August, 1916

I am thirty this day, the twenty-ninth of August, 1916. The guns are roaring along the Somme front. Another great attack is on. The gray waves are passing over the top for the thousandth time and, for the thousandth time, hope is in the air once more. I feel it in the sudden optimism of the daily bulletin, in the groups in the market-place, in the little knot of evacuÉs, here in a Savoyard courtyard, basking in the sun and studying the winding line of pins on the yellowed map of the front.

“Brigadier David Littledale, LÉgion EtrangÈre, Croix de Guerre, wounded at Verdun, March 5th, shell wound in the shoulder and the leg, shell-shock and gangrene. Entered Val de Grace, March 21st, evacuated on ChambÈry, July 10th, 1916.”

The record used to hang at the foot of my bed beside the fever chart and the record of operations. From ChambÈry, here into a rest area, to put on flesh again, to quiet my jumping nerves and to fatten up for the return to the front. To-day I have no desire to hasten that return. I write it down frankly,—as I intend to keep honesty with myself and my impressions. There are other times when I feel the tug and fret to be back. It is my mood to-day, as war is a succession of unrelated moods.

This morning I ask no more of life than to continue here at my open window in the buzzing month of August, looking down on a drowsy world in animal content. A pipe of tobacco and the noonday meal—Pinard, pommes de terre frites, and perhaps a ragout with a touch of onions—all these simple joys to my keen senses seem the limit of human desires.

There is a touch of ivy at my window; below, the courtyard is flagged and the red-tiled, shovel-hatted Savoyard roofs throw sharp blue shadows across the glowing yellow pavement. Bompard, an old territorial, is peeling potatoes in the door frame. Coustic and Valentin, of the Chasseurs Alpins, are quarreling good-humoredly over a game of Manille, and old Canache, of the Bat d’Af, is baking in the chaise-longue, kepi over his nose, and a thin stream of smoke twining upward like Jack’s beanstalk. A mottled setter is flat on his side; a kitten plays with its toes; over the pink roofs the Col du Chat strikes into the skies with its brass cross blazing in the sun, and I say to myself, incredulously, that on the Northern Front cannon are roaring, men pitting themselves against machines, as the long trains of wounded begin to move our way,—into one of which at some near day I shall step and return to the Legion.

A buxom, tow-headed girl comes clattering into the courtyard, draws a pail of water and moves sinuously out. An exchange of jests, and we watch her go. She is more than a woman. She is woman. She represents that incredible other life to us, the dream life that runs at night with the will-o’-the-wisps along the trenches; violins and dancing under southern harvests; wet beaches and a glowing Normandy hearth; lights on the boulevards; children’s voices; an old couple waiting on a doorstep,—many things to many men! To me it brings back a stranger of four years and some months ago,—David Littledale, of Littledale, Connecticut; an old, rambling, red-sided house under the elms; a household of young people, frolicking; a girl’s face,—a first love; Ben, Alan, and Rossie, and one tomboy, shock-haired sister, Molly, galloping up the avenue on Pinto, the cow pony.

Will I ever go back to it and, if I do, will all this pass away like the frantic shadow that blots out the valley when thunder clouds come stampeding down the Col du Chat? Will the old life come out again, as the countryside returns, brilliant and glistening, sunlight and shadow, balanced and friendly? Is war an incident, or an education that remains? To tell the truth, I have seldom thought on such things,—never in the line of duty.

In resigning my will I am conscious of having resigned my imagination. The future is so indecipherable that it is rather a relief to say to one’s self:

“Nothing that I can do, say or think, except obey orders, can have the slightest effect on what is fated to happen.”

After two years war ceases to be an experience: it becomes a journey to be traveled in the shafts of the inevitable. I have gone through it, inspired, thrilled, grumbling, skeptical, rebellious, joking mechanically, but always, at the last test, obedient to the hidden power in the machine that decides my every act.

Why have I fallen back on this introspective mood in these emerging days of convalescence? I think it is as a refuge from the cafard,—a feeling of after all being a stranger in a strange land. Perhaps it has a basis in physical weakness,—perhaps simply inaction: inaction which is so demoralizing. To-day I have a longing to be back—to rub elbows with my own people—to be no longer “l’Americain” but an American among Americans.

For there is always this difference between me and Coustic and Valentin, sons of the mountain side; Canache, Apache and filcher of the gutters; Bompard, tiller of Normand soil: they are fighting for something bigger than themselves that at times raises them to heights of heroic eloquence, that obliterates the present and joins them to their forbears of the brave days of old: Grognards, Sans Culottes, Chevaliers and bearded Gauls. While I, I am fighting alone, for love of a man’s adventure, in order to find myself. I am alone, for, much as I love their country, it is theirs,—not mine.

Yet, if I cannot entirely possess this deep spirit of nationalism, it has been the most satisfying experience of my haphazard, drifting life to live among those who did. You cannot understand the poilu with your ears alone.

Blagueur, critique, sceptique (bluffer, critic and skeptic)—I have lived two years with them, poilu myself by the grace of rags and dirt, by a thousand sworn oaths never to move a further inch. I have sung with them in the slimy trenches of the first winter. I have cursed their commanders and sat on their boards of strategy. I have doubted, rebelled, grumbled, and denied my leader and,—at the zero hour, surged up and gone over the top.

I went into the war, heaven knows, wearied of my kind and of myself, disillusioned with man, seeking men. I have found what I sought. I have found and I understand them,—men, the mass, the race, which moves on, slowly, irresistibly, without inner questionings, doing what must be done. Above all, I have known the love of the Fatherland, the faith of the humble, handed down at simple hearths,—the will to remain, whatever the cost, French. Well, if I am fated to lie in No-man’s-land, I am honestly thankful to have known life at its simplest, its keenest, and to have served some purpose.

Blagueur, critique, sceptique, but, at the call of duty,—ready. Often have I marveled at the soul of the poilu, the bit of sunlight that abides in it—the love of the beautiful—the answering thrill when a hero leads; that inexhaustible reserve, at the bottom of which miracles wait! Yesterday the answer came, and it illumined the dark places.

At lunch we were discussing the prospects of going back, that and the end of the war are, of course, the daily topics. Canache launched on his favorite tirade against the embusquÉs; Paris was full of them; the hospitals were full of them; twenty miles behind the front they were as thick as berries; before they sent back the older classes who had been shot to pieces once already, let them clean out the embusquÉs! As for him, Canache, he would refuse to go,—like that, flat! He’d demand justice; he’d tell a few names, and he ended by spitting contemptuously on the flagging, and exclaiming:

“Sale Gouvernement!”

Coustic, who wore the Military Medal and the Croix de Guerre, humored the old rogue, knowing well the heart of iron behind the froth. But, as a poilu, he would have been a traitor to his kind not to grumble. For the poilu has a fixed attitude: everything is wrong, from top to bottom: the government, the leaders; the commissariat, especially; the civilians, always. And, always, the poilu, despite injustice, favoritism, neglect and inefficiency, is there to save the day! Valentin wagged his head wisely and swore that every word was gospel. Bompard alone remained mute, buried in his bread and cheese.

“Well, old grunter, what do you say to all this?” I said, addressing him.

“Me?” Bompard’s face is the purple of the grape; he has a long sweeping moustache and his eyes disappear behind shaggy eyebrows.

“Yes, you. What’ll you do if you have to go back?”

“Bah! What’s the use of words,” he said contemptuously; “if we have to go back, we’ll go. If we’ve got to fight, we’ll fight. That’s all there is to it. We’ll do our duty—the same as the others—perhaps, the same, perhaps, a little better. Que diable! Nous avons du sang franÇais dans nos artÈres, et le sang franÇais ne ment pas!”

The revolt died. Canache’s eyes flashed. He was back at the front, spitting Boches and swearing horribly. Coustic and Valentin, ashamed to have been caught in a cheap insincerity, sat up under the reproof, the good red blood of France mounting to their cheeks. Bompard had found the phrase. At that moment, had the hated little town major stuck his head through the postern and cried, “Volunteers, to go immediately to the front!” we would have risen, as one man, and cried:

“Ready!”

So our leaders talk to us who understand us. A phrase—something to fire the imagination—something to exalt the heart—something to throw defiantly from the lips in the cauldron of battle—a phrase to the poilu is worth an army or ten thousand cannon!

It was with a phrase that we won at Verdun and rolled the Hun back from the Marne.

“Mourir sur place! Debout les morts! Ils ne passeront pas!” The whole war is there. And to me who heard it, the phrase which fell unconsciously from old Bompard’s lips,—“French blood never lies!” makes the rest comprehensible.

It is something to have the right to a phrase like that.

Yesterday, when I began these notes, it was more as a caprice than from any conviction that I would continue them. Yet to-day, I find myself to my surprise filled with a certain eagerness. During the night the thought came to me that it would be interesting to attempt an absolutely honest portrayal of myself, setting down everything, small and great, the good and the bad, as it occurred.

A classmate I met at Harvard (I cannot remember his name) once said to me, casually:

“The man who has the courage to write down day by day the true record of his life, concealing nothing, excusing nothing, without attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, putting down the sublime and the ridiculous, the mud that soils his feet as he contemplates the stars, the struggle, the inconsistencies, the little basenesses, the hypocrisies that make him virtuous—the man who will dare arraign himself before the pitiless bar of his own judgment—will leave an immortal book. But no one has ever confessed, and no one ever will.”

I never forgot this remark. It determined a whole course of mental speculation, fortunately or unfortunately, for it threw me into a period of introspection which at times verged perilously close to a melancholia, which might have been fatal had I not had in my sound body the corrective of an intense animal delight in life and an abounding curiosity for adventure. Since then, I have read copiously in the so-called confessions that line the shelves of intimate libraries, and I have recognized the essential truth of the dictum. Even Jacques Casanova who, in the effrontery of his brilliant record of a master-rogue, seems to have approached the stark verity of a confession, has moments of colossal vanity, in which he cannot resist the temptation to pose as an honest man. As for the famous confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, they confess nothing at all except perhaps the author’s desire to pass as a great man.

It may be that a sentiment of vanity alone is the impulse which has determined me to this attempt; yet I do not think it is entirely that,—except as vanity is a natural and healthy quality and is allied to ambition. What is ambition? Is it not an instinctive rebellion against the little term of existence which is accorded to us, the soul’s struggling against mortality,—the longing to leave something behind us so that we shall not be utterly snuffed out?

Of such ambition I am conscious. If two years voyaging over the stormy paths of war has left me with a new conception of the flotsam value of my life against the great currents of human destiny, it has robbed death of half its terrors. Death has seemed such a casual thing. Yet, at other times, there comes a swift, passionate revulsion towards living,—a need of not entirely passing out of the memory of those who have known us. This is the explanation, I believe, of the multitude of little diaries, often but a jumble of hasty notes jotted down on the eve of an attack; an impression of incredulous delight after deliverance out of the agony of battle; a last cry of the soul, scribbled in a shell hole under the flaming winds of a bombardment; a final struggling to leave something that will remain,—something tangible beyond a memory that recedes. It is this instinct, I think, which I obey. We are all more or less fatalists; and I, for my part, feel that my end will come in the moving ranks—some day—sooner or later—but inevitably. There were those who were certain they would pass unscathed out towards the unimaginable dawn, who died at my side, by a grim freak of fate that left me living. Yet my fatalism is unshaken. I am neither sadder nor happier for it: I accept it as the final explanation of my presence here.

Before estimating my past conduct or proceeding to a critical analysis of the future, I may as well take stock of Mr. David Littledale, as he stands to-day.

Physically the damage done is trifling and soon repaired. The shoulder is as good as new. The leg will carry a limp for some time to come. The effects of the gas are rapidly departing, and in another two months my nerves should come again under complete control.

Outwardly I am a typical Littledale, of a family of fighting men and militant preachers. There never was a Littledale who did not have three marked characteristics; the straight bushy line of the eyebrows, the low cropped hair over the forehead, and the mouth cut like an inverted sickle. The stark ruggedness of the jaws of our Puritan ancestry has been softened with easier generations but the faces run lean and brown and muscled. The ears are particularly my own and have a defiant way of leaving the head that has earned a score of insulting nicknames.

