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been as if they were merely leaving them behind for things larger and deeper, as if their background was the real world rather than world of perfunctory things. From him she had a consideration, not perfunctory, but in the mood of the things they were sharing. That sense of sharing big things, things real and rude, had swept them out of the world of artificial things. Now did he perhaps hold back in timidity from that world of the trivial things?

She put it from her, disliking herself as of the trivial things in letting it suggest itself at all. Expecting him to be just like the men she had known would be expecting the sea to behave like that lake in the park.

That night she put on her most attractive gown, a dress sometimes gray and sometimes cloudy blues and greens, itself like the sea, and finding in Katie a more mysterious quality than her openness would usually suggest. Feeling called upon to make some account to herself for dressing more than occasion would seem to demand, she told herself that she must get the poor old thing worn out and get something new.

But it was not a poor old thing, and the last thing Katie really wanted was to succeed in getting it worn out.

As she dressed she was thinking of Ann’s pleasure in clothes. There were times when it had seemed a not altogether likeable vanity. It was understandable–lovable–after having been to Centralia, after knowing. So many things were understandable and lovable after knowing.

She wished she might call across the hall and ask Ann to come in and fasten her dress. She would like to chat with her about the way she had done her hair–all those intimate little things they had countless times talked about so gayly.

She walked over into Ann’s room–room in which Ann had taken such pride and pleasure. Ann had loved the things on the dressing-table, she had more than once seen her fairly caressing those pretty ivory things. She wondered if Ann had anything resembling a dressing-table–what she wore–how she managed.

Those were the little worries about Ann forever haunting her, as they would a mother who had a child away from home. New vision of the immensity of life could save her from giving destroying place to that sense of the woe of the world, but a conception of the wonders of the centuries could not keep out the gnawing fear that Ann might not be getting enough to eat.

There was a complexity in her mood of that night–happiness and sadness so close as at times to be indistinguishable–the whole of it making for a sense of the depth of life.

But their evening was constrained. Katie blamed the dress for part of it, vexed with herself for having put it on. She had wanted to be attractive–not suggest the unattainable.

And that was what something seemed suggesting. He appeared less ill at ease than morose. Katie herself, after having been so happy in his coming, was, now that he was there, uncontrollably depressed. They talked of a variety of things–in the main, the things she had been reading–but something had happened to that wonderful thing which had grown warm in their hearts as they walked those last two blocks.

Even the things of which they talked had lost their radiance. What did it matter whether the universe was wonderful or not if the wonderful thing in one’s own heart was to be denied life?

From the first, it had been as if the things of which they talked were things sweeping them together, they were in the grip of the power and the wonder of those things, wrung by the tragedy of them, exalted by the hope–in it all, by it all, united. It was as if the whole sea of experience and emotion, suffering and aspiration, was driving, holding, them together.

So it had been all along.

But not tonight. It was now–or at least so it seemed to Katie–as if those forces had let them go. What had been as a great sea surging around their hearts was now just things to talk about.

It left her desolate. And as she grew unhappy, she forced her gaiety and that seemed to put him the farther away.

The two different worlds had sent Ann away; was it, in a way she was unable to cope with, likewise to send him away?

Watts passed through the hall. She saw him glance out at the soldier loweringly and after that he grew more morose, almost sullenly so.

It seemed foolish to talk of one’s being free when held by things one could not even see.

It was just when she was feeling so lonely and miserable she wished he would go that the telephone rang and central told her that Chicago was trying to get her.

It was in the manner of the old days that she turned to him and asked what he thought it could be.

The suggestion–possibility–swept them back to the old basis, the old relationship. Katie grew excited, unnerved, and he talked to her soothingly while she waited for central to call again.

They spoke of what it probably was; her brother was in Chicago, Katie told him, and of course it was he, and something about his own affairs. Perhaps he had news of when he would be ordered away. Yes, without doubt that was it.

But there was a consciousness of dissembling. They were drawn together by the possibility they did not mention, drawn together in the very thing of not mentioning it.

As in those tense moments they tried to talk of other things, they were keyed high in the consciousness of not talking of the real thing. And in that there was suggestion of the other thing of which they were not talking. It was all inexplicably related: the excitement, the tenseness, the waiting, the dissembling.

Katie had never been more lovely than as she sat there with her hand on the telephone: flushed, stirred, expectant–something stealing back to her eyes, something both pleading and triumphant in Katie’s eyes just then.

The man sitting close beside her at the telephone desk scarcely took his eyes from her face.

When the bell rang again and her hand shook as it took down the receiver he lay a steadying hand upon her arm.

At first there was nothing more than a controversy as to who had the line. In her impatience, she rose; he rose, too, standing beside her.

“Here’s your party,” said central at last.

Her “party” was Wayne.

But something was still the matter on the line; she could not get what Wayne was trying to tell her.

As her excitement became more difficult to control the man at her side kept speaking to her–touching her–soothingly.

At last she could hear Wayne. “You hear me, Katie?”

“Oh yes–_yes_–what is it?”

“I want to tell you–“

It was swallowed up in a buzzing on the line.

Then central’s voice came clear and crisp. “Your party is trying to tell you that _Ann_ is found.”

“Oh–” gasped Katie, and lost all color–“Oh–“

“Katie–?” That was Wayne again.

“Oh _yes_, Wayne?”

“I have found her. She is well–that is, will be well. She is all right–going to be all right. I’ll write it all to-morrow. It’s all over, Katie. You don’t have to worry any more.”

The next instant the telephone was upside down on the table and Katie, sobbing, was in his arms. He was holding her close; and as her sobs grew more violent he kissed her hair, murmured loving things. Suddenly she raised her head–lifting her face to his. He kissed her; and all the splendor of those eons of life was Katie’s then.

CHAPTER XXXII

Captain Jones had come down from Fort Sheridan late that afternoon. He had been in Chicago for several days, as a member of a board assembled up at Fort Sheridan. The work was over and he would return to the Arsenal that night.

But he was not to go until midnight. He would have dinner and go to the theater with some of the friends with whom he had been in those last few days.

He wished it were otherwise. He was in no mood for them. He would far rather have been alone.

He had a little time alone in his room before dinner and sat there smoking, thinking, looking at the specks of men and women moving about in the streets way down there below.

He was in no humor that night to keep to the everlasting talk about army affairs, army grievances and schemes, all those things of a world within a world treated as if larger than the whole of the world. The last few days had shown him anew how their hold on him was loosening.

There seemed such a thing as the army habit of mind. Within their own domain was orderliness, discipline, efficiency, subservience to the collectivity, pride in it, devotion to it–many things of mind and character sadly needed in the chaotic world without. But army men lacked perspective; in isolation they had lost their sense of proportion, of relationships. They had not a true vision of themselves as part of a whole. They had, on the other hand, unconsciously fallen into the way of assuming the whole existed for the part, that they were larger than the thing they were meant to serve. Their whole scale was so proportioned; their whole sense of adjustment so perverted.

They lacked flexibility–openness–all-sides-aroundness.

Life in the army disciplined one in many things valuable in life. It failed in giving a true sense of the values of life.

He could not have said why it was those inflated proportions irritated him so. They lent an unreality to everything. They made for false standards. And more and more the thing which mattered to him was reality.

He tried to pull away from the things that thought would lure him into. He had not the courage to let himself think of her tonight.

He feared he had not increased his popularity in the last few days. At a dinner the night before a colonel had put an end to a discussion on war, in which several of the younger officers showed dangerous symptoms of hospitality to the civilian point of view, with the pious pronouncement: “War was ordained by God.”

“But man pays the war tax,” he had not been able to resist adding, and the Colonel had not joined in the laugh.

He found it wearisome the way the army remained so smug in its assumption that God stood right behind it. When worsted on economic grounds–and perhaps driven also from “survival of the fittest” shelter–a pompous retreat could always be effected to divinity.

It was that same colonel who, earlier in the evening, had thus ended a discussion on the unemployed. “The poor ye have always with you,” said the Colonel, delicately smacking his lips over his champagne and gently turning the conversation to the safer topic of high explosives.

He turned impatiently from thought of it to the men and women far down below. He was always looking now at crowds of men and women, always hoping for a familiar figure in those crowds.

With all the baffling unreality there had been around her, she seemed to express reality. She made him want it. She made him want life. Made him feel what he was missing–realize what he had never had.

It seemed that if he did not find her he would not find life.

She, too, had wanted life. Her quest had been for life–that he knew. And he wanted to find her that he might tell her he understood, tell her–what he had never told any one–that all his life he, too, had dreamed of a something somewhere.

And he was growing the farther apart from his army friends because he had come to think of them as standing between.

During the summer he had seen. In the mornings when they were going to work, in the evenings when they were going home, he had many times been upon the streets with the people who worked. He could not any longer regard the enlargement of the army, its organization and problems as the most vital thing in the world. It did not seem to him that what the world wanted was a more deadly rifle. His lip curled a little as he looked down at the men and women below and considered how little difference it made to them whether rifles were improved or not. And so many things did make difference with them–they needed improvements on so many things–that to be giving one’s life to perfecting instruments of destruction struck him as a sorry vocation.

It made him feel very distinctly apart.

