Chapter XII: Introduction (11)

Well, we just stood around and watched the different games for two or three days and finally I set down in a checker game with a man named Weaver from Danville, Illinois. He was a pretty fair checker player, but he wasn’t no match for me, and I hope that don’t sound like bragging. But I always could hold my own on a checkerboard and the folks around here will tell you the same thing. I played with this Weaver pretty near all morning for two or three mornings and he beat me one game and the only other time it looked like he had a chance, the noon whistle blowed and we had to quit and go to dinner.

While I was playing checkers, Mother would set and listen to the band, as she loves music, classical or no matter what kind, but anyway she was setting there one day and between selections the woman next to her opened up a conversation. She was a woman about Mother’s own age, seventy or seventy-one, and finally she asked Mother’s name and Mother told her her name and where she was from and Mother asked her the same question, and who do you think the woman was?

Well, sir, it was the wife of Frank M. Hartsell, the man who was engaged to Mother till I stepped in and cut him out, fifty-two years ago!

Yes, sir!

You can imagine Mother’s surprise! And Mrs. Hartsell was surprised, too, when Mother told her she had once been friends with her husband, though Mother didn’t say how close friends they had been, or that Mother and I was the cause of Hartsell going out West. But that’s what we was. Hartsell left his town a month after the engagement was broke off and ain’t never been back since. He had went out to Michigan and become a veterinary, and that is where he had settled down, in Hillsdale, Michigan, and finally married his wife.

Well, Mother screwed up her courage to ask if Frank was still living and Mrs. Hartsell took her over to where they was pitching horseshoes and there was old Frank, waiting his turn. And he knowed Mother as soon as he seen her, though it was over fifty years. He said he knowed her by her eyes.

“Why, it’s Lucy Frost!” he says, and he throwed down his shoes and quit the game.

Then they come over and hunted me up and I will confess I wouldn’t of knowed him. Him and I is the same age to the month, but he seems to show it more, some way. He is balder for one thing. And his beard is all white, where mine has still got a streak of brown in it. The very first thing I said to him, I said:

“Well, Frank, that beard of yours makes me feel like I was back north. It looks like a regular blizzard.”

“Well,” he said, “I guess yourn would be just as white if you had it dry cleaned.”

But Mother wouldn’t stand that.

“Is that so!” she said to Frank. “Well, Charley ain’t had no tobacco in his mouth for over ten years!”

And I ain’t!

Well, I excused myself from the checker game and it was pretty close to noon, so we decided to all have dinner together and they was nothing for it only we must try their cafeteria on Third Avenue. It was a little more expensive than ours and not near as good, I thought. I and Mother had about the same dinner we had been having every day and our bill was $1.10. Frank’s check was $1.20 for he and his wife. The same meal wouldn’t of cost them more than a dollar at our place.

After dinner we made them come up to our house and we all set in the parlor, which the young woman had give us the use of to entertain company. We begun talking over old times and Mother said she was a-scared Mrs. Hartsell would find it tiresome listening to we three talk over old times, but as it turned out they wasn’t much chance for nobody else to talk with Mrs. Hartsell in the company. I have heard lots of women that could go it, but Hartsell’s wife takes the cake of all the women I ever seen. She told us the family history of everybody in the State of Michigan and bragged for a half hour about her son, who she said is in the drug business in Grand Rapids, and a Rotarian.

When I and Hartsell could get a word in edgeways we joked one another back and forth and I chafed him about being a horse doctor.

“Well, Frank,” I said, “you look pretty prosperous, so I suppose they’s been plenty of glanders around Hillsdale.”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve managed to make more than a fair living. But I’ve worked pretty hard.”

“Yes,” I said, “and I suppose you get called out all hours of the night to attend births and so on.”

Mother made me shut up.

Well, I thought they wouldn’t never go home and I and Mother was in misery trying to keep awake, as the both of us generally always takes a nap after dinner. Finally they went, after we had made an engagement to meet them in the Park the next morning, and Mrs. Hartsell also invited us to come to their place the next night and play five hundred. But she had forgot that they was a meeting of the Michigan Society that evening, so it was not till two evenings later that we had our first card game.

Hartsell and his wife lived in a house on Third Avenue North and had a private setting room besides their bedroom. Mrs. Hartsell couldn’t quit talking about their private setting room like it was something wonderful. We played cards with them, with Mother and Hartsell partners against his wife and I. Mrs. Hartsell is a miserable card player and we certainly got the worst of it.

After the game she brought out a dish of oranges and we had to pretend it was just what we wanted, though oranges down there is like a young man’s whiskers; you enjoy them at first, but they get to be a pesky nuisance.

We played cards again the next night at our place with the same partners and I and Mrs. Hartsell was beat again. Mother and Hartsell was full of compliments for each other on what a good team they made, but the both of them knowed well enough where the secret of their success laid. I guess all and all we must of played ten different evenings and they was only one night when Mrs. Hartsell and I come out ahead. And that one night wasn’t no fault of hern.

