 INTRODUCTION It was by a strange irony of fate that we found ourselves reunited for a summer's outing in a French garden in July 1914. With the exception of the youngster we had hardly met since the days of our youth. We were a party of unattached people, six men, two women, your humble servant, and the youngster who was an outsider. With the exception of the latter we had all gone to school or college or dancing class together and kept up a sort of superficial acquaintance ever since, that sort of relation in which people know something of one another's opinions and absolutely nothing of one another's real lives. There was the doctor who had studied long in Germany and became an authority on mental diseases, developed a distaste for therapeutics, and a passion for research in the laboratory. There was the lawyer who knew no international law as he knew his Greek alphabet and hated a courtroom. There was the violinist who was known the world over in musical sets, everywhere except in the concert room. There was the journalist who had traveled into almost as many queer places as Richard Burton, seen more wars and followed more callings. There was the sculptor, the fame of whose greater father had almost paralyzed a pair of good modelers' hands. There was the critic, whose friends believed that in him the world had lost a great romancer, but whom a combination of hunger and laziness and a pronus to think that nothing but genius was worthwhile had condemned to be a mere breadwinner, but a breadwinner who squeezed a lot out of life and who fervently believed that in his next incarnation he would really be it. Then there was me, and of the other two women, one was a trained nurse and the other a divorcee. And well, none of us really knew just what she had become, but we knew that she was very rich and very handsome and had a leaning towards some sort of new religion. As for the youngster, he was the son of an old chum of the doctor, his warden fact, and his hobby was flying. Our reunion after so many years was a rather pretty story. In the summer of 1913 the doctor and the divorcee, who had lost sight of one another for twenty years, met by chance in Paris, her ex-husband had been a college friend of the doctor. They saw a great deal of one another in the lazy way that people who really love France and are done sightseeing can do. One day it occurred to them to take a day's trip into the country, as unattached people now and then can do. They might have gone out in a car, but they chose the railroad with a walk at the end, on the principle that no one can know and love a country who does not press its earth beneath his feet. The doctor would probably have said, lay his head upon its bosom. By accident they missed a train. They found themselves at sunset of a beautiful day and a small village, and with no possible way of getting back to Paris that night, unless they chose to walk fifteen miles to the nearest railway junction. After a long day's tramp that seemed too much of a good thing. So they looked about to find a shelter for the night. The village, it was only a hamlet, had no hotel, no café even. Finally an old peasant said that old mother-servant, a widow, living a mile up the road, had a big house, lived alone, and could take them in, if she wanted to. He could not say that she would. It seemed to them worth trying, so they started off in high spirits to tramp another mile. Deciding that, if worse became worse, well, the night was warm, they could sleep by the roadside under the stars. It was near the hour when it should have been dark, but in France at that season one can almost read out of doors until nine, when they found the place. With some delay the gate and the stone wall was opened, and they were face to face with the old widow. It was a long argument, but the doctor had a winning way, and at the end they were taken in. More they were fed in the big clean kitchen, and then each was sheltered in a huge room with cement floor, scrupulously clean with the quaint old furniture, and the queer appointments of a French farmhouse. The next morning when the doctor threw open the heavy wooden shutters to his window, he gave a whistle of delight to find himself looking out into what seemed to be a French paradise. And better than that he had never asked. It was a wilderness, way off in the distance he got glimpses of broken walls with all kinds of green things creeping and climbing and hanging on for life. Inside the walls there was a riot of flowers, hollyhocks and jiriflees, dahlias and flocks, poppies and huge daisies, and roses everywhere, even climbing old tree trunks, and sprawling all over the garden front of the rambling house. The edges of the paths had green borders that told of Corbelle d'Agent in midwinter and violets in early spring. He leaned out and looked along the house. It was just a jumble of all sorts of buildings which had evidently been added at different times. It seemed to be on half a dozen elevations, and no two windows were of the same size, while here and there an outside staircase slid up into a loft. Once he had taken it in he dressed like a flash. He could not get out into that garden quickly enough to pray the widow to serve coffee under a huge tree in the center of the garden, about the trunk of which a rude table had been built and it was there that the divorcee found him when she came out simply glowing with enthusiasm. The house, the garden, the widow, the day, everything was perfect. While they were taking their coffee poured from the earthen jug in the thick old ruin cups the divorcee said, How I'd love to own a place like this. No one would ever dream of building such a house. It has taken centuries of accumulated needs to expand it into being. If one tried to do the thing all at once it would look too on purpose. This place looks like a happy combination of circumstances which could not help itself. Well, why not? It might be possible to have just this. Let's ask the widow. So when they were sitting over their cigarettes and the old woman was clearing the table the doctor looked her over and considered the road of approach. She was a rugged old woman, well on toward Aidae, with a bronzed weather-worn face, abundant coarse-gray hair, a heavy shapeless figure, but a firm bearing in spite of her rounded back. As far as they could see they were alone on the place with her. The doctor decided to jump right into the subject. Mother, he said, I suppose you don't want to sell this place. The old woman eyed him a moment with her sharp dark eyes. But yes, Monsieur, she replied, I should like it very well, only it's not possible. No one would be willing to pay my price. Oh, no, no one, no indeed. Well, said the doctor, how do you know that? What's the price? Is it permitted to ask? The old woman hesitated, started to speak, changed her mind, and turned away muttering, oh, no, Monsieur, it is not worth the trouble. No one would ever pay my price. The doctor jumped up laughing, re-enacted her, took her by the arm, and led her back to the table. Now, come, come, mother, he remarked, let us hear the price at any rate, I'm so curious. Well, said the widow, it is like this. I would like to get for it what my brother paid for it when he bought it at the death of my father. It was to settle with the rest of the heirs. We were eight then. They are all dead but me, but no, no one will ever pay that price. So I might as well let it go to my niece. She is the last. She doesn't need it. She has land enough. The cultivator has a hard time these days. It is as much as I can do to make the old place feed me and pay the taxes. And I am getting old. But no one will ever pay the price. And what will my brother think of me when the bone-deer calls me if I sell it for less than he paid? As for that, I don't know what he'll say to me for selling it at all. But I'm getting old to live here alone. All alone. But no one will ever pay the price. So am I as well die here. And then my brother can't blame me. But it is lonely now. And I am growing too old. Besides, I don't suppose you want to buy it. What would a gentleman do with this? Well, said the doctor, I don't really know what a gentleman would do with it. And he added under his breath in English. But I know mighty well what this fellow could do with it if he could get it. And he lighted a fresh cigarette. The keen old eyes had watched his face. I don't suppose you want to buy it, she persisted. Well, responded the doctor, how can a poor man like me say if you don't care to name your price, and unless that price is within reason? After some minutes of hesitation the old woman drew a deep breath. Well, she said, with the determination of one who expected to be scoffed at, I won't take a sue less than my brother paid. Come on, mother, said the doctor. What did your brother pay? No nonsense, you know. Well, if you must know it was five thousand francs. And I can't, and won't sell it for less. There now. It was a long silence. The doctor and his companion avoided one another's eyes. After a while he said in an undertone in English, by Jove I'm going to buy it. No, no, remonstrated his companion, her eyes gazing down the garden vista, to where the wisteria and clematis and flaming trumpet-flower flaunted on the old wall. I am going to have it. I thought of it first. I want it. So do I, laughed the doctor, never wanted anything more in all my life. For how long, she asked, would a rover like you want this? A rover yourself. And you? Besides, what difference does it make? How long I want it, since I want it now. I want to give a party. Haven't given a party since—since class day. The divorcee sighed. Still gazing down the garden, she said quietly. How well I remember. Ninety-two. Then there was another silence, before she turned to him suddenly. See here, all this is very irregular. So that being the case, why shouldn't we buy it together? We know each other. Neither of us will ever stay here long. One summer peace will satisfy us, though it is lovely. Be a sport. We'll draw lots as to who is to have the first party. The doctor waved the old woman away. Her keen eyes watched too sharply. Then, with their elbows on the table, they had a long and heated argument. Probably they were more things touched on than the garden. Who knows. At the end of it the divorcee walked away down that garden vista, and the old woman was called, and the doctor took her at her word. And out of that arrangement emerged the scheme which resulted in our finding ourselves, a year later within the old walls of that French garden. Of course a year's work had been done on the interior, and doctor and divorcee had scoured the department for old furniture. Water had been brought a great distance. A garage had been built with servants quarters over it. There were no servants in the house. But the look of the place, we were assured, had not been changed, and both doctor and divorcee declared that they had had the year of their lives. Well, if they had, the place showed it. But as fate would have it, the second night we sat down to dinner in that garden, news had come of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Charles-Louis-Joseph-Marie d'Autriche-Estée, whom the tragic death of Prince Rudolph, almost exactly twenty-four years and six months earlier to a day, had made Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, and the tone of our gathering was changed. From that day the party threatened to become a little bedlam in the garden, a rostrum. In the earlier days it did not make so much difference. The talk was good. We were a traveled group. And what would the reminiscences of people and places and the scandals of courts, it was far from being dull. But as the days went on and the war-clouds began