2

there was nothing better to do; and if you had had time to run your legs off with the dogs after breakfast, it was comfortable enough to curl up in the pew, with your head in your grandmother's roundness, and think sleepy things about the place where the swallow had been. (It was a source of pride to Grandma Boole that Dicky was always reported as being "less good" on the Sundays when her rheumatism kept her from church.)

Thus Immersed in this state of beatitude, Dicky was nevertheless aware of the progress of the service as a burrowing animal may be of the passage of the daylight overhead. Some obscure sense of the lapse of time told him when to lower his legs for the next hymn, and enabled him to distinguish the gospel and Epistle from the lessons; and he always knew when he could abandon himself to the final repose of the sermon. He was sure, therefore, that the sermon had begun, and been several minutes in progress, before the thing happened which, even there, on the spot, he obscurely felt to be a great event, an event as great as could happen in anything so small as his life.

"O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"

That was what happened— this rain of celestial syllables pouring down on him from heights higher than the swallow's nest and the summer sky. Words— just words joined together and meaning something so simple that he could class the phrase immediately with the familiar maternal reproach: "Oh, Dicky, I do wish you hadn't done that!" or his father's sterner: "My boy, I'm sorry you've disobeyed me." But he didn't care a straw what the words meant: that had nothing to do with it. He simply noticed that they were words; and that was the great event. He had noticed many things already: birds, dogs, beetles, tadpoles, people's faces, the look of rooms and the pictures on their walls. But he had never noticed words, or the sound of words joined to-

3

gether; and now the wonder of the linked syllables seemed to catch his
little heart in a grasp of fire. He shut his eyes and listened, praying
that his father would say them again. But his father's discourse ran on
as usual, dull as a road if one had to drive over it (going to church
always reminded Dicky of taking a drive, because you couldn't jump out
and touch and taste the things you saw by the way.) He listened in
vain, losing his sense of time, forgetting to watch for the "And now
unto Him" for which he usually yearned with such all-over pricklings of
his impatient little body; till of a sudden the walls of his niche col-
lapsed, and he found himself precipitated to his knees under the final
"Life Everlasting", which his father always pronounced as if it were the
jam after the powder.

They were all at luncheon at the Rectory that Sunday (it was
called dinner on Sundays, except when Uncle Horace came): Uncle Wayne
Kitterick and Aunt Lucy, who had driven over from Brown Towers, their
place on the Hudson, and Uncle Horace Boole, who was staying with them,
and Aunt Elizabeth Kitterick, Uncle Wayne's elder sister, who lived just
outside of Tryan, in a ginger-coloured house set on beautiful steep
grass-banks that Dicky was positively forbidden to slide down (though he
might pick the raspberries in the garden if the gardener were there, and
stroke the cat if it were in Aunt Elizabeth's lap).

They were all there, and they all knew a great deal: they
could probably, any one of them, have told Dicky where his wonderful
words came from and why they were so wonderful. Uncle Wayne Kitterick
was a small busy man with a brown face, scintillating eye-glasses and a
combative manner. He was always full of plans for improving and re-
dressing things, and now and then Aunt Lucy (who was larger and slower)
had to say warningly: "Wayne, you'll wear yourself out", as Mrs.
Thaxter did when Dicky bicycled too many times round and round the

5

and a secret look of being at home in places even bigger than Brown Towers. No wonder Dicky's grandmother took out her cap with coloured ribbons on the Sundays when Uncle Horace came, and Dicky's mother said laughingly to his father: "Oh, well, if Horace likes us to call it luncheon!"

About Aunt Elizabeth Kitterick there was less to be said, and she figured in Dicky's world chiefly by virtue of what she possessed: her cat, her raspberries, her fat black horses and two big red morocco books called "Hogarth", that were full of pictures but that he was not to be allowed to look at till he was a good deal older. In other respects she was a somewhat negative figure, a mere embodiment of the complicated series of taboos which ranged from the grass-banks to the Hogarth, and even included the white marble Psyche who stood in the bay-window on a revolving pedestal and was not to be spun round because her arm had once caught in the lace curtains and pulled them down. Aside from Aunt Elizabeth's possessions, nothing about her interested Dicky. She seemed a great deal older than his mother and Aunt Lucy, and had not nearly as pretty clothes or as good a smell as his grandma Boole; and if she had not always said to him, at a certain moment of the year: "I should be glad of a nice letter, telling me what you think a little boy ought to have for his birthday", it is to be feared he would have judged her even less leniently. Still, even Aunt Elizabeth was not unlettered. Behind the glass doors of her tall Gothic book-cases there were rows and rows of sermons bound in black cloth (ever so many more than on the Rectory shelves), and Letters of clergymen who had died young, and Memorials of ladies in white caps seated at open windows with Cathedral spires in the background. And occasionally Dicky had seen her reading a volume on the Cultivation of Small Fruits or A Lady's Guide to Lace-making.

It will be seen that the group around the Rectory table was

6

one that ought to have been able to answer any question a little boy
might put; and when one added to it Grandma Boole, rosy with pride under
her light ribbons, and Dicky's mother in her best muslin, and his father
divested of that absurdly flapping garment which seemed to cut him off
from humankind, and talking again in his natural voice about familiar
things, it became a circle comprehensive enough to box the compass of
experience.

Nevertheless, Dicky hesitated to submit his problem. He was
partly restrained by the inability to express what he meant, and by the
child's instinctive reluctance to speak of any deep and mysterious im-
pression; but chiefly by the fear, if he mentioned anything connected
with "church", of raising the vexed question of Sunday School. Dicky
had not yet been sent to Sunday School. His mother thought he ought to
go, and Grandma Boole said that Uncle Horace had begun at six— which
ought to have been a convincing argument to any one privileged to look
on Uncle Horace. But Dicky's father was for postponement— in fact,
when cornered by Uncle Wayne (who, though not always orthodox, could
never resist an argument), he had explicitly declared that he didn't see
why a clergyman's son should ever go to Sunday School. He ought to get
religion enough at home without depending on what was imparted by some
callow girl or long-necked youth during an hour on Sundays. Dicky's own
mind had at first been divided. He was ashamed to miss an experience
which Bowler Bush enjoyed, and he knew his mother was pained by his not
going; but his father's reasons filled him with a vague sense of superi-
ority, and when he learned that Hudnut Wayne went to Sunday School (at
St. Helena's, the Kittericks' parish church, lower down the River) he
vowed by all the gods of his infant mythology that he would never be
found doing anything that Hudnut did. This resolve was confirmed when
his mother (instigated by Grandma Boole) attempted to give him a little

7

private tuition on Sunday mornings. Dicky, compelled, at an hour of the
day when the outer world was most seductive, to adopt an Infant-Samuel
attitude and respond to irrelevant questions about remote old men with
teased, was seized with a passion of rebellion which his father had to
be called in to quell; and after receiving the paternal reprimand he had
the unholy joy of hearing (through the crack of the library door) Mr.
Thaxter sum up: "Teach him to be a decent chap, my dear; but do leave
theology where it belongs— on the top shelves."

Since then the question had remained in suspense; but Dicky
knew that Uncle Wayne had subjected his mother to a searching interroga-
tion (Hudnut, overhearing, as he always managed to, had retailed it
gleefully), and that Mrs. Thaxter had said she couldn't understand her
husband's reasons, but supposed he wanted to wait till their boy's own
feelings impelled him to seek enlightenment. This timely warning caused
Dick to set a watch upon his lips. He dared not, thereafter, betray the
slightest curiosity as to the things the Lessons told about (some of
which, the fights especially, were undoubtedly interesting), and he was
afraid even to allude to the strange lament which had not ceased to mur-
mur through his thoughts.

After luncheon a heavy thunder-storm imprisoned the Rectory
visitors in the drawing-room. The drawing-room was the dullest place in
the house, and after flattening his face for a while against the stream-
ing panes, and listening to a long argument between Uncle Wayne and Uncle
Horace on the relative merits of different types of fire-extinguishers,
Dicky, a little languid from excess of food and talk, began to cast
about for some rational occupation. His quest carried him all round the
room till he reached his mother's slender-legged writing-table— (oh,
the dear old rosewood-and-ebony Rectory furniture — how it suited the
three-crayon drawings in oval frames, the pale paper with blue morning-

8

glories, the painted hand-screens on the mantel, and the deeply-looped muslin curtains framing a lawn with round beds of heliotrope and roses!) On the table, Dicky had the luck to find a stray sheet of note-paper, and— rarer still— a pencil; and prone on the floor he began to write. The magic words still sang through his be-puddinged brain, and his impulse was to give them shape. But this was not easy. Slowly printing each letter, he laboured on with frowning forehead and restless heels; but though the words were so clear inside his head they grew indistinct when he tried to put them down.

"O my so nabsalan my son my so nabsalan, wood god" (there were wood-gods in his fairy books, so he understood that) — at this point the reconstitution broke down: the next words sounded like "die had died", but that didn't make sense, and he lay pondering.

"Hullo! Hullo! Writing a letter, young man?" Uncle Wayne's omniscient eye-glass bore down on him before he could shield the paper.

"No."

"What is it, then? Not doing lessons on Sunday, I hope?" The clarion-note of reform rang out through Uncle Wayne's nose.

Mrs. Thaxter intervened. "Perhaps it's a story. Dicky sometimes writes stories: don't you, darling?"

Darling lay mute.

"Oho! Stories, indeed? We're going to be an author, are we? Is this a story?"

"No."

"Dicky, don't answer in that way. Sit up and show Uncle Wayne what you've been writing."

"Yes, do, dear," murmured Grandma Boole, fumbling fondly for the spectacles in her velvet châtelaine-bag (Horace's last present from Paris.)

