“When these little diversions failed to drive dull care away, we passed the time cursing the gentleman in the immaculate cotton ducks. He had either lied to us, or was dead, or had been transferred—anyway, he had gone back on us and left us to rot in jail.

“At last we determined to escape.

“We had made that same resolution every day for months and had planned out half a dozen schemes, some of which might have been successful but for two difficulties—the double guard on the outside of the building and the two dogs in the jail-yard. There was now but one chance of success. We would dig a hole in the dirt floor clear under the wall, watch for a stormy night, and make a break for the town and the coast, where we might be able to signal some trading craft and so get away.

“So we started to digging, beginning on the side opposite the door—our utensils being a sharpened bone, my pocket-knife, and a bayonet which had dropped from a sentry’s scabbard, and which I managed to pick up on our exercise walk in the court-yard and conceal in the straw on which we slept. This straw too helped hide the dirt. We rammed the wisps up into each end of the pallets, put the excavated earth in the middle with a dusting of loose straw over it, and so hid our work from view. At the end of a month we had a hole under the wall large enough to wriggle in. I could see the daylight through the loose earth on the other side. Then we waited for a storm, the rainy season being on and thunder showers frequent. Two, three, four nights went by without a cloud; then it began to pour. We determined to try it just before the guards were changed. This was at 2 A. M. by the church clock. The outgoing sentry would be tired then and the new man not thoroughly awake.

“When the hour came I crawled in head first, worked myself to the end of the tunnel, and, putting out my hands to break away the remaining clods of earth, came bump up against a piece of heavy board. There I lay trembling. The board could never have rolled down from anywhere, nor could our opening have been detected from the outside.

“Somebody had placed it there on purpose!

“I wriggled back feet foremost, whispered in my companions’ ears what I had found, and we all three sat up the rest of the night wondering what the devil it meant. When morning broke, the head jailer came in. I noticed instantly a change in his manner. Instead of a few perfunctory questions, he gave a cursory glance around the cell, his eyes resting on the pile of straw, and turning short on his heel left without a word.

“There was no question now but we were suspected, so we held a council of war and determined to keep quiet—at least for some nights. What was up we didn’t know, but at all events it was best to go slow. So we stuffed most of the dirt back in the hole and waited—our ears open to every sound, our teeth chattering. You get pretty nervous in jail—especially when you have about made up your mind that the next hour is your last.

“We didn’t wait long.

“That afternoon the bolts were slid back and the head jailer, who had never before appeared at that hour, stood in the doorway.

“I thought right away that it was all over with us; that we were discovered and that we were either to be shot or moved to another cell—I really didn’t care which, for instant death could not be much worse than lingering in a South American prison until we were gray-bearded and forgotten.

“The jailer stepped inside, half closed the door, and made this announcement:

“‘The American consul is outside and wants to see you.’ Then he stepped out, leaving the door open.

“They have a way of coaxing you to escape down in that country and then filling you full of lead. It’s justifiable murder when sometimes a trial and conviction might raise unpleasant international questions. We all three looked at each other and instantly decided not to swallow the bait. The American consul dodge had been tried when they wanted to get legal possession of our letters. So it isn’t surprising that we didn’t believe him. Then, to my astonishment, I caught through the crack of the door a suit of white duck, and the natty young man stepped in.

“‘I’ve been down the coast,’ he began as chipper as if he was apologizing for not having called after we had invited him to dinner, ‘or I should have been here before. I have a permit from the governor to come as often as I like, or as often as you would be glad to see me. I must tell you, however, that I am pledged to keep faith with the authorities, and it is their confidence in me which has gained me this privilege. I can bring you nothing to eat or drink, no tools or knickknacks or any bodily comforts. I can only bring myself. This I have told his Excellenza, who has his orders, and who understands.’ Then he turned to the jailer. ‘Get me a stool and I will stay a while with them. You can leave the door open; I will be responsible that none of them attempts to escape.’

“When the jailer was out of hearing, he passed around cigarettes, lighted his own, and started in to tell us the news of the day: what was going on in town and country; how the revolution had been put down; how many insurgents had been shot, exiled, or sent to horrible prisons—worse than ours, which, he informed us, was really only a sort of police station and unsafe except for the dogs and the guards, who were picked men and who had never been known to neglect their duty. Only the year before five men had attempted to dig their way out and had been shot as they were climbing the outside wall—rather dispiriting talk for us, to say the least, but it was talk, and that was what we hungered for, especially as his spirits never flagged.

“All this was more or less entertaining, and he would have had our entire confidence but for two things which followed, and which we could not understand. One was that he always chose rainy or stormy nights for his subsequent visits, dropping in on us at all hours, when we least expected him; and the other that he never referred to what was being done for our release. That he would not discuss.

“By and by we began to grow uneasy and suspect him. One of the men insisted that he was too damned polite to be honest, and that the American consul yarn was a put-up job. Anyway, he was getting tired of it all. It would take him but half an hour to dig the loose earth out of the tunnel, and he was going to begin right away if he went at it alone.

“We at once fell to, working like beavers, digging with everything we had—our fingers bleeding—until we had cleaned out the dirt to the plank. Then we crawled back and waited for the consul’s customary visit. After that was over—no matter how long it lasted—we’d make the dash.

“He came on the minute; and this time, to our intense disgust, brought his guitar—said he thought we might like a little music—and without so much as by-your-leave opened up with negro melodies and native songs, the instrument resting in the hollow of his knee, one leg crooked over the other, a cigarette stuck tight to his lower lip.

“Hour after hour went by and still he sang on—French, German, Italian—anything and everything—rolling out the songs as if we had been so many classmates at a college supper. Charming, of course, had we not had a hole behind us and freedom within sight.

“Hints, yawns, even blunt proposals to let us go to bed, had no effect. Further than these we dared not go. We were afraid to turn him out bodily lest we should be suspected of trying to get rid of him for a purpose. To have let him into the secret was also out of the question. Better wait until he was gone.

“Would you believe it, he never left until broad daybreak, his confounded irritating cheerfulness keeping up to the last, even to his tossing his fingers to us in good-by, quite as he might have done to his sweetheart.

“At eight o’clock on that same morning, not more than two hours after he had left, there came a bang at the door with a sword-hilt, the bolts were drawn, and we were marched into the court-yard between five soldiers in command of a sergeant. Then came the orders to fall in, and we were pushed into the same room where, nearly a year before, we had been examined by the ruffian in shoulder-straps and sent back to our cell.

“And here I must say that, for the first time since our capture, I lost all hope. Five men for three of us, and two of the cartridges blank!

