Chapter II: Part 2

Continue in ease of mind, my most trusted intimate. I shall not drop in to interrupt you and Ben--both not so young as you once were and both getting stout--heavy Polly, heavy Ben--as you sit side by side in your little Franklin Flat parlour. That parlour always suggests to me an enormous turnip hollowed out square: with no windows; with a hole on one side to come in and a hole on the other side to go out; upholstered in enormous bunches of beets and horse-radish, and lighted with a wilted electric sunflower. There you two will sit to-night, heavy Polly, heavy Ben, suffocating for fresh air and murmuring to each other as you have murmured for years:

"I do! I do!"

"I do! I do!"

One sentence in your letter, Polly dear, takes your photograph like a camera; the result is a striking likeness. That sentence is this:

"Why not let him suffer awhile? I will explain afterwards."

That is exactly what you will do, what you would always do: explain afterwards. In other words, you plot to make Ben jealous but fear to make him too jealous lest he desert you. If on the evening of this visit you should forget "to explain," and if during the night you should remember, you would, if need were, walk barefoot through the streets in your nightgown and tap on his window-shutter, if you could reach it, and say: "Ben, that appointment wasn't with any other man; it was with Tilly. I could not sleep until I had told you!"

That is, you have already disposed of yourself, breath and soul, to Ben; and while you are waiting for the marriage ceremony, you have espoused in his behalf what you consider your best and strongest trait--loyalty. Under the goadings of this vampire trait you will, a few years after marriage, have devoured all there is of Ben alive and will have taken your seat beside what are virtually his bones. As the years pass, the more ravenously you will preside over the bones. Never shall the world say that Polly Boles was disloyal to whatever was left of her dear Ben Doolittle!

_Your loyalty_! I believe the first I saw of it was years ago one night in Louisville when you and I were planning to come to New York to live. Naturally we were much concerned by the difficulties of choosing our respective New York residences and we had written on and had received thumb-nailed libraries of romance about different places. As you looked over the recommendations of each, you came upon one called The Franklin Flats. The circular contained appropriate quotations from Poor Richard's Almanac. I remember how your face brightened as you said: "This ought to be the very thing." One of the quotations on the circular ran somewhat thus: "Beware of meat twice boiled"; and you said in consequence: "So they must have a good restaurant!"

In other words, you believed that a house named after Franklin could but resemble Franklin. A building put up in New York by a Tammany contractor, if named after Benjamin Franklin and advertised with quotations from Franklin's works, would embody the traits of that remote national hero! To your mind--not to your imagination, for you haven't any--to your mind, and you have a great deal of mind, the bell-boys, the superintendent, the scrub woman, the chambermaids, the flunkied knave who stands at the front door--all these were loyally congregated as about a beloved mausoleum. You are still in the Franklin Flats! I know what you have long suffered there; but move away! Not Polly Boles. She will be loyal to the building as long as the building stands by the contractor and the contractor stands by profits and losses.

While on the subject of loyalty, not your loyalty but woman's loyalty, I mean to finish with it. And I shall go on to say that occasionally I have sat behind a plate-glass window in some Fifth Avenue shop and have studied woman's organised loyalty, unionised loyalty, standardised loyalty. This takes effect in those processions that now and then sweep up the Avenue as though they were Crusaders to the Holy Sepulchre. The marchers try first not to look self-conscious; all try, secondly, to look devoted to "the cause." But beneath all other expressions and differences of expression I have always seen one reigning look as plainly as though it were printed in enormous letters on a banner flying over their heads:

"Strictly Monogamous Women."

At such times I have felt a wild desire, when I should hear of the next parade, to organise a company of unenthralled young girls who with unfettered natures and unfettered features should tramp up the Avenue under their own colours. If the women before them--those loyal ones--would actually carry, as they should, a banner with the legend I have described, then my company of girls should unfurl to the breeze their flag with the truth blazoned on it:

"Not Necessarily Monogamous!"

The honest human crowd, watching and applauding us, would pack the Avenue from sidewalks to roofs.

Between you and me everything seems to be summed up in one difference: all my life I have wanted to go barefoot and all your life, no matter what the weather, you have been solicitous to put on goloshes.

My very nature is rooted in rebellion that in a world alive and running over with irresistible people, a woman must be doomed to find her chief happiness in just one! The heart going out to so many in succession, and the hand held by one; year after year your hand held by the first man who impulsively got possession of it. Every instinct of my nature would be to jerk my hand away and be free! To give it again and again.

This subject weighs crushingly on me as I struggle with this letter because I have tidings for you about myself. I am to write words which I have long doubted I should ever write, life's most iron-bound words. Polly, I suppose I am going to be married at last. Of course it is Beverley. Not without waverings, not without misgivings. But I'd feel those, be the man whoever he might. Why I feel thus I do not know, but I know I feel. I tell you this first because it was you who brought Beverley and me together, who have always believed in his career. (Though I think that of late you have believed more in him and less in me.) I, too, am beginning to believe in his career. He has lately ascertained that his work is making a splendid impression in England. If he succeeds in England, he will succeed in this country. He has received an invitation to visit some delightful and very influential people in England and "to bring me along!" Think of anybody bringing _me_ along! If we should be entertained by these people [they are the Blackthornes], such is English social life, that we should also get to know the white Thornes and the red Thornes--the whole social forest. The iron rule of my childhood was economy; and the influence of that iron rule over me is inexorable still: I cannot even contemplate such prodigal wastage in life as not to accept this invitation and gather in its wealth of consequences.