The fat was in the fire, then— no help for it! Dicky pulled

9

away his hand and sullenly surrendered what it hid. Uncle Wayne
straightened the glasses on his inquisitive brown nose and read out:
"My so nabsalan— what on earth— 'O wabsalan—' oh, of course: of
course! Absalom. I see— I see." He laughed ridiculously.

"Are you writing a story about Absalom, dearest?" Dicky's
grandmother encouraged him.

"No."

"What is it, then? It doesn't make sense," said Uncle Wayne
irritably.

"Yes, it does. Father said it." That was irrefutable!

"Said it? When did he say it?" Again the idiot laugh!

"Dicky, answer," his mother commanded.

"In church."

Grandma Boole melted. "I told you so, Margaret! I often see
him listening. Is it father's sermon you're trying to write out,
darling?"

"No!"

"What is it, then? George, do look!"

Her son-in-law, roused from one of his fits of abstraction,
(family parties often seemed to bring them on) strolled over to Mrs.
Boole and took the paper from her. He scanned it, smiled and gave it
back to Dicky. "David's lament— a phonetic version." Mr. Thaxter
wandered away again, and Dicky was perfectly aware that he was edging to
the door with the design of slipping out unnoticed.

"Ah, ah, to be sure!" Uncle Wayne exclaimed. 'O Absalom, my
son Absalom, my—' how does it go? Beautiful thing— 'would to God
that I had died for thee, O my son Absalom': yes, that's it."

"Oh, no!" Dicky almost screamed. The misplaced syllables
seemed to writhe with pain.

"No' what?"

10

But he couldn't explain.

"A very beautiful passage— a celebrated passage," Uncle Wayne continued. "Of course, Dick, you know the story of David and Absalom?""

Dicky pondered, and once more said "No". What he wanted to explain— but again couldn't— was that at that moment it didn't matter in the least about the story.

"Not know—? You, a clergyman's son! You hear that, Margaret?" Uncle Wayne turned to his sister-in-law. "If that doesn't bear out what I said the other day—!"

Grandma Boole sighed. "Of course we all feel alike about that. Horace was astonished when I told him."

"About Dicky's not going to Sunday School?" Uncle Horace rolled out. If he was on Grandma's side there was indeed no hope! "Well, the fact is, these new theories... I must confess I don't always follow George's ideas." Uncle Horace was apt to preface any expression of opinion with "I must confess", as if humbling his magnificence to explain and justify.

"We none of us do," said Aunt Elizabeth tartly.

Mrs. Thaxter murmured: "I must do as George decides."

This, in turn, was so incontrovertible that the family sighed out unitedly: "Of course", and a weight rolled from Dicky's breast. He looked from one to the other of the wise mysterious faces overhead and touched his paper. "I want to know why it's like that."

"You see he longs to be taught the Word of God!" his grandmother wailed. "Sit down here, darling. Once, you see, King David, who was a very great and wise King—"

"No— no!" Dicky stamped. Here they were thrusting the "story" at him again! "I only want to know about— about the words

II

themselves."

"But the story tells about the words."

He shook his head and pressed the paper close. Two tears gathered and dropped from his lashes.

"The child's not well, Margaret," said Aunt Lucy, who seldom spoke. "I <u>wondered</u> at that second helping of hot gingerbread... We never allow Hudnut..."

"Has he a temperature? He does look a little flushed!" his Grandma Boole exclaimed. But Uncle Horace, bored by the discussion, had opened the French window to whistle to old Badger the field-spaniel, and Dicky, slipping between his uncle's legs, scudded away to a safe place he knew behind the grapery.

## II.

Only a few months later there occurred the next most important event in Dicky Thaxter's life: an event so thrilling that for a while it totally eclipsed the earlier episode, though he found it, in the light of subsequent experience, to be of a more general and therefore less significant character.

The month was February, the day St. Valentine's, and Dicky was walking with his father along one of the snowy upper streets of Tryan. The crystal air was as resonant as a sleigh-bell, and so cold that Dicky, in spite of muffler and mittens, was glad of the quick trot required to keep up with Mr. Thaxter's absent-minded stride. They were on their way to call on Aunt Elizabeth Kitterick, a monthly ceremony which, but for

I2

the manly satisfaction of being out with his father, Dicky would gladly
have exchanged for the fun of snow-balling with Bowler Bush in the lane
behind the Rectory. But that was partly because the latter diversion
was forbidden.

Instead, he would have to sit for an hour on a high-backed
Gothic chair, under dreadful engravings of bated stags and other agoniz-
ing animals (called indiscriminately "Landseers"), while Miss Kitterick
descanted on the delinquencies of the Tryan tradesmen and Mr. Thaxter
murmured "Yes— yes— yes" on every note of resignation and inattention.

"Ah— how are you, Thaxter?" It was Dr. Doubledyke's big
round voice, dropping down from ever so far above his familiar trousers
and square-toed boots with wrinkled sides (Dicky, in the street, still
recognized people by their lower extremities). Mr. Thaxter stopped, and
Dicky found himself face to face with a little girl of his own size who
looked at him steadily while she clasped Dr. Doubledyke's thumb in her
white woollen fingers.

"You don't know my granddaughter?" the doctor said in a voice
of pride, and Mr. Thaxter stooped to pat the little girl's cheek. Then
the gentlemen began to talk, and the two children continued to look at
each other.

Dr. Doubledyke's granddaughter was dressed all in white, from
her woollen leggings to her silky beaver, and her cheeks were so red,
her eyes so black, her curls so like yellow chicken-down, that the white
knitted veil over her face made her look like a Valentine— one of the
expensive ones, in layers. It was perhaps this resemblance that made
Dicky want to turn back the veil and look at the picture underneath.
At any rate he did want to, suddenly, with the passionate irresistible
craving that had once drawn him to a velvet peach on the sideboard, the
day the Bishop came to dine. The peach was one of six that Uncle Wayne

I4

him out of fairy-books, from distances coloured like sunsets behind
winter trees; and it made his adventure seem even more beautiful and
incredible, its heroine more hopelessly remote.

Dicky was much given to drawing maps. The practice had not
greatly advanced his acquaintance with the terrestrial globe, since he
obstinately refused to depict what he called "real places"; but whenever
his presence became too assertive he could be silenced by being given
his paints and his father's old Classical Atlas. From it he drew the
figures of strange lands and the names of far-sounding cities, combining
them, indefatigably, into a new geography patterned on the sound of the
names and the colours of the countries. To the Classical Atlas he now
turned and, after days of puzzled search, came upon Troas (Troy), a
black city on a rosy coast.

"What happened at Troy, father?" he suddenly asked that same
evening. He was lying on the library hearth, his head against old Badg-
er's ribs, in the drowsy bliss of the half-hour after tea, before his
old nurse Hannah darkened the doorway.

"At Troy— is there anything about it in the *Post*?" Grandma
Boole dived for her spectacles.

Mr. Thaxter handed her the evening paper with a smile. "I
don't believe so;" and turning to Dicky he went on: "Why, two of the
greatest things in the world— a great war about which a great poem was
written."

"Yes— but I mean: who lived there?"

Mrs. Thaxter looked up from her embroidery-frame." Helen of
Troy! Don't you remember?"

Dicky's face fell. "She lived a long time ago, didn't she?"

"Yes— thousands of years."

"Who was she?"

I6

Boole beamed on the scene above her spectacles.

"You ought to teach him some poetry, George— does he know 'Excelsior'? Horace did at his age," she said.

His father's citation awakened in Dicky's memory the poignant cadences of David's lament. The new words had the same mysterious power, gave him the same sense of knowing something he couldn't tell; and henceforth every word and cluster of words endowed with that power grouped themselves about this little nucleus of music, building up an enchanted island of sound to which his fancy could put off at will. He grew, in after years, to mistrust his infant memories, and to suspect himself of unconsciously elaborating them; but he could have sworn that when, a year or two later, he chanced on the Island of Epipsychidion,

"Washed by soft blue Oceans of young air", he knew it at once for his own Isle of Sounds...

After this it became clear that the kind of words he wanted came out of books; not the ones his uncles and aunts and his Grandma Boole gave him for Christmas and his birthday, but the others, the grown-up ones, on his father's shelves; and from that day his travels among them began.

No one read much at the Rectory, and even Mr. Thaxter did not often disturb the serried rows that gave such a pleasant look of warmth to the long low-ceilinged library. Dicky had the feeling that his father knew all about his books, but had either ceased to care for them or was too busy or too tired to take them down. Mr. Thaxter was, indeed, often busy or tired— and still more often both. When he wasn't writing sermons/ or resting he was incessantly occupied with a mysterious institution called "The Parish" which seemed to make the most unreasonable demands upon his time and thoughts. Church-wardens and vestrymen and old ladies in dowdy bonnets were perpetually coming to the Rectory to

I7

confer with him about the Parish; at luncheon the conversation generally turned on the same question, and Dicky was constantly learning that the Parish was too poor, or too big, or too small, or too indifferent, or too inactive for such and such measures to be carried out, or such and such benefits to accrue to it. It seemed to him rather like a helpless cantankerous old relative for whose welfare every one was actively concerned and who met every effort in her behalf with fresh complaints and demands. And more and more, as time passed, the demands and complaints seemed to drain Mr. Thaxter's strength, and leave him with no heart for anything, not even for a quiet game with his boy. In every interval of leisure he used to stretch himself out on the black horse-hair sofa by the library fire, his hands clasped under his head and his face as still and cold as the plaster mask of Dante on the book-case; and at such times Dicky, tiptoeing across the worn Turkey rug, would abstract a volume of Haklyut, or of Chambers's Encyclopaedia of English Literature, and stagger away under his load without any sign of recognition from the motionless figure on the sofa.