As a family we are not given to gayety, rather over-serious, I am afraid; tenacious, introspective, seldom shining in conversation, listeners rather than debaters, realists and traditionalists,—though occasionally a dreamer, like my brother Alan, comes into the family, rebels, breaks away, and disappears restlessly into the outer world.

To take stock of myself mentally is not so easy. I have received the deplorable education of the day. Everything that possibly could be done was done to make me hate the pursuit of knowledge. I am, indeed, an excellent example of the signal failure of American education,—the failure to provide for the utilization of a developed type. My father and my grandfather and his father before him were brought up to public service as the result of a system of society and education which demanded service of them. What, all at once, has happened to our generation? We had everything to make us leaders, family traditions, unlimited opportunity and undoubted energy; yet the only result that I can see of our education has been either to divert our unquestioned energy towards a heaping up of material comforts or to make of us triflers and dilettanti; in a word, parasites. It may have been our fault, but I think it was deeper,—the fault of national thinking. Undoubtedly, in the future, the irresistible forces which mold a nation will bring order into the multiplicity of confused movements which now dominate us. But as I look back, even from my short retrospective, and see myself and my brothers, I can give but one judgment. We are a generation wasted.

I am at that point in my life when traditions fall away; when a man, educated as I have been, suddenly finds himself alone, wandering through a vast valley of doubt, seeking, with the instinct that is in men for order, to recreate in stone the house of cards which has just fallen about him.

What do I really believe? What of my education remains after the test of experience? I was taught certain principles of morality, certain judgments on conduct, given certain standards of right and wrong. Virtue must bring its own reward and the wages of sin is death.

After a few years’ contact with the world, I find myself completely mystified. Perhaps I have been too often behind the scenes and must pay the penalty of disillusionment. I was given certain principles of common honesty,—and I have seen great criminals exalted because they either stole on a grandiose scale or procured others to steal for them. True, I have heard many unflattering judgments passed on these financiers, privately, but these criticisms seemed to proceed more from an instinctive envy, and I seldom found that they interfered in the least with the successful rogue’s power in the community. I was given certain sharp distinctions between good women and bad. In the cosmopolitan society which I knew in Paris, I saw those who were surest of their position flagrantly and insolently defying all public criticism. I have never found, in my occasional contact with women of the demimonde, the libertinage that I have met with in certain of the most exalted spheres of society.

My grandfather was Senator and a member of the National Cabinet. My great-grandfather was one of the founders of the nation. My father, as judge of the Circuit Court, has been in intimate touch with public men and party politics. The ideal of public leadership I have always regarded reverently and yet, on closer contact, I have discovered that the leaders who were like demigods to my young imagination were capable of underhand trafficking for office and midnight deals with repellant political tricksters that seemed to me to place them on a level with political fences,—receivers of stolen political goods. Puritan I am and shall always be, so long as the heart of a child, which abides in every man, remains open. Yet I have been wandering along pagan roads, seeking new readjustments, which do not satisfy me, as I at first believed.

There may be a deeper truth than I have uncovered below the shallow surface of my experience. There must be, though I have not yet had the vision to perceive it,—unless it be by renouncing the class into which I was born and seeking new elements of faith in closer contact with the great simple mass of humanity which remains vitally significant and predestined, through the saving grace of struggle.

Yet do I believe, whole-heartedly and without reservation, in Democracy? I am not sure. Certainly, not in the demoralization into which I see it now wandering. Not if it means Democracy at the price of inefficiency, rejection of self-discipline, and the negation of real leadership. The vital principle, to me, is the equalization of opportunity. Yet with it there must be an aristocracy of achievement and an ability to recognize the quality of leadership in exceptional men,—without which Democracy is no better than a rabble.

If I should announce such ideas in the rigid formalism of my Littledale home, I would be regarded, I know, as an intellectual pariah. But I am not seeking to impose my ideas on others. I am setting them down in a moment of intellectual luxury, for my own self-education; that is, as I perceive them through this vista of isolation, when old commonplaces come into a new significance.

To-day there is a great yearning inside me, allied with a new feeling of homesickness. I long to go to the home that is denied me. The air which I have breathed these long two years has been extraordinarily vital. I have lived with humanity at its keenest. With all the sodden realism of war, with all its inconsistencies of detail, its mingled brutality and heroism, it has been a privilege to have known its rare moments of exaltation. I have known my kind as they are, as my friends in the courtyard below are,—inconsistent and frail, selfish, avaricious, sunk in mere animal passions of living; but I have seen a sudden flaming vision of sacrifice exalt them above the brute, as I have known Christian and Pagan to offer themselves on the cross of their own suffering that their race might go on living.

September

Sunday evening.

This morning I attended Mass with Coustic and Valentin, who are very religious. (The others are not.) I like the solemnity and the calm of the old Cathedral, the footsteps that slip past lost in the obscurity, the candle-points that punctuate the darkness without illuminating it, the sense of repose, beauty, meditation. Yet, every time I enter a church now and see the cross, my memory returns to another crucifixion, to a man who was not divine, yet who never flinched in his sacrificial agony.

His name was Jules Fromentin, and a worse rascal did not exist in the company. He had been a deserter in the Argentine, but he had his code. And, somewhere in the bottom of his muddied philosophy was the love of France. He caught the first steamer, claimed foreign citizenship, and enlisted in the Legion. One night, in the spring of 1915, when we held the trenches at the foot of the Notre Dame de Lorette slopes, working towards Ablain St. Nazaire, a scouting detail was caught between the lines and wiped out. Fromentin, alone, wounded to the death, was left hanging on an advanced section of our barbed wire, to which he had struggled. To attempt a rescue was humanly impossible. We had made an advance the night before, and another was expected. The Boches, on the qui vive, kept the night luminous with rockets and drooping flares. No head could have appeared for an instant above the trench in the illuminated night. At that, only the authority of our commander held us in. I can remember still our feeling of horror and of rage as we crouched helplessly in the whipped-around trench and listened with the cold sweat starting up our backs. Fromentin was singing,—a ribald marching song, an unprintable thing, salacious and vilifying the Boches. From time to time a bullet reached home. Then the song ceased, and a defiant voice cried:

“TouchÉ! Vive la France!”

He lay there, suffering untold tortures—a man, and not a god—without hope or faith, passing through the sacrificial agony, and yet, hour after hour:

“TouchÉ! Sales Boches! Vive la France!”

Then, at dawn, a final bullet, more merciful than the rest.

“TouchÉ! Ah—” And silence.

When we got to him, two days later, there were twenty-two bullet wounds in him.

I put it down reverently, and reverently I compare that crucifixion that is a symbol of mankind dying for an ideal with the divine agony on Calvary. The agony was equal but no certainty of Paradise opened before the man, unless there came a glorified vision we could not share. Often, in the drab weariness of war, the sodden fatigue, the brutalizing of the instincts and the weakening of the spirit, I go back to the lingering horror and sublimity of that night and cling to my symbol. For me every crude wooden cross that rises in the fields has this human replica of the Calvary.

The strange thing, or perhaps the natural thing, is that I have little inclination to write about the war. It is rather myself in its past progression and the self which has come out of the reaction of the war which interests me.

For the war is not a logical sequence in my memory. It is a jumble and confusion of reiterated notes, endless movement, hunger, drenching, cold. Only a few scenes detach themselves,—a very few. When I recall the mobilization, I hear only one voice in the surge and roar of hysterical multitudes crowding down to the departing trains at the Gare du Nord,—a child’s voice, saying:

“Non, non, mamma,—don’t cry. Be brave,—till he’s gone!”

I seldom remember definite details, any particular dawn breaking after the night of vigil, or the shrinking waiting of any one bombardment. It is all one stretching gray line of sky; a tireless to and fro of men and horses; the same broken line of trenches, a monotony of slime and sleety rain; and all this is confused, as though I were struggling upward through swirling, roaring bodies of water. Repetition has dulled the perceptions. I am conscious only of fatigue, of unending beating against the ears, of vigils under stars that never sink, of marching,—yes, here one vivid impression always returns. It is one of those memories that enter into the phantasmagoria of the night.

I am back again in the ranks, that have been marching for days. Some one—the comrade at my left—says:

“Mon vieux?”

“What is it?”

“I want to sleep a little.”

“Pass over your rifle.”

Then he places his arm about my neck and the same to the comrade on the other side, and presently I hear him begin to snore; marching, and dead asleep,—until we wake him up and another takes his place.

What else comes out of the blur? The red smile of a comrade who lay grinning at me in a shell hole all one mortal day. I remember no one night, but I remember distinctly Night in the trenches,—the winging bullets, the occasional rocket, the rising, lumbering whirl of a trench mortar, the sudden digging in against the damp wall, a breathless wait, and then, somewhere up the line, an explosion, and a shriek:

“Ah, JÉsu!”

But all this is the confusion of drifting fog. Out of the months in the Val de Grace I can see but two faces,—the provocative smile of a nurse, as a doctor whispered in her ear amid the groans and delirium of a Senegalese dying beside me, and another, the face of an old, ugly woman, strangely devoted and untiring,—an old woman on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floors for us, who, I was told, was a Princess of the House of Bourbon.

Only these details come back to me. The war is too near and too inevitable. I wish to escape it, if not entirely, for a brief period. For inaction is what is demoralizing now, inaction and the contemplation of the approaching fact. The moment convalescence ends and I step again into the ranks and feel the touch of a comrade’s shoulder, before that accomplished fact, all will seem obvious again,—but not now. All my instinct now is to put from me this thing that approaches so relentlessly.

Two periods of my life stand out; the calm of the early home days, and the disorder of two years in Paris; two utterly, inexplicably different David Littledales; on whom now I, a third personality, can look with some dispassionate estimate.

October

A budget of letters with a touch of home has sent me back to my diary this morning, which, as I feared, I have neglected these last weeks. At the time these letters had been written no word had reached them of my having been wounded at Verdun, and as I sat recalling the thousand details of our daily life, I imagined how the family would receive the news.

Nothing could be more characteristic of the Littledale family than its departure to worship on Sunday morning. We are organized on the theory of absolute liberty of conscience in matters religious as well as political. My mother and Ben departed in one direction for the Unitarian Church, Aunt Janie to the Congregational, and my father, Molly and myself for the little Presbyterian chapel in the village square. Rossie, the privileged character of the family, remained in that state of suspended judgment which permitted him to lengthen the Sunday morning rest. No asperities, no dissensions resulted from this opposition of views. In fact, each Littledale was a little proud of the family’s individualism, regarding it as the inherited trait of a strong intellectual strain.

We were four brothers and a sister, and all as different as one day is from another. Because of my mother’s public interests and her theories on individualism, we were brought up with small restraint, along lines of our own choosing. Alan, the third of the line, was the rebel of the family. As I look back, I can see where the mistakes were all on the part of Ben and myself. Wild, impatient of restraint, Alan certainly was, yet the rough discipline which the older brother inflicted was the worst method of dealing with him. The two never understood each other. Every idea and every instinct was opposed and each in his way was remarkably unyielding in type.

While Rossie was alive, he and Molly, through their good humor and affection, were able to hold the insurgent in check, but after Rossie’s tragic drowning matters went from bad to worse. Alan quickly assumed the traditional rÔle of the family black sheep.

In every respectable family of New England there is, I suppose, always that predestined place. It had been so in my father’s generation and in the generation before him. We all, with the exception of Molly, who was too young to have an opinion, expected that Alan would sooner or later disgrace the family, and as we did not conceal from him the state of our convictions he did his best to justify them. After being expelled from two schools and dragged into college by the application of every family influence, there came the final storm. In his sophomore year he became involved in a disgraceful row which reached the columns of the metropolitan press. Alan was permitted to resign, returned home, had a violent scene with Ben and my father, and departed, vowing never to set foot in the family home again. That we were all unjust to him admits of no doubt—I among the rest—but at that time I was completely under the influence of Ben, who was three years my senior.

I have left my brother Ben until the last: utterly different from me in temperament, impulse and character, he exercised over me the strongest domination. From boyhood we had been inseparable. Study came laboriously to him, to me naturally, so, despite the difference in age, we passed through school and college together. Mentally I was his superior but he exercised over me a moral supremacy by the direct and ruthless expression of his will. His strength lay in the fact that he was diverted by no complexities. He had little imagination, read little, and talked less. The two or three ideas which guided him were settled convictions. Nothing perplexed him. In all things he was a direct force.