He knew of no class of men more isolated from the real war of the world than were the men of the army. They were tied up in their own war of competition–competition in preparedness for war. They were frantically occupied in the creation of a Frankenstein. They would so perfect destruction as to destroy themselves. Meanwhile their blood had grown so hot in their war of competition that they were in prime condition for persuading themselves a real war awaited them. This hot blood found its way into much talk of hardihood and strenuousness, vigor, martial virtues, “the steeps of life,” “the romance of history”–all calculated to raise the temperature of tax-paying blood. So successful was the self-delusion of the militarist that sanity appeared mollycoddelism.

Their greatest fear was fear of the loss of fear.

And now they were threatened by colorless economists who were mollycoddelistically making clear that the “stern reality” was the giant hallucination.

It seemed rather close to farce.

That night he was going back. Katie, too, had gone. For the first time that summer neither of them would be there. It seemed giving up.

Loneliness reached out into places vast and barren in the thought that both in the things of the heart and the affairs of men he seemed destined to remain apart.

He looked far more the dreamer than the man of warfare as he sat there, his face, which was so finely sensitive as sometimes to be called cold, saddened with the light of dreams which know themselves for dreams alone.

That very first night, night when she had been so shy, he had felt in her that which he called the real thing, which he knew for the great thing, which had been, for him, the thing unattainable. And with all her timidity, aloofness, elusiveness, he had felt an inexplicable nearness to her.

He had found out something about the conditions girls had to meet. His face hardened, then tightened with pain in the thought of those being the conditions Ann was meeting. He did not believe those conditions would go on many days longer if every man had to see them in relation to some one he cared for. “The poor ye have always with you” might then prove less authoritative–less satisfying–as the final word.

And the other conditions–things his sort stood for–Darrett–the whole story–He had come to loathe the words chivalry and honor and all the rest of the empty terms that resounded so glibly against false standards.

Something was wrong with the world and he could not see that improving a rifle was going to go very far toward setting it right.

And there was springing up within him, even in his loneliness and gloom, a passion to be doing something that would help set it right.

An older officer with whom he had been talking that day had spoken lovingly of his father, under whom he had served; spoken of his hardihood and integrity, his manliness and soldierliness. As he thought of it now it seemed to him that just because he _was_ his father’s son–had in him the blood of the soldier–he should help fight the real battles of the day–the long stern battles of peace.

His father had served, faithfully and well. He, too, would like to serve. But yesterday’s needs were not to-day’s needs, nor were the methods of yesterday desirable, even possible, for to-day. What could be farther from serving one’s own day than rendering to it the dead forms of what had been the real service to a day gone by?

There came a curious thought that to give up the things of war might be the only way to save the things that war had left him. That perhaps he could only transmit his heritage by recasting the form of giving.

Looking out across the miles of the city’s roofs, hearing the rumble of the city as it came faintly up to him, watching the people hurrying to and fro, there was something puerile in the argument that men any longer needed war to fill their lives, must have the war fear to keep them from softness and degeneration. Thinking of the problems of that very city, it seemed men need not worry greatly about having nothing to fight for, no stimulus to manhood.

Men and women! Those men and women passing back and forth and all the millions of their kind, they were what counted. The things that mattered to them were the things that mattered. Their needs the things to fight for.

So he reflected and drifted, brushing now this, now that, in thought and fancy.

Weary–lonely–he dreamed a dream, dream such as the weary and the lonely have dreamed before, will dream again. Too utterly alone, he dreamed he was not alone. Heart-hungry, he dreamed of love. He dreamed of Ann. He had dreamed of her before, would dream of her again. Dream of her, if for nothing else, because he knew she had dreamed of love; because she made him know that it was there, because, unreasoningly, she made him hope.

Her face that night at the dance–that night in the boat, when they had talked almost not at all, had seemed to feel no need for talking–things remembered blended with things desired until it seemed he could feel her hair brush his face, feel her breath upon his cheek, her arms about his neck–vivid as if given by memories instead of wooed from dreams.

But the benign dream became torturing vision–vision of Ann with hands held out to him–going down–her wonderful eyes fearful with terror.

It was that which dreaming held for him.

And it seemed that he–he and his kind–all of those who stood for the things not real were the thing beating Ann down.

Dreams gone and vision mercifully falling away there came a yearning, just a simple human yearning, to know where she was. He felt he could bear anything if only he knew that she was safe.

The telephone rang. He supposed it was some of his friends–something about the hour for dining.

He would not answer. Could not. Too sick of it all–too sore.

But it kept ringing, and, habit in the ascendency, he took down the receiver.

It was not a man’s voice. It was a woman’s. A faint voice–he could scarcely catch it.

And could with difficulty reply. He did not know the voice, it was too faint, too far-away, but a suggestion in it made his own voice and hand unsteady as he said: “Yes? What is it?”

“Is this–Captain Jones?”

The voice was stronger, clearer. His hand grew more unsteady.

“Yes,” he replied in the best voice he could muster. “Yes–this is Captain Jones. Who is it, please?”

There was a silence.

“Tell me, please,” he managed to say. “Is it–?”

The voice came faintly back, “Why it’s–Ann.”

The keenest joy he had ever known swept through him. To be followed by the most piercing fear. The voice was so faint–so unreal–what if it were to die away and he would have no way to get it back!

It seemed he could not hold it. For an instant he was crazed with the sense of powerlessness. He felt it must even then be slipping back into the abyss from which it had emerged.

Then he fought. Got himself under command; sent his own voice full and strong over the wire as if to give life to the voice it seemed must fade away.

“Ann,” he said firmly, authoritatively, “listen to me. No matter what happens–no matter what’s the matter–I’ve got something you must hear. If we’re cut off, call up again. Will you do that? Are you listening?”

“Yes,” came Ann’s voice, more sure.

“I’ve got to see you. You hear what I say? It’s about Katie. You care a little something for Katie, don’t you, Ann?”

It was a sob rather than a voice came back to him.

“Then tell me where I can find you.”

She hesitated.

“Tell me where you’re living–or where I can find you. Now tell me the truth, Ann. If you knew the condition Katie was in–“

She gave him an address on a street he did not know.

“Would you rather I came there? Or rather I meet you down town? Just as you say. Only I _must_ see you tonight.”

“I–I can’t come down town. I’m sick.”

His hand on the receiver tightened. His voice, which had been almost harsh in its dominance, was different as he said: “Then I’ll come there–right away.”

There was no reply, but he felt she was still there. “And, Ann,” he said, very low, and far from harshly, “I want to see you, too.”

There was a little sob in which he faintly got “Good-bye.”

He sank to a chair. His face was buried in his hands. It was several minutes before he moved.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Children seemed to spring up from the sidewalk and descend from the roofs as his cab, after a long trip through crowded streets with which three months before he would have been totally unfamiliar, stopped at the number Ann had given. All the way over he had been seeing children: dirty children, pale-faced children, children munching at things and children looking as though they had never had anything to munch at–children playing and children crying–it seemed the children’s part of town. The men and women of tomorrow were growing up in a part of the city too loathsome for the civilized man and woman of today to set foot in. He was too filled with thought of Ann–the horror of its being where she lived–to let the bigger thought of it brush him more than fleetingly, but it did occur to him that there was still a frontier–and that the men who could bring about smokeless cities–and odorless ones–would be greater public servants than the men who had achieved smokeless powder. Riding through that part of town it would scarcely suggest itself to any one that what the country needed was more battleships.

The children still waited as he rang an inhospitable doorbell, as interested in life as if life had been treating them well.

He had to ring again before a woman came to the door with a cup in her hand which she was wiping on a greasy towel.

She looked very much as the bell had sounded.

She let him in to a place which it seemed might not be a bad field for some of the army’s boasted experts on sanitation. It was a place to make one define civilization as a thing that reduces smell.

Several heads were stuck out of opening doors and with each opening door a wave stole out from an unlovely life. Captain Wayneworth Jones, U. S. Army, dressed for dining at a place where lives are better protected against lives, was a strange center for those waves from lives of struggle.

“She the girl that’s sick?” the woman demanded in response to his inquiry for Miss Forrest.

He replied that he feared she was ill and was told to go to the third floor and turn to the right. It was the second door.

He hesitated, coloring.

“Would you be so kind as to tell her I am here? I think perhaps she may prefer to see me–down here.”

The woman stared, then laughed. She looked like an evil woman as she laughed, but perhaps a laughing saint would look evil with two front teeth gone.

“Well we ain’t got no _parlor_ for the young ladies to see their young men in,” she said mockingly. “And if you climbed as many stairs as I did–“

“I beg your pardon,” said he, and started up the stairway.

On the second floor were more waves from lives of struggle. The matter would be solemnly taken up in Congress if it were soldiers who were housed in the ill-smelling place. Evidently Congress did not take women and children and disabled civilians under the protecting wing of its indignation.

Wet clothes were hanging down from the third floor. They fanned back and forth the fumes of cabbage and grease. He grew sick, not at the thing itself, but at thought of its being where he was to find Ann.

Though the fact that he was to find her made all the rest of it–the fact that people lived that way–even the fact of her living that way–things that mattered but dimly.

As he looked at the woman in greasy wrapper who was shaking out the wet clothes he had a sudden mocking picture of Ann as she had been that night at the dance.

The woman’s manner in staring at him as he knocked at Ann’s door infuriated him.

But when the door was opened–by Ann–he instantly forgot all outside.