“The squad closed in and we were lined up in front of a table before another black-haired, greasy, villanous-looking reptile who read the death-warrant, as near as I could make out—he spoke so fast. Then he rose from his seat, bowed stiffly, and left the room. Next the sergeant saluted us, ordered his men to fall in, and left the room. Then the jailer stepped forward, shook our hands all around, and left the room.

“We were free!

“Outside, in the broad glare of the scorching sun, his boyish face in a broad grin, stood the consul, looking as if he had just stepped out of a bandbox.

“‘I am sorry you found me such a bore last night,’ he said, gay and debonair as an old beau at a wedding, ‘but there was nothing else to do. If I’d gone home earlier and let you crawl out of that hole, you would have been shot to a dead certainty. I knew a month ago you were at work on it, and when it was nearly finished I got permission to drop in on you. The plank that you ran up against I had put there with the help of the jailer. It was meant to keep you quiet until my mail got in. I was helpless, of course, to assist you until it did, being my government’s representative. It arrived yesterday, informing me that our State Department has taken up your cases with your government and has entered a formal protest. Now all of you come over to the consulate, and let me see what I can do to fix you out with some clothes and things.

“‘After that we’ll have breakfast.’”

XI

IN WHICH THE HABITS OF CERTAIN GHOSTS, GOBLINS, BANDITS, AND OTHER OBJECTIONABLE PERSONS ARE DULY SET FORTH

“You overlooked this, I am afraid,” he said, addressing The Engineer. “It is one of the most precious things I own. It is a portrait of Madame de Rabutin-Chantal, the grandmother of Madame de Sévigné.” The Sévigné family were a favorite topic with the old gentleman, and anything pertaining to them of peculiar interest to him. “You will note, I am sure, Monsieur Herbert, the marvellous carving especially in the dress and about the neck.”

Before Herbert could answer, Louis craned his head and a disgusted look overspread his face. “I hope,” he said, “she didn’t look like that, Lemois—squatty old party with a snub nose.”

Herbert, ignoring Louis’ aside, reached over and took the little image in his fingers.

“Squatty or not, Louis, it is an exquisite bit—modern Tanagra, really. Seventeenth century, isn’t it, Lemois?”

Lemois nodded. If he had heard Louis’ remark he gave no sign of the fact.

“Yes,” continued Herbert, “and wonderfully modelled. We can’t do these things now—not in this way”—and he passed it to The Engineer, who turned it upsidedown, as if it were a teacup, glanced at the bottom in search of its mark, and without a word handed it back.

Lemois replaced the precious object in the triptych, his mind still filled with his favorite topic, and, turning suddenly, wheeled a richly upholstered chair from a far corner into the light.

“And here is another relic of Madame Sévigné, monsieur. This is madame’s own chair; the one she always used when she stopped here, sometimes for days at a time, on her way to her country-seat, Les Rochers. The room which she occupied, and in which she wrote many of her famous letters, is just over our heads. If monsieur will shift his seat a little he can see the very spot in which she sat.”

But The Engineer neither shifted his seat nor rose to the bait. None of the small things of past ages appealed to him. Even mummies and the spoil of coffins three thousand years old—and he had inspected many of them—failed to stir him. It was what was built over them, and the brains and power that hoisted the stones into place, as well as the forces of wind and water—the song of the creaking crane—those were the things that thrilled him. That Herbert, after his career in the open, had contented himself with a few tools and a mass of clay was what had most surprised him when he came upon his statues in the Royal Academy.

So he kept silent until what Louis called the “bric-à-brac moment” had passed—such discussion often occurring whenever Lemois felt he had a new audience. Gradually the talk drifted into other channels. Mistaken identity and the injustice of convictions on circumstantial evidence were gone into, The Engineer recalling some of his own errors in dealing with his men in Egypt. At this Le Blanc, wandering slightly from the main topic, gave an account of a mysterious woman in white who on certain nights when the moon was bright used to descend the wide staircase of a French château which he often visited, the apparition being the ghost of a beautiful countess who had been walled up somewhere below stairs by a jealous husband, and who took this mode of publishing her wrongs to the world. Le Blanc had seen her himself, first at the head of the great staircase and then as she crept slowly down the steps and disappeared through the solid wall to the left of the baronial fireplace. His hostess, who affected not to believe in such uncanny mysteries, tried to persuade him it was merely a shaft of moonlight stencilled on the white wall, but Le Blanc scouted the explanation and was ready to affirm on his word of honor that she looked at him out of her great, round, beseeching eyes, and would, he felt assured, have spoken to him had not one of the servants opened a door at the moment and so scared her away.

I told of a somewhat similar experience in which a strong-minded Englishwoman, who laughed at ghosts and all other forms of unsavory back numbers, and a bishop of distinction were mixed up. There was a haunted room in the Devonshire country house that no one dared occupy. Another white figure prowled here, but whether man or woman, no one knew. That it was quite six feet high and broad in proportion, and had at various times scared the wits out of several nervous and semi-hysterical females who had passed the night between the sheets, all agreed. As it was the week-end, there were a goodly number of visitors and the house more or less crowded. When the haunted room was mentioned, even the bishop demurred—preferring to take the one across the corridor—he being a frequent visitor and knowing the lay of the land. The strong-minded young woman, however, jumped at the chance. She had all her life been hoping to see a ghost and, in order to allow his or her ghostship free entrance, had left the door of the haunted room unlocked when she got into bed. Despite her screwed-up courage she began to get nervous, and when she heard the door creak on its hinges and felt the cold, clammy air of the corridor on her cheek, she slid down off her pillow and ducked her head under the sheet. Then, to her horror, she felt the blanket slowly slipping away and, peering out, was frozen stiff to see a tall figure, dressed in white, standing at the foot of her bed, its long, skinny fingers clutching at the covering. Without even a groan she passed promptly into a fit of unconsciousness, known as a dead faint, where, with only a sheet over her, she lay until the cold woke her. She left by the early coach and believes to this day that she would have been strangled had she offered the slightest protest. Nor did her hostess’s letter, covering a full explanation, satisfy her. “It was not a ghost you saw, my dear, but the bishop, who wanted an extra blanket, and who jumped out of bed in search of one, and into your room, thinking it empty. It’s a mercy you didn’t scream, for then the situation could never have been explained—better say nothing about it, or, if you do—stick to its being a ghost.”

While these and other yarns were sent spinning around the table, Louis had cut in, of course, with all sorts of asides—some whispers behind his hand to his next neighbor—some squibs of criticism exploded without rhyme or reason in our midst—all jolly and diverting, but nothing approaching a story short or long.

My own and Herbert’s efforts to draw him out into something sustained brought only—“Don’t know any yarns” and “Never had anything happen to me”—followed at last by—“The only time I was ever in a tight place was when I was sketching in Perugia; then I jumped through the window and took most of the sash with me.”