More news of me, very, very important: _at last_ I have made the acquaintance of George Marigold. I have become one of his patients.

Beverley is furious. I enclose a letter from him. You need not return it. I shall not answer it. I shall leave things to his imagination and his imagination will give him no rest.

If Ben hurled at _you_ a jealous letter about Dr. Mullen, you would immediately write to remove his jealousy. You would even ridicule Dr. Mullen to win greater favour in Ben's eyes. That is, you would do an abominable thing, never doubting that Ben would admire you the more. And you would be right; for as Ben observed you tear Dr. Mullen to pieces to feed his vanity, he would lean back in his chair and chuckle within himself: "Glorious, staunch old Polly!"

And what you would do in this instance you will do all your life: you will practise disloyalty to every other human being, as in this letter you have practised it with me, for the sake of loyalty to Ben: your most pronounced, most horrible trait.

TILLY SNOWDEN.

POLLY BOLES TO TILLY SNOWDEN

_June 7._

DEAR TILLY:

I return Beverley's letter. Without comment, since I did not read it. You know how I love Beverley, respect him, believe in him. I have a feeling for him unlike that for any other human being, not even Ben; I look upon him as set apart and sacred because he has genius and belongs to the world.

As for his faults, those that I have not already noticed I prefer to find out for myself. I have never cared to discover any human being's failings through a third person. Instead of getting acquainted with the pardonable traits of the abused, I might really be introduced to the _abominable traits of the abuser_.

_Once more_, you think you are going to marry Beverley! I shall reserve my congratulations for the _event itself_.

Thank you for surrendering your claim on my friendship and society last night. Ben and I had a most satisfactory evening, and when not suffocating we murmured "I do" to our hearts' content.

Next time, should your visits clash, I'll push _him_ out. Yet I feel in honour bound to say that this is only my present state of mind. I might weaken at the last moment--even in the Franklin Flats.

As to some things in your letter, I have long since learned not to bestow too much attention upon anything you say. You court a kind of irresponsibility in language. With your inborn and over-indulged willfulness you love to break through the actual and to revel in the imaginary. I have become rather used to this as one of your growing traits and I am therefore not surprised that in this letter you say things which, if seriously spoken, would insult your sex and would make them recoil from you--or make them wish to burn you at the stake. When you march up Fifth Avenue with your company of girls in that kind of procession, there will not be any Fifth Avenue: you will be tramping through the slums where you belong.

All this, I repeat, is merely your way--to take things out in talking. But we can make words our playthings in life's shallows until words wreck us as their playthings in life's deeps.

Still, in return for your compliments to me, _which, of course, you really mean_, I paid you one the other night when thinking of you quite by myself. It was this: nature seems to leave something out of each of us, but we presently discover that she perversely put it where it does not belong.

What she left out of you, my dear, was the domestic tea-kettle. There isn't even any place for one. But she made up for lack of the kettle _by rather overdoing the stove_!

Your _discreet_ friend,
POLLY BOLES.

BEVERLEY SANDS TO PHILLIPS & FAULDS

_Cathedral Heights, New York,
June 7, 1900._

GENTLEMEN:

A former customer of yours, Mr. Benjamin Doolittle, has suggested your firm as reliable agents to carry out an important commission, which I herewith describe:

I enclose a list of Kentucky ferns. I desire you to make a collection of these ferns and to ship them, expenses prepaid, to Edward Blackthorne, Esquire, King Alfred's Wood, Warwickshire, England. The cost is not to exceed twenty-five dollars. To furnish you the needed guarantee, as well as to avoid unnecessary correspondence, I herewith enclose, payable to your order, my check for that amount.

Will you let me have a prompt reply, stating whether you will undertake this commission and see it through?

Very truly yours,
BEVERLEY SANDS.

PHILLIPS & FAULDS TO BEVERLEY SANDS

_Louisville, Ky.,
June 10, 1900._

DEAR SIR:

Your valued letter with check for $25 received. We handle most of the ferns on the list, and know the others and can easily get them.

You may rely upon your valued order receiving the best attention. Thanking you for the same,

Yours very truly,
PHILLIPS & FAULDS.

BEVERLEY SANDS TO EDWARD BLACKTHORNE

_Cathedral Heights, New York,
June 15, 1910._

MY DEAR MR. BLACKTHORNE:

Your second letter came into the port of my life like an argosy from a rich land. I think you must have sent it with some remembrance of your own youth, or out of your mature knowledge of youth itself; how too often it walks the shore of its rocky world, cutting its bare feet on sharp stones, as it strains its eyes toward things far beyond its horizon but not beyond its faith and hope. Some day its ship comes in and it sets sail toward the distant ideal. How much the opening of the door of your friendship, of your life, means to me! A new consecration envelops the world that I am to be the guest of a great man. If words do not say more, it is because words say so little.