to gather, the overcharged air seemed to get on the nerves of the entire group. And instead of the peaceful summer we had counted upon, every one of us seemed to live in his own particular kind of fever. Every one of us down to the youngster had fixed ideas, deep-set theories, and convictions as different as our characters, our lives, our callings, and our faiths. We were all cosmopolitan Americans, but ready to spread the eagle, if necessary, and all of us except the violinist of New England Extraction, which means really of English blood, and that will show when the screws are put on. We have never thought of the violinist as not one of us, but he was really of Polish origin. His great-grandfather had been a companion of Adam Zartarisky in the uprising of 1830, and had gone to the States when the amnesty was not extended to his chief after that rebellion. Holland's last had been stamped out. As well as I can remember, it was the night of August 6 that the first serious dispute arose. England had declared war. All our male servants had left us except two American chauffeurs and a couple of old, outside men. Two of our four cars and all of our horses but one had been requisitioned. That did not upset us. We had taken on the wives of some of the men, among them Angile, the pretty wife of one of the French chauffeurs, and her two-month-old baby into the bargain. We still had two cars. That, at a pinch, would carry the party, and we still had one mount in case of necessity. The question rose as to whether we should break up and make for the nearest port while we could, or stick it out. It had finally been agreed not to evacuate yet. One does not often get such a chance to see a country at war, and we were all ardent spectators, and all unattached. I imagine not one of us had at the time any idea of being useful. The stupendousness of it all had not dawned on any of us, unless it was the doctor. But after the decision of stick had been passed unanimously, the critic, who was a bit of a sentimentalist, and if he were anything else, was a Norman Angolite, stuck his hands in his pockets and remarked, After all, it's perfectly safe to stay, especially now that England's coming in. You think so? said the doctor. Sure, smiled the critic. The Germans will never cross the French frontier this time. This is not 1870. Won't they, and isn't it? replied the doctor sharply. They never can get by Verden and Belfort. Never said they could remark the doctor, with a tone as near to a sneer as a good-natured host can allow himself. They'll invade fast enough. I know what I'm talking about. You don't mean to tell me, said the critic, that a nation like Germany—I'm talking now about the people, the country that has been the hotbed of socialism—will stand for a war of invasion? That, started the doctor off. He flayed the theorists, the people who reasoned with their emotions and not their brains, the mob that looked at externals, and never saw the fires beneath, the throng that was unable to understand anything outside its own horizon, the mass that pretended to read the history of the world, and because it changed its clothes, imagined that it had changed its spirit. Why, I've lived in Germany, he cried. I was educated there. I know them. I have the misfortune to understand them. They'll stick together and socialism go hang, as long as there is a hope of victory. Confederation was cemented in the blood of victory. It can only be dissolved in the blood of defeat. They are a great, a well-disciplined, and an obedient people. One would think you admired them in their military system, remarked a critic, a bit crestfallen at the attack. I may not, but I'll tell you one sure thing. If you want a good circus, you've got to train your animals. The Kaiser has been a cooking-rigmaster. Of course, this got a laugh, and though both critic and journalist tried to strike fire again with words like democracy and civilization, the doctor had cooled down and nothing could stir him again that night. Still, the discord had been sown. I suppose the dinner-table talk was only a sample of what was going on in that month all over the world. It did not help matters that as the days went on we all realized that the doctor had been right, that France was to be invaded, not across her own proper frontier, but across unprotected Belgium. This seemed so atrocious to most of us that indignation could only express itself in abuse. It was not a night that the dinner-table talk was not bitter. You see, the doctor did not expect the world ever to be perfect, did not know that he wanted it to be, believed in the struggle. On the other hand, the critic, and in a certain sense the journalist, in spite of their experiences, were more or less utopian, and the sculptor and the violinist purely spectators. No need to go into the details of the heated arguments. They were only the echo of what all the world that had cradled itself into the belief that a great war among the great nations had become, for economic as well as humanitarian reasons, impossible, were, I imagine, at this time saying. As nearly as I can remember it was on August 20th that the climax came. Lees had fallen, the English expedition had landed, and was marching on Belgium. A victorious German army had goose-tipped into the defenseless Brussels and was sweeping out towards the French frontier. The French advance into Alsace had been a blunder. The doctor remarked that the English had landed twelve days too late, and the journalist drew a graphic and purely imaginary picture of the pathos of the Belgians, straining their eyes in vain to the west for the coming of the men in khaki, and unfortunately he let himself expatiate a bit on German methods. The spark touched the doctor off. By Jove, he said, all you sentimentalists, read the history of the world with your intellects and your breeches' pockets. War is not a game for babies. It is war. It is not sport. You chaps think war can be prevented. All I ask you is, why hasn't it been prevented? In every generation that we know anything about, there have been some pretty fine men who have been of your opinion, a rasmus for one, and how many others. But since the generations have contented themselves with talking, and not talked war out of the problem, why I can't see, for my part, that Germany's way is not as good as any. She is in it to win, and so are all the rest of them. Schools of war, I like that schools of art you chaps talk so much about. It does not make much difference what school one belongs to. The important thing is making good. One would think, so the journalist, that you liked such a war. Well, I don't even know that I can deny that. I would not deliberately choose it. But I'm willing to accept it, and I'm not a bit sentimental about it. I'm not even sure that it was not needed. The world has let the Kaiser sit twenty-five years on a throne announcing himself as God's anointed. His pretensions have been treated seriously by all the democracies of the world, what for? Purely for personal gain. We have come to a pass where there is little a man won't do for personal gain. The business of the world and its diplomacy have all become so complicated and corrupt that a large percentage of the brains of honest mankind are little willing to touch either. We need shaking up all of us. If nothing can make man realize that he was not born to be merely happy and get rich, or to have a fine old time, why such a complete upheaval as this seems to me to be necessary. And for me, if this war can rip off with its shrapnel, the selfishness with which prosperity has encrusted the lucky, if it can explode our false values with its bombs, if it can break down our absurd pretensions with its cannon, all I can say is that Germany will have done missionary work for the whole world, herself included. Before he had done we were all on our feet shouting at him, all but the lawyer who smiled into his coffee-cup. Why, cried the critic and anger, one would think you held a brief for them. I do not, snapped the doctor, but I don't dislike them any more than I do well, catching himself up with a laugh, lots of other people. And you mean to tell me, so the gentle boy, so the divorcee at his elbow, that you calmly face the idea of the hundreds of thousands of men, well and strong to-day, dead to-morrow, the thought of the mothers who have borne their sons in pain and bred them in love, only to fling them before the cannon? For what, after all, are we born, said the doctor? Where we die or when is a trifle, since die we must. But why we die and how is vital? It is not only vital to the man that goes, it is vital to the race. It is the struggle, it is the fight, which no matter what form it takes, makes life worth living. Men struggle for money. Financiers strangle one another at the boss. People look on and applaud in spite of themselves. That is exciting. It is not uplifting. But for men, just like you and me to march out to face death for an idea, for honor, for duty, that very fact ennobles the race. Ah, so the lawyer, I see, the doctor enjoys the drama of life, but he does not enjoy the purely domestic drama. And out of all this, said the train nurse in her level voice, you were leaving the Almighty. He gave us a world full of beauty, full of work, full of interest, and he gave us capacities to enjoy it. And he endowed us with emotions, which make it worth while to live and to die. He gave us simple laws. They are clear enough. They mock sharply the line between good and evil. He left us absolutely free to choose, and behold what man has made of it. I deny the statement, said the doctor. That's easy, left the journalist. I believe, said the doctor, impatiently, that no good comes but through evil. Read your Bible. I don't want to read it with your eyes, replied the journalist, and marched testily down the path towards the house. Well, snapped the doctor, if I read it with yours, I should call on the Almighty to smite this planet with his fires and send a spinning, a flaming brand through space, to annihilation. The great scheme would seem to me a failure. But I don't believe it is. And off he marched in the other direction. The lawyer shrugged his shoulders and suppressed, as well as he could, a smile. The youngster, leaning his elbows on his knees, recited under his breath. And as he sat all suddenly there rolled from where the woman wept upon the sod, Satan's deep voice, O thou unhappy God. Exactly, said the lawyer, what's that? asked the violinist. Only the last three lines of a great little poem by a little great Irishman named Stevens, entitled What Satan Said. After all, said the lawyer, the doctor's probably right, it all depends on one's point of view. And one's temperament, said the violinist, and one's education, said the critic. Just here the doctor came back, and he came back, his smiling self. He made a dash down the path to where the journalist was evidently sulking, went up behind him, threw an arm over his shoulder and led him back into the circle. See here, he said, you are all my guests, I am unreasonably fond of you, even if we can't see life from the same point of view. Man, as an individual, and man as a part of the scheme, are two different things. I asked you down here to enjoy yourselves, not to argue. I apologize all my fault, unpardonable of me. Come now, we have decided to stay as long as we can. We are all interested. It is not every generation that has the honor to sit by and watch two systems meet at the crossroads and dispute the passage to the future. We'll agree not to discuss the ethics of the matter again. If the men marching out there to the frontier can agree to face the canon. And there are as many opinions there as here. Surely we can look on in silence. And on