“Let’s have it!” we all cried in one breath. No one was so lively and entertaining once we got him started.

“That’s all there is to it. They had locked the door on me—three of them—and when the back of the chair gave out—I was swinging it around my head—I made a break for out-of-doors.”

“Oh!—go on—go on, Louis!” came the chorus.

“No, I’d rather listen to you men. I haven’t been tattooed in the South Seas, nor half murdered rounding Cape Horn. I’m just a plain painter, and my experience is limited, and my three Perugian villains were just three dirty Italians, one of whom was the landlord who had charged me five prices for my meal, and tried to hold me up until I paid it—only a vulgar brawl, don’t you see? The landlord had his head in splints when I passed him the next day.”

“You were lucky to escape,” said The Engineer. “They have a way of knifing you while you are asleep. I had a friend who just got out of one of those Italian dives with his life.”

“Yes, that was why I was swinging the chair. Hard for any three men to get at you if its legs and back hold out. Of course a fellow can sneak up behind you with a knife and then you—By Jingo!—come to think of it, I can tell you a story! It just popped into my head. You have brought it all back”—and he nodded to our guest—“about the closest shave—so I thought at the time—that I ever had in my life. Your ghost stories don’t hold a candle to it—stealthy assassin—intended victim sound asleep—miraculous escape!—Oh! a blood-curdler!—I was scared blue.”

Everybody shifted their chairs and craned their heads to watch Louis’ face the better, overjoyed that he had at last wakened up. Louis scared blue—and he a match for any five men—meant a tale worth hearing.

“It was the summer I made those studies of mountain brooks flowing out of the glaciers—you remember them, Herbert? Anyway, I was across the Swiss border, and in a ragged Italian town dumped down on the side of a hill as if it had been spilt from a cart—one of those sprawled-out towns with a white candle of a campanile overtopping the heap. The diligence, about sunup, had dropped me at the exact spot with my traps, and was hardly out of sight before I had started to work, and I kept it up all day, pegging away like mad, as I always do when a subject takes hold of me—and this particular mountain brook was choking the life out of me, with lots of deep greens and transparent browns all through it, and the creamy froth of a glass of beer floating on the top.

“When the sun began to sink down behind the mountains I realized that it was about time to find a place to sleep. I was at work on a 40 x 30—rather large for out-doors—and, as it would take me several days, I had arranged with a goatherd—who lived in a slant with stones enough on its roof to keep it from being blown into space—to let me store my wet canvas and my palette and box under its supports. I’d have bunked in with the goats if I’d had anything to cover me from the cold—and it gets pretty cold there at night. Then again I knew from experience that a goatherd’s sour bread and raw onions were not filling at any price. What I really wanted was two rooms in some private house, or over a wine-shop or village store, with a good bed and a place where I could work in bad weather. I had found just such a place the summer before, on the Swiss side of the mountains, belonging to an old woman who kept a cheap grocery and who gave me for a franc a day her two upper rooms—and mighty comfortable rooms they were, and with a good north light. So I hung the wet canvas where the goats couldn’t lick off my undertones, shouldered my knapsack, and started downhill to the village.

“I found that the red-tiled houses followed a tangle of streets, no two of them straight, but all twisting in and out with an eye on the campanile, and so I struck into the crookedest, wormed my way around back stoops, water barrels, and stone walls with a ripening pumpkin here and there lolling over their edges, and reached the church porch just as the bell was ringing for vespers. When you want to get any information in an Italian village, you go to the priest, and if he is out, or busy, or checking off some poor devil’s sins—and he has plenty of it to do—then hunt up the sacristan.

“There must have been an extra load of peccadilloes on hand that night, for I didn’t find his reverence, nor the sacristan, nor anybody connected with the church. What I did find was a chap squatting against one side of the door with a tray on his lap filled with little medals and rosaries—and a most picturesque-looking chap he was. His feet were tied up in raw hides; his head bound in a red cotton handkerchief, over which was smashed a broad-brimmed sombrero; his waist was gripped with another to match; his lank body squeezed into a shrunken blue jacket, and his shambly legs wobbled about in yellow breeches. The sombrero shaded two cunning, monkey eyes, a hooked nose, a wavering mouth, and a beard a week old. It was his smile, though, that tickled my funny-bone, and this happened when he held up the tray for my inspection—one of those creepy, oily smiles that spread slowly over his dirty, soapy face, like the swirl of oil and turpentine which floats over a basin of suds when you wash your brushes.

“Not a very inviting person;—a loafer, a lazzaroni, a dead-beat of a dago, really—and yet my heart warmed to him all the same when he answered me with enough French sandwiched between his ‘o’s’ and ‘i’s’ to help out my bad Italian. What finally trickled from his wrinkled lips was the disappointing announcement that no hostelry at all worthy of the Distinguished Signore existed in the village, nor was there money enough in the place for any one of the inhabitants to have a surplus of anything—rooms especially—but there was—here the oily smile overran the soap-suddy face—a most excellent casino kept by an equally excellent citizen where travellers were wont to stay overnight; that it was up a back street—they were all ‘back’ so far as I had seen—and that, if the Distinguished Signore would permit, he would curtail the sale of his religious relics long enough to conduct his D. S. to the very door.

“So we started, the vendor of ‘helps to piety’ ahead and I following behind, my knapsack over my shoulder. I soon discovered that if the casino was up a back street he was going a long way round to reach it. First he dived into an alley behind the mouldy, plaster-pock-marked church—the candle-stick of the campanile—ducked under an archway—‘sotto portico,’ he called it—opened out into a field, struck across a little bridge into another street—hardly a soul about, nothing alive—nothing except dogs and children—all of which he explained was a short cut. For some time his dodging made no impression on me; then the way he rounded the corners and hugged the shadowed side of the street, away from the few dim lamps, set me to wondering as to his intentions. What the devil did he mean by picking out these blind alleys? He must have seen that I was no tenderfoot or tourist who had lost his way.

“With this I began to fix certain landmarks in my memory in case I had to make my way back alone. There was no question now in my mind as to the town’s character. Half the murders and hold-ups in the large cities are concocted in these villages, and this had rascality stamped all over it. Every corner I turned looked more forbidding than the last—every street seemed to end in a trap—the kind of street a scene-painter tries to produce when he has a murder up a back alley to provide for the third act. And crooked!—well, the tracks of a bunch of fishworms crawling out from under a brick were straight compared to it. When I at last protested—for I was getting ravenous and I must say a trifle uneasy—the beggar bowed low enough for me to see the tail of his jacket over his sombrero, and gave as a reason that any other route would have greatly fatigued the signore, all of which he must have known was a lie. The fact was that if I had known how to get out of the tangle, I would have lifted him by the scruff of his neck and the slack of his trousers and dropped him into the first convenient hole.