Delay has been unavoidable in any mere formal acknowledgment of your letter. You spoke in it of the hinges of a book. My silence has been due to the arrangement of hinges for the shipment of the ferns. I wished to insure their safe transoceanic passage and some inquiries had to be made in Kentucky.

You may rely upon it that the matter will receive the best attention. In good time the ferns, having reached the end of their journey, will find themselves put down in your garden as helpless immigrants. From what outlook I can obtain upon the scene of their reception, they should lack only hands to reach confidingly to you and lack only feet to run with all their might away from Hodge.

I acknowledge--with the utmost thanks--the unusual and beautiful courtesy of Mrs. Blackthorne's and your invitation to my wife, if I have one, and to me. It is the dilemma of my life, at the age of twenty-seven, to be obliged to say that such a being as Mrs. Sands exists, but that nevertheless there is no such person.

Can you imagine a man's stretching out his hand to pluck a peach and just before he touched the peach, finding only the bough of the tree? Then, as from disappointment he was about to break off the offensive bough, seeing again the dangling peach? Can you imagine this situation to be of long continuance, during which he could neither take hold of the peach nor let go of the tree--nor go away? If you can, you will understand what I mean when I say that my bride persists in remaining unwed and I persist in wooing. I do not know why; she protests that she does not know; but we do know that life is short, love shorter, that time flies, and we are not husband and wife.

If she remains undecided when Summer returns, I hope Mrs. Blackthorne and you will let me come alone.

Thus I can thank you with certainty for one with the hope that I may yet thank you for two.

I am,

Sincerely yours,
BEVERLEY SANDS.

P.S.--Can you pardon the informality of a postscript?

As far as I can see clearly into a cloudy situation, marriage is denied me on account of the whole unhappy history of woman--which is pretty hard. But a good many American ladies--the one I woo among them--are indignant just now that they are being crowded out of their destinies by husbands--or even possibly by bachelors. These ladies deliver lectures to one another with discontented eloquence and rouse their auditresses to feministic frenzy by reminding them that for ages woman has walked in the shadow of man and that the time has come for the worm [the woman] to turn on the shadow or to crawl out of it.

My dear Mr. Blackthorne, I need hardly say that the only two shadows I could ever think of casting on the woman I married would be that of my umbrella whenever it rained, and that of her parasol whenever the sun shone. But I do maintain that if there is not enough sunshine for the men and women in the world, if there has to be some casting of shadows in the competition and the crowding, I do maintain that the casting of the shadow would better be left to the man. He has had long training, terrific experience, in this mortal business of casting the shadow, has learned how to moderate it and to hold it steady! The woman at least knows where it is to be found, should she wish to avail herself of it. But what would be the state of a man in his need of his spouse's penumbra? He would be out of breath with running to keep up with the penumbra or to find where it was for the time being!

I have seen some of these husbands who live--or have gradually died out--in the shadow of their wives; they are nature's subdued farewell to men and gentlemen.

DIARY OF BEVERLEY SANDS

_June 16._

A remarkable thing has lately happened to me.

One of my Kentucky novels, upon being republished in London some months ago, fell into the hands of a sympathetic reviewer. This critic's praise later made its way to the stately library of Edward Blackthorne. What especially induced the latter to read the book, I infer, were lines quoted by the reviewer from my description of a woodland scene with ferns in it: the mighty novelist, as it happens, is himself interested in ferns. He consequently wrote to some other English authors and critics, calling attention to my work, and he sent a letter to me, asking for some ferns for his garden.

This recognition in England hilariously affected my friends over here. Tilly, whose mind suggests to me a delicately poised pair of golden balances for weighing delight against delight (always her most vital affair), when this honour for me fell into the scales, found them inclined in my favour. If it be true, as I have often thought, that she has long been holding on to me merely until she could take sure hold of someone else of more splendid worldly consequence, she suddenly at least tightened her temporary grasp. Polly, good, solid Polly, wholesome and dependable as a well-browned whole-wheat baker's loaf weighing a hundred and sixty pounds, when she heard of it, gave me a Bohemian supper in her Franklin Flat parlour, inviting only a few undersized people, inasmuch as she and Ben, the chief personages of the entertainment, took up most of the room. We were so packed in, that literally it was a night in Bohemia _aux sardines_.

Since the good news from England came over, Ben, with his big, round, clean-shaven, ruddy face and short, reddish curly hair, which makes him look like a thirty-five-year-old Bacchus who had never drunk a drop--even Ben has beamed on me like a mellower orb. He is as ashamed as ever of my books, but is beginning to feel proud that so many more people are being fooled by them. Several times lately I have caught his eyes resting on me with an expression of affectionate doubt as to whether after all he might be mistaken in not having thought more of me. But he dies hard. My publisher, who is a human refrigerator containing a mental thermometer, which rises or falls toward like or dislike over a background for book-sales, got wind of the matter and promptly invited me to one of his thermometric club-lunches--always an occasion for acute gastritis.

