Cosmopolitan 1906-03: Vol 40 Iss 5

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ene Ao Ss Raghnnee iat PII e TY Oe te a ise

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eat eaten tah aea bay teeta Se Pee raters se —— The makers of Safo/io (a product that through special merit has gained more friends than any other household commodity in the world) call atten- tion to its sister product, Hand Safolio, of equal merit in z¢s special sphere, the Toilet and Bath. It is a pure soap, a necessity to those whose hands be- come frequently stained, yet equally desirable for general daily use, from the delicate-skinned baby to the romping school-boy. It ensures an enjoyable, invigorating bath; one that makes every pore respond, removes dead skin, energizes the whole body, starts the circulation and leaves a glow equal to a Turkish Bath.

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The House of Dollars BY ERNEST CROSBY ONEY makes the Senate go. It was’ thé intention,.of,our simple- minded ancestors to have a House of Representatives to repre-— sent the people, and a Senate to represent the states. We have changed all that. ‘The Senate of the United States has ceased to exist, and in its stead we have the House of Dollars. Of course we don’t call it that. We very rarely do call things by their right names. They had a Senate in Rome which at one time was a patriotic, public-spirited and independent body, but the emperors gradually took away all its powers and it became finally a mere figurehead. Still it went on talking as if it were the whole state, and the emperors went on treating it with the greatest respect in form. It was still in appearance the great Roman Senate, but in fact it was an empty shadow of pewer. The history of our Senate is precisely the opposite of this on the surface, and precisely like it underneath, and I will show you how. On the political surface of things the Senate of the United States has absorbed the lion’s share of governmental power at Washington. This is contrary to the expectation of the framers of the Constitution. They intended the lower house of Congress to be the stronger force. All revenue bills were to originate with it, and as it was expected to hold the purse strings, they predicted that it would be the dominant partner. That is the case in England, in France, and in other constitutional countries, where there are two legislative houses. Only in the United States of America is ** otherwise. Why has our Senate be- come so powerful? For that it is the real ruler of the country no one can deny. It treats the lower house and the Presid-nt of the United States with scant courtesy, amending the bills of the former t= suit itself and throwing the treaties of the latter into the waste-paper basket with a contemptuous laugh. How has it secured this power? Perhaps the second half of our inquiry will show. The Senate has acquired this great power on the surface because it has ceased to speak in the name of its own Constitutional rights, but represents instead a vast ulira-constitutional influence which has gradually ousted the states from their function. The Senate is now the agent of the money power—the repre- sentative of Wall Street. It is the House of Dollars. It has drawn to itself the powers of government, because it has itself abdicated its own powers to the lords of finance, and now confines its activities to registering their decrees. It has, in fact, no more real power of its own than the degenerate Roman Senate had, but it is strong in the strength of its imperator, and its imperator is high finance. Like the Romans, we keep up the good old forms. The president of the Senate still addresses the members as ‘‘the Senator from the State of New York,” or ‘the Senator from the State of Rhode Island,” when everybody knows he means “the Senator from the New York Central Railroad,” and ‘‘the Senator from

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Cosmopolitan Magazine the Standard Oil Trust.” Our political system was original y a fair expression of the real life of the country, but it is to-day altogether outgrown and serves only as a veil behind which the power of monopoly disports itself. It is because monopoly has gone so much further in this country than in most other countries—because our trusts so overshadow the industrial combi- nations of Europe, because the centralization of financial control in private hands has reached with us such a point of perfection—that our legislatures are more money ridden than other parliaments. Monopoly picked out the Senate as an easier body to handle than the House. It is a smaller body than the House of Representatives, and its rules make it possible to kill hostile legis- lation by infinite discussion and delay. Its personnel changes gradually. It is the best club in the country, and the trusted retainers of our billionaires enjoy a berth there as they might enjoy a peerage. The intricacies of graft may be pursued in its atmosphere with more comfort and dignity than in the rough- and-tumble of the lower house. And so the trusts have gradually sent their lawyers and managers to the Senate, where they continue to earn their grati- tude, and possibly other more substantial evidences of esteem. They have many opportunities of usefulness to their employers. They can prevent any alteration of an iniquitous tariff which robs the poor to pay the rich. They can perpetuate a telegraph franchise which makes us pay forty cents for ion cent telegrams. ‘They can refuse to allow our post-office to carry parcels (thus making our service inferior to that of any third-rate power) at the command ot They can throw the public money away in extortionate express companies. In dozens of ways paying the railways absurd sums for carrying the mails. they can serve their real masters by opposing the obvious interests of the people. They have carried the trust principle into politics. In forming a trust it is usual to shut down all unnecessary plants and continue only those that are needed. So in the political trust, the House of Representatives is treated as an unnecessary plant and it has virtually been shut down for years. Then again the Senate itself is unnecessarily large, and, as in the case of the Equitable board of directors and other such institutions, a small executive committee has been formed consisting of four of the ablest friends of monopoly, and this un- official cabal determines what legislation shall take effect and what shall not. The political trust is thus modeled upon the industrial trust. The election of such senators depends, of course, upon the ability to bribe the electors, and it is much easier to buy up a state legislature than it would be to debauch the entire electorate of a state. For this reason it is very desirable to take away the power of selecting senators from the legislaturés, and to give it to the people at large of each state. Even the trusts cannot yet purchase the voters of a whole state. Public opinion is ripe for this change. On the Pacific slope they are beginning to put United States senators in prison, and in the state of New York they are loudly calling for the resignation of the unworthy. representatives of that state. Before the scandal of the House of Doilars goes further, let us put a stop to it by insisting upon our right to elect senators by general ballot. Washington must be saved from Wall Street, and the popular election of senators would be a most important step in that direction.

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DELIVERING IHOMILIES TO YOUNG [MEN “AS AN AFTER=DINNER SPEAKER AS A FAMILIAR PARK FIGURE Drawn by Homer Davenport “Chauncey Depew? Oh you mean the man that Vanderbilt sends to Albany every winter to say ‘haw’ and ‘gee’ to his cattle up there.” —Roscoe Conkling

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Drawn by William de Leftwich Dodge FOR MINUTES THE STRUGGLE CONTINUED (See ‘* The Whisperer,” page 503)

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Vol. XL 2 MARCH, 1906 < E ti hie «=F MLS ch Cosmopolitan:.Magazine No. 5 “

Cop, right, 1898, by Vander Weyde DEPEW’S JOVIALITY AND PHILLIPS, POPULARITY, HAVE COST THE AMERICAN ACCORDING TO MR. PEOPLE AT LEAST ONE BILLION DOLLARS The Treason of the Senate BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. —THE CONSTITUTION OF =O NE morning, during this ses- ZN\Xe4 sion of the Congress, the Sen- ate blundered into a discus- sion of two of its minor disreputables, Burton and Mitchell, who had _ been caught with their fingers sliding about in the “change pocket of the people. The

THE UNITED STATES, Article III, Section 3. discussion on these change-pocket thieves was a fine exhibition of ‘‘senatorial dignity and courtesy,” which means, nowadays, regard for the honor and dignity of the American people smugly sacrificed to the Senate’s craftily convenient worship of the Mumbo-Jumbo mask and mantle of its own high respectability. In closing the 487

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488 Cosmopolitan Magazine brief debate over his fellow-senators who had been so unluckily caught, Senator Lodge said, “There is too much tendency to remem- ber the senators, and to forget the Senate.” A profound criticism—profounder far than was intended, or realized, by the sena tor from the ‘‘interests” that center in Massachusetts. Let us take Mr. Lodge’s hint. Let us disregard the senators as individuals; let us for the moment ‘‘remember the Senate.” The treason of the Senate! Politics does not determine prosperity. But in this day of concentrations, politics does determine the distribution of prosperity. Because the people have neglected politics, have not educated themselves out of credu- lity to flimsily plausible political lies and liars, because they will not realize that it zs not enough to work, it is also necessary to think, they remain poor, or deprived of their fair share of the products, though they have produced an incredible prosperity. The people have been careless and unwise enough in electing every kind of public administrator. When it comes to the elec tion of the Senate, how describe their stu- pidity, how measure its melancholy conse- quences? ‘The Senate is the most powerful part of our public administration. It has vast power in the making of laws. It has still vaster power through its ability to for- bid the making of laws and in its control over the appointment of the judges who say what the laws mean. It is, in fact, the final arbiter of the sharing of prosperity. The laws it permits or compels, the laws it re- fuses to permit, the interpreters of laws it permits to be appointed—these factors de- termine whether the great forces which modern concentration has produced shall operate to distribute prosperity equally or with shameful inequality and cruel and de- structive injustice. The United States Sen- ate is a larger factor than your labor or your intelligence, you average American, in de- termining your income. And the Senate is a traitor to you. The treason of the Senate! Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too weak, to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, inde- fatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous; inter- ests that manipulate the prosperity pro- duced by all, so that it heaps up riches for the few; interests whose growth and power can only mean the degradation of the people, of the educated into sycophants, of the masses toward serfdom. A man cannot serve two masters. The senators are not elected by the people; they are elected by the “interests.” A servant obeys him who can punish and dismiss. Ex- cept in extreme and rare and negligible in- stances, can the people either elect or dis- miss a senator? The senator, in the dilemma which the careless ignorance of the people thrusts upon him, chooses to be comforta- ble, placed and honored, and a traitor to oath and people rather than to be true to his oath and poor and ejected into private life. New York’s Misrepresentatives Let us begin with the state which is first in population, in wealth, in organization of industries. As we shall presently see, the nine states that contain more than half the whole American people send to the Senate eighteen men, no less than ten of whom are notorious characters, frankly the servants of the interests the American people have decided must be destroyed, unless they themselves are to be crushed down. And of these servants of the plutocracy none is more candid in obsequiousness, in treach- ery to the people, than are the two senators from the state which contains one-tenth of our population and the strong financial citadel-capital of the plutocracy. Thomas Collier Platt! Chauncey Mitchell Depew! Probably Platt’s last conspicuous appear- ance will have been that on the witness stand in the insurance investigation, where he testi- fied that he had knowingly received thou- sands of dollars of the stolen goods of the insurance thieves. He confessed this with obvious unconsciousness of his own shame. We shall come across this phenomenon fre- quently in our course through the Senate —this shamelessness that has lost all sense of moral distinctions. Our Platts and Bur- tons have no more moral sense than an ossified man has feeling. Then, there are those of our public men who, through fear or lack of opportunity or some instinct of personal self-respect, sit inactive, silent or

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Copyright, 1902, by Pach Bros DEPEW AT CLOSE RANGE Here is the Archetypal Face of the Sleek, Self-satisfied American Opportunist in Politics and Plunder 489

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490 Cosmopolitan Magazine only vaguely murmurous spectators, while the treasons are plotted and executed. These men have been corrupted by associ- ation. The public man meets the people only in masses, at political gatherings. His associations are altogether with other public men and with the class that is either fat- tening on the people or quite cynical about corruption of that kind. Hence; his sense of shame becomes paralyzed, atrophied. The very “interests” that are ruining the people come to stand in his mind for the people themselves,and in his confused mind prostitution becomes a sort of patriotism. Platt cannot live long. His mind is al- ready a mere shadow. The other day a friend found himcrying like a child because Roosevelt was unable to ap- point for him to a_ federal district attor- neyship a man who had _ been caught _ steal- ing trust funds, and in- sisted that he must select some _hench- man wearing the brand less conspicuously. “Platt waslike an unreason- able child,” said his friend. Just before the holidays, Platt called Chauncey Depew, his junior, over to his seat, and said, ‘‘ Chauncey, I hear youare thinking of resigning.” Depew began to shift and fumble and hem and haw—to act as he kas been acting ever since he was publicly dis- graced. Platt looked him coldly in the eye. “Chauncey,” he said,‘ whenever are you go- ing to grow up and stop being a fool 2?” It was one of those rare moments of “supreme courage” when Platt gives way to profanity. His colleague’s shame excited the contempt of his brass-plated soul. And DEPEW HOMESTEAD, well it might; for, Depew’s shame was not, shame for his dishonorable and dishonest acts; nor was it even so little erect a feeling as the shame that follows the shock of being found out; it was that basest of all the base kinds of shame—the shrinking fear of the steady, pointing finger of public scorn and contempt. And from that finger Depew is not secure anywhere but in the Senate itsel{—when the galleries’ are cleared and only his colleagues are there. But let us not linger upon Platt— Platt, with his long, his unbroken record of treachery to the people in legislation of privilege and plunder promoted and in decent leg- islation pre- vented. Let us leave him, not because he is sick and feeble; for death itself without re- pentance or restitution de- serves no con- sideration ; but because he needs no ex- tended exam- ination to be understood and entered under his proper head- ing in the rec- PEEKSKILL, NEW YORK ord. Wher- ever Platt is known, to speak of him as a patriot would cause wonder if not open derision. The most that could be said of him is that, wherever the interests of the people do not conflict with the interests of the “‘interests”’ or with his own pocket, which includes that of his family, Platt has been either inactive or not positively in opposition Depew, the Courtier Let us turn to the other of the two repre- sentatives whom the people of New York suffer to sit and cast the other of their two i a Ae

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WASHINGTON RESIDENCE OF SENATOR DEPEW votes in the body that arbitrates the division of the prosperity of the country, the wages and the prices. At this writing Depew has just given out a flat refusal to resign. “ Why should I resign?” he cried out hysterically. ‘Has anybody put forward any good reason why I should resign?” And he added, “As soon as I have completed my resignation from certain companies, I shall give all my time to my senatorial duties.” What are his senatorial duties? What does he do in the body that is now as much an official part of the plutocracy as the exec- utive council of a Rockefeller or a Ryan? No one would pretend for an instant that he sits in the Senate for the people. Indeed, why should he, except because he took an oath to do so—and among such eminent respectabilities as he an oath is a mere formality, a mere technicality. Did the people send him to the Senate? No! The Vanderbilt interests crdered Platt to send him the first time; and when he came up for a second term the Vanderbilt-Morgan interests got, not without difficulty, Harri- man’s O.K.-on an order to Odell to give it to him. Since he became a large public figure, the only time he has presented himself to the people, he was overwhelmingly beaten. In no part of the state of New York, these thirty-five years, would the people have elected him to any office of trust, great or small. Except, then, for the negligible reason of his oath, he has no reason to - SENATOR DEPEW’S HOME, NEW YORK CITY 4g

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SENATOR PLATT TESTIFYING AT THE INSURANCE INVESTIGATION represent the people. His “senatorial du- ties” are like the duties of more than two- thirds of his colleagues—to serve his master, the plutocracy, in his old age as he has served it from his earliest youth. He has or has borrowed enough of the ‘“‘statesman’s supreme courage” to act upon the theory that, if he should resign from the Senate, he would be ejected from his seventy and odd directorships which bring him in upward of fifty thousand dollars a year in attend- ance fees alone; whereas if he resigns the directorships and clings to his senatorial seat, his plutocratic associates, needing his vote there, will treat him with what he re- gards as consideration. To show what he represents in the Senate, in whose service his vote and his talents are entirely enlisted, we must look at his past. For, a man is his past—not its pretenses and palaverings but its performances. In January, 1862—forty-four years ago 492 -there appeared at Albany among the new members of the Assembly a young man of unusual opportunities, gifts and promise. His name was C. M. Depew, and soon everybody was calling him Chauncey, and was liking him. He was twenty-seven years old, was a grad- uate of Yale—and in that day a degree from a college, while it perhaps meant less as to attainments, certainly meant more in the ears and imaginations of men. He wasa young lawyer from Peekskill, good as a law- yer, better as a mixer, best of all as a jollier; for nature had given him that dangerous flexibility which tempts a man to seek suc- cess by the sideling, cringing, crawling way of the courtier. It was the day <f big enthusiasm for country, and so the politicians were even more offensive with their shailow shoutings of patriotism than now. The Depew youth developed a fine talent for “tall talk,” for Sar

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OF ae “making the proud bird soar.” And he laid well the foundations of the public reputation behind which he has so indus triously plied his cowardly trade these forty years. In those days the big “interests” had not yet appeared, and graft was not consolidated and glozed slimy with respect fiom a painting in the State Capitol at Albany CHAUNCEY M, DEPEW, SECRETARY ability, as now. But the politicians were for the most part grafters, as now; and very bold and coarse they were about it. Graft wasn’t ‘campaign contributions” and ‘“re- tainers” and such smooth and delicate evasions; it was plain bribery, plain pass- ing of money from briber to bribed. The The Treason of the Senate 493 legislative bodies of to-day are no more corrupt than then; the corruption is simply more subtle, more “gentlemanly,” more respectable. The vast difference, the vast excess of peril in the now over the then, lies in the fact that the corrupting force is to-day the national dispenser of the sharings in OF STATE OF NEW YORK, 1864 prosperity where then it was simply small corporations and individuals stealing a rela- tively small part of the people’s abundance. Depew Finds a Master Young Depew was looking about for a master. Nature has made him the kind of

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494 Cosmopolitan Magazine man who, whether good or bad, cannot be self-owned. Soon his glib tongue and fer- tile brain had ingratiated him into favor with Thurlow Weed, the boss of the Repub- A SNAP SHOT IN THE STREETS OF WASHINGTON lican party in that day and a corruptionist who will never get his dues in history be- cause so many men so much more skilled at his specialty, rotten politics, have lived since and have eclipsed his fame. Depew, at twenty-nine, was nominated for secre- tary of state by a trick: the boss was beaten in convention; but the nominated candidate declined to run and Depew, whom the con- vention had rejected, was put on the ticket by the boss’ state committee. Depew was elected, and proceeded publicly to parade his branding-mark. He took a boss’ census of the state and, to cut down New York city’s Democratic representation, gave it a population smaller than the federal census of five years before, 1860, had given it. “‘ Depopulator Depew” was denounced by the Democrats and de- spised by the Republicans; for, while the rank and file of as partisan a party as was the Republican in those war times wil) accept the fruits of the shameful acts of the politicians, it will not thereafter respect or trust them. Thus, when Depew became a conspicuous public figure, his character- istics were fully developed. His first dis- tinct public appearance was as a traitor to the people; for, his treachery of procuring fraudulent representation is of that same kind of fundamental and unmitigated treason as the ballot box stuffer’s or the vote buyer’s. At twenty-nine Depew was definitely launched upon his career of treason. Round and round the press in the mid-sixties went this “suggestion for the next edition of the dictionary:” “ Depewism—any inexplicable depopulation of a town or village; sudden desertion of a neighborhood; falling off in the inhabitants of any locality.” Depew was not renominated. The Re- publican organization had to drop him from its list of figureheads available for submis- sion to the people. Several attempts other- wise to “‘take care of him” miscarried. He finished his term as secretary of state at the end of 1865 and became a “lawyer” for cor- porate and other seekers of favors from the legislatures. His acquaintance, his knowl- edge of the wheels of political machinery, his intimacy with the leaders, gave him peculiar fitness for the work of a lobbyist. At that time the Vanderbilt fortune was being stolen from the people of the state. The ‘‘old commodore” had discovered that millions could be made by bribing legisla- tures where scant thousands would be the reward of honest industry; and he was act- ing upon the discovery with all the energy of —— eeyrer — SN =

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= CORNELIUS (COMMODOKE) VANDERBIL'1 THE MEN WHO DEVELOPED DEPEW, AND a cutpurse at a county fair, and no police about. His son and chief ‘pal,’ William H., first employed Depew; Depew’s suc- cesses, combined with his personal qualities which seemed capable of great development, attracted the commodore to him. Depew, in his ‘Retrospect of Twenty-five Years with the New York Central,” has given his version of how he got the bit and saddle he was to wear proudly and docilely for forty years: “William H. Vanderbilt said to me, ‘We want your services, and the commodore re- marked, ‘Chauncey, politics don’t pay. The business of the future in this country is rail- roading.’ ” It is impossible to say whether the com- modore indulged in that bit of persiflage, or whether Depew’s memory, as flexible as his tongue, his knees, his brain and his con- science, has here bent for him. The com- modore never was and hardly professed to be a railroad man, any more than Ryan isan insurance man or Morgan a steel man; he was, almost frankly, a purchaser of stolen franchises, a procurer of profitable legis- lation, a bond and stockjobber and swin- WILLIAM H. VANDERBIL' OWNED HIM MENTALLY AND MORALLY dler, a parasite upon production; he founded and entailed the policy which has made the New York Central about the most corrupt and about the least progressive railroad in the world in proportion to its opportunities. So, he must have meant by that remark to Depew, if he made it, “‘railroadmg legisla- tion”; must have meant that while politics as an honorable pursuit did not “pay,” politics as a criminal industry was the future business of the country; for, not out of busi- ness but out of politics have the vast for- tunes been made, except the few real estate and mining accumulations. A Railroad Lawyer Depew became a “‘lawyer”’ for the New York Central, with headquarters at Albany, of course. In view of the true nature of old Commodore Vanderbilt’s ‘‘ business” activ- ities, Depew’s fairly accurate description of his own position becomes interesting. ‘‘ My duties,” says he, ‘‘covered everything offi- cial or personal in which the commodore was interested. For the last eleven years of his life I was in daily consultation with this 495

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Se earns 496 Cosmopolitan Magazine remarkable man.” Further: ‘“ Vanderbilt cared little for details and speedily wearied of them. He stated in general terms the re- sults he desired, and then expected the offi- cers of the companies to work them out. It was impossible to explain to him a failure.”’ Read aright, this last is a wonderful pic- ture of the first typical plutocrat—ignorant of business, indifferent to it, rich and grow- ing ever richer by hoarding the property of the people which his agents stole for him, and treating those agents as a Fagin treats the clever boys he sends out to pick pockets. Depew’s picture of old Vanderbilt belongs beside Rockefeller’s self-painted portrait in his famous sentence, ‘I don’t know any- thing about those matters; Iam a clamorer for dividends.” But, incidentally, Depew presents a picture of himself—the sly courtier-agent, with the greasy conscience and the greasy tongue and the greasy back- bone and the greasy hinges of the knees. It would be a mistake to suppose that Depew had not a good brain. On the con- tary, his brain was, and perhaps still is, far superior to the first Vanderbilt’s, or to any of the first Vanderbilt’s successors-as chief custodian of the millions he got by robbing the people and by “milking” the New York Central system. Why, then, should superior serve inferior? For the same reason that the great lawyers of to-day, with their splendid brains, are yet mere fetchers and carriers to the plutocrats who are like huge, soft grubs—mere feeders. Depew lacked that courage which never goes with such adaptability, such timidity of soul as his. He would do anything, and do it thoroughly, as a lieutenant; but as an initi- ator, he was always worthless. He had to have a man behind him, some one to stiffen him to the execution of the clevernesses his brain devised. His nature was essentially servile, parasitic, typical of the truckler and the procurer. Brains without courage will serve, to the furthest extremity of syco- phancy, courage, even though it has no brains. It was, therefore, when Depew was but thirty-two years old that he took “personal and official” service with the Vanderbilt family. And ever since then they have owned him, mentally and morally; they have used him, or rather, he, in his eager- ness to please them, has made himself use- ful to them to an extent which he does not realize nor do they. So great is his rever- ence for wealth and the possessors of wealth, so humble is he before them, that he prob- ably does not appreciate how much of the Vanderbilt fortune his brain got for that family. The successive heads of the family have been, like the old commodore, typical plutocrats. The plutocrat sees something he wants; he has not the brains to get it, only the appetite for it and the determina- tion to gratify that appetite. He hires a brain, a lawyer, to tell him how to get what he wants. Depew’s public front of light- hearted, superficial jester and buffoon, and his private reputation, and character, of spineless sycophant have combined to make him mentally underestimated both by others and by himself. Probably the old commodore, and perhaps William H., did dimly realize that without their Chauncey to think for them and to cloak them, they would have been unable to steal so largely or with so little outcry. But even they, shrewder though they were than the later heads of the family, must have been preju- diced by Depew’s utter lack of self-asser- tiveness, and by his extreme and sordid parsimony, a quality to which we must return later, as it was the immediate cause of his final downfall. The Vanderbilt Lobbyist The Vanderbilts, when he entered their service, were engaged in stealing a series of franchises and existing railroads, and in getting upon the statute books laws legal- izing the thefts and other laws making them absolute masters of the railway situation in the richest territory between New York and Buffalo. Their object was twofold—to rob the people and to rob the capitalists whom they had induced to invest in the stolen railways. It may be said in passing that while the investors whom they cheated may possibly deserve a little sympathy—not much, as investors all knew the whole enter- prise was a swindle and went in because they thought they were on the “ground floor”—the people deserve no sympathy. Year after year they sent back the same old thieves to the legislature. Indeed, are they not still sending notorious rascals there by the score? However, Depew became an ideal lieutenant for a plutocrat, incom- parably the best, take him all round, this country has yet been foozled by. A few years after he had hired out to the Vander- A LI NL OE TR A Ny eR SRE

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wp Nee re i i bilts, Roscoe Conkling, being asked one day what he thought of him, said, ‘‘ Depew? You mean the fellow Vanderbilt sends to Albany every winter to say ‘gee’ and ‘haw’ to his cattle there.” Depew understood the “cattle business”; Vanderbilt did not; but he did not need to understand it, as he owned Depew. Before Vanderbilt got control of the New York and Harlem and New York Cen- tral, the New York Central had been one of The Treason of the Senate 497 stupendou swindles that netted the Van derbilts the cash, the franchiscs, the vested rights to levy upon the people in perpetuity which have enabled them to reach out and out until now they control twenty-two thousand miles of railway and have in the total a wholly owned fortune of nearly half a thousand millions. On May 20, 1869, the Vanderbilts got, in one bill, the right to con- solidate several railways, and a free grant of franchises worth hundreds of millions, and DRAWING-ROOM OF SENATOR DEPEW’S RESIDENCE, WASHINGTON the most industrious and extensive cor- ruptors of the legislature. In the fourteen years up to 1867, it had spent upward of half a million dollars, a big sum for those Spartan days, in buying laws at Albany and to “protect its stockholders against injurious legislation’”—which phrase al- ways means to prevent just laws from being enacted, since an unjust law would be unconstitutional and would be upset by the courts. Not long af- ter Depew became “junior counsel,”’ there was put through the first of the series of the right to water stocks and bonds practi- cally as freely as they might choose. Of the immediate plunder—the watered stocks— the Vanderbilts put in their pockets no less than forty million dollars which cost them nothing whatsoever and to which they had no title and as to which they could never give any pretense of explanation. Accord- ing to Charles Fran¢is Adams, the distin- guished railway man, the first douche of water into the stock was about fifty thou- sand dollars per mile for every mile between New York and Buffalo.

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SFE eee nanan tee tee eee eeeeeeeeeengeeeee eee = SS 498 Cosmopolitan Magazine Here is just one instance of thc effrontery of the Vanderbilt lobby in those days: An innocent looking bill, which freed the rail- road from payment of heavy judgments in Suits pending against it and gave it the right to raise the passenger fare from two to three cents a mile, was introduced in the closing days of the session of 1872. The bill’s true nature was exposed and it was defeated. Immediately, it was hidden away in the depths of another bill and was passed. “During that hour,” said the Buffalo “ Ex- press,” ‘‘ Depew was the busiest man in the lobby.” Another Buffalo newspaper the ‘“Com- mercial,” said, ‘‘ Depew stands convicted of being a corrupter of the lawmakers of the commonwealth,” and that he “had the audacity to cajole or bribe the chief mag- istrate of the state into endorsing one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated.” In that same year when the press was describing Depew as a “regular atten- dant” at the sessions of the “third house,” the lobby of the legislature, the bill was put through that presented Fourth Avenue, New York city, to the New York Central, and compelled the ONE OF THE SENATOR’S Pavorire RECREATIONS city to spend millions of dollars in improv- ing the railway! A Political Change of Heart Depew left the Republican party with the Greeley movement which looked very promising until election day. He took, with his owner’s hearty consent, the nomi- nation for lieutenant governor. In those days the lieutenant governor was ex-offi- cio the chief power in control of the Erie Canal. It has been a fixed part of the Van- derbilt policy to inflict upon the canal, the one restraint upon its monopoly, all possible damage. If Depew had been elected, he would have had the chance to ‘‘ depopulate” it. But he was overwhelmingly beaten. His reputation at that time would alone have been enough to wreck the ticket. In no one of Depew’s own accounts of his career will you find mention that he was a commissioner of the state capitol from 1871 to 1875. It was during this period that the plans were adopted and the works under- taken which have made the capitol the most expensive building for its size in the world. It ought to have cost about four million dollars. It has cost more than twenty-five million and is not yet finished. The scandal over the doings of Depew and his colleagues was so great that the legislature was forced to appoint a committee to “whitewash” them. The commission in its report com- plied to the extent of saying that it had “found nothing in- volving the personal integrity of the commissioners.” But it went on to say of one part of the work that “if it had been honestly done, the commission would have saved at least a mil- lion dollars.” It cited one build- ing “made entirely of brick, stone and iron,” yet against which bills of $59,129.64 were charged for lumber and $100,- 215.25 for carpenter work! De- pew and his colleagues were kicked out of office. The Vanderbilts’ Creature New followed a quarter of a century of arduous and most

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re adroit lobbying, as counsel and then as figurehead pres ident of the Vanderbilt road, and finally as “‘ honor- ary” chairman of it. He got for the Vanderbilts, with ever increasing facility and ever decreasing public clamor, free franchises large and small, large free grants of land, immensely valua ble shore rights and rights to land under water,author- izations of more consolida- tions and of more issues of watered stock, exemptions from taxation, etc., etc.,etc. Also he was always on hand to cover the operations of the bribe- brigade with speeches full of catching sophistries against any and all legislation seeking to lessen the oppressive bur dens imposed by the Van- derbilts upon the people. He managed it all most ably. He grew more and more respected. By gener- ous, even wholesale, distri- bution of passes, by culti- vating editors and reporters, by ingratiating himself with small politicians and the influ ential men of little towns and villages, by making popular addresses and after-dinner speeches, by the thousand and one devices which his ingenious mind and his expansive temperament and his passion for public ap- plause suggested, he made himself a popular figure. Everyone knew he was the Vander- bilts’ creature. Those who saw him in the presence of the members of the family to which he was soul-vassal, whether the elder members or the little children, half-pityingly despised him for his truckling, despised him the more that he was beyond question a man of unusual ability and mentality. The wife of one of the younger Vanderbilts re- fused to have him at her table. “T do not let my butler sit down with me,” said she to the head of the house; “Why should I let yours?” But in general he was liked. The con- tempt for him was tolerant. He was re- garded as a “good fellow, for the kind.” And sohe got what he sought. His persistent and good-humored and clever pushing of The Treason of the Senate SENATOR DEPEW Alt WORK AT THE CHICAGO CONVENTION, Ig04 himself in public produced valuable results to him and invaluable results to the Vander- bilts. It would be a moderate statement that the geniality of Depew has cost the people of New York State a thousand million dollars, besides the infamous grants of the rights to tax the public in perpetuity. The Vanderbilts and their clique kept much; but it is charac- teristic of plutocracy that it damages and de- stroys much more than it carries away, like a bear in a beehive. “Our Chauncey’s” geniality is responsible, to cite one of a graver kind of instances, for the tunnel exit from New York city, a criminal nuisance which the Vanderbilts have maintained all these years in brutish disregard of the com- fort of the people, and at an appalling sac- rifice of human lives. Depew’s popularity with the public so loth to believe that ‘‘one may smile and smile, and be a villM®&,” his “puligwith the too good-natured editors and reporters throughout the state have gracefully cloaked the ignorant and greedy and criminal poli®y which the Vanderbilts

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yea EeNieEene eran EE 500 Cosmopolitan Magazine have always pursued, and which, by the way, has cost them many more millions than they put in the bag. Our history offers no more striking instance of one man power than the wide paralyzing effect and the vast and sinister economic results of the studied and shallow geniality of this sycophant to a plutocratic family. And, for reward, the Vanderbilts have given him scant and contemptuous crumbs. After forty years of industrious,. faithful, and, to his masters, enormously profitable self-degradation he has not more than five millions, avaricious and saving though he has been. And they tossed him the sena- torship as if it had been a charity. Of all the creatures of the Vanderbilts, none has been more versatile, more willing or more profitable to his users than Depew. Yet he has only five million dollars and a blasted name to console his old age, while his users are in honor and count their millions by the score. The Insurance Iniquity Besides the Vanderbilts, he has served one other member of the plutocracy—the famous, the curious, the posthumously ex- posed and disgraced Henry B. Hyde. Hyde discovered Depew’s genius for giving “good” advice away back in the late seventies—in 1877. Depew, on the witness stand last December, told the shameful story. He said, “T came in close touch with Mr. Hyde be- cause a revolution was taking place in life in- surance largely through the instrumentality of Mr. Hyde.” This revolution was, he went on to ex- plain, the “deferred dividend plan,” which means, though he did not admit it, a scheme by which the managers of a life insurance company accumulate in their own hands an enormous sum to be used in gambling and stockjobbing and in a variety of ingenious ways for adding vastly to their own per- sonal fortunes, while the owners of the risked wealth get only the meagerest, if any, interest on their money. Depew, without shame or consciousness of the necessity for it, testified that Hyde and he and their associates in the insur- ance (!) company roped in the public by the familiar device of the “ get-rich-quick” jail birds. Revolution, indeed! It was this “revolution” that made Hyde rich, and also the heads of such of the Equitable’s rivals as adopted Hyde’s meth- ods, which, by the way, he did not invent but imported from abroad, where they had been practiced until the law forbade. Depew testified that he advised with Hyde only about investing the huge sums; for, to use Depew’s own language, “from the moment when the Equitable entered into that plan of Mr. Hyde’s, their business began to grow by leaps and bounds, and money came in with great rapidity.” Depew swore he advised only as to the storage of those huge masses of loot for Hyde and his gang, including Director and Trustee Depew, to graft upon. He denied on oath all knowledge of the in famous laws which Hyde bought—laws to make the policy holders defenseless. He denied on oath that he knew anything whatever as to the Equitable’s traffic with the lobby and the legislature. Later, this following letter was shown him by Mr. Hughes: “ New York, Dec. 19, 1896. “My pEAR DEPEW: “ My friend who usually gets around at this time of the year has written me several letters to which | have not replied. He now writes that he will be here Monday or Tuesday, and desires to have me help him as usual. What shall I do? ‘Faithfully yours, “Joun A. NICHOLS.” To show Depew’s notion of the obliga- tion of his oath, he, after admitting that he received the letter, gave this testimony: “Do you know to whom the letter refers?” asked Mr. Hughes. *T do not,” replied Depew on oath. “ Reference is made to some one who ‘ usu- ally gets around at this time of the year.’ Does that refresh your recollection? ” And Depew swore, “ It does not refresh my recollection as to his name.” Mr. Hughes then handed him this second letter: “New York, December 24th, rgoo. “My DEAR SENATOR: “Our friend up the River has been very rantankerous of late and wants to know, you know. Don’t care a hang, etc., and etc. As soon as you can conveniently say, will you kindly do so? “ Wishing you all the good things of life in this holiday season, I am, “As ever yours, “Joun A. NicHots.” “To Honorable Chauncey M. Depew, “ New York City.” 35 NRT

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New York, Dec. My dear Depew: My friend who usually gets around at this time of the year has written me several letters to which I have not replied. he will be here Monday or Tuesday and desires to nave me help him as usual, What shall I do? Faithfully yours, John A, Nichols Again Depew admitted having received a letter he dared not repudiate. Then came _ this astounding “lapse of mem ony’: “To what does that refer?” in quired Mr. Hughes. “Tt refers to the same person,” replied Depew. “Do you now recall who he is? ” “T do not recall his name, no.” “Do you recall the subject-mat The Treason of the Senate He now writes that Know. 501 and even public-spirited busi ness to a swindling scheme, had created. And he took this salary graft—though the law forbids life-insurance di- rectors to make money for themselves out of their trust funds. He did more and worse. As a member of the executive committee he voted to authorize a loan of two hundred and fifty thousand 19, 1896. New York, December 24th, 1900 My dear Senator: Our friend up the River has been very rantankerous of late and wants to know, you Don't care a nang, etc., and etc. As 300n a8 you can conveniently say, will you kindly do so, Wishing you all the good things of life ter?” in this holiday season, I am, “Tt was some claim he had against the company, which | As ever yours, never understood, and why I should have been written to on Jonn A. Wichols. the subject I do not know.” “Was it anyone connected with the New York legislature?” “No, not at all,” was Depew’s hasty and eager and significantly positive reply. “Or connected with New York politics?” “T think not.” “Or with the legislature or politics of any jurisdiction ?” “T think not.’ This testimony on oath! It is explainable only on one of three theorics—that Depew has had dealings with so many queer fish that he could not remember this one; or that he perjured himself; or that he both perjured himself and has had dealings with a multitude of queer fish. Depew was a director of the Equitable from 1877, and an enthusiastic and even noisy public advocate of insurance. Yet he had no insurance himself, seeker of safe, conservative investments though he was. From 1888 he drew twenty thousand dollars a year as counsel—to give the Hydes and Alexanders advice on the “vast and intricate problems” which the Hyde “revo- lution” of life insurance, from an honorable THE To Honorable Chauncey M. Depew Wew York City se FAMOUS RANTANKEROUS FRIEND” LETTERS (From the official transcript of the report of the Insurance Investigation Committee) dollars to the Depew Improvement Com- pany, an enterprise in which he was interested to the extent of one hun- dred thousand dollars of stock and whose total properties were appraised by the insurance department at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He went still further and did still worse. When the enterprise went smash, he promised— but let us quote the exact words of the testimony of Gerald H. Brown, the super- intendent of the Equitable’s bond and mortgage department: Q. “What did you say to him (Depew) on that subject?” A. “ At that time he led me to believe that he was going to see the Equitable through without any losses.” Q. “ What did he say in substance?” A. “ He said in substance that he had been dragged into this matter by Walter Webb,