that agreement we all went to bed. But on the following day, as we sat in the garden after dinner, our attempts to keep off the grass were miserably visible. They cast a constraint on the party. Every topic seemed to lead to the forbidden enclosure. It was at a very critical moment that the sculptor, sitting cross-legged on a bench, in a real Elma-Tedema attitude, filled the dangerous paws with. It was in the days of our Lord, 1348, that there happened in Florence, the finest city in Italy. And the violinist, who was leaning against a tree, touched an imaginary mandolin concluding, A Most Terrible Plague. The critic leapt to his feet. A quarking idea, he cried. Mine, mine own, replied the sculptor. I propose that what those who, in the days of the terrible plague, took refuge at the Villa Palmiere, did to pass away the time we who were watching the war approach, as our host says it well, do hear. Let us, instead of disputing, each tell a story after dinner, to calm our nerves, or otherwise. At first everyone hooded. I could never tell a story, objected the divorcee. Of course you can, declared the journalist. Everybody in the world has one story to tell. Sure, exclaimed the lawyer. No embargo on subjects? I don't know, smiled the doctor. There is always the youngster. You go to Blazes, was the youngster's response, and he added, No war stories, draw that line. Then, laughed the doctor, let's make it tales of our own, our native land. And they are the mad arrested. Only when we separated that night each of us carried a sealed envelope containing a numbered slip which decided the question of precedence, and it was agreed that no one but the storyteller should know who was to be the evening's entertainer, while storytelling our arrived with the coffee and cigarettes. The Youngster's story. It happened at midnight. The tale of a bright new home. The daytimes were not ever very bad. Short-handed in the pretty garden, everyone did a little work. The lawyer was passionately fond of flowers, and the youngster did most of the errands. The sculptor had found some clay, and looked to surprises at night with a new centrepiece for the table. And the divorcee spent most of her time tending Angelie's baby, while the doctor and nurse were eternally fussing over new kinds of bandages. And if ever we got together, it was usually for a little read and allow at teetime or a little music. The spirit of discussion seemed to keep as far away before the lights were up as did the spirit of war, and nothing could be farther than that appeared. The next day we were unusually quiet. Most of us kept in our rooms in the afternoon. There was no stories to think over, and that we all took it so seriously proved how very much we had been needing some real things to do. We got through dinner very comfortably. There was very little news in the papers that day, except enthusiastic accounts of the reception of the British troops by the French. It was lovely to see the two races that had met on so many battlefields conquered, and been conquered by one another, embracing with enthusiasm. It was to the credit of all of us that we did not make the inevitable reflections, but only saw the humour and charm of the thing, and remembered the fears that had prevented the plans of tunnelling the channel, only to find them humorous. The coffee had been placed on the table. The trained nurse, as usual, sat behind the tray, and we each went and took our cup, found a comfortable seat in the circle under the trees, where a few yellow lanterns swing in the soft air. Then the youngster pulled a white headband with a huge number one on it, out to his pocket, placed it on his head after the manner of the French conscripts, struck in attitude in the middle of the circle, drew his chair deftly under him, and with the air of an expected monologist began. Not so many years ago, there was a pretty wedding at Trinity Church in Boston. It was quite the sort of marriage Bostonians believe in. The man was a rising lawyer, rather a skeptic on all sorts of questions, as most of us chaps pride ourselves on being when we come out of college. They were married in church to please the woman. What odds did it make? Before they were married, they had decided to live outside the city. She wanted a garden and an old old house. He did not care where they lived so long as they lived together. Very proper of him too. They spent the last year of their engaged life. The nicest years in some girls' lives, I have heard in haunting the place. What they finally settled on was an old colonial house, colonnaded front, with a round tower at each end, standing back from the road, and approached by a wide circular drive. It was large, substantial, with great possibilities and plenty of ground. It had been unoccupied for many years, and the place had an evil report, and at the time when they first saw it appeared to deserve it. He had it looked over. The situation was healthy. It was convenient to the city. He could make it in his car in less than 45 minutes. They saw what could be done with the place and did not concern themselves with why other people had not cared to live there. Architects, interior designers, and landscape gardeners were put to work on it, and even before the wedding, the place was well on toward its habitable state. Then they were married, and quite correctly went aboard to float in the gondola on the grand canal together, to cross the gemmy together, to stroll about Pompeii and cross the capris together, and then ravaged young tequity shops in Paris together. They returned in the early days of a glorious September. The house was ready for its master and mistress to lay the touch of their personalities on it, and put in place the trophies of their wedding journey. The evil luck the house once had was gone. A few old trees had been cut down round it to let the glorious autumn sun all over the house, and when, on their first morning, after a good sound well earned sleep, they took their coffee on the terrace of the breakfast room under a yellow awning. They certainly did not think if they ever had of the mysterious rumours against the house, which had been whispered about when they first bought it. To them it seemed that they had never seen a gay place. But on the second night, just as the woman was putting her book aside, and had her hand stretched out to shut off the light, she stopped. A carriage was coming up the drive. She sat up and listened for the bell. It did not ring. After a few moments, as there was absolutely no sound of the carriage passing, she got up and gently pushed the shutter. Her room was on the front. There was no, there was nothing there, so attaching no importance to it. She went quietly to bed, put out a light, just noticing as she did so, that it was midnight, and went to sleep. In the morning the incident made so little impression on her that she forgot to even mention it. The next night, by some queer trick of memory, just as she went to bed, the thing came back to her, and she was surprised to find that she had no sleep in her. Instead of that, she kept looking at the clock, and just before twelve, cold chills began to go down her back. When she heard the rapid approach of a carriage, this time she was conscious that her hearing was so keen that she knew there were two horses. She listened intently. No doubt about it, the carriage had stopped at the door. Then there was silence. She was just convincing herself that there must be some sort of echo which made it appear that a team passing in the road had come up the drive. When she was suddenly sure that she heard a hurried step in the corridor, it passed the door. Now she was naturally a very unimaginative person, and never had occasion to know fear. So, after a bit she put out her light, saying to herself that a belated servant was busy with some neglected work, nothing more likely, and she went to sleep. Again the morning sunlight, the man's gay companionship, the hundreds of delightful things to do, wiped out that bad quarter of an hour, and again it never occurred to her to mention it. The next night the remembrance came back so vividly after the man had gone to his room that she regretted she had not at least asked him if he had heard the carriage passing the night. Of course she was sure that he had not. He was such a sound sleeper, besides it was not important. If he had he would not have been nervous about it. Still she could not sleep, and just before that dining room. She'd never heard it before, and that she heard it now was proof of how her whole body was listening. Again came the rapid thread of running horses, this time every hair stood up on her head and before she could control herself she called out towards the open door. Dearest, are you awake? Almost before she had the words out, he was standing smiling in the doorway. It was all right. Did you think you heard a carriage come up the driveway? She asked. Why yes, he replied, but I didn't. Listen, is there someone coming along the corridor? He crossed the room quietly, opened the door and turned on the light. No, dear, there's no one there. Can't you better ring for your man and have him see if any of the servants are up? He sat down on the edge of the bed and laughed heartily. See here, dear girl, he said. You and I are a pair of healthy people. We've happened to hear a noise which we can't explain. Be sure that there is a rational explanation. You're not afraid? Well, no, I really am not, she declared. But you cannot deny that it's strange. Did you hear it last night? Go on, now, with your cross-examination. He said, let's go to sleep. At any rate, the exhibition is over for tonight. The fourth night they did not speak in the night any more than they had in the daytime, but the next day they had a long conversation, the gist of which was this. They had bought this place, but except for 50 minutes at midnight, the place was ideal. They were both level-headed, neither believed in anything supernatural. Were they to be driven out of such a place by so harmless thing as an unexplained noise? They could get used to it. After a bit, it would no more wake them up. Such was the force of habit than a tickling of the clock. To all this they were both agreed, and the matter was dropped. For 10 days they did not mention it, but in all those 10 days a sort of crescendo of emotion was going on in her. At first she began to think of it as soon as bedtime approached, then she felt it intruding on her thoughts at the dinner table, then she was unable to sleep for an hour or two after the 15 minutes had passed, and finally one night she fled into his room to find him wide awake just before dawn, and to confess that the shadow of midnight was stretching before and after until it was almost a black surf around the 24 hours. She knew it was absurd, but she had no intention of being driven out of such a lovely place, but, See here dear, he said, let's break all rule. We neither have one company, but let's at least have a big weekend, and perhaps we can prove to ourselves that our nerves are wrong. One thing is sure, if you are going to get pale over it, I'll burn the blooming house down before we'll live in it. But you mind it yourself, not a bit, but you're awake. Of course I am, because I know that you are. Do you mean to say if I slept you wouldn't notice it? On my honor I shall not. You are a comfort, she ejaculated. I shall go right to sleep, and off she went, and did go to sleep. All the same in the morning, he insisted on the house party. Let me see our list, he said, let us have no students of a cult, no men who dabble in laboratory spiritualism. Just nice, live, healthy people who never heard of such things if possible. You can find them. You see, dear, she explained, it