“When he did come to a halt I found myself before a low two-story ruin of a house—almost the last house in the village, and on the opposite edge from that which I had entered on my way to the church. It was evidently a common road house, the customary portico covered with grape-vines and a square room on the ground floor, containing one or more tables. In the rear, so I discovered later, was a dreary yard corralling a few scraggly trees—one overhanging a slanting shed under which the cooking was done—and below this tree an assortment of chairs and tables under an arbor, where a bottle of wine and a bit of cheese or bunch of grapes were served when the sun was hot.

“It was now quite dark, and my guide had some difficulty in getting his fingers on the latch of the garden gate. When it swung open I followed up a short path and found myself in a square room which was lighted by a single lamp. Under this sat another oily Italian, in his shirt-sleeves, eating from an earthen bowl. Not a picturesque-looking chap at all, but a fat, swarthy lump of a man with small, restless eyes, stub nose, and flabby lips—one of those fellows you think is fast asleep until you catch him studying you from under his eyebrows, and begin to look out for his knife. The only other occupant of the room was a woman who was filling his glass from a straw-covered flask—a thin, flat-bosomed woman who stooped when she walked, and who sneaked a glance at me now and then from one side of her nose. I might better have slept in the slant and bunked in with the goats.

“My guide bent down and whispered a word in his ear; the man jumped up—looked me all over—a boring, sizing-up look—like a farmer guessing the weight of a steer—bowed grandiloquently, and with an upward flourish of his hand put his house, his fortune, and his future happiness at my feet. There were bread and wine, and cheese and grapes; and there were also eggs, and it might be a slice of pork. As for chicken—he would regret to his dying day that none was within his reach. Would I take my repast in the house at the adjoining table, or would I have a lamp lighted in the arbor and eat under the trees?

“I preferred the lamp, of course, under the trees; picked up the flask of wine, poured out a glass for my guide, which he drank at a gulp, and handed him a franc for his trouble. The woman gave a sidelong glance at the coin and followed him out into the garden; there the two stood whispering. On her return, while she passed close enough to me to graze my arm, she never once raised her eyes, but kept her face averted until she had hidden herself in the kitchen.

“I had selected the garden for two reasons: I wanted the air and I wanted to know something more of my surroundings. What I saw—and I could see now the more clearly, for the moon had risen over the mountain—were two rear windows on the second floor, their sills level with the sloping shed, and a tree with its branches curved over its roof. This meant ventilation and a view of the mountains at sunrise—always a delight to me. It also meant an easy escape out the window, over the roof, and down the tree-trunk to the garden, and so on back to the goatherd if anything unusual should happen. That, however, could take care of itself. The sensible thing to do was to eat my supper, order my coffee to be ready at six o’clock, go to bed in one of these rear rooms, and get back to my work before the heat became intense.

“All this was carried out—that is, the first part of it. I had the rear room, the one I had picked out for myself, not by my choice but by his, the landlord selecting it for me; it would be cooler, he said, and then I could sleep with my window open, free from the dust which sometimes blew in the front windows when the wind rose—and it was rising now, as the signore could hear. Yes, I should be called at six, and my coffee would be ready—and ‘may the good God watch over your slumbers, most Distinguished of Excellencies.’

“This comforting information was imparted as I followed him up a break-neck stair and down a long, narrow corridor, ending in a small hall flanked by two bedroom doors. The first was mine—and so was the candle which he now placed in my hand—and ‘will your Excellency be careful to see that it is properly blown out before your Excellency falls asleep?’ and so I bade him good-night, pushed in the door, held the sputtering candle high above my head, and began to look around.

“It wouldn’t have filled your soul with joy. Had I not been tired out with my day’s work I would have called him back, read the riot act, and made him move in some comforts. The only things which could be considered furniture were a heavy oaken chest and a solid wooden bed—a box of a bed with a filling of feathers supporting two hard pillows. And that was every blessed thing the room contained except a toy pitcher and basin decorating the top of the chest; a white cotton curtain stretched across the lower sash of the single window; a nail for my towel, a row of wooden pegs for my clothes, and a square of looking-glass which once had the measles. Not a chair of any kind, no table, no wash-stand. This was a place in which to sleep, not sit nor idle in. Off with your clothes and into bed—and no growling.

“I walked to the open window, pushed aside the cotton curtain, and looked out on the sloping shed and overhanging tree, and the garden below, all clear and distinct in the light of the moon. I could see now that the tree had either prematurely lost its leaves or was stone dead. The branches, too, were bent as if in pain.

“The correct drawing of trees, especially of their limbs and twig ends, has always been a fad of mine, and the twistings of this old scrag were so unusual, and the tree itself so gnarled and ugly, that I let my imagination loose, wondering whether, like the villagers, it was suffering from some unconfessed sin, and whether fear of the future and the final bonfire, which overtakes most of us sooner or later, was not the cause of its writhings. With this I blew out the candle and crawled into bed, where I lay thinking over the events of the evening and laughing at myself for being such a first-class ass until I fell asleep.

“How long I slept I do not know, but when I woke it was with a start, all my faculties about me. What I heard was the sound of steps on the shed outside my window—creaking, stealthy steps as of a man’s weight bending the supports of the flimsy shed. I raised myself cautiously on my elbow and looked about me. The square of moonlight which had patterned the floor when I first entered the room was gone, although the moon was still shining. This showed me that I had slept some time. I noticed, too, that the wind had risen, although very little seemed to penetrate the apartment, the curtains only flopping gently in the draught.

“I lay motionless, hardly breathing. Had I heard aright—or was it a dream? Again came the stealthy tread, and then the shadow of a hand crept across the curtain. This sent me sitting bolt upright in bed. There was no question now—some deviltry was in the air.

“I slid from under the cover, dropped to the floor, flattened myself to the matting, worked my body to the window-sill, and stood listening. He must have heard me, for there came a sudden halt and a quick retreat. Then all was silent.

“I waited for some minutes, reached up with one hand and gently lowered the sash a foot or more, leaving room enough for me to throw it up and spring out, but not room enough for him to slide in without giving me warning. If the brute tried it again I would paste myself to the wall next the sash where I could see him, and he not see me, and as he ducked his head to crawl in I’d hit him with all my might; that would put him to sleep long enough for me to dress, catch up my traps, and get away.

“Again the step and the shadow. This time he stopped before he reached the window-sill. He had evidently noticed the difference in the height of the sash. Then followed a hurried retreating footstep on the roof. I craned my head an inch or more to see how big he was, but I was too late—he had evidently dropped to the garden below.