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BIRTHPLACE OF SENATOR PLATT, OWEGO, NEW YORK who is now deceased, I believe a brother of Dr. Seward Webb; that the place had been named after him without his consent, and that he had sunk one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of his own money in it, which he was willing to lose if necessary or put in more to help the Equitable out and get it out without loss.” Q. “ Did he say in substance that he would save the Equitable harmless for the delay?” A. “Yes, he did.” Q. “Do you know if Mr. Depew made the same statement to any other person in your presence?” A. “He made the statement to the comp- troller of the society in my presence.” Q. “To Mr. Jordan?” A.“ Yes, sir.” His Predominant Trait Last spring, before the quarrel which is still raging in Wall Street over the great life insurance bone, Depew was urged to “pay up” by friends of his, who knew what was coming. He was warned that dis- grace was imminent for him. But he has one further characteristic which his mask of geniality has hid. He is stingy. To quote one of his intimates, ‘Chauncey is as stingy as Russell Sage. The only differ- ence between them in that respect is that Chauncey keeps up his personal appear- ance.” It is his stinginess that has pre- vented him from getting enormously rich, despite the niggardliness of the Van- derbilts—his stinginess and that utter 502 lack of courage to act for himself which is best revealed in his adoring admiration of very rich men who have the courage to risk real money. This admiration seems the quainter when it is considered that no one knows better than he that those “bold captains of industry” put their money down only when they have marked the cards and loaded the dice; and that, if by some strange chance they should lose in an enterprise, they make the people, as passengers or freight shippers or policy holders, bear the loss. Depew’s stingi- ness made it impossible for him to settle up his Equitable “loan” loot, which, as he was forced to admit on the stand, he had, as a member of the executive com- mittee, voted to himself and his associates. He went away to Europe—and the blow fell. And now he is back where he was thirty years ago in the matter of reputa- tion. With this difference—the world judges youth leniently, but not maturity, especially not such experienced maturity as Depew’s. As the financial result of Depew’s short- sighted stinginess in failing to get himself off the black list of the insurance inves- tigating committee, suits for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars are now pend- ing against him—seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars of the money of the Equitable policy holders whose trustee he was for twenty-eight years. A

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The Whisperer BY GILBERT PARKER “And thou shalt be brought down and shalt speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be as of one that hath a familiar spirit out of the ground, and thy speech shail whisper out of the dust.” as far as eye could observe, nothing golden sea of wheat which had covered the wide prairie save the yellow stubble, the bed of an ocean of wealth which had been gathered. Here, the yellow level was broken there, by a with yellow, or crimson and mauve—the harbinger of autumn. The sun had not the insistent and intensive strength of more southerly climes; it was buoyant, confident and heart ening, and it shone in a turquoise vault which covered and endeared the wide, even world beneath. Now and then a flock of wild ducks whirred past, making for the marshes or the innumerable lakes that vitalized the expanse, or buzzards hunched heavily along, frightened from some far resort by eager sportsmen. That was above; but beneath, on a level with the unlifted eye, were houses here and there, looking in the vastness like dolls’ habitations. Many of the houses stood blank and staring in the expanse, but some had trees, and others little oases of green. Everywhere prosperity, everywhere the strings of life pulled taut, signs that energy had been straining on the leash. Yet there was one spot where it seemed that deadness made encampment. It could not be seen in the sweep of the eye, you must have traveled and looked vigilantly to find but it was there—a lake shim mering in the eager sun, washing against a reedy shore, a little river running into by a dark patch of covert of trees deepening to fallow also tinged land, the reedy lake _ one end and out at the other, a small, dilapidated house half hid in a wood that stretched for half a mile or sO upon a rising ground. house, In front of the not far from the lake, a man was HE harvest was all in, and, remained of the lying asleep upon the ground, a rough felt hat drawn over his eyes. Like the house, the man seemed dilapi a slovenly, ill-dressed, demoral ized figure he looked, even with his face covered. He seemed in a deep sleep. Wild ducks settled on the lake not far from him with a swish and flutter; a coyote ran past, veering as it saw the recumbent fig- ure; a prairie hen rustled by with a shrill cluck, but he seemed oblivious to all. If asleep, he was evidently dreaming, for now and then he started, or his body twitched and a muttering came from beneath the hat. The battered house, the absence of barn or stable or garden, or any token of thrift or energy, marked the man as an excres- cence in this theater of hope and fruitful toil. It all belonged to some degenerate dated also: land, some exhausted civilization, not to this field of vigor where life rang like silver. So the man lay for hour upon hour. He slept as though he had been upon a long journey in which the body was worn to helplessness. Or was it that sleep of the worn-out spirit which, tortured by remem- brance and remorse, at last sinks into the depths where the conscious vexes the un- conscious—a little of fire, a little of ice, and now and then the turn of the screw ? The day marched nobly on toward even- ing growing out of its blue and silver into 1 pervasive golden gleam; the bare, gray- ish houses on the prairie were transformed into miniature palaces of light. Presently a girl came out of the woods behind look- ing at the neglected house with a half- pitying curiosity. She carried in one hand a fishing rod which had been telescoped till it-was no bigger than a cane; in the other she carried a small fishing basket. Her father’s shooting and fishing camp was a few miles away by a lake of greater 503

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’ : EEE ERT RN A REN 504 Cosmopolitan Magazine size than this which she approached. She had tired of the gay company in camp, brought up for sport from beyond the American border where she also belonged, and she had come to explore the river run- ning into this reedy lake. She turned from the house and came nearer to the lake, shaking her head, as though compassion- ating the poor folk who lived there. She was beautiful. Her hair was brown, going to tawny, but in this soft light which en- wrapped her, she was in a sort of topaz flame. As she came on, suddenly she stopped as though transfixed. She saw the man—she saw also a tragedy afoot. The manstirred violently in his sleep, cried out, and started up. As he did so, a snake, disturbed in its travel past him, suddenly raised itself in anger. Startled out of sleep by some inner torture, the man heard the sinister rattle he knew so well, and gazed paralyzed. The girl had been but a few feet away when she first saw the man and his angry foe. An instant, then, with the instinct of the woods and the plains, and the courage that has habitation everywhere, dropping her basket she sprang forward noiselessly. The short, telescoped fishing rod she car- ried swung round her head and completed its next half-circle at the head of the rep- tile, even as it was about to strike. The blow was sure, and with half-severed head the snake fell dead upon the ground beside the man. He was like one who has been projected from one world to another, dazed, stricken, fearful. Presently the look of agonized dismay gave way to such an expression of relief as might come upon the face of a re- prieved victim about to be given to the fire, or to the knife that flays. The place of dreams from which he had emerged was like hell, and this was some world of peace that he had not known these many years. Always one had been at his elbow—‘‘a familiar spirit out of the ground ’’—whis- pering in his ear. He had been down in the abysses of life. He glanced again at the girl, and real- ized what she had ddhe; she had saved his life. Whether it had beer worth saving was another question; but he had been near to the brink, had looked in, and the animal in him had shrunk back from the precipice in a confused agony of fear. He staggered to his feet. He had been in hell, and this was heaven to him—and the latent heaven in himself stirred a little. In some small sense he was again alive—he had been dead for so long, criminal as he was. ‘““Where do you come from?” he said, pulling his coat closer to hide the ragged waistcoat underneath, and adjusting his worn and dirty hat—in his youth he had been vain and ambitious, and good-looking too. ; He asked his question in no impertinent tone, but in the low voice of one who “‘shall whisper out of the dust.” He had not yet recovered from the first impression of his awakening, that the world in which he now stood was not a real world. She understood, and half in pity and half in conquered repugnance said: “IT come from a camp beyond’’—she indicated the direction by a gesture. “I had been fishing”—she took up the basket ‘and chanced on you—then!” She glanced at the snake significantly. “You killed it in the nick of time,” he said, in a voice that still spoke of the ground, but with a little more animation and a note of half-shamed gratitude. ‘I want to thank you,” he added. ‘‘ You were brave —it would have turned on you if you had missed. I know them. I’ve killed five.” He spoke very slowly, huskily. “Well, you are safe, that is the chief thing,” she said, making as though to de- part. But presently she turned back. ‘““Why are you so dreadfully poor—and everything?” she said gently. His eye wandered over the lake and back again, before he answered her, in a dull, heavy tone: ‘‘I’ve had bad luck, and when you get down there are plenty to kick you farther.” “You weren’t always poor as you are now—I mean long ago, when you were young.” “T’m not so old,” he said sluggishly; “only thirty-four.” She could not suppress her astonishment. She looked at the hair already gray, the hard, pinched face, the lusterless eyes. ‘Yet it must seem long to you,”’ she said with meaning. Now he laughed—a laugh sodden and mirthless. He was thinking of his boy- hood. Everything, save one or two spots all fire or all darkness, was dim in his de- bilitated mind. “Too far to go back,” he said, with a Sees sae 1 Oe er sz

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Drawn by William de Leftwich Dodge THE SHORT, TELESCOPED FISHING ROD SHE CARRIED SWUNG ROUND HER HEAD gleam of the intelligence which had been strong with him once. She caught the gleam. She had wisdom beyond her years. It was the greater be- cause her mother was dead, and she had had so much wealth to dispense, for her father was rich beyond counting, and she controlled his household, and helped to regulate his charities. She saw that he was not of the laboring classes, that he had known better days; his speech, if abrupt and cheerless, was grammatical. “Tf you cannot go back, you can go forward,” she said firmly. ‘‘Why should you be the only man in this beautiful land who lives like this—who is idle when there is so much to do, who sleeps in the daytime when there is so much time to sleep at night ?” A faint flush came on the grayish, color- less face. ‘‘I don’t sleep at night,” he said moodily. ‘“Why don’t you sleep?” she asked. He did not answer, but stirred the body of the snake with his foot. The tail moved; he stamped upon the head with sudden, almost frenzied, violence, out of keeping with his sluggishness. She turned away, yet looked back once more—she felt tragedy around her. ‘‘It is never too late to mend,” she said, and moved on, but stopped, for a young man came running from the woods toward her. ‘‘T’ve had a hunt—such a hunt for you,” the younger man said eagerly, then stopped short when he saw to whom she had been talking. A look of disgust came upon his face as he drew her away, his hand on her arm. ‘In heaven’s name, why did you talk 505

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ete eee nr Ateoerseeeemaeerterneer 506 Cosmopolitan Magazine to that man?” he said. ‘‘You ought not to have trusted yourself near him.” “What has he done?” she said. “Ts he so bad?” “T’ve heard about him. I inquired the other day. He was once in a better po- sition—ten years ago as a ranchman; but he came into some money one day, and he changed at once. He never had a good character—even before he got his money he used to gamble, and was getting a bad name. Afterward he began drinking, and he took to gambling harder than ever. Presently his money all went and he had to work, but his bad habits had fastened on him, and now he lives from hand to mouth, sometimes working for a month, sometimes idle for months. There’s some- thing sinister about him, there’s some mys- tery; for poverty or drink even—and he doesn’t drink much now—couldn’t make him what he is. He doesn’t seek com- pany, and he walks sometimes endless miles talking to himself, going as hard as he can. How did you come to speak to him, Grace?” She told him all, ‘ith a curious ab- straction in her voice, .r she was thinking of the man from a standpoint which her companion could not realize. She was also trying to verify something in her memory. Ten years ago—she had just heard from the man she was to marry—ten years ago the poor wretch behind them had been a different man; and there had shot into her mind the face of a ranchman she had seen with her father, the railway king, one evening when his “special” had stopped at a railway station on his tour through Montana. Why did the face of the ranchman which had fixed itself on her memory then, because he had come on the evening of her birthday and had spoiled it for her, having taken her father away from her for an hour—why did his face come to her now? What had it to do with the face of this outcast she had just left ? ‘What is his name ?” she asked at last. “Roger Lygon,” he said. “Roger Lygon,” she repeated, me- chanically. Something in the man chained her thought—his face that moment when her hand had saved him and the awful fear left him, and a glimmer of light came into his eyes; it haunted her. But the man beside her broke into song. He was happy with her. Everything was before him, her beauty, her wealth, her- self. He could not dwell upon dismal things; his voice rang out on the sharp sweet evening air: “*Oh, where did you get them, the bonny, bonny roses That blossom in your cheeks, and the morning in your eyes?’ ‘I got them on the North Trail, the road that never closes, That widens to the seven gold gates of Paradise.’ “O come, let us camp in the North Trail to- gether, With the night-fires lit and the tent-pegs down.’” Left alone, the man by the reedy lake stood watching them until they were out of view. The song came back to him, echoing across the waters: “O come, let us camp on the North Trail to- gether, With the night-fires lit and the tent-pegs down.” The sunset glow, the girl’s presence, had given him a moment’s illusion, had ab- sorbed him for a moment, acting on his deadened nature like a narcotic at once soothing and stimulating. As some wild animal in a forgotten land, coming upon ruins of a vast civilization, towers, temples and palaces in a golden glow of an Eastern evening, stands abashed and vaguely won- dering, having neither reason to under- stand wholly, nor feeling to enjoy com- pletely yet is arrested and abashed, so he had stood. He had lived the last three years so much alone, had been cut off so completely from his kind—had lived so much alone. Yet to-night he would not be alone. Some one was coming to-night, some one whom he had not seen for a long time. Letters had passed, the object of the visit had been defined, and he had spent the intervening days since the last letter had arrived, now agitated, now apathetic and sullen, now struggling with some invisible being that kept whispering in his ear, saying to him: ‘It was the price of fire, and blood, and shame. You did it—you—you —you! You are down, and you will never get up. You can only go lower still—fire, and blood, and shame!” Criminal as he was he had never become hardened, he had only become degraded. Crime was not his vocation. He had no "TT ae ayidlaiiaeataalt | {

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MP agi. nica itacininrmiticasaninal vift for it; still the crime he had committed had never been discovered—the crime that he did with others. There were himself and Dupont and another. Dupont was coming to-night—Dupont who had profited by the crime, and had not spent his profits, but had built upon them to further profit; for Dupont was avaricious and prudent and a born criminal. Dupont had never had any compunctions or remorse, had never lost a night’s sleep because of what they two had done, instigated thereto by the other, who had paid them so well for the dark thing. The other was Henderley, the financier. He was worse perhaps than Dupont, for he was in a different sphere of life, was rich beyond counting and had been early nurtured in quiet Christian surroundings. The spirit of ambition, rivalry, and the methods of a degenerate and cruel finance had seized him, mastered him; so that under the cloak of power—as a toreador hides the blade under the red cloth before his enemy the toro—he held a sword of capital which did cruel and vicious things, which at last became criminal. Hender ley had incited, and paid: the others, Du pont and Lygon, had acted and received. Henderley had had no remorse, none at any rate that weighed upon him, for he had got used to ruining rivals, and seeing strong men go down, and those who had fought him come to beg or borrow of him in the end. He had seen more than one commit suicide, and those they loved go down and farther down, and he had helped these up a little, but not enough to put them near his own plane again; and he could not see —it never occurred to him—that he had done any evil to them. Dupont thought upon his crimes now and then, and his heart hardened, for he had no moral feel ing; Henderley did not think at all. It was left to the man of the reedy lake to pay the penalty of apprehension, to suffer the effects of crime upon a nature not naturally criminal. Again and again, how many hundreds of times had Roger Lygon seen in his sleep —had even seen awake so did hallucination possess him—the new cattle trail he fired for scores of miles. The fire had de- stroyed the grass over millions of acres, two houses had been burned and three people had lost their lives; all to satisfy the savage desire of one man, to destroy the chance of The Whisperer 507 a cattle trade over a great section of coun- try for the railway which was to com- pete with his own—an act which, in the end, was futile, failed of its purpose. Du- pont and Lygon had been paid their price, and had disappeared, and been forgotten— they were but pawns in his game—and there was no proof against him. He had forgotten. Lygon wished to forget, but Dupont remembered and meant now to reap fresh profit by the remembrance. Dupont was coming to-night, and the hatchet of crime was to be dug up again. So it had been planned. As the shadows fell, Lygon roused him- self from his trance with a shiver. It was not cold, but in him there was a nervous agitation, making him cold from head to foot; his body seemed as impoverished as his mind. Looking with heavy-lidded eyes across the prairie he saw in the distance the barracks of the Riders of the Plains and the jail near by, and his shuddering ceased. There was where he belonged, within four stone walls; yet here he was free to go where he willed, to live as he willed, with no eye upon him. With no eye upon him—there was no eye, but there was the Whisperer whom he could never drive away. Morning and night he heard the words, ‘‘You—you—you! Fire, and blood, and shame!” He had_ snatched sleep when he could find it, after long, long hours of tramping over the plains, osten- sibly to shoot wild fowl, but in truth to bring on a great bodily fatigue—and sleep. His sleep only came then in the first watches of the night. As the night wore on the Whisperer began again, as the cloud of weariness lifted a little from him, and the senses were released from the heavy sedative of unnatural exertion. The dusk deepened. The moon slowly rose. He cooked his scanty meal, and took a deep draught from a horn of whiskey from beneath a board in the flooring. He had not the courage to face Dupont without it, nor yet to forget what he must forget, if he was to do the work Dupont came to ar- range—he must forget the girl who had saved his life and the influence of those strange moments in which she had spoken down to him in the abyss where he had been lying. He sat in the doorway, a fire gleaming behind him; he drank in the good air as

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EE AA RE SPREE EAT WN a ek agen 508 Cosmopolitan Magazine though his lungs were thirsty for it, and saw the silver glitter of the moon upon the water. Not a breath of wind stirred, and the shining path the moon made upon the reedy lake fascinated his eye. Everything was so still except that whisper louder in his ear than it had ever been before. Suddenly upon the silver path upon the lake there shot a silent canoe, with a figure as silently paddling toward him. He gazed for a moment dismayed, and then got to his feet with a jerk. ‘“‘Dupont—Dupont,” he said, mechanic- ally. The canoe swished among the reeds and rushes, scraped on the shore, and a tall, burly figure sprang from it, and stood still, looking at the house. “Oui reste la—Lygon?” he said. “Dupont,” was the nervous, hesitating reply. Dupont came forward quickly. “Ah, ben, here we are again—so,” he grunted cheerily. Entering the house they sat before the fire, holding their hands to the warmth from force of habit, though the night was not cold. “‘Ben, you will do it to-night—then ?” Dupont said. “Sacré, it is time.” “Do what ?” rejoined the other heavily. An angry light leapt into Dupont’s eyes. “You not unnerstan’ my letters—bah! You know it all right, so queeck!” The other remained silent, staring into the fire with wide, searching eyes. Dupont put a hand on him. “You ketch my idee queeck. We mus’ have more money from that Henderley—cer- tainlee. It is ten years, and he tink it is allright. Het’ink we come no more becos’ he give five t’ousan’ dollars to us each. That was to do the t’ing, to fire the country. Now we want another ten t’ousan’ to us each, to forget we do it for him—hein?” Still there was no reply. Dupont went on, watching the other furtively, for he did not like this silence. But he would not re- sent it till he was sure there was good cause. “Tt comes to suit us. He is over there at the Old Man Lak’, where you can get at him easy, not like in the city where he lif’. Over in the states, he laugh mebbe, becos’ he is at home, an’ can buy off the law. But here—it is Canadaw, an’ they not care eef he have hunder’ meellion dol- lar. He know that—sure. Eef you say you not care a dam to go to jail, so you can put him there, too, becos’ you have no’ting, an’ so dam seeck of everyt’ing, he will t’ink ten t’ousan’ dollar same as one cent to Nic Dupont—ben sur!” Lygon nodded his head, still hoiding his hands to the blaze. With ten thousand dollars he could get away into—into another world somewhere, some world where he could forget; as he forgot for a moment this afternoon when the girl said to him: “You can go forward. It is never too late to mend.” Now as he thought of her, he pulled his coat together, and arranged the rough scarf at his neck involuntarily. Ten thou- sand dollars—but ten thousand dollars by blackmail, hush-money, the reward of “fire, and blood, and shame!” Was it to goon? .Was he to commit a new crime? He stirred, as though to shake off the net that he felt twisting round.him, in the hands of the robust and powerful Dupont, on whom crime sat so lightly, who had flour- ished while he had gone lower and lower. Ten years ago he had been the better man, had taken the lead, was the master, Du- pont the obedient confederate, the tool. Now, Dupont, once the rough river-driver, grown prosperous in a large way for him— who might yet be mayor of his town in Quebec—he held the rod of rule. Lygon was conscious that the fifty dollars sent him every New Year for five years by Dupont had been sent with a purpose, and that he was now Dupont’s tool. De- bilitated, demoralized, how could he, even if he wished, struggle against this powerful confederate, as powerful in will as in body! Yet if he had his own way he would not go to Henderley. lived with ‘‘a familiar spirit” so long, he feared the issue of this next excursion into the fens of crime. Dupont was on his feet now. “ He will be here only three days more—I haf find it so. To-night it mus’ be done. As we go I will tell you what to say. I will wait at the Forks, an’ we will come back to- gedder. His check will do. Eef he gif at all, the check is all right. He will not stop it. Eef he haf the money, it is bet- ter—sacré—yes. Eef he not gif—well, I will tell you, there is the other railway man he try to hurt, how would he like—but I will tell you on the river. Maintenant —queeck, we go!” He had © | a ee eee reeenreepeereenesmesmnmemenenecemeeses> en = —

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The Whisperer Without a word Lygon took down another coat, and put it on. As he did so he concealed a weapon quickly, as Dupont stooped to pick a coal for his pipe from the blaze. Lygon had no fixed purpose in taking a weapon with him; it was only a vague instinct of caution that moved him. In the canoe on the river, in an almost speechless apathy, he heard Dupont’s voice giving him instructions. Henderley, the financier, had just finished his game of whist and dismissed his friends —it was equivalent to dismissal, rough yet genial as he seemed to be, so did immense wealth and its accompanying power affect his relations with those about him. In everything he was “‘considered.”” He was in good humor, for he had won all the even- ing, and with a smile he rubbed his hands among the ngtes—three thousand dollars it was—as, with a pocket full of money, a man chuckles over a coin he has found in the street. Presently he heard a rustle of the inner tent curtain, and swung round. He faced the man from the reedy lake. Instinctively he glanced round for a weapon, mechanically his hands firmly grasped the chair in front of him. He had been in danger of his life many times, and he had no fear. He had been threat- ened with assassination more than once, and he had got used to the idea of danger— life to him was only a game. He kept his nerve; he did not call out; he looked his visitor in the eyes. ‘“‘What are you doing here? you?” he said. ‘Don’t you know me?” answered Lygon, gazing intently at him. Face to face with the man who had tempted him to crime, Lygon had a new sense of boldness, a sudden feeling of reprisal, a rushing desire to put the screw upon him. At sight of this millionaire with the pile of notes before him there vanished the sickening hesitation of the afternoon, of the journey with Dupont. The look of the robust, healthy financier was like acid in a wound—it maddened him. “You will know me better soon,” Lygon added, his head twitching with ex- citement. Henderley recognized him now. He gripped the armchair spasmodically, but presently regained a complete composure. He knew the game that was forward here; Who are 599 and he also thought that if once he yielded to blackmail there would never be an end to it. He made no pretense, but came straight to the point. “You can do nothing; there is no proof,” he said, with firm assurance. “There is Dupont,” answered Lygon, doggedly. “Who is Dupont?” “The French-Canadian me—I divided with him.” “You said the man who helped you died—you wrote that to me. I suppose you gre lying now.” Henderley coolly straightened the notes on the table, smoothing out the wrinkles, arranging them according to their denomi- nations with an apparently interested eye, yet all the time he was vigilantly watching the outcast before him. To yield to black- mail would be fatal, not to yield to it—he could not see his way. He had long ago for- gotten “‘the fire, and blood, and shame.” No Whisperer reminded him of that black page in the history of his life; he had been immune of conscience. He could not un- derstand this man before him. It was as bad a case of human degradation as ever he had seen—he remembered the stalwart, if dissipated, ranchman who had acted on his instigation. He knew now that he had made a foolish blunder then, that the scheme had been one of his failures; but he had never Jooked on it as with eyes reproving crime. As a hundred thoughts tending toward the solution of the problem by which he was faced, flashed through his mind, and he rejected them all, he re- peated mechanically the phrase, ‘‘I sup- pose you are lying now.” “Dupont is here—not a mile away,” was the reply. ‘“‘He will give proof. He would go to jail or to the gallows to put you there, if you do not pay. He is a devil —Dupont.” Still the great man could not see his way out. He must temporize for a little longer, for rashness might bring scandal or noise— and near by was his daughter, the apple of his eye. ‘““What do you want—how much did you figure you could get out of me, if I let you bleed me?” he asked sneeringly and coolly. ‘““How much now?” Lygon, in whom a blind hatred of the man still raged, was about to reply when he heard a voice calling, “‘ Daddy, Daddy!” who helped

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pre na auneeeneeneeesn ERE STEN 510 Cosmopolitan Magazine Suddenly the red, half-insane light died down in his eyes. He saw the snake upon the ground by the reedy lake, the girl stand-- ing over it—the girl with the tawny hair. This was her voice. Henderley had made a step toward a curtain opening into another room of the great tent, but before he could reach it the curtain was pushed back, and the girl entered with a smile. “May I come in?” she said; then stood still astonished, seeing Lygon. “Oh!” she said. ‘Oh, you!” All at once a look came into her face which stirred-it as a flying insect stirs the water of a pool. On the instant she re- membered that she had seen the man before. It was ten years ago in Montana on the night—of her birthday. Her father had been called away to talk with this man, and she had seen him from the steps of the “‘special.”” It was only. the carica- ture of the once strong, erect ranchman that she saw, but there was no mistake, she recognized him now. Lygon, dumfounded, looked from her to her father, and he saw now in Hender ley’s eyes a fear that was not to be mis- understood. Here was where Henderley could be smitten, could be brought to his knees- it was the vulnerable part of-him. Lygon could see that he was stunned. The great financier was in his power. He looked back again to the girl, and her face, was full of trouble. A sharp suspicion was in her heart that somehow or other her father was responsible for this man’s degradation and ruin. She looked Lygon in the eyes. “Did you want to see me?” she said. She scarcely knew why she said it; but she was sensible of trouble, maybe of tragedy, somewhere; and she had a vague dread of she knew not what, for hide it, avoid it, as she had done so often, there was in her heart an unhappy doubt con- cerning her father. A great change had come over Lygon. Her presence had altered him. He was again where she had left him in the after- noon. He heard her say to her father. ‘This was the man I told you of—at the reedy lake. Did you come to see me?” she re- peated. “IT did not know you were here,” he answered. “I came—” he was conscious of Henderley’s staring eyes fixed upon his helplessly—‘“‘I came to ask your father if he would not buy my shack—there is good shooting at the lake; the ducks come plenty, sometimes. I want to get away, to start again somewhere. I’ve been a failure—I want to get away—right away south. If he would buy it—he is rich—it would start me again. I’ve had no luck.” He had invented it on the moment, and he had made his words longer than neces- sary to give Henderley time to understand and act. The girl understood better than Lygon or Henderley could have dreamed. She had seen the change that had passed over Lygon. Henderley had a hand on himself again, and the startled look went oyt of his eyes. ‘What do you want for your shack and the lake?” he said with restored con- fidence. The fellow no doubt was grate- ful that his daughter had saved his life, he thought. ‘Two hundred dollars,” answered Lygon, quickly. Henderley would have handed over all that lay on the table before him, but that he thought it better not to do so. “Dll buy it,” he said. ‘‘ You seem to have been hit hard. . Here is the money. Bring me the deeds to-morrow—to-morrow.” “T’ll not take the money till I give you the deeds,” said Lygon. ‘It will do to- morrow. It’s doing me a good:turn. I'll get away and start again somewhere. I’ve done no good up here. Thank you, sir— thank you.” Before they realized it, the tent curtain se and fell, and he was gone into the night. The trouble was still deep in the girl’s eyes as she kissed her father and he wished her a good night overdone in its cheerful- ness. The man of iron had been changed into a man of straw once at least in his lifetime. Lygon found Dupont at the Forks. “Eh ben, it is all right—yes ?” he asked eagerly as Lygon joined him. “Yes, it is all right,” answered Lygon, at once. With an exuiting laugh, and a vulgar reRaacscaeen Seay FT Te

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Drawn by William de Lestwich Dodge BUT NOW HE HEARD A VOICE ABOVE HIM IT WAS HER VOICE

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i ' on ~ bo oath, Dupont pushed out the canoe, and they got away into the moonlight. No word was spoken for some distance, but Dupont kept giving grunts of satisfaction. ‘You got the ten t’ousan’ each—in cash or check, eh? The check or the money— hein?”’ “T’ve got nothing,” answered Lygon. Dupont suddenly put down his paddle with a curse. “You got nothing! You said it was all right!” he growled hoarsely. “Tt is all right. I got nothing. I asked for nothing; I have had enough. I have finished.” With a roar of rage Dupont sprang on him, caught him by the throat as the canoe swayed and dipped. He was blind with fury. Lygon tried with one hand for his knife, and got it, but the pressure on his throat was growing terrible. For minutes the struggle continued, for Lygon was fighting with the desperation of one who makes his last awful onset against fate and doom. Dupont also had his knife at work. At last it drank blood, but as he got it home, he suddenly reeled blindly, lost his balance, and lurched into the water with a groan. Lygon, weapon in hand, and bleeding freely, waited for him to rise and make for the canoe again. Ten, twenty, fifty seconds passed. He did not rise. A minute went by, and still no stir, no sign. Dupont would never rise again. In his wild rage he had burst a blood vessel on the brain. Lygon bound up his reeking wound as best he could; he did it calmly, whispering to himself the while. ‘“‘T must do it—I must get there if I can. Cosmopolitan Magazine I will not be afraid to die then,” he mut- tered to himself. Presently he grasped an oar, and pad- dled feebly. A slight wind had risen, and as he turned the boat in to face the Forks again, it helped to carry the canoe to the landing- place. Lygon dragged himself out. He did not try to draw the canoe up, but began this journey of a mile back to the tent he had left so recently. First, step by step, lean- ing against trees, drawing himself on, a journey as long to his determined mind as from youth to age. Would it never end? It seemed a terrible climbing up the sides of a cliff, and as he struggled fainting on, all sorts of sounds were in his ears, but he realized that the Whisperer was no longer there. The sounds he heard did not torture, they helped him forward. They were like the murmur of waters, like the sounds of the forest and soft, booming bells. But the bells were only the beatings of his heart—so loud, so swift. He was on his knees now crawling on— on—on. At last a light, suddenly bursting on him from a tent—he was so near. Then he called, and called again, and fell for- ward on his face. But now he heard a voice above him—it was her voice. He had blindly struggled on to die near her, near where she was, she was so pitiful and good. He had accomplished his journey, and her voice was speaking above him. There were other voices, but it was only hers that he heard. “God help him—oh, God help him!” she was saying. He drew a long quiet breath. “I will sleep now,” he said clearly. He would hear the Whisperer no more. TS RR

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Dy} SIP" ates { i XN yy) W Wage Ir was ages ago in life’s first wonder I found you, Virgilia, wild sea-heart; And ’twas ages ago that we went asunder, Ages and worlds apart. Your lightsome laugh and your hair’s dark I knew them of old by an ocean-stream, In a far, first world, now turned to story, Now faded back to dream. I saw you there with the sea-girls fleeing, And I followed fast over rock and reef; And you sent a sea-fire into my being, The lure of the lyric grief. One after one the stars were slipping, Pearl after pearl to the bowl of night; And down the west three moons were dipping Into the waves, all white. I know not now where the moons were misting, On what lost sea in the milky track; But I know that you swore to a lovers’ trysting, In those quick glances back. I followed you fast through the white sea-splendor, On into the rush of a blown, black rain; Drawn on by that mystery strangely tender, The lure of the lyric pain.

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RRR yp Ne ET Pa ADSI US 1 lin BORE LA aS b ET RE ESS PEN A tg Ul see: ; GP. i PN Sos oa " AN ian As up round a headland the tides came hurling, You sang one song from your wild sea-heart: Then a mist swept in, and we two went whirling, Ages and worlds apart. II We are caught in the coil of a God’s romances— We come from old worlds and we go afar: I have missed you again in the Earth’s wild chances— Now to another star! Perhaps we are led and our loves are fated, And our steps are counted one by one; Perhaps we shall meet and our souls be mated, After the burnt-out sun. For over the world a dim hope hovers, The hope at the heart of all our songs— That the banded stars are in league with lovers, And fight against their wrongs. If this all is a dream, then perhaps our dreaming Can touch life’s height to a finer fire: Who knows but the heavens and all their seeming Were made by the heart’s desire ? One thing shines clear in the heart’s sweet reason, One lightning over the chasm runs— That to turn from love is the world’s one treason That treads down all the suns. So I go to the long adventure, lifting My face to the far, mysterious goals, To the last assize, to the final sifting Of gods and stars and souls. Our ways go wide and I know not whither, But my song will search through the worlds for you, Till the Seven Seas waste and the Seven Stars wither, And the dream of the heart comes true. I am out to the roads and the long, long questing, On dark tides driven, on great winds blown: I pass the rims of the worlds unresting, I sail to the unknown. EN PTO NEC

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ES PO taney ‘a . =e a PSs ie There are more lives yet, there are more worlds waiting, For the way climbs up to the eldest sun, Where the white ones go to their mystic mating, And the Holy Will is done. I will find you there where our low life heightens— Where the door of the Wonder again unbars, Where the old love lures and the old fire whitens, In the Stars behind the stars. Perhaps we will meet where the boughs for rafters Shelter a cliff by an ocean-stream, As we met long ago in the light sea-laughters, When over me went the dream. Perhaps we will meet in some field of faery, Twined round by the sea and the scented vales, To stray moon-charmed in a high-hung, airy Dream-wood of nightingales. We will hear some word of the final meaning, As we meet at last by the love-loud trees, Hushed with the wonder of life, and leaning Over the marveling seas. Ah, strangely then will the heart be shaken, For something starry will touch the hour; And the mystic wind of the worlds will waken, Stirring the soul’s tall flower. As we go star-stilled in the mystic garden, All the prose of this life run there to rhyme, How eagerly will the poor heart pardon All of these hurts of Time! For ’twill all come back—the wasted splendor, The heart’s lost youth like a breaking flower, The dauntless dare, and the wistful, tender Touch of the April hour. In that wondrous hour of our souls dream-driven, In that high, white hour, O my wild sea-bride, The tears and the years will be all forgiven, And all be justified.