would not trouble me if I heard it, and you did not. But, oh fudge, he laughed. Just now I should be sure to hit anything you did, I suppose. You old darling, she replied, then I don't care for it a bit. All the same, we'll have the house party. So the following Saturday, every room in the house was occupied. At midnight, they were all gathered in a long drawing room, opening on the colonnade, and when the hour sounded, someone was singing. The host and hostess heard the running horses, as usual, and they were conscious that one or two people turned a list in here. But evidently, no one saw anything strange in it, and no comment was made. It was after one when they all went up to their rooms, so that evening passed off all right. But one Sunday night, two of the younger guests had gone to sit on the thumped terrace, and the older people were walking in the moonlight in the garden at the back. The sweet little girl who was having her hand held got up properly when she heard the carriage coming and went to the edge of the terrace to see who was arriving at midnight. She had a fit of nerves as the invisible vehicle in its running horse seemed about to ride over her. She ran in trembling with fear to tell the tale, and of course everyone laughed at her. And the matter would have been dropped if it had not happened that just at that moment, a very pale gentleman came stumbling out of the house with a statement that he wanted a conveyance to take back to town, that he refused to sleep in a haunted house, that he had encouraged an invisible person running along the corridor in his room, in the fact that footsteps had, as he put it, passed right through him. The house broke into laughter, but he took the ball by the horns. The fact, as he knew them, was safer than the tales which he knew would run over the city if he attempted to deny things. See here, my good people, he said. There's a little mystery here that we can't explain. The truth is, there is a story about this house. It used to belong to the president of a well-known railroad that was 25 years ago. They say that one night, when he was driving from a place he had upcountry, his team was run into a railway crossing five miles from here, one of those grade crossings that never ought to have been, and he was killed and the horses came home at midnight. They say that people who lived here after that declared that the horses have come home every night since. Now there's the story. They don't do any harm. It only takes them a few minutes. They don't even trample the driveway, so why not? All the same, I went to go back to town. So the frightened guest, I would stay the night if I was you, said the host. They won't come again until tomorrow. All the same, when morning came, everyone skipped, and as the last of them drove away, the woman put her hand through the man's arm and smiled as she said, It's all over now. I don't mind a bit. When I heard your saying last night, they don't even trample the driveway, so why not? I said to myself, Why not indeed? Good girl, he replied. I'll bet my top hat you grow to be proud of them. I don't know that they ever did, but I do know that they still lived there. I went to school with the son, and whenever anyone bragged, he used to say, Well, we've always had a ghost. You ain't got that. The youngster threw his lighted cigarette into the air, ran under it and caught it between his lips, and made a bow, as the doctor broke into a roar of laughter. I know that old house, he said. Jamaica pond, but see here, youngster, your good idea of ghost is terribly illogical. It was the man who was killed, not the horses. The wrong part of the team walked. You are particular, replied the youngster. The man did not come back, and the horses did. I can't split hairs when it's a ghost story. I feel afraid that I have missed my vocation, and that flights in the imagination are more in my line than flights in the air. I don't know what you think. I think it's a mighty good story, I say. Journalist, do you think I could sell the story? I've never earned a dollar in my life. Well, laughed the journalist. A dollar is just about what you would get for it. If I had been doing that story, said the critic. I should have found a logical explanation for it. Of course you would, said the youngster. I know one of a haunted house on St James Street, which had an explanation. But the doctor cut him short with, come now. You've done your stunt. No more stories tonight, off to bed. You and I are going to take a run to Paris tomorrow. For what? Tell you tomorrow. As everyone began to move toward the house, the violinist remarked, I was thinking of running to Paris myself tomorrow. Anyone else wants to go with me? The journalist said that he did. And the party broke up. As they strolled towards the house, the lawyer was heard asking the youngster, what were the steps in the corridor? Well, replied the youngster. I suppose on the night that the team came home, there must have been a great excitement in the house. Everyone running to and fro and, but the journalist's shout of laughter stopped him. The youngster eyed him with shock, surprise. Bye Jupiter cried the journalist. That was the darndest ghost story I've ever heard. Everything and everybody walked but the dead man. Even the courage. That isn't my fault, said the youngster, indigently. End of chapter one, recording by Scott Blagdon, www.scottblagdon.net The House was very quiet next day. All the men, except the critic and the sculptor, had made an early and hurried run to Paris. So we saw little of each other until we gathered for dinner, and the conversation was calm, in fact, subdued. The doctor was especially quiet. No one was really gay except the youngster. He talked of what he'd seen in Paris, the silent streets, the moods of the women, the sight of officers in car key flying about in big touring cars, and no one asked what had really taken them to town. The trained nurse and I had walked to the nearest village, but we brought back little in the way of news. The only interesting thing we saw was Monsieur Le Curie talking to a handsome young peasant woman in the square before the church. We heard her say, with a sob in her throat, if my man does not come back, I'll never say my prayers again. I'll never pray to a god who let this thing happen unless my man comes back. She will, just the same, said the lawyer. One of the strangest features of such a catastrophe is that it steadies a race, especially the race convinced that it has right on its side. It goes deeper than that, said the journalist. It strikes millions with the same pain, and they bear together what they could not have faced separately. True, remarked the doctor, and that is one reason why I have always mistrusted the effort of people outside the radius of disaster to help in any way except scientifically. That is rather a cruel idea, commented the trained nurse. Perhaps, but I believe organized charity, even of that sort, is usually ineffective and weakens the race that accepts it. I believe victims of such disaster are healthier and come out stronger for facing it, dying or surviving as fate decrees. Keep off the grass! cried the youngster. I brought back a car full of books. The hint was taken, and we talked of books until the coffee came out. As usual the trained nurse sat behind the pot, and when we were all served she pushed the tray back, folded her strong, capable white hands on the edge of the table, and sat quietly. Monsieur et mesdames, willed our cigarettes, and she began. It was the first year after I left home and took up nursing. I had a room at that time in one of the friendly society refuges on the lower side of Beacon Hill. It was under the auspices of an Episcopal high church in the days of Father Hall, and was a rather English in tone. Indeed, its matron was an English woman. Gentle, round-faced, lace-capped, and very sympathetic. I was very fond of her. I heard, as a seamstress, a neat little girl named Josephine. Josephine was a tiny creature, all grey in tone, with mouse-coloured hair. She was a fountaling. She had not released notion who her people were. Her first recollections were of the orphan asylum where she was brought up. In her early teens she had been bound out to a dressmaker, who had been kind to her. When her first employer died, Josephine, who had saved a little money, and longed for independence, began to go out as a seamstress among the women she had grown to know in the dressmaking establishment, and went to live at one of the Christian Association homes for working girls. Everyone knows what those boarding houses are. Two or three hundred girls of all ages, from sixteen up, of all temperaments. Old girls willing to submit to control, girls with their gay days and their tragic, girls of ambition, and girls with fate in the future, as well as girls of no luck, and girls with their simple youthful romances. Everyone loved Josephine. She was by nature a little lady, dainty in her ways, industrious and rebellious, always ready to help the other girls about their clothes, and a model of a confident. Everyone told her of their little troubles. Everyone confided their little romances. They were sure of a good listener, who never had any troubles or romances of her own to confide. I don't know how old Josephine was at that time. She might have been twenty-five, looked younger, but was perhaps older. She was so tiny, and such a mouse of a thing, that she seemed a child, but for her energy and her capacity for silence. It was, I fancy, three years after I first knew her, that she, one evening, confided to a group of her intimate friends, as they sat together over their sewing, that she was engaged to be married. That was great excitement, little lonely Josephine, so discreet, who had sympathised with the romances of so many of her comrades, had a romance of her own. Such a hugging and kissing as went on you never saw, unless you have seen a crowd of such girls together. Everyone was full of questions, and there were almost as many tears shed as questions asked. He was a carpenter, Josephine told them. She had known him ever since she was with the dressmaker who took her out of the asylum. He lived in Utica in New York. He had a good job, and they were to be married as soon as she could get ready. So Josephine set to work with her nimble fingers to make her true so. During the years she had worked for me, the matron of the friendly society, and many of its patrons, had come to know and love dear little Josephine, and in our house there was almost as much excitement over the news as there was at the association at the south end. All the girls set to work to make something for little Josephine. Everyone, from shit worked, gave her something. One lady gave her black silk for a frock. All the girls sewed a bit of underwear for her. She had sheets and table linen, and all sorts of dainty things which her girlfriends loved to count over, and admire in the evening, without the least bit of envy. By the time spring came, Josephine had to buy a new trunk to pack her things away in. Then she told us all that she was going to Utica to be married. What was the use of his spending his money to come east for her, and pay his expenses back? That seemed reasonable, and the day was fixed for her departure. Her trunks were packed. She took a night train so that we could all go to the station to see her off, and I'm sure that the crowd who saw us kissing her goodbye are not likely to forget the scene. Then the girls went home, chattering about dear little Josephine. In due time came a letter from a place near Utica where she was, she said, on a little wedding trip, and very happy, and he sent his love, and it was signed with her new name, and she would send