He closed the door and stood leaning against it, looking at her. For the moment that was all that mattered. And in that moment he knew how much it mattered–had mattered all along. Even how Ann looked was for the moment of small consequence in comparison with the fact that Ann was there.

But he saw that she was indeed ill–worn–feverish.

“You are not well,” were his first words, gently spoken.

She shook her head, her eyes brimming over.

He looked about the room. It was evident she had been lying on the bed.

“I want you to lie down,” he said, his voice gentle as a woman’s to a child. “You know you don’t mind me. I come as one of the family.”

He helped her back to the bed; smoothed her pillow; covered her with the miserable spread.

Ann hid her face in the pillow, sobbing.

He pulled up the one chair the room afforded, laid his hand upon her hair, and waited. His face was white, his lips trembling.

“It’s all over now,” he murmured at last. “It’s all over now.”

She shook her head and sobbed afresh.

His heart grew cold. What did she mean? A fear more awful than any which had ever presented itself shot through him. But she raised her head and as she looked at him he knew that whatever she meant it was not that.

“What is it about Katie?” she whispered.

“Why, Ann, can’t you guess what it is about Katie? Didn’t you know what Katie must suffer in your leaving like that?”

“I left so she wouldn’t have to suffer.”

“Well you were all wrong, Ann. You have caused us–” But as, looking into her face, he saw what she had suffered, he was silenced.

She was feverish; her eyes were large and deep and perilously bright, her temples and cheeks cruelly thin. But what hurt him most were not the marks of illness and weakness. It was the harassed look. Fear.

_Fear_–that thing so invaluable in building character.

Thought of the needlessness of it wrung from him: “Ann–how could you!”

“Why I thought I was doing right,” she murmured. “I thought I was being kind.”

He smiled faintly, sadly, at the irony and the bitter pity of that.

“But how could you think that?” he pressed. “Not that it matters now–but I don’t see how you could.”

She looked at him strangely. “Do you–know?”

He nodded.

“Then don’t you see? I left to make it easy for Katie.”

He thought of Katie’s summer. “Well your success in that direction was not brilliant,” he said with his old dryness.

Her eyes looked so hurt that he stroked her hand reassuringly, as he would have stroked Worth’s had he hurt him. And as he touched her–it was a hot hand he touched–it struck him as absurd to be quibbling about why she had gone. She was there. He had found her. That was all that mattered.

He became more and more conscious of how much it mattered. He wanted to draw her to him and tell her how much it mattered. But he did not–dared not.

“And how did you happen to be so unkind as to call me up, Ann?” he asked with a faint smile.

“I wanted–I wanted to hear about Katie. And I wanted”–her eyes had filled, her chin was trembling–“I was lonesome. I wanted to hear your voice.”

His heart leaped. For the moment he was not able to keep the tenderness from his look.

“And I knew you were there because I saw it in the paper. A woman brought back some false hair to be exchanged–I sell false hair,” said Ann, with a wan little smile and unconsciously touching her own hair–“and what she wanted exchanged–though we don’t exchange it–was wrapped up in a newspaper, and as I looked down at it I happened to see your name. Wasn’t that funny?”

“Very humorous,” he replied, almost curtly.

“I had been sick all day–oh, for lots of days. But I was trying to keep on. I had lost two other places by staying away for being sick–and I didn’t dare–just didn’t dare–lose this one. You don’t know how _afraid_ you get–how frightened you are–when you’re afraid you’re going to be sick.”

The fear–sick fear that fear of sickness can bring–that was in her eyes as she talked of it suddenly infuriated him. He did not know what or whom he I was furious at–but it was on Ann it broke.

He rose, overturning his unsteady chair as he did so, and, seeking command, looked from the window which looked down into a squalid court. The wretchedness of the court whipped his rage. “Well for God’s sake,” he burst forth, “what did you _do_ it for! Of all the unheard of–outrageous–unpardonable–What did you _mean_”–turning savagely upon her–“by selling false hair?”

“Why I sold false hair,” said Ann, a little sullenly, “so I could live.”

“Well, didn’t you know,” he demanded passionately, “that you could _live_ with _us_?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t think I had any right to–after–what happened.”

He came back to her. “Ann,” he asked gently, “haven’t you a ‘right to’–if we want you to?”

She looked at him again in that strange way. “Are you sure–you know?”

“Very sure,” he answered briefly.

“And do you mean to say you would want me–anyhow?” she whispered.

He turned away that she might not see how badly and in what sense he wanted her. His whole sense of fitness–his training–was against her seeing it then.

The pause, the way she was looking at him when he turned back to her, made restraint more and more difficult. But suddenly she changed, her face darkening as she said, smolderingly: “No–I’m not _that_ weak. If I can’t live–I’ll _die_. Other people make a living! Other girls get along! Katie would. Katie could do it.”

She sat up; he could see the blood throbbing in her neck and at her temples. She was gripping her hands. She looked so frail–so helpless.

“But Katie is strong, Ann,” he said soothingly.

“Yes–in every way. And I’m not.” She turned away, her face twitching. “Why I seem to be just the kind of a person that has to be taken care of!”

He did not deny it, filled with the longing to do it.

“It’s–it’s humiliating.”

He would at one time have supposed that it would be, should be; would have held to the idea that every man and woman ought be able to make a living, that there was something wrong with them if they couldn’t. But not after the things he had seen that summer. The something wrong was somewhere else.

“And yet you don’t know,” Ann was saying brokenly, “how hard it is. You don’t know–how many things there are.”

She turned to him impetuously. “I want to tell you! Then maybe it will go. I couldn’t tell Katie. But I don’t know–I don’t know why–but I could tell you anything.”

He nodded, not clear-eyed, and took one of her hands and stroked it.

Her cheeks grew more red; her eyes glitteringly bright. “You see–it’s _men_–things like–that’s what makes it hard for girls.”

He pressed her hand more firmly, though his own was shaking.

“Katie told you–Katie must have told you about–the first of it–” She faltered. He drew in his breath sharply and held it for an instant. “And after that–” She turned upon him passionately. “_Do_ they know? _Does_ it make a difference?”

He did not get her meaning for an instant and when he did it brought the color to his face; he had always been a man of great reserve. But Ann seemed unconscious. This was the reality that realities make.

He shook his head. “No. You only imagine.”

“No, I don’t imagine. They pretend. Pretend they know.”

He gritted his teeth. So those were the things she had had to meet!

“They lie,” he said briefly. “Bluff.” And for an instant he covered his eyes with her hand.

“You see after–after that,” she went on, “I couldn’t go back to the telephone office. I don’t know that I can explain why–but it seemed the one thing I couldn’t do, so–oh I did several things–was in a store–and then a girl got me on the stage–in the chorus of ‘Daisey-Maisey.’ I thought perhaps I could be an actress, and that being in the chorus would give me a chance.”

She laughed bitterly. “There are lots of silly people in the world, aren’t there?” was her one comment on her mistake.

“That night–the last night–” she told it in convulsive little jerks–“the manager said something to me. _He_ pretended. And when he saw how frightened I was–and how I loathed him–it made him furious–and he said things–vowed things–and he kissed me–and oh he was so _terrible_–his face–his lips–“

She hid her face, rocking back and forth. He sat on the bed beside her, put his arm around her as he would around Katie or Worth, holding her tenderly, protectingly, soothingly, his own face white, biting his lips.

“He vowed things–he claimed–I knew I couldn’t stay with the company. I was even afraid to stay until it was over that night. I had a chance to run away–Oh I was so _frightened_.” She kept repeating–“I was so _frightened_.

“I can’t explain it–you’d have to see him–his _lips_–his thick, loose awful lips!”

“Ann,” he whispered. “Please, dear–don’t talk about it–don’t think about it!”

“But I want it to go away! I don’t want to be alone with it. I want somebody to know. I want _you_ to know.”

“All right,” he murmured. “All right. I want to hear.” His whole body was set for pain he knew must come.

Ann’s eyes were full of terror, that terror that lives after terror, the anguish of terror remembered. “It’s awful to be alone with awful thoughts,” she whispered. “To be shut in with something you’re afraid of.”

“I know–I know,” he soothed her. “But you’re going to tell me. Tell _me_. And then you’ll never be alone with it again.”

“I’ve been afraid so much,” she went on sobbingly. “Alone so much–with things that frightened me. That night I was alone. All alone. And afraid. You see I went and went and went. Just to be getting _away_. And at last I was out in the country. And then I was afraid of _that_. I went in something that seemed to be a barn. Hid in some hay–“

He gripped her arm as if it were more than he could stand. His face was colorless.

“I almost went crazy. Why I think I _did_ go crazy–with fear. Being alone. Being afraid.”

He looked away from her. It seemed unfair to her to let himself see her like that–her face distorted–unlovely–in the memory of it.

“When it came daylight I went to sleep. And when I woke up–when I woke up–” She was laughing and sobbing together and it was some time before he could quiet her. “When I woke up another man was bending over me–an old man–so _old_–so–

“Oh, I suppose it was just that he was surprised at finding me there. But I thought–I hadn’t got over the night before–

“So again I went. Just went. Just to get away. And that was when I saw it was life I’d have to get away from. That there wasn’t any place in it for me. That it meant being alone. Afraid. That it was just _that_–those thick awful lips–that old man’s eyes–Oh no–no–not that!”