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The Girl of the Middle West Ilustrated with Drawings by H. Richard Boehm F attempts to describe and portray a type that will gain recognition as characteristic of all American women have never been successful, we must offer in explanation the length and breadth of our great land, with its climatic differences and other variations in the conditions of life. The clever draughtsmen who make such appeal to us by their charming delineation of the American girl should be franker and state more specifically the section of the country in which their girls ray be found. Neither the foreign observer nor the American student is willing to stamp the creaticns of our popular illustrators as a national type. It may be, after all, that the American girl as a distinctly composite figure does not yet exist in reality; and certainly art has been unable to imagine her. While the men whose portrayal of lovely types of woman- hood have received deserved success, have been working mostly in the East, a fellow-artist has been carefully studying and portraying the Girl of the Middle West. Mr. H. Richard Boehm is a native of Chicago, and the Art Institute of that city has the credit of having trained his great talent. We are struck at once with the particularly refined and lovely type of face that Mr. Boehm has elected to depict. If we would compare him with any of his young contemporaries in his idea of feminine beauty, the most points of resemblance would probably be found in the work of Mr. Henry Hutt. Neither the large-framed, square-faced woman of Mr. Christy nor the coquettish and somewhat flippant beauty of Mr. Fisher has ever appealed tohim. But in getting at the really human qualities of the face Mr. Boehm excels them all. This is probably due to the fact of his great love and close study of M. Paul Helleu’s women. The fine modeling of Mr. Boehm’s faces, the poise and carriage of his figures— all attest the devotion of this young American to the French master. And now the art conditions of the country have drawn this artist, at the age of thirty, to New York. But the change will not affect the portrayal of the type of feminine beauty he has found in the Girl of the Middle West. She, it is true, is closely akin to her Eastern sister, for did not her parents or grandparents come from the Atlantic seaboard? But the beauty and richness of the new land and the wholesomeness of its life, have already left their marks in the beauty of its women. The Girl of the Middle West must stand alongside her sisters from New England, Louisiana and California as one of our com- prehensive types until further amalgamation is achieved, if that be possible. H. RICHARD BOEHM BY ELBERT HUBBARD Art follows the lead of commerce. In _ send honesty, originality and spontaneity fact, we produce our art of the surplus that business men accumulate. Whether New York city will ever be- come a center of art, like Athens, Rome, Venice and Amsterdam, is a question. Probably she will not, for there are pos- sibly certain conditions in New York that 516 on their way, but of these it is not lawful to speak. The tide of empire moves westward, and with art and literature it is the same. My opinion is that the art center of the world will within a decade be somewhere in the Mississippi valley, for there the conditions 36 i TT ee py A Le

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THE YOUNG BUSINESS WOMAN

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THE MOTORING GIRL 37 524

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are ripe for the production of the greatest race of men and women the world has ever seen. It is quite probable that there will be no exact center of art, but that the art spirit will be diffused and there will be many centers, for the telephone and quick transportation distribute thought and feel- ing as well as things. The Middle West has even now evolved a distinct type of strong, healthy, self- reliant, happy, capable and competent men and women. And some of these men and women will set the world a pace in art and literature—and they have, even now. ‘“Where the artist is, there is art,’ said Whistler. The Middle West is passing out of the pioneer stage. The question there no longer is, ‘How can we make money ?” but, ‘‘What shall we do with the money we have made?” There are great difficulties in the way of high achievement, but men become strong by overcoming adverse conditions; and the limitless wealth of the Middle West will see to it that the man who does a great work is rewarded. In Chicago there is a group of young writer-artists—corn-fed and farm-educated —who worked on the village paper and then by ambition were lured to Chicago, where they took up newspaper work, each doing the thing he could do best. There was no favor for any of them. Success depended upon making good. It was a severe school, and often the fare was as meager and the discipline as severe as those supplied by our old friends, Scrooge and Squeers. Among others in this survival-of-the fittest group, I might name Frank Holme, who with a smile and a wave of the hand dropped out of the game, as did Stephen Crane, and I hope now both have found good assignments in Elysium. Lawrence Mazzanovich, one of the Chicago group of black and whiters, came down to Roycroft and plugged away hard at his easel and drawing-board. Then he worked at lithography, to get a stake so he could go to Italy and see what his ancestors had done. Persistency and work have placed Mazzanovich on the high tide to success. We shall hear more from him. Then there are Otto Schneider, John T. The Girl of the Middle West 525 McCutcheon, William Schmedtgen, Hugo Von Hofsten, H. Richard Boehm and T. A. O’Shaughnessy. These men are all of German parentage save McCutcheon and O’Shaughnessy, who, I am told, are descen- dants of Milesian kings. But here is the point: they are all men who have made their own way, and have wrung recognition from a busy and tardy public. Evidently they were all born with artistic tendencies, but the Middle West supplied the condi- tions under which they evolved. Schneider and Richard Boehm evolved and grew side by side, yet their work is now distinctly different. Boehm seems at his best in picturing women and children. His subjects are not horsy, golfy, disagreeable girls—but sweet, simple, wistful children of nature. You love them, you know not why, and are drawn toward the man who can create such airy, fairy, divinely human creatures. Boehm has the strength of the Pre- Raphaelites. He pictures the things he loves, just as the old master posed the woman he loved for the Madonna and the Christ-Child shown on his canvas was his own baby. Boehm paints the things he loves, and he loves the things he paints. His lines are free, seemingly careless, bold and touched with a right manly quality— suggestive of poise and purpose. Into Richard Boehm’s being has been infused a deal of the identical rugged, practical spirit that has animated and made many big men. He has the strong, buoyant, hopeful spirit that filled the soul of the peasant Millet, when he drifted into Paris to face famine and heart-break. And now I,hear that Boehm has listened to the siren-song of Manhattan, and New York is to be his home. Transplantation is just as necessary to men as to plants. Millet had to go to Paris to be disillusioned; and the happiest day of his life was when he, with his little family, were safely mounted on top of the Barbizon stage and saw Paris fade away into the mist. Life in New York may be propitious for Boehm and it may not, but the move is all a part of life’s experience, and the genius of the man will continue to bloom and blossom, for in the soul of Richard Boehm is that which passeth show.

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What Life Means to Me BY JACK LONDON Mr. London’s article is the first of a series now in preparation for the Cosmopolitan. A number of important and successful men and women are to tell what life means to them and how they take it. The publication of their views is a matter which we believe our readers will follow with the keenest interest. Everyone tries to work out a philosophy of life for himself, and must therefore be the more curious to know what others have acc hie CD) WAS born in the working DS Ba be class. I early discovered Cape FG § enthusiasm, ambition, and a Pe AYNGs PA INK Po, e RE IRN Ny by MG ideals; and to satisfy these ¥uk became the problem of my Pye childlife. My environment 4 was crude and rough and te raw. I had no outlook, but Gwe an uplook rather. My place =F) in society was at the bottom. Here life offered nothing but sordidness and wretchedness, both of the flesh and the spirit; for here flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented. Above me towered the colossal edifice of society, and to my mind the only way out was up. Into this edifice I early resolved to climb. Up above, men wore black clothes ished. worried my child’s brain into an under- standing of the virtues and excellencies of that remarkable invention of man, com- pound interest. Further, I ascertained the current rates of wages for workers of all ages, and the cost of living. From all this data I concluded that if I began immedi- ately and worked and saved until I was fifty years of age, I could then stop working and enter into participation in a fair portion of the delights and goodnesses that would then be open to me higher up in society. Of course, I resolutely determined not to marry, while I quite forgot to consider at all that great rock of disaster in the working- class world—sickness. But the life that was, in me demanded fmore than a meager existence of scraping and boiled shirts, and women dressed in, Yand scrimping. Also, at ten years of age, I beautiful gowns. Also, there were good things to eat, and there was plenty to eat. This much for the flesh. Then there were the things of the spirit. Up above me, I knew, were unselfishnesses of the spirit, clean and noble thinking, keen intellectual living. I knew all this because I read ‘‘Sea- — side Library” novels, in which, with the ex- ception of the villains and adventuresses, all men and women thought beautiful thoughts, spoke a beautiful tongue, and performed glorious deeds. In short, as I accepted the rising of the sun, I accepted that up above me was all that was fine and noble and gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life, all that made life worth living and that remunerated one for his travail and misery. But it is not particularly easv for one to climb up out of the working class—especi- ally if he is handicapped by the possession of ideals and illusions. I lived on a ranch in California, and I was hard put to find the ladder whereby to climb. I early inquired the rate of interest on invested money, and 526 became a newsboy on the streets of a city, and found myself with a changed uplook. All about me were still the same sordidness and wretchedness, and up above me was still the same paradise waiting to be gained; but the ladder whereby to climb was a dif- ferent one. It was now the ladder of busi- ness. Why save my earnings and invest in government bonds, when, by buying two newspapers for five cents, with a turn of the wrist I could sell them for ten cents and double my capital? The business ladder was the ladder for me, and I had a vision of myself becoming a baldheaded and suc- cessful merchant prince. Alas for visions! When I was sixteen I hea already earned the title of ‘‘prince.” | But this title was given me by a gang of cut- throats and thieves, by whom I was called ‘The Prince of the Oyster Pirates.” And at that time I had climbed the first rung of the business ladder. I was a capitalist. I owned a boat and a complete oyster-pirat- ing outfit. I had begun to exploit my fellow- creatures. I had a crew of one man. As Sir

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captain and owner I took two-thirds of the spoils, and gave the crew one-third, though the crew worked just as hard as I did and risked just as much his life and liberty. This one rung was the heights I climbed up the business ladder. One night I went on a raid amongst the Chinese fishermen. Ropes and nets were worth dollars and cents. It was robbery, I grant, but it was precisely the spirit of capitalism. The capitalist takes away the possessions of his fellow-creatures by means of a rebate, or of a betrayal of trust, or by the purchase of senators and supreme-court judges. I was merely crude. That was the only difference. I used a gun. But my crew that night was one of those inefficients against whom the capitalist is wont to fulminate, because, forsooth, such inefficients increase expenses and reduce dividends. My crew did both. What of his carelessness he set fire to the big mainsail and totally destroyed it. There weren’t any dividends that night, and the Chinese fishermen were richer by the nets and ropes we did not get. I was bankrupt, unable os then to pay sixty-five dollars for a new mainsail. I left my boat at anchor and went off on a bay-pirate boat on a raid up the Sacramento River. While away on this trip, another gang of bay pirates raided my boat. They stole everything, even the anchors; and later on, when I recovered the drifting hulk, I sold it for twenty dollars. I had slipped back the one rung I had climbed, and never again did I attempt the business ladder. From then on I was mercilessly exploited by other capitalists. I had the muscle, and they made money out of it while I made but a very indifferent living out of it. I was a sailor before the mast, a longshoreman, a L - roustabout; I worked in canneries, and <~ factories, and laundries; I mowed lawns, and cleaned carpets, and washed windows. And I never got the full product of my toil. I looked at the daughter of the cannery owner, in her carriage, and knew that it was my muscle, in part, that helped drag along that carriage on its rubber tires. I looked at the son of the factory owner, going to col- lege, and knew that it was my muscle that helped, in part, to pay for the wine and good- fellowship he enjoyed. But I did not resent this. It was all in the game. They were the strong. Very well, I was strong. I would carve

What Life”Means to Me 527 my way to a place amongst them, and make money out of the muscles of other men. I was not afraid of work. I loved hard work. I would pitch in and work harder than ever and eventually become a pillar of society. And just then, as luck would have it, I found an employer that was of the same mind. I was willing to work, and he was more than willing that I should work. I thought I was learning a trade. In reality, I had displaced two men. I thought he was making an electrician out of me; as a matter of fact, he was making fifty dollars per month out of me. The two men I had displaced had received forty dollars each per month; I was doing the work of both for thirty dollars per month. This employer worked me nearly to death. A man may love oysters, but too many oysters will disincline him toward that particular diet. And so with me. Too much work sickened me. I did not wish ever to see work again. I fled from work. I became a tramp, begging my way from door to door, wandering over the United States, and sweating bloody sweats in slums and prisons. I had been born in the working class, and I was now, at the age of eighteen, beneath the point at. which I had started. I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel house of our civilization. This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore. Lack of space compels me here to ignore it, and I shall say only that the things I there saw gave me a terrible scare. I was scared into thinking I saw the naked simplicities of the complicated civilization in which I lived. Life was a matter of food and shelter. In order to get food and shelter men sold things. The merchant sold shoes, the politician sold his manhood, and the representative of the people, with excep- tions, of course, sold his trust; while nearly all sold their honor. Women, too, whether on the street or in the holy bond of wedlock, were prone to sell their flesh. All things were commodities, all pepple bought and sold. The one commodity that labor had to sell was muscle. The honor of labor had no price in the market place. Labor had muscle, and muscle alone, to sell.

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528 Cosmopolitan Magazine But there was a difference, a vital differ- ence. Shoes and trust and honor had a way of renewing themselves. They were imperishable stocks. Muscle, on the other hand, did not renew. As the shoe merchant sold shoes, he continued to replenish his stock. But there was no way of replenish- ing the laborer’s stock of muscle. The more he sold of his muscle, the less of it remained to him. It was his one commodity, and each day his stock of it diminished. In the end, if he did not die before, he sold out and put up his shutters. He was a muscle bank- rupt, and nothing remained to him but to go down into the cellar of society and perish miserably. I learned, further, that brain was like- wise a commodity. It, too, was different from muscle. A brain seller was only at his prime when he was fifty or sixty years old, and his wares were fetching higher prices than ever. But a laborer was worked out or broken down at forty-five or fifty. I had been in the cellar of society, and I did not like the place as a habitation. The pipes and drains were unsanitary, and the air was bad to breathe. If I could not live on the parlor floor of society, I could, at any rate, have a try at the attic. It was true, the diet there was slim,- but the air at least was pure. So I resolved to sell no more muscle, and to become a vender of brains. Then began a frantic pursuit of knowl- edge. I returned to California and opened the books. While thus equipping myself to become a brain merchant, it was inevitable that I should delve into sociology. There I found, in a certain class of books, scien- tifically formulated, the simple sociological concepts I had already worked out for my- self. Other and greater minds, before I was born, had worked out all that I had thought and a vast deal more. i discovered that I was a socialist. The socialists were revolutionists, inas- much as they struggled to overthrow the society of the present, and out of the ma- terial to build the society of the future. I, too, was a socialist and a revolutionist. I joined the groups of working-class and in- tellectual revolutionists, and for the first time came into intellectual living. Here I found keen-flashing intellects and brilliant wits; for here I met strong and alert- brained, withal horny-handed, members of the working class; unfrocked preachers too wide in their Christianity for any congrega- tion of Mammon-worshipers; professors broken on the wheel of university sub- servience to the ruling class and flung out because they were quick with knowledge which they strove to apply to the affairs of mankind. Here I found, also, warm faith in the human, glowing idealism, sweetnesses of unselfishness, renunciation and martyrdom —all the splendid, stinging things of the spirit. Here life was clean, noble, and alive. Here life rehabilitated itself, became won- derful and glorious; and I was glad to be alive. I was in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents; and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum-child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial ex- pansion and world-empire. All about me were nobleness of purpose and heroism of effort, and my days and nights were sun- shine and starshine, all fire and dew, with before my eyes, ever burning and blazing, the Holy .Grail, Christ’s own Grail, the warm human, long suffering and mal- treated, but to be rescued and saved at the last. And I, poor foolish I, deemed all this to be a mere foretaste of the delights of living I should find higher above me in society. I had lost many illusions since the day I read ‘“‘ Seaside Library” novels on the Cali- fornia ranch. I was destined to lose many of the ‘illusions I still retained. As a brain merchant I was a success. Society opened its portals tome. I entered right in on the parlor floor, and my disillu- sionment proceeded rapidly. Isat downto dinner with the masters of society, and with the wives and daughters of the masters of society. The women were gowned beauti- fully, I admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered that they were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down below in the cellar. “The colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady were sisters under their skins ”’—-and gowns. It was not this, however, so much as their materialism, that shocked me. It is true these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities; but in spite of their prattle the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimen- tally selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities, and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they ate gua : ——_——_—— ~e, —_- a

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| and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends stained with the blood of child labor, and sweated labor, and of prostitution itself. When I men- tioned such facts, expecting in my innocence that these sisters of Judy O’Grady would at once strip off their blood-dyed silks and jewels, they became excited and angry, and read me preachments about the lack of thrift, the drink, and the innate depravity that caused all the misery in society’s cellar. - When I mentioned that I couldn’t quite see that it was the lack of thrift, the intemper- ance, and the depravity of a half-starved child of six that made it work twelve hours every night in a Southern cotton mill, these sisters of Judy O’Grady attacked my private life and called me an ‘‘agitator””—as though that, forsooth, settled the argument. Nor did I fare better with the masters themselves. I had expected to find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were clean, noble, and alive. I went about amongst the men who sat in the high places, the preachers, the politicians, the business men, the professors, and the editors. I ate meat with them, drank wine with them, automobiled with them, and studied them. It is true, I found.many that were clean and noble; but with rare exceptions, they were not alive. I do verily believe I could count the exceptions on the fingers of my two hands. Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, they were merely the unburied dead—clean and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive. In this connection I may especi- ally mention the professors I met, the men who live up to that decadent university ideal, ‘“‘the passionless pursuit of passion- less intelligence.” I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons with which to shoot down strikers in their own factories. I met men incoherent with indignation at the brutality of prize fighting, and who, at the same time, were parties to the adulteration of food that killed each year more babies than even red- handed Herod had killed. I talked in hotels and clubs and homes and Pullmans and steamer chairs with cap- tains of industry, and marveled at how little traveled they were in the realm of intellect. On the other hand, I discovered that their intellect, in the business sense, was abnor- What Life Means to Me 529 mally developed. Also, I discovered that their morality, where business was con- cerned, was nil. This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentle- man, was a dummy director and a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans. This gentleman, who col- lected fine editions and was an especial patron of literature, paid blackmail to a heavy-jowled, black-browed boss of a munic- ipal machine. This editor, who published patent-medicine advertisements and did not dare print the truth in his paper about said patent medicines for fear of losing the advertising, called me a scoundrelly dema- gogue because I told him that his political economy was antiquated and that his biol- ogy was contemporaneous with Pliny. . This senator was the tool and the slave, the little puppet of a gross, uneducated machine boss; so was this governor and this supreme-court judge; and all three rode on railroad passes. This man, talking soberly and earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the goodness of God, had just betrayed his comrades in a business deal. This man, a pillar of the church and heavy contributor to foreign missions, worked his shop girls ten hours a day on a starvation wage and thereby directly encouraged prostitution. This man, who endowed chairs in universi- ties, perjured himself in courts of law over a matter of dollars and cents. And this rail- road magnate broke his word as a gentle- man and a Christian when he granted a secret rebate to one of two captains of indus- try locked together in a struggle to the death. It was the same everywhere, crime and betrayal, betrayal and crime—men who were alive, but who were neither clean nor noble, men who were clean and noble but who were not alive. Then there was a great, hopeless mass, neither noble nor alive, but merely clean. It did not sin positively nor deliberately; but it did sin passively and ignorantly by acquiescing in the current immorality and profiting thereby. Had it been noble and alive it would not have been ignorant, and it would have re- fused to share in the profits of betrayal and crime. I discovered that I did not like to live on the parlor floor of society. Intellectually I was bored. Morally and spiritually I was sickened. I remembered my intellectuals and idealists, my unfrocked preachers,

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530 Cosmopolitan Magazine broken professors, and clean-minded, class- conscious workingmen. I remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life was all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance. And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning, the Holy Grail. So I went back to the working class, in which I had been born and where I be- longed. Icarenolongertoclimb. The im- posing edifice of society above my head holds no delights for me. It is the founda- tion of the edifice that interests me. There I am content to labor, crowbar in hand, shoulder to shoulder with intellectuals, idealists, and class-conscious workingmen, getting a solid pry now and again and set- ting the whole edifice rocking. Some day, when we get a few more hands and crow- bars to work, we’ll topple it over, along with all its rotten life and unburied dead, its monstrous selfishness and sodden material- ism. Then we'll cleanse the cellar and build a new habitation for mankind, in which there will be no parlor floor, in which all the rooms will be bright and airy, and where the air that is breathed will be clean, noble and alive. Such is my outlook. I look forward to a time when man shall progress upon some- thing worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of to-day which is the incentive of the stomach. I retain my belief in the nobility and excel- lence of the human. I believe that spiritual sweetness and unselfishiness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-day. And last of all, my faith is in the working class. As some Frenchman has said, ‘‘ The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending.” Looking Landward BY PAUL HAZELTON Breast bravely, ship, the battling tide And sweep the watery miles aside That part from me the one that should be nighest, Deferring the ineffable moment when I'll envy not the kingliest of men; No, not a soul that soars among the highest. “Land ho!” Bless thee, wind-wavered voice, Vibrant with love of home; rejoice With me whose heart with blest home thoughts is thronging. Yes, weary eyes, there surely is the land— Low, but agieam with gold, its stretching strand Lit by her love and hallowed by her longing.

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Drawn by Phillipps Ward ‘*Is HE VERY DEAD?” BARNEY ASKED IN A LOUD VOICE, TO GET AHEAD OF THE CLATTERING MILK-CANS The Queer Feeling BY ANNIE HAMILTON DONNELL ARNEY went out to the top stair to weigh things. All his momentous little decisions had been weighed out there, and this was a Decision— Barney was not sure it should not be all capitals. There would be cows there. ; He set them gravely into the scales over against the striped cat that there was here. The cat rose into the air. For to a little tencment boy cows would natu- rally weigh more than a lean little cat. And there was, of course, likelihood that there would be cows and a cat. Something warm rubbed against Bar- ney’s legs and something cold against his hand. He leaned over and caught up a little striped cat, and in the instant of his doing it the cows rose into the air. “Tt wouldn’t be you, Tags! It might be striped but it wouldn’t be you! Oh, it might have one ear chewed and walk on three paws, but it wouldn’t be!” Still there were the other things to weigh. Trees, the milkman had said, and grass you needn’t keep off, and a great deal of sky. Barney put them all! in with the cows, and soberly added a tuberculous geranium- tree, a twopenny patch of weeds, and a glimpse of sky between tall chimneys, to the lean cat in the other scale. Even then the cows stayed a little way up. The voices were still going on in the 531

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532 Cosmopolitan Magazine kitchen, the Stepmother voice and the milkman’s. Barney knew they were weigh- ing things, too. But it was not a Decision with them, as it was with him. The little Stepmother had said, ““You can decide, Barney.” Cows, sky, grass, trees, and likely a cat —would there be horses? Barney got up suddenly, with the striped cat in his arms, and went back to the kitchen. He must find out if there would be horses. If there were “Three,” promptly the milkman. Not one, or even a span, but three! So there would likely be one — one _ unoccupied one—to pet and smooth and talk to, while the other two were truck- ing. Barney could not imagine three ‘‘unoccu- pied” horses, or horses that did not take their turn at trucking. He was very fond of horses. They weighed more than cows. One weighed more, and three horses——! “Tll_ go,” Barney said quietly, dropping the little striped cat. “‘Oh, Barney!—well, I suppose you’re right, dear. You’re such a thin little thing and it’s a beautiful place for you. But” —the little Stepmother’s lips smiled shak- ily—‘“‘but who’s to sprinkle my clothes and take care of the baby?” The milkman was ina hurry. He got to his feet now and held out his hand to Bar- ney. ‘‘Come along then,” he said briskly. ““Needn’t mind about bringing any clothes. She said not to—there’s her little boy’s.” And Barney walked slowly away from the old life toward the new. It was a colorless little leave-taking, as appearances went. Even when he turned back the first time and kissed the sleeping baby, or the second time and whispered to the lean little cat, there was not much emotion apparent. Barney had scarcely known what it was that he whispered to Tags, but the little cat Drawn by Phillipps Ward HE CAUGHT UP A LITTLE STRIPED CAT took it for an apology as it was intended. It made the separation friendlier. The new life was to be lived out in the country where a sonless woman hungered for a little son. The milkman had told her of Barney and offered to bring him out to her, for her to ‘“‘try.”. He was a hand- some little chap all right, if she wanted a handsome litide chap, and a smart one too, Barney was. The milk- man had recommended him heartily. And it would be a regular snap for the little chap! “Ts he very dead?” Barney asked in a loud voice, to get ahead of the clattering milk-cans. They were already out of the city. The milk- man started a little and looked down at the dan- gling little legs and fol- lowed them up to the serious little face. ‘“‘*Er—is who what?” asked the milkman be- wilderedly. “The Lady’s little boy—I only thought I’d like to know how dead he was.” This was even worse. The milkman, divided between amusement and mild horror, for- bore to question further. Better wait. “Because if he isn’t very dead, I shouldn’t suppose she’d want me. I should think she’d feel too bad.” Light was dawning. The solemn, par- son little chap meant had the other little chap been dead Jong. Queerish way to put it, though! ‘“‘He’s been dead couple years or more.” ‘“‘Oh!—oh, then I guess it’s all right. She’s prob’ly forgot how he looked—the color his eyes were, you know, and his hair. I thought if I didn’t happen to match him——” The clattering cans drowned the rest. The milkman, apprehending more remarks of this nature, whipped up his horse. He felt oddly embarrassed and a new sense of responsibility came upon him and sat heavily. He had not given much thought

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heretofore to his share in this little enter- prise. Barney was seven. His eyes were sky- color, the bluest variety. He had a touse of red-gold hair, and little, straight, splendid legs. He was the kind of a boy that mothers watch with covert pride and kiss in their sleep. But Barney’s mother had had but a few short days and nights to do it in, and he could not remember her kisses. He had never been kissed that he knew of, for the little Stepmother had not had time, and even if she had found a spare moment, it would “‘prob’ly” have been her own baby she would have kissed. Barney’s father had been dead a year. Barney had been in regular trousers a long time, hence his surprise when the CRUST Os Ae pr Drawn by Phillipps Ward The Queer Feeling 533 Lady put him into puffy knee-things with what might as well be a dress over them, covering all but the puffs. He seemed to be looking downward at somebody else. It was the morning after his arrival into the new life. “Don’t you like them, Barney?” the Lady asked anxiously. She liked them so much. She had been admiring the straight little body at every stage of the toilet. Her own little boy had been straight like that. “I like the cloth,” Barney replied gravely. It was soft and smooth, and when it touched his hands or his little bare knees, it would have felt as if it were caressing him if Barney had known what caressing felt like. He knew he liked the feeling. ““The other clothes were too old for you,” cS ‘“ WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO GET ACQUAINTED WITH ME, BARNEY?”

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534 Cosmopolitan Magazine the Lady’s kind voice went on. She was fasteninga little patent-leather belt. ‘“‘ You’re just a little mite of a thing—did they think you were grown up? You're going to be my little boy.” “He said there’d be horses,” Barney broke out, with gentle abruptness. He did not mean to be rude, but here was a new and uncomfortable sensation. He did not know it was embarrassment, but it dis- turbed him. He wanted to get away from it. He wanted to get away from the strange, puffy knee-things, too, and the thing that might as well be.a dress. But he realized with a sigh that he must take those about with him. “You little jockey! Well, there are horses—run away and get acquainted with them. But, dear—but, Barney ” “Yes, ma’am?” Barney stood at atten- tion, a bewitching little figure with grave, intent face. The Lady longed to gather him up and lavish upon him her stored-up caresses. “When are you going to get acquainted with me, Barney ?” Honesty was as the breath of Barney’s lean little nostrils. If he answered, he must answer straight. He met her beau- tiful, wistful eyes unflinchingly. “T guess you’ll have to ’scuse me,” he said. ‘‘You’re so—so new. I’m not used to getting ’quainted with very new folks.” ‘But to-morrow I’ll be old, Barney—or the next day. Won’t you like me to- morrow or the next day?” “T’ll see,” Barney promised, and went away to find the horses. They were beautiful horses, and none of them was away trucking. They did not look like the trucking kind. Barney went from one to another, reaching up on tiptoe to pat them with his kind little hands. They helped the queer feeling inside him a good deal. He might even have forgotten it a moment, if the soft little cat had not come along—Barney could not bear the soft little cat. ““Go away!” he cried, then relented. For the soft little cat could not help it for not being Tags—for not having stripes instead of long, soft ‘‘feathers”—for having too many legs and unchewed ears. Even as Barney looked down at it, faint, indeter- minate stripes seemed to appear on its back, as if to appease him. He leaned down and stroked them. ‘““You’re not to blamed,’”? he murmured kindly, “but I wish you’d go away and rub against somebody else. I—I’m a little sore where you’re rubbing; it’s where Tags used to,” The queer feeling inside Barney was back again. It stayed all day, growing queerer. He did not know its name, but he went about laggingly, in the clutch of it. It made his eyes wistful and troubled, and the Lady watched him anxiously. She had not thought there would be a queer feeling, reasoning from what the milkman had told her of Barney’s home surroundings. If the child had had an own mother or lived in a beautiful place—but a little tenement boy, stepmothered only, and old with lack of little childish joys The queer feeling did not seem to go with Barney. There was too much room—too much sky—too many trees. And Barney wan- dered over the great grass-spaces and felt lonely on them. It would have been a comfort to come upon a warning on a tree: ‘‘Keep Off the Grass.” He was acquainted with Keep Off the Grasses—they were old friends. It was an old friend that Barney craved in this beautiful, new place. At ten o’clock he wondered if the baby was having her nap and if she had had to go to sleep unrocked. Barney had always rocked the cradle. It would be hard to get to sleep lying stockstill—it almost seemed to Barney he could hear a little protesting wail, and he shut the ears of his heart against it. Barney had never called the feeling he had for the baby love, but that was its name. Oh, why hadn’t he asked the milkman if there would be babies? Now he realized his mistake. Before cows and little striped cats and horses, he should have remembered babies; they weighed more than the other things. One little mottled, puny baby in the scales would have balanced 21I the others. And if a little appealing cry had gone into the scale with the baby, how the other side would have gone up! Too late Barney realized. At twelve—who was giving the baby her dinner? Who would take her out for an airing at one? Who was sprinkling the little Stepmother’s clothes?—running her errands p—making her laugh at the baby’s pranks? Who was taking care of the baby and the little Stepmother ? Barney sought out one of the Lady’s -

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maids. The one that looked most like a washerwoman he accosted courageously. “‘Haven’t you some clothes I could sprinkle?” he asked. ‘I’m quite a good sprinkler.” “Saint Pathrick!” startled, the One Like a Washerwoman ejaculated. She had never before been accosted by a handsome little boy in a Russian frock who wanted to sprinkle clothes. ‘‘Because I feel queer in here””—Barney indicated gravely his little flat breast— ‘‘and I thought it would make me weller— better,” correcting himself hastily, “‘to sprinkle something.” The maid, looking down into the small face, agreed with Barney, only, sure, it was himself needed it, from the pale little face on him! If he was going to faint—but Bar- ney’s next words reassured her on that score. “Or a baby would do,” he said. ‘“‘I— I don’t suppose there’s ever a baby, is there? I could rock it to sleep—I’m a pretty good rocker.” There was never a baby. Barney turned away sadly, the queer feeling growing queerer all the time. Perhaps—perhaps he was going todie. Was it queer feelings peo- ple died of? If so—if he was going to—he wished he could do it at home where the baby was and the little Stepmother, in sound of their voices—the baby’s little coo- ing one and the monotonous soft little Stepmother hum. It would be easier to die at home. There would be—would be the dear four walls shutting them in together, and—the good, steamy smell of the little Stepmother’s suds. And perhaps, if he were dying hard of this terrible, queer feeling, she would come across the room and put the baby down beside him and even—even stoop down herself and kiss him. The Lady had kissed him now, so he knew what it would be like—a little, but, of course, little Stepmother-kisses would be the best. ‘You little thin thing, you!” she might say. Barney swayed unsteadily on his short legs. It made him dizzy to think how beautiful it would be to have her say, ‘You little thin thing, you!” to him again. The Lady left him to himself, then flut- tered anxiously about him—-trying both ways. He would get on better alone—no, no, with some one near him, to point out things and try to make him laugh. The Lady tried all day to make him laugh. The Queer Feeling 535 There were too many things to see, or else it was because the baby and the little Stepmother were not there to see them, too. Or else because of the terrible, queer feel- ing. Or else—or else—Barney struggled with his little emotions bewilderedly. He made a stanch little fight, but it was too much for him. The Lady went up to bed with him, to a beautiful, rose-tinted little room. Her gentle fingers unfastened the little patent- jeather belt. Barney noticed that they f } Drawn by Phillipps Ward BARNEY HAD ALWAYS ROCKED THE CRADLE were white, slender fingers—the little Step- mother’s were redder and not so smooth, and nothing glittered on them. But he liked little Stepmother-ones the best. He wondered, if the Lady were to say, ‘“‘ You little thin thing,” if it would sound like—

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AOR ein hb Se i a A RRO Hg “You poor little thin thing!” Barney sighed. No, it didn’t sound that way. The white fingers were unbuttoning the soft little frock now. They lingered over it—it had been so long since they had un- buttoned a soft littie frock. “‘You poor little thin thing! I didn’t know one little boy could have so many bones— but we’ll make you fat!” The Lady softly laughed. Her breath on Barney’s cheek Was very sweet. “Are you very tired, Barney?” “Tf you please,’”’ Barney murmured, for he did not like to explain that he was dying. , “You poor little—well, you shall lie in this soft little bed and rest! See, I’m going to turn the light down and sit here beside you. Shall I tell you a story, Barney?” “Tf you please.” The queer feeling was choking him, but he fought on against it. The need for being polite—the little Step- mother had said, ‘‘Be polite, Barney” — helped him a little. “About a mother and a little baby, Barney ?” Barney turned on the soft pillow. ‘The Step-kind of a mother?” he asked eagerly, but she could not have heard. “Once there was a mother with a little baby like a little crumpled rose-leaf in her arms. Its little face was so small, Barney! You can’t think how small——” “‘T know,” nodded Barney, interested. “Well, while it lay there on her arm, the mother planned such beautiful things. He should be a great lawyer—for it was a boy- baby, Barney—and some day a judge, per- haps. And he would do such wonderful tender things for humanity—especially suf- fering, sinful, friendless humanity! “But first she could hold him in her arms and rock him to sleep—-” “T know,” whispered Barney. If he could only see the baby before he died! “And then she would send him to col- lege—but oh, Barney, he died!” “T know” —for he was so very near to it. ‘“‘He had just begun to be straight and tail and walk with a dear little man-stride. They used to talk about his going to college after he went to bed—Barney, it was this little bed! Shall we talk about your going to college? He is asleep! The poor little thin thing—he was so tired!” She leaned over him, but she did not kiss him 536 Cosmopolitan Magazine again, lest it wake him. Time enough— to-morrow, next day—next—next! Yes, he should go to college. She would take him some day to great halls and chapels and dormitories, to see how it was going to look. She had taken her own boy once, when he was still in puffy knee- things, to several places and asked him laughingly to choose. And he had chosen the college with the most bare floors, be- cause he liked the sound of his little stamp- ing feet on therm! But Barney was not asleep. He was only lying very still, indeed, for her to go away. It would not be polite to die before her, and he was sure it was going to happen very soon now. The queer feeling had become a Queer Feeling, and it was pressing so on his breast! He plucked at the bed- clothing over it. He began, when he was all alone, to sob drearily. “Come right in!” Barney did not know that he had gone to sleep. “Come right in, you little thin thing, you!” It was like a little Stepmother- voice, only—only shinier. There was a great golden gate and he knew inside it was heaven. Then he had died. ‘““The bab—is there a baby ?” he faltered, holding back. ““Yes—oh, yes!” “And the Step-kind of mothers? And things to sprink——” “Come right in. They are all here,” the shiny voice said. And he had been going in when he woke. Then he knew he had been asleep. He sat up in the soft little bed and remembered. A sudden anguish of desire seized him to get up and hurry home in the dark—to get there be- fore it was too late! He could see the puffy things, by the dim-burning light, but he passed them by and tried to find his own man-clothes to put on instead. When he could not, he went back to them, pattering noiselessly on his little bare feet. He must make no noise —no noise—— He would write the Lady a letter. There was a little writing desk on the table. He stood up before it and printed in great un- steady letters his little explanation: “ive gorn Home to dye. ive gorn with the milkman. i cood have bore it if therde been a baby or a Step mother or eaven somthing to sprinkkle, ide rather go Home then to ge to——” —_

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AGL! - ies Pores \ i Wy, ih wld Milla 7 \\ . \ os Drawn by Phillipps Ward SHE HAD NEVER BEFORE BEEN ACCOSTED BY A HANDSOME LITTLE BOY IN A RUSSIAN FROCK WHO WANTED TO SPRINKLE CLOTHES What was that place she had said? He could not remember. “to that plase you sed,” he wrote, in de- spair of remembering, “enny ways i coodent have went there after ide dyed, like yore little boy coodent. I tride not to but it choaked me so I hadto.” The light was too dim to see lines. The little letter ran uphill and downhill and crossed deep chasms. The beginning and the end came together unexpectedly and shook hands. Barney pinned it to the pin- cushion and stole away. The milkman started at four o’clock, he knew. Supposing he should be too late! The thought of that gave wings to his weak little legs and he sped along in the faint light that cleft the darkness in the east. He 537

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538 Cosmopolitan Magazine must get to the milkman’s—he must get to the milkman’s—he must get to the milk- man’s. It was like a refrain set to the tune of his little pounding heart. It could not be far away now. They had passed it on that long, long-ago ride that was yesterday, and the milkman had flicked at it with his whip and said, ‘“‘That’s my place.” So Barney knew. He came to it by and by. The milkman was just clattering out of the yard. “Oh, stop! Oh, stop!” panted Barney, brandishing his arms. ‘‘It’s me! I’m Bar- ney! I want to go, too!” In the bliss of going home, he went to sleep among the- cans, as they clattered on. The milkman’s unchiseled features under- went queer changes as he looked down at the small curled figure. Barney had ex- plained it all to him breathlessly, and be- cause the milkman had been a boy once himself, he understood. “Beats me!” yet he muttered, for the parallel was not perfect. He felt that un- der exactly like circumstances he would have been going the other way. Even a Stepmother would not have called him back! At six they clattered into Barney’s street, and now Barney was wide awake. He sat on the seat with his dangling little legs trembling with excitement. His head wagged from side to side as he gazed, in his endeavor to miss none of the beloved land- marks. What a beautiful street it was! There weren’t any other tenements as tall as. those tenements, no, sir! No others more wide- awaker at six o’clock in the morning, or brimminger-full of little children, or that toed the line of the dingy sidewalks straighter, or—or looked so beautiful! And babies—where were there such babies? Barney sat breathless, waiting for his own. His heart sang in his flat little breast. He forgot he had come home to die. Suddenly he remembered what day it was. The little Stepmother ironed on Tues- days. That she ironed often on Wednes- days and Thursdays and on Fridays and Saturdays, he had no time to remember. It was early in the morning. He would get home in time to sprink ‘Barney! Barney!” joyously. The three of them were there in the door, and in his excitement he could not have told whether it was Tags or the baby or the little Stepmother that called out, “Barney! Barney!” He caught off his cap and waved it. He stood up and danced. ‘T’ll sprinkle the clothes!” he shouted. The milkman was muttering, ‘“ Beats me!”