Rumour of my fame has permeated my club, where, of course, the leading English reviews are kept on file. Some of the members must have seen the favourable criticisms. One night I became aware as I passed through the rooms that club heroes seated here and there threw glances of fresh interest toward me and exchanged auspicious words. The president--who for so long a time has styled himself the Nestor of the club that he now believes it is the members who do this, the garrulous old president, whose weaknesses have made holes in him through which his virtues sometimes leak out and get away, met me under the main chandelier and congratulated me in tones so intentionally audible that they violated the rules but were not punishable under his personal privileges.

There was a sinister incident: two members whom Ben and I wish to kick because they have had the audacity to make the acquaintance of Tilly and Polly, and whom we despise also because they are fashionable charlatans in their profession--these two with dark looks saw the president congratulate me.

More good fortune yet to come! The ferns which I am sending Mr. Blackthorne will soon be growing in his garden. The illustrious man has many visitors; he leads them, if he likes, to his fern bank. "These," he will some day say, "came from Christine Nilsson. These are from Barbizon in memory of Corot. These were sent me by Turgenieff. And these," he will add, turning to his guests, "these came from a young American novelist, a Kentuckian, whose work I greatly respect: you must read his books." The guests separate to their homes to pursue the subject. Spreading fame--may it spread! Last of all, the stirring effect of this on me, who now run toward glory as Anacreon said Cupid ran toward Venus--with both feet and wings.

The ironic fact about all this commotion affecting so many solid, substantial people--the ironic fact is this:

_There was no woodland scene and there were no ferns._

Here I reach the curious part of my story.

When I was a country lad of some seventeen years in Kentucky, one August afternoon I was on my way home from a tramp of several miles. My course lay through patches of woods--last scant vestiges of the primeval forest--and through fields garnered of summer grain or green with the crops of coming autumn. Now and then I climbed a fence and crossed an old woods-pasture where stock grazed.

The August sky was clear and the sun beat down with terrific heat. I had been walking for hours and parching thirst came upon me.

This led me to remember how once these rich uplands had been the vast rolling forest that stretched from far-off eastern mountains to far-off western rivers, and how under its shade, out of the rock, everywhere bubbled crystal springs. A land of swift forest streams diamond bright, drinking places of the bold game.

The sun beat down on me in the treeless open field. My feet struck into a path. It, too, became a reminder: it had once been a trail of the wild animals of that verdurous wilderness. I followed its windings--a sort of gully--down a long, gentle slope. The windings had no meaning now: the path could better have been straight; it was devious because the feet that first marked it off had threaded their way crookedly hither and thither past the thick-set trees.

I reached the spring--a dry spot under the hot sun; no tree overshadowing it, no vegetation around it, not a blade of grass; only dust in which were footprints of the stock which could not break the habit of coming to it but quenched their thirst elsewhere. The bulged front of some limestone rock showed where the ancient mouth of the spring had been. Enough moisture still trickled forth to wet a few clods. Hovering over these, rising and sinking, a little quivering jet of gold, a flock of butterflies. The grey stalk of a single dead weed projected across the choked orifice of the fountain and one long, brown grasshopper--spirit of summer dryness--had crawled out to the edge and sat motionless.

A few yards away a young sycamore had sprung up from some wind-carried seed. Its grey-green leaves threw a thin scarred shadow on the dry grass and I went over and lay down under it to rest--my eyes fixed on the forest ruin.

Years followed with their changes. I being in New York with my heart set on building whatever share I could of American literature upon Kentucky foundations, I at work on a novel, remembered that hot August afternoon, the dry spring, and in imagination restored the scene as it had been in the Kentucky of the pioneers.

I now await with eagerness all further felicities that may originate in a woodland scene that did not exist. What else will grow for me out of ferns that never grew?

PART SECOND

EDWARD BLACKTHORNE TO BEVERLEY SANDS

_King Alfred's Wood,
Warwickshire, England,
May 1, 1911._

DEAR SIR:

It is the first of the faithful leafy May again. I sit at my windows as on this day a year ago and look out with thankfulness upon what a man may call the honour of the vegetable world.

A year ago to-day I, misled by a book of yours or by some books--for I believe I read more than one of them--I, betrayed by the phrase that when we touch a book we touch a man, overstepped the boundaries of caution as to having any dealings with glib, plausible strangers and wrote you a letter. I made a request of you in that letter. I thought the request bore with it a suitable reward: that I should be grateful if you would undertake to have some ferns sent to me for my collection.

Your sleek reply led me still further astray and I wrote again. I drew my English cloak from my shoulders and spread it on the ground for you to step on. I threw open to you the doors of my hospitality, good-fellowship.

That was last May. Now it is May again. And now I know to a certainty what for months I have been coming to realise always with deeper shame: that you gave me your word and did not keep your word; doubtless never meant to keep it.

Why, then, write you about this act of dishonour now? How justify a letter to a man I feel obliged to describe as I describe you?

The reason is this, if you can appreciate such a reason. My nature refuses to let go a half-done deed. I remain annoyed by an abandoned, a violated, bond. Once in a wood I came upon a partly chopped-down tree, and I must needs go far and fetch an axe and finish the job. What I have begun to build I must build at till the pattern is wrought out. Otherwise I should weaken, soften, lose the stamina of resolution. The upright moral skeleton within me would decay and crumble and I should sink down and flop like a human frog.