When we had been down there about two weeks, we spent one evening as their guest in the Congregational Church, at a social give by the Michigan Society. A talk was made by a man named Bitting of Detroit, Michigan, on How I was Cured of Story Telling. He is a big man in the Rotarians and give a witty talk.

A woman named Mrs. Oxford rendered some selections which Mrs. Hartsell said was grand opera music, but whatever they was my daughter Edie could of give her cards and spades and not made such a hullaballoo about it neither.

Then they was a ventriloquist from Grand Rapids and a young woman about forty-five years of age that mimicked different kinds of birds. I whispered to Mother that they all sounded like a chicken, but she nudged me to shut up.

After the show we stopped in a drug store and I set up the refreshments and it was pretty close to ten o’clock before we finally turned in. Mother and I would of preferred tending the movies, but Mother said we mustn’t offend Mrs. Hartsell, though I asked her had we came to Florida to enjoy ourselves or to just not offend an old chatterbox from Michigan.

I felt sorry for Hartsell one morning. The women folks both had an engagement down to the chiropodist’s and I run across Hartsell in the Park and he foolishly offered to play me checkers.

It was him that suggested it, not me, and I guess he repented himself before we had played one game. But he was too stubborn to give up and set there while I beat him game after game and the worst part of it was that a crowd of folks had got in the habit of watching me play and there they all was, looking on, and finally they seen what a fool Frank was making of himself, and they began to chafe him and pass remarks. Like one of them said:

“Who ever told you you was a checker player!”

And:

“You might maybe be good for tiddle-de-winks, but not checkers!”

I almost felt like letting him beat me a couple games. But the crowd would of knowed it was a put up job.

Well, the women folks joined us in the Park and I wasn’t going to mention our little game, but Hartsell told about it himself and admitted he wasn’t no match for me.

“Well,” said Mrs. Hartsell, “checkers ain’t much of a game anyway, is it?” She said: “It’s more of a children’s game, ain’t it? At least, I know my boy’s children used to play it a good deal.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “It’s a children’s game the way your husband plays it, too.”

Mother wanted to smooth things over, so she said:

“Maybe they’s other games where Frank can beat you.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hartsell, “and I bet he could beat you pitching horse-shoes.”

“Well,” I said, “I would give him a chance to try, only I ain’t pitched a shoe in over sixteen years.”

“Well,” said Hartsell, “I ain’t played checkers in twenty years.”

“You ain’t never played it,” I said.

“Anyway,” says Frank, “Lucy and I is your master at five hundred.”

Well, I could of told him why that was, but had decency enough to hold my tongue.

It had got so now that he wanted to play cards every night and when I or Mother wanted to go to a movie, why one of us would have to pretend we had a headache and then trust to goodness that they wouldn’t see us sneak into the theater. I don’t mind playing cards when my partner keeps their mind on the game, but you take a woman like Hartsell’s wife and how can they play cards when they have got to stop every couple seconds and brag about their son in Grand Rapids?

Well, the New York-New Jersey Society announced that they was going to give a social evening too and I said to Mother, I said:

“Well, that is one evening when we will have an excuse not to play five hundred.”

“Yes,” she said, “but we will have to ask Frank and his wife to go to the social with us as they asked us to go to the Michigan social.”

“Well,” I said, “I had rather stay home than drag that chatterbox everywheres we go.”

So Mother said:

“You are getting too cranky. Maybe she does talk a little too much but she is good hearted. And Frank is always good company.”

So I said:

“I suppose if he is such good company you wished you had of married him.”

Mother laughed and said I sounded like I was jealous. Jealous of a cow doctor!

Anyway we had to drag them along to the social and I will say that we give them a much better entertainment than they had given us.

Judge Lane of Paterson made a fine talk on business conditions and a Mrs. Newell of Westfield imitated birds, only you could really tell what they was the way she done it. Two young women from Red Bank sung a choral selection and we clapped them back and they gave us Home to Our Mountains and Mother and Mrs. Hartsell both had tears in their eyes. And Hartsell, too.

Well, some way or another the chairman got wind that I was there and asked me to make a talk and I wasn’t even going to get up, but Mother made me, so I got up and said:

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “I didn’t expect to be called on for a speech on an occasion like this or no other occasion as I do not set myself up as a speech maker, so will have to do the best I can, which I often say is the best anybody can do.”

Then I told them the story about Pat and the motorcycle, using the brogue, and it seemed to tickle them and I told them one or two other stories, but altogether I wasn’t on my feet more than twenty or twenty-five minutes and you ought to of heard the clapping and hollering when I set down. Even Mrs. Hartsell admitted that I am quite a speechifier and said if I ever went to Grand Rapids, Michigan, her son would make me talk to the Rotarians.

When it was over, Hartsell wanted we should go to their place and play cards, but his wife reminded him that it was after 9.30 P. M., rather a late hour to start a card game, but he had went crazy on the subject of cards, probably because he didn’t have to play partners with his wife. Anyway, we got rid of them and went home to bed.

It was the next morning, when we met over to the Park, that Mrs. Hartsell made the remark that she wasn’t getting no exercise so I suggested that why didn’t she take part in the roque game.