The Silent Place BY PAULINE BROWER A sBuRTHEN of soft laughter, and of words That lips of lovers whispered long ago, Is in the wind to-night, and the low sigh Of tired hearts that weary of their woe, And through low apple-boughs sleep droppeth down, And the white, sinless moonbeams gently lave, With their great gift of peace, A little nameless grave. I know not why my heart Cries out in such despair. Is it that sudden thought, “Tf thou wert there ? ”

Tl a MTT Te it i <a

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ESOT r No. 6431** & a I, Saas a a thesumof Oi AL £f000.0 .4, wom Pounds Sterling. \\orlou ad bos. CHECK RAISED AND ‘‘ CROSSED,” WHICH CAUSED THE BANK OF ENGLAND TO LOSE NEARLY FORTY THOUSAND DOLLARS Famous Forgeries Involving Curious Legal Points, of Interest to Business Men BY SAMUEL WOODS T is well known that a signa- ture may be forged so as to 4*~“@ deceive the most scrutinizing : NS of bank tellers, yet when such RYk writing comes under the eye { of a chirographic expert for \4q Minute or even microscopic & # examination, there are never WS lacking certain signs which = show the fraud. A common practice in forging is the overlaying cr trac- ing process, which produces an exact fac- simile. This is well calculated to deceive the handler of checks in the ordinary course of business, but is soon caught by an expert with the aid of modern testing appliances. No person ever writes his name exactly alike twice, so if two precisely identical signa- tures are discovered one must be a traced counterfeit. In non-traced forgeries the ex- pert eye can detect signs of the cramped movemer.t of the hand, and variations of the flow of the pen that result from the delibera- tion necessary in making the counterfeit. And again, in spite of all the forger’s care, there are certain personal characteristics that even the most skilled do not seem to be able to escape. Such are the joining of the letters and the position of the dot over the “i” with relation to the letter itself. The forger is pretty sure to follow his own habit in these matters. There also lurks betrayal in the crossing of the “‘t”’, in the shading of some of the letters, and the preservation of a straight line for the base line of the writing. When an erasure has been made or matter added in any document, the microscope and the chemical reagent are brought into play to detect the change. The most minute differences in the composition of two inks are perfectly determinable by these means. On the other hand, banks, corporations and business men generally, are constantly adopting new means, and employing new precautions to defeat the schemes of the forger. They have called to their aid the arts of the engraver, paper maker and ink manufacturer to block his cupidity. Never- theless forgery is a common and often suc- cessful crime. In many cases the act in- volves more than the mere counterfeiting of a signature, and we shall tell the story of some of the more interesting of these crimes that have startled the business world within the past ten years. About five years ago a London firm paid 539

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ELLE es: I AEE SEAL IN I Et MINI ig YN Soi i a Sag

ara ee eel ean ne atta nen earn EN Neste senna eetenndernuetupstendie Tose ob Fe. 7869 a a SU & Ta 9 y e +> > , os < 4 : 2G 2 Ged TAQOFs 7 eN075 7 577 Vz 2 BAR SEISYS wo, abies CHECK RAISED FROM $12 TO $22,000. THE LOSS STOOD BY THE DRAWER-BANK 0 oodland, Cal, LEO LT 159.8 Crocker=-Woolworth National Bank of San Francisco

BECAUSE THE COURTS DECIDED THAT THE CLEARING-HOUSE ENDORSEMENT OF THE BANK WHICH CASHED IT DESTROYED ITS NEGOTIABILITY an account of £8 by a check on the Bank of England, one of the most careful and con- servative of financial institutions. |The paper fell into the hands of a forger who skilfully raised the amount to £8000, or nearly $40,000, by writing in a word of eight letters and making a few ciphers at the bot- tom. It is clear from the reproduction of this check that the drawer showed great carelessness in making it out, especially in the writing in of the amount. Probably this circumstance did more than anything else to inspire the cupidity of the forger. He was further helped to success in his scheme by taking advantage of a practice peculiar to English business methods. He made a ‘crossed check” of it. That is, he drew the No. LOS@...... two lines across the face of the paper and wrote between them the name of the drawee. Now a check thus “crossed” cannot be cashed at a teller’s window. It must be paid to a bank through a bank. The swindler deposited the raised check in the firm’s bank, was paid the money and decamped the following day. The forgery was not discovered until some weeks later, and the careful ‘‘Old Lady of Threadneedle Street” found herself the poorer by the exact sum of seven thousand, nine hundred and ninety- two good English sovereigns. About ten years ago banking circles in this country were greatly interested in a California forgery case. It seems that a man named A. H. Dean obtained from the COLUMBIA FALLS, MONT. “Yo /7¢ COLUMBIA BANK. Pay to the order of '

COnn ___-Dollars. CHECK CASHED BY MAN FOR WHOM IT WAS NOT INTENDED. LOSS STOOD BY BANK, BECAUSE IT DID NOT MAKE SURE OF THE PAYEE’S IDENTITY 540 38

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NE nn ne alae a eenenenaninaiel , Midablinth ince be ba 07S ES | ee ae ae i TH : .e milined i oA hit Ulf. Cod si ee Drunlyyaul Viet Wee ie eeregy sf rach e STOCK CERTIFICATE RAISED FROM ONE TO ONE HUNDRED SHARES, cisokghh sie ‘on eh Joe t (oho i BENJAMIN H. GASKILL BOR- ROWED LARGE SUMS OF MONEY BY THIS MEANS Bank of Woodland, Woodland, California, a cashier’s check for $12 on the Crocker- Woolworth National Bank of San Fran- cisco, made payable to his own order. This he raised to $22,000, and after endorsing, deposited to the credit of his account in the Nevada Bank. The latter endorsed the check “‘ Pay only through Clearing House. Dec. 17, 1895,” and it was duly paid. After collection, Dean drew all but $1500 of the money from the Nevada Bank and ab- sconded. The Crocker-Woolworth sued the Nevada Bank for $22,000 less $12, the orig- inal amount of the check, and obtained judgment. A higher court reversed this MANUFA Pay to the order o \ AI \ 0) NOD Mt CHECK RAISED AFTER CERTIFICATION, 541 | Ue = , A \ = | yee ase cme ; THE BANK RESPONSIBLE FOR ONLY THE AMOUNT CERTIFIED decision, taking the ground that the clear- ing-house endorsement of the Nevada Bank was a specific endorsement, and destroyed the check’s negotiability; that it was not a case wherein an individual or a bank collects a raised check with or without a general en- dorsement, in which case the rule is, barring extraordinary negligence on the part of the drawer-bank, that the holder must refund. Such an endorsement as the Nevada Bank put on this check would therefore seem to imperil the bank receiving it, for had it been endorsed by the former bank and been paid by the Crocker-Woolworth, the Nevada Bank would have had to refund the amount. 2. NoS\LD. = + see door Jaunasy 1% 1003 RR ” NATIONAL BANK ‘i th li NS Bollars 10e THE AKRG ILLING COMPANY AULA GOLAN A A Treasurer President 39

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: Seti nepal RR ls SOI SEG 542 Cosmopolitan Magazine But the specific endorsement destroyed its negotiability and showed the Nevada Bank to have been not the check’s owner but simply the collecting agent for Dean, a point which, with a general endorsement, could not have been made. Another point of great interest to the busi- ness world was brought .out in the forgery case of the Columbia Bank, of Columbia Falls, Montana. A firm in that town owed a man named Owen Owens the sum of $5000. Through an error a check was drawn to the order of Owen O. Owens. There happened to be an individual of that name, and he received the paper and deposited it in his bank. A few days later he withdrew his entire account and left for parts unknown. According to the law his act was forgery. But the law also has decided that a middle initial is not part of a man’s name, and if a bank cashes a check, draft or note, it is *: bound to know that it is paying the money to the proper person, otherwise it must be responsible for the full amount. Such incidents as these could be avoided if persons cashing checks or drafts offered by strangers would take the trouble to make sure of the one to whom they pay the money. Certified checks are just as danger- ous as uncertified ones since the certification may be forged as well as the check itself. The loss in the raising of a certified check depends entirely whether the raising has been done before or after certification. The Akron Milling Company’s check, here illus- trated, was originally drawn for $100 and certified as such. Afterward it was raised to $1000 by the use of chemicals. In this kind of forgery the bank does not lose a penny above the certified amount. The firm that cashed the check for Rawlings lost $900. Readers are doubtless familiar with the astonishing disclosures that followed the recent death of Benjamin H. Gaskill of Philadelphia, by which the much-respected banker was shown to be one of the cleverest adepts at the forger’s art. Gaskill was well rated, and his credit was so excellent that on an outlay of five cents’ worth of oxalic acid he could raise any amount he desired. With a dip or two of ink, certificates were raised a thousandfold in value. A number of the big Philadelphia banks were hard hit, and the City Trust Company was compelled to close its doors. Gaskill would apply for a loan of one or two hundred thousand dollars and to the three- or four-month collateral note he would attach a stock certificate of the Philadelphia Traction Company, raised from one share to the desired amount. There are such things as secret signatures in the business world, but they are not always proof against the forger who can call photography to his aid. Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, Treasurer of the Women’s Department Store Company, of Cleveland, Ohio, adopted a signature which was known only to herself, the cashier and paying teller of the bank. As may be seen from the fac- simile, the characteristics were the two dots over the ‘“‘i” and the blot in the loop of the “ty.” The bank paid this thousand dollar check without a suspicion and then it was discovered to be a forgery. The signature must have been photographed and repro- duced. The bank demurred at standing the loss, putting forward woman’s proverbial weakness in keeping a secret as the basis of a claim that the treasurer had described the signature to other persons. In the end the bank was obliged to restore the $1000 to the drawer’s account. TREASURER FORGED CHECK—A SECRET SIGNATURE COUNTERFEITED WITH THE AID OF PHOTOGRAPHY i} ee —_

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Some Uncanny Tales BY AMBROSE BIERCE ONE SUMMER NIGHT HE fact that Henry Arm- strong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to con- vince. That he really was buried the testimony of his senses compelled him to ad- mit. His posture—flat upon his back, with his hands crossed upon his stomach and tied with something that he easily broke without profitably altering the situation—the strict confinement of his entire person, the black darkness and profound silence, made a body of evidence impossible to controvert and he accepted it without cavil. But dead—no; he was only very, very ill. He had, withal, the invalid’s apathy and did not greatly concern himself about the uncommon fate that had been allotted to him. No philosopher was he—just a plain, commonplace person gifted, for the time being, with a pathological indiffer- ence: the organ that he feared consequences with was torpid. So, with no particular apprehension for his immediate future, he fell asleep and all was peace with Henry Armstrong. But something was going on overhead. It was a dark summer night, shot through with infrequent shimmers of lightning silently firing a cloud lying low in the west and portending a storm. These brief, stam- mering illuminations brought out with ghastly distinctness the monuments and headstones of the cemetery and seemed to set them dancing. It was not a aight in which any credible witness was likely to be straying about a cemetery, so the three men who were there, digging into the grave of Henry Armstrong, felt reasonably secure. Two of them were young students from a medical college a few miles away; the third was a gigantic negro known as Jess. For many years Jess had been employed about the cemetery as a man-of-all-work and it was his favorite pleasantry that he knew “‘every soul in the place.” From the nature of what he was now doing it was inferable that the place was not so populous as its register may have shown it to be. Out- side the wall, at the part of the grounds 543 a

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SR a ete renee es 544 Cosmopolitan Magazine farthest from the public road, were a horse and a light wagon, waiting. The work of excavation was not difficult: the earth with which the grave had been loosely filled a few hours before offered little resistance and was soon thrown out. Re- moval of the casket from its box was less easy, but it was taken out, for it was a perquisite of Jess, who carefully unscrewed the cover and laid it aside, exposing the body in black trousers and white shirt. At that instant the air sprang to flame, a cracking shock of thunder shook the stunned world and Henry Armstrong tran- quilly sat up. With inarticulate cries the men fled in terror, each in a different direc- tion. For nothing on earth could two of them have been persuaded to return. But Jess was of another breed. In the gray of the morning the two students, pallid and haggard with anxiety and with the terror of their adventure still beating in their blood, met at the college. “You saw it?” cried one. “God! yes—what are we to do?” What they did was to pass around to the rear of the building, where they saw a horse, attached to a light wagon, hitched to a gatepost near the door of the dissecting room. Mechanically they entered the room. On a bench in a corner sat the negro Jess. He rose, grinning, all eyes and teeth. “T’m waiting for my pay,” he said. Stretched naked on a long table lay the body of Henry Armstrong, the head defiled with blood and with clay from a blow with a spade. JOHN MORTONSON?S FUNERAL ft) dead: his lines in “‘thetragedy ‘Man’” had all been spoken a) and he had left the stage. See $= The body rested in a fine munca coffin fitted with a plate of glass. All arrangements for the funeral had been so well attended to that had the deceased known he would doubtless have approved. The face, as it showed under the glass, was not disagreeable to look upon: it bore a faint smile, and as the death had been pain- less had not been distorted beyond the re- pairing power of the undertaker. . At two o’clock of the afternoon the friends were to assemble to pay their last tribute of respect to one who had no further need of friends and respect. The surviving members of the family came severally every few minutes to the casket and wept above the placid fea- tures beneath the glass. This did them no good; it did no good to John Mortonson; but in the presence of death reason and philosophy are silent. As the hour of two approached the friends began to arrive and after offering such consolation to the stricken relatives as the proprieties of the ‘occasion required, solemnly seated themselves about the room with an augmented consciousness of their importance in. the scheme funereal. Then the minister came, and in that overshadow- ing presence the lesser lights went into eclipse. His entrance was followed by that of the widow, whose lamentations filled the room. She approached the casket and after leaning her face against the cold glass for a moment was gently led to a seat near her daughter. Mournfully and low the man of God began his eulogy of the dead, and his doleful voice, mingled with the sob- bing which it was its purpose to stimulate and sustain, rose and fell, seemed to come and go, like the sound of a sullen sea. The gloomy day grew darker as he spoke; a cur- tain of cloud underspread the sky and a few drops of rain fell audibly. It seemed as if all nature were weeping for John Morton- son. When the minister had finished his eulogy with prayer, a hymn was sung and the pall- bearers took their places beside the bier. As the last notes of the hymn died away the widow rushed frantically to the coffin, cast herself upon it and sobbed hysterically. Gradually, however, she yielded to dissua- sion, becoming more composed; and as the minister was in the act of leading her away her eyes sought the face of the dead beneath the glass. She threw up her arms, her face assumed a dreadful pallor, and with a shriek she fell backward insensible. The mourners sprang forward to the cof- fin, the friends followed, and as the clock on the mantel solemnly struck three all eyes were Staring down upon the face of John Mortonson, deceased. They turned away, sick and faint. One man, trying in his terror to escape the awful sight, stumbled against the coffin so heavily as to knock away one of its frail supports. The coffin fell to the floor, the glass was

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Drawn by James Preston F | A @ =| @ WITH INARTICULATE CRIES THE MEN FLED IN TERROR shattered to bits by the concussion. From the opening crawled John Mortonson’s cat, which lazily leapt to the floor, sat, tranquilly wiped its crimson muzzle with a forepaw, then walked with dignity from the room. STALEY FLEMING’S HALLUCINA- TION F two men who were talking one was a physician. “T sent for you, Halder- man,” said the other, ‘‘but I don’t think you can do me any good. May be you can recommend a specialist in psychopathy. I fancy I’m a bit loony.” “You don’t look it,” the physician said. ““You shall judge—I have hallucinations. I wake every night and see in my room, in- tently watching me, a big black Newfound- land dog with a white forefoot.” “You say you wake; are you sure about that? ‘Hallucinations’ are commonly dreams.” “Oh, I wake, all right. Sometimes I lie still a long time, looking at the dog as ear- nestly as the dog looks at me—I always leave the light going. When I can’t endure it any longer I sit up in bed and—nothing is there!” “°M, ’m—what is the beast’s expres- sion ?” “‘It seems to me sinister. Of course I know that, except in art, an animal’s face in 545

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4 DRS, SEE ee ENOTES OS UTE Em as... 546 Cosmopolitan Magazine Drawn by James Preston HIS ENTRANCE WAS FOLLOWED BY THAT OF THE WIDOW repose has always the same expression. But this is not a real animal. Newfound- land dogs are pretty mild looking, ycu know; what’s the matter with this one?”’ “Really, my diagnosis would have no value: I am not going to treat the dog.” The physician laughed at his own pleas- antry, but narrowly watched his patient from the corner of his eye. Presently he said, ‘‘Fleming, your description of the beast fits the dog of the late Atwell Barton.” Fleming half-rose from his chair, sat again and made a visible attempt at indif- ference. ‘‘I remember Barton,” he said; “T believe he was—it was reported that— wasn’t there something suspicious in his death ?” Looking squarely now into the eyes of his patient, the physician said: ‘‘Three years ago the body of your old enemy, Atwell Barton, was found in the woods near his house and yours. He had been stabbed to death. There have been no arrests; there was no clew. Some of us had ‘theories.’ J had one. Have you?” “I? Why, bless your soul, what could I know about it? You remember that I left for Europe almost immediately afterward —a considerable time afterward. In the few weeks since my return you could not expect me to construct a ‘theory.’ In fact I have not given the matter a thought. What about his dog ?” “Tt was first to find the body. It died of starvation on his grave.” We do not know the inexorable law underlying coincidences. Staley Fleming did not, or he would perhaps not have sprung to his feet as the night wind brought in through the open window the long wail- ing howl of a distant dog.. He strode several times across the room in the steadfast gaze of the physician; then, abruptly confront- ing him, almost shouted: ‘‘What has all this to do with my trouble? You forget why you were sent for.” Rising, the physician laid his hand upon his patient’s arm and said, gently: ‘“‘ Pardon me. I cannot diagnose your disorder off- hand—to-morrow, perhaps. Please go to bed, leaving your door unlocked; I will pass the night here with your books. Can you call me without rising?” ‘“Yes, there is an electric bell.” “Good. If—if anything disturbs you, push the button without sitting up. Good night.” Comfortably installed in an armchair the . LL a TTT . eee

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‘*T WAKE EVERY NIGHT AND SEE IN MY ROOM A BIG BLACK NEWFOUNDLAND DOG” man of medicine stared into the glowing coals and thought deeply and long, but ap- parently to little purpose, for he frequently rose and, opening a door leading to the staircase, listened intently; then resumed his seat. Presently, however, he fell asleep, and when he woke it was past midnight. He stirred the failing fire, lifted a book from the table at his side and looked at the title. It was Denneker’s “Meditations.” He opened it at random and began to read: “‘Forasmuch as it is ordained of God that all flesh hath spirit and thereby taketh on spiritual powers, so, also, the spirit hath powers of the flesh, even when it is gone out of the flesh and liveth as a thing apart, as many a violence performed by wraith and . lemure sheweth. And there be who say that man is not single in this, but the beasts have the like evil induement and——” The reading was interrupted by a shaking of the house, as by the appulse of a heavy object. The reader flung down the book, rushed from the room and mounted the stairs to Fleming’s bedchamber. He tried the door, but contrary to his instructions it was locked. He set his shoulder against it with such force that it gave way. On the floor near the disordered bed, in his night clothes, lay Fleming gasping away his life. The physician raised the dying man’s head from the floor and observed a wound in the throat. ‘‘I should have thought of this,” he said, believing it suicide. When the man was dead an examination disclosed the unmistakable marks of an animal’s fangs deeply sunken into the jugular vein. But there was no animal.

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Drawn by Peter Newell THERE CAME ABOARD A TALL MAN OF MELANCHOLY EXPRESSION, WHO CARRIED A BANJO SWUNG BY A CORD AROUND HIS NECK The Kings of Maleta BY ARTHUR COLTON SyR. ULSWATER was a \ large man of luxurious build m& and flowing side whiskers. % I met him in the West Indies, { whither he came casually *)@ cruising-about the world in \ his steam yacht, the Violetta, and he took me aboard to , see his wife, a small, but de- ! termined looking lady, for whom his admiration was enormous and pronounced. ‘There on the deck, from the setting of the sun over Porto Rico till the rising of the moon out of the sea, he spoke of the oceans, and mainly of the Pacific—her islands and tiny kingdoms and the strange white men that roam and anchor in her out of the way ports. He stroked his side whiskers slowly with his right hand, while in his left hand his lighted cigar in course of time went out. 548

“Did you ever hear of the island of Maleta?” he said, and told me about the Kings of Maleta. It was Christmas time two years ago, while cruising the Pacific in the Violetta, that I first saw the island. I remembered this because Mrs. Ulswater was making a Christmas mince pie. I would as soon have eaten a pound of bound whalebone or a swarm of congealed bees as a mince pie, whose inward action on me would resemble that of resilient whalebone or thawed-out bees. I regarded the mince pie with a certain anxiety, as to what she intended to do with it. In this way I remember the date of the circumstance. Mrs. Ulswater’s purpose in the Pacific Ocean was connected with foreign missians and orphan asylums. She took an interest in the respectability, happiness and morals ne LL TT GG <TR = en ~~

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of the Pacific Islanders. At that time she had the Violetta furnished in a manner to show them how respectable households look in the United States. Such was her method of slumming on the ocean. There was a flowered carpet on the deck, there were rocking chairs on the carpet, there was a clean doily on the back of each chair, there were geranium pots along the scup- pers. Now and then she collected an orphan. She carried them in batches to the United States. Maleta is not an unknown island, nor yet well known. I was not surprised to see wattled huts along the curving beach of the The Kings of Maleta 549 said. Such was my first meeting with Mr. Sadler. : Presently he sat in one of the rocking chairs with his feet tucked behind him, and talked freely, and candidly. He had hap- pened upon Maleta, and becoming interested in its romantic politics, had resolved to “‘take a hand in that seducing game.” He added, “It looked real sporty. Yes’m. I judged the show-down was comin’ soon, but it ain’t come yet, but it’s been rollin’ up the blankedest jack pot you ever saw.” “The what?” said Mrs. Ulswater. “Beg pardon, ma’am. I shouldn’t have sworn, but those are the facts.” Drawn by Peter Newell ‘“WE DISCHARGED ARTILLERY FROM THE FRONT DOOR TO LET PEOPLE KNOW WE WERE ON THE THRONE” bay where we came to anchor, but I did not know there were any white men there. I was surprised to see a boat come out, power- fully rowed by one I made out to be white. The boat drew near and there came aboard a tall man of melancholy expression, who carried a banjo swung by a cord around his neck. His voice was husky and his hands large. ‘‘How do?” he said, and then cast- ing his eyes down to the Violetta’s deck, stopped, and seemed impressed. Mrs. Ulswater was sitting at the time under the awning, on the carpet, and ina rocking chair, sewing. “T don’t get my vest around your com- bination. Is it waxworks or pirates?” he ““May I,” said I, “venture to suggest that your terms are perhaps a trifle technical ?” I explained to Mrs. Ulswater that by a “‘show-down” was intended merely the deci- sion of a given issue, and that a “ jack pot,” as such, might be defined as an accumula- tion of undecided issues ? ‘“‘Why,” said Sadler slowly, ‘‘your ideas and mine about technical language, doctor, don’t jibe, and I’ll bet my last week’s shirt to yours of the week before, Mrs. Ulswater don’t agree with either of us.” On this point my own opinion was simi- lar to his, and I let pass that interesting wager, while Sadler described the politics of Maleta.

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550 Cosmopolitan Magazine ‘Some years ago,”’ he said, ‘‘a friend of mine, who was a white man named Craney, was King of Maleta, for he’d bought out the different candidates, or pooled the in- terests, and mounted the throne himself, but he was killed soon after. I come here really to ask Craney for a job as prime minister, found him dead, and the place was on the edge of another dynastic war. There was a young man named Kolosama who claimed the throne on account of his popularity; and there was an old one named Ogelomano who claimed the throne by right of superior wisdom; and this here royal chieftainship appeared to be partly elective, but mostly revolutionary; which is all very well, but hard feelin’ in small king- doms is vicious. Kolo had the largest back- ing, but Ogel, seemed to me he had the superior wisdom as appeared from this, namely, he immediately laid himself out to get the support of a newly arrived combina- tion of military genius, statecraft and diplo- macy—that’s me; so that, arguin’ with a scrupulous conscience, I came to this con- clusion; I says: ‘The first requirement for a happy kingdom is a forehanded king; the next is a superior prime minister. It’s clear from the behavior of this party that he knows what’s what; and it’s clear from the behavior of the other party that he’s got no real penetration at all, or he’d know that a kingdom without a prime minister is as unhappy as a cat with no dog to chase it. Anybody but a fool knows that, and conse- quently that Kolosama is unfit to rule this here balmy isle, and this here Ogel is a promisin’ monarch.’ I stated the argument to Ogel, and he agreed that as an argument it was all right. Then we went over inland about two miles till we came to the palace, which is all on the ground floor, but other- wise is a commodious mansion, and full of Craney’s furnishings; and we discharged artillery from the front door to let people know we were on the throne. Kolosama collected his party and went off to the other side of the island,and declared war. Then we called him, on the chance it was a bluff; which it was, and so was ours, for neither of us showed down. That’s how it is. Me and Ogel’s warriors, and Kolosama with his warriors, we’ve been prancin’ forth over these picturesque mountains as if we in- tended to be real vicious, and then dodgin’ back, till the island’s distracted. Wisdom and foresight are ours, and we’ve got all Craney’s firearms, but Kolo appears to have a majority of the foolish population with him. And there you are. There’s your jack pot. I ain’t got the hand to open it, or do anything but jockey for position. Kolo’s got most of the warriors. I don’t know what’s the matter with him unless his warriors don’t like gunpowder. Maybe his hand’s weaker than it looks, but I’d bet something, if I held it, this jack pot would be opened.” “What sort of man is Ogelomano?” I asked, when Sadler paused. “Hot and sulky,” he said. “But I’ve seen worse, and I’ve seen a homelier lookin’ man somewhere, but I’ve forgotten where that was. For that matter Kolo’s all right enough too, and I guess the island would be happy with either were t’other dear charmer away.” Sadler stopped, and rubbed his chin gloomily and said: ‘Nice outfit of yours. Waxwork pirates maybe ?” I explained the purposes and mission of the Violetta. “Floatin’ orphan asylum,” said Sadler; “sort of perambulatin’ benevolence, and steam mission house to teach temperateness to the tropics. Why, that’s all right. Any man can go to sleep on his benevolence. It’s a good idea.” He began strumming distressfully com- plaining chords on his banjo, looking off to sea, and then raised a tune that never should have existed, and sang it in a voice, like that of a walrus, to these words: “T want to be an orphan, And with the orphans roam, A millionaire for guardian, A steam yacht for my home.” “Doctor,” he said, at last, ‘‘you’ve come to the right shop with those goods. Here’s your chance for benevolence. You steam around to the other side of Maleta, and find Kolo—I could spot his location for you pretty near. And havin’ found him, if you just ladled him out benevolent, and told him you were his long lost aunt, who was thinkin’ of giving him a toy pistol, maybe he’d come aboard. If he brought any warriors with him, you’d better make him send them ashore to wash their faces, which they’ll need it all right. Then if you happened to get up steam and sail away with Kolo, and if you took Kolo to the States and gave him a college educa-

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, Md fs DO 7d ern Drawn by Peter Newell HE BEGAN STRUMMING DISTRESSFULLY COMPLAINING CHORDS ON HIS BANJO, AND ‘THEN KAISED A TUNE THAT tion, and sent me the bill, why, ’d pay it, I would. Now see here, doctor: this scheme is neat sure, and it’s gentlemanly. Here you leave the island of Maleta with its politics smooth, its civil war squelched, and on the throne is a fore- handed king, whose policy is guided by a prime minister unequalled in the general direction of single matrimony and a vege- tarian diet. Consider that strategy! Regard it! Look at it all around! Remark the moral purpose and the simplicity of design! Why, it’s a wonder!” I looked at Mrs. Ulswater, who had said nothing during the preceding, but sat there sewing and sometimes glancing up at Sad- ler. She laid down her sewing and said mildly: ‘Are you sure it would be better if one of the kings were taken away ?” “Why, look at it! You can see for your- self, ma’am.” ‘‘Of course it would look so. But then is Kolosama a nice person? We don’t like to take orphans without knowing about them.” “Well,” said Sadler, “‘T’ll tell you honest. Kolo’s slow and opinionated and don’t take to prime ministers and official advice. He needs discipline and encouragement. Yet I'd call him a promisin’ kid and a hopeful NEVER SHOULD HAVE EXISTED orphan. He’d be a credit to you,” he said earnestly. ‘ Yes’m.” Mrs. Ulswater took up her sewing again, and said, ‘‘I should want to see this older king too.” “Tf you will come up to the palace to- morrow morning,” said Sadler, “‘he’d be pleased to see you. You’ve no notion how he’d like Kolo to have a foreign education.” Then he got up and murmured, “ Pirati- cal waxworks!” and departed. As respects the proposition he had made, granted that King Ogelomano was no unworthy monarch, it seemed to me that a kingdom guided by a prime minister who played the banjo and composed impromptu poetry would have certain Arcadian attrac- tions. But as to King Kolosama’s entrance into my family circle, it seemed to me that the orphans ought to be selected with great care. I hoped Mrs. Ulswater was not going to be hasty. The next morning we started for the palace. The path led up a pleasant valley, sparsely inhabited, and we came in due time to the palace, and found it a long, one- story bamboo house, surrounded by piazzas. It was built by the late King Craney. Within, it was profusely furnished with stuff imported by Craney from the States. His tastes appeared to have run to plush-cov- 55!

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Drawn by Peter Newell SADLER INTRODUCED US. THE KING GRUNTED, ‘‘ HOW DO?” ered chairs, and gilt and _nickel-plated clocks, for which latter King Ogel seemed to share King Craney’s weakness. I counted fourteen clocks in the audience room, all going. The king sat on a plush sofa among his clocks. The largest of them stood on the floor in front of him, and was evidently his favorite. He was an elderly man, stout and un wieldy, of morose expression, his complex- ion choppy, and his grizzled hair stuck full of chicken bones. He wore a pink shirt without a collar, and a kind of skirt that seemed to have been formerly a lace window curtain. Sadler introduced us. The king grunted, ‘ Howdo ?”’and we sat down on the plush chairs and discussed Sadler’s scheme. He expatiated on the moral qualities in it, the peace that would fall on the distracted island when Kolo was removed strategically and for his own best welfare. The king looked pleased. His pleasure seemed to arouse his hos- pitality. His hospitality was startling. He rose, and shouted. From the far piazzas came scuttling brown men and women bearing baskets and platters; in the baskets was fruit, in the platters fish and other articles of diet which I had no curiosity about. 552 I thought Mrs. Ulswater seemed favor- ably impressed with the king. It now fell the hour of ten, and the clocks ‘broke out striking noisily. The effect on the king was interesting. His manner was royal, but naive and barbaric. Over his face passed an expression of unutterable delight. His heavy cheeks wrinkled into smiles. He thumped his chest and chuckled. He turned from clock to clock, keeping his eye in particular on the great gilt timepiece at his feet, from whose ornate front nosound as yet was come. The other clocks all ceased. But the great gilt clock had not struck. Suddenly as a crash of thunder he passed from chuckling happiness to anger, violent and uncontrolled. | He clambered to his feet. He stamped. He swore in the lan- guage of beachcombers and decayed mari- ners, inexcusable, abominable. He shook his fists at Sadler. “My clock don’ go!” he shrieked. “‘Arrr! She don’ go!” and snatching up a fruit basket he fell, in utter and abandoned rage, beating, yelling, swearing and scatter- ing fruit, upon the frightened and frizzle- haired henchmen and henchwomen, who fled before him with tumult and wailing, from room to room, from piazza to far

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en renee piazza, and beyond into the forest, where the noise of pursuit died distantly away. Iwas amazed. Mrs. Ulswater sprang up. “Ts that a king!” she said, indignantly, and started for the piazza, followed by myself and by Sadler in deprecation. ‘‘He ought to be spanked! That’s what he ought!” she cried. “Vou’re right, ma’am,” said Sadler. The Kings of Maleta “Would you do that ?” “T would. Yes’m.” “Well,” she said, “if you’ll catch that king and bring him down to tea this even- ing, we’ll think it over by that time. Good- ness!” And we returned to the Violetta. Sadler came down late in the afternoon and with him King Ogel. If Mrs. Ulswater Drawn by Peter Newell SNATCHING UP A FRUIT BASKET HE FELL, IN UTTER AND ABANDONED RAGE, UPON THE FRIGHTENED AND FRIZZLE-HAIRED HENCHMEN AND HENCHWOMEN “ Ain’t a doubt it would bea good thing. I was thinkin’ when you spoke, that when Kolo was gone and things were settled like, I'd just get that introduced quiet into the regular court ceremonial, puttin’ it under the head, maybe, of ‘official care of the king’s person,’ and I was thinkin’, ma’am, it was my recollection of happy childhood that a strap got there better’n a shingle. Yes’r ’ Mrs. Ulswater stopped on the edge of porch, mollified. was expecting a contrite autocrat she was disappointed. He came with a bodyguard of three warriors, whose garb and outfit were more ferocious than ornamental, more ornamental than decorous, and more orna- mental in intention than in result. He was not ashamed. His misbehavior had left no traces on his complacence. He was imperti- nently vain of his bodyguard. I noticed Mrs. Ulswater’s expression become sud- 'y set and determined. I knew the king’s

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554 Cosmopolitan Magazine complacence irritated her, his unrepented misbehavior roused her instinct for disci- pline. Something was going to happen. I looked at the warriors. I wished it might not be something that would cause the in- troduction into my anxious digestive organ- ism of shovel-headed spears, which did not look digestible. “Doctor,” said Mrs. Ulswater, “when kings are invited to tea, don’t people have entertainments for them ?” “Invariably! Music and dancing!” I exclaimed, relieved at the turn Mrs. Uls- jig, to the whistling accompaniment of his mates who had grouped themselves about the king and his bodyguard. ‘“‘Now!” cried Mrs. Ulswater sharply. Judge of my astonishment to see Captain Jansen and his muscular crew fall suddenly on Sadler, King Ogel and the bodyguards, two to one, and jerking each backward, proceed to tie their hands and feet. “Mrs. Ulswater!” I gasped. “Pirates!” said Sadler. But after one plunge he submitted, and even broke out in husky merriment. Drawn by Peter Newell JUDGE OF MY ASTONISHMENT TO SEE CAPTAIN JANSEN AND HIS MUSCULAR CREW FALL SUDDENLY ON SADLER, KING OGEL AND THE BODYGUARDS water’s intentions seemed to be taking. “Daughters of Herodias—a—I mean to say you are quite right, my dear. No barbaric potentate can swallow his victuals without some agreeable distraction.” ““Of course we haven’t anything very good,” she said, ‘‘but I’ve seen the sailors dance and whistle on the front deck.” She went forward to talk with Captain Jansen, our sailing master. I explained her pur- pose to King Ogel, who seemed pleased. Presently she returned, followed by Cap- tain Jansen and the entire crew. One of them stepped forward in the center of the company and began a horn pipe or violent The things which the humiliated mon- arch wanted to say were not said, for Cap- tain Jansen clapped his hands over and corked up the royal anathema. Ogel was carried forward. My impression is that Captain Jansen used a strap rather than a shingle, to impress upon the king Mrs. Ulswater’s opinion of his behavior. He was stowed away and we heard no more of him for the time. “Tie up those black men,” commanded Mrs. Ulswater. ‘Take those black men ashore. Go and tell Captain Jansen to get up steam right away. Untie Mr. Sadler.” She sat down and rocked nervously.

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resent EEE Sadler sat up and suppressed his laughter. She took up her sewing again. Sadler and I looked at her and waited. “Well!” she said at last, as the sound of oarlocks told of the boats drawing away shoreward loaded with astonished warriors. “T don’t care what you think, but I think Ogel would have been a dreadful king, and 1 think, from what Mr. Sadler said, that Kolo will do much better. Besides it’s a great deal more convenient, if you have to carry one of them off, to take the one that’s handy, instead of running after the other. Isn’t it? Nonsense! Of course it is!”” She ended defiantly. Sadler wiped his eyes and sighed. ‘‘It is so,ma’am. But I ain’t been dished up so green and tasty, like a potato salad,” he caid, ‘since Moses and Pharaoh and me used to play cards, and Moses used to keep special providences up his sleeves. I ain’t had such a good time since last I was licked for stealing horehound candy, which my recollection of sweet infancy, ma’am, is in favor of straps rather’n shingles. Well, Maleta’s too small for me, anyhow. You can’t stretch nights without kickin’ other families out of bed, which makes reverbera- tin’ scandals. You can’t sit down without squashing the judiciary. You can’t get up Earth-Bound 555 without shaking the throne. Moreover,” he said, getting his feet under him: “ What’s a civil war sans slaughter ? I'd rather be at A coop deetat By Mrs. James Ulswater.” We left the island of Maleta, I suppose, at peace in the possession of but one king. Mrs. Ulswater resumed the preparation of the Christmas mince pie, and I my anxiety on that subject. “Why,” said Sadler, ‘‘look here, doctor. That’s all right. The king ’ll eat it. Now,” he said, ‘that’s not the question that troubles me. The point that troubles me is this: if I recommend an orphan, she says he’s good enough for a king; if I recom- mend a king, she has him spanked for an orphan. Now, if a candidate for a throne has got to qualify himself that way, why, maybe he has, but I never heard of it before. Which is why you see me a potato salad. Which,” he said, ‘‘isn’t so good as a mince pie, but better suited to the tropics. Which for revelry and sorrow,” he said mournfully, “for a taste of lost Eden’s rapturous but snaky joys, a mince pie lays over most things in nature. And,” he said, “I guess the king ’il eat it!” Earth-Bound BY GEORGIA WOOD PANGBORN You mourn that I live but in yester- day, Gone from the world by a hidden way; But the hand of the wind in your hair is mine, I am the bubble within your wine. With their long All night with the moths I have played and sped, g, curled tongues from the roses fed, Wondered with them at the moon and stars, Bruised my wings at your window bars. But my wings with your tears are confused and weak; I am chained by the sorrowful words you speak. Free me from murmur of life and fret— Love me enough to forget—forget !