She was fighting it with her hands–trying to push it away. It took both tenderness and sternness to quiet her.

“So I hurried on,”–she told it in hurried, desperate way, as if fearful she would not get it all told and would be left alone with it. “To find a way. A place. I just wanted to find the way–the place–before anything else could happen. I thought all the people who looked at me _knew_. I thought there was nothing else for me–I thought there was something wrong with me–and when I remembered what I had wanted–I hated–hated them.

“I saw water–a bridge. On the bridge I looked down. I was going to–but I couldn’t, because a man was looking up at me. I hated him, too.” She paused. “Though I’ve thought of it since. It was a queer look. I believe that man _knew_. And wanted to help me.

“But I didn’t want to be helped. Nothing could help. I just wanted to get away–have it over. So I hurried on–across your Island–though I didn’t know–just looking for a place–a way. Just to have it all over.”

She changed on that, relaxed. Her eyes closed. “To have it all over,” she repeated in a whisper. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. “Doesn’t that ever seem to you a beautiful thing?”

His eyes were wet. “Not any more,” he whispered. “Not now.”

“Then again I saw water–the other side of the Island.” She went back to it with an effort, exhausted. “I ran. I wanted to get there. Have it all over–before anything else could happen. I couldn’t _look_–but I kept saying to myself it would only be a minute–only a minute–then it would be all over–not so bad as having things happen–being alone–afraid–“

She shuddered–drew back–living it–realizing it. Her visioning–realizing–had gone on beyond her words, beyond the events. She was shuddering as if the water were actually closing over her. But again she was called back by Katie’s voice and that look he felt he should not be seeing went as a faint smile formed on her lips. “Then Katie. Katie calling to me. Dear Katie–pretending.

“I didn’t want to go. I thought it was just something else. And oh how I wanted to get it all over!” She sobbed. “But I saw it was a girl. Sick. I wasn’t able to help going–and then–Well, you know. Katie. How she fooled me. And saved me.”

She looked up at him, again the suggestion of a smile on her colorless lips. “Was there ever anybody in the world so wonderful–so funny–as Katie?

“But at first I couldn’t believe in her. I thought it must be just something else.” She stopped, looking at him. “Why I think it wasn’t till after I met _you_ I felt sure it couldn’t be–“

His arm about her tightened. He drew her closer to him. He was shaken by a deep sob.

And so she rested, lax, murmuring about things that had happened, sometimes smiling faintly as she recalled them. The terror had gone, as if, as she had known, telling it to him had freed her. That twisted, unlovely look which he had tried not to see, loving her too well to wish to see it, had gone. She was worn, but lovely. She was resting. At peace.

And so many minutes passed when she would not speak–resting, rescued. And then she would whisper of little things that had happened and smile a little and seem to drift the farther into the harbor of security into which she had come.

He saw that–exhausted, protected, comforted–she was going to fall asleep. His heart was all tenderness for her as he held her, adoring her, sorrowing over her, guarding her. “I haven’t really slept all summer,” she murmured at last, and after a few minutes her breathing told that sleep had come.

But when, in trying to unfasten her collar–he longed to be doing some little thing for her comfort–he took his hand from hers, she started up in alarm and he had to put it back, reassuring her, telling her that she was not alone, that nothing could ever harm her again.

An hour passed. And in that hour things which he would have believed fixed loosened and fell. It was all shaken–the whole of his thinking. It could never be the same again. Old things must go. New things come.

Watching Ann, yearning over her, sorrowing, adoring, he saw life as what life had done to her. Saw it as the thing she had found.

He watched the curve of her mouth. Her beautiful bosom rising and falling as she slept. The lovely line of her throat, the blood throbbing in her throat, her long lashes upon her cheek, that loveliness–beauty–that sweetness and tenderness–and _what it had met_. She, so exquisitely fashioned for love–needful of it–so perfect–so infinitely to be desired and cherished–and _what she had found_. He writhed under a picture of that old man bending over her–of that other man–bully, brute–thick awful lips snatching at her as a dog at meat. And then still another man. That first man. Darrett. _His_ friend. _His_ sort. The man who could so skillfully use the lure of love to rob life–

As he thought of him–his charm, cleverness–how that, too, had been pitted against her–starved, then offered what she would have no way of judging–close to her loveliness, conscious of her warmth, her breath, the superb curves of her lovely body–thinking of what Darrett had found–taken–what he had left her _to_–there were several minutes when his brain was unpiloted, a creaking ship churning a screaming sea.

And now? Had it killed it in her? Taken it? If he were to kiss her in the way he hungered to kiss her would it wake nothing more than that sick terror in her wonderful eyes? That thought became as a band of hot steel round his throat. Was it _gone_? How could she be sleeping that way with her hand in his–his face so close to her–if there remained any of that life-longing that had been there for Darrett to find?

Life grew too cold, too gray and misshapen in that thought to see it as life. It could not be. It was only that she was exhausted. And her trust in him.

At least there was that. Then he would make her care for him by caring for her–caring for her protectingly, tenderly, surrounding her with that sea of tenderness that was in his heart for her. Life would come back. He would woo it back. And no matter how the flame in his own heart might rage he would wait upon the day when he could bring the love light to her eyes without even the shadow of remembering of fear.

So he yearned over her–sorrowing, hoping. And life was to him two things. What life had done to Ann. What life would be with Ann. He wanted to let himself touch his lips lightly to her temple–so close to him. But he would not–fearing to wake the fear in her, vowing to wait till love could come through a trust that must cast fear forever from the heart.

Passion melted to tenderness; the tenderness flooding him in thought of the love he would give her.

That same night he had her taken to a hospital. It was the only way he could think of for caring for her, and she was far enough from well to permit it. He left her there, again asleep, and cared for. Then returned to his hotel and telephoned Katie. It was past daylight before sleep came to him.

CHAPTER XXXIV

Once again Katie was donning the dress which had the colors of the sea. She was wearing it this time, not because she must get the poor old thing worn out, but because she had been asked to wear it. “By Request” she was saying to herself, with a warm smile, as she shook out its folds.

As Nora was fastening it for her she saw her own face in the mirror and tried to twist it about in some way. It seemed she would have to make some explanation to Nora for looking like that.

It had been a day of golden October sunshine without, and within Katie’s heart a day of such sunshine as all her years of sunshine had never brought. She had not felt like playing golf, or like reading about evolution; body and mind were filled with a gladness all their own and she had taken a long walk in and out among the wooded paths of her beautiful Island and had been filled with thoughts of many beautiful and wonderful things. Of the past she had thought, and of the future, and most of all of the living present: the night before, and that evening, when he was coming to see her again and would have things to tell her.

He had wanted to tell them then–some of the things about himself which he said she must know and which he gave fair warning would hurt her, “Then not to-night,” she had said.

And now the happiness was too great, filled her too completely and radiantly for her to fear the pain of which she had been warned. She was fortified against all pain.

Wayne’s finding Ann seemed to throw the gate to happiness wide open to her, giving her, not only happiness, but the right to it. She smiled in thinking how, again, it was Ann who opened a door.

If Ann had never come she would not–in this way which had made it all possible–have known her man who mended the boats. The experience with Ann was as a bridge upon which they met. It was because of Ann they could walk so far along that bridge.

The adventure, and what had come to seem the tragedy of the adventure, was over. It turned her back to those first days of play–the pretending which had led to realizing, the fancies which had been paths to realities.

They would not go on in just that way; some other way would shape itself; she and Wayne would talk of it, make some plan for Ann. She could plan it better after the letter she would have from Wayne the next day telling of finding Ann.

It was a new adventure now. The great adventure. But it was because she had ventured at all that the great adventure was offered her.

Her venturing had led her to the crowds. She was not forgetting the crowds. She would go back to them. It could not be otherwise. There was much she wanted to do, and so much she wanted to know. But she would go back to them happy, and because happy, wiser and stronger.

In myriad ways life had beckoned to her, promised her, as with buoyant step and singing heart she walked sunny paths that golden October afternoon.

Later she had stopped to see Mrs. Prescott, and she, as she so often did, talked of Katie’s mother. Katie was glad to be talking of her mother, and, as they also did, of her father. It brought them very near, so close it was as if they could know of the beautiful happiness in their child’s heart. They talked of things which had happened when Katie was a little girl, making herself as the little girl so real, visualizing her whole life, making real and dear those things in which her life had been lived.

As she thought of it again that night, after she was dressed and was waiting, hurt did come in the thought of his feeling for the army. She must talk to him again about the army, make him see that thing in it which was dear to her.

Though could she? She did not seem able to tell even herself just what there was in her feeling for the army.

Instead of arguments, came pictures–pictures and sounds known from babyhood: Men in uniform–her father in uniform, upon his horse–dress parade–the flag–the band–from reveille to taps things familiar and dear swept before her.

It would seem to be the picturesque in it which wove the spell; but would her throat have tightened, those tears be springing to her eyes at a thing no deeper than the picturesque? No, in what seemed that fantastic setting were things genuine and fine: simplicity, hospitality, friendship, comradeship, loyalty, courage in danger and good humor in petty annoyances.

Those things–oh yes, together with things less admirable–she knew to be there.