us her address as soon as she was settled. Time went by, some months. Then she did send an address, but she did not write often, and when she did, she said little but that she was happy. As nearly as I can remember, it was a year and a half after she left that news came that Josephine had a son. By that time a great many of the girls she had known were gone. Changes come fast in such a place. But there was great rejoicing, and those who had known her found time to make something for dear little Josephine's baby, and the sending of the things kept up the interest in her for some months. Then the letter seized again. I can't be sure how long it was, after that, that I received a letter from her. She told me that her husband was dead, that she never really had taken root in Utica, and now that she was alone with her baby to support, she longed to come back to Boston and asked my advice. Did I think she could take up her old work? I took the letter at once to the matron of a friendly society. I happened to be resting between two cases, and we decided that it was safe. At least between us, we could help her make the trial. A few months later she came, and we went to the station to meet her. I could not see that she had changed a bit. She did not look a day older, and the bouncing baby she carried in her arms was a darling. Of course, she could not go back to the association. That was not for married women. But we found her a room just across the street, and in no time she dropped right back into the place she had left. Every morning she took the baby boy to the crash, and every night she took him home, and a better cared for, better loved, more wisely bred youngster was never born, nor a happier one. Everyone loved him just as everyone loved Josephine. There I thought Josephine's story ended, and so far she was concerned it did. But when the baby was six years old, and forward for his age, the matron of the Friendly Society came into my room one day when I was there to take a longer rest than usual, after a very trying case, and told me that she was in great distress. A friend of hers, who had been her predecessor, and was now the matron of an orphan asylum in New York State, was going to the hospital to have a cataract removed from her eye, and had written to ask her to come and take her place while she was away. She begged me to replace her at the Friendly Society while she was gone, as her assistant was a capable young woman, and my relations with everyone were pleasant, I was only too glad to consent. She had always been so good to me. She was gone a month. On a return I noticed that she was distressed about something. I texted her with it. She said it was nothing she felt like talking about. But one evening when Josephine had been sewing for me, after she was gone, the matron, who had been in my room, got up and closed the door after her. I've really got to tell you what is on my mind, she said, and I'm sure that you will look on it as a confidence. You know the asylum where I've been is not far from Utica, where Josephine went when she was married. Well, one day, about a fortnight after I got there, I had occasion to look up the record of a child in the books, and my attention was distracted by a name the same as Josephine's. The coincidence struck me, and I read the record that on a certain day, which as near as I could calculate, must have been a year after Josephine left, a person of her name written down as a widow, a member of the Orthodox Church, had adopted a male child a few months old. I was interested. I did not suspect anything, but I asked the assistant matron if she remembered the case. She did, clearly. She said the woman was a dear little thing who had come there shortly before, a young widow, a seamstress. She was a lonely little thing, and someone connected with the asylum had given her work, which she had done so well that she soon had all she needed. She had been employed in the asylum, and loved children as they did her. The child in question was the son of a woman who had died at its birth, from the shock of an accident which had killed the father. It took a fancy to Josephine, and she wanted to adopt it. The committee took the matter up. The clergyman spoke well of her, as did everyone, and they all decided that she was perfectly able to care for it. So she took the child. All of a sudden one day Josephine went as she had come. There was no mystery about it. She told the clergyman that she was homesick for her old friends, and had gone east and would write, and she always has. Of course I was puzzled. There was no doubt in my mind that it was our little Josephine. Naturally I was discreet. Luckily, I spoke of her to several people who remembered her, and they all called her Dear Little Josephine, just as we had. I talked of her with the clergyman and his wife. I asked questions that were too natural to arouse suspicions, when I told them that I knew her, that the baby was the dearest and happiest child I knew. What do you suppose I have found out, more by inference than facts? No need to ask me. Didn't I know? Josephine had never been married. There had never been any he. It all seemed so natural. I did not shock me as it had the matron, and I was glad she had told no one but me. Dear Little Josephine, sitting there in the association, without family, with no friends but her patrons, and those girls whose little romances went on about her. No romances ever came her way. So she had made one all of her own. I proved to the matron easily that what she had discovered by accident was not her affair, that to keep Josephine's secret was a virtue and not a sin. I was sure of that, for, as I watched her afterwards, I knew that Josephine had played her part in her dream romance so well, that she no longer remembered that it was not true. She had forgotten, she had not really borne the child, she carried so lovingly in her arms. Is that all? asked the journalist. That is all, replied the trained nurse. My Jove, said the doctor. That's a good story. I wish I had told it. Thank you, doctor, laughed the trained nurse. I thought it was a bit in your line. But fancy the cleverness of the little thing to do all the details up so nicely, said the lawyer. She dovetailed everything so neatly. But what I want to know is whether she planned the baby when she planned the make-believe husband. I fancy not, replied the nurse. One thing came along after another in her imagination, quite naturally. Poor little Josephine, it seems to me hard luck to have had to imagine such an everyday fate, sighed the divorcee. Don't pity her, snapped the doctor. Poor little Josephine indeed. Lucky little Josephine, who arranged her own romance and risked no disillusion. There have been cases where the joys of the imagination have been more dangerous. You are sure she had no disillusion? asked the critic. I am, said the nurse. And her name was Josephine, asked the divorcee. It was not, and Utica was not the town, replied the nurse. Perhaps her disillusion is ahead of her, said the journalist. Say no man or woman either is happy until the day of his death. She is dead, said the nurse. I told you she was lucky little Josephine, ejaculated the doctor. And she died without telling the boy the truth, asked the journalist. The truth, repeated the nurse. I've told you, she'd forgotten it. No woman was ever so loved by a son, no mother ever so grieved for. Then the son lives, asked the doctor. The nurse smiled quietly. Good night, said the doctor. I'm going to bed to dream of that. It is a pity some of the rest of the childless slackers have not done as well as Josephine. She took her risk. She was lucky. She did, replied the nurse, but she did not realise anything of that. She was too simple, too unanalytic. I wonder, said the critic. You need not, I know. Her eyes fell on the lawyer, and she caught a laugh in his eye. What does that mean? she asked. Well, said the lawyer, I was only thinking. She was religious, that dear little Josephine. At least she always went to church. I know the type, said the violinist, gently, accepted what she was taught, believed it. Exactly, said the lawyer. That is what I was getting at. Well then, when her son meets her, Odela, he will ask for his father. Or, interrupted the violinist, his own mother will claim him. Don't worry, laughed the critic. It's dollars to donuts that she was dear little Josephine to all the heavenly host, half an hour after she entered the gates of Pearl. Don't look shocked. That is not sacrilegious. It is intentions, motives that are immortal, not facts. Besides, don't push that idea too far, interrupted the doctor from the door. Don't be alarmed. I was only going to say, There are the marvels, Odela. I knew that idea was in your head. Drop it, laughed the doctor. Anyway, said the violinist, if life is but a dream, she had a pretty one. Good night. And he went up to bed, and we all soon followed him. And I imagine not one of us, as we looked out into the moonlit air, thought that night of war. End of chapter 2. Section 3 of Tolled in a French Garden This is a LibriWox recording. All LibriWox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriWox.org. Recording by Chassi. Tolled in a French Garden by Mildred Aldridge. Chapter 3. The Critic Story. Tours in the Indian Summer. The Tale of an Actress. The next day, just as we were sitting down to dinner, the news came that Namur had fallen. The German army had marched singing into the burning town the afternoon before. The youngster had his head over a map almost all through dinner. The Belgians were practically pushed out of all but Antwerp, and the Germans were rapidly approaching the natural defenses of France, running from Lille to Verdun, through Valenciennes, Mauberge, Irson and Messier. Things were beginning to look serious, although we still insisted on believing that the Germans could not break through. One result of the march of events was that we none of us had any longer the smallest desire to argue. Theories were giving way to the facts of every day, but in our minds, I imagine, we were every one of us asking, how long can we stay here? How long will it be wise, even if we are permitted? But as if by common consent no one asked the question, and we were only too glad to sit out in a garden we had all learned to love, and to talk of anything which was not war. Until the critic moved his chair into the middle of the circle and began his tale. Let me see, he remarked, I need a property or two. And he pulled an envelope out of his pocket and laid it on the table, and, leaning his elbows on it, began. It was in the autumn of 81 that I last saw Dylan act. She had made a great success that winter, yet in the middle of the season she had suddenly disappeared. There were all kinds of newspaper explanations. Then she was forgotten by the public that had enthusiastically applauded her and which only sighed sadly a year later on hearing of her death in a far off Italian town. sighed, talked a little, and forgot again. It chanced that a few years later I was in Italy, and being not many miles from the town where I heard that she was buried, and a trifle overstrung by a few months' delicious aimless life in that wonderful country, I was taken with a sentimental fancy to visit her grave. It was a sort of pilgrimage for me, for I had given to Dylan my first boyish devotion. I thought of her, and to remember her was to recall her rare charm, her beauty, her success after a long struggle, and the unexpected inexplicable manner in which she had abandoned it. It was to recall, too, the delightful evenings I had spent under her influence, the pleasure I had had in the passion of her Juliet, the poetic charm of her Viola, the graceful witchery of her Rosalind, how