessed at a marketable figure and a proper rental paid.

“Trust your manager,” advised Kate. “I don’t intend to give anything away. A stock-company is to be formed, which will buy the land and house. I will take 51 per cent. of the shares as security and to control you reckless ones. The stock-company pays taxes and improvements; but I insist upon the wild rose and all the literary ceremonies.”

“Right!” agreed Allen. “The first wild rose of spring shall be yours; but this is something more than poetry; it is almost my only means of livelihood. I should be needlessly worried if I felt for a single minute that the thing did not pay for itself entirely. I cannot live on your property, Kate.”

“Now, that is vairy strange,” Bardek commented when the matter had been made clear to him. “You cannot take the ol’ house and little earth.”--He said something like “leetle airt,” but it was perfectly clear as he spoke it.--“Oh, no! You would have such shame! But you would take it quick if I be fool and sell it cheap! You cannot take money! But you take rent from poor peoples who cannot pay! And you not take my ol’, good coat which is now too little for me! Ach! you would be beggar! But you take present from me of my best workmanship which give me much labor and a big pain in t’ back! And you take my dinner at my table wit’ no shame at all; and my laughter and all my good talk and my friendliness, which take all my life to make and cost me--everyt’ing! It is strange! As for me--poof!--I have not the shame. When you give and I want, I jus’ take and forget, like wind and rain.”

For the next few days they toiled like slaves on the “property.” They dug, planted, cut weeds, sawed and even plastered. Bardek secured the help of one or two Italians to do the heavy hauling. “Work is good,” he argued, “it is the only medicine; but a broken back, it is not good. The little men of Italy? Ah! They are built so. See how they laugh! I talk to them of Garibaldi and zoop! they carry like demons.”

As they trudged home one weary afternoon, full of exultant hopes, a newspaper fell into their hands. Blynn’s picture had caught Kate’s quick eye. “Blynn, Holden’s Chief,” ran the headlines. It told of a special meeting of the board of trustees, and reviewed Blynn’s history with the accuracy of a fond parent. The vote was 7 to 2.

“Never you mind,” Blynn grew rigid as he turned to his friends. “That won’t go! I told Diccon to withdraw my name; I see he didn’t. It’s all right, Kate. I’ll get out of this somehow. I’ve been to the top of Pisgah; there’ll be no turning back until we reach the Promised Land.”

“Not when I have worked like a coal miner,” implored Bardek. “Who would give me my ol’ back back?--Oof! _wass für eine Sprache!_ What a language!--give a back back! Ho!”

“That’s good business,” Kate nodded her head, satisfied. “I’m glad they elected you. It will boom Top-o’-the-Hill immensely. I’ll have it easy financing this job. The trouble will be to keep the money from swamping us.”

“‘The President of Holden College resigns to become a kindergartner,’” exclaimed Gorgas. “Allen Blynn, that’s _too_ funny. It’s almost as funny as the waggle-waggle beard!”

“You minx!” he shook a finger at her. “Are you cogitating another sonnet?”

“I _may_ get on my poet-bonnet!” she smiled at him.

XXV

DAGO

At the suggestion of Gorgas, Leopold became a member of the staff of “Top-o’-the-Hill.” Of all the old group that used to make rendezvous of the Levering house, Leopold and Blynn were the only two who kept up the relationship; but both men were rather intermittent visitors. Leopold--everyone said “Leopold,” possibly because of the impossible surname, Hayim--called punctiliously upon Mrs. Levering, although Mrs. Levering saw little of him. Gorgas and he spent the time exercising their French. He was a silent, grave man, with a far-off friendly smile; and, once enticed, he could talk out of a rare life. On festival occasions he could always be counted upon for a plaintive song.

“Leopold will do the science, you know,” Gorgas explained. “I have talked it over with him. You should have seen his fine eyes sparkle! He’s got heaps of money, you know; we’ll make him treasurer. Besides, he’s English. That will give _such_ a tone!”