She said she had not played a game of roque in twenty years, but if Mother would play she would play. Well, at first Mother wouldn’t hear of it, but finally consented, more to please Mrs. Hartsell than anything else.

Well, they had a game with a Mrs. Ryan from Eagle, Nebraska, and a young Mrs. Morse from Rutland, Vermont, who Mother had met down to the chiropodist’s. Well, Mother couldn’t hit a flea and they all laughed at her and I couldn’t help from laughing at her myself and finally she quit and said her back was too lame to stoop over. So they got another lady and kept on playing and soon Mrs. Hartsell was the one everybody was laughing at, as she had a long shot to hit the black ball, and as she made the effort her teeth fell out on to the court. I never seen a woman so flustered in my life. And I never heard so much laughing, only Mrs. Hartsell didn’t join in and she was madder than a hornet and wouldn’t play no more, so the game broke up.

Mrs. Hartsell went home without speaking to nobody, but Hartsell staid around and finally he said to me, he said:

“Well, I played you checkers the other day and you beat me bad and now what do you say if you and me play a game of horseshoes?”

I told him I hadn’t pitched a shoe in sixteen years, but Mother said:

“Go ahead and play. You used to be good at it and maybe it will come back to you.”

Well, to make a long story short, I give in. I oughtn’t to of never tried it, as I hadn’t pitched a shoe in sixteen years, and I only done it to humor Hartsell.

Before we started, Mother patted me on the back and told me to do my best, so we started in and I seen right off that I was in for it, as I hadn’t pitched a shoe in sixteen years and didn’t have my distance. And besides, the plating had wore off the shoes so that they was points right where they stuck into my thumb and I hadn’t throwed more than two or three times when my thumb was raw and it pretty near killed me to hang on to the shoe, let alone pitch it.

Well, Hartsell throws the awkwardest shoe I ever seen pitched and to see him pitch you wouldn’t think he would ever come nowheres near, but he is also the luckiest pitcher I ever seen and he made some pitches where the shoe lit five and six feet short and then schoonered up and was a ringer. They’s no use trying to beat that kind of luck.

They was a pretty fair size crowd watching us and four or five other ladies besides Mother, and it seems like, when Hartsell pitches, he has got to chew and it kept the ladies on the anxious seat as he don’t seem to care which way he is facing when he leaves go.

You would think a man as old as him would of learnt more manners.

Well, to make a long story short, I was just beginning to get my distance when I had to give up on account of my thumb, which I showed it to Hartsell and he seen I couldn’t go on, as it was raw and bleeding. Even if I could of stood it to go on myself, Mother wouldn’t of allowed it after she seen my thumb. So anyway I quit and Hartsell said the score was nineteen to six, but I don’t know what it was. Or don’t care, neither.

Well, Mother and I went home and I said I hoped we was through with the Hartsells as I was sick and tired of them, but it seemed like she had promised we would go over to their house that evening for another game of their everlasting cards.

Well, my thumb was giving me considerable pain and I felt kind of out of sorts and I guess maybe I forgot myself, but anyway, when we was about through playing Hartsell made the remark that he wouldn’t never lose a game of cards if he could always have Mother for a partner.

So I said:

“Well, you had a chance fifty years ago to always have her for a partner, but you wasn’t man enough to keep her.”

I was sorry the minute I had said it and Hartsell didn’t know what to say and for once his wife couldn’t say nothing. Mother tried to smooth things over by making the remark that I must of had something stronger than tea or I wouldn’t talk so silly. But Mrs. Hartsell had froze up like an iceberg and hardly said good night to us and I bet her and Frank put in a pleasant hour after we was gone.

As we was leaving, Mother said to him: “Never mind Charley’s nonsense, Frank. He is just mad because you beat him all hollow pitching horseshoes and playing cards.”

She said that to make up for my slip, but at the same time she certainly riled me. I tried to keep ahold of myself, but as soon as we was out of the house she had to open up the subject and begun to scold me for the break I had made.

Well, I wasn’t in no mood to be scolded. So I said:

“I guess he is such a wonderful pitcher and card player that you wished you had married him.”

“Well,” she said, “at least he ain’t a baby to give up pitching because his thumb has got a few scratches.”

“And how about you,” I said, “making a fool of yourself on the roque court and then pretending your back is lame and you can’t play no more!”

“Yes,” she said, “but when you hurt your thumb I didn’t laugh at you, and why did you laugh at me when I sprained my back?”

“Who could help from laughing!” I said.

“Well,” she said, “Frank Hartsell didn’t laugh.”

“Well,” I said, “why didn’t you marry him?”

“Well,” said Mother, “I almost wished I had!”

“And I wished so, too!” I said.

“I’ll remember that!” said Mother, and that’s the last word she said to me for two days.

We seen the Hartsells the next day in the Park and I was willing to apologize, but they just nodded to us. And a couple days later we heard they had left for Orlando, where they have got relatives.

I wished they had went there in the first place.

Mother and I made it up setting on a bench.