The feeling of remoteness which these glimpses produced made it impossible to put the many questions that Mr. Thaxter might have answered; and from the contact Dicky had been known there was no use in propounding them to his mother or his grandmother. This sense of their intellectual restrictions did not lessen his admiration for his two guardian angels. To his mother, especially, he ascribed a sort of celestial superiority because she could do, quickly and easily, so many things that Mr. Thaxter fumbled and broke his nails over, and because it rested with her to decide whether or no one should have second helpings, or sit up another half hour after Hannah had signalled from the door. But Dicky knew instinctively that she could tell him nothing about poetry.

There were, of course, many hours of the day when he felt no

I9

He never missed a fire, a runaway or a street-fight, and had always just met a rat as big as a terrier, with red eyes and whiskers, or seen a boy who was fishing for frogs catch a rattle-snake on a bent pin, or found that a fox had littered in the old spaniel's kennel, or seen a band of gypsies go through the town with a little girl in a pink silk dress who was screaming and crying out "Save me! Save me!"

He retailed these adventures in a singular dialect, poor in words but rich in intonations, which Dicky acquired with surprising quickness and condescendingly imparted to Hudnut Wayne. This condescension was his undoing; for after one of the family visits to Brown Towers Hudnut was heard to "use words" (Aunt Lucy preferred not to specify), and, on being asked where he had learnt them, promptly accused Dick. Their source was as promptly traced to Bowler Bush, and after a family discussion, in the course of which Dicky heard his father murmur that "such things generally righted themselves", a majority vote decided against future intercourse with the taloned one, to whom Dicky was instructed to be "very nice when they met", but always to say that his mother didn't want him to play that day. The following autumn Bowler Bush was sent off to what Dicky heard described as an "industrial school", and thereafter Mrs. Thaxter explained to parochial callers that her husband had "interested himself" in the sexton's oldest boy, who was remarkably clever, and taken measures to "keep him off the streets"— for which the sexton was fittingly grateful.

Deprived of this stimulating presence, Dicky was thrown back on literature. More and more words (not of Bowler Bush's kind) kept adding themselves to his musical coral-island; and gradually he found out the extreme pleasure of reading, or rather chanting, them aloud. For the most part, those he liked best had but a fragmentary significance for him, and he discovered (in the inexhaustible depths of

20

"Chambers") one or two great cataracts of sound, unhampered by meaning, which he could roll out before him and pile up into any sense he liked, as "window-dressers", every morning, model their lustrous silks into new shapes.

His next discovery was that an audience added immensely to his elocutionary enjoyment; and having exercised himself on Hannah (who interrupted), and on his mother (who smiled sympathetically, but continued to count the holes in her canvas), he finally singled out his Grandma Boole. It was that very autumn that Mrs. Boole, after saying, for a year or two: "You know you really needn't raise your voice," or: "It's very odd—but I can always hear Horace," had finally been induced to acquire an ear-trumpet; not one of your dangling slippery tubes that the interlocutor is always having to catch and hold like a refractory reptile, but a big black horn such as a Bad Angel might have put to his lips to sound a blast against the walls of heaven. Not that there was anything about Grandma Boole to suggest this dark analogy: it was only when the trumpet was out of her hand that it seemed to Dicky supernatural and sinister. Applied to the ancestral ear it became the vehicle of the purest pleasure; for Grandma Boole was the ideal listener, and her calm attitude, her gentle changes of expression, the very angle at which her quiet old hand held the instrument toward him, swelled Dicky's heart with the ecstacy of communicated joy.

Thus the two explored the realms of gold, ranging from the Lays of Ancient Rome to the Morte d'Arthur, and from fragments of Tamerlane and The Broken Heart to the Percy Reliques and Evangeline. But Dicky was insatiable, and the day came when he wanted to make his own books instead of reading ready-made ones. It must have been when winter set in, and a long cold kept his restless legs confined for a week to the nursery floor, that he found himself, one day, reading aloud.

22

It was the following summer that he discovered his mistake.
Some one in the house was unwell, and as usual Dr. Doubledyke was sent
for. But word came back that he had "left for Troy that morning", and
Dicky, listening, pictured the doctor heading a train of strangely ca-
parisoned camels (or were they elephants?) that wound away interminably
boring into a fearsome desert.

"But who will take care of us when we're very very ill, mother,
if Dr. Doubledyke's gone so far away?" he sobbed out in one of his
strange sudden panics, fears for the good doctor's safety mingling with
his more intimate sense of his family's exposed condition.

His mother laughed. "Oh, I hope nobody'll be very very ill
before evening. Dr. Doubledyke will be back by six."

"Back from Troy?"

"Of course."

Dicky gasped. "Mother, where are we?"

"Where we? Why, what do you mean, dear?"

"I mean— where's Troy?"

"Troy? Up the river, of course— an hour from here. I
thought your father was teaching you geography!"

She turned away to give an order about the packing— they
were off next morning for Mr. Thaxter's mid-summer vacation— and Dicky
stood dumbfounded, staring at the fact she left him with. Troy was not
on the farther verge of perilous deserts— it was on the Hudson, only
an hour away! His maps had got it all wrong, and Miss Doubledyke had
been living near him all the while— almost as near as the Kittericks
and Hudnut Wayne!

"Dicky— Dicky! What have you done with your butterfly-net?
I suppose you want to take it with you— and Hannah says you were fish-
ing tadpoles with it last week, and she hasn't seen it since..."

23

In an instant the vision of Miss Doubledyke was obliterated
and Dicky was storming off to rummage for his net. They were starting
next morning for his grandmother's place at Stonington, where Uncle
Horace kept his sail-boat in the cove just under the house, and where
there would be bathing, sailing, paddling, crab-catching, keeping sea-
things in pails, and all the salt sea-weedy joys of a long six weeks by
the shore! How could any other fact find a cranny in Dicky's mind? He
knew now that Miss Doubledyke lived only an hour away—but it no
longer mattered where she lived...

### III.

A sudden sense of darkness and deep cold, a flare of light in
his bewildered eyes, and Mr. Silmore's gentle voice, saying, even more
gently than usual: "Thaxter, don't be startled... there's really
nothing..."

Thaxter sat up in his narrow school-bed. Through the window
behind Mr. Silmore's figure he saw the pale glimmer of morning. His
young body was heavy with sleep and he was rolling over again into the
mellow warmth of the pillow when the light in his tutor's hand, stooping
lower, slipped like a knife-blade between his lids.

"Jump up and get into your clothes, there's a good fellow.
The sleigh will be here in fifteen minutes... Your father's not as well
... If you hurry there'll be time for a bite before you start..."

A quarter of an hour later Dick sat in the sleigh at the tu-
tor's side, watching the trees slip by against an icy bar of lemon-col-

24

oured light canopied with darkness. The dawn was soundless and bitter.
Right and left of the road leading from Saint Stephen's to the station
the snow stretched away interminably, under clumps of leafless trees
that looked unfamiliar in the solemn light. Dick could not believe that
these were the fields he played in: he felt as if he were driving
through a country he had never seen, and was glad Mr. Silmore was with
him.

"Mother didn't seem much worried when sherote..."

"I don't know that she's really worried now... but she feels
you'll be a help... very naturally..."

"Oh, of course, sir." The words made Dick feel at once res-
ponsible and shy. He was glad to have Mr. Silmore with him, but he
didn't know what to say, having no language wherewith to meet the new
situation. He had never before heard himself described as "a help".

"Look at that great big star, Mr. Silmore— over there, be-
hind the elm!"

"Planet, my dear boy— but of course you meant planet. You
know it's Jupiter."

"Oh, yes— Jupiter..."

Dick began to think ardently about his father. His mother's
letters, during the last five weeks, had been vaguely apprehensive, pre-
monitory—he saw it now. His father had had "one bad cold after an-
other", and Dr. Doubledyke had advised Florida; but they were to consult
a New York specialist first. Grandma Boole had gone to Aiken for her
rheumatism, and they might possibly join her there; but Mr. Thaxter
didn't want to move, and nothing was settled. Every letter contained
the germ of a new plan that came to nothing...

"Here we are!"

Mr. Silmore, pale and brisk in the ashy light, was jumping

25

from the sleigh, seeing that Dick's portmanteau was lifted out, and
leading the way to the ticket office, where an unshorn official in shirt
sleeves pushed the ticket under the grating. They passed out of the
waiting-room just as the wooden platform began to shake with the thunder
of the approaching train.

"Here's the Pullman! Now then, Richard! How much of a wait,
porter? Five minutes?"

Mr. Silmore clambered into the carriage after his charge,
seated him half way down its length, ("You won't feel the jarring so
much here—it's always a good thing to remember,") and dropped into
the opposite chair, looking anxious, kindly and rather red-nosed from
the icy drive. Dick reflected that he had never before seen Mr. Silmore
unshaved—and then he felt ashamed of noticing such things at such a
time. The tutor's hand was on his, and he saw that Mr. Silmore's throat
was agitated.

"My dear, dear boy— do all you can for your mother!"

"Oh, of course." It suddenly occurred to Dick that there was
something he had forgotten to ask. "Mr. Silmore, what did mother's
telegram say? You didn't show it to me."

Was it only his imagination, or did Mr. Silmore's face grow
red through its chilled sallowness? He beat the breast of his garments,
as if vainly searching. "I must have left it behind— on my dressing-
table. I can't recall the exact words... Now, Richard, you know you're
not to worry..."