She got out her pictures of her father and mother; her father in uniform–that gentle little smile on her mother’s face. She thought of what her mother had endured, of what hosts of army women had endured, going to outlandish spots of the earth, braving danger and doing without cooks! She was proud of them, proud to be of them.

She lingered over her father’s picture. A soldier. Perhaps he was of a vanishing order, but she hoped it would be long–very long–before the things to be read in his face vanished from the earth.

Through memories of her father there many times sounded the notes of the bugle–now this call, now that, piercing, compelling, sounding as _motif_ of his life, thing before which all other things must fall away. She seemed to hear now the notes of retreat–to see the motionless regiment–then the evening gun and the band playing the Star Spangled Banner and the flag–never touching the ground–coming down for the night. She answered it in the things it woke in her heart: those ideals of service, courage, fidelity which it had left her.

She would talk to him–to Alan (absurd she should think it so timidly–so close in the big things–so strange in some of the little ones)–about her father and mother. To make them real to him would make him see the army differently. It hurt her to think of his seeing it as he did, hurt her because she knew how it would have hurt them. To them, it had been the whole of their lives. They had not questioned; they had served. They had given it all they had.

And that other thing there was to tell her–? Was that, too, something that would have hurt them? She hoped not. It seemed she could bear the actual hurt to herself better than thought of the hurt it would have been to them.

But when the bell rang and she heard his voice asking for her a tumult of happiness crowded all else out.

She was shyly radiant as she came to him. As he looked at her, it seemed to pass belief.

But when he dared, and was newly convinced, as, his arms about her he looked down into her kindling face, his own grew purposeful as well as happy, more resolute than radiant. “We will make a life together,” he said, as if answering something that had been in his thoughts. “We will beat it all down.”

An hour went by and he had not told the story of his life, life itself too mysterious, too luring, too beautiful. Whenever they came near to it they seemed to hold back, as if they would remain as they were then. Instead, they told each other little things about themselves, absurd little things, drawing near to each other by all those tender little paths of suddenly remembered things. And they lingered so, as if loving it so.

It was when Katie spoke of her brother that he was swept again into the larger seriousness. Looking into her tender face, his own grew grave. “You know, Katie–what I told you–what I must tell you–“

“Oh yes,” said Katie, “there was something, wasn’t there?” But she put out her hand as if to show there was nothing that could matter. He took the hand and held it; but he did not grow less grave.

“Katie,” he asked, “how much do you really care for the army?”

It startled her, stirring a vague fear in her happy heart.

“Why–I don’t know; more than I realize, I presume.” She was silent, then asked: “Why?”

He did not reply; his face had become sober.

“You are thinking,” she ventured, “that your feeling for it is going to be–hard for me?”

He nodded; he was still holding her hand tightly, as if to make sure of keeping it.

“You see, Katie,” he went on, with difficulty, “I have reason for that feeling.”

“What do you mean?” she asked sharply.

“I have tried not to show you that I knew anything–in a personal way–about the army.”

Her breath was coming quickly; her face was strained. But after a moment she exclaimed: “Why–to be sure–you were in the Spanish War!”

“No,” said he with a hard laugh, “I am nothing so glorious as a veteran.”

He felt the hand in his grow cold. She drew it away and rose; turned away and was picking the leaves from a plant.

But she found another thing to reach out to. “Well I suppose”–this she ventured tremulously, imploringly–“you went to West Point–and were– didn’t finish?”

“No, Katie,” he said, “I never went to West Point.”

“Well then what did you do?” she demanded sharply.

He laughed harshly. “Oh I was just one of those fools roped in by a recruiting officer in a gallant-looking white suit!”

“You were–?” she faltered.

“In the ranks. One of the men.” The fact that she should be looking like that drove him to add bitterly: “Like Watts, you know.”

She stood there in silence, held. The radiance had all fallen from her. She was looking at him with something of the woe and reproach of a child for a cherished thing hurt.

“Why, Katie,” he cried, “_does_ it matter so? I thought it was only when we were _in_ that we were so–impossible.”

But she did not take the hands he stretched out. She was held.

It drove him desperate. “Well if _that’s_ so–if to have been in the army at all is a thing to make you look like _that_–Heaven knows,” he threw in, “I don’t blame you for despising us for fools!–But I don’t know what you’ll say when I tell you–“

“When you tell me–what?” she whispered.

“That I have no honorable discharge to lay at your feet. That I left your precious army through the noble gates of a military prison!”

She took a step backward, swaying. The anguish which mingled with the horror in her face made him cry: “Katie, let me tell you! Let me show you–“

But Katie, white-faced, was standing erect, braced for facing it. “What for? What did you do?”

Her voice was quick, sharp; tenseness made her seem arrogant. It roused something ugly in him. “I knocked down a cur of a lieutenant,” he said, and laughed defiantly.

“You _struck_–an officer?”

“I knocked down a man who ought to have been knocked down!”

“_Struck_–your superior officer?”

“Katie,” he cried, “that’s your way of looking at it! But let me tell you–let me show you–“

But she had turned from him, covered her face; and before Katie there swept again those pictures, sounds: her father’s voice ringing out over parade ground–silent, motionless regiment; the notes of retreat–those bugle notes, piercing, compelling, thing before which all other things must fall away–evening gun and lowered flag–

She lifted colorless face, shaking her head.

“_Katie_!” he cried. “Our life–_our_ love–_our_ life–“

She raised her hand for silence, still shaking her head.

“Won’t you–_fight_ for it?” he whispered. “_Try_?”

She kept shaking her head. “Anything else,” she managed to articulate. “Anything else. Not this. You don’t understand. Can’t. Never would.” Suddenly she cried: “Oh–_go away!_”

For a moment he stood there. But her face was locked against appeal. Colorless, unsteady, he turned and left her.

Katie put out her hand. Her father–her father in uniform, it had been so real, it seemed he must be there. But he was not there. Nothing was there. Nothing at all. As the front door closed she started forward, but there sounded for her again the notes of the bugle–piercing, compelling, thing before which all other things must fall away. “Taps,” this time, as blown over her father’s grave, soldiers’ heads bowed and tears falling for a fine soldier who would respond to bugle calls no more.

CHAPTER XXXV

Paris was in one of her gray moods that January afternoon. Everything was gray except the humanity. Emotion never seemed to grow gray in Paris. From her place by the window in Clara’s apartment Katie was looking down into the narrow street, the people passing to and fro. Two men were shaking hands. They would stop, then begin again. They had been doing that for the last five minutes. They seemed to find life a very live thing. So did the _femme de menage_ and her soldier, who also had been standing over there for the last five minutes. Katie did not want to look longer at the _femme de menage_ and her soldier, so she turned her chair a little about and looked more directly at Clara.

Clara was in gray mood, too. Only Clara differed from the streets in that it was the emotion was gray; the _robe de chambre_ was red.

So were Clara’s eyes. “It’s not pleasant, Katie,” she was saying, “having to remain here in Paris for these foggy months–with all one’s friends down on the Riviera.”

“No,” said Katie grimly, “life’s hard.”

Clara’s tears flowed afresh. “I’ve often thought _you_ were hard, Katie. It’s because you’ve never–_cared._ You’ve never–suffered.”

Katie smiled slightly, again looking out the window at the _femme_ and her soldier, who were as contented with the seclusion offered by a lamp-post as though it were seclusion indeed. As she watched them, “hard” did not seem the precise word for something in Katie’s eyes.

“You see, Katie,” Clara had resumed, as if her woe gave her the right to rebuke Katie for the lack of woe, “you’ve always had everything just the way you wanted it.”

“Just exactly,” said Katie, still looking at the _femme de menage._

“Your grandfather left you all that money, and when you want to do a thing all you have to do is do it. What can you know of the real sorrows and hardships of life?”

“What indeed?” responded Katie briskly.

“And your heart has never been touched–and I don’t believe it ever will be,” Clara continued spitefully–Katie seemed so complacent. “You have no real feeling. You’re just like Wayne.”

Katie laughed at that and looked at Clara; then laughed again, and Clara flushed.

“Speaking of Wayne,” said Katie in off-hand fashion, “he’s been made a major.”

She watched Clara as she said it. There were things Katie could be rather brutal about.

“I’m sure that’s very nice,” said the woman who had divorced Wayne.

“Yes, isn’t it? And other things are going swimmingly. One of those things he used to be always puttering over–you may remember, Clara, mentioning, from time to time, those things he used to be puttering around with–has been adopted with a whoop. A great fuss is being made over it. It looks as though Wayne was confronted with something that might be called a future.”

“I’m sure I’m very glad,” said Clara, “that somebody is to have something that might be called a future. Certainly a woman with barely enough to live on isn’t in much danger of being confronted with one.”

Katie made no apology to herself for the pleasure she took in “rubbing it in.” She remembered too many things too vividly.

“It’s pretty hard,” said Clara, “when one has a–duty to society, and nothing to go on.”

Katie was thinking that society must be a very vigorous thing, persisting through all the “duties” people had to it.

She smiled now in seeing that the thing which had brought her to Clara that day was in the nature of a “duty to society” and that in her case, too, a duty to society and a personal inclination moved happily together.

Katie was there that afternoon to buy Worth.

So she put it to herself in what Clara would have called her characteristically brutal fashion.

She was sure Worth could be had for a price. She had that price and she believed the psychological moment was at hand for offering it.