Since, then, you dropped the matter in your way--without so much as a thought of a man's obligation to himself--I dismiss it in my way--with the few words necessary to enable me to rid my mind of it and of such a character.

I wish merely to say, then, that I despise as I despise nothing else the ragged edge of a man's behaviour. I put your conduct before you in this way: do you happen to know of a common cabbage in anybody's truck patch? Observe that not even a common cabbage starts out to do a thing and fails to do it if it can. You must have some kind of perception of an oak tree. Think what would become of human beings in houses if builders were deceived as to the trusty fibre of sound oak? Do you ever see a grape-vine? Consider how it takes hold and will not be shaken loose by the capricious compelling winds. In your country have you the plover? Think what would be the plover's fate, if it did not steer straight through time and space to a distant shore. Why, some day pick up merely a piece of common quartz. Study its powers of crystallisation. And reflect that a man ranks high or low in the scale of character according to his possession or his lack of the powers of crystallisation. If the forces of his mind can assume fixity around an idea, if they can adjust themselves unalterably about a plan, expect something of him. If they run through his hours like water, if memory is a millstream, if remembrance floats forever away, expect nothing.

Simple, primitive folk long ago interpreted for themselves the characters of familiar plants about them. Do you know what to them the fern stood for? The fern stood for Fidelity. Those true, constant souls would have said that you had been unfaithful even with nature's emblems of Fidelity.

The English sky is clear to-day. The sunlight falls in a white radiance on my plants. I sit at my windows with my grateful eyes on honest out-of-doors. There is a shadow on a certain spot in the garden; I dislike to look at it. There is a shadow on the place where your books once stood on my library shelves. Your specious books!--your cleverly manufactured books!--but there are successful scamps in every profession.

I am,

Very truly yours,
EDWARD BLACKTHORNE.

BEVERLEY SANDS TO EDWARD BLACKTHORNE

_Cathedral Heights,
May 10, 1911._

DEAR SIR:

I wish to inform you that I have just received from you a letter in which you attack my character. I wish in reply further to inform you that I have never felt called upon to defend my character. Nor will I, even with this letter of yours as evidence, attack your character.

I am,

Very truly yours,
BEVERLEY SANDS.

BEVERLEY SANDS TO BEN DOOLITTLE

_May 13, 1911._

DEAR BEN:

I ask your attention to the enclosed letter from Mr. Edward Blackthorne. By way of contrast and also of reminder, lest you may have forgotten, I send you two other letters received from him last year. I shared with you at the time the agreeable purport of these earlier letters. This last letter came three days ago and for three days I have been trying to quiet down sufficiently even to write to you about it. At last I am able to do so.

You will see that Mr. Blackthorne has never received the ferns. Then where have they been all this time? I took it for granted that they had been shipped. The order was last spring placed with the Louisville firm recommended by you. They guaranteed the execution of the order. I forwarded to them my cheque. They cashed my cheque. The voucher was duly returned to me cancelled through my bank. I could not suppose they would take my cheque unless they had shipped the plants. They even wrote me again in the Autumn of their own accord, stating that the ferns were about to be sent on--Autumn being the most favourable season. Then where are the ferns?

I felt so sure of their having reached Mr. Blackthorne that I harboured a certain grievance and confess that I tried to make generous allowance for him as a genius in his never having acknowledged their arrival.

I have demanded of Phillips & Faulds an immediate explanation. As soon as they reply I shall let you hear further. The fault may be with them; in the slipshod Southern way they may have been negligent. My cheque may even have gone as a bridal present to some junior member of the firm or to help pay the funeral expenses of the senior member.

There is trouble somewhere behind and I think there is trouble ahead.

Premonitions are for nervous or over-sanguine ladies; but if some lady will kindly lend me one of her premonitions, I shall admit that I have it and on the strength of it--or the weakness--declare my belief that the mystery of the ferns is going to uncover some curious and funny things.

As to the rest of Mr. Blackthorne's letter: after these days of turbulence, I have come to see my way clear to interpret it thus: a great man, holding a great place in the world, offered his best to a stranger and the stranger, as the great man believes, turned his back on it. That is the grievance, the insult. If anything could be worse, it is my seeming discourtesy to Mrs. Blackthorne, since the invitation came also from her. In a word, here is a genius who strove to advance my work and me, and he feels himself outraged in his kindness, his hospitality, his friendship and his family--in all his best.

But of course that is the hardest of all human things to stand. Men who have treated each other but fairly well or even badly in ordinary matters often in time become friends. But who of us ever forgives the person that slights our best? Out of a rebuff like that arises such life-long unforgiveness, estrangement, hatred, that Holy Writ itself doubtless for this very reason took pains to issue its warning--no pearls before swine! And perhaps of all known pearls a great native British pearl is the most prized by its British possessor!

The reaction, then, from Mr. Blackthorne's best has been his worst: if I did not merit his best, I deserve his worst; hence his last letter. God have mercy on the man who deserved that letter! You will have observed that his leading trait as revealed in all his letters is enormous self-love. That's because he is a genius. Genius _has_ to have enormous self-love. Beware the person who has none! Without self-love no one ever wins any other's love.

Thus the mighty English archer with his mighty bow shot his mighty arrow--but at an innocent person.