I had smiled with her Porsche, laughed with her Beatrice, wept with her Camille. In fact, how I had yielded myself up to her magnetism with that ecstatic pleasure in which one gets the best choice of every passion, because one does not drain the dregs of any. I well remembered her last night, how she had disappeared, how she had gone to Europe, how she had died abroad. All mere facts known in their bareness only to the public. It was hard to find the place where she was buried, but at last I succeeded. It was in a humble churchyard. The grave was noticeable because it was well kept, and utterly devoid of the tawdry ornamentation inseparable from such places in Italy. It was marked by a monument distinctly unique in a European country. It was a huge, unpolished boulder over which creeping green vines were growing. On its rough surface, a cross was cut, and underneath were the words. Yesterday, this day's madness did prepare. Tomorrow's silence triumphed for despair. Below that I read with stupefaction Margaret Dillon and Child, and the dates January 1843, July 25th, 1882. In spite of the doubts and fancies this put into my mind, I no sooner stood besides the spot where the earth had claimed her than all my old interests in her returned. I lingered about the place, full of romantic fancies, decorating a tomb with flowers as I had once decorated her triumphs, absorbed in the dreamy adoration of her memory, and singing her praise and words. It was then that I learned the true story of her disappearance, guessed at that of her death as I did at the identity of the young Dominican priest who sometimes came to her grave, and who finally told me such of the facts as I know. I can best tell the story by picturing two knights in the life of Margaret Dillon, the two following her last appearance on the stage. The play had been much ado. Never had she acted with finer humor or greater gaiety. Yet all the evening she had felt a strange sadness. When it was all over, and friends had trooped round to the stage to praise her, and trooped away laughing and happy, she felt a strange, sad, unused reluctance to see them go. Then she sat down to her dressing table, hurriedly removed her make-up, and allowed herself to be stripped of her stage-finery. Her fine spirits seemed to strip off with her character. She shivered occasionally with nervousness or superstition, and she was strangely silent. All day she had for some inexplicable reason been thinking of her girlhood. Of what her life might have been, if at a critical moment she had chosen a woman's ordinary lot instead of work. Or if at a later day she had yielded to instead of resisted a great temptation. All day, as on many days lately, she had wondered if she regretted it. Or if, the days of her great triumph having passed, as past they must, she should regret it later if she did not yet. It was probably because early in the season as it was, she was tired, and the October night oppressed her with the heat of Indian summer. Silently she had allowed herself to be undressed and redressed in great haste. But before she left the theater, she bade everyone good night, with more than her usual kindliness. Not because she did not expect to see them all on Monday, it was a Saturday night. But because, in her inexplicably sad humor, she felt an irresistible desire to be at peace with the world, and a still deeper desire to feel herself beloved by those about her. Then she entered her carriage, and drove hurriedly home to the tiny apartment where she lived quite alone. On the supper table lay a note. She shivered as she took it up. It was a handwriting she had been accustomed to see once a year only, in one simple word of greeting. Always the same word, which every year in 18 had come to her on new years wherever she was. But this was October. She sat perfectly still for some minutes, and then resolutely opened the letter and read, Maj, I am so afraid that my voice coming to you not only across so many years, but from another world may shock you, that I am strongly tempted not to keep my word to you. Yet judging you by myself, I feel that perhaps this will be less painful than the thought that I had passed forgetful of you, or changed toward you. You were a mere girl when we mutually promised that, though it was fate that our path should not be the same, and honourable that we should keep a part, we would not pass out of life whatever came without a farewell word, a second saying goodbye. It is my fate to say it. It is now God's will, before it was yours. It is eighteen years since you chose my honour to your happiness in mine. Today you are a famous woman. That is the consolation I have found in your decision. I sometimes wonder if fame will always make up to you for the rest. A woman's ways peculiar, and right I suppose. I have never changed. My son has been a second consolation, and that too, in spite of the fact that, had he never been born, your decision might have been so different. He is a young man now. Strangely like what I was when as a child you first knew me. And he has always been my confidant. In those first days of my banishment from you, I kept from crying my agony from the housetops by whispering it to him. His uncomprehending ears were my soul confessional. His mother cared little for his companionship, and her invalidism threw him continually into my care. I do not know when he began to understand, but from the hour he could speak, he whispered your name in his prayers. But it was only lately that, of himself, he discovered your identity. The love I felt for you in my early days has grown with me. It has survived in my heart when all other passions, all prides, all ambitions, long ago died. I leave you, I hope, a good memory of me. A man who loved you more than he loved himself, who for eighteen years has loved you silently, yet never ceased to grieve for you. But I fear that I have bequeathed to my son, with the name and the state of his father, my hopeless love for you. If by chance what I fear be true, if, when bereft of me, he seeks you out as be sure he will, deal gently with him for his father's sake. There was an old compact between us, dear. I mention it now only in the hope that you may not have forgotten, indeed in the certainty that you have not. I know you so well. Remember it, I beg of you, only to ignore it. It was made, you know, when one of us expected to watch the passing of the other. This is different. If this reminds you of it, it reminds you only to warn you that time cancels all such compacts. It is my voice that assures you of it. Felix R. Underneath, written in letters, like, yet so unlike, were the words. My father died this morning, F. R., and an uncertain mark, as though he had began to add junior to the signature and realized that there was no need. The letter fell from her hands. For a long time she said silent, Dad, she had never felt that he could die while she lived. A knowledge that he was living, loving her, adoring her hopelessly, was necessary to her life. She felt that she could not go on without it. For eighteen years she had compared all other men, all other emotions, to him and his love, to find them all wanting. And he had died. She looked at the date of the letter. He would be resting in that tomb she remembered so well before she could reach the place. That spot before which they had often talked of death, which had no terrors for either of them. She rose. She pushed away her untouched supper, hurriedly drank a glass of wine, and, crossing the hall to her bedroom, opened a tiny box that stood locked upon her dressing table. She took from it a picture, a miniature. It was of a young man, not over twenty-five. The face was strong and full of virile suggestion, even in a picture. The eyes were brown, the lips under the short moustache were firm, and the thick short brown hair fell forward a bit over the left temple. It was a handsome, manly face. The picture was stated eighteen years before. It hardly seemed possible that eighteen years earlier this woman could have been old enough to stir the passionate love of such a man. Her face was still young, her form still slander. Her abundant hair shaded deep gray eyes where the spirit of youth still shone. But she belonged by temperament and profession to that race of women who guard their youth marvelously. There were no tears in her eyes as she sat long into the morning, and with his pictured face before her reflected until she had decided. He had kept his word to her. His good-bye had been loyally said. She would keep hers in turn and guard his first night's solitude in the tomb with her watchful prayers. She calculated well the time. If she travelled all day Sunday, she would be there sometime before midnight. If she travelled back at once, she could be in town again in season to play Monday. Not in the best of conditions to be sure for so hard a role as Juliet, but she would have fulfilled a duty that would never come to her again. It was near midnight on Sunday. The light of the big round harvest moon fell through the warm air, which scarcely moved above the graves of the almost forgotten dead in the country churchyard. The low headstones cast long shadows over the long grass that merely trembled as the noiseless wind moved over it. A tall woman in a riding dress stood beside the rough section at the door of the only large tomb in the enclosure. He had grown into a bent old man since she last saw him, but he had recognised her and had not hesitated to obey her. As he unlocked and pushed back the great door, which moved easily and noiselessly, he placed his lantern on the steps, and telling her that according to a family custom, there were lights inside, he turned away and left her to keep his watch nearby. No need to tell her the family customs. She knew them but too well. For a few moments she remained seated on the step where she had rested to await the opening of the door. On the threshold of the tomb of the one man among all the men she had met, who had stirred in her heart a great love, how she had loved him, how she had feared that her love would wear his out, how she had suffered when she decided that love was something more than self-critification, that even though for her he should put aside the woman he had heedlessly married years before, there could never be any happiness in such a union for either of them. How many times in her own heart she had owned that the woman would not have had the courage shown by the girl, for the girl did not realise all she was putting aside. Yet the consciousness of his love, in which she never ceased to believe, had kept her brave and young. She rose and slowly entered the world. The odour of flowers, the odour of death was about it. She lifted the lantern from the ground, and with it raised above her head, approached the open coffin that rested on the cedar fog in the centre of the tomb, and mounted the two steps. She was conscious of no fear, of no dread at the idea of once more, after eighteen years, looking into the face of the man she had loved, who had carried a great love for her into another world. But as she looked, her eyes widened with fright. She bent lower over him. No cry burst from her lips, but the hand holding the lantern lowered slowly, and she tumbled down the two steps, and staggered back against the wall, where behind lettered slides, the dead richmans for six generations slept their long sleep together. Her breast heaved up and down, as if life, like a caged thing, were striving to escape. Yet no sound came from her colourless lips. No tears were in her widened eyes. The realising sense of departed years had reached her heart at last, and the shock was terrible. With a violent effort she recovered herself. But the firm step, the