I have noticed the same phenomenon in later life. Men of little imagination and small mental baggage often dominate men of superior imagination by the sheer tenacious simplicity of never being in doubt of what they want. As I see them now, Alan was revolt and Ben traditionalism in its most rigid New England form. He was born to maintain what was as it had been, a mid-Victorian in his tastes, a Bourbon in his ideas,—quite capable, in another era, of burning witches at the stake.

For better or for worse, our destinies have been tragically intertwined,—how tragically, I alone know. His code of morality would not have looked well in copy books but, such as it was, it did have the advantage of sincerity and a contempt for hypocrisy as he saw it in others.

To fight hard and fairly on any question; to do as he believed every man of breeding did in months of relaxation, but never to surrender the control of one’s self or to be moved out of one’s calm by any wind of passion; to take women as they came, lightly; but never to lie to them or descend to petty meanness, or to become involved in situations which compromised your dignity: this was a code which savored rather of the condottieri of the Middle Ages than of the Puritan traditions he represented. Yet he saw in it no inconsistencies and, as men go (and as I have known them), the code had certain qualities of noblesse oblige. I have since turned from this insolent egotism but for a long time it influenced my attitude towards life and brought me close to disaster. Yet, by establishing this moral tyranny, Ben saved me from what would have been the shipwreck of my life.

At the age of eighteen, in the summer of my Sophomore year, I fell madly, foolishly in love with the daughter of a farmer back of Littledale, Jenny Barnett, a handsome little country girl, red-cheeked, black-haired, and gray-eyed, the beauty of the county. Looking back now, I can understand many things,—particularly with the subsequent career of Jenny before me, but then I was an extremely innocent youngster, whose head turned at a look from the gray eyes in the warm odors of June, and it would never have entered my imagination to entertain the slightest suspicion of her. She, on her side, perceiving what a greenhorn she had to deal with, made up her shrewd little mind to set her cap for me. Before I knew it, I had lost so completely all perspective that I seriously considered a runaway match.

To-day it is all so incredible that I ask myself if I could have proceeded so far, if, in the last test, a saving grain of common sense would not have halted me, and I like to reason that I was but playing with an idea, deceiving myself as much as the girl. Yet I do not know that this is a fair estimate, for I have seen so much of what men do under the narcotic impulse of passion, even against their own will and intelligence, that I am not certain I might not have played the fool,—without the interception of my brother.

In my simplicity I had gone to him with my confidence. I can still see the shock of amazement on his face. Then he remained silent a long moment, his eyes on my face.

“Absolutely sure you want to marry?”

“Oh, absolutely,” I said, yet my heart sank as though I had pronounced my own sentence.

“And the girl,—Jenny? Absolutely sure she loves you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, you’re making a fool of yourself, but that’s your affair. I’ll see you through, that’s promised.”

His words brought me no joy. A cloud settled before my eyes. At the end of half an hour, as though his mind had been made up, he questioned me adroitly as to our relations, our place of meeting, our next rendezvous. All of which information I gave him, without mistrust. The second day he came to me and said:

“What are you doing this afternoon? Nothing? Wait for me in Talbot’s wood, by the old spring. I’ve got a line on a honey tree. Meet me at four.”

“At four. I’ll be there,” I answered, not without surprise.

I installed myself in the wood at the appointed time and shortly afterward, hearing familiar voices, I sprang up and perceived Jenny on the arm of my brother. My first thought was that he was bringing her to me in sign of allegiance. The next moment, to my astonishment, I saw her fling her arms about his neck and kiss him passionately, very differently from the furtive embraces she had vouchsafed me.

The next moment I was before them, with murder in my heart. The girl sprang back with a cry. My hands reached Ben’s throat and we went to the ground. In my rage I understood but one thing,—that what he had done he had done deliberately, after having put to sleep my suspicions by an attitude of false acquiescence. My next impulse was the most tragic and instinctive hatred which can blind the reason of a human being,—the wild jealousy of brother against brother. At the thought that the girl could so easily have preferred him after all that had been between us, all the love that I had for him turned to the blackest fury, and I believe that for a short moment if I could have killed him I would have done so. The minx stood by, no longer frightened, but delighted in her vanity at the sight of our struggling over her.

At first Ben had burst out laughing, defending himself from my frantic rage but, little by little, under the sting of my blows, he too lost his head. We rolled over and over, clawing at each other frantically, striking out blindly. I was no match for him then in strength, and at the end I found myself on my back, my arms pinned under his knees, looking up into his bruised face.

Suddenly he bent down and cried angrily:

“You little fool! Is that the sort of wife you want to bring home!”

“You made her do it!” I cried, and in my rage I almost succeeded in freeing myself. He exerted all his strength and brought me back to earth.

“Made her do it! A girl that’s engaged to you? Do you want to be the laughingstock of the country?”

My brain cleared and a great thankfulness came over me. I began to laugh uproariously.

This was too much for Jenny. With a swish of her skirts, she went flying through the woods.

I continued to laugh, with a sudden detention of all my nerves, cut by sudden involuntary sobs, but the laugh was not honest and something bitter and contemptuous descended into my heart, there to remain.

“Let me up,” I said, at the end.

“All right?”

“Quite.”

We arose and surveyed the wreck we had made of each other.

“I had to do it, Davy.”

“You did right.”

We shook hands and went home, his arm over my shoulder, a rare demonstration of affection for him. Had I only been present to render him a like service when the rÔles were reversed, years later!

There was no need of admonition and it was characteristic of him that he never once referred to the episode. All my anger turned on myself. I saw the fool I had played and I swore that I would never be caught again. From that time on vulgarity played no part in my life. Milestone Number 1.

Unquestionably the thing that saved me was the blow to my vanity. Even to this day I cannot recall the incident without resentment and, though it is quite illogical, I believe of all the episodes of my life this will always be the one I shall think on with keenest humiliation. Even between Ben and myself the memory has always remained a secret irritation. For despite all my efforts to fight down the feeling, I still retain a little resentment at the superiority he had shown,—a primitive instinct of the male, I suppose, particularly when a woman is involved.

A revulsion was imperative, and the revulsion sent me back to my own kind. There is, I suppose, in every man’s life the figure of some woman who represents what might have been; some turning point at which he looks back and perceives where the direct road abruptly diverged. My intimacy with Anne Brinsmade was not the usual boy and girl romance but was something quite genuine and loyal and, though in the end the inevitable complications brought their misunderstandings, I look back on this natural comradeship, which extended over two years, with real affection. For this, strangely enough, I had Jenny Barnett to thank. The anger in me against my credulity and weak sentimentality was so insistent that to recover some self-respect I felt the need of asserting my ascendancy over some worthier one of her sex, if but to prove to myself that I had the qualities of reticence, authority and self-control I admired in my brother. It was not premeditated or conscious, yet if it had been skillfully calculated, nothing could have served me better.

Stephen Brinsmade was a lawyer of large political and business activities, a man of considerable fortune, and Anne was surrounded with every luxury and attention which he could shower on her. They had a big place at Taunton, about fifteen miles from our home at Littledale, and the friendship of the families was traditional. In my case there was a deeper reason. At school I had roomed with young Stephen and when he had died as the result of an accident on the polo field, the memory of his friendship brought me close to the father and sister.

Anne, even as a young girl, was a problem. She was all impulse, and no one knew where impulse might lead her. I was approaching twenty and she was scarcely sixteen at this time, and my air of determined impersonality successfully piqued her curiosity, roused her resentment, and finally drew her to me in impulsive trust. Her brother had been my dearest chum. For his young sister I could have only the most exact loyalty. I became her confidant, assuming the rÔle of mentor, and occasionally delivered moral precepts with a gravity that was so natural that it even eluded my sense of humor. Different beings, I suppose, appeal to different qualities in us, according to their needs, and there was something in the wayward, lovable, undirected charm of the young girl which aroused the chivalry in me. My attitude, so different from that of the men who surrounded her, naturally had two results. It brought a delightful companionship, utterly free from mawkishness, or the simulated coquetries and aped sentimentality which too often, in the freedom of our American intercourse, leave the regret in man and woman of having failed in reverence before the things that count. Unconsciously, however, as this intimacy continued, the feminine temptation was hard to resist. Once or twice she tried to provoke my jealousy. I do not think it was consciously done, but I recognized it and my studied indifference undoubtedly gave me an increasing value in her eyes.

The influence I exerted over her was, I know, the strongest in her life. I saw that she idealized me and though the incongruity of making a hero of me struck me, a certain strength came from the realization. I never fully believed in her and frequently told her so,—much to her annoyance. I saw her as a young girl, too easily influenced, with natural instinct towards the good, yet with dangerous cravings for excitement and pleasure. I knew as a woman she would be the creature of circumstances and, foreseeing the flattery and adoration that would be hers on her entrance into the world, I doubted the stability of her best motives. On these subjects we talked frankly, and once, with suddenly clouded face, listening to me intently, she confessed in a burst of feeling that my fears were justified and, genuinely moved, placing her hand in mine, said:

“When I’m with you, Davy, I don’t want to be just selfish and superficial. I do want other things in life; but I know myself so well that—I’m afraid.”

It was in the summer after my graduation that I first became aware that my own feelings were undergoing a change. In the beginning I was master enough of myself to control them, even when in daily contact with her implicit trust and her too frankly shown desire for my company. My reason warned me that my strength was in her ignorance of my true state of mind but, at twenty-two, with a young girl on the brink of a radiant and lovely womanhood, the reason is but an intermittent refuge, and propinquity and the moment, decisive. One night in mid-summer, after a long and intimate discussion, when least I expected it, at her hand freely and impulsively placed in mine, every inhibition in me stopped. I raised her fingers suddenly to my lips, drew a long breath and held them there until, troubled, she sought to withdraw them.

“Why—David!”

She was looking at me, wide-eyed and wondering.

I tried to repair my blunder, hastily and awkwardly.

“You’re such a good sort, I was thinking—well, I’d hate to have anything but the best come to you, later—”

She was still looking at me as I stopped, floundering. I drew a long breath and said:

“It’s chilly here. Let’s go in.”

She slipped her arm from mine and led the way back. She said no word for the rest of the evening, while I exerted myself to talk to her father, and left as soon as I could make the opportunity. But I knew that she was not deceived, then or later, by my new, almost hostile attitude of aloofness.

The damage was done. From that day we never really talked to each other. And here a curious thing happened. Until then there had been no mistaking her preference for me. It was so open that every one saw it,—her father, my brothers, everybody. In fact, it was rather looked upon as a matter of course that eventually we should marry. I knew this. There are things which do not deceive us and in the attitude of Mr. Brinsmade there was even more than consent, though on the part of the mother I felt an increasing antagonism.

Now, over night, all was changed. We avoided the moments of intimacy which had come so naturally. Her attitude became the extreme of capriciousness. I knew I had blundered and believed that the blunder was irreparable, but when I would deliberately refrain from seeing her, she was certain to call me up and insist upon my coming to dinner. Yet the moment I was in her presence she was so silent and so moody that I always returned with a feeling of hopelessness and disillusionment. Hurt and miserable, my pride drove me to assume an attitude of raillery, which crystallized in a studious assumption of tolerant amusement and an apparent refusal to see in her anything but a wayward child. She resented this and never let pass an occasion to rouse my jealousy. I was, in turn, mortified, proud, and angry.

My old doubts returned and, forgetting how much my own attitude could excite irritation; forgetting how young she was in the knowledge of her own needs; forgetting all that we had built upon together, I saw her only as an inconscient child, disdaining the toy which she had finally acquired. As her mother was, so I felt she would inevitably become, and I ceased to believe that the memory of our talks and the natural, kindly impulses in her would ever be strong enough to counteract the craving for the baubles of vanities which to-morrow would be thrown into her lap.

What hurt me most was the seeming ungenerosity of her attitude,—that after the years of unswerving loyalty and protection I had given her she should now adopt towards me the methods of a coquette. It ended on a trifle. There was a scene of petty jealousy—I cannot recall it now without astonishment—a dance accorded and withdrawn,—nothing more. And yet for that, the course of two lives was irretrievably affected. Perhaps this was but the pretext. We were both high-spirited, both too young to understand life’s values or the emotions which swayed us, and both too proud to yield the first. For a moment’s pique, we parted in anger,—I have never seen her since. A month later I left for Paris, to take up the study of architecture. Milestone Number 2.