What a varied group it was! At night they drew up the staff as it would be printed in the “prospectus.” The list of names and qualifications was almost formidable when one considered how informal and unregulated all their teaching hoped to be; and in that list they stumbled over the name of Bardek. He would never admit any other names. “Jus’ Bardek,” he would say. “Why have more than one name? Even one is hard to remember.” Here is the first faculty of “Top-o’-the-Hill,” that prototype of the “new schools” which were soon to spring up all over America:

IN CHARGE:

MR. ALLEN BLYNN
Holden and Jena

MISS KEYSER LEVERING
The Warren School

ASSOCIATES:

MR. HAYIM LEOPOLD
Harrow and Cambridge

MR. BARDEK
Naples and Bordeaux

MISS GORGAS LEVERING
School of Applied Arts

“It sounds so learned,” Allen looked on ruefully. “We oughtn’t to print it.”

“It ought to sound learned,” said Kate.

“But we are to deal with young life, not learning,” he reminded her.

“We’ll do all of that,” she assured him. “This list of names is just advertising. No one will question us after they see all our vast qualifications; they won’t even inquire if we have them. This,” tapping the sheet, “will bring us more paying pupils than any other page in the pamphlet. I know these people. ‘Jena,’ ‘Bordeaux,’ ‘Harrow,’ ‘Cambridge’--why, that’s as good as paying dividends already. You watch.”

“When you go fishing, my friend,” Bardek’s eyes twinkled, “it would be big fool if you not put on the dying worm or the already dead insect. Of _course_,” spreading his hands, “you might say to the fish, ‘Come, jump on my hook; it won’t hurt you any worse jus’ because the dead insect is not there. Come; quick; get it over.’ Ah! no! The fish are too wise.

“Titles and degrees and all that,” Bardek went on, “they are vairy great power. We see little men wit’ big decorations, and we come to them and ask questions, and prod them with the stick of our minds, and we turn them round and round and open their mouths and look down their throats. How we tremble! At any minute dese great man may say some wise thing! And you stay and stay for hundert t’ousand years and he say, nothing--nothing that you don’t know when you were small boy. ‘It look like rain,’ maybe he say after two, t’ree thousand years. But the world! Ah! It walks in a great wide circle and will not come near the great man. Mystery! Mystery! They are afraid of his wisdom. It will strike them dead, like lightning. So they send their children to him.

“And the children! First they are afraid--they believe then all the papa and mamma has tol’ dem. Then they find he don’t know what happened in the world day before it was yesterday. And soon they laugh. Then he grow red in face and scold; and then because they have pains of laughter they stop. And all their days they meet ol’ school friend and they sit and drink and eat and laugh at that ol’ fool who did not know what happens the day before it was yesterday.

“And t’en t’ey send _dere_ children to him and make beeg stories how great is that man!

“Oh, put the dead insect on the hook, my friend: or there will be no little pupils and we will be so hungry to teach t’at we fall on each other and teach.”

It was precisely as Kate had predicted. She seemed to know exactly where to drop her printed bait. By August she had closed the doors and had engineered a waiting list, for they were resolved the first year to begin with small numbers.

“We’ll pay you your wages and have something besides for improvements,” she announced to Blynn.

Of all that enthusiastic lot of teachers he was the only one who could not afford to give his time without salary. It hurt him to take that money, but his good sense showed him that there was no other way out. It was shame of the sort that Bardek thought so strange, and it must be downed. He reflected with some grimness that while the others were giving energy, joy, and enthusiasm to the work, he was offering all that and something much harder to give, his pride as an independent man.

To no one he spoke of this. In spite of his innocence and in spite of the face which, as Bardek claimed, he wore for the most part “on the outside,” Blynn could mask a hundred worries back of his Pestalozzian smile. Yet Gorgas knew. She had pieced together his jests and his half-uttered opinions.

They had worked all day together on a baseball diamond and were celebrating the conclusion by a picnic supper on the grounds of “Top-o’-the-Hill.”

“Mein guter Kamarade,” she whispered, “you mustn’t feel bad about that fool salary.”

“Oh, I don’t,” he smiled.

“Yes, you do,” she nodded wisely. “I’m onto your curves, old chap. I’ll just have to talk to you like a Dutch uncle. I’ve a scheme, too; better than anything Kate gets off. _Now_--mustn’t it be grand?”

“Phew!” he affected seriousness. “It must be a corker. Let’s hear it.”

“Here? Wouldn’t that be funny,” she asked herself aloud. “Wouldn’t that be _too_ funny!” The idea amused her. “Oh, no, _mon capitaine_, not here before all these folks. It’s--it’s private. Yes,” she mused, “it’s quite private.... You must let me have an interview. I’ve been trying to have one with you ever since June.”