Still the arrow of this letter, though it misses me, kills my plans. The first trouble will be Tilly. Our marriage had been finally fixed for June, and our plans embraced a wedding journey to England and the acceptance of the invitation of the Blackthornes. The prospect of this wonderful English summer--I might as well admit it--was one thing that finally steadied all her wavering as to marriage.

Now the disappointment: no Blackthornes, no English celebrities to greet us as American celebrities, no courtesies from critics, no lawns, no tea nor toast nor being toasted. Merely two unknown, impoverished young Yankee tourists, trying to get out of chilly England what can be gotten by anybody with a few, a very few, dollars.

But Tilly dreads disappointment as she dreads disease. To her disappointment is a disease in the character of the person who inflicts the disappointment. Once I tried to get you to read one of Balzac's masterpieces, _The Magic Skin_. I told you enough about it to enable you to understand what I now say: that ever since I became engaged to Tilly I have been to her as a magic skin which, as she cautiously watches it, has always shrunk a little whenever I have encountered a defeat or brought her a disappointment. No later success, on the contrary, ever re-expands the shrunken skin: it remains shrunken where each latest disappointment has left it.

Now when I tell her of my downfall and the collapse of the gorgeous summer plans!

BEVERLEY
(the Expanding Scamp and the
Shrinking Skin).

BEN DOOLITTLE TO BEVERLEY SANDS

_May 14th._

DEAR BEVERLEY:

I have duly pondered the letters you send.

"Fie, fee, fo, fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman!"

If you do not mind, I shall keep these documents from him in my possession. And suppose you send me all later letters, whether from him or from anyone else, that bear on this matter. It begins to grow interesting and I believe it will bear watching. Make me, then, as your lawyer, the custodian of all pertinent and impertinent papers. They can go into the locker where I keep your immortal but impecunious Will. Some day I might have to appear in court, I with my shovel and five senses and no imagination, to plead _une cause célèbre_ (a little more of my scant intimate French).

The explanation I give of this gratuitously insulting letter is that at last you have run into a hostile human imagination in the person of an old literary polecat, an aged book-skunk. Of course if I could decorate my style after the manner of your highly creative gentlemen, I might say that you had unwarily crossed the nocturnal path of his touchy moonlit mephitic highness.

I am not surprised, of course, that this letter has caused you to think still more highly of its writer. I tell you that is your profession--to tinker--to turn reality into something better than reality.

Some day I expect to see you emerge from your shop with a fish story. Intending buyers will find that you have entered deeply into the ideals and difficulties of the man-eating shark: how he could not swim freely for whales in his track and could not breathe freely for minnows in his mouth; how he got pinched from behind by the malice of the lobster and got shocked on each side by the eccentricities of the eel. The other fish did not appreciate him and he grew embittered--and then only began to bite. You will make over the actual shark and exhibit him to your reader as the ideal shark--a kind of beloved disciple of the sea, the St. John of fish.

Anything imaginative that you might make out of a shark would be a minor achievement compared with what you have done for this Englishman. Might the day come, the avenging day, when Benjamin Doolittle could get a chance to write him just one letter! May the god of battles somehow bring about a meeting between the middle-aged land-turtle and the aged skunk! On that field of Mars somebody's fur will have to fly and it will not be the turtle's, for he hasn't any.

You speak of a trouble that looms up in your love affair: let it loom. The nearer it looms, the better for you. I have repeatedly warned you that you have bound your life and happiness to the wrong person, and the person is constantly becoming worse. Detach your apparatus of dreams at last from her. Take off your glorious rainbow world-goggles and see the truth before it is too late. Do not fail, unless you object, to send me all letters incoming about the ferns--those now celebrated bushes.

BENJAMIN DOOLITTLE.

PHILLIPS & FAULDS TO BEVERLEY SANDS

_May 13, 1911._

DEAR SIR:

We acknowledge receipt of your letter of May 10 relative to an order for ferns.

It is decidedly rough. The senior member of our firm who formerly had charge of this branch of our business has been seriously ill for several months, and it was only after we had communicated with him at home in bed that we were able to extract from him anything at all concerning your esteemed order.

He informs us that he turned the order over to Messrs. Burns & Bruce, native fern collectors of Dunkirk, Tenn., who wrote that they would gather the ferns and forward them to the designated address. He likewise informs us that inasmuch as the firm of Burns & Bruce, as we know only too well, has long been indebted to this firm for a considerable amount, he calculated that they would willingly ship the ferns in partial liquidation of our old claims.

It seems, as he tells us, that they did actually gather the ferns and get them ready for shipment, but at the last minute changed their mind and called on our firm for payment. There the matter was unexpectedly dropped owing to the sudden illness of the aforesaid member of our house, and we knew nothing at all of what had transpired until your letter led us to obtain from him at his bedside the statements above detailed.

An additional embarrassment to the unusually prosperous course of our business was occasioned by the marriage of a junior member of the firm and his consequent absence for a considerable time, which resulted in an augmentation of the expenses of our establishment and an unfortunate diminution of our profits.