“Listen, Charley,” she said. “This is our Golden Honeymoon and we don’t want the whole thing spoilt with a silly old quarrel.”

“Well,” I said, “did you mean that about wishing you had married Hartsell?”

“Of course not,” she said, “that is, if you didn’t mean that you wished I had, too.”

So I said:

“I was just tired and all wrought up. I thank God you chose me instead of him as they’s no other woman in the world who I could of lived with all these years.”

“How about Mrs. Hartsell?” says Mother.

“Good gracious!” I said. “Imagine being married to a woman that plays five hundred like she does and drops her teeth on the roque court!”

“Well,” said Mother, “it wouldn’t be no worse than being married to a man that expectorates towards ladies and is such a fool in a checker game.”

So I put my arm around her shoulder and she stroked my hand and I guess we got kind of spooney.

They was two days left of our stay in St. Petersburg and the next to the last day Mother introduced me to a Mrs. Kendall from Kingston, Rhode Island, who she had met at the chiropodist’s.

Mrs. Kendall made us acquainted with her husband, who is in the grocery business. They have got two sons and five grandchildren and one great-grandchild. One of their sons lives in Providence and is way up in the Elks as well as a Rotarian.

We found them very congenial people and we played cards with them the last two nights we was there. They was both experts and I only wished we had met them sooner instead of running into the Hartsells. But the Kendalls will be there again next winter and we will see more of them, that is, if we decide to make the trip again.

We left the Sunshine City on the eleventh day of February, at 11 A. M. This give us a day trip through Florida and we seen all the country we had passed through at night on the way down.

We reached Jacksonville at 7 P. M. and pulled out of there at 8.10 P. M. We reached Fayetteville, North Carolina, at nine o’clock the following morning, and reached Washington, D. C., at 6.30 P. M., laying over there half an hour.

We reached Trenton at 11.01 P. M. and had wired ahead to my daughter and son-in-law and they met us at the train and we went to their house and they put us up for the night. John would of made us stay up all night, telling about our trip, but Edie said we must be tired and made us go to bed. That’s my daughter.

The next day we took our train for home and arrived safe and sound, having been gone just one month and a day.

Here comes Mother, so I guess I better shut up.

[17] Copyright, 1922, by The International Magazine
Company (Cosmopolitan).
Copyright, 1923, by Ring W. Lardner.

HE LAUGHED AT THE GODS[18]

By JAMES OPPENHEIM

(From _Broom_)

During the course of some psychological investigations I was making, I found it necessary to visit an insane asylum near New York. The building was no more than an ill-smelling barracks, very desolate; but the young interne, who guided me through the place, finally took me to a series of private rooms, which were homelike and pleasant and had windows facing the fields and the hills. He told me by the way that I must above all things see Dr. Farraday. Dr. Farraday, he explained, knew a great deal about the human soul; so much so that the young doctors often consulted him about puzzling and unusual cases.

“He is the most interesting man here,” he told me.

“And what is he suffering from?” I asked.

He smiled. “You’ll have to get his own diagnosis,” he said. “Between you and me, I think he has a high regard for our free board and lodging. He has the sort of insanity of the hobo, of the I-Won’t-Works. But he came to it too late in life to make freight cars and hay-lofts at all attractive. He was too settled down to wander the world, and too--well, insane to work.”

“Well!” I laughed, “I daresay there are many like him--only they are quartered on relatives, or wives, or friends.... In ancient days that form of insanity was highly honorable. It is, isn’t it, the insanity of the artist?”

His answer was to knock at a door, and a deep and rather pleasing voice cried, “Come in.” So we went in.

The light flooded brightly through the tall wide window, so that at first I only saw a dark bulk coming toward us. But I noticed the walls hung with many strange and brilliant drawings, all of a symbolical nature, mythic animals and gods, stars and moons, and landscapes that never were. When I was through blinking, and had my man on the darker side of me, I saw him quite plainly. He was rather bulky and large, swarthy and something about his face resembling the face of a turtle.

His manner was very courteous, but a little absent. The young interne excused himself, with a private wink at me, as much as to say: “I won’t interfere”; and so we were left alone.

I offered him a cigar, which pleased him, and we sat in comfortable armchairs by the window, and were soon plunged in scientific discussion.... But I saw he was restless. I noticed, too, now, that his clothes were ill-fitting, worn out, patched and rather dirty; that his nails and fingers were sooted up with crayon and stained with ink; that his cheeks and chin needed a shave and his hair was rather longer than we wear it.

His restlessness increased. He rubbed his chin, gazed about abstractedly, swung his leg back and forth in a too obvious rhythm. And at last he spoke in a voice which did not seem his at all--a voice which appeared to me to belong to some other person. The voice he had used was quiet and cool, although sympathetic. This new voice was personal, hot, and almost bitter.

“What is the use of all this talk?” he cried out. “It gets us nowhere. Intellect! science! theory! brain-spinning! Young man, that is our modern Devil. Kill him ... strangle him out of your soul. He is the Devil of the ice, of the cold polar regions. Better a hundred times the old Devil of the burning hell, for in fire there is also God!”