“I remained glued to the window-jamb and waited. I’d watch now for his head when he pulled himself up on the roof. If it were the lumpy landlord, the best plan was to plant the flat of my boot in the pit of his stomach—that would double him up like a bent pillow. If it was the brigand with the rosaries, or some of his cut-throat friends, I would try something else. I had no question now that I had been enticed here for the express purpose of doing me up while I was asleep. The mysterious way in which I had been piloted proved it; so did my guide’s evident anxiety to avoid being seen by any of the inhabitants. Then there bobbed up in my mind the cool, sizing-up glance of the landlord as he looked me over. This clinched my suspicions. I was in for a scrap and a lively one. If there were two of them, I’d give them both barrels straight from the shoulder; if there were three or more, I’d fight my way out with a chair, as I had done at Perugia.

“With this I came to a sudden halt and moved to the middle of the room. There I stood, straining my eyes in the dim light, hoping to find something with which to brain the gang should they come in a bunch. I took hold of the bed and shook it—the posts and back were as solid as a cart body. The chest was worse—neither of them could be whirled around my head as a club, as I had used the chair at Perugia. Next I tried the door, and found it without lock or bolt—in fact it swung open as noiselessly and easily as if it had been greased. The toy pitcher and basin came next—too small even to throw at a cat. It was a case, then, of bare fists and the devil take the hindmost.

“With this clear in my mind, I laid the pitcher on the floor within an inch of the door, so that the edge would strike it if opened, and again raised the window high enough for me to jump through. I could, of course, have dragged the chest across the door, as a girl would have done, put the basin and pitcher on top, and shoved the head-board of the bed against the window-sash—but this I was ashamed to do; and then, again, the whole thing might be a blooming farce—one I would laugh over in the morning.

“The question now arose whether I should get into my clothes, walk boldly down the corridor, and make a break through the kitchen and square room, with the risk of being stabbed in the garden, or whether I should stick it out until morning. Inside, I could choose my fighting ground; outside was a different thing. Then, again, daylight was not far off.

“I decided to hold the fort; slipped into my clothes—all but my coat—packed my knapsack, laid the basin within striking distance of the pitcher, placed the candle and matches close to my hand, stretched myself on the bed, and, strange as it may seem to you, again dropped off to sleep; only to find myself again sitting bolt upright in bed, my heart pounding away like a trip-hammer, my ears wide open.

“More footsteps!—this time in the corridor. I slid out of bed, crept to the door, and pulled myself together. When the pitcher and basin came together with a clink, he would get it behind the ear—all at once—ker-chunk! He was so close now that I heard his fingers feeling around in the dark for the knob. A steady, gentle push with his hand near the key-hole, and he could then steal in without waking me. Whether he smelt me or not I do not know, for I made no sound—not even with my breath—but he came to a dead halt, backed away, rose to his feet and tiptoed down the corridor.

“That settled all sleep for the night, and it was just as well, for the day was breaking—first the gray, pallid light, then the yellow, and then the rose tint. Nothing like a sunrise to put a fellow’s ghosts to flight. So I picked up the basin and pitcher, unhooked my towel, had a wash, finished dressing, leaned out of the window for a while watching the rising sun warm up the little snow peaks one after another, and, shouldering my trap, started along the corridor and so on downstairs.

“The pot-bellied lump of a scoundrel was waiting for me in the square room. He gave me the same keen, scrutinizing look with which he had welcomed me the night before. This time it began with my hair and ended at my boots, which were still muddy from the tramp of the previous evening.

“‘I am sorry, your Excellency,’ he said, ‘but if you had left your shoes outside your door I could have polished them; I was afraid of disturbing you or I should have hunted for them inside.’”

Louis, as he finished, settled his big shoulders back in the chair until it creaked with his weight, and ran his eye around the table waiting for the explosion which he knew would follow. All we could do was to stare helplessly in his face. Le Blanc, who hadn’t drawn a full breath since the painter began, found his voice first.

“And he didn’t intend cutting your throat?” he roared indignantly.

“No, of course not—I never said he did. I said I was scared blue, and I was—real indigo. Oh!—an awful night—hardly got an hour’s sleep.”

“But what about the fellow on the shed, and his footsteps, and the shadow of the hand?” demanded Brierley, wholly disappointed at the outcome of the yarn.

“There was no fellow, Brierley, and no footsteps.” This came in mild, gentle tones, as if the hunter’s credulity were something surprising. “I thought you understood. It was the scraping of the dead tree against the roof of the shed that made the creaking noise; the hand was the shadow cast by the end of a bunched-up branch swaying in the wind. The same thing occurred the next night and on every moonlight night for a week after—as long as I stayed.”

“And what became of the soap-suddy brigand with the rosaries?” inquired The Engineer calmly, looking at Louis over the bowl of his pipe, a queer smile playing around his lips.

“Oh, a ripping good fellow,” returned Louis in the same innocent, childlike tone—“a real comfort; best in the village outside the landlord and his wife, with whom I stayed two weeks. Brought me my luncheon every day and crawled up a breakneck hill to do it, and then kept on two miles to mail my letters.”

“Well, but Louis,” I exclaimed, “what a mean, thin, fake of a yarn; no point, no plot—no nothing but a string of——”

“Yes, High-Muck, quite true—no plot, no nothing; but it is as good as your bogus ghosts and shivering bishops. And then I always had my doubts about that bishop, High-Muck. I’ve heard you tell that story before, and it has always struck me as highly improper. I don’t wonder the girl was scared to death and skipped the next morning. And the gay old bishop! Felt cold, did he?” and Louis threw back his head and laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks.

XII

WHY MIGNON WENT TO MARKET

It means, too, that the street fronting the Inn is blocked up with a line of carts, little and big, their shafts in the gutter, the horses eating from troughs tied to the hind axle; that another line stretches its length along the narrow street on the kitchen side of the Inn which leads to the quaint Norman church, squeezing itself through a yet narrower street into a small open square, where it comes bump up against a huge hulk of a building, choked up on these market days with piles of vegetables, crates of chickens, boxes of apples, unruly pigs alive and squealing; patient, tired, little calves; geese, ducks—all squawking; chrysanthemums in pots spread out on the sidewalk; old brass, old iron; everything that goes to supply the needs of the white-capped women and wide-hatted men who crowd every square foot of standing room.