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Copyright, 1896, by Foseph Byron IZEYL The Logical Death of Sarah Bernhardt BY ALAN DALE OMEBODY has spoken of “the coquetry of white hair.” dinary, unsophisticated in- ZX dividual, although the allur- ing delights of the hair- \ restorer must be an immense temptation. For the suc- cessful actor and actress, AL however, ‘‘the coquetry of white hair” is a delusion, pure and simple. There is no such thing. The stage declines to tolerate the waning powers, the lessened vitality, the atrophying beauty that white hair ushers in. The public is fickle, cha- meleon-like, and unreliable. There is that terrible bugbear ‘‘a new generation” to reckon with. Nothing is really sadder than the last years of the successful actor, usually spent 556 in a tame, pussy-cat retirement. The old man becomes reminiscent, and—worse still—sees nothing but degeneration in the new art of the hour. The ‘‘good old days” loom up in his conversation, and become very distressing. For ‘‘good old days” are a sop that age throws out to itself, as an ex- cuse. The old actress ends in fertile seclu- sion, with her “‘memoirs”’ as a last chapter. The “‘memoirs ”’ of an old actress can safely be relied upon to tell you only that which you don’t care to know. The recent passing of Sir Henry Irving “in harness” (one has to go to the stable to find a simile) was a really picturesque ending to a signally artistic and highly-col- ored career. Toothless inarticulation stared Irving in the face. The ‘‘new generation” had nearly decided to refuse its endorse- ment; the actor had become an interesting, 39 reer a

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< Qa Zz ° = pi 1)

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558 Cosmopolitan Magazine magnificent relic offered to the appreciation and loyalty of the more or less grateful “‘old generation”—when, behold! in the very midst of his work he was artistically snuffed out. The actor knows that it is never sage to rely upon the mere gratitude of the public, for, as the French cynic said, gratitude is for favors to come, not for those received. Moreover, a gratitude that costs money is unpopular in these money-grabbing days. Stranger.” His last words were said to be, “‘There is another and a better world,” though people who preferred cold facts— silly people!—declared that his final speech was, “I left them at a small town hard by.” Last words, of course, need doctoring. This season has been inordinately inter- esting by reason of the ‘‘farewell tour” of the untiring Sarah Bernhardt, and it is this farewell tour that has moved me to the above reflections. Wonderful it was in FEDORA One does not dole out cash to buy a noble sentiment. Irving’s death, if not sensational, was beautiful. Other actors have died sympa- thetically. It is recorded of Paterson that he dropped dead in Moody’s arms, after repeating from ‘‘ Measure for Measure”’ the lines: “Reason thus with life,— If I do lose thee, I do Icse a thing That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art.” The well-known John Palmer also died agreeably, during a performance of “‘The every way, for we saw a woman not very far removed from our poor little allotted ‘‘three score and ten,” playing exhausting rdles in eleven different plays, all crowded into a two-weeks’ engagement at the Lyric The- ater, New York. We watched powers that have excited the admiration of the multitude all over the civilized world. We saw that they had slightly waned, but we paid a tribute to youthful spirit that will survive the decay of the physical husk. Never has Sarah had such a phenomenally sensational reception. When she was younger we went to see her apathetically. This time she was ART SERRE

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Vo < 0% re] Oo 4 w a) a QA ° a - m4 al Oo Aan ait. rer. Ms oe Twin

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560 a famous personage as well as a magnificent actress, and we delighted to do her honor. Moreover there was the tingle of an eter- nal adieu in her appearance. We like to be sentimental occasionally when it is in a good cause. Sarah, throughout her astounding career, has died in all styles. She has jumped into a river and ended; she has been extin- guished by poisons; she has succumbed to tuberculosis; she has been shot to kingdom come. She has rare- ly elected to survive in any of her plays. The idea of living happily ever after- ward has invariably been repulsive to her. It was her joy to dismiss her audi- ences with the notion that she was dead, and that there was nothing further to linger for. In all her dramatic flights Sarah has courteddeath. There is an artistic side to this, of course. In plays that end hap- pily you can imag- ine anything you like. The hero and heroine are usually at the wedding point. In real life this is often where the trou- ble germ sprouts. On the stage it is where the trouble germ ends. Sarah pre- ferred to let you go home with nothing toimagine. She was dead and that was the end of the hero- ine and of her play. The remarkable thing about this woman, who would have been great in whatever line she had selected, is that she has had no other life than that of the stage. There has been no private Sarah. She has invariably be- longed to the public. She has acted as much off the stage as on it. She has acted for forty-five years persistently. There has never been a “society” Sarah—the THEODORA Cosmopolitan Magazine Sarah with a domestic side has never ex- isted. Off the stage, Sarah has been startling, sensational, intense. Impossible to escape her. ‘‘Scare-heads” in the daily prints were as much in demand for Sarah off the stage as for Sarah on it. When she used to go up in a balloon; when she loved to be ‘photographed in her coffin; when duels were fought on the subject of her Hamlet; when she got herself crowned immortal—when she did this, and when she did that, Sarah was always acting. It is easier to be a_ successful actress on the stage than off it. Sarah has been an electric success in bothstyles. Can anybody im- agine that she is go- ing to die a placid death, in pussy-cat retirement ? Think of Sarah, knitting on a summer balcony for her two grand- daughters! Or tell- ing the adoring young women grand- mother stories be- ginning, “‘ My dears, when J was a girl— in my time—” in her time! Sarah is and has been for all time. The mind refuses to contemplate her giv- ing good advice to console herself for being no longer in a condition to set a bad example. How will Sarah die? Wecannotthink of her as a slave to senile maladies in a rheumatic hobble or a bronchitic debility. Impossible to imagine her in the gruesome peace of a second childhood, arranging a cozy lace cap over her snowy tresses. “The coquetry of white hair” would scarcely attract her. If it could, the splendid artifices that are hers to-day would be less splendid. For this season, we have seen a Sarah with hair blond as the peroxide

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RR Rm ee rn ne oer see TM CeaaeN oq Fr "Ae 7 ne oe CSENE sane sa PETE Te! > PO LA glories of the aureate chorus-girl; with her throat rejuvenated by an artistic collar, so artistic that silly young women will probably adopt it as a fashion, forgetting that Sarah uses it as a necessity, with her figure draped into the outward semblance of eternal youth. Has Sarah selected any mature réles to portray? Not a bit of it. She has given us the Lady of the Camelias, an impersona- tion identified with her youth, the vitriolic Tosca, the ardent Fédora, the elusive Magda, the beautiful Adrienne, and the willful siren of ‘“‘La Femme de Claude.” No old women for Sarah. And remem- ber I have said that Sarah’s stage life is her whole life; that she has no other. What she is on the stage, she is off the stage and vice versa. Nobody would be in the least surprised if she ended as electrically as she has lived. Sensation is the very breath of her life. Perhaps it will be her last breath. Per- we e* 8 822% > ' ee ES © az2'. 2.) Beas. mM ia TOSCA haps she will make history in the last supreme moment as fervently as she has ever made it. She has dreaded the horror of anticlimax throughout her life. Will she permit this to write the finis to her astonishing career ? How will Sarah die? Let me imagine it. Let me do so with no other reason than the impersonal, artistic pleasure of con- structing a picturesque dénouement for a series of matchless vital episodes. Let me imagine it, forgetting that Sarah is, after all, a woman, subject, of course, to the laws that govern our frailty; and regard her as a mere sensational figure clamoring for one last sensational feat. Let me im- agine something that posterity (yours is at school just now, so is mine) may read with a squirm of delighted awe. It is a gala night, and an eager throng has fought for tickets to the playhouse, big as the Metropolitan Opera House. It is Sarah’s night, and she is to present 561

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562 Cosmopolitan Magazine a play of which we know nothing, except that its end is to cap all the climaxes, and show us Sarah, for the very last time, in a réle that she intends to make immortal. The reporters sharpen their pencils, for they can at least say that “the house is packed from pit to dome.” It is. The multitude surges in the lobbies. ‘The boxes are filled with diamonds attached to shim- mering ladies. The performance begins. It is a new Sardou play. Sarah is in high feather. More febrile than ever and torrential in her moods. The audience rises to her. At the end of the fourth act, she is called tempestuously before the curtain and bows her acknowledgments in her accustomed way. In the last act there is no way of escape from the horror of the melodramatic situation in which the playwright has plunged her, but poison. The audience murmurs a little. This, after all, is tame. Did she not die from poison quite recently in “‘La Sorciére”? Sarah is more febrile than ever. One last ‘Quelle horreur!” One final ‘‘C’est atroce!”’ and she takes up the phial, and drains it to the dregs. There is a fall—a stage fall more realis- tic than any that Sarah has ever shown. Of late she has avoided falls and has peace- well-cushioned _ sofas. fully expired on There is This fall astounds the house. something unusual in the thud. For a moment there is an awed silence. Then the audience sees on the faces of the assem- bled actors an expression of fright and dismay. They rush to Sarah. They lift her in their arms; the curtain falls. The audience cheers. There are cries of “Sarah! Sarah!” The quick response to plaudits usually given by the actress when she comes forth with outstretched arms and upturned eyes remains unmade. There is no Sarah. Insistent tumult. No Sarah. The audience refuses to be pacified and grows unruly. No Sarah. The lights are extinguished; the burly forms of the police are seen, but there is no Sarah and a mob goes to the stage door. Thereall is chaos, confusion confounded. Out troop the stricken actors; in troop stern officials. Sarah has ended herself with her play. The poison was real. What was it? It must have been prussic acid. Until the investigation is made nothing can be affirmed positively. To- morrow all will know—to-morrow—— There are “extras” already out. Sarah is dead. A mock death was a real one. Great excitement. The most sensational ending to a most sensational career. So on, and so forth. Pardon my imagination. It has run away with me. Sarah’s life has always been to me such an overweeningly de- lightful mystery that I have—er—con- structed its finish—artistically, of course. CLEOPATRA Sa TET ET RP TENS

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The Way of an Indian BY FREDERIC REMINGTON Synopsis : White Otter, a Chis-chis-chash boy grows to manhood and wins the eagle-plume of the warrior. From his fetich, or ‘‘ medicine,” he is known as the Bat. His character shows itself as a strange mixture of base instincts and a somewhat fine sense of honor. He steals an Indian girl, wife of a half-breed, and marries her. On a raiding expedition the Bat and his followers come across a small body of white traders and annihilate it. From this success the Bat is now called the Fire Eater, and becomes a great man among his people. He believes himself invincible until, miscalculating the strength of a party of freighters and Absaroke Indians, the whole of his attacking band is wiped out. The Fire Eater alone survives, and he flees to the Shoshones rather than face a return to his people. After two years the fame of a mysterious warrior among the Shoshones reaches the Chis-chis-chash, and they ask the white traders to bring him to them. The Fire Eater is recognized. He tells his people he has been dead, but has been sent back by the gods to complete another life on earth. ‘The white men are now coming in large numbers to the Indian country. The redskins harass them con tinually, but are unable to drive them out. They resent and deride the government's attempt to make them live like the whites, and troops of soldiers put in an appearance. Vill THE MEDICINE-FIGHT OF THE CHIS-CHIS- CHASH 2 ITHER and yon through the “{ valleys dragged the wagon- soldiers, while the Indians laughed at them from the hills. In the time of the yellow-grass the tribe had made a successful hunt and the sides of their lodges were piled high with dry meat. 4 Their kettles would _ boil through this snow. As the tops of the mountains grew white, the camp was moved into a deep gorge of the Big Horn Mountains out of the way of the trailing Yellow-Eyes. Fora thousand feet the rock walls rose on either side. A narrow brook wound down between their narrow ways. Numerous lateral cafons crossed the main one, giving grass and pro- tection to their ponies. As it suited the in- dividual tastes of the people, the lodges were placed in cozy places. They felt secure in their eerie home, though the camp-crier frequently passed shouting, “‘Do not let your ponies wan- der down the cafion and make trails for the Yellow-Eyes to see.” The women worked the colored beads and porcupine quills, chatted with one another, or built discreet romances, as fancy dictated. The men gambled, or made smoke-talks by the night fires. It was the Indian time of social enjoyment. Restless young men beat up the coun- try in search of adventure; and only this day a party had arrived with Absaroke scalps which they were dancing after the sun had gone. The hollow beat of the tom-toms multiplied against the sides of the cafion, together with wild shrieking and yelling of the rejoicers; but the old Fire Eater had grown weary of dancing scalps. He had danced his youthful en- thusiasm away. Thus he sat on this wild, whooping night with old Big Hand by his side to smoke his talk, and with his son asleep across his lap. “Where did the war-party leave its trail as it came to the lodges?” he asked. Big Hand in reply said: ‘The man who strikes said they came over the mountains —that the snow lay deep. They did not lead up from the plains. They obeyed the chiefs. If it was not so, the camp- soldiers would have beaten them with sticks. You have not heard the women or the dogs cry.” “It is good,” continued the Fire Eater. Che wagon-soldiers will not find a trail on the high hills. The snow would stop their wheels. They will dream that the Chis-chis-chash were made into birds and have flown away.” Then Big Hand: “TI have heard, brother, that ponies passed the herders at the mouth of the cafon last smoke. It was cold, “er 563

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Drawn by Frederic Remington HE MADE HIS MAGAZINE GUN BLAZE UNTIL EMPTY 564 4°

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and they had their robes tight over their heads. It is bad.” “Ves, you talk straight. It is bad for the pony trails to show below where the land breaks. Some dog of an Absaroke who follows the gray fex may see them. Ponies do not go to live in the hills in the time of snow. The vonies will not travel straight, as the her’ ss drive them back. They will understand. With another sun, I shall call the council. It will talk the herders’ eyes open. The young men have closed ears in these days. ‘The cold makes their bones stiff. Brother, when we were young we could see a horse pass in the night. We could smell him. We could tell if he had a man on his back.” Big Hand gave wise consideration to his companion’s statement, saying it was as he spoke. ‘Brother, those big horses which we took from the pony-soldiers run badly in the herd. They gather in a bunch and run fast. They go over the herders when they see the valley. They will do nothing unless you strike them over the head. They are fools like their white riders were.” So the old men gravely passed the pipe over the little things of life, which to them bore all their interest in the world. The squaw combed her hair and put fresh sticks on the fire from time to time. After a time the boy woke up and stretched him- self cubbishly across his father’s knees. The ancient one gave him a piece of fresh meat, which he held in both hands as he gnawed it, smearing his chubby face with grease. Having devoured his morsel he blinked sleepily, and the old Indian tucked him away in the warm recesses of his old buffalo-robe couch, quite naked, as was their custom to sleep’ during the winter nights. Long sat the smokers, turning their tongues over youthful re- membrances, until Big Hand arose and drawing his robe about him, left the lodge. The Fire Eater removed the small buck- skin bag which contained his little brown bat’s skin from his scalp-lock and smoked to it saying, ‘‘Keep the big horses from running down the cafion—keep the eyes of the herders open while I sleep—keep the little boy warm—keep the bad spirits outside the lodge after the fire can no longer see them.” With these devotions con- cluded, he put the relic of the protection of the Good Gods in his war-bag which hung on his resting-mat over his head. The Way of an Indian 595 Undressing, he buried himself in his buffalo robes. The fire died down, the tom-toms and singing in the adjoining lodges quieted gradually, and the camp slept. In the ceaseless round of time the night was departing to the westward when, as though it were in a dream, the old warrior was conscious of noise. His waking sense was stirred. Rapid, frosty cracking of snow ground by horse-hoofs came through the crevices of his covering. All unusual, he sat up with a savage bang, as it were, and bent a stiff ear to the darkness. His senses were electric, but the convolutions of his brain were dead. ‘A rifle shot, far away but unmistakable. Others followed; they came fast, but not until the clear notes of a bugle blazed their echoing way up the rock walls did he, the Fire Eater, think the truth. He made the lodge shake with the long yell of war. He did the things of a lifetime now and he did them in a trained, quick way. He shoveled his feet into his moccasins and did no more because of the urgency of the case; then he reached for his rifle and belt and stood in the dark lodge aroused. His sleep was gone but he did not comprehend. __Listen- ing for the briefest of moments, he heard amid the yelping of his own people the dull, resonant roar which he knew was the white man’s answer. Fired into a maddened excitement, he snatched up his precious boy and seizing a robe, ran out of the lodge followed by his squaw.. Overhead the sky was warming but the cafion was blue dark. Every moment brought the shots and roar nearer. Plunging through the snow with his burden, the Fire Eater ran up a rocky draw which made into the main cafion. He had not gone many arrow-flights of distance before the rushing storm of the pony-soldiers swept past his deserted lodge. Bullets began to whistle about him, and, glancing back, he saw the black form of his squaw stagger and lie slowly down in the snow. He had, by this time, quite recovered the calm which comes to the tired-out man when tumult overtakes him. Putting the boy down on a robe behind a rock, and, standing naked in the frosty air, he made his magazine gun blaze until empty.. Re- suming his burden, he ran on higher up the rocks until he was on the table-land of the top of the cafion. Here he resumed his shooting, but the darkness and distance 41

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566 Cosmopclitan Magazine made it difficult to see. Other Indians joined him and they poured their bullets into the pony-soldiers. The Bad God had whispered to the Yellow-Eyes; they had made them see under the snow. The Chis-chis-chash were dead men, but they would take many with them to the spirit-land. The Fire Eater felt but a few cartridges in his belt and knew that he must use them sparingly. The little boy sat crying on the buffalo robe. Holding his smoking rifle in one hand, he passed the other over his scalp-lock. The bat-skin medicine was not there. For the first time since the Good Gods had given it to him, back in his youth, did he find himself without it. A nameless terror overcame him. He was a truly naked man in the snow, divested of the protection of body and soul. Shoving cartridges into his magazine, he made his way down, the light snow flying before him. Rounding the rocks he could see down into the main cafion; see the pony- soldiers and their Indian allies tearing down and burning the lodges. The yellow glare of many fires burned brightly in contrast with the cold blue of the snow. He scanned narrowly the place where his own lodge had been and saw it fall before many hands to be taken to their fires. The bat-skin—the hand of the Good Gods—was removed from him; his shadow was as naked as his back. In the snow a hundred yards below him lay his young squaw, the mother of his boy, and she had not moved since she lay down. As the pony-soldiers finally saw the stark figure of the Indian among the rocks they sent a shower of bullets around him. He had no medicine; the Bad Gods would direct the bullets to his breast. He turned and ran frantically away. The last green-grass had seen the be- plumed chief with reddened battle-ax leading a hundred swift warriors over the dying pony-soldiers, but now the cold, blue snow looked on a naked man running before bullets, with his medicine somewhere in the black smoke which began to hang like a pall over the happy winter-camp of the bravest Indians. The ebb and flow of time had fattened and thinned the cir- cumstances of the Fire Eater’s life many times, but it had never taken his all before. It had left him nothing but his boy and a nearly empty gun. It had placed him between the fire of the soldiers’ 1ifles and the cruel mountain winds which would pinch his heart out. With his boy at his breast he flew along the rim-rock like a crow, hunting for shelter from bullets and wind. He longed to ex- pend his remaining cartridges where each would put out a white man’s fire. Re- covering ‘from thei: surprise, the Indians gathered thickly on inaccessible heights and fought stiffly back. Being unable to follow them, the pony-soldiers drew back; but, as they retreated, they left the village blazing, which the Chis-chis-chash could not prevent. - Their rifles had only handed them over to the hungry winter. The Fire Eater sat muffled on a ledge, firing from time to time, and anxiously scanning his shots. The cold made him shake and he could not hold his rifle true. His old, thin blood crept slowly through his veins, and the child cried piteously. His fires were burning low; even the stimu- lus of hate no longer stirred him as he looked down on the white men who had burned his all and shot his wife and were even then spattering his den in the rocks with lead. He gave up, overpowered by the situation. With infinite difficulty he gathered himself erect on his stiffened joints and took again “his burden in his trembling arms. Standing thus on the wind-swept height, with the bullets spotting the rocks around him, he extended his right hand and besought the black, eddying smoke to give him back his bat-skin; he begged the spirits of the air to bring it to him. He shouted his harsh pathos at a wild and lonely wind, but there was no response. Then off through the withering cold and powdery snow moved the black figure of de- spair tottering slowly away from the sound of rifles which grew fainter at each step. He chattered and mumbled, half to himself, half to the unseen influences of nature, while the child moaned weakly under his clutched robe. When he could but barely hear the noises of the fight, he made his way down into the cafion where he shortly came upon a group of his tribesmen who had killed a pony and were roasting pieces over a log fire. They were mostly women and chil- dren or old, old men like himself. More to note than their drawn and leathery faces was the speechless terror brooding over all. Their minds had not digested their

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& Drawn by Frederic Remington HE SHOUTED HIS HARSH PATHOS AT A WILD AND LONELY WIND, BUT THERE WAS NO RESPONSE

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568 sudden fate. If the young warriors broke before the guns of the pony-soldiers, worse -yet might overtake them, though the wind- swept table-lands dismayed them equally with the bullets. Munching their horse meat, clutching their meager garments, they elbowed about the fires, saying little. In their homeless helplessness their souls deadened. They could not divine the immediate future. Unlike the young war- riors whose fires flashed brighter as the talons of death reached most fiercely for them, they shuddered and crouched. Warriors came limping back from the battle, their robes dyed with a costly vermil- ion. They sat about doing up their wounds in filthy rags, or sang their death-songs amid the melancholy wailing of the squaws. Having warmed himself and quieted the boy, the Fire Eater stalked down the cafion, past the smoking poles, stopping here and there to pick up fragments of skins which he used to swaddle the boy. Returning warriors said the soldiers were going away, while they themselves were coming back to get warm. Hearing this, the old man stalked down the creek toward the place where his lodge had been. He found nothing but a smoldering heap of charred robes and burnt dried meat. With a piece of lodge pole he poked away the ashes, searching for his precious medicine and never ceasing to implore the Good Gods to restore it to him. At last, drop- ping the pole, he walked up the side cafion to the place where his wife had fallen. He found her lying there. Drawing aside the robe he noticed a greenish pallor and fled from Death. Finding the ponies tethered together by their necks, he caught them and improvising packs out of old robes and rawhide, he filled them with half-burnt dried meat. With these he returned to the fires where he constructed a rude shelter for the com- ing night. The boy moaned and cried through the shivering darkness as the old Fire Eater rocked him in his arms to a gibberish of despairing prayer. Late in the night, the scouts came in, saying that the walking-soldiers were coming, whereat the Indians gathered their ponies and fled over the snow. The young men stayed where from the cliffs they Cosmopolitan Magazine fought back the soldiers. ..Many weak persons in the retreating band sat down and passed under the spell of the icy wind. The Fire Eater pressed along, carrying his rifle and boy, driving his ponies in a herd with others. It was too cold for him to dare to ride a horse. The crying boy shivered under the robe. The burden- bearer mumbled the troubled thoughts of his mind: ‘‘My mystery from the Good Gods is gone; they have taken it; they gave it to the fire. Iam afraid.” Hour after hour he plodded along in the snow. His body was warmed by his exertions and the boy felt cold against his flesh. He noted this, but with the passing moments the little frame grew more rigid and more cold until to the Fire Eater it felt like a stone image. Stopping with his back to the wind, he undid the robe and fingered his burden. He knew that the shadow had gone; knew that the bad spirits had taken it away. ‘Oh, Bad Gods! Oh, Evil Spirits of the night, come take my shadow! You have stolen my boy, you have put out my lodge-fire; put out the fire of my body! Take vengeance on me! Iam deserted by the Good Gods! I am ready to go! I am waiting!” Thus stood in the bleak night this vic- tim of his lost medicine; the fierce and cruel mysteries of the wind tugged at his robe and flapped his long hair about his head. Indians coming by pushed and pulled him along. Two young men made it a duty to aid the despairing chief. They dragged him until they reached a cafion where fires had been lighted around which were gathered the fugitives. The people who had led him had supposed that his mind was wandering under suffering or wounds. As he sank by the side of the blaze he dropped the robe and laid the stiffened body of his frozen boy across his knees. The others peered for a time with fright- ened glances at the dead body, when with cries of ‘‘Dead, dead!” they ran away, going deeper down the cafion. The Fire Eater sat alone, waiting for the evil spirits which lurked out among the pine trees, to come and take him. He wanted to go to the spirit-land where the Cheyennes of his home and youth were at peace in warm valleys, talking and eating. (The End)

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Story of Paul Jones BY ALFRED HENRY LEWIS XVIII ANTHONY AND CLEOPATRA RESENTLY the beautiful Aimée quits the room, and the good Maerchioness de Marsan tells her story. “There is surely no rea- son why you shouldn’t know, my dear Commodore, what all France knows. Aimée’s mother is of the De Tierce DAZAULY lins, a noble house, but im- poverished. As a girl the mother was ravishingly lovely. This was in the days of Monsieur le Bel and the Parc-aux-Cerfs. The old king saw Mademoiselle de Tierce- lin; the Pompadour did not object. Aimée was born; and presently her mother, whom the king called his ‘De Bonneral,’ was put away with a pension. The Bonneral’s father talked loudly, and was sent to the Bastille as a Russian spy. One may say what one will in the Bastille; the walls are thick and have no ears. The Pompadour looked after poor De Bonneral and the little Aimée. She married the mother to a gentleman named Telison. The Pom padour died; the king died; Aimée was sixteen. Her stepfather De Telison, and her mother De Bonneral, neglected her. They said, ‘She is a Bourbon. Let the Bourbons provide.’ So I, who am her godmother, took Aimée. That was four years ago; and it is as though she were my own child in very fact, I love her so.” ‘But the present king ?” “Thus far, he has done nothing for Aimée. She goes to court; her position is recognized; the king is kind. But you know the cold Savoy blood—it is stingy. However, that is now of little moment so far as Aimée is concerned, for I am rich.” Com. Paul Jones is established at the palace of the good Marsan. Sailors are \CD7Z swift to fall in love; and the image of Aimée fits into his heart as into a niche that was made for it. The second day he calls on the Duchess of Chartres, the beautiful girl-duchess. He wears a guilty feeling at the base of his conscience. Fortunately, his cheek is tanned by wind and weather, and the guilty feeling does not clearly show. The -girl-duchess is with her husband, the Duke of Chartres, who has quit the sea for the shore, his man-of-war for his palace. The girl-duchess receives Com. Paul Jones in something of a formal man- ner, which is a relief to him. His manner is also formal, which is not a relief to her. The duke, who makes a specialty of democ- racy, greets him with bluff cordiality as a brother sailor. He congratulates him on beating the English dogs. Com. Paul Jones is modest in his re- plies; for he is not thinking on the Serapis, but on Aimée; and, with the eyes of the girl-duchess upon him, that guilty feeling overlays all else. The girl-duchess watches him through half-shut lids. She almost guesses the truth; for she knows of the good Marsan, and Aimée. Besides, she is a woman, and clairvoyant in matters of the heart. After an hour with the duke and girl- duchess, Com. Paul Jones goes back to the good Marchioness de Marsan and to Aimée. As an excuse for his own idle- ness, he travels down to L’Orient and, albeit the Alliance is as fit as a fiddle, sets Lieutenant Dale—‘‘ Dick the Practical ” to overhauling the ship from truck to keel. Then he returns to the good Marsan and Aimée. Now he spends sunny hours in Aimée’s company, and his love creeps and grows upon him like ivy on a wall. The con- queror is conquered; the invincible is overthrown. As for Aimée, her blue eyes become a deeper blue, her pink cheeks take on a warmer pink when he is near. And the good Marsan sees it all and does not interfere. For she is versed in the world and its ways, and this is France, and after life comes death. When the ardent sailor would be too a

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57° ardent, Aimée represses him; the barrier of her modesty is as a barrier of ice be- tween them. Thereupon, he loves her the more, and refreshes his soul with Shakespeare: , “Chaste as the icicle That’s curdled by the frost of purest snow, And hangs on Dian’s temple.” Com. Paul Jones goes down to L’Orient again. Not so much to see after the AJli- ance, as to pique his love and give it edge. For absence makes the flame burn brighter, and Aimée ever bursts upon him with a new charm when he has been away. For all his lovelorn case, however, he makes arrangements for his two pets, Lieutenants Mayrant and Fanning, to go privateering for the French, and gives them nearly one hundred and fifty of his fiercest sea-wolves to bear them company. The Serapis is held by the French as a king’s prize, and De Sartine pays Com. Paul Jones twelve thousand dollars as his share. There are other thousands from other prizes, and, after a French sort, he finds himself rich. A CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH CARICATURE OF PAUL JONES Cosmopolitan Magazine When after his visit to L’Orient he re- turns to the Marsan, that estimable lady is discovered in a state of much excitement. The Duchess of Chartres has ‘“‘com- manded” the presence of Com. Paul Jones at her palace. The prospect does not overcome him. He receives it with steadiness, although privily a-quake because of that feeling of guilt. The good Marsan’s excitement is supplanted by wonder to see him take his honors so coolly. ‘“Ah, these Americans!” she thinks. Then she says: ‘“‘She is a Bourbon, my Commodore! No one below the blood royal has ever received such a summons.” In spite of the uplifted palms of the good Marsan her commodore refuses to be im- pressed. He will go, since no one can decline the ‘‘command” of royalty. But he will go calmly, hiding, of course, his sense of guilt, and spreading the skirts of his conscience very wide to hide it. Aimée hears that he is to go, and cannot avoid a little flutter of alarm. She knows her beautiful kinswoman, the girl-duchess, knows the spell and the power of her. It gives the tender Aimée a dull ache of the heart. A lone feel- ing of helplessness overwhelms her, as fears rise up for her poor love that, in so short a space has become the one sweet thing in life. True, she her elf is a Bourbon! But with the bar sinister. How then shall she, obscure and poor and by the left hand, hope to sustain herself in the heart of her lover, against the wiles and the siren wooings of one who is at once the most legitimate, most beau- tiful, and most wealthy woman in France? The tears stand in the soft eyes. The good Marsan goes from the room, for she has a deal of sympathy and good sense. Com. Paul Jones, when now the two are alone, draws Aimée to him, and dries those tears in ways that lovers know. Aimée, for the first time, per-. mits him to fold her in his arms, and kiss her lips. “Perhaps it is also the last time,” she thinks, sadly.

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And the gallant lover, as though he reads her thoughts, kisses her again, and vows by sword and ship and flag to love her always. XIX THI FETE OF THE DUCHESS OF CHARTRES Com. Paul Jones finds the Duchess of Chartres in high spirits. She and the duke give him a suite of apartments that has, heretofore, been sacred to Bourbon occupation alone. At this the sensation that rocks the court is profound. It even reaches the rabbit- faced king, weak rather than dull, at Versailles, and gives him a shock. He draws down the uncertain corners of his unde- cided mouth, says naught, and goes out under the trees to feed his squirrels. He would be wiser were he to go out into the starved highways and byways of his op- pressed realm, and feed his sub- jects. The Duke and Duchess of Chartres give a grand banquet in honor of Com. Paul Jones. The duchess asks Doc- tor Franklin, whom she esteems and calls ‘‘ Monsieur le Sage,” for his wisdom. Also, to please the worthy doctor, she has Madame Houdetot, and the rest of his Passy friends, including the vivacious Madame Helvetius. “Only,” says the duchess, who has weak- nesses that favor washtubs, ‘‘only I trust our ‘rich widow of Passy’ will wear a fresh frock, if only to give us something new to talk about.” The good Marsan and Aimée are among the guests. Indeed, it is to see Aimée and Com. Paul Jones together, that has caused the duchess to order the féte. She will bring the pair beneath her eyes; the young Aimée, and the commodore, who has be- come formal. She will then know the best and the worst of their hearts. The duchess is quite right in this assump- tion; for you may no more hide love than smoke. With half-watchfulness she readily surprises their secret. Still she is gay and Story of Paul Jones COM. PAUL JONES—FROM THE PORTRAIT MADE IN 1780, BY MOREAU THE YOUNGER (Below the published engraving is printed the following couple f from Moliére . ** Rarely does heaven such men as these allow us, And we should profit when the gods endow us.’’) light; for her heart is the heart of a Bour- bon, and the heart of your Bourbon is never breakable. She seats Com. Paul Jones on her right, which is the thing expected. Aimée is on his other hand; which last excites his sus- picions—having that guilty feeling—while attracting the attention of nobody else. Over across, is the wise Franklin, who finds himself vastly at home between the Houde- tot and the rosy widow Helvetius, who is, for her, a marvel of tidiness. The duchess pays a deal of polite atten- tion to Com. Paul Jones. “‘T cannot think, my dear Commodore,” she cries, ‘‘how, with your ship both on fire and sinking under your feet, you had cour- age to continue the fight.” “Your royal highness forgets. To sur- render would have meant a postponement of the bliss of meeting you.” “Now Bayard himself,” returns the duchess, touched, despite her jealousy, ‘‘could have said nothing so knightly.”

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572 Aimée beams at this. In the face of her fears, she still likes to hear her lover-hero praised. “There is a promise!’ duchess, after a pause. Com. Paul Jones reddens even through the tan. What is coming? There is a dash of recklessness in the duchess’ royal blood; she will now and then say a bold thing. ‘““You promised,” she goes on, “to lay an English frigate at my feet.” Com. Paul Jones is relieved. More, he is pleased, since the duchess gives him a chance to be dramatic. He sends for his servant, who brings him a slim morocco case. “Your royal highness,” he says, un- buckling the morocco case, ‘‘I shall be better than my word. [ lay at your feet, not a frigate truly, but a forty-four-gun ship of two decks. And here is the token of it, the sword of as brave a sailor as ever walked salt water.” Com. Paul Jones presents the duchess with the vanquished sword of Captain Pear- son, which he has taken from the morocco case. The duchess, who has not foreseen this return to her sally, is deeply stirred. “Tt is dear to me as the sword of a con- quered Englishman,” she cries, turning with swimming eyes upon the company. “Tt is doubly dear when it comes from my Achilles of the ocean.” There is a buzz of admiration about the tables. Aimée herself is in a glow of happi- ness; for though she has alarms she has no jealousies, and the glory of her lover is her glory. Before the guests break up for departure, Doctor Franklin and Com. Paul Jones have a word together. “‘T have asked for it,’’ says the doctor, “and De Sartine leads me to think that as soon as the ship’s refitted, the king will give you the Serapis.” Com. Paul Jones brightens toa sparkle. “‘T could do wonders with so stout a ship,’ he replies. “T think you may count on it,’”’ goes on the doctor. ‘Indeed, when I remember in what manner the French came to own the Serapis, I cannot see how the king is to refuse.” ‘Should I get it, P’ll put Dick Dale in command of the Alliance. There shall be , exclaims the ’ no second Landais, you may be sure.” “Speaking of the Alliance, ” returns the Cosmopolitan Magazine doctor, ‘“‘I shall send it to America, as soon as the overhauling is finished, with certain munitions of war I’ve collected.” Com. Paul Jones’ pulse begins to beat uneasily. Anthony does not want to leave his Cleopatra. What the doctor next says sets him at renewed ease. “Lieutenant Dale might better take the Alliance across. You will be needed here, if we are to coax the king into giving you the Serapis. There will be time for the Alliance to return before the Sera pis is re- fitted.” Doctor Franklin tells how he has relieved Landais from all command, and ordered him to report to the marine committee in Philadelphia on charges of cowardice and treason. Also, Commissioner Arthur Lee has been called home; Congress is sus- picious of his work. ‘““The man’s a greater traitor than Lan- dais!” cries Com. Paul Jones heatedly. ‘Without expressing myself on_ that point,” observes the doctor, his eye a-twin- kle, ‘‘the situation produced by Mr. Lee’s recall makes another reason why Dale should sail with the Alliance, and you stay here. Mr. Lee, I understand, has decided to take passage home in the Alliance.” It is the next day; the duchess summons Com. Paul Jones to the morning-room, where she sits alone in the spring sunshine. “Your love is like your ship, my friend,” she observes. “It goes voyaging from heart to heart, as the other does from port to port. No, not a word! I promise that you shall not break my heart. Come, I will show you what makes me safe—safe, even from that terrible heart-rover and _ sea- rover, that buccaneer of the ocean and of love—the invincible Paul Jones.” She smiles; but there is that about the smile which reminds one of the hard glitter of a rapier. She rings a bell, says a low word, and presently a little round-faced boy is brought in. He is the baby son of the duchess. Com. Paul Jones has heard of the little boy, but this is his earliest glimpse of him. He is a handsome child, and Com. Paul Jones gazes upon him with admiraticn. The boy is to grow up and, fifty years later, sit on the French throne as the Citizen King. That, however, is a secret of the future, and neither the mother nor Com. Paul Jones, as they look on the small, round face, is granted a least glint of it. Released

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by the nurse, little Louis Philippe toddles across to Com. Paul Jones, with pudgy hands outstretched. He catches him up and kisses him; at this the eyes cf the duchess soften with mother love. ‘“See!”? she remarks, and a sigh and a laugh struggle for precedence on her lips, “see! he is like all of us. He loves you!” She becomes grave. ‘‘ There is my re- source!” she goeson. “My friend, I will let you into a secret. No man’s treason, not though he be the bewil- dering Paul Jones” — this, with just a tinge of em- phasis — ‘* can break a moth- er’s heart. No; she takes _ref- uge in her babe, and finds his kisses sweeter than a lover’s.”’ She takes the boy out of his hands. and EXTRACT FROM A LETTER OF IS hands, anc HIS TREATMENT Att THE kisses him DEFEAT OF THE BRITISH FLEET * once, and again, and still again. He says no word of either protest, explanation or defence. The duchess is taking her revenge; he knows it, and thinks her entitled to it. Moreover, he is beginning in his own heart to be re- * ALLIANCE, Texel Dec rsth, 1779 “T have my dear friend, recd your esteemed favor of the 26th of Novr from Nantes as well as that of a prior date from Marley—In both I receive with the most lively pleasure the good wishes & friendship of the fair and amiable Mrs. Williams.—You are the best Judge how to use my letters as I have hitherto 7” full confidence given you Carte Blanche. I cannot however think my fair Friend would put any misconstruction on the short letter that I wrote you on board the Serapis in a storm ; for where is the wonder that even then I felt so disposed to bend the knee to Beauty ? Before this time I suppose you have heard of the strange behaviour towards me of the Court? Having shown them that the Enemies’ Coasts are Vulnerable as well as their Two Decked Ships of War Story of Paul Jones 573 lieved, and the guilty feeling that gnaws his conscience is sensibly dulled. The nurse returns and carries away the boy. The duchess gives him a last kiss, and throws him another at the door. Then her glance comes back to Com. Paul Jones. “Y¥ €s,.-my friend,” she says; “love your red- haired Aimée, since you love her. I can give you up; for even though you leave me, you still leave me a Bourbon. And yet I feel a small jealousy, just a little stab. For that stab,my friend, you must pay. No one harms a Bourbon,and escapes unpun- ished. Yes, I shall have my revenge. I in- tend that you shall marry Aimée.” XX THE WEDDING WITHOUT BELLS PAUL Ji INES, COUR! RELATING TO FRENCH AFTER THE Doctor Franklin journeys down to Lyons on some secret errand of his government; he will be gone a week. Com. Paul Jones, at home with the good Marsan, and drunk with love, forgets the blue of the ocean in the blue of his Aimée’s eyes. One sun-filled June afternoon he is disturbed by Lieuten- ant Dale, who stalks in with a scowl on his usually steady face. ~ “What is it Dick?” asks Com. Paul Jones, all alive in a moment. ‘Something too deep for me, Commo- dore, or I shouldn’t be here with the tangle. Commissioner Lee, with Landais, has taken possession of the Alliance.” ‘“What!”