"Oh, no, of course not." Dick straightened himself. He knew
Mr. Silmore was fibbing, and doing it because it was what "one did" in
the circumstances. Mr. Silmore was always immensely strong on what
"one did".

"Time up! Don't forget: you change at Revere. And buy a

26

sandwich... If I were you I wouldn't drink station milk." He stood up, wrung his pupil's hand, turned away and came back. "One thing more, my boy— of course I needn't tell you _where_ to look for strength?" He was gone.

As the train rolled forth into the February dawn Dick Thaxter, for the first time, was conscious of the grown-up act of thinking things over. Hitherto life had been a mere big snow-ball of sensations: now he began to take apart and examine and relate certain of these agglomerated experiences.

His father was going to die—he was sure of that. Why else had Mr. Silmore blushed and fibbed about the telegram? And why was he setting out alone on an eight-hour journey, with a change and a wait at a strange junction—he who had never left home till the year before, and whose travels had hitherto always been performed under grown-up protection? The answer was plain enough. Mr. Silmore had withheld the telegram because it was too bad to show, and Dick was travelling alone because there had been no time to send for him.

His father was dying, and would soon be dead—that was what it all meant. Dicky became suddenly conscious that for the last year or two he had thought less than usual about his father, but he now began to recall certain little scenes and incidents that seemed to have left no mark on his mind. The fact disengaging itself from these memories was that Mr. Thaxter, for a long time past, had been troubled—oh, dreadfully troubled—about something: something he never spoke of, perhaps didn't often think of, but that hung between himself and the persons about him like one of those fluctuating sea-fogs which are now a mere chill of the air and now a pall of darkness.

In particular, Dick recalled a day, the summer before his first term at school, when Dr. Lafford, the Rector of St. Helena's, had

27

driven over to spend the night and replace Mr. Thaxter in the pulpit.
Dr. Lafford was a large benevolent man with a leonine head and a weak
laugh, greatly esteemed for the eloquence of his sermons and the humour
of his after-dinner stories. Dicky, in his honour, had been allowed to
sit up for dinner, and to come into the library afterward; and as he
squatted on the hearth-rug, hugging old Badger (whom he loved more than
ever because they were so soon to part), he felt Dr. Lafford's benedict-
ory palm descend on him.

"And how about confirmation, eh, young man? Is it to be here
or at St. Stephen's? He turned to Mr. Thaxter. "I've heard from the
Bishop. He takes us in directly after Easter— but perhaps you think
Dicky too young."

"Oh, yes— decidedly," said Mr. Thaxter.

"How old are you, Richard?"

"Twelve. I'm going to school in October."

"I know you are! Closser's been tutoring him, hasn't he?"
Dr. Lafford turned to ask his host.

"Yes".

"Well, then the grounding ought to be sound. Richard, do you
want to be confirmed?"

"My dear Lafford—" Mr. Thaxter stood up suddenly— "I've
never even broached the subject to him. My idea is that there's time...
plenty of time..."

"Ah, well— yes... How has Closser turned out, by the way?
He's to be ordained after Easter, I understand?"

The talk wandered from Dick, leaving him with the obscure
feeling that the main part of it had taken place, inaudibly, over his
head.

The next day he said to Mr. Thaxter: "Father, what's confirm-

28

ation?" and his mother, who sat near, uttered a faint sigh and then
stooped over the silks she was sorting.

Mr. Thaxter considered. "I'll tell you about it this after-
noon on our walk"; but on the walk he made no attempt to return to the
subject, and seemed, to Dick's observant sense, unusually eager to crowd
their talk with other topics.

"Father, you said you'd explain about confirmation."

"I didn't say I'd explain—I said I'd tell you what it was."

"What is it, then?"

"A— a form: the ceremony of admission to the Christian Church."

"Wasn't I admitted when I was christened?"

"Yes; but the vows were taken for you. In confirmation you
take them again for yourself. I am confirming you. That is the meaning
of the word."

"Why do they have to be taken again?"

"Because you're to decide whether your own feeling disposes
you to take them. You're supposed to be old enough to understand."

"Understand what?"

"The mysteries of the Christian faith."

Dicky pondered. "I wish you'd explain them, father."

"Ah, my boy— ah, my boy!"

The very note of Mr. Thaxter's voice came back to Dick— its
strange mingling of irony and sadness. He had not understood then; he
did not understand now; but for an instant his face was swept by the
cold fog that always hung about his father.

He thought of addressing himself to Mr. Closser, who had been
his tutor for the last two years, and with whom he was on terms of the
easiest intimacy. But Mr. Closser never talked of religion, and Dick
was shy of raising with any one else a question his father had post-

29

poned. So he let the problem lie till it was brought up again by an in-
cident in which Mr. Closser figured.

Coming in one afternoon from a walk with his mother, Dicky had
seen the library door open, and a downcast figure emerge, sobbing out:
"My son, my poor son— oh, Mr. Thaxter—" while, from within, his
father's voice repeated: "I can't, Mrs. Closser— I simply can't."

Mrs. Thaxter, taking the visitor's arm, ~~in a compassionate~~ *dow*
~~compassionately into~~ *a*
clasp, had led her across the hall to the drawing-room, and Dick himself
had been despatched to order tea. He hovered out of sight till he saw
his tutor's mother leave the house and walk with bowed shoulders ~~toward~~ *away*
the gate; then he rushed in *panting* to Mrs. Thaxter.

"Oh, mother, what's happened— is he dead?"

Mrs. Thaxter sat with a pale face behind the untouched tea-
cups. She started.

"Dead? Who? Oh, of course not— how you frightened me!"

"Has he done something that's disgraced him forever and for-
ever?"

"Poor Mr. Closser!" *To Dick's relief* She forced a faint smile
of negation. "I hope it's not as bad as that."

"But Mrs. Closser was crying dreadfully, and father was saying
'I can't'. What was she asking him to do? To rescue Mr. Closser from
prison?"

Mrs. Thaxter hesitated; then she held out her hand. "Dicky,
sit down beside me. You're old enough to understand. Mr. Closser has
made his poor mother very unhappy. He was to have been ordained next
spring; and now he doesn't want to be— ever."

Dicky pondered: this seemed to him natural enough. It had
always embarrassed him to picture Mr. Closser in a surplice. "But why
does it make her so unhappy?"

3I

turtles, that Dicky began to think doubts didn't change a person as much
as toothache. The preparations for school soon banished the whole ques-
tion from his mind, and it was only now, as he flew homeward through the
snowy landscape, that the episode revived and dimly linked itself with
others...

Mrs. Thaxter met him at the door, and for the first time he
noticed what she looked like— just as, in driving from the station, he
had seemed to see for the first time the old coachman's red face and
corrugated dewlaps. It was as if the touch of calamity had unsealed his
eyes, showing him the wistful hollows in his mother's cheeks, the soft-
ness of her light-brown hair, and something appealing and noble in her
whole slight presence. She pressed him close, drawing off his mittens,
chafing his hands, wanting to know if his feet were dry, and trying to
make his precipitate arrival seem the most natural of returns. But the
whole house breathed of illness, and the sense of the unwonted was em-
phasized by Uncle Horace's appearance— Uncle Horace actually staying
at the Rectory, directing the disposal of his nephew's bags, and speak-
ing to every one in the same tone of ringing cheerfulness. Uncle Horace,
too, Dicky noticed, had a face for the first time: a splendid spacious
face, laid out like a public square, around the smile which his wonder-
ful white teeth made as showy as a marble monument...

Mr. Thaxter was asleep, and Dicky was sent to have his tea.
When his mother took him up to the sick-room, dusk had already fallen,
and only a screened lamp, at a distance from the bed, made a ring of
light in the dimness. A nurse in a white cap sat near it, and the bro-
ken outline of the counterpane was all that marked another living
presence.

Dicky, muffling his steps, stole to the bedside with his

32

mother, who leaned over it to say: "Here he is, dear. His cold hung on
so that I thought, *the change*—" She stopped, perhaps conscious that
she had forgotten to prepare Dick for *the* fib. (It was then he first
learned that in the solemn moments of life people almost always fib.)

Mr. Thaxter's eyes met his boy's with a faint smile. "Yes—
that cold—"

His hands were stretched out on the counterpane, and one of
them made an uncertain rambling motion toward Dicky. The boy was start-
led by its hot dryness: it felt like a bit of charred wood. Dicky had
entered the room with a great sense of awe, an almost painful expanding
of the heart; but now he could not seem to get beyond the noting of ex-
ternal details: the withered look of his father's throat, the way his
lower jaw drooped, ~~as though he had to breathe through his mouth~~, and
even the fact that Grandma Boole's brown knitted bedspread had been add-
ed to the blankets on the bed.

"Glad to see you, Dick," Mr. Thaxter sighed out in a thin
voice; then he turned his head away, and the nurse, bending over him,
said: "He'd better doze off again."

IV.

The next morning Mr. Thaxter was a shade better, and Uncle
Horace proposed to Dick that they should take a walk.

It was one of those glittering days of the American winter
when one can almost hear the sunshine crackle, and Uncle Horace let Dick
take Badger and all the coachman's fox-terriers, and they walked up the

33

hill to the edge of the town, and out to the white fields beyond. Uncle Horace was really splendid on that walk. He told Dick all about his autumn duck-shooting in Maryland, and about a wonderful boat-race he had rowed in college, and a new racing-schooner a friend of his was building, and made life seem so large and strong and secure that it was impossible Mr. Thaxter should be silently slipping out of it while they two stamped along through the snow with the dogs bustling after them.