The reason for its being the psychological moment was that Clara wanted to join a party at Nice and did not have money enough to buy the clothes which would make her going worth while. For there was a man there–an American, a rich westerner–whom Clara’s duty to society moved her to marry.

That was Katie’s indelicate deduction from Clara’s delicate hints.

And Katie wanted Worth. It wasn’t wholly a matter of either affection or convenience. It had to do, and in almost passionate sense, with something which was at least in the category with such things as duties to society. Worth seemed to her too fine, too real, to be reared by a “truly feminine woman,” as Clara had been known to call herself. Clara’s great idea for Worth was that he be well brought up. That was Clara’s idea of her duty to society. And it was Katie’s notion of her duty to society to save him from being too well brought up.

The things she had been seeing, and suffering, in the past year made her feel almost savagely on the subject.

Katie had been there since October. Clara had magnanimously permitted Worth to remain with his Aunt Kate most of the time, with the provision that Katie bring him to her as often as she wanted him. This was unselfish of Clara, and cheaper.

Clara’s alimony was not small, but neither were her tastes. Indeed the latter rose to the proportions of duties to society.

Katie knew it was as such she must treat them in the next half hour. She must save the “maternal instinct” Clara was always talking about–usually adding that it was a thing which Katie, of course, could not understand–by taking it under the sheltering wing of the “child’s good.”

Katie knew just how to reach the emotions which Clara had, without outraging too much the emotions she persuaded herself she had.

So she began speaking in a large way of life, how hard it was, how complicated. How they all loved Worth and wished to do the best thing for him, how she feared it must hurt the child’s personality, living in that unsettled fashion, now under one influence, now under another. She spoke of Clara’s own future, how she had _that_ to think of and how it was hard she be so–restricted. She drew a vivid picture of what life might be if Clara didn’t “provide for the future”–she was careful to use no phrase so raw to truly feminine ears as “make a good marriage.” And then, rather curtly when it came to it, tired of the ingratiating preamble, she asked Clara what she would think of relinquishing all claim on Worth and taking twenty thousand dollars.

Clara tried to look more insulted by the proposition than invited by the sum. But Katie got a glimmer of that look of greed known to her of old.

She went on talking. She was sure every one would think it beautiful of Clara to let Worth go to them just because they had a better way of caring for him, just because it was for the child’s good. Every one would know how it must hurt her and admire her for the sacrifice. And then Katie mentioned the fact that the matter could be closed immediately and Clara start at once for Nice and perhaps that itself would “mean something to the future.”

From behind Clara’s handkerchief–Clara’s tears were in close relation to Clara’s sense of the fitness of things–Katie made out that life seemed driving her to this, but that it hurt her to think so tragic a thing should be associated with so paltry a sum.

“It’s my limit,” said Katie shortly. “Take it or leave it.”

Amid more sobs Katie got that all the Jones family were heartless, that life was cruel, but that she was willing to make any sacrifice for her child’s good.

“Then I’ll go down and get him,” said Katie, rising.

Clara’s sobs ceased instantly. “Get who?”

“My lawyer. I left him down there talking to the _concierge_.”

“Katie Jones–how _could_ you!”

“Oh she looks like a decent enough woman,” said Katie. “I don’t think it will hurt him any.”

“Katie, you have grown absolutely–_vulgar_. And so _hard_. You have no fineness–no intuition–nothing feminine about you. And how dared you bring your lawyer here to me? What right had you to assume I’d do this?”

“Why I knew you well enough, Clara, to believe you would be willing to do it–for your child’s good.”

Clara looked at her suspiciously and Katie hastened to add that she brought him because she wanted to pay ten thousand francs on account and she thought Clara might want to get the disagreeable business all settled up at once so she could hurry on to Nice before those friends of hers got over to Algiers, or some place where Clara might not be able to go after them.

Clara again looked suspicious, but only said it was inconsiderate of Katie to expect her to receive a lawyer with her poor eyes in that condition.

But when Katie returned with him Clara’s eyes were a softer red and she managed to extract from the interview the pleasure of showing him that she was suffering.

As she watched the transaction, Katie felt a little ashamed of herself. Not because she was doing it, but because she had known so well how to do it. But with a grimace she banished her compunctions in the thought of its being for the child’s good, and hence a duty to society.

Less easy to banish was the hideous thought that she might have been able to get him for less!

By the time the attorney had gone Clara seemed to be looking upon herself as one hallowed by grief; she was in the high mood of one set apart by suffering. In her eyes was something which she evidently felt to be a look of resignation. In her hand something which she certainly felt to be an order for ten thousand francs.

The combination first amused and then irritated Katie. It was exasperating to have Clara giving herself airs about the grief which was to make such a sorry cut in Katie’s income.

Clara, in her mellowed mood, spoke of the past, why it had all been as it had. She was even so purged by suffering as to speak gently of Wayne. “I hope, Katie–yes, actually hope–that Wayne will some time find it possible to care, and be happy.”

And when Katie thought of how much Wayne had cared, why he had not been happy, it grew more and more difficult to treat Clara as one sanctified by sorrow.

It gave her a fierce new longing for the real, the real at all costs, a contempt for all that artifice and self-delusion which made for the things at war with the real.

She had enough malice to entertain an impulse to strip Clara of her complacency, take away from her her pleasant cup of sorrow, make her take one good look at herself for the woman she was rather than the woman she was flaunting. But she had no zest for it. What would be the use? And, after all, self-deception seemed a thing one was entitled to practice, if one wished.

What Katie wanted most was to get out into the air.

CHAPTER XXXVI

To get out into the air was the thing she was always wanting in those days, or at least for the last two months it had been so. At first she had been too wretched to be conscious of needing anything.

But Katie was not built for wretchedness; everything in her was fighting now for air, what air meant to spirit and body.

It was in the sense of the spirit that she most of all wanted to get out into the air, out into a more spacious country than the world Clara suggested, out where the air was clear and keen and where there were distances more vast than those which would shut her in.

For she had looked into a larger country. Allegiance to the smaller one could not be whole-hearted.

She wondered if it were true she was getting hard. Something in her did seem hardening. At any rate, something in her was wanting to fight, fight for air, fight, no matter who must be hurt in the struggle, for that bigger country into which she had looked, those greater distances, more spacious sweeps. Sometimes she had a sense of being in a close room, and nothing in the world was so dreadful to Katie as a close room, and felt that she had but to open a door and find herself out where the wind would blow upon her face. And the door was not bolted. It was hers to open, if she would. There were no real chains. There were only dead hands, hands which live hands had power to brush away. And the room was made close by all those things which they of the dead hands had loved, things which they had served, things which, for them, had been out in the open, not making the air unbearable in a close room. And when she wanted to tell them that she must get out of the room because it was too close for her, that she could no longer stay with things which shut out the air, it seemed they could not understand–for they were dead, but they could look at her with love and trust, those hands, which could have been so easily brushed away, as bolts on the door of the room holding the things they had left for her to guard.

And they were proud, and their trusting eyes seemed to say they knew she would not make all their world sorry for them.

She walked slowly across Pont du Carrousel, watching the people, the people going their many ways, meeting their many problems, wondering if many of them had well loved hands, either of life or death, as bolts upon the doors which held them from more spacious countries, holding them so securely because they could be so easily brushed away. It was people, people of the crowds, who saved her from a sense of isolation her own friends brought: for she was always certain that in the crowds was some one else who was wondering, longing, perhaps a courageous some one who was fighting.

Paris itself had fought, was fighting all the time. She loved it anew in the new sense of its hurts and its hopes. And always it had laughed. She felt kinship to it in that. Seeming so little caring, yet so deeply understanding. The laughter-loving city had paid stern price that its children might laugh. It seemed to her sometimes that one could love and hate Paris for every known reason, but in the end always love for the full measure it gave. She stood for a moment looking at the spire of Sainte Chapelle, slender as a fancy, yet standing out like a conviction; watching the people on the busses, the gesticulating crowds–blockades of emotion, the men on the Quai rummaging among the book-stalls for possible treasures left by men who had loved it long before, looking at the thanks in stone for yesterday’s vision of to-morrow, and everywhere cabs–as words carrying ideas–breathlessly bearing eager people from one vivid point to another in the hurrying, highly-pitched, articulate city.

It interested her for a time, as things that were live always interested Katie. The city’s streets had always been for her as waves which bore her joyously along. But after a time, perhaps just because she was so live, it made her unbearably lonely.

The things they might do together in Paris! The things to see–to talk about.

And still filled with her revolt against Clara’s self-delusions, she asked of herself how much the demand of her spirit to soar was prompted by the hunger of her heart to love.

She could not say. She wondered how many of the world’s people would be able to say. How many of the spacious countries would have been gained had men been fighting only for their philosophies, pushed only by the beating of wings that would soar. But did that make the distances less vast? Less to be desired? Though visioning be child of desiring–was the vision less splendid, and was not the desire ennobled?

Her speculations were of such nature as to make her hurry home to see whether there was American mail.

A certain letter which sometimes came to her was called “American mail.” All the rest of the American mail which reached Paris was privileged to be classed with that letter.