Market day means, too, that Pierre is unusually busy; and so is Lemois, and so are Leà and our little Mignon. Long before any one of us were out of bed this morning, the court-yard was crowded with big red-faced Norman farmers and their fat wives, all talking at once over their coffee, each with half a glass of Calvados (Norman apple-jack) dumped into their cups. At noon, the market over, they were back again for their midday breakfast, and Pierre, who had been working since daylight without a mouthful to eat, then placed on a big table in one of the open kiosks a huge earthen crock, sizzling-hot, filled with tripe, bits of pork, and chicken—the whole seasoned with onions and giving out a most seductive and inviting smell when its earthenware cover was lifted. There were great loaves of brown bread, too, which Lemois himself cut and served to the guests, besides cold pork in slices and cabbage chopped into shreds. When each plate was full, and the knives and forks had begun to rattle, he went indoors for his most precious heirloom—the square cut-glass decanter with its stopper made of silver buttons cut from a peasant’s jacket and soldered together—and after brimming each glass, seated himself and took his meal with the others, bowing them out when breakfast was over—hat in hand—as if they were ambassadors of a foreign court—gentleman and peasant, as he is—while they, full to their eyelids, stumbled up into their several carts, their women climbing in after.

And a great day it was for an out-door meal or for anything else one’s soul longed for—and they have these days in Normandy in October, when the fire is out in the Marmouset, the air a caress, and a hunger for the vanished summer comes over you. So soothing was the touch of the autumn air, and so lovely the tones of the autumn sky, that Louis hauled out a sketch-box from beneath a pile of canvases, and tucking one of them under his arm, disappeared through the big gate in the direction of the old church. Brierley took down his gun, and, calling Peter, strolled out of the court-yard promising to be back at luncheon, while Herbert, who had risen at dawn and walked to Houlgate to bid The Engineer good-by, dragged out an easy-chair from the “Gallerie,” backed it up against the statue of the Great Louis, and under pretence of resting his legs, buried himself in a book, the warm sunshine full on the page.

I, being left to my own devices, waited until the last cart with its well-fed load of Norman farmers had turned the corner of the Inn and quiet reigned again; and remembering that I was host, sought out our landlord and put the question squarely as to what objections, if any, he, the lord of the manor, had to our lunching out of doors too, and at the same table on which Pierre had placed the big crock and its attendant trimmings.

“Of course, my dear Monsieur High-Muck, you shall all lunch in the court, but the menu shall be better adapted to your more gentle appetites than the one prepared for our departed guests. I am at this moment paying the penalty for my share of the indigestible mess—but then I could not hurt their feelings by refusing—and so I have a queer feeling here”—and he ironed his waistcoat with the flat of his hand, his eyes upraised as if in pain. “But let me think—what shall it be to-day? I have a fish which Mignon, who has just gone to the market, will bring back, because I could not go myself nor spare Leà. Those big-eating people came so early and stayed so late. After the fish we will have Poulet Vallèe D’auge, with stewed celery, and at last a Pêche Flambée—and it will be the last time, for the late peaches are about over. And now about the wine—will you pick it out or shall I? Ah!—I remember—only yesterday I found a few bottles of Moncontour Vouvray at the bottom of a shelf in my old wine-cellar. It will bring fresh courage to your hearts. When it does not do that, and you have only dull despair or thick headaches, it should be poured out on the ground”—having delivered which homily, the old man, with his eye on Coco asleep on his perch, sauntered slowly up the court in the direction of the wine-cellar, from which he emerged a few minutes later bearing two dust-encrusted bottles topped with yellow wax—a distinguishing mark which he himself had placed there some twenty years before and had forgotten.

So while Herbert read on, only looking up now and then from his book, Leà and I set the table, stripping it of its rough, heavy dishes, swabbing it off with a clean, water-soaked towel—I did the swabbing and Leà held the basin—bringing from the Marmouset our linen and china, then dragging up the big wooden chairs, which were rain-proof and never housed.

We missed Mignon, of course. Buying a fish, and the market but half a dozen blocks away, should not require a whole hour for its completion, especially since she had been told to hurry—more especially still, since Pierre’s pot was on the boil awaiting its arrival, Louis and Brierley having returned hungry as bears. Indeed I had already started in to ask Lemois the plump question as to what detained our Bunch of Roses, when Leà’s thin, sharp, fingers clutched my coat-sleeve, her eyes on Lemois. What she meant I dared not ask, but there was no doubt in my mind that it had to do with the love affair in which every man of us was mixed up as coconspirator—a conclusion which was instantly confirmed when I looked into her shrivelled face and caught the joyous, lantern flare behind her eyes.

Waiting until we were out of hearing, Lemois having gone to the kitchen, she answered with a shake of her old head:

“Mignon loiters because Gaston is well again.”

“But he has never been ill. That crack on his head did him a lot of good—hurt Monsieur Lemois, I fancy, more than it did Gaston—set him to thinking—maybe now it will come out all right.”

“No; it only made him the more obstinate; he has forbidden the boy the place.”

“And is that why you are so happy?”

The shrewd, kindly eyes of the old woman looked into mine and then a sudden smile flung a myriad of wrinkles across her face.

“I am happy, monsieur,” she whispered as I followed her around the table with the box of knives and forks, “because things are getting brighter. Gaston has a stall now in the market where he can sell his fish himself, and where Mignon can see him once in a while. She is with him now. You know the hucksters paid him what they pleased, and sometimes, even when Gaston’s catch was big, he made only a few francs some mornings. And the mother and he were obliged to take what they could get, for you cannot wait with fish when the weather is hot. To buy the stall and pay for it all at once was what troubled them, so it is a great day for Gaston—Monsieur Gaston Duprè now”—and her eyes twinkled. “Even if Monsieur Lemois holds out—and he may, after all—then there may be another way. Is it not so? Ah, we will see! She is very happy now. Only I am getting nervous; she stays so long I am afraid that Monsieur Lemois may find out,” and she shot an anxious glance up the garden.

“What did the stall cost, Leà?” I asked, flattening the knives beside the plates as I talked, my eye on the kitchen door so Lemois should not surprise us.

“Oh, a great sum—one hundred and ten francs. Two knives here, if you please, monsieur.”

“Well, where did it come from—their savings?” obeying her directions as I spoke.

“No—not his money nor his mother’s; she could not spare so much. She must be buried some time, and there must always be money enough for that. All Gaston knows is that the chief of the market came to his house and left the receipt with the permit. It is for a year.”

“Well—somebody must have paid. Who was it?” I had finished with the knives and had begun on the forks and tablespoons.

“Yes—there was somebody, perhaps it was madame la marquise?” and she turned quickly and looked into my eyes, an expression of shrewd inquiry adding a new set of wrinkles to her gentle face. “Maybe you know, monsieur?”

“No, it’s all news to me. I am glad for her sake, anyhow, whoever did it. Was it news to Mignon?”

“When?”

“Why this morning when she went to market?”