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74 on “Tt’s as Tsay. Lee declares that Doctor Franklin had no authority to depose Lan- dais. He, Lee, has restored him to com- mand.” ‘““What did you do?” “T did nothing.. I’m a sailor, and pre- tend to no knowledge of the limits of Lee’s authority. Speaking for myself, I refused to serve with Landais, and Lieutenants Stack, McCarty and Lunt, and Midshipman Lindthwait did the same. We came ashore, and Bo’s’n Jack Robinson, at the head of sixty of the crew, came with us.” Com. Paul Jones, while Lieutenant Dale talks, is thinking. What is to be done? Manifestly nothing. Doctor Franklin is out of reach. Without the doctor’s authgr- ity, no one can meddle with Lee, who has still his powers as a commissioner. Be- sides, there’s the Serapis; it is only a ques- tion of weeks when he, Com. Paul Jones, will be given its command. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Dale and the others can disport themselves ashore, as he does. Let Lee and Landais keep the Alliance, since they already have it. “You’ve done right, Dick,’ he j “Stay ashore then, ard keep the lads together, and we'll wait for the Serapts. Also, King Louis has given Doctor Frank- lin the Ariel, a ship-sloop, the size of the old Ranger. When I take the Serapis to sea, Dick, you shall sail captain of the Ariel.” Lieutenant Dale goes his way, and Com. Paul Jones returns to Aimée, pleased in secret to think he may continue unhindered to sun himself in her smiles. It grinds a bit to think of the dog Landais and the “traitor Arthur Lee” in control of the Adli- Still, all will come right; for is he And, while he and love is even Says. ance. not to have the Serapis? waits, there is Aimée; sweeter than war. Com. Paul Jones is not to be permitted to forget Lee and Landais. Within. the hour he is again called from the side of his Aimée by his friend Genet, who is a noble upperling in the French foreign office. ‘“T come to tell you,” says Genet, “that Captain Landais and Monsieur Lee have got the Alliance.” “T know,” he returns. “They are to sail in three days.’ ‘Lieutenant Dale has told me as much.” ‘“‘He did not, however, tell you that we have issued orders to General Thevenard, , Cosmopolitan Magazine who commands the forts at the barrier, to sink the Alliance should they try to put to sea.” “Sink the Alliance!’’ Com. Paul Jones is thunderstruck. ‘‘My dear Genet, you jest.” : : “‘No jest, my friend. The orders have been given. It is by request of your Doc- tor Franklin.” “Do you tell me that Doctor Franklin asks you to sink the Alliance ?” “He has asked us—for he had some inkling of the designs of Lee and Landais— to prevent them sailing away with the ship. We know of but one way to do that. We must sink it, since we have no ship here to arrest them. So we gave the orders to Thevenard. Those orders, however, we did not impart to Doctor Franklin; and, in good truth, I tell them to you now, not as a French official but as a friend.” “This must be stopped!” cries Com. Paul Jones, his old habit of decision and iron promptitude reassumed in a moment. “What! Sink more than two hundred brave, good men, to punish a pair of trait- ors? Never!” Genet, who makes a cult of red tape, shrugs his shoulders and spreads out his hands. ‘it 4s toe Tate,’ Doctor Eranklin’s request. termand the orders to Thevenard he withdraws his request.” “T shall see Thevenard!’’ returns Com. Paul Jones. Two hundred and eighty miles in fifty- four hours! An unprecedented thing! And yet Com. Paul Jones does it, and rides into L’Orient in time to prevail on Gen- eral Thevenard, who is his friend and one of his worshipers, to let the Alliance pass free. The forts, with their tons upon tons of metal, would else have sunk the ship. As it is, he saves the Alliance by a narrow margin of hours, and allows Lee and Landais, uninterrupted, to shake out their sails for America. ‘They go to disgrace and grief,” thinks Com. Paul Jones, by way of consoling himself for their escape. Then he con- siders how he has saved the lives of more than two hundred honest sailors, who have fought well for flag and country. Com. Paul Jones, it would seem, is surrounded by surprises. He is met on the road, while returning to his Aimée, , he says. “There is I cannot coun- until

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by a message from the Duchess of Char- tres. ‘‘Come instantly to me,” it says. There is a look of mingled sorrow and resentment, with over all, a hue of humor, on the duchess’ bright face, when she and Com. Paul Jones meet. “The Marchioness de Marsan and I have arranged it,’”’ she says, and her glance is both wicked and amused. “Arranged what?” “Your marriage, my friend! I con- gratulate you! You and your blue-eyed one are to wed,” “With all my heart then!” says he, turning wicked too. For, manlike, it offends his vanity that one who has pre- tended to love him so deeply, should be so ready to give him to another. ‘I could wish no fairer fate.” ‘But the wedding must be held secret.” ‘Secret ?” he repeats. ‘‘Believe me, I shall tell all France.” ‘And ruin the blue-eyed one! Hear me, my Commodore, once my _ beloved, ever to be my friend! I have had a world of trouble in your affairs. I arranged with the Marsan, but only by agreeing that the marriage is to be buried in secrecy. You know much of the sea, little of the shore, when all’s said. Should the king hear of Aimée as your wife, he would drive her from court.” “May I ask why?” and his cheek be- gins to burn angrily. “You forget that Aimée is a Bourbon,” returns the duchess, with a fashion of malicious satisfaction. He has deserted her for his Aimée; it is now her revenge to irritate his pride. ‘‘ You are a valorous man, and the king makes much of you. Besides, vou beat the English, whom he fears and hates. And yet he does not for- get that you are a peasant—as I did. Marry Aimée, my friend, marry a Bour- bon, even a Bourbon by the left hand, and King Louis will bolt the doors of France on both your faces. Indeed, the Bastille might easily be the end of it for your Aimée.” “T think your royal highness sees un- necessary ghosts,” he replies, with a sneer. Just the same, that linking of the Bastille and Aimée has alarmed him. ‘ Without pausing to question the king’s powers touching Bastilles and French doors, I may (To be continued) Story of Paul Jones 575 tell you he has already heard that I love Aimée. Doctor Franklin, himself, told me.” ‘‘Love Aimée! Yes; love her as much and to what limit you will! The king will never resent that. But do not let the whisper that you have married Aimée reach the kingly ear. Can you not under- stand? Here, I will put it in the abstract. A princess may have a liaison with a peas- ant, and in the teeth of that dishonor she will remain forever a princess. But she must not make a mésalliance. Should the princess, in some gust of virtue, be swept into a marriage with the peasant, she be- comes instantly a peasant. It is one of those strange cases, my friend, where the word ‘wife’ is a stain, and the word ‘mis- tress’ no stain at all.” It is midnight; two candles burn dimly on the altar of Our Lady of Loretto. The great chapel is dark and_ vacant; the feeble light does not reach the vaulted roof, and the groined arches disappear upward in a thick blackness. At the altar stands a priest. Near the rail is gathered a group of four; the Duchess of Chartres, the good Marchioness de Marsan, Aimée, heart a flutter, her red cheeks hidden in a veil, and Com. Paul Jones. The priest draws the duchess aside. “Your royal highness, pleadingly, ‘‘I am afraid.” “Afraid of whom, pray?” “The king, your royal highness.” The duchess makes an angry motion with her hand, while her little boot smites the stone floor, and sends one echo through the room’s vast emptiness. ‘Father Joseph, observe! You are my almoner. Through your hands I give fifty thousand louis d’or to the poor of Paris, and keep you in fatness besides. It is I, not the king, whom you should fear.” And so, before the flickering altar can- dles, Com. Paul Jones weds Aimée Adele de Telison. In the book which the duch- ess and the good Marsan sign as witnesses, Father Joseph, with a pen that shakes a little, records the nuptials of ‘‘ Monsieur le Joignes and Mademoiselle Adéle de Bonneval.” For “‘De Bonneval”’ was the dead King Louis’ name for Aimée’s moth- er, in the days of Monsieur le Be and the Parc-aux-Cerfs. ” he whispers,

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Im the Days of the Comet BY H. G. WELLS BOOK THE FIRST—THE COMET CHAPTER THE THIRD—THE REVOLVER—(CONTINUED) Synopsis: The narrator tells the story of the Great Change. When a young man he was a clerk in a pot-bank in Clayton. He is refused an increase in wages and gives up his position. His intimate friend, Parload, a man of his own age, is a socialist, who has, besides, a taste for science and is deeply concerned about a comet whose path is approaching the earth’s orbit. Why continue to think about socialism, he argues, when there is a possibility that the comet will hit the earth? Times are bad in England, on account of overproduction and the intrusion of American products in the English market. Strikes and lockouts exist throughout the country. The narrator has been engaged to marry Nettie Stuart, but the engagement has been broken on account of his socialism and religious doubt. He is distressed because of a suspicion that Edward Verrall, the son of Stuart’s employer, is paying the girl attention. Obeying some vague impulse, he buys a revolver. Trouble breaks out in the collieries owned by Lord Redcar, whose motor car is destroyed by the mob. The narrator witnesses the affair and goes home in a greatly excited condition. PSYAN the night, fever, pain, fatigue—it may have been 9 the indigestion of my supper of bread and cheese—roused ry meat last out ofa hag-ridsleep i] to face despair. Iwasa soul lost amidst desolations and shame, dishonored, evilly ‘4 treated, hopeless. I raged against the God I denied, and cursed him as [ lay. And it was in the nature of my fever, which was indeed only half-fatigue and ill- 57¢ ness, and the rest the fever of passionate youth, that Nettie, a strangely distorted Nettie, should come through the _ brief dreams that marked the exhaustions of that vigil, to dominate my misery. I was sensible, with an exaggerated distinctness, of the intensity of her physical charm for me, of her every grace and beauty; she took to herself the whole gamut of desire in me and the whole gamut of pride. She, bodily, was my lost honor. It was not only loss but disgrace to lose her. She stood for Life and all that was denied; she mocked me as a creature of failure and defeat.

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Drawn by Henri Lanos I NEVER SAW SUCH WEEPING

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578 Cosmopolitan Magazine There were times when something near madness took me, and I gnashed my teeth and dug my nails into my hands and ceased to curse and cry out only by reason of the insufficiency of words. And once, toward dawn, I got out of bed, and sat by my look- ing-glass with my loaded revolver in my hand. I stood up at last and put it care- fully in my drawer and locked it—out of reach of any gusty impulse. After that I slept for a little while. Such nights were nothing rare and strange in that old order of the world. Never a city, never a night the whole year round, but amidst those who slept were those who waked, plumbing the deeps of wrath and misery. Countless thousands there were so ill, so troubled, they agonized near to the very border line of madness, each one the center of a universe darkened and lost. The next day I spent in gloomy lethargy. I had intended to go to Checkshill that day, but my bruised ankle was too swollen for that to be possible. I sat indoors in the ill-lit downstairs kitchen, with my foot bandaged, and--mused darkly and read. My dear old mother waited on me, and her brown eyes watched me and wondered at my black silences, my frowning preoccu- pations. ~ I had not told her how it was my ankle came to be bruised and my clothes muddy. She had brushed my clothes in the morning before I got up. Ah well! Mothers are not Treated in that way now. That, I suppose, must console me. I wonder how far you will be able to picture that dark, grimy, untidy room, with its bare deal table, its tattered wall paper, the saucepans and kettle on the narrow, cheap, but by no means, economical range, the ashes under the fireplace, the rust-spotted steel fender on which my bandaged feet rested; I wonder how near you can come to seeing the scowling, pale-faced hobbledehoy I was, unshaven and collarless, in the Windsor chair, and the little timid, dirty, devoted old woman who hovered about me with love peering out from her puckered eyelids. When she went out to buy some vegeta- bles in the middle of the morning she got me a half-penny journal. It was just such a one as these upon my desk, only that the copy I read was damp from the press; and these are so dry and brittle they crack if Itouch them. I have a copy of the actual issue I read that morning; it was a paper called emphatically the ‘‘New Paper,” but everybody bought it and everybody called it the “yell.” It was full that morn- ing of stupendous news and still more stupendous headlines, so stupendous that for a little while I was roused from my egotistical brooding to wider interests. For it seemed that Germany and England were on the brink of war. Of all the monstrous, irrational phe- nomena of the former time, war was cer- tainly the most strikingly insane. In re- ality, it was probably far less mischievous than such quieter evils as, for example, the general acquiescence in the private ownership of land, but its evil conse- quences showed so plainly that even in those days of stifling confusion one mar- veled at it. On no conceivable grounds was there any sense in modern war. Save for the slaughter and mangling of a multi- tude of people, the destruction of vast quan- tities of material, and the waste of in- numerable units of energy, it effected nothing. The old war of savage and bar- baric nations did, at least, change hu- manity. You assumed yourselves to be a superior tribe in physique and discipline, you demonstrated this upon your neigh- bors, and, if successful, you took their land and their women and perpetuated and enlarged your superiority. The new war changed nothing but the color of maps, the design of postage stamps, and the relationship of a few accidentally conspicuous individuals. In one of the last of these international epileptic fits, for example, the English, with much dysentery and bad poetry, and a few hundred deaths in battle, conquered the South African Boers at a gross cost of about three thousand pounds per head. They could have bought the whole of that preposterous imitation of a nation for a tenth of that sum; and except for a few substitutions of personali- ties, this group of partially corrupt officials in the place of that, and so forth, the perma- nent change was altogether insignificant. (But an-excitable young man in Austria committed suicide when at length the Transvaal ceased to be a ‘‘nation.””) Men went through the seat of that war after it was all over, and found humanity un- changed, except for a general impoverish- ment, and the convenience of an unlimited supply of empty ration tins and barbed wire and cartridge cases—unchanged and

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Drawn by Henri Lanos ONE WORD UPON IT IN STARING LETTERS—WAS, “WAR” THE WORD UPON IT—THERE WAS BUT

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580 Cosmopolitan resuming, with a slight perplexity, all its old habits and misunderstandings, the nigger still in his slum-like kraal, the white in his ugly, ill-managed shanty. But we in England saw all these things, or did not see them, through the mirage of the ‘‘New Paper” in a light of mania. All my adolescence, from fourteen to seven- teen, went to the music of that monstrous resonating futility, the cheering, the anxie- ties, the songs and the waving of flags, the wrongs of the generous Buller and the glorious heroism of De Wet—who always got away; that was the great point about the heroic De Wet—and it never occurred to us that the total population we fought against was less than half the number of those who lived cramped, ignoble lives within the compass of the Four Towns. But before and after that stupid conflict of stupidities,a greater antagonism was com- ing into being, was slowly and quietly de- fining itself as a thing inevitable, sinking now a little out of attention only to resume more emphatically, now flashing into some acute, definitive expression, and now per- colating and pervading some new region of thought, and that was the antagonism of Germany and Great Britain. Here were we British, forty-one millions of people, in a state of almost indescribably aimless, economic, and moral muddle that we had neither the courage, the energy, nor the intelligence to improve. Most of us had hardly the courage to think about it and our affairs were hopelessly entangled with the entirely different confusions of three hundred and fifty million other persons scattered about the globe. And here were the Germans over against us, fifty-six millions, in a state of confusion no whit better than our own. The noisy little creatures who directed papers and wrote books and gave lectures, generally in that time of world-dementia, pretended to be the national mind. They were busy in both countries, with a sort of infernal unanimity, exhorting—and not only ex- horting, but successfully persuading,—the two peoples to divert such small, common store of material, moral and _ intellectual energy as either possessed, into the purely destructive and wasteful business of war. And—I have to tell you these things even if you do not believe them, because they are vital to my story—there was not a man alive who could have told you of any real, Magazine permanent benefit, of anything whatever to counterbalance the obvious waste and evil, that would result from a war between England and Germany, whether England shattered Germany or was smashed and overwhelmed, or whatever the end might be. The thing was, in fact, an enormous irrational obsession; it was in the mac- rocosm of our nation, curiously parallel to the egotistical wrath and jealousy that swayed my individual microcosm. It meas- ured the excess of common emotion over the common intelligence, the legacy of in- ordinate passion we have received from the brute from which we came. Just as I had become the slave of my own surprise and anger, and went hither and thither with a loaded revolver, seeking and _ intending vague, fluctuating crimes, so these two nations went about the earth, hot eared and muddle headed, with loaded navies and armies terribly ready at hand. Only, there was not even a Nettie to justify their stupidity. There was nothing but quite imaginary thwarting on either side. And the press was the chief instrument that kept these two huge multitudes of people directed against each other. The press—those newspapers that are now so strange to us—like the ‘‘ Empires,’ the ‘‘ Nations,” the ‘‘ Trusts,” and all the other great monstrous shapes of that ex- traordinary time—was in the nature of an unanticipated accident. It had happened, as weeds happen in abandoned gardens, just as all our world had happened, be- cause there was no clear Will in the world to bring about anything better. Toward the end this “‘press”’ was almost entirely under the direction of youngish men of that eager, rather unintelligent type, that is never able to detect itself aimless, that pur- sues nothing with incredible pride and zeal. If you would really understand this mad era the comet brought to an end, you must keep in mind that every phase in the production of these queer old things was pervaded by a strong, aimless energy and happened in a concentrated rush. Let me describe to you, very briefly, a newspaper day. Figure first, then, a hastily erected, and still more hastily designed, building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of old Lon- don, and a number of shabbily dressed men coming and going in this with pro- jectile swiftness. Within this factory, com- 41

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panies of printers, tensely active with nim- ble fingers—they were always speeding up the printers—ply their typesetting ma- chines, and cast and arrange masses of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, above which, in a beehive of little, brightly lit rooms, disheveled men sit and scribble. There is a throbbing of telephones and a clicking of telegraph instruments, a rush- ing of messengers, a running to and fro of heated men, clutching proofs and copy. Then begins a roar of ma- chinery catching the infection, going faster and faster, and whizzing and bang- ing. Engineers, who have never had time to wash since their birth, fly about with oil cans, while paper runs off its rolls with a shudder of haste. The proprietor you must suppose arriving explosively on a swift motor car, leaping out before the thing is at a standstill, with letters and docu- ments clutched in his hand, rushing in, resolute to ‘‘hustle,” getting wonderfully in everybody’s way. At the sight of him even the messenger boys who are waiting, get up and scamper to and fro. Sprinkle your vision with collisions, curses, incoheren- cies. You imagine all the parts of this complex, lunatic machine working hyster- ically toward a crescendo of haste and ex- citement as the night wears on. At last, the only things that seem to travel slowly in all those tearing, vibrating premises, are the hands of the clock. Slowly things draw on toward publica- tion, the consummation of all those stresses. Then, in the small hours, into the now dark and deserted streets comes a wild whirl of carts and men, the place spurts paper at every door; bales, heaps, torrents of papers, that are snatched and flung about in what looks like a free fight, and off with a rush and. clatter east, west, north and south. The interest passes outwardly; the men from the little rooms are going homeward, the printers disperse, yawning, the roaring presses slacken. The paper exists. Dis- tribution follows manufacture, and we follow the bundles. Our vision becomes a vision of dispersal. You see those bundles hurling into stations, catching trains by a hair’s breadth, speed- ing on their way, breaking up, smaller bundles of them hurled with a fierce ac- curacy out upon the platforms that rush by, and then everywhere a division of these smaller bundles into still smaller bundles, In the Days of the Comet 581 into dispersing parcels, into separate papers. The dawn happens unnoticed amidst a great running and shouting of boys, a shoving through letter-slots, openings of windows, spreading out upon book-stalls. For the space of a few hours, you must figure the whole country dotted white with rustling papers. Placards everywhere vociferate the hurried lie for the day. Men and women in trains, men and women eating and reading, men by study fenders, people sitting up in bed, mothers and sons and daughters waiting for father to finish— a million scattered people are reading— reading headlong—or feverishly ready to read. It is just as if some vehement jet had sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface of the land. Nonsense! The whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable ex- citement, witless mischief, and waste of strength—signifying nothing. And one of those white particles was the paper I held in my hands, as I sat with a bandaged foot on the steel fender in that dark, underground kitchen of my mother’s, clean roused from my personal troubles by the yelp of the headlines. She sat, sleeves tucked up from her ropy arms, peeling potatoes as I read. The comet had been driven into obscurity overleaf. The column headed, ‘“Dis- tinguished Scientist says Comet will strike our Earth. Does it Matter?” went un- read. ‘‘Germany”’—TI usually figured this mythical, malignant creature as a cor- seted stiff-mustached emperor enhanced by heraldic black wings and a large sword— had insulted our flag. That was the mes- sage of the ‘“‘New Paper” and the monster towered over me, threatening fresh out- rages, visibly spitting upon my faultless country’s colors. Somebody had _ hoisted a British flag on the right bank of some tropical river I had never heard of before, and a drunken German officer, under ambiguous instructions, had torn it down. Then one of the convenient, abundant natives of the country, a British subject in- disputably, had been shot in the leg. But the facts were by no means clear. Noth- ing was clear, except that we were not go- ing to stand any nonsense from Germany. Whatever had, or had not, happened we meant to have an apology for, and ap- parently they did not mean apologiz- ing. 42 A i ITA = mm Si ae: A Rh PINs sa ERE A RE an TG RIAD DM TLINA Ui Se

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582 “HAS WAR COME AT LAST ?” That was the headline. One’s heart leaped to assent. There were hours that day, when I clean forgot Nettie, in dreaming of battles and victories by land and sea, of shell fire, and entrenchments, and the heaped slaughter of many thousands of men. But the next morning I started for Checkshill, started, I remember, in a curiously hopeful state of mind, oblivious of comets, strikes and wars. V You must understand that I had no set plan of murder when I walked over to Checkshill. I had no set plan of any sort. There was a great confusion of dramatically conceived intentions in my head, scenes of threatening and denunciation and terror, but I did not mean to kill. The revolver was to turn upon my rival my disadvan- tage in age and physique. But that wasn’t it really! The revolver!—I took the re- volver because I had the revolver and was a foolish young lout. It was a dramatic sort of thing to take. I had, I say, no plan at all. Ever and again during that second trudge to Checkshill, I was irradiated with a novel, unreasonable hope. I had awakened in the morning with the hope—it may have been the last, unfaded trail of some ob- literated dream—that, after all, Nettie might still relent toward me, that her heart was kind toward me in spite of all that I imagined had happened. I even thought it possible that I might have misinterpreted what I had seen. Perhaps she would ex- plain everything. My revolver was in my pocket for all that. I limped at the outset, but after the second mile, my ankle warmed to forgetful- ness, and the rest of, the way I walked well. Suppose, after all, I was wrong? I was still debating that as I came through the park. By the corner of the paddock near the keeper’s cottage, I was reminded, by some belated blug hyacinths, of a time when Nettie and I had gathered them together. It seemed impossible we could really have parted ourselves for good and all. A wave of tenderness flowed and still flooded me as I over me, Cosmopolitan Magazine came through the little dell and drew toward the hollies. But there the sweet Nettie of my boy’s love faded, and I thought of the new Nettie of desire and the man I had come upon in the moonlight; I thought of the narrow, hot purpose that had grown so strongly out of my spring- time freshness, and my mood darkened to night. I crossed the beech wood and came to- ward the gardens with a resolute and sor- rowful heart. When I reached the green door in the garden wall, I was seized, for a space, with so violent a trembling, that I could not grip the latch to lift it, for I no longer had any doubt how this would end. Through the open door of one of the glasshouses, I saw old Stuart. He was leaning against the staging, his hands in his pockets, and so deep in thought he gave no heed to me. I hesitated, and went on toward the cot- tage, slowly. Something struck me as unusual about the place, but I could not tell at first what it was. One of the bedroom windows was open, and the customary short blind, with its brass upper rail partly unfastened, drooped obliquely across the vacant space. It looked negligent and odd, for usually everything about the cottage was conspic- uously trim. The door was standing wide open, and everything was still. But giving that usually orderly hall an odd look—it was about half-past two in the afternoon—was a pilepf three dirty plates, with used knives and forks upon them, on one of the hall chairs. I went into the hall, looked into either room, and hesitated. ; Then I fell to upon the door-knocker and gave a loud rat-tat-too, and followed this up with an amiable, “‘Hel-lo!” For a time no one answered me, and I stood listening and expectant, with my fingers about my weapon. Some one moved about upstairs presently, and was still again. The tension of waiting seemed to brace my nerves. I had my hand on the knocker for the second time, when Puss, Nettie’s sister, appeared in the doorway. For a moment we remained staring at each other without speaking. Her hair was disheveled, her face dirty, tear-stained, and irregularly red. Her expression at

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the sight of me was pure astonishment. I thought she was about to say something, and then she had darted away out of the house again. “T say, Puss!” I said. “Puss!” I followed her-out of the door. ‘Puss! What’s the matter? Where’s Nettie?” She vanished round the corner of the house. I hesitated, perplexed whether I should pursue her. What did it all mean? Then I heard some one upstairs. “Willie!” cried the voice of Mrs. Stuart. “Ts that you?” “Yes,” I answered. ‘‘Where’s every- one? Where’s Nettie? I want to have a talk with her.” She did not answer, but I heard her dress rustle as she moved. I judged she was upon the landing overhead. I paused at the foot of the stairs, ex- pecting her to appear and come down. Suddenly came a strange sound, a rush of sounds, words jumbled and hurrying, confused and shapeless, borne along upon a note of throaty distress that at last sub- merged the words altogether and ended in a wail. Except that it came from a woman’s throat it was exactly the babbling sound of a weeping child with a grievance. “T can’t,’’ she said, ‘‘I can’t,’ and that was all I could distinguish. It was to my young ears the strangest sound conceivable from a kindly, motherly little woman, whom I had always thought of chiefly as an unparalleled maker of cakes. It fright- ened me. I went upstairs at once in a state of infinite alarm, and there she was in her room, leaning on the top of a bureau. I never saw such weeping. As. I came into the bedroom her voice rose again. ‘‘Oh that I should have to tell you, Willie! Oh that I should have to tell you!” She dropped her head again, and a fresh gust of tears swept all further words away. I said nothing, I was too astonished; but I drew nearer to her, and waited. “That I should have lived to see this day!” she wailed. ‘I had rather a thou- sand times she was struck dead at my feet.” I began to understand. “Mrs. Stuart,” I said, clearing my throat; “‘what has become of Nettie?” “That I should have lived to see this day!” she said by way of reply. In the Days of the Comet 583 I waited till her passion abated. There came a lull. I forgot the weapon in my pocket. I said nothing, and sud- denly she stood erect before me, wiping her swollen eyes. ‘‘Willie,” she gulped, “she’s gone!” “Nettie?” “Gone! Run away! Run away from herhome. Oh, Willie, Willie! Theshame of it! The sin and shame of it!” She flung herself upon my shoulder, and clung to me, and began again to wish her daughter lying dead at our feet. “There, there,” said I, and all my being was a-tremble. ‘‘Where has she gone?” I said as softly as I could. But for the time she was preoccupied with her own sorrow, and I had to hold her there, and comfort her with the blackness of finality spreading over my soul. “Where has she gone?” I asked for the fourth time. “T don’t know—we don’t know. And oh, Willie, she went out yesterday morn‘ng! I said to her, ‘ Nettie,’ I said to her, ‘you’re mighty fine for a morning call.’ ‘Fine clo’s for a fine day,’ she said, and that was her last words to me!—Willie!—the child I suckled at my breast!” She went on with sobs, and now telling her story with a sort of fragmentary hurry: ‘‘She went out bright and shining, out of this house forever. She was_ smiling, Willie—as if she was glad to be going. (‘‘Glad to be going, ”’ I echoed with sound- less lips.) ‘You’re mighty fine for the morning,’ I says; ‘mighty fine.’ ‘Let the girl be pretty,’ says her father, ‘while she’s young!’ And somewhere she’d got a par- cel of her things hidden to pick up, and she was going off—out of this house for- ever!” She became quiet. “Let the girl be pretty,” she repeated; “let the girl be pretty while she’s young. Oh! how can we go on living, Willie? He doesn’t show it, but he’s like a stricken beast. He’s wounded to the heart. She was always his favorite. He never seemed to care for Puss like he did for her. And she’s wounded him——” “Where has she gone?” I reverted at last to that. ‘“We don’t know. She leaves her own blood, she trusts herself—oh, Willie, it’ll kill me! I wish she and me together were lying in our graves.” ”? Ate ey a hs AO OA ROGIER 2 RTF UE RRR SERENA IE een!

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584 ““But”—I moistened my lips and spoke slowly, “‘she may have gone to marry.” “Tf that was so! I’ve prayed to God it might be so, Willie. I’ve prayed that he’d take pity on her—him, I mean, she’s with.” I jerked out, ‘‘Who’s that?” “In her letter, she said he was a gentle- man. She did say he was a gentleman.” ‘“‘In her letter. Has she written? Can I see her letter?” ‘“‘Her father took it.” ‘But if she writes write?” “It came this morning.” “But where did it come from? You can tell——” “She didn’t say. She said she was happy. She said love took one like a storm——”’ “‘Curse that! me see it. And as for this gentleman—— She stared at me. “You know who it is.” “Willie!” she protested. “You know who it is, whether she said or not.” Her eyes made a mute, unconfident de- nial. “Young Verrall?” She made no answer. ‘All I could do for you, Willie,” she began presently. “Was it young Verrall?” I insisted. For a second, perhaps, we faced each other in stark understanding. Then she plumped back to the bureau, and her wet handkerchief, and I knew she sought refuge from my relentless eyes. My pity for her vanished. She knew it was her mistress’ son as well as I. And for some time she had known, she had felt. I hovered over her for a moment, sick with amazed disgust. Then I suddenly be- thought me of old Stuart, out in the green- house, and turned and went downstairs. When did she Where is her letter? Let 3 VI Old Stuart was pitiful. I found him still inert in the greenhouse where I had first seen him. He did not move as I drew near him; he glanced at me, and then stared hard again at the flower- pots before him. “Eh, Willie,” he said, ‘this is a black day for all of us.” ‘What are you going to do?” I asked. Cosmopolitan Magazine “The missus takes on so,” he said. “TI came out here.” ‘What do you mean to do?” ‘“What is a man to do in such a case?” “Do!” I cried, “why——. Do!” “He ought to marry her,” he said. “By God, yes!” I cried. ‘‘He must do that anyhow.” “He ought to. It’s—it’s cruel. But what am J to do? Suppose he won’t? Likely he won’t. What then?” He drooped with an intensified despair. “Here’s this cottage,” he said, pur- suing some contracted argument. ‘We've lived here all our lives, you might say. Clear out? At my age? One can’t die in a slum.” I stood before him for a space, specu- lating what thoughts might fill the gaps between these broken words. I found his lethargy, and the dimly shaped mental attitudes his words indicated, abominable. I said abruptly, “ You have her letter?” He dived into his breast pocket, became motionless for ten seconds, then woke up again and produced her letter. He drew it clumsily from its envelope, and handed it to me silently. It was written on greenish-tinted, fancy notepaper, and with all and more than Nettie’s usual triteness and inadequacy of expression. Her handwriting bore no traces of emotion; it was round and up- right and clear as though it had been done in a writing lesson. Always her letters were like masks upon her image; they fell like curtains before the changing charm of her face. One altogether forgot the sound of her light clear voice, confronted by a perplexing, stereotyped thing that had mysteriously got a hold upon one’s heart and pride. How did that letter run? “My Dear MorHer: “Do not be distressed at my going away. I have gone somewhere safe, and with some one who cares for me very much. I am sorry for your sakes, but it seems that it had to be. Love is a very difficult thing, and takes hold of one in ways one does not expect. Do not think I am ashamed about this, I glory in my love, and you must not trouble too much about me. I am very, very happy. “ Fondest love to Father and Puss. “Your loving “ NETTIE.” That queer little document! I can see it now for the childish, simple thing it was, but at the time, I read it in a suppressed

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In the Days anguish of rage. It plunged me into a pit of hopeless shame; there seemed to remain no pride for me in life until I had revenge. I stood staring at those rounded, upstanding letters, not trusting myself to speak or move. At last I stole a glance at Stuart. “You can’t even tell where she is,” he said, turning the envelope in a hopeless manner, and then desisting. ‘It’s hard on us, Willie. Here she is; she hadn’t any- thing to complain of; a sort of pet for all of us. Not even made to do her share of the ’ousework. And she goes off and leaves us like a bird that’s learnt to fly. Can’t trust us, that’s what take’s me. Puts ’erself But there! What’s to happen to her?” ““What’s to happen to him?” He shook his head to show that problem was beyond him. “You'll go after her,” I said in an even voice; “you'll make him marry her?” “Where am I to go?” he asked helplessly, and held out the envelope with a gesture; “and what could Ido? Even if I knew— How could I leave the gardens?” “Great God!” I cried, ‘‘not leave these gardens! It’s your honor, man! If she was my daughter—if she was my daugh- ter—I’d tear the world to pieces!” I choked. ‘You mean to stand it ?” “What can I do?” “Make him marry her! Horsewhip him! Horsewhip him, I say! I’d strangle him!” He scratched slowly at his hairy cheek, opened his mouth, and shook his head. Then, with an intolerable note of sluggish, gentle wisdom, he said, “People of our sort, Willie, can’t do things like that.” I came near to raving. I had a wild impulse to strike him in the face. Once in my boyhood, I happened upon a bird terribly mangled by some cat, and killed it in a frenzy of horror and pity. I had a gust of that same emotion now, as this shameful, mutilated soul fluttered in the dust, before me. Then, you know, I dis- missed him from the case. “May I look?” I asked. He held out the envelope reluctantly. “There it is,” he said, and pointing with his garden-rough forefinger. ‘“I.A.P.A. M.P. What can you make of that?” I took the thing in my hands. The ad- hesive stamp customary in those days was defaced by a circular postmark, which bore the name of the office of departure and the of the Comet 585 date. The impact in this particular case had been light or made without sufficient ink, and half the letters of the name had left no impression. I could distinguish— HAP AMB and very faintly below, D.S.O. I guessed the name in an instant flash of intuition. It was Shaphambury. The very gaps shaped that to my mind. Per- haps, in a sort of semi-visibility, other let- ters were there, at least hinting themselves. It was a place somewhere on the east coast, I knew, either in Norfolk or Suffolk. “Why!” cried I—and stopped. What was the good of telling him ? Old Stuart had glanced up sharply, I am inclined to think almost fearfully, into my face. ‘‘You—you haven’t got it ?”’ he said. Shaphambury—I should remember that. “You don’t think you got it ?’’ he said. I handed the envelope back to him. He replaced the letter in it and stood erect to put this back in his breast pocket. I did not mean to take any risks in this affair. I drew a stump of pencil from my waistcoat pocket, turned a little away from him and wrote “Shaphambury” very quickly on my frayed and rather grimy cuff. “Well,” said I, with an air of having done nothing remarkable. I turned to him with some unimportant observation—I have forgotten what. I never finished whatever vague remark I commenced. I looked up to see a third person waiting at the greenhouse door. VII It was old Mrs. Verrall. I wonder if I can convey the effect of her to you. She was a little old lady with ex- traordinarily flaxen hair. Her weak, aqui- line features were pursed up into an as- sumption of dignity, and she was richly dressed. I would like to underline that “richly dressed,” or have the word printed in florid old English or Gothic lettering. Nosone on earth is now quite so richly dressed as she was; no one, old or young, indulges in so quiet and yet so profound a sumptuosity. But you must not imagine any extravagance of outline or any beauty or richness of color. The predominant col- ors were black and fur-browns, and the effect of richness was due entirely to the ex-