Katie had come over in October with her Aunt Elizabeth, who felt the need of recuperation from the bitter blow of her son’s marriage. Katie, too, felt the need of recuperation–she did not say from what, but from something that made her intolerant of her aunt’s form of distress. Her aunt said that Katie was changing: growing unsympathetic, hard, unfeminine. She thought it was because she did not marry. It would soften her to care for some one, was the theory of her Aunt Elizabeth.

She had remained in order to be with Worth; and, too, because there seemed nothing to go back to. Mrs. Prescott had come over to be for a time with a niece who was studying music, and she and Katie were together. Now the older woman was beginning to talk of wanting to go back; she was getting letters from Harry which made her want to see him. The letters sounded as though he were in love again.

And Katie was getting letters herself, letters to make her want to see the writer thereof. They, too, sounded as if written by one in love. With things as regards Worth adjusted, Katie would be free to go with her friend, and she was homesick. At least that was the non-committal name she gave to something that was tugging at her heart.

But–go home to what? For what?

Her vision had not grown any clearer. It was only that the “homesickness” was growing more acute.

And that night’s mail did not fill her with a yearning to become an expatriate.

In addition to the “American mail” there was a letter from Ann. That evening after Worth was asleep and Mrs. Prescott had gone to her room, Katie reread both letters, and a number of others, and thought about a number of things.

Wayne had undertaken the supervision of Ann. In his first letter, that unsatisfactory letter in which he gave so few details about finding Ann, he had said quite high-handedly that he was going to look after things himself. “I think, Katie,” he wrote, “that with the best of intentions, your method was at fault. I can see how it all came about, but it is not the way to go on. It was too unreal. The time of make-believe is over. Ann is a real person and should work out her life in a real way, her own way, not following your fancyings. She must be helped until she gets stronger and more prepared. You’ve had the thing come too tragically to you to see it just right, so I’m going to step in and I want you to leave things to me.”

So Wayne had “stepped in” and was lending Ann the money to study stenography. Katie had made a wry face over stenography, which did not have a dream-like or an Ann-like sound–but a very Wayne-like one!–but had entered no protest; at that time she had been too dumbly miserable to enter protest about anything.

Wayne seemed to her curt and rather unfeeling about the whole thing, insisting, somewhat indelicately, she thought, on the point that Ann be prepared to earn her own living and that there be no more nonsense about her. She hoped he was kinder with Ann than he sounded in his letters about her.

Ann was in New York. Wayne had said, and Katie agreed with him, that Chicago was not the place for her to start in anew. She had gone through too many hard things there. And Katie was glad for other reasons. With Wayne in Washington, she would have no more occasion to be in the middle-west and Ann would be too far away in Chicago.

But Katie was looking desperately homesick at that thought of having no more occasion to be in the middle-west.

The man who mended the boats was still out there, mending boats and finishing his play, which she knew now was to be about the army. One reason he had wanted to mend boats there was that he might know some of the men who worked in the shops at the Arsenal, interested in that relation of labor to militarism.

For two months Katie had heard nothing from him. In those first months he, too, seemed helpless before it, seemed to understand that Katie’s feeling was a thing he could not hope to understand–much less, change.

Then there rose in him the impulse to fight, for her, against it all, stir her to fight.

“Katie,” he wrote in that first letter, letter she was re-reading that night, “we have seen two sides of the same thing. Our two visions, experiences, have roused in us two very different emotions. Does that mean it must kill for us what we have said is the biggest emotion–experience–the greatest joy and brightest hope life has brought us?

“We’re both bound by it. I by the hurt it’s brought me, you by the happiness; I by the hate it roused, you by the love that lingers round it. Are we going to make no efforts to set ourselves free? Are we so much of the past that the institutions of the past and the experiences and prejudices of those institutions can shut us out from the future and from each other?

“Katie, you have the rich gift of the open mind. I don’t believe that, lastingly, there’s anything you’ll shut out as impossible to consider. Your eyes say it, Katie–say they’ll look at everything, and just as fairly as they can. Oh they’re such honest, fearless, just eyes–so wise and so tender. And it was I–I who love them so–brought that awful look of hurt to those wonderful eyes. Katie–I want to spend all of my life keeping that hurt look from those dear eyes!

“You’re asked to do a hard thing, dear Katie. It’s cruel it should be _you_ so hard a thing is asked of. Asked to look at a thing you see through the feeling of a lifetime as though seeing it for the first time. To look at all you’ve got to push aside things you regarded as fixed. I suppose every one has something that to him seems the things unshakable, something he finds it terrifying to think of moving. All your traditions, all your love and loyalty cling round this thing which it seems to you you can’t have touched. But Katie, as you read these pages won’t you try to think of things, not as you’ve been told they were, but just as they seem to you from what you read? Think of them, not in the old grooves, but just as it comes in to you as the story of a life?

“You’ll try to do that for me, won’t you, dear fair-minded, loving-spirited Katie?

“I was a country boy; lived on a farm, got lonesome, thought about things I had nobody to talk to about, read things and wanted more things to read, part the dreamer and part the great husky fellow wanting life, adventure, wanting to see things and know things–most of all, experience things. I want to tell you a lot about it sometime. I can’t let go the idea that there is going to be a sometime. Just because there’s so much to tell, if nothing else. And, Katie, _isn’t_ there something else?

“No way to begin the story of one’s life!

“Then I went away from home. To see the world. Try my fortune. Experience. Adventure. That was the call.

“And the very first thing I fell in with that recruiting officer in the white suit. I can see just how that fellow looked. Get every intonation as he drew the glowing picture of life in the army.

“The army sounded good. The army was experience, adventure, with a vengeance. A life among men. A chance. He told me that an intelligent fellow like me would soon be an officer. Of course I agreed perfectly I was an intelligent fellow, impressed with army intelligence in picking me for one. Why I could see myself as commander-in-chief in no time!

“There’s the cruelty of it, Katie. The expectation they rouse to get you–the contemptuous treatment after they’ve got you. The difference between the army of the ‘Men Wanted For the Army’ posters and the army those men find after those posters have done their work.

“Remember your telling me about visiting at Fort Riley when you were quite a youngster? The good time you had?–how gay it was? How charming your host was? As nearly as I can figure it out, I was there at the same time, filling the noble office of garbage man. Now, far be it from me, believing in the dignity of all labor, to despise the office of garbage man. I can think of conditions under which I would be quite happy to serve my country in that capacity. But having enlisted because of the noble figure of a soldier carrying a flag, I grew pretty sore at the ‘Damn you, we’ve got you’ manner in which I was ordered to carry things–well, not to be too indelicate let us merely say things less attractive than the flag.

“It’s not having to peel potatoes and wash dishes; it’s seeming to be despised for doing it that stirs in men’s hearts the awful soreness that makes them deserters.

“In our regiment men were leaving right along. Our company had a particularly bad record on desertions. Our captain, a decent fellow, was away most of the time and the lieutenant in command was a cur. I’d find a more gentle word for him if I could, but I know none such. Army men talk a great deal about discipline. But there’s a difference between discipline and bullying. This fellow couldn’t issue an order without making you feel that difference.

“He had a laugh that was a sneer. It wasn’t a laugh, just a smile; a smile that sneered. He couldn’t pass a crowd of men cutting grass without making their hearts sore.

“I don’t say he’s the typical army man. I don’t doubt that there are men high in the army who, if all were known, would despise him as much as the men in his company did. But I do say that if there were not a good many a good deal like him more than fifty thousand young men of America would not have deserted from the United States army in the past twelve years.

“There was a fellow in our company I had been particularly sorry for. He wasn’t a bad sort at all; he was more dazed than anything else; didn’t understand the army manner; the army snobbishness. This lieutenant couldn’t look at him without making him sullen.

“One day he told him to do a loathsome thing, then stood there with that sneering smile watching him do it. Well, he did it, all right; that’s what _gets_ you, that powerlessness under what you know for injustice. But that night he left.

“I knew he was going. He wanted me to go with him. I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t blame men for deserting. But for my own part, it would only be two years more; I used to say to myself, ‘You got into this. You’ll see it through.’

“They caught him, brought him back the next day. I happened to be there at the time. So did our spick and span lieutenant. The man who had been caught–or boy, rather, for he was but that–was anything but spick and span. His clothes were torn and muddy, his face dirty and bloody–it had been scratched by something. He knew what he was in for. Court martial and imprisonment for desertion. We knew what _that_ meant.

“He was a sorry, unsoldierly sight. Gone to pieces. Unnerved. All in. His chin was quivering. And then the little lieutenant came along, starting out for golf. He stood in front of him and looked him up and down–this boy who had been caught. Boy who would be imprisoned. And as he looked at him he laughed; or smiled rather, that smile that was a sneer.

“He stood there continuing to smile–torturing him with that smile he couldn’t do a thing about–this boy who was down; this fellow who was all in. That was when I struck him in the face and knocked him down.

“The penalty for that, as I presume I need not tell an army girl, is death. ‘Or such other punishment as a court martial may direct.’

“The thing directed in my case was imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth for five years. Most of the men in that prison would say, ‘Give me death.’

“I’d better not say much about it. Something gets hot in my head when I begin to talk about it. If you were with me–your cooling hand, your steadying eyes–I could tell you about it. ‘If you were with me’! I find that a very arresting phrase, Katie.

“Those were black years. Cruel years. Years to twist a man’s soul. They took something from me that will not be mine again. I remember your telling how Ann said there were things to make perfect happiness forever impossible. She was right. There _are_ hours that stay.