“Yes, of course it was news to her. I, myself, only knew it last night, and I wouldn’t tell her; she would have betrayed herself in her joy. So when the market people stayed so long—and I did all I could to make them stay”—here her small bead eyes were pinched tight in merriment—“I said there was nothing for your dinner and we must have a fish and that Mignon might better go for it. Watch her when she returns: her face will tell you whether she has seen him or not. Now give me the box, monsieur, and thank you for helping me. Listen! There she comes; I hear her singing.”

And so did the whole court-yard, and she kept on singing, her basket on her arm, her face in full sunlight, until she espied Leà. Then down went the fish and away she flew, throwing her arms around the dear old woman’s neck, not caring who saw her; hugging her one minute, kissing her seamed cheeks the next, chattering like a magpie all the time, her eyes flashing, her cheeks red as two roses.

Only when Lemois appeared in the kitchen door and bent his steps toward us did her customary demureness return, and even then the joy in her heart was only stifled for the moment by a fear of his having overheard her song and of his wondering at the cause.

And if the truth be told, he did come very near finding out when luncheon was served, and would have done so but for the fact that I upset Le Blanc’s glass of Vouvray and followed up the warning with a punch below his fat waist-line when he began telling us how sorry he was for being late, he having made a wide détour to avoid the market carts, winding up with: “And oh, by the way, I met your little maid, Mignon, in the fish-market; she was having a beautiful time with a young fisherman who——”

It was here the dig came in.

“Ouch! What the devil, High-Muck, do you mean? Oh, I understand—yes, as I was saying”—here he stole a glance at Lemois—“I met Mignon in the market; she was buying a beautiful fish. I hope, Monsieur Lemois, we are to have it for dinner. Don’t bother, Leà, about the spilt wine; just get me a fresh glass. And, Louis, do you mind letting go that crusting of cobwebs so I can get another taste of that nosegay?” and thus the day was saved.

We broke loose, however, when Lemois was gone, and I told the whole story as Leà had given it, Louis, in his customary rôle of toast-master, rising in his seat and pledging the young couple, whose health and happiness we all drank, Brierley whistling the Wedding March to the accompaniment of a great clatter of knives and forks on the plates.

In fact, the very air seemed so charged with uncontrollable exhilaration that Coco, the oldest and most knowing of birds—he is sixty-five and has seen more love-making from his perch in the dormer overlooking that same court-yard than all the chaperones who ever lived—suddenly broke out into screams of delight, ruffling his feathers, curling up his celery sprout of a topknot, his eyes following Mignon, his head cocked on one side, when she raced back and forth from Pierre’s range to our big table. Even Tito, the scrap of a black kitten, who was never three feet away from Mignon’s heels, dodged in and out of her swaying petticoats in mad chase after her restless feet, and would not be quieted until she stopped long enough to take him up in her arms for a moment’s cuddling.

Of none of all this, thank Heaven, did Lemois have the faintest glimmer of a suspicion. When on her return from market he had scolded her for being late, he had taken her silence only as proof that she thought she deserved it. When he would have broken out on her again, suddenly remembering that our coffee was likely to be delayed, Herbert, to whom I had whispered my discovery—diplomat as he was—begged him to delay the serving of it until it could be poured directly from the pot into our cups, as the air of the court would chill it. All of which, Heaven be thanked again, Mignon overheard, sending her flying back to the kitchen, her eyes aglow with the happiness of a secret that filled her heart to bursting.

When she at last appeared with the coffee-pot, so contagious was her joy that our extended hands trembled as we held the tiny cups beneath her fingers. Somehow we had caught a little of her thrill. And it was all so evident and so marvellous and so inspiring that every man Jack of us, blighted old bachelors as we were, fell to wondering whether, after all, it would not have been better to have bent the neck to the yoke and had a running-mate beside us than to have continued our dreary trot in single harness.

XIII

WITH A DISSERTATION ON ROUND
PEGS AND SQUARE HOLES

Next followed the slicing off of the raw edge of the landslide, the building of a fence, and, later on, the preparation of a new garden. This last was to be madame’s very own, and neither care nor cost was to be considered in its making. She could sleep in a garage—she had slept there since the catastrophe—and take her meals from the top of a barrel (which was also true), but a garden meant the very breath of her life—flowers she must have—flowers all the time, from the first crocus to the last October blossoms. Marc, now her abject slave, was then at Rouen arranging for their shipment. The daily news—such as twenty or more men at work, the chimney half finished, the fence begun, etc., etc.—Le Blanc, who was constantly at the site, generally brought us at night, his report being received with the keenest zest, for the marquise was now counted as the most delightful of our coterie.

His very latest and most important bulletin set us all to speculating;—the old garage—here his voice rose in intensity—was to be moved back some fifty feet and a new wing added, with bedroom above and a kitchen below. “A new garage!” we had all exclaimed. Who then was to occupy it? Not madame, of course, nor her servants, for they, as heretofore, would be quartered in the reconstructed villa. Certainly not any of her visitors—and most assuredly not Marc!

“Take my advice and stop guessing,” laughed the Frenchman; “she’ll tell you when she gets ready, and not before. And she’ll have the wing completed on time, for nothing daunts her. To want a thing done is, with her, to have it finished. The new wing was an after-thought, and yet it did not delay the work an hour. She’ll be serving tea in that wreck next week.”

“It is because madame la marquise was born with a gift,” remarked Lemois dryly from his seat near the fire. “Her mind is constructive, and everything madame touches must have a definite beginning and lead up to a definite ending. Her sanity is shown in her never trying to do things for which she is not fitted. As a musician, or a painter, or even a sculptor, or in any occupation demanding a fine imagination, madame, it seems to me, would have been a pathetic failure.”

“How about an antiquary?” remarked Louis, blowing a ring of smoke across the table, a quizzical smile lighting up his face.

“As an antiquary, my dear Monsieur Louis, the eminent lady would have been a pronounced success. She is one now, for she insists on knowing that the thing she buys is genuine, and it saves her many absurdities. I can think of nothing in her collection that can be questioned—and I cannot say that of my own.”

“And so you don’t believe that a man or a woman can make what they please of themselves?” asked Herbert, who was always glad to hear from Lemois.

“Not any more than I believe that tulip bulbs will grow blackberries if I water them enough.”

“It’s all a question of blood,” essayed Le Blanc, snipping the end from his cigar with a gold cutter attached to his watch-chain. “Failures in life are almost always due to a scrap of gray tissue clogging up a gentleman’s brain, which, ten chances to one, he has inherited from some plebeian ancestor.”

“Failures in life come from nothing of the sort!” blurted out Louis. “It’s just dead laziness, and of the cheapest kind. All the painters I knew at Julien’s who waited for a mood are waiting yet.”