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586 Cosmopolitan Magazine treme costliness of the materials employed. She affected silk brocades with rich and elaborate patterns, priceless black lace over creamy or purple satin, intricate trimmings through which threads and bands of velvet wriggled, and in the winter, rare furs. Her gloves fitted exquisitely; and ostentatiously simple chains of fine gold and pearls, and a great number of bracelets, laced about her little person. One was forced to feel that the slightest article she wore cost more than all the wardrobes of a dozen girls like Net- tie; her bonnet affected the simplicity that is beyond rubies. Richness, that is the first quality about this old lady that I would like to convey to you, and the second was clean- liness. You felt that old Mrs. Verrall was exquisitely clean. If you had boiled my poor, dear old mother in soda for a month you couldn’t have got her so clean as Mrs. Verrall constantly and manifestly was. And, pervading all her presence, shone her third great quality, her manifest con- fidence in the respectful subordination of the world. She was pale and a little cut of breath that day, but without any loss of her ulti- mate confidence. It was clear to me that she had come to interview Stuart upon the outbreak of passion that had bridged the gulf between their families. And here, again, I find myself writing in an unknown language, so far as my younger readers are concerned. You who know only the world that followed the Great Change will find much that I am telling inconceiv- able. Upon these points I cannot appeal, as I have appealed for other confirmations, to the old newspapers; these were the things that no one wrote about because every one understood and every one had taken up an attitude. There were in England and America, and indeed throughout the world, two great in- formal divisions of human beings—the Se- cure and the Insecure. ‘There was not and never had been in either country a nobility —it was, and remains, a common error that the British peers were noble. Neither in law nor custom were there noble famies; and we altogether lacked .he edification one found in Russia, for example, of a poor no- bility. A peerage was an hereditary pos- session that, like the family land, concerned only the eldest son of a house; it radiated no luster of noblesse oblige. The rest of the world were in law and practice common— and all America was common. But through the private ownership of land that had re- sulted from the neglect of feudal obligations in Britain, and the utter want of political foresight in the Americas, large masses of property had become artificially stable in the hands of a small minority, to whom it was necessary to mortgage all new public and private enterprises, and who were held together, not by any tradition of service and nobility, but the natural sympathy of common interests and a common large scale of living. It was a class without any very definite boundaries. Vigorous individualities, by methods, for the most part, violent and questionable, were constantly thrusting themselves from insecurity to security, and the sons and daughters of secure people, by marrying insecurity or by wild extrava- gance or flagrant vice, would sink into the life of anxiety and insufficiency which was the ordinary life of man. The rest of the population was landless, and except by working directly or indirectly for the Secure, had no legal right to exist. And such was the shallowness and insufficiency of: our thought, such the stifled egotism of all our feelings before the Last Days, that very few, indeed, of the Secure could be found to doubt that this was the natural and only conceivable order of the world. It is the life of the Insecure under the old order that I am displaying, and I hope that I am conveying something of its hopeless bitterness to you, but you must not imagine that the Secure lived lives of paradisaical happiness. The pit of insecurity below them made itself felt, even though it was not comprehended. Life about them was ugly; the sight of ugly and mean houses, of ill- dressed people, the vulgar appeals of the dealers in popular commodities, were not to be escaped. There was below the threshold of their minds an uneasiness; they not only did not think clearly about social economy but they displayed an instinctive disinclina- tion tothink. Their security was not so per- fect that they had not a dread of falling toward the pit. They were always lashing themselves by new ropes; their cultivation of ‘“‘connections,” of interests, their desire to conform and improve their positions, was a constant ignoble preoccupation. You must read Thackeray to get the full flavor of their lives. Then the bacterium was apt to disregard

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happy in their servants. Read their sur- viving books. Each generation bewails the decay of that “fidelity” of servants, no gen- eration eversaw. A world that is squalid in one corner is squalid altogether, but that they never understood. They believed there was not enough of anything to go round, they believed that this was the intention of God and an incurable condition of life, and they held passionately and with a sense of right, to their disproportionate share. They maintained a conmimon intercourse as ‘‘So- ciety”’ of all who were practically secure, and their choice of that word is exhaustively eloquent of the quality of their philosophy. But, if you can master these alien ideas upon which the old system rested, just in the same measure will you understand the horror these people had for marriages with the Insecure. In the case of their girls and women it was extraordinarily rare, and in the case of either sex it was regarded as a disastrous social crime. Anything was bet- ter than that. You are probably aware of the hideous fate that was only too probably the lot, dur- ing those last dark days, of every girl of the insecure classes who loved and gave way to the impulse of self-abandonment without marriage, and so you will understand the peculiar situation of Nettie with young Ver- rall. One or the other had to suffer. And as they were both in a state of great emo- tional exaltation and capable of strange gen- erosities toward each other, it was an open question and naturally a source of great anxiety to a mother in Mrs. Verrall’s posi- tion, whether the sufferer might not be her son—whether as the outcome of that glow- ing, irresponsible commerce, Nettie might not return prospective mistress of Checks- hill Towers. The chances were greatly against that conclusion, but such things did occur. These laws and customs sound, I know, like a record of some nasty-minded lunatic’s inventions. They were invincible facts in that vanished world into which, by some accident, I had been born, and it was the dream of any better state of things that was scouted as lunacy. Just think of it! This girl I loved with all my soul, for whom I was ready to sacrifice my life, was not good enough to marry young Verrall. And I had only to look at his even, handsome, charac- terless face to perceive a creature weaker class distinctions, and they were never really In the Days of the Comet 587 and no better than myself. She was to be his. pleasure until he chose to cast her aside and the poison of our social system had so saturated her nature—his evening dress, his freedom and his money had seemed so fine to her and I so clothed in squalor—that to that prospect she had consented. And to resent the social conventions that created their situation, was called ‘‘ class envy,” and gently born preachers reproached us for the mildest resentment against an injustice no living man would now either endure or con- sent to profit by. What was the sense of saying “‘peace” when there was no peace? If there was one hope in the disorders of that old world it lay in revolt and conflict to the death. But if you can really grasp the shameful grotesqueiess of the old life, you will begin to appreciate the interpretation of old Mrs. Verrall’s appearance that leaped up at once in my mind. She had come to compromise the dis- aster! ° And the Stuarts would compromise! I saw that only too well. An enormous disgust at the prospect of the imminent encounter between Stuart and his mistress made me behave in a violent and irrational way. I wanted to escape seeing that, seeing even Stuart’s first gesture in that, at any cost. “I’m off,” said I, and turned my back on him without any further farewell. My line of retreat lay by the old lady, and so Ladvanced toward her. I saw her expression change, her mouth fell a little way open, her forehead wrinkled, and her eyes grew round. She found me a queer customer even at the first sight, and there was something in the manner of my advance that took away her breath. She stood at the top of the three or four steps that descended to the level of the hot- house floor. She receded a pace or two, with a certain offended dignity at the deter- mination of my rush. I gave her no sort of salutation. Well, as a matter of fact, I did give her a sort of salutation. There is no occasion for me to begin apologizing now for the thing I said to her—I strip these things before you —if only I can get them stark enough you will understand and forgive. I was filled with a brutal and overpowering desire to insult her. And so I addressed this poor, little, ex- j ' : i a

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588 pensive, old woman in the following terms, converting her by a violent metonymy into a comprehensive plural. ‘‘ You infernal land thieves!” I said point-blank into her face, “‘ Have you come to offer them money ?” And without waiting to test her powers of repartee, I passed rudely beyond her and vanished, striding with my fists clenched out of her world again. I have tried since to imagine how the thing must have looked to her. S@ far as her particular universe went I had not ex- isted at all, or I had existed only as a dim, black thing, an insignificant speck, far away across her park in irrelevant, unim- portant transit, until this moment when she came, sedately troubled, into her own secure gardens and sought for Stuart among the greenhouses. Then, abruptly, I flashed into being down that green-walled, brick- floored vista as a black-avised, ill-clad young man, who first stared, and then advanced, scowling, toward her. Once in existence I developed rapidly. I grew larger in per- spective and became more and more impor- tant and sinister every moment. I came up the steps with inconceivable hostility and disrespect in my bearing, towered over her, becoming for an instant at least a sort of second French Revolution, and delivered myself, with the intensest concentration, of those wicked and incomprehensible words. CHAPTER THE I ROM that moment when I % insulted old Mrs. Verrall I SS) became representative, I was ¥ 2 man who stood for all the disinherited of the world. I Shad no hope of pride or 4 pleasure left in me, I was 2 raging rebellion against God and mankind. There were intentions swaying me this way and that; I was perfectly clear now upon what I meant to do. I would make my protest and die. I was going to kill Nettie—Nettie who had smiled and promised and then given herself to an- other, and who stood now for all the con- ceivable delightfulnesses the lost imagina- tions of the youthful heart, the unattainable Cosmopolitan Magazine Just for a second, I threatened annihilation. Happily that was my climax. And then I had gone by, and the Universe was very much as it had always been except for the wild swirl in it, and the faint sense of insecurity, my episode left in its wake. The thing that never entered my head in those days was that a large proportion of the rich were rich in absolute good faith. I thought they saw things exactly as I saw them, and wickedly denied. But, indeed, old Mrs. Verrall was no more capable of doubting the perfection’ of her family’s right to dominate a wide countryside, than she was of examining the Thirty-nine Arti- cles or dealing with any other of the ada- mantine pillars upon which her universe rested in security. No doubt I startled and frightened her tremendously. But she could not under- stand. None of her sort of people ever did seem to understand such livid flashes of hate, as ever and again lit the crowded darkness below their feet. The thing leaped out of the black for a moment and vanished, like a threatening figure by a desolate roadside, lit for a moment by one’s belated carriage lamp and then swallowed up by the night. They counted it with nightmares, and did their best to forget what was evidently as insignificant as it was disturbing. FOURTH—WAR joys in life; and Verrall who stood for all who profited by the incurable injustice of our social order. I would kill them both. And that being done, I would blow my brains out and see what vengeance fol- lowed my blank refusal to live. So indeed I was resolved. I raged mon- strously. And above me, abolishing the stars, triumphant over the yellow, waning moon that followed it below, the giant meteor towered up toward the zenith. “Let me only kill!” I cried. only kill!” So I shouted in my frenzy. I was in a fever that defied hunger and fatigue; for a long time I prowled over the heath toward Lowchester talking to myself, and now that night had fully come, I was tramping homeward, walking the long seventeen miles without a thought of rest. And I had eaten nothing since the morning. “Let me

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In the Days of the Comet I suppose I must count myself mad, but I can recall my ravings. There were times when I walked weeping through that brightness that was neither night nor day. There were times when I reasoned in a topsy-turvy fashion with what I called the Spirit of All Things. But always I spoke to that white glory in the sky. “Why am I here only to suffer igno- minies?” I asked. ‘Why have you made me with pride that cannot be satisfied, with desires that turn and rend me? Is it a jest, this world—a joke you play on your guests? I—even I—have a better humor than that! “Why not learn from me a certain de- cency of mercy? Why not undo? Have I ever tormented, day by day, some wretched worm, making filth for it to trail through, filth that disgusts it, starving it, bruising it, mocking it? Why should You? Your jokes are clumsy. ‘Try—try some milder fun up there; do you hear? Something that doesn’t hurt so infernally. “You say this is your purpose—your purpose with me. You are making some- thing with me—birth pangs of a soul! Ah! How can I believe you? You forget I have eyes for other things. Let my own case go, but what of that frog beneath the cart wheel, God?—and the bird the cat has torn?” And after such blasphemies I would fling out a ridiculous little debating-society hand, “‘ Answer me that!” A week ago it had been moonlight, white and black and hard across the spaces of the park, but now the light was livid and full of the quality of haze. An extraordinarily low, white mist, not three feet above the ground, drifted broodingly across the grass, and the trees rose ghostly out of that phantom sea. Great and shadowy and strange was the world that night. No one seemed abroad ; I and my little cracked voice drifted solitary through the silent mysteries. Some- times I argued as I have told, sometimes I stumbled along in moody vacuity, some- times my torment was vivid and acute. Abruptly, out of apathy, would come a boiling paroxysm of fury, when I thought of Nettie mocking me and laughing, and of her and Verrall clasped in each other’s arms. “T will not have it so!” I screamed. “I will not have it so!” 589 And in one of these raving fits, I drew my revolver from my pocket and fired it into the quiet night. Three times I fired it. The bullets tore through the air, the startled trees told one another in diminish- ing echoes the thing I had done, and then, with a slow finality, the vast and patient night healed again to calm. My shots, my curses and blasphemies, my prayers—for anon I prayed—that silence took them all. It was—how can I express it ?—a stifled outcry tranquilized, lost, amid the serene assumptions, the overwhelming empire of that brightness. The noise of my shots, the impact upon things, had, for the instant, been enormous, then it had passed away. I found myself standing with the revolver held up, astonished, my emotions pene- trated by something I could not under- stand. Then I looked up over my shoulder at the great star, and remained staring at it. ‘Who are you?” I said at last. I was like a man in a solitary desert who has suddenly heard a voice. That, too, passed. As I came over Clayton Crest I recall that I missed the multitude that now, night after night, walked out to stare at the comet, and the little preacher in the waste beyond the hoardings, who warned sinners to repent before the Judgment, was not in his usual place. It was long past midnight, and every one had gone home. But I did not think of this at first, and the solitude perplexed me and left a memory behind. The gas lamps were all extinguished because of the brightness of the comet, and that, too, was unfamiliar. The little news agent in still High Street had shut up and gone to bed, but one belated board had been put out late and forgotten, and it still bore its placard. The word upon it—there was but one word upon it in staring letters—was, “WAR.” You figure that empty, mean street, emptily echoing to my footsteps, no soul awake and audient but me. Then my halt at the placard. And amidst that sleeping stillness, smeared hastily upon the board, a little askew and crumpled, but quite dis- tinct beneath that cool, meteoric glare, pre- posterous and appalling, the measureless evil of that word— “WAR!”

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ES ST EN An ETE 590 Cosmopolitan Magazine II I awoke in that state of equanimity that so often follows an emotional drenching. It was late, and my mother was beside my bed. She had some breakfast for me on a battered tray. “Don’t get up yet, dear,” she said. “You’ve been sleeping. It was three o’clock when you got home last night. You must have been tired out. Your poor face,” she went on, ‘“‘was as white as a sheet, and your eyes shining. It frightened me to let you in. And you stumbled on the stairs.” My eye went quietly to my coat pocket, where something still bulged. She probably had not noticed. ‘I went to Checkshill,” I said. ‘‘You know—perhaps a4 “T got a letter last evening, dear.”” She bent near me to put the tray upon my knees, and she kissed my hair softly. Fora moment we both remained still, resting on that, her cheek just touching my head. I took the tray from her to end the pause. “Don’t touch my clothes, mummy,” I said sharply, as she moved toward them. “T’m still equal to a clothesbrush.” And then, as she turned away, I aston- ished her bysaying: ‘‘ Youdear mother, you! A littlke—I understand. Only—now—dear mother; oh! let me be! Let me be!” And, with the docility of a good servant, she went from me. Dear heart of submis- sion that the world and I had used so ill! It seemed to me that morning that I could never give way to a gust of passion again. A sorrowful firmness of mind possessed me. My purpose seemed now as inflexible as iron; there was neither love nor hate nor fear left in me—only I pitied my mother greatly for all that was still to come. I ate my breakfast slowly, and thought where I could find out about Shaphambury, and how I might hope to get there. I had not five shillings in the world. I dressed methodically, choosing the least frayed of my collars, and shaving much more carefully than was my wont; then I went down to the public library to consult a map. Shaphambury was on the coast of Essex, a long and complicated journey from Clay- ton. I went to the railway station and made some memoranda from the time- tables. The porters I asked were not very clear about Shaphambury, but the booking- office clerk was helpful, and we puzzled out all I wanted to know. Then I came out into the coaly street again. At the least I ought to have two pounds. I went back to the public library and into the newspaper room to. think over this problem. A fact intruded itself upon me. People seemed in an altogether exceptional stir about the morning journals. There was something unusual in the air of the room; more people and more talking than usual, and for a moment I was puzzled. Then I bethought me, “This war with Germany, of course!”’ A naval battle was supposed to be in progress in the North Sea. Let them! I returned to the consideration of my own affairs. Parload ? Could I go and make it up with him, and then borrow? I weighed the chances of that. Then I thought of selling or pawning some- thing, but that seemed difficult. My winter overcoat had not cost a pound when it was new; my watch was not likely to fetch many shillings. Still, both these things might be factors. I thought with a certain repug- nance of the little store my mother was probably making for the rent. She was very secretive about that, and it was locked in an old tea caddy in her bedroom. I knew it would be almost impossible to get any of that money from her willingly, and, though I told myself that in this issue of passion and death no detail mattered, I could not get rid of tormenting scruples whenever I thought of that tea caddy. Was there no other course? Perhaps, after every other source had been tapped, I might supple- ment with a few shillings frankly begged from her. “These others,” I said to myself, thinking without passion for once of the sons of the Secure, “‘ would find it difficult to run their romances on a pawnshop basis. How- ever, we must manage it.” I felt the day was passing on, but I did not get excited about that. ‘Slow is swift- est,” Parload used to say, and I meant to get everything thought out completely, to take a long aim and then to act as a bullet flies. I hesitated at a pawnshop on my way home to my midday meal, but I determined not to pledge my watch until I could bring my overcoat also. [ate silently, revolving plans. (To be continued.)

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subject of the North } American Indian coming up, Mr. Milo Bush without hes- 2@ itation took the conversa- tional reins and related sev- MZ eral incidents _ illustrating what he conceived to be edi- 24s fying traits of character in the red man. I regret to say that these reminiscences sel- dom showed the red brother in an enviable light. Then, on my tentative suggestion that education might yet do something for him, Mr. Bush launched out into the fol- lowing account of some alleged occurrences having a bearing on the point: That reminds me of old Hannibal Gaffey. Doctor Gaffey he always called himself. “‘Doctor, hey?” says Jap Bingerford to him when he first come, a-sizing him up; “hoss or human?” ‘Sir, neither,” says Gaffey; “nor yet divinity. I am a doctor of philosophy.” ‘‘Well,” says Jap, turn- ing away keerless, “‘there ain’t never been a case of it in this town. You can’t build up no practice here.” ‘Sir, you mistake me,” says Gaffey; “‘it ain’t a business that I earn my living at. It’s a degree bestowed by my allymatter.” ‘Oh, yes; yes, yes,” says Jap, sparring for time and bound not to be floored; ‘I unnerstand now. I I was didn’t catch what you said at first. Old-Man-With-His-Head-On in one of them insurance lodges myself once. I was Grand Royal Pushant Out- side Guyard. Shake, doc,” and Jap held out his hand and looked around at the rest of us and smiled easy and comfortable. Well, it ’peared the doc was a teacher, and he got a place in our school and inter- juiced modern methods, such as reading by sight. Said it was all wrong to learn children the alphabet, but sot ’em right at reading the first thing. We school officers didn’t cotton to it, and we dropped the doc and got an old-fashioned teacher. “Oh, ecks—ox; see, oh, double-you—cow; dee, oh, are, gee—dorg.” ‘That’s the way we told the teacher we wanted our children learnt, with the multiplication table for’ards and 59

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592 Cosmopolitan Magazine back’ards, and with how to parch every word in Pollok’s ‘‘Source of Time.” Was the doc discouraged? Not a bit of it. Said he’d expected his methods might be too advanced for us, but that the dooty he owed to his allymatter wouldn’t let him do no other way. Then he took up with the Injuns. “Sir,” says he, “the only trouble with the red man is that he lacks eddication. Let the light of learning into his benighted mind and you drive out them there savage propensities ”—or something like this—I disremember the doctor’s exact words. Says Jap Bingerford: “‘Doc, as a friend of yourn, and a man who has also been allymattered, let me warn you agin Injuns. Injuns is pizen.” ‘““Troo,” replies the doctor, “‘but why? i Drawn by Arthur G. Dove ALWAYS MEASURED IT OUT WITH A SPOON On account of their untootered condition. Sir, what would you and me be, Mr. Bingerford, if we had no eddication?” ‘Well, J wouldn’t be no jim-switched Injun, going round making a collection of scalps on a string,” says Jap. “But if your father and mother had been Injuns, then don’t you think you’d ’a’ been a Injun?” says the doctor. “Not by a jugful,” says Jap; “I'd ’a’ took after my grandparents and been white. No Injun in mine, thank you.” Well, the doctor was for starting a school for the Injuns right away, but his red brother wasn’t inclined to pay, and so doc tried to get other folks to chip in and sup- port the school. But we didn’t take to no such tomfoolery as this. So then says the doctor: “IT have good friends in Boston and Philadelphia who are also friends of the red man. I will write to them and explain the grand work I propose doing.” Which he done, and he writ with such ellerquence that a good many of them ac- chooly sent money and he started his school. Called it the William Penn Injun College; a Institoo- tian for the Eddication and Up- lifting of the Red Man. Sup- ported ‘by Voluntary Contriboo- tians. Well, the folks that supplied the money being fur off, the doc could run his school to suit him- self, and he lit right into it with all his modern methods. There being no sootible books for In- juns, ’cording to his igee, he writ some out by hand and soon had things going hammer and tongs. “‘See the white man. See the red man. The red man has land. Does the white man want the red man’s land? Oh, yes. See the white man buy-ing the red man’s land. Will the white man pay what he a-grees? Oh, no. Will he get the land? Oh, yes. Lo, the poor red man. The white man has him on the run.” And *bout every day or two he’d send off a long letter to somebody in S 7) Vaz 7 Kener aeem, Boston or Philadelphia, telling ’em of the glorious work his school was doing. He got in a right smart pile of

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Drawn by Arthur G. Dove HE STARTED TO PULL OUT THE CORK money, too, and kept on running his school. Had twenty or thirty young Injuns up at his house all day pounding eddication into ’em like a house afire. Got ’em so they could read anything, and started ’em on the higher branches, like psycholera and socilolergy and such. It made Jap Binger- ford mighty down in the mouth to see it. “You can’t do it,” he used to say. “It’s agin nature. The Injun is a savage, seeking whom he may devour, and you can’t make a white man out of him.” It finally come out that Jap was right so far as the doc’s school went, though mebby he’d ’a’ pulled through if it hadn’t been for an unfortunate happening which took place and knocked the old man’s school sky-high. The doctor’s best scholar was a young Injun named Hungry Bear. His father was Old-Man-With-His-Head-On. Of course, I don’t need to tell you about the very delicurious effect of liquor on the In- jun. He don’t get along with it nohow. Jap used to say it was one of the strongest proofs that you can’t civilize the Injun. Well, the doc kept a large bottle at his house strictly for medicinal purposes, so he often said. ‘Curious thing about liquor,” he used to say; “‘such an awful curse when drunk promiscuous and still so bonign and useful medicinally. Sir, let me put it in a nut-shell: As a drink a bumnation—as a medicine, a blessing.” Then he would go over and get the bottle filled again. Always seemed in good health when he was out 593

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Enea anaes ene Pn ARTUR TE 594 Cosmopolitan Magazine around, and in no need of medicine, but used to be took frequent at home with cramps, he said, and was only saved by a little liquor. Always measured it out with a spoon. Used to seem to think that a half-glass poured out was a drink, and the same amount measured out with a spoon was medicine; an igee many persons have, I find, and a rather reasonable one, too, when you come to con- sider it close. Well, Injuns, old or young, are great snoop- ers, you know. If you don’t watch ’em when they’re around they’ll rummage into every- thing you’ve got. So the doctor always kept a big red pizen label pasted on his bottle. “T reckon that makes it all safe,’ he used to say. “Besides, it ain’t no untrooth—it 7s pizen for Injuns and them as don’t unnerstand its scientific medicinal use.” Then he would go and get a soup-ladle and measure himself out another dose. One day the doc had to go up to American Eagle on business. This was what them young Injuns had been waiting for, and they proceeded to ransack the house. After a good deal of hunting, they unearthed the doc’s bottle. Hungry Drawn by Arthur G. Dove Bear’s eye lit up as his hand clutched round the neck of it and he started to pull out the cork. ‘Spiritus jrumenti,” says he, in his best eddicated talk. ‘‘ Pop- erally called whiskey, from the Gaelic usquebaugh, uisge, water, and beatha, life; literally, ‘water of life.’ Well named, my friends. Let us drink to higher eddica- tion.” Just then he caught sight of the label. ‘‘What’s this? ‘Pizen—for Ex- ‘* HERE’S HOW!” ternal Use Only’? Alars, I was mistaken. It was a close call. See how our ability to read saved us.” Then they put the bottle back and walked out with their faces long. A little while after, along came Old- Man-With-His-Head-On and a few other ancient savages. Seeing the house was empty, in they went to snoop like the others. They soon found the bottle. ‘Ugh, fire- water,” says old Head. “Him bully. Get drunk same like pale- face.” He grabs the cork with his teeth, and just then sees the label. Points to the skull and says he: “Him no good. Heap scalped. Here’s how!” Then he puckers his lips round the bottle- neck and takes a long, deep drink. The others do the same. When the doctor come back, he lifted them insensible old braves out of the winder and let them fall in a picturesque pile in the front yard. A little later, Hun- gry Bear and his friends comes along by again. Old-Man- With - His - Head - On still has the empty bottle in one hand. Hungry Bear looks at them and then smells of the bottle. ‘“‘Alars, my friends,’ says he, ‘“‘see how our . eddi- cation betrayed us. And see, too, what a lie the great paleface philosopher tells when he says that much reading maketh a full man. Alars, no reading at all maketh a full man. Come on!” They was so disgusted by what they had missed that they never come back, and the consequence was it busted up the school.

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IEP i Eo pda ‘ pan rere > @ LITERATURE Cand NG BY AMBROSE BIERCE A Notion That 7s Natled Down [HE way of a man with a maid is forthright and candid com- pared with the way of a fixed idea with a man. Let a man have a fixed idea, inaccessible to eviction, and the ducks and drakes that it makes of his intellectual faculties are the eighth wonder of the world. In many of our countrymen the queer notion that a people’s will can find expres- sion in a republic only, is as firm as the heart of amountain. Nothing can move it—not even the example of such a democracy as England, where public opinion executes its will with a celerity and power to which our own system supplies no parallel. To argue with a protagonist of republican institu- tions is “throwing words away”; to him a monarchy, however established, main- tained and limited, is a system of oppres- sion and repression, the monarch a “gory tyrant,” sternly bent on the extermination of political and personal liberty. Doubt- less that is well; if the average human mind were open to conviction, stability of government would be impossible. Every people would experiment with every form and end by committing political suicide in anarchy; for assuredly no government has ever been, or is ever likely to be, other than bad, and nobody seems able to learn that the cause of failure inheres in the badness of human nature. Every people has as good government as it merits, and a people good enough to have a good one would need none at all. Apropos of these remarks, because sug- gesting them, is this amusing utterance in ‘al ME Wy y z y AEE i Sag QS VV OW sf Cw) I —Le REPUBLIC. the editorial columns of a high-class news- paper of the national capital, “For a full one hundred years republican- ism has been driving autocracy to the’ wall in Europe.” In proof, the writer gravely explains that “France is a pretty good republic’—an illustration that is at least relevant. But he goes on to point out that the German emperor “‘has in the Reichstag a partner in the government’; that ‘‘the Cortes holds the purse of Spain”; that “Italy has”—a republic? Dear, no; ‘‘a_ constitutional monarchy”; that ‘‘ Austria-Hungary has a legislature and the Scandinavian peoples have enjoyed liberty for ages.”” How under the sun the existence of legislative bodies immemorially characteristic of limited mon- archies can prove the power of republican- ism and its feat of ‘‘driving to the wall” the system of which they are an essential part it is not given to any but the possessors of the republican fixed idea to see. It is as if one should argue the prevalence ot hump-backed persons by the fact that, like them, all persons have backs. The mention of “the Scandinavian peoples” is particularly amusing in the light of the facts that the liberty which they “have enjoyed for ages” they have always found under their kings, and that within a few months one of them has decided by an overwhelming popular vote to have nothing to do with republican institutions. Even France is an experimental republic, and a republic at all only because the majority of her citizens are monarchists whose factions hate a republic less bitterly than they hate one another. Observers who, surveying Russian turbulence through the 595

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Cosmopolitan Magazine eyes of American editors and correspondents, think they discern republican aspirations at the back of it may profitably prepare for disappointment. If the ‘“‘reds” and the artisans of the large towns succeed in over- throwing the czar they will have to reckon, not only with the ‘‘intellectuals,” as at present, but with the great body of the Russian people—the peasantry, whose part in the revolution so far has consisted, mainly, in exterminating republican Jews. Except in France there has not been in Europe since the lurid days of 1848 any republican sentiment amounting to more than a negligible political factor. Monarchy was never more firm on its foundations than it is to-day in the Old World, and a good American’s most patriotic hope is that the example of the New has had nothing to do with making it so. ¥ ¥ ¥ On Putting Ones Brains into One's Belly R. HENRY HOLT, the pub- lisher, utters his mind at no in- considerable length in depreca- tion of what he calls “‘the com- mercialization of literature.” That literature, in this country and Eng- land at least, has somewhat fallen from its high estate and is regarded even by many of its purveyors as a mere trade is unfor- tunately true, as we see in the genesis and development of the “‘literary syndicates ”’; in the unholy alliance between the book reviewer and the head of the advertising department; in the systematic “booming” of certain books and authors by methods both supertabular and submanual, not materially different from those used for the promotion of a patent. medicine; in the reverent attitude of editors and publishers toward authors of ‘‘best sellers,” and in more things than can be here set down. In the last century when, surely by no fortuitous happening, American literature was made by such men as Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Poe, Emerson, Whittier, Haw- thorne, Longfellow, Holmes and Lowell, these purely commercial phenomena were in less conspicuous evidence and some of them were altogether indiscernible. That the period of literature’s com- mercialization should be that of its decay is obviously more than a coincidence. Mr. Holt observes both, and is sad, but that is a coincidence pure and simple: his melan- choly, like Caliban’s stars, comes ‘‘other- wise.” In the first place, the ‘‘com- mercialization” is confessedly compelling him to do a good deal more advertising than he likes to pay for; for commerce spells competition. The authors of to-day and their agents have acquired the dis- agreeable habit of taking their wares to the highest bidder—the publisher who will give the highest royalties and the broadest pub- licity. The immemorial relation whereby the publisher was said to drink wine out of the author’s skull has been rudely disturbed by the latter demanding some of the wine for himself—an irritating infraction of a good understanding sanctified by centuries of faithful observance. It is only natural that Mr. Holt, being a conservative man and a protagonist of established order, should experience some of the emotions appropriate to the defenders in a servile insurrection. With a candor that is most becoming, Mr. Holt expressly bewails the passing of the old régime—the departed days when authors “‘had other resources” than author- ship. This is the second time that it has been my melancholy privilege to hear the head of a prosperous American publishing house make this moan. Another one, a few years ago, in addressing a company of au- thors, solemnly advised them to have some means of support additional to writing. I was not then, and am not now, assured that publishers find it necessary to have any means of support additional to publishing. ¥ * ¥ Some Vagaries of Our Esteemed Satellite ~ JERTAIN hardy persons having ‘| more or less of the faculty of ob- servation have from time to time made merry over the errors committed by authors and artists in dealing with their favorite sub- ject, the moon. The conduct of that really staid and steady-habited orb is a thing which these two classes of worthy citizens have not, apparently, the good luck to be able to understand; they represent it as doing all manner of impossible things, such 42

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The Passing Show as rising or setting full-faced at midnight, ‘or presenting a crescent in the early even- ing, with its concavity to the west. That latter phenomenon is visible to artists only; to the everlasting honor of the writer folk be it said that it is the sole lunar impossi- bility that they have not, so far as I know, recorded. Jean Ingelow makes the new moon—‘‘such a slender moon”—rise at sunset, whether in the west or the east one must guess. Longfellow thought he saw the full, or nearly full, moon at noonday, “ Sailing high, but faint and white As a schoolboy’s paper kite.” Bayard Taylor makes the half-moon rise as the Newberry clocks strike twelve, and at the same hour of the night, marked by a clock in a castle, Spielhagen has his full moon on the horizon—eastern or western, ‘I forget which. As proponents of a private and personal astronomy they are all beaten out of the field by an artist who illustrates a story by Jack London in one of the December magazines. This gentleman represents the full moon floating tranquilly between the spectator and a range of hills. And the hills are not very far away—if that has anything to do with it. ¥ Ky Ly Why the Human Nose Western Exposure HEN Bishop Berkeley had the good luck to write, “ Westward the course of empire takes its way,” he suggested a question which has not, to my knowledge, been adequately answered: Why? Why do all the world’s peoples that move at all move ever toward the west, a human tide, obedient to the suasion of some mysterious power, setting up new ‘‘empires ” superior to those en- feebled by time, as is the fate of empires? Even so thoughtful a person as Professor Serviss has recently confessed himself unable to name the natural law at the back of-the movement. Yet a law there must be: things of that kind do not come about by accident. A natural law is one thing, a cause is another, and the cause of this universal tendency to ‘‘go West” may not lie too deep for discovery. May it not be that the glory of the sunset has something to do with it?—has all to do with it, for that Has a matter. In civilization that may count for littlek—we know too much. We know that the magical landscapes of the sunset are “airy nothings”—optical illusions ‘‘signi fying nothing.” ~ But we inherit instincts from primitive ancestors to whom they were less unreal. The savage is a poet who ‘Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind,” reading into the visible aspects of nature many a meaning which in the light of exact knowledge we read out of them. Not a Grecian of the whole imaginative race that had sight of Proteus rising from the sea and heard old Triton blow his wreathed horn could: beat him at that. He knows that beyond the mountains that he dares not scale, and beyond the sea- horizon that he has not the means to transgress, lies a land ‘wherein are all beauty and _ possibilities of happiness. To him the crimson lakes, purple promon- tories, golden coasts and happy isles of cloudland are veritable presentments of magical regions below. -He never bothers his shaggy pate with the question ‘‘Can such things be?”’—his eyes tell him that they are. Why should he not have ever in heart the wish to reach and occupy the delectable realm to which the sun daily points the way and sometimes discioses ? That is the way he feels about it and his forefathers felt about it, as is shown in the myths and legends of many tribes of them. And because they so felt we have from them the Wanderlust that lures us ever a-west. To this hypothesis it may be objected that the cloudscapes of the sunrise ought, logically, to offset the others. But the primitive ancestor was not an early riser; he was a notorious sluggard, as is the savage of to-day, and seldom saw the sunrise— seldom that its fascination did not get int» the blood of him and from his into ours. Even when he did see the cloudlands of the dawn he was not in a frame of mind to observe them, being engrossed in rounding up the early cave-bear or preparing an astonishment for his sleeping enemy. But the chromatic glories of the country re- flected in the sunset sky took his attention when it was most alert. Moreover, those of the dawn are distinctly inferior, as I am assured by credible witnesses who have seen them, through the happy chance of having been up all night.