The memory quickly receded. I was, of course, too young myself to have been truly capable of love. Yet to-day, as I look back, but for that one instant’s wavering, I can see how my whole life would have run. From time to time I followed her career, saw her photograph in the public fashion show blazoned forth in newspaper and periodical; read occasional news of her reported engagements, and then, lost in the maelstrom of a malevolent infatuation, I put her finally from my mind, as at that time I put from me all memories of a life where quiet, order and simple ideals dominated.

I cabled home my decision to enlist. A month later, among the frantic letters from the family, I found one from her.

Dear old Davy:

Molly has just told me and I can’t help writing to you. We are no longer children, are we? And the old misunderstanding was of a boy and a girl. I have always bitterly regretted it. I don’t know whose fault it was,—perhaps both. If I was to blame I am truly sorry. I have never forgotten the old days or how fine you were with me. In all my life there has been nothing more honest. I cannot bear to have you go without knowing it. If you will let me, it will mean a great deal to me if I could help just a little,—keep you in touch with things at home, and let you know how many, many of your friends are keeping you in their thoughts. May I,—please, Davy—for old times.

Just as I used to be,
Anne.

I have the letter in my hand and to-day the memory hurts. The cafard is strong on me, and the futility of my drifting existence. There are other letters, chatty, carefully restrained letters, matching the tone of my answers,—but this one I keep, for sometimes, in moments of depression, in the passionate revulsion to living, I turn to what might have been.

At this point, Coustic came in with my orders. To-morrow I am to set out for Paris, there to report before an examining board. He stared at my long face and the open diary.

“What’s wrong, youngster?”

“Thinking of home, mon vieux.”

“What are you writing there,—a romance?”

“It passes the time.”

“Literature? Bad for the nerves. Don’t do it. You can’t change anything—can you?”

“Evidently not.”

“Come with me. We’ll dine at La MÈre Argentine’s,—a couple of red bottles and—to hell with the rest! Moi, je suis philosophre.”

Which, after all, was the best thing I could do. And so, out for a last dinner with Coustic and Valentin and then no more. Quick friends and open hearts,—but when you haven’t the time, as Coustic says, to smell a man over, it must be open-handed and open-hearted at once. Besides, one man is as good as another, to smoke with, to dine with, and to damn the politicians.—I drank my two bottles and sang with the loudest, but it cured nothing. To-night I feel the dead weight of homesickness as never before. The prospect of Paris brings no pleasure.

Paris

At the Quai d’Orsay, where I debarked three nights ago, the old days came back to me with a vividness of pain which I had not expected; the old careless days of another world which has been snuffed out. I walked out alone, being en permission, feeling my way along the black banks of the hidden Seine. The street where she had lived was close at hand and habit was so strong that despite my reason I felt the tug of old instinct. Where was now that light, reckless crowd, so indefatigable in the scampering pursuit of pleasure? Scattered to the four winds of heaven. Most of the women have drifted away,—some to London, some to America; one, a fortune’s favorite, died in an air raid; another, a suicide after her lover’s death, one whom I had not thought capable of a real passion. The test of war has redeemed some of the men—there were the good with the bad—by some spark of a saving ancestry, perhaps simply from a gambler’s love of a new hazard. Those who were born to fight have found a purpose; the rest,—well, it does not much matter what has become of the froth: all that matters is that a man or two, whom once we despised, has redeemed himself with an heroic death. All these memories are inseparably bound up with the experience which, I suppose, was bound to come into my life,—that I believed erased from my memory, but which to-day remains a haunting, ominous specter which sooner or later must be faced.

The memory that obtrudes is of a clouded page in my life—a chapter which I fatuously hoped had been closed and laid aside forever—something to be regretted, to stand as a warning in the future, and yet inclining me to a greater charity. This I know is the experience of many men. That in my case, by some malignant turn of the fates, it should remain in tragic permanence, is something against which I rebel.

I think that I can now look back dispassionately upon the David Littledale of 1913 and recognize the impulses which led me into an infatuation which, without the outbreak of the great war, would in all probability have left me a moral wreck.

Even as I write this severe judgment, I react against it. Perhaps I am too harsh upon myself. It may be that of my own will I would have found the strength to free myself of the humiliating bondage—perhaps—but I am not sure.

Yet I am quite certain that not for a moment was I in love with Madame de Tinquerville. Curiosity, vanity, habit, idleness; the pride of a young man still a boy in the ways of the world; a fancied domination over a woman accomplished in artifice; an unsated appetite for pleasure; susceptibility to flattery; the old Littledale failing of intense exaggeration in all things; all these motives I clearly see. And then,—I was playing at love, which often is more dangerous than love itself.

I have frequently heard women of the demimonde referred to as dangerous women. There is nothing dangerous in such women except to a young and inexperienced man, with quick sympathies and a conscience. They carry their warning on their faces. The woman who is truly dangerous is the unsuspected woman who waits behind the mask of a Madonna. Since my arrival, twenty instances have reminded me of the woman I knew as Letty, Madame de Tinquerville.

I do not know that I can be entirely dispassionate as I look back over this incident in my life. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner: to understand everything is to forgive everything. There may have been in her life, in her inheritance, or in her tradition—perhaps in her earlier contact with men—things which would make her comprehensible. I do not know them. There is a mystery of evil and good in us that defies analysis. It is so in my case; it must be so in hers. And yet,—she is the only human being in my experience who did evil from the sheer delight of doing it. She did it as a child plays with some defenceless animal. Yet there was nothing obvious about her, and in all the different societies through which she moved I doubt if more than five men ever suspected what lay behind her quiet, strictly conventional attitude toward life.

I met her first at the studio of a fashionable artist, Enrico Gonzalez, in the midst of a Goya fÊte, to which the fashionable, slightly dÉclassÉe society of cosmopolitan Paris had come, eager for a new sensation.

I saw her directly I had passed under the swinging lanterns and entered the glowing studio. Amid the gay confusion of reds and yellows, greens and purples of gala Spain, she stood out, slight and dark in the black velvet serenity of her costume,—an infanta with a certain intuitive dignity of childish astonishment.

She saw my persisting look, studied me a moment, and asked a friend to present me. The next moment I was at her side, flattered, inviting her to dance.

She shook her head with a smile.

“What—not dance?”

“Never, in public.”

She motioned me to a seat and, looking at me intently, said:

“Tell me, where have we met before?”

“I am certain that I have never seen you.” I was on the point of adding, “For I could not have forgotten it,” but instinctively feeling how banal the answer would seem to her satiated ears, I refrained.

She looked at me, unconvinced.

“You are quite certain?”

“Yes, quite.”

“As children, perhaps?”

“No.”

My manner seemed to amuse her. She studied my face a moment, and then said:

“You are from the South; from Virginia, perhaps?”

“Not even that. A Yankee from Connecticut.”

“Strange! I shouldn’t have thought it.”

After a moment, as if her interest in me had ceased, she asked:

“You like to dance, of course?”

I bowed my assent.

“There is a little girl from the OpÉra over there who dances beautifully. Ask her to dance.” Then, as I rose, perplexed, not quite certain whether to be angry or not,—“and later, come back and talk to me.”

The conversation had been in French and, though I was certain she was not of that nationality, I was unable to place her. I know that my first movement was one of mistrust, for my answers had been unnecessarily brusque. For no reason whatsoever I was conscious of an instinctive antagonism and yet I obeyed her suggestion and began a tango. From time to time I glanced in the direction of Madame de Tinquerville but, though I was certain she was observing me, each time I sought her glance I found her in languid conversation with the group of young men who surrounded her.

The dance ended. With a growing antagonism, I asked myself why I had so docilely followed her request. With a resentment that was like a child’s, I avoided her and did not speak to her again that night. This was the instinctive revulsion of our first meeting.

Yet from the crowd I watched her. Very small, she seemed slighter for the prevailing note of black. The only note of color was the natural brilliance of her lips,—extraordinary lips, full and, the lower one, sensuously so, lips that had just been plunged into strawberries; eyebrows like the flight of ravens’ wings; a nose that might have been Cleopatra’s, thin-bridged and slightly irregular; eyes black as Africa, not nervously alert like the glance of the city woman, which is crowded with shifting details, but with the fixed contemplation of one accustomed to gaze steadily towards far horizons and clear spaces.

Her manner? At first contact utterly impersonal, interested only in herself, in her pretty poses, her transparent fingers and her dainty feet. I remember thinking that one might live with such a woman a lifetime and never know her inmost thoughts,—if thoughts there were behind the mask. She had two characteristic smiles which I learned to know; one for the public,—the smile that she wore like a necklace. Occasionally, when something stirred a slumbering spark in her, a smile all excitement and vibration suffused her face like the flash of footlights: it was then that mischief was brewing. My first impression was of distrust: of a woman all instinct, tyrannous, jealous, adroit, feline, languid, brooding, voluptuous, hidden and, above all, without sense of pain, either for herself or for others.

I retained only a troubling memory of this pungent, irritating impression when, a few days later, I received a formal note inviting me to call. I was flattered. I went.

She was alone. She made no reference to my avoiding her, led me to talk with intelligence, turned any approach to intimacy, and was so natural and gracious that I asked myself in astonishment why I should have felt such a sudden antagonism. In a short time, without my being able to distinguish the gradual progression, I was enveloped in the insidious charm of her personality as completely as though she had bound me hand and foot. For six months I forgot everything else in the world and followed where she led, allowing her slender fingers to turn my destiny according to their malicious fancy.

How did she do it? As skilfully as one plays a trout. Indifference—with a sudden touch of simulated interest, immediately withdrawn as soon as offered—a little opening of the doors to intimacy and, once I had learned to expect it, an abrupt refusal; the power to read me and to rouse my appetites and my vanities: in a word, the ability to create the illusion of being pursued and of waking in me the instinct of the pursuer.

I learned of her life only by hearsay, never from her own lips. Paris is full of just such women; the drift of strange currents, out of mysterious beginnings. Her father was an Irish adventurer, John Finucane, who by devious and clouded ways had amassed some fortune in Egypt and the Orient. Her mother, according to one story, was the daughter of an Arab sheik; according to another, a gypsy; others ascribed to her the rÔle of a woman of the circus, a wandering mountebank. I saw her once and, allowing for all exaggerations, she was undoubtedly of some Eastern strain,—an inheritance apparent in Letty. Madame de Tinquerville had married early an old rouÉ of that well-known family, impoverished and exiled to a minor diplomatic position, and who, shortly after bringing his bride and her fortune back to Paris, left her a widow.

She was, I am certain, thoroughly conscient in everything she did. The corruption she exerted over me was both mental and moral. I had come back to Paris filled with enthusiasm and ambition. My self-discipline disappeared. I threw myself into a life of pleasure and dissipation. My days were disorganized and I obeyed only the craving for excitement, movement, and rapidly succeeding sensations. My old philosophy, simple and proud, yielded to the worldly wisdom of the facile luxury which surrounded me. I saw how easy it was to achieve by social trafficking what men spent lifetimes laboriously to acquire.

Not that I yielded without a struggle. At times, scenes of extreme violence broke out between us; scenes I realize now it was her delight to provoke. Though of strong and violent passions, I had always held myself in firm control. What had been an orderly, measured mode of life, contemplative, tolerant, and good-humored, now became a tumultuous succession of days and nights, when every nerve was raw to the exposure. I found myself irritable, suspicious, passing from sudden depressions to feverish flights of gayety; quick at offence and wincing under the new tortures which she invented each day for the perverse delight of proving to herself how completely she held me in subjection. Why I did not strangle her in some blind moment of rage, I do not know.

This I will say: she did not lack courage. It never failed her in the dangerous excesses of jealousy she provoked in me, for, even as my fingers itched to close over her delicate throat, at a sudden smile, at a look in the shadowy eyes, at a caress from her fingers, the heat would vanish from my brain and I would be pliant in her hands. Perhaps it was this constant revolt—the rough, untamed animal in me—that interested her. Did she care for me, or not? At this moment, despite the tragic sequence of events, I am not certain but that at bottom, despite all her malignant appetites, her joy in destruction, her catlike love of cruelty, for some unknown reason, she genuinely loved me,—so far as she could comprehend love. Sometimes I believe that the secret of her attachment to me was in my resemblance to some one whom she had known and loved—as a young girl loves—before the flood of corruption had contaminated her. It may be that I recalled this other by some trick of look or manner. I do not know. I know very little of her past life.