When they got back, the Brown Towers sleigh was at the door, and Mrs. Thaxter was bidding good-bye to Aunt Lucy, while Uncle Wayne, muffled and fur-capped (with blue spectacles against the glare) was saying in his most masterful tones: "I should certainly insist on the nurse's trying my system of ventilation— and it's a pity you can't burn wood in his room instead of coal. Statistics show that coal-dust is sheer poison in cases of—"

"But smoke would be worse, and a wood-fire always smokes in that chimney— we've tried everything," Mrs. Thaxter objected, visibly on edge.

"Good-bye, my dear," Aunt Lucy murmured. "Ah, here's poor little Dick! We should have brought Hudnut, but the child is so dreadfully sensitive that we don't like to expose him to sadness—" She spoke of it as if it were the chicken-pox.

"Remember, Margaret," Uncle Wayne interrupted, "it's been proved again and again that the action of coal-dust on the lungs—"

"That's a first-rate suggestion, Wayne; I'll look into it," Uncle Horace said, steering his brother-in-law toward the sleigh; while the latter grumbled: "The thing is not to look into it but to act on it—", and Dicky felt in every grateful pulse that Uncle Horace was doing all he could to help his mother, and that the others were merely bewildering and bothering her.

34

In the afternoon Mr. Thaxter seemed so much better that when Mrs. Thaxter went up to relieve the nurse, Dicky was told he might come too, if he kept very still and didn't prevent his father's sleeping. Mrs. Thaxter carried her work to a seat near the window, and Dicky curled himself at her feet with the old Classical Atlas. It had begun to snow, and from where he sat he could see his father's face, with the cold reflection of the snow-light on it. Now and then Mrs. Thaxter's needle paused, and she raised her head, as though listening; then her hand began to rise and fall again above the canvas.

Dicky sat very still, not thinking of anything, but just vaguely conscious of the general strangeness: the curious expectant silence of the room, his father's immovable face and the reflection of the snow upon it. There were a great many things he wanted to think about and to feel, but they stirred in him under a deep surface of numbness, like fish in a frozen pond.

Presently there was a sound of sleigh-bells and Mrs. Thaxter lifted her head. Dicky was starting up to look out of the window, but her hand dropped on his shoulder with a strength he had never felt in it, and he sank down wondering.

Mr. Thaxter, raising his lids, looked at his wife; but she had bent again above her work. Suddenly the door was softly opened and she rose and stole across to it; then she came back to her husband.

"George, dear— Dr. Lafford—"

Mr. Thaxter shut his eyes. "It's very kind. Please thank him ... and explain that I see no one..."

"But surely you'll see him?" Mrs. Thaxter paused. "Wouldn't it help, dear?"

Dicky saw his father's eyes open again, and fix themselves on the entreating face above the bed. He had the distinct sense that some-

35

at that moment, that decisive was passing between his parents.

"Did you send for Lafford?"

"He was passing... he stopped to ask... I assure you, ...but now he's here, it seems so strange..."

Mr. Thaxter, with an immense effort, raised himself on one weak elbow. "I told you I'd see no one... no one..."

There was another pause. "It would be such a help to me, George..." Dicky just caught his mother's whisper.

Mr. Thaxter's lids sank. "No one." He lay back on the pillow, and his wife crossed the room and went out.

Mr. Thaxter lay perfectly still, and Dicky, feeling an added responsibility, crept across the floor and squatted down between the bed and the fire, close enough to catch the least faint signal of hand or eye-lid. Mr. Thaxter seemed to be dozing again; but presently he raised his lids, and in a clear voice said: "Dick!"

The boy ran to the bedside. There was a faint tinge of colour in Mr. Thaxter's face, and he seemed nearer and more natural— more like a human father— than at any time since his son's return. The sense of relief broke from Dick in a cry. "Oh, father, you're going to get well!"

A smile drew up the thin lip from Mr. Thaxter's teeth. "I'm trying to." He clasped Dick's hand in his wooden fingers. "There's something I must tell you— in case I don't. I want you to defend yourself— keep free... Do you understand me?"

Dick crimsoned with the effort to do so, and the passionate desire to say yes. He felt a rush of tears, and his father's face grew dim to him.

"Listen. Don't be confirmed... wait... I made a terrible mistake... I entered the Church in ignorance... I hadn't studied...

36

in the modern sense. Afterwards I woke up to things... to what the
world's doing and thinking. You're too young to understand... but I
couldn't free myself... Once in, you're like a fly in a bottle... and
your mother never could see— it would have killed her..." He paused,
a hard whistling in his throat. "Only I can't see you caught in the
same trap." His dry wooden fingers tightened about Dick's fist. "Keep
free— that's what I wanted to tell you. I've tried to do what good I
could in the parish; but I can't die lying— for any one."

Dick heard a hurried sweep of skirts and his name breathed low.
His mother stood above him, white and tall.

"What have you done? You were told to stay perfectly still."

"I did, mother. It was father—"

She signed to him imperiously and he scrambled to his feet.
Mr. Thaxter turned his eyes toward them. "Let him stay, Margaret. I
wanted..."

"Later, dearest. You're too tired..." Dicky felt her hand on
his shoulder, again so coercingly strong. She steered him to the door,
followed him out and closed it.

"The fever has come on again. It's your fault. You disobeyed
me."

"But, mother, it was father who called to me." Dicky straight-
ened himself, flushing at the injustice. "There were things he wanted
to tell me—"

She uttered a faint sound like a laugh. "My poor boy, he
didn't know what he was telling you. It's the fever!" She lowered her
voice still more. "Your father is delirious... out of his mind," she
whispered with penetrating distinctness.

Mrs. Thaxter did not come down to dinner, and Dick— promoted
to grown-up hours— faced his uncle across the bouvardias and the old

37

Sheffield candlesticks. Uncle Horace talked with a random cheerfulness, pouncing on fresh topics as if they were trying to escape him, and saying occasionally, as he took a second helping: "Look here, old man, where's your appetite?" But Dick could not eat— could hardly listen. He could think only of the mysterious scene at his father's bedside. He longed to confide in Uncle Horace, but, as always happened when his whole soul craved for light on any question, he could not bring himself to name it. For the first time he welcomed the familiar admonition: "How about bedtime?" and fled upstairs on noiseless feet, holding his breath as he crept by his father's inscrutable door. But when he had undressed and slipped into bed his vague fear seemed suddenly precise and close to him. The outer shutters had not been closed, and when he had put out the light the whole black and star-sown night swung in on him. He thrust his head under the blankets, and tried to think of the dogs, of things Uncle Horace had told him, of the boys who were his chums at school— of every homely friendly fact he could recall. But he heard only his father's terrible words, saw only his mother's white rebuking face. At first he had fancied his mother was angry with him; but now he knew better. It was with her husband that Mrs. Thaxter was angry, and if she had believed that he did not know what he was saying her face would not have worn that look. It was perfectly clear to Dicky that his father had been watching for a moment alone with him to entreat him to renounce Christianity. Dicky had always vaguely regretted that Mr. Thaxter was a clergyman— he couldn't have said why, except that they seemed a class apart, intermediate between school-masters and Aunt Elizabeth, but the notion that his father's distress was caused not merely by regret at having entered the Church but by the actual inability to accept its creed— this was indescribably terrifying. Dicky understood now the meaning of Mr. Thaxter's cry to Mrs. Closser— the "I can't! I can't!" which had met her desperate appeal. Of course Mr. Thaxter

38

could not help Mr. Closser when he himself had "doubts"! Dicky's own thoughts on religion had hitherto been vague and careless; but now he felt as if the God his father had denied were looking down on him in wrath from the depths of the winter sky. Fascinated by the sense of that imminent Presence, he tore down the blanket and plunged his gaze into the bottomless whirlpool of stars. The possibility of his father's dying, which had seemed the most dreadful thing conceivable, was as nothing compared to the thought of his lying close by in the darkness, defying the God of those black and sparkling abysses.

"Of course I can't do it— of course I can't," Dicky gasped out to his pillow, as if the sick man, through the thin wall that divided them, were silently and insistently challenging him to join in that awful gesture of defiance...

When he woke the sun was up, the dogs were nuzzling in the snow, and instinctively he wondered if, in Uncle Horace's honour, there would be griddle-cakes for breakfast. But there were no griddle-cakes, and when Dicky came down his uncle had already breakfasted and driven off in the sleigh. Dicky could not learn where he had gone, and could not find his mother, whose room was empty and whose bed looked cold and unslept-in. The fear of the night returned, stranger and more disquieting, like a ghost beheld by day. Dicky resumed his wanderings through the silent house, noticing many small signs of neglect and confusion: the cold hearth in the library, the burnt-out lamps, the withered flowers. It was nearly luncheon time when Uncle Horace came back, and on his nephew's asking where he had been he answered evasively: "Oh, I wanted to give the old mare a spin."

Mrs. Thaxter came down with red lids and a fixed face. She kissed her son and said, without his asking: "Your father seems a little easier," in a voice which sounded as if she had said he was much

39

worse. After luncheon she and her brother went upstairs without seeming to remember Dick, and he began again his aimless roaming. Suddenly he heard sleigh-bells, and Uncle Horace's voice on the stairs. He slipped into the cold drawing-room, and caught through the crack of the door Dr. Lafford's genial tones in the hall. The voices dwindled up the stairs, and Dicky stood in the window staring out at the clergyman's sleigh, which revolved round and round the snowy circle as though it marked the time on a great white dial.

"Dick," said Uncle Horace suddenly behind him, "your mother wants you to come up.""

"To father? Does he want to see me?""

Dick's joy fell at the sight of his uncle's face, which looked swollen and solemn, like a school-boy's after he has been up for a

"Yes. Come.""

They mounted the stairs in silence, and Uncle Horace pushed Dick into the room.