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oe Pena? ACRE my ade. Magazine Shop-Talk With Some Valued Opin:ons as to the Need for the “ Treason of the Senate” Articles ELL, the CosMopoLiraNn has { heaved the stone and the rip- A) ples have been sent circling 5G all over the national pool! 0) The editor of this magazine f knew that the announcement M{ of ‘The Treason of the Sen- (y ate” articles by David Gra- ham Phillips would create a stir, but that he would hear such loud acclaim of his purpose in so short a time was not dreamed of in his philosophy. From the Penobscct to Puget Sound, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf have come let- ters, post cards and newspaper clippings that have hailed Mr. Phillips as the coming hero of the greatest piece of work in all the literature of exposure. Nearly everybody who can read has read some of Mr. Phillips’s brisk writing at some time or other, and those who have seen the announcement of his “‘ Treason of the Senate” have been confidently counting upon a rare literary treat, while many of them seem to regard the publication as a national event. To be sure, our announcement did not please a certain order of minds. It is not strange, for example, to find the worthy trust folk puffing out their sleek jowls and lowering their brows in wrath. This threat- ened advance upon their strongest bulwark is not pleasant for Sir Knight of the Dollar Sign and his fellows to contemplate. That the Senate is their strongest bulwark nobody of the slightest political or commercial dis- cernment will for pne moment deny. oS But the outburst of approving letters and paragraphs—what of them ? Well, they have come from all sorts of people living in all sorts of places, and they reveal an intense interest in the truly dis- tressing senatorial situation. These letters show that the people are thinking—thinking deeply, too—of the dangers that threaten our good Ship of State. They reveal the 598 fact that the revolt against the dominancy of dollars in this republic is stronger and more general than many of us had suspected. What warms the cockles of the Cosmo- POLITAN’s heart more than anything, in viewing this tidal wave of correspondence that is rolling into its snug little cove, is the fact that its stanch old friend, the country editor, is with it in this fight. Indeed, out of six hundred and seventy-three letters, notes and post cards from the editors of small daily and weekl: journals throughout the land we find but two that sound a dissonant note, while very ‘:w are merely mild in their tones of approv:.i. As a matter of fact, the great majority of our editorial friends are delighted with the prospect of the attack upon the traitorous senators, while one highly enthusiastic gentleman, the editor of the “Leader,” of Fowler, Ind., whose blood was evidently affected by the tonic air of January, wrote a note consisting of the three potent words, Give ’em he!!! Now those who have studied the social mind of the -ountry and what actuates it will tell you that the country editor is one of the strongest representatives of whatever latent power of opinion we have in America. Your sophisticated city journalist, who gen- erally expresses himself with a morbidness due to his brick perspective and his un- wholesome acquaintance with the shams of life, can rarely be relied upon for a fresh and sturdy view of affairs. He takes no short cuts. If you want straight talk you must go to the country editor. Here, for another example, is an extract from a very pointed letter from Richards, Mo., at the head of which is printed: THE RICHARDS PROGRESS BY M. S. BRADY As? Us About Richards I think a great deal about our misrepre- sentatives in the United States Senate. It is enough to set every honest man to think-

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Magazine ing and doing. There can be no doubt if every man would think and act for himself that some of our senators would be retired to private life (or prison) at the very earliest opportunity. 1 certainly believe in the election of all senators by the people. William Glasman, editor of the “‘Stand- ard” of Ogden, the stronghold of the anti- Mormon ele- ment of U ah, Says: If the matter is handled, as I believe Mr. Phillips will handle it, you ought to make the hit of this century up to date. We shall be pleased to reproduce all or any part of the writings of Mr. Phillips. Fromthe far- away State of Washington, come these words, written by George N. Tuesley of the “ Vakima Her- ald ” of North Yakima: In regard to our. misrepre- sentatives in the Senate, I believe that such pressure should be brought to bear on them through the press and otherwise, that they will be com- pelled to resign the positions of honor and trust which they now hold and have stultified. his should be done for two reasons, that the higher branch of our great legislative body may have the blot on its character removed, and that those men in the Senate who are true to their trust and office may not be. con- tinually placed in the position of being known as of the same class as these men whom you are discussing. HOMER DAVENPORT, “Yours for Salvation,” is the way Thomas J. Middleton, editor of the “Ellis County Mirror” of Waxahachie, Texas, signs himself to a letter in which he says: WHO IS CARTOONING ‘THE COSMOPOLITAN Shop-Talk 599 I shall look with interest to Mr. Phillips’s articles, believing that they will do good to- ward a better method of electing senators— or the abolition outright of the Senate itself! Williston Manley of the “St. Lawrence Plaindealer,” cf Cantcn, N. Y., sends us these words of compliment and cheer: Tf the Lord God could allow Lawson to kick ul. p the muss he has, how much greater muss the editor of the CosMmopoLt- TAN. ought to be able to kick up with a. long lineage of re- spectability be- hind him. L. E. Brown of the ‘“Inde- pendent Her- ald,” Bertrand, Neb., says in his letter: My opinion is that the Senate is at this time a stumbling- block and an obstacle in the way of the nation’s true progress — now, as at no other time, because we have in the executive chair the ablest, most practical and most fearless champion of popular rights THE SENATE FOR Since Abraham Lincoln. Let Mr. Phillips give the Senate what it deserves! Charles H. Lamar of the ‘‘Calhoun Herald” of Hardin, Ill., writes: I am pleased to note that the CosMmopoLt- TAN through Mr. Phillips takes up the record of each, and I shall take pleasure in calling attention to the CosMopoLITAN’s good work. Harry E. Agee of the “Record,” La Monte, Mo., writes: The manner in which some of our misrep- resentatives in the United States Senate have utterly disregarded their oaths of office and

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600 betrayed the interests of their real constitu- ents, the people, calls for the severest con- demnation. These men should not be per- mitted to remain in office. I believe that the election of United States senators by direct vote of the people will do much toward improving existing conditions. I am very glad that you are about to pub- lish a series of articles by David Graham Phillips along this line. By so doing you will render a real public service. J. O. Shepard of the “Midland Virgin- ian” writes from Palmyra, Va.: I congratulate you on taking up the sub- ject of misrepresentation in the Senate. It is a subject that needs a scourging article. It should not be handled daintily. Mr. Phil- lips selected a good subject to begin with. We will cheerfully join in the fight. Arthur E. Bailey, publisher of the Mar- cellus (Mich.) ‘“‘ News,” writes: The revelations of corruption bring dis- grace upon the nation, and if the United States senators and other officials shown to be implicated in wrongdoing have not the good judgment to resign they should be kicked out. Let the good work of exposing them go on. This is from Lew B. Brown, editor of the leading paper of Harrodsburg, Ky. I most heartily commend your fight on dol- larocracy misrepresentation in our House of Lords, and hope to see every misrepresenta- tive retired. E. C. Detuncq, editor of the Murdock (Minn.) “Voice,” says: _I shall be pleased to read the articles men- tioned. I firmly believe the United States Senate is composed of would-be get-rich- quick, and in the words of the late Vander- bilt: “ The Public be D—d” is apparently the motto of the senators. George A. Byrne, publisher of the Mead (Neb.) “‘ Advocate,” says: I shall follow your articles on “ Treason of the Senate” with interest, and hope you can stir up the members of the Senate to a gen- eral house-cleaning if there are any honest senators left to do the job. E. E. McCrea, editor of the ‘‘ Alexandria Post-News” of Alexandria, Minn., sends these heartening words: I am in hearty sympathy with your move- ment, and will aid in giving it publicity. If we have any political body in this country which needs reforming, it is the United States Senate. Cosmopolitan Magazine George C. Gunn of the “Daily Enter- prise” of Burlington, N. J., writes in this forcible manner: Every senator holding his seat in this great million-dollar club by purchase, should be exposed and impeached in office. It was intended by the founders of the government that the Senate should constitute a safety- valve on the engine of state and not a leaky steam chest. The poor “nigger” who steals a chicken generally gets all that is coming to him. It is evident from recent disclosures that “stripes for a lifetime” would not satisfy the demands of justice in the case of at least some of them. Push along with the work, and may it do great good for the country. S The pen of George W. Connelly of the “Sun,” published at Lecompton, Kan., was pushed to good purpose in writing this: The Senate has lost power and the con- fidence of the people, and worst of all it has lost the senatorial ideal. With the passing of Senator Hoar, almost the last vestige of the men of honor and statesmanship passed with him. Of course there are some men of real force among the members, but it is largely a gathering of corporation lawyers and retainers. Let the people elect, by all means. Shall look forward to the Phillips articles with interest. Signed simply ‘‘The News,” comes this letter from Baraboo, Wis.: In regard to the United States Senate no doubt it could be greatly purified by the members being elected by the people instead of the legislatures. There should be clearing out at all hazards. From the office of ‘The Louisburg Herald,” an influential Kansas paper, Editor R. H. Cadwallader writes: Referring to proposed articles by David Graham Phillips on the United States Sen- ate, I am very glad to know that light is to be let in on it. I have stood for years for the election of United States senators by direct vote of the people. The public cannot but be benefited by this proposed publicity. J. H. Johnson of the “American Stock Farm,” Winona, Minn., has this to say: I am most heartily in favor of the election of senators by the people direct. There is no question but some of the senators ought to be impeached, and the “finger of scorn” ought to be pointed at at least one-half of the members as now composed. The other half can be condemned by their lukewarmness in many measures affecting the common people.

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Magazine Shop-Talk ‘Brother Editors,” is the way P. H. McCarty of the Rock Rapids (Iowa) ‘‘Re- view’ addresses us. He writes: Personally I believe that you will strike a popular chord, and will do a great and good deed for posterity. Public opinion is ripe for such matter, and it needs only to be pre- sented in an intelligent manner to awaken our people from the lethargy in which they are now slumbering. Lawson’s articles will pale into insignifi- cance in contrast. The magazines are the molders of public opinion in this age. os “You are on the right track,” writes M. M. Warner of the Lvons (Neb.) “‘ Mirror.” “Keep up the battles for human rights and human liberty! Impeach the misrepresent- atives in the United States Senate. Elect senators by direct vote of the people.” From Maine is heard the voice of T. L. Barker of the Rumford Falls “Times” in the following: There is only one method of inaugurating a clean government for the United States, and this can be done by ousting all of the representative grafters. The past year has been one of revelation, and by these revelations I think that the people have been awakened to the great need of a purification process to be instituted in every department under our national govern- ment. The editor of the Havre de Grace ‘‘ Re- publican,” an influential Maryland paper, is on our side. W.S. McCombs writes from the office of his journal: We think by virtue of their own testimony before the Insurance Commission that both of New York’s senators should resign. The senators should be elected by the people di- rect, and not by the manipulations of legis- latures. J. D. Babbage, editor of the ‘ Brecken- ridge News ” of Cloverport, Ky., writes: I want to congratulate you on your cour- age. Go ahead in your good work. The people need to know more of the doings of their representatives. We need a David Graham Phillips in every state, county and district—men who know and dare to do. This is from a letter sent in by the editor of the Austin ‘‘Autograph,” a Pennsyl- vania paper: It gives me pleasure to know that you in- tend showing up some of the “ highbinders ” of our United States Senate. 601 Wishing you all manner of success in your undertaking, and what assistance I can ren- der, | am Very truly yours, H. D. Caskey. Ps Lawrence E. Brown of the “ Progressive Age” of Scottsboro, Ala., writes: Our country would be vastly improved by a thorough purging of the United States Senate. I favor the election of the United States senators by the people. If all its members possessed the old-time honesty of the mem- bers from Alabama, who despite long lives of public service will die poor men, no change would be necessary. The great in- fluence that money now exerts in the selec- tion of public officials makes it necessary that every restraint be used to counteract its efficiency. Your series of articles on “ The Treason of the Senate,” by David Graham Phillips, will be looked forward to with interest. possible Here is a strong personal opinion from A. C. Lehmann, publisher of ‘‘ Der Lands- mann,” a German weekly paper of Green Bay, Wis.: I believe and have believed for years that that body is the most pernicious portion of our national governmental machinery; the greatest hindrance to all progress and re- form—the great cenfral nest of corruption, that ought, were it possible in its present form, to be wiped out of existence. Its com position is an anachronism, its privileges and rules are preposterous, its practices con- temptible or ridiculous and its members to a great extent men of whom the country feels ashamed. I receive the every day and read some of it. of the Senate is therefore not hearsay, but from facts. “ Congressional Record” My opinion derived from The ‘‘Republican” of Marshall, Mo., is represented by the following note from its editor, J. J. Witt: I am decidedly in favor of electing United States senators by direct vote of the people, being a Missourian and having in mind the disgraceful conditions of last winter. But I think the senators should be permitted to serve their time out. C. A. Buchanan, editor of the “Okla- homa Safeguard”? of Guthrie, Okla., says he believes that ‘“‘all representatives and senators should be elected by direct vote of the people and thereby stop this political graft and bossism.” W. H. Gustin, editor of the ‘Evening Times” of Bay City, Mich., is quite radical in his views, writing as follows:

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602 As far as permitting United States sena- tors to remain in office is concerned, I be- lieve the interests of the United States would be best subserved if there were no Senate at all. It is nothing, at times, but a stumbling- block in the way of progress. Edward Pollock, who is Treasury agent of the State of Wisconsin, and also the editor of the “‘ Teller” of Lancaster, Wis., writes a long letter from which this is extracted: The frenzied financiers have come to re- gard the country as their great human cattle- ranch, and the legislators, from United States senators down, as their cowboys under orders to herd, and in market time to corral and turn them over to the railroads for beeves. The great need of the country is to bring every man to the sense of responsibility as citizen and voter. The citizen must be made to feel that he is the sovereign, and that if he does not use his sovereignty the men who do use it will make booty of his rights. & Though the sturdy country editor has and always shall have a warm place in our hearts (as witness our proud printing of the foregoing long string of epistolary extracts), there have been many letters from city journalists as well. One of the foremost of New York newspaper men writes to us as follows : Your idea of attacking the Senate is the greatest of them all. Lawson’s articles will be small potatoes alongside of Phillips's. God speed you in your good work! B. O. Flower, the well-known editor of the ‘‘Arena,”’ writes from his Boston office: I believe that every United States senator should be elected by the direct vote of the people. This I believe to be imperatively necessary in order to wrest the Senate from the hands of corrupt corporate wealth and to make it a body that shall consider the wishes and interest of the people instead of thwart their wishes in the interest of privileged wealth. I am extremely glad that you have secured so brilliant and competent a writer as Mr. David Graham Phillips to prepare this im- portant series of papers. You could not, I believe, have secured an abler man for the work, and I am convinced that the series of papers will be of great value to the public. “Leslie’s Weekly” is represented by its editor in the following note: Misrepresentatives of the people ought not to be continued in office in the Senate or elsewhere. Senators should be elected by the people, and should be held responsible by the Cosmopolitan Magazine latter for the faithful performance of their diits i wili read your articles with interest, but I trust you will not ovérreach the mark, as has been done too often by: those who seek only condemnation of public officials. Con- sidering their opportunities for evil, we may well be amazed at their moderation, as has before been said. “The Postmasters’ Advocate,” of which J. William McKinley is editor, sends in the following under date of Washington, Jan- uary 5, 1906 It is our opinion that senators should be elected by popular vote, and if such condi- tions exist as painted by Lawson of Boston; if Standard Oil, the beef trust, the railroads, or any corporation literally owns the senators and can order them to do their bidding, we think too much noise and fuss cannot be made about it. Partisanship, as it will be seen by a care- ful reading of these letters, does not enter into the scale of judgment against the recreant senators. The editors, we are assured, have given their views without po- litical bias. There was never a time in the history of our country when the criticism of corrupt officials has been so little colored by party feeling. aS So then it is evident that the CosMopott- TAN has awakened the best thought of the country. It hopes to te able to continue to keep it awake. It is not merely our purpose to stimulate interest, but to satisfy our read- ers, and this, we promise, shall be done. We shall keep at this work jong enough to accomplish somethiug by way of results. We hope at least to speed the coming of the time when our lawmakers shall not be as dangerous to the country as our law- breakers. Meantime, we are progressing in a ma- terial way. If you could look into the office of the CosMOPOLITAN you would see sub- scription clerks working night and day, entering names of new subscribers and attending to their wants. We are rapidly approaching the 500,000 mark, and it will not be long before we pass even that high figure. A friend of the magazine who is a liberal advertiser and is watching us closely, says: “The CoSMOPOLITAN as a popular maga- zine will soon outstrip them all. One can lie awake nights and hear it grow.”

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MR, PHILLIPS MR. LEWIS MR, GHENT The Day of Discontent First of the Series of Cosmopolitan Table-Talks in which Vital Problems are Discussed in a Vital Way SY invitation of the editor of }the Cosmopo.itan, Alfred \ Henry Lewis, W. J. Ghent and David Graham Phillips { met at luncheon in a room in the Hotel Astor, New York, the other day to discuss the social unrest in America —an unrest admitted by the KJ) most optimistic of our latter- day philosophers. The gentlemen represent- ed various shades of opinion. Mr. Ghent, as the author of ‘Benevolent Feudalism” and ‘““Mass and Class,” is well known as one of the leading scientific socialists of the day. Mr. Phillips is known as a writer of stirring political novels of a reform nature and Mr. Lewis not only as an au- thor but as a strenuous individualist. Each of these gentlemen was prepared to urge in a radical manner the principles he represented and the result was a highly interesting argument on the question of our social discontent, its cause and its cure. At the beginning of the three-cornered interview, Mr. Ghent was asked if in his opinion there was any valid reason for the restive state of the masses. “T suppose,” he replied, “that the best generalization on the subject is that of Alfred Russell Wallace. He that our civilization is ‘absolutely condemned by the fact that while in fifty years there has been a hundredfold increase in wealth, the sole result has been to add to the luxury of a few, while the great mass of the workers is as deeply steeped in poverty and misery as ever. According to Frederic Harrison, ninety per cent. of all the workers have no home to call their own beyond the end of the week. They are doomed to a con- 60 Says 3

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604 dition in which food, warmth and necessary clothing are simply not obtainable. This condition has been particularly evidenced during the last ten years in Germany, France and England, and to a certain extent in America. It is due in great part to the expansion of factory production, the dislodging of the country people and the forcing of them into the towns. The newcomers gravitate to the meanest, the most squalid quarters, like our East Side here, and there have to battle for jobs with those already on the ground. It is shown that in London, year after year, one person out of every four dies in an almshouse or hospital, or on some form of public charity.” “How about this country?” asked Mr. Phillips. “Well,” said Mr. Ghent, ‘Mr. Hunter and others have attempted to show the extent of poverty among us. Out of the little statistical material available Mr. Hunter has made a very good book. He shows that there are ten million persons in America who are constantly living at or below the bare margin of normal exist- ence. Shortly after the appearance of Mr. Hunter’s work there came up a ques- tion of the number of underfed school children in New York city. Mr. Hunter asserted that there were seventy thousand of these. The statement was denied up and down by hundreds of persons. Since then three different investigations have shown that Mr. Hunter probably spoke very conservatively. There is a rising wave of discontent, due to this privation, which expresses itself in many ways. Still, the great majority of the workers of Amer- ica live in a sort of hope that by some means they are going to beat the game.” PuiLiirs: You really think then that there is a deep discontent in this country ? GHENT: Not only among the workers, but among the middle class as well. The middle class feel that they are being put out of business. Puitiirs: At whom is this discontent aimed ? GHENT: It is very largely an instinc- tive and uninformed revolt, not at all cer- tain of its point, but in general it is against present conditions. Of course, it is greatly aided by the exposures of the insurance investigation and others of that kind. Lewis: You speak of discontent on the part of the poor as a probable cause Cosmopolitan Magazine of coming revolt. Do you think the rich are contented ? GHENT: I don’t know at all. But their kind of discontent would not be the sort we mean when we are speaking of the discontent of the poor. It is that of the poor man living at the margin of existence. Lewis: Don’t you know that there are thousands of rich men living at the margin - of existence? Because a man is walking down Fifth Avenue, well dressed, and well fed, does that mean that he is a contented man? Also, you speak of the starvation and the sickness on the East Side; I have gone through the East Side many times, and looked into the faces of the children. They were healthy, happy-looking chil- dren; they didn’t seem to be sick or dis- contented or starved. GHENT: Your observation in the street would not be worth as much as that of a hospital doctor who has seen them when they were ill. Lewis: I’ve no peculiar faith in doc- tors or their observations. I have seen perfectly healthy men killed by doctors. GHENT: No number of personal im- pressions can stand up against the figures of an actuary or the records of a hospital which receives poor patients. Lewis: Let us go back to the discon- tented man. Take John D. Rockefeller. He is a discontented man. He _ hasn’t all he wants; he is trying to get more. The fact is, I can’t find a contented man- outside of savagery. I never saw a con- tented white man. GHENT: What do you think of social- ism, Mr. Lewis? Lewis: In the first place, I think so- cialism is hampered by the term. You try to cover too many eggs at once. It is good for the public to do some things, good for the individual to do some things. Speaking of socialism, I take it to be axio- matic that everything the public does as a body is socialism. The post-office is socialism. A police force is socialism. I saw something the other day from Minot J. Savage telling his congregation not to vote for “municipal ownership.” He suggested that the Post-Office Department didn’t pay. This non-paying element he seemed to think an argument against government ownership of such trinkets as railways. Of course it doesn’t pay. Neither does the army pay. If you are to

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speak of money, nothing that the govern- ment does ever pays. That, however, is not a proper argument. GHENT: To what do you attribute the different political uprisings of late years? Lewis: To the wolf in the man. A man is selfish. Also he is destructive as a matter of instinct. GHENT: We have nearly every year, whether or not there is any unusual suf- fering on the part of a section of the public, a political uprising. We had a People’s party in 1892 which polled over a million votes, and in 1894 nearly two million votes. In 1806 we had something like six and a half million persons who voted for a radical candidate for President. Last year the Socialistic candidate, Debs, polled more than four hundred thousand votes. What could these instances mean other than a vote of discontent against existing conditions ? PuiLiirs: The reason the farmers raised the uproar in 18g2—when they elected Cleveland, and again in 1896—when, in my opinion, Bryan was elected—the reason for the farmer revolt appeared in the enor- mous number of farm mortgages. It is not among the very poor that you now find, or will find in history, the discontent that makes itself effective. The French Revolution was started, was directed, was carried to success by the middle classes. About being chéerful—a tramp is more or less cheerful; he is sinking down into the mire comfortably and cheerfully. I think the discontent that amounts to some- thing is the discontent of the great, intelli- gent middle class, with its high and rising standards of living and with its ever stronger sense that the division of property isn’t fair. It refuses to believe in the justice of the masses having to work for what they get, while a small class gets more than enough without work. For, you can’t call the chicane of the financiers and their lawyers work. Swindling—no_ kind of swindling is work. If literal starvation were the cause of our discontent, the plutocracy might be secure. Our discon- tent is the dangerous anger that has civi- lized ideas of what constitutes a square meal. Lewis: There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy. GHENT: The intellectual leaders you speak of, Mr. Phillips, are simply the for- The Day of Discontent 605 mulators of the working-class demands. The revolt against existing conditions, in so far as it is conscious and directed at a cer- tain goal, remains a working-class move- ment, even though its philosophy is for- mulated and expressed by men from another class. These men come into the working and accept its instinctive attitude as that of their own. Puitiirs: But I think a programme as precise as the socialist programme is an at- tempt to prophesy. And I’ve no great faith in prophecy, especially in politics. GHENT: Not more so than to predict in general terms the overthrow of the capi- talist mode of production and the installa- tion of coéperative production. There is no scientific socialist in the world who will attempt to give you more than guesses at the details. He can tell you no more of the details of what is to follow than Wash- ington or Franklin could have told at the outbreak of the American Revolution. Lewis: Our Revolution worked no tre- mendous change, beyond providing for self-government. We have got a Senate and they in England a House of Lords, and they have a king, we have a president. Our president has forty times as much power as their king. I don’t see anything very democratic in this government. If there were, the workingman could not be so truly referred to as one whom we “always respect and avoid.” Puitiips: I don’t think that whether a man will or will not associate with me intimately has anything to do with his democracy, or with mine. Association in that sense is a matter of personal taste. Lewis: Mr. Ghent, what better con- ditions would we have if the socialists were in power? GHENT: It staggers the imagination to picture the difference. The sense of security of every person from a haunting fear of privation would of itself greatly better human character. There would be a definite elimination of the frightful massacre of human beings which goes on all the time under the name of peace. In the recent Japanese war, according to the official statistics printed in September, 46,000 men were killed in battle, 11,000 died of wounds and 16,000 died of sick- ness; and we look upon this slaying with horror. But we have a_fatal-accident list in American industries every year of class

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Oe Re 606 Cosmopolitan Magazine somewhere between sixty-five and eighty thousand. The railroads and trolleys alone kill about 12,500 and injure about 150,000 yearly. There is furthermore, under pres- ent conditions, a terrible mortality from unhealthful occupations at which men, women and children are forced to work, and from adulterated foods, drinks and medicines. Socialism, by organizing in- dustry coéperatively, and producing for social use instead of for profit-making, would simply revolutionize the methods of production. Lewis: One trouble with socialism is that it goes on the theory that men are all alike, and as a matter of fact, the differ- ence between men and men is a vast one. Unless your socialism is prepared to play the modern Procrustes, it would assur- edly fail with man as he is. Nor do I find fault with that discontent against which you preach. The way to get men to work is to make them discontented, and even make one fellow try to get more than the other. I fear that socialism would pro- duce lots of human cana] boats. Present conditions produce steamers. GHENT: Admitting, for the moment, that this incentive of discontent does keep things going, it also keeps going this frightful mortality. Puittirs: Mr. Ghent, what is_ this frightful mortality of which you speak ? GHENT: According to Mr. Booth’s investigation in London and Mr. Rown- tree’s in York, it is shown that about one- third of the population of these cities is constantly at or below the bare margin of normal existence. The most recent figures of the Board of Trade of England show an unexampled state of prosperity. At the same time it is shown that the state of unemployment in London is worse than it has been before since 1882. We can thus see that an increase of wealth may attend the most frightful privation among the poor. Thorold Rogers shows that the best day of the English peasant and laborer was that part of the feudal age between 1480 and 1525; he has never had so much food and comfort since. PHILLIprs: But how about his self- respect? He had none. He was a well- cared-for slave, not a man. There never was a time in the history of the world when self-respect was so widespread and so deep as it is to-day. And that sense of personal dignity, of the rights of mar, is the force that will prevent the coming again of the conditions into which the happy serfs of the feudal age fell soon after Mr. Rogers’s “golden age.” Lewis: The most unhappy man I have ever seen was and is one of the ten richest men in the world. And yet his trouble is really his ignorance—the natural ignor- ance of one who has been rich a long time. Most of the trouble of to-day lies not in the discontent of the poor, but in the ignorance of the rich. Puitiirs: We have a great mass of intelligent people getting more intelligent all the time. They will correct the ignor- ance of the rich. But, to go back to so- cialism, Mr. Ghent. Its grave scientific defect is that it can not suggest how men are to be kept at the healthful, necessary routine of work, if they appoint their own bosses. Take any of our government services, for example. And where there is hard work done in them, it is done by the poorest paid. The postman has to work, but not the big fellows. GHENT: If the government as an em- ployer is lax, the private employer, on the other hand, goes to the other extreme. There is a tendency on the part of all em ployers to “‘speed up” machinery to the limit of a man’s or child’s capacity to tend it. PHILLIPS: But at the same time, I don’t think hard work is killing any class. Lewis: I see as many pale faces in Fifth Avenue as in Third. Shifting dis- cussion a trifle, I should say that one great evil in the final influence is this tip- ping system, this trying to get something for which you have not worked. It cul- minates finally in our McCurdys and Depews. They are only big tip-takers. And yet, I suppose tip-taking and tip- hunting are forms of pillage natural to our human nature. GHENT: Human nature is about the most plastic thing we know of, and it under- goes marked changes along with the changes in the form of production and the form of government. Under socialism, where private interest will be abolished, no one will feel the impulse to fly at the throat of his neighbor. Instead he will cultivate the better traits of his nature— traits that now lie dormant within him, but which have no proper field in which

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to develop. Under socialism everyone who works will be secure. He will not have that haunting fear for himself or his dependents. He will then, instead of seeking at all times to beat out his neighbor, seek to aid his neighbor. He will seek to do for the welfare of all, as he now seeks to do for himself to the detriment of others. This different attitude toward life means a change almost revolutionary in human nature and consequently in human conduct. Thus socialism would abolish fear. Lewis: Fear is inborn, and not from the outside. GHENT: The nature of one’s fears depends upon one’s environment. In Ari zona one would be likely to fear Apaches; in a community like London, where one person out of every four dies on public charity, he would be most likely to fear starvation. Lewis: And yet Shakespeare wrote, ‘He that is down need never fear to fall.” Now I have talked with poor people; they don’t seem to be afraid. And to tell the truth, I don’t see why they should be. If a man is pinched down to one dollar and thirty cents a day, why should he be afraid to lose that? Now a man drawing a one-hundred-thousand-dollar salary, like our hysterical James Hazen Hyde, ought to be afraid. “If he loses it he’ll never get another. But why a fellow who is getting one dollar and thirty cents a day should be afraid, I can’t understand; he can get it next door. GHENT: The chances of getting re-em ployment decrease all the time. Lewis: If that be so, then death is your only remedy. And why not? What do you do with a bed of onions when they grow too thick? You thin them out. Puitups (Laughing): This is a terri- ble attack on your friend Roosevelt. This is worse than race suicide. Lewis: Mr. Ghent, I'll tell you how you social philosophers are misled. The minute you go to the East Side they lie to you. They picture themselves as in want, hoping thus to make you give them some- thing. They will point to their poor rooms thinking you will put your hand in your pocket. And yet these people are living as they desire. Most of them have money in the bank. PHILLIPS: better way. We want them to live in a The Day of Discontent 607 Well, PuHiLiipes: An East Side would be an advancement. Ellis Island.* bath for the LEwIs: begin at occasional GHENT: They take baths there and the death rate for certain has been greatly reduced since the munici pality opened its cheap bath-houses. Dirt and the death rate go hand in hand. PHILtips: But after all the principal degradation is the spiritual degradation of the man himself—cringing before an other man for a chance to work. That has always existed in the world, and what we should most want to see is the end of that. Lewis: Isn’t it a fact that our Choates and Roots are quite as cringing ? PHILiirs: They are a lot of parasites, courtiers, cringers. The hope of the country lies in that great mass that does not yet cringe and must not learn to do so, Lewis: I have seen but one uncring- ing independent man in New York; that was Richard Croker. Puitiirs: The man that takes the tip doesn’t like to take a tip; he is forced to it by the conditions. If he could get a decent wage, he would take it any time in place of a larger sum in tips. He doesn’t like to be cringing and to submit to insult and abuse. GHENT: When William Dean Howells, in a letter written some years ago, criti- cised the cab drivers of this city for taking tips, they held a meeting at which they discussed the matter. Many of them frankly acknowledged that accepting tips was degrading and asserted that if they could get better wages they would stop it. They could not get better wages, and there- fore had to take tips. Puitiips: Do the or tolerate violence ? GHENT: The Social Democratic party, wherever the workers have the franchise, advocates the ballot as the sure means, about which there can be no mistake, for the overthrow of capitalism. Of late the general industrial and political strike has won favor as another means. The social- ists have generally opposed it, except as a last desperate resort, out of a fear that it now; diseases socialists advocate might do more harm than good. But Bebel, the leader of the German Social Democrats, in his recent speech at the * The immigrant landing-station of the port of New York.

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eer aaa 608 Cosmopolitan Magazine Jena Congress, has frankly accepted the general strike as a weapon and has served warning on the German government that it will be resorted to if the government attempts to withdraw the franchise from the workers. Just now we are witnessing the effects of the general strike in Russia. Armed violence the socialists have almost invariably discountenanced, not out of any innate scruples against it, but out of a sense of its uselessness. Lewis: If they steal the vote as they = the other day in this city, I could not egard the ballot as much of a remedy. diseesine voting is often sealeaaead by violence as the hospital wards will indicate. GHENT: There were about six hundred thousand votes polled in New York, and so far as I am aware, no persons were killed and but few injured in election rows. But this is not the point. In this country or in Germany, perhaps in Bel- gium, the overthrow of the capitalist sys- tem may come about like the overthrow of slavery. It would be attended by violence, but that would be no fault of ours. A popular majority for the Socialist party may be followed by a revolt of the capital- ist power, just as Lincoln’s election was followed by the slaveholders’ revolt. The Socialists, who will then represent the government, will be forced to suppress the insurrection. Lewis: I do not like the term social- ism. You try to include too much. I believe that the government should do for me whatever it can do better and cheaper than the individual. For example: | believe. the country should own the rail- roads. Even if I were then robbed .as am now, I would rather the plunder went to the conductors and the other emplovees than to the Goulds, the Hills, and the Belmonts. I would rather be plundered for a thousand men than for one, if I am to be plundered. Puiiiirs: They talk about these public utilities being run better by private enter- prise; where has there been with any public enterprise any such scandal as with private enterprises—railroad companies, in- surance, etc. ? Lewis: Still there is a graft.that goes with government. GHENT: That is private interest prey- ing upon government. Pritiips: Exactly. Compare graft in the Post-Office Department with the graft in the three life insurance companies, or take the graft of hundreds of millions in merely the making and floating of the United States Steel Corporation. Where is there anything equal to the latter in public affairs ? Lewis: What is the government appro- priation for this year? PuHILuips: About six hundred and eighty million dollars, I believe. Lewis: In 1860 it cost only about fifty- five million dollars to run this government. Andrew Jackson ran it for thirteen million. Doesn’t the difference between now and then smell of graft ? PHILLips: I want to make one point about the public utilities. Under the present system we have two sets of grafters, private and government—for our political parties are simply the tools of grafters. Under government ownership we should have only the one. It is simply a question of getting directly at the grafters. At present, with private ownership, we have the public utili- ties owning the government. We would he better off if the government owned the pub- lic utilities. Then, if we dismissed the party in power, we would dismiss all the grafters. Now, we dismiss only the agents of grafters and are at once saddled with a new set. GHENT: There is a great difference be- tween public graft and private graft. Real public graft amounts to little more than occasional embezzlements of public funds. What is considered public graft is simply the invasion of private interests into the government service. Practically all the corruption of public servants is due to pri- vate interests attempting to prey upon the government. Lewis: One sort of graft is in place- making. Take our Treasury. In Martin Van Buren’s time the amount of salaries paid in that building was under five hundred thousand dollars. Now it is over five mil- lion. It is the result of place-making. You can run this government with twenty per cent. of the people at present employed in it. The other eighty per cent. means graft. Pui.ties: You sometimes hear that there is less graft in the European govern- ments. But the truth is that there is more there. As it is imbedded in law and custom, they don’t call it graft but the right of the upper classes. Lewis: One reason why the robbery 3 Scam

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5 ' called graft is committed in this country is because we won’t take the time and trouble to collar the thief. We’re too busy getting rich. We see a man stealing, but we won’t leave our business to go after him. Puitiies: It seems to me that in no country ia the world is the discontent so keen as it is in this. It is intelligent discon tent here. It is a very healthy discontent, and I think it will continue and grow greater. Our politicians are most amusing just now. They are all trying to dodge or shift the issue. The Socialist party, it must be admitted, is the only one that squarely faces the issue—which is the distribution of wealth, the division of the products of labor. But, eager though the politicians are to keep political discussion to the old, stupid, silly lines, they are being forced by the people toward the real issue. That is why we are beginning to hear our statesmen dis- cuss timidly but nervously the taking over of the great public utilities, the railways, the telegraphs, insurance. All this is, of course, socialism. Lewis: And on that point my idea would be to have the public do everything that it can do best and cheapest. Let every tub stand on its own bottom. Is it a good thing for the public to own a railroad? I think it is. Is it a good thing for the public to own a gas company? I think it is. But I would not call these things socialism. Puitiirs: The socialists were the first to advocate these things. Lewis: The trouble is that the socialists go too far and grasp at toomuch. Like the fabled monkey who reached in the jar they grab fifty propositions at once, and then they can’t get their hand out. They should cease to call themselves socialists; and, as — mere American citizens, tackle one thing at a time. Puitiips: There is no workable scheme that anybody can devise for government control of the freight rates of privately owned railroads. One little railroad will have volumes and volumes of rates, and one little case can be kept in the courts for years. It is foolish to talk about government con- trol of things so intricate, so subtle as that; the only possible move in the direction of solution is for the government to take over the roads. And no one knows this better than the crowd that is swindling itself into wealth by manipulating freight rates. Lewis: Every public gets the kind of The Day of Discontent 609 government it deserves. A public is the architect of its own troubles. If a legisla- ture takes bribes, you should not forget that the public elects the legislature. If I had been McCall of the New York Life, I would have stood pat. I would have said, “T have been blackmailed by the legisla- ture, because the public elected black- mailers.” But beyond that, given a great criminal, the public condones the offense. It is that condonation which is the great reason of both public and private wrong- doing. Take the McCalls, McCurdys and Depews. What happens to these people ? Nothing. Everyone is glad to see them. The preacher still calls them “pillars of righteousness.” They are as well off so- cially, religiously and_ professionally, in spite of their testimony, as they ever were. GHENT: i am disappointed in this: While you, Mr. Lewis, and you, Mr. Phil- lips, admit about all we socialists charge, as to the prevalence of graft, swindling, op- pression and hunger, you have no remedy to offer. We socialists have a programme and a goal. PHILLIPS: But we do not accept your remedy. Lewis: You are in error, Mr. Ghent. For the “oppression” you speak of, I offer the remedy of manhood and _ individual independence; for the “‘ hunger,” work; for the ‘‘graft and swindling,” Sing Sing. There isn’t, take it any way you will, an evil named by socialism that an honest, thorough enforcement of existing law wouldn’t cure. If the law be not enforced, that is the public’s fault, and I for one shall not sit up nights to protect a public from its own criminal indifference. I am aware that my pose seems one of cynicism and selfishness. So be it: it is the result of my own inquiries and my own experiences. I have found the rich as ignorant as are the poor. I’ve found the poor as thievish, as mendacious, as tyrannical within their nar- rower power as are the rich. Everywhere, and not at all dependent on either poverty or riches, I’ve found good and bad, happi- ness and misery, love and hate, laughter and tears. Nor shall you ever change these things—which are the very reasons of life. You speak of the threat that lurks in a “popular discontent”; and when ques- tioned, that “popular discontent” would appear to be an individual eagerness to make money and better the individual’s

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a a . : : { f | i ; 610 Cosmopolitan Magazine financial condition. You say that socialism would do away with that ‘“discontent”—a discontent which in its analysis turns out to be no more than just a fierce spirit of com-’ petition. To my thought, this competition, this discontent, so far from being a disaster, is the seed of health and strength and final human purity, like the current of a stream. You would eradicate the discontent, para- lyze the current with socialism. What would be the outcome? Stagnation, and the rottenness and falling to destruction which attend it as inevitable corollaries. That is where you lead me, as I see my way through, by the torch of your argu- ment. Socialism is to be the synonym of stagnation, and stagnation the synonym of humanity in putridity—humanity gone to moral, mental and physical decay. As for Mass versus. Class—the so-called laborer against the so-called capitalist—I’m free to say, as the result of my observation, that there is but one greater fool than the work- ingman and that is the fool he works for. Fools? Yes; fools because neither is honest, neither upholds the law, while both are wolves rending each other to the widest limits of their jaws, their ignorance and their opportunities. And now [rising to go and speaking to the .waiter] where is that member of the proletariat who took my overcoat and hat? Cupid’s Binocular BY JULIAN DURAND Drawn by Ralph T, Willis Saw Cupid, in a jocular And tempting sort of way, «« Pray look through my binocular And see your hearts at play.” We looked; and She, with laughter Approved the magic done, Remarked to me just after that, «« Sweetheart, I saw but one!’’

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