“Why, my dear child!” he was surprised. “We’ve been together nearly every blessed day, taken walks together and all that!”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “I’ve tried to say it--and couldn’t. But I’m going to dive in soon. That’s what I came to your house for, in June; you remember when you were teaching the Croft boy? If he hadn’t been there I’d have done it then. Hush!” she raised a finger. “They’re coming back. Not a word.... It’s partly about _him_.” She nudged toward Leopold.

That was an exasperating way to end a conversation, characteristic of Gorgas--just like an exciting continuous story. “It’s partly about _him_.” About Leopold?

Leopold had never ceased his subtle interest in Gorgas since the night of their first conversation in French. He was both French and English, and, back of that, the Oriental. He seemed ever ready to do two contradictory things; to leap into the breach and seize the enemy by the throat, or to stand, courageous as the day, and undisturbed take every shock. One of these--the French or the English--might have won out and given him a positive emotional character, but the persistent Hebrew, trained to keep emotions in check, to pass them in review before hard, good sense, held the two contrary horses together and dominated from the driver’s seat. One needs a mixed metaphor to describe Leopold.

There was much more to Leopold than that--what forked, straddling biped can be summed up in a phrase?--he had the smile of compassion and the hovering sadness of those who have looked upon the world from afar off, who have travelled sympathetically among peoples and have seen the splendid futility of the life effort.

It was generally believed that Leopold was rich. He admitted a competence, but his life was simple. Ah! Blynn had a swift thought of comprehension. Leopold was to furnish the salary! That was it. Wise little Gorgas had thought to dissipate a man’s pride in being self-supporting by shifting the source of income from a stock-company to a person! Women will never understand that side of man, he mused; the fierce hatred of leaning upon another. In illness women are meek and saintly; when men become sick and incapacitated they grow unbearable, their maimed spirits cry out against the very charity that would make them whole. Women live in dependence without shame. They take furs and carriages and spending money from their fathers. Even a boy of sixteen begins to rebel. He cannot take things, even from fathers; he must earn.

Over the sprightly little fire Blynn told them of Diccon.

“You know how mean I felt because I had to leave him in the lurch,” he said. “Well! Diccon was just fine about it. He said he suspected that turn of affairs all along and had prepared for it.

“What a loyal chap that Diccon is! He said his only interest was in having the post officially tendered me; he really didn’t care what I did with it. He said just what you remarked the other day, that the election would make my name valuable anywhere else I went. I told him about ‘Top-o’-the-Hill.’ He said, ‘Bully! It’ll be a great go. Put me on the trustees, will you?’”

“Let’s!” suggested Gorgas. “I like Diccon. He’s got sense. We haven’t.”

“What!” they shouted.

“We’re dreaming,” she nodded wisely. “We need his kind to prevent us soaring right up in the air like a balloon and--”

“And go bust, eh?” continued Bardek.

“Just that,” said Gorgas. “We need ballast badly.”

They could hardly eat, these dreamers, until the new idea had been incorporated. A board of advisers was drawn up to give ballast: it included Diccon, and the rector of Grace Church, the butter-and-egg man, others of the tennis-court group, and three influential “mothers.”

“We’ll get out a second edition of the prospectus,” Kate smiled her satisfaction. “That front page will look slick! We’ll charge ’em two hundred next year.”

Bardek brought the Italian laborers to the picnic supper. They demurred mightily at first, but Gorgas won them by a neat speech of invitation in Italian. How their eyes glistened, not for the good things to eat, although that must have touched them, but for the sound of that rich Italian speech.

“They are so hungry for words,” laughed Bardek; “the sound of your own language in a strange land--ah! that is sweet. One day I pass an ol’ woman wit’ bundle of sticks and she say, ‘Dam t’ose t’ings; t’ey won’t stay on my ol’ head’; but she say it in Czech, the clicking-clacking Czech which my mother spoke to me.” He burst into a strange rattle of exclamations. “That is the sweet Czech, my friends. It sounds not so sweet to you, eh? No? Your ear it is not right. Suppose you was in the middle of China and could never go to your home and, quick, you hear little children wit’ high American voice sing in the evening,

‘Here we go ’round the mulberry bush,
Mulberry bush, mulberry bush,
Here we go ’round the mulberry bush,
So early in the morning.’