As I try to reconstruct this episode, much of it remains blurred,—a confused repetition of fatiguing emotions; scenes of jealousy no sooner ended than begun again: revulsions in me away from her, weak returns: the obsession of her presence; her caprices and her demands disorganizing all the routine of a once methodical existence. Only a few scenes come back to me vividly. Of her life I know as little as of the motives which ran in her agile mind. I am beginning to see her now with a colder point of view; then I did not understand her at all. We never discussed her life or mine,—that is, what had happened before our meeting.

I do not know her age exactly (perhaps twenty-five, perhaps thirty) yet she seemed always of another generation, and old in the wisdom of experience. I had often the curious feeling of not looking at her but at the mirror of a woman, and of never being able to progress beyond the pale reflection.

As I try to analyze her now, her salient quality was an utter inability to feel pain. Nor do I believe she could understand it in others, even when for her own enjoyment she was its cause. She was, of course, one of those women of over-refined temperament who simulate sensations they no longer can feel, seeking mentally what is no longer a natural impulse. Her curiosity in inflicting pain was of this nature.

Occasionally, however, she was capable of an amazing frankness, whether by cunning or from the inconsistency of her woman’s nature. Once, when I sought to penetrate beyond her reserve—the occasion was after an accidental meeting with her mother as we were driving in the Bois—she said something to me in such prophetic artlessness that to this day I wonder if for one moment this was not the true Letty.

Our carriages had met and passed and for an instant I had felt her suddenly rigid at my side. I looked over and saw something out of Letty’s past,—a thin, crooked old lady, very black, bejeweled and grotesquely dressed, who was agitating a pink parasol as though it were a bell-rope, to attract our attention. The next second, and we had passed.

“Your mother?”

“Yes.”

She had been too startled to deny it.

“Letty,” I said eagerly, for the tone of her voice threw an air of romantic mystery about her figure to me, “don’t you want to,—can’t you tell me something of your life?”

She shook her head.

“To you, if to any one. Don’t ask me. It is too painful!”

She added, and at such moments I felt twenty years rushing in between us:

“Life is only a succession of doors to be closed and never reopened. I never do.”

Something made me reply:

“Not very flattering to me.”

She looked at me, and answered:

“Oh, you! How you will hate me, some day!”

It was by such unexpected remarks, by the very seeming frankness of an abrupt confession, that she knew how to rouse my curiosity and to surround herself with a glamor of mystery. I believed in her sorrows until the day came when I was shocked out of my fatuity and saw the feline delight in playing with a wounded animal which alone was insatiable in her character.

I have often wondered over that speech and why she had made it. A sense of the dramatic, a moment’s indulgence in absolute truth, a sure sense of the effect on my tempestuous imagination, to be warned of danger? Perhaps, all three.

“Life is only a succession of doors to be closed and never reopened.”

It is strange how a phrase remains when a memory has been conquered. This phrase, which summed up all her defiant, selfish, worldly wisdom, has come back to me again and again and, though I am freed of the tyranny of her malicious personality, the poison of her philosophy still lurks in my memory.

There are moments when we look back in cold memory and cannot comprehend the whence and the wherefore of the hot fever that once dominated every sense and drove us through the hallucination of a passion. So with me, to-day.

When I think of Jenny Barnett, I seem to remember a confidence told me by a friend of college days: when I recall Letty, I seem to recall a chapter in some unhealthy romance. It is impossible that I and that David Littledale are one and the same person!

The heart of a man is like running water,—the years in their course purify the moral contagion. I do not know that this is true of all men. Perhaps those who remain in the stagnant pools of little existence never free themselves of the scum of the past; yet it is true of those who venture out into the traveling current. In a large sense, it is true of the generations, that move as great rivers move,—and in this running purification is the hope of all society.

Why, at this period of my life, should I have fallen so completely under the spell of such a woman as Madame de Tinquerville? It was not genuine love that caused it, for as I conceive love it is the calm of a great certainty,—and with Letty it was never anything but a ceaseless conflict. If not Letty, would it have been some one else? Was it an experience which I was to undergo,—an impulse that came from within me, rather than from outside? Perhaps I understand better to-day the springs of my impulses.

There are in most men two strong and opposite impulses towards women which, at first sight, appear contradictory but are easily reconcilable, as they spring from the two linked needs of their natures and are the key to the many seeming inconsistencies, infidelities, abrupt passions and incomprehensible tyrannies into which their sentimental cravings lead them. A man seeks in woman saint and sinner, calm and tempest, salvation and demoralization.

As architects of life our instincts are towards order and discipline, yet we are eternally seeking the thing that will upset our self-control. We are irresistibly attracted by what threatens our equanimity, enslaves our senses, imprisons our will,—for that brief, fleeting ecstasy which we feel at its fullness only when we are aware that we have cast aside the reins of our government. But, as the abiding instinct of our nature is order, there remains always the ideal of woman, which represents the revulsion to sanity, calm and serenity,—back to which we grope with reverence and to which we fasten with the instinct of self-preservation. I know this is true, though to-day this woman, the woman who is serenity and order, has not come into my life.

So intimately entwined are these two natures, these twin struggling impulses, that they often remain confused and inseparable. This is the explanation of the two tragedies of society, each proceeding from the same complex source: the phenomenon of a man’s marrying his mistress and that darker mystery which remains behind the curtain of marriage, the debasing of an ideal once raised in reverence.

The ease with which I yielded to her dominance, the disorganization into which I plunged, and the violent revulsion which came in the end are explainable, I believe, by this conflict in our nature. But then I did not reason thus, I did not reason at all, and therein lay the danger,—a danger that I shudder now to contemplate.

What was the essence of this corruption which she exercised over me,—that was more moral and mental than physical? It was in the stifling of all the youth and ambition of my nature by the baleful weight of her age-old weariness of intellect. She took a keen delight in seeking out my illusions, one by one; of slowly destroying them before my eyes under her malicious wit. She taught me that all striving was futile, that youth was a season of riotous enjoyment for the wise, and that only fools sacrificed it in a groaning pursuit of an ambition which could never be attained.

“Why strain for the thing that is here, at your finger tips? This is the fullness of life; seize it. What would you seek?—a career?—fame? My dear little Davy, you are not a genius. Your talents are not even considerable. The chances are that after ten years of drudgery you would only have condemned yourself to the bitterness of disillusionment! What do men seek in fame? Just the vanity that a pretty woman has to be noticed as she enters a restaurant. Believe me, the quality of youth, which you hold so lightly, is worth all your drowsy, rheumatic celebrities! You have senses given you to enjoy life with,—enjoy it!”

“And, the end—”

“Who knows what may be the end? Rather remorse than regrets!”

All her philosophy was summed up in this sentence. Yet she was exceedingly punctilious in her religious observances and, although she had a sort of dare-devil courage, she hated so the intrusion of realities that she would turn down a side street rather than meet a funeral.

The struggle to free myself was a hideous one. Again and again I determined to fling off the unhealthy bondage that weighed on my freedom of thought, and as often, from weakness, from fear of giving pain, with rage and hatred in my soul, I temporized. The fear of giving pain! How it holds a man at the last to his own destruction! For I was still innocent enough of what such a world can hold of depravity to believe that, such as she was, she loved me with all the good and bad of her nature.

Once, after a week of mutual recriminations, driven beyond my strength by her simulated scenes of jealousy, I went to her, determined to provoke a final rupture. I can still remember the rage in my heart as I came into her salon that night of the final rupture that calls out the primitive criminal which abides in all of us. For criminal instinct is essentially the instinct of the survival of the fittest, and in that moment when, rightly or wrongly, we reach the frenzy where we must tear from us the arms that hold us back,—we destroy as criminals destroy. I cannot think of what might have happened that night, without a shudder.

I came resolved to wound her on the raw, to force her out of her calm, and in the clash of our hatreds to find my escape. Yet, despite taunts and insults, she remained superbly self-possessed,—complete mistress of the situation. When from very exhaustion I stopped, she looked up at me, with her smile of Mona Lisa, her eyes sparkling with triumph, and said carelessly:

“So you love me as much as that!”

“Love you?” I cried, choking with inarticulate rage. I tried to continue but I could not. I felt that if I remained another minute in her presence I did not know what I might do. “The end—thank God! The end!”

I flung up my arms, with a horrible laugh, and bolted for the door. But as I went I heard her clap her hands, as a delighted child might have done, and her voice came to me:

“David—you will come back.”

And back I returned, to delude myself, once more, with her sudden melting repentance, to listen to her self-accusation, to believe that all she had done wickedly and consciously had been only the instinct of a jealous woman to know how completely she was loved. Not a delectable page in my life. I set it down as it happened, without extenuation. Yet, two days later, I was free of her, forever! She lied to me and I caught her in the lie.

We were to have dined together and to have gone to the theater, but she had written me the day before that she would be forced to leave town. This had often happened and this postponement did not in the least excite my suspicion. A young Frenchman, the Comte Maurice Plessis de Saint Omer, one of my intimate friends, happened to drop in on me, and agreeing to dine together, we set out for Foyot’s, near the Luxemburg, bent on an epicurean dinner and a quiet evening.

Maurice de Saint Omer, in the pleasure-seeking crowd in which we moved, had the reputation of being a great dandy and my natural attraction towards him was considerably enhanced by the compliment to my vanity. He came of one of the great families of France which named its ancestors before the Crusades (his father was the Duc de Saint Omer and the chÂteau is the famous one near the Lorraine border). While he lived the life of a thorough man of the world, as it was understood in the Paris before the war, he brought to all relations of life dignity and distinction. He was neither rake nor profligate. Straight, tawny-haired, nose high-bridged and sensitively chiseled, blue-eyed and soft of voice, almost too elegant for our American ideal, his courage and tact had made him one of the arbiters on the field of honor. Why he should have taken to me, I do not know, but he did, and he occasionally favored me with his confidences. My own entanglement with Madame de Tinquerville was known to him. In fact, for months all his influence had been exerted to show me the quicksands into which I was sinking. We were talking of her as we neared the restaurant.

“And La Belle Tinquerville?”

“I was to have dined with her to-night but she was called to St. Germain.”

“No use warning you, my dear fellow, I suppose?”

“Evidently not,” I answered moodily. “I must work out my fate alone.”

“At least—open your eyes.”

“In what way?”

“Neither she nor you is the slightest in love.”

“What do you call it, then, when one moment you are ready to do murder, and the next you are as weak as a child, ready to believe anything, undergo anything, afraid of everything?”

“My dear friend, I went through that, at the age of sixteen, with a little girl in a laiterie who could not write five words correctly and who ran off with a lawyer’s clerk. The trouble is you are still sixteen. You know, I do not discuss women lightly; my principles are fixed on that point. But you have come to me as a friend and as a friend I am once more going to warn you.”

“Go on,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

“My dear David,—you have no place in this society of ours,” he said, taking my arm. “You have a heart, and you have no knowledge of the conventions of the game. We do not love in this crowd; we play at love; just as we do not discuss; we play at discussing. We meet, to fence lightly and gracefully, with tremendous lunges,—which are always parried. We do not seek a woman because we want her but because twenty other men want her and—we wish to carry off the prize. You are seeking romance, and—it has never crossed our thresholds. This society is old: it refines only on its emotions. It is egotistical, selfish, superficial, and self-indulgent. There isn’t a man or woman in it who doesn’t love himself or herself better than anything else in the world. Madame de Tinquerville may be better, or worse, than the rest of her set. I do not know. If you were an American nabob, perhaps she might make up her mind to marry you. Luckily, you are not. There is something primitive enough in you to resist and rebel. There is still something young in you,—a piece of a real heart left. When she has completely broken you, dominated you and corrupted you, you will cease to interest her. Bid her good-by before she closes the door in your face.”