Near the bed knelt Dr. Lafford, murmuring familiar words in a strange voice—the kind of chanting voice that belonged with a surplice.

"Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me... Lead me in Thy truth and teach me; for Thou art the God of my salvation... Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of Glory shall come in...""

While this went on, Dick was aware of a stir at the other end of the room. The table with the shaded lamp had been cleared of tubes and glasses; a white cloth with a lacy edge was spread on it, and Mrs. Thaxter, some pale flowers in her hand, moved about it with lowered lids. Presently candle-light gleamed on silver surfaces, and Dr. Lafford, murmuring: "Spare me, that I may recover strength before I go hence," rose

40

and passed into the room beyond. Old Badger, discovered under the bed, was coaxed out by Uncle Horace and could be heard nosing and whining insistently outside the door. In a moment Dr. Lafford reappeared in surplice and stole, sheltering something in the curve of his large hands. Mrs. Thaxter, Uncle Horace, the nurse and Hannah were on their knees; Mr. Thaxter's face was steady and still. Dr. Lafford approached the bed, his voice sounding like an organ with the soft pedal on.

"Take, eat, this is my Body which was broken for thee"—
Dick, cowering against his mother's skirts, saw the Rector of St.
Helena's bend above the bed, and then slowly pass from one to the other
of the kneeling figures.

"This is my Blood which was shed for thee... unto Everlasting Life..."

Again the circle was completed, and Dick heard a low gasp from
his mother. She rose to her feet, pulling him up with her. He looked
at the bed and saw that the nurse was gently lifting up his father. Mr.
Thaxter's eyes seemed to seek him, and Dicky stole nearer. He felt his
mother at his side.

"George," he heard her whisper.

Mr. Thaxter put out his hand with a seeking motion like a
blinded animal's.

"Dick, I want you... to know..." His lids dropped and he
lifted them with an effort. This is peace, he thought. The nurse let
him down and he lay staring. His wife burst into inaudible sobs.

"Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant..." Dr. Lafford began
again beside the bed; and Uncle Horace led Dicky from the room. Old
Badger, lurking on the landing, jumped up and covered him with kisses.

43

"That's a fine line, my boy:

'Great silences like snow-fields in the night'.

"There's great beauty of feeling... you've felt it, haven't you? It was that kind of a night when he went?" Mr. Silmore's eyes seemed to swim up against the glasses like a pair of benevolent fish.
"I believe you're going to write some day," he said.

After that he began to criticize in detail, pointing out lame grammar and mixed metaphors, and expounding an elementary theory of metric based on classical rules. The next day he lent Dick a treatise on English prosody, which was too dull and technical to hold his attention, and soon afterward a volume of Rossetti, and two or three of Browning, which loosed all the sleeping ardours of his soul. How far he had travelled since the day when he had shouted Horatius into his grandmother's trumpet, and thought that poetry!

He was seized with a frenzy of production, and for the next few months poured out poem after poem. He did not show them all to Mr. Silmore: he knew instinctively that some were not worth showing. And even those he submitted did not always meet with his tutor's approval. Some were more echoes of Dick's last reading, and the most original were unluckily the least successful. Dick himself was conscious of struggling confusedly with the twofold problem of having very little to say and yet being hampered by that little. What he instinctively wanted was simply to run splendid words together; but his thread of meaning was always either too thick to string them on, or too tenuous to bear their weight. He had hoped for help from his tutor, but Mr. Silmore's criticisms were disappointingly vague, and his help consisted chiefly in handing his pupil more poetry to read. "Don't be discouraged— you've got to go through an imitative period," he said, and quoted Stevenson on the seductive ape. But Dick resented the thought of not being self-sufficient,

44

and tore up in a passion whatever Mr. Silmore found reminiscent. His
childish habit of continuous improvised narrative had been broken up by
the incessant promiscuities of school life, and his yearning for self-
expression was now lyrical and intermittent. But the attempt to attach
a definite meaning to his words seemed to take from them their old pow-
er, as though they were captive magicians who could not perform their
rites under strange stars. Vaguely he divined that there must be formu-
las to compel them; but he groped for one in vain, and Mr. Silmore did
not even seem to suspect his need.

The tutor's palliative was still to pour out more literature;
and as his offerings to Dick reflected all the twists of his own random
reading, his pupil found himself breathlessly navigating from the icy
mountains of the Sagas to the coral strand of Sanskrit fable. It was an
enchanted voyage, with all the mystery, the irrelevance, the facile
fore-shortenings of travels performed in dreams; and when Dick, later,
came upon Faust's cry:

"O wär ein Wunderteppich mein,"

he said to himself that he would not have exchanged Mr. Silmore's wonder-
carpet for all the kingdoms of the world. At the time, however, he seem-
ed to get comparatively little from most of the books forever dropping
from the tutor's tree of knowledge. They were too unrelated to each
other, or he was too ignorant to supply the links; and when he tried to
follow up any line of enquiry Mr. Silmore always put him off. If he
asked about the Battle of Brunanburh his tutor would say: "Ah, but
Theocritus, my dear boy— not another day must pass without your begin-
ning Theocritus;" and when Dick had absorbed enough of Theocritus to
want to know something more about Greek magic and Syracusan customs, Mr.
Silmore, looking as surprised as if he had never heard of Sicily or its
poet, would take down another vellum-covered volume and murmur: "My

45

dear Richard, I've a treat for you— I'm going to introduce you to
Novalis."

From this phase of bewilderment he was drawn by being offered
the editorship of the school magazine. The unforeseen tribute to his
scholarship steadied him and gave him a clearer view of his case. He
found he had opinions without number and a vehement desire to express
them. He initiated his new career by an essay on "Style" beginning:
"No one who cannot feel the irresistible beauty of such a line as

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more,
quite irrespective of either the rhythm or the meaning of its context,
should consider himself entitled to express an opinion on the subject of
English verse." He was especially pleased with the use of the word
"context", and also with the fact that the line he had chosen had really
no independent meaning, and was therefore a perfect example of the kind
of metrical sufficiency he was dimly trying to define to himself and ex-
plain to others. But he found it hard to finish his article, and when
he began to write on other questions he discovered that his opinions,
though numerous and emphatic, never carried him very far into his sub-
ject. It was as though he had chanced on a little clearing in a virgin
forest, with innumerable paths that ran a few yards into the jungle and
then stopped. Whichever way his curiosity led him, he soon brought up
against impenetrable barriers; and gradually his didactic ardour flagged,
and with it his editorial zeal. The next year a more efficient boy
succeeded him as editor, and for a while he gave up writing.

Mr. Silmore's library contained few scientific works; but one
day, in the room of another master, Dick picked up a book called
"Primitive Culture". He had never before speculated about beginnings:
the centre of things was too rich to leave time for a thought of their
periphery. But here were new channels for his straining imagination, and

47

VI.

Mrs. Thaxter was still living at the Rectory when Dick went
home the following winter for the holidays. The new rector, who was a
bachelor, preferred to board with one of his parishioners till a sister
from California should come and keep house for him. The sister was not
to arrive till the following summer, and Mrs. Thaxter welcomed the sug-
gestion that she should remain in the Rectory. Eventually she was to
hire a small house in New York, and she and Dick were to spend their
summers with Grandma Boole at Stonington; and these last months under
their own roof were full of a poignant sweetness. To mother & son.

Mr. Thaxter's death had brought them nearer to each other, or
had at least made Dick feel himself of more importance to his mother,
who asked his opinion of people and things, and consulted him about
household matters, quite as if he had been grown-up. He began to see
that under her composed exterior there trembled an anxious vacillating
spirit; and his childish vision of her as a serene domestic divinity was
replaced by the image of a kind of older sister as pitifully inexperi-
enced as sisters, in a brother's estimation, always are.

Uncle Wayne and Aunt Lucy were at Brown Towers, where Uncle
Horace presently joined them. He had been travelling abroad, and seemed
bigger, handsomer and more experienced than ever. Grandma Boole, who
had gone to town to meet him on his arrival, made arch allusions to a
lady on the steamer, and Dick overheard Aunt Lucy saying to his mother:
"Wayne doesn't approve of these endless flirtations". These innuendoes
gave the finishing touch to Uncle Horace's romantic figure, and when, on

48

leaving, he said mysteriously to Mrs. Thaxter: "You'd better address
me at my club—I shall be a good deal on the move," Dick stored the
phrase for future use. At this stage in his career it was his fixed in-
tention, when he grew up, to model himself on Uncle Horace.

Mr. Thaxter, who had divided his property equally between his
wife and son, had appointed Uncle Wayne and Uncle Horace as executors, and
as Dick's guardians till his majority. Mrs. Thaxter's share of the
estate was bequeathed unconditionally, but as she had never occupied
herself with business it seemed to all concerned not only natural but
fitting that she should leave the management of her property to her son's
guardians. This was made clear to Dick in the course of several busi-
ness talks between the gentlemen. Mrs. Thaxter protested that she was
too ignorant to take part in these talks, and Uncle Horace did not seem
to think her presence necessary; but Uncle Wayne nervously declined to
assume any responsibility unless she authorized it, and she sat holding
her son's hand, murmuring "Yes, yes" when it seemed to be expected, and
listening with distant eyes in which Dick saw the lingering reflection
of complicated embroidery stitches.