“Ach! Gott, would you not cry?

“I did cry and hug that ol’ woman and tell her in her own Czech that I be long-gone son. And she believe me! I make her say, ‘Dam t’ose sticks,’ five, ten times and give her silver dollar for each time she speak. Ach! if she do not go mad after that! Somewhere in America is a crazy woman, all her life-time singing and shouting, ‘Dam t’ose sticks!’”

“We’ve caught you at last, Bardek,” Gorgas cried. “You are Czech! That’s what you are!”

“Oh, no!” he protested. “I am cosmopolitan. My mother, she was Czech when I was boy; but before t’at she was many t’ings; and after, many t’ings. I am cosmopolitan,” he claimed again. To Leopold and to Gorgas he spoke in French, to Blynn he made his remarks in German, and to the Italians he talked in their own tongue. The very _timbre_ and rhythm of his voice changed with each language; he had the music of each in his head.

“Ask Caproni, here,” he boasted, “if I am not Italian.”

Gorgas inquired in their language.

“Him?” their eyes opened in surprise at the question. “Oh, but, yes, milady. He is grand signor, Italian gentleman. He has lived in Milan, Napoli, everywhere, even in our own Sicily. Italian? Oh, but yes. French? You would make fun, milady? He speak French as we in Sicily speak French; ah! he talk Italian from the heart.”

While Gorgas translated, Bardek sat transfigured.

“You see!” he shook his great, round head in pride.

“And I would take oath you are French,” Leopold remarked quietly. “You have tones and nuances of the Loire--”

“Oh, yes, I have lived on the Loire,” he admitted, “and also in Brittany.” For example, he shifted back and forth between the patois of the north and south of France.

“I say again that I am cosmopolitan,” he averred. “The Bohemian belongs to all countries. In New York city is a Bohemia which New York city does not know. There we talk all languages and listen to the pulses of the world. New York is a little place, full of the small thinkings of little places. It has great pride and wonderful industry--just like little places--but of the doings of the great world, it knows everything too late. Long before the big wars the Bohemia of New York city knows what is to be, and prepares; one day New York city wake up and scream the stale news. So wit’ everyt’ing.

“But I should not so talk,” he shook his head sadly. “I am no longer cosmopolitan.”

They tried for some time to get him to tell them why. At first he would not speak. Sadness enveloped him. After a while he laughed.

“I am not sorry; it is good,” he said, with characteristic optimism. “In America one cannot be cosmopolitan, I see. America is too strong, it sucks t’ blood out. In Europe I could change my skin and still be--deep--myself, Bardek, Citizen of No Place. Always I could be French and still look on like foreign; or German or Dutch or Spanish or Polish or Italian or anyt’ing. Jus’ so I be in America for long time. Zen somet’ing happen to me. I eat poison grass, or somet’ing. My skin, it does not change; it gets tough.

“Sometimes when I talk French or Italian to my boys or to Miss Gorgas, I must stop and t’ink for the word. Me, Bardek, stop to think! It is terrible, my friend, to have big things bubbling inside and no word at the mout’! And always the English word, it come. And such English! Ach! My boys, dey laugh and make fun--when they t’ink I do not look--and they say, ‘Dago.’ Oof! Sometimes I beat t’em in six languages; but, sometimes, too, I laugh.... ‘Dago!’ It is so.”

A chorus of protests told him how well he spoke English.

Leopold scolded him for his desponding. “It is thinking that counts, my dear Bardek,” he said, “not words. Greek is a wonderful language, but without Plato or Homer and Aesculus or Sophocles and Aristophanes, it would be a dead instrument. You _think_, my dear Bardek. If you spoke in Pennsylvania-Dutch you would be worth listening to.”

“And your English is better than English,” spoke up the loyal Gorgas. “It is softer and lovelier and beautifully strange.”

“Thank you,” he smiled. “I like you to say zat. A good lie, you owe it to a friend, to make him happy. What! You laugh? But it is not sin to lie. You do not read your Bible, my friend. To kill? steal? yes. To bear false witness? yes. But the good Moses was too wise to say, ‘Thou shalt not lie.’... Yet I am ‘Dago,’ jus’ like dese Italian ol’ men.