fearless, hopeful face with which she had approached the coffin of her dead lover, were very different from the blind manner in which she stumbled back to his beer. And the hand which a second time raised the lantern, trembled so that its wavering light shed an added weirdness on the still face. So strange to her eyes, and stranger still to her heart. He had been a young man when they parted. To her he had remained young. Now the hair about the brows was thin and white. The drooping moustache that entirely concealed the mouth was grizzled. Lines furrowed the forehead, outlined the sunken eyes, and gave an added thinness to the nostrils. She bent once more over the face, to her only a strange cold mask. A painful fascination held her for several minutes, forcing her to mark how love, that had kept her young, proud, content in its very existence, had zapped his life and doubled his years. The realization bent her slender figure under a load of self-reproach and self-mistrust. She drooped lower and lower above the sad dead face, until she slid to the ground beside him. Heavy, tearless sob shook her slight frame, as it stretched its length beside the dead love and the dead dream. The ideal, so long treasured in her soul, had lost its reality. The present had wiped out the past as a sponge wipes off a slate. If she had but heeded his warning and refrained from coming until later, she would have escaped making a stranger of him forever. Now the sad aged face, the dead strange face which she had seen but five minutes before, had completely obscured in her memory, the long-loved young face that had been with her all these years. The spirit whose consoling presence she had thought to feel upholding her at this moment made no sign. She was alone in the world, bereft of her one supporting ideal, alone besides the dead body of one who was a stranger alike to her sight and her emotions. Alone at night in an isolation as unexpected as it was terrible to her, and which chilled her senses as if it had come to oppress her forever, the shadows which she had not noticed before, the dark corners of the tomb, the motionless gleam of the moon as it fell through the open door and laid silently on the floor like light stretched dead. The low rustle of the wind as if nature restlessly moved in her sleep came suddenly upon her and brought her fear. She held her breath as she stilled her sobs to realize that she alone lived in this city of the dead, the chill of fright crept along the surface of her body which still vibrated with her storm of grief. She seemed paralyzed. She dared not move. Every sense rallied to her ears in dread. Suddenly she heard her name breathed. Margaret. It was whispered in a voice one so familiar to her ears. A voice that used to say, match. She raised herself on her elbow. She dared not answer. She hardly dared breathe. She was afraid in every sense, and yet she hungered for another sound of that loved voice. Every hour of its banishment was regretted at that moment. There seemed no future without it. Every nerve listened. At first she heard nothing but the restless moving of the air which merely emphasized her loneliness. Then she caught the pulsation of slow, regular breathing. She started to her feet. She snatched up the lantern and quickly mounted to the beer. She looked sharply down into the dead face. Silent with its white hair and worn lines, it rested on its white pillows. No sound came from the cold still lips. Yet while her eyes were riveted on them, once more the longed for voice breathed her name. Margaret. It came from behind her. She turned quickly. There in the moonlit doorway with a sad, compassionate smile on a strong young face, as if it were yesterday they had parted, stood the man she remembered so well. Her bewildered eyes turned from the silent, unfamiliar face among the satin cushions to the living face in the moonlight. The young brown eyes, the short brown hair falling forward over the left temple. The erect elastic figure, the strong loving hands stretching out to her. She was so tired, so heart sick, so full of longing for the love she had lost. Felix. She sobbed and blindly groping to reach what she feared was a hallucination. She stumbled down the steps and was caught up in the arms flung wide to catch her and which folded about her as if forever. She sighed his name again. Upon the passionate young lips which had inherited the great laugh she had put aside so long before. As the last word stied away, the critic drew himself up and laughed. He had told the story very dramatically, reading the letter from the envelope he had called a property, and he had told it well. The laugh broke the spell and the doctor echoed it heartily. All right, old man, said the critic, you ought me that laugh. You're welcome. I was only thinking, said the doctor, his face still on a broad grin, that we have always thought you ought to have been a novelist, and now we know at last just what kind of a novelist you would have been. Don't you believe it, said the critic, that was only improvisatory. That's no sample. Oh, I'll bet you anything that the manuscript is up in your trunk, and that you have been committing it to memory ever since this idea was proposed, said the doctor, still laughing. No, that I deny, replied the critic, but as I am no pursuer I will own that I wrote it years ago and rewrote it so often that I never could forget it. I'll confess more than that, the story has been declined with thanks by every decent magazine in the States and in England. Now perhaps someone will tell me why. I don't know the answer, said the youngster seriously. Unless it is, why not? I shouldn't wonder if it were sentimental twaddle, cites the journalist, but I don't know. I noticed, expostulated the critic, that you all listened and fraught. Oh, replied the doctor, that was a tribute to your personal charm. You did it very well. Exactly, said the critic, if editors would let me reach them my stories, I could sell them like hot cakes. I never believed that Homer would have lived as long as he has if he had not made the reputation of his tales by singing them centuries before anyone tried to reach them. Now no one dares to say they bore him. The reading public and the editors who catered to it are just like some stupid theatrical managers I know of, who will never let an author read a play to them for fear that he may give the play some charm that the full theatrical man might not have felt from mere typewritten words on white or yellow paper. By Jav, I know the case of a manager who once bought the option on a foreign play from a scenario provided by a clever friend of mine, and paid a stiff price for it too, and when he got the manuscript wrote to the chap who did the scenario, play dashity dash rod. If it had been as good as your scenario, it would have gone. And what is more, he sacrificed a tidy 5000 he had paid and let his options light. Now, when the fellow who did the scenario wrote, if you found anything in the scenario that you did not discover in the play, it is because I gave you the effect it would have behind the footlights. Which you have not the imagination to see in the printed words. The manager only replied, you are a nice chap. I like you very much, but you are a blankety blankety fool. Which was right, asked the journalist. The scenario man, how do you know? How do I know? Why simply because the play was produced later, ran five years and drew a couple of million dollars. That's how I know. Pie Cricky exclaimed the youngster, I believe he thinks his story could earn a million if it had a chance. I don't say no, said the critic yawning, but it will never get a chance. I burnt the manuscript this morning, and now being delivered of it, I have no more interest in it than a sparrow has in her last year's offspring. The trouble with you is that you haven't any patience, any staying power. That ought to have been a free volume novel. We would have heard all about the first meeting, the first love, the separation, his marriage, her debuts, etc. etc. declared the journalist. Oh thunder, said the doctor. I think there was quite enough of it. Don't throw anything at me. I liked it. I liked it. Only, I'm sorry she died. So am I, said the critic. That really hurt me, because, said the doctor, shying away towards the door. I should have liked to know if the child turned out to be a genius. That kind do sometimes. And he disappeared into the doorway. Anyhow, said the critic, I am going to wear laurels until someone tells it better. And I'd like to know why the journalist looks so pensively thoughtful. I am trying to recall who she was, Margaret Stillen. Don't fret. She may be a poor thing, but she is all mine own. A genuine creation, Mr. Journalist. I am no reporter. Ah, then you are more of a sentimentalist than I even dared to dream. Don't deny it, said the critic as he rose and yawned. So I am going to bed to sleep on my laurels while I may. Good night. Well, called the sculptor after him as he sauntered away, as one of our mutual friends used to say, the Indian summer of passion scorches. But alas, added the other, it does not always kill. Witness, began the journalist, but the critic cut him short. As you love me, not that famous list of yours, including so many of the actresses we all know. I can't bear that tonight. After all, the French have a better phrase for it. La crise de carante-en. The nurse and the divorcee had been very quiet. But here they locked hands, and the former remarked that they prepared to withdraw. That is our cue to disappear. And you too, youngster, these men are far too wise. So we of the discussed sex made a circle with our clas-ed hands about the youngster and danced him into the house. The last I saw of the garden that night, as I looked out of my window towards the northeast, with Namur beating in my head, the five men had their heads still together. But whether the other sex was getting scientifically torn to bits, or they too had Namur in their minds, I never knew. End of the critic's story. Tours in the Indian summer, the tale of an actress. Section 4 of Told in a French Garden. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Sophia Bravo of Miami, Florida. Told in a French Garden by Mildred Aldrich. Chapter 4. The Doctor's Story. As One Dreams, the Tale of an Adolescent. The next day was very peaceful. We were becoming habituated to the situation. It was a Sunday, and the weather was warm. There had been no real news so far as we knew, except that Japan had lined up with the Allies. The youngster had come near to striking fire by wondering how the United States, with her dislike for Japan, would view the entering into line of the yellow man, but the spark flickered out. And I imagine we settled down for the story with more eagerness than on the previous evening, especially when the Doctor thrust his hands into his pockets and lifted his chin into the air, as if he were in the Tribune. More than one of us smiled at his resemblance to Pierre Genet, entering the Tribune at the Collège de France. And the youngster said, under his breath, a Clinique, I suppose. The Doctor's ears were sharp. Not a bit, he answered, running his keen brown eyes over us to be sure we were listening before he began. In the days when it was thought that the South End was to be the smart part Boston, and when streets were laid out along wide tree-shaded malls, with a square in the centre, in imitation of some quarters of London, for Boston was in those days much more English than it is now. There was in one of those squares a famous private school. In those days it was rather smart to go to private school. It was in the days before Boston had much of an immigrant quarter, when some smart families still lived in the old colonial houses at the North End, and ministers and lawyers and all professional men sent their sons and their daughters to the public schools, at that time probably the best in the world. At this private school there was, at the time of which I speak, what one might almost call a principal girl. She was the daughter of a rich banker, his only daughter. The gods all seemed to have been very good to her. She was not only a really beautiful girl, she was, for her age, a distinguished girl, one of the sort who seemed to do everything better than anyone else. And with a lack of self-consciousness or pretension, everyone admired her. Some of her comrades would have loved her if she had given them the chance. But no one could ever get intimate with her. She came, and she went from school quite alone, in the habit of the American girl of those days before the chaperone became the correct thing. She was charming to everyone, but she kept everyone a little at arm's length. Of course, such a girl would be much talked over by the other type of girl to whom confidences were necessary. As always happens in any school there was a popular teacher. She taught history and literature, and I imagined girls get more intimate with such a teacher than they ever do with the mathematics. Also, as it always happens, there was a teacher's pet, one of those girls that has to adore something, and the literature teacher, as she was smart and good-looking, was as convenient to adore as anything else, and more adjacent. Of course, teacher's pet never has any secrets from her teacher, and does not mean to be a sneak either. Just can't help turning herself inside out for her idol, and when the heart of a girl of 17 turns itself inside out, almost always something comes out that is not her business. That was how it happened that one day the literature teacher was told that the principal girl was receiving wonderful boxes of violets at the school door, and don't you know, one day she was seen by a group of pupils who happened to be going home, and were just behind her, getting into a closed carriage, and driving away from the corner of the street. Now, the literature teacher did not, as a rule, encourage such confidences, but this time it seemed useful. She liked the principal girl, admired her in fact, she was terribly shocked. She warned her pet to talk to no one else, and then she went at once to the clergyman who was the head of the school. She knew that he felt responsible for his pupils, and this had an unpleasant look. He took the pains to verify the two statements. Then there was but one thing to do, to lay them out before the parents of the girl. Now, as so often happens in American families, the banker and his wife stood in some awe of their daughter. There was not that confidence between them which one traditionally supposes to exist between parents and children. I imagine that there is no doubt that the adolescent finds it much easier to confide in someone other than the parents who would seem to be her proper confidants. At any rate, the banker and his wife were simply staggered. They dared not broach the subject to the principal girl, and in their distress turned the family royal, as they were too cowardly to take his first advice. Perhaps they were afraid that the daughter would lie. They sometimes do in best-regulated families. It was decided to put a discreet person on the job, and discover first of all what was really going on. The result of the investigation was at first consoling, and then amazing. They discovered that the bunches of violets were ordered at a smart downtown florist by the girl herself, and by her order delivered at the school door by a live red messenger boy, who, by her orders, awaited her arrival. As for the clothes to carriage, that she also bespoke herself at a smart livery stable where she was now. When she entered it, she was at once driven to the Park Street station, where she bought a brown trip ticket to Walton. There she walked to the river, hired a boat, rode herself upstream, tied her boat at a wooden bank, climbed the slope, and sat there all afternoon, sometimes reading, and sometimes merely staring out at the river, or up at the sky. At sunset she rode back to the town, returned to the city, and walked back from the station to her home. This all seemed simple enough, but it puzzled the father. It made him unquiet in his mind. Why all this mystery? Why? Well, why a great many of things? For, of course, the principal girl had to prepare for these absences. And although the little fibs she told were harmless enough, well, why? The literature teacher, who had been watching her carefully, had her theory. She knew a lot about girls. Wasn't she once one herself? So it was by her advice that the family doctor was taken into the family confidence, chiefly because neither father nor mother had the pluck to tackle the matter. They were ashamed to have their daughter know that she had been caught even in a small deception. It seemed so like intruding into her intimate life. There are parents like that, you know. The doctor had known the girl since he had ushered her into the world. If there were any one with whom she had shown the slightest sign of intimacy it was with him. Like all doctors whose associations are so largely with women, and who are moderately intelligent and temperamental. He knew a great deal about the dangers of the imagination. No one ever heard just what passed between the two. One thing is pretty sure. He made no secrets regarding the affair. And at the end of the interview he advised the parents to take the girl out of the school, take her abroad, keep her active, present her at courts, show her the world, keep her occupied, interest her, keep her among people whether she liked it or not. The literature teacher counted for something in the affair, and I imagine that it was never talked over between the parents and the daughter, who soon after left town for Europe, and for three years were not seen in Boston. When they did return it was to announce the marriage of the principal girl to the son of the family lawyer, a clever man, and a rising politician. Relations between the literature teacher and the principal girl had never wholly broken up. So ten years after the school adventure, it happened one beautiful day in early September that the teacher was a guest at the North Shore summer home of the principal girl, now the mother of two handsome boys. That afternoon, at tea, sitting on the veranda, watching the white sails as the yachts made for mobile head harbor, and the long line of the surf, beating against the rugged rocks beyond the wide peably beach, on which the dragging stones made weird music. The literature teacher, supposing the old story to be so much ancient history that it could, as can so many of the incidents of one's teens, be referred to lightly, had the misfortune to mention it. To her horror, the principal girl gave her one startle book, and then rolled over among the cushions of the hammock, in which she was swinging and burst into a torrent of tears. When the paroxysm had passed, she sat up, wiped her eyes, in which, however, there was no rafter, and said passionately, I suppose you think me the most ungrateful woman in the world. I know a woman too well that too many women, my position, has always appeared enviable. Poor things, if only they knew. Of course my husband is a good man, and always I do him perfect justice. He is everything that is kind and generous. Only alas, he is not the lover of my dreams. My children are nice, handsome boys, but they are the everyday children of everyday life. I dreamed another, and a different life in which my children were all so different, and beside which the life I try to lead with all the strength I have, is no more like the life I dreamed, than my boys are like my dream children. If you think it has not taken courage to play the part that I have played, I am sorry for your lack of insight. And she got up and walked away. It was as well for, as the literature teacher told the doctor afterwards, it was one notch above her experience, and she absolutely could have found no word to say. When the wife came back to the hammock ten minutes later, the cloud was gone from her face, and she never mentioned the subject again. And you may be sure that the literature teacher never did. She always looked upon the incident as her worst moment of techlessness. Bully, bolly, exclaimed the lawyer, take off your laurels critic and crown the doctor. For that little tale shouted the critic, never. That has not a bit of literary merit, it has not one rounded period. The lawyer is a realist, said the sculptor. Of course that appeals to him. If you want my opinion, I consider that there is just as much imagination in that story, as in the morbid rigmarole you threw at us last night, persisted the lawyer, blah, declared the critic. I call mine a healthy story compared with this one. It is a shocking tale for the operating room. I mean, the insane asylum. All right, laughed the doctor. Then we had all better go inside the sanitarium walls at once. Do you presume, said the journalist, to pretend that this is a normal incident? I am not going into that. I only claim that more people know the condition than dare to confess it. It is, after all, only symbolic of the duality of the soul, or call it what you like. It is the embodiment of a truth which no one thinks of denying, that the spirit has its secrets. Imagination plays a great part in most of our lives. It is the glory that guilds our facts. It is the brilliant barrier which separates us from the beasts. And the only real thing that divides us into classes though, of course. It does not run through the world like straight lines of latitude and longitude, but like the lines of mean temperature. The true things, said the lawyer. If the principal girl had been obliged to struggle for her living, the fact that her imagination did not run at any point into her world of realities would not have been dangerous. Naturally not, said the doctor. Or she would have been a great novelist, or a poor one. And all would have been well or not, according to circumstances. All the same, persists the critic. I can get a horrid story. And, I think, interrupted the doctor. That you have a vicious mind. And here the doctor cast a quick welcome in the direction of the youngster, who was stretched out in a steamer chair, and had not said a word. All right, said the train nurse. He's fast asleep. And so he was. Just as well, said the doctor. Though it does not speak so well for the story as it might. Wow, laughed the journalist. You have had a double success, doctor. You have been spontaneously applauded by the law of man, and sent the man of air to fair d-d-d. I reckon you get the laurels. Don't you be in such a hurry to award the palm, protested the sculptor. There are some of us who have not spoken yet. I am going to put some brilliant torches on mine before I give my star performance. Who would say about stars? Young the youngster, waking up slowly. Nothing except that you have given a very distinguished and unexpected star performance as a sleeper, said the doctor. I say, he exclaimed, sitting up. By Jove, is the story of the principal girl all told? That's a shame. What became of her? You'll never know now, said the doctor. Besides, said the critic, you would not understand. You are too young. Well, I like your cheek. After all, said the journalist, it is only another phase of the dear little Josephine, and I still think that is the banner story. Me too, said the doctor, as we went into the house. And I thought to myself, I can tell a third phase, the tragic, when my turn comes. And I was the only one who knew that my story would come last.