Uncle Horace took—as one would have known— an easy lordly
view of the questions that came up, saying: "Hang it, why not pocket
the loss, and re-invest?" or: "I think the tenant's certainly entitled
to improvements," in a tone that made Uncle Wayne's objections seem meti-
culous and fussy. But Uncle Wayne had a better mastery of details and
a clearer head for figures, and Dick noticed that several times Uncle
Horace was brought up short, and ended the argument by saying with a
touch of condescension: "Oh, well, it's a small matter: have it your
way if you like." Between them they gave Dick an impression of "busi-
ness" as something tortuous and treacherous with which the uninitiated
had best not meddle; and he shared his mother's relief when these dis-

49

cussions were over, and her satisfaction in the thought that their ma-
terial welfare was in the hands of two such counsellors.

But if Uncle Wayne retained his prestige as a man of business
he was losing it, in Dick's eyes, as a representative of culture. A
great deal had always been made— chiefly by Aunt Lucy — of Uncle
Wayne's literary tastes and the importance of his library; but to Dick,
fresh from Mr. Silmore's atmosphere, the Brown Towers library was merely
an odd agglomeration of dead books, and Uncle Wayne's culture a little
tray-full of fossil "specimens". Dick understood now why his father had
smiled down on his thin finger-tips when Uncle Wayne quoted "Marco
Bozzaris" and "the Culprit Fay"; and the remembrance of that smile
brought up the thought of Mr. Thaxter's own books. He had read little
in the last years, but there were many volumes in the library, and
though Dick had thoroughly explored the lower shelves he had neglected
the upper, which were out of reach, and showed only an arid waste of
theology.

The next morning he borrowed the house-maid's ladder and began
the attack. He had just effected a breach in a wall of black sermons,
and was in the act of rescuing from behind it some imprisoned volumes
on which he had detected the names of Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Helmholtz
and Clifford, when he heard his mother's voice.

"Dick! What are you looking for?" She spoke with an authori-
ty that carried him back to the days before his father's death. But now
he was a bigger boy.

"Nothing in particular. I just thought I'd like to go through
father's books."

She hesitated. "I'm not sure your father would have wanted
you to—yet."

He squatted down on the ladder and faced her. "Why?"

50

"Well... You're hardly old enough... There are books one oughtn't to read till one knows enough to understand them."

"How can I tell if I can understand them till I've tried?"

"You might _think_ you did— and then later you'd find they'd led you into all sorts of mistakes that you would have been spared if you'd been less ignorant."

Dick did not consider the contingency worth discussing. "I mean to know everything," he simply stated.

His mother ignored this. "There were certain books that even your father thought it better not to read, because he found they had a bad influence on him— I mean intellectually. That's why he put them away behind the others." She held out her hand. "Let me see the one you've taken out."

Reluctantly he proffered it. " 'Spencer. First Principles.' I shouldn't think there could be anything wrong about that. But it's so hard to tell. And it was at the back of the shelf. Oh, Dick, it may be unsettling!" She kept the book in her hand.

"What's unsettling?"

He knew she hated to be asked meanings, but he didn't care.
She lowered her voice to say: "Unchristian."

"The kind of books Mr. Closser read?"

She nodded. "You know he's most unhappy. He had to take a
place in a steamboat office, on a wretched salary, and he's married a
horrid woman whom his mother can't receive." She added firmly: "Come
down, Dick. I want you to respect your father's wishes."

Dick obeyed— but her last words had given him his cue and he
faced her stubbornly.

"Father's wish was that I should know things."

"Whatever it was right for you to know."

vigils that the first pages of the great work seemed so disappointingly dull. He had flown through Tylor with an ease and understanding that which gave him a gratifying sense of superiority— since he knew that boys of his age didn't usually *such* commonly care for that kind of book. But here he was in a denser element. There was nothing to rouse curiosity or stimulate the fancy in this close analysis of minute differences between certain kinds of plants and animals. He tried to stiffen his languid attention and push on, but the sober serried phrases continued to succeed each other, page by page, and when he had reached a paragraph beginning: "Indefinite variability is a much more common result of changed conditions than definite variability, and has probably played a more important part in the formation of our domestic races," the book dropped from his hand, and irresistibly there pressed upon his drowsy eyes the vision of the sun-gilt snow he had tramped through that morning, and of hemlock-tops incised upon the blue. He *before to* slipped down deliciously under the warm bed-clothes, *and* then, ashamed of his weakness, raised himself and opened the other book.

"Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth Month midnight,
Over the sterile sands...."

Dick *sat* started upright and propped the book against his knees.

"Soothe! soothe! soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind, embracing
and lapping, every one close,
But my love soothes not me, not me..."

Never had words shaken out such wild lights, *beat* on him in waves so multitudinous. It was the swing of the sea itself, the sea of the poem tirelessly tossing, and he the child, awed, melted, trembling, crying out, "Oh, if I am to have so much, let me have more!" and feeling all over him (as if his veins were ears) the deep mysterious answer,

56

high over his window. He jumped up, got into his dressing-gown, throw
back the shutters and laid the book upon the window sill. The silver
flood fell full on it, pale but clear; and kneeling down, he propped his
elbows on the sill and with straining eyes read on.

BOOK II.

VII.

Dick Thaxter had left his seat on the platform at the end of
Rollins Cleaver's studio, and striding, manuscript in hand, across the
slippery rugs and animal-skins with curled-up parchmenty edges, had with-
drawn into the deep bay of the western window. There, for a few minutes,
he stood looking down West Fifty-sixth Street at the remote silver blur
of the "River", while behind him the talk continued to subside and flare
up again excitedly.

It was the only way of getting himself in hand: he had to turn
his back on his twittering exclamatory row of listeners while the great
flood of passion and rapture rolled its first surges over him.

He was hardly aware of what the others were saying: his whole
being still quivered and danced on the high tide of emotion which the
reading aloud of his play had produced in him. And as he stood there,
staring westward, the tin roofs, the ventilating-pipes, the sallow walls
trellised with fire-escapes, the factory chimneys and black riverside

structures beyond, were lit by a glory of which the extravagant red sunset seemed but an ineffectual afterglow. What a world it was to be young in!

A voice was lifted authoritatively behind him: the drawling imperious voice of Miss Inez Clay of the Liberty Theatre.

"It's great— it's perfectly *great*," she proclaimed, with a fulness of emphasis and a poverty of epithet that might have once have made him smile; but now her words set the surges rolling again, rolling so high and fast that they choked his utterance and dashed their dazzling spray into his eyes.

"Come and be petted, infant prodigy! Don't stay over there sucking your thumb in the corner!""

Lorry Marsh's light touch fell cheerfully on the dramatist's shoulder; and the dramatist, with a helpless school-boy laugh, turned to face the group beneath the platform.

They rose as he approached, sending out a general blast of praise that burned his face as if he had plunged it into the core of the fiery sunset, becoming, in their kindly indiscriminate zeal to approve, to encourage, to exalt, almost his antagonists, his tormenters.

Another palm, bear-like and ponderous, descended on his shoulder.

""My God, Dick, it's— it's *genius!*" came in broken accents from his host, the big shambling Rollins Cleaver; and at the word Richard's tension was relieved by a burst of laughter.

"Oh, you illimitable ass!" he exclaimed; and was able, a moment later, to ask quite naturally: "Where the deuce have you gone and put the cigarettes?"

"The cigarettes?" Rollins stood vacantly before him, unable to re-adjust his shaken soul to the transition; but a quicker spirit,

58

from the edge of the circle, directed a white hand toward the poet.

"Here, Mr. Thaxter— and the matches..."

It was the thin girl with grey eyes and a long face who had come with Inez Clay, vaguely introduced by her as Miss Something— "artistic": nearly every one in Rollins Cleaver's set was artistic.

As Thaxter bent his head to the match she struck, he noticed, from the height of his two-and-twenty years, what amere slip of a girl she was— then turned away and forgot her.

Miss Clay surged up to him, plumed, perfumed, strung with exotic beads, and imperfectly hooked in the back.

"I don't know about genius— it's theatre, anyway," she said, giving him what she was said to call her "Spanish look" as she lit her cigarette from his.

Again the dazzle of the spray was in his eyes. Poetry he knew it was— had known more and more distinctly as he read; but *theatre*! And who better than Inez Clay was able to pronounce such a point?

"I mean to tell Abe Garbish so—" "Miss Clay spoke the name of the dread impresario as familiarly as if he were in her pay instead of her being in his. "I mean to tell him I'm going to do Ireen!"

"I-re-*ne*," a low voice fluttered in her ear; and the actress looked down with her large smile at the thin eager girl who had come to the studio in her train.

"I-*what?* As if I hadn't had a friend for years called Ireen Stickles!"

"Yes— but in the play..."

"Mercy! Here's a young lady who knows more about the stage than I do! Mr. Thaxter, my friend Miss Lansing says I ought to call your heroine Ireeny."

She gave the girl a good-natured push toward the middle of the

59

circle, while Cleaver, Lorry Marsh and the other young men waited laugh-
ingly for Richard's answer. But he did not see Miss Lansing's protest-
ing face, or hear her faint murmur— "Oh, I only meant in Greek"; he was
benumbed by the discovery that his hoped-for interpreter, as to whose
erudition he had no illusions, but on whose artistic sensibility his
very life depended—that the actress to whose lips his verse was to be
entrusted had heard him read aloud the four acts of his play, charged
with every shade of rhythmical significance which the subtlest gradation
of emphasis could convey, without noticing whether the heroine's name
had two syllables or three! The towering future seemed to crumble at
his feet and he dared not turn and face the eyes around him.