“Oh, I know; it is right,” he continued. “The Italian, oh, he will come to America and he say, ‘I will live like pig and make much money and go back to my country and live like prince. Yah! He stay wit’ his own people and talk, talk, talk his own speech. He laugh at funny Americans. Yah! Soon he must hide his fine clothes of colors and put on grease-pants and ol’ hat. It is not good to make money when peoples laugh. Yah! And zen he must learn little English, and he speak ‘Dago,’ jus’ like me. Or how can he make the much money, eh? Yah! To his little boys and girls he talk ze good language of his own land; but zey? Ach! Zey will not. In ze house, yes; so not to get ze beatings. But in ze street, là! là! _là!_ là! Gabble, gabble, gabble. Some day zey make fun of daddy and wink and say, ‘Dago!’

“And he is ‘Dago.’ Soon he find himself talking ‘Dago’ in house, even wit’ his wife. Once he fight and beat her and all cry curses--in his own speech? Ah, no; in ‘Dago.’ He call her ‘Dam dog’ and she say to him ‘Go t’ ’ell!’ and zen he is done. His skin cannot change. All his life he is not’ing--he is American.”

It was the strong America seizing on the immigrant and twisting him into a new mold. The children would be Americans, but the old ones, they were wrecked in the process. The Germans became “Dutchmen”; the Irish became “Micks”; the Poles became “Hunkies,” and the Italians “Dagos.”

“But sometimes they go back,” ventured Blynn.

Bardek laughed at the picture his mind conjured.

“Oh, yes, they go back. Là! là! _là!_ là! What a comic! The people of their own land rush out of t’ house to see t’ funny t’ing. Là! là! _là!_ là! The dead clot’es of ragman! The gol’ watch-chain for t’ tie big dog! Zen they talk! It is no language. Perhaps they stay to be comic all their lives? Ah, no. For they get sick for America, where the little boys and girls go to school. They do not rest till zey go back and be once more ‘Dago.’”

The twilight came slowly about them while they lingered over the camp-fire. Some of Bardek’s brooding spirit had infected them; but it did not drive them home. Night began to make its claims for a habitation, and the stars of a fine August evening shone clear, yet they stayed to hear Leopold talk of his boyhood days at Harrow. Finally they joined hands with him and formed the circle about the ebbing fire--as Harrow “old boys” have done for generations--while they sang the Harrow parting song:

Forty year on, when afar and asunder
Parted are those who are singing today,
When you look back, and forgetfully wonder
What you were like in your work and your play;
Then it may be, there will often come o’er you
Glimpses of notes, like the catch of a song--
Visions of boyhood shall float them before you,
Echoes of dreamland shall bear them along.
Follow up! Follow up! Follow up!
Till the field ring again and again
With the tramp of the twenty-two men.
Follow up! Follow up!

XXVI

THE BIOLOGIST AND THE PURITAN

The solemnity of the parting song had driven Bardek off alone. Allen and Kate walked along ahead, but at the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks, a dark, forbidding place, Allen insisted upon stopping to wait for Gorgas and Leopold, who were straggling far in the rear. Fumbling accidentally in his pockets, Blynn produced his morning mail, two letters, still unopened. They moved up to the lights of the station to see what it would disclose. One was from Gorgas--she had a habit of jotting notes to persons she met every day. He glanced at it hurriedly, but in the bad light did not catch the full meaning. The other letter set him dancing.

“Can you spare me for the remainder of the month, Madam Manager, and part of September?” he asked. His eyes showed good news.

“Is it money?” the practical manager asked first.

“Bushels!” he cried. “Diccon has booked a series of lectures in a string of cities,” he read, “Rochester, Ithaca, Albany, Providence and Boston. I cover the route three times, fifteen lectures in five weeks, at--what do you think? One hundred dollars each and expenses!”

“How much is that altogether?” Kate was figuring.

“I don’t know. I’m so excited, I can’t count. One hundred apiece--child’s play! I’ve got ’em all done. Isn’t it great! and isn’t it robbery! ‘Each local center pays three hundred dollars,’ he read, ‘and expenses, which makes it one hundred dollars per lecture. I hope this is not too slight an honorarium.’ Golly! Too slight? Let me confess something, Kate. I don’t take any pennies out of the cash-drawer of Top-o’-the-Hill. By George! you don’t know how splendid I feel to be able to face those children like a man. That ‘salary’--oh, you were managing it beautifully, I know--but that ‘salary’ was choking me, even before I got any. I’m glad that’s all over and settled.”