For a moment I thought I was coming to psychic fisticuffs with him; but I reflected, and at once swallowed my pride.

“I see,” I said, looking him in the eyes, “you knew this modern Devil very well; perhaps intimately.”

He glanced at me.

“You sit there,” he cried, “a bit of ice yourself. I feel no warmth from you; I am not a human being to you, but just another case. Everywhere I look for Christ and find a Devil. But you scientists will never save the world without love--yea, and hate, too. Fire cleanses and resurrects, but the ice freezes and slays. You would embalm me too in your waste places; and there is no healing in it. Feel this asylum--chilly and cold and full of living death--and the blasted crowd waiting for a great lover to cast out their demons. He is late in coming; He is late in coming.”

The something that was strange in his voice, his manner and in his words troubled me deeply.

“You are quite right,” I said simply. “Forgive me for my attitude.”

He looked at me attentively and spoke more softly.

“There is some hope for you, then,” he murmured. “Look,” and he reached and brought a sheet of drawing paper from the little table beside him.

He had drawn a picture in crayon, and done it very well. There was a powerful man, with arms crossed on his chest, standing like a Napoleon on an ice-sheathed rock, and out of the sky a lightning in the form of a great serpent had leaped down and was about to fasten his fangs into the man’s eyes.

“Wonderful!” I cried. “And it means?”

“You tell me what it means,” he commanded.

It flashed intuitively across my mind that it meant: “He who sees too much must be struck blind.” I told him and he was highly pleased: he regarded me affectionately.

“This is the first human contact I have had in a long time,” he said. “Except, of course, some of the lunatics....”

“But how,” I asked, “can a man see too much, and why is such a man like Napoleon?”

“Ah,” he said, “when Christ was shown the kingdoms of the world from a high mountain, he chose then between Cæsar and the Galilean. Seeing, man--to see, to know--knowledge, they say, is power.... But when one is blind then one sees truly ... sees inwardly. ‘They have eyes, but they see not’....”

I felt his meaning, though, to use the word in his sense, I did not see it.

“And what is the serpent?” I asked.

“The gods.”

“Then you believe in the gods?”

“I have always believed in them,” he said in his strange voice again, “but I laughed at them. The great Dr. Farraday laughed at the gods. Believed? Of course. The fool says in his heart, There is no God. And the intellectual says in his heart, There are gods, and I laugh at them.”

We sat in silence, smoking, and now and then I felt him trying to pierce me with a look. At last he said:

“You are troubled, my friend.”

“Yes, I am troubled,” I admitted. “We are all troubled in these days.”

“The days of the great ice,” he murmured. “The second Glacial Period.” He paused, then spoke abruptly. “I have a strange feeling for you, very unusual. I am going to tell you something. You may forget it as soon as you have heard it. You may say to yourself: ‘It is the phantasy of an insane man.’ Or you may find it material for analysis and so enrich your science. Or perhaps if I am not wholly demented, you may take it into your being and find it a gift of the gods.... It is a story--one of the few that have meaning for me. And it is about a man I knew--oh, knew very well. Most intimately.... Perhaps it is the story of our age. Who knows?”

I looked at him. Our eyes met.

“Tell me,” I said.

And he told me....

“His name was Trudo. That name after all is as good as another.... I must tell you a little about his childhood ... not much ... it is not very important. Trudo was a sensitive child; he couldn’t compete with the boys; he was a coward and a stay-at-home. He felt everything so intensely that he suffered incessantly. He could not fight, he could not play ball. And his father, whom he worshipped, died. And his mother was practical and embittered by her struggles and her poverty. Trudo felt he was a worm. Yes, he was vermin. Until he made a discovery.... If you couldn’t beat others with your fists or your skill or your leadership, you could beat them with your mind. And that was the beginning of the end for Trudo....

“He resolutely killed all his feelings. It can be done, you know. You become like the snail. His body is soft and fragile; but he draws it into his shell when there is danger of attack. This is what Trudo did. And for the rest, he studied. He became a physician and a man of research. He developed his intellect in a truly marvelous way. And he rose, and was well on the path toward greatness.

“I won’t bore you with the details. They are the same for everyone who succeeds. Think of your own successes. Merely imagine Trudo at the top of his profession, living in a very fine house near Central Park on a chaste side street. Respectability, luxury, the waiting room with old masters on the wall, the tiled and shining laboratory, the cushioned library, and so on, and so on.... It is not important, is it?

“I pause a moment to speak of his wife. She was a very fine woman, doubtless. Of one of the old New York families. If I mentioned the name, you’d know all about it, I’m sure. And she was religious, in a way, though her god was rather a crude one, a sort of hybrid, not of the sphinx variety exactly, but a good respectable American god. I am not cynical about it either. That god has given us much of America.... Let me describe him in a word, a line: He was a puritan who believed in hard work, righteousness and business. And he believed in kindness and purity. You see my wife, don’t you? She wanted me to be honest and upright, respectable and wealthy, and at the same time lowly and obedient--down on my knees to her deity.... She found me then an anomaly: I was honest, I was wealthy, I was upright; but I was proud and vain and consumed in myself. I had no love in my heart. You know there was John Brown to prove that a puritan can love like a blast of fire. But also, as you know, a puritan can be a peak of ice.