In view of the illness of the senior member of our house and in view of the marriage of a junior member and in view of the losses and expenses consequent thereon, and in view of the subsequent withdrawal of both from active participation in the conduct of the affairs of our firm, and in view also of a disagreement which arose between both members and the other members as to the financial basis of a settlement on which the withdrawal could take place, our affairs have of necessity been thrown into court in litigation and are still in litigation up to this date.

Regretting that you should have been seemingly inconvenienced in the slightest degree by the apparent neglect of a former member of our firm, we desire to add that as soon as matters can be taken out of court our firm will be reorganised and that we shall continue to give, as heretofore, the most scrupulous attention to all orders received.

But we repeat that your letter is pretty rough.

Very truly yours,
PHILLIPS & FAULDS.

BURNS & BRUCE TO BEVERLEY SANDS

_Dunkirk, Tenn.,
May 20, 1911._

DEAR SIR:

Your letter to hand. Phillips & Faulds gave us the order for the ferns. Owing to extreme drought last Fall the ferns withered earlier than usual and it was unsafe to ship at that time; in the Winter the weather was so severe that even in February we were unable to make any digging, as the frost had not disappeared. When at last we got the ferns ready, we called on them for payment and they wouldn't pay. Phillips & Faulds are not good paying bills and we could not put ourselves to expense filling their new order for ferns, not wishing to take more risk. old, old accounts against them unpaid, and could not afford to ship more. proved very unsatisfactory and had to drop them entirely.

Are already out of pocket the cost of the ferns, worthless to us when Phillips & Faulds dodged and wouldn't pay, pretending we owed them because they won't pay their bills. If you do not wish to have any further dealings with them you might write to Noah Chamberlain at Seminole, North Carolina, just over the state line, not far from here, an authority on American ferns. We have sometimes collected rare ferns for him to ship to England and other European countries. Vouch for him as an honest man. Always paid his bills, old accounts against Phillips & Faulds unpaid; dropped them entirely.

Very truly yours,
BURNS & BRUCE.

BEVERLEY SANDS TO BEN DOOLITTLE

_May 24._

DEAR BEN:

You requested me to send you for possible future reference all incoming letters upon the subject of the ferns. Here are two more that have just fluttered down from the blue heaven of the unexpected or been thrust up from the lower regions through a crack in the earth's surface.

Spare a few minutes to admire the rippling eloquence of Messrs. Phillips & Faulds. When the eloquence has ceased to ripple and settles down to stay, their letter has the cold purity of a whitewashed rotten Kentucky fence. They and another firm of florists have a law-suit as to which owes the other, and they meantime compel me, an innocent bystander, to deliver to them my pocketbook.

Will you please immediately bring suit against Phillips & Faulds on behalf of my valuable twenty-five dollars and invaluable indignation? Bring suit against and bring your boot against them if you can. My ducats! Have my ducats out of them or their peace by day and night.

The other letter seems of an unhewn probity that wins my confidence. That is to say, Burns & Bruce, whoever they are, assure me that I ought to believe, and with all my heart I do now believe, in the existence, just over the Tennessee state line, of a florist of good character and a business head. Thus I now press on over the Tennessee state line into North Carolina.

For the ferns must be sent to Mr. Blackthorne; more than ever they must go to him now. Not the entire British army drawn up on the white cliffs of Dover could keep me from landing them on the British Isle. Even if I had to cross over to England, travel to his home, put the ferns down before him or throw them at his head and walk out of his house without a word.

I told you I had a borrowed premonition that there would be trouble ahead: now it is not a premonition, it is my belief and terror. I have grown to stand in dread of all florists, and I approach this third one with my hat in my hand (also with my other hand on my pocketbook).

BEVERLEY.

BEVERLEY SANDS TO NOAH CHAMBERLAIN

_Cathedral Heights, New York,
May 25, 1911._

DEAR SIR:

You have been recommended to me by Messrs. Burns & Bruce, of Dunkirk, Tennessee, as a nurseryman who can be relied upon to keep his word and to carry out his business obligations.

Accepting at its face value their high testimonial as to your trustworthiness, I desire to place with you the following order:

Messrs. Burns & Bruce, acting upon my request, have forwarded to you a list of rare Kentucky ferns. I desire you to collect these ferns and to ship them to Mr. Edward Blackthorne, Esq., King Alfred's Wood, Warwickshire, England. As a guaranty of good faith on my part, I enclose in payment my check for twenty-five dollars. Will you have the kindness to let me know at once whether you will undertake this commission and give it the strictest attention?

Very truly yours,
BEVERLEY SANDS.

NOAH CHAMBERLAIN TO BEVERLEY SANDS

_Seminole, North Carolina,
May 29._

SIR:

I have received your letter with your check in it.

You are the first person that ever offered me money as a florist. I am not a florist, if I must take time to inform you. I had supposed it to be generally known throughout the United States and in Europe that I am professor of botany in this college, and have been for the past fifteen years. If Burns & Bruce really told you I am a florist--and I doubt it--they must be greater ignoramuses than I took them to be. I always knew that they did not have much sense, but I thought they had a little. It is true that they have at different times gathered specimens of ferns for me, and more than once have shipped them to Europe. But I never imagined they were fools enough to think this made me a florist. My collection of ferns embraces dried specimens for study in my classrooms and specimens growing on the college grounds. The ferns I have shipped to Europe have been sent to friends and correspondents. The President of the Royal Botanical Society of Great Britain is an old friend of mine. I have sent him some and I have also sent some to friends in Norway and Sweden and to other scientific students of botany.