* * * * *

They were strolling toward home through the wooded Seminary grounds, on which site once stood the old “Classical and Military Lyceum,” where Beauregarde, Meade and many another Northern and Southern officer received preliminary training. Over these same grounds, in 1777, came Sullivan’s men, driving the British advance post before them; and a little later, on that October morning, General Washington rode down the “Great Road” with his eager staff.

“I dug a cannon-ball out of my garden the other day,” Allen remarked abruptly. The thrill of the evening was upon them and they had had no need for speech; but if the man would talk, Kate would tuck her hand in his arm and be content. “A little round, rusty thing, about as big as your fist--it made me a little more reverent toward this old battleground.... The Continentals came up out of the fog over there,” he pointed earnestly, although it was almost too dark to see him, “surprised the pickets in the Allen House and bayoneted every one--poor devils!... They swept on over this ground, firing from behind trees, for the Fifty-second British Light Infantry, who were tenting over there in the fields beyond the New Street, were stirring out like hornets--and such a bugling and banging there must have been!... The Fifty-second put up a running fight and weren’t able to make a stand for nearly a mile.... Think of it! Washington himself followed right after Sullivan’s men--perhaps he rode over this very spot!... Doesn’t it excite you?”

“Not a bit, Sentimental Sir,” she laughed coolly.

“You are standing, mebbe, on historic spots, madam!” he mocked her laughter with assumed sternness. “That battle came near to deciding everything--think of the historic persons who struggled here--Washington and Wayne, and Lafayette, and--and--”

“And me,” she helped.

“Since when have you become an historic person, madam?”

“‘On this spot,’” she quoted an imaginary stone, “‘one wonderful evening late in August in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-two, stood Keyser Levering, familiarly known as Kate, with her arm linked comfortably in that of a poetic but pleasant person otherwise unknown.’... Washington and Lafayette were nice boys,” said she, “and that battle was their fun, but standing here very much alive and living my little life is all the history I’ll ever have; so I’ve got to make the most of it.... Sentimental Sir, aren’t you going to get all worked up over historic me, standing here?--or do I have to be dead before it is proper to become really stirred?”

She waited expectantly. Kate had told her story to this man in as many veiled ways as is permitted to a lady; but each time he had looked at her earnestly, as if she had propounded a serious riddle. And always it amused her--at least she smiled gamely--to see how really obtuse this clever man could be. This time, in the darkening night, she could not see his eyes as he bent forward; but she felt his arm tighten and the brotherly pat of his hand upon her own.

“You’re all right, Kate,” he said; and then, “Good old Kate!” which he repeated with great satisfaction. A second later, he asked irrelevantly, “Where are those children?” meaning Gorgas and Leopold.

They peered fruitlessly into the darkness, and even retraced their steps a part of the way down the Valley, but there was no sign of them.

“They have felt the spell of the evening and have tracked off,” Kate suggested. “Didn’t Leopold do that song well? ‘Forty year on when afar and asunder,’” she sang. “It gave me a thrill, I tell you.”

“Me, too,” Blynn pressed his lips together. “And how he felt it! Did you see him straining to keep the tears back? Think what it meant to him, that old parting song of Harrow!”

The floating melody and the words of the song lingered. By association, the thought of Gorgas came into their minds.

“They’ll be home before us,” Kate spoke out. “While we’ve been dawdling along they have probably taken some short cut. It may be Gorgas has dragged Leopold on one of her ‘bee-lines.’”

“Well, well!” Blynn laughed. “At night, too. Gorgas claims that’s to be one of the studies in Top-o’-the-Hill. ‘Cut a straight path,’ she says, ‘like a bee, only bee-ier:

‘Through bush, through briar,
Ice, rain, water, fire;
Over river, up tree,
Bee-ier than a flying bee,
Through hedge and over gate,
Straight! straight! straight! straight!’

“She goes up one side of a tree and down the other like a squirrel! I was on one last Wednesday. Phew! She chose a southeast ‘bee-line’ and insisted upon fording the Schuylkill river, clothes and all! She said her conscience wouldn’t let her back out. I just had to follow to keep her from mischief.”