“Now I must tell you a great joke. My patients thought me a second Jesus. Actually. And why? Because I was remarkably intuitive. I could pierce direct into their souls, and so I knew just what to say and to do to make them feel I was in full sympathy with them. Is there anything more devilish than that? I ask you. Think. To use the art of love to serve merely one’s ambition and one’s egotism. To wear the mask of Christ in order to be a great doctor. Good old American bluff, isn’t it?”

He paused, and took a puff on his cigar. It was as if he had forgotten my presence. Indeed he did not seem to realize that he had dropped speaking of “Trudo” and was speaking directly of himself, in the first person.

Then he went on, his voice growing warm and poignant.

“My wife warned me, often. She said I had slain my soul, and was headed for a great crash. She pointed out how many of our great business-men make forced marches on success and are killed or driven insane or into a sanitarium before they are fifty. I agreed with her. But what could I do? The greatest tragedy of my life was the fact that it was a comedy. I knew all the facts, but I didn’t care a snap of my fingers. I could not feel the tragedy. I was perfectly happy on the ice--that is, if you can call it happy. Perhaps, to put it more honestly, I was neither glad nor sad, but busy, alert and keen.

“Then the symptoms came. I will not enter into the details. Palpitation of the heart, for instance--a very bad symptom, as you know. You see, I had no heart; so it was just there that the gods began to make mischief. Ah, yes, I knew then that the gods I had laughed at were preparing a little doomsday for me. Man does not live by intellect alone. If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one, and buy hyacinths for thy soul. Lord! I said those very words to myself at the time. But of what avail?

“Obviously there was nothing I could do--except one thing. I could put away Mammon--I could give up my practice, my fine house, my scientific researches. But what modern successful man can do it? It was exactly like the rich young man who went to Jesus. And Jesus asked him if he could give up his wealth; leave all, and follow. And the young man could not. That was I.

“No. My pride and revolt increase, if anything. And I even became cold toward my wife. And this killed her. I looked on her dead face, and not even then could I break through the ice, and drop one poor tear of pity or self-pity.

“You see, I was utterly lost. And now with my wife dead, and no children, and no true friends, you might have thought that it would be easy to let go of the power of the world. But not so. Not so. The decks were cleared for action, that was all. I was going to do a great bit of scientific writing....

“Then the lightning struck me. Oh, it was so simple, so simple. I was walking one night on a side-street on the lower west side. And a prostitute accosted me. I had a sudden burning curiosity. I was curious about the psychology of prostitution. I would go with this woman, and study her. I had no desire. I was a puritan. I did not want to touch her. Ugh! as a physician I knew too much about the diseases of vice....

“She took me then to her dingy hall bedroom in a cheap lodging house. I sat on the cot; she sat on a soap-box. And in the gaslight I saw her; a very thin woman, a little tall, and perhaps tubercular. Shining eyes and glowing cheeks. And she was very poor.”

He groaned, and stopped. Then he whispered:

“Now the story begins.... I began questioning her, when suddenly she burst out on me:

“‘But you are not a human being. You are terrible. I feel as if the Devil himself were in this room.’

“I was startled. I asked her:

“‘Who are you? Where do you come from?’

“‘I am a Russian,’ she said, ‘and a Jewess. My name is Losha.’

“‘But are not you in league with the Devil also?’

“‘No,’ she cried defiantly, rising before me and clenching her fists. ‘I am driven by need and loneliness; but you are only vain and learned. You are a lost soul.’

“‘Yes.’ I admitted in my honest way, ‘I _am_ lost. What’s to be done about it?’

“‘You know you are lost,’ she cried, ‘and yet ask me that? Oh, this is terrible. This is the eternal damnation they talk about....’

“‘That doesn’t help me,’ I said. ‘Talk has never helped me. I can talk myself.’”

She stared at me, and leaned toward me.

“‘You are right. Only an infinite love could help you.’

“That was the way we talked. And suddenly I forgot that I was the questioner and had a great desire to tell her about myself. I told everything, just as I have told you. It was amazing enough; an ignorant sick woman of the gutter, one whose body was common merchandise, and who had no life of her own, and I, the learned scientist, the respectable and wealthy doctor.

“Three times I went to see her. And at the third the lightning passed through me. She was weeping when I entered and would not rise from the bed. Her face was buried in her hands.

“‘Why are you crying, Losha?’ I asked.

“‘I weep,’ she said, ‘because you are to be pitied more than I am. We are both prostitutes. But the Devil in me is a god, and you have no god.’

“I stood, silent, but quite calm. Then she rose slowly and flung her arms about my neck. I had not expected it. She whispered passionately:

“‘I love you. I love you. I love you.’

“‘Why do you love?’ I asked.

“‘Because I am your lost soul.’