It only shows that your next-door neighbour may know nothing about you, especially if you are a little over your neighbour's head.

My daughter, who is my secretary, will return your check, but I thought I had better write and tell you myself that I am not a florist.

Yours truly,
NOAH CHAMBERLAIN, A.M., B.S., Litt.D.

CLARA LOUISE CHAMBERLAIN TO BEVERLEY SANDS

_Seminole, North Carolina,
May 29._

SIR:

I can but express my intense indignation, as Professor Chamberlain's only daughter, that you should send a sum of money to my distinguished father to hire his services as a nurseryman. I had supposed that my father was known to the entire intelligent American public as an eminent scientist, to be ranked with such men as Dana and Gray and Alexander von Humboldt.

People of our means and social position in the South do not peddle bulbs. We do not reside at the entrance to a cemetery and earn our bread by making funeral wreaths and crosses.

You must be some kind of nonentity.

Your cheque is pinned to this letter.

CLARA LOUISE CHAMBERLAIN.

BEVERLEY SANDS TO NOAH CHAMBERLAIN

_June 3._

DEAR SIR:

I am deeply mortified at having believed Messrs. Burns & Bruce to be well-informed and truthful Southern gentlemen. I find that it is no longer safe for me to believe anybody--not about nurserymen. I am not sure now that I should believe you. You say you are a famous botanist, but you may be merely a famous liar, known as such to various learned bodies in Europe. Proof to the contrary is necessary, and you must admit that your letter does not furnish me with that proof.

Still I am going to believe you and I renew the assurance of my mortification that I have innocently caused you the chagrin of discovering that you are not so well known, at least in this country, as you supposed. I suffer from the same chagrin: many of us do; it is the tie that binds: blest be the tie.

I shall be extremely obliged if you will have the kindness to return to me the list of ferns forwarded to you by Messrs. Burns & Bruce, and for that purpose you will please to find enclosed an envelope addressed and stamped.

I acknowledge the return of my cheque, which occasions me some surprise and not a little pleasure.

Allow me once more to regret that through my incurable habit of believing strangers, believing everybody, I was misled into taking the lower view of you as a florist instead of the higher view as a botanist. But you must admit that I was right in classification and wrong only in elevation.

Very truly yours,
BEVERLEY SANDS, A.B. (merely).

NOAH CHAMBERLAIN TO BEVERLEY SANDS

_June 8._

SIR:

I know nothing about any list of ferns. Stop writing to me.

NOAH CHAMBERLAIN.

CLARA LOUISE CHAMBERLAIN TO BEVERLEY SANDS

_June 8._

SIR:

It is excruciating the way you continue to persecute my great father. What is wrong with you? What started you to begin on us in this way? We never heard of _you_. Would you let my dear father alone?

He is a very deep student and it is intolerable for me to see his priceless attention drawn from his work at critical moments when he might be on the point of making profound discoveries. My father is a very absent-minded man, as great scholars usually are, and when he is interrupted he may even forget what he has just been thinking about.

Your letter was a very serious shock to him, and after reading it he could not even drink his tea at supper or enjoy his cold ham. Time and again he put his cup down and said to me in a trembling voice: "Think of his calling me a famous liar!" Then he got up from the table without eating anything and left the room. He turned at the door and said to me, with a confused expression: "I _may_, once in my life--but _he_ didn't know anything about _that_."

He shut his door and stayed in his library all evening, thinking without nourishment.

What a viper you are to call my great father a liar.

CLARA LOUISE CHAMBERLAIN.

BEVERLEY SANDS TO BEN DOOLITTLE

_June 12._

DEAR BEN:

I knew I was in for it! I send another installment of incredible letters from unbelievable people.

In my wanderings over the earth after the ferns I have innocently brought my foot against an ant-hill of Chamberlains. I called the head of the hill a florist and he is a botanist, and the whole hill is frantic with fury. As far as heard from, there are only two ants in the hill, but the two make a lively many in their letters. It's a Southern vendetta and my end may draw nigh.

Now, too, the inevitable quarrel with Tilly is at hand. She has been out of town for a house-party somewhere and is to return to-morrow. When Tilly came to New York a few years ago she had not an acquaintance; now I marvel at the world of people she knows. It is the result of her never declining an invitation. Once I derided her about this, and with her almost terrifying honesty she avowed the reason: that no one ever knew what an acquaintanceship might lead to. This principle, or lack of principle, has led her far. And wherever she goes, she is welcomed afterwards. It is her mystery, her charm. I often ask myself what is her charm. At least her charm, as all charm, is victory. You are defeated by her, chained and dragged along. Of course, I expect all this to be reversed after Tilly marries me. Then I am to have my turn--she is to be led around, dragged helpless by _my_ charm. Magnificent outlook!

To-morrow she is to return, and I shall have to tell her that it is all over--our wonderful summer in England. It is gone, the whole vision drifts away like a gorgeous cloud, carrying with it the bright raindrops of her hopes.