They were not at home, however, when Kate and Allen arrived, nor did they come in for hours after. Then Gorgas walked in alone. She was rather disheveled. With only a slight word of greeting, she went up the stairs as if she were tired out.

“Another ‘bee-line,’ Gorgas?” Blynn asked cheerfully.

She stopped on the landing and looked back at him.

“You bet!” she nodded almost angrily and moved swiftly up the stairs.

“What is a ‘bee-line’?” Leopold, at the doorway, asked quietly. He was spick and orderly as ever, save that his tie was completely off its moorings and hanging over his left shoulder.

Blynn explained, quoting the verses of the game, and joked about the tell-tale tie.

“Ah!” Leopold adjusted the cravat thoughtfully. “She did not give a name to it.”

* * * * *

That night Blynn and Leopold walked home together. They talked of Gorgas as if the theme had been set in advance. She came abruptly into their conversation, but so intent was each upon his own thought that neither considered the need of apology or explanation. Without introduction, Leopold began:

“She is beautifully unschooled. It is a rare thing nowadays to meet a natural woman--and with the beginnings of a mind.”

“Sometimes,” Blynn pondered as he talked, “I have taken pride in having shaped that mind of hers. But--she is herself, and would have been herself without any help or hindrance from me.”

“You have done much for her,” Leopold protested.

“Nonsense!”

“Much! I recognize it. Some of your Puritan conscience is in her.”

“How do you make that out?”

Leopold pondered in turn. “Tonight she--and on other nights, too--she--but I can’t give illustrations.”

Blynn looked at him. “I think I understand,” he brightened up. “She is just naturally moral.”

Leopold laughed quietly. “Moral! What a wretched word!”

“Oh, I don’t mean--”

“Don’t explain, friend Allen. I know you don’t mean the little prudential codes of playing safe and getting on in life. You mean that she has principles of conduct which she has thought out--”

“No,” explained Blynn. “I don’t mean that at all. She has principles of conduct, all right, but they are not thought out; they are instinctive. She plays fair by instinct; she couldn’t want to take advantage: not because she has reasoned the thing out, but because--because she just knows it isn’t the square thing to do. And then she has a powerful lot of self-respect without a trace of vanity. She--”

The two men interrupted each other continually. That was their method--tossing the idea back and forth.

“Yes,” Leopold took it up, “she fights reason without any reason at all, and won’t let herself go. She admits things with delicious candor; she has wants and owns up to them, but she won’t let herself satisfy them. She knows her instincts, but she holds them down.”

“Good!” Blynn commented. “She has character. Control--that’s the whole of character. But we’re talking very vaguely. Wants! Instincts! What sort? They may be friends or enemies.”

“Ha!” Leopold interjected gleefully. “That’s her very phrase! I can see your coaching there, old boy! And you’ve done a good job--so far.”

“I’m glad,” said Blynn simply. The thoughts of the two men were on totally different levels. For over an hour that night off in Cresheim Valley, Leopold had been matching his instincts against that very control which meant in Gorgas, character. All the rushing events of that tremulous night were in his mind as he talked; but Blynn, characteristically, considered only the general application of his theory. “I’m glad,” he went on. “I wasn’t sure. Her mother is practically useless to her--so is her sister, for that matter. I have planted a few seed-ideas, that is all. If they’ve rooted, I’m glad. But, gracious me! She’s had no chance to test herself. That may come; but it will be later, when she’s older and better able to be her own master. She’s quite sheltered here. No one will bother her here. What--”

Blynn stopped speaking. A self-satisfied exclamation from Leopold arrested his thinking. Some of his own dormant instincts began to tug at his mind--suspicion, among others and a swift, unreasoned touch of jealousy; but he checked himself and went on. “Of course, I have been able to do very little. A man must generalize, he must--”

“She understood all your generalizations,” Leopold interrupted.

“Did she say--but--how could you know?”

“She told me.”

“Told you what?”

“Well, among other things, she told me your story of the pale wanderer who turned a whole city full of people into lepers. Ugh! That was an ugly dose! It got into her, somehow, and sickened her. It has made her afraid to let go. Leper! Ugh! How could you?”