“And I saw the truth. I saw that what lay buried in me was not only divine love, but also the great beast, and that this woman was both. And first I felt a burning steal through my body, a hot and primal fire, the smoky breath of hell itself, and for the first time I could remember, I had the horrible cannibal lust to tear a human body limb from limb. But while I was convulsed with this, something strangely other came up and mingled with the lust. It was as if I saw the Christ. It was holy and ecstatic and divine.... Yes, yes, yes, it was love....

“You can imagine an earthquake that raises some monstrous buried formation to the surface and buries what it finds there. That happened to me.... It was like a conversion. But in my conversion both Christ and the beast came up and tore asunder the great Dr. Farraday--the fine intellect, the high-minded ego....

“In short, I went suddenly mad, and gave a great shriek, tearing off my clothes and foaming at the mouth. I called Losha ‘the goddess’ and prostrated myself before her. Then I shrieked aloud for the torture and agony and had something very like a fit of epilepsy.

“She was terrified. She finally put me to bed, and soothed me. She nursed me tenderly. I would lie quiescent for hours, in a fever. Then the spell was on me. I saw great beasts, kings and gods. I was ground by terrible passion and ecstasy. It was a death....”

He paused; then smiled sadly....

“You can imagine the sequel. I could not return to my house. It was all ended. All my interest in my work, my position, my power and place in the world, had vanished. Everything, but the emotions that swept me, was quite unreal. And so I ruined myself.

“I married Losha. It seemed a simple matter. And we opened a little stationery shop and kept it together.... And then I began to draw: I became an artist. I was alive from head to foot, and yet quite tormented--tormented by these terrible passions and ecstacies, these perverted and glorious impulses which for years had festered in my darkness, and which, when they came upon me, came more like monsters than divinities....

“What can I say of Losha? She was the one woman whom I never knew. My intuition failed me. I never understood. Was she ugly or beautiful? stupid or wise? base or noble? I cannot tell. I only could know her simple and undivided love, which never forsook me. It was those fires in which I became as ashes.

“As ashes, ashes.... One cold morning she coughed a great big racking spasm.... Then she whispered to me:

“‘Trudo, I love you.’

“And she died.... I closed the shop.... I did not need the shop. I needed only my own soul, which began to dawn in me like the sun in spring.... And being quite insane, I came here....”

We were silent. He fussed about among his papers and murmured: “I suppose it isn’t much of a story.”

I smiled at him, but said nothing. Then he showed me a portrait he had made of Losha.

She was dark and thin, even gaunt, and a look almost of madness in the eyes.... The tears rolled down the Doctor’s cheeks....

A little later I said goodby to him. We stood, facing each other and he held my hand.

“I am insane,” he said, “do not forget that. And out there--” he waved his other hand in the direction of New York, “live the sane ones. Losha is dead, and Dr. Farraday is dead. You know the ancients,” he smiled quaintly, “thought the insane were close to the gods. But that’s a fable, isn’t it?”

I closed the door on him very softly, troubled in spirit.

[18] Copyright, 1921, by _Broom_.
Copyright, 1923, by James Oppenheim.

IN THE METROPOLIS[19]

By BENJAMIN ROSENBLATT

(From _Brief Stories_)

She sat in a show window of a large department store.

“A prize to those who make her laugh,” read a conspicuous sign over her head. An American flag was wrapped around her slim figure; a sword which she clutched with both hands rested on her lap with its point towards a placard announcing a bargain sale.

She sat motionless, her eyes wide open, her face hardly betraying a trace of life.

All day long she sat there, while multitudes passing on the sidewalk turned their heads towards her and wondered: “Is it a living woman or a wax figure?” It was this puzzle which held the pedestrian, and caused the manager of the store to chuckle at his own cleverness. When he saw in the morning this bashful country girl shuffling into the store and asking inaudibly for a job, he caught at the chance for novelty in the advertising of his sale. Her features were so immobile; she appeared, on the whole, so lifeless that his agile mind had promptly pictured her in her present setting.

Unceasingly the crowd surged before the window. Newsboys with bundles under their arms, messengers in uniform, girls with lunch boxes in their hands, even trim-looking business men--all forgot their errands for a few minutes, and directed their mingled breath towards that window. Some of the boys stood for hours, sticking out their tongues, puffing up their cheeks, grinning and grimacing in a vain effort to get a smile from that grim apparition.

Though she was alone inside the window, still it seemed to her as if she were thrown into that seething mass before her, as if jostled and mercilessly kicked about. How strange everything! How confusing to her!

In the morning, when she learned there was work for her at the store, she was so happy that she thought of writing home at once about her good luck. But in the evening, after her first day’s work, she was so exhausted that the girls of the establishment who took her to their boarding house, had to lead her under her arms. She walked and wondered: the manager had said there was absolutely no work attached to her job.

At the supper-table, the girls, good naturedly, poked fun at her; and she grew livelier. Later, some of them had a romp, and decided that the feet of the uncouth lass were surely more used to follow the cows to pasture, than to dance.