“Every word you say is the truth,” I said impulsively, “but,—then—”

“I know,—I know,” he said, laughing, and then, turning to a more serious tone, he added, “Do not think me cynical. I am not. There exist in this world women that are worthy to be loved, in reverence. One day I shall meet a young girl whom I can respect and adore as I do the ideal of womanhood that is in my mother and sister, but when I take a wife I shall never bring her to this poisoned atmosphere. David, if you were a man of the world, if you could keep to the surface of things, I should shrug my shoulder, but you can not.” He gripped my arm tightly. “You are not even a man. Confess that it is only your vanity that holds you, that at bottom you hate this entanglement that humiliates you and corrupts you.”

“It is a nightmare,” I said gloomily.

“Well, then?”

“In her way,” I said, “she loves me.”

He stopped and looked at me in amazement at my innocence. I did not understand his look then. I do, now. He started to speak. I can imagine what was on the tip of his tongue but, beyond a certain point his notion of chivalry would not permit him to go.

“In that case, my dear David, I have nothing more to say. Your appetite, at least, is not affected?”

“Not in the least.”

“Then a very good solution to all problems is a certain Canard au vin blanc and gooseberries, that Carlo will cook for us with his own hands!”

We had ascended the old Rue de Tournon, the Senate rising ahead of us. We entered the restaurant, and the first person I saw was Madame de Tinquerville, dining en tÊte-À-tÊte with a man unknown to me.

She looked up, saw me, and glanced down again, quickly. We passed into the inner room and took a table. Something exploded in my brain.

“You saw?” said De Saint Omer.

“Yes.”

“You are convinced?”

“Quite. The man?”

“Pedro Fornesco,—an Argentine millionaire.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Three months.”

I began to laugh. De Saint Omer slipped his hand over my wrist.

“David—it is Providence.”

“Thank God,” I said loudly, but, despite myself, I felt a cold in the small of my back and a dryness in my throat.

“Will you follow my advice?” he said, studying me anxiously.

“Wait.” I put my head in my hands and drew great breaths, while I fought for calm and decision.

“Now.”

“You are sure of your control?”

“Absolutely.”

“No scenes?”

“I give you my word.”

“That must be understood,” he said firmly. “No public scandal—no dramatics, my friend, or as sure as you are sitting here you will have to answer to me. Is that understood?”

“I assure you I never was more master of myself,” I said, smiling, and, indeed, a cold indifference had come to me. I felt a tempest raging in my brain and somewhere in that tempest a voice crying, “Now or never!”

“Very well, I believe you. Carlo!” The head waiter came hastily to us.

“Carlo. A table opposite M. Fornesco,—the one that is engaged.”

“M. le Comte—”

“Carlo—this is an exception. I must have it.”

His eye met the head waiter’s, who hesitated and bowed. We rose and, sauntering into the main dining room, seated ourselves two tables away from Madame de Tinquerville, in an angle that was partitioned off from the rest of the room. When, with an appearance of casualness, I turned to watch her, I saw in her eyes a look of abject terror. Every such woman believes more or less in the dramatics of Camille and, from that moment to the end, I know Letty awaited the public scene that would strip her sacred reputation and leave her the butt of Paris gossip. As for myself, I was at that moment capable of the greatest cruelty without the turning of a hair: I found resources of self-control in me that astounded me. I laughed, discussed affairs of the day whimsically, and swapped anecdotes, as though out on a collegian’s holiday. Madame de Tinquerville watched me from the corner of her eye, never losing me from her gaze, listening, waiting—

Towards the end of the dinner, De Saint Omer said to me:

“You know the anecdote on Gommecourt,—no? Quite amusing. I’ll tell it to you. Besides,—there is a moral.”

“A moral?” I said, feeling that the comedy was about to begin.

“Gommecourt was a young parvenu of the time of the Regence who had become involved in an affair with a celebrated actress of those days. He was avaricious, vain, prudent, and not without a certain wit, as you shall see.”

The conversation at Madame de Tinquerville’s table had stopped. De Saint Omer’s voice could be heard distinctly, and I knew that Letty was listening breathlessly.

“When it was time for Gommecourt to marry, he was much embarrassed how to break away from his charming but expensive friend. He took up a pen and wrote a long and very tender letter, recalling his past happiness, his regret at the decision of his family,—a very, very moving, affectionate, temperamental and tragic letter, and at the end he wrote, ‘I shall never forget, and I send you an order for one hundred thousand francs.’”

“Very handsome,” I said mechanically, not yet seeing daylight.

“A little too handsome—as Gommecourt decided, after a very brief struggle. He wrote a second letter, a very tender letter, too, but a little modified in its transports of passion, and ended by announcing a gift of fifty thousand francs.”

“Very prudent.”

“Wasn’t it? You see, Gommecourt was of good, thrifty stock. The more he considered it, the more absurd it seemed to him to give way to his impulses. And then, suppose she had not been faithful? He wrote a third letter, quite formal this time, and cut the sum to twenty thousand francs.”

By this time the conversation at the other two tables had ceased, and every one was listening, quite frankly amused at De Saint Omer’s vivacious account.

“So, Gommecourt, quite delighted with his two transactions by which he had saved himself eighty thousand francs, arose to send off letter number three. But, halfway to the bell, suddenly he stopped, struck his forehead and exclaimed, ‘But, after all, it’s simpler than that!’ And, returning to the table, he wrote a final letter, thus,—‘I have discovered all. Adieu.’”

“Bravo!” I cried loudly, above the ripple of laughter which greeted the ending. “And he was right.”

“You like the anecdote?”

“Excellent.” I glanced at Madame de Tinquerville and saw her rigidly examining her plate. “But it doesn’t fit all cases,—since we are now talking of ruptures.”

“Oh, a friend of mine had an even better expedient!”

“I should like to know it,” I remarked, pretending to laugh. “One never knows—”

“He simply took his card and marked on it ‘P.P.C.’ and left it at her home. That, and nothing more.”

“Thanks for the idea.”

I drew out my portfolio instantly and selected a card. The couple next to us, deceived by my gayety, began to laugh.

“A pencil?”

“Be careful!” said De Saint Omer, under his breath.

“Don’t worry.”

I took the pencil he offered me, after a little hesitation, and inscribed the three letters.

“Carlo! An envelope—and call a taxi.”

“David! No scene.”

“Don’t worry, I tell you.”

I addressed the envelope, slipping the card into it and, the reckoning being paid, rose and stood deliberately facing Madame de Tinquerville. For that one awful moment, which I prolonged, I paid her back in terror the thousand humiliations of those hideous months.

Then we lifted our hats with exaggerated ceremony and went out.

We left the letter at her concierge’s and went directly to my apartment.

“You have letters—keepsakes—of hers?” asked De Saint Omer.

I nodded.

“Make a package of them and leave them with the concierge, to be given to her when she calls—”

“When she calls?”

“Idiot, she will come at once! And now, throw some things in a bag, and come away with me for a couple of weeks’ fishing.”

As I look back at it now I am filled only with a feeling of nausea. All I can say in extenuation of this period, when the thinking man had ceased and was near to the brute, is that for weeks I had not been master of myself, that I moved in a delirium of passionate anger, weak jealousy, with every nerve unstrung and every impulse riotous, incapable of either controlling or judging my action.

It is not a chapter that I like to contemplate but, as it was I write it down. For the mystery of evil is that out of it there often comes a revulsion to sanity. I am not sure but in the end it was beneficial. The shock of experience made me see myself as I was, and after the disorganization the primeval spirit of order awoke in me, and now that I am seeking to build up again it is as my own mason, consciously and responsible.

The trouble with the New England tradition is its lack of flexibility. Nothing gives, but it breaks. Yield the slightest, and everything crumbles. We lack a sure sense of values and are therefore at the mercy of little things as well as great. We conceive of man’s struggle against the forces of demoralization as the defence of a fortress: one breach made, and capitulation follows. More mature reflection, tempered with a knowledge of good and evil, has led me, I think, to a broader philosophy. We are not intrenched in our beliefs but are mobile forces, constantly maneuvering, constantly at war—turned back here, advancing there—with only the ultimate objective important.

We had been gone but four days when the war broke out and we separated, he to join his regiment, and I to enlist in the Foreign Legion. His last words to me were, “David, my dear friend, if through weakness you return now, you are worse than the most despicable of men,—you will be utterly lost. After this, Madame de Tinquerville will hate you or love you beyond anything else in life,—and either will be fatal.”

I did not see her again. I threw myself into the war as a salvation, seeking an escape from a life that filled me with horror, hating and despising myself, asking only to forget. She wrote me many letters, frantic, repentant, imploring an answer, and then a final one—the rage of a woman scorned—full of veiled threats. I did not answer them.

I heard indirectly that she had entered the Red Cross, devoting herself with a courage and determination that had surprised every one. When the memory had receded and my normal self had returned, I was willing to believe that the mobilization which had come to France as a moral re-birth had perhaps reached the Magdalene in her,—as in how many others! Yet, I wondered how much the dramatic impulse was responsible.

But the scales had fallen from my eyes. It was not against the woman but myself against which I revolted with every force in me. The strange thing is that, once the rupture was complete, she passed completely out of my existence, and in a fortnight I was looking back upon that period with incredulity. Events were too colossal to remember private sorrows. I felt myself, at last, one of a great army of action, redeemed to meaning and purpose.

Those who did not see the mobilization can never have a conception of all that war can bring of sublimity and purification,—as those who never knew the first winter in the trenches cannot imagine the long horror of that soul-crushing defence. If the war had only ended in the first year! But, it didn’t. Incredulity succeeded the first flaming rise of faith. Neither the end nor the issue can now be foreseen. Those who had faith remain in that faith; others, to whom faith had come as a revealing experience, have lapsed into the old easy habits. Life has readjusted itself along the lines of war, and society has returned to its old divisions! So it must have been with Madame de Tinquerville. By the end of the year the impulse had burned out. The daily thing ceased to be dramatic. Her old nature asserted itself. She drifted away to England, and then to America, gradually and easily back into the life of self-indulgence and pleasure she craved.

I had not heard of her for over a year and a half when, dragged out of the inferno at Verdun, transported from a field hospital, more dead than alive, to the Hospital du Val du Grace at Paris, I came out of a battle for life to have a letter from my brother placed in my hands, announcing his marriage to Letty, Madame de Tinquerville.

I went off into a delirium and for weeks fought against a return to life. But the obstinate nature in me triumphed over my will, and I found myself at last convalescent, facing the issue of some day confronting the brother I loved with the knowledge of the secret which must always be between us.

The thing that frightens me, that leaves me cold when I think of it, is this: Can she still have power over my senses? I say I am certain that I never loved her, that this yoked hostility, this mutual tyranny could not be love, and yet—Something there was that was insidious and instinctive, something that blinded me and stopped my ears to warnings, and sent me to her with the obsession of pursuit and conquest. I have seen infatuation in other men and understood it, yet in myself it still is incredible. If it had to be, I only hope it is a fever that has burned itself out and left me immune for the future.—Yet now, as I stop to analyze myself and my motives, as I look back at that scene in the CafÉ Foyot (I think I suffered as much as she did), and remember the first wild leap of animal rage when I saw her with Fornesco at her side, I wonder—

If I were only sure that I could write—Milestone Number 3.

November

To-day I saw my brother, Alan, after six years. Through a chance meeting, I found him living in the Luxemburg quarter. A girl answered my knock. We stood confronting each other, mutually surprised. I remembered her among the restless habituÉs of the AbbÉ de ThelÊme and the CafÉ de Paris, in the old days. The paint and artifice were gone. She stood there, dark-eyed, frail, olive-tinted, considering me suspiciously, her woman’s instinct warned of possible danger to the thing she sheltered from the world.

“Tiens; it’s you, Toinon!”

She started forward and looked at me intently, but in her multitudinous conception of man, my face was but a blur in the panorama.

“It’s me you want to see—what’s your business?”

“Does Mr. Alan Littledale live here?”

“And if he does?”

“I am his brother.”

Instantly her manner changed.

“Ah, you’ve come to take him away, then?”

Before I could answer, a voice from within cried querulously: “Qui est lÀ?”

The next moment a big frame, topped by a shaggy head, came into the anteroom.

“Hello, Alan!” I said, extending my hand.

He drew back, scowling and undecided.

“What the devil brings you here?”