"Well, it's Greek to me, anyhow!" Miss Clay laughed; and
mounting to the platform, tossing aside her feathered hat and running
her untidy hands through the large dyed masses of her hair, she burst
out:

Richard's heart was beating violently. It was the first
time he had heard his verse spoken by trained lips; and the very fact
that Miss Clay remembered the lines after one hearing seemed such proof
of their power that it made him deaf to her displacements of stress and
her vulgarity of intonation, and left him only the immense new sensation
of getting far enough away from his work to see its outline. Was it
really *his*, the creature of his brain and blood, this burning shape
which the actress's lips built up before him into a presence so palpable

62

hearsal." Her lustrous eyes rested on Dick, and she let him have a deep draft of them. When she looked at him like that, how could he ask her when she meant to speak to Garbish? He said to himself that he would stop at the florist's and send her some roses... But on the threshold she paused to sign to him through the general explosion of farewells.

"I sha'n't forget; but you know I'm all balled up with rehearsals. We bring out 'Mint Julep' on the fifth. But come round behind any night." She glanced over her shoulder. "Rose Lansing— I'll drop you at the office if you like."

There was a burst of laughter at the other end of the room, in the shadow of a small worm-eaten balcony which Rollins had described as "the minstrels' gallery" when "Art in the Home" had published carbon prints of his studio.

"What's the matter?" Miss Clay asked, as the group under the balcony, dispersing, exposed to view the grizzled head and sallow face of a short shabbily dressed man who sat leaning back with closed eyes in a Venetian arm-chair. He opened his eyes, looked about him and said: "Well?"

"Caspar's slept through it all like a babe," some one pro-claimed, and the laugh broke out again.

"Wake up, Caspar— apologize to your host!"

"It's the author he ought to apologize to!"

"And the interpreter! Brace up, Levick! Here are Thaxter and Miss Clay waiting for an explanation."

The grizzled man stood up, and as he came forward Dick was struck by the Socratic ruggedness of his ugly swarthy face. He looked like a Pompeian bronze with the lava-crust on it. His small eyes travelled from Dick to the actress, and he began, in a shy ceremonious voice: "My dear Miss Clay, my dear Mr. Thaxter, I beg you to believe

63

that what seemed slumber to the profane was merely a state of ecstatic contemplation."

"That's all right, Caspar! I guess you won't go to sleep when you see me in 'Mint Julep'," the actress called back from the threshold, while Dick, embarrassed, shook Levick's hand with a vague laugh. He remembered Rollins' saying, when the reading of "Ravenna" had been first projected: "I want to be sure of getting Caspar Levick to hear it— there's not a better judge going—" and it was a sharp blow to his vanity to know that Levick, whose critical work he himself profoundly admired, should have been soothed to slumber by his verse. But Levick's evident embarrassment distressed him, and he longed to find a humorous answer, and could not. The blow had cut too deep.

"Rose Lansing! Ain't you coming? I've got a taxi waiting," the actress insisted; but Miss Lansing, slipping her hand through Levick's arm, replied: "No, thanks; Mr. Levick's going to walk down to the office with me. We've got a lot to talk about."

Dick was relieved when Levick vanished in her wake: the episode cast an absurdly big shadow on his triumph.

Rollins, who was not always perceiving, saw his friend's perturbation, and said, when they were left alone: "Levick will be frightfully cut up. He was keen to hear you, I know—but he's no good till after dark. He writes all night, and spends half the day at the 'Lisener' office. You must let him have the manuscript some day."

Dick gave an ironic laugh: he began to be aware that his nerves were twitching. "Oh, he'll see it at the Liberty, I hope!"

Rollins' wide face lit up. "By George, so he will—I'll back my last dollar on that!"

"Miss Clay has a good deal of influence, I suppose?"

"Oh, she's Garbish's biggest star. It was rather lucky, get-

65

down the transmitter and turned to Dick. "She hasn't got there yet.
After all, the easiest way is to leave the thing at her flat; but I must
rush home and dress for an early dinner. She lives just near here, in
Fifty-ninth Street; I wonder if it would be out of your way—?"

Dick held out his hand for the bag. "Rather not! I'm going
to stretch my legs in the Park."

"All right— thanks." Rollins followed him to the door.
"I sha'n't let the thing rest, you know. I'll be after Inez in a day or
two if you don't hear from her."

They clasped hands on the great event, and Dick, from the
threshold, turned back to say carelessly: "It might be decent to send
her some roses. Who's the best florist near here?"

Rollins gave him the address, and he swung down the long bare
flights, Miss Lansing's purse dangling from his wrist. At the florist's
he selected a tall pyramid of roses, wondered what to write on his card,
inclined a moment to

"A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreathed trellis of a working brain,"
and ended by writing "'s compliments" beneath his name.

He wondered whether he ought to address the offering to Miss
Clay's apartment or the theatre, decided on the theatre, and, as he gave
the clerk the envelope blushed a little (at least inwardly) at the idea
that he might be suspected of intentions of a different nature. For as
soon as Miss Clay ceased to personify his heroine she became, to his un-
sealed eyes, the very incarnation of vulgarity. The roses paid for, he
was turning away when he noticed, in a slender glass, a single gardenia
unfolding its lunar whiteness. He bent to it, and its scent seemed to
catch him in the starry net of a tropic night. He picked it up to carry
to his mother with the announcement of his triumph.

"If you're going to take it with you I'd better do it up," the

66

florist suggested. He wound the flower delicately in jeweller's cotton
and sheathed it with oiled tissue paper. "In this kind of weather
they're as sensitive as babies," he remarked. "Couldn't you put it in
that bag?"

Dick, amused, accepted the suggestion. He meant to deliver
Miss Lansing's property first, and then to go for the long tramp his
lungs were thirsting for; but he could transfer the gardenia to my over-
coat pocket after leaving the bag.

VIII.

He walked up to Fifty-ninth Street through the vivid twilight
and the great subsiding din of the streets. Just such waves of excite-
ment were slowly ebbing in his head, leaving his mind as clear and shi-
ning as sea-washed sands. He handed over the bag to Miss Lansing's
porter, struck eastward and entered the Park.

Darkness had dropped on it from a remote sky hung with the
first stars. The air was windless, but so buoyant that it seemed to bub-
ble at his lips, and as he wound on between black shrubberies and the
bare tracery of trees he had again his old boyish sense of being absorb-
ed into the immense and palpitating night. It was a feeling he had
never been able to define or to trace to its beginning: he knew only
that sometimes, when his individual life was at its tensest, a tremen-
dous hand seemed suddenly to seize and plunge him into the general sea
of being. He abandoned himself now to its mysterious waves, thought and

677

perception dancing on them like straws on the tide, while he pressed on farther into the night. Presently his path wound up one of the little knolls that diversify the level of the Park, and he was confronted by a view of the vast engirdling city springing up to enclose him in sombre rings of flame. The sense of mystic fusion was lost in a shock of recovered personality, and he began to relive the details of the afternoon and to reach forward to their possible results.

He had left Harvard the year before, and the writing of his play had filled the summer and autumn. After a month or two with his grandmother at Stonington he had been carried off by Rollins Cleaver to a camp in Maine, and there, during the crystal days and long fire-scented evenings, the first-fruit of his dreams had ripened. More and more, in his last years at Harvard, the craving for expression had possessed him; but, as at school, he had been distracted by too many contacts and, far more than at school, by the absorbing and confused business of living. His impressions, his ardours, his astonishments, were too numerous and contradictory to be reduced to the pure medium of art; and to satisfy their demand for utterance he had to seek their reflection in the words of others. It was the period of his most ravenous reading: he plunged into books as into a magic prolongation of experience. There were hours when it seemed to him that literature contained all art and all beauty: when the reading of a single phrase was like entering the colonnade of a mighty temple, and each word became a dewdrop reflecting a whole landscape.

Then, in the silence of the northern woods, his own soul began to speak. He had known nothing before like this tidal rush of utterance: it seemed incredible how that the words of others had ever satisfied him! Why should he care if he never saw another book, when he carried a new literature within him? The play was conceived and born in

69

youth, urged her brother and Uncle Wayne to give him, for a little longer,
the benefit of their invaluable experience.

As Dick paused for her reply to his impatient question he was
struck by a change in her face. She looked anxious, and yet ashamed of
showing her anxiety, and even of feeling it.

"You know we're not so very rich, dear," she began.

"Oh, such things are purely relative. I shall never want more
than I've got now."

"Before deciding, I think you ought to know that hereafter we
may have a little less than we've had."

She seemed unable to give any good reason for her fear, but,
gathering that Uncle Wayne thought they should "be prudent", Dick ap-
pealed to the latter for corroboration. He would rather have consulted
his Uncle Horace, who took the larger view, and did not worry about de-
tails, but Horace, on the eve of sailing, had said in his easy postpon-
ing way: "Oh, you'd better talk to Kitterick. I'm rather rushed with
my packing."

Dick, who had been impressed, as a boy, by Uncle Wayne's pow-
ers of exposition, felt sure that a few minutes' talk would clear the
matter up, and prove that his mother's fears were groundless. Uncle
Wayne, as usual, was busy concocting a letter to the papers to denounce
an outrage, and it cost him an effort to turn from this civic preoccupa-
tion to the narrower question of his nephew's dividends; but after a
perceptible moment of slightly aggrieved surprise he declared himself
ready to give the necessary enlightenment. His explanations, however,
served only to increase Dick's confusion. He acknowledged that his
nephew's income had diminished, and, when pressed for reasons, furnished
them with volubility; but his statements, though lucid and even impress-
ive when considered separately, seemed irrelevant as answers to Dick's

70

questions, and it was plain that Uncle Wayne resented his nephew's perception of the fact.

"I can talk business to you as much as you like, but I can't give you the brains to understand me," he grumbled; and Aunt Lucy, entering at this point with the unmistakable air of having come only from the other side of the door, said severely: "Your uncle's been rather feverish these last two days, Richard. Couldn't you put off your talk? Everybody always seems to put everything on your uncle."