“The trouble with most unsuccessful men,” volunteered Brierley, “is the everlasting trimming up of a square peg to make it fit a round hole.”

“Then drive it in and make it fit,” answered Louis. “It will hug all the tighter for the raw edges it raises.”

“And if it splits the plank, Louis?” I asked.

“Let it split! A man, High-Muck, who can’t make a success of his life is better out of it, unless he’s a cripple, and then he can have my pocket-book every time. Look at Herbert!—he’s forged ahead; yet he’s been so hungry sometimes he could have gnawed off the soles of his shoes.”

“Only the imagination of the out-door painter, gentlemen,” answered Herbert with a laughing nod to the table at large. “The hungry part is, perhaps, correct, but I forget about the shoes.”

“I stick to my point!” exclaimed Le Blanc, facing Herbert as he spoke. “It’s blood as well as push that makes a man a success. When he lacks the combination he fails—that is, he does nine times out of ten, and that percentage, of course, is too small to trust to.”

“That reminds me of a story,” interrupted Brierley with one of his quiet laughs, “of some fellows who took chances on the percentage, as Le Blanc calls it, and yet, as we Americans say, ‘arrived.’ A well-born young Englishman, down on his luck, had been tramping the streets, too proud to go home to his father’s house, the spirit of the hobo still in him. One night he struck up an acquaintance with another young chap as poor and independent as himself. Naturally they affiliated. Both were sons of gentlemen and both vagabonds in the best sense. One became a reporter and the other a news-gatherer. The first had no dress suit and was debarred from state functions and smart receptions; the second boasted not only a dress suit useful at weddings, but a respectable morning frock-coat for afternoon teas. The two outfits brought them lodgings and three meals a day, for what the dress suit could pick up in the way of society news the man with the pen got into type. Things went on this way until August set in and the season closed; then both men lost their jobs. For some weeks they braved it out, badgering the landlady; then came the pawning of their clothes, and then one meal a day, and then a bench in St. James’s Park out of sight of the bobbies. This being rock bottom, a council of war was held. The news-gatherer shipped aboard an outgoing vessel and disappeared from civilization. The reporter kept on reporting. Both had courage and both had the best blood of England in their veins, according to my view. Twenty years later the two met at a drawing-room in Buckingham Palace. The reporter had risen to a peer and the news-gatherer to a merchant prince. There was a hearty handshake, a furtive glance down the long, gold-encrusted corridor, and then, with a common impulse, the two moved to an open window and looked out. Below them lay the bench on which the two had slept twenty years before.”

“Of course!” shouted Le Blanc; “that’s just what I said—a case of good blood—that’s what kept them going. They owed it to their ancestors.”

“Ancestors be hanged! It was a case of pure grit!” shouted Louis in return. “All the blood in the world wouldn’t have helped them if it hadn’t been for that. Neither of them expected, when they started out in life, to be shown up six flights of marble stairs by a hundred flunkeys in silk stockings, but, as Brierley puts it, ‘they arrived all the same.’ Blood alone would have landed them as clerks in government pay or obscure country gentlemen waiting for somebody to die. They kept on driving in the peg and before they got through all the chinks were filled. Keep your toes in your pumps, gentlemen. High-Muck is loaded for something; I see it in his eyes. Go on, High-Muck, and let us have it. How do you vote—blood or brains?”

“Neither,” I answered. “Lemois is nearest the truth. You can’t make a silk purse out of—you know the rest—neither can you force a man, nor can he force himself, to succeed in something for which he is not fitted. All you do is to split the plank and ruin his life. I’ll tell you a story which will perhaps give you and idea of what I mean.

“Perhaps five years ago—perhaps six—my memory is always bad for dates—I met a fellow in one of our small Western cities at home who, by all odds, was the most brilliant conversationalist I had run across for years. The acquaintance began as my audience—I was lecturing at the time—left the room and was continued under the sidewalk, where we had a porter-house steak and a mug apiece, the repast and talk lasting until two in the morning. Gradually I learned his history. He had started life as a reporter; developed into space writer, then editor, and was known as the most caustic and brilliant journalist on any of the Western papers. With the death of his wife, he had thrown up this position and was, when I met him, conducting a small country paper.

“What possessed me I don’t know, but after seeing him half a dozen times that winter—and I often passed through his town—I made up my mind that his brilliant talk, quaint philosophy, and mastery of English were wasted on what he was doing, and that if I could persuade him to write a novel he would not only drop into the hole his Maker had bored for him, but would make a name for himself. All that he had to do was to put himself into type and the rest would follow. Of course he protested; he was fifty years old, he said, had but little means, no experience in fiction, his work not being imaginative but concerned with the weightier and more practical things of the day.

“All this made me only the keener to do something to drag him out of the pit and start him in a new direction.

“The first thing was to make him believe in himself. I pooh-poohed the idea of his failure to succeed at fifty as being any reason for his not acquiring distinction at sixty, and counted on my fingers the men who had done their best work late in life. Taking up some of the editorials he had sent me (undeniable proofs, so he had maintained, of his inability to do anything better or, rather, different), I picked out a sentence here and there, reading it aloud and dilating on his choice of words; I showed him how his style would tell in an up-to-date novel, and how forceful his short, pithy epigrams would be scattered throughout its text.

“Little by little he began to enthuse: I had kindled his pride—something that had lain dormant for years—and the warmth of its revival soon sent the blood of a new hope tingling through his veins. He now confessed that he had always wanted to write sustained fiction without ever having had either the opportunity or the strength to begin. Inspired by my efforts, others of his friends at home joined in the bracing up, recognizing as I had done the charm and quality of the man—his wit and tenderness, his philosophy and knowledge of the life about him. They forgot, of course, as had I, that in fiction—and in all imaginative literature for that matter—something more is required than either a knowledge of men or the ability for turning out phrases. As an actor steps in between the dramatist and the audience—visualizing and vitalizing the text by deft gestures, telling emphases, and those silent pauses often more effective than the speech itself—so must the author with his pen: in other words, he must infuse into the written word something that presents to you in print that which the actor makes you see beyond the footlights. This, however, you men know all about, so I won’t dilate on it.

“Well, he started in and threw himself into the task with a grip and energy of which I had not thought him capable. It took him about six months to finish the novel; then he came East and laid the manuscript in my hands. We shut ourselves up in my study and went over it. When I suggested that a page dragged, he would snatch it from my hand, square himself on my hearth-rug with his back to the fire, and read it aloud, pumping his personality into every line. Conversations which, when I read them, had seemed long-winded and commonplace took on a new meaning. When he had gone to bed I reread the passages and again my heart sank.

“The publisher came next, I delivering the manuscript myself with all the good things I could say about it.