“My dear fellow,” I said, smiling. “You do happen to be my own flesh and blood and, no matter how we’ve fought in the past, we’re both Littledales, to the end.”

Now, Alan had scoffed and stormed against all our traditions but, despite all, there still remained a lingering pride in the name. He relented a little bit,—though with ill grace.

“If you’re coming in to lecture me—”

“Don’t be an ass, Alan,” I broke in good-naturedly. “I’m no more saint than you are. Well, am I to come in or not?”

“You can come in.”

I had expected a shoddy, disordered interior. The little apartment was immaculate; flower-boxes, red and white geraniums at the balcony which gave on a garden; neatness, order, charm. I sat, asking no questions,—puzzled. Was it from love of the man, or from the denied natural instinct towards home-building? Toinon served the dinner, which she had cooked herself; hesitated and then, at a sign from Alan, sat down with us. When Alan left the room she turned to me and said, in a warning voice: “He is very ill.”

Down the hall I heard him coughing.

“How ill?”

She shook her head.

“Does he realize—?”

“No, no.”

Dinner over, she cleared the table deftly and converted the room into a salon, brought the tisane to her invalid, lit our cigars and, drawing up her chair before the fire, began to crochet. But, all at once, looking up, she said:

“If you’d rather be alone?”

“Stay, of course.”

I, studying the end of my cigar, waited, feeling his defiant glance on me.

“Shocked?”

“Why?”

“You always were sanctimonious when it was a question of doing things openly.”

“I haven’t come here to quarrel,” I said, smiling. His characterization at the moment struck me as grotesque. So far, we had barely skimmed the surface of things, and I felt the underlying hostility of his attitude. Resolving to take the bull by the horns, I said:

“Alan, before we bury the past, as I hope we’ll do, I want to tell you that I blame myself. I was unjust; we were all unjust to you. I regret it with all my heart.”

He stared at me, as a man grudging to relinquish his advantage.

“What good will that do—now?”

“You are right. It can do no good—now. But we can’t talk as man to man until we’ve had it out. So now you know how I feel. As for the rest—I’ve done a lot of things, been a bigger fool than you’ve ever been, so, your adjective doesn’t apply.”

He looked at me quizzically.

“You’ve changed; changed a lot! You talk like a two-fisted man. How long have you been away from that precious family of ours?”

“About five years.” I drew a letter from my pocket. “It was through Molly I heard of you.”

His face softened. “The one human being in the family.”

“And Rossie, Alan.”

“Yes, yes,—Rossie,” he said hastily. “Had he lived—but he didn’t. Great God! What a family! As much human affection as you can squeeze out of the hind foot of a horsefly! You—you were one of them, but I—God knows why—I was different. I was stifling in that atmosphere of smug egotism.” His voice rose as his face set in anger. The girl looked up from her knitting and then at me, anxiously, but I knew that it was better for him to give play to the pent-up grievances of years. “I was stifling. I tell you—starved! A home? A mockery! A gallery of granite statues. I can’t remember one single time having known what it was to have a father or mother. I never knew a word of sympathy, a look of love. You made me believe I was a lost soul—a gallows bird—you made me believe it myself! Why? Because I had warm blood in my veins, because I was human, had imagination, ambition, wild animal force. I, who was worth the whole lot of you, you crushed out with your cold, damned superiority, your conventionality and your pride in yourselves. And now, you come here and acknowledge you were wrong! Sublime!”

“We were wrong.”

“Wrong? Can you give me back these ten years? Can you make me what I should have been? Great heavens, this decent little devil here has got more of a woman’s heart to her when she brings me my medicine than the whole blooming lot of you ever dreamed of!”

Toinon, who only half understood, looked up.

“What are you saying about me, mon ami?”

“Only good things, and only half of what you deserve,” he said, laying his hand on her shoulder. He sat down, exhausted, and leaning over, buried his head in his hands.

“Now, you know what I think, what I shall always think. At that, though I hate it all—your narrowness and priggishness and holier-than-thou attitude—you’ve left your confounded Littledale pride in me. I am one of you, under my skin, or else I’d marry the only human being—” He stopped, looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t worry. I won’t. Give me Molly’s letter.”

When he came to a part that told of my father’s ill health, he frowned and looked up. “That’s why you’ve come round, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“To take me back with you—grand reconciliation—prodigal son—and all that sort of stuff?”

“I had no such thought,” I answered warmly. “As a matter of fact, I am not going myself.”

“You’re not?” He looked at me, too sharply for comfort. “Why not? Easiest thing in the world for you to get leave in your condition.”

“I want to get back to the Legion,” I said, looking away.

He saw there was more than I wished to say and probably he ascribed it to a different reason for, the letter read, his manner changed, and he said:

“Looks bad for the Governor. Well, I’ve nothing against him. A good sort, in his way, and as he saw; a civilization that passes away with the rising flood. Good sort—but utterly without significance. No—I won’t go back. What a farce—to play the prodigal son! Why, Davy, I’ve lived! You haven’t, none of you has. I’ve lived—I’ve seen—I’ve been down in the depths and seen! And you’ve gone on playing at being eighteenth century Littledales, and never realizing that you don’t count! You don’t even realize what America—the new America—is!”

“I think I suspect it,” I said, surprised at the turn of the conversation. I had come, I think, rather patronizingly, and I found myself yielding to a mental supremacy.

“Your kind still believes in government by individuals; you can’t even see what’s coming. It’s mass that counts, to-day. I don’t say ‘majorities’: the world has always been governed by organized minorities, and it always will be. You don’t know your generation; I do; I’ve been one of them. I know what’s coming!”

“You don’t think much of our generation, I gather,” said I, startled at the way his thought had run with mine.

“Of the generation of our kind? Precious little!”

“Well, Alan—that’s about my way of thinking.”

“Honest?”

“Why not?” I said, amused.

“What’s happened to you?” he said, pulling at his chin. “Aren’t you satisfied with being a Littledale, with a Harvard accent, and a number of good clubs, and parading up and down this private preserve God made for you? You haven’t lost faith in your Divine right of being a Littledale? Good God—he has!”

We broke out laughing and, leaning over, struck hands with a resounding clap.

“Davy, damned if I expected this!”

“Well, Alan, you’ve been knocking round one way. I’ve knocked round another: between us we must have gone up and down the scale,” I said, settling back. “Well, what have you gotten out of it, and what do you think of this funny old world of ours?”

He looked at me a long moment, still a little suspicious of me.

“I enjoy it,” he said, to my surprise.

“Really? As for me, I’ve had about everything I started with knocked into a cocked hat.”

“Then there’s hope—so long as you cling to some sort of code.”

“Wonder if I do.”

“Aren’t there some things that you wouldn’t do, no matter what happened? You wouldn’t forge—or cheat—”

“Well, hardly.”

“Well, David, that’s moral. Suppose my ideas shock you. They do most persons. You asked just now what I’ve picked up these ten years. That’s about the most important,—judging men by their codes. A man who’s got a code of morals is moral, whether he’s a libertine, a horse thief or—a minister. We start with about a hundred and fifty inhibitions that are poured into our ears; we end with about five or six fences which, no matter what happens, we won’t cross.”

“Don’t get you.”

“Take your man of the world, who considers every woman fair game; go further down; take one who’ll think nothing of taking a woman to pay his debts, use one woman to pay what he gives another; yet there are certain things he won’t do. He won’t cheat at cards. That’s a code. Take your criminal type. If there is something stops him somewhere—say that it’s only going to the gallows without ‘peaching’ on a friend—that’s a code,—his code of morals, and, by that, he’s moral!”

“You’re not serious,” I said, laughing.

“Never more so. Think me crazy—wild—eccentric—anything you want. I’m looking from the bottom up towards your top-heavy society and your morality, and I tell you that it’s only the man who won’t stop at anything, who’ll cheat, lie, steal, seduce a young girl, traffic in women—a man incapable of a code—that is absolutely, hopelessly immoral. Look here; you’re still looking at things from a moral point of view; you can’t help it. I’m just looking on—recognizing things as they are—interested in the human game. You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“Frankly—yes.”

“You think I’m bitter—a rebel—my head against everything. Perhaps so; once, very much so. Not now. Fact, I’m rather more of an optimist than you. If we got down to it, you’d find I had a better opinion of mankind than you.”

The excitement into which his defence of himself had worked him started a coughing fit. Toinon came in and looked at me in warning. I rose immediately, holding out my hand.

“Well, Alan, I don’t have to agree with you, do I, to say that I’m honestly glad to talk to you?”

“No, no, of course not. I’m a queer dick, probably, but I’ve got reasons for what I think. Don’t ask questions, if you don’t want my answers.” He touched the decorations I wore and said, “I’m human enough, though, to be glad you’re wearing those. Picked up a couple myself, with the Canadians.”

“We never heard—”

“I was under an assumed name. Tell them at home about it when you write.”

“Alan, there’s one thing,” I said, voicing a thought that had been uppermost in my mind, “one thing I have a right to know—”

“Oh, go along with you. Of course, you’d have to say the obvious thing,” he said, slapping me on the shoulder. “I’m well fixed. Thanks just the same. And don’t worry about me; I’m picking up amazingly. Come again. Come again, soon.”

He went off into the back room, that I might not hear his coughing.

“Is he any better?” I asked of Toinon, who had followed me to the door.

She shook her head.

“Gas—at Neuve Chapelle.”

“No hope?”

“He is condemned.”

I stood, moodily incredulous, unable to believe that beneath the vital activity of the brain the inevitable, relentless contagion was working in the body. Then I tried to thank her but made a sad botch of it.

“Whatever happens, Toinon,” I said, giving her my address, “remember that I shan’t forget what you’ve done. I shall see that—” She looked at me, so suddenly and so straight that I floundered and stopped. “I meant if ever you were in need—” Still she kept her eyes directly on mine, disdaining a reply and, under that look I stammered: “Forgive me. I’m an ass—but it was kindly meant.”

Then, not knowing what to do, I took off my hat and made her an absurdly exaggerated bow. She shrugged her shoulders and closed the door. Which was no more than I deserved.

At the hotel I found a card from Stephen Brinsmade, offering me a rendezvous for the next day. I wonder if he is behind this transfer to Paris, and what it means?

I have set down as nearly as I can remember the circumstances of my first meeting with my brother after the lapse of years. I do not pretend to judge him for I am not in the mood to formulate judgments. I only know that a great new current of thought flowed into my mind and that I felt an eagerness to encounter again the opposition of his strangely antagonistic and dispassionate mind. As for Toinon, I don’t pretend to sentimentalize her kind. In my experience nothing is further from the truth than the Marguerite Gauthiers of fiction.

The war, after a brief period of the hysterical emotionalism of mob psychology, has shaken down society into much the same order as before. The rear has its pagan side, a revulsion to life, a frantic determination to eat, drink and be merry under the shadow of to-morrow’s realism. There is an outward sobriety and a decent respect for the black democracy of sorrow. Below the surface, revelry is as macabre as ever, for it must compress the passions of a lifetime into a span of hours, and laughter is the hunger for unrealities. A few of Toinon’s class—a very few—have turned Magdalene, some genuinely impelled to service, most of them swayed by a new dramatic loyalty to some man who brings them the new sensations of heroic love.

There is nothing sentimental about Toinon. She is a realist who looks life steadily in the face. Yet she, too, has her code, as Alan would have said.

I am going back to America. I am going home! It has all come about so quickly that I hardly know what I feel. If it were not for the inevitable meeting with Letty—At the very thought everything in me rebels: rather an exile of ten years than the hideous mockery of that confrontation! Yet I am no longer a free agent; a superior destiny is directing all my movements. To what end? For there is no choice; my father has had a stroke and I have been sent for. In my present condition there is no excuse that I can offer. America! Home! Despite even the ominous shadow that awaits me there, I feel everything in me palpitating at the prospect. I sail from Bordeaux in three days, with Mr. Brinsmade.

As I had begun to suspect, Mr. Brinsmade has been the quickening finger in my transfer here. Yet I cannot reproach him, given the end in view,—though at first, when he announced that he had secured me my leave, I was inclined in my pride to be a little resentful. Of course, being the legal representative of the great banking house of Gunther and Son, purchasing agents in America for the French Government, a hint from him is all that is necessary. When you reach the inner circle of government you find always a very practical realism, and Brinsmade is in all things a realist. Yet, there is another side to him.