The next morning the girls hurried feverishly. They paid little attention to the “rustic clown.” Some had slept too late; they looked anxious and careworn. Last evening’s warmth had all evaporated, and the “wax figure” felt a strange chill and a sinking at the heart.

Again she took her seat in the show window. She was faint, not having been in the mood for breakfast, and before long dizziness overtook her. She felt as if she looked into some deep water from which a wave suddenly emerged--a huge wave that roared, groaned, moved towards her, striving to engulf her, to carry her away.

Still, she appeared on that second day conscious of things she had not observed at first. The cars that thundered back and forth seemed new, and she noted the elevated overhead. The crowds were again as large and again as busy making “faces” which frightened her into immobility, so that it became harder for the people to get her attention, and most of them wondered: “Will she ever smile?”

In the afternoon it rained. The electric lights began to twinkle early, and a sea of umbrellas moved, moved endlessly before the motionless figure in the window.

She stared at the rumbling taxis that splashed hither and thither; at the zig-zag drizzle, the steady downpour, and her eyes suddenly filled. Thoughts of home were awakened within her by the rain. Her brain and heart, hitherto as if congealed by the terror of the strange world before her, now thawed and filled her with a gnawing sadness and self-pity. How is it at home now? her thoughts ran. How is it at home? It rains. There is the muddy road, the ruts and the pools. Father is indoors now, back from the field. The gray dusk falls. Mother sits with folded arms by the window and gazes longingly out into the dark.

“Are you looking for me?” the figure in the window, forgetting herself, suddenly wailed. “Mother, mother dear, take me to you. I ain’t used to this; I’m so lonely and afraid.”

Her lips trembled visibly. A spasm shot across her face and contracted it--and many of the crowd outside who made “mouths” at her, burst into a triumphant hurrah. “She laughed!” roared a colored man so loud that it reached the manager, who forthwith decided to discharge the “figure.” “I get the prize,” yelled others. “I made her laugh! I made her laugh!”

[19] Copyright, 1921, by Brief Stories Publishing Company.
Copyright, 1923, by Benjamin Rosenblatt.

FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF
THE SOUTH[20]

By WILBUR DANIEL STEELE

(From _The Pictorial Review_)

The day had been dead hot. Under the weight of the afternoon one would have thought it could never be cool again in the Mzab. But immediately the sun had dipped behind the cliff that guards the western rim of the oasis the thin air emptied itself, and the night-chill, penetrating and treacherous, flowed over the dry bottom of the _oued_.

The town stirred. Under my gallery there came and went a word-fight between Berber muleteers from the north. After that I heard the evening call of the muezzin dropping down from the mosque-tower on the crowded hill, arid, sinuous, like the note of another wooden well-wheel shrilling above the desert floor. Then somewhere under a house arose the hollow voice of a tambour struck with a thumb, and a man sang. In a rift of silence a wandering breeze threshed all the date-fronds in the _oued_-bottom with a phantom of distant applause. Nearer at hand a foot-scuffle in the dusk. A choked laugh. And all around in the heavy shadows of that quarter the subdued giggling, the rustling, and jewel-clanking of the women of dark delight.

“What’s wrong with the Ouled Naïl girls to-night?” I asked along the gallery. Abd, son of Abdallah the Mozabite, rose to his feet on the tiles near the stair, a white wraith.

“_Kain kairouan ja, sidi._” (There is a caravan come.)

Drums banged; women scurried. The momentous night was established and stars sprinkled the sky, large and restless stars, always flickering a little to the eye in that air without body.

I sat at an island crossroads of the western Sahara, where the pale, blurred sand-courses, like the wakes of ships, come up the bald skin of the globe from the green mysteries that lie months away on the other side of the south.

“Abd!” I called, “where does the caravan come from, east or west?”

Abd was gone. On the tiles I heard the fall of a Christian boot. Borak, the Englishman, came toward me in the shadows.

“I wonder you’re not out,” he said. “The caravan comes from the south.”

“Not----!”

“Rather! This is a real one--like the old days again. Right away up from under. You’d better have a look at the beggars; you’re romantic, you know. Might not have another chance in a year.”

I put on my coat and went with him. Borak has been too long in Africa, one part and another. He has forgotten that it is the Dark Continent. As we walked he went on in his habitual vein of banter.

“It’s a tidy lot of heroes for you. You may imagine. Seven ‘moonlights’ on the trek, and I lay a pound sterling not a man in the crowd has washed in the thirty weeks.”

“Thirty weeks!” I couldn’t help echoing it. “Lord!”

“There ought to be a story there, eh? As a matter of fact there isn’t. I insist again that there’s more story, more poetry and romance in the life of a Whitechapel coster than you’ll hear in a year listening to these people. They lack imagination. They want the mental whip of civilization; that’s it in a nutshell.”

I felt like saying “Bosh!” Borak is too dogmatic.

We were passing into the thick of the “low town,” and on our right loomed the ugly oblong of the douane, the French custom-house that stands at the converging of the deep-Sahara routes. Borak looked at it and chuckled.