“I went into the army just an adventurous boy. I came from it an embittered man. My experience with it made me suspect all of life. I was more than unhappy. I was sullen. I _hated_–and I wanted to get even. Oh it was a lovely spirit in which I went forth a second time to meet the world.

“I don’t know what might not have happened, I think I was right in line to become a criminal, like so many of the rest of them who have served time at Leavenworth–I don’t suppose the United States has any finer school anywhere than its academy for criminals at Fort Leavenworth–had it not been for a man I met.

“I got a job in a garage. I had always been pretty good at mechanical things and knew a little about it. And there I met this man–and through him came salvation.

“I don’t know, Katie, maybe socialism will not save the world. I don’t see how it can miss it–but be that as it may, I know it has saved many a man’s soul. I know it saved mine.

“This fellow–an older man with whom I worked–talked to me. He saw the state I was in, won my confidence and got my story. And then he began talking to me and gave me books. He got me to come to his house instead of the places I was going to, saying nothing against the other places, but just making his things so much more attractive. We used to talk and argue and gradually other things fell away just because there was no room for them.

“You know I had loved books–read all I could get–but didn’t seem to get the right ones. Well, after I had served time breaking clay I didn’t care anything about books–too sore, too dogged, too full of hate. But the love for the books came back, and through the books, and through this friend, came the splendid saving vision.

“Vision of what the world might be–world with the army left out, with all that the army represented to me vanished from the earth. With men not ruling and cursing other men; but working together–the world for all and all for the world. And the thing that saved me was that I saw there was something to work for–something to believe in–look at–think about–when old memories of the guard knocking me down with the butt of his gun would tear into my soul and bring me low with the hate they roused.

“And so I began again, Katie dear, that sense of things as they might be–that vision–taking some of the sting from what I had suffered from things as they were. I stopped hating and cursing; I began thinking and dreaming. There came the desire to _know_. I tore into books like a madman. I couldn’t go on hating my fellow-men because I was too busy trying to find out about them. And so it happened that there were things more interesting to think about than the things I had suffered in the army; I was carried out of myself–and saved.

“I wish I could talk to some of those other fellows! Some of those boys who ran away from the army, not because they were criminals and cowards, but just because they didn’t know what to make of things. I wish I could talk to some of those men who dug clay with me at Fort Leavenworth–men who went away cursing the government, loathing the flag, hating all men, and who have nothing to take them out of it. I wish I could take them up with me to the hill-top and say–‘There! Don’t look at the little pit down below! Look out! Look wide!’

“Katie–you aren’t going to save men by putting them at back-breaking work under brutalized guards. You aren’t going to redeem men by belittling them. You’re going to save them by making them _see_. And the crime of our whole system of punishments is that it does all in its power, not to make them see, but to shut them out from seeing….”

In the letters which followed he told her other things, things he had done, the work he hoped to do, what he wanted to do with his life. Told it with the simplicity of sincerity, the fine seriousness untainted with the self-consciousness called modesty.

He believed he could work with men; things he had already done made him believe he could do more, bigger things. He wanted to help fight the battles of the people who worked; not with any soldier of fortune notion, but because he was one of those people, because he had suffered as one of those people, and believed he saw their way more clearly than the mass of them were seeing it.

And he wanted to write about men; had some reason for believing he could. He was hoping that his play would open the way to many other things; it looked as though it were going to be put on.

He told of his feeling for it. “More than a showing up and a getting even, though there _is_ that. It will be no prancing steed and clanking saber picture of the army. More digging of clay than waving of the flag. I see significant things arising from that survival of autocracy in a democracy, an interesting study in the bitter things coming out of the relation of the forms and habits of a vanishing order to the aspirations and tendencies of a forming one. And in that bending of spirit to form, the army codes and standards making for the army habit of mind, the army snobbishness and narrowness. The things that shape men, until a given body of men have particular characteristics, particular limitations. You said that if you loved them for nothing else you would love army people for their hospitality. But in the higher sense of that beautiful word they are the least hospitable of people. Their latch string of the spirit is not out. Their minds are tight–fixed. They have not that openness of spirit and flexibility of mind that make for wider visioning.

“And it’s not that they haven’t, but why they haven’t, brings one to the vein.

“Yes, I got the article you sent me, written by your army friend, eloquent over the splendid things war has done for the human race, the great things it has bred in us. Well if the ‘war virtues’ aren’t killed by an armed peace, then I don’t think we need worry much about ever losing them. It’s the people at war for peace who are going to conserve and utilize for the future the strong and shining things which days of war have left us. Men who must base their great claim on what has been done in the past are not the men to shape the future–or even carry the heritage across the bridge. War is now a faithful servant of capitalism. Its glorious days are over. It’s even a question whether it’s longer valuable as a servant. It may lose its job before its master loses his. In any case, it goes with capitalism; and if the good old war virtues are to be saved out of the wreck it’s the wreckers will save them!

“Which is not what I started out to say. This play into which I’m seeking to get the heart of what I’ve lived and thought and dreamed is not the impersonal thing this harangue might make it sound. I trust it’s nothing so bloodless as a study of economic forces or picture of the relationship of old things to new. It’s that only as that touches a man’s life, means something to that life. It’s about the army because this man happens, for a time, to be in the army–it’s what the army does to him that’s the thing.

“Though it seems to me a pretty dead thing in these days. Life itself is a dead thing with you gone from it.”

In the letter she received that night he wrote: “Katie, is it going to spoil it for us? Can it? _Need_ it? We who have come so close? Have so much? Are outlived things to push us apart? That seems _too_ bitter!

“Oh don’t think that I don’t _see_. The things it would mean giving up. The wrench. And, for what?–your friends would say. At times I wonder how I _can_–ask it, hope for it. Then there lives for me again your wonderful face as it was when you lifted it to me that first time. _You_–and I grow bold again.

“I don’t say you wouldn’t suffer. I don’t say there wouldn’t be hurts, big hurts brought by the little things arising from lives differently lived. I know there would be times of longing for things gone. For the sunny paths. For it couldn’t be all sunny paths with me, Katie. Those years in the dark will always throw their shadow.

“Then, how dare I? Loving you–laughing, splendid you–how can I?

“Because I believe that you love me. Remembering that light in your eyes, knowing _you_, I dare believe that the hurts would be less than the hurt of being spared those hurts.

“I can hear your friends denouncing me. Hear their withering arguments, and I’ll own that at times they do wither. But, Katie, I just can’t seem to _stay_ withered!

“You’re such an upsetting person, dear Katie. To both heart and philosophy. It’s not possible to hate a world that Katie’s in. World that didn’t spoil Katie. And if there are many of the _you_–oh no other real you!–but many who, awakened, can fight as you can fight and love as you can love–wouldn’t it be a joke on us revolutionists if we were cheated out of our revolution just by the love in the hearts of the Katies?

“Well, nobody would be so happy in that joke as would the defrauded revolutionists!

“You make me wonder, Katie, if perhaps it isn’t less the vision than the visioning. Less the thing seen than that thing of striving to see. Make me feel the narrowness in scorning the trying to see just because not agreeing with the thing seen. Sometimes I have a new vision of the world. Vision of a world visioning. Of the vision counting less than the visioning.

“Those moments of glow bear me to you. Persuade me that our visions must be visioned together.

“Life’s all empty without you. The radiance is not there. In these days light comes only through dreams, and so I dream dreams and see visions.

“Dreams of _us_–visions of the years we’d meet together. And you are not bowed and broken in those visions, Katie. You’re very strong and buoyant–and always eager for life–and always tender. No, not _always_ tender. Sometimes fighting! Telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s a splendid picture of Katie fighting–eyes shining, cheeks red.

“And then at the very height of her scorn, Katie happens to think of something funny. And she says the something funny in her inimitable way. Then she laughs, and after her laugh she’s tender again, and says she loves me, though still maintaining I didn’t know what I was talking about!

“And in the visions there are times when Katie is very quiet. So still. Hushed by the wonder of love. Then Katie’s laughing eyes are deep with mystery, Katie’s face seems melted to pure love, and from it shines the light that makes life noble.

“In these days of a fathomless loneliness I dare not look long upon that vision.

“Do you ever hear a call, dear heart? A call to a freer country than any country you have known? Call to a country where the things which bind you could bind no more? And if in fancy you sometimes let yourself drift into that other country, am I with you there? Do you ever have a picture of our venturing together into the unknown ways–daring–suffering–rejoicing–_growing_? Sometimes sunshine and sometimes storm–but always open country and everwidening sky-line. Oh Katie–how splendid it might be!”

She read and re-read it, dreaming and picturing. And at length there settled upon her that stillness, that pause before life’s wonder and mystery. Her eyes were deep. The light that makes life noble glorified her tender face.

She broke from it at last to look for a card they had there giving dates of sailings.

CHAPTER XXXVII

They would get in late that afternoon. Off on the horizon was a hazy mass which held the United States of America, as sometimes the haze of a dream may hold a mighty truth.

Katie and Mrs. Prescott were having a brisk walk on deck. They paused and peered off at that mist out of which New York must soon shape itself.

“Just off yonder’s your country, Katie,” the older woman was saying. “Soon you’ll see the flag flying over Governor’s Island. Will it make