I think I admire him genuinely as much as any man I know. He is utterly free from cant or pretense. He is an idealist with an objective mind. When I talk with him, I feel that I am building my philosophies on the safe ground of things as they are. His knowledge of men and their motives is stupendous. He is privileged to pass in the corridors of the human opera, and though his knowledge gained of the dark places might form another to cynicism,—not so Brinsmade. His mental attitude is like his physical aspect,—genial, tolerant, unhurried, strong, not through bluster but by the authority of his knowledge and experience. The war has waked in him the desire for bigger things in America. He says so frankly, and this new hunger in him, so close to my own awakening, promises to be a great intellectual stimulus to me on the trip over. There is no misunderstanding the quality of his affection for me. I seem suddenly lifted out of a drear monotony of unchanging days, back to a life of extraordinary vitality and promise.

Saw my old friend, Maurice Plessis de Saint Omer. I should not have known him. All the dandy is gone, the feminine languor and grace sloughed off, and from underneath has emerged the grim, unyielding granite of a race of warriors. He is commandant in a regiment of dragoons and decorated with every honor. The mortality in his family has been fearful, but he dismisses it quickly.

“Nothing matters,—except France!”

His optimism is that of absolute faith. I can imagine how his men must adore him.

Said good-by to Alan,—a stiff, unsatisfactory parting, in which we acted like puppets, rather than human beings. But that is the Anglo-Saxon of it. He gave me his decoration, to put in father’s hand, and immediately began to joke about the family fetiches, our cave-dweller’s point of view, etc., but I think it was to cover up his emotion. He hates sentimentality.

“Good-by, then—”

“Good-by.”

We had separated as though it were the most casual parting in the world. I wonder if I shall see him again.

Bordeaux

My last night on the soil of France. To-morrow I leave for America, and for a brief, incredible two months go back into the life that was once mine, but which to-night is incomprehensible, strange and unreal. I am writing in a little bedroom of the Hotel de l’Europe, fitfully awake, and stirred at the thought of the change as I never had believed possible. I don’t quite know this sudden self that is come so imperiously into my mood. I am older by a dozen years than this morning,—and by a mental decision that I feel deep down in my heart has been made. To-night I believe has brought a crisis in my life. I am not quite sure of my motives; I do not know that I wish to examine them too closely. But to-night the old rebellion against the obvious in life has somehow left me. I am conscious of a new point of view. Acceptance of life, a middle-age philosophy, a yielding to safe currents? Yes, all of these and, perhaps, most of all, just an overpowering homesickness,—the cry in my heart to be back among my own kind. For all of which I have Mr. Brinsmade to thank and the strangest of strange confidences.

It began quite naturally and I had not the slightest suspicion of any serious purpose. We were dining in a papier-machÉ grotto of the celebrated Chapon Fin when, in the midst of the meal, he looked over at me and said abruptly:

“David, ever thought of getting out of the service?”

The question took me by surprise, coming so close to thoughts that had haunted me for weeks.

“At times, when I get the cafard,” I admitted. “Every one does.”

“How long have you been in the Legion?”

“Over two years, now. There isn’t much of the glamor left, sir. It gets to be a long drag without much light ahead.” A little regretful of my frankness, I sought to justify myself. “You see, I went into it from the spirit of adventure; it was a man’s job. I don’t say it wasn’t also from love of the French. You couldn’t have seen that mobilization and not have felt a thrill. Then—you do hate a bully. At bottom, though, it was the adventure,—the biggest thing that had ever happened in the world. You couldn’t be there and keep out of it.”

“But now—?”

“Now the thrill is gone,” I admitted. “It’s grim plugging, not much fireworks or new business. When you’ve seen Verdun—”

“Yes?”

“When you’ve gone through that,” I said, frowning at the starting memories of that inferno, “it takes it out of you.”

“It ages you—” he interrupted, looking at me.

“It’s hideous—horrible. I wake up at night even now and then and feel myself back in it. You can’t imagine it. I can’t describe it. You go in because you’re a soldier and a man,—that’s all. You expect to die—you know you’re going to die; all there is to it is a blind rage for killing and a prayer to die quickly when it comes.”

My hand was trembling and my eyes must have taken on that strange far-off glaze which we bring back out of battle, for he stopped me with a sudden grip on my arm.

“Here! That’s doing you no good. We’ll talk of other things.”

I looked at my hand, which was shaking, and feeling an attack of nerves impending, I rose hurriedly and left the room.

“It takes you like that,” I said, when I had fought it out and returned. “I’m sorry. I’m much better now. I don’t get it often.”

He looked at me gravely.

“Good heavens, man! Are you going back in that condition?”

“It won’t take a month to get me in shape.”

“It still attracts you?”

“I hate it.”

“Why, then?”

“Because,” I said, shrugging my shoulders, “because I hate this other thing more,—this sitting out of it, when real men are doing!”

He hesitated, and then leaned forward.

“David, if you ever make up your mind—if you feel you need a longer time to pull yourself together—or if you want to get out—let me know. That’s all.”

This hurt more than he could understand, and my answer must have been brusque, for though he spoke out of affection for me, he deserved it.

“Look here, Mr. Brinsmade, I don’t want things done that way.”

“I only meant—”

“Thank you, but there’s too much of that, already. Question of pride; that’s all.”

He was tactful enough not to insist and turned the conversation. Towards the end of the dinner, and a magnificent bottle of ChÂteau Margot 1896, he said to me:

“David, you are a hard man to talk to.”

“Oh, no—if you talk directly.”

“All right: suppose I do. Let’s talk about Anne.”

“About Anne!” I exclaimed, taken off my guard.

“Suppose I should tell you, point-blank, I want you for my son-in-law? Well, what astonishes you? My frankness?”

“Why sir, it’s very kind of you,” I began lamely, “but, Anne—?”

“Exactly. As to Anne,—I’m convinced she cares, always has cared,” he said, leaning forward. “I know something happened. I don’t know whether you want to talk about it. Really, I should appreciate—”

The interview had taken such an extraordinary turn that I found myself, without surprise, answering:

“Mr. Brinsmade, quite frankly, I am not in love with Anne.”

“I know that now, but—”

“Once, for a time,—yes, I thought so. But neither of us had the right to be thinking of such things, then. It was a boy and girl affair.”

“Quite sure that was all?”

“Quite. The trouble was I showed her what I felt, or thought I felt, and from that came the inevitable complication and misunderstanding. We were both very stubborn. Mr. Brinsmade, there’s another thing, since we’re speaking plainly,” I added, suddenly impelled to frankness. “Do you realize that in these years many things have come into my life? I wonder if you would feel as you do—”

“David, you have been tried; that shows in your face,” he said, looking at me keenly. “I have been a young man myself, and I don’t pretend to misunderstand you. Perhaps this is unfair to you—”

“Mr. Brinsmade, there was a woman—I almost went on the rocks two years ago,” I said abruptly, and immediately regretted it.

“Are you your own master to-day?”

“Yes—thank God.”

“Absolutely certain?”

“Absolutely.”

“That’s all I want to know,” he said, as though satisfied by the estimate of his own eyes. “I appreciate your confidence, and like you for it. I’m not partisan for the wild oats theory but, sometimes, when you’ve been through the mill, it does leave you with a sense of values.” Our eyes met, and each nodded in silent comprehension.

“Now, let’s go on. Was there ever a question of pride in it—on your side?”

“Frankly and naturally, yes. I have no intention of going through life on my wife’s pocketbook.”

“Good. Now the decks are cleared. As I thought. You’ve been frank. So’ll I. Take up this question of money. What is money? Opportunity. If men like yourself, who have ideas, energy, and ambition, refuse to take the opportunity money offers you,—who profits? Some well-groomed little parasite who will loaf through life genteelly until the day when the real people rise and take it away from him. And quite right, I say. And that is what I don’t intend to have for my daughter.” He cited names of men, men in public life of our acquaintance, whose start in life had been facilitated by the fortunes of their wives. “Look at it from my point of view. I’ve made what I’ve made, and I want it to count in this world. David, what do you intend to do in life?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Fight through the war.”

“But, after?”

“After!” I said incredulously. “I may take up the study of architecture again, unless—unless I am able to do what I really want,—which is to write.”

“So I supposed. Don’t decide quickly. The current is all the other way. We are a country of action, and you’ve got that in you. I don’t make mistakes in men. The real Americans are not those who sit and meditate; they are those who are laying the foundations. Write? What is the future? Deceptions. You know I’m not a low-brow, as they say. Every night, before I go to sleep, I read an hour in Balzac. Books are half my life, so what I say to you I say without narrowness. But what are our writers to-day? The servants of a great public that wants to be amused, diverted in moments of relaxation; a great mass that is striving, combating, contending,—a public of children. Is that all you want to do? Amuse them? Write for yourself: you’ll be over their heads—misunderstood—if not ridiculed! The current is against you. We move rapidly, and we read rapidly; a moment to laugh or dream, as we read on the train. Hard for you,—yes, but what do individuals count, to-day?” He laid his hand on my arm. “Commerce, science, public affairs. You like a man’s job. That’s where it lies, and it’s our kind that must lead. Jump into the fight. Wealth and education are not only opportunities but responsibilities: that’s what we must understand. I said I want you as my son-in-law, Davy. It’s more than that: I want to invest what I’ve made in a man that counts. I want you with me. I want to feel when it comes time for me to step out that I’m passing on the power to count for big things to some leadership I’ve inspired.”

He talked some while in this strain and, despite myself, I felt myself yielding to his persuasion. Brinsmade is not a selfish man. Among his own friends he was looked at rather askance for his progressive tendencies. I found myself thinking, with pride, “Here is a man, thoroughly American, who has a sentiment of nationality; who does not look at life from a detached point of view but has a sense of being one in a multitude with a higher loyalty than his own interests—loyalty to the name he bears—and a pride in the America that will come!”

I think he saw the effect he had produced on me and, shrewd lawyer that he was, he did not insist. I left him, exceedingly flattered and already inclined to the pleasant ways he opened to me.

Just why I should feel any compunction is the thing that surprises me, now. Yet I do feel,—well, if not compunction, a little uneasiness. After all, up to now, whatever I have done has been done impulsively, without a second thought as to the advantages or disadvantages to me. This is another thing. For the first time, I am looking on life with a middle-aged estimating of values,—and to-night is like a valedictory to a youth that has fled.

In one way I almost resent the very frankness of his discussion with me. For now I am somehow uneasily conscious that there must be a certain grim deliberation about my future conduct. And I ask myself again, “Is this a new phase of life into which I have entered,—a new milestone left behind?”

There are other things which haunt me. I know that with Brinsmade’s influence with the French Government it would be an easy thing for him to procure my discharge and, under the circumstances, with my past record and my present condition, who could criticize me? I have the feeling that this is in the back of his mind, and looking ahead and wondering what may happen when I meet Anne again, I cannot help wondering if to-night I am not stepping out from the bonds which have forged my destiny here to a foreign land, to those whose every thought and action is strange to my traditions. The thing is so obvious I cannot avoid facing it. If only it had come unperceived and by hidden ways: would it have been easier for my pride and my self-respect?

The trouble is that during my convalescence I have been aware that the terrific strain on my physical energy has left a moral inclination towards the easy way through the future. This physical and moral vitality in us is of course inseparable. I have noticed that as men’s bodies grow old a tolerance of social laxities comes with it. Women in moments of physical exhaustion are most vulnerable. The effect of shell-shock on the moral fabric, even in officers of the highest character, is well known. And then, there is something else. Comrades of mine, who have fought with me with unimaginable bravery, return from death with the feeling that they have spent all their vital energy and looking to society to assure their future, as a right acquired.

To-night I feel old, with the sense of duty accomplished. I have done quite enough, I tell myself, in my passage through the inferno of war. If now, when opportunity offers, it pleases me to dispense with the bruising struggle for existence, who has the right to judge of my actions? Certainly not those who have not dared what I have dared.

All this is really rather morbid: both my will and my body have given beyond their strength and are still convalescent, or I should not be troubled with such sickly doubts. Well—who knows? Is this a mood, or a decision? To-night, frankly, I feel I have done enough to have earned my right to rest. Let others do their part